@failures art,
Quote:A wholly predicable and boring reply spendi. Really? You find atheists' thoughts to be false! No way! You'll never miss a chance to be the next to post though. A hollow jab just to assert your presence, and inflate your importance in the the thread.
Well fa--I can hardly place posts like this on every thread.
"The sometimes Professor Emeritus of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Geneva (1974–1994), Professor of Comparative Literature and Fellow at the University of Oxford (1994–1995) and Professor of Poetry at Harvard University (2001–2002) George Steiner, opened his famous essay Real Presences (Is there anything in what we say?) with this--" I wrote
Quote:We still speak of 'sunrise' and 'sunset'. We do so as if the Copernican model of the solar system had not replaced, ineradicably, the Ptolemaic. Vacant metaphors, eroded figures of speech, inhabit our vocabulary and grammar. They are caught, tenaciously, in the scaffolding and recesses of our common parlance. There they rattle about like old rags or ghosts in the attic.
This is the reason why rational men and women, particularly in the scientific and technological realities of the West, still refer to 'God'. This is why the postulate of the existence of God persists in so many unconsidered turns of phrase and allusion. No plausible reflection or belief underwrites His presence. Nor does any intelligible evidence. Where God clings to our culture, to our routines of discourse. He is a phantom of grammar, a fossil embedded in the childhood of rational speech. So Nietzsche (and many after him).
This essay argues the reverse.
It proposes that any coherent understanding of what language is and how language performs, that any coherent account of the capacity of human speech to communicate meaning and feeling is, in the final analysis, underwritten by the assumption of God's presence. I will put forward the argument that the experience of aesthetic meaning in particular, that of literature, of the arts, of musical form, infers the necessary possibility of this 'real presence'. The seeming paradox of a 'necessary possibility' is, very precisely, that which the poem, the painting, the musical composition are at liberty to enact.
There's your ID. Your whole way of thinking, communicating and feeling. And no amount of crude insults from the likes of you lot have the power, the reach or the courage to lay a glove on it.
Mr Steiner provides two quotes to begin his essay.
"Proofs weary the truth."
Georges Braque
"When you are philosophizing you have to descend into primeval chaos and feel at home there."
Wittgenstein.
Perhaps you will comment on it. Your friends have ducked it. And you should see how "thoughtful" Setanta's last post on that thread is.
