Numinous

The adjective "numinous" is associated especially with religion, but I think it's a broader concept than that. I suggest that whatever is experienced by an individual as numinous is that individual's living "religion." I suggest that abstractions can be experienced as numinous. Wittgenstein said that to feel the world as a limited whole was the mystical. Has communism been numinous for some? Is Romantic-Byronic-Satanism numinous? Is "Truth" numinous? Is "Reason" numinous? Is the ethical self concept numinous? I think that some symbols, as opposed to mere signs, are numinous.
Numen - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Numinous - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Man, you are something ! :a-ok:

well, Truth is numinous and (perceived) Reason is phenomena...

Great minds think alike....:detective:

It was Jung who put me on the numinous. Jung is the Kant of religious experience. He seeks out transcendental proto-symbols. These proto-symbols cannot be represented directly, but must be inferred. The kernel or essense of a proto-symbol/archetype is just this numenousness. In that sense, the Truth is numinous/ness, and Reason or Symbolization is Husk/Representation.

The adjective "numinous" is associated especially with religion, but I think it's a broader concept than that. I suggest that whatever is experienced by an individual as numinous is that individual's living "religion." I suggest that abstractions can be experienced as numinous. Wittgenstein said that to feel the world as a limited whole was the mystical. Has communism been numinous for some? Is Romantic-Byronic-Satanism numinous? Is "Truth" numinous? Is "Reason" numinous? Is the ethical self concept numinous? I think that some symbols, as opposed to mere signs, are numinous.
Numen - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Numinous - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Religion and art...

I am reading a real good book called the Critique of Scientific Reason, by Kurt Hubner, a translation by Dixon and Dixon... It is really good, but for me being very busy right now and distracted, is slow reading... And he covers the numinous and art to an extent, side by side, though they are not the same, naturally, but seem to work on a similar plane..
Kant is much quoted in this section, but regardless, I think that much of the discussion really comes out of a metaphysical conception of reality, and an improper division of reality that is no division at all when it consideres the spiritual with the real...Reality is properly divided between the physical and the moral, and art is sort of transitional or perhaps transendental object of one into the other...Art works by touching moral chords, but is clearly physical, and can be measured in the physical world and yet, its measure means nothing to the moral measage... How does it work..I saw a Monet, I think, many years ago in the Metro Museum in NY, and in one picture of a sailor by his boat before the background of the sea, and his arm was an arm that looked like no arm, his shirt looked like no shirt, and the sea looked like no sea, and yet the whole worked...Is it like us throwing our interest and understanding in advance of the object onto the object as we see it, so we lose all judgement and go on belief??? If we accept before logic, before becoming reasonable the existence of magic and the supernatural, then the effort is always toward thought, and belief comes without effort...The same is true of art, that we know it is not real, so we do not have to judge it as objective reality, so physical rules do not apply...

Otto's most famous work is The Idea of the Holy, published first in 1917 as (The Holy - On the Irrational in the Idea of the Divine and its Relation to the Rational). It is one of the most successful German theological books of the 20th century, has never gone out of print, and is now available in about 20 languages. The book defines the concept of the holy as that which is numinous. Otto explained the numinous as a "non-rational, non-sensory experience or feeling whose primary and immediate object is outside the self". He coined this new term based on the Latin numen (deity). This expression is etymologically unrelated to Immanuel Kant's noumenon, a Greek term referring to an unknowable reality underlying all things. The numinous is a mystery (Latin: mysterium) that is both terrifying (tremendum) and fascinating (fascinans) at the same time. It also sets a paradigm for the study of religion that focuses on the need to realize the religious as a non-reducible, original category in its own right. This paradigm was under much attack between approximately 1950 and 1990 but has made a strong comeback since then, after its phenomenological aspects have become more apparent.

Spengler, in his Decline of the Westmakes two central points relevant to our concerns: that histories of various cultures--his principal point of comparison is Classical (Greek)--can be shown to follow a similar pattern and that all aspects of a culture--art, politics, mathematics, science--have related underlying principles which differ from culture to culture. He reaches conclusions about the current position of Western culture (in the 1920s) and how one can best live within it. Mo Spengler views cultures as "organic" by which he means that the follow a life pattern, one he names by analogy to seasons. The spring of a culture is the time of the origin of its basic principles, the time of the birth of the religion of that culture. He believes that all great cultures have behind them a great religion. A culture acting "in form" (a comparison to athletes who are at the peak of their form) is in its summer, when all aspects can be seen as working under the principles at the basis of the culture, and when great accomplishments are made--the artifacts of lasting value.
Our culture, as compared to other cultures, is one of directedness and will; Spengler refers to it as Faustian. We see our religion as requiring us to convert others. Our art has a perspective, a point of view and direction. Our music is directed toward a tonal center. Our science is about forces and changes. We apply it to change our world. Our mathematics goes beyond the static geometry of the Classical world to deal with the calculus of tendencies and averages.
All cultures come to a Civilization phase, an autumn when this breaks down. Mega-cities are characteristic of this time. Politics is motivated by money, and move through Imperialism and the Period of Contending States to Caesarism, a period of despots. Science no longer reaches certainties. People no longer accept common principles or goals, they fight all rules from the past. The arts, rather than working in ways that seem obvious to the artists and the people, follow fashions with constant changes of style. Later in this culture after a period of atheism, people turn to a religious renewal based on the religion developed in the spring of the culture.

To where I stand the funny part is that Numinous being all is the closest thing to nothingness...stripped from all the faked noise of phenomena...with no time no true 3D space, no nothing, just being, a well organized and frozen set of binary codes...in one dimension... I call it the AXIS. (The axis of Order)

How would someone describe the difference between numinous and noetic?

rebecca

After reading The Future of an Illusion (1927c), in a letter dated December 5, 1927, Romain Rolland wrote to Freud: "By religious feeling, what I mean-altogether independently of any dogma, any Credo, any organization of the Church, any Holy Scripture, any hope for personal salvation, etc.-the simple and direct fact of a feeling of 'the eternal' (which may very well not be eternal, but simply without perceptible limits, and as if oceanic). This feeling is in truth subjective in nature. It is a contact."

aha. Noetic is derived from Nous, which was one of the Greek terms for intellect, especially in the works of Plotinus. (Defined as 'reason and knowledge as distinguished from sense perception', but the Greek notion of both is very different from the modern one.) Noetic is etymologically somewhat similar to 'gnostic', although Plotinus distinguished himself carefully from the Gnostics.

interestingly nous is preserved in modern slang as 'nouse' signifying one with a lot of cunning or cleverness ('he's got a lot of nouse').

Have a look at the website of the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS), they are into some interesting things.

Nous is opposed by logos.

Opposed? How so? According to who?