About intellectuality from a lutheran

[Len]

I wanted to talk about intellectuality, and looked it up in my computer. The year of 2003, at this site, there was a discussion about intellectuality and *********. I agree on the whole with the opinions uttered then. The writers seemed to prefer a spiritual base to intellectuality, which made it into deeper wisdom. So intellectuality is still a reality within islam buth vanish in the eurosociety. If I thus have to seek sympathy for my firm opinion that intellectuality is a necessary ingredience in society building, and cannot or should not be overlooked or eliminated in any political work, the neoliberal market globalism is not the ideology from which I will find agreement. And who do not seek sympathy. My language is probanly not the most elegant, I beg Your pardon. In fact I find English to be not the best language for this topic at all, the anglosaxon culture has never been intellectual and the language offer resistance.

 

It seem that intellectuality is a culturally based function that asks a lot of sustaining work in time, acclimation ,accumulated experience, adjustment, even true contact to organic structures, to be able to develop, endure and survive. Absence of intellectuality is a sign of that culture is put out of function, and that human mind is utilized in hard captivity commanded and directed by powerful structures which pursue the good ( so as the religious, the holy, the natural law etc.) in evry detail. Also is lack of intellectuality theologically “a sign of unholyness”, and ********* indicates a state where general indulgence to sin is encouraged. It almost indicates a prohibition to act by conscience.

 

In modern secularized societies, where intellectuality has no place, the individual may still try to keep it up, by reading and building for her self, but the result survives as on a lonely island and have no practical or social use outside entertainment. Because ********* is the fruit of general decomposition and distortion of a world-wiew, even a sign of non-belief, it repells intellectuality.

********* tries to confuse the cultural state of direct oneness, sometimes with negativism, sarcasms, or aggressive deafness. ********* obeys destructive rules of conduct: Need, subordination, dependency, routine. It is poor of concepts.

A secularized and industrialized society without true view, is byond reach and misuses the intellect for disrupting activities. The theological implications are interesting. Such structures have to cease, as they are corrupted and dangerous to the functions of solidarity or oneness. ********* and indifferency in secular industrial society is thus a moral defiency as a unavoidable defect, but the only possible way of attitude, as the whole is made invisible and the oneness denied trough lasting violent agendas.

 

To theorize in lonelyness is he only comfort left to those who reflect over such a society from inside. Long years of reflection do not bring the philosopher nearer to communion. Access to writings from older times or other cultures are always only allouding an approximative participation. At last she finds that she is only a “head”, not maybe by choice, but because participation has been denied, as she disapprove of a shallow work. In this lies a great opportunity, as the torture of anti-intellectuality cannot be endured forever. What kind of revolutionary act is asked I do not know.

 

My situation as an intellectual has always been crucial and “hidden”, as if it would be an impossible task to reach the world with word and work. As a young girl I had to smoke a pipe (a merely male attribute) to show I was “an intellectual”. As I fled the World my need to be heard did not vanish. Later on I found Derrida but I had just found him when within a year the Master was dead…The key words of Derrida , as the Gift, hospitality, the democracy to come…where mysteriously inspiring and flexible and in their diffuseness possible to laden with all the new content that the new border crossing thinking today demands. He seems to have lured the philosophic establishment and smuggled, past the always vigilant ideologic censors’ US-EUcentric eye, stuff which is usable for many purposes of deconstruction.

 

Deconstructed thinking for new topics - but where make your contribution when nobady listens to the values of words, words that it still took so much work and great pains to develope? And when it is in contradiction with “political correctness” of shallow propaganda to openly analyse matters of civilization and conflict? And when there no longer exists any arena for disputes above this niveau if you do not turn to a high philosophical code language which, at the niveau of the struggling western civilization, aim to drop the, as embarrassing considered, politically critical debators which would take the debate out of the academic philosophy and give it to us all?! So: to tell truths in a understandable democratic way is not popular. Media is more corrupt and narrow than ever, in spite of internet and free distribution, as the sole language and expressions used are coined from the few power centra. To join around or find different idioms are, to the average reader, now more impossible than ever. This diminish the possibilities of political mobilization for the sake of other goals than market-economic pragmatism.

 

There thus exist two problems in very rational bureaucratic eurocultures today : Forced silence and absence of a honest dialogue AND lack of possibilities to influence on the happenings around and in the world, which taken together make the intellectual’s life a life in frency and dull imprisonment. Also there is some sign of further shoving religions, to pave the way for hard market-economic solutions (no understanding for serbs, some demanding crucifixes away from public Italian scools).

The honest non-alienated intellectuality built on islam seems oh so seducing. Islam as an actor changes the tune and remove the chill. Islam seems to be the only brake on the big scene to a way of thinking and acting which denys reality and bring about *********.

 

Yours,

[Khayr]

Intellectuals now adays are those that 'Reject the Divine aka GOD' becuase they have rationally concluded that God does not exist and if God does exist, he is not relevant to us anymore (the pride, the hubris speaks).

 

It has almost become axiomatic, to reject religion and religous authority today and equity lower IQ's with religiousity. Hence, why there are evolutionary pyschologists that are propogating this and conducting studies (which are biased because most of the knowledge base comes from post-renaissance, post- modernism, wherein it is mass manufactored information that dominates that world).

 

In the islamic paradigm, the Intellect is Divine and is the center of MAN. Without the Intellect, without the connection to GOD/the Divine, MAN ceases to be MAN (al Insan). They just become Al-Haywaan/Animals because Animals lack the capacity of free will and intellect (the capacity to recognize the Divine/God).

[Voltaire]

^ An ironic post, as almost the reverse is true. The only time that man's freewill becomes under question is when we suppose there to be as such thing as divine intervention in human affairs. Faith more often than not happens to be a threat to the human intellect; it’s arguably reason’s nemesis. And giving man a supposedly divine name doesn’t change his nature; it’s just that, a label.

[Darwin]

I would add to Voltaire's point by pointing out that that reason and logic are necessarily based in the natural world. In order for something to be reasonable it must exist within the frames of the perceivable world. Once something becomes supernatural, magical, divine it ceseases to be reasonable. Though some might argue that intellect is not the brother of reason, I would say at worst it is a close cousin.

 

The hubris and the pride exist in saying that I am chosen and have heard the true words of the Divine. The pride exists in saying I know the unknowable simply becuase I accept that I know it. Saying that I do not know how this world and this universe came to be is honesty not pride.