The following thoughts were provoked by noticing a sense of convergence of Maimonides’ negative theology and the transhumanist whispers that have reached my ears. I present them to you roughly as how they came to me- as a solution to a medieval conundrum that puzzled me followed by a stream of thought that rushed once the damn broke.
The King of Kuzar, in his dream, encounters an angel who informs him that his good intentions have found favor in God’s eyes. However, his actions have not. This revelation prompts a religious journey for the king. Upon awakening, he seeks the counsel of a philosopher. To the king’s disappointment, he quickly deconstructs the dream's imperative. The philosopher, while acknowledging God's existence, argues that a perfect being like God cannot possibly have desires or wants, as these imply a deficiency or lack. God is ultimately satisfied with contemplating Himself, and somehow the world emanates from this. As God is not an active being the dream cannot be a prophecy from the divine, but rather is a natural and worldly phenomenon. And because God demands nothing of us, we should instead turn the question to human nature and search for the good life with rational inquiry. He then presents to the king his vision of human perfection, with an emphasis on intellectual pursuits.
Sa'adyah Gaon, merging the roles of a Rabbi and a Philosopher, asserts that God's creation of the world was an act of spreading inherent goodness. God is good and therefore an agent of good. His nature is to spread goodness. Sa'adya’s approach suggests that creation is not an arbitrary act of will as the naive Bible reader might suppose. Neither is it a mechanical emanation of sorts as the philosopher thinks. Rather it is a vaguely anthropomorphic overflowing of goodness that seeks expression.
In examining these diverse viewpoints, a Nietzschean question shows itself as worthy of attention: what kind of person would subscribe to each of these philosophies? What is the psychological character that would see God in each manner? The naive Bible reader would be in search of God that is a tyrant, projecting himself as God’s chosen child. But then, the masses are clearly weak and corrupt, and it should come as no surprise that their image of God is the same.
The philosopher's stance would appeal to a man who sees desire as a flaw, emanating from lack. This is downstream of a suppressed individual. Someone who cannot fulfill their desires will slowly make their heart small, until they squash all drives and lusts with an internal iron fist. For it is better to die by suicide then by the explicit mocking of reality. It is, in a word, the perspective of the impotent. Hence God is essentially the ultimate navel gazer. If anything comes from Him it is only by strange effects of God masturbating, the eternal perfect thinker thinking of his own perfection.
In contrast, the vibrant, life-affirming individual might resonate more with Sa'adyah's view, seeing the act of creation as the ultimate expression of vitality. The greatest virtue is in self-expansiveness of power and beauty, a dynamic unfolding of never ending multiplicity. Sa’adyah is clearly the ubermensch in this psychologizing competition. However, we still need to understand how he addresses the concept of God's desire. How does he solve the riddle that the philosopher poses- all actions are a result of desires, and all desires a result of lack?
In the human realm, Deleuze and Guattari attacked the idea that human desire is an effect of lack. Deleuze and Guattari take beef with traditional psychoanalytic concepts, and for our purposes we’ll look at their attack of the idea that desire originates from a sense of lack or deficiency. Instead, they propose a radical view where desires are inherent to life. They also abstract them and present desires as energies that utilize humans, akin to how the biologist Dawkins describes memes as using humans for replication. This perspective introduces a new dimension to understanding human motivation. According to D&G, desire is not a symptom of a flaw of humans, but almost their essence.
In all three views, the Naive Bible hugger, Kuzari’s philosopher and Sa’adyah’s source of goodness God is still too anthropocentric, limited by human perspectives and experiences. Deleuze and Guattari's approach offers a way out. We can instead see God as the ultimate and primordial desire, something akin to Schopenhaur’s Will, or the most primal Nietzchean will to power. Let us know God as a fundamentally non-human entity of desire; God's act of creation is an extension of His existence, a manifestation of an unfathomable self-breeding. This gives us a more abstract, less tangible God. He is a mysterium tremendum as he should be. Cthulthu and its fellow Lovecraftian minions are only a drop in the water of the explosive grace that God has bestowed upon the void. For each demon there may be a thousand fold angels. Or not.
The Kabbalist book ‘Yosher Divrei Emet” tells us that when God created the world he kept on manifesting himself into the most corporeal forms until it had reached such a low level of spirituality that God stopped lest these lower life forms be unable to return to him. But let us attempt a new myth.
God created the world with all of his powers, ever stretching himself. At the fringes of reality, there are whisps that cannot even imagine God, let alone cleave to him. Shadows of existence that flicker, hardly real. For God is the ultimate dynamic creator, the foundation of all existence, with no regard to our all too human narratives. He is the ultimate source of energy and matter, explosively desiring to manifest Himself in every possible way, even if point zero, the beginning of all creation is too distant for our puny minds to see.
Contra the Kabbalists, it is the concrete reality that is an expression of divinity, even if God is beyond us eternally.
God our lord, how powerful is your name in all the dirt. (Psalms 9)
This analysis leads to a provocative conclusion about imitatio dei (the imitation of God). It suggests that emulating God might involve spreading our own 'fire,' creating beings that reflect beauty and power, regardless of simplistic human morality. This radical thought implies a significant shift in how we view religion. Instead of praising the meek, it would be worship through art and reproduction. Walking in God’s path becomes a call to unleash human potential.
For now the greatest thing we can make is other humans, of greater quality and power than ourselves. But to do this right would require destroying those neutering institutions and instead form new patterns that cultivate a glorious people. But even humanity might be an illusionary wall that needs to be broken to reach the glory of our King.
Building on this, a vision of post-humanism, somewhat Landian emerges. This vision suggests the evolution of beings beyond our current conception of humanity. This expansion of the concepts of spiritual practice and religious worship introduces a challenge to the narrowness of the present preconceptions. It paints a picture of a future where intelligence and action transcend its current human limitations.
In this alignment with the Lord of Hosts we become vehicles for the divine vitality to continue to conquer the frontiers of nothingness.
I'm stuck on desires utilizing humans - to what end? The potato chips must be eaten, digested and excreted, hence the human being to eat them?
Wow