Federica wrote: ↑Fri May 03, 2024 2:58 pm
AshvinP wrote: ↑Fri May 03, 2024 12:01 am
Again, I think this and many of the other aspects you expressed also deeply relate to cynicism with the Christ impulse. I'm not using that to mean synonymous with seeking the Good, but rather the specific way it has manifested in the course of the last 2,000 years through Western civilization. This partial manifestation of the Christ impulse is not inherently good, it can also become extremely one-sided and an obstacle to higher development, for ex. for those souls who remain chained to ecclesiastical traditions and dogmas, or who adopt a 'slave morality' and become quite resigned and resentful in the face of worldly happenings. It can also be expressed pathologically in rigid hierarchies where all sorts of corruption are justified in the name of 'religious ideals'.
Yet I also see the resistance from that one-sidedness as more easily navigated on the inner path than its opposite, which is expressed often in the form of cynicism toward the hierarchical structure of Western civilization and the soul forces of admiration, reverence, and devotion to the wisdom and examples of those who may stand at a higher stage of development than oneself. This inner stance simply dreads the prospect that others have already tread further on a path of evolutionary development than we have and therefore have something to teach us, even if it is patently obvious from the facts and healthy reasoning, and even if the teaching is how we ourselves can be raised to higher stages of understanding and thereby overcome the disparities.
I’m not entirely clear how you intend the Christ impulse then. If you are speaking of the evolution of Western civilization as it has unfolded after the coming of Christ, to the present day, then the attitude of those who are disgusted by phenomenology is a part of it too, by the same token the conservative worldview is. Why would “
individual agency and sovereignty, hierarchical structure, moral ideals, inner perfection“ that is, the values of conservatism, constitute the (“
partial, not inherently good", but still)
only manifestation of the Christ impulse?
Again, I think that these values you mention are only a partial manifestation of the Christ impulse, firstly because there can be ideology (as you describe) but also, secondly, because they don’t exhaust the spectrum of Western values emerging from the Christ impulse in historical sense.
Invention is also part of it. By the way, agency is not an exclusive conservative value. You can't have a spirit invention without agency. The same applies to striving for inner perfection (and there would be more to say here). Of course, ideology and weakness can vice all that, but this is true for the entire spectrum of Western values.
In this context, what does cynicism for the Christ impulse mean? If you put exclusively the conservative values behind the impulse, well yes, the liberal impulse will have to be said to have cynicism for the Christ impulse, since it doesn’t focus on the values of tradition, and conservatism, turned to the past, but on those of progression. Safe that, as said, I don’t see why only one side of the two (in their elevated, archetypal meaning, not as ideologies) should alone deserve the quality of representative of Western values "
as manifested in the course of the last 2,000 years through Western civilization".
The fact that resistance to living thinking is less present on the side of conservative ideology than it is on the side of liberal ideology seems logical to me, since conservative are less struck by spiritual loneliness, because they find some comfort and protection within the structure provided by authority. However, that this allows for less resistance is also just accidental (not grounded in affinity for the phenomenology), and doesn't grant higher probability of higher development. Just because authority is not resisted in conservative ideology as it is in liberal ideology doesn’t mean that the indications in your essays have better chances to be followed up in conservative circles.
The reason is that submission to authority, when accepted as part of “how the world works”, isn't per se of much help to exploring and applying the phenomenological indications. What counts is the ability to recognize and respect authority
independently, through agency, not by ascription, titles or conformism to external status quo. And this independence and agency are not an exclusive prerogative of the conservative worldview. So I believe that the more easily navigated resistance on that side of the conservative spectrum is true, as such, but also a superficial indicator of inner potential, which doesn’t affect the real chances of higher development. These chances do not depend on political preferences.