SolitaryWalker
Tenured roisterer
- Joined
- Apr 23, 2007
- Messages
- 3,504
- MBTI Type
- INTP
- Enneagram
- 5w6
- Instinctual Variant
- so/sx
This higher realm ought to be interpreted as the noumenal world, which by its nature is indescribable. You cant stuff a religious message into that one. You certainly can argue that the noumenal world is God, which is a claim that Kant would grant, but this does not have anything to do with Jesus being the Messiah.Kant would say that in terms of teleological morality, we have faith (which he classifies as an attitude of the mind) and we can believe in a Higher being for which we have not or can not find any empirical proof in the sensorial sphere, in the teleological in nature.".
What matters for each person is whether they can accept Jesus' message, and that is "denial of the self and to follow him". But one thing that people are afraid of the most is to lose the self, something that each will lose either way in the long run (temporal), and not only to lose it but to entrust it into someone else's hands-Jesus'. For some this may be a big challenge, for me it is simple "He is my Lord and Savior".
Denial of the self is impossible because of psychological egoism. We want to 'deny the self' so we can later be redeemed.
As Jesus once said, whoever humbles himself shall be exalted. No, Nietzsche responds 1800 years later--whoever humbles himself wants to be exalted.
Moreover, Nietzsche was also right to claim that the more we practice the Christian monkish virtues the more dishonest we become. We befool ourselves into thinking that we are altruistic because we do good for others and not for ourselves, thinking we've given our 'self' up. But we really did not--we are still subtly insisting on others repaying us for our 'generous deeds'. Thus, the more of our 'self' we renounce, the more we will insist on the world taking care of us. And the more we will think we are entitled to. Jesus's prescriptions, without a doubt would have been disastrous. Evil stems from a lack of inner comfort, yet the further we carry through with our self-abnegation mantra, the less comfortable we become and the more evil we get. Scarily enough, contemporaneously, the better we get at presenting ourselves as congenial. As our society tends to mistake altruism for virtue, whilst notoriously failing to acknowledge the impossibility of such an ethical component.
Unless you can refute psychological egoism, 'giving up the self for Jesus' can be no more than a travesty.