Saturday, June 12, 2010

John the Baptis and Hegel?

The most important statement in the New Testament: “My dear people, we are already the children of God but what we are to be in the future has not yet been revealed; all we know is, that we shall be like him because we shall see him as he really is.” (1 John 3:1/2) cited by Philip K. Dick – Valis

I’m reading this book, very late 60s / 70s and this quote I found startling. Hegel said (something like this, I’m paraphrasing from memory) That God could not be without us, with the implication that the creator is shaped by the creation. An anticipation of Marshall McCluhan’s (with others) quote that humans shape tools and then the tools shape humans. Essentially this is the dialectic self and the realization of the post-modern challenge – that since reality is an unfolding one a ‘non-teleological’ or perhaps more accurately, an ‘unteleological’ (as in ‘undead’ – neither living nor dead, therefore neither with an end nor without an end) we co-create that which creates us. Perhaps then the ’singularity’ is when this truly self-creation-ism of reality will become ‘revealed’ and give us the full responsibility of who we are.

Then again, maybe I’m reading too much into it.

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