This is from a closed-group online discussion with a Christian Nationalist concerning the totalitarian nature of the metaphysical framework of Christianity. Due to the non-public nature of the conversation, I present only my response.
This first response focuses on your first few paragraphs concerning the nature of totalitarianism, Because of the excessive length of the past replies, I will limit this response to those paragraphs because it is the nature of totalitarianism that needs to be addressed before we can adequately address all that followed.
You start with an assertion that there is a distinction between illiberal and totalitarianism, but fail to tell what the difference is, so I will just set that aside and discuss your attempt to tell us what totalitarianism is, and your claim that it doesn’t include Christianity.
Your reference to Arendt and Conquest gives us a superficial description, but tells us nothing about the nature of totalitarianism. I started with Heidegger’s thoughts on this because the nature of something tells us more and might even cause some correction of the superficial description. I had asked you to critique that ground of my position and to try to justify logic as a mode of explaining reality, but you failed to do either. You simply repeated you assertion that my. “View that Christianity is totalitarian for positing objective truth, beauty, and goodness is simply not true. Furthermore, if your reason for this is appealing to a relativist axiology and epistemology, that is even more contentious”. Your introduction of axiology to characterize my thinking here is further evidence that you failed to grasp my meaning, but perhaps we can correct that misunderstanding as part of what follows.
All you presented beyond your simple denial and a superficial definition was a reference to a difference between illiberal and totalitarian, and a comment that Locke and Smith were both Christians, While the latter point is certainly true, I can only guess at what relevance you thought it might bear here. Perhaps you meant to imply that Christianity can’t be totalitarian if certain liberal thinkers were Christians, but that is an obvious fallacy. I never implied that all Christians were totalitarian as there is a difference between the totalitarian nature of the metaphysical construction of Christianity, and individuals who identify as Christian. Differences in interpretation can certainly occur individually, and it is important to note that starting with the Enlightenment most of those differences concern a liberalizing thrust that is condemned by those who describe themselves as traditional or orthodox. And rightly so, as this liberalization indeed strays from the Western metaphysical construction of Christianity.
I am convinced that your absence of a critique on the Heideggerian demonstration of the totalitarian nature of metaphysics and the inadequacy of logic to describe reality stems from your lack of knowledge about it. I did ask you read a short essay of Heidegger’s, but there is no indication that you have. This and what you refer to as contentious relativism cannot be fully rendered in this post, but I will give a brief outline of it. We can then dive further into any aspect as required.
1. Heidegger saw the danger of metaphysics in its reductiveness. What had earlier been physis was split into physics and metaphysics, where physics is reduced to mere superficial interchangeable objects, and Being is displaced to an imaginary metaphysical realm beyond the mere physical. Logos, which was the experience of meditation on Being in its fullness in this world, was reduced to “the cheap acid bath” of logic. This cheap acid bath, ungrounded by the fullness of of Being, was free to spin off any sort of pretense of answering the mysteries of Being and nature of reality. These were systematic constructions that claimed to produce a unitary explanation of reality, and with evermore complicated designs. What this was in essence was a determining subject imposing a logical order on a manifold and largely hidden reality, as opposed to the pre-Socratic logos of receiving truth through physical thought experience. In short, this was what Heidegger frequently refers to as subject/object metaphysics, where our connection to Being is severed, resulting in our perception of the world reduced to an imposing subject experiencing the world as object in opposition. A forcing of order instead of a “Letting” of reality.
Heidegger’s method is not one of propositional logic due to its inadequacy to describe reality, but rather through thoughtful (poetic) presentation of experience and its traces left in language itself. This brings us to totalitarianism. Keep in mind that Heidegger wrote entire books about what I am about to summarize in a couple sentences and I would be happy to expand on any of this, but this will need to suffice for the moment.
Totalizing is a word often used to describe elevating an idea to such primacy that it obliterates all else. This necessarily occurs in any metaphysical construction through a unifying explanatory idea. The construction itself presents itself as a totality of existence. The primary idea enacts a totalization to maintain the apparent unification of reality. From within the metaphysics the obliteration of all but the idea through the totalization blinds the inhabitant of the metaphysic to the multiplicity of reality and therefore to the error of the metaphysic itself. This inevitably leads to clashes with other metaphysics, and more importantly, with reality itself. It is a short step from this totalization under threat to totalitarianism. For Heidegger, Christianity was once such a threat, but saw in his time the major totalitarian threats as Communism and Nationalism. Today, Christianity has reappeared as an ally of Nationalism.
The totalizing idea of Christianity is a perfect god which forms a reductive notion of one truth, one good, one beauty. Over the centuries an elaborate metaphysical structure has been constructed from this idea. When it was able to, it enforced totalitarianism on its subjects, and in various instances seeks to again. That is simply the nature of totalizing metaphysics. Communism and Nationalism are prime examples.
2. Over the past 140 years what Heidegger points to as the full manifold nature of reality beyond any logical reduction has born born out in physics and neuroscience. Again, entire books are written on this as well as the entire field of modern physics, but here I will simply cite some of the most important examples from physics.
In the late 19th Century Poincare wrote his “Four Geometries” where he showed that perfectly consistent geometric systems could be devised from contradictory premises, giving a hint of the arbitrary nature of systems. Between 1949 and 1962, Eugene Wigner elaborated on this, showing mathematics (and formal systems in general) to be an esthetic game where mathematicians posited arbitrary maximums and rules and showed their cleverness in their manipulations. Very little of this had any relation to reality but was an esthetic game. Number itself was only an approximation and a rational construction. He demonstrates how physics through its adoption of the language of mathematics, itself became an esthetic game employing non-physical things such as complex numbers. By including entropy into the mix, he devised his Empirical Law of Epistemology, which shows all rational systems to be arbitrary as to chosen events, approximate from the nature of number, and limited in scope (space and time). Inevitably in every such system as chosen events (information) increases, or the temporal/spatial frame of reference increases, the order begins to pull part and entropy increases back to the primal chaos of reality.
At the same time, Heisenberg picked up this same theme and again showed any order to be a result of consciousness. The implication for Heisenberg was that no unitary explanation of reality was ever possible, and more importantly, physics no longer could claim to study nature, but rather was a study of our conscious interaction with nature. Today this idea has been further devolved by Carlo Rovelli through his Relativist Interpretation of Quantum, depending heavily on quantum field theory starting with quantum fields of energy as primary and constantly spewing chaotic spin (quantum) foam from which temporal complex organizations arise. Any system or experience of time is necessarily connected to perspectival consciousness entangled with the universe and engaged in an extreme reduction which he calls blurring.
This is the state of our knowledge of physical reality in the 21st Century and needs to be addressed head on. It does not suffice to merely dismiss it as contentious.
Too Late for the Gods 