helena.handbasket on Nostr: God is dead wasn't a statement about being an atheist, it was meant to say that even ...

God is dead wasn't a statement about being an atheist, it was meant to say that even when people renounce the concept of god, they still live in the residue of a god-centered worldview. You often see this with people who talk about evolution like as if it's a concious being who has preferences and goals, just using the word evolution to describe the god idea without realizing it. A lot of trouble results from this, one big one being that if god created us according to Christian ideas, then it follows that the world is meant to be comprehensible to us, but within an evolutionary framework there's no particular reason to assume we evolved to understand the world beyond whatever is required to survive and propagate. A lot of anguish I think cones from people being confused by the world, but it's only confusing if you have an underlying belief that it's supposed to make sense, which is a consequence of belief in a created universe with a coherent point to it.

I think similarly, Kant is dead, but we live in the residue of his thought. Every time someone talks about music or books or shows being "good or bad" as opposed to "I like it or don't" or some more in depth reading they are just playing Kant's game. The notion that your wavy air must contain some inherent quality within it that I access transparently and which makes it sit on a universal hierarchy of wavy airs is an absurdity on inspection, and everyone knows it too, nobody will actually defend the notion of absolute measures of how good music is but damn if we can't escape that mode of talking about it, and in doing we keep reanimating the dead corpse of Kant who imo we would be much better off letting die and go away