Earwa > The No-God

I have been struggling processing some of the philosophical points of TUC

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Unrepentant Schoolman:
I am going to sit and think about what everyone has written.  In the final chapters when Kellhus is conversing with the Disfigured (?) there were several equivalencies made that are the basis of my confusion.  I'll try to tease them out further.

The name Koringhus has appeared ... does anyone have a reference as to where in the texts his name has appeared.

Now I do recall in TUC referring to the No-God as the conjoining of the Subject and Object, the No-God being the Absolute ... I find this interesting and I need to brew on this more.

TaoHorror:

--- Quote from: Unrepentant Schoolman on January 14, 2019, 04:34:25 pm ---The name Koringhus has appeared ... does anyone have a reference as to where in the texts his name has appeared.
--- End quote ---

He's the "Survivor" in Ishual - he's who Akka and Mimarra meet when they travel there - he takes a nose dive off a cliff after taking some quiri, thinking it brings him into the Absolute.

H:

--- Quote from: Unrepentant Schoolman on January 14, 2019, 04:34:25 pm ---I am going to sit and think about what everyone has written.  In the final chapters when Kellhus is conversing with the Disfigured (?) there were several equivalencies made that are the basis of my confusion.  I'll try to tease them out further.
--- End quote ---

Well, just throw in the quotes here, there are plenty of people here that can give you ideas on what it might be talking about.


--- Quote from: Unrepentant Schoolman on January 14, 2019, 04:34:25 pm ---The name Koringhus has appeared ... does anyone have a reference as to where in the texts his name has appeared.
--- End quote ---

You might want to reread Chapter 14 of The Great Ordeal.  While Koringhus appears and disappears in a short time in the narrative, I think his role is pretty important to the meta-physics.

In the  thread I linked above, you can see what one could do in extrapolating out what Koringhus "uncovers" in that chapter.

Wilshire:

--- Quote from: TaoHorror on January 14, 2019, 04:48:11 pm ---
--- Quote from: Unrepentant Schoolman on January 14, 2019, 04:34:25 pm ---The name Koringhus has appeared ... does anyone have a reference as to where in the texts his name has appeared.
--- End quote ---

He's the "Survivor" in Ishual - he's who Akka and Mimarra meet when they travel there - he takes a nose dive off a cliff after taking some quiri, thinking it brings him into the Absolute.

--- End quote ---

He is also Kellhus's son. But specifically, he's the adult Dunyain that Mimara and Akka find in Ishual. There's also the child, but he was never named in the text.

Like H said, chapter 14 in The Great Ordeal. If you're wrapping your head around Earwa Metaphysics, this chapter (and Koringhus) leaves us with very interesting insights.

SmilerLoki:

--- Quote from: Unrepentant Schoolman on January 14, 2019, 02:23:23 pm ---Please share your thoughts and understandings ... I have had my brain working on this for a few days but im left feeling thrilled by my inability to resolve this. It's fun to ponder.

--- End quote ---
I wanted to start my post with this quote:

--- Quote from: R. Scott Bakker ---There's no real world sense to be made of this: the Absolute, the unconditioned condition, is chimerical, a kind of cognitive perpetual motion machine. So fictionally speaking, the question is what kind of plausibility tales can you cook up. The Mutilated go pure objectivity, sapience absent sentience, while Kellhus goes pure subjectivity, sentience absent sapience. Press in either direction, and you trip into conceptual crash space, which is why all philosophical investigation of the theme remains mired in endless disputation.
--- End quote ---
http://www.second-apocalypse.com/index.php?topic=2278.msg36429#msg36429

"Cû'jara-Cinmoi" is R. Scott Bakker's nickname on this forum.

So, in terms of our world, what Bakker calls the Absolute has no meaning, it's purely a fictional device.

In our world we have a lot of competing worldviews that aren't initially built to be reconciled with each other. On the contrary, they're built to be self-sufficient and all-explanatory. In many ways, all of them are Mechanical Philosophies since they presuppose the existence of one consistent set of rules for the universe. This approach is very effective for getting actual pragmatic results (just look at what science brought us), so the holes of those worldviews are only coming into light when the amount of pragmatic implementations associated with them starts to dwindle.

The worldviews I'm talking about are materialism (including its subcategories like quantum mechanics or "the world is a machine" postulate, which is also referred as predeterminism, like in discussions about possible meanings of Bell's theorem), indeterminism, idealism, and more exotic theories like eternal return (both version, philosophical and Eliade's). This list is by no means exhaustive. What matters for the purposes of your question, though, is the fact that we don't know which of those worldviews are correct - if any - and to what extent. In this sense our reality is undetermined or multiple-choice. We can choose a frame of reference to view it, and then discard it for the sake of another. But nothing is set in stone (yet), however strong are people's beliefs. In addition, many of the current worldviews (even seemingly contradictory ones) very much can be reconciled, though the value of such reconciliations remains undetermined.

In the universe of TSA (I'll call it "Earwa" from this point on for brevity) everything is different. Bakker constructed Earwa to be a universe of concepts, close to idealism, but not in the mainstream sense. His construct is more arbitrary, exploring philosophical and religious questions he's interested in (like the existence of afterlife, the all-encompassing importance of meaning, the nature of consciousness torn between material and idealistic - the Inside and Outside, - etc.). In this sense all of those concepts objectively exist in Earwa, like the Gods, the Outside, and sorcery.

I think all of this is closely related to your question, since the No-God is one such "absolutized" concept. There is an inherent dichotomy of objective and subjective (or Subject and Object) in Earwa. Essentially, the world is a kind of reconciliation between what is and what's perceived. This reconciliation is fixed in the form of the world of the series we've read. The No-God is supposed to change that, to "shut the world", in essence creating a different reconciliation of Subject and Object. For this purpose, the function of the No-God is an absolutized, world-encompassing concept that's achieved via Tekne (and the means pretty much can be irrelevant here, it's quite unclear). This is what, in my opinion, the Mutilated are talking about when they say that the No-God is the Absolute. Its function is to create a new world when the division of Subject and Object is equal to what the No-God has, which makes it a first self-moving soul. Since this is the goal of the Dunyain, they see it as the Absolute, which is the term they're using for said goal.

Now, whether the No-God works the way the Mutilated think or does something else entirely is a completely different question. I'm of the mind that there is not enough information to make educated guesses, so I don't.

In conclusion, welcome to the Second Apocalypse, Unrepentant Schoolman, and I hope we can if not answer your questions, then at least entertain you!

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