Okay, but it doesn't have to be just one thing. Judgement, for example, is being constructed inside ourselves all the time. The influence of some "Great Other" on that is part of the process. The fact that we really care about what our children understand us to be, and our ability to explain to our children, means the cultural continuation into subsequent generations is also part of what is captured by imagery of the afterlife. But for me, it isn't the whole thing - more like a newer, more tangible image for the issues at stake.
Yes, I remember feeling an "Aha!" when I realized this "continuation" of the self.
The rich man goes to someplace, but where it is cannot be discerned. The mythology of the time is all mixed up, with Persian and Greek and Egyptian influences. I think it is best to leave it as a vaguely evocative notion of an unpleasant afterlife, in which "consequences" help people to realize the isolation and hard-heartedness of their ordinary life. Scrooge style.
I try to remember that the audience for these writings included people actively engaged in practices of mutuality, whether just shared meals or actual support for widows and orphans. And in many cases, maybe most, this would have been experienced as a source of great joy. A liberation from "the cares of the world." The quality of their lives was elevated because their mutuality was meaningful to them, in a way they expressed in terms of being in end times, in a kind of overthrow of an oppressive order of the world.
Well, it can also be translated as "into the life of the age to come." Cleansed, perhaps, from domination systems and deliberate humiliation of others.
There are two dimensions of the life of the age to come. One of them is this "eternal order" dimension, which we experience as improved perspective and a sense of rightness. Light, and peace. The other is a right-brain sensation of ecstasy, of disruption of the crawl of time by an urgent in-breaking of love and joy. I believe that when that ecstasy is combined with a sense of belonging, of having arrived at the "true home" we all feel a longing for, it results in a setting aside of weighing and calculating any advantage or gain.
I heard an example on the radio today. I was listening to an NPR story about people of very limited means who set up a meal service, providing free meals to immigrant day laborers in their community. No outside funds - they were happy to have enough that they could share, but the real reward was to see the smile of gratitude on the faces of hungry men fed. Their mirror neurons were juicing them up on oxytocin, presumably.
Well, it might just be that the time scales involved seem longer than anything we can visualize as anthropological forces. I haven't dug into the lore of alchemists or any of those others who helped put astrology together. I would not put it past their abilities to be able to calculate such ages. But I keep wondering if the changes corresponding to the ages could have been preserved in any kind of lore. We have flood stories and Norse ice age stories, but are they any more reality-based than world serpents or giants?
I certainly see the point. I gather the original Greek typically interpreted telos as a quality of manufactured intention, like "what a shovel is for" or "what an ax is for". And in the metaphysics of the time that would mean that the marvelous adaptation of giraffes to their "purpose" of reaching leaves at the tops of trees would also obviously have been a matter of created intention. Etc. But teleological thinking has other dimensions, and teleological use of language tends toward a view that better integrates lived life with consideration of values, by comparison with descriptive or explanatory language.
While I think this is helpful, it is also very externalized. The purpose of my life is not going to be found in anything that stems from the slow time of mutation and adaptation. The purpose of my life is an experience of feeling motivated to "suffer the slings and arrows" for the sake of the goodness of life. It is framed by an understanding of how I fit in with other people, including my family and my society, and not just an understanding of geological scale progress.
I think this makes a persuasive appeal as to what constitutes a "high" moral purpose. I would be very dissatisfied with any moral structure that shut out such perspective and priorities. But I think it will always feel somewhat like a left-brain "should" and therefore feel disconnected, for many people, from the mutuality of tribe. Light and peace, but somewhat dessicated of the moisture of belonging. It isn't that way for me - I feel very much united with others by this perspective of attacking our own fragile lifeboat. But when the enemy is us, it invites a certain alienation for people who focus more on their own friends and neighbors.
Well! I never would have thought of Locke as a source of corruption, but I am also very worried by individualism. I like the notion that it is "traumatised". Locke was in opposition to Hobbes, if I understand rightly, and they were both reacting to a time of trauma, when people were persecuted, even tortured at times, for their highest and most enlightened motivations. Hobbes saw a forbidding prospect of such murderous strife continuing always unless a ruler imposed order, but Locke concerned himself with the legitimacy of the ruler and saw no alternative to consent by the governed, which tends toward individualism for sure.
My primary source on teleological imperatives seems to envision a more organic, untraumatized process of educating people into a natural sense of community (more in line with Rousseau than with either of those other two, perhaps?) without imagining any conflict too threatening for the cultivation of the good and true. I fear if we continue on our blinded, heedless path we will make a Mad Max world inevitable, with Hobbes sitting up in heaven saying, "See, I told you so."
Yes, there is something very deep in this. The good of the future has a claim on us that is not entirely about light and peace and "shoulds". I think it also has to do with the goodness felt about sustaining life. All of our longings for a better world are embedded in a sense of possibility, that where there is life there is hope. And one cannot hope when the future is taken away.
I have to think this is understood holistically in the right-brain longing for belonging and home. I have trouble believing that anyone with a "life is short - live it up" outlook is not, in some way, blocking nurturant instincts and nurturant pleasures.
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