> I'm not sure what you are talking about -- and in particular, the hotel > allegory is obscure.
Ever deconstructed the word "obscure" ? > > But Homer would have agreed with Joanna. The lives of the gods > (immortals) are meaningless, because it is their mortality that gives > meaning to human lives. We are our histories, after all, and eternity > dissolves history. As far as I recall, the Gods were immortal, because they were not men, like Socrates. The presumption here, is that the prospect of death is necessary for human meaning to realise itself in the world, a sort of mystical justification for genocide with a christian beat. Sort of like Dad saying, "If you do that again, you will get a whack". Mortality is a prompt for the survival instinct, the urge for life, the imperative of realising one's goals in a finite time. But ought humanity to be engaged in a perpetual battle for survival, as a bit of discipline from the almightily wise ruling classes ? Or should we rather conceive of true humanity as homo faber, homo creans, homo imaginosus, homo sperans, on the basis that once the problem of survival is solved, and we can get on with better things ? (I am using the generic Latin words and not intending to refer to homosexuality here ?) Resorting to Wittgenstein, eternity does not dissolve history, it relativises it. This is also a rudimentary dialectical insight: the full meaning of a concept can only be grasped with its opposite, in defining what X means, what X does not mean is just as important, etc. By the way, I really hate "Gods", outside of artistic expression, because as far as I am concerned, there is really only one God, whatever you like to call it, Allah, or any other name, and God is WITHIN each human being, we share God, whether we like it or not. We human beings conceived of God, God is ours, and we are not abandoning God, even if people fall out of contact with God or deny God's existence. God is a perfectly ordinary human experience, not unlike eating a peanut butter sandwich or a state of trance, and why people still make such a fuss about it, I really do not know. This view of the matter blows the whole Nietzchean crapola skyhigh into smithereens. Jurriaan
