Sunday, September 14, 2014

When the universal affirms the particular


If the universal affirms the particular as higher than the universal, then the complicated attempt by Leo Strauss (guru of the neoconservatives) to lower in value Christian or German or Traditional particularist history may not be valid.

Universals, including spiritual universals, are usually abstractions of particular things, or they are definitions of things that simply do not exist. It is objects that are the reality which are only defined by the abstractions of universals.

If you affirm a particular people who use reason or revelation to affirm universals, as Strauss does with the Greeks and the Jewish people, his favorites, then you are affirming a particularism.

For me the higher reality is the objects that are only defined by universals, and this justifies the decentralization of states, people and particular traditions and histories, which can then be protected with a universal sort of federalism defined by the objects it protects.

This can be grounded in the definition of Godhood as a material, or more precisely, a supermaterial object, evolved to in the material world. When your God is only an abstraction or definition or symbolic-experience, then it is easier to hypertrophy spiritual universalism over particular living objects.

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