The weekly you demon, full steam ahead. The Gnostic hates the structure. So this is like part six of Eric Wublin's six traits that make Gnostic. This is actually the fifth part.
One, two, and three traits were each their own episode. Four and five were combined into one episode. And the trait six is going to be broken into two, maybe three episodes. So this is part five of a six-part series, and it's part one of a two-part sub-part series I think it's worth.
So ancient Gnosticism presupposed an elaborate cosmological structure of evil. So ancient Gnosticism used the ancient cosmic system. The Earth was in the center, surrounded by the air and the spheres, sun, moon, mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and a ring of fixed stars that closed it all off. You know, that was more or less the accepted astronomical science around the time of Christ.
It was nothing novel. But the ancient Gnostic took this cosmological system one step further. It taught that the cosmological system was a prison. I'm pretty sure every Gnostic set taught this idea.
I mean, I think that is like the Cinquan now without which ancient Gnosticism didn't exist. I mean, most X said the cosmos was the creation of an evil god, the Demurge, who created the cosmos as a structure of deception. The Demurge then outfitted the structure with demons and archons who acted as prison guards to make sure no one got out of this cosmological prison. And that was the key.
Gnosticism offered liberation from the prison. The cosmological prison was the Cinquan non-of Gnosticism. If existence wasn't a prison, the Gnostics product, knowledge, the map, the plan for escape was worthless. I mean, Gnosticism without a structural evil to overcome is like football, baseball, or basketball without a ball.
Gotta have the structure. And that's a big problem. So recall the Metaxi, that in-between area between transcendence and imminence. The Metaxi is a tough place.
It's tension between the two poles, transcendence and imminence. It's frustration and hope, it's struggle and peace, it's work and calm, it's confusion and serenity. It sucks and it doesn't suck. It's a structure, but it's not a structure.
And I actually drew up a diagram last month and posted it. And you can go over the show notes, you'll see it. Yeah, but it's a structure, but it's not a structure. The Tao is a symbol of its ineffable and ultimately mysterious nature.
Ancient Gnostic didn't like that. The ancient Gnostic said the entire cosmos has a structure. Moreover, he said it was a structure he understood and could defeat by escaping it and that he could teach others how to escape it. And that our whole purpose was to escape it because the cosmological structure sucks.
It's a fundamental misstep. It's the biggest misstep because it is metaphysically, primordial, and frames everything in the picture. So right from the get-go, the Gnostic is wacked in the head, he has his bad worldview. He thinks the cosmos is a prison and it sucks.
You know, I was that a funeral recently? One of my sons said, hey, my older guy told his friend who just lost his father, who wasn't more than the older guy said to the young man. He said, look, life's a shit sandwich every more than you take another bite. And that's an exact quote.
The older guy was right, but he's also wrong. I mean, life might be a shit sandwich, but there's mouthwash, floss, and a toothbrush. It's hard to get that taste out of your mouth. Sure, but it can be managed.
And occasionally, the bad taste is almost completely gone. And things actually seem pretty good until you have to take another bite. But to the ancient Gnostic, there is no mouthwash, floss, or toothbrush. It's all shit sandwich all the time.
So the answer to the Gnostic is to get red or to be red of the shit sandwich. And the demurge keeps cramming it down her throats with the evil structure you put in place. I mean, it's no wonder the Gnostic feels existential discontent and unhappiness, which is Vogland's first trait of the Gnostic, just an unhappy person, discontented all the time. The ancient Gnostic taught its followers.
They could be rid of the shit sandwich by escaping the structure. The modern Gnostic teaches its followers or modern Gnostic teaches its followers. They can be rid of the shit sandwich by demolishing the structure. All right, now we're going to talk a little bit about the modern school of structuralism.
Okay, now, just in general, modern thought tends to revolve around the idea that we live in an imminent structure, eminent IMMA and ENT, like earthly structure. There is no transcendence. There is no metaxi. There's just the earth with a massive dome of linguistic connections, inferences, presumptions, beliefs, customs, traditions, rules, institutions that sits over every culture.
Most modern thought starts with the view that every culture sits in prison under this constellation of conceic that we created and then forgot that we created it. That's a niche idea. And because we made it originally, we can unmake it, teach these modern structuralists and start over whenever we want. We can toss aside cultures, presumptions, beliefs, customs, rules, institutions because they're all just quote-unquote artificial constructs.
And I'd say this general feeling laces modernity. Even if most moderns aren't aware of it, it's one of those presumptions that informs the modern attitude. Now, this attitude was largely formed by a philosophical school known as structuralism. It was founded by the Swiss linguist, Hetat and France, I believe, but Ferdinand Diese Schur, whose lectures on language were collected by his students and published after his death in 1913.
His idea spread wildly. And by the mid-1960s, structuralism was considered an absolutely unassailable final source of truth. In fact, when Jacques Derrida demolished the hell out of it, discredited, he was speaking at a lecture in Baltimore where he was being brought over to celebrate the whole conference with a celebration of structuralism. And Derrida was a star speaker and Derrida came in and crapped over and says, this is BS.
I'll be talking about Derrida in a future episode. Anyway, so what exactly is structuralism? Okay, it's dense stuff. And I'm just going to read you know, probably the best quote I've ever heard or seen by Lewis Marcos.
Here's a teacher, a professor, I think at Southern Methodist or Houston Baptist or something like that. Anyway, Lewis Marco says structuralism is quote, an interdisciplinary approach to all branches of human knowledge that rejects all ontological and epistemological sources of meaning in favor of an anti-metaphysical approach that pauses that all humanistic pursuits are the products of deep structures that predate human consciousness, unquote. All right, so structuralism teaches that words do not signify an underlying reality. That's first and foremost thing to grasp.
When you say apple, it doesn't refer to a real permanent idea of apple that exists somewhere above us and comes down to us to inform human affairs, which was Plato's philosophy of the forms. I mean, forms Plato said, give us ideas that impart real truth and are the origins of everything in our world. Forms Plato said, give us centers around which meaning can coalesce. The structuralist disagrees and says words merely connect a concept with a sound or image.
Let's talk about the signified and the signifier. But anyway, it's just an artificial connection here that we make. Words are arbitrary. I mean, if they weren't, we'd only have one language in the world.
Words only have meaning because they are part of a greater system of signs. That greater system is the social and cultural structure in which we live. Words are the signs to which we communicate with one another, whether it's in print, video, podcast, and because the words are given meaning by the place in the structure, then it's the structure that gives us meaning. Our words are products of an objective, materialistic, scientific, linguistic structure that determines the meanings of our words and thoughts, the system of language in which one exists, i.e., the structure a person is born into, determines our thought.
Thought doesn't result in language, but vice versa. Our language gives us our thoughts. Someone's like we're programmed by the structure we're in. The structure is important and precise, comes from these concepts.
It underlies us and forms us from down under, so to speak, unlike Plato's idea that the ideas come from above and forth and inform us. All meaning to the structure less is imminent, with no input from the transcendent. Now, if all meaning comes from the imminent structure, then the structure is everything. Moreover, the structure constantly changes and grows.
And if you can change the structure, then you can change meaning. So here is structuralism's bottom line. If all meaning derives from the structure, and the structure itself has no eternal permanence or truth embodied within it, but instead is constantly growing and changing, then there is no transcendent truth, but rather only a pattern of structures that can be plotted and analyzed through math and science. Structures use the Cartesian coordinates to plot the various sciences.
Like a little constellation out there. Mental pursuits, therefore, are mere emanations from the structures and therefore can be plotted and analyzed through math and science. The structural scales really elaborate diagrams using these Cartesian coordinates of how the words all work together to create the structure. Anyway, the Gnostic seeks to disrupt the structure.
And that is Vogel's sixth Gnostic trait. So I'm going to read just the Vogel's sixth Gnostic trait. That's a tough slide in here, but bear with me. There's a Vogel that said, quote, If it is possible, however, so to work a structural change in the given order of being that we can be satisfied with as a perfect one, then it becomes the task of the Gnostic to seek out the prescription for such a change.
Knowledge, gnosis, of the method of altering being is the central concern of the Gnostic. As the sixth feature of the Gnostic attitude, therefore, we recognize the construction of a formula for self and world salvation as well as the Gnostic's readiness to come forward as a prophet who will proclaim his knowledge about the salvation of mankind. That end quote, the Gnostic rejects the reality spectrum that we've been talking about in these podcasts. To Gnostic, ancient or modern, there is no doubt there is no Metaxi.
To the modern Gnostic, there is no transcendence. It's all eminence all the time. And the structure erected from eminence that prisons us and makes life a shit sandwich. The Gnostic hates the structure and wants to be rid of it.
The ancient Gnostic wanted to escape the cosmic structure. The modern Gnostic wants to demolish the imminent structure and then erect a new structure that fits his idea for how things should be. And we discuss that in much more detail in the next installment, as always thanks for listening.