No Robots

And what is it that the prophets proclaimed? Jahve ehad--Beingness is One.

The complete absolute truth is simply this: Jahve ehad--Beingness is One.

Amedeo

With this I close my responses to Brunner:

He believes that "JAHVE EHAD" means BEINGNESS IS ONE.

He is a truth-inventor, worse than those who hear inner voices and proclaim them to be divine voices.

No Robots

Moses conceived the Deity as a Being Who has always existed, does exist, and always will exist, and for this cause he calls Him by the name Jehovah, which in Hebrew signifies these three phases of existence.--Spinoza, TTP

Amedeo

Moses and Spinoza invented the meaning of "yahweh" -- a word (name of a deity) which existed prior to and independently of the Bible -- a word which no rabbinical exigesis has been able to decipher. Yahweh, the Elohim, the Nephilim, etc., are prior to the Jewish religion, and rabbis cannot not even cope with the male and female gods who created a male and a female human. (I wrote too much on all this already, and I am not interested in defending my standing here.) Brunner lives in a vicious circle of delusions, and I don't have the psychiatric skills to redeem him. That's why I said I terminate my responses on him. HE HAS NO VALID CONCEPTION OF TRUTH; he lives in pre-philosophical ages and does not have a leg to stand on. In those time, there was NO conception of truth [they knew only veracity and mendacity]; in our times, primitive minds take the word "truth"... and describe it according to the darkness of their own minds. (The result is a view that the human mind constitutes truth, with no reference to reality,... precisely because prophetic "truth" consists of RECEIVED INFORMATION, not of knowledge of reality. So, we can speak of subjectivistic truth, just as I have spoken of the subjectivistic morality that obtains in the Bible or jewish culture, in contradistiction to the objectivistic morality of the Gentiles in the Philosophical era of mankind. In primitive times, there was also subjectivistic beauty, which consisted in what is pleasant or pleasurable. // There has been a real evolution of the human cerebrum -- which refutes the immutability of the species which some god allegedly created.)

No Robots

What is called morality is nothing but a tool of egoism.--Brunner, Our Christ, p.211.

No Robots

Sven is referring here, no doubt, to Brunner's take on evolutionism:

Once more in human history, superstition is undergoing a transformation: this time, from religion to that hundred times, thousand times greater folly of evolutionism. Of course, people are completely unaware of the fact that evolution requires as much faith and credulity on their part as formerly did religion, and that they have simply found therein some new superstitions.—Brunner, Spinoza contra Kant.

Of course, Brunner does have his partisans. Here is Yehudi Menuhin:

For my understanding of the dilemmas of our times, I am deeply grateful to the great German philosopher, the Jew Constantin Brunner, who was born in Altona and lived the greater part of his life in Berlin. He also helped me to understand that greatest of paradoxes: how could a people that has made some of the very greatest contributions in music, in poetry and literature, in science and philosophy, in religion and mysticism, embrace genocide, murdering not only the sick and handicapped, not only political opponents, not only Gypsies and Jews, but all of Europe?—[original text, in German, available here]

Scholars have been reluctant to deal with Brunner's take on Christianity. One exception is Kornelis Miskotte:

Constantin Brunner declared that when Jesus said 'Father,' this was a veiled rejection of the religion of the disciples and a hidden profession of 'atheistic' salvation. Naturally this raised a storm of indignation among the religious liberals. We too believe that Brunner's assertion is untenable, but that it comes closer to the mystery of this giving of a new name to God than does the interpretation which regards the name 'Father' as the apex of general religious experience.—Miskotte, When the Gods are Silent, p. 120.

Actually, I am something of a connoisseur of criticism of Brunner. I have, for example, on my website this assessment by Albert Einstein:

I find him quite interesting as a critic. From the standpoint of knowledge theory however, it seems to me objectionable that he does not correctly establish the logical independence of concepts vis-Ã*-vis naked sense experience. His doctrine of knowledge becomes thereby a weakly underpinned type of psychologism. In this sense, his criticism of Kant in my opinion goes too far; in positing that there is no self-evident necessary category, he has ignored the fact that each thought rests on a categorical foundation, ie. on pre-established concepts which are formed from the sensuous realm however logically independent from it they are.

Now, I do have criticisms of Einstein's assessment, but I certainly am interested in what he had to say. I only wish I could find more criticism of this calibre.

Clouseau

Is 'egoism' a synonym for 'survival instinct'?

No Robots

Absolutely. Brunner uses the term "Lebensfürsorge".

Clouseau

In that case, the translation is somewhat unfortunate, as 'egoism' has technical and popular uses that carry rather different meanings.

No Robots

Brunner does use both 'Lebensfürsorge' and 'Egoismus'. 'Lebensfürsorge', provident care, refers to practical thinking in the interest of life maintenance. This thinking is accompanied by egoism, the esteem in which one holds one's own beingness. The exaggeration of egoism is the basis of superstition in its three principal forms: religion, metaphysics and moralism.