Jump to content

Bakker's the Great Ordeal excerpts III: Barthes to Balzac(spoilers)


Kalbear

Recommended Posts

Prologue: Momemn
And naught was known or unknown, and there was no hunger.
All was One in silence, and it was as Death.
Then the Word was spoken, and One became Many.
Doing was struck from the hip of Being.
And the Solitary God said, “Let there be Deceit.
Let there be Desire.”
——The Book of Fane

This disproves the Dunyain central axiom of "the Logos is without beginning or end"

Here in this line it says THE WORD (aka as THE LOGOS in Christian tradition) was spoken

The logos has a beginning.

Dunyain disproven

Additionally bakker wants to write an eschatological mileau, literally write words that utter a world that has a beginning and an end.

So the logos therefore also has a defined end.

Dunyain disproven.

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

9 minutes ago, lokisnow said:
Prologue: Momemn
And naught was known or unknown, and there was no hunger.
All was One in silence, and it was as Death.
Then the Word was spoken, and One became Many.
Doing was struck from the hip of Being.
And the Solitary God said, “Let there be Deceit.
Let there be Desire.”
——The Book of Fane

This disproves the Dunyain central axiom of "the Logos is without beginning or end"

Here in this line it says THE WORD (aka as THE LOGOS in Christian tradition) was spoken

The logos has a beginning.

Dunyain disproven

Additionally bakker wants to write an eschatological mileau, literally write words that utter a world that has a beginning and an end.

So the logos therefore also has a defined end.

Dunyain disproven.

 

Well this assumes the Truth of the Book of Fane. Which may be right and I agree with your points on what Bakker wants to right, but worth making your implicit assumption explicit. 

Also what you disproved is the lesser of the Dunyain pillars. More important is the pillar that what comes before determines what comes after. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

6 hours ago, unJon said:

So Bakker made the Inchoroi ship to the dimensions of Noah's Ark but an order of magnitude larger? Interesting. 

Yeah, I also noticed the Inchoroi ship seems rather small, but decided it is probably author's mistake. It is possible Bakker purposefully used Noah's Ark dimension, in a typical philosopher's way choosing literary allusion over physical coherence, though.;)

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Quote

Wert, how would you rate TGO with the other books? Do you prefer the first trilogy or the Aspect Emperor?

I enjoyed it the most out of all six books. But then I didn't have a clue what was going on for about half the first trilogy. Visiting the lunacy in this thread and its infinite number of forebears left me better-prepped for this book and TWLW. I felt I actually understood about 95% of what was going on ,which was a big step up over previous volumes.

I should reread the first trilogy in light of this info and see if it improves things.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

3 hours ago, lokisnow said:
Prologue: Momemn
And naught was known or unknown, and there was no hunger.
All was One in silence, and it was as Death.
Then the Word was spoken, and One became Many.
Doing was struck from the hip of Being.
And the Solitary God said, “Let there be Deceit.
Let there be Desire.”
——The Book of Fane

This disproves the Dunyain central axiom of "the Logos is without beginning or end"

Here in this line it says THE WORD (aka as THE LOGOS in Christian tradition) was spoken

The logos has a beginning.

Dunyain disproven

Additionally bakker wants to write an eschatological mileau, literally write words that utter a world that has a beginning and an end.

So the logos therefore also has a defined end.

Dunyain disproven.

 

Following traditional Christian theology, the Logos is an emanation of God that partakes in the timeless eternity of God. Recall that Christ is the Word Made Flesh, i.e. the Logos incarnate. A traditional means of accounting for the difficulty of reconciling Christ's dual identity as eternal person within the Trinity and historical man has been to point to his identity with the Logos at the beginning of time. The Logos, as partaking in the divine nature, is therefore without beginning or end and is not of the World but is rather a condition of the existence of the temporal world that originates from the Outside.

The Dunyain as therefore attempting to become God through embodying the Logos.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

The other day I was thinking that even if the logos is without begining or end, mans/the dunyains knowledge of it does have a begining. Trying to invoke it's eternal nature as if it has anything to do with the dunyain is just hindsight bias in the dunyain.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Since Earwa is supposed to be an inversion of our world in some ways, maybe there exists an Earwan magic-fiction writer who says things like "any sufficiently advanced sorcery is indistinguishable from technology," in response to those who marvel at the Inchoroi's technology.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

23 minutes ago, Hello World said:

Since Earwa is supposed to be an inversion of our world in some ways, maybe there exists an Earwan magic-fiction writer who says things like "any sufficiently advanced sorcery is indistinguishable from technology," in response to those who marvel at the Inchoroi's technology.

Awesome.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

7 hours ago, Werthead said:

I enjoyed it the most out of all six books. But then I didn't have a clue what was going on for about half the first trilogy. Visiting the lunacy in this thread and its infinite number of forebears left me better-prepped for this book and TWLW. I felt I actually understood about 95% of what was going on ,which was a big step up over previous volumes.

I should reread the first trilogy in light of this info and see if it improves things.

Re-readability is real high, Wert.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Concerning The Logos

Quote

The Greek word -- transliterated logos -- which was used by John in the prologue to his gospel, is often translated as word. Taken literally, that meaning is problematic, for how could a mere word exist from the beginning of time? How could a word be God? And how could such a word become human, in particular, the man, Jesus Christ? To properly understand John's prologue and, in fact, to fully understand his gospel and the whole New Testament, one must know something of the interpretation a literate, first century citizen of the Roman Empire -- one thoroughly steeped in Greek philosophy and culture -- would attach to the term.

Literally, logos, did mean word. It could also mean utterance, speech, logic, or reason, to name but a few. Heraclitus of Ephesus, who lived in the sixth century, BC, was the first philosopher we know of to give logos a philosophical or theological interpretation. Heraclitus might in fact be called the first western philosopher, for his writings were perhaps the first to set forth a coherent system of thought akin to what we now term philosophy. Although his writings are preserved only in fragments quoted in the writings of others, we know that he described an elaborate system touching on the ubiquity of change, the dynamic interplay of opposites, and a profound unity of things. The Logos seemed to figure heavily in his thought and he described it as a universal, underlying principle, through which all things come to pass and in which all things share.

This notion of The Logos was further developed by Stoic philosophers over the next few centuries. The Stoics spoke of The Logos as the Seminal Reason, through which all things came to be, by which all things were ordered, and to which all things returned.

Perhaps the most extensive accounting of The Logos was by Philo of Alexandria, a Hellenistic Jew who lived around the time of Christ. Philo wrote allegories of Old Testament books authored by Moses, interpreting them in the light of Greek philosophy. He used the term, logos,refer more than 1300 times in his writings, in many varied ways. Of particular note are his references to The Logos as the Divine Reason, by participation in which humans are rational; the model of the universe; the superintendent or governor of the universe; and the first-born son of God. Although there is no direct evidence that John ever even read Philo, it seems clear that the concepts he articulated were firmly in the mind of the evangelist when he wrote his gospel.

The understanding of The Logos by an intended reader of the prologue to the fourth gospel may be summarized as follows...

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

3 hours ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

The Dunyain are the ultimate behaviorists, aren't they?

Kinda? The Dunyain believe a whole lot of what you are and what you do is driven by genetics, which isn't strictly behavioralism. This is why their face study works - or at least why they think their face study works. If Loki is correct, they're just reading souls and attributing it to facial recognition. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Historically, almost every Second Apocalypse book has suddenly received a delay before publication, I was wondering when this one was going to happen. Happened with WLW and TJE as well. It's only 1 week though, previous times it was a month or more.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

So my exams are done. Hopefully someone has already worked this out for me and I won't have to go on a google adventure, but as a kindle user in the UK do i have any legal way of acquiring TGO before the Uk release date ?

edit - just risked spoilers and saw its still not out in the states. What on earth is going on.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

3 hours ago, Sheep the Evicted said:

So my exams are done. Hopefully someone has already worked this out for me and I won't have to go on a google adventure, but as a kindle user in the UK do i have any legal way of acquiring TGO before the Uk release date ?

edit - just risked spoilers and saw its still not out in the states. What on earth is going on.

This thread is full of spoilers for the next book, just so you know.

 

Release date in the North America is 12th July or something. I buy the book over there and get it sent to me(UK too). Although that's a physical book as opposed to kindle. Not sure how ordering kindle from north America to play in the UK works sorry. I'll just get the kindle version when it comes out here.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Yeah, there is always book depository too for a physical copy, even if tends to arrive later than the release date. Was TGO ever slated to be released 05 of June in the states or is my mind playing tricks on me ? Because I could swear that was one of the dates i saw at one point. Now we are saying 17th of July in the states and still 29th Septemeber in the UK ?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

31 minutes ago, Sheep the Evicted said:

Yeah, there is always book depository too for a physical copy, even if tends to arrive later than the release date. Was TGO ever slated to be released 05 of June in the states or is my mind playing tricks on me ? Because I could swear that was one of the dates i saw at one point. Now we are saying 17th of July in the states and still 29th Septemeber in the UK ?

5th July was my memory of the date :)

Seen a few dates for this release over the years mind you.

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Archived

This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.

×
×
  • Create New...