The opposite of a personal God: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_god
You’ve probably had this conversation before, I’ve had it a few times myself.
For me, it’s just confusing to call the absolute, the all or the ground of being, God, and hardnosed, scientific materialists, who wouldn’t dream of ‘deifying nature’, thinking of or describing themselves in such a manner, also believe in absolutes, like gravity, or in a unifying principle behind gravity and all the other forces and processes, like Einstein’s relativity.
And I mean of course there’s totality, there is one thing, like a chair, there is many things, like all the stuff in, on and around planet earth, and there’s everything, how could there be some things without there being everything?
A ground of being?
That’s what quantum physics is.
It seems to me there is no difference between your Machiavellian (I prefer modern) and Nietzschean (postmodern) ages other than semantics, or even if there is, I wouldn’t liken it to a deification, or demonization.
If there is a difference between the modern and postmodern age, I would say postmoderns aren’t terrified of their subjectivity, the way moderns were, and are, they fully embrace their emotions, values and individuality, their creativity, without objectifying it, trying to turn it into some external entity like Gods or ghosts.
Art, poetry and creative passion becomes paramount, as opposed to the religion and mysticism of the premodern age, or the dry, intellectual detatchment of the modern one.
And abstractions like language/cognition are increasingly viewed as pragmatic, as tools of measuring and evaluating nature, rather than as, things in themselves, in the Platonic, transcendent or Aristotelian, imminent sense.
So the subjective is permitted its sphere, its domain, without it being (mis)construed as objective.
We are free to wonder, speculate, emote and judge without getting too, hung up on them.
The postmodern age isn’t so much a rejection of the modern as it is a further development of it.
What the transition from paganism (immanent, pluralistic theism) to monotheism (transcendent, monistic theism) to modernism and postmodernism represents, is the desubjectification of reality.
Postmodernism is the latest development in this process, it’s even more objective than modernism, in that not only is it atheist and aspiritual, it doesn’t impose or project morals and values, nor cognition and language itself onto the things it’s thinking and talking about.
Interestingly, In the west, moderns got hung up on this idea of pluralism, that things were fundamentally separate, where as in the east, they got hung up on that idea of monism, that things were fundamentally together, where as postmodernism recognizes that things are neither necessarily pluralistic, nor monistic, it’s the rejection of both metaphysical extremes.
For the postmodern, one and many are just imperfect tools we can apply, or misapply to stuff, same as mind and matter, the confusion comes from going to extremes, from making a false dichotomy out of them.
This doesn’t mean postmodernism is dualistic, or nondualistic for that matter.
Postmodernism is all things, as it is no things, it is a kind of cognitive, linguistic and, metaphysical pragmatism, not going to extremes.
The transition from paganism to postmodernism hasn’t exactly been linear, the Greeks and Romans, or at least their academia, and I’m sure some of it trickled down to the people, were able to go from paganism straight to something akin to modernism and postmodernism, bypassing the monotheistic phase, or at least not getting caught up in the monotheistic phase present in Plato and Aristotle’s thought.
And if it’s not at all linear, in the future we may find ourselves going back to the modern, monotheistic or even pagan stage, I mean for some, neopagans, this going back has already occurred, but could it occur for humanity as a whole?
We shall see, especially if our civilization was to collapse back into an agrarian or scavenging one, we may find that under such conditions, paganism comes more naturally to us.
A couple of things. First, you’re replying to a five-year-old post. Second, I said in that post:
“We are now in the transitional period between 3 and 4, in which the two overlap. The necessary link between the two is nihilism.”
Back then, I would have placed postmodernism in the transitional period, not in the Nietschean age (4). Today, I’m a bit more favourably inclined to postmodernism, but still wouldn’t quite identify it with the Nietzschean age, which is in great part still to unfold.
As for the rest of what you say, it’s good that you have your own take, and it’s a sensible-sounding one. I don’t think it’s at odds with my own, though:
pagan : Homeric
monotheistic : Platonic
modern : Machiavellian
postmodern : nihilistic/Nietzschean
postmodern/pagan : Nietzschean