Dear George,

... after an extended Easter break let us take a glance today at some more "home truths", not about Africa, but about some basic aspects of this wonderful world in which we live, in order to provide you not only with answers to your questions and concerns, but also with new questions to the answers you already have, with regard to the truth, the human being, dreams, hope, possibilities of change, the capital system, greed, guilt, love and marriage. I will take you to the movies today, invite you for a big treat on popcorn, and as we sit down and start crunching, the lights fade out and the curtain raises.

History-Heilstory or Eternal Progress to the Happy End

Heilsgeschichte (Salvation-Story), Version I: The Fig-Leaf Bikini

Ende gut - Alles gut, that’s what they say in Germany. But for something to have an end it also must have a beginning, and you start with the beginning, which actually is the case in every "good" story, in every "logical" story. You wouldn’t want to read Agatha Christie’s "Zehn kleine Negerlein" ("Ten Little Niggers" - my apologies to New African for choosing this story as an example) the other way round, starting with the end and ending with the start, although reading it this way would probably have it’s own amazing kind of logic in Agatha Christie’s case.

So, "Am Anfang war das Wort", in the beginning was the word, as the Bible tells us, but before our story begins, we see God sit there all alone in eternity, being Alpha and Omega, being Beginning and End, being the Absolute Truth, and looking a bit bored. (So are you and I, and after ten minutes we start whistling and shouting "boo" and throwing popcorn against the screen.) And then, out of no visible reason, God speaks the word, fiat lux, let there be light, and this very word creates the world and the notorious human being, the crown of creation, the secondary "player" of biblical history, which begins with a sin. Biblical history actually begins as HER story, because interestingly it was the lady, who ate the apple in paradise, became like God, that is, distinguished between "good" and "bad", put on her fig-leaf bikini as she saw naked was "bad", and was expelled from paradise together with Adam, whom she had seduced to do the same thing. And here is, where "real action" starts within biblical history, where human labour by the sweat of the brow begins. However let’s not forget that the "main player" of biblical history is God, who actually, for six long days, worked hard himself, too, creating the world and it’s "players", including his own antagonist, the Devil, without whom we would have a considerably boring story here, with nothing worthwhile to tell. - We didn’t see the Devil sit there together with God in eternity before the story begins. He comes into existence through the word of God, he is a creation of God, he is derived from God, and actually, without the Devil, we would not even have a story at all! Let’s not forget either, that after every creation God "saw, that it was good". Consequently, the Bad, the personalized Evil, the Devil himself, must have been good in God’s eyes, because without the Devil there wouldn’t have been a motor of biblical history. If it wasn’t for the Devil, sharing Paradise with Adam and Eve, we wouldn’t have had the Original Sin and Adam and Eve would still be sitting in Paradise at the feet of God, singing and worshipping him (...we would have left the movies wanting our money back, if we were to sit and watch this for more than two hours!). In any case, the biblical conception of history pictures, after a long and tormented story, the final progress toward salvation, at least for those, who make "the right choice", the "good" choice, that is, in the final analysis, for the human beings (the twelve tribes of the House of Israel, 144000 human beings altogether according to the New Testament as described in the Apocalypse). What is even more interesting: there is not really a choice to make for the human beings! The main player, God, is the decision-maker and thus also makes the choice: He separates the goats from the sheep and the straw from the wheat. The good, benign, almighty, all-knowing God knows to distinguish between straw and wheat and would not make such a fatal mistake at the end as to condemn human beings to "eternal weeping and gnashing of teeth" - we would not speak about Salvation and Happy End then. It is only the no-humans, the "bad guys", who fry forever in hell, and so we surely have a very happy ending here for the human being, a return to Paradise, to the total stillstand, to the total resting point (and one might ask oneself, where in the final analysis the difference is between "heaven" and "hell"...)

Coming back to Agatha Christie and the problem of reading a story from the end to the beginning, in the case of biblical history we will find, that it doesn’t really matter which way we read it. In any case we end and start, start and end with the same thing: God, the one principle, being Alpha and Omega and boring himself happily before and ever after. (Amen!)

Heilsgeschichte, Version II: The Magic Coat

"Am Anfang war die Tat", in the beginning was the deed, this is, how Goethe’s most famous story begins. Because similarly to Eve in Paradise, it’s precisely thanks to the Devil, that Goethe’s story enters into action with the remarkable Tat (deed) of Dr. Faust to put his soul on stake in a bet with Mephisto, a bet, which allows him to travel in his magic coat within the extremes of the spiritual and physical pleasures, of "good" and "bad", in search for satisfaction, Verweilen, rest. Faust is a real candidate for Hell, as he demands for the highest stars of heaven, that is, spiritual cognition AND for the highest earthly pleasures, according to the TWO souls that live in his breast and that break all the rules of a one-principle-world. He consciously and limitlessly wants the "good" AND the "bad", the spiritual AND the physical pleasures, and, in this his endless drive, never finds satisfaction, as he longs for pleasure in his restless desire, and for restless desire in his pleasure. He is the prototype of what you would call a greedy human being, one of his own kind, however, searching for "was die Welt im Innersten zusammenhält" (what keeps the world together in its core), for totality (Faust geht aufs Ganze!) Faust knows, that he will never reach entire satisfaction, neither of spiritual cognition, nor of physical pleasures, that he will never come to rest, and thus makes the famous bet with the Devil: "Werd ich zum Augenblicke sagen, verweile doch, Du bist so schön! Dann magst Du mich mit Fesseln schlagen, Dann will ich gern zugrunde gehn."
Besides, Goethe tells us a "home truth", that the Bible sure doesn’t, as he lets Mephisto, the devil, describe himself as "ein Teil der Kraft, die stets das Böse will und stets das Gute schafft", as a part of the force that always wants the "bad" and always creates the "good", being part and parcel of God’s creation and World Plan. Poor Mephisto, the bad guy, in the final analysis, works in the service of God and has the ungrateful task to pull the chestnuts out of the fire for God. The Happy End, the Salvation of Dr. Faust in Part II of the story, is already anticipated in the prologue of the first part, when God says to Mephisto: "Und steh beschämt, wenn Du bekennen mußt: Ein guter Mensch in seinem dunklen Drange ist sich des rechten Weges wohl bewußt." (And stand ashamed if you have to recognize, that a good human being in his darkest drive is still well aware of the right way). In other words, God has already made the decision to save Dr. Faust, and although Faust loses his bet with Mephisto, the Devil, he is being saved by God in the Happy End, as Faust finally comes to rest, wants to grasp the moment and eternalize it, stands still and dies. Faust "rests in peace", and, once again, what do we have? We have another variant of the Heilstory of Version I.

Heilsgeschichte, Version III: Die List der Vernunft (The Guile of Reason)

Am Anfang war die Logik, die "Gedanken Gottes vor Erschaffung der Welt", in the beginning was Logic, God’s thoughts before the creation of the world, so Hegel, the Philosopher, der Philosoph überhaupt, tells us. Now, Logic is but an adjective or "mode of being" of the Spirit, it is the Ansichsein des Geistes (Being-In-Itself of the Spirit), Thesis. Logic is the whole of the basic ontological relations of the Spirit ante rem, before the story starts. Out of sheer boredom, this Spirit starts to objectivate itself (entäußern, vergegenständlichen), in order to face itself as that, what it is not: Nature (sich selbst als das gegenüberstehen, was er nicht ist). The Spirit, thus, is not only Logic, Thesis, it is its own Objectivation (sein eigenes Außersichsein), Antithesis, Nature. Finally, just like Baron von Münchhausen pulled himself out of the swamp by his own hair, only by objectivating itself into what it is not, the Spirit "recognizes" itself as what it is, "returns" enriched to its "being Spirit", that is, Anundfürsichsein des Geistes (Being-In-and-For-Itself of the Spirit), Synthesis. And there it sits, all alone, bored again, and if it didn’t pass away, it’s still gotta be there. Nothing new under the Sun.
 - Haven’t we seen this somewhere before?, you will ask me now. - Yes, I’m afraid so, George. Worse even:: There also is a "devil" in Hegel’s Weltgeschichte (world history), which puts the individual passions and interests of the human beings into the service of the World Spirit, to make sure that history will progress towards freedom and reason, towards the Happy End. It is precisely the guile of reason (List der Venunft), that makes the individual human beings pull the chestnuts out of the fire for the World Spirit. Human Beings are secondary players in history. Not "great men" make history, but the guile of reason makes use of the "great men" in order to push forward with the task and purpose of history. The guile of reason somehow seems to be a remote relative, an "uncle or auntie from America" of  Goehte’s "Teil der Kraft, die stets das Böse will, und stets das Gute schafft". The human beings, finally, are some sort of puppets on the stage of world history, with the illusion of acting and thinking independently on their own behalf, not knowing that they are insignificant servants of a "higher purpose", which ends in conceited self-recognition of the World Spirit. So, all the fuzz about history, which is objectivation of the Spirit in time, and nature, which is objectivation of the Spirit in space, serves the only purpose to make the main player, the Spirit, recognize itself, find itself, come to be for-itself and unite itself with itself.
Let us now resume the bottom line of this story, which is the modern update of Version I, in a little quiz.

Phrase: Hegel denkt. (Hegel thinks).
Question: What is Subject, what is Predicate in this Phrase?
Answer: Subject = denkt, Predicate = Hegel.
 

Heilsgeschichte, other versions.

Of course, there is a whole lot of other versions of the Salvation-Story, but basically all versions are based on the same principle, which we will explain just after this. As for the dialectical materialists Marx and Engels, we find the same logic, that is, dialectics, as applied in Hegel’s philosophy, with the only difference, that the premises change places. Therefore, in the beginning was matter, and matter produced the thinking spirit, embodied in the appearance of the human being, nature’s "highest blossom" according to Marx and Engels. But it is Friedrich Engels, who designs the most consequent dialectical-materialistic philosophy in his "Dialectics of Nature", when he speaks of the eternally changing matter, where the only constant factor is precisely motion, change. So, in the "beginning", as well as in the "end" there is matter-in-motion. (Why does it sound absurd to speak about beginning and end concerning eternal motion? - Interestingly though, it sounds just as absurd concerning eternal rest). For Engels, there is an eternal circular course of worlds that come into being and vanish again, including their "highest blossoms of nature", the human beings, which, for the philosopher Ernst Bloch, is quite a frightening perspective, if not to say a nightmare, as cosmic entropy inevitably lurks around the corner every few million light-years, and destroys everything achieved by this sonorous thinking human being in its formidable history. This is why Bloch’s "offenes System" (open system) is strongly tending towards closing itself in the Happy End, which, in Bloch’s case, is the ability of matter to perform a "qualitativer Letztumschlag" (ultimum novum, last qualitative change) into a nevermore changing material base for "Heimat" (Home), where everything finally comes to a standstill, a rest, an end, a good end, a Happy End. Scientific hope and the subjective factor "human being" are Bloch’s motor and force to help this happen.

So we have this steady progress to a Happy End, being the motor of this progress Divine Providence in case of the biblical history, Faust's restlessness and Magic Coat in the pantheistic Goethe’s case, Dialectics in Hegel’s and also Marx & Engels case, and Hope in Bloch’s case. The Happy End - call it New Jerusalem, call it "die L&aauml;uterung oder den Sieg der positiven über die negativen Triebe" (rectification or the victory of the positive over the negative desires), call it "die Rückkehr des Geistes zu sich selbst" (reunion of the Spirit with itself), call it "ewiger Kreislauf der Materie" (eternal circular course of matter), call it Heimat (Home), can be resumed in one sole concept: Rest. In other words: Death. -

Preliminary Conclusions

1. All versions we saw of the Heilstory are nothing else but variants of the first one, and all of them, the one way or the other, progress to a Happy End, to rest, to standstill, to death. Ironically, from the above follows, that Happy End is equivalent to Death.
2. There is a linear conception of the respective process of history, and even Hegel with his dialectical method is no exception in the final analysis, as his Weltgeist ends just at the very starting point, "enriched" with its experiences, but still being Absolute Spirit, at rest.
3. In all these conceptions of history, no matter whether religious or philosophic, there is only one single principle postulated, which is declared to be superior to a second one, which in all cases is a derived one from the first, thus second or secondary principle. If the one principle postulated is good, almighty, superior, right, true, etc., the second, the derived one, cannot also be good, almighty, superior, right, true, but only the opposite, that is bad, powerless, inferior, wrong, false, etc., in any case: secondary. In no case do we find two or three or more "first principles" in the sense, that none is superior or inferior to, or derived from the other one, and that all of them are true, good, right, etc.
4. With only one principle given, we have two possibilities of self-relations:
a) Pure Identity: Gott (God) -. or: Geist (Spirit) -. or: Ruhe (Rest) -. or: Materie (Matter). - or: Bewegung ((Motion).  No story at all. (Movies: money back!) No history tells this "no-story", although all of our examples could very well be reduced to this Identity.
b) Identity, from which it’s own Difference is derived: The Devil, derived from God.  Matter, an excrement of Hegel’s Spirit. Spirit, the highest blossom of nature, a product of matter (Marx/Engels/Bloch). Story done, but at least we have a story.
5. All the possible relations that can be established between a given postulate and its derivation(s) have been elaborated by Aristotle in his Formal Logics, which was and is, up to this very day, the primordial basis of thinking of the entire Western-European civilization and culture, never mind Hegel and Einstein, whose intellectual "atomic bombs" have not managed to detonate this formal-logical brain-jail of Aristotle.
Referring to Aristotelian Formal Logics, modern mathematics and logics talk about a "zweiwertige Logik" (two-value-logic), because it has two values: right and wrong. The funny thing however is, that in reality we are dealing with an einwertige Logik (one-value-logic) here, precisely because there only can be one value true of the two in question, never both of them.
The problem starts, whenever we come across something that is not explainable within these parameters, that falls outside their range. We will not even notice it, it is invisible to us, because our brain is short-range trained, and we stick to the calculations and explanations and conceptions of history-heilstory exposed above. We have swallowed what they taught us with hook and sinker.

- Have you ever asked yourself: What, if the way we see things is not so? What, if this is not only so, if it is this AND also not this, different? And: What, if it is neither so, nor not so? Your concepts of true/false, good/bad, right/wrong would no longer make sense. Almost everybody takes the basics explained above for granted, and this also explains, why, as Franz stated in his last response to you, "everybody thinks and says the same thing without even noticing it". Thus, he will explain to you in his next mail what ideology is.
Well, George, you will have noticed long ago, that it’s not Franz writing today. As we saw you keep insisting on the "marriage matter", we decided that I’d write to you today, and we suggest you consider the whole of this letter as an answer to your question about "love and marriage". In any case, it’s been a great pleasure writing to you today, I did enjoy you letters to Franz as much as he did, and both of us are looking forward to more thoughts and reflections of you to come.

Sincere wishes and greetings from
                                                           JUTTA, the other principle.

(CONTINUED)