2.96
That the gods war amongst each other means knowledge can have no universals and there are no grounds for absolute certainty — of prime importance to philosophy: a ‘point’ to hold things together just so.
When our concern ceases to be laying all things out on a grid in line with non-contradiction (e.g., only one thing can be in one place at any given time), we open a new horizon for philosophy; not epistemology in service of technological mastery, but rather divergent ontologies. Not seeking one principle to unify disparity itself; even now we think of pluralities or pluralism within a singular principled frame (e.g., tolerance). That the gods war amongst each other means that there is no single rule, criterion, or argumentative form.
‘The gods war amongst each other’ is a depth charge. – If set right, it’ll show how atheism too is beholden to the principle of God. Another way to put this is that an onto-theological principle doesn’t need God per se. For the typical atheist, the world is still singular, unified, and held together such that universal knowledge is guaranteed, absolute certainty is coherent (even if unattainable), and all can be mapped on the non-contradictive grid.
Religious ontologies run deeper than the godhead.
We err in thinking all things in our galaxy revolve around the sun. We forget that forces also implicate the sun, that the active/passive dichotomy is distributed throughout the galaxy, that the sun is not the metaphysical centre we once thought it was. This was a projection of our metaphysics, a way to ground our onto-theology, an insistence on the absolute centre and guarantor of meaning, which also grounds our onto-ethics (§2.19) and onto-politics.
We have a long history of longing for authoritarianism.
We have a long history of combating doubt, chaos, contradiction, superstition, and anarchy, calling these evil, reconciling all voices into one (the recession of polyphony). We wanted a stake to secure the specimen. But I’m not calling for a reversal where we would value doubt, chaos, contradiction, etc., for these are created by a particular orientation; they’re shadows with which our onto-ethical authoritarianism had to wrestle, for they’re caricatures of competing ways of being. If the sleep of reason produces monsters, it’s not when sleep lets down its guard; it’s reason as sleep — reason itself produces monsters. Not ex nihilo: for it gathers them together, monstrously, from various sources, hideously repainting them.
The war against disorder, against darkness, can never end. Lightness, as we think it, is precisely a war: lightness is inextricably implanted within the dark/light binary, linked to the evil/good binary. We strive to eradicate evil and produce it at the same time.