"God is dead, and we have killed him" by Paul King.

In this week's Dialogic Drinks Paul King invites us into a thinking experiment about choice, and the necessity for making choices.

Covered in three short talks, with breakouts after each for discussion, this is set against a broad sweep of the intellectual history of Europe from the mid 17th to the mid 20th Centuries. This period began with Descartes famous 'Cogito' at a time when power was beginning to be claimed by 'the people', and included the regicide of Charles I.

In the middle period under discussion there is the publishing of the Communist Manifesto, and 'The Madman' announces that God is dead, and we're told that we have killed him. Now what do we do? Hegel tells us there is an end point to chaos and change, where all will be settled.

In the later period the two world wars and the Bolshevik revolution leave us with extremes of choice and sides to take. The centre that was promised by Marx and Engels has not held, and the old centre of a divine hierarchy has been emasculated to the point of puppetry.

How are we doing with the now entrenched normality that binary, adversarial opposition equals balance? What do we think we believe and how does it feel to be challenged?

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Our presenter this week, Paul King MSc (psych) will give a fundamental analysis of “Being” and suggest that Authenticity is an active choice between falling into step with pre-existing ideas and traditions and understanding that our Being is not the static inner-self (to be discovered) that religion, and mainstream and pop-psychology alike, suggest. This dynamic feeling of having individual and group identity is called Distantiality. This word first came to light for Paul during his 2022 MSc (psych) re-investigating “Imposter Syndrome”, and it is now at the centre of his current thesis for an MLitt (philosophy).