Down in La Mancha

2009-10-23T19:58:00.001-04:00

Postmodernism is allergic to the idea of certainty, and makes a great deal of theoretical fuss over this rather modest, everyday notion. As such, it is in some ways the flip side of fundamentalism, which also makes a fuss about certainty, but in an approving kind of way.

Reason, Faith, and Revolution, by Terry Eagleton

2009-10-21T02:15:00.002-04:00

Religion has wrought untold misery in human affairs. For the most part, it has been a squalid tale of bigotry, superstition, wishful thinking, and oppressive ideology. I therefor have a good deal of sympathy with its rationalist and humanist critics. But it is also the case, as this argues, that most such critics buy their rejection of religion on the cheap. When it comes to the New Testament, at least, what they usually write off is a worthless caricature of the real thing, rooted in a degree of ignorance and prejudice to match religion's own. It is as though one were to dismiss feminism on the basis of Clint Eastwood's opinions of it.

Reason, Faith, and Revolution, by Terry Eagleton

2009-10-16T01:49:00.004-04:00

On Self, and Other Selves. How many people does one pass by on a given day? How many eyes are met and smiles exchanged? How many words of greeting? How many of thanks? How many hands does a person shake?

I suppose the answer to any one of these questions depends on where a person happens to be. Among friends? or among strangers? When among friends, exchanging some form of greeting is almost a requirement. When among strangers, out of courtesy one walks with one's eyes straight ahead staring off into the vast beyond or at ground as if to trace a crack in the sidewalk. Yet friends do not always want your attention and strangers just might crave it. I do not offer the former observation as an example of strife or the later as an example of inordinate desire. It just is the case that friends sometimes desire space while strangers do not.

But the interior of a person remains forever just beyond view of the eyes, just out of reach of the ears, forever beyond the touch of the finger tips, and certainly beyond the sense of smell and taste. What a person is thinking, contemplating, imagining, or feeling may bubble up to the bodily surface, but rarely does it do so with any discernible content. One says to a person, 'I can tell you are worried by the look on your face,' but the precise reason why the same person is worried is not written out in bold letters on their forehead. One says to a person, 'I see someone is happy today,' but which wellspring of joy they are drinking from at that moment isn't exactly marked out for all to see.

This is not to say that you might not have an idea of what might be passing through my head at any given moment, or that I might not have idea of what might be passing through yours. The longer one person knows another, the bigger the repertoire of shared memories one has to draw on to make an inference. Memories are of external impressions, to be sure, but it is memories on which familiarity between persons is built up. To understate the obvious, I suspect this is why husbands and wives are instructed to communicate with each other, and why, when communication breaks down, the marriage is said to be on the rocks. Conversation need not always plumb the depths of a of passionate togetherness; the simplest of subjects will do. Regardless, the closer in proximity one is to another person, the more necessary communication becomes.

Still, even between the closest of friends and the most intimate of lovers full disclosure of self to self is never achieved. All the words in the world could never lay the mind of one person bare to another. One might wonder why, of course, that this should be the case. Or one might not wonder at all, but simply accept this as part and parcel of the way things are. But someone, like myself for example, might wonder why it is that my thought, when it passes through the lips to the ears of another as a vocal sound, is incapable of conveying the whole content of my mind. (Or why it is so difficult to blog about.) Why is it that I struggle to find words to express myself to another when what I am thinking seems, most of the time at least, perfectly intelligible.

When thought becomes the vocal word a boundary is crossed from the interior to the exterior of a person. The exterior world I share with others, but in the interior, I find myself mostly alone. Memories of other people in other times and places are to be found ready at hand in the mind; so in a limited sense I am not alone in my innermost thoughts. But memories are only records, and as such have not the capacity to respond on their own accord like an actual person with whom I share the external world would be able to.

Let me dip in my bag of analogies and draw out that of glass. Neither are persons perfectly transparent nor completely opaque to each other, but persons exist in varying degrees of translucence. The analogy can be extended: like the sheen of light on glass, persons reflect each other with varying degrees of clarity. One finds oneself in another. Not wholly or completely, of course, but necessarily nonetheless. A child depends on their parents for affirmation. Friends come together to celebrate each other's differences, in and through which they find themselves. The same goes for lovers, only to a much greater, deeper, more pervasive, extent. To communicate the contents of one's own mind to another is a way to receive the same back, albeit from the reflected vantage of the other.

Still on the graph of familiarity, on which familiarity is directly related to the amount of time spent together, the function of disclosure is asymptotic, always approaching, but never reaching, one hundred percent. We might wonder why. The only answer that can be given is that the boundary between body and soul, between what is internal and what is external to a person, is always to some degree translucent, and never completely transparent.

At one and the same time, this translucency of self is the dignity and misery of humankind. It is misery because it is the cause of so much hurt. One honestly didn't know that is the way the other person would react. Or maybe one didn't care to know that would be the way the other person would react. Either way, to act towards another person while one lacks a complete knowledge of them is to take a risk, which bears the potential for being causing extreme pain. It is dignity because there will be something that escapes human comprehension of other persons, which is the way it should be. Knowledge of a person is power over a person, which can be used for good or for ill. With persons, however, something escapes the knowing of other persons, which entails that the power one exercises over person ought to be curtailed. A parent raises a child with the intention of enabling the child to take care of themselves. A friendship would quickly end if the only thing that defined the relation was a struggle for supremacy. Marriage would quickly fall to pieces if the other spouse is neither affirmed nor deferred to at the appropriate times.

We read in Genesis 1, 'So God created man in his image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.' A curious paradox arises, however, if this passage is compared to the Decalogue, where it says, 'You shall not make for yourself an idol in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below.' The Creator of heaven and earth, who created humanity in his image, is not Himself imageable. Humanity bears the image of an imageless God, from which we gather that the inscrutability of God is shared somehow by human beings. The basic principle of being created in the image of the Imageless is comprehensive in its scope: it means the human being does not belong to him or herself, nor in a final sense to another other human being, but to their Creator alone. Thus it will follow that the human body, which is plainly visible and easily comprehendable by other persons, is a leasehold. Because it is a human body, it must be accorded respect and dignity by other persons.

Created in the image of the Imageless, the inner person, which is in a final sense beyond the comprehension of other persons, however, lies completely exposed to its Lord and Maker.

1 O LORD, you have searched me
and you know me.
2 You know when I sit and when I rise;
you perceive my thoughts from afar.
3 You discern my going out and my lying down;
you are familiar with all my ways.
4 Before a word is on my tongue
you know it completely, O LORD.
5 You hem me in—behind and before;
you have laid your hand upon me.
6 Such knowledge is too wonderful for me,
too lofty for me to attain.
7 Where can I go from your Spirit?
Where can I flee from your presence?

--Psalm 139

2009-10-15T03:06:00.004-04:00

Time moves ever onwards. Things change, but never surely for the better. And you and I change, by the gathering and the scattering of ourselves, but never surely for the better, moving in time ever onwards towards some destination that at present remains outstanding.

Space extends in all directions. Things move, but only ever in one. And you and I walk, run, jump, climb, crawl, swim, or dance in whatever direction we should choose but those in which other things stand in our way. All but up, that is.

Light pleases the eye, but only so long as one does not stare directly its source. In its absence, the eye strains to make out that which lies just beyond a dark veil. And you and I rise with the sun and lie down after it has passes beneath the arc of the horizon.

Life is precious, but fleeting. Grasp it too hard, it may slip through your fingers. Throw it away, it may be beyond recovery. And you and I, dying since our births, living until our deaths, lay down what is precious for a brother or sister in order to receive back what was never ours to begin with until we each in our own time go the way of all flesh.

Words are plentiful, but silence can speak louder--if only we would listen. Words can bind us together or tear us apart; but silence runs still deeper, erasing boundaries or erecting walls. And you and I cross the infinite chasm of silence that lies between us on spoken words--to what end? All the words in the world could never fill the silent void. Better it is to stand quietly together than to stand alone lost in silence, each on his or her own.

And time still moves ever onwards. Life remains precious, but fleeting. A cord of two strands is better than one; a cord of three strands is not easily broken.

2009-10-14T02:22:00.001-04:00

Move Along. I am wanting to write something—anything will do, actually. Most will understand what is meant to 'writer's block.' I find myself afflicted by its opposite: 'writer's itch.' And it needs to be scratched, badly.

So I shall write on what prompted me to change the name of this page from 'A House at Pooh Corner' to 'Down in La Mancha.' (Simply typing as much has provided a small measure of relief.) The former was chosen for the sense of stubborn but almost absent-minded curiosity it evoked, which I felt, in some small way, reflected the first eight years of my post-secondary education. But, having spent a year out of school working and having begun a PhD program, I thought it was now time to change the page name to reflect my changed circumstances and changed self-perception. What more respectable literary reference than the madman Don Quixote de la Mancha?

Part of the reason I choose 'Down in La Mancha' was precisely its most famous resident's perceived insanity. Indeed, in the first part of the book, there is good reason to believe he is insane. The author Cervantes leaves you no reason to think otherwise. In the second part of the book, though, Cervantes deals more explicitly with questions of madness and the perception of madness. Is Quixote mad? It would seem so. Regardless what other people think, for most of the book Quixote himself doesn't think he is mad. After all, he is single-handedly resurrecting the chivalrous Order of Knight-Errantry, restoring it to its place of glory from whence it has since fallen.

Am I mad for pursuing a PhD? This is a question I ask myself in all seriousness in those moments of sanity when it briefly dawns on me that the Order of Philosophical Doctors may not be within reach of the likes of me.

Most people read Don Quixote as a discourse in madness—or a comical relief at the expense of heroic anti-hero whose name doubles as the book's title. A couple of years ago I did some reading around in the secondary literature on Cervantes' masterpiece and was shocked to discover, in fact, how many read it as such. But it seems to me that most had never read the book to its final chapter, which set all the preceding absurdities in their rightful place: in a narrative of the recovery of a man's sanity. On his death bed, Quixote says,

Blessed be Almighty God, who has done me such good! Indeed his mercy knows no bounds, and the sins of men do not lessen or obstruct it...The mercy..is that which God has this instant shown me, unobstructed, as I said, by my sins. My mind has been restored to me, and it is now clear and free, without those gloomy shadows of ignorance case over me by my wretched, obsessive reading of those detestable books of chivalry.

Substitute 'books of philosophy and theology' for 'books of chivalry' to insert myself into the narrative in place of Quixote. There is one thing that prevents a clean substitution, though; Quixote's unmerited deliverance from error coincided with his death. I only wish that my deliverance would coincide with a successful defense of a thesis.

2009-10-04T01:44:00.002-04:00

Nighttime. This city comes alive at night. Be it my fortune or misfortune—if by the root word 'fortune' is meant 'fate,' and if by 'fate' is meant the inscrutability of divine providence—the building complex I now call home is situated in the beating heart of Montreal. I do not seem to mind, though, the steady river of persons flowing down the side walks, nor the torrent of vehicles, nor the scream of sirens that momentarily part these human waters. On the contrary, it fascinates me. Persons, each unique, each with their own destination, doing pursuing remarkably similar goals: to drink, to party, to laugh. It is a chaos theorists dream, I suppose, to watch order emerge from the the inchoate mass. I am not a particularly versed in chaos theory, but the usefulness of its models make a certain amount of sense.

The term city can be spoken of in two ways. One refers to the geographical location and physical infrastructure of buildings, streets, sidewalks, powerlines, sewers, grocery stores, bus stops, and so on. The other, which is of a much nobler and more ancient origin, refers to a gathering of people, a community, a polis. When people use the term city in their daily meanderings, I suspect they have in mind much more the former definition than the latter. But word city cannot be separated from either definition. If the city as infrastructure comes alive at night, it is because because the city as people have taken to the streets. But the city is always both these at once. Drawing distinctions that divide one from the other is just a game theorists like to play.

I am sitting on my little rock in the human stream, a seat at the rear of a coffeeshop five minutes walk away from my apartment. A slightly inebriated young lady saw fit to engage me in a conversation about 'real' life after see caught me reading from Thomas Aquinas Summa Theologiae a little while ago. Her friend, who was doubling as her chaperon, was busy on the phone trying to coordinate travel plans. Her purpose for the ten minutes we chatted was slightly more nefarious. Books, she claimed, teach a person nothing about 'real' life. Two can play at this game, I thought, taking the bait. I have enough experience working blue collar jobs to have some notion of 'real' life, which books teach a person nothing about. Books like the ones I read have no place in 'real' life, so that part of the conversation didn't last long. Drunk women, I learned a long time ago, love to talk about their boyfriends. They love to hear from another guy how lucky their boyfriend is to have them around. I didn't learn that in a book, of course, but from 'real' life.

It is 1:30 in the AM and I am still sitting here on my little rock with no real desire to move. Just to my right are the entrances to the men's and women's washrooms. The women's washroom has been closed for a number of hours now due to some unfortunate business in or with a toilet—the employee I spoke to didn't think to specify which. To deal with the problem, the men's washroom is now simply the washroom, which has meant for quite a number of classic moments, priceless expressions, and memorable comments. Very few people seem put out by the mixed-gender circumstances. And out of a potential chaos has come a peculiar sort of order. Men seem intent of giving the women their space by waiting outside the door; on the other hand, but for a tiny number of exceptions, women seem intent on insisting the space can be shared.

2009-10-02T01:22:00.003-04:00

Routine. This is always a good thing to have. In a little while, I shall turn in for the evening in preparation for another day walking the distance between book stacks and study carrels in the library. If it sounds boring, all I can say is to each his or her own. At the moment, I am working on smaller assignments and papers for both of the classes in which I am enrolled. The sheer amount of literature I have to digest--not completely, of course--is wonderful. Hmmm...that last bit may sound a bit strange. I guess being out of school for a year gives a person a different perspective on a student's work. Like I said, to each his or her own.

My apartment finally feels like home, now that I am have been here for a little more than a month. Books are strewn across the tables just the way I like it. They haven't migrated to piles on the floors yet, which means the floors are still clean. Nothing is perfect; so there is, thankfully, always room for improvement. The heater does not seem to be working at the moment. If it did work, that would definitely be an improvement.

The noise of the streets outside no longer seems to bother me. Sleep comes all the same. Thursday night is generally the night of week the street comes alive with bar-hoppers, partiers, and other inebriated folk, as well as the police, ambulances, and fire trucks needed to keep them safe. There is bus stop right beneath my window, and even now I can hear the people scream with excitement as they wait. So the weekend comes early and lasts until early Monday morning, by which time the student crowd has half-heartedly repented of the error of its ways. When class starts early Monday morning, they will stumble onto McGill's campus, red-eyed and sour-faced. I know this because I have seen them.

2009-09-25T15:30:00.000-04:00

Losses and Gains. Religion did all that culture was later to do, but far more effectively. It could enlist countless millions of men and women in the business of ultimate value, not just the few well-educated enough to read Horace or listen to Mahler. To assist it in this task, it had the threat of hell fire at its disposal – a penalty which proved rather more persuasive than the murmurs of cultivated distaste around those who hadn't read Horace. Religion has been for most of human history one of the most precious components of popular life, even though almost all theorists of popular culture embarrassedly ignore it.

Through ritual and moral code, religion could link questions of absolute value to men and women's everyday experience. Nothing was less abstract than God, heaven, sin, redemption. Just as art fleshes out fundamental issues in sign, sound, paint and stone, so religion brought them home to everyday experience in a whole iconography, devotional sensibility, pattern of personal conduct and set of cultic practices. It planted the cosmic Law in the very depths of the individual, in the faculty know as conscience. Faith bound together the people and the intellectuals, the simple faithful and the clergy, in the most durable of bonds. It could create a sense of common purpose far beyond the capacity of a minority culture. It outlined the grandest narrative of all, known as eschatology. It could interweave art, ritual, politics, ethics, mythology, metaphysics and everyday life, while lending this mighty edifice the sanction of supreme authority. It was thus a particular shame that it involved a set of beliefs which seemed to many decent, rational people remarkably benighted and implausible.

It is no wonder, then, that culture has been in perpetual crisis since the moment it was thrust into prominence. For it has been called upon to take over these functions in a post-religious age; and it is hardly surprising that for the most part it has lamentably failed to do so. Part of religion's force was to link fact and value, the routine conduct of everyday life with matters of ultimate spiritual importance. Culture, however, divides these domains down the middle. In its broad, popular, everyday sense, it means a set of ways of doing things; in its artistic sense, it means a body of work of fundamental value. But the connection between them is fatally missing. Religion, by contrast, is culture in both senses at once.

After Theory, by Terry Eagleton

2009-09-21T23:23:00.002-04:00

Fear of the Past. Now this same primary panic that I feel in our rush towards patriotic armaments I feel also in our rush towards future visions of society. The modern mind is forced towards the future by a certain sense of fatigue, not unmixed with terror, with which it regards the past. It is propelled towards the coming time; it is, in the exact words of the popular phrase, knocked into the middle of next week. And the goad which drives it on thus eagerly is not an affectation for futurity Futurity does not exist, because it is still future. Rather it is a fear of the past; a fear not merely of the evil in the past, but of the good in the past also. The brain breaks down under the unbearable virtue of mankind. There have been so many flaming faiths that we cannot hold; so many harsh heroisms that we cannot imitate; so many great efforts of monumental building or of military glory which seem to us at once sublime and pathetic. The future is a refuge from the fierce competition of our forefathers. The older generation, not the younger, is knocking at our door. It is agreeable to escape, as Henley said, into the Street of By-and-Bye, where stands the Hostelry of Never. It is pleasant to play with children, especially unborn children. The future is a blank wall on which every man can write his own name as large as he likes; the past I find already covered with illegible scribbles, such as Plato, Isaiah, Shakespeare, Michael Angelo, Napoleon. I can make the future as narrow as myself; the past is obliged to be as broad and turbulent as humanity. And the upshot of this modern attitude is really this: that men invent new ideals because they dare not attempt old ideals. They look forward with enthusiasm, because they are afraid to look back.

What's Wrong with the World, by G.K. Chesterton

2009-09-16T04:21:00.006-04:00

Insomnia. I can't sleep. Nothing else to do, I suppose, but blog about it.

The past two days have been grueling. At the end of the month, applications for SSHRC grants are due. So, like most every other student who is applying, I have to go through the whole rig-a-ma-role of putting the application together. This includes, among other things, former professors are contacted to reference letters, transcripts from previous and current academic institutions are ordered, and a single-spaced, two-page proposed program of research is drawn up. Well, around 1:30 this morning at saved the first full draft, and second attempt at a draft, of my proposed program of research and then fired it off to my supervisor for his comments. It is to my infinite misfortune, however, not to be able to simply switch my mind off and on at will. As a result, I find myself here, in front of a keyboard at 4:30 in the AM, with all my mental cylinders firing at 110% capacity. My body, on the other, is dropping is the expected places. I can feel my facial muscles protest and my reflex-response time to external stimuli is significantly impaired. It is as if I were mildly inebriated, expect I have had nothing to drink.

SSHRC kept me from posting a few pictures from a lovely afternoon spent with Brian and Jen, who vacationed in Montreal for the weekend and were good enough to spend a bit of time with me. Their hotel had a pool on the roof, which I where I spent the afternoon on Sunday. It was my first chance to see what Montreal looks like from above.

The hotel was downtown on Sherbrooke Street near McGill. Here is Sherbrooke stretching off into the west of the city.

A view of Sherbrooke directly below.

And a view of Sherbrooke as it makes its way east. If you look closely, the Olympic Stadium can be seen against the horizon. The second squat, square building on the far side of the street is the Humanities and Social Sciences library where I spend a lot of my time. The greenry just beyond marks the entrance to the McGill campus, but the angle the picture was taken at prevents you from being able to make very much out. The stone colonade, a portion of which you can see between the trees, must be passed through if you want to drive on the campus.

One more picture, for vanity's sake. Here I am cutting an a figure of some sort or other against the city of Montreal as a backdrop as I squint to keep the sun out of my eyes. The buildings over my shoulder on the left belong to McGill and the green space in front of them is a soccer/football field. The McGill campus is large enough to extend the width of the picture, from the buildings over my left shoulder to the trees down in the bottom right-hand corner. But most of it is hidden by the office complex directly behind me.

Okay. Let's try this one more time and see if I can't sleep.

2009-09-12T17:35:00.001-04:00

Science and the Savages. A permanent disadvantage of the study of folk-lore and kindred subjects is that the man of science can hardly be in the nature of things very frequently a man of the world. He is a student of nature; he is scarcely ever a student of human nature. And even where this difficulty is overcome, and he is in some sense a student of human nature, this is only a very faint beginning of the painful progress towards being human. For the study of primitive race and religion stands apart in one important respect from all, or nearly all, the ordinary scientific studies. A man can understand astronomy only by being an astronomer; he can understand entomology only by being an entomologist (or, perhaps, an insect); but he can understand a great deal of anthropology merely by being a man. He is himself the animal which he studies. Hence arises the fact which strikes the eye everywhere in the records of ethnology and folk-lore — the fact that the same frigid and detached spirit which leads to success in the study of astronomy or botany leads to disaster in the study of mythology or human origins. It is necessary to cease to be a man in order to do justice to a microbe; it is not necessary to cease to be a man in order to do justice to men. That same suppression of sympathies, that same waving away of intuitions or guess-work which make a man preternaturally clever in dealing with the stomach of a spider, will make him preternaturally stupid in dealing with the heart of man. He is making himself inhuman in order to understand humanity. An ignorance of the other world is boasted by many men of science; but in this matter their defect arises, not from ignorance of the other world, but from ignorance of this world. For the secrets about which anthropologists concern themselves can be best learnt, not from books or voyages, but from the ordinary commerce of man with man. The secret of why some savage tribe worships monkeys or the moon is not to be found even by travelling among those savages and taking down their answers in a note-book, although the cleverest man may pursue this course. The answer to the riddle is in England; it is in London; nay, it is in his own heart. When a man has discovered why men in Bond Street wear black hats he will at the same moment have discovered why men in Timbuctoo wear red feathers. The mystery in the heart of some savage war-dance should not be studied in books of scientific travel; it should be studied at a subscription ball. If a man desires to find out the origins of religions, let him not go to the Sandwich Islands; let him go to church. If a man wishes to know the origin of human society, to know what society, philosophically speaking, really is, let him not go into the British Museum; let him go into society.

from Heretics, by G.K. Chesterton

2009-09-10T20:11:00.002-04:00

On Self. This was a piece I began earlier this year, but never finished. In its final form, it would have consisted of six sections, each capable of standing on their own, all focused on the questions that arises from being a self. The interlocutor I choose was the novelist Julian Barnes, who I was previously acquainted with through his novel A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters. I only managed to finish two of the six vignettes. Some other time, maybe, I might finish the other four.

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In the words of a sage called the Teacher, son of David, king in Jerusalem, 'All go to the same place; all come from dust, and to dust all return.' (Ecc. 3.20)

Death proves all our strivings to be for naught and shows us all to be failures at our terminal end. This page remained blank, a testament to my failure, until my wandering mind paused to reflect on its emptiness. Much like death, it was empty. There was nothing written: presumably there was nothing to write that had not yet been written. Can a person write about what they do not, indeed, cannot, know? Perhaps nothing would be lost by not writing: but then equally nothing would be gained.

What possibly could Julian Barnes have gained by writing about death? The title of his book, Nothing to be Frightened of, belies its contents. Barnes fears death, as he makes plain for his readers to see. His fear, he says, is a rational fear—the fear of a being without a reasonable reason for being. Can we infer that what is gained in the act of writing is consolation? From a diary entry twenty years prior, he quotes himself,

People say of death, 'There's nothing to be frightened of.' They say it quickly, casually. Now let's say it again, slowly, with re-emphasis. 'There's NOTHING to be frightened of.'

If not an act of self-consolation, an effort to steel oneself against the inevitable infinite emptiness, there would likewise be nothing about which to write. It seems to me, that is.

So, as best as I can make out, Barnes writes a book to console himself. This something we human beings call our self will one day go the way of all fleshly things, passing over into nothing, or nothing knowable, at least. As with the existence of God, its best to be agnostic on this last point. The only conceivable way to know with any sort of certainty what death holds would be to hear the testimony of someone who had returned from the dead, which is absurd. Whether or not we survive the passing over with our personality in tact is likewise beyond our ability to know. Best to prepare for immanent dissolution; best to ready oneself for the experience of passing over; and best to live the life you have while you have it. We only get one kick at this can, after all.

As I reread it, my short summary strikes me a too clinical, too sterile. It may be that I am too young to understand. A few more years, if they are granted me, and maybe then I will understand. A few more years, someone will say to me, and you may know that to taste the bitterness of life is better than not tasting anything at all. Then I too would need to console myself.

Still, if age is not yet a burden to me, I do know failure. There are times when I too need consolation. Might it be then that I have something to write on the topic of death?

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It is not altogether clear whether Barnes understands that, contrary to contemporary individualistic thinking, not one of us will face death alone. Up to that final moment when the last neuron fires, when this body of mine finally gives the ghost, beyond which nothing can be said for certain, a life-time of living in community with others continues on in the dying embers of the mind. A dying person may think and/or feel themselves to be alone, they may be unable to comprehend what it means to be in community, but these are other matters entirely. The reality is that no one person entered the world apart from the community—most basically, in the form of sexual intercourse—of others. And no person will leave the world without bearing the impressions of others. Should a person, say, well-advanced in years, find themselves physically isolated towards the end, it is no evidence that we individually face death alone, but that life is not what it ought to be.

The hollow truth about death would seem to be that it can only be understood in reference to a life, in which it is the final word of the last chapter. 'For me,' Barnes writes, 'death is the one appalling fact which defines life: unless you are constantly aware of it, you cannot begin to understand what life is about.' No more direct statement will be had from Barnes' pen. Much of the book is an exploration of death through the living (more often than not, the dying) examples of other persons, who are quite often personal relations, like grandparents, parents, a sibling, etc. Literary relations are also cultivated with the now deceased, the embers of whose mind's persist, though much diminished, in texts: Jules Renard and Gustave Flaubert, especially. Death is 'factually' pervasive as Barnes moves in and through each the voice of each of his chosen interlocutors. Little wonder, then, that he should insist this is not his autobiography.

Three times now I have read the book, though still I cannot say for certain. Is it lost on Barnes that he must surround himself with a cloud of witnesses? Death being such an obscure topic, the more witnesses, the better. Would it be perverse if I added, the more the merrier? Better not. Barnes himself does not go that far: consolation, like its cousin strength, is found in numbers. Does Barnes think himself alone in his thoughts of dying? My instincts tell me no. He writes through the words and his memories of others, just as I read my own thoughts through him. He is not hermetically sealed off from the rest of humanity; the predilection he shows for the task of a novelist preclude such a possibility. Yet when I turn the final pages of the book, I find Barnes prematurely (by some twenty years, by his estimate) bidding his self farewell—in the presence of others, myself, and should you read the book, yourself, and so on—as if facing death were a solitary venture.

Death can only be understood with reference to its opposite, life, and vice versa. But Barnes hesitates to apply the same sort of reasoning to self: our self can only be understood with reference to the selves of others, in whose presence we are an other self.

2009-09-09T12:48:00.001-04:00

Eating Well. Yesterday afternoon I promised myself a home-cooked meal. This is a quite naturally dangerous tactic. When the only person one might disappoint by not keeping the promise in question is oneself, one has very little motivation to actually keep the promise. Nevertheless I managed to make good on my promise and set aside easy eating for a dish fit for a king: spaghetti garnished with meat sauce lightly sprinkled with chilli power and mixed with peppers, onions, basil, and oregeno. I even managed to get the noodles just right, the point where they have lost their crunch, but have not yet become a coagulated mass of carbohydrates. I wasn’t simply trying to bulk up; a respectably palatable dish was my goal.

Time spent cooking, I rediscovered, is opportune for thinking. Most of the energy spent perparing is exerted hovering, stirring, cutting, and so on, which means the mind can wander, more or less, free of bodily constraints and concerns. And while my hands chopped onions and my eyes watered, my mind could be at workat any number of other involuntarily aggrevating subjects.

2009-09-07T19:23:00.001-04:00

This is my first warning that I have begun the inevitable descent into a student's disconnect from the wider world. Witness: I got up this morning with the intent of going to the library. Unbeknowst to me at the time, it was Labour Day. All the libraries, bookstores, and other campus buildings were locked up tight. So I have wandered to a Second Cup situated half-way between my apartment and the campus, where I have sat the last few hours reading and taking notes. The press of people has steadily increased over the course of the afternoon. I was here early enough, however, to secure an outlet for my laptop. Without it, my battery would have run dry long ago and I would have been forced to retreat to the solitude of my apartment.

If one finds solace in solitude, does one lapse into an existential solipsism? Is it even possible to be an existential solipsist? Ought a person to try if it were possible? Solipsism, it seems, to me rests on a manifestly absurd presupposition, namely, that one can potentially be oneself, and only oneself, apart from other people—say, parents, family, friends, acquaintances, etc. My meager life thus far in Montreal leads me to ask these questions. Classes do not start until next week Monday. My attempts to find a church community have turned up empty to this point. The residents of the apartment I am staying stay, like myself, largely to themselves.

But I can't yet say I am lonely, if by lonely one means a state of depression. I suppose that is why I can reflect on the meaning of solipsism: I don't yet find myself burdened by the angst that is supposed to accompany it.

Yesterday I attended The People's Church situated just outside the front gates of McGill. After attending a heavily and hollow liturgical (by my judgment, at least) Presbyterian service the week before, evangelical-style worship was a relief—a fresh breeze billowing through the curtains of my soul even. The sermon the pastor, who holds a Ph.D. of all things, reminded me of reading one of John Calvin's commentaries. And next week Sunday they are having a welcome lunch for students after the 11:00 service. So things may be improving.

2009-09-05T17:27:00.000-04:00

Apostolic Continuity. The discussion that follows reflects on the epistemological concerns of the early church fathers guiding them to make the strong claims about the continuity of apostolic tradition, the rule or deposit of faith taught by the Apostles, that they did. Their charge against those they deemed heretics was that of being novel while they themselves laid claim to true faith, centered on the Hebrew canon and the writings of the Apostles, handed down to them through generations of faithful teachers, ultimately as it was received from the mouth of the Lord Jesus Christ himself. The question of the guiding epistemological concerns I take up because it seems to me that today we are bound to look on any claim of unadulterated continuity with past with no small amount of skepticism, or we overlook it as unimportant, since it cannot be reconciled with contemporary convictions about the cultural relativity of all human constructions. Even the venerable Peter Brown, who made a name for himself studying the Late Antiquity of the Roman Empire, especially as it related to the life of Christian communities, and who might expect to treat the claims of the early church fathers to apostolic continuity with scholarly seriousness, for example, can be found to state a preference for the plural term 'Christianities' instead of singular 'Christianity' to account for the differences between Christian communities around the Mediterranean. It remains a question that he never answers, however, whether by 'Christianities' he simply means 'communities of believers,' of which their were obviously many, ' or whether he means 'orthodoxies.' If he means the latter, of course, he has to place 'orthodoxy' on the same footing as 'heresy' in order to generate the plural 'Christianities.'

The discussion must, by necessity, follow the route of comparison and contrast. All too often, when one meets with skepticism with regards to claims for apostolic continuity, the skepticism is directed at the claim to orthodoxy without due consideration to what was being claimed about heresy. When one surveys the relevant source material, however, the representatives of 'orthodoxy' stake their claims on the strength of their own position over against the weaknesses of the 'heretical' position. Among the perceived strengths of the orthodox position was the unity of confession across the Roman world, which was placed in stark contrast with the plurality of heresies. Or, again, among the perceived strengths of the orthodox position was antiquity of orthodox confession, which was placed in stark contrast with the recent novelty of the many heresies. Though both of these claims could be examined profitably at length, the epistemological focus of this discussion leads me to examine a third contrast drawn by the early church fathers between the orthodox truth of the Gospel, which was a message for all people, versus the gnostic truths, or special revelations, of the so-called heretics. Those who call themselves orthodox, even if they may be faulted for over-stating confessional unity of Christian community in, and beyond, the Roman empire, at least had the decency of being consistent in their criticism of what they termed heresy. If anyone claimed to have a special revelation from God not learned from teachers who faithfully expounded the message of the Scriptures, that person was automatically deemed a heretic.

Important to note is the strong claims made by the early church fathers to the reasonableness of the rule of faith handed down to them from the Apostles. The Hebrew doctrine of creation provided them with a primitive version of Ockham's Razor against the metaphysical improvisations and speculations of the Gnostics. Ockham's Razor states, 'Entities shall not be multiplied unnecessarily,' or more simply, 'given two competing theories to account for given body of evidence, the simpler one is the better.' Under contention, in this case, was an account of the origin of the world and all things found therein. The doctrine of creation simply stated that the things of this world were created by God, that is, they had not existed from all eternity in some from or other, but had a beginning in/with time. Gnostic alternatives, however, presented a detailed account of how the things of this world were created/call into being. These accounts generally included a multiple of creators, generative principles, gods, demi-gods, and other sorts of spiritual mediators in a convoluted set of relations with each other and with the human beings they were said to have generated. An application of Ockham's Razor to the question of the origin of the world, of course, will favor its creation by a single all-powerful God, who had and needed no assistance. It may thus be said quite safely that a well-reasoned simplicity of explanation was on the side of the orthodox.

The above metaphysical observations I offer as a backdrop to my discussion of the epistemological concerns guiding the early church fathers claims to apostolic continuity. There was one God, the Creator of all things under heaven, on the earth, and under the earth. It followed that all people, everywhere were endowed (potentially, at least, if not in actuality) with the same faculties, sharing in the same nature, subject to the same laws. And from this it would follow that there was a right way to think about what it meant to be human and so also a wrong way.

The standard Gnostic claims was to possess a 'special' revelation from God. Such a revelation was unmediated by human and/or other external circumstances; it was, as it were, breathed directly from God in the soul of willing supplicants. As such, it was in principle unverifiable by another human being: one could either accept or reject that this particular person was the special recipient of a divine message. The recipient, in essence, became the Voice of God on earth. In his treatise Against Heresies, a livid Ignatius drives home this point when treating the work of the gnostic Valentinus: 'It is manifest also, that he himself is the one who has had sufficient audacity to coin these names; so that, unless he had appeared in the world, the truth would still have been destitute of a name.' (I.xi.4) The epistemological assumptions of such a claim was the wrong way to think about what it meant to be human, so far as the early church fathers were concerned, not the least because it demonstrated impiety towards God and arrogance towards other human beings. The argument Saint Augustine makes in the preface to On Christian Teaching runs along the same lines, but is much gentler in its application. If a person had a special revelation from God, good for them, but because it was special—which is to say, was not found in the Scriptures or the teachings of the Fathers—God obviously intended it only for them, so they did best by keeping it to themselves. He writes,

[A]nyone who boasts that without having been taught any rules he can understand the difficult passages in the scriptures, by virtue of a divine gift, does well to believe—for it is quite true—that this ability does not somehow originate within the human mind but is given by God: in this way he seeks God's glory, not his own. But if he reads and understands without any human expositor, why does he then aspire to expound it to others and not simply refer them to God so that they too may understand it by God's inner teaching rather than through a human intermediary?

The early church fathers rejected Gnostic claims precisely on this point: in order for a person to be the Voice of God on earth, that person would actually have to be God on earth. Merely human claims to possess a knowledge of God must, inevitably, fail to represent the divinity of their object in question. One could say that human knowledge of God will always be too colored by the humanity of the knower. Hence the centrality of the doctrine of the Incarnation of God in the person of Jesus Christ; no special gnostic revelation from God was required. Here was a man, who claimed to be God, telling humanity who God was and what He required of them. The crux of the matter, however, rested not on the intrinsic rationality of the claim. The doctrine of the Incarnation did satisfy the epistemological problem of how a human being could ever possess a knowledge of God, but one actually had to believe that this particular man was, in fact, God. If one did not believe, the remaining options one had were few. With the Jews, one could continue to wait for the messiah, or with the Gnostics one could continue to believe that God, or some Being like Him, had selected certain men to be his mouthpieces. The Jewish option was, to my mind, preferable if belief in the Incarnation was, as the Apostle Paul claimed, a stumbling block.

The epistemological concerns, then, guiding the early church fathers to make strong claims to Apostolic continuity found its rationale in the doctrine of the Incarnation. The idea of a God-man was the culmination of divine revelation: God not only spoke to humanity, he now did so as a human being. That knowledge of God could never be arrived at by the mere application of human reason to the investigation of the divine order, but could only be preserved insofar as believers clung to its very human origin: Jesus Christ. To lay claim to Apostolic continuity, it will follow, was to honor the frailty and limits of human knowing.

2009-09-04T01:49:00.007-04:00

Overheard. The nature of what I am about to relate prompts me to pause for a second to offer a word of warning. Should you be the sort of person who does not appreciate even the smallest discussion of topics touch on private matters--that is, matters pertaining to a person’s ‘privates’--you may not want to continue reading. That said, I only relate these private matters in a tangential manner without the intent of indulging in a unecessarily gratuitious discussion, in order to comment on student life more generally. Even so, if your happen to be my mother, you still may want to close the browser.

After a good long day of getting stuff done, which made today markedly different than yesterday, I retired to a nearby Second Cup for a strong blend of coffee with Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time in hand. I placed myself on the patio. Undergrads in breezy skirts and tops leaving little to the imagination hurried by in small groups, coming from somewhere going somewhere else: excitement on their faces, purpose in their steps, they chattered loudly with their friends. From time to time, a member of one of these excitable clusters would spot a young gentleman she hadn’t seen in three or four months. He would be called over and forced to hug each of her friends. I say, ‘forced,’ with my tongue stuck firmly in my cheek. Not once did I see a young gentleman refuse the attention lavished upon him.

Take note, as you read this, that I find the ambient background noise of a coffeeshop helps me concentrate while reading a heavily jargon-laden philosophical text. No lie. Watching people, I also find, helps me collect my thoughts. Just watching, not voyuerism.

And somewhere in the middle of all this celebration, two young gentleman rode by on bikes. The entire course of their conversation I cannot relate because they passed me by quite quickly, but what I did hear went a little like this: ‘What do you mean you don’t, you won’t, masturbate. You gotta try new things, man.’ He said what? I thought to myself. The intended recipient gave no response, but looked a little flustered. He was, I surmised, the sort of person who had a very strong sense of right and wrong, and was willing to voice his opinion on the matter, but was unprepared for someone to challenge his convictions point blank. I have met this sort of person before. He (never a she, in my experience) comes from a home that has sheltered him from ‘worldly’ topics, auto-eroticism being one of them, but instilled him with a very strong sense of self. So when he first meets ‘worldly’ peers, he stands firmly by his convictions, only to have them trampled on in some of the devious ways possible. His worldly peers aren’t going to mock him, at least not too much; but they are going to going to plant potent seeds of doubt in his mind. And it will take him a few months to stand on his own two feet in the face of a steady barrage of tempting suggestions.

My first thought was that both of these young gentlemen were to be pitied: they had no close female friends to share the excitement of returning to school. In large groups, the presence of women generally steers male conversation away from baser topics, but these two were riding around on bicycles talking about...well, you know. But then I thought better of it. To the new student, fresh from home, I say, welcome to public university downtown Montreal. No better time like the present to toughen up that moral skin of yours.

Heidegger, by the way, makes a fundamental mistake in his existential-ontological analytic of Dasein. Principally, he is concerned with the concept of being. So he asks, 'What is the Being of entities'--this thing, that thing, anything? The question of being pertains to the What is...? in the question, which can be condensed by askingm What are entities--things? But Heidegger never once asks the question, What is time? or, What is the being of this thing called time? This question, of course, cannot be answered. Time is nothing; or, time is not a thing. When we speak of time, the concept of being is fractured into the three temporal tenses that determine of being of things: what was, what is, and what will be. Heidegger sets out to seek the meaning of Being within the transcendental horizon of time, but he would have done better to seek out the meaning of time among entities, past, present, and future--this thing, that thing, everything in time. In any case, Being cannot be sought in time: that which is, is necessarily so, always and everywhere, eternally.

2009-09-03T23:21:00.003-04:00

The Creator. As it is the experience of most who, like myself, would style themselves thinkers, I find it takes a good long while for a thought to mature. A good idea is, in this sense, like a fruit: it takes time to ripen. For some time now I have entertained the idea that the sum total of divine revelation contained in an understanding of the world as created, and God as creator. Every other doctrine one might derive form the biblical texts, it would follow, is merely a derivate of this central thought. To deviate from it, it will follow from this, is to fall into what is classically known as heresy (as opposed to faithful confession), which might be translated in contemporary terms into heterodoxy (as opposed to orthodoxy).

This, from the preface to Irenaues' Against Heresies:

They overthrow the faith of many, by drawing them away, under a pretence of [superior] knowledge, from Him who founded and adorned the universe; as if, forsooth, they had something more excellent and sublime to reveal, than that God who created the heaven and the earth, and all things that are therein. (Pre.1)

2009-09-02T22:42:00.006-04:00

Nameless and Faceless. I feel right now how a worm, if it had the mental capacity, would always feel. The last few days I have been running from office to office trying to formalize my relationship with the intangible entity known as McGill without much success. Having returned to school, one thing I need to do is inform another intangible entity known as OSAP that I, by right of law, no longer have to pay interest or principle on my student loan. Were I at an Ontario university, I would simply walk down to the financial office, stand in a long line of persons annoyed with wasting time standing in line, and present the correct documents. Almost as if it were magic, the great and powerful OSAP would hear my small cry for interest relief, and would relieve me of the onnerous financial burden it had imposed on me a year ago (for the short time, at least, I am attend school). But McGill is in Quebec; and in Quebec, no one could tell, and no official university website would inform me, whether a Quebec financial aid office would deal with an Ontario student loan. My intuition was that it would not.

Thankfully, my intution was wrong. Two unversities, which are exceptions to the provincial rule, that exist outside of Ontario that deal directly with OSAP: the nearby Concordia and my own McGill. It was too late in the day, however, when I discovered this previous truth. So tomorrow I will get up bright and early, beat the other peons to the financial aid office, have my questions dealt with by a staff who are bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, and not yet tired of the endless line of students, whose polite mask only just barely conceals their contempt and irritation with the entire financial aid process.

This is the front entrance to McGill. In the past week, I have walked through it at least twice a day. Just beyond the entrance is a field of green grass, a nice touch in an otherwise thick with houses and apartment buildings.

This is what I call the 'Promenade'. Behind me, relative to the position I was in when I took the picture, are doors to the Humanities of Social Sciences Library. The Promenade is, in fact a sort of runway, with the point of lift-off being either the library doors or the access to the greener parts of the campus at the far end. This analogy too is entirely relative: it all depends on whether one wants to be in the library or not.

And here I am with the field just below the Promenade directly in front of me.

At a orientation session a couple of days ago, I was encouraged--or, rather, all the students at the session were encouraged--to attend another orientation session put on by the graduate students association. Dutifully, I went. My name was placed on the attendence list, I received a few brouchures, and was given a single ticket, which could be redeemed for a beverage of my choice. Not seeing anyone familiar among the crowd of laughing, smiling faces, I picked up a single candy from a bowl near an exit and left quickly. The beverage voucher is still in the breast pocket of my shirt.

2009-09-01T01:13:00.000-04:00

The Evening. Undergraduates continue to prowl the streets until early in the morning. They pass me by, seemingly oblivious to my presence, as they go on their merry to the end of a long line-up outside one of the clubs just up the street. Not that I want to be noticed, or feel somehow slighted that I go unnoticed. Annonimity has its advantages when one merely wishes to observe.

These peculiar representatives of the species usually travel in packs, though they can also be found, quite often, in pairs. In the latter grouping, one is likely to find them laughing for the sheer pleasure of being with someone else. The former grouping is much darker in its organization. Typically, one observes an alpha female, or, at most, a pair of alpha female, who seem to possess, by sheer power of their presence, an almost hypnotizing effect on the males present in the immediate vicinity. She, or the shes, command the attention of the males by way of their sudden vocal outbursts and the peculiar, often provocative, way the carry themselves. And the males seem willing participants in this whole charade: competing for the coveted attention of the alpha female, provoking them to even greater displays of bravodo. The other females in the grouping hover around its edges, whispering in hushed tones.

I walked onwards towards my destination, past the press of eagar youth, past the dimmly lit clubs, past the expensive coffee shops, past the boutiques now closed, to a trusty establishment called Tim Hortons. My plan was to nurse a large regular coffee, which is archiacallyreferred to in Montreal as a 1 and 1 (1 cream, 1 sugar), while reading Iranaeus’ Agaisnt Heresies. The whole excursion lasted a little more than an hour. The only person that noticed me was a slightly built, middle-aged man, who walked up to me and began to speak rapidly, though clearly, in French. Looking up from my reading, I interrupted him, I said I could only understand English. He smiled weakly, and reverted to what, to my ears, sounded like his native tongue. It sounded, at least, as if he was more comfortable speaking in English than in French. He needed money to buy something to eat.

I paused only for a second to consider the request before handing over the two-dollar coin in my pocket. Unlike other denizens of the street who had approached me requesting whatever spare change I had handy on my person, the tone of voice this man had used lacked the whiny demanding edge that leaves one feeling guilty for not immediately drawing whatever coinage can be found in one’s pocket. He addressed me, he stated his plight, all the while retaining his own dignity. I felt no sickening feeling, no twinge of guilt, no pressure to hand over that which was in my possession. He simply asked. So I stuck my hand in my pocket, not the least bit concerned with whether this man might spend the money on something other than food.

2009-08-31T00:05:00.001-04:00

One week. It is raining outside. The temperature must be sitting around 12 or 13 degrees Celcius. This is a far cry from last Sunday, when I moved into my new place at 25 Avenue des Pins (Pine Avenue) in Montreal, Quebec. It was hot and humid. Carrying all my possessions up three flights of stairs to my apartment must of drained me of all excess the water by body contained. On top of the impediments due to weather, I also had to contend with a filthy apartment. You see, I made the mistake of taking on a lease transfer rather than a lease. With a lease transfer, you, the leasee deal with the former leasee, not the lessor, or landlord. The landlord thus bears no responsibility to make sure the apartment is clean when the new leasee arrives to take possession. And cleaning, as anyone who has finished a lease knows, is the last thing one wants to do on the day one leaves a place of residence.

The apartment was filthy. The former leasee had lived there for five years, and I am quite sure he had given the apartment a good spring cleaning in at least four years. Aside from that, he decided to gift me with the possessions he no longer had use for. An old table. A delapidated set of shelves. Things like that. It was the sort of place a person feels deep down they could catch a venereal disease in just be being there. It took three days of hard scrubbing to get the apartment to a place where I could sleep easy at night. Only on Saturday night, in fact, six days after I had first arrived, was I able to set up my bookshelves and bring the process of moving in to something of a completion.

This is what my place looks like for the time being.

My place is on the third floor of a small apartment builing about 10 minutes walk from the university. The location is ideal for my purposes. A large window overlooks Avenue des Pins, giving me more sunlight than I am used to. A potential downside to the location of the building is that I can hear everything that goes on down on the street. For example, for four days straight now, undergraduate students have been parading up and down the street yelling obscentities until 4:00 in the morning. Slick young men in expensive cars drive by with the bass cranked all the way up. Scantily-clad young women shriek in delight simply because they can as they walk by on their way to one of the dance clubs a few blocks away. The Rue de St. Laurent, just up the street, insecting with Avenue des Pins, has been the sight of one long street party for the duration of the weekend. So the human traffic beneath my window has been enormous. But eventually the snow will come to chase the people away.

Tomorrow I go to the university for a day of orientation. I am still not sure what day exactly classes start. Tuesday, perhaps. Maybe Thursday. Most likely, that will be one of the things covered in the orientation.

2009-08-30T23:04:00.002-04:00

So. It has come to pass, as all good things are wont to do in time, that I have returned to school. Bad things, of course, also come to pass in time—the passing of time being utterly indifferent tothe good and bad you or I might encounter along the way. Now I have placed my return among the good things, not the bad. But even so, time goes its merry way. Something Garison Keillor related about the Mid-Western Lutherans he grew among comes to mind: if they felt even the smallest twinge of excitement, there was no need to worry, for it too would pass.

Returning to school is good, I can affirm that much. For some reason, though, I find myself having to offer excuses for why I am not excited at the prospect. I cannot say I am scared of the work ahead. The ability to do the work, once I applied myself to it, comes easily enough. I can say, on the other hand, the culture that pervades the community of contemporary higher academia, to which I now return, sucks the life right out of me. I am supposed to be a humanities student trained in the liberal arts: the study of letters, which gets divided into the disciplines of history, literature, philosophy, and theology. It slowly dawned on me while doing history and philosophy at the Masters level that what I was being prepared for was not a life of lettered study, but a skilled trade not unlike carpentry or plumbing. Take someone else’s ideas, plumb their depths, drain them of their content, build a scaffold around some pertinent feature, and construct an argument, either to elucidate its application to this or that problem preoccupying scholars at present or to criticize some weakness or other, and construct an argument. But I am a humanities student: humanity should be my concern. I do not want to deal with ideas, but with people who have ideas. There is a difference. Too much methodology, and not enough humanity, leaves me something less than cheerful. Damn Rene Descartes’ Discourse on Method. To hell with Immanuel Kant’s transcendental method. May phenomenology in all its forms, Hegelian or Heideggerian or some derivative therefrom, burn forevermore. Damn the whole project of modern empirical study and give me humanity with all its successes and failures. Give me the good with the bad, but do not coddle me with the empty promises of sterile methods.

Twice I have been told by Masters review committees, once at McMaster and once at the Institute for Christian Studies, that significant a failing feature of my work was that it did not take up the ‘contemporary questions’. Rendered in layman’s terms, this means nothing more than that I did not adequately kiss someone’s ass, or ass of someone whose that was being widely kissed at the time. So I am not excited at the prospect of returning to school, even though I can say it is a good thing to be back. The passage of time being utterly indifferent to you or I, this too, I suppose, will pass.

2008-12-10T13:41:00.004-05:00

Incarnation. Set against other ancient religious texts (Near-Eastern or further afield, it matters not), the Hebrew canon, which forms the Old Testament in the Bible, is peculiar in its attention to detail. Granted that it is always dangerous to provide a summary account of what 'everyone else thought' and compare it to what 'the exceptions to the rule thought', comparisons still must be made to illustrate some intended meaning. So to illustrate: it was typical in most (if not all) ancient religious texts to treat the mundane details as if they were bearers, or were exemplar of, some 'higher' meaning, and so, in a final sense, inconsequential for the meaning of the text. Most contemporary examples of 'spiritual writings' that are to be found today, regardless whether the authors are Christian or not, exhibit this same sort of denial of the intrinsic value of the details. But the Hebrew canon is very concerned with the details: times and places, familial lineage, significance of names, etc, which, as I said above, sets its apart.

To illustrate what is meant, take the doctrine of the Incarnation. A 'spiritual' reflection of the doctrine, which would tend away from appreciating the Hebrew background against which the Incarnation is set--especially in the first three Gospels, but also in the fourth Gospel--would reflect on the significance of God become human, God sharing in human misery, the dignity imparted to the human person because of this divine condescension, the accomplishment of the reconciliation of humanity to its Creator, etc. None of these points are wrong per se. What is missing in each of them, however, is the essence of the Incarnation: at some point in the past, God was born to, and lived with, human parents in a backwater Roman province on the outskirts of Jewish society; God walked and talked with people like us and he looked much the same you and I walk and talk with each other. In other words, God-become-man is very specifically locatable to a time and a place. The Creator, who created all places and rules over all times, deigned to inhabit a single place at a single time. (St. Augustine makes the point that time itself is a creature of God, and so is 'created'. There are both theoretical and semantic issues, however, that lead me to distinguish between God's creation of places and his rule over all times.) The Word, by which everything was created, became flesh and tabernacled among us, according to the Apostle John. If God did not do these things, if these things did not actually happen in the past, we Christians should affirm with the Apostle Paul that our faith is in vain. For it amounts to saying that there is no Christ to follow. No amount of discourse on the Incarnation, Passion, Resurrection, and Ascension of Christ Jesus can ever breathe life into those words unless God-become-man actually was incarnated, died, was raised from the grave, and ascended into heaven in some specific place on earth and at some point in the past. These things either happened, or they did not. If they did not, contemporary Christians will be full of hot air--but not much more.

Too many commentators I have run across treat the doctrine of the Incarnation as if it were a Greek addition to the Hebrew canon. It almost seems commonplace to assume that something of profound significance must of changed in a Jewish mindset for the Incarnation even to be considerably a remote possibility. My own sentiments are precisely the opposite: God's incarnation, conceived of as a unique occurrence that has universal consequences, with a positive regard to the particular circumstances under which the occurrence occurred, is perhaps the most Hebrew/Jewish of doctrines.

Come to think of it, too many commentators treat the Creeds of the Early Church as if they dressed the Gospel messages up in clothes of Greek categories. Most miss the fact that the creeds tend to pay close attention to the specificity of God's incarnation, which is very Hebrew/Jewish and not very Greek.

rich

2008-12-05T23:47:00.002-05:00

How to be a Natural Philosopher; Or, On Being Human. Ours is a most unnatural age. A staunch refusal to say anything of substance is now a mark of intelligence. One’s learning is measured by the number of vantages from which one can view a given question. Someone else can always be cited as an authority. The measure of a person’s ability to teach has been reduced to wit. Does a teacher tickle the fancies of students? Is their discourse pleasurable to hear? Do we laugh? But this was not always the case.

Around about two centuries ago, the venerable old term ‘nature,’ eternally self-same even in this changeable world of time, underwent a transmutation into the Idea of History. The transmutation, which might otherwise be called an evolution, principally took place in German craniums. Wissenschaft was the name under which its many faces were joined into a single whole; all of time, past and present, was reduced to an empirical order. An inner tendency of being was sough, and a way to an unfettered transcendental future was plotted along a course of immanent necessity.

The spread of an empirical scientific method called into question one of the basic suppositions of a natural philosophy, namely, that the human being was a composite being. Only a very few in the main stream of Western though from Aristotle to David Hume called this conception of human being into question. Yet today, few (if any) are willing affirm that the human being is a composite being, a composite unity of two sides, one inner and the other outer, that is, of soul and body.

To be a natural philosopher one must defend an understanding of the human being as a composite unity of body and soul. Taken as a basic assumption will be that the human being has always been, and has never ceased to be, a composite being—Hegel’s dialectical reconciliation of the inner and outer and the search for a non-dialectical Idea it inspired in generations of empirical thinkers be damned. The guiding question of the natural philosopher will not be a question of being. That unnatural privilege belongs to the discipline of ontology. The question of the natural philosopher is metaphysical: it is a question of our knowing of human being. If I am a composite being, how can I know I am composite being? The reasoning is circular, to be sure, but what of it? So is all reasoning. If nothing else, we can learn this lesson from Heidegger’s understanding of the hermeneutical circle.

If a person wants to be a natural philosopher, he or she must be willing to go it alone. It is perhaps the most intolerant of philosophical positions to take—or, it will be seen as such by the empirical (which is to say, unnatural) thinker. If a person proposes to expound a natural philosophy, that person proposes to expound a position that is universally binding on all persons. In other words, that person proposes to tell everyone how they do, in actuality, think, and hence, by extension, how they ought to think.

But at this most unnatural of times, when the term nature has fallen disrepute, and when history—the historicity, or historicality, the cultural-situatedness, or contextuality of human knowing—is taken as axiomatic, all-important, it is a strange twist of fate that only the natural philosopher should be equipped to ask questions about what it means to be in time. The empirical position forces the thinker out of time: the ‘self’ is beyond time, or supra-temporal. But a natural philosophy, which treats the ‘self’ as a composite unity of body and soul, places the thinker in time—which is where his or her being is to be found anyways. This is a question of our knowing of our being. I can know myself in two interdependent ways: via perception and via memory, the former through the bodily sense and the latter through the contents of the soul/consciousness/mind. The world I perceive is always present-at-hand while past perceptions are contained in memory. Who will disagree with me when I say that I do not see or hear what I or anyone else did and said yesterday or the day before, but only what is present-at-hand in the here and now? Who will disagree with me when I say that I can, and often do, remember what I saw and heard what I or someone else did or said yesterday, or the day before? If at some point in the future you remember reading this short reflection on natural philosophy, is your memory not a memory of reading, that is, a memory of some past perception? If it is, you have affirmed the basic tenet of a natural philosophy: you have a body endowed with senses capable of perceiving and a soul capable of remembering.

rich

2008-12-04T18:57:00.004-05:00

Time and Secularity. Perhaps the most frustrating aspect of a Christian graduate education at present is that the chief end of the Christian scholar is to find better ways to package the Christian faith in secular, post-Kantian, theoretical frameworks. Most seem preoccupied with the debate between the modern and the postmodern or the structuralist and the post-structuralist. If you are a secular thinker, of course, there will be no problem. You have a choice between Kant, Hegel, or Marx, on the one hand, and Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, and Derrida, on the other. Or, if you are really creative, you can find ways of synthesizing the two groups into a complementary whole. But if you aren't a secular thinker, it would seem to follow that the transcendental problems, i.e. whether there is such a thing (which is not a thing) as a transcendental subject or not, of secular thought will not be your concern. (Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche would say yes, while Marx, Heidegger, Foucault, and Derrida would say no)

Alas, in my experience, this has not been the case. The draw of the secular, post-Kantian, Continental tradition quite easily drags Christian thinkers into its bottomless abyss. This is in part, I think, due to an innate susceptibility towards 'being in the world' but forgetting to 'not be of the world' that is derived from the doctrine of the Incarnation. God entered into the world, and the assumption is that so should we. Partly true; that is, but for the fact that we never entered the world. For in reality we were already there to begin with.

Still, the ease with which Christian scholars adopt the positions of secular thinkers who know neither God as Creator nor God as Redeemer, especially in the person of Christ, and so do not understand our world as God's creation, nor human beings as created in God's image, continues to astound me.

One of my more profound thoughts is that secularity, or a secular culture, can be identified and explained away if we pay close attention to how time and human history is understood. A secular person understands themselves to live at the end of history, at a time when the whole of human history can finally be understood (as it was meant to be understood). But a secular person cannot understand themselves to live in history; that is, they must always be escaping history--escaping the past and looking to the future.

Thankfully, I am not alone in thinking these thoughts, nor are these thoughts unique to me. Charles Taylor had this to say in his A Secular Age:

But the interesting issue is whether there could be unbelief without any sense of some religious view which is being negated. A condition of absence of religion which would no longer deserve the name unbelief. If so, it would be different from our present world in one crucial respect. Unbelief for great numbers of contemporary unbelievers is understood as an achievement of rationality. It cannot have this without a continuing historical awareness. It is a condition which can’t only be described in the present tense, but which also needs the perfect tense: a condition of “having overcome” the irrationality of unbelief…It is difficult to imagine a world in which this consciousness might have disappeared.

Christopher Dawson says, on very similar terms, in his Progress and Religion:

It is owing to this historical sense that the modern Western Europeans differs most profoundly from men of other ages and cultures. World history means infinitely more to him than it meant to the ancient Greek or Oriental thinkers, to the latter, Time, and consequently History, were without ultimate value or significance; to the modern European they are the very foundation of his conception of reality. Yet this sense of history found no adequate expression in the movement of scientific rationalism.

Why not? Presumably because time and human history, being a reality we presently live in, cannot be escaped, overcome, etc. Well, there is one way out: death, which comes to us all, each in our own time.

rich

2008-11-30T21:27:00.003-05:00

Letters from Home 1.4. The early winter shows no sign of letting up, at least not for the next week. Where in the last few years, whether or not Christmas would be white was in question, this year the month of November was locked in the grips of the chilly colour. If the estimates are correct, approximately 40% of the corn in southern Ontario is still standing in the field waiting to be harvested. The heavy wet snow that has fallen over the last few weeks will hamper whatever efforts farmers make in the near future. And I can be thankful my father and uncle finished their harvest in the nick of time.

Family gathered from across North America this last week to say their final farewells to my grandfather. Only today did the last of the visitors return to their regular routines; my brother, who had taken up residence in Halifax, has begun his long journey home. Life on the farm is finally getting back to normal, though I have noticed for a few people, my mother and grandmother included, life is now experienced in more stark contrasts. The reality of human frailty, when one is forced to confront it directly in the death of a loved one, leaves nobody unscathed. What joy or comfort might be had in the knowledge that the loved one passed from this life in relative peace and without pain is always joined by feeling of emptiness and loss. The latter is, I suspect, a universal human experience. Death leaves no one person untouched. I was present in the hospital room about 12 hours before my grandfather's death when he addressed those surrounding him, saying, 'You will miss me when I am gone.' A few days after he had died, my grandmother remarked that he never once said he would miss us.

I had intended to blog with a relative frequency, but the funeral and the business that it brings interrupted that plan. We shall see if I can get myself back into the swing of things.

rich

2008-11-25T15:26:00.003-05:00

Note from Home 1.3. My grandfather died earlier Saturday morning surrounded by family and friends. It was a blessing that in his final hours he had a better command of his mental faculties than he had been in for several months. He was fully conscious of the significance of that the time of his death was near at hand, and several times in the course of the day he voiced his wish that the end would come. The present life had become a burden to heavy for him to bear. His wish to be released from the burden was granted much sooner than the family anticipated.

Today, in the presence of family and friends, his body was committed to the ground. A farmer in life, my Aunt Wilma scattered seeds on his coffin before the cement case surrounding the coffin was lowered into the ground. The pastor recalled that according to the testimonies of the Scriptures, seeds were a sign of resurrection and new life.

rich

2008-11-22T15:21:00.001-05:00

Sidebar Additions.

Joel Haas - At the Crossroads

Dave Beldman - tolle lege

2008-11-20T22:10:00.000-05:00

Letters from Home 1.2. Snow has been falling for five days. The trees, which had formerly been bare, are now covered with their winter foliage. Instead of a contrast between some shade of green and a variegated, pock-marked brown, white clings to the up-turned side of the trunk and branches. It is a tasteless icing that, lacking the sweetness of icing on a cake, is marked instead by a sharp chill unpleasant to taste and touch even if pleasing to sight. The fieldwork undone when the snow first started to fall remains undone. And if the weather gods decide winter is here to stay, the fields will remain unworked until spring. Having had the winter to harden without being worked, the ground will be difficult to break. But that is the way things are here on the farm. You must play the hand that is dealt to you and complaining about it will not change a thing. Did I mention I saw my first sunrise in two years this morning?

For whatever reason, I find I have more energy in the winter. This may be due to the fact that in the cold air a person always has to stay moving to keep warm. It is a form of incentive, you might say. Regardless whether I have more energy or not, I discovered (once again) how dependent I am on my glasses and how disorienting the world is without them. The pair I currently own broke in my hands while I was cleaning the dust from the lenses on Monday whilst eating lunch. Snapping at the weld between the lens frame and the nose bridge, the right lens popped out. Only a couple of pieces of well placed tape could keep the lens secure in place, but the tape had to be placed on the lens like shutters beside a window or blinders on a horse. Immediately I went to the local optometrist to see if I could get the frames replaced where I received the worst possible news: the glasses were no longer under warranty and the specific frame I have was no longer being produced. Usually this will mean that I would need to get a whole new pair of glasses, including new lens, all at my own cost. The receptionist, however, made a heroic effort to locate a pair of my old frames. The prospective bill of a couple hundred dollars happily whittled down to the size of $35. When I had walked up the front desk, the receptionist greeted me with the standard, How may I help you? I smiled at her and thought to myself, I've just walked into an optometrist office with two large pieces of tape on my glasses, so the answer is a little redundant. My response to her: 'I think you know.' That earned me a few laughs—and, I like to think, the heroic effort.

Money is always on my mind these days. In the past, I watched and listened as friends left undergraduate and graduate programs and stepped bravely into the work-a-day world bearing a substantial debt-load. None of them have committed suicide as yet, so I can only assume that there is hope at the end of the tunnel. The one money-making scheme with which I flirted briefly, which I wrote about last week, was to go to Northern Alberta for six or so months. But it appears now that this would have been a terrible idea. The price of oil has dropped from $150/barrel, the high of six months ago, to a mere $58/barrel. Large investments for future developments are pulling out of the tar sands and the existing production capacity, if I followed the CBC news report correctly, is being scaled back. I just may have found myself in Northern Alberta with a brand new $1000 coat, $500 boats, $200 gloves, and a pair of $50 thermal long underwear (specially designed to keep chestnuts roasting over the equivalent of an open fire in the dead of winter), freezing in -30 to -40 degree (C) temperature without the only job that could have justified the front-end investment. All that expenditure with the potential of no return: not exactly the sort of thing I want to be investing in at this point in time. At least at home I have the option of going back to my warm bed for a nap after breakfast. And even if there isn't as much work as there would have been in Fort McMurray or surrounding area, my cost of living continually (asymptotically, you might say) approaches absolute $0 thanks to the mom and pop.

Many other reasons could be conjured up to convince myself that I am content to be living at home with my parents once more. At some point, though, a person simply has to stop rationalizing and say that it is good to be home. By good I do not necessarily mean pleasant. In the last week, my mother's father—my grandfather—took a turn for the worse. Over the last two years, he has succumbed to mental illness, but that did not necessarily mean that the quality of his life was negatively affected. Now, however, he has been diagnosed were liver and lung cancer—and if the latter was not bad enough, the former is always terminal. My parent's house has become a way station for aunts and uncles, and I expect that more distant relatives will soon be making their way to Listowel, Ontario. After Adam and Eve ate the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil that had been forbidden them to eat, the Good Lord expelled them from the garden so they would not 'take also from the tree of life and eat, and life forever.' (Gen. 3.22) Somewhere in these words there is a bit of old Hebrew wisdom that addresses the folly of seeking to extend human life beyond a certain length, though I cannot find it today. Death will come to us all in our own time. And yet, despite all that might be affirmed about its 'naturalness,' or its inevitability, death is also a most unwelcome guest. May we find in the Risen Son the strength to see us through the coming days, and may he see to it that one day death will be no more,

rich

2008-11-18T21:24:00.001-05:00

Ontology of Time. To provide a definition for the nature time is impossible, I suspect, because time is that which we are in. Say someone asks you, What is time? The best answer you can give is that time is that which joins what was to what will be. What time is, that is, what time is in its essence, is always pulled apart into three verbal tenses: the was, the is, and the will be. So whatever time is, it has, does, and will always evade an essential determination. The enquirer, in this case myself, is like a fish in water. Should I try to leave the water, I would very quickly die from lack of oxygen.

The great secular philosophies of history like that found Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, Marx's Captial, or Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra all contain within them a moment of conflict, a dialectic in 'consciousness,' between 'consciousnesses,' or something similar, which precedes a moment when all differences are rendered equal, a universal equilibrium is achieved (in the cases of Hegel and Marx), the mundane is transcended (in the case of Nietzsche), and the human being finds themselves holding the key to the historical process. In other words, they find themselves, at long last, at the end of history. A feature of these narratives that is very rarely appreciated is that to conceptualize the final moment, the human being has to raise themselves out of time. Really? Is such a thing possible? Can at fish ever leave their watery home without starving themselves of the necessities of life?

A recurrent theme of philosophical investigation in the Continental tradition following Immanuel Kant's 'discovery' of the transcendental subject has been the 'ontology of time.' Hegel's Phenomenology and Heidegger's Being and Time are the two focal texts in the tradition. Philosophers discourse on the meaning of time, on the destiny of being in time, on the coherence of things in time, on the structure of time, etc., etc. It is all very profound and sublime, etc., etc. Philosophers approach questions concerning the ontology of time with awe and reverence and fear and trembling, etc., etc. But few, if any, seem to realize that an ontology of time is a contradiction in terms. One person who recognized that something had gone awry was Ernst Cassirer, a long time critic of Heidegger who had abandoned the ontological project in favor of a metaphysics.

Ontology is the study of being, which, in the form of a question, asks, What is? It follows that an ontology of time is the study of the being (nature) of time and asks, What is time? It is a good question, to be sure, but not one this fish proposes to answer without quickly affirming that time is my natural habitat, my watery home. Whatever it is, time has, does, and will always evade any attempt to determine its nature.

Who does the ontologist of time think they are to suppose themselves to be able to leave time and answer the question, What is time? God?

rich

2008-11-16T21:34:00.006-05:00

Chance Sighting. My major project over the last five years has been to figure out how Christopher Dawson, a Catholic social historian and philosopher/theologian of history, tells the stories of human history. Like all good things, the project is an obsession. If you do something, they say, do it well or don't do it at all. And that takes a touch a madness.

Now I am not speaking necessarily of the madness that used to land you in a sanatorium. This madness might be termed a habituated response mechanism--which would appear odd to people who are not in the know. But now you are in the know, the comments that follow will have context..

Black Like Me, by John Howard Griffin, has sat on a shelf in my parent's house for as long as I can remember, that is, approximately twenty-two years. The corner are frayed and the front cover is missing, but that's okay because all someone needs to identify the book is a legible title on the spine. Yesterday was the first time I decided to pick it up.

In 1959, Griffin had his appearance medically altered, with the end result that he, a white man, looked like a black man. Attitudes changed almost immediately after he made his reappearance in public. About a half a month into his new life, Griffin went looking for a place to change a travelers cheque at night, late enough that all the banks were closed. Places that would have quite readily served a person with a paler shade of pigment turned Griffin away. All expect one: a local Catholic book store. Griffin, who was at his wits end by this point, was so grateful that he purchased books by several notable authors: Jacques Maritain, Thomas Aquinas, and Christopher Dawson.

The qualified madness I referred to above kicks in at this point. My habituated-response is to wonder why Dawson's name would appear in this particular book. Certainly I was not expecting to run across Dawson's name, though the Catholic stance against racial discrimination and Dawson's life-work, a historical apology for the human being created in the image of God, do resonate with Griffin's message.

rich

2008-11-16T17:58:00.002-05:00

Comment on Comment. David Greusel describes two strains of environmentalism--or, as the article is titled, 'Two Shades of Green'--in the latest issue Comment, only one of which is compatible with the Christian faith. There is nothing overtly objectionable in Greusel's article, to my mind. That is, if you ignore the implicit tendency in his statement 'our God is a god of abundance...for fresh air, fresh water, nutritious foods, and natural resources,' a message which may have some resonance among the affluent, commodity-rich citizens of the Western world, but which might fall on deaf ears in other parts of the world, there is nothing overtly objectionable. His argument did, however, strike me as a bit of a straw-man argument.

It goes something like this: There are two types of environmentalism, one concerned with the care of the environment and therefore compatible with the doctrine of creation, and the other the Malthusian time-bomb. The Malthusian time-bomb theory has been disproved time and again making it obviously wrong. Thus the choice should be obvious to Christians.

Poor Thomas Malthus! Such a bad reputation he has garnered for himself. Greusel seems to oppose Malthus' view of a limitation on natural resources with a view on the providential intervention of God to supply us with ever-more natural commodities: 'The message of global scarcity is a modern invention, and is not supported by what the Bible teaches.' Are we to suppose the opposite, then, and say that the Bible teaches the world's natural resources are limitless?

That is simply to make a small point. Now back to my main original train of thought.

It would seem to me that the Christian can make common cause with someone interested in what is recognizably the stewardship of God's creation, even if they speak about it on different terms. Thus far I agree with Greusel. Yet I do not believe that the Great Foe is to be found in a neo-Malthusian argument. More likely, they are to be praised by environmentalists everywhere for being overly cautious and for being overly quick to point out that the end of all life on earth is nigh at hand.

No, I suspect the real problems comes from people who defend the Gaia (Mother Earth) principle. When wedded to modern empirical science, the Gaia principle is transformed into a sort of god which is the soul of the world and all things in it, including human beings. This conception is of an immanent God, not a transcendent Creator. In fact, it precludes an understanding of a transcendent Creator, which means it also precludes an understanding of the human being as a responsive (religious/moral) creature. Instead, in Gaia, the human being is a being who has forgotten that he or she is one with everything--in other words, has forgotten that he or she is Gaia.

The well-known Canadian environmentalist David Suzuki advocates this sort of perspective in his The Sacred Balance: Rediscovering Our Place in Nature. He proposes to construct a new environmentally-friendly worldview based on modern science and ancient wisdom. The spiritual contribution of modern science is obvious. But it is telling what Suzuki looks for in the texts of ancient wisdom. Two things attract his attention: anything that indicates that human beings are of the earth and anything that shows that human beings are one with everything. The Book of Genesis is listed amount the texts of ancient wisdom, along with the Bhavagad Gita, the Upanishads, and Ancient Greek philosophy. When Suzuki reads Genesis, he immediately grabs hold of the human being formed from the dust of the ground: who is doing the forming, namely, the Creator God, is quietly set aside, almost as if he never existed in the first place. It is almost as if Suzuki did not read the Book of Genesis.

rich

2008-11-15T18:06:00.004-05:00

Letters from Home 1.1. This week has seen the sky shed much of its watery weight on the welcoming ground. My father and uncle used the one dry day there was to harvest the last of the corn crop. Now the fields, picked of their fruits, lie mostly bare. All that remains is a few severed stalks on the ground in need of a plow to turn them under where they will return a small amount of nutrition to the soil. That will have to wait for the time being, though. In the morning, rain turned to snow, the skies are overcast, and what appears to be a southerly wind is driving the snow across the fields, which are accumulating a soggy blanket of white. Not the sort of weather a person wants to be outside in, any sane person would say to themselves. For myself, I am quite happy to be on the inside of a house looking out, rather than the other way around.

My parent's home, where I have taken up a semi-permanent residence after eight years of semi-permanent absence, can be found about a ten minute drive north of the largest urban center for about forty-five minutes drive in any direction. To call Listowel, Ontario, an urban center, however, is quite laughable. The town has boasted a population of 5500 souls on signs marking one's entry into its municipal limits for the last twenty or so years. Surely the numbers have changed, but the average person who passes through can have no knowledge of that. The nearest center that deserves the designation urban, Kitchener, Ontario, has steadily eroded the distinctiveness of the small town. It no longer seems to bother people that they have to take a forty-five minute to an hour drive to see a movie or shop in specialty shops. Several years ago the independent movie theater in the middle of town closed down and the locally-owned hardware store, grocery store, and drug store have all been replaced by chain stores. The McDonalds restaurant chain has erected a pair of golden arches at the one end of town and the Zellers department store chain built a rather large box-like building in which to pedal its imported Chinese wares at the other. An intimate sense of locality, of community, of civic pride in place that I see among neighbours, whose families have been living in Canada for five or six generations, has almost been exhausted. Listowel is now a place most young people will leave, but when they do they will find that the town is a carbon-copy of so many others towns. That is my impression, at least.

But you don't return home for any of these things, nor to complain about them. I haven't. It has been a couple of weeks now since I successfully defended a thesis to complete a MA degree in the study of philosophy. The horrid What's next? question that confronts every recent graduate would not allow me to show it disrespect for any longer than I already had, so returning to my parent's home is my way of offering what is hopefully a temporary answer. Debts pile up after eight years of post-secondary education, and with no real course of further study alt the graduate level open to me at the moment, which would incidentally have allowed me to stave off the inevitable debt repayment for another few years, I had to find work. Where I had been living, Hamilton, Ontario, there were a few $10/hr jobs at 40 hr/wk doing the sort of work that requires no accreditation or expertise available to me. Though none of these options would have worked. Not that I think myself above 'menial' labour. Ah heck! I grew up on a farm and have no qualms with getting dirty, even if that means getting covered with fecal matter (a.k.a 'shit'). More important to me is paying off a little school debt and put a little money aside so that I might get myself started somewhere else in the world next spring or summer. And I could not do that on $10/hr while paying for rent, food, and a government student loan, which has just come due.

Briefly I flirted with the option of going to northern Alberta. A job bank on the Government of Canada website says that is where the jobs are at. The flirtation was very brief. My aunt and uncle, who live just down the road from my parent’s place, are due to have another child, which means they can use all the help they can get around the farm for the winter and into the spring. They need the help, and I get a chance to regroup. Sign me up.

Home is where the heart is, they say. Who 'they' are, I cannot be sure. But their hoary catch-phrase does not necessarily fit in my case. I am not sure whether my heart is in fact at my parent's home. At this point, I am not sure where my heart is at all. On the other hand, I do know that home is where my head is. As a student of philosophy with an introspective bent, I fall into a habit of watching myself very closely. Whether the conclusions I draw about myself are on target or not remains to be seen, but I can say this about being home: I think better, more clearly, in my parent's house. That may have something to do with diet. My mother's cooking is wonderful. But I suspect it also has something to do with wide open spaces and hours on end with nothing to do but make sure the tractor follows a straight line, turn around when you reach the end of the field, and repeat over and over and over again. Did I mention the money is also good, at least, good for someone who is as unqualified for any sort of specialized work as I am?

This is the first of a series of 'Letters from Home.' The blogosphere seems to have reached its zenith and its population appears to be in a steady decline. I will be less leery than I once might have been at posting this sort of personal reflection. Until some time next week, may the Good Lord bless you and keep you warm in the coming winter,

rich

2008-11-14T20:11:00.005-05:00

Introduction. So I have decided to take up blogging once again. A number of reasons could be offered. Blogging seems to have lost its appeal for many previous bloggers, which makes it shine with new light for me. I winnowed down my list of contacts (just to the right), separating the sheep from the goats, and the grain from the chaff. Those who qualified as sheep/grain--those who are still blogging--got to stay. But more than that, for the first time in a while I actually want to write. And a blog seems as good as any place to start.

The name of my blog had to change. A House at Pooh Corner no longer fit my temperament. You see, I am not looking for another metaphorical honey-pot anymore. Now I have found my honey-pot. Yes indeed. It was an unexpected find. It was unanticipated. I simply did what all bears do best: I followed my nose.

The name Down in La Mancha fits my present temperament better. Lost in limbo, I am. The problem is that it might just as well be a self-imposed exile to limbo. I can't really tell at the moment, but I have my suspicions. Cervantes' character Don Quixote will have to serve me as an inspiration, and perhaps I can find myself out of this merry conundrum.

Of course, all that was very vague. I do plan on spelling things out in a little more detail in the coming weeks.

rich

2008-08-22T16:52:00.003-04:00

Christopher Dawson and the Spiritual Unity of Human History. Understanding a person is easiest if you listen to the stories they tell about their lives. Human life is a storied existence stretched from beginning to end, from past to future, along a narrative trajectory. Whether those stories sound fanciful, fantastic, or even offensive, to our ears, they open a window onto a way of life in which they have a real purchase. Human life is lived with some ultimate destination in mind; and so much so is this the case that even when a person despairs of reaching their destination, the despair itself must find a reflection in how a life is lived. Sometime during the year 1939, around the time the nations of Europe crossed the threshold of the slaughterhouse of total war for the second time, Christopher Dawson sat down and penned this reflection on the nature of calamity in human life:

When Our Lord spoke of the future He gave His disciples no optimistic hopes, no visions of social progress; He described all the things we are afraid of today and more—wars, persecutions, disasters and the distress of nations. But strange to say He used this forecast of calamity as a motive for hope. “When you see these things,” He said, “look up and lift up your heads for your redemption is at hand.”
That may seem a strange philosophy of history, but it is the authentic philosophy of Christ, and if the prospect of these things causes us to hand down our heads instead of lifting them up, it shows that there is something wrong with our point of view. I know we are apt to feel this this does not apply to us—that it merely refers to the end of the world. But to the Christian the world is always ending, and every historical crisis is, as it were, a rehearsal for the real thing.1

Dawson claimed to defend 'the Christian view of history' and to have developed a 'science of culture,' which I have called a 'science of human being.' So here I must summarize very quickly the ubiquity of his proposals. It is a 'science' in the sense Dawson sets forth a view on the natural foundations of human knowing; and also in the sense that he intends to get at the truth about human beings and the world they inhabit. Nothing more and nothing less. The principle object in Dawson's sights is anthropological and he starts from the supposition that everything belonging to this object may be understood as the cultural expression of a particular community developing on a social tradition of education while living in our world at some time and in some place. What is cultural, Dawson will insist, is merely artificial. The language used, for example, the concepts you or I or Dawson himself will use, belongs to a tradition of education. To the Christian, Dawson will confess, is given to know, in a small measure, that what is artificial is the flawed expression of our fallen human nature- of a creature who is also a creator, whose creations—e.g. language, concepts—fall short of perfection.

Dawson objects to the modern 'scientific' tendency towards specialization or the division the whole body of human knowledge, past, present, and future, into different disciplinary categories. Specialization must obscure the anthropological object. For example, a theologian should not content themselves with describing how the grace of God works in the saint; a philosopher, regardless whether they begin by affirming the existence of God or not, should not limit themselves to describing the natural conditions of the saint's knowledge; and a historian should not delight in showing from their sources materials that the saint was in fact a sinner by the moral standards of their own faith. Instead, Dawson proposes a very difficult equation: 'all saints are sinners', but 'not all sinners are saints'. The anthropological object of the theologian, philosopher, and historian was, is, and will always be, one and the same object. For this object is a subject which has itself as its own object; and this subject lives a storied life stretched out on a narrative trajectory from past to future, lacking the eternal vantage necessary to grasp the whole of itself as an object. It is our propensity to grab hold the eternal vantage, especially if we find ourselves intellectually inclined, that is the clearest evidence of our fallen nature.

If Dawson's basic anthropological thesis is correct, that what characterizes modern 'scientific' study is a dislocation between the 'inner' and 'outer' worlds of human activity and experience (existence), that the human mind is no longer seen to depend on the five bodily senses for knowledge of the external world, the reason secular 'scientific' study examines the anthropological object by abstracting from it something other than the object itself, is that the 'spirit' of 'scientific' study refuses to admit that there is something wrong with the 'inner' person—that 'all saints are sinners.' The pre-modern world-religions, on Dawson's reading, are all attempts to understand the problem. Our fives senses only furnish us with knowledge of the external world. Any human being can look at another human being, but the 'inner' person will always escape the perception of sight. And what escapes, or transcends, the perception of our five senses—the seat of what is wrong with human nature: the heart, mind, soul, or spirit—we say only God can know truly. So 'not all sinners are saints,' but only God can truly distinguish one from the other. For the Christian, only at the end of the present age when Christ returns will the citizens of City of God and the City of Man, respectively, be divided from one another; but in the present age our intellectual vision continually falls into the external world perceived through our five senses, so we are compelled to say that they are commingled.

Like Augustine before him, Dawson will make a great deal about the event of God's Incarnation. Human history is a spiritual unity, for Dawson, with Christ at its center. Almighty God has come in the flesh; and our world is forever changed. He is no longer silent, but can now be seen and heard; and he has come to set what was wrong inside our human being, in the heart, aright.

'You do not want to leave too, do you?' Jesus asked the Twelve.
Simon Peter answered him, 'Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. We believe and know that you are the Holy One of God. (Jn. 7.67-8)

To the Twelve, Christ gave the command to go into all the world to make more disciples. Dawson will claim that the Christian strikes out on the middle path between idealism and materialism, between embracing the world whole-heartedly and rejecting it outright, between optimism and pessimism, and is neither overly confident in present successes nor utterly despondent in present failures. Why? Because the Christian has been granted, in a small measure, an understanding of the irresolvable tension to be found in the restless heart of every human being.

The modern secular European age is one of intellectual, social, political, and economic revolutions. Some good may have been accomplished, but only at tremendous cost to human life. To the Christian has been given to know why humanity is capable of great successes and failures, of great good and great evil. Nothing in the study of human life in the historical record should leave the Christian unduly perturbed or overly surprised. For the Christian perspective on the way things are, so to speak, can never be upset; the Christian should know that the way things are can at times be upsetting. Having understood these things, Dawson quotes Christ saying, 'look up and lift up your heads for your redemption is at hand.' rich

2007-12-18T00:38:00.000-05:00

At the beginning of this course, Bob presented us with the thesis that the genealogical approach to the history of philosophy constructed by Nietzsche and Foucault can be understood to belong within a rhetorical tradition in Western philosophy which has a much longer history. On my final appraisal, the thesis has been adequately demonstrated: both Nietzsche and Foucault can be seen to make the classic protreptic move which demonstrates that, though “this” and “that” can be analytically distinguished from each other, in fact, on closer examination “this” shows itself to “that”.

One should grant that the thesis is a devilishly clever one since it situates Nietzsche and Foucault precisely where they do not want to be: inside the conceptual trails and tribulations of the history of Western philosophy. To get out of those same trails and tribulations I take to be conscious intention behind Nietzsche's insistence, in The Geneaology of Morals, that there is no thinkable “'being' behind the doing, working, becoming; [that] the doer is a mere appendage to the action.” (I.13) And for reason of Nietzsche's “innovation,” Foucault can point to him as the person who liberated discourse from the age-old interrogation of the being of language. In order to say this, however, he must ignore safe distinctions someone like Vollenhoven will draw between philosophy and the formal disciplines--in his case, between philosophy and philology--to subject language itself to a radical critique. Discourse, thus liberated, can then be lost in the eruptive plentitude of its manifold meanings; which is to say, of course, that discourse is, at one and the same time, everything and nothing. Thus liberated, the contents of a discourse no longer can be analytically distinguished between “this” and that”. As Foucault will say in The Order of Things, language “can possess neither sound nor interlocutor, where it has nothing to say but itself, nothing to do but shine in the brightness of its being.” (327)

More specifically, this thesis cleverly situates Nietzsche and Foucault in the rhetorical tradition. The subtle critique behind such a positioning--left unspoken by Bob and in present need of his confirmation or disconfirmation--is to say that neither rate as serious philosophic thinkers. Rhetoric is, after all, identified by Aristotle as one of the arts, not one of the sciences. Properly exercised, the arts are meant to bring into conformity with nature; they do not investigate nature itself. The one thing that neither Nietzsche nor Foucault can or will take very seriously--you might say that it is exactly where they do not want to do be--is a natural philosophy. They seem to want to believe that Reason (with a capital “R”), its privileged claim to get at the natures (essences) of beings, also died along with the Spirit it from issued; and in retrospect, we can safely doubt it never had a life of its own in the first place.

But this places us at an impasse of sorts between Bob's positioning of Nietzsche and Foucault and their own descriptions of their projects. Neither Vollenhoven nor McIntrye, both of whom Bob has cited as authorities, are willing to take the Nietzschean “risk”. If one has in mind to doubt that beings have in potency some existent trace of a rational whole capable of being actualized via careful logical analysis, the distinctions drawn by Vollenhoven between the thinker, the thinking, and the thinkable which leaves objective thinking hanging in an impossible space between the subject of thought and a thinkable subject will fall on deaf ears. For it presupposes the presence of some existent trace of a rational whole belonging mutually to the thinker and the thinkable. One can also hear traces whisperings of Nietzsche's laugh when McIntyre says, “Reason can only move towards being genuinely universal and impersonal insofar as it is neither neutral nor disinterested.” The movement of Reason would seem to be the exact thing that Nietzsche and Foucault have in mind when they set out to dismantle the entire edifice of Western philosophy. Is Reason not the mask that they expose as bankrupt in its claims to get at the essence of beings, or the Being of beings? Is Reason's movement not what Nietzsche refers to when he exclaims, “but it is and remains a will!” (III.28)--a will to Truth covering over a will to Power?

My training in history predisposes me to be suspicious of any equation of “tradition” with an abstract principle like thinking or Reason divorced from the human subject. I am willing to grant that tradition is a habit of the mind, a patterned way of thinking about oneself and one's relation to the world, inherited from teachers and texts, but not much more. So I am given to do doubt McIntyre's claim that Reason can make progress under any circumstances. Even if Reason could progress, I am not sure how, I, as mere mortal, can measure that progress. How is it, for instance, that McIntyre knows that the Western philosophic tradition got off track after Aquinas? Both Nietzsche and Foucault would beg to differ. What privileged access to truth must McIntyre suppose he has in order to make that claim? Quite obviously, Nietszsche and Foucault are doing something markedly different from the way things have always been done. In order to assess their conceptual depravity, however, I suspect one must sound stranger depths than the simplistic binary opposition evoked here between Thought and the Unthought, between Being and Nothingness.

One can see McIntyre engaged in conversation with Nietzsche, but at some point he must cease to listen to Nietzsche because the latter does not place himself left the bosom of an rationality that extends from Socrates to Aquinas. How might we make sense of this difference? Take the question Foucault recovers from Nietzsche, Who is speaking? as offering a potential solution. Who is speaking always involves the complicity of a subject that thinks, formulates a response, and gives voice to that repsonse. Who is speaking? however, is the single question Foucault forgets to interrogate himself with. I, on the other hand, am quite sure Vollenhoven, McIntyre, Nietzsche, and Foucault are all thinking, formulating, speaking. In the words of Saint Augustine, “I know that I cannot know unless I am alive, and I know more certainly that by knowing I attain a richer life.” (Of True Religion xlix, 97) But divorced from the living human subject, Thought cannot be other than the Unthought, Being cannot help but be Nothingness.

2007-12-09T00:44:00.000-05:00

40. Time has become the great enigma; minds have grown deaf to the trace of its silent sound. Even for Heidegger, time was nothing more than an after-thought. The one thing that Being and Time could never comprehend was being-in-time: temporality is too eternal to be temporal, Dasein's reach far too infinite to be finite, far too universal to be particular. One does not "fall" into temporality; rather, one finds oneself always already there. If only Heidegger had realized it was Augustine who understood being-in-time--not Aristotle.

2007-12-07T16:07:00.000-05:00

The two readings assigned for today, the Dialogue with Trypho (I-IX) by Justin Martyr (100-65) and The Prescription Against Heretics (I-XII) by Tertullian (155-230) come from a troubled time in the history of the Early Church. In the face of mounting, though sporadic, persecution and diminutive accusations of being the irrational, demonstratably self-contradictory, doctrine of an “uncultured” rabble, Christians schooled in the methods and arguments of “pagan” literatures mounted a reasoned defense. These readings also belong to a rhetorical tradition in the history of Western philosophy characterized by a protreptic move that aims at showing “this” is actually “that”. Two analytically distinguished entities are synthesized in such a way that, though they appear to be mutually exclusive ~(x, ~x), they are in fact not so: (x, ~x). This move flies in the face of the logical principle of non-contradiction as it negates the negation sign, short-circuiting sound logical method--perhaps this is done in protest of its principled (dogmatic?) point of departure? No doubt Aristotle shudders in his grave at the very thought of someone entertaining such illogic. But as we have seen in a previous class, he himself utilizes this same protrepic strategy (in the Protrepticus): body and soul are analytically distinguished to show that the supposed “goods” of the body are not the “good” of the soul ~(x, ~x), but in actual fact the former are the latter (x, ~x) so long as the soul's absolute government over the body (the synthesis) is perfected.

As my assignment is to treat these two readings in detail by drawing on recent and contemporary literature, I must call on some aid from Thomas Kuhn. In his study The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), famous for establishing the term “paradigm” in common academic parlance, Kuhn contends that in a paradigm shift the assumptions about the nature of things change along with the methodological approach to the study of those same things. For reasons I have outlined in the footnote, I think a scientific paradigm is better understood as a “paradigm of truth;” namely that, to different paradigms belong differing criteria and methodological assumptions for getting at the truth about things which are informed by the things themselves.

1. Justin Martyr

A survey of the three works scholars agree were authored by Justin shows that he was familiar with at least five paradigms of truth, only one of which he was willing to own fully as his own. These were: 1) the fated existence of gods and men described by Homer in the Illiad, 2) the reasoned order of the Greek philosophers, a critique of the popular polytheism of the Greek rabble, 3) the fated rational polytheism of the Roman civitas, 4) the prophetic Jewish belief in a Creator God, and 5) the prophetic Christian belief in an Incarnate Redeemer God. By characterizing Justin's intellectual background like this, it is unavoidable that I treat the history informing these characterizations as a sort of modern barbarian-scholar, the type that goes to a library, not with spectacles and notebook in hand, but with a machete and torch. There are too many connections between --if Justin is to be believed, they all owe their inspiration to Moses--and exceptions to these paradigmatic summaries for which to account. For the sake of simplicity, however, I will swing my machete once more and apply my torch to the excess of historical detail by disregarding the first paradigm, joining the second and third under the term “philosophy,” the fourth and fifth under the term “prophecy,” and in the fifth paradigm (Justin's own) find the unity of the philosophic and the prophetic.

Justin's work continues to attract scholarly attention because of the relation he draws between the "logos” present in the human mind and the Logos-Christ. Most scholars take the slightest mention of “logos' as an indication of an effort to translate the content of biblical revelation out of a Jewish paradigm another. How this attempt at translation is understood varies. Older scholarship appears to have concluded that Justin's intentions conformed to orthodoxy, though his arguments were eclectic. (Barnard 1967) For one of these authors this meant that it was no longer necessary to take his self-identification as a philosopher at face value. (Shotwell 1965, 116) Another argues that Justin (like Calvin) adopted the term and drew the relation between the human mind and God's self-revelation in Christ as an apologetic tool to point to a universal human accountability before the Creator God. (Helleman 2002, 146) Another scholar argues that because the idea of innate universal knowledge is, in world-historical terms, unique to Greek philosophy, Justin (and Philo, the Apostle John, and all the Church Fathers) transforms a particularist Jewish perspective into a universal message on the intellectual coat-tails of the Greeks. (Thysen 2006, 133)The last example I have to offer is of a scholar who reacts against a body literature, saying, “The search for pagan elements in his concept of the Logos has all but blinded us to…[his] important contribution to the problem of Christian thought” (Edwards 1995, 262)--the problem of communication between different truth paradigms. It should be added that the second last example was quite hostile to this problem of Christian thought. The question of translation and how one understands the universality presupposed to make possible translation, then, is a contentious one, attracting attention for any number of reasons.

On my reading, Justin is a remarkably consistent thinker, despite whatever conceptual deficiency might be found in his work. His consistency finds its arche in the Apostle John's declaration, “And the Word [logos] became flesh [sarx] and lived [tabernacled] among us…” (Jn. 1:14) This allowed him to profess a philosophic atheism with Socrates at the same time as confessing faith in Christ. A reasoned criticism of the popular polytheism of the Greek rabble and the Old Testament, prophetic critique of idolatry share at least this much in common: the source of truth was singular, not plural. (2^nd Ap. X) The Dialogue with Trypho, however, is not a dialogue with either a Greek or Roman philosopher, but rather with a Jew. Justin dialogues with Trypho as someone who knows the truth of God's creation; but who does not yet know the truth of God's self-revelation. But, having escaped from the failed revolt of the messiah-figure Simon Bar Kochba (132-5 A.D.), Trypho cannot be expected to be receptive to claims about another messiah. That philosophy addresses questions of God's “unity and providence” (I) is bound to have been attractive to a Jew, who could believe “I AM WHO I AM” had rescued his ancestors from Egypt and would find comfort in the call of the Shema, when many of the Jews had been taken in by the spurious claims of an imposter.

A representative of the prophetic paradigm, Trypho comes to Justin looking for a philosophic dialogue concerning God's unity and providence. Justin's first discourse throws into doubt the ability of a philosophic paradigm to give him what he desires. (I-II) He affirms that philosophy is “the greatest possession, and most honourable before God, to whom it leads us”, but “[w]hat philosophy is…and why it has been sent down to men [has] escaped the observation of most.” (II) The philosophic paradigm(s) had become “many-headed,” failing to reflect the unity of the One who gave it to humanity. Under the tutelage of a “Platonist,” in a manner similar to other Fathers of the Church, Justin made much progress in matters immaterial, making “the greatest improvements daily.” (II) With the advantage of hindsight, however, he confesses “such was my stupidity, I expected forthwith to look upon God.” (II)

One scholar argues, with good reason I think, that the old man in the conversion narrative fits the model of Christ looking for his one lost sheep or of Christ instructing the two unknowing disciples on the road to Emmaus after his resurrection (Lk. 24:13-35) (Hofer 2003). Unlike the biblical record which has Christ demonstrating how he fulfilled prophecies, this “Christ” uses philosophic argumentation to demonstrate its own need for fulfillment. (III) How can the mind expect to look on the Deity, if the soul remains in this body? How does the mind remember the sight of God when the soul has returned to its bodily “grave”? If the souls of animals are weighed down by the nature of their bodies, how can the human body be any different when the nature of the soul is common to all? (IV) Being in a body, can you know what a soul truly is apart from the body?

Knowing no way to maintain the analytic distinction between soul and body, Justin concedes to the old man that the soul is not immortal or unbegotten and that all souls die. (V) The soul is not the source of life itself; but rather partakes of life--or, is willed by God to live. (VI) When the soul dies, “the spirit of life is removed…it goes back to the place from whence it came.” (VI)

The conclusion of the discussion is that life is not found in the soul itself; and if the soul does have life in itself, nor can it have truth in itself. (VII) The conversation reaches an impasse as it appears to Justin then there is no hope for life to be found among mere mortals. The old man tells him of prophecy given to “certain men more ancient than all those who are esteemed philosophers… who spoke by the Divine Spirit.” (VII) The old man exhorts Justin to pray, “for these things cannot be perceived or understood by all, but only by the man to whom God and His Christ have imparted wisdom.” (VII) Immediately after the old man leaves, Justin finds his soul kindled for love of the prophets and the friends of Christ, and says, “while revolving his words in my mind, I found this philosophy alone to be safe and profitable.” (VIII)

Trypho laughs at Justin, saying that he was better off with the philosophy of Plato than to repose confidence in a man. If I may attempt to read between the lines, Trypho's experience with Bar Kochba no doubt informs his suggestion: as he would have understood it, the Platonists were still interested in the God's unity and providence. But the messianic claims of Christ, the perceived division of a person's religious convictions, were bound to provoke no small amount of skepticism. Justin excuses him and proposes to engage him, not in philosophic dialogue, but in the interpretation of biblical prophecy to demonstrate that Christ is the messiah. (IX) This marks the completion of the protreptic move made in the introduction to the Dialogue with Trypho: philosophy is not prophecy, but insofar as both their end in Christ, they are the same.

A further question, I think, should be asked: how are they the same? The opposition of a unity of the prophetic paradigm over against the many-headedness of the philosophic paradigm misses something. Two hundred years ago, Hegel asserted a dialectical unity of the movement of the Spirit through history which overshadowed any claim to a unity found in prophetic revelation, whereas today any claim that historical revelation is true because there is a unified core of meaning is bound to reap accusations of being oppressively dogmatic. On my reading, however, the contrast drawn between the unity of prophecy and the disunity of philosophy is not assessed on philosophical (metaphysical) terms. Rather, Justin assesses unity and disunity on prophetic (historical) terms. The form of his argument is similar to one put forward by Giambattista Vico in his The New Science:

1) all the histories of barbarous peoples begin with Jupiters and Herculeses, i.e. many heads,
2) the Bible has no such beginnings,
3) therefore, biblical history is true.

The reason for the comparison will not yet be entirely clear; its anthropological premises remain hidden. Vico's argumentation is taken up by G.K. Chesterton in his The Everlasting Man: “In other words, every sane sort of history must begin with man as man, a thing standing absolute and alone…This creature was truly different from all other creatures; because he was a creator as well as a creature. Nothing in that sense could be made in any other image but the image of man.” The oldest text presently available that has the human person cut such a distinctive figure against the receding, past horizon of human history is found in Genesis 1:27--the creation of humankind in the image of God. On my reading, Justin asks, Why did philosophy become many-headed? His answer is simply this: they did not know they were created in the image of God, creatures who were also creators.

There is ample evidence in the text for this sort of reading. 1) Justin agrees with the old man that the Neo-platonic understanding of traces of a divine existence living on in the soul as memories after a fall into the material body is untenable (IV)--he does not agree with Porphyry, whom we read last week. What, then, for Justin is the human mind? Where does it come from if it does not fall from divinity? 2) The place Justin accords the mind in his anthropology is that of being able to perceive the source from where the life of the soul comes. The old man convinces him that when a person dies, “the spirit of life is removed from it, and there is no more soul, but it [spirit] goes back to the place from whence it was taken.” (VI) The use of “spirit” here is comparable to Qoheleth's use of “breath”: “the dust returns to the earth as it was, and the breath returns to God who gave it.” (Ecc. 12:7) Qoheleth draws from the second creation narrative: “then the LORD God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being.” (Gen. 2:7) In step with this, the old man says, “Now the soul partakes of life, since God wills it to live.” (VI) The mind [equivalent of spirit/breath], then, does not fall; rather Justin understands it to be the given image of God that distinguishes humanity from the rest of God's creatures--creatures who are also creators. 3) Justin states, “they [the philosophers] moreover attempt to persuade us that God takes care of the universe with its genera and species, but not of me and you, and each individually, since otherwise we would surely not need to pray to Him night and day.” The philosophers know there is a Creator (logos); but they know nothing of his intentions for the human person. To come to that knowledge, to know that humanity was created in the image of God, that it has the spirit of life given by God, redemptive revelation was required. 4) At the very beginning of the dialogue, Justin asks Trypho, “And in what…would you be profited by philosophy so much as by your own lawgiver and the prophets?” (I) Given the tone of the dialogue--questions about happiness and the source of the life of the soul--he may as well have asked, What “good” is philosophy to a Jew? If you recall my introduction, the question about how the “goods” of the body and the “good” of the soul relate was one that Aristotle could not answer without violating his own principle of non-contradiction. Trypho, a Jew, already knows where the life of the soul comes from--what does he have to gain from philosophers who does not know? However, Justin, the Christian, believes both philosophy and prophecy have same end in Christ: “Christ, who appeared for our sakes, became the whole rational being, both body, and reason [equivalent to breath, spirit, or mind], and soul” (2^nd Ap. X) It follows that philosophy is useless for Trypho, unless he believes in Christ. Finally, 5) the old man asks Justin, “what do those suffer who are judged to be unworthy of this spectacle?” i.e. the rabble who are incapable of the Platonic vision of God? Justin answers, “They are imprisoned in the bodies of certain wild beasts” before conceding that the Platonists are wrong. The unity of philosophy and prophecy in Christ, however, provides a rational whose access is not restricted to a philosophic elite, but is for all humanity, i.e. all who are created in the image of God. Hence Justin concludes, “I found this philosophy alone to be safe and profitable.” What can be more reasonable than to admit than that all human beings, even the rabble, are rational beings--soul, reason, body--beings who think for themselves? As the Dialogue concludes,

I can wish no better thing for you, sirs [Trypho and his Jewish friends], than this, that, recognizing in this way that intelligence is given to every man, you may be of the same opinion as ourselves, and believe that Jesus is the Christ of God. (CXLII)

2. Tertullian

With the advantage of hindsight, it is ironic to note that The Prescription Against Heretics was written by someone who is regarded by Christian orthodoxy, conceived of in very broad and generous terms, to have joined himself to a heretical movement. The irony only grows larger: after parting with the established Church to join the Montanist movement--and possibly after he broke with the Montanists to start his own Tertullianist movement--he would coin the hallmark formula of Christian orthodoxy, that God was “one substance and three persons.”

All the necessary ingredients for the protreptic move made by Tertullian are already found in chapter I: heresies are not faithful belief, but insofar as “their final cause, is, by affording a trial of faith, to give it also the opportunity of being 'approved,'” (I) the former is the latter because heresy finds its raison d'etre alone in faithful belief. “What indeed has Athens to do with Jerusalem? What concord is there between the Academy and the Church?” (VII) The usual answer put in Tertullian's mouth is a resounding nothing. These are posed as rhetorical questions, however, and left unanswered. A more careful reading of the text, I think, will yield a double-answer: insofar as Athens finds its end in Jerusalem, everything and nothing. To search for the Truth found in Jerusalem by way of Athens is not problematic in itself, but one risks loosing one's eternal inheritance if one tarries too long in the Academy. In Tertullian's usage, the Academy may as well stand for the Empty Grave: the rationality (logos) you seek is not here, He is risen. When what is being sought is found, Tertullian prescribes to his readers the remedy of seizing hold by believing in that which has been found. (IX) Tertullian will say, “No one is wise, no one is faithful, no one excels in dignity, but the Christian; and no one is a Christian but he who perseveres to the end.” (III)

The discussion surrounding Tertullian in the secondary sources hinges on the basic question I introduced with Justin: how does Tertullian relate the philosophic and prophetic truth paradigms? (E.g. Sider 1971, Ayers 1979) One scholar examines a unity of the universal mind of divinity and the particularity of the natural will in the doctrine of the Incarnation, as it formulated by Tertullian. This he argues serves as a theological foundation for his understanding of the soul as having a problematic unmediated knowledge of God. (House 1988, 36) Another scholar protests against misquotations of Tertullian for the purpose of anathematizing Christianity, pointing out that the statement “it is…to be believed, because it is absurd” cannot be accused of being a reductio ad absurdum since Tertullian makes no attempt to derive the category belief from any a set of given premises; rather, belief is his non-rational point of departure. (Siemens 2003, 564) Responding the charge of Tertullian's so-called “fideism,” another scholar argues that this is highly improbable given the vigor of his mode of argumentation: he made fun of the dialectical method, but made ample use of it himself--the difference with his appropriation of dialectic being that “[t]he final perfection of Christ solves each confrontation which Tertullian presents.” (Osborn 1997, 46) There is, then, what appears to be a shift in recent scholarship towards a reassessment of the supposed absolute divide Tertullian draws between philosophy and prophecy, though some parties remain unconvinced.

With Tertullian, I want to pose the same question I posed with Justin: how does he arrive at the conclusion that philosophy and prophecy are the same thing? At the end of my discussion of Justin, I posed the question, What can be more reasonable than to admit that all human beings, even the rabble, are rational beings--beings who think for themselves? There is at once a sort of sheer obviousness and a seeming conceptual relativism implied that prompts us to answer: So? So what? How does this help us understand the world? Tertullian, I want to argue, provides a Late Antique counter-position: Justin had found a safe and profitable philosophy--and he rests in it comfortably--but Tertullian explores the already-present implication that in itself this philosophy does not give life--rather, the One who gives this philosophy is also the One who gives life. This belief had to be fought for.

Tertullian does not address himself to philosophers, nor primarily to those he labels heretics, but to believers in the faith: the work is called, after all, The Prescription Against Heretics. “Unhappy Aristotle!” he says, “who invented for these men dialectics, the art of building up and pulling down; an art so evasive in its propositions, so far-fetched in its conjectures, so harsh, in its arguments, so productive of contentions--”. Recall from my introduction that Aristotle was unable to relate the goods of the body to the good of the soul without violating the principle of non-contradiction. On Tertullian's terms, Aristotle was unhappy; the analytic distinction he drew between soul and body did account for the good of the whole rational person--body, reason, soul. (A Treatise On the Soul) Aristotle, a rational person, did not think to include an account of the rational person in his natural philosophy. But Tertullian is not concerned with Aristotle; rather with heretics who use Aristotle's dialectical method to delve the mysteries of true belief. (VII) Heresy involves a conscious choice on the part of the rational person, the exercise of a free will. “For this reason it is that he [Paul] calls the heretic self-condemned, because he has himself chosen that for which he is condemned.” (VI) Thus on my reading, Tertullian's charge against those he labels heretics is that they distort the message of Christ's redemption of the whole rational person; and he points out that they condemn themselves in the process because they remain whole rational persons in need of Christ's redemption.

Tertullian's explication of the meaning of the text, “Seek, and ye shall find,” is made in a prophetic (historical) mode of argument; his presentation of the subject matter in terms of historical dispensations of God's revelation. Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob knew the promise of God's redemption of the entire rational person--but “the Gentiles know nothing either of Him or of any of His promises” (VIII). Now the situation has been reversed: the Jews still cling to the old covenant which has been fulfilled in Christ, who opens it up to the Gentiles. Tertullian finds himself the inheritor of a long history of God's redemptive activities. He lets it be granted that “Seek, and ye shall find” is addressed universally to humanity. What the Jews had for so long sought, as an example to all humanity, could now be found in God's self-revelation in Christ:

There is some one, and therefore definite, thing taught by Christ, which the Gentiles are by all means bound to believe, and for that purpose to “seek,” in order that they may be able, when they have “found it, to believe. However, there can be no indefinite seeking for that which has been taught as one only definite thing. You must “seek” until you “find,” and believe when you have found…(IX)

Tertullian defends this formula as being in accord with “the rule of reason.” (IX) When seeking the good of the whole rational person, if one finds what is sought, one must stop seeking and believe: there is nothing beyond. If that good is found, why seek to go beyond what is found? (XI) If God has revealed himself in Christ, why try to go beyond that revelation by applying to the unity of divinity and humanity in person of Christ the method of dialectic? Thus the category of a belief in a source of the good functions as a limiting concept for Tertullian. (X) And for him, there is only one source of the good: the Word (logos) become flesh (sarx). Hence these strong words: “If I thus desert my faith, I am found to be a denier thereof.” (XI)

The structure of a person's belief leads Tertullian into what appears to be a vicious cyclical argument: if a person seeks and finds belief in Christ, but then abandons that belief, he concludes they never actually sought it in the first place. (XI) Tertullian does provide, I think, a good reason for his determination to remain within this vicious circle rather than follow the indefinite seeking of those he labels heretics:

You, as a man, know any other man from the outside appearance. You think as you see. And you see as far only as you have eyes. But says (the Scripture), 'the eyes of the Lord are lofty.' 'Man looketh at the outward appearance, but God looketh at the heart. (III)

What is more “reasonable” than to maintain that you do not know with any rational certainty the most basic motivations of the human heart, how another person lives and moves and has their being, that they are as you are, creatures who are also creators?

2007-12-07T15:48:00.000-05:00

In a book whose canonical status has often been called into question, the author, identified as Qoheleth, the Teacher, the king in Jerusalem, writes, “This only have I found: God made man upright, but men have gone in search of many schemes. (Ecc. 7.29) Lacking the literary credentials of a biblical scholar, I can have no official comment on the canonical status of Ecclesiastes, and must content myself with tracing the general form of the given statement down through the ages. In Of True Religion, Augustine takes up Qoheleth's observation: “For thus he showed to carnal people, given over to bodily sense and unable with the mind to behold the truth, how lofty a place among creatures belonged to human nature” (xvi, 30). This statement is taken up again by Søren Kierkegaard in The Sickness Unto Death: “The possibility of this sickness is man's advantage over the beast, and it is an advantage which characterizes him quite otherwise than the upright posture, for it bespeaks the infinite erectness or loftiness of his being spirit” (A.B, 44-5). The consistent thread that can be drawn through these three texts is the given-ness of “mind,” “spirit,” or “self”--distinguishing humanity from animals--and the blessedness of the knowledge of its given-ness.

No claim will be made that Qoheleth and Augustine are existentialists, or that Qoheleth and Kierkegaard are Neo-platonists, or that Augustine and Kierkegaard are Hebrew sages. Each of these designations can only make sense within the hazy confines of the cultural context to which they each belong. By placing Augustine between Qoheleth and Kierkegaard, I want instead to relativize the context-laden content in Of True Religion to respond to a curious modern phenomenon: most every major figure will at some point in their career return to Augustine. This is no always done charitably: Hegel calls Augustine unhappy, Foucault finds him conflicted, Derrida makes fun of him. Even those who do engage charitably with him want to cut his project into pieces: Cassirer praises his understanding of time, Riceour, his account of memory, Dooyeweerd, the restless heart. If you go to the library, you will find books on the contemplative Augustine, the rationalist Augustine, the Platonist Augustine, the mystical Augustine, the secular Augustine (Markus), the idealist Augustine, the humanist Augustine--and the list goes on. Some of these authors will offer suggestions about where Augustine's conceptual precision failed him, and how his formulation of a particular problem can be improved upon. The result is that Augustine has become many persons to many people; and in the process, he has become as uncertain about himself as he claimed the Greek philosophers were about the nature of the gods. (i, 1)

Restricting myself to the text assigned for this week, I want to pose to Augustine the question, What is the indubitable foundation of your certainty? Answers are quickly forthcoming: there is a God, who is unchangeable; in his own times, it has been reduced to self-evident certainty that the Christian religion is true (iii, 3); via a constructed conversation with Plato, it is certain that the mind must be healed by God in order for the soul and mind to be joined together in a chaste unity (iii, 3; xxvi, 48). Each of these answers, however, is hardly qualified to be an indubitable foundation of knowing which demands the certainty that they each be an indubitable foundation. More likely, we will quickly point out to Augustine that he believes these things; and that as beliefs, they are self-referentially incoherent.

To treat each of these answers merely as a religious doctrines or tenet of belief, i.e. the particular what which is believed, and then proceed to demonstrate on their own term their self-referential incoherence, is to miss the fact that Augustine was quite aware of their being so. This was a charge commonly brought against Christians in Late Antiquity; and I think it safe to assume that Augustine was aware of the charge, but was not persuaded. Instead he appealed to the rationality of the Christian faith--as if faith was reasonable.

Now, the standard procedure of philosophical dialogue is to isolate the moment of self-referential incoherence in a person's argument, with the purpose of pressing the question, Are you certain of this moment of certainty? As I read Of True Religion, Augustine does not invest the rational certitude of his certainty in the belief in a Creator God. The certitude of his certainty is much more self-contained. He will say, “All that I have said about the light of the mind is made clear by that same light. By it I know that what I have said is true, and that I know that I know it” (xlix, 97). In other words, Augustine can be found to argue the seemingly most useless of arguments, namely that he is certain of his certainty, that he is self-certain, or that he is certain he is who he is certain of being, etc.

That one is self-certain is, of course, about the most useless argument one could make unless self-certainty is certainty about some thing. Augustine continues, “I know that I cannot know unless I am alive, and I know more certainly that by knowing I attain a richer life” (xlix, 97). He attaches his self-certainty to being alive, and being alive to a divine voice: “All rational life obeys the voice of unchangeable truth speaking silently within the soul.” (lv, 110) Compare this to Socrates, whose moment of self-certainty was to know that he knew nothing. He held that this knowledge was imparted to him by a God, and believed himself to be God's gift to Athens because of his knowledge of his own ignorance. Divine wisdom was rational, its source, singular. Augustine could approve of Socrates' motives when he called into question the nature of the gods because those motives conformed to an Old Testament critique of idolatry (ii, 2). But Socrates did not know that his self-certainty was indicative of being alive; at his trial in Plato's Apology, Socrates takes his moment of self-certainty as a comfort when facing immanent death. He says at the end dialogue, “Well, now it is time to be off, I to die and you to live, but which of us has the happier prospect is unknown to anyone but God.” (42a) Now, is this God's truth? or is this Socrates' truth? It is Socrates, after all, who knows that whether life or death be the happier prospect is something unknown to anyone but God. With this self-certain knowledge, he can face his death with a “stoical” composure.

Self-certainty always begs the question, Are you certain? It is not clear Augustine is certain about anything beyond being alive. For him, however, this simple move from the reasoned argument of the Greek philosophers to rational life of the Christian faith places humanity in relation both to other creatures and to the Creator God, imparting an understanding of a universal moral order inscribed in human being. As Kierkegaard will say, “having a self, being a self, is the greatest, the infinite, concession that has been made to man, but [it is] also eternity's claim on him.” (A.C, 50) Augustine articulates this conviction in the terms of a Neoplatonic metaphysic, placing the human person in relation to both changeable creatures and the Unchangeable Creator, calling the person to turn away from inordinate loves of lesser things to love the source of self-certainty--the “I AM WHO I AM”. “By looking at eternity with the mind's eye I remove from it all changeableness,” he says, “and in eternity I see no temporal duration, for periods of time are constituted by the movements, past or future, of things...Eternity is ever the same.” (xlix, 97) This is not so different from Qoheleth, who enjoins his readers to, “Remember your creator in the days of your youth” (Ecc. 12.1), for “[God] has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end.” (3. 11)

2007-11-27T16:23:00.000-05:00

For the purposes of this presentation, before I discuss the Marx’ “The German Ideology,” I want to set out a frame how I understand his advance upon Hegelian paradigm. Not being familiar with either the Young Hegelians or Feuerbach, and given that Hegel has already been dealt with in this course, I will compare and contrast Marx’s position directly with that of Hegel.

Marx asks, Where to go now that Hegel’s critique of religion is complete? In the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel will claim that self-consciousness--in which “I” = “I”, one’s pure essence is one’s pure existence, where the subject has its own self as its object, or where one has the self-certainty of seeing oneself, as it were, “face to face,” etc.--“cannot and does not want any more to go beyond this object, for in it, it is in communion with itself.” (Phen. C.AA.b[420]) The implication would seem to be that Hegel is convinced there is nowhere to go from his phenomenology of the Absolute Spirit. To his credit, I think, Marx notices a very human flaw in Hegel’s system: the ambiguous status of the individual person vis a vis the Absolute Spirit. The individual person does not comprehend the Spirit, but vice versa. The individual is not Spirit, but is nothing apart from Spirit; for, to truly comprehend the being of their individuality, the individual must plug him or herself into (actualize), or submit to, the existence (self-actualization) of Spirit. Marx will not subscribe to this claim.

Take the three moment cycle of Hegel’s system: 1) the abstractly negative, individual “I” posits itself as an immediate determinate existence (Marx’ material determinacy), 2) the abstractly negative “I” encounters other individual “I’s” as immediate external, determinate existences, and 3) the actualization of the content of the “I’s” initial positing of itself in an immediate external, determinate existence such that the “I” finds its self both in itself and in other “I’s”--and so the cycle is completed with “I” = “I”. In simpler terms, at the completion of the three-moment cycle, I find myself in myself and in you in such a way that I come to see that our mutual individual existences are essentially the same. The first two abstractly negative moments, prior to being actualized in the third, however, exist in a unity of contradiction in need of being superseded. The advance upon Hegel made by Marx is to take the “I” = “I” out of the transcendental realm of the self-conscious Spirit and place in the individual person. “Hence,” he writes,

it is not a question of the Hegelian ‘negative unity’ of two sides of a contradiction, but of the materially determined destruction of the preceding materially determined mode of life of individuals, with the disappearance of which this contradiction together with its unity also disappears. (200)

As this informs Marx’ understanding of the historical process, no longer is it a question of how the Spirit comes to consciousness of itself, and individuals attaining self-consciousness in Spirit with themselves and with each other, as it was for Hegel; but rather it is a question of how individuals come to consciousness of themselves as individuals, with themselves and with each other. Marx would hold that Hegel’s Absolute Spirit is simply another obstacle on the way to becoming truly human.

1. Marx’ Scientific Historiography

As the present article is lengthy, my purpose will be to whittle it down to a few basic theoretical moves made by the author. Very generally, it can be read as an exercise in turning tables on the Young Hegelians, whose critique of consciousness had been to show, “They, the creators, have bowed down before their creations.” (176) Marx takes “creatorship” out of the realm of the Spirit and places it in the material reality determining the existence of individuals by transferring the “I” = “I” to the latter. He says, “The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men, the language of real life.” (180) The consequence of this move is to leave the Young Hegelians bowing down before a creation of their own. On this score, he repeatedly makes some rather pointed, comparative remarks:

Empty talk about consciousness ceases, and real knowledge has to take its place. When reality is depicted, philosophy as an independent branch of knowledge loses its medium of existence…Viewed apart from real history, these abstractions have in themselves no value whatsoever. (181)

the Germans move in the realm of the ‘pure spirit’, and make religious illusion the driving force of history. The Hegelian philosophy of history is the last consequence, reduced to its ‘finest expression’, of all this German historiography… (190)

The first of four premises Marx lays down for the study of history, that humanity makes its own history, reflects an older humanist sensibility shared by significant figures like Lorenzo Valla (1407-57) down to Giambattista Vico (1688-1744). But insofar as these took their inspiration from Saint Augustine, their conception of the human person lacked the revolutionary self-certainty of the “I” = “I”; they remained caught in Hegel’s Unhappy Consciousness, whose transformative potential was stunted by virtue of being divided against itself. The theoretical move Marx makes is to place humanity back into an unhappy consciousness; though the self-certainty he accords the individual results in, not necessarily being unhappy, due to being inexplicably divided against itself, but more likely in being angry, due to being self-certain of the cause of the division.

The second premise is found in the need of the individual to satisfy him or herself materially. The creative individual has needs and must posit him or herself in an immediate external, determinate existence in order to fulfill them. The fulfillment of this ontologically primordial need (cause) starts a cascade effect--the first need creates other needs which in turn need their own satisfaction. This is, in effect, what gets human history going--which leads to the third premise he lays down: “men, who daily remake their own life, begin to make other men, to propagate their kind.” (182) The three premises are for Marx the three aspects, or moments, of social activity, that correspond the Hegel’s three-moment cycle with the significant difference that they always already function as a continual movement. Thus it is not a matter of coming to self-consciousness, but of always already being self-conscious, of always having been at bottom conscious of their being social creators/creatures. As he will say, “By social we understand the co-operation of several individuals, no matter under what conditions, in what manner, and to what end. (182) The laying bare of the ontologically basic, social existence (activity) of the individual, the summation of the first three premises, is his fourth premise--the moment of the totality of social activity.

Marx uses this framework to interpret and develop a social alternative the contemporary situation of 19th century Germany: “In the present epoch, the domination of material conditions over individuals, and the suppression of individuality by chance, has assumed its sharpest and most universal form, thereby setting existing individuals a very definite task.” (207) The assignment of a very definite task, especially characteristic the mode of production assumed in the bourgeois/capitalist epoch, is a form of “objectification”; the creative expression of a greater proportion of the society is reduced to its capacity to produce a product (the object). The historical possibility of this oppressive reduction of individuals to the status of mere objects--as means to some end--is predicated on an originary division of labour, the “division of material and mental labour”. (184) Any structure of thought predicated on the existence of a realm of “pure” thought (the supposed realm of Spirit, or “I” = “I”) results in positing a distinction between individuals. That small number of individuals who claim access to pure thought are able to objectify the product of the productive activity of other individuals. What necessarily follows (in terms of the premises Marx lays out) is the development of private property: “Division of labour and private property are, moreover, identical expressions: in the one the same thing is affirmed with reference to activity as is affirmed in the other with reference to the product of the activity.” (185) Both the division and the privatization of property are symptoms are the deeper ontological division between the individual’s activity prompted by a need and the material determinacy in which the need finds satisfaction; individual existence is divided from individual essence (“I” = “I”), individuals are divided against themselves, against other individuals, and individual families likewise divided against each other. These necessary consequences produce a conflict between separate classes of individuals, i.e. between a ruling class that illegitimately finds the satisfaction of its needs in the productive abilities of a subservient class--“the class which has the means of material production at its disposal…at the same time [has control] over the means of mental production”. (192)

Marx traces the historical consequences of an initial solidification of a division of labour between citizens and slaves, of a class conflict, and the attendant nascent development of private property in the political organization of the state in Antiquity down to the present day. The motive force of the historical trajectory of this conflict between classes he draws assumes a strong distinction between two ontological realms of individual activity, mind and matter, or mental and material labour. These two realms find their positive unity in the individual. But when the distinction is forced apart, and the unity of mind and matter in the individual is broken, many individuals suffer under a yoke of slavery. “This fixation of social activity, this consolidation of what we ourselves produce into an objective power above us, growing out of our control, thwarting our expectations, bringing to naught our calculations, is one of the chief factors in historical development up till now.” (185) “Thus things have now come to such a pass that the individuals must appropriate the existing totality of productive forces, not only to achieve self-activity, but also merely to safeguard their very existence. (194) Because Marx places the “I” = “I” in the individual, he can point to a primordial well of social activity to account for the reason why the study of history reveals that the mastery of one class over another is never complete. All individuals at bottom belong to a totality of socially productive forces; hence, any form of political mastery (either religious or secular) is depends for its existence on this social activity. When the subservient class has, as it were, had enough of the oppressive “objectification” of the labour by a class claiming assess to pure thought, it is able to call on a much deeper well of creative activity in order to set things aright.

2. Marx’ Historical Apocalypse

The use of the word “apocalypse” in the above subsection heading is not meant to be understood as a derogatory slight on my part. Some might accuse Marx of propagating the myth of a communist society; nor would I necessarily be in complete disagreement with those who do on this point. The reason for my reticence at condemning Marx outright, however, is that I am not sure humanity can do without “myth”--or, if you will, “hope.” Rather, the reason I have chosen to use the word “apocalypse” is to underscore a tension in Marx’ presentation of the history of class struggle: on the hand, he makes mounting claims to empirical veracity and historical objectivity; and on the other, he posits what, in more religious language, is best understood as “an old order of things” passing away and “a new order of things” breaking through into reality. In the present article, the latter seamlessly flows from the former as the absolutely necessary conclusion to the historical process. We would do Marx himself an injustice, I think, if we doubted his conviction on this point. The reservation I have with this use of historical materials--this coming from my hard-nosed, “dispassionate” training in the criticism of historical sources--is that I see no necessary reason that we should ever expect class struggle to come to an end. That is, no necessary reason is afforded by the study of history itself. It is entirely possible to see the specter of communism rising out of the pages of history; but in order to see it, one must go to history with a presupposed expectation of finding it lurking between those many lines. Human history yields such a bewildering pluraformity of cultural configurations that it tends to breed an attitude of thoroughgoing relativism among its practitioners with respect to the very idea that humanity might come to possess a self-actualizing, self-certain Truth, scientific, or otherwise. The idea that the historical process could have a necessary conclusion, were it put forward in the contemporary historical academy, would raise a few eyebrows.[1] But it needs to be added quickly that Marx does not belong to the contemporary academy; nor, as I stated previously, I do not think humanity can do for very long without hope. Simply because he articulates his hope for the future in terms of a 19th century scientism does not necessarily mean he has missed the boat entirely. The survival of Marxism down to the present day is more likely a testament to a basic fact that Marx did indeed touch on a very sensitive spot in the human conscience.

The question that should be dealt with asks why Marx thinks communism is a necessary conclusion to the historical process. In order to answer this question, one must look for indicative moments of a rational telos that runs the entire length of human history. The pre-historical beginnings of the telos find the individual completely submerged in an “immediate sensuous environment” with a “limited connection with other persons and things,” (183) but nevertheless at one with themselves (“I” = “I”). The first indication of an oppressive division of labour appears on the past historical horizon innocuously enough as the gendered “division of labour in the sexual act.” (184) The division of labour solidifies when the Antique distinction between citizen and slave, i.e. between mental and material labourers, is drawn; here the institution of private property is also brought into concrete existence. (184) The cyclic process of old fetters (old modes of production, or class relations) being replaced by new ones gains momentum as it runs its historical course. (197) The cleavage between the ruling class (mental labourers) and servile class (material labourers) increases as the historical process moves towards its conclusion, creating an almost unbearable dialectical tension. Marx understands the 19th century bourgeoisie establishment in a newly industrialized Europe to be the world-historical breaking point at which the old order based on the division of labour will be overthrown and the state apparatus will wither away. The institution of private property must be done away with in order for this to occur. This means dethroning those “private individuals” who have illegitimately claimed access to an illusory realm of pure thought and, by so doing, objectivized the productive activities of the masses. Thus historical materialism for Marx is as much a return to an origin (“I” = “I” as the individual) as philosophy, for Hegel, was a circle (“I” = “I” as Absolute Spirit).[2]

But even this is not quite true. A second dialectical development can be seen to run the length of the historical process: the communist society is not a return to an original pristine commune with nature. What was originarily “merely consciousness of an immediate sensuous environment” (183) will be transformed into a social order that allows “the development of individuals into complete individuals and the casting-off of all natural limitations.” (195) This historical progression from a fettered natural existence to an unfettered social existence is most likely a result of Marx’ conceptual debt to Hegel such that nature is “subsumed” in the individual’s social realization of him or herself. (But what happens to the necessary material conditions of the individual’s existence when nature’s fetters are thrown off? Economic activity would seem to require natural materials in order to be carried out. But it appears Marx does not treat “material” and “natural” as wholly equivalent terms.) The new world order he envisions as neither purely egoistic, nor purely altruistic, but rather a pure mixture of both. (199-200) The communist person is at one and the same time a private and public individual, their communality and individuality, social universality and individual particularity, are reconciled to one another, in a totality of social activity: “this development is determined precisely by the connections of individuals, a connection which consists partly in economic prerequisites and partly in the necessary solidarity of the free development of all, and, finally, in the universal character of the activity of individuals on the basis of the existing productive forces.” (207) About this new world order, Marx offers a single observation: “The individuals’ consciousness of their mutual relations will, of course, likewise become something quite different…” (208) If I may offer my own speculative musing as a conclusion, one has to wonder whether humanity will make this new social existence, or whether, in virtue of the necessary historical telos that ends in communism, those details might not have to work themselves out at a time of their own choosing.[3]

[1] This is one reason (possibly the reason) why Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man (1992) did not attract nearly as much attention in the historical academy as did Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996). Fukuyama rehashes Hegel’s thesis via Alexandre Kojève’s notion of “the end of history” in defense of liberal democracy as a criticism of Marx’ communist conclusion of the historical process, which he does this in reaction to of the fall of the Soviet regime (1991); whereas Huntington shifts the focus away from Western political ideologies--liberal democracy and communism--towards the resurgence of traditional forms of religious worship around the world.

[2] I cannot resist quoting G.K. Chesterton’s (The Everlasting Man) summary criticism of Marx’ position:

The materialist conception of history, that all politics and ethics are the expression of economics, is a very simply fallacy indeed. It consists simply of confusing the necessary conditions of life with the normal preoccupations of life, which are quite different things. It is like saying that because man can only walk about on two legs, therefore he never walks about except to buy shoes and stockings.

[3] The American sociologist Peter Berger uses the phrase “cargo cult” to describe the different quasi-religious, secular options offered to the modern Western person. Per his definition, the “cargo cult” entails a promise of some sort of material “cargo” that is always en route, but is never delivered. To be more conceptually precise: to this point in time, the cargo has not yet been delivered. The demand for conceptual precision, however, only serves to demonstrate the “cargo cult’s” cultish appeal: one can use it to hold out hope that the cargo will one day arrive.

2007-11-25T20:29:00.000-05:00

39. Human history is a totality of human activity; it is a totality context that comprehends any distinction one might make within that totality. There is no dialectical reconcilation of opposites capable of closing its "ciricle". Time moves forward, and as it does, human history swallows thinkers like Hegel and Marx whole. The historicists are themselves historized. To paraphrase Vico, humanity makes it own history: it is also made by it.

2007-11-24T01:34:00.000-05:00

The reading of Epictetus (Enchiridion) and Porphyry (Letter to Marcella) I will conduct places these two authors in conversation with Aristotle’s Protrepticus. The theoretical point of departure which establishes a common ground for the conversation, drawing on the Heideggerian adaptation of the Augustinian insight that everyone knows what the human person is, is taken from Aristotle’s parenthetical statement “reason is ‘the divine dwelling within us.’” (104) Both Epictetus (XXXII) and Porphyry (11) make the same claim; hence, the conversation is theoretically defensible so long as this is kept in view. What we have seen thus far in the course is that the various representatives of the rhetorical tradition have as their end to persuade their readers towards doing (will) something with some end firmly in mind, i.e. to conceive of themselves as being (mind) towards some end. Rhetoric is, after all, the art of persuasion; one must do it, in some sense, in order to be, in the same sense, in the way as is proposed by the author--at this is the author’s purpose. What that end is does not concern me here. Nietzsche would have it that we find no being behind the doing, i.e. (Genealogy, I.13) to dialectically reconcile to doing with being, as Hegel did in his Phenomenology of Spirit (C.AA.a [406]); but this is the end he has in sight, not the way towards that end. My purpose will be to examine the developing sensitivity of the existence (will) of a human subject (mind) that is absent in Aristotle account of the person as a whole except as the unarticulated trace of his own subjectivity, i.e. the terms and relations between terms which stamp his philosophy as his own.

In the Protrepticus, “men as wholes,” the unities of soul and body, are presented in the form of a natural, or negative, unity. The positive completion of the unity, its actualization, awaits the perfect imitation of what naturally is. As art imitates nature, so the rhetorician aims at imitating the natural unity of soul and body. The rhetorician would have his hearers or readers passively submit to what naturally is. It would be anachronistic to say that Aristotle conceives of himself as moving unmoved essentially in an element of universality; rather, the Unmoved moves him. Nature, then, in some sense, is understood to exercise will, or is the medium through which will is exercised, over the person, and the person is moved to submit to its proscription for a rightly ordered soul and right government over the body. Any movement on the part of the person that contravenes what naturally is, is deviant, disruptive--or what naturally is-not, non-existent, evil.

When we come to Porphyry--or to Neoplatonism more generally--the person ceases to be a negative unity and takes on certain positive characteristics of its own. To soul and body, a third component is added: mind. Porphyry does not passively testify to what naturally is; rather, he engages himself as a subject (mind). There is recognition of a need to assume responsibility for one’s own existence, a need to exercise one’s will, on the part of the person in order to bring the whole of the person into conformity with a right order that remains in the present life just beyond reach. Porphyry understands this recognition of responsibility on the part of the person in terms of a past “recollection of our fall” and a present “journey home from this terrestrial exile…most dangerous for souls which have sunk to this earthly life.” (10) To accord the person a mind makes possible for him to say, “I am in reality not this person who can be touched or perceived by any of the senses…but [can] be grasped by the mind alone.” (8) And further, he says, “We must regard the rational soul as the body of the mind, which the mind nourishes by bringing into recognition, through the light that is in it…the truth of divine law.” (26) Positively, then, we can say that Porphyry endows the person with mind in order to accentuate the personal need to take responsibility for one’s self in a manner that has no explicit parallel in Aristotle’s natural philosophy.

When we come to Epictetus--or to Stoicism more generally--discussion of the soul in relation to the body appears to have disappeared entirely. Mind is equated directly with intellectual activity, or will; body with inert material things. With the other Stoics, he held that the person is a unity of two basic ontological principles, mind and matter, a unity that is, in some sense, unique to each person. In comparison to Aristotle, what it means for the human subject (mind) to possess an individual existence (will) its own comes into full view. Aristotle writes,

All that comes into being according to nature, however, also comes into being for a purpose, and furthermore, comes into being for a superior purpose to that which comes into being through art. For nature does not imitate art, but art, rather, imitates nature Art exists to assist nature and to complete what nature leaves undone. (12)

Epictetus writes,

There are things which are within our power, and there are things which are beyond our power. Within our power are opinion, aim, desire, aversion, and, in one word, whatever affairs are our own. Beyond our power are body, property, reputation, office, and , in one word, whatever are not properly our own affairs.

Now the things within our power are by nature free, unrestricted, unhindered; but those beyond our power are weak, dependent, restricted, alien. (I)

Aristotle’s distinction between “art” and “nature” has an echo in Epictetus’ distinction between “things within our power” and “things beyond our power.” However, the distinction between art and nature is merely categorical--one might say, insofar as art imitates nature, merely natural, a negative unity of potency awaiting actualization. Aristotle does not question whether the artist could achieve the ends is his or her art; for art assists nature in order to achieve those ends determined by nature for art to achieve and the status of the artist is treated as secondary to their art. By contrast, Epictetus addresses the problem of “things beyond our power” to achieve. To do this, he must place a part of himself, his mind, over against his material body and posit a fundamental anthropological and cosmological distinction wholly unlike the distinction Aristotle draws between body and soul. As a consequence, however, the status of the artist and their art are both of primary concern; or, the artist is their art insofar as mind is immanent in matter.

Aristotle’s allusion to the divine dwelling in us, then, would appear to refer to the existence (will) of a divine subject (mind). All three compared here refer to a rule, law that compels, or voice that speaks into, the person which it inhabits. (Nietzsche hated the very idea.) With Porphyry and Epictetus, the human subject (mind) takes on either some or all of those divine qualities in a way that is unconceivable within the confines of Aristotle’s natural philosophy.

2007-11-15T17:04:00.000-05:00

On my shelf at home I have a source book containing readings from the tradition of modern Western philosophy entitled The Great Conversation. A very crass assessment of the material following the selections from Hegel works might go like this: after Hegel one finds modern philosophers talking about talk, or more precisely, thinking about thought. As the conversation continues, they talk less with each other than they talk about how to talk with each other and they think less about each other than they think about how the others should think about themselves. There are notable exceptions, of course. Nor do I mean to demean the aims of modern philosophy. I do, however, want to note that the aims of early modern philosophy differ with modern philosophy. After Hegel, the topic of the Great Conversation seems to tend more towards talk per se, or thinking per se, than towards conversations philosophers have with each other about this, that, or the other. Over the next few centuries, down to the present day, some participants in the conversation will draw the radical conclusion that talking about talk, or thinking about thought--being a tautological exercise--is precisely talk or thought about nothingness, Death, or illusion. Something to lament, perhaps.

The reading of Aristotle’s Protrepticus I will perform will place Hegel, as he shows himself in The Phenomenology of Spirit, in conversation with Aristotle in order to recover an understanding of philosophic conversation that may or may not have been lost in the last few centuries. (Having had a sensitivity to my own epistemic limitations instilled in me by contemporary post-structuralism, I absolutely refuse to pass any absolute judgments on the matter.) My specific interest is finding in Aristotle what Hegel describes as two moments of a single transcendental-logical, self-consciousness, or two consciousnesses: soul and body, governor and governed, master and slave. The relation between the two consciousnesses in the single self-consciousness is one of government: the soul over the body, the master over the slave. Hegel claims that this relation is a relation between two abstractly negative moments since neither consciousness has realized itself as self-consciousness. The former can only find its existence in the latter through the exercise of government: the soul in the body, the master in the slave. Thus the relation lacks unity necessary for consciousness to become self-conscious, a moment when it achieves a unified existence both in and for, or with, itself as an infinite personality.

We find the initial part of Hegel’s reading of Aristotle’s position borne out where The Philosopher writes, “part of us is soul, party body; one rules while the other is ruled; one makes use of the other, while the other functions as an instrument.” (Prot., 55) The slightly more difficult part of Hegel’s reading of Aristotle will to be locate something comparable to his characterization of soul and body as two abstractly negative moments. Aristotle describes reason as being “the divine dwelling in us”. (Prot., 106) In fact, reason is that which compels us to acknowledge,

Men as wholes possess nothing of worth and have no reason to consider themselves perchance divine or blessed, except in so far as they possess reason and philosophic wisdom (phronesis). This alone of all our endowments seems to be deathless; this alone seems to be divine. (Prot., 104)

Aristotle will identify the deathless divine dwelling in us with a state of happiness. (Prot., 102) If we turn and compare this with Hegel, he identifies Life and happiness with self-consciousness, the positive unity of the two abstractly negative moments, soul and body. So it would appear that Aristotle and Hegel are looking at the same thing from two different vantages: a rational truth associated with some notion of divinity. The difference between the two vantages would also appear to be bound up in Hegel’s notion of self-consciousness, the transcendental-logical subject, as being capable of superseding the two previous abstractly negative moments, soul and body. Aristotle can only train his mind via the mastery of the soul over the body over to think towards divine wisdom; but Hegel sees divine wisdom, as it were, face to face; or, he thinks it thinking itself.

What is lost in Hegel’s reading of Aristotle? I want to make an initial observation that for Hegel in the 19th century the 4th century BC philosophy possessed what might be called a negative existence. This is meant in the same sense that both Hegel and Aristotle possess a negative existence in relation to my own existence insofar as their existence is confined to texts which must be interpreted, or whose meaning must be positivized. The reader must always make the text in front of themselves, in some sense, speak; the knowing subject must find itself in the known object of its inquiry in order for the object to gain meaning for the subject. Heidegger calls this the hermeneutical circle: “every seeking is guided by what is sought.” Thus we can say that Hegel finds himself in Aristotle’s texts: he finds himself precisely in the place Aristotle can only train his mind to think towards. To put it bluntly, Hegel’s transcendental-logical subjectivity, or self-consciousness, is that which Aristotle calls “the divine dwelling within us.” To put it even more bluntly, Hegel is Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover; that is, he presumes that his philosophy is a dispassionate scientific enterprise that “moves [unmoved] essentially in an element of universality” (Phen., 1) and hence he can presume that he is unmoved. As he says, “since what consciousness examines is its own self, all that is left for us to do is simply to look on.” (Phen., 54)

What is lost? When Aristotle considers himself and others, persons as wholes, the unities of bodies and souls, he finds himself moved to contemplate an unmoved divinity. Divine existence is such that the human subject is rationally compelled to find itself wholly deficient in the presence of, but apart from, it. To truly contemplate divinity, the government or mastery of the soul over the body must be made perfect. The crucial point of comparison between these two intellectual giants, I think, is found between “persons as wholes, the unity of soul and body” and “two abstractly negative moments, soul and body.” What is lost in Hegel’s reading of Aristotle is an understanding of the human person as a whole. To regard the human person as a whole for Aristotle, we must acknowledge a deficiency intrinsic to its (our) unity. Not knowing such a deficiency, Hegel finds himself in Aristotle’s texts in a way that he must at a certain point stop reading.

2007-11-09T21:17:00.000-05:00

The reflection on the Gorgias I have written for this week has vaguely Derridian or Foucauldian impulses. Both Derrida and Foucault, I think, offer some helpful methodological approaches to interpreting texts. Both offer critiques of a transcendental-logical subject who stands, in some sense, outside of texts. Both are more interested in the relations between the trace of the signified and its signifier or the authorial function in texts that legitimates or de-legitimates some relation between two correlata. In both cases, they are interested in unmasking the presumed presence of an infinite subject who wills some Power or Truth. Implicit behind this theoretical concern is an ethical critique of the willing of a supposedly unbounded Power or infinite Truth over persons. This is quite biblical, I think, in the limited sense that it is a confession that we are not divine, nor is our knowing such that we know how to will some unbounded Power or infinite Truth. This approach also satisfies the predilections of my historical training: I am quite certain that if the subject “Plato” can be said to exist in some sense, he does so in texts and other trace evidences, and in them alone. To follow the standard philosophic strategy of isolating the moment of self-referential incoherence, the tautological “a = a,” or “‘I’ = ‘I,’” and to oppose it to the multitude of particular aims a philosopher might have in order to isolate one of them from the whole for closer analysis is a transcendental-logical move. The universality of philosophy is opposed to the particularity of the sciences; or infinitude of theory to the finitude of practice; or thought to will; or however you want to parse out this distinction. To paraphrase Heidegger in one of his more Augustinian moments, however, “everyone knows what man is”; human being is both these things together, or, humanity, the what is understood, is how it understands itself. In colloquial terms, we are self-interpreting creatures. So it is how Plato understands himself, and human existence in terms of himself, the orator and his oratory, that interests me.

I want to note as I begin that Socrates hears voices; or rather, he hears a Voice. At his trial he will say this Voice impels him to confess that he knows he knows nothing--and for that reason he never sought political office. He had submitted his life to this Truth like one submits oneself to the voice of will of God in order to search for that truth. By comparison, in The Order of Things, Foucault “does away with this site, [this] mute ground upon which it is possible for entities to be juxtaposed.” In Of Grammatology, Derrida develops the method of deconstruction as a critique of logocentrism and phonocentrism, noting, “Within this logos, the original and essential link to the phonè has never been broken.” The conclusion, I think, that can be drawn is that Derrida and Foucault either do not hear, or refuse to listen to, the Voice of a transcendental-logical subject welling up from deep within the Western philosophic psyche. They have chosen to take the only way out Socrates left for them: “The only remedy is to stop my love, philosophy, from talking like this.” (482) Why did they choose this course?

To answer this question, I want to examine the relation between two correlata--body and soul--and briefly chart how it guides Socrates to his conclusions. The soul governs the body in the sense that the soul legislates and the body is trained. (464) The soul is a window on truth that must be cared for; the body is a source of untruth. Socrates points out the inconsistency in Gorgias’ claim that the orator need not have an expert knowledge of the thing they expound upon but must be careful not to put their art to ill use. This is begging the question: how is an orator to put their art to right use without a knowledge of the thing they talk about? Socrates points out the inconsistency in Polus’ claim that the power over people oratory is of benefit--is a good--to an orator if they possessed no wisdom--no knowledge of the good. With a knowledge of the good, however, it becomes apparent that suffering wrong at the hands of another is better than doing wrong. Therefore, Socrates concludes, there is little use for oratorical exercise of power over other persons, unless, of course, one would use it to condemn one’s own misdeeds. Socrates points out the inconsistency in Callicles claim that the “stronger” are naturally the “better” if they have no mastery over themselves. At this point, the initial distinction Socrates drew between the body and soul takes on cosmological and soteriological dimensions as well as an ethical political dimension. The soul is caught between life and death--the body is its grave. He writes,

It seems to me the goal that one should have in view throughout one’s life; we can win happiness only by bending all our own efforts and those of the state to the realization of uprightness and self-discipline, not by allowing our appetites to go unchecked, and, in an attempt to satisfy their endless importunity, leading the life of a brigand. (507)

But the temperate submission to a universal rational order, to the Voice, in public office is very rare. Plato draws out the implications of his relation between soul and body for the political realm to conclude that Pericles--of all people!--was a bad statesman because his government over the political body failed miserably. The conclusion he makes--the full implications he draws out only for himself; his temperate intemperance--is that it is better for a person not to enter into the political community at all if they have in mind to leave their own soul unsullied by the temptations of the body.

It is ironic that Socrates, who prizes the brevity of speech in his interlocutors, is himself quite verbose. Of course, he needs to be; he has to lay out Plato’s theoretical framework within which to test the questions and responses he receives. The underlying message seems to be that, having submitted himself to an unchanging Truth, Socrates knows the path to righteousness. His interlocutors are either slaves to sensuality and/or lost in ignorance insofar as they fail to reason along the way of a dialectical assent to Truth. Individually, Gorgias, Polus, and Callicles are compelled, mastered, by Socrates’ rational method. Also pay attention to violence done at the periphery of the argument: notice the barely contained condescending attitude towards the popular assembly, the implied necessity of the use coercive force needed to enforce righteousness on the people, the disdain for any form of political engagement in the name of a possible social order that is presumably has yet to arrive.

To draw Foucault and Derrida back into the discussion: Is not what is supposedly other to humanity, the Truth of this Voice, Socrates himself? Is not Socrates’ appeal to a Voice merely a mask assumed by a man who has refused to face the most originary of truths: that the Voice which cannot speak to mere mortals, but must be mediated by singular intellects like that of Socrates, did not, does not, and will not, in fact, speak at all. And by speaking what cannot be spoken, by showing the way, has Socrates not made himself a master of, a god among, men?

2007-11-09T19:02:00.001-05:00

38. I honestly do not understand why people are accusing Alvin Plantinga of holding a belief in God as if it were a sort of absolute in response to his critique of Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion. His argument is much more subtle. If there are any absolutes for Plantinga, it is that a person should be willing to rationally defend their beliefs. How a person articulates what they believe is notoriously unabsolute. Hence we, by which I mean absolutely everyone, keep on rearticulating what we believe. Those people who are convinced that God is a delusion merely because belief in God implies a belief in some absolute standard of...whatever, miss the point that Plantinga's emphasis is not on the content of belief, but on its articulation. I only wish Plantinga would make a little more effort to define what it is exactly he is interested in.

2007-11-05T20:37:00.000-05:00

Before I begin the discussion of sections 230-271 in Elements of the Philosophy of Right, I want to parse out the three moments that form the rational cycle of Hegel’s system, i.e. why philosophy is a circle and what makes it move, in terms of existence (will), which will give form to the content of my discussion.

The basic framework for the three moment cycle is the concept of Right and its actualization as the Idea of Right.

Moment 1: The infinite indeterminate existence (Existenz) of the individual “I” posits (wills) itself in an immediate external or determinate existence (Dasein), in the finitude of the content of the concept of Right.

Moment 2: The posting the determinate existence (Dasein) of the content is the passing from an undifferentiated state of existence into one of differentiation. Hence the rational person encounters other persons or things as other determinate existences (Daseins).

Moment 3: The actualization (willing) of the concept of Right as the Idea in a determinate existence (Dasein) such that it is brought into conformity with the indeterminate existence (Existenz) of the individual “I,” and in so doing with other “I’s”.

The movement through these three moments can be characterized as a movement through 1) the individual expression of will, 2) the finite particularity of individual wills, to 3) the actualization of an infinite unity of individual wills in the ethical substance in which all conflicting particular arbitrariness (wills) has been eliminated.

The Police and the Corporation (230 - 256)

a. The Police (231 - 249)

Hegel has recycled these three moments at each stage to account for the unity of the increasingly complexity of the political order. The subject matter of this section belongs to the third moment of his description of civil society. In the first moment: the immediate needs of the individual for determinant things are satisfied by work. In the second moment: the duty to conform to standards of justice (laws) protects the rights of individual persons to satisfy their needs. In the third moment, the abstract negativity of the first two moments is actualized; or, in his own words, “What the police provides for in the first instance is the actualization and preservation of the universal which is contained within the particularity of civil society…” (249)

Actualization of the third moment involves eliminating “contingency in the shape of arbitrary evil” (232), i.e. compelling particular wills to conform to “the authority [Macht] of the universal” (231). Hegel describes what to most would appear to be a police-state, granting the policing authority wide-reaching powers to use at their discretion (234). The ever-present potential for the particular will to deviate from its rational course creates the potential for the upsetting of what he understands to be a balanced, largely self-regulating relation between producers and consumers. Thus the relation’s “adjustment also needs to be consciously regulated by an agency which stands above both sides” (236).

Hegel characterizes civil society as a universal family that receives family members, as self-sufficient individuals, torn away from family ties--presumably upon achieving something like the age of majority (238). Civil society therefore has a vested interest in how the family chooses to educate children; and Hegel allows for the intervention of civil authority into the family to guarantee that its ends are served (239). In the case that an individual should enter into poverty after being torn away from their family (241), he places them at the mercy of the universal authority [Macht] in both senses of the words: charity or chastisement (242).

The discussion of the poor gives the impression that Hegel views society as a machine, the place of the poor in society as the product of a self-regulating natural order, the integrity of which is threatened arbitrariness in the shape of contingency (244-5). It is, however, contingency, not poverty, that directly concerns him. Using England as his example, he describes the problem being that “even the poorest man believes he has rights; this differs from what the poor are content with in other countries” (244). The “feeling” of entitlement to some intrinsic rights produces the rabble. Charitable handouts are not necessarily the solution to the problem; they may in fact exacerbate it as they are “contrary to the principle of civil society and the feeling of self-sufficiency and honour among its individual members” (245). In the case of England, specifically, Hegel specifically identifies the abolition of corporation as being a chief factor in the growth of the rabble.

Two final points are made with regard to the intimate relation between industry and colonization. Both are connected to the important place of sea-ways in an economy of international trading relations and as possible outlets for access population (247-8).

b. The Corporation (250 - 256)

Once Hegel has conceptually secured the elimination of the evil of arbitrariness in the shape of contingency through the policing authority, he goes on to state “the ethical returns to civil society as an immanent principle; this constitutes the determination of the corporation” (249). He elaborates further, saying “the corporation has the right, under the supervision of the public authority [Match], to look after its own interests within its enclosed sphere.” By way of comparison, the preservation of the integrity of a civil sphere within the “sphere” of the ethical substance of the state that Hegel proposes is in direct contrast to Kuyper’s notion of the sovereign integrity of spheres--church, family, business, education, politics--that are preserved by the lawful order of creation. The difference between the two rests on where absolute authority or sovereignty is located: whether in one specific universal sphere, or in each sphere in its own particular way.

Hegel regards the corporation as occupying a middle place in civil society between the universal authority of the state and the particular will of individuals. It is here that particular activities can be pursued in particular communities of persons as a derivate sort of family in the context of the universal family of civil society. (252) He distinguishes between the tradesmen, who belong to the corporation, and day labourers, who do not. This is an important distinction to note because the tradesmen possess privilege in the sense of being in possession of an objective right--“he has his honour in his estate,”--or, they belong a corporation which has the universal as its end (252-3). Within the corporation, poverty “loses its contingent and unjustly humiliating character.” (253) But the day labourer does not belong to the corporation. So by all appearances, Hegel defends a socially entrenched notion of privilege, i.e. possessed by some (tradesmen) to the exclusion of others (labourers), at the same time as viewing civil society as a largely self-regulating mechanism that by the nature of natural law (albiet regretfully) excludes some from the “civil sphere” of privilege. Nor does he do any more than simply to note that this is problem. (244) It might be worth asking whether the beauty of the conceptual simplicity of Hegel’s three moment cycle does not cover over the ugliness of a social world. (No doubt this is what Marx will ask.)

The State (257 - 271)

In the state Hegel place “the actuality of the ethical Idea - the ethical spirit as substantial will” (257), or the third moment which actualizes the abstract negativity of the first moments of ethical life: the family and civil society. He comes full circle--“philosophy forms a circle” (2)--by returning to what was posited as mere immediate substance in the family: “love is a feeling, that is, ethical life in its natural form” (158). “The state consists in the march of God in the world, and its basis is the power of reason actualizing itself as will” (258). The standard definition for God is, of course, God is Love.

Hegel’s discussion of the state contains within it the three moment cycle: first, in the constitution of the individual state; second, in potential relationships between states; and third, in “the spirit which gives itself its actuality in the process of world history” in and through individual states (259). The principle of the modern state, Hegel claims, has enormous strength and depth because it allows individual persons to pursue their particular ends while maintaining a “substantial” unity of action (will) among individuals (260). In his words, “Everything depends on the unity of the universal and the particular within the state…The determinations of the will of the individual acquire objective existence through the state, and it is only through the state that they attain their truth and actualization.” (261) The self-sufficient individual is thus a reflection of the self-positing spirit moving through history which manifests itself concretely in the state (263). The constitution of any particular state--“developed and actualized rationality” (265)--has as its universal end the actualization of the concept of Right as the Idea: Freedom. He also speaks of the state and its constitution as an organism (267).

In the lengthy section Hegel dedicates to the relationship between state and church, he fights a battle defending the universal claims of reason against the universal claims of religion. A place for the Church is preserved in the political order of things as a foundation for state in the same way, it would appear, that the family was the foundation for civil society. In “its all-embracing center [i.e. religion], everything is merely accidental and transient” (270). I believe it safe to say that he regards the Church as a subjective family of families, “the absolute in the form of feeling” (270) in contrast to the state, the objective family of self-sufficient individuals, the absolute in the form of rationality. If the objective content of religion is the “divine will present as spirit, unfolding as the actual shape and organization of a world” (270) in the state, it is fairly clear he sees any claim that the absolute is objectively present in the Church as dangerous for any number of reasons (religious fanaticism being key among them.) The basic form of his argument hinges on a strong distinction between the objective and the subjective, rationality and feeling, the all-encompassing universal and the encompassed particular, public and private truths, etc. For the modern self-sufficient person, the unity of the Church and state, of religion and philosophy, part ways once the person transcends the realm of the particular will: for both philosophy and the state encompass the universal and the particular while the Church and religion are impotent to do so. From the privileged vantage of his present, Hegel is able to say, “far from it being, or ever having been, a misfortune for the state if the Church is divided, it is through this division alone that the state has been able to fulfill its destiny [Bestimmung] as self-conscious rationality and ethical life” (270) Regardless how this might pan out against variety of philosophical or theological positions taken by orthodox Christian thinkers, the ethical substance of the Hegelian state as the culmination of the thunderous march of God on earth through human history, I think, pales against to the comparatively simple footsteps of Christ, who not only instructed his disciples to feed the poor and hungry, but also washed their feet. Let me suggest that Hegel’s notion of individual self-sufficiency, the sense of honour it inspires in those privileged to have a place in the civil estate, can only with the greatest of difficulty be made fit with an ethic which inspires a person to assist the impoverished--those who ought to be themselves self-sufficient--or for that same person to allow God to wash their feet.

2007-11-04T01:30:00.000-04:00

To begin, a brief commentary: Why does everyone have it in for the Victorians? Foucault may object to an earlier form of critique, but his project is nonetheless an extension, a refinement, of what had already been said. The analysis of the relation between the Self and the Other made by Edward Said holds the Other is whom all our fears and loathings are cast off on; the Self is the Good, the True, and the Beautiful; the Other, the Bad, the False, and the Ugly. I want to suggest Foucault has “othered” the Victorians in order to recover those “Other” Victorians.

Let me conduct a brief experiment. Take the constellation of categories which Foucault obviously has in his sights--“Victorian,” bourgeois,” and “sex”--then add the category “gender,” as well as to two centuries of prudish repressiveness following the 17th century date he provides for genesis of discourses of sexual repression so that the deleterious effects of this repression has had time to sink into the political regime--the 19th century--and go to any textbook surveying Western history. What historical “phenomena” do you find at the intersection of all of these categories? A nascent feminist movement spearheaded by the likes of the English bourgeois Mary Wollstonecraft and Harriet Martineau and, a little further afield, the French bourgeois Olympe de Gouges. If women’s rights and freedoms are to be deemed “good,” “true,” and “beautiful,” could it be that a sexually-repressive prudishness has had certain beneficial cultural effects?

Foucault uses what I would describe as a reconstituted notion of historical objectivity. His methodological approach to and treatment of the history of sexuality in these brief readings displays a clinical, or critical, sterility reminiscent the very regime of scientific knowledge he proposes to unmask--he adopts it in order to unmask it. Why else is it that in describing socio-cultural relations evidenced in historical texts, he adopts terms like “causality,” “mechanisms of power,” “techniques,” “the effects of power”--in sum, historical “phenomena” critically dissected in terms of cause and effect, categories one would otherwise assign to a natural philosophy or one of the natural sciences? The last historical theorist of note who dared to explicitly apply critical tools derived from the natural sciences to textual materials was one of Foucault’s contemporaries, Maurice Mandelbaum. But it seems, if Foucault has now come into his own in present-day cultural and historical studies, the ghosts of the likes of Mandelbaum live on behind the mask of Foucault.

Foucault has as his purpose to expose a Nietzschean “will to truth” operative in texts. He writes, “The object, in sort, is to define the regime of power-knowledge-pleasure…the overall ‘discursive fact,’ the way in which sex is ‘put into discourse.’” (299) As it is traditionally conceived, the exercise of will denotes the presence of some subject who wills. The institutions propagating (willing) these discursive formations described by Foucault, however, are lifeless unities--as lifeless as we might regard the collection of letters combining to make words placed in a certain order to form sentences that are arranged in paragraphs under headings in the articles assigned for this week that are unified under the authorial signature “Foucault,” that is, if we take seriously the question he poses at the end of the essay, “What is an Author?” “What difference does it make who is speaking?” (120) What difference does it make who animates these institutions? What difference does it make that an institution is a community of persons joined together for some common institutional purpose? Are the discursive formations attached to some institution more than just a sum of their discursive parts? Are the articles in front of us more than simply a sum of their lettered parts? What gives either Foucault’s notion of institutions or the articles in front of us an intelligible unity? The answer to these questions, I think, is found in recovering a notion of a creator of meaning, an author of existence, a subject that wills. I want to suggest that we must think through how we can save Foucault from himself.

The entirety of Foucault’s analysis is directed at sex or sexualities, i.e. types of sexual relations between persons. As it is he who draws the radical conclusion in The Order of Things “that man is in the process of disappearing” (420), it follows that he can treat persons as accidental to the relation. By shifting his focus away from the subject to a relation between subjects, there is a possible consequence which I will table for discussion here: because persons have little or no integrity in Foucault’s analysis, he must conclude that it is not persons who have sexual relations, but sexualities that have persons.

The willing subject that Foucault describes in the second article is a transcendental subject that reduces the conflicting particularity of human existence to a natural order--the repressive will to truth substantively embodied in any number of institutions. But Foucault notices something else: “a discursive ferment that gathered momentum from the eighteenth century onwards.” (302) This had two positive effects: “First, a centrifugal movement with respect to heterosexual monogamy,” (318) and second, the “proliferation of sexualities through the tension of power.” (327) The mere opposition of unity (monogamy) and difference (proliferation of sexualities), of a “one” and the “many,” should be indication enough that Foucault is still stuck within the pale of a transcendental subject, a unity which imposes order on difference, a “one” which wills the “many” to be one. The novelty here is that he is more interested in difference; hence he says, “one sees a veritable discursive explosion” (302), a “true” eruption of meanings. The relation between unity and difference, why it has thus far in the history of philosophy proved to be just beyond the reach of the greatest metaphysicians to reduce the many to a one, is a metaphysical question. For Foucault to impose another solution (or non-solution) to the problem on texts and reinterpret history through that lens, however, is to follow the same transcendental a priori path of the will to truth.

2007-10-28T23:45:00.000-04:00

37. Aquinas ceased writing at the end of his life after Siger de Brabant exposed a flaw in his metaphysics: metaphysical doublings, an inherent flaw in the categories he took over from The Philosopher. His pen ceased: "I can write no more. I have seen things which make all my writings like straw." A failure? Perhaps. But not the failure Truth, or Religion, or God.

All people are grass,
their constancy is like the
flower of the feild.
The grass withers, the flower
fades,
when the breath of the LORD
blows upon it;
surely the people are grass.
The grass withers, the flower
fades;
but the word of our God will
stand forever.

Isaiah 40:7-8

If you judge yourselves by these same words, Thomas' intellectual achievements can be truly appreciated. You should try to appreciate them: for if you are what is known as "Western," or trace you intellectual genealogy through that tradition, (if you are reading this post,) the efforts of he and his contemporaries flow through your mental veins.

2007-10-27T18:35:00.001-04:00

36. Entertain for the briefest of moments this heresy: Hegel was right, world history is the world tribunal. Now Hegel himself is judged before a jury of his peers, accused on two counts: 1) of passing a judgment against humanity reserved only to world tribunal of world history, and 2) of hypocrisy for refusing to submit to his own sentence.

2007-10-26T00:50:00.000-04:00

There is a tiny passage in the introductory lecture found in a collection of lectures by Foucault titled Hermeneutics of the Subject that I think is illustrative of his project. In this passage, he discussed various possible meaning provided by historians for the Delphic prescription gnothi seauton, or “know thyself.” He reports in a matter of fact tone, “this was the principle [that] you should always remember that you are only a mortal after all, not a god, and that you should neither presume too much on your strength nor oppose the powers of the deity.” But immediately following he says, “Let us skip this quickly.” He goes on to define his project as a rescue the epimeleia heautou, or “care of the self” out from underneath the weight accreted by the gnothi seauton by a long history of neglect. More on this in a moment.

In the opening essay assigned for this week, Foucault examines “technologies of the self,” that is, ways of mastering the self. The specific portion of the text that I am interested in comes at the end of the last essay where he describes how it is he conceives of himself interacting with these technologies. Three sorts of history are described: of systems of representations, of attitudes and types of action, and of thought. “[T]he work of a history of thought would be to rediscover at the root of these diverse solutions the general form of problemization that has made them possible.” (389) The three types of history, perhaps, to neatly reflect the three-fold notion of human being Heidegger describes in his Mindfulness: between god and man, earth and world, there is the most question-worthy: be-ing, that which has been forgotten beneath the machinations of te_Xne, or technology. What interests me in this comparison is that Heidegger is after what it is to be mindful, i.e. the gnothi seauton, not necessarily epimeleia heautou, but certainly not one to the exclusion of the other.

The most-question worthy for Heidegger is the lost freedom of be-ing as thought for Foucault is the analysis of freedom which the history of thought must “rediscover at the root of these diverse solutions”. (Ibid) It is a theoretical disappointment, however, that in Mindfulness Heidegger abandoned the guiding tenet of Being and Time that every seeking is guided by what is sought. If you look for an anti-metaphysical notion of freedom, a pure creative potential, pure existence, you will find it. This seeking guided by what is sought, I want to suggest, is a good definition for the technologies of the self; and Foucault forgets to examine his own technology of the self, and in the process, something is forgotten--but it is not an anti-metaphysical notion of freedom.

As an anti-metaphysical notion, freedom aims to be freedom from every essential restraint one one’s own existence. But Foucault must see it working in and through social, economic, and political processes in order to give it “meaningful” content. Read back into textual evidence drawn from the works significant historical figures, his notion of freedom renders inert part of their meaningful content. Self-knowledge and care of the self in both the classic Greek tradition and the late-antique Christian tradition go together for a specific reason. Recall the quote I opened this discussion with and compare it to the opening words of Saint Augustine’s Confessions:

Man, a little piece of your creation, desires to praise you, a human being ‘bearing his morality with him’ (2 Cor. 4:10), carrying with him the witness of his sin and the witness that you ‘resist the proud’ (1 Pet. 5:5). Nevertheless, to praise you is the desire of man, a little piece of your creation. You stir man to take pleasure in praising you, because you have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.

Now Augustine is one of the chief perpetrators of the Christian technology of the self--one of the bad guys. Let me ape Foucault, skip this point quickly, and note that Augustine shares with the Greeks an inconvenient sensitivity to human mortality and a moral sense of responsibility that it bears along with it. What, then, is freedom for Foucault? Might it be that he has forgotten his own being human, that he is mortal? Would that entail that he thinks, in some sense, that he is a god or God? If he does, though I should listen to his diagnoses of a problem, why should I submit to or believe anything his prescription for truly being human? Being human, he doesn’t possess the divine credentials necessary to offer a prescription.

2007-10-18T21:35:00.000-04:00

In his essay, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” Foucault argues history is something other than what the metaphysicians, those who search for a lost origin, have made of it. We are supposed to be disturbed; we would have been had we been convinced that a knowledge of what was lost could be recovered with the scientific precision demanded by a modern search for an origin.

But on Foucault’s account, the genealogist makes something of history as well. “The genealogist needs history to dispel the chimera of the origin. (80) “The purpose of history, guided by genealogy, is not to discover the roots of our identity, but to commit itself to its dissipation.” (95) The search for the origin masters the historical sense from a supra-historical perspective.

However, if the genealogist refused to extend his faith in metaphysics, if he listens to history, he finds that there is “something altogether different” behind things: not a timeless essential secret, but the secret that they have no essence or that their essence was fabricated in a piecemeal fashion from alien forms. (78)

What does Foucault’s genealogist listen for when he or she goes to history? The assumption that guides his discussion of Nietzsche’s use of genealogy seems to be that the, on the terms he sets out, the genealogist has a better grasp of history than the metaphysician. By “better” I mean to say that the genealogist is more “objective” in his historical work than the metaphysician. For Foucault appears to hold that behind the timeless essential secret sought by the metaphysician you find a timeless inessential secret, or the secret that all essences are fabricated--and this is Nietzsche’s discovery of the inessential essence of history. “Only then will the historical sense free itself from the demands of a suprahistorical history.” (93) That the origin is devoid of all meaningful content, however, does not make it any less an origin. It is rather presumptive to hold, if essences are merely constructed human meanings, that those constructions must then be devoid of meaning for the person who constructed them.

Any person who works with history needs a way into their subject material. Nietzsche, Paul Ree, Foucault, I will contend, start at the same place, a beginning, an origin. That one must begin somewhere should be obvious; where one begins is up for debate. What is it that makes the genealogical origin, i.e. the inessential beginning, better than the metaphysical origin, i.e. the essential beginning--what makes it a better way into the subject material? Guided by genealogy, the task before history “is to become a curative science.” (90) Now a disease and its cure belong together, belong to one another, in a unity of difference. On Foucault’s terms, the disease is to hold the metaphysical origin to be the more basic component of the unity and the cure is to hold the genealogical origin to be the same. This a mere polemical strategy.

But Foucault’s description of genealogy hinges on the “fact” that genealogy is something wholly other than metaphysics. Metaphysical origins are made; genealogy has as its original purpose to unmake what was made. The metaphysical search for origins belongs to a history within a deeper history. “Truth, and its original reign, has had a history within history from which we are barely emerging ‘in the time of the shortest shadow,” when light no longer seems to flow from the depths of the sky or to arise from the first moments of the day.” (80) Here I think is Foucault crucial mistake, his betrayal of history, evidence that he himself is not listening to the very history to which he appeals. Simply because people have for much of human history looked up to the sky does not mean, as he must assume in order for his genealogy to have any theoretical traction, that Truth in the modern sense, the content of a naïve human self-certainty, issues from there. Using Solon as his mouthpiece, Herodotus makes this point succinctly: “Look to the end, no matter what it is you are considering. Often enough God gives a man a glimpse of happiness, and then utterly ruins him.” (The Histories, 1.32)

2007-10-14T22:06:00.000-04:00

It is, perhaps, the inevitable fallout of Descartes' displacement of a divine presence from the center of humanity's Being with the simple formula, I think, therefore I am, that Nietzsche would draw the conclusion that humanity had killed God. "The God who beheld everything, and also man: that God had to die! Man cannot endure it that such a witness should live." From Nietzsche, it is a short step to Heidegger to conclude that humanity should find in the center of its Being its meaning in its own death, in Dasein’s Being-towards-death, in the potentiality-for-Being-a whole, in "the possibility of the impossibility of every way of comporting oneself towards anything, of every way of existing." As he says, "Death is Dasein’s ownmost possibility."

But Dasein is not dead, yet. Rather, Dasein, as Being-towards-death, is dying. This much is factically, ontically, obvious. The problematic epistemic divide between ontic and ontological which Heidegger must breach in order to conduct his phenomenological inquiry into Being-there functions as a buffer protecting him against drawing a most radical conclusion: that Dasein is already dead. By forcing the epistemic divide, he can appeal to the ontical facticity (or pre-ontological experience) of death--a common everyday occurrence, one which we all have an "intuitive" access to. "Dasein can thus gain an experience of death, all the more so because Dasein is essentially Being with Others. In that case, the fact that death has been thus 'Objectively' given must make possible an ontological delimitation of Dasein’s totality." The Being-there with (Dasein-with) of Others also belongs to the ontical facticity (or pre-ontological experience) of Dasein. But the meaning of Being-with, like the meaning of Dasein's ownmost Being, can only be understood through the existential-ontological analytic of Dasein. We all have an experience of death, but what does it mean? Heidegger says,

The full existential-ontological conception of death may now be defined as follows: death, as the end of Dasein, is Dasein's ownmost possibility--non-relational, certain and as such indefinite, not to be outstripped. Death is, as Dasein’s end, in the Being of the entity towards its end.

In other words, the meaning of death is meaninglessness, the most universal and emptiest of concepts, which Heidegger had ontically determined beforehand. The same "remarkable relatedness backwards and forwards," the dialectical tension created by forcing apart Dasein’s simulataneously ontical and ontological characters, deprives ontical facticity (and pre-ontological experience) of any meaning in view of the existential-ontological meaning of Dasein's Being-towards-death. If Heidegger had carefully followed his theoretical definition of the simultaneously ontical and ontological characteristics of Dasein, his own Dasein, he should have concluded that Dasein, he himself, was already dead. Of course, he cannot draw that conclusion. Somebody, some still-living being had to write the book in which it should have been drawn.

2007-10-13T02:16:00.000-04:00

This problematic epistemic divide Heidegger maintains between phenomenology and the positive sciences--for he does indeed behave as if phenomenology is a positive science--raises the question, Who watches the watcher? Does he or she watch him or herself? Does Heidegger watch himself? Need he watch himself? In line with Heidegger, again, I agree that accusations of theoretical circularity are not necessary productive for advancing philosophical inquiry. There is, however, another vantage on this problematic which can be taken: the divide is dialectical, vacillating back and forth between Dasein’s ontic and ontological characters. As a positive, ontical phenomenon for philosophical inquiry, Dasein is “what” is to be interrogated. Its ontological character, however, evades positive determination:

Being, as the basic theme of philosophy, is no class or genus of entities, yet it pertains to every entity. Its ‘universality’ is to be sought higher up. Being and the structure of Being lie beyond every entity and every possible character which an entity may possess. Being is the transcendens pure and simple. And the transcendence of Dasein’s Being is distinctive in that it implies the possibility and the necessity of the most radical individuation. Every disclosure of Being as the transcendens is transcendental knowledge. Phenomenological truth (the disclosedness of Being) is veritas transcendentalis.

Dasein, then, has the character of being ontically (positively) determined as ontologically undeterminable. This need not be understood as viciously circular; nevertheless, it is dialectical given the nature of the hermeneutical circle being that every interpretation presupposes some understanding of what is to be interpreted. When he comments on the metaphysical definition of Being, Heidegger notes, “It is said that Being is the most universal and the emptiest of concepts.” The radical concentration of the metaphysical concept of Being in Being-there (Dasein), which is theoretically determined by the look he takes beforehand at the primordial phenomenon of Dasein’s temporality, exhibits the same “remarkable ‘relatedness backward and forward’ which what we are asking about (Being) bears to the inquiry itself as a mode of Being of an entity” that he proposes to lay bare in the existential-ontological analysis of Dasein. For Dasein’s Being is the transcendens pure and simple, the most universal and emptiest of concepts. Beforehand Heidegger has determined that humanity shall emerge from its inauthenticity and indifference to understand the meaning of its Being to discover that it has none--or rather, concretely very little.

2007-10-10T23:57:00.000-04:00

35. With Hegel, the modern mind exorcises the last of its demons, the spirit of the living God. And so, humanity ceases to be the bearer of a personality. In his Mindfulness, Heidegger locates the problem of human existence in the triadic relation between body-soul-spirit, the third being the relation between the other two. The infinite grace and understanding of the Creator God is thus reduced to a mere trace; the Redeemer God still lies in his grave; and God is no longer with us in Spirit. As a consequence, humanity no longer abides with itself. When the spirit is forced to flee, the personality is driven out along with it--inhuman.

2007-10-07T12:06:00.000-04:00

32. It escapes contemporary analysis of the relation between the Self and the Other that the Self is also an Other to its Self. If I call myself a Self, my Self has becomes its own Other. Likewise, if I call you my Other, as my own Self becomes an Other to its Self, so do you become an Other to my Self. I was and you were always already my Others. But knowledge of my Self can only be found in the Others--strictly speaking, the Self is quite empty without its Others. Self-knowledge, then, is found in and amongst the relations between those whom the Self knows to be its Others, between your Self or your Selves and my Self.

33. The temporal sensibilities of the Renaissance and Reformation are diametrically opposed to that of the Revolution of 1789. The former pair sets their face to the future, having the comedy and tragedy of the past well in mind. The latter sets mounts steps towards eternity, glorying in the fairy tale, past and present be damned, all under the pretense of going somewhere.

34. Dread days are upon us if historians rely on sophistical philosophies to debunk their critics, if they appeal to the “reality” of the individual and particular over against the “unreality” of the totality and universal. For historia would no longer have a defense against the ever-advancing mythos for which Herodotus and Moses laid the first foundations; and truly, we could conclude, humanity has lost itself. The reality of history, however, is that humanity never found itself, gained the self-certainty so many presently seem to think it gained, that it must loose itself in the radical manner fashionable among contemporary critical theorists.

2007-10-06T14:57:00.000-04:00

31. The modern person--which I take to encompass the work of many down from Leibniz and Hegel to Foucault and Derrida to the present day--is like one blinded by the light. If you stare into the sun for too long, you can only expect you have your retinas burned out. They called it "courage"; but even Socrates knew better than to commit himself to this fool's errand.

2007-10-06T00:04:00.000-04:00

28. What do we make of post-structuralist ethics? At first glance, it would seem that the post-structuralist has an ethic without principles--for indeed, principles are structured, so it would seem that post-structuralists are, in ethical terms, post-principle-ists. But that isn’t quite the whole story. Post-structuralism has attached itself to the notion that structures continually under re-negotiation. The ethic espoused, therefore, must be a dynamic one--able to account for change. So it seems that at the very bottom of the post-structuralist ethic, there is a structured ethic. To be ethical is to account for re-negotiation of principles; to be unethical is to hold that principles do not change. Necessarily, for the post-structuralist, this distinction between the ethical and the unethical does not change.

29. Our question concerns the bivalent being, the essence and existence of the human--that which I am/ we all are. A topic with depth and gravity, immeasurably immeasurable, no doubt. Qualitative analysis of the motives and aims of early 20th century Marxist ideologues on this very topic was the topic of a book I was reading in the corner of a crowded room. Just over the right-hand, top corner of the page I could see a comparatively--if I take myself, aged 26, as the comparative standard--young couple was locked in a tender embrace. She held his head in her arms, stroked his hair, spoke soft words. After awhile of this form of engagement, she kissed him full on the lips repeatedly, smiling all the while. He returned the favors and patted her quite firmly on the bottom. I sat bemused, at that point unable to read further, a tiny smile forming on my face. Perhaps this was the reason communism failed.

30. In the preface to his book, The Killing of History, Keith Windschuttle says, "I have use the word 'killing' in this book's title to signal that there is a lethal process well underway." His polemical targets? Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida and the like: all of them anti-humanist. The death of God, followed by Dasein's Being-towards-death, following by the death of man, followed a certain violence, a reading of the structures of the human against itself. The killing of history, then, would seem to entail the killing of humanity. For the living to dance the cheerful nihilist dance on a grave yet unoccupied, to "give up the ghost," so to speak, before the ghost lets itself be given up, is, to put it as delicately as possible, a form of intellectual suicide.

2007-10-05T14:01:00.000-04:00

Rhetoric is the art of persuasion. As such, I take rhetoric to include both knowing and willing. When I read Nietzsche, I find myself being persuaded, an exercise of both will and knowledge, to adopt his construal of the relation between knowing and willing: in his terms, the relation between Being and Doing (a non-relation), or in Hegel's terms, between essence and existence. Nietzsche says,

But in the very fact that the ascetic ideal has meant so much to man lies expressed the fundamental feature of man's will, his horror vacui [horror of emptiness]: he needs a goal--and he will sooner will nothingness than not will at all. (1)

The final purpose of any rhetorical display, as I understand it, can be expressed in three statements:

1) I do not know everything, nor do I will everything.
2) I do not know nothing, nor do I will nothing.
3) Therefore, I know something to the exclusion of something else, and I will something to the exclusion of something else.

The purpose of any rhetorical display, then, is to persuade the listener or reader to know and will something to the exclusion of something else.

What does Nietzsche want to persuade me of? He says, "The ascetic ideal has an aim--this goal is, putting it generally, that all other interests in human life should, measured by its standard, petty and narrow." (24) Here he points to the complicity of moral valuations in knowing and willing something to the exclusion of something else. And I think he has touched on another of the weaknesses of the modern synthesis: the Hegelian ideal of Science or Reason posited a single end of humanity, i.e. the march of God through human history embodied presently by the ethical substance of the state. One needs to read Thus Spake Zarathustra to find out that Nietzsche does not think very highly of the state. He calls it "the coldest of all cold monsters"--home of the sickly, the superfluous ones. (I.xi) In the present essay he says, there "is absolutely no proof of science as a whole having to-day one end, one will, one ideal, one passion for a great faith." (24)

The Will to Power is the target of Nietzsche's polemic--it is a will to know everything. He sets up Life as the alternative to the ascetic ideal which sets Life against Life. Nietzsche, I think, recognizes something obvious: that if I know and will something, I know and will it to the exclusion of something else. In this sense, I am, we all are, human, all too human--all too ascetic. But, Nietzsche's Life is precisely the opposite of the Will to Power, to know everything--it is the will which can know nothing, and so wills nothing. Might we call Life, then, inhuman? If so, he would merely have me trade one inhuman aim, the Will to Power, for another.

My own preference is to will nothingness, especially if by nothingness a parallel is being drawn with Jewish nihilism as it is articulated in the first essay. (14) To know and will nihilism as my one goal, to level the distinction between master and slave, is a cause I will shamelessly champion. And for my shameless claim to have a share in Abraham's inheritance, Nietzsche would call me an ascetic, a slave. So be it.

2007-10-04T00:02:00.000-04:00

24. The genius of Kant and Hegel is found in their discovery of a world constituted by our knowledge of it--thus “what” is known ceases to be of primary concern for the modern age, but rather “how” it is known takes center stage. Kant was quite convinced that, even if “how” the world was known could be found in our faculty of knowing, that did not necessarily imply that human knowing could guarantee the permanence of human being, i.e. the existence of a human world. With Hegel, this ceases to be a concern.

25. Phenomenology is a science only so long as by science one has in mind to impose a regular order on a neutral media or material. But if one takes into account that in order for there to be a science, there must be a scientist who is complicity in constructing a method with which to get at the meaning of the subject matter, phenomenology cannot be a science. As it has as its aim to construct a method to survey the mind’s representations of its objects, its subject matter must necessarily exceed the capacities of scientific observation. The human mind is not a neutral media or material.

26. One of the disturbing trends in modern philosophy I have noted is that after Hegel, the conjunction of knowing and willing ceases to be a major concern. What comes to the fore are questions of knowing; willing, or willing what is known, drops from sight. The exception to the rule would be Nietzsche, though for him the reverse is true: willing displaces knowing. Is it such a novelty to consider oneself an agent, who knows as s/he wills and wills as s/he knows?

27. Take the categories essence and existence and ask yourself which has priority. Does X because it is? Or, is X because it does? Or Essence and existence relate to each other as substance to subject. Consider carefully, then, which choice you make. If you choose the former, and give essence priority over existence, X cannot exist in any other manner than set by the bounds of its essence. In Aristotle’s terms, a slave must forever be a slave, despite all evidence to the contrary; or, in Hegel’s terms, a bondsman must forever be a lord, despite all evidence to the contrary. If you choose the later, and give existence priority over essence, however, a slave may be a master and a bondsman a lord; and perhaps, just perhaps, in time the distinction between the two may be eliminated entirely.

2007-10-02T22:07:00.000-04:00

21. Socrates knows that he knows nothing--and it is credited to him as wisdom by the Oracle at Delphi. Qohelet knows that he knows and knows that he does not know; or, he knows that such absolute Socratic certainty is present in him reminding himself of what lies beyond him. Still, they share this conviction: the ways of the gods are unknown to mere mortals and they heap much misery upon themselves when they seek that forbidden knowledge.

22. The defense of human dignity is bound up with the most curious sort of offense: one must believe what a person says, regardless how reprehensible--believe that it is possible to believe as they believe. Only then can one put to them the question, As I have done for you, can you do the same for others?

23. It is quite odd that critics of "logocentrism" think David Hume a skeptic. More than likely, this is because he had an alternative critique of "logocentrism"--and that cannot be possible! It’s fairly clear that Derrida never took Hume seriously--indeed, it is very possible that he never read any of his work. But Hume is a good test case insofar as Derrida condemns the entire history of Western philosophy for succumbing to the sickly pull of the infinite sign. Observe: Derrida claims,

In the thinking and the language of Being, the end of man has been prescribed since always, and this prescription has never done anything but modulate the equivocality of the end, in the play of telos and death. In the reading of this play, one may take the following sequence in all its senses: the end of man is the thinking of Being, man is the end of the thinking of Being. Man, since always, is his proper end, that is, the end of his proper. Being, since always, is its proper end, that is, the end of its proper.

Hume responds,

All I can allow him is, that he may be in the right as well as I, and that we are essentially different in this particular. He may, perhaps, perceive something simple and continu'd, which he calls himself; tho' I am certain there is no such principle in me.

If Derrida’s "man" and Hume's "himself" are read as equivalent terms, we can safely say that there is at least one person who escapes the critique of logocentrism.

2007-10-02T20:40:00.000-04:00

I am also at this point accustomed to reaffirm with emphasis my conviction that the sun is real, and also that it is hot - in fact hot as Hell, and that if the metaphysicians doubt it they should go there and see.

Winston Churchill, My Early Life

Of course, this is clever. Unfortunately, its appeal to empirical evidence will fail to convince any of the metaphysicans. There is no purpose in making the journey, if one is not first convinced that answers can be found at the destination.

2007-10-02T16:06:00.000-04:00

19. Suppose for a minute my self achieves certainty of itself, i.e. self-certainty which guarantees both an adequate knowledge of means and end of self a la Hegel. Whither from the privileged vantage of itself to does my self go? It would seem that all relevant questions have been answered.

20. It is for the Christian to embody a historical faith. What business does a Christian have, then, in testing the adequacy of concepts and ideas against the backdrop of "the real" a priori to admitting that those same categories must necessarily be the damaged vehicle in which truth is carried and broken road on which truth travels? None so far as I can see--though, admittedly, my sight fails me time and again.

2007-09-29T00:25:00.000-04:00

11. Post-structuralist critiques of science fail precisely because they never enquire into the nature or object of scientific enquiry. Derrida’s method of deconstruction is cast in terms of a scientific critique of science. But what is science? In Hegel’s terms, scientific reason is a self-perpetuating totality, a way of being in the world--the human spirit raised to the Absolute, i.e. THE Self-positing Subject. Hegel too has a scientific critique of science, one which condemns scientists for not grasping the absolute. Does no one see the grand irony here? Post-structuralism hasn’t gotten beyond Hegel: thought thinking itself has merely been traded for thought un-thinking itself--i.e. condemnation for grasping the absolute.

12. How is it that the same post-structuralists who critique the metanarratives of progress themselves think they are making progress? So long as the metanarratives of progress are understood solely in terms of a rational telos which runs the length of human history, post-structuralists are naively content with having obtained their object: a progressive critique of progress. What then is progress? In the very simplest terms, the metanarratives of progress measure progress in terms of distance from some former order of things, or, to what extent we have unburdened ourselves of our past. On these terms, to be post-structuralist, to have gotten beyond structuralism, is to still be operating within the modern metanarratives of progress.

13. Edward Said’s Self is as empty as his Other. This is hardly a coincidence. How is it then that, in speaking about his Self, he can claim not to have spoken on behalf of the Other. Presumably Others have had, and do have, more to say about their Selves. If this were not the case, there would be no Others.

14. No one has seen God’s face but the one who came from God--who was God. In faith, Moses was granted a chance to see God’s back and afterwards it was too much for the Israelites to look on his face, so he had to wear a veil. Derrida looks upon the infinite sign and finds it “veiled” by the play of the signified and signifier just like Hegel had found it “veiled” by the play of Forces. Truly, then, we are strangers in this strange land, strangers to ourselves, to one another, and to God--that we might be pilgrims, with ourselves, with one another, and with God.

15. God has ceased to be the dispensable hypothesis; at present, if a philosopher, say Heidegger, does devote a small amount of their attention to the problematic question, the general response is that God must be thought differently than he/she/it has been in the past. The notion of an eternally present God is passé, to say the very least; defies the fundamental principles of reason, to say a little more; unlikely given the present philosophic consensus, to give voice to the assumptions that are more than likely underpinning these speculative forays into the nature of divinity. But, then, what is Dasein, Being-there, being in the temporally present moment? Does Heidegger not reduce all temporal moments to mere iterations of Dasein, i.e. the infinite extensions of past and future, all time, to Being-there? Heidegger’s time looks a lot like eternity; Dasein’s temporal present, a lot like the eternal present of divinity.

16. One can never be alone. Even in a crowd of strangers, one is not, strictly speaking, alone. Indeed, one always has one’s own company when the company of both friends and strangers is lacking. On the other hand, one can dislike oneself.

17. To claim that the human person is a self-positing subject, a subject that has its self as an object is to claim everything and nothing at the same time. As this regards either individual or communal expressions of the self, this is to say everything and nothing, again, at the same time. Positively everything is nothing; negatively nothing is everything. Things get interesting when we try to make sense of the paradox of the self.

18. Hegel demands the highly implausible and the downright impossible of himself in Phenomenology of Spirit. First, he must perform the astounding feat of standing on his own head: the motionless tautology of I = I. This is highly implausible due to the fact that the performance of great feats of physical prowess ceased to be part of the philosophic curriculum with the passing of the classical gymnasium. And second, he must also stand to the side and watch himself do so. But this is downright impossible.

2007-09-27T22:35:00.000-04:00

The principle rhetorical device Nietzsche uses, as I take it, is antithesis: drawing attention to a single term composed of two contradictory terms. The essay opens,

The breeding of an animal that can promise--is not this just that very paradox of a task which nature has set itself in regard to man? Is not this the very great problem of man? (II.1)

In the single term, man, Nietzsche describes the conflict of two other terms: nature and the ability to promise. The latter term, I will suggest, can be subsumed upon the concept freedom, free will, or a creative potential unfettered, or undetermined, by nature.

I want to put forward a strategy for reading Nietzsche that is drawn from the work of Herman Dooyeweerd. Dooyeweerd characterized the modern age as one caught in an antithetical Nature-Freedom rational-religious dialectic. I will suggest that Nietzsche use of antithesis as a rhetorical device owes itself to his peculiar take on Dooyeweerd's Nature-Freedom dialectic.

Dooyeweerd saw Kant as the turning point of the modern age--he contrasts the orderliness of sense-experience with the freedom of the "I"--or, the starry heavens above and the moral law within. To make sense of Nietzsche take on the Nature-Freedom dialectic, however, I think that a comparison with Hegel is more appropriate. Hegel says the "I" is determined as indeterminate, by rational necessity, free: an antithesis of nature and freedom in the "I"--in Nietzsche’s "man." For Hegel, nature is simply freedom by another name, and vice versa. Now I cannot provide overwhelming amounts of material evidence to justify the comparison between Nietzsche and Hegel; but it seems to me that Nietzsche has seen inherent weakness the modern synthesis: how can I be free if I am determined as such? Is the autonomous modern "man" truly autonomous if he must bind himself to promises in order to be moral?--autonomy and morality being contradictory categories, as Nietzsche points out. (II.2) Autonomy easily corresponds to freedom; morality to nature, to some determined origin, if one takes into account Nietzsche critique of the origin of the good.

It seems to me, however, that Nietzsche has no critique of the Nature-Freedom dialectic comparable to Dooyeweerd: in hoping to get beyond the dialectic, he merely places himself within it. The principle feature of a rational-religious dialectics is to drive the knower from a point of conceptual deficiency to adequacy--from nature to freedom where freedom is the end of human nature. Nietzsche's rhetorical use of antithesis can only drive his readers to hope for the coming of "This man from the future, who in this wise will redeem us from the old ideal, as he will from that ideal’s necessary corollary of great nausea"--that is, the absolute unfettered, or free, creative spirit will--"he must one day come" (II.24). But there is no rational necessity in this "must" as there was for Hegel. Its necessity is found in lying at the terminal point of the religious dialectic: we must unburden ourselves of nature, our determinations, so that we may enter the abode of the "higher man".

2007-09-26T20:09:00.000-04:00

The first thing one must do when reading Nietzsche’s The Genealogy of Morals is disbelieve the opening lines.

We are unknown, we knowers, ourselves to ourselves; this has its own good reason. We have never searched for ourselves--how should it then come to pass, that we should ever find ourselves?

That we have never searched for ourselves is a very, very strong claim to make. More likely, the truth of the statement is that we have never searched for ourselves on the terms that Nietzsche lays out, i.e. we have never searched for ourselves in humanity itself, apart from a divine or natural origin. The fundamental problematic of modernity, one which Nietzsche inherits and inverts, rests in the presumption to have found ourselves: the self is understood to be metaphysical reality/totality, something simple, whole, impenetrable, but nevertheless secure. By the time Nietzsche writes, the presence of a divine subject uniting subject and object in the human mind has been so discredited that he is able to turn away from the natural world, look into himself, and find nothing simple or whole.

2007-09-26T15:26:00.000-04:00

The third chapter of the book of Ecclesiastes, written by the Teacher (Qohelet), named “the son of David, king in Jerusalem,” reflects on the first three chapters of Genesis. Underscored in the first eight verses is both the dignity and tragedy of human life. All is not well in the world, nor human life in it. Death follows birth; weeping follows laughter; every search must come to an end. Such is life subject to frustration by human sinfulness. V. 9 poses the fundamental question that the Hebrew people ask time and time. “What gain have the workers from their toil?” To toil had been the part of the curse specifically assign to the man in Genesis 3. V. 10 responds by saying, “I have seen the business that God has given to everyone to be busy with.” There no escape from the curse; humanity will toil. V. 11 continues, “He has made everything suitable for its time; moreover he has put a sense of past and future into their minds, yet they cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.” To toil is humanity’s lot; but the toiling itself is not tainted by the curse. Humanity would seek to know the meaning of its toil: they would want to know while all their plans come to naught. The Teacher is well aware of the meaning of the first three chapters in Genesis: God created humanity in his image, male and female he created them; he has placed a sense of the past and future in their minds. The Teacher submits himself to the Torah: sin brought the curse, toil, down on humanity. To seek to know the meaning of human toil apart from divine revelation only ends in further frustration. The reader is supposed to know the meaning of toil: rebellion brought it upon humanity. So the Teacher submits himself to the redemptive judgment of the Creator in v. 12: “I know that there is nothing better for them to be happy and enjoy themselves as long as the live.” This is what God intended for humanity in the first place; a part of the Garden can still be had East of Eden. The Teacher continues in v. 13, “moreover, it is God’s gift that all should eat and drink and take pleasure in all their toil.” Such a claim can only be understood if one remembers that the Creator had deigned to reveal to humanity the meaning of its toil--an act of love. God would have us know the meaning of our toil; and he would have us flourish in that knowledge.

2007-09-25T18:33:00.000-04:00

4. Modern philosophy since Hegel provides the most perfect set of instructions on how to gaze into one’s own navel, how to stare down eternity's way, to go everywhere and nowhere at the same time. On the other hand, with my head out of by belly, I know myself to be going somewhere: the destination is a particular one, though it takes only a hazy form against the future horizon on which my failing intellectual sight is trained.

5. In recent centuries, it rarely escapes anyone's attention that time’s arrow must be the first nocked and loosed from the mental bow. But that one has been pierced by that same arrow is noticed with equal rarity.

6. There has never been, and with all likelihood never be, the realization of a mass individual like the one proposed in Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan. This may be said with relative confidence after perusing a few history texts in which one can find figures expounding endlessly about humanity qua humanity but never witnessing the fruition of their ideas. Of course, one must use words hesitant words and phrases like "relative" and "with all likelihood" in order to keep the flame of hope in a universal peace alive as much as to remind oneself of the dangers of that illusion. The historian, like anyone else it should be added, must keep in mind that the term "humanity" always takes both the singular and the plural form.

7. What is X? Any answer requires three basic terms, "x," "~x," and the "relation" between them, which may be expressed in this form: (x, ~x). But the answer cannot satisfy the strictures of the question; the relation is complicit in preventing any synthesis of X with (x, ~x). Hence if X is (x, ~x), then X is ~X, or (X, ~X).Whatever X may be, it escapes the utmost mental efforts of the enquirer. Should the enquirer ask the question of their ownmost being, the same answer is received: (x, ~x). Necessarily, one is forced to admit, though I am what I know myself to be (x), I am not what I know myself to be (~x). This need not be taken as a recipe for theoretical despair. No, if one finds oneself in despair, one has willfully misplaced the third term, the relation: "what it is I ought to be."

8. The movement of time through human history bears only the slightest resemblance to Becoming.

9. Human history is a totality context; necessarily, historical studies do not concern themselves solely with the particular.

10. Everything Hegel writes in the Phenomenology of Spirit after he declares, alone among the many modes of human thought, "philosophy moves essentially in the element of universality, which includes within itself the particular [i.e. the other modes of human thought]" is complete nonsense. For his entire project is dedicated to overcoming that initial self-inflicted wound.

2007-09-22T02:22:00.000-04:00

The question of history is directly related to the problem of time. To be in history is to inhabit and to be inhabited by the movement of time from the past, through the present, to the future. Time must be this movement or it ceases to be what is normally meant by time. Brought together or compressed into a single term, the three terms past, present, and future simply bracket all times, or all moments in time. Without the movement of time, these three terms so bracketed cannot stand for time, but rather eternity. Another way of saying that humanity inhabits a movement through time is that the human person inhabits eternally, and is inhabited temporally by the movement through, the present moment. In its parts and in its wholes, humanity is a self-positing substance-- creatures who are also creators, or agents--that draws its world into itself and spin its world out of itself. Humanity thus inhabits and is inhabited by a fundamental duality: eternal the present moment is everything, temporally it is nothing. In the present, the relation between eternity and time is expressed as a relation between the finite and the infinite, i.e. the potentially infinite number of finite objects of experience in the infinite totality of what is. The two relations are reflections of each other, yet distinct, the movement of time being the complicit factor. Their duality forces upon humanity the fundamental question of history, of existence: what is...? It should be added that the duality is such that humanity always already has an answer.

In his The Penguin History of the World, J.M. Roberts introduces the subject matter of his book with the observation that “history is the one subject where you cannot begin at the beginning.” The observation is a modest one, to say the least. For the irony is that world history qua world history already contains all the other subjects into which humanity might enquire insofar as humanity, which inquires, inhabits and is inhabited by the movement of time through that totality context. A world history, like the book that Roberts writes, inhabits and is inhabited by the movement of time through that same totality context. Its author and the character of its composition, i.e. the creative signature of the author, can be assigned a place on a chronologically measured index of temporal moments. The distinctive qualities of its content sharpen as the temporal distance from the present moment grows, as the cultural distance, i.e. the change in cultural form, grows between the historical context in which the work was written and the context in which the work is read. No less does this temporal conditioning apply to the content of this reflection.

History, then, is always human history. On the receding boundary of human history, the horizon of history proper, what traces of humanity may be found already stand off in sharp relief against the backdrop of the natural world--utterly unique, alone. Human history begins when humanity first exercises its creative abilities and leaves a telltale imprint, an intelligible symbol, on the natural world that has survived the test of time. The possibility of having and doing history, then, is humanity: the creative expression of a creature who is also creator. Whatever distinction one might draw between cultural and natural history already belongs to human history--the categories nature and culture themselves belong to that same history, products of the attempt to make sense of the dual nature of the self-positing substance that is humanity. To search for the pre-historical origins of humanity is to pose an unanswerable question: what was humanity before humanity? The question is also inhabited by the fundamental duality; but it remains unanswerable because the questioner does not make a like effort to inhabit that fundamental duality when seeking the answer. Of course, the questioner need not make an effort to inhabit the duality. If they do not, however, the duality is better termed a dualism, i.e. the result of an attempt to construct an eternal definition of human being (Whereas if they did, they might find the question of the origin to be a hindrance to the study of history.) Humanity cannot simply precede itself in the sense of being an object of its own enquiry (a necessary supposition on which to theoretically ground any search for humanity’s pre-historical origins); it must also be preceded by itself in the sense of being the subject of its own enquiry, i.e. the enquirer.

2007-09-19T19:03:00.000-04:00

1. With a given presupposition about the origin of the truth, Nietzsche’s question, What good is truth? is indeed a very profound question. With another presupposition about the same origin, that the good of the very question, What good is truth? may be called into question is equally profound. The profundity of the former depends on the self-constitution of the questioner as the origin of the truth. Only then can one doubt absolutely the good of one’s various constructions of the truth. The profundity of the later depends on conceiving of oneself as having the truth as a fundamentally basic issue for one’s ownmost being. It remains that the later is the more profound question: for anyone who posed the former question has no idea why, or to what end, they posed it in the first place. One must have the good of the truth as a fundamentally basic issue for one’s ownmost being in order to ask, What good is truth?

2. Never will you meet a single person who does not have an opinion about what human qua humanity is. Only on the very rarest occasion will you meet a person who is absolutely certain they hold the correct opinion. These generally go by the title “philosopher”.

3. Every time I attempt to form an answer to the question, What is time? time steals my answer away from me. It seems that the question about time is intent on instilling in me a lesser opinion of the powers of my mental faculties. That time must do this again and again leads me to conclude that I am quite encourageable.

2007-09-11T02:25:00.000-04:00

The Book of Joshua & The Structure of Space and Time in the Garden

The following is meant as an exploration of a thesis that the entire Bible can be read as a continuing re-exposition of the first chapter of Genesis through a reading of the Book of Joshua. Readily I admit that I am not qualified, in any sense of the word, to defend what is written below. So one should bear in mind that the claims made here are done with fear and trembling. As for the content thesis, I will not expound it here at great length. Suffice it to say that the basic tenet of the thesis is that the Bible never says anything "new" in the sense of ontologically originary--and that is its historical novelty. Nor is the meaning of the first chapter of Genesis "new" in the ontological originary sense. Rather, it lays down the basic message of the Bible--the meaning of human life through the lens of divine revelation--which is later summarized by the Teacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem: "Vanity of vanities...all is vanity," or "there is nothing new under the sun." (Ecc. 1:2, 9)

The first settlement in human history that can credibly be called "urban," though even this is to stretch the meaning of the term to the pointing of breaking, was at Jericho. Somewhere around or about the year 8000 BC the first signs of permanent settlement appear to us nearly ten millennia later. Somewhere before the year 6000 BC, the foundations of elaborate defensives were laid. As it is recorded in the book of Joshua, by the command of the Lord God, the Israelites marched around the city once each day for six days. On the seventh day, they marched seven times, and to the sound of horns and voices, the ancient walls came tumbling down. God’s people had returned to the Garden.

The story of Jericho’s destruction inaugurates what appears to be a rain of divine terror that offends the modern imagination. The offence is perceived as an infinite one, utterly unthinkable, inhuman. This is, however, to read into the book narrative categories utterly foreign to the context in which it was written. The offence, no doubt, was an infinite one; but the human subjects of the narrative were not the ones infinitely offended. The only infinite offence was that of a finite creature against its Creator.

The book of Joshua contains within it all the basic details of the first three chapters of Genesis, of which the later two chapters are already anticipated in the first chapter. In six days God created the heavens and the earth and on the seventh day he rested. Against this backdrop, the otherwise seemingly pointless command to march around the city once each day for six days and seven times on the seventh takes on a depth of meaning otherwise it lacks. God’s rest on the seventh day of the creation week, foundational to a Judeo-Christian understanding of the divine order of time which has come down to the present in the form of the "week," parallels the initial step taken in Joshua towards the recovery of the rest in God humanity had in Eden.

The interpretive strategy that I will forward, which I cannot substantiate with sources external to the biblical text, here is that the author of the book of Joshua is well aware of Jericho’s extremely long history. Archeological evidence indicates that it was, as far back as can be seen, the site of a religious sanctuary in the center of an agricultural community. Its walls, no doubt, were set up to protect against nomadic raiders who lived a leech-like existence on the edges of the barely-established society. The general pattern of the development of Mesopotamian society saw in its initial stages places of sacrifice and later temples established as places where people met the gods of heaven and earth, who controlled weather patterns and blessed the coming year's crop. So it stands for "paradise lost," to use John Milton’s turn of phrase; it's walls, for the infinite wall of iniquity that divided humanity from its Creator. At the opening of Joshua, God promises all the land between the Great Sea in the west (the Mediterranean) and the River Euphrates in the East. Doubtless, this is not an exact description of the extent of the Garden in Genesis 2:10-4. Nor, I would argue, need it be. To place on the biblical text the sort of exacting literal transposition of the extent of the Garden from the former book to the later is to press the biblical narrative into structure of space and time that is foreign to the context in which it was written. The demand for evidence of exact spatial parallels carries along with it a "scientific" expectation, one that drives divinity from the space in question. The author of the book clearly believed that God was giving his people the land, a land flowing with milk and honey, his Garden. So it makes little sense to read back from a distance of many millennia and to consciously make an effort not to think about the land in Hebrew terms. Neither does it make any sense to impose upon the narrative something like an "objective, linear understanding of time." The author of Joshua is not dropping archeological hints for archeologists to take up and find evidence of an edenic existence at the site of Jericho. The time of modern scientific investigation and the time of the book of Joshua are quite different and the author clearly believed time is in God’s hands while the science of archeology operates quite different principles. One does not look for Eden apart from divine revelation, apart from the time of creation in which "nothing is new under the sun." Time without a trace of divinity, as is presupposed in an "objective, linear understanding of time," would be, by definition, "new," in an ontological originary sense.

The spies sent to scout out the land around Jericho and its defenses took refuge in the house of Rahab, the prostitute, who hid them from the rulers much like Adam and Eve hid from God after taking the forbidden fruit. The parallel to be drawn here is made between the rulers, either the "usurpers" or the true ruler, the Creator God. Rahab herself confesses, "The Lord your God is indeed God in heaven above and on earth below,"(Josh. 2:11) and in so doing repeats the formula found in Gen 1:1. Moreover, it is significant that Rahab was a prostitute as part of the curse which the original sin brought down on humanity was a distortion of the relation between the sexes to the disadvantage of women. (Gen. 3:16) From Eve's hand Adam received the forbidden fruit; from Rahab, the (male) spies receive hiding place. So we are given a glimpse into the moment the weight of the curse, as it applies to women, begins to be lifted. She and her family are taken into Israel and the Gospel writer Matthew lists her in the genealogy of Christ. (Matt. 1:5)

Just prior to the siege of Jericho Joshua has a vision in which the commander of the Lord’s army appears to him with a drawn sword. In response to Joshua challenge, "Are you one of us, or one of our adversaries?" the man in his vision responds, "Neither…." (Josh. 5:13-4) Now the final sentence of the third chapter of Genesis reads, "He [the Lord] drove out the man; and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed a cherubim, and a sword flaming and turning to guard the way to the tree of life." (Gen. 3:24) The intended meaning of the parallel, as I take it, is that the cherubim remains to guard the way to the tree of life and so stands impartial during the siege. The burden of the curse that humanity brought down on itself is not removed by the return of Israel to the Garden. But the Lord God nevertheless has initiated the plan of redemption; though it remains for him to bring it to completion. To seek access tree of life apart from that plan of redemption, to seek everlasting life, to seek something "new" in the ontological originary sense, remains an impossibility; thus cherubim still stands his guard.

The incompleteness of the plan of redemption is underscored in the two following narratives which parallel the serpent's deception in Genesis 3: the defeat of Israel at the hands of the men of Ai due to Achan's wrongful taking of the spoils from the siege of Jericho and the trickery of the Gibeonites. Achan coveted what had been dedicated to the Lord. Upon questioning, he owned up to his sin, and received as a penalty for the infinite offense death, both he and his family, just as Adam and Eve brought upon themselves, expulsion from the Garden, the penalty of death for taking the forbidden fruit. Soon after the covenant is renewed and Ai defeated, the Gibeonites come and seek an audience with Joshua fearful of the same fate. They claim to come from a distant land having heard that the hand of the Lord was with Israel, and seek to make a treaty with Israel. When Joshua discovers their deception, he summoned them and said, "Now therefore you are cursed, and some of you shall always be slaves, hewers of wood and drawers of water for the house of my God." (Josh 9:23) The serpent-figure who first deceives Eve in Genesis is usually equated with the Devil, though there is no direct indication in the book that this is indeed the case. As it applied to the serpent, the curse reads, "Because you have done this, cursed are you among all animals and among all wild creatures; upon your belly you shall go, and dust you shall eat all the days of your life. I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will strike your head, and you will strike his heel." (Gen. 3:14) If Gibeon does indeed fit the profile of the serpent, one who strikes the heel of the woman/Israel and whose head is crushed, the weight of the antithesis between it and the woman begins to be lifted. For immediately following Gibeon’s submission to Israel, Joshua takes up arms in its defense against a coalition of cities led by the king of Jerusalem.

A minor part of the narrative structure of Joshua, which becomes much more prominent in the Book of Judges, is a cycle of victory for Israel, fall into temptation, and covenant renewal, and again victory, which is repeated. The defeat at the hands of Ai prompts Joshua to return, in despair no less, to enquire of the Lord. The passage will be quoted here at length:

Then Joshua tore his clothes, and fell to the ground on his face before the ark of the Lord until the evening, he and the elders of Israel; and they put dust on their heads. Joshua said, "Ah, Lord God! Why have you brought this people across the Jordan at all, to hand us over to the Amorites so as to destroy us? Would that we had been content to settle beyond the Jordan! O Lord, what can I say, now that Israel has turned their backs on their enemies! The Canaanites and all the inhabitants of the land will hear of it, and surround us, and cut off our name from the earth. Then what will you do for your great name?"
The Lord said to Joshua, "Stand up! Why have you fallen upon your face? Israel has sinned; they have transgressed my covenant that I imposed on them." (Josh. 7:6-10)

Joshua, and by extension Israel, is plainly aware of the infinite magnitude of the offense which the sin of a finite creature is against the Creator God: that was the meaning of the law handed down at Sinai to Moses. The Ten Commandments listed in Exodus 20 repeats the tripartite division of creation from Genesis 1, i.e. the parallel structure of forming and filling the new creation. God announces himself first as Redeemer before laying out the meaning of the covenant.

Then God spoke all these words: I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the house of slavery: you shall have no other God’s before me.
You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, punishing the children for the iniquity of the parents, to the third and the fourth generation of those who reject me, but showing steadfast love to the thousandth generation of those who love me and keep my commandments.
You shall not make wrongful use of the name of the Lord your God, for the Lord will not acquit anyone who misuses his name.
Remember the Sabbath day, and keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work. But the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God; you shall not do any work--you, your son or your daughter, your male or female slave, your livestock, or the alien resident in you towns. For six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, all that is in them, but rested the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and consecrated it. (Ex. 20:1-11)

Both the structure of the space of the Garden and time of the Garden contained in the first chapter of Genesis are rehashed in the covenant given to Moses. For their failure to keep covenant with God, Adam and Eve were sent from his presence. But notice this: though he tears his clothes and falls to the ground before the ark of the Lord, Joshua is told to stand in the presence of the Almighty, to take ownership of the infinite offense, something which Adam and Eve were unable to do. This is not "new" in the sense of ontologically originary. If it was "new," the offense would not be infinite. It still remains that there is "nothing new under the sun"--creation is as it was and will be--but it is novel, i.e. redemptive-historically novel. With each covenant renewal, Israel is told to stand and take ownership of their infinite offense. And it can stand: God honors his covenant by calling his people to account. This pattern is repeated throughout the Old Testament; and perhaps it’s most colorful examples are found in Isaiah 1:18-20 and Job 38. Each time the person in question asks the question, "Why do I suffer?" or God asks, "Why do you bring suffering on yourself?" Each time God reminds them of the sheer immensity of creation, utterly beyond human comprehension. The Teacher poses this same question:

What gain have the workers from their toil? I have seen the business that God has given everyone to be busy with. He has made everything suitable in its time; moreover he has put a sense of past and future [i.e. eternity] into their minds, yet they cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end. I know that there is nothing better for them than to be happy and enjoy themselves as long as they live; moreover, it is God’s gift that all should eat and drink and take pleasure in all their toil. I know that whatever God does endures forever; nothing can be added to it, nor anything taken from it; God has done this, so that all should stand in awe before him. That which is, already has been; that which is to be, already is; and God seeks out what has gone by. (Ecc. 3:9-15)

Again, the structure of the space of the Garden and the time of the Garden are repeated. Humanity still walks East of Eden; the utter incomprehensibility of creation still testifies against him. But the teacher is well aware of the meaning of the first few chapters of Genesis. To toil all the days of his life, the part of the curse assigned to the man in Genesis 3:17-9, is to his benefit. To know the meaning of toil, for humanity to be able to stand and take ownership of its sin, is a blessing. Just as Joshua was commanded to stand, so humanity can stand in the presence of God and give an account for its sin because God has as his purpose to redeem the infinite image this finite creature bears, to lift the infinite burden from its finite back.

The end of the matter; all has been heard. Fear God, and keep his commandments; for that is the whole duty of everyone. For God will bring every deed into judgment, including every secret thing, whether good or evil. (Ecc. 12:13-4)

What was it that Christ said?

"Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden light." (Matt. 12:28-30)

2007-09-09T01:32:00.000-04:00

The Unanswerable Problem of Time

What follows is a reflection on the "essence" of time. The reader is invited to glance at their watch, or at a clock hanging on the wall, or some other available timepiece, to take note of the present time. At the end of the reflection, this invitation will be given once again, this time to note the amount of time which has lapsed in the interim. Despite the obvious change in what might be termed "objective" temporal position, it will be brought to the attention of the reader that, in fact, they find themselves back at the beginning of this reflection. In other words, time will not have changed and the reader will not have gotten anywhere at all.

The "essence" of time may be quickly summed up in these few words: time is a movement from the past, through the present, to the future. Any definition of time worth its salt contains, at minimum, the three predicates just mentioned: past, present, and future. But the bare minimum is inadequate to express the "essence" of time. On the very strictest terms, if the definition of time were to contain only past, present, and future, it would cease to be what is normally meant by time. For if this were the case, the term time contains all times, past, present, future--which is to say that to apply to the definition of time the bare minimum merely equates time with eternity.

No, the "essence" of time must be located in a movement from the past, though the present, to the future in order to distinguish it from eternity. For the later, meaning of "to contain all times," or "to be eternally present," characterized by precisely the opposite, i.e. the lack of temporal movement. Eternity cannot move from the past to the future; if it did, it would no longer be eternity, but time.

That feature which eternity and time share in common is the present moment. The first observation that is offered should appear commonsensical. Eternity contains all moments, past, present, and future, in a single present moment. The second observation, however, may jar the reader slightly so they are asked to bear with the writer. Time, or temporal movement, is not contained in a single present moment. The line of reasoning which has been followed to draw this conclusion goes as follows: time cannot be contained in any single one of the moments it moves through for the consequence of trying to contain time in a single moment would be to deny time movement. If one were to attempt to contain time in a moment, time would not be time, but eternity.

This same conclusion can be reached another way, this by posing a question. What is the present moment? Above we established that the "essence" of time is found in a movement from the past, through the present, to the future. If this were not the "essence" of time, then it would not be time about which we were speaking, but eternity. From this established definition, the answer drawn to the question posed is this: the present moment is that through which time moves from the past to the future. Or, in other words, the present moment does not contain time per se, but is that through which time moves as it makes it way from the past to the future. The distinction between eternity and time is maintained: eternity lacks movement while time does not.

Even if the present moment were seen to move through time from the past to the future, the basic observations made here would not be undermined in the slightest way. For the present moment to move from the past to the future, it is necessary to posit an eternal moment, a totality of time, past, present, and future, through which the present moment can move. It remains that the eternal present moment lacks movement; whereas the temporal present moment moves. (The reader is advised to revert to the previous terminology to avoid any further confusion.)

A comparison can be made between eternity and time as they share in common the present. Eternally, the present moment is everything, i.e. it contains all moments, past, present, and future. Temporally, the present moment is nothing, i.e. time moves through the present but is not contained in it. In both instances, the present moment can be represented by a mere "X" with this difference: time does not move through "X1" whereas time does move through "X2"; or, "X1" is everything, i.e. all moments, whereas "X2" is nothing, i.e. no time.

Both "X1" and "X2" belong to the same present moment; they are at one and the same time the same "X," distinct but indistinguishable. If one were to attempt to posit an absolute distinction between them "X2" would cease to be "X2" and would become "X1". Any such attempt at constructing an absolute distinction ends in constructing an absolute indistinguishability. To do so reduces the definition of time to its bare minimum--past, present, and future--and denies time its "essential" movement. As was observed before, under these circumstances time would not be time, but eternity. Time can only move from the past, through the present, to the future so long as there is a past to move from and a future towards which to move.

What, then, is "X"? This is merely another way of re-stating the instituting question of philosophy, What is...? To it we return eternally. This is necessarily so as the present moment is caught between eternally everything and temporally nothing. If we were to ask, What is the present moment? the answer received is (X1. ~X2). The principle of non-contradiction is violated in order to posit the difference between the eternal and temporal present; and we must do so, if we are to speak intelligibly about time.

But eternity is only concerns the present reflection insofar as it relates to time. The two other predicates belonging to the term time bear need of some reflection.
If time is a movement from the past, through the present, to the future it is impossible to say whether time had any beginning or ending. The past recedes into the past infinitely; the future proceeds into the future infinitely. This infinite recession and procession, however, are simply other ways of saying that time comes from eternity and returns to eternity; time returns eternally. For the term "infinite" relates not to the movement of time, but the number of moments through which time passes. It hardly needs to be added that an infinite number of moments, regardless whether they belong to the past or future, can only be contained by an eternity.

The term "infinite" as it is used in relation to time signals the past and future horizons of time.The horizons of the movement of time, whether past or future, must be treated with due care. To determine some past moment as that moment at which time begins or some future moment as that moment at which time ends is to collapse the distinction between eternity and time. No, the distinction must be maintained for it is a productive distinction. Nevertheless, to conceive of oneself as moving through time one must avoid making undue determinations about the "essence" of time. Two pairs of eternal determinations should brought to the fore:

1) The only way one could definitively say the past lacked objective reality vis a vis the present moment would be to collapse the distinction between eternity and time and to say past was not past, but eternally present. In a similar manner, the only way one could definitively say the past possessed objective reality vis a vis the present moment would be to collapse the distinction between eternity and time and to say past was not past, but eternally present. Both of these must be avoided with respect to the “essence” of time.

2) The only way one could definitively say the future lacked objective reality vis a vis the present moment would be to collapse the distinction between eternity and time and to say future was not future, but eternally present. In a similar manner, the only way one could definitively say the future possessed objective reality vis a vis the present moment would be to collapse the distinction between eternity and time and to say future was not future, but eternally present. Likewise, both of these must be avoided with respect to the “essence” of time.

The reality--the word "objective" will be avoided here because of the conceptual baggage which it carries along with it--of past and future can only be understood in terms of the movement of the through the present. Now if the movement of time is ignored, the depth of one’s temporal perception is greatly shortened. The quintessential example of this is provided by the modern Western age, which has been plagued by a great hurry to get to a "better" future. But if the temporal past is seat of ignorance or illusion, so necessarily is the temporal future. This is often missed by the proponents of the metanarratives of progress. So eagerly do they want to unburden themselves of the past, in order to construct for themselves an unfettered future, that they fail to realize that they have unburdened themselves of a temporal future as well. This is why they speak so often of "transcending" themselves; for if one willfully confines oneself to the temporal present moment, all that is left is to assume a mantle of eternity. Hegel’s assertion that philosophy inhabits that element of universality is the paradigmatic example of this sort of conceptual move. His dialectical assent to universality is constructed as a solution to the principle of non-contradiction which states that ~(X. ~X). He constructs a formula for the identity of identity with non-identity: the individual X1 is X1, X1 is also ~X2, and that ~X2 in turn shows itself to be the universal X, or (X1. ~X2).

Hegel’s dialectical assent to universality is only made possible by the temporal movement of the Spirit from the past, through the present, to the future. But on the terms that he sets out, the distinction between eternity and time collapses and the temporal past lacks reality vis a vis, or collapses into, the temporal present moment. (How else does he impart the semblance of movement to Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover?) The result is that Hegel assigns to the eternity, i.e. (X1. ~X2), what in actuality is a product of the necessary violation of the principle of non-contradiction so long as one is to speak intelligibly about time, i.e. the distinct yet indistinguishable eternal and temporal present moment. The difference cannot be found solely in the eternal moment, the Absolute Spirit, nor solely in the temporal moment, but in the relation between time and eternity. Nor can the difference find its identity in itself, and in so doing reconcile itself to itself, that is, if one wishes to continue to speak intelligibly about time. One is quite free to ignore the eternal-temporal difference, of course, but one abandons any theoretical recourse to conceptualizing time in doing so.

At this point, this reflection will be drawn to a close. The reader is invited to glance at the timepiece that they choose earlier and to note the time once again. Did the "essence" of time change? The timepiece would have measured in terms of hours, minutes, and seconds a change in temporal distance. None of those measurements, however, can be said to contain time. Each of them is infinitely divisible. Rather, time moved through each of those measured moments. What is the conclusion to be drawn here? To say that time "changed," in theoretical terms, involves collapsing the distinction between eternity and time, forcibly containing all times within the present moment in order to exploit the eternal-temporal difference in such a way as to give time the appearance of change, i.e. a dialectical assent or progressive unfolding of a perfect temporal order one finds in the metanarratives of progress.

No, time does not change. It remained what it was, is, and will be: a movement from the past, through the present, to the future. Notice, however, that even if the "essence" of time is movement, one still cannot say with any objective certainty what time is. The present moment is at one and the same time an eternal everything and a temporal nothing: (X1. ~X2). Time is and is not what it always already is, or, time is a movement from the past, through the present, to the future. And so, we return to where this reflection began--eternally.

The identity of identity with non-identity in the present moment creates an insoluble antinomy that cannot be solved on the terms laid out by modern philosophy. Any answer to the instituting question of philosophy, What is...? that collapses eternity and time--e.g. Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida--eliminates the reality the past vis a vis the absolutization of the present moment. By consequence, with such a theoretical move, the temporal future suffers the same fate. (Who says the Roman Catholics are the only ones too "heavenly" minded to be any earthly good? No, the present pope knows better.)

What recourse is left at this point? To honour the necessary violation of the principle of non-contradiction which allows one to speak intelligibly about time, one should avoid any attempt to collapse the distinction between eternity and time, and in so doing, forcing the movement of time to a place of eternal rest. What remains is to investigate how time moves through all the moments contained in eternity.

2007-05-31T01:08:00.000-04:00

Is the biblical narrative a linear historical narrative?

I will argue that, though it contains the seeds of linear historical narrative, itself the biblical narrative is not. If one speaks of a linear narrative, one refers to the "Being" or telos around which the narrative takes its form. As I understand it, the Being of a narrative is that idea or guiding tenet which guides a narrative. So one may speak of the point of a story as being its Being. Stories evoke a narrative movement from some point in time to another point ahead in time; stories which explicitly take the form of a history are stretched along a template of "objective" time from a time past to a historically relative time future--one which nevertheless belongs in the past. In both cases, the Being of the story is stretched along. And so it is proper to speak of Being as telos, that is, directed towards its end, its Being.

In order to claim the biblical narrative presents the reader with a linear historical narrative, it is necessary to demonstrate the biblical authors objectified the Being of the biblical narrative. By objectified, I mean to say, "grasped absolutely," mastered the Being of the biblical narrative. In present academic discourse, when post-structuralist seek to eliminate all traces of telos from historical narratives, they are reacting to a modernist over emphasis on the ability of human reason to get at the Being of human existence. Hegel, Marx, and Freud, for example, all had the philosophic perspectives on the Being of human existence, whether that be an idealistic dialectic, and economic dialectic, or a psychoanalytic dialectic. As a lens through which to interpret human history, these dialectics either pushed humanity towards some teleological destination, an eschaton, or, as in the more pessimistic varieties, left humanity in the dialectic flux. Regardless, the Being of human existence was stretched across the template of "objective" time from past, through present, to the future in the form of a telos. And generally speaking, the telos the narratives of modern history are best described as metanarratives of progress. Humanity was going somewhere, as the history demonstrated, and if humanity would continue to plug itself into the telos of the history’s narrative, it could expect bright things. Let’s return to the original question.

Is the biblical narrative governed by a telos? Now the biblical writers don’t propose to "objectify" the Being of human existence. The third chapter of Genesis is a declaration that humanity has lost its way--it doesn’t know who or what it is. One can still argue, of course, that this is still to invest humanity with an understanding of the Being of human existence. That this could be called an "objectification" is beyond contention. But the Being of the biblical narrative is not empirically available. Or if it is empirically available, it is empirically available in a very particular way: the Being of the biblical narrative reveals itself in particular places and times to a peculiar group of people called the Hebrews or the Israelites. When the Being of the biblical narrative revealed itself, it ceased to be a concept that could be mastered and took on the characteristics of an Agent. The Being of the biblical narrative revealed itself, though perhaps not in terms as explicit as these, simultaneously as the Creator and Redeemer God. Hence the Being of the biblical narrative both can and cannot be "objectified": via revelation it can be known, and its purposes for humanity as well, but via the same revelation it cannot. Being as an Agent permits something like "objectification" of those aspects of its Being that it chooses to reveal, but it forever eludes the mastery of permitting itself to be "grasped absolutely"--which means no more than that humanity cannot master its Creator and Redeemer.

The Being of the biblical narrative enters into the life of humanity at certain points in time. Being’s entries into time are always redemptive in their end. String enough of these entries into time in a temporal row and something like a narrative telos is constructed. In other words, the biblical narrative has a destination towards which it is moving, a point for being. But the Being of the biblical narrative does not, strictly speaking, master the narrative. (If it did, we could suspect that the biblical writers had mastered the Being of the biblical narrative. For the narrative would take on a determined linear character.) No indeed, the Being of the biblical narrative allows humanity, which it created, to tell their own narratives. There is no reason to suspect that this in itself is a problem which might interrupt the telos of the biblical narrative. It becomes a problem, however, when the stories told by humanity are stories about Being--namely stories of humanity’s attempts to master Being. Even though this latter from of telling stories is problematic, the Being of the biblical narrative lets humanity go on telling its stories about Being. All such attempts prove to be failures; and the Being which is mastered proves to be quite different than the Being of the biblical narrative.

Humanity's attempts to tell its own stories about Being, thereby attempting to master Being, fails because the Being of the biblical narrative cannot be mastered. The Being of the biblical narrative lets humanity go on telling its own stories about Being for a period of time. Notably this breaks whatever linear telos the biblical narrative would have had, which provides a partial answer to the initial question. At these points a cyclic movement enters alongside the telos of the biblical narrative. The cyclic movement indicates that humanity has fallen away from the Being of the biblical narrative. Being re-enters the narrative after a period of time re-establishing the continuity of the linear telos of the narrative, which provides the rest of the answer to the initial question. Is the biblical narrative a linear historical narrative? Yes and no. The reason for the dual answer rests on the Being of the biblical narrative’s revelation of itself as an Agent. Hence, even for the Biblical writers, who framed their narrative around some Being, the outcome of the story is never, strictly speaking, "objectively" given because the Being of the biblical narrative is permitted freedom to act as it will. One could say that the biblical writers don’t "grasp absolutely" how the narrative will end. But given that the Being of the biblical narrative is an Agent, an agent interested in the redemption of humanity, they can hope for a satisfactory conclusion.

What is more, according to the biblical narrative the Being of human existence is the Being of the biblical narrative: the Creator God created humanity in his own image. It follows then that neither can humanity be "objectified" to produce a linear historical telos as per the tendency of modernist historiography which post-structuralist historiography is presently reacting against. Rather, as bearers of the Being of the biblical narrative, human beings are understood in terms of agency. Contrary to post-structuralist predilections, however, humanity’s agency in the biblical narrative is always understood as a moral or religious agency, a Being towards an end, which presently permits a limited sort of "objectification" via what Being chooses to reveal about it, but not mastery.

(A simpler answer to the initial question would have been to point out that the biblical narratives is, properly speaking, a collection of narratives. To that collection of narratives, as disjointed as they first appeared, the label “divinely inspired” has been attached. Inspiration, however one describes its mode, signals the redemptive entry of eternal Being into time. Much Hebrew, Jewish, and Christian reflection on the biblical narratives, both during and after their composition, has strung together these redemptive entries into something like a narrative telos. So, I think it possible to speak of a biblical narrative. At the same time, I shy away from speaking of a biblical metanarrative. Indeed, it is possible to speak of an over-arching or meta- narrative weaving itself through the respective narratives that make up the biblical texts. The term metanarrative, however, risks investing the biblical narrative with a telos, a Being-towards an end, that betrays a strong sense of "objectification," or mastery, of the Being of the biblical narrative. The Being of the biblical narrative, however, cannot be mastered.)

2007-05-29T18:36:00.000-04:00

Nietzsche on the Self in Thus Spake Zarathustra

If Foucault and Derrida can be called the siblings of contemporary post-structuralism, at least insofar as they grew up with it, Heidegger its intellectual father, Nietzsche deserves the honorific title of grandfather. It is Nietzsche who first invites the human race to a gathering celebrating the end of philosophy and the end of history, Heidegger who signs the invitations, and Foucault and Derrida who stand at the door welcoming guests. So much for the colorful opening.

How does one appropriate the widely influential atheist prophet of the Higher Ones, the coming monumental generation of creatures freed from the shackles laid on them by the absurd belief in a Creator? Who are these Higher Ones? we are wont to ask. What can we say about them? Nietzsche himself says very little, though he is quite sure they represent humanity's hitherto repressed potential. The only positive description he can give of them is a negative one: they are not what humanity has been.

A thousand goals have there been hitherto, for a thousand peoples have there been. Only the fetter for the thousand necks is still lacking; there is lacking the one goal. As yet humanity hath not a goal.

But pray tell me, my brethren, if the goal of humanity be still lacking, is there not also still lacking--humanity itself?--

But where does Nietzsche want humanity to go? Inwards and upwards? What guarantee do we have that retreating into ourselves will lead us anywhere? What guarantee is there that once inside we will ascend? And doesn’t this all sound just a little narcissistic? In classical Christian reflection on the subject of humanity, Nietzsche’s priority on the inwards over the upwards is problematic. It’s a reversal of priority, in fact. A few examples that come to mind: At the end of The Last Battle, Book 7 in the Chronicles of Narnia, C.S. Lewis has his characters going further up and further in. Further up places priority on divine being over one’s own being. Persumably, if one is created in the image of God, one must know God in order to know oneself. John Calvin says something very similar in the opening sections of his The Institutes of the Christian Religion: without knowledge of the self there is no knowledge of God and without knowledge of God there is no knowledge of the self. Calvin sets up a vicious circle; for how can one know that one knows if the knowing the self requires knowing God and vice versa? Where might one find firm enlightened ground? Presumably the self is impotent to know that it knows unless the circle is broken by divine revelation (and the movement of grace in the human heart). Saint Augustine speculated that the prideful action which had precipitated the Lucifer’s fall from grace was to retreat into himself (presumably he had intended to gain a beatific vision of his maker) and had become thrilled with his own reflection. Each of these movements follows generally the same pattern: one finds one’s true identity in the one who made you or one fails to find one’s true identity. Thus it matters where one begins. Nietzsche begins by looking in, not by looking up (figuratively speaking). As a result, he is always running away from a definition of the being of humanity. Only able to say what humanity is not, humanity (theoretically speaking) implodes in on itself.

In Thus Spake Zarathustra, Nietzsche provides a brief history of the Self in Western history. First came the pleasure of the herd, then came the pleasure of ego (Descartes'), and finally…humanity itself? The pleasure of the herd encapsulates, with fairly broad strokes, Christian metaphysical and theological reflection from Augustine through to the 14th century. Humanity found its Being, its true Self, in an ascent to divinity. The pleasure of ego, however, meant destruction for the pleasure of the herd: Nietzsche writes, "Verily, the crafty one, the loveless one, that seeketh its advantage in the advantage of the many--it is not the origin of the herd, but its ruin." Where the herd had sought its Being in divinity, the ego sought it in the fetters of loveless nature. Only one goal remained outstanding: to seek its Being, its true Self, in itself. One wonders whether such a prescription of humanity’s woes does not end in inhumanity. Humanity as it presently is ceases to be an end, but rather a means to an end, an end that is defined against what humanity presently is. Would this sort of prescription not end in inhumanity? Humanity as it presently is, is rendered superfluous in the drive to become something that humanity presently is not.

I want to suggest that Nietzsche failed to understand the true Being of the herd. Despite the failings of medieval metaphysics, there was one thing the medieval mind did not think: the "herd" had not achieved its final constitution. That end remained outstanding. Certainly there is ample evidence of a confidence that they were well on their way towards that end. Nevertheless, the idea that, that end could be accomplished without further divine assistance was foreign to the medieval mind. (It will only appear in any significant fashion at a time well after the pleasure of the ego had taken hold of Europe, i.e. in the modern age.) Nietzsche seems to have thought that that medieval mind had brought the "herd" into being--that it was something de facto accomplished. And as something de facto accomplished, something that had to be overcome. Nietzsche's preoccupation with the metaphysical problems first raised by the ancient Greeks blinds him to the other tradition at work on the medieval mind: a redemptive-historical tradition of Jewish origin. The medieval mind, for all its speculative access, was not in fact fueled by eloquent proofs of divinity, nor by an ever increasing ability to logically chop reality into smaller bits. Rather, it was fueled a belief the herd had not yet all been gathered in. In this process, humanity was both a means and an end. Humanity as it present was, was the means by which humanity would come to its end. All this was to happen in accordance with a divine plan--by looking up before looking in. Divinity had shared in humanity as it presently was; and in sharing, had invested it with divine dignity. Or as Augustine said, Christ was both God and man. As God, he was the destination, as man, the way.

Nietzsche's atheistic eschatology is an inheritance, not bequeathed him by his beloved Greeks, but by the same Jewish heritage he is unable to see operating in the medieval mind. There is a sort of willfulness, appropriately so given his cast of mind, that he must assume in order to hold out hope that the Higher Ones are indeed coming when, after having proclaimed the death of God, he is forced to stare into the vicious circle of the Eternal Return and to realize that (theoretically speaking) humanity as it presently is, is humanity as it always will be.

2007-05-28T21:45:00.000-04:00

Are all scientific paradigms equal?

To ask this question is to examine the ambiguous legacy Thomas Kuhn left to the historiography of science. Later in his life, Kuhn admitted the debt he owed to Herbert Butterfield’s The Origins of Modern Science (1949). At best Butterfield was an amateur in the study of the history of science. No matter, though, he was also a pioneer, one of the first to draw the significant attention of the academic world to this particular field of historical inquiry. For Butterfield, changing a scientific paradigm "virtually means putting on a different kind of thinking-cap." Moreover, Butterfield did believe that not all thinking-caps were equal, particularly with regard to the history of science: he did believe there was a scientific revolution. So did Kuhn.

But all this difference has recently been called into question. In the introduction to his book The Scientific Revolution (1998), Steven Shapin writes, "There was no such thing as the Scientific Revolution, and this is a book about it." Now, I propose that a line can be drawn from Butterfield through Kuhn to Shapin that illustrates something of the dilemmas of post-structuralism for historiographical theory. One's notes, for example, at the terminal points of this line that Butterfield believed humanity had discovered something significant about the natural world--and this discovery was like putting on a new thinking-cap--whereas Shapin is far more interested in ideas as expressions of social relations, but whatever purchase those ideas might have had on the natural world is left by the wayside. The typical post-structuralist cop-out: we can't get at the essence of nature, so we can't know anything about it at all.

Though his book is dated, in my own estimation Butterfield does an excellent job navigating the problematic nature/culture divide. (In my own Reformational tradition, this is captured in the distinction drawn between the lawful and normative modalities.) Kuhn does a mediocre job. But Shapin buries nature under the weight of culture--and the ambiguous legacy of Kuhn is to blame.

If one surveys the different scientific paradigms Kuhn treats and pays close attention to the analytic categories he sets up, one notices that he doesn’t want to answer certain questions. He chooses his words quite carefully: paradigms prior to the modern European age are not necessarily unscientific. What does he mean, not necessarily unscientific? He doesn’t elaborate on what he means exactly. He is, however, not willing to say that paradigms prior to the modern European age are scientific. This, I think, is crucial; for he has an idea about what science is, but is unwilling to commit himself to a definition.

The singlemost startling feature of Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) is the sudden reversal of priorities in Chapter XIII. The first twelve chapters are spent demonstrating his basic thesis, that paradigms prior to the modern European age are not necessarily unscienitific. Chapter XIII lays out the thesis that the modern scientific paradigm is the way to the future. Why this paradigm over any other paradigm? Indeed, in the process of demonstrating the not necessarily unscienitific character of all world-historical paradigms, Kuhn is unable to account for why the modern scientific paradigm is the most productive (glaringly so) of all paradigms. As a good historian, he is constrained to acknowledge "[t]he bulk of scientific knowledge is a product of Europe in the last four centuries." Not all scientific paradigms are equal, Kuhn is well aware, but he burns all his theoretical bridges back to an adequate theoretical account of why that is exactly. A dialectical tension emerges in his world-historical narrative, and by the end of the book he quite clearly favors one of the poles.

Herman Dooyeweerd claimed the two dominant motifs of modern European thought were Nature and Freedom, which combined to produce the dialectical religious ground-motive Nature-Freedom. The ground-motives are a remarkably helpful tool for interpreting modern thought. Nature is to Freedom what the scientific method is to the human mind, one absolutely determined, the other absolutely free. Of course, when one applies the scientific method to the study of the human mind, one quite quickly sees the dialectic in action. Questions can be raised: Is the mind free? Is the mind determined by the cause and effect relations between particles in some material substrate? Can the mind enquire after its freedom if it is determined? Or was it determined that the mind should enquire after its freedom?

Contemporary post-structuralism represents the victory of the Freedom motif over the Nature motif. Kuhn himself is a paradigmatic figure in this development. Freedom no longer has to be wrenched from the mechanical maw of Nature’s mouth--as he claims, paradigms prior to the modern European age are not necessarily unscientific, but fails to provide a definition of science. Shapin’s book demonstrates the "logical" consequences of such a stance towards science: nature is swallowed up by culture, that is, human culture, the realm of human Freedom. Kuhn himself, however, was unwilling to walk this road as far as Shapin does, so in the end Kuhn turns around and throws his eggs in Nature’s basket thus conclude that not all scientific paradigms are equal.

I suspect the about-face Kuhn does in Chapter XIII owes itself to a conviction that modern science does in fact get at something essential about the structure of the natural world. Kuhn believes something, and history provides ample evidence for his belief. The Egyptian pyramids have withstood many millennia of sand storms, but drop a nuclear bomb, a relatively recent innovation in human history, and they would crumble quite quickly. The vaguely scientific skillset required to build pyramids historically precedes the scientific exploration of nuclear physics: one comes before the other, and properly so. Shapin’s willful neo-Nietzschean refusal to examine the uncomfortably linear lines, something Kuhn himself throws into question, in the development of modern science, however, ends in absurdities: he must conclude that all scientific paradigms are equal, and that it is merely coincidence that the Egyptians built pyramids and Oppenheimer built the nuclear bomb.

The ambiguous legacy of Kuhn and the absence of Nature in Shapin are both owed to their failure to appreciate subtle thread woven through Butterfield’s narrative. Namely this, modern science arises develops in the Europe at the time it does owing to a peculiar religious attitude towards Nature. Whether the scientist is of theist or later of deist persuasion, it was believed that Nature arose out of an act of divine creation, as did human Freedom. There is something out there that modern science gets at. Modern science, however, does not guarantee its being there. Though if one takes divine creation as one’s point of departure, neither Nature nor Freedom end up being quite what Kuhn or Shapin think them to be.

2007-05-26T20:31:00.000-04:00

Is historicality, as Heidegger claims, at bottom just a further working out of temporality?

At the intersection of the two previous questions, Is history a science? and Does Heidegger think philosophy is a science? arises a certain understanding of the relationship between history and time. History is ontologized. In my own tradition, this same understanding appears in Dooyeweerd’s negotiation of the relationship between the historical and the temporal. This is an understanding of a certain Self-sameness which remains constant throughout human history. It invests the study of human history with an implicit assumption that past historical subjects ought to have shared in the present definition of the Self or understanding of the structure of the human subjectivity. The corollary implication, also implicit, is that past historical subjects did in fact share in this present definition of the Self--and that human history can be interpreted as if they did.

I make this observation in order to raise some concerns I have about a certain Self-sameness which can be found in post-structuralist theory. Heidegger, Foucault, and Derrida, to name the big three, share in common, as a non-rational point of departure, a belief that the human subject/Self is dead. Whatever evidence there is to the contrary, we ought to theorize as if they were, and our theory ought to direct ourselves towards an understanding that we are in fact dead. And in death, we find our liberation. For instance, Heidegger sees Dasein as Being-towards-death. Foucault eschews any question of the good life contained in the philosophical imperative, Know thyself, preferring to focus his analysis on a dead or dying Self. And Derrida sacrifices the Host (Self) of Humanity daily on the Altar of Deconstruction. A rather morbid improvement on Heidegger, Derrida recognized that death, in fact, could not be "objectified,"” a Self-same totality which remained outstanding until the moment of death, so it became necessary to put the Self to death again and again and again ad infinitum.

The politics of the death of the Self is revolutionary and lacks any imperative for reformation. Certainly practical concessions will be made: the revolution cannot be accomplished overnight. But the essence of the death of the Self, particularly in Derrida’s case, is a politics of destruction, implosion, without direction. It demands one raise one’s consciousness: to where, we are not quite sure. Curiously, however, the death of the finite Self is quite infinite: it is a Self that knows no cultural-historical bounds, this despite the fact that post-structuralism is quite clearly a 20th and 21st century philosophical movement. We are all finite creatures, it says, as is "proved" by the ever-present, infinite phenomenon of death.

But history is quite meaningless if history is simply further working out of an existential-ontological analysis of time--time in which only the present moment, as Heidegger points out, is actual. Such a configuration renders times past illusory; times future, fanatical intoxications. Rather, only the present moment is actual, the present moment is finite, and only an infinite handing down of finitude to oneself, an infinite concession to eternity, to death, can raise one’s consciousness to this realization. Where are we going when our consciousness is raised? Presumably eternity. Change the world, time? I can’t, I am dead. Understand the past? Why bother? It is no different than I am. Via a seemingly contradictory movement, it is precisely the realization that I can’t change the world, that I can’t understand the past, that empowers me to do both.

Heidegger, I think rightly, points out that there is nothing in being (entities) temporally present-at-hand that renders them in and of themselves historical. In other words, there is nothing in beings (entities) substantially that is essentially historical. What is essentially historical, and on this point I disagree with Heidegger is Dasein, Being-towards-death, the dead Self. When consciousness is raised to the realization of the death of the Self, Heidegger claims Dasein, that entity which in each case I am, may choose its heroes--heroes past and present. This sounds reasonable enough; we all have our own heroes. But if I was to think that my hero was more "heroic" than your hero, and were to try to persuade you of such, Heidegger would no doubt try to put an end to my illusory Self-deception. "Objectively" the Self is dead--our lives are spent traveling towards that "objectively" determinable destination. You can have your heroes; but "objectively" speaking, they are no more heroic than you or I.

This is insulting to everyone (Heidegger included). From his supposedly detached, disinterested, existential-ontological vantage Heidegger pats the head of us, his children, and assures us that, yes, we can have our heroes. When we grow up and become enlightened adults, however, we must set our heroes aside and see them for what they are: childish distractions. When we grow up, yes, when we raise our consciousness: and the sooner the better. In the study of history this works itself out in an analogous manner: yes, you can try to figure out cultural development, the passing of practices and ideas from generation to generation. When you grow up, however, you must set these preoccupations aside and see them for what they are: childish distractions. Then and only then will to truly be mature historians: choosing your heroes without regard to their cultural-historical location, choosing them just because you can. Or rather, refusing to enquire into one’s heroes cultural-historical location precisely because they and you are culturally-historically located, that is, finite, dead. It should come as no surprise that the same generation of historians who have boldly set out to eliminate all traces of religious belief and rational telos from their historiographies is also the generation that scratches its head unsure of how to solve the problem of contextual relativity. Unfortunately, it does. Most cannot see the consequential connection.

We all believe something about the relation between time and eternity, the finite and the infinite (Heidegger included). But what happens if I believe one of my heroes rose from the dead? Heidegger must answer: such a belief is childish.

2007-05-25T14:18:00.000-04:00

Does Heidegger think philosophy is a science?

To answer this question one would have to provide a definition of what it would have to occur for philosophy to be considered a science. My simple definition of philosophy as science is that one "objectifies" eternity, Being, Presence, in order to conduct one's philosophical investigations. It naturally follows from the answer to this question whether Heidegger thinks history is a science. And Heidegger does indeed objectify eternity.

It is, perhaps, the inevitable fallout of Descartes’ displacement of a divine presence from the center of humanity’s Being with the simple formula, I think, therefore I am, that Nietzsche would draw the conclusion that humanity had killed God. “The God who beheld everything, and also man: that God had to die! Man cannot endure it that such a witness should live.”[1] From Nietzsche, it is a short step to Heidegger to conclude that humanity should find in the center of its Being its meaning in its own death, in Dasein’s Being-towards-death, in the potentiality-for-Being-a whole, in “the possibility of the impossibility of every way of comporting oneself towards anything, of every way of existing.”[2] As he says, “Death is Dasein’s ownmost possibility.”[3]

But Dasein is not dead, yet. Rather, Dasein, as Being-towards-death, is dying. This much is factically, ontically, obvious. The problematic epistemic divide between ontic and ontological which Heidegger must breach in order to conduct his phenomenological inquiry into Being-there functions as a buffer protecting him against drawing a most radical conclusion: that Dasein is already dead. By forcing the epistemic divide, he can appeal to the ontical facticity (or pre-ontological experience) of death—a common everyday occurrence, one to which we all have an “intuitive” access. “Dasein can thus gain an experience of death, all the more so because Dasein is essentially Being with Others. In that case, the fact that death has been thus ‘Objectively’ given must make possible an ontological delimitation of Dasein’s totality.”[4] The Being-there with (Dasein-with) of Others also belongs to the ontical facticity (or pre-ontological experience) of Dasein. But the meaning of Being-with, like the meaning of Dasein’s ownmost Being, can only be understood through the existential-ontological analytic of Dasein.[5] We all have an experience of death of Others, but what does it mean? Heidegger answers,

The full existential-ontological conception of death may now be defined as follows: death, as the end of Dasein, is Dasein’s ownmost possibility—non-relational, certain and as such indefinite, not to be outstripped. Death is, as Dasein’s end, in the Being of the entity towards its end.[6]

In other words, the meaning of death is meaninglessness, the most universal and emptiest of concepts, which Heidegger had ontically determined beforehand. The same “remarkable relatedness backwards and forwards,” the dialectical tension created by forcing apart Dasein’s simulataneously ontical and ontological characters, deprives ontical facticity (and pre-ontological experience) of any meaning in view of the existential-ontological analysis of Dasein’s Being-towards-death. If Heidegger had carefully followed his theoretical definition of the simultaneously ontical and ontological characteristics of Dasein, his own Dasein, he should have concluded that Dasein, he himself, was already dead.

The dialectic arising out of the forced epistemic divide between Dasein’s simultaneously ontical and ontological characters enables Heidegger to conceive of death as something yet to be accomplished. Dasein is on a journey: “Factical Dasein exists as born; and, as born, it is already dying, in the sense of Being-towards-death.”[7] As was noted before, this is factically, ontically, obvious. But it has effect the effect of leaving Dasein between a rock and a hard place—between an ignorance of its ownmost Being, Being-towards-death, and its ownmost Being, Being-towards-death. As ignorant of its death, Dasein is “fallen” away from itself, its ownmost Being, or “thrown” into a world of cares.

Dasein has, in the first instance, fallen away from itself as an authentic potentiality for Being its Self, and has fallen into the ‘world’. “Fallenness” into the ‘world’ means an absorption in Being-with-one another, in so far as the latter is guided by idle talk, curiosity, and ambiguity.[8]

The last three items are characteristic of the inauthentic, everyday existence of Dasein, which, “in its everydayness, has lost itself and, in falling, ‘lives’ away from itself…”[9] Dasein loses itself in the “worldly” objects of its cares, whether that which is present-at-hand or in the Dasein-with of Others, the “They-self.” At first glance, this would seem to render the “world” external to Dasein illusory, something which, in its authentic existence, Dasein, would leave behind. The forced epistemic divide, however, enables Heidegger to accord the external world a measure of ontical (and pre-ontological) “reality,” all the while reserving the theoretical foundation for an interpretation of its meaning for the existential-ontological analytic. As per the hermeneutical circle, every interpretation presupposes some understanding of what is to be interpreted: Dasein is always ahead of itself, projecting itself prior to encountering objects in its experience of the world. This projecting may be characterized as searching. But for what? Dasein is searching for itself, but it will not be able to find its Self in the objects of its “worldly” (ontical and pre-ontological) cares. Heidegger says, “The ‘ahead-of-itself’, as an item in the structure of care, tells us unambiguously that in Dasein there is always something still outstanding, which as a potentiality-for-Being for Dasein itself, has not yet become ‘actual’.”[10] To paraphrase the words of an ancient authority on matters pertaining to living and dying, Dasein’s “heart” is restless until it rests in Dasein.[11] Or, in Heidegger’s words, “In Dasein there is undeniably a constant ‘lack of totality’ which finds an end with death,”[12] in Dasein’s ownmost Being, that is, in the meaning of meaninglessness, in death, the most universal and emptiest of concepts. The journey factical Dasein embarks upon, from birth to death, can be described as a journey from ontical (or pre-ontological) ignorance to an existential-ontological enlightenment in which one resolutely faces the ontical (“objectified”) finitude of one’s existence. Where Descartes presume that the totality of what “I” am was guaranteed by the cogito in life, Heidegger pushes the realization of that totality to the radically individuated experience of death. The moment in which “I” can truly say “I” am, when my dispersed Self truly forms a totality, is the same moment in which “I” am not, in which “I” cease to be. But can the end of Dasein’s journey towards death be reduced to a mere conceptual definition?

http://rgrydns3.blogspot.com/2007/05/cs-lewis.html

[1] Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, trans. Thomas Common (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover Publications, Inc., 1999), 189.
[2] Heidegger 307.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid 281.
[5] Without pointing to the problematic dialectical relation between Dasein’s simultaneously ontic and ontological characters, Lilian Alweis, "Heidegger and 'the concept of time,'" History of the Humane Sciences 15.3 (2002): 117-132, is still able to recognize the paradox it produces in Heidegger’s understanding of death. "The fundamental problem is--strange as it may sound--that there “is” no death in Being and Time. We can experience another person’s demise but not his or her death--in the same way as we can only experience ourself as dying, as comporting ourselves towards death, but cannot experience ourselves as undergoing death. The paradoxical position is thus that we can grasp the certainty of death even though we never die." (126-7) Ontically, Heidegger can point to the "objective" end of Dasein; ontologically, this is cast as Dasein’s Being-towards its end. Alwies argues that this is Heidegger’s "rival metaphysics". "In the end, death is just another name for timelessness, and indeed, eternity." (124)
[6] Heidegger 303.
[7] Ibid 426.
[8] Ibid 220.
[9] Ibid 223.
[10] Ibid 279.
[11] Craig J.N. de Paulo, "The Augustinian Constitution of Heidegger’s Being and Time," American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 77.4 (Fall 2003): 549-568, explores Heidegger’s debt to Augustine in his discussions of "(i) the existential analytic, (ii) everyday Being-in-the-world, (iii) anxiety, (iv) the Being of Dasein as Care, (v) Care and solicitude, (vi) temporality." (549) Theodore Kisiel, The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993) discusses the formative influence Book X of Augustine’s Confessions had on Heidegger’s notion of temporality. (192-217) The comparison between Augustine’s Christian neo-Platonism and Heidegger’s secularized neo-Platonism with reference to the reality of a being/entities beyond Dasein is instructive. Where Augustine holds that the world is created by God in the sense that creation is meaningfully from, through, and to its Creator, Heidegger appeals to the ontic facticity (and pre-ontological) experience, i.e. the "objective" availability, of being/entities, but reserves an interpretation of their meaning to the existential-ontological analytic of Dasein.
[12] Heidegger 286.

2007-05-25T00:22:00.000-04:00

Is history a science?

The single point which I can wholeheartedly, unreservedly, agree with Friedrich Nietzsche is that history is not a science. There is, however, a stubborn persistence among philosophers to regard it as such. Off the cuff one could name Martin Heidegger, and Jacques Derrida, and in my own philosophic tradition, Herman Dooyeweerd, who defend this view. Those who do not hold to this position are numerous: Nietzsche and Michel Foucault, for instance, and the little appreciated Ernst Cassirer. Among Christian scholars the list can be drawn out further: Christopher Dawson, Herbert Butterfield, G.K. Chesterton, C.S. Lewis, Groen van Prinsterer, and perhaps most surprisingly, I would claim, Leopold von Ranke. For whatever reasons (of which I have opinions about), however, the idea that history is a science persists.

The last addition to the list bears further reflection, for Ranke is heralded as the father of modern empirical historiography. A distinction, I would argue, needs to be drawn between the question, Is history a science? and, Can scientific methods be applied to the study of history? Ranke would answer, “No,” to the former and, “Yes,” to the later. Careful attention to the texts, a well elaborated methodology for approaching the texts, these things are indispensable for the study of history. But history itself is not scientific.

The initial question, I think, can be dealt with rather quickly by comparing two further questions. First, what is science? However one answers this question, whether using natural scientific terms like matter and motion, cause and effect, one addresses oneself to the structure of something. Of course, one cannot always capture the essence of that something’s structure, as chaos theory readily demonstrates, but one nevertheless notices patterns emerging. So the simple definition of science I will use here is the theorization about recognizable patterns. Second, what is the subject matter of history? Again, the simple answer would be “the past.” But there is a sort of naiveté found here. We are interested in the past precisely because it is a human past. Likewise we should say that we are interested in history precisely because it is human history. Whether there is something like non-human history is debatable. The non-human becomes historical precisely because humanity shows interest in it; the human element in the non-human cannot be eliminated, in a final sense.

Now compare these two questions, and ask some further questions: Can humanity be captured or reduced to a scientific definition? Do recognizable patterns constitute the be all and end all of being human? My answer parallels my answer to the possibility of applying scientific methods to the study of history, that is, no, even though humanity can be studied scientifically.

The more interesting question is that of why history is not a science. The modern study of science is born in the Renaissance discovery of a human past which was different than the human present. Lorenzo Valla’s debunking of the Donation of Constantine is the quintessential example of this. He realized that terms and phrases and their usage could be dated to a specific historical context. In the broadest sense, his discovery can be characterized as the discovery that humanity is a creator of meaningful content belonging to a historical context. Not the Creator, mind you--Valla was no atheist--but creators; not creatio ex nihilo, but, applied in the loosest sense, creatio secunda. Valla belongs early modern humanist return to the text, ad fontes, which impressed itself powerfully, not only on Renaissance scholars, but on the first few generations of Reformers. Their discovery is quickly summed up by saying, things aren’t quite what they used to be. Indeed, there was a recognition that people, quite literally, had believed differently in past days than they did in the present. Their task became one of recovering, as far as was humanly possible, meaningful content borne of former worlds. Whether they succeeded is another debate, whether any one can recreate a former world is highly doubtful. Still, the task presents itself. The past is a human past; the debt we owe to others is a debt we owe to ourselves.

Sensitivity to historical difference between ages past and present, meaningful historical distance appears in the first years of modern European history as a sustained scholarly interest as a result of a belief in a fractured Present. What I will call here the historical difference arises in a specific religious context: very generally, monotheistic, more specifically, in the context of a revealed religion. Revelation renegotiates the relationship between time and eternity. Time is valorized precisely because God enters into it in some fashion or other. He acts in time, he reveals in time, and, for those of a Christian confession, he himself enters time. The entry of God into time creates the possibility to conceive of "the time of history," the recognition of a fractured Present between a time Past and a time Future. Now, it cannot be denied that humanity is more or less aware of a past--or even what in retrospect might be called a historical past. But world religions like Buddhism, Hinduism, and even the Greek philosophers, could only conceive of eternity as Presence which is Present. Nirvana, Brahman/Atman, Being are a variety of names assigned to Presence. The Past was understood as an extension of the Present and time was generally understood as a mode of deficiency which could only be corrected by the assent to eternity. Revelation signals the entry of an eternal value into time investing it with a value that it had all but lacked. Time remained a mode of deficiency, but deficiency of a peculiar type: namely, time is not the time it was supposed to be in the light of eternity. The entry of eternity into time creates the awareness of a stretching along, temporal distance, a sequence of moments with each bear the stamp of eternity.

These moments of time should be understood as human moments, memories of a human past into which God had entered. As Augustine in former days observed, time is a distention of the mind. The entry of God via Revelation into time is always a redemptive entry, the stretching along, a redemptive-historical stretching. Here we find the non-rational foundations of historical consciousness: a time Past and a time Future, and between them a fractured Present which is neither Past nor Future, sub specie eternitatis. For Augustine, what time “actually” was remained a mystery. As a distention of the mind, time stretched off into the Past and Future vanishing into the horizon of the mind’s eye veiled by human sinfulness which fractured the Present.

In view of the time of history, not all non-rational beliefs are equal. All beliefs are more or less historical, all beliefs recognize an outstanding need for redemption. Most beliefs are much less historical, that is, providing a non-rational ground for Past and Future between which is a fractured Present, and much more temporal, that is, a Present orientation towards Presence, however, than a belief in Revelation. Now we see through a glass darkly, then we shall see clearly. History is not a science; it never was, it never will be.

http://rgrydns3.blogspot.com/2007/05/saint-augustine.html

2007-05-23T23:12:00.000-04:00

Is the Bible a philosophical text?

This is a question that has perplexed me of late. Most people, I suspect, are quite comfortable with designating the Bible as a text, or a collection of texts, from which theological statement may be gathered. How comfortable, however, are we with reading the Bible as a philosophic text? Can it be read as a philosophic text? Both these questions beg a third question: What, in heaven’s name, is philosophy?

Perhaps it is best, for the moment, to set aside the New Testament and repose the initial question in light of the cultural-historical context of the Old Testament. (The Gospel of John would confuse this exploration.) Did the Hebrew or Jewish community in the Old Testament produce any philosophers? If the question is directed towards the historical time frame in which the Old Testament was produced, and not the inter-testamental period, the literary sources from which we can draw conclusions in response to the question raised above are limited to the Old Testament texts due to an extra-canonical silence. Still, an approach to the question is required.

Philosophy means "the love of wisdom". Strictly confined to the literal definition of the term, the Hebrew and Jewish community do indeed qualify as philosophers. A collection of wisdom literature in the Old Testament canon confirms this. Is then the philosophical content of the Old Testament texts limited to wisdom literature? Perhaps not. The beginning of wisdom is the fear of the Lord, the necessity and character of the latter being "revealed" by the Lord. In its broadest sense, it would seem to follow that wisdom is co-terminus with divine revelation. But, no doubt, this line of argument will fail to satisfy the high standards of philosophers.

There is another way to approach this question. If the Hebrew and Jewish community of the Old Testament did not produce philosophers, did they produce theologians? The literal meaning of the term theology is the science of God--or theo-logos, a systematic reflection on the content of revelation. It seems to me, however, that if the Hebrew and Jewish community of the Old Testament produced theologians, they were theologians without logos, that is, theologians without a rational ground (logocentric Being or Presence) on and from which to articulate a systematic reflection on the content of revelation. What they lacked was a rationally circumscribed origin (Origin).

But this, of course, is not to say that they lacked an understanding of God. Here is where, I think, we arrive at the crux of the matter: the Old Testament judiciously avoids describing God. Certainly God is the Creator God, God alone is God, the creative I AM that I AM. But God's ways our higher than human ways, God's thoughts than human thoughts; otherwise put, God cannot be thought beyond what God has revealed about himself. Revelation reveals God, not only as Creator God, but also the Redeemer God (esp. in Isaiah). Revelation reveals that God has done something monumental in human history and will do so something more monumental in the future. God, therefore, is not understand as the rational ground (logocentric Being, Presence, or Origin), but via his Past actions which anticipate a Future fulfillment. A divine Presence in the sense of a rational ground for human knowing which is Present is conspicuously absent from the Old Testament text. God has placed eternity in the hearts of humanity, but they cannot fathom what he has done from beginning to end. The most, perhaps, that can be said is that the Hebrew and Jewish community of the Old Testament affirmed Being without the attendant logocentrism, that is, Presence without a rationally certified definition.

I suspect that if one were to claim that the Hebrew and Jewish community of the Old Testament did not produce philosophers what is really meant is that the community wasn’t Greek. Interestingly, the Greeks tradition was interested in Being or Presence. Were the Greeks, then, theologians? Jacques Derrida would claim so--the Greeks too loved wisdom, but they loved it onto-theologically. Would it follow, then, that being lovers of wisdom and theologians without logos, the Hebrew and Jewish community of the Old Testament perhaps has a better claim for producing philosophers than does the Greek?

An affirmative answer to such a question would no doubt serve to jostle the philosophical applecart a little too much. Consider, however, two of the tasks of philosophy, epistemology and ontology, a theory of knowledge and a theory of existence. Being or Presence figures into both tasks, though in different ways: first as the rational ground of human knowing and second as the ultimate ground of existence. The Hebrew and Jewish communities began with both these tasks by going to Revelation. Revelation revealed the human Present to be a fractured one, which entailed that Being or Presence could only be understood by constantly returning to Revelation. The fractured Present stood between Past and Future, and the fracturing thus produced a sense of movement towards a goal which was yet to be accomplished as was attested to in Revelation. In contrast, the Greek tradition can be characterized as a Present orientation towards logocentric Being or Presence. The historical development of the Greek tradition can likewise be characterized as a continual renegotiation of the Present orientation towards logocentric Being or Presence. In both these cases a cyclic movement appears--a continual return to something, either to Revelation, or to logocentric Being or Presence. Yet it is only Revelation which demands a continual return to Revelation. Logocentric Being or Presence demands an adequate rational explication, but abilities of rationality to provide an adequate explication is not questioned. By demanding a continual return to Revelation, Revelation denies that adequacy.

In both these cases, the cyclic movement which emerges, I would suggest, demonstrates that human thought demands a non-rational ground on which to ground rationality. Revelation demands a non-rational belief in Revelation and its contents--how one rationally explicates the contents of Revelation is of a secondary concern and is grounded non-rationally in Revelation. The continual renegotiation of the Present orientation towards logocentric Being or Presence indicates that one’s starting point, how one stands in reference to logocentric Being or Presence, is of a non-rational character. The continual renegotiation of the Present orientation towards logocentric Being or Presence, however, cannot rationally account for itself. One cannot rationally explain why rationality continually fails. It must rather simply be non-rationally affirmed that it cannot be rationally explicated. One must go to Revelation to first learn, however, that our Present orientation to Being or Presence is a fractured one.

Is the Bible a philosophical text? Perhaps it is, but it is also much more.

http://rgrydns3.blogspot.com/2007/04/sren-kierkegaard_9861.html

2007-04-18T01:00:00.000-04:00

We must stir very strange memories and return to very simple dreams, if we desire some origin that can make man other than a monster. We shall have discovered very different causes before he became a creature of causation; and invoked other authority to turn him into something reasonable, or even into anything probable. That way lies all that is at once awful and familiar and forgotten, with dreadful faces thronged and fiery arms...

This blog has been discontinued indefinitely. The page will remain active as the front door to my home on the web.

Personal writing has been posted here: My Papers

Any quotes that catch my eye in the course of reading will be posted here: Quotes

Email me at: rgrydns@gmail.com

rich

2007-01-02T21:49:00.000-05:00

Bud Light. King of Beer Commercials

Guys, hurry up! The magic fridge is back!

2006-12-19T21:05:00.000-05:00

The answer must be near at hand; there was still the serpent whispering: For God doth know that in what day soever you shall eat thereof, your eyes shall be opened: and you shall be as Gods...

2006-12-19T21:03:00.000-05:00

This blog has been discontinued indefinitely. The page will remain active as the front door to my home on the web.

Personal writing has been posted here: My Papers

Any quotes that catch my eye in the course of reading will be posted here: Quotes

Email me at: rgrydns@gmail.com

rich

2006-11-06T00:00:00.000-05:00

Bush Humour

I am not here. What is here? Isn't here just there without a "t"?

Gobble, gobble!

2006-10-09T01:45:00.000-04:00

White and Nerdy

I'm fluent in Javascript as well as Klingon!

2006-07-10T22:58:00.000-04:00

Picture Perfect Dive. Look closely. rich

2006-07-09T14:14:00.000-04:00

Flooding in Bombay. rich

2006-07-08T00:34:00.000-04:00

Nuclear Fusion--It's Not Fission. As oil prices soar, as concern grows about global warming, and as politicians balance the potential of conventional nuclear power and renewables, there is a growing need for a new source of electricity that combines the capacity of a nuclear power plant with the cleanness and safety of a wind farm. Fusion could, eventually, be the answer. Even fusion's most ardent supporters admit it will be several decades before the technology becomes commercial. But if the physics comes to fruition, it could be very big—just as the oil runs out and climate change accelerates. rich

2006-07-07T00:07:00.000-04:00

On the Father of Science Fiction. Jules Verne, the author claims, had limited powers of the imagination. More than likely, he would have considered time travel absurd. So he deserve the title? rich

2006-07-06T11:15:00.000-04:00

Oil Investment. Middle East investing oil monies in a economically viable future. rich

2006-07-05T11:28:00.000-04:00

2006-07-04T13:24:00.000-04:00

Whose History? Simon Schama claims the study of history is "a resistance against oblivion, against loss," he says. "It tells you about what it was like to be a human being."

Are we to number each and every one of the hairs on our head? . rich

2006-07-03T23:24:00.000-04:00

Jesus is Not A Democrat Either. Anonymous points me to "the other side..." of Randall Balmer's "Jesus is not a Republican" argument with this peice by Joe Carter at the evangelical outpost.

Towards the conclusion of his article, Carter does not so much present the other side of the argument, but transcends it by refusing to wholly identify the Kingdom of God with either party.

He accuses Balmer of arguing "that conservative Christians should stay out of politics because religious informed political positions have no place in a pluralistic society." But that's not quite what Balmer was getting at. I read him as attempting to articulate a different vision of Evangelical political engagement.

For all the flaws in his argument, I believe Balmer makes an effort to come to grips with being Evangelical among a plurality of opinions in democratic America.

Notably, Carter avoids directly adressing Balmer's contention that the religious right in America "prizes conformity above all else." rich

2006-07-02T14:52:00.000-04:00

Agrianism After Modernity? ...more like without a doctrine of Creation. The author seems to argue that a sinful humankind can tear Creation away from a sovereign God and that a faithful humanity can restore it to God. So much for God's sovereignty; so much for faith in the ascended Christ to complete the good work he began in his life, death, and ressurection. rich

2006-07-01T12:24:00.000-04:00

Lighting the Way to a Greener Future. A global switch to efficient lighting systems would trim the world's electricity bill by nearly one-tenth. rich

2006-06-30T12:37:00.000-04:00

Fukuyama is Growing On Me. Not so long ago I would have styled myself more along the lines of Samuel Huntington than a Francis Fukuyama, until I read this: After the “end of history” rich

2006-06-29T16:49:00.000-04:00

New Urbanism: A Good Idea?

Sprawl is messy, chaotic, and sometimes annoying. In short, it is everything one expects from a free and democratic society. Leave the neat and clean societies for totalitarian regimes.

rich

2006-06-28T16:49:00.000-04:00

Hear! Hear! Jesus is not a Republican. rich