Analytic Philosophy has become a series of intellectual puzzles to challenge refined intellectual tastes

Quaker/Philosophy What does it mean to be a Philosopher and a Friend?
Friday, November 30, 2007 The Meaning of Life

I can't remember the exact quote but Iris Murdoch says something rather like this: any philosophical theory that you can't live isn't worth reading. Whatever the exact words; I heartily endorse the idea.

Contemporary philosophy, particularly the Analytic Philosophy in which I am trained, has become remote from life. It has become a series of intellectual puzzles to challenge refined intellectual tastes. It was not always so. In ancient times, particularly in the Hellenistic period, philosophy was viewed as medicine for the soul. It was the use of argument and reasoning deployed for the express purpose of curing the suffering of human life.

My question to my fellow Quaker philosophers is this: to what extent do you, in your teaching or your research, seek to address the problem of how to live. Do you see this as a proper part of philosophy or as something arrogant or juvenile (or both)?

This semester I added a few lectures on Hellenistic philosophy to my Introduction to Philosophy lectures and found that students related quite well to the issue of how we should live. Have any of you had similar experiences? Posted by RichardM at 4:18 PM

There is a terminological problem with “immanence” having two meanings

A Secular Age: SSRC Home SSRC Blogs Blog Home About the Immanent Frame About the Editor
Spinoza’s immanence posted by Lars Tønder

Has A Secular Age exhausted the meaning of immanence? That is, does Taylor’s analysis of belief capture the alternatives available to constituencies struggling with the meaning of religion and politics? If it doesn’t, might there be other ways of construing “the immanent frame”? If so, would these alternatives make the frame more receptive to people of different faiths, creeds, and beliefs?
In her provocative essay posted on this blog, Elizabeth Hurd encourages us to probe these questions. She argues that Taylor “dismisses modes of belief/unbelief that come from within Western experience yet operate outside of and often in tension with the Christian categories that animate his extraordinarily rich analysis.” Moreover, she speculates whether “the field of immanence [can] be ‘experience-far’? Can it also hold mystery, and, if so, would this open interesting possibilities?”
I want to pick up on this line of inquiry because it seems critical to what we make of the immanent frame. My hunch is that immanence does not necessarily lead to the “exclusive humanism” of which Taylor is so critical. My hunch is also that by questioning this connection we may (1) see some of Taylor’s own blind spots and (2) create a new frame of experience irreducible to dichotomies of belief and unbelief, naïveté and reflexivity, interior and exterior.

To make this argument, we would have to engage the long history of immanence. From Lucretius’ naturalism over issues of evil in late medieval philosophy to the gay science of Nietzsche, immanence has been a challenge to both atheists and believers. It identifies a surprising agreement among them: while atheists and believers disagree on whether or not to affirm the source of enchantment, they agree that the source itself lies beyond this world. Unsatisfied with how this agreement squeezes out an affirmation of this world, radical immanence takes a third position, fusing enchantment with a worldly orientation to religion and politics.
The fusion finds its boldest expression in the work of Spinoza. Situated at the junction of Judaism and Christianity, Spinoza launched what not only his contemporaries but also subsequent critics thought was a scandalous critique. The critique probes the historicity, legitimacy, and authority of religion. Spinoza’s project in that sense parallels Taylor’s: both reveal a change in the conditions of belief, both investigate the causes of this change, and both aim to make belief more legitimate, more democratic.

Surprisingly, then, Spinoza doesn’t play a prominent role in A Secular Age. On the few occasions that his work does appear, Taylor focuses on the depreciation of religious experience, aligning Spinoza with a movement that resists the enchanted qualities of lived experience. For example, Spinoza’s attempt to write off historical religion as “a pandering to popular fears and illusions” leads to seeing “awe-inspiring acts and experiences of ordinary people…in a derogatory light.” Likewise, by “following a path opened by Spinoza,” we may realize that “our attachment to rational freedom…shows us how we ought to behave.” Finally, the impersonal bent of Spinoza’s God made it possible to “rise above and beyond our particular, narrow, biased view of things, to a view from everywhere, or for everyman, the analogue of the ‘view from nowhere’ which natural science strives to occupy.” On the whole, then, Spinoza seems the perfect candidate for the kind of exclusive humanism that organizes the immanent frame.
Is this really how we should understand Spinoza? A posting on this blog cannot answer this question conclusively. But take the case of prophecy. Skeptical of how individuals might communicate with an otherworldly agent, Spinoza does indeed show how prophecy historically has been used to instill fear in the multitude. And yet this is not all there is to the discussion. For rather than disregarding prophecy tout court, Spinoza makes two additional moves: first, that prophecy relies on imaginative powers; and second, that the authority of prophecy is a moral one. Both moves emphasize the cultural, historical, and affective circumstances of prophetic utterances. Moreover, they downplay prophecies as explanations of natural phenomena while recognizing how prophets are able to inspire new encounters with the world. Spinoza, in order words, does not disregard awe-inspiring experiences, nor does he try to establish the possibility of rational freedom independently of lived experience. Rather, he places both within a broader context in which some—but not all—experiences affirm the enchanted quality of life. A subset of these affirmative experiences might be religious.

If this is the case, we do not have to see Spinoza as a proponent of exclusive humanism. Indeed, a radical immanence like Spinoza’s seems very much at odds with a privileging of the human (whether we understand this privileging in existentialistic or rationalistic terms). It does so because the alignment of God with nature, expressed in the doctrine Deus sive Natura, points to an ontology of connections and crossings rather than separations and domestications. As the impersonal God expresses its power through nature, modes of being emerge as animated flows of embodied material. Some of these modes may be characterized as uniquely human. But the majority will entail a combination of things, humans, and animals. In that sense we may approach the field of immanence in terms of assemblages for whom there are no absolute distinctions between interior and exterior, inside and outside.
But again, this does not mean that there is no space for belief. Here it might be helpful to invoke the work of Deleuze. A follower of Spinoza, Deleuze insists on the need for belief: as he says in his study of cinema, we “need to believe in this world.” For our purposes, the phrase “this world” might be the most significant one. Anticipating Taylor’s analysis, Deleuze identifies a break between the world as it is and the world as we see it, a break that has made us detached viewers of our own lives. (We find here a similar claim to what Taylor calls the “buffered self”.) But rather than turning to a transcendent agent of fullness, Deleuze proposes a transformation of belief as such. This transformation targets what we see and hear within concrete assemblages, reckoning the flows and depths of immanence. To believe in this world is in that sense to perpetuate life, to affirm its cracks and dissonances as sites of undisclosed potentiality. It is, we might say, an immanent enchantment.

I detail these aspects of immanence because they point to a constellation of the immanent frame that differs from the one we get from Taylor’s discussion of exclusive humanism. That is, the field of immanence does not necessarily entail a “victory for darkness” (A Secular Age, p. 376), nor does it simply oppose all modes of religion. Instead, it tries to locate sources of enchantment within this world so that apparent modes of suffering and injustice can be fought at the level of lived experience. This struggle entails faith, belief, and enchantment—in part because no one can master the field of immanence completely, and in part because the registers of faith, belief, and enchantment inspire new perspectives on and encounters with the world. Without engaging this richer account of immanence more affirmatively, Taylor may risk losing an important ally in the struggle for a better world. This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 5th, 2007 at 10:58 am and is filed under A Secular Age. RSS 2.0 feed. One Response to “Spinoza’s immanence”

Robert Bellah: December 5th, 2007 at 11:17 pm Having read Lars Tønder’s contribution, it to some degree parallels some discussions at the AAR panel on Taylor’s book last month. Taylor does seem to use the idea of immanence in a very negative way, but even in the Immanent Frame chapter he distinguishes between open and closed immanence, and it is the latter he is criticizing. There is a long tradition of religious immanence, including even Augustine, and Taylor draws examples from that tradition. So I think there is a terminological problem with “immanence” having two meanings and Taylor is to be sure not clear in distinguishing them.

We seek critics who challenge us to the core, compelling us to rethink our own foundations

Reflections: On anger from Rarefactions: by Andrés Melo Cousineau by amelo14

A questioning spirit, a truly philosophical spirit seems to generate a certain level of discomfort with our lives, for to question is to ask for diverse articulations of what is dearest to us. But not all have the capacity for articulation or patience for conversation that Socrates had; though this does not mean one cannot develop one’s capacity to articulate to a much greater extent than one actually thinks one is able to. Moreover, in seeking articulation one must face oneself in such a way that the presuppositions of our alleged knowledge come to be undermined temporarily in such a way as to generate a healthier more grounded form of being. Some cannot see the end goal of refection and therefore terminate reflection even prior to its beginnings by having recourse to indignation and either, outward-tending, or inward-tending anger.

But the anger itself resides not in the questioner, but rather in the, let me invent this word, “questionee”. What is truly perplexing about Socrates’ life is that, though continuously developing his conversation in private and with only a few citizens he carefully screened, still many sought him for they sensed in him a healthier, if by no means easier or more convenient, form of being. Xenophon’s writings on Socrates record the multiple benefits he provided to many Athenians, including his own child. Or as professor Pangle, a defender of the Socratic life, puts it:

“A revealing and helpful symptom of liberation, indicating that we are in the right track, is our initial anger or moral indignation at the worldview we have encountered: for that indignation is a sign that we have run up against a real challenge, one that does not fit our accepted notions of what is right, and yet that we cannot view it from a cool distance, laugh off as absurd, or shrug off…
In short, we seek serious and thoughtful critics whose arguments draw us, into a true dialogue, in which the very meaning and purpose of our lives is at stake. We seek critics who challenge us to the core, compelling us to rethink our own foundations, and eliciting from us some genuine, if grudging, admiration for the alternative they represent or pose.” (The Ennobling of Democracy, p. 196)

Let us just say in this respect that Plato’s work and a newly developed psychology founded on the interaction of three elements —-reason, spirit ( in Greek, thumos) and appetite—– can be seen as a political attempt by the very founder of political theory to understand the anger related to thumos and to provide us with the reasons both for seeing its crucial and unavoidable importance, as well as for the necessary moderation required in order to provide a healthy political community with healthy citizens within that community. Little wonder Socrates at the end of the Apology sets himself as a model in outright competition with the angriest of all Greeks, Achilles.

Our age has movies for Achilles, not for Socrates. Such moderation requires challenging questions but not all will seek their moderation and an understanding of the crucial limitations of an angered approach (outward or inward based) to life. In this respect as well, we need turn to the Greeks in order to understand why that spirited nature which is thumos for the Greeks, is clearly linked to political and military courage; for surely one must feel a certain anger if one’s own are killed unjustly. In this same vein, the very last chapters of Aristotle Politics entertain the possibility that though such potential anger is politically necessary, it must be radically moderated so that citizens can ensure a certain well-being beyond permanent war. (see, for instance: Ralph Rosen and Ineke Sluiter (eds.), Andreia: Studies in Manliness and Courage in Classical Antiquity, (Leiden: Brill, 2003),) Unfortunately, we must leave the Greeks aside for now. (more…) 5:09 AM

Anonymous and nomadic, impersonal and pre-individual singularities

Whose Transcendental? from Fido the Yak

Deleuze says,

"The error of all efforts to determine the transcendental as consciousness is that they think of the transcendental in the image of, and in resemblance to, that which it is supposed to ground" (The Logic of Sense, p. 105).

I don't undertsand this idea that transcendental consciousness must ground anything, but I must allow that Deleuze has a better grasp than I do on the phenomenology of his day, which is the primary target of criticism in this section. This is what Deleuze means by the transcendental:

"Only when the world, teeming with anonymous and nomadic, impersonal and pre-individual singularities, opens up, do we tread at last on the field of the transcendental" (p. 103).

Whose world? Whose transcendental? I'm a little perplexed.

Memory played an important part in Locke’s philosophy of money

The Book Publications Papers Other Keith Hart
Money in the making of world society 2 20 October 2007
Filed under: Commonwealth, Anthropology — keith @ 10:48 am

Durkheim insisted in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life that we are at once collective and individual. What we know empirically is our own everyday life. But we are also subject to forces whose origins we do not know – natural disasters, social revolutions and death. What is ultimately unknown to us is our collective being in society. Religion is the organized attempt to bridge the gap between the known and the unknown, between the world of ordinary experience and an extraordinary world that lies beyond it. So we worship society and call it God. The chaos of everyday life attains order to the extent that it is informed by ideas representing the social facts of a shared existence. We internalize these beliefs through the heightened consciousness fostered by ritual.

Kant held that society may be as much an expression of individual subjectivity as a collective force out there. Copernicus solved the problem of the movement of the heavenly bodies by having the spectator revolve while they were at rest, instead of them revolve around the spectator. Kant extended this achievement for physics into metaphysics. He wrote, ‘Hitherto it has been assumed that all our knowledge must conform to objects… but what if we suppose that objects must conform to our knowledge?’ In order to understand the world, we must begin with the reasoning embedded in our experience itself. The world is inside each of us as much as it is out there. Our task is to unite the two poles as subjective individuals who share the object world with the rest of humanity.

Kant’s achievement was soon overthrown by a counter-revolution, launched by Hegel and only truly consummated after the First World War, that identified society with the state. As a result, the personal was separated from the impersonal, the subject from the object, humanism from science. Society was now conceived of as an impersonal mechanism defined by international division of labour, national bureaucracy and scientific laws understood only by experts. Not surprisingly, most people felt ignorant and impotent in the face of such a society. But, even if the rules are impersonal, social organization consists of real people doing things with each other...

Memory played an important part in Locke’s philosophy of money. For him a person, by performing labour on the things given to us in common by nature, made them his own. But, to sustain a claim on his property through time, that person has to remain the same; and personal identity depends on consciousness. Property must endure in order to be property and that depends on memory. Money thus expands the capacity of individuals to stabilize their own personal identity by holding something durable that embodies the desires and wealth of all the other members of society. Money is a ‘memory bank’, a store allowing individuals to keep track of those exchanges they wish to calculate and, beyond that, a source of economic memory for the community. One of money’s chief functions is remembering.

Money is intimately linked to democracy as a political principle. This is because its impersonality dissolves differences between people. So we vote with our money whenever we buy something. But this system of voting is vastly unequal. As a result, money not only binds individuals together; it separates them from each other and disrupts community. Ever since Keynes, modern economies have been seen to be driven by the ‘purchasing power’ of people in the mass. The extension of personal credit in the digital age may allow for this power to be realized by individuals to an ever greater degree. The world economy is once more being transformed by radical reductions in the cost of producing a basic commodity, the transfer of information. The era of mass production and consumption may be ending as a result. A lot of information about individuals may now be attached to transactions at distance. Personal identity is being restored to what were not long ago impersonal contracts. If modern society has always been individualistic, only now is the individual emerging as a social force to be reckoned with.

Society and the individual, the impersonal and the personal, are equally necessary to human existence; and working out specific ways of combining them is durably problematic. What is going on is less a shift from the impersonal to the personal, more a change affecting the relationship between the two. Economic history is dialectical. Most people are made quite anxious by being economically dependent on impersonal and anonymous institutions. This is an immense force for reversing the historical pattern of alienation on which the modern economy has been built. So any renewed emphasis on human personality and concrete social relations in economic life must go hand in hand with the search for forms of impersonal society appropriate to such a goal.

Any move towards greater humanism in economy entails increased dependence on impersonal governments and corporations, on impersonal abstraction of the sort associated with computing operations and on impersonal standards and social guarantees for contractual exchange. If persons are to make a comeback in the post-modern economy, it will be as bits on a screen who sometimes materialize face-to-face. We could become less weighed down by money as an objective force, more open to the idea that it is a way of keeping track of complex social networks that we each generate. Then money could take many forms compatible with personal agency and human interdependence at every level from the local to the global.

To turn our backs on markets and money in the name of collective as opposed to individual interests is to reproduce by negation the bourgeois separation of self and society. Moreover, it is not enough for sociologists, anthropologists and institutional economists to emphasize the controls that people already impose on money and exchange as part of their personal practice. That is the everyday world as most of us know it. We also need ways of reaching the parts we don’t know, if we are to avert the ruin they could bring down on us all. Money’s potential to sustain universal connection offers one indispensable means to that end.

Because our ephemeral economic transactions depend on using money, it seems to be more stable than the relations it expresses. Money may thus be conceived of as durable ground on which to stand, anchoring identity in a collective memory whose concrete symbol is money; or it may be viewed as the outcome of a more creative process where we each generate the personal credit linking us to society. When the meaning of money is seen to be what each of us makes of it, we may be ready at last to embrace Kant’s Copernican revolution in metaphysics; and money will be dethroned as the archaic God of capitalism it has become. Short version of the essay posted on 1st May 2007, given at a conference held in Oxford, June 2007 on '21st century anthropology: global process and power'.

My starting premise is that the current academic (left academic?) infatuation with “ethics” is severely misplaced

Rancière (1) from The Pinocchio Theory by Steven Shaviro

I’ve been reading Jacques Rancière these last few weeks, trying to get a grip on what he’s about. I have read four short books of his, so far: The Politics of Aesthetics, The Future of the Image, The Ignorant Schoolmaster, and The Hatred of Democracy. (All of these have been translated, though some of them I read in French, because I happened to have the French editions at hand). There was also a lengthy interview with Rancière sometime this past year in Artforum, which I finally got around to. I haven’t really sorted it all out yet, but I’m making these preliminary comments in order to get a start at it.

I first became interested in Rancière because of the way that he links politics and aesthetics. This is something that, from a different angle, I have been quite interested in. My starting premise is that the current academic (left academic?) infatuation with “ethics” is severely misplaced. I’m inclined to say — though I will not endeavor to back up this statement here — that the category of the ethical (whether understood in Levinasian/Derridean terms, or in ones derived from Spinoza and a Deleuze-inflected Nietzsche) is worse than useless: it is actively obfuscatory when it comes to thinking about actual instances of suffering, exploitation, and domination in the world today. At best, ethical thought leads to the impotent wringing of hands and to empty sympathizing (in the Derridean version), or to optimistic fantasizing (in the Spinoza/Negri version). At worst, it leads to accepting the “tragedy” of the neoliberal world order as the ineluctable Way Things Are.

As I said, I will not try to defend this argument here. I want rather to suggest an alternative: which comes down to evacuating the space of ethics, and replacing it with politics and political economy on the one hand, and aesthetics on the other. Every ethical dilemma needs to be displaced, both into a politico-economic problematic, and into an aesthetic situation on the other. As Mallarme wrote, some 130 years ago: “everything comes down to Aesthetics and Political Economy” (Tout se résume dans l’Ésthetique et l’Economie politique). We need to reverse the direction of Kierkegaard’s Either/Or, and move from the ethical to the aesthetic. This involves, on the one hand, seeing the situations of exploitation and domination that lie behind every ethical dilemma or tragic situation; and on the other hand, disengaging the ways that, in our neoliberal network society (society of the post-spectacle, of the simulacrum, of the proliferation of electronic media and their saturation of the real), the distribution of percepts, affects, and concepts (to use Deleuze and Guattari’s schema) can potentially be altered.

It can be noted that the program I am outlining both relies very strongly on Deleuze and Guattari, both for their analysis of Captial as Body without Organs, and for their unrepentant aestheticism; while at the same time this program distances itself from certain aspects of Deleuze’s — with and without Guattari — Spinozianism and Nietzscheanism. This is the point at which I vastly prefer Whitehead to Spinoza and/or Nietzsche. Though Whitehead never polemicizes about it, his subordination of ethics to aesthetics (but in an entirely un-Nietzschean way, without any of that tiresome pontification about blond beasts and breeding a master race and so on and so forth) is precisely on track with what I am trying to work out. Of course, Whitehead has nothing worthwhile to say about political economy; but in that stalled chapter I hope to get back to shortly, I am trying to work out the ways in which Whitehead’s notion of “God” is homologous to Deleuze and Guattari’s formulations about the Body without Organs (I am referring to the analysis of BwO-logic as capital-logic in Anti-Oedipus, rather than to the far less interesting “make yourself a Body without Organs” stuff in A Thousand Plateaus).

Anyway: this is where I encounter Rancière’s thesis on the “distribution of the sensible.” Rancière argues for a direct connection between politics and aesthetics (one that implicitly leaves out ethics) like this. Immediate aesthetic practices (aesthetics in the sense of Art) both establish and contest the ways in which, and the structures according to which, a given society distributes the “conditions of possibility” for what can (and what cannot) be sensed, felt, and spoken about, and what cannot (aesthetics in the sense of Kant’s “Transcendental Aesthetic,” which deals with time and space as forms of intuition — Rancière, like Foucault, in effect offers us a historicized version of the Kantian a priori argument — cf. The Politics of Aesthetics 13). Rancière offers, in effect, a more subtle version of McLuhan’s claim that new media produce new “ratios of the senses.” (Rancière dislikes McLuhan’s emphasis on media as determining by themselves, independently of “content”; but he rightly attributes to social arrangements that include media technologies the power to redistribute “sensibility” that McLuhan perhaps too simply attributes to the media alone).

The “distribution of the sensible,” which art addresses, and at once accepts as its condition of being, and disputes, is precisely also the ground and the stake of politics — every “distribution of the sensible” thereby also defines who is entitled to speak, and what sorts of things they are able to say. The “distribution of the sensible” defines the rules and the arena for “normal” political and social decisions. But politics, in the radical sense that Rancière champions, is a movement that does not just operate within these parameters, but actively challenges them, seeks to alter them.

In other words: Politics in the conventional sense — which would include both the US presidential election process, and the ways in which policy decisions are made by institutions like the Supreme Court and the Federal Reserve Bank — operates within the parameters of an already-given, socially sanctioned distribution of the sensible. Rancière dismisses this sort of policy-making as oligarchic even in supposedly “democratic” societies like France and the US — it is the work of the “police” rather than actual political engagement, and it always involves domination and inequality. On the other hand, what Rancière calls actual “politics,” and which he also describes as radical democracy, occurs when these background a priori rules, embodied in an official distribution of the sensible, themselves become contested.

Isn't close reading illustrating merely a philosophical relation between form and content?

Le gai savoir philosophy, literature, art, and other things i'm up to and working on, in cambridge, california, new york, princeton, and wherever else i may be Tuesday, December 4, 2007 To literary critics and philosophers, from critical theorists

We get assaulted a lot for being critical theorists. We get assaulted by people who study literature, and by people who study philosophy:

• why aren't we doing the tasks of just one or the other?
• Why can't we stay at the level of the text and read, or go elsewhere and think and be philosophers?

Going into a literature or philosophy classroom and engaging people as a critical theorist immediately produces a sort of crisis (especially in the latter). You see people asking themselves,

• "what does this abstraction have to do with literature?" or
• "what does this particular reading have to do with philosophy?"
• It would be better if we simply went away, wouldn't it?

It might even make our work more rigorous: you see, many among us love that crisis just for the sake of it being a crisis--we tend to be a little ostentatious in our thinking, in our reading, because we cite both of you. So you say, thinking needs to be done by thinkers, reading by readers.

• But can thinking ever completely distinguish itself from reading?

We aren't asking this question: you ask it.

Philosophers, you ask it in the structure of your discipline, in how you write articles (you read and comment on a philosopher), in how you teach a class ("the readings for this week are"), in how you contradict each other ("X misreads Carnap in saying X"), in how you assert ("One must read X in this way"). You ask it in the figure of Heidegger, you ask it in the figure of Wittgenstein, you ask it, perhaps most directly, in the figure of Jacques Derrida (in fact, this is all he means by "text"). You come to us in these figures: we didn't make them do it. You ask it most forcefully when you use an example from a literary text--what philosopher has not done this, if only to illustrate something? When you do this, you gesture in our direction and you ask us how you can do this. We do not ask this question.

Literary critics, you ask it whenever you read, even when you "close read," as you call it: isn't close reading illustrating merely a philosophical relation between form and content? When you close read, you are not merely presuming a connection there between the two, you are demonstrating it, thinking through the question of its validity in a situation, and thus thinking like a philosopher as you read. So you, too, gesture in our direction because you ask us how you can do this. You come to us and ask it in the figure of Samuel Johnson, of Samuel Coleridge, Matthew Arnold, Cleanth Brooks, and Stephen Greenblatt. We do not ask this question.

Can thinking ever be dissociated from reading? This question you put to us, that you burden us with, that you distract us from our work to answer (maybe we should just ignore you), this question can indeed be answered by us.
And not just by answering it in the negative. Critical theory is not a discipline founded only on the premise that there are no differences between thinking and reading. It doesn't just open up in the hole in your discipline, in the problem you have yet to resolve. If this were the case, what legitimacy could you have as a discipline if you could have let this question be posed, if you could have let us exist? We are not just composed of you two. We are more than just you (we are also history, various cultural studies, law, economics, and other disciplines). Nor are we just interdisciplinarity itself. We don't rise and fall with any discipline--only, perhaps, with the people in them.

In fact, we answer in the positive: yes, there is a difference between thinking and reading. And we articulate the contours of this difference--that is to say, not merely comparatively. Critical theory is perhaps most concretely this emphatic yes. But you had to come to us to ask it: you could not merely read, or merely think. Indeed, and this is the heart of the matter, we may answer these questions you come to us to ask because we are you already.
You can't believe this. In fact, you protest against this almost every day. You come to us and ask these questions and then go behind our backs and say that you answered them yourself. You say, you can illustrate this thought merely as a philosopher, or read this text merely as a literary critic. But what remains undeniable is that you have retained a trace of us. You are us when you think or when you read. So to wish us to go away is to wish yourself to go away, to renounce reading if you are a literary critic or reader, to renounce thinking if you are a philosopher or thinker. Thinking needs to be done by thinkers, reading by readers, you say. But if you say this more than just to protest, if you actually enact it and think or read according to its rule, you have given up on your respective task. Posted by Mike at 6:27 PM What is written about: Critical Theory, Literary criticism, Philosophy 1 comments: Mike said... P.S. I am not "we," here. -MJ December 4, 2007 11:14 PM Post a Comment

Discourses that would have never otherwise occurred in the pages of a book, journal, or in a presentation at a conference

Cultural Parody Center Buggering global culture violently
DR SINTHOME IN ”THEY’RE HEEEEEEEEEEEEEEREEEE” Explore posts in the same categories: Random Cultural Observations

***

Dejan of Cultural Parody Center feels my pain. Here and here.

What a wonderful anarchic space we’ve all created, with these aleatory connections and relations, spinning out discourses that would have never otherwise occurred in the pages of a book, journal, or in a presentation at a conference. And within such a space what is it that emerges, but the logos, the pattern, the agon of its own encounter that could have never been prescribed from the outset and that has no state to regulate it save the state that we produce and undo. Such a marvelous and often upsetting web of relations. I hope only that it grows. Roasted Posted by larvalsubjects under Blogging, Boring Stuff About Me

For the Manicheans, this dualism—Good and Evil—constituted the structure of the spiritual world

9-27-04 Calling Bush's Views Manichean Is an Insult to the Manicheans By Dan Skinner Since George W. Bush’s “Axis of Evil” speech on January 29, 2002, his polarizing politics have often been characterized in terms such as a “Manichean struggle with a single overarching enemy called terrorism” (Washington Post, April 19, 2002). Since September 11 the term “Manichean” has been bandied about carelessly in the media as though it were a mere synonym for “binary” or “polar”—suitable for use in describing any worldview comprised of forces of “Good” and “Evil.” A closer look at the etymology of the term, however, reveals that we might have been better off had we elected an actually Manichean president.

The Manicheans were a syncretic religious sect led by Mani, a Buddhist-influenced ascetic born in Baghdad in the 3rd century AD. Like Bush, the Manicheans carved the spiritual world up into two categories—Good and Evil—but, as orthodox dualists, they believed that the forces of Good and Evil were not engaged in some continuous and messianic struggle, but rather that their contrasting presence was the very basis of the spiritual order. For the Manicheans, this dualism constituted the structure of the spiritual world that framed each individual’s relationship with reality. Everyone, they believed, would benefit from identifying the presence of Evil within themselves and should endeavor a personal journey to allow Good to dominate. Evil could never be eradicated; it simply wouldn’t make existential sense to think it could be.
Bush’s public pronouncements of faith have somewhat successfully hidden from the public the reality of how unchristian his particular form of dualism is. The so-called “Doctors” of Catholic theology—Augustine, Aquinas, and Anselm—rejected any such battle between Good and Evil and, in the case of Augustine, rejected the idea that Evil really existed as a concrete entity, for to admit this would be to admit that God creates Evil. Instead, the Doctors conceived of reality as a continuum, where sins take people away from the ideal, but where all human action is gauged in its relative position to “Good,” with the sinful being simply less Good than those who live their lives closer to the word of God.
Ironically, if there is any theological tradition that Bush’s politics embody it is that of another ancient Persian religion, Zoroastrianism—but with a twist. Unlike the Manicheans, Zoroastrian theology was eschatological, premised on the ultimate destruction of Evil, and the collapse of the quasi-dualistic system of Good and Evil that defined its primitive stages. The forces that Zoroaster thought comprised the world were conflicted poles that had not yet reached their point of rest with the triumph of Good. The final state, characterized by a monolith of Good, would rid the world of spiritual weakness and impurity caused by Evil forces. But for the Zoroastrians, and unlike Bush, the triumphant party in this struggle was the entire spiritual world, whhich benefited from a real and non-discriminatory peace. The Zoroastrian quest was spiritual, which eliminated force or violence as options for obtaining peace.
It should be noted that Zoroaster was the same man that Friedrich Nietzsche called Zarathustra, from whose ontology Nietzsche challenged enlightenment conceptions of progress, shunned democracy and surmised that the weak were albatrosses around society’s neck. Nietzsche took the peaceful and hopeful philosophy of Zoroastrianism and stripped it of its optimism, leaving behind not the triumph of Good over Evil, but conflict itself. The one who would triumph in Nietzsche’s dualistic struggle was the “overman,” a superior human who, emancipated from the shackles of morality, embraced struggle as the highest articulation of human existence. For Nietzsche, conflict was a desirable end in and of itself.

This brief theological excursion is only politically relevant today because modern politicians such as George W. Bush have made it so. In drawing upon a dualistic political framework (“Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists”), Bush has positioned himself as the arbiter of good versus evil, a struggle which has come to define the public face of his foreign policy.

The major problem with this mode of thinking is that, aside from Bush’s role as ontological authority, his rigid dualistic politics forces yet another logical distinction: friends and enemies. In Bush’s Zoroastrian world, life is defined not by positive categories that envision a better world, but by a preoccupation with destruction of the Other. Who we are as Americans—at least in W’s America—is determined by who we are not. Once we determine who we are not, then the task at hand becomes to destroy who we are not. The paradox inherent in this formulation is even scarier than it might first appear, for this ontological system is incapable of envisioning a world without enemies and is dangerously close to the ideas suggested by the title of Chris Hedges’s recent book: War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. In military parlance, an “exit strategy” from this battle would result in a loss of our own identity. Therefore, there can be no such exit strategy.
The student of politics will also recognize the more stark historical manifestation of Bush’s ontology. It was the patron philosopher of the Nazi party, Carl Schmitt, who suggested that the state has one essential function: distinguishing friends from enemies. This friend-enemy distinction has two classifying functions: friends make up the members of the national body (based on a number of possible criteria for inclusion and exclusion—race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, religious and political beliefs) while enemies are targeted for destruction in an effort to rid the state of the inconvenient schisms caused by a pluralistic society. It was this pluralism that Schmitt blamed for the weakening of the German state in the 1930s.
In today’s political climate the question is often asked, when or how does this end? The honest observer would be forced to acknowledge that an end is unattainable so long as dualisms remain the ontological building blocks of our political understanding. The Cold War dualism that shaped his father’s worldview has been replaced by new categories, but their fundamental effects are the same. Should the “war on terrorism” somehow end, or at least be rendered insignificant, a new opponent will need to be created, lest America lose a sense of identity in a world of shared values. There needs to be something to be destroyed when the Messiah returns, or else we will have to acknowledge that there really is no urgent need for such a return.

Manicheans—those great dualists who gave the Catholic theologians such a hard time—at least had the vision necessary to find non-destructive meaning in their distinction between Good and Evil. The permanence of these forces allowed individuals to reconcile themselves with the spiritual world as they found it, and not attempt to do violence to what they saw as the very structure of the world, the opposing forces that “give life meaning.” Bush seems willing to put his chips on the triumph of Good over Evil, even at the cost of antagonizing these forces to the point where life during wartime becomes unbearable for those who actually have to put their lives at risk. Meanwhile, we spectators of a purportedly democratic society can only wait for the grand struggle to reach completion.

In this sense Bush’s “Freudian slip” in calling the post-9/11 U.S. mission a “crusade” was a necessary extension of his particular dualistic world view. There is really no alternative in this battle; Good must confront Evil and to “smoke it out of its cave.” The battle, in fact, must be forced. Good says to Evil: “Bring it on.”
Underlying all of this is the question that might follow the construction of any dualism: Did Bush get the categories right? Is he sure who is Good and who is Evil? If not, he is energizing a high-stakes dualistic game based on false distinctions. Of course, those with cooler heads know that the world is too complex and too diverse for such frigid black and white distinctions. But the political reality is that Bush has already made the first move in a risky game that, if not stopped, will yield unpredictable results. Bush has manufactured a political world order out of a spiritual ontology intended to make us better human beings.

Mr. Skinner is an instructor of political theory at Hunter College at the City University of New York. He is a PhD student of Political Theory at the City University of New York Graduate Center, focusing on the relationship between language and politics. Comments (5) Home Newsletter Submissions Advertising Donations Archives Internships About Us FAQs Contact Us All Articles

But it observes the rules of its own self-oblivion, self-opposition, self-limitation

Sri Aurobindo

But to a supermind cognition these three are always an inseparable Trinity, even though one can stand in front of the others and manifest its own spiritual determinates; for each has its primal aspects or its inherent self-formations, but all of these together are original to the triune Absolute. Love, Joy and Beauty are the fundamental determinates of the Divine Delight of Existence, and we can see at once that these are of the very stuff and nature of that Delight: they are not alien impositions on the being of the Absolute or creations supported by it but outside it; they are truths of its being, native to its consciousness, powers of its force of existence. So too is it with the fundamental determinates of the absolute consciousness,—knowledge and will; they are truths and powers of the original Consciousness-Force and are inherent in its very nature. This authenticity becomes still more evident when we regard the fundamental spiritual determinates of the absolute Existence; they are its triune powers, necessary first postulates for all its self-creation or manifestation,—Self, the Divine, the Conscious Being; Atman, Ishwara, Purusha.

If we pursue the process of self-manifestation farther, we shall see that each of these aspects or powers reposes in its first action on a triad or trinity; for Knowledge inevitably takes its stand in a trinity of the Knower, the Known and Knowledge; Love finds itself in a trinity of the Lover, the Beloved and Love; Will is self-fulfilled in a trinity of the Lord of the Will, the object of the Will and the executive Force; Joy has its original and utter gladness in a trinity of the Enjoyer, the Enjoyed and the Delight that unites them; Self as inevitably appears and founds its manifestation in a trinity of Self as subject, Self as object and self-awareness holding together Self as subject-object. These and other primal powers and aspects assume their status among the fundamental spiritual self-determinations of the Infinite; all others are determinates of the fundamental spiritual determinates, significant relations, significant powers, significant forms of being, consciousness, force, delight,—energies, conditions, ways, lines of the truth-process of the Consciousness-Force of the Eternal, imperatives, possibilities, actualities of its manifestation. All this deploying of powers and possibilities and their inherent consequences is held together by supermind cognition in an intimate oneness; it keeps them founded consciously on the original Truth and maintained in the harmony of the truths they manifest and are in their nature. There is here no imposition of imaginations, no arbitrary creation, neither is there any division, fragmentation, irreconcilable contrariety or disparateness. But in Mind of Ignorance these phenomena appear; for there a limited consciousness sees and deals with everything as if all were separate objects of cognition or separate existences and it seeks so to know, possess and enjoy them and gets mastery over them or suffers their mastery: but, behind its ignorance, what the soul in it is seeking for is the Reality, the Truth, the Consciousness, the Power, the Delight by which they exist; the mind has to learn to awaken to this true seeking and true knowledge veiled within itself, to the Reality from which all things hold their truth, to the Consciousness of which all consciousnesses are entities, to the Power from which all get what force of being they have within them, to the Delight of which all delights are partial figures. This limitation of consciousness and this awakening to the integrality of consciousness are also a process of self-manifestation, are a self-determination of the Spirit; even when contrary to the Truth in their appearances, the things of the limited consciousness have in their deeper sense and reality a divine significance; they too bring out a truth or a possibility of the Infinite. Of some such nature, as far as it can be expressed in mental formulas, would be the supramental cognition of things which sees the one Truth everywhere and would so arrange its account to us of our existence, its report of the secret of creation and the significance of the universe.

At the same time indeterminability is also a necessary element in our conception of the Absolute and in our spiritual experience: this is the other side of the supramental regard on being and on things. The Absolute is not limitable or definable by any one determination or by any sum of determinations; on the other side, it is not bound down to an indeterminable vacancy of pure existence. On the contrary, it is the source of all determinations: its indeterminability is the natural, the necessary condition both of its infinity of being and its infinity of power of being; it can be infinitely all things because it is no thing in particular and exceeds any definable totality. It is this essential indeterminability of the Absolute that translates itself into our consciousness through the fundamental negating positives of our spiritual experience, the immobile immutable Self, the Nirguna Brahman, the Eternal without qualities, the pure featureless One Existence, the Impersonal, the Silence void of activities, the Non-being, the Ineffable and the Unknowable. On the other side it is the essence and source of all determinations, and this dynamic essentiality manifests to us through the fundamental affirming positives in which the Absolute equally meets us; for it is the Self that becomes all things, the Saguna Brahman, the Eternal with infinite qualities, the One who is the Many, the infinite Person who is the source and foundation of all persons and personalities, the Lord of creation, the Word, the Master of all works and action; it is that which being known all is known: these affirmatives correspond to those negatives. For it is not possible in a supramental cognition to split asunder the two sides of the One Existence,—even to speak of them as sides is excessive, for they are in each other, their co-existence or one-existence is eternal and their powers sustaining each other found the self-manifestation of the Infinite.

But neither is the separate cognition of them entirely an illusion or a complete error of the Ignorance; this too has its validity for spiritual experience. For these primary aspects of the Absolute are fundamental spiritual determinates or indeterminates answering at this spiritual end or beginning to the general determinates or generic indeterminates of the material end or inconscient beginning of the descending and ascending Manifestation. Those that seem to us negative carry in them the freedom of the Infinite from limitation by its own determinations; their realisation disengages the spirit within, liberates us and enables us to participate in this supremacy: thus, when once we pass into or through the experience of immutable self, we are no longer bound and limited in the inner status of our being by the determinations and creations of Nature. On the other, the dynamic side, this original freedom enables the Consciousness to create a world of determinations without being bound by it: it enables it also to withdraw from what it has created and re-create in a higher truth-formula. It is on this freedom that is based the spirit's power of infinite variation of the truth-possibilities of existence and also its capacity to create, without tying itself to its workings, any and every form of Necessity or system of order: the individual being too by experience of these negating absolutes can participate in that dynamic liberty, can pass from one order of self-formulation to a higher order. At the stage when from the mental it has to move towards its supramental status, one most liberatingly helpful, if not indispensable experience that may intervene is the entry into a total Nirvana of mentality and mental ego, a passage into the silence of the Spirit.

In any case, a realisation of the pure Self must always precede the transition to that mediating eminence of the consciousness from which a clear vision of the ascending and descending stairs of manifested existence is commanded and the possession of the free power of ascent and descent becomes a spiritual prerogative. An independent completeness of identity with each of the primal aspects and powers—not narrowing as in the mind into a sole engrossing experience seeming to be final and integral, for that would be incompatible with the realisation of the unity of all aspects and powers of existence—is a capacity inherent in consciousness in the Infinite; that indeed is the base and justification of the overmind cognition and its will to carry each aspect, each power, each possibility to its independent fullness. But the Supermind keeps always and in every status or condition the spiritual realisation of the Unity of all; the intimate presence of that unity is there even within the completest grasp of each thing, each state given its whole delight of itself, power and value: there is thus no losing sight of the affirmative aspects even when there is the full acceptance of the truth of the negative. The Overmind keeps still the sense of this underlying Unity; that is for it the secure base of the independent experience. In Mind the knowledge of the unity of all aspects is lost on the surface, the consciousness is plunged into engrossing, exclusive separate affirmations; but there too, even in the Mind's ignorance, the total reality still remains behind the exclusive absorption and can be recovered in the form of a profound mental intuition or else in the idea or sentiment of an underlying truth of integral oneness; in the spiritual mind this can develop into an ever-present experience.

All aspects of the omnipresent Reality have their fundamental truth in the Supreme Existence. Thus even the aspect or power of Inconscience, which seems to be an opposite, a negation of the eternal Reality, yet corresponds to a Truth held in itself by the self-aware and all-conscious Infinite. It is, when we look closely at it, the Infinite's power of plunging the consciousness into a trance of self-involution, a self-oblivion of the Spirit veiled in its own abysses where nothing is manifest but all inconceivably is and can emerge from that ineffable latency. In the heights of Spirit this state of cosmic or infinite trance-sleep appears to our cognition as a luminous uttermost Superconscience: at the other end of being it offers itself to cognition as the Spirit's potency of presenting to itself the opposites of its own truths of being,—an abyss of non-existence, a profound Night of inconscience, a fathomless swoon of insensibility from which yet all forms of being, consciousness and delight of existence can manifest themselves,—but they appear in limited terms, in slowly emerging and increasing self-formulations, even in contrary terms of themselves; it is the play of a secret all-being, all-delight, all-knowledge, but it observes the rules of its own self-oblivion, self-opposition, self-limitation until it is ready to surpass it. This is the Inconscience and Ignorance that we see at work in the material universe. It is not a denial, it is one term, one formula of the infinite and eternal Existence.

It is important to observe here the sense that is acquired in such a total cognition of cosmic being by the phenomenon of the Ignorance, its assigned place in the spiritual economy of the universe. If all that we experience were an imposition, an unreal creation in the Absolute, both cosmic and individual existence would be in their very nature an Ignorance; the sole real knowledge would be the indeterminable self-awareness of the Absolute. If all were the erection of a temporal and phenomenal creation over against the reality of the witnessing timeless Eternal and if the creation were not a manifestation of the Reality but an arbitrary self-effective cosmic construction, that too would be a sort of imposition. Our knowledge of the creation would be the knowledge of a temporary structure of evanescent consciousness and being, a dubious Becoming that passes across the vision of the Eternal, not a knowledge of Reality; that too would be an Ignorance. But if all is a manifestation of the Reality and itself real by the constituting immanence, the substantiating essence and presence of the Reality, then the awareness of individual being and world-being would be in its spiritual origin and nature a play of the infinite self-knowledge and all-knowledge: ignorance could be only a subordinate movement, a suppressed or restricted cognition or a partial and imperfect evolving knowledge with the true and total self-awareness and all-awareness concealed both in it and behind it. It would be a temporary phenomenon, not the cause and essence of cosmic existence; its inevitable consummation would be a return of the spirit, not out of the cosmos to a sole supracosmic self-awareness, but even in the cosmos itself to an integral self-knowledge and all-knowledge.

It might be objected that the supramental cognition is, after all, not the final truth of things. Beyond the supramental plane of consciousness which is an intermediate step from overmind and mind to the complete experience of Sachchidananda, are the greatest heights of the manifested Spirit: here surely existence would not at all be based on the determination of the One in multiplicity, it would manifest solely and simply a pure identity in oneness. But the supramental Truth-Consciousness would not be absent from these planes, for it is an inherent power of Sachchidananda: the difference would be that the determinations would not be demarcations, they would be plastic, interfused, each a boundless finite. For there all is in each and each is in all radically and integrally,—there would be to the utmost a fundamental awareness of identity, a mutual inclusion and interpenetration of consciousness: knowledge as we envisage it would not exist, because it would not be needed, since all would be direct action of consciousness in being itself, identical, intimate, intrinsically self-aware and all-aware. But still relations of consciousness, relations of mutual delight of existence, relations of self-power of being with self-power of being would not be excluded; these highest spiritual planes would not be a field of blank indeterminability, a vacancy of pure existence.

It might be said again that, even so, in Sachchidananda itself at least, above all worlds of manifestation, there could be nothing but the self-awareness of pure existence and consciousness and a pure delight of existence. Or, indeed, this triune being itself might well be only a trinity of original spiritual self-determinations of the Infinite; these too, like all determinations, would cease to exist in the ineffable Absolute. But our position is that these must be inherent truths of the supreme being; their utmost reality must be pre-existent in the Absolute even if they are ineffably other there than what they are in the spiritual mind's highest possible experience. The Absolute is not a mystery of infinite blankness nor a supreme sum of negations; nothing can manifest that is not justified by some self-power of the original and omnipresent Reality.

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What von Hildebrand captures in his analysis, is affectivity as a “form” of Jasper’s “non-rational”

Vox Nova Catholic perspectives on culture, society, and politics Home About the Contributors About Vox Nova Jaspers, von Hildebrand and the “non-rational”

In what may be at first glance a seeming turbid assertion, the great German philosopher Karl Jaspers provides a line whose rich insight is yielded only before the affectively awakened spirit: “The rational is not thinkable without its other, the non-rational, and it never appears in reality without it. The only question is, in what form the other appears, how it remains in spite of all, and how it is to be grasped.” Taking a moment to lay-out only a few implements of this philosophical copia, I find the following at hand: the “non-rational” that “appears” in some “form” that perhaps can be “grasped.” By Jaspers’ lights, the non-rational has some discernible form that may be “thinkable” if we can determine, in whatever measure, how it is that the non-rational can be grasped. What Jaspers is not suggesting is that the non-rational can somehow be reduced to brute fact, accessible to full rational scrutiny and analytic dissection. Rather, I take Jaspers to posit a non-rational that is not itself made into an object of reason, but rather is an embracing companion of the rational that, while occasionally glimpsed fleetingly in the spotlight of reason, prefers the recesses of reason’s shadow.

But does not “form” carry with it the sense of rational intelligibility? It can. But if we recall that the Latin forma does not merely mean “shape” or “contour” and that it irreducibly carries with it the connotation of “beauty,” perhaps we may permit ourselves to be taken with Jasper’s “non-rational.” Indeed, if we may appeal momentarily to medieval Christian thought, we represent to ourselves that oft cited, yet oft underdeveloped transcendental known as beauty which is never lags far behind truth and goodness.

I pause to remind myself that this notion of the presence of beauty may well be far from what Jaspers detected within himself as he penned his line on the “non-rational.” But the immediate sense he invokes in me refers me to the experience of beauty as spiritual bedazzlement, enrapturing and trepidation that pronounces its distinctiveness from reason and rational appetite. While it may court reason for a time, it never permits reason to have the last word. I think here especially of the encompassing title of William Barrett’s standard study of existentialism, Irrational Man. While some thinkers have described the non-rational as a mood or an ontological condition—and I find theses descriptions and elucidations not only helpful but intuitively appealing—Dietrich von Hildebrand’s description of the affective sphere comes immediately to mind each time I encounter Jasper’s “non-rational.” Perhaps it is no accident that Jasper’s connection to Martin Heidegger links him to the same phenomenological tradition out of which von Hildebrand emerged. Edmund Husserl himself, the founder of the phenomenological movement, gave little time in his published works to the “non-rational,” yet his most apt pupils (Von Hildebrand and Heidegger) were led to explore its horizons through the phenomenological method.

Lamenting the rather squalid adornment bestowed on affectivity in the history of philosophy, von Hildebrand sought to illume the dignity and value of the “non-rational.” He held that the denial to the “heart” of the spiritual character accorded to the intellect and will was tantamount to the dis-integrating of the human condition. At the center of Von Hildebrand’s analysis of affectivity is his concept of affective response, which entails the intentionality of consciousness, but involves the non-rational. He adopts Husserl’s understanding of “intentionality” from the latter’s Logical Investigations as consciousness in directed orientation to an object. The person and the object enact a rational and meaningful relation through intentional experience in contrast to unintentional experiences, which include all pure states, such as fatigue or irritation, and do not have reference to a known or perceived object. Of these two spheres, the intentional is the higher due to its capacity for spiritual response, since this perception of the object is a transcending experience. There is an intentional partaking and penetration into this object that remains extraneous to me. Correspondingly, as it confronts me, my response to it is directed toward it as I embrace and incorporate it. Affective responses always entail an intentional relation between the intellect and the object, which bespeaks of their spiritual and transcendent quality. Here von Hildebrand keeps the dialectic of the rational and non-relational in sync. Logically following this intention is the fourfold moment of affection: 1. the initial capacity to be affected; 2. the actual act of being affected; 3. the affective response; 4. a new state of affectability whereby the capacity to be affected is vivified. There results from this affective response a new fructification of affectivity from which further affective consciousness my stem. The fourth moment becomes the first in cyclical fashion as affective spontaneity is achieved.

Hence, there is an axiological relation between the actual affective response and the particular event or object which engenders it. The value of an object or event calls for an adequate and proper response that can only proceed from the affective sphere of the human person. It is a response endowed with intentionality and motivation, but also entails what Von Hildebrand calls a “meaningful concerting.” In essence, the response is a giving the object its due in a non-rational way. Here I prefer Jasper’s “non-rational” to Barrett’s “irrational.”

What von Hildebrand captures in his analysis, in my opinion, is affectivity as a “form” of Jasper’s “non-rational.” It need not be the only form, but it is sufficient in itself to convince us that there is, indeed, a non-rational at the heart of human existing that is no less important in giving name to this existing than the so-called “rational.” And on account of this, I cannot but embrace Jaspers’ axiom: “The rational is not thinkable without its other.”

This entry was posted on December 1, 2007 at 10:07 pm and is filed under Culture, Philosophy, Policraticus. trackback One Response to “Jaspers, von Hildebrand and the “non-rational””
Victor Says: December 2, 2007 at 12:11 am
It strikes me that a great deal of what is at issue in the ‘rational/non-rational (irrational?)’ dialectic is, in part, the gradual rise to dominance, at least within post-modern thought, of ‘identity and difference.’ Something cannot attain to its own self-identity with asserting its difference–think for instance of how, on the Aristotelian-Thomistic view, the soul comes to know itself–from the other. Here, Heidegger’s short work on this very subject_Identitat und Differenz_comes to mind, but so does Michel Foucault’s work _Madness and Civilization_, where he notes that madness or irrationality gradually come to be “defined” or thrown into greater resolution through reason’s own concentration upon itself in self-identity and coming to regard madness as l’autre, “the other.”

This is a slightly different analysis than provided above with respect to von Hildebrand, yet I think it one that moves along the same byways to arrive at the same conclusion. I agree then that “The rational is not thinkable without its other,” which is simply to say that identity is not thinkable without the other. In fact, otherness, like beauty mentioned above, seems to be a transcendental itself. At least such is Thomas’s position when, in the opening article of the De veritate, in addition to thing (res), good (bonum), truth (verum), one (unum), being (ens) is understood as aliquid–other. (It is interesting of course that ‘pulchrum’ or ‘formosa’ isn’t mentioned in this text.) It seems to me somewhat legerdemain when Aquinas’s translators substitute ’something’ for ‘aliquid,’ and then put a period at the end of the sentence as if that were the end of the story, for Thomas seems to be suggesting that even being cannot be understood without its other…

In my view Deleuze gives us the ontology required by historical materialism

Off to London… Well Soon from Larval Subjects

I am especially interested in how territories of subjectivity are formed, how forms of life are molded, through various musical refrains, and how this might be thought in terms of Marx’s thesis that “production is immediately consumption and consumption is immediately production” (i.e., not only the question of how to reproduce the conditions of production, but also how to reproduce the conditions of consumption… A problem that becomes pressing in a capitalist milieu when basic needs are met).

In part, I would like to show that distributed subjectivity is not something new, but is in fact the “truth” of subjectivity (in the sense that democracy is, according to Marx, the truth of all social formations). This, I think, resituates the question somewhat and helps to ameliorate some of the doom and gloom surrounding the disappearance of agency. Of course, I, no more than anyone else, do not have questions as to what is to be done. At any rate, the title of the paper is “Territories of Music: Deleuze, Guattari, and the Formation of Territories of Subjectivity”… Or something like that.

I am told that the Newcastle folk are somewhat hostile to Deleuze and Guattari, seeing them as apologists for contemporary consumer capitalism and being better friends with Lacan, Zizek, and Badiou. Needless to say, in my view Deleuze gives us the ontology required by historical materialism. Hopefully I can compelling make this case in some form or other and I am not the recipient of rotten tomatoes or eggs!

Critchley’s “ethics as an anarchic meta-politics”

Despite the failures of any number of the theories – and there are many – of its adherents, the framework that Derrida established with the notion of “democracy to come” does not refuse abstraction as such, but only its formulation and development outside of the relation of engagement. That is, the thought of radical politics can itself only come-to thought on the basis of and through acts of ethico-political engagement, and not as the prescriptive incarnation of universal principles into concrete, material particularities. What is here being refused is any theory that would be deployed in such a way as to be reducible to non-action. And, it is a peculiarity of the “Democracy to Come” that it cannot be invoked without simultaneously insisting on the priority and non-neutrality of the ethical demand to act; and, this action itself always already occurs in the domain of the political – not only is it compromised, but it is partisan [5.]

In this sense, although I have not read anything of Critchley’s book other than the pages 114-123 quoted here, I am heartened by his idea of “ethics as an anarchic meta-politics,” if for no other reason than that he equates the State with the Idealist “fantasy” of the idea of political action, which simply is the very basis for liberal, parliamentary proceduralism. As far as I can see, his project is an absolute refusal of all such illusions – without reserve – and signals the most fruitful way forward for a radical politics.

[1] Despite the obvious brilliance of essays like “Can a Gift Be Given? Prolegomena to a Future Trinitarian Metaphysic” [Modern Theology, 11 (January 1995), 119-61], Milbank’s reading of Derrida on this matter is simply obtuse – and that because of other egregious theological errors that condition that reading. Remember, anything philosophy can do, theology can do better! Cf. also his essay here. And, keeping the work of Graham Priest close at hand, the mere fact that the law of contradiction is violated may – repeat, may – qualify as a paradox, but this does not, nor can it, be elided with theological mystery. (As an aside, in light of Priest’s work, when considered alongside the notion of theological mystery, it might be important, against Lubac’s claim in The Drama of Atheist Humanism, but in continuity with his impulse. to preserve Kierkegaard’s use of “contradiction” rather than his suggestion that “paradox” is more appropriate.)
[2] On this point about the priority of action, thought as a mode of action, and thinking action as distinguished from thinking the idea of action, cf. Maurice Blondel, L’Action: essai d’une critique de la vie et d’une science de la practique (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1950.)
[3] I am undecided on this point since there is something I need to think about regarding these claims and Deleuze.
[4] One would have to include Badiou in this group as well, not only because of the function of the Void in this work, and his Platonism, but also because of what are, in my terms, the blatant proceduralism in his construal of fidelity to the event. He demonstrates this more clearly than other thinker in his category of the “mystic,” which shows his utter inability to actually think the priority of political engagement over the idea of that engagement itself.
[5] As such, when Caputo says that if he did politics, he would develop a liberal democracy, it seems to me he is actually violating the ethical demands implicit in his invocation of that messianic vision. Posted by JD Filed in Christian theology, Idealism, Milbank Responses to “Theorizing Political Practice (II): On Why the “Democracy to Come” Is Not the Perfection of Liberal Ideology, and May Be Its Cure” An und für sich

Dave Belcher Says: Wednesday, November 28, 2007 at 3:07 pm ...Milbank “agrees” with liberation theology on this point–before moving beyond them of course…and that is significant, that he must move beyond them on precisely this point–but for Milbank this begins and ends as a theorized principle of a universal…quite the opposite is obviously the case for liberation theology when they make this same claim…it grows from out of their engagement in the base communities, with the political situation of the poor in the various contexts of Latin America.
Also, on Kierkegaard’s “contradiction”: absolutely. The “paradox” in SK is “the absurd,” not for its logical contradictoriness but because of the impossibility of thinking the God-man…Christendmom is in that sense much easier to swallow. What is even better, Johannes Climacus requires the next step: to think that which cannot be thought.
Where is that Caputo quote from?…that’s really disappointing (like a [BAD] negative play (a double-negative, as we’ve come to expect from Caputo) on Heidegger’s “If I were to write a theology the word Being would not appear in it”). I’ve been saying for years that the most brilliant thing that Caputo has ever formulated is the insight from Prayers and Tears that one must ceaselessly pray for that which cannot arrive to come…as if it is coming.
These are all kind of asides…I’ll respond to the main thesis later…I’m crazy-writing right now. By the way, I have a new baby girl.

Brad Johnson Says: Wednesday, November 28, 2007 at 6:49 pm While I am taken by the ingenuity of your analogy between Milbank & Zizek, I’m not sure I agree with your assessment of “non-action.” To point at the thinking of non-action is not to diminish the demand to act. It is “non-active” only in the sense that it escapes conceptualization, not that it hasn’t happened.
The originary decision (for Schelling / Zizek, the decision to begin) is a more real decision prior to its conceptualization than it is after. It may only make sense after the fact or retroactively, but even then there is a haunting of the remainder, the haunting of this non-act impossibly and actually acting — the trauma of that originary act that is not a part of the “proportionate” reflection that turns it into something. As such, in my view, the thinking of the non-act is itself a more sustained engagement than what you cite as preferable. In effect, the “democracy to come” has always already come, and it is the task of “therapy,” aka reflective engagement, now to engage the trauma of it having done so. (In this sense, Z.’s appeal to the “not-all” is helpful.) The trauma of the non-active political act, of a disproptionate democracy that is not reducible to thinking, for me, opens it to a new kind of activity: that of beginning anew repeatedly (each time, in a sense, always, “for the first time”).

To all this unseen movement and action the subliminal inner consciousness can open our awareness

Sri Aurobindo

In our surface mind we have no direct means of knowing even other men who are of our own kind and have a similar mentality and are vitally and physically built on the same model. We can acquire a general knowledge of the human mind and the human body and apply it to them with the aid of the many constant and habitual outer signs of the human inner movements with which we are familiar; these summary judgments can be farther eked out by our experience of personal character and habits, by instinctive application of what self-knowledge we have to our understanding and judgment of others, by inference from speech and conduct, by insight of observation and insight of sympathy. But the results are always incomplete and very frequently deceptive: our inferences are as often as not erroneous constructions, our interpretation of the outward signs a mistaken guess-work, our application of general knowledge or our self-knowledge baffled by elusive factors of personal difference, our very insight uncertain and unreliable.

Human beings therefore live as strangers to each other, at best tied by a very partial sympathy and mutual experience; we do not know enough, do not know as well as we know ourselves, — and that itself is little, — even those nearest to us. But in the subliminal inner consciousness it is possible to become directly aware of the thoughts and feelings around us, to feel their impact, to see their movements; to read a mind and a heart becomes less difficult, a less uncertain venture. There is a constant mental, vital, subtle-physical interchange going on between all who meet or live together, of which they are themselves unaware except in so far as its impacts and interpenetrations touch them as sensible results of speech and action and outer contact: for the most part it is subtly and invisibly that this interchange takes place; for it acts indirectly, touching the subliminal parts and through them the outer nature.

But when we grow conscious in these subliminal parts, that brings consciousness also of all this interaction and subjective interchange and intermingling, with the result that we need no longer be involuntary subjects of their impact and consequence, but can accept or reject, defend ourselves or isolate. At the same time, our action on others need no longer be ignorant or involuntary and often unintentionally harmful; it can be a conscious help, a luminous interchange and a fruitful accommodation, an approach towards an inner understanding or union, not as now a separative association with only a limited intimacy or unity, restricted by much non-understanding and often burdened or endangered by a mass of misunderstanding, of mutual misinterpretation and error.

Equally important would be the change in our dealings with the impersonal forces of the world that surround us. These we know only by their results, by the little that we can seize of their visible action and consequence. Among them it is mostly the physical world-forces of which we have some knowledge, but we live constantly in the midst of a whirl of unseen mind-forces and life-forces of which we know nothing, we are not even aware of their existence. To all this unseen movement and action the subliminal inner consciousness can open our awareness, for it has a knowledge of it by direct contact, by inner vision, by a psychic sensitiveness; but at present it can only enlighten our obtuse superficiality and outwardness by unexplained warnings, premonitions, attractions and repulsions, ideas, suggestions, obscure intuitions, the little it can get through imperfectly to the surface.

The inner being not only contacts directly and concretely the immediate motive and movement of these universal forces and feels the results of their present action, but it can to a certain extent forecast or see ahead their farther action; there is a greater power in our subliminal parts to overcome the time barrier, to have the sense or feel the vibration of coming events, of distant happenings, even to look into the future. It is true that this knowledge proper to the subliminal being is not complete; for it is a mixture of knowledge and ignorance and it is capable of erroneous as well as of true perception, since it works not by knowledge by identity, but by a knowledge through direct contact and this is also a separative knowledge, though more intimate even in separation than anything that is commanded by our surface nature. But the mixed capacity of the inner mental and vital nature for a greater ignorance as well as a greater knowledge can be cured by going still deeper behind it to the psychic entity which supports our individual life and body.

There is indeed a soul-personality, representative of this entity, already built up within us, which puts forward a fine psychic element in our natural being: but this finer factor in our normal make-up is not yet dominant and has only a limited action. Our soul is not the overt guide and master of our thought and acts; it has to rely on the mental, vital, physical instruments for self-expression and is constantly overpowered by our mind and life-force: but if once it can succeed in remaining in constant communion with its own larger occult reality, — and this can only happen when we go deep into our subliminal parts, — it is no longer dependent, it can become powerful and sovereign, armed with an intrinsic spiritual perception of the truth of things and a spontaneous discernment which separates that truth from the falsehood of the Ignorance and Inconscience, distinguishes the divine and the undivine in the manifestation and so can be the luminous leader of our other parts of nature. It is indeed when this happens that there can be the turning-point towards an integral transformation and an integral knowledge.

These are the dynamic functionings and pragmatic values of the subliminal cognition; but what concerns us in our present inquiry is to learn from its way of action the exact character of this deeper and larger cognition and how it is related to true knowledge. Its main character is a knowledge by the direct contact of consciousness with its object or of consciousness with other consciousness; but in the end we discover that this power is an outcome of a secret knowledge by identity, a translation of it into a separative awareness of things. For as in the indirect contact proper to our normal consciousness and surface cognition it is the meeting or friction of the living being with the existence outside it that awakens the spark of conscious knowledge, so here it is some contact that sets in action a pre-existent secret knowledge and brings it to the surface. For consciousness is one in the subject and the object, and in the contact of existence with existence this identity brings to light or awakens in the self the dormant knowledge of this other self outside it.

But while this pre-existent knowledge comes up in the surface mind as a knowledge acquired, it arises in the subliminal as a thing seen, caught from within, remembered as it were, or, when it is fully intuitive, self-evident to the inner awareness; or it is taken in from the object contacted but with an immediate response as to something intimately recognisable. In the surface consciousness knowledge represents itself as a truth seen from outside, thrown on us from the object, or as a response to its touch on the sense, a perceptive reproduction of its objective actuality.

Our surface mind is obliged to give to itself this account of its knowledge, because the wall between itself and the outside world is pierced by the gates of sense and it can catch through these gates the surface of outward objects though not what is within them, but there is no such ready-made opening between itself and its own inner being: since it is unable to see what is within its deeper self or observe the process of the knowledge coming from within, it has no choice but to accept what it does see, the external object, as the cause of its knowledge. Thus all our mental knowing of things represents itself to us as objective, a truth imposed on us from outside; our knowledge is a reflection or responsive construction reproducing in us a figure or picture or a mental scheme of something that is not in our own being.

In fact, it is a hidden deeper response to the contact, a response coming from within that throws up from there an inner knowledge of the object, the object being itself part of our larger self; but owing to the double veil, the veil between our inner self and our ignorant surface self and the veil between that surface self and the object contacted, it is only an imperfect figure or representation of the inner knowledge that is formed on the surface.

This affiliation, this concealed method of our knowledge, obscure and non-evident to our present mentality, becomes clear and evident when the subliminal inner being breaks its boundaries of individuality and, carrying our surface mind with it, enters into the cosmic consciousness. The subliminal is separated from the cosmic through a limitation by the subtler sheaths of our being, its mental, vital, subtle-physical sheaths, just as the surface nature is separated from universal Nature by the gross physical sheath, the body; but the circumscribing wall around it is more transparent, is indeed less a wall than a fence. The subliminal has besides a formation of consciousness which projects itself beyond all these sheaths and forms a circumconscient, an environing part of itself, through which it receives the contacts of the world and can become aware of them and deal with them before they enter. The subliminal is able to widen indefinitely this circumconscient envelope and more and more enlarge its self-projection into the cosmic existence around it.

A point comes where it can break through the separation altogether, unite, identify itself with cosmic being, feel itself universal, one with all existence. In this freedom of entry into cosmic self and cosmic nature there is a great liberation of the individual being; it puts on a cosmic consciousness, becomes the universal individual. Its first result, when it is complete, is the realisation of the cosmic spirit, the one self inhabiting the universe, and this union may even bring about a disappearance of the sense of individuality, a merger of the ego into the world-being. Another common result is an entire openness to the universal Energy so that it is felt acting through the mind and life and body and the sense of individual action ceases.

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