“So you think you’re a liberal?” or why the concealment of state-worship is destroying the planet

A standard point that liberally minded people bring against any religious perspective is the assertion that they don’t believe anyone should be required or forced to convert from any religion to another. And this is unsurprising – the principle of freedom of religion goes way back in the history of liberal and libertarian thought. But the catch is, for liberals, you’re allowed to have your religion, so long as it isn’t a religion any longer – which is to say, so long as it isn’t the fundamental ground of your social being.

And this is the real religion of liberals – the state. As long as your first allegiance is as a citizen, then subsequent allegiances do not push you out of the in-group. Liberals are not actually tolerant across in/out group lines, they simply draw an in-group line which they pretend to be so obvious that it isn’t there, and then accept everyone right up to the point where a group draws in/out group boundaries that conflict with state loyalty.

Large surprise that Liberals vow for the separation of Church and State – the state is the new religion (which mostly repeats the norms of which ever religion is/was held by the majority or the elite), and the explicit connection of the state to a particular religion is sacrilege - because it puts another religion (in this case, probably Christianity), on the same level as the true religion: the state.

This might be why liberals are so frightened of Islam – for many practicing muslims it is an actual religion, which, unlike most modern forms of Christianity or Judaism, is a more foundational part of identity than allegiance to the state.

Sometimes it is argued that Christianity is one of the first cosmopolitan religion, or at least an important step against tribalism and towards a world where fear of the stranger begins to become neutralized.

The Christian teaching to “love thine enemies” is interesting, but in the end it remains imperialist and genocidal. It doesn’t mean don’t slaughter your enemies in war, and it doesn’t mean don’t kill the heathens – it just means consider your enemies as people basically like you, who are differentiated by contingent aspects rather than essential ones. IIn other words, anyone can convert to Christianity – the in/out group lines are defined, but are fundamentally permeable. If for tactical reasons, it’s not possible to convert someone, their life is of no value – and this becomes very obvious when you study even the recent history of Christianity in Canada. So, a neat teaching, but not really good enough.

The liberal can very quickly point out what is wrong in Christianity – it doesn’t actually shift the frame of moral analysis away from your own perspective – perhaps you must love your enemies, but you needn’t consider the way they order their life as a potential critique of your own framework. The problem with the liberal is that they’ve only created the pretence of considering alternative perspectives – they can love and respect others who practice different forms of life only insofar as everyone shares in fundamental obedience to the state. As soon as people disobey the state, they are criminals, and if they rise against it, they are terrorists and can be shot on site.

But, could the liberal do any better than this? What would it mean for the liberal to give up state-worship, and actually embrace their own ideals of inter subjective tolerance, and re-evaluation of moral codes on a continuos, practical, social level? Well, I think it’s obvious what it would mean – state worship would need to become explicit, and by becoming explicit it would in a sense cease to be “worship”, but instead careful consideration of the extent to which dissent is required and unquestioned authority pathological, as well as the inverse – to what extent is questioning authority pathological, and when should dissent be put down? In other words, liberalism could become honest with itself.

So long as liberalism remains ideology, so long as it maintains itself through various levels of shared deception, anarchism will remain a serious critique of all liberal state worship. The need to create a new world based on solidarity and honesty will not pass – the revolutionaries will always be right about the pathology of the state system. And today this should be more than obvious, when it is considered impossible to raise the highest tax bracket by 1%, when it is impossible to save the world from environmental catastrophe, it is clear that liberalism has become a joke – a thin sheen for corruption, stagnation, and dishonesty.

A truer, more honest liberalism would obey the teaching to “love thine enemies”, but obey it not in the Christian sense, but in the critical-moral sense of not taking your own frame for granted, but always potentially allowing it to come into question when it comes up against that which it excludes. So, stop excluding people’s views because they are “terrorists”, or “radicals”, or “fundamentalists” – maybe you have something to learn from them. Maybe they are more serious than you are, maybe their situations are more honest, less post-modern and consumerist and not engaged in the indefinitely and speedily transforming libidinal desire production machine we call “agency.

The Trip So Far

My European tour 2010 promises to be quite an adventure. A Castle of philosophy in Ireland, a friend in Belfast, and then some mountainous adventures in Switzerland, and hopefully a little hop in to France at the end!

But, my trip to the Castle in Ireland is a voyage in itself. Check here for photos so far. Yesterday I took the 7am train from Toronto to Montreal, to catch a 7pm flight out to Heathrow. The train was uneventful, and I did quite a bit of reading. I read the first hundred pages of “The Weathermakers” by Tim Flannery, a book I actually found on the street on my way to the subway station. The book is good, although a bit out of date (2005). It’s general message – the science is certain enough and we need to start acting to slow global warming – remains true today, with increasing urgency (although, from any reasoned perspective, the urgency was quite great back in 2005 as well). Urgency, however, is not rational – it’s an emotion. Hopefully the emotion or urgency with respect to action on climate change increases in the near future – otherwise, as I learned from Hansen’s book, the venus syndrome is a real possibility.

However, I hadn’t meant to read that book, and I have course reading to finish before the start of the philosophy program on Monday, so I abandoned the book in Montreal. I had quite a good time there, despite only having a half-day. Simon was just finishing packing, and like Totem park and Fairview residences, there was much free-stuff to be had. I took some tea, because I like the idea of having english breakfast tea in my residence room in a castle. We went to the “OP”, which is an outdoor beer garden on the last day of school. We hate charity samosas, and drank 4 beers for 10 dollars – and good beers from the McAusland brewery – Ambroise Blonde, and Griffin extra-blonde ales. The “moment” of the beer garden was standing in line, hearing someone behind the counter yell “We’re out of Moosehead!”. Simon and I laughed expansively – who drinks Moosehead?

Simon’s friends continue to impress me – I met a good number at the beer garden and they remind me highly of people I would have met in first year. Not to say I’m nostalgic – I like my friends now, and I like being friends with 25-35 year olds. But I love the creativity, open-ness of smart kids just getting started. It really makes me think about what kind of school I’d like to teach in – I’ve had fantastic experiences teaching philosophy in high school for short periods, and generally disappointing experiences teaching philosophy at York. My empirical conclusion was to perhaps not teach university philosophy – but perhaps its more a matter of which university one teaches at. The best would be to teach in an integrated first year program like Arts Legacy at McGill, or the defunct Foundations Program at UBC (which still has its website!)

My flight to the UK was delayed 3 hours on the tarmac due to a broken radio. “Everyone knows how the number 2 radio works until it stops working”, I said to the man sitting next to me, and then followed with Jordan Peterson‘s story of a crashed computer caused by instability in the sun. The man I sat next to was actually quite interesting – from Pakistan, moved to Canada in 1989 because he was not able to get a US passport. Upon arriving in Canada, immediately moved to the US, but moved back in 3 days due to hating it. He really noticed a difference between people in Canada and in the United States, and after experiencing it first hand, no longer had an interest in becoming a US citizen. He now works as a chef in Saint-Hyacinthe, near to Sainte Madelaine where I spent a week in grade 6 on an exchange trip. (I’ve been thinking about that trip a lot recently – mostly because I really could do the J’Explore program next year and justify it as a scholarly activity. Apparently doing J’Explore in a small town is like going back to elementary school, mom included (your home-stay parents are paid to cook for you and do your laundry!), except you are old enough to drink.) He still owns shops in Pakistan, and travels back yearly to pay taxes, etc… He agrees that flying is insane – it’s shooting through the sky in a thin tube full of too many people.

He asked me about 2012, what my perspective was on it as a philosopher. I told him about how eschatology is thought within the German Phenomenological tradition – how the idea that the overturning would occur at a single moment in time is (thought to be) due to a mistaken interpretation of time itself. However, I think within the right interpretation of temporality, there is something eschatological about time, and it has something to do with something like “gods”, the divinities, the non-human. I actually believe Global warming might be the “in the face of an absent god” which Heidegger foresaw as a manner of humans “going under” in the Der Spiegel interview. For effect, I might as well cite the relevant passage here:

Only a god can still save us. I think the only possibility of salvation left to us is to prepare readiness, through thinking and poetry, for the appearance of the god or for the absence of the god during the decline; so that we do not, simply put, die meaningless deaths, but that when we decline, we decline in the face of the absent god.

This translation is confusing – I’ve seen “meaningless deaths” translated as “go under” in other places. Another indication that Jim is right and I must learn German, at least Scholar’s German. Anyway, the point is, humanity will not go-under without facing its own inability to recognize that which is radically other to it, that which radically exceeds its power. Global warming is such a phenomena – because while we might know the technical solutions, we do not know how to deal with the socio-psychic blockades against action. Capitalism, insofar as it reproduces irrationality, can either be seen as a lack (humans failing to be perfectly rational), or, we might need to face that humanity has something barbarous about it, and therefore it is not due to something inhuman that we fail to act to save the planet – but rather due to something deeply human, or at least western-historical.

Anyway, the good news is I was booked executive class to Ireland. This is good not because of the flight itself, but because it means i have access to the executive lounge during the 4 hour delay. This lounge is amazing – free expensive beer, expensive wine, expensive food. Rich people sure know to live. What strikes me most about it, however, is the absence of advertising, the total absence of commercialization of the space. This isn’t to say the space is neutral – it privileges certain kinds of body movement, intellectual style (through which newspapers and magazines are available for free), and diet (not so many vegan options). But, there is nothing about the space encouraging me to buy things I don’t need, or to over-consume. The amazing thing about a fridge full of free beer in a place like this is that no one over-drinks. I’ve said before that I think we should get rid of most restaurants and replace them with free food supply for all (non-luxury). I think this would reduce over-eating radically, because of the diminishing marginal price of fast food (always a “better deal” if you supersize). The fact that it works here indicates that it could work in the rest of society – all that’s required is the destruction of the public relations industry.

I should get back to readings for the philosophy program.

Why should non-Christians care about Lent or the Resurrection?

What possible meaning could the sacrifices of lent, or the notion that God came to earth to suffer among men, have for non-Christians? In this entry I will attempt to show that these questions are not so difficult. While it is true that the language of Christianity alienates non-Christians from the meaning of the narratives, a mythical analysis which translates the stories into a more secular, maybe even “existentialist” language, can reveal the genuine power of these stories. The purpose of the following analysis is to show that the Christian experience of Lent and Easter is not merely mythical word-play, but a genuine appropriation of the Christian world-experience.

As a non-Christian, I speak from a precarious position which lacks any moral-authority to speak on-behalf of Christian texts or Christian “word-experience” – if I have anything like Christian world-experience, I have it purely as an existentialist, or as an eschatological Heideggerian. However, as I reject identity politics, my writing attempts to speak not from a particular position but “as anybody” – which is to say, from a particular position, but as a particular position which anyone could take up. In other words, there is nothing inherently valid or invalid about my position – if my analysis reveals anything to anyone, this would be wonderful, but I have desire to declare that my analysis ought be comprehensible to any particular group. That said, I do dedicate the following piece of writing to resolute atheists, of which I consider myself one.

What is Lent? Lent is a period of sacrifice. Christians who participate in lent give up something which they desire in order to free themselves from that desire. The giving up happens in community with other Christians, has dates, and concludes with a celebration (more on that later). In modern consumerist society, the “me” society of ipads, ipods and personal computers (who anymore shares a computer?), any restriction on desire appears as a destruction of your personhood. Worse, any restriction imposed by an arbitrary external power, i.e. the Church, appears as a controlling ideology – a dangerous imposition on human freedom, a stifling of creativity and exploration. Who then today could see value in lent, other than Christians who refuse to acknowledge that God no longer stirs the hearts of men – those passive nihilists who cling to ideals, refusing to acknowledge their devaluation by the rise of man as the ultimate measure on earth?

All this is certainly true. However, at the same time, does not everyone recognize the importance of sacrifice to succeed in our dog-eat-dog society? For instance, what sacrifices do people make to go to university? To have Children? To save money to travel? To quit smoking? In many areas of life, we recognize sacrifice as essential to success. More primordially, all work is sacrifice – the putting off of immediate enjoyment to attempt to secure future well being. Sacrifice, understood as the essence of labour, is what differentiates us from animals. Actually, that is a human-centric bias, in reality many if not all animals work, and exhibit exactly the same behaviour of sacrificing immediate pleasure for the sake of attempting to secure a better chance at survival and flourishing.

Furthermore, doesn’t the exact structure of sacrifice in Lent appear as a supplement to control the excess of immediate gratification in post-industrial society? Don’t we all have addictions today which hold us back – addictions to the internet, to cell phones, to certain kinds of food or drink. One primary way we have of dealing with addictions is to essentialize the addiction, call it an essential property of your human being, and define a human’s being in terms of that addiction no matter how long they have refrained from it. This is not a practice of the church – but alcoholics anonymous. Lent, on the other hand, attempts to establish a better relationship to the addictive element by gaining a distance from it (40 days of committed sobriety). The purpose is not to exorcize the object, but to enable the production of self legislation and control. Heidegger might call this “Freedom”, not the everyday consumer freedom of having a thousand choices, but the freedom of transparency which is gained at the moment when the human is freed from the desires which entrap it.

What might a secularized version of lent look like? The difficulties of secularizing the lent practice reveal the continued strength of religious communities in a world where there is a “question” of God’s existence, and where that existence can be secured only by an epistemic dualism which declares one class of beliefs evaluable on a different standard than all other beliefs (for example, the way Dawkin’s example of a belief in the great spaghetti monster reveals the absurdity of the unsubstantiated “belief” in God). The decision to make sacrifices for the period of lent is a personal decision, made out of conscience, and yet the experience of lent is not a personal experience. Individualistic ipod society might be able to re-value the personal choice of sacrifice in something like Lent, but not the communal being-together in that personal sacrifice. Furthermore, Lent is a period leading up to a community celebration – Easter. While Easter has been secularized along the same lines as Christmas, this secularization has not succeeded in carrying over any of the essential positive moments of the festival as experienced by the religious community over to the capitalist community. Whereas Christmas is about family, easter is only about eating too much chocolate. However, the eating-too-much-chocolate of easter can’t fulfill its essential function for the a-religious community because no one was eating any less chocolate than usual during lent. Therefore, unless Lent were secularized along with Easter, there seems no obvious way that the positive role for personal sacrifice in establishing distance from our everyday addictions could occur outside religious communities.

The elephant in the room in any discussion of Lent and Easter and their possible meaning for secular society is, of course, the resurrection of Jesus Christ. What could this possibly mean for non-believers? I admit, this will be more of a stretch than what I’ve said so far – but I do believe I can make some sense of this story without appealing to belief in an intelligent higher power. First one must ask, “What is the Death of Christ?” – the theological consensus on this issue is that it is not merely Jesus who dies on the cross, but God himself (this is, I’ve been told, not controversial – most Christians believe Jesus is God). This is important – if what died on the cross was not God, then Jesus would be only a deem-God, and the origin of Christianity would be nothing other than Judaism becoming pagan. What does this mean that God dies on the cross? This is not so complex – the standard story says something like God dies on the cross because genuine love for man can not be established but out of an intimacy which can only come to be through becoming one of them, and experiencing all the vulnerabilities of humans. But what does this mean? First, remember that the monotheistic God is usually thought to be omnipotent. What it mean to be omnipotent is that every object of your will becomes reality without resistance. In other words, an omnipotent being does not first think of a world, then labour and bring it into existence (i.e. the way man sacrifices in labour to bring about the fruit of his ideas) – God thinks being into existence. But, in this case, we have an example where God can not simply think being into existence. In order to establish the desired intimacy with his people, God had to experience the vulnerability of being a being who must labour and sacrifice, and worse – have this sacrifice end in a failure: crucification for crimes not committed. From the perspective of man, the sacrifice of Jesus appears at best exemplary, and at worse irrelevant – after all, humans sacrifice themselves for each other all the time, and everyday good people who laboured all their life are put to death for wrongs they did not do. What is essential, then, about Jesus’ sacrifice is that Jesus is not a man but is God. In other words, using the two different terms is the source of the confusion surrounding the meaning of Easter – God is Jesus – and what is essential about Jesus/God dying coming to earth and dying on the cross is the notion that an infinite, omnipotent being would need to experience the finitude of man in order to love his people. This is, I think, far more radical than most Christians admit – it means that God is not, in fact, omnipotent. If God were omnipotent then he could merely think this new relationship with his people into existence. What the resurrection story shows up, therefore, is that omnipotence is not as powerful as it thought – omnipotence lacks the ability to feel the frailty of labour and finitude, and omnipotence can not, as itself, come into empathy with finitude.

The life and death of the Christ figure, therefore, is an ontological statement about the nature of reality of Christian experience. Just as the human condition is finitude and chaos (you labour because the world resists you, and this labour offers no guarantees of success), the ground of being itself (God), even in its omnipotency, experiences a lack in the face of the demand to empathize with non-ominipotent creatures. Omnipotency is not all it was cracked up to be – it cannot think love other than as pure Law, which cannot differentiate between care and concern and fire and brimstone – this is why the God of the Torah / Old Testament is genocidal, i.e. the story of the Battle of Jericho. For God to love man in a way appropriate to man, empathy is not optional, and this empathy can not be thought into existence in originally intuition. Rather, this empathy can only be acquired by God through going-under, walking among us, experiencing labour, frailty, and the failure of good works and truth to result in worldly success. God surely could have known these truths of human existence cognitively, but this was inadequate for Love. This inadequacy shows that the condition of Being itself (i.e. God) is finite, even thought as infinitude. Infinitude produces its own lack – an inability to empathize with tragedy – and because Being (God) desires empathy with all of creation this lack is significant and must be overcome.

What does this have to do with Lent? A Christian friend of mine tells me that the sacrifice of lent, leading up to Easter weekend, is felt/thought as a walking beside Christ – what could this mean? Following my analysis, it is quite clear that it might mean that the failures we experience in our own life, the difficulties we have at making the sacrifices which we believe we ought (and might be wrong about), mirror the suffering of God in his attempt to become adequate to the demands which universal love and empathy place upon him. Just as we suffer from our finitude, God suffers finitude in order to complete his infinitude. Thus, the walking alongside Jesus in Lent is a fidelity to the essence of Being as suffering.

But what is Being for the secular, atheist society? Being is not infinity, or the mystery, or an empathy between finitude and the absolute – rather being is thought as cognizability, rationality, computability. In other words, Being is the mechanizable by man, the organizable and securable to be put on reserve for further ordering. But is being really any of this? Certainly – but not only this. Being is also suffering, chaos, our inability to approach existence which constructs which stably secure our success. Being, in other words, is tragedy, and is failure. The standard notion of Christian Being as redemption and love is wrong (and politically wrong – counter revolutionary and immoral) if it serves to justify the suffering in the world, and put out the dreams of a fair society. However, the Christian notion which I have attempted to express here, that Being is suffering – both of God and of Man, is adequate to the human condition in a way technological being is not.

However, it is not enough to say Being is suffering (or, as Krell says, “God is trauma” or “the suffering of the absolute”) – and not only because of the political worry that the ontological declaration of suffering might be used to justify real political suffering. It is not enough to say “Being is suffering”, or “Being is redemption” or “Being is securability” because being is only any of these things grasped out of the essential thought of the will. The will projects possibilities in advance of itself, and sacrifices in its uncertain attempts to bring them about. Easter demonstrates that God, as Man, is a wilful being. But Being is not only thinkable or livable out of the thought of the will – will individualizes (even in its creation of communities), and will prioritizes abstract thinking (even in its recognition of the importance of emotions like empathy and love). Will is one of the ways man can be towards the world – and the “towards” itself is part of the willful orientation. To think Being other than by way of the Will might be the demand placed upon us by our current historical-ecological position. I have attempted nothing towards this demand in the preceding essay – and even the manner in which I express this other, as a “demand”, reveals that nothing of this thinking has yet occurred.

“Religion as Revolution” at McGill

This weekend I’ve come to McGill with my friend Kate to attend McGill’s Religious Studies’ graduate conference entitled “Religion as Revolution”. It has been a fruitful two day conference, with many new faces and friends made – and definitely something to return to next year, and a place to properly contribute something. =

On friday there were two keynote talks, one by micro historian Johannes Wolfart, and another by Travis Kroeker, a philosopher from the religious studies department at McMaster university. Whereas Wolfart dismissed the categories of “religion” and “revolution” as un fruitful “second order abstractions”, Kroeker expressed a fidelity to both these notions – recognizing the importance of fidelity to universalisms in our possible appropriation of a world changing event to-come. During question period I pointed out that Wolfart’s claim that “there is no data for revolutions” is trivially true – there is no data for any empirical universalities – every abstraction gained from individual examples is subject to the contingency of the possible failure of the next example to be fruitfully explained by the construct. The talks were followed by much wine, and open discussion with the keynote presenters. Kroeker, it turns out, finds my dissertation project very appealing – he encourages me to go on “fighting the good fight” in making Heidegger comprehensible and meaningful to people outside nerdy Heidegger circles.

Today, Saturday, was comprised of 3 seminar blocks and one “salon” block. For a graduate conference, it was huge – there were 3 or 4 panels during each seminar block, and 4 “salons”. The seminar blocks were normal (several presenters, followed by questions). One was especially excellent – a block on “Heidegger, Camus and the critique of modernity”, where a student from Trent gave a particularly excellent paper on the Death of God in Heidegger and the wider situation. The “Salon” block was novel – a block devoted to free and open discussion around a few quotes. The salon I picked, entitled ”religion as critique of global capital” had its tone set by short quotes from Zizek, Freud and Heidegger. The discussion was quite fruitful, with many voices contributing, real disagreements exposed, and many clarifications made present.

The conference was followed by an excellent vegan diner of indian food which, and I’m not kidding here, reminded me deeply of “Curry Point”, a UBC institution. And then the pub, which served pints of Maudite at normal pint-prices. Pints of Maudite ought be illegal – it’s like two pints in one!

Tomorrow it’s back on the train to Toronto – school, courses, papers, grading etc… But – the term is nearly over, and in only one more month I’m off to Ireland for a week long academic festival of methodological nerdyness.

On Rememberance Day

On Remembrance Day we are expected to honour soldiers. Soldiers who made individual sacrifices, for the sake of us – so that we can partake in the value(s) they defended. This is what is asked of us “in return” for their “gift”.

But is this demand without political, contemporary interest? Are we expected to value the soldier’s sacrifice for the soldier’s sake – or is there another purpose, another goal in step with this demand to honour individual sacrifice?

First, what is it exactly that we valourize in a soldier’s sacrifice? We honour the following of orders, the putting-oneself-in-harms-way which is demanded by officers, generals – who do not (or only contingently) put themselves in harms way. This is certainly something expected of soldiers – but is something being hidden, something essential about soldiering covered over by this kind of honour?

We expect soldiers to use their personal private reason to evaluate the moral status of their actions. This is the consequence of the Nuremberg decision – in order to prosecute Nazi’s for participating in war crimes, they must be held responsible for their actions – one’s responsibility cannot be eluded by the argument that one was simply “following orders”.

We could valourize soldiers for this personal decision – for the ability of soldiers in the Second World War to see the rightness of their cause, and the potential soldiers in the Vietnam war to see the wrongness of it. If we honoured soldiers for their personal decision, we would respect draft dodgers as much as war heroes – because they gave up their rights (their right to citizenship – ironically the same right deprived of Jews in the 3rd Reich and which contributed to the rightness of the war against that empire), Remembrance day could not be used as a ceremony that glorifies war, the army, and the inherent rightness of whatever cause our State endorses.

Last year on Remembrance day I saw the military parade marching along Bloor street. In the front, the Canadian Scottish honour guard, complete with kilts and pipes. They marched in perfect harmony. Behind, the “real army” – adult troops, battle hardened. Marching in unison, but not the perfect unison of the honour guard – more a pragmatic, useful unison. Behind them – the cadets. Behind the other regiments both in age and discipline, their not-having-been-to-basic-training was apparent – they could not approximate the order – either perfect or pragmatic – of the first two regiments. What was the symbolic order of this march? On one level at least: the perfection of the symbolic army (honour guard) brings along, justifies, glorifies, the real army (destruction, murder, blood), and inspires the future army (children, the Hitler Youth, etc…) The amazing thing about this march is how literal the representation allowed itself to be: you could actually see the lives to be given up, straggling on behind, while they are dragged along by the iconic perfection of the kilts and pipes.

It is interesting that the only value the soldier’s are thanked for fighting for is “freedom”. Freedom, one could argue, means something quite different now as it meant during the 2nd war – freedom now means not so much freedom to choose your political affiliation, or your way of life, so much as your freedom to choose between the products capitalism gives you to select. There are other values people flight for, such as self-determination. Self-determination is an interesting value since it is key to Woodrow Wilson’s rhetorical intervention in conclusion to the first Great war, and it continuous to be selectively applied to American foreign policy as a justification when convenient, and ignored when inconvenient (such as America’s consistent voting record against U.N. general assembly resolutions in favour of self-determination for the Palestinian people).

I wonder how a society without hypocrisy would celebrate remembrance day? I believe Obama’s Remembrance day speech, in which he has (apparently) said that “If there is a God, he does not celebrate today” can be a clue for us here. Perhaps we, like Obama’s God, would not celebrate. What do I mean by this? Certainly not that we forget the veterans, that we not mourn their passing or thank them for their personal sacrifice for those who went to war, and their courage in the face of officers who would have them commit war crimes in the case of those who in their situation chose rightly not to. Rather that we would find no cause for celebration in this mourning, no way of turning this mourning, this thanks, into a celebration of the state or a glorification of the politics of their struggle. A society without hypocrisy would honour, but not glorify their courage, lest that glorification be used to justify needless conflicts, needless bloodshed, needless sacrifice.

Summer Ponderings, Existential Crisis, Meaning and Purpose

“Back in touch”

This summer I have not spent much time reading and writing. In other words, I have not done much philosophy. I’ve found myself wondering, “What is the point of philosophy?”, “What is philosophy for?”. Of course, easy and bad answers to these questions exist. The usual solution is to posit some principle which you accept as unconditionally valuable and true and them demonstrating some sort of philosophy as a means to it. For instance, if you think politics or global warming or math or physics is really important, I could probably show you why we need philosophy. But this isn’t, and can’t be a serious way of responding to the initial question, “What is the point of philosophy?” because philosophy has in it the notion that all values and beliefs must be put into question. Therefore, attempting to justify philosophy externally requires either an infinite regress, or a suspension of philosophy. In other words, if philosophy is putting everything, even one’s most deeply held beliefs into question, what can the purpose or value of philosophy be? The answer is not difficult – philosophy is valueable in itself and without it, nothing has value. This truth is preserved in worn out catchphrases like Socrates’ “The unexamined life is not worth living”, and Kant’s “Know thyself”.

But the value of philosophy cannot be discovered through catchphrases anymore than the safe operation of complex machinery. In each case what is in question is a practice much more complex than the simple labels we use to refer it. And if the value of philosophy is knowable only through the practice of philosophy, we should not expect to be able to express it adequately in writing. We should not be able to refer to it, but only engage in it.

And yet, this summer has been a summer of abandonment. Perhaps philosophy is only important and fulfilling as long as one continuously engages in it. But in that case, is it just a cult?

It is not as if I’ve stopped doing philosophy because I’ve found some more worthwhile practice to engage in. Or even to consider engaging in. When people ask me, “What would you do if you weren’t going to grad school?”, I haven’t the slightest idea. Very few professions seem worthwhile enough to engage in today. I can’t help but ask myself – sure, being a railway engineer or an architect or an environmental planner are important, but what serious difference would be made in the world if I took up any of those professions? And – to examine the unjustified assumption therein – what is the point of making a difference in the world? To make it better? Who’s “better”? Is that a desire or an obligation?

The answer I come to in these lines of questioning is that without a transcendent Purpose held above all others the value of which is not put into question, whether that be called God or the universal salvation of humanity or continued progress and the end of poverty or freedom or democracy or preventing global warming, then no purposes or values retain the kind of solidity we unjustifiably want when we try to give our life meaning. Meaning does not actually reside in ends but in ongoing activity, our day to day practices, our vacations, our social, intellectual, emotive life.

It is worthwhile to ask what we mean when we say “X gives life meaning”? Do we mean life means X? It seems rather it means life with the addition of X, life gains the quality of “worthwhileness”. But what is worthwhileness? Is it only the absence of existential crisis!?

In Being and Time, Heidegger argues that we fill our life up with occupations, everyday busyness and tasks, and thereby come to ignore that it is us with reference to which these are meaningful. The ignorance of the self as the locus of value is associated with inauthenticity and avoiding existential angst. So, according to that, worthwhileness looks very much like the stuff we fill life up with in order to avoid the fundamental mood of man’s existence.

So, the opportune question arises – is philosophy merely another means of busyness by which to avoid the unpleasant angst which collects man whenever he cannot preoccupy himself? Is it merely the most enlightened way for those that know of God’s death to wait for their own?

A response that has quite a bit of popularity is a sort of back-to-the-land movement in philosophy: “Theory must be grounded in reality!”. This is stupid for two reasons – first because reality is through and through theoretical, and secondly because traditional philosophy wanted nothing other than to know the really real (i.e. for Plato the most real thing is the forms, and the purpose of philosophy is to become acquainted with the forms). (Contemporary physics is incidentally fully Platonic – they are only interested in the forms matter takes on – its shapes, its properties – what is measurable in essence. The idea that the ideal or the formal is disconnected from the real and “abstract”, spoken from contemporary materialism, is nothing but ideological hypocrisy).

My summer has largely been characterized with trying to get “back to the land” in its own ways – traveling across the country by van (and soon by rail), visiting friends in Vancouver and Victoria, spending time at the cabin. Taking the road less traveled has been the watchword – trying to notice the quality of where I am. Trying to find where we are in history, what is history? What is the past? Where is it for us? Where is the future? Always, always trying to find the future. Doing philosophy by doing, in other words is, perhaps, what I’ve been doing. What have I learned? Not nothing. To start I’ve learned that our time is obsessed with its history, usually only insofar as it can remain mysterious and not understood. Perhaps for us history is characterized by wonder. Perhaps wonder at the non-eternity of the present – even the lingering of the past in the present, the non-ability of the present to cover over everything, demonstrates the contingency of the present and hints at the future.

My summer has been a summer of content. Doing things, seeing people. Although, since I haven’t been working very hard I sometimes find that I have less to talk about. Since the “less” I have to talk about is philosophy, this probably makes me more likable.

As I’m writing this entry, the Dayliner is about to arrive in Victoria station. Summing up then – have I come to any conclusions? The purpose of philosophy can’t be anywhere outside philosophy, but philosophy is over. The obvious solution is to become some sort of teacher of philosophy (they teach dead languages after all), although this solution is nothing like “correct” since it requires positing values like “awareness” and “sharing” which themselves can be interrogated and lack stability. A summer of content leads to less content (cries of “get a job!”).

But then, the solution appears immediate and obvious – the purpose is flourishing. This cannot be argued (although many try). Community’s of reciprocal capability – this is the point of a department/office/social network. The key is, without the recognition that the subject is the value-er, the origin of value, one remains in a continuous search for transcendental justification (philosophy). But since all transcendental signifiers – purposes which cannot themselves be put into question (i.e. God or the salvation of mankind) make the basic mistake of pushing the origin of meaning outside the subject they remain engaged in curiosity, occupying oneself to cover up the angst which is man’s basic emotive attitude towards his own location in the nexus of meaning as value-er.

The main objection to solution as “flourishing” – for the Greeks eudaimonia is not “flourishing” because it applies immediately to the eternal and only derivatively to being-in-activity inasmuch as being engaged in an activity can be thought analogously to be aeonic (eternal time, time of ages) as opposed to chronic (clock time). Counter objection: eternity and the chronic are both contingent modalities of temporality. No reason “being well” must be thought primarily in any particular temporal modality. Today, “well” replaced by value, by normativity. Today eternity replaced by future as primary authentic modality. Today, flourishing must be futuristic – but what is the future today? The past recapitulated? The radical new? (Here – more space for thinking).

Why it is necessary to have children.

I must have children – it is not a matter of choice. Why? Because I myself am a child – to not have a child is to act in contradiction with my own existence. Because my generation does not exist independently of the previous one, because we continue the previous generation and intimate the next (intimation in the classroom and the bedroom).

I must have children because it is upon the next generation that the decisions of history rest. Our task, if we have a task, is to further the mechanization and organization of the world such that it can sustain it’s own ordering and securing indefinitely – in other words, be equal to the idea of itself. This task is essentially simple and requires not the power of thought but the power of inquiry and persuasion. This task has been given to us by the previous generation, who could only produce indefinitely, but who could not produce indefinite production itself as such.

The task of the true philosopher in this age is not to “aid with the saving of the Planet” (the production of indefinite producibility), or rather it is not only in this. The philosopher can become technocrat, and may perhaps be commended for this, but this is not a becoming-other in which the philosopher remains a man of Works and of Stillness – rather he contradicts his essence by entering the sphere of production and hubbub.

The task of the true philosopher in our generation is to grasp and hold the seed, to be the rare and the few who do not merely enact other thinking (the true artists of our generation do this), but comprehend it in its truth – and comprehension of other thinking, or the enactment of other thinking is never something like securing a series of propositions or performing an argumentative method.

When the Danger becomes absolute, in other words, after the transcendent danger of world catastrophe is passed and the danger as such becomes immanent (the danger that being will never be grasped otherwise than as an object), then the hermeneutic task of the philosopher will become social – the philosopher/poet/politicien will enact otherwise thinking in stillness and quell the hubbub of objective-determination. This task can never become social while the hubbub continues to produce its own extermination, but only when it becomes absolutely everyday and not threatened by anything at all.

Question of the day: If history in the West since Hegel is determined as the thesis structure of abstract becoming concrete, in other words, having a telic orientation towards its own fulfillment, does the overcoming of western history itself have that structure? Does the grounding question (not “what is”, but “how is?”) gather as a logos towards a futural projection of unity? Or need it not have this telic gathering structure at all – might it have the de-centering sinuous line of physis? Or, does physis gather only futurally?

What’s wrong with secularism today

Flipping through “Walrus” today, I found a review of Charles Taylor’s new book: “A Secular Age”. Apparently, Taylor shifts the question concerning religion in the present context “away from whether belief in God or some higher power is reasonable to whether belief or unbelief are appropriate interpretations of one’s experience in the world”(71-72). This is an altogether sensible proposition – it directs us that the problem with religion is not whether it is true or false (Nietzsche – truth is error, more on that later), but whether it discloses the character of our worldly experience in a manner appropriate to it, or in a manner that alienates it, that covers it up?

I would be fully prepared to side against religion, if the question is posed this way. Almost all religions posit an eternal time which stands removed from our own, in which a God dwells in unchanging permanent endurance. This already misjudges the temporal character of our experience – in which eternity is a character of everyday time. What I mean by this is that we always experience time both as a sequence of events and as an “age in time”, we say we live in “the modern age”, even the name of a year – we can after all ask what the character of 2007 as a whole was, expressed the presence of the eternal, or the aeonic, in our everyday experience of time. (New Years Eve is in fact a celebration of the repetition, the circularity of time – but not time as sequence, time as aeon, as age, as wholeness of duration). “Eternity” as the removed place of god is an abstraction of this sense of aeon which mis characterizes it, and thereby distorts, covers up our primordial experience of time as experiencing the world temporally.

However, it is exactly in the opposite way that Daniel Baird of the Walrus opposes Taylor’s argument:

“A central claim of A Secular Age is that the historical forces behind modern secularism are complex and multi layered, and that, while they open up the possibility of different interpretations of the world, they in no way predetermine them: religion, in this multifarious forms, remains an intellectually and emotionally viable point of view. But however much Taylor insists upon shifting the question from belief or unbelief to interpretations of one’s experience, the question of the truth of a particular religious outlook – whether that involves the existence of a loving God, or the primacy of a particular Middle Eastern prophet, or some less easily definable higher power – still matters. We need to know whether our readings are true or not, whether our ecstatic experiences of transcendence actually refer to something beyond us. In the end, it makes little difference whether the secularization of Western societies s rooted n earlier religious movements or n the ascendancy of the natural sciences. So long as one is not a relativist – and Taylor is no relativistic – the truth of a particular world view becomes urgent. And that is the question Taylor has remarkable little to say about, indeed he seems to avoid it at all costs in A Secular Age.”

So, to put it simply, Baird has in just a few sentences dismissed Taylor’s entire book as “not that important if we don’t want to be relativists”. This entirely misses the point, and covers up what it means to be “a relativist”, and what truth means. It is unclear whether Baird has grasped at all what it means to shift the question of religion from “belief” to “appropriateness”. So, if the Walrus is not capable of dealing with such complex issues of “relativism” and “truth”, suppose I’ll have to do it. (72)
How to begin. In a recent set of comments ensuing from a post concerning Freewill on Sindark’s blog, Milan asserted “it matters in the end little how we describe the world”. I would disagree with the face meaning of this statement, and I’m sure he does as well – it matters to us (we are the one’s who make values after all, we are the value-making animals) very much how we describe the world, this is something we care about. It is only because it matters to us in the sense of caring and valuing that religious intolerance becomes poignant and violent. There is thus no surprise that we see violence, although usually not bloody violence, between the religious viewpoint and the secular one – both sides care very much about how they describe the world. But, why do they care? Baird inadvertently answers this perfectly, they care because they believe it matters whether their view is true, whether the beyond to which they transcend is real. Taylor’s criticism of this position on both the religious and secular level is that the position that my view or your view of transcendence is a “true reading” and corresponds to something “real” is simply mistaken. So far as the objects of our experience, the answer is simple – science describes them best, and for the most part the religious centre no longer disagrees that science in fact describes the world. The question which remains, which is a mistake founded in religion but taken up by science, is whether science or religion describes the world “as it is in itself”, in other words “in abstraction from our human experience”. Kant already asserted this was the question to which there are no answers, we simply could not know if the world as a thing abstracted from all experience was the same thing which was given to us in experience – the “in itself” is just a bad idea which refuses to go away.

It is precisely this “in itself” which Taylor’s change in emphasis to “appropriate to our human experience” attempts to sidestep – he no longer wants to talk about whether God is “real” or not, (a stupid, mistaken question, which Science and religion ought stop talking about), but whether “religious experience” is actually a phenomenal character of our experience. As Taylor asserts, whether or not phenomenal experience is religious depends largely on what we take the world to be – if we believe the world to be the kind of thing created by God, then “such catastrophic events as floods, famines, and plagues were seen as acts of God”(72). However, it is not as simple as an input-output model, because we can in fact evaluate whether the belief in God and therefore the showing up of these events as acts of god is appropriate to our human experience, and this is not as easy a question as we might first assume. One could say, “oh, but floods and famines can be explained entirely in terms of the forces of nature and politics”. That may be true, but this takes floods as abstract objects – not as the objects of our experience. When you experience a flood, it appears as an force so powerful it exceeds the grasp of your cognition – Kant called this terror the “Sublime”, and the romantic poets tried to capture it in lyric and art. It must be admitted that the scientific understanding does not appear to be appropriate to the experience of a flood or a famine. This does not prove the existence of God at all – rather I would assert that Science succeeds so well at grasping nature precisely because it doesn’t burden itself with capturing the particular character of my experience. It does however, prove a limitation to Science as a way of understanding the world in experience.

I spoke earlier of Nietzsche asserting “All Truth is error” – this claim is often dismissed as nonsense, or in Searle’s borrowed words, “the perchance for making obviously false claims”. What it means in fact is that the world is in a constant flux, it is becoming not being. And thus, all “truth”, understood as propositional knowledge which corresponds with some part of the world by way of a truth conditional, is an error because in its very structure it lies about the character of the world. This is difficult for us to recognize, because science approaches the world necessarily assuming it to have some set of internal and consistent laws such that it can be modeled according to some set of models that approach, or ideally, reach those internal laws. This, however, is indefensible philosophically for obvious reasons: it is Platonism. It is assuming the world is in itself “formed”, having eternal morphe which exist in a realm beyond our experience. It is not exactly Platonism because we don’t come across the forms by philosophical meditation, but by empirical testing. However, this is a different epistemic method which has no necessary implication on the metaphysics (metaphysics – that which is beyond physics).

The metaphysics appropriate to empircism, and modern experience in general, is one of ambiguity. We should recognize that the notion of a world “in itself, in abstraction from our experience” is a bad idea – what we care about is our experience in the world. Now, sometimes our experience is in Labs and our values are planning and predicting for the future, and in this case, Science is damn appropriate. But on the other hand, we sometimes find ourselves faced with poetic texts, sometimes with great feats of nature, and in these cases science is of little use to understanding the character of our experience. I am the last person to encourage the flight to Christianity (although I do believe that faith is the best way of understanding Hegel’s logic of non-representational thought), but I am no secularist either. I begin my metaphysics from my immediate experience, I find myself as a fleshy body that has experience in time, and in such a way that meaningful descriptions of the body’s fleshiness and its temporality can be made without resorting to abstract theories – the phenomena are right there in immediate experience. I don’t intend this to be an argument for any metaphysical position, only to point out that there are coherent views which oppose both radical secularism and the positing of an Eternal god. Sometimes we find the denial of God’s eternity in the Church itself – a few months ago on this blog I linked to this video, of a vicar in the Church of England who advocates a view of God as “the indwelling presence in things”. He might deny this – but his view makes God as finite as the world, as finite as our experience, as finite as mortals. What is God on this view? It is the wondrous character of beings, their property of always exceeding any look we use to pin them down, the inherent corrigibility of experience. If people want to call that “God”, or “radical empiricism”, I don’t really care.

The mistake in the argument concerning religious tolerance is thinking it can be achieved without making normative claims on any party, or at least this is my position as a non expert. It seems to me that the way to solve the problems of religious tolerance is to force everyone to accept the corrigibility of experience, in other words, the necessity of the strict falsity of any propositional statement. If everyone is “wrong”, then the question is no longer “who is right”, but “which view is appropriate to human experience” – and the answer of course will be many of them are, in different ways. This is not relativism though, because arguments can always be leveled that abrahamic religions especially are inappropriate to our experience because they distort the phenomenon of temporality.

Covered in Techne

Covered in techne

we pound down on the earth

the ground sinks under our weight

hot new editions fill dumpsters

as groundless will swallows up what was left of our souls

But not – even, and especially here in the centre

hunger lingers, which cannot be paid off with dollars or utils

a hunger which starves in the total silence of the question, the absolute

decisiveness of our knowing shuts off

the bounty of the earth

And like the unmanicured greenery

that sprouts up in vacant lots,

our spirits grow wise to the co-opting of all

life into the image

we may yet again feel the

richness in the oldest of things

Hamilton Art Crawl

Hamilton is often dismissed as a place to leave, not to visit. However, as the James North Art crawl showed last night, it has a good bit of culture left in it. (Perhaps organized by those who forgot that Hamilton was a place they were supposed to leave before they did anything interesting). It seems to be a function of what artists need: Cheap space, and people to buy their art. While it is obvious that Hamilton has the first, it was not obvious to me that they would have the second. But, apparently they do, or perhaps the proximity to Toronto lessens the issue. The art crawl was the best I have ever been on. There were many galleries (I’m not sure – more than 10?). Crucially – each served food. Mostly cheese (although perhaps Sky Dragon was vegan… vegan cheese?). In the name of conviviality and welcoming people into the spaces, certainly. What made me distinctly uncomfortable was the offering of complimentary wine at one gallery – while I recognize that this is within Ontario liquor laws, it is so outside the scope of what is legal in B.C. it continues to make me cringe. Even better – one of the galleries (the blue water) had a band – an old timey bluegrass band! (My favorite). Real proper old mountain music, at the bottom of the mountain! (The escarpment in Hamilton is called “the mountain)  Perhaps the most interesting thing about hamilton is that the scene, although small is very united. So, while I don’t know anyone other than m, I get the sense that it would be easy to meet a lot of people (who appear interesting and attractive) once one got started.  I feel I should say something about the art. The art was of varying affect, but much of it was well above average. Seeing many galleries in succession, and the food, helped balance interpretation. I like to write spurious interpretations in the guest books – at one gallery instead of the usual stylized ”thankyou”, I wrote “Flesh Catholic Trip Hop (What a body can do?)”, in response to the art, which portrayed various fleshy angels to a Rave soundtrack.   Some information on the galleries is available here:http://www.jamestreetnorth.ca/galleries.htm If anyone wishes to join me, I foresee myself going on the crawl again in the future, as it is only a 2 hour busride from York University.