From Behind the Veil: The Epistles of John

Deep Exegesis:The Mystery of Reading Scripture

Jane Austen
(A Biography)

Solomon Among the Postmoderns

The Baptized Body

1 & 2 Kings
Brazos Theological Commentary

The Promise Of His Appearing: An Exposition Of Second Peter

A Great Mystery: Fourteen Wedding Sermons

Deep Comedy: Trinity, Tragedy, And Hope In Western Literature

Miniatures & Morals: The Christian Novels of Jane Austen

The Priesthood of the Plebs: A Theology of Baptism

A Son To Me: An Exposition of 1 & 2 Samuel

Against Christianity

From Silence to Song: The Davidic Liturgical Revolution

Ascent to Love: A Guide to Dante's Divine Comedy

Blessed Are the Hungry: Meditations on the Lord's Supper

A House For My Name: A Survey of the Old Testament

Heroes of the City of Man: A Christian Guide to Select Ancient Literature

Brightest Heaven of Invention: A Christian Guide To Six Shakespeare Plays

Wise Words: Family Stories That Bring the Proverbs to Life

The Kingdom and the Power: Rediscovering the Centrality of the Church

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Philosophy: Wonder

Near the beginning of the Metaphysics, Aristotle notes that “it is owing to their wonder that men both now begin and at first began to philosophize; they wondered originally at the obvious difficulties, then advanced little by little and stated difficulties about greater matters. . . . A man who is puzzled and wonders thinks himself ignorant (whence even the lover of myth is in a sense a lover of Wisdom, for the myth is composed of wonders). . . . For all men being, as we said, by wondering that things are as they are.”

Philosophy: Desire and knowledge

“All men by nature desire to know.  An indication of this is the delight we take in our senses.”  So Aristotle.  Jonathan Lear glosses: “That we take pleasure in the sheer exercise of our sensory faculties is a sign that we do have a desire for knowledge.”

Obviously, Aristotle is talking about the pleasures we derive from beautiful landscapes, sunsets, paintings; the ecstasies of listening to a string quartet; the transport of aroma; the sensuality of taste and touch.   Our most common and basic knowing of the world is all bound up with delight.

Isn’t this reason enough to be suspicious of – if not to reject outright – any epistemology that puts desire and pleasure on the back burner?

Philosophy Uncategorized: Cartesian pathologies

Levin again: “Since, for Descartes, the senses are nothing but a source of deception and the body is nothing but perishable matter – that is to say, they are challenges, in both cases, to the power of the ego cogitans, the ego must ‘abandon’ them; the Cartesian ego is a cogito which has dissociated, split off, from its embodiment and taken itself as the object of its ‘love.’ In order to possess absolute certainty and security, Descartes undergoes a process of separation and withdrawal, methodically abandoning all the ‘objects’ of the body’s desires and taking himself, as purely thinking substance, for ‘object.’ This is the narcissistic process, homologous to the process clinically recognized as the defensive comportment of severe depression.  In the isolation of human beings from each other and the separation of human beings from Being, there is indeed cause for deep depression.  Without astonishing prescience, Nietzsche could already see the depression and interpret it as a signifier or nihilism.”

Philosophy: Embodiment and Being

Levin interestingly explores the question of whether human beings are completely determined by history by emphasizing human embodiment.  He plays off of Heidegger, who abandoned the “analytic of Dasein” in his later work because he had come to see it as a continuation of the metaphysical tradition he was trying to escape.  What Heidegger missed was the notion that “the human body [could be] an organ of Being” or the ”primal medium into which this pre-understanding of Being is always first inscribed.”

“By grace of the ‘flesh,’” he argues, Being is always sensed prior to any clear theoretical ontological understanding.  A “felt sense” provides “our pre-ontological attunement.”  As a result, “we are never completely ‘in the dark’” as regards Being.  This sense is not complete: It “calls for a deep commitment to questioning and exploring its implicit potential: it needs to be recognized, made explicit, conceptually articulate, and clear.”  But our embodiment means that we always already have a sense of Being and of transcendent being, and therefore “our pre-ontological understanding . . . is not totally reducible to the understandings imposed by our historical life.”  Heidegger could have seen this had he not overlooked “the natural body, the wild body of metaphorical existence.”

Philosophy: Existentialism to Post-Structuralism

Terry Eagleton suggests in his Terry Lectures (Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate (The Terry Lectures Series)) that existentialism “was for the most part an ontologically imposing way of saying that one was nineteen, far from home, feeling rather blue, and like a toddler in a play school hadn’t much of a clue as to what was going on.  A few decades later this condition persisted among late adolescents, but it was now known as post-structuralism.”

Philosophy: Rosenstock-Huessy

On the First Things web site today, they’ve posted a little article of mine on Rosenstock-Huessy, in memory of his death, February 24, 1973.

You can find it here: http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/2010/02/fathers-and-sons

Philosophy: Desire as lack

Deleuze and Guattari chide Lacan for assuming, with most of the Western philosophical tradition, that desire expresses a lack.  They suggest instead that desire is productive, that we are “desiring machines.”

Why would everyone think that desire expresses lack?  Calvin would say it comes from a confusion of the present state of man with the original state, the assumption that fallen human beings straightforwardly point to the character of human nature as such.

John Paul agrees.  Far from being part of the original creation, the lust or concupiscence of which 1 John speaks is a result of the “damage” and “deficiencies” and “limitations” that come with sin: “Concupiscence is to be explained as a lack, as a lack, however, that plunges its roots into the original depth of the human spirit.”  Postlapsarian desire, not desire as such, arises from the desperation of loss.

Philosophy: Enlightened Terrorism

In his recent book on Dostoevsky: Language, Faith, and Fiction (Making of the Christian Imagination), Rowan Williams notes Dostoevsky’s “diagnosis of the pathology of fantasies of absolute freedom” that he likens to those of Hegel’s Phenomenology: “‘the freedom of the void’ is the dream of a liberty completely without constraint from any other, human, subhuman or divine; because it has no ‘other,’ it can also have no content.  But this means that the hunger for such freedom can only manifest itself in destruction, flinging itself against existing limits; and when those limits are destroyed, it has to look around for more ‘others’ to annihilate, culminating in self-destruction.”

He cites Terry Eagleton’s Holy Terror, where the critic writes “Since limits make us what we are, the idea of absolute freedom is bound to be terroristic.”

Philosophy: Differences

Milbank criticizes Hegel for the philosophical “error” in his “myth of negation.”  The issue is how difference arises, the logic of difference.  Milbank points to Leibniz by way of contrast, who “conceived logic as a ’series,’ which unfolded by infinitesimal steps such that every act of analysis of a ’single’ thing revealed a slightly ‘different’ aspect of possibility.”  That is, difference does not arise negatively, by way of contradiction, by unfolds.

Hegel is more “conservative” in rooting his logic and his myth of negation in the principle of identity.  Given A:A, “difference cannot here result (as for neo-Platonism, stoicism and Leibniz) from analysis, or the unfolding of a series, but must imply contradiction, or denial of the ultimate identity.”  Hegel could have avoided this only by removing himself from his “panlogicism” and admitting “‘other’ identities,” but that wouldn’t do.  Difference arises from negation, a position that, Milbank points out, “coalesces nicely with the fiction of a polarity between subject and object,” which for Hegel are “comprehensive, totalizing genera” that can only relate “in terms of opposition.”

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Philosophy: Anti-skepticisms

Milbank notes in Theology and Social Theory that there are two modern responses to skepticism.  One is the Cartesian view that “thinks of the known object both as something ‘beneath’ the subject, and so as under the subject’s control, like the instruments of technology, and also ‘within’ the subject to the degree that it is fully known.”  The Cartesian responses attempts to “conceal the abyss opened to view by the post-Renaissance discovery that language creates rather than reflects meaning.  This abyss is hidden by the attempt to establish a new pre-linguistic stability for meaning in the ‘internal’ domain of the ’subject.’”

To the Cartesian mind, the rhetorical emphasis of the Renaissance appears to lead only to relativism and skepticism, but Milbank argues that the “aesthetic” and linguistic outlook of the Renaissance, reflected in Herder and Hamann, is as anti-skeptical as Descartes, but in a different way.

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Philosophy: Aquinas the Foundationalist?

No, according to A.N. Williams, writing in New Blackfriars.  Williams defines foundationalism not only in terms of the structural distinction between basic and inferred propositions, but in telic terms: “the purpose of the non-inferred or basic propositions is to impart to the structure as a whole a measure of certainty.”  He also notes that this criterion often loosens “as one moves farther away from the classical roots of the idea in Aristotle and Descartes,” because “criteria for foundations are modified and chastened to the point where it becomes difficult to determine what could not count as a basic belief.”

So, how does Aquinas differ from foundationalism so defined?

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Philosophy: Aristotle and metaphor

Lakoff and Johnson explain why Aristotle must reduce metaphor to linguistic deviance: Aristotle employs the metaphors “Ideas are Essences” and “Essences are Forms,” and on this basis argues that “things in the world . . . can be directly grasped by the mind.  Ideas therefore are aspects of the physical world.  It is not possible for one idea to be conceptualized in terms of another.  It is not possible for part of the logic of one idea to come from another idea.  The logic of an idea, for Aristotle, is part of the structure of the external world.  Because a domain is in the world, not just in the mind, a cross-domain mapping would have to be part of the world.  But that is impossible.  In the world, things exist as distinct kinds, as part of distinct categories.  Each essence has its own inherent logic and not that of another kind of thing.  The idea that the essential form of a thing could be that of another kind of thing makes no sense at all in the Aristotelian worldview.”

Philosophy: Free will

Lakoff and Johnson make the striking claim that the notion of free will is implicated in the traditional disembodied conception of reason: “Will is the application of reason to action.  Because human reason is disembodied – that is, free of the constraints of the body – will is radically free.  Thus, will can override the bodily influence of desires, feelings, and emotions.”

Does this work in reverse?  Does denial of radically free will, as it occurs in Augustinian theology, imply an affirmation of embodiedness?  Does it create pressure toward a notion of embodied (impassioned, desiring, emotional) reason?  There seems some support for this, especially in Augustine, with his strong notion that we are what we desire.

Philosophy: Poets of system

George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (Philosophy in the Flesh : The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought) agree with Paul DeMan that metaphors lie at the heart of metaphysical theories.  They do not, however, believe that exposing the metaphorical ground of metaphysics destabilizes philosophy.  Rather, “conceptual metaphors ground abstract concepts through cross-domain mappings using aspects of our embodied experience and how they establish the inferential structures within philosophies. . . . Metaphors are the very means by which we can understand abstract domains and extend our knowledge into new areas.”

DeMan would be right only if there were some non-metaphorical substrate to thought.  But, Lakoff and Johnson say, there isn’t.  And this means that “philosophers are not simply logic-choppers who fine-tune what their culture already knows in its bones.  Instead, they are the poets of systematic thought.”

Philosophy Uncategorized: Postmodernism rightly understood

In his Postmodernism Rightly Understood: The Return to Realism in American Thought, Peter Augustine Lawler says that “Postmodern thought rightly understood is human reflection on the failure of the modern project to eradicate human mystery and misery and to bring history to an end.  One form of postmodern thinking is found in the writing of anticommunist dissidents Vaclav Havel and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.  The fall of communism, Havel said, should be understood as a lesson about the resistance of being and human being to manipulation.  And Solzhenitsyn, of course, told Americans at Harvard that if human beings were born only to be happy, they would not be born to die.  Postmodern thought begins with the news, perhaps both good and bad, about the intractable limits to any pragmatic project to make human existence predictable, tranquil, secure, and carefree.”  He strikingly include Tocqueville among the postmoderns.

Postmodernism is thus a kind of realism:

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Philosophy: Principles of philosophy

“The principles of philosophy are certain truths within the immediate ken of every human person,” writes Ralph McInerny (Praeambula Fidei: Thomism And the God of the Philosophers).  His first example: “Who could fail to grasp being, since it is grasped in anything we conceive?”

Who indeed?  Well, practically everyone.  When a normal person “grasps” something conceptually, he typically thinks he’s grasping the thing.  If I think about teapots, my thoughts are occupied with the specifics of teapots.  I don’t have a thought about “being” at all, and for many people it would take a good bit of instruction to train them to think they are thinking about being when they thought they were thinking about teapots.

Philosophy, at least of the kind that McInerny is offering, is by no means instinctive.  One has to be taught to think like a philosopher.

One side note: McInerny also thinks that there’s a moral truth immediately available like the metaphysical truth of being, which is the first principle of practical reason, that good is to be done and evil avoided.  He sums this up as the “moral metatruth” that “you should not to do others what you would not have them do to you.”  Moral metatruth that might be, but it’s not what Jesus teaches.

Philosophy: Post-Hegelian Metaphysics

Jenson notes that Barth was not opposed to philosophy, but “refused to depend on the official philosophers because what they offered to do for him he thought he should do for himself, in conversation with them when that seemed likely to help.”

This leads Jenson to the striking claim that the Church Dogmatics “can be read as the first truly major system of Western metaphysics since the collapse Hegelianism.”

Philosophy: Difference and knowledge

Nicholas of Cusa broke with traditional Aristotelian views of uniform substance and motion.  No two things are ever exactly the same: ”two or more objects cannot be so similar and equal that they could not still be more similar ad infinitum. Consequently, however equal the measured and the measured thing may be, they will always remain different.”

Thus, difference is the universal reality of the creation.  ”Wherefore it follows, that, except for God, all positable things differ.”

And this in turn means that all measures of things are imprecise:

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Philosophy: Poetic philosophy

In his book on the origins of German Romanticism and idealism (Mystical Sources of German Romantic Philosophy (Pittsburgh Theological Monographs)), Ernst Benz notes that, in contrast to France where philosophical terminology could be smoothly translated from Latin, German philosophy drew its first philosophical language from mysticism:

“The philosophical and theological language, the language of German schools and universities, was the same Latin as in France, since Latin was the European language of theologians and scholars.  No philosophical terminology existed outside Latin disputations, Latin lessons, and Latin scholastic books.  On the contrary, the German language of the High Middle Ages was essentially poetic.  German literature of the Middle Ages was the literature of the Minnesang, of the troubadours, and of the Hiedenlied, of epic songs such as the Nibelungenlied, which means that it was a language of images, allegories, parables, not a language of abstract concepts and philosophical and logical terms.  There was no philosophical terminology in the German language, and there were no German translations of Latin philosophical or theological treatises.”

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Philosophy: Zizek on idealism

According to Slavoj Zizek, German idealism is characterized by the combination of two insights that appear contradictory: “(1) subject is the power of ‘spontaneous’ (i.e., autonomous, starting-in-itself, irreducible to preceding causality) synthetic activity, the force of unification, of bringing together, linking, the manifold of sensual data we are bombarded with into a unified representations of objects; (2) subject is the power of negativity, of introducing a gap/cut into the given-immediate substantial unity, the power of differentiating, of ‘abstracting,’ of tearing apart and treating as self-standing what in reality is part of an organic unity.”

To Zizek, Idealism doesn’t attempt to balance or simply link these features, but to identify them: “In order truly to understand German Idealism, it is crucial to think these two features not only together (as the two aspects of one and the same activity – like claiming that the subject first tears apart natural unity and then brings these membra disjecta together into a new, his own (‘subjective’), unity), but as stricto sensu identical: the very synthetic activity introduces a gap/difference into substantial reality, and/or the very differentiation consists in imposing a unity.”

“How, exactly,” he asks, “are we to understand this?”  Good question.

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