Quentin Meillassoux: After Finitude

"But then it is as if the distinction between transcendental idealism - the idealism that is (so to speak) urbane, civilized, and reasonable - and speculative or even subjective idealism - the idealism that is wild, uncouth and rather extravagant - it is as if this distinction which we had been taught to draw - and which separates Kant from Berkeley - became blurred and dissolved in light of the fossil-matter. Confronted with the arche-fossil, every variety of idealism converges and becomes equally extraordinary - every variety of correlationism is exposed as extreme idealism, one that is incapable of admitting that what science tells us about these occurrences of matter independent of humanity effectively occurred as described by science. And our correlationist then finds himself dangerously close to contemporary creationists: those quaint believers who assert today, in accordance with a `literal`reading of the Bible, that the earth is no more than 6000 years old, and who, when confronted with the much older dates arrived at by science, reply unperturbed that God also created at the same time as the earth 6000 years ago those radioactive compounds that seem to indicate that the earth is much older than it is - in order to test the physicist`s faith. Similarly, might not the meaning of the arche-fossil be to test the philosopher`s faith in correlation, even when confronted with data which seem to point to an abyssal divide between what exists and what appears?"

Well fuck you too, Quentin.

The More Things Change: The New Philosophical Stylistics

Once upon a time, Rene Descartes insisted that truth consisted in clear and distinct ideas. This is pretty intuitive; a true statement is a true statement. It corresponds with some state of affairs in the world.

Then the 19th century happened. Herr Hegel found isolated concepts to be useless; Herr Nietzsche began to speak of mobile armies of metaphors and a multiple subject. Ideas were no longer so clear and distinct. The critique of identity was underway; Hegel found negativity to be the engine of change, while Nietzsche insisted that only becoming had being, and being was becoming.

Ok, let's make this clear and distinct. Take your average logical syllogism:

A = B
B = C
A = C

See all those cute little signs of equality in there? Step three of a syllogism confirms the identity of all three elements. That's pretty useful in daily life. Except what does it tell you? Nothing new. A = C. Whoopy. Dialectics offers a way of introducing something new; B negates A, producing C (technically, C is the truth of A). As I said above, negativity is the engine that produces something new, allowing us to move beyond the logical syllogism. Just... take my word for it.

The twentieth century ran with that. And this is the important thing: when you leave behind identity and the syllogism, how do you write? In dense, complicated prose that attempts to allow pure difference, or negativity, or multiplicity (take your pick of terms) to diffuse into your writing. This makes for some wildly difficult texts. This attempt at having one's writing style actually enact one's ontological concepts is the reason lurking behind the reputation of "postmodern" philosophy's total impenetrability. Let's take Richard Dawkins' own example of "postmodern nonsense," a quote from Felix Guattari:

"We can clearly see that there is no bi-univocal correspondence between linear signifying links or archi-writing, depending on the author, and this multireferential, multi-dimensional machinic catalysis. The symmetry of scale, the transversality, the pathic non-discursive character of their expansion: all these dimensions remove us from the logic of the excluded middle and reinforce us in our dismissal of the ontological binarism we criticized previously."

It is fairly rare to find "clear" arguments or statements in a lot of contemporary philosophy, because most ontology since Hegel (or historically since Kant's critiques of finite reason) simply does not allow for logical statements which depend upon unthought-out conceptions of identity.

But the times, they are a-changing. We are just now beginning to see what appears to be a return to the old school style of arguments and logic. The two most notable examples are Alain Badiou and his former student, Quentin Meillassoux. Their writing certainly resembles old-school philosophy - the synthesis of emperical facts and syllogisms.

Does this mean that the byzantine writings of the 20th century are now being repudiated? That we need to return to the classical argumentation style of everyone from Aristotle to Hume? Let's not be so hasty.

To rephrase what I've already said, the texts of the 20th century were so difficult because they were trying to present that which is by defition is un-presented - pure difference or multiplicity. Alain Badiou has by no means given up on this project; he has simply shifted the focus. It is Badiou's startling (and frustrating and scary) thesis that true ontology is performed only with math.

It's scary, because he is basically telling philosophy departments around the world, "you know that project you've been devoting your life to? Forget it... it's the guys in the math department that are doing the serious ontological work."

He is a philosopher himself, of course. Exactly what role he offers philosophy is unconnected to my point here. What I want to say is that because Badiou places pure multiplicity in the realm of mathematics, it is now possible to use identity in meta-ontological works once again. Reading Badiou's work is like reading a text from the 18th century; he offers clear axioms, then logically works out their implications.

I think such a shift was inevitable. The Marxist streak of much the the philosophical world has always required serious philosophical thought to support it, and Deconstruction and Schizoanalysis have not necessarily proven themselves as adequate tools of emancipation. Which is of course not a criticism of either; I am merely locating an empirical impetus for the shift in writing styles.

Clear writing is back... now we all just have to learn trans-finite set theory in order to actually do ontology. Yeah, right, that'll happen.

Certainty: Like the Welfare State

My argument here is that there are going to be 2 kinds of certainty. The first is the banal kind, the sort that we move in every day. Things like the immediate presence of physical objects, or a certainty about a social rule - I am certain I can exchange the appropriate amount of money for the goods I want. In other words, the kind of certainty that no one philosophizes about (except as part of a larger hypothetical) because it is so banal and obvious.

It is the kind of certainty that the world demands from us. Even the most ardent skeptic is certain he has to jump out of the way of the oncoming truck. The world demands that we believe particular things, or we will suffer death, humiliation, or foolishly wasted time.

The idea that the world demands this certainty from us is key to my argument here. We can't question these basic certainties; the problem of whether or not to accept them is taken out of our hands. Individual desires have nothing to do with them.

The problem comes when one wants everything in life to be certain in this way. There are some things that we must make decisions to believe, some things that we must take responsibility for. In other words, there are matters that we must judge rather than discover.

Isn't this precisely what most moral or apologetic reasoning is about? The attempt to find in the world something that will take the judgments out of our hands?

Take moral reasoning. I think the vast majority of ethical thought is about wanting the world to be a place that makes our moral judgments for us. Every time a moral situation comes up, we'd like the situation to tell us what we must do. We want our world to be like a platoon Sergeant barking out orders at us.

So, we find positive laws from theological sources, or from evolutionary psychology, or from "objective self interest."

The point of all that is to avoid making a moral judgment and to do something much simpler: make a moral discovery.

And apologetic reasoning? It's the same thing, isn't it? Rather than making a judgment about God, or a making a wager, one hunts for "reasons," "justifications," and "warrants" that will make the judgment for us. We want to discover that, goodness me, we must believe in God! We have no choice! "Reason" demands it! Or, we must follow this law! "Morality" demands it!

So how is this like the welfare state? It's an abdication of responsibility. Rather than standing behind one's moral judgments or theological wagers, we expect the world to do it for us. We expect the world to give us what we "need" rather than throwing the dice and making a choice. The state gives us the goods we "need" rather than us achieving them for ourselves.

It is those choices that create the second kind of certainty. It is a retroactive certainty; you can't see how the dice will fall until you throw them. Once you make the choice, you walk down the path, and the second kind of certainty will come of its own accord.

I'm not saying that we should believe or do things without reasons; I'm saying that we can't pretend that we can live lives devoid of significant choice because all the answers are ready made for us. Plenty of people do pretend this, especially in politics - what else is the meaning of "Let's not challenge liberal democracy and capitalism, because every attempt to do so has ended in tears"?

I want to make it clear that nothing in this post is about making deductions from these certainties; I'm not Descartes talking about his cogito.

House, MD and Risk

My favourite show on network tv is House. It’s a popular enough show that I assume anyone reading this already knows the premise: Greg House is the head of a medical team that deals with the cases that baffle everyone else. He’s a medical Sherlock Holmes – almost literally; references to the Sherlock Holmes stories abound in the series.

The series is remarkable in a particular way – it illustrates one of the big debates in social theory today. The first side of this debate is represented by the German philosopher Jurgen Habermas. His position is basically in support of the standard liberal democratic attitude: 2 opposing sides in an argument sit down and have a rational discussion. Person A presents his case, and person B presents his. Either A or B is expected to present a more rational, fact based case, and so their position is selected to act upon.

The other side of this social theory debate is represented by folks like Zizek and Alain Badiou. In a nut shell, their position is that rational, fact based thought does not always lead to a clear course of action. Whether through insufficient data or through some constitutive limitation of the situation, there must come a point at which the rational discussion ends and a decision is made. A risk must be taken, perhaps in defiance of the standard democratic expectation of majority rule or individual choice.

House consistently finds himself between these two positions. In every episode, he and his team write down a list of the patient’s symptoms. Often, the team is split as to what the diagnosis should be. The doctors on his team are obviously intelligent, and at least one of them is every bit as excellent a doctor as House himself is. That’d be Foreman, for those who watch the show. The other two members of the team are Cameron (who just happens to be played by the hottest woman on tv) and Chase.

The patient is always, of course, in imminent peril. They’ll die in 24 hours if House’s team doesn’t come up with the answer. Often the symptoms conflict with one another; symptoms 1 & 2 suggest diagnoses X, but symptom 3 seems to rule out X and suggests diagnoses Y.

House stands by and occasionally interjects while Foreman, Cameron and Chase debate the possibilities. Foreman insists the diagnosis is X, while Cameron and Chase insist on Y. Eventually House stops the discussion and orders them to treat the patient for a wholly other diagnosis, Z. What follows is a replay of a famous anecdote from one of GWF Hegel’s lectures: Foreman (standing in for one of Hegel’s students) says the facts don’t fit Z, and House basically says “So much the worse for the facts.”

So they treat for Z. Sometimes House is right, and the patient is cured. Sometimes House is wrong, and the patient develops a whole new problem.

Sometimes the doctors find themselves in a situation where diagnosis X seems correct, but the lab test to confirm it will take 48 hours, whereas the patient only has 24 hours to live. If X is the wrong diagnosis, the treatment will kill the patient almost immediately. I think part of the reason House is such an admired character (despite his abrasive personality) is that he is capable of making a firm decision to treat. He says to forget the test and just administer the treatment; how many of the rest of us would hem and haw and fritter away the patient’s life trying to discover new and more reassuring facts?

So my suggestion is that decisions always come down to something like this. Take any ethical dilemma you please; you’ll often find yourself in a situation in which the facts don’t produce a clear answer. It is the same with politics; the situation rarely tells you what must be done. Sooner or later, an authoritative decision must be made. The rational, democratic discussion must end, and action must take place.

The Inverted World

2 posts down, you'll see that the internets have declared my blog to be all but unreadable. This is fine. Still, I've decided to express an opinion on jargon.

The continental tradition has built up a reputation for impossible jargon and vulgar relativism. They're the postmodernists, and if you write something like they do, your blog's reading level will be College (Postgrad). Incomprehensible and completely impractical, it seems. Nothing about it accords with common sense. Another pretty common accusation is that the jargon is used just so that the author can fool the readers into thinking the author is smarter than he really is.

There are a few things here. First, the tyranny of common sense. The insistence that philosophical jargon is bizarre and counter-intuitive amounts to the insistence that all thinking be common thinking. In any other area, however, the common is the mediocre. Pennies are common. Michael Crichton novels are common. On the other side, the excellent is the uncommon. Common sense is always mediocre, while uncommon sense at least as the opportunity to become excellent, or path-breaking, or truly creative.

The second thing is the insistence that thinking be practical. That we must study reality in order to know how to interact with it in the best way - morality, knowledge, politics, etc. However, this subordinates all thinking to a factory-like process. Thought becomes a product that enters the market place, and is consumed like a bottle of coke. The problem is that the commodification or instrumentalization of any human effort - like thinking - immediately forces thinking to become a popular product. Any sort of individuality is stripped away from it. To insist that thinking be practical is to miss the basic nature of thinking, which, at its best, actually lies prior to the theory/praxis distinction. It's not a product, it's a way of being in the world. In the jargon, its an ethos, a particular way of "dwelling."

So thinking should neither be common nor "practical." I think this is partly why Hegel called philosophy "the inverted world" - everything appears upside down. And this, to me, is the great merit of the entire project - to be able to turn one's world on its head.

To turn one's world on its head, to create concepts or find distinctions, to think in an uncommon way, one needs tools adequate for the job. The tools are the words, and sometimes the words are difficult. It is entirely worth the effort, though. It's a strangely exhilarating experience to reflect on the temporal structure of the moment of decision, but such reflection can only take place when one has a particular vocabulary and is willing to leave behind common sense.

One should always be able to step back into the "real world," of course, and discuss matters with friends and family that have no particular interest in the jargon. At this point, if one wishes to avoid the inane repetition of common sense, all one can do is fall back on the ethos one has developed through thinking. It's a bit like having a new common sense, a new default way of looking at things. This can be expressed without the jargon, and hopefully some communication can take place.

Love and Law, Collected Posts

Part 1: Elaborating on Love and Law
Part 2: The Law/Desire Connection
Part 3: Feminine Non-All
Part 4: Excess and Mortification
Part 5: Two Views on Redemption
Part 6: "As If"
Part 7: Parallax Gap and Conclusion

Love and Law, Part 7: A Shift in Perspective, and Conclusion

Part 6

Summary of Part 6: When you are working within the confines of the pleasure principle, a life gripped by love and one crushed by law look about the same.

Žižek makes it quite clear that the perspectivism of the parallax gap is operative here. The life gripped by love and the life crushed by the insane superego appear identical from the outside. Both are lives that appear to be utterly without freedom; what separates them is not a change in content or actions but a shift in perspective. The way love appears as identical to Law can only be surmounted by a shift in the subject themselves - one must enter the life of the spirit for themselves.

The non-all logic of love is hinted at in the New Testament again in 1 Corinthians. This is the passage that speaks of love as being only for incomplete beings; it is only incomplete beings with incomplete knowledge that have access to knowledge. However, this passage also speaks of love as still existing even when knowledge is complete. This, again, must be read in terms of the non-all. Žižek says “love is not an exception to the All of knowledge, but precisely that ‘nothing’ which makes incomplete even the complete series/field of knowledge.”

It is not difficult to see the application of this to the symbolic realm of the Law. One that lives the life of the spirit is submersed in the Law, living out the “as if” demands. The one that is living life instead of existing in a state of living death is encompassed by a rigid series of responsibilities and demands upon conduct; however, they are not totalized by the Law. The subject never becomes an automaton, engaged in compulsive repetition of acts, trying to answer the question of what the Other wants.

It is here that we may return to the Kantian relationship between morality and freedom cited above. Kant argues that the ability to legislate laws is the pre-condition of freedom, and vice verse. Freedom cannot exist without a certain relationship to the symbolic Law. Freedom without Law will never have access to jouissance. What is freedom but the ability to be thrown into one’s desire, which is held by the Law and guided by the nothing of love? Law, desire, love and freedom all presuppose one another, though, as Paul would say, “the greatest of these is love.”

By way of conclusion, it is clearly the way of love that steers a path through the dismal responses to the harsh dialectic of Law and desire. The path of the libertine attempts to deny Law itself, and discovers that pleasure descends into mechanistic repetition. It leads to a life incapable of investment in any particular object and the abandonment of desire. The alternate path of the ascetic finds the superego growing immeasurably, swallowing up any last hint of agency or life. One’s desire is constantly foreclosed, deferred, mutilated. Both of these paths lead to the Pauline existential positions of death. Love, however, leaves the subject under the Law, but the lack of totalization leads to the ability to make choices and decisions as a subject. Learning to love is, then, a vital part of fulfilling the psychoanalytic maxim of wo es wor, soll ich werden. Love is an element of that which allows me to appear where it was, for my desire to grow where it was once crushed by the desire of the other.

Love and Law, Part 6: "As If"

Part 5

Summary of Part 5: In the participatory reading of Christ's death, the presence of the Law is in fact increased when under a regime of love. To see how this is possible, we must again look at the feminine "non-all" logic.

The critical passage to begin with in Paul is the “as if” passage from 1 Corinthians. Paul exhorts the Christians to live in a manner in which they have dealings with the world in a kind of suspended manner; the Christians are those who “rejoice as though they were not rejoicing, and those who buy as if they had no possessions, and those who deal with the world as if they had no dealings with it.” One should live “as if” one were under the Law, “as if” one were subjected to a series of great demands, despite not being so. This living one’s life under a series of great demands shows that Pauline love cannot simply be reduced to a suspension of the Law. The Law remains active; the symbolic order is not somehow abolished. What is accomplished in this life of living “as if” is that the Law is no longer a totalizing force sustained by its own transgressions, its own constitutive exceptions. The Law otherwise achieves a totalizing dominance, complete with its own transgressions. It is the introduction of love that prevents this totalization, this bear subjection to the Law.

When one lives in “the way of the spirit,” the transgression of the Law ceases because the Law is suspended. In other words, one lives with sin. Here the issue of the constitutive exception becomes vital. Any structure is of course maintained by one; if sin disappears from the subject’s life, what place then does the Law have?

What this suspension of Law - to live “as if” one were not under the Law - amounts to is an engaged position, the (non-biological) life, a “fully subjectivized, positive yes!” to [one’s] own life.” It is this exuberant affirmation of life that throws one into the grip of the “as if” demands, the laws without their constitutive exceptions. Žižek says this best in his description of falling passionately in love:

“Love shatters our daily life as a heavy duty whose performance demands heavy sacrifices on the level of the ‘pleasure of principle’ - how many things must a man renounce? ‘Freedom,’ drinks with friends, card evenings.”

The duty of love - the fidelity to desire - will always be the harshest series of demands possible upon one’s life. St. Paul found himself condemned to death in a Roman prison, Antigone was buried alive in a tomb, and Slavoj Žižek does not play cards with friends. The Law does not disappear; what love does is “suspend the obscene libidinal investment on account of which the Law generates / solicits its own transgressions.” It is sin - transgression, resistance to the law - that makes the law appear to be a foreign power crushing the subject. So the problem is not that the law does not contain enough love - but rather that it contains too much love. I am unable to recognize myself in the Law insofar as I cling to the immediacy of a “love” that feels threatened by the rule of Law. The Christian suspension of the law remains is a love that remains tied to the Jewish law that creates a distance from the social order, while the pagan suspension of the law is only aimless transgression. Enjoy your not enjoying. Obey the law as if you were not obeying it - obey from love.

This setting of love against Law that Paul appears to be using to critique the older Jewish position is, however, exactly how the Jewish law already works. The Jewish law doesn’t have a superego backing it up; because it does not rely on an obscene underside, it is the excess of the law itself that address us, not the law.

This, as Zizek says, is the ultimate alternative. The opposition between law and love is internal to law itself - the gap between the specific, determinate, positive laws and the infinite superego. Love and the excessive superego appear identical from within the frame of the law. Put another way, when you’re working within the confines of the pleasure principle, a life gripped by love and one crushed by law look about the same.

Love and Law, Part 5: Two Views on Redemption

Part 4

Summary of Part 4: The Jewish law is typically seen as harsh and repressive, while Christian love and grace are set against this. Is this an adequate reading of redemption?

There are two basic interpretations of how the redemption made possible by Christ’s death operates. The first interpretation is sacrificial, and the second is participatory. We are redeemed either because Christ pays out debt to God, or because we participate in his death - we “die to sin” in Christ.

The problem with the sacrificial reading is that it leads up right back to the dominance of the Law. Christ pays a debt for us, thus simply leading us into a gift economy. Christ gives us a gift, and we must pay him back with what Spinoza might have called "the basest servitude." With this debt simply transferred to the Crucified rather than God, we are placed in a position in which we must continuously ask of Christ “what do you want from me?” Christ takes the position of the infinite superego; the infinite debt of sin can never be paid. Christ’s love becomes a mask for this infinite debt, this hyperbolic Law. The sacrificial reading ends with the same impasse as the attempt to fully accede to the Law: domination and repression.

Žižek expands on the difficulties with the sacrificial reading with a second biblical passage, offering context for the first. The passage ends with a rhetorical question, “and why should we not say ‘Let us do evil so that good may come!’” The suggestion St. Paul is intending to refute here is that, because God’s grace and forgiveness is a good thing, we should engage in ever more and greater sins so that more forgiveness will take place. What this does, however, is place God into the position of the pervert: God’s desire to act as our saviour becomes an imperative to sin and transgress. God’s actions become the source of our pleasure. This still ties pleasure to transgression, however, and the morbid guilt that arises from this remains.

It is the participatory reading that offers a move away from the oppressive superego. According to Žižek, it is Paul’s “way of the Spirit” that offers a way out of the dialectic of Law and desire. It is a matter of rejecting the subjective position of “death” and choosing the alternate position of “life.” The key to this choice lies in another Biblical passage from 1 Corinthians: “All things are lawful for me, but not all things are beneficial.” This is a surprising shift away from the usual moralistic tone of religion; the Law finds itself suspended - by what? - love. In the sacrificial reading of the crucifixion, love becomes a supplement for the Law in the form in the infinite superego. In the participatory reading, however, “the Law which regulates and prohibits certain acts is suspended.” The Christian ceases to be bound by the Law, and their affirmations and negations are guided by love, not Law. Put another way, the Christian undergoes the second death, entering the realm of ate. This love beyond Law is no longer the transgressive desire that is aroused by the Law, but rather itself a fidelity (which, as Alain Badiou points out, is itself a term of love) to desire. The superego ceases to shout “do your duty!” and das Ding ceases to drag us into doing what we hate. When one is guided by love, one’s duty is their desire.

The Law, being constituted by the symbolic realm, obviously does not somehow disappear. In fact, the Law’s presence may actually grow or intensify under this regime of love. To see how, we must return to The Puppet and the Dwarf and it’s exploitation of the feminine non-all logic.

Love and Law, Part 4: Excess and Mortification

Part 3

Summary of Part 3: In order to escape the sin/desire deadlock, an element of excess needs to be found in life. Zizek looks to Christ as a figure of this excessive life.

In order to frame his argument, Žižek offers us a portrait of a confused world that, in attempting to deny the “Law,” merely finds itself denying excess. This is a world that is trapped on the safe side of the Law. In other words, it is a world immersed in the pleasure principle. A world that denies excess cannot help but exist in a kind of living death, the Pauline existential position of flesh. Žižek offers an example from physics called the Higgs field as an illustration. The Higgs field is a condition under which less energy is expended to exist as something rather than dissipate into nothing. This is a concept reminiscent of Nietzsche’s “man would rather will nothingness than not will.” The Higgs field is a fine metaphor for the difference between the death drive and the nirvana principle. The nirvana principle seeks the lowest tension; it is easier to live a sickly life than to burn out like Achilles on the battlefield. It is not life that is opposed by this nirvana principle, by this submission to the pleasure principle - such an opposition would require far too much effort. What is opposed by the man locked into the Law and governed by the pleasure principle is the excess of life.

It is a world that combines pleasure with constraint. Everything is permitted so long as its dangerous element is removed. Anything that would require risk or commitment is eliminated; hence we have the goal of revolution without revolution, coffee without caffeine, and the “libertine” insistence on the legalization of a weak drug like marijuana.

In this world, the only possible extreme is a negative one: absolute evil. This is the central place that the Holocaust and the Soviet gulags hold in the twentieth century; they stand as warnings for all those that would posit any sort of rigid goals. Any attempts to agree on a positive good are held in suspicion as attempts to wield “power” over others, like a variation on Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s warning that revolution inevitably leads to the gulag. The “good,” then, can never be anything other than a defense against “evil.” Positive good can never be anything other than a position of moderation.

The (alleged) denial of law (which is only an affirmation of hedonistic pleasure) is bound up with the denial of love, jouissance and excess. A fine example of this can be found in Antigone: Antigone’s sister, Ismene. After Antigone informs her of Creon’s orders against burying Polyneices, and of her intent to violate this order,

Ismene exclaims:

"Oh no! Think carefully, my sister.
[. . . .]
And we must obey this order, even if it hurts us more.
As for me, I will say to those beneath the earth
This prayer: 'Forgive me, I am held back by force.'
And I’ll obey the men in charge. My mind
Will never aim too high, too far.”

Ismene’s advice contains four elements. The first is the demand to “think carefully.” This advice can obviously many different things, but it is all too easy for “careful thought” to simply emerge as the infinite deferral of action. Ismene, by opening her speech with this phrase, indicates her intent to calculate out the possible goods and harms that may result from action. Secondly, Ismene says that they must obey Creon, “even if it hurts.” What is this advice if not to choose a sickly, painful life over the even greater pain of rushing beyond the pleasure principle? Ismene would rather endure the constant, nagging, low level suffering and guilt of having betrayed her brother rather than face the potentially swift death of violating the law. Thirdly, Ismene claims that external forces are controlling or limiting her. She is “held back by force.” She is deferring to the Other, to the Law, in the attempt to avoid pain. Finally, she says that she will always limit her goals to the possible, later going on to say that “it’s the highest wrong to chase after what’s impossible.” A positive good, in a world that denies excess, is nothing other than the impossible or the insane.

Against this mortification of life, Žižek sets the figure of Christ on the cross. Christ’s death, of course, is an attempt to deal with the Law and sin (the Thing). The Jewish tradition of the law is typically seen as oppressive and legalistic, while Christian love and grace are set against this. The question remains as to whether or not this is an adequate reading of the mechanics of Christian redemption.

Love and Law, Part 3: Feminine Non-All

Part 2

Summary of Part 2: The Law crushes life, and only something like madness can escape the law and affirm life.

A partial attempt to escape that Law/madness battle is something like libertinism, the “path of uninhibited jouissance.” This amounts to the denial of the Law, the move toward a life of pure pleasure without restraint. This collapses, however, when the necessity of the Law for pleasure is remember. Sin - or pleasure - needs the Law. If one denies the Law, one has no access to anything but the most banal enjoyment, like Zarathustra’s little pleasure of the day and the little pleasure of the night.

Another attempt to escape the cycle of guilt and pleasure is the full acceptance of the Law. In other words, this is the choice to live one’s life in a radically moral way. The fault here, as Lacan points out in his discussion of Freud, is that whoever “attempts to submit to the moral Law sees the demands of his superego grow increasingly meticulous and increasingly cruel.” The Law, when one willingly enters into its economy, can only grow. The positive order of being attempts to overtake all excess, creating a world in which every action is carefully formed to continuously answer the question of what the Law wants. The life thrown into the Law is spent asking the Law, which is the Other, “what do you want from me?” Because there is no specific answer offered, the subject must search for more and more emphatic ways of answering this question for themselves.

So here we have three separate yet related problems for the relationship between Law and desire. Under Law, desire can only be expressed in a hyperbolic way, in a rush into the repulsive real where morbid guilt awaits. The question for both Lacan and Žižek revolves around the possibility of moving beyond this impasse. Lacan asks if the ethics of psychoanalysis leaves “us clinging to that dialectic.” The search is for a relationship to desire beyond the Law, and Žižek locates this in a non-all logic of love.

In The Puppet and the Dwarf, Žižek introduces his reading of non-all logic by dealing with a potential problem for Lacan’s formulations of sexuation. Žižek pits Bruce Fink’s and Suzanne Bernard’s reading of this against each other. In Zizek’s portrayal, Fink argues that feminine jouissance is both ineffable and inextricably bound up with speech. Fink appears willing to allow this sort of contradiction or incompletion in Lacan’s work. This seems like a reasonable enough position to take, considering Lacan’s general views on lack and knowledge. However, Žižek insists that this cannot be written off as an innocent contradiction, as this problem lays at the crux of sexual difference itself. To solve this problem, Žižek turns to the work of Suzanne Bernard in the same volume.

The logic of feminine non-all does not mean there is some mysterious part of a woman that remains outside the symbolic. Rather, there is a “simple” lack of totalization. All totalization takes place through its constitutive exception, in much the same way that the Law is sustained by transgression. Here, the argument is made that the woman is in the symbolic without exception. There is nothing in a woman that is not immersed in the phallus. So the woman is completely symbolized, but because there is no exception, she cannot be said to be totalized by the symbolic. There must be some excess here, a nothing that is a something. It will be by following up on this logic of non-all with a reading of Christianity universality that Žižek tackles the Law and desire problem.

Part of the solution involves the idea that something can be immersed by not totalized because there is an excess; in the case of the feminine non-all subjection to the Law, there is the jouissance of the other. Being in the symbolic without any sort of exception produces its own excess, formulated by Lacan as S(A). It is down the road of excess that we need to travel if this question of Law and desire is to be answered. Žižek will follow St. Paul in looking to Christian agape and Christ as a figure of excessive (eternal) life for clues to the solution.

Love and Law, Part 2: The Law/Desire Connection

Part 1

Summary of Part 1: The Law creates/sustains Desire/sin.

There are three specific, related problems in this situation (of Law sustaining Desire/sin). The first problem is that the relationship of Law and desire means our desire only ever appears as a death drive, as a movement beyond the pleasure principle. As Lacan says, it is only because of the Law that “sin . . . takes on an excessive, hyperbolic character.” Law only ever allows enjoyment to take place as a transgression.

Lacan also traces the oppressiveness of the Law back to the logic of the murder of the great man. This mythic origin has the “all-powerful, half animal creature of the great horde” being killed by his sons. The sons kill the father in the attempt to achieve their desire; they find, however, that the guilt of this murder imposes profound guilt. Lacan says that “every act of jouissance gives rise to something that is inscribed in the book of debts of the Law.” The Law is an economy of debts and payments that can never be superceded; one is forever caught in a cycle of guilt and pleasure.

In The Ticklish Subject, Žižek offers a second problem for this intertwined relationship of Law and desire. He lays out St. Paul’s ideas of life and death as “existential positions,” that is, not as biological states but as ways of carrying out life. Žižek here equates the Law with the positive order of being; the mechanical, extant, non-excessive life. This is living one’s life in a type of living death. Life, on the other hand, exists under divine grace - a sort of universalism. Death is equated with Law, Life is equated with love. The existential position of Life is that which is excessive, capable of moving beyond the Law and the positive order of being.

The very introduction of the Law, then, creates the Life/Death dichotomy. In other words, the subject is torn between life and death, between mechanical, conscious subjection to the Law and an unconscious desire for transgression. The unconscious becomes the only affirmation of life; it might be the case that Bataille’s exuberant, repulsive festivities are the only expression of freedom in such a world.

Elaborating on Love and Law

In a culture in which love and sex have become synonymous, the need for questioning the concept of love becomes ever greater. To equate love with sex is to make love an act, something engaged in only under specific circumstances. However, a more traditional concept of love that centres on an emotional state is no more adequate; emotional states come and go. If love is to have some place in our lives, it must be at home in the subject as subject. Love must find a place in the subject that is not affect, emotion or action. If love is to be rooted in subjectivity, at least in Lacanian terms, it must have a relationship to the Borromean knot structure of the subject.

To describe love as an active force rather than a passive trait, we must have an idea of how love affects the tri-part structure. How does love interact with the symbolic, the imaginary, and the real? This is a broad question that one could say Lacan arguably struggled with his entire career. The question will have to be narrowed, then. What relationship does love have to desire, and that which institutes desire, the Law? This is one of Lacan’s questions in his seminar concerning ethics, and it is the driving question of Slavoj Zizek’s book The Puppet and the Dwarf. Love does not eliminate the Law, or mitigate the Law. Neither does it guide the Law. Love, here, suspends the Law. This suspension is not the Bataillan festival, the madness that overtakes a social group and sees social norms disintegrate. This suspension has a very specific meaning: love suspends the Law’s ability to produce transgression and morbid guilt. The subject of love continues to find themselves under the Law, but with a lurking nothing, an element that prevents the excess that does nothing but foul life.

As Kant opens his Critique of Practical Reason, a footnote appears tucked off onto the margin of the page. Here, Kant claims that freedom is the essence of morality, and that morality is the condition that makes us aware of freedom. This mutually conditional relation cannot help but bring to mind the relationship Lacan develops between the Law and the Thing; “I can only know of the Thing by means of the Law.” This explicit use of St. Paul highlights the fact that the Law produces its own transgressions. Our desire is aroused by the Law; to understand how this works a brief description of the logic of castration is necessary. Žižek, in The Puppet and the Dwarf, offers a useful explanation of this idea. He begins by critiquing the usual interpretation of the fort/da story. The boy’s spool is not the compensation for the mother’s absence, but rather her presence. The boy is working out his anxiety over her overbearing, infinitely encroaching desire, her jouissance. The mother’s desire crowds out the boy’s own desire. The boy’s solution is, in effect, the acting out of his own castration. The insistence that he is incapable of fulfilling his mother’s desire is what provides the necessary space for his own desire. The boy’s desire, then, is only sustainable by means of the institution of the Law. The boy has to assert his own incompleteness, his own split subjectivity.

This version of the fort/da game is a picture of how the Law sustains desire. If the boy was not subject to the Law, he would be forever suffocated by his mother. This arousal of desire by the Law is specifically read into the Biblical text Romans 7:8-18 by both Lacan and Žižek. In this text, St. Paul argues that “sin, seizing and opportunity in the commandment, produces in me all kinds of covetousness.” In other words, the Law produces its own transgressions. The Law is an enticement, an enticement to an object that is always beyond it. The very fact that this object is forbidden only makes it more attractive.

A General Reading List

I was asked this past weekend about an introductory reading list for philosophy. I just decided to place my suggestions here. I'm hardly widely read, relatively speaking, but I have a fine handle on the broad movements of the tradition. This is meant to balance brevity, breadth, depth and readability. I'll move from the early aspects of the tradition right to the cutting edge of contemporary thought.

Ancient:

I'm skipping the Pre-socratics and Plato altogether, because I'm pretty hopeless in those areas.

1. Aristotle's Metaphysics. This is one of the books that the tradition keeps coming back to, over and over. Read the Metaphysics, and you'll see Aristotelian language everywhere. It's a roadmap for the next 2000 years of thought. Aristotle's Physics, Politics and Nichomachean Ethics are important as well, but the Metaphysics is where it all really begins.

From: The Basic Works of Aristotle

2. St. Augustine's Confessions. Specifically, chapters 8 - 11. The earlier chapters are kinda emo, but once Augustine gets his act together, he makes up for all the repentant whining that came before. His thinking of time, memory, literary interpretation, God and creation keeps the entire Western tradition coming back for more. Augustine's thinking has a pivotal influence on at least one author in this list.

The Confessions of Saint Augustine

Modern:

I know I'm making a huge jump. I'm skipping over Stoics, Cynics, and Christians, traditional and mystical. Once again, I just don't know much about these guys.

3. Rene Descartes' Meditations on Method and Discourse on First Philosophy. Descartes' thought exploded in the western world like a philosophical Little Boy, and began a new era. That is the standard interpretation, anyways. It is facile to think Descartes was really an ahistorical clean slate for philosophy, but you cannot do reputable scholarship without knowing him.

4. Baruch Spinoza's Ethics. Spinoza has strong kung fu. Learn from him. The fact that traditional religion continued to exist after this man is a testament to the stubbornness of the human race. Be joyful, strong and creative.

5. GW Leibniz's Discourse on Metaphysics and The Monadology. God's knight in shining armour, defending Christondom from Spinoza's otherwise crippling blows. If you do not think the monad is one of the coolest ideas anyone anywhere has ever come up with. . . maybe philosophy is not for you after all.

6. Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. This is one of the most brutally difficult books ever written. I have only a vague grasp on it. This being said, Kant's importance rivals Aristotle and Descartes.

7. GWF Hegel's Phenomonology of Spirit. 20th Century political thought lives and dies with Hegel. This is probably the most difficult book ever written, however.

3 - 7 Are all found in: The European Philosophers. That single book contains excerpts from all the books listed above, except the Hegel book. If you pick up the book I've linked to here, you'll have highlights from all the above thinkers in a single volume, plus several more. There are different selections from Hegel here, but they will perhaps act as a better introduction than the frankly insane Phenomonology. You can skip the Pascal, Rousseau, Fichte, Schopenhauer, Comte and Mach selections as they are less important. As for the Nietzsche bits...

8. Friedrich Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil and Genealogy of Morals. Every word that slipped from this man's pen was golden. Reading Nietzsche is like breathing fresh mountain air. These two books will work in tandem to tear down and rebuild much of what you believe. Nietzsche is a diagnostician. Where else to go? Nietzsche has the words of life.

Keep in mind the importance of reading Walter Kaufman's translations; other translations are notoriously bad.

Found in: Basic Writings of Nietzsche

20th Century:

9. Martin Heidegger's Being and Time, What Is Metaphysics? and Letter on Humanism. Rather than read Being and Time, simply read the introduction. It is about thirty pages long, and defly summarizes the entire work. Being and Time is a terribly beautiful book, but it is also terribly difficult. There is no need to jump into it yet. What is Metaphysics and are both fine and short descriptions of Heidegger's thought. The anti-humanist philosophers of the 20th century fed on the Letter on Humanism for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Found in: Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings

10. Georges Bataille's Erotism. Influenced by Hegel, Nietzsche and Freud, Bataille produced fascinating work on the links between sex, death and religion. Yes, such links exist. Bataille is certainly the most readable of 20th century continental philosophers, and one of the most widely read. Highly recommended.

Erotism: Death and Sensuality

11. Michel Foucault's The Subject and Power. How are identities formed? Put another way, how is the content of the word "I" formed? When you say "I," what exactly do you mean, and why? In Foucault speak, how are we subjectified, and what role does power play in this? Important thinking for the 20th and 21st centuries.

Found in: The Essential Foucault

21st Century:

12. Alain Badiou's Ethics and Infinite Thought. Badiou is a deeply multidisciplinary thinker; his ontology is rooted in mathematical set theory. Every generation or so, a thinker comes along to clean house, to break up the old patterns and remind us all that we always need to be exploring new territory. For the philosophers of the 21st century, Badiou is the trailblazer we all must reckon with.

Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil
Infinite Thought

All right, there you go. If you read through all those, you'll know pretty much everything I know. Philosophy is an amazing adventure; it is extraordinary how different the world can look when seeing it through Nietzsche or Heidegger's eyes.

Good tidings.

Fidelity and the Word

This is a response to a post on Jamie's blog, yonder. I wanted to offer a more detailed, and possibly more useful, response than the two brief comments I've already left.

I think the best way to frame these topics is in terms of a brief discussion of faith. In a spirit of gross simplification, I'm going to suggest that there are two basic ways of viewing faith.

• The first involves a path to knowledge; it is an intellectual acceptance of a certain category of data, i.e. revelation. Or prophecy. One knows something to be true because they have faith. Belief in this piece of information brings salvation. To be wordy, this kind of faith is a question of epistemology. To be critical, it is a shortcut. This is the faith that fruitlessly opposes skepticism. This is the Josh McDowell vs. Richard Dawkins kind of faith.
  

• The second involves holding a certain perspective. It is not the same thing as a simple acceptance of particular propositions. This second kind of faith is an evaluation -- certain propositions are not only held to be true, but they are held to be valuable. This form of faith has more to do with a way of being; it is a human possibility. Incidently, this faith is the true object of study for theology.
  

I do not intend to suggest that the second form of faith - the evaluative - includes the first, and adds something else. The first form is an epistemological shortcut; the second form has only a secondary concern with epistemology. The evaluative form of faith does not first accept the truth of a proposition, than add a value to it; it's not really the other way around either. It's something rooted in lived experience - which is not empiricism, by the way.

How is this related to Jamie's post, you might be asking?

20th/21st Century North American Evangelical Christians place a great deal of stock in the idea that God speaks to them (and make no mistake, this is a contemporary North American oddity). They believe God offers direction and gives commands, in any myriad of ways. I am not interested in passing judgement on the truth of all this; I just want to comment on this belief in light of the above discussion of faith.

There are two ways to problematize the idea that God has spoken to you.

• One is to question the truth of it - to study the possibility of revelation as an object, the way an astronomer studies a star. To pass judgement on the truth of this possibility - did God speak or not? There are two problems that a Christian thinking this way has to deal with.
  • The first is that of finding a criteria for judging the authenticity of a possible prophecy. Whatever criteria you wish to use - however strict or exact - it is still a question of finding a yardstick. Some kind of systematic way of judging. There are a myriad of problems with this problem of finding criteria, not the least of which is that this epistemological approach always leaves open the possibility that you are wrong.
  • The second is a question of diffusion of responsibility. If you believe that God said something, commanded something, and your response is basically "I was given this piece of data, and now I must act on it," you are walking into "I was only following orders" territory.

So to take some information - revelation, prophecy, whatever - and approach it as a question of correct or incorrect knowledge is to invite a disaster. You're gambling on a possibility (as opposed to a Pascalian wager) and you're letting yourself be led around like a donkey.

• The second way of problematizing the idea of God speaking to you is, obviously, rooted in the second kind of faith. It takes God's word and holds it for true. The epistemological question of whether or not God actually spoke is not ignored, it is simply a secondary matter. Yes, this involves an act on the part of a subject. The subject of faith holds the word of God as true, and is formed by this word.

This second way dodges both of the problems of the first way. It ceases to take the word of God as an object to be studied and judged. The question of whether or not you are wrong ceases to have the same sort of import, because it is the wrong question. The responsibility also entirely falls upon your own shoulders, because you are choosing to accept the word of God and you are the one holding it as true. None of this "God made me do it!" stuff, which is really no better than the devil making you do it.

If one chooses to be a subject of faith in this sort of way, they aquire a particular perspective. Because they are engaged in a particular way of being - a particular comportment to the world - the immediate circumstances surrounding them in the world do not have the same power over them.

God's word acts as a disruption in the status quo of their life, and they conform their perspective to these disruption. Their life revolves around living out the consequences of holding God's word to be true - not around taking care of the myriad possibilities that may befall them. Calculating possible harms and possible goods becomes a tertiary issue.

I do not say any of this to denegrate someone's faith, even if it comes down to being that epistemological version. I am trying to illustrate a perspective that does not revolve around harms and goods, a perspective that an orthodox Christian can accept. If the best part of one's self is given over to God's word, then harms and goods are distractions.

A disclaimer is almost certainly required. I absolutely insist that I am not suggesting that a Christian believe they exist in the best of all possible worlds. I am absolutely not saying "chin up! Jesus loves you!" or "things will get better!" I have already said this, but God is just as likely to kill your entire family as he is anything else. You are just as likely to end up homeless or an inmate in Auschwitz as you are rich or comfortable or secure. But remember, these things are goods and harms. They can be calculated out in a utilitarian way: "five units of possible good versus six units of possible harm... better not take that route!" If that is the route you want to take, gambling and calculating possibilities, than what do you do when your calculations fail and the "truths" you have had faith in turn out to be childish fairytales?

Free Will Debate

I really was serious when I said the hiatus was over!

Some time ago, I said I was going to start writing about ethics. I even wrote what amounted to a preface, here. This post should be seen as part 2 of that preface.

Part and parcel of any discussion of ethics is the free will / determination debate. Are we simply incredibly complicated robots, or do we have freedom? In my readings this semester I've come across a handful of answers to that question. There's Spinoza, who believes our only freedom is the ability to assent to what is. There's Kant, who says that while all reality is chained to cause and effect, our choices can be thought of as atemporal and therefore outside that chain.

My own approach is to begin with a very practical reality. The answer to this question of free will has no practical value. This may seem counterintuitive; is it not a popular belief that "free will" is necassary for any sort of responsibility, and therefore morality? No morality, no law, no society: chaos would reign.

Here's the problem with that belief. A belief in determinism is no more a guide to behaviour than a belief in free will. Consider the legal system. If criminals begin making the philosophical claim that they have no free will (as opposed to psychiatric claims of insanity) and therefore cannot be held responsible for their crimes, judges can throw the claim right back at them. A judge is just as bound to toss them in jail.

A belief in determination doesn't remove the consequences from our actions; all it can do is facilitate a series of excuses for one's behaviour. However, the need for these excuses, and the creation and deploment of them, must both come from different places in a person's mind. The need for excuses for one's behaviour is a question of psychological insecurity; the creation of the excuses is a matter of philosophy. In order to deploy the excuses, one must already be willing to admit insecurity and weakness. That admition, however, would itself require a certain overcoming of that weakness and insecurity. Attempting to use the idea of determination as an excuse or justification for behaviour is a self-defeating and forced position; it can only be used coldly and cynically, and is therefore not legally or ethically important.

The free will debate, then, is an abstract, academic matter. However, a discussion of it remains bound to the discussion of ethics; in order that our behaviour not be arbitrary or futile, we need a knowledge of what we are capable and incapable of. We require a critique of will.

Cutting to the chase, I think the answer to the debate lies in its very undecidability.

Whenever someone claims a certain form of knowledge is limited, there are two possible meanings for this. First, it could simply refer to a lack of information. We lack the required quantity of data to form a conclusion. Only more research and thought is required. Perhaps the quantity of information required is so great that it is practically impossible to attain; it is still, in principle, a possibility for knowing. The second way knowledge can be limited is in quality. There may be information or beings that we are simply unequipped to explore or analyze. I would argue that there is an aspect of humans that is inadmissable to analysis or full knowing.

When I say it cannot be analyzed, I mean it is something we cannot directly access. It is not something that can be pointed to and described; it can only be posited as an explanatory device.

When people argue over free will, they are either claiming a certain creative spontaneity for humans, or for a rigid determination. I would argue this is an impossible question; it cannot be answered. When we ask what this spontaneity may be; a particular aspect of human nature is named. Spirit, reason, will, whatever. This aspect is then explained to be somehow independant of all immanant causes; nothing has shaped this one aspect. Family life, no matter how fine or horrible, has molded this aspect. Absolutely no combination of socio-economic-historical factors has affected this aspect, because if this aspect was capable of being affected, than it would be one more link in the cause and effect chain and therefore determined.

This aspect - will, spirit, reason - therefore only has a one way relationship with everything else. All else that might reside in a human subject and its environment can only be affected by this aspect; they themselves can only be altered; they can do no altering themselves.

The determination folks believe every last aspect of reality rests within a cause and effect structure. Nothing happens without an immediate cause; every human action has a cause, which itself has a caused, all the way down to the bottom turtle. The aspect the free willers believe in is itself determinted by something else. There is a two way relationship between the spirit/will/reason and the environment - they affect each other.

Now, why do I think this debate is unresolvable? Because neither position can truly support itself. Free will can never be proven, because it is a simple matter to posit that one is determined to believe in free will. However, determination cannot be proven either. The moment one posits a free will/spirit, an aspect of the self that stands unaffected by the environment, no philosophy of determination can track down and kill this aspect. If there is such a free aspect, it would be impossible to conclude exactly which environmental factors might affect this aspect. Every determination posited - ie, bad family life, can only explain a single piece of behaviour. Those who believe in free will can simply relocate the will to a position unaffected by the posited determination; this process can go on indefinately.

The claims of free will and determination cancel each other out. They negate each other. In negating each other, they create an unknowable aspect of human nature. A nothingness. Our knowledge of ourselves is essentially finite, and no quantity of information or observation can ever change that.

This nothingness itself is, in practice, identical to the posited free will. Because we can never know if or how anything determines it, it appears to us to be a responsible, spontaneous, creative, force. What it is on its own account is unknowable; all we can deal with is the appearance and the appearance is undetermined.

Theology: Speech and Writing

Back, with nary a comment on the long hiatus!

Ok, so I don't think that theological study and religious activities share a common basis. I think they are two different human activities that come together with the glue of culture.

It's probably a pretty common belief that religion is theology put into action. The corallary is that theology is the theoretical underpinning of religion. If it isn't that, what is it?

Let's try asking this question: what would theological study in an atheistic reality hold in common with theological study in a theistic world?

The answer: speech and writing. Theological study is about developing propositions about God; if God does not exist, the activity of developing propositions still exists. Propositions take the form of speech and writing. Also known as symbolic representation.

In both atheistic and theistic worlds, theological study is about symbolically representing God and beliefs about God.

Religion and Theology as Mutual Exteriority

Why yes, I'll be writing essays with titles like that this fall! I have to start warming up my lingo spewer.

Over the past year, on and off, lurking in the background of my mind, has been a line of thought that I only now feel ready to properly express. It seems to me that my problems in these threads on Jamie's and Joel's blogs can be be used to point to a fairly startling idea: religion and theology are not united, at least not in the way people think they are. There is a body of human activity - from magic spells to mass - that is geared to answering particular human needs. This body of human activity ("religion") exists independently of (and possibly prior to) the intellectual study of God ("theology").

I am not arguing that religion and theology never meet, or that religion does not make rational statements about the world. I am arguing that the one does not require the other. When they meet, it is because the individual in which they meet finds it useful for them to do so.

As I said, this has been developing in my head for about a year now, so some history on my thought and reading is in order. For the sake of comparison, it should be noted that I wrote a post on this topic almost a year ago. I hadn't thought of the religion/theology split past a single line in the final paragraph.

I've dabbled a bit in what might be called "academic" theology over the past year; Paul Tillich, Augustine, NT Wright, Meister Eckhart. The most striking thing I have noticed: while these men have left their fingerprints are on much of modern Christian belief, that's all there is - fingerprints. The men - and women! - who have written the theological masterpieces are but vaguely recognized names for the vast majority of Christians. Augustine's towering books are ignored in favor of "Jesus loves me, this I know." I don't juxtapose the two to disparage either, but to point out that the simple creed has no need of Augustine's serious study.

Theology, as an intellectual study, requires human intellectual capacity. All theologians have to engage in literary and philological analysis, historical research, anthropology and philosophy. These are not pursuits that everyone is capable of. The best works of theology are simply beyond the reach of many people; it's tough shit. Pick up Thomas Aquinas, if you don't believe me.

Religious activities, on the other hand, require no intellectual capacity. I don't mean that to sound condescending; religious activities just don't require one to reflect on the symbolic or ontological significance of Euchrist. Religious activities are effective (for reaching whatever goal you think they are reaching for; the specifics do not matter for this discussion) whether or not you have a sophisticated intellectual understanding of them.

This is not to claim that lay people are totally thoughtless. That would be embarrassingly arrogant and obviously wrong. Everyone engages in thought that organizes the world according to their imago. Religious people form and express statements that justify and clarify the religious aspects of their imago. Professional theologians do the same, of course.

It is for this reason that religion and theology are seen as a unity; all religious believes are theologians after a fashion. However, the sophistication of the theology one uses to clarify or justify their religious activities is secondary to the activity itself. This thought comes from my dabbling in philosophical anthropology, namely Ernst Cassirer and George Bataille. Both place religious activities in the realm of human activities. For Cassirer, religion is a "symbolic form" that humans use to organize the world in particular ways. For Bataille, religion is part and parcel of the human desire for ecstasy - a longing to stand outside one's self, a kind of mystical experience. Both Cassirer and Bataille consider "religion" as something distinct from particular belief systems or theologies. I did, by the way, write the post "A Theory of Religion" almost immediately after reading Bataille and Cassirer.

So, one can speak in tongues without an encyclopedic knowledge of the issues surrounding the tongues "debate." One can engage in the three religious activities I outlined here: ecstasy (called "subsumation of the individual" in that post, but I've changed it because of the wordiness), totemism and the concept of symbolic cause and effect with any theological backing, or sometimes no backing at all. Religious activities all have a unity that no exclusivist, sophisticated theology can overcome. For example, most religious promise that one can affect physical reality through symbolic acts. A shaman cuts a chicken's throat, and expects a good hunt. A group of Christians hold hands and prays for traveling mercies. The two activities come from the same place in human nature - conflicting theologies notwithstanding.

But does it stop there? Are theologians simply engaging in an activity that is functionally identitical to a much more casual line of thought? I would say no.

Theological thought views God as an object of study, not veneration. This is not to claim an impersonal disinterest, or that a theologian cannot attempt to honor God with his actions. However, just as religious activities do not require theological thought in order to function, theological thought does not require religious significance in order to be engaged in. Theological thought can be approached as an academic subject, the same as literature and philosophy. If a particular theologian insists that their theological work is an act of religious veneration, they are not making a theological claim; their insistence rests in their philosophy.

To cap this post off, here's an metaphor. Think of religion and theology as two travelers. They both begin in the same place - human nature - but they are most definitely two separate people. They leave the city by two different gates, out of sight of each other. Then suddenly, one sneaks up on the other so carefully and gradually and they walk parallel lines for so long that they think they have been together since the beginning. Religion never notices that theology is a bit arrogant and aloof, while theology never notices that religion is simply ignoring him except when he needs help.

And now for my patented blink-and-you'll-miss-it conclusion. My professors hated this.

"I'll draw out implications of this idea in future posts."

There.

Thinking

Before I continue with morality, theology and religion, there's one more issue that needs to be hashed out. What, exactly, is the point of thinking about all this? How does it contribute to anyone's life? Why not just get on with the business of living? Be more practical, man! More grounded! It's against statements like these - and the seeming omniscience of science - that philosophers have been scrambling to justify their own existence for a century or two now, and this is my two cents.

It's a pretty common theme to hear that philosophy is the search for truth. Truth with a big, dignified looking "T." I tend to think this just isn't true. Ultimately, “true” statements are not necessary to achieve the self-reflecting world we want most. Philosophy is fundamentally about creation, not exploration. For the most primaeval human purposes, all that matters is that you believe what you believe. And for the sake of the reading impaired, yet another qualification: this does not mean that all statements are equally true.

This, incidentally, is what I consider philosophy to be: sustained reflective thought. The two terms are synonymous. Everyone does it from time to time. Philosophy is not science; science is calculative thought. Reflective thought is abstract, interested and passionate; calculative thought is concrete, disinterested and cold. This being said, the two are not opposites; reflective thought is both chronologically and existentially prior to calculative thought. Every scientific formula is preceded by the (however unarticulated) reflective idea that forming the formula is somehow important. Calculative thought always rests inside a context of reflective thought.

Why say "sustained"? Reflective thought is common in human life, very common; everyone on some level or another engages in some kind of philosophy. Not everyone is interested enough to make it a hobby or a career, however. It's just a matter of quantity. For thought to be philosophical, it has to be a practice.

So, what place does philosophy hold in human life? For one, it gives philosophers something to do. But of course, it shares this in common with every other human occupation. Being a plumber and being a philosopher have the same basic grounding in human life.

Philosophy as creation - e.g. creating previously unseen links between ideas, or creating new ideas, or creating works that influence others - is one of its vital functions. It shares this with art and literature, however.

Philosophy - which is at least partly reflection upon one's self - can open up a dialogue with one's imago. It shares this with psychology, though. Still not a uniquely philosophical activity.

Actually, as a human activity, I don't think philosophy is fundamentally unique. It shares all of its traits with the rest of the humanities.

(On a side note, this is basically why I flippantly choose History over English for my major, and it is why I feel comfortable switching focuses for my MA.)

None of this still doesn't really answer the question; between the apparent non-importance of "Truth" and the epistemological juggernaut of science, why bother with sustained reflective thought?

It's important to remember that philosophy mixes these traits in a way that the other humanities do not. The building blocks of the discipline are the same, but the structure is different. Philosophy is the conscious attempt to create and reveal new ideas about life; it brings together the aims of psychology and art in a powerful and useful way.

To speak practically - and so maybe a little bit calculatively - sustained reflective thought ferrets out new avenues of behavior and interpretation. It helps us cast our lives and environments in different lights. Even deeply conservative philosophies do this, by the way, though perhaps not very effectively.

When one thinks reflectively, one is trying to arrange the facts, conclusions and judgements they have formed in new ways, ways that uncover new ways of seeing the world. It is psychology, it is literature, it is art.

The limits of philosophy should be discussed too. I don’t believe that particular propositions hold any intrinsic motivation power. Changing or forming one’s belief about proposition X does not mean their behavior will change. Human behavior is not guided by propositions: this must be clear. We do not live by our moralities or our philosophies; we wear them like clothes. Our behavior is not subordinate to what we believe; what we believe is subordinate to our behavior.

Behavioral or psychological change does not come with epiphanies; it does not come when we accept certain intellectual propositions. Our behavior and psychology change as part of a circle; our environment changes us, and we seek to change our environment. Accepting propositions is only a piece of the circle; our relationship to our environment must change in ways we do not have full control over before our behavior and psychology change.

The most practical thing that can be said about philosophy is that it helps us ferret out those aspects of our relationship to our environment that we can change. Philosophy helps us consciously change the clothes we wear; our environment interacts with us differently upon that basis, thus bringing about a more holistic change. Philosophy is creation - of both ourselves and the world. Other pursuits - art, religion, etc - also “change our clothes”, but they do so in an unreflective manner.

Words as Pockets

There's something I've been trying to say about words and language these past few years. It has popped up in discussions with friends and in my comments on blogs. I've never been satisfied with how I've said it. Finally, Nietzsche has come to my rescue.

The word "revenge" is said so quickly, it almost seems as if it could not contain more than one root concept and feeling. And so people are still trying to find this root - just as our economists still have not got tired of smelling such a unity in the word "value" and of looking for the original root concept of value. As if all words were not pockets into which now this and now that has been put, and now many things at once! Thus "revenge," too, is now this and now that, and now something very composite.

- "The Wanderer and His Shadow," Basic Writings of Nietzsche.

Nietzsche's specific example is revenge, but it's the same with other words. Whenever we're talking with one another, we need to recognize that even though we are using the same words, we may very well be placing different things into these "pockets."

Here are two good examples, one from my own blog and one from Into The Depths. My post Suicide Is Painless provoked a discussion over exactly how we should be using the word suicide. I was enlisting the word "suicide" to describe an action that Stash felt required a more "dignified" term.

In the comments for Joel's 2 Kicks Dan and I tussled over both the words "evangelical" and "morality." Same words, same pockets. Different filling.

These disputes weren't trivial to Dan, Stash, or myself; we all had something at stake. We all find some sort of valuable or powerful conotation in these words, so each of us wanted to wield these words in support of our positions. It is somewhat futile to argue over who is right in these cases, though. Just like the value of money, the meaning of words is social. In our mutual attempts to alter the language each other uses, we were attempting to alter each other. If Stash began using the word "suicide" to describe what is more commonly and simply referred to as a martyrdom, it would have reflected (or caused? perhaps, yes) a change in how he viewed the world.

Despite these inevitable conflicts, it is possible to reach a practical and useful mutual understanding. Despite the reality of conflicting metanarratives or even the mythical Calvinist antithesis, we can see what another person fills a particular word with and so effectively communicate. And how can we do this? Empthy. Whenever someone is being weird, we can only communicate with them on the basis of empathy; temporarily taking on their perspective.

All this is important for... well, pretty much everything I thoughtfully speak and write about. It's specifically going to be important for the next couple of posts; I'm finally going to get around to the twin topics of religion and theology. And yes, part two of the morality thing is coming too.

I can't stress how valuable and insightful Frederich Nietzsche is, by the way. By all means, pick up Beyond Good and Evil or Genealogy of Morals. Better yet, get the collection I linked to above. Every single person that wishes to be thoughtful should write more like Nietzsche, myself included. I only wish the folks I'll be studying in the fall were influenced in a literary sense by Nietzsche and not only in a philosophical way.