The Necessity of Angels: Caputo and the ‘Warrior Realists’

First, I want to thank Tripp Fuller and Indiana University Press for facilitating this “blog tour,” and encourage everyone to check out the previous posts available here.

In chapter 10,Facts, Fictions, and Faith: What Is Really Real after All?Caputo continues to put his thesis of “perhaps” in play with some of the biggest names in contemporary

continental philosophy. Here, Caputo sets out to take on what he dubs “Warrior Realism,” and others call Speculative Realism. Caputo sets his sights on Quentin Meillassoux’s (pronounced may-yah-sue) critique of “correlationsim” which he believes as corrupted philosphical thought and its ability to say anything meaningful about the world itself. In this first post, I’ll simply try to give Meillasoux a bit of background and fair treatment.  If you don’t want to hear a lot about Meillassoux before diving into Jack’s critique, then skip this section in between the *’s.

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In his seminal work After Finitude, Meillassoux starts out by bringing to the fore the question of what have traditionally been called primary qualities. Secondary qualities are qualities of a thing that are produced in some relation to another thing. For example, when your finger touches a flame and you feel the sensation of heat, or burning, this is a quality that, we can assume, the flame itself does nor perceive, it does not burn itself. Meillasoux’s project does not involve these kinds of qualities, but primary qualities, or qualities of the thing itself, the flame as if there is no finger for it to burn. In short, to bypass getting stuck speaking about secondary qualities, Meilassoux, unsurprisingly given his mentor was none other than Alain Badiou, posits that mathematics are the thing that can tell us about things in themselves, or the universe, without recourse to relation. There is, in other words, a rehabilitation of the objects of relation themselves, or the related terms, rather than the relation itself.

For those familiar with Kant, he is an obvious target and exemplar of such correlationism. Kant, along with other transcendental idealists,  took it upon themselves to mediate between idealism and realism.  Kant urged that knowledge has an a priori component that allows rational subjects to make s synthetic a priori judgements about the world. Synthetic a priori judgements are not about the world, they are about the world as it is experienced by subjects possessing certain a priori principles. Metaphysics, then, is about the conditions of experience. For Kant, the conditions of experience are: Sensibility (space and time, both subjective), understanding (intuition, concepts/categories), and reason (makes sense of world by applying a priori categories… 12 of them). This transcendental idealism of Kant meant not that objects in our experience conform to our concepts, not the other way around. Hence, in this mediating philosophy between realism and idealism, there is the necessity of what Meillassoux calls correlation, we cannot have knowledge of objects themselves, they are process through those 12 a priori categories (e.g. causality, plurality, unity, possibility, existence, etc.).

As Graham Harman points out in his treatment of Meillasoux, Meillasoux obviously rejects this correlational aspect of Kant, but happily follows Kant in his critique of “dogamtic metaphysics,” or metaphysics’ insistence on saying something about the world without first talking about how we can come to know the world in the first place. Therefore, Harman formulates Meillasoux’s idea of correlationism is that philosophers have thought that if we try to think beyond thought, we thus turn whatever that is into a thought, and return to square one. Unlike other Speculative Realists and Object Oriented Ontologists, Meillassoux also thinks there is something to privilege about the human-world relation (over object-object relations) while at the same time radicalizing the relationship to show that there must be things independent of this relationship or thought itself.

Meillassoux further asserts that the finitude exemplified or founded in Kant’s system is not unique to human knowledge, finitude is part of the stucture of all existence, objects themselves contain an obvious finitude in failing to grasp the nature of their condition or the existence of other objects. However, even if the human-world relation stands at the center, this is what can, in radical form, tell us about experience or relation independent objects “in themselves.”

One example of how this becomes possible is what Meillasoux calls the “arche-fossile,” which presents a conundrum for Kantian reason. While a fossil merely bares the marks of the past, an arche-fossil is old enough to tell us about conditions before life even emerged on earth. This kind of prehistoric science might, for those sympathetic with Meillassoux, seriously jeopardize all post-Kantian philosophy in its assumption that we simply can’t speak objectively about the world “out there” independent of our experience. Science, at least in this respect, does a pretty good job of describing the world or universe before life or Dasein existing to think, relate, or be thrown into it.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             ***

Caputo picks up his hammer (in a Heideggarian sense of course, his theory is not a hammer until he uses it to bash Meillassoux!) and goes to work on Meillassoux for the basic assertion that “objects fall from the sky,” and says that this kind of thought is a fundamentalist about obectivism as any Christian fundamentalism (200). To substantively counter Meillassoux, and other “Warrior Realists,” Caputo turns to philosopher of science Bruno Latour. The question about “reality” is quite tiresome when non warrior realists confront their opponents. Caputo says the problem is this:

Once we point out the role that is played by practicing scientists in constructing a scientific account of things, have we relativized science, absorbed the real into the mind of the scientist and destroyed the objectivity of science? Does not “the real” (objectivity) demand the absolute disappearance of human intervention (subjectivity)? Are not objectivity or reality and subjectivity or human investigator inversely and unilaterally related instead of being directly and bilaterally related, as demanded by the notion of correlation? Latour’s thesis is that if you asked practicing scientists that question (in a way they could understand) you would be greeted with dumbfounded and uncomprehending silence. The very opposite is true. The more complex the scientific community, the more sophisticated scientific instruments at its disposal, the more elaborate the mathematics, then the more real the result, not the more “subjectivistic.” In short, the more construction, the more reality… (200).

Through Latour, we can begin to see that the dichotomy between subject and object, or construction and reality, is not really the issue. The way science is actually practiced, the distinction is between successful and unsuccessful constructions. Physicist Niels Bohr agreed with this well before Latour, as he define scientific theory as not something that simply seeks to represent nature “in itself,” but to give us rules for manipulating objects in the world and then a language we can use to communicate or describe our results. By way of example, Caputo employs Latour’s case study of Pasteur’s famous discovery that yeast is a living organism. The only way Pasteur could make this discovery, Latour explains, is through an ingenious series of plots and stagings, through which he was able to “trick” the microorganism to appear. Naive realism, then, is that which tries to “erase Pasteur from the scene.” It is not simply the case that the yeast existed in a living identifiable form before Pasteur came along and performed his successful experiments. Rather, in collaborative process, Pasteur worked with the yeast, they were not merely “there” before Pasteur came along, Latour insists. Experiments are not a matter of passive objects and active subjects, or passive subjects taking in the content of the objects or enviroment around them.

This is why Caputo follows Latour in thinking that we have been “blackmailed by modernity” (204). The choice is not between “omnipotent human creator (Feuerbach on religion) or an omnipotent transcendent reality (Barth on God).” There is a drive for purity of thought in the Warrior Realists which is even willing to cut off our access to the real in order to preserve its objectivity (for a great look at quests for purity of thought, see Jeff Robbins’ excellent Between Faith and Thought). Unlike these realists, Latour somewhat ironically insists that transcendence, by which he means truth or others might substitute God, never comes into view (for us) in the first place without the work of human hands. There is a direct proportion between mediation and transcendence, as Caputo paraphrases.

By the very arrival of the angel, we are instructed about the necessity of angels, of images, messages, and mediators; every parable is a parable of the necessity of parables. The angel is the “dangerous supplement” (Derrida) of/ from God, which is the point being elaborated so brilliantly in Michel Serres …The question is not how to make unconditioned contact with reality but how to find the right conditions under which it is possible to make contact with reality at all. Without the right conditions, the result is not unconditioned reality but a total lack of contact with reality…Unconditional access to reality is an illusion, like the illusion of Kant’s dove that thinks it would be able to soar all the more freely but for the resistance offered it by the wind.(206-7).

Theologians of the perhaps, Caputo concludes, are as interested in reality as anyone. Physics, Caputo surmises, is indeed as close to metaphysics as we can get (212). The role of meta/physics is then to tell us about the real (oui, oui, viens! as Jack always says) but “we still need to talk about the real inter-relations of the real, of the chiasmic intertwining of human reality with reality at large, the curling up of reality that takes place in human reality.” This is of course no surprise for anyone familiar with Caputo, and the “curlings up of reality,” plays, intertwining, traces, etc make up his Derridian impluse.

What Jack overlooks is that these physics experiments that Latour references and we can now test empirically all started as metaphysics, or Gedanken, thought experiments, that he seems opposed to when he axiomatically asserts that “the best metaphysics is physics.” Caputo’s strategy, via Latour, is to imbricate the physical sciences with the constructivism of the social sciences, a both/and approach to science and post-structural thought. It is metaphysics, then, that is left out in the cold (and not even the “cold war realists” will touch it). The trouble is that just because we can do experimental metaphysics now does not mean that the thought experiments, a definition one might give to metaphysics, weren’t necessary to begin with. As Whitehead makes clear at the outset of Process and Reality, “metaphysical categories are not dogmatic statements of the obvious; they are tentative formulations of ultimate generalities” (8). Without the adventurous spirit of metaphysics, we wouldn’t have the ideas to test in the first place. Physicist Karen Barad in a published interview says as much, that “there has never been a sharp boundary between physics, on the one hand, and metaphysics or philosophy, on the other.” Thought experiments thought up by Bohr and Heisenberg, among other giants, were never expected to be tested, they were tools to think with. Of course now that we can test them, all the better, but the ability to test certain metaphysical propositions empirically in no way limits the necessity to “experiment” with thought to create new tools and concepts that can help us manipulate and understand the world in certain ways (Bohr).

Ultimately, affirming the danger of faith is to accept what Derrida called the “new humanities,” a blurring of the line between human and inhuman, or as is the case above, reality and construction. Faith, or a theology of the perhaps, in this instance, is the realization that “we have never been purely human;  we have never been purely alive; there has never been any pure human life.” Caputo cites Derrida to argue that “différance is shown to be the ‘dead’ element in the ‘living present,’ that is, the formal, neutral, or differential spacing of a technology embedded in the heart of living speech.” Hence, there might be said to be a kind of “technology” at the heart of humanity itself, a revelation that as human beings enmeshed in a world of language in signs, we cannot speak about ourselves without speaking of the technologies that, at least in part, compose our being.

Faith, for Caputo, is accepting that because of our hybrid identities, our “real” and “constructed” elements, we can never quite see what is coming, so we need a theology of “the event” (as many posts before me have touched on.” In this mode, theology becomes radical theology, which, of course, is not metaphysics but theopoetics. Instead of a Kantian system that shields us from knowing too much therefore allowing for a kind of fideism that believes simply because it can’t be proved wrong, Caputo’s “headless Hegelian” theology of the event/perhaps accepts the uncertainty of a world which always withdraws from our attempts to wrangle it or categorize it within our constructed systems. As we have seen, there are ingenious moments in which we can glean even revolutionary new facts about the way the world is, but the way the world is is always the way the world is with us, we are a part of the world we measure, take in, and come to know. Even though I reject Caputo’s swearing off of metaphysics as just as absurd a move as Meillassoux calling Derrida and foucault fideists, theology as theopoetics is still, in my view, a justified and effective response to a world such as ours. Theopoetics, as a drawing forth, is a practice for religious communities to engage in which might not be as different from Pasteur’s experiment as we might think. Certainly religious practitioners are not scientists, trading in the currency of empirica\tests with concrete, reproducible results to share with the world, which is why Caputo says that “religious traditions as so many ways that events take place, so many ways to make conditional historical response to the unconditional solicitations, invitations, injunctions, promises, and recollections, which take place as so many events” (221-2).

How we know about the world is inextricable from how we “intra-act” (a neologism of Barad) in the world. Knowing and practicing are bound together, and being responsible and accountable to the performances in which we all variously take part. Barad drives the point home by claiming that “things don’t preexist; they are agentially enacted and become determinately bounded and propertied within phenomena. Outside of particular agential intra-actions, ‘words’ and ‘things’ are indeterminate (Meeting the Universe Halfway 150). I think Caputo insists that we accept this indeterminacy, and through what he calls theopoetics, expose ourselves to the risk (rather than shielding our faith from in with Kantian epistemological postmodernism) of creating new and better meaning in the world, perhaps even changing it. This might be what the Bible meant by the Kingdom of God.

October 15, 2013 | Categories: Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Müntzer, Engels, and Seeing Through the Ideology of “Theonomics”

If you have taken classes dealing with the Protestant Reformation, chances are it was explained to you in generally theological terms, centered on the figure of Martin Luther. Of course we all know that on Halloween of 1517 (they loved Halloween back then, trust me), Martin Luther dressed up like a friar in a weird hat (or something) and instead of a asking for a treat, pinned his infamous “95 Theses” to the door of the All Saints Church in Wittenberg. Luther, we are told (not wrongly, just simply) was protesting the sale of indulgences, and of of course had other concerns about particular Roman Catholic doctrines and practices. From that point of the story on, we are regaled with the theological disputes not only between Luther and the Church authorities, but with fellow dissidents like Zwingli, whom he spared over the theological significance of the Eucharist. The real issues, many are led to think, were theological. Of course theological differences were both acute and real, but Friedrich Engels tells a different story when he writes about the Peasant War in Germany.  Taking up the kind of analysis he and his partner Marx are famous for, Engels looks at the social conditions and relations leading up to the Reformation, and inflects not Luther’s theses, but rather the Peasant Revolt and another radical protesting figure, Thomas Müntzer.

Church dogma, Engels explains, was also a matter of jurisprudence for the feudal order in the 16th century. Theology, at least in name, was used as a foundation for laws and various taxes everyone from feudal lord to burghers had to pay to the Church. Therefore, “existing social relations had to be stripped of their halo of sanctity before they could be attacked.” In this sense, theological challenge becomes a kind of instrument for power plays within the existing social order. Protest against the feudal order had always been alive in radical mystical movements/heresies like the Waldenses and Albigenses, but the “town heresies,” which Engels says are the “official heresies of the Middle Ages… were directed primarily against clergy, whose wealth and political station they attacked.” Crucially, and especially relevant today, the bourgeoisie demanded (and continues to demand) a cheap government. In the 16^th century, as we have already noted, matters of jurisprudence and theology were inextricably linked. A theological or biblical defense that could cut off the authority of well paid priests and church structures in the name of something like the “priesthood of all believers” would be a direct method of cutting the most expensive element of the church. This is the primary “burgher heresy.” This heresy, Engels continues to explain, while initially in

the name of diminishing the economic and social power of the church those in upper feudal society had to support, found unintended, more radical expression in the Peasant War and the idea of the equality of the children of God. A figure like Müntzer shows well how Christianity can thus be a radical starting point for radical social change.

Žižek’s method of ideological critique comes to mind, when he explains that the most effective method of criticizing dominant ideological thought can sometimes be to take it more seriously than it takes itself. Žižek recounts:

In early 1980s, a half-dissident student weekly newspaper in ex-Yugoslavia wanted to protest the fake “free” elections; aware of the limitations of the slogan “speak truth to power” (“The trouble with this slogan is that it ignores the fact that power will not listen and that the people already know the truth as they make clear in their jokes.”), instead of directly denouncing the elections as un-free, they decided to treat them as if they are really free, as if  their result really was undecided, so, on the elections eve, they printed an extra-edition of the journal with large headline: “Latest election results: it looks that Communists will remain in power!” This simple intervention  broke the unwritten “habit” (we “all know” that elections are not free, we just do not talk publicly about it…): by way of treating elections as free, it reminded the people publicly of their non-freedom.

So in a way, figures like Müntzer and the phenomenon of the Peasant Revolt took challenges to ecclesial authority in the form of populist theology more seriously than the burghers intended. This is the distinction, for Engels, between Luther and Müntzer. Muntzer, by analogy, stepped into the role of Žižek’s student newspaper editor while Luther stepped into a position of ideological authority . In Luther, we see the same kind of disavowal of the popular elements of his thought as many communist leaders in Žižek’s youth (as he tells the story). Luther put powerful tools in the hands of the plebeians, as Engels points out, not least of which was a Bible they could read, but when the peasants began to take Luther and the Bible more seriously, or at least literally, than Luther and his bourgeois supporters did , violent upheaval became inevitable between moderates (wanting to challenge the official Church on economic grounds) and the “extremists” who challenged the logic by which the burghers and their noble supporters tried to gain an upper hand on the clergy. Luther, of course,  played the part of the “liberal,” and eventually sold out the peasants at the behest of the princes whom he owed his life. Luther’s rage at the peasants, fervently advocating for their defeat, even went as far as to seem to revel in the prospect of strangling, stabbing, and knocking them to pieces. Liberals get quite upset when material conditions present the possibility of actual change. It is here, Engels points out, that Luther totally disavows his mutiny against religious authority, selling out not only the peasants but the burghers as well in the name of the princes.

Müntzer, in refusing to engage Luther on theological grounds, insisted, crucially, on bypassing the pretense of theology as a discourse of ideology. This realization that the approved or sanctioned mode of discourse is founded on bypassing the real cause of alienation (social relations) is an important step, even in our current situation of economic downturn and class oppression. Today, one might think of “economics,” rather than theology, as an abstract, in many ways fideistic discipline and carrier of so-called inherited, unchallengeable knowledge as the turf by which the bourgeoisie insist the debate take place. Today, economics, if not quite the equivalent of theology in the 16th century, at least has taken up many of its qualities so that we might call it, more appropriately, “theonomics.”

In his book Debt: The First 5000 Years, David Graeber describes the current state of economics thusly:

September 26, 2013 | Categories: Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Deleuze and Cinema: The Political Significance of (Time) Images (Part 2 of 3, and this is a bit dry)

In my last post, I tried to explore the significance of what Deleuze calls “the movement image.” Sidestepping or questioning the way in which semiotic (Derrida) and psychoanalytic (Lacan/Freud) interpretations function, Deleuze insists that we pay attention to images in themselves as signs, looking for ways in which juxtapositions of images affect our habits of thought, perception of movement (as well as time), and therefore our (political) imagination. If, as Deleuze claims in Difference and Repetition, that “We live with a particular image of thought, that is to say, before we think, we have a vague idea of what it means to think, its means and its ends,” (4) then we must take quite seriously the circularity of the mode in which modern philosophy has functioned since its inception. Deleuze goes on to argue that classical philosophy often identified the image of thought with “common sense,” or what everyone is supposed to know, or proposing a natural representation of what it means to think. Eventually, Deleuze argues, in Hume philosophy realizes its own groundlessness, and thinking becomes nothing more than a higher form of Habit far from being grounded in Reason. Finally in Kant philosophy becomes “critical” of its own image and in Hegel images of thought are arranged “in a dialectical progression that leads up to the contemporary moment where the circular nature of the relationship between idea and image is grounded in the movement of Ideology” (Lambert 2). Deleuze, however, sets out to attain a “new image of thought and act, its functioning, its genesis in thought itself” (D&R xvii) Though I jumped the gun a bit at the end of my last post lapsing into the time image a bit toward the end, it is this concept I wish to explore now. Cinema, as I have hoped to begin to show, contains immeasurable depth in creating new images of thought through breaking established habits of perception and thought (though Deleuze explores this project of creating new images of thought in virtually all of his work).

I say that I jumped the gun in my last post bringing in the link Deleuze draws between cinema or the screen and the brain because this point is directly tied to the time image itself. To understand the significance of the “brain” for Deleuze, we might start by contrasting it with the understanding of the psyche put forward by Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis. A psychoanalytic image of thought concerned the brain, like the movement or action image, remains deterministic. For Freud, for example, there is absolute causality even if it is often un or subconscious, there are not accidents. For every slip of the tongue, to take the most obvious example, there is a causal link to some repressed element of consciousness and it is the analyst’s job to make this causal linkages apparent. For Lacan, the relationship between signifier and signified might be open to metonymic displacement that appear to be irrational, but the analyst again interprets them thought a “grid of semiotic determinations” (Lambert 168).

These semiotic images of the brains are still fundamentally based on (metaphysical) Reason, Deleuze says. In Cinema 2 Deleuze insists that “the discovery of the synapse was enough in itself to shatter the idea of a continuous cerebral system, i.e. the brain as a whole…since it laid down irreducible points or cuts… Hence the greater importance of a factor of uncertainty, or half uncertainty, in the neuronal transmission” (318n). Deleuze has no problem acknowledging how psychology and analysis help grant insight into our relationship with our brain, but little of the lived brain itself (212). We must, for Deleuze, move away from thinking of the structure of a brain in terms  terms of a separation between subject and object, causally related.

If we recall, this problemitizing of causality is also party the problem of the movement image in postwar cinema leading to the advent of the time image- the faith humanity once had in the onward march and success of history, in organization, in straightforward progress is deteriorated. Organic unity is no longer assumed in history after the movement image, and here we now speak of the non-unity of a brain, which correlates to that which the movement image gives way to, the time image… “time presents itself when history fades away” (Marrati 65). The way in which time begins to present itself in cinema has to do with a transformation of cinematic subjectivity, Deleuze write “Subjectivity, then, takes on a new sense, which is no longer motor or material, but temporal and spiritual: that which ‘is added’ to matter, not what distends it” (C2 47). The memories and thoughts that compose our subjectivity are not only “in” our brains, but they exist in time. It is not time that is in us but we who are in time (Marrati 72). All of this points to the presenting or imaging of time itself as an expression of a change in cinema from the movement to the time image. To reiterate, when a causal, motor-sensory model falls apart (movement image or deterministic psychology), we begin to think time itself.

The time image is not a negation of the movement image, and Deleuze does not simply wish to malign its existence, but rather the problem is that it has broken down (much like, we might say, deterministic psychology based on the Whole or structure). This way of thinking has to do with the aforementioned “cuts” that Deleuze finds exhibited in synapses, but are actually part of time itself. So what is this thing Deleuze describes as “time itself, ‘a little time in its pure state'”? When the actual and the virtual are compressed into the tiniest possible form. The actual and virtual images form a “crystal” that represents the diffraction of time (rather than its full unveiling, which is the time image, which is more than the crystal of time). A classic example of such a crystal of time  (or “crystal image”) wherein the actual and virtual become indiscernible from one another is in the classic Orson Welles film The Lady from Shanghai in a palace of mirrors. In this famous scene, the virtual images produced by the seemingly endless mirrors subsume the actual image (the actual actor/actress) into a sea of the virtual. The actor becomes one “virtuality” among others (Marrati 73).  The only course of action for the characters becomes smashing all of the images until they can “win back” their actuality and find each other (Marrati 73/C2 70). One way of rephrasing this is thinking of the characters un-defracting time and winning back the present, because the only form of the actual image is the present, while it is the contemporaneous past which makes up the virtual.

To unpack this, Clayton Crockett suggests we read the the crystal image – the diffraction of time – through the lens of the three syntheses of time from Difference and Repetition. If we recall the first synthesis of time is “habit, or the present, [which] corresponds to the sensory motor image, which is under the sing of the movement image” (Crockett 95). The second synthesis is that synthesis which grounds the present, it is the form of memory that grounds our perception of the present (a point Deleuze takes from Bergson in Matter and Memory). In Cinema 2, this is couched in terms of the “recollection image.” As Crockett explains, the recollection image in its smallest form is actually the crystal image, which “serves two functions: seed and mirror” (Crockett 95). As mirror, the crystal image subsumes the actual into the virtual, as we noted in the example taken from Lady from Shanghai. As seed, the crystal image acts as the cut or caesura that “breaks through to the time image proper, which is also a shattering of all images based on representation” (Crockett 95). The time image proper, then corresponds to the third synthesis of time we find in Difference and Repetition, the passage to the future. This passage to the future is where we get a “break” or caesura (keeping in mind the constitution of a brain for Deleuze is also made of of many cuts and caesuras, see above). This caesura is within the image as it is torn in two unequal parts, which Deleuze calls an “interstice.” This split is the seed of time generated by the crystal image (Crockett 96). It is the unequal exchange past and present (correspondence between the virtual and actual) that generates the break which “bursts forth” future . This break, if we harken back to Difference and Repetition, also exposes the fallacy of representation in general, as the actual continually shatters the virtual (much like in Lady from Shanghai), breaking open time itself and birthing the future, making representation, in any straightforward, common sense manner, impossible.

Time has to split at the same time as it sets itself our or unrolls itself: it splits in two dissymmetrical jets , one of which makes all the present pass on, while the other preserves all the past. Time consists of this split, and it is this, it is time, that we see in the crystal. (C2 81)

There is a kind of coexistence of past and present, virtual and actual, that disrupts our common sense notion of time as linear. The past does not “pass,” Paola Marrati explains, in a point Deleuze takes from Bergson, it “becomes endowed with its own virtual reality distant from any psychological existence” (Marrati 74). Subjectivity, then, is not something we have it is something we are in, not in the sense of a world spirit or something, but time itself.

Citizen Kane is a prime example of the way in which the “virtual sheets” of the past are explored: “The  succession of cross-cutting shot-reaction shots describe Kane’s habits, the ‘dead time’ of his life, while the depth shots mark moments in which Kane’s life changes dramatically.At these points, the image operates…as a true leap into the past” (Marrati 77). The way in which these “sheets” of the virtual past play into the narrative is an example of Deleuze’s argument for what he calls the “powers of the false.” Time, according to Deleuze, always puts truth “in crisis,” and cites an old Stotic argument to make his point. If it is true that a battle might take place tomorrow, then a paradox arises the next day. Today’s possibilities always become impossible tomorrow. Therefore, we might say that the past is not necessarily “true.” Rather than being a sophism, Deleuze argues that this paradox demonstrates the direction relationship of truth and time. Leibniz solved this paradox by famously positing multiple worlds, wherein both scenarios are possible, just not together, or so they are “incompossible.” Deleuze, however, does not separate incompossible scenarios into different worlds like Leibniz, but asks the question of their contemporaneous existence (C2 170).  In this sense, each “peak” of the present can be said to be “true” along with its possibilities, but each peak of the present cannot be true along with other peaks as they come into existence. The trouble is that peaks, or presents, cannot be fully sperated from one another by virtue of the present and past being folded into one another in the virtual and actual: “incompossible presentsrelated to not necessarily true pasts” (C2 171). Narrative, a method that tries to string together events into a coherent sequence, thus employs the “power of the false,” it is these “not necessarily true” pasts that bear on the present and give it semblance of meaning. We have the ability to decide which sheets of the past we might treat as true, however the consequence of this is making other sheets of the past (which are equally present in the ever passing present) false. In other words, time does not proceed A ->B->C, etc. Rather, present ‘A’ folds into present B, AB folds into C which becomes ABC, etc. as time progresses. This is a progression of time that renders fixed or “true” identities continually “false.”

Art, for Deleuze, and especially film, deals in the powers of the false, rather than being fraudulent for not dealing in “truth.” There is no longer opposition between truth and falsehood in a common sense manner, the false quite literally produces the true. The artist is “the creator of truth, for truth is not something to be attained, found, or reproduced- it must be created” (C2 191). Again, this is a riff on Deleuze’s major repetitive point- identity is not fixed and cannot be represented. As such, traditional notions of truth must be rethought, especially as the product of creativity working within and with myriad “false” representations.  The payoff, for me, after all of this [no one is reading, I don’t blame them] is the revelation of the radical choice we face- the matter is not representation or finding truth (instead setting out to create it), but also realizing the rich “virtual” realities of time itself which we perpetually inhabit. We must inhabit the radical “breaks” that the time image reveals in order to choose, in Deleuze’s sense of eternal return, difference rather our normal mode of re-cognition and re-creation. This seems crucial if we are to break the linear, cause and effect common sense that seems to peretuate our tolerance for a world that seems to be speeding toward cataclysmic collapse at the hands of neoliberal global capitalism. Cinema, in revealing the image of time itself, is the creation of a brain. That will be what I talk much more interestingly about in my next post.

August 28, 2013 | Categories: Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Crockett and Robbins in Dialogue With Cornel West and Mark L. Taylor

At long last, the video from our event at Union Theological Seminary with Clayton Crockett and Jeff Robbins in dialogue with Cornel West and Mark L. Taylor has been uploaded. The event was a lot of fun to host, and I’d especially like to thank Professor Taylor for his time and preparation coming all the way out to Union from Princeton and preparing such an eloquent constructive response. It’s these kinds of dialogues that need to be staged more than ever, “Radical” theologians talking to liberals and liberationists like West, and figures like Taylor who already are synthesizing some of the best of Continental thought with Liberation Theology. No longer can there be silos of thought on the Left, each more or less disinterested with what the rest have to say. James Cone was in the audience for this event, and while we had hoped that he would ask a question, he was at least interested enough to admit that he would have to read some of the material he heard about because it seemed important. West himself remarked that what Crockett and Robbins are doing might be a new kind of liberation theology, and while that may seem like a stretch in the early stages of “the New Materialism,” I hope that at the very least it represents the beginnings of the formations of certain crosscurrents that are novel and useful in the face of the biggest threats both civilization and the planet has ever seen. Crockett and Robbins’ book is truly a manifesto, and I hope that this event was an embodiment of the spirit of the book, which is a call to engagement across borders and activism rather than just a new theory (though that’s in there, too!). Enjoy, and don’t miss the questions that were asked at the end from brilliant minds like Karen Bray, John Thatmanil, and Jan Rehmann! (And btw, f you haven’t had a chance to get the book yet because of cost or it’s not at your local library, the paperback is due out in October for a much more reasonable price).

April 26, 2013 | Categories: Uncategorized | 1 Comment

What I’ll be Talking About at Subverting the Norm

As Subverting the Norm II approaches, for anyone interested I thought I’d share the abstract for my talk and share some of the resources I’m working with. Though I’m sure my session won’t be nearly as exciting as talks from the likes of John Caputo, Clayton Crockett, Jeff Robbins, Peter Rollins, Katherine Moody, Kester Brewin, Barry Taylor, Namsoon Kang, Tripp Fuller (the list goes on), I am honored to share my session with the great Jeremy Fackenthal. Jermey’s (I should say Dr. Fackenthal’s) paper will be called “Repoliticizing the Church: Finding Postsecular Engagement in Adorno and Benjamin.” We go on at 3:15 on Saturday in room 3 (Breakout session IV). A complete schedule can be found here.

My paper: The Resonating Church: Overcoming Liberalism to Save the World

In Cinema II, Gilles Deleuze describes how films, unlike written word, have the power of image, music, rhythm, plot, and background sounds which mimic the ways in which our orientation towards the world is formed via lived experience. The Church now has the chance to cultivate renewed belief in this world via tangible, communal, aesthetic experiences that form “resonances” in a pluralist framework that transpose private religious affection into a resonance that is efficacious publically and politically. Such resonances are vital in order to resist what William Connolly names the “evangelical-capitalist resonance machine.” Connolly argues partners in this “resonance machine” are drawn across creedal differences by virtue of similarities in their shared existential ethos that seeks to undermine workers, or the “99%.” The intensity of this resonance machine, wherein special entitlement, privilege, and “cowboy capitalism” “resonate” to create a powerful feedback loop, remains unrivaled on the Left, where liberal ideals of tolerance and individuality work against potential resonance. The key for a postmodern church must not be to just conform to the epistemological and hermeneutical boundaries of its theory, but to follow Deleuze in asking how to best integrate and cultivate positive attachments to the world in our communities and hence overcoming restrictive, tribal, non-resonating liberalism. Against the evangelical-capitalist resonance machine, the Church must become the site of orienting us anew towards an embrace of the world. It must cultivate transformative experience, as Deleuze describes film, for personal and political revitalization.

Hopefully weaving these into a coherent and interesting paper…

Hope to see some of you this weekend in Missouri, especially those of you I have engaged with via social media and not met in person!

PS The session Jeremy and I are in is at the same time as the Process session featuring Tripp Fuller and Bo Sanders… You can hear them ANY time on the podcast and I’m sure you’ve all heard the Process gospel by now, so not need to go to their session instead of ours ; )

April 2, 2013 | Categories: Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Who is François Laruelle?

According to John Mullarkey and Anthony Paul Smith, Francois Laruelle is not to be mistaken for the “next big thing in French Philosophy.”[1] Risking the chagrin of Mullarkey and Smith, it could be the case that Laruelle’s “Non-Philosophical” approach to thinking “The Real” or “The One” could have the potential to be the next big thing, especially, in my mind, in the world of theology. The reason Mullarkey and Smith warn against appropriating Laruelle as the newest preeminent figure in certain philosophical circles is due to the fact that his project is concerned precisely with not being associated with those circles, “breaking from philosophy itself,”[2] and a project that is wholly distinct not only from phenomenology, deconstruction, postructuralism, metaontology, psychoanalysis etc. but from the whole of philosophy itself.

Francois Laruelle still remains a somewhat unknown, obscure figure in the world of “philosophy,” though he has long been respected in academic circles over his long and vast career extending from the late 1960’s to today. By and large, his work has yet to be translated from French into English, with only two of his works being published in America by Continuum in the last two years, along with a collection of essays, and one more forthcoming next year. To make Laruelle even more difficult and inaccessible, his thought it divided into four “periods:” Philosophy I (1971–1981), Philosophy II (1981–1995), Philosophy III (1995–2002), and Philosophy IV (2002–Present). One of his two books published in English, “Future Christ: A Lesson in Heresy,” (in which one of Laruelle’s claims derived from a radical thesis on immanence is that the “Future Christ” is any one of us) is undoubtedly provocative (and esoteric), but it is from his “Philosophy IV” period, and a reader may pick it up, noting that it is a very recent publication, without realizing where it fits in relation to his other “periods” (this is a problem I myself have and cannot begin to contextualize properly). Ray Brassier states that “Any presentation of Laruelle’s thought is bound to involve a certain amount of distortion and caricature” for this reason.[3] Here is my best attempt to sketch what Laruelle is up to, derived graciously mostly from secondary literature (I’m a fraud!)

Though I have noted that Laruelle sees himself outside of the philosophical tradition, his work is at least reminiscent of the “immanence turn” in continental philosophy, exemplified by thinkers like Gilles Deleuze. Accordingly, the aim of many thinkers in recent decades has been to develop phenomenologies and ontologies that all but abolish the “transcendent” in favor of the immanent. In this line, Laruelle seeks to point out a central fallacy of all philosophical thinking in the name of such immanence, which he terms “the real.” With no further adieu, Laruelle’s position is that all philosophy seeks to be representational, any philosophical system is not the representation is understands itself to be, but rather is a material part of reality, or “the real.” So, as Mullarkey and Smith note, non-philosophy is an experiment regarding the implications of seeing philosophy this way (through the lens of “non-philosophy”).

Laruelle posits a simple challenge from which all of his implications seem to be derived: He says, “Think this- Thought is a thing.”[4] So, therefore, any thought, not just philosophical ones, is the material that reality is composed of, not simply a description of it. Reality itself, or “The One,” can be said to be “Not a unification of that which was previously divided (transcendence/immanence) but rather an immanence that is ‘always already’, absolutely and of itself, indivisible…Immanence is lived prior to all representation.”[5] Hence, Laruelle characterizes (or caricatures?) all of philosophy as a unified front that misunderstands itself as describing the One (or The Real) when in actuality, it is not so much describing reality as it is being given rise to by the Real itself. Here, Laruelle can be distinguished from even the most orthodox (or radical) Kantians. It is not simply that Laruelle posits that metaphysics itself cannot access the ding an sich, but that Kantian thought still thinks that “reality can be thought, or inferred, through its own philosophical method.”[6] In other words, somehow Kantians simply “know” that the thing in itself cannot be known, but it can be inferred via our experiences and ways of knowing the world. It tells us that our perceptions are representations, and it does so through a representational (philosophical) metaphysical system. Laruelle wishes to exactly reverse this impulse, and posit instead that philosophy missteps when it seeks to represent the whole while not realizing that it itself is a part.

This leads Laruelle to say that philosophy is always constituted by and shares in common “decision.” “To decide is to cut oneself off from the Real, to represent it- decaedere (de – ‘off’ + caedere ‘cut’). To represent, to cut-off, to de-cide.”[7] A part, then, by virtue of being incomplete and a component of a larger whole, cannot, by definition, represent the whole, even if such a representation was hypothetically possible. There is no escaping, for Laruelle, the “part-ness” of attempts to represent, hence “the Real is indifferent to its parts…Non-Philosophy performs its part, comes out of [The Real].”[8] Thus we return to the argument that thought itself is “auto-affective,” it is “a kind of thing, and not a representation…the thought implicates itself – thus the auto– but it sidesteps…from philosophers (that is merely ‘more philosophy) by seeing itself as a performative thought and not a representational one… non-philosphy is an action.”[9] Thus, it might be said, as Mullarkey and Smith suggest, that this is not a theoretical matter at all, but a very practical one. Non-philosophy is not something that unfolds itself within a system or text like deconstruction, it is a performative that arises within the Real before it can give thought or representation to itself. Non-philosophy, on the other hand, takes philosophy as its raw materia

The “performance” of non-philosophy is also termed “science” by Laruelle. As Ian James explains:

Laruelle’s ‘science’ and the non-philosophical practice which flows from it does not require any foundation of the kind that philosophy always seeks or, rather, seeks to confer upon itself…Lauruellian science has no need of a foundation because it has a cause: The One, the real-as-identity: not only an immanent cause, but a cause by immanence, the causality of radical immanence itself… Laruelle is able to affirm that all thought is (always already)’in’ and ‘of’ the Real (that is, caused by it in the last instance) but also, crucially, that everything we can know or think is ultimately not grounded in a subject. Or, at least being caused by the One, it is not in any way dependent upon a subject of knowledge such as philosophy may have conceived it from Descartes onwards…’this real, rather than Being that sciences, all sciences, postulate (Laruelle 1991:25).[10]

There is a lot going on in this passage along that cannot be sufficiently unpacked in this space. Suffice it to say, however, that perhaps now we can understand the radical inversion being instituted by Laruellian “science.” Whereas philosophy conforms the world to knowledge and concepts that mix transcendence and immanence (even Deleuzian thought with its categories such as “actual” and “virtual” can be said to be transcendent by virtue of them being categorical to begin with), non-philosophy, strictly speaking, is “conditioned by the real since it is ultimately caused by it,”[11] what Laruelle calls “determination-in-the-last-instance.”

If this “system” is becoming clear at all thus far, one may ask what justificatory work such a theory can itself do (let alone whether or not it is self-justificatory, circular, gnostic, or arbitrary. Questions and charges I am not prepared to answer at this point). For Laruelle, his theory is not only practical, but it is democratic, and radically so. One might argue that it is itself a justification for democratic practice, and perhaps a robust explanation of pluralism. This is because it follows from the premise of the One which causes thought, and all thought is part of the One (or “real-one”), that “no single philosophy and no specific form of the philosophical decision can have any greater purchase on the real than any other (since ultimately they have none at all).”[12] I would wager that this has the potential to be a more robust defense of what Jean-Francois Lyotard calls a differend. While Lyotard agrees that reality cannot be unilaterally represented, and thus consists of singular events, he does so in the line of Descartes and Heidegger. A differend occurs when two parties have a dispute, and each party, broadly, has equally justifiable reasons for its position. There is no agreement about what criteria can be used to litigate or judge which position is superior. Each case of reasoning accords to its own internal standards. There is no external “third” that can come in to mediate and justify one over the other. The victim is constituted by “damage accompanied by the loss of the means to prove the damage,” a victim’s wrong cannot even be presented. Lyotard analyzes “events,” derived from experience, signs, and language in developing his poststructural ontology. Laruelle, however, may be able to tell us why there is no such thing as true litigation, rather than simply that it is impossible. It is because, according to Laruelle, no part can be confused for a whole. This means, radically, that mutually exclusive propositions are no worry for the One, because they are caused by it. Every philosophical system, every experience, every thought is real in that it is a thing.

The one generates divergence rather than our systems of representation converging upon it. No system can simply reduce one thing to another; there is a “democratic exchange”[13] between competing theories. In the same way that an orange and an apple can both sit on the same counter top presenting no problem. It is only when an apple, so to speak, tries to explain away why the orange is not an apple and sees it as it’s rival. Philosophical systems, to carry the analogy, try to describe reality as essentially “apple-like” or “orange-like” while ignoring the ground that gave rise to both of them. Therefore, “philosophies in relation to the real would explain the fact that philosophy itself has historically been produced in so many different, mutually exclusive, but on their own terms perfectly coherent, forms.”[14] Philosophy itself is transcendence (a point Derrida also makes), and Laruelle claims the only immanentist position (in his view). It is only non-philosophy that can speak without the transcendence of categories, representations, and dualisms. John Mullarkey postulates that perhaps only Laruelle can help us out of the epistemological “trilemma’ posed by Jacob Fries: philosophical positions can only be justified by another statement (regression), a forceful axiomatic assersion (dogmatism) or be an appeal to some percept (pyschologism).[15] Perhaps, if we think “non-philophically,” we do not have to choose any of the fallacious three.

To wrap this up (no one is still reading), hierarchy is removed from competing systems, providing a justification for an ontologically democratic view. Reality itself is contingent and non-hierarchical. Non-philosophy extracts, or performs, all philosophies so that they are neutered of their transcendence and placed back into a framework of radical immanence. This “determination-in-the-last-instance,” or what Laruelle also calls “cloning” of philosophy or “force (of) thought” wherein any philosophy is seen as part of the real apart from posturing transcendent representation.[16] Hegel and Kant are performers, not authentic, competing “representers” when viewed non-philosophically. Whether or not two representations (philosophies) are compatible or not is not a question for non-philosophy; a priori, neither could stand in competition to begin with. If everything is a part, Laruelle argues, then naturally it seems that these parts are given rise by the One. In fact, for Laruelle, non-philosophy is a kind of revitalizing “common sense” in this respect, and yet it makes no truth claims of its own whatsoever. Rather, again, it “seeks to think alongside the Real, not about the Real.”[17] The burden of proof is strangely not on the non-philosophy “scientist,” but on those claiming to somehow transcendently represent the whole. Because “the real is already acquired prior to all cognitive or intuitive acquisition… already-undivided…already-manifest…and that by which we are already-gripped,”[18] thinking theology religious pluralism within this paradigm may offer an inversion of the methods usually invoked to describe the “real” and our hope to converge upon it. If Laruelle is correct, the mistake has always been to think from the bottom up, rather than the top (or surface) down. In other words, the world phenomenally appears to us as a series of contradictions, events, even differends, and we assume that we must “reason up” to some “one” wherein such exclusions and contradictions are shown to be mere “fingers pointing to the (one) moon.” We think that we aren’t getting something right if such difference is present. But, if we think from the surface down to Laruelle’s one, we see that we have been thinking in exactly the wrong direction with exactly the wrong presupposition. I’m interested to wait and see if Laruelle picks up a fraction of the interest of Foucault, Derrida, or even Deleuze within the theological academy to see what happens. Or maybe I’m just looking for the “next big thing” like the next pretentious theology student. Nonetheless, if anyone is interested, I can’t recommend the essays of Anthony Paul Smith enough, in the volumes After the Post-Secular and the Post-Modern and Laruelle and Non-Philosophy.

January 26, 2013 | Categories: Uncategorized | 1 Comment

The Ideology of Being Pro-Life pt.2

In the last post I tried to utilize a bit of psychoanalysis and Foucault in order to bring to the surface the true logic of the Pro-Life platform by way of exposing its inherent contradictions. With those ideological contradictions in mind, now I want to turn to Giorgio Agamben’s  theory of the homo sacer and his distinction between two kinds of life to shed more light on what it means to be pro-life in America.

In his book Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life  Agamben begins by differentiating two kinds of life under the state. Agamben begins his book by stating “The Greeks had no single term to express what we mean by the term ‘life.'” The two terms Agamben points to that served such a function are “semantically and morphologically distinct” and they are  zoe (ζωή) and bios (bίος). Zoe is life “common to all living beings… animals, men, or gods,” or “bare life” while bios is the “form or way of living proper to an individual or group” (1). Kinds of life contemplated by philosophy, especially in the ancients, were all of the bios variety, the political life, the “good” life, the life of pleasure, etc. These are the important and valuable kinds of lives, or the possibility for them. On the other hand, zoe, life itself, is relegated by Aristotle to the oikos, the home. Agamben stresses the great care Aristotle took to differentiate “the oikonomos (the head of an estate) and the despotes (the head of the family), both of whom are concerned with the reproduction and subsistence of life.” The difference we are told is not of quantity but kind. In other words it is not a matter of the household concerning a few lives and the state or estate concerning many. Rather, Agamben quotes Aristotle explaining “born with regard to life, but existing essentially with regard to the good life.”

Summarizing Foucault, Agamben succinctly writes “a society’s ‘threshold for biological modernity’ is situated at the point at which the species and the individual as a simple living body what is at stake in a societies’ political strategies” (3). With the advent of modernity, for the first time in history, there were new massive techniques to either protect bare life or authorize genocides and holocausts, and in many ways the state controlled such methods, and “zoe entered the polis” like never before. “Politics today,” Agamben observes “seems to be in a lasting eclipse because it has failed to reckon with this foundational event of modernity.” Here is the key, I argue, to understanding the deadlock of the debate over abortion, the missing insight is the distinction between bare life (zoe)  and political, subjugated life (bios). Which one is the debate about in contemporary society?

If Agamben is right that the production of a bio-political body is the “original activity of sovereign power,” we might rightly see that while on the surface the debate seems to be about the zoe of the fetus, what is really at stake is the bios of the person the fetus will become. The differentiation of kinds of life explains yet another antimony of the pro-life platform, that of fervent care for the fetus and relative apathy for the child that becomes of it after it is born. As we have seen of course, it is the pro-lifers that couple their “pro-life” position with reducing social programs, cutting education, supreme support for sending kids to war, ignore the suffering of children within global

Popular meme I’ve seen on social media… 

poverty, etc. Hence,  it is Agamben’s distinction that sheds light on the situation. Progressives must not stop at mocking conservatives for their inherently unstable positions, but work to understand the problem in order to properly combat it. For that we need the right concepts. Again, what the Right is attempting to do (even if they “do not know they are doing it,” as is certainly the case for the average protestor) is sure up the power of a sovereign power (or more like a would-be sovereign  I would compare the Right’s power right now to that of Hobbit-era Necromancer aka Sauron).  The state therefore is what uncovers this secret tie between  power and bare life by it’s ability to include and exclude from the public square or polis. Politics is thus constituted by the exclusion (which Agamben rightly points out is simultaneously an inclusion) of bare life. It is this function of exclusion that is at stake in the abortion debate, i.e. as we have seen, the guaranteeing of unwanted life in the hands of people in no position to care for it. There is no room for zoe / bare life within the modern state, and this is precisely why zoe (life itself) is the center of a debate that actually is about bios. Bare life serves as the stand in for political life, it hides both the true nature of the pro-life platform (buttressing the power of the state/status quo) completely concealing bios, often with graphic depictions of zoe, aborted fetuses, etc. The Right is horrified by zoe, they do not support it, which explains their endless desire to regulate the individual’s sex life, family life, political life, even physical appearance via engrained social norms.

It is here that Agamben’s “protagonist” comes onto the scene, the homo sacer, the sacred man. Controversially I posit the unborn fetus as a primary homo sacer in this setting. In Roman times,the “sacred man” was he:

 …Who may be killed and yet not  sacrificed, and whose essential function in modern politics we attend to assert. An obscure figure in Roman law, in which human life is included in the juridicial order solely in the form of exclusion (that is, of its capacity to be killed), has thus offered the key by which not only the sacred texts of sovereignty but also the vey codes of political power will unveil their mysteries. At the same time, however, this ancient meaning of the term sacer presents us with the enigma of a figure of the sacred that, before or beyond the religious constitutes the first paradigm of the political realm in the West.

While obviously I may be stretching Agamben here (or taking for granted his argument about the homo sacer, as scholars have already debated) I think the fetus is a perfect stand in for the “sacred man” in American politics. It works because abortion is a ritual “sacrifice” from the perspective of the right to the gods of the secular. From this perspective, abortion is clearly prohibited. However, once the fetus comes to term and is born, its very ability to be “sacrificed” (to the secular/liberal gods) dissipates, and as a child (no longer able to be sacrificed because its life has transformed from zoe to bios) is eligible to be killed by anyone (embodied by the Right’s absolute disregard for children after they are born in the form of education, healthcare, and welfare cuts and a willingness to send children to war). Hence, the fetus/child is constituted “in the juridicial order solely in the form of exclusion” in that while in fetus form, it is under the qusi-mystical protection of the religio-politico aura of the pro-life debate, wherein any abortion is automatically a political act (read, sacrifice). Once born, this child is the homo sacer (sic) because it literally cannot be sacrificed. It has been assimilated into the policial order of bios and as such can only be killed, it’s sacred value is gone.

This is the “love affair with the fetus” of the Right. My wager is that is has much more to do with the creation of a bio-political body and sovereign power. What is missing from our collective consciousness and the debate itself is a robust understanding of how we are conflating and using kinds of life itself.

January 16, 2013 | Categories: Uncategorized | Leave a comment

The Ideology of Being Pro-Life pt. 1

By now we all know about Todd Akin of Missouri and Richard Mourdock of Indiana (or hopefully we’ve forgotten about them in their unconditional and consistent defeat), and now failed congressional candidate John Kloster coming out and romanticizing rape as “something God intended to happen” in Mourdock’s case and Akin’s belief that “women can shut that whole thing down.” Thus, implicitly, if a pregnancy occurs in either case, either God (in Mourdock’s case) or the woman and God  (in Akin’s case) wills it. This seems absurd to all of us thinking people, but there is a lot more to analyze in these cases in relation to the general Pro-Life platform, Obamacare, and birth control. What is going on here? When something absurd like this surfaces, perhaps by looking at all the contradictions we can learn something about conservative ideology in general that synthesizes all the crazy into one basic principle. Throughout, keep in mind Marx’s famous and succinct definition of ideology: “They are doing it but they do not know they are doing it.” What are Republicans really doing?

The first contradiction of the Pro-Life platform (that they would even acknowledge) is this: unwanted pregnancies are wanted. What does this tell us? The premise here is that any mother-to-be who does not want the child is mistaken, and does not realize the true value of “life,” which is supposedly God-ordained. A calvinist worldview implies that everything that happens is God’s will, so a fertalized egg was ordained by God. The underside of this belief is that, according to Mourdock’s logic (and Calvin’s), an abortion would too then be caused by God. So invoking the logic of God’s sovereighnty to defend unwanted pregnancies (let alone rape) and then to act as if an abortion interrupts this is not only prima facie absurd, but perhaps confronts the believer that God is not all powerful and that all it takes is a doctor to intervene and disrupt the will of God. But I digress.

Back to wanted unwanted pregnancies. Presumably, the logic here is not simply that every sperm is sacred. So the principle is not more life for the sake of life at all times in all circumstances. No, the principle not that we should want more wanted pregnancies, but that unwanted pregnancies are particularly important. Surely others have pointed this out,  but what the real issue seems to be is what Foucault famously called “Biopolitics,” which is the “explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugations of bodies and the control of populations” by the state or ruling power. What is proffered as a defense of the unborn sacred life is more like a kind of control over life itself. At first blush, this might seem to be an inversion, i.e. that the pro-choice position is more of an assertion of “control” over life, as it seeks to place in the hands of human beings the “choice” to choose life or non-life for a potential life. But the control, or biopower, goes much deeper, revealing how the biopower of pro-life proponents seeks a much more powerful and sinister goal.

It is in fact a red herring to posit that the pro-life people are the advocates of fighting against biopower by virtue of their stance against the “artifical” ending of potential life. We can see this by analyzing the contradiction present in the platform that abortions should be illegal, and that government ensured birth control, either through the government itself or a mandate to private employers, is antithetical to Christian values. So the line of reasoning is thus:

1. No pregnancy should be terminated

2. Guaranteed access to birth control is not a right

3. Therefore, actually what is desired are unwanted pregnancies themselves
Here is the key, that blocking birth control access combined with the fetish of carrying pregnancies to term results in the strange conclusion that what is truly desire by pro-life advocates are unwanted pregnancies. Why is this the case? Why don’t they take the more consistent position, given that they do not think “every sperm is sacred,” i.e. we should just have more and more people, that to reduce abortions, we should widely distribute contraceptives? Why not do everything to increase the rate of wanted pregnancies rather than taking up a position that obviously generates unwanted ones? In line with Zizek, we might say that the best way to expose ideology is taking it more seriously than it takes itself. Here psychoanalysis helps us to see the root.

Pro-lifers are neurotic in that they are obsessed with controlling the bodies women, but not just any women. While abortion overall is down over 8%, it has dramatically increased amongst poor women, 18% in the last few years. So what is really at stake is guaranteeing the unwanted pregnancies of poor women. Most pro-life advocates do not have to worry about unwanted pregnancies in as serious of a way, because they are of a higher income bracket that can afford to procreate. We must ask why is it so essential for people who cannot afford to have children have them? Is it merely a coincidence that pro-life individuals tend to be conservatives, and conservatives have the least sympathy for the poor and are in favor of cutting social programs and funding? It seems as though they are two sides of the same coin, part of the same exact ideology. This is where we turn back to biopower of the state.

We live in a political and economic state that depends on things not getting better. As Tad Delay points out in a recent blog post, “Your political leaders want you to think an economic crisis is the exception, not the rule.  They would rather you not realize that since the Great Depression capitalism has experienced a downturn every 18 months on average. That is the power of ignoring the exception that constitutes the rule.” As Tad quotes Zizek, we see the claim that the real goal of reactionary politics is ““to change things so that, at their most fundamental, they can remain the same.” In a world where Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan expressed a desire to end medicare/medicaid as we know them, get rid of social security, and cut social funding for all kinds of things from food stamps to public housing, this principle is in play. Our system is predicated on a very few controlling the wealth, and it is actually to their benefit to see the lower and middle classes pummeled by social inequality.

One tactic to ensure things remain the same, if not get worse, is to take away the right of a women who cannot afford to be pregnant or have a child to choose what to do with her body.Remember, this is an issue that does not really affect affluent people. It is affluent people telling poor folks how to (not) control their own bodies. This is biopower. Conditions are set in place to ensure more unwanted pregnancies, more unwanted children that cannot be supported, and thus the circle of poverty is ensured to continue more so than it would be otherwise. Foucault explains the concept further:

A set of processes such as the ratio of births to deaths, the rate of reproduction, the fertility of a population, and so on – related with a whole series of political and economic problems…in the 18th century… we see the beginnings of a natalist policy, plans to intervene in all phenomena related to birth rate…Biopolitics last domain is, finally…control over relations of the human race, or human beings insofar as they are a species, insofar as they are living beings, in their enviroment, the milieu in which they live… And also the problem that the environment is not a natural environment  that it has been created by the population and therefor has effects on the population.This, essentially, is the urban problem.

With biopolitics, pro-life advocates ensure a particular kind of “environment” that controls the relations between social groups and strata. The double insistance upon fertilized eggs being taken to birth and the concerted effort to restrict birth control are a high form of biopolitics, control over life itself as it functions. This contradiction is the site where the ideology becomes apparent. Our economic system is grounded on exploitation, and the proliferation of the poor plays into the direct interest of the wealthiest among us. As Marx says, the capitalistic class depends on structural and organization exploitation of labor to grow and thrive. The bottom line is that the abortion debate is fought primarily on a ground where the issue is not very relevant- amongst the middle and upper class wherein having a child is a normal part of life, sustainable, and even a joyous occasion. What the fight is about is what to do with unwanted pregnancies amongst those who cannot afford to have children and who’s lives would be consumed by doing so (those who cannot afford day care, nannies, basic care, etc.). The only logical conclusion in regard to these facts is that this is, absolutely,  an ideological social-economic issue, not one of morality or even about the “life” of a fetus, at least in a certain sense.

November 18, 2012 | Categories: Uncategorized | 5 Comments

Some Buddhist/Christian Comparative Theology: “The Way to the Spirit is Through the Flesh”

 Just a little diddy I wrote for Paul Knitter’s seminar on Jesus and Buddha. I’ve been too lazy to blog so I’m dumping it on here. Tell me I’m wrong, I dare you! I have mastered Christian and Buddhist though! Mwahahaha (yeah right). 

As a Christian, I have approached comparative theology and interfaith dialogue fully intending, with various levels of success, to withhold critiquing Buddhism with Christian doctrine or understanding. Rather, as a Westerner with a relatively facile understanding of the deep mysteries of my religious neighbors, use it as a chance to delve further into my own tradition via the perspective of outsiders. Reflecting on the Buddhist perspectives and critiques of Christianity within Buddhism, I recall a quote attributed to Jacques Lacan:  le vérité surgit de la meprise – “The way to the spirit is through the flesh.”[1] It is this sentiment that I have seen embodied in the thought and practice of our Buddhist interlocutors, and it is a point, religious attitudes which emphasize concepts such as “belief’ and transcendence as containing salvific efficacy. By turning to Buddhist wisdom, it is my hope that Christianity can recover the “fleshy,” embodied practices that lead toward liberation.     Inspired by John D. Caputo’s recent theo-philosophical reflections, I think that it is useful to speak of  “’flesh’ not bodies, because while I agree, indeed insist, that religion is all about bodies and I am interested in ‘religious bodies’ of all sorts, I am distinguishing ‘flesh’ as the site of pleasure and pain, suffering and jouissance, from the body as ‘agent,’ as the site of action, agency and movement.”[2] So while Buddhism is certainly not anti-activism or action, and the stereotype of Buddhists “not leaving their cushions” is a patently false straw man, it is indeed the site of the “flesh” where Buddhist study and insight has impacted me most, in the wisdom of its rigorous practice as spiritual discipline. Christianity, especially in its liberal, politicized form, can be predisposed to thinking primarily of bodies while neglecting the flesh.  With nothing but good intentions, it can be the case that Christian communities create movements to heal the world before healing themselves. Indeed, I have found abrasiveness in my own attempt to be a productive member of community by ignoring the discipline of my own flesh, and by extension my own spirit. For me, “flesh” in Buddhist teaching is best articulated in the teaching of “Mindfulness.”

It seems Paul Knitter is quite right in observing that the practice of mindfulness, or smrti, is not typically “An ingredient found in most Christian pantries –or, if found, used too sparingly.”[3] Now, of course, to be clear, “flesh” being the site of “pain and pleasure” does not mean a reduction of our experience to physical sense input. Rather, “flesh” denotes the site of pain, anxiety, fear, explosive joy, etc. Thus, “Mindfulness,” as a precursor or even prerequisite for action, is analogous to the experience of the “flesh” before the “body,” as Caputo put it, is moved to action, agency, and movemen . To be sure, one of the strengths of Christianity is its emphasis on certain absolutes and ideals – charity, grace, forgiveness, compassion, agape love, and, for better or worse, “justice.”[4] The downside of these more or less eschatological ideals, again as Knitter maintains, is that they “can be dangerous if they prevent us from really being mindful of and responsive to what the moment contains and is trying to teach us.”[5] When Christians both assume, more or less a priori, that we understand the ideals for which we seek, and also rush to enact them (whether it is in the form of street evangelism or political demonstration), we certainly run the risk that we are closing ourselves to vital information available to us in the present, not to mention the un-preconfigurable, unforeseeable “to come.”

Thich Nhat Hahn is right to point out that what separated Jesus from the rest of us fools (my summation) is that he was already enlightened by the time of his Baptism by the Holy Spirit – he was “in touch with the reality of life, the source of mindfulness, wisdom, and understanding within Him, and this made him different from other human beings.” [6] This understanding of the mindfulness of Christ has implications that may lead us to rethink “incarnation” within the Christian imagination, not just something about “bodies” in the sense which I have been using the term, that of action and agency, e.g. within Christianity the actions of Christ: death, atonement, resurrection, healing, feeding, etc. but also “flesh,” which means that the incarnation is not reducible to God’s “substance” being within Jesus (homoousian), but Jesus being mindful, on a moment to moment basis, throughout all of his life, aligning his own will with that of God’s.[7]  Incarnation as mindfulness explains Christ as a savior of both the “flesh”- the site of momentary sensations and feelings – and our “bodies,” with which we act in response to the flesh, grounding us in mindful discipline, and “embodying” the actions which naturally result from perfect, or even salvific (to pass back to Christian vocabulary), mindfulness.

Study of Buddhism has thus been a stark wake up call to remember quotidianism, daily practice, daily attention, daily discipline, of the flesh before the action of bodies. Chödrön explains the Buddhist understanding of homelessness as the “hanging out in an uneasy space.”[8] There is a certain anxiety that comes with leaving the routine (the undisciplined routine in contrast to the aforementioned quotidianism), the familiar, and the “cozy,” that should call to many Christians who do not take seriously enough the call of Christ to be willing to take radical steps in the direction of the Kingdom, which we cannot articulate in full. Hence, here is yet another case of what I see to be a “fleshy” endeavor recalling Lacan’s dictum “The way to the spirit is through the flesh.” Through mindfulness, we are lead into “uneasy places,” forging new routines, uneasy routines, which lead us toward the Kingdom. As Jesus’s mindfulness (at least in part) constituted his divinity (or Enlightenment). Furthermore, mirroring Jesus’s own divinization, or incarnation, we too become the incarnate Kingdom rather than the idealized Kingdom in our own imaginations and dreams. We shift focus from eschatological vision (which is not evil in its own right, and is important) to embodied, fleshy, bodily, grounded agents of transformation. We cannot, as Christians holding beliefs about spirits and souls, afterlives and salvation, skip this critical step. Spirit only through flesh; “Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it”(Matthew 10:39). Here, Jesus seems to be demonstrating the principle we have been discussing. Only by taking ones eyes “off the prize,” so to speak, in living life for life’s sake, not the reward, may one find what they seem. If we want “spirit,” we must forsake it for flesh. For mindfulness leading to action, there is no alternative route; it is the paradox of our deepest longing. By learning the art of mindfulness not only from our own Gospels, but with the help of our Buddhist brothers and sisters, it is my hope that this principle is enacted: those who forsake the Kingdom of God to be mindful to one’s neighbor and environment find the Kingdom of God.

Roger Haight points out that the incorporation of the story of creation into the Christian account of creation is one way to see the entire universe as sacramental.[9] Similarly, I believe the grafting of mindfulness as a way to understand the Kingdom and the incarnation of Jesus is another way to view all that is as sacred. (and interconnected!) Paul Knitter reminds us of the power “Sacrament of Silence” that silence, what we typically ignore as emptiness, as a way of not suppressing that which haunts us, our inner reality that we may want to drown out. Mindfulness is how we engage silence and do so sacramentally, so that we can accept whatever it is to avoid “knee jerk feelings of fear, anger, or envy.”[10] These negative feelings are the account of separating the flesh from the body, acting without mindfulness, losing touch of oneself in the world.

Perhaps more now than ever, amid financial meltdowns, political injustice, and any number of misgivings, the call to mindfulness, to return to the “flesh,” grounded in the moment, will help us as Christians who strive for justice to remember not just of the old cliché that we must heal ourselves in order to heal others, but additionally that the means by which we achieve our goals are not as simple as attacking the goals themselves – at every turn we must remain vigilant within ourselves to, what our flesh is experiencing, in order to assess situations carefully and accurately. Caputo asks, “When the life of flesh comes in contact with God (ultimate reality), is it compromised or intensified, relieved of carnality or lifted up into a higher carnal life?” Christians and Buddhists may well disagree about the answer to this, but in no way does it undermine the importance of journeying to discover the answer, together. Buddhists and Christians should not be assimilated, this is not meant to be a homogenizing piece of comparative religious study, but simply what one faith tradition may see as a prophetic practice (among others which may not be so prophetic!) in the other. Just as the correspondence between theologian and activist Rosemary Radford Ruether and Catholic monk Thomas Merton revealed that the former chided the latter for not acting enough, while the latter chided the former for not spending enough time in quiet reflection in a monastery, each seems to have seasoned the other with the reminder that the flesh and the body cannot be divided, each is in need of the other to be valuable. Practice is nothing if it is blind and rash while reflection and mindfulness seems wasted if it is not utilized to change the world, even if in some small way. May we all live incarnate lives of the flesh leading to wise bodies seasoned with discipline, awareness, and compassion.

May 29, 2012 | Categories: Uncategorized | 2 Comments

Why “Blue Like Jazz” Should Have Stayed Dead

A couple weeks ago I had the chance to see a pre-screening of  Blue Like Jazz and it elicited some strong feelings. And they weren’t positive. First, I want to say that, like everyone else, I read Blue Like Jazz at a critical point in my journey into Christianity, and it helped in ways I honestly don’t remember anymore. I do remember I thought it was profound and bought copies as gifts, but the reasoning behind all that has vanished. If your’e not familiar with the book or Don Miller, check out my friend Tim’s (much more positive) review and synopsis here .

Why is Blue Like Jazz a bad movie that I hope is not seen my a great number of people? I’ll start with my ideological/theological beef.

1.) This movie (and book) was maybe appropriate for the year 2000, but not 2012. Regardless of who you are or what you’re dealing with.

I should perhaps admit that for as long as I can remember after I started reading theology, I’ve had a problem with Donald Miller’s work (published and blog). This is because once I became aware of Miller’s actual theological framework, which wasn’t far removed (if at all) from fairly conservative evangelical orthodoxy, I began to view his work differently. I think the message of BLJ is totally disingenuous, and falls into line with so much of hipster Christianity that operates under the assumption that all we need to do as the Church is to change how we are the Church. In other words, there is nothing inherently wrong with our theology, our assumptions about what church is, the real problem is the way in which we embody it. As far as I understand, this was a basic discrepancy in the early Emergent movement when everyone from Tony Jones, Brian McLaren, Doug Paggitt, Mark Driscoll, Dan Kimball et al. were together talking about the future of the Church. While one group (the good guys) were adamant about learning from post modern and other novel insights and using these to critique what was accepted as orthodoxy while we reform our methods. For others, obviously Driscoll, postmodern culture was something to be countered with a traditional (Reformed) “Gospel” dressed up in tattoos, shirts with those buttoned strip things on the shoulders, and Francis Schaeffer-esque cultural literacy. Like the impression I get from BLJ, the problem with Christianity is not Christianity, it’s philandering youth pastors (in the most cringe-worthy plot device I’ve seen in a while, the douchey youth pastor impregnates the main character’s mother) and hypocrites of all sorts. If only people would…

2.) Believe. My second point is that the dichotomy of belief/unbelief in God  is painted as the crux of the existential crisis young Don has in the movie. In fact, a turning point comes in the film when Don attends a debate at the famous Powell’s book store where your standard Christian apologist is debating a nondescript atheist. Don hears the apologist accuse the atheist of not having any kind of framework to assign more value to human beings than animals, or argue for the aesthetic quality of butterflies over cow dung (or something absurd like that). After losing his “faith” after only a few weeks at Reed College, I suppose it is no surprise that it could be won back so easily. Don’s character isn’t the most reflective. No matter what stage of doubt one is having, I don’t think it’s ever a good idea to cure it with facile arguments for God or shallow emotional porn (like an alter call). Peter Rollins has done a fantastic job of showing why belief itself is problematic  in books like How Not to Speak of God and Insurrection, and in the wake of these insights (that Pete has marvelously bestowed on a Christian audience from people like Zizek and Lacan) we can never go back. Pete says:

I would love to see churches take seriously the idea that mystery, unknowing, brokenness, doubt, and mourning should be expressed in the very structure of the church itself. Religion is the system that gives us a sense of being right, of having answers and knowing how to stay on the right team. I want to see churches that break open religion open through sermons, music, and prayers; churches that bring us face to face with unknowing and pain. Not that we despair, but so that, in bringing it to light and sharing it, we can find healing and light… [the] highest principle is not some object we need to love, but rather the act of love itself.

What would have really made for a great indie movie would be a version of BLJ where we are shown how Don legitimately loses his “belief” in God but in the process of being amongst the diversity of Reed, discovers what love really is, but outside the Church and away from the influence of Christianity. (the quasi-love interest in the film happens to be the only other Christian at Reed and goes to a church full of nice white people). That’s challenging. Instead, what we get is a film that will no doubt meet praise from a Christian audience because it is self-congratulatory. Much like how Congress approval ratings are usually abysmal, something like 90% of people, when asked, approve of their representative, people are going to see this film as a call to arms to get people back to church, to get people to believe in God again, which is the “real” problem. It is re-submitting oneself to authority, unlike the heathens of Reed.

3.) This film is apparently going to be screened at Reed, and I will be shocked if they find is nuanced, introspective, or meaningful in any real way. My guess is they probably care less about however they’re portrayed in the film, but if they do, I doubt they will be happy with the intellectual facileness of nearly every character (except maybe the Russian dude… I liked him). These characters are more like teenage message board atheists that use the most crude justifications for their mockery of religion that would make Ditchkins blush (I have the Pope character in mind). Not only that, whether it’s intentional or not, perhaps the most offensive part of the movie is the portrayal of liberals, and particularly gay folks, as being that way because of “issues.” In the end, the characters that have the most antipathy toward religion are undercut by the relation of divorce, and even molestation at the hands of a priest. This, of course, is not to trivialize those reasons for viewing religion negatively, but not only is there no truly compelling and intelligent atheist character, there is not one whose issues we do not know about. In other words, there is no “normal” foil to nice Christian girl who inspires Don, there is the implication that the normative state of believer is only disrupted by childhood trauma or something. There is no nuance.

4.) The movie is boring. Not only is the lack of nuance and heavy handed plot painful to watch unfold (Good Christian goes to college, gets corrupted, meets pretty girl orthodox Christian who challenges him and makes him feel bad, ex-Christian who lost his faith regains it just as quickly and inexplicably) but the jokes mostly fall flat, and you never really feel for the characters. All characters are pretty much what you’d expect. Naive main character, rebellious tattooed students, and go figure, the Christian girl love interest is as clean cut and straight edge as it comes, the only character we don’t see with alcohol! Which of course leads to the point that some waves have been raised about this being a PG-13 movie, which is edgy for the market! All this means is that there may be a curse word or two and they show alcohol. Very boundary pushing.

5.)All of this leads to a final point that if this is supposed to be “Christian” art, then I lament the distinction. As Rob Bell has pointed out (among others I’m sure), all goodness is God’s goodness. We don’t need to make these distinctions. Even if BLJ does not consider itself “Christian,” that’s who it’s marketed towards. This is just a better-funded production of Christian subculture that has never, ever (ok, that I know of) made a piece of art that stands the test of time and quality. This shallow story of lost and found belief full of caricature that eclipses nuance and absurd scenes like when Don marches into the middle of the service of a church on his college campus and interupts the service by throwing pieces of plastic knight’s armor on the pulpit, “returning” it because he was given it to wear as “the armor of God” by his milf-loving youth pastor back at an evangelical Church in Texas. Who would do that? A 14 year old? I forgot to point out that along with the false dichotomy of belief/unbelief, all religious difference is pretty much glossed over.

Have I been too harsh? Have I not considered the needs of people who are at a different stage in their “spiritual journey” or something like that? Miller’s book came out before a lot of stuff happened. Before Emergent, before the digestion of a lot of important theory and reflection upon the norms of Christian practice and theology, and in the wake of these facts, I find this narrative unacceptable for anyone. This kind of hollow, plastic caricature (I know I already used that word) of religious life and belief can do nothing but harm the current landscape of religious progress and dialogue. This is a regression, not progress, and I hope only enough people see it to keep Don and Steve Taylor from losing a lot of money, because they’re nice guys and I like them. Now on to the movie adaptation of The Orthodox Heretic… or better yet, God Meets Girl or The Shack! Anyone use Kickstarter? ; )

Trailer

March 28, 2012 | Categories: Uncategorized | 7 Comments

The Predicament of Belief: Part II

This is a series of posts for a “blog tour” supporting Philip Clayton and Steven Knapp’s new book “The Predicament of Belief: Science, Philosophy, and Faith” organized by the fellas over at Homebrewed Christianity. On March 15th ,everyone is encouraged to attend the first “Theo-nerd Book Party” that will be streamed live from 10pm-1am EST where we the readers (and fans) can try our best to “Make Phil sweat” as we ask our questions, raise or concerns, or sing our praises of the new book. More info can be found here. The book can be purchased at Amazon (for an especially great price on Kindle). 

In chapter two of The Predicament of Belief, Clayton and Knapp take up the project of actually arguing for their hypothesis that there is an Ultimate Reality (UR) that “intended for us to be here and desires our flourishing” and that in light of this, moving toward “the most plausible Christian theism” (23) taking seriously both the traditions core commitments as well as the standard objections to this worldview. First, the authors try to address the fundamental question that might be asked of why this project is interesting in the first place. In light of modern science’s explanatory powers, for instance, is it necessary or desirable to venture into this territory in the first place? In answering in the affirmative, Clayton and Knapp are explicit that contrary to some Christian apologists, these type of speculative metaphysical excursions are not to be in competition with scholarly scientific consensus, however the scientific authorities and conclusions are also not the final arbiters of truth (25). Likewise, this kind of metaphysical approach is anti-, meaning that it rejects the kind of verifcationism/positivism that gives meaning only to “objective” observational statements (26). In other words, the authors argue that the metaphysics they are engaging in are certainly not willy nilly, anything goes, or fideistic – they strive to take seriously all serious objections from multiple disciplines, but also that objections leveled from a particular standpoint (like science) will likewise not possess all of the tools to work within their own parameters and create the kind of theory of the ultimate that is the project of this book. It is stated that:

Science, aided by theories of evolutionary emergence, can in principle explain the causal mechanisms by means of which physical and biological processes gave rise to life and eventually to beings like us. But it would seem that science cannot even in principle answer the larger question – the metaphysical question – of why such processes should exist in the first place…It is not inconsistant, consequently, for someone who accepts contemporary physics and biology to grant the power of these sciences to explain how particular phenomena arose from processes of the natural universe and yet still maintain that the ultimate explanation of those phenomenas lies outside their theories. (29)

What makes science scientific is that it is very, very good at creating specific methods and standards that explain the world and universe that we inhabit, but these precisions also mark a certain limitation that  can be supplemented by metaphysics (which, like science, is also not the final authority on such matters). Thus, even in the wake of Darwin, and the rejection of the simplistic ancient principle that “like proceeds from like,” there is reason to ask questions about the emergence of persons from a potentially personal reality.

With the defense of the project behind them, the next order of business for Predicament is to start making positive statement about the UR. First, why should we think that the UR is personal? Prima facie, it seems that the universe itself was created with a desire for us to be here. As the well known argument of “fine tuning,” or the “Anthropic Principle” goes, conditions for for life in our universe are extremely special, in that even if they were slightly off to the smallest degree, carbon-based lifeforms like us could not exist, let alone flourish. Clayton and Knapp want to point out that even if this argument succeeds (duly noting multiverse objections), it succeeds at a  philosophical, not scientific, level. Thus, the authors point out, it is unfortunate that so much time and energy has been spent over the intelligent design/ evolution debate pertaining to which is the better scientific method, when it is clear that one is an assumption (even if well grounded) that lies outside the scope of scientific discourse. If one does want to characterize the unvierse in strictly physical terms, it seems that whether one proposes a multiverse theory or not, one is in a double-bind, Clayton and Knapp write that:

If she accepts the notion that there is only one universe, she is confronted by striking evidence of fine-tuning that at least seems to suggest that our universe was intentionally framed with intial conditions that would be conducive (in the long run) to the emergence of intelligent life. If, on the other hand, she rejects the fine-tuning argument and affirms the theory that ours is only one of innumerable universes, she then finds herself subscribing to a framework of universe-transcending laws, which in turn implies the existence of a mindlike realm t hat precedes or transcends the infinite succession of physical universes (33).

Ultimately, according to this line of reasoning, the predominant objection to the anthropic principle itself points to a mindlike reality that may be more Platonic than personal, yet nonetheless, the “universe is a physical effect of a mental cause like any other intentional act” (35). To this point, however, nothing as been said that leads us to believe that the UR that has been described in benevolent. Clayton and Knapp admit that in the wake of great thinkers like David Hume and Voltaire, honestly assessing the world we live in makes it very difficult a benevolent, personal deity. For instance, a UR that takes “personal interest” in our world and being is not in itself morally admirable (38). To defend such a potentially benevolent UR, the authors assume that the UR is infinite in nature, and thus the UR’s self-reflection would seem to be infinitely rewarding in itself, therefore new creation on behalf of the UR would seem to be bereft of ulterior motivation (39).

In addition to the reflections about the act of creation itself in evaluating the nature of the UR, Clayton and Knapp utilize what sociologist Peter Berger calls “signals of transcendence.” The “signals” can be thought of as fingers that point in the direction of a benevolent UR, but are not in themselves proofs. Our seemingly inherent conscience, or desire for justice that often transcends human justice, may be examples of this phenomena. At this point in the book, Clayton and Knapp seem to think we are taking our first steps toward a tenable hypothesis for the existence of something like the God of Abraham, Moses, and Jacob. The caveat here, of course, which is necessary to keep in mind, is that the thesis defended in Predicament is not a traditional form of religious “apologetic.” Apologetics, by in large, or proofs for the existence of God, all the way back to Anselm, seek to deduce or derive God from a set of premises. There is a significant gap between this approach between the apologetic method and what we have seen unfolding here, in that what we are getting from Clayton and Knapp is not a derivation, but though they do not use the term, the style and intent is much more inductive, i.e. the mode of operation is within probability in regard to the best information we have an have observed.

I have only slight concerns in in regard to this section of the book. First, I am still not entirely sure how I would explain to someone how the authors have indeed moved from what they implicitly see as inadequate for scientists to accept methodologically, philosophical theories (like ID) to an actual tenable scientific cosmology. While I find myself agreeing with the reasoning of of this chapter, I have reservations about putting it the category it seems that the authors do. In my humble, perhaps skewed estimation, I’m unclear about how, aside from being more epistemologically humble and open, this is not an updated, more sophisticated Intelligent Design argument. There is the distinction within Process cosmology between ID and theories of divine participation in the act of creation in that Process thinkers take issue with the “design” aspect of the theory, in favor of a truly open cosmology that leaves the future contingent upon different factors other than God’s plan and novelty/creativity (or at least this is the impression I got from a John Cobb lecture). Secondly, I am a bit resistant to the a priori assumption that the UR, or God, is “infinite” and hence skeptical of the justification for a kind of “kenotic” creation. I do not disagree with the conclusion that creation seems to be an act of love, but I would hope that we can provide better justification than to appealing to the notion of God’s omnipotence.

Again the length of this post has gotten away from me, and subsequent posts will definitely cover multiple chapters (except for chapter 7, my favorite). If anyone else has questions like I do, don’t forget to check out the live stream of the event at Philip Clayton’s house tomorrow night at 10pm EST! If you want to know more about Philip Clayton’s theories of emergent evolution and cosmology, check out this:
http://homebrewedchristianity.com/2012/03/13/emergent-evolution-spirituality-god/

Also, you can see Steven Knapp, co-author, introduce the book in a sweet little video here!
http://vimeo.com/38126426

And lastly, here’s one more link to the live event tomorrow night:
http://www.pingg.com/rsvp/y37ff7gn3p64cfvkm

March 14, 2012 | Categories: Uncategorized | Leave a comment