(Ir)religiosity

I’ll put all my cards on the table:  I think Kierkegaard is unfortunately habitually misread today.  The common reading as dictated by the philosophical and theological canon and undoubtedly displayed in undergraduate intro. courses couches (and caricatures) Kierkegaard as a prime example of religious fidelity gone awry.  His “teleological suspension of the ethical” represents all that is wrong and dangerous with religion after the Enlightenment and such a position is decidedly irrational, lacking the proper grounding in ethical reasoning.  That is one reading.  To be sure, it is important and one that should be not ignored, but it is, however, not the only one nor is it, in my view, the best one.

I was re-reading some articles and interviews by John Caputo in preparation for Emergent Outliers’ first book club meeting tonight (you should join us!) when I ran across an interesting reading of Kierkegaard that avoids that usual, banal approach and obliquely offers a critique of modern ethics.  Commenting on Derrida’s reading of Fear and Trembling, Caputo writes that:¹

“Responsibility is the issue of the singularity of the situation of the responing subject (for which “Abraham” is a place-holder) standing alone before the “wholly other” (for which “God” is a place-holder) while the demands of the “other others” (for which Isaac is a place-holder) press in upon and interrupt the intimacy of this exclusive tête-à-tête ["head-to-head"].  Thus, to decide responsibly is always a matter of sacrificing “Isaac,” the ones who hold the Isaac position, by which he [Derrida] means, of sensitizing oneself to my responsibility to all the other others who also lay claim to my responsibility, even as I respond to the other one before me.  Unlike de Silentio, Derrida’s analysis does not turn a suspension of my ethical duty in the face of the religious call that overrides it, but on the conflict of ethical duties that structures every ethical choice, which makes the paradox of the akedah [the binding of Isaac] the paradigm of everyday ethical decisions right on down to the smallest detail….”

Interesting.  So instead of fixating on Abraham’s suspension of ethics perhaps it is helpful to read the narrative in a different manner, one that recognizes the sacrifice and conflict that is inherent in every ethical decision.  One must always, in every situation (even the most mundane and seemingly insignificant), chose between opposing responsibilities as there always other others.  That is the paradox of ethics and a paradox that most popular approaches to ethics (the deontological, utilitarianism, etc.) seem to avoid precisely because they are impermeable systems conceived in the abstract, demanding fidelity to a certain set of presupposed to premises which may or may not relate to the situation at hand.  I suspect that this is what Caputo is getting at in his book Against Ethics (though I have not read it in it entirety) and I believe that this is what the usual readings of Kierkegaard miss:  that modern ethical systems, while helpful as guidelines, will always be deconstructible insofar as they posit a set of disembodied propositions that must be applied to situation that always already has other cards that have been played ahead of time.

Such a critique virtually renders moot the tiring discussions we’ve all had over which ethical system is the best because all systems are in agreement that the most proper approach should be conceived in the abstract, relying on the so-called impartiality of Reason and  constructed outside palpable relations with the wholly Other and other others.  But the  true ethical dilemma is the one that catches us by surprise as we realize the impossible choice we must make between two responsibilities, two others who have already laid claim to us.  Such an event, not at all unlike the one faced by Abraham, simply cannot be solved by a intangible system alone.

That is, I believe, an unsung lesson of Kierkegaard and one that Caputo and Derrida can both return to after the desert of modern criticism:  that there is always already conflict inherent in every ethical situation, conflict that cannot be fully resolved and conflict that demands a choice between rival responsibilities and irreconcilable others.

1. The quotation is taken from an article Caputo wrote in the 2002 Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook titled, “Looking the Impossible in the Eye: Kierkegaard, Derrida, and the Repetition of Religion, pg. 8-9.  Caputo writes on the same subject at length in The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida:  Religion without Religion, but the article provides the most concise and lucid description of his larger, more complex argument. [↩]

I was inspired to revist some of Zizek’s work last week.  I ran across this passage in The Puppet and the Dwarf on epistemology.

The site of truth is not the way “things really are in themselves,” beyond their perspectival distortions, but the very gap, passage, that separates one perspective from another, the gap (in this case social antagonism) that makes the two perspectives radically incommensurable. The “Real as impossible” is the cause of the impossibility of ever attaining the “neutral” nonperspectival view of the object. There is a truth; everything is not relative—but this truth is the truth of the perspectival distortion as such, not the truth distorted by the partial view from a one-sided perspective. So when Nietzsche affirms that truth is a perspective, this assertion is to be read together with Lenin’s notion of the partisan/partial character of knowledge (the (in)famous partij’nost): in a class society, “true” objective knowledge is possible only from the “interested” revolutionary standpoint. This means neither an epistemologically “naive” reliance on the “objective knowledge” available when we get rid of our partial prejudices and preconceptions, and adopt a “neutral” view, nor the (complementary) relativist view that there is no ultimate truth, only multiple subjective perspectives. Both terms have to be fully asserted: there is, among the multitude of opinions, a true knowledge, and this knowledge is accessible only from an “interested” partial position.”

I gotta say, that makes a lot of sense to me.  Then we can only talk about better and worse “interested, partial positions” and never The Complete Position.

What would really interest me now is juxtaposing this with Caputo’s notion of truth as a happening or a event, a facere veritatem in his words.  Both positions seem to avoid the sinkholes of both objectivity and complete nihilistic relativism to a place beyond truth as disembodied proposition and toward truth as particular way of being in the world — a way of transformation.

As I’ve mentioned before — or maybe I haven’t mentioned it before, I can’t remember — I reserve the right to blatantly disagree with myself and change my mind on this blog.  That’s just the nature of things.

A while back I wrote a post in which I attempt to provisionally answer Augustine’s timeless question: What do I love when I love my God?  One commenter pointing out that my answer was very anthropocentric. No doubt he is right.  I’d probably modify my language were I answering it today.

Last night I was reading On Religion by John Caputo and I ran across a quote that made me wonder about the premise of the question.  No that’s not right.  Not the premise of the question per se, but perhaps the way the question has been couched by virtually every commenter since Augustine firs posed it.

The name of God is the name of the ever open question.  Unlike reductionists, who think that the name of God closes every question down, that it supplies  a ready-made answer for every possible questio, the name of God in my post-modern Itinerarium is the name of infinite questionability, of what is endlessly questionable, for no name can cause my head to spin more than the name of what I love and desire.  But what do I love when I love my God?  In loyalty to St. Augustine, whom I also love, I have retained the “what,” but of course, if I dared to correct a Saint, which I would never do, if I were an obscure copyist in an Irish monastery in the tenth century working on the Confessiones, I would in all fear and trembling have furtively amended the what to a how.  How do I love when I love my God? For love is a how, not a what.

Captuo goes on to argue that God is not merely a name to by examined by theologians and metaphysicians, but a deed — or deeds plural, that is more like it — to be carried out, a doing to be done, and action to be enacted, a how to be put into practice.  For it is in doing justice and doing love that God exists, not in the hopelessly modernistic arguments for or against the existence of God as a simple proposition, for God cannot be constraint my reductionist propositions and premises.

Perhaps then both ends of the spectrum, of God as Being-Itself (Paul Tillich) and God as that which is without Being (Jean-Luc Marion), are as equally problematic as is the false dichotomy of theism and atheism.  To ask whether God is or is not is to miss the higher movement at play and to reduce the name of God to pure empirical proposition.  Rather, in this view, God is in facere veritatem ( the doing of truth), to borrow Caputo borrowing Augustine.  Truth is brought into existence in the happening; likewise God is brought into existence in the event.  God is a God-Who-May-Be, to use Richard Kearney’s expression, because God rejects as false both modern reductions of theism and atheism, of possibility and impossibility, real and unreal.  This God is utterly Beyond, a God of a/theism, a God of im/possibility, and a God of the hyper-real, that is the Real beyond real, whose name is brought to bare in the happening of truth, the doing of justice, and the enacting of a possibility otherwise thought to be impossible — that is love.

I’m taking an online class this semester called “The Way of Emergent Church and Ministry,” taught by the one and only Tony Jones.  This week we read John Caputo’s book/essay Philosophy and Theology.  It’s a great, short, and thought provoking read.  I imagine I’ll be rereading it and using it for reference often.  In less than 100 pages, Captuo provides a concise history of continental philosophy whilst suggesting the theology and philosophy need not be completely divorced as modernity has insisted.  On page 14 Caputo writes:

“Religion needs theology and theologians need philosophy if they are going to anything more than tell us that God told them so when pressed about their faith.”

Several pages prior he states the same thing in a different way:

“If we think of philosophical thinking and thoelogical thinking as two different acts or modes of thinking, as two different dimensions of a whole human life, then we can imagine the two acts cohabiting happily in the same head, yielding a person who would be a thinking believer, or a believing thinker, a person of learning and faith.”

The overall thrust of Caputo’s thesis is that orientation and turn toward the postmodern is opening up many new — or not so new if you look back prior to the Enlightenment, which he does – possibilities for the playful interaction between philosophy and theology.  The two are usually pitted against one another, a mistake Caputo credits to the overall modernization and fragmentation of disciplines.  But for him, the two overlap more than not.

What do you think of this idea?  How are philsophy and theology related?  And, for you, which one comes first?  That is, to which act or mode is your thinking fundamentally rooted?

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That’s the title of one of Martin Luther King Jr.’s most underrated and least well known speeches.  A speech that he gave in 1967 opposing the war in Vietnam and voicing dissent toward American tolerance of economic injustice.  I hope very much that we will remember, especially as we enter the age of Obama, that the egregious realities of classism and racism still exist today.  Simply electing a black man president is no magic bullet to change the status quo nor does it warrant the convenient dismissal of our dark history.  It is grounds for exuberant rejoicing, yes, but let us continue to remain vigilant in our pursuit justice and truth.

In honor of King’s full dream and legacy, here are a few exerpts of that speech we have sadly forgotten.

I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a “thing-oriented” society to a “person-oriented” society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. n the one hand we are called to play the good Samaritan on life’s roadside; but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. … A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: “This way of settling differences is not just.” A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing, except a tragic death wish, to prevent us from reordering our priorities, so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war. There is nothing to keep us from molding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood.

We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked and dejected with a lost opportunity. The “tide in the affairs of men” does not remain at the flood; it ebbs. We may cry out desperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is deaf to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residue of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words: “Too late.” There is an invisible book of life that faithfully records our vigilance or our neglect. “The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on…” We still have a choice today; nonviolent coexistence or violent co-annihilation.