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Final Conference Programme – Towards a Unified Science of Religion

27 Wednesday Jan 2010

Posted by The Dunedin School in Conferences & Seminars, Philosophy

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Dunedin, Towards a Unified Science of Religion

Here is the conference programme for the upcoming Towards a Unified Science of Religion Conference, 12-14 February 2010, University of Otago.

Click to open pdf: USR-Programme

The registrations were to be in by 20 January, but they also said that the conference programme would be out by the end of December, so just email jonathan [at] psy.otago.ac.nz to register in the next cuppla days or so, if you want to attend. Full price $250; unwaged $100.

As a special offer, there’s daily pass at $80 for academics, $40 for students. Email jonathan [at] psy.otago.ac.nz in the next couple of days or so, to register.

Registration form here.
The Philosophy Department is physically located on Union Street East near the intersection with Clyde Street, and their P.O. Box is P.O. Box 56, Dunedin.

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Towards a Unified Science of Religion Conference Programme

15 Friday Jan 2010

Posted by The Dunedin School in Conferences & Seminars, Philosophy

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Dunedin, experimental method, Polynesian religion, quakerism, science, the soul, Towards a Unified Science of Religion

Jonathan Jong, Conference Secretary

Jonathan Jong, Conference Secretary

Conference secretary, Jonathan Jong has revealed titillating details of the programme for the upcoming Towards a Unified Science of Religion Conference, 12-14 February 2010, University of Otago.

The conference boasts:

  • Three keynote speakers giving overviews of the field (David Sloan Wilson, Harvey Whitehouse and Jesse Bering)
  • Three papers on the philosophical implications of science
  • About half a dozen papers on the applications of theories to specific religious movements (e.g., Quakerism, Polynesian religion)
  • A paper on the evolution of the soul
  • A paper on experimental method

Full details will appear later this month on the conference website.

Note: registration is due by 20 January 2010. Full price is NZ$250; students and unwaged at NZ$100.

Conferences: Towards a Unified Science of Religion and The Bible and Critical Theory Seminar – Buy One, Get One Free!

05 Tuesday Jan 2010

Posted by The Dunedin School in Biblical Studies, Conferences & Seminars, Philosophy

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b&ct, Bible and Critical Theory, David Sloan Wilson, Dunedin, Harvey Whitehouse, Jesse Bering, Towards a Unified Science of Religion

Towards a Unified Science of Religion

University of Otago
Dunedin, New Zealand
12-14 February 2010

Just a note that registration is due by 20 January 2010. Full price is NZ$250; students and unwaged at NZ$100. Programme details to come soon.

From the conference website:

The belief in gods, demons, and other supernatural agents is a persistent feature of human culture, which cries out for explanation. In the last twenty-five years explanations of religion have reached a new level of sophistication. We now have a range of different scientific theories of religion, in cognitive science, anthropology, and evolutionary psychology, drawing upon a significant body of empirical data. This conference, sponsored by the Department of Philosophy at the University of Otago, will bring together researchers from these different disciplines and different theoretical perspectives, to explore the possibility of a unified science of religion.

Keynote Speakers

David Sloan Wilson
Binghamton University
Harvey Whitehouse
Oxford
Jesse Bering
Queens University, Belfast

BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE!

Register for this conference, and get this one free:

The Bible & Critical Theory Seminar,
February 7-8, 2010,
The Bog Irish Bar, Dunedin.

The Bible & Critical Theory Seminar Program

February 7, 2010
0930-1015    Roland Boer, University of Newcastle, NSW
The sadness of Friedrich Engels

1015-1100     Eric Repphun, University of Otago
The Monstrous Cinematic Christ: Biblical Narrative as ‘Supplement’ or ‘Multiple Opposite’?

Break

1130-1215     John Barclay, University of Durham, UK
Paul and Alain Badiou

Lunch at The Bog – Menu: http://www.thebog.co.nz/dunedin/menu_breakfast.html

1300-1345    Christina Petterson, Macquarie University, NSW
Spirit and Matter in John

1345-1430     Robert J. Myles, University of Auckland
Dandy discipleship: A queering of Mark’s male disciples

Break

1500-1545    Holly Randell-Moon, University of Newcastle, NSW
Left or Right? Religion and politics in Australia under the Howard and Rudd governments

1545-1630     Remy Low, University of Sydney, NSW
Submission in the War of Position:  Towards a Neo-Gramscian Reading of 1 Peter 2:18-21

Drinks and dinner at The Bog
The Bog has live music from 2000 on Sundays

February 8, 2010
0930-1015    Judith McKinlay, University of Otago
The Daughters of Zelophehad hanging out with Edward Gibbon Wakefield: What am I doing with them?

1015-1100     Moana Hall-Smith, St John’s College, Auckland/University of Otago
Divine colonization in the Book of Judges: A Maori woman’s ecological reading of Judges 19

Break

1130-1215     Elaine Wainwright, University of Auckland
From Wilderness to Waterfront: The Play of Time and Space in an Ecological Reading of Matt 3-4

Lunch at The Bog

1300-1345    James Harding, University of Otago
The David and Jonathan narrative(s) as open text

1345-1430     Yael Klangwisan, Laidlaw College, Auckland
The Marine Lover & the Song of Songs

From 1430
Drinks at The Bog
Depart

So you think you are interdisciplinary?  Prove it and come on down for both.

Philosophy Departments slowly turning postmodern

22 Tuesday Dec 2009

Posted by Deane in Philosophy, Theory

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analytic philosophy, Atheism and Agnosticism, Continental Philosophy, God, meta-ethics, moral realism, Philosophy, postmodernism, scientific realism, Theism

The PhilPapers Survey was carried out in November 2009, and surveyed some 3226 respondents, including 1803 philosophy faculty members and/or PhDs and 829 philosophy graduate students. The respondents were questioned on everything from realism to metaethics to the existence of zombies. But something interesting emerges when you compare the “Target Faculty” (faculties at top-ranked universities) against lesser lights and newbies coming up from the ranks.

Check this: for “Tradition”, the respondents had to choose between various options, of which the main options were Analytic and Continental. See the difference between the old fossils and the new and rising stars:

Target faculty: Analytic 91%; Continental 4%
Philosophy faculty or PhD: Analytic 81%; Continental 7%
Philosophy graduate student: Analytic 85%; Continental 10%
Philosophy undergraduate: Analytic 74%; Continental 18%

And for meta-ethics, here’s the differences between moral realists and anti-realists, for the same range of people:

Target faculty: Moral realism 56%; Moral anti-realism 28%
Philosophy faculty or PhD: Moral realism 56%; Moral anti-realism 28%
Philosophy graduate student: Moral realism 50%; Moral anti-realism 35%
Philosophy undergraduate: Moral realism 48%; Moral anti-realism 36%

And science: scientific realism or scientific anti-realism?

Target faculty: scientific realism 75%; scientific anti-realism 13%
Philosophy faculty or PhD: scientific realism 70%; scientific anti-realism 16%
Philosophy graduate student: scientific realism 62%; scientific anti-realism 21%
Philosophy undergraduate: scientific realism 54%; scientific anti-realism 25%

And what about God: theism or atheism?

Target faculty: atheism 73%; theism15%
Philosophy faculty or PhD: atheism 70%; theism 16%
Philosophy graduate student: atheism 64%; theism 21%
Philosophy undergraduate: atheism 62%; theism 20%

Come mothers and fathers
Throughout the land
And don’t criticize
What you can’t understand
Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command
Your old road is
Rapidly agin’
Please get out of the new one
If you can’t lend your hand

A Modest Plea for a Historically Responsible Atheism

30 Friday Oct 2009

Posted by Eric Repphun in Atheism and Agnosticism, Continental Philosophy, Ethics, History, Language, Metaphor, Philosophy, Politics, Religion, Texts, Theology, Theory

≈ 7 Comments

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Atheism and Agnosticism, Christopher Hitchens, History, John Milbank, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Slavoj Žižek, Terry Eagleton, The Monstrosity of Christ, Theism

zmonstrosity

The Monstrosity of Christ, by Slavoj Žižek, John Milbank, and Creston Davis

Some half-formed thoughts on the contemporary debate about atheism, sparked in large part by a recent reading of Slavoj Žižek’s and John Milbank’s new book, The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic? (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2009 [a review copy courtesy of the International Journal of Baudrillard Studies]):

The Monstrosity of Christ documents a debate between Milbank (a highly influential Catholic theologian and a founding member of the Radical Orthodoxy movement) and Žižek (a philosopher, intellectual celebrity and professional madman) about the nature of Christianity, or at least about Hegel’s interpretation of the nature of Christianity, largely as mediated through the central figure of Jesus as Incarnation.  There is a good deal of interest in the book and both authors make some pointed criticisms of the other – Milbank accuses Žižek of being little more than a heterodox Christian, while Žižek claims that ‘it is Milbank who is guilty of heterodoxy, ultimately of a regression to paganism: in my atheism, I am more Christian than Milbank’ (248 – all page numbers in this post refer to Monstrosity).  If for nothing more than watching two brilliant if equally flawed minds at work against one another, Monstrosity makes for very good, very fun reading.

However, what stuck me as the most intriguing point of all of this was Žižek’s simultaneous defence of an essentially materialist (and thus atheistic) view of the world and his continuing interest in Christian intellectual history.  In doing these two things at the same time, which might seem to be wildly counterintuitive, Žižek makes some tentative first steps towards establishing a viable and historically responsible contemporary atheism.  He by no means settles the matter and by no means even thinks out his own argument through to the end (always a problem for Žižek), but what he does do is present a potential means of arguing for an atheistic worldview that properly acknowledges that such a stance occurs against a deeply-rooted religious milieu dominated by Abrahamic understandings of God.  In Žižek’s view – and here I am extrapolating on his work here – atheism in traditionally theistic cultures is always already a matter of religion, but atheism is in itself not necessarily a religious position (though in some cases it must be).

Žižek here pushes us towards a different and more substantive version of atheism than that being offered in the populist work of Christopher Hitchens, Bill Maher, Sam Harris, and Richard Dawkins.  Regardless of what one thinks of these arguments from a philosophical or logical standpoint, the overarching point of much of this work, that religion in all of its forms – though they all, as a rule, focus on theistic traditions – is illogical, destructive, and misguided and should, therefore be discarded, or at least ignored, is eminently impractical.  Firstly, people are rarely swayed by rational arguments in such matters.  It is very difficult to imagine a new-earth creationist being swayed by Dawkins’ recent book defending evolution, The Greatest Show on Earth, particularly in a cultural climate where the teaching of evolution has again – and bafflingly – become a matter of controversy, in American schools at least.  In such a highly emotional and frankly juvenile sphere of debate, Dawkins is going to be dismissed before his arguments are ever even voiced.  Given this, such attempts at the reasonable assertion of atheism are preaching largely to the choir. If modernity has taught us anything, it should be that people will persist in all manner of irrational and illogical behaviour, no matter how rational our picture of the world may be.  Secondly, and ever more so since the late 1960s,  many froms of religion have shown that they can co-exist quite happily with the modern.  Religion in its many guises is not going anywhere – though it will very certainly mutate into new and at times surprising forms – and to argue that it should (no matter how valid the reasons for making such a suggestion might be) is to argue in essence nothing at all, at least nothing with any social utility whatsoever.

An incidental point should be made here as well: if we are to discard anything that is illogical, irrational, or responsible for violence and oppression, what would we be left with?  To carry this logic through to the end, if we are to begin by discarding those religions that do not hold up under logical scrutiny, we must continue by discarding the mythology of the nation-state and finally rid the world of any and all financial systems based on illusory, artificial conceptions such as ‘money’.  Any system that has the requisite complexity to exist in a modern society is going to be, to at least some extent, rooted in the selective application of reason and truth.  To put this another way: are the central tenets of the Christian Trinity (to take a notorious example of convoluted religious nonsense) really any more nonsensical than Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’ or the belief that it is possible to have a financial system that requires infinite growth in a system of finite resources, two ideas upon which the contemporary world balances ever more precariously?  If there is going to be a revolution of the rational, it will have to be total.

Creston Davis, the facilitator and editor of the debate in The Monstrosity of Christ, like so many scholars of religion (myself included), is almost entirely dismissive of the philosophical weight of the theism vs. atheism debate as it appears in the Alister McGrath vs. Richard Dawkins title card:

But for all the pomp and circumstance of this ‘debate’, in the end, it only manages to recapitulate the same premises with which each side begins.  Consequently, the debate over the truth of either stance can never be resolved through the arbitration of speculative reason – and this because each side appears to be different, but, on a deeper level, they share the exact same version of that which underlies their very thinking, viz. secular reason.  Reason functions in this atheistic/theistic debate in a very limited, even reductionist way as it becomes the final arbiter of all truth forced into propositional form and thus sundered from everyday life … In short, although this Dawkins/McGrath debate looks genuine, and is certainly successful in terms of selling a great many books, it nevertheless is only a limited and not very intellectually significant debate.  It is more an exercise in ideological (mis)interpretation of the same premises than a real debate, because is fails to risk forgoing the very existence of what both sides presuppose. (8-10)

What Žižek argues for in Monstrosity is something else from the dismissive and reductionist arguments for atheism that are taking up so much space bookshelf space these days.  What he argues for here seems on the surface to be counterintuitive or simply nonsensical: he is making an atheistic plea for the absolute singularity and necessity of the monstrous figure of Jesus – though Žižek regularly uses the theological title of ‘Christ’, his argument is still thoroughly materialistic in a Hegelian sense and thus at least formally atheistic.  He makes this point in no uncertain terms, something which in itself isa rarity in Žižek’s work:

It is only in this monstrosity of Christ that human freedom is grounded; and, at its most fundamental, it is neither as payment for our sins nor as legalistic ransom, but by enacting this openness that Christ’s sacrifice sets us free … This is the way Christ brings freedom: confronting him, we become aware of our own freedom.  The ultimate question is thus: in what kind of universe is freedom possible?  What ontology does freedom imply? (82)

All praise to Žižek aside for the moment, there is in all of this an unresolved and very troubling tension between Žižek’s evident hopes for liberation from the excesses of contemporary capitalism and what appears to be – and this is not putting it too strongly – a refigured Christian universalism.  In all of this, when he uses the word ‘religion’, what Žižek is talking about is Christianity, the only religion he really considers in these essays.  Even when he addresses Judaism, he does so obliquely and only as it pertains to Christianity.  In doing this, Žižek is (oddly enough, given his track record) repeating a mistake made by a great many theologians, one arguably rooted in a long history of anti-Semitism in European intellectual history, and in Christian theology in particular.  There is something odd, even disturbing, in Žižek’s reaffirmation of Christian universalism in an atheist guise, though such an idea does have a fairly long history, reaching its apex in the ‘death of God’ movement in theology, which briefly caught the public imagination in the 1960s to such an extent that it made the cover of Time magazine.

magazine_covers_00

Time magazine, 8 April 1966

Is this really a step away from the harm that such universalism has wrought in history, or merely a restatement of this central tenet of European superiority?  Though he makes a compelling argument later in the book that seems to address this precise point head-on, one can’t help be beset by lingering doubts at taking such a tack in a work that purports to be advocating a new and less violent world order based on a new kind of balance between the secular (whatever that might mean) and the religious (whatever that might mean).

In this book, there is a closer agreement between Milbank and Žižek than might be expected, and one of the things that they agree on is that that naïve, de-historicised atheism is of little value.  Bringing us back to my unease with Žižek’s restatement of Christian universalism, this is a position that is fiercely relevant to the contemporary study of religion, but one that no one – at least in this reporter’s opinion – has managed to convincingly lay out the reasons for, until now:

The incompleteness of reality also provides an answer to the question I am often asked by materialists: is it even worth spending time on religion, flogging a dead horse?  Why this eternal replaying of the death of God?  Why not simply start from the positive materialist premise and develop it?  The only appropriate answer to this is the Hegelian one – but not in the sense of the cheap ‘dialectics’ according to which a thesis can deploy itself only through overcoming its opposite.  The necessity of religion is an inner one – again not in the sense of a kind of Kantian ‘transcendental illusion’, an eternal temptation of the human mind, but more radically.  A truly logical materialism accepts the basic insights of religion, its premise that our commonsense reality is not the true one: what it rejects is the conclusion that, therefore, there must be another, ‘higher’, suprasensible reality.  Commonsense realism, positive religion, and materialism thus form a Hegelian triad. (240)

Žižek argues that our position is thus a precarious one that our religious inheritance can help us to understand, regardless of whether or not we are willing or able to make the leap to theistic belief: ‘we created our world, but it overwhelms us, we cannot grasp and control it.  This position is like that of God when he confronts Job toward the end of the book of Job: a God who is himself overwhelmed by his own creation.  This is what dialectics is about: what eludes the subject’s grasp is not the complexity of transcendent reality, but the way the subject’s own activity is inscribed into reality’ (244). He repeats this all-important gesture a few pages later in answering the slightly different question ‘but why God at all?’: ‘The true formula of atheism is not “I don’t believe”, but “I no longer have to rely on a big Other who believes for me” – the true formula of atheism is, “there is no big Other”’ (297).

We cannot ignore Christianity as a whole and the problematic of the Incarnation in particular, Žižek claims, because these things from an essential part of the intellectual world of modernity.  Here he also offers at least a partial answer to my own charge of universalism, despite the fact that he never bothers to articulate this explicitly.  Christianity achieves its unique position in history because it is an essential element of modernity itself, an essential piece of the dominant logic of a globalising capitalist modernity.  Given this, Žižek is quite correct when he argues that he is moving into new territory with this particular argument: ‘A new field is emerging to which the well-known designations “poststructuralism”, “postmodernism”, or “deconstuctionism” no longer apply; even more radically, this field renders problematic the very feature shared by Derrida and his great opponent, Habermas: that of respect for Otherness’ (254).  This is a hybrid (or, to use Hegelian language, synthesis) of modern and postmodern (to use two very loaded, very inadequate terms) territory that many others – Terry Eagleton, for one, in his After Theory (2003) – are also trying with varying degrees of success to define and understand.

What Žižek does here is to make atheism respectable again, after the onslaught of what Eagleton quite rightly calls ‘school-yard’ atheists, reactionaries like Hitchens and Harris as well as (slightly) better-informed critics of religion like Dawkins.  In Žižek’s arguments, we find the deeper meaning to Milbank’s assertion that ‘the supposition of naive atheists that the West can leave behind either Christology or ecclesiology is worthy to be greeting only with ironic laughter’ (181).  One cannot blithely ignore the centuries of theological thinking that lies at the back of any assertion of atheism, philosophically justifiable as any such an assertion may be, at least not if there is to be actual, productive debate – not just people shouting at each other or simply restating their own presuppositions over and over again – about all of this.

This might not be an argument that will ever be resolved, and The Monstrosity of Christ, may not document a proper argument in the strictest sense of the word – Žižek and Milbank might, as Dawkins and McGrath seem to, be simply talking past or at rather than to each other.  However, Žižek, in dialogue with Milbank, gives us a way to argue – or to at least to begin to argue – for an intellectually respectable and historically responsible atheism that both avoids the abuses of an overly prescriptive ‘secular’ rationalism that seeks to discard the past and transcends this ironic laughter by searching to explicate the present though a respectful and critical re-examination of the past.  For what has modernity taught us about history?  The past haunts the present and there can be no exorcising the spirits of History.

 

Public Lecture: Heidi Campbell on ‘When Religion Meets New Media: Considering the Religious-Social Shaping of Technology’

28 Wednesday Oct 2009

Posted by The Dunedin School in Conferences & Seminars, Dunedin School, Internet, Language, Philosophy, Texts

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Communication, Heidi Campbell, Public Lectures, Technology

The Dunedin School would like to invite all of you to a public lecture sponsored by the University of Otago’s Department of Theology and Religion:

Dr. Heidi Campbell, Texas A&M University, will deliver an Open Lecture entitled ‘When Religion Meets New Media: Considering the Religious-Social Shaping of Technology’ on Monday 16th November at 5.10pm. The lecture will be held in Burns 7 St David Seminar Room 2.

Dr. Campbell has a PhD in Practical Theology and Computer-mediated Communication from the University of Edinburgh-Scotland and is been an active researcher studying religion and the internet. She is author of Exploring Religious Community Online (Peter Lang, 2005) which explores the relationship between online and offline Christian communities and implications online religion has for offline faith communities and religious institutions. She is also co-editor of A Science and Religion Primer (Baker Academic, 2009) an introductory resource to the study of science, technology and religion and author of the forthcoming book When Religion Meets New Media (Routledge, forthcoming 2010) on how religious communities negotiate their use of new media. Dr. Campbell writes about her research interests also in her blog: When Religion Meets New Media.

The Minds Which Seduce Us: On First Reading E. M. Cioran’s The Temptation to Exist

11 Sunday Oct 2009

Posted by Eric Repphun in Biblical Studies, Continental Philosophy, Death, Ethics, Evil, God, Hebrew Bible, History, Language, Philosophy, Reference, Religion, Rhetoric, Texts, Theory

≈ 2 Comments

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America, Confession, E. M. Cioran, Exile, Job, Judaism, The Temptation to Exist

One of the most palpable pleasures of the academic life is to find a new thinker, a new author who challenges, excites, infuriates, or simply makes one prick up one’s ears.  So much the better to stumble upon a thinker who has a long list of books just waiting to be explored, deconstructed, and enjoyed.  My recent encounter with Emil Cioran’s collection of essays, The Temptation to Exist[1], is the intellectual equivalent to my first listen to Tom Wait’s Closing Time as an undergraduate, where the joy of discovery is only deepened with the knowledge that there are – in the case of Waits – albums like Rain Dogs and Bone Machine waiting in the wings.  Unlike Waits, Cioran is no longer living and working among us, so his body of work is bounded in time, but there is still a lifetime of writing to anticipate reading.  I’ve got two more of his books waiting for me at home already.  I’ve come to Cioran by recommendation of Deane, who is, according to one commenter, The Dunedin School’s ‘archblogger’, who has yet to recommend to me a bad book, which is in itself rather remarkable.

E. M. Cioran

E. M. Cioran

Cioran, born in Romania in 1911 with a Romanian Orthodox priest for a father, took to philosophy early in life, travelling to Berlin in 1933, where he developed a certain sympathy for the Nazis and for the Romanian nationalistic organisation The Iron Guard, despite the fact that violence of any kind made him uncomfortable.  Cioran spent much of his adult life working and living largely as a hermit in France and he would eventually repudiate all of his ties to the political right, expressing his regret clearly in later interviews.  He died in 2005, leaving a mass of unpublished work that is still tied up in the French courts.   Reading Cioran is maddening, joyous, and difficult.  Understanding him is, if anything, even worse.  Writing in the aphoristic philosophical tradition that includes such diverse figures as Nietzsche, Baudrillard, and Wittgenstein, Cioran is one to read and to ponder in mad, great lumps or in discrete bites.  I can’t pretend to have mined any of this with any thoroughness, but I’ve included some highlights, some things that caught my attention, that pricked up my ears.

Cioran, in ‘Thinking Against Oneself’, betraying his history of sympathy to fascism (which, though this is a troubling thought, does not mean that he is wrong):

Almost all our discoveries are due to our violence, to the exacerbation of our instability.  Even God, insofar as He [sic] interests us – it is not in our innermost selves that we discern God, but at the extreme limits of our fever, at the very point where, our rage confronting His, a shock results, an encounter as ruinous for Him as for us (33).

In the same essay, on Christianity:

But the Christian virus torments us: heirs of the flagellants, it is by refining our excruciations that we become conscious of ourselves.  Is religion declining?  We perpetuate its extravagances, as we perpetuate the macerations and the cell-shrieks of old, our will to suffer equalling that of the monasteries in their heyday.  If the Church no longer enjoys a monopoly on hell, it has nonetheless riveted us to a chain of sighs, to the cult of the ordeal, of blasted joys and jubilant despair … No sage among our ancestors, but malcontents, triflers, fanatics whose disappointments or excesses we must continue (34-35).

Wherever there is suffering, it exhausts mystery or renders it luminous (39).

The only minds which seduce us are the minds which have destroyed themselves trying to give their lives a meaning (45).

From ‘On a Winded Civilisation’ on the intellectual life (and this hits very close to home):

The tired intellectual sums up the deformities and the vices or a world adrift.  He does not act, he suffers; if he favors the notion of tolerance, he does not find in it the stimulant he needs.  Tyranny furnished that, as do the doctrines of which it is the outcome.  If he is the first of its victims, he will not complain: only the strength that grinds him into the dust seduces him.  To want to be free is to want to be oneself; but he is tired of being himself, of blazing a trail into uncertainty, of stumbling through truths.  ‘Bind me with the chains of Illusion’, he sighs, even as he says farewell to the peregrinations of Knowledge.  Thus he will fling himself, eyes closed, into any mythology which will assure him the protection and the peace of the yoke (57-58).

The future belongs to the suburbs of the globe (64).

In ‘A Little Theory of Destiny’ and ‘Advantages of Exile’, Cioran explores the idea of exile and living as an expatriate, which is very much on my mind on as I am on a short trip back to my American hometown of Boulder, Colorado (the New Age capital of the universe), a place I love and hate in equal measure – and his writing captures some of the essence of my experience so well that is almost chilling:

The aspiration to ‘save’ the world is the morbid phenomenon of a people’s youth (66).

Hating my people, my country, its timeless peasants enamored of their own torpor and almost bursting with hebetude, I blushed to be descended from them, repudiated them, rejected their sub-eternity, their larval certainties, the geologic reverie.  No use scanning their features for their fidgets, the grimaces of revolt: the monkey, alas! was dying in them.  In truth, did they not sprout from the very rock?  Unable to rouse them, or to animate them, I came to the point of dreaming of an extermination.  One does not massacre stones.  The spectacle they offered me justified and baffled, nourished and disgusted my hysteria.  And I never stopped cursing the accident that caused me to be born among them (70).

It is a mistake to think of the expatriate as someone who abdicates, who withdraws and humbles himself, resigned to his miseries, his outcast state.  On a closer look, he turns out to be ambitious, aggressive in his disappointments, his very acrimony qualified by his belligerence.  The more we are dispossessed, the more intense our appetites and our illusions become (74).

On poetry, an analysis that fits New Zealand, a decidedly minor nation that is very fond of poetry, like a glove:

Consider the production of any ‘minor’ nation which has not been so childish as to make up a past for itself: the abundance of poetry is its most striking characteristic.  Prose requires, for its development, a certain rigor, a differentiated social status, and a tradition: it is deliberate, constructed; poetry wells up: it is direct or else totally fabricated; the prerogative of cave men or aesthetes, it flourishes only on the near or far side of civilization, never at the center.  Whereas prose demands a premeditated genius and a crystallized language, poetry is perfectly compatible with a barbaric genius and a formless language (76).

In ‘A People of Solitaries’, which on occasion strays dangerously close to an unformed, casual anti-Semitism, Cioran offers as astute, troubling look at Judaism in European history:

To be a man is a drama; to be a Jew is another.  Hence, the Jew has the privilege of living our condition twice over.  He represents the alienated existence par excellence or, to utilize an expression by which the theologians describe God, the wholly other (80).

However grave its consequences may have been, the rejection of Christianity remains the Jews’ finest exploit, a no which does them honor.  If previously they had walked alone by necessity, they would henceforth do so by resolve, as outcasts armed with a great cynicism, the sole precaution they have taken against the future (85).

On Job, a frequent guest here at The Dunedin School (turn the pages and stop here and here):

The tragic hero rarely seeks an accounting from a blind, impersonal Fate: it is his pride to accept its decrees.  He will perish, then, he and his.  But a Job harasses his God, demands an accounting: a formal summons results, of a sublime bad taste, which would doubtless have repelled a Greek but which touches, which overwhelms us.  These outpourings, these vociferations of a plagued man who offers conditions to Heaven and submerges it with his imprecations – how can we remain insensitive to such a thing?  The closer we are to abdicating, the more these cries disturb us.  Job is indeed of his race: his sobs are a show of force, an assault.  ‘My bones are pierced in me in the night season’, he laments.  His lamentation culminates in a cry, and this cry rises through the vaults of Heaven and makes God tremble.  Insofar as, beyond our silences and our weaknesses, we dare lament our ordeals, we are all descendents of the great leper, heirs of his desolation and his moan.  But too often our voices fall silent; and though he shows us how to work ourselves to his accents, he does not manage to shake us out of our inertia.  Indeed, he has the best of it: he knew Whom to vilify or implore, Whom to attack or pray to.  But we – against whom are we to cry out?  Our own kind?  That seems to us absurd.  No sooner articulated than our rebellions expire on our lips … Job has transmitted his energy to his own people: thirsting like him for justice, they never yield before the evidence of an iniquitous world.  Revolutionaries by instinct, the notion of renunciation fails to occur to them: if Job, that Biblical Prometheus, struggled with God, they would struggle with men (99-100).

There is so much more that could be said about The Temptation to Exist, but it is late and I will leave you with a final note, from ‘Some Blind Alleys: A Letter’, in which Cioran, writing decades before the rise of the now dominant therapeutic ethos and the repellent spectacle of reality television, sees into the future with a striking clarity:

The confessional? a rape of conscience perpetrated in the name of heaven.  And that other rape, psychological analysis!  Secularized, prostituted, the confessional will soon be installed on our street corners: except for a couple of criminals, everyone aspires to have a public soul, a poster soul (109).

Never have I wanted more to be a criminal, and more ashamed to be working – with these very words – towards a public soul.


[1] E. M. Cioran, The Temptation to Exist, translated by Richard Howard, with an Introduction by Susan Sontag (London: Quartet Encounters, 1987).  All page numbers cited in parenthesis refer to this version of the text.

(Incidentally, The Dunedin School has been ranked #35 on the Biblioblog Top 50 list this month, which is kind of funny, as some of us aren’t even Biblical scholars, though we are constantly running into that damned thing.)

Fitzmyer’s Neutral Historical Criticism

24 Thursday Sep 2009

Posted by Luke Johns in History, Philosophy, Theology

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

Fitzmyer, historical-critical method, neutrality, no true scotsman

Joseph A. Fitzmyer recently published The Interpretation of Scripture (2008), which is subtitled In Defense of the Historical-Critical Method. The way he sees it, the historical-critical method is a “neutral” method. One can either employ this neutral method to Christian ends, by adding on presuppositions of faith and belief, or one can employ the neutral method in service of the Devil, by adding on presuppositions opposed to Christian dogma (and Fitzmyer cites the work of Reimarus, FC Baur and DF Strauss in this latter category):

“Since the historical-critical method is per se neutral, it can be used with such faith presuppositions. Indeed, by reason of them it becomes a properly oriented method of biblical interpretation, for none of the elements of the method is pursued in and for itself.  They are used only to achieve the main goal of ascertaining what the biblical message was that the sacred writer of old sought to convey – in effect, the literal sense of the Bible.” (69)

So even though the method was developed as a result of Enlightenment ideals of freedom from dogma, and before that from Reformation ideals of freedom from tradition – despite the genealogy which gave rise to it – the historical critical method is a neutral method.

As theoretical logic this is probably quite right. It doesn’t matter what your motives are for constructing a method; evaluation of a method as ‘neutral’ or ‘biased’ depends wholly on the mechanics of the method itself.

But in practice the historical critical method is never simply a matter of theoretical logic. It is always pressed into the service of some overarching project, whether Calvin’s attempt to establish a rival magisterium in the Bible, or Kant’s and de Wette’s project to establish a rival to church dogma, or the project of most recent confessional biblical scholars to serve the church.

So, for example, even if there is no a priori reason why the historical-critical method should favour atheistic material monism rather than theism, its utilization by material monists will practically always favour atheistic conclusions, whereas its utilization by theists will almost always favour theistic conclusions. For the method is inseparable from its background presuppositions. These conclusions may not technically be the a priori result of employing the method, but due to the  background, such conclusions are effectively a priori (or if you like, they are a priori results masquerading as a posteriori results – the situation of the ‘no true Scotsman’ fallacy).

So in explaining an event – say the Resurrection of Christ (just to get away from 586 and all that) – although the method has the theoretical appearance of a netural method, there is no hope in hell that an orthodox Christian historical critic will ever weigh the evidence in favour of the Resurrection not occurring, and there is the same chance that an atheist will view the evidence as demonstrating a miracle.

The historical critical method is never in reality “neutral” – even if it is in theory.

Putting Faiths/Religion (anything really!) on the Same Level …

11 Friday Sep 2009

Posted by Gillian in Intertextuality, Philosophy, Politics, Relativism, Religion, Texts, Theology

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

bookshelves, juxtaposition, Religion, Theology

Here is a brilliant bookshelf idea that every Theology/Religious Studies Department should have!

Juxtaposition Bookshelf

The JUXTAPOSED: Religion Bookcase by BlankBlank plays by the numbers: it holds just 7 selected theological books, was made in a very limited edition of 50, and costs $2,500. Once you get past that, it’s easy to appreciate the unique attributes of this most unusual reclaimed hardwood shelf that puts very different religious books, for example the Bhagavad Gita, Bible, Qur’an, Analects of Confucius, the Tao Te Ching, Discourses of the Buddha and the Torah on the same level. Literally.

Other University Departments could design their own shelves: Politics could have space for Marx, Machiavelli, & Mill et al; Philosophy could have Butler, Baudrillard, & Buber et al! The scope for this is endless!

Thanks to The Weburbanist site for this information and to Geoff Pound for alerting me to it!

Conference: Towards a Unified Science of Religion – Call for Papers

07 Monday Sep 2009

Posted by The Dunedin School in Conferences & Seminars, Philosophy, Religion

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

call for papers, conference, Philosophy, Religion, Towards a Unified Science of Religion, University of Otago

CALL FOR PAPERS
Towards a Unified Science of Religion

University of Otago
Dunedin, New Zealand
12-14 February 2010

The belief in gods, demons, and other supernatural agents is a persistent feature of human culture, which cries out for explanation. In the last twenty-five years explanations of religion have reached a new level of sophistication. We now have a range of different scientific theories of religion, in cognitive science, anthropology, and evolutionary psychology, drawing upon a significant body of empirical data. This conference, sponsored by the Department of Philosophy at the University of Otago, will bring together researchers from these different disciplines and different theoretical perspectives, to explore the possibility of a unified science of religion.

Participants are invited to submit paper proposals presenting original research on any topic related to the theme of the conference. The proposal should take the form of an abstract of no more than 200 words, and should be submitted electronically (along with contact details) to the conference secretary: Jonathan Jong ( jonathan[at]psy.otago.ac.nz ) by 15 December 2009.

Further details about registration and accommodation and will be available soon on the conference website.

Please direct enquiries to the conference secretary, Jonathan Jong ( jonathan[at]psy.otago.ac.nz ).

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