The hundred masks will serve in lieu of one countenance.

I hope to do a more extended post on my reading of Franz Rosenzweig’s Understand the Sick and the Healthy but I could not resist putting up this quote.  What can I say I really am an existentialist at heart (wait, is that self-contradictory?!).

Let us seek not seek for anything beyond ourselves. Let us be ourselves and nothing more. Such a moment of existence may be nothing but delusion; we shall, however, choose to remain within the moment, deceived by it and deceiving it, rather than live in deception above or below the moment.  Let our personal experience, even though it change from instant to instant, be reality.  Let man become the bearer of these shifting images.  It is preferable that he change masks a hundred times a day (at least they do belong to him) rather than wear continually the mask of the divine ruler of the world (gained by thievery) or that of the world’s bondservant (forced upon him).  The hundred masks will serve in lieu of one countenance.

The Devil, Hell, Demons, and Excorcism (enough to interest you yet?)

This is a rough draft of my sermon on Sunday (Mark 1:9-15; 1 Peter 3:18-22).  I will likely make some more edits and developments but I am curious if there is any feedback that I should take into consideration here.

At times the church gets criticized for holding on to outdated and backwards views of the world.  And we do need to be open to these criticisms and concerns.  But it is interesting to note that while many churches on the one hand are working hard to remove unhelpful ideas about mental illness being some sort of evil spirit or of heaven and hell as literal places in the clouds and in the center of the earth on the other hand we find so-called enlightened western culture fascinated with movies about books about zombies, vampires, demons, ghosts and all sorts of hellish creatures.  Out of curiosity I went online to search for videos on YouTube about demon possession and exorcisms and I found plenty, some with millions of views.  What is going on here?  How do we discern these matters as a church?  Is there a relationship between our current curiosities and interests in evil spirits and other hellish matters and what is happening with Jesus and the Devil in the wilderness and Jesus message to the spirits of the dead in prison?  I think there may be a connection but I think the connection is in their opposition to each other.  Let’s start by looking at our current and ongoing fascination with the realms of the dead.

Continue reading “The Devil, Hell, Demons, and Excorcism (enough to interest you yet?)” →

A phenonmenal turn around

Circumspective concern decides as to the closeness and farness of what is proximally ready-to-hand environmentally. – Being and Time, 142.

This quote reflects Heidegger’s discussion of the manner in which we attempt to bring the world ‘close’, which is to say have it concernfully, subjectively, before us.  The examples given is that while glasses and pavement can be the most spatially present they are often the most concernfully distant entities to us.

Much is of often made of the silliness which postmodern philosophy seems to concern itself with respect to our inability to be present to realities and truth around us.  A while back I posted a quote on Facebook from Heidegger in which he said, “In principle the chair does not touch the wall.”  Now in what follows I am not claiming some sort of direct correspondence or example of this quote, though I think it relates to the initial quote of the post.

I can still vividly remember driving in a new section of Winnipeg that I was not familiar with.  I generally have a good sense of direction and ‘bearings’ so I was sort of going on my gut at that point thinking that I was at least heading generally in the right direction.  At one point an overhead sign was approaching and it basically communicated to me that I was heading in exactly the opposite direction as I thought I was.  Now at some point earlier in the drive I had made this shift but not noticed.  Now with the communication of this sign the reality of being turned around was ‘brought close’ to me immediately and physiologically I felt as though I had been spun around, I felt nauseous.  This always struck me as strange though I could not quite frame the experience.  Now what happened was the neither the truth of what already happened nor was it the direct response to some change in my bodies spatial direction.  What happened was a particular subjective appropriation that I can’t imagine would happen to everyone nor what it likely happen again to me in the same way.  It is this experience that helps me understand his earlier statement which says,

Yet this ‘subjectivity’ perhaps uncovers the ‘Reality’ of the world at its most Real. (141)

This thinking often does not effect (affect?) many aspects of everyday life but it follows as a spectre or hangs as a reminder which, I think, in certain situations should call us both to boldness and humility when faced with those claiming to have ‘direct access’ to the world or ‘Reality’ as such and how such decisions are enacted.

A Note on Luke 7:35

I am not a huge proponent of the ideology that says one must know Greek and Hebrew to really understand the Bible, though of course, we must have those who do know it.  Anyway, I will be preaching on Luke 7:31-35 which culminates in the fairly well known saying by Jesus,
Wisdom is vindicated by all her children.
I don’t always do a much work in the original text but I thought I would take a quick look and saw the relatively simple construction of this phrase.

καὶ ἐδικαιώθη ἡ σοφία ἀπὸ πάντων τῶν τέκνων αὐτῆς
and / passive verb ‘be justified,released’ / wisdom / from, by / all her children

Another simple and direct translation could be,
Wisdom is freed from all her children

This strikes me as offering an altogether different sense given so much of the preceding context speaks about various ‘genealogical lines’, namely that of a mother and son, John and disciples, John and Jesus, John and those of the Kingdom of God.

It also seems altogether plausible that both translation could be put forward as opposed to having to choose.

Any thoughts?  We’ll see what I come up with for Sunday.

A matter of X and Y

There is a sense in which Heidegger’s work in Being and Time is at best some sort of ivory tower abstracting.  And of course it is abstracting.  Heidegger is looking to dismantle the traditional concepts of philosophy at the time to see if there is way of building up an ontology from the resources of observation and reason.  So language sounds even more foreign because he does not want to appeal to ready-made categories of philosophy.  What I want to definitely demonstrate however is that this is not an ivory tower exercise.  Case in point;

Overheard at Robin’s Donuts in the morning last week,

I think the sexiest woman in Hollywood is X
but the person I would most want to bang is Y

Think of the nuanced distinction of categories here.  To be quite honest this line stuck with me for a couple of days.  Here is a man who has clearly given some thought to the manner in which women-are-being-in-the-world-for-him (to use a heideggarian term . . . sort of).

So remember this the next time you disparage the project of someone like Heidegger.  Turn that disparaging finger inward and examine your own fundamental categories of being in the world!

Oh and I did catch X but missed Y.  Though it is easy to follow his line of thinking and it would make the name of Y almost superfluous anyway. X was Jennifer Aniston . . . (!?!)

And as though that conversation was not bizarre enough to overhear.  This is what I caught later at a University Starbucks,

So we were hooking up and then he said, ‘You should consider yourself lucky to be with someone so good at Tetras’  And he kept playing while he took his pants off.

I am not sure Heidegger is sophisticated enough to respond to that one.

To love is to bear with the chaos

In an earlier post I raised some provisional concerns over the direction Danial Barber’s work On Diaspora was heading (book event details now up).  Namely, I was concerned that what would be produced would have value for ‘strong subjectivities’ that would be able to do the work of decomposing sedimented discursive traditions, at mercy of the vulnerable who suffer under such forces.  I was concerned in terms of what could possibly be the therapeutic extensions of such a project (if any would indeed be relevant).  I am still not quite finished the work and so this is still provisional but I was struck by Barber’s use of Catherine Keller’s work in chaos in relationship to his development of diaspora.  I was struck if for nothing else than to read the line that titles this post.  Here is the excerpt.

The discursive tradition of Christianity is inconsistent from the beginning, and this is because the beginning it signifies is discontinuous: in the beginning was the discontinuity of chaos and God, of material divergence and creative consistency. Just as there is no need to choose between pure disruption and identitarian traditions, neither is there a need to choose between chaotic excessiveness and formal consistency. Keller considers an interpretation of creation that evades such mutual exclusivity, an interpretation “in which the chaos is neither nothing nor evil; in which to create is not to master the formless but to solicit its virtual forms.” It is precisely this approach that is implied in diaspora, which sees difference neither as something to be sublated in identity nor as something that remains the brute inverse of identity. Diasporic thought sees the chaos of the deep as that which decomposes identitarian forms and enables the re-composition—here the creative solicitation—of differential forms. Indeed, a diasporic account of Christian declaration, which emphasizes that enemy-love means beginning with the signification that exceeds recognition, discovers an ally in Keller’s “proposition for any tehomic ethic: to love is to bear with the chaos. Not to like it or to foster it but to recognize there the unformed future.”

Approaching one of the Big Four

I am not sure it is the case with you but for at least a decade or so four books have hung over my head standing out as foundational for particular interests that I have.  These four books are Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, Marx’s Capital, and Heidegger’s Being and Time.  Of course other works jockey for position but these sort of linger, not that I think reading them will necessarily be transformational (or even good) but only that they are required if I want to feel as though I can develop a proper orientation around the questions these works address.

Given my current reading schedule I have now begun one of the four, Being and Time.  It has been tremendously helpful to have read Husserl prior to starting this work (Heidegger was Husserl’s student).  Heidegger also believe that philosophy and so also science has not ‘gone back far enough’.  This is of course a disputable (overthrown?) quest today but I still find it helpful to try and think along the process of thinking being.  As I am still early in the work I thought I would offer a reasonably accessible quote on Heidegger’s concept of phenomenology,

[Unlike other sciences] ‘phenomenology’ neither designates the object of its researches, nor characterizes the subject-matter thus comprised.  The word merely informs us of the ‘how’ with which what is to be treated in this science gets exhibited and handled.  To have a science ‘of’ phenomena means to grasp its objects in such a way that everything about them which is up for discussion must be treated by exhibiting it directly and demonstrating it directly.  The expression ‘descriptive phenomenology’, which is at bottom tautological, has the same meaning.  Here ‘description’ does not signify such a procedure as we find, let us say, in botanical morphology; the term has rather the sense of prohibition – the avoidance of characterizing anything without demonstration.

. . .

What is it that phenomenology is to ‘let us see’?  What is that must be called ‘phenomenon’ in a distinctive sense?  What is that by its very essence is necessarily the theme whenever we exhibit something explicitly?  Manifestly, it is something that proximally and for the most does not show itself at all:  it is something that lies hidden, in contrast to that which proximally and for the most does show itself; but at the same time it something that belongs to what thus shows itself, and it belongs to it so essentially as to constitute its meaning and its ground.

Being and Time [trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson], 59.

Preparing for the apocalyptic book event

Having finally got my hands on a copy of Daniel Barber’s recent book On Diaspora I am trying to carve out enough blocks of time to get it down before the book event.  I am only two chapters in and a question is forming in my mind.  It may well be that Dan answers the question in the course of the book but the question relates to other accounts that attempt to furnish a theoretical engagement with ‘the powers’ and how they might be named, undermined, overthrown, etc.  My experience with these accounts is that they seem to function with the implicit need of a ‘strong subjectivity’.  What I mean by this is that there is much language about and call to de-centering, deconstructing, dispossessing, or decomposing (I am of course not assuming these are all the same) while many people simply live in the midst of such processes at the mercy of those who hold power over them.  This question reminded me of a post by Tim at Veeritions.  What I will be curious about understanding as I continue to read Barber’s work is the extent to which this is a work for the oppressors or at least the strong.  Is that inevitable in this medium?  I struggle to think of valorizing those who already experience this undoing and can’t understand why I would want to perpetuate it.  Barber speaks of endless deterritorialialization and undoing identities, will this mean then I must ‘submit’ in the face of those for whom such a process is enforced so that some other movement might be possible?  Can we only ever speak either to the mountain that must be brought low or the valley that must be raised but never both?

In any event these are pre-mature questions, at least with respect to Barber’s work.  If you have not already decided to come on board for the event I strongly advise it.