A note on fact and meaning

My interest in working through Husserl’s The Crisis of European Sciences has waxed and waned.  This is probably due to the sharp transition I feel in moving from Kierkegaard’s style to the more straightforward work of ‘real’ philosophy.  What has kept my attention though is Husserl’s genuine impression of having discovered something and of its significance and secondly of the fact that in historical context the work he did has had tremendous historical significance.  So what is he doing?  I understand a primary motivation of his work to be a method of thinking subjectivity scientifically.  How can I be included in scientific investigation?  For this reason the natural sciences and mathematics always play a secondary (but certainly not disparaged) role.  These secondary sciences work from the assumptions of a pre-given world that accord with our experience of that world.  These sciences always rest on something prior.  So Husserl is trying to carry out to completion Descartes’s emphasis on the primacy of the ego.  But the ego is not a ‘premise’ from which the rest of knowledge is deduced.

The point is not to secure objectivity but to understand it.  One must finally achieve the insight that no objective science, no matter how exact, explains or ever can explain anything in a serious sense. To deduce is not to explain.  To predict, or to recognize the objective forms of composition of physical or chemical bodies and predict accordingly – all this explains nothing but is in need of explanation.  The only true way to explain is to make transcendentally understandable. (Crisis, 189)

This is not particularly shocking to anyone with exposure to philosophical hermeneutics but it is a helpful reminder for what continues presently to be a common and serious misconception, namely, that scientific findings are self-evidently meaningful.  These findings are framed as such because they give the air of authority and therefore power to various expressions.  While I am not sure I will follow Husserl in his own project I think this point remains sound.

High school wisdom

I have never studied philosophy institutionally.  This is, almost, a fact.  When I was in high school a few students were selected (how I don’t know) to participate in the University of Winnipeg’s Mini-U program which was a week’s worth of classes on a topic of the student’s choosing.  I chose philosophy (why I don’t know).  I remember the basic outlines of certain sessions.  We looked at theories of essence in which a knife was evaluated by its knifiness.  I remember making a comment and the professor saying I was a closet Nietzschian (I remember neither the comment nor do I know why it would have been associated with Nietzsche).  I remember being told that a dog does not think.  I remember some high school bantering about how truth can be known.

What I remember most, though, was coming across Zeno’s paradox.  I will go from memory so I don’t need to worry about accuracy.  Zeno’s paradox explores the nature of two simultaneous and seemingly conflicting processes.  As I remember it the paradox was described (either in the original context or taught as an example) as a race in which the runner has a clear start and finish.  However, during that run a mathematical process also occurs or can at least describe the runner.  Mathematically the space can be divided into halves.  Halving a finite space, however, is an infinite process.  A half can always be mathematically halved.  How can an infinite mathematic process be completed within a finite progression?  I am probably stating this horrendously.  However, Zeno’s paradox came back to mind as I am reading Husserl in which he attempts to outline the faulty thinking of science in assuming that objective and abstract processes can be the basis for all knowledge, when in reality “the objective is precisely never experienceable as itself.” So Husserl attempts to move back into understanding what a science of the subjective could be.

And more than this Zeno’s paradox came to mind with this image from a newly added blog to my feed, Fuck Theory.

Finally we meet

You know, you just don’t here this kind of confidence anymore.  Here is the final paragraph of Part I of Husserl’s The Crisis of European Sciences.

Yet, over and above this, the more concrete critical analyses of the conceptual structures of the Kantian turn, and the contrast between it and the Cartesian turn, will set in motion out own concurrent thinking in such a way as to place us, gradually and of its own accord, before the final turn and the final decisions.  We ourselves shall be drawn into an inner transformation through which we shall come face to face with, to direct experience of, the long-felt but constantly concealed dimension of the “transcendental.”  The ground of experience, opened up in its infinity, will then become the fertile soil of a methodical working philosophy, with the self-evidence, furthermore, that all conceivable philosophical and scientific problems of the past are to be and decided by starting from this ground.

I for one am looking forward to coming face to face to the ‘transcendental’.  I hope it lives up to the hype.

Do my words ring

The readings for this Sunday included the following:
Genesis 1: 1-5 – creation
Mark 1:4-11 – the baptism of Jesus
Acts 19:1-7 – an account of Paul baptizing believers and the believers receiving the Holy Spirit and speaking in tongues and prophesying.

My sermon last Sunday began with tracing the trajectory that connects creation in Genesis to Jesus’s baptism in Mark.  The imagery of creation (chaotic waters/deep, wind/spirit moving over them, dry land/body appearing) has to be one of the best candidates for helping to form a ‘biblical theology’.  I spoke of the culmination of this imagery in Jesus’s baptism and how the words of creation that are now spoken are ones of love.  However, I went on to say that the trajectory does not end there and continues into Acts 19.  Here is the second half of the sermon,

Continue reading “Do my words ring” →

Taking as its medium

I have for some time now moved away from using language that refers to life and action as somehow ‘poetic’.  This shift has happened for a couple of reasons.  First, I had developed a theological writing style that employed a certain type of poetic language.  And what I mean by this is that I wrote about theological topics in a style that was simply supposed to ‘sound good’.  Theology, along with other disciplines, can afford one this opportunity.  No one can really verify if my explication of the Trinity is really valid or relevant.  Rather, it is supposed to move or  persuade.  This style tends to work fine when keeping the conversation theologically ‘in-house’.  As I began to expand my theological discourse I found that my language was running aground on folks who simply did not share some of my presuppositions and basically had the refrain of bullshit called out to me on several occasions.  This presented a clear intersection in how I was going to proceed.  I could entrench my approach and state that the conversation stalled on mutually incompatible presuppositions.  Or I could head back into the workshop and take another look at how I was going about things.  I decided on the latter.

This experience was part of larger theological shift that saw me move away from theology and practice as a discipline of orthodoxy (yes I can be challenged on how I understand orthodoxy) to theology and practice as a mode of understanding and engaging joy and brokenness in the world.  And I should also note that this past year found me heavily influenced by Kierkegaard for whom ‘the poetic’ is a false attempt at immediacy in life which actually puts oneself at arm’s length from life through ‘pretty’ language (I am grossly paraphrasing here).

This process also left a profound mark on how I now read theology.  Theology that was once inspiring now came off flat.  I don’t think I have many illusions about some neutral or material access to reality ‘as such’.  But I am much more interested in beginning from a phenomenological perspective which attempts to describe and not only describe what I see and intuit but also describe my location and perspective.  If I could now characterize my theology I would call it something like an existentially minded attempt at liberation theology.

All this to say that I was somewhat taken aback by Tim McGee’s recent post which outlines James Cone’s understanding of theology as a sort of poetic task.  Now as I read it I could see that the use of ‘poetic’ was different than the understanding I had moved away from.  It still struck me, however, that I had almost completely discarded any expression of the ‘poetic’ in how I express theology and practice.  Poetics for Cone is a response to the possibility of liberation.  We are creative and evocative because we are free.  This is an embodied and holistic poetics.

I had posted a comment on Tim’s blog stating briefly something of what I here stated above.  After that comment I went to a hospital to do some visits.  At the hospital I encountered what we all encounter at hospitals.  I saw bags of urine stacked on a cart in the hall.  I saw a bloody skid mark on the floor next to one person I visited.  I hear the calls for and saw the silhouetted nursing aids clean soiled patients.  I saw a neighbouring patient with a foot bloated literally like a blown-up surgical glove.  I heard sounds and moans coming out of doorways; one with the never ending refrain
Deloris . . . please help me, Deloris . . . please help me, Deloris . . . please help me . . .
I experienced all these common hospital scenes and I thought of the pretty words that people hold on to in this time; the pretty words people look to me for in this time.  It is many of these pretty words that I am trying to speak less of.  I am trying now to understand what theological poetics would look like and sound like taking as its medium the piss and shit of these places.

Who ain’t?

Who ain’t a slave?  Tell me that.  Well, then, however the old sea captains may order me about – however they may thump and punch me about, I have the satisfaction of knowing that it is all right; that everybody else is one way or other served in much the same way – either in a physical or metaphysical point of view, that is; and so the universal thump is passed round, and all hands should rub each other’s shoulder-blades, and be content.

And so I have begun to wade into Moby Dick for the first time.  This quote is from the first chapter where Ishmael frames his calling to the sea.  It reminded me, even if tangentially, of an image I saw driving home today.  – 10 C can be biting with a wind chill here in Winnipeg.  In that wind I saw a man scouring a patch of frozen pavement for usable cigarette butts.  A pathetic image, but not an image of laziness.  A shameful image of addiction but only because of this addiction’s object.  Who ain’t a slave?  Tell me that.  The sentiment reminds me of the fine line of how little separates a certain subjective drive between an impoverished addict searching for a fix and a wealthy addict looking to increase on abundance.   You will not escape the universal thump there will always be a larger hammer than the one you are able to wield.  Those larger hammers will likely always create circumstances which will determine a level of external comfort our addictions will afford us.

How does Ishmael’s knowledge and acceptance of this reality play out?  I’ll keep you posted.

2011 on into 2012

In 2011 I . . .

1. Got ordained.

2. Finished Kierkegaard’s published works.

3. Got an e-reader and returned to the world of fiction (Infinite Jest was much easier to tote around in this form).

4. Did a good number of reviews.

5. Found continual frustration in trying to develop a more sustained piece of theology for publication.

6. Perhaps most confusingly seem to have become a sports fan.

2011 was also my first full year blogging at the de-scribe.  I literally felt like I reached a certain ‘crisis point’ at my old site in that my basic theological orientation had made enough of shift that I could no longer look out the same way through the framework that had been developed there.  The move to this new site reflects my desire to engage the world both more plainly and more rigorously; to begin with a certain subjective honesty (yes, I’ll let that phrase stand) and then work through some of the implications or holes.

While I would enjoy more traffic and engagement here I have no real plan to publicize the site.  It seems the only way for this to remain valuable for myself is to continue to post as though no one was reading . . . but many thanks to the small tribe who does!

As for 2012

Incidentally 2012 will mark my tenth year engaging on the internet.  I created an online forum after graduating from college in 2002 and have truly valued the opportunity this medium afforded since that time.  It has been or at least become the most formative educational space in my life (ummmm, yah).  This of course has been frustrating on one level because many others have had the opportunity to continue their formation in the furnace of a direct academic community; and so I am left taking some comfort that there remains enough folks within those communities willing to share of their time and thoughts.  The most formative spaces online for myself in the past year have been An und für sich and The Last Psychiatrist (with appreciative nods going to On Journeying with those in Exile, Veeritions, and Bifurcated Life).

With the goal setting of my Kierkegaard reading last year I was able to carve out a new discipline of reading outside of my regular responsibilities in work and life.  So I have decided to outline a new reading list.  The drawback of this one is that it became large and sprawling and so I could not reasonably set a clear end date for accomplishing it.  That being said I hope it will continue to focus and energize my reading.  In any event here is my own version of a Great Books course (see tab at top of page).  The hope in this is to give attention to all those used books I picked up over the years thinking them necessary for my personal library.  Many of these readings will not in any way be close readings but chances to familiarize myself with influential styles and content.  I will not follow the list chronologically and so the first concentration will be on phenomenology (Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, and Marion) with second concentration likely being some Freudian trajectory.

All the best to your own new year’s endeavors.

A skeptical rant

A while back I started to occasionally cruise the local atheist/skeptic sites from around Winnipeg.  It was an interesting cultural experience.  It made me think of what some non-religious folks might (possibly) experience when they encounter  particular church cultures.  What I am thinking of primarily is the seemingly unconscious maintenance of a certain in-house mindset that helps support and perpetuate a larger view of the world that is not held by popular culture.  This was strikingly impressed on me in a recent post at Winnipeg Skeptics entitled, Top Ten Reasons Why Being a Skeptic is Fulfilling.  Now there really is nothing to criticize here as the post is about a subjective experience, that is, being fulfilled.  However, the experienced fulfillment strike me as either unhealthy or simply generic and so confusing in terms of its being unique to skepticism (though I did admit the author did not claim uniqueness for many of the reasons).

First is the prescriptive nature of the post.  Here are a few excerpts,
As a skeptic you love science
Through your skeptical endeavors you have found your social conscience, a sense of camaraderie and have made friends for a lifetime.
I feel bad for the poor skeptic who remains unconvinced of the current employment of science as an effective means to address human well-being and in so doing finds him or herself ostracized from this fraternity for such contrarian views.

More than this defining of what a skeptic loves and will experience is the nature of the claims.  So take the full sentence of the first reason skepticism is fulfilling,
As a skeptic you love science and know that the scientific method is the best method mankind has ever invented to understand who we are, how we got here, and how we can improve our lot in this universe.
Okay I will grant the how we got here but who we are and how to improve our lot, really?  I’ll leave a comment over at that post and wait for some elaboration because I don’t even know where to start on that claim.  But more to the point.  This post is about fulfillment.  Skepticism is fulfilling because it is the best.  How is it the best?  It is the best not because of demonstrable realities but because it is fulfilling for this individual.  It provides a subjective condition which the author enjoys.  Shouldn’t there be reasons to be skeptical about that?

Here is number two,
You know that reality is a puzzle and that it will take a lot of effort to understand it. At times truth goes against what seems to be common sense. You have discovered that the struggle to understand reality reveals truths that are, at times, deeply profound. That knowledge will keep you searching the for the truth for the rest of your life.
That may well be true of skepticism but I am going to go ahead and say that is true of anyone who is semi-conscious or attentive to life.

The author goes on in number three,
You possess a willingness to learn accompanied by a willingness to change, that’s why your skepticism makes you a better person.
How does a willingness to change make anyone better?  There is simply no relationship here.

Number four,
I have only ever met one group of people who cheer when they have been proven wrong. Skeptics. Especially those who employ scientific skepticism. You may be bold when you ask those annoyingly tough questions, but underneath it all you are humble enough to know when you have discovered the truth. After all, evidence is evidence and that’s good enough for you.
This is about as laughable as the Christian radio station that claims to only use ‘safe’ language. Hmmm, agreed upon in-house rules are cheered upon when followed by one another?  Strange.  I am still waiting for evidence of things like, say, the above claim about how science is the best mode of ‘improving out lot in life’.

Bizarrely perhaps this post reminds me of certain strands of pentecostalism.  The nature of these claims reminds me of the pentecostals who tried to show me the fulfilling nature of speaking in tongues.  They just wanted me to try it and if I opened myself to it I would see its value.  I tried.  I did not see.  I have the same feeling about these models of skepticism/atheism.  They continue to strike me as so profoundly lacking as an overall approach to life.  It is almost as though the author knows this and instead simply tries to amp up the volume to create a kind of Prosperity Gospel for skepticism.
Do this and you will end up fulfilled, isn’t it wonderful.
Sure, the author of this post is someone who apparently was an Anglican Minister and now an enlightened skeptic so I guess I should forgive him the zeal of conversion but these expressions strike as so terminally unfulfilling that I can’t even begin to wrap my head around them.  I want to be clear that author does admit that “You understand that being skeptical on it’s own just doesn’t cut it.”  But this is followed quickly about an apparent openness to letting others ‘prove themselves’.  I think most people with any familiarity to this discussion knows how this goes.  Two sides with differing foundational logics attempt to ‘prove’ something and surprisingly no one is convinced.

As I reflect on this post, which I was originally going to scrap, what remains most impressing is this notion of hope.  Why should there be hope in this?  I am guessing there is hope because of this author’s experience.  This all strikes me as somehow strange.

Kierkegaard on politics

In Kierkegaard’s Postscript to his treatise on authority and revelation, also known as The Book of Adler, Kierkegaard makes some telling political statements.  Kierkegaard is of course popularly criticized for his lack of politics but rarely is it mentioned that he is most often simply trying to maintain a rigorous qualitative distinction.  Some may simply disagree with his distinction but it needs to be clear that Kierkegaard is entirely intentional in what he develops.  Kierkegaard makes clear in his postscript that he this writing is ‘ethico-religious and has nothing to do with politics’.  The point of departure for the religious is from above, from God, “and the formula is this paradox that an individual is employed.”

Humanly understood, an individual, according to all reason, is infinitely nothing in comparison with the established order (the universal), so it is a paradox that the individual is the stronger. . . . When there are hundreds of men, what comes to pass is explained simply by the activity of the hundreds of men, but the paradox compels us (insofar as freedom can be compelled) to take notice of God, that he is taking part in it.

Kierkegaard then goes to talk about the political which comes from below, that is, how does politics attempt to change the established order.  I will include several excerpts as there are few times in all his published corpus that he speaks this directly.  The political as he understands it is being conceived and built now as a ‘monstrous multitude’.

“The multitude,” an absurd monster or a monstrous absurdity, which nevertheless is physically in possession of power, of outcries and of noise, and besides that has an extraordinary virtuosity in making everything commensurable for the decision of the hands upraised to vote or the fists upraised to fight.  This abstraction is an inhuman something, the power of which is, to be sure, prodigious, but it is a prodigious power which cannot be defined in human terms, but more properly as one defines the power of a machine, calling it so and so many horsepower: the power of the multitude is always horsepower.

This abstraction creates politics as a game and the game is played for the multitude whoever can win over the many legs.

This human mass becomes at last enrages by friction, and now demands – or rather it demands nothing, it does not itself know what it wills, it takes the threatening attitude only in the hope that something after all will come to pass, in the hope that the weaker side (the established government, the ruler) will perhaps become so much alarmed that it will go ahead and do something which neither the multitude nor those at the head of it, the stronger ones, the courageous ones (if there be any such), have the courage to speak out in definite words. . . . In alarm the king goes off and does something – and what the king does, that the human multitude then adores, maintaining that it had done it.

Kierkegaard then returns to the individual.

While the individual who truly connects himself with a religious movement [in the internal sense] must watch out and be ready to fight lest the dreadful thing should come to pass that this monstrous abstraction should wish to help him by going over with its legs to his side.

When the abstract of the multitude has finally taken the throne the result is idolatry.

Wherever this abstraction is set upon the throne there really is no government.  One is obedient only to the man whom he himself has boosted up, pretty much as the idolater worships and serves the god he himself has made, i.e. one obeys himself.  With the discontinuance of the rational State the art of statesmanship will become a game.  Everything will turn upon getting the multitude pollinated, and after that getting them to vote on his side, with noise, with torches and with weapons, indifferent, absolutely indifferent, as to whether they understand anything or no.

Kierkegaard’s politics are of course conservative but what I would want to further reflect on is the implications of his theology.  It will of course have political implications.  Is it necessary to label and criticize Kierkegaard’s politics as unduly conservative without considering the implication of what it would mean to be engaged in his aesthetic-ethical-religious movement?  For instance Kierkegaard, towards the end of his life, made the political gesture of abstaining from public worship on Sunday.  He sat outside at a cafe nearby the church so he would indeed be visible.  I am not convinced that Kierkegaard would have spoken out against various forms of progressive political theory. What seemed to be his concern was his perception that ‘these days everything is politics’.  This led for him inevitably to a herd mentality in which the ‘horsepower’ of the multitude would ultimately be wielded for destructive purposes.

I am hoping within the year or so to get into Hardt and Negri’s trilogy in which ‘the multitude’ is explicitly leveraged.  I am curious to see how that notion is developed.

A learned twaddler

I am into the thick of the final volume of my Kierkegaard reading project.  It looks like I may even finish ahead of schedule by a few days.  I already have an outline for my next reading plan as this one really seemed to focus my time and attention to accomplish an amount of reading I can’t imagine I would have been able to under ‘normal’ circumstances.  In any event part of the next reading project will include a stint in phenomenology.  I have for some time sensed a ‘call’ towards phenomenology.  If there is one thing I have learned about my style of critical engagement is that I can easily move into ‘poetic’ gestures or expressions.  I certainly don’t mean this comment to belittle the role of the poetic in communication only that for me it was a space I attempted to inhabit when I really did not know what I was talking about.  In communicating this way I hoped that the frills were distracting or persuasive enough to keep from further scrutiny.

My rudimentary view of phenomenology is of a process by which someone learns the simple task of description.  I don’t assume that description will be neutral of course only that a certain form of content can be developed and articulated that will provide a more decisive engagement and understanding of a given context or idea.  I am simply working at trying to be more specific and honest.  I think honesty does have potential currency to it, not in some heartfelt intention but in clarity.  When Kierkegaard responded to the real or imagined question ‘What do you want?’ in a local periodical he replied, ‘honesty’.  Much of his writings in his so-called ‘Attack on Christendom’ have to do with being honest about why Christianity exists as it does and how that relates to the text of the New Testament.

In The Book Adler Kierkegaard gives an aside with regards to how it often seems to easier for people to talk about immeasurably more complex topics than specific ones.  His sentiments reflect some of the motivation behind my own development.

A learned twaddler who at bottom knows nothing can seldom be got to deal with anything concrete; he does not talk of a particular dialogue of Plato, that is too little for him – also it might become apparent that he had not read it.  No, he talks about Plato as a whole, or even perhaps of Greek philosophy as a whole, but especially about the wisdom of the Indian and the Chinese.  This Greek philosophy as a whole, the profundity of Oriental philosophy as a whole, is the prodigiously great, the boundless, which advantageously hides his ignorance.  So also it is easier to talk about an alteration in the form of government that to discuss a very little concrete problem like sewing a pair of shoes; and the injustice towards the few capable men lies in the fact that by reason of the prodigious greatness of the problem they are apparently on a par with every Peer, who ‘also speaks out.’  So it is much easier for a dunce to criticize our Lord than to judge the handiwork of an apprentice in a shop. . . . But our Lord and his governance of the world is something so prodigiously great that in a certain giddy abstract sense the most foolish man takes part in gossiping about it as well as the wisest man, because no one understands it.

I am trying in my own way to be honest about what I know and what I do not know.  This is not about knowing completely but simply in how I can talk about specifics.  In this way much of the theology I currently touch on (and it is less and less these days) seems to fall under the final line in the quote above and I am left wondering if it is a wise or foolish person who is speaking.