Category: world

A thorough, no, a systematic beating

Heading into Canada Day tomorrow I am about half finished Geoffery York’s The Dispossessed: Life and Death in Native Canada.  I have known about this book for probably about 15 years and the cover alone has haunted me for almost that whole time.  While I have known about most of the areas covered in Canada’s relationship with the First Nations people what I was not prepared for was to realize the layering and interrelatedness of injustice and abuse this people has faced at the hands of the nation of Canada.  At nearly every intersection of contact First Nations were ploughed over.

Take the basic orientation of the relationship.

You are a damned people in need of our salvation.

You are in the way of us establishing ourselves and appropriating these rich and virgin resources.

What did these two motives result in?  The attempted reform and actual fracturing of an entire generation in residential schools that wrought profound personal and social devastation.  First Nations people are ‘granted’ reservations.  I was not aware that many reservations leading up into the 1960s found significant economic models of sustainability (through traditional practices, crime rates were low and substance abuse at a minimum.  But then in instances like Manitoba a hydro dam project unfolds in which a reservation receives peanuts for their land and false promises for their future and then their way of life is literally drowned.  So in the future band leaders may want to take legal recourse but due to educational, financial, bureaucratic and prejudicial limitations they lack their own resources and cannot afford to hire someone so they are screwed.  Some entire reservations were relocated three or four times in the course of a decade due to the government’s growing awareness and desire for particular resources.  The shift is always with less opportunities and resources at the next site.  And if a reservation is not relocated then mining and extraction companies would descend and kill off traditional sources of food and contaminate water supplies.  If an individual or group wants to start a small business they would be unable to mortgage any property (reservation land is not their property) as an operating loan and they must jump through extensive bureaucratic hoops in order to receive funding that should rightly be theirs in the first place.  And if they did get permission they often lived in a place with inadequate electricity to power an significant machines.  I did not realize the web that this created or more accurately how thorough, how systematic, a beating this group of people has received.  And the blows keep coming.

It is hard to imagine this sort of abuse and then we expect them to find their proverbial ‘boot-straps’.  Really?  Would I want to bend-over in the midst of a dominant culture that has expressed such consistent deception and hatred?

This book was published in 1990 and I do not know how many things have changed at the level of government support and bureaucracy but many of the same stories still surface in the daily newspaper.  Insanitary conditions, displacement,  land-claim stalling, death by housing fires, suicide, violence and the list goes on.  To enter into this situation is at the very least to be overwhelmed as an entire culture has been continually overwhelmed at the hands of a political force that has never made a sustained expression of support and faithfulness to a people.

In as much as anyone wants to ask them to take responsibility for their lives those of us having received the privilege of this land must ask and express what our responsibility is.

Total guilt

I am drawing close to the mid-way point of Kierkegaard’s writings.  Appropriately enough this coincides with Concluding Unscientific Postcript which represents a sort of culmination of his earlier writings (which he actually attempts to integrate in one section of CUP).  As I understand it this work was potentially to be  his last and subsequent works are called his ‘second authorship’ many of which reflect a more ‘concrete’ engagement with social issues.

I want to offer an extended quote here as it helped to clarify certain lingering thoughts that have surfaced in various areas of my life namely the interplay of guilt and action.  How does one reconcile (if that is the appropriate method) the call of the Gospel, the limitedness of humanity, and the unwieldy variables of life?  In many ways I find my own experience partially reflected in a heightened and intensified way through recent posts by Dan O (here and here . . . in many ways it is the comments [particularly on the second site] that capture what I am talking about).

What I find intriguing in the quote is how it forms part of Kierkegaard’s attempt to shift guilt-consciousness towards a category of ‘totality’ rather than remain in an ethical category.  To remain under the ethical is to remain under the numerical (I think I am getting this right).  To remain under the numerical is to forever have the more hanging over our head that while aimed at being life-giving tends towards death-dealing in the one desiring to be a practitioner of the Gospel.  This death comes in the externalizing of guilt-consciousness which can never be integrated directly into another individual and so becomes a law unto itself.  There is no amount of ‘good’ that will resolve this guilt.

Now perhaps Kierkegaard’s ethical and religious domains are infinitely caught up in ‘beginning’ and never become as political as people want them to be but I think he should be well heeded in also acknowledging that running furiously in the wrong direction is also not much better . . . likely worse.

The second half of this quote gets a little diluted but the first half reads well in terms of the line between much guilt and total guilt.  Particularly poignant is the line about the one bound up with happiness, by the finest thread, as it were, by the help of a possibility that continually perishes.  There is a possibility that holds us even if the possibility continually perishes.  The emphasis added belong is mine.

In the eternal recollecting of guilt-consciousness, the existing person relates himself to an eternal happiness, but not in such a way that he now has come closer to it directly; on the contrary, he is now distanced from it as much as possible, but he still relates himself to it.  The dialectical that is present here, still within immanence, creates resistance that intensifies the pathos.  In the relation that is the basis of the misrelation, in the intimated immanence that is the basis of the dialectic’s separation, he is closely bound up with happiness, by the finest thread, as it were, by the help of a possibility that continually perishes – for this reason the pathos, if it is there, is so much the stronger.

The guilt-consciousness is what is decisive, and one guilt joined together with the relation to an eternal happiness is sufficient, and yet it is true of guilt, more than of anything else, that it sows itself.  But the total guilt is what is decisive; compared with it, making oneself guilty fourteen times is child’s play – this is also why childishness always keeps to the numerical.  When, however, the consciousness of the new guilt is in turn referred to the absolute consciousness of guilt, the eternal recollecting of guilt is thereby preserved, in case the existing person should be on the point of forgetting.

If someone says that no human being can endure such an eternal recollecting of guilt, that it is bound to lead to insanity or to death, then please not who it is who is speaking, because finite common sense frequently speaks that way in order to preach indulgence.  And this way of speaking rarely fails, provided three or four people are gathered together.  I doubt that anyone in solitude has been able to deceive himself with this talk, but when a number of people are together an one hears that the others are behaving in this way, on is less embarrassed – how inhuman, also, to want to be better than others!  Once again a mask; the person who is alone with the ideal has not knowledge at all about whether he is better or worse than others.  So it is possible that this eternal recollecting can lead to madness or death.  Well, now, a human being cannot endure very long on water and bread, but then a physician can discern how to organize things for the single individual, not in such a way, please note, that he ends up living like the rich man but that the starvation diet is so carefully calculated for him that he can just stay alive.  Just because the existential pathos is not the pathos of the moment but the pathos of continuance, the existing person himself, who in pathos is indeed inspired and is not, spoiled by habit, peeking around for subterfuges, will seek to find the minimum of forgetfulness needed for enduring, since he himself is aware, of course, that the momentary is a misunderstanding.  But since it is impossible to find an absolute certainty in this dialecticizing, he will, despite all his exertion, have a guilt-consciousness, once again totally defined by his never having dared to say that, in his relation to an eternal happiness, he had done everything he was able to do in order to hold fast to the recollecting of guilt. Concluding Unscientific Postscript 535-537

A call for global everything specialists

I hate feeling at the mercy of other specialists.  I am not thinking so much about my occasional visit to the doctor’s office.  I am thinking particularly of the specialists who trade in information about the state of the world, the whole world that is.  How does one become such a specialist?  How does one negotiate the perspectives coming from the humanities, social and natural sciences as well as economics?  All this to say that I have been sitting with an article from last Saturday’s Winnipeg Free Press in the back of my mind for the last couple of days.  It is an op-ed piece entitled “The world is not running out of natural resources” (May 28) by Brian Lee Crowley.  As the title suggests the article outlines the false notion that there is an imminent crisis in global resources.  The main thesis of this position is that most accounts do not take seriously the ongoing capacity for humans to innovate and change course when necessary.  This is the reason why past prophecies of collapse and destruction continue to miss their mark.  This thinking reflects the first half of the article.  I suspect this sort of voice is necessary to counter the type of mindless hysteria that may actually serve advertising firms more than other ‘good’ causes.  But even here I really have no good idea.  I trust soundbites and articles such as these.  It is in the second half that my reservations begin to intensify.

The second half of the article makes a dramatic shift to the economic in stating that since 1800 global economic product has increased 50-fold and “this increase in human wealth has improved the state of humanity throughout the world.”  This is of course patently false as I think it could be argued that it has not improved the state of the First Nations community in Canada (I will not try and speak beyond my borders).  His point however is proved by statistics.  Yes, I suppose statistical improvement is difficult to deny as it has the power to ignore the cost of the marginal who literally do not figure in.  I am reminded of Kierkegaard’s thoughts on statistics near the end of Stages,

With the help of statistical tables one can laugh at all of life. . . . After all, a person can shut his door on the poor, and if someone should starve to death, then he can just look at a collection of statistical tables, see how many die every year of hunger – and he is comforted.

Sorry.  Off track.  As Crowley begins to conclude things really come off the rails in my mind.  Crowley holds wealthy nations as the beacon of what direction the world should be moving in.  “The richer countries become, the cleaner their environment.  So economic growth is the key factor allowing us to reduce most of the problems facing humanity. . . . [T]he right human institutions, such as private property, the rule of law, contract, incentives and human intelligence all work together reliably to solve those problems.”  Is it just me or should it be hard to make such statements (at least without some gag-reflex kicking in).  I have no doubt that I would be quickly silenced under the statistical ‘facts’ that Crowley would load on me if I tried to refute this thinking.  And again, I have little hard evidence with which to enter this conversation.  However, take the statement of correlation between wealth and environmental cleanliness.  Is this not simply a matter of a nation’s ability to bring in and then off-load undesirable content and processes such as manufacturing, recycling and disposing of the junk wealthier nations desire for temporary pleasure?  Can Crowley continue to say these things under the tenuous economic conditions that still (seem to) exist in the US?  Is it possible to speak of an ‘improved state of humanity throughout the world’ by statistics?  Seriously, I am no expert.  Does it even make sense to enter this argument using the same methodology?  I mean Crowley moves from the natural sciences to economics to existential well-being without any necessary transition, they are all seamless in his conception.  Is this just the worst of ‘ivory tower’ thinking that does not live alongside those whose lives have gone from okay to shit while some larger global trend tracks in a rising graph according a ‘human well-being index’?  Again, I don’t know.  Any global everything specialists out there that can help me?

Closeted transcendence

Over at AUFS they have just concluded a book event engaging Adam Kotsko’s recent work Politics of Redemption.  Adam has just posted a response to the event and in it engaged one of the topics raised which is the highly debated but perhaps hardly debatable question of transcendence/immanence.  I thought the response was quite diplomatic without interest in any sensational jabs (the jabs were quite under-stated but still present . . . well fine perhaps ‘jab’ isn’t even the right word).  In any event I thought of commenting directly there but it would not have been in keeping with the event as a whole and since I am still waiting for a copy of the book I don’t have much to contribute.

I did, however, want to pick up on one line.  Adam writes,

Even at its best, though, I can’t see how one can argue for divine transcendence — it’s always going to be an argument from authority, because it’s fundamentally an argument in favor of authority.

Continue reading “Closeted transcendence” →

I do not dance

I just finished Philosophical Fragments (PF).  I wanted to get a few observations down while they are fresh in my mind.

First, while I get Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous authorship this is the first one where it makes real sense to me.  Either/Or is also blatantly clear but it strikes me as too much of an abstract experiment.   PF still comes as an experiment.  The experiment being whether it is possible to go beyond Socrates and what that might look like in philosophical discourse.  However, Kierkegaard comes off as more invested in this venture, more curious about how this will actually play out.

Second, it is important to note that these are fragments.  In his original manuscripts they were actually called ‘pamphlets’ which he also refers to them as within the book.  The significance of this is brought fully to bear in the final section.  Here he talks about the possibility of a ‘second pamphlet’.  He writes,

If I ever do write a second section – because a pamphlet writer such as I am has no seriousness, as you presumably will hear about me – why, then, should I now in conclusion pretend to seriousness in order to please people by making a rather big promise?  In other words, to write a pamphlet is frivolity – but to promise the system, that is seriousness and has made many a man a supremely serious man both in his own eyes and in the eyes of others. (109)

The ‘system’ of course is Hegelianism.  What I find intriguing about this passage is  the notion that perhaps the more ‘serious’, thoroughgoing, complete even social and political approach can actually end up being the most individualistic and self-serving.  This is partially a critique of academia as well as what could now be termed an ideological centralizing of power by ‘men who talk about important stuff’ as I have heard it put.  This final section really bookends well the intro to PF, which did not make a great deal of sense to me originally.  The preface begins,

What is offered here is only a pamphlet, by one’s own hand, on one’s own behalf, at one’s own expense, without any claim to being a part of the scientific-scholarly endeavor in which one acquires legitimacy. (5).

Kierkegaard goes on in the Preface to consider what it might mean to have social (world-historical as he puts it) significance.  No one would consider a pamphlet to have such significance.  So what is Kierkegaard’s opinion on the matter?

Do not ask me about that.  Next to the question of whether or not I have an opinion, nothing can be of less interest to someone else than what my opinion is.  To have an opinion is to me both too much and too little; it presupposes a security and well-being in existence akin to having a wife and children in this mortal life, something not granted to a person who has to be up and about night and day and yet has no fixed income. (7)

There is a certain tone of liberation thought in the Preface and conclusion to PF (which hardly alludes to the book’s actual content in many ways!).  The critique is of those wielding socially constructed and maintained forms of power who believe that they can function as the benefactors of truth.  The framing of this book, which has just dawned on me, is making me rethink how I interpreted the bulk of the work.  Hopefully I can post a reading of PF that reflects its preface and conclusion.  Here are the final words of the preface.  I thought they were pretty.

I can stake my own life, I can in all earnestness trifle with my own life – not with another’s.  I am capable of this, the only thing I am able to do for thought, I who have no learning to offer it, ‘scarcely enough for the one-drachma course, to say nothing of the big fifty-drachma course’ (Cratylus).  All I have is my life, which I promptly stake every time a difficulty appears.  Then it is easy to dance, for the thought of death is a good dancing partner, my dancing partner.  Every human being is too heavy for me, and there I plead per deos obsecro [I swear by the gods]: Let no one invite me, for I do not dance. (9).

Is this heaven? No . . . its the 44.

A few weeks ago in the first Sunday of Lent I challenged our congregation to fast from the fruits of privilege.  One minor act on my part has been to ride the bus as often as possible.  As a country-boy the bus has always been a source of fascination for me and this spiritual exercise paid dividends this last week as my experience ended comprising about half the sermon.

Continue reading “Is this heaven? No . . . its the 44.” →

Some updates

Things have been a little busy around these parts so posting has slowed down.  I am arguably keeping pace with my Kierkegaard reading schedule (almost finished his Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses) but have not had time or energy to post on them.

Though I have abandoned my sentence-a-day translation project I have picked up on another idea.  With some renewed interest in psychoanalysis I began exploring some of the resources from La Borde clinic in France which embraces an ‘experimental(?)’  approach to mental illness.  Its founder Jean Oury is part of the Lacanian school of psychoanalysis and worked alongside figures such as Felix Guattari.  Looking at Oury’s works I noticed that none have as yet been officially translated into English.  So I got the public library to bring a copy of his work Creation et Schizophrenie.  This collection reflects a series of seminars (1987-88) in which Oury seeks to transcend “the artificial distinction between ‘normal’ and ‘pathological’.”  I am little skeptical of this language as I still feel there was a ‘romantic’ period in the development of our understanding of mental illness.  It will, however, be interesting to see how Oury develops this notion as works such as Delueze and Guattari’s Capitalism and Schizophrenia deal more with a social construct as opposed to an individual pathology.  In any event I will post my translation over at writing in tongues and note updates here.  I have just completed and posted the Preface or Averstissement.

Soren K meet Chuck D; Or, How you sell soul to a soulless people who sold their soul

Kierkegaard’s Upbuilding Discourses have not always been engaging but they have offered what I think is a helpful corrective or supplement to much of my contemporary reading.  I hope to post more on some earlier discourses but I am now about halfway through the eighteen and have come across his reflections on the soul, namely how to gain and preserve your soul in patience.

Continue reading “Soren K meet Chuck D; Or, How you sell soul to a soulless people who sold their soul” →

Did you wish . . . could you wish

Either / Or concludes with Judge William offering the transcript of sermon he received from a friend who is a minister.  William is convinced that this sermon reflects what he had been straining towards in his letter (which is what all of vol 2 is considered).  The minister has yet to preach this sermon but believes in time that he will be able to have his entire congregation understand it “for the beauty of the universal consists precisely in the fact that all can understand it.”

Continue reading “Did you wish . . . could you wish” →

The self as choice . . . the choice to impregnate yourself that is

This weekend I finished Kierkegaard’s Either / Or. A major theme in the ethical ‘Or’ of Either / Or is the role of choice.

But what is it I choose?  Is it this thing or that?  No, for I choose absolutely, and the absoluteness of my choice is expressed precisely by the fact that I have not chosen to choose this or that.  I choose the absolute.  And what is the absolute?  It is I myself in my eternal validity.  Anything else but myself I never can choose as the absolute, for if I choose something else, I choose it as a finite thing and so do not choose it absolutely.  Even the Jew who chose God did not choose it absolutely, for he chose, indeed, the absolute, but did not choose it absolutely, and thereby it ceased to be the absolute and became a finite thing.

. . .

This self which he then chooses is infinitely concrete, for it is in fact himself, and yet it is absolutely distinct form his former self, for he has chosen it absolutely.  This self did not exist previously, for it came into existence by means of the choice, and yet it did exist, for it was in fact ‘himself.’

In this case choice performs at one and the same time the two dialectical movements: that which is chosen does not exist and comes into existence with the choice; that which is chosen exists , otherwise there would not be a choice.

This strikes me as a tremendously pivotal move in Kierkegaard’s work.  The notion of ‘self’ will be picked up again with greater rigour in The Sickness Unto Death but here we must also remember that Kierkegaard is still trying to awaken, to disturb, to move.  These are not his ‘direct’ religious writings.  It is easy to see that as Kierkegaard’s work was slowly translated into German and English that these sort of passages were developed into the type of ‘individualism’ that existentialism became known for.  However, even in this section Kierkegaard has no interest in the unique individual instead Kierkegaard demands the dialectic of the individual which is both absolutely singular and universal.  In following page he writes,

Therefore it requires courage for a man to choose himself; for at the very time when it seems that isolates himself most thoroughly he is most thoroughly absorbed in the root by which he is connected with the whole.

This then culminates not in the maxim of ‘knowing yourself’ but in the admonishment to ‘choose yourself’.  Though he admits if he wanted to be clever he would say that we must ‘know’ ourselves as Adam knew Eve.

By the individual’s intercourse with himself he impregnates himself and brings himself to birth.

I’ll let my distinguished readers unpack that one.