Future, Present, & Past:



Speculative
~~ Giving itself latitude and leisure to take any premise or inquiry to its furthest associative conclusion.
Critical~~ Ready to apply, to itself and its object, the canons of reason, evidence, style, and ethics, up to their limits.
Traditional~~ At home and at large in the ecosystem of practice and memory that radically nourishes the whole person.

Oυδεὶς άμουσος εἰσίτω

Monday, November 10, 2014

faith, form, content: a fragment.


(From work-in-progress, and possibly may be left on the cutting-room floor. Some details may not make a great deal of sense out of context, but I think the gist is comprehensible.)

In one crucial sense, Meillassoux is right: philosophy as it culminates in correlationism (and it is indeed a culmination, for Meillassoux) does yield to "religiosity as such," i.e., to fideism. What Meillassoux seems to miss is that the Biblical paradox, like philosophy, is a critique of "religiosity." Only, whereas philosophy opens upon the pure “form” of faith -- without content -- Meillassoux would rather give us pure content -- "brute" content, as it were: contingency as such. The Biblical critique (the articulation of "revelation", i.e., theology), however, does not pursue reasons, as philosophy does, but the Person. Because of this, it was able to navigate the upheavals of cosmology; but it is also sanguine regarding the critique of "Sufficient Reason". Ancient philosophy does indeed lead up to the question of revelation; and music is the grammar of this preparatio. Modern philosophy accepts the formal critique of religion by the Bible, but not the experiential one; it thinks it can stipulate it and move on. Thus "faith" becomes a formal "as-if," and is either uncritiquable but empty, or (if there is any content to it) superstitious. Meillassoux’s novel move is to reject all this, in favor of "content" without form -- pure contingency. The only questions, then, are (1) whether this move is consistent and thinkable, and (2) whether philosophy can possibly be satisfied with such a conclusion and remain philosophy.

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