tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1651908162607091292.post5639912037911783392..comments2024-01-05T01:21:21.702-08:00Comments on <center>SPECULUM CRITICUM TRADITIONIS</center>: Radical Orthodoxy, for and againstskholiasthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05410057905377189336noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1651908162607091292.post-51763830004529618872010-01-29T10:07:35.533-08:002010-01-29T10:07:35.533-08:00Joe,
Yes, Gillespie is also much-cited by the RO ...Joe,<br /><br />Yes, Gillespie is also much-cited by the RO stars. And the critics are no less harsh with him; see e.g. the snide review in Notre Dame Philosophy Reviews, <br />http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=14665<br /><br />The charge on the one hand is that the scholarship is shoddy or revisionist. But on this front I take a Rortian stance: if you can persuade your colleagues (providing you cast your net broadly enough), the truth will take care of itself. It is useless after a certain point to continue to distinguish between the fashions of scholarship, the consensus of the moment, and "how things really were." Every age constructs its own past.<br /><br />However, having said this, we still have a responsibility that I do not hesitate to call a responsibility to the past, to 'get it right'-- to depict the past in outlines in which the past would recognize itself. I can imagine impressionist, chiaroscuro, pointillist, photorealist, or cubist portraits, but at a certain point they cease to be portraits and become something else.<br /><br />The Nietzschean question, of course, is, what purpose do these re-castings of the past serve? And I think if they can serve to construct a workable triangulation with the horizon of our existence, then they are worthy projects; but they can only serve this if they really do strive to say "what it was like" and not be naked exercises in propaganda.<br /><br />Most importantly, I think that the re-descriptions you list must be re-framings of *our* past, not our enemies'. Yes, they are all attempts to trace the etiology of what ails us (nominalism, nihilism, relativism, secularism, superstition, scientism, revolutionary stances, reactionary stances, etc etc..); but unless we grasp that these are *us*, our redescriptions will have no power to transform or steady us for the work ahead.skholiasthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05410057905377189336noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1651908162607091292.post-70389696932076760142010-01-28T15:49:47.529-08:002010-01-28T15:49:47.529-08:00I very much enjoyed your discussion of R.O. I too ...I very much enjoyed your discussion of R.O. I too am a somewhat skeptical fan of their work. Besides Lowith and Voegelin and MacIntyre one can also look at Michael Allan Gillespie on the Medieval origins of the Secular World. <br /><br />It is not only the secular world, however, that is suffering the re-description of its origin. The same goes on in specialized (and also some more more general) historical studies of Judaism, Christianity, Islam and even Hinduism. ...In fact, one wonders if there isn't any origin that isn't being given a new meaning.<br /><br />But, what all these various (hostile) re-descriptions of existing (I am thinking of, for example, Christian, Moslem, Hindu, modernity) world-views actually do is clear the field for something new. In the long run, that is the real practical effect of all this...<br /><br />When Nietzsche unleashed the dragon-seed of 'genealogical' unmasking I wonder if he thought it would ever be this successful. 'Who taught the Will to will backwards?', Zarathustra rhetorically asks. - That is, how does one get rid of an unwanted past? Well, we now know the answer. One gives it another meaning!<br /><br />Everyone is now playing this game and striving to give the origins of their enemies another meaning. But in doing so they have all entered into a suicide pact. Why? Because if no existing position can actually win (and I believe this will prove to be the case) then all they do is create a great skepticism towards all existing positions.<br /><br />So - is that not nihilism? No. Nietzsche somewhere said that people would rather will nothing than not will at all. He also said that in order to make a temple a temple must be destroyed. The rubble that the various world-views leave behind will serve as the raw material for the new world.<br /><br />This new post-Platonic world will be built on Becoming and Creating instead of the Being and Knowing of these old dying Platonic Worlds. So yes, theory stands behind, or, if you prefer, above, the practical. (I too very much think that there is something Real that is beyond human rhetoric!)<br /><br />But, insofar as Humanity remains itself, the new world will one day be old too. ...And it will be searching for its ownmost death.Joe Pomonomohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15799366948466532024noreply@blogger.com