SPECULUM CRITICUM TRADITIONIS

Amod, No, without knowing the biography, I think ...

2012-05-29T20:53:40.001-07:00

Amod,

No, without knowing the biography, I think it is safe to say Adorno and Tillich do not immediately call each other's work to mind. I did not know it until I became aware of Adorno's life. However, the more I read him the more I see how there is an undercurrent of theology in Adorno, who in this respect is very much like Benjamin.

Thanks for this, Skholiast. I hadn't realized ...

2012-05-29T19:56:26.422-07:00

Thanks for this, Skholiast. I hadn't realized Adorno and Tillich knew each other. They're not thinkers I would have connected until now.

Robert, welcome and thank you. Yes, certainly th...

2012-05-27T13:27:12.171-07:00

Robert,

welcome and thank you. Yes, certainly the author / redactor of the Gospel has taken pains not only to weave an older strand into a new context but also to underline this. For we may rest assured that "Matthew" assumed his readers would know the whole psalm. This back-&-forth does not equate to a simplistic "fulfillment of prophecy." It is a dialogue with, and transmutation of, a tradition.

Always gratifying to get a comment from an author of a blog I read.

Interesting stuff! I do think that the citation o...

2012-05-27T08:51:06.999-07:00

Interesting stuff! I do think that the citation of the first line of the psalm creates the condition for a complex emotional response: one feels the despair and then, possibly, remembers the larger context of the psalm, in which despair is converted to praise. To deny either part of that would be a truncation of the richness of the text, here. But there's something else important, too: remember, the 22nd psalm includes the lines

the assembly of the wicked have inclosed me:
they pierced my hands and my feet.

So I think that in the assembly of the gospels, the intended effect of the citation of the psalm wasn't just to give both the experience of alienated despair (and the implication of redemptive praise) -- it was also quite clearly one of many attempts to turn the Old Testament into a prefiguration of the new, to transform one kind of faith into another.

The textual history of the gospel of Matthew is particularly murky, but whoever worked that allusion into it was quite clever and quite sensitive to nuance, don't you think?

Tim, When you say, " Christ is for thos...

2012-05-26T22:23:14.504-07:00
Tim,

When you say,

" Christ is for those who are at the point of having done with diversions and debates, for those who are, in a sense, done with discourse, with ideas, with everything save the purification of body, mind, and spirit ",

I am reminded of a remark Wittgenstein makes: "In religion every level of devoutness must have its appropriate form of expression which has no sense at a lower level. This [such-&-such a] doctrine, which means something at a higher level, is null and void for someone who is still at a lower level; he can only understand it wrongly and so these words are not valid for such a person." Wittgenstein's own example is the doctrine of predestination, which he says means nothing to him and just gets in the way. (Culture & Value, p32.) I take Simone Weil to be saying something similar when she says that for her, "the cross is sufficient," and it is the Resurrection which is a stumbling-block.

I am of course far from turning my back on the 'universalist' claims of Christianity or indeed of philosophy. I really do maintain that there is a sense in which wisdom must be "true for everyone." But I also understand the utterly personalist focus of a declaration that conceives itself as good news which is addressed in some way to the one Kierkegaard called "that individual." Don't misunderstand me -- I genuinely stake my project upon the sense of liturgical enactment, and no one can "do liturgy" by himself. Nor do I think that the doctrinal and creedal definitions and disputes are pointless -- but it is curious how their pertinence seems to shift over time. To be a person is to be a strange hybrid of change and continuity.

All our prayers should begin with "Help me never to feign..." -- yes. What else does Wittgenstein say? "Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself"?

Good to hear from you.

I think the idea of "God piling more afflicti...

2012-05-26T00:41:07.090-07:00
I think the idea of "God piling more affliction upon us" could only be called "masochism" if it were for the sake of our own obscene pleasure. But the Christian thinkers remind us often enough: it is not mortification of the body we are after, but purification of the spiritual and physical heart. This purification cannot be a mandate on life, passed down by any human authority; it must be a need felt deeply within. One must turn voluntarily toward God-- and I would add, one must resolve daily, one must turn daily, one must never assume that one has really done anything. Faith without (continued!) existence is dead.

What I mean is that the notion that "the wages of sin is death" is something that, without or without "Christianity," we learn over time if we are attentive to the innermost movements of our heart. We see what being quick to anger and indulging in controversies does to our words. We see what pornography does to our body. We see how the daily news clouds our thoughts and impedes our meditation. We see how passing attractions detract us from God and rob us of peace. After feeling this for many years, to then turn to Christ (after much failing!) is not to beef up with religion, but to heed the call that says: there is a better way, there is New Life. "All are called, few are chosen," yes, but also: only those who choose are chosen, only those who heed the call are called. And the call doesn't issue from elsewhere. It issues from the inside of "me." Only those who are self-aware can taste of the true need for self-obliviation.

More and more, I am realizing that, without it ("Christ"), I will feel like I have wasted the blessing of time. But I don't think that means I've been wasting my life up to this point. As Thomas à Kempis writes, "Read such matters as may sting your conscience, rather than merely fill your time." That is a vow I made years ago, and it has brought me to this point. And when it suddenly dawns on a man that those staggering texts deemed "Christian" are perhaps the most stinging, who will be surprised? Whatever that may be, I'm still convinced that so long as we are pursuing titles that sting our conscience, and modifying our lives accordingly, we are following "the way of Christ"-- defining the latter by the former, not vice versa. Just as we should recognize God according to the degree of love we find, and not according to anything else. No love, no God. Simple.

Christ is for those who are at the point of having done with diversions and debates, for those who are, in a sense, done with discourse, with ideas, with everything save the purification of body, mind, and spirit (no human consolations!). It's for those who realize that there is a final accounting of our ways and deeds, and that that judgment doesn't come some future day, but increasingly comes upon us in the instant. Critical self-examination and self-humbling (in light of my death right now) are the essence of a Christian life; without them, "Christ" never even gets started. We need to begin all our prayers with, "Help me never to feign..." either our words or our love. I've been trying to do this forever. May God give me the strength to pursue the path I've been on even higher. Or turn it all around if need be.

Anyway, I hadn't heard from you in a while, so I thought I would send a note. All the best to you my friend,

Tim.

thanks for this insightful post (which I read just...

2012-05-15T12:41:14.380-07:00
thanks for this insightful post (which I read just now… apologies). It is strange that the innovative traits of Christianism (such as the Christus patiens, the humiliation of the cross, the avoidance of a final miracle, etc.) have often created problems to Christians themselves.

Tim, at the risk of sounding like I endorse a vis...

2012-04-29T12:29:04.247-07:00
Tim,

at the risk of sounding like I endorse a vision of Christianity as masochism, I agree with you here. For all his bombast, Zizek gets this right about Christianity; it is the "traversing of the fantasy", and this means, accepting ones incommensurability.

Thank you for sharing this with us. I have ordered...

2012-04-29T06:37:18.695-07:00
Thank you for sharing this with us. I have ordered the book and look forward to reading through these aphorisms. In the past few months, I have been getting closer and closer to God/Love/Christ (this is the only way to say it), mostly due to my return to Kierkegaard (all his later writings specifically) and Rilke, but especially thanks to Simone Weil (the volume you mention here as well as Gravity and Grace). I have to tell you, I can feel a bit overwhelmed by it -- the demand that K's and W's "vision" of being-Christian -- and insofar as they call for nothing less than the imitation of Christ, the incredibly high demand that Christ Himself sets for us, this vision of utterly equal love that casts off all the world. I think there is a difference here between these "Christians" (of course, none of them call themselves that, except Christ) and more eastern methods of spirituality. The latter seem aimed at comforting, at peace and realization of ones true nature; but these Christians seem to require that we refuse peace, that we refuse realization, and that we beg God to pile on more and more affliction upon us, and then to know that in doing so we bear the weight of the whole world with Christ, and that it is only by grace and love that we are able to bear it. Anyway, I'm excited to receive the Lewis book and see where he fits in this, and what specifically he has to tell me at this juncture of life.

All the best,
Tim.

Shrewd move to invoke Use vs. Mention here. To pa...

2012-04-12T11:37:54.547-07:00
Shrewd move to invoke Use vs. Mention here. To paraphrase Flannery O'Connor, if it's just a citation, the Hell with it.

Your joke about jokes is spot on. Frege's dist...

2012-04-12T11:00:32.647-07:00
Your joke about jokes is spot on. Frege's distinction between sense and reference comes to mind here as well: even if this cry carries an allusion or citation, that is not ALL it is. It feels hyper-Protestant to reduce Jesus' final cry to a citation, akin to reducing wine and bread in communion to a function of "meaning" or "standing for" rather than actually embodying something beyond mere representation....

The expression "forsaken me" cannot, by ...

2012-04-08T13:39:04.526-07:00
The expression "forsaken me" cannot, by any somersault of apologetic linguistic acrobatics, be construed as an expression of "triumph"! What an abuse of English to do so!

That cry of despair was an expression of that man's near-death insight into the fact that he had labored under a delusion all his life, that his "Father", if he existed at all, couldn't wag even a little finger to save him from the torment of dying on the cross in the blazing Sun.

This insight into the horrifying truth that there was no "Father" to save him from agony now, that he could only be saved from that agony by the actions of a human being like himself, e.g., taking him off the cross, is the only silver lining in this tragic and cruel conclusion to a life riddled with messianic delusions.

Hsu's argument seems to me to be offering E...

2012-04-07T18:15:38.845-07:00
Hsu's argument seems to me to be offering Evangelicals a triumphalism at any cost

Yes! Triumphalism is exactly what came to mind when I first read the post. It's the evangelical version of a "theology of glory." Thus, as with the Roman Catholic variant, a theology of glory is overly concerned with apologetics; hence, Hsu opens with his musings on secular culture and the defense of the faith. That should have been my first clue that things will go horribly wrong...and they did.

Thill, Glad you liked it. Yes, Thompson reminds ...

2012-04-06T07:19:33.721-07:00
Thill,

Glad you liked it. Yes, Thompson reminds me much of aspects of Wittgenstein, though LW seems more anguished. Both have the unflinching ascetic edge. As for Krishnamurti, I remain cheerfully agnostic. I don't know his work well enough and I have never felt especially compelled in that direction -- the stuff on dialogue you mention (with Bohm) would seem to be right down my alley, but I haven't found anything I could sink my teeth into. But I do like the vignette of the meeting in the corridor.

'The Unknown Real" Perhaps, he means tha...

2012-04-05T16:35:17.274-07:00
'The Unknown Real"

Perhaps, he means that it is unknown to him (but known to others, the "spiritual" elite?) but nevertheless real based on the testimony of those who have known it?

But how do we know that the testimony is reliable? How do we know that the ones offering testimony have not deluded themselves?

In any case, reasoning from testimony is inductive reasoning, and, hence, probabilistic in nature. Therefore, it ought to be "the probably real" rather than the certain "Real".

Skholiast (May I know your "Real" first ...

2012-04-05T13:42:24.502-07:00
Skholiast (May I know your "Real" first name?), I think this is one of your best pieces. It certainly "feels" inspired.

Thompson: "Thinking of intellectual coordination of discrete aphorisms and the artificiality of the result: don't try to force a final abstract order among themselves on the aphorisms. Rather, do the minimum of arrangement.... Don't kill lyricism by absolute, rigid, closed intellectual order."

This could well have been the voice of Wittgenstein on the arrangement of his philosophical remarks!!!

And it is not well-known that W. wrote that his conception of philosophy could be summed up in the remark that philosophy ought to be written only as a form of poetry.

W. would have wholeheartedly agreed with the last sentence in the quote from Thompson.

"Toward an Unknown Real"???? Ah, the as...

2012-04-04T22:47:01.399-07:00
"Toward an Unknown Real"????

Ah, the astonishing Māyā of language!

If it is unknown, how do you know that it is "Real"?

And if it is unknown, and hence not known to be "Real, how can you possibly move "Toward" it?

I read your piece with interest. You may also be i...

2012-04-04T22:29:31.958-07:00
I read your piece with interest. You may also be interested in Ronald Nixon who left Cambridge and went to India and blossomed into the Yogi Sri Krishna Prem. Then there is J.A. Chadwick, given the name of "Arjava" by Aurobindo, a pupil of C.D. Broad who later went to India and became a disciple of Aurobindo and an inmate of Aurobindo Ashram. He also wrote some interesting poems, apparently inspired by his spiritual experiences.

Now to "J.K." mentioned in your closing paragraph. I was enjoying your piece before reaching its closing paragraph!

In my teens, I used to attend "J.K's" talks in Chennai, India. I even confronted him once with a question as he walked back to his rooms in "Vasanta Vihar" after a talk.

What a poseur! And how muddled in his "thinking"!

He almost drove David Bohm to suicide with his confused, disorienting, and repetitive monologues. Bohm naively thought that "JK" was enlightened and never recovered after learning about the revelations by Radha Rajagopal Sloss, in her book "Lives in the Shadow of Krishnamurti", concerning J.K's long term secretive affair with her married mother and the abortions he compelled her to go through.

For all his outward show disavowing the theosophical doctrine of "Masters" and their "chosen vehicles", the man pathetically deluded himself that he was a "special guy" and that he was being used as a "vehicle" by some extraordinary being!

But I will grant that, at least in my teens, and perhaps even now, his "spiritual" aestheticism of nature appreciation, however fancifully expressed, and evident in "Krishnamurti's Notebook" and his "Commentaries on Living", did/does stimulate interesting contemplative experiences along the same lines.

I'm intrigued. Have added this to my reading l...

2012-03-21T09:49:59.264-07:00
I'm intrigued. Have added this to my reading list.

BTW, thanks very much for your review of my Wilber article. I enjoyed your comments and I expect I'll give them a more thorough look when it's time to revise.

Thanks! This post contains very significant ideas ...

2012-03-06T23:01:38.483-08:00
Thanks! This post contains very significant ideas and facts that every reader should be followed. Great idea indeed.

Liberal Bias

The vast majority of market interactions are posit...

2012-03-06T15:38:23.676-08:00
The vast majority of market interactions are positive sum relations. That is, after all, why we voluntarily enter into these relationships. Zero sum relationships are relatively rare unless one party is under duress or coerced. The accretion of this positive sum is capital and in healthy systems should grow over time much as ecosystems become richer and more diverse. I don’t think it idolatrous or in bad faith to think there are natural laws at work here which we are wise to observe. I wonder now how much the debate about evolution is fueled by those who do believe it to be idolatrous. That would certainly explain why the resistance is so entrenched. But that is just a disturbing tangent.

I follow Francis Fukuyama's new book on the origins of political order in thinking that the advantage the west has had in its rise has been the strong rule of law that protected private property even from the rapacious elites. I do not see a global collapse for capitalism in the cards. Cheering on such a collapse would certainly be psychopathic as it would entail untold suffering and chaos. I do however expect the coming decades of turmoil to be a great "opportunity" for us to rewrite the rules of engagement and perhaps make them more sustainable and humane. When we do so we would be wise to remember that not everything should be put on the table and we should not just discard the lessons we have learned for some utopian experiment. Those never seem to work out well.
I would never challenge your reading of scripture and mention Job only loosely. Like Blake I read the bible in its diabolical sense. I only refer to his outrage at the human condition and the truth that we cannot escape it. I never take seriously the idea that he actually had a dialog with god.

more on the isomorphism between econo- and ecolo- ...

2012-03-05T09:40:22.107-08:00
more on the isomorphism between econo- and ecolo- evolution here.

d~~ I hoped you would find something to say on thi...

2012-03-02T12:26:53.192-08:00
d~~
I hoped you would find something to say on this one.

I am subject to correction, but I think I was using the term zero-sum in a correct but also most open sense of meaning some win, some lose. I agree w/ Waldman (as I understand him) that there is a strong case to be made that the disproportions in terms of both transparency and of outcome of the boom/bust are, on the whole, advantageous in a certain relevant sense. It is to this, I think, that he attributes the 'rise of the West', if I am reading him right. While I think that particular story can be told in many ways, I'm sure this is at least one of them.

'Pyramid scheme' need not, as you point out, be pejorative. But I frequently meet with mere incomprehension when I use the term, perhaps because people can't shake the 'bad' connotations, or perhaps because they suspect me of something like, well, social Darwinism. Really, all I mean here is that the economy is "founded" upon certain practices and de facto agreements, that is upon choices; and thus it is possible for us to choose otherwise. Not without constraints; but the notion that there is something bedrock-solid, "scientific" and unquestionable about the way money and markets function now strikes me as either ostrichesque (or some other kind of bad faith) or, yes, idolatrous (which I guess is the very defoliation of "bad faith," now that I think of it.

Now doubtless, I am at least mildly perverse in the sense you name, since I cannot help but at least critique, if not the "laws" (of economy, of ecology) themselves, then the rhetorical uses into which I often find them pressed. Whatever "solution" I have to the problems I think I see is inescapably piecemeal and local. (Is vegetarianism perverse? Certainly in some lights. And I cannot claim the supposed spiritual acumen or far-sight that would justify it in terms of kalpas and myriad worlds, a la Buddhism.) Your invocation of Job is interesting, since as you know the great cosmological vision which features in the theophanic climax is not part of Job's complaint, but part of the "answer"... and yet as many commentators have suggested, it really does not do much to answer the question, and in some ways aggravates it. And yet, mysteriously, Job is satisfied.

Using Darwinism to describe the markets, even with...

2012-03-01T10:35:54.381-08:00
Using Darwinism to describe the markets, even with that highly charged "social" modifier, is IMO spot on. The study of life itself is the best way to approach something as ridiculously complicated as the economy, because, like the economy, life is a pyramid scheme. To use that phrase pejoratively is telling. Would we imagine that we could somehow create a better system if we told the krill where the whales are? Is plankton in need of a march on Washington? Why is it after every boom and bust cycle in nature systems reemerge that pretty much follow the rules of the previous scheme? Now obviously we expect something “more” from a human system that we make than something “accidental” like the ecosystem. In this we presume to be greater than god. A presumption that is in some respects well founded. We can after all greatly increase productivity of the environment through careful management. But we can’t invent a better scheme than what we have found. Grass will be eaten, some animals will die to feed others, these seem to be the laws we have been given. I think it a human perversity to try to transcend these laws. And perversity has its place. Job is a hero of mine but in the end he didn’t get to tell god how to run the world.
Fantasies of a global collapse of capitalism need to be taken seriously because they inspire great mischief. Leninism is the obvious example of someone who decided to engineer a system that he didn’t, despite the massive amount of scribbling in Das Capital, understand. It is certain that we will continue to see booms and busts but imagining that something will emerge from that process fundamentally different than what created it is….aspirational. The modern American market fundamentalism is just the other side Leninism. You might say it is a type of “Organic farming”. Instead of managing the economy they worship it. When a little regulation might be in order they object because they “know” that human intervention is never a good thing.
Accepting that there will be winners and losers is hard. It would be as nice as it would be meaningless if all the kids were above average. Does that mean we are doomed to let bankers enslave us? Of course not! The game of the economy is always rigged for one interest or another, that will never change, but we can manage it to make it as fair as possible and that is where our creative energies should be focused. At the moment those of us who think more or less gradual evolution of our institutions is the best course are beset from both sides by fundamentalisms. I hope they exhaust themselves before they can gain unchallenged control.
I also object to the description of the economy as a zero sum game. On the contrary, once again like life itself, the normal function of the economy is to accumulate wealth and develop ever more complex and diverse ecosystems. That wealth has been misappropriated and unfairly distributed should be seen as flaws that need to be improved rather than an indictment of the whole. We can and should develop an economy that meets the real basic human needs of everyone. But first we will have to agree this is possible and desirable. That we have not yet come to that agreement is our biggest obstacle. Those who think it is impossible are sanguine to the suffering of the poor and self-righteous about their own “election”. Then there are those who think there is spiritual value in poverty and suffering. They do not want to see the odious complacency of a fat happy world. I don’t think we will ever change these attitudes. At best a coalition of moderates will finesse around the ideologues and continue down the slow steady progress we have seen since the enlightenment.

(3/3 from fragilekeys)

(...cont'd)
The outside of metaphysics that considers being-as-presence -- metaphysics beyond Being, Levinas would say, metaphysics as ethics -- is only articulated and complicated through terms that come from the 'inside' of metaphysics. Which is just to say that when we are talking about 'the history of metaphysics,; we're talking about the whole history of the usage of the verb 'IS,' and so of language as such -- of the "present indicative." The closure of metaphysics as being-as-presence thus implies the production of an

"elliptical change of site, within the difference involved in repetition; this displacement is no doubt deficient, but with a deficiency that is not yet, or is already no longer, absence, negativity, nonbeing, lack, silence. Neither matter nor form, it is nothing that any philosopheme, that is, any dialectic, however determinate, can capture. It is an ellipsis of both meaning and form.... In this way we are offered an infinite and infinitely surprising reading of this structure of history."

Why do I share this? Because I believe your post, at many points, boils down to this idea or the challenge of the ellipsis between meaning and form. Form does not fully give the meaning, nor does meaning lead perfectly to the form. NOR do the meaning of our work and the form of our work form a perfect circle in referring to one another -- ever. There is always an ellipsis, a rupture. And "contrary to what our desire cannot fail to be tempted into believing, the thing itself always escapes."

I'm pressing "publish" now, with all of that in mind. Cheers.