therivermerchant

A Response to 'The American Malaise'

2011-09-26T18:55:00.000-04:00

A video I found that, in part, responds the question I raised last week. He is speaking of the ideas of guy named Georg Lukacs, a Marxist theorist.

Finding Community and The American Malaise

2011-09-17T14:07:00.002-04:00

Those of you who read my blog on a pseudo-regular basis know that I really don’t write blogs which deal with my personal life. Mostly, they consist of my musings emerging from philosophical problems I find in the world. Today, though, I’m finding that the philosophical issue most pressing is my own story. Or, should I say our story.

As my understanding of cultural and social issues in society (specifically education) has deepened with my doctoral studies, I’ve found myself becoming increasingly active in these issues. I’ve tried to get involved in the larger discourse, have started volunteering, etc…I’ve even started tweeting a whole bunch more. Yet, it’s also made me painfully aware of the tragic reality in American culture: most people just don’t care about what happens in the world around them. They simply don’t want to be bothered.

In no way am I saying many of the folks I know are idiots, nor am I questioning their compassion. I’m simply saying that as a Deweyian and an activist, I find it a curiosity when I sit down with a new group of people, they are far more likely to have watched the latest edition of American Idol than have read anything on the social, cultural and political climate of the world in which they live. They typically excuse their behavior by saying ‘they don’t have time,’ which I might be able understand if they hadn’t just stated that they watch 2-3 hours of television per night. Usually I find myself having nothing to discuss because people sort of see me as ‘that troublemaker’ who won’t just go along with the world. Usually, I just drink my beer and stare off into space. If it isn’t clear already, the problem I’m having here is both one of understanding and one of belonging. I simply have no ability to relate to someone who takes no interest in a world they are responsible for creating.

I’ve read enough political theory to argue several different stances on why this might be the case, but when it comes down to it, I simply don’t get it. My friends and neighbors are bright people. Most of them can pretty much accomplish anything they put their mind to, yet for the most part, they just flat don’t care. They’d rather just not be bothered, and I have absolutely no way to empathize with that position. How could it be that a citizen is not interested in his or her generation’s impact on history? Why is it that people have no interest in understanding the world around them, much less participating in that world? Could it be that people truly don’t value each other anymore – that we’ve finally internalized the heartlessness of the corporate way of thinking?

Part of it might be the way I see the world. I stand with Dewey who argues that freedom isn’t the imagined neutral playing field, but the emergence of the self who participates in the world around them. That was a little ‘heady.’ Maybe it would be better said this way: I only truly become myself when I am an engaged participant in the world around me. ‘Engaged’ means the constant struggle to understand, know, relate to, and participate with my friends, neighbors, and fellow citizens in the construction of the world. This is the only true freedom. Slavery, by contrast, is bondage to someone else’s ideology – an uncritical, disinterested stance in the world.

To the contrary, most people conceptualize themselves as only loosely related to their fellow citizens. They only really ‘engage’ when they are told it is the ‘right’ thing to do. For example, (for those of you old enough) remember in the months following September 11 when everyone and their brother flew American flags from their cars and put stickers on everything? People I know even signed up for the military. I also remember being bullied at work, stores, etc…for choosing not to pin a flag on my chest. As I expected, week by week the fanfare died down until it became just a sport on TV: when were they going to get Bin Laden? We became uncaring, uncritical observers as we pumped trillions of dollars into an unnecessary war which we will eventually lose. Now people really don’t care other than the mild grumbling at extra lines in the airport.

The moral of the story is this: I don’t think most people see themselves as citizens. Instead they have sort of decided that ‘democracy’ was something that’s already been done and now they can just sit back and enjoy the ride. For me, this general malaise would be at least tolerable if we weren’t living in the face of a legislative climate that is systematically dismantling most of democratic aspects of this country and handing them over to for-profit corporations.

When I have posed this question to people I know, they often reply this way: “well, you’ve done a lot of reading and most people just don’t know,” but this simply begs the question of the responsibility of a democratic citizen to research, investigate, to know, and to act. In other words, my reading hasn’t made me a citizen; my citizenship has made me a reader.

A little more rambling than most posts, I know, but I’m struggling here to find out where all the critical thinkers and engaged citizens have gone, and how we can get them back.

Everything's Better In Finland

2011-09-16T07:52:00.001-04:00

I find it curious that the US so often compares itself against the Finnish system as the high-water mark of secondary education. What’s surprising isn’t that Finland is seen as the mark, but that US thinks it has a hope of ever reaching that bar based when it’s cultural assumptions and infrastructure is so wildly different from Scandanavia. A case study can be found in a recent article on CNN, highlighting how West Virginia is trying to use Finland as a model for its education system.

http://www.cnn.com/2011/US/08/29/education.wv.finland/index.html?hpt=hp_bn1

Here are assumptions WV has made that will never allow it to fully transition to an education system that works as well as Finland’s.

(1) Assumption #1: education is a cognitive problem

The first and most glaring problem in the way the US conceptualizes education is pointed out with the first three paragraphs. The contrast between the two environments begins here: “…In West Virginia, many children face poverty, illiteracy and broken homes and lack easy access to health care or proper nutrition. [While] Finland has a largely literate and relatively homogeneous population, little immigration and almost no poverty or social problems. They also offer a vast network of social supports including free meals and health care for school children.”

The article then points out that Finland is ‘on top’ of international test rankings (which, as a sidenote, are a sham which I’ve discussed in other blog entries). Superintendent Paine believes the correct way to remedy this is, rather than speak out against the issues of hunger, poverty, oppression bearing down on these kids, he should “…West Virginia should concentrate on developing more rigorous standards, curriculum and perhaps most importantly -- teacher supports.” The fundamental issue is this: we are still locating the problem of “success” in the school, in general, and the student’s mind, in particular. This is based on a deep-rooted neoliberal and American assumption that everyone has an equal chance to succeed. Unfortunately, they don’t. So, Finland provides socialized systems to help those struggling. We are categorically eliminating them.

(2) Assumption #2: learning is the consumption of information which can be assessed through tests

It is a brute fact that “Finland doesn't use standardized tests to assess teachers or schools.” Why is this a brute fact? Because Finland’s education system is based on the experiential educational model set forth by John Dewey and other pragmatic thinkers. For Dewey, thought is the ability to understand the causes and consequence of action in practice. For Developmental Psychology (the ground of the US system), it is the mental retention of facts. Yet, memorization of facts, or non-experiential learning will never, ever get you to either learning or thinking (see my blog entry on Dewey and The Art of Cooking).

The CNN article even points out that “Project-based learning -- an integral part of Finland's education system -- uses one "project" as a starting point for learning about multiple subjects and how they fit together.” Experiential learning its not only integral to Finland’s education system, IT IS THE WHOLE SYSTEM.

The US, on the other hand, bases its education system on deeply flawed models of developmental psychology. West Virginia has, therefore, interpreted Finland’s system, through its developmental lens. In other words, instead of looking at the Deweyian process of education, WV is focus on the product. WV refuses to examine its own assumptions about teaching and learning like a spoiled child: they are ‘modeling’ Finland’s performance by RAISING the difficulty of their own standardized tests. Superintendant Paine will align “…West Virginia's testing with national and international benchmarks.” Where these ‘international’ benchmarks are coming from is anyone’s guess. Certainly not Finland (West Virginia’s model), because Finland thinks they are harmful to student success.

Taking it even further, WV is committing a classic fallacy in educational philosophy by trying to correct a broken educational infrastructure by dressing it up with bells and whistles, which is what the Global21 initiative is in WV. It’s essentially just traditional education coated in shiny, new chrome packaging (which includes healthy doses of the words “21^st century” in every sentence).

The problem is that this ‘new’ take on education (like most others in the US) embeds every single one of the problems John Dewey saw in the traditional education system: that it begins with a complete misunderstanding of what it means to learn, that it extracts education from students lives, that it ignores context, that its aimed in the wrong direction… In the end, WV educators completely misunderstood Finland’s system and essentially forced a student-driven, emergent and experiential system into the language of an American assembly line.

(3) Assumption #3: teachers deserve more respect

Actually, I agree with this claim. I only put it in there to prove a point. West Virginia still isn’t respecting its teachers, nor is most of the US. I can give you the historical reason for this: it’s called the feminization of teaching (google it; there’s a lot out there). Here’s the moral of the story: the respect for teaching is correlated with the respect for women in culture. We still marginalize women and, therefore, don’t respect teaching (i.e. every legislator and businessman thinks they know better because silly teachers -mostly women - are apparently too stupid to solve the problems facing their own field).

Don’t get me wrong, it is very noble West Virginia’s goal is to follow Finland in trying to give teachers a social status “a status comparable to what doctors, lawyers and other highly regarded professionals enjoy in the U.S.” Okay, that’s fine, but first you have to get culture (not just WV) to recognize that teaching is a more difficult, demanding, emotionally strenuous, and time-consuming vocation than any other (I say this as the partner of a fourth grade teacher and, trust me, I know).

And this isn’t about brute economics. We could give the Defense budget to Education and the Education budget to Defense; that would be a start. It would not touch the deep oppression and marginalization of teachers in our country.

A true first step would be putting teachers in control of education and kicking out business leaders and politicians. For example, in Finland, “like other professions, teachers gain seniority and tenure primarily on the basis of training and experience, and teacher unions have a strong voice in shaping education policy…” Further, in Finland, “…only about 10% of some 7,000 applicants to primary school programs are accepted annually to Finnish teacher training programs”

In other words, it’s fantastic that WV wants to take on 200+ years of American oppression of women, yet this is not truly what they are interested in. They simply want happy teachers to pump out skilled workers.

Dewey and the Art of Cooking

2011-09-08T11:14:00.001-04:00

How I explained the fallacy of reification (the philosophical fallacy for Dewey) to students in my Philosophy of Education course. We're currently reading Democracy and Education. Its a bit heady for a blog post, I know, but this fallacy lies at the heart of the majority of problems in our current education system. If you can get it, it will do a lot of work for you and it may change your life, as it did mine.

All:

I mentioned in class that I was going to try and send a quote to illustrate the point further, but I thought I would send both an example and a quote. Don't worry if you're struggling to understand what Dewey means when he says we confuse ends with means. This is a very difficult concept to grasp, in part because we have the weight of a culture which repeatedly makes this mistake bearing down on us. Yet, Dewey will argue that committing this mistake is one of the major problems pushing our schooling in the wrong direction. So, here is my attempt at an example, which popped into my head last night as I was cooking dinner (yes, this is what I think about while I'm cooking dinner).

Dewey will argue that traditional models of education commit a major fallacy when they confuse the recipe for Chicken Marsala (the formulaic outcome) for cooking the dish we call Chicken Marsala (the process). Dewey will argue that learning is not something which should focus on the recipe. Instead, it should focus on the cooking, even though the two are related.

The relationship between the two (means/ends) might be explained this way. I can go to my cookbook at home, open it and find a recipe for Chicken Marsala. Yet, that recipe was not given to me or anyone else in culture transcendentally, but was created through a historical process of transaction between individuals and the environment. This historical process was a bit like playing telephone and you can imagine it extending back as far as simply learning to put meat over a fire, to understanding how to mix ingredients, to developing a taste for the different ingredients, to throwing the ingredients together, and all the way to throwing all the ingredients together in certain portions for certain amounts of time, etc.... Each person tweaked it a bit, experimented a bit, threw in something new (e.g. "This chicken tastes good with some lemon juice," or "I think it should be cooked longer and at a lower temperature.") At the end of that process, viola, we had something that tastes pretty darn good, and we decided to call it Chicken Marsala! In fact, people in history have done us a huge favor not only by (a) naming the result of the process 'Chicken Marsala' to help us distinguish it from other dishes, but they also (b) put the steps they took during their process of cooking into written language, as a way to help guide and direct our own process of creating Chicken Marsala at home (in other words, so we could reproduce their process on our own). In the end, culture has passed down a basic experimental formula (recipe) for the process of cooking a dish.

Yet, having the recipe manifested in language confuses us in a number of ways. First, we often (falsely) think the recipe has always and will always exist in the same way. In other words, 'Chicken Marsala' has been the same thing in all places and times. Second, it confuses us into committing the fallacy of reification. In other words, we think that the literal process of creating fabulous dish on my plate is the same thing as the recipe written in my cookbook, when (in fact) the recipe is simply some crib sheets passed down to me. Further, the thing on my plate will really never be the same each time I go through the process because I am constantly involved in tweaking, adjusting, and putting my own spin on how that recipe is applied in practice. Third (and the major problem in education) is that traditional education is focused almost exclusively on forcing students to focus on the recipe, because it believes that the recipe will give you the skills to cook. In fact, the recipe is only a tiny fraction of what's involved in cooking. The learning is the cooking, itself, with a few helpful hints from the cookbook to help guide and direct the action in environment. We don't need to know the recipe divorced from the process, but how the recipe functions for us in our own cooking, based on our own taste, and with the ingredients we have in our kitchen. Further, we should never be fooled into belieiving the the recipe is anything more than a set of crib notes handed down to help us solve our own problems. When we focus on the crib notes exclusively, we never encounter the problem at-hand: the act of getting dinner on the table.

Dewey's definition of education goes this way: "[education] is the reconstruction or reorganization of experience which adds to the meaning of experience, and which increases the ability to direct the course of subsequent experience" (Democracy and Education, 74). Further, "the essential contrast of the idea of education as continuous reconstruction with the other one-sided conceptions which have been criticized in this and the previous chapter is that it identifies the end (the result) and the process" (Democracy and Education, 75).

Four Fallacies In Education

2011-08-27T15:34:00.007-04:00

I have the good fortune of being married to a fourth grade teacher who, like it or not, keeps me a more committed pragmatist than I ever could be on my own. A few nights before the start of her academic year, I launched into a stout-induced rant about the decay of our secondary education over a plate of London broil, potatoes and salad. At first she challenged the notion that good teachers are not already keenly aware that teaching and learning has nothing to do with testing. She said that all good teachers know ways of working around the system to educate, no matter how much governing boards try to stamp it out. But then she asked me what I might do differently. In other words, what is it that I take issue with, beyond the obvious naiveté of the current testing culture.

My issue is, precisely, the picture of reality on which our approach to teaching and learning is built. If I can boil down the fallacies I find particularly offensive, they would be the following (in no particular order).

(1) Education as an economic imperative.

Perhaps one of the most difficult and frustrating parts of the educational discourse in this country is that we believe the issues of poverty, oppression, unjustice, suffering, etc….can and will be solved through the school system. In other words, we live in a world which acts as though all of our problems would be solved if kids would all just pass their sixth grade math test. Here is the brute reality: the way the current education system is run it not only won’t solve the issues of poverty and oppression, it actually reproduces them. Further, in doing so, it allows us to launder our morals - in other words, we force kids to take tests which they can’t pass and - when they don’t - we call them lazy and stupid rather than fixing the system.

(2) Learners as independent, autonomous agents.

Part of the proceeding is made possible by a deeply entrenched philosophical fallacy in our culture: that of the essential or Platonic self. In other words, we believe that who we are is: (a) independent of those around us (e.g. we would still be the same ‘person’ if we had been born in a different place); (b) static and essentialized (e.g. we ‘find’ who we are, and are essentially the same person from birth until death); (c) always available and self-disclosed (e.g. we are aware of who we are and what we know). And yet, all three of these commitments are dead wrong. The self is, instead, (a) relational (i.e. the mind is social. In fact, the mind is not a ‘thing’ but a social action, a verb; (b) an event (i.e. always being revised, expanded, re/created), (c) only partially available. What this means is that we are all radically interconnected and thinking of learning as an independent process is nonsensical, because there is no such thing as an independent process for an interdependent being.

(3) Knowledge as facts and learning as the consumption of those facts.

John Dewey believed that the philosophic fallacy was the reification of categories. Major problems were created, in other words, when knowledge was seen as a destination rather than a process of revising, refining and recreating tools (conceptual and physical) for the purposes of surviving and thriving in the world. Knowledge, then, is not some set of facts divorced from use, but a set of dispositions and habits.

Further, much of the education system is grounded in something called the ‘conduit metaphor’ which is basically the idea that a mind is like a computer and that learning is like downloading information to that computer. In fact, the mind is nothing like a computer, knowledge is not facts, and, (most importantly) learning is not something imposed, but – in fact – is an emergent process of inquiry.

The danger, here, is that we are increasingly instilling a set of habits in our children which estranges them from their own culture and mind. We are not teaching them to fish, just to eat as fast as they can.

(4) History as progressive.

This is probably the least discussed and most dangerous fallacy on which our culture rests. It is the idea not only that history is progressive, but also that we are in some type of historical race to be able to ultimately explain, predict and control the natural world. Many thinkers, including Dewey, will argue this emerges out of the human condition: the impending chaos of death breeds a fever-like need to explain, predict and control something which is ultimately out of the realm of our control and ability to predict. This is partially the reason why the STEM fields are imposed on our children as the cultural necessity: their labor allows us to explain, predict and control, whereas the humanities and liberal arts are not able to perform such tricks.

This fever relies on the metaphor of motion and of speed as though life and learning were a race with deep consequences (e.g. ‘No Child Left Behind,’ or ‘Race to the Top’). What we most fear is being ‘left behind,’ but if we were to ask in what – exactly – being left would result, the metaphor crumbles. Yet, it is constantly invoked as an educational imperative – as though we will be ‘behind’ other countries. Needless to say that these comparisons are all fraudulent – a smoke and mirrors game, which plays on some of our deepest fears. The truth is that history is not progressive, it is responsive, and our obsession with control of the natural world is masking the problems of hunger, poverty and oppression which we have yet to begin to solve.

Needless to say, I’m WAY over my word limit. If you’d like me to build some of these sections out, offer more references, etc…just let me know.

Democracy or Oligarchy? The Choice Is Yours...

2011-08-11T08:46:00.000-04:00

Regardless of your political stance, you should care about this.

Education: Where The Market Is God

2011-08-06T22:01:00.005-04:00

Over the last few years, I’ve come to the conclusion that the most important and dangerous issue we face as a society is education. There are multiple reasons for this, but perhaps the most compelling is that there is no difference between education and democracy. What I mean by that is the same thing that educational philosopher John Dewey argued in his seminal work ‘Democracy and Education’ – which is that the major aim of education should be to promote self-aware, critical thinkers who understand their interdependence with and responsibility to the society in which they live.

If you believe the major premise of Dewey’s argument – that democracy and education are so intertwined they literally cannot be separated – then it is immediately obvious why a vibrant education is the most important thing in the country. More important, even, than national defense, the economic outlook, etc…

Now the tragedy is that our current educational discourse presents two equally terrible options: either our legislators are silent on the issue of education (i.e. they just don’t care), or they are vocal and hold a terribly mistaken understanding of what education is, and its goals. I believe that, unless the current trajectory of education is changed, it will ultimately collapse our already thinning democracy. I’m quite serious about this.

Now, how is it that we’ve put a gun to the head of the best education system in the history of the world and pulled the trigger? Well, the reasons for this are as deep as they are wide, but the primary driver behind the dismantling education (secondary and post-secondary) is a thing called neoliberalism.

In a nutshell, neoliberalism is the idea that everything in society should be measured by a market-driven approach. It assumes not only are those with ‘business experience’ more capable and qualified to oversee any system of policymaking or administration, but that all things essentially boil down to business analytics and standards.

I don’t want to harp on this point too much, but the short version of the story is this: this assumption is not only dead wrong, it going to end up destroying our democracy and our way of life. It is fueled by a McCarthy-era fear of economic globalization, meaning that the US will no longer be the economic bully it once was. It is grounded in a number of hugely mistaken philosophical ideas about the nature of human existence, knowing and learning (which I don’t bore you with, but will happy to discuss at a later date). It has made itself manifest across all sectors of society, but the one I, personally, most interested in is education for the aforementioned reasons.

What it’s meant in terms of education is the absolutely ludicrous claim that the ultimate aim of education is economics. It extends this premise into the argument that business methods and mindsets (based on a completely naive understanding of knowing, teaching and learning) are best suited to the education system: training models, comparable performance measures, efficiencies of scale, standardization. Viola! Education has now become big business.(FYI: Obama's policies on education are more destructive and terrifying than George W. Bush's)

This neoliberal disease has reached near fever pitch. Here’s a good example: the Wake County School System (traditionally considered a model of public education in moderately urban environments) hired retired Army Brig. Gen. Anthony J. Tata to run its system. His credentials? A 12-month training program at a big business education training facility. In any other field, this would be considered absolute lunacy. Could you imagine taking a one-year course in medicine and then being hired to run Duke Medical Center? Well, the people of Wake County decided that was not only acceptable, it was preferable to alternatives like, say, taking the best a brightest in the field of education as a leader for the system.

I’ve reached my self-imposed word limit. I will leave you with two thoughts:

(1) There are some things we will never be able to reduce to statistics and business models. Education (like art) is one of them. In the end, we’re going to produce generations of people who (at best) have no ability to think. This will not only kill our democracy, it will (ironically) kill our economy because Americas “human capital” (neoliberal term) will dry up. Teachers have known this all along, which is why helping kids cheat is becoming an act of civil disobedience.

(2) This is not simply a political or economic issue. This is a moral issue, a justice issue, an issue of civil rights and we must take a stand against it. I hope you will join me.

Chomsky on Obama and liberalism in America

2011-08-02T21:23:00.003-04:00

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The politics of knowledge

2011-08-01T14:26:00.006-04:00

I'm at home today watching my daughter and spent part of the morning listening to Diane Rehm's show on NPR, where she basically let caller after caller let their voice be heard on the current economic and political situation. To be honest, it was actually quite therapeutic to hear so many people be disgusted with the Congressional gridlock. There were people on both sides of the aisle who had quite a few fantastic things to say, including many of the right-wingers saying how nobody can be upset with the Tea Partiers who basically ran a platform, and stuck with it all the way through. I'll give them marks for at least taking a stand, I suppose.

Then there was the gentleman who called in and started making a sophomoric and long-winded case for supply-side economics. He went on a 5-minute tear about how the only way to boost the economy was to massively cut spending to corporations and the absurdly rich. There was a moment when he proudly proclaimed that you can look at "any graph" and it would show you that when taxes are cut, the GDP goes up. The reciprocal, he claimed, was also true. Diane cut him off and asked him where he was getting his information and all he could muster was to repeat the claim "any graph."

I want to make it very clear (if it isn't already) that I am not an economist and have no degree in economics, yet I feel fairly confident in saying that history has borne out that supply-side economic theory (i.e. tax cuts = higher GDP) just doesn't hold up. Yet, many lock-step right-wingers hold onto it because they believe that in abandoning it, they abandon something of the nostalgic ideology of their political party. This, despite the failure of supply-side economic theory being explicitly spelled out in Bruce Bartlett's 2007 book “Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy.” Bruce Bartlett, in case you're wondering, was an architect of supply-side economics under Reagan. Here's a good article that sort of sums it up why he believes it has failed.

The heart of the matter, it seems to me, is that we are guided by a lot of mythology, and we really don't take the time to investigate these things and think for ourselves. (I think, for example, most evangelical Christians would be shocked to find out that the rapture was invented in the 19th century by a British guy named John Nelson Darby.)

In any case, we just take spoon-fed information from people we trust and start spewing it out with no critical filter. (Ironically, as an epistemologist, I would argue we kind of have to operate this way – knowledge is an economy which is also built on trust.) But that’s beside the point. It’s not a problem that people disagree. It is a problem that people make grand claims with absolutely nothing to back it up other than their emotional allegiance to a political ideology – be that on the right or left. At the very least, you should be able to articulate the criterion of falsifiability for any argument you are making (i.e. in a nutshell, you should be able to articulate what counter-evidence would cause you to change your position).

The reason we give every citizen the gift of a free, high-school education in this country is so that we can think for ourselves. (The discussion for how we increasingly don’t offer this to the poor and marginalized is for a later post). The fact that remains that we’ve kind of forgotten the point that education is something we must struggle after, not simply a certification. Instead, most of us are too busy watching American Idol, or Two and Half Men, or whatever other garbage we pay to be delivered to our living room in HD.

I’ll leave you with this quote from Hilter to warm the cockles of your heart:

“The receptivity of the great masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous. In consequence of these facts, all effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on these in slogans until the last member of the public understands what you want him to understand by your slogan. As soon as you sacrifice this slogan and try to be many-sided, the effect will piddle away, for the crowd can neither digest nor retain the material offered. In this way the result is weakened and in the end entirely cancelled out” (“Main Kampf,” Vol 1, Chapter 6).

Where have all the progressives gone?

2011-08-01T07:47:00.005-04:00

This blog began a few years ago as a way to for me to have a forum to write about issues I was tackling through various master’s degrees. I’m changing formats a bit because I met a lot of great people through my blogging experience, and I’ve fallen off the radar in the last year because I couldn’t keep up sticking to my formal reading schedule. So, this is going to be the new format, with more off-the-cuff, shorter material.

The other reason I’m dusting off this blog is that my wife and I recently moved to a new area and I haven’t really established a community. If I’m honest, I also feel like a bit of an outcast as a progressive in a mostly conservative-dominated area of the country, and I sort of need to write in order to maintain my sanity. It’s akin to someone on Alcatraz tossing notes in a bottle into the bay. Well, that may be just a bit overstated.

Nevertheless, what’s been on my mind lately (like much of the country) is the national debt. Unlike most of the people I interact with, it’s not actually the debt that bothers me – it’s the tenure and trajectory of the discourse that’s most troubling. I find myself driving to work, my blood pressure rising, feeling more than a little bit marginalized by what I hear.

A good case study for the way I’m feeling is this: A friend of mine sent me a link the other day to a web game that allowed you to try and move money around to reconstruct the budget. The first thing it asked you to do is to pick a ‘theme,’ which represented the most important issues to your platform. The only progressive issue on the table was ‘sustainability.’ The other choices were things like “debt reduction,” “lower taxes,” “defense,” etc…The exercise gave no room for the things that I find the most fundamental issues in this country: education, healthcare, social justice, etc…

And there it was, staring me in the face again: the fact that the discourse has been so hijacked by a fear-based brand conservativism, that we can’t even imagine a world where progressive issues matter. Not to get too technical, but our national discourse is completely dominated by a commitment to a thing called neoliberalism. In the U.S. it began as a reaction against the justice-orientation of the 60s and has become so deeply ingrained in our culture that even modern progressives consider it to be the playing field.

No one in the media, in my church, across the lunchtable seems to be interested in or even aware of the fact that the only discourse available is neoliberal, conservativism. And this propaganda machine is quickly taking over the media (e.g. Rupert Murdoch) and education (e.g. NCLB and now ‘Race to the top’) - while, at the same time, claiming their own marginalization by progressive voices. It’s become so pervasive that we now see Obama, who in any other day would have been considered a moderate Republican, as a progressive Democrat.

It's why, for example, the conservatives (the minority) have been so easily able to bully the Congress into passing a completely unethical debt reduction bill, which places the cost of the Bush war and corporate bailouts in the backs of the poor and marginalized. Its all due to being able to leverage neoliberal discourse as some type of moral high ground.

That’s it. I’ve run way past the 500 word limit I set for myself. Here is the punchline: we are handing our country over to greed. Neoliberalism has hijacked all public discourse (e.g. religious and civil) to the point where those seeking peace-focused, justice-focused issues aren’t considered normative, but outliers. In the center are fear- and greed- based policy makers (I include those on both sides of the aisle) who have convinced the poor that poverty is their fault, and that God is Republican. So, where is the community out there that rises up and stops being bullied like a kid on the schoolyard, as progressives have been since the mid-70s?

Part 1: The question of truth...

2011-01-31T08:21:00.003-05:00

(b) The Guiding Concept of Humanism

(i) Bildung (Culture)

The concept of Bildung is one of four foundational concepts of the humanistic tradition which Gadamer believes may help liberate the human sciences from the artificial narrowness in which its methodology is caught. In other words, the human sciences can and should be understood more easily from the tradition of the concept of Bildung than from the modern idea of scientific method.

At its most brute level, Bildung is associated “with the idea of culture and designates primarily the properly human way of developing one’s natural talents and capacities” (9). Wilhelm von Humbolt argues that by Bildung “we mean something both higher and more inward, namely the disposition of mind which, from the knowledge and the feeling of the total intellectual and moral endeavor, flows harmoniously into sensibility and character” (9). We might think of Bildung as growth, in its richest sense. There are a few aspects of Bildung which we must note:

It is organic: Bildung is not a technical construction, but an inner process of formation and cultivation, and therefore constantly remains in a state of continual Bildung

It is process-oriented: Bildung has no goals outside itself and is not a goal, itself, but a process.

It is relational: Bildung is unlike the simple cultivation of talents, because the thing through which one is formed becomes completely one’s own (10).

It is historically bound and future-oriented: “To some extent everything that is received is absorbed, but in Bildung what is absorbed is not like a means that has lost its function. Rather, in acquired Bildung nothing disappears, but everything is preserved” (10).

Gadamer uses Hegel as a starting point. Hegel argues that a defining characteristic of a rational being is the separation from the immediate and the natural process of being in the world. It is from this separation, according to Hegel, that humanity strives to the level of becoming a “universal intellectual being,” which reciprocally requires the restraint of desire. In working toward a universal or abstract understanding, the human consciousness raises itself above the immediacy of its existence. This universal is not one thing but is any ‘capacity’ or working skill. In working to understand underlying, universal structures a person gains the sense of him or herself by taking the universal upon oneself. This work can be done both practically and theoretically.

“To recognize one’s own in the alien, to become at home in it, is the basic movement of spirit, whose being consists only in returning to itself from what is other. Hence all theoretical Bildung, even acquiring foreign languages and conceptual worlds, is merely the continuation of a process of Bildung that begins much earlier. …Thus every individual is always engaged in the process of Bildung and in getting beyond his naturalness, inasmuch as the world into which he is growing is one that is humanly constituted through language and custom. Hegel emphasizes that a people gives itself its existence in its world. It works out from itself and thus exteriorizes what it is in itself” (13).

The core aspect here is that Bildung is an ongoing working between abstract other/universal and the self/particular. “Thus what constitutes the essence of Bildung is not clearly alienation as such, but the return to oneself – which presupposes alienation, to be sure” (13). Gadamer adds that we can acknowledge what Hegel has to say about Bildung without having to be tied to Hegel’s concept of absolute spirit.

The idea of memory is, then, key component to Bildung, because Bildung is not simply the compilation of an encyclopedic knowledge. Instead, memory is also part of the process of Bildung and “must be formed; for memory is not memory for anything and everything” (14). For Gadamer, memory is not “a psychological faculty” (14). Instead it is “an essential element of the finite historical being of man. In a way that has long been insufficiently noticed, forgetting is closely related to keeping in mind and remembering; forgetting is not merely an absence and a lack but, as Nietzsche pointed out, a condition of the life of the mind. Only by forgetting does the mind have the possibility of total renewal, the capacity to see everything with fresh eyes, so that what is long familiar fuses with the new into a many leveled unity” (14). Bildung requires a letting go of the idea of memory as factual photograph, and instead an understanding that memory is shaped, formed and reconstructed as part of the process of forgetting and discovering.

“If all that presupposes Bildung, then what is in question is not a procedure or behavior but what has to come into being” (15). “…the general characteristic of Bildung: keeping oneself open to what is other – to other, more universal points of view. It embraces a sense of proportion and distance in relation to itself, and hence consists in rising above itself to universality. To distance oneself from oneself and from one’s private purposes means to look at these in the way that others see them” (15).

(ii) Sensus communis

‘Common sense,’ at its most basic level, is having a rich understanding of the sensibility of a group of people, as well as the ability to employ that sensibility appropriately in unique contexts and situations.

Sensus communis might be represented by the contrast between (a) saying something well and (b) saying the right thing. Here, the former is subsumed under the latter, in which the aesthetic merges with the moral, ethical, political and relational. We might also use the contrast between (a) the scholar and (b) the wise man, in which the former is again subsumed under the latter. Sensus communis “…is a kind of genius for practical life, but less a gift than the constant task of “renewed adaptation to new situations” (23).

Gadamer outlines the history of the term with respect to several thinkers: Vico, Shaftesbury, Bergson, Oetinger.

“By sensus communis, according to Shaftesbury, the humanists understood a sense of common weal, but also ‘love of the community or society, natural affection, humanity, oblingingness’” (22). “What Shaftesbury is thinking of is not so much a capacity given to all men, part of the natural law...(but more like) the attitude of the man who understands a joke a tells one because he is aware of a deeper union with his interlocutor” (22).

“Oetinger expressly distinguishes rational truths from receptivity to common truths – “sense truths,” useful to all men at all times and places” (26). “Its hermeneutical meaning can be illustrated by this sentence: ‘the ideas found in Scripture and in the works of God are the more fruitful and purified the more that each can be seen in the whole and all can be seen in each.’ Here what people in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries like to call ‘intuition’ is brought back to its metaphysical foundation: that is, to the structure of living, organic being in which the whole is in each individual: ‘the whole of life has its center in the heart, by which means of common sense grasps countless things all the same time’” (26).

A core component of sensus communis is that “more profound than all knowledge of hermeneutical rules is the application to oneself” and one’s unique context (26).

Yet, “the concept was emptied (of all political and moral content) and intellectualized by the German enlightenment” (27). In doing so, lost its critical significance and, instead, “was understood as a purely theoretical faculty.”

For Gadamer, “…the human sciences (should) work on the concept of sensus communis. For their object, the moral and historical existence of humanity, as it takes shape in our words and deeds, is itself decisively determined by the sensus communis. Thus a conclusion based on universals, a reasoned proof, is not sufficient because what is decisive is the circumstances” (20). Further, “The possibilities of rational proof and instruction do not fully exhaust the sphere of knowledge” (21). The basic problem is, then, that “the human sciences’ claim to know something true came to be measured by a standard foreign to it – namely the methodical thinking of modern science” (21).

In other words, the problem with the human sciences employment of the inductive method is that it does not organically account for the unique, particular contexts and circumstances in which its object of study occurs. Instead, the inductive method becomes a type of Procrustean bed for its object of study.

Part 1: The question of truth...

2011-01-31T08:12:00.007-05:00

So, I'm doing a directed reading of Gadamer's major work 'Truth and Method' this semester. I thought, to keep me honest, as well as to help me understand the material better I might attempt to blog through it. If you want an overview of the text, the Wikipedia summary is pretty good.

I'm hoping to make this summary as accessible as possible, unlike a lot of feedback I got on stuff I wrote a few years back. Gadamer's work is terribly important for pretty much everything. In the past, it certainly woke me up from my dogmatic slumber. Hopefully it will be helpful for you, too. This is my first attempt to read it cover to cover. I can't promise I'll be able to blog the whole thing, but I'll do my best.

(a) The problem of method

The problem as it stands is that for most of the 19th century, as onward, the human sciences are governed by employing the model of the natural sciences (3). In other words, the inductive method – basic to all experimental science – is the only method which yields valid results. Attached to this is the assumption that the inductive method is also free from all metaphysical assumptions and remains independent of how one conceives of the phenomena one is observing (4).

The specific problem, as it relates to the human sciences is that one has not actually grasped their nature if on measures them by the ‘yardstick’ of the inductive method. “The experience of the sociohistorical world cannot be raised to a science by the inductive procedure of the natural sciences” (4). The reason for this is that historical research doesn’t attempt to grasp a concrete phenomenon as an instance of a universal law. In other words, the individual case doesn’t serve only to confirm a law from which practical predictions can be made. It’s ideal is rather to understand the phenomenon itself in its unique and historical concreteness.

Yet, this leads to a deeper problem: even if we acknowledge that the human sciences are fundamentally different from natural sciences, we are still tempted to describe the human sciences in a negative way – as ‘inexact’ sciences.

There have been multiple approaches of dealing with this problem. Gadamer outlines several: Hemholtz, Droysen, Dilthey, Kant.

Perhaps the greatest of those dealing with the problem was Herder who “transcended the perfectionism of the Enlightenment with his new ideal of ‘cultivating the human’ and thus prepared the ground for the growth of the historical sciences of the 19th century. “The concept of self-formation, education or cultivation (Bildung), which became supremely important at the time, was perhaps the greatest idea of the 18th century, and it is this concept which is the atmosphere breathed by the human sciences of the 19th century, even if they are unable to offer any epistemological justification for it” (8).

new stuff

2010-06-28T20:18:00.002-04:00

Gone fishin'

2010-01-27T20:20:00.002-05:00

Sorry I've been gone for a few months. Kind of buried in papers and putting a dissertation committee together. I'll come back soon. Until then...

robbing the poor to give to the rich: foucault and the american way

2009-11-07T10:16:00.004-05:00

This is something I wrote to help me work through 'Archeology and Knowledge' by Michel Foucault. I think this is sort of what Foucault is after.

AS

****

Think of the concept of charity, its purpose, and how it operates in society. In the case of charity, it seems as though the problem in society is that the poor should be helped.

But this is not actually the problem but a masking of the problem. The true issue is that we’ve built a system which requires having ‘those with’ and ‘those without.’ So the problem of charity is actually not the visible issue (those in need) but the invisible issue (the set of circumstances which created a class of people in need). So, this is the first thing that Foucault is going to argue: that if we spend our time focusing on a solution-based approach to issues that we see, it blinds us to the fact that that things are only an issue because we are not examining the circumstances which allowed them to become issues in the first place.

Foucault’s second concern is that the system perpetuates this sort of problem/solution model by masking the circumstances which allow the issue (those I need) to come into being.

The first thing we do is ask “how might we solve this problem?” Very well-meaning and loving from all parts of the system spend an enormous amount of time trying to boost charity in society as a ‘solution’ to the problem of those in need. This seems logical. And their thinking goes something like this: if we transfer enough capital between classes then the system itself will eventually even out.

But actually the system won’t even out. In fact, the system can’t even out because that’s not how it was designed. Capitalism is a system which relies upon a sort of self-serving accumulation of resources for its existence, so it in fact requires the robbing of the poor to feed the rich. For example, we not told in school that there a point where we will have enough money and we should just stop accumulating capital. No, in fact if everyone did this it would undermine our economy. We are told that we should accumulate capital in our 401Ks for ever and ever and ever. The situation is this: in order to be good Americans and good people, we should accumulate as much capital as possible.

And yet there's this nagging problem: in order for the system to function, we need an oppressed class. It is also clear that people have a heart for those in need, and this is where the very sinister thing happens. We forgo the question of circumstances (“why might we have a system which requires two classes of people: those with and those without”) and focus instead on the issue which only exists within the set of circumstances we uncritically accept (“people in need”). In other words, we try to find a solution to this problem which is only a problem because we live in a set of circumstances which allows it to be a problem. This is where charity comes in.

The system certainly doesn’t want to change and most people in the system truly don’t want it to change because they are benefiting from it. Even the people donating to charity don't REALLY want the system to change, otherwise they wouldn't have money to donate to charity in the first place. They want to donate to feel as though they have done their part without actually changing the circumstances of the system.

The result? Charity exists as the cultural pressure valve which allows the problem of oppression to continue. Without charity we might actually have to hold ourselves accountable to the problem of oppression. But here's the trick: instead, charity allows us a way to keep our hands clean morally, while being the beneficiaries of a system of oppression. In a sense, charity allows us to launder our morals.

Here is how the trick works. We focus purely on the problem of ‘people in need' and say: “If we put a system of charity in place then all people will have the ability to move between classes.” Now it appears as though even though we live in a oppressive class system, people now have the option of situating themselves anywhere in the socio-economic class system they want. Charity becomes our justification of the system: anyone can be anywhere they want in the system because funds are available.

Now it is not a problem of the system creating those in need and, in fact, it is not even a problem of those in need not having access. Now the problem is that those in need ‘just aren’t trying hard enough’ – never mind the fact that the system requires the perpetuation of a lower class, never mind the fact that that the problem is not exclusively economic, never mind the fact that the money given to ‘charity’ isn’t even a fraction of what it would take to even out capital in the system.

So, here is when the mildly dangerous becomes evil. All of a sudden it looks as though (because a system of charity is in place) that it’s now the poor person’s fault for being poor. Even more sinister is that the rich (particularly the very rich) look like heroes for their charity work. Bill Gates is now a hero for donating tens of millions of dollars to charity - never mind the system which allowed him to accumulate unspeakable resources from the poor). And we all go to bed at night and sleep quite soundly because we donated to Goodwill or our church - never mind the fact that we are all beneficiaries of a system which robs from the poor to give to the rich. How do you think we got the money to donate in the first place? We certainly didn’t get it from charity.

scholarship and society

2009-09-27T12:31:00.003-04:00

Reflection from this week. Primary question: do the liberal arts, humanities and social sciences have an obligation to society? I think so. Most don't.

We're reading Denzin and Lincoln's "The Landscape of Qualitative Research."

***

Being young and naive, I had never encountered ‘action research’ until this week’s reading. The concept, for me, was valuable on two levels. First, anecdotally, it was valuable to see how deeply social science researchers had interacted with many important theoretical elements emanating out of the liberal arts and humanities. The second is that it raised a question which is and will continue to be critically important to my own work, which is the question of what obligation the academic community has to the public. It seems that the primary call of the action researcher is to use her/his work to actual serve some public good or contribute to society in some way.

While I don’t consider myself a pragmatist, I am committed to the idea that the academy has an ethical obligation to contributing to society-at-large rooted, if for no other reason, in the fact that society-at-large creates the space (through funding, land grants, tuition, etc…) in which scholarship happens. Yet, my experience leads me to believe that this very basic relationship between society and the academy is either not understood or fundamentally ignored in most of the liberal arts, humanities and social sciences. I will return to this point shortly.

Chapter seven (the essay discussing the role of the IRB and research standards) raised a question we have discussed on several occasions and will continue to discuss this semester, which is show particular discourses and disciplinary methods gain authority over others. In the case of chapter seven, the question was how the modern, empirical, categorical, colonial discourse (what I will call the Modern mode) has the authority over the “Post” mode, which emanates out of the liberal arts and humanities and has been taken up by qualitative social science researchers.

In my experience, there is a fundamental tension that exists between, on the one hand, those who pride themselves on the proliferation of ‘post’ theories which have allowed us to ‘overcome’ the naivety present in the Modern mode and, on the other hand, the fact that very few people outside the humanities, liberal arts and some social sciences seem to have noticed the insights emanating out of these programs.

In other words, I think it would be fair to say that most of society-at-large continues to operate as if the Modern mode is simply ‘life in general.’ I also think it would be fair to say that most of the university community outside the liberal arts (up to and including university administration and the more vocational schools – business, medicine, law) also seems to have little understanding of (or use for) the “Post” mode.

This begs the question of how, if the insights of the “Post” mode are so valuable, this can be the case.

I’d like to make a case that these two states of affairs - (a) the valuing of the Modern mode over the “Post” mode and (b) the lack of scholarly commitment to society-at-large by the humanities, liberals and most social sciences – are fundamentally interrelated. In addition, I believe the call of action research is a call which should be taken up (perhaps becoming a ‘turn’?) across the liberal arts and humanities if they wish to remain viable in the future.

In the chapter on the IRB, Lincoln makes a case that we currently face a state of affairs where ‘hard’ sciences and neoconservative agendas dominate the overarching discourse of the academy. The question, for me, comes back to who has agency in this situation.

Lincoln seems to locate the primary agency for this state with the ‘hard’ scientists themselves as well as with public governmental agencies – neither of which understand the most recent happenings in qualitative methods. In other words, if they would just come around to what’s happening with action research, then we could solve this little issue. I have heard the same case made in different ways from friends across the liberal arts (i.e. “If the administration would just see the value we add, and then we’d get more money and be taken more seriously.”)

I disagree with this claim. While I do think that the ‘hard’ sciences and governmental agencies should be more receptive to competing methods, it seems to me that the burden of explanation and education falls squarely on the shoulders of those who have constructed alternative paradigms.

In fairness, Lincoln does argue that action researchers should do a better job of educating IRB members, but I don’t think she goes far enough. This question, I believe, is much broader than simply educating IRB members – it is a question of who controls the public discourse, since the public discourse has a direct and immediate impact on the funding and administration of the university.

It is no secret that to impact a discourse the first step is to participate in that discourse. Further, it is also no secret that the liberal arts and humanities, for the most part, see little obligation to participate in the public discourse, aside from simply critiquing it and writing up those critiques in journals which are only disseminated to other scholars in the liberal arts and humanities. In fact, I would argue that participating in the public discourse – to direct one’s research toward actual, social problems and to be vocal the public sphere – is often seen as a sort of ‘softening’ of intellectual standards for scholars in the liberal arts, humanities and most social sciences. An example of this would be Cornell West who was fired by Harvard for not spending enough time conducting ‘scholarly research’ while spending the majority of his time focusing on the public.

Part of the danger of this stance, which eschews engagement with the public discourse, is that the public and its structures of authority – which almost always have oversight over the universities in which we operate - see no value in what we do. How could they? We have chosen to systematically remove ourselves from the public discourse.

Therefore, the proliferation of and authority gained by the ‘hard’ sciences is really no surprise, since they, for the most part, have a direct relationship to society-at-large. It is because of this relationship that the sciences have the gained the authority and have the privilege that they do.

To be fair, the ‘hard’ sciences are engaged in work which is much more easily commodified than the social sciences and liberal arts. But does the fact, in itself, relieve us from the burden of making a societal contribution? I’m not convinced that it does. I also think that if the ‘Post’ mode was more active and vibrant in society, the public discourse would not be so easily swayed by the Modern mode. But since there is no vocal alternative, what choice is the public given?

I suppose the case I am making is, quite simply, that most of the humanities and liberal arts seem to be operating under an assumption that their internal discourse that will eventually ‘trickle down’ to the larger public discourse. Meanwhile, the incredibly meaningful insights made in the “Post” mode are nullified by the lack of direct, outward engagement by scholars in these fields. I believe this is the call and critique of action research and my great hope is that it will be taken up into an ‘action turn’ across all the liberal arts, humanities and social sciences.

the enlightenment project and the artistic paradigm

2009-09-20T17:05:00.003-04:00

Class response again. Sorry if it's long-winded. Basic premise is that we're reading scholars who are debating if the narrative form ('narrativity') has value for scholarship. If you can't tell, I really like when systems of thought come into conflict.

Cheers -

Much of the reading this week raised the question of whether or not ‘narrativity,’ as a descriptive method, has value for the discipline of history. Coming to scholarly research out of a creative writing program, I find this entire debate immensely problematic.

Part of my issue is that the two basic positions (value vs. no value) have framed the discourse purely in terms of an enlightenment paradigm with no attention to the fact that ‘narrativity’ (arising fundamentally out of an artistic form) is operating out of an entirely different paradigm with different motives, assumptions and commitments.

I also take issue with the fact that there are several fundamental questions under the surface of this discourse, which directly impact this debate, but which are never directly addressed. These questions are (a) is the enlightenment project (the dissolution of all unknowing) even achievable?, (b) is the enlightenment project the best way of understanding?, and (c) where can the enlightenment project actually take us – in other words, what is its end-game?

Lastly, it seems that the two sides of the ‘narrativity’ debate seem to be resting on two sides of a fundamental paradox in the enlightenment project, which remains unaddressed and unresolved: on one hand, the goal of the enlightenment (which dominates modern scholarship) is the dissolution of all unknowing, yet on the other hand, human beings (yes, scholars are human beings too) are unable to remove themselves from their own skin are therefore inextricably tangled in a web of partial knowing and, to employ a hermeneutic term, are subject to ‘effective history.’

In some sense, this debate is simply old wine in new wineskins, which began with the question over the value of (or ‘cognitivity of’) ‘religious knowledge’ to the enlightenment project. Religious thought, once the dominant paradigm for understanding, is now seen (within the framework of general scholarly discourse) as malformed and misguided, contrasted against the solidity and purity of enlightenment thought which actually gets us to the end-goal of ‘progress.’ But religious thought, as problematic as it may be within the academic discourse, presents a fundamental challenge to the enlightenment project because it embodies those things which the enlightenment is unequipped to handle: the raising up of metaphysical questions; the focus on the ‘meaning’ over ‘knowing;’ the reality of paradox; and, of course, the valuing of tradition. These are all questions which deeply matter to actual, human discourse and, while they have been systematically erased from the core curriculum, have not been dissolved.

Now we find ourselves rehashing this same debate again: can there be value in a narrative (i.e. non-enlightenment) approach to reality?

In this week’s reading there are two primary opinions on the value of narrativity. One, represented in Kramer’s argument in The Content of the Form, that “Literature suggests alternative ways of knowing and describing the world and uses language imaginatively to represent the ambiguous, overlapping categories of life, thought, words and experience” (117). The other, represented in White’s The Value of Narrativity, which claims that “…real events should not speak, should not show themselves. Real events should simply be; they can perfectly well serve as the referents of a discourse, can be spoken about, but they should not pose as the subjects of a narrative” (3). And later, “Narrative becomes a problem only when we wish to give real events the form of a story. It is because real events do not offer themselves as stories that their narrativization is difficult” (4).

While each author presents a litany of reasons why narrativity should or should not be taken up into historical scholarship, they both seem to miss the fundamental point that the method and goals of narrativity are fundamentally different from the method and goals enlightenment. In other words, the enlightenment goal seems to be a kind of totalized description of everything, which ultimately produces knowledge, and its primary methods to those ends are clarification, categorization, and the elimination of metaphysics. Reciprocally, the goal of the artist/narrativity is to revel in a kind of fragmented understanding which leads directly meaning (personal and, often, societal) and the primary method to those ends are anything that will get the narrator there. In other words, simply because narrative employs the same medium – language – as historical scholarship, it is not of the same fundamental substance - it only bears a family resemblance.

Part of the reason why I believe enlightenment attempts to ‘understand’ art are ultimately doomed to fail (and often remain quite as crude as early anthropological discourses on ‘uncivilized man’) is that the enlightenment employs a methodological framework which is ultimately incompatible the artistic paradigm. In other words history can never be poetic, as Kramer would like it to be, because history is not a process of meaning-making, but of calculation. And so when Kramer argues that “Such a conception of historiography is consistent with the aims of much of contemporary, or at least recent, poetry” – aims that stress the importance of perceiving the ‘strangeness of ordinary things’ “ he is still approaching poetic enterprise out of an enlightenment paradigm (119). In fact, by claiming that history can be poetic, Kramer is quite explicitly claiming that the enlightenment project has dominion over all other modes of knowing and can slip in and out of them at will.

To make this argument a little more general, it is no surprise, then, that art schools have been relegated to the ghettos of the American university because they make claims out of a paradigm which threatens the ideology of enlightenment scholarship, and ask questions which most enlightenment scholars are unwilling – or unable –
answer.

In a very real way, artists operating inside the university play the role of Foucault’s madmen, who at once speak a gibberish which is unintelligible to enlightenment scholarship, yet are heralded for their mystical powers of healing and communion. This is why every university must have its crown jewel – the highly paid artist (usually a poet) who is paraded out at services of convocation or healing – and yet the project of art has no true voice in the enlightenment economy of the academy, as evidenced by art classes being outside the boundary of most core curriculums.

Therefore, I believe the ‘narrativity’ debate is a bit premature and a bit misguided. Before the question of the value of ‘narrativity’ can be answered, a more fundamental question must be answered, which is this: what, precisely, is the goal of historical scholarship? This seems to be the question underneath the question of the value of narrativity. I don’t mean this question pegoratively, but I believe the question of whether narrativity has value is tied directly to the question of what each author sees as the goal of the historical enterprise. On the one hand, it seems that White’s claim that ‘real events do not offer themselves as stories’ – can only be argued effectively if one takes the enlightenment paradigm as the true state of affairs and assumes that the goal of history is a total, objective description. On the other hand, it seems that Kramer finds more value in the goal of history as a representation of the experiences of people in the moment of history and, in this sense, events only have one option for presentation: narrativity.

mapping sin in the united states

2009-09-12T10:28:00.002-04:00

A little fun.

Tip of cap to Craig's blog 'The Flaming Heretic.'

authority, truth and the unknown

2009-09-12T10:14:00.004-04:00

Sorry if this is extremely 'heady' - it's my weekly reflection for a class I'm taking. We're finishing up Foucault's 'Archeology of Knowledge.' Some context: some folks in my class last week were very disturbed that 'religious people' had taken up the term 'postmodern.' They felt that these 'religious people' misunderstood the philosophical use of the term (I sort of agree, sort of don't) and were 'bastardizing' it (I sort of agree, sort of don't).

Side note: A 'field of discourse' is a term Foucault uses to describe an invisible border drawn around a dialogue. Also, inside that border there are certain rules of engagement. For example, at a fundamentalist Bible study it would 'out of bounds' to say that Jesus wasn't divine. Or, in an English Lit class it would be 'out of bounds' to say "This poem really moved me." A dialogue, in this case, doesn't just refer to one conversation, but to the conversation of an entire community of people. In this case: the field of philosophy and the field of religion.

I want to follow up on the dialogue we had in class last week about the concept of ‘postmodernity.’ I left class last week very unsettled about the way in which we framed this concept in our discussion, and I think our discussion about the usage of the term ‘postmodernity’ by religious groups might serve as a good case study which is quite relevant to the Foucault reading this week and to the goals of interdisciplinarity.

I will begin with the question of authority. In particular, who has authority over a field of discourse and over the concepts emerging out of that field of discourse? Several of us, myself included, used the phrased ‘bastardized’ in describing what happened to the concept of ‘postmodernity’ as it left the field of philosophical discourse and entered other disciplinary and non-academic discourses.

Last week, we threw this description (bastardized) around as though it was appropriate and we all agreed on its usage, but I want to dig a little deeper into the prejudices behind this term. It’s a term I’ve heard in other courses not only to describe concepts as they shift between fields of discourse, but also to describe the way in which Academic A employs Academic B’s work.

In terms of our discussion last week, I believe the term ‘bastardized’ only has value if we take the following as given: (a) the originating field of discourse (philosophy) and all philosophers in that field of discourse understand, objectively, precisely and completely, what the concept ‘postmodernity’ means and how it describes the world; (b) the originating field of discourse (philosophy) and all philosophers in that field of discourse have the authority to dictate usage and appropriation of the term ‘postmodernity’ by other fields of discourse.

I’m not so sure this claim holds.

To the first part, I think Foucault would offer a heavy critique of the claim that the originating field of discourse and all voices in that discourse actually understand the terminology central to the field of discourse. Not only can we return to Foucault’s critique of the stability of objects and concepts, but I also think Foucault’s conception of the ‘statement,’ takes aim at the validity of boundaries placed on fields of discourse. In other words, concepts (‘postmodernity’) which at first appear to belong to a single field of discourse (philosophy) actually belong to and in fact require a network of concepts extending beyond that field of discourse in order to be understood.

To the second part, the question is simply this: who holds authority to regulate the meaning and interpretation of individual concepts? If we are going to argue that a field of discourse holds the authority, where should we draw our boundary: who do we include/exclude as being part of the field of discourse? If we want to argue that a field of discourse only includes those people who have been awarded a doctorate in the field, then no student has the right to employ the term. If we want to argue that only those who are students and professors in the field are the boundary, then do we include undergraduates the minute they have declared a major? And what do we do with those on the margins of the field, or in subfields who ‘belong’ to a discipline without ‘belonging’ to it?

My point is simply that to claim that a term has been ‘bastardized’ (and I am certainly guilty of making this claim) is also to assume (a) there is a correct and incorrect usage, (b) there are those in authority who have a clear and precise understanding of the term, set against those in the margins who are confused, and (c) that the term itself is stable and available, rather than always already undergoing massive reconstruction and revision in the midst of dialogue.

I believe Foucault would argue (I would agree with him) that these are all false claims. But this is also quite unsatisfying for those of us (like me) who would like to know where the hell we stand. In other words, it’s one thing to critique the epistemological underpinnings of fields of discourse, it’s quite another to offer a suggestion which lets us know if we’re actually getting somewhere.

Part of the danger of Foucault is that he opens up a huge epistemological question for those of us who have been raised up in an intellectual system which has taught us to believe that that our goal as humans and the goal of the academy is to determine truth and falsity - or, as was stated in ‘Dialectic of Enlightenment,’ to eliminate all unknown. We want to know - in fact we must know - where the truth lies, how we can know when we’ve found it and what is the truth on which we can build our discipline.

Conversely, if our goal is to determine truth, our fear is not falsity, but the unknown. Our fear is that all fields of discourse will become relativized (no compass to determine truth from false), that the value we place on them will dissolve, and we will then be simply stuck in the mud. And, to be honest, I’m not sure how Foucault might respond. He seems to get at a response in his Lecture on the Discourse of Language, which is phrased not as a response to the question, but as a rejection of the question entirely: that the intellectual infrastructure of the academy is built on a ‘will to truth,’ which itself is a false impulse. I also think he might argue that the deeply connected networks to which all statements and fields of discourse belong and through which they have meaning, concurrently reject the truth/false distinction while stabilizing the known from the unknown. In this way the very paradigm of knowledge is shifted from true/false to known/unknown.

While I’d much prefer to just find the ‘truthiness’ of the world and tuck it under my pillow at night and sleep soundly, I don’t think this is good enough for Foucault. I also think Foucault’s argument severely complicates the academy’s view of itself as the unabashed expert of the world. In other words, if no field of discourse can make an unequivocal claim on truth, then no field of discourse can make an unequivocal claim on truth.

Let me move toward conclusion.

We have spent the last few weeks critiquing the disciplines for committing the sin of doggedly guarding the boundaries of their fields of discourse, with little attention to the even deeper boundary which divides the field of intellectualism from the field of non-intellectualism. By no means am I arguing for a trans-disciplinary method here, but simply pointing out what I see as the double standard of our disciplinary critique. On the one hand, we can agree that disciplines should begin the process of diplomacy. On the other, we are levying a critique of non-academics who attempt to take up concepts which emerge from the academic field of discourse and blend them into non-academic fields of discourse. Again, I am not arguing for a trans-disciplinary method, but what I do see in Foucault is the propensity to critique this sort of prejudice in the academy. Foucault, I don’t believe, is simply critiquing the borders between the sane and the ‘mad’ as an exercise in intellectualism, but is doing do as a way so that the ‘mad’ in society are, in some sense, set free.

Ultimately, I believe there is a fine line between, on one hand, claiming that those outside of a field of discourse are ‘bastardizing’ concepts if they appropriate concepts into a separate field of discourse and, on the other hand, claiming that we, as interdisciplinarians, are using concepts between fields of discourse to form unique and creative syntheses. In fact, ‘creative synthesis’ viewed in a different light – from the light of those ensconced in traditional disciplinarity - is simply another name for bastardization. Yet we know that it is not until concepts are dislodged from disciplinary boundaries and revisioned that they can truly be set free. Therefore, I think that before we as interdisciplinarians gain the sort of critical buy-in necessary to do our work, we first have to be willing to answer the epistemological critique that we, ourselves, levy against others. We have to be able to determine where the line is drawn between ‘bastardization’ and ‘critical synthesis,’ and how it is that one is a fallacy while the other is a movement forward.

Does objectivity exist?

2009-09-06T10:25:00.003-04:00

I've been reading Foucault's "Archeology of Knowledge" and Adorno/Horkheimer "Dialectic of Enlightenment" for my class. Just had some thoughts...

In "Dialectic of Enlightenment," Adorno and Horkhiemer argue that the “…concern (of the enlightenment) is not ‘satisfaction, which men call truth,’ but ‘operation,’ the effective procedure” and that “for enlightenment, anything which does not conform to the standard of calculability and utility must be viewed with suspicion” (2-3). In "Archeology of Knowledge," Foucault offers a critique of the ‘great, silent, motionless bases’ on which disciplinary knowledge rests.

Both texts offer a critique of the epistemological assumptions of modern disciplines; what they seem to be getting at is the question of whether ‘objectivity,’ which is the linchpin of most modern disciplines, actually exists. In different ways, they both raise the question of whether, if objectivity is possible, how does one have access to it, and what might be the benefit of an objective state of affairs? Certainly it might allow us to tinker with our environment and build better bombs, but where does that get us? The question of objectivity further spills over into questions of which type of knowledge counts as valid, what is the purpose of knowledge, and where learning happens.

One of the things I find fascinating is just how pervasive the view of a ‘great, silent, motionless’ base is at most universities. I believe most students, as well as most academics – particularly as one proceeds through the social sciences toward the natural sciences -- believe in the fundamental assumption that objective knowledge is not only possible, but that it is achieved every day. Objective knowledge is further stabilized by Derrida’s ‘metaphysics of presence.’

I would argue that much of the political economy of the disciplines is built on the enlightenment assumption of the reality of objectivity. Further, this assumption assigns values to types of knowledge. At the top of the value system lays the objective, empirical knowledge, which is closely followed by objective, rational knowledge. At the bottom rests knowledge gained outside of the classroom – knowledge of self, intercultural knowledge, service learning, leadership skills.

We see this value system embedded in the way we speak about disciplines - the sciences are the ‘hard’ sciences, thereby implying that knowledge in the humanities is ‘soft’ and, therefore, less valid. We can see this at Virginia Tech in the way students joke about the validity of particular majors – that those in the sciences and engineering are somehow doing work which is more difficult (i.e. more conceptually valid) than those in the liberal arts and humanities. It also manifests in the ‘assessment’ imperative at most universities, which are under pressure to produce quantitative data which can ‘prove’ learning occurs. I wonder what would happen is we were to admit that the history of science is guided not by objective insight, but by funding sources and political ideologies?

We can see the pandering for objectivity most clearly in the social sciences as, on the one hand, they want to cash in on the ‘epistemological value’ and ‘objective stability’ of scientific method by employing a repeatable, observable approach but, on the other hand, they only have access to a messy data set which can’t conform to such empirical or rational parameters – you and I.

Counter to this approach, Adorno, Horkeheimer and Foucault seem to be taking a much more hermeneutical approach to knowledge construction, arguing for the dialogical character of knowledge, the notion that investigators are also subject to the same historical and cultural forces as the ‘data sets’ with which they try to engage, and the notion that every element present in the constitution of knowledge is also bound to concentric circles of context and community.

One critique which can be levied against the kind of approach for which Foucault argues is the question of relativity. But, again, the notion of relativity only really makes sense if one rests on a kind of dualism which posits either knowledge is stable or it is not – in other words, if one assumes in advance the reality of objectivity. I think Foucault is trying to offer another alternative which complicates the notion of a stable epistemological center, but also argues that the construction of knowledge is still possible.

Long time, no see

2009-09-06T10:14:00.004-04:00

It's been forever since I posted anything on here. I'm going to blame it on the birth of my daughter, since I haven't really had the chance to sleep or get situated in the last eight weeks. Needless to say, things are starting to settle down in my life, and I'm ready to go move forward.

What's new?
1. I'm trying to start an emergent cohort in my local area. If you have ideas on how to build a strong nucleus, please let me know.

2. I'm beginning my doctoral studies this semester. I'm a student in an interdisciplinary program, focusing on philosophy of education, hermeneutics and higher education.

3. I want to continue to write, knowing that this blog is going to be very 'heady' at times and that I have no real 'topic' other than simply the things that interest me. Mostly, that is higher education, student affairs and religion.

4. I'm currently taking a seminar on the concept of disciplines. I'm going to be posting a lot of ideas from that seminar here.

Cheers -

End times

2009-04-27T14:48:00.003-04:00

The end of the university? Not a brilliant article, but an insightful one. Its odd, but not surprising, that he doesn't consider the role of student affairs as part of the university at all.

Sad news for TEC

2009-04-02T16:13:00.002-04:00

Article on Ann Redding's deposition from the Episcopal Church. I guess if you want to be a truth-teller you have to be willing to face crucifixion...

Hermeneutics & higher ed

2009-04-02T11:41:00.003-04:00

I apologize for my extended absence. I recently found out that I was accepted to a doctoral program in interdisciplinary studies at my current university, which I'll be doing part-time. My focus will be philosophy of education, hermeneutics, epistemology and higher education. I'm extremely excited about the opportunity, and I think it will have long-lasting and practical application on my job as a student affairs professional. It's a shame that most humanities & social science programs don't do more to train their gradutes for work outside the field of teaching - but that's for another post.

Also I've been busy preparing for the baby arriving this summer. Most of my readership are folks interested in religion and I still am, to be sure, interested in religion. I'm hoping that my dissertation will focus on the collision between the two worldviews of the academy and religion, and their impact on students as they begin to move from pre-critical to critical thinkers.

That being said, I've been dipping back into Heidegger, this time with a particular eye to hermeneutics.

"Conceived with a view to Dasein's possible self-transparency, hermeneutics does not itself carve out a trail to this awareness or propose models for doing so. It must remain the task of each individual Dasein to open up its own path to self-transparency....Dasein has a natural propensity to overlook itself, to deny that its possibilities for transparency are of its own making. This is especially evident in that human beings dissolve unawares into their world and are so lost to themselves. Instead of undertaking their own interpretations of themselves, they take up interpretations that are already available and so relieve themselves of the burden of self-elucidation. (98 - Introduction to Philosophical Hermeneutics)

So the question remains: Does higher education play a part in this process, should it play a part in this process and, if so, what is that role?

Cheers -

Lowering the drinking age...

2009-03-19T08:52:00.002-04:00

This probably the most pressing problem in higher education right now, and nobody seems to be willing to take a stand. Really good clip that outline the problem. If you want me to give feedback based on my experiences in student affairs, let me know.

http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=4819332n

The dark side of the moon

2009-03-13T09:14:00.001-04:00

So, I was going to log on this morning to make a post and accidentally misspelled the URL of my blog. I got this instead, which I find extremely coincidental.

Do Schools Kill Creativity?

2009-03-09T09:05:00.002-04:00

Cartesian dualism & family life centers

2009-03-08T10:09:00.000-04:00

“In phenomenology, for instance, philosophers tell us that the basic unit is not the substantial self relating to an objective world as a neutral observer, but the ‘self-in-the-world.’ We are selves only in relationship – relationships with the world of which we are a part and with other selves who respond to us as well influence us…The classical Western notion of the ‘individual’ as a substantial entity over against the world (both cosmic & personal) is the correlate both of Aristotelian metaphysics and seventeenth-century science, and it is no surprise that the rise of the novel, which charts the destiny of the individual, occurred at approximately the same time as Cartesian philosophy….” McFague, “Metaphorical Theology” (96).

It seems to me that one of the greatest threats we currently face is the Cartesian dualism on which Modernism is built. What I mean by this is our assumption that a distinct split between subject/object, I/Thou exists in the world – or, as McFague says, the basic unit is self/world, rather than ‘self-in-the-world.’

I don’t know why I didn’t see it before, but it seems to me painfully obvious that post/modernism is not about a simple tearing apart at the epistemological structures of society (i.e. the structures of knowledge – who defines it, creates it, controls it), but a rejection of the Cartesian dualism which underlies the Western version of reality. No wonder post/modernity is and can only be a Western condition.

What this means to me, as a university educator & employee, is that my task is not getting my students to begin the process of meaning-making. In fact, I am confident they already are. My task is the problem of integration – that is, breaking down the barriers which they assume exist between the ‘different worlds’ in which they exist. In other words, what does a physics major’s religious identity have to do with anything? I would argue, a whole hell of a lot, even though being a fundamentalist Christian or an atheist doesn’t change the speed of light. But it may, in fact, in form her vision of her essential task in the world, and the assumptions which direct her work. In other words, all of the constituent elements which inform our reality are always already integrated, though we believe we can ‘bracket’ them quite easily. This is one legacy of Cartesian dualism.

The same case can be made for Christianity. A basic problem in the history of the tradition has been Christianity’s relationship to the world, as outlined by St. Augustine. A Modern (with a capital M) solution has been to drink deeply of the dualism presented by Cartesian philosophy and create cities within cities – the ‘family life centers’ of the world, which are a ‘Christian oasis’ in the midst of the turmoil of society. The way I see it, this is (at best) a dangerous exercise in hubris, if not (at worst) a turning away from the very call of Christianity. I say ‘hubris’ because it seems to me that these centers exist as a statement that Christians are somehow ‘better’ than the rest of the world, therefore they require castle gates to create a boundary between the clean & unclean. I say ‘a turning away’ because these centers imply a Christian’s job is to give resources, aid, skills only on the terms of Christianity – rather than giving charity freely with no expectation of conversion, which is the reward.

The fundamentals

2009-03-07T08:54:00.001-05:00

A friend of mine posed a question to the Anglimergent group the other day: ‘what are our primary questions?’ And I thought, a few days after reading it, that this would be a good exercise for me to undertake in terms of my own life. I’m hoping that doing this isn’t one of those narcissistic games that get passed around facebook so frequently, nor do I expect I might actually arrive at something tangible. Even as I’m typing this sentence, I’m a bit concerned I’m going to draw a blank. But, if I look back over the entirety of my life, I think there are a few questions which have driven me, though I’ve never really drawn them up explicitly. So, here goes:

1. Where is my place in the world?
2. What does it mean that I will eventually cease to exist?
3. Is the ultimate effect of what I’m doing having a positive effect on the world?
4. Where is God? How will I know God if I see her?
5. Am I loved?
6. Must the world be this way and, if I were to reshape it, what would it become?

After spending some time writing those, it occurred to me that it’s probably just as important to write down what I take as givens in my life:

1. God exists, though Christianity doesn’t have a corner on the market.
2. There is inherent value & meaning in life, though not necessarily a purpose.
3. By living a privileged life, I am inherently responsible for suffering in the world.
4. Everyone has the capacity for love & honesty, and is deeply shaped by their experience in the world.
5. It is human nature to fear life, to fear change, to fear death – and this guides most of our decision making.
6. For me, the questions are more important than the answers. For most people, the answers are more important than the questions.
7. Suffering & joy are constituent elements of life.

After writing down my givens, it occurred to me that I might write down a few significant experiences that have shaped my givens & guiding questions.

1. Growing up in a culture where, for most of my youth, I felt marginalized. Having parents that challenged me to think about my place in and relationship to this culture.
2. Moving by myself to Atlanta after I graduated and having to encounter myself for the first time. This was my desert experience. Oh, and finding friends there who believed in me in a way I never had before.
3. Meeting my wife who believes in & encourages my vision at moments when even I do not. Also, learning from her what patience, balance & empathy are.
4. Going to art school in Arizona and learning that becoming human is not an easy task. And learning to trust myself in the process.
5. Going to divinity school and taking a stance on my own theological identity. Again, learning to trust my identity, even though most people – if they actually asked me – would conclude I’m a heretic.
6. Working with Dr. E. at Pitt who brushed away some of the cobwebs in my thinking, and then taught me how to sweep.
7. Trusting that skipping around the country and following my heart during my 20s would carry a value I would not discover until it was finished.
8. Finding out I’m going to be a dad in five months, and seeing that every time I think I’ve ‘got it,’ I really don’t. The first shall be last, right?

War On The Rich?

2009-03-06T15:18:00.001-05:00

Great article in Slate that I had to pass along.

Babies & the religion question

2009-02-21T08:46:00.000-05:00

As many of you know, my wife is pregnant and we’re due in July. It’s a strange thing, preparing for your life to change radically while also knowing you’re completely ignorant about what is about to happen. It’s really not that a baby has made me more contemplative, I think I had a helping and a half of that already – in fact, I’m finding myself swinging the other way. I’m, in some ways, deciding that the best way to prepare is just to walk through this experience without doing my typical obsessive thing. It seems to be working out well – for now.

If anything has changed, it’s gotten me to think more intentionally about some of the decisions I’ve made and am preparing to make in my life. Decisions like my career, where and how I’m spending my time, what I’m doing (or not doing) in terms of the environment and social justice, and then (of course) there’s the religion question.

Truth be told, I know a lot of new parents (all friends of my wife and I) who seem wistful, if not regretful, about the things they didn’t do in and with their lives before they had children. I’m sure I’ll understand this once I can’t do things like go get coffee on Saturday morning just to work on my blog. But my great hope is that I never become one of those people who totally deny themselves on behalf of their children. That’s a bold statement, I know, and I feel the need to explain in greater detail. What I do NOT mean is being inflexible and believing a child will never change things. What DO I mean is that I don’t want to become one of those parents who divorces themselves from the social, political, intellectual, and religious worlds in which they were involved before children – and replaces all their worlds with their child. You know, one of these people that you basically never see after children, because they’re too tired or afraid to leave their children home with a sitter on the weekend.

It’s probably not surprising that the ‘religion question’ has become increasingly important to me as we’ve continued to move forward in pregnancy. There are a lot of tensions we’re juggling with respect to religion, knowing this is one of those decisions that may have a deep impact on our child’s worldview. Truthfully, I think no matter what we decide, if we raise our child to be a critical and reflective thinker who can make his/her own decisions, it will all work out in the end.

I think the tension we’re juggling comes down to the fact that both my wife and I have, for the most part, positive memories of ‘growing up in’ a church community. It was important to us to think about religion, to have the social community, etc… On the other hand, as adults, we’ve both been badly burned by the church and are having a hard time coming back ‘in.’ Mixed in with all this is that neither of us wants to rejoin the denomination in which we were raised, for our own individual reasons – but also have a hard time feeling ‘at home’ if we’re not worshipping in communities of that style.

I was sort of hoping there would be an emergent cohort in where I live, but sadly, it’s too rural to really get anything started (at least that’s what I’ve heard from the 2 or 3 people who tried it the past few years). This may ultimately be one of those issues that I just choose to walk through and not worry too much about. For now I’ll keep chewing it over. Advice is much appreciated.

All you've ever wanted to know

2009-02-15T08:16:00.001-05:00

..about philosophy is here.

(I know this isn't that great of a post, but this is my favorite website and I haven't posted in a while.)

Turning Over Tables

2009-02-06T08:23:00.002-05:00

I heard a cool story on NPR this morning. Makes the introvert in me wish I was more of an activist.

McFague + Metaphor

2009-02-06T08:13:00.001-05:00

“But there is, I believe, an even deeper reason why religious literalism runs rampant in our time. It is not only that many people have lost the practice of religious contemplation and prayer, which alone is sufficient to keep literalism at bay, or that a positivistic scientism has injected a narrow view of truth into our culture. While both are true, it is also the case that we do not think in symbols in the way our forebears did. That is to say, we do not see things of this world as standing for something else; they are simply what they are. A symbolic sensibility, on the contrary, sees multilayered realities, with the literal level suggestive of meanings beyond itself. While it may have been more justified for people in earlier times to be biblical literalists since they were less conscious of relativity, as symbolic thinkers, they were not literalists.…The claim can be made that our time is more literalistic than any other time in history. Not only were double, triple, and more meanings once seen in Scripture (and Scripture considered richer as a consequence), but our notion of history as the recording of ‘facts’ is alien to the biblical consciousness. The ancients were less literalistic than we are, aware that truth has many levels and that when one writes the story of an influential person’s life, one’s perspective will color that story. Ours is a literalistic mentality; theirs was a symbolic mentality.”

- Sallie McFague “metaphorical theology”

Barak + the Economy

2009-02-05T15:24:00.002-05:00

Amazing letter from the president. Quite refreshing to have a politician who is willing to speak out radically on justice.

my atheism

2009-02-05T08:11:00.001-05:00

“In other words, Kierkegaard starts from the forlornness of the individual in the completely explained world. The individual finds himself in permanent contradiction to this explained world, since his ‘existenz,’ namely the pure factual character of his existing in all its contingency, can be neither foreseen by reason, nor resolved into something purely thinkable.”

-- Hannah Arendt

This is what I wrote down last night after two glasses of cheap scotch.

Tonight I began reading systematic theology again for the first time in several years. No matter how I fixed my attention on the text, all it appeared to be was a personal confession of faith, which simply took one person’s experience to its rational conclusion.

It seems that systematic theology is nothing other than a guess taking the form of an answer.

It is clear to me, as it has for many years, that I am agnostic first and Christian second – if I am even really Christian at all. Or is it more likely that I am atheist? I know that I don’t feel any faith in the church, though my connection to the cosmos has grown deeper and more profound with age. Church serves no purpose for me other than relieving an obligation I believe I still owe.

It seems clear that to believe one has access to God’s intentions is a form of lunacy. It is a type of a Napoleonic complex, which we all share in some form –we all want to unequivocally know ‘the truth’ – which is the meaning of the world.

But we cannot know what we want to know.

Perhaps this is where faith might start, in redemption. I cannot know what I need to know and so I must be redeemed of this burden of the unknowing.

And because of this it is confidence that forsakes redemption. It is confidence which is the stumbling block to faith. The paradox, then, is that redemption requires drinking deeply of the unknowing – from that which one needs redemption from.

Quotes of the moment

2009-01-26T08:37:00.002-05:00

“In fact history does not belong to us; we belong to it. Long before we understand ourselves through the process of self-examination, we understand ourselves in a self-evident way in the family, society, and state in which we live. The focus o f subjectivity is a distorting mirror. The self-awareness of the individual is only a flickering in the closed circuits of historical life. That is why the prejudices of the individual, far more than his judgments, constitute the historical reality of his being."

Gadamer, “Truth & Method”

“Given the intermediate position in which hermeneutics operates, it follows that its work is not to develop a procedure of understanding, but to clarify the conditions in which understanding takes place.”

Gadamer, “Truth & Method”

Theological worlds

2009-01-25T08:25:00.004-05:00

It’s clear that what most of what I write about (and think about) goes back to hermeneutics. It seems that the questions I struggle with in education are the same I struggled with in religion – which are, primarily, questions of interpretation.

One of the difficulties, I believe, is that we all carry a body of assumptions and commitments upon which we (intentionally or not) do not reflect. They are our blind spots. We move through our lives believing that we are operating in the same world as those around us. And while we are all on the same planet, the contents of the world in which we live is, in many ways, self projected. This is not altogether a bad thing, unless we allow the world in which we operate to go unreflected, or we try to defend its correctness against all opinions to the contrary.

Religion is a prime example. It is well known that while most believers would scoff at the idea that the concept of religion cannot be defined, most scholars of religion still have not found a workable definition. The closest being Geertz’s, which in my opinion carries far too much Western baggage to be accurate.

Part of the reason we have so much trouble defining it is that, well, religion is not the same thing to every person and in every culture (if it even exists at all). Now on sunny June Sunday in most churches across the US, I would have a hard time arguing this point. Clearly everyone arrives at the same time, dresses similar, seems to use the same language, and many feel meaning for their lives. Clearly this is the case – and I’m certainly not arguing that folks, myself included, haven’t felt something moving inside of them at church.

Yet for each of these people, religion has a very different meaning. For some it is a sanctuary, away from the harsh world. For others it is a place of contemplation, or a place to find meaning, or a place to find answers, or a place to find friends. What religion is, and how it functions, is a product of a dialogical relationship between the world of the group and the world of the individual. And for each individual this is radically different. There is not religion, but religions – and worlds which silently colliding.

[Post script: a good read on this sort of thing, though on a much more macro-level, is 'Theological Worlds' by W. Paul Jones.]

University worlds

2009-01-24T08:36:00.001-05:00

I am increasingly amazed at what I perceive as the gap between most universities’ perception of student engagement and actual student behavior. This point was made more apparent to me this week when I taught an ethics class for students who had gotten in trouble through the judicial system at my university. Though it wasn’t really a shock, it was sort of an eye opener to see students, who are incredibly serious about getting top grades and achieving in front of their parents and professors, being so disconnected and frustrated in a course which simply asked them to reflect on the impact of their behavior. Granted, this was a punishment, so I wasn’t expecting they would be chipper and excited to be there.

One example I can’t get out of my head is a student who tried to make the familiar argument that using a fake ID to get into a bar was okay because the drinking age was stupid and ‘everybody drinks at college anyway.’ Obviously, this was why she was in the course. I did my philosophy thing and wrote her argument on the board:

(1) The drinking rule in the US is wrong. (p)
(2) If I know a rule is wrong, then I can disregard it. (p)
(3) The drinking rule is wrong, therefore I can disregard it. (1, 2)

I asked her if she agreed that Mormons who wanted to engage in polygamy and believed the US policy was wrong could do that based on her logic. She didn’t like that, so she revised it:

(1) If I know a rule is wrong AND breaking it doesn’t hurt anybody, then I can disregard it. (p)
(2) The drinking rule is wrong. (p)
(3) If I don’t drive home afterwards, breaking the drinking rule doesn’t hurt anybody. (p)
(4) Therefore, I can disregard the drinking rule. (1-3).

So, I asked her, is cheating okay? I mean, it doesn’t physically hurt anyone AND I think having to take a math class is dumb for an English major – so shouldn’t the English major be allowed to cheat in math? At this point, she became very disgusted, though she never changed her mind because, ultimately, she didn’t really want to have to change her behavior or her beliefs. For her, college was clearly about fun and I was getting in the way of that.

I walked away from that class not mad at the student for not coming to my conclusion (unlike my co-presenters), but really wondering about the nature of university education. It seems to me that student affairs professionals, professors, and students all carry certain assumptions about the goals of a university education – but I’m beginning to question (a) whether those assumptions and expectations are remotely similar, (b) whose goal is correct, and (c) how we all begin to work from similar commitments to make the greatest impact.

This is all very abstract, I know. What I mean is this (in, admittedly, the most horribly stereotypical exercise ever):

(1) Most professors that I know are (and are expected to be) far more invested in their research subject than in wondering about their impact on students and society. In addition, sadly, most of them were not ‘typical’ college students in the sense that they didn’t party 2-3 nights a week and do their assignments at the last minute just to achieve a good grade. No, they were often deeply invested in the material they were learning – they believed in it, they saw it as applicable to the world, they thought it could (and can) change things – even at 20. Now they either assume most of their students are the same as they were, and/or they ignore what happens outside the classroom – so long as assignments are turned in on time. Knowledge is the most important thing, and class is the way to gain it.

(2) Most student affairs professionals were those college kids who, contrary to the young professors, tried to ‘get the most out of the experience of college.’ I don’t necessarily mean that they partied and didn’t do work – no, they were the heads of the student organizations, they attended university social events, they saw the university as a place to find and create their own identity. They were, alas, the ‘goody goodies.’ Class is important, but having a terrific experience and finding one’s path is the MOST important thing. They wanted to take it all in, and so now they expect their students to do the same thing.

(3) Students run the gambit. And yet, I’d say the average college student wants to get good grades, not be bothered, and have a good time. Many see their university education as a diploma – as a way to get a good job - but before they have to enter the workforce, which means adulthood in full, they want to party it up while they have the chance. After all, they’ve heard their parents talk about their wild times, they’ve heard older siblings or friends do the same, and they’ve all seen Animal House or Old School. This is their image of university: grades first, beer second. Learning? Sure, it’s a nice byproduct.

Please hear me out: I don’t actually believe people fit neatly into these categories, though I still think the general idea has some merit. My point really is that each of these three groups, in my estimation, is operating in distinctly different worlds, and having these worlds exist with no dialogue between them is quite detrimental to all three groups. But, where exactly does the truth lie in terms of what a university education is supposed to be? And how do we get from here to there? I don’t really have an answer, though this is sort of what my career is about and I think I might need a little help. Reflections are appreciated. Cheers –

Obama + Moltmann

2009-01-22T08:23:00.001-05:00

Ever since the inauguration, I’ve been amazed with how the tenor of an entire country can do a complete reversal in such a short period of time. It feels as though we have truly moved from a nation operating out of fear to a nation operating out of hope – and it’s been a long time coming. This was all made so much more palpable when President Obama called for the closure of Guantanamo Bay. I used this shift as a way to begin rediscovering some of works of Jurgen Moltmann’s which have had a powerful effect on me. Here is a quote I came across last night as I was re-reading ‘The Experiment Hope’:

“Today we understand hope quite differently. Dostoevsky wrote: ‘The ant knows the formula of his ant hill. The bee knows the formula of his beehive. They do not know their formula in a human way, but in their own way. And they don’t need to know more. Only man does not know his formula.’ With this epigram he wanted to say that man is not a finished creature like an ant or bee. His essence his not handed to him as a finished product but assigned to him as a task. Thus he is hidden to himself and constantly in search of his true essence. His essence is for himself and for his equals an open question, a puzzle, and often a dread. He must himself give the answer to humanity and yet in history he can consider none of his answers as final. Man in his mere existence is an experiment. It can be attributed to his messianic nature that he must go to the boundaries of his possibilities and even beyond them in order to find himself.” (20).

Bush's last days

2009-01-21T11:14:00.003-05:00

Probably one of the best articles I've read summarizing the last eight years. Cheers -

Quote of the moment

2009-01-21T08:39:00.002-05:00

'And today? The age of phenomenological philosophy seems to be over. It is already taken as something past which is only recorded historically along with other schools of philosophy. But in what is most its own, phenomenology is not a school. It is the possibility of thinking, at times changing and only thus persisting, of corresponding to the claim of what is to be thought. If phenomenology is thus experienced and retained, it can disappear as a designation in favor of the matter of thinking whose manifestness remains a mystery.'

- My Way To Phenomenology, Heidegger.

the tipping point

2009-01-17T09:05:00.000-05:00

I know it’s probably because I’ve worked in and around student affairs for the past six years, but it never ceases to amaze me how confused students & parents are that a lot more people than professors work at universities. I had a student and her mom come in to my office this past week, both visibly upset that her room wasn’t big enough. I did the usual – tried to calm both of them down, tried to speak directly with the student (rather than have the mom solve her 20-year-old daughter’s problem). Ultimately, I ended up flat out asking the kid – ‘exactly how is it that you’ve lived here 5 months without speaking to anyone on staff about this problem?’

I got the typical list of defensive answers, all of which I know were completely untrue, but would save face in front of her mom:
“I didn’t know where to go”
“I don’t have an RA”
“I told somebody, but they weren’t able to help me.”

I think the longer I go in this field, the more I’m fascinated by why the situation that all ancillary units in a university are not valued – the situation applies to students, parents, alumni, professors, etc….I wonder why this is the case (and if anyone has any big ideas, please leave me a comment).

Part of it, I know is that student affairs is a ‘helping field’ and we, Americans suckled on empiricism and capitalism, aren’t going to value it because on the surface it contributes very little to either of these concepts.

There is also the sad but true fact that ‘student development theory’ isn’t exactly the most critical of fields.

There is also the fact that faculty don’t really want to get involved too deeply in students’ real lives (this is a sweeping generalization, for sure, but one that I think holds merit). Faculty are so crushed with competition that even if they did, most of the time they couldn’t. But many of them get into the game not to teach, but because they are passionate about their subject area. This is not a terrible state of affairs, but does dictate where most of their time and attention goes. Most universities have a ‘don’t ask / don’t tell’ policy, where we don’t tell professors about the rabid alcoholism, the outbreaks of sexual assaults, the psychological disorders that often occurs in the halls, and they pretend that students leave their class, study and arrive back refreshed the next day.

It’s also a question of money. Student affairs departments are almost universally grossly underfunded, meaning that all we have time for is putting out fires and not truly contributing to education.

Ultimately, I have to believe that I’m contributing to students’ education. That’s why I got into this field. But many days I feel like my field is stuck in a rut. Afraid to be creative for fear of lawsuits, fear of having to stand up to faculty, fear of change. What would my model residential experience look like? I’m not sure. It would probably be something like U Chicago where a student’s educational experience is intended to take place in more places than the classroom – and where space is given for reflection, contemplation, dialogue – not only on the subject matter, but on the very process of learning, itself.

So if anybody has any big ideas on how to start moving toward the tipping point of change, please let me know.

Long time gone

2009-01-11T08:18:00.001-05:00

Wow, it’s been a while. I feel like this is sort of an awkward chance encounter with an ex-girlfriend. You know what I mean. I have to sort of reintroduce myself to somebody who knew me deeply a while ago. Anyway, I’ll stop before this gets any creepier. I’m pretty sure the reason I have trouble blogging with any consistency is that I’m really wordy, and I have to find at least 45 minutes to write a single entry. I guess I’m not as postmodern as I once hoped to be. Maybe things will change.

News and notes I want to expand on in the future, ala Trippor. Hopefully this will make me write more.

(1) My wife is pregnant. She just entered her second trimester, and I’ve never felt as terrified, underprepared, or thrilled as I did at the first major sonogram last week.
(2) I’ve just applied to a doctoral program and proposed to do a project melding hermeneutics and education theory. Not sure if I’ve got a snowball’s chance of getting in, but I feel good about my project. Unlike the long foray into philosophy of religion, I have a deep sense of urgency about this project which I think has to do with it having practical application.
(3) Six months in a new city and we’re still ‘church shopping.’ It doesn’t help that my wife and I are both insanely introverted, as well as the fact that I’ve got so much theological baggage it took two moving trucks to bring it to VA.
(4) For the last eight months I’ve been working on my first completely unified book of poetry. It’s still untitled and is a response to Wittgenstein’s ‘Philosophical Investigations.’ The process has been sort of like eating your favorite meal for every day, with no real end in sight. It’s been extremely different than just writing single pieces and then collecting them. When I get a few of the individual pieces finished I’ll post them here.
(5) My first full length work, ‘Notes from the Eli Manuscript,’ which is sort of hybrid work coming out of my work in phenomenology has yet to hit the stands. I’ve gotten a few bites, but nothing substantial.

No Child Left Behind?

2008-11-29T12:12:00.001-05:00

"[Hermeneutics] stands opposed to our characteristic Modern (and modernist) assumptions (which are): that any worthwhile discipline of thought will deliver answers, will tell us ‘what works,’ will prove its merit by the criterion of effectiveness. [Hermeneutics] is at odds - and we need to be clear that this is so – with an age that seems to believe that nothing has value unless it has demonstrable, quantifiable outcomes. It does not only fit ill with, but constitutes an act of resistance to, what we have learned to call, following Lyotard, the culture of performativity: a culture that behaves as if in education as in everything else the highest good is to maximize the ratio between input and output, as if economy with resources (larger class sizes and standardized lessons) and better results (as measured by test scores and examinations) automatically means better education. To the mentality that fetishizes the performance-indicator, the Socratic dialogue is likely to remain a lasting puzzle."

- Padraig Hogan & Richard Smith in ‘Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Education,’ pg 174-175

A case study in postmodernity

2008-11-22T08:47:00.001-05:00

Alright, I admit that this program is really cool.

You can’t go home again

2008-11-22T08:26:00.001-05:00

As some of you know, I’m again toying with the idea of doctoral work. I know - it’s a terrible habit I have, and those who have known me long enough are already rolling their eyes. But this time around, I have a lot more clarity about both the means and aims of my scholarship, as well as my vocational goals. It also helps that my current position will pick up the tab on part-time doctoral work, meaning I can be a practitioner for change while I’m becoming more creative and more informed about what I’m putting into action on a daily basis. (It also means I won’t get any sleep for a while.)

I’m proposing as a project melding something from my past (philosophical hermeneutics) with something from my present & future (education theory). I am interested in what I see as a deep relationship between education and a broad approach to hermeneutics, primarily insofar as (a) education involves interpretation and understanding, (b) education is guided by texts, reading and writing, (c) learning is mediated through language and symbols, (d) and educational experience is a temporal process involving an interplay of traditions, approaches and expressions.

In other words - just what is it that happens when a multiplicity of paradigms come into contact?

I have a particular interest in how the concept higher education is shifting as universities increasingly become more like ‘knowledge factories’ than bastions of higher education. In other words, as a university education becomes a commodity to be bought and sold on the free market, professors are expected to privilege ‘production’ over scholarship & teaching; students are expected to privilege return on investment over dialogue, exploration and risk; administrators are to privilege university stakeholders over those who embody the university. The question is: how does this change the concept of education?

I’m not sure what my chances are with this proposal, particularly because the university where I work is very analytic and mathematical – meaning that they will, inevitably (and unfortunately), see this work as ‘soft.’ This will partially arise out of one of my underlying assumptions, which will come as slight (but unintended) dig - that the objectivity most academics claim is an impossible ideal.

But that’s where I am and, like it or not, I can never go home again.

Open Anglicanism?

2008-11-02T08:51:00.003-05:00

Has it finally arrived? Like the U2charist, I'm not convinced this is the saving grace for the Anglican communion, but it raises a whole hell of a lot of theological and historical questions. I imagine it will play out in fascinating ways in the years ahead.

See also: "Sydney Diocese Approves Lay Presidency at the Eucharist"

Am I missing something?

2008-11-01T09:44:00.003-04:00

Dear reader,

I apologize for my extended absence during the month of October and, I anticipate, into the month of November. I will be back, and please know that therivermerchant is still on the top of my mind. As many of you know, I have gone through a bit of a career shift since June of last year. Perhaps inevitably, this has caused my intellectual attention to turn quite a bit - in ways I did not and could not have anticipated. While I am still very passionate about religion and philosophy of religion, I have spent most of the last few months doing extensive reading in the philosophy of education, in social epistemology, and in hermeneutics. Where this leads me, I'm not sure, but I will try to post a bit of my findings here in the future. I also have been working to finish edits on a creative manuscript and send it out to publishing houses, which is also extremely time consuming. Perhaps I need to get better at the art of the quick post. Though those who know me personally will also know how much of a challenge that will be for me.

Cheers -

The art of the philosopher is not to be cheated of [her or] his puzzlement before it is really cleared up. Wittgenstein

Poem of the moment

2008-10-10T13:02:00.002-04:00

Culture and the Universe

Two nights ago
in the canyon darkness,
only the half-moon and stars,
only mere men.
Prayer, faith, love
existence.

We are measured
by vastness beyond ourselves.
Dark is light.
Stone is rising.

I don't know
if humankind understands
culture: the act
of being human
is not easy knowledge.

With painted wooden sticks
and feathers, we journey
into the canyon toward stone,
a massive presence
in midwinter.

We stop.

Lean into me.
The universe
sings in quiet meditation.

We are wordless:
I am in you.

Without knowing why
culture needs our knowledge,
we are one self in the canyon.

And the stone wall
I lean upon spins me
wordless and silent
to the reach of stars
and to the heavens within.

It's not humankind after all
nor is it culture
that limits us.
It is the vastness
we do not enter.
It is the stars
we do not let own us.

- Simon J. Ortiz from "Out There Somewhere"

Fuller on Objectivity

2008-10-03T09:56:00.002-04:00

From Steve Fuller's text, "Social Epistemology."

"…in order to cover up the socially constructed character of reality, it is important that any potentially discontented individuals be made to feel that they must bear the burden of proof, should they ever become suspicious of the regnant social metaphysics. For example, Foucault himself writes of the “discipline” that both a psychiatrist and a patient must undergo before the psychiatrist can classify the patient as having a certain mental disorder. For his part, the psychiatrist must learn to focus his attention – his ‘gaze’ Foucault calls it – on specific behaviors manifested by the patient that are to be treated as ‘symptoms,’ even if, in a different social context, they would appear quite normal. Likewise, the patient must learn to interpret his own behavior in this way and thereby admit that the psychiatrist better understands what sort of person the patient is than the patient himself does. In thus submitting to the psychiatrist’s authority, the patient contributes to the standardization of the scheme for classifying mental disorders and, hence, to its objectivity." (33)

Poem of the moment

2008-09-30T07:27:00.007-04:00

This is a piece of longer poem
entitled "Lacrimae Rerum" from
Geri Doran's book Resin.

At Dachau, in the women's latrine, was a vanity
fashioned thus: a wooden box,
a triangle of mirror culled from the Oberfuhrer's bin.
She made this, the woman
who cleaned, to see what vestiges of beauty
remained.

Tell me.
Who are the common? Who the unclean?

Tune in, drop out

2008-09-28T09:20:00.001-04:00

A few weeks ago a friend asked if I would blog a little about my decision to leave the faculty side of the academy. I know from the outset that I’m not going to do justice to the range of emotion I’ve had over the last year, as I’ve seen something which constituted a huge part of my identity dissolve and something else emerge in its place. I also touched a little on this concept in a blog post about a month ago called “Problematizing Higher Education.”

Anyway, I think a decent portion of my decision had to do with finally accepting that the fact that higher education in the US is an industry – the knowledge industry – and it is this fact dictates the superstructure, curriculum and priorities of most universities. What a large portion of my decision came down to was realizing how this brute fact of industry would affect my personal life, and realizing that I am not (nor will I ever) be willing to put my career before my marriage, my wife, or my own emotional/mental well-being. In the words of my former advisor, I was unwilling to become (as one must) in academics - “a shark in a bathtub.”

This is not to say that all people I worked with were sharks – many of them were amazingly intelligent, passionate people. It’s just that the nature of the industry is such that one must subsume all other life goals in order for the dream of professorship to become a reality – something I cannot and will not do.

There is also the fact that liberal arts and humanities do not prepare graduate students for work in any other industry – unlike many of the scientific and research fields. And so as students are becoming experts in their field, they are also crippling their job skills should the dream of becoming a professor not become a reality.

There is also the fact that I was never one of those people passionate about changing ‘the history of ideas.’ While I take philosophy of religion seriously, I always believed its most important use was not as an industry commodity, but a method by which student’s worldviews could be changed.

I have written before about the day I was working with a student of mine, a chemistry major, on the problem of evil. She said to me something to the effect of ‘I guess this is interesting and everything, but as a chemistry major it has no use to me.’ I think that was the day something broke – the day I started wondering what the actual relationship between the university and its students was, and what my role would actually have been had I been in front of the classroom. (I also looked out at the field and saw job placement figures looming around 30% for recent religious studies doctorates and got a little nervous.)

Through my two master’s degrees, I worked as a graduate hall director and, frankly, the position and the students with whom I worked left me profoundly changed me. I took a few months thinking deeply and critically about my life, what I wanted out of it – what, when I head home, I want my narrative to be. What I decided is that I am extremely passionate about working with students during the developmental experience of college and that I have something to important offer, but perhaps in a way very different than I originally envisioned.

So, I don’t believe my old interest has died, but perhaps been reformed – and I took a position in student affairs at a large research university.

One of the benefits of my scattered experience is that I have become hyperaware of the ‘two worlds’ of the university in which most students live – the academic and social - and the fact that never the twain shall meet.

My experience on the faculty side made it abundantly clear that most (not all) faculty are oblivious to the social world in which their students live; on the contrary, most student affairs professionals have no clue of the demands and expectations placed on most professors and their role as educators. In fact the two departments in large universities are often quite hostile toward each other – both believing they are what constitute the authentic ‘educational’ mission of the university.

I see my future as combating this brute fact, as it is not the egos of the university who suffer because of it – but the students. I also have not thrown out the idea of working toward a doctorate, but I can only envision myself working on a pragmatic problem born out through my experience at the institution – rather than some sort of theoretical mudslinging.

Lastly, while student affairs is perhaps one of the most marginalized positions in the university, I believe I am best positioned here to create actual, observable change in the university – not only structurally, but in the lives of the student with whom I work.

The skittish christian

2008-09-28T09:18:00.002-04:00

This is a repost of something I wrote in March, 2008 for a friend of mine.

I’ve always been a marginal christian. That’s not completely true. Maybe it’s better to say something like I’ve been a skittish christian. What I mean is that for most of my adult life I’ve had extreme difficulty being a member of a church. Perhaps it’s that I expect too much of people in a religious setting – that they would act civil and leave their egos at the door. I think I’ve finally realized after all these years that’s just not going to happen. But for whatever reasons I’ve had in the past, now that I’m moving closer to thirty and some of my restless angst has worn away I find myself now looking to try and commit myself to a church. The problem is: I can’t find any.

As my wife and I enter the second month of the aptly-named “church shopping” process, I find myself worn down and underwhelmed. To be fair, we haven’t blanketed the city just yet, but we’ve done a fair amount of visiting, and reading about what different congregations say about themselves online, etc…What I’ve discovered is that there is no place that seems to fit what I’m looking for, and I’m starting to wonder if the problem isn’t the churches, but if its me. (It should be no secret perfectionist tendencies are the reality I live within.)

I decided it might be helpful to come up with a short list of what I’m looking for in a congregation, and hopefully this might help me get a bearing on why this process has been so difficult. So, here it is: I’m looking for a community with (a) an open theology which (b) has a strong social justice component and (c) at least a small, core group of people my age I can dialogue with. And then (d) is the “big worship question”, which is always difficult when one has deeply engrained liturgical genes.

The “big worship question” is simply that I want a place that doesn’t rely on the spoken word (i.e. preaching) as the primary trick in their worship toolbox. What I mean is that I want Eucharist, or some other major non-verbal liturgical experience to be the pinnacle of the service, not just some dude talking. In other words, I go to church for an experience which is quite different from the classes I sit through Monday through Friday. I go to church to become. (Tips cap to Process thought).

Now that I’ve written it, I think that what I’m looking for in a congregation seems simple in theory, but very difficult in delivery. This seems like some perfect world, like some Clark Griswold old fashioned family Christmas. Thus far, nearly every church I’ve found that meets the requirements for “C” (with a group my age) requires me to be bathed in the blood of the lamb on entrance. Not something I’m quite prepared to do. On the other hand, nearly every church that meets “A” (a half-decent theology) and “B” (focused on social justice) has an average age of 75 and a worship experience quite akin to getting a root canal, sans anesthesia. In all scenarios the worship culminates in a half-baked lecture that somebody calls a sermon simply because they’re at the front and I’m sitting in a pew. I used to be able to stomach this, but as a post-Tupperian theolog this is just too difficult.

If that wasn’t enough, it doesn’t help that my raging perfectionist critic is matched only by my raging introvert. And so I find myself sitting it the back of these pews (always underdressed, because people feel like God somehow cares if you wear pressed underwear) silently critiquing something that very likely can never live up to my fantasy standards, and then running out the door because I don’t want to ask any questions. I think I may have a full-blown dysfunction here. I couldn’t sabotage myself any more if I was George Costanza.

So where do I go from here? This is not a rhetorical question, but an open one. Where am I suppose to find a community that allows me to be myself, to be open and to be invested? Do I need to adjust my matrix? I’m tired of this being a painful process, and I’m about an eyelash away from packing it up for at least another year.

Random quote

2008-09-16T08:02:00.001-04:00

"The driving force behind the desire to know is the need to make the world over in terms that are meaningful."

- Paul Ricoeur, Ricoeur Reader, 11.

Random quote

2008-09-14T16:50:00.003-04:00

On the Panopticon:

"He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaniously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection."

-- Foucault, Discipline & Punish, 202/203.

does religion exist? (Part 6)

2008-09-14T10:32:00.004-04:00

Part 6: Christianity & Religious Belief

[This is the sixth part of my conversation with & reading of Talal Asad’s Genealogies of Religion.]

As the Western definition of religion shifted from a disparate set of cultural practices to an apparently systematic system of belief, the Christian West began to understand religion as being primarily about correct meaning and conceptual clarity. And as religion became increasingly an affirmation about the fundamental nature of reality – in a systematic, cognitive sense – then, reciprocally, membership in religious groups was contingent upon individual affirmation of the group’s set of theological beliefs.

Thus, while Western thought (both religion and religious scholarship) would admit religion is a praxis of (a) belief and (b) practice – it is quite clear that the theological & conceptual belief is the more privileged of the two aspects.

It is this very privileging of the conceptual over the practical that leaves scholars and believers, alike, in the position of constructing the theoretical category of religion through a preconceived notion of religion in the world. In other words, as Asad asks: ‘how does theoretical discourse actually define religion?’ (44). Put another way, we might say: our current definition of religion is so narrow and predetermined by Western cultural assumptions, that when we go out in the world looking for "religion," we’re bound to miss quite a lot. Or, as Brian McLaren says – ‘what we focus on determines what we miss.’

The next question is, then: what kinds of affirmations, of meaning, must be identified with practice in order for it to qualify as ‘religion’ in a Western sense?

Most scholars (and many Christians) follow Clifford Geertz in arguing that because all human beings have a profound need for a general order of existence (and a deep dread of disorder) that religious symbols, concepts and practices function to fulfill that need.

Yet, this view of religion most likely would have horrified the early Christian Fathers and medieval churchmen and can be considered a product of the only legitimate cultural space allowed to Christianity by post-Enlightenment society: the right to individual belief. In other words, the post-Enlightenment West generally views the human condition as full of ignorance, pain, injustice – therefore religious symbols are a means of coming positively to terms with that condition.

Yet to argue that right belief is the universal function of religion is one indication of how marginal religion has become in modern industrial society, as it now is reduced to being the site for producing disciplined knowledge and personal discipline.

On one hand, many scholars carry this Western assumption of religion as belief and argue religion actually comes to resemble the Marx’s conception of religion as ideology. In other words, religion is a mode of consciousness which is outside the consciousness of reality, which produces no knowledge, but both expresses the anguish of the oppressed and gives the oppressed consolation.

On the other hand, many religious leaders & believers carry this Western assumption religion as belief and argue, contrary to Marx, that religious belief stands independently of the worldly conditions. They argue, instead, that it is the world that produces bafflement, pain and moral paradox – and belief is primarily a way of coming to terms with them. Perhaps it goes without saying, but that religion cannot exist independently of culture, as it is part of culture. In fact, what many Christians believe today about God, life after death, the universe, is not what they believed a millennium ago – simply on the basis of socio-cultural change. Asad gives as an example the medieval valorization of pain as the mode of participating in Christ’s suffering. This contrasts sharply with the modern Catholic perception of pain as an evil to be fought against and overcome as Christ the Healer did. I would use as an example the fact that early fundamentalism believed technology, such as broadcasting sermons via the radio, was a mark of the devil - whereas now Sunday morning television is clogged with televangelists.

In any case, what we are left with is that the Western conception of ‘religion’ is based is a modern, privatized Christian expectation. And is not too unreasonable to maintain that the “the religious perspective” is not everywhere the same. It is preeminently the Christian church that has occupied itself with identifying, cultivating, and testing belief as a verbalizable inner condition of true religion. And it is this very characterization which guides the vast majority of Western assumptions about religion (from the scholar, to the preacher, to the atheist).

Problematizing Higher Education

2008-09-06T10:20:00.000-04:00

I find myself a bit at a loss this morning trying to write my first post in a long while. This is partly due to my being ‘out of the game’ for a while, but partly because my vocational shift brought with it quite a shift in the focus of my attention. It is not that my interest in religion as a subject has dissolved, but that most of my waking hours are spent thinking about not about the structures of religion, but the structures of higher education and their effect on the students operating within them.

I also find myself, for the first time, at a university which places very little value on the liberal arts & humanities. This has been an extremely strange experience for me, as I find myself surrounded by very bright people who tend think only in extremely pragmatic and black/white terms. This isn’t necessarily a terrible thing, as it stands – the trouble is that they see no value in that which is non-scientific or non-empirical, or what they label condescendingly as the “subjective” rather than the “objective” (a categorical distinction which I find holds no merit and which I feel confident I will write several posts about).

What I am curious in understanding more about (and getting feedback on) is what I perceive as a giant, gaping hole in our current system of higher education. That hole is the distinction between the experiential reality of students and the “academic education” they receive at university – a distinction which I find does not hold, but which the university tends both to assume and support. [I should note that I find the entire concept of “education” to be philosophically slippery and intriguing and will probably write on that as well.]

About three weeks ago I went to a talk by the provost of my current university who said, quite explicitly, that faculty are completely oblivious to what happens in the lives of students (he was speaking specifically of their social lives) and that, in fact, they prefer it to stay that way. About a week later, a dean was addressing a group of undergraduate students, and said how wonderful it was that all facets of the university rallied behind the goal of becoming a major research institution.

Perhaps I perceive something that isn’t a problem, but most students who I have spoken with tend to disagree with both statements and, in fact, resent them being made (as do I). And in both situations, the problem seems to be the same: that when the university is structured around faculty research and money, the university ceases to be an institution of higher education and is simply another scientific commodity on the open market. To me, this is as much as issue of education, as it is an issue of social justice and civic responsibility.

To be honest, I’m not sure where I’m going with this. I think I am, in some sense, beginning to clarify and problematize the situation as I see it.

I will end with this. Husserl argued that one of the tasks of phenomenology is to overcome and replace the narrow definition of experience as simply the reception of empirical data – as well as to clarify all the different forms of experience. In a sense, what Husserl argued is that lived experience is much more rich and nuanced than simply looking at sensory impressions (what has been called ‘the myth of the given’) and making judgments based on them. To expand this concept in a much more Heideggerian direction: hermeneutical interpretation is not A form of life but is THE form of life. We are always already interpreting each part of our lives in relationship to itself in the continuum of our ever-present and ever-expanding history.

My university (as many are) is structured on quite dangerous and detrimental criteria regarding how and why students learn. One of those criteria is: what happens in the classroom is completely and utterly disconnected to what happens in their lives. And yet if I take any part of phenomenological hermeneutics seriously (which I do), any such distinction is destined to be false and, ultimately, damaging to students and the communities of which they are a part. This must change.

Short sabbatical

2008-08-03T08:43:00.002-04:00

As you might already know, I work in student affairs which means that I pretty much work 24/7 during the month of August. Chances of me updating the blog between now and September 1: 10%. Chances of me having a record number of posts in September: 100%.

Heretics, Religious Systems & Foucault; or Why My Favorite Jesus is Post-Structural Jesus

2008-07-26T17:09:00.001-04:00

It’s been a while since I wrote a spontaneous post, so forgive me as I jump back up onto my rickety, rambling soapbox. My Asad project, to the dismay of both of my readers, will continue shortly.

A few weeks ago I was involved in a pretty cool discussion on the Anglimergent site regarding the Anglican debate about homosexuality. We weren’t actually discussing the issues, but the necessity (and ridiculousness) of even having the debate. Conversation inevitably digressed into a dialogue about the nature of biblical stances on homosexuality, what happens if someone is bordering on heresy, and the necessity of communal correction. In other words, we left the ‘–mergent’ behind and headed straight for the ‘Angli-.’

The question I took away from the discussion was about the nature of communal religious systems and their role in the instruction (and correction) of members. It is to this question I will turn.

This morning I was reading the French philosopher & social theorist Michel Foucault’s major work Discipline and Punish, which is pretty amazing, in spite of some questionable research tactics. The book is an examination of just such a topic: the relationship between systems of knowledge and systems of power, as well as how & why ‘corrective’ action is taken by such systems. It is perhaps important to note that one Foucault’s major tasks in this text is to examine those things we assume are necessary truths in society and to find what is actually socially constructed or contingent in them.

The book seems to make two claims relative to this post. First, that there is a direct relationship between systems of knowledge & systems of power. In other words, those who are in power dictate what ‘counts’ as knowledge or truth and what does not. Second, Foucault attempts to show how modern systems of knowledge are built on corrective systems, such as the modern prison system, such that when someone subverts them, corrective action is taken to bring them back to the normative view.

What we might say is that systems of knowledge (i.e. systems of education, religious communities, etc…) are based on a corrective model and power dynamic which seeks to silence dissenting or questioning voices in order to normalize and unify participant/subjects. Those who challenge or subvert the system are exposed to corrective action which seeks to normalize the subject by eliminating his/her individuality or, if this is impossible, to eliminate the subject from the system entirely. (Note: this my reading of Foucault, and I am not a Foucault scholar by any means).

Foucault’s critique, which could be described as poststructuralist or postmodern, seeks to overturn this corrective or normalizing model of participant/subjects, and replace it with a model in which knowledge/power is redistributed from the hands of the few in control of the system to the hands of the many.

If we take Foucault seriously (which I do), in terms of religious heresy the question, then, is not ‘what action should be taken against a heretical member of a religious community,’ but instead ‘who controls the matrix of heresy?’ or ‘who decides who stands inside, and who stands outside the boundary of religious truth?’

It is no secret that traditional, denominational models are built on the modernist corrective model. Some leaders in this model would most likely answer this question of “who controls the matrix” by saying “the boundary is dictated by God through the Bible,” which is a flimsy (yet apparently effective) way of reinforcing the traditional matrix of religious power. The answer “God decides” clearly implies that although God may dictate through the Bible, only a few powerful church leaders are competent enough to understand the Bible. We can see this very clearly fundamentalist/conservative circles where the few in power dictate the theological agenda and the “acceptable” moral boundaries of the many. In this way, those in power become God’s power brokers - forcing their own cultural and ideological agenda on the many and eliminating dissent by appealing to their own, unique relationship to God (see also: the Southern Baptist Convention).

Yet this same model of power and corrective action quietly persists in the more liberal denominational models which, though overtly dialogical when it comes to matters of faith and theology, are still saturated in a system which give unique privileges and authority to those in power. I will use my own Anglican denomination as an example. Episcopalians tend to value individual thought and expression, as evidenced in the motto of the church as a “priesthood of all believers.” And yet, we still find there are a very few with unique power who dictate the liturgical, educational and, in many ways, theological (through the sermon) agenda of the congregation. I find the greatest evidence for this sort of persistent power dynamic in the often overlooked tradition that only the ordained have the privilege of reading the Gospel (the cornerstone of Christian faith) during the course of communal worship.

This is not to say both models don’t have merits and weaknesses, but that they are both based on a modernist corrective model. And the only way to move toward empowering the many is honesty in understanding how and why we do what we do.

In my mind this power/knowledge dynamic is why the emergent movement represents such a radical and important change (contrary to the popular believe that the only change they represent is the use of acoustic guitars during worship). The emergent model strives to actually distribute power/knowledge in the hands and lives of the many, rather than the few. This flies in the face of 99.9% of the history of Christendom, and is truly, truly post-modern.

I will end on this note. This thought occurred to me on the walk home from reading Foucault: if I am taking the Christian tradition seriously, then I tend to view Jesus as a pretty important guy. And, further, when I read the Gospels, I hear very little (if anything) in Jesus’ voice which is either distinctly absolutist or corrective (to the chagrin of most televangelists). Instead, I hear a great deal of concepts and stories which are paradigmatic or (as we might say) intentionally dialogical. In other words, what Jesus offers is not dictatorial, but provocative - it provokes us to something outside of ourselves. Jesus’ articulations, by in large, tend to redistribute power and knowledge from the absolutism of a religious system into the hands of powerless, individual subjects by elevating and including the powerless in radical rediscovery of their humanity and intrinsic value as being made imago Dei.

And so to the question of communal correction, I believe we must reject any system which relies on this language or tactic, as it implies a wholly normative/absolute matrix enforced by a powerful few. Instead, we must embrace a ‘-mergent’ view which is not constructed of leaders & followers, but embodies nodes of willing, empathetic friends. There is not communal correction, but only the ebb and flow of communion and friendship. And it’s quite terrifying because it calls us forward to ownership of our humanity and a responsibility to the dignity of the other. This seems to me, at least today, to be my Christian call.

does religion exist? (part five)

2008-07-19T07:52:00.002-04:00

Okay, what was a week turned into a month. Who knew moving and starting a new job would be hectic? Obviously not me.

Part 5: Religion and Universal Truth

[This is the fifth part of my conversation with & reading of Talal Asad’s Genealogies of Religion.]

It was late in the seventeenth century, after the Protestant Reformation, that we find the earliest systematic attempts at producing a universal definition of religion. This was primarily due to the shattering of the authority of the Roman church and many old structures of political power.

Lord Herbert’s De veritate produced a definition of what later became known as ‘Natural Religion.’ This is, in short, the idea that there is there is a universal and innate religious reality common to all human beings, expressed through the world’s various religions. Lord Herbert’s assessment included as part of the definition that all religions held (a) particular beliefs about a supreme power, (b) a set of practices or ordered worship and (c) ethics, or a code of conduct based on eternal rewards and punishments. All three were said to exist in all societies throughout all time.

A key point here is that the emphasis of ‘religion’ shifted away from how one practiced, to being about what one believed. It was in this period that ‘religion’ became conceptualized as a set of propositions to which believers gave assent. This new understanding of the concept of religion did two important things.

First, it allowed all religions to be compared against each other this new universal measuring stick of natural religion. In this way, natural religion was a crucial piece formation of the modern concept of religious belief, experience and practice.

Second, it carved out cultural space where Christianity could still hold authority against the burgeoning of ‘natural science.’ In other words, as ‘natural science’ emerged and gained power as the source for knowledge about the world, Christianity was losing power as the primary cultural authority. Christian theology needed a way to respond to the diminishing of its cultural power.

In seventeenth century works like Locke’s The Reasonableness of Christianity we can see Christianity’s response to both the former and latter circumstances. Locke’s text was one of the first to popularize a newly developing theory in Christianity: that Jesus’ prophecy was foretold in the Hebrew Bible, and that Christianity could be reduced to simply belief in Jesus as the Messiah. The idea behind this slimmed down version of Protestantism was to create a universally agreed upon message within Christianity, to allow Christianity to be measured against other religions, and to prove Christianity’s authority in the emerging belief-centered model of religion.

In 1795, Immanuel Kant articulated a fully developed concept of natural religion: that while there were many different forms or expressions of religion, there was only one true religion each as its common denominator. In this model, each had some relationship to the truth.

In the 18^th and 19^th century this concept gave rise to the assumption that the truth claims of the different religions could be classified or judged with respect to their relationship to true religion. In other words, although it was now assumed all religions were an expression of the one underlying truth, some were understood as more developed and more authentic than others.

Let me draw a short synopsis, before the next sections which will be more reflective than descriptive.

The basic idea is this: what began as (a) a set of practical local rules which were attached to particular processes of power and knowledge and embedded in local cultural systems, became (b) increasingly abstracted and universalized as “religion.”

For most of the Western population (including religion scholars) it is often assumed that the concept of religion is generally self-evident: that it (a) is based in systems of symbols and concepts (b) attached to ideas of general moral or ethical order, (c) expressed through rites and doctrines, and (d) has little or no relationship to particular cultures or histories (i.e. it is a sui generis category of culture). But, in fact, this view could not be more embedded in the history of Christianity in the West.

Asad is arguing (and I completely agree) that, to the contrary, “religion” is neither a unique nor universal category of culture. In fact, this movement from the local/practical to the universal/abstract sustained in the development of the category of religion is part of a larger change in the social landscape of power and knowledge structures. This change included a new kind of state, a new kind of science, a new kind of legal and moral subject.

In short, what we believe about religion, how we interpret religion, how we relate to religion, is all embedded in a particular Western history. And so what we call ‘Religion’ (assumed to be universal) is really ‘religion’ (the way our culture creates a boundary and location for the concepts included in religion).

Until next time…

Hittin' the road...

2008-07-01T07:41:00.001-04:00

So we're moving in two days. I won't be back online for about another week, but hopefully sooner...catch you on the flip side.

Brief interruption...

2008-06-26T08:23:00.002-04:00

As you may or may not know, for most of this year (my first year as a full-time doctoral student) I've been struggling with all sorts of vocational questions - wondering what it was I was after and where my life was headed. Well, after much heartache and deliberation I have withdrawn from my philosophy of religion program and accepted a position in student development at a different university. The basic theme of the decision was that I care too much about students and not enough about publishing. In addition, as the humanities are neither a scientific, engineering nor business field (i.e. a field producing a product for an outside funding source) they are underfunded and overcompetitive - and I just don't have the desire to fight for table scraps the rest of my life when all I really wanted to do was work with students. (Last year, only 30% of candidates at the annual American Academy of Religion job fair which is the major market for hiring professors of religion were able to land any type of job).

In any case, that was as vague as I could possibly make it. If you have questions about my decision or my story, feel free to contact me. Hopefully I will be able to get back to finishing up this Genealogies of Religion piece soon, but since we’ll be moving in about a week I might be MIA for a while.

But don’t fret (as I’m sure you already are) – I will continue this blog, my musings and, most likely, will be taking advantage of the ‘free tuition’ clause in my new contract to stir up more fodder in the future for my three readers….

does religion exist? (part four)

2008-06-18T09:08:00.000-04:00

Part 4: Invented Boundaries, Invented Religion

[This is the fourth part of my conversation with & reading of Talal Asad’s Genealogies of Religion.]

The invention of the concept of religion in the West began in the Middle Ages in Western Europe. It is at this historical moment that many parts of culture began to shift to create (through a 200+ year process) the Western category of religion.

There were several elements which effected the development of the notion of religion as a separate cultural category. One major element was the beginning of a major emphasis by Christian leaders on boundary creation. In other words, deciding what Christianity was and was not.

Though we might imagine it to be this way, the problem for Medieval Christian leaders was not that ‘religion’ was a mix between indigenous traditions & myths, on one hand, and Christianity, on the other – leaving only the chaff to be discarded from the wheat. Instead, the very terms of what constituted ‘Christianity’ were not yet established. In fact, what people might have identified as ‘religion’ was a confluence of indigenous ideas, traditions, and myths – many of which involved the Christian church – and remained unique to each place and locality. In other words, a ‘Christian’ in village A, and a ‘Christian’ in village B would have more which separated them then brought them together. But, unlike today, where people squabble over varied theological interpretation of a basically similar foundation – Medieval ‘Christians’ in different localities would have disagreed on the very foundation on which Christianity stood. (Read “The Cheese and the Worms” as a fascinating case study and fun read about one Christian man’s beliefs during this time period).

It was in this time period that attempting to determine, validate and defend a universal Christian enterprise moved forward with full force. This began primarily as Christian leaders both wanted to (a) decide which local ‘pagan’ practices would be absorbed into or rejected from Christianity, and (b) validate and defend Christian stories to people through relics and miracle witnesses, confession/absolution rituals, etc…

The medieval Church was not trying to establish uniformity of practice (Orthopraxy), but instead concerned with ironing out the cultural details of what ‘counts’ as religion and what does not. Asad argues that the medieval Church was, in some way, trying to become the sole arbiter of cultural knowledge. It was in this period that the Church began to argue rigorously that there was a need to distinguish both (a) true knowledge (i.e. Christianity) from falsehood (i.e. whatever subverted it), and (b) the sacred (i.e. Christianity) from the profane (i.e. anything outside it). The final authority was not the belief of the practitioner (as it had been in the past), but the authority of the Church universal.

Determining a distinct boundary for Christianity would again become important in the 18^th, 19^th and 20^th centuries with the rise of empirical science, modern industry and the creation of the nation-state. It was in the modern period that, as other modes of knowledge and authority rose, the role and voice of the church diminished in Western culture. Again, the church became intent on drawing a sharp line between what constituted the ‘sacred’ and the ‘secular,’ in some sense as a defense mechanism to create a new jurisdiction of cultural authority, and to distinctly separate itself from the other modes of knowledge and power which had been stripped from it. I would argue that a book which has influenced so many Christians – Niebuhr’s Christ and Culture - could only have been written in the modern West where the authority and relevance of the Church has been, in a sense, allocated so little cultural space.

It was in this modern period that the authority of religion shifted from dictating the intellectual and social discourse of culture to (now) authorizing the moods and motivations of the individual believer. It is also when when terms like “belief” and “conscience” came into popular use and were attached to the cultural space juried by religion.

does religion exist? (part three)

2008-06-17T08:59:00.002-04:00

Part Three: Constructing Religion's 'Essence'

Through much of the nineteenth century religion was seen through the lens of natural history and the assumption of human progression through time. In this model, religion was understood as an earlier or more archaic human condition from which law, science and politics emerged. In the twentieth century, religion came to be viewed less as an early mode of scientific thinking, but instead a unique space of human practice & belief which had its own essence, distinct from politics, business, or science. In other words, in the twentieth century we tend to understand these cultural categories (which we created) as having organic differences and logically definable essences.

It is this assumption of the ‘essence’ of different cultural categories which allows the West to claim that religion has the same essence today as it had in the Middle Ages, although its social function and existence within human culture then are completely non-relatable to the way ‘religion’ exists today. Further, this assumption of the ‘essence,’ invites us to define religion (like any essence) as a transhistorical and transcultural phenomenon, which we somehow finally noticed in the 19^th and 20^th centuries.

It is this shift of religion into its own cultural space (i.e. having a reified ‘essence’) and away from the major structures of cultural power that is vital to the construction and location of religion as a Western cultural category. In other words, the separation of religion from cultural structures of power is a modern Western norm and the product of a unique post-Reformation history. As Asad writes, to apply this model in an attempt to understand Muslim traditions (as we have in Iraq) by insisting that religion and politics (two essences Western society tries to keep conceptually and practically apart) are coupled must lead to failure. In other words, it is not that Iraqi Muslim people are not ‘listening to reason’ but that they are operating out of schema which rejects the Western ideology.

Asad’s primary goal in his first chapter is to identify some of the historical shifts which have produced the Western concept of religion as a transhistorical essence. (Those shifts will be identified in my next post).

For now it is enough to say that what medieval Christianity considered ‘religious’ is completely and utterly different than what we consider ‘religious’ today. What we might call religious power was distributed differently throughout the culture. There were different ways in which religious power was created and worked through legal institutions. There were different categories of knowledge which religion authorized and made available.

What Asad argues is that the entire historical development of religion as a cultural category can be seen, in large part, as the attempt of Christians to achieve a coherence in doctrines and practices, rules and regulations (even if that was a state never fully attained) in order to carve out space where it was culturally relevant and defendable.

Asad’s major claim is not that religion does not exist, but that what the West assumes to be true about religion – that there is a universal, underlying essence we define as religion – is a totally and utterly false. This assumption is a position steeped in our own cultural and ideological assumptions.

Instead, according to Asad, a universal definition of religion cannot exist precisely because ‘religion’ is historically specific. In other words, because ‘religion’ is a product of shifting set of historical processes, there can be no transhistorical and transcultural definition of religion. Religion is, instead, culturally and historically embedded, and can only be understood on those terms. And when the West tries to impose its definition of religion on other cultures and histories, it is in turn imposing as much of a imperial Western mindset as it is a ‘religion.’

shameless plug

2008-06-12T10:27:00.003-04:00

I've decided that once I'm finished with this Asad post I'm going to try to post some more ornery, contentious, less philosophical musings.

Until that day comes, I've finally put up my personal artist's website: aaronjstoller.com.

Come one, come all. Cheers -

does religion exist? (part two)

2008-06-12T10:21:00.003-04:00

Part Two: The Roots of the Western Ideology

One of the most difficult and profound components of Asad’s argument is that most of the cultural assumptions ingrained in the Western mind (i.e. its “ideology”) were inaugurated in Europe as recently as two centuries ago.

Perhaps you’re thinking to yourself ‘What’s so surprising about the fact that things like democracy and capitalism are relatively recent?’ Well, two things are surprising in particular.

First – while Asad is interested in the relationship between the invention of cultural elements like democracy with the invention of religion, he’s also talking about how religion relates to the invention of more deeply embedded philosophical assumptions. For example, ideas such as how we perceive time, the structure of the universe, and the history of human culture.

Second – culture doesn’t exist in a vacuum. The invention of ideas like democracy, capitalism, and science (and the invention of the notion of culture having categories) don’t just spring up from nowhere with no effect on the shape of other cultural elements. Asad is arguing, in short, that the 17^th and 18^th century began the Western move to categorize culture. In doing so, the concept of religion was invented alongside other cultural categories as a way to bind and domesticate particular beliefs, ideas and behaviors, that didn’t quite fit into any other cultural space. Ultimately, ‘religion’ was invented alongside ‘capitalism,’ and ‘science’ – and each one affected the other profoundly.

If that seems a bit too abstract, perhaps outlining some of these cultural concepts that were invented in the 18^th century will help. All of these, I would gather, your average Western Joe probably assumes have been around universally and for eternity. And that assumption has a profound effect on how Western Joe understands the history and practice of his own religion and the religions of others.

(a) Historical time. The Western understanding of history (history making) is intertwined with and dependent upon a conception of historical time invented in the 18^th century. As Asad argues it was in the 18^th century that our notion of historical time came to be. It was then that “historical time [was] divided into three great periods (Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and Modernity), accelerating forward into an open future” (18). One of the ways in which the modern West began to define itself in opposition to other all other human cultures through time and space was this modern concept of history. Both oddly and contradictorily, “the West” views its history as an organic continuation of history: from the Greeks & Romans, the Hebrews & Early Christians, through Latin Christendom, the Renaissance, the Reformation to the ‘universal civilization’ of modern Europe. Yet, this view of history is not an organic union, but a patchwork of disjointed histories that shift randomly between times and places, as the mythos of the story requires.

(b) Progress. Older Christian views of historical time (based on salvific expectation) merged with newer, secular practices (i.e. logical, rational prediction) to become the modern concept of progress (19).

(b) Agency. A philosophy of agency began to develop. In other words, it began to be understood that the actions and arguments of an individual person (agent) could actually have an effect on the collective.

(c) History making. Actions seeking to maintain the ‘local’ mindset, or to follow local modes of social life were being sublimated for the newer, more optimistic view of history as ‘history making.’ In other words, the idea of the individual ‘agent’ merged with a new concept of history in which in order to be considered successful and ‘make history,’ the agent must create some new vision for future, break away from the past, remake herself, or help others to do so.

(d) Local vs. Modern. A critical component for religion was that as industry began to emerge, there was a sharp categorical division created between the (i) non-modern, local and traditional and (ii) the modern, universal and progressive. In addition, the ‘local’ only had identity in terms of their relationship with the ‘modern/universal’ – in other words, the ‘modern’ has nothing to learn from the ‘local;’ it is the local who has not yet discovered the modern, universal truths of the West.

(e) Human nature & evolution. An important collision, with respect to religion, also happened in this time period. While the West was in the midst of a psychological reconstruction of the notion of European individuality (i.e. the power of the agent, and the universality of Western culture), missionaries and explorers (carrying this burgeoning Western mentality) went into the field. They expected, of course, to find cultures and peoples grateful for the Western salvation being delivered to them. What they found instead were cultures that heard the proclamations of the Western paradigm and the message of Christianity and didn’t quite care for it. The West had no way of comprehending that their culture and worldview was not the pinnacle of human achievement and so, rather than consider the fact that other cultures simply had different ways of operating, the Renaissance developed the notion that all humans shared a common human nature - but that nature was assumed to exist in various stages of maturity and enlightenment. It was, therefore, up to Europe to liberate tribal/local peoples from their own ignorance.

Ultimately, as Asad argues and I agree, the “the West” is utterly dependent on a sharp differentiation from (and sublimation of) the “non-Western.” Further, the creation of the category of “religion” was (and remains) an essential part of the construction of Western ideology.

It is to an examination of this category of religion (both how it was shaped by and shapes Western ideology) I will now, finally, turn.

does religion exist? (part one)

2008-06-05T08:48:00.005-04:00

This is a series I'm developing over the course of the next few weeks. I'm not sure how many parts it will be in total, but I am trying to break them down to more manageable pieces (for you and for me). My goal is a reading of and conversation with the first two sections of Genealogies of Religion by Talal Asad.

I find this to be a terribly interesting question and one which can be engaged on many fronts (philosophy, sociology, history, psychology). I will follow Asad in taking a more historical approach here, though the philosophical question, particularly as it relates to the reification of the category of religion based on disparate elements of human experience is also intriguing and (hopefully) I might get to it one day.

Part One: The Western Matrix

To pose the question ‘does religion exist?’ is, in part, to ask the question ‘if there is such a thing as religion, why do we (Westerners) believe it manifests in this particular way?’

One of the things I have taken for granted most of my life is that religion is thing or a unit or a cultural entity which is universally present in all cultures across time and space. Asad argues to the contrary, and I agree with his argument, that while the concept of religion is integral to the development of Western history, the category of “religion” belongs only to Western history and so is not normative term in other histories and cultures. If religion exists as a universal entity – if – then it must be seen as concept which emerged as a modern, historical object in response to shifting structures of power.

If you’re having trouble visualizing how religion might not exist, as I did when I first read this text, think for a second about Buddhism, Taoism, Shinto, or the Hebraic or Hindu traditions (pre-19^th century). Ask yourself if any ‘member’ would describe their tradition being a religion, or instead would they call it, more simply, ‘life.’

The difficultly in visualizing the non-existence of religion, I believe, is embedded in Western cultural assumptions. In other words, in order to pose the question, we must begin with a glance at Western assumptions about universal human history and the rise Western culture, which are inextricably linked.

For the West, the ‘history’ is both universal and active. In other words, history is not simply ‘what happened in the past,’ but instead history is history making – it is a temporal category denoting a set of new ideas and products created through human ingenuity. Further, history is not ‘made’ unless significant change occurs. It is not enough for events to succeed one another; something substantial must be transformed.

In addition, the West assumes itself to rule over and be the standard for universal human history and culture. As an example of this, Asad notes how non-Western students are obliged to study Western history, but Western educational systems don’t feel any need to give attention to non-Western histories. Or the fact that “Western history” is written as an independent, non-bounded entity, while other histories are written in relationship to and in response to Western history.

Asad all but outright rejects this view of history and culture and, in order to show how deeply engrained this mode of thinking is in Western thought, he presents a current debate in Western anthropological scholarship. The debate is this: are marginalized people in history determined by their economic circumstances surrounding them or do they truly have economic mobility and, ultimately, freedom? In other words, for example, are the lower class unable to help themselves, or can they truly rise up?

The problem, of course, is not in the answer – but the very phrasing of the question. In both scenarios (lower class staying lower class, or lower class becoming upper class) success and failure are measured by Western, capitalist standards – either they do or do not have economic mobility, as though economic mobility, a capitalistic breakthrough, is the only measure of history and success. The major point is this: the Western mind believes itself to be the ultimate, universal measuring stick for the value of all peoples and all histories. If other peoples and histories gravitate toward a Western model, they are a success, if not they are a failure.

Further, the Western matrix of success/failure, as well as truth/falsity is laid out solely in terms of material presence. For example, a culture is only economically successful if it has found a way to exploit its resources to product materials for profit. Conversely, if they choose not to engage in a capitalist economy, they are not judged as having a different way of being – but instead of denying the universal truth of capitalism. The same is true of cultural intelligence (this will become important for religion) – if a culture doesn’t completely and utterly rely on an empirical model of science and of history (i.e. confirmed by material data) then they are failures, operating in a haze of untruth.

Asad points to this difference in the way scholars label particular cultures “local” or “ethnic,” against the assumed universality of Western culture. In other words, local or ethnic people are “attached to a place, rooted, circumscribed, limited” (8). For example, Saudi theologians calling on the authority of medieval Islamic texts are deemed ‘local,’ while Western writers who invoke the authority of modern secular literature are not deemed anything – they are assumed to be ‘universal’ and their claims universally valid. Yet, as Asad points out, both are located in cultures and systems that have rules for inclusion/exclusion.

Ultimately, the West envisions itself as the dispenser of universal truths. (Perhaps this is more easily apparent in early missionary activity, but the claim holds today). The West’s job is to free local peoples from their ignorances, to give them an opportunity to experience the economic and political freedoms it enjoys, to let them taste true success and ‘freedom.’ And yet, not only does the West define the boxes that freedom must exist within, but the West, itself, depends on this ‘discourse of mobility’ with the non-West as a way to manifest itself as the dominant power. The discourse of mobility (i.e. that it is allowing marginalized people to gain mobility) is not an act of freedom-giving, but it is a moment of assertion of its own power over another. In other words, the West first constructs the ‘universally true’ playing field for the rest of the world, and then retains the right to be the authorizer and referee for the game yet to be played.

poet of the moment

2008-06-01T08:05:00.004-04:00

This is the opening poem from Catherine Barnett’s Into Perfect Spheres Such Holes Are Pierced, written about her two nieces and their stepfather who were lost in a plane crash.

"The Return"

For a long time there were no signs though we looked
wildly for them.
Of course there were lawyers, they came to the house,
lawyers might have been a sign –

And the birds in the park, circling us –

And the DNA, which Aristotle
would have called the fourth kind of recognition,
not what we invent (oh the girls come to us in dreams)
or what we remember, on waking, but –

Someone resembling me has come:
No one resembles me but them:
Therefore they have come.

derrida and the metaphysics of presence

2008-05-27T07:22:00.004-04:00

Alas, this will be my final short book review – at least from the directed reading I did. If you want to see what I’m up to, here is the introduction.

Derrida, J. (1973). Speech and phenomena, and other essays on Husserl's theory of signs. Evanston, Northwestern University Press.

My reading of this text focused on chapter 5 (“Signs and the Blink of an Eye”). In this text, Derrida (1930-2004) claims that there are certain problematic distinctions made by Husserl (1859-1938), who is considered to be the founder of modern phenomenology, in his major work Logical Investigations.

The most interesting point seems to be this: according to Derrida, underlying Husserl’s work is the premise that inner human consciousness can be temporally present to itself.

What does that mean? I’ll say it a few different ways to make sure I’m getting the idea across correctly. We might say that Husserl believes that at any moment we have complete access to the works of our own mind. Or, perhaps that our minds are completely transparent to ourselves at all points in time. In other words, Husserl operates on the premise that the mind truly is like a filing cabinet – things are ordered and labeled properly and we can always find time when we need them. I should also add that this is the beginning premise of most Western analytic philosophy and most Western modes of thinking. This is a challenge not only to Husserl but to the assumptions embedded in how most Western minds think.

Derrida rejects this claim. In fact, he thinks Husserl’s own concept of ‘internal time-consciousness’ rejects it as well. (Internal time-consciousness is basically the idea that how we experience time psychologically is different from the way we measure time with a clock. In other words why, in the same amount of measured time, getting a cavity filled and riding a rollercoaster ‘feel’ like different spans of time).

While Husserl’s notion of ‘internal time-consciousness’ implies the possibility of perfect ‘self-presence’ (i.e. having access to all the parts of our mind at any given time), it is never fully achieved. Instead we can achieve a type ‘self-presence’ but not perfectly and, at best, only momentarily through ongoing self-relation or self-reflection. In other words, self-presence is always limited to being one moment in an ongoing movement of self-actualization. In other words, our minds change, we reflect on our own experience, we are in dialogue with ourselves and our memories, etc…We can never fully grasp a perfect manifestation of the contents of mind.

[Nerdy side-note: How time works in the concept of internal time-consciousness is very important here. Derrida argues that we (and Husserl) might believe we have achieved a moment ‘self-actualization,’ but that moment is only part of a three-fold overlapping relation of our past, present and future. In other words, Derrida argues, that the present moment of awareness is only part of a spectrum which includes the “just now” as well as “retention” (presencing of the past) and “protention” (anticipation of the future). In believing we can achieve full ‘self-presence’ we are denying the fluidity of time and its influence on the mind.]

Therefore, for Derrida, there is never a sealed, constant, actualized moment of interior self-actualization or self-presence. Instead, there exist only manifestations of moments in the larger movement of interior time. Like Derrida’s concept of difference (which is related to this) self-presence is not achievable or static. Instead, it is a continual relation and flow of presence/absence within the ‘just now.’

Why is this important? Well, it certainly softens the soil underlying our ability to grasp Truth, to be correct, to know more perfectly than another person or culture. This is not a questioning of the reality of a particular truth or knowledge, but a questioning of the conditions which make any and all knowledge possible.

levinas, the question of meaning, and the other

2008-05-23T08:34:00.002-04:00

Yet another post offering a synopsis of some of the key thinkers/themes in my phenomenology directed reading this past Spring...

Levinas, E. (1983). “Beyond Intentionality,” in Alan Montefiori (ed.), Philosophy in france today, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin, pp. 100-115. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

This short synopsis is of an essay entitled “Beyond Intentionality,” which was published in a larger collection of essays (Philosophy in France Today) in which French philosophers attempt to summarize the major claims of their work.

Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995) begins by explicating some of the persistent themes in his work, including (and perhaps most importantly) the claim that philosophical questions of being and meaning (e.g. what is the meaning of our existence?) are opened up not by our knowledge of the world but, in fact, arise from our response to the Other – from our interaction with others in the world.

Levinas explains that for Husserl and other many other phenomenologists, meaning is derived explicitly and directly from a particular presencing of objects in the world. In other words, the question of meaning and its answer are derived from our perception of objects (including texts) in the world. This perception is completed, then, when the phenomenal object is absorbed and manipulated for the purpose of the subject. For example, Husserl’s conception of “intentionality” is both a pointing at something and a possessing of it. In this model (and in many other phenomenologists) Truth (with a capital “T”) is a conceptual grasp of things in the world and, as Levinas explains, both being and meaning are equated only with what is immediately present (rather that which is potentially absent). In addition, the self or subject has no uniqueness or identity, but has its conception of meaning constituted by that which it grasps. In other words, the self is a product of what it comes into contact with and its perceptive ability.

Against this model, Levinas argues that the Other (i.e. other people in the world) is not reducible to an object in the world – the Other is fundamentally different from an object and this is a difference for which we should account. To show his point, Levinas uses the example of the human face. He argues an encounter between self/other is different from a typical subject/object encounter in three core ways:

(a) Time/Space. In a self/other encounter, the time and distance separating our two bodies dissolves. Another way to say this might be that the self/other are absorbed in the moment of interaction in a different way than the interaction between self/object. There is a type of union and dialogical movement involved which dissolves phenomenal space/time, sort of like watching a movie – when we are involved in meaning-filled conversation, the house lights dim and the world dissolves. (This is based on a generally accepted notion of phenomenology that there is a difference between how we measure time/space and how we perceive it phenomenologically).

(b) Meaning. In a self/other dialogue, meaning is extended beyond the subject’s expectations and abilities. This is because the Other disrupts the self’s intentionality in a way which is different and more profound than an object. Another way to say this might be that dialogue disrupts the self, pushing it beyond where it could have gone otherwise. Dialogue and difference between self/other are the way questions of meaning are both manifested and revised.

(c) Ethics. The face of the Other embodies both strangeness and vulnerability, which is quite unlike encountering an object. This difference summons an ethical responsibility toward the other, which is present before any attempt to understand the other cognitively.

The key points for me are (a) this notion that other people are fundamentally different from objects in the world and phenomenology needs to account for this difference and (b) it is only through dialogical encounter that questions of meaning are raised and revised. In other words, it is only through dialogue that we can truly explore meaning and being.

poet of the moment

2008-05-19T09:19:00.006-04:00

From Dennis Sampson’s Needlegrass.

"For The Dawn"

What comes to me now comes slowly
and I am alone
with the death of everyone
I have known, with my daughter
dressed as if for a wedding
in the dark of this first morning,
this first night,
my oldest sister in silence
outside the door that will not open
until time is no longer time
and the heavens fall.

It is the ocean
before the sun, the waste of water
borne through the night,
that lets the beginning
and the end become finally
what I can fathom. The face of a god
crumbles to fine dust.
My love of a woman disperses
like see through the air.
One star steadies itself.
It goes out. Now I am no one.

And the sound of the waves
is the sound of the shameless
chasing after what never was.
Water to green water. Give me
the heedless world again.
Come toward me, mustard week.
My own heart stops hurrying.
More than the sun. More than the light.

I wear the ladder of sky,
a bare tree twisting upward
like the still flame
gliding slowly back to me now
lighter,
meadow of lupine, gorge of black rock.

My father finds peace.
My mother weeps in the dawn.
And it is final
and it is beginning
in this place below the dark.

ricoeur, husserl and hermeneutics

2008-05-19T08:51:00.002-04:00

This post is part of my exploration of some of the main concepts I encountered in a directed reading I did in phenomenology. To see what I’m up to, see the intro of the first entry here. I hope it will be of use to you.

Ricoeur, P. (1981). Hermeneutics and the human sciences. ed. and trans. John B. Thompson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

I am focusing on chapter 3 of Part 1 of this text, which is titled “Phenomenology and Hermeneutics.” This chapter is primarily aimed at points of difference between Paul Ricoeur (1913-2005) and Edmund Husserl (1859-1938, considered the founder of phenomenology), and reflects a shift in Riceour’s philosophical method as he moves toward developing an explicitly hermeneutic phenomenology. [Hermeneutics = development and study of theories of the interpretation and understanding of texts; Phenomenology = For Edmund Husserl, phenomenology is "the reflective study of the essence of consciousness as experienced from the first-person point of view." (Wikipedia)].

Ricoeur begins by making an important distinction between Husserl’s and his own understanding of perception (i.e. how we perceive objects in the world). For Husserl, the foundation of being (i.e. our human being-ness) is our ability to perceive, or what he called our intuition. Husserl believed in the possibility of a presuppositionless (i.e. purely objective) perception of phenomenon. In other words, behind our reflection of phenomena was a pressuppositionless moment where objective perception was present. For example, we could read a text or observe an object, and its objective reality laid there before us. We only have to dig deep enough to return to this pristine state of perception.

Ricoeur rejects this premise of objectivity. Instead, for Ricoeur, phenomena are always already contextual. In other words, phenomena only exist in a context, from which they cannot be separated. This is why, Ricoeur will argue, the meaning of phenomena cannot exhausted by any singular or particular use In the case of language, words and texts are determined by context and, therefore, interpretation is the process through which users determine meaning and value. In other words, it is impossible to claim “this is the meaning of the text!” Instead, textual meaning is dependent on context, and therefore must be determined through a community of readers, and is applicable only to that community of users.

Complicating the matter, Ricoeur argues that texts exist only in intersubjective contexts – both in present conversation, and within a history. Traditions (e.g. religions) are established and rely upon written texts which survive well beyond the historical context from which they were created. This creates a situation in which there only exist a multiplicity of readings and interpretations. For Ricoeur, this is where the “hermeneutical circle” begins – in the continued and unending dialogical relationship between (a) the reader’s understanding and (b) the meanings offered by the text.

Ricoeur’s claim is that a reader’s understanding is developed out of interpretive acts, as opposed to Husserl who held that the goal of interpretation was to arrive at the pressupositionless foundation of interpretation. Ricoeur’s model instead places the reader in the middle of a conversation (i.e. the hermeneutical circle) which has already begun in history and which s/he cannot terminate. The goal of Ricoeur’s hermeneutical act, then, is not a passage from interpretation to full vision, as Husserl would suggest, but instead interpretation is an open process that no single vision concludes, but can only find personal value in and, hopefully, contribute to.

merleau-ponty and the primacy of perception

2008-05-13T08:28:00.002-04:00

Merleau-Ponty, M. (1947) Bulletin de la societe francaise de philosophie. Vol. 49 (December), pp. 119-53.

This article is a reprint of an address Merleau-Ponty gave to the Societe francaise de philosophie in 1946 titled “The Primacy of Perception” after his major work The Phenomenology of Perception was published. The published address summarizes the major claims of the text. His overarching concern seems to be an attempt to identify the conditions which make knowledge possible in the human mind.

Merleau-Ponty’s (1908-1961) major thesis is that perception (i.e. how we perceive objects in the world) is the ground for our knowledge, for everything we know. He claims that perception is transcendental, meaning that it cannot be adequately understood from an objective or scientific conception of human life. In other words, because individual, perceptual experience is fundamentally ‘behind’ our ability to collect and understand empirical knowledge, ‘perception’ cannot fully be comprehended from the perspective of natural science. Another way of saying this might be that empirical knowledge or scientific knowledge, itself, is fundamentally reliant on human perspective – and that there are some things for which empiricism cannot account. We might say that there is an objective reality, but our access to it is necessarily given in our perception.

Of primary importance to Merleau-Ponty is what he understands as a paradox of ‘immanence’ and ‘transcendence’ in perception - between what is known of an object and what remains unknown. The paradox is something like this: how is it that our perception is limited to particular aspects of an object, and yet the complexity of the object can be grasped? In other words, the perceived object (e.g. a pen held in our hand) is never completely foreign or totally unknown. For example, we know what the pen looks like, its coloration, its dimensions and so forth. And yet, at the same time, the perceived object always contains aspects which are unknown, because an object is always more than is ever given at a single point in time. For example, when I look at the pen, there are always aspects which I cannot see or touch (e.g. the back) when I am seeing and touching other aspects (e.g. the front). While this may be a simple example, the concept pertains as much to simple, physical objects as it does to complex, conceptual phenomena.

Lastly, Merleau-Ponty argues that ideas or concepts are always preceded by perceptual experience, yet both thought and perception have a past and future horizon. Knowledge is gained only through a process of clarification in dialogue through past, present, and future with perceptual objects and others in the world. Ultimately, philosophy must acknowledge the primacy of perception, which yields the authentic conditions for knowledge. This claim requires that (a) we always remain open to the possibility of new insight and (b) always remain aware that truth hinges on our capacity to attain and express truth at any given moment: “Thus perception and thought have this much in common – that both of them have a future horizon and a past horizon and that they appear to themselves as temporal, even though they do not move at the same speed or in the same time. We must say that at each moment our ideas express not only the truth but also our capacity to attain it at any given moment.”

derrida and differance

2008-05-06T08:11:00.002-04:00

I did a lot of reading in phenomenology this semester and am trying to post some of the more interesting highlights. I hope it will be of use to you.

Derrida, J. (1968) Bulletin de la Societe fancaise de philosophie, LXII, No. 3 (July- September), 73 – 101.

This article was originally a paper delivered to the Societe francaise de philosophie in January 1968, discussing Derrida’s concept of ‘differance.’

In the paper, Derrida attempts to define the different uses of his term ‘differance,’ which is a phenomenological concept meaning something like ‘differing relation.’ Derrida intends the term to be a description of the way in which language manifests itself, or reveals itself, in use.

It works in this way: in order for any term or narrative to be constituted conceptually it must be distinguished from another, reciprocal, concept. For example, when we say ‘crime’ we must implicitly have in mind an ideal concept of ‘justice’ in order for the concept of ‘crime’ to have any meaning. In this way, the identity of any term or series of terms is dependant upon a system of differentiation (i.e. differance) between what the term is and what the term is not. Derrida takes the concept from the phenomenological concept of presence/non-presence in thought.

In ordinary language acts, we are not aware of this system of differentiation and instead we only see what the language claims (e.g. “He committed a crime”). Yet, for every element present in a system there is, by necessity, an absent which we only know implicitly (e.g. “He did not uphold justice”). The question in the example quickly becomes: what is justice, who defines it, who authorizes it, what does the speaker mean by it?

Further, in language, since every manifestation of a concept exists in reality (and not strictly in theory) the concept which is ‘implicit’ or ‘absent’ creates has an ‘othering’ effect between the speaker and the object of speech.

Why might this be important? Well, each of us carries with us a set of assumptions and a set of commitments about the way the world is, and the way the world should be. Part of the process of ‘deconstruction’ (which, in some sense, is the application of this term in practice) is to lay bare the assumptions and commitments which lay behind what we intend with our language. In doing so, not only will we come to more clarity about our own matrix of thought, but also (hopefully) understand just because we see the world in a certain way, this doesn’t mean the world is this way.

I wrote a sermon about this last year, perhaps I can dig it up and post it in a few days…

poet of the moment

2008-05-04T07:34:00.003-04:00

It occurs to me that this blog has been dominated by what's stuck in my head after Philosophy of Religion. So it's time to start putting some of my first love up here - poetry.

This book is a few years old, but it's a brilliant piece of work. I suggest you order from your local library and read slowly and deliberately. It'll be worth it.

From Geri Doran's Resin, which won the Walt Whitman award in 2005.

"Tonight is a night without birds"

The sky feel open to a map of the constellations.
Earlier the snowmelt reconfigured the field.
I tried to describe it, but the field transformed
into the plains of the soul pressed flat.

Fierceness and moonlight, I thought I’d write,
but the stars outshone the moon and the brightest
star, at any rate, is on the ground and a continent
away. My brightest star is a continent away.

Looking up from the cobbled path in a swath
of darkness darker than any Portland night,
I see a skyful of nightbirds, but none of them’s singing.
Like Orion, they’re keeping an obstinate silence.

Across the continent, Orion is probably drenched.
Anyway, it is unlikely my love is watching the sky.
A star-flush sky makes the earth seem flat.
Dryness and flatness are the ways a field inhabits a body.

I do not know much about fields, apart
from this amassment of dry grass leaning down.
I know about starry skies. I know silent birds.

brentano and intentionality

2008-04-30T09:28:00.006-04:00

One of the major projects on which I worked this semester was developing a bibliography for a directed reading in phenomenology. I thought it might be interesting to post some brief annotations of my readings on the ol’ blog.

Please keep in mind that this is not scholarship, but a blog post, therefore: (a) these are my readings (and misreadings) and (b) these entries occasionally borrow closely from the language from the texts, themselves, without giving credit. In the main, though, these are my reflections in my language.

They might be tough work to read, as philosophy always is, but in the end I believe (and hope) you may find them as nourishing as I did.

**

Brentano, F. C., O. Kraus, et al. (1973). Psychology from an empirical standpoint. London, New York,, Routledge and Kegan Paul; Humanities Press.

This text is fantastic one as a primer on the philosophical field of phenomenology, though it is a bit dry. If Husserl (1859-1938) is the ‘father’ of modern phenomenology, Brentano (1838-1917) would most likely be its grandfather. He differs quite a bit from modern phenomenologists because of Husserl’s influence, but he laid a lot of the groundwork with his concept of empirical or descriptive psychology. Oddly enough, he had two very important students in terms – Husserl, of course, but he also taught Freud during his undergraduate years.

Brentano argues in the Forward that his goal in establishing an ‘empirical psychology’ is to give an accurate description of mental states instead of a causal explanation. Brentano argued that while we have direct and explicit knowledge of our mental acts, we have only indirect knowledge of the external world. In other words, we know only phenomena (i.e. what we perceive) and nothing about things in themselves. Yet he broke from a long tradition of philosophers who wondered if the external world was merely an illusion. Instead, Brentano argues that that mental phenomena are given to us directly as they actually are in the world. In addition - and this is an important concept - in addition to being directed at actual objects in the world, all mental acts carry an additional or secondary awareness of the act itself. In other words, not only do we see the object, but we perceive ourselves as seeing the object.

In the first chapter of Book Two, titled “The Distinction between Mental and Physical Phenomena,” Brentano attempts to describe the nature of mental acts. Brentano rejects the traditional Cartesian claim that mental acts differ from physical acts, because mental acts are "non-extended." Instead, Brentano suggests that mental phenomena are “intentional.” Intentionality is crucial concept for phenomenology. What Brentano meant is that mental phenomena relate explicitly and directly to objects, whether or not the objects toward which they grasp actually exist. In other words, I can imagine a unicorn and it exists as an object in my mind, but it does not exist in reality. Either way, I'm still intentionally grasping at an object. Therefore, there is always a direct and explicit connection between perception and what we perceive.

my theological canon

2008-04-26T08:36:00.001-04:00

Four years ago, the esteemed Dean Leonard said something in class which I haven’t really let go - it was simply that each one of us operates with our own canon. In other words, acknowledged or not, each of us operates with a set of guiding texts (or pieces within texts) which influence our paradigm and our lives moment-to-moment. And of course these text change as we pass through periods of our lives; my life-canon was quite different at 17 then it is now, at 30.

Perhaps still lamenting the fact that my mileage counter just turned to 30, or perhaps spurred on by my buddies Mike and Tripp’s muxtape competition, I thought I would like to try to write down what I believed my “life canon” to be right now, on this day, at this moment. I hope this might encourage you to take a few minutes and do the same.

before I begin, I want to establish a few ground rules:

(1) Only individual works rather than artists are to be included in the canon. It’s not fair to say “I like everything Hemingway wrote” – certainly you could say this, but his entire catalogue hasn’t effected you in the same way.

(2) The canon does not need to be restricted to textual pieces. As you perhaps know, I reject the idea that only texts and language are cognitive and meaning-filled.

(3) This is a biggy. Sacred texts are banned from the list. The rationale for this is two-fold. First, they’re too easy. Second, I would feel a sense of obligation to place them on the list. And, if I’m honest, I’ve spent more time contemplating my top 10 more than I have the Hebrew Bible, New Testament, Koran or Dao De Jing.

(4) Because this is a written exercise, there will necessarily be an order, but these are no way a hierarchy. Each of these should function equally as part of my “life canon.”

(5) There shouldn’t be an explanation of the works, just the list. This is my poet coming out – “the work should stand on its own…”

(6) The list is restricted to ten items.

my life canon (for today):

1) The Lord & The General Din of the World by Jane Mead

2) Kid A – Radiohead

3) Andrew Wyeth – Winter 1946

4) Under the Table and Dreaming - DMB

5) Trinity Center, particularly the dock at the end of the nature walk.

6) Caddyshack

7) Speech and Phenomena, Derrida.

8) The Branch Will Not Break – James Wright

9) Demian – Herman Hesse

10) Six Cello Suites – Bach

Creedalism and Contemporary Life (part three)

2008-04-23T09:21:00.003-04:00

I promise this will be my final post on the ‘oh so engaging’ topic of creedalism. It was probably more important for me to write it than it was for you to read it, and in that my goals were fulfilled. I’m getting more interested in hermeneutics and language and will probably be doing some posting on that in the near future. In any case, if you’re not sure what I’m up to in this series check out the introduction to ‘part one.’

4: (a) The Liturgy is best spend doing rather than saying; (b) But we need creedalism is how we know where we’re going before we hit the road.

[Again, with the less time than I’d like (finals are bearing down) I’m going not going to separate this out, but let it go the direction that it will…I apologize if this is less than clear…]

In some of the discussions in which I’ve been engaged “(a)” has been a major criticism of saying creeds. In other words, that (i) saying the creeds are the only moment in worship where our attention is self-directed; (ii) the creeds interrupt the flow of the liturgy because we’re saying things instead of doing them; (iii) the liturgy only becomes real in motion rather than recitation.

First let me say that an equivocation is being made. I believe (a) intends to address the historical creeds, while (b) is speaking about the notion of creedalism. This could be one cause of the problem.

More to the point, I think (a) is interesting, but I don’t see how it is sound. In other words, it begs the question of which criteria determine which liturgical elements “do” rather than “say,” or by which criteria do we know which elements cause motion rather than recitation. I don’t think there are such criteria, and I think a case could be made for every element of the liturgy falling into either category.

That being said, I agree with that church communities are often at their best being practice-centered rather than doctrine-centered. And in many ways the historical creeds make it appear as though the ECUSA is dogmatic church. This is a problem, yes, but the question becomes: is this a problem in the nature of creedalism or with the language of the historical creeds? I would vote it is an issue with the latter rather than the former.

Part of my dilemma with this issue of ‘doing rather than saying’ is that I think every intentional community needs a moment of self-reflection on its identity in order to understand what it is and what it’s after. That’s not to say it should spend all its time in dialogue, but if the liturgy is an embodiment of the story of our community, then that story must encompass a moment of reflection and future vision as a way giving birth to and authorizing our action in the world.

My other hesitation with (a) is that it appears to fully embody the logocentrist assumptions embedded in the majority of Western churches, which I reject. In other words, I reject that language is the only thing which communicates and has meaning. If my claim holds, then being practice-focused rather than language-focused will not dissolve the tension between (a) a community taking a stance and (b) people in the community disagreeing with that stance. Visual and aural phenomenon and participatory actions communicate as powerfully (if not more powerfully) than words. And so removing discursive language doesn’t remove differences of opinion. The Eucharist and the stained glass windows and the architectural layout are as much a theological stance as the Bible or the prayer book or the creeds - it’s just that we often assume the non-verbal isn’t a language of its own. If you don’t believe me (and you’re Episcopalian) think about the ridiculous Eucharistic “sit down / stand up / kneel” wars which are still going on in much of the country. Ask yourself, if ritual and the visual don’t communicate, why these are happening? Simply because it involves practice or movement, rather than language, doesn’t make it less conceptual or divisive. Therefore, the creeds might not be the only element of our community which are creating boundaries and divisions and seem threatening to new members. Again, I ask, what about the “white Jesus” stained glass windows? These are an intentional projection of divisive community values with no regard to the historicity of the living man – why are these not an issue? I maintain it’s because of our logocentrist assumptions that the words are the only thing doing the damage, so if we can route them out our problems may just be solved.

It seems to me, between (a) and (b), the truth may just be in the middle, which I believe goes back to the problem of interpretation. We can’t go out and “do” without interpreting our vision of what God wants (i.e. developing and voicing a creed). Reciprocally, our interpretation has no value without action. The motion between the two needs to be ongoing and dialogical. We can’t be satisfied with the historical creeds which may be stale and oppressive to a contemporary audience; we can’t just dispense with creedalism or we’ll be like a ship without a beacon. (One could argue that Jesus or God or the Bible should be our beacon. I would reply that this is what I’m arguing. God is our beacon, and we must use her to interpret a vision for our community, voicing this vision faithfully in unison).

Conclusion

It seems to me that a large part of this debate has nothing to do with ‘creedalism’ and all to do with what people think of the language of the historical creeds. From my perspective, there is a need to maintain creedalism because it is so radical, as I’ve mentioned several times before. Reciprocally, I believe the radicality and authenticity of the creeds is lost when the last community interpretation was developed in 325CE.

I don’t believe that throwing out the historical creeds will eliminate all points of division, nor will it eliminate the only theological boundary our church draws. But is this really our goal? I would maintain that most Episcopalians’ goals for the creeds is to maintain creedalism which is simply a call to unity, a laying down of one’s ego, a statement which says that the collective has greater agency than the I, though the collective is established and authorized by a dialogue between the I and God.

It seems to me that a community needs to stand for something, and this will always create some heartache. On the other hand, a creed should be more of a vision statement than a mission statement - not stating where we stand apart from everyone else, but where we believe God wants us to be. This is a never ending process – and that’s good. That’s what it should be.

But having and using creedalism (in other words, continually revising the creeds for a contemporary world) forces us to admit that at our best we are still only interpreting what we believe Jesus might have been like or wanted for our communities. Most of us (including me) often want to deny our participation in spiritual interpretation (as though God reveals herself purely and objectively) because we like that security. It’s comfortable and warm - but we truly can’t know for sure. We can’t get away from the problem of interpretation, no matter how we slice it. The best we can do is to opt for that stance which radically includes and radically embraces and radically loves. We take this stance, we voice it together, we remain empathetic and we let the chips fall where they may.

Creedalism and Contemporary Life (part two)

2008-04-22T09:24:00.001-04:00

The second part of my series on creedalism, which began last week. If you want to see what I'm up to, check out the introduction to the first part (below).

3: (a) The creeds make you say things you don’t fully believe; (b) But you don’t have to believe the creeds, we just say them as part of our communal identity.

I’ll admit this is a major tension which I don’t think can or will ever be resolved. But, then again, while the point of good philosophy seems to be resolution of tension, the point of good theology seems to be the clarification of it.

I think these two issues are too intertwined to break into (a)/(b) explications, so I’m just going to let this one fall to the ways of the wind. I apologize if it isn’t as clear as it could be.

Let me begin by saying that there’s no way I can see of getting around this question: the creeds, in different times and places, DO make people say things they don’t fully believe. I suppose my biggest question about this critique is: why is this a problem? Don’t get me wrong, I’ve felt this way for many years, and I’m still not committed to the oppressive language of the Nicene creed. But let’s bracket discussion about “the historical creeds” for a moment and just think about the nature of creedalism. Again I ask: why is creedalism a problem?

Part of what differentiates the ECUSA from the Baptist church is that it is creedal rather than confessional. Crazy as it may seem, I find great strength in submitting something (not all of) my individual identity to the church body and the community. I’ve written of this before, but I believe creedalism takes very seriously the nature of the life partnership between the church body and the church member. I’m not claiming that the confessional model doesn’t deeply value church members, because it does. What I mean is that occasionally (not always) confessional models have a tendency to turn ‘church’ into a commodity. Church is not a life partnership, but an array of family services and life products (including metaphysical products) from which members choose. If something goes awry, then the member simply walks away and chooses another business which will suite their needs. The creedal model (not always) gestures at a more ‘life partnership’ approach. In other words, if something goes awry, the member falls back on their mutual commitment and, as an individual, looks to him or herself as the culprit before shopping elsewhere. This all requires patience and empathy, I know, and to most of my confessional friends this looks like some kind of communist lock-step requirement. (The flip-side is that it also seems to be one reason why the ECUSA is having a difficult time competing in the ‘church industry’ these days, but that’s for another post).

My response is that creedalism can be viewed as communism, yes, but only from a vantage-point saturated in American individual idealism. From my point of view, every long-term committed relationship requires compromise from all parties involved. And while my confessional friends bemoan that the church is defining my matrix of belief, I don’t believe this to be the case. (Assuming, of course, there is a release-valve requiring continual, ongoing dialogue about the relevance of “the historical creeds” - right now I’m more than a bit concerned that the release-valve is a bit clogged. But that’s for another installment.)

It appears to me that the “saying something you don’t believe” critique is coming from two sides the same coin: on one side are the AmIA-style folk who might (and have) told me that “saying without believing” is an indication that I’m out of step with the church; on the other side, are those who think creedalism has lost its cultural relevance. (Remember, we’re discussing creedalism not ‘the creeds’).

It appears to me that both sides are ignoring the fact that every church regardless of affiliation or outlook has components on which not everyone agrees. In other words, there are a diversity of things spoken during the course of a worship service (either communally or from one speaker toward the community) with which people disagree. For example, the hymns, selections from the Bible, and readings from the prayer book, are all problematic for a lot of people for different reasons. Personally, there’s a lot in the New Testament with which I don’t agree. Yet I’m still forced to accept that the Book of Revelation and a lot of Paul’s writings are part of the traditional canon. Ultimately, you’re only fooling yourself if you think your church doesn’t have divisive elements embedded within it.

I ask again: why is this a problem? Having parts of the canon with which I struggle only means that I struggle more intentionally and invest more effort into my spiritual identity. I believe that part of why creedalism is so abrasive is: (a) it runs counter to American ‘church industry’ culture; and (b) it makes our differences of opinions explicit, which calls us into honest, empathic dialogue (which also runs counter to American culture in all forms).

To return to an earlier critique, I believe that if done in dialogue with the rest of the community, creedalism has the opposite effect of defining a matrix of belief for members, precisely because it forces us to confront the difference and diversity embedded in our parishes (assuming, of course, that people actually use it as a vehicle for dialogue). In other words, it causes those parishes which are willing to be prophetic into a stance of authenticity by owning the fact that not everybody is the same, and it (hopefully) is one part of making that difference visible and tangible.

The sticking point might be that “the historical creeds” were intended to draw very sharp theological and doctrinal boundaries. This is, to me, not only problematic but completely inappropriate today, and this may be reason enough to dispense with them. I might even take this one step further to say that if parishes in the ECUSA aren’t in deep dialogue about the effect and relevance of “the historical creeds” then they might be, in fact, ignoring the call of creedalism which is dialogical and communal and prophetic and (should be) always a bit unsettling.

…at least one, but perhaps two more installments to come. Cheers -

Creedalism and Contemporary Life (part one)

2008-04-14T08:44:00.001-04:00

I’ve written about this topic sporadically and I found myself in great discussions about it over the last few weeks, so I thought it might be a good idea to try and ‘write it out’– to make the concepts and issues more explicit.

So, the topic I will address over the next few weeks (maybe more, depending on how my finals schedule goes) is creedalism. Is it worth anything? Is it appropriate to a postmodern context? What are the arguments on both sides? Where can it take us?

I’ll admit I waffle on this issue; I think there are compelling arguments on both sides, which perhaps I hope to do justice to and outline here.

Before I begin, though, I want to make a crucial distinction. There is a difference between (a) ‘creedalism’ (i.e. the intention toward a statement of communal identity) and (b) ‘the creeds’ (e.g. Nicene, Apostles, etc…). I find that many arguments about ‘creedalism’ equivocate between these two terms. (‘Equivocate’ is philosophical jargon meaning that people intend different things with the same term or terms). I will try my best not to blend the two. When I say ‘creedalism’ I mean the intention toward voicing communal identity; when I say ‘the creeds’ I mean the historical documents of the church.

So, without further delay, my intention is to put several points of contention in opposition to each other, sort of like a dialogue, and see what happens. Hopefully this will help me come to some conclusion, though it may not.

Today I will start with the following argument:

1: (a) The creeds are part of the liturgy! (b) No, it’s the liturgy, itself, which binds us together, not the creeds.

1: I have to admit that neither of these arguments seems very compelling to me – primarily because neither of them have anything to do with why I should care about creedalism as part of my own Episcopal and theological identity.

(a) Yes, the creeds are part of the liturgy in the ECUSA. They are. But this seems to beg the question of whether we are in charge of the liturgy or whether the liturgy is in charge of us. We developed the liturgy, so we can (and should) thoughtfully and intentionally revise the liturgy to meet the needs of the changing, shifting world. The prayer book, to my knowledge, was written with the intention of making the church more explicit, contemporary and available - so why should we violate that intention by letting Thomas Cranmer do all of our difficult thinking? (Yes, I realize there have been many versions and revisions to the Book of Common Prayer). The point is that just because the creeds are part of the liturgy, this doesn’t mean either that they need to be included or that they need to be included in their current form.

(b) On the other hand, it’s a bit slippery to argue (b), simply because (a) is valid. In other words, certainly the liturgy binds us together. But “the liturgy” is simply a reified metaphor for the set of words, actions and images which comprise worship. Arguing that the liturgy binds us, rather than the creeds, is sort of like saying “The wallboard doesn’t house us, the building does. Let’s take out the wallboard out!” The liturgy is only a word for the elements it contains, and currently it contains the creeds.

2: (a) The creeds create an insider/outsider boundary to belief. (b) But, the creeds are part of our shared tradition.

2: To be honest I sort of agree with both of these points – and both, for me, touch deeply on important parts of my theological identity and need to be a part of the ECUSA. I tried to stay as true to language used in recent conversations I’ve had, because I did want to point out that I believe there is an equivocation (confusion of the meaning of terms) being made here, which is creating some (not all) of the frustration. In other words, I think people arguing “(b)” often mean both “the creeds” AND “creedalism” without realizing it.

(a) There is no escaping the fact that the Nicene Creed creates a tension in the Episcopal Church: we claim, on one hand, that we don’t embrace a dogmatic theology but, on the other, in the center of our service we recite a creed which draws (and was intended to draw) sharp lines of theological orthodoxy. I’m not a historian by any means, but I’m fairly confident that the phrase “eternally begotten of the Father…begotten, not made, of one Being with the Father” is a product of the “Arian controversy” over the issue of the "homoousian" statement. Basically, it was intended to make the belief that God/Jesus/The Holy Spirit were all eternally of the same “substance” (i.e. begotten, not made) orthodox and the Arian position (that Jesus was adopted into God’s divinity later) heretical. Since I actually lean more Arian, this is a problem for me. I realize many folks might not understand the deep history embedded in the statement, but no matter which way you slice it, it is intentionally drawing lines of theological orthodoxy and heresy.

Of course, the way many Episcopalians get around the orthodoxy problem the Nicene Creed creates by saying one of several things, particularly: (i) ‘Well, we say it but we don’t necessarily believe it.’; or (ii) ‘How can we say it without believing it? That’s a mystery.” While I’ll discuss the question of saying without believing in the next edition, I will say that while the solution to the problem may be a mystery (or probably more like a tension), where the problem originated is certainly not a mystery. We created it by voicing an open theology and embodying a closed one.

(b) There’s also no escaping the fact that both the historical creeds AND creedalism are part of the tradition of the ECUSA. If we are a denomination which prides itself on its tradition, than this is may be a bit of a problem – or at least a tension with which we need to wrestle (and by ‘wrestle’ I don’t mean “keep them in for the sake of argument” – mean wrestle deeply with the relationship between our identity and creedalism and the creeds). The answer is not as simple as throwing out the creeds, because the creeds are simply one case study of how an organization rooted in tradition appropriates and interprets traditional elements for a contemporary world. This is an ongoing problem for every organization everywhere. The question raised is this: what are our criteria for throwing out this traditional element and not other traditional elements which also embody the problem of being abrasive to a contemporary mind? Why not throw out the Book of Revelation? Or most of the hymnal? Or all the “white Jesus” stained-glass images that show Jesus as a representation of Euro-centric culture when we know (or should know) this can’t be the case? On the other hand, simply being part of a tradition doesn’t necessitate inclusion. While tradition does account for something, this doesn’t exclude the possibility of revision or resurrection from something archaic to something new and life-giving. By my count, creative thought and meeting the needs of the people are also part of the tradition of the ECUSA. By not evaluating the creeds and our tradition of creedalism in a postmodern context we are, in fact, denying a very important part of our tradition.

The problem of interpretation (take three)

2008-04-13T10:00:00.001-04:00

Okay, I realize by now I’ve completely lost my readership. But, I wrote this so I sort of felt the need to post it. The most interesting piece can probably be stated here – that neither Literary Theory nor Hermenutics seem to take the reader’s intention or disposition into account in the process of interpretation. Keep in mind this is based on my limited encounters with these fields, but I’m interested in whether or not there is such a thing as reading religiously, as opposed to just reading. In other words, does a reader’s disposition (I would say ‘intention’ but that’s a loaded term in philosophical jargon) toward the process of reading/interpretation, have any consequence on the act or outcome. From my reading, hermenutics and reader-response theory seem to suggest a sort of amorphous category of reading, where disposition could be a factor, but its effect isn’t addressed specifically. Oddly, in psychology, I found the opposite to be true. Psychology (perhaps as a more scientific endeavor) classifies readers and reading much more explicitly and (I find) helpfully. Without further delay…

Psychological research on reading relies on a wide number of sub-fields of psychology, including developmental psychology, cognitive psychology, psycholinguistics, cognitive neuropsychology, and educational psychology.

Psychology understands the object of the reading process as encompassing more than simply the relationship between literate adult and printed text, instead including behaviors as varied as infants and mothers reading nonverbal signs of one another (Sagi, 1981), young children reading picture books and other visual stimuli (Bogatz & Ball, 1971), adults reading body language, carpenters reading blueprints, students learning a foreign language and both translate signs, as well as understand meaning (Samuels & Eisenberg, 1981), etc… In this sense, reading is part of a broad communication sequence that begins with emotional utterances and develops into complex lexicon of spoken and written language. For this project, I concentrated exclusively on the reader-text relationship.

E. B. Huey and others began doing psychological research on reading in the early 1900s, but research on reading went out of favor due to the work of Behaviorists who shifted the focus of American psychology to studying behaviors that were more observable than reading. But as cognitive psychology became increasingly dominant during the latter half of the century, reading and all human thinking, in general, became a important area of focus.

Bottom-up

Partly because of the lasting effects of Behaviorism, early models of reading were “stimulus-driven” and most of the work operated under the assumption that information in the text is passively absorbed by the reader. In other words, information was understood flow from the “bottom up” or from the text to the reader, and it was assumed that reading happens letter by letter, building from individual letters to full texts.

Researchers soon discovered that reading short and long words require the same amount of time, and that we read short to medium-sized words faster than individual letters, a phenomenon termed the “word superiority effect.” What this research showed, in effect, was that in the process of reading not all information flows from the text to the reader.

Top-down

“Top-down models” were developed, which emphasized the expectations and predictive abilities of readers.

One of the most well-known of these models was developed by Ken Goodman based on his analysis of reader errors, which he called “miscues,” as they read aloud. Goodman’s experiments showed that when his subjects misread a word, good readers were more likely than poor readers to substitute a word that makes sense in the context of the sentence. (As a side-note, Goodman’s brainchild was the educational disaster known as ‘whole language’).

Other evidence supporting a “top-down” model of processing include “semantic priming effects,” in other words, we read the word “doctor” more quickly following related words like “nurse” or “hospital” than after unrelated words like “table.” In addition, the “prior knowledge effect” shows that when interpreting sentences containing ambiguous words we impose prior knowledge or categories on the ambiguous words.

Interactive Models

Based on research, most psychologist have also rejected “top-down” models of reading, arguing that reading is an interaction between text and reader, rather than purely an active or passive activity. Most reading researchers now adopt a theoretical model that includes elements of both “top-down” and “bottom-up” models.

Interactive models acknowledge the reading is a process which requires a complex coordination of elements including the text on the page, the textual context from the previously-encountered text, the prior knowledge of the reader and the goals of the reader. Some of the implications of the model are that during reading, attention cannot be everywhere at once, even in an interactive model. In other words, if attention is required to recognize particular words or phrases, less attention is available to devote to understanding the story context or to synthesize information in relationship with prior knowledge. Another implication is that as readers gain skill, several reading processes become increasingly automatic, such as word recognition and other ‘lower level’ skills, meaning that they run without conscious attention or effort.

Reading Types

Work in this area of conceptualization of reading breaks the reading process down into different types, or ways of knowing: (1) Semantic-logical reading, which evaluates the content for logical consistency and is typically a type of reading used in historical research; (2) symbolic-mathematical reading, which is the type of reading involved in experimental research and serves as the basis for the statistical testing of hypotheses; and (3) the empathetic-mystical reading, which makes possible the understanding of written messages on religious beliefs and life-styles.

The third type of reading, empathetic-mystical, can be classified as mystical, religious, and allegorical and demands an extraordinary level of responsiveness from readers. It is comprised of a few identifiable component parts: (1) it requires an empathic reader who responds to the emotions of authors who write of experiences that are often conveyed indirectly (e.g. metaphorically or allegorically); (2) it relies on sensorial language and common experience which are emphasized to give reality to the deeper meanings the writer intends to communicate; (3) semantic forms are used to express nonsemantic ideas. In other words, literature of this type often tries to articulate non-linguistic feelings; (4) it often relies on restricted code language to express several meanings to more than one group. For example, poets and novelists may write on more than one level with multiple meanings only available to the perceptive reader.

Particularly as it concerns religious and mystical languages, scholars are often skeptical of all forms of communication that cannot be objectively measured and statistically treated and are, therefore, likely to find mystical-empathetic literature unsettling and unreal. Nevertheless, psychology of reading, literary theory and hermeneutics all seem to maintain the claim no approach to reading has an exclusive hold on a “correct” interpretation of reality.

the problem of interpretation (take two)

2008-04-10T17:32:00.002-04:00

Continuing on my oh so intriguing three-part series on approaches to the problem of interpretation, here is a snapshot of how literary theorists have approached hermeneutics....

It can be difficult to differentiate between philosophical work on reading and literary theory, which overlap in significant and interesting ways particularly because theoretical thought, in order to articulate with precision, often draws on fundamental philosophical concepts.

Generally speaking, literary theory is very broad and, in addition to concentrating on the process of reading, focuses issues relating to the literary text, textuality, language, genre, social, historical and cultural context, sexuality and gender, and psychology.

It might be argued that literary theory in the twentieth century developed along two main pathways: one that emphasized language, linguistic difference, and formalism and another that emphasized historicism, ideology and the determining influence of social and cultural forces. If anything remains constant, it is the impulse to understand how literary and cultural texts create meaning and how we, as readers, find meaning in them.

Of particular interest to my project is reader-response theory, which is where I’ve chosen to concentrate. Reader-response theory includes an array of approaches to literary and cultural texts that focus on the role of the reader in the creation of meaning. While the importance of the reader has long been a part of literary theory, the reader’s role has typically been subordinated to qualities of textuality. In formalist theories, including the New Criticism, the reader’s experience is guided by formal cues inherent in the text; it is essentially a passive mode of reading that involves the discovery of the text’s internal dynamics and structural unities. Reader-response theory, in contrast, is interested in the formal aspects of literary texts insofar as they illustrate the way readers frame interpretations, and in this way is anti-formalist and process oriented.

In fact, contemporary reader-response theory developed out of philosophical hermeneutics and phenomenology. The critical question, then, was establishing, as Gadamer described, the “horizon” of the reader’s consciousness in relation to a text perceived as a type of consciousness.

Georges Poulet (1902-1991) argued that the act of reading is a process of opening oneself up to an “alien” consciousness. In the act of reading, “I am aware of a rational being, of a consciousness; the consciousness of another, no different from the one I automatically assume in every human being I encounter, except in this case the consciousness is open to me, welcomes me, lets me look deep inside myself” (A Phenomenology of Reading, 54). Reading breaks down the barrier between subject and object in part by transforming the text-as-object into another subject, one that occupies the reader’s consciousness, existing simultaneously within it. In Poulet’s phenomenology of reading, what penetrates the reader’s mind and exists within it as an “alien subject,” what effectively “loans” the reader’s subjectivity to the text is the consciousness of the text itself: “the subject which presides over the work can only exist in the work” (A Phenomenology of Reading, 58). Poulet’s phenomenological approach was influential in the 1960s and 1970s, but was ultimately rejected in favor of more pragmatic conceptions of the relationship between reader and work.

The most significant and influential advances in reader-response theory came in the work of Wolfgang Iser (1926-2007) and Stanley Fish (1938 - ), who believed reading is fundamentally a process in which the reader activates or completes a text. In his phenomenological study of the novel, Iser wrote that “The convergence of the text and reader brings the literary work into existance” (How To Do Theory, 275). Iser postulates the existence of expectations (what Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) called pre-intentions) whose unfulfillment constitutes the structure of the literary text. Unlike a cookbook or textbook, the literary text is filled with “unexpected twists and turns, and frustrations of expectations” (How To Do Theory, 279). For this reason, it is constitutively indeterminate and inexhaustible. The literary text is far more than what is written in it; and this “far more” comes into existence precisely as part of a creative process whereby the reader’s own faculties are brought into being.

Like Iser, Stanley Fish believed that the reader is instrumental in the construction of meaningful texts. The only way to maneuver within a “scene of reading” riddled by contradictions, ellipses, gaps and other inconsistencies is to learn the interpretive protocols of a given community of readers. Hedging against the formalist critique of falling into pure relativism of meaning, Fish also argues that the “informed “reader’s response is not arbitrary or random, that there are “regularizing constraints on response.” These constraints are produced by “the system of rules all speakers share” and by various forms of linguistic and semantic competence honed within “interpretive communities” (Surprised By Sin, 44-45).

Also like Iser, Fish argues that the meaning derived from literary texts is the product of a “joint responsibility.” Meaning is thus “redefined as an event rather than an entity:” “The reader’s response is not to the meaning; it is the meaning” (Surprised By Sin, 3). The “informed reader” learns the appropriate reading responses by being a member of an interpretive community “made up of those who share interpretive strategies” that “exist prior to the act of reading and therefore determine the shape of what is read rather than, as is usually assumed, the other way around” (Surprised By Sin, 171).

Disagreements hinge not on a universal notion of truth about texts or their meanings but rather on the conditioned and relative truth of each community. The meanings generated by communities are “both subjective and objective: they are subjective because they inhere in a particular point of view and are therefore not universal; they are objective because the point of view that delivers them is public and conventional rather than individual and unique” (Surprised By Sin, 335-336).

the problem of interpretation (take one)

2008-04-04T09:34:00.002-04:00

As some of you know, one of my major projects this semester has been to work on the problem of perception. In other words, the questions related to how the world around us presents itself and how we perceive and make judgments about it. As part of this endeavor, I’ve been doing a lot of reading about hermeneutics (which can be generally understood as the “art of interpretation”), which I thought might make an interesting series of entries.

For this entry, I’m hoping to give a very basic entry into the philosophical approach to hermeneutics, hopefully expanding it in the next few weeks into how literary theory and psychology approach the problem. While this whole series may be too dry for a lot of folks, I think the question of hermeneutics is fundamental to how religious persons create and understand their own faith-paradigm. No, it’s not fundamental to the creation of faith-paradigms, it actually is how the creation of faith-paradigms happens.

I find this whole question of interpretation particularly important because of the stickiness of religious language and symbols. In other words, religious communities rely deeply on language and symbols which are also employed in non-religious parts of culture. When language and symbols shift from cultural (e.g. father) to religious (i.e. Father) usage they often shift from a primarily literal use to a fundamentally metaphorical one. In other words, our faith-paradigms subsist on metaphors and analogies drawn from everyday experience. Part of tension this creates is that when language/symbols shift from being primarily literal (i.e. non-religious) to primarily metaphorical (i.e. religious), religious people are often a bit unsure about the content and meaning of the terms they are using. This seems to me where a lot of anger and fighting happens, and ultimately this involves a question of interpretation. For example, is father-language for God metaphorical or literal? How does our answer impact our theological and ecclesiastical outlook? Another example would be how can we tell the difference between when terms in the Biblical text are used metaphorically or literally? What are our criterion for labeling one metaphorical and one literal? How does that impact our worldview, our theology, our missional vision? Hermeneutics is important, then, because so many parts of our religious faith and understanding are impacted by the question of interpretation.

Before I go completely down a rabbit trail, let me turn to the task at hand. Philosophical hermeneutics is more generally “the problem of interpretation,” but is more often understood (particularly in religious circles) as “the problem interpreting texts,” as it was originally the theory and method of interpreting the Bible.

The field was formally developed from disparate partial theories into a single discipline by Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834). In 1813 Schleiermacher wrote: ‘Essentially and inwardly, thought and its expression are completely the same’ (1959: 21). [1] Schleiermacher was the essentially the first to introduce hermeneutics as field with a goal: (a) the mutual understanding of texts, in general, and (b) gaining access to the truth claims of the Bible, in particular.

One of Schleiermacher’s major contributions to the field was the assertion that at each level of interpretation readers are involved in a ‘hermeneutical circle’ which is, in short, that it is impossible to understand a piece of a text without understanding the whole of the text at the same time. Reciprocally, the whole cannot be understood without knowing its parts. This applies as both too individual phrases or events in relationship to the totality of the text (e.g. is it possible to understand the stories in the Gospels without an awareness of the resurrection?), as it does to individual texts in relationship to the author’s life, culture and body of work (e.g. is it possible to understand Paul’s letters without some understanding the political and social culture in which he lived?).

Later, Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911) extended the field of hermeneutics to include the interpretation of all human acts, including history and human life. In particular, Dilthey used hermeneutics to attempt an answer to the question of how the social sciences differ from the natural sciences. He concluded that while the natural sciences seek to explain, the social sciences seek to understand all meaningful expressions of human life.

Philosophical hermeneutics, as a modern discipline, cannot be understood apart from Heidegger’s (1889-1976) Being in Time (1927). Heidegger’s major proposition was that hermeneutics is neither limited to being a matter of textual or linguistic interpretation, nor is it about finding a clear methodology for the social sciences, but that ultimately hermeneutics is ontology. Don’t be put-off by the fancy philosophical jargon. Basically what Heidegger meant is that even with all the knowledge science collects, it can never adequately respond to the problem of death. For Heidegger, death is ultimately the point of solidarity common to all human beings.

On this basis, Heidegger developed his hermeneutics of facticity. In other words, he interpreted the temporal structure of Dasein (i.e. his German term meaning roughly a human becoming, or a human to be, stressing the process or future orientation of human life) as the movement of interpretation such that interpretation doesn’t occur as an activity in the course of life, but is the form of human life. Thus, the very fact of our life is a process of interpretation.

Heidegger eventually dropped the word hermeneutics because he felt it invited the expectation that it was a weapon with which one could learn how to interpret more reliably, more surely, with deeper meaning and authenticity than before. Instead, hermeneutics for Heidegger is behind the whole activity of human life, rather than an interpretive strategy within it.

Heidegger did more on textual interpretation in later works, but Being and Time foreshadows this work, particularly his emphasis on the fact that words do not have fixed, univocal meanings independently of their use and application; meanings are developed from the significant interrelationships that constitute our world. In other words, the meaning of a word depends on the world of its user, therefore to understand a text we need to go beyond dictionaries to reconstruct the world of its author and the ‘possibilities’ it offered.

Heidegger’s student Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900-2002), one of the most profound writers on hermeneutics in the 20^th century, insists that interpretation involves a recapturing of the context in which an author wrote, taking into account the intended audience and the questions the author was answering.

For Gadamer, all interpreters operate out of historical and social context and therefore bring a “pre-understanding” to the process of interpretation. Gadamer calls this pre-understanding a “horizon of understanding.” The process of interpretation, then, involves a “fusion of horizons,” between the constellation of elements contacting any interpretive event. To say this another way, in any moment of interpretation there are many elements which impact the shape of our eventual interpretation. These change within any interpretive moment, but can include things like the author’s intended meaning, the author’s historical & social context, the genre of the work, the interpreter’s horizon of understanding (i.e. historical & social context, familiarity with the work or genre, etc..), and even the community of readers all in dialogue – just to name a few. Therefore, for Gadamer, any interpretation is both (a) an exploration of the phenomenon and (b) an exploration of our own interpretive “horizon” – in other words, an exploration of self. If we invest ourselves in the process, we gain understanding and our changed, as well. It is important that, for Gadamer, we cannot ever be certain our interpretation is correct, or better than previous interpretations. Our interpretation, and our verdict on previous interpretations, always remains open to future revision. And, yes, Gadamer has responded to criticisms to which his philosophical position remains open (such as relativism, his optimism in the hermeneutical process, etc…) which I can’t go into now.

Ultimately, I have no final verdict on this subject, but simply wanted to present some of what I’ve found. I do believe that interpretation, empathy and dialogue are inseparable and necessary in the context of religion and, unfortunately, often lacking in the face of unrelenting existential angst. But perhaps this is for another post. Cheers -

why we need god in school

2008-03-28T09:28:00.005-04:00

I’ve come to the conclusion that for most of my adult life I’ve been wrong. We actually do need god in school.

This is a thought that’s been brewing for years, I think, but made itself known the other day in a discussion in my philosophy of religion class over the problem of free will. All of a sudden a student who never speaks, who has a very strong loyalty to a personal faith tradition, got into an emotionally charged argument with my token atheist – each refusing to listen to the other’s point of view. It all occurred to me, like a flash, that this was not simply the fault of the students, but was a major failing of the university – that students’ personal worldviews are so far removed from their classroom education that they (a) don’t see the two as being related in any way and (b) don’t know how engage in patient, honest, empathetic dialogue.

Much of what I’m about to say depends, of course, on your definition and expectations of a university education. On one hand, I believe the traditional “liberal arts” education is increasingly morphing into an advanced vocational degree for the white collar worker. This is a problem. On the other hand, I’m a hopeless romantic who believes an undergraduate education should be more than job preparation, but should also be liminal time in which one is allowed to briefly let one’s intellect and passions unite for the purposes of self-discovery.

I no longer believe that university is a safe space for the exploration of questions of meaning and purpose. A major part of the damage done, as I see it, has to do with economic forces – that universities are being increasingly funded and run by business schools and science programs, leading to a mistrust of the humanities and social sciences. Consequently, the humanities and social sciences respond by modeling themselves on the illusion of objectivity taken up by natural sciences.

One of the ultimate results of this economic situation, combined with a blind reliance on empiricism, is that a naturalist line of argument (what might be called ‘academic naturalism’) is embedded in the curricula of most colleges and universities. In other words most (if not all) university courses don’t go outside the realm of science at all to make their point: if there is an explanation for the phenomenon they are studying (a) it can be holistically and completely explained through observation and, further, (b) Ockham’s razor (“Entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity”) is ready to quickly shave off any metaphysical questions students may have related to what they encounter in class. In other words, in this naturalist view, all our explanatory needs are met without including God in our world picture, and therefore we shouldn’t include her at all.

There are perhaps no departments whose courses actually claim they have no need of the God-hypothesis, but each department speaks for its own discipline: “This discipline has no need of the God-hypothesis.” And yet, as students fill their divisional requirements semester-by-semester, they are smart enough to piece together the big picture. In fact, in most universities, simply by meeting the requirements for the Bachelors degree, students acquire a worldview with no God in it. Each course contributes only a few premises to the picture, but together they imply a single conclusion: “The world has no need of the God-hypothesis.”

I want to be very clear that I’m not arguing every student should be required to take a Bible study; the university isn’t about and shouldn’t be about one particular theological stance. The big problem is that the brute fact that the university relies completely and utterly on a naturalist argument which isn’t discussed either as part of the undergraduate curriculum or campus cultural life. Why might this be a problem?

The truth is that the naturalist line of argument is not objective, not neutral and can do much damage if (a) undergraduates aren’t made aware that it is the baseline assumption of most university courses and (b) other services, classes, and programs aren’t put built into the curriculum which allow space for intentional dialogue about what students’ discover during their courses - space which develops and expands students’ questions of meaning and self-understanding, rather than shutting them down.

I believe there are many more economies in the world than simply the financial one our culture worships. I also believe there is a price for this typical attitude by university departments and, by extension, universities as a whole, which isn’t felt in its billion-dollar endowment.

To my knowledge, most students are raised with a worldview in which God (in whatever form) plays a prominent role. Even those who are atheist often hold a worldview in which their life has some sort of meaning. Further, at eighteen students are bright. They often come to university already asking questions of meaning and purpose, already excited about the exploration on which they are about to embark. They want to question their relationship to the world which, most often, includes God. They come to a university not simply to find a career, but to discover a vocation. They come to a university not simply to discover a vocation, but to discover something about themselves which stretches beyond understanding their body as a series of chemical processes and their world as a social construction.

Yet they come to university and, beginning in their freshman year, are forced to acknowledge a world-picture in which God and meaning and purpose and vocation plays no role at all. This change is drastic, and for many students, is painful too. And in all cases it is the students rather than the faculty or the university which pays the price.

In doing so, the university unequivocally fails its mission. Even worse are the universities which recognize this dangerous situation and, rather than acting, point to chaplains, counselors and student development professionals (all of whom are most often marginalized by the system, in general) to try to resurrect their departmental failings. The sad truth is that most of these solutions (chaplains, counselors, and student development professionals) have little to no interaction with academic departments and thereby do little more than unintentionally assist the growing distinction between the naturalist argument of classroom education and life-in-general.

My heart nearly broke the other day in office hours as a student and I spent an hour discussing the problem of evil and at the end she said, “Thanks so much for your help. I think I now understand some of the issues here. Its too bad, as a chemistry major, I’ll never really use this again, but it’s really interesting.” Maybe she’s right. Maybe chemistry majors don’t need to worry about the problem of evil. Or perhaps this is, instead, the model she’s been given and that model desperately needs to change.

The Anglimergent Canon

2008-03-26T17:07:00.000-04:00

Okay, so this is a monster post. I admit it. Maybe we should consider it to be for posterity, but I found a lot of value in writing it which is enough for me. An awesome guy on the Anglimergent site named Tim wrote a great post about the common elements of this thing that might be termed "Anglimergent." His thoughts are in bold + italics, and my responses are interspersed below.

I want to throw out a few of my thoughts in the theology section here about what seem to me to be the fundamental elements of Anglimergent identity at this juncture in history. Let me know what you think.

Tim, I apologize that I’m late to the conversation and wordy. I typed this and then, later, saw the conversation about the “three legged stool” was already happening, so I hope this doesn’t overlap too much. My two dollars (see the monster list below) is that I think the difficulty in trying to outline any distillation of elements means that for every element we include we are necessarily (though not intentionally) excluding others. Still, there’s no harm in trying and I think it can and will yield some important discoveries of identity for anyone who chooses to engage with your proposal. With that said, here’s my attempt to ‘riff’ off of your contribution to offer my important elements (or my personal “Anglimergent Canon,” if you will).

1) First off, we're liturgical/sacramental in orientation, and we affirm the three legged stool of Scripture, tradition and reason. By liturgical/sacramental, I don't just mean that we like structure and wine (who doesn't?), but that we affirm the underlying importance of the physical. That is, to use Alister McGrath's term, we believe in the 'Enchantment' of the world, that God is present around us, in what we do and how we act, and in the physical Eucharist that we eat on Sundays. By 'affirm the three legged stool', I mean that in some form or another, we believe that those are the proper and primary sources for the developing Anglimergent belief and practice--wherever that might take us.

(1) I would personally say that the “three-legged stool” model needs to be revamped. In fact, I think you’ve already identified exactly why –it includes neither the heart nor the sensory (nor the liturgical, nor the sacramental). I know that your typical country club Episcopalian might bristle at this thought, but in my own life I’ve discovered that if I completely relied on the ‘big three’ (Scripture, tradition and reason) I wouldn’t probably have any faith, because I find they sort of distill God to a series of philosophical and historical propositions. In other words, my own faith is guided as much by my embodied intuition in the world and the reasonable reflection on those intuitions. And in order to get to God, I have to be able to take a leap which goes beyond where any of those three will allow me to go, including Scripture. So, I would take the ‘big three’ and add intuition, or embodiment, or some other term which captures the way I experience God in the world.

2) In the same vein, we're Nicene Creed-centric rather than Bible or "gospel"-centric. Some of the evangelical wings of the emerging church conversation tend to find their unity in Scripture, while we find it in our common affirmation of the creed. (And our common dis-affirmation of the band Creed).

(2) I love the second element, if for no other reason then our common distaste for Creed the band. My personal Anglimergent identity embraces creedalism whole-heartedly (I have a blog post on the issue of creedalism and the emergent conversation), yet I’m not sure if I would go so far as to embrace the Nicene Creed whole-heartedly. I embrace it as an important document to Anglican history and tradition, but my emergent spirit wants me to dust it off for a new, relational generation. So I say creedalism, yes! But I also want to argue for careful, unending consideration of the ultimate effect of the language and theological commitments of our historical creeds (e.g. gendered language for God) in postmodern congregational life.

3) Like other elements of the emerging conversation, we are self-consciously post-modern when it comes to our epistemology. That is, we like to say "I don't know" a lot, because we've realized that we actually don't, and ultimately can't. We're part of a bigger dialogue with reality, and we never finally come to an absolute final 'answer' to any of our questions--particularly religious ones. Like Michael Polanyi and John Polkinghorne, I like to identify this approach as "Critically Realist" rather than "relativist", because it's not that we don't believe that ultimate reality exists--we do, and we call it God--but we just are realistic about the fact that we can't totally grasp it. "I still haven't found what I'm looking for...but yes I'm still running..."

(3) I like your element number three a lot. I do think there’s a tension with the fact that any strong definition of the post-modern would probably reject any affirmation of an ultimate reality as simply an acknowledgment of another (though decentralized) metanarrative. But, of course, as people aligning with a religious faith we are left in a curious position of both acknowledging a greater, unified force and our inability to comprehend that force. In the same way, as Christians, we are left in the curious position of saying both “we don’t know” and “we privilege the Bible over other sacred texts.” So, perhaps we’re not purely post-modern, but undeniably paradoxically postmodern.

4) Along the same lines, we're conversational in orientation. We don't fully trust dogma, so we try to network with other people with other opinions in the attempt to move closer to the truth. Tied to this, we call ourselves 'conversational' because we don't want to be labeled as a 'movement' or 'trend', although if you think about the definitions of those terms, that's what we are. I don't know what's so bad about that...

(4) Again, my Anglimergent identity agrees with number four. I think hinge, for me, again lies in the paradox of conversation. If we are truly conversational, then we have to be willing to listen and, consequently, risk changing our position on faith every time we enter into authentic dialogue with another. The question I’ve had (and probably will continue to have) is that emergent folk talk a great deal about “intentional conversation” as a foundational element in this sense of willingness to privilege the other, to listen to the other, and ultimately be transformed through dialogue. What I don’t hear much about is how this dialogue works with folks of other (or no) faith traditions. This is, for me, where the rubber meets the road. In other words, it’s one thing to risk transformation with a person of essentially the same faith. It’s quite another to risk it with someone of no faith, or another faith.

[As a side-note, my impression of the concern over being labeled a ‘movement’ or ‘trend’ has partially to do with concern over becoming what all radical movements eventually become – stagnant. I think (though am probably wrong) that it has even more to do with fear of labels which categorize things and make people start to see them as linear, bounded phenomena.]

5) We're closet Anglophiles with secret crushes on Bono. Just thought I'd throw that in. But seriously, we do embrace the old (i.e., England) and the new (i.e. U23D) --hence we tend to identify as the 'new monastics', the 'new friars', and so forth.

(5) Yes and yes. I would simply add that in my identity, history becomes a dialogue partner meaning that things such as the creeds, hymnals, and all the formulas of our Anglican identity are opened up for exploration and conversation.

6) We're trans-institutional, and communitarian. I don't like the term post-institutional, because I think that's a little bit over dramatic. We are, however, happy to cross institutional boundaries and disregard institutional requirements when we find it to be expedient. That's because we believe in the concept of the priesthood of all believers, and have a catholic spirit about the unity of the body of Christ. We're CANA, ECUSA, COE, non-denominational, etc. etc.

(6) This element is, for me, is one which I haven’t worked out and is going to be vitally important to the future of Anglicanism as an institution. I think you’ve brilliantly called it to our attention. There are two important points you raise, and here’s my take.

First, the question of the church as an institution. I think a distinction does need to be made here. My sense of ‘trans-institutional’ is that it implies a crossing or unifying many institutions. On the other hand, ‘post-institutional’ means quite the opposite: that institutionalization should be dissolved entirely. One of the sticking points between “Anglicanism,” on one hand, and “emergence” on the other is just this difference. Are we dissolving the institution or are we revolutionizing it? I think this will have to be worked out through history, but I would gather that of all the great elements you’ve pointed out, this is the one in which this group would differ the most. Also, I have no answer to this very difficult element, I think it’s just an important tension to continue to think through.

Second, the question of “the priesthood of all believers.” This is a biggy. In my mind, here’s the primary question: if we truly embody this concept, how does that affect our sacramental and liturgical theology? In other words, am I (a believer-priest) able to consecrate the host, proclaim the gospel during a service, or baptize an infant? If not, what is the difference between the agency of a believer-priest and an ordained-priest? And if there IS a difference does the claim “priesthood of ALL believers” still hold? Perhaps this is for another post, but I believe this question is a hornet’s nest waiting to be stirred in this post-modern world. If you don’t believe me, wait until the middle of a sermon on Sunday, then raise your hand and ask these questions. Then follow them with these questions: was Jesus ordained? How about Paul? (But make sure to have the car warmed up first).

7) We have an ethical/missional/kingdom of God orientation rather than an 'evangelism' orientation. This is almost a cliche at this point, but it's true. We're trying to impact our communities in a way that is different from an Evangelical evangelistic model. We believe in building the Kingdom of God, loving our neighbors, and generally not being assholes (we also curse self-consciously as our petty little stand against traditional religious authority). We think the Christian message is important, but believe that it is integrally connected to a Christian way of acting. Orthodoxy and Orthopraxy aren't mutually exclusive.

(7) I couldn’t agree more. I wish that there was more talk about social justice in the “emergent conversation” which, by its categorical title, privileges talk over action. In my ideal Anglimergent world, orthodoxy and orthopraxy wouldn’t exist at all and would be replaced by dialogical authenticity. But again, Tim, I think you’ve hit on a really big concept here, which is what does God’s kin-dom look like? In my mind it looks something like radical egalitarianism. The issue I’ve always had with traditional evangelical missional models is that when I read the gospels, I recall a lot of moments when Jesus healed and then requested secrecy and very few times when he required orthodoxy before services were rendered. But I wish this issue of social justice carried much more of a sense of urgency, as you suggest. I suspect that part of the gift of our Anglican heritage is reminding our evangelical emergent friends that radical sacramentalism demands social justice. In other words, feed, clothe, educate and empower first - ask questions later.

(8) Okay, that was the easy part because you provided so many great things to think about. Now its my turn to add one or two, which are more like extensions of what you’ve already said. That being said, my Anglimergent identity is also constituted of:

(a) A focus on process over product. In other words, a continual awareness of the profound tensions, contradictions and paradoxes of my faith-stance. This will (hopefully) result in an ongoing reinterpretation of the assumptions and commitments of my faith, and a continual renewal of my actions in the world. In other words, what I say, what I do, and how I worship.

(b) A commitment to the value of other faith (or non-faith) traditions. In other words, a commitment to the belief that God is larger than Christianity and trying to find ways in which I can connect and learn from the authenticity of others in the world.

(c) Renouncing the sacred/profane divide. Niebuhr’s “Christ and Culture” is a classic on this issue, as you probably already know. But my Anglimergent identity leads me to believe that if I am acting authentically on behalf of Christ in the world, then everywhere I stand I am standing on holy ground. I can’t hide from the world, but must immerse myself in it.

(d) Ceaseless action for social justice in the world. I just wanted to reiterate this one. My Anglimergent identity leads me to believe that we must become active agents for God’s kin-dom in the world. Conversations are only as good as the effect they produce.

birthday poem

2008-03-22T10:43:00.000-04:00

Somebody who loves me sent this to me 'cause I'm turning 30 today. I also wrote a new post (below) so check that out too. Cheers -

poetics

I look for the way
things will turn
out spiraling from a center,
the shape
things will take to come forth in

so that the birch tree white
touched black at branches
will stand out
wind-glittering
totally its apparent self:

I look for the forms
things want to come as

from what black wells of possibility,
how a thing will
unfold:

not the shape on paper -- though
that, too - but the
uninterfering means on paper:

not so much looking for the shape
as being available
to any shape that may be
summoning itself
through me
from the self not mine but ours.

-a.r. ammons

sartre and jesus

2008-03-22T10:38:00.000-04:00

I’m currently reading selections from Sartre’s Being and Nothingness and had a sort of gestalt moment which centered on two concepts in Sartre’s work. So, here are my rambling notes.

(1) First is Sartre’s conception of the ego, of the self. Basically he believes that for each of us the ego or the “I” is not the known, perfectly-understood subject we typically assume it to be. Instead the “I” (our I) functions for us as an object in the world just like any other object.

This appears at first more confusing than I think it might be. Stop reading for a moment and look at a chair (or any object) in the room around you. Now think for a moment about what happened when you stared at that chair. You didn’t automatically think “I am looking at the chair” but instead only saw the chair. In other words, in order to understand the ego, the self, as part of the event of looking at the chair, you had to intentionally reflect on the moment. In other words, as Sartre concludes (through a much more detailed analysis) it is only upon reflection that the self begins to manifest itself in our consciousness.

For Sartre this conclusion is not a minor happening, but points to two critical realities in human life. (Please note that these are my extractions from Sartre.) The first is that (a) the self or ego exists in a constant state of differentiation - even from itself. In other words, we neither begin nor end life as holistic, unified beings, but are always misunderstood and separate (even from ourselves). There is both a violence and a danger in this circumstance. The second, an extension of the first, is that (b) the unending process of self-understanding (which is the same as self-unification) is deep and difficult work and should not be taken for lightly. In other words, though Western culture assumes that we are perfectly transparent to ourselves by virtue of our existence, this is not the case at all. Instead, the process of self-understanding is, itself, a critical, misunderstood, and neccessary economy in our world.

(2) Second, and tied into his notion of the ego, is Sartre’s concept of freedom. Sartre believed that human freedom operated against a background of “facticity” (i.e. the facts about myself which cannot be changed – my age, sex, race, class of origin, etc...) and “situation” (i.e. those things which may be modified, but still begin in my facticity). Freedom, then, always exists (a) within a given set of circumstances, (b) as part of dialogical movement of past/present/future, and (c) against the expectations of my self and others. And yet, while the ego has no choice over its facticity, it has complete freedom over how it will react to its facticity. This is how it begins to change its situation.

A section that I’m currently reading (“Bad Faith”) is focused on Sartre’s account of the moment when the ego deceives itself. In other words, for Sartre, self-deception occurs when the ego believes it is merely a product of uncontrollable outside forces (facticity) has no choice of reaction to those forces. And because Sartre understands the ego to be differentiated to itself (i.e. an object in the world) ‘bad faith’ happens when the ego does not reflect on itself, but instead moves along inauthentically in any situation in the world.

Let me clarify that Sartre’s notion of freedom isn’t really akin to the American myth of the ‘self made man’ – in other words, that someone is born into bad circumstances and works themselves into a different socioeconomic class. No, Sarte’s freedom has more to do with the choice of being authentic in a circumstance or event in the world. In other words, while it is true that no person is perfectly identical to their orientation, ‘bad faith’ is that gap we constantly struggle to overcome between who we are and who we are called to be.

Let me shift gears here. As many of you know by now, I constantly struggle with claiming a Christian identity. I often find it difficult to articulate why this is a struggle for me, but I believe it has to do with the fact that if I am to claim myself as Christian then I have to look to Jesus as my model of a human responding to the world. I find this very difficult (and here is where it comes into contact with Sartre).

My reading of the gospels is such that I understand the model Jesus as one of pure unity of self. In other words, with few exceptions, Jesus spoke and lived in perfect authenticity or unity of self and called others to do the same. This is difficult because having Jesus as a model forces me to encounter this gap, this ‘bad faith,’ in my own life. Not only am I forced to realize that there is a gap between who I am and who God is calling me to be – but I have to take action in my daily life to unify this gap.

Of course, I also have to realize I am never going to close the gap - but this is why faith is a risk. I have to strive for something I cannot achieve. I have to realize my failings and ask for help. And so perhaps the best I can do is to learn to forgive myself for being differentiated, while constantly nursing my differentiation. It is like a wound which will not heal, but there is some comfort in the fact that we all share this wound.

To push this a bit further, it also seems to me that many Christians seem to take very difficult, organic realities and turn them into abstract, intangible forces (such as evil, sin and salvation) which have little to do with the true effect of this ‘bad faith’ in everyday life. But being Christian, for me, has absolutely nothing to do with proclaiming Jesus as my “Lord & Savior” because that would relieve me of the responsibility of working toward self unification in my life. No, Christianity for me has all to do (for example) with the tiny sweaty-palm moments in my life when I hear someone speak words of oppression and bigotry and I, sitting at the table, have a choice to respond. I feel confident I am not alone in having these moments which seem to happen on a daily basis. And each time I find myself sitting there, I hear the words of James Cone reverberating in my head who said that every white person who does not speak out against racism every time they hear it spoken participates in racism. The same is true of any sort of –ism or system of oppression against any marginalized person.

Now when I read the gospels, I see a man who made the choice to live a life of perfect authenticity and unity, but I also see what happens to such people - because embodied authenticity has a way of reminding others of the gap in themselves and, therefore, stirring up trouble. And if Jesus was all about unification, ‘bad faith’ is reciprocally all about differentiation (and I believe the gospels support this).

‘Bad faith’ is ignoring or extending the gaps between things in the world: between self/self, between self/other, between sacred/profane. These gaps are like scaffolding for the human ego. They make things in the world appear neat and tidy, but all gaps necessarily create systems of oppression and marginalization. This can be seen, for example, in the way in which much of the Christian tradition has differentiated Jesus to the point that he has become an idol. This seems to me what “Christ-following” and heavy “Christocentrism” is all about. Yet, I don’t recall many times in the Gospel when Jesus healed someone and then proclaimed himself to them – in fact I recall far more that Jesus healed and then asked for secrecy. And I wonder, for example, how Christocentric Jesus was and I think that perhaps this should be my model.

The crux, for me, is that in Jesus’ way of doing things, he was not only being authentic to he was but he was allowing all those around him to be authentic to their own life-path. He was unifying and calling for unification. And while it is true that unification goes against our nature, I believe it is the dream of God for the world - a world where we decide to make no differentiation between what is sacred and profane; a world where each of us has equal access to holiness; a world where we accept our brokenness; a world where every place we stand, we find our selves on holy ground.

a fragment from merleau-ponty

2008-03-13T17:12:00.000-04:00

Unfortunately I don’t have time for a proper post; life is a bit too overwhelming as it occasionally becomes. I wanted to post a quote from Merleau-Ponty’s lecture on his major work The Primacy of Perception. In the quote he’s referring to the way we perceive physical objects in space, but I also believe it to be more than this. Cheers -

“What prohibits me from treating my perception as an intellectual act is that an intellectual act would grasp the object either as possible or as necessary. But in perception it is “real”; it is given as the infinite sum of an indefinite series of perspectival views in each of which the object is given but in none of which is it given exhaustively.”