Approaching one of the Big Four

I am not sure it is the case with you but for at least a decade or so four books have hung over my head standing out as foundational for particular interests that I have.  These four books are Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, Marx’s Capital, and Heidegger’s Being and Time.  Of course other works jockey for position but these sort of linger, not that I think reading them will necessarily be transformational (or even good) but only that they are required if I want to feel as though I can develop a proper orientation around the questions these works address.

Given my current reading schedule I have now begun one of the four, Being and Time.  It has been tremendously helpful to have read Husserl prior to starting this work (Heidegger was Husserl’s student).  Heidegger also believe that philosophy and so also science has not ‘gone back far enough’.  This is of course a disputable (overthrown?) quest today but I still find it helpful to try and think along the process of thinking being.  As I am still early in the work I thought I would offer a reasonably accessible quote on Heidegger’s concept of phenomenology,

[Unlike other sciences] ‘phenomenology’ neither designates the object of its researches, nor characterizes the subject-matter thus comprised.  The word merely informs us of the ‘how’ with which what is to be treated in this science gets exhibited and handled.  To have a science ‘of’ phenomena means to grasp its objects in such a way that everything about them which is up for discussion must be treated by exhibiting it directly and demonstrating it directly.  The expression ‘descriptive phenomenology’, which is at bottom tautological, has the same meaning.  Here ‘description’ does not signify such a procedure as we find, let us say, in botanical morphology; the term has rather the sense of prohibition – the avoidance of characterizing anything without demonstration.

. . .

What is it that phenomenology is to ‘let us see’?  What is that must be called ‘phenomenon’ in a distinctive sense?  What is that by its very essence is necessarily the theme whenever we exhibit something explicitly?  Manifestly, it is something that proximally and for the most does not show itself at all:  it is something that lies hidden, in contrast to that which proximally and for the most does show itself; but at the same time it something that belongs to what thus shows itself, and it belongs to it so essentially as to constitute its meaning and its ground.

Being and Time [trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson], 59.

Preparing for the apocalyptic book event

Having finally got my hands on a copy of Daniel Barber’s recent book On Diaspora I am trying to carve out enough blocks of time to get it down before the book event.  I am only two chapters in and a question is forming in my mind.  It may well be that Dan answers the question in the course of the book but the question relates to other accounts that attempt to furnish a theoretical engagement with ‘the powers’ and how they might be named, undermined, overthrown, etc.  My experience with these accounts is that they seem to function with the implicit need of a ‘strong subjectivity’.  What I mean by this is that there is much language about and call to de-centering, deconstructing, dispossessing, or decomposing (I am of course not assuming these are all the same) while many people simply live in the midst of such processes at the mercy of those who hold power over them.  This question reminded me of a post by Tim at Veeritions.  What I will be curious about understanding as I continue to read Barber’s work is the extent to which this is a work for the oppressors or at least the strong.  Is that inevitable in this medium?  I struggle to think of valorizing those who already experience this undoing and can’t understand why I would want to perpetuate it.  Barber speaks of endless deterritorialialization and undoing identities, will this mean then I must ‘submit’ in the face of those for whom such a process is enforced so that some other movement might be possible?  Can we only ever speak either to the mountain that must be brought low or the valley that must be raised but never both?

In any event these are pre-mature questions, at least with respect to Barber’s work.  If you have not already decided to come on board for the event I strongly advise it.

A question

Is it completely obvious or completely erroneous to say that a or the major point of departure for continental philosophy is taking subjectivity seriously as a direct question of thought?

A note on fact and meaning

My interest in working through Husserl’s The Crisis of European Sciences has waxed and waned.  This is probably due to the sharp transition I feel in moving from Kierkegaard’s style to the more straightforward work of ‘real’ philosophy.  What has kept my attention though is Husserl’s genuine impression of having discovered something and of its significance and secondly of the fact that in historical context the work he did has had tremendous historical significance.  So what is he doing?  I understand a primary motivation of his work to be a method of thinking subjectivity scientifically.  How can I be included in scientific investigation?  For this reason the natural sciences and mathematics always play a secondary (but certainly not disparaged) role.  These secondary sciences work from the assumptions of a pre-given world that accord with our experience of that world.  These sciences always rest on something prior.  So Husserl is trying to carry out to completion Descartes’s emphasis on the primacy of the ego.  But the ego is not a ‘premise’ from which the rest of knowledge is deduced.

The point is not to secure objectivity but to understand it.  One must finally achieve the insight that no objective science, no matter how exact, explains or ever can explain anything in a serious sense. To deduce is not to explain.  To predict, or to recognize the objective forms of composition of physical or chemical bodies and predict accordingly – all this explains nothing but is in need of explanation.  The only true way to explain is to make transcendentally understandable. (Crisis, 189)

This is not particularly shocking to anyone with exposure to philosophical hermeneutics but it is a helpful reminder for what continues presently to be a common and serious misconception, namely, that scientific findings are self-evidently meaningful.  These findings are framed as such because they give the air of authority and therefore power to various expressions.  While I am not sure I will follow Husserl in his own project I think this point remains sound.

High school wisdom

I have never studied philosophy institutionally.  This is, almost, a fact.  When I was in high school a few students were selected (how I don’t know) to participate in the University of Winnipeg’s Mini-U program which was a week’s worth of classes on a topic of the student’s choosing.  I chose philosophy (why I don’t know).  I remember the basic outlines of certain sessions.  We looked at theories of essence in which a knife was evaluated by its knifiness.  I remember making a comment and the professor saying I was a closet Nietzschian (I remember neither the comment nor do I know why it would have been associated with Nietzsche).  I remember being told that a dog does not think.  I remember some high school bantering about how truth can be known.

What I remember most, though, was coming across Zeno’s paradox.  I will go from memory so I don’t need to worry about accuracy.  Zeno’s paradox explores the nature of two simultaneous and seemingly conflicting processes.  As I remember it the paradox was described (either in the original context or taught as an example) as a race in which the runner has a clear start and finish.  However, during that run a mathematical process also occurs or can at least describe the runner.  Mathematically the space can be divided into halves.  Halving a finite space, however, is an infinite process.  A half can always be mathematically halved.  How can an infinite mathematic process be completed within a finite progression?  I am probably stating this horrendously.  However, Zeno’s paradox came back to mind as I am reading Husserl in which he attempts to outline the faulty thinking of science in assuming that objective and abstract processes can be the basis for all knowledge, when in reality “the objective is precisely never experienceable as itself.” So Husserl attempts to move back into understanding what a science of the subjective could be.

And more than this Zeno’s paradox came to mind with this image from a newly added blog to my feed, Fuck Theory.

Finally we meet

You know, you just don’t here this kind of confidence anymore.  Here is the final paragraph of Part I of Husserl’s The Crisis of European Sciences.

Yet, over and above this, the more concrete critical analyses of the conceptual structures of the Kantian turn, and the contrast between it and the Cartesian turn, will set in motion out own concurrent thinking in such a way as to place us, gradually and of its own accord, before the final turn and the final decisions.  We ourselves shall be drawn into an inner transformation through which we shall come face to face with, to direct experience of, the long-felt but constantly concealed dimension of the “transcendental.”  The ground of experience, opened up in its infinity, will then become the fertile soil of a methodical working philosophy, with the self-evidence, furthermore, that all conceivable philosophical and scientific problems of the past are to be and decided by starting from this ground.

I for one am looking forward to coming face to face to the ‘transcendental’.  I hope it lives up to the hype.

Do my words ring

The readings for this Sunday included the following:
Genesis 1: 1-5 – creation
Mark 1:4-11 – the baptism of Jesus
Acts 19:1-7 – an account of Paul baptizing believers and the believers receiving the Holy Spirit and speaking in tongues and prophesying.

My sermon last Sunday began with tracing the trajectory that connects creation in Genesis to Jesus’s baptism in Mark.  The imagery of creation (chaotic waters/deep, wind/spirit moving over them, dry land/body appearing) has to be one of the best candidates for helping to form a ‘biblical theology’.  I spoke of the culmination of this imagery in Jesus’s baptism and how the words of creation that are now spoken are ones of love.  However, I went on to say that the trajectory does not end there and continues into Acts 19.  Here is the second half of the sermon,

Taking as its medium

I have for some time now moved away from using language that refers to life and action as somehow ‘poetic’.  This shift has happened for a couple of reasons.  First, I had developed a theological writing style that employed a certain type of poetic language.  And what I mean by this is that I wrote about theological topics in a style that was simply supposed to ‘sound good’.  Theology, along with other disciplines, can afford one this opportunity.  No one can really verify if my explication of the Trinity is really valid or relevant.  Rather, it is supposed to move or  persuade.  This style tends to work fine when keeping the conversation theologically ‘in-house’.  As I began to expand my theological discourse I found that my language was running aground on folks who simply did not share some of my presuppositions and basically had the refrain of bullshit called out to me on several occasions.  This presented a clear intersection in how I was going to proceed.  I could entrench my approach and state that the conversation stalled on mutually incompatible presuppositions.  Or I could head back into the workshop and take another look at how I was going about things.  I decided on the latter.

This experience was part of larger theological shift that saw me move away from theology and practice as a discipline of orthodoxy (yes I can be challenged on how I understand orthodoxy) to theology and practice as a mode of understanding and engaging joy and brokenness in the world.  And I should also note that this past year found me heavily influenced by Kierkegaard for whom ‘the poetic’ is a false attempt at immediacy in life which actually puts oneself at arm’s length from life through ‘pretty’ language (I am grossly paraphrasing here).

This process also left a profound mark on how I now read theology.  Theology that was once inspiring now came off flat.  I don’t think I have many illusions about some neutral or material access to reality ‘as such’.  But I am much more interested in beginning from a phenomenological perspective which attempts to describe and not only describe what I see and intuit but also describe my location and perspective.  If I could now characterize my theology I would call it something like an existentially minded attempt at liberation theology.

All this to say that I was somewhat taken aback by Tim McGee’s recent post which outlines James Cone’s understanding of theology as a sort of poetic task.  Now as I read it I could see that the use of ‘poetic’ was different than the understanding I had moved away from.  It still struck me, however, that I had almost completely discarded any expression of the ‘poetic’ in how I express theology and practice.  Poetics for Cone is a response to the possibility of liberation.  We are creative and evocative because we are free.  This is an embodied and holistic poetics.

I had posted a comment on Tim’s blog stating briefly something of what I here stated above.  After that comment I went to a hospital to do some visits.  At the hospital I encountered what we all encounter at hospitals.  I saw bags of urine stacked on a cart in the hall.  I saw a bloody skid mark on the floor next to one person I visited.  I hear the calls for and saw the silhouetted nursing aids clean soiled patients.  I saw a neighbouring patient with a foot bloated literally like a blown-up surgical glove.  I heard sounds and moans coming out of doorways; one with the never ending refrain
Deloris . . . please help me, Deloris . . . please help me, Deloris . . . please help me . . .
I experienced all these common hospital scenes and I thought of the pretty words that people hold on to in this time; the pretty words people look to me for in this time.  It is many of these pretty words that I am trying to speak less of.  I am trying now to understand what theological poetics would look like and sound like taking as its medium the piss and shit of these places.

Who ain’t?

Who ain’t a slave?  Tell me that.  Well, then, however the old sea captains may order me about – however they may thump and punch me about, I have the satisfaction of knowing that it is all right; that everybody else is one way or other served in much the same way – either in a physical or metaphysical point of view, that is; and so the universal thump is passed round, and all hands should rub each other’s shoulder-blades, and be content.

And so I have begun to wade into Moby Dick for the first time.  This quote is from the first chapter where Ishmael frames his calling to the sea.  It reminded me, even if tangentially, of an image I saw driving home today.  – 10 C can be biting with a wind chill here in Winnipeg.  In that wind I saw a man scouring a patch of frozen pavement for usable cigarette butts.  A pathetic image, but not an image of laziness.  A shameful image of addiction but only because of this addiction’s object.  Who ain’t a slave?  Tell me that.  The sentiment reminds me of the fine line of how little separates a certain subjective drive between an impoverished addict searching for a fix and a wealthy addict looking to increase on abundance.   You will not escape the universal thump there will always be a larger hammer than the one you are able to wield.  Those larger hammers will likely always create circumstances which will determine a level of external comfort our addictions will afford us.

How does Ishmael’s knowledge and acceptance of this reality play out?  I’ll keep you posted.

2011 on into 2012

In 2011 I . . .

1. Got ordained.

2. Finished Kierkegaard’s published works.

3. Got an e-reader and returned to the world of fiction (Infinite Jest was much easier to tote around in this form).

4. Did a good number of reviews.

5. Found continual frustration in trying to develop a more sustained piece of theology for publication.

6. Perhaps most confusingly seem to have become a sports fan.

2011 was also my first full year blogging at the de-scribe.  I literally felt like I reached a certain ‘crisis point’ at my old site in that my basic theological orientation had made enough of shift that I could no longer look out the same way through the framework that had been developed there.  The move to this new site reflects my desire to engage the world both more plainly and more rigorously; to begin with a certain subjective honesty (yes, I’ll let that phrase stand) and then work through some of the implications or holes.

While I would enjoy more traffic and engagement here I have no real plan to publicize the site.  It seems the only way for this to remain valuable for myself is to continue to post as though no one was reading . . . but many thanks to the small tribe who does!

As for 2012

Incidentally 2012 will mark my tenth year engaging on the internet.  I created an online forum after graduating from college in 2002 and have truly valued the opportunity this medium afforded since that time.  It has been or at least become the most formative educational space in my life (ummmm, yah).  This of course has been frustrating on one level because many others have had the opportunity to continue their formation in the furnace of a direct academic community; and so I am left taking some comfort that there remains enough folks within those communities willing to share of their time and thoughts.  The most formative spaces online for myself in the past year have been An und für sich and The Last Psychiatrist (with appreciative nods going to On Journeying with those in Exile, Veeritions, and Bifurcated Life).

With the goal setting of my Kierkegaard reading last year I was able to carve out a new discipline of reading outside of my regular responsibilities in work and life.  So I have decided to outline a new reading list.  The drawback of this one is that it became large and sprawling and so I could not reasonably set a clear end date for accomplishing it.  That being said I hope it will continue to focus and energize my reading.  In any event here is my own version of a Great Books course (see tab at top of page).  The hope in this is to give attention to all those used books I picked up over the years thinking them necessary for my personal library.  Many of these readings will not in any way be close readings but chances to familiarize myself with influential styles and content.  I will not follow the list chronologically and so the first concentration will be on phenomenology (Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, and Marion) with second concentration likely being some Freudian trajectory.

All the best to your own new year’s endeavors.