I've been involved with the "Integral Movement" for several years, because I see a lot of promise there, and a lot that corresponds to my own thinking, and also to integrate Sri Aurobindo and the Mother's teachings (the mainstream integral movement has no idea about SA & M, they respect SA but are absolutely ignorant, and except for brief mentions on Cohen's WIE magazine and website, ignore the Mother altogether). Here is my latest essay on Integral World The high profile of people like Cohen in the Integral Movment is due to the fact that there is a poverty of moral leadership in the movement in America (the Europeans in contrast have it together a lot better - look at Laszlo and his Club of Budapest). This will only change as the integral movement outgrows its infantile roots, and new integralists like Steve McIntosh and Mike Psyka & co (Integral Praxis) are able to provide a healthy alternative to the Wilber-Beck-Cohen "old guard". In addition, there are highly admirable people like Robb Smith within the Integral Institute itself (see Robb's statement on Open Integral). So I'm pretty optimistic about how things will work out. Reflections on Andrew Cohen from Zaadz: M. Alan's Recent Blogs
Saturday, October 13, 2007
There is no way I could have surrendered to any other gurus apart from Sri Aurobindo and The Mother
Women’s Intellectual Abilities from The Stumbling Mystic by ned
Some of us have lately been having a discussion on gender and sexism at the Open Integral (see here and here). After my horrible experience with organized religion, which nearly — nearly! — convinced me of men’s superior intellectual abilities compared to women (how Life got me out of this nonsense will be the subject of a detailed post in the future), I was an agnostic with pretty much zero tolerance for sexism. Not only was religion tainted with misogyny, but, I found, even many “New Age” and spiritual teachers could not seem to shed their biases against women or could not seem to resist undermining women in one way or another. I think there is no way I could have surrendered to any other gurus apart from Sri Aurobindo and the Mother in part because of my zero tolerance for sexism (the main reason is of course that they truly engage the modern mind in a way that I’ve never seen anyone else do). What they say about feminism, how they talk about the spiritual roots of the problem, and show us a way out, has always struck a chord deep within me. They are two of the few gurus who really make a lot of sense when they talk about this subject, without pandering to any kind of fixed ideology, be it traditionalism or even feminism itself. The concept of Supramentalisation is far more radical than anything even the most radical feminist has ever conceived. It is truly the only way to transcend the fixed gender binary permanently.
I would just like to quote a dialogue between Sri Aurobindo and a disciple here to show the high regard in which he held women. Ironically, I have been told by some Indian friends that this is perhaps one of the reasons why Sri Aurobindo is not all that well-received in India itself.
I would just like to quote a dialogue between Sri Aurobindo and a disciple here to show the high regard in which he held women. Ironically, I have been told by some Indian friends that this is perhaps one of the reasons why Sri Aurobindo is not all that well-received in India itself.
- “He considered a woman his equal?
- A French woman of Jewish descent?
- A salonierre in Paris?
- Twice-married and twice-divorced?
- Introduced khaki shorts in the ashram?
- Played tennis with disciples till she was eighty years old as part of her teaching?*
- What a scandal!”
Indeed, the fact that Mother was such a strong personality, and not a virginal wife cooking food for her husband’s disciples, is very difficult for many conservative Indians to accept... This dialogue has actually inspired me to start work on a website chronicling the lives of unrecognized and forgotten female scientists, philosophers, mathematicians, saints, and sages. There is no doubt that history has been written from a male point of view and women’s history has been suppressed. I grew up hearing all this rubbish about women not having contributed anything to human history and civilization, and it took me ages to find female role models, particular in all the male-dominated fields I was interested in — computer science, physics and so on. So the search for the missing her-story is one of my passions — and I want to make all this information freely available on the Internet. There are some sites that cover this topic, but not as comprehensively as I would like. I was actually surprised to find out just how many female scientists were systematically oppressed and unrecognized — even if they had done Nobel-caliber work. Sri Aurobindo is dead on target in the above dialogue: women were always barred from progress in most fields of human endeavour, and those who managed to achieve some of their goals, did so IN SPITE of the tremendous odds stacked against them. That they achieved those things is not something to be taken lightly — it’s kind of a mini-miracle in itself, given how much they had to fight against the ill-will and ignorance of the men around them. To this day, discrimination remains, and it is much harder for women to get tenure in universities than it is for men. Women have to work twice as hard as men to achieve the same status.
* I kid you not about this. Mother actually integrated tennis into her interaction with the disciples. For her, a game of tennis was part of the sadhana, part of helping the disciples grow spiritually. Talk about dynamic!
* I kid you not about this. Mother actually integrated tennis into her interaction with the disciples. For her, a game of tennis was part of the sadhana, part of helping the disciples grow spiritually. Talk about dynamic!
Friday, October 12, 2007
Nancy's distance from the Nietzschean approach
Dis-Enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity (Perspectives in Continental Philosophy) (Paperback) by Jean-Luc Nancy (Author), Bettina Bergo (Translator), Gabriel Malenfant (Translator), Michael B. Smith (Translator) Editorial Reviews
Book Description This book is a profound and eagerly anticipated investigation into what is left of a monotheistic religious spirit-notably, a minimalist faith that is neither confessional nor credulous. Articulating this faith as works and as an objectless hope, Nancy deconstructs Christianity in search of the historical and reflective conditions that provided its initial energy. Working through Blanchot and Nietzsche, re-reading Heidegger and Derrida, Nancy turns to the Epistle of Saint James rather than those of Saint Paul, discerning in it the primitive essence of Christianity as hope. The "religion that provided the exit from religion," as he terms Christianity, consists in the announcement of an end. It is the announcement that counts, however, rather than any finality. In this announcement there is a proximity to others and to what was once called parousia. But parousia is no longer presence; it is no longer the return of the Messiah. Rather, it is what is near us and does not cease to open and to close, a presence deferred yet imminent. In a demystified age where we are left with a vision of a self-enclosed world-in which humans are no longer mortals facing an immortal being, but entities whose lives are accompanied by the time of their own decline-parousia stands as a question. Can we venture the risk of a decentered perspective, such that the meaning of the world can be found both inside and outside, within and without our so-immanent world? The deconstruction of Christianity that Nancy proposes is neither a game nor a strategy. It is an invitation to imagine a strange faith that enacts the inadequation of life to itself. Our lives overflow the self-contained boundaries of their biological and sociological interpretations. Out of this excess wells up a fragile, overlooked meaning that is beyond both confessionalism and humanism.
About the Author
Jean-Luc Nancy is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the Universite Marc Bloch, Strasbourg. The most recent of his many books to be published in English is The Ground of the Image. Bettina Bergo is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Montreal and the author of Levinas: Between Ethics and Politics. Gabriel Malenfant is a graduate student at the University of Montreal. Michael B. Smith is Professor of French and Philosophy at Barry College and the translator of many works, including, with Bettina Bergo, Judeities: Questions for Jacques Derrida.
Jean-Luc Nancy is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the Universite Marc Bloch, Strasbourg. The most recent of his many books to be published in English is The Ground of the Image. Bettina Bergo is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Montreal and the author of Levinas: Between Ethics and Politics. Gabriel Malenfant is a graduate student at the University of Montreal. Michael B. Smith is Professor of French and Philosophy at Barry College and the translator of many works, including, with Bettina Bergo, Judeities: Questions for Jacques Derrida.
ALREADY, NOT YET ADAM KOTSKO Chicago Theological Seminary
A review of Jean-Luc Nancy, La Déclosion : Déconstruction du christianisme, 1. Paris: Galilée, 2005. 248 pp. 30.00€ (paper). ISBN: 2-7186-0668-1. (Translation forthcoming from Fordham University Press.)
A review of Jean-Luc Nancy, La Déclosion : Déconstruction du christianisme, 1. Paris: Galilée, 2005. 248 pp. 30.00€ (paper). ISBN: 2-7186-0668-1. (Translation forthcoming from Fordham University Press.)
THIS IS A LONG-PROMISED BOOK. Jean-Luc Nancy’s engagement with Christianity has been long-standing, both in passing glances and in sustained treatments, perhaps most notably in his essay "Of Divine Places."1 More recently, as well, the prospect of a "deconstruction of Christianity" specifically has turned up in passing references—but references that nevertheless show this "deconstruction of Christianity" to be more and more important to his philosophical project as a whole. In Being Singular Plural, for example, one finds a long parenthesis, at the end of which Nancy asserts that "both the summit and the abyss of a deconstruction of Christianity" would be "the dis-location of the West,"2 a crucial step in his attempt to begin rethinking "being-with" and therefore also subjectivity, mediation, and place. In The Sense of the World, he goes so far as to claim that "sense," one of the key preoccupations of his work, "can proceed only from a deconstruction of Christianity."3 Clearly, then, Nancy has had the basic project of this work in mind for many years. At the same time, however, this book still remains in many respects a promissory note. The fact that more work remains is obvious enough from its designation as a first volume, but this book is not yet what one would expect under such a title. Nancy himself foresees the likely confusion, saying in his introduction:
A simple warning for those who will not have already hurled the book with fury, pity or discouragement: what follows here does not constitute the steady and organized development that one ought to expect… It has not yet seemed to me to be possible to undertake more systematic treatment of this object… (23).4 Instead of a systematic treatment, then, Nancy provides "a recollection, entirely provisional, of scattered texts that turn around the same object without taking it head-on," mainly texts published before but not widely available now (23).5 Spread out over the past ten years and written for a variety of settings, they confirm what the passing references in his more extended works had indicated: namely, that the project of a deconstruction of Christianity is a serious one for Nancy and is the subject of continuous and concentrated (though not yet sustained and systematic) intellectual elaboration. Indeed, one should not make the mistake of dismissing Déclosion as merely a book of preparatory exercises: it is not. The essays in this book undertake penetrating analyses of Christian concepts, most notably monotheism, atheism, faith, and sin. By turns, they engage a wide range of thinkers, including Jacques Derrida, Maurice Blanchot, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Roland Barthes, Michel Deguy, and Gérard Granel. The influence of Derrida is particularly important here, and not only in the obvious reference to "deconstruction." Two of the essays, "The Judeo-Christian: Of Faith" and "Of a Divine Wink," are responses to the essay "Faith and Knowledge,"6 one of Derrida’s most important texts on religion, which was itself part of a very important collaboration among European intellectuals on religion. This not only situates Nancy within the broader consideration of religion among European intellectuals generally, and more specifically in the "religious turn" of French phenomenology, but it also explains his distance from the more Nietzschean approach he seems to have taken in "Of Divine Places."7
Here he no longer takes an adversarial stance toward Christianity—not because he has had a sudden change of heart and come to love those aspects of Christianity he formerly critiqued, but because he has come to see to what degree Christianity has determined and continues to determine the philosophical tradition in which he works. In his introduction, entitled "Ouverture" (a fascinating essay in its own right), Nancy argues that as Western culture is globalized (mondialisé), philosophy will only be enabled to ask the questions it needs to ask through "a mutual déclosion of the heritages of religion and of philosophy" (16). The word déclosion stands in contrast with closion or clôture, as an un-closing or de-closing—tearing down the wall, opening the cloister. The mutuality of this déclosion is enacted in the essays, in which Nancy explores the philosophical resonances of Christian thought and the Christian resonances of philosophical thought. It is clear, however, that for Nancy, the question of how Christianity can be changed through such an operation is of very little interest.
Much more important are the ways in which philosophy can be changed by extending its field of inquiry over Christianity or by recognizing the Christianity at work within itself and within the secular West. In part, such work among the inheritors of the Enlightenment tradition will serve to correct the arrogance with which the West has viewed its own Christian past: The Reformation and the Enlightenment, with and despite all their nobility and all their vigor, have also accustomed themselves to behave vis-à-vis the past of Europe like the ethnologists of not so long ago did toward "primitives." The revision of ethnology today only just begun – or the déclosion of its ethnocentrism – cannot not hold for the relationship of the West to itself. (19). Beyond satisfying the demands of simple fairness, it is hoped that through a déclosion of the clôture between modernity and Christianity, the West will benefit from recognizing itself as it actually is: It is necessary rather to pinpoint the matter of a congenital illness (Platonism, Judeo-Christianity) of the West, which, consequently, indicates less a pathogenic accident than a constitution of essence and, thus, another type of "health." A congenital illness is not an infantile illness; it is often incurable; it can however also give the condition of a "health" that does not comply with standard requirements (19-20). And so, beyond the many grievances that could be brought against Christianity, one must seek to account for its sheer perdurance, its enduring ability to elicit thought.
To this end, Nancy undertakes to give a sketch of what elicits thought, or of what thought elicits. He begins with the most serious intellectual charge leveled against Christianity, a charge that Nancy takes to be accurate as far as it goes: namely, that Christianity underwrites and consolidates the "closure of metaphysics." Yet the most rigorous critics of the "closure of metaphysics"— primarily Nietzsche, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Derrida, and Deleuze—all recognized that "closure always un-closes [déclôt] itself" by its necessary and constitutive reference to "the extremity of reason in an excess of and above reason itself" (17). Or in other words: "The alogon as such as an extreme, excessive, and necessary dimension of the logos: it is never seriously a question of anything else as soon as one is speaking of serious things (death, the world, being-together, being-self, truth)." For Nancy, however, Christianity "designates nothing other, essentially…, than the demand to open in the world an unconditional alterity or alienation" (20). Even as it gives aid and comfort to a metaphysical closure, Christianity elicits and enacts the auto-déclosion of every clôture—including its own.
The essays in this volume vary widely in the directness with which they advance this argument. Broadly, one could place them in two categories: those that treat Christianity in an extended manner and those that deal primarily with specific thinkers and the elements in their thought that resonate with his reading of Christianity. In the remainder of this review, I intend to focus primarily on two of the essays that are more programmatic in character. But before doing so, I must make clear that the essays on particular thinkers were included because of their resonance with Nancy’s more programmatic statements on Christianity, not simply because they deal with broadly religious or Christian themes—but it seems fair to say that their value is basically secondary in terms of the intellectual task Nancy is setting himself here.
A simple warning for those who will not have already hurled the book with fury, pity or discouragement: what follows here does not constitute the steady and organized development that one ought to expect… It has not yet seemed to me to be possible to undertake more systematic treatment of this object… (23).4 Instead of a systematic treatment, then, Nancy provides "a recollection, entirely provisional, of scattered texts that turn around the same object without taking it head-on," mainly texts published before but not widely available now (23).5 Spread out over the past ten years and written for a variety of settings, they confirm what the passing references in his more extended works had indicated: namely, that the project of a deconstruction of Christianity is a serious one for Nancy and is the subject of continuous and concentrated (though not yet sustained and systematic) intellectual elaboration. Indeed, one should not make the mistake of dismissing Déclosion as merely a book of preparatory exercises: it is not. The essays in this book undertake penetrating analyses of Christian concepts, most notably monotheism, atheism, faith, and sin. By turns, they engage a wide range of thinkers, including Jacques Derrida, Maurice Blanchot, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Roland Barthes, Michel Deguy, and Gérard Granel. The influence of Derrida is particularly important here, and not only in the obvious reference to "deconstruction." Two of the essays, "The Judeo-Christian: Of Faith" and "Of a Divine Wink," are responses to the essay "Faith and Knowledge,"6 one of Derrida’s most important texts on religion, which was itself part of a very important collaboration among European intellectuals on religion. This not only situates Nancy within the broader consideration of religion among European intellectuals generally, and more specifically in the "religious turn" of French phenomenology, but it also explains his distance from the more Nietzschean approach he seems to have taken in "Of Divine Places."7
Here he no longer takes an adversarial stance toward Christianity—not because he has had a sudden change of heart and come to love those aspects of Christianity he formerly critiqued, but because he has come to see to what degree Christianity has determined and continues to determine the philosophical tradition in which he works. In his introduction, entitled "Ouverture" (a fascinating essay in its own right), Nancy argues that as Western culture is globalized (mondialisé), philosophy will only be enabled to ask the questions it needs to ask through "a mutual déclosion of the heritages of religion and of philosophy" (16). The word déclosion stands in contrast with closion or clôture, as an un-closing or de-closing—tearing down the wall, opening the cloister. The mutuality of this déclosion is enacted in the essays, in which Nancy explores the philosophical resonances of Christian thought and the Christian resonances of philosophical thought. It is clear, however, that for Nancy, the question of how Christianity can be changed through such an operation is of very little interest.
Much more important are the ways in which philosophy can be changed by extending its field of inquiry over Christianity or by recognizing the Christianity at work within itself and within the secular West. In part, such work among the inheritors of the Enlightenment tradition will serve to correct the arrogance with which the West has viewed its own Christian past: The Reformation and the Enlightenment, with and despite all their nobility and all their vigor, have also accustomed themselves to behave vis-à-vis the past of Europe like the ethnologists of not so long ago did toward "primitives." The revision of ethnology today only just begun – or the déclosion of its ethnocentrism – cannot not hold for the relationship of the West to itself. (19). Beyond satisfying the demands of simple fairness, it is hoped that through a déclosion of the clôture between modernity and Christianity, the West will benefit from recognizing itself as it actually is: It is necessary rather to pinpoint the matter of a congenital illness (Platonism, Judeo-Christianity) of the West, which, consequently, indicates less a pathogenic accident than a constitution of essence and, thus, another type of "health." A congenital illness is not an infantile illness; it is often incurable; it can however also give the condition of a "health" that does not comply with standard requirements (19-20). And so, beyond the many grievances that could be brought against Christianity, one must seek to account for its sheer perdurance, its enduring ability to elicit thought.
To this end, Nancy undertakes to give a sketch of what elicits thought, or of what thought elicits. He begins with the most serious intellectual charge leveled against Christianity, a charge that Nancy takes to be accurate as far as it goes: namely, that Christianity underwrites and consolidates the "closure of metaphysics." Yet the most rigorous critics of the "closure of metaphysics"— primarily Nietzsche, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Derrida, and Deleuze—all recognized that "closure always un-closes [déclôt] itself" by its necessary and constitutive reference to "the extremity of reason in an excess of and above reason itself" (17). Or in other words: "The alogon as such as an extreme, excessive, and necessary dimension of the logos: it is never seriously a question of anything else as soon as one is speaking of serious things (death, the world, being-together, being-self, truth)." For Nancy, however, Christianity "designates nothing other, essentially…, than the demand to open in the world an unconditional alterity or alienation" (20). Even as it gives aid and comfort to a metaphysical closure, Christianity elicits and enacts the auto-déclosion of every clôture—including its own.
The essays in this volume vary widely in the directness with which they advance this argument. Broadly, one could place them in two categories: those that treat Christianity in an extended manner and those that deal primarily with specific thinkers and the elements in their thought that resonate with his reading of Christianity. In the remainder of this review, I intend to focus primarily on two of the essays that are more programmatic in character. But before doing so, I must make clear that the essays on particular thinkers were included because of their resonance with Nancy’s more programmatic statements on Christianity, not simply because they deal with broadly religious or Christian themes—but it seems fair to say that their value is basically secondary in terms of the intellectual task Nancy is setting himself here.
I turn first to "The Deconstruction of Christianity" the earliest piece collected here.8 The transcript of a lecture delivered in 1995, it clearly lays the groundwork for the project announced in the introduction. Quoting the Italian philosopher Luigi Pareyson, he first lays out a first principle:
"Only a Christianity that contemplates the present possibility of its negation can be contemporary."
Inverting it, he comes to a second principle, more important for his purposes:
Inverting it, he comes to a second principle, more important for his purposes:
"Only an atheism that contemplates the reality of its Christian provenance can be contemporary" (205). This move is crucial to what Nancy is concerned with here: the deconstruction of Christianity, the opening of philosophy to Christian thought, is conceived as being in the service of atheism (a point further developed in the essay "Atheism and Monotheism," in which he argues that monotheism provides the necessary conditions for atheism). Following these two complementary principles, he then lists three more:
"Christianity is inseparable from the West."
"All of Western thought is Christian through and through."
"To deconstruct Christianity is to accompany the West" up to the void that is the limit and possibility of sense (207-08).
"All of Western thought is Christian through and through."
"To deconstruct Christianity is to accompany the West" up to the void that is the limit and possibility of sense (207-08).
Or in short: "the modern world is itself the becoming of Christianity" (209). Clearly, then, the deconstruction of Christianity is going to require historical as well as conceptual analysis, and so on the way to analyzing three key Christian concepts—"faith, sin, and the living God" (205)—Nancy indicates some lines of historical investigation. For example, rather than subscribe to the "projection of Christmas," the belief that one day, Christianity simply sprang into being, Nancy proposes to ask "how and why Antiquity produced Christianity" (211). Further, it is necessary to go beyond the "Rousseauism of Christianity," which posits "a good primitive Christianity in order to deplore its subsequent betrayal"—a position that he accurately ascribes even to Nietzsche. Rather, he proposes to look at the history of Christian dogma as a philosophical elaboration of the "fundamental structure of the announcement and of the opening of meaning" (218), arguing by way of example that the reworking of the concept of ousia through the development of trinitary doctrine transforms philosophy even as philosophy transforms Christian doctrine. In the concluding analysis of Christian concepts in "The Deconstruction of Christianity," Nancy takes the position that faith, in any case, is not compliance without proof or the leap above proof. It is the act of the faithful person, an act which, as such, is the attestation of an intimate consciousness of the fact that it exposes itself and allows itself to be exposed to the absence of attestation, to the absence of parousia. … Christian faith is distinguished precisely and absolutely from all belief (221). Faith is faithfulness to that which gives faith, to the infinity of and above sense, and thus ultimately "faithfulness to nothing, faithfulness to no one, faithfulness to faithfulness itself" (223). This theme is re-elaborated in other essays, particularly in "Deconstruction of Monotheism," where he goes on to argue that an atheist who "refuses all consoling or redeeming assurance is paradoxically or strangely nearer to faith than the ‘believer’" (56). This concept of faith—a kind of "atheist Protestantism"—could easily be brought into productive dialogue with two other contemporary thinkers who are taking seriously the call to think Christianity: Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek.9 Badiou’s reading of St. Paul finds faith to be faithfulness to an event, which becomes actual as event only insofar as it inspires faithfulness, while in Žižek’s analysis of Christianity (through St. Paul as well as GK Chesterton, Kierkegaard, and others), faith becomes analogous to the psychoanalytic cure, in which the analysand is brought face-to-face with the impossible Real—or in other words, with the void. Nancy decisively furthers this ongoing dialogue on Christianity in the essay "The Judeo-Christian: Of Faith." The recent attention to Paul is an essential first step in a philosophical reassessment of the Christian tradition, but it is equally essential to begin working through the other New Testament and early Christian documents. Nancy’s essay is largely taken up with a reading of the New Testament document that I take to be the natural and necessary next step beyond the Pauline epistles: the Epistle of James. The occasion for Nancy’s reading is a conference on Jacques Derrida, who in French shares the same first name as the author of this epistle.10 Beyond the pun on the first name, to which Derrida could not possibly object,11 the epistle suggests itself because of Derrida’s attention to "the two sources of religion and morality" in the essay "Faith and Knowledge"— which Nancy here takes to be the "Synagogue and the Church" (66). Beginning with the term "Judeo-Christian," popularly used to denote the religious heritage of the West, Nancy explores various historical meanings of the term before settling on the Judeo-Christian in the New Testament: the author of the Epistle of James. The historical set-up to his reading of the epistle does contain some questionable assertions, indicating areas in which philosophical interpreters of Christianity might make better use of biblical scholarship. For instance, one of his primary scholarly authorities is Harnack, a great scholar to be sure, but one whose work is now a century old. Perhaps more problematically, he takes a remarkably uncritical view of traditional attributions of authorship and, more broadly, of the traditional view of early church history. The James who wrote this Epistle is taken to be James the Lesser, the brother of Jesus and the head of the Jerusalem council (71), whereas very few biblical scholars today would concede that the James of the Epistle is the same person as the James of Acts. The book of Acts is treated as a straightforward historical account, and speeches of Paul from Acts are unproblematically attributed to the historical Paul. He also attributes Colossians to Paul without noting its disputed character, and even more strangely, he persistently attributes the Epistle to the Hebrews to Paul, despite the fact that virtually no contemporary scholar would find such an attribution plausible and even early interpreters such as Origen and Augustine recognized that Paul could not have written that anonymous epistle. Certainly it is the case that an overly skeptical view of the traditional account of early church history could contribute to the aforementioned "Rousseauism of Christianity" (218). Alain Badiou, for instance, who scrupulously limits his reading of Paul to those letters that are undisputed by current scholars, leaves himself open to that charge.12 It is also the case, however, that a failure to take into account the rich resources of scholarly interpretation of scripture that are available unnecessarily hurts Nancy’s credibility among those who would otherwise be quite open to having such an acute intellect grappling with the biblical texts. Nancy has already commended biblical scholarship for its seriousness during a period when many "former materialists or former freethinkers began intoning the mumbo jumbo (patenôtres) of a return to the spiritual,"13 and so it is to be hoped that he and other philosophers will avail themselves of that scholarship. This would be in the spirit of Nancy’s project as a whole and in the spirit of Jacob Taubes’s recommendation that "a chair for Old Testament and a chair… for New Testament and even a chair for Church History should be instituted in departments of philosophy."14 More attention to biblical scholarship would also help his other historical analyses—in particular his persistent inclusion of Manichaeism among the "monotheisms"—be heard for the provocative and insightful comments they are. In any case, Nancy’s reading in itself does not depend on the historical set-up, and that reading is rigorous and creative. He rightly finds in James an insistence that faith must be distinguished from belief (73), and beyond that, an insistence that faith is indistinguishable from faithful action—that faith is not merely "expressed" in works, but that it has utterly no existence aside from the works that expose themselves as faithful. Or in other words: "Pistis [faith] is the praxis that takes place in and as the poesis of erga [works]" (77). Beyond this, he derives a conceptual necessity for James’s "preferential option for the poor" in the fact that faith is always given and that sin is living in a way that denies the givenness of all things. Yet his thesis that faith is the working-out of faithful action keeps him from spiritualizing away James’s diatribes against the rich.15 Nancy’s recognition that James is fundamentally in agreement with Paul could help philosophical readers of Scripture to move beyond psychologizing readings of Paul’s epistles (to which Žižek in particular has been very susceptible). The sparse references to Jesus are taken to indicate the functional character of Jesus in James’s thought: the use of the proper name together with the anointed indicates that the givenness of faith has actually been revealed, serving to enable faithfulness. Yet, for Nancy, James’s closing description of what would later become "extreme unction" introduces a slippage of identity: in the anointing (which is the concept at the root of the words "christ" and "messiah"), "each dying person is a messiah, and each messiah is a dying person" (86). The structure of the promised resurrection in James is the same structure of resurrection he finds in Blanchot (in the essay "Resurrection of Blanchot"): that is, it is the resurrection of death itself, not an undoing of death. Having at least touched on most of the contents of this volume, it would perhaps be appropriate to give some attention to the title: Déclosion. As noted above, the promised project, and even the promised title, was The Deconstruction of Christianity—and indeed, two of the most important essays in this volume contain the word "deconstruction" in their title title. Yet alongside "deconstruction," and even above it, displacing it, there is the insistent reference to a déclosion, which is first of all an un-closing. Certainly there are reasons to work with terms other than "deconstruction," chief among them being the widespread overuse and misunderstanding of the term itself. It seems to me, however, that there is a deeper necessity in shifting from "deconstruction" to déclosion, and that necessity is indicated in the brief closing essay of the volume, itself entitled La déclosion. In the introduction, déclosion has been paired with closion, as is appropriate given Nancy’s emphasis on the "closure of metaphysics." In the closing essay, however, déclosion is contrasted also with éclosion, a word referring literally to "hatching" and used to signify breaking through a barrier into a wider world (as in the examples of Columbus’s journey and, more immediately, of space exploration). For Nancy, the world has reached a point where no further éclosion is possible, and so we are entering into a phase of déclosion, "the éclosion of éclosion itself" (230). This excess of "hatching" over itself is difficult to think, let alone to capture in a literal translation. Yet a first step in thinking this is found in a passage in Nancy’s Inoperative Community where he juxtaposes éclosion and déclosion.16 In a particularly felicitous translation, Peter Connor renders this pair as "hatching or blossoming."17 It is to be hoped that Nancy’s project of a déclosion of Christianity, indeed the déclosion that was already underway before he named it as such, leads to a blossoming—that for a coming generation of thinkers, what often appears to be the empty husk of Christianity will instead reveal itself to be a seed which, fallen to the ground and dead, can spring forth in a new and unexpected kind of life. ADAM KOTSKO is a doctoral student at the Chicago Theological Seminary. His current research interests include early Christian thought and 20th century European philosophy. ©2005 Adam Kotsko. All rights reserved. Kotsko, Adam. "Already, Not Yet." Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory vol. 6 no. 3 (Fall 2005): 87-95. PURL:
1 Translated by Michael Holland in Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, ed. Peter Connor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991).
2 Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural, trans. Robert D. Richardson and Anne E. O’Byrne (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000): 95. In a footnote to this same volume, published in France in 1996, Nancy directs the reader to his La déconstruction du christianisme, forthcoming.
3 Jean-Luc Nancy, The Sense of the World, trans. Jeffrey S. Librett (Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, 1997): 55. The note to this passage echoes many of the same themes of Déclosion: "[The deconstruction of Christianity] signifies, to be precise, something other than a critique or a demolition: the bringing to light of that which will have been the agent of Christianity as the very form of the West, much more deeply than all religion and even as the self-deconstruction of religion…. It will of course be necessary to come back to this" (183n50).
4 All translations from Déclosion are my own. Parenthetical page references all refer to this text.
5 The exceptions are "Verbo caro factum" (unpublished) and "Prière démythifiée" (intended for a volume not yet published).6 "Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone" in Acts ofReligion, ed. Gil Anidjar (New York: Routledge, 2002). The essay was originally published in thecollection La Religion, ed. Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo (Paris: Le Seuil, 1996).
7 Viz. pp. 138-39 particularly.
9 See Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, trans. Ray Brassier (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003); and Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (New York: Verso, 1999), The Fragile Absolute—Or, Why Is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For? (New York: Verso, 2000), On Belief (New York: Routledge, 2001), and The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003).
10 Due to the vagaries of the tradition of English translation of the Bible, it is unclear to English readers that the Greek name of this epistle’s author is the same Greek name that is translated as "Jacob" when it refers to the Old Testament character—when that Greek name refers to personages living during the New Testament period, it is translated as "James." French translators have, correctly, rendered the name as "Jacques" wherever it appears.
11 See Jacques Derrida, "Force of Law: The Mystical Foundation of Authority," trans. MaryQuaintance, in Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar (New York: Routledge, 2002), in which he plays with the pun between Walter Benjamin’s first name and the German Gewalt (meaning "violence," among other things).
12 Badiou’s named sources for Pauline scholarship are Günter Bornkamm, Paul, trans. D.M.G. Stalker (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995) and (it seems, more decisively) Stanislas Breton, Saint Paul (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2000). Breton distinguishes the authentic letters from those that are not "part of the elect" (7; my translation), but makes use of disputed texts, particularly Colossians, arguing that even if they do not come from the pen of the historical Paul, they are still "Pauline" in character. I object not to Nancy’s use of Colossians as Pauline as such, but rather to the fact that he is not making the argument in favor of doing so that is readily available to him.13 "Of Divine Places," 134.14 Jacob Taubes, The Political Theology of Saint Paul, trans. Dana Hollander (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004): 4.
15 As Clement of Alexandria did, in an exemplary and sadly influential way, in his "Who is the rich man who can be saved?"
16 Jean-Luc Nancy, La Communauté désœuvrée (Paris: Christian Bourgois Editeur, 1986): 124.
17 The Inoperative Community, 49.
17 The Inoperative Community, 49.
KOTSKO: Already, Not Yet JCRT 6.3 (Fall 2005)
Thursday, October 11, 2007
We are not likely to see the end of religion anytime soon
God is Not Great: Twelve Books, 308 pages, Rs810 Reason versus religion Posted: Sat, Aug 18 2007. 1:05 AM IST Books Christopher Hitchens is at his acerbic best in this new book that argues why god is man-made Chandrahas Choudhury
The conflict between believers of different persuasions and degrees on the one hand, and between believers and non-believers on the other, is one of the running battles of our times, stoked into a series of flashpoints by terrorism, the Bush presidency, the renascence of religious chauvinism, and worldwide debates over the meaning of secularism.
Where religion has demonstrably been the cause of violence, many have argued that we need to emphasize the enlightened and moderate aspects of religion to help keep the peace. We are variously reminded that we need to be true to the precepts of Jesus Christ, that Islam is a religion of peace, that Hinduism is a religion of tolerance, and so on.
Christopher Hitchens will have none of it. The latest book by this restless and prolific journalist and intellectual, a relentless debunker of fraud and hypocrisy and a partisan of secular and rational values, is a thoroughgoing attack on religion called God is Not Great. As Hitchens sees it, religion is a relic from the infancy of our species, “the period of human prehistory where nobody had the smallest idea of what was going on”.
His book is a systematic polemic, two parts reasoned argument to one part sarcasm, on “the improbability of god, the evil done in his name, the likelihood that he is man-made, and the availability of less harmful alternative beliefs and explanations” for everything we attribute to god, from happenings in our own lives (Hitchens is highly amused by the idea that god is tuned into each one of us) to victories in war and natural disasters. His trenchant, vigorous prose style (just as religious people are always certain of their access to truth, Hitchens is always reliably pugilistic and adversarial) here lays into religion from all sides.
Firstly, Hitchens alleges, religion’s account of the origin of the world at the hands of god is false, and has been proved so by the theory of evolution, which outlines the ascent of homo sapiens over millions of years by the process of natural selection. Far from being god’s chosen people in part or whole, we share much of our DNA with lower animals. The attempt by religious people to co-opt this truth by interpreting it as “intelligent design” directed by god is a joke.
Secondly, the great religious texts of the world, which believers understand as the word of god by way of revelations granted to one or more prophets, are full of inexplicable lapses and inconsistencies. These show that they are entirely man-made and the motivations behind them were the usual human motivations of desire for power and authority. In three barnstorming chapters, Hitchens lays bare the problems with the Old Testament, the New Testament and the Quran. Among the incriminating details about these books is that their context is not universal, but “oppressively confined and local”—that is to say, they refer not to people but, suspiciously, to specific peoples who must then carry the torch. For what reason should these documents from a certain time and place, with their ethical insight often counterbalanced by a tribal and brutal morality, have jurisdiction over all humanity, as their adherents have always believed? “God did not create man in his own image,” writes Hitchens. “Evidently, it was the other way about.”
And thirdly, Hitchens argues that human beings are naturally solipsistic, and although religion in theory moderates this by holding human beings to the will of a higher authority, in practice it aggravates human egoism and fosters violence. It assures human beings that god cares for them individually and it makes them contemptuous not only of non-believers, but also believers of other faiths, both of whom religious majorities have ruthlessly persecuted in the past and now, in our multicultural age, are taught to “tolerate”. Why should any self-respecting person agree to be tolerated by another?
Yet, as even Hitchens concedes, despite the toppling of so-called revelation by reason, we are not likely to see the end of religion anytime soon, because the need for religion is seemingly hard-wired into us. The need of the hour, rather, is to impose restraints upon the casual and serious trespasses of believers, who must recognize that the rule of law takes precedence, at least in this world, over the rules of their gods. If religious faith is here to stay, we must in our multi-religious global village find a way of making tribalism accountable to reason and universalism or, else, perish in its wake. Respond to this review at lounge@livemint.com
Where religion has demonstrably been the cause of violence, many have argued that we need to emphasize the enlightened and moderate aspects of religion to help keep the peace. We are variously reminded that we need to be true to the precepts of Jesus Christ, that Islam is a religion of peace, that Hinduism is a religion of tolerance, and so on.
Christopher Hitchens will have none of it. The latest book by this restless and prolific journalist and intellectual, a relentless debunker of fraud and hypocrisy and a partisan of secular and rational values, is a thoroughgoing attack on religion called God is Not Great. As Hitchens sees it, religion is a relic from the infancy of our species, “the period of human prehistory where nobody had the smallest idea of what was going on”.
His book is a systematic polemic, two parts reasoned argument to one part sarcasm, on “the improbability of god, the evil done in his name, the likelihood that he is man-made, and the availability of less harmful alternative beliefs and explanations” for everything we attribute to god, from happenings in our own lives (Hitchens is highly amused by the idea that god is tuned into each one of us) to victories in war and natural disasters. His trenchant, vigorous prose style (just as religious people are always certain of their access to truth, Hitchens is always reliably pugilistic and adversarial) here lays into religion from all sides.
Firstly, Hitchens alleges, religion’s account of the origin of the world at the hands of god is false, and has been proved so by the theory of evolution, which outlines the ascent of homo sapiens over millions of years by the process of natural selection. Far from being god’s chosen people in part or whole, we share much of our DNA with lower animals. The attempt by religious people to co-opt this truth by interpreting it as “intelligent design” directed by god is a joke.
Secondly, the great religious texts of the world, which believers understand as the word of god by way of revelations granted to one or more prophets, are full of inexplicable lapses and inconsistencies. These show that they are entirely man-made and the motivations behind them were the usual human motivations of desire for power and authority. In three barnstorming chapters, Hitchens lays bare the problems with the Old Testament, the New Testament and the Quran. Among the incriminating details about these books is that their context is not universal, but “oppressively confined and local”—that is to say, they refer not to people but, suspiciously, to specific peoples who must then carry the torch. For what reason should these documents from a certain time and place, with their ethical insight often counterbalanced by a tribal and brutal morality, have jurisdiction over all humanity, as their adherents have always believed? “God did not create man in his own image,” writes Hitchens. “Evidently, it was the other way about.”
And thirdly, Hitchens argues that human beings are naturally solipsistic, and although religion in theory moderates this by holding human beings to the will of a higher authority, in practice it aggravates human egoism and fosters violence. It assures human beings that god cares for them individually and it makes them contemptuous not only of non-believers, but also believers of other faiths, both of whom religious majorities have ruthlessly persecuted in the past and now, in our multicultural age, are taught to “tolerate”. Why should any self-respecting person agree to be tolerated by another?
Yet, as even Hitchens concedes, despite the toppling of so-called revelation by reason, we are not likely to see the end of religion anytime soon, because the need for religion is seemingly hard-wired into us. The need of the hour, rather, is to impose restraints upon the casual and serious trespasses of believers, who must recognize that the rule of law takes precedence, at least in this world, over the rules of their gods. If religious faith is here to stay, we must in our multi-religious global village find a way of making tribalism accountable to reason and universalism or, else, perish in its wake. Respond to this review at lounge@livemint.com
There is a strong parallel between Christianity and Sri Aurobindo's yoga
One Cosmos Under God Robert W. Godwin
Interestingly, there is a strong parallel between Christianity and Sri Aurobindo's yoga, undoubtedly because he was snatched from India when he was just 7 years of age, and educated at some of the finest schools in England, including Cambridge, at a time when a liberal university education was still steeped in an appreciation of our western spiritual inheritance. Nor, at the time, was there the supposed unbridgeable rift between science and religion that secular intellectuals like to play up today. For example, it is entirely possible that Aurobindo was taught by Alfred North Whitehead, who was a professor at Cambridge during the years Aurobindo was there, and the formidable Whitehead was obviously "on the case" when it came to integrating the most recent findings of science with an expansive metaphysical view that is easily compatible (with modifications) with Christianity (e.g., process theology). For the same reason, Aurobindo was readily able to assimilate science to Vedanta...
As Aurobindo remarked in a letter, "My own life and yoga have always been, since my coming to India, both this-worldly and other-worldly without any exclusiveness on either side.... I could make no sharp divorce or irreconcilable opposition between what I have called the two ends of existence and all that lies between them.... In my Yoga also I have found myself moved to include both worlds in my purview -- the spiritual and the material -- and to try to establish the Divine Consciousness and the Divine Power in men's hearts and earthly life...." Indeed, this unification of the interior and exterior worlds is what is meant by Integral Yoga, and this integration is certainly the purpose of Christianity as well: the Word became flesh so that the flesh might become Word, thereby spanning all the degrees of existence.
In another letter Aurobindo wrote of the Buddha's attitude toward life, that "I do not quite see how 'service to mankind' or any ideal of improvement of the world-existence can have been part of his aim, since to pass out of life into a transcendence was his object. His eightfold path was the means towards that end and not an aim in itself or indeed in any way an aim." Those who don't see Buddhism this way are usually thoroughly westernized minds who interpret Buddhism through an unconscious Judeo-Christian lens that they think they have rejected. It's the same reason why, for the most part, the only tolerant (and tolerable) Muslims are the Christianized ones living in the West.
Now, the world is not ultimately real, but it's still real. And the reason why it is real is that it is a projection -- or creation, if you like -- of the Absolute Real. It exists, in the words of Schuon, by virtue of the intrinsic infinitude of the Absolute, which necessarily "projects" into relativity and thereby produces both the world and the metacosmic "space" that we call the great "Raccoon Den" in the sky. If we rummage around that Den -- there, behind the big easy chair -- we see the various degrees of the Divine Essence, which ultimately come down to "Beyond-Being, creative Being, and the Spirit or the existentialating Logos which constitutes the divine Center of the total cosmos." Again, in contrast to the implicit nihilism of Buddhism, "To say, out of a concern for transcendence, that the Absolute is 'beyond good and evil, beauty and ugliness,' can only mean one thing, namely that It is the Good in itself, Beauty in itself; it cannot mean that It is deprived of goodness or beauty."
But Bob, you never got around to answering your own question about whether reality is just reality, or a symbol of something else. Hmm. I'm not so sure about that. I'll have to read the post. posted by Gagdad Bob at 10/10/2007 08:45:00 AM
Tuesday, October 9, 2007
Sam Harris is no ordinary atheist. He's a Buddhist Geek
Review: The End of Faith from ~C4Chaos by ~C4Chaos
If you think Sam Harris is an ultra-rationalist who reduces consciousness and spirituality to its neurological correlates, or that Harris is evangelizing his own flavor of Buddhist spirituality then you probably didn't take the time to digest the End Notes. Speaking of End Notes, a whopping one fourth of the book consists of end notes and bibliography. A patient reading of the end notes would reveal that Sam Harris is a broadly-read philosopher, a non-conventional scientist when it comes to the ultimate mystery of consciousness, and, for lack of a better secular description, a hard core non-dualist mystic in the Buddhist (specifically Dzogchen) tradition. Here's what he has to say about Buddhism, on Notes to Page 215 (end note 12)... Word. Sam Harris is no ordinary atheist. He's a Buddhist Geek ;) Anyway....
A lot has been said already about the God/religion vs. science perspective that this book had covered. In fact, during the first year of its publication, Sam Harris had taken heat from different camps--religious camps for his "angry" and non-compromising critique on religion (particularly the Abrahamic religions); liberal camps for his critique on postmodernism and moral relativism; atheist camps for his championing of Buddhist practice and his non-conventional scientific views on consciousness. Harris had addressed most of these criticisms in the Afterword section of the paperback edition of the book. If you're interested in other critical reviews of the book, you can start with the The End of Faith entry on Wikipedia and the customer reviews on Amazon.
My main criticism with this book is that, although Sam Harris had acknowledged the stages of moral development of culture and society (for example, he compared the violence and non-tolerance in contemporary Islam to fourteenth century Christianity), he didn't expound on the moral and psychological development of individuals (i.e. stages of faith) which could've shed more light and supported his argument that blind mythic faith belongs to a lower rung of psychological development than reason. I've pointed this out in my review of his book, Letter to a Christian Nation. So I won't repeat it here...
A lot has been said already about the God/religion vs. science perspective that this book had covered. In fact, during the first year of its publication, Sam Harris had taken heat from different camps--religious camps for his "angry" and non-compromising critique on religion (particularly the Abrahamic religions); liberal camps for his critique on postmodernism and moral relativism; atheist camps for his championing of Buddhist practice and his non-conventional scientific views on consciousness. Harris had addressed most of these criticisms in the Afterword section of the paperback edition of the book. If you're interested in other critical reviews of the book, you can start with the The End of Faith entry on Wikipedia and the customer reviews on Amazon.
My main criticism with this book is that, although Sam Harris had acknowledged the stages of moral development of culture and society (for example, he compared the violence and non-tolerance in contemporary Islam to fourteenth century Christianity), he didn't expound on the moral and psychological development of individuals (i.e. stages of faith) which could've shed more light and supported his argument that blind mythic faith belongs to a lower rung of psychological development than reason. I've pointed this out in my review of his book, Letter to a Christian Nation. So I won't repeat it here...
It's clear that Harris is attempting integration here. The End of Faith is all about the jettisoning of blind religious faith, which is "the belief in historical and metaphysical propositions without sufficient evidence," so that integration of science and spirituality and ethics can begin at the level playing field of reason.
Before I conclude, allow me to speculate on why Harris had chosen to take a hard swing at religion instead of going along the safe and politically-correct route. After all, who in their right minds would willingly anger religious fundamentalists, religious moderates, conservatives, liberals, moral relativists, scientists, and fellow atheists, all at the same time?
Before I conclude, allow me to speculate on why Harris had chosen to take a hard swing at religion instead of going along the safe and politically-correct route. After all, who in their right minds would willingly anger religious fundamentalists, religious moderates, conservatives, liberals, moral relativists, scientists, and fellow atheists, all at the same time?
Sam Harris strikes me as a very intelligent, reasonable, tolerant, spiritual, and sensitive guy. You can sense this by his tone and his demeanor on debates and lectures. So why did he write the book in a polemical and ultra-critical tone? Being a Dzogchen practitioner, he should be familiar with the concept of "skillful means" and "the middle way", right? So how come his approach is more combative than embracing? Isn't that so non-Buddhist of him? By his own account, Harris wrote the book immediately after the September 11 attacks, so it's logical to assume that the book was tainted by is own personal anger at religion (especially at Islam). However, it's just hard for me to imagine Sam Harris gritting his teeth while writing pages after pages of End Notes and including a vast literature on philosophy, religion, science and mystical spirituality in the bibliography section at the same time. If Harris truly practices what he preaches (e.g. nondual meditation), then I think it's more logical to speculate that Harris had consciously channeled his passion in service of non-idiot compassion. Only time will tell if his efforts would put a dent on the current religious atmosphere in the U.S. and the rest of the world. I wish him well. I'll be following him deep down the rabbit hole he's digging...
But regardless of the controversy and the non-compromising position of Harris when it comes to religion, The End of Faith is an important contemporary book. This book is not about Atheism. It's a book about exercising one's faculty of critical thinking on religion, science and ethics. It's a rude and crude initial attempt at integrating science and authentic spirituality. Read it. Critique it. Discuss it with your friends. Discuss it your school and universities. Discuss it in your congregation. Discuss it with your priests and pastors. Use it as a tool to separate the wheat of reason from the chaff of mythic hubris and the flatland of postmodernism. Godspeed ;)
But regardless of the controversy and the non-compromising position of Harris when it comes to religion, The End of Faith is an important contemporary book. This book is not about Atheism. It's a book about exercising one's faculty of critical thinking on religion, science and ethics. It's a rude and crude initial attempt at integrating science and authentic spirituality. Read it. Critique it. Discuss it with your friends. Discuss it your school and universities. Discuss it in your congregation. Discuss it with your priests and pastors. Use it as a tool to separate the wheat of reason from the chaff of mythic hubris and the flatland of postmodernism. Godspeed ;)
Saturday, October 6, 2007
Don Lavoie's research and teaching should be remembered
Brian, Lachmann's argument was that the first task of praxeology was to render social phenomena intelligible in terms of purposive human action, and the second task was to trace out the unintended consequences of those human choices. I think that is what drove Lavoie as well.
As for Geertz --- one has to understand that Lavoie did not just fix on Gadamer, but instead had us reading Geertz ("The Natives Point of View"), Ricouer ("On Narrative"), Taylor, etc. Lavoie was just persuaded that Gadamer's Truth and Method laid out the philosophical issues at stake better than alternatives. I, on the other hand, while persuaded by Lavoie about Gadamer's relevance, learned more from reading synthesis works like Bernstein's two books --- Beyond Objectivism and Realtivism, and Restructuring Social and Political Theory.
So my Lavoie inspired turn led me to read sociologists like Peter Berger, and then also the economic sociologists like Swedberg, and to think about ethnography and political economy. I think Swedberg's Max Weber and the Idea of Economic Sociology combines the main insights for the questions I am interested in at this stage of my career.
So in the end, I learn more from social scientists than I do from pure philosophers --- so Geertz rather than Derrida.
But now for a twist on all of that, the social scientist who really excited me after I left Lavoie immediate influence was Jon Elster and his work on "A Plea for Mechanism" was very influential on me in terms of what we had to accomplish even as we made the interpretative turn. So it is that intellectual/philosophical discourse that is what I have been trying to engage in and encourage my students to engage (thus witness Leeson's emphasis on mechanisms in his work).
Someday I plan to write the book, Economics as a Philosophic Science, which will lay out the position clearly --- but in the meantime I am still trying to figure it all out through application and "testing" of it through application.
Pete
Posted by: Peter Boettke October 04, 2007 at 12:20 PM
Rafe: Are/Were you stating that Lavoie (1985) was off the mark in paraphrasing Popper (1972) that the interpretation of facts are theory-laden; hence, they must be placed into a conceptual framework to be rendered meaningful? If so, Why?
Dr. Boettke: I too enjoy the work of Swedberg (sans his call for rational choice theory unifying theory and empirical research in sociology!). And I particularly enjoyed reading the work that you referenced. But what is most interesting about the Swedberg(s), Lavoie(s), Schumpeter(s), and yourself is that you all believe(d) that one should always strive to establish a symbiotic relationship between theory and empirical research, where each contributes to the development of the other.
Posted by: Brian Pitt October 04, 2007 at 01:41 PM
So, according to Pete, Don Lavoie and Richard Ebeling--both of whose publications indeed show an excellent grasp of Mises's thought--have a better "understanding" of Mises than Rothbard or Hayek or even Guido Huelsmann, who is trained in philosophy and spent the last 5 or 6 years of his life writng a 1,000 page intellectual biography of Mises. Couldn't a case at least be made that the latter were equal or superior in their grasp of Mises's thought to Don or Richard? And what are Pete's criteria and evidence for making such a sweeping statement? Moreover what special competence or private source of knowledge does Pete himself possess in distinguishing between and ranking scholars on such a complex matter as their cognition of another scholar's mind and work? How much thought and study has Pete devoted to this issue? Without cogent and convincing answers to these questions, I am afraid Pete is once again engaging in ill-considered and unscholarly pontification a la his characterization of Austrian economics in the Doherty book.
Posted by: Joe Salerno October 04, 2007 at 02:48 PM
As far as I know none of the guys you mention has had any formal philosophical training. The one outstanding contemporary philosopher who got it right on Mises is Barry Smith. Mises´s methodological self-awareness is confused. He refers to Husserl but also to Hilbert. There seems to be some "mathematics envy" in Mises. He says "We can develop praxeology as a purely deductive science like logic and mathematics" but he offers nothing of the sort. One could claim that for this reason alone Human Action is a failure. Now if you look at what he actually did, it is more like Husserl than Hilbert so yes Peter Boettke has a point.
Posted by: Ludwig van den Hauwe October 04, 2007 at 06:37 PM
A few responses:
Ludwig --- I majored in economics and philosophy in undergraduate school and also studied philosophy (at least sat in some classes) in graduate school. But yes you are right that I am no philosopher, and you are right that Barry Smith is a very good philosopher.
Brian --- I hold the strict Misesian line that theories are never defeated by empirics, but instead that theories are proven to be applicable or inapplicable to given situations. We learn from engaging in that act of historical interpretation, but it does not prove theories to be right or wrong --- that is a matter of logic. So I apologize if in some writings I communicate the wrong message ... no doubt I am not as clear as I should be in some writings. Also I am mostly arguing what I consider to be a very poor interpretation of the great contributions of Ludwig von Mises that have been allowed to circulate.
Joe --- we really shouldn't be engaged in our own version of "fight club". As a scholar I am asked to make judgments, as are you. It is my considered judgment that you are challenging. You are entitled, though I am not sure you are justified in your characterization of my statements. You are the editor of the QJAE, I am the editor of the RAE, I have been teaching Mises and Austrian economics for close to 20 years at the PhD level, you have been studied Mises and the Austrian school for 30 years or more. I respect (though disagree) with your positions, you obviously neither respect nor agree with mine.
But you know all those journal articles and book chapters you complained about for being methodological, they were mostly about Mises and his position on methodology and method, including the essay on Mises for the Handbook of Economic Methodology (edited by John Davis, Wade Hands and Uskali Maki) and an even more recent essay "Was Mises Right?" published in the Review of Social Economy. These pieces were not self-published, they met the critical test of referees, etc. If they are so wildly off the mark, write up a comment straigthen me and the economics community out and increase the line on your CV. It is the way science progresses. BTW, I also just edited The Legacy of Ludwig von Mises, 2 volumes. But that is all just bean counting, but you did raise the issue and I just want to point out that while I may be wrong or right from your perspective it is not accurate for you to say that my opinion is unscholarly, though (like yours) it is a strongly held opinion. I am not offering just a mere opinion, but one based on close to 20 years of study of Mises and Misesian scholarship, and conversations with those who studied with Mises (of course mostly with Sennholz and Kirzner, but others as well including Lachmann and Rothbard and Bettina and Percy).
Do you deny what Mises wrote in Epistemological Problems, or in Theory and History? Or that Rothbard himself recognized the phenomenological aspects of Mises's thought, etc.? I mean you don't deny that he had paper in that Nathanson book do you? I know Murray said that the good parts of phenomenology were already in praxeology and that the modern phenomenological philosophers didn't have much to add, but still the historical point is clear.
On Huelsmann's biography of Mises, I am just reading it now (it arrived from Amazon 2 days ago). I have very high expectations for the work and look forward to reading it carefully. I think Huelsmann possessess a very good mind and he is seriously committed to the subject so I am excited to read it to see if he found anything new.
I will say this, however, I was disappointed that it was published by the Mises Institute and not a major university press --- Princeton, Harvard, Chicago, Michigan, Stanford, etc. I think this will ultimately limit the impact of the work unfairly. That is too bad. But I am hoping that the book is awesome and that it will have a huge impact on the profession of economists and intellectual historians. Robert Leonard's major work on Red Vienna (Cambridge) will be coming out and Mises is not as important a player in his story as I would like to see, so Huelsmann's book could be important if it accomplishes what I hope it does.
The motivation for writing what I wrote was that people were saying that Lavoie's agenda proved to be a dead-end and that it was some sort of deviation. I wanted to counter that --- Don was not a deviationist, but a Misesian, and Don's project did not end in a dead-end, it suffered the fate of many projects when it becomes identified with a person and that person passes. There were no doubt major problems with the way Don set up the project that need to be worked out, but Don has been so influential on a variety of research directions in modern Austrian economics --- from work on non-positivistic and non-formalistic social science, to the analysis of socialism and interventionism, to the examination of the mechanisms of anarcho-capitalism.
Don Lavoie's research and teaching should be remembered in our circle and that is all I was trying to defend against what I considered to be false claims.
Posted by: Peter Boettke October 04, 2007 at 09:27 PM
It seems difficult to believe that Levoie understood Mises better than Rothbard, who Mises personally commended.
But, on a more critical note, I think Rothbard had excellent criticism of hermenetics, which to my understanding seems like a philosophical justification for moral relativism. There was some consulting company that came to Simon to do a conference on leadership (I forget their name). But they were affiliated with Mike Jensen, and had hermenetical philosophical background. In any event, while they had some useful things to say, the philosophical underpinnings was BS. They talk about "stories", w/c of course implies things such as rapist and rape-victim, just "his story" and "her story". And all that stuff about meaning being unknowable.
PS: The company was Landmark Education Business Development.
Posted by: David J. Heinrich October 05, 2007 at 12:29 AM
As for Geertz --- one has to understand that Lavoie did not just fix on Gadamer, but instead had us reading Geertz ("The Natives Point of View"), Ricouer ("On Narrative"), Taylor, etc. Lavoie was just persuaded that Gadamer's Truth and Method laid out the philosophical issues at stake better than alternatives. I, on the other hand, while persuaded by Lavoie about Gadamer's relevance, learned more from reading synthesis works like Bernstein's two books --- Beyond Objectivism and Realtivism, and Restructuring Social and Political Theory.
So my Lavoie inspired turn led me to read sociologists like Peter Berger, and then also the economic sociologists like Swedberg, and to think about ethnography and political economy. I think Swedberg's Max Weber and the Idea of Economic Sociology combines the main insights for the questions I am interested in at this stage of my career.
So in the end, I learn more from social scientists than I do from pure philosophers --- so Geertz rather than Derrida.
But now for a twist on all of that, the social scientist who really excited me after I left Lavoie immediate influence was Jon Elster and his work on "A Plea for Mechanism" was very influential on me in terms of what we had to accomplish even as we made the interpretative turn. So it is that intellectual/philosophical discourse that is what I have been trying to engage in and encourage my students to engage (thus witness Leeson's emphasis on mechanisms in his work).
Someday I plan to write the book, Economics as a Philosophic Science, which will lay out the position clearly --- but in the meantime I am still trying to figure it all out through application and "testing" of it through application.
Pete
Posted by: Peter Boettke October 04, 2007 at 12:20 PM
Rafe: Are/Were you stating that Lavoie (1985) was off the mark in paraphrasing Popper (1972) that the interpretation of facts are theory-laden; hence, they must be placed into a conceptual framework to be rendered meaningful? If so, Why?
Dr. Boettke: I too enjoy the work of Swedberg (sans his call for rational choice theory unifying theory and empirical research in sociology!). And I particularly enjoyed reading the work that you referenced. But what is most interesting about the Swedberg(s), Lavoie(s), Schumpeter(s), and yourself is that you all believe(d) that one should always strive to establish a symbiotic relationship between theory and empirical research, where each contributes to the development of the other.
Posted by: Brian Pitt October 04, 2007 at 01:41 PM
So, according to Pete, Don Lavoie and Richard Ebeling--both of whose publications indeed show an excellent grasp of Mises's thought--have a better "understanding" of Mises than Rothbard or Hayek or even Guido Huelsmann, who is trained in philosophy and spent the last 5 or 6 years of his life writng a 1,000 page intellectual biography of Mises. Couldn't a case at least be made that the latter were equal or superior in their grasp of Mises's thought to Don or Richard? And what are Pete's criteria and evidence for making such a sweeping statement? Moreover what special competence or private source of knowledge does Pete himself possess in distinguishing between and ranking scholars on such a complex matter as their cognition of another scholar's mind and work? How much thought and study has Pete devoted to this issue? Without cogent and convincing answers to these questions, I am afraid Pete is once again engaging in ill-considered and unscholarly pontification a la his characterization of Austrian economics in the Doherty book.
Posted by: Joe Salerno October 04, 2007 at 02:48 PM
As far as I know none of the guys you mention has had any formal philosophical training. The one outstanding contemporary philosopher who got it right on Mises is Barry Smith. Mises´s methodological self-awareness is confused. He refers to Husserl but also to Hilbert. There seems to be some "mathematics envy" in Mises. He says "We can develop praxeology as a purely deductive science like logic and mathematics" but he offers nothing of the sort. One could claim that for this reason alone Human Action is a failure. Now if you look at what he actually did, it is more like Husserl than Hilbert so yes Peter Boettke has a point.
Posted by: Ludwig van den Hauwe October 04, 2007 at 06:37 PM
A few responses:
Ludwig --- I majored in economics and philosophy in undergraduate school and also studied philosophy (at least sat in some classes) in graduate school. But yes you are right that I am no philosopher, and you are right that Barry Smith is a very good philosopher.
Brian --- I hold the strict Misesian line that theories are never defeated by empirics, but instead that theories are proven to be applicable or inapplicable to given situations. We learn from engaging in that act of historical interpretation, but it does not prove theories to be right or wrong --- that is a matter of logic. So I apologize if in some writings I communicate the wrong message ... no doubt I am not as clear as I should be in some writings. Also I am mostly arguing what I consider to be a very poor interpretation of the great contributions of Ludwig von Mises that have been allowed to circulate.
Joe --- we really shouldn't be engaged in our own version of "fight club". As a scholar I am asked to make judgments, as are you. It is my considered judgment that you are challenging. You are entitled, though I am not sure you are justified in your characterization of my statements. You are the editor of the QJAE, I am the editor of the RAE, I have been teaching Mises and Austrian economics for close to 20 years at the PhD level, you have been studied Mises and the Austrian school for 30 years or more. I respect (though disagree) with your positions, you obviously neither respect nor agree with mine.
But you know all those journal articles and book chapters you complained about for being methodological, they were mostly about Mises and his position on methodology and method, including the essay on Mises for the Handbook of Economic Methodology (edited by John Davis, Wade Hands and Uskali Maki) and an even more recent essay "Was Mises Right?" published in the Review of Social Economy. These pieces were not self-published, they met the critical test of referees, etc. If they are so wildly off the mark, write up a comment straigthen me and the economics community out and increase the line on your CV. It is the way science progresses. BTW, I also just edited The Legacy of Ludwig von Mises, 2 volumes. But that is all just bean counting, but you did raise the issue and I just want to point out that while I may be wrong or right from your perspective it is not accurate for you to say that my opinion is unscholarly, though (like yours) it is a strongly held opinion. I am not offering just a mere opinion, but one based on close to 20 years of study of Mises and Misesian scholarship, and conversations with those who studied with Mises (of course mostly with Sennholz and Kirzner, but others as well including Lachmann and Rothbard and Bettina and Percy).
Do you deny what Mises wrote in Epistemological Problems, or in Theory and History? Or that Rothbard himself recognized the phenomenological aspects of Mises's thought, etc.? I mean you don't deny that he had paper in that Nathanson book do you? I know Murray said that the good parts of phenomenology were already in praxeology and that the modern phenomenological philosophers didn't have much to add, but still the historical point is clear.
On Huelsmann's biography of Mises, I am just reading it now (it arrived from Amazon 2 days ago). I have very high expectations for the work and look forward to reading it carefully. I think Huelsmann possessess a very good mind and he is seriously committed to the subject so I am excited to read it to see if he found anything new.
I will say this, however, I was disappointed that it was published by the Mises Institute and not a major university press --- Princeton, Harvard, Chicago, Michigan, Stanford, etc. I think this will ultimately limit the impact of the work unfairly. That is too bad. But I am hoping that the book is awesome and that it will have a huge impact on the profession of economists and intellectual historians. Robert Leonard's major work on Red Vienna (Cambridge) will be coming out and Mises is not as important a player in his story as I would like to see, so Huelsmann's book could be important if it accomplishes what I hope it does.
The motivation for writing what I wrote was that people were saying that Lavoie's agenda proved to be a dead-end and that it was some sort of deviation. I wanted to counter that --- Don was not a deviationist, but a Misesian, and Don's project did not end in a dead-end, it suffered the fate of many projects when it becomes identified with a person and that person passes. There were no doubt major problems with the way Don set up the project that need to be worked out, but Don has been so influential on a variety of research directions in modern Austrian economics --- from work on non-positivistic and non-formalistic social science, to the analysis of socialism and interventionism, to the examination of the mechanisms of anarcho-capitalism.
Don Lavoie's research and teaching should be remembered in our circle and that is all I was trying to defend against what I considered to be false claims.
Posted by: Peter Boettke October 04, 2007 at 09:27 PM
It seems difficult to believe that Levoie understood Mises better than Rothbard, who Mises personally commended.
But, on a more critical note, I think Rothbard had excellent criticism of hermenetics, which to my understanding seems like a philosophical justification for moral relativism. There was some consulting company that came to Simon to do a conference on leadership (I forget their name). But they were affiliated with Mike Jensen, and had hermenetical philosophical background. In any event, while they had some useful things to say, the philosophical underpinnings was BS. They talk about "stories", w/c of course implies things such as rapist and rape-victim, just "his story" and "her story". And all that stuff about meaning being unknowable.
PS: The company was Landmark Education Business Development.
Posted by: David J. Heinrich October 05, 2007 at 12:29 AM
Friday, October 5, 2007
Bourdieu analyses that aesthetic taste is correlated with class position
Posted by larvalsubjects under pedagogy
If Lucretius doesn’t get students irate and worked up– that philosopher that so incensed St. Jerome that he probably fabricated stories to discredit him –what could possibly get them worked up? I suppose that they begin with the premise that it’s a philosophy class so obviously there are going to be “wild ideas”. Yet I’m strangely disappointed that they aren’t showing up at my doors with torches as a result of being forced to read a philosopher that claims everything is a combination of atoms in motion, without purpose or meaning, and that the soul is inextricably bound up with the body such that it ceases to exist when our particular combination of atoms ceases to hold. If anything, the students are expressing amazement at how much Lucretius was able to envision (even if wrong in many details), just by using reason and observation and working through the logical necessities of his key foundational claims. Oddly they seem more traumatized by Plato’s assertion that numbers and forms like Justice are real, mind independent things; or when they encounter Descartes’ proof for the existence of God, deployed through reason alone. In the case of Descartes, it is not at all unusual for me to get student essays that read “while I believe in God, I do not think you can prove the existence of God.” Of course, they seldom go into the details as to just why the proofs go astray. It’s just some sort of obvious given or truth. At any rate, what is this recoil in horror from a rational proof or the thesis that there are objective, mind-independent universals for things like beauty and justice such that one can be mistaken a symptom of? And why would Lucretius, a thinker so consistent in developing the consequences of his particular materialist vision, be so easily taken in stride?
5 Responses to “Unperturbable Students”
Jacob Russell Says: October 3, 2007 at 1:42 am
Do you think it has to do with the type of subjects? The overwhelming American belief in “efficiency,” that questions of technical or functional nature can be decided and ranked, but all opinions are equal when it comes to “beauty” or “justice.” These are areas where I find that my students cling fiercely to the notion that “every one has a right to their opinion,” and react most defensively to the suggestion that opinions on, say–aesthetics, are stronger than others. To frame these questions as matters of “judgment,” rather than mere “opinion,” strikes them as offensive. Beyond elitism. A kind of intellectual bigotry.
Their ability to compartmentalize–to maintain archives of received notions impervious to critical examination, and subject everything else to a pseudo-rational, utilitarian critique of “efficiency” (which would destroy all their pet fantasies) never ceases to astonish me.
In this matter of “efficiency,” Jaques Ellul is due a revival. The Technological Society, and Propaganda are amazingly prescient. He needs his Zizek!
larvalsubjects Says: October 3, 2007 at 3:51 pm
These are very interesting observations. I’ve encountered the same phenomena in my classroom. I wonder, also, whether there aren’t various class conflicts at work here. In Distinction, Bourdieu presents a sociological analysis of taste that convincingly demonstrates the manner in which aesthetic taste is correlated with class position. Perhaps anxiety about objective universals in aesthetics is reflective of anxieties about class and social position. I am not, of course, suggesting that I endorse the existence of such universals, just that I find it curious that students often react so strongly to arguments for their existence.
Apikores Says: October 4, 2007 at 4:58 am
it might have to do with the development of the religious question in american culture, where an exponentially increasing amount of apologetic space has been necessary to accomodate belief in light of enlightened standards of reason and intelligibility
(perhaps that, coupled with the epidemic of politically correct mutliculturalism of an age drenched in the appealing laziness of a chic relativism accompanied by the cult of individualism etc etc…)
statestreet Says: October 4, 2007 at 4:51 pm
When I was enrolled in the University of Chicago’s Basic Program, a four year study of the classics, my fellow discussion members seemed scandalized by these ideas and arguments in Plato and Descartes. A shared underlying assumption was the mind creates concepts and universals rather than the mind discovers them in some mysterious continent that can only be explored by Reason. Issues about the objectivity of concepts, if they are created things, was not discussed much since the scandal and notion of mind independent concepts blocked the way.
At the time, I did not share my fellows’ uneasiness about Forms, etc. Since the then, I have come to share the premise or prejudice against mind independent concepts. I like to think I could defend the prejudice if put to the task. I think of Plato and Aristotle as depicted in Raphael’s The School of Athens. Plato points toward the sky; Aristotle holds his arm and palm toward the earth. The prevailing taste seems to be for Aristotle over Plato.
The prevailing and unquestioned taste may have arisen from such things as modern medicine in its ability to treat trauma to and disease in the brain. When a mind no longer functions properly, the idea of the mind creating concepts and communicating them seems easier to reconcile with the dysfunction than the idea of Reason, a weary explorer, taking a rest before plunging further into some dark unexplored continent.
Jacob Russell Says: October 4, 2007 at 9:37 pm
Why must we assume that the discovery is between the subject and something “out there?” Aesthetic “concepts” are not like clay pots, things that we make, but more like an accumulation of discoveries we that happen within ourselves, and in our meeting with the world. While our capacity to apprehend the world through them, by means of them, is something we find, not “out there,” but within our subjectivity, or in our dialog with other subjects, this is not the same thing as mind independent concepts, far from it, and neither is it a kind of making, or making up.
5 Responses to “Unperturbable Students”
Jacob Russell Says: October 3, 2007 at 1:42 am
Do you think it has to do with the type of subjects? The overwhelming American belief in “efficiency,” that questions of technical or functional nature can be decided and ranked, but all opinions are equal when it comes to “beauty” or “justice.” These are areas where I find that my students cling fiercely to the notion that “every one has a right to their opinion,” and react most defensively to the suggestion that opinions on, say–aesthetics, are stronger than others. To frame these questions as matters of “judgment,” rather than mere “opinion,” strikes them as offensive. Beyond elitism. A kind of intellectual bigotry.
Their ability to compartmentalize–to maintain archives of received notions impervious to critical examination, and subject everything else to a pseudo-rational, utilitarian critique of “efficiency” (which would destroy all their pet fantasies) never ceases to astonish me.
In this matter of “efficiency,” Jaques Ellul is due a revival. The Technological Society, and Propaganda are amazingly prescient. He needs his Zizek!
larvalsubjects Says: October 3, 2007 at 3:51 pm
These are very interesting observations. I’ve encountered the same phenomena in my classroom. I wonder, also, whether there aren’t various class conflicts at work here. In Distinction, Bourdieu presents a sociological analysis of taste that convincingly demonstrates the manner in which aesthetic taste is correlated with class position. Perhaps anxiety about objective universals in aesthetics is reflective of anxieties about class and social position. I am not, of course, suggesting that I endorse the existence of such universals, just that I find it curious that students often react so strongly to arguments for their existence.
Apikores Says: October 4, 2007 at 4:58 am
it might have to do with the development of the religious question in american culture, where an exponentially increasing amount of apologetic space has been necessary to accomodate belief in light of enlightened standards of reason and intelligibility
(perhaps that, coupled with the epidemic of politically correct mutliculturalism of an age drenched in the appealing laziness of a chic relativism accompanied by the cult of individualism etc etc…)
statestreet Says: October 4, 2007 at 4:51 pm
When I was enrolled in the University of Chicago’s Basic Program, a four year study of the classics, my fellow discussion members seemed scandalized by these ideas and arguments in Plato and Descartes. A shared underlying assumption was the mind creates concepts and universals rather than the mind discovers them in some mysterious continent that can only be explored by Reason. Issues about the objectivity of concepts, if they are created things, was not discussed much since the scandal and notion of mind independent concepts blocked the way.
At the time, I did not share my fellows’ uneasiness about Forms, etc. Since the then, I have come to share the premise or prejudice against mind independent concepts. I like to think I could defend the prejudice if put to the task. I think of Plato and Aristotle as depicted in Raphael’s The School of Athens. Plato points toward the sky; Aristotle holds his arm and palm toward the earth. The prevailing taste seems to be for Aristotle over Plato.
The prevailing and unquestioned taste may have arisen from such things as modern medicine in its ability to treat trauma to and disease in the brain. When a mind no longer functions properly, the idea of the mind creating concepts and communicating them seems easier to reconcile with the dysfunction than the idea of Reason, a weary explorer, taking a rest before plunging further into some dark unexplored continent.
Jacob Russell Says: October 4, 2007 at 9:37 pm
Why must we assume that the discovery is between the subject and something “out there?” Aesthetic “concepts” are not like clay pots, things that we make, but more like an accumulation of discoveries we that happen within ourselves, and in our meeting with the world. While our capacity to apprehend the world through them, by means of them, is something we find, not “out there,” but within our subjectivity, or in our dialog with other subjects, this is not the same thing as mind independent concepts, far from it, and neither is it a kind of making, or making up.
Thursday, October 4, 2007
What an educated person should know
Books on the Canon Wars By RACHEL DONADIO
Shelves of books on the state of American higher education have appeared over the years, ranging from the historical to the analytical to the downright polemical. The following list presents some highlights from the last half-century of debate over what an educated person should know. - Rachel Donadio "ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM IN AMERICAN LIFE" by Richard Hofstadter (1962) In his classic study, Hofstadter argues that intellectuality has always been unpopular in America, where revivalist religiosity and the industriousness of the self-made man have often been valued over book learning. Hoftstadter also offers a critique of the early 20th-century education reformer John Dewey, whose belief that teachers should respond to the natural impulses of their pupils Hofstadter thought had a "devastating" effect on the design of curriculum because it led to a disdain for authority and the institutionalization of "anti-institutional methods." Review (PDF format)
"ON THE TEACHING OF MODERN LITERATURE" by Lionel Trilling (1965) In this essay, collected in "Beyond Culture," Trilling discusses how Columbia came to offer a course in modern literature and charts the challenges of teaching recent books that carried for him an "extravagant personal force." No matter how difficult it might be, Trilling argues, teachers of modern literature should honor Thomas Mann's mandate to teach books whose "chief intention" could be seen as an effort to free readers from the middle class, even if the prescribed "means of freedom" — "losing oneself up to the point of self-destruction, of surrendering oneself to experience without regard to self-interest or conventional morality, of escaping wholly from the societal bonds" — end up promoting "not merely freedom from the middle class but freedom from society itself."
"THE CLOSING OF THE AMERICAN MIND: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished The Souls of Today's Students" (1987) The book that kicked off the recent canon wars — and spent more than a year on the bestseller list. Bloom taught political philosophy at the University of Chicago, and his book is filled with dense readings of thinkers from the ancient Greeks to Hobbes, Tocqueville, Rousseau and Kant. He excoriates some intellectual heirs of Nietzsche, whose relativistic ideas took hold in bastardized form on the political and cultural left, with disastrous results. Bloom also inveighs against feminism, rock music and the campus upheavals of the 1960s, which he compared to the student riots in Nazi Germany. "In both places," he writes, "…commitment was understood to be profounder than science, passion than reason, history than nature, the young than the old." Review
"CULTURAL LITERACY: What Every American Needs to Know" by E.D. Hirsch, Jr. (1987) In this book, which spent six months on the Times bestseller list, along with Bloom's polemic, Hirsch argued against the idea, prevalent at all levels of the educational system, that it was more important to teach modes of thinking than names, facts and specific bodies of knowledge. Hirsch listed some of that crucial information — from 1066 (the year of the Norman Conquest of England) on through amortization, Edmund Burke, cerebellum, immaculate conception, nuclear fission, Saigon, Warren Court, Young Turk and Zurich — in an appendix. The list was expanded in Hirsch's best-selling "Dictionary of Cultural Literacy," which is now in its third revised updated edition. Review
"TENURED RADICALS" By Roger Kimball (1990) In this scathing polemic, Kimball, an editor at The New Criterion, a conservative monthly, aimed "to expose these recent developments in the academic study of the humanities for what they are: ideologically motivated assaults on the intellectual and moral substance of our culture." Kimball takes aim at feminists, multiculturalists, deconstructionists, and other theory-addled professors who would teach Star Trek and Bruce Springsteen alongside Victorian novels. He also chronicled the posthumous fall from grace of Paul de Man, the highly influential Yale literary theorist who in 1987 was discovered to have published anti-Semitic articles in a pro-Nazi Belgian newspaper in 1941. (The poet and journalist David Lehman offered a more complete discussion of the affair in "Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man" (1991).) Review
"ILLIBERAL EDUCATION: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus" by Dinesh D'Souza. (1991) In this forceful book of reportage, D'Souza — then fresh out of Dartmouth, where he had been a founder of the upstart conservative journal Dartmouth Review — chronicled what he saw as the dangerous advance of political correctness at colleges nationwide. D'Souza produced a vigorous critique of race-based admissions, the fetishization of victim status, and the "more vehement application of preferential treatment, teach-ins, reeducation seminars, and censorship," which in his view legitimized "a regime of double standards that divides and balkanizes the campus." Review
"BEYOND THE CULTURE WARS: How Teaching the Conflicts can Revitalize American Education" by Gerald Graff. (1992) Graff, author of "Professing Literature," a definitive history of the teaching of literature in America, argued that his colleagues should incorporate debates about the curriculum into the curriculum itself. "The best way to prevent students from being bullied by their teachers' political views," he wrote, "is to bring them into the debates between those views."
"DEBATING P.C.: The Controversy over Political Correctness on College Campuses" edited by Paul Berman. (1992) "Only in medicine are crises a sign of impending death," Berman writes in this anthology of key texts from writers on the right and the left. "In intellectual matters, crises are signs of life." In Berman's view, the roots of political correctness lie in the radicalism of the 1960s, though the larger media frenzy began in the fall of 1990, with a "small, innocuous-seeming article" by Richard Bernstein in the Times. The anthology includes contributions from Michael Bérubé, Barbara Ehrenreich, Stanley Fish, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Katha Pollitt, Diane Ravitch, Edward Said, John Searle, and Catharine Stimpson.
"DICTATORSHIP OF VIRTUE: Multiculturalism and the Battle for America's Future" by Richard Bernstein (1994). In this book, Bernstein expands on his reporting for the Times on campus debates over political correctness and the canon. He writes about the rise of the diversity-training industry on campus and in corporate America and challenges the multiculturalists' simplistic denunciations of "dead white males," who have become "synonymous with the hunger for power, with imperialism, with ruthless capitalist exploitation, while all others belong to the camp of the meek and the beautiful." In addition to documenting various curriculum debates, Bernstein describes the growing popularity of figures like Rush Limbaugh, who present themselves as regular guys victimized by the "liberal elites." Review
"CULTIVATING HUMANITY: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education" by Martha Nussbaum. (1997) A professor of law and ethics at the University of Chicago, Nussbaum challenges the view, promoted by Bloom and other conservative critics, of a higher education system devastated by radicals and multiculturalists. "Sensationalistic descriptions of horrors may sometimes be more fun to read than nuanced accounts of responsible decision-making," she writes, "but the latter…represent the far more common reality." The study of non-Western peoples, as well as African-American Studies, Women's Studies, and the study of human sexuality, Nussbaum argues, helps us see ourselves "as human beings bound to all other human beings by ties of recognition and concern." Review
"RAVELSTEIN" by Saul Bellow (2000). Bellow's final novel is a dazzling double portrait of two dying men: himself and his friend Allan Bloom, here cast as Abe Ravelstein, a man of earthy appetites and abstruse philosophical preoccupations, a homosexual in a conservative intellectual milieu, a Jew who rose up through the then-Waspy ranks of academia. We meet Bloom/Ravelstein after "The Closing of the American Mind" has made him rich enough to indulge in expensive clothes, furnishings and trips to Paris, and before his death of AIDS in 1992. Bellow captures his friend's passionate and idiosyncratic approach to the life of the mind. "Without its longings your soul was a used inner tube many good for one summer at the beach, nothing more," he writes. "Spirited men and women, the young above all, were devoted to the pursuit of love. By contrast the bourgeois was dominated by fears of violent death. There, in the briefest form possible, you have a sketch of Ravelstein's most important preoccupations." Review
BEYOND THEORY by Terry Eagleton. (2003) Eagleton's "Literary Theory" (1983) was a handbook for a generation of students and scholars. "After Theory" is his witty, ironic reconsideration of the impact of the various interpretive movements that had swept through literature departments in the past few decades. Though nostalgic for the promise of the 60s and the possibilities of radical Marxist transformation, Eagleton is clear-eyed about some of theory's unintended consequences. "Today," he observes, "students once wrote uncritical, reverential essays on Flaubert, but nowadays they write uncritical, reverential essays on 'Friends.'"
"QUICK STUDIES: The Best of Lingua Franca" edited by Alexander Star. (2002) An anthology of articles from Lingua Franca, a journal of ideas published from 1990, the heyday of the academic culture wars, to 2001, when theory was on the wane and behavioral psychology, evolutionary biology and other approaches were pushing debates on ethics and morality in new, more scientific directions. It includes the magazine's most famous article, published in 1996, in which Alan Sokal, a physicist at New York University, recounts how he got the cultural studies journal Social Text to publish a fake paper purporting to outline a "transformative hermeneutics of quantum gravity," written in fluent post-modernese and riddled with scientific absurdities. Other articles include "A Most Dangerous Method," Margaret Talbot's account of a sexual harassment case against the maverick feminist theorist Jane Gallop, and Frank Lentricchia's "Last Will and Testament of an Ex-Literary Critic," in which the Duke English professor charts his disenchantment with the dogmatism and reductive politics that have crept into English classrooms.
"WHAT'S LIBERAL ABOUT THE LIBERAL ARTS? Classroom Politics and 'Bias' in Higher Education" by Michael Bérubé. (2006) In this personal account, Bérubé, an English professor at Pennsylvania State University, strikes back against the rise of the anti-academic right, fueled by activists like David Horowitz, Fox News and other outlets. While acknowledging that most professors are left-leaning, Bérubé argues that the real threat to American education isn't professors preaching against racism, sexism and homophobia but conservatives who distort the complexities of genuine inquiry to further their own political agendas. Bérubé brings more abstract debates down to earth by reporting live from his own spirited classroom discussions of books like Willa Cather's "My Antonia" and "The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man" by James Weldon Johnson, in which he describes the challenges of respecting students' varying views rather than encouraging them to parrot his own. Review
"THE TROUBLE WITH DIVERSITY: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality" by Walter Benn Michaels. (2006) An English professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Michaels argues that an emphasis on racial identity on campus and beyond has detracted attention from a more important problem: the divide between rich and poor. "From their affirmative-action admissions procedures to their multicultural graduation requirements," he writes, "American universities are propaganda machines that might as well have been designed to ensure that the class structure of American society remains unchallenged." If racism is "extinct" in academia, Michaels asks, why is so much attention paid to it? Because, he answers, "we prefer fighting racism to fighting poverty."
"INDOCTRINATION U: The Left's War Against Academic Freedom" by David Horowitz. (2007) A Marxist turned conservative and the author of "The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America" (2006), Horowitz started a campaign in 2003 to promote intellectual diversity on college campuses, which he sees as bastions of leftwing anti-Americanism. Here Horowitz describes campus visits to promote his campaign for an "Academic Bill of Rights" aimed at protecting students and faculty against discrimination as a result of their political views. The measure was debated in several state legislatures but has come under fire from academics wary of the intrusion of external political actors in internal campus debates.
"ON THE TEACHING OF MODERN LITERATURE" by Lionel Trilling (1965) In this essay, collected in "Beyond Culture," Trilling discusses how Columbia came to offer a course in modern literature and charts the challenges of teaching recent books that carried for him an "extravagant personal force." No matter how difficult it might be, Trilling argues, teachers of modern literature should honor Thomas Mann's mandate to teach books whose "chief intention" could be seen as an effort to free readers from the middle class, even if the prescribed "means of freedom" — "losing oneself up to the point of self-destruction, of surrendering oneself to experience without regard to self-interest or conventional morality, of escaping wholly from the societal bonds" — end up promoting "not merely freedom from the middle class but freedom from society itself."
"THE CLOSING OF THE AMERICAN MIND: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished The Souls of Today's Students" (1987) The book that kicked off the recent canon wars — and spent more than a year on the bestseller list. Bloom taught political philosophy at the University of Chicago, and his book is filled with dense readings of thinkers from the ancient Greeks to Hobbes, Tocqueville, Rousseau and Kant. He excoriates some intellectual heirs of Nietzsche, whose relativistic ideas took hold in bastardized form on the political and cultural left, with disastrous results. Bloom also inveighs against feminism, rock music and the campus upheavals of the 1960s, which he compared to the student riots in Nazi Germany. "In both places," he writes, "…commitment was understood to be profounder than science, passion than reason, history than nature, the young than the old." Review
"CULTURAL LITERACY: What Every American Needs to Know" by E.D. Hirsch, Jr. (1987) In this book, which spent six months on the Times bestseller list, along with Bloom's polemic, Hirsch argued against the idea, prevalent at all levels of the educational system, that it was more important to teach modes of thinking than names, facts and specific bodies of knowledge. Hirsch listed some of that crucial information — from 1066 (the year of the Norman Conquest of England) on through amortization, Edmund Burke, cerebellum, immaculate conception, nuclear fission, Saigon, Warren Court, Young Turk and Zurich — in an appendix. The list was expanded in Hirsch's best-selling "Dictionary of Cultural Literacy," which is now in its third revised updated edition. Review
"TENURED RADICALS" By Roger Kimball (1990) In this scathing polemic, Kimball, an editor at The New Criterion, a conservative monthly, aimed "to expose these recent developments in the academic study of the humanities for what they are: ideologically motivated assaults on the intellectual and moral substance of our culture." Kimball takes aim at feminists, multiculturalists, deconstructionists, and other theory-addled professors who would teach Star Trek and Bruce Springsteen alongside Victorian novels. He also chronicled the posthumous fall from grace of Paul de Man, the highly influential Yale literary theorist who in 1987 was discovered to have published anti-Semitic articles in a pro-Nazi Belgian newspaper in 1941. (The poet and journalist David Lehman offered a more complete discussion of the affair in "Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man" (1991).) Review
"ILLIBERAL EDUCATION: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus" by Dinesh D'Souza. (1991) In this forceful book of reportage, D'Souza — then fresh out of Dartmouth, where he had been a founder of the upstart conservative journal Dartmouth Review — chronicled what he saw as the dangerous advance of political correctness at colleges nationwide. D'Souza produced a vigorous critique of race-based admissions, the fetishization of victim status, and the "more vehement application of preferential treatment, teach-ins, reeducation seminars, and censorship," which in his view legitimized "a regime of double standards that divides and balkanizes the campus." Review
"BEYOND THE CULTURE WARS: How Teaching the Conflicts can Revitalize American Education" by Gerald Graff. (1992) Graff, author of "Professing Literature," a definitive history of the teaching of literature in America, argued that his colleagues should incorporate debates about the curriculum into the curriculum itself. "The best way to prevent students from being bullied by their teachers' political views," he wrote, "is to bring them into the debates between those views."
"DEBATING P.C.: The Controversy over Political Correctness on College Campuses" edited by Paul Berman. (1992) "Only in medicine are crises a sign of impending death," Berman writes in this anthology of key texts from writers on the right and the left. "In intellectual matters, crises are signs of life." In Berman's view, the roots of political correctness lie in the radicalism of the 1960s, though the larger media frenzy began in the fall of 1990, with a "small, innocuous-seeming article" by Richard Bernstein in the Times. The anthology includes contributions from Michael Bérubé, Barbara Ehrenreich, Stanley Fish, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Katha Pollitt, Diane Ravitch, Edward Said, John Searle, and Catharine Stimpson.
"DICTATORSHIP OF VIRTUE: Multiculturalism and the Battle for America's Future" by Richard Bernstein (1994). In this book, Bernstein expands on his reporting for the Times on campus debates over political correctness and the canon. He writes about the rise of the diversity-training industry on campus and in corporate America and challenges the multiculturalists' simplistic denunciations of "dead white males," who have become "synonymous with the hunger for power, with imperialism, with ruthless capitalist exploitation, while all others belong to the camp of the meek and the beautiful." In addition to documenting various curriculum debates, Bernstein describes the growing popularity of figures like Rush Limbaugh, who present themselves as regular guys victimized by the "liberal elites." Review
"CULTIVATING HUMANITY: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education" by Martha Nussbaum. (1997) A professor of law and ethics at the University of Chicago, Nussbaum challenges the view, promoted by Bloom and other conservative critics, of a higher education system devastated by radicals and multiculturalists. "Sensationalistic descriptions of horrors may sometimes be more fun to read than nuanced accounts of responsible decision-making," she writes, "but the latter…represent the far more common reality." The study of non-Western peoples, as well as African-American Studies, Women's Studies, and the study of human sexuality, Nussbaum argues, helps us see ourselves "as human beings bound to all other human beings by ties of recognition and concern." Review
"RAVELSTEIN" by Saul Bellow (2000). Bellow's final novel is a dazzling double portrait of two dying men: himself and his friend Allan Bloom, here cast as Abe Ravelstein, a man of earthy appetites and abstruse philosophical preoccupations, a homosexual in a conservative intellectual milieu, a Jew who rose up through the then-Waspy ranks of academia. We meet Bloom/Ravelstein after "The Closing of the American Mind" has made him rich enough to indulge in expensive clothes, furnishings and trips to Paris, and before his death of AIDS in 1992. Bellow captures his friend's passionate and idiosyncratic approach to the life of the mind. "Without its longings your soul was a used inner tube many good for one summer at the beach, nothing more," he writes. "Spirited men and women, the young above all, were devoted to the pursuit of love. By contrast the bourgeois was dominated by fears of violent death. There, in the briefest form possible, you have a sketch of Ravelstein's most important preoccupations." Review
BEYOND THEORY by Terry Eagleton. (2003) Eagleton's "Literary Theory" (1983) was a handbook for a generation of students and scholars. "After Theory" is his witty, ironic reconsideration of the impact of the various interpretive movements that had swept through literature departments in the past few decades. Though nostalgic for the promise of the 60s and the possibilities of radical Marxist transformation, Eagleton is clear-eyed about some of theory's unintended consequences. "Today," he observes, "students once wrote uncritical, reverential essays on Flaubert, but nowadays they write uncritical, reverential essays on 'Friends.'"
"QUICK STUDIES: The Best of Lingua Franca" edited by Alexander Star. (2002) An anthology of articles from Lingua Franca, a journal of ideas published from 1990, the heyday of the academic culture wars, to 2001, when theory was on the wane and behavioral psychology, evolutionary biology and other approaches were pushing debates on ethics and morality in new, more scientific directions. It includes the magazine's most famous article, published in 1996, in which Alan Sokal, a physicist at New York University, recounts how he got the cultural studies journal Social Text to publish a fake paper purporting to outline a "transformative hermeneutics of quantum gravity," written in fluent post-modernese and riddled with scientific absurdities. Other articles include "A Most Dangerous Method," Margaret Talbot's account of a sexual harassment case against the maverick feminist theorist Jane Gallop, and Frank Lentricchia's "Last Will and Testament of an Ex-Literary Critic," in which the Duke English professor charts his disenchantment with the dogmatism and reductive politics that have crept into English classrooms.
"WHAT'S LIBERAL ABOUT THE LIBERAL ARTS? Classroom Politics and 'Bias' in Higher Education" by Michael Bérubé. (2006) In this personal account, Bérubé, an English professor at Pennsylvania State University, strikes back against the rise of the anti-academic right, fueled by activists like David Horowitz, Fox News and other outlets. While acknowledging that most professors are left-leaning, Bérubé argues that the real threat to American education isn't professors preaching against racism, sexism and homophobia but conservatives who distort the complexities of genuine inquiry to further their own political agendas. Bérubé brings more abstract debates down to earth by reporting live from his own spirited classroom discussions of books like Willa Cather's "My Antonia" and "The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man" by James Weldon Johnson, in which he describes the challenges of respecting students' varying views rather than encouraging them to parrot his own. Review
"THE TROUBLE WITH DIVERSITY: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality" by Walter Benn Michaels. (2006) An English professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Michaels argues that an emphasis on racial identity on campus and beyond has detracted attention from a more important problem: the divide between rich and poor. "From their affirmative-action admissions procedures to their multicultural graduation requirements," he writes, "American universities are propaganda machines that might as well have been designed to ensure that the class structure of American society remains unchallenged." If racism is "extinct" in academia, Michaels asks, why is so much attention paid to it? Because, he answers, "we prefer fighting racism to fighting poverty."
"INDOCTRINATION U: The Left's War Against Academic Freedom" by David Horowitz. (2007) A Marxist turned conservative and the author of "The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America" (2006), Horowitz started a campaign in 2003 to promote intellectual diversity on college campuses, which he sees as bastions of leftwing anti-Americanism. Here Horowitz describes campus visits to promote his campaign for an "Academic Bill of Rights" aimed at protecting students and faculty against discrimination as a result of their political views. The measure was debated in several state legislatures but has come under fire from academics wary of the intrusion of external political actors in internal campus debates.
Wednesday, October 3, 2007
It is a world of very high social capital and low anomie
MORAL PSYCHOLOGY AND THE MISUNDERSTANDING OF RELIGION
By Jonathan Haidt
In my research I have found that there are two common ways that cultures suppress and regulate selfishness, two visions of what society is and how it ought to work. I'll call them the contractual approach and the beehive approach. The contractual approach takes the individual as the fundamental unit of value. The fundamental problem of social life is that individuals often hurt each other, and so we create implicit social contracts and explicit laws to foster a fair, free, and safe society in which individuals can pursue their interests and develop themselves and their relationships as they choose.
Morality is about happiness and suffering (as Harris says, and as John Stuart Mill said before him), and so contractualists are endlessly trying to fine-tune laws, reinvent institutions, and extend new rights as circumstances change in order to maximize happiness and minimize suffering. To build a contractual morality, all you need are the two individualizing foundations: harm/care, and fairness/reciprocity. The other three foundations, and any religion that builds on them, run afoul of the prime directive: let people make their own choices, as long as they harm nobody else.
The beehive approach, in contrast, takes the group and its territory as fundamental sources of value. Individual bees are born and die by the thousands, but the hive lives for a long time, and each individual has a role to play in fostering its success.The two fundamental problems of social life are attacks from outside and subversion from within. Either one can lead to the death of the hive, so all must pull together, do their duty, and be willing to make sacrifices for the group. Bees don't have to learn how to behave in this way but human children do, and this is why cultural conservatives are so heavily focused on what happens in schools, families, and the media. Conservatives generally have a more pessimistic view of human nature than do liberals. They are more likely to believe that if you stand back and give kids space to grow as they please, they'll grow into shallow, self-centered, undisciplined pleasure seekers. Cultural conservatives work hard to cultivate moral virtues based on the three binding foundations: ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity, as well as on the universally employed foundations of harm/care and fairness/reciprocity. The beehive ideal is not a world of maximum freedom, it is a world of order and tradition in which people are united by a shared moral code that is effectively enforced, which enables people to trust each other to play their interdependent roles. It is a world of very high social capital and low anomie. It might seem obvious to you that contractual societies are good, modern, creative and free, whereas beehive societies reek of feudalism, fascism, and patriarchy. And, as a secular liberal I agree that contractual societies such as those of Western Europe offer the best hope for living peacefully together in our increasingly diverse modern nations (although it remains to be seen if Europe can solve its current diversity problems).
I just want to make one point, however, that should give contractualists pause: surveys have long shown that religious believers in the United States are happier, healthier, longer-lived, and more generous to charity and to each other than are secular people. Most of these effects have been documented in Europe too. If you believe that morality is about happiness and suffering, then I think you are obligated to take a close look at the way religious people actually live and ask what they are doing right.
Don't dismiss religion on the basis of a superficial reading of the Bible and the newspaper. Might religious communities offer us insights into human flourishing? Can they teach us lessons that would improve wellbeing even in a primarily contractualist society. You can't use the New Atheists as your guide to these lessons. The new atheists conduct biased reviews of the literature and conclude that there is no good evidence on any benefits except the health benefits of religion.
JONATHAN HAIDT is Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia, where he does research on morality and emotion and how they vary across cultures. He is the author of The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom. Jonathan Haidt's Edge Bio Page
Tuesday, October 2, 2007
My personal bias is towards an experiential knowledge of God rather than a conceptual proof
Theology is comparable to the study of leprechauns. That is according to the ballsy Richard Dawkins. For Dawkins, Theology has no place in a University...
My quick reaction to it is that, I think Dawkins has an excellent point. I'm all for comparative religious studies and I think Theology as a subject would fit nicely under the bigger umbrella of Philosophy. Of course, Christian Universities could keep the subject since Theology is "peculiar to the Christian religion. "Personally, I see no value in Theology, at this point in time. In its entire history, I don't know of any convincing proof that came of out that domain of study. Maybe because I don't have enough faith to see the proof. My personal bias is towards an experiential knowledge of God rather than a conceptual proof. I'd rather see Contemplative Science in universities, wherein all contemplative and spiritual practices of all religions are studied, practiced, evaluated, and continuously improved. But what do I know? I'm only a person who grew up as an indoctrinated Catholic whose faith had already evolved out of the mythic-membership stage. A friend of mine once said, "I'm skeptical of my own skepticism." So I'd like to hear from readers out there. What's your take on this issue? Should Theology be a subject in a University? Why? Why not? If you live in a secular country (e.g. somewhere in Europe), what is the state of Theology in your country and how is it treated in the academia?
P.S. Speaking of Contemplative Science, here's B. Alan Wallace's presentation at Google.
Sri Aurobindo's Integralism also places quite a high value on overall development, and work
Irene Lancaster, a leading Jewish commentator who recently made aliyah from Manchester to Israel, said: “This ignores both Israel and India. This is a bit surprising, because the Protestant work ethic is supposed to have derived from the Protestant attitude to the so-called ’Old Testament’, taken literally and strictly adhered to. India is a predominantly Hindu country, with a huge and very important population.”
Ramesh Kallidai of the Hindu Forum of Britain said: “I believe that the Protestant religion must have had some positive impact through its emphasis on the work culture and the position of women in employment. But it is a bit too simplistic to think that these countries have a higher employment rate mainly because of the Protestant religion. In particular, to say that Catholicism, Islam, Buddhism and other religions do not emphasise a culture of work shows a degree of ignorance about other world religions. In the Hindu tradition for instance, we say that work is worship.
"We must not forget that many countries like India started off with very high levels of economic development, but after years of colonial rule by foreign countries, their economic might was stripped. Interestingly, many of the colonial powers in the world also seem to be protestant. But it would be wrong to conclude from this fact that Protestants believe in occupying other countries.” Ruth Gledhill Religion Correspondent of The Times From Times Online October 1, 2007
Ramesh Kallidai of the Hindu Forum of Britain said: “I believe that the Protestant religion must have had some positive impact through its emphasis on the work culture and the position of women in employment. But it is a bit too simplistic to think that these countries have a higher employment rate mainly because of the Protestant religion. In particular, to say that Catholicism, Islam, Buddhism and other religions do not emphasise a culture of work shows a degree of ignorance about other world religions. In the Hindu tradition for instance, we say that work is worship.
"We must not forget that many countries like India started off with very high levels of economic development, but after years of colonial rule by foreign countries, their economic might was stripped. Interestingly, many of the colonial powers in the world also seem to be protestant. But it would be wrong to conclude from this fact that Protestants believe in occupying other countries.” Ruth Gledhill Religion Correspondent of The Times From Times Online October 1, 2007
Integralism - Protestant Work Ethic In Effect!
by ebuddha on Mon 01 Oct 2007 04:31 PM PDT Permanent Link Cosmos
Saw this post on how countries with large amounts of Protestantism, work harder, because of that dreaded "work ethic"...
by ebuddha on Mon 01 Oct 2007 04:31 PM PDT Permanent Link Cosmos
Saw this post on how countries with large amounts of Protestantism, work harder, because of that dreaded "work ethic"...
Now, however, Aurobindo's Integralism also places quite a high value on overall development, and work. I remember being in a graduate and a member of the class, who had spent time at Auroville, spoke about how discouraged she was by "how hard" it could be, being devoted to the practices of Aurobindo.
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