Devil's Lake, WI

(PHOTO: After Nature)

anatheism and strange strangers

Review of Richard Kearney's book, Anatheism (Columbia University Press, 2010).  Excerpts copied below.

Anatheism is a fresh attempt to reconceive the possibility of the sacred for the 21st century, seeking a way, as the subtitle suggests, of “returning to God after God.”

So what is anatheism? Kearney describes it variously as a movement, a paradigm, an invitation, a wager, a drama; a position between, before, and beyond the division of theism and atheism; “another word for another way of seeking and sounding the things we consider sacred but can never fully fathom or prove” (p.3).

Yet it bids adieu to the God of metaphysics and traditional religion whose surname has long been “Almighty” taking seriously the critical and iconoclastic force of atheism.

Thus, anatheism works back from the experience of God-loss toward a genuine renewal of the sacred to recover forward a second, more mature faith. While insisting that anatheism is “nothing particularly new” (p.7), it seems to be of particular moment in this age where the gods have withdrawn. “Ana” – seeking ‘after’ (toward) God ‘after’ (subsequent to) the death of God.

Anatheism–seeking a rebirth of faith after the loss of faith.

The thematic core of Anatheism: Returning to God after God is the encounter with the Stranger and the event of hospitality/hostility. In this basket Kearney’s places all his eggs. While official theologies and the popular religious imagination typically emphasize stories of creation, salvation, miracles, power, or final judgment as inaugural solicitations of faith, Kearney takes up the neglected figure of the Stranger.

The second half of the book (Interlude and Postlude) details the third moment of Anatheism: sacramental transformations in the everyday, mostly in secular scenes,

The sacred for Kearney is “in the world but not of the world” (p.152). Hence the preference for the figure of the Stranger over a disembodied, otherworldly traditional Omni-God, and over the rather abstract and well worn master concept of postmodernism –‘the Other’.

sensation and aesthetics

Hartshorne's neoclassical approach to Plato on the soul and Absolute Beauty

From Chapter 3 "Plato's Near Miss: The Soul as Self-Moved," in Hartshorne's Insights and Oversights book.

How did Plato conceive soul or psychical process?  After exploring the logically possible sorts of motion or change, he finds one of them unique to soul, that of self-change, together with the power to change others.  Souls initiate change as well as transmit it to others.  In contrast bodes merely receive and transmit change.  Souls create processes, other entities merely constitute them…

What does Plato mean by self-moved or self changed?...Whatever self-motion may be for Plato, it cannot be the only power of soul or psychical process if it is to provide the explanation of change generally.  We need to ask, What gives psychical or self-changing process the additional power to change others?...If soul can explain reality, it must a threefold power: to initiate change, receive it from, and transmit it to, others.  Bodies must have at least the second and third of these powers…

How close or not close Plato came to solving the problem dualism is shown by the following, from The Laws X (897, 897):

The self-moved is…that which has the name soul.

The self moved…is the source of change and motion in all things.

[The movements of soul are] will, deliberation, joy, sorrow, confidence, fear, hatred, love, and other primary movements which again receive the secondary movements of corporeal substances and guide all things.

Here matter is contrasted with mind in the negative, as that which is without self-movement, but in the positive as that which is corporeal….

Leibniz argued that whatever is positive in spatiality is attributable to mind.  This positive meaning is coexistence.  And few philosophers have denied that minds coexist.  Thus matter is “not-mind” only by negation.  And negation always implies a positive grounding.

            It is remarkable that Plato seems almost to think that mind “receives” motions only from bodies, not from others minds.  But clearly souls are influenced constantly by other souls, at the very least by the supreme or divine soul…

Plato’s attempt in the Phaedo to derive personal immortality from the primacy of soul as self-changing and the key to all change is, so far as I can see, a confusion between soul as such and this or that individual soul.  Soul as such is immortal in the sense in which change is unchangeably there.  Reality cannot change but from a changing to an unchanging reality; hence, not from a besouled to merely unbesouled reality…

That souls are moved from without is implied by the Platonic doctrine of Eros, as expounded by Diotima in the Symposium: Love (in this sense) implies deficiency, which one seeks to overcome by admiration and longing directed to the Absolute Beauty, the good that is without deficiency.  And what is this beauty?...

Is absolute beauty the concrete union of all possible values or “perfections,” all fully actualized?  This idea conflicts with the truth (perhaps first clearly stated by Leibniz, who, however failed to draw the implied theological conclusion from it) that there are “incompossibles.”  Not all possible values could be coactualized.  Nor will it do to argue, as Leibniz did, that in the divine perfection there are only positive values and that these cannot conflict….

On the contrary, positive values can and do conflict, as Kant pointed out….There are contraries as well as contradictories!  Red-here-now conflicts with green-here-now, and the one is as positive as the other….The expression Absolute Beauty has never been given a lucid explication, unless in the formula of Leibniz, maximal unity in maximal variety, or as he put it in his rationalistic way, “maximal consequences from minimal premises.”  But what does “maximal” here connote?  It cannot be all possible variety, for that could not be actualized?  What short of that?  Leibniz could not tell us…Aesthetic value is logically incapable of an unsurpassable maximum.  There  can be a factual maximum, namely all actual variety ideally integrated.  But any actual variety is logically capable of being surpassed…

Perhaps another reason why Plato almost omits capacity to be moved by another from soul’s nature is that he thinks it would imply mortality; moveable by another, then destructible by another (Phaedrus 246).  However, capacity to be moved by another implies mortality only with certain qualifications.  An individual that can be influenced by its environment must, to maintain its integrity, “adapt” to that environment.  It must be able to find a response to stimuli compatible both with the forces and with its own already formed character.  In this way morality is implied: The environment may present forces to which the individual cannot adapt at all, in which case it dies.  But suppose an individual so perfectly adaptable, that failure of adaptation is excluded.  In other words, suppose infallible powers of adaptation to (or control of) the environment, the union between the two powers constituting an infallible capacity to survive environmental change.  Just this is how I read the account of the “world soul” in the Timaeus….

"L'inexistence divine" meillassoux mediafire download

Published excerpts, no commentary, HERE.

new book: Deleuze and Theology

Deleuze and Theology, by Christopher Ben Simpson (T & T Clark, forthcoming September 2012) [Pre-order US]

What can a theologian do with Deleuze? While using philosophy as a resource for theology is nothing new, Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) presents a kind of limit-case for such a theological appropriation of philosophy: a thoroughly “modern” philosophy that would seem to be fundamentally hostile to Christian theology–a philosophy of atheistic immanence with an essentially chaotic vision of the world. Nonetheless, Deleuze’s philosophy can generate many potential intersections with theology opening onto a field of configurations: a fractious middle between radical Deleuzian theologies that would think through theology and reinterpret it from the perspective of some version of Deleuzian philosophy and other theologies that would seek to learn from and respond to Deleuze from the perspective of confessional theology–to take from the encounter with Deleuze an opportunity to clarify and reform an orthodox Christian self-understanding.

the dead shall be raised incorrputible: Locke's theory of the soul (SEP entry and NDPR review)

The neo-Lockean theory sketched so far—somewhat simpler than Parfit’s official view—is admirably suited, as Locke hoped, to securing survival on the other side. To bring you back from death, God does not need to give you an immaterial soul or go to the bother of collecting the atoms that composed your body when you drew your last breath...

Granted neo-Lockeanism, all God has to do is ensure that your psychological life continues on in a non-branching way. That could be accomplished by a divine form of teleportation, perhaps in the process replacing your clapped-out body with a new and improved model. “The dead shall be raised incorruptible,” as the Apostle Paul says.  

The above is from the fascinating article written by Alex Byrne, "Cheating Death" (link HERE), which, although largely denying the afterlife, has prompted me to look up how John Locke saw the soul given his view that immateriality is not needed for "the great ends of religion," and so materialism may be true, yet true as well may be something like the soul, the resurrection of the dead, and the afterlife too - thus the view that materialism does not require (though it is not inconsistent with) the immateriality of the soul.   (As a note, I have also been looking at Democritus' notion of a material soul and how that is different from the Lockean theory.)

I also found an NDPR book review, John Locke and Personal Identity: Immortality and Bodily Resurrection in 17th-Century Philosophy and a terse but very good SEP entry on The Immateriality of the Soul that explains Locke's view.

This all prompted, of course, by my ongoing interest in matter and life; materialism and idealism, panpsychism, self-powering matter, the notion of what a soul might be.

Varieties of Continental Thought and Religion conference

Varieties of Continental Thought and Religion

June 15-16, 2012

Ryerson University

Toronto, Canada 

Confirmed Speakers: John Caputo (Syracuse U.), Bettina Bergo (U. de Montreal), more to be announced in the near future.

We invite submissions from scholars and graduate students based in Canada and abroad on the topic of Continental Thought and Religion. The general theme of the conference is meant to reflect the variety of articulations of religion that have emerged in contemporary European thought. While the focus of the conference is continental thought, we nonetheless conceive the latter in an interdisciplinary manner (including literary theory, social and political thought, psychoanalysis, and religious studies). We also encourage submissions from people interested in exploring possible connections with analytic philosophy.

In addition to our keynote speaker, John Caputo, we will have four commissioned workshops comprised of two papers and a response, and a series of themed panels. We invite submissions of three-page proposals for essays for the following themed panels with included possible topics:
Phenomenology of Religion

• The thought of Chrétien, Henry, Lacoste, Levinas, Marion, and Ricoeur
• Topics: the gift; the work of art; appearance and transcendence; call and response

Religion and Politics

• The thought of Agamben, Asad, Connolly, Derrida, de Vries, Girard, Habermas, Schmitt, and Taylor
• Topics: political theology; the post-secular; sovereignty; religion and violence; pluralism

Religion and Speculative Realism

• The thought of Brassier, Harman, Laruelle, and Meillassoux
• Topics: materialism; correlationism; nihilism; the things themselves; divine inexistence; “future Christ”

Beyond Theism and Atheism

• The thought of Caputo, Kearney, Kristeva, Milbank, Vattimo
• Topics: kenosis; anatheism; weak theology; a/theology; radical orthodoxy

Continental Thought, Religion, and Aesthetics

• The artwork of Bresson, Caravaggio, Celan, Chagall, Dostoyevsky, Dumont, Artemisia Gentileschi, Kahlo, Kapoor, Kiarostami, Kiefer, Malick, Newman, O’Keefe, and Stevens
• The thought of Cavell, Cixous, Critchley, Irigaray, Marion, Nancy, and Rancière
• Topics: transcendence in art; image and icon; creativity and creation; representation and idolatry

Immanentism and Religion

• Agamben, Badiou, Bergson, Deleuze, James, Foucault, Keller, and Žižek
• Topics: self-organization; the event; plurality; bio-power; polydoxy

History of Continental Thought and Religion

• Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Freud, Benjamin, Heidegger
• Topics: death of God; reason and faith; scripture and philosophy; religion and fantasy; onto-theology

Please send only one three-page (double-spaced) proposal on one of the above themes and any questions to varieties2012@gmail.comby December 31, 2011. We intend to notify authors about our decisions by February 28, 2012. Other conference details (registration fee, preliminary program, etc.) will be announced in new year.

The VCTR Conference is organized by John Caruana (Philosophy, Ryerson University) and Mark Cauchi (Humanities, York University).

Nietzsche on Soul in Nature

This keynote speech by Graham Parkes examines if, according to Nietzsche, experience of nature is inevitably conditioned by some archetypal phantasm or cultural construction process or if unmediated apprehension of nature is possible.   Audio file link HERE.

Plato's Near Miss: Soul as Self-Moved

The title of this blog post references the title of the third chapter in Hartshorne's Insights and Oversights book.  After reading that chapter I must recommend it in particular (if not the book in general), for it illuminates Plato according to a process, speculative, and systematic metaphysic.

After Nature readers may also want to check out: "Hartshorne, Plato, and the Concept of God" (D. Dombrowski) and "Philosophy after Hartshorne" (Viney) wherein we learn of the "Peirce, Whitehead, Hartshorne" axis - established by those philosophers for whom the legacies of Plato and Aristotle were so crucially important.

photo at the park