Truth & Identity: Alan Badiou

Its always a bit annoying when you discover someone else has already developed the line of thought you’ve been working on for a while – especially when they do it better.  Which, realistically, and because I don’t think of myself as anything special, I come to expect most days.  My wife bought home ‘St. Paul Among the Philosophers‘ edited by John Caputo and Linda Martin Alcoff for me to read last night.  It’s a book based off a conference held a couple years ago that discussed how philosophers are using Paul, with a focus on how Paul advocates the unversality of truth.  So I cracked it open and began reading Alan Badiou, someone I’ve been wanting to read for a while, and immediately found what he was saying is something I’ve been thinking over and trying to develop for a few months.

“Any process of truth is at variance with the figure of the same.  It interrupts the repetition and cannot then be sustained by homogeny.  No truth can be sustained by the expansion of homogeny, but neither can it be by the construction of identities, for singularity is universalizable.  But universalizable singularity is necessary at variance both with the singularity constructed from identity and with homogeny.  The world is the arena for the play of both axiomatic homogeny (market, capital) and mythological identity.  We might say that the world is, in part, an interplay of the symbolic and the imaginary in response to the collapse of the real.  And this eliminates the event, and so fidelity to the event, which is the subjective essence of the truth.  The world is then hostile to the process of truth insofar as it resists the universal of identity through homogeny or the adhesion to constructed identities.  The symptom of this hostility is an effect of the overlapping of names: where the name of a truth procedure would have its place, another name appears which expels it in the direction of homogeny.  The name “culture” thus obliterates the name of “art,” for the cultural can be inscribed within the market.  The name “technique” obliterates the name “science,” as Heidegger said.  The word “management” obliterates the word “politics.”  The word “sexuality” obliterates “love.”  This system of culture, technique, management, sexuality is the superposition of the registers of homogeny (pgs 27-28).”

How he talks about superposition, homogeny and singularity made me read it a couple more times, I think I’m gonna have to read some more of Badiou’s work.  In the rest of his chapter he takes this line of thought and interacts with Paul.  This is yet another reason why I’m keen on looking further into post-structuralism.

//Jimmy

Introducing: Principles of Emergence Theory

I’m currently reading through authors who discuss the nature of a theological anthropology which starts with pneumatology.   In ‘The Work of the Spirit: Pneumatology and Pentecostalism‘ (edited by Michael Welker) Amos Yong authored a chapter in which he discusses the insights gained from Emergence Theory put forward by Philip Clayton and applies them to the creation narrative.  Since I haven’t posted anything for a while – dispite a list of possible topics that is lengthening – I thought I would put up these principles here.  This is something I would have liked to have come across earlier in my studies, so I’m thinking someone else may do as well.

1. Creation, in all its complexities, is made up of one kind of stuff.  This is opposed to either Cartesian or substance Dualism and outright materialism.  Unity in diversity essentially.
2. It accounts for hierarchical complexities and ontological dualisms (for example; a person is made up of the physical, biological, psychological, spiritual etc).
3. ‘Recognition of the temporal dimension of emergentist monism’ which as I read this means that it accounts  for the unpredictability of the evolving world in the temporal which cannot be ontologically or epistemologically reduced.  Each new evolution is dependant on the configuration of the previous.
4. It recognizes that within the varying levels of complexity there are observable systems occuring that cannot be derived from fundamental  physical principles – such as conductivity or the prediction of the pattern that will occur on a snowflake from an observation and study of their chemical structures.
5. Emergence theory coherently links all of what occurs in point 4 together (the significance of this being that the linking is inter-disciplinary).
6. ‘Downward causation is exercised by higher levels on lower levels.”  For example, the mind is dependant, but not reducible to, the lower functionings of the body as it exercises causal agency on such lower functions which may be noted feed back and affect the mind.
7. Emergence theory combines points 2 and 3 in such a way that new ontological levels of reality present themselves which whilst are aggregates of the lower levels, are not reducible to them.
8. And the final point is that emergence theory put forward by Clayton proposes that the mind is emergent as it is dependent on all the lower levels of human existence, but is not reducible to them. (Taken from pgs 184 – 188)

This is my reading of what Amos Yong puts forward of Clayton’s emergence theory.  I am not familiar with emergence theory but I do find it a very interesting theory that has alot of traction.  The beauty of it being it’s inter-disciplinary nature.  I hope this benefits someone somewhere in their thinking.

//Jimmy

Pinnock ducks left and jabs Calvinism in the right…

Tonight I was reading through Sherman’s discourse on Pinnick’s epistemological development and shifting over his career.  It is fair enough to say Pinnock has surprised me…again.  I was quite unaware that at the start of his career he held a combative, calvinistic stance proclaiming the inerrancy of scripture.  Such a position reminds me of a couple of people I have come across during my under-graduate studies (as I imagine most people will testify to).  So I found this Pinnock quote interesting, he made it in ‘Grace of God and the Will of Man’ (1989).

“One thing I am asking people to give up is the myth that evangelicals often hold – that there is such a thing as an orthodox systematic theology, equated with what Calvin, for example, taught and which is said to be in full agreement with the Bible.  As if theology itself were an immutable system of concepts not relative at all to the historical context in which they are conceived and frame!  Granted, the idea holds great appeal to us, not because it is our experience, but because it delivers such a delicious sense of security and gives us such a great platform from which to assail those dreadful liberals who are such historicists….I guess it is time for evangelicals to grow up and recognize that evangelical theology is not an uncontested body of timeless truth.  There are various accounts of it.  Augustine got some things right, but not everything.  How many evangelicals follow him on the matter of the infallible church or the miraculous sacraments?  Like it or not, we are embarked on a pilgrimage in theology and cannot determine exactly where will it [sic] lead and how it will end.”  (Pinnock, ‘Grace of God’, 1989,  pg 28)

//Jimmy

Speaking for $15 – 30,000 a message!

This was something I came across today that seemed a little crazy.  Bristol Palin getting paid between $15-30,000 per speech.  It makes me wonder why and what sort of people are holding onto that sort of money for the purposes of paying people to speak?  The article I linked above I don’t hold to be the most credible source.   It does seem easy to bag Bristol, particularly with the comments in the article bout the negative effects having to work 5 days a week and being tired is having on her life – which sound a lot better than other situations I know of let alone something like The Wire.  It does speak about something unjust, or not right, but I am left to wonder, in my current situation – which is a lowly Masters student, with a wife, a baby, very minimal income, and questionable career prospects (cause who hires theologians?) – would I take up such a gig if I was offered it?  I would be lying if I said it wouldn’t be appealing.

The Introverted Spirit…

In reading through Pinnock’s ‘Flame of Love’ this afternoon I came across this passage:

“It may be that we should seek the face of the Spirit in the face of the community, God’s dwelling and the place where love is being perfected (1 Jn 4:12).  As the Son reveals the Father’s face and the Spirit reveals the Son’s face, perhaps the place where Spirit’s is seen is the faces of the believers (Rev 22:4).  As they grow in grace and holiness, it will become increasingly possible to recognize the Spirit in their faces.  Perhaps the church is the face of the Spirit, who shines from the faces of all the saints.” (Pg 41, Flame of Love)

Which caused me to reflect on the nature of the Spirit.  It is hard to put a face on the Spirit because there isn’t one to be discovered in scripture except for the likes of metaphors, analogies, and functions.  Given the Spirit is often experience it becomes a little frustrating; it seems a natural part of life to have a representational image cognitively present whenever we interact with people and objects.  So I got to wondering.  It seems that every time we reach out to grasp the Spirit in the event of its experience, all we grasp is its withdrawal, its re-movement.  It’s like it lives in the intervals of change, between the threads that make up the fabric of life, a place which cannot be represented by a face.  Perhaps we experience the Spirit as the experience of the impossible when he brings and bridges the interval between the eschatalogical and the present.  A facilitation of our ‘becoming’ as humans, and the realizing of the now/but not yet Kingdom of God.  We experience this facilitation, and when we try to grasp what is happening within this experience, all we experience is the withdrawal, a trace of the Spirit.

Revitalizing Theological Epistemology by Steven B. Sherman

My wife works in the College’s library and every now and then comes back with a book for me to look at. Sometimes it feels sorta like a try-before-you-buy thing. Last night she bought back ‘Revitalizing Theological Epistemology: Holistic Evangelical Approaches to the Knowledge of God’ by Steven B. Sherman. It looked alright, but I wasn’t sure if I’d read it all thinking I’d at least give the preface and intro a read before taking it back. Then on pg xiv of the preface I read this (which also so happens to be on the back of the book):

“A Rather Acrimonious divorce is underway between evangelical theology and foundationalism – especially among younger evangelical proteges less directly connected with the modernist-fundamentalist controversy than their professors. These primarily younger evangelical thinker are almost certainly reading and engaging more of Derrida than Descartes; more interested in doing theology and philosophy for the church than for the academy; more in tune with Wesley’s than Warfield’s theology; more interested in applying the Bible than defending it; more concerned with the hermeneutics of Gadamer and Ricoeur than (Arno) Gabelein and (A.T.) Robertson; more occupied with the philosophical method of Heidegger than Hegel; more moved by the epistemology of Kierkegaard and Barth then by Kant and Bultmann; and finally, more comfortable with postmodern than modern culture.”

A statement that I found affinity with.  Not with all of it though, after reading this I felt I should be reading more of Wesley, not to mention I don’t consider myself an evangelical protege.  So I’m thinking I might give it a bit longer read and see what results out of this book.

//Jimmy

Descartes: ‘Why are you studying theology?” Me: Huh?

If someone were to ask me why I’m studying theology (a question that I should expect to come up more often than it does) I’m not sure what answer I could give.  In Descartes case, he made the observation in his Discourse on Method:

“I honoured our Theology and aspired as much as anyone to reach to heaven, but having learned to regard it as a most highly assured fact that the road is not less open to the most ignorant than to the most learned, and that the revealed truths which conduct thither are quite above our intelligence, I should not have dared to submit them to the feebleness of my reasonings; and I thought that, in order to undertake to examine them and succeed in so doing, it was necessary to have some extraordinary assistance from above and to be more than a mere man.”

To which I reply that there is some truth in what he says.  Presently I do not see how someone having studied theology for much of their life is anymore likely to enter heaven than say, a regular church going electrician.  Which seems to lead some people to ‘so whats the point of doing theology then? Isn’t it self-evident?’  Evidently it is and isn’t.  We do not need to transcend our intelligence (at least completely) in order to try and grasp God because we have the revelation of Christ.  He is, to some extend, that ‘extraordinary assistance from above’ Descartes reflects upon.  So why study theology? Because I believe it is conducive to living a full life.  I doubt I will ever grasp the internal nature of the Trinity, yet through the historical locatedness of the Trinity we can know somewhat how we are to live life in all its facets as humans.

//Jimmy

Descartes and Gadamer: The Bookends

I received Descartes ‘Discourse on Method’ in the mail today and have started reading it.  As I move into Part III of this small book I am constantly grasped by how much reading this alongside Gadamer is like holding two bookends of an era in history.  One talks about freeing himself of all prejudices so that he may know for certain what may be true amongst all the falsehood of the world, and to that end he focuses on developing a method.  The other talks about how we can never be free of prejudice, that by suggesting that we should be free from prejudice is prejudice itself.  Ontop of this, he argues there is no method that can lead to certainty.  I have to say, both scholars are respectable and make for very interesting reading.  Reading Descartes has changed my opinion of him quite significantly, I find the image I had of him come through other writings and culture to be quite different.  There is something quite genuine in the way he inquired into the world.  I guess this happens with most great thinkers though, it reminds me of how people turn Calvin into Calvinism and then are surprised when Calvinism says one thing and Calvin says another.  Just some thoughts.

//Jimmy

How Gadamer Informed My Marriage

Been reading through some of “Truth and Method” by Gadamer and had one of those moments of enlightenment.  One of those moments that aren’t really profound, but nevertheless reveal something that was always there, yet was forgotten.  It was under his section on ‘Elements of a Theory of Hermeneutic Experience’ that he said:

“if a person fails to hear what the other person is really saying, he will not be able to fit what he has misunderstood into the range of his own various expectations of meaning.  Thus there is a criterion here also.  The hermeneutical task becomes of itself a questioning of things and is always in part so defined(pg 271, italics Gadamers).”

Much to my wife’s [mis]fortune I have a tendency to cognitively break apart what another person is saying and test it for consistency.  Consistency within the immediate conversation, and across all the experience I can prefigure from memory at that time.  So when it comes to my wife in which I have much material to sift through it is not uncommon to come across an anomaly that presents itself as something I misunderstand and am unable to fit within what/how I know Briar – hence the quote above.  Further down the page Gadamer writes:

“Rather, a person trying to understand a text [text I interpret here to also mean another person]  is prepared for it to tell him something.  That is why a hermeneutically trained consciousness must be, from the start, sensitive to the text’s alterity.  But this kind of sensitivity involves neither “neutrality” with respect to content nor the extinction of one’s self, but the foregrounding and appropriation of one’s own fore-meanings and prejudices (pg271).”

So instead of allowing my prejudices and fore-meanings to apprehend the misunderstanding (which seems to happen so often and so easily in arguments),  my wife and I try to exercise a sort of protocol, or structure, in which misunderstandings are worked out by talking about them without allowing them to escalate or minimizing the situation.  I guess I can see how his approach to hermeneutics and text is beneficial for how it is we approach others as Other.

/Jimmy

An Experience of the Impossible

In thinking about hermeneutics I’ve been considering Caputo’s section in his book “The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event” on the ‘poetics of the impossible’.  I like it because in the construction of theology he offers an alternative approach that complements the use of logic.  Of course it plays right into his weakness of God – which is something I’m a little unsure about at this point – but it does allow for that which negative theology, or dialectical theology, at least from what I’ve observed, has been unable to fully apprehend.  He uses it to describe the nature of the Kingdom of God which is characterized by Caputo as a holy anarchic experience of impossibilities, likened to Lewis Carrol’s mad hatter tea party.  Where logic “addresses real or possible occurrences in the world…[wherein] things are really possible or necessary or not, and that is that (103-104).”  The poetics “addresses the event of being addressed, not by what actually is but by what is promising(103).”  And in a furthur description of what a poetics looks like he says:

“A poetics gives voice to the properly symbolic discourse of the kingdom, while logic enunciates the literal discourse of the world.  As a symbolic discourse, then, a poetics is a certain constellation of idioms, strategies, stories, arguments, tropes, paradigms, and metaphors – a style and a tone, as well as a grammar and a vocabulary, all of which collectively, like a great army on the move, is aimed at gaining some ground and making a point.  We might say that a poetics is a discourse with a heart…(104).”

Its value for me lies in its ability to account for a God who is not necessarily bound by logic, and other cognitive faculties of the mind.  It enables a way of perceiving the interventions of God in the world and history without reducing such an event to propositions and summary statements.  However I would not suggest we stop using our cognitive faculties, but use such a poetics as a complementary tool.  How that might look at this point is left to be worked out for me.  But in closing, for an example, such an event for the Christian is no small event, but Jesus, who breached the grounds of possibility, who in our thinking on the nature of Christ still breaches those grounds, and in his breaching he allows space for other experiences of the impossible – such as the adulteress woman in John 8, and the calling of Levi/Matthew.