Heidegger and Kearney

Steiner interprets Heidegger as regarding poets as being closest to the meaning of being. But only some poets. ‘The poet names what is holy.’ An analogy with religion suggests itself: only a few individuals have the heightened feel of and for the divine and the ability to express it. The rest of us follow along as best we can, but can’t be expected to be such first order witnesses, just as we cannot all be poets. Heidegger’s question of ontotheology raises many questions but one of them is, since God is what I like to call a ‘weird entity’ in that s/he does not behave predictably, how is it that we can know reliably what God is like? Must God inevitably appear as capricious? The record of divine acts in history is meant to guard against this by showing God as loving and helping, but there are multiple times when God does not. Can this be explained by Richard Kearney’s idea of the God of the possible who needs us just as we need God. Kearney cites Ettie Hillesum who told God we would help him, take responsibility for God where he couldn’t take responsibility for himself. Perhaps God is only able to act when we make what the Celtic tradition called ‘thin places’, where humans are so attuned to the divine as to allow it to unconceal itself in us (to put it in Heideggerese). This is not to say God is limited to what humanity can do but that God, on the whole, does not act without our consent and help. This in turn may help explain why it is more difficult to establish divine justice as the scale on which we act increases: too many constraints come into play, against which we cannot assert our will. Only over a very long time may we climb out of such a situation.

AV and public debate

The level of public debate about AV has been pretty poor. Most of the coverage on the news has been about the effect on the coalition, the unlikely juxtapositions of political enemies and the name calling shenanigans. There hasn’t been too much by way of substantive debate, though of course there has been a little. Even the No campaign’s website doesn’t have particularly detailed, long or convincing arguments. Each side has used the endorsement of celebrities as a source of authority (Enlightenment advocates despair).

Good posts on it here and here.

Aphorisms 2

I watched Mel Gibson’s The Passion recently but made the mistake of eating a kebab at the same time. It did make me think though: the eucharist is all high GI foods. Clearly God disagrees with low-GI diets. That’s why there’s so much fasting required by the church.

Also: you know you’ve been in academia too long when you can remember someone’s thesis topic and supervisor but not their name.

Augustine/Pelagius

The ever wonderful In our time had an enjoyable programme on Augustine and Pelagius with John Milbank, Caroline Humfress and Martin Palmer. This is the further reading list (I bet Melvyn Bragg read all of it). Anything major missing? I see Ayres’ new book is there.

Serge Lancel, ‘St Augustine’ (2002)

Robert Dodaro and George Lawless (ed.), ‘Augustine and his Critics’ (1999)

Lewis Ayres, ‘Augustine and the Trinity’ (2010)

John Burnaby, ‘Amor Dei’ (2007)

James Wetzel, ‘Augustine and the Limits of Virtue’ (1992)

M. Lamberigts, ‘Pelagius and Pelagians,’ in “Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Studies”, ed. Susan Ashbrook Harvey and David G. Hunter (2008), 258-279

B. R. Rees, ‘Pelagius: Life and Letters’ (1991)

D. Hunter, ‘Marriage, Celibacy, and Heresy in Ancient Christianity: The Jovinianist Controversy’ (Oxford Early Christian Studies, 2007)

G. Bonner, ‘Freedom and Necessity: St Augustine’s Teaching on Divine Power & Human Freedom’ (2007)

R. A. Markus, ‘Pelagianism: Britain and the Continent’ and ‘The legacy of Pelagius: orthodoxy, heresy and conciliation’ in “Sacred and Secular: Studies on Augustine and Latin Christianity”. Variorum Collected Studies Series 465 (1994), 191-204 and 214-234

Reviewing teaching

I found teaching difficult this term, as though I had to try to drag the enthusiasm out of the class. I had a small class, which helps with discussions, but it was an evening class, which doesn’t help, and on a Wednesday, which apparently was the end of two days of solid lectures for many of my students. That is, they were tired. Whether there was more to it than that I’m not sure (though I have my suspicions I won’t go into here). In the end, five of the essays were in the B range or above, which is pretty good. But I had three fails. Not good. One of these failed essayers asked for my help with a draft and then ignored it. I think next time I’ll require students to hand in an outline with a thesis statement and an argument, objection and reply, followed by another argument/obj/reply (a bit like Aquinas!).

I tried testing my students with four tests worth 5% of the grade each, instead of just an essay as in previous years. The idea was to assess for (not of) teaching. As I told my students, the point was to help them remember the theories as we went along (I’ve noticed in the past students just forget stuff we did a few weeks before (I probably did that as an undergraduate…)) I’m not sure it worked. Almost everyone got the same grade in their essay as when their essay and test scores were added together, which makes me think the tests didn’t really help the weaker students and were superfluous for the more able students. Given that it involves more work for me (marking and calculating), I was tempted to ditch this, but I think I’ll try it again next time (assuming there is one) because I’m going to change the syllabus.

The course is an ethics class in a theology degree (of varying kinds). I think as it stands the class tries to introduce too many ideas, though I like the history of ideas sweep of it. My plan is to change the structure and reduce the number of topics. I’ll do each theory lecture followed by a class that deals with a practical issue from the point of view of that theory. So they’ll start by reading Aristotle on virtue ethics, and then read Hirsthouse on virtue and abortion. I’ll repeat that structure throughout. This will help students understand the theory better by seeing it used; show an updated version of the theory as opposed to the original historical version of the theory; deal with practical issues alternate lectures and help keep up momentum and debate; break up the theory (which many struggle with); and provide examples of arguments and essay structure that the class can see and work through. The down side is that I lose the flow of the history of ideas and some of the political content, but I think concentrating how to understand and make arguments is more important.

So, it’s back to the drawing board once again, but I’m excited to see if I can make it a better course. I also want to see if I can draw out the theory they need to know from practical examples, so I may even do the practical issue first and then go onto the theory, but I find it tricky to get across the architecture of a theory when aspects of it come up randomly through debate. I guess we’ll see.

Taylor on Hegel and Weber on politics

Charles Taylor, Hegel and Modern Society is a condensation of the earlier and larger Hegel. The first chapter outlines Hegel’s philosophy and is very admirably done in such a brief space. Taylor takes the Absolute and Geist to be references God (rather than, say, culture or collective consciousness or general will). On Taylor’s account Hegel must prove that everything can only be understood with reference to Geist and vice versa, which is the aim of the Logic by starting with ‘being’ as the most empty category and showing it is dialectically related to nothingness and so becoming. This then grounds the relation between identity and opposition in the speculative form of reasoning, where A is A and A is not A, and we proper understanding comes only from the movement between these positions, not from frozen predicative propositions. Taylor is skeptical of Hegel’s proof here but thinks that Hegel still frames questions much more productively than many others, especially as regards to freedom. His importance springs partly from his attempt to combine the Enlightenment emphasis on reason, with the Kantian call for radical freedom, and the Romantic protest against the Enlightenment for an integral wholeness (what Taylor calls ‘expressivism’). Current society does not wish to lose the gains from the Enlightenment but still feels the force of the Romantic critique, so that Hegel continues to speak to us.

Hegel’s political philosophy is neither conservative nor liberal. Hegel wants to include Sittlichkeit, existing cultural obligations, within political philosophy and culture/institutions but by exposing it to the demands of reason. By contrast, he thinks Kantian Moralität is vacuous and this was why the Jacobin Terror was so destructive, because it could only be against any determinate political form. This Sittlichkeit involves three things (p.93): 1) what is most important in human life can only be attained in relation to a community; 2) this community must not be partial but be self-sufficient – and so it must be at the level of a state; 3) the community/state is important for us because it expresses the Idea (which means something like our most articulate form of self-consciousness so far, perhaps vaguely like Herder’s national spirit idea, except Hegel can ward off the dangers of nationalism through a dialectical openness to the collapse of a historical formation at the recognition of its limits and contradiction).

Another of Hegel’s critiques of absolute freedom is that it requires homogeneity, massive decentralization, and it cannot allow for the majority to impose its will on the minority, it cannot allow for some sort of political differentiation (which is necessary in a community as big as the state). Thus ideals of equality and participation lead to homogenization, loose people from their communities but then cannot replace them as forms of identity (except by bad nationalism, say). Modern society needs some way to generate meaningful differentiation without pitting the different groups against one another but knitting them into a larger whole (similarities with de Tocqueville and Montesquieu).

Max Weber’s ‘Politics as a vocation’ begins with the famous claim that ‘a state is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory. Politics is the attempt to share or influence power, within or between states, which ultimately rests on this right to use violence. Legitimation of claims to the right to force rest on tradition, charisma or legality. Weber contrasts politicians, whose task is to be passionate and take personal responsibility, with civil servants, whose task is to impersonally execute orders as if they agreed with them, with lawyers, whose task is to make strong technical arguments for interested parties (irrespective of the strength of their moral argument).

Towards the end of the essay Weber discusses the politician’s need to have a ‘passionate devotion’ to a cause, where passionate means ‘matter-of-factness’. That is, the politician must have ‘distance’ from events and people and a ‘sense of proportion’ to be able to act always in the interest of the cause. The politician will only be able to keep going because of this devotion to a cause and from a sense of faith (or hope) because the results of political action are ‘regularly’ different from what was intended. This leads to a fascinating discussion of the relation between ethics and politics. Weber denies that they are unrelated but equally that the same ethical considerations obtain in politics as they do in ‘erotic, business, familial, and official relations’. Since politics has the unique means of ‘power backed up by violence’ it has a unique ethics. Weber contrasts two attitudes that he calls an ‘ethic of ultimate ends’ and an ‘ethic of responsibiliity’. The former advocates actions according to its own lights but does not consider the consequences of those actions as relevant to moral guilt or innocence; the latter acts on the assumption that the actor must account for the ‘foreseeable’ consequences of her actions. For example, the responsible actor must take into account the ‘average deficiencies’ of people. (Weber identifies the ethics of ultimate ends with religion and the Sermon on the Mount but it sounds Kantian). Weber also claims that the use of bad means to bring about good ends is unavoidable and that no ethical system can decide when and to what extent which bad means justify which good ends (presumably with certainty rather than offering any guidance at all). At the end of the essay Weber suggests these two ethics are supplementary rather than mutually exclusive, which we could perhaps understand in terms of the tension between political interests and values.

Arendt’s Human Condition

Arendt thinks that political philosophy from Plato to Marx has neglected the plurality of humanity and the open-endedness of action (beginning/natality). It has tried to understand political agency on the model of making (or labour and making for Marx) instead – in which humanity is in control of a process and the end product. If we take plurality and natality seriously then we need forgiveness and promise to deal with the inability to control history. Though we cannot fully control events or history by definition, so these are only partial measures, but they are all we have (and some evils are beyond forgiveness).

It is a curious book because it does not offer a straightforward argument in favour of a thesis. Instead it offers a philosophical exposition of ancient Greek history in order to bring to light the dimension of action that has been occluded in western political philosophy. Margaret Canovan suggests (in her Introduction) that it is a phenomenology of labor, work and action, yet there are never any examples of what would count as action. Action ‘appears in the guise of a miracle’, because it bucks statistical trends (178). And although for the Greeks, normal behaviour must be judged by moral standards, taking account of aims, consequences, motives and intentions, but ‘action can be judged only by the criterion of greatness because it is in its nature to break through the commonly accepted and reach into the extraordinary, where whatever is true in common and everyday life no longer applies because everything that exists is unique and sui generis.’ All of which suggests that actions in the technical sense are outside the norm, challenge how things have been done up till now. But how often does this happen? And how useful is this as an interpretation of politics if it doesn’t happen often? If the coalition government is trying to re-structure the state at national and local levels and society too, does that count as an action? It is certainly not without precedent, and people make moral and political arguments for an against, so it wouldn’t seem to count as action, even though it is potentially a major change in Britain’s political culture. So what would count as an action? A revolution? But again, people make arguments for and against revolutions. If one tries to think of what the Greek citizens of the polis might have done – build some infrastructure, donate money for a war, pay for a festival – none of it seems unusual in the life of the polis, which is the context from which she derives her idea of action. Arendt points out that the Greeks saw performance as the highest type of human activity (whereas modernity denigrates them as unproductive) and that performance was taken as a model for political action. So she hints at seeing political action as a performative affair, but in contrast to what? Following procedures? But not all of politics consists in following procedures.

Whilst very suggestive about political philosophy as a tradition, and in the suggestion of forgiveness and promise as a response to plurality, The Human Condition would have been more perspiscacious with some examples.

the mathematics of regret

If you were an undergraduate again, but knew what you know now, what would you do differently? Or, what would be the best advice you could give undergraduates starting out on their studies? Some of it will be specific to subject areas but perhaps much of it will be general across the humanities. Much of it may seem obvious but it’s easy to forget how little undergraduates know and that study skills take time to develop. My own thinking is people should start languages as soon as possible; to read widely and to read primary texts (I’m still a little ambivalent about introductory textbooks and don’t require my ethics students to read them, preferring to assign primary texts); and to read philosophy alongside their theology. Which leads to an additional question: are there any absolute must-reads, that you really shouldn’t graduate without having read? Thoughts?

2 links

A discussion of the previous post in Finnish.

An interesting note about the American civil war.

Food Meridian

The kid chopped the vegetables as if desecrating some secret argosy belonging to the lost gods who suffer no theft and execute their jurisprudence in blood and death alone. The judge entered the room. He spat. 

You cant be here he said.

Can’t?

No.

The kid spat. Why not?

Because my philosophy gains its credibility from its locations amongst only the most sedulous murderers and most base civilizations. It cannot survive charity nor the least permanence of enduring civility.

Not my problem said the kid spitting.