Cupitt’s ‘Creation out of nothing’

The book (published in 1990) is a bracing run through of philosophy, focusing on the wake of German idealism, including Derrida and Lacan, and asking what the religious and theistic implications are of accepting this philosophy. The results are anti-realism in theism, which is the same as atheism, and of treating religion as a form of paying attention and being awake, so that Christianity (but presumably any religion buying into this) becomes rather like Buddhism.

Nihilism is the belief that no ultimate explanation of the world is possible, there are only historically produced beliefs; i.e., there is no criteria to which we have access that can finally or ultimately arbitrate between philosophies; there is no outside.

(Rorty in Irony, Contingency and Solidarity prefers the term irony, because he thinks nihilism sounds too drastic. With Rortian irony we can’t help but believe in our beliefs but we simultaneously know that others quite legitimately don’t believe them.) Cupitt thinks this make realism impossible, including realist theism (or religious realism). There’s no immediate contact with anything – reality, the divine – everything is filtered through language (and so culture and history) and so it’s impossible to prove theism. This means also the end of Platonism – there are no Forms, no eternal or metaphysical objects. But Cupitt is also wary of the postmodern tendency to valorise art as a new kind of clericalism; artists will not save us any more than priests.

This is very interesting at a time when some want to resurrect the neoplatonic scheme and others want to create a Christianity without it. A key issue in this debate is transcendence: Platonism allows talk about transcendence to happen quite naturally, whereas more modern philosophies want to explain everything on immanent terms, as does Cupitt. The result for Cupitt is atheism, but there is the feeling that he fails to account for some essential features of religion. One such feature is the idea of doing something ‘for the glory of God’ rather than in order to become a more mature human being. He turns everything into being about our ego, even though that’s what he wants to avoid, yet much religious activity is not about the self at all. This is one example of a general feeling of reduction. I read the book thinking, ‘yes, that’s right,’ and yet still feel that the move to atheism is reductive, doesn’t fully explain religious experience or thought, if only because it’s just too easy.

A couple of choice quotes.

143 ‘But the God of speech is mythical. That is to say, there is no way in which God could so speak to me that there could be no doubt, either about who is speaking to me, or about what he means to tell me.’

‘All theologies, up to Bonhoeffer at least, supposed that God could communicate himself to us human beings, and could yield himself up into the hands of men while yet remaining not less than himself. God in paradosis (=traditio) would still be God; the Word of God proceeding forth would still be at his Father’s side. But we can no longer see how this could be so. For God is expression, God revealing himself to human beings, is God going out into language. And this is death for God, as it is for all of us, for it requires God to abandon his absoluteness and selfsameness and suffer dispersal into the endlessness of interpretation.’

 

You don’t have to be middle class to be a postmodern philosopher but it helps

Mike Featherstone in Consumer culture and postmodernism, says that Habermas’ ‘dissatisfaction with Foucault and Derrida (and by association with Deleuze and Lyotard) was for endorsing a decentred boundless subjectivity, content to experience expressive intensities that were effectively derived from the postmodernist avant-garde which had sought to break down the boundaries between art and everyday life and hence gave primacy to aesthetic experiences and gestures over morality and communicative modes of truth’ (31). So some forms of postmodern philosophy actually advocate forms of subjectivity that are found in the middle classes of consumer culture. These postmodern philosophers thereby reveal their class situation. (This is somewhat ironic given many of them have Marxist positions). Admittedly most consumers may have learned to make ‘style’ the most important part of their ‘lifestyle’ but this suggests that their theories may be much less useful for understanding other subcultures in society.

Notes on Charles Taylor

Human Agency and Language. Philosophical Papers 1. Charles Taylor. CUP, 1985.

97-114 ‘The Concept of a Person’ (numbers in the text are page numbers).

97 a person has moral status, capacities, the ability to make choices and life-plans, a point of view. Taylor calls this a ‘respondent’.

 98 Taylor summarises two conceptions of the person.

View 1: a person has consciousness, which is ‘a power to frame representations of things.’

View 2: a person is an agent for whom things matter, have significance.

101 our formulations about ourselves – how we describe our situation or our emotions, say – can alter our experience. For instance, if I see that I was experiencing false guilt, I may stop ceasing to feel guilty, thus changing my emotion and experience. So our formulations are constitutive of our feelings, and yet they can also be wrong (we can recognise we had misconstrued our feeling or inaccurately described our situation). So emotions are in some ways like objects that we represent in our minds, but in other ways not, because our representations are, at least partly, constitutive of what they represent. C.f. 107 our emotions ‘incorporate in a sense a view of our situations. To experience an emotion is to be in a sense struck or moved by our situation being of a certain nature. Hence, I said, we can describe our emotions by describing our situation./But this is only so because we describe our situation for us.’

103 In order to be a moral agent we need to be self-reflexive, and therefore we need to be linguistic, to be able to formulate reflections. [note how important education is then. As MacIntyre says in After Virtue, being stupid can be a moral failing, or at least lead to them, because it can entail failures in moral reasoning. Also notice the importance of accurate description of our situation.]

II

106 the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century produced a distinction between primary and secondary properties, the latter being properties such as ‘colour and felt heat.’ But these latter existed only insofar as there were agents to experience them, which meant they were relative to us and not ‘absolute properties of things’; subjective rather than objective we might say. This tied in with a rejection of understanding the universe in what was seen as an anthropocentric way, that of ‘correspondences’ between ideas and objects, explained through something like a Platonic doctrine of ideas. The idea of eschewing anthropocentric properties enabled the amazing success of science in the last three hundred years, and this made it tempting to apply to the human sciences. Hence 107 the drive to explain human behaviour without recourse to what is significant for them.

But 107-8 we describe and explain actions in terms of our sense of significance, it is the latter that makes sense of our purposes. 108-9 what has happened in some branches of psychology and sociology is that ends have been described in absolute terms without reference to significance, in the way you might describe a machine’s behaviour. But in the are of motivations like shame, guilt, moral sense and the like: ‘Finding absolute descriptions which nevertheless capture the explanatory relevance of situation and goal is in principle impossible in this domain.’ (In Sources of the Self Taylor argues that the scientific rationality is not bad model for practical reasoning for this reason).

III

112 how does this affect moral reasoning? If we think of ‘absolutely defined ends’ then moral deliberation is strategic thinking, reason is instrumental, we have the freedom of the ‘self-defining subject.’ This desire for control stems from forms of Greek and Christian asceticism; it is 113 ‘a novel variant of this very old aspiration to spiritual freedom.’ This aspiration is ‘too fundamental a part of human life ever to be simply set aside.’ 114 The significance view, rather than avoiding emotions, seeks their true form: what is properly shameful? What should we feel guilty about? And so on. But, unlike earlier periods, there is no universally agreed context or meaning to appeal to.

Kant and the mentally handicapped

Kant wants us to treat everyone as a means to an end, not just as a means. I think it’s reasonable to infer that this means we should try to persuade people into doing what we think they should do, give them reasons we  hope will convince them, rather than simply tricking them or forcing them. This respects their autonomy rather than subjecting them to heteronomy. This is all the more pressing because Kant is insistent that imitation has no place whatsoever in ethics and in teaching ethics; in fact, it just gets in the way, it clouds the issue. Even when teaching children, we shouldn’t use examples from every day life, we should just use ‘pure’ reason.

This mean that we could only ever treat some mentally handicapped people as means, we could never fully respect them. And this is only one good reason why Kant’s ethical theory is a bit bonkers. There are some people who do not understand their own good as well as we do, and for their own good we have to cajole, entice, command or otherwise lead them into it, hopefully so that it becomes a habit for them. But we could never explain to the people in question why this is for their good (and yes, that also means we have the majority of the power in the situation. That’s not bad in itself, it’s simply the fact of the matter). And so we could never treat them as ends on Kant’s definition. But that doesn’t mean we’re not treating them as ends, that we’re simply using them somehow. It is just that there is more to people than thinking in a certain way. That is why ethical theories should include a conception of the good life and a richer picture of the human in its context. That’s why Charles Taylor is on the ball.

Sometimes the best way to do lead people to their good is to model it. Which means that  imitation has a central place in ethics! If only phenomenology had been invented in the eighteenth century.

An excellent article by Jason Read

Which can be seen on the excellent Foucault Studies site. Read argues, following Foucault, that neoliberalism differs from classical liberalism by positing an anthropology based on competition rather than on exchange. This affects our subjectivity, causing us to view all of life through market eyes. His examples are considering marriage or children as an investment, looking to get the maximum gain from the minimum input. (I’m not sure that’s a good example for his case. Are people really daft enough to do that? I guess some are, but the majority? We need someone to do some study on that…).

Neoliberalism posits such an anthropology but also tries to create it. For instance, short term contracts encourage people to see other workers as competition rather than as fellow workers with whom one might be in solidarity. They also encourage seeing one’s whole life as a form of capital, so that everything must become an investment (taking courses to go on your CV etc). And this thinking pervades all of social life. (Again, perhaps a bit over done, but very perceptive I think). He ends with a great paragraph I’ll quote at length.

As Foucault argues, neoliberalism operates less on actions, directly curtailing them, than on the condition and effects of actions, on the sense of possibility. The reigning ideal of interest and the calculations of cost and benefit do not so much limit what one can do, neoliberal thinkers are famously indifferent to prescriptive ideals, examining the illegal drug trade as a more or less rational investment, but limit the sense of what is possible. Specifically the ideal of the fundamentally self-interested individual curtails any collective transformation of the conditions of existence. It is not that such actions are not prohibited, restricted by the dictates of a sovereign or the structures of disciplinary power, they are not seen as possible, closed off by a society made up of self-interested individuals. It is perhaps no accident that one of the most famous political implementers of neoliberal reforms, Margaret Thatcher, used the slogan, “there is no alternative,” legitimating neoliberalism based on the stark absence of possibilities…It is also this sense of possibility that the present seems to be lacking; it is difficult to imagine let alone enact a future other than a future dominated by interest and the destructive vicissitudes of competition. A political response to neoliberalism must meet it on its terrain, that of the production of subjectivity, freedom and possibility. (36)

It’s a bit pessimistic, as you might expect from a post-structuralist, but it also seems sadly accurate.

Quick question about Lacanian subjects

Does Lacan overdo the instability of the subject and the instability of their inhabitation of social roles? I don’t think they are often particularly unstable, and I think they’re more stable in the working class than in other classes. I think this latter point has something to do with postmodernism being a luxury (as my wife would say). Those with less money are typically less able to indulge in fluid subjectivity; they’re too busy surviving.

Is Althusser an anarchist?

Owing to my extreme ignorance about anarchism and Althusser, can anyone tell me if Althusser is an anarchist? When he says the State and all its apparatuses should be destroyed (p.15 of the Verso 2008 edition of On Ideology) does he think a Marxist or socialist society wouldn’t need a state? And does he think in that society that there would be no need for the violence and repression involved in States now?

thanks.