Ricoeur on Prophetic Politics

I’m currently doing some research on the social uses of the concepts “sin” and “Fall,” and have been led to the early work of the French phenomenologist Paul Ricoeur. Currently I’m reading his Symbolism of Evil (1960). This is my first encounter with Ricoeur’s writing and so far I’ve found him fascinating. As phenomenologists go he’s actually quite readable. Moreover, the breadth of his engagement with biblical materials and research on the Ancient Near East is impressive, exempting him from my earlier critique of “phenomenologists of nothing.”

There are various overlaps with Yoder I’d like to explore someday, particularly on their readings of prophetic politics. In Ricouer’s terms Isaiah, Ezekiel, and Jeremiah teach a “political ‘nihilism,’” “the expression of a pedagogy of historical failure that aims at placing the ethical demand beyond any assignable historical end, beyond any finite observance, beyond any self-justification” (62). For Ricoeur, this move towards infinite demand characterizes the prophets, and completes the Old Testament’s overall picture of ethics as simultaneously a call to unconditional righteousness and to specific, finite acts of righteousness. Without eliminating the latter, the prophets want to “shatter any assurance that the pious man might draw from his observance of the commandments.” Instead of political zeal, no matter how “righteous,” it is through prophetic “non-resistance” (61) and “unarmed obedience” (57) that “the song of hope of second Isaiah might be heard” (62). (By “second Isaiah” I assume he means Isaiah 40-55, though he might have another division in mind.)

Though Yoder would likely (and rightly) refrain from calling this “political nihilism,” there are clearly certain accents here that go well with his treatment of the Jeremianic “politics of exile,” as well as with his general project. For Yoder, Jeremiah’s admonition that Jews exiled in Babylon “seek the peace of the city” (Jeremiah 29:7) prefigures the politics of the cross which, for Yoder, are the politics of not being in control, of giving up “handles on history.” Though this politics does not count on immediate success, it does follow the “grain of the universe”–it corresponds to the underlying moral order and thus in the long run is far more realistic than what politicians short-sightedly call “realism.”

I’m not sure where Ricoeur will go with the phrases “non-resistance” and “unarmed obedience” or with his general reading of prophetic politics, but from a Yoderian perspective it’s a good start. Perhaps the influence of Gerhard von Rad is notable here, as Ricoeur draws from him extensively, and Yoder (with his student Marva Dawn) translated von Rad’s Holy War in Ancient Israel. As a non sequitur, I’m also curious to know what influence, if any, Symbolism of Evil and related works had on Derrida, who was Ricoeur’s teaching assistant around the time he wrote it.

Alba Rising

My lovely Scottish schools, St Andrews and Edinburgh Universities, were featured today in a NY Times article. It’s about why there are so many of us Americans over here ($$$).

Quote(s) of the Day

On my way to school I came across the following passage from Yoder. It made me laugh, but I realize I’m a total nerd.

“To deny Jesus Christ today would mean being secularist, an agnostic, or an atheist, claiming in one way or another that there is not, or that there is no way to talk about, a transcendent reality coming to us in Jesus. The doubters in the late first century were making just the opposite point. They did know about transcendent reality. They thought of themselves as responsible for the preservation and refinement of a high level of religious insight. Historians call their position ‘gnostic,’ from a root which refers to special inside knowledge. They were the insightful, the initiated. Today we might call them gurus, maharishis, or systematic theologians.” (J.H. Yoder, “Glory in a Tent,” He Came Preaching Peace, 77).

A couple pages later, Yoder writes this beautiful passage on John’s inversion of gnostic language:

“That is what the Gospel prologue [John 1:1-18] does with the language of gnosticism. It turns inside out a whole system of thought, whose entire purpose had been to dramatize the distance between the spirituality of God and our poor humanity, and to describe the need for rare and costly exercises of meditation and initiation to seek to rise in contemplation just a step or two toward that distant light. This is the language which is seized and stood on its head to claim–no to proclaim–that all the meaning behind creation, all of the orderliness and purposefulness and goal-directedness of the created order, has come right into our life in a form which preposterously puts itself at our mercy, letting it depend on us whether we will let it illuminate us, transform us, and make us children of God.” (J.H. Yoder, “Glory in a Tent,” He Came Preaching Peace, 80).

Sex Evangelism

There is a really amusing article in the NY Times this week about a Dallas-area mega-pastor, Ed Young, and his crusade to get his married parishioners to have more sex.

Probably not a bad idea, but I have to point out this quote:

“If you’ve said, ‘I do,’ do it,” he said. As for single people, “I don’t know, try eating chocolate cake,” he said.”

Mr Young and his ilk might find they have less problems with married sex if they articulated a richer sexual ethic for single people. I’ll give Young the benefit of the doubt and assume his “Seven Days of Sex” are not merely about personal emotional fulfilment, but about strengthening the covenant which exists between the couple and God. If that’s the case, then he ought to be able to spell out how single peoples’ sexuality also has covenental dimensions. I realize the “chocolate cake” comment is meant to be facetious–but much of the time, at least in the church, singles’ sexuality is treated precisely in those terms: as a sugary treat with no substance. For many evangelicals like Young, singles are simply supposed to refuse sexuality, as if it were optional–like dessert–and not an intrinsic part of human being-in-the-world. No wonder Young’s congregation (and scores of others like it) have trouble with married sex: eating cake as one of your main courses tends to make you sick.

A Phenomenology of Nothing

I’m presenting a paper at a conference on “Adam Smith as a Theologian” in early January, here in Edinburgh. The conference is a response to the overemphasis on Smith’s economics at the expense of his moral theology. Everyone knows about the “invisible hand”–a phrase which actually occurs twice in all of Smith’s writings–and the free market vision proposed in Wealth of Nations. But few know that Smith actually got famous for his first book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (first pub. 1759). In that book, first published while he was a prof over at Glasgow Uni, he provides kind of a phenomenology of “sympathy,” that “universal” and “natural” trait by which we all are able to put ourselves in another’s shoes and feel what they feel. I haven’t read very much of the book yet, but it looks like he’s going to say, somehow, that this natural sympathy is the basis of morality, and therefore we can (and sometimes do) make institutions which are morally just.

Again, I’ve yet to finish the book, but it seems like Smith’s view of a natural morality will share all the problems inherent in any such “natural theology.” But I’m more interested right now in the book as a case study in pre-sociological speculative philosophy. (I deal with the natural theology stuff in my paper.) Smith is basically just spouting off a fairly coherent phenomenology of sympathy, without really giving any concrete examples. Sure, he’ll often times give a general picture of what he means, such as to say something like “you know when you see someone really angry, and it’s hard not to be initially put off by their anger rather than share it.” All the examples are of this vague “you know when…” type.

Anyway, that’s all to say thank God for Wittgenstein, Austin and the others who forced philosophers to answer the question “show me what you mean.” It may be laudable to ground philosophy in common experience, however vague, but it’s not hard to turn on what is assumed to be “common” and find it only to be common for professors and other elites. This problem is not limited to Smith, but to those who actually paraded under the name “phenomenologist” before Bourdieu (Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, Gadamer, etc.). Obviously, this is a far too easy, anachronistic assessment in the wake of 20th-century historicism.

Back when it was published Smith’s book was hailed as being informative and entertaining. In this day and age, it’s hard not to write it off as merely entertaining. Some rich guy even hired Smith to travel around Europe with his son. How bored must people have been back in 1759 to consider this kind of thing entertaining? Well, how bored are you to have read this far?

An unceremony

Given that Wess just linked to this blog in a post, it seems like a good a time as any to restart. So, for the two of you who still have this in your RSS feed (you know who you are), here goes nothing.

Books: Toulmin’s Cosmopolis

I’m trying to get in the habit of writing short reviews of all the books I’m reading. When I think they could be of general interest, I’ll try to post them here. With that in mind, here’s a review of Stephen Toulmin’s Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (Chicago: Macmillan, 1990).

Toulmin’s job here is to give an alternate reading to the “standard account” of modernity as ushering in the age of reason and tolerance. Basically, he sees Renaissance humanist skepticism (Montaigne, Shakespeare, Rabelais, Erasmus, Machiavelli, etc.) as celebrating pluralism and accepting the limited nature of human reason, and so focusing on the timely, local, particular oral, rhetorical, experimental, and so on. With the death of Henry IV and the advent of the 30 Years War, intellectuals at every level turn their back on skepticism in the search for “pure reason”–the reversal of all the Renaissance foci. The modern period, represented at its birth by Descartes and Donne, and later by Leibniz and Newton, is characterized by the search for a unified science, absolute authority vested in nation-states, universal art, and total philosophical certainty. In sum, it searched for a new “cosmopolis” in which the predictable, cause-and-effect character “found” in the natural world was seen to be of a piece with the “rational” character of human reason and society. This search, much more than the limited aims of medieval or Renaissance societies, gave rise to political absolutism and intellectual and cultural intolerance.

Toulmin believes that the 18th and 19th centuries and early 20th century witnessed a return to a more humanistic perspective (Kant, Freud, Darwin, Einstein, Austen, etc.), which was “deferred” by the two world wars, and then the Cold War. But we are currently experiencing a return to Renaissance values, as seen in the thought of Kuhn, Rorty, Walzer, Gadamer, Ong, and Wittgenstein. Overall this transformation can be termed a turn to the practical; e.g., in ethics we see a return to the particularism of casuistry (Walzer), in science and medicine a focus on application rather than pure theory, in art the breakdown of the “high” and “low” culture distinctions, and in politics, new possibilities for internationalism and the expanded role of non-governmental institutions, which wield moral influence rather than force. Toulmin embraces these changes, calling for the continued “humanization”, that is, subordination to human interests rather than the aims of ideological purity or certainty, of each of the various disciplines he touches on.

A fascinating and quick book, which is quite useful given the breadth of its overview and the depth of its historical insights. That said, the discussion is rarely technical; Jeff Stout’s Flight From Authority is much better in this regard. Though his narrative of modernism may be essentially sound (I’m not really qualified here), in retrospect, Toulmin’s conclusions seem somewhat naive. Many universities (and high schools) have adopted a more practical, “people centered” curriculum; but this emphasis on the practical, devoid of richer ontological or teleological accounts, only makes the “practical” subservient to the managerial and technocratic needs of contemporary global capitalism, and more often than not (especially in the sciences), the ever-expanding diet of national militaries. We surely need to learn from the Aristotelian emphasis on practical wisdom; but this cannot be sundered from Platonic speculation about the ultimate Good, however chaste we are about our claims to have identified that Good. A Platonic-Aristotelian synthesis, and indeed something which exceeds this synthesis, is to be preferred over Toulmin’s reductionist pragmatism. He does, however, make some good points about the importance of NGOs in the political sphere, the need for international political bodies to find a better way of incorporating multiple types of political communities, and the general move away from the nation-state. These recommendations seem particularly urgent in light of American foreign policy since 2003.

Fish on Deconstruction, Pt 2

Apparently around 600 people commented on Stanley Fish’s earlier article on French deconstruction, so he has posted a response. Here he argues that deconstruction only disrupts the idea of a theory of knowledge (epistemology), not the ideas we use on a day-to-day basis. Deconstruction, for Fish, is apolitical, because “theories of knowledge” don’t really contribute to politics anyway, so whether you have one or not doesn’t really matter. His argument is basically pragmatic, and he tips his hand when he starts quoting Dewey. In essence, this is a recapitulation of Richard Rorty’s thesis in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. That Rorty went on to work with Continental philosophers gives some validity to the deconstruction-pragmatist connection Fish is trying to make, but I wonder if Continentals would really accept a pragmatist label.

El Papa & The UN

The Pope kicked it over at the United Nations HQ yesterday, giving a great 30 minute speech on the importance of human rights in resolving international disputes, and the indispensability of the transcendent in grounding human rights. Here are some highlights:

On science and technology:

Here our thoughts turn also to the way the results of scientific research and technological advances have sometimes been applied. Notwithstanding the enormous benefits that humanity can gain, some instances of this represent a clear violation of the order of creation, to the point where not only is the sacred character of life contradicted, but the human person and the family are robbed of their natural identity. Likewise, international action to preserve the environment and to protect various forms of life on earth must not only guarantee a rational use of technology and science, but must also rediscover the authentic image of creation. This never requires a choice to be made between science and ethics: rather it is a question of adopting a scientific method that is truly respectful of ethical imperatives.

On transcendence and human rights:

The founding of the United Nations, as we know, coincided with the profound upheavals that humanity experienced when reference to the meaning of transcendence and natural reason was abandoned, and in consequence, freedom and human dignity were grossly violated. When this happens, it threatens the objective foundations of the values inspiring and governing the international order and it undermines the cogent and inviolable principles formulated and consolidated by the United Nations. When faced with new and insistent challenges, it is a mistake to fall back on a pragmatic approach, limited to determining “common ground”, minimal in content and weak in its effect.

It is evident, though, that the rights recognized and expounded in the [Universal Declaration of Human Rights] apply to everyone by virtue of the common origin of the person, who remains the high-point of God’s creative design for the world and for history. They are based on the natural law inscribed on human hearts and present in different cultures and civilizations. Removing human rights from this context would mean restricting their range and yielding to a relativistic conception, according to which the meaning and interpretation of rights could vary and their universality would be denied in the name of different cultural, political, social and even religious outlooks. This great variety of viewpoints must not be allowed to obscure the fact that not only rights are universal, but so too is the human person, the subject of those rights.

On conversion and justice:

Discernment, then, shows that entrusting exclusively to individual States, with their laws and institutions, the final responsibility to meet the aspirations of persons, communities and entire peoples, can sometimes have consequences that exclude the possibility of a social order respectful of the dignity and rights of the person. On the other hand, a vision of life firmly anchored in the religious dimension can help to achieve this, since recognition of the transcendent value of every man and woman favours conversion of heart, which then leads to a commitment to resist violence, terrorism and war, and to promote justice and peace.

On the Church and the UN:

The United Nations remains a privileged setting in which the Church is committed to contributing her experience “of humanity”, developed over the centuries among peoples of every race and culture, and placing it at the disposal of all members of the international community. This experience and activity, directed towards attaining freedom for every believer, seeks also to increase the protection given to the rights of the person. Those rights are grounded and shaped by the transcendent nature of the person, which permits men and women to pursue their journey of faith and their search for God in this world. Recognition of this dimension must be strengthened if we are to sustain humanity’s hope for a better world and if we are to create the conditions for peace, development, cooperation, and guarantee of rights for future generations.

(The full text is available here and the NY Times has a cool interactive page with the video and text.)

Fish on Deconstruction

The noted American literary critic Stanley Fish has written an excellent summary of postmodern philosophy in his latest column for the NY Times. Especially helpful is his presentation of Anglo-American and Continental postmodernists as offering similar, rather than competing, solutions to Enlightenment problematics. Of course, were he to bring postmodern Aristotelians like Alasdair MacIntyre into the picture, his narrative would become much more complicated. But a useful introduction nonetheless.