Marxism, Mysticism, and Philosophy

Two passages that seems to fit, the first from Edward Said’s On Late Style, the second from Eberhard Busch’s biography Karl Barth.

Lateness is being at the end, fully conscious, full of memory, and also very (even preternaturally) aware of the present. Adorno, like Beethoven, becomes therefore a figure of lateness itself, an untimely, scandalous, even catastrophic commentator on the present.

Which reminded me of this:

When the birthday celebrations were over, Karl Barth did not want to [go] back to his autobiography and become involved again with himself and his past. So he finally stopped work on it ‘in order to turn once again to the theological present’. He did not want to do this, however, ‘in the form of a contribution to the discussion on the foolish “God is dead” movement, which has proved on both sides of the Atlantic to be the last and most glorious fruit of illustrious existentialist theology.’ Much less did he want to be involved ‘in the equally stupid “confessional movement”, in which some people, who are neither called to nor capable of it (either mentally or spiritually), think they have to rush in order to contradict the rest.’

[...]

While Barth found this whole complex of questions insubstantial and inconsequential, he took an ‘increasingly keen interest in the results of the Second Vatican Council’ and post-conciliar Catholicism. ‘Having been long interested in the much more urgent and objectively much more important problems of Roman Catholicism, on my sick-bed I read not only Goethe, Jeremias Gotthelf, Gottfried Keller and other good authors, but also all the news and the texts (primarily German) that I could get from the Council.’

Karl Barth’s “late style”? Irascible, untimely, full of memory, but fully aware of the present.

At any rate, food for thought, as I prepare, tomorrow, to launch into my two projected series on Shakespeare and Barth.

August 27th, 2010

For my Environmental Science class, we were required to read and respond to Bill McKibbens’s article “The Gospel of Green.” I thought my response interested enough to share:

The kind of thinking — large-scale, even cosmic, and far-seeing — required by environmental issues sometimes feels like reading science fiction. In books like Iain Banks’s Culture series, sustainability, the non-scarcity threshold, is a presumption of future history. Some of the wildest ideas regarding solutions to environmental issues also spring from science fiction — from Asimov’s Gaia to Frank Herbert’s ecological epic, the Dune series. More recently, Orson Scott Card’s Homecoming series has turned the Mormon eschatology into a speculative fiction focused upon questions of sustainability and the fashioning of new and better ecologies.

This last example brings me to my first reflection on “The Gospel of Green”: as we can see from Card’s hybrid of the two, religious thinking shares a similar capacity to science fiction for entertaining the questions and imagining the answers that earth’s current predicaments require. McKibben says, for example, that global warming “almost demanded a theological response.” What he meant, presumably, was that an issue as threatening and imminent as global warming required not just a change in management or technique, but a radical repositioning of mankind with respect to our environment. Such a repositioning would not merely have implication for lifestyle but would also require theoretical changes as deep as our core perceptions of who we are and what we are meant to do on earth — the kind of theoretical issues theology has always specialized in addressing.

But I’ll be frank: I was disappointed in the way this insight panned out, at least judging by the aspects of his story which McKibben seemed to be most excited about. In the middle of the article he memorializes what was clearly a central moment for him. Apparently a “select retreat” for various influential Christian leaders resulted in the publication and signing of a document that surprised by the world by the support it evidenced among American Christians for what was formerly considered the liberal idea of environmental care. In short, rather than the resources of Christian thinking coming to enrich the quest for environmental solutions, we are expected to be most excited about the political conversion of Christians as a political bloc. Admittedly, without that bloc political change in the direction of sustainable development is basically dead in the water. But environmental questions do require cosmic intellectual response. In celebration of the gradual diminution of Christian political bullheadedness, I wonder if McKibben hasn’t abandoned the real advantage of being a Christian in favor of managerial solutions.

I don’t yet know much about the issues facing those who think about the environment or the range of answers proposed. — That’s why I’m taking this course. But I can’t help but confront an incredible blindspot right from the start, a blindspot inscribed into the very name of the discipline I am learning and also very evident in McKibben’s article: Environmental science has always already granted the, if you will, human exception. Hence the over-emphasis on managerial response, rather than the model of self-abnegating (and even emptying) identification with the object of our concern — the Christian salvific model, intellectually applied. I think the first, and possibly the finest, pre-managerial response that Christians should have (and why should they have any other, since the managerial response is political and should therefore take place on a public level inclusive but transcending of religion) would be a reconceptualization of nature — in particular, including ourselves in nature, expanding our leading notion of the common good to include what includes us, an evaluating common rhetoric like sustainability and stewardship and dominion in light of this reconceptualization.
So, in short, I appreciated McKibbens’s article, and felt a similar elation at the transformation of political concern he documents. But I feel that such elation is premature in the cycle of theory and action, and I hope the elation doesn’t exclude the possibility that the larger contribution of Christianity to environmental problems could be deeper than mobilization.

August 25th, 2010

This is just a link to a guest post I put up today at An und fur sich. It’s about the novel Kleinzeit, by Russell Hoban. I loved this novel: thanks Brad Johnson for suggesting it. It’s also incredibly awesome, to me, to get to post at An und fur sich: they were probably the second blog I ever started reading regularly (I now read over 400 regularly), and each of the main-main authors (a lot more are listed), Adam Kotsko, Anthony Paul Smith, and Brad Johnson, are heroes in my pantheon. It was a good day in the life of Robert Minto.

Thoughts on Barth and Shakespeare, in this space, are on their way very soon.

August 17th, 2010

I intend to invest part of my Saturdays in Shakespeare and Shakespeare criticism until I have read his complete plays. I’ll try to get through one play (and criticism of it) every two weeks — to allow for the exigencies of the school year. I’ll follow the order of plays that Harold Bloom discusses them in, in Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human.

Then, for the entertainment of my readers and (mostly) of myself, I will wrench, tear, squash, pinch, poke, and wrestle the play I have read and contemplated into some relation to contemporary events or ideas. The resulting atrocity will appear — here, of course. Look for the first installment next Saturday.

August 14th, 2010

“A Post-Neoliberal Ecopolitics?: Deleuze, Guattari, and Zapatismo,” by Thomas Nail, which I discovered in Philosophy Today and picked up because I’m reading Difference and Repition, reawakened my interest in a subject that has tickled the back of my mind for quite a while. Ecopolitics.

Basically, Nail uses the work of Deleuze/Guattari and the example of the Zapatistas to argue that we need to get beyond environmental philosophies of representation (which do not liberate) and environmental philosophies of critique (which do not pay the philosophical attention they should to existing ecopolitical experiments). In other words, current environmental philosophies tend to either subjugate “the environment” to the purposes and plans of human representatives or to neglect burgeoning alternatives because critiquing the other kind of environmental philosophy is too consuming. I can buy that.

Actually, this set up makes sense in terms of my own experience. I’ve only really worked intellectually on the problem of the environment when encountering the neocalvinist stewardship movement as it is represented by certain professors at my college. Neocalvinists are all about “stewardship of the resources God has given us” — all of which boils down, when it boils down to anything, to finding ways to get around the threat the environment poses to the continuation of our projects. “Sustainability” is a common catch-phrase, but it bothers me: if sustainability, in the sense of de-fanging the environment as it were, is all one’s about, then I don’t think one has a right to consider oneself engaged with the question of the environment at all. Instead, one is only considering one’s own interests and the demands of one’s consumption in a rather longer-sighted way than usual.

The failure of stewardship talk, I think, comes from its resolute anthropocentrism. Stewardship is the wrong metaphor for talking about the environment, because stewardship suggests a pile of stuff, for the enjoyment of the owner and, subsidiarily, of the steward. “Development,” therefore, is a key purpose, suggested by the metaphor. But here’s the problem: environment/steward is a false dualism. We are embraced and “developed” by our environment as much as we embrace and develop it — in fact, the distinction is mostly one of perspective. “We” over against “our environment” is about as intelligent a notion as “Me” over against “my foot.” Two things need to take place with regard to this metaphor: (1. it needs to be replaced for the purposes of the problem of the environment, (2. it needs to be repositioned, not merely jettisoned, into a less asinine position.

But, yeah, that’s the only thinking I’ve done about the environment. It amounts to a weak critique of a weak representational philosophy of the environment. I haven’t really fulfilled the conditions for either of the kinds of environmental philosophy Nail talks about; I certainly haven’t gotten beyond them, as he suggests.

I’ll be taking an environmental science course this semester, and I can get extra credits from the course if I write a big, extra paper. I’d like to do so: a paper at least beginning to outline a more complex philosophy and theology of the environment than we have here at Dordt, or at least beginning to outline how such could be developed.

But I have a question for any readers of the blog who know what they’re talking about on this subject: I can find plenty of very intriguing environmental philosophy to read, but I don’t know where to go for suitably nuanced environmental theology. I’m looking for three things in the literature I can’t find: (1. de-centered theology, which privileges neither nature nor human in a dualistic way; (2. historically aware theology, which doesn’t merely speculate with technical terms borrowed from the Bible and systematic theology but without any real reference to the tradition, orthodox and heterodox, of actual theology; (3. politically aware theology that takes account, as Nail emphasized, of existing ecopolitical experiments and problems. Islamic or Judaic theology fulfilling the same three conditions would also be of interest.

Any suggestions?

August 11th, 2010

As announced earlier, I plan to read through Barth’s Church Dogmatics this coming school year. I’ll begin the first of September. For the rest of this month, I plan to read The Word of God and the Word of Man, a collection of his early speeches and essays, and Anselm, Fides Quaerens Intellectum. The first whets one’s appetite for Barth’s rhetoric, as well as displaying primitive and powerful versions of some of his ideas; the second is, according to the man himself, the “key” to his theological method.

Come September, I will tackle the CD, taking it at the rate of approximately two books per month.

Thinking about how to integrate this longest individual reading project of my life into my blogging, I was inspired by yesterday’s description (and example) of creative restatement. I’m going to try to follow that method, reporting in every so often with a list of most striking ideas garnered or suggested by my reading in Barth. I’ll list them succinctly at the top of a post, and then flesh them out one by one, so readers can peruse those items which interest them.

I like two things about creative restatement: first, a reader who had read the same text I’m restating from, probably wouldn’t have read anything that much resembled what I write. Having distilled my understanding of a text down to a few concise points, I build them back up, infused by my own subjectivity, reoriented to my concerns and the conjuncture of my intellectual life. Second, writing creative restatements feels like a perfect blog medium because it doesn’t require strenuous regular creativity, while yet consistently generating new and useful ideas.

August 10th, 2010

I finally got around to reading a book — or rather, an appendix — recommended by Scott McLemee a couple months ago: “On Intellectual Craftsmanship,” by C. Wright Mills. It delivered as promised. You should read it.

In my notebook — I already have the kind Mills recommends — I wrote down the following principles that I either took from the essay or that occurred to me independently while I read it.

1. Daily life and intellectual work should mutually support each other.
2. Self-reflection is the fount of the best ideas.
3. The creative organization of ideas (even “old” ideas) usually constitutes or reveals the possibility of a new idea.
4. As an addendum to the last principle, restatement of read arguments often is original work.
5. A review of the state of problems and plans should be regular.
6. When thinking about one thing, also considering its opposite often clarifies.

1.) Considering that intellectual work is often unremunerative and sedentary, it should be obvious that it requires a conducive lifestyle. Yet I find — at least in the undergraduate, germinal intellectuals around me — that this principle isn’t obvious. Many of my friends profess eagerness to spend their lives on intellectual work, but they fail to develop the discipline, the environment, or the relationships that would help them. Mills’ best piece of advice in this regard — I thought, anyway — was the kind of notebook he advised keeping, half journal, half workspace. The idea is to record anything in either life or reading that contributes to one’s intellectual work. I suppose the notebook is really just an icon for the kind of mixing that should occur in one’s mental life. For my part, I know that some of my best ideas occur to me on my way out of the gym, when it’s especially cold or hot outside,as I step out of the temp-controlled environment into the shock, the intense post-cardio smells and sights, of the outdoors. It seems obvious to me, but I’ll mention it anyway, that the support between life and intellectual work is mutual. So life also benefits from intellectual work. I suppose if you haven’t felt the way your daily life changes when your intoxicated with a problem or an idea, then you probably wouldn’t be reading this post with any interest anyway.

2.) Sort of as a result of the interdependence of life and intellectual work, ideas (understood simply as creativity in one’s discipline) rarely occur from pure concentration on the abstracted problems of intellectual work. A sort of decollage, if you will, a thinking by analogy and intuition, the cross-classification of life and work, produces the best ideas. I find this concept easier to grasp in terms of a conjuncture. At any given moment the combination of the books you are reading, the environment you are in, the emotional sensations you are experiencing, the intentions that impel you to think, are utterly unique. And ideas are the mental events that result from such conjunctures.

3.) What taking notes or keeping an intellectual notebook really does for one — besides aiding the memory — is to reorganize the raw input of other people’s ideas and of data into a subjectively grasped idea of one’s own. This idea is different — leads in new directions, applies to new situations. Of course this difference doesn’t free you to plagiarize, to treat a subjectively grasped idea as if it emerged from the vacuum of your genius. But it does free you to play with the idea, to enlarge it or revise it or criticize it, as if it were your own. Restatement, therefore, is almost always the way forward.

4.) Consequently, I think it would be good if we all considered restatement a valuable use of our time, a generative and creative form of scholarship. Straining after new ideas is a bit like thinking too hard about concentrating — concentration is really a kind of relaxing into focus (—a zen thing, yeah?). Likewise, thinking generatively is about relaxing into contemplation, about organizing raw mental stuff in the easy and natural way each of our own minds has.

5.) But all this about relaxation doesn’t override the necessity of self-awareness. At all costs, I think, boredom, aimlessness, and trifling should be avoided in intellectual work. So many dangers beset the uncareful. Not only is intellectual work dangerous in its potential for extraneous harm, but self-deception and all kinds of, frankly, evil thoughts and purposes enter the mind of the intellectual drifter, silly obsessions, groundless troll-like skepticism, etc. Sitting down and listing out the ideas one is trying to flesh out or grasp, the longterm reading goals one has, the over-all goals one has for one’s intellectual work, is consequently a part of what I would call disciplining the intellectual conscience. If you need inspiration, think of Augustine’s Confessions, possibly the biggest and best statement of problems and purposes ever.

6.) Though it was unlike the other things that struck me in Mills’ essay, I was, nonetheless, very struck by his advice for attacking a problem with comprehensiveness and clarity — include its opposite in your ruminations. On second thought, this isn’t a new idea — I’ve certainly encountered it in the “topics” section of ancient rhetoric, the part of rhetoric that deals with invention, with finding things to say. Comparisons are generative, basically. Aristotle would say, perhaps, when your writing an encomium, think of a character as directly opposite the one you are praising as possible: thus, the vices of the one will reveal the virtues of the other, and the virtues of the one will differentiate and take on complexity in the shade of the other’s contrasting vices. So with any idea.

August 9th, 2010

Well, dear readers, I am married. The knot is tied, the deed is done, and I can report to you that I will become both a better and also a more productive man because of it. My at-home-in-my-apartment-at-Dordt meter skyrocketed, my habits (bed-time, waking, eating, etc.) are growing more regular than ever before, and consequently I anticipate the most intellectually satisfying year of college to date. If you’re contemplating getting married — to a genuinely wonderful person — I recommend it.

In other news, the time has come for a prospectus, a reading list, and a brief meta-report.

The great theme of the next semester will, of course, be applying to grad school. I’ve switched up my projected concentration once again, aiming for a comparative literature degree with an interdisciplinary emphasis in philosophy. I suspect my non-English literatures of concentration will be French and Hebrew. I’ll be applying to the University of Chicago, Yale, Columbia, Northwestern, and Cornell. However, I most want to get to the U of C.

Consequently, I’m keeping my private pursuits fairly open, given the very different lines of study I’ll be pursuing depending on which school accepts me. I’m allowing myself simply to drink deeply and searchingly in the writings of a few of my favorite authors — Sir Thomas Browne, Marcel Proust, Henry James, Michel Montaigne — and to digest Heidegger, Ricouer, and Deleuze as well as I can, and finally to embark on the large (but worthwhile) project of reading Barth’s Church Dogmatics. (On which last note, all should check out Jeremy Ridenour’s interesting ongoing comments on his journey through the CD.)

I’ll be writing here mainly about the four authors mentioned first in the above paragraph — Browne, Proust, James, and Montaigne — though I also have some theological issues to raise and explore — something I haven’t done for some time.

In other news:

– I’ll be posting at An und fur sich shortly, as part of a reading group of Russell Hoban’s Kleinzeit. I’ll post a link when that happens.

– I’m going to try to begin reading one play by Shakespeare per Saturday, in conjunction with some kind of Shakespeare criticism each week. In my experience, Shakespeare criticism is a genre of commentary extraordinarily fruitful of world-opening ideas.

– Nutmeg is an under-used and under-rated spice. On this subject I have more to say, but I thought it was worthwhile to warn you in advance.

August 7th, 2010