Religion is a "delicate" issue because this is the way people usually refer to discussions of religion, and not because it's a good description of the way those discussions are usually conducted.
When I was growing up, however, I don't remember anyone discussing religion. In fact, even though I was raised a Catholic, and an Irish Catholic on top of it, I don't remember anyone, outside of church, discussing God at any length. Strictly speaking, I have always felt that many Catholics don't believe in God. Let me explain...
In my family, we regarded ourselves as good Catholics while I was growing up--and I'm certain that my mother and sister at least still think of the family that way. But this idea had (and has) a different significance for various members of my family. First, there is the difference in education, including dogmatic instruction. My brother and sister went to Catholic elementary and middle school, and public high school. They didn't like attending Catholic school, and they thought the dogmatic aspect of it was silly. I went to public schools except for one year of private Catholic instruction when I was about five years old, a kind of Catholic kindergarten.
Second, there were differences in our habits. My sister, brother, mother, and I all went to mass every Sunday while I was growing up--at least until I was in my early teens when I stopped going. My father had no interest in going to mass, and only attended church on high holidays. By this I mean that he went on Easter, Ash Wednesday, Christmas, and sometimes around St. Patrick's Day. The Church's definition of "holiday" extends a lot further, and includes almost every Sunday, and a lot of weekdays, on the regular calendar, if you want to get technical about it. My father was not technical about it. For that matter, I don't think that most Catholic men are, but more on that later.
The point is that despite all these inconsistencies, we were "good Catholics," or so I was told up until the time I was old enough to realize what that really meant: we tried to go to mass, we observed some of the rituals and norms (we didn't eat meat on Fridays etc.), and most importantly, we belonged to a Catholic community. I want to emphasize this last point about belonging to a community because it is at the center of what it meant to be a Catholic when I was growing up, but I'm not so sure that's still the case. With the suburbanization of America, and the collapse of the old urban parishes and their Old World ethnic character over the past few decades, what it means to be a Catholic in America has changed considerably. And since many of the old Catholic communities were also working class, and union, it's quite relevant to talk about this process here.
Accompanying the changes has been a drive by the Catholic hierarchy to try and keep up with the competition from the huge growth in suburban Protestant "super churches." This in turn was spurred on not only by the revival in fundamentalist Christian sects, but by the general tendency toward suburbanization itself. Changing life patterns change other patterns in people's lives, including religious belief and how, and where, it gets expressed. Along with these rather rapid changes has come a loss in certain aspects of local history, and the mores, of those communities that got erased in the process, or at least altered almost beyond recognition.
This brings me to one of my main contentions about what it meant to be a Catholic when, and where, I grew up:
Catholic men don't believe in God.
This may seem like an outrageous statement, although I suspect that it seems a lot less so to those who grew up in an all-Catholic urban enclave, or in a small, working-class community on the verge of a big city, like I did. And it probably seems totally unbelievable to the vast majority of Americans, who are Protestants, and whose conception of what it means to be a Catholic is largely shaped by a media and political establishment that are overwhelmingly Protestant, and therefore unfamiliar with the actual experience of growing up in one of these places. Instead the elite in America largely accept the official discourse of the Church as an accurate self-description of Catholics, something they would never do with most Protestant faiths. "You mean, all Baptists don't believe that homosexuality is a sin that will send you straight to hell?" No, stupid, of course not. But if you were to ask them, "You mean all Catholics don't believe that only Catholics (who believe in the 'only one, holy, Catholic, apostolic Church') will go to heaven?" Well, of course they do, would probably be the answer (while the reality is a lot closer to "no, not really, but many Catholics say that they do, stupid"). This isn't so much a matter of prejudice as it is of indifference to another faith. Most people just don't think that far.
In this atmosphere, it's hard to conceive of what it was really like to grow up in my hometown. But take my word for it. In a Catholic family, in an old Catholic community, the only person who absolutely had to believe in God, really, in order for the family to remain part of the community, was the mother. In a sense, the mother in a Catholic family believed for everyone.
Not so long ago, I went to visit my mother in Florida. She's in her eighties now. We were sitting around with my sister and brother discussing a distant relative who had just died, and my mother said: "Well, he's with God." There was silence, no sign from my brother or myself, although my sister nodded vaguely in assent. And then we went on talking about something else. One could explain this moment by pointing out that my family knows that I'm an atheist, and has for a long time, so they didn't want to offend me with an outward showing of raw faith. Or, that my mother is simply a deeper believer than the rest of us because she's older and nearer to death. But those would be false explanations because this has always been the case in my family, even before I "came out" as an atheist, and long before my mother's mortality became an unavoidable concern.
The truth is that spontaneous expressions of faith are supposed to come from the mother in a Catholic household (and, to some extent, in some Protestant communities of faith, too, especially, interestingly enough, black communities). And it's not necessary for everyone else to agree with them--so long as they are not contradicted. Besides that, the religion of Catholicism itself is all about ritual. Even here, there's quite a bit of wiggle room, and there always has been. You can go to mass on Sunday, or not, but you're still a Catholic. It isn't even the originary ceremony of baptism that makes you a Catholic. It's important, yes, but it's not like people sit around and discuss the metaphysical mechanics of what it means to be endowed with a name under the auspices of the Church. That's for scholars to do. (There is a lengthy literature on the subject, by the way, but who the hell would want to read it? Even most priests don't care, I suspect.)
So this was why my sister was the only one of us to indicate any agreement with what my mother said. Because she has her own family, and she plays the same role with them now. She believes for them. Only her agreement was muted, and silent, because it's my mother's part to play that role in our family. And also, I suspect, because my sister believes less in all this than my mother's generation did--since the old communities have collapsed and been absorbed.
One final note:
When I went to college, my first extended experience outside my hometown, I was shocked to find that so many people (Protestants mostly) actually believed in God, and said that they did. I was especially suprised to find out that so many men believed in God. In my community, it was considered somewhat effeminate for a grown man to express a deep faith in God. Again, that was somebody else's job.
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Comments
-R-
Very nicely written with calm honesty and direct experience.
But I've found, at least for me, if you're raised this way, the sacrament of Baptism is like a permanent flea dip. It clings, it penetrates to the very core of my existence. I don't agree with everything the church puts forth because that's not what it's about - it's a way of thinking plus the ceremony plus the mystery of faith all rolled into one. There's a tiny part of me that still thinks every other sect and religion is a pretender.
But I never found God through Catholicism. I don't think you can find God through religion; I think you find him in your own way, when you're ready.
yeah.
Atheism isn't what you mean here, I gather. You make the distinction in your comments. But the issue of belief and how it works in a social setting, what function it serves, is the point anyway, isn't it? We can argue forever about God. The fact that certain members of the family are given different roles to play in relation to faith, and the community, seems accurate. What do you suppose is the force of social coercion used here? Does the family that doesn't adhere lose standing in some way? Or is it an internal loss of coherence inside the family that's threatened? Or both?
Engaging.
Rated
Is there a way of telling whether Catholic men are actually atheists or whether they just don't buy into specific doctrine and figure that God's in the background somewhere but that the where isn't all that relevant to them? That God, if He exists, doesn't care whether they go to services but limits His concern to the big stuff, like whether they murder someone?
rate
Although my mother goes to church daily at times she never preaches religion to me. It's just the way it is. Mom is holy for us all but will make you feel guilty that you are not. Good post.
Davey - No, it's not meant to be coherent. The mystification runs right to the core. And as a social glue, it can't compete with economic forces anymore. Look at how the Church has had to change to compete in the suburbs--doing away with Latin liturgies, and the old, dark message of suffering, in favor of a more positive, "psychological" approach. This is in response to the Protestant churches heading more and more in the direction of a kind of talk-show sermon. Even the architecture changed. The new churches are bright, airy spaces. No more gloom. And very little sense of community exists outside its doors. The time that people spend at church has become a fantasy of community, a substitute for the real thing which is lacking under consumerism. People adhere to their houses of worship in the suburbs in disturbingly dependent ways. The institution in the old communities may have been rooted in a family "scheme," but the Church itself didn't interfere in people's lives, and they didn't rely on it for a sense of togetherness. That came from real common interests, like labor.
Feike - The lack of discussion is revealing. Catholic men don't discuss God with each other, either. There's nothing going on "over there," since it's all taken care of by the arrangement of certain roles in the family. It's unclear to me how this works in Protestant communities, since I've never grown up in one. Certainly Protestant men are encouraged in spontaneous confessions of faith, it's an openly confessional point of view. At the extreme, I know that some fundamentalist sects provide members with regular exposure to Bible study groups where people are expected to confess their sins to each other. This is unthinkable even in the new, suburbanized version of Catholicism. The confessional door remains firmly shut. It's hard to say which form of personal-psychological control is more intimidating.
Dr Lee - "...there are lots of exceptions to the Big Lie." An apt formula.
old new lefty - That's possible. It's interesting how these things have a habit of turning back on themselves. Like I mentioned to skinnydave above, the Latino community is an exception. The old structures are being preserved there. And the mother definitely plays the central role.
rita shibr - I don't think my father ever would have gone to church if it hadn't been for my mother. Thanks for reading.
DandyLion - You know the line criticizing the office of the pope for becoming a "species of Dalai Lama"? Well, there is a type of leftist criticism that accuses Buddhism (which has often been associated with the conservative establishment, especially in Southeast Asian countries) of being a species of Catholicism where the Dalai Lama is worshipped as a pope. I don't think most Catholic men do either.
The radical American political philosopher, Michael Hardt, points out that there are different types or strains of atheism that correspond to different religious faiths: a Protestant strain, a Catholic and Jewish one, even an Islamic strain. And the point is more than a mere psychologicization of non-belief, more than the idea that atheism represents a rejection of the particular form of belief that one grows up with.
Hardt suggests that there are entire traditions of atheism that exist alongside the world religions and run through their theology. After all, what is the main condition of inquiry in Christian thought besides doubt? In this sense, Descartes doesn't establish methodological doubt out of thin air. He unearths and brings it forward as something distinct--and as a way of investigating things that can then be applied to other objects, not just divinity and one's own relationship to it. One might say that what comprises the modern "dogma" on the deepest level is this insistence that doubt remain caught up in the continual investigation of everything.
In the same vein, modern theologians like Paul Tillich and the religious existentialists, who emphasize the profound experience of doubt as the absolute crucible of faith, represent an extension of this atheistic tradition that runs alongside and "interbraids" with faith. When the power of the formal institutions weakens in the modern period, doubt finally escapes to confront the material world head on. And various types of atheism emerge that correspond to these long submerged considerations.
This isn't a recontainment of atheism by faith, either, since this means that atheism is exactly what most atheists (and everybody else) take it to mean: that which exists in belief "after religion."
But once again, this shouldn't be confused with the position of Catholic men in the kind of community described in the post. There faith and doubt are still interbraided with each other, and have to be, and through this dialectic of belief and un-belief in the structuring of the family, doubt is put at the service of a community of faith. The containment of doubt in such a community is not just in the discourse that rests on it (theology), or its enforcement (dogma), or the ideological apparatuses (church/school), or even the institutional structure as a whole. It's in how doubt is included as an element in the community to begin with, how it's given a role to play in the community, so to speak. That makes it almost a function of faith. Note how the men defer to the mother in her role as believer-for-the-family. So it's still faith that is the unassailable term there. Atheism comes "after" this moment, it emerges in the unbraiding of the two terms when doubt is freed up and belief finds a whole other life in the world besides the continual orbiting, in tension, around the object of deity.
Historically, even in my youth in the early 60's, this type of community was a holdover from another era. The situation was probably much more pronounced--and much harder for participants to "see"--in my grandparents' time. This history can turn back on itself and start up in another locale or culture (see Old New Lefty's comment and my response above), or it can be turned back for a while by the sheer force of revivalism, led by an institution. But in general there has been an unbraiding of doubt from faith in the modern period, due in part to the slow extinction of such communities and their structures in favor of new ones. The forces that did this were as much economic as social or philosophical--maybe more economic than anything else.
and...what is the theory about how this came to be the case? how did the mother come to be in the position of "believing for the whole family"? why not the father? and why does the axis turn on gender?
Your focus on the community is spot on. It's really all about the community. Having grown up with both Catholic and Protestant influences (yes, that is possible) I can tell you that I don't see the differences between the two as being as pronounced as you do.
In many Protestant families, it's the woman's role to be the believer too.
As a Christian, my own belief is that Christianity is too (and pick your own adjective here---many would use a damning adjective---I prefer the word mysterious) And being mysterious it requires community.
Above all---there are always exeptions. People have been trying to figure out Christianity for 2,000 years. Maybe that's the point. Maybe now the only thing that's different is that its our turn.
Excellent piece.
I accept what Hardt has to say about the tradition and its interbraiding of faith and doubt in the subject (congregant, community member), and that it's not just some sort of psychological "trace" of former personal beliefs. But it's a leap to call that atheism--and in all fairness to Hardt, he only talks about strains of atheism in the present tense. He starts with the present case of atheism and works his way back. That may suggest a submerged history of atheism adhering to each religion, but it's clear that it takes shape as a coming-into-being around the historical separation of doubt and faith, and only finds the form we're familiar with once doubt is freed--that is, once it's methodologized around objects other than the deity.
And I like your new Gulf-of-Aden pirate deckhand look.
"...why does the axis turn on gender?" Good question, difficult to answer. My own theory...
Matrilineal societies were common in the West thousands of years ago, but their institutions were contained and supplanted by patriarchy before the monotheistic religions arose. The role of the believer for the entire family was, therefore, embodied by the mother, the female head of the household, as both a leftover and as compensation in some ways for the loss in influence outside the home during the transition. This gave her authority over the spiritual affairs within the family, while the priest/cultic-functionary took over for the community as a whole, and men more generally took over economic and social affairs. At the same time, the law became more important--more complex and more binding--and this gave women, excluded in many ways from the formal-juridical system except as subjects of it, a smaller and smaller sphere in which to act. Finally matrilineality itself was legislated away in favor of patriarchal descent of name, rank, and wealth. Again, this process began before Judaism arose, but it was not complete. There even though the community is matrilineal, the juridical and political structure that accompanies it is patriarchal. By the time Chrisitianity came on the scene, patriarchy had been in place for a long time--and so the role of the mother as the cypher for faith in the family was set. It was also never any threat to a generalized patriarchal authority.
& thanks. thought it was time for a new look here.
I also agree about the whole non-believer thing with Catholics. From what I have experienced, Catholics in my neighborhood talked about God and Christ and Church, but it was more metaphorical than anything else. People who "really" believed and lived that stuff were mocked, severely. We especially felt nervous around evangelical Christians for this reason.
I remember going to Friendlys and hearing a bunch of Evangelicals discussing the Bible passionately. Me and my working class friends, most of whom went to Catholic School, were very much wierded out by the whole process. You're only supposed to do that "in school" or "in church." They are "mentally derranged" my friends thought.
The only time my Catholic pals and neighbors ever became uber-Catholic was when we were around non-Catholics and felt our sense of tribal/community/belonging threatened, due to "the other," usually somebody of another parish, religion, group, etc... who came into our town, which was Irish, German, Italian.
I remember my mother, who never prayed the rosary in her life, would visibly leave it around the house, when an annoying Protestant cousin would visit. LOL
The argument that one could find any large number of examples where subordination of women is present, but not class, was always based on a dual hypothesis, both parts of which are false. The first part is contemporary: "real socialist" societies evidenced oppression despite being "classless." But we know that these were state capitalist systems where class persisted. For that matter, even those who reject the state capitalist position still recognize that these societies were deeply flawed, top-down attempts at "local socialism"--again, with class persisting in their bureaucratic superstructures. (It's also odd that many of capitalist critics who take up this line do so as nominally leftist, posing in one part of their arguments to attack imperfect socialism, while in the next part uncritically celebrating capitalism.)
The second arm of the hypothesis is also contemporary, but only in that it concerns contemporary "primitive" societies. Here we now know, beyond the structuralists' sometimes excellent observations, that there are no real paleolithic societies still in existence. Or even merely ancient ones, for that matter. All these groupings carry on, and have been carrying on for some time, both trade and cultural exchange with the so called developed (capitalist) world. This was the case even before the development of colonialism on a large scale, which coincided more or less with the establishing period of "primitive accumulation" in capital's history.
This was an uneven process, taking place in different times and places, but surprisingly persistent overall across cultures, since it has as its base the buildup of a social-organic system of production. We tend to think of the establishment of the home as the "proper sphere of women" belonging to the history of the monotheistic, Abrahamic faiths (the literary record, uninformed by archaeology and other sciences). But there is every evidence to suggest that this process predates antiquity and that the Abrahamic tradition represents a true imitation of these earlier attempts. In ancient Greece, women were married off to their husbands when they were still teenagers and were kept secluded in the home, formally to protect their virginity, but the effect is the same: the home is designated as "women's space," even as the laws of city life and commerce come to encase this zone, making any gesture to an earlier matrilineality and its institutions less and less powerful. Renfrew's work on Mycenaean society reveals a similar process, and so the descent goes back even further into prehistory (prior to the established written record).
yeah.
What role do you see women having in resisting the forces of capitalism?
I think the version in the Works is revised, longer, with better notes including more contemporary archaeological material.
This debate has been somewhat forgotten in the recent rush of work on prehistory, a discussion that often seems like little more than a revisiting of Gordon Childe's theories on urbanity with added gloss that pretends to be more of an advancement than it really is. For a review of the major trends and positions see Colin Renfrew's "Prehistory: The Making of the Human Mind" (Modern Library, 2008), which makes up for Renfrew's often droning tone by being meticulously detailed in its explications of the various theoretical schools of thought.
In America and Europe, a lot of feminist work in recent decades has centered on efforts to obtain equal pay, hardly a socialist-progressive cause by itself. We may see a change begin to take place--with the debate here and elsewhere over healthcare, an industry where disproprotionate numbers of women work, and with the revival of union politics in the Midwest, there's a need for new ideas and new theories. Contemporary services employee unions and public employee groups are more likely to represent large numbers of women than the old industrial organizations. Whether or not all the activity results in a new praxis that speaks to these workers is another thing.
"One day humanity will play with law just as children play with disused objects, not in order to restore them to their canonical use but to free them from it for good. What is found after the law is not a more proper and original use value that precedes the law, but a new use that is born only after it. And use, which has been contaminated by law, must also be freed from its own value. This liberation is the task of study, or of play. And this studious play is the passage that allows us to arrive at that justice that one of Benjamin's posthumous fragments defines as a state of the world in which the world appears as a good that absolutely cannot be appropriated by the juridical."
This isn't the "post-secular" return to the sublime, or an infinity after-God, or anything like that, either. But simply the world without the law, the world as unassimilable to the law.
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Why-safe-corporate-bonds-apf-1701928262.html?x=0&sec=topStories&pos=6&asset=&ccode=
My favorite quotes:
"This market has gone from stupid to ridiculous." (a Miami money manager)
"All hell is going to break loose in the next 4-5 years...." (in the comments to the story posted on Yahoo!)
By the way, these are exactly the kinds of bonds that make up a large part of the investment-side portfolio of so called "venture capital funds" and other structures that close-to-default states around the US are investing in right now, putting themselves even further into debt.
For a fuller explanation, see the previous post on this blog titled "Why we're broke".
But, what happens to faith itself, in the absence either of community or of any serious "inner" self searching?
Something very sad. Abandoned by community--or denied it in an increasingly anti-social society--faith becomes not only individualized, but overwhelmingly, endlessly invested in the self constructed by capital. That is, faith takes up a permanent relation to the toxic subject, which it has no way to understand, except as a fellow subject of the same faith, and even then a suspicious one.
The toxic subject is without a country, existing in a time and a place filled with enigmatic, frightening others. The subject of faith becomes the subject of the thriller, the suspense noir, the horror movie, the apocalyptic blockbuster--the one lone rock facing a world of chaos. But why should we trust this rock? These are all lonely subjects, enduring in a world that has turned on them. This is the threatened subject, the capital- and state-terrorized subject, the fundamentalist confronting a world filled with nothing but Homo Sacer. Of course, that includes the fundamenalist too, but the fantasy persists.
so...faith gets reinvested in political ideologies, localism, "mediatized" beliefs, apocalypticism (non-economic, non-materialistic) etc. there is a remainder tho...the Real...which none of the various fundamentalisms can deal with, not even as well as communitarian theology used to. people feel abandoned, they drift...or worse, they try to reestablish communities, beliefs, nation-states, economies that are already dead.
Only the containment is failing, and politics is making a comeback, beyond competing fundamentalisms...
What's your take on such a corporate perspective? I shall have to read that essay by Harman. I am currently reading Zombie Capitalism and wish to read more by him in the near future.
Globalized labor in different sectors was based on large numbers of women workers from the beginning because the types of labor globalized first--textiles, small manufacturing--was always overwhelmingly female. The model carried over, like so much in business. There was very little thought involved in the process of globalization--and there still isn't all that much critical thought put into it, even post-crash. Most of the voluminous material produced on it just repeats the same things over and over. The policies that make up globalization (which is not the same thing as global capital) belong to an extremely ideological era in capital's development, so their official critique has always been pretty weak, and pretty bad at predicting any down sides. Just look at how globalization in heavy manufacturing turned out to be far more expensive than everyone thought when they started getting into it. A number of companies almost destroyed themselves doing it.
http://www.aflcio.org/issues/jobseconomy/women/global/WorkersRights.cfm
Hardly a picture of docile female workers.
by the way, i'm going to amsterdam. might as well enjoy a spliff while i still can, hey? some bad media coverage over here has the ban on coffee shops selling weed to tourists already in effect, but (as usual) that's wrong. want to come? last chance unless you manage to make in there before early next year...
I've often thought that fundamentalist preachers who "fall" by getting caught doing something they're not supposed to be doing, something they preach against all the time, seem to plan their fall, so to speak, and that the reconciliation with their flock, too, is planned in this same sense. It's a script built into a religious faith structured around salvation. But the performative doesn't entirely explain it, you're right, or at least it doesn't exhaust the phenomenon. What we need instead, rather than some elaboration of the performative (which might even privilege it as absolute), is a clear statement of what is really going on here. Gadamer puts it succinctly, when he says of the ascent v. the descent, the downward path and the way of salvation: "I think it is a straightforward example of how one and the same thing can look quite different, even opposed." This is a more profound statement than it at first appears--and it has nothing to do with amoralism, or an amoral universe "looking on" while our puny human affairs play themselves out. Gadamer is modern, remember, so he doesn't mean anything other than what he says here: what we are witnessing in one performance (the preacher exhorting his flock to follow him in the way of the Lord) is exactly the same as what we are witnessing in the other (the preacher, fallen from grace, begging to be forgiven). Exhortation, all around.
From the point of view of "interiority," the experience is the same. In a sense, there is only one way of seeing things here. To be involved in, to be a part of, a community and its experiences, is to have your self structured by it. This is what you are, and you have no sense of being anything else. Not at least in relation to these realities, ideas, beliefs etc. The whole complex that makes up religion in a religious community is the self itself. There is nothing else. Even the criticism of the same, from within the community, becomes a part of it, comes in some way from the structure since it makes no sense when it's directed at any other target. The trajectory determines the critique. If it were aimed at anything else, it would unravel. This is why the performative is inadequate to explain what's going on here--it assumes that something exists prior to the event. But what is that? Knowledge? A (pre-existing) transcendent? These are unities after the fact, even after after the fact, that is, after all the states and actions of which we are made are subjectified. The "I" here isn't absolute except as transcendent, as unity.
As faith begins to break down in this structured form, as doubt intervenes in other methodological projects, the self is reshaped. And it's capitalized. But this happens right from the beginning. It's not a product of late capital, or even of the modern era. It's an unraveling that's taking place all the time. Just like the construction of the self under capital, and capital itself and all its relations, is taking place all the time. This is history. There's no end to that until we found a new hegemonic alternative.
It's in the nature of a presentiment to be inadequate as well. It's an indication of events to come and not a new way forward. Doubt, methodological and otherwise, is now trapped in orbit around the object of its own critique: capital. This is why we see the production of so much anticapitalism--resistance to capital--and so few alternatives. And why the endless rehearsal of the story of the "fallen" subject of capital--the CEO, the business type, the conservative, and the liberal, and even the preacher (as far as fundamentalist Christianity is the barely unofficial philosophy of political and legal power in the West)--is the (auto)biographical record of the present crisis. It would seem to lead to something new, redemption, insight, but this is just a return to the same plateau of absoluteness.
The asshole reformed is still the asshole, structurally and in every other sense--it's a non-transformation. "Repent and you shall be forgiven." Only nothing changes. At least in the old religious communities, however off they were in their criteria of judgment, they knew this. Those who repented were indeed forgiven. Then they were cast out, or killed. The modern retains this, and reaches toward clarity without absoluteness. The "postmodern" surrenders, and ends up engaged in an endless round of mutual self-pity with the sources of our misery. We hire them back to run our banks, to run everything.
"In our century the leading natural scientific disciplines...continue to be physics, the theory of relativity, and quantum physics. Here, the problems at the limits of the measuring sciences have eliminated the last vestige of intuitiveness by means of the complete mathematical formulation of physics. The concept of nature in philosophy has been replaced by symmetrical equations.
It will be our task to discuss whether or not the situation of today's natural sciences can also...lead to a new kind of confrontation with the ancient heritage of science. Today, to a certain extent, one could expect biochemistry...to placed at the center of research interests. But it could be that the discredited philosophy of nature, in addition to remembering the ancient concept of physis, will make new problem horizons visible."
and how. yeah.
Amazing work. Gadamer is one of the reasons I'm really not impressed by the anti-academics, at least on this level--all their carping about how academic philosophy is sealed off, irrelevant to the contemporary, etc. Graham Harman's little larvae, in particular, go on and on about how academics have nothing to offer while they're busy feeding off the leftovers of Heidegger, Gadamer, Badiou and other academics, or those who got their start there. What do the anti-academics have to offer instead? "Wilderness philosophy"? Please. That's Heidegger in his hut, the weird, useless Heidegger.
The point is that what the primitivists, and most of the anti-academic crowd, mean to point to with all their broadsides is analytic philosophy. But they don't have the fortitude to name it, so they end up throwing everyone else overboard, too. Sloppy, and dangerous. Remember Rorty, the ultimate academic analytic philosopher, and all that entails, ended his career as an anti-academic, albeit one whose work is deeply entrenched in those structures. Gadamer remained, unapologetically, in his emeritus position until he died at 102.
but it raises a point. what is philosophy? or rather, what makes for good philosophy? is it, "when something else is going on," like with art? are the two related? how?
i think good philosophy is a toolbox of methods. and a search after truth that is useful to people in their fight against power. i don't see why this should exclude continental, or marxist, or even analytic tools...keeping in mind that some of them are more tool-like than others.
yeah.
And no thanks on Amsterdam for now. I'll wait for the movie.
It really shouldn't be an issue. Guys who try too hard with women--try to be sensitive all the time, interested in everything they are, etc.--are usually up to something. Or just trying to get them in the sack.
It was alongside this sort of thing that themes of renunciation and spiritual salvation started to creep in. Sitcoms and other shows really began to get under my skin when they got serious. Themes of death and birth and outright conversion were featured more and more. Something like "The Dick Van Dyke Show" or "Mary Tyler Moore" would be unthinkable today because they're just silly, screwball comedy at their core. Even the gender roles there are not so important. The stories that deal with them address them head-on, but usually only to dismiss them, and show you that "people are people" and so forth--insipid enough, but far preferable to the born-again shit of today.
The only thing worse than the empty paranoid critiques that get things wrong are analyses of them that fail to go beyond opposition and offer any real insight--these theories wallow in the critical and ignore truth. And the truth is that bad art (most pop culture) is a distraction from good art, not from economy. It's politics--the liberal-democratic routine of representative democracy--that is the distraction from economy. There is nothing going on there.
it's the matriarch's job to act as a sort of guardian of her children's dreams, and to judge them, according to their practicality or at least their achievability. this might seem like the father's role, but i think his function in relation to work and the world is to lay down a general framework, with certain landmarks, which is supposed to be used as a guide for all activities. so...he doesn't so much pass judgement on one's aspirations, as he helps to determine how they're conceived of--the list of possibilities--to begin with. he doesn't intervene, unless it's a basic matter of rule-breaking...like going outside of the standard conceptions by choosing an unfamiliar field (the arts for many, but if it's a more intellectual family, maybe manual work which would be considered "beneath" the mark). but the mother's role is more active, she keeps judging things to be inadequate regardless of the choice. this is something that's always brought up as part of a typology in pop culture, like in sitcoms, without ever really being explained--in the nature of typologies. the point is control...and the result is that many people grow up thinking of their mothers as unreasonable, and on some level, unable to determine what is really practical in the world. this could even be the fundamental source of the idea that women are unworldly...especially since we gave up on the "victorian" idea of women's innocence a long time ago. i don't buy the presumption of media stories about cheating, where it's always the man and so forth...it seems like a desperate attempt to re-impose something that noone identifies with in real life. again, the total separation between present media images and street-life. yeah.
What doesn't show up in your brief analysis, however, is how this situation, this political-economic division of family labor, frees women to some extent, so that they're able to participate in subtle, even subterranean critiques of capital. My mother does this. She's very old now, and she fixates on money problems. But she doesn't have any money problems. She's taken care of by myself and my brother and sister, and she has some small fixed income like most old folks. Her fixations on money are all in the form of complaints about various big institutions though. This company or that company is trying to rip her off for a few dollars, or they're not sending her the right forms, etc. This despite the fact that most of her affairs are handled by others. It isn't just her way of keeping in touch with the "real world", either. I mean the world of financial and commercial experience. At some level this could be part of it, but look at the form it takes. It's a basic critique, but a critique of capital, big capital, nevertheless. The problem is in thinking that this will take us somewhere. It's too basic, TOO close to home. It points out another reason, perhaps the best one, to distrust the reliance on localism--any decent radical politics starts with local issues, and at the same time, the point is to get beyond them to some kind of understanding of the major crisis trends in global capital and why they CAN NOT be solved. The social-organic HAS to be re-founded on other means, on something other than this old, exhaused logic of exploitation, for economic as well as real-material reasons. Trajectory is important from the beginning in critique.
A phrase came to me over my vacation:
"God is Disengaged"
Ya know...? Ya know...?