Being & Logos

Leithart
According to Gadamer (Truth and Method (Continuum Impacts), 405), philosophy essentially began with a nominalist move. The “earliest” view saw an “intimate unity of word and thing,” so intimate that the “true name was considered to be part of the bearer of the name.”

Philosophy “more or less began with the insight that the word is only a name – i.e., that it does not represent true being. This is precisely the breakthrough of philosophical inquiry into the territory over which the name had undisputed rule. Belief in the word and doubt about it constitute the problem that the Greek Enlightenment saw in the relationship between word and thing. Thereby the word changed from presenting the thing to substituting for it.”

This inevitably raised the question of whether language can be true at all, and the pressure of this question led Plato away from language to ideas as the locus of truth:

Having rejected the alternative accounts of language in the Cratylus, “Plato wants to demonstrate that no truth . . . can be attained in language – in language’s claim to correctness . . . – and that without words . . . being must be known purely from itself” (p. 407).

And this, Gadamer thinks, is the source of the problems of skepticism, objectivity, and truth in Western philosophy, problems that can only arise when one needs to compare what we say about a thing to what the thing is, a comparison only possible on the assumption that we have non-linguistic access to the thing to which we can compare our linguistic descriptions.

Philosophy begins not with forgetfulness of Being, but with forgetfulness of Logos, in the specific sense of language. Philosophy begins from forgetfulness of the truth that “in the beginning was the word.”

Is Leithart saying (here) that Plato was mistaken, & that his move was a nominalist, minimalist account of the power of Logos, moving away from seeing that the Word is identical to the Thing? If he is, my understanding of Plato is that this is overly simplistic to the point of error. Plato isn't saying that (for example) chanting the names of God or praying the prayer of the heart can't lead one to a realization of the divine shekinah. He is saying that one must first transcend one's own mentation and linguistics, prior to "seeing" God. This means that the "Logos" is not "wordy"or empirical. The Logos is the Divine Idea of God. Augustine canonizes this tradition, later on, and Plotinus explicates it in more nuance.

Are Nations Idols?

Strayer argues that city-states and empires both had their problems, and that “The European states which emerged after 1100 combined, to some extent, the strengths of both the empires and the city-states. They were large enough and powerful enough to have excellent changes for survival – some of them are approaching the thousand-year mark, which is a respectable age for any human organization. At the same time they managed to get a large proportion of their people involved in, or at least concerned with the political process, and they succeeded in creating some sense of common identity among local communities. They got more out of their people, both in the way of political and social activity and in loyalty than the ancient empires had done, even if they fell short of the full participation which had marked a city such as Athens.”

We might add an insight from Adrian Hastings (The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion and Nationalism (1996 Wiles Lectures Given at the Queen’s University of Belfa)), who argues that this middling form of political organization (which he thinks begin much earlier than most contemporary historians would believe) drew their inspiration from Scripture: “The Bible presented Israel itself as a developed model of what it means to be a nation – a unity of people, language, territory and government.” Elsewhere, he adds, “The Old Testament provided the paradigm [of nationhood]. Nation after nation applied it to themselves, reinforcing their identity in the process.” Because they possessed the ark of the covenant, Ethiopians saw themselves as the “true, Christian, Israel.” So did everyone else: “Undoubtedly in Frankish eyes, the French were little less. And, in English eyes, the English. In Serb eyes, the Serbs. . . . Each people sees its ‘manifest destiny’ clearly enough.” Hastings knows that the concept of a “holy people” is “realized in a universal community of faith and by no means in one nation” but he observes that “for ordinary Christians, lay and clerical, that can seem too remote, too unpolitical.” We are likely to have to combat this heresy for a long time to come.

Why would a nation-state be any more inherently idolatrous than "a city set on a hill", or "vital Christianity"?

The Medievals had already solved it

Marx looked forward to the withering of the state. He was centuries
late. Figgis says it already happened in the middle ages:

“As Professor Maitland pointed out, under feudalism there is no public law; all rights are private, including those of the king. It is this absence of a theory of the
State as such which characterises especially medieval history, except for the
great Church as a whole. In the strict sense of the term, there is no sovereign
in the Middle Ages; only as we find even a little later in France, there is an
etat which belongs to the king; but there is also an Etat de la Republique,
while even a lawyer in the Paris Parlement has his etat. Only very
gradually does State come to mean the organisation of the nation and nothing
else.”

Source

Modernity's Beauty?

David Nye points to the fact that experiences of the sublime are not confined to the grand vistas of nature, but are also found in technological and urban civilization.

“A city sounds much different at the top of a skyscraper than on the streets below. The wind makes on feel more vulnerable out on the open span of a long bridge. The steam locomotive shook the ground and filled the air with an alien smell of steam, smoke, and sparks; the Saturn rocket did much the same thing on a larger scale. The strong contrast between the silence of a rocket’s liftoff and the sudden roar that follows a few seconds later is also a vital element in making that spectacle sublime. The sheer size of the crowd attracted to a technological display further arouses the emotions. In each event, the human subject feels that the familiar envelope of sensory experience has been rent asunder.”

Leithart - This quote reminds me of Junger's essay "On Pain" where much the same claim is made.

Universalism

"Against Badiou and Zizek, who want to use Paul to defend a generic “universalism” that can become homogenization, John Caputo (St. Paul among the Philosophers (Indiana Series in the Philosophy of Religion)) argues that the universalism of Paul is more paradoxical, more Kierkegaardian (because Kierkegaard was Pauline): It is a “universalism of conversion to something quite concrete (grafting), not the formalism of a philosophical universal (subtraction), like the principle of causality, or a mathematical universal, like the Pythagorean theorem.”

He goes on to suggest that “it is not that all differences or distinctions are abolished, but that one difference or distinction in particular, the Jewish difference, is transformed and in being transformed proves to be transcendent, or better self-transcendent, in Christ Jesus, in whom it is able to break out of the particularity of the first form it took in the law and to trump and assimilate other differences, both its own early Jewish form and the Greek difference.”

That’s well said. I have more trouble with Caputo’s further claim that “Christ fulfills a Jewish promise, not a Greek one,” a claim based on the notion that events can only be recognized as events within a context and “the Christ-event is an event only in the context of the Jewish promise.” As central as Jewish particularity is, it doesn’t seem correct to say that “The crucifixion and resurrection of Christ is not an event for the Greeks.” The gospel is to the Jew and the to Greek, and it seems that Paul argues for some form of Gentile preparation for the coming of the gospel of the Jewish Jesus."

While it is good that Leithart is stepping back some from earlier statements on "a third way" of humanity = Christianity, and while few people wrestle with the issue at any deeper level, the problem remains within modern Christianity that ethnicity/kinship is a taboo subject which Christians are ill-equipped to handle & which they attempt to efface, just as they do in real life. Pre-committed as we are in our political religion to negating ethnicity, it is hardly virtuous or necessarily Christian to presuppose that such is something to enhance. It might be more productive to consider how Supernature transforms Nature & perfects it, and what this means for ethnicity. Also, how and why might this have implications for larger categories, like "whiteness"?

Spengler (Asia Times Online) declares he has no love for the "stench of the barbarian tribes". To which I would ask, have you seen an inner city ghetto in America lately? Or a nursing home? It's still with us, it's just out of sight, out of mind...this rhetoric begs the question most at stake ~ is there anything of value we have lost during our "evolution" out of tribes? The standard American political religion answer is No, ethnicity has no value whatsoever, or if it does, only in an individual context (miscegenation to create someone of "higher" qualities with another race). (One notable exception, of course.) But isn't this intermarriage just another race? How does this solve anything? It looks a lot (suspiciously a lot) like Hegelian synthesis (which I already reject, for reasons stated elsewhere, and violently). Inbreeding and outbreeding are both qualities of humanity which are valuable; after all, it's good to limit (inbreed) to the species. And Christ came to transform & perfect. Which implies that the nations will exist at the End of Times. Which is exactly what we find in Revelation. St. James warns those who would neglect their kith & kin. As GP Grant might say, our particular good (race/tribe) is not the Ideal, but without roots in the local particular, can we ever be nourished enough to begin the ascent to the Ideal?

The answer, naturally, is No. American political religion is a heresy, a Hegelian superstition and legalism, which is addicted to Idealism in the ideal, but which actually possesses immense hatred for all of the concrete realities it pretends to understand.

And Liberalism has weird connections to Fascism which I don't understand, or think anyone else does either. State control/coercion of economy, culture & religion is pretty close to "Fascist", and we are pretty close to the former, here in America, although much conformity is semi-voluntary (for now).

A Defense of Literary Meanness

In the October 14 issue of TNR, Leon Wieseltier gives a curmudgeonly defense of publishing negative reviews, specifically of the negative review of Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom published in the same issue.

It’s bracing: “A shabby treatment of a consequential subject or a significant form is a corruption, and it is the mark of a reviewer’s depth of conviction, and of her knowledge, to treat it as such, to fight it. An opinion about a book is an opinion about the world. Anger at the false and the fake – as long as the labor of persuasion is done: a curse is not an act of criticism – is an admirable anger, because it is the heat of a cause, and our causes are the spurs of our culture. No culture, no literature, ever advanced by niceness.”

Literature is “a proposal, or an infinity of proposals, for an emendation, or a transformation, of consciousness. It commends ideals of thinking, and even ideals of living; and no such instructions should be exempt from strenuous and unsentimental judgment, from the foul tempers of thoughtful people, or else nothing will weigh anything and we will be only compilations of the trends of our times.”

He is not complimentary to contemporary literary culture:

Readers today receive guidance from “a literary and literary-critical world that is amiable, bland, clubby, pious, careerist, relentlessly cheerful, desperate for numbers, suavely relativizing, and awash in worthless praise. A universe of invitations and congratulations, of pals and candidate-pals appreciating and mythologizing each other. Books are generally assessed only internally, for what ‘works’ and what does not ‘work,’ with synopsis usurping analysis, politely against the background of the author’s literary or personal history, and almost never for the sake of a larger concept, a transcending idea, to which the review, if not the book, should owe its life. Reviews without inner necessity extol books without inner necessity. . . . It is not the responsibility of the critic to lift the spirits of the writer or publisher.”

Bracing as this is, I’m put in mind of Ken Myers’ recent review of Steven D. Smith’s work on law. Smith argues (as I have summarized in a recent post) that our bland public discourse is not accidental, but precisely what our Rawlsian liberal polity called for. Weightlessness is what we want, what our politics and culture are designed to produce. Wieseltier is right to be upset at the thinness of literature and criticism; he should examine what role the magazine that employs him has played in creating what he condemns.

Peter Leithart

All of this reminds me of The Underground Grammarian, who examined the ways in which language was used as a tool of anti-thought and political control. Secular liberal democracy....insofar as it is chaotic and useless, is doomed. Insofar as it "works", it tends to become Fascistic/Totalitarian. It is therefore something that is irrelevant to the informed citizen's future.

The Asia Minor Debacle

Leithart writes, concerning a question which has long troubled me; we'll call it the "mystery of Asia Minor"?

One of the themes of Jenkins’s The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia–and How It Died is that Christianization is reversible: Churches die. How to account for it?

Jenkins He cites on Payne Smith, a Victorian scholar, who wrote in the introduction to the works of John of Ephesus that “the young Mahomet, repelled in his first inquiries by the idolatrous aspect which Christianity outwardly bore, was rising to be the instrument of God’s just anger against the Eastern Church. For the picture which John has drawn for us . . . of the narrowness and bigotry, the fierce strifes, the want of self-restraint, the injustice and cruelty and utter absence of Christian charity, which characterized all parties in his days alike, make us feel that the times were ripe for punishment.”

Jenkins observes, “Obviously, such opinions carry little weight for most mainstream Christians today.” Call me “a modern reader of literal inclinations” or a non-mainstream Christian, but I fail to see why Jenkins is so skeptical. Suppose we just lopped off the divine dimension of Smith’s explanation: Would internecine conflict among Christians, bigotry, injustice and cruelty be a sufficient explanation for the failure of these churches? Or: Would it be a sufficient explanation if we noted that the churches of John’s day failed entirely to live up to the demands of their professed Lord, that they were hypocritical, that their actions belied their proclamation that Jesus had come to renew human life? Why does adding the theological dimension make this explanation less weighty?

Jenkins characterizes this style of explanation as an “Old Testament perspective.” He should read Revelation 2-3 again.

posted by Peter J. Leithart on Thursday, August 12, 2010 at 1:23 pm

The question of idolatry obscures things somewhat, for Leithart, here. There is clearly (at least) a symbolic connection between the Reformation and Islam (as Oswald Spengler has trenchantly pointed out in his Untergang des Abendlandes, Vol. I & II). This doesn't minimize the fact that government endorsement had somewhat compromised the Gospel by the time of Mahomet.