the church and postmodern culture: conversation

On Risks Worth Taking: A Reply to Smerick and Minister

This post is a reply to the previous posts by Christina Smerick and Stephen Minister as part of the review symposium on God and the Other: Ethics and Politics After the Theological Turn (Indiana University Press, 2011). 

By: J. Aaron Simmons, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Furman University  

 

Let me begin by thanking Professor Smith for his invitation to host this symposium on my recent book, God and the Other: Ethics and Politics After the Theological Turn.  I also want to thank Professor Smerick and Professor Minister for their careful analyses of the book and especially for the serious criticisms they offer.  In this reply to Smerick and Minister, I will not only respond to their criticisms, but also attempt to clarify a few things about the intention of the book itself.

In light of Professor Smerick’s suggestion that my “main concern seems to be to ‘translate’ Continental philosophy’s main constructs to appear more reasonable and ‘grounded’ than they are often understood to be,” I want to make clear that my goal is less one of translation and more one of expanded conversation.  In the introduction to God and the Other, I outline three guiding questions for the book.  The third of these questions is: “Can the insights of Continental philosophy of religion and Continental ethico-political philosophy be brought into a productive conversation with ‘mainstream’ debates in Anglo-American philosophy?” (7)  My answer to this question (at least as presented in the book) is less of an unqualified “yes” than it is of an “I hope so” or, even better, “we should try.”  We should try because it is problematic to think that one philosophical tradition would have an exclusive grasp of truth while all of the work occurring in other traditions would rest on mistakes and misunderstandings.  For ease of reference, let’s term this view “disciplinary exclusivism.”  It is important to understand that I am not attributing such an exclusivist view to any specific thinker(s).  Rather, I see it as a temptation that can creep into one’s professional life for all sorts of reasons and, even if no one else is tempted by it, I know that I occasionally am (surely everything I believe is right, right?).  Moreover, I do not think that the temptation toward disciplinary exclusivism only affects continental philosophers; it can certainly run in other directions such that continental thought is what gets excluded. 

That said, in light of this temptation, I think that philosophers who take seriously the Socratic admonition to “follow inquiry wherever it may lead” would do well to remain open to the possibility that inquiry might best be served when one stands in conversation with those outside one’s own community (or professional society).  Now, crucially, this conversation may for the most part be quite critical.  This critical engagement, however, is not something of which philosophers should be wary.  The worry is that the temptation to disciplinary exclusivism can potentially give rise to what I term philosophical “cliquism” (7), which I take to be an obstacle to inquiry precisely because it would already too narrowly circumscribe where such inquiry could go.  For those who have not read God and the Other, let me note that I do not affirm the reality of such cliquism, but merely raise it as a possibility that can emerge if the answer to the question about bringing Continental philosophy and Aglo-American philosophy into conversation is “no.”  Accordingly, I would not say that my “main concern” is a project of translation, though there are certainly moments in the text where I do engage in such work, but instead one of encouraging dialogue where it has not been as prominent as it might have been.  However, my commitment to dialogue is not simply for the sake of dialogue.  As I see it, the central task of God and the Other is to demonstrate how key questions in the philosophy of religion and political philosophy are more productively addressed when one is receptive to both Continental and non-Continental voices.  In other words, I think that there are good reasons to affirm a Levinasian account of subjectivity, a Kierkegaardian approach to faith, and a Derridian model of democracy.  Nonetheless, these perspectives are themselves enriched and made more plausible when drawing upon, for example, Robert Audi’s notion of modest foundationalism, Susan Wolf’s critique of moral sainthood, and the excesses that attend to some dimensions of John Rawls’s political liberalism.  Though there are certainly risks when one attempts to draw upon different perspectives (sometimes entailments and assumptions can be introduced that lead to possible incoherence at different levels), I think that following inquiry wherever it may lead requires us to take this risk.  Hence, I do not think that I am asking Continental philosophy “to speak the language of analytic philosophy in order to be considered ‘legitimate’,” as Professor Smerick suggests.  Rather, I am attempting to work though issues such as political criticism, postmodern religious belief, and ethical normativity in a way that does not offer merely a “Continental” perspective or a non-Continental perspective, but instead provides what I hope is an account that is well-argued and made all the more substantive precisely because it draws upon relevant philosophical resources wherever they may be found.  Though it might seem trivial, I think the best philosophy occurs when we are motivated to answer difficult questions even if doing so might put in jeopardy our prior commitments. 

Nonetheless, one of the risks that Professor Smerick rightly cautions against is the possibility that when one brings Continental and non-Continental philosophy together it is easy to fall back into the “very ideas or lingo that Levinas, et al., was trying to problematize: that of agency and choice.”  I wholeheartedly agree that this is troubling and, if I am guilty of it, that it would indeed be at odds with one of the underlying claims of God and the Other—namely, New Phenomenology (when read in light of an engagement between Kierkegaard and Levinas) provides a more robust ontological account than one finds in liberalism (whether classical or contemporary).  Crucially, one of the key components of this ontology, which I term the “ontology of constitutive responsibility,” is that it does not rest upon autonomy and agency, but instead on heteronomy and obligation.  While I appreciate Professor Smerick’s objection, which I admit is perhaps invited by my occasional use of words like ‘assent’, ‘endorse’, and ‘affirm’, I want to suggest that there might be a confusion of levels occurring between my use of such terms and Professor Smerick’s critique of such use.  This can be illustrated by turning to her defense of a Levinasian approach to ethics, which she takes to be occasionally at odds with my own supposedly Levinasian account. 

While Professor Smerick is absolutely correct to say that “using [the] language of ‘assent’ seems very problematic when applied to Levinas, as it may indicate a self-that-asserts rather than a self that is itself constituted by the gaze of the Other,” I do not think that this poses a problem to my argument.  Notice that the passage from God and the Other quoted prior to Professor Smerick’s claim reads as follows: “Levinas and Kierkegaard . . . offer an account of human subjectivity and sociality that is worthy of our assent precisely because . . .” (32).  Here the use of “assent” is in reference to what account of subjectivity one decides to affirm.  Obviously there are many alternatives from which one can choose and when one chooses between such accounts one gives assent to one account while not giving assent to others.  This is not a matter of subjectivity itself, but of the account of subjectivity one considers to be true.  If giving one’s assent to the ontology of constitutive responsibility entails rejecting the priority of the Other found in Levinas, then this would indeed be a problem (since I have claimed that this ontology is in line with Levinas’s notion).  However, my contention is that one of the reasons that such a Levinasian ontology is worth assenting to is its ability to challenge the self-priority found in so many alternative ontologies. 

Part of assenting to the ontology of constitutive responsibility is recognizing that there is a deeper level of ethico-religious relationality that establishes selfhood prior to any autonomous decision of the self.  Nonetheless, affirming such relationality does not lessen the importance of choosing here and now how best to live in the world as a result of being constituted by the call/command of the Other.  Being (pre)originally given over to the Other does not mean that I am somehow not required to answer for what I do or do not believe, say, do, and endorse within my specific historical and political context.  I would even go as far as suggesting that for Levinas and Derrida this is precisely the underlying reason for why justice is said to be “impossible.”  My proposal is not that we abandon the language of autonomy and agency, but that we relocate such language as occurring on this side of the subjectivity that has always already been established by the Other’s call/command.  Now, I do think that Professor Smerick is right to say that I attempt to “arrive at some sort of normativity” in Levinas because I am worried about the problems that accompany a purely descriptive account.  Yet, I think that the place to look for such normativity (and I work this out in the last chapter of God and the Other) is the lives of individuals who have struggled with the requirement of choosing how to live in the world in light of assenting to an ontology of constitutive responsibility whereby the self is not its own ground. 

In response to Professor Smerick’s suggestion that I think that “if these thinkers will not tell us how to live . . . then they have no pragmatic advice to provide the world, and thus Rorty and others are right to dismiss them,” I want to draw a distinction between telling one how to live (which I take to be too authoritarian and final) and giving pragmatic advice (which I take to be dialogical and thoroughly revisable, though I don’t remember using that specific terminology).  New Phenomenology is decidedly not the right place to go for a thick theory of ethical and political normativity such that one could algorithmically live a righteous life simply by following a set of codified rules or instructions.  However, one of the central theses of God and the Other is that New Phenomenology can be read, nonetheless, as relevant to difficult realities that accompany postmodern social existence.  Part III of God and the Other is a series of suggestions on how the ontology of constitutive responsibility might offer productive ways forward for such issues as religious belief, epistemic justification, religion in the public square, climate change, and moral guidance.  While it is entirely plausible that others might take issue with the specific ways in which I work out some of the possible implications of New Phenomenology in such areas, I think that a more robust conversation about such implications would be a step in the right direction for overcoming the Rortian charge that much of continental philosophy is disconnected with the real struggles that individuals face.  Although we should not miss the weight of Professor Smerick’s question: “if one wants to hold that the subject/object dichotomy is not just problematic, but perhaps unethical in its very structure, how does one, who takes one’s subjected self seriously, agree to submit to a language that seems inherently unjust?”, my answer to this question is quite simple: we should give good reasons internal to the context of one’s discursive community for doing so or refusing to do so.  Yet, since I believe that the stakes of epistemology are ethical, giving good reasons is as much an ethical demand as it is an epistemic requirement (see Chapter 11 of God and the Other).  Accordingly, the Levinasian should be especially attuned to speaking in a way that does not prevent others from joining the conversation, but actively invites them to do so.  This is not tantamount to asking Continental philosophy “to adopt a language that it is trying to interrogate,” as Professor Smerick says, but rather amounts to trying to do the hard work of resisting the complacency that can accompany preaching to the choir, as it were.  This is the key move to my defense of democracy in God and the Other, and I appreciate Professor Smerick’s claim that I do not do enough on this front (especially as it concerns the work of Gianni Vattimo).  Though I have written other essays that attempt to go further in this regard, perhaps I should have done more in God and the Other as well.  Regardless, while it is tempting to give in to disciplinary exclusivism, it is also risky trying to resist such a temptation by seemingly calling into question one’s own tradition at key points.  For good Levinasian reasons, though, it is a risk worth taking, and I do not think that God and the Other is unique in this regard.  Many others have also attempted to work at similar intersections while taking similar risks—to name but a few, consider the work of Merold Westphal, John Davenport, James K.A. Smith, Bruce Ellis Benson, as well as that of the second of my reviewers, Stephen Minister.    

Let me, then, turn to the two main objections offered by Professor Minister.  On the one hand, he suggests that since I do not spell out in enough detail exactly what I mean by the “God-relation,” the bi-directional relationality I advocate is not adequately supported.  On the other hand, he challenges my proposal of a deconstructive approach to justification by claiming that all one needs is an understanding of “justifying” as an ongoing social phenomenon.  Though a substantial response to each of these criticisms would take a full essay in its own right, in brief I want to say that I actually agree (to some extent) with both of the objections as being quite on the mark.  I do think that I leave the “God-relation” underdeveloped and, as such, Professor Minister is right to wonder if more than merely leaving space for a postmodern apologetics, my account actually requires a supplemental apologetics (and he even suggests that it might require a theology) if I am to make the case for the bi-directional relationality.  That said, this underdevelopment was not an oversight on my part, but the result of an intentional attempt to think through the structural relationship between the relation to God and the relation to the Other (and the attending implications for ontology, subjectivity, politics, etc.) and not the specifics of a particular way of understanding that relationship as historically deployed internal to Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, etc., and, I would even say, internal to Atheism. 

Of course Levinas and Kierkegaard (and Derrida, Henry, Marion, and others) will understand the content of the God-relation in different ways.  In this book, my goal was not to defend one specific content as more philosophically plausible (or even more pragmatically worthwhile) than another content, but simply to contend for the importance of keeping the Other-relation and the God-relation both in play and in tension with each other.  My hope is that God and the Other stands as an invitation to others operating from within different religious backgrounds and internal to different religious communities to see the ontology of constitutive responsibility and the attendant bi-directional relationality to be a helpful framework for thinking through different ways of understanding the God-relation itself.  So, I take the underdeveloped notion of the God-relation to stand as a strength for opening spaces for the political import of New Phenomenology beyond the primarily Christian and Jewish perspectives of its main proponents.  I grant that it is important to go beyond this structural account and get into the hard work of dealing with specifics, but I see that as a different project motivated by a different question.  For my own part, I do attempt to go further in this direction elsewhere.  For a book entitled Religion with Religion, that (ironically) Professor Minister and I are co-editing, I have written an essay entitled “Apologetics After Objectivity.”  Therein, I attempt to sketch what such a postmodern apologetic enterprise might look like in the context of Pentecostal Christianity (though my arguments there are certainly not limited to such a perspective). 

Regarding Professor Minister’s suggestion that we do not need a “full-blown, normative account of justification,” I think our disagreement lies in what counts as such a full-blown account.  I am very sympathetic with Professor Minister’s claim that descriptive relativism need not imply metaphysical relativism, and I grant that there is a danger of theories of epistemic justification “risk[ing] closing off the critical conversation with others.”  When one begins to speak about whether someone is or is not justified in affirming a particular belief, say, there is always the worry that claims to being within “my epistemic rights” can end up masking a persistent dogmatism. While granting this serious worry, which I think raises the same point regarding the ethical stakes of epistemology that I attempt to do in the book, I again think that offering an account of justification compatible with New Phenomenology is a risk worth taking.  Indeed, I would suggest that Professor Minister’s own notion of “justifying” is quite plausibly framed as a “full-blown” epistemic theory of justification in its own right—namely, I take it to be a variety of epistemic infinitism (which is a theory that suggests reasons are ongoing and nonrepeating, and has been defended variously by such thinkers as Peter Klein, Scott Aikin, and a few others).  The dangers of dogmatism are significant if a particular theory of justification allows for finality, certainty, or indefeasibility.  However, according to the modest foundationalism I propose as consistent with the philosophy of New Phenomenologists such as Levinas and Derrida (drawing on such philosophers as Robert Audi, William Alston, Nicholas Wolterstorff, and Alvin Plantinga), none of these temptations toward dogmatism remain in place.  Instead, we are left with an account that is sensitive to non-inferential sources of belief while admitting that the beliefs we hold about how best to account for these sources (the particular content that we affirm about the ethical relation or the God-relation, say) are themselves bound up in language games, practices, histories, and shared understandings that occur internal to the community or communities in which one finds oneself. 

While strong foundationalism  or even some thick varieties of coherentism might indeed lead to the sort of dogmatism about which Professor Minister rightly worries, I do not see that modest foundationalism does so.  In fact, I think that abandoning the attempt to give a theory of justification might be likely to yield its own version of dogmatism.  That is, if we do not have a “full-blown” theory of justification (in the sense that it is not merely a descriptive but also a normative account), then it is hard to see what would prevent the conversations occurring “in the context of the shard social existence of responsible subjects” from being merely self-interested manifestations of power-play.  What something like a deconstructive approach to modest foundationalism gets us is a reason for understanding what is required of “responsible subjects” when it comes to the ethics of belief.  Importantly, the normative account of modest foundationalism is itself open for revision and so already allows for the ongoing “justifying” called for by Professor Minister.  However, within such an epistemic framework, which is itself ethically demanded according to the ontology of constitutive responsibility, I think that we have good reasons to keep the critical conversation going as not only an epistemic task, but also as an ethico-religious requirement.  Nonetheless, I do think that Professor Minister’s suggestion that we need to focus more on the constant social dimensions of justification itself is exactly right.  In a paper I recently co-authored with Scott Aikin, we attempt to make such a move.  Therein, Aikin and I argue that something like an “impure epistemic infinitism” (which would allow for modest foundationalist doxastic inputs) might come as close as we can get to a theory that recognizes both the virtues of a full-blown theory of justification, as it were, and also the importance of keeping the process of reason-backing ongoing in the context of “social justifying,” as Professor Minister might say.  As I see it, this impure epistemic infinitism is another way of cashing out the basic idea of a “recursive hermeneutics,” which I defend at length in God and the Other.    

Let me again express my genuine gratitude to Professor Smerick and Professor Minister for their thoughtful and engaging criticism.  I hope that my replies here to their insightful objections serve to stimulate further conversation in the “comments” section of the Church and Postmodernism website. 

"God and the Other" Symposium: Part 2

The second instalment in our review symposium on Aaron Simmons' God and the Other: Ethics and Politics after the Theological Turn is from Stephen Minister who is assistant professor of philosophy at Augustana College in South Dakota where he specializes in continental philosophy and ethics.

 

Simmons’ God and the Other is an impressive work, both in its range of ambition and its ability to deliver sophisticated, illuminating, and well-reasoned analyses across this range.  It is bound to shake up contemporary religious thought by demonstrating the viability of a continental philosophy of religion that is theistic not only in name but in substance, while also bringing together analytic and continental philosophers of religion into one coherent dialogue.

Simmons argues for three main theses.  First, despite their postmodern opposition to metanarratives, Søren Kierkegaard, Emmanuel Levinas, and the thinkers doing “new phenomenology” all advance an “ontology of constitutive responsibility” which offers an interpretation of the human that is contrary to the dominant strands of modern philosophy.  Secondly, contrary to Dominique Janicaud’s accusations of religious dogmatism, the new phenomenology of thinkers such as Jean-Luc Marion, Michel Henry, Jean-Louis Chrétien is properly phenomenological.  Finally, Simmons argues that the ontology of constitutive responsibility offers vital resources for the challenges of contemporary life.  As a performative argument for the practical relevance of this philosophical project, the final section of the book considers the implications of this ontology for religion, ethics, and politics, including a specific application of his notion of responsibility to the issue of climate change.  In arguing for these theses, Simmons is seeking to justify both the philosophical legitimacy and the ethical and political value of “God-talk” in a postmodern context.  Anyone interested in either of those questions will find this book to be a very worthwhile and stimulating read.

 In order to illuminate the obstacles to his project, Simmons turns to Richard Rorty who serves as the main antagonist throughout because he rejects the necessity and even possibility of grounding our ethical and political thinking in an ontological account of humanity.  Simmons is concerned that without such an account Rorty’s social vision lacks anything resembling a rational defense and so ultimately and paradoxically relies on political power play to achieve its goal of peaceful, autonomous co-existence.  It is precisely because Simmons shares Rorty’s belief in the pre-eminence of working for a better, more humane and just social future, that he endeavors to show that such an ontological account is philosophically possible and can be practically helpful in achieving this better future.  As this move illustrates, key to Simmons’ project is a much-needed resurrection (albeit with fallibilistic, hermeneutic bents) of some traditional philosophical notions that postmodernity seemed to have left for dead, such as ontology, epistemology, and justification.

 As Simmons points out all practical ethical and political action is inextricably tied up with an understanding, usually unthought and implicit, of ourselves as humans, that is, with an ontology.  Precisely because of their practical significance, we ought to articulate and philosophically think these ontologies, even if we no longer believe philosophy can secure the final, right answer.  The account that Simmons argues for here is what he calls the “ontology of constitutive responsibility,” where the responsibility is “bi-directional,” both to God and to singular others.  This account, which Simmons develops primarily from the work of Kierkegaard and Levinas, thinks of subjectivity as open, vulnerable, embodied, and always already called into loving relations with God and others.  This account contrasts sharply with the dominant modern ontologies that define the human in terms of self-interest or autonomy.

Establishing such a bi-directional responsibility from Kierkegaard requires refuting the notion that for Kierkegaard our religious duty negates our ethical responsibilities to others.  To this end, Simmons offers a sophisticated and compelling reading of Fear and Trembling in which he shows that Abraham’s God-relation does not eclipse, but actually intensifies his ethical responsibility to Isaac.  With regard to Levinas, Simmons’ account of bi-directionality amounts to a rejection of those readings that collapse all of Levinas’s references to God into the idea of responsibility to others.  Simmons suggests that such readings are unnecessarily tone-deaf to the consistent and significant place of God in Levinas’s philosophical work.  Nonetheless, as Simmons acknowledges, within their bi-directional ontologies Kierkegaard seems to give priority to the God-relation and Levinas to the Other-relation.  Herein Simmons leaves the question of priority undecided, suggesting instead that we see these two relations in an ongoing tension.  Tension is for Simmons, as equivalent concepts are for Kierkegaard and Levinas, a positive, productive force that, in preventing comfortable complacency, can drive us forward to a future of more faithful, ethical action.

 While I find Simmons’ readings of these thinkers’ works generally compelling, I’m not sure what a God-relation means in this book.  Certainly, Kierkegaard, the Lutheran, and Levinas, the Jew, have rather different conceptions of this.  Simmons is eager to avoid reducing God to an abstract term or mere reference to ethical responsibility as we find in much continental philosophy of religion.  However, since the notion of God in Simmons’ book is so regularly coupled with the notion of a responsibility to others, I’m not sure what a relation to God entails over and beyond such responsibility.  Moreover, given the fact that responsibility to a multiplicity of others already provokes tension—hence the difficulties of the political—it is not clear why we need a relation to God to add more tension.  Without answers to these questions, it is not clear what the force of the bi-directionality really is.  I get the sense that when he refers to a relation to God, Simmons has in mind something more Kierkegaardian, like a relationship with a personal, accessible, loving “being,” but this is not explicitly developed here.  Simmons rightly notes that his work opens up the possibility of a postmodern Christian apologetics.  Perhaps more than that, maintaining bi-directionality actually requires such an apologetics and correlative theology.  This point need not be read as a criticism.  God and the Other is primarily about ethics and politics, not apologetics and theology.  One book can only do so much and this book already does a lot.

Two of Simmons’ other resurrected philosophical notions are epistemology and justification.  Because much of postmodern thinking is, as the name suggests, born out of the rejection of the modern philosophical project, it consistently emphasizes the permanent failure of epistemology, the non-existence of neutral, unbiased Reason, and the impossibility of ever giving a final, true metaphysical account.  While accepting all of these postmodern points, Simmons helpfully clarifies that the rejection of modernity’s capital-R Reason need not precipitate the end of reason-giving.  Since at least Kierkegaard, philosophers have spilt much ink giving reasons for the death of Reason.  What is more, to abandon reason-giving isn’t just philosophical laziness for Simmons, but actually an abdication of ethical responsibility.  His ontology of constitutive responsibility to multiple singular others precisely calls us to reason-giving, even as it defies the possibility of possessing Reason “whole and entire” within oneself (Descartes) that “determines quite precisely what is to be done…with respect to all duty in general” (Kant).  If we are to work towards a just and peaceful social existence, we must be willing to engage each other in reasoned discussion, exposing our views to the criticism of others and listening critically to theirs as well.  Hence, throughout his work Simmons gives arguments for his positions, rather than appeals to religious dogma, power, aesthetics, or authority, and then willingly submits his work to critical reviews.  There is nothing in any of this fallible reason-giving the guarantees that we’re getting at truth, but it is politically and interpersonally significant nonetheless.

In pressing this point, Simmons brings in analytic epistemology to devise an account of epistemic justification.  Simmons advocates a “modest” or “minimalist” foundationalism, according to which beliefs are justified either through logical reference to other justified beliefs or when grounded in experience.  Simmons notes that this notion of foundationalism, as developed by Robert Audi, William Alston, and Alvin Plantinga, is fallibilistic and so contrary to any form of foundationalism that would claim we can get at a certain, fixed foundation for knowledge.  While I applaud Simmons for practicing what he preaches in being open to voices, such as those of analytic philosophers, that are critical of his tradition, and while this account strikes me as a generally accurate description of belief-formation, it remains unclear why endorsing the value of reason-giving requires a full-blown, normative account of justification.  Once we have a clear account of when a belief is justified, once I can know that I am, in the words of Plantinga, within my “epistemic rights” in holding a certain belief, then doesn’t this risk closing off the critical conversation with others that Simmons advocates?

 Simmons seems to turn to this epistemology in order to ward off the accusations of relativism or arbitrariness that sometimes dog continental philosophy.  It seems to me that reading this epistemology as a descriptive account of belief-formation, rather than a normative account of justification, is sufficient to accomplish this.  If beliefs are grounded (or through faulty logic or misperception sometimes misgrounded) in other beliefs or lived-experience, then regardless of whether beliefs are justified, they’re never arbitrary, but are always relative to lived-experience.  This descriptive relativism, need not imply metaphysical relativism, but instead in the context of the shared social existence of responsible subjects seems to call for precisely the conversation and discussion among people with diverse experiences that Simmons advocates.  So why not replace “justification,” a misleading and potentially dangerous honorific, with the permanent task of “justifying,” that is, the non-conclusive activity of giving honest reasons to others and listening to their responses in order to jointly think through our beliefs and actions.  After all, isn’t that what philosophy (analytic and continental), new phenomenology, God and the Other, and this very book review do anyway?

WPS CFP: "Curb Your Enthusiasm?"

Call for Papers | 2012 Meeting of the Wesleyan Philosophical Society

Curb Your Enthusiasm?  Philosophy and Religious Experience

Location: Trevecca Nazarene University, Nashville, Tennessee

Conference Date:  March 1, 2012

Proposals Due Date:  October 1, 2011

Keynote Speaker: Merold Westphal, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy Emeritus (Fordham University)

Lectures: “Faith as Passion” and “Reason as Dispassion”

Not all that calls itself faith is passionate and not all that calls itself reason is dispassionate, thus the aim of these lectures will be to sort out the possibilities.

Conference Theme:

Enthusiasm was described by John Locke as a form of mental assent distinct from both reason and faith, an assent fueled by nothing other than a vain and groundless conviction that one is the recipient of illumination by the Spirit of God.  Locke was among the first in a long line of early modern thinkers, including John Wesley and Immanuel Kant, who warned of the epistemological, ethical, religious and socio-political dangers of countenancing enthusiasm and enthusiasts.  Currently, however, there are calls within the philosophical community urging us to reconsider the modernist marginalization of religious experience as a warrant for belief and action.  These calls span the analytic and continental divide, with some arguing that claims like ‘God spoke to me’ express properly basic beliefs for which no further evidence is available nor needed and others inviting us to practice philosophy within a discursive space delimited by particularistic creedal confessions.  Questions considered relevant to the theme of the conference include, but are certainly not limited to, the following:

• Does religious experience warrant a belief in existence of God or perhaps more controversially a divinely inspired call to action?
• How do issues of ethnicity, gender or class factor into accounts and critiques of religious experience?
• Why were early moderns concerned about countenancing enthusiastic religious experiences and should we share these concerns?
• What should we say about purported experiences of the demonic?
• What are the implications of mystical experience for the philosophy of language?
• Can the public squares of long-standing liberal democracies or trying-to-emerge democracies accommodate appeals to particularist religious experience? And if not, should we care?
• What, if anything, distinguishes ecstatic aesthetic and religious experience?

 

We will also consider submissions on any philosophical issue, with priority given to those dealing with the selected theme. 

Special Note: This year we intend to host a special session on feminist perspectives on the issues under consideration.  Please note on the proposal form if the submission ought to be considered for this session. 

Please submit proposals of 250-500 words, the title of the abstract, along with name, position, and institutional affiliation (if applicable) to Brint Montgomery at Brint@snu.edu by October 1, 2011. The proposal should be sent as an email attachment in Microsoft Word format. Each proposal will undergo a double-blind peer review process.

Please check the WPS website updates for exact hotel and meeting site information at: http://wps.snu.edu. The Wesleyan Theological Society will be holding its annual meeting at Trevecca Nazarene University, March 2-3, 2012.

"God and the Other" Symposium: Part 1

Our first engagement with Aaron Simmons' God and the Other: Ethics and Politics after the Theological Turn  comes from Christina Smerick who holds the Shapiro Chair in Jewish-Christian Studies at Greenville College.

 

I am honored to have been asked to weigh in on Dr. Simmons’ weighty tome, God and the Other: Ethics and Politics After the Theological Turn.  I find myself in much sympathy with this intricate and wide-ranging text.  Its goals are lofty and laudable: to find areas of common interest between analytic and Continental philosophy, particularly regarding religion, ethics, and politics; and to demonstrate that Continental philosophy does indeed offer us concrete ways of navigating the world and living out our responsibility to and for it and for Others (be they human, divine, or…other).  These are difficult goals to achieve, and Simmons comes closer than most, even if I do have some concerns about what is sacrificed in order to arrive at these objectives.  First, however, I would like to touch upon the many strengths of this work.

Simmons evidences a deep understanding of both Continental philosophy’s language and methods, and analytic philosophy’s structures and concerns.  His main concern seems to be to ‘translate’ Continental philosophy’s main constructs to appear more reasonable and ‘grounded’ than they are often understood to be.  As such, the ‘translation’ is mostly in one direction: that of translating Continental philosophy into terms and structures more familiar to analytic philosophers.  In the first part of the text, he provides an in-depth reading of Soren Kierkegaard and Emmanuel Levinas, taking these thinkers as prime examples of  ‘Other’-first methods of philosophy.  While Kierkegaard maintains that this Other is primarily God, and Levinas insists that the Other who ‘comes first’ is the other person, Simmons demonstrates their areas of overlapping concern and has almost convinced me that Kierkegaard does have a ‘politics’ lurking in his existential philosophy. 

Simmons also claims that, “Levinas and Kierkegaard...offer an account of human subjectivity and sociality that is worthy of our assent precisely because it is one according to which all inhabitants of the earth are part of the same ethico-political community,” (32).  While I find this claim too bold (using language of ‘assent’ seems very problematic when applied to Levinas, as it may indicate a self-that-asserts rather than a self that is itself constituted by the gaze of the Other), this reading of both philosophers makes them more palatable to someone coming from a place of critique similar to Richard Rorty.  Simmons’ term for this human subjectivity is “constitutive responsibility”.  Rather than seeing the world in the Foucauldian sense of politics and power plays ‘going all the way down,’ Simmons is arguing that Continental Philosophy, via the figures of Kierkegaard, Levinas, Derrida, etc., offers an ontology of the ‘self’ that is first and foremost ‘ethical’.  The self is itself in its submission to the ethical, rather than as a freestanding cogito or ego ‘self-presencing’ itself.  I find this argument to be very helpful in framing Continental philosophy’s provisional conclusions in a language that may resonate with more traditional philosophical language. 

The work’s other concerns are to demonstrate the practicality of Continental philosophy’s constructs, and to address the ‘theological turn’ that it is ‘accused’ of making.  In this area, I found his account of Derrida’s philosophy to be particularly strong.  The notion of the ‘messianic’ in Derrida, while not strictly speaking ‘religious, suggests another plane than the lateral one we assume to be operative. Accordingly, the distinction between what politics can reasonably achieve and what our hope is regarding ethical relations must be maintained. Rather than imagining ourselves as the bringers of a future utopia, if only we work hard enough, get enlightened enough, sympathize with the other enough, religious thinkers maintain a ‘both/and’ dynamic.   The political as such will never be able to achieve justice, because by its very structure there will be losers and winners; but this does not get us off the hook, as we are still called to live toward a future Justice-to-come.  Simmons is not content to remain within the atheistic religiosity of Derrida, however, and makes the case that there is space within Continental philosophy not just for religious language, but also for specific religious beliefs.  In particular, the kenosis of Christ as a specific religious belief resonates strongly with Continental philosophy’s concerns for the Other, and its desire to maintain a construction of the self that is addressed by, rather than addressing, God and the world.  Simmons completes his project by attempting to bring Continental Philosophy ‘down to earth’ via exemplars—people who have embodied in some way the ‘trust and hope’ Simmons finds in the works of Continental philosophers.

Given the scope of the project, there are some areas in which Simmons may have over-reached.  For example, it seems at times as if he is trying to arrive at some sort of ‘normativity’ in Levinas--he does not want Levinas to remain primarily descriptive, because then the accusations that Levinas (or Derrida or Kierkegaard) is ‘inapplicable’ to real life seem to hold water.  If these thinkers will not tell us how to live, it seems, then they have no pragmatic advice to provide the world, and thus Rorty and others are right to dismiss them (111).  I agree that what we stand to gain from Continental philosophy is a notion of selfhood that disallows the collapse into reified notion of the liberal individual self, acting out of her own self-interest in the polis, with other free individuals.  The stories we tell ourselves about our relations with Others define the political landscape and delimit what we see as possible (or impossible)--thus, a different account of subjectivity, one that prioritizes the Other rather than the Self all the way down to the ontological level, is a crucial gift Continental philosophy can provide.  However, extending this gift to a more pragmatic level of ethical systematicity or ‘advice’ seems to be a stretch. 

Secondly, I am a fan of Gianni Vattimo, but I think Simmons lets him off the hook here.  The main issue I have with Vattimo’s philosophy is that it seems to adopt a loose notion of the liberal self: one imbedded in a hermeneutic and a tradition, to be sure, but a self that can act and will act freely within those bounds.  I think this blind spot in Vattimo’s perhaps problematic ontology of the being of the self is similar to Simmons’ relatively unexamined (in this text) belief in democracy--in fact, in such a  thorough work as this, his light treatment of democracy as the ‘hope’ for the world seems out of place. 

However, my main concern throughout the text is this: the manner in which Simmons frames the conflict between analytic and Continental philosophy  falls back into the very ideas or lingo that Levinas, et al, was trying to problematize: that of agency and choice.  Simmons writes in the introduction, “Unless I put the Other ‘first’ and work to make the world better for her...this ‘firstness’ risks becoming only a theoretical perspective and not a way of life,” (6).  If one falls back upon this language of agency, one undermines the ‘firstness’ that Simmons wants to retain.  The language of agency and action may be part of why we are not yet ethical.  We are not eager to be ‘submitted’ to one another, not eager to be submissive, to be responsive rather than active.  This is the key insight that Levinas’ philosophy provides us.  Further, while I am in deep sympathy with the call for ‘clarity’ that Simmons echoes, I am concerned that Continental philosophy is being asked to speak the language of analytic philosophy in order to be considered ‘legitimate’.  Thus, Continental philosophy is asked to adopt a language that it is trying to interrogate.  This implies a power dynamic, suggesting that those who are ‘serious’ about the world will only allow such philosophy in as submits to the subject/object dichotomy and language. I am in hesitant agreement with Simmons’ insistence that Continental philosophy cannot expect to be taken seriously by non-Continental philosophers without joining in some common language game.   However, is capitulation to the categories of analytic philosophy necessary for dialogue, or merely the rendering palatable of a language that seeks to avoid such palatability--and seeks to avoid it for ethical reasons?  Should analytic philosophy justify itself in the same way to Continental philosophy--speak its language? To his credit, Simmons raises this very question, and even points out that he may be trying to make Continental philosophy do something that it cannot, or should not, do (283).  Further, I think that he attempts a translation of analytic language to ‘Continental’ language in his chapter on “The Epistemological”.     

I admit to being at a moral impasse regarding this issue.  On the one hand, if I ascribe to the ‘tenets’ of thinkers like Levinas and Kierkegaard, then I must be willing--indeed I should be willing--to submit to the structures of analytic philosophy.   To hold to my own language and resist translation may be in violation of the very constitution of my selfhood as defined by the Other who faces me.  At the same time, if one wants to hold that the subject/object dichotomy is not just problematic, but perhaps unethical in its very structure, how does one, who takes one’s subjected self seriously, agree to submit to a language that seems inherently unjust?  My concern, from a ‘Continental’ perspective, is that Simmons’ laudable desire to bring the schools of thought together so as to better serve the world and our Others in it ends up succumbing to the very language (and language shapes our thinking and action) that can promote the kind of injustice he seeks to fight.

A work like God and the Other has been needed for a long time, and Simmons represents the ontologies of Continental philosophy in a powerful way to those who may be unused to its linguistic structures or resistant to its ‘poetics’.  The problems I addressed here are not those of Simmons’ making; and while it may be the case that it is a call to ethics to try to confront and undo these problems, this is not Simmons’ task alone.  This ‘dragon’ cannot be slayed by one book, or one person.  I am profoundly glad that this work has boldly entered the fray.  It is an honest, well-crafted and well-argued attempt to reconcile differences such that we may better live authentic lives with each other and in the world.

"God and the Other": A Symposium

Next week we're going to launch a multi-week symposium on Aaron Simmons' new book, God and the Other: Ethics and Politics After the Theological Turn.  Our contributors will be Christina Smerick (Greenville College), Stephen Minister (Augustana College), and Nick Trakakis (Australian Catholic University).  We'll roll out one engagement per week, with opportunity for comment and engagement.  Aaron Simmons (Furman University) will then respond to our symposiasts. 

God and the Other is an important book that stages helpful conversation between analytic and continental philosophy of religion, as well as wider conversations in political philosophy. 

Here's what some others are saying about the book:

"J. Aaron Simmons has firm command not only of recent work on Levinas and Kierkegaard, but also of a wide range of alternatives in analytic philosophy of religion and political philosophy. More than an exercise in analytic-continental bridge building, Simmons moves continental ethics forward and makes it politically worthwhile." —John Davenport, Fordham University

"Debates within so-called "continental philosophy" and "analytic philosophy" are far closer to each other than most on either "side" realize. By boldly crossing the continental/analytic divide, J. Aaron Simmons convincingly argues that engagement between the two is not only possible, but necessary. God and the Other is a significant step forward." —Bruce Ellis Benson, Wheaton College

"Combines solid research with thoughtful consideration of the issues, and opens up genuinely creative and integrative thinking. . . . Informative, challenging, and provocative." —Jeffrey Dudiak, Kings University College, Edmonton