It is hardly surprising that some of the leading pomos after having jettisoned Enlightenment philosophical views should now be getting around to jettisoning modernist views concerning religion. Indeed, the apropos question here, is what took them so long? After all their patron saint, Heidegger had speculated at considerable length concerning the mysteries of Being in a rather mystical vein. And Levinas has long been a hero to many pomos. And in any case here in the US pomo has long enjoyed a vogue within the religious studies departments of leading American universities.
As Yoshie correctly fears this "religious revival" among the intellectuals or at least the pomo wing of the intelligentsia will no doubt be used to give the current retrofitting of religion a veneer of intellectual respectability. And that in turn fits in with the current plans of the two presidential frontrunners, George W. Bush and Al Gore to use the churches as a principal vehicle for the delivery of federally financed social services.
I suppose Americans in their own way have replicated the Roman attitudes towards religion as described by Gibbon who said that the religions of the Roman Empire were viewed by the people as being equally true, by the philosophers as equally false and by the magistrates as equally useful.
Jim Farmelant
On Wed, 17 Nov 1999 20:11:03 -0500 Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu>
writes:
>Doug:
>>Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>>>That said, militias and believers
>>>in Satanic day care workers _are_ idiotic, in a peculiarly American
>way.
>>
>>44% of Americans surveyed told Pew Center pollsters that Jesus Christ
>>will arrive on earth sometime during the 21st century
>><http://www.people-press.org/mill2rpt.htm>. 44% said He wouldn't.
>
>Yikes! It almost makes you feel as though the Enlightenment bypassed
>America, and Americans moved from premodern to late-modern &
>"post-secular"
>culture directly! While I agree with Maureen that capitalism and its
>attendant changes in the mode of reproduction are the material basis
>of
>many oddities, we can't ignore the thriving religious nonsense to
>which
>Americans seem more prone than others. Is there something about
>living in
>the belly of the beast that makes people more religious & moralistic
>than
>otherwise? Or can it be that Americans gained religious liberties too
>easily, so they don't treasure them now? Anyway, the dominance of
>retrofitted religion in public culture has had tremendous
>anti-feminist
>implications here.
>
>BTW, are you aware that among the posties there exists a
>"post-secular"
>philosophy? Check out the e-mail exchange "Postmodernism and the
>Desire
>for God," available at <http://www.crosscurrents.org/caputo.htm>.
>
>***** POSTMODERNISM AND THE DESIRE FOR GOD: AN E-MAIL EXCHANGE
>by Edith Wyschogrod and John D. Caputo
>
> Augustine's question returns, unanswered:
> "What then do I love when I love my God?"
>
>EDITH WYSCHOGROD, J. Newton Rayzor Professor of Philosophy and
>Religious
>Thought at Rice University, is the author of Saints and Postmodernism,
>Spirit in Ashes, and, most recently, An Ethics of Remembering (all
>published by the University of Chicago Press). Her essay "Works That
>'Faith': The Grammar of Ethics in Judaism" appeared in Cross Currents,
>Summer 1990.
>
>JOHN D. CAPUTO, Cook Professor of Philosophy at Villanova University,
>is
>the author of Against Ethics (Indiana, 1993), Deconstruction in a
>Nutshell:
>A Conversation with Jacques Derrida (Fordham, 1997), and The Prayers
>and
>Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion (Indiana, 1997).
>
>At the invitation of the editors, philosophers John D. Caputo and
>Edith
>Wyschogrod engaged in a lengthy e-mail correspondence that produced
>the
>following dialog, itself a phenomenon of the postmodern.
>
>John D. Caputo. In just the past year we have seen two books edited by
>English theologians -- one entitled The Postmodern God, the other
>Post-Secular Philosophy -- that have pressed the claim that
>"postmodern"
>must be understood to mean or at least to include "postsecular," that
>the
>delimitation of the claims of Enlightenment rationalism must also
>involve
>the delimitation of Enlightenment secularism. A critical stance toward
>modernism goes hand in hand with a critical stance toward secularism.
>In
>France, Jacques Derrida's most recent work has taken a turn toward
>what he
>calls "religion without religion," that is, to a thinking that
>involves a
>certain repetition of basic religious structures, most notably the
>"messianic." Derrida now analyzes in detail notions like the gift,
>hospitality, testimony -- and most recently, forgiveness -- that have
>always belonged to classical religious discourse. As you well know, on
>the
>continent this renewal is very much the effect of the impact Levinas's
>work
>has had.(1) This is especially true of Derrida himself and also of
>Jean-Luc
>Marion, who speaks of a God "without being," without the "idols" of
>what
>Heidegger calls "onto-theo-logic." As these thinkers have been
>arguing, it
>seems that God is making a comeback.
>
>This is a fascinating development, and one that sends shock waves
>through
>certain American "postmodernist" writers who, however avant-garde they
>might be in their own work on the question of God and religion remain
>deeply and intractably modernist in protecting the rear guard of
>modernist
>critiques of religion. Religion is one "other" that these thinkers,
>who are
>otherwise deeply persuaded about the power of the "other," do not want
>to
>hear about. I have many friends who love to talk about exposing
>philosophy
>to the "other," still better to the "unconditionally" or "wholly"
>other,
>but when I mention religion, they turn pale. It turns out that by
>"other"
>they mean literature. So their unconditional, wholly other is
>constrained
>by several conditions, and religion is just too, too other for them,
>too
>"tout autre," if I may say so.
>
>This development raises many questions. What does "God" mean if one
>speaks
>of a "postmodern God"? What does reason and philosophy mean? What can
>we
>say today of the most ancient religious motif of all, the desire for
>God?
>
>What do you make of these developments?
>
>Edith Wyschogrod. Much of the process of rediscovery hangs, I think,
>on the
>way in which immanence and transcendence are now being construed in
>the
>postsecular conversation. The problem in the present context has been
>at
>least in part framed by the way in which Levinas has been drawn into
>the
>God-question. For Levinas, the Other is the other person whose very
>existence places a demand of noninjury upon me, an ethical demand that
>I
>read in the face-to-face relation with the Other. But it has not gone
>unnoticed that the Other is in the track or trace of transcendence
>which,
>for Levinas, is construed in terms of a God who has always already
>passed
>by, who cannot be made present. This allows for a transcendence that
>for
>him is seen in conformity with rabbinic tradition. Ethics is first
>philosophy and the Old One, the Ancient of Days is, as it were,
>cordoned
>off. But the imago dei (to be construed an-iconically, in conformity
>with
>Jewish tradition) is not a representation of God but an invisible
>writing
>that more than hints at an immanentist theology. Our postsecular
>friends,
>like Philip Blond, maintain that Levinas's thought is deeply dualistic
>in
>that the otherness of the Other and the otherness of God -- or to use
>Levinas's term, of illeity (the He) -- cannot be maintained. Levinas's
>Otherness, it is argued, has sustained an interest in ethics as a
>means to
>eradicate a world that is debased.(2) Now Blond (and John Milbank)
>want to
>save the appearances by an appeal to God, not by rereading the
>appearances
>as redeemed, but as a therapeutic gesture in the direction of
>philosophy,
>making the world safe for philosophy by showing that God's infinite
>distance does not destroy but proves to be the ground for the
>realization
>of human possibility. It is I think a misreading of Levinas to see him
>as
>world-denying or at least world-castigating in almost Buddhist
>fashion. But
>what has been correctly perceived is that Levinas has opened the need
>for
>thinking through the paradox of the Other as being in the track of
>transcendence, but of transcendence also being (somehow) in the track
>or
>trace of the Other.
>
>Caputo. I quite agree with you about the line Blond takes on Levinas.
>Blond
>says in effect that for Levinas the Good is otherwise than being
>because
>being is evil. It is a shocking misrepresentation, almost a
>denunciation of
>a thinker who is no doubt the single most important figure in putting
>the
>question of God back on the table for philosophical discussion, who
>has
>opened the eyes of a highly secular philosophical world to the
>question of
>God. It is furthermore an ironic denunciation, inasmuch as for Levinas
>the
>whole force of the name of God, of the Ancient of Days, of the past
>which
>was never present, is spent in the name of earthly peace and social
>justice
>-- spent, I am tempted to say, "without remainder." That is why I
>would
>like to hear more about what you mean when you say, as I understand
>it,
>that today we experience the need to think not only the Other person
>as a
>trace of God but also to think God as the trace of the Other. Is that
>what
>you mean by an "immanentist theology"? Is that the direction a
>"postmodern"
>theology or religion would take for you? Or even a "religion without
>religion," to use Derrida's expression.... *****
>
>I hope you get disturbed by this "post-secular" turn! If not, I'll
>send
>you a "post-development" discourse, too, for good measure.
>
>Yoshie
>
>
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