Archive

I have just begun teaching a new rendition of my department's course in the history of modern philosophy (1600-1900). Since I take a rather unorthodox approach--spending little time on Descartes, Locke, and Hume, instead focusing on Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche--I felt compelled in today's lecture to explain this rather idiosyncratic, even "heretical," approach. I thought I might share the lecture notes here in case they're of interest. Of course, as always, much more could be said.

Early Modern Philosophy as “Detour”: A Frame for the Course

As I mentioned last time, the configuration of this course in the history of modern philosophy is a bit eccentric compared to “typical” surveys of what is supposedly important in philosophy from 1600-1900. Today, I want to address some of those typical themes from early modern philosophy but then highlight why I think these debates are answering an artificial question, and why we do better to attend to later modern philosophy that refuses the “set up” of Descartes et al.

Dear Readers,

It was just about 1 year ago that I launched the "God and the Philosophers" newsletter. It was very much a pandemic project. My usually busy travel schedule ground to a halt, and finding myself at home looking for an outlet, the newsletter seemed like one way to continue the sort of work that energizes me as a writer and speaker: "translating" philosophy for wider audiences. I've very much enjoyed both the exercise and your notes in response.

Generating two newsletters per month seemed feasible during "pandemic time." But now that travel has ramped up again (it feels like all of 2020 has been rescheduled for October & November 2021!), I know that I am not keeping up my end of the bargain, and so I have suspended this as a "premium" (i.e., paid) newsletter. You will no longer be charged $5/month. However, you will remain as a free subscriber and I'll treat this newsletter as a platform for a more "occasional" schedule--that is, when I'm able, when I want to get something off my chest, when I'm energized by a philosophical text, etc.

I'm grateful for your support over the past year and hope this will still be an occasion for us to interact around things that matter.

I came to appreciate Richard Rorty a little later in my career. It's not that I hadn't encountered him earlier. When I was in grad school in the 90s, studying German and French phenomenology, we were also reading Rorty--first when I was at the Institute for Christian Studies at the University of Toronto, and then at Villanova, where my doktorväter Jack Caputo offered a seminar on Wittgenstein, Rorty, and Lyotard one year during my coursework. But my appreciation for Rorty emerged later, after I spent more time with Wittgenstein and made a more "pragmatic" turn in my own work. This is kind of the backstory to my book,

My thanks to those of you who noted you were still having trouble accessing the archives to "God and the Philosophers." The administrators at Buttondown have told me that you should be able to access a personalized archive by clicking here--and that link should now appear in all subsequent emails.

Let me know if that doesn't work, and thanks for your patience.

Dear Readers,

While I'm waiting on the folks at Buttondown to fix the archive feature for premium subscribers, in the meantime I'm making the archive to my newsletter publicly accessible, but only sharing this with premium subscribers like you.

So, for now, you should be able to access all past newsletters at https://buttondown.email/jkasmith/archive

Indulge me: I want to write an entire post about two footnotes. But only because these footnotes are illustrative of the unique challenge for reading the history of philosophy in an increasingly secularized philosophical academy. For all our advances in philosophical knowledge and insight, we are also collectively forgetting things, and that forgetting becomes a screen that obscures texts in the history of philosophy.

The case in point is actually one of my favorite contemporary philosophers, Robert Pippin. Alongside Charles Taylor and Martha Nussbaum, I consider Pippin an exemplar of what I would aspire to be: a rigorous philosopher, steeped in the history of philosophy, who exhibits an uncanny ability to expound difficult texts, but also clearly embodies his own constructive philosophical program. Pippin, a scholar of German idealism, and particularly Hegel, is the sort of commentator who can make you believe that you could read Hegel! (His book on , for example, is the perfect companion/entrée to the .) But he's also someone who brings all the power of a Hegelian outlook to contemporary challenges of our own cultural moment, such as his masterful essay, "," in which, to my mind, should be required reading for any philosopher who aspires to be a so-called public intellectual. Plus, Pippin has also written widely on the arts. Honestly, he's kind of my spirit animal.

Last time we considered themes from Lyotard's too-much-neglected work, Just Gaming, particularly the way in which pluralism is not just something to be endured or managed but, in some sense, --like Yahweh's taking the side of many tongues in the face of Babelian hegemony. Lyotard describes this situation as "pagan," but I think there are ways, per Augustine, that it could just be described as [sic] or part of the post-secular condition.

In a famous "report on knowledge" for the government of Quebec, the French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard hazarded a definition of postmodernism and, unfortunately, people read little else. Since I've addressed that side of Lyotard in Who's Afraid of Postmodernism?, I thought it might be fun to take the next couple of newsletters to introduce readers to one of his less well-known books called . In particular, I think it's illuminating to read Lyotard in the light of the Babel narrative in the book of Genesis, especially in light of Jacques Derrida's own reading in "" (that play on words is vintages 80s deconstruction!). But is also intriguing because it is a point of intersection between so-called "continental" philosophy and the Anglo-American stream that comes down to us via Wittgenstein and his notion of language games.

[Readers, thanks for your patience and flexibility as I've worked through my first summer as a newsletter writer. This is the first of 4 newsletters you'll receive this month, making up for August.]

In our we considered an alternative reading of David Hume, not as a Scottish Voltaire but as perhaps something more like the Kierkegaard of Edinburgh. This is not a popular reading, I grant, and there is certainly ambiguity in Hume’s texts. But I think it is a reading that takes his texts more seriously than some that have simply decided, in advance, that he is a skeptic.

[Summer vacation has jostled the usual 2nd/4th Saturday schedule. Nevertheless, here’s a second installment for July. We’ll hope to return to regular programming in September.]

David Hume, doyen of the Scottish Enlightenment, is often read as if he were the Voltaire of Edinburgh. He takes a certain delight in subverting pious assumptions. Given the longstanding alliance between religion and various sorts of idealism and rationalism from Plato through Descartes, Hume’s empiricism regularly bumps up against religion, and certainly many contemporaries posited that Christianity and empiricism were mutually exclusive. Thus Hume acquired a reputation as a skeptic and likely atheist.

But what if, in fact, he’s a mystic?

In just one month, my new book, The Nicene Option: An Incarnational Phenomenology, will be published by Baylor University Press. As a teaser, I’m here sharing an exclusive excerpt from the previously-unpublished final chapter, “Picturing Revelation: Idolatry and the Aesthetic in Rosenzweig and Marion.” In the chapter, I ultimately argue, not uncontroversially, that the Jewish Rosenzweig offers a more “incarnational” aesthetic than the Catholic Jean-Luc Marion. At stake is their respect accounts of idolatry and how they sketch the conditions of possibility for revelation.

For those unfamiliar, was part of a renaissance of Jewish philosophy in Europe before and after the First World War. This chapter engages primarily with his seminal work, (abbreviated as SR below).

At the heart of Christianity is not a teaching but an event. Revelation is something that unfolds in time, and redemption is accomplished by what happens. This is something that philosophers have impressed upon me more than theologians.

It was perhaps Kierkegaard who was the first catalyst in this regard. In Philosophical Fragments, written under the pseudonym Johannes Climacus, Kierkegaard works out a thought project that is meant to unveil and analyze the difference between the “Socratic” notion of enlightenment (“recollection”) and the Christian emphasis on the necessity of revelation. But the difference between them, he emphasizes, isn’t just a difference of method or sources of knowledge; more fundamentally, the difference between the Socratic and the Christian is a completely different sense of the significance of time.

Dear Readers,

Thanks for your patience as I work to get all subscribers access to the archives of this newsletter.

I am hoping that I have now finally solved the issue: if you are a premium subscriber, a link should appear in the footer of this email that provides access to each issue of the newsletter.

(There’s a weird snag in which I, as author, can’t see exactly what you’ll see as a reader. Hence the experimentation here. Apologies that the attempt at resolution has to be so spammy.)

This summer my headspace is dominated by a new book I am writing titled When Are We? I won’t bore you with the details (just yet!) except to say that it is a book that is trying to get Christians to take history seriously, to cultivate a renewed sense of time-consciousness as a counter to the many modes of systematic forgetting that traffic under the banner of (so-called) “Christianity” these days.

As you might guess, my sensibilities here are significantly shaped by Hegel–reading him (audaciously, perhaps) as a Christian philosopher. However, since this is a trade book intended for a wider, general audience, my Hegelian intuitions are mostly a skeletal: they shape the book but will remain largely invisible to most readers.

But the exercise has meant I’ve spent time re-reading Hegel and I was newly intrigued by a rather famous line in his (rather notorious) Preface to the . It’s a phrase you’ve perhaps heard in very different contexts. At one point Hegel talks about the “night in which call cows are black.” It was re-encountering the context of this line that intrigued me.

A million years ago, when we were earnest, we watched The Matrix. In a key early scene, Neo stores his renegade hacker disks in a copy of Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation, in particular, in the chapter entitled “On Nihilism.” There were read:

In a recent newsletter on Jean-Luc Marion’s account of vanity and boredom, I mentioned Conor Cunningham’s fascinating book, Genealogy of Nihilism. It’d been a while since I’d thought about this book, so I’m selfishly revisiting my notes here in the hopes that you’ll see why his argument intrigues me so.

There is a kind of philosophical response to evil that is itself ghoulish. I think of this every time I teach Keith Yandell’s rather classic essay on “The Greater Good Defense.” There is a posture in such approaches that treats evil like one more thing about which to be clever. The examples are almost flippant. Evil is discussed as if slavery and the Holocaust never happened. Evil and suffering are just another topic for the analytic philosopher’s toolbox, a path to tenure. It’s the sort of philosophical approach to evil that brings out the Ivan Karamazov in me.

The French phenomenologist Paul Ricoeur, a lonely Protestant in that 20th century milieu of Marxists and Catholics, articulates what I still think is a landmark critique of “theodicy,” the attempt to “justify” God in the face of evil. In “,” he articulates the problem with the so-called problem of evil. What evil calls into question, Ricoeur emphasizes, “is a way of thinking submitted to the requirements of logical coherence.” The very project of theodicy is to explain evil; but to explain evil is to give it a place, to make it “make sense” somehow. And that, Ricoeur says, is to make it something else, something other than “what ought not to be.” Every “necessary evil” is an instrumental good. And in the process of looking for an explanation, evil melts into the thin air of logical coherence.

Most of the time, for most of us, the world is too solid, too reified, too much a “given” to be transpierced by transcendence. So, in the mundane, Jean-Luc Marion argues in God Without Being, the world settles as an idol in which our gaze settles and rests. The world is not transparent; we don’t see through it, nor are we seen through it. We are sealed and protected from the “crossing of being.”

If it’s going to be any different, Marion suggests, something has to change, and what has to change, in phenomenological terms, is our “attitude.” Now, we can’t produce the icon (then it would be a product of us, and remain an idol); however, we might be able to identify a kind of pre-iconic attitude—an attitude ready to receive the gift of the icon, open to being envisaged—an attitude where the screen of Being has been thinned to transparency:

I hope you’ll indulge a bit of a swerve this week.

As I hope you’ve sensed, one of the animating convictions of my work as a philosopher is that the constructive work of contemporary philosophy is inseparable from an ongoing engagement with the history of philosophy. To “do philosophy” is to carry on a conversation that started long before us. In the same way, to “do” the history of philosophy is not simply an antiquarian endeavor, toying with ideas embedded in amber; the history of philosophy is itself a philosophical endeavor. These twin convictions inform the range of forays I’m trying to present in this newsletter, so I thought it might be helpful to unpack this approach.

It’s also an opportunity to undertake something of a service to the profession by summarizing key theses from a generative article by Jean-Luc Marion that (to my knowledge) has not yet been translated into English. In 1999 Marion published an essay that significantly shaped my own thinking: “Quelques règles en l’histoire de la philosophie,” in 4:495-510. Marion both crystallized some of my own rumbling intuitions about these matters and inspired my own approach at the beginning of my career. Marion is himself an exemplar in this regard. His corpus includes seminal contributions to the history of philosophy (particularly on Descartes and Husserl), as well as original contributions to phenomenology and metaphysics. It’s impossible to imagine one without the other.

O.K. Bouwsma’s essay, “Anselm’s Argument,” is vintage Bouwsma: playful yet deadly serious; delightfully idiosyncratic yet provocatively incisive; irreverent, but only because it is infused by a deep faith. Bouwsma is never interested in making things easy for us. Consider this his Kierkegaardian spirit. Indeed, the epigraph to this essay is a wry line from Kierkegaard’s Fragments: “For why do we have our philosophers if not to make supernatural things trivial and commonplace?”

Anselm, an Italian who became the Archbishop of Canterbuy from 1093 to 1109, was a monk who bequeathed to philosophy what came to be described as the “ontological argument” for God’s existence. Anselm’s proof is a kind of intellectual acrobatics that makes you want to keep stopping it to rewind and see the mental slight of hand you must be missing. You’re not convinced, but you’re not sure why you’re not convined. Bertrand Russell, who wasn’t given to sympathy for theistic proofs, said it was easy to be persuaded Anselm’s argument didn’t work but much harder to say just what was wrong with it. Whatever you might think after walking away from Anselm’s proof, there’s something generative about an exercise that philosophers have been talking about for almost a thousand years.

I want to spend two newsletters considering Anselm’s proof. This week we’ll focus on understanding the argument itself, articulated in the Proslogion. If you haven’t read this argument before, it might be worth taking the time to read Anselm’s .

When it comes to the question of philosophy’s relationship to God, I suggest there are two very different traditions or postures–two different threads that course through the history of western philosophy. The first I’d describe as the sanguine tradition that, despite disagreements on the particulars, affirms a harmony or complementarity between faith and reason, philosophy and God. Aristotle, Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas all believe that disciplined philosophical reflection will lead us to conclude that God exists and that philosophy enables us to understand some of God’s properties (e.g., simplicity, immateriality, eternity, etc.). Philosophy is seen as a kind of “on-ramp” to theistic belief, or what Aquinas calls a “preamble” to faith.

But there is another philosophical stream, no less faithful, that is more of this sanguine sense of synchronicity, or at least wants to complicate the picture. These are not philosophers who are skeptical of God, it should be noted, but rather philosophers who are skeptical of the god of philosophy. In figures like Kierkegaard, Pascal, Heidegger, and O.K. Bouwsma, there is suspicion whether the being at the end of this philosophical chain of inference should be identified with the revealed God who liberated slaves from Egypt and endured the horror of a cross. The “sanguine” tradition, you might say, was confident that we could climb up to God via the ladder of philosophical reflection; the skeptical tradition worries that the being at the top of the ladder isn’t God but an impostor, a substitute, an idol. Whatever being philosophy climbs up to, they would say, is already a domesticated being cut to the measure of human ingenuity. No, these philosophers would say: if God is going to be known it is only because that God stoops down to reveal himself–sometimes to the scandal of reason.

The animating thesis of this newsletter is a question asked by Heidegger: “How does the deity enter into philosophy, not just modern philosophy, but philosophy as such?”

What makes Heidegger’s question so analytically interesting is that first word: how. The question isn’t whether God shows up in philosophy, even modern philosophy; that’s undeniable. The question is the mode of God’s appearance. Heidegger, , is particularly attentive to those philosophies that domesticate the divine, where conceptual conditions lord it over the timid god that is allowed to appear therein. Indeed, Heidegger contended, too many “religious” philosophies are guilty of such domestication, which is why Heidegger suggested that “god-less” thinking, refusing the god of the philosophers, might actually be open to a “more divine God.” In this sense, Heidegger was a scandalous disciple of someone like (whom I adore).

On the rare days when I lament the fact I don’t teach in a PhD program, it’s mostly because I would love the excuse to teach an in-depth seminar on Emmanuel Levinas. It’s hard to communicate how formative the encounter with Levinas was for me (he died on Christmas day, 1995, at the end of my first semester at Villanova). To this day, I think Levinas–a staunch critic of Husserl and Heidegger–was nonetheless the most faithful practitioner of Husserl’s axiom, “To the things themselves!” His most famous work, Totality and Infinity, is an exercise in moral attentiveness. Rather than merely debating the theories of others, Levinas undertakes a patient and impassioned description of ethical encounter that is as literary as it is phenomenological. I remember first reading Totality and Infinity and being struck by the dearth of footnotes. Attending to themselves, Levinas’ method is not logical demonstration but phenomenological unveiling. He takes us to “the things themselves” in order to show us the Other that calls to us in our everyday experience.

When I was an undergraduate at the University of Waterloo, I took a number of philosophy courses “across the river” (as the philosophers at the university derisively referred to it) at St. Jerome’s, the Catholic college affiliated with the university. I probably haven’t taken the full measure of how much influence one of my teachers, F.F. Centore, had on me there. It was he who introduced this Protestant to St. Thomas Aquinas. More proximately, he introduced me to the remarkable work happening at the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto. This was something of a North American outpost for the work and influence of Étienne Gilson and the Thomist renewal he spawned.

It was almost certainly from Dr. Centore that I learned of a marvelous, if minor, text from Aquinas: , translated by Armand Maurer and published by PIMS. (There’s an in a different translation.) Ostensibly a commentary on Boethius’ treatise, Aquinas’ work is a primer on the relationship between faith and reason, asking questions from a slightly different angle than he does in the .

I have the privilege of teaching in a rather storied department. We sometimes like to boast that Philosophy at Calvin College (now University), a smallish liberal arts college in the midwest, has produced four presidents of the American Philosophical Association. Many are familiar with figures like Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff who played a critical role in the founding of the Society of Christian Philosophers. (You can read a lovely recollection from Wolterstorff about the role the department played in what he calls “the renaissance of Christian philosophy” in the late 20th century. Nick has also written a lovely and moving memoir that recounts his time at Calvin.) William Frankena became one of the most significant moral philosophers of the past century.

A prefatory suggestion: If you haven’t done so, it might be worth taking a few minutes to read Descartes’ Meditations I-III. But not essential.

When we reached the end of Descartes’ first Meditation , his quest for a “basic principle” or foundation which is “certain and unshakeable” was still underway. All the candidates he entertained in Med. I failed the RFD (“reason for doubt”) test. “So what remains true?,” Descartes asks, worriedly. “Perhaps just the one fact that nothing is certain.”

Welcome to the first instalment of “God and the Philosophers,” a newsletter project I’ve been contemplating for a while. Since many people associate me with postmodernism (publishing a book called Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism? probably explains that), I thought it might be fun to begin counter-intuitively by offering a sympathetic reading of Descartes. So, while generally each newsletter will discuss a different philosopher and text, for the first couple we’ll build some steam by focusing oon Descartes’ Meditations and see the integral role that God plays in the Cartesian project. (If you want to refresh your familiarity with the , I’ll be referring to Cottingham’s translation, but the Hackett edition is also fine and widely used. There are several versions available .)