Gaia: Integral Post-metaphysical Spirituality - Re-visioning the Great Traditions - Postmetaphysical Theology

Re: Postmetaphysical Theology

http://MarkDuBois.gaia.com — Thu, 14 May 2009 23:49:59 GMT

"Suzuki famously never claimed to be enlightened or to have realized kensho or satori, and in fact he is known to have denied that he was enlightened, which is to say that he never placed himself on “the throne of the divine.” Many people who knew him have remarked about his apparently genuine humility."

“Christ is the perfect man who is crucified.”

Well, apparently Cameron is experiencing his own dose of genuine humility and may be in the process of crucifying himself:

CamFession: An Apology

Who knows, maybe Cam will transform himself into a poet of the possible...

Re: Postmetaphysical Theology

http://brucealderman.gaia.com — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 14:30:23 GMT

For interested members: Cameron has posted another Caputo-inspired blog on Integral Life.

Jesus and the Poetics of the Impossible

Re: Postmetaphysical Theology

http://holotrope.gaia.com — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 22:15:36 GMT

Hi Balder, thanks for posting a link to Cameron's essay.

I especially appreciate what he says here:

...for me (and I would appreciate any comment on this thorny issue) there is this deep tension between the second-tier “elitism” of Integral - an excellence to which everyone is invited, and the undeniable privileging of the outcast, the afflicted, the powerless in the Gospel story of Jesus – who is for me the human face of God…

As Paul writes, those who find their righteousness in Christ “glory in their weakness”… where the love of God is freely given in suffering and the Cross – and where the boundless love of God is revealed to us in the form of an executed criminal, a despised and abandoned heretic...

So there is no getting around the fact that Christ shows up not at the top of the socio-cultural pyramid, but on the margins, as the menace at the Temple gates, or as the mustard seed that slip through the crack s [sic] of the established order and de-centers all fixed enters [sic] of power and privilege with good news for the poor and the permanent possibility of offense for the sanctified who put themselves on the throne of the divine…

Here's an example of "the second-tier 'elitism' of Integral" to which Cameron refers:

But isn't this view of mine terribly elitist? Good heavens, I hope so. When you go to a basketball game, do you want to see me or Michael Jordan play basketball? When you listen to pop music, who are you willing to pay money in order to hear? Me or Bruce Springsteen? When you read great literature, who would you rather spend an evening reading, me or Tolstoy? When you pay sixty-four million dollars for a painting, will that be a painting by me or by Van Gogh?

All excellence is elitist. And that includes spiritual excellence as well. But spiritual excellence is an elitism to which all are invited. We go first to the great masters--to Padmasambhava, to St. Teresa of Avila, to Gautama Buddha, to Lady Tsogyal, to Emerson, Eckhart, Maimonides, Shankara, Sri Ramana Maharshi, Bodhidharma, Garab Dorje. But their message is always the same: let this consciousness be in you which is in me. You start elitist, always; you end up egalitarian, always.

But in between, there is the angry wisdom that shouts from the heart: we must, all of us, keep our eye on the radical and ultimate transformative goal. And so any sort of integral or authentic spirituality will also, always, involve a critical, intense, and occasionally polemical shout from the transformative camp to the merely translative camp.

If we use the percentages of Chinese Ch'an as a simple blanket example, this means that if 0.0000001 of the population is actually involved in genuine or authentic spirituality, then .99999999 of the population is involved in nontransformative, nonauthentic, merely translative or horizontal belief systems. And that means, yes, that the vast, vast majority of "spiritual seekers" in this country (as elsewhere) are involved in much less than authentic occasions. It has always been so; it is still so now. This country is no exception.

This passage is from Wilber's essay, "A Spirituality That Transforms," which appears in his book One Taste, in a back issue of What Is Enlightenment? magazine, and on his Shambhala website.

I think there most certainly is what Cameron calls a "deep tension" between what Wilber expresses here and what Cameron expresses through the vehicle of Jesus.

In his book Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, Jung speaks of Christ as a symbol of the Self. Jung writes:

...the realization of the Self, which would logically follow from a recognition of its supremacy, leads to a fundamental conflict, to a real suspension between the opposites (reminiscent of the crucified Christ hanging between two thieves), and to an approximate state of wholeness that lacks perfection. ...

The Christ-image fully corresponds to this situation: Christ is the perfect man who is crucified.

(I took the liberty of capitalizing "Self" here to avoid confusion, for Jung wrote "self" in lower case whether he meant "the Self," i.e., what Jung called the God or Self archetype, or the "self" in a decidedly small "s" sense as the personal ego, and readers can only tell which self Jung is referring to by the context.)

The back cover of the paperback edition of Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind is a black and white close up of author Suzuki Roshi's face. I remember looking at that photo at some point in the seventies and thinking that here is a man who looks awake and sober in the face of the real world, where "life is suffering."

It was only a few years ago that I read the following story about Suzuki. In 1952 he presided over a temple in Japan where he lived with his first wife, Chie. One day when Suzuki was away, a "strange" monk named Otsubo hacked Chie and the temple dog to death with a hatchet. As David Chadwick reports in Crooked Cucumber: The Life and Zen Teachings of Shunryu Suzuki, "Otsubo had struck Chie seven times in the face and head with the hatchet."

Suzuki blamed himself for what happened, and he admonished his and Chie's children to not hate Otsubo.

Suzuki famously never claimed to be enlightened or to have realized kensho or satori, and in fact he is known to have denied that he was enlightened, which is to say that he never placed himself on "the throne of the divine." Many people who knew him have remarked about his apparently genuine humility.

"Christ is the perfect man who is crucified."

Re: Postmetaphysical Theology

http://brucealderman.gaia.com — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 06:10:45 GMT

Cameron has posted more thoughts on postmetaphysical theology here, in a new Integral Life blog.

Re: Postmetaphysical Theology

http://DouglasRWallack.gaia.com — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 22:31:49 GMT

Mary,

Thanks so much.

Well said and I deeply resonated with your musings.

Cheers,
Doug

Re: Postmetaphysical Theology

http://maryw.gaia.com — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 09:41:57 GMT

Hi again Steven --

You wrote --

I know that I first encountered you and Balder, and possibly other readers, on Int. Naked and you might recalled that DavidD, always a good straight man, would spin out some kind of earnest thread on the practice of newage rapture or some such and I would recite a couple of stories about nondual kundalini activating ecstasies (K Events)that I have known and loved. Perhaps you don't recall, but that doesn't matter. But I did not find it strange that no one else ever responded in kind. Either everyone was too reticent or shy or private to share or else they never went there. So over the years I have concluded that I have experienced such things more often than anyone else I have known. And that was the surprise because I have been known to hang with a lot of mystics.

Indeed I do recall your Integral Naked (Lunch) writings -- maybe not this particular one in which you discuss your K awakenings -- but many other of your provocative yarns, galloping descriptions and teeth-in-flesh philosophizings, full of adventure and poetry and good humor. I think that you and Balder and a few others encountered a similar "lack of response" effect there -- with your postings often being so full and complete and refined that many folks may have felt too .... blown away to say anything as follow-up -- or they could have thought that there was really nothing else to say after such tomes.

And as far as I know, sudden spontaneous K awakenings such as you've described are uncommon (esp in the West) -- thus few of us here can really relate -- I certainly cannot, although I love hearing accounts of these experiences. On occasion I still savor just sitting and wondering about the wildness and mystery of it all!

Such an crushing awakening out of the blue, "shorn of myth" and pre-fab interpretations, cannot help but set you on a different trajectory than I, who was born steeped in myth -- purely an accident of birth and culture. Partly because of this accident of my birth, I cannot help but read your description and think: wow, what a profound rush and flow of Spirit .... such language seems embedded bone-deep in my being -- even during the 20 years of my life when I staunchly rejected any of the "G" and "S" and "D" words -- those words and stories never really "left" me. And now (on a good day, at least) "Spirit" feels as obvious to me as gravity or sunlight on my skin...

I recall a writer -- don't remember who -- once saying that atheism was simply a failure of the poetic imagination -- an inability or unwillingness to perceive the world's mythic symbols dancing within our individual and collective experiences. I don't know if I really agree with that (because I know some wonderfully imaginative nontheist poets!) but it does seem that we get all tangled and messed up by language and signs, by the words we use in our attempt to point out what's happening.... And yet in the end ithe words don't really matter, do they? Because here we all are, connected and interconnected for better or for worse in this wild woolly existence no matter what terms we put to it.

I am a sensualist, not a thinker, nor a spiritualist thinker

I dunno, you seem to do a lot of thinking for not being a thinker ... ! I'm not much of a thinker either -- though sometimes I try to play one in cyberia. It looks like I was born with a contemplative temperament -- perhaps that's even a kind of "sense," so maybe around the same age you were going through your K awakening, I was doing a rudimentary form of meditation -- just an open "flowing with being" -- without really knowing what I was doing. So when I tried out a few different specific meditative practices later on, I implicitly trusted them because it felt like I was going deeper in a direction that held some vague familiarity for me .... even as I was stepping into a great cloud of unknowing. While I've had a few profound "mystical" experiences, the main impact of these practices on me is a ever-deepening trust in the cosmos, in the mystery, in the void, in all that is. And a subtle conviction that we are swimming in a flood of love, even if we don't usually feel the wetness, and even when we resist the current. And I have .... a quiet desire to keep letting the flow flow.

And I still dig Ken Wilber! If not for him, we'd probably not be shootin' the breeze together here right now, would we?

Okay, gotta go back and read a bit more of this thread .... (for all I know somebody said all of this already, with more precision and clarity ....)

Smiles and peace to you and to Marianthi across cyberia,

Mary

Re: Postmetaphysical Theology

http://kabiri.gaia.com — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 01:45:09 GMT

Mary,

You wrote: In other words: defining any of the “all of this” as God would be hubris. Or idolatry. Pointing to “this” or “that” as divine or holy isn't, imo. It's a way of saying: Behold this emanation, this manifestation of Spirit (or Whatever)! Taste this drop of the love-flood!

The other day while searching through old files I found a lost ms word copy of a 2006 Naked Lunch, or Integral Naked or Something Naked post that turned out to be one of Marianthi's favorites from way back. I was reminded of it by your quote above because you hint at most of its elements and condense the bulk of it into that juicy love-flood sentence. Anyway, I was encouraged to dress it up a little and re-post it as a circumlocutious and quasi-Sufi-subtle way to illustrate the landscape seen from here.

I know that I first encountered you and Balder, and possibly other readers, on Int. Naked and you might recalled that DavidD, always a good straight man, would spin out some kind of earnest thread on the practice of newage rapture or some such and I would recite a couple of stories about nondual kundalini activating ecstasies (K Events)that I have known and loved. Perhaps you don't recall, but that doesn't matter. But I did not find it strange that no one else ever responded in kind. Either everyone was too reticent or shy or private to share or else they never went there. So over the years I have concluded that I have experienced such things more often than anyone else I have known. And that was the surprise because I have been known to hang with a lot of mystics.

The K Events started when I was 15 or 16 in a non-sexual, spontaneous coming of age situation. I believe it was Loren Eiseley who once wrote that in a rite of passage, whether ritualized or not, "the boy becomes a man and the man sees god." which would have been true no doubt if I had come from a culture that held rite of passage ecstasies in high esteem to the extent that I would have known before hand that if the vision came that vision would be of god. Luckily I was spared all of that. As a result I just got the bare bones, stripped of interpreted features, shorn of myth...as if that were not enough to have the entire universe, or at least my momentary take on it, change in every way I could envision. And it continued to do so with every subsequent experience: the texture of the air changed...like cheese cloth transformed to brocade silk, as did the cascading colors of it all, and the weight and dimension of my body, the nature of sound and the velocity of this illusion called time in which everything moves together with such precision that if I could have distinguished any seams in the environment they would have been seams with an over riding messianic cause. And these were just a fraction of the effects. Energy rose from just below the hips, fired all the chakras with dense cool flames, stretched the body, exploded in the heart, freed the lungs of all constrictions so the next breath had infinite capacity. And those were just a fraction. The real wonders were the languages I learned at every turn of my head and just as rapidly and essentially forgot, the volumes of wisdom that were written in an instant and then instantly hidden away--just a fraction.

I never went there through meditation, it never worked and I would not have trusted it if it had. Meditation was too much like self-hypnosis--my first form of meditation that dated back at least two years before the first K Event. I would not trust mediated...meditated...nonduality for the same reason I distrust the veracity of the effects of "transpersonal" (really big) doses of MDMA. There is an essence within those constructions that is built on a lie in the sense that any mention of an essence is a lie.

I am a sensualist and I like living deep in the kind of raw world to which I can trust my life. When a nondual experience arises out of a worldly situation I trust it is giving my consciousness the most profound sense of reality it can absorb, a perception of the absolute immediate reality of all that can be perceived in a harmony of moment, place, process, action, identity, relations and cohesion. I know that I have forgotten more than I can remember from the composite K Event list, but I recall a few: walking into a freezing, wind torn sunset at what seemed like the end of the world, the first listening to the ballet music for Daphnis et Chloe, ten hours of stalking an elk, running damp streets at dawn in Washington DC, realizing a guiding, life-long truth when hitchhiking east out of Flagstaff at the age of 17, realizing the liberating value of abject insignificance on a road in southeastern Wyoming, waiting for a gunfight outside Ruidoso, NM, doing shamanic energized healing, racing horses, racing cars, driving a far too tiny boat through far too great big water when one second finds me in paralyzing terror of a standing wave that I cannot see around, or see over because I can see nothing save all that thick brown river and dirty white foam curling back down over me, but the next second I am assured that I am immortal, that mistakes are impossible, I can read every molecule of water in that wave, velocity slows to none at all and gives me the privilege of doing all I need to do...effort not a question. The entire universe changes and all that happened before, all the happened two paragraphs above happens again and I am assured that if I am not immortal it will not make a shred of difference.

The other things I trust explicitly are dreams. I have awakened with a dream image set perfectly before my eyes and in a full state of nondual awareness. In fact one such dream and the awareness that arose from it prompted me to spend about five years trying to create a unified field theory of everything human not unlike Ken Wilber's attempts to do the same. I quite that fool's pursuit when I realized with almost perfect certainty that the image...and it is a single condensed and comprehensive image...that I thought I was drawing of the human universe was nothing but the image of my own psyche. And I suspect the same of Wilber's work.

I am a sensualist, not a thinker, nor a spiritualist thinker...they call them theologians, right? I do not hold with anything that has to do with any aspect of what could be called The Spirit, or The Divine or any of the 1,000 names of God. I have no superstitions about these nondual things, but I do have a theory that has everything to do with integral, but not the academic theological/philosophical Integral, but the commonly sensed, at-hand integral.

Until my participation in Int. Naked compelled me to research Wilberismo and all its minor correlated tangents I had not read much except poetry for years. When I was first informed of the apparently pressing need for an Integral philosophy and that Wilber was slaving away on books and lectures to prove there was such a thing and that any account of the universe had to meet the requirements he had set for such efforts, I had to wonder, "Why?" Why develop a theory as to everything being integrated, and develop a compulsive punch-list of necessaries for entry into Integral Consciousness, when anyone with half a set of senses and a shred of instinct on how to use them can know with near perfect certainty that integral reality is plainly, manifestly, there to be known, and if reasonably known, easily navigated. It exists complete and perfect on the dimensionless leading point of now when all that is within one's sphere manifests into perception, including the perceiver, and cascades into the spherical, also dimensionless veil of the senses as a perfectly integrated instantaneous pattern between potential and entropy, a seamless and fleeting 15 billion-year-old legacy of what even the pathetically stupid genius of Mullah Nasrudin called "intertwined events" (as opposed to cause and effect). And despite the perception that this pattern is dimensionless in the illusion of time and the fullness of space does not mean that it does not have structural integrity (all things on either or all sides of it have none) nor does that integrity mean there is anything determined or intelligently designed about it. (Both of those concepts are the artifacts of dualistic thought and the desperate safety-seeking of anthropocentric projection,) There is an accidental, extemporaneous (outside of time) and random quality to this pattern like that of the patterns of colored shards of glass tumbling past the mirrors and prisms of a kaleidoscope where, within it, or within the pattern of the universe the integration is complete to the ultimate point that this integration is no longer of conscious consideration. The universe changes within the standards of perception to constrain itself within the instant because the perceiver is no longer drawing back to perceive, but is absorbed, balanced and upright in its tiny, insignificant vessel, integrated...integral. Real.

Re: Postmetaphysical Theology

http://brucealderman.gaia.com — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 16:45:03 GMT

LOL. Yep. There's an enjoyable, smug power available in such a voice.

Re: Postmetaphysical Theology

http://kabiri.gaia.com — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 13:51:24 GMT

Mary,

You wrote: Pointing to “this” or “that” as divine or holy isn't, imo. It's a way of saying: Behold this emanation, this manifestation of Spirit (or Whatever)!

And I can understand the point and thereby understand why you also wrote: (Oops! I've just failed postmetaphysical theology!!)

But that also means that you didn't flunk plain old theology. I can appreciate this because if I were a spiritually inclined man I would much rather identify with a plain old God, I might even be some kind of pagan, for such Gods have so much more heart (in the sense of courage, will, penache,) than the compromised and constructed wussy dieties of the retreating horizon.

More on the implications of this later in the day...

Re: Postmetaphysical Theology

http://kabiri.gaia.com — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 13:31:38 GMT

Balder,

…nor, apparently, notice the Lord smiling quietly, content to let the serf indulge in the belief in his self-sufficiency …

Is this the answer you got when you asked the question, "What would Jerry Falwell say?" ;-)

Re: Postmetaphysical Theology

http://maryw.gaia.com — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 12:19:52 GMT

"It might even be hubris trying to humble itself."

Whoa; that statement gives me something to ponder!

But I guess my current thinking is that we (or at least I) usually don't recognize what wild grace there is in the most seemingly ordinary things: the exquisite and unfathomable mystery of a humble ungilded lily. Or the stew, or the rum, or the caress .... or existence or being itself.

In other words: defining any of the "all of this" as God would be hubris. Or idolatry. Pointing to "this" or "that" as divine or holy isn't, imo. It's a way of saying: Behold this emanation, this manifestation of Spirit (or Whatever)! Taste this drop of the love-flood!

It's in part an expression of deep gratitude, and -- honestly -- awe and confoundment, when it comes to "all of this."

And (I hope) .... of humility stepping fully into itself.

(Oops! I've just failed postmetaphysical theology!!)

Re: Postmetaphysical Theology

http://kabiri.gaia.com — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 11:03:06 GMT

Hi Mary,

To make make attributions of divinity or holiness, or address by any of the thousand names of God, the wholly all of this, seems to me to be gilding the lily. It might even be hubris trying to humble itself.

Re: Postmetaphysical Theology

http://maryw.gaia.com — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 10:27:47 GMT

I ask God the Spirit. “Can you taste this fine beef stew, this incomperable rum?” I hear nothing. I ask, “Can you feel the silk of this woman's skin?” I hear nothing. I ask, “What good are you anyway?”

I hear nothing.

-------------------------------------------------------

The fine beef stew, the incomparable rum, and the silk of this woman's skin are already divine.

The steer that dies for your meal, the artisans who distill and bottle that delightful rum, and the skin that feels the silk of another's skin are all holy. Wholly.

So why these askings? If God / Spirit/ Being [insert your preferred word, or no word at all, here] savors these delights through and with and in us, the questions are moot.

Besides, God prefers to answer a question with silence. It's Spirit's first language.

Re: Postmetaphysical Theology

http://brucealderman.gaia.com — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 02:16:52 GMT

...nor, apparently, notice the Lord smiling quietly, content to let the serf indulge in the belief in his self-sufficiency ...

Re: Postmetaphysical Theology

http://kabiri.gaia.com — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 01:53:40 GMT

Edward,
You wrote: Pieterse says that Rorty, in his critique of metaphysics, maintains the same framework of logical positivism used by the metaphysicians.

I'm pasting below more of the Rorty essay I posted Sunday last, I do not think it sounds like it was written by anyone given over to metaphysical logical positivism:

"I hope that what I have said so far has given some plausibility to my thesis that the last five centuries of Western intellectual life may usefully be thought of first as progress from religion to philosophy, and then from philosophy to literature. I call it progress because I see philosophy as a transitional stage in a process of gradually increasing selfreliance. The great virtue of our new-found literary culture is that it tells young intellectuals that the only source of redemption is the human imagination, and that this fact should occasion pride rather than despair.

"The idea of redemptive truth requires the conviction that a set of beliefs which can be justified to all human beings will also fill all the needs of all human beings. But that idea was an inherently unstable compromise between the masochistic urge to submit to the non-human and the need to take proper pride in our humanity. Redemptive truth is an attempt to find something which is not made by human beings but to which human beings have a special, privileged relation not shared by the animals. The intrinsic nature of things is like a god in its independence of us, and yet—so Socrates and Hegel tell us-- self-knowledge will suffice to get us in touch with it. One way to see the quest for knowledge of such a quasi-divinity is as Sartre saw it: it is a futile passion, a foredoomed attempt to become a for-itself-in-itself. But it would be better to see philosophy as one our greatest imaginative achievements, on a par with the invention of the gods.

"Philosophers have often described religion as a primitive and insufficiently, unreflective attempt to philosophize. But, as I said earlier, a fully self-conscious literary culture would describe both religion and philosophy as relatively primitive, yet glorious, literary genres. They are genres in which it is now becoming increasingly difficult to write, but the genres which are replacing them might never have emerged had they not been read as swerves away from religion, and later as swerves away from philosophy. Religion and philosophy are not merely, from this point of view, ladders to be thrown away. Rather, they
are stages in a process of maturation, a process which we should continually look back to, and recapitulate, in the hope of attaining still greater self-reliance."

While I do not have access to any direct refutation of what Pieterse claimed of Rorty's lack of post formal operations, I think that the sophistication of thought presented in the preceding three paragraphs would be implication enough to show that Pieterse's claim is a little ingenuous.

You wrote: It is one in which there is a continuous, dynamic tension between poles that is always changing from moment to moment. Thus while there is no fixed, purely absolute center there is a center nonetheless.

The poles, transcendence and immanence, contaminating each other, shifting, sliding--the shifting, sliding "center" between them--are just blue smoke and mirrors, agitated puffs of air called words. The only center I can say I will ever recognize is my own don tien which just might be harboring some sort of shade, a material function of the psyche that has the inherent capabilities of keeping me from madness in this naive, delicious free fall through existential nothing. Everything else is the abyss as far as I know...blue smoke, mirrors and words sent out by others to grab for them at straws.

You wrote: This is where Pieterse redefines what we mean by “God.”

And I ask, like Tonto asked the The Lone Ranger in that classic joke, "Whaddaya mean 'we,' White Man?" ;-)

You condense Pieterse's descriptions of Spirt down to this: “The Spirit is not a self-subsistent, static entity that exists apart from its coinherence with other living beings.” “Understands the Spirit’s work in adjectival rather than nominative terms.” “God’s reality is coterminous with its instantiations.” “…function of the dynamic relational interplay between text and interpreter in a concrete context.”

The same could be said for the cat that lives here with us in this house.

And Balder writes: "...where God is described as the open, present/retreating “horizon” of being – not a fixed absolute, not inhabiting a fixed transcendental address."

All of us, the cat, M and I can be decribed as the foreground and mid-distance as well as the horizon of being. None of us is a fixed absolute either, nor do we inhabit a solid, transendental address. So I sit here with my peers, the Cat, M and God the Spirit. I ask God the Spirit. "Can you taste this fine beef stew, this incomperable rum?" I hear nothing. I ask, "Can you feel the silk of this woman's skin?" I hear nothing. I ask, "What good are you anyway?"

I hear nothing.

Re: Postmetaphysical Theology

http://brucealderman.gaia.com — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 18:38:58 GMT

I appreciate your reflections here, Edward. There is a resonance with what you are saying in some progressive forms of Catholic theology, where God is described as the open, present/retreating "horizon" of being -- not a fixed absolute, not inhabiting a fixed transcendental address.

Some of the questions you (and Steven) raise have also been on my mind. With this post-metaphysical, deconstructive turn, it is also not clear to me why one would still try to keep things "anchored," for instance, in the teachings or person of Jesus Christ. Unhinging spirit from a fixed, metaphysical absolute, do we not also unhinge it from fixed historical referents? Why hold on to the Biblical narrative, re-use it, re-interpret it generation to generation, instead of just moving on? I'm not suggesting that no good reason to continue to do this can be offered, only that it isn't clear to me what it would be.

Re: Postmetaphysical Theology

http://theurj.gaia.com — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 17:51:04 GMT

Pieterse says that Rorty, in his critique of metaphysics, maintains the same framework of logical positivism used by the metaphysicians. The latter indeed posit God as a foundational absolute beyond time and space, beyond humanity. But Rorty merely reverses this hierarchy in a purely relativistic, immanent, human-oriented pragmatism. As we discussed above, it’s still within the confines of the formal operational dichotomies of either/or thinking.

Postmetaphysics then might be defined as no longer using this type of logic but rather what we’ve come to describe as a postformal dialectic. This though is not of the Hegelian variety wherein the poles are “integrated” via a higher third thing. Rather, as Pieterse says, this “requires a different logic.” It is one in which there is a continuous, dynamic tension between poles that is always changing from moment to moment. Thus while there is no fixed, purely absolute center there is a center nonetheless.

Even saying this though appears to set up another either/or dichotomy in that we have absolute fixity (transcendence) on the one hand and relative contingency (immanence) on the other hand. But that way of framing it is exactly what Pieterse, Hyman, Derrida and others question. Within the type of dialectic above we can have both that aren’t really either but some combination thereof in that dynamic tension and interplay. So even transcendence and immanence interplay and neither are purely one or the other but both are “contaminated” by each.

This is where Pieterse redefines what we mean by “God.” God is no longer the Absolute other apart from humanity is some foundational “heaven” apart from earth. He does this by using the word “spirit” as that which is within each context, each situation, so that it is a “situational transcendent.” Here again paradoxical wording is the only way we can communicate this relation in our language, which by its nature separates subjects from objects. And indeed this spirit is much like the shade or spectre and even in religious parlance, the holy “ghost.” It never really enters as a definitive “presence” or “subject” but rather lies in that space in between, the khora, which presupposes both the intelligible and the sensible in this relation.

Hence Pieterse’s descriptions of spirit:

“The Spirit is not a self-subsistent, static entity that exists apart from its coinherence with other living beings.” “Understands the Spirit’s work in adjectival rather than nominative terms.” “God’s reality is coterminous with its instantiations.” “…function of the dynamic relational interplay between text and interpreter in a concrete context.”

So in this sense I don’t see this type of transcendental position as positing a definitive “address” or location, at least not in the fixed sense that “god” always resides at One Heaven Lane. It is also a redefinition and recontextualization of the word “transcendence” as well as “god” in that it is not one in dichotomous opposition to the other, as in transcendence/immanence, god/man. But Steven has a good point in that why continue to use the same words likes transcendence or god? Why try to redefine them in a postmetaphyical way instead of just coming up with new terms that reflect this revelation? If one point of this neo-Christianity is the “lure of new modes of being” (and language), why use the same, tired words that have so much metaphysical baggage? Indeed, “do they deserve the name God?” Or transcendence? For example, Derrida’s re-spelling of différance really does make a difference in this regard.

Re: Postmetaphysical Theology

http://theurj.gaia.com — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 00:26:17 GMT

96 degrees, in the shade
real hot, in the shade.

--Third World

Speaking of the shade, Derrida used the word "spectre" (among others) for that postmetaphysical (quasi[moto?])transcendental that was neither here nor there.

Re: Postmetaphysical Theology

http://kabiri.gaia.com — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 23:35:42 GMT

Edward,
Thanks for the chemistry lesson and for posting the Pieterse essay. The following are notes on the latter.

1. Speaking of the language with which we all have to struggle, I have yet to read any of Rorty's prospectuses for the neopragmatic, humanistic and secular semi-utopia that couldn't be imaginatively construed as at least a quasi-metaphysical Transcendent Other. This leads me to think that if it taken to its best illogical conclusion my argument against postmetaphysical spirituality that is based on the inadequacy of language would reduce down to: The only valid positive statement that can be made about postmetaphysical spirituality is "I don't know that;" four words that would also be the only valid negative statement that could be made on the issue too. This would work well for launching the phase of Rorty's benign neglect of metaphysics and theology, but is would certainly put a lot of professional thinkers and talkers out of work.

2. I have often thought that Rorty's non-secular utopia is as alienating and dehumanizing as the Christians' Kingdom of God, or Wilber's Kingdom of the Third Tier or any other kingdom that promises to be the best of all possible situations for humanity through the elimination of __________ (fill in the blank with the name of your pet ruination). And just as often I have wondered if Rorty was really committed to that vision only because he didn't want to be included along with Baudrillard on every Important Person's list of famous nihilists. Important People pay attention to the brighter atheists but always write off nihilists--even those of genius--as "just a nihilist." (I am not sure, but didn't Nietzsche write that the true nihilists were those that would deny humanity anything other than the fullest living experience in the moment, or something to that effect?) In this light, I appreciate Rorty's preference for benign neglect over the aggressive atheism of Hook and the Four Horsemen of the Bright. The lazy agnosticism of an indifferent "I don't know that" can be far more devastating to metaphysical theology than a rant by a skeptical atheist in both function and form for an aggressive atheist is a true believing metaphysician in the same sense that the teetotaler, co-dependent, enabling spouse of an alcoholic is an alcoholic.

3. This sentence from Pieterse strikes me as one of the more important ones in the essay:

"But a postmetaphysical theology must resolutely eschew the "metaphysical comfort" of what Dean calls an "older historicism," which, while acknowledging the ever-changing realities of history, time, and contingency, nevertheless argued that "beneath the change there was a structure impervious to the vicissitudes of time and perspective and that the thinker’s job was to introduce that structure into present history as faithfully as possible" (Dean 1988:4)"

if for no other reason than to highlight Ken Wilber's work as an example of what must be eschewed.

4. Despite all its limitations, I have a great appreciation for the English Language for when it comes time to give a close reading to a paragraph it can present a word that literally cries out for examination and deconstruction in the extreme. For example, this from Part III:

"Construing God’s otherness in the way I have prohibits interpreting transcendence as either a generic quality of the divine life or as a static, ontological relation between eternity and time. Rather, God’s otherness is always the function of the normativity of power within a concrete historical context. This makes the Spirit’s otherness radically contextual. Because ineluctably insinuated in the power relations of a particular historical context, God is always "situationally transcendent," to borrow Jerome Stone’s felicitous phrase. The Spirit’s transcendence—her gracious ability to bring liberation and healing—is thus a fragile and vulnerable performance; indeed, it is as fragile and vulnerable—even fickle—as the historical contexts within which the Spirit is insinuated."

The word is "insinuate." No longer can the more imaginative theologians say, "Behold the miracle, prima facie evidence for the existence and glory of God!" But the postmetaphysical theologian writes, "Imagine the contextual, fragile and vulnerable possibility of liberation, inferential evidence of the insinuation of God...."

This from Dictionary.com: "In-sin-u-ate: 1. to suggest or hint slyly. 2. to instill or infuse subtly or artfully, as into the mind." The word is derived from sinuous (1. having many curves, bends, or turns; winding. 2. indirect; devious.) which comes from sinus (1. an abnormal passage leading from a suppurating cavity to the body surface. [syn. fistula]). Insinuate, what a great word to use in Pieterse's context, it fits perfectly. But is this word, in its full existence and glory, the word he really wanted to use here? I think there is something about both the word and the context that inadvertently (perhaps) speaks from a background of decay.

5. Given all of its limitations I am frequently exasperated with the English Language for when it comes to finding a noun that requires pinpoint specificity, it fails. For example: "shade." The other day I wrote this at the end of a post--"...for those who find shields inimical to the sweet life, they might choose to see their center (where ever it may slip or slide) as a unique and singularly inexpressible, incomprehensible shade (the presence of which can only be known by its absence) and they might choose to act as if it is the only valid, though still not redeeming,locality."

I spent at least one-half hour trying to find a name for the presence that I had located as the "center." Actually my first impulse was to use "shade," both in its more or less archaic usage as a ghost, and as something that dissolves when cast upon by light, such as the light of consciousness. But it seems to have too many other meanings as well. I wanted something more restricted. But I did not want a word that came directly or indirectly from any psychological lexicon...too scientific. I thought of "trace" as in something left behind by a now absent presence, but trace has other pomo connotation. And I did not want anything that carried any spiritual baggage or significations...too spiritual. So I I checked "shade" in Roget's International Thesaurus, to see if it contained a substitute, but found the definition I was using listed as a synonym in both the psychological and the spiritual vocabulary as both fields are bound together through the Greek word Psyche. And since "shade" sounded like the most distant cousin of each branch in that particular family, "shade" was what I set down.

But here in Part III of this essay, when all is boiled down, Pieterse's God and my shade could be used almost interchangeably. Sometimes I think--screw the English language, I'll only use Spanish from here on out...even in North America.

But more importantly I have to ask, is this what God has come to--the scraps of a degraded antique that a few thinkers keep around for sentimental reasons? Is it just the divinization of anything that gives one pause in a relative state of awe? Something like that will never have the strength to earn its own keep. What both Pieterse and I were writing about, which he in true spiritualistic fashion reduced to God, I wanted to portray as a complex, functionally ahistorical, almost indefinable, genetically wrought, felicitous arrangement of neural pathways and synapses. Are they worthy of awe? Of course. Do they deserve the name God?

I don't know that.

Re: Postmetaphysical Theology

http://brucealderman.gaia.com — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 20:18:56 GMT

That looks interesting, Edward. Worth a read.

Alan Malachowski, a Rorty scholar, recently (within the last year or two) wrote an essay called "Paradoxes of Transcendence in Time-Space-Knowledge," looking at some of these questions in relation to TSK. I have looked for this essay online, to quote here, but I don't think it's available. I may type up some excerpts from it later, when I have time.