Date: Fri, 15 Jun 2001 14:59:21 -0400
From: hugh bone <hbone-AT-optonline.net>
Subject: Re: Tantalizing times - arguing for atheism....


Steve and All,

If we post-modernists eliminate "self" and "truth", what to talk about?
Your very thoughtful post led me to an old quote:

 "Kierkegaard is convinced that the quest for certainty that drives modern
philosophy from Descartes to Hegel inevitably ends in failure and
frustration.  ...The fragments in which Kierkegaard argues that truth is but
a fantasy of pure thought become the aphorisms in which Nietzsche contends
that truth is a fiction whose fictive status has been forgotten.  In this
way Kierkegaard's subjectivism is transformed into Nietzche's perspectivism.
>From Nietzsche's point of view, there is no exit from the labyrinth of
interpretation; everything is 'interpreted through and through'.
Consequently there are no facts, 'only interpretations'.  The notion of an
independent truth or true world beyond the realm of appearances is a
construction or projection that grows out of the effort to escape the flux
of becoming and repress the disruptive movement of
time."

Regards,
Hugh
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


> Eric, Hugh and Don etc
>
> The reactionary turn in contemporary philosophical and thinking about
> culture derives from the moment when the myth, the fiction of the subject,
> (the self) returned to the centre stage, in its many types it is supposed
to
> represent the sovereignty of the human subject over itself and its world.
> Those who, philosophers (Luc Ferry, for example) amoungst others, found it
> unacceptable that the subject of  philosophical and cultural thinking had
> shifted because of the onslaughts of Marxists, Neitscheans, the
descendents
> of Freud, Hegalo-Marxists, Althussarians, structuralists,
> post-structuralists and the legions of others. Those who have
"Kierkegaard is convinced that the quest for certainty that drives
modern philosophy from Descartes to Hegel inevitably ends in
failure and frustration.  ...The fragments in which Kierkegaard
argues that truth is but a fantasy of pure thought become the
aphorisms in which Nietzche contends that truth is a fiction whose
fictive status has been forgotten.  In this way Kierkegaard's
subjectivism is transformed into Nietzche's perspectivism.  From
Nietzche's point of view, there is no exit from the labyrinth of
interpretation; everything is 'interpreted through and through'.
Consequently there are no facts, 'only interpretations'.  The
notion of an independent truth or true world beyond the realm of
appearances is a construction or projection that grows out of the
effort to escape the flux of becoming and repress the disruptive
movement of time."worked so hard
> against this work, have expended a great deal of effort in placing centre
> stage the human subject  marvellously centred, pure and unified, with the
> great range of human feelings To make this more than  concrete they
promote
> the return to spirituality, engaging at great length with the discourses
> borrowed from religion, defining what it is to be human in terms derived
> from religion, effectively of course Christianity, is used to inject the
> spiritual into the everyday. The reactionary neo-Kantian turn of Ferry who
> along with the other new philosophers has a strong relationship with the
> work of Burke, Hobbes and others  the return, and it is a return that they
> are engaged in, to the certainties of the divine.
>
> Three elements have returned, as reactionary thoughts always return, to
> centre stage. Firstly the human subject. Secondly the return to
spirituality
> and religion, Thirdly the adoption of reactionary ideologies descended
from
> the original counter-revolutionary thinkers. They firmly locate their
> thinking in a metaphysics related to the state and religion. The ending of
> the enlightment project was constructed as the end of the objective
> development of science that refuted the claims of religion, the shift back
> into the divine and the religious is an attempt to return to an earlier
> certainty  with the results that we return to conservative ideological
> positions.
>
> see below:
>
>
> >
> > 3. Isn't your whole argument concerning atheism and anti-theism closer
> > to being a modernist project, rather than an instance of postmodernism.
> > It seems to me very close to the Enlightenment project which claimed the
> > objective development of science had refuted the claims of religion. Now
> > that the social, cultural and political assumptions inherent in this
> > epistemology have been made more explicit, science and reason no longer
> > seem to occupy such a privileged role.
>
> This rests on the following fundemental misunderstanding of the scientific
> project, the enlightenment version proposed science as being in some sense
> truth in the sense descended from religion, as divine and perhaps
absolute.
> The post-modern variety (in the sense that we live in post-modern
times...)
> has returned to the understanding that scientific truth is always
> probabilistic.
>
> It is interesting however that current reactionary philosophical thought
> reacts strongly against scientific work on the body, genetics and cloning
> referring to it in ways that unthinkingly invoke the spirit of facism, but
> at the same time applauding the bombing of Kosovo, and often the
imposition
> of state controls on the reproductive body...
>
> > 4. I think religion is not merely an historical project or a grand
> > narrative, but an open project, one that is not yet unfinished.  In my
> > view, the various religions are attempts to answer various questions
> > differently framed...
>
> No definitely not. "I define postmodern as incredulity towards
> metanarratives. This increduality is undoubtedly a product of progress in
> sciences: but that progress in turn presupposes it. To the obsolescence of
> the metanarrative apparatus of legitimation corrosponds, most notably, the
> crisis of metaphysical philosophy and of the unicersity institution that
in
> the past supported it... The narrative function is losing its functors,
its
> great hero, its great dangers, its great voyages, its great goal..." Does
> not this opening moment in the post-modern text not work for religion and
> the collapse of the legitimation of the dominant institutions. ...
>
> The origins of religious myths all derive from the inevitability of death
> and suffering.
>
> > I also think that the current legislation regarding marijuana, peyote,
LSD
> > etc. is
> > basically a form of religious persecution.
>
> Sorry - what ?
>
> > Part of the reason I don't want to give up on the God gene just yet is
> > that I feel in my gut that religion (in the good sense) opens us up to
> > the mystery of such radical experience in a way that implicitly calls
> > into question the social construction of the human.
>
> > Religion points to the imagination and our social imaginary.
>
> Apt really: since the social imaginary refers to collective values that
> provide for unitary meaning but are logically unprovable.
>
> regards
>
> sdv
>