Polk on Augustine and Time

In a 1991 article in Augustinian Studies, Danne W. Polk talks about Augustine, Husserl (and to a lesser extent Heidegger), phenomenology, theological anthropology, and the relationship between time and eternity. And because I have written posts and a paper or two about all of them, it seems only fair to write one more. Allow me to begin by summarizing Polk's paper. It is a phenomenological anthropology in which Polk puts the time-awarness of human beingness under the microscope. And, after examination, Polk contrasts it with the being of God so that the being of God is revealed as the ground of the becoming of everything else. Here is a rough outline (Heideggarian language added by me in square brackets):

1. Human beings are time-trapped creatures [da-Sein]; God is not
2. As bodied things, humans beings interact with the world from a particular point of view [Geworfenheit, thrownness]; God sees it all
3. Human beings interact with all things as they arrive and disappear in the flow of time [held out into the nothing]; All things are present to God
   • Attention, expectation, and memory
4. For human beings, the present is not an objective point but a subjective synthesis; God's eternity is timeless
   • A critique of Aristotle's objective and static model of time
5. God's being supports beings; eternity is the hub of time's wheel

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Human Beings are time-trapped creatures; God is not

The way human being are in the world is tensed. We move. We have extension. There is a a before and an after, a future that flows into a past. Time is dramatic; time is storied. Our lives are stories, and we tell stories about our lives. Polk says that Aristotle described a cosmic or objective time existing outside us. But Augustine, and much later Edmund Husserl and other phenomenologists such as Heiddeger and Merleau-Ponty, did not understand time like that. They said time is intimate and basic to human experience. Time is subjective to us, an insight that Husserl attributed to Augustine's Confessions.

Temporality (pro tempore)--what Augustine called "subjective time" and what Husserl called "immanent time"--is so close to us that any attempt at uncovering the essence of the human person, or in more modern terms, a description of human existence, must include an equal attempt at a personal or 'authentic' portrayal of the way time in fact appears to us. For Husserl, this amounts to a 'pure' description of how 'external' or 'transcendent' objects come to be constituted within the continual flow of experience. . . . [Later, Heidegger would say that the] human subject as it exists in time (or as time) is . . . the phenomenological question par excellance.

If Aristotle is right about time being objective, we cannot know. How could we know? We have no access to objectivity. But we know time because we are time. "This field of presence is not the presence of God, but rather, it is the presence of ourselves in the existential unfolding of our own experience" (66).

And why are humans so trapped in time? We are so because our bodies fix us in place. Our bodies locate us. “The body is the vehicle of being in the world, and having a body is … to be intervolved in a definite environment, to identify oneself with certain projects and be continually committed to them.”[6] We cannot know nor do we experience time as an objective whole, but only in our fixed locatedness. This qualifies all human knowing.

Things come and go

Time, then, cannot be understood objectively. We only understand it from our perspective. And the same goes for everything else. Things come into our awarness--they come in from the future--and they pass out again--they recede into the past. Objects take time to be. "Neither thoughts nor objects are able to stand still, at least not in the radical sense that it would take to understand the object as God understands it."

Objects (including human beings) are 'measured' by birth and death. That is, nascency and finality are the limits or boundaries between which the process of becoming takes place. These limits, and what goes on between them, keep us from knowing the object (or person) as a whole. . . . And it is this existential situatedness which marks off the contrast between time and eternity. (67)

Attention, expectation, and memory

So, then, our perception of an object is achieved by a synthesis in the mind. "Consciousness is a 'bond' which holds the object with its elements of being and non-being together (Husserl's Zeiterlebnisse, internal time-consciousness). We give conscious attention to things (for Husserl, intentionality). We anticipate or expect them. And we hold their passing by us in memory until they are gone into nothingness. Trying to hold anything in stasis, in an unmoving now, is impossible. The now is too thin, too transitory. We synthesize to form a whole. "Memory is the power of synthetically preserving the meaning of an object as it takes its time to make an appearance" (75). Memory is the subjective form of time. Through anticipation and memory, the mind dilates. The sliver of the present is thickened to behold the world. Say a friend recites a psalm. "We do not receive all the words and silences at once, but gather them together in our mind to make a meaningful and understandable unity which fills itself out in its passing, moving from anticipation into the present and then into the past." In the psalm, "each moment exists in relation to all the others." (71)[2] Attention is necessary for this. Without attention, there can be no unity of experience.[1] The whole appearance takes time. Things occur in the realm of becoming, not in a fixed point of time, no matter how slight.

God's Time / Human Time

Objectivity, such as Aristotle's present now, is unavailable to us. Aristotle presumed a now or a present moment as an objective point. Standing apart, high on a height, the world could be examined objectively. But, of course, there is no now from which Aristotle may stand objectively and judge the world. Such objectivity could only be achieved if we could stop time's flow. And that, for Augustine, would be to step into eternity, for only God sees things as they are.

What seems to be present if we could stop the flow is eternity, stillness, sameness, it is the absolute ground of God. But for us, the flow of time continually pushes us off the center point of the exact now. (75)

Augustine said that eternity hides behind the flow of time. And when we raise the question of objectivity (or, rather, when we ask the question about the difference between objectivity and subjectivity), we stand at the rift between being and becoming. Augustine would say that we ask even how time and eternity are compatible, and with that, whether it is possible for God and creation to interact at all.[3]

Being and Becoming

Underneath this reflection on phenomenological, subjective time and experience versus Aristotle's objective time is the deep problem of how being and becoming might connect. Aristotle's objective now was upgraded by Augustine into God's timelessness, an eternity that for timely thing is like a distant star peeking out between rolling clouds. Nothing moves for God. Worlds stand still. Unchanging eternity supports and gives meaning to finitude and change. Eternity supports faith.[4] Consider this Lenten collect:

Almighty God, you alone can bring into order the unruly wills and affections of sinners: Grant your people grace to love what you command and desire what you promise; that, among the swift and varied changes of the world, our hearts may surely there be fixed where true joys are to be found; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.

The thing is, Augustine's Neoplatonic metaphysics have been severely challenged in the twentieth century. There is a great suspicion that says this entire machinery of God's eternity is imported from Greek metaphysics, not the Bible. It is an ontology or onto-theology, they say, that has exposed Christian metaphysics to a host of dangers and defeats under the withering blows of Enlightenment ideas, under Spinoza's interrogation of substantia and Kant's critiques.[5] Many say its should be abandoned. A new metaphysics and a new doctrine of God should be built. I do not know. To run the other way seems to me to run into panentheism and process theology. Centuries of theological ground would be overturned. And God would not be eternal but everlasting. God is then not being but the most becoming of all becomings. God comes to resemble modernity; God becomes the wave that has us all.

Also to be considered is hamartiology. Augustine's teaching that sin (αμαρτια) is not being is, to my knowledge, the most useful understanding of sin that we have. [Augustine equates temporality with fallenness. "The experience of time indicates that the soul is 'distended,' fallen from the otium, the restful contemplation of eternal truth, into the busy negotium of temporal activity." (Robert O'Connel Art and the Christian Intelligence in Saint Augustine 72.] If being is eliminated as a category to Christian metaphysics, then this helpful explanation of how sin works as disorder is abandoned as well.

Therefore, I hardly know what to do. This is a major question that I have not yet solved. And, the thing is, I have done twenty years of work in an attempt to try and solve it! I'm afraid it is beyond me to understand the metaphysical philosophy necessary to choose wisely. So where does this leave things? I have only the incarnation. Augustine sought answers everywhere but in the narrative life of Jesus.

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Danne W. Polk. "Temporal Impermanence and the Disparity of Time and Eternity" Augustinian Studies 22 (1991) 63-82.

See the pattern Opening a Closed Circle for God || Creation; Eternity || Time.

Works Cited

Augustine. Confessions
Ibid., De Musica
Edmund Husserl. The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness
Ibid., Phenomenological Psychology
Ibid., Ideas
Maurice Mereau-Ponty. Phenomenology of Perception
Heidegger. Being and Time

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[1] Paying attention--allowing something to unfold itself under sustained contemplation--is learning to see things coram Deo in the light of the resurrection. This is the theologian's calling a thing what it is. This is what the arts help us to do. Individually, we will never see a thing as it is [its absolute quiddity] with even a fully restored imago. But the community can together over time begin to take steps to reflect God's complete knowing. We are allowed, by grace, to name the cosmos. Human beings are Michelangelo, seeing the David inside the stone. / Here is where I can connect with the contemplative tradition, with the arts, with the ethics of being for others (Bonhoeffer or even Levinas), an ethics that gives others the attention/the respect to become what they are. Simone Weil's work on attention is worth noting. And the scientific method comes sheepishly to the table.

[2] Augustine is reminding me--such as how each and every moment in his psalm singing exists in relation to all the others--of Leibniz's Monadology. In his speculative metaphysics, the cosmos is made of innumerable points called monads. Each monad reflected from its position the entirety of the cosmos. Every monad forms an absolute relation with the others, yet each is its own individual thing. Each has its particular perspective. Each is its own center of the map of the whole. There is absolute individuality and absolute relation. Polk refers to the Confessions (XI, 18): "An essential difference between eternity and temporality is that eternity has no particular perspective while temporality is always situationally located." For more on Leibniz, see my introduction to his Discourse on Metaphysics.

[3] Augustine drew a line between everlasting being and finite non-being. God was on one side; creation on the other. Now quoting from Polk (69) "Being," he thought, "is what it is because of itself, and time at best is only an image of the eternal sameness of Being. This means that objects are not only inadequate because of the way they appear, but because they lack the quality of true existence, 'for what is forever changing is not, since it does not abide.' But objects in the world do abide for a time, they are given a quasi-existence in 'my' time, and it is in this sense that an object is 'not wholly without being; rather, it is not supremely existent.' In this way, earth and sky exist as objects for me. In a sense, they are intimations of objects, subtle and delicate announcements of stability, which even though inadequate, participate in the ontological categories of the good and the beautiful. [Elsewhere, Augustine refers to time as a trace (vestigium or copy (imitatio) of eternity.] Still, in reference to subjective time, the world and things exist, but this realm of becoming is basically and essentially a lack of immutable Being. Unlike the objects of creation, Being has perfect self-identity which, for Augustine, is none other than the absolute being of God. By this ultimate standard, temporal objects are equivalent to nothingness just as our knowledge in comparision to God is equivalent to ignorance." Later Polk says "Augustine does not hold that objects are ever 'really real,' becuase all things are created, except for God, therefore all things are in some way mutable. That is, all things lack Being. (City of God VIII, 6). "Objects do show themselves, but they do so in time where faculties such as memory and expectation must be employed in order to hold the object together." (78) This makes objectivity a problem. // C. S. Lewis's The Great Divorce comes to mind. As does Einstein's universe, where everything is exactly this: moving and subject to constant entropy. God, however, calls order from dissolving chaos. This order needn't be thought of as unchanging Being. Perhaps it need only be good enough, and that is as much as any created thing may be. // I cannot help but quote another lengthy bit from Polk--and I quote this because I hear its echo in liturgy even though it is talking about Augustine's view that the flow of time reflects Being's influence in its going:

In his early work, De Musica, Augustine does portray time as an image of eternity, but he moves away from this view toward an exploration of a radical difference between time and eternity in Confessions: 'times are ordered and made and changed, imitating eternity as they do when the turn of the heavens comes back to the same state and the heavenly bodies to the same place, and in days and months and years and centuries and others revolutions of the stars obey the laws of equality, unity, and order. So terrestrial things are subject to celestial, and their time circuits join together in harmonious seccession for a poem of the universe. (VI, 11.29)

Note also how the entire machinery of Augustine's anthropology of anticipation and memory come together in the singing of a psalm (Confessions XI, 28):

Suppose that I am going to recite a psalm that I know. Before I begin, my faculty of expectation is engaged by the whole of it. But once I have begun, as much of the psalm as I have removed from my province of expectation and relegated to the past now engages my memory, and the scope of the action which I am performing is divided between the two faculties of memory and expectation, the one looking back to the part which I have already recited, the other looking forward to the part which I have still to recite. But my faculty of attention is present all the while, and through it passes what was the future in the process of becoming the past. As the process continues, the province of memory is extended in proportion as that of expectation is reduced, until the whole of my expectation is absorbed. This happens when I have finished and it has all passed into the province of memory.

[4] Because temporality has its source in eternity, God's providence makes from flux his economy--the fortunes of our lives included. // Remember that, like Plato, Augustine believed in the natural immortality of the soul. That belief is the (pagan) flaw in the Western mystical tradition. Because their anthropology is flawed and their exegesis is at best dated, how can they be guides for spiritual practice? For ethical practice, of course, but not for guiding the soul. Augustine wrongly taught an inward journey because the soul participated in God's eternity. Perhaps a robust pneumatology might alter the flooring but keep the walls in place?

[5] See the posts Onto-Theology and Its Fate; On Panenthism; The Three Options; Heraclitus's Chiasmus as a philosophical step toward sacrament; You have to set aside a block of time; Padgett versus Wood on time and eternity; Hannah's Natality and Juergen's Novum.

[6] Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Maurice Merleau-Ponty: Basic Writings, ed. by Thomas Baldwin (Routledge: London, 2004), 93.

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Excursis: By reading this article, I am set up to make a leap forward. I am set to unify two arguments that, until this point, I had always considered very different. These arguments are arguments about time and arguments about interpretation. The former argument is represented by Augustine and phenomenology. The latter is represented by Hans-Georg Gadamer and hermeneutics. I can now bring them into relationship withone another in a vertical and a horizontal. Phenomenology occupies the vertical around the question of God's being; hermeneutics occupies the horizontal with ethical praxis at the center. Both are, of course, united in the one living One. He occupies both and transcends each. At the juxtaposing center is the perfect quiddity of shalom.

Heidegger's entanglement

"Had Heidegger ever come up with a saying to sum up his philosophy it would have been: ‘I dwell, therefore I am.’ For him, identity is bound up with being in the world, which in turn means having a place in it. We don’t live in the abstract space favoured by philosophers, but in a particular place, with specific features and history. We arrive already entangled with the world, not detached from it. Our identity is not secured just in our heads but through our bodies too, how we feel and how we are moved, literally and emotionally.

"Instead of presenting it as a puzzle to be solved, Heidegger’s world is one we should immerse ourselves in and care for: it is part of the larger ‘being’ where we all belong. As Malpas puts it, Heidegger argues that we should release ourselves to the world, to find our part in its larger ebb and flow, rather than seek to detach ourselves from it in order to dominate it." ~ Charles Leadbeater summarizes a lot of what I like about Heidegger in as clean a language as one could care for.

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A quick word about Heidegger's Nazism: I want to say that Heidegger was like Ezra Pound, whom I feel gets a pass for being a good poet, but a political and social idiot. Pound was selfless enough to encourage many world-class poets. But, Heidegger wasn't selfless. He was man of poor character, a bigot, a coward. He did not practice what he preached. Reading Heidegger is like coming back to what was a family home, now made rubble by a spring twister. Tragedy everywhere, but some keepsakes remain.

Jürgen Moltmann's Man: Summary: Chapter 3b

Chapter 3: Images of man and experiments

D. The life of dialogue

In a world saturated with technology’s whirring activity, human beings and their problems and situations – love, suffering, death – leave technicians speechless.  Human beings, after all, are so awash with mass-sensations that they no longer experience life.  Thus they nurse a deep anxiety.

Historically, the Enlightenment labored to produce an ‘I’ fit to lord over the world of things.  For Descartes and others, freedom’s expression was a resounding ‘I.’  But the ‘I’ cannot exist on its own without loneliness. Feuerbach, addressing this very problem, wrote, “The nature of man is contained only in community in the unity of man – a unity which however rests upon the reality of the distinction of ‘I’ and ‘Thou’.” (80)  It was a move mirrored in new evaluations of language where life does not make language, but is rather made by it.  The ‘I-Thou’ of language is the basis of self-consciousness and community with others.  Thus, subjectivity is intersubjectivity.

Martin Buber’s work I and Thou brought further clarified the linguistic element of human relations.  Buber created a continuum of possible human relationships, with the I-Thou on one side and the I-It on the other.  The ‘I’ of the latter is a subject who perceives and acts.  The ‘I’ of the latter pair is an ‘I’ who hears and dialogues.  It is a useful continuum when considering humanity within the roaring power of technological life.

The I-it, which asks of human beings, “What?” is absolutely disjunctive to the I-Thou, which asks of human beings, “Who?”  Technological life, which treats human beings as consumers, or numbers, producers, or liabilities, cannot comprehend the human life which mediates the whole being in an encounter with actual living.  Furthermore, within the Thou one may come to themselves and, now whole speak wholly. The I, on the other hand, offers relentless experiential dissection.

Buber developed an entire philosophy of religion from his linguistic personalism.  “In the ultimate grounds of our linguistic and spiritual life, God is the true ‘Thou’ to the true and enduring ‘I’ of man. . . . And if anyone avoids the names for the unnameable, because they are all misused, and addresses with his whole being the ‘Thou’ of his life, it is God that he addresses.” (83)  As well, the Thou, he said, was accessible only in the Thou of one’s neighbor.  Community, then, is the new-and-forever after locus of divine visitation.

Moltmann, though enthusiastic about Buber’s insights, asks if perhaps the ‘It’ has not been misunderstood.  He asks about the community of work, the everyday community, the life with others that is more concrete than the small, oath-bound communities of Buber’s vision.  Community, he say, requires “a common material agency and reliable institutions” the “necessary and good incarnations of the human into real life.” (84)  Modern society, he says, cannot be humanized through personalization.

“It is not possible directly to repersonalize relationships which have been divided up for a rational purpose. . . . The ‘life of dialogue’ can easily lead to a romantic flight from the reality of scientific and technological civilization.  Then it loses its humanizing and healing powers and survives in a petty corner for the criticism of culture.” (85)

Furthermore, he says, industrialization, instead of depersonalizing life, has allowed it the freedom to dialogue.  Thus, in condemning the technopolis of the I-It, Buber’s personalistic protest cuts away at the floor beneath it.  What is good about the community of ‘I’ and ‘Thou’ is that it reminds human beings of their own humanity with one another.  That, he says, should inform social and political work in the modern world.  “Men will then take to themselves the sorrow of a reality which is constantly alienated and materializing, and see the future under the image of its alteration so that it can be characterized as a human society.” (86)

E. The irony of the "man without qualities"

Rootlessness characterizes the order of the day in an industrial society.  For many, there is no ultimate realization of a universal human society.  Yet, irony has become a way forward for some; the irony of the ‘man without qualities.’

Ralf Dahrendorf, in his essay "Homo Sociologicus," described a model of human expression, a sociological model.  In this model, human beings both describe themselves and are described by a matrix of social roles: parent, child, teacher, citizen, bird watcher, female.  Indeed, there is no other way of describing who someone is, whether someone else or yourself, outside of these relationships.  These do not have to do with who someone is, however, but only what they do.  They are societal descriptions in which someone lives, descriptions that are horizons of the possible, each one molding the subject to the shape of a different expectation; a German professor and a farm laborer live on disparate tracks. Social roles are the process of socialization, molding the man and introducing him to the society of his peers.

Social roles bring dangers with them.  Their role play separates the human person into personalities, inner and outer in a division which begs the question: “Is [one] identical with the echo which his personal life has made among other people?” (88)  There is the danger too of so becoming one’s role that there is no humanity left save what is proscribed.[1] Again, as relationships multiply one upon the other, the self becomes a juggling act which, in critical cases, could result in a split of the personality itself.  Each role, each expectation, brings with it different claims.  In a whirl of competing demands, can one even speak of an ‘I’ at peace with itself and the world?  Moltmann asks, “Where is he a man, and where is he free to be man?  Or does he just not appear as himself and as ‘man’ in the functional activity of this pluralistic society? (90)  So is there a subject at all?

There is hope for a subject if passive imagination is considered.  To the clingy aggregate of social roles there is always one untouched addition.  This one addition, this passive imagination, allows a detachment, an even laughable point of view by which to critique all the other demanding selves.  This one addition is the free possibility of being different.  “By means of self-irony man can look out from the reality of his life and reflect, keep his negative independence from everything and toy with the quite different possibilities that he has.” (93)  So free and open can this ironic man without qualities be that Moltmann draws a line between it and Marx’s total man.  Both, he says, look beyond constricting societal walls to bare hills of human possibility.

Yet, Moltmann also warns this passive ironic of romantic dangers.  She struggles to acquire greater possibilities, but knows she can never belong to any of the roles which she acquires.  She develops an experimental attitude toward life and “lives the delusion that the thousand possibilities … are worth more than the one reality.” (93)  The external world, the real world, slides away within the foggy disconnect.  “This fascination is paid for … by  an increasing inability to identify oneself and to become flesh in practical life, and to love.” (94)  With no real place to stand, the passive ironic ironically is swept along by the active forces, plans and expectations against which irony was chosen in the first place.

Moltmann sets another contextual warning.  This time against a form of Christian identity.  He describes this identity as such:

If radical contextualization is what it is to be human, then how can one live from and in God?  If a man is but the result of his social relationships, then how can we understand him when,

“the transcendent God calls him and he receives the call of the word of God and trusts it, he releases himself at the same time from the enclosedness of the world and becomes free of the powers and laws of the world.  He becomes free of the mirror of his social activities and can stand over against himself.  He is then no longer the result of his social circumstances, but becomes Son of God and Lord of the World (Gogarten).” (95)

The creature of God lives in a different world than Dahrendorf’s homo sociologicus.  Roles do not define, but become tools which may be owned without owning.  They are no longer laws from jealous gods but simply roles; they are secularized.  The real does not dominate.  At the same time, the inner self is made sacred because it receives itself from God.  There is a place to stand outside the roles, a place for possibility.  Freedom is granted to the inner self so that there is no longer the cacophonous demands of society but, instead, the silent place of one’s decision.  Chiding Bultmann’s free decision of faith, Moltmann retorts, “The freedom of faith is indeed always specific in decisions, but decisions do not turn into decisiveness.” (96)  The problem with this point of decision which stands between the cut made between God and the world (for in the solitary, sacred place before God one takes refuge from the social demands of the secular) is that nothing gets done by it.  There is no inner ability in its position to make decisive choices.  There is no human incarnation for the sake of others.  Social reality is not changed.  It is a “Utopia of the negative.”  “This form of belief is always in danger of changing into the romantic attitude of the beautiful soul, which like a butterfly moving from flower to flower dashes past reality from one decision to another, without really and effectively taking corporate reality seriously.” (96) The passive ironic, untouched because she is without qualities even as she lives in a world of qualities, is aesthetically attractive.  But, as Moltmann concludes the segment, it arises from the experience of social powerlessness.

F. The adventurous heart

One option in the face of life’s increasing complexity is raw and direct action.  Instead of the patient labor of maintaining community networks upon networks; instead of political decisions made more and more obscure as awareness of the layered contexts are understood; instead of these, Alexander’s sword of naked decision is drawn from its sheath (Scheide) and with it the clarity of action (Entscheidung).

“Critically Utopian thought builds upon the relationships of the present which have become opaque the objective counter-image of a liberated-harmonious society. . . . Self critical scepticism withdraws from an oppressive social reality into the inner secret of the man without qualities, to satisfy those possibilities in unreality.  There is yet a third way, from multiplicity to simplicity, the mover from the thousand possibilities to the one necessary reality, which is the naked decision.” (97)

It is not the purpose of acting but that one has acted that clarifies.  In the teeth of battle, decisions are elementary, friend and foe are clearly manifest.  Moltmann identifies “the struggle for the existence of the nation” – war –with this very desire.  On the level of nation state, political and social factions, melt away and unify under the banner of patriotism.  Such decisiveness, says Moltmann, explains why facism held such attraction, despite having no plan of its own other than to act.

The will to power grants unity to the individual as well.  In the commitment to arms, all the manifold demands, roles and divisions of the self stitch together.  Existence is one, a fulcrum between the scales of living and dying.  “Deliverance from the uncertainty in which one does not know what one is there fore, lies in total self-sacrifice.” (100)

The best preparation for a life of self-sacrifice is the destruction of humanistic education.  Contempt today for the ‘ivory tower’ universities, the desire of some to hitch the intellect to a certain powerful politic, or even the wholesale embrace of anarchy: all of these, he says, is a treason of intellect against intellect.

Politically, such a life is paved by abolishing parliamentary procedure and bureaucratic process.  The Utopia of the bourgeoisie “consists  in the hope that one could transmute the decisive battle into a continuous parliamentary debate, and put it off by delay.  The opposite to discussion is dictatorship…” (101)  In times of war, there is no need for congressional debates, but only kill or be-killed.  The dictatorship offers seductively a simple, naked decision.  Therefore, dictatorships thrive in existential politics.

Just as the longing for decision is met by secular categories of friend and enemy, that same longing is met by ideas of apocalypse in religious sects and churches.  In the looming shadow of the end, faith is the absolute decision made on the basis of an absolute call; both, notes Moltmann, beyond verification by any objective standard.  “One can only take an attitude to them without reference to reasons and proofs.” (103)  Faith is the ultimate risk, a leap without evidence.  “It is not the credibility of its object that is evidence for [faith], but one’s own decisive commitment, in which man comes to himself.” (103)  Yet, he asks, without a credible object, does one really have the Christian faith?

Brushing away complexity, responsibility and the political and social demands of responsible human living by means of violence and the act only brushes them away.  It does not balance the need for society.  Furthermore, the very thing that makes decisiveness so decisive is its context against the daily background of complexity.  Without needs, demands, and deadlines, there is no way of talking about decision.  The two are related in a negative circularity.

The same circularity appears in religious faith.  The existential leap, too, is only an antithesis against the thesis of the church of historic confession and liturgical and missiological praxis.  The existential leap has no real substance of its own; inexpressibility is no foundation.  “Christian faith is indissolubly linked with historical recollection of the Christ-event and with eschatological hope in the future of Christ, and so is itself a historical decision.” (104)  The call of the gospel does not bow him to crisis in a last day, but, rather, “opens to him new possibilities of altering himself and his circumstances.  It puts him in the time of love, which trusts in the possibility of conversion of the ‘enemy’, because it hopes in him, and therefore does not kill or damn him, but tries to help him to life.” (104)  Neither Modern society nor the Christian faith will find a solution in the naked friend-foe decision.  Rather, both should adhere to the better way, loving and rational dialogue with others.

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[1] Heidegger’s Das-Man

See: Man: Chapter 3a

See Man: Chapter 2

See Man: Chapter 1

Christianity is like baseball

There is an article that has stayed with me for quite a while now. The article is "How Baseball Explains the Nature of Language" by Alva Noë. Noë is a philosopher of perception at UC Berkeley. He is also a member of the Institute for Cognitive and Brain Sciences and the Center for New Media, and he blogs on NPR's science blog 13:7 Cosmos and Culture, where this article was published.

Now I've been asking methodological questions about theology for over a decade now. What is theology? What makes theology good or bad? Does theology mean anything? Does it have purpose? Is it useful? What is appropriate to it and when could it be said to go off the tracks? Is it a craft or a science? How do you know if you are doing theology versus, say, sociology, psychology, political theory, writing protest songs, or abandoning oneself to phantasie under the illusion of piety? What are its basic moves, its tools, its core principles? How can one define its edges and sort out its territories? Is theology native to confession or imported (or worse) into/onto it?

Nearly all of these sorts of questions are simply assumed by surveys and the literature (though not by Barth who plows right in from the start), and so I've been forced to work backward into the questions, which is my usual and oh-so-efficient method. Nevertheless, I have made slow, imperceptible progress. My hypothesis is that theology is not akin to philosophy or a philosophical system, but resembles more a craft, something that is made by human beings and that also makes them back.

So if theology is a craft, then what structures and orders it? What are its tools? I've been around the block long enough to have heard a bit about Ludwig Wittgenstein's language games, and I own a copy of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and the Philosophical Investigations. But his work outstrips my abilities--and Noë's article enters the picture at exactly this point, meeting low-brow abilities like mine with exactly the sort of metaphor this citizen of Red Sox Nation can respond to: baseball.

A fundamental of Noë's argument is that context governs meaning. The phrase "home run" is meaningless outside of the context "baseball". Baseball creates a space in which meanings like home run, triple play, our grand slam can come to be and make sense. (Wittgenstein put it like this in the first proposition of the Tractatus: Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist / The world is all that is the case. Think also of Heidegger’s Dasein—that we are thrown (Geworfenheit) into this world. Dasein ist geworfener Entwurf.) But what sort of activity is baseball?

Baseball is based on rules, but it far transcends them. Baseball includes all of these actions—throwing, hitting, catching, how to steal a base, how to bunt—and all of this new grammar—double-play, foul ball, home run. But it also includes a higher-order discussion of how it is best played and what makes for the best team and the best game. “Baseball people are concerned not just with how you play, but with the very question of how one ought to play baseball.” And it also brings with it an ethic: “When you are initiated into the baseball world, you learn to care about such things as stolen bases and pick-off attempts.”

Baseball is a human space. And this space is not just system, but a practice, a game, an activity which by definition is participatory, social, and makes as much as it is made. "To learn baseball," writes Noë, "is to come to be able to see and feel and be motivated in ways that are meaningless to strangers of the game. Baseball is more than a system of rules, it is a practice."

Noë says that there is a class of actions that human beings practice, a class based on rules, but that can’t help but transcends rules. A class that always has both first-order activities (what is done) and second-order activities (how we evaluate what is done). He calls these “baseball-like practices” and practices whose “ontologies are practice relative” and includes in these other social practices such as dance, art, law, speech, and language.

As a philosopher of language, Noë is taking linguistics to task. Linguists, he says, want desperately to be descriptive and evaluate only what is there. But they cannot do that, he maintains, because language is one of those class of actions that cannot be described from the outside. We live inside language; we can’t examine it from some removed and untouchable location. “We are so deeply embedded within and at home in the language world (compare: the baseball world) that we find it difficult to believe in the practice relativity of our convictions and commitments.” And because of that language is not only a first-order practice, like chemistry or geology, which can be comfortably described and dissected, but always and everywhere a second-order practice which can’t help but comment and critique itself.

And so I say that Christianity is a baseball-like practice whose ontology is practice-relative. It is a human practice, and that means a social, a political practice. It is based on rules (law), but those rules create a space of actions and activities and words and meanings and, almost instantly, the second-order discussion of how this should all work called theology. But going deeper than that, it is a revealed religion, which means it is based in language (Word) and, because language is a baseball-like practice, then by definition it must have grammar, it must have ethics, it must have theology.[1]

Coming the long way around, then, Christianity is a practice-specific, a baseball-like ontology that exists along the first-order—its practices (liturgy, public and private)—and the second-order—the ethics generated by and for those practices as well as the metaphysics, the theology that questions the fitness of the whole.

Well, I’ve thrashed around in this for a while. Such thrashing is not Noë’s fault. His article isn’t about Christianity, after all, but an intramural jab at linguistics. There is something lex orandi, lex credenda (the law of prayer is the law of belief) about it. And there is something of Plato’s Paradox of the Meno and previous discussions on this blog about the epochē that are here as well. I’m dissatisfied as this last point I’ve neglected altogether in this description. At any rate, I’d better post.

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[1] "I belong to a generation of furniture makers to whom woodworking initially presented itself as a lost art from a more authentic time. When I turned my first clear pine board into a crade, and for many years thereafter, I was beguiled by rediscovering the how of the craft. How do you sharpen a chisel? How do you cut a sliding dovetail? How do you make a chair comfortable? Eventually, though, I also began to wonder about the why. What is craft and why does it matter? Why do we make things? Or, more specifically, why do we choose the spiritually, emotionally, and physically demanding work of bringing new objects into the world with creativity and skill?

The answers I have found -- through considering the work of my own hands, through the practical education of a life in craft and through the shared experiences of others -- all seem to lead back to one fundamental truth: we practice contemporary craft as a process of self-transformation." ~ Peter Korn. Why We Make Things and Why It Matters. David R. Godine: 2015, 7. Korn goes on to mention Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Richard Sennett's The Craftsman, and Matthew Crawford's Shop Craft as Soulcraft.

scrap of notes from April 2005

For the sake of memory and chronology, here's what I'm working on right now.

First, I'm very slowly beginning to read the early twentieth century French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859-1941). I'm digitizing an introductory monograph of his for inclusion in Project Gutenberg. Bergson's works were published in French just before the turn of the century and, up until WWI, he was a world-star of academia. A 1913 announcement that Bergson would be lecturing caused the New York's Times Square's first traffic jam. Indeed, Bergson is experiencing a renaissance in phenomenology circles, and especially among film theorists such as Gilles Deleuze. French thinkers as Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, and Lévinas acknowledge his influence on their thought. There is something in him about the image and its permanence through change. I don't know enough to even know why I want to know. I'm just following the tip of my nose and seeing where it all goes.

Martin Heidegger, on the other hand, is beautiful! He is to the twentieth century what Kant and Hegel are to the nineteenth. I'm teasing apart the eleventh edition of his 1929 address "Was ist Metaphysik?" In eight or nine pages, he overthrows the Enlightenment projects "certainty" and announces the hermeneutical nature of theology up to the present day. Marvelous! In that one essay--as fundamental as Renee Descartes's Meditations on First Philosophy--Heidegger cracks the solid wall of modernism and opens a space for the suspicion-of-supicion called postmodernism. It is really exciting, but slow going. I only have a few minutes a day to devote to the few pages a day I can cover. And it is not uncommon to review.

Additionally I'm discovering what I believe could be the beginning of my first pursued publication/article. The theme is the nakedness of Christ. I believe that research will show that Christ was crucified naked, yet the Gospels do not directly mention this, nor does any treatment in art or film of which I am aware. Being the second Adam, there is something here, a parallel to the innocent nudity of our first parents. And, note that he appears clothed after the resurrection. Paul, too, talks about our present nakedness and a longing to be clothed. Nakedness in the OT is always bad, connected to adultery (idolatry), but it seems that there is a change in that--a restoration of it. And this theme can easily branch out into discussions of the human gaze, our own embodiedness (and shame), even philosophically there is a motive of conceal/reveal; known/unknown; there is something about the difference between voyeurism and the gaze of love. I mentioned to L/ the other day, thinking about this, that Jesus's nakedness (for I am assuming at this point, albeit prematurely, that he was naked on the cross) was the nakedness of a groom who presents his body lovingly to his bride, whereas the world sees through the eyes of humiliation and rejection. It quakes with fear at the exposure of its own nakedness. [A later addition: this would also figure into media studies where people reveal and conceal themselves through media.]

I'm also playing with ideas about a unique method for writing theology modeled on the improvisational community-making methods of jazz. As in music composition, I would like to propose a fundamental motive and build my paper out of its development just as if it were a musical composition. I want to think of theology from the perspective of the liberal arts, rather than syllogistically like a math problem or taking a cue from Quintillian's rhetoric. I want it to welcome, receive, and serve as a vehicle for the opening up and uncovering of human being-ness (there's the Heidegger.) We should read a theological text as much like a work of art or a musical score as a "logical argument." People are not argued into the Kingdom as much as they are drawn as the Spirit opens their eyes to the beauty of the gospel. In that case, the choice is obvious. It is the choice for oneself as one was created to be, and the giving up of fantasies about personal divinity.

Anyway, as soon as I'm done with this review, I'm going to get back into Greek during the day and devote next Tuesday to beginning the Biblical/exegetical historical-critical research on the nakedness of Christ. Since the gospels do not say (they turn away, really, viewing the crucifixion with their eyes shut to a large extent), I have to be able to build a pretty solid case if I'm going to rest an entire argument on the nakedness of Jesus. As to why this theme comes to me--this theme of the nakedness of Christ--I have no idea. It just bubbled up two or three weeks ago.

See, my heart says that I'm tired of reading secondary sources. I need to stop "throat clearing" as Dr. Lim calls it, and pick up my own pen, whether I'm totally ready or not. I will even go so far as to say I'm "called" to this, like a missionary is called overseas. It burns away in my mind and my heart night and day, and even obstructs my reading: "Why are you reading this? This is not your work. Why are you following this argument? It is not your argument. It is time, time to find out who you are. What do you have to say for yourself? It is time: do it now, before you become forever lost to yourself and become a parrot and a servant of the ideas that others are having. You will be forever reading, forever questioning, but arriving nowhere. You will be growing, but to where? From where? What is your offering? What do you bring? Do you even have your own questions any longer? Do it now."