Comments on: Conversations with Augustine: Commentary on Saunders’s Essay

By: Janet leslie Blumberg

Janet leslie Blumberg — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 18:48:58 +0000

Joel Hunter,
Thank you for such an eloquent and empathetic response! You are one of the ones who reads Derrida faithfully and I agree with everything you (and Caputo) say about his work. (I love that quip of Derrida’s that every decade he seemed to be being read “more widely and less well.”)
On Heidegger, I am very intrigued. How do you take his critique of “ontotheology” if it does not imply a reading of Aquinas or of historical Christian theology in general as placing those claustrophobic closures upon “God”? I assumed that he was in fact simply characterizing Christian theology as he had encountered it in his own post-Cartesian modernity and assuming (in reading earlier theologians) that theology was always that way…. So I am not dismissing the quality of Heidegger’s own thoughtwork at all, but I’d love to hear a bit more about how the orthodox Heideggerians might be misreading him on this….
Finally, yes, I was on a bit of a fishing expedition. I am going in a different direction from the one staked out by Derrida et alia, but still against the closures of Enlightenment metaphysics, because this is the way that I have been instructed by pre-Cartesian Western thinkers. I want to pursue THEIR notion that since thought always always be directed towards one kind of thing and not all the others, and since it must therefore sink into the heuristic structures of a discipline devoted to that kind of thing, therefore the so-called metaphysical or conceptual closures decried (rightly) by their poststructuralist deconstructors for their oppressive role in modern scientism were absent in the earlier liberal arts tradition of knowingS.
The methods and conclusions (always tentative and open to the future) of pre-scientific thought and theology were always heuristic, investigative constructs that were not regarded as timeless or eternal since they reveal in their very construction the limitations and dependencies of the structures themselves upon those ongoing disciplinary conversations and upon the inescapable need to balance all truths against other truths in the discipline and across disciplines. (And upon correction from the “origins” themselves, the phenomena whose formality is never fully ENOUGH known or “comprehended,” save by God. But premoderns sought ongoing HUMAN knowings, not the divine knowing.)
Since this weblog has such a marvelously articulate and informed readership, I wanted to see if there would be a hue and cry of protest and perhaps references to textual passages that I could check out that might seem to refute the project I am working on….
So I appreciate your supportive responses, Joel. I must say, though, that I never expected the rehabilitations we are talking about could extend to Heidegger! He seems to me to think, like Husserl and Levinas and Derrida, that the closures of pre-scientific theology and philosophy are generally as logocentric as the epistemological closures enacted by early modern philosophy. (P.S. I agree that when Derrida is actually reading Plato he is exceptionally acute and cagey and careful, but he still reads “like a hound on the scent” for reductive closures that cannot be there simply because Plato already expects readers to bring many ways of knowing to the reading of his dialogues, if they desire to become philosophers. That is why and that is HOW Plato deconstructs himself far better than any of us postmoderns could ever do, in my readings of him at least.)

By: joel hunter

joel hunter — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 01:06:07 +0000

Oops, sorry for that unclosed italic tag (Cynthia…?)

And I forgot the footnote:
* John D. Caputo, ed., Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida (New York: Fordham University Press, 1997), “The Villanova Roundtable,” p. 9.

By: joel hunter

joel hunter — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 01:01:51 +0000

Dr. Blumberg,

I’m not sure if this post and your comment has passed the expiry date, but in case you check back, I thought I’d ~~walk into your trap~~offer some response.

1. Re. the “Heideggerian reading” of Augustine and medieval thought. I don’t disagree with your characterization, but I would not drop that dead rodent on Heidegger’s doorstep. Rather, the reductionism that you rightly decry I find pronounced by the Cardinals of the Church of Heidegger. There is certainly a system of canonical interpretations of the Heideggerian corpus (woe unto those who stray from the narrow path), but I do not find Heidegger himself making the “closures” on medieval thought, including theology.

2. Is it possible that we (I) are (am) still reading pre-modern ratio, in general, and the Platonic texts, in particular, rather reductively? Yes. And I appreciate what you go on to say in that paragraph about what Plato is up to. Since you mentioned Derrida, let me clarify my position by referring to Derrida’s philosophic project.

We are not rejecting all schemata of distinctions and oppositions so that we may now get on with our catchy word play and corrosive radicality to, as many devotees (and critics) of Derrida think he is doing, talk randomly. After all, do we forego language? How might we reconceive what language is? What exactly does the “undoing” of the “logocentrisms of Enlightenment modernity” do? What “positive” discovery do we make in this enterprise?

What we are doing in this program of philosophic inquiry (and I think that is what Derrida’s and Marion’s work should be called) is trying to make intelligible the origin of meaning articulation and the process by which it comes about. This becomes a philosophical (and theological) imperative when any schema of articulative expression becomes dogmatically regulative. Thus, when we begin to speak of “Plato’s philosophy” or “the system of Plato,” (or Heidegger!) it is (past) time to solicit critique–and here’s the distinctively postmodern point–within the corpus that is given. This is why “deconstruction” is not opposed to the institutional as such, much less to disciplined thought. But neither is it a new, substitute “positive,” merely conservative, merely uncritical repetition of the schemata. Derrida explained that [d]econstruction is not a method or some tool that you apply to something from the outside. Deconstruction is something which happens and which happens inside…”* and he goes on to give Plato’s work as an example.

So I am in profound agreement with what you say (or imply) about how we should read Plato, and how you describe sapientia in your closing remarks (beautiful).

3. Rather than seek to name the proper way of knowing, I would ask how we are to take up and work our way intelligibly into Augustine’s program of philosophic thinking, as I think you are suggesting, too. The common way to go about this is to treat Augustine as a Figure who produced Texts that, if they’re to be taken seriously, must be shoehorned into the contemporary intellectual institution. A better way, in my view, is to raise the perennial issue in philosophy (or theology): what is the origin which this project in its beginning aims to discover, disclose and make intelligible? What Marion does is recommence some of Augustine’s work; i.e., it is taken up again and understood again, differently.

4. You ask in your penultimate paragraph whether we have found among the medievals any spelling out of a capacity that is genuinely thought capable of “comprehending” its subject. Since I would never consider myself among those “widely read in the medieval texts,” I will sit back and listen to those with that knowledge. However, I would like to restate the problem. You mentioned ‘phenomena’ as one possible subject. I am currently interested in ‘nature’. Do we have the capacity to “comprehend” nature? Well, can one question if nature has to be (or at least has to have been) pure nature, i.e., nature before (human) rationality? Would speaking come about–originate–out of pure speechless nature? By some pure power or pure act purely opposite to pure nature? Yes, we can (and should) question this schema for nature.

So I answer your question: if our inquiry concerns the perennial issue of origination, then no, I do not think we have such a capacity for comprehension. And if we reduce ‘origination’ to empirical origins, then we certainly have not grasped the nature or meaning of nature. This proximate wisdom regarding nature does not preclude our “seeking the depths of a complex proportionality” in our subject matter. It does, however, undermine any assumption we may have about this unstable order originating in a harmonious system, a “pure,” changeless, motionless equilibrium.

This is why, if I may conclude with an ellipsis, that Christian theologizing that begins with a “doctrine of God” or a “doctrine of sacred writings” is entirely wrongfooted. Rather, we have God revealed in Jesus, that Intruder into the chaos of the concrete history of humanity and creation (nature). I do not think christocentric theology allows our thinking to be regulated ultimately by metaphysics, and this is what makes it such a difficult–but open!–project. We are “seeking the depths” of the wisdom of God (1 Cor 1:24).

By: Janet Leslie Blumberg

Janet Leslie Blumberg — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 20:47:37 +0000

“he does not retread analyses which focus on the equivocity of the word ‘know’. Indeed, one kind of knowing is ruled out implicitly-ratio-that which “comprehends,” i.e., that which might be known exhaustively, without remainder. I cannot know myself objectively….”

“given the Platonic sea in which Augustine and Calvin are swimming, what with the inflexible lexicon of infinite-finite, original-copy, absolute-relative, real-corporeal, and so on….”

———————-

May I ask a question of Hunter, Saunders, and the rest of this well-informed reading community?

We know that Marion has rescued Aquinas from the Heideggerian reading that reduces such rich medieval thought to mere onto-theology and the closures of “being.”

And here (above) we are learning about Marion’s similar rehabilitation of Augustine from the closures of Cartesianism.

But is it possible that we are still reading pre-modern “ratio,” in general, and the Platonic texts, in particular, rather reductively (or in modern philosophical terms) as well? Plato situates these “inflexible lexicons” of his within layer upon layer of ambiguation, highly purposeful ambiguation at that. Perhaps we are ignoring the gestures these texts perform and fastening on the (often mischievous and heuristic?) dichotomies of Plato that seem to correspond so well to the logocentrisms of Enlightenment modernity, with which Derrida and Levinas, for instance, have been rightly locked in mortal combat? I would greatly appreciate any comments.

Specifically, have we found among the medievals any spelling out of a capacity, including “ratio,” that is genuinely thought capable of “comprehending” its subject — not only with respect to God, but even with respect to phenomena? I would greatly appreciate having my attention called to such passages by those of you who are so widely read in medieval texts. Augustine? Anselm? Aquinas? Scotus?

Or does Boethius, for instance, introduce such a “ratio” in his translations and transmissions of Aristotelian texts to later centuries? Is not ratio a limited and inferior cousin of sapientia? And is not sapientia involved in seeking the depths of a complex proportionality, between different ways of knowing (or different doctrines), that is unceasingly to be sought, but never finally to be reduced to rule or closed against the future for the purposes of on-going inquiry?