Beyond the Present Absence

by Denis Larrivee

Frederick Wilhelmsen’s republication of Romano Guardini’s End of the Modern World marks yet another upward tug in the to and fro between efforts to proselytize a modern public with the long view and the usual tendencies to propagate an ongoing ennui, where future gazing means just the search for yet another momentary sparkle amidst the listless frolics of an unending present. Wilhelmsen’s choice is significant not just for an iconic author come to symbolize historical perspective taking, but for the symbolism of Guardini’s absence from a public whose interests have pushed beyond mere technical surfeit to personal makeovers. By reinserting this particular author into public view, there is the sense that what is negatively perceived in the current cultural progression away from self-reflection is supposed also to merit approbation for what its willful neglect will bring. Wilhelmsen’s retrieval of Guardini seems thus intended both to incur his chastisement and elicit an historical correction.

The man claimed to be intellectual father to three culturally and geopolitically diverse papal officeholders - by the holders themselves - claimed for himself just two hats, philosophy and theology, and two cultures, German and Italian. Yet neither hat named the figure, and neither culture owned the man. Sailing beyond such loyalties, Guardini took, in his little, but big opus, the long view, where hats were just instruments chiseling away patina on the momentary modernesque. True to form, Guardini's view was modern and empirical, culling facts to validate interpretations, while his insights were distinctively a-modern, selecting a-temporal lenses to correct modernity's pretensions. His originality, though, lay not in the method of magnifying, but in the normative value that their amplified images revealed. In this instrumental sense, that is, in the instrumentalization of his instruments, he was both influenced by his era yet diverged from it. With Nietzsche, he could share recognition of modernity's marking, its temporality and its objectifying - "culture is nothing more than hollowed out Christianity" - and a knowledge of how the organs of the age were pressed into its service, like science, shaped and shaping according to modernity's prevailing notions about the truly real.

Modernity’s faithless faith in the demonstrably evident and its severance from the a-temporal transcendent, for example, led him to conclude that its instrumentalization was largely the shaping of self by the subjects that had created its premises and that, then, pro-created indifference to the exemplary. This indifference to the significant gave impetus to chronology, defining epochs and exalting progress, shaping the shaper who is its object. Thus arose the peculiar contradiction, the fruit of self-exaltation that is the modus to the mundane, connoted by the trivial, the banal, and the replaceable. Guardini identified in this process the making of mass man, indistinguishable by no longer being hallowed, but rather hollowed, bereft thereby of distinctions that could claim personal significance, that make a who and not a what; a thriller to chill Chesterton's Man from Thursday.

Following along Guardini’s line, then, it is perhaps no coincidence that the peculiar form adopted by science since Descartes, and that since the Enlightenment has brandished self-emancipation and self-creation, has had a singular inability to see things not as wholes but rather as outcomes of temporal sequences. In this way, it remains always possible to gaze backward in order to value looking forward. Comte, after all, made clear that the point of empirical validation was its cumulative verification and Descartes proposed that no final end could relate a present to a future that would legitimate its arrival.

This peculiar contradiction seems in evidence again, this time driving speculation on the feasibility of brain copying. Coverage of the topic by Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers flagship op-ed journal IEEE Spectrum merely expresses what is otherwise a widely hoped for outcome of technological design, that mimicking nature will create a technological future where nature becomes obsolete. This rampant trend appears to be more than mechanically emulative, with its retinue of inspirational natural patterns, but seems also meant to embrace a future by obliterating the past, a planned obsolescence not of personally inspired and personally referenced devices, but a self-obsolescence that would make the individual the past against which the future appears brighter. Subliminal messaging in the motivational literature on ‘learning to love thinking machine’s’ and ‘can a machine be made conscious’   create normative aspirations about powers and future promise, the new era where not just the devices that serve us, but we ourselves trend upward in reconceived, remolded, re-cognized selves, an evolution by design and not by chance, propelled by the lyricism of temporal philosophies.

Lurking behind the aspirations is the introduction of a qualitatively, original paradigm, the instrumental paragon, that makes of the instrumentalizer the instrumentalized. What is noteworthy, perhaps, in this remaking of the peculiar contradiction is not just the recapitulation of the diminished creator seeking exaltation, or, in Guardini’s insightful vision, the recreating of the circumstances of ennui that bind self to a ‘material world’, but, in another insightful note, the foreclosure of upward trajectory to those seeking one.

Comte’s inspirations, it seems, assure us, positively, that our way forward, lies blissfully through our retreat. This lesson, adopted in the emulation that is subliminally dispensed, has become inscribed, virtually, in the vaunted hosts gathering in science citadels from les pais vieux e les pais jeune, as well as our eastern middle kingdom. The attempt to algorithmically siliconize our finest philosophical gestures, to immortalize our intuited thoughts, and lay them open to viewing, only to avail them later for duplication or clever permuting, could itself take a lesson from economic value. Cheap value in the common and the mundane; from the mass man to the mass brain.

But if, by looking backwards, what can our way forward be? Insights from microcircuits? Sensorially coordinated neural fields? In IBM’s cognitive era what is True North? Communing with our machine friends will likely give us insight on their normative neutralities, their materialized preferences, and, likely, their foreignness. Material bound, our past becomes instead our future, our trajectories stilled and cycling. In the neuroscientific age, perhaps no more fitting epigraph than that our purported means to purpose and grandeur also created the paragon that denied it.

What is clear, and what is perceived clearly, however, is how little the effect of material descent silences our upward urge. Bostrom’s posthumanist subject vicariously encompasses all that we wish to conform to, not just for self-exaltation, but also to join with a higher form of life, which is to say to form a union with a life form no longer mundane, trivial, or banal. What makes a world foreign is the empty absence, the hollowing divested of presence in need of filling, or escape for sanity.  Guardini's tacit insight here is the absence that is temporality, occupied, yet unfilled, frustrated in its higher search and incapable of relief from the evanescent spiritual, the legacy bequeathed but not accepted. 

Woman Gazes at Cat

by Teresita Pumará

I tell him that I’m hurting too, ever since I started talking.

Joann Sfar, The Rabbi’s Cat

one

Some time ago I invited to my house a friend who loves cats. Let’s call this friend F. and let’s refer to F. as “he” because, as my German teacher says, “masculine always stronger is”. F. does not have a cat in the moment, although he did as a child. So, when F. got home, he was happy and excited to meet my cat. Let’s call my cat Mishkin, because that is the name we gave him. F.’s anxiety was so intense, that he was all over Mishkin. He caressed him roughly, he poked him to force him to play with his hand, he chased him around the house and he did not coward when Mishkin showed him his ferocious teeth -Mishkin is a big cat who used to hunt weasels. I must say that Mishkin behaved like a civilized gentleman. He put up with F. with patience and despise. He is the hero in this story. I am the coward. I was always polite to F. and tried unsuccessfully to moderate his anxiety with warnings and fake concern about his safety. I felt pulled between my love and distress for my cat and my wish not to make my guest feel uncomfortable. When F. finally went home, I felt ashamed and sad. I had wronged Mishkin and failed his trust.

two

I am probably exaggerating. I am a cat person. But feeling pulled between human customs and the wellbeing of a cat left me wondering. Why did F. felt he could disturb Mishkin without minding his own disposition to play or to be caressed? F. obviously felt the cat was at his disposal. Some men feel that way about women. Although F. loves cats, he did not think a cat’s wishes and humour should be respected, and he ignored the signs of annoyance Mishkin repeatedly sent him.

I, on the contrary, have an almost religious respect for cats. I feel honoured when a cat likes me and seeks my hand to be petted. In fact, we do not say Mishkin is our pet, but that we are his humans. I must say, nevertheless, this pagan feeling of mine does not extend to all living things. I like plugging green leaves off trees and break them into a million pieces. I enjoy watching spiders eat their preys. I hate pigeons. Plants always die in my hands. But after sharing five years with a cat I slowly came to understand non-human beings live in a world of their own, a world radically different from ours but superposed to ours.

In the afternoons, I often take Mishkin out to the building’s courtyard so that he takes some fresh air and watches birds flying over his head. I take a book with me, but it is always more fun to watch Mishkin lift his head and sniff as if the wind brought some far away message, and then lie down majestically in his Tischbein’s Goethe position, “All is well in my kingdom”. No matter how used I am to the cat and his ways, I always go through the childlike philosophical experience of wonder. Mishkin presents me the mysterious in the familiar. Nature has a life of its own, he shows me, a way unknown to us, the all-knowers. We are not indispensable to nature.

three

When I was in the university I assisted to a couple of meetings of a reading group dedicated to French post-war gloomy philosophers. In one of the meetings I went to we discussed a Blanchot text where Blanchot claimed that a human being (most probably a Dasein) could only approach death and experience his finitude when faced with the death of the Other, the death of the fellow… Dasein. I remember everyone talking about the Otherness and the great Abyss and I feeling intimidated and never finding anything clever to say, because I was not sure what where we actually talking about. I also recall I was left thinking about the deaths I had faced and how they left me dumb, as if I was suddenly turned into stone or other inanimate material. The death of the other did not make me feel more human, if anything it made me feel less human and revealed me how much earth, fire, water and air we are. Maybe when faced to death we become aware of the thread we walk on. But only when spying life can we perceive its fragility and power, its self-sufficient virtuality.

four

In Ursula Le Guin’s Tales of Earthsea magicians exert their power by using the ancient language, which holds the true names of entities. Dragons, ancient, highly intelligent creatures, speak this language, and so by using the true speech magicians can communicate with them. Le Guin’s dragons usually have towards humans the attitude of a Nietzschean god: cruel and condescending, but generous. Something like Mishkin with F., Dragons in Le Guin’s book evoke for me ancient wisdom belonging to non-human beings. They are the perfect stoics. Some twentieth century philosophies taught us that through the awareness of death we become human, and that is what separates us from animals, not reason. I still believe that to be true. But I do not believe in the hierarchy it presupposes. This s because, when I gaze at my cat I feel he learned the lesson, embraced it and jumped to the other side while I stand petrified by death with my eyes fixed in the deepness of the abyss. An abyss I fill with words.

Beyond Realism: In Search of the Divine Other

Preface

The meaning of ‘talk about God’ remains the first and most fundamental issue facing philosophers and theologians in the modern age. This study concerns the analogies needed to make sense of that talk: images, ripe with poetic intensity, borrowed from the language and practice of faith; from the splicing together of lives, human and divine. It concerns, moreover, the reinvestment of those images in the structures of human personality, their role in the development of a renewed metaphysic of the human spirit, aspirationally divine or ‘upwardly’ oriented.

Such concerns have, in recent years, gained still greater urgency as a popular and aggressive ‘evangelical atheism’ has come to dominate religious discourse, threatening to obscure the human truth of religious language. The challenge is a familiar one; its polemic deeply indebted to British Empiricism and, perhaps, especially the Logical Positivism of the last century. It seems that those who put their faith in post-modern theories of language to silence the likes of Ayer and Russell spoke too soon.

In response, theism has retreated from empiricist attack into a new-found realism. Championed by the likes of Peter Byrne, William Alston, and of course, Richard Swinburne, neo-realist metaphysics has, ostensibly, steeped itself in classical philosophy. Amid the search for reason and necessity, the God of grace and providence, of ordinary belief, has been forced to yield to ‘Perfect Being’ thinking, Absolute Being ontology, and other forms of untenable metaphysics, with few alternatives on the margins of relevance. The God of the philosophers may have the virtue of necessity, but this Being’s temperament remains essentially anti-social. With God successfully held in logical quarantine, we may well wonder whether ‘God-talk’ means anything at all.

To close the breach and realign finite with Infinite, philosophical faith with practical piety, has become the most pressing problem in contemporary philosophical theology. Undoubtedly, Whitehead and his neo-classical followers have been quick to learn the lessons of British Empiricism. If anything, however, they learned them too well, placing the religious emphasis almost exclusively on natural, physical forces. So seamless an alignment of God with Creation can be of little comfort to the ordinary believer.

Caught between inflationary transcendence and reductive empiricism, the ‘gap’ between theological speculation and religious belief has widened until neither side seems very concerned with the other. Cleaving to ‘first principles’ and other metaphysical abstractions, both classical and neo-classical theologians have disenfranchised the faithful, putting faith on a trajectory for atheism.

To steer a course between such extremes, I want to return to an earlier tradition; to a metaphysic of persons exemplified in the practice of faith. Doing so draws upon the logic of personal identity: what it means to be, or rather, to become, a person.

This is the practical application of a cutting-edge theology, progeny of one of the twentieth century’s last great metaphysical minds. Almost fifty years after his death, Austin Farrer remains in the vanguard of modern theology, his vital grasp of faith and philosophy unequalled and unrivalled. Farrer first defended theology against the excesses of positivist and then process reduction but he used them to drive his own retreat from the scholastic tradition. This was analysed at great length by Charles Conti in Metaphysical Personalism.

Locating the means and motive for revision in the experience and expressions of lived faith, Farrer supplied the vital corrective; there is nothing more one can say about such an overweening impersonalism which describes God as Ens per se, so cuts its own throat by depersonalising the cosmological connection.

It is my supposition, on Farrer’s behalf, that person-concepts meet the pragmatic demands of both metaphysical theism and realistic belief. So doing, they open up a more fertile route between orthodox and ‘process’ mythologies. Following that route, I begin with the incoherence of philosophical realism and its ruinous application to theism. From there, we journey backwards into neo-classical and neo-Thomist thinkers who themselves attempted to overcome realist abstractions. Our destination lies in a Feuerbachian anthropology of theology or ‘anthropotheism’. Like Farrer, Ludwig Feuerbach used the language of the believer to relocate theology and philosophy within a framework which makes fertile use of anthropomorphic personifications to ‘think’ God.

Ultimately, revisiting the personalist presuppositions of metaphysics in this way throws light on questions of personal identity, which is to describe the nature of an ‘overview’ existence directly related to or experienced in ourselves. This is to ‘draw’ reality on a grand-scale and, most importantly, locate our place within that image. Doing theology dynamically, or psychologically informed – as both Farrer and Feuerbach insisted we must – means recognising the constitutive role projections play in self-construction. Without conscious, active, or intentional participation in our projects, we cannot become persons at all. This returns us to the practice of faith wherein Feuerbach’s anthropology is reconstructed as applied theology, thus completing the personalist metaphysics perpetuated by Farrer as initially developed by the Biblical faith in a Godly person. And what greater challenge can religious philosophy respond to today?

New Book by Simon Smith!

Vernon Press Presents:

Beyond Realism: Seeking the Divine Other

A Study in Applied Metaphysics

by Simon Smith

The meaning of “God-talk” remains the fundamental issue facing religious thinkers today. This study concerns the analogies needed to make sense of that talk. Embracing those analogies signals the application of Austin Farrer’s cutting-edge theology. Almost fifty years after his death, Farrer remains one of the twentieth century’s last great metaphysical minds, his grasp of faith and philosophy unequalled. Having defended religious thought against both Positivist and Process reduction, he pursued his own revision of scholastic tradition, ultimately developing the vital corrective to an overweening impersonalism, one which depersonalises the divine so severs the cosmological connection.

Following this course returns us to an earlier tradition, to a metaphysic of persons exemplified in the expressions of lived faith. This draws upon the logic of personal identity: what it means to be, or rather, to become, a person. Hence, journey’s end lies in a Feuerbachian anthropology of theology or ‘anthropotheism’. Like Farrer, Feuerbach used the believer’s language to relocate theology and philosophy within a framework that makes fertile use of anthropomorphic personifications to ‘think’ God.

Revisiting the personalist presuppositions of metaphysics in this way throws light on the most vital questions of personal identity. To answer them is to ‘draw’ reality on a grander scale than either realism or consequentialism is capable of. Most importantly, it is to locate our place within that image.  

Beyond Realism: Seeking the Divine Other

Vernon Press 

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