Posted by: gcarkner | June 20, 2013

Critique of the Aesthetic Self…5

Final Reflections on the Critique of the Aesthetic Self

This five part discussion has been a deeper look at Foucault’s theme of the aesthetic component of the constitution of the moral self. It is now clear that the hermeneutic of the aesthetic is the determinative interpretive concept in Foucault’s ethics: aesthetics goes all the way down. Ethics for Foucault is a sign language of the aesthetic. The return to the subject is a return to the subject as a function of interpretation, as opposed to a subject as a metaphysical or epistemological starting point. The place of freedom as ontology is  a basic working assumption within self-constitution or construction.  The discussion so far captures the contours, the impact and consequences of dissolving the boundaries between ethics, art and everyday life into an aesthetics of existence, a life as a work of art. The series has also begun to reveal some of the shortcomings and problems with this approach through a critical dialogue with Charles Taylor.

As discovered in this investigation, there is a positive, robust edge to this hermeneutic of self. It is the self taken seriously as a site for creativity, imagination and self-respect and even a site to resist forms of social and political oppression, towards the empowerment of the individual. The self is the frontier of freedom and of the invention of new forms of life and lifestyle (the entrepreneurial self). Foucault is right to encourage the individual to be more circumspect about her moral self and how it has or is being shaped, and to realize that one has a significant part to play in this shaping process.

One’s chosen actions (habituses) does contribute to the shaping of one’s character, which in turn creates a lifestyle, which creates the unity of this eclectic process. One is to some degree the author or the reflective architect and engineer of oneself in Foucault’s ethics. It has been his goal to intensify the awareness of this process, to make it more central to one’s consciousness. He has offered tools as found in the ancient world to inspire imaginative self-creation, a creatio continua. He also holds out promise that a few (not many) will be able to remain in the archives as a fine exemplum, as a work of art to be admired by the masses. Read More…

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Posted by: gcarkner | June 19, 2013

Richard Swinburne, Oxford Philosophical Giant

Screen shot 2013-06-19 at 7.18.03 AMRichard G. Swinburne (born 26 December 1934) is a British philosopher of religion. He is an Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oxford. Over the last 50 years Swinburne has been a very influential proponent of philosophical arguments for the existence of God. His philosophical contributions are primarily in philosophy of religion and philosophy of science. He aroused much discussion with his early work in the philosophy of religion, a trilogy of books consisting of The Coherence of Theism, The Existence of God, and Faith and Reason. Personal Homepage at Oxford University – Includes a curriculum vitae and more complete list of publications.

 

 

Academic Career

Swinburne has been a very active author throughout his career, producing a major book every two to three years. His books are primarily very technical works of academic philosophy, but he has written at the popular level as well. Of the non-technical works, his Is There a God? (1996), summarizing for a non-specialist audience many of his arguments for the existence of God and plausibility in the belief of that existence, is probably the most popular, and is available in translation in 22 languages. Swinburne received an Open Scholarship to study Classics at Exeter College, Oxford, but in fact graduated with a first class BA in Politics, Philosophy and Economics. Swinburne has held various professorships through his career in academia. From 1972 to 1985 he taught at Keele University. During part of this time, he gave the Gifford lectures at Aberdeen from 1982 to 1984, resulting in the book The Evolution of the Soul. From 1985 until his retirement in 2002 he was Nolloth Professor of the Philosophy of the Christian Religion at the University of Oxford (his successor in this chair is Brian Leftow).

Christian Apologetics

A member of the Eastern Orthodox Church, he is noted as one of the foremost Christian apologists, arguing in his many articles and books that faith in Christianity is rational and coherent in a rigorous philosophical sense. William Hasker writes that his “tetralogy on Christian doctrine, together with his earlier trilogy on the philosophy of theism, is one of the most important apologetic projects of recent times.” While Swinburne presents many arguments to advance the belief that God exists, he argues that God is a being whose existence is not logically necessary, but metaphysically necessary in a way he defines in his The Christian God. Other subjects on which Swinburne writes include personal identity (in which he espouses a view based on the concept of a soul), and epistemic justification.

Though he is most well known for his vigorous rational defense of Christian intellectual commitments, he also has a theory of the nature of passionate faith which is developed in his book Faith and Reason.

Swinburne’s philosophical method reflects the influence of Thomas Aquinas. He admits that he draws from Aquinas a systematic approach to philosophical theology. Swinburne, like Aquinas, moves from basic philosophical issues (for example, the question of the possibility that God may exist in Swinburne’s The Coherence of Theism), to more specific Christian beliefs (for example, the claim in Swinburne’s Revelation that God has communicated to human beings propositionally in Jesus Christ). Read More…

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Posted by: gcarkner | June 18, 2013

Critique of the Aesthetic Self…4

 Is an Aesthetics of Violence hidden in Foucault’s Re-invented Self?

Foucault believes strongly in aesthetic-freedom and the creative imagination and heartily celebrates a wide spectrum of diverse human expression. In fact, he is unlikely to judge the behaviour of others, unless they claim to be morally right. Sadly, one of the implications of this strong and uncritical embrace of aesthetic-freedom is that it can lead to an embrace of violence, cruelty and death itself as something to be celebrated. Aesthetics can both promote one’s self-discipline and create an open field for ethical practice towards the Other; it entails a spectrum which traverses from benevolence to indifference to hatred to cruelty and violence.

This is one of the controversial implications of Foucault’s moral projectivism (the projection of one’s values onto life), and lived experience as a self-legitimating entity. Taylor (1991, pp. 65-68) notes that one of the darker implications of aesthetic self-making is the draw towards violence. Referring back to Taylor’s criteria of self-making, Foucault elevates the impulses of category A (Creativity) over category B (Accountability), and even excludes category B.

There is an insensitivity to the larger context of self within moral praxis. This can lead the self to a sense of severe autonomy and strident power, power that can be dangerous and destructive depending on how it is directed. Is this one of the key elements of ethics that Foucault ignores, that is, to guide and control how power and freedom are used? This can indeed produce a crisis of moral normativity (Horovitz, 1992, pp. 325f; McNay, 1994, pp. 134f) in his ambivalent and undefined notion of the aesthetic. Taylor wants them to be used to promote fairness and justice, and positive treatment of the Other? Read More…

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Posted by: gcarkner | June 10, 2013

Critique of the Aesthetic Self…3

Critique of Foucault’s Aesthetic Self: the Danger of Narcissism

Higher forms of authenticity, in Taylor’s language, means a self that is connected to a moral horizon larger than that entailed by radical self-determination. The higher form is more concerned for its recognition by, and resonance with, other people, including external accountability  and social interdependence. Foucault seems to lack a concept or structure of non-oppressive mutual accountability and life-promoting communal interdependent moral dialogue. By overplaying his hand on the aesthetic and the creative in his ethics, he has stripped morality down to the minimalist free self-articulation of the individual.

He has reduced morality to a single component, its beauty. In speaking of Foucault’s emphasis on the aesthetic, Taylor (1991) writes:

The notion that each of us has an original way of being human entails that each of us has to discover what it is to be ourselves. But the discovery can’t be made by consulting pre-existing models, by hypothesis. So it can be made only by articulating it afresh. We discover what we have it in us to be by becoming that mode of life, by giving expression in our speech and action to what is original in us. The idea that revelation comes through expression is what I want to capture in speaking of the “expressivism” of the modern notion of the individual. (Taylor, 1991, p. 61)

Discovery of self happens through self-making (projection of a creative self onto the screen of life). The individual self must hold itself in existence: “I am what I am because of what I make of me.” Thus the aesthetic self is in danger of simply evaporating into nothingness. Ironically, nihilism is the perfect philosophical environment for aesthetic self-creation. Is this why Foucault saw self-creation as a continual process, an ongoing labour, a struggle of creation and recreation, a necessary yet treacherous deconstruction and reconstruction process? Read More…

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Posted by: gcarkner | June 8, 2013

Provocative Quotes on Faith and Reason

Think Again about the Relation between Reason & Faith

Are we entering a post-truth society, where spin doctors and fake news producers are taken seriously, despite the facts? This is fideism. The current attempts towards a pure reason or pure faith are really impossible to actualize. There  are no pure domains of reason and/or faith. They are intertwined. One cannot get rationalism without the other extreme of fideism. Both rationalism and fideism are forced/abstract categories and don’t exist in real life. Rationalism needs faith to be reduced to fideism for its very survival. Nietzsche claimed that there are only interpretations; positivists claim that there are only facts. What should we believe whatever our starting point or prejudgments? It is perhaps a life-long quest to understand the nuances of this faith-reason, knowledge-religion relationship. Marquette intellectual D. Stephen Long helps our quest offering fresh insight and much to ponder in his profound book Speaking of God:  theology, language and truth. Stephen was a past guest speaker a few years ago at UBC in the GFCF series. I have chosen some priceless quotes below to spark the creative imagination. ~Gord Carkner

D. Stephen Long, Marquette U.

D. Stephen Long, Marquette University

The certainties which the church has received as a gift require its participation in humanity’s “commom struggle” to attain truth. The human search for truth, which is philosophy’s vocation, is not set in opposition to theology’s reception of truth as gift. What we struggle to understand by reason we also receive by faith. No dichotomy exists between the certainties of faith and the common struggle by human reason to attain truth. … the truths humanity seeks by common reason (philosophy) and the certainties of faith can be placed over against each other such that each illuminates the other and renders it intelligible until the two ultimately become one, which is of course what the incarnation does in reverse. The concretion of the one Person illumines the natures of both divinity and humanity. (p. 87)

Faith seeks reason and reason assists faith. They mutually enrich each other. (p. 88)

Philosophy should be the love of wisdom that prompts persons to use reason in the quest for truth, goodness and beauty…. Philosophy and theology have distinct tasks, but those tasks cannot be delineated solely in terms of nature and supernature or reason and faith. (pp. 83-4)

Faith not only seeks and presumes reason, it converts it. Every account of reason assumes something beyond it, some enabling condition that makes it possible but cannot be accounted for it within its own systematic aspirations… Likewise faith can never be pure; it will always assume and use reason even as it transfigures it. (p. 135)

Faith adds less a material content to geology, physics, mathematics, evolutionary science, economics, etc., than the form within which they can be properly understood so that they are never closed off from the mystery that makes all creaturely being possible. (p. 135)

Creation, although significant, is not self-interpreting; its meaning, if it has any, resides beyond it…. Creation has no meaning; it is a brute fact, until we give it value… Metaphysics will continue to ask why is there something rather than nothing. The question points beyond the world trapped in it s own immanence. Read More…

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Posted by: gcarkner | June 7, 2013

Critique of the Aesthetic Self…2

Taylor’s Critique of Foucault’s Aesthetic Self-creation continued

Foucault would agree with Taylor’s placement of his project in the twentieth century cultural transition called the Post-Romantic Turn (Taylor, 1989, pp. 434-455). The expressivism of this tradition gives a higher, even perhaps a normative significance to the aesthetic culture sphere, and opens a full challenge to the moral culture sphere (Taylor, 1991, p. 63). Foucault clearly wishes to transcend the code-morality of Old Europe, with its universal intent towards normalization, via a new morality of the evolving ethics of the autonomous, artistic self. The pressing question at hand is whether Foucault’s project of recovering the self is ironically captive to a totalizing impulse, the aestheticization of the moral. Does it become an ideology of the aesthetic which can be easily manipulated by higher or lower motivations?

There is a strong tendency in Foucault to celebrate the individual’s own powers to construct and interpret reality in a context shaped by immanence and the finite, and to deny the legitimacy of any binding moral horizon or moral culture outside or above the self. Taylor sees the picture this way. Read More…

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Posted by: gcarkner | May 27, 2013

The Creation: a poem and video

Creation of man

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LwGvfdtI2c0   Beautiful Video Reflection  with music by Brian Doerksen,  Creation Calls: Are You Listening?

The Creation 

by James Weldon Johnson

 

And God stepped out on space,

And he looked around and said:

I’m lonely —

I’ll make me a world.

 

And far as the eye of God could see

Darkness covered everything,

Blacker than a hundred midnights

Down in a cypress swamp.

 

Then God smiled,

And the light broke,

And the darkness rolled up on one side,

And the light stood shining on the other,

And God said: That’s good! Read More…

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Posted in Faith & Culture, GCU Personality

Posted by: gcarkner | May 23, 2013

A Critique of Aesthetic Self-creation

A Short Critique of Foucault’s Aesthetic Self-constitution

There are positive and negative implications of Michel Foucault’s aesthetic self-determination, which ultimately yields a full-orbed self-making. A strategic starting point is with Charles Taylor’s diagnostics of self-constitution in his book, The Malaise of Modernity (Taylor, 1991, pp. 65-67, aka The Ethics of Authenticity). This chart is employed in this argument as a criteria grid to begin the critical examination of the robustness of Foucault’s concept of aesthetic moral self-constitution, otherwise know as the art of self. The chart highlights what is present and what is absent or intentionally excluded. It leads us on a trajectory of opening up our awareness of the fullest and richest dimensions of the self.

Taylor begins by agreeing with Foucault that, in the West, one is self-consciously involved in one’s self-development, and that one’s identity, one’s spirituality and one’s moral self are intimately entwined. Those convictions are held in common. Both philosophers are also critical of a cultural over-emphasis on scientific definitions of the moral self: the disengaged subject controlling the world, defining its value.

Their debate begins when one asks who and what else is involved in one’s self-shaping. In Taylor’s analysis, there are five significant criteria in the chart below, divided into categories A and B, indicators of the shape of one’s own moral self-constitution. It is a chart which is respectful of the plurality of contemporary approaches to self. Taylor suggests that all five elements tend to be involved, in some combination and different weight, in moral identity development. Read More…

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Posted in Aesthetics, Faith & Culture, Seeker Corner, Stewardship

Posted by: gcarkner | May 21, 2013

Work & Identity: Freedom in Context

Reflections on Calling, Work & Identity

Two priceless quotes from Eugene Peterson’s Practice Resurrection put in perspective our hard work as students and faculty, our deliberations, research, debates, writing, teaching and study. They give life to and empower what we do and how we do it. They offer a qualitative difference.

“Work is first of all what God does, not what we do. Genesis 1-2 is our entrance story of God in his revelation to us. Most significantly, it is a story of God at work, working the very same environment in which we do our work. The first thing we learn about God is that God works. God goes to work making the world and all that is in it (Genesis 1) and then invites us into his work, giving us work to do that is commensurate with his work (Genesis 2)…All our work is preceded by his work. All our work takes place in God’s workplace. All our work is intended to be a participation in God’s work…. It is the nature of work to provide material form for the invisibilities of grace.” (Practice Resurrection, pp. 99-101) Read More…

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Posted in GCU Personality, Grad Student Strategies, Stewardship

Posted by: gcarkner | May 21, 2013

After Atheism What?

After Atheism What?

 How do we bookmark our place in our ‘secular age’? This is a difficult and complex challenge indeed. Charles Taylor writes (A Secular Age, especially Chapter 15 “The Immanent Frame”) that we must find our way in the midst of modernity with its various humanisms and antihumanisms, its conflicting narratives, mythologies and visions, even its anti-intellectualisms, political extremes and closed minds. There are many things (historical, cultural and philosophical) that have called into question the hard culture of atheism in the last hundred years. But there is no going back to a golden age. Is it possible to move towards rediscovery of faith after Nietzsche, to recover meaning and belief once again in an age of unbelief, to find God again after the death of God? Or are we lost in a sea of doubt, alienation, quoting the works of Masters of Suspicion, and yet bragging about our human technological prowess and our trips to the moon?

What does mature adulthood look like philosophically in late modernity? Where does courage lie at the edge of the abyss, at the end of man? Can we find such a future after Camus and his declaration of the absurdity of hoping for meaning in a universe that is deaf to our deepest human aspirations for happiness and a meaningful life? Is there a possibility of something more than self-authorization: the creation of our own needed meaning and values in a meaningless cosmos? After Schopenhauer, Marx and Freud, is it still possible to link with something greater than ourselves, to find what William James called ‘the more’? These are some of the tough questions raised and examined in a CBC Ideas series called After Atheism produced by the very thoughtful David Cayley. We found some real insight in this high dialogue, especially in the interviews with Richard Kearney, William Cavanaugh, Roger Lundin and to some extent John Caputo. There seems to be a tough, even disturbing, hermeneutical examination needed as we reflect on our journey with modernity. Read More…

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