razorsmile :: philosophy//magic //revolution

Category: trust

  • Movement and the Knights within ‘Fear and Trembling’

    Movement and the Knights within ‘Fear and Trembling’

    It is perhaps dangerous to be too assertive when giving an account of Kierkegaard. There’s a whole series of multiple meanings and possibly even the odd trap and foil for the unsuspecting, though less so than in Nietzsche. To think on from Kierkegaard, however, is to grant oneself a license to be wrong about what he said but still right in what is said. An exculpation, no doubt, but one that seems almost ‘truer’ to Kierkegaards’ thought than a slavishly accurate but effortless exegesis. Nonetheless this is an excuse even whilst it may be an exculpation.

    It is with these caveats covering my back that I approach the ‘Preamble from the heart’ [Fear and Trembling: Penguin 2006, henceforth FT]. It is, to locate the exculpation within Kierkegaards’ own words, in an attempt to do some of the work so that I may get my bread with justice that this approach is made. The ‘Preamble’ is the introduction in the drama that is FT of the Knight of Resignation and the Knight of Faith within FT. We are to meet these key conceptual personae – as Deleuze would call them – as Kierkegaard attempts to conceptualise and think the problem of movement. It is how things move that is crucial to the Preamble, what it is that makes something a movement. To tighten this some, it is what makes a specific kind of movement exemplary or vital to the very notion of movement itself.

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  • Phenomenology and the ‘natural attitude’

    Let’s begin by looking at the ‘natural attitude’.  In the ‘Ideas’ (class reader extracts), sections 27, 28, 29 and 30 contain the core outline of the ‘natural attitude’ (NA) that will concern us at the moment.

    Before going any further let me give a ‘pre-philosophical’ definition: the NA is that attitude in which we normally stand, the way in which we go about our life, prior to all questioning of what we are doing or thinking.  The NA is like the unquestioned life, as it were.
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  • Dennett and The New Atheists

    Dennett and The New Atheists

    There’s a very interesting article on The New Atheism over at Wired magazine, worth a look (particularly, perhaps, for those in my Kierkegaard class).  I particularly liked the following extract from the conversation the author has with withDaniel Dennett, in particular the line about philosophers being the ones who refuse to accept sacred values.

    “Yes, there could be a rational religion,” Dennett says. “We could have a rational policy not even to think about certain things.” He understands that this would create constant tension between prohibition and curiosity. But the borders of our sacred beliefs could be well guarded simply by acknowledging that it is pragmatic to refuse to change them.

    I ask Dennett if there might not be a contradiction in his scheme. On the one hand, he aggressively confronts the faithful, attacking their sacred beliefs. On the other hand, he proposes that our inherited defaults be put outside the limits of dispute. But this would make our defaults into a religion, unimpeachable and implacable gods. And besides, are we not atheists? Sacred prohibitions are anathema to us.

    Dennett replies that exceptions can be made. “Philosophers are the ones who refuse to accept the sacred values,” he says. For instance, Socrates.

    I find this answer supremely odd. The image of an atheist religion whose sacred objects, called defaults, are taboo for all except philosophers — this is the material of the cruelest parody. But that’s not what Dennett means. In his scenario, the philosophers are not revered authorities but mental risk-takers and scouts. Their adventures invite ridicule, or worse. “Philosophers should expect to be hooted at and reviled,” Dennett says. “Socrates drank the hemlock. He knew what he was doing.”

    With this, I begin to understand what kind of atheist I want to be. Dennett’s invocation of Socrates is a reminder that there are certain actors in history who change the world by staging their own defeat. Having been raised under Christianity, we are well schooled in this tactic of belated victory. The world has reversed its judgment on Socrates, as on Jesus and the fanatical John Brown. All critics of fundamental values, even those who have no magical beliefs, will find themselves tempted to retrace this path. Dawkins’ tense rhetoric of moral choice, Harris’ vision of apocalypse, their contempt for liberals, the invocation of slavery — this is not the language of intellectual debate but of prophecy.”

    Read the whole thing here.

  • Just answers

    This afternoon I was chilling out a little after listening to Radio4’s ‘Afternoon Play’. It was an interesting one too, a ‘chiller’. The story involved a guy telling someone a story on a train, a two handed piece between an older man and a younger woman set in the late 1960’s and harking back to Ypres and the First World War for its ghost. I do love a good ghost story and it reminded me of these excellent recordings I have of some H.P.Lovecraft tales. One of those stories, about the music of Howard Zinn if I recall, has these screeching violins and the ‘Afternoon Play’ used little bits of that at the end today. It was as though there’s a sound, quite a specific sound, to this particular genre of story. The world-slipping, uncanny, ‘chilly’ world. Somewhere it’s going to be very cold in those stories. The shiver down the spine.

    This particular story also made me think about a connection with Kierkegaard’s tale of Abraham. The shiver down the spine and the shudder of thought. (more…)