One of the most common arguments advanced against materialism and the Enlightenment is that it led to the horrors and deaths of the French Revolution, Soviet Stalinism, and the Maoist Cultural Revolution. Given that no one with the possible exception of Zizek wishes to see a repeat of these sorts of events, many recoil from any endorsement of materialism or the Enlightenment, lest they be identified with cold-blooded mass murderers. Rhetorically this entails that the signifier “materialism” goes underground, living a subterranian life, and discussions that take it as foundational that inquiry should seek naturalistic explanations without positing any form of transcendence become more improbable in the public space. I find it interesting, of course, that this criticism seems to come most often from those who are politically oriented with rightwing forms of thought, neoliberals, and those who are defenders of religion. The motivation for religious hostility towards materialism is obvious, as materialism undermines precisely the sorts of myth-based explanations and superstitions that the many religious folk would like to embrace. The principles of the Enlightenment are a threat to conservative orthodoxy due to the anti-authoritarian nature of reason.
I would be delighted to see a discussion about this. To what degree is this criticism legitimate and true? Was it really materialism per se that caused these horrors? What are some effective counter-arguments against these claims? If materialism and the Enlightenment did, in fact, have something to do with these events– i.e., if there was something internal to this sequence of thought that led to these events –in what way must these forms of thought undergo critical re-evaluation without sacrificing the core of these commitments? I personally believe we sacrifice too much, both rhetorically and conceptually, by giving up these words.
May 13, 2007 at 10:34 pm
Dr Sinthome, I am also looking forward to this issue being discussed without prejudice.
But I need to draw your attention to something I just discovered researching the philosophy of Christian Orthodoxy. It appears that Christian Orthodoxy appeals on REASON and FREE WILL (ideas that also belong to Enlightenment) as the basis of moral conduct. The mere presence of a divine source does not deny or hamper REASON. This is very remote from any Christian fundamentalism. There is no conflict here between reason and faith.
http://www.goarch.org/en/ourfaith/articles/article7063.asp
The Ten Commandments of the Old Testament (cf. Exodus 20:1-17) are considered the minimum of rules for right living, enabling reason and free will to discern right from wrong.
May 13, 2007 at 10:46 pm
It always makes me chuckle when people evoke the need for the ten commandments. Let’s look at what they actually are:
1. Thou shall have no other God before me.
2. Thou shall not make for yourself an idol.
3. Thou shall not make wrongful use of the name of God.
4. Remember the Sabbath and keep it holy.
5. Honor your parents.
6. Thou shall not murder.
7. Thou shall not commit adultery.
8. Thou shall not steal.
9. Thou shall not bear false witness or lie.
10. Thou shall not covet your neighbor’s house; thou shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, nor his male servant, nor his female servant, nor his ox, nor his donkey, nor anything that is your neighbor’s.
The first three actually have the strong tendency to create more conflict and bloodshed than less. 6, 8, 9, and 10 can be known easily through reason and observation, and are fairly universal cross-culturally. 4 is culturally contingent and therefore not a truth of reason or observation. And 7 depends largely on the kinship structure that you’re living in. It is amazing that anyone would take their morality from a text that is over 2000 years old.
May 13, 2007 at 11:02 pm
The first three actually have the strong tendency to create more conflict and bloodshed than less.
I don’t know on what basis you claim this tendency. I think it depends on the interpretation of this polysemic text. If you interpret it as ”I have come here to bring the sword” (what dr. Zizek invokes in Puppet and Dwarf) then I would agree, it creates murder. But this statement is never invoked (within the Orthodox Church at least) without appeals to tolerance, and the Thou shallt not murder also makes it clear I think that it is not meant as a call on violence. I think the Commandments have to be read structurally.
6, 8, 9, and 10 can be known easily through reason and observation, and are fairly universal cross-culturally.
but surely you imply that the cross-cultural universal is extrapolated from the Ten Commandments? It didn’t come from the Enlightenment.
4 is culturally contingent and therefore not a truth of reason or observation.
Yes, although I don’t know what you meant to say by this.
And 7 depends largely on the kinship structure that you’re living in. It is amazing that anyone would take their morality from a text that is over 2000 years old.
Right, although I feel that the appeal of psychoanalysis to the Oedipus complex also depends largely on the kinship structure that you’re living in, or do you find otherwise?
But did you note my point that the Church points you in the direction of free will and reason: it does not tell you to accept the Commandments solely on faith!
May 13, 2007 at 11:14 pm
I don’t know on what basis you claim this tendency.
I just observe the world around me. Christianity and Islam are riddled with bloodshed as they see their God as the one true God and this leads to conflicts both among various sects of Christians and with other religions. It’s as simple as that.
No, I don’t. I mean they can be known through reason and observation, exactly like I said. You find identical or very similar principles in texts that predate the Old Testament and the Bible, such as the writings of Plato. You find such principles in Confucious and Epicurus and Lucretius, etc., etc., etc. The reason that these principles are so commonly found is not because some deity revealed them to us but because these kinds of activities tend to lead to violent conflict within social groups so it is good to avoid them.
I mean that it is a cultural practice specific to the Hebrews and there is no reason to think that everyone should practice it, nor is it clear that it serves any basic human end… Though a day of relaxation is nice.
Yes, this is true. My point is that Christians end up universalizing a culturally contingent set of kinship structures illicitly… Or that’s what many of them do here in the States.
But did you note my point that the Church points you in the direction of free will and reason: it does not tell you to accept the Commandments solely on faith!
This is nice, I’m glad to hear it. My point is that we do not need any divine authority or “revealed truths” to arrive at values and moral knowledge, so the church and the Bible can be cut out of the equation altogether. If the Bible occasionally says something true or useful, this is because it is reflective of human experience and wisdom that arose in grappling with questions of how to avoid self-destruction and how to form flourishing social groups/communities, not because it was revealed on high by some divinity. Sadly some people need stories about the boogeyman to keep them in-line, and cannot see why it is beneficial to live in certain ways.
Dejan, I ask you to cease this discussion as it has little or nothing to do with the topic of the post. I will delete any additional comments from you in this thread.
May 13, 2007 at 11:38 pm
Put a bit differently, what I object to in evocations like the Ten Commandments is not the content of propositions like “do not kill” or “do not steal”, but the form of their presentation in a Biblical context. Sure, some of the commandments are great and later Jesus will say a lot of things I think are terrific. The problem is that they are still presented as commandments from an authority that are to unconditionally be obeyed, rather than truths arrived at through living in social groups or communities and reasoning about what promotes harmonious living and collective flourishing and what tends to diminish it. I think this is a major, if not fundamental, difference between philosophy and religion, and why no genuine philosophy can ever be religious. One chooses either unconditional authority or reason and observation; there’s no compromise here. Consequently, while a book such as the Bible might contain some conclusions that the philosopher might herself come to, the form of the book (and any other sacred text) is necessarily anti-philosophical by virtue of its relationship to authority. Such texts are dangerous in that they tend to create unthinking persons that navigate the world in terms of myths, the fantastic, and the commands of authority, rather than reason and observation. A person that endorses them is already suspect in their judgment and character, for their willingness to endorse such things also suggests a strong willingness to deny careful observation and reasoning when it suits them.
May 13, 2007 at 11:46 pm
My focus is more on how people arrive at particular conclusions, rather than what these conclusions are. This is a key point and a key difference, and is a large part of why I am suspicious of all myths, whether it be Orthodox Christianity, Catholicism, Islam, Judaism, Homer, the Egyptian Book of the Dead, and so on. In all cases they share this common authoritarian structure based on unconditional acceptance of the sacred writ that is revealed not discovered through a process of inquiry in grappling with the world. This is also why religious folk, at a certain point, can only sputter, fling names, distort, and scream when questioned as ultimately their views are grounded authority and authority alone and all the endless rationalizations that are subsequently woven around that authoritarian “foundation”.
But this is off topic from the original post, which proceeds on the premise that religion of any form is an illegitimate way of explaining the world and relating to the world, and is at best a sometimes benign collective delusion or shared psychosis, and, at its worst, a highly oppressive form of social organization that leads to endless unnecessary conflict. Therefore the post begins with the premise that materialist explanation is the only legitimate way of explaining anything about the world– including the explanation of religious delusions and infantile religious attachments –brackets any talk of religion, and then proceeds to the Enlightenment activity of self-critique asking whether there were things internal to previous materialisms that did, in fact, contribute to the atrocities outlined in the post. The post is also premised on the belief that the current revival we see of fundamentalism throughout the world is a symptom of the demise of religion, and that slowly materialism will ultimately win the day. It has only been about 400 years, after all, since we begin to make a concerted effort to overcome our primitive and barbaric religious past, finally escaping our self-imposed infantile state and directly explaining the world about us.
May 13, 2007 at 11:55 pm
Well which is it now, do you want to talk about it or not?
The problem is that they are still presented as commandments from an authority that are to unconditionally be obeyed,
Any Church that presents them as such while denying free will and reason comes straight from Satan, Beelzebub, Chutilu or whatever you want to call Evil, for reason and free will are the prerequisites of any faith. No more than you can attend psychonalaysis without wanting to can you believe in God blindly (without the will to see Him, hear Him, etc). God only reveals himself to those who knock on his door. This is quite like psychoanalsys, in fact; if you don’t want to believe in it, trust your analyst to develop a transferrential relationship, you can’t enter psychoanalysis. But aggressive religions like Catholicism, Calvinism, Prothestantism and Islam, I grant you, do in fact call on repressive authority (e.g. the Pope) to deliver the commandment. This is primarily why they separated from Orthodoxy during the Great Schism, although Kotsko spent a lot of time trying to persuade me that the reason was the Nicene creed or something like that. For me, these religions are heresy to Christian faith precisely because they pervert the point you just brought into view. FREE WILL, not faith, is the core of proper Christianity.
rather than truths arrived at through living in social groups or communities and reasoning about what promotes harmonious living and collective flourishing and what tends to diminish it
May 14, 2007 at 12:12 am
“If only everyone agreed with me then there wouldn’t be all this conflict!”
It’s funny how all these different sects talk very calmly about how they’re the reasonable ones.
I will give Kotsko and Anthony Paul Smith credit, however, their behavior over the last year with its shrill voices, distortions, non sequitors, personal attacks, and obscenities had the effect of pushing me completely in the militant materialist direction and losing any sympathy whatsoever I had for religion. I used to delight in reading Jean-Luc Marion, in teaching Augustine and Saint Thomas, in exploring Plotinus with my students, etc, in reading scripture such as the epistles of Paul, or the various gospels, along with Job, and Ecclesiastes. I would have heated and passionate discussions with religious friends late into the evening over beer, discussing how churches should be organized and various forms of religious belief. These two killed any residual tenderness and tolerance I might have had. I was never a militantly self-identified atheist until this year, and until having to endure endless attacks because I attacked what some group of fundamentalist nuts were doing here and there. These two convinced me that there’s something seriously problematic about the thought process as a whole.
No more on religion, Dejan! NO MORE! This thread is about materialism and the Enlightenment, not about religion.
May 14, 2007 at 12:20 am
It’s funny how all these different sects talk very calmly about how they’re the reasonable ones.
Oh no no, don’t misunderstand, I’m not aiming at a theological discussion. The political praxis of Catholic countries (and of the religions deriving from Catholicism) has been persistently proselytising, aggressive, colonial – and the Church cooperated with the government(s) as well. Isn’t this what you notice right now with Bush? His EITHER OR clause goes great with JESUS IS YOUR ONLY SAVIOR. The Christian Orthodox church, as I’m sure you’re informed, does not meddle in politics.
May 14, 2007 at 12:55 am
Posting on the run… The critique I’m most familiar with along these lines doesn’t target materialism per se, but claims to find a “totalitarian” thread that runs through political ideals that emanate from the Enlightenment – perhaps with a link back to “materalism” via some kind of claim that the notion of a self-grounding system must necessarily be totalistic. I’ve always found this a bit dubious, in the sense that it seems to smuggle a lot of content into the concept of “materialism” that is… er… not terribly materialistic – i.e., there’s a difference between the surrendering a transcendent standpoint, and positing some kind of lockstep, totalistic, self-grounding immanence… I suppose the counter-argument could be that, historically, such contents have been smuggled into particular conceptions of materialism – and thus that this might create a situation that you have criticised in some contexts, of trying to salvage a “true” materialism from various false claimants to the name…
Personally, I don’t have particular difficulty with reappropriating a term with a transformed meaning – but then, I tend to see most useful things as having been historically constituted in alienated form… ;-)
Sorry for the superficiality of this post… Running…
May 14, 2007 at 1:32 am
Was it really materialism per se that caused these horrors? What are some effective counter-arguments against these claims?
Dr. Sinthome, I think one effective counterargument to such a claim would be that the horrors being mentioned all primarily came from the abuse of power – in itself not a material phenomenon. Communism, for example, bombed largely due to corruption and embezzlement, not because of its materialist premises or outcomes per se.
May 14, 2007 at 2:09 am
”All the cults they think they got it made. All the Hindus and the Buddhists and the Lutherans. Oh yeah. Well the Hindus they got some kinda Wheel and the Buddhists they got a circle and everyone’s got Allah coming down. But friends: we have got Jesus Christ!”
May 14, 2007 at 2:26 am
“Christianity and Islam are riddled with bloodshed as they see their God as the one true God and this leads to conflicts both among various sects of Christians and with other religions.”
I don’t know, without necessarily approving or disapproving of these religions, that bloodshed aspect makes the religious basis to it sound very materialistic. How much more materialistic does a belief system have to be before it concerns itself so focally with killing living beings?
You can think of the many kinds of (Marxist) links made between religion and the rise of Capitalism. The abstract, so-called spiritual aspect of popular Western religion is, like the commodity, a fiction within which material political forces act on material people.
Is it necessarily that religious traditions and practice are categorically ideological in this way? I’m not convinced. I think there is a desperately marginalized space for discussing religion (not uniquely) in a way that pulls the inconsistency of the Symbolic order to the front of the conversation.
May 14, 2007 at 2:39 am
I will quietly note that I have not mentioned you on either of my blogs since banning you.
May 14, 2007 at 2:43 am
I don’t know, without necessarily approving or disapproving of these religions, that bloodshed aspect makes the religious basis to it sound very materialistic. How much more materialistic does a belief system have to be before it concerns itself so focally with killing living beings?
You’re using the term “materialism” in a very different way than I use it. Clearly any human practice has a material dimension to it in that it engages with the world and with other persons. I’m using materialism to refer to a philosophical position that claims there is nothing but material realities and material causes. Neither Islam nor Christianity advocate such a view (whatever Zizek might wish to say) insofar as these religions posit a transcendent God that intervenes in the world in ways that violate ordinary principles of nature and posit the existence of the soul and the afterlife.
You can think of the many kinds of (Marxist) links made between religion and the rise of Capitalism. The abstract, so-called spiritual aspect of popular Western religion is, like the commodity, a fiction within which material political forces act on material people.
Yes, and these are materialistic/naturalistic critiques of religion. Religious believers themselves, of course, would have a very different perspective on these matters. This is a very important distinction to make.
Is it necessarily that religious traditions and practice are categorically ideological in this way? I’m not convinced.
I don’t believe I’ve suggested they are, though I think the history of Christianity has, by and large, been ideological in this way and continues to be.
I think there is a desperately marginalized space for discussing religion (not uniquely) in a way that pulls the inconsistency of the Symbolic order to the front of the conversation.
You’ve got to be kidding! Are you from the United States? There is nothing “marginal” about religion in United States discourse or the social space… Though a number of Christians here like to speak as if they’re victimized or marginalized.
May 14, 2007 at 2:56 am
Adam I loved your performance in ”Spiderman 3”, by the way! I was just a little disappointed that there was no SEX in the movie.
May 14, 2007 at 3:29 am
hi Synth,
It depends on what one means by ‘materialism’ doesn’t it? According to one version of materialism, this argument simply can not be correct because the argument (“the doctrine of materialism led to the actions of great violence”) proceeds from theoretical system to consciousness to actions, whereas in reality the the series proceed in the other direction.
I personally think that version of materialism is reductive, but I still think that any one-way flow from ideas to actions is subject to scrutiny. People are capable of draing (and do draw) all sorts of inferences (in terms of action steps to take next) from their observation statements. That said, one could still say that certain systems of observation statements – virulent racism, for instance – (especially when highly concentrated in an area) are likely to correlate with or even to cause negative actions. Whether or not materialism is such a system isn’t clear at all, in part because materialism means many things.
Even with really pernicious materialisms, though, it’s not clear that the doctrine caused the actions, exactly. It might be that the doctrines were formulated around (or as expressions of) prejudices or intuitions which are likely to give rise to the negative behaviors. In that case, the materialism would be a tactic, a way of making the intuition effective. Other doctrines might serve/have served the same function, and the doctrine would be more like a necessary condition for the behavior (a condition which enabled the doctrine to result in the behaviro) but not exactly the cause of the behavior.
That’s my take.
take care,
Nate
May 14, 2007 at 3:34 am
I would like to make a brief comment for discussion which I believe relates both to this discussion and the ‘religion wars’ that have graced these pages:
Do you really think that a materialist or dualistic metaphysics have anything to do with any atrocities committed in their names?
People do godawful things for ‘materialist reasons’ and ‘religious reasons’. Big fucking surprise. People suck.
It seems to me a much more historically realistic possibility that these metaphysical/religious/ontological positions can do excellent jobs of justifying one’s actions, but no one has yet sold me on the idea that either a ‘religious’ or ‘materialist’ stance has anything to do with (i.e. motivates) politics on a basic level – it often sounds a little like people who talk about how Heidegger’s philosophy made him a Nazi.
Perhaps there are some excellent arguments I just haven’t heard, but the discussion and reduction of ideologies without reference to their material circumstances seems both positively absurd and positively anti-materialist.
(This seems to be the central lesson of Marx’s critiques of Feuerbach in his Theses: don’t attack ideology – that is only half of the battle – what needs to be discussed are the material conditions and motivations which gave rise to these ideologies.
As long as one limits oneself to a discussion of ‘ideology as such’ it seems we are only talking about the rhetorical moves which have been used to justify political action.
This reminds me of Benjamin’s thesis on ‘the puppet and the dwarf’ which Zizek (ab)uses; theology is the puppet being controlled by the political. Could not the same be true of any flavour of ideology?)
Perhaps I am coming at this argument from too radically different of a perspective on the political, but it seems that this obsession with the supposed theology/materialism conflict is totally ignorant of actual politics and leads one to ignore possible allies where it actually matters.
meh.
May 14, 2007 at 3:39 am
Eisenkowski, I think what you describe is a materialist position and is certainly the position I endorse. In my view, institutions and social organizations that are structured in particular ways invite this sort of violence, regardless of whether they are secular organizations or religious organizations. Moreover, I agree that material conditions always need to be closely examined in raising these sorts of questions. As for alliances between religious groups and materialist groups, when push comes to shove in the realm of political struggle I don’t think the first question of who to align oneself with should be “so, what’s your metaphysics?” I do think, however, that materialism tends to lead to better questions where investigation of the world is concerned and an understanding of social organizations is at stake.
May 14, 2007 at 3:41 am
Larvelsubjects,
My point was that religion to me, in these situations of secular bloodshed fighting for one’s God, comes across as powerfully materialistic– materialistic in the sense that the fantasy that underpins these issues (for the integrated participants) compels to act without reason. Materialism in this sense is like the pseudo-oikos of Thomas Mann’s Italy in Mario and the Magician.
I take issue with the argument that religion has risen against materialism (scientific, socialistic, whatever), and say that it is more like the opposite: the religion (a reductionist term) that has supposedly risen in response to rampant, modern, secular materialism, in its wholly political and worldly concerns and aims, is really a perverse (i.e. re-active) affirmation of that nihilistic core to what from a certain angle we are calling materialism.
This is part of why I can see Zizek’s rationale in giving so much ironic credit to the Christian tradition– writing a book on why it is a legacy for which it is worth fighting.
When God was found dead in the 19th Century, the point is that the reactive forces of morality had won out; Capitalism won out. The Marxist and then Communist movements seemed to rise as one final active force, even if itself nihilistic (i.e. its constant reference-point being the alienated labour for which Postone critiques “traditional marxism”). Even that was won out by the reactive forces, by Capitalism, and the so-called populist religion that walked hand-in-hand with Regan’s era of deregulation.
I do not think this about a non-materialistic world any more than commodities are really about things of use-value. Of course they are, but then they aren’t too. It’s not that talking about God, whether you really believe what you are talking about, whatever that means, makes you an opponent to materialism, but that it hides how materialistic you really are.
The kind of marginalized space for religion that I’m talking about is marginalized by what is called and calls itself (typically) religion in this country.
May 14, 2007 at 3:46 am
*I am using ideology here as a synonym for metaphysics – in retrospect, likely a very bad move.
Perhaps a better argument, if we want to hold to the primacy of ideology, would be that arguments about metaphysics (i.e. theology, materialism) and the political fail to penetrate to the level of the truly ideological, but continue to talk about rhetoric. That is, who cares how we convince each other to fight for the shared cause?
Perhaps we are talking about tools *of* the ideological and not ideology itself?
And hey, I’m all for the use of the word ‘materialism’ – but it seems that, due to what Zizek calls ‘the parallax view’ we may be allowed (or forced) to discuss the Real in ways which are dualistic or even, gasp, theological.
May 14, 2007 at 3:46 am
The post is also premised on the belief that the current revival we see of fundamentalism throughout the world is a symptom of the demise of religion,
Dr. Sinthome I believe this should be the focus of the discussion; what plagues scares and horrifies me is that in America, Christian fundamentalism seems to be working hand-in-hand with a form of fascism (I use the word tentatively, because it’s a kind of a free-floating signifier, and because I don’t know what the best alternative word would be – imperial capitalism or something).This is new, historically, a new kind of totalitarianism. Although Christianity used to be a totalitarian system in quite a few instances, it has also been persecuted by total. systems. Now, along with a Puritan sort of backlash in culture, we’re getting the situation where Jesus is a warrior for Capital (and when dr. Zizek invokes this violent potential of Christianity, for me this isn’t far from a fundamentalist view).
I think you should be asking how can we use materialism to combat this, or rather, why is materialism so slow or inefficient in providing an answer?
May 14, 2007 at 3:48 am
And it was by no means intended to be non-materialist; I consider myself a materialist generally speaking.
May 14, 2007 at 3:52 am
I really didn’t make any sense in that first paragraph, because I forgot I was adding more to one of those sentences. I should have written something like: “materialistic in the sense that the fantasy that underpins these issues (for the integrated participant) is the very support of the materialist’s reality.” In other words, the reality in which materialism is possible is supported by fantasy, and that fantasy need not be obvious or explicit in its support of the materialist’s reality.
Adorno and Horkheimer’s charge that as Enlightenment rationality (since antiquity) disenchants and displaces myth, it becomes and is treated more like it, is kind of hitting on the same point.
May 14, 2007 at 3:58 am
I do not think this about a non-materialistic world any more than commodities are really about things of use-value. Of course they are, but then they aren’t too. It’s not that talking about God, whether you really believe what you are talking about, whatever that means, makes you an opponent to materialism, but that it hides how materialistic you really are.
PDX, the last sentence in this paragraph sounds really interesting, but I’m not really sure what you’re getting at here. How is it that talking about God hides how materialistic you are?
May 14, 2007 at 4:00 am
And hey, I’m all for the use of the word ‘materialism’ – but it seems that, due to what Zizek calls ‘the parallax view’ we may be allowed (or forced) to discuss the Real in ways which are dualistic or even, gasp, theological.
I don’t know, I tend to think that Zizek’s talk about materialism is a lot of rhetorical hot air. I don’t find that there’s anything I would recognize as a materialism in the first chapter of The Parallax View, and feel that he’s significantly moved away from a genuinely Marxist position. Some might argue that that’s not necessarily such a bad thing.
May 14, 2007 at 4:01 am
Perhaps a better argument, if we want to hold to the primacy of ideology, would be that arguments about metaphysics (i.e. theology, materialism) and the political fail to penetrate to the level of the truly ideological, but continue to talk about rhetoric. That is, who cares how we convince each other to fight for the shared cause?
I do think this argument hits the mark, though I also believe that rhetoric matters and has a material reality of its own that can’t be ignored.
May 14, 2007 at 4:04 am
In other words, it’s difficult to motivate people to do anything without rhetoric and this requires attentiveness to how various rhetorical fields are organized, the organization of various media, networks of communication, and so on. In this regard, certain forms of Marxist thought risk being impoverished by focusing on production and distribution alone, failing to also examine systems of representation.
May 14, 2007 at 4:45 am
Which is why I’ve always found it more productive to read Marx as trying to grasp the systems of representation characteristic of capitalism – including characteristic concepts, experiences, or practices of materialism… ;-) So the “Critique of Political Economy” becomes an attempt to understand why the modes of perception and thought characteristic of political economy resonate – not by reducing these modes of perception or thought back to, say, interests, but by asking (following Hegel’s notiong that things appear as what they are) what things must be, in order for them to appear to us in this way.
Sorry – beside the point, I know… Couldn’t resist… Just ignore me… :-)
May 14, 2007 at 5:05 am
Larvalsubjects,
I say “God,” but perhaps mean the more contestable phrase of “religion” as I think it’s being used in this context. Personally, I think it is used as a catch-all for a belief system that is opposed to secular rationality and politics, when they are really perverse partners– like prohibition and enjoyment in the Superego.
You could say that I see practically all popular use of the term “religion,” which is to say those uses that really don’t refer to anything except for the way people relate to the fact that it doesn’t refer to its supposed material support (like the secret of the commodity-form being our misrecognition of its illusoriness in the reality behind the form (the content or use-values) rather than the form itself), as a mis-leading caricature. In this sense, religion is outrageously oppressive in comparison to secular social organization. Rather than demonstrate how fair and progressive the latter is though, to our face religion, in its oppressive and irrational/contradictory obviousness, shows us precisely how violent the whole system is, while providing the vindicating backdrop that makes it seem like secular, materialist rationality is, for one thing, really an alternative, much less the more humane one.
So, if it clears up what I’m getting at, I mean to restore the problematic division between secular and religious motives/beliefs/whatevers. Do I think there is a more appropriate, more genuinely non-materialistic aspect to what we might otherwise confuse as “religion”? Yes. It is that which I mean when I say that religion as subversive practice, with regards to Symbolic authority as such, is marginalized by both the secular and so-called religious contingencies in the United States.
May 14, 2007 at 5:13 am
Gah, I really should read through these comments more than once before hitting “send.” In that last paragraph, I meant to say something more like: “I mean to restore the problematic of the division between secular and religious motives/beliefs/whatevers.”
In other words, I think that when we have conversations about “religion vs. secular/materialism/reason there is much not being said about the structurally parallels between the two, and how those parallels tend to dispel any truly non-materialist, “spiritual” motives on the part of religion.
May 14, 2007 at 5:59 am
I wish you’d quit being so self-effacing! I think this is right on the mark and is what I’m trying to think about as well… As well as I understand it, that is! Tomorrow or Tuesday I hope to post on my concept of populations and how it relates to all of this.