… philosophical and theological discourses belong to something that, while expressed by each of them, is prior to them. They share, in other words, a common condition. Accordingly, the fundamental task of thought becomes one of thinking this common condition–or, more precisely, of thinking the commonality as it is differentially expressed by philosophy and theological discourse (for the commonality is not something positive that transcends them).
From: On Diaspora by Daniel Barber
Reasons I like this:
(1. Personally, because it agrees with my experience of both theology and philosophy.
(2. Methodologically, because it highlights the need for interdisciplinarity in way that neither collapses one discipline into another nor believes its proud task to be the creation of a new discipline: no, instead there is something productive to be found between things.
(3. Intellectually, because it represents the summation of an orientation placed in an exemplary manner between the most persuasive counter-orientations of the age (earlier in the chapter), one that acknowledges its historical debts while (via the notion of reverse causality) maintaining strong claims for itself. (Good because: why should one apologize for the origin of one’s ideas? That origin refutes an idea is wrong. Consequently one may always historicize without weakly relativizing.)
3 Comments
Robert, i’m glad you found the approach of use. My aim was to at once address the historical constellation of these discrete inquiries, to take our inheritance of them seriously, while at the same time finding a “principled” way to go beyond them. So I’m very happy that came through.
REAL Intelligence is tacit, or intrinsically wordless, living existence.
Words or language ARE the original and entirely seductive artificial virtual “reality”.
We now “live” entirely within our brain created language games – our “individual” and collective towers of babel/babble.
ALL of our so called “culture”, including our so called religion and “theology”, conspires to keep us within the artificial limits of our brain-created virtual “world”.
This was the essential theme of the Matrix Trilogy series of films.
Daniel, I think you very much succeeded. I’m slowly working my way through the book, in my evening hours after work, and enjoying it very much. Lots of new ideas and new relations between familiar ideas. Regarding the approach of immanence — I especially appreciated the way you distinguished it from the Philosophical Excess orientation, a distinction that seemed to me both charitable and incisive. I look forward to the discussion over at AUFS.
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