The Dialectical King

06 May 2015

Martin Luther King, Jr., offers us the rare example of a man who, perhaps more than any other person of his generation, grasped its Spirit, who so inwardly felt its needs and longings and future. He offers us the equally rare example of a figure who is, like Adam Smith, praised but never read, memorialized but never remembered, transfigured into a prophet whose tomb is built and decorated by political “pharisees” and “teachers of the law” of every sort, who praise a man who never never existed (Matthew 23:29-30). And if we should hope to avoid being kind of the hypocrites against whom Jesus Christ inveighed, we would do well to remember Dr. King for the man he actually was, attending to the details of his thought as he himself expressed it. Toward this end, it of particular importance to develop an understanding of what might be called the broad conceptual economy of King’s thought — to grasp not only the main themes, concepts, and ideas of King’s thought, but also, perhaps more importantly, to grasp their inner relations, which are not reducible to the sum of their constituent parts. Here I would offer that every major aspect of King’s thought is fundamentally informed by Hegelian dialectics and cannot therefore be fully understood or appreciated without it.

The Criticism of Heaven: Idealism, Materialism, and the Dialectic of God

12 May 2015

Introduction.

Our subject is the Absolute, or God, our contention, that God reveals Godself (at least in part) through communism of the sort that Marx envisioned, that this follows from a proper understanding of the relation of Hegel’s philosophy and Marx’s, a relation which has been in my view misunderstood, oversimplified to the point of caricature. This owes in some part to Marx’s own misreading of Hegel and, in consequence of this, his own misunderstanding of the relation of his philosophy to Hegel’s. But the nature of this misreading is complex, and, as we will see in the course of this argument, it puts Marx’s philosophy into a somewhat ambiguous relation with regard to Hegel’s. On the one hand, it enabled Marx, following Feuerbach, to elaborate the anthropological implications which were implied in but never thoroughly elaborated in Hegel’s absolute idealism, i.e., his identification of the divine and human nature. On the other hand, Marx’s misreading of Hegel prevented him from recognizing his own materialist philosophy as an expression of the Absolute, conceiving his philosophy instead rather falsely in opposition to Hegel’s.

Modern Theology and the Dialectic of God

01 May 2015

Our subject is the dialectic of God, our contention, that God reveals Godself through the element of the finite, that the development of modern theology, the general movement of which is characterized above all by its descent from the misty realms of dogmatic metaphysics into the human sphere, not only recapitulates the Christian logic of Incarnation, God’s own self-movement from heaven to earth, but also — a much stronger claim — that the development of modern theology is this self-movement, its philosophical and theological expression, and that the development of modern theology is as such God’s self-revelation, the mode of this self-revelation through the finite and fallible theoretical constructions of finite and fallible creatures

Nieztsche’s Nose

15 February 2015

Nietzsche, with characteristic humility, praised himself as a philosopher.  He considered himself such a genius that it would take epochs of world history before humanity could even begin to understand his genius. The “light of the remotest stars comes last to men,” Nietzsche casually explained.^[1] Toward the end of his career, Nietzsche wrote Ecce Homo, an account and assessment of his own life’s work. The titles of the sections which constitute this account give us some idea of what esteem Nietzsche held himself in: “Why I Am So Wise,” “Why I Am So Clever,” “Why I Write Such Good Books,” and “Why I Am A Destiny.”^[2]  But what to Nietzsche’s mind constituted his self-proclaimed genius? Why does Nietzsche think he is so wise and clever?  As he explains in Ecce Homo, it is at least in part because he has such a good nose.  This is what sets Nietzsche apart from his fellow men — his olfactories.  As he writes: “My instinct for cleanliness is characterized by a perfectly uncanny sensitivity so that the proximity of — what am I saying? — the inmost parts, the ‘entrails’ of every soul are physiologically perceived by me — smelled.”^[3]

The Criticism of Heaven: Marx, Feuerbach, and the Dialectical Self-Realization of Incarnation

08 February 2015

In his famous thesis on Feuerbach, Marx writes, “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.”^[1]  For Marx, the criticism here applied not only to the German idealists he never tired of lampooning, but also to Feuerbach, whose materialism Marx saw as the key, however incomplete, to the construction of a truly historical and materialist interpretation of history.  Like Feuerbach, Marx believed that religion was in truth nothing other than the alienated consciousness of the human creature, and he credits this to Feuerbach, whose work consisted in “resolving the religious world into its secular basis.”^[2]  Feuerbach shows that “the true sense of Theology is Anthropology, that there no distinction between the predicates of the divine and human nature, and, consequently, no distinction between the divine and the human subject.”^[3]  For Feuerbach, religion is the projection of the human being’s “species-being,” the infinite element of Reason, Will, and Love, onto an external being, which then confronts the human creature as an alien entity. He writes, “Religion is the dream of the human mind.  But even in dreams we do not find ourselves in emptiness or in heaven, but on earth, in the realm of reality; we only see real things in the entrancing splendour of imagination and caprice, instead of in the simple daylight of reality and necessity.”^[4] Feuerbach thus formulates the basic materialism from which Marx will proceed, but for Marx, he does not come to a consciousness of the results of his own analysis.  Feuerbach’s materialism does not go far enough in following its own logic. “He overlooks the fact that after completing this work, the chief thing still remains to be done.”^[5]

Crucifixion, Resurrection, Revolution

28 December 2014

In her essay, “The American Dream and the Economic Myth,” Betty Sue Flowers stresses the importance of myth in the life of a society.^[1] “The power of stories to shape our reality,” she writes, “is seldom acknowledged. Most of us simply don’t understand the extent to which we’re always embedded in a story. We’re … storytelling animals. We even dream in stories.”  The reason that myths prove so powerful in shaping our lives is that they imbue mere facts with deeper meaning.  As a species, we are not so much thinking beings as we are living beings, and facts alone mean little divorced from the narrative dimension in which we live. “Each of our lives,” Flowers writes, “is a collection of historical events and facts which we can do nothing to change. But these facts are embedded in the story we tell about ourselves. And the future is shaped not by the mere facts, but by this story …”^[2]  This, I think, is part of the reason why our religious traditions are so vital to our collective existence.  They are libraries of myths.  They provide the structures of meaning in which we enact our most deeply held values and beliefs.  At least in the United States, the most influential religious tradition is Christianity, with its thematic emphasis on the narrative of crucifixion and resurrection.  For many Christians, this narrative has a distinct meaning, largely dependent on their particular tradition.  But narrative themes are not exhausted in one interpretation, and so long as other interpretations are not incompatible, myths are polyvalent, and have many meanings.  In the following essay, I attempt to draw out one of these meanings from the Christian narrative of crucifixion and resurrection in order to show the manner in which this mythological narrative can help us to reconceptualize our economic future.  The need for myths of this sort is, I think, all the more necessary given the historical circumstances in which we find ourselves. People are searching for alternatives.  The story they have been told is not squaring with the reality they have experienced, and they are searching for other stories to tell.

On Galbraith’s Affluent Society

13 January 2015

It has been nearly sixty years since John Kenneth Galbraith, the famed public intellectual, Harvard economist, diplomat, and author penned The Affluent Society.  His most influential book, it was an expression of the man behind it and a distillation of the world and of the times in which he lived. Molded by the experiences of the Great Depression and World War II, Galbraith was a passionate and unapologetic liberal, a restless and prolific defender of its basic values: liberty, equality, and freedom.  As a liberal, he was one of the last in the tradition of political economy inaugurated by Smith, Ricardo, and Marx, a way of thinking about the world which did not prize itself on the mathematical formalism so characteristic of contemporary economics, but focused instead on the complex interactions of firms, the market, and the state.  Today there are few prominent political economists, and none as prominent or as sharp as Galbraith.  Political economists like Robert Heilbroner and Robert Reich fall into the tradition after Galbraith, and they owe their debt to him.  Living and writing in the period in which the obsession mathematical formalism came to prominence in professional economics, Galbraith stood for a tradition which sought explanations not in numbers alone, but in the complex interactions of economic actors, institutions, society, and nature. It found evidence not in the mist-enveloped regions of mathematical theory, but in the unaccommodating circumstances of concrete history.  Against the narrow, insular, and reductionist tendencies of professional economics, Galbraith’s political economy stood for a manner of thinking which remained holistic and practical.  It abandoned the conceit that economic life is an autonomous phenomenon, and saw it instead as inextricably bound up with the greater life of society, not least with politics. As a political economist, Galbraith, like Keynes before him and Reich after him, had an eye for aggregates, for sifting through and sorting through the manifold factors and trends and patterns of economic life to find a few basic principles which could describe its general motion, for penetrating through a maddening sea of variables to see the laws which govern them.  Like a true scientist, he had an uncanny ability to sit with huge magnitudes of complex and unintelligible data, and distill from them a few key aggregates.   These aptitudes and tendencies may have had something to do with the fact that Galbraith was, above all, a practical political economist.  He had to be.  Like Reich, who was the Secretary of Labour in the Clinton administration, Galbraith, as a public official in the Roosevelt and Kennedy administrations, did not have the dual luxuries of error and irrelevance enjoyed by other economists.  It was practical necessity which informed Galbraith’s work and dictated his thinking.  It was practical necessity which lent it its distinctively historicist character.  As a practical political economist, Galbraith’s work was not only an expression of the direct historical circumstances in which he lived, but also a response to the unique problems which it posed.

For Socialism

11 March 2014

In May 1949, Monthly Review, the leading socialist journal, published an article in its inaugural issue entitled “Why Socialism?” written by a leading intellectual who went on in this article to write, “I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate” what he called the “grave evils” of capitalism, “namely through the establishment of a socialist economy.”^[1]  His name was Albert Einstein.  He was a socialist, indeed but one among a host of those today we consider to be hopelessly quixotic and starry-eyed, among them people like Bertrand Russell, Helen Keller, the Dalai Lama, George Orwell, even Martin Luther King, who suggested, like Einstein, a sentiment which should be obvious to anyone who thinks about it for about two seconds, namely that “something is wrong with capitalism,” and that “America must move toward a democratic socialism.” 

Heschel and the Problem of Modernity

12 December 2014

Among the most salient facts of modern existence is what is sometimes called the death of god, the experience of godlessness, the feeling that things somehow no longer hang together in a way they used to, nihilism, the absence of meaning in a world in which all value is reduced to an exchange relation expressed in price.^[1]  It is not an isolated fact of modern life, but makes itself felt everywhere, a cold chill in the bones, a real if vague sense of the vanity and emptiness of so much that characterizes modern existence, with its cars and bombs and manufactured happiness, with its brutal racism and sexism and capitalism.  For a poet like T.S. Eliot, the modern world is a kind of wasteland, a moral and spiritual dump where truth, rationality and meaning rot away in their squalid quarters, decaying amid the amnesiac waste.  The French philosopher Jean Baudrillard has compared reality in this world to “a few shreds still discernable in the deserts … rotting like a carcass.”^[2]  The context here is European, and it would be erroneous to treat all nihilisms as if they were one thing, but there is at least an element of truth in this conception which generalizes more broadly.  If the spiritual landscape of late modernity is best described by a wasteland, its inhabitants are perhaps best described as amnesiacs, hopeless and weary, sleep-walking amid the dismal slums of meaning, stalking with a mild torpor amid the decaying heaps of what was once good and true and beautiful, not real living human beings but shadows, casting about the graveyard of meaning with numbed senses and half-dimmed vision, furtively lurking, in whisper and in shadow, unseeing, unfeeling, with self-induced somnambulence, amid the tombs of value and its empty sepulchres. 

Origen’s Science of the Text: An Essay on the Role of Philosophy in Origen’s Exegesis

19 November 2014

The relevance, significance, and implications of the question regarding the relation of Christianity to philosophy in general, Greek and specifically Platonic philosophy in particular, is well known and requires little description.[1]  The issue is by no means resolved by the fact that the scriptures have remarkably little to say about it.  If one is interested in the ritual laws of purity or the genealogies of certain families or mythical accounts of creation, one can find numerous references to these topics in the scriptures.  On all manner of things the scripture has a good deal to say, often a good deal more than one is disposed to deal with, but on the topic of philosophy, it remains recalcitrantly silent.  As some have pointed out, there is a single reference to philosophy in the scripture.^[2]  In his epistle to the Colossians, Paul writes, “See to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deceit, according to the elemental spirits of the universe and not according to Christ.”^[3]  But is it not precisely the maddening variety of scriptural quotations on so many issues that makes them difficult to interpret?  Should not the fact that there is a single reference to philosophy in the scriptures settle the whole matter once and for all?  If only theologians were known to be of a single undivided opinion on all the important matters of faith.  For as we will shortly see, the very passage we have quoted has lent itself to two vastly different interpretations, and we should by no means be surprised to find that they say almost exactly the opposite of each other.  If, owing to the variety of its interpretation, scripture alone cannot settle the issue of the relation of philosophy to the Christian faith, then the task falls to theology.