American Theology (a calling)

TC: Any thoughts on the article at the following link? “The US Empire Is Acting Like A Desperate, Cornered Animal, Because That’s What It Is” https://medium.com/@caityjohnstone/the-us-empire-is-acting-like-a-desperate-cornered-animal-because-thats-what-it-is-25308ee10221 =============== ABN: You shouldn't have sent this to Ivar, if you did, because he's already very paranoid. Seriously, you ought to speak to him.... =============== TC: Really?----------I didn't, actually... =============== ABN: He said to me, "America is dead, that's a direct quote from the State Department" and all kinds of other blather until my power went out. I honestly was thinking of hanging up on him because I thought he was making fun of me. Unfortunately, several months ago I encouraged him to read The Black Monk, a story by Chekhov, in which a professor of philosophy says, "Congratulate me, I have just lost my mind." ============== TC: I thought of you. How is the weather today? ============= ABN: Thanks for thinking of me. 80% of my county is without power and my power is sporadic. ----- Call Ivar and calm him down, please. Oh, why didn't I send him the "optimistic" Chomsky book! =============== TC: Ok, I'll give him a call and see what is happening with him. Re: Electric: The worst that can happen is that you wake up with the sun, read, eat and walk, walk, eat and read; and, when the sun goes down, you sleep. Salubrious vacation from electrons' power over our lives. =============== ABN: Thank you for your message, that beautiful poetry of thought regarding electricity and not complaining about static interference. I spoke to Ivar today and, while he is very worried about America's condition and economic status as the reigning world power, to the point that he is looking for options regarding alternative ways of life, he is not sufficiently "off the rails" that I would consider it a necessity for you to cajole him to return to the fields of sanity; I believe he was more or less playing a joke on me, imputing the paranoid logic of schizophrenic fantasy-formation, which is quite common among those middle-class and existentially barren physiognomies of latter-stage capitalism. =============== TC: Eloquent, sir! I'm not sure you mean to imply you are in the practice of assessing character and suitability for privilege from the bumps on bald middle classers' heads, but Ivar does have a middle age belly! =============== ABN: I meant to say 'physiology' instead of physiognomy. A rather ridiculous error, I admit, unfortunately triggered by the boldness of Ivar's conduct and his impact on my otherwise placid environment. Ivar preaches, rather than teaches, his philosophy, and he constructs it on the borders of Christology. Whether or not President Trump colluded with the Russians is for him a moot point, morally speaking.---------------Martin Heidegger once wrote, "there is no room for faith in philosophy," meaning one's personal beliefs. Do you agree with him or not ? =============== TC: No, I think one's own experiences inflect our judgments, even affecting whatever we think actually/objectively exists and how carefully we come to assess how the world really works. Whether we own up to a belief system, faith exists anyway. ----- Actually, I suspect Martin was clearing the decks of bad thinking, maybe making way for the budding promise of Nazi nihilism? ----- I think he wasn't around when the world came to understand just how difficult the problem that we can't transcend the limits of our perceptions and conceptualizations. Nature has tested our survival every generation, and I think our survival as individuals and a species depends on a shared subjectivity that fills in gaps between what we can see, and what is, and how well that faith fits the test of reality.---------------You prompted me to review Heidegger, and honestly, I don't think I can critique the quote out of context. I do stand by the idea that philosophy is remarkable relevant and enduring, but also that the more we actually know, the more we know very little. All that is left, after a humbling assessment of whether anything is left for reason to establish without any any doubt, is "faith" and community. =============== ABN: According to Jacques Derrida's essay Faith and Knowledge: Two Sources of 'Religion' and the Limits of Reason Alone, "Heidegger wrote in a letter to Lowith in 1921: I am a 'Christian theologian'. This declaration would merit extended interpretation and certainly does not amount to a simple declaration of faith, But it neither contradicts, annul or excludes this other certainty: Heidegger not only declared, very early and on several occasions, that philosophy was in its very principle 'atheistic', that the idea of philosophy is madness for faith (which at least supposed the converse), and the idea of a Christian philosophy as absurd as a 'squared circle'. He not only excluded the very possibility of a philosophy of religion, he proposed a radical separation between philosophy and theology, the positive study of faith, if not between thought and theiology, the discourse on the divinity of the divine. He not only attempted a 'destruction' of all forms of the ontotheological, he also write, in 1953: 'Belief [or faith] has no place in thought.'" ----- When I came across this passage, I found succor for my antipathy for Ivar's method of teaching philosophy to his students; specifically, when he teaches the Sermon on the Mount and the apex of past philosophical thinking. Am I wrong? =============== TC: I think some philosophers tire of debating dogmatic truth claims. 2000 years ago christians made their claims based on faith alone. There is a big difference however between using philosophical tools to debate dogma. And actually contemplating what exists is beyond philosophy. Noodling about how it all works, and what is true has its limits. There are limits to what philosophy can do. ----- Like trying to get a car mechanic to use what is in his tool box to decide whether some cancer is operable. ----- Why do you think Heidegger says he is a Christian philosopher?---------------To the extent that Heidegger is otherwise alive, he may have other intuitions and experience that allows him to embrace religion, AND keep it separate from rational examination. I'm not sure what Ivar is doing, but ALSO important is that we swim in the culture and reality we are in. That include a foundation in religious teaching and practice. If you want to live apart from society, and the prevailing cultural realities, you might be able to stand against faith. I don't think that is a healthy impulse. =============== ABN: Thanks for your responses. ----- I think my blog, The Catholic Life of the Heart, makes it unequivocally clear which side of the equation I am on yet, at the same time, I cannot but have my ire aroused at Ivar's saying of his intellectual charges, "While they may be good students, they're not yet good Christians!" Perhaps Ivar should be teaching at Marist College or Catholic University, instead of XXX. Why does Heidegger consider himself a Christian theologian ? I can recall walking to North Rockland High School, across the soccer and baseball fields every morning, pondering deeply over Heidegger's claim to be able to use the world 'soul' without exercising and of its spiritual connotations. Later at Rockland Community College, I took Introduction to Philosophy with Dr. Joseph Gusmano but, while we studied John Locke and John Rawls, J.P. Sartre and H.G. Gadamer, as well as others, the closest we got to studying Biblical tenants was thru studying passages of Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov. I can't claim to know precisely what Ivar is doing, either, but all I can say is that if I went to college/university and was presented with the Sermon on the Mount as the capstone of Western philosophy, I would feel cheated. It's a sermon so contrary to logic that they would institutionalize anyone that serious tried to follow it and so contrary to reason that some, Walter Kaufmann for instance, claims it borders on the apocryphal. Christ's injunction, "Give everything to the poor and follow me," leaves one with a feeling of an impossible task that has been left unaccomplished. Nevertheless, that's what I have tried to do in my life..... =============== TC: We're reaching into absolutes. Has anyone ever given everything to the poor (yep, say St. Francis) and was that spiritually fulfilling? Did Carnegie? Which came first Christ or the intellectual traditions? Did they grow up together? Each was shaped by the other, and science, discovery, social turmoil... =============== ABN: It's for the same reason that the teaching of Nietzsche's "Thus Spoke Zarathustra" is out of place in a philosophy class... It's an obscure, dark, 'impossible' book. While Christ bore his cross to Golgotha, Nietzsche's life ended in a confined madness; his last question was, "Have I been understood?" Who, if anyone, taught you to think philosophically ? =============== TC: I'm sympathetically inclined to give N the benefit of the doubt, but he and others before him and after played a dangerous game. On balance N probably fanned flames in the darkest corners of the human soul, maybe because he could, possibly because he meant well, many pre-inclined to skirt our mortal burden fell. Moral weaknesses, vain illusions and evil are easy to encourage, but at a cost, ultimately to everyone. ----- I think about these things every minute, like my dad thinks in sermons, maybe ivar in logical formalities. I think you might actually have the whimsy of a poet? =============== ABN: I think about these thing, too, and yes, I admit I have the faults and sentiments of a poet.