Posts Tagged ‘Martin Heidegger’
March 22nd, 2011
posted by
Vincent P. Pecora
John Boy, in a post on March 15th, titled “What we talk about when we talk about the postsecular,” provides a brisk empirical overview of his key word’s appearance in recent discourse. But it is not at all what I talk about when I talk about the post-secular, and in many ways I think Boy’s account is rather wrong-headed.
Boy takes his cue from a lecture delivered by Jürgen Habermas in 2001, where Habermas proposes to bridge the gap posited by Ernst Bloch’s notion of non-synchronicity—which is simply an uncritical early version of Johannes Fabian’s “denial of coevalness,” in his Time and the Other—through “democratically enlightened common sense.” However, what this “common sense” means for Habermas—”a translation of religious positions” into (for example) “Kant’s postmetaphysical ethics”—is in no sense post-secular! It is in fact the essence of the secularization thesis itself, in one of its most prominent historical guises . . . .
Tags: Jürgen Habermas, Martin Heidegger, philosophy, post-secular, secularization, social theory
Posted in here & there | 13 Comments »
December 3rd, 2010
posted by
Mary-Jane Rubenstein
By insisting that this is all there is, the secularist position forecloses the emergence of anything other than this. Since people are violent, we must manage violence with violence as responsibly as possible—any other option is just foolish. What troubles me is that by sticking to what is probable and practical, secularism misses that which from our perspective seems impossible—say, peace, justice, compassion for all sentient beings, swords into plowshares…. These sorts of promises, it seems to me, are only held by something like transcendence—even if only the possibility of transcendence—the possibility that things might genuinely be otherwise.
Tags: Martin Heidegger, philosophy, Plato, Radical Orthodoxy, secularism, transcendence, wonder
Posted in Secularity and the liberal arts | 3 Comments »
September 16th, 2010
posted by
James K.A. Smith
“Strangely enough,” Foucault mused, “man—the study of whom is supposed by the naïve to be the oldest investigation since Socrates—is probably no more than a kind of rift in the order of things.” He is “only a recent invention, a figure not yet two centuries old, a new wrinkle in our knowledge” who “will disappear again as soon as that knowledge has discovered a new form.”
Foucault’s flippant requiem for “man” reflects a midcentury antihumanism in European thought, which, in the wake of two World Wars in the heart of Europe, had become suspicious of the “anthropotheism” of humanism wherein “Man” replaced the God who had died. And it is this story that is told so brilliantly by Stefanos Geroulanos in An Atheism That Is Not Humanist Emerges in French Thought. For these antihumanists, humanistic atheism had never really gotten over its theological tendencies; so the result of the death of God was the divinization of Man.
Tags: atheism, Catholocism, Christianity, Emmanuel Levinas, Henri de Lubac, intellectual history, Jacques Maritain, Jean-Luc Marion, Martin Heidegger, Michel Foucault, philosophy, theology
Posted in An Atheism that Is Not Humanist | No Comments »
July 21st, 2010
posted by
Stefanos Geroulanos
I begin this post by posing straightaway the questions that will guide my argument. In what way can atheism and antihumanism be posed and understood in intellectual history? In what sense do they constitute objects of study? How does one go about weaving and articulating for them an adequate intellectual-historical approach that may facilitate an understanding of texts, concepts, and systems of thought? I want to thank Martin Kavka, Sam Moyn, Judith Surkis, and Gil Anidjar for taking the time to read and address my book with the very encouraging care that each of them has taken. In what follows, I want to take into account a number of issues that they have raised, not so much to respond as to elaborate, in relation to their stances, some of the positions I have adopted in the book and in my introduction to this discussion. I thus frame this post as an attempt to tend first and foremost to methodological questions and critiques that have been raised directly or indirectly.
Tags: Alexandre Kojève, antihumanism, atheism, Emmanuel Levinas, Europe, France, humanism, intellectual history, Jean Hyppolite, Martin Heidegger, theology
Posted in An Atheism that Is Not Humanist | 2 Comments »
June 3rd, 2010
posted by
Stefanos Geroulanos
In a 1956 text on ethics and literature, Emmanuel Levinas offered the following diagnosis of the philosophical trends of his time: “Contemporary thought holds the surprise for us of an atheism that is not humanist. The gods are dead or withdrawn from the world; concrete, even rational man does not contain the universe.” This atheism that is not humanist, the sense that certain strands of contemporary philosophy had abandoned secularism’s central ethical and political investment in humanism, poses the motivating question behind the book I am presenting for discussion here, An Atheism that Is Not Humanist Emerges in French Thought. In twentieth-century French thought, particularly in the period from the end of World War I through the late 1950s, a new form of atheism, and with it, a new conception of man, emerged and crystallized. What historians and critics of French thought, literature, and intellectual culture have, since the 1960s, called “antihumanism,” I argue, can be best understood in terms of this development, which is at once theological, epistemological, and political.
Tags: antihumanism, atheism, communism, Emmanuel Levinas, epistemology, Europe, existentialism, France, Friedrich Nietzsche, history, humanism, Jacques Maritain, Jean Hyppolite, Martin Heidegger, Marxism, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, philosophy, science, theology
Posted in An Atheism that Is Not Humanist | 2 Comments »
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