Geisler’s Systematic Theology vol. 1

August 28, 2021 / J. B. Aitken / Leave a comment

Geisler, Norman. Systematic Theology: Introduction, Bible. Bethany House.

This book would be perfect if it were divided into two separate books. The first half would be a book on prolegomena, foundations, and apologetic method. Had I read such a book before I went to seminary, I would have been spared 8 years of wrong thinking (most of which would have been my fault). The second half is a survey of issues relating to inerrancy, bible survey and introduction, and the like.

There is quite a bit of repetition in this book. Numerous quotes by Albright, J. A. T. Robinson, and others appear over and over. Moreover, much of this book can be found in The Big Book of Apologetics/Baker Encyclopedia of Apologetics. It’s still good material, though.

Preconditions of theology:

Mind capable of sending a message (encoder)
Mind capable of receiving message (decoder)
There is a common mode of communication shared by both persons.

God: The Metaphysical Precondition

Geisler defines metaphysics as the study of being.

Theism posits an Infinite, Personal God that exists both beyond and in the universe. After surveying various forms of dualism and monism, Geisler posits a form of Thomism, noting that all finite beings are composed of act and potency in their very being. Potentiality limits a finite being’s actuality, as opposed to God, who is Pure Act.

In a move somewhat rare among systematic theologies, Geisler actually defines being. It is that which is, either a mix of potency and act or a pure actuality. God is, other beings have. From here Geisler moves to his arguments for the existence of this Pure Act.

Cosmological

Horizontal argument.

(1) Everything that had a beginning had a cause.

(2) The universe had a beginning.

(3) Therefore, the universe had a Cause.

The second premise needs defending, which those from Bonaventure to William Lane Craig have done:

1) An infinite number of moments cannot be traversed.

(2) If there were an infinite number of moments before today, then today would never have come, since an infinite number of moments cannot be traversed.

3) But today has come.

(4) Hence, there were only a finite number of moments before today (i.e., a beginning of time). And everything with a beginning had a Beginner. Therefore, the temporal world had a Beginner (Cause).

Vertical Form of the argument:

This argument begins with “present contingent existence.” It argues from effect to Necessary Cause.

(1) If everything were contingent, then it would be possible that nothing existed.

(2) But something does exist (e.g., I do), and its existence is undeniable, for I have to exist in order to be able to affirm that I do not exist.

(3) Thus, if some contingent being now exists, a Necessary Being must now exist, otherwise there would be no ground for the existence of this contingent being.

But granting the arguments, would this even prove the Christian God? It will get closer than you think. Such a God would not be the one of finite godism, “since the cause of all finite things cannot be finite.” Nor can it be the god of polytheism, since there can’t be more than one unlimited being.

Miracles: The Supernatural Precondition

The problem of definition:

Weak sense: something that is not contrary to nature, only our knowledge of nature (Augustine). On this view an event doesn’t even have to be supernatural to be a miracle. This is obviously inadequate.

Strong sense: an event beyond nature’s power to produce (Aquinas, SCG 3).

A miracle doesn’t have to violate natural law. It is simply a new effect produced by a supernatural cause.

Answering objections

Spinoza: standard objection of “violating immutable natural laws.” Response: He begs the question on immutable laws. He also operates in a closed system.

Hume: Miracles are in-credible. Uniform experience is against miracles. Response: He begs the question in advance by claiming to know uniform experience. He can’t know all possible sense experiences. Moreover, as Geisler notes, “he never weighs the evidence on miracles. He simply adds evidence against them.” Even worse, Hume’s method of “adding evidence” eliminates any unique experience in history, even natural ones.

Revelation: The Revelational Precondition

The possibility of divine revelation depends on the reality of God. If God exists, which he does, then divine revelation is not only possible, but actual. The only real challenges today concern whether humans are capable of receiving this revelation (postmodernism) and whether the medium is reliable.

Geisler correctly notes that “In order for an infinite Mind to communicate with finite minds, certain things must be possible. To begin, there must be a common principle of reason that both possess.” Language and being are analogical.

Geisler’s charts are really good.

While some like to say that man’s thought sinfully distorts general revelation, and at one level that is true, general revelation is still essential to human thought. And while it is true that “Scripture determines what we believe on general revelation,” we still use general revelation (e.g., laws of logic) to make that statement.

That doesn’t fully answer the existential question: when our understanding of general revelation and our understanding of special revelation clash, who wins? Geisler says the interpretation with more certainty. Sometimes this is general revelation, sometimes special.

Logic: The Rational Precondition

Geisler summarizes here his other writings on logic. At their most basic they are:

1) Law of non-contradiction
2) Law of identity
3) Law of excluded middle.

In order to help us think better, Geisler has given a nice summary of categorical propositions:These should be written on the inside of all study bibles.

(1) There must be only three terms.

(2) The middle term must be distributed at least once.

(3)Terms Distributed in the conclusion must be distributed in the premises.

(4) The conclusion always follows the weaker premises(i.e., negative and particular ones).

(5) No conclusion follows from two negative premises.

(6) No conclusion follows from two particular premises.

(7) No negative conclusion follows from two affirmative premises.

Most evangelicals will go with him this far, but what is the relationship between Logic and God? According to Geisler, Logic is subject to God ontologically. “God is prior to logic in the order of being.” Nevertheless, God is rational by his very nature. On the other hand, logic is prior to God epistemologically. As Geisler notes, the statement “God is God’ makes no sense unless the law of identity holds (A is A).” The statement “God exists” isn’t true unless the law of noncontradiction is true.

Meaning: The Semantical Precondition

Thesis: all true statements must be meaningful. Geisler identifies three different types of schools: conventionalism (Wittgenstein), essentialism (Plato), and realism. Conventionalism is self-falsifying, for when it says all linguistic meaning is conventional, it, too, is relative.

Truth: The Epistemological Precondition

Thesis: Truth is that which corresponds to its object.

Exclusivism: The Oppositional Precondition

Thesis: Christianity’s truth claims entails that other religious oppositions are wrong (or at least cannot be correct at the same time as Christianity’s). Much of this is standard fare in evangelical apologetics, but Geisler hones in one of John Hick’s questionable presuppositions. Hick says an undifferentiated Real is known in all faiths. The problem is that an undifferentiated Real doesn’t have any definable characteristics, which means it can’t be identified. It can’t be known in any faith! Even worse, if it is undifferentiated, then no symbol can represent it.

Language: The Linguistic Precondition

Thesis: How do our concepts relate to God? They can’t be equivocal, for that would be self-defeating. They can’t be univocal, since God is infinite. Analogy makes the most sense. It allows for both similarity and differentiation. Similar to Parmenides’ dilemma, Geisler notes: “Either one’s principle of differentiation is inside of being or it is outside of being. If outside, then things do not differ in being; they are identical in being, and monism is true. The only way to maintain a pluralism essential to theism is to insist that things differ in their very being. Yet how can they differ by what they have in common? The answer is that they cannot, if being is univocal. But it isn’t.”

We’re not done yet, though. We can say that we have univocal concepts but analogical predication. The definition is the same between God and creatures, but the application is different.

Interpretation: The Hermeneutical Precondition

Contra Heidegger, Geisler asks how he can say Being is unintelligible. How could he know this about Being unless he understood it? Moreover, Heidegger’s denial of correspondence assumes that his denial corresponds to the way things are.

Heidegger correctly notes that man is a contingent being, yet he draws back from affirming the logical conclusion: there is a Necessary Being.

Contra Derrida, his statement that all meaning is limited by language tries to get outside those limits in order to establish them. (The rest of the criticisms flow from this critique).

Savage Burn: “it is fruitless to turn to poetry to avoid metaphysics. Metaphysical questions still exist, and they cannot be answered in anything but metaphysical language. Any so-called poetical protest is nothing more than an exercise in ventilating one’s tonsils.”

The Alternative

Can we know things objectively? Yes. The metaphysical precondition, God, has made it possible. Geisler: “The objective basis for meaning is found in the mind of God.” Much of this chapter is standard fare in grammatical-historical hermeneutics. The following is a long quote, for which I indulge the reader’s forgiveness, but it is worth noting:

Applying the six causes to meaning will help explain the point. Following Aristotle, scholastic philosophers distinguished six different causes:

(1) efficient cause—that by which something comes to be;

(2) final cause—that for which something comes to be;

(3) formal cause—that of which something comes to be;

(4) material cause—that out of which something comes to be;

(5) exemplar cause—that after which something comes to be;

(6) instrumental cause—that through which something comes to be.

Remember the example of the chair? A wooden chair has a carpenter as its efficient cause, to provide something to sit on as its final cause, its structure as a chair as its formal cause, wood as its material cause, the blueprint as its exemplar cause, and the carpenter’s tools as its instrumental cause. As we have seen, applying these six causes to meaning yields the following analysis:

(1) The writer is the efficient cause of the meaning of a text.

(2) The writer’s purpose is the final cause of its meaning.

(3) The writing is the formal cause of its meaning.

(4) The words are the material cause of its meaning.

(5) The writer’s ideas are the exemplar cause of its meaning.

(6) The laws of thought are the instrumental cause of its meaning.

In conclusion, we use the laws of logic in biblical hermeneutics. Anything else makes rational meaning impossible.

Historiography: The Historical Precondition

Method: The Methodological Precondition

The Evangelical method begins with an inductive basis in Scripture, which involves an abductive step. It will also deduce truths from Scripture and make use of analogies. He puts them all together into what he calls a Retroductive Method, worth quoting in full:

1. The Inductive Basis:

(a) God cannot err.

(b) The Bible is God’s Word.

2. The Deductive Conclusion:

3. The Use of Analogies:

(d) Just as Christ was divine and human yet without sin, even so the Bible is divine and human yet without error.

(e) Just as nature (God’s general revelation) presents difficulties with possessing errors, so does the Bible (God’s special revelation).

4. The Use of General Revelation:

(f) The earth is not square.

(g) The sun does not move around the earth.

5. The Retroductive Method:

(h) The biblical teaching is fleshed out in view of facts known from general revelation and the data (phenomena) of Scripture.

(i) There are errors in the manuscript copies.

(j) The Bible uses figures of speech and other literary devices, round numbers, everyday (nontechnical) language, paraphrases, etc.

(k) The deductive conclusion (point c) is understood in the light of the retroductive enhancement. For example: (1) The Bible is without error only in the original text, not in all the copies. (2) Round numbers, observational language, figures of speech, and paraphrased citations are not errors.

The rest of the book is a summary and defense of inerrancy, inspiration, and the like. Some things to note, like Geisler’s chart between accommodation to error and adaption to finitude.

Note: To the everlasting embarrassment of Bible critics, at least those who claim to be followers of Christ, Jesus affirmed exactly the opposite of what much of negative “higher criticism” teaches.

Short History of Modern Philosophy (Scruton)

May 28, 2021 / J. B. Aitken / 1 Comment

Scruton, Roger. A Short History of Modern Philosophy. New York: Routledge, 2002.

This was a joy to read. Scruton communicates depth with a certain type of elegance rarely matched in academic writers. Bertrand Russell is probably the closest equivalent.

There are several angles from which we can view Scruton’s work. An exhaustive review of each figure and movement would be beyond the scope of this review. Several key themes emerge in Scruton’s narrative. Substance never disappears as a concept, pace modern nominalists. On the other hand, it cannot stand simply in its Aristotelian form. Developments in mathematics, logic, and language require a sharper focus on substance.

First, some comments on Aristotle’s logic. Every proposition contains both subject and predicate, which corresponds to substance and attribute (Scruton 16). Since a substance can have, or perhaps lose, different attributes, a substance is something that survives change. One problem raised is whether substances can cease to exist and what is meant by the term “exist.”

Distinction between stuff and things. Stuff can be measured. Things can be counted. This made the idea of substance rather fuzzy.

The Port Royal Logic

The Jansenist critics of Descartes anticipated several key breakthroughs in logical analysis. They noted the distinction between the intension and extension of a term. The former denotes what a thing is. The latter applies to the set of things: man vs. the class of men.

Leibniz

Gottfried Leibniz emerges as a true champion in this narrative. Spinoza had previously said there was only one substance and an infinity of modes. Leibniz, by contrast, saw reality as reducible to individuals known as “monads,” which Scruton highlights as (68):

1 Monads are not extended in space.

2 Monads are distinguished from one another by their properties (their ‘predicates’).

3 No monad can come into being or pass away in the natural course of things; a monad is created or annihilated only by a ‘miracle’.

4 The predicates of a monad are ‘perceptions’—i.e. mental states—and the objects of these mental states are ideas. Inanimate entities are in fact the appearances of animated things: aggregates of monads, each endowed with perceptions.

5 Not all perceptions are conscious. The conscious perceptions, or apperceptions, are characteristic of rational souls, but not of lesser beings. And even rational souls have perceptions of which they are not conscious.

6 ‘Monads have no windows’—that is, nothing is passed to them from outside; each of their states is generated from their own inner nature.

To be sure, not every organic thing is an individual monad. Most aren’t. Humans, for example, would be aggregates of monads.

Hegel

Scruton’s analysis of Hegel’s logic put the brakes on any Hegelian speculations I might have had. The main difficulty with Hegel, apart from his impenetrable prose, is that his use of terms doesn’t mirror the way the world normally uses such terms. In normal usage, logic is a tool. For Hegel it is almost an active, living entity.

Scruton summarizes the problem in reading Hegel in one elegant, witty passage:

“It is not to be expected that such a logic can readily be made intelligible, or that a philosophy which is able cold-bloodedly to announce (for example) that ‘Limit is the mediation through which Something and Other is and also is not’ should be altogether different from arrant nonsense” (175).

Scruton interrupts his survey after Nietzsche to make a few comments on political philosophy.

For John Locke, when I mix my labor with an object, I make it my own. It becomes my property (206). Locke’s arguments on natural rights are interesting and quite important. Contract theory, however, is built on a much shakier foundation. Scruton identifies several problems. 1) On what grounds do we infer the existence of such a contract? It is almost always an implied contract, if it exists at all. Claims of “tacit consent” are vacuous, as Hume noted. It’s not clear how anyone born in such a society gave “tacit consent.”

Marx takes Hegel’s concept of alienation and comes up with “false consciousness.” Scruton notes that Marx didn’t use alienation all that much later on in life. What is “alienation?” As Scruton observes,

“Under capitalism it is not only objects, but also men, who are bought and sold. And in this buying and selling, under the regime of which one party has nothing to dispose of but his labour power, we reach the ultimate point in the treatment of men as means. Men have become objects for each other, and whatever remnants of their human (social) life remain will be dissipated” (225).

Although such a view is not entirely coherent (and Marx would trade it in for “false-consciousness” later on), it did have imaginative power. A false consciousness, on the other hand, is a universal error one makes in examining the social world. This unhappy consciousness emerges from Marx’s analysis of “base” and “superstructure.”

Following this chapter Scruton examines utilitarianism and British idealism. More pertinent for this review will be Scruton’s analysis of Gottlob Frege’s logical revolution.

Frege

What did Frege do? He overthrew Aristotelian logic. He began by examining J. S. Mill’s claim that arithmetic was abstracted from experience, as in 2+3 = 5. Numbers are empirical aggregates from experience. Frege responded that Mill could give no account of the number zero. Moreover, while I cannot with my senses apprehend a 1,000 sided figure, I am easily prepared to acknowledge such a figure exists. And in the final coup de grace on Mill, Frege notes that induction assumes probability, but probability presupposes arithmetical laws (250).

Frege then asks, “What is a number?” They can’t be a property, since if I say “Socrates is one,” I do not attribute the property of one-ness to Socrates. Nor are they abstractions. If numbers are objects, then we need to be able to locate them, and that entails a host of philosophical headaches.

A more immediate problem, and one for which Frege is ultimately famous, concerns existential quantification. If I say “Unicorns are horned animals,” am I saying that unicorns exist? Frege made it clear that identity and prediction are different.

I don’t feel smart enough to explain what Frege meant by sense and reference, so we will go on to Heidegger, particularly, Scruton’s wonderful rhetorical comments on Heidegger.

“It is impossible to summarise Heidegger’s work, which no one has claimed to understand completely. In the next chapter I shall give reasons for thinking that it may be unintelligible” (268).

“the reader has the impression that never before have so many words been invented and tormented in the attempt to express the inexpressible” (268).

“All these are more or less pompous ways of distinguishing things from persons” (269).

“Heidegger notices and applauds the result, but does not, as he perhaps should, feel threatened by it” (269).

“One thing is clear, which is that Heidegger’s conclusions, where intelligible, are clearly intended as universal truths, not merely about the human condition, but about the world as such” (272).

“Heidegger does not give any arguments for the truth of what he says. Most of Being and Time consists of compounded assertions, with hardly a ‘thus’, ‘therefore’, ‘possibly’, or ‘it might follow that’, to indicate the relations which are supposed to hold between them” (272).

This book was a sheer pleasure to read and absorb. It is easily my favorite text and first recommendation on the history of modern philosophy.

Dugin notes, 4th Political Theory

March 24, 2020 / J. B. Aitken / Leave a comment

I have my questions about his larger project, but his analyses of modernity and postmodernism are simply too good to ignore.

Birth of a Concept

Three Ideologies
1. Liberalism: the individual is the normative subject (this includes both free market capitalism and the Democratic Party. I am using “liberal” in a non-perjorative sense).
2. Fascism: race or nation is normative subject
3. Communism: Class
  The second and third options failed, leaving liberalism in charge. Without any alternatives, liberalism is the norm.
4. 4th political theory: Dasein is the acting subject. We will explain more on this later.
Postmodernism
1. Global Market Society
  1. Globalism
  2. Technology
2. Kingdom of Antichrist
Heidegger and the Event
1. The ancient greeks confused the nuances between pure being (Seyn) and a being (Seinende).
2. Nihilism and the event
  1. The “Nothing” is the flip side of being and paradoxically reminds one of Being’s existence.
  2. Event: the sudden return of being.

Dasein as Actor

What is the nature of freedom?
1. Classical Liberals defined freedom as “freedom from.” There should be no ties on an individual’s will.
  1. It is these individuals, acting alone but taken as a whole, who form the circle of liberal action.
  2. Lacking a telos by definition, liberalism is hard-pressed to explain what we have freedom for.
2. All political theories have an acting subject.
Dasein as subject.
1. Dasein is a way to overcome the subject-object duality. It is inzwichen, the “between.”
Hidden Racisms
1. Is “progress” racist? Maybe. Progressive societies have an implicit judgment that other societies, who do not hold such views, are inferior.
2. The only true human rights are those enshrined by global capitalism, democracy, individualism.
Ethnos: A community of language
1. Racist societies, whether Nazis or American neo-liberals, reduce society to a concept like race, blood, market.
2. A better reduction, if reduction it is, is language.
  1. Language allows for an “accommodating landscape” (Gumilev). It is the matrix of a “Life-world” (Husserl).
  2. Ethnicities generate the criteria by which they are judged (Dugin 48).
3. The village-state is an alternative to the metropolis.

Critique of the Monotonic Process

Liberal ideology is necessarily evolutionary. The concept of progress takes one from barbarism to technologism and the more refined way of life of the markets.

Monotonic process: the idea of constant growth, accumulation, steady progress by only one specific indicator (60). In other words, in a system only one value (x) grows. Only one thing (or a small group of things) accumulates. Applied to either machines or biological life, this is death.

The Gift

In traditional societies surplus was always sacrificed or given away. Thus, festivals.

Nietzsche: if there is growth in life, the movement towards logos, then the balance of the nocturnal Dionysian world exists as well (65).

Modern political options have all seen progress and time in a linear fashion. Even more so, because of time there must naturally be progress. By contrast, Dugin suggests that

T1: Time is a social phenomenon with its structures arising from social paradigms (68).

By this he wants to safeguard the idea that there can be “interruptions” and reversals in the flow of time. History does not simply teach the march of capitalism upon earth (borrowing and adapting Hegel’s phrase).

Nevertheless, and perhaps unaware, Dugin remains close to the linear view. He does note that time is “historical” (70) and from that draws a very important, Heideggerian conclusion: it cannot be objective.

Why not? The acting subject, the historical observer (whom we will call “Dasein,” but this is true also of the individual in liberalism) is finite. He doesn’t have a god’s-eye view on history.

Of course, that’s not to say it can’t be real or reliable per the observer, but we don’t have the Enlightenment’s dream of a god’s-eye application of reason to reality.

Global Transition and its enemies

What is the New World Order?
1. It is a “universalism of free market economics, political democracy, and the ideology of human rights” (71).
2. From the American point of view: a strong imperial core with the periphery divided and fragmented.
  1. Creation of multilateral unipolarity.
  2. Promotion of accelerated globalism and swift de-sovereignisation of nation states in favor of a global United States.
3. Global democracy is a self-generating virus (Stephen Mann).
The World Order from a non-American point of view

Conservatism and Postmodernity

Paradoxes of Freedom

Liberal freedom in action is the freedom to choose TV stations.
1. If I am “free,” am I free to say no? Can I say “no” to freedom?
2. Liberalism cannot allow this, which means there is no alternative to it.
Df. conservatism = repudiation of the logic of history. True conservatism means that history isn’t necessarily moving towards a moment of universal global markets.
1. Fundamental Conservatism: Traditionalism (86ff).
  1. Opposes “time.” Specifically, it does not accept the argument that progress is necessarily good.
2. Status quo conservatism: liberal conservatism.
  1. It is liberal in that it says yes to modernity, “but at each stage it attempts to step on the breaks” (91).
3. Left Wing Conservatism (Social Conservatism)
4. Eurasianism: an umbrella of subordinate conservatisms
  1. There is no single historical process.
  2. Every nation has its own historical model and moves in its own rhythm.

Transformation of the Left in the twenty first century

The Leftist Philosophy in Crisis: three varieties
1. Old Left:
  1. Orthodox Marxists.
    1. Stuck in concepts anchored in the Industrial Revolution. Really couldn’t adapt to hyper-technological ages.
    2. Fundamentally wrong about historical dialectic.
  2. Social Democracy:
    1. Income tax, government in the private sector, free medicine; traditional “liberal” mores.
    2. Social Justice + Market expansion
2. Left Nationalists
3. New Left: anti-globalism, postmodern, post-human
  1. Utilized Marxist analysis of ideology as “false consciousness” to explain society, philosophy, economy.
  2. Bourgeois society is a result of superstructures.

Ontology of the Future

Three ecstasies of time (Heidegger). Normally, we would say that the future “lacks the most being.”
1. Immediacy (there is/there is not)
2. Documentary (there was/there was not)
3. Probabilistic (there will be/there will be not)
Perception and Being: Kant denied that by mere perception we have access to the thing-in-itself.
1. Therefore, if the being of the present is put in doubt, then all three moments become ontologically unproveable.
2. From the perspective of pure reason, the future is the phenomenon, and hence, it is (157).
3. Kant puts time nearer to the subject and space nearer to the object.
  1. Therefore, time is subject-ive.
  2. It is the transcendental subject that installs time in the perception of the object.
4. Time is like music (Husserl); the resonance lingers.
  1. The future is continuous in the present.
  2. The future is the tail-end of the present.
5. Consciousness
  1. That which is beneath the level that the nature of time is perceived.
  2. In the present consciousness perceives itself and nothing else.
6. Short circuit: perception of pure being as the presence of the subjectivity of consciousness. Transcendental subjectivity (158).
  1. Causes all kinds of dualities to be born.
  2. The creation of time stops this trauma.
  3. “Intentionality and logical judgments are all rooted in this evasion of the perception of pain of the void whereby consciousness becomes aware of itself” (158).
    1. Pure presence of the same is unbearable.
    2. Time constitutes consciousness running from the unbearable confrontation with itself.
7. Initial Conclusions
  1. Time precedes the object.
  2. The world is created by time (or time through God)
    1. Time’s manifestation is as self-aware subjectivity.
    2. The future is predefined by the structure of the subject.
  3. Organizing time: circular, traditional, material.
8. Society and Time
  1. Every society is a separate act of consciousness in temporal and rational horizons.
    1. Every society has its own history.
    2. Thus, time is rooted in geography.
    3. Thus, globalization, in canceling out traditional differences, erases time.
      1. Therefore, with no time, the “short circuit would grow exponentially without the possibility of being dissipated.
      2. Cataclysm.

Overcoming Ontotheology (Westphal)

March 23, 2020 / J. B. Aitken / Leave a comment

Westphal, Merold. Overcoming Ontotheology. New York, Fordham University Press, 2001.

This is a Christian, albeit sympathetic, reading of academic postmodernism as it has come to us via Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida. It is not a treatment of the emergent church. That is not academic postmodernism.

Ontotheology is when someone treats God as another datum to be analyzed and uses this datum to explain all of reality. Like all of Westphal’s books, this is very well-written and learned. Parts are even in German. There is a danger to this book: both sides, modernist and postmodernist, and the Christians within both camps, might say that this book, and by extension Continental Philosophy, is the true philosophy. Therefore, analytic philosophy is ontotheology. Even worse, they might argue that Continental philosophy = postmodernism. Westphal himself doesn’t do that, as he notes that some postmodernists like Rorty are closer to the analytic tradition in some ways.

For Heidegger, philosophy starts out as Being qua being, but this needs an Unmoved Mover to complete the system. For Heidegger, if we try to introduce God into this system, we can only do so on philosophy’s terms.

We will have to square up to Westphal’s use of the term “postmodern.” By it he is simply denying that humans can have a “God’s-eye view” of Truth. He finds this in Plato’s claim of “the unaided intellect” which is purified from the senses (Phae 65e ff). Pure thought meets a pure object.

What critics like Kant and Heidegger suggest is that we can never escape Time. Our experience is always temporal. With this in mind, Westphal summarizes the leading postmodernists (Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Rorty, Heidegger, Derrida):

All our experience is linguistically mediated.
Every language is a conceptual scheme that lacks universality.
Every language is contingent.
Every language is a perspective.

Christian Philosophers and the Copernican Revolution

Westphal’s specific argument is that Kant’s claim to a thing-in-itself is not necessarily an anti-Christian claim. Indeed, Westphal argues that Kant correlates (somehow) the phenomenal and noumenal worlds. For him, the distance between things-in-themselves and appearances is the way the world is versus the way I experience it.

Positive Postmodernism as Radical Hermeneutics

*Foundationalism is a replacing of mythos with logos.

The Hermeneutical Turn in Modern Continental Philosophy

The trace: something at work in my thinking that is not present now yet never has been fully present.

Laughing at Hegel

Mediation: mediation involves otherness. Immediacy is its absence. At this level Hegel is a philosopher of difference. Hegel does hold to immediacy at one level, though. Something is immediate in its being “self-evident,” yet it is not self-evident in itself. It is self-evident to us.

Immediacy is abstract self-relation and hence it is abstract identity (EL 74A). Immediacy is a product of social mediation, of our being in history. Hegel’s argument is that immediacy can never exist at the level of abstraction, for then it would only give you the altar of the unknown god.

Immediacy tries to undo all of the relations that connect to us.

What does Hegel mean by “dialectics?” First, he doesn’t mean what you’ve been told by bloggers that he means. He never uses that triad (thesis/antithesis = synthesis) in the way that you think he does. For him, and well for all of the philosophical tradition, dialectics is the negative point of reason (EL 81R). Everything finite is its own sublation. Westphal suggests that this sublation, this aufhebung, is a recontextualization into the whole.

If you want a triad, it is this: abstract self-relation, mediation through another, and the self-mediation of the totality.

The Otherness of God and Ontological Xenophobia

I see where Horton got the “meeting a stranger” motif. I agree that the Augustinian/Ps.-Dionysian project is more Neoplatonist than classical theists want to admit. I just don’t think Derrida is the answer.

For the Neoplatonist et al, the goal of religion is “overcoming estrangement,” by which he means finitude. For Covenant man, it is meeting a stranger who descends to us. In the former we ascend via negation. In the latter God descends to us.

Conclusion

Heidegger himself might not avoid his own criticism, for in saying we must go beyond the horizon of being to understand being, is he not putting being into intellectualist terms?

Criticisms

*He says Husserl’s process of epoche is an attempt to escape finitude. I’m fairly certain Husserl is not doing that.

* Westphal takes issue with Plantinga’s attack on Kant’s “creative anti-realism.” This hinges on whether Westphal’s theistic reading of Kant is tenable. When read in light of Kant’s philosophy of religion, I don’t think it is.

* Finally, the pious churchgoer might wonder if there is any point in reading Derrida. I would have to say no. Everything Derrida wants the Reformed already have in the archetypal distinction. Further, while we agree with Heidegger that we should overcome ontotheology, God has already done so in being the God of the Covenant.

Handout on Heidegger

September 29, 2019 / J. B. Aitken / 1 Comment

I’ve been reading Martin Heidegger since 2010. I am not a Heideggerian. I am closer to Husserl. Still, I think a handout on what Heidegger said can help those who are trying to get into his works. I’m also going to end with some criticisms of where Heidegger went wrong.

Being-There, not just Being

Trying to figure out what Heidegger meant by “being” is a nightmare. An easier angle is what he replaced it with. That might help us see some of his criticisms of “being.” Heidegger reads Heraclitus and Aristotle as saying that Logos = Being = Unity (49). Heidegger wants to challenge the idea that Being is the foundation of beings. The Tradition, which Heidegger will ultimately attack, says “Being” is the common property of “beings.”

It’s like this. I am a being. That seems fairly straightforward. You are a being. What we have in common is also “being.” What does that mean?

I am not going to say whether he was right or wrong. Okay, I think he is mistaken. I do think, though, this explains why he replaced Aristotle’s categories of Being with the “Existentials.” To dangerously oversimplify, I suggest that Heidegger isn’t interested in traditional discussions of being. Those are dead-ends. Rather, how would he reframe the discussion around “existence?”

Existentiale

Worldhood
Concern
Care (i.e., being is being-with)
Mood
Thrownness

In authentic existence, on the other hand, is characterized by “anxiety” and “falling” and “fear.” I disagree with his rejection of traditional metaphysics, but he is quite perceptive here.

Inauthentic Dasein

Chatter. If “speech” is a good existential, then chatter is bad. I agree.
Ambiguity
Everyday Man (Das Man)

This is all quite fascinating. It’s inadequate, though. Missing, as Dallas Willard points out, is any discussion of consciousness or how consciousness relates to external objects. Some difficulties:

How does Dasein actually work?
Can you ultimately escape categorical thinking? Even Heidegger’s disciples like Dugin still refer to the “predicates” of Dasein’s existentials (Dugin 328).
Where is consciousness? I’ve read and reread Being and Time. I might have missed where he discussed it.

Desiring the Kingdom (Smith)

August 4, 2019 / J. B. Aitken / Leave a comment

Thesis: “We love in order to know” (Smith 18n). Christian education is formative as well as in-formative. It is a formation of desires. This is Augustine 101.

Smith notes that the phenomenology of visiting a mall echoes that of visiting a cathedral (20ff). This shows the limit of “worldview” talk. W-V ignores the formative impact of cultural sites.

Thesis 2: “Liturgies–sacred or secular–shape and constitute our identities by forming our most fundamental desires and our most basic attunement to the world” (25). Liturgies teach us in pre-cognitive ways. Do liturgies take precedence over doctrine, as some of Smith’s critics fear? Not necessarily. I don’t think it is a strict temporal separation. Do you learn how to pray by reading treatises on prayer or by actually praying? What about both?

Education: a constellation of “practices, rituals, and routines that inculcate a vision of the good life” (26). “Behind every pedagogy is a philosophical anthropology” (27).

In the first chapter Smith gives a very lucid account of how phenomenologists like Heidegger and Husserl, echoing Augustine, describe pre-cognitive modes of being-in-the-world. He also analyzes alternatives to worldview talk. Pace the worldview revival, we aren’t simply “thinking things,” brains on a stick.

Other thinkers in the neo-traditionalist school (Macintyre, perhaps Plantinga and Wolterstorff) give a better construal: we are governed by control beliefs that operate on a pre-cognitive level This is good but Smith notes several problems:

it simply moves the clash of ideas down a level.
still tends to operate with a disembodied view of the world.
Is it really possible to have a belief that we don’t think about? Maybe. I can believe something to be true without always thinking about it to be true. Smith doesn’t really address this point.

Smith, instead, suggests we view man as “homo liturgicus.” What we love is a more ultimate category. This is Augustine 101. Love is our most basic mode of being-in-the-world. He illustrates this with Husserl’s category of “intentionality.” We are always intending-towards or -about something. We don’t simply “think.” We think about something. Consciousness is consciousness about something.

There are different modes of intentionality. We don’t simply “think.” We are “involved” (what Heidegger called “care”). Heidegger shifted the discussion from the cognitive to the sub-cognitive level, from the head to the kardia.

Augustine would have changed “care” to “love.” Love is the primary mode of being-in-the-world. Its structure is longing and desire (50). Habit is Love’s Fulcrum.

Apocalyptic literature exposes what the Empire tries to hide. It gives us a new perspective so to see through the blinders. As Richard Bauckham says, it provides its own counter-images (Smith 92).

Towards a Liturgy

Smith’s liturgical proposals, far from being simply “high church” (what does that even mean?), is more or less the same as many Reformed and Evangelical proposals in the last 40 years (Horton, Gore, Webber). Sure, some of his applications are goofy but the structure is not. Some high points:

Prayer

“It is a practice that makes us people who refuse to settle for appearances” (193). Prayer is a “performative ontology,” a new construal of the God-world relation. It is also a “performative epistemology.” When we pray we are training ourselves for reception and dependence–epistemic humility.

Scripture and Sermon: Renarrating the World

When the Scriptures are read aloud, they are in a certain sense “enacted.” When we are habitually engaged in the reading aloud of the Scriptures, we begin to absorb its ethical and moral compass. Scripture does not confront us with merely abstract truths, but with narrating creation’s telos (196). It is the shape of the kingdom we are looking for, so it narrates our telos, too.

Eucharist: Supper with the King

Draws on recent analyses of the “communal” and “economic” aspects of the Supper, rather than focusing on essences. Correctly notes that the Supper is a sign of kingdom economics, where none will hoard a surplus or go without; it is one of free distribution (200-201; cf. Isaiah 55:1-2; 65:21-23).

Smith ends with a critique of the Christian University.

Good

As is usual with Smith’s work, he is a complete master of difficult philosophical literature–namely the German phenomenological tradition (yikes!). I now know what Heidegger and Husserl are saying. Further, he connects Husserl’s doctrine of intentionality with Heidegger’s Dasein, noting that both are drawing off of Augustine’s understanding of love as our Dasein. If someone does not address Smith’s use of Heidegger and Husserl in his critique of this work, then they simply do not know what Smith is saying. Full stop.

Smith isn’t saying that we first “do liturgy” and then only secondly come around to the doctrine stuff. Rather, he points out that we are already engaged in a being-in-the-world. As Augustinians, we will see this being-in-the-world as directing our love toward God or toward things. Smith’s project is Augustine 101.

He is saying that liturgies affect us in two ways: 1) what we hear and 2) what is happening in our tacit dimension (HT to Michael Polanyi). To illustrate this he “exegetes” the experience of going to a mall. In short, malls are shaped like cathedrals and have the same sort of sensory overload as a cathedral does.

Bad

*Smith’s applications, especially in worship, aren’t near as goofy as they were in Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism? We are encouraged on that point.

*Smith spends a lot of time attacking “nationalism” and “American Religion.” True, those can be idols, but they are also convenient idols. No one is going to get in trouble attacking “nationalism” today. But if someone starts attacking the EU, the UN, or the IMB, or the Council on Foreign Relations, watch out.

Review: Martin Heidegger: Philosophy of Another Beginning

July 10, 2019July 10, 2019 / J. B. Aitken / 2 Comments

Heidegger was the most powerful non-analytic philosopher of the 20th century. His language is both poetic and at times indecipherable. It takes a powerful thinker to interpret him and Aleksandr Dugin is such a man. I am not endorsing Dugin’s larger project (though it is obviously superior to Western liberalism). Rather, Dugin more than anyone else understood Heidegger’s own Dasein.

Thesis: Heidegger is the transition point between the last of the old philosophy (Greece to Germany) and the new way of thinking (Dugin 18). Heidegger’s narrative: something was, something began, something ended (31). Europe is the evening land (Abendland): it is time to put “Being” to sleep (37).

What makes Dugin helpful is that he clearly outlines Heidegger’s “code.” The root of his thought is ontological differentiation (41).

Seiende: beings.

Sein: Being

Noema: does not correspond to beings themselves, but to thoughts about beings.

These two form a dyad. The formation of the verb is always related to its inflection, its linkage to something (elastic bending, 42). Sein in its pure form is abstract. It doesn’t “bend” to anything. Man already implicitly assumes that beings (Seiende) are. If we reflect upon this, we ask “What is the being (Sein) of beings (Seiende)? What is common to all beings that makes them beings?

Heidegger reads Heraclitus and Aristotle as saying that Logos = Being = Unity (49). Heidegger wants to challenge the idea that Being is the foundation of beings. The Tradition, which Heidegger will ultimately attack, says “Being” is the common property of “beings.”

Fundamental Ontology

Ousia is a particular way to conceive of Being–share quality of all beings (54). If we say that Being is the essence of beings, we establish two parallel levels: the level of beings and the level of essence (ousia).

Main argument: if we differentiate Being and beings through essence, we overlook the difference between Being and beings (54). Thus, Being is not beings. This logically leads to nihilism.

Ontics

Ontic dimension: that which is present to thought. Thinking about the world. This is the topography of Phusis: the sphere of beings. This is a collected concept.

Ontology

The distance that arises as ontics reflects upon itself. Ontology identifies the Being of beings with the essence (ousia: shared class of) of beings. It attributes Being as an attribute of beings, but also exalts Being to a higher level. This is what Dugin calls the “double topography” (58). Greek thought abstracted Being from beings when it should have leapt into the primordial foundation of beings.

Seyn: the kind of Being that eludes ontology and is not grasped by abstracting it from other beings, but rather penetrating to the Nothingness (59). Argument: in the doubled topography logos was severed from beings (63). When we say we need to explore the nothing, we are not modern nihilists. We are going to beings’ primordial source (63). This is what generates beings but is not beings.

The Beginning and End of Western European Philosophy

The Greek take on Being leads to the oblivion of Being.

Being–beings-as-a-whole–is replaced by the notion (Vorstellung) of it. This notion then becomes more disconnected and mechanical (92)

The Pre-Socratics took the obvious claim that “beings” are, but they then sought to find what was the “Being” of beings, and they interpreted this as phusis (99). This means that Being now is. Now Being (Sein) precedes beings and is different from them.

Plato

Being is now an Idea. It is that which is placed before man (106). That’s Dugin’s language and I don’t think it is the clearest. This is one of those times where German could be clear. Ideas function in a gegenstand relationship with Man. That’s not all, though. Not only does man stand before Ideas, but Ideas stand before things of the world (107).

Maybe we can say it this way: Ideas are always across from man. There is a “gap.” Man is always “before” (across) the ideas. Thus Heidegger’s conclusion: man (being) is no longer in the world, but across from it. Man is pre-sented before the world, which means Ideas have to be re-presented to him. Truth is now correspondence between Idea and Object.

dugin_1_fot_yt-746x280

I’ll skip Heidegger’s section on Christianity. For all of his genius, he is utterly incompetent on this point. If all he had to say was that Thomas Aquinas helped with the oblivion of being, then fine. But he didn’t understand Semitic thought, nor did he want to. Thus when Yahweh says “I am that I am,” Heidegger just thinks it means Being qua Being.

Descartes

Descartes adapted but never left Plato. In Modernity instead of Plato’s Idea we have new “representations: the subject, apperception, energy, reality, the monad, etc.” (114). Descartes starts with the Subject. This subject either is or inside the human mind.

Everything is is re-presented before the Subject. Descartes calls these beings objects (115). A subject must have an object to stand before it. Modernity will then use Scientism to function as the subject. This means that Scientism now controls the objects before it, which could be anything from plants to animals to humans.

The chart doesn’t make it clear, but the actual topography stops at Marxism. I wrote “break” in the margin. Everything below the break is what pertains to the New Beginning. What I’m interested in is the topography itself. He shows how Western Philosophy took “Being” and made it into Ideas, Will, reason, Power, and finally techne, the reign of machine over man.

Metapolitics,

Heidegger’s true genius is his opening of political space. I don’t think his attack on “Being-Sein” will hold out, although he does make some valid criticisms of Marxism and Liberalism.

Heidegger uses “Planetarism” for what we call “globalism” (161). He identifies this with America, or rather an extreme individualism and consumerism. For Heidegger Planetarism is nihilistic because it expresses only one thing: the triumph of techne, which obliterates Being. Dugin argues that “Liberalism equates the Cartesian subject with the individual and pragmatic calculations in the area of countable tangible and intangible objects” (162).

Communism and Machenschaft

Marx stays true to the metaphysical topography. He has a subject (society, class) and an object (matter, product, thing). Marx correctly noted that Machenschaft created alienation. His solution is to use techne (objects) to overcome the alienation. He overcomes the alienation by means of what brought alienation (166)!

This explains why Heidegger identified with National Socialism. He saw Being at its historical end. Liberalism and Communism were the last manifestation of the history of Being. National Socialism, so he thought, was the only thing resisting these two. Therefore, the New Beginning would come. Except it didn;t.

This next section is difficult, even from a Heideggerian perspective. Heidegger’s argument is that Western metaphysics reached its nihilistic end. I suppose that’s true. A new metaphysics is needed and this one must focus on Seyn-being (good being). The only way to do this is what Heidegger calls “Das Geviert,” the four-fold. The only way to reach Geviert is through the Ereignis (the event) which calls for a radical decision, a leap into the abyss.

That’s the summary, anyway. Let’s unpack it. When we experience Seyn, that is, when we choose to let beings spring up rather than abstracting them into an artificial genus, then we will see everything in a four-fold way: Sky (world), Earth, gods, and men.

Sky: this normally corresponds to Welt or world (totality). It is what cosmos was for the Greeks. It is the principle of harmony. Heidegger strangely says these principles will be at war with each other, which is odd since sky is supposed to represent harmony. I think by war he really means risk, the element of uncertainty. Sky is not an object. It is the world in its openness (200). It is an orientation.

Heidegger insists that world/sky is always connected with a Volk, a people.

Earth: the earth leads to presence. It makes sky real.

Gods: He doesn’t mean what we mean by gods. He means something like the numinous. They can’t be gods like we think because that would put them back into the Platonic metaphysics of being. The “gods” can’t have being. Well, what are they? I’m not sure. I’m not sure that Heidegger is sure, either. The only close parallel I can think of is “sacramental presence,” which of course Heidegger doesn’t accept.

Men: They are neither subjects of being nor objects, but only a dimension of being.

geviert

The four-fold forms a St Andrews Cross. Seyn-being lives in between (Inzwischen). Since Heidegger rejects the old metaphysics, it can’t be located in a place, but only between places (but isn’t this also a place?). Another name for this “in-betweeness” is “Ereignis, the event. This is the single moment where Seyn is manifest. At the risk of sounding like the old metaphysics, let’s take what they call an object but which we will call the Thing (das Ding). It is being in presence. The sky makes it what it is. The earth makes it present. The gods give it the holy. Man speaks it through language (231). Applied to objects in general this is incoherent. Applied to the Lord’s Supper it makes sense.

ereignis

I’m not so sure this works as a whole metaphysics. On the other hand, though, it does function as a cipher to view the current metaphysical chaos, which appears to lead to transhumanism.

Misplacing Geviert

The old metaphysics took the dimension of Sky and place the “Ideas” in it. The Ideas then replaced sky (235). The earth has now been turned to matter. It is hule. Man is now a rational animal. He no longer names things through poetry but rather mass produces them in a factory.

After Descartes man is now a subject who transforms everything else into an object (254). Everything, even God, is now an object. This god “lost the attributes of a subject and became a mental abstraction,” which was soon discarded (255).

Gestell

Gestell is Heidegger’s word for the artificial framing of an object. It is “the essence of the world’s inauthentic concepts” (258). Applied to the Sky-dimension, we no longer have ideas but satellites (261).

Simulacrum

This is an interesting postmodern concept. It is a copy without an original (see the idiocy of a Rorschach test). On one hand it is meaningless and empty. On the other hand it represents an endless will to power (268).

The New Dasein

Dasein is not a what but a how. It is the “shock” you experience when you are awakened to a new idea (293). Heidegger wants Dasein to function as a way to overcome the subject-object duality.

Conclusion and Analysis

It’s easy to see why Amazon banned this book. Dugin is too powerful a thinker for them to deal with. That’s a shame, too, since this is one of the better books on Heidegger. Aside from a few typos, this edition is quite nice. It is well-bound and has a fine finish on the cover.

I question Heidegger’s larger project. He wants a god who can never be. Literally. His god that passes by does absolutely nothing. To his credit I think he realized this. He saw that National Socialism couldn’t bring about Geviert.

Here is the problem with his take on Christianity: We do not say that God is a being among beings. We say that God is beyond being. Hyper-ousia.

Metaphysics as Geviert

July 10, 2019 / J. B. Aitken / Leave a comment

heidegger-dugin