Christ the Vampire reappears

I posted about this novel once before and have now uploaded an old review of it:

Review of J. G. Eccarius, The Last Days of Christ the Vampire by L. Chernyi

Here is a sample of the novel itself.

III Publishing is still in business, but only offers digital editions now.

You can now buy a Kindle (3rd) edition of this book.

Philip Roth: 'The Conversion of the Jews'

Philip Roth is a famous name in Jewish American literature, but I never read him or much of any of the Jewish American literature of his era, which would seem to have much to do with the tribulations of assimilation into the American mainstream. I read a story by him, from 1959, for the first time a week ago. And this is the second, for an online class on Jewish culture two days from now:

The Conversion of the Jews by Philip Roth (1959)

This is really brilliant, with multiple ironies. By all means read it, and then read my analysis:

1. Ozzie the child is a child, not having the understanding, perspective, illusions, and inhibitions of the adult.

2. Ozzie doesn't really care whether or not Jesus is God, but he poses the philosophical question about the possibility of virgin birth.

3. Ozzie's reasoning mirrors the absurdity of all religious justification, but freed of understanding or interest in any superstitious tradition, pursues an abstract question.

4. Sticking to his guns, he's willing to suffer and rebel against persecution as a heretic, but flees to the rooftop.

5. On the roof, Ozzie discovers he has a peculiar power, first over the firement, then over the rabbi, then his mother, then the entire crowd.

6. Ozzie's friend Itzie yells for him to jump, and whips up the crowd. They love the spectacle, and they don't particularly care about Ozzie.

7. Ozzie discovers the power of martyrdom.

8. The crowd wants a martyr for its own delectation, not for any principle.

9. The guardians of Jewish religious orthodoxy--the rabbi and mom--don't want a martyr. This is because they don't want Ozzie to die. But this is also a commentary on and condemnation of Christianity.

10. So as not to become a martyr, Ozzie commands the rabbi and mom to bow down and acknowledge that God can do anything, he induces them to kneel and to acknowledge Jesus Christ as the son of God.

11. This is a paradoxical commentary on how Christianity makes converts, by coercion and spectacle. And also, how the Jews can be forced to kowtow to Christianity in order to survive, although in this case, it's because (for the rabbi and mom) they want Ozzie to survive, that is they want the prospective martyr not to be a martyr, and so they humiliate themselves for his sake. So, in this ironic situation, Judaism is subordinated to Christianity, but for the sake of saving a Jew.

12. And nobody should ever be slapped for their thoughts about God.

13. Ergo, Roth condemns both Judaism and Christianity and all religious authority. But paradoxically, while Christianity is posited as a viable theological option, Christianity receives the bulk of the condemnation for the glorification of martyrdom.

Max Horkheimer on Montaigne

Max Horkheimer's take on Montaigne is far harsher than that of Ivan Sviták. (See previous post and Sviták's essay on Montaigne.)

Horkheimer, Max. "Montaigne and the Function of Skepticism" (1938), in Between Philosophy and Social Science: Selected Early Writings, translated by G. Frederick Hunter, Matthew S. Kramer and John Torpey (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1993), pp. 265-311.

Horkheimer sees skepticism, especially in the bourgeois period, as fundamentally conservative. He lays out the contemporaneous situation viz. the rising bourgeoisie, intensification of labor exploitation, the rise of Protestantism and its effect on Catholicism, the indictment of Montaigne by fellow-reactionary Pascal. Horkheimer analyzes skepticism as bourgeois inwardness, religion as the indispensable irrationalist undergirding of bourgeois rationalist existence, Hume's skepticism as liberal bourgeois status quo, the skeptical ego (290) esp. from the early bourgeois to the imperialist epoch, skepticism's adaptation to tyranny, transformation of skepticism into conformism, nationalism and fascism in 1938, hatred of the masses and celebration of Montaigne in the 19th century, Nietzsche's admiration for Montaigne (303-4), Dilthey's conservatism and advocacy of Montaigne, D.F. Strauss's demythologization of Christianity and its compatibility with authoritarianism, Hegel's dialectics as a way out, materialist dialectics vs. the unity of thought and history.

Here are a few choice quotes:

 "Just as bourgeois individuals reserve philosophy for their leisure hours and thus turn it into idle thought, knowledge and critique are isolated in the society as particular aspects of business." [p. 289]

"The idiocy of the notion that an individual or collectivity can save itself or the world by conciliation with the spreading rule of violence has now become so patently obvious that it can only be understood as a thinly veiled sympathy with that rule, or as an anxiety about sunk capital." [p. 293]

"The further society develops, the more obviously this principle [bourgeois equality], and with it that of bourgeois freedom, reveal their internal contradictions. The continued dominance of this principle, the skeptical rejection of revolutionary activity, and the hostility toward critique of the totality thus have something cynical about them. They reveal subordination to irrational relations, not integration into rational ones." [p. 295]

"Skepticism is a pathological form of intellectual independence: it is immune to truth as well as to untruth." [p. 307]

Conclusion:

"To be sure, it is typical of skepticism, as well as of the dominant character as such, to ascribe the vulgar motives--according to which alone the rulers of the world act--not to them and their principle, but to the idea of humanity itself. The difference here is that the critical theory which we espouse, in contrast to skepticism, does not make an antitheoretical absolutism of the insight into the inadequacy of things as they are and the transitoriness of cognition. Instead, even in the face of pessimistic assessments, critical theory is guided by the unswerving interest in a better future." [p. 311]

For noteworthy philosophical generalizations see esp. pp. 270-4, 278-9, 284-5, 290, 295.

Ivan Sviták on Montaigne

Once again:

Sviták, Ivan. The Dialectic of Common Sense: The Master Thinkers. Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1979.

This volume covers Montaigne, Voltaire, and Holbach (also published separately). I have added a link to the essay on Montaigne, which comprises pp. 1-42 of this book. The link is to a PDF file consisting of images of the text rather than true text.

It is a curious take on Montaigne, both praising him to the skies and analyzing the historical context and obsolescence of his philosophy. I am sure that this reflects Sviták's predicament under Stalinism. The extreme intellectual measures undertaken to escape reification remind me of Merab Mamardashvili in the USSR in a certain respect.

Lenin on political agitation, liberalism, & the Russian Orthodox Church

V. I. Lenin, 'Political Agitation and “The Class Point of View”' [Iskra, No. 16, February 1, 1902], in Lenin Collected Works, Vol. 5 (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1961), pp. 337-343.

Here is a sample:

 “What does our ’intellectual’, frivolous crowd that instigates and applauds the Stakhoviches care for the affairs of our sacred orthodox faith and our time-honoured attitude towards it?”... Once again, so much the worse for you, gentlemen, champions of the autocracy, the orthodox faith, and the national essence. A fine system indeed our police ridden autocracy must be, if it has permeated even religion with the spirit of the prison-cell, so that the “Stakhoviches” (who have no firm convictions in matters of religion, but who are interested, as we shall see, in preserving a stable religion) become utterly indifferent (if not actually hostile) to this notorious “national” faith. "... They call our faith a delusion!! They mock at us because, thanks to this ’delusion’, we fear and try to avoid sin and we carry out our obligations uncomplainingly, no matter how severe they may be; because we find the strength and courage to bear sorrow and privations and forbear pride in times of success and good fortune...." So! The orthodox faith is dear to them because it teaches people to bear misery “uncomplainingly”. What a profitable faith it is indeed for the governing classes! In a society so organised that an insignificant minority enjoys wealth and power, while the masses constantly suffer “privations” and bear “severe obligations”, it is quite natural for the exploiters to sympathise with a religion that teaches people to bear “uncomplainingly” the hell on earth for the sake of an alleged celestial paradise. But in its zeal Moskovskiye Vedomosti became too garrulous. So garrulous, in fact, that unwittingly it spoke the truth. We read on: "... They do not suspect that if they, the Stakhoviches, eat well, sleep peacefully, and live merrily, it is thanks to this ’delusion’.”

The sacred truth! This is precisely the case. It is because religious “delusions” are so widespread among the masses that the Stakhoviches and the Oblomovs,” and all our capitalists who live by the labour of the masses, and even Moskovskiye Vedomosti itself, “sleep peacefully”. And the more education spreads among the people, the more will religious prejudices give way to socialist consciousness, the nearer will be the day of victory for the proletariat —the victory that will emancipate all oppressed classes from the slavery they endure in modern society.

Ludwig Feuerbach 11: culture vs. religion

Christianity came into the world long after the invention of bread, wine, and other elements of civilization, at a time when it was too late to deify their inventors, when these inventions had long since lost their religious significance. Christianity introduced another element of civilization: morality. Christianity wished to provide a cure not for physical or political evils, but for moral evils, for sin. Let us go back to our example of wine in order to clarify the difference between Christianity and paganism, that is, common popular paganism. How, said the Christians to the heathen, can you deify wine? What sort of benefit is it? Consumed immoderately, it brings death and ruin. It is a benefit only when consumed in moderation, with wisdom, that is, when drunk in a moral way; thus the utility or harmfulness of a thing depends not on the thing itself, but on the moral use that is made of it. In this the Christians were right. But Christianity made morality into a religion, it made the moral law into a divine commandment; it transformed a matter of autonomous human activity into a matter of faith.

In Christianity faith is the principle, the foundation of the moral law: "From faith come good works." Christianity has no wine god, no goddess of bread or grain, no Ceres, no Poseidon, god of the sea and of navigation; it knows no god of the smithy, no Vulcan; yet it has a general God, or rather, a moral God, a God of the art of becoming moral and attaining beatitude. And with this God the Christians to this day oppose all radical, all thoroughgoing civilization, for a Christian can conceive of no morality, no ethical human life, without God; he therefore derives morality from God, just as the pagan poet derived the laws and types of poetry from the gods and goddesses of poetry, just as the pagan smith derived the tricks of his trade from the god Vulcan. But just as today smiths and metalworkers in general know their trade without having any particular god as their patron, so men will some day master the art of leading moral and happy lives without a God. Indeed, they will be truly moral and happy only when they no longer have a God, when they no longer need religion; for as long as an art is still imperfect, as long as it is in its swaddling clothes, it requires the protection of religion. For through religion man compensates for the deficiencies in his culture; and it is only from lack of culture that, like the Egyptian priest who makes sacraments of his rudimentary medicines, he makes sacraments of his moral remedies, makes sacred dogmas of his rudimentary ideas, and makes divine commandments and revelations of his own thoughts and emotions.

In short, religion and culture are incompatible, although culture, insofar as religion is the first and oldest form of it, can be termed the true and perfect religion, so that only a truly cultivated man is truly religious. This statement, however, is an abuse of words, for superstitious and inhuman notions are always bound up with the word “religious”; by its very nature religion comprises anticultural elements; for it strives to perpetuate ideas, customs, inventions that man made in his childhood, and to impose them as the laws of his adult age. Where man needs a God to tell him how to behave—as He commanded the Israelites to relieve themselves in a place apart—man is at the religious stage, but also at a profoundly uncivilized stage. Where man behaves properly of his own accord, because his own nature, his own reason and inclination tell him to, the need for religion ceases and culture takes its place. And just as it now seems ridiculous and incredible that the most natural rule of decency should once have been a religious commandment, so one day, when man has progressed beyond our present pseudo culture, beyond the age of religious barbarism, he will find it hard to believe that, in order to practice the laws of morality and brotherly love, he once had to regard them as the commandments of a God who rewarded observance and punished nonobservance. 

— Ludwig Feuerbach, Lectures on the Essence of Religion, translated by Ralph Manheim (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), 23^rd Lecture, pp. 212-213

Ludwig Feuerbach redux

I have just updated my bibliography of works in the English language:

Ludwig Feuerbach: A Bibliography

Aside from the addition of print works, there are now links to YouTube videos.

Here are a few stray quotes gleaned from the Internet, not yet sourced:

‎"The present age . . . prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, fancy to reality, the appearance to the essence . . . for in these days illusion only is sacred, truth profane."

‎"'Faith moves mountains!' Certainly! Faith does not solve difficult problems; it only pushes them aside."

‎"The pious one bases faith on human weakness. How weak must be something that is supported by weakness."

And here is a very interesting quote from Feuerbach's Principles of the Philosophy of the Future (1843), Part II: Critique of Hegel, § 21 (different translation):

‎"The Hegelian philosophy is the last magnificent attempt to restore Christianity, which was lost and wrecked, through philosophy and, indeed, to restore Christianity—as is generally done in the modern era—by identifying it with the negation of Christianity."

Feuerbach constantly highlights the tug of war between philosophy and theology, and which won wins out within the thought of particular philosophers. Here though note also that Feuerbach's remark is applicable to liberal, (partly) demythologized religion.

From a quick scan of Feuerbach's works in English, I've concluded that I first most need to read Lectures on the Essence of Religion (1851).This is a later work than his other noted works on religion and by this time he has revised some earlier views. Also, it seems to be the most general treatment of religion beyond Christianity, with some interesting remarks about philosophers. Lectures I & XXX are available at the Marxists Internet Archive. Both are worth checking out. Lecture I has some interesting commentary on Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz, for example. I intend to scan Lecture II, which begins with a treatment of Pierre Bayle. Lecture XXX is "Atheism alone a Positive View."

Descartes' Bones & The Best of All Possible Worlds

I never got around to continuing my review of Russell Shorto's Descartes’ Bones: A Skeletal History of the Conflict Between Faith and Reason, nor did I ever get around to reviewing Steven Nadler's The Best of All Possible Worlds: A Story of Philosophers, God, and Evil. The former has objective content that merits attention regardless of Shorto's spin on the subject suggesting a moral for our time. Shorto is a journalist. Nadler is a serious scholar of Spinoza and of that period. Here is a paragraph I wrote on 21 July 2010:

The last two books I'm reading are about early modern philosophy: Russell Shorto's Descartes’ Bones and Steven Nadler's The Best of All Possible Worlds. The latter is about the theological-metaphysical problematic of Leibniz, Malebranche, and Arnauld. [This] . . . coincidentally dovetails with parts of the former book, which I'm still reading. Nadler refrains from drawing too many conclusions from this material, unlike Shorto, who thinks like a shallow journalist in reading today's conflict between faith and reason into the past. However, one can draw more severe conclusions from Nadler's book, should one choose to adduce the evidence presented therein to condemn Christianity—not just religion in general but Christianity in particular. I will write about this, assuming I can catch up to my proliferating ambitions.

Blasphemy Tanka for James Baldwin

 Blasphemy Tanka for James Baldwin

In James Baldwin's tale,
    Go Tell It on the Mountain,
        a note for Jesus:
    ". . . tell that puking bastard to
kiss my big black ass." It's there!

REFERENCE: James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953; New Dell Edition, 1970), p. 163.

— Ralph Dumain, 7 & 11 August 2011

Is Critique Secular?

Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech, Critical Horizons by Talal Asad, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler and Saba Mahmood. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009. (The Townsend Papers in the Humanities; no. 2)

As if Judith Butler weren't already disgusting enough. Anti-imperialism as an absolute for the (pseudo-)left is rotten politics. And of course academic politics is nothing but unscrupulous careerism anyway.

Edis, Taner. Is Critique Secular?, The Secular Outpost (blog), December 6, 2010.

I'm glad to see someone besides myself denounce the intellectual alliance between postmodernist westerners and apologists for Islam.

Gourgouris, Stathis. “De-transcendentalizing the secular,” The Immanent Frame (blog).

Unequivocal defense of secularism and rejection of identity politics, coupled with an interesting analysis of the relation between transcendentalism and theism (Descartes, Kant), but decoupling a necessary relation between secularism and the Christian West.

Mahmood, Saba. “Is critique secular?”, The Immanent Frame (blog).

“This line of thought urges you to choose: either one is against secular values or one is for them.” This is actually the case, though Mahmood denies it. A noxious example of the dishonest Counter-Enlightenment collusion between postmodernism & religion.

Sullivan, Winnifred Fallers. “What the Danish Cartoon Controversy Tells Us About Religion, the Secular, and the Limits of the Law,” Religion Dispatches, January 7, 2010.

Rotten to the core.

Thomassen, Lasse. Review: Talal Asad, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler and Saba Mahmood, Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech, Critical Horizons, Vol 12, No 1, 2010, pp. 103-107.

On the Danish cartoons; the book under review is apparently another horrid example of the meeting of postmodernism and religion.

Yager, Colin. “Is Critique Secular? Thoughts on Enchantment and Reflexivity.”

A completely confused mess. Thoughts on Habermas, Taylor, Romanticism, with too much dallying on Byron. Bankrupt.

---

Marxism & religion: 2 articles

A key challenge for socialists - Marxists and Religion - yesterday and today
by Gilbert Achcar, International Viewpoint, 15 October 2004.

I mostly agree. I agree esp. with the criticism of alliances between British Trotskyists and Islamists.

Opiate of the People? - Marxism and Religion
By Michael Löwy
International Viewpoint Online magazine, IV368, June 200.

The historical overview is interesting, but I think Löwy is shallow and wrong. I also think Ernst Bloch is wrong. Löwy's treatment of the Frankfurt School is deplorable.

Frederick Douglass & Darwinism

"I do not know that I am an evolutionist, but to this extent I am one. I certainly have more patience with those who trace mankind upward from a low condition, even from the lower animals, than with those that start him at a high point of perfection and conduct him to the level with the brutes. I have no sympathy with a theory that starts man in heaven and stops him in hell."

   — Frederick Douglass, "'It Moves': or the Philosophy of Reform", address delivered in Washington, DC, 20 November 1883; in The Frederick Douglass Papers, series 1, vol. 5; ed. John W. Blassingame et al (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), pp. 124-145.

Note that the title of this speech is inspired by Galileo's reaction to the suppression of his work: "Eppur si mouve"— "nevertheless, it moves" (the Earth round the sun). Interestingly, this formulation of Douglass reminds me of Bakunin's antitheist argument in God and the State.

Jewish attitudes toward Jesus in history

Jewish Perceptions of Jesus in Religious Texts and Artistic Works
Bennett Muraskin
Jewish Currents, Spring 2010

Most of this information is new to me. Christian slanders against Jews are legendary. Jewish resentment against Christians is understandable. I never knew of any particular Jewish hostility to Jesus, though. Apparently, there's a long history of this from about half way through the second century AD through the Middle Ages. This I found absolutely hilarious:

Throughout the Middle Ages, European Jews generally continued to revile Jesus, albeit secretly. They would bring images of Jesus and Mary into their outhouses. Jesus was called Yoyzl or Yoshke Pandrek, which means “Mr. Shit.” They would treat Haman as a proxy for Jesus during Purim, hanging an effigy on a cross and burning it. Michael Wex’s acclaimed Born to Kvetch: Yiddish Language and Culture in All Its Moods (2006) provides numerous examples of Yiddish expressions that mocked Jesus and Christian beliefs well into the 20th century.

The fun had to end sometime:

However, the Jewish Enlightenment (Haskole) of the 18th and 19th centuries effected a sea change in attitudes towards the figure of Jesus among liberal and secular Jews.

The author documents praise of Jesus from Heinrich Graetz in the 19th century to Buber and Einstein in the 20th. Jewish artists like Chagall and Jacob Epstein also used the Jewish Jesus as a weapon against Christian anti-Semitism and to promote peace and justice. Several Yiddish writers capitalized on Jesus' martyrdom. Sholem Asch made a decisive impact but also caught a lot of flack with his popular Yiddish novel The Nazarene in 1939. Matthew Hoffman in Rebel to Rabbi: Reclaiming Jesus and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture (2007) judged "the Jewish reclamation of Jesus" an important contribution to secular Jewish culture.

Hypatia revisited

Written 12 January 2008:

Dzielska, Maria. Hypatia of Alexandria, translated by F. Lyra. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995.

Interesting little book on the great mathematician/astronomer/philosopher Hypatia, torn to pieces by Christians in Alexandria, 415 AD. Much accepted as fact about Hypatia is actually the repetition of legend. This book reviews the literary history of Hypatia. She was a hero of the Enlightenment. Several writers of the period blamed St. Cyril for complicity in her assassination. (The first English writer to honor her was the heretical John Toland.) Hypatia became a symbol of Hellenism defiled by Christian fanaticism. She was also the subject of a novel in the 19th century by Charles Kingsley (of which I have two editions), a Protestant clergyman who wanted to sock it to the Catholics. In more recent years she has become a heroine of the feminists.

After reviewing this history, Dzielska assembles ascertainable historical data about her and her belief system, based on what can be learned by her disciples. I don't recall her relation to Christianity, but I believe she was most likely a Platonist who headed an esoteric circle rather than a public or itinerant teacher.

I paused after this point. The third chapter I think is about the circumstances of her death, and the fourth is the conclusion.

17 January 2008:

After reviewing the literary history of Hypatia and the ascertainable facts about her circle, the subsequent chapter is about her life and death, then a conclusion, finally a bibliographical supplement.

While portrayed as a beautiful young woman in literature, in reality Hypatia was probably born circa 355 AD and thus was murdered by a Christian mob at the age of 60. Her father was a noted mathematician and astronomer, and she carried on his work and added her own achievements. In addition, she was, as were other scientifically minded individuals of her time, heavily involved in hermeticism and esoteric teachings. An elite, upper class group constituted her circle. She was neither popular with the masses, nor was she a particularly avid defender of the traditional "pagan" religion.

Hypatia got caught up in the vicious religious politics of her time. When the patriarch Cyril (later sainted, natch) took over from Theophilus, he made aggressive efforts to wipe out paganism and Judaism, which destabilized an inherently precarious situation. Cyril incited violent, homicidal warfare between Jews and Christians, which ultimately resulted in an anti-Jewish pogrom devastating the Jewish presence in Alexandria. Furthermore, he locked himself into a power struggle with the pagan leader Orestes. Hypatia has friends in high places, both with Orestes and in the center of empire. Aloof from public life, she was set up as a scapegoat for the city's tensions. She was portrayed as a witch casting a spell over Orestes, preventing a rapproachment with the Christians. Cyril is known to have incited the climate of hate, but there is no evidence directly linking him to her assassination. However, a cabal of Christian leaders whipped up a lynch mob against her among the poor and ignorant yet obedient to the priesthood, and these people attacked and dismembered her in 415 AD.

Nothing like that Christian love, n'est ce pas?

Joachim Kahl, German atheist

Joachim Kahl (1941- ) was once a theologian, once a Marxist, and is still a philosopher. Apparently he is no fan of Dawkins & co. One of his books has been translated into English: The Misery of Christianity, Or, A Plea for a Humanity without God, with a preface by Gerhard Szczesny, translated by N. D. Smith. (Penguin, 1971).

Here is one translated piece that can be found on the web:

The Answer of Atheism: "There Is No God" by Joachim Kahl, translated by Michaela Sommer.

There are various quotes from Kahl on various web pages. Here are a few quotes from The Misery of Christianity to be found in an article entitled If Christianity does not scandalize you, you do not know it!:

“The necessity to go on criticizing Christianity and theology is due to the simple fact that they continue to exist. The light of reason once more has to be directed against today's representatives of religion who have always benefited from the universal human trend to forget.”

“This book is a pamphlet . . . It cannot and does not want to conceal its polemic intentions. It was written due to a constant constraint of purification. I do not share the generally prevailing prejudice that rational criticism can only be presented in an undercooled and reserved manner. I have not written this work without anger and without study, but with anger and with study, with the ire developing of its own accord after a sufficient amount of thorough studies. If Christianity does not scandalize you, you do not know it!”

“The New Testament is a manifesto of inhumanity, a wide-ranging mass betrayal; it makes people dumb instead of enlightening them about their real interests.”

“The New Testament is the outcome of neurotic and narrow-minded people. Human sexuality is not seen as a source of pleasure, but as a source of fear, not as a medium of love, but as a medium of sin. Everything natural and bodily is banned – in part openly, in part hidden.”

Here is another quote from another web page:

“If have learnt a great deal from Franz Overbeck’s writings — so much that his personal fate terrifies me. At the end of his long period as Professor of Theology at Basle, he admitted: ‘I can honestly say that Christianity cost me my life. To such an extent that, although I never possessed it and only became a theologian as the result of a ‘misunderstanding’, I have taken my whole life to get rid of it.’ Does this situation have to be perpetuated? Christianity has already cheated too many people out of their lives. That is why I want to get rid of it, right away.” (p. 21)

Yet another quote, from the web site Bad News About Christianity:

The Ustaša, as this terrorist organisation was called, was responsible for the forcible conversion of some 240,000 Orthodox Serbs to Roman Catholicism and for putting about 750,000 of these people to death. There was, from the beginning, close collaboration between the Catholic clergy and the Ustaša. Archbishop Stepinać, whom the Vatican appointed in 1942 to be the spiritual leader of the Ustaša, had a place, together with ten of his clergy, in the Ustaša Parliament. Priests were also employed as police chiefs and as officers in the personal body-guard of the fanatical Croatian head of state, Pavelić. Nuns marched in military parades immediately behind the soldiers, their arms raised in the fascist salute. Abbesses were decorated with the Ustaša order. The most cruel part of this movement was played, however, by the Franciscans, whose monasteries had for some time been used as arsenals. Several monks and priests agreed to work as executioners in the hastily set up concentration camps to which the Orthodox Serbs were sent for mass execution by decapitation. These massacres were so brutal that even Croatia's allies, the German Nazis, protested against them and petitions were sent to the Vatican. Pope Pius XII, however, said nothing, just as he also said nothing about Auschwitz. It was not until some ten years later, in 1953, that he broke his silence by promoting Archbishop Stepinać, who, as one of those bearing the greatest guilt, had been sentenced by the Supreme People's Court of Yugoslavia to sixteen years" forced labour, to the rank of Cardinal for his "great services" to the Church.

Descartes as a Moral Thinker

"'I think, therefore I am', said Descartes, and the world rejoiced at the perspective of the expansion of individual personality and human powers through the liberation of the intellect." — C.L.R. James et al

The watershed marked by the philosophy of Descartes has long been recognized. The dualism of Descartes' philosophy has often been linked to his historical and social position, e.g.:

Descartes' Dualism (Extract) by Albert William Levi

One can find such treatments also in the Marxist tradition (e.g. C.L.R. James & the Johnson-Forest Tendency, quoted above):

Descartes & Marxism: Selected Bibliography

There is, of course, the perennial favorite which deals not with Descartes specifically but with the contradictions of Enlightenment, unsatisfactorily in my view: Dialectic of Enlightenment by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno. See also my web guide/bibliography:

Positivism vs Life Philosophy (Lebensphilosophie) Study Guide

Here is a book I just discovered which is alleged to challenge common wisdom about Descartes:

Steiner, Gary. Descartes as a Moral Thinker: Christianity, Technology, Nihilism. Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2004. See also at Prometheus Books.

There is one brief passage on Marx, and, surprisingly, Steiner finds an affinity between Descartes and Marx. Otherwise, the book appears to be innocent of Marxism. Looking through the bibliography, the one author I'm tempted to pursue is Hans Blumenberg (also known for a debate with Karl Löwith).

Here is the publisher's product description:

Although commentary on Descartes is extensive, the importance of morality in his thought has been all but overlooked in contemporary English-language scholarship. Considered to be the first modern philosopher, Descartes is often interpreted as a wholly secular thinker who acknowledged no authority above the human will. In this important reassessment of the great French philosopher, Gary Steiner shows the influence of Christian thought on the moral foundations of Descartes's philosophy.

Descartes's commitment to Christian piety and to the autonomy of human reason stand in an uneasy tension with one another. In DESCARTES AS A MORAL THINKER, Steiner examines this tension between the "angelic" aspirations in Descartes's Christian commitments and the "earthly" or technological aspirations reflected in his endeavor to use reason to ground scientific practice. Steiner provides a close analysis of all Descartes's texts and correspondence that bear on morality. By placing Descartes's work in historical context, Steiner demonstrates Descartes's indebtedness not only to Galileo and Bacon in developing his conception of autonomous human reason but also to Augustine and Aquinas in conceptualizing the human condition and the role of belief in God. Providing a detailed survey of German, French, and English scholarship on Descartes, Steiner concludes with an in-depth examination of contemporary debates about secularization, nihilism, and modernity in such thinkers as Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Hans Blumenberg, and Karl Lowith. Steiner shows how Descartes's own ambivalence about the relation between faith and reason can shed light on contemporary controversies regarding what Blumenberg calls "the legitimacy of the modern age."

This bears looking into. I think this will inadvertently confirm the incomparable greatness of Baruch Spinoza.

Tarrying with Theology: Slavoj Žižek & The Monstrosity of Christ

The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic?
Slavoj Žižek & John Milbank, edited by Creston Davis.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009.
http://www.sok.bz/web/media/video/ChristZizek.pdf

Contents:

Introduction: Holy Saturday or Resurrection Sunday? Staging an Unlikely Debate / Creston Davis

The Fear of Four Words: A Modest Plea for the Hegelian Reading of Christianity / Slavoj Žižek

The Double Glory, or Paradox versus Dialectics: On Not Quite Agreeing with Slavoj Žižek / John Milbank

Dialectical Clarity versus the Misty Conceit of Paradox / Slavoj Žižek

Creston Davis is a jackass: he is the philosophical correlate of the Democratic Party, of Clinton-Obama bipartisanism: overcome the cleavage between liberals and conservatives by capitulating to conservatives. In philosophy, is there anything more disgusting than postmodern theology?

Apparently, one of Žižek's other conceits, besides being a poseur tough-guy born-again Leninist, is to pose as an atheist Christian theologian. This is almost as sickening as the rest of the book, but there are some interesting moments. I'll confine myself to Žižek's first essay "The Fear of Four Words."

Žižek begins with a quote from Chesterton. The aims is to posit Christianity against magical thinking, nature worship, and other religions. Žižek has an animus against New Age mysticism, which is at least interesting:

The next standard argument against Hegel’s philosophy of religion targets its teleological structure: it openly asserts the primacy of Christianity, Christianity as the “true” religion, the final point of the entire development of religions. It is easy to demonstrate how the notion of “world religions,” although it was invented in the era of Romanticism in the course of the opening toward other (non- European) religions, in order to serve as the neutral conceptual container allowing us to “democratically” confer equal spiritual dignity on all “great” religions (Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism . . .), effectively privileges Christianity—already a quick look makes it clear how Hinduism, and especially Buddhism, simply do not fit the notion of “religion” implied in the idea of “world religions.” However, what conclusion are we to draw from this? For a Hegelian, there is nothing scandalous in this fact: every particular religion in effect contains its own notion of what religion “in general” is, so that there is no neutral universal notion of religion—every such notion is already twisted in the direction of (colorized by, hegemonized by) a particular religion. This, however, in no way entails a nominalist / historicist devaluation of universality; rather, it forces us to pass from “abstract” to “concrete” universality, i.e., to articulate how the passage from one to another particular religion is not merely something that concerns the particular, but is simultaneously the “inner development” of the universal notion itself, its “self- determination.”

Postcolonial critics like to dismiss Christianity as the “whiteness” of religions: the presupposed zero level of normality, of the “true” religion, with regard to which all other religions are distortions or variations. However, when today’s New Age ideologists insist on the distinction between religion and spirituality (they perceive themselves as spiritual, not part of any organized religion), they (often not so) silently impose a “pure” procedure of Zen- like spiritual meditation as the “whiteness” of religion. The idea is that all religions presuppose, rely on, exploit, manipulate, etc., the same core of mystical experience, and that it is only “pure” forms of meditation like Zen Buddhism that exemplify this core directly, bypassing institutional and dogmatic mediations. Spiritual meditation, in its abstraction from institutionalized religion, appears today as the zero- level undistorted core of religion: the complex institutional and dogmatic edifice which sustains every particular religion is dismissed as a contingent secondary coating of this core. The reason for this shift of accent from religious institution to the intimacy of spiritual experience is that such a meditation is the ideological form that best fits today’s global capitalism.

Adorno did as good a job or better on this subject. Later, Žižek approvingly quotes Chesteron again:

Love desires personality; therefore love desires division. It is the instinct of Christianity to be glad that God has broken the universe into little pieces. . . . This is the intellectual abyss between Buddhism and Christianity; that for the Buddhist or Theosophist personality is the fall of man, for the Christian it is the purpose of God, the whole point of his cosmic idea. The world-soul of the Theosophists asks man to love it only in order that man may throw himself into it. But the divine centre of Christianity actually threw man out of it in order that he might love it. . . . All modern philosophies are chains which connect and fetter; Christianity is a sword which separates and sets free. No other philosophy makes God actually rejoice in the separation of the universe into living souls.

Žižek has his problems with Western mysticism, too, e.g. Eckhart, who, among others, neutralized the "monstrosity of Christ". A couple more interesting paragraphs:

The trap to avoid apropos of Eckhart is to introduce the difference between the ineffable core of the mystical experience and what D. T. Suzuki called “all sorts of mythological paraphernalia” in the Christian tradition: “As I conceive it, Zen is the ultimate fact of all philosophy and religion. . . . What makes all these religions and philosophies vital and inspiring is due to the presence in them all of what I may designate as the Zen element.” In a different way, Schürmann makes exactly the same move, when he distinguishes between the core of Eckhart’s message and the way he formulated it in the inappropriate terms borrowed from the philosophical and theological traditions at his disposal (Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Aquinas . . .); even more, Schürmann designates the philosopher who, centuries later, was finally able to provide the adequate formulation of what Eckhart was striving at, Heidegger: “Eckhart came too early in his daring design. He is not a modern philosopher. But his understanding of being as releasement prepares the way for modern philosophy.” However, does this not obliterate the true breakthrough of Eckhart, his attempt to think Christology (the birth of God within the order of finitude, Incarnation) from the mystical perspective? There is a solution to this impasse: what if what Schürmann claims is true, with the proviso that the “modern philosopher” is not Heidegger, but Hegel? Eckhart’s goal is withdrawal from the created reality of particular entities into the “desert” of the divine nature, of Godhead, the negation of all substantial reality, withdrawal into the primordial Void--One beyond Word. Hegel’s task is exactly the opposite one: not from God to Godhead, but from Godhead to God, i.e., how, out of this abyss of Godhead, God qua Person emerges, how a Word is born in it. Negation must turn around onto itself and bring us back to determinate (finite, temporal) reality.

Later on, Žižek does reveal what a reactionary Chesterton is without naming him as such; Chesteron has merely failed to see that the anarchist lawlessless of the philosopher is not just the most criminal act, but an indictment of the criminality of an entire system. I imagine that Orwell would have a field day--perhaps he did, for all I know, with Chesterton's contention that orthodoxy is the greatest rebellion.

Here is a curious comment on the diversity of atheisms:

Peter Sloterdijk was right to notice how every atheism bears the mark of the religion out of which it grew through its negation: there is a specifically Jewish Enlightenment atheism practiced by great Jewish figures from Spinoza to Freud; there is the Protestant atheism of authentic responsibility and assuming one’s fate through anxious awareness that there is no external guarantee of success (from Frederick the Great to Heidegger in Sein und Zeit); there is a Catholic atheism à la Maurras, there is a Muslim atheism (Muslims have a wonderful word for atheists: it means “those who believe in nothing”), and so on. Insofar as religions remain religions, there is no ecumenical peace between them—such a peace can develop only through their atheist doubles. Christianity, however, is an exception here: it enacts the reflexive reversal of atheist doubt into God himself. In his “Father, why have you forsaken me?”, Christ himself commits what is for a Christian the ultimate sin: he wavers in his Faith. While, in all other religions, there are people who do not believe in God, only in Christianity does God not believe in himself.

Žižek demonstrates here how little he knows of Jewish atheists, and how he obtuse he is to real, historical Christianity, not the sanitized version of theologians. It is the same intellectual fraud that real theologians and mystics perpetrate via their religions: that their constructs constitute the inner meaning of the vulgar exoteric religions that form the actual substance of history.

Žižek digresses from there to Frankenstein, the Book of Job, pop culture, and Freud. Then back to Kant and Hegel. Another curious assertion follows:

This double kenosis is what the standard Marxist critique of religion as the self-alienation of humanity misses: “modern philosophy would not have its own subject if God’s sacrifice had not occurred.” For subjectivity to emerge— not as a mere epiphenomenon of the global substantial ontological order, but as essential to Substance itself—the split, negativity, particularization, self-alienation, must be posited as something that takes place in the very heart of the divine Substance, i.e., the move from Substance to Subject must occur within God himself.

A little farther down, another indictment of "standard" Marxism:

This is why standard Marxist philosophy oscillates between the ontology of “dialectical materialism” which reduces human subjectivity to a particular ontological sphere (no wonder Georgi Plekhanov, the creator of the term “dialectical materialism,” also designated Marxism as “dynamized Spinozism”) and the philosophy of praxis which, from the young Georg Lukács onward, takes as its starting point and horizon collective subjectivity which posits / mediates every objectivity, and is thus unable to think its genesis from the substantial order, the ontological explosion, “Big Bang,” which gives rise to it.

More rehabilitation of Hegel. Then literature, movies, detective stories. . . and Wagner.

Žižek poses the question of what is different about the Jewish communal spirit and the Christian one? I must have missed his answer, for we are back to Hegel. Then on what makes Christ different from other wise men.

The next section begins with Pope Ratzinger's verbal assaults on Islam, secularism, and Darwinism. Then comes a curious defense of Islam, coupled with Judaism. Christianity as the monstrous exception that unifies the two abstractions. More Chesterton. Žižek sees an affinity between Catholicism and dialectical materialism (vs. the ontological incompleteness of the universe, viz. quantum mechanics, Badiou). More on Badiou and materialism . . . and of course Lacan. Passing remarks about the new atheists. Then ruminations about the relationship between monotheism and atheism, e.g.:

. . . what if the affinity between monotheism and atheism demonstrates not that atheism depends on monotheism, but that monotheism itself prefigures atheism within the field of religion—its God is from the very (Jewish) beginning a dead one, in clear contrast with the pagan gods who irradiate cosmic vitality. Insofar as the truly materialist axiom is the assertion of primordial multiplicity, the One which precedes this multiplicity can only be zero itself. No wonder, then, that only in Christianity—as the only truly logical monotheism—does God himself turn momentarily into an atheist.

More on materialism, Deleuze, Badiou, Lenin, Bukharin, Chalmers, Lacan . . . . Then:

What, then, is the proper atheist stance? Not a continuous desperate struggle against theism, of course—but not a simple indifference to belief either. That is to say: what if, in a kind of negation of negation, true atheism were to return to belief (faith?), asserting it without reference to God—only atheists can truly believe; the only true belief is belief without any support in the authority of some presupposed figure of the “big Other.”

Žižek is a clever boy. Interesting little observations here and there, but he adds up to nothing. And this intervention in theology is outstandingly worthless and devoid of integrity.

Atheism & the arts revisited

I've posted on this subject before. I just came across this little article:

Richard Norman on Whether Atheists Can Appreciate Religious Art
Nigel Warburton
November 27, 2006

Kierkegaard's twisted mind

This book has been added to my bibliographies on humor and philosophy and philosophical style:

Watson, Richard A. The Philosopher's Joke: Essays in Form and Content. Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1990. (Frontiers of Philosophy)

For content irrespective of humor, the most important essay is "The Seducer and the Seduced," about Kierkegaard. Original publication: The Georgia Review, 39 (1985): 353-366.

Neither the Bible nor Kierkegaard comes off well in this philosophical exercise. Expulsion from the Garden of Eve, Abraham's near-sacrifice of Isaac, the tribulations of Job, Christ's despair on the cross--from all this Watson's daughter scornfully infers God's unfairness. Kierkegaard, too smart in spite of his rebuffs to reason, is haunted by victimage perpetrated by the Fuckwit Creator of the Universe. Watson retells the saga of Kierkegaard's "Diary of the Seducer" in Either/Or, which Watson characterizes as "one of the greatest masturbation fantasies in Western literature." The friction between the aesthetic and the ethical is never allowed to climax, however. In real life, Kierkegaard breaks his engagement to Regine Olsen and flees to Berlin for a whirlwind of creative writing activity. To Kierkegaard, God demands an exclusive relationship and women only get in the way.  There is also a vulgar disdain for sex and for its uncontrolled nature, with precedents in Christian theology. God is also a Fuckwit with man's sex drive. And women are only carnal, nothing spiritual about them. Mary and Jesus are sanctified as virgins. Did Kierkegaard secretly crave to be raped by God? Can God say in his defense: "Yeah, he wanted it!" -- ?

Any account of Kierkegaard shows him to be a hateful sadomasochistic prick at heart and his religion cynical and nasty.

Feuerbach revisited

Some years ago I compiled an essential bibliography of works by and about Ludwig Feuerbach in English. Little of the material listed is (or was) readily available online. (Most likely Google Books did not exist or was not as extensively developed back then, so you might want to check there now.) I've just had occasion to check for more material online, albeit not in a systematic fashion. So let's begin with an overview of Feuerbach.

Feuerbach, Ludwig - Introduction (eNotes)

Unfortunately, much Feuerbach commentary derives from theologians. So to know one's enemy, here are a couple of examples:

Anthony J. Godzieba, "Feuerbach and the Interpretation of Religion"[review of Van Harvey]. Theological Studies. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_hb6404/is_n3_v58/ai_n28691700/

B. A. Gerrish, "Feuerbach’s Religious Illusion" [review of Van Harvey]. http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=77

I've also had occasion to take a look at Feuerbach's Lectures on the Essence of Religion, a copious volume only a little of which is available online. Here is a quote, though, not hitherto found online as of this writing:

"My doctrine or view can therefore be summed up in two words: nature and man. The being which in my thinking man presupposes, the being which is the cause or ground of man, to which he owes his origin and existence, is not God‑-a mystical, indeterminate, ambiguous word-‑but nature, a clear sensuous, unambiguous word and thing. And the being in whom nature becomes personal, conscious, and rational is man. To my mind, unconscious nature is the eternal, uncreated being, the first being-‑first, that is, in time but not in rank, physically but not morally; man with his consciousness is for me second in time, but in rank the first."

-- Ludwig Feuerbach, Lectures on the Essence of Religion, translated by Ralph Manheim (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), 3rd lecture, p. 21.

Next time I get to reading Feuerbach, I'm going to keep an eye out for what he says about the evolution of religion. The Young Hegelians took off from the liberalization of Protestantism, which may have skewed their notions, but the logic of what all of them have to say about the logic of religion and its relation to society is worthy of attention.