{"id":8085,"date":"2014-03-10T19:06:09","date_gmt":"2014-03-10T19:06:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2014\/03\/10\/deconstructing-god-gutting-interviews-caputo\/"},"modified":"2014-03-10T19:06:09","modified_gmt":"2014-03-10T19:06:09","slug":"deconstructing-god-gutting-interviews-caputo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2014\/03\/10\/deconstructing-god-gutting-interviews-caputo\/","title":{"rendered":"Deconstructing God: Gutting Interviews Caputo"},"content":{"rendered":"

Another<\/a> in the NYT Opiniator series.  This one is particularly bad and illustrates what is wrong with later Continental philosophy.  Earlier Continental philosophy is good: Brentano, Meinong, Husserl, early Heidegger, early Sartre, and a whole host of lesser lights including Stumpf, Twardowski, Ingarden, Scheler, von Hildebrand, Edith Stein, et al.  The later movement, however, peters out into bullshit with people like Derrida who, in the pungent words of  John Searle, "gives 'bullshit' a bad name."<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

This is the third in a series of interviews about religion that I am conducting for The Stone. The interviewee for this installment is <\/em>John D. Caputo, a professor of religion and humanities at Syracuse University and the author of \u201cThe Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion Without Religion.\u201d<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Gary Gutting<\/strong>: You approach religion through Jacques Derrida\u2019s notion of deconstruction, which involves questioning and undermining the sorts of sharp distinctions traditionally so important for philosophy. What, then, do you think of the distinction between theism, atheism and agnosticism?<\/span><\/p>\n

John Caputo<\/strong>: I would begin with a plea not to force deconstruction into one of these boxes. I consider these competing views as beliefs, creedal positions, that are inside our head by virtue of an accident of birth. There are the people who \u201cbelieve\u201d things from the religious traditions they\u2019ve inherited; there are the people who deny them (the atheism you get is pegged to the god under denial); and there are the people who say, \u201cWho could possibly know anything about all of that?\u201d To that I oppose an underlying form of life, not the beliefs inside our head but the desires inside our heart, an underlying faith, a desire beyond desire, a hope against hope, something which these inherited beliefs contain without being able to contain.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

One could be forgiven for stopping right here, though I read the whole thing.  First of all, it is simply false to maintain that one is a theist or an atheist or an agnostic "by virtue of an accident of birth."  Some are brought up theists and become atheists or agnostics.  Some are brought atheists and become theists or agnostics. And so one.  It is also wrong for Caputo to imply that those brought up theist or atheist can have no reasons for their theism or atheism.  Then there is the silly opposing of beliefs and desires, head and heart.  And the talk of a form of life as if it does not involve beliefs.  Then the empty rhetoric of desire beyond desire.  Finally, the gushing ends with the contradictory "contain without being able to contain."<\/span><\/p>\n

The interview doesn't get any better after this.  But there is an insight that one can pick out of the crap pile of mush and gush:  there is more to religion than doctrinal formulations: the reality to which they point cannot be captured in theological propositions.<\/span><\/p>\n

Retractio 3\/11<\/strong>.  Joshua H. writes,<\/span><\/p>\n

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As one of your loyal "continental"-trained readers, I must say I agree that Caputo's performance in the NYT <\/em>elicits a rather terrible odor of self-congratulatory BS. But surely "later" continental philosophy as a whole doesn't suffer from this unfortunate illness?! Gadamer, Frankfurt School, Ricoeur, among others? Surely Gadamer-Habermas and Habermas-Ratzinger are some of the most interesting debates the discipline has produced in the last 50+ years?<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

As someone who, back in the day, spent his philosophical time mainly on Gadamer and Habermas and Adorno and Horkheimer and Levinas and Ricoeur, et al., I must agree that Joshua issues a well-taken corrective to what I hastily wrote above at the end of a long day of scribbling.  The later movement cannot be dismissed the way I did above.  I would, however, maintain that the quality declined as the movement wore on and wears on.<\/span><\/p>\n

I will also hazard the observation, sure to anger many, that just as one becomes more conservative and less liberal with age, and rightly so, one becomes more analytic and less Continental, and rightly so.  It is the same with enthusiasm for Ayn Rand and Nietzsche.  Adolescents are thrilled, but as maturity sets in the thrill subsides, or ought to.<\/span><\/p>\n

I present some reasons for my aversion to much of the later Continental stuff<\/em> — an apt word — in The Trouble with Continental Philosophy: Badiou.<\/a> <\/span><\/p>\n

\nRelated articles<\/legend>\n
\n
\"\"<\/a>A Bad Reason for Thinking that Atheism is not a Religion<\/a><\/div>\n
\"\"<\/a>Russell's Leaky Teapot Revisited<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/fieldset>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Another in the NYT Opiniator series.  This one is particularly bad and illustrates what is wrong with later Continental philosophy.  Earlier Continental philosophy is good: Brentano, Meinong, Husserl, early Heidegger, early Sartre, and a whole host of lesser lights including Stumpf, Twardowski, Ingarden, Scheler, von Hildebrand, Edith Stein, et al.  The later movement, however, peters … Continue reading “Deconstructing God: Gutting Interviews Caputo”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[325,143],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8085","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-continental-philosophy-criticized","category-god"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8085","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8085"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8085\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8085"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8085"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8085"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}