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This is KZSU Stanford.
Welcome to entitled opinions.
My name is Robert Harrison.
We're coming to you from the Stanford campus.
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That's right.
This is entitled opinions coming to you from the catacombs of KZSU,
where Alumis spent the, my guests and I
practiced the persecuted religion of thinking.
We're ready to think on just about anything that calls for thought on this show.
Today we're going to be thinking about God,
whatever, whomever, or why ever he or she or it is.
Have any of you heard the story of that little girl who asked her mother?
Is it true that God is present everywhere?
Her mother answered, "I think that's indecent."
In his preface to the gay science, Frederick Nietzsche called the mother's response,
"A hint for philosophers."
"Coding comrade Nietzsche,
one should have more respect for the bashfulness with which nature
has hidden behind riddles and iridescent uncertainties.
Perhaps truth is a woman who has her reasons for not letting us see her reasons.
Perhaps her name is, to speak Greek, Bao-Bao.
Bao-Bao, who is that?
Let's look that up in the Oxford Classical Dictionary, Bao-Bao.
A primitive and obscene female demon,
originally a personification of the female genitals.
Oh my!
We can't talk about Bao-Bao-Bao on KZSU, can we?
Stay tuned to show on God coming up.
[Music]
I'm joined in the studio today by a very distinguished guest to his visiting
Stanford from the East Coast. His name is Richard Carney and he holds
the Charles B. C. Legg chair of Philosophy at Boston College. He's the author of some 20 books on a wide array of subjects mostly
in the domain of continental philosophy and the editor and co-editor of several other books.
Yesterday I attended a lecture of his on the topic of what he calls anotheism.
That's the title of a book of his that came out in 2010 anotheism
returning to God after God. And that book deals with the new religious turn in contemporary continental thought and engages with figures like
Levi-Nas-Derrida and Riga. It asks the question how can we rethink God after the death of God beyond the poles of dogmatic
theism and atheism Richard Carney proposes a third option that he calls anotheism and today we'll try to find out just what that is. Richard welcome to the program.
Thank you. Can we start with the title of your book the main title of anotheism and if you could give our listeners just a sense of how they should be understanding that word?
Sure well in a way it's the simplest word in the world and it's the most difficult. Anna from the Greek means again a new after.
So the long and the short of it is that anotheism is something that comes and happens after God.
That is after you have one has let go of the old God what I call the God of sovereignty power might punishment, expiation.
And opened to the possibility of something else that some people might call the spiritual the sacred.
Something more than just ordinary every day happens times.
So that in the ordinary day happens times there still can be things that we say are sacred to us. The sacred place is sacred time is sacred person that's sacred to me.
And so what I want to propose in the book and with this idea is that after the death of God was Freud, Mark and Nietzsche, philosophical speaking, I'm with them after the enlightenment.
After we have got rid of the idols that come from our sense of fear and taboo, our need for consolation with the giant father, the superintendent of the universe.
Once we have let go of all that and have entered clearly and fully into our secular age, we can then ask the question, is there something that can come back?
Is there something after God that we can still legitimately call God? Given the fact that our secular atheistic West,
certainly academically speaking, where atheism is almost mandatory and for certain good reasons, what do we say to the other 95% of the world that does not necessarily follow the way of Freud, Mark and Nietzsche?
And something that I've said to me, well why keep theism even in anotheism? Why keep the resonance of theism? Why don't you just give rid of the word God altogether?
And I say well that's fine if you want to talk amongst ourselves to the 5% but there are 95% of the people in the world out there who still believe in something called God.
And do we simply want to dismiss them as sometimes Dawkins and Hitchens and the anti-God squad have done and said say well they're simply stupid, they're living in illusion?
Or do we want to be open to the possibility that there may be something still very legitimate and real and fundamental in the name God which comes under many different translations?
That God is a monotheistic God, I would take it in the tradition of the Judeo-Christian tradition that the thinkers that you engage with the most were either brought up on or nourished on or were apostates from.
And maybe we could talk a little bit about how the old God who presumably now has gone away and before he comes back and what guys before we talk about in what guys that God will come back, what is the God that had been buried as it were by Nietzsche, Freud or Marx and others?
Okay, well let me come to that. Before I do I just want to preface my response by saying that even though in the book and atheism and in my talk yesterday I focus mainly on the deconstruction of the monotheistic God, Freud, Marx and Nietzsche, that's our western God for the most part.
I see parallels in all the great wisdom traditions. I mean the Buddha comes to break our attachments and addictions to what, to notions of God, in order to open us up to a new sense of emptiness but emptiness is form and form as emptiness.
So I just note that now we can come back to it if you wish that in Hinduism, in Buddhism and all the great wisdom traditions there is the same movement of the double A of Anna, the first day which is the idea that leaving the goodbye to our addiction to God, the God of power and might have come back to it.
And then the second A, the second Hajuha is Addayum, the movement towards a different sense of the sacred which sometimes may be as post-theistic but it is a sense of the sacred.
I just mentioned that in terms of interrelated dialogue which is very important for me. It's not just debate within monotheism but you are correct to say the Freud, Marx and Nietzsche and the Enlightenment and most of contemporary western atheism is geared towards a critique and unmasking of an illusory father God, a God of power, a God of the Odyssey.
What you called yesterday the Alpha God, what I call the Alpha God and also the Omni-God, the God of omnipotence, omniscience and omnipresence, the God of the first cause for Aristotle, the Supreme Being in Plato and others.
So this notion of a God beyond the world, beyond life, beyond time, beyond the body came to prevail, mixing with the Judeo-Christian monotheism in our western world so that we ended up with the split.
God is out there, we're here and God is there to create us and guide us and determine our lives and ultimately punish our reward us.
So that notion of God which is called technically the God of the Odyssey, that everything is part of the will of God, you've heard people say this even today, oh so and so died, so and so was run over by a bus, and innocent child is tortured to take Dustyevsky's famous example, it's all part of the will of God.
We don't understand how or why, or is not to reason why, but it's all part of a secret providence. That notion of God to me died, if I may quote a little bit, on the Hangman's News in Auschwitz, because if there is such a God, why did that God not come to save the Jews in Auschwitz or the tortured child as Dustyevsky says.
So true faith, Dustyevsky then goes on to argue, comes out of the crucible of doubt. We must doubt in that God, we must get rid of that God in order then to be open to a God of industry,
and it's compassion. But there has to be the letting go of the old, the first day of abandonment and abstention in order to come back to the God, when might say of Advent, who is a God of service, not of sovereignty.
Now yesterday, I don't want to refer too often to a lecture that our listeners haven't heard, but you began discussing Leviness, very interesting idea of Leviness that it's actually this traditional alpha God, the creator of the universe, who through his act of creation, created a distance between himself and human beings,
and therefore created the conditions for his own overthrow or repudiation or his own death by separating himself from the created world, he opened up this gap, this space which then we can claim maybe that the enlightenment through Freud and Nietzsche have claimed as a space of independence from God.
Yeah, well, living as this idea, which I'd partly agree with partly disagree with, is that creation we should understand creation not actually in terms of an all mighty God who creates creatures for his own pleasure or displeasure.
But as basically as separation, creation is a story because all religions are stories that we tell ourselves in order to explain ourselves to ourselves and in order to explain God to ourselves.
We have nothing but stories and there have been a good tradition, it's pretty good about that. It's fundamentally anti-fundamentalist and that they would argue there are ten readings to every line in the Bible and they riff on it, you know, like jazz, they go into different stories and Rabbi this said this and Rabbi that's of that, and Christianity at its best is a series of stories, the lives of the saints, the lives of holy people and of course the Gospels themselves, there are four that could have been more, it's different stories, but back to your point.
So creation should be seen as a story of separation between two beings, the Self and the Stranger and the Stranger for loving us in Judaism is the widow, the orphan and the Stranger.
It is not an alpha God or a nominee God, it is the person who comes to us in radical nudity, weakness and says, "Feed me, do not kill me."
That's where the commandments begin. So in fact in Leviness and in this I'm very influenced by him, there is a radical overturning of the God of the Odyssey and Omnipotence and he of course went through the Holocaust, he lost most of his family in Dakao, he himself was in captivity under the Germans during the war and he had a real sense that God of power and might is gone and rightly so.
So the separation that he celebrates as opened up by the creation is simply that two is better than one and the phrase he uses in French is also a museum that God created the world in the story because it's better to have two people, I speech, language relation and what he calls hospitality a host that can receive a guest, the Stranger as guest, then to be alone talking to him.
Because the traditional metaphysical western notion of God that Freud Marx and Nietzsche got rid of was basically, I don't want to get too technical here, but it was the self thinking thought of Aristotle.
What is the divine, it's the being that has no need of another, it is purely self sufficient that then becomes the self causing cause of scholasticism, the self loving love of Augustine and so on. So it's a self regarding self referential, self sufficient God.
It's a self coincident, self coincidentality that is sufficient unto itself and in Dante's part of these on the very last canto, when he's speaking about the Trinity, it's the Trinity that smiles upon itself through its own self reflection.
Right, well we could get onto Trinity and Dante in a minute but I don't know whether you want to go on. I want to get back to the notion of how Levi-
Mass goes from the Creator God to a new ethical imperative of hospitality towards the widow, the Stranger and the Child.
Which is straight out of Isaiah and the Torah.
So one of the founding events of Judaism is what Levi- Mass calls the moment of after you and I like the after because that's also Anna, the Greek Anna, which we have in our words Anna-Godji, Anna-Fora, Anna-Mises, it's in English too, but it's this movement of after.
And I once asked Levi- Mass, "What is God for you?" If it's not a God up there in the skies and who is ruling over us all the emperor of the world, he said God is in the moment the gesture of after you saying the other person first, opening the door to the guest.
And I read that in terms of in the book and I mentioned this in the lecture yesterday too, the inaugural moment of Judaism and indeed you might say of the Abrahamic tradition is when Abraham,
and Sarah are in their tent and suddenly they look out, they're under the man-murtry and they see three strangers walking in from the desert.
And there's a choice. What do I do with these three strangers? They're covered in dust, they're dirty, they're threatening, they're foreign above all, they're strangers.
Do I go and kill them, which is what my God would tell me, I am a God of power and might, I will protect you, I will banish your enemies, or do I go and throw myself at their feet and welcome them into the tent.
So that hostility becomes hospitality. And the word in Latin, which is the one I use because it's most familiar to us is hostess, which traditionally means both enemy, hence our word hostility, but also hostess as guest.
So this ambiguity in the word which is found in all into European languages, Zenos and Greek guests, guests in Old German and Anglo Saxon plays on this fundamental moment that I see as the inaugural moment of all great religions in their ethical moment of transforming hostility in task brutality, given the fact that the person can go either way.
And in receiving the three strangers and giving them food in that moment of sharing of food, the enemy becomes God and the three become one.
And that to me is the sort of formative story of the Abrahamic religion going down through Christianity is lamb we could take time on that if you want.
Now, to ask the question from a philosophical point of view, I'm interested to know whether this ethics of hospitality is something that someone like living us or even the rabbinic tradition derives from the traditional concept of God, can it exist independently of any kind of theism, just as a self evident truth that human beings are
better off being hospitable towards each other than being hostile towards each other. Yeah, philosophically does God necessarily enter into the equation as a foundation or as something from which the ethical imperative derives?
Well, that's a very important question. And ultimately, you know, the bottom line is human solidarity, love and justice.
And if monotheism, religion, God gets in the way of that, and at theism, I say, I'm living as I'm sure would agree with me out.
Living as talks about the humanism is a little book called the humanism of the other person.
In other words, if we're going to talk about the greatness of the human and the glory of the human which he does, it should be the other person, not the self glorification of self.
So that's a point we could make about humanism. Humanism shouldn't actually be an open humanism and it shouldn't actually be in compatible with anotheism at all.
But why call it God? Why introduce God into it at all? Now, of course, in Hebrew Judaism and later in Latin, there are many names for God, Elohim, Yaveh, and many others, Abba, Kiryas, Christas,
we have many names. In Hinduism, there are 350 names. So we're talking about many names. Well, why use any of the names to talk about this moment where hostility becomes hospitality?
Because it is impossible to man.
All right, let me put it like that. This is a phrase that comes back again and again.
Sarah says, Abraham does the impossible. He turns enemies into guests.
And the divine happens then. It doesn't pre-exist that moment. God is born of what we call God, which is the impossible becoming possible, is born in that moment.
And in the story of Abraham and Sarah, this coincides with the three strangers who then review themselves to be God saying, you will have a child.
And she says, no, that's impossible. And they say, we will be back in a year and you will have a child.
And she does the child is Goss Isaac, which means laughter because what did she do? She laughs when they say it. You must be joking. God, you must be joking. I am sterile. I am barren. My husband is 560 years old. This is not going to happen.
So the transformation of hostility to hospitality is then translated or accompanied by it, translated into a company by this moment of the impossible.
But then Christianity begins with exactly the same thing. The Nazarene girl Mary says to the stranger walks in of the street and says you are going to be with child. No way. It is impossible.
And the stranger replies what is impossible to man or woman is possible to God. So what is our word for God? It is the impossible becoming possible. That happened. You take ordinary examples, let's move away from the great stories of the Bible and the Gospels. It happened in Northern Ireland.
When the head of the Protestant hate campaign, Ian Paisley shakes hands with the head of the IRA and they become Prime Minister and Deputy Minister of Northern Ireland. It happened with Gandhi. It happened with Mandela. It happens all the time in little moments where the impossible becomes possible. Can that happening of the impossible take place through human agency alone or is God the enabler or some kind of
Protestant hate campaign, Ian Paisley, shakes hands with the head of the IRA and they become
Prime Minister and Deputy Minister of Northern Ireland.
It happened with Gandhi.
It happened with Mandela.
It happens all the time in little moments where the impossible becomes possible.
Can that happening of the impossible take place through human agency alone or is God the
enabler or some concept of God or some faith in God on behalf of these actors or performers
of the impossible necessary for these highly improbable, if not impossible things to take
place in the human secular sphere?
Yeah, put it like this.
Anotheism is not about a theistic belief that God exists because then you're going to say
well what is God?
It's this kind of entity.
It's the first call.
You know, or that God doesn't exist because then you spend your time arguing positions
about something that we know nothing about.
Right, Socrates as you begin philosophy by acknowledging you know nothing.
Faith begins Dostiowski out of the crucible of doubt.
Keats put it even better the poor at Keats when he said, "A poetic faith is being in
a condition of what he called negative capability, mystery uncertainty and doubt without
the irritable reaching after fact and reason."
So there you are faced with an impossible situation.
How do we get peace from violence?
Northern Ireland, Rwanda, India, under Gandhi?
By having faith in the impossible.
So what is God?
God is a name for the event of the impossible that it can happen.
Good, okay.
And if we give a face and an agency and being to that of course because we're human beings
we have things called a very creative imagination and religion is imagination.
So Richard before we move on to the other thinker that you spoke with, which is Dehida.
Let me ask, you mentioned that he has two ideas.
The French word, "Adieu" is both a goodbye and you know, a welcome coming back.
The first "Adieu" you say is necessary, the leave taking of that traditional alpha God.
What is the second "Adieu" consistent?
Right.
Okay.
Well, the first is, as you say, just to repeat, letting go of the God of fear and taboo
and refuge and God is on our side and against the other, et cetera.
The God, the alpha God.
The second "Adieu" once that has gone and it doesn't have to be, by the way, a moment
of, "I've read Freud, Freud, Marx and Nietzsche.
I'm an intelligent guy, therefore I can't, of course, believe in the old God."
So now I'm a new secular humanist atheist, you know, student in Stanford or Boston College
or Oxford and Cambridge.
So I'm one of the privileged five percent that have seen through the illusions of the
common folk and big brother and I will now tell it to you as it is.
It's Dawkins.
Et cetera.
It can happen that first "Adieu" and I'm coming to the second can happen just by waking
up in the middle of the night and not knowing anything.
You know what the great kuzanas, the great doctor of the church, Christian church called
the Dr. Ignoransia.
Faith is the doctrine of ignorance.
We just don't know.
So it's that moment of not knowing anything and letting go of all your certainties, all your
predictions and your attachments to talk like the Buddhists and to open up a space, the space
of what keeps called negative capability.
So what's the second day?
The second day is as simple as being open to the advent of something radically new that
I could not have imagined, that I thought impossible.
Take AA and I sometimes play perhaps a little bit, fortuitously, on the double A of
Anna in Anatism and the double A of addiction and anonymous.
I first say addiction then alcoholism because alcoholism is alcohol is only one form
of the addiction.
The movement was founded by sort of ex-Irish American Catholics, so drink was their thing,
right?
It's not everybody's thing.
There are other forms of addiction and the Buddhists were very good at, very good on that.
And they do the questions called at idolatry, are idols.
So letting go of those idols and addictions.
And in the case of the AA movement, what's called the 12 Steps program, which now is very,
very developed and disseminated into all kinds of healing programs, begins with a very
important moment which is I am helpless, I am abandoned, I am helpless before my addiction,
my life is falling apart.
If you're not there, that first moment of adieu or abandonment, the second cannot come
and the second moment is I cannot cure myself, I ego, cogito, self-willing will cannot do
this, it is beyond my power.
So what do I do?
I hand myself over to a higher power.
All right, now that sounds very monotheistic, theistic, if you will, but the manual says
a higher power, however you define it simply means something bigger than you.
And that can be the stories of the other people because it's a very communal thing,
you listen to other people's stories and you say, they did the impossible, they gave up
their addiction, I can do it too.
That's what the higher power means.
It does not mean some big being with a beard up in a platonic heaven waiting to punish
a reward us when we die.
So it's actually a very simple thing.
It's that disposition of openness and of receptivity to something coming to us that will heal.
That disposition to openness is something that Daddy takes up in his discussion of the
messianic and you referred to him, I don't recall now, in which of his countless books
he deals precisely with this, where he wants to redefine what the messianic is, still defining
it as a disposition to openness as you called it if I understood you correctly and a waiting,
a kind of open waiting for something to happen, but he doesn't want there to be any actual
content to that expectation and therefore I was quite interested when you first laid out
his distinction between the messianic and the messianicity and so he wants to embrace
messianicity but not messianism.
Correct.
And that I was with you when you said that there's something for you that is unsatisfying
about leaving everything in the realm of the completely indeterminate without content because
there's no possibility if I understood you correctly from going from Daddy does messianicity
back to a re-sacralization of the everyday.
Did I get you right on that?
You did.
Let me sort of try and put it like this and it's complex but you put it well.
Messianicity is this sort of formal structural moment or position disposition of waiting,
constant waiting for something to arrive for the other to arrive.
But to fill it in by saying, "Well, I'm waiting for Shiva," or, "Jesus to return," or
a lie-jad to return, or the messiah to come, and to fill it in with a language and a
narrativity and a tradition and liturgies and readings is already to predetermine what's
coming and then you have your little booklet, your ID and you say, "Oh, well this is
not the messiah, this is not the messiah," the messiah is always something surprising and
unexpected that arrives.
This little story is, which it takes from Blancho, the beggarman at the gates of Rome, when
the messiah comes and he's been waiting where he goes up to him and he taps him on the
shoulder and he says, "Mr. Messiah, when will you come?"
And of course, that for Daddy Dad is the only thing you can say to the messiah because
the messiah is always to come.
And if we have our pre-identified identification kit, then we ask for passports and identity
papers and then we say, "Okay, you're the messiah you can come in, you're not, therefore
you can't come in."
So in one sense I admire in Derrida, how shall I put it, the generality and universality
of this position which is we should always remain open to what is coming.
And he can--
Or never confuse the messianic event with any actual event, exactly, right?
Then if we're going back to what you said earlier about God being, they're becoming possible
of the impossible, it sounds to me like Daddy Dad's messianicity is a state of openness that
can remain open only to the degree that the impossible cannot become possible because
he may have become possible then it is no longer messianic.
Well, you see, Derrida will admit that the impossible becomes possible.
You just say that once it becomes possible, it's gone and you're left with kind of traces,
but you shouldn't put a name on them and you shouldn't create a church and you shouldn't
develop a tradition of belief around that because you're then capturing it.
You're turning the messianic into a messianism.
Now at one level I understand Derrida, although we always said I rightly pass for an atheist,
is basically doing good Judaic anti-idolatory, never turn something into an idol.
The difficulty with this position is that it remains a very lonely position because there's
nobody to talk to when you witness the impossible becoming possible.
And I often think of him and he writes about this as being like Kierkegaard, you know,
with Abraham the night of faith, in fear and trembling on the top of Mount Mariah, I don't
know whether your listeners know Kierkegaard's fear and trembling story, but he describes
what it's like for Abraham to go up to the mountain and leave behind his old God, if
you will, and suddenly be faced with this terrible dilemma to I kill my son or not.
Now for Kierkegaard and Derrida, you're alone in that moment.
Kierkegaard, it's good old Lutheran, you know, I'm the single one, the night of faith.
No community is going to help me out here.
No stories, no narratives, no letter to his.
I'm alone with this voice of the absolute that comes to me and says to do something impossible,
kill your son.
Of course, it's a complex one because the impossible is actually receiving back your
son, not killing your son.
And the night of faith has faith to believe that Yave who says, do not kill your son,
that's the end of the old God, will Trump, Elohim, who has said, go and kill your son,
the old God, the Alpha God of child sacrifice, and you must expiate your sins and then I would
give you, you know, crops and rain and everything you want, but give me your son.
So there's a battle going on, but for Derrida and for Kierkegaard, that battle is a battle
with you on your own before the absolute.
And you don't know what the absolute's called.
You have no name, you have no narrative context, you have no community, you have nothing
but you and God.
There's a great heroism about that, but there's also a desperate solitude.
But doesn't it fail to take into account the first principle of AA, which is confessing the
radical impotence and helplessness of the self in that moment of abandon and solitude,
and then in need of help from the outside and the night of faith doesn't have that.
No.
It is not in an AA room with 10 people sitting around who have also travelled that road
from the impossible to the possible.
No, and that's precisely where I would critique Kierkegaard and Derrida.
I admire hugely their kind of solitary heroism, but if there isn't the movement to community
and in community, and after all going back to Abraham and the strangers, there are three
strangers and there are two hosts, Sarah and Abraham and a child about to come.
There is relation, what Levinas calls relation, and Levinas's critique of Kierkegaard was precisely
that his faith did away with the ethics of relation with others and became this one-to-one
relationship of the pure sovereign subject faced with ultimately sort of a pure sovereign
God.
There are two of us and nobody else.
You brought in some artworks in your lecture, visual, which we can't obviously show our listeners
because we're an audio medium, not visual, but also some poetry that puts into play the
the anotheistic moments in a different sort of language than the one, the discourse of language
that you and I are speaking now or that Levinas and Derrida and the other continental philosophers
who have recently in the past three or four decades turned their attention again to the
question of God, which was taboo up until Levinas actually opened up the discourse with his
book, the intelligence and infinity.
Can you share with us some of these poems that you use as not illustrations, but as moments,
epiphyphonic moments of anotheism will be delighted to do so.
Because I mean either two as you've just remarked, we've been talking about philosophy
deals with this and kind of theology going to build the text, the tour and the gospels.
So what I like to do a lot is to go to poets and painters and artists because I do believe
that faith is a matter of anotheistic faith at any rate is a matter of religious imagination.
So the poets and the painters get it much better than the scribes of the gospels and
the the the the Torah.
And so I look again and again to if I want to understand what's going on in in Abraham
meeting the strangers, I'll go to Shagal or I'll go to the poets who've talked about that
and did it with the enunciation.
And I'll come back to the enunciation in a moment and some paintings and poems around it,
but just as a way into that, Jerkmani Hopkins is a poet I often like to take.
He was a religious poet.
Who knew huge massive depressions, clinical depressions, almost suicidal depressions.
And he wrote a lot of poetry about this, we call the dark sonnets, when he was sort of
exiled in Dublin, he wrote a series called the dark sonnets and one of these, just to give
one example called Carrie in Comfort.
And it is about the self in condition of total abandonment and he writes, "I wake and
feel the fell of dark not day."
So this is the first idea of waking in the middle of the night and feeling the fell of
dark, the skin, the fur of dark not day.
And he says he goes on to say, "The mind has mountains, sheer, frightful, no man
fathom'd, hold them cheap may, those who never hung there."
And this point is, and I agree with him, it's who has not hung there.
Every body has had that moment of atheism, where you feel abandoned by meaning, by grace,
by life.
And for him that was expressed, he was a Jesuit priest in terms of radical abandonment.
And then after that, his second moment, which he writes about as aftering, is the poetic
moment where he returns to the world and finds in the world a sacredness in everything.
Is that his word aftering?
That's his word aftering, and I like it because Anna means aftering.
That's aftering that you come back after, and then you take the experiences and you
poetically revisit them.
I mean, words were talked about poetry as emotion recollected in tranquility.
It's a similar kind of process.
But he says that in that poetic moment of coming back to your experiences, you revisit
them and recover a sense of the sacredness in everyday ordinary discarded, ridiculous,
inconsequential things.
What he calls speckled, dappled things.
So there's a huge openness, not just to the human.
Let me ask the remains of the human.
But the poet's also taken on nature.
He sees this in birds, in trees, in stones, and in human bodies and beings.
And he has this one poem called "Nature is a Herricating Fire."
And in it, he describes the patch, pots heard, "Patwood Immortal Diamond" is a mortal
diamond.
That in the most ordinary, you know, Joker, Jack, patchwood, pots heard, there is the divine.
Or again, this time a bit more Christo-centric, he says, "Christ plays in ten thousand
faces, lovely and eyes and lovely in limbs, not his, to the father through the features
of men's faces."
And that's an extraordinary poem for me, as we can revolution it, because what he's
saying is, "The divine is in the particular singular limbs and eyes of human beings, lovely,
in eyes, lovely in limbs, not his.
God is not some kind of great invader, you know, hiding behind the scenes is going to
come in and say, 'I'm occupying this being now.'
You know, the devil was there before now, I've taken over.'
It's that in the radical strangeness and singularity of each person, and thing, there is
the divine.
What he called Hechaitas, 'thisness.'
That it seems is very important and consistent with the Christian message of Matthew 25,
where Christ says, 'You were looking for some kind of alpha-god, you know, and you didn't
recognize that I was the stranger in the street.
The word 'Hospaces' repeated five times in Matthew 25, 'Who asked for food and water?'
And when you gave it, you gave it to me.
And that's what Hopkins is saying, that it is the multiplication of the divine into any
stranger that you may encounter in the street or in your neighbor or in your loved ones.
Maybe even in yourself, it is the stranger.
And when asked to put that certainly, but otherwise we're back to Nietzsche's little anecdote
about the little girl saying, 'Is it true that God is everywhere?'
And the mother saying, 'I think that's indecent.'
Well, you know, it is indecent.
It is indecent to think that God will put it like this is potentially everywhere.
Because a Benjamin says every moment is important to which the Messiah may enter.
But you may not open the door.
So it's indecent to think that God is everywhere irrespective of whether you open the door.
It's not indecent.
But maybe it's indecent in another way to say that God can come through, is the stranger
who may enter any door.
But most of the time, God doesn't come because we don't open those doors.
Well, the interesting thing is that Nietzsche actually goes on in the next paragraph, which
concludes that preface to say those Greeks, their wisdom was that they courageously stopped
at the surface of things.
Adored forms, tones, words, colors, everything that you are calling the ordinary and the
everyday.
That Hopkins is finding a thousand faces for.
And not this looking in the deep way probing into the hidden mysteries and secrets.
That's where the more traditional God has always tended to locate himself in the Bible.
God is in the skin.
There is nothing as profound as the skin, as Pauline says.
And that's what the poets remind us.
God is on the surface.
There is nothing behind the surface.
That's to deny life.
But the surface is the deepest thing, just as the Buddha say emptiness is the fullest thing.
So speaking of the skin, Richard, you are also working on a book that you talked about
that you call carnal hermeneutics, where you want to recover the time-audiality of this above
all the sense of touch.
And so skin being that epidermis at which we are touched by the world at all moments in
our lives.
And is this skin of the world you're referring to related to this topic of yours about carnal
hermeneutics and how are being in our bodies is where we begin to cultivate the disposition
of openness that you were talking about earlier?
Yeah, it is.
And let me sort of try and connect the two, the book, "Karnal Hermutex," which is actually
called flesh in its simple mode and anotheism.
Aristotle, in book two of the day anima, said, look, the physiologist, the materialists,
the mechanists, and even the plateanists, all say that touch and taste, the most carnal
of our senses, are basically animal senses.
They lead to bestiality and lasciviousness and immorality.
But I say, I Aristotle say, that actually touch and taste are the most discriminating
of the senses.
So that knowledge Sapiencia comes from separate to taste.
And so I word "savoure" and "saver."
It's a question of "savi."
When you say that somebody is savvy, they have a kind of a tactile wisdom.
Or when you say somebody has tact, what are the stars that in every moment of contact,
there is tact.
So not to get too technical, but he says, "Flesh, socks," is not an organ but a medium
that already are flesh through taste and touch, the despised senses are actually mediating
sense.
They are signifying.
They are making sense.
And in our exposure to the world, because we are always exposed through touch to the
world, even Aristotle says, when we dream, our skin is still naked.
We are receiving air and warmth and gold and whatnot.
We are responding to the world.
So he said, in fact, he reverses the old hierarchy, the old metaphysical hierarchy, which
may I say prevailed right up through day cart and count, always touch and taste
really despised until we get to contemporary phenomenology.
But that's another day's work.
And the work goes on.
So what interests me if you take that is that we have in a sense in our Western civilization
lost touch with ourselves.
And even in the age of the virtual and the digital where it would seem, we live in an
age of materialism, it is actually a radically immaterial age.
We seem with our touch screen to be touching everything, but we're actually out of touch
with everything.
There's a vicariousness and even a certain voyeurism where we see everything on the screen.
The screen becomes our world and the world is our screen, not an oyster anymore that you
taste and touch, but it's green.
But something then is arguably lost, a huge amount is gained, but something is lost in not
having touched sometimes in pedagogy, in sex, in so much of sex, pornography is the second
biggest industry in the United States.
It goes with a certain puritanism, in fact, is the other side of puritanism.
And what's lost in all that is touch.
So one could say a lot about that.
And that's something that interests me in terms of our contemporary world, which I
say is increasingly becoming a world of ex-carination.
Are there any other champions of touch, of the haptic, after Aristotle?
Well, a Merlot Ponti brings a bank.
European phenomenology, who has settled, went to a technical idea too, and then this
picked up by Merlot Ponti and some others.
And even Chompal sat, I think, he has a whole thing about the caress.
He does.
He's where the body is redeemed in being a nothingness.
Well, it is, but it's a funny thing, because in the caress he says we swoon, our consciousness,
our freedom is clogged, and we swoon into this moment of velocity.
But also the caress gives me, I need the caress of the other in order to feel my actual
embodiment, or my body, it takes some sort of phenomenological density from the caress.
Correct.
He says that we incarnate ourselves, right?
We are touched by the other in the caress, to discover our own embodiment.
But our main purpose in discovering our embodiment is not to remain a body, because then
Loragal de Lóde, the look of the other, captivates us, controls us and possesses us.
So what we got to do is caress in a way that we are caressed and therefore embodied, but
in being embodied, we seduce the other to enter into their bodies, and to incarnate
so we can then capture them.
So it's actually, he's still a Cartesian.
Correct.
It's still a consciousness that uses the body to be touched and touched in order to catch
the other in a kind of a master's slave game of Hegelian power.
Do you think a gaze is a form of touching, or can it be?
It can be.
But you know Plato said the greatest temptation is the guy just ring.
You put on this magic ring and you can see people, but you cannot be seen.
That's the tyrant.
And there is a temptation in sight to see the other and not be touched by the sight of
the other.
We all know when we say, "That's a very touching scene that we can be touched, not just
metaphorically and emotionally, but our skins," even telehabitically can be.
But there is no way in which, because touch, as Aristotle says, is in every sense.
It's in taste, hearing, but there is no replacement for touch as touch to bring us back
into touch with ourselves and our bodies.
And coming back briefly to Anatyism, I would simply say that as John Manis, I guess
says in the book, "Charnel Hermules," Christ came to us to do two things to touch and
to taste.
And all of the great moments of breakthrough in his life, from the marriage feast of
Kana, wine, to the last supper, to the breaking of bread at a mouset, to the feeding of
fish.
It's always through eating and tasting.
And in the case of Thomas touching him, the woman touching his ham and being cured, the
Phoenician woman looking for the crumbs from the table.
It's touch and taste, the pudding of mud and spittle on the blind man's eye.
It's not talk.
He doesn't write anything down.
Even when he's saving the adulterous woman, we don't know what he wrote.
He touches the earth.
He says, "The Buddha, when he's asked by Mara, by what authority do you talk about suffering?
And do you claim to be enlightened?
What does he do?"
He says, "Nothing.
He touches the earth."
And the laying on of hands.
The laying on of hands.
A good bedside manner.
I mean, what's happened in medicine?
One of the terrible things that's happened in medicine, with insurance and so on, there's
no touch.
There's no bedside manner.
There's no laying of the hand on the hand.
Yeah, we've done a couple of shows about this on this program before with doctors and
the virtualization of the patient.
The reality of the patient is on the computer, what the x-rays are revealing on the
computer screen or what the data is showing, not the actual person in the bed or in the
office.
Exactly.
So, here I'm quite interested in the, a certain kind of philosophical history of the
senses, because what you were referring to with the computer screen is the absolute
privacy that vision has had in the Western.
Correct.
From the beginning.
From Plato on, through the Christian tradition, all the way through Husserl to a certain
extent.
Some people have argued, I believe persuasively, that the philosopher who has overturned
the primacy of vision is Heidegger in being in time where now it's the hearing is the
most intense way of connection to being, as it were, one's own being that you hear, you
heed the call of conscience, you hear.
In other words, the hearing takes place in time because vision has served as the paradigm
for this kind of alpha primordial God because you see things almost atemporally and you
see the hold and one and this is served.
When you relate to the derived through the hearing, it's already more temporal, it's distant
and it echoes.
I think it's interesting that you're taking it into the other two senses, which I've never,
I know that metal upon D and the flesh is there, but I think there's, I'm looking forward
in other words to this next meditation of yours on the touch and taste.
When Heidegger takes it a step further, you're right, Heidegger and leaven us both say hearing
should be seen as prior and more fundamental to sight for the very reasons you've outlined
and to overcome that platonic Cartesian prejudice, because sight is to dominate to master,
to control and our cyber culture very much feeds into that.
Not that our cyber culture can't be brought back to the tactile, that's a real challenge
and to the haptic.
Yes, I would go further than Heidegger and say, yes, it's good to go from sight to hearing
and it's good to go from hearing to smell and then from smell to taste, but ultimately
we've got to get back to touch.
Because that is the most, as Aristotle says, the most universal of all the senses that
traverses all the senses and brings us back into touch with ourselves, with others and
with the world.
So Richard, one last thinker that you did talk about yesterday is Paul Rekure and by the
way, these are thinkers, David, leaven us and Paul Rekure, you haven't merely read,
but you know them personally and they served on your doctoral committee in France and you
have a congenital, genetic relationship to these thinkers.
So leaven us, wrang me the night before the exam, my doctoral thesis, give me the questions.
Very nice.
That was very ethical of my fellow.
I was a bit of a stranger from Ireland, you know.
But I gather that Paul Rekure's parts of his corpus are important for your thinking on
these issues.
Is that correct?
That is correct.
Yeah, well, on the question of anotheism, he talked about which did influence me a first
naivety that we enter into the world with a sense of wonder and attachment and connection.
And then we go through a disenchantment, what is very very important, and so on.
You know, this happened in our secular humanist world too, with the industrial revolution
and the advances of science and so on.
But in our ordinary lives, not our macro historical lives but our individual lives, we also
go through a first naivety as children and then we go through a certain disillusionment,
a certain loss of that initial faith and connection.
And then he talks about the possibility of a third joy that may come back, a second naivety,
after and through the moment of critical detachment and suspicion.
And she sees as necessary.
And I think that that's true not just of our people in our Western world, you know,
we're questioning and suspicion and cynicism and whatever disillusionment and depression
are prevalent.
I think in any society you will have this.
The moment of going into the dark and then coming back from the dark, I mean the sweat
lodges in the natives from American.
It's just you go back, you die.
The point of your initiation is you leave the outer world, you go back into the dark and
you die into yourself and then you come back again.
And there is something there at an existential level that resonates from me in terms of the
anotheism, the God after God is a second naivety.
Right.
That's great.
You also are involved in other projects that are not academic but are trying to work out
the laws of hospitality in real life's political situations among all.
Can you share with our listeners the project in particular on the hospitality that you're
working on?
Yeah, taking the team of hospitality, what I've been doing is with this guest book project
is inviting young people in divided communities.
So we worked with Dairy London, Dairy Northern Ireland, we worked with Jerusalem, we
worked with Mitrovitch and the Balkans, D'Occo, between Japan and Korea and so on.
Different divided communities divided societies and we invite the young people to, at
a time pairs to tell their own story and to tell it, you know, to get down and dirty.
I hate, you know, the Protestant who threw me out of the city of Dairy when the walls
were founded 300 years ago and cast me into the bogside.
And then the Protestant would say, well, I hate the Catholic who challenges my good Protestant
in a light and sense of civic rights with their papers and their begrudgery and their
superstition.
And they tell their story that has divided them for centuries, transgenerationally.
And then in part two, having done that in a kind of back and forth, one to one to camera
narratives, testimonies, they then create a new story together.
So as the idea, you begin with hostility, these are all short five-minute documentaries.
And then there's an award for the best story in these two parts.
Hostility and the hospitality is simply listening to the story of the other and saying,
how can we co-create something new?
So in Dairy, it's the founding of the walls of Dairy 400 years ago that divide, cause
the division, what can we do today in terms of creating with comic strip animation, with
video work, with poetry and image, some story where we can bring together our adversarial
narratives and create something new.
And it's amazing some of the stuff that comes up.
So in the winners, we fly to Boston and we bring them together and we give them an award.
We hope to go here and on that.
That's fascinating stuff and it brings me back to hearing, which is a sense which I would
like to say that before you can get to the point of hospitality where touch becomes possible
among adversaries, which would be maybe a moment of impossibility becoming possible,
I think the necessary portal to that is listening to one another.
I'm just repeating your words there, they listen to the other person's story.
And this education is--
And it's touched by the story.
And our touch, yeah.
But it's through the listening and learning to listen.
Listening is not just the sense of hearing, it's something about learning how to listen.
And I think that anyone who's been listening to our show today has gotten a taste and
been touched by what it means to listen to thinking taking place in real time.
So, well, it's all about matter.
It's all a matter of taste and touch in the end with a little bit of savvy.
Well, we'll take that home and savor it.
So we've been speaking with Professor Richard Carney from Boston College who is passing
through Stanford gave a lecture here.
Interesting, I'm glad we get you into the studio for this conversation, Richard.
I hope next time you come through Stanford, you'll let us know and we'll continue this
conversation.
I'm Robert Harrison for entitled opinions.
Thanks for listening.
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I'm ready to go, she's eating mine.
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