This panel probes philosophical and literary responses to secularity and post-secularity, with attention to Weber, Wittgenstein, Murdoch, and Dussel. Panelists consider how these figures have turned to poetry, mysticism, and post-secular theology to disrupt disciplinary boundaries and narratives of disenchantment.
Central to Iris Murdoch’s moral-aesthetic philosophy is her conception of prayer, which she derives largely from Simone Weil’s theory of attention, and from Plato’s Eros. In both philosophers she finds a model for moral perfectionism as the turning away from fantasy towards reality and the good. She locates among the most seductive of fantasies the unified image of a personal God, and thus, I argue, seeks to theorize a “demythologized” form of prayer without God, or a practical mysticism of the Good. This position hews close to Weil’s mystical “attention,” but Murdoch trades Weil’s God for Plato’s Good, and diverges from both thinkers in placing greater emphasis on the imaginative practice afforded by art, especially the reading of tragic literature. This paper considers how her practical mysticism poses a modest resolution to “the old quarrel between philosophy and poetry” initiated by Plato, who professed a grave mistrust of literature.
Since the 1980’s, Enrique Dussel has been regarded as the most important scholar in the fields of philosophy and theology in Latin America. An early contributor to liberation theology, a pioneering leader in the concurrent field of liberation philosophy, all the while being a highly respected historian of the Catholic Church in his own right, Dussel’s work spanned fields, geographies, and world history in an effort to dismantle the Eurocentric and colonialist pretensions of modernity. In this short reflection, I will argue that one of the most significant legacies of Dussel’s work is the urgency to rethink disciplinary divides with an eye towards epistemic decolonization. The relation between history and philosophy and the relation between history and theology are good examples of this interdisciplinarity.
The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein asserted that ethics is not finally a matter for philosophy. For him, the ultimately good or ultimately meaningful cannot be captured by reason. Wittgenstein thus gives us a different route for answering Kant’s famous questions: “What should I do?” and “What can I hope for?” If Wittgenstein’s skepticism about ethical philosophy is correct, we do not need a theory to act or hope. Rather, theories serve to procrastinate action and obscure hope. Wittgenstein’s deflationary approach to philosophy teaches us to abandon the hope for a theory of hope. I will argue that this is not a counsel of despair. Rather, Wittgenstein frees us for authentic hope: hope not underwritten by a philosophical or theological system, but simply ordinary hope for this or for that, hope that relies on nothing but itself. It is this hope, hope freed from philosophical theory building, that liberates us to act.
This paper foregrounds the theme of maturity as the way of life of human freedom in Weber’s political thought. It does so to explore how Weber’s ethic of responsibility bears the trace of the religious that it disavows. This trace, the paper suggests, can be seen in the influence that the exemplary lives of certain religious virtuosi exert upon Weber’s ethic of responsibility, lives which capture his hopeful imagination, spur his desire, and thus motivate his call for a politics of limits. Making this claim, however, entails setting aside an intellectualist understanding of religion premised on belief in favour of understanding religion as a desire-driven practice. Shifting to such a register brings into relief how Weber’s notion of maturity as the exercise of human freedom remains tied to the religious virtuosi even when Weber insists that religious belief has become incredible.