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‘‘God,’’ Gods, God
- Fordham University Press
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‘‘God,’’ Gods, God A D R I A A N T . P E P E R Z A K The relation to an unalloyed transcendence can only be expressed in contemporary discourse as an erotics. . . . The attempt to establish God’s necessary existence can be seen as the coming to consciousness of the desire for a God who may be invoked in prayer but whose name resists explication. . . . Efforts to show what cannot be said in phenomenological terms . . . express both a fundamental category mistake and an ineradicable hope. Edith Wyschogrod1 Gedanken sind frei. Thoughts are free. Thinking is autonomous. Philosophers are free because they are able to receive, accept or refuse, distance, display, suspend, or focus on all that exists or has been thought. But philosophy is never first (except, perhaps, in a quite abstract sense of being first), because, before beginning to practice it, philosophers have already been educated, formed, accustomed to a particular language and culture, become part of an ongoing history, and set on a certain path. Primum vivere, deinde philosophari. Emerging from a life that already has solved the basic problems of its survival, philosophy comes late, as a reflective activity, a posteriori, re-turning—in memory—to decisive adventures , experiences, influences, authorities and traditions that grant it a certain style and content. However, philosophy does not only listen to the already-practiced lives of individuals, communities and cultures; it also questions and critiques them, including the thoughts that have emerged 82 from them. Indeed, all customs, experiments, thoughts, and lives need critical testing, but this again is influenced by inherited or amended methods and criteria that have been tried out in lives and philosophies of the past. Traditional histories of philosophy have emphasized the influences of former philosophers on later ones, but an insight into the complete situation from which a philosophy emerges demands a much wider scope: social psychology, sociology, psychoanalysis, and many kinds of cultural study are required for drawing a somewhat adequate, albeit still simpli- fied, picture of the many ties through which particular philosophers, trends, schools, and traditions are bound to the space and time in which they appear. No thinking exists without being marked by its past history and actual surrounding, even if the thinkers’ memories encompass only a small part of the filiations that scholarship can detect in their meditations. The initiation of newcomers to philosophy follows patterns that have become familiar as standards for continuation. In our time, these standards are for the most part typically modern, even if many teachers insist on renewal and originality. We can debate the extent to which a thinker is able and allowed to propose an entirely new or a very old sort of thinking , but if such thinking does not connect with any element of the memory that dominates the philosophical actuality, it hardly can be integrated into its ongoing history. Sometimes, however, an old thought, forgotten or deemed a fossil, is reanimated by thinkers who claim that it has been misunderstood or distorted before it was discarded. The multiplication of renaissances in Western history is an illustration of such revivals, but we must also recognize that each rebirth is at the same time a thorough transformation of the repressed or forgotten past. While studying the history of philosophy, one gets the impression that almost all renewals in philosophy had the structure of a revival produced by the cooperation of a refreshed memory with a (re-)creative imagination. Once a new stage has been set, the machinery of definitions and argumentation can play its game, but the style and climate, and even the content at stake, have changed dramatically. Are we today involved in the birth pangs of a new epoch of philosophy? If so, to what extent can we speak of a revival or renaissance of any stillpromising past? Depending on one’s preferences and perspective, the answers will differ widely. Some will contend that the birth of the modern sciences was a new start of Western or even of all human thought. Others, who instead are saddened by the exorbitant influence of scientific questions and patterns on philosophy, may complain or exult when they interpret our epoch as the radical secularization of a contemplative trend, Adriaan T. Peperzak 83 [3.235.243.45] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 15:00 GMT) which until recently had not lost its religious and theological interests. Yet more others might see all modern and postmodern attempts...