ID :
165994
Sat, 03/05/2011 - 13:29
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Shortlink :
https://oananews.org//node/165994
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Working within pre-given framework constrains one’s authority: expert
TEHRAN, March 5 (MNA) - Clayton Crockett, a professor of religious studies at the University of Central Arkansas, tells the Mehr News Agency that “people become authorities based upon their expertise, and the impact and influence” that they exercise.
However, Crockett says “working within a pre-given or pre-determined framework blunts one's impact and constrains authority.”
Following is the text of the interview :
Q: What is your definition of authentic thinking? Why do we need to have authentic thinking in our time?
A: "Authentic thinking," the phrase makes me think of Martin Heidegger, the German philosopher who contrasted a deep and profound meditative thinking with a calculative technical thinking that is purely instrumental. Heidegger is nostalgic in many ways, but his philosophy of technology points to something deeply important, which is the extent to which our thinking is overwhelmed today by practical and ideological demands. It is almost impossible to extract our ideas and our thoughts from the pervasive and devastating need to make money in corporate capitalist terms. Money becomes a value that determines all other values. The British philosopher of religion Phillip Goodchild claims that money replaces God as an absolute value in the modern world, and the sovereignty of money ultimately trumps all other forces. For me authentic thinking is also visionary and imaginative thinking, not in terms of flights of fancy, but the ability to question and think otherwise than the ways in which we have been trained and indoctrinated, no matter what culture or tradition. Positivism means a strict separation of meaning or value – ethics -from facts or information, being or what is the case. In the United States, we have an incredible split between the sciences, whose research has become more narrowly focused and hyper-specialized, and the humanities, which are supposed to think but often become entangled in and distracted by ideological debates. So we need serious, sustained and authentic thinking about urgent and important problems in ways that do not cut off either the resources of literary and poetic imagination, or the realities generated by scientific and technological developments. Finally, authentic thinking is not impotent and divorced from action, but itself is a vital activity. The capacity for authentic thinking distinguishes us as human beings, even if we rarely excercise it.
We need authentic thinking today more than ever for at least two reasons. The first is because the processes of information and communication are so fast that they prevent serious reflection. When you are bombarded by stimuli you only have time to react. Neurologists have shown how superficial are the neural connections that are made by people using only electronic media. Attention spans shorten, and links are more ready-made, pre-given. Reading, thinking, time for sustained reflection shrinks. At the same time, and secondly, we face an incredible challenge to human civilization that demands such authentic thinking. The current predominant model of neo-liberal democratic corporate capitalism is premised on indefinite if not infinite growth, and we are running up against real limits to growth, in terms of fossil fuel extraction, global atmospheric absorption of carbon emissions, and environmental, natural and human resources around the globe.
Global oil production peaked in 2006, and the global recession was touched off by oil prices that reached $150 per barrel. When you cannot grow in absolute terms, the only growth possible is relative growth, and we have seen an incredible polarization of wealth in which the richest people and corporations have arrogated to themselves more and more of the planet's financial resources. We are confronting scarcity of resources, chaotic climate change, and a coarsening of political and human discourse amid a desperate struggle for the resources that remain. Human beings are hard-wired to discount the future, but we have to think in terms of the future if we want to have one. Authentic thinking is necessary for this, more than ever before.
Q: There are some thinkers in every discipline who have some specific authority. For example Plato and Aristotle have this position in philosophy, and Weber and Durkheim in sociology. In your opinion, what characteristics have created such a position for those thinkers? What is the justified relation with them? Do you accept this view that we do not have unique thinkers in the 21st century?
A: The question of authority is very complex. Many authoritative thinkers such as the ones you mentioned are seen as authorities because they originated problems and areas of inquiry, such as philosophy for Plato and Aristotle, or sociology for Durkheim and Weber. People become authorities based upon their expertise, and the impact and influence that they have. At the same time, working within a pre-given or pre-determined framework blunts one's impact and constrains authority.
I think of it in terms of Thomas Kuhn's book - The Structure of Scientific Revolutions -. For Kuhn, normal science develops within accepted frameworks, and people who master that science become authorities or experts, but they are not recognized as authorities in the far-reaching sense your question invokes. But revolutionary science occurs when people fashion new paradigms, and the people who give us new paradigms attain the status your question implies. The main example in twentieth-century physics, of course, is Einstein.
So to answer your question, I think we definitely have experts, authorities who are leaders in their respective domains, and we also have creative thinkers who are searching to comprehend and articulate new paradigms. But we cannot foresee whether and to what extent such transformative thinkers exist who will later be looked back upon as authorities in the same way that we view Einstein, Plato and Durkheim today. Often this only becomes possible in hindsight. I think the creation of an authoritative thinker involves at least three things: it takes a mastery of a discipline or way of thinking, an extraordinary vision or the imagination to see things differently, and finally, a certain amount of luck or fortune insofar as that discipline or area of inquiry ends up being incredibly important.
Q: Please explain about your new book “Radical Political Theology: Religion and Politics After Liberalism”?
A: This book analyzes contemporary theoretical discussions of religion and politics from a Continental philosophical perspective, and argues for a non-confessional theological viewpoint that is not conservative in a political sense or orthodox in a religious sense. In both epistemological and cultural terms, a strict opposition between religious and secular has broken down, which means that we cannot maintain a strong distinction between political philosophy and political theology. Furthermore, this breakdown is tied to the breakdown of classical modern liberalism, which has important political, religious and philosophical implications. By constructively engaging themes of sovereignty, democracy, potentiality, law and event from a religious and political point of view, Radical Political Theology articulates a theological vision that is responsive to our contemporary world and its theo-political effects. This book directly engages with a number of significant theorists, including Spinoza, Carl Schmitt, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Antonio Negri, Giorgio Agamben, Slavoj Zizek, Catherine Malabou, Alain Badiou, John D. Caputo and Catherine Keller. Radical Political Theology claims that we should think about God and the state more in terms of potentiality than sovereign power. It deploys new concepts, including Zizek’s idea of parallax and Malabou’s notion of plasticity, to intervene in current discussions about the nature and status of religion, ideology and messianism. Finally, the book suggests reasons to reconsider what democracy means as a form of political thought and religious practice insofar as it is not tied to modern liberal capitalist democracy.
Q: There are different methods for writing papers. Phenomenological, hermeneutical, constructivist, deconstructivist, or thematizatic are some of these methods. What is your method and why do you use it?
A: My method is probably more deconstructive than any other defined method, although I do not entirely accept that word, method. I am thinking of Hans-George Gadamer's famous book Truth and Method, where method is opposed to truth. I do not agree completely with Gadamer, because the opposition between method and truth can be demonstrated to deconstruct, but as Derrida says, deconstruction is what happens, it is an event, not so much a method. Attention to and reflection on methodology is important, but not at the expense of something like truth. Furthermore, I do not accept the idea that postmodernism means that we no longer have any truth. Postmodernism is partly a North American phenomenon, an American interpretation of contemporary French philosophy, but it is also a distortion. Postmodernism is in many ways a resignation to contemporary culture and capitalism, although that has
been contested in the first decade of the twentieth century with the return of the political in theory, in the work of Badiou, Zizek, Negri and others.
My method is way of thinking and writing informed by Continental philosophy, but it is oriented towards truth. That is, my work seeks to make theoretical connections that are important rather than remain within narrow scholastic boundaries. I try not to give in to the hyper-specialization that dominates the academy. The alternative, however, is not to become a generalist, but to take this specialized and focused theoretical and epistemological thinking and use to reflect on broader phenomena that are less apparently related to my field of philosophy of religion, such as energy resources and thermodynamics.
(Clayton Crockett is associate professor and director of Religious Studies in Department of Philosophy and Religion at University of Central Arkansas. He is the author of three books, most recently Radical Political Theology: Religion and Politics After Liberalism (Columbia University Press, 2011). He is currently working on a book comparing two French philosophers, Gilles Deleuze and Alain Badiou.)
However, Crockett says “working within a pre-given or pre-determined framework blunts one's impact and constrains authority.”
Following is the text of the interview :
Q: What is your definition of authentic thinking? Why do we need to have authentic thinking in our time?
A: "Authentic thinking," the phrase makes me think of Martin Heidegger, the German philosopher who contrasted a deep and profound meditative thinking with a calculative technical thinking that is purely instrumental. Heidegger is nostalgic in many ways, but his philosophy of technology points to something deeply important, which is the extent to which our thinking is overwhelmed today by practical and ideological demands. It is almost impossible to extract our ideas and our thoughts from the pervasive and devastating need to make money in corporate capitalist terms. Money becomes a value that determines all other values. The British philosopher of religion Phillip Goodchild claims that money replaces God as an absolute value in the modern world, and the sovereignty of money ultimately trumps all other forces. For me authentic thinking is also visionary and imaginative thinking, not in terms of flights of fancy, but the ability to question and think otherwise than the ways in which we have been trained and indoctrinated, no matter what culture or tradition. Positivism means a strict separation of meaning or value – ethics -from facts or information, being or what is the case. In the United States, we have an incredible split between the sciences, whose research has become more narrowly focused and hyper-specialized, and the humanities, which are supposed to think but often become entangled in and distracted by ideological debates. So we need serious, sustained and authentic thinking about urgent and important problems in ways that do not cut off either the resources of literary and poetic imagination, or the realities generated by scientific and technological developments. Finally, authentic thinking is not impotent and divorced from action, but itself is a vital activity. The capacity for authentic thinking distinguishes us as human beings, even if we rarely excercise it.
We need authentic thinking today more than ever for at least two reasons. The first is because the processes of information and communication are so fast that they prevent serious reflection. When you are bombarded by stimuli you only have time to react. Neurologists have shown how superficial are the neural connections that are made by people using only electronic media. Attention spans shorten, and links are more ready-made, pre-given. Reading, thinking, time for sustained reflection shrinks. At the same time, and secondly, we face an incredible challenge to human civilization that demands such authentic thinking. The current predominant model of neo-liberal democratic corporate capitalism is premised on indefinite if not infinite growth, and we are running up against real limits to growth, in terms of fossil fuel extraction, global atmospheric absorption of carbon emissions, and environmental, natural and human resources around the globe.
Global oil production peaked in 2006, and the global recession was touched off by oil prices that reached $150 per barrel. When you cannot grow in absolute terms, the only growth possible is relative growth, and we have seen an incredible polarization of wealth in which the richest people and corporations have arrogated to themselves more and more of the planet's financial resources. We are confronting scarcity of resources, chaotic climate change, and a coarsening of political and human discourse amid a desperate struggle for the resources that remain. Human beings are hard-wired to discount the future, but we have to think in terms of the future if we want to have one. Authentic thinking is necessary for this, more than ever before.
Q: There are some thinkers in every discipline who have some specific authority. For example Plato and Aristotle have this position in philosophy, and Weber and Durkheim in sociology. In your opinion, what characteristics have created such a position for those thinkers? What is the justified relation with them? Do you accept this view that we do not have unique thinkers in the 21st century?
A: The question of authority is very complex. Many authoritative thinkers such as the ones you mentioned are seen as authorities because they originated problems and areas of inquiry, such as philosophy for Plato and Aristotle, or sociology for Durkheim and Weber. People become authorities based upon their expertise, and the impact and influence that they have. At the same time, working within a pre-given or pre-determined framework blunts one's impact and constrains authority.
I think of it in terms of Thomas Kuhn's book - The Structure of Scientific Revolutions -. For Kuhn, normal science develops within accepted frameworks, and people who master that science become authorities or experts, but they are not recognized as authorities in the far-reaching sense your question invokes. But revolutionary science occurs when people fashion new paradigms, and the people who give us new paradigms attain the status your question implies. The main example in twentieth-century physics, of course, is Einstein.
So to answer your question, I think we definitely have experts, authorities who are leaders in their respective domains, and we also have creative thinkers who are searching to comprehend and articulate new paradigms. But we cannot foresee whether and to what extent such transformative thinkers exist who will later be looked back upon as authorities in the same way that we view Einstein, Plato and Durkheim today. Often this only becomes possible in hindsight. I think the creation of an authoritative thinker involves at least three things: it takes a mastery of a discipline or way of thinking, an extraordinary vision or the imagination to see things differently, and finally, a certain amount of luck or fortune insofar as that discipline or area of inquiry ends up being incredibly important.
Q: Please explain about your new book “Radical Political Theology: Religion and Politics After Liberalism”?
A: This book analyzes contemporary theoretical discussions of religion and politics from a Continental philosophical perspective, and argues for a non-confessional theological viewpoint that is not conservative in a political sense or orthodox in a religious sense. In both epistemological and cultural terms, a strict opposition between religious and secular has broken down, which means that we cannot maintain a strong distinction between political philosophy and political theology. Furthermore, this breakdown is tied to the breakdown of classical modern liberalism, which has important political, religious and philosophical implications. By constructively engaging themes of sovereignty, democracy, potentiality, law and event from a religious and political point of view, Radical Political Theology articulates a theological vision that is responsive to our contemporary world and its theo-political effects. This book directly engages with a number of significant theorists, including Spinoza, Carl Schmitt, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Antonio Negri, Giorgio Agamben, Slavoj Zizek, Catherine Malabou, Alain Badiou, John D. Caputo and Catherine Keller. Radical Political Theology claims that we should think about God and the state more in terms of potentiality than sovereign power. It deploys new concepts, including Zizek’s idea of parallax and Malabou’s notion of plasticity, to intervene in current discussions about the nature and status of religion, ideology and messianism. Finally, the book suggests reasons to reconsider what democracy means as a form of political thought and religious practice insofar as it is not tied to modern liberal capitalist democracy.
Q: There are different methods for writing papers. Phenomenological, hermeneutical, constructivist, deconstructivist, or thematizatic are some of these methods. What is your method and why do you use it?
A: My method is probably more deconstructive than any other defined method, although I do not entirely accept that word, method. I am thinking of Hans-George Gadamer's famous book Truth and Method, where method is opposed to truth. I do not agree completely with Gadamer, because the opposition between method and truth can be demonstrated to deconstruct, but as Derrida says, deconstruction is what happens, it is an event, not so much a method. Attention to and reflection on methodology is important, but not at the expense of something like truth. Furthermore, I do not accept the idea that postmodernism means that we no longer have any truth. Postmodernism is partly a North American phenomenon, an American interpretation of contemporary French philosophy, but it is also a distortion. Postmodernism is in many ways a resignation to contemporary culture and capitalism, although that has
been contested in the first decade of the twentieth century with the return of the political in theory, in the work of Badiou, Zizek, Negri and others.
My method is way of thinking and writing informed by Continental philosophy, but it is oriented towards truth. That is, my work seeks to make theoretical connections that are important rather than remain within narrow scholastic boundaries. I try not to give in to the hyper-specialization that dominates the academy. The alternative, however, is not to become a generalist, but to take this specialized and focused theoretical and epistemological thinking and use to reflect on broader phenomena that are less apparently related to my field of philosophy of religion, such as energy resources and thermodynamics.
(Clayton Crockett is associate professor and director of Religious Studies in Department of Philosophy and Religion at University of Central Arkansas. He is the author of three books, most recently Radical Political Theology: Religion and Politics After Liberalism (Columbia University Press, 2011). He is currently working on a book comparing two French philosophers, Gilles Deleuze and Alain Badiou.)
