Extraordinary Comments

I find that indulgence of verbal "license" almost invariably leads to deterioration of discussion, as the resort to words generally deemed offensive almost always marks a decision against the requirements of any serious inquiry to be conducted in common, and in favor of prejudice in the full sense of the term, though not incidentally also in the everyday social-political and legal sense. Brutal words deployed brutally are already brutal conduct, proxies for and often preludes to worse - "fighting words."

I do aspire to discuss things that are difficult to discuss, because other discussions are not interesting to me, but the pursuit of such discussion precludes and is precluded by, is short-circuited by, a refusal of mutual respect. There is, furthermore, nothing of interest to me to be said about "fuck, shit, or even nigger" in the language of "fuck, shit, or even nigger." Being "perturbed" by any resort to the latter is not a question of entitlement. It is a matter of reasonable estimation of a discussant's clear intention to perturb.

I remain confounded, and continue to be appalled, by your apparently irrepressible penchant for saying nasty and ridiculous things nastily and ridiculously. I mean especially the sentiment about gentile, black, and other brains. It's hard for me to imagine why you put it forward here, except out of a perverse and unwelcome desire to provoke just this kind of attention. Next time, I'll just delete it, and I suppose I'll have to ask you to stop commenting or I'll have to put you on permanent "moderation." I don't want to. You seem capable of much better.

When I set AG coming up on 3 yrs ago, I decided not to include a blogroll because they seemed to me to be generally in a state of digital ruin.   I could see they once functioned as a community building tool, but all the dead links I encountered said that was becoming more and more in the  past.

It also recalls for me, now, an erstwhile passage from my exploration of digital ruins, Post #74

What changes and what stays almost the same in the experience of abandonment and ruin as one travels through digital-analog space?  This socially created, technologically mediated, transduced space deforms, re-forms, informs, conforms, confounds, conjoins the experiences of human and machine individuation and collectivity moment to moment, each arising as ephemeral wholes dependent on their decaying parts.

The passage now exists as a saved draft in my dashboard, and now here.  The words in random order still occupy Post #74.

No conclusion to all this, just sayin.

At any rate, I like the current update in the site.  It's getting much closer to the sense I have of what you've been working towards.

I hope everyone has a thankful Thanksgiving.

bob

I don't take such phrases as categorically poor writing, although I leave to your judgment in this case.  Whether Chaucer in The Knight's Tale, describing  death as being "Allone, withouten any compaignye" or Shakespeare's murderous "most unkindest cut of all",  I rather like the non-conforming unruliness of the well crafted redundancy.

A Levinasian paradox: she was a Polish RC right-wing nationalist bigot, yet she issued an appeal, itself in entirely anti-semitic terms, for the rescue and defense of Polish Jews, and founded a branch of the "Home Army" to carry out that purpose. The Israelis awarded her the honor of "the righteous among nations", but only after she was safely dead.

Speech-act theorists have the notion of "performative contradictions", that there are non-isomorphic correspondences between what one says and what one does. Her case is the flip side of that coin. Human beings are complicated.

I think there's plenty of blame to go around here. Gopnik seems stunningly ignorant of the Western theistic tradition, at least based on the quote you reproduce. Much of Hart's language God as "the ground of Being," "Being itself," etc.)is lifted, without much alteration, from the leading lights of Christian philosophical theism. The fact that many of his atheist critics seem unaware of this reinforces the impression that they haven't bothered to actually learn much about the tradition.

As far as Hart himself goes, however, I'm inclined to agree that he hasn't done much to show how his rather rarefied philosophical theism comports with concrete religious beliefs and practices (full disclosure: I haven't read the entire book). In his defense, it could be said that his explicit purpose was to provide a kind of lowest (greatest?) common denominator drawn from traditions east and west. And that he has written elsewhere in a more explicitly Christian vein (Hart is Eastern Orthodox by confession, I believe). But I do think he elides some of the problems that have been canvassed--particularly in the last several decades--in reconciling the God of Greek metaphysics with the God of the Bible.

Regarding this, Hart has consciously and explicitly positioned himself on one side of a debate that has been ongoing in Christian theology since at least the mid-20th century. A series of big names, particularly in Protestant theology, undertook a rethinking of the inherited concept of God. In several cases they drew on Hegel (among other sources) to redescribe God in more historical, dynamic, and relational terms than (it was thought) were permitted by the "static" categories of Scholasticism. I'm thinking here of, among others, Barth, Jurgen Moltmann, Wolfhart Pannenberg, and Robert Jenson. To see how Hart positions himself vis-a-vis this movement, you might take a look at an article he wrote specifically on Jenson's theology:

http://www.firstthings.com/article/2007/01/the-lively-god-of-robert-jenson-4

This is still very much a live issue in contemporary Christian theology; if anything, classical theism of the Hartian variety seems to be, as far as I can judge, somewhat on the defensive these days.

Sorry that was so long!