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    Richard - Aristotle and Religious Theory - JCRT 1.3

    Aristotle and Religious Theory

    Alan J. Richard

    Theology has ended,[1] and religious life proliferates.[2] No longer presuming to discern a divine intention written in the plethora of signs that once marked religious space and time as a space and time of divine visitation, we are left with the signs themselves ’ an elevated scroll or cup, bodies leaping and jerking, a circle of standing stones ’ and the bare fact that, for ‘us’ at least, they advance a common claim to the name of religion. [3] Of course, this bare fact is historically and geographically located. The end of theology means that we cannot start from an assumed a priori category of ‘religious experience,’ and straightaway begin to elucidate its endless varieties. In fact, any attempt to understand the common claim to religion would have to begin with a critique of the implicit rules that ‘we’ students of religion, relying on the assumed a priori perception of missionaries and ethnographers, have used to collect the specific array of signs that we call ‘religious.’ Thus, it would locate the process within what Carl A. Raschke has called ‘the Roman epoch’[4] and what Jacques Derrida has called ‘Latinity.’[5] It would also note peculiar modifications of the Latin notion of religio arising out of contact between various non-European peoples and the European colonialists who believed they had identified, isolated, and understood the word. These peoples they often imagined to be the antitype of their own religious purity, the embodiment of their own disavowed sin. In the end, however, our own attempt to understand “religion,” like that of the Romans and the European colonialists, will have recourse to an explicit or implicit theory.

    One can not deny it, which means that the most one can do is to deny it. Any discourse that would be opposed to it would, in effect, always succumb to the figure or the logic of denial (denegation). Such would be the place where, before and after all the Enlightenments in the world, reason, critique, science, tele-technoscience, philosophy, thought in general, retain the same source as religion in general.[6]

    Saying and Being

    The god and another

    Self-Movement

    Just as when one contemplates the painting in the picture as being a likeness, and without having [at that moment] seen the actual Corsicus, contemplates it as a likeness of Corsicus, and in that case the experience involved in this contemplation of it [as relative] is different from what one has when he contemplates it simply as a painted figure ’ [so in the case of memory we have the analogous difference, for], of the objects in the soul, the one [the unrelated object] presents itself simply as a thought, but the other [the related object], just because, as in the painting, it is a likeness, presents itself as a mnemonic token.[7]

    The Theology of Theory

    Thinking in itself deals with that which is best in itself, and that which is thinking in the fullest sense with that which is best in the fullest sense. An thought thinks on itself because it shares the nature of the object of thought; for it becomes an object of thought in coming into contact with and thinking its objects, so that thought and object of thought are the same.[8]

    Notes

    Alan Jay Richard, Ph.D., an independent researcher, is principal investigator for ‘Formative Research on Cocaine Use among Hispanics in the Southwestern United States,’ a three-year, multimillion dollar research effort funded by the National Institutes on Drug Abuse. He has served as co-investigator on a number of other federal research grants in the areas of HIV risk, social networks, and addiction. He has published over 70 articles in peer-reviewed journals in the fields of religion, ethics, sociology, and psychology. Besides religious theory, his scholarly and research interests include emotional attachment, affective neuroscience, addiction, sociology of religion, American religion, and the erotic imagination.

    2000 Alan J. Richard. All rights reserved.
    Updated 07/28/21 .
    jcrt.org/archives/01.3/richard

    1. “Theology has ended” here primarily refers to Carl A. Raschke’s usage of the phrase “end of theology,” the most extended discussion of which occurs in Raschke, C., The Alchemy of the Word: Language and the End of Theology. (Missoula, MT: Scholars Press, 1979). Since the publication of this work, Raschke (“Theology, Hermeneutics, and the Shattering of Foundations,” Encounter [Autumn, 1982], 401-407) has summarized his use of the phrase as designating “not the cessation of what might be loosely imagined as ‘theological’ conversation, but abstention from any ‘theologizing’ that recurs to privileged representations such as kerygma, doctrine, or even ‘God’ in the doctrinaire meaning of the word.” On the other hand, the word “end” in Alchemy of the Word implies the notion of fulfillment as well as the notion of termination, just it reminds us that “destruction” or “deconstruction” is not so much about sheer iconoclasm as it is about a dismantling that frees what has hitherto remained unthought within the ontotheological tradition. ↩︎

    2. This seeming paradox - the proliferation of religious life and academic chatter about it, along with the philosophical disenfranchisement of theological discourse - is the starting point for Charles E. Winquist’s reflection on the critical vocation of the theologian after the end of theology in Epiphanies of Darkness: Deconstruction in Theology. (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1986). Winquist insists that a “surplus of unsaid meaning calling from the darkness of primary religious experience” (p. 19) pressures thinking toward a transgression of the delimitations that “semantic anxiety” has imposed on theology and its successor, the academic study of religion.‘’ ↩︎

    3. Raschke, C., “Meaning and Saying In Religion: Beyond Language Games,” Harvard Theological Review, 67 (2): 79-116; 1974. ↩︎

    4. Raschke, C., “The Image of the Beast, or Theology and the Thought of Difference,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Thematic Studies, XLIX (1): 109-126. ↩︎

    5. Derrida, J., “Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone,” In J. Derrida and G. Vattimo (eds.) Religion. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 29. ↩︎

    6. Ibid., p. 59. ↩︎

    7. De Memoria I, 450b 26 - 451a 4. ↩︎

    8. Metaphysics XII.VII, 1072b: 18-23. ↩︎

    9. This supposedly straightforward distinction has been advanced by first-amendment groups who see it as a serviceable compromise between organized religious expression in public schools and the conspicuous absence of any and all reference to religion in the primary school curriculum (c.f., Haynes, C., “Teaching Religion’s Role is not Teaching Religion,” The Tennesseean, March 9, 1997, p. 4B). ↩︎

    10. Raschke, “Meaning and Saying,” p. 88. ↩︎

    11. Raschke, Alchemy of the Word, p. 66. ↩︎

    12. The phenomenological method, as represented by the Chicago School, can be read in an almost unbroken series of works starting in the late 1950s and continuing into the late 1980s. Milestones include Eliade, M. and Kitagawa, J. (eds.), The History of Religions: Essays in Methodology. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959); Kitagawa, J. (ed.), The History of Religions: Essays on the Problem of Understanding. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967); Kitagawa, J. and Alles, G. (eds.), Essays in the History of Religions. (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1988). ↩︎

    13. Westphal, M. God, Guilt, and Death: An Existential Phenomenology of Religion. (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press), 1990. ↩︎

    14. Smart, N. Dimensions of the Sacred. An Anatomy of the World’s Beliefs. (New York: HarperCollins, 1996), pp. 1-2. ↩︎

    15. Charles H. Long’s reading of Mircea Eliade’s Patterns in Comparative Religion (Long, C.H., “Mircea Eliade and the Imagination of Matter,” Journal of Cultural and Religious Theory, 1 (2): jcrt.org/archives/01.2/long) strongly suggests that Eliade at least, far from employing phenomenology as an evasion of theory, explicitly offers a theory of religion whose force comes from an engagement with materialism and the philosophical problematic of “matter.” ↩︎

    16. Raschke, C. “Religious Studies and the Default of Critical Intelligence,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion, LIV (1): 131-138. ↩︎

    17. McCutcheon, R. T. “The Common Ground on Which Students of Religion Meet”: Methodology and Theory Within the IAHR, Marburg Journal of Religion, 1 (2). http://www.uni-marburg.de/fb03/religionswissenschaft/journal/mjr/lukensbull.ht ml ↩︎

    18. Derrida, J. Speech and Phenomena, and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs. (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), esp. p. 51. ↩︎

    19. The foundational works in this developing theoretical system are R. Stark and W. Bainbridge, The Future of Religion: Secularization, revival and cult formation. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985); R. Stark and W. Bainbridge, A Theory of Religion. (Toronto: Peter Lang, 1987); and R. Finke and R. Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990: Winners and Losers in our religious economy. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992). The following are examples of reviews that have praised their theory: R. Collins, Review of A Theory of Religion by R. Stark and W. S. Bainbridge. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 1993, 32:402-406; E. M. Hamberg, Review of The Churching of America by R. Finke and R. Stark. Review of Religious Research, 1995, 36: 313-315; T. Jelen, Review of The Churching of America by R. Finke and R. Stark. Review of Religious Research, 1995, 36: 315-317. ↩︎

    20. Warner, R. Stephen. 1993. “Work in Progress toward a New Paradigm for the Sociological Study of Religion in the United States,” American Journal of Sociology, 1993, 98: 1044-93. ↩︎

    21. A Theory of Religion, p. 39. ↩︎

    22. Derrida, J., “Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone,” p. 18. ↩︎

    23. Ibid., p. 37. Derrida cautions against assuming that etymological analysis can clarify what concerns us about religion today, which for Derrida appears in the form of a violence that both enlists and resists globalization in the name of living communities (pp. 52-53). Despite this caution, however, the reflexivity implied by the etymology is vindicated later in the essay when Derrida associates it, the “promise of truth” contained in the address, to the other (p. 63). ’ ↩︎

    24. Ibid., p. 64. ↩︎

    25. Ibid., pp. 58-59. ↩︎

    26. Derrida, op. cit.’ p. 45. ↩︎

    27. Aristotle’s argument from saying is quite formidable and complex. It continually subverts critical and so-called “deconstructive” attempts to defuse it, largely because the way occupies an undecidable territory between ethics and ontology. Jacques Derrida (“Faith and Knowledge,” p. 44) has correctly emphasized its common tie to both science and religion. ↩︎

    28. Metaphysics IV.IV, 1006a: 26-27. ↩︎

    29. Metaphysics IV.IV, 1006b: 11-13. ↩︎

    30. Derrida, ‘The Politics of Friendship,’ Journal of Philosophy 85 (11): 632-644; esp. p. 637. ↩︎

    31. Ibid. ↩︎

    32. Metaphysics VII.I, 1028a: 10-30. ↩︎

    33. Metaphysics IV.IV, 1006b: 12-18. ↩︎

    34. Timaeus 47e; see also Philebus 26e-30e. ↩︎

    35. Timaeus 30a. ↩︎

    36. Sallis, J. Chorology: On Beginning In Plato’s Timaeus. (Bloomington and Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1999), p. 57. ↩︎

    37. Timaeus 51a, b. ↩︎

    38. Aristotle maintains that the ‘primary’ objects of thought and desire are the same, and this sameness is realized to the degree that the object of desire is cognized as the cognitive power that constitutes it.[77] Because desire fastens on the object that is the apparent good (e.g., whether or not it is the actual good), and thought is capable of distinguishing between apparent and actual goods, it is cognition that makes actual goods appear as good to desire.[78]‘’ Thus, although thinking activity in humans is inseparable from desire, thinking activity qua thinking activity is logically so separable when this activity moves desire as its fully active object. Desire, then, both desires to ‘possess’ its object, and desires its object inasmuch as that object is already actively self-possessed. Any object that was capable of being possessed by another would not be desirable; but any object that was actively self-possessed could not be grasped by desire’s ‘reaching out.’ Hence, Nussbaum can say that, for Aristotle, desire is a sign that a being’s self-sufficiency is incomplete, a sign of being’s ‘fragility.’[79] This contradiction at the heart of desire is thus a contradiction between being and having. If desire is thinking reaching out for itself, the potential being by virtue of which beings are multiple is the failure of thinking to finally grasp itself, and this incompleteness in being just is desire. ↩︎

    39. Derrida, 'Khora," p. 92. ↩︎

    40. Metaphysics V.VII, 1017b: 24-25. ↩︎

    41. Metaphysics VII.III, 1029a: 24-25. ↩︎

    42. Metaphysics VII. III, 1029a: 28-29. ↩︎

    43. Cf. Ackrill, J. L., ‘Aristotle’s distinction between energeia and kinesis,’ in Bambrough, R., (ed.) New Essays on Plato and Aristotle. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965), pp. 121-141. ↩︎

    44. Lear, p. 105. [Need full biblio] ↩︎

    45. Scaltsas, pp. 177-178. ↩︎

    46. Metaphysics VIII.II, 1043a: 14-21. ↩︎

    47. Metaphysics VIII.VI, 1045b: 20-25. ↩︎

    48. Lear, p. 102. ↩︎

    49. Scaltsas, p. 188. ↩︎

    50. Metaphysics XI.IX, 1066a: 3. ↩︎

    51. Wedin, M., ‘Aristotle on the mechanics of thought,’ in Preus & Anton, pp. 245-271. ↩︎

    52. This is precisely the role Kant assigns to the reproductive imagination in the first Critique (p. 183): ‘the image is a product of the empirical faculty of reproductive imagination; the schema of sensible concepts, such as of figures in space, is a product and, as it were, a monogram, of pure a priori imagination, through which, and in accordance with which, images themselves first become possible;’ see also pp. 218-219. Kant himself notes a fundamental problem with the epistemological reliability of the Kantian imagination when he describes it as a ‘blind but indispensable function of the soul’ (Critique of Pure Reason, p. 112). On this particular problem as it affects Kant’s various restatements of the doctrine of the faculties, see Deleuze, Kant’s Critical Philosophy, op. cit. Stuart Hampshire (‘Public and private morality,’ in Morality and Conflict [Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1983], pp. 101-1250) argues that Aristotle’s phantasia shares this weakness, and so cannot serve as the moral guide Nussbaum seems to want it to be. ↩︎

    53. Nussbaum, M., ‘The discernment of perception: An Aristotelian conception of private and public rationality,’ Proceedings of the Boston Area Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy, 1 (1985), pp. 151-201; and in Love’s Knowledge, pp. 54-105. ↩︎

    54. In Kantian terms, this sort of cognition would still be an employment of the transcendental function of the imagination because, for Kant, the very notion that bricks could become a house depends on a prior experience of a house. This prior experience ’ the ‘first’ cognition of a house ’ involves the transcendental imagination, without which there would be no experience at all. Aristotle’s phantasia fulfills a similar function except that, as indicated in the last chapter, Aristotle does not locate cognition in the subject of cognition, and so there is no noumenal limit-concept in his system. On the difference between (A) the perception/cognition of a built house and (B) the anticipatory mental construction, as well as an explanation as to why in (B) phantasia is entirely a cognitive process, see Wedin, p. 267. ↩︎

    55. Metaphysics XI.IX, 1066a: 5-7. ↩︎

    56. Metaphysics IX.II, 1046b: 16-18. ↩︎

    57. Metaphysics IX.II, 1046b: 23. ↩︎

    58. Metaphysics IX.V, 1048a: 10 ↩︎

    59. Nussbaum, M., ‘The ‘common’ explanation of animal motion,’ in P. Moraux & J. Weisner, (eds.), Zweifelhaftes im Corpus Aristotelicum. (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1983), pp. 116-157. ↩︎

    60. Fragility, p. 274. ↩︎

    61. Metaphysics IX.V, 1048a: 14-15. ↩︎

    62. Wedin, pp. 245-271. ↩︎

    63. Scaltsas, p. 199. ↩︎

    64. Metaphysics VIII.VI, 1045b: 17-18. ↩︎

    65. Metaphysics VIII.VI, 1045b: 20-21. ↩︎

    66. Metaphysics IX.IX, 1051a: 31. ↩︎

    67. Metaphysics IX.VI, 1048b: 17-22. ↩︎

    68. Metaphysics IX.VI, 1048b: 20-25. ↩︎

    69. De Anima II.I, 412b: 17. ↩︎

    70. De Anima II.II, 413a: 25-31. ↩︎

    71. De Anima II.II, 413b: 1-4. ↩︎

    72. De Anima III.VII, 431a 14 - 431b: 9. ↩︎

    73. De Anima III.X, 433b: 10-12. ↩︎

    74. De Anima III.X, 433b: 13. ↩︎

    75. Metaphysics XII.VII, 1072a: 26. ↩︎

    76. Cf. Lear, pp. 135-141. ↩︎

    77. Metaphysics XII.VI, 1072a: 27. ↩︎

    78. Metaphysics XII.VI, 1072a: 28-29. ↩︎

    79. Fragility, p. 276. ↩︎

    80. Metaphysics XII.VII, 1072a: 28-35. ↩︎

    81. Metaphysics XII.VI, 1072a: 29-30. ↩︎

    82. Metaphysics XII.VII, 1072b: 3. ↩︎

    83. Metaphysics XII.VI, 1072a: 1-3. ↩︎

    84. Metaphysics XII.VII, 1072b: 25-29. ↩︎

    85. Lear, p. 304. ↩︎

    86. Metaphysics XII.VII, 1072b: 16. ↩︎

    87. Nichomachean Ethics X.VIII, 1178b: 21-22. ↩︎

    88. Nichomachean Ethics X.VIII, 1178b: 24-26. ↩︎

    89. Nichomachean Ethics VI.I, 1139a; 6-8. ↩︎

    90. Nichomachean Ethics X.VII, 1177b: 20-22. ↩︎

    91. Nichomachean Ethics X.VII, 1177a: 22-23. ↩︎

    92. Nichomachean Ethics X.VII, 1177a: 24-25. ↩︎

    93. Nichomachean Ethics X.VII, 1177a: 30-35; this self-sufficiency is particularly troubling for Nussbaum and Cooper, because they believe it implies isolation. Cf. ‘Transcending Humanity,’ and Cooper, J., ‘Aristotle on Friendship,’ The Philosophical Review, 86 (1977), pp. 290-315. ↩︎

    94. Nichomachean Ethics X.VII, 1177b: 18-24. ↩︎

    95. Metaphysics X.VII, 1177b: 14-16. ↩︎

    96. Phaedo 58b. "Now the Athenians made a vow to Apollo, as the story goes, that if they were saved they would send a mission every year to Delos (e(ka/stou e)/touj qewri/an a)pa/cein ei)j Dh=lon). ↩︎

    97. Apology ‘Socrates, we have strong evidence that we and the city pleased you; for you would never have stayed in it more than all other Athenians if you had not been better pleased with it than they; you never went out from the city to a festival (ou)/t’ epi qewrian pw/pot’ ek th=j po/lewj e)ch=lqej), or anywhere else, except on military service, and you never made any other journey, as other people do, and you had no wish to know any other city or other laws, but you were contented with us and our city." ↩︎

    98. Ibid. “The beginning of the mission (arch d’ esti th=j qewri/aj) is when the priest of Apollo crowns the stern of the ship; and this took place, as I say, on the day before the trial. For that reason Socrates passed a long time in prison between his trial and his death.” ↩︎

    99. Phaedo 65e ↩︎

    100. Republic 516a-c ↩︎

    101. Republic 342c ↩︎

    102. Sophist 239b ↩︎

    103. Cratylus 401a ↩︎

    104. Symposium 210c ↩︎

    105. Cf. Parmenides’ observation that without the eidh the observer will have nowhere to direct his mind, and dialectic will perish. Parmenides 135b-c. ↩︎

    106. Especially Parmenides 134d-e ↩︎

    107. Metaphysics XII.VII, 1072b: 22-24. ↩︎

    108. Wedin, p. 268. ↩︎

    109. Metaphysics IX.I, 1046a: 27. ↩︎

    110. Metaphysics IX.I, 1046a: 13. ↩︎

    111. Metaphysics IX.II, 1046a 37 - 1046b: 2. ↩︎

    112. Metaphysics IX.V, 1048a: 10-20. ↩︎

    113. Lear, pp. 138-141. ↩︎

    114. Raschke, “The Image of the Beast,” p. 123. ↩︎

    115. Derrida, “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials,” p. 41. ↩︎

    116. Raschke, C. ↩︎