Backed into a corner: Dan turns to "fashionable nonsense" to save the church

[Tom]

I did say that, but in another thread. He has ignored my question thus far. And thus far, there is no indication that either the Afore or the many scholars who post at Sic et Non have read or attempted to read Brother Faulconer's fine essay. I may pick it up again after attending to a few matters of the vineyard.

It’s close to what you wrote. The Afore didn’t need to invent an exclamation point. (Unlike the Afore, I care about accuracy.) “Don't believe me? Ask him if any scientific fact anywhere is better established than the antiquity of the Book of Mormon.” End of my threadjack.

[drumdude]

Wow. DCP already knows people are well aware of his rampant use of plagiarism to attempt to appear smart. This passage, taken from his failed attempt to insult, seems to be projecting every additional attribute he worries that others see in himself.

The "sometimes, self-congratulation" line is especially hilarious.

Speaking of the afore's "sometimes, self-congratulation" accusation of this board, his latest Meredian article demonstrates his abilities at it perfectly.

He writes about "holy envy":

...By “holy envy,” Stendahl was referring to the recognition of elements in another religious tradition or faith that an outsider appreciates or admires and even wishes were present or found greater scope in his or her own religious faith or tradition, without converting...

The underlying anecdote was from his mission experience. Did he experience holy envy?

Well, no. A Swiss pastor experienced it after he, a teenaged Mormon missionary, taught the religously educated pastor the principles of pastoral care found in home teaching. The pastor was astonished, and according to Dan, expressed that "...he rarely heard in time about people who were sick, troubled, hurting, or sad. He typically didn’t learn about people who were on their deathbeds until after they had died..." Hmm. A reliously educated career pastor really told a 19 year old that?

Moving on, no story of holy envy would be complete without this additional extraneous bit of self-congratulation:

...some time later, a visiting German choir performed in Ringgenberg’s seventeenth-century castle church, where he preached on Sundays, we were the pastor’s special invited guests, seated with him in his family box. I’ve always wondered what his parishioners thought of that!

I wonder if he has "holy envy" for the non-religious, since he believes they are still somehow part of a dogmatic religion. I think you're right that it's a very empty idea in practice for him. The epitome of vain Mormon virtue signaling.

[Gadianton]

Thank you for the correction Tom, I should have known better than to think you'd overlooked something. My generosity has been taken advantage of by the apologists, yet again!

as it seems like the more Moroni fights Amalickiah’s world of violence and rebellion, the more the Moroni starts to look like that which he is fighting.

Yes! A textbook example of deconstruction. Now, some might think, if that's all deconstruction is, what's the big deal? Hadn't people already thought of stuff like this already? Paradise Lost was recognized as subversive long before deconstruction came around (and is not an example from Derrida). The world could go on just fine looking for reversals and blind spots and use different wording to describe similar insights that have been available since time began.

So what was his contribution? I don't know. Derrida was all over the map, he was deeper into literature than philosophy, and the philosophical school named after him, poststructuralism, was thanks to his study of Saussure and Levi Strauss, nothing to do with Heidegger. The relativism he's accused of was already deeply embedded within structuralism itself not to mention Freudianism (and Heidegger). He had an impact of some kind on just about everything. What he amounts to may depend on who is teaching the course and how their department was affected.

From what I've seen, in the USA, he's introduced 75% through English departments and 25% philosophy. Faulconer's article strikes me as following the (continental) philosophy playbook. Hegel-> Kierkegaard/Nietzsche -> Husserl -> Heidegger -> Derrida. Heidegger has the deepest insights available into the grounds (or lack) of metaphysics, and then Derrida one-ups him. Faulconer explains this in his article. In the way I approached him, my history of philosophy course ended at Heidegger, and so when I was out of school I wanted to see what came next, and that was Derrida.

From the English departments, deconstruction is a well-honed tool with a political ax to grind for sure. A friend of mind who majored in English took courses on it and her summary was, "they spend all day just looking for binaries." It owes a lot to psychoanalysis, what did he really mean when he wrote that book? Philosophers into Derrida see the lit crit version as trivializing, and reducing deconstruction to a method that's both predictable and relatively shallow. The term "deconstruction" comes from Heidegger after all and deals with bedrock reality type stuff not just subverting books like Moby Dick.

Well, here's the thing. Bro Faulconer says:

He argues that Heideggerian deconstruction cannot get us to a first disclosure of truth, not even a glimpse of it, without implicitly reinstating God.

Skipping the nuts and bolts here, but Faulconer describes Derrida's approach to Heidegger at this high, theoretical level, but you could also describe his approach, boots on the ground, as doing exactly what those English students do with Moby Dick, find the binary and show the subversion. In the case of Heidegger, Bro Faulconer explains that Heidegger is looking for how beings (people like us) be, at the most basic level. To understand that would be to understand Being. Derrida finds a binary opposition between beings and Being, and concludes that Heidegger fails to tell us what Being is, but rather comes to understand Being through metaphors and examples of being. To complement my quote from Bro. Faulconer, Derrida says something like, "Being becomes the highest being present". This is how Heidegger accidentally reinstates God.

What to make of it? A cynical take could be that Derrida was really good at subverting texts and what that ultimately means is up in the air.

[Limnor]

I’m trying to see if I’m following this. Would Mormon eternal progression actually make the Being/beings problem more complicated rather than solve it?

If God was once as we are and humans can progress to become gods, then God is just another being within an already existing reality. Promoting one being to the highest position doesn’t explain Being itself, because if God exists within that reality rather than creating everything ex nihilo (for example), then asking “what makes it possible?” or “Why is this so?” doesn’t really end with God.

[The Before]

So what was his contribution? I don't know. Derrida was all over the map, he was deeper into literature than philosophy, and the philosophical school named after him, poststructuralism, was thanks to his study of Saussure and Levi Strauss, nothing to do with Heidegger. The relativism he's accused of was already deeply embedded within structuralism itself not to mention Freudianism (and Heidegger). He had an impact of some kind on just about everything. What he amounts to may depend on who is teaching the course and how their department was affected.

Curious. That’s not the understanding I came away with, but of course, I could be wrong. Derrida’s engagement with Saussure and Levi-Strauss was crucial to the emergence of what later got called poststructuralism. But Heidegger is just as fundamental, arguably more fundamental to Derrida’s philosophical project (even if a horrible Nazi). Derrida actually coined déconstruction partly as a French rendering of Heidegger’s Destruktion, and his critique of the Western “metaphysics of presence” develops directly out of Heidegger’s destruction of the history of ontology.

[The Before]

I’m trying to see if I’m following this. Would Mormon eternal progression actually make the Being/beings problem more complicated rather than solve it?

If God was once as we are and humans can progress to become gods, then God is just another being within an already existing reality. Promoting one being to the highest position doesn’t explain Being itself, because if God exists within that reality rather than creating everything ex nihilo (for example), then asking “what makes it possible?” or “Why is this so?” doesn’t really end with God.

Yes, I believe you’re following it swimmingly! In fact, you’ve found one of the genuinely interesting consequences of putting Mormon metaphysics into conversation with Heidegger (I hate just saying his name). Eternal progression potentially pushes the explanatory question back a level. If god is an exalted being who exists within an eternal reality containing things he did not create, then appealing to god does not answer the question of being. You can still ask of the entire god/intelligence/matter/order system: why or how is there any of this at all?

And, I think there’s a fun Derridean turn available after that: Mormonism may actually evade one version of onto-theology precisely by declining to make gd the metaphysical ground of being, while simultaneously leaving the ground of being radically unexplained. That’s a much more interesting issue than simply saying Mormonism has an “infinite regress.”

[Gadianton]

Faulconer makes that point

But he is a being among others rather than the metaphysical foundation for all being. The Latter-day Saint God is not the God of the tradition, so he is not the God whom Nietzsche attacks

(which goes for Heidegger also)

I think I recall elsewhere Faulconer saying Mormonism doesn't solve any philosophical problems. As far as this essay, he seems to say it evades most of the conversation in high philosophy that could do it damage.

"creating everything ex nihlo"

So, you're locked into a particular kind of explanation, the material cause. Heidegger is trying to escape this framework. The way I remember it, God, as the material cause, becomes a giant vending machine. A manufacturing plant. Theists want to say that if the material source of an object is identified, then it is explained. He thinks this is a huge mistake that he calls ontotheology. What is God? The machine that cranks out all these tin cans, except the cans are people.

By focusing so much on ontotheology, we've forgotten about the question of Being.

[Gadianton]

Curious. That’s not the understanding I came away with, but of course, I could be wrong. Derrida’s engagement with Saussure and Levi-Strauss was crucial to the emergence of what later got called poststructuralism. But Heidegger is just as fundamental, arguably more fundamental to Derrida’s philosophical project (even if a horrible Nazi). Derrida actually coined déconstruction partly as a French rendering of Heidegger’s Destruktion, and his critique of the Western “metaphysics of presence” develops directly out of Heidegger’s destruction of the history of ontology.

Yes, I mentioned that "deconstruction" comes from Heidegger, I believe in the very post you're quoting from I mentioned that. In fact, I think that's why I said philosophers really focus on Heidegger and Derrida's reaction because H's project is the most sophisticated of any philosophical undertaking anywhere, according to people who know about it.

[canpakes]

I’m trying to see if I’m following this. Would Mormon eternal progression actually make the Being/beings problem more complicated rather than solve it?

Years ago I remarked to my SO - after their shelf finally collapsed - that one of the biggest issues with Mormonism’s attempt to explain or answer so many questions about the basic beliefs of the faith is that those attempts end up creating even more and bigger questions and more ludicrous scenarios.