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Action, Love, and the World: An Inquiry Into the Political Relevance of Christian Charity (With Constant Reference to Hannah Arendt)
Full text linkIn The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt identifies the central principle that has defined Christian communities since their earliest appearance as “worldlessness.” On Arendt’s analysis, Christianity has always tended to found relations between people on charity, a virtue that, due to its affiliation with the anti-political experience of passionate love, is incapable of serving as the basis of any public realm or common political world. This thesis aims to reconcile the virtue of charity to Arendt’s political vision on the basis of a reconsideration of love’s “worldlessness.” In the first two chapters, I characterize Arendt as a political thinker and provide an account of her ideas of political action and the common world. In the third chapter, I place Arendt’s understanding of the world in dialogue with Jean-Luc Marion’s phenomenological account of charity, which dissociates charity from the idea of passion and presents it as an act of will through which one resolves to see past the simple objectivity of the world and to perceive the invisible “flesh” or personhood of others. Charity is “worldless”—and thus crucial to an Arendtian understanding of politics—in the sense that it looks beyond what the world automatically makes present in order to “see” the other person and to invite her voice into the common world of speech and action.Introduction -- The human condition and its political importance -- Action and the world -- The political worldlessness of charity -- Conclusio
Rejoinder to 'Seeing Beyond the Scenery': Exploring the World Through Metaphor
No full textResponse to the paper "Seeing Beyond the Scenery': Exploring the World Through Metaphor" presented by Deborah Bowen at the March 27, 2013, Toronto Inter-Faculty Colloquium.Dr. Bowen responds to Dr. Sweetman with: Bowen, Deborah. "'Seeing Beyond the Scenery': Exploring the World Through Metaphor. Responding to Bob Sweetman's Response at the ICS Colloquium, Wed. Mar. 27, 2013. (paper presented at the Centre for Philosophy, Religion and Social Ethics, 'Toronto Inter-Faculty Colloquium, March 27, 2013, Toronto, Ontario)[http://hdl.handle.net/10756/346292
Cosmogenetic Labour in the Crisis of the Anthropocene
No full textThis paper won 3rd prize in the Concordia University Religion Department's Annual Graduate Conference, Brave New World: Traditions and Transitions. It will be published in the conference proceedings (forthcoming)As the insights from anthropology slowly filter into philosophy, it is becoming clear that technology should not be thought of as a contingent product of the European Enlightenment; instead, in the words of archaeologist Timothy Taylor, “technology, within the framework of some 2 to 3 million years, has, physically and mentally, made us.”1 Our huge brains, our dexterous hands, our upright stance, our ability to speak – these distinct characteristics of our biology could only evolve in the context of a new kind of development, a complexifying matrix of techniques and artifacts. Taylor calls us “a new, symbiont form of life,” with the technology that we project around ourselves forming “the nonbiological aspect of the artificial ape.”2 I argue that this insight calls for a massive change in perspective. In short, we need to understand life as an explosion. Growing out of geothermal vents into the oceans, out of the oceans onto the land, this explosion is now constrained by the barrier of the atmosphere, beyond which lies the void of space. The only way the living explosion will ever be able to transcend this barrier is through the kind of symbiosis between technology and biology described by Taylor. With reference to the long neglected ecological thought of Krafft Ehricke, I argue that the ecological crisis should not be seen as the death-throws of nature, but rather as the birth-pangs of a new mode of life, the crisis whereby the biosphere expands beyond the geosphere, to infuse extraterrestrial fields of matter with the beauty of living form. As the progenitors of technology, this cosmogenetic labour is one of the duties of humanity with regard to the living process that birthed us. 1 Timothy Taylor, The Artificial Ape (), 198. 2 Taylor, The Artificial Ape, 194
