A marker for a new beginning

This post is written with a degree of trepidation. After a gap of almost a year I plan to start again. The last year has been a mad one but I am about to enter a very different phase of life and I hope to have more time for reflection and writing.

I plan to write shorter, more reflective, more regular and, hopefully, more interesting and useful posts. I will aim for most of them to be just a few hundred words with occasional longer more academic ones.

My content will encompass:

• Exploring some themes of contemporary thought that reframe how we engage with landscape and with place
• How these might effect how we relate to the environmental, political and cultural situation we live in
• How they might open up a non-theological way of religious thinking, beyond theism and atheism
• And most importantly, how I am grappling with embodying all of this, how to live it.

My hope is that atleast some of this will be of interest to some, and dialogue might build up around my rather tentative thoughts.

So a new cairn is built in my virtual / physical life – lets hope the path beyond it travels some distance this time!

The Crossing out of Religion and the Poetics of Place – 1

Some time around 1996, I read John Muir’s First Summer in the Sierra and Henry Thoreau’s Walden, and I guess some sort of re-orientation happened. A little later came Thomas Berry’s flawed but thought provoking The Dream of the Earth and finally in a Dublin bookshop in 2005 I came upon the poems and essays of Kenneth White (who deserves and will get atleast one full post, and from whom my blog title comes).

The wrestling to make sense of the life changing encounter that had occured earlier in my life, that I had reasonably called God, and the desire to live some sort of ethical life continued, but somehow I now felt that any debate or discussion that did not occur in the context of a non anthropocentric position within nature, however persuasive, was inevitably starting out from the wrong initial co-ordinates.  Beyond that I was persuaded by White that human culture in its essence must ground itself in a delicate, lively engagement of ‘mindscape with landscape’ which he names ‘geo-poetics’. And for White, this engagement wasn’t a purely philosophical one but a simple direct one, free of all notions of God, spirit, metaphor or allegory.

Alongside this tragectory of thought, in the last couple of years the whole theological turn of continental philosophy, and the possibility of a religion without religion, opened up by Marion-Levinas-Derrida-Caputo-Vattimo-Zizek-etc-etc has captured my imagination, and plenty more on that another time, but these lines of thought operate in a different space and if they engage with the natural world at all, as far I can see, they only do so as a form of the ‘other’ to which we must offer care, i.e., it exists as object rather than some sort of ‘ground’. My final post on my old blog joking introduced Caputo to White in the hope they could work it out together!

However, rather than leave others to work it out, the object of my MA dissertation will be to attempt, in the context of Heidegger’s thought, to site the discussion of god that occurs ‘after the death of god’ in the context of our lived experience through what Heidegger would call ‘poetic dwelling (White would use the expression ‘geo-poetics) in real, geographical places. In the second post of this name I will roughly outline the path that I think the dissertation will take (and explain the title!) and then in occasional posts in the future offer up aspects of the work as it progresses.

A community of the question

This quote is from Derrida’s essay on Levinas ‘Violence and Metaphysics’ in Writing and Difference.

In the garden we are in the process of reviewing what defines us and whilst this paragraph is actually talking about the community of philosophers in/after the end of philosophy, for me it captures perfectly the nuanced situation that projects like the garden must maintain -  obligated to decide and to act but never in a way that closes the question, always moving forward in a way that leaves the open open.

“A community of the question, therefore, within that fragile moment when the question is not yet determined enough for the hypocrisy of an answer to have already initiated itself beneath the mask of the question, and not yet determined enough for its voice to have been already and fraudulently articulated within the very syntax of the question. A community of decision, of initiative, of absolute initiality, but also a threatened community, in which the question has not yet found the language it has decided to speak, is not yet sure of its own possibility within the community. A community of the question about the possibility of the question.”

I know this seems so vague but I really feel the journey we are on is this fragile and  I fear the temptation to settle for easy short-cuts.