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.