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.

In lieu of an ‘About’ page

I will write a more nuanced explanation and context soon but just so I can go public here are some rough thoughts on why I am attempting to blog again.

1)I am doing an MA in Philosophy which is inevitably challenging my thinking in new ways. Whilst I am far too insecure in my thoughts on many of the texts I am studying to voice them publicly there will some responses that I will be interested in trying to articulate in the blog.

2)The garden, the project in Brighton I am involved with, is seeking to re-articulate its vision, develop a more reliable programme of activities, re-think how it operates and re-work its web presence. The vision of the garden and my own thoughts, whilst closely related are independent, so it seemed a good time to create space for me to explore my own thoughs in a way that can hopefully have a strong dialogue with those of the garden but remain separate.

3)Whilst I am extremely engaged with the whole ‘Derrida religion without religion; Zizek materialistic Christianity, Caputo theology of the event’ space (to throw in just a few co-ordinates of the current discussion) I feel that they all fail to engage adequately with our human situatedness as part of the landscape-earth-cosmos. I will save words now and shape this out better in another post but my hope in this blog is to jot on my attempts to weave a single cloth from these threads. Pete Rollins in his response to one of my posts on his blog recently said that to move away from Christianity as a ‘narrative that facilitates a more fully engaged interaction with the world would require the creating of language fit to do that’. I guess I want to try floating a few thoughts that might edge towards a possible new language. Anyway, will try to map this out better soon – for myself  – if no  one else!