Deepest Commitments Research Articles

Fleeing from War or Pandemic, and Returning Home

Today, the word ‘flee’ connotes a moral weakness for many, perhaps even cowardice for some. However, that is not entirely accurate. Fleeing may be a morally decent response to a dangerous situation. As the American philosopher Todd May wrote in his insightful book A Decent Life: Morality for the Rest of Us (2019): “Most of us seek to live a morally decent life. We are not moral monsters, but neither do we strive to be moral saints. [There are] avenues of moral improvement that do not require us … to sacrifice our deepest commitments and projects ….[Why? That which] … makes life meaningful gives me permission to limit my aid to others.”

With the World at Heart: Studies in the Secular Today by Thomas A. Carlson

Reviewed by: With the World at Heart: Studies in the Secular Today by Thomas A. Carlson Douglas E. Christie, PhD (bio) With the World at Heart: Studies in the Secular Today. By Thomas A. Carlson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019. 256 pp. $30.00 pbk. In Book IV of the Confessions, Augustine describes an experience of loss that undid him completely: a dear childhood friend fell gravely ill, lay unconscious and close to death for a long time, then unexpectedly recovered. But not long afterwards the fever returned, and he died. Augustine says: "Grief darkened my heart. Everything on which I set my gaze was death. My hometown became a torture to me; my father's house a strange world of unhappiness; all that I had shared with him was without him transformed into a cruel torment. . . I thought that since death had consumed him, it was suddenly going to engulf all humanity." The power of death; the debilitating force of grief; and the question of whether love for someone destined to die can be trusted. Whether it will endure. The "lesson" of Book IV, situated within Augustine's sustained reflection on the nature of love and our capacity to know love, is that such love cannot be trusted and will not last: "the reason why that grief had penetrated me so easily and deeply was that I had poured out my soul on to the sand by loving a person sure to die as if he would never die. . . for wherever the human soul turns itself other than to you, it is fixed in sorrows." Everything less than God will, because of its impermanence and mutability, ultimately disappoint us. Only God is unchanging; only God, or that which is experienced in and through God, is ultimately worthy of our love. This Augustinian insight and its long afterlife figure centrally in Thomas A. Carlson's With the World at Heart, both as a question and as a foil. Like many readers of the Confessions before him, Carlson takes seriously Augustine's profound struggle with death and his effort to identify a love (and a way of loving) that will not ultimately fail us. But he also questions whether Augustine's radically transcendent understanding of love, and his insistence on the [End Page 338] circumscribed, limited, and ultimately unsatisfying character of love constrained by time and mortality can still serve us in the present moment. He examines whether the idea of "loving a person sure to die as if he would never die" is as illusory and ill-conceived as Augustine ultimately makes it out to be. And he considers whether there is a way of understanding love, including love bound to time and mortality, that can help us rethink our own deepest commitments in a secular age. This is an ambitious and even audacious book that aims to extend and deepen the arguments the author has pursued in two earlier books, Indiscretion: Finitude and the Naming of God (1999), and The Indiscrete Image: Infinitude and Creation of the Human (2008), both of which draw upon pre-modern theological-mystical traditions and post-modern philosophy to reimagine the meaning of transcendence in the present moment. In the present work, Carlson examines the question of love—its very possibility, its extent, its durability—in light of ancient spiritual texts (principally Augustine's Confessions) and a formidable array of modern and postmodern writers. Beginning with a searching reading of Cormac McCarthy's The Road, Carlson proceeds to investigate (often in dialogue with Augustine) the meaning and possibility of love—a transcendent reality nested within and shaped by the ordinary, concrete, mutable character of mortal existence—in the work of Jean-Luc Marion, Jacques Derrida, Martin Heidegger, Robert Pogue Harrison, Jean-Luc Nancy, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Friedrich Nietzsche. Charles Taylor's The Secular Age also casts a long shadow over this work, especially given Carlson's intense interest in reimagining the secular. He acknowledges the importance of Taylor's work but resists Taylor's narrower and more pessimistic reading of the secular. Instead, he argues for a more generous and open understanding of how the ostensibly post-religious or non-religious currents...

The Liberal Arts Endeavor: Celebrating a Quarter Century of University Studies at Portland State

The Liberal Arts Endeavor: Celebrating a Quarter Century of University Studies at Portland State

Cognition and the Crisis of Citizenship and Care

Abstract The American struggle over healthcare policy is emblematic of the larger crisis of citizenship and national identity. We have a crisis at the structural, policy level, but the problem also goes deep into our moral lives as individuals and commitments as a society. We struggle to come to a workable consensus about why and how we should provide healthcare, and for whom. Who belongs in our circle of care, and what are our commitments to one anothers’ wellbeing? This identity crisis is spinning out into a breakdown of institutional structures and even loss of caring practices. As a Christian ethicist interested in how moral discourse works, my central concern is this: Why are so many American Christians speaking and legislating against health care programs - the Affordable Care Act, but even also Child Health Insurance Program, which covered children? They are using Bible verses to anchor and justify their policy stances. The American health care reform fight is a crisis of citizenship and national identity, but it is also a crisis of Christian mission and witness. A policy statement given by a conservative congressman is used as a test case with which to display how two experts on language could help us understand conservative Christian thinking on healthcare. Charles Taylor reflects as a philosopher on how “the politics of bringing about care” expresses our deepest commitments and our struggle with the impersonal forces of modernity. Charles Fillmore offers models for understanding how thought and language are linked and systematically structured, framed. There are alternatives to conservative ways of framing healthcare, ways that are arguably more coherent and more in keeping with biblical calls to love of neighbor and to building communities of the beloved.

Religious Ideals and the Idea of Liberalism: Goodman's Religious Pluralism and Values in the Public Sphere

Lenn Goodman's defense of a vital role for religiously grounded considerations in the political culture of a pluralistic liberal polity is supported in important respects though aspects of his critique of secular pluralism are challenged. It is true that secular liberalism sometimes fails to acknowledge constructive ways religion can figure in pluralistic liberal political culture. Additionally, it sometimes excludes valuative considerations crucial to many persons’ deepest commitments and convictions. Also, there is merit in Goodman's critique of public reason. However, liberal theory contains resources enabling it to respond to some of the objections he elaborates. Moreover, claiming that pluralism will be stunted and inadequate to human needs and concerns without values and reasons that transcend politics is more problematic than Goodman suggests. The intelligibility of the valuative considerations figuring in politics remains challenging. Without a standard of public reason what can be an effective basis for socio-political—if pluralistic—cohesion?

Complimenting rivals

This article pursues two questions: Can one use Foucault’s later writings on parrhesia and Kant to create a Foucaldian approach to public reason? If so, what lessons might those attracted to John Rawls’ well-known model of public reason draw from a Foucaldian orientation? By putting Foucault into a competitive yet productive relationship with Rawls, this article addresses some of the latter’s shortcomings. In doing so it also makes a larger argument about the need to develop approaches to democratic deliberation that involve engagement with – rather than simple toleration and/or accommodation of – the various ‘reasonable’ ethical commitments deliberators, on some fundamental level, reason in light of. The justificatory aims of public reason are best achieved when participants’ most-cherished beliefs are opened to critical dialogue rather than banished to the realm of the ‘non-political’. The article begins by briefly illuminating the salient features of Rawls’ model of public reasoning as well as three problems that ensue with the limitations it places on discourses regulated by public reason. It then attempts to distill a Foucaldian approach to public reason by briefly discussing 4 elements of Foucault’s later work on Rawls’ philosophical godfather Kant together with several features of the antiquarian studies of parrhesia that Foucault was conducting at the time these Kantian works were written. Third, Jeffrey Stout’s recent account of theistic democratic actors in some of the most economically disadvantaged US localities demonstrates how many of the ideals integral to this Foucaldian approach to public reasoning built on engaging (rather than simply tolerating and/or accommodating) contrasting ethical perspectives are central to some concrete practices of public reasoning. It concludes with some thoughts on the necessity of publicly reasoning through rather than independently of our deepest commitments.

‘Bound by recognition’1: some thoughts on professional designation for teachers

A recent move in the effort to professionalize teaching has been a call for a professional designation for teachers in some Canadian jurisdictions. While teacher certification or licensure seeks to protect public interest and is concerned about professionalism – the quality of teachers' work – professional designation is concerned with public recognition of teachers' professional status, that is, acknowledgement of the legitimacy of the intellectual and ethical location from which teachers act – teachers' identities. While not wishing to argue for or against professional designation per se, I do want to reveal a certain predicament that results when the teaching profession becomes ‘bound by recognition’ (Markell, 2003). The predicament relates to the limits of identity: in the context of recognitive encounters with others, human beings constantly exceed and frustrate prior identifications, often contradicting their own expressed and deepest commitments. What then, one may ask, is the use value of recognition for the profession?

Self-Censorship in Public Discourse

Uncertainty about what motivates “senders” of public messages leads “receivers” to “read between the lines” to discern the sender's deepest commitments. Anticipating this, senders “write between the lines,” editing their expressions so as to further their own ends. I examine how this interactive process of inference and deceit affects the quality and extent of public deliberations on sensitive issues. A principle conclusion is that genuine moral discourse on difficult social issues can become impossible when the risks of upsetting some portion of one's audience are too great. Reliance on euphemism and platitude should be expected in this strategic climate. Groups may embark on a tragic course of action, believed by many at the outset to be ill-conceived, but that has become impossible to criticize.

The Unimportance of Semantics

Our deepest commitments about history are reflected in how we break it down into periods. (Cf. Galison 1988) By drawing a break at a certain point we emphasize the novelty and importance of a new development. It is also how we contain and dismiss certain work as no longer relevant. Thus, in the history of physics we break the story with Newton, both to emphasize his roles in bringing previous developments to a close and in initiating new lines of work, and also to suggest that the ongoing practice of physics thereafter can appropriately in large measure ignore what preceeds Newton. Periodizing history is essential to understanding it, including when we periodize the work of a given writer. In philosophy, anyone who did not see a gulf between Kant’s early work and his critical philosophy or between Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and his Philosophical Investigations would be missing something enormously important.

Never Again? Zionism and the Holocaust

a Jew I believe the creation of Israel to have been an absolute necessity. a Marxist committed to the struggle for human liberation-that is, as a human being-I am convinced that the creation of Israel is among the cruel and oppressive acts of the incredibly cruel twentieth century. As a Jew, As a Marxist-such moral and political double-shuffling is the way one would prefer to talk. But the desired consistency of a single voice eludes me if I write and speak honestly today. I cannot help identifying myself in some way with Israel in my heart of hearts much as I grieve and rage over what its creation has meant to the Palestinian people. I have tried to detach myself, but in doing so turned my Marxism into ideology, abstract and rhetorical. I have identified with the Palestinians against the Israelis, for long periods, only to see that identification break down. During the Yom Kippur War in 1973, when, for a moment, it seemed that Israel itself might be threatened, I was awakened by fear and panic I had never before known. To such an extent that I behaved unaccustomedly: I contributed money to an Israeli emergency medical relief fund which while not for military purposes could not, in wartime, be anything but help for one of the belligerents. Indeed, help for what had become the wrong side by the canons of national liberation and anti-imperialism which were and are part of my very political and cultural breathing space. I admit this neither with pride nor shame, merely as a fact which emphasizes the internal tension and apparent moral inconsistency Israel's existence imposes on so many. I insist on the word moral. Indeed this essay will be an exploration of the Israeli moral position in relation to the Holocaust. Marxists frequently pretend to be unconcerned with issues of political morality, but in doing so are obfuscating their own deepest commitments. Indeed, perhaps more than others Marxists constantly pass moral judgments on political events, even if cloaking them with the claim to merely evaluate facts and tendencies. Marxism reflects our commitment to the oppressed against the oppressors, both nurtures and structures our determination to reverse domination and exploitation. It does so by seeing such struggles as the moving force of history, and by providing us with keys to understand both the larger process and its details. It is, finally, both science and morality, guide to understanding, judging, and acting. such, whether explicitly or not, it treats as central questions of political morality such as the rightness of Israeli Jewish and Palestinian Arab claims.

American Democracy: The View From Scotland, 1776–1832

The American democratic model was utilized by Scottish reformers and conservatives who saw in American events a confirmation of their own ideas and hopes. The ideals articulated by the American Revolution and the political institutions created in the new nation were analyzed as matters that impinged on the deepest commitments of Scottish intellectuals. Conservatives perceived America as a threat to the stability and continuance of British political tradition, which they saw as dependent upon the preservation of Scotland's distinctive national past. The American experience was significant to reformers of all persuasions because it invested their discursive thought with a reality it had not known before. Yet American principles and precepts were not determinative, but rather were used to convey certain carefully selected ideas. As Adam Ferguson, one of Scotland's brightest enlightenment minds, noted, “If nations actually borrow from their neighbors, they probably borrow only what they are nearly in a condition to have invented themselves.” America was useful to Scottish political thinkers because Britain was ready to “invent” her own political forms.The differences that divided Scotland's most articulate political writers were fundamental. The conservatives firmly believed that man's brutish nature required restraints, an established church, a balanced hierarchical social-political order, and stability. Radical Scots argued that with freedom and democratic institutions society would be humane and prosperous. Reformers spoke out against the worst social evils: they advocated Catholic emancipation, abolition of the slave trade, an end to flogging in the army and navy, prison reform and, in 1832, the extension of the franchise to the middle class.

America as a Model for the Radical French Reformers of 1789

HE American Revolution created a sentimental bond between the new American nation and French reformers who saw in American events a confirmation of their own ideas. With the philosophy of the Enlightenment they could lift the American Revolution out of its provincial context, and the American Revolution in turn invested their discursive thought with a reality it had not known before. Because the FrancoAmerican alliance protected the publication of American works from the customary ban on foreign political writings, French reformers were able to make the first real breach in government censorship. Several European periodicals catered to the demand for news of America, and translations of the American state constitutions circulated widely.' After the Declaration of Independence one French writer after another took up his pen to analyze the significance of the American Revolution, debating small points of American political forms as matters that impinged on his deepest commitments. Not a book on America was printed between I775 and I790 but ended with a sort of homily, Bernard Fay observed.2 The obvious need for changes in the superannuated Bourbon monarchy had turned many prominent Frenchmen into reformers. Outwardly they were working for specific goals-penal reform, abolition of slavery, religious toleration, freedom of the press-but implicitly their activity suggested the need for the liberalization of French public life. Able men were eager to apply the knowledge of their enlightened age to the prob-