The benefits and risks of strategic genealogy and dichotomy

This contribution to a symposium on Manuel A. Vásquez’ More Than Belief: A Materialist Theory of Religion (2011) looks at the role of genealogy in the book. Vásquez reviews a range of authors (from Plato to Tweed) to contextualize his view that the study of religion should place greater emphasis on embodiment, practices, and emplacement. The resulting sequence of paraphrases is highly dichotomized; some illustrate the 'dominant canon' that he critiques and some the view that he champions. This is used to illustrate two very broad 'epistemologies.' (In this light, the book champions a very general meta-theoretical stance, not a specific theory.) I suggest that this approach does not offer an argument, i.e., independent rational support, for Vásquez' view. However, it does tell a story that could be very persuasive in the study of religion, given that the use of theory in the discipline tends to be a matter of applying precedents and concepts from an accepted body of literature.     

Life,the Unhistorical,the Suprahistorical: Nietzsche on History

Abstract

Nietzsche was a philosopher who prided himself, in deliberate contradistinction with previous philosophers, on his ‘historical sense’. But this leaves many questions unanswered about the precise role of the historical in Nietzsche’s philosophy. Perhaps most importantly, can the conception of genealogy in Nietzsche’s later philosophy, as a revised historical method, be taken to represent his mature philosophical methodology in general? I argue, firstly, that there is considerable continuity between Nietzsche’s conceptions of history in the early essay ‘On the uses and disadvantages of history for life’ and those of his later philosophy. The former can therefore be used as a resource for understanding the latter. Through a reading of the early history essay I demonstrate that Nietzsche’s conception of the historical here is intimately bound up with the notion of the ‘unhistorical’ and that it is precisely renewed access to the unhistorical which is required in order for history to be conducive to the flourishing of humanity. I go on to contend that this holds for Nietzsche’s later writings as well, and that genealogy, being purely historical, must therefore be seen as one subsidiary part of a broader philosophy in which the unhistorical will play, literally, a vital role.     

Averintsev’s Archipelago: Towards Understanding the Era of Post-Atheism

Drawing on MacIntyre’s encyclopaedia–genealogy–tradition typology of the humanities, the author describes Averintsev’s project as bringing together the elements of encyclopaedia and tradition. The article identifies three forms of isolationism which are evident not only in ‘post-atheistic’ societies but more widely, and comments on Averintev’s treatment of these.     

On the value of genealogy,materiality, and networks: a response

In response to the challenges posed by Steven Engler, Martha Finch, Mark Gardiner, Laura Harrington, Paul Johnson, and Michael Stausberg, this essay fleshes out key terms in More than Belief (2011), including genealogy, materialism, non-reductionism, and networks, showing their value in researching and theorizing about religion.     

The objects of American religious studies

Disciplinary retrospectives on American religious studies have come over the last several decades to center on a single turning point, a decisive and expansive reformation of the object of scholars’ attentions. In a nutshell, somewhere between the 1970s and 1980s a vanguard among us began at last to leave off writing about white, northeastern, Protestant men and to write instead about everybody: more religions, more relations to religion, more of what counts as religion in the first place. Even as it lies at the animating heart of our disciplinary self-appraisals, however, this narrative turn from Protestantism to pluralism in American religious studies seems itself peculiarly resistant to analysis. This essay proposes that we revisit the dialectic between ‘oneness’ and ‘manyness’ in American religious history and historiography. In particular, it urges that we bring scrutiny to bear on the ways that our newer narratives of religious pluralism in America come to be spliced within a more longstanding and resilient metanarrative rooted in American Protestantism.     

Nietzsche’s pragmatic genealogy of justice

This paper analyses the connection between Nietzsche’s early employment of the genealogical method and contemporary neo-pragmatism. The paper has two goals. On the one hand, by viewing Nietzsche’s writings in the light of neo-pragmatist ideas and reconstructing his approach to justice as a pragmatic genealogy, it seeks to bring out an under-appreciated aspect of his genealogical method which illustrates how genealogy can be used to vindicate rather than to subvert, and accounts for Nietzsche’s lack of historical references. On the other hand, by highlighting what Nietzsche has to offer neo-pragmatism, it seeks to contribute to neo-pragmatism’s conception of genealogy. The paper argues that Nietzsche and the neo-pragmatists share a naturalistic concern and a pragmatist strategy in responding to it. The paper then shows that Nietzsche avoids a reductive form of functionalism by introducing a temporal axis, but that this axis should be understood as a developmental model rather than as historical time. This explains Nietzsche’s failure to engage with history. The paper concludes that pragmatic genealogy can claim a genuinely Nietzschean pedigree.     

NATURALISM AND THE CATEGORIES “SCIENCE” AND “RELIGION”: A RESPONSE TO JOSH REEVES

This article is a response to Josh Reeve's “A Defense of Science and Religion.” I begin with the disclaimer that this was not solely my project but a joint enterprise. A common commitment of participants was to make the disciplines of history and theology central to the discussion and explore what new possibilities follows for the field of science and religion. I then address Reeves's two central concerns: first that I am too dismissive of the categories “science” and “religion.” In fact I have not advocated dispensing with these categories, but have insisted than we employ them critically and with a sense of their history. The second concern is that my position on naturalism seems to place me perilously close to advocates of ID or scientific creationism. I deny this, but point out that more work needs to be done, beyond simply invoking methodological naturalism, to clarify the differences between naturalistic and theological approaches to the world.     

The individualization of conscience: what Daybreak (9, 10, 544) and The Gay Science (117) tell us about the sovereign individual

ABSTRACT

The figure of the sovereign individual has stood for about two decades at the center of an exegetical debate concerning its identity and ideality. What is often lost sight of in these debates is the role of the sovereign individual in Nietzsche’s genealogy of guilt and bad conscience in the Genealogy’s second essay. I argue for the following claims. First, that the figure of the sovereign individual is not a singular occurrence in Nietzsche’s published writings but is present in sections from Daybreak and The Gay Science that have not been pursued in this context in the Anglophone literature; sections that shed new light on the sovereign individual. Second, that examination of these texts reveals that the sovereign individual is for Nietzsche embodied by Socrates and the Socratic individual. Third, and most importantly, that with the sovereign individual there emerges individualized conscience – the capacity for self-laceration that concerns one’s misdeeds alone and involves the belief that one’s misdeeds are entirely one’s own individual fault, rather than the fault of the community or the gods. A fourth, rather negative consequence, is that at the end of the day Nietzsche, in the Genealogy, does not manage to provide us with a genealogy of moral guilt.