ascetic ideal
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2021 ◽  
pp. 45-70
Author(s):  
Richard B. Miller

This chapter critically examines the work of Jonathan Z. Smith and the Interpretive-Comparative Method for studying religion. It unpacks Smith’s ideas about theory and method and shows how they instantiate the guild’s ascetic ideal in the study of religion. It describes three signature ideas in his approach, noting in particular Smith’s silence about matters of purpose when theorizing about method. It then describes how he mobilizes his ideas in his treatment of the mass suicide in Jonestown, Guyana with the aim of overcoming incomprehension surrounding that event by invoking a method of interpretive and comparative reasoning. Drawing on the ideas of Peter Strawson, the chapter shows what a critical humanistic assessment of Jonestown would look like in contrast to Smith’s reading of them, focusing on the experience of indignation at injustice and the tragic loss of life at Jonestown.


2021 ◽  
pp. 127-146
Author(s):  
Richard B. Miller

This chapter critically examines the Materialist-Phenomenological Method for studying religion and the work of the sociologist of religion Manuel A. Vásquez. This method focuses on the study of embodied religious practices, visual cultures, vernacular idioms, and particular locales as these are studied according to historical and often ethnographic methods of analysis. The chapter interrogates Vásquez’s work More than Belief: A Materialist Theory of Religion, which proffers a “somatocentric” theory that aims to escape the legacy of Cartesian dualism. The chapter raises questions about Vásquez’s philosophical anthropology and shows how he repeats and reinforces the firewall separating the study of religion from reasons for studying it. In More than Belief, the chapter shows, one encounters the fact-value dualism that underwrites the ascetic ideal in religious studies, one so thoroughgoing that it prevents Vásquez from grasping the need to provide philosophical reasons to justify his theory.


2021 ◽  
pp. 3-17
Author(s):  
Richard B. Miller

This chapter takes up the question whether the study of religion can be justified and indicates why scholars of religion deny themselves reasons for tackling that question. It uses as its point of departure Max Weber’s lecture, “Science as a Vocation” as articulating a methodological standard for studying religion, one that privileges value-neutrality and avows an “ascetic ideal” (following Nietzsche). It is argued that this ideal poses obstacles to making justificatory claims on behalf of studying religion and fortifies a repressive scholarly conscience in the field’s regime of truth. The chapter adds that this conscience is not entirely repressive and notes the presence of quixotic, haphazard appeals to normative ideals that materialize in the study of religion. Lastly, it sketches the book’s alternative to the ascetic ideal and describes ideas from moral philosophy that inform the book’s critical and constructive argument.


Author(s):  
С.В. АРХИПОВА

Целью статьи является рассмотрение последовательно сменявших друг друга форм аскетического идеала в Египте, способствовавших переходу от античных социокультурных ориентиров к новой системе христианских общественно значимых ценностей и норм. Во II в. до н.э. парадоксы крайних воплощений религиозной аскезы, чуждые традиционной египетской ментальности, вызывали негативную реакцию со стороны приверженцев общепринятых мировоззренческих стереотипов, которая проявлялась в актах варварской агрессии. По мере смещения мировоззренческих парадигм к христианству смещался и вектор агрессии: в III–IV вв. ее объектами становились уже сторонники прежних стереотипов. Являясь, с одной стороны, выражением экзистенциального кризиса своего времени, египетские аскезы в то же время несли в себе мощный цивилизационный потенциал, включивший механизм перехода общественного сознания от Поздней Античности к Раннему Средневековью. Инверсия варварства и цивилизации в оценках этих исторических процессов современниками и последующими поколениями была неизбежна. В сплаве идей, представлений, общественных ориентиров и ценностей выкристаллизовывался вектор развития будущего христианского культурного сообщества, породившего в качестве своего стержня явление монашества с его социальной ролью «патрона», «заступника» и «посредника», характерной для позднеантичного сознания и перепереосмысленной в рамках новой системы ценностей. Однако без ранней формы аскезы катохов, воплотивших первоначальный аскетический идеал, эволюционный скачок в истории мировоззрений был бы невозможен. Ни в российской ни в зарубежной научной литературе не освещалась историческая роль катохов и не рассматривались египетские аскезы в аспекте их взаимосвязи. The purpose of the article is to consider the successive forms of the ascetic ideal in Egypt, which contributed to the transition from ancient socio-cultural guidelines to a new system of Christian socially significant values and norms. In the second century BC, the paradoxes of extreme embodiments of religious asceticism, alien to the traditional Egyptian mentality, caused a negative reaction from adherents of generally accepted ideological stereotypes, which was manifested in acts of barbaric aggression. As the worldview paradigms shifted to Christianity, the vector of aggression also shifted: in the III–IV centuries its objects were already supporters of the previous stereotypes. Being, on the one hand, an expression of the existential crisis of their time, Egyptian asceticism at the same time carried a powerful civilizational potential, which included a mechanism for the transition of public consciousness from Late Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages. The inversion of barbarism and civilization in the assessments of these historical processes by contemporaries and subsequent generations was inevitable. In the fusion of ideas, ideas, social guidelines and values, the vector of development of the future Christian cultural community was crystallized, which gave rise to the phenomenon of monasticism as its core, with its social role of “patron”, “intercessor” and “mediator”, characteristic of the late Antique consciousness and reinterpreted within the framework of a new system of values. However, without the early form of asceticism of the Catholics, who embodied the original ascetic ideal, an evolutionary leap in the history of worldviews would have been impossible. Neither Russian nor foreign scientific literature has covered the historical role of the Catholics and has not considered Egyptian asceticism in the aspect of their relationship.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Stephen Mulhall

In the Introduction I offer a selective summary of the argument of Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morality, placing particular emphasis on my interpretation of the genealogical method that it defines and employs, and on two of that method’s constituent features: its indebtedness to the value system it is used to criticize, and its inherent susceptibility to genealogical development. This allows me to introduce and justify the nature of my own attempt to elaborate upon Nietzsche’s concluding treatment of the ascetic ideal to include cultural developments after his death.


2021 ◽  
pp. 99-181
Author(s):  
Stephen Mulhall

This chapter focuses on the relation between philosophy, biography, and autobiography, as a way of tracking how the ascetic ideal informs our thinking about our relation to ourselves, and so about selfhood in general. Certain ascetic ideas about the possibility of self-identity and truthful self-characterization are shown to crop up throughout modern treatments of autobiographical theory and practice, and to generate opposition and criticism. The work of MacIntyre, Sartre, and Heidegger provides a general framework for navigating this part of the territory of life-writing; and the recent autobiographical trilogy by J. M. Coetzee is examined as a site within which ascetic practices of confession are developed, criticized, and then turned against themselves.


Author(s):  
Stephen Mulhall

This book develops a reading of Nietzsche’s concept of ‘the ascetic ideal’, through which he tracks the evolution, mutation, and expansion of the system of slave moral values that he associates primarily with Judaeo-Christian religious belief through diverse fields of Western European culture—not just religion and morality, but aesthetics, science, and philosophy. The work of Stanley Cavell and Michael Fried, and its impact in the philosophy of film and literature, is central here, as is J. M.Coetzee’s on the philosophy of autobiography; Martin Heidegger’s critique of science and technology is also addressed. In so doing it also offers an interpretation of his genealogical method that aims to rebut standard criticisms of its nature, and to emphasize its potential for enhancing philosophical understanding more generally. The focus throughout is on developments in those fields which occurred after the end of Nietzsche’s intellectual career, and in particular on influential modes of thought and practice that have a contemporary significance. However, the goal is not simply to argue that Nietzsche’s diagnosis and critique retain considerable merit. It is also to show that Nietzsche is himself significantly indebted to the ideals he criticizes; and that this opens up a possibility of synthesizing elements of his approach with those drawn from its target. Hence, the book also tracks various ways in which the object of Nietzsche’s criticism has further mutated (just as his genealogical method would suggest), and in doing so has generated ways of pursuing the values central to asceticism that avoid Nietzsche’s criticisms.


2021 ◽  
pp. 18-98
Author(s):  
Stephen Mulhall

This chapter tracks the ascetic ideal from its religious point of origin to some of its key manifestations in the realms of morality and aesthetics. It relates Nietzsche’s original critique to Kierkegaard’s critical advocacy of Christianity, and uses Cavell to show how the latter can help us to understand twentieth-century artistic modernism as genealogically related to religious and moral concerns. It also argues that contemporary debates between moral individualists and moral philosophers influenced by Wittgenstein (such as Raimond Gaita and Cora Diamond) can be understood as arguments over contemporary manifestations of the ascetic ideal in both religion and morality. The central themes of the chapter are then brought together in a reading of a novel by William Golding.


2021 ◽  
pp. 182-298
Author(s):  
Stephen Mulhall

The first half of this chapter is an exercise in the philosophy of film, which treats Christopher Nolan’s body of cinematic work as Nietzsche treats a Wagner opera in the final essay of the Genealogy—as a key cultural site at which the complex interaction of the elements of the ascetic ideal play themselves out. The second half takes the analysis into the realms of science and philosophy: taking orientation from certain of Nietzsche’s claims about how modern philosophy adopts a scientistic stance, it weaves together these suggestions with some complex and controversial arguments advanced by the later Heidegger, to defend the idea that our contemporary age is best understood as the age of technology, and how this has informed and deformed some central cultural projects—in art, particularly the advent of modernist painting and its continuation in contemporary photographic practices; and in philosophy, in its treatment of secondary qualities, and more generally in its willingness to regard physics as metaphysics.


The Agonist ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 15-24
Author(s):  
Lawrence J. Hatab

Living in the time of a pandemic, where illness has become a prominent concern, it might do well to consider Nietzsche’s thinking on sickness and health, which is far from a clear-cut delineation and calls for careful and circumspect analysis. I begin by distinguishing three types of sickness and health: physical, psychological, and cultural, where health in each type can initially be understood as flourishing unimpaired by sickness. Physical illness involves some infirmity of the body, such as cancer or viral infection. Psychological illness is some malady of the mind, such as depression. Cultural illness is the kind of thing emphasized by Nietzsche and involves a worldview that is symptomatic of life denial and nihilism when measured against natural life instincts, energies, and needs—for instance, the story Nietzsche tells about slave morality and its production of the ascetic ideal that has contaminated Western thought.


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