The Beginning of Historicism: Chladenius & Möser

Johann Martin Chladenius and Justus Möser are two names that one does not hear in many households (especially the ones inhabited by Anglo-Americans).  However, in Beiser's new book on the German Historicist tradition, he makes the claim that these two are the grandfathers of Historicism. This is important because most  begin with Herder.


So what is so significant about both of them?  They both begin to look at history outside of simple confessional history or the history of the elite.  They also notice the importance of context and perspective in viewing the past. Because of their attention to history some may place them outside of the eighteenth century Enlightenment and see them as forerunners of nineteenth century movements.

Möser especially deserves mention here because he rejects Wolffian rationalism for its emphasis on reason and turns to the action and emotions of real historical actors. Chladenius seems to turn away from the relativism and perspectivism that may form from a historicist understanding of history because of his orthodox Lutheranism.  All in all, they are both pioneers in asking critical, modern questions about history.

Barth's Nietzschean View of History

I am half way done with Richard E. Burnett's book Karl Barth's Theological Exegesis.  The main reason I am reading this book is because he spends a fair amount of time describing what Barth's reading style (his hermeneutics) is like.  He does this by seeing Barth's Romans (I and II) as breaking from the hermeneutical tradition of Friedrich Schleiermacher and Wilhelm Dilthey and also the higher criticism of his contemporaries.

The Eureka moment I had is when Burnett pointed out that Barth quotes (in his unpublished preface to Romans) Nietzsche's book The Use and Abuse of History.   Here is the quote (see page 114):

"You may only interpret the past out of the highest power of the present: only in the strongest efforts of your noblest qualities will you divinize what in the past is great, worth knowing and preserving.  Like through like!    Or else you will pull the past down to yourself!  It is the mature and preeminent man who writes history.  He that has not passed through some greater and nobler experience than his contemporaries will be incapable of interpreting the greatness and nobility of the past. The voices of the past speak in oracles; and only the master of the present and the architect of the future can hope to decipher their meaning."

This helps one of my recent points (which is probably not too original) that Barth follows in the genealogy with Nietzsche's and Burckhardt's school of history.  For these three, they held a skeptical view of the progressive reading of history at the end of the nineteenth century, and they wanted a separation between science (its appeal to objective, detachment) and the other disciplines in the humanities.  Following this quote, Barth appeals to Nietzsche in the way the dynamic between the past and present is important for practicing history; thus, their is no detachment with regard to the past.

Prepping for Spring Semester 2013:On History

I have been away from the blogging game for a few months while I wrapped up Chapter 2 of the dissertation.  Here are a few things I have on my agenda for the coming year:

The relationship between what historians call micro-history and macro-history, social-cultural history and just general trends in historiography.  I am assigning some Jared Diamond and then some Robert Darnton/Natalie Zemon Davis/W. E. B. Du Bois to illustrate some of the differences.  Also, attached to this debate is the role of German historicism and its attention to historical hermeneutics.  I definitely have Burnett's book on Barth's early hermeneutics in mind.  German historicism is a subject that is ill defined especially in the English speaking world, so I plan to read what I can on exactly what was at the heart of this movement and where Barth fits in this world (or how he fights against it).  Some of the figures I want to cover are: Droysen, Rickert, Troeltsch, Dilthey, Meinecke, Cassirer, and Heidegger.

I wrote a lot on Deleuze during my early doctoral seminars, and I am looking to create something out of that research since it is not particularly relevant to my dissertation.  I'm thinking about looking at Fernand Braudel's book On History as a catalyst for comparisons (since Deleuze does refer to Braudel from time to time).  My educated hunch would be both have a view that tries not to favor the anthropocentric viewpoint.  Part of the challenge is to teach World Civilizations as less the struggle of important characters and events, but to look at long periods of time to establish why things changed over time and why some things stayed the same.  In order to do this correctly, some argue, is to downplay the human element.  My first step toward this is to lean on the interpretations of Kenneth Pomeranz and Robert Marks and the popular work of Jared Diamond.

To wrap things up, I want to correlate all this stuff on history and ask how does this translate over to my work at my local church or in theological discourse.

The good thing is that I have spaced out my doctoral work to give me more time to potentially write a journal article or two, be better prepared for lectures and enjoy the birth of my second son!!!

Jack Goody on the Other

Some sound advice from anthropologist/historian Jack Goody:

"We need always to be on our guard against the misrepresentation of others, whether of the Oriental other or of the other next door (or even the other in our own house).  The total avoidance of misrepresentation may well be beyond our capacities.  But that is no reason for withdrawing from the task, especially since the process of representing the other will continue, whatever we think or do about it.  School children will be taught history and adults will make judgments about other cultures.  It is surely our task in the Universities and elsewhere (or one of our tasks) to make certain those products and those judgments are the best that it is within our power to make: not to conclude, as some have done, that the way out is to throw up one's hands in despair or to take refuge in the indulgence of frankly fictional or personalized accounts.  That may be a way out; it is no way forward." 

Gary Dorrien's new book on Kant's influence on Modern Theology

A brand new book is out that features the way theologians wrestled with joining the Enlightenment(s) and Christian theology.  For Dorrien, Kant is the main thread to the story that covers both Schleiermacher's and Hegel's reaction to Kant along with the later reaction from Barth.  If you want to really understand Barth's program, you must know Kant (and Hegel too)...

Dorrien is known for his work on social-theological ethics and a great book on Barth's theology, as well.  The asking price for the book is over $100 bones, so I'm hoping to get a hold of a library copy soon.

Status of Summer work...

Since my work has taken the turn to the historical, I thought that this would increase the amount of time it would take for me to finish this bloody dissertation thing. Instead I am about 55 pages completed with three other chapters on the horizon. Here is some of the progress of my work:

 I have explored the work of recent theologians and philosophers for the last couple of years thinking about how this actually has helped my overall work.  First, struggling with concepts is rewarding in and of itself, but what my reading of thinkers like Zizek, Agamben and others have taught me is that they are often leaning on older thinkers within the philosophical tradition. The main figures, who are obviously having an impact on theological thought today, are, for me, Hegel and Spinoza. One of the things I have taken from both philosophers is that, one, labeling them in a particular school is hard and sometimes anachronistic, and, two, I found that it is better to see their historical impact and appreciate their contribution than to whine and complain about how they took things down a wrong turn or that they need to somehow be overcome. Their discussion of theological matters has had an important impact in all factors of human thought (see Jonathan Israel's majestic work if you think Spinoza is not important).

 Again, exploring the history of this tradition (and yes, I think one can see a flow from Spinoza to Schleiermacher and Hegel) has moved the trajectory on how we have historically thought about God, among other things. One can judge the merits of this turn, but, as I just start to wrestle with this history, I must admit that I stand with a certain awe of the so-called Spinozian line and the way Hegel wrestled with post-Kantian thought.  Hegel and Spinoza are very difficult thinkers that need real dedication to understand their ideas, but I have a feeling that the payoff is extremely rewarding.

 Where does Barth fit in? Well, for some who follow the neo-orthodox argument he really does not, because he is anti-modern; but if Bruce McCormack's recent interpretation of modern theology is correct then it helps lead Barth to a more actualistic understanding of God, which is very modern because it is built around a terminology that came from both Spinoza and Hegel (and Kant).  I think that my driving point here has been to articulate a thoroughly Protestant theology and to see an intellectual history that moves from the late seventeenth century into the twentieth century.  However, even against a certain Barthianism, I want to follow a sort of German tradition that notes how much Barth inherited his ideas from the nineteenth century tradition he is so noted for taking on.

It's all Nominalism's Fault???

Part of my dissertation preparation is to read as many books on the "theological" origins of modernity like the recent books by Michael Allen Gillespie and Joshua Mitchell.  In other words, to look at books and essays that note how important religious issues were at the beginning of modernity until the present.  Even the Enlightenment itself was a contest of competing religious options and not simply the triumph of science and rationality over superstition (even though it was probably the French that popularized this particular narrative).

I guess in some cases of popular wisdom, religion has ceased to be a major factor in the continual quest of Western societies quest for modernization.  However, research has shown that the narrative that says religion will be passed by because of growing secularization is a myth.

Now the more and more I read about this issue, the more and more I come to the conclusion that 1) religion is here to stay because it is adaptable (much like many other things in society-see Giddens post on tradition) and 2) in many cases, the religious element has learned to correspond with the secular elements quite well.  In short, it is a very complex relationship between the secular and religious forces.

The problem with books by theorists like Gillespie and others is the need to boil down this complexity to a single, overarching problem.  He claims that it was the Nominalism of Ockham, later inherited by Luther, that led Western society into secularization.  Now Gillespie joins a host of other thinkers (not typically historians, I might add) like Milbank and the RO, who lay blame for modernization at Nominalism.

A recent discussion with George Hunsinger led me to see this move toward the Nominalist bogeyman to be a traditionalist account of modernization.  In other words, when one pulls out the Nominalist card it usually is a catchword for "Catholic" defense of religious traditionalism where the Church is still the controlling center of society (I detect even some of this in Protestant thinkers like Pannenberg).  The fact that modernization and secularization has decreased religious influence in society is frowned upon by many of this group, but I think otherwise.  There is still religious influence in society, sometimes it crosses over the church/state borders, but again, I think that is due to its complexity and in a democratic society with competing structures, it is up to its subjects to work the messiness out.

Finally, of course Nominalism had a part to play in the beginning of modernity, but I do not think it had the central part.

Danto on History: The Importance of Narrative

"Our incapacity, which is granted, to observe the past, is not a defect in history itself, but a deficiency which it is the precise purpose of history to overcome."

"History has been the central category of my philosophy, and the way we define our experience through narrative structures - through stories. The thing about stories is that we don't know how they are going to turn out, and how different the beginning is going to look to us when we see how it all ended. Philosophers mainly get hung up on the connection between consciousness and the brain, but my interest is in the historical structure of consciousness - how the consciousness of someone living in the thirteenth century has to have been different from the consciousness of someone living as we do in the twenty-first century."

Ankersmit on Historians

"I wanted to cut through all ties with literary theory and why, without changing conceptually or theoretically, I preferred to replace the term narrative by  representation.  Representation is a neutral term. I think it also quite adequately describes what an historian does – he gives a representation of the past in the sense of making the past present again. That is why we need historical writing. A representation is not necessarily a narrative; you have the so called cross-sectional studies, the famous example being Jacob Burckhardt's Die Cultur der Renaissance in Italien or Huizinga's The waning of the middle ages or Braudel's on the Mediterranean world. They do not tell a story, they do not give us a narrative with a certain beginning, middle and end, but they are historical works representing the past."


"This is why the epistemological situation in which you find yourself when having to do with truth no longer exist when it comes to representation. You cannot say of representations that they are true. What you can say is that one representation is in a certain sense better than another and it is the task of the philosophy of history to clarify how one can be better in one way or another. And that is what I try to do with the notion of metaphor."


"Historians are swamped by historical truths – and this is how it ought to be. The more truths we have about the past, the better the historian's representations of the past may become."

LaCapra: Intellectual History

If I had to define the method that I am most comfortable with, I would probably place myself within the Intellectual History tradition.  This tradition has come under fire for being too philosophical or not contextual enough, but I think it has much to offer multiple disciplines.  The author I will be leaning on for help to describe this method is Dominick LaCapra.  LaCapra is famous for his work on Intellectual History and his work on the Holocaust; some of the questions he raises is on how historians can show empathy for their subjects like in a topic as grave as the Holocaust.  Much of the information below is found in Elizabeth Clark's book History, Theory, Text.

LaCapra describes Intellectual History as "a history of the situated uses of language constitutive of significant texts."  He criticizes a documentary historiographical approach (this includes both social and economic historians) to texts as positivism; he notes that historical documents are never simply just "there" to read.  His point is to ask what do these text really do. Oftentimes the move is to read everything per context or authorial intention and thus the text takes a backseat to the context.  However, context itself is something that also needs interpretation.  Another factor to take into consideration are those traces in a text of what is actually left unsaid.   LaCapra therefore focuses on the place where contexts and texts come into relation with each other.  Clark notes that what is so helpful about LaCapra's method is that his concern for language does not compromise the importance of good research practices.  Therefore, better reading methods with regards to a more nuanced reading of the context/text and the way the historian actually reads them combined with typical research methods of archival work, and attention to primary and secondary works is the method that seems to form here.

Jungel on History, Barth and the Election

"If it is truly the case that the reality and truth of God's revelation is comprehensive and self-contained in all respects, then it must also be the case that this revelation brings its own historical location, its own reality in space and time.  Note that the revelation establishes its location as a historical location, its reality as an earthly reality.  There is nothing ghostly or ethereal about the revelation.  History becomes an authentic predicate of revelation.  But the revelation brings its own history, seeking to be historically real and effective for us.  This is what Karl Barth calls election."  See Karl Barth: A Theological Legacy, pg 129

Which Enlightenment?

The time period known as the Enlightenment is probably one of the most controversial moments in human history. One learns a lot about a person's belief system in hearing their own feelings about it. When I teach the subject I introduce it in a couple of ways.

1. Understand the Enlightenment from location. This means that one understands the Enlightenment by studying how it took place in England, Scotland, France, Germany, etc. In short, instead of collapsing all the varieties of the Enlightenment under this blanket term one tries to view it per certain local, social-political issues per each culture. One of the problems with this view is that it oftentimes sees the Enlgish/American Enlightenment as superior to the French because the French led into the Terror of the French Revolution. However, this is to deny overlap of ideas from the perspective cultures.

2. Understand the Enlightenment per Radical versus Moderate. This view (see Jonathan Israel's work) tends to see an ignored strand of thinking starting from Spinoza that pushed for real equality and real freedom of thought for all; Spinoza and his naturalist followers like Diderot are the heroes while Voltaire and Locke are moderates who want to keep some type of political/religious tradition because of their elitism. The best from the radical elements of the French Revolution are thus the extension of Spinoza's and others thought. This is somewhat a revisionist take that probably reads too much Spinoza into the history of thought (Spinoza was influential but perhaps not as much as Israel would like). It also tends to be the view that pure secularism is the only true Enlightenment and so those who are not atheist, egalitarian democrats are deemed half-hearted or duplicitous.

3. Understand the Enlightenment as a war against Christianity. This view sees modernity as an anti-God view that propels modernity in its secular ways. I would call this the typical Evangelical view (what I learned as a kid). This view is right in that traditions were debated and criticized. However, there is definitely a religious tradition within the Enlightenment (see those Israel calls moderate or counter-Enlightenment and David Sorkin's work). Simply way too simplistic in saying these "religious" thinkers were not serious or "real" Christians in wrestling with modern thought and ancient traditions without falling into naturalism or pure anti-Trinitarians.

4. Understand the Enlightenment via Postmodern critiques. This view sees the so-called power-plays of Enlightenment thinkers via European superiority and imperialism/colonialism. In short, Reason equals reason via white, European male and not for other races. This view again probably fails in not noticing the diversity of thinkers but makes us aware of just how racist/sexist these thinkers really were. It also suffers in that the critiques of Enlightenment thinkers are carried out by the very methods formed by the Enlightenment.

Well those are 4 generalized readings of the Enlightenment. From Adorno's view that Enlightenment Reason led to 20th Century disasters to Darnton's view that philosophy books were not even the principal means that led to reforms and changes in society, the Enlightenment is a contested time period. Honestly we cannot escape its shadow. The models are not perfect but are at the most part helpful in describing how people see the Enlightenment from different perspectives.

I believe the pragmatic view about the Enlightenment is to take the reformist view. It is to understand that the time was ripe then and now for reforming traditions and society-that progress is a healthy option for every society. I currently think that Rousseau might be the hero of the Enlightenment (an extremely flawed hero). There is enough balance to his look backward at Athens/Sparta as models (a pretty consistent staple of the "moderates") while at the same time pushing for a democratic impulse in current society. I also think a tempered secularism is something that must be fought for. In some sense Spinoza was on to something, but the problem is in trying to see how much he is the true inspiration for democratic-egalitarian movements. The other problem is in seeing our own concepts of liberty, freedom and equality today as it matches up with the Enlightenment. Does it really match up all that well or do we simply pick figures and thinkers we like and make them say what we want them to say?

Wanting to Follow Rorty

I have never read a book or article by the American philosopher Richard Rorty. The primary reason for avoiding Rorty is because I usually read all things Continental. However, from discussions Rorty had with Gianni Vattimo over belief and truth, I decided to purchase a small book by Rorty (published posthumously from a lecture with excellent introductions and conclusions of the book) on Religion.

What I found from the book is that Rorty writes and thinks like an American. What do I mean by that? Well, because to summarize Rorty is to say he is a pragmatist, who believes the best society is utilitarian based on liberal democracy. In short, liberal democracy creates a "public" space for debate and discussion for the betterment of the greatest amount of happiness for the "we" of the nation. Utilitarianism (from the thought of Mill) is a philosophy that aims at the greatest happiness for the greatest number and American pragmatism (from Pierce, James and Dewey) is based on a thought process that states that one works with a way of life till a better one comes along. So it has an American flavor because it is pragmatic and democratic.

Rorty thus thinks all thought process that has truth or an all-encompassing, essentialist system as its goal as foolhardy. To create systems is to do violence to real life. Philosophy since Plato, according to Rorty, has failed because it seeks after eternal truth or in representing the true world than helping humans enjoy life better.

The American in me really likes Rorty because his thought is so easy to translate to American life. It is to say that democracy in its best egalitarian/pragmatic form is the best politics to push for a better way of life in things like education, health and security. It is to argue about everyday uses than simply about the big ideas we can never have a final answer. So Rorty is quite dismissive of those who try to do philosophy the classical way.

What about those that see Rorty's utilitarianism as denying rights to the minorities in the sense that it aims for the greatest happiness for the majority? Rorty would probably state that its not a perfect system but since its aim is practical and pragmatic, those who believe in the greater good will struggle to see that all are included into the "we" of the majority. That is why the public space is no place for religious dogma, for Rorty. Rorty, on the other hand, would argue that anyone can practice their religion in the private area, yet to argue the truth, for example, of belief versus non-belief in God is unpractical due to the fact that we do not have access to that kind of knowledge. Thus Vattimo's weak thought and Christianity as a deconstruction of metaphysics would be something Rorty would line up with. Again, it is to set up a situation where the goal is the betterment of human life and the monitoring of thought forms that would do violence to this happiness.

Fall History classes and Theology Fail

One of the Fall classes I will be teaching is Historiography. So far I have a few books planned out and a number of essays/journal articles for the class ( a lot of new stuff so I am excited to try it out especially on reading Agamben). The aim of the class is to teach the writing of History and also to help the students prepare their own writing project by doing a historiographical survey.

I think I have been a historian by heart more than a theologian. One of the themes without a solid answer is the tension between concepts (metaphysical, philosophical or theological) and the historical context. Theology has at times rubbed me the wrong way because it seems to deal with a discussion in the clouds totally divorced from history. Now the other side of this coin is that if you go too forward with the historical context then the charge of relativism is leveled at the historicist. But it's that Nietzschean suspicion of concepts that I think are more than ever necessary as we try to work out or at least live within this tension.

On a side note, I just recently had a paper rejected that I wrote on Barth and Zizek on the human subject. This response reminded me of a similar one I had at community college when my essay was read in front of the class as an example of a crappy paper (this was especially enlightening after having my essays from a previous class published). Still, it taught me to write for an audience and to keep working on the craft. So the criticism boiled down to "this is a graduate paper, with all its promises and faults" because it ended up being more of a survey than a critical piece. What I might end up doing with this paper is to see Zizek as radicalizing a Barthian stance especially as I would classify both as part of the Hegelian tradition since Zizek has a pragmatic use for theology.

So one of the issues that I'm having I posted on last week: finding my critical voice. I think the historian in me likes to layout the scholarship but the theologian in me has a hard time saying were I stand in this landscape. For example, I am at the point of figuring out my thesis and the fact that I have to boil it down to its smallest point is a little daunting. I have themes and ideas I have written about in the last 3 years but to completely commit to something is a little scary especially because it has to be new to scholarship. The point is that it is time to put the cards on the table and move away from the somewhat facile comparisons and start to boldly say: "I claim."

Ranciere (and Barth) on Equality and Disciplines

Below is part of a seminar paper I completed last semester on Barth and his view of modernity. I closed the essay with this section on Jacques Ranciére (who I was all about around Christmas time 2010).

The French philosopher Alain Badiou describes Jacques Ranciére in the following way: “Ranciére takes delight in occupying unrecognized spaces between history and philosophy, between philosophy and politics, and between documentary and fiction.”[1] This is a good description in that it helps us understand what Ranciére tries to do when he attempts to illustrate the connection between aesthetics and politics and how he blurs the lines between academic disciplines. He does this by articulating three regimes of art: the ethical, the representative and the aesthetic. What is important for me is the distinction between the representative and the aesthetic. He believes these regimes have historical presence, yet not in a historically progressive manner; in some ways these regimes still co-exist today. In short, these regimes serve the purpose of viewing and articulating the artistic changes that have occurred throughout history. The representative regime tries to establish what is considered proper in society especially in the way it produces form over matter by organizing what one can say, do, make and judge.[2] Thus, it is an all encompassing regime that delineates what is sensible and gives itself the responsibility of faithfully imitating the things in the world.

Ranciére asserts that the aesthetic regime of art which took shape in the late eighteenth century challenges the representative regime. He declares: “The aesthetic regime of the arts is the regime that strictly identifies art in the singular and frees it from any specific rule, from any hierarchy of the arts, subject matter, and genres.”[3] The openness to artistic practices especially to the things considered common has, for Ranciére, political implications. The aesthetic and the political link up to the extent that they are used to reexamine the distribution of the sensible. He writes: “Politics revolves around what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak, around the properties of spaces and the possibilities of time.”[4] In short, politics happens when the defined lines of what is considered normal is disputed; art can help open up the possibilities of this change. Badiou observes that what Ranciere “discovers is a discourse plotted and held in the aftermath of an event, a sort of social flash of lightning, a brief and local invention, both prior to and coextensive with domination and its burdens.”[5]

The way Ranciére articulates the disagreement of what is considered sensible as a disruptive event in the order of things through aesthetics fits well with Barth’s theory of the subject produced by the event. As we have seen Barth was also suspicious on how the modern idea of form was used to create divisions. In this sense, then Barth’s idea of absolutism as all-encompassing over different genres and forms of society matches what Ranciére says about the representative regime in its canonization of what is regarded as proper. However, Ranciére’s thought is aimed at a political reformation especially geared toward the outcast in a place that Barth’s thought really does not go. Ranciére’s theory highlights the mood of the discontent or those outside of the norm because equality is the presupposition that guides his thought. If equality is the presupposition then that means the hierarchies in things like art and politics are in constant need of reform. Therefore, Ranciére promotes an equality that “destroys all of the hierarchies of representation” because the aesthetic establishes the ambivalence of things.[6] Badiou is then correct in stating that Ranciére’s guiding theme is “that anyone, regardless of experience, can exert mastery without being in a position of mastery provided that anyone in question is willing to be unbound.”[7]

An example of what Ranciére is trying to accomplish can be seen in the way that he contests the delineation or proper form of disciplines and the hierarchies that form there. Here he relates how philosophy oftentimes relates to other disciplines:

Classically, philosophy has been considered a sort of super-discipline which reflects on the methods of the human and social sciences, or which provides them with their foundation. Thus a hierarchical order is established in the universe of discourse. Of course these sciences can object to this status, treat it as an illusion and pose itself as the true knowledge of philosophical illusion. This is another hierarchy, another way of putting discourses in their place. But there is a third way of proceeding, which seizes the moment in which the philosophical pretension to found the order of discourse is reversed, becoming the declaration, in the egalitarian language of the narrative, of the arbitrary nature of this order.[8]

His point is to show how that the allotted roles of the disciplines are really a fiction and that one must simply think through a problem and use whatever tools are necessary to come to some type of conclusion; in other words, the walls that separate disciplines need to be invaded for the sake of free thought. Ranciére challenges the hierarchy of the disciplines because it betrays the principle of equality for the fact that this structure ultimately produces those that are in the know and those that are not. Again, his principle of equality judges harshly any thought form that posits an enlightened one to guide the rest of the masses.

Ranciére’s attempt to blur the boundaries between disciplines also raises the issue of the relation of theology to other disciplines. On the one hand, one can see how his method could match Barth’s in criticizing the strict and proper roles forced upon theology in the eighteenth century. On the other hand, his principle of equality would challenge any so-called Barthian interpretation that judged the theology of modernity too harshly. In one sense, this was what Barth’s goal in addressing his historical lectures toward his over-zealous students.[9] One must also consider that much of the criticism of thinkers throughout the eighteenth century was aimed at the traditional hierarchies of the church and the state; the problem is that they would soon replace these traditional forms with a hierarchy and a normality of their own.

Theology is an open discipline; it cannot be used to control other seats of knowledge as the so-called queen of the sciences. Those days are long gone. Also gone is the idea that makes theology subservient to other disciplines like science, history or philosophy or irrelevant to the issues of the contemporary world; this flawed understanding of theology has its nascent in the eighteenth century. Barth’s reading of theology and history as event in that he declares a critical openness toward texts challenges these readings. In fact, Barth spent a lifetime trying to make the point that theology is a happy discipline for all that gives freedom to the other disciplines.[10] In one sense, he was trying to escape from the defined lines of the period of absolutism by positing the free happy exercise of theology.

---

[1] Alain Badiou, Metapolitics, trans. Jason Barker (New York: Verso, 2005), 108.

[2] Jacques Ranciére, The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (New York: Continuum, 2006), 22. For a good introduction to Ranciére see a very recent article by Joseph J. Tanke, “Why Ranciére Now?” The Journal of Aesthetic Education 44 (2010): 1-17.

[3] Ranciére, The Politics of Aesthetics, 23.

[4] Ranciére, The Politics of Aesthetics, 13.

[5] Badiou, Metapolitics, 108.

[6] Ranciére, The Politics of Aesthetics, 14.

[7] Badiou, Metapolitics, 110.

[8] Ranciére, “Thinking between disciplines: an aesthetics of knowledge,” trans. Jon Roffe, Parrhesia 1 (2006):10. Also see Sudeep Dasgupta, “Art is Going Elsewhere and Politics has to Catch it. An Interview with Jacques Ranciére,” Krisis 1 (2008): 70-75.

[9] Barth would later caution this same harsh reading of modern theology in his essay titled “Evangelical Theology in the 19th Century,” found in Barth, The Humanity of God, trans. Thomas Weiser (Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster John Knox Press, 1960).

[10] See Barth, Evangelical Theology, 12 and 15 for an example of Barth’s comments on the theological discipline and its place as a happy science.

Getting History Right?

Some may find it surprising to read Barth's short essay on history in his Protestant Theology and find him to be so charitable. In it he cautions those who mishandle history in two different ways. The first are those who find only problems in history, and the second are those who lift up the historical on a pedestal. In short, it is to be guilty of either presentantism or traditionalism. Instead, Barth advocates an openness toward history (and specifically the texts of the past) because one may discover something new in it. This may even lead to looking at a so-called heretic anew.

Barth's thought led me to ask what do we really want with the works of the past (both its events and texts)? Do we section off parts of it to fit within the time line of our liking? Do we dismiss it as irrelevant to the concerns of the present and the future? Are we trapped by it because it is the cause behind the effects we see all around us?

There is certainly a narrative aspect about it. When I put together lecture notes I inevitably choose some events and persons apart from others (time only permits such a choice). From Deleuze I have learned that History can be stifiling when it becomes an "official" all-encompassing story, so I am okay with the conscious decision that I am creating something out of the raw data of facts that have happened in the past. This is not making stuff up, but instead trying to be creative with the historical stuff that is there. Perhaps a more open and creative attitude toward history can help avoid the useless debate over telling history as it "really was" versus the idea that there is no such thing as history but only stories/fictions.

I think one of the best examples of this is the use of film for telling historical events. It sometimes connects the audience to history in a better way than a dense textbook even though the director may not have dotted all his i's and crossed his t's when it came to historical accuracy. Frankly, who cares! A good film may push someone to then read a good book.

Rancière: Wikipedia as a levelling force

As an adjunct lecturer of history (and a history major during my undergrad years) I often tell my students that if they really want to begin to grasp an event or a person to first check out Wikipedia. The response to this suggestion is usually one of surprise. Why?

Most history teachers or historians do not like Wikipedia for at least two reasons. One, because it is not scholarly enough (even though most posts have scholarly references at the bottom of the page); and second, because the author of the post is anonymous and posts can thus be updated or written by an anonymous other. Perhaps this other is not a qualified historian!

The philosopher Jacques Rancière (who I have just started reading with great delight) in a recent interview discusses reasons why there is a certain distrust of things on the internet. One of the reasons is that there is an accessibility there. It also allows the bypass of the teacher. In short, anyone from any station of life has access to literature on the net. So, when people decry the use of websites like Wikipedia there may be an underlying distrust of the student to understand what is real historical knowledge. Wikipedia may in fact be a real democratic way of learning that truly levels out the "enlightened" teacher with the "ignorant" student.

So back to the question. Yes, I always tell my students to check Wikipedia first because it is frankly trustworthy in most occasions and universally accessible; it is the method I use. However, I always follow that up with reading the actual books and articles that deal with the subject as well, if the Wikipedia essay has led to my interest in the topic.

NOTE: love the picture because Rancière looks lost on the side of the road or something.

For more information see Nina Power's interview with Rancière:

http://www.ephemeraweb.org/journal/10-1/10-1rancierepower.pdf