In this paper I explore Jacques Ellul’s sociology of religion in terms of Weber’s disenchantment thesis. In contrast to Mircea Eliade’s depiction of modern persons as nonreligious, owing to scientific and technological development, Ellul argues that traditional religions have merely been replaced by new ones. This has occurred, according to Ellul, because the desacralization of one realm of experience results in the resacralization of another realm of experience.

_Purpose._ The purpose of the research is to outline the strategies of desacralization of writers by means of merch, to determine the positive and negative aspects of the search for new meanings in the reproduction of cult figures. _Theoretical basis._ The article examines merch as a tool that encourages people to change sacred meanings and ideas about writers as bearers of the sacred for Ukrainians. The source base of the study is the works devoted to the problems of the (...) sacred in philosophical thought, as well as the process of desacralization in art and literature. The peculiarities of the destruction of tendencies regarding the notions in the perception of writers as idols of the nation, the formation and emergence of new meanings regarding sacred figures are highlighted and described. The relevance of this study is due to active searches in business, propaganda, agitation for the use of literary practice, transformation and new contexts of literary idols. _Originality._ Until now, the change in the processes of sacralization and desacralization of writers by means of merch has not been considered as a reversal of worldview in culture, vectors of changes in the dominants of spirituality in the world picture. It turned out that the metacategory of the sacred has been studied by many scholars, both foreign and domestic, in recent years. The problems of the sacred are in the centre of attention of sociologists, philosophers, literary critics, and culturologists, but merch as a basis for the desacralization of man was not considered in publications in the field of mass communication theory. Scientists considered the worldview vectors of the sacred and desacralization as processes that are inherent not only in postmodernity, but also those that accompanied Ukrainian culture during previous periods. It is determined that the most noticeable manifestations of desacralization are the reproduction of the figure of Kobzar, moreover, in quite unusual and even provocative images of him. However, the majority of Ukrainians positively perceive the updated images of the prophets of the Ukrainian nation and talk about the permanence of their worldview, despite the change and reinterpretation of many years of later development. _Conclusions._ Conscious desacralization of literary images is gradually gaining momentum. We observe a tendency to positive perception of merch with the figures of T. Shevchenko, I. Franko, H. Skovoroda, Lesia Ukrainka in a new interpretation: during the war, on the barricades – wherever the struggle for Ukrainian statehood is taking place. From the results of the survey it becomes clear that stereotypical perceptions of writers need to be changed, but only if it is an organic fusion with value imperatives, only emphasizes and affirms the spiritual greatness of Man and serves the growth of Ukrainian society and every Ukrainian. (shrink)

This article aims to approach the COVID-19 health crisis through the category of precarity in two senses. On the one hand, in the face of power, a state of exception has been configured as the new form of political handling of the new normality. On the other hand, the loss of public space has meant that community ties have been broken, fostering greater atomisation and loneliness. Both processes were already present in modernity and post-modernity and foster an increasing uprooting of (...) the individual through the loss of the symbolic axes of socialisation, as well as more intense social control. In short, the defining characteristic of the pandemic is the precarity of life. (shrink)

In my writings on the history of human rights, the Axial Age, and the genesis of values, I have treated the experience of self-transcendence and the attribution of sacredness as a fundamental anthropological phenomenon. But this fundamental fact of ideal formation has a flip side: The sacralization of particular meanings is originally always also the sacralization of a collectivity. This I call the danger of self-sacralization. In this contribution I offer a brief, historically oriented sociological sketch of the tensions between (...) “religion” and “politics” in light of this assumption, discuss H. Richard Niebuhr’s relevance for this area of study, and illustrate my thesis with regard to contemporary cases where the danger of self-sacralization is particularly urgent. (shrink)

Despite his significance in early modern Germany, where he was well-known as a political and moral philosopher, jurist, lay-theologian, social and educational reformer, Christian Thomasius (1655-1728) is little known in the world of Anglophone scholarship. 1 Unlike those of his mentor, Samuel Pufendorf, none of Thomasius's works was translated into English, when, at the end of the seventeenth century, English thinkers were searching for a final settlement to the religious question. None has been translated since. Moreover, while Thomasius has been (...) subject to increasing scholarly attention in Germany since the 1970s, where he has been treated largely as a representative of the "early Enlightenment," there is very little secondary literature on him in English. 2 Things are however beginning to change in this regard, with recent research already giving rise to important new Anglophone books and essays. 3 Knud Haakonssen's article on [End Page 595] Thomasius for the new Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy might well be a straw in the wind. (shrink)

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Resumen: En el presente artículo se examinan, a la luz de los planteamientos de Michel Foucault -y, en menor medida, de Roland Barthes y Jacques Derrida-, ciertos postulados fundamentales de la Teoría literaria, como el estatuto tradicional de la crítica literaria, la función del autor en la literatura y la propia literatura como disciplina de estudio, en especial desde su dimensión institucional. Para el desarrollo de los argumentos foucaultianos se toman como referencia algunos de los textos de la llamada “primera (...) época” en los sesenta, pero sobre todo un par de documentos inéditos en francés respecto de la literatura, provenientes de los expedientes del Fondo Michel Foucault localizado en el Institut Mémoires de l’Édition Contemporaine, en Caen, Francia.: This paper aims an approach to some of the most solid assumptions of Literary Theory considering the critique of Michel Foucault and, in lesser extent, that of Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida. Some of those assumptions include literary criticism in its traditional way, the role of the authorship in literature and the literature itself as an institutional device set up to claim upon the value of the literary discourses. In order to develop Foucault’s arguments we undertake a reading of some “minor writings” corresponding to “the first Foucault” in the sixties’ decade -keynotes, interviews, journal articles and so on- although we are mostly based on two or three unpublished documents on literature topics from the Michel Foucault Archives located at the Institut Mémoires de l’Édition Contemporaine, in Caen, France. (shrink)

When Religious Experience went into production with the University of California Press, I was still in residence as a graduate student at Columbia, where I was working with Wayne Proudfoot on issues in the philosophy of religion and philosophical theology. Although this is now more than thirty years ago, I distinctively remember having a conversation with him about whether Religious Experience should have a subtitle and, if so, what. Proudfoot’s disposition as a writer is hardly baroque, and so he decided, (...) heedless of his student’s youthful love of circumlocution, to do without the ornament of an explanatory or at least cautionary subtitle. Naked Religious Experience it would be.The Press, no doubt... (shrink)

Knowledge and its desacralization --What is tradition? -- The rediscovery of the sacred : the revival of tradition -- Scientia sacra -- Man, pontifical and Promethean -- The cosmos as theophany -- Eternity and the temporal order -- Traditional art as fountain of knowledge and grace -- Principal knowledge and the multiplicity of sacred forms -- Knowledge of the sacred as deliverance.

The prelims comprise: Introduction The “Frankenstein” Myth The Responsibility of Researchers for Animal Welfare.

In the small village of Kinnarumma in western Sweden an old wooden church was replaced by a new church buildning in the early twentieth century. The old church was de-sacralized by being moved to an open-air museum in Borås and used there for exhibitions and the storage of museum objects. The need for more church premises in the city led to the re-sacralization of the old church in 1930. The transition of Kinnarumma’s old wooden church to museum object, its museumification, (...) was an expression of change in religious heritage, and its re-sacralization expressed an unchanged part of the same heritage. (shrink)

Thomas Piketty’s Capital and Ideology constitutes a landmark achievement in furthering our understanding of the history of inequality, and presents valuable proposals for constructing a future economic system that would allow us to transcend and move beyond contemporary forms of capitalism. This article discusses Piketty’s conceptions of ideology, property, and ‘inequality regimes’, and analyses his approach to social justice and its relation to the work of John Rawls. I examine how Piketty’s proposals for ‘participatory socialism’ would function not only to (...) redistribute income and wealth, but also to disperse economic power within society, and I discuss the complementary roles of redistribution and predistribution in his proposals, and Piketty’s place in a tradition of egalitarian political economy associated with James Meade and Anthony Atkinson. Having elaborated on Piketty’s account of the relationship between economic policy and ideational change, and his important idea of the ‘desacralization’ of private property, I develop ‘seven theses’ on his proposals for participatory socialism, examining areas in which his approach could be enhanced or extended, so as to create a viable twenty-first century version of democratic socialism. (shrink)

Sophistics is the paradigm of a discourse that does things with words. It is not pure rhetoric, as Plato wants us to believe, but it provides an alternative to the philosophical mainstream. A sophistic history of philosophy questions the orthodox philosophical history of philosophy: that of ontology and truth in itself. In this book, we discover unusual Presocratics, wreaking havoc with the fetish of true and false. Their logoi perform politics and perform reality. Their sophistic practice can shed crucial light (...) on contemporary events, such as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, where, to quote Desmond Tutu, "words, language, and rhetoric do things," creating things like the new "rainbow people." Transitional justice requires a consistent and sustainable relativism: not Truth, but truth for, and enough of the truth for there to be a community. Philosophy itself is about words before it is about concepts. Language manifests itself in reality only as multiplicity; different languages perform different types of worlds; and difficulties of translation are but symptoms of these differences. This desacralized untranslatability undermines and deconstructs the Heideggerian statement that there is a historical language of philosophy that is Greek by essence and today is German. Sophistical Practice constitutes a major contribution to the debate among philosophical pluralism, unitarism, and pragmatism. It will change how we discuss such words as city, truth, and politics. Philologically and philosophically rethinking the sophistical gesture, relying on performance and translation, it proposes a new paradigm for the human sciences. (shrink)

This study is an analysis of the relationship between homo religiosus and the Christian man, as it emerges from Mircea Eliade’s work. His ideas concerning the dialectics sacred-profane are related to homo religiosus, the man of the traditional societies. According to Eliade’s vision, one can use the term homo religiosus only within the context of his universe. Many mythical themes are present in the modern world, but it is difficult to identify them, going through the process of desacralization. The (...) “mythical” elements became Christian from the very beginnings and they are still significant for Christianity which characterizes itself by rendering value to history. The issue that Eliade analyses is whether Christianity can develop the sacred horizon of the archaic societies. As a conclusion of this research, one cannot say that there is a separation of homo religious from Christian man. The reader’s impression is that the scientist refers to Christianity as having lost the real meaning, as it was discovered in its early beginnings. Although the modern man still keeps the Christian elements, is far from what represented the Christian man from his early centuries. However, there are many common points of homo religiosus with the archaic societies. The critics treat the issue from some perspectives which are different from the ideas of the scientist from Chicago: either as being based on the protestant theology of “God’s Death” as the cases of Kenneth Hamilton and J. J. Altizer, either from partial position, the accusations not having a real basis. Dubuisson’s case is this way. This work was meant to be a step of an approach that attempts to discover correspondence between the scientist’s ideas and Christianity. (shrink)

Mechanistic and Humanistic Science -- Acquiring Knowledge of a Person as a Task for the Scientist -- The Cognitive Needs Under Conditions of Fear and of Courage -- Safety Science and Growth Science:Science as a Defense -- Prediction and Control of Persons? -- Experiential Knowledge and Spectator Knowledge -- Abstracting and Theorizing -- Comprehensive Science and Simpleward Science -- Suchness Meaning and Abstractness Meaning -- Taoistic Science and Controlling Science -- Interpersonal (I-Thou) Knowledge as a Paradigm for Science -- Value-Free (...) Science -- Stages, Levels, and Degrees of Knowledge -- The Desacralization and the Resacralization of Science. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Reforming the Law of Nature: The Secularization of Political Thought, 1532–1689 by Simon P. KennedyFrancis J. BeckwithKENNEDY, Simon P. Reforming the Law of Nature: The Secularization of Political Thought, 1532–1689. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2022. ix + 125 pp. Cloth, $110.00In this monograph Simon P. Kennedy offers an account of the desacralization of politics in the West by critically examining the works of five central figures in (...) the Protestant Reformed tradition: John Calvin (1509–64), Richard Hooker (1554–1600), Johannes Althusius (1557–1638), Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), and John Locke (1632–1705). He dedicates a chapter to each thinker. The core of Kennedy's thesis is that desacralization is the result of a shift in the way modern thinkers like Hobbes and Locke reimagined the nature of natural law. The medieval tradition, having found its fullest expression in the work of St. Thomas Aquinas, saw natural law as one of four different types of law: eternal law (the eternal plan of creation in the mind of God), natural law (the rational creature's participation in the eternal law), human law (civil laws that are derived from the natural law), and divine law (the Old and New Testaments). According to Kennedy, the eventual desacralization of politics was set in motion with the development of arguments for natural rights that relied on a natural law that was in [End Page 553] practice severed from eternal law. But in that case, our political institutions—which are founded on the natural law—are purely human constructions and thus entirely secular.The usual story is that the Protestant Reformation constituted the decisive break with the medieval tradition and that it was the political theology of the reformers and their immediate successors that made the secularization of politics nearly inevitable. Kennedy wants to push back against that story. He argues, quite convincingly, that Calvin, Hooker, and Althusius, all Reformed Protestants, were in continuity with their medieval predecessors. Although Calvin is often depicted by his contemporary followers—especially among American Evangelicals—as hostile to the natural law tradition, Kennedy marshals an impressive case that shows that classical natural law seemed almost second nature to Calvin. My own sense is that the confusion over Calvin is the result of his contemporary readers expecting him to use the vocabulary of an Aquinas or a Duns Scotus. But not finding that vocabulary, they conclude that he rejected the natural law. Kennedy dispels that confusion by showing that Calvin in fact was fully committed to the four types of law absent the technical jargon of medieval scholasticism.Hooker and Althusius, writes Kennedy, continue in that tradition, though with a bit of a twist that some argue portends to Hobbes and Locke. Hooker and Althusius use the language of contract to account for the origin of certain aspects of political life. But Kennedy insists that it is a mistake to interpret them as proto-contractarians (as one finds in Hobbes and Locke), for they still held that the natural law participates in the eternal law, and that any agreements employed in the service of political life are under the authority of, and guided by, the natural law. One could argue, then, that these "contracts," like constitutions and treaties, are nonstatutory manifestations of the human law, which is perfectly consistent with classical natural law. So like Calvin before them, Hooker and Althusius were, as Kennedy puts it, theistic political naturalists.Hobbes and Locke are a different story. According to Kennedy, they both defended desacralized views of politics, with Hobbes being the more extreme of the two. Although I think he is correct in that assessment, I am not sure he locates the cause of the desacralization in the right place. For example, he says that because for Locke politics is artificial and not natural—that is, it is the result of a social contract to insulate members of society from the instability of a state of nature—politics is desacralized, even though God is the ultimate source of the natural law. But it is not clear how that in and of itself desacralizes politics. After all, Aquinas, the paradigm case of a classical natural lawyer, held... (shrink)

In 2017, Pope Francis appointed a commission to investigate the continued suitability of the Liturgiam Authenticam Instruction, approved by John Paul II, on the rules of translating liturgical texts. This article shows the genesis of this event, not necessarily the one which is marking the next stage of a “dewojtylization” of the Church, as conservative Vatican commentators would have it. The main reason for the establishment of this commission is the controversy over the two translations into English: the official one, (...) approved in 2010, which is maintained in the spirit of Liturgiam Authenticam, and the earlier one, from 1998, done in accordance with the principles of the Instruction of Paul VI of 1969, which, in fact, recommended the use of the so-called dynamic equivalence, which in practice implied the usage of contemporary colloquial language. In order to understand the essence of the dispute, the author of this article presents the concept of dynamic equivalence developed by Pastor Eugene Nida, pointing to its strengths and weaknesses. The former mainly lies in the fact that in the years around the Council it was the first serious scientific theory of translation. That concept is also full of weaknesses, which are reflected in the significant development of translation theory over the past 60 years. The most serious of these is the fact that it reduces the act to the already existing resources of the target language thus inhibiting its development. Therefore, it is essentially the opposite of the method of St. Jerome, adopted in the Catholic tradition. According to the author the Liturgiam Authenticam Instruction takes into account several decades of biblical translation practice in the post-Conciliar spirit, with its successes and failures. The conclusions of this analysis are as follows: The absolutization of dynamic equivalence as “the only scientific theory of translation” proves that there is no cooperation between the biblical studies communities and those developing contemporary theories of The Liturgiam Authenticam Instruction focuses on what is preventing the process of desacralization of liturgy, as occurring in many Protestant Churches, but also in many post-conciliar Catholic. (shrink)

Levinas argues that tragic descriptions---from the Greeks to Nietzsche and Heidegger---rarely dare to draw the full implications of asserting that being is tragic. At the same time that it accurately attests to the irremediable character of being, the tragic position proposes a remedy that presupposes the self's capacity for transformation and meaningfulness. Heidegger, for example, holds that Dasein possesses as its highest possibility the capacity to embrace its finitude. For Levinas, however, the self is mired in a hopeless state of (...) perpetual ambivalence---oscillating between moments of enjoyment and a horror of being. If the self lacks the means to rectify its condition in being, what is the genuine source of meaningfulness and purpose in our lives? Levinas attempts to respond to this question by inquiring into what he dubs the Desire for transcendence. Though western philosophy has at times voiced this Desire---for example, Plato's notion of a 'good beyond being' or Descartes's conception of the idea of the Infinite---ultimately, the philosophical tradition betrays the Good, because transcendence is almost always conceived in relation to anonymous being. For Levinas, the true 'site' of the Good is the face or presence of the other human being that speaks to me directly. The deepest level of the human drama takes place in what he calls the "ethical intrigue" that binds the self to the Other. The Other's plea for me to address the ruins of being affects me immediately. Integrity or moral wholeness involves the mature capacity to accept bad conscience---which always bears the Other's imprint---as fundamental to being human. The capacity to be responsible necessitates desacralization. Levinas awakens us to the importance of uprooting the sacred impulse at both the social and the individual level. The sacred is the attempt to bypass the ethical intrigue for direct communion with a supposed supernatural world. The sacred experience, like the tragic position, ultimately promotes moral evasiveness by undermining the Other's call to be responsible. (shrink)

In Pagans & Christians in the City, Steven D. Smith argues that in contrast to ancient Rome, ancient Christianity, following Judaism, located the sacred outside the world, desacralizing the cosmos and everything in it—including the political order. It thereby introduced a political dualism and potentially contending allegiances. Although Smith’s argument is right so far as it goes, it underplays the role of Christianity’s immanent dimension in subverting the Roman empire and the sacral pattern of antiquity. This division of authority not (...) only undermined the Roman empire and antique sacral political order more generally—it also subverts the modern state, which, in the work of Hobbes and Rousseau, sought to remarry what Western Christianity divorced. (shrink)

This publication aims to analyze the economic, social, and cultural phenomena that first appeared in the "era of revolutions" that occurred in the nineteenth to early twentieth centuries. The modern European trend toward tolerance, which is the basis of current social and cultural changes, including in our country, has specific intellectual grounds. The subject of the study was the ideosphere of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including philosophical, economic, and psychological concepts that gave rise to modern trends in these (...) areas. The result of this study was the determination of the reasons that caused the change of the ideological paradigm in Europe. The novelty of the research lies in the fact that, for the first time, the intellectual foundations of the formation of tolerance as an actual socio-cultural phenomenon are analyzed. This article consistently proves that among the first such grounds, it is possible to determine the emergence of machine production and, as a result, the appearance of a mass person with a culture corresponding to them, performing a compensatory and entertaining function. The most important cultural foundation is mainly the intellectual "background" created by the teachings of Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx, and Sigmund Freud. The ideas of Anglo-American pragmatism played a significant role in forming a new morality, which included the denial of religion and its values, giving it a utilitarian character. During the subsequent historical period and at present, these views have become the basis for the creation of the so-called "individual faith," in which religion ceases to be the guide of human life but only serves the needs of the individual. The desacralization of religion leads to the study of different aspects of sexuality, which opens up the possibility for modern thinking about gender. The concept of "natural law" should also be attributed to the intellectual factors of the formation of modern European tolerance. (shrink)

The process of turning a myth into a fairy tale, its internal and external causes, patterns, consequences... It may be difficult to find a more traditional way of exploring a fairy tale than this one. We will not avoid it either, because whatever aspect of the fairy tale analysis we choose, it is impossible to bypass this side of its genesis. And the choice of the method of explication of this problem largely predetermines both the angle of her vision and (...) the means of solution. The same traditions have already been given peculiar power lines that urge more and more researchers to move in the area of ​​these lines and to cover more and more varieties of the same dimensions of the object: demythologization and desacralization of the hero, his actions, his environment; giving the myth an exoteric character, with the elements of fiction and irony that are inconceivable as a result; the shrinking of the scale of the hero's actions, and hence the replacement of the mystery of myth with mysteriousness, intrigue in the fairy tale, the decline of the mythological worldview. The topics of branching of the subjects through the myth to the fairy tale, finding and researching common for both phenomena of binary oppositions, etc., are densely addressed. (shrink)

In this study I intend to prove that there is a close connection between ethical purposes of Environmental Philosophy as World Philosophy and the idea of sacred nature as part of the “world” in a phenomenological sense, which includes sacred space as defined in the philosophy of religion. The main points that intersect here are: the idea of sacred space; the perception of virtue in a sacred world; the beauty of creation: nature, life, human sensibility. The theoretical background of this (...) study contains points of view that express phenomenological, hermeneutic, theological, and aesthetic conceptions belonging to authors and exegetes such as Mircea Eliade, William E. Paden, David Cave, Ion Ianoși, Douglas Allen, Arnold Berleant, and Vincent Blok. I believe that the neglect of the environment-as-a-condition-of-life (the consequences of which can already be seen in ecological imbalances) is caused by, among other factors, the desacralization of human attitudes towards nature and the world of life. Few people still have a feeling of sacred nature or the aesthetic emotion of perceiving beauty in natural forms. The relationship with the environment and nature is reduced to its exploitation as a source of economic profit or as a way for spending free time, a source of personal comfort devoid of any spiritual significance. Surely we cannot go back to archaic religions or medieval Christianity, but we can reintegrate into our moral values something of those cultures’ admiration and respect for the beauty/sublimity of nature and the world as expressions of divine creation, as something sacred. Philosophical debates related to this retrieval and their dissemination could be part of solving the ecological problems of the contemporary world. (shrink)

No concept attracted as much controversy, or muddled ideological identifications so thoroughly, as ‘myth’ in interwar France. By the late 1930s, ‘la mythomanie’ was drawing systematic attention from existentialists, Surrealists, ethnologists, sociologists, and nascent fascist movements. This essay reconsiders this polemical and misunderstood moment in interwar thought. It focuses on the intellectuals most central to its notoriety: the members of the Collège de sociologie and their fascination with Georges Sorel. Though interwar mythomania has long been treated as an antiparliamentary cultural (...) politics designed to secure enthusiastic mass conformity, this essay argues that such accounts are incomplete. They misunderstand the deeper philosophical debate unfolding about the conditions of revolutionary agency in a desacralized society. Bringing this debate back into focus helps liberate mythomania from historiographic commonplaces. It emphasizes how, for better or worse, many of those who advocated for new political myths aimed to spur human agency, not confiscate it. (shrink)

The living world is expanding thanks to the rapid and massive expansion of new technological capabilities. At the same time, paradoxically, it has been narrowed as thinking itself has become narrower and impoverished. Thinking has been pushed away by knowledge in almost all areas of the living world. Instead of thinking, modern man is becoming more and more curious. The acquisition of massively produced knowledge has become a form of consumption or even of entertainment. New theories that appear every day (...) and reveal the failures of the previous ones only emphasize the limitations and fragmentation of the attitude itself. Although such knowledge is useful in solving practical local tasks, its universal validity is unfounded. What is needed is a more open consciousness which is able to reconcile different modes of experience. The rejection of ancient spiritual contemplating traditions and desacralization have impoverished the ability to express reality. This paper presents—as an attempt to recreate contemplative thinking—the conceptions of Martin Heidegger and Shinichi Hisamatsu, two thinkers living in different cultures. The paper pays a special attention to the way of being. The articulation of the state and the posture of the thinker and his/her attitudes uses concepts, that are often ambiguous, multidimensional, but already capable of articulating phenomena that could not otherwise be named. Such a stance paves the way for creative thinking capable of extending and overstepping the limits of the strict causal Western way of thinking. (shrink)

Historical scholarship often relies on intermittent adjustments rather than radical innovation. Through a close reading of three different universal histories published between 1690 and 1760, this essay argues that the secularization of world history in the age of Enlightenment was an incomplete and often unintended process. Nonetheless, one of the most significant changes in this period was the centering of universal history in Europe, a process that accompanied the desacralization of the story of man. Once human progress was embraced (...) as a universal process, the story of the development of the arts and sciences gradually eclipsed the non-European cultures that had formerly played a central role in the Christian narrative of human history. (shrink)

In the paper two forms of human dealing with the notion of the sacred are compared — manifestation and proclamation. Author suggests that proclamation is a characteristic for modern monotheistic religions based on the Old Testament theology. In particular, a vivid example of proclamation is a teaching of Jesus Christ, as presented in synoptic Gospels. In Ricouer’s view, a decline of the sacred in modern Western civilization is connected with an unjustified absolutization of the scientific and technical achievements and must (...) be overcome in the course of the further social development. (shrink)

Three points are discussed: first, that limits of technological fixes are revealed by current economic, social, and environmental problems; second, that these problems cannot be solved by a technological fix but require alternative forms of activity and being; third, that realizing these limits makes possible the re‐emergence of the sacred. Two attitudes toward technology, nature, and the sacred are described: Technocrats desacralize nature and strive to shape it technologically for human ends alone; pernetarians resacralize nature and develop a perennial philosophy (...) (synthesized from elements of different spiritual disciplines) allied with an enlarged, artful science, so as to design activities compatible with nature. (shrink)

Rival Enlightenments, first published in 2001, is a major reinterpretation of early modern German intellectual history. Ian Hunter approaches philosophical doctrines as ways of fashioning personae for envisaged historical circumstances, here of confessional conflict and political desacralization. He treats the civil philosophy of Pufendorf and Thomasius and the metaphysical philosophy of Leibniz and Kant as rival intellectual cultures or paideiai, thereby challenging all histories premised on Kant's supposed reconciliation and transcendence of the field. This study reveals the extraordinary historical (...) self-consciousness of the civil philosophers, who repudiated university metaphysics as inimical to the intellectual formation of those administering desacralized territorial states. The book argues that the marginalization of civil philosophy in post-Kantian philosophical history may itself be seen as a continuation of the struggle between the rival enlightenments. Combining careful and well-documented scholarship with vivid polemic, Hunter presents penetrating insights for philosophers and historians alike. (shrink)

In the last century and a half, many have lamented the loss of a sense of the holy (or the sacred)—das Heilige in German—that is, the condition of modernity that Friedrich Nietzsche called the “death or God” or what Friedrich Hölderlin poetized as the “flight of the gods.” Martin Heidegger, even while speaking of the forgetting of Being (Seinsvergessenheit) in the history of Being, and even as he had discoursed on the nihilism of modernity, appropriated this term, das Heilige, as (...) one of his many terms for Being (Sein) as distinct from, and yet granting, beings (Seiende). In what sense, then, is the holy for Heidegger tied to its apparent opposite in the modern world—the sense of desacralization or nihilism in modernity—while also being the Being of beings? And how are we to (co-)respond to the holy in an unholy (desacralized) world? In the following I will attempt to unpack this paradox. Keys to solving this question may be found in the ancient Greek concepts of chaos and chora to which Heidegger’s understanding of the holy is connected. Heidegger’s own concepts of Lichtung (clearing) and Gegend (that-which-regions, regioning) can also be related to his view of the holy. (shrink)

This article tries to explain a current typical paradox: contemporary art, although desacralized by modern secularism and the application of Enlightenment reason to every field of life, still keeps many of its former sacred features. This sacrality is analyzed from three different points of view tied to three main elements of art, understanding the latter as a communication process: the artist, the artwork itself and the aesthetic experience. The conclusion is the same in all three cases: the survival of sacred (...) nature in the artistic field in contrast to its weakening or full vanishing in the ideological general field of western culture. (shrink)

The whole problem under our collective investigation, as I view it, is about understanding the human situation in terms of the impact of technology. The union of science and technology still resides within the limits of a “practical anthropocentrism” (Marsel G.), that is increasing satisfaction of human needs. An advancement in science and technology is accompanied by the desacralization of culture and the crisis of humanism. An awareness of the growing environmental, cultural, existential problems leads to the necessity to (...) shift the vectors of scientific inquiry and technological development. In this process, the role and mission of the humanities is an articulation and promotion of human perspectives of science and technological progress. The humanities’ mission consists in attracting attention of scientists and society to humanizing technology and its aiming not only towards the growth of power over nature, but also to the making of a new relationship to the humans, to solving global problems. (shrink)

In this paper, I explore a possible a/theological response to what Nietzsche called the ‘death of God’—or Hölderlin’s and Heidegger’s ‘flight of the gods’—through a juxtaposition of the Christian-Pauline concept of kenōsis and the ancient Greek-Platonic notion of chōra, and by taking Nishida Kitarō’s appropriations of these concepts as a clue and starting point. Nishida refers to chōra in 1926 to initiate his philosophy of place and then makes reference to kenōsis in 1945 in his final work that culminates—without necessarily (...) completing—his oeuvre. What he had thereby accomplished is an inversion of Platonism resulting in the collapse of the transcendent/immanent—idea/genesis and by implication the Heaven/Earth—dichotomy. I then unpack the ethical implication of this kenotic chōra Nishida has left us with. It suggests from us a certain response to the desacralization or secularization of the world. I shall build upon this suggestion and unfold its implications by drawing from a variety of sources, starting with Nishida but including others, such as Meister Eckhart, Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas, Gianni Vattimo, Reiner Schürmann, Mark Taylor, Jürgen Moltmann, and other philosophical and theological sources. (shrink)

The present study tries to solve the enigma of the legendary Sao on the basis of the traditions of the city-state of Makari south of Lake Chad. It analyses the town’s king list, its oral traditions and its ritual heritage in the light of the Assyrian hypothesis (put forward by the author in several publications). It suggests that Makari’s ancient traditions correspond to extensive transcontinental projections which underwent important transformations by processes of localization. By resetting the traditions in their original (...) Mespotamian context, it shows that the Sao were the Neo-Assyrian conquerors of vast regions of the ancient Near East. After the destruction of Nineveh by the Babylonian insurgent Nabopolassar in 612 B.C. and the subsequent fall of the Assyrian Empire, some of the formerly resettled deportees fled to the region south of Lake Chad where they founded the city-state of Makari. Their desacralized traditions bear witness to the former prestige accorded to the Sao-Assyrians. (shrink)

Dans le chapitre 12 de son TTP, Spinoza définit le sacré de la sorte : « Mérite le nom de sacré et de divin ce qui est destiné à l'exercice de la piété et de la religion et ce caractère sacré demeurera attaché à une chose aussi longtemps seulement que les hommes s'en serviront religieusement ». De par cette définition première qui fait relever le sacré de la religion, Spinoza est en train d'exclure le sacré du domaine de la vérité (...) qui est propre à la philosophie. Quant à sa lecture désacralisante de la Bible, bien qu'elle s'appuie sur sa philosophie pour nier au surnaturel son existence, c'est par le biais de sa « méthode historico-critique », qu'elle va permettre à Spinoza d'atteindre son but. La question du sacré est donc loin d'être pour Spinoza une question de simple piété ou de soumission au divin. Elle est au contraire une source de problèmes. Cet article voudrait montrer comment Spinoza comprend ce problème, et d'examiner la solution qu'il y propose à travers son programme de désacralisation radicale de l'Écriture.In the 12th chapter of his Tractatus theologico-politicus, Spinoza defines the sacred in this way: “A thing is called sacred and Divine when it is designed for promoting piety, and continues sacred so long as it is religiously used: if the users cease to be pious, the thing ceases to be sacred”. By this first definition that situates the sacred in the realm of religion, Spinoza is excluding the sacred from the domain of the truth proper to philosophy. As for his desacralizing reading of the Bible, though it denies, on the basis of his philosophy, any existence to the supernatural, it is thanks to the “historico-critical method” that this reading will enable Spinoza to attain his goal. For Spinoza, the question of the sacred is therefore far from being a question of simple piety or submission to the divine. On the contrary, it is a source of problems. This article will attempt to show how Spinoza deals with this situation and to examine the solution he proposes through his program of radical desacralisation of the Scriptures. (shrink)

This article examines valuation and payment practices of psychoanalysts in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Psychoanalysts do not use explicit sliding scales but rather reach an agreement about fees in conversation with the patient. This negotiation is conducted with some principles of gift-giving, where parties try to give more, rather than through competitive bargaining (an inverted bazaar). Drawing on the sociology of money, morals and markets, and valuation studies literatures, I distinguish four factors to explain this: 1) Some formally produced prices as (...) well as market mechanisms shape benchmarks for fees, but the peculiar service psychologists offer (which makes quality judgments hard), the way patients and therapists are matched, and the lack of public information about prices allow for high flexibility in price-setting; these are structural factors that remain unsaid in the conversation on fees. 2) A professional narrative that highlights a responsibility towards patients that should not be contaminated by economic interest. 3) Psychoanalysts’ elaborations on the meanings of the payment, which should reflect the uniqueness of each patient and the bond analyst-patient and symbolize the patient’s commitment to treatment, involving a cost and a loss beyond the economic. 4) The prevalence of cash, face-to-face payment without intermediaries, which helps desacralize the analyst and disentangle the session from the rest of the economic life of the analyst, but impedes evading moralization of the transaction. Payments in psychoanalysis are delicate arrangements, and analysts often stress about valuation and payments. They have to be careful to ensure this flexibility results in morally acceptable transactions. (shrink)

In a span of twenty years, two of the autocephalous churches of the Orthodox Christian world released documents addressing the social realities of contemporary life: the Russian Orthodox Church's Basis of the Social Concept (2000) and the Ecumenical Patriarch's For the Life of the World: Toward a Social Ethos of the Orthodox Church (2020). This article offers a side-by-side comparison and analysis of the documents’ treatments of matters of birth and death, including childbirth, abortion, miscarriage, end-of-life care, euthanasia, suicide, and (...) a vision of a good death. Detailed comparison demonstrates remarkable accord between the two churches on many of these matters. Differences of omission and emphasis appear to be indicative of contrasting demographic and historical situations, with the exception of one, notable divergence between the churches, all of which are discussed. The striking degree and depth of consonance between the documents offers potential for cooperation and unity as the two churches negotiate their conflicts while also seeking to guide their flocks and offer Orthodox Christian witness in an increasingly desacralized world. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Erictho and Demogorgon: Poetry against Metaphysics DAVID QUINT Epic without the gods? The Roman poet Lucan (39–65 ce) created a secular counter-epic inside classical epic, removing the genre’s usual pantheon of Olympian deities and replacing them with Fortune. His Bellum civile (titled De bello civili in manuscripts, alternately titled Pharsalia) a poem about the conflict between Julius Caesar and Pompey, thereby delegitimizes the emperors who succeeded the dying Roman (...) republic, including Nero, the reigning emperor of Lucan’s day.1 They are not part of a divine plan: no such plan has ever existed. In an epic where the gods are silent or refuse to speak, Pompey’s son, Sextus, anxious to know the future, has to seek other means. In Book 6, he consults the Thessalian witch Erictho about the outcome of the approaching battle in Pharsalia. She reanimates the corpse of a dead soldier on Pompey’s republican side and makes it talk (BC 6.419–830).2 Lucan’s scene of necromancy gave birth to a major antimetaphysical strain in the European literary tradition. Among others, Dante, Cervantes, Marlowe, Spenser, Goethe, and Shelley confronted this episode of the Pharsalia and pondered its implications. Erictho’s magic is a figure for poetic making itself. It turns the supernatural into theater— the divine machinery of epic exposed as a deus ex machina— and these authors’ responses to Erictho will shift from epic into dramatic forms. In place of the gods, in place of the epic visit to the underworld, particularly in place of and in response to Aeneas’s trip to the realm of the dead arion 28.2 fall 2020 2 erictho and demogorgon in the corresponding Book 6 of the Aeneid, Lucan presents Erictho’s macabre performance: human witchcraft and intimations of an alternate, eerie numen residing in the earth, a force of nature. Subsequent readers would give this latter power a name: Demogorgon.3 Lucan links republicanism and freedom to a kind of atheism and to historical contingency. He unmasks and strips the props of religion from Caesarism and monarchy. (In vain for the poet: Lucan was forced to commit suicide in 65 ce, after he was implicated in the failed Pisonian conspiracy against Nero.) Lucan desacralizes poetry itself, which here confesses its limits, which are the limits of human mortality, even as Erictho seems, however briefly, to overcome them. No, poetry cannot literally raise the dead: it is a magic trick that makes the words on the page form into images, take life, and speak to us. Lucan answers the criticisms the philosopher and theologian make to poetry by openly acknowledging the false bottom of the hat from which poetry pulls its rabbits. It has no access to a real bottom, an underworld beyond death; it is all representation.4 The philosopher and the theologian may be poets no less than he is, but they do not want to know it, too busy, perhaps, in supporting tyranny over human minds and bodies. Plato and Augustine are two such critics on either historical side of Lucan, and they help us to understand the stakes of the Roman poet’s project. Both were dissatisfied with literature and they wanted to be something more than the great rhetoricians that they were. In the Symposium, Plato demystifies the archetypal myth of poetry, the singing of Orpheus that sought to bring Eurydice back from death: the gods sent Orpheus away from Hades empty-handed and showed him the mere shadow [eidolon] of the woman he had come to seek: Eurydice herself they would not let him take, because he seemed, like the mere minstrel that he was, to be a lukewarm lover, lacking the courage to die as Alcestis died for love, and choosing rather to scheme his way, living, into Hades. And it was for this that the gods doomed him, and doomed him justly, David Quint 3 to meet his death at the hands of women. (179d)5 Behind the words of his shallowly sentimental speaker Phaedrus we can detect Plato’s familiar hostility to poetry, his objection in Book 10 of the Republic that the poet merely imitates the appearances of things and is... (shrink)

The article proposes a systematic reconstruction of Joas’ theory of the sacred. After having characterized the disciplinary profile of Joas, who is a specialist in social theory and historical sociology, and presenting his approach, which ties together pragmatism and hermeneutics, it will be seen how Joas’ theory of the sacred is rooted in his theory of the genesis of values. For Joas, this genesis is closely tied up with the experiences of self-formation and self-transcendence, which can be collective (Durkheim) as (...) well as individual (James). Joas qualifies them as experiences of the sacred, which are susceptible to religious articulation. Therefore, religion is a possibility for interpreting the sacred. This mode, however, may itself assume a variety of forms, not necessarily making recourse to the category of the transcendental, which represents the major discovery of what Karl Jaspers named the axial age – a central topic of Joas’ work for about 15 years. As an alternative to the Weberian notion of disenchantment, Joas develops his history of sacralization and desacralization on this ground. (shrink)

Accession Number: ATLA0001712204; Hosting Book Page Citation: p 328-344.; Language(s): English; General Note: Bibliography: p 343-344.; Issued by ATLA: 20130825; Publication Type: Essay.

Les dérives politiques, au XIXe siècle, du thème du Royaume de Dieu et des attentes messianiques, et les désillusions qui en résultent aujourd’hui, invitent à mieux souligner le caractère théologal de l'espérance chrétienne en lien avec la foi au Dieu créateur.Confesser la création, en effet, désacralise la nature et donc aussi l'histoire et renvoie ainsi la fin ultime au-delà des aspirations aux satisfactions d’ordre mondain. La logique de l'incarnation également, tout en inscrivant notre action dans le monde, projette notre vérité (...) au-delà de lui, en Dieu seul. La fin ultime est pascale : en lien avec l'humain et le monde, mais en rupture avec l'histoire et la nature, et non en prolongement ni en comblement de l’une ni de l'autre. La matrice apocalyptique disjoint le Règne de Dieu de l’ordre de ce monde. L'ultime habite et transforme le présent, mais il n’est pas le terme du déroulement du temps.Le chrétien est institué témoin du Règne de Dieu sur ce monde, « théâtre de sa gloire » : c'est pourquoi son espérance est hétérogène à ce monde. En tant que vertu théologale, elle n'oublie pas de faire mémoire du passé pour se disposer à recevoir le futur, mais elle ne fait pas du futur qui vient de Dieu l'accomplissement d'un sens de l'histoire, pas plus que l’éternité ne se situe sur la ligne du temps. The political deviations in the 19th century of the theme of the Kingdom of God and of Messianic expectations, and the disillusions that are the result today, invite us to underline better the theological character of Christian hope connected with faith in a creator God.To avow the creation, indeed, desacralizes nature and, therefore, also history, thereby sending the ultimate end beyond aspirations to satisfactions of a worldly kind. The logic of the Incarnation, while writing our action in the world, also projects our truth beyond it, in God alone. The ultimate end is paschal : in connection with the human and the world, but in rupture with history and nature, and not in prolonging nor in filling up of the one nor of the other. The apocalyptic matrix disconnects the Kingdom of God from the nature of this world. The ultimate inhabits and transforms the present, but it is not the end of the passing of time.The Christian is made witness to the Kingdom of God in this world, « theatre of his glory » : that is why his hope is heterogeneous to this world. As a theological virtue it does not fail to remember the past in order to dispose itself to receive the future. But hope does not make of the future that comes from God the accomplishment of a sense of history, no more than eternity is situated on the time-line. (shrink)

Enlightenment thought is widely considered to consist of four key features--atheism, democracy, humanism, and modernity. Common to all is an explicit process of desacralization. Yet the intellectual history of these concepts reveals that in the process of desacralization new sacred spaces arose in their name. The aim of Nothing Sacred is to question this second-order sacralization and consider, in a form of negative dialectics, whether (and how) these domains can argue against themselves in order to once again desacralize (...) their own self-sacralization. Secular critique is not simply an attack on religion but rather on the range of society's unavowed self-occlusions. Its object is to elucidate the politics and practices of knowledge that animate them. In the field of religion critique challenges the alleged permanence of political theology and transforms the epistemologies of both sacred and secular. For Stathis Gourgouris the state of nature that he terms political animality critiques political theology much as the anarchy of democracy, inhabited by it, critiques sovereignty. He takes aim at the desacralizing capacity of these historical formations, which produce their own historical conditions for self-sacralization, in order to demonstrate their dynamic subversive power against deeply ensconced conditions of disempowerment and incapacitation and to understand how societies and individuals are driven to self-subversion and self-disempowerment. These forces are alive today in the form of discursive "posts"--posthumanism, postdemocracy, post-truth, postracial--which are just as self-sacralizing. Exposing them is not a nostalgic liberal return to an idealized past but an expansive anarchic ontological affirmation of the political dimensions of human animality on a planetary scale and of a radical politics in which democracy has severed its bind to capitalism. Nothing Sacred thinks across orders, obstacles, and intersectional spaces in a world of warring multipolar oligarchies and psychotic rage. (shrink)

The prevailing historiographies of Jewish life in England suggest that religious representations of the Jews in the early modern period were confined to the margins and fringes of society by the desacralization of English life. Such representations are mostly neglected in the scholarly literature for the latter half of the long eighteenth century, and English Methodist texts in particular have received little attention. This article addresses these lacunae by examining the discourse of Adam Clarke, an erudite Bible scholar, theologian, (...) preacher and author and a prominent, respected, Methodist scholar. Significantly, the more overt demonological representations were either absent from Clarke‘s discourse, or only appeared on a few occasions, and were vague as to who or what was signified. However, Clarke portrayed biblical Jews as perfidious, cruel, murderous, an accursed seed, of an accursed breed and radically and totally evil. He also commented on contemporary Jews, maintaining that they were foolish, proud, uncharitable, intolerant and blasphemous. He argued that in their eternal, wretched, dispersed condition, the Jews demonstrated the veracity of biblical prophecy, and served an essential purpose as living monuments to the truth of Christianity. (shrink)

One of the most important facts in the contemporary intellectual life of mankind is its increasing liberation from the shackles of religion and the church. This is admitted even by bourgeois ideologists. Gabriel Marcel speaks of "desacralization" and the loss of the sense of the "holy" . Martin Heidegger speaks of "atheization" , and at the Second Session of the 21st Ecumenical Council the Council fathers noted with alarm the "de-Christianization" of society.

‘Dancing mania’ has often been understood as an expression of purportedly ‘typical medieval’ mass hysteria. Yet evidence suggests that a better interpretation would be to see it as a disease, the idea of which was shaped by patterns tracing back to antique cosmology. During the later Middle Ages, this concept became reality as a form of suffering primarily determined by spiritual forces which typically struck only individuals or small groups in narrowly defined regions. This article closely examines a key shift (...) in the semiotic setting of how this disease was interpreted: During the 15th and early 16th centuries, it became medicalised and desacralized. Evidence of this development can be found in isolated instances of ‘dancing mania’ in towns of the Rhine and Moselle area which at first glance would appear to be of little significance. As a medical concept, ‘dancing mania’ would survive the Reformation, and as a concept of primarily medical understanding it would later be re-integrated into the renewed Catholic culture of the late 16th and 17th centuries. (shrink)

This paper addresses the modern crisis of the philosophical project that conceived of literature as mathesis universalis. In the digital universe, literature maintains its relationship with truth, which is no longer considered as transcending the process of knowing, but as given in unity with it. The new statute of the text is captured well by Carlo Sini’s idea of “foglio-mondo” (“world-page”). Sini suggests that the desacralized text is not situated “outside” of truth; it does not become, as happens in many (...) postmodern thinkers, play, deceit, and gratuitous narration. Rather, “foglio-mondo” is the text freed from the tutelage of transcendental truth to become an “event” of truth. Questo intervento affronta il problema della crisi moderna del progetto filosofico della letteratura come mathesis universalis. Nell'universo digitale la letteratura mantiene il suo rapporto con la verità che non viene più considerata trascendente il processo della conoscenza, ma data in unità ad esso. Il nuovo statuto del testo è bene indicato dall'espressione di Carlo Sini “foglio-mondo." Il testo desacralizzato non viene a situarsi per Sini “fuori” dalla verità, non diventa, come in tanti pensatori postmoderni, gioco, menzogna, narrazione gratuita. Il “foglio-mondo” è piuttosto il testo che si è liberato dalla tutela della verità trascendente per diventare “evento” di verità. (shrink)