The point of religion is to wake up. "The dream of going to another world is just that: a dream, and probably also a deep sin" (WS 437).
On Latour's account, the test for religious competence is clear. "If, when hearing about religion, you direct your attention to the far away, the above, the supernatural, the infinite, the distant, the transcendent, the mysterious, the misty, the sublime, the eternal, chances are that you have not even begun to be sensitive to what religious talk tries to involve you in" (TF 32). Religion has no interest in selling you insurance or in telling you something you don't already know. It does not want to teach you or inform you. Religion wants to change you. It wants to render you sensitive to the passing worlds alrady hard upon you. "Information talk is one thing, transformation talk is another" and religion is about the latter, not the former (TF 29).
Adam S. Miller, Speculative Grace, pg. 156
Showing posts with label Adam S. Miller. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Adam S. Miller. Show all posts
Monday, July 1, 2013
Adam S. Miller - The Art of Losing
Subjects, whatever the limitations imposed upon them, can have their constraints transubstantiated into grace and liberation. This is the message of the cross: redemption unfolds as the practice--as the art--of losing. The cross is that most intimate detour to salvation.
Adam S. Miller, Speculative Grace, pg. 150
Adam S. Miller, Speculative Grace, pg. 150
Adam S. Miller - Religion and the Two Faces of Grace
Religion corrects for our farsightedness. It addresses the invisibility of objects that are commonly too familiar, too available, too immanent to be seen. To this end, it intentionally cultivates nearsightedness. Religion practices myopia in order to bring both work and suffering into focus as grace. Redemption turns on this revelation.
...
Double-bound, grace has two faces. On the one hand, grace presents as the ceaseless work required by the multitude's resistance. On the other hand, grace presents as the unavoidable suffering imposed by our passibility. Work is grace seen from the perspective of resistance. Suffering is grace seen from the perspective of availability. Hell is when the grace of either slips from view. Work and suffering are the two faces of Grace.
...
The business of religion is "to disappoint, first, to disappoint" (TF 32). Religion aims to intentionally, relentlessly, and systematically disappoint this desire to go away by bringing our attention back to the most obvious features of the most ordinary objects. Its work is to bring us up short by revealing our desire to be done with the double-bind of grace. To disappoint this drive, "to divert it, break it, subvert it, to render it impossible, is just what religious talk is after (TF 32). Habitually, we smooth over the rough edges, downplay the invompatible lines, and fantasize that the relative availability of a black box depends on something other than the unruly mobs packed-away inside. Sin is the dream of an empty black box, of a black box that is absolute rather than relative, permanent rather than provisional. Sin repurposes the obscurity imposed by ta black box for the sake of obscuring grace. In this way, sin is as natural as the habits upon which substances rely. But in religious practices, "incredible pain has been taken to break the habitual gaze of the viewer" (TF 39). Great effor is expended to show work and suffering as something other than regrettable. "Religion, in this tradition, does everything to constantly redirect attention by systematically breaking the will to go away, to ignore, to be indifferent, blasé, bored" (TF 36).
Mark this definition: religion is what breaks our will to go away.
...
...This revelation of the ordinary as a grace already given, as a life already being lived, is nothing exceptional, but it is something that must be enacted. It is a revelationt aht must be practiced. Attention is difficult to exercise, it resists focus and is available for distraction. It is a little bit subtle and requires great care. Religion, rather than fleeing, practices attending. It bends the flight of our attention back toward the ground that's already bracing us.
Adam S. Miller, Speculative Grace, pgs. 143-145
...
Double-bound, grace has two faces. On the one hand, grace presents as the ceaseless work required by the multitude's resistance. On the other hand, grace presents as the unavoidable suffering imposed by our passibility. Work is grace seen from the perspective of resistance. Suffering is grace seen from the perspective of availability. Hell is when the grace of either slips from view. Work and suffering are the two faces of Grace.
...
The business of religion is "to disappoint, first, to disappoint" (TF 32). Religion aims to intentionally, relentlessly, and systematically disappoint this desire to go away by bringing our attention back to the most obvious features of the most ordinary objects. Its work is to bring us up short by revealing our desire to be done with the double-bind of grace. To disappoint this drive, "to divert it, break it, subvert it, to render it impossible, is just what religious talk is after (TF 32). Habitually, we smooth over the rough edges, downplay the invompatible lines, and fantasize that the relative availability of a black box depends on something other than the unruly mobs packed-away inside. Sin is the dream of an empty black box, of a black box that is absolute rather than relative, permanent rather than provisional. Sin repurposes the obscurity imposed by ta black box for the sake of obscuring grace. In this way, sin is as natural as the habits upon which substances rely. But in religious practices, "incredible pain has been taken to break the habitual gaze of the viewer" (TF 39). Great effor is expended to show work and suffering as something other than regrettable. "Religion, in this tradition, does everything to constantly redirect attention by systematically breaking the will to go away, to ignore, to be indifferent, blasé, bored" (TF 36).
Mark this definition: religion is what breaks our will to go away.
...
...This revelation of the ordinary as a grace already given, as a life already being lived, is nothing exceptional, but it is something that must be enacted. It is a revelationt aht must be practiced. Attention is difficult to exercise, it resists focus and is available for distraction. It is a little bit subtle and requires great care. Religion, rather than fleeing, practices attending. It bends the flight of our attention back toward the ground that's already bracing us.
Adam S. Miller, Speculative Grace, pgs. 143-145
Adam S. Miller - Pluralistic Religion
In the same way that religion gets into trouble when it tries to out-science science, science gets into trouble when it tries to out-religion religion. This is particularly true when science apes the confused, traditional view of religion as something that is all things to all people, a mixture of everything, and the final word on all of it.
Adam S. Miller, Speculative Grace, pg. 136
Adam S. Miller, Speculative Grace, pg. 136
Adam S. Miller - The Relationship between Religion & Atheism
Belief is a lure, a shiny, spinning distraction. Faith, in contrast, is the work to which religion calls us.
If the aim of religious practices is to enact, again, the nearness of what is too close to be visible, then we must always begin again from the ordinary ground upon which we stand. If this ground is secular, that is neither your fault nor mine, but we must not claim it as an excuse for our own laziness. "Christians take as proof of the tediousness and decadence of this age what is in fact the result of their own laziness in pursuing the translation task of their fathers" (TS 228). There are nothing but translations all the way down. If contemporary religion remind s us a bit too strongly of a dry well or a gaily painted sepulcher, this is not the fault of the age in which we live. It is the result of our unwillingness to do the only kind of work that has ever been done: the work of repeating, copying, translating, concatenating, aligning, porting, processing, and negotiating the whole settlement, from the top, again. Religion works crosswise to theism or atheism. When, Latour asks, "will we be able to entertain a coherent form of atheism, that is to accept the the ordinary way of talking about religion today is through common sense atheism, which performs the same role as the common sense powerful Gods of a bygone past?" (TS 232). Atheism is not an objection against but an invitation to religious work.
"Theologians should not shun but on the contrary embrace the formidable chance provided by a thoroughly secularized spirit to say that there is no powerful, omniscient, omnipresent Creator God, no providence, that God does not exist (or maybe does not exist yet, as Whitehead could argue), and to see in those common sense features of ordinary talk the expression, the power of religion which may start exactly as freshly as it once did, when it had to use the obvious common parlance of ancient people for whom God was as unproblematic as market forces are for us today. (TS 229)"
The force of religious speech depends on its ability to speak plainly about obvious things. Religion addresses the most ordinary features of our most common objects and renders the difficult grace of the nearness visible again. God himself has always insisted, not on orthodoxy, but on the religious centrality of the least, the common, the ordinary, the vulgar, the downtrodden, the poor. The path beat by their feet marks the way.
Adam S. Miller, Speculative Grace, pg. 133-135
If the aim of religious practices is to enact, again, the nearness of what is too close to be visible, then we must always begin again from the ordinary ground upon which we stand. If this ground is secular, that is neither your fault nor mine, but we must not claim it as an excuse for our own laziness. "Christians take as proof of the tediousness and decadence of this age what is in fact the result of their own laziness in pursuing the translation task of their fathers" (TS 228). There are nothing but translations all the way down. If contemporary religion remind s us a bit too strongly of a dry well or a gaily painted sepulcher, this is not the fault of the age in which we live. It is the result of our unwillingness to do the only kind of work that has ever been done: the work of repeating, copying, translating, concatenating, aligning, porting, processing, and negotiating the whole settlement, from the top, again. Religion works crosswise to theism or atheism. When, Latour asks, "will we be able to entertain a coherent form of atheism, that is to accept the the ordinary way of talking about religion today is through common sense atheism, which performs the same role as the common sense powerful Gods of a bygone past?" (TS 232). Atheism is not an objection against but an invitation to religious work.
"Theologians should not shun but on the contrary embrace the formidable chance provided by a thoroughly secularized spirit to say that there is no powerful, omniscient, omnipresent Creator God, no providence, that God does not exist (or maybe does not exist yet, as Whitehead could argue), and to see in those common sense features of ordinary talk the expression, the power of religion which may start exactly as freshly as it once did, when it had to use the obvious common parlance of ancient people for whom God was as unproblematic as market forces are for us today. (TS 229)"
The force of religious speech depends on its ability to speak plainly about obvious things. Religion addresses the most ordinary features of our most common objects and renders the difficult grace of the nearness visible again. God himself has always insisted, not on orthodoxy, but on the religious centrality of the least, the common, the ordinary, the vulgar, the downtrodden, the poor. The path beat by their feet marks the way.
Adam S. Miller, Speculative Grace, pg. 133-135
Adam S. Miller - God Suffers Grace
The very premise of an object-oriented metaphysics excludes the possibility of a traditional, omnipotent, impassible, wholly transcendent God who created the world out of nothing...God, if he does or will exist, is an object, one among many, who suffers the grace of resistant availability like the objects that compose him.
Adam S. Miller - Religious Expectations Revealed
To expect a modest arrangement of people and frescoes and bread and hard wooden pews to do what the Hubble telescope does and lay down a through-line to deep space is to court pretty certain disappointment. But to think that a modest arrangement of these objects has no disclosive power is to miss religious phenomena altogether. Religious practices do not, like scientific practices, send us far away. Religious practices work in the opposite direction: they ratchet us down and in. They display the invisible grace of what was already available. Saying a prayer isn't like flying off to an exotic locale, it's like squishing your toes down through layers of mud.
Adam S. Miller, Speculative Grace, pg. 131
Adam S. Miller, Speculative Grace, pg. 131
Adam S. Miller - Religion is not about "Belief"
Religion aims at illuminating objects that are too near rather than too far. Religion is the work of making-present what is already available. Religious narratives, rather than conveying us to some distant place, are meant to enact the nearness of what is already given. Enacting this nearness is the key to redeeming the present and unveiling grace. "The truth-value of those stories depends on us tonight, exactly as the whole history of two lovers depends on their ability to re-enact the injunction to love again in the minute the are reaching for one another in the darker moment of their estrangement" (TF 33).
...
Religion should not and never was defined by belief in things absent and distant, invisible and beyond. God is not the object of a belief-action" (TS 231). Rather, religion requires something of an entirely different order. It requires that I be faithful to the grace of what has already been made available. Only this fidelity can redeem the present of presence. Religious work depends, of course, on faith, but "faith and belief have nothing so say to one another." (TS 231).
Adam S. Miller, Speculative Grace, pg. 126-127
...
Religion should not and never was defined by belief in things absent and distant, invisible and beyond. God is not the object of a belief-action" (TS 231). Rather, religion requires something of an entirely different order. It requires that I be faithful to the grace of what has already been made available. Only this fidelity can redeem the present of presence. Religious work depends, of course, on faith, but "faith and belief have nothing so say to one another." (TS 231).
Adam S. Miller, Speculative Grace, pg. 126-127
Adam S. Miller - Science and Religion
For Latour, religion and science do have distinguishable magisteria--but these magisteria are anything but "non-overlapping" and, more critically, Latour finds their commonly assigned division of labor laughable. "What a comedy of errors! When the debate between science and religion is staged, adjectives are almost exactly reversed: it is of science that one should say that it reaches the invisible world of the beyond, that she is spiritual, miraculous soul-lifting, uplifting. And it is religion that should be qualified as local, objective, visible, mundane, unmiraculous, repetitive, obstinate, sturdy" (TF 36). It is the work of science to build fragile bridges of carefully constructed, painstakingly tested, and incessantly extended chains of reference. It is science that gropes out into the dark beyond and bring us into relation with the distant and the transcendent. It is science that funds the miraculous, defends the counterintuitive, excavates the unbelievable, and negotiates with the resistant and unavailable.
But the invisibility of the resistant and transcendent is only one kind of invisibility. The invisibility of the available, obvious, familiar, local, repetitive, sturdy, matter of fact phenomena remains. This invisibility,while quite different in character, is just as difficult to breach. "The far away is just as foreign, just as difficult to reach, just as unrealistic, and I would add just as unreasonable as the nearby" (WS 465). Confusion results when it is assumed that all invisibility is reducible to a single kind, and accessible from a single line of sight. In particular, confusion results when it is assumed that the invisibility proper to religious phenomena is identical to that of scientific phenomena.
On Latour's telling, though the analogy is mine, the story of our common confusion about science and religion goes like this: To great applause, science works out dependable methods that correct for our near-sightedness and bring into focus distant, transcendent phenomena. However, full of its own success and egged on by religious pretensions, science can't help but draw some unflattering conclusions about its neighbors. Science borrows some spectacles from religion (spectacles meant to correct for our far-sightedness), puts them on, and then loudly complains that these glasses are useless. Seen through these lenses, all of science's hard-earned, transcendent objects have suddenly become blurry or disappeared altogether.
The mistaken assumption that commonly follows--for many religious people and scientists alike--is that religious talk, because it doesn't address the transcendent objects articulated by science, must then be referring to "an invisible world of belief" that is even more distant, even more transcendent, even more miraculous, than the one science itself is articulating (HI 433). As a result, both science and religion get backed into a corner. Scientists think such religious talk about the super-transcendent is ridiculous and many religious folk feel compelled by the strength of their own practice--knowing that religion does in fact bring something crucial into focus--to make a public virtue out of believing in the super-absurd. "Belief," claims Latour in response, "is a caricature of religion exactly as knowledge is a caricature of science" (TF 45). both of these caricatures need to be abandoned. Science doesn't deal with obvious facts any more than religion deals with magical beliefs and "the fights, reconciliations, ceasefire, between these two 'worldviews'are as instructive as a boxing match in a pitch black tunnel" (WS 464).
...
The same competencies needed to be good at science are those needed to be good at religion. The practitioner needs patience, modesty, persistence, curiosity, concentration, generosity, creativity, rigor, care, and of course, and objective bent. As commonly understood, neither knowledge nor belief describes the work of science or religion. Both science and religion require the same compentencies and both science and religion produce the same output. Both induce revelation. However, where science reveals transcendent objects by correcting for our myopia, religion reveals immanent objects by correcting for our hyperopia.
Adam S. Miller, Speculative Grace, pgs. 119-122
Adam S. Miller - Religion and Science, correcting two kinds of invisibility
Objects that are either too resistant or too available will fail to appear. Both the unavailable and the acquiescent tend toward invisibility. In one case, the object is too distant, too opaque, too transcendent. In the other, it is too close, too transparent, too immanent. Science and religion differ in that they address two different kinds of invisibility. Where science aims to illuminate resistant but insufficiently available objects, religion aims to illuminate available but insufficiently resistant phenomena. Science is a third-person exposition of the unavailable. Religion is a first-person phenomenology of the obvious. Science corrects for our nearsightedness, religion for our farsightedness.
Adam S. Miller, Speculative Grace, pg. 119
Adam S. Miller, Speculative Grace, pg. 119
Adam S. Miller - Ontology & Hermeneutics, no original meaning to recover
The need for interpretation and translation is not the mark of a fallen world, it is the substance of life. To live is to interpret. This can be hard to swallow. "When you speak of hermeneutics, no matter which precaution you take, you always expect the second shoe to drop: someone inevitably will add: 'But of course there also exist "natural," "objective" things that are "not" interpreted'" (RS 144-145). But no--there are, of course, not. This is not because all natural objects have been contaminated by the interpretive meddling of other objects.
...
There is no original meaning to recover. There are only objects to be persuaded. The more, the better.
Adam S. Miller, Speculative Grace, pg. 108
...
There is no original meaning to recover. There are only objects to be persuaded. The more, the better.
Adam S. Miller, Speculative Grace, pg. 108
Adam S. Miller - Truth is the product of a mundane democracy
In a metaphysical democracy, every object gets a vote. Producing statements that only some humans find persuasive won't get you very far. If you want to speak truthfully about icebergs, then it is not enough to convince your fellow scientists, some influential politicians, or even a bevy of soccer moms. To have real traction you must also convince the icebergs themselves to line up behind what you say. If you want to make claims about honey, your alignment will have to queue not just bee-keepers, but flowers and hives and bees as well. The more bees that agree, the more substantial your claim becomes. When it comes to truth, appeals to authority carry only as much weight as the masses that such authority can muster. Blanket appeals to truths sponsored by absent gods, angels, Platonic forms, natural laws, or noumenal things-in-themselves have no force...Truth is the product of a mundane democracy, not the province of a magic kingdom. In order to vote, you have to show up at the polling place.
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Truth is a function of both popularity and durability. If a truth hits it off with a persuasive mass of humans and (in particular) nonhumans and then manages to get itself copied and repeated, ti has a career on its hands. Truths "are much like genes that cannot survive if they do not manage to pass themselves on to later bodies" (SA 38). Claims that are not persuasive to humans and nonhumans alike will quickly die out.
Adam S. Miller, Speculative Grace, pgs. 103-104
...
Truth is a function of both popularity and durability. If a truth hits it off with a persuasive mass of humans and (in particular) nonhumans and then manages to get itself copied and repeated, ti has a career on its hands. Truths "are much like genes that cannot survive if they do not manage to pass themselves on to later bodies" (SA 38). Claims that are not persuasive to humans and nonhumans alike will quickly die out.
Adam S. Miller, Speculative Grace, pgs. 103-104
Monday, June 24, 2013
...to be is to be passible. God is no exception to this rule. God, should such an object exist, would be one being, one particularly complex multiple, that composes, is composed of, and is in interdependent relation with many other objects. Like every other object, God would be available, passible, resistant, and graced by the unavoidability of hard work.
This last point about the link between grace and passibility is crucial to the experiment I've undertaken because it fundamentally reframes the problem of suffering. To say that grace unfolds as the exceptionless universality of passibility is to say that grace guarantees the universality of suffering. Moreover, it is to say that the imposition of suffering (classically understood as the problem) and the reception of grace (classically understood as the answer to this problem) are equivocal....both sin and salvation turn on this equivocity.
However, whatever the nature of salvation, suffering, because it names the double-bind of resistant availability constitutive of every object, cannot be expunged. To be is to suffer and, outside of classical theism, suffering must characterize both activity and passibility. Available for relation, every object passively suffers its passibility to being enlisted, entrained, repurposed, or redistributed by other objects. Moreover, even in actively influencing other multiples, each object will suffer the only partially reducible resistance of those objects it means to influence. And it is important to note that, because every object (God included) must also suffer itself.
This universality, though, is not simply bad news because suffering is the universal mark of grace. Without exception, grace comes. Suffering it to be so, grace is what enables us to act, think, feel, love, an be.
Adam S. Miller, Speculative Grace, pg. 80-81
This last point about the link between grace and passibility is crucial to the experiment I've undertaken because it fundamentally reframes the problem of suffering. To say that grace unfolds as the exceptionless universality of passibility is to say that grace guarantees the universality of suffering. Moreover, it is to say that the imposition of suffering (classically understood as the problem) and the reception of grace (classically understood as the answer to this problem) are equivocal....both sin and salvation turn on this equivocity.
However, whatever the nature of salvation, suffering, because it names the double-bind of resistant availability constitutive of every object, cannot be expunged. To be is to suffer and, outside of classical theism, suffering must characterize both activity and passibility. Available for relation, every object passively suffers its passibility to being enlisted, entrained, repurposed, or redistributed by other objects. Moreover, even in actively influencing other multiples, each object will suffer the only partially reducible resistance of those objects it means to influence. And it is important to note that, because every object (God included) must also suffer itself.
This universality, though, is not simply bad news because suffering is the universal mark of grace. Without exception, grace comes. Suffering it to be so, grace is what enables us to act, think, feel, love, an be.
Adam S. Miller, Speculative Grace, pg. 80-81
Grace is suffered in that it is passively received rather than actively controlled...There are no exceptions to the rule of availability, interdependence, co-composition, passibility, and passivity. This means in turn, that there are no exceptions to the rule of grace. Every object is shaped by forces and relations that exceed its knowledge and control. Every object suffers the conditioning and enabling gifts of the other objects that compose, sustain, and cannibalize it.
Adam S. Miller, Speculative Grace, pg. 79
Adam S. Miller, Speculative Grace, pg. 79
As a working agent, every possible object is dependent both on the other objects that compose it and on the other objects that can be leveraged into business with it. Grace is enabling precisely because the gift of agency is always borrowed. Grace may no longer make every impossible thing possible, but it does enable the fermentation of every possible thing.
Adam S. Miller, Speculative Grace, pg. 78
Adam S. Miller, Speculative Grace, pg. 78
Knowledge, though engaged in the work of tallying objects, is itself a tallied object. Facts unfold as workable chains of partially linked, abstracted, or reduced subsets of objects that, in their novel configuration, are added to or folded back into the multitude of objects from which they came.
...
Strictly speaking...knowledge (as a faithful, mirror-like reflection without surplus or deficit) does not exist. Such "knowledge does not exist--what would it be? There is only know-how. In other words, there are crafts and trades. Despite all claims to the contrary crafts hold the key to knowledge" (PF 218). To know an object is to know how to connect with it, how to link it with other networks, how to repurpose it as a flexible widget in some novel situation. This kind of knowledge is intimate, messy, hands-on, adaptive, and above all, real.
Adam S. Miller, Speculative Grace, pg. 76
...
Strictly speaking...knowledge (as a faithful, mirror-like reflection without surplus or deficit) does not exist. Such "knowledge does not exist--what would it be? There is only know-how. In other words, there are crafts and trades. Despite all claims to the contrary crafts hold the key to knowledge" (PF 218). To know an object is to know how to connect with it, how to link it with other networks, how to repurpose it as a flexible widget in some novel situation. This kind of knowledge is intimate, messy, hands-on, adaptive, and above all, real.
Adam S. Miller, Speculative Grace, pg. 76
Wednesday, June 19, 2013
Additionally, if we do try to divide "Nature" from "Society" in a neat and tidy way, then the transcendence that traditionally characterizes the supernatural simply gets transposed into Nature itself. Nature becomes that which forever "transcends" any of our feeble attempts to represent it. "When," Latour asks, "will we finally be able to secularize nonhumnas by ceasing to objectify them?" (PN 51). When will we stop taking objects as masks for noumenal things in themselves? Latour's response to this version of "natural" tanscendence is identical to his response to claims of "supernatural" transcendence: he doesn't deny transcendence, he affirms it while multiplying it. he flattens and secularizes it by rendering it ubiquitous.
Adam S. Miller, Speculative Grace, pgs. 64-65.
Adam S. Miller, Speculative Grace, pgs. 64-65.
The human and the nonhuman bleed into each other as human intentions are animated by powerfully purposeless forces and purposeless processes like natural selection bear the emergence of order and direction...Agency is always only borrowed and a specifically human agency can be borrowed only from a complex of nonhuman objects. Everything human is organized around an unavoidable detour through the nonhuman because everything human is composed of and dependent upon nothing else.
..every agent is a machine that dissembles the multitude from whom its strength is borrowed. An agent is an object that speaks on behalf of others fromt he sake of itself. But such agency is always a two edged sword because there is no simple way to determine when the agent is ventriloquizing the multitude and when the multitude is ventriloquizing the agent. We're not likely to go wrong if we say taht agency is always both.
In an object-oriented theology, grace is the concurrently imposed and enabling strength that emerges in the give and take of agency. Grace shows up in the way that agency simultaneously endows an object with and divests it of itself. Agency ist he grace of acting for oneself on another's behalf. Or, agency is the grace of acting for another on one's own behalf.
Adam S. Miller, Speculative Grace, pgs. 57-58
..every agent is a machine that dissembles the multitude from whom its strength is borrowed. An agent is an object that speaks on behalf of others fromt he sake of itself. But such agency is always a two edged sword because there is no simple way to determine when the agent is ventriloquizing the multitude and when the multitude is ventriloquizing the agent. We're not likely to go wrong if we say taht agency is always both.
In an object-oriented theology, grace is the concurrently imposed and enabling strength that emerges in the give and take of agency. Grace shows up in the way that agency simultaneously endows an object with and divests it of itself. Agency ist he grace of acting for oneself on another's behalf. Or, agency is the grace of acting for another on one's own behalf.
Adam S. Miller, Speculative Grace, pgs. 57-58
The world, always an imbroglio, is no different now than it is has ever been [sic]. It is the urge to reduce and purify that desacralizes the world, not the world's own ontological promiscuity. We cannot be guilty of mixing up this world with another or of cutting the string that once tied us to a higher plane because this world (i.e. these transcendences) is all there is. If the gods exist, they live and move and have their being in the same motley pluriverse as every other object.
The good news is that, "as soon as there is no other world, perfection resides in this one" (PF 233). Every object is simply and perfectly whatever that object is. "There is no rear-world behind to be used as a judge of this one" (RS 118). This does not mean that legitimate judgements cannot be made, but it does mean that non-messy, non-provisional, non-concatenated judgments cannot be made. It means that the messiness of these judgments does not stem from our poor access to what is real, but from the messiness of the real itself. And it means that, with nowhere else to go, "God has come down from Heaven to Earth" and he too must go "to work to discuss, through experimentation with possible worlds, the best of deals, the optimum that no one is allowed to calculate in others' stead" (PN 177).
..if we can manage to renounce our dreams of revolution and reduction, then "the most ordinary common sense suffices for us to take hold, without am inute of apprenticeship, of all the tools that are right here at hand" (PN 163). This work of acknowledging both the modesty and adequacy of the tools an dinstruments at hand--of confessing both the "perfection" and sufficiency of the grace of this disheveled world--is the work of an experimental metaphysics. and, if there were to be such a thing, it would be the work of an experimental religion as well.
Adam S. Miller, Speculative Grace, pgs. 47-48.
The good news is that, "as soon as there is no other world, perfection resides in this one" (PF 233). Every object is simply and perfectly whatever that object is. "There is no rear-world behind to be used as a judge of this one" (RS 118). This does not mean that legitimate judgements cannot be made, but it does mean that non-messy, non-provisional, non-concatenated judgments cannot be made. It means that the messiness of these judgments does not stem from our poor access to what is real, but from the messiness of the real itself. And it means that, with nowhere else to go, "God has come down from Heaven to Earth" and he too must go "to work to discuss, through experimentation with possible worlds, the best of deals, the optimum that no one is allowed to calculate in others' stead" (PN 177).
..if we can manage to renounce our dreams of revolution and reduction, then "the most ordinary common sense suffices for us to take hold, without am inute of apprenticeship, of all the tools that are right here at hand" (PN 163). This work of acknowledging both the modesty and adequacy of the tools an dinstruments at hand--of confessing both the "perfection" and sufficiency of the grace of this disheveled world--is the work of an experimental metaphysics. and, if there were to be such a thing, it would be the work of an experimental religion as well.
Adam S. Miller, Speculative Grace, pgs. 47-48.
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