Quick Thoughts on the SMPT Conference

Posted on March 27, 2010
Filed Under Philosophy, Religion | 13 Comments

I unfortunately could only make it for today. (I was at the doors twice yesterday, only to be called away) However it was a great conference and quite nice to meet folks like Adam Miller face to face finally. Adam said he thought this was one of the best conferences SMPT had had. While podcasts of the conference will undoubtedly be available for members within a few months, I figured I’d jot down a few notes. Hopefully some of the rest of you can chime in with your thoughts.

First I really enjoyed Kevin Hart’s presentation on the prodigal son. There was one point that I especially liked – his point that the call of justice is deferred. This is the moment when the youngest son gripes about the party for the brother to his father. Hart suggests that in this moment of forgiveness it would be inappropriate to allow justice its due.

In the Q&A I brought up Derrida. In many places such as Spectres of Marx Derrida has Justice acting in a way that time becomes dis-jointed. (Which allows the ghostly process) I asked Hart if he was placing love in a fashion akin to how Derrida places justice. Unfortunately Hart answered by suggesting Derrida focuses too much on the ideals such as the ideal gift. I’m not sure how true that is, although I do think that Derrida focuses in on universals that orient us phenomenological. Not quite the same as the Kantian idea or category but acting in a somewhat similar role. However to me Derrida also allows a degenerate or contaminated form of all these – indeed to me this is key to his thought. (I think this can best be seen in essays like “Force of Law” with the relationship between law and justice)

So to me it seemed a bit of a non-answer. What I’m curious about is whether justice can in fact be deferred in this manner by love. Of course for a Mormon (which Kevin Hart obviously is not) one immediately thinks of Alma 42:25 “…do ye suppose that mercy can rob justice? I say unto you, Nay; not one whit. If so, God would cease to be God.” It seems that for a Mormon this very notion of “robbing” is tied to the notion of an economy. Of course Hart is right this is also tied to the notion of the gift. I just think that Derrida is very much thinking about time relative to the gift contra how I perceived Hart to see Derrida.

As for the answer for a Mormon regarding the prodigal son (which effectively in Hart’s framing is the question of whether love can rob justice) I don’t have a good answer. It seems that Mormons are always in this balancing act between love and justice. When one gets privileged things break down. To a Mormon the reconciliation is the Atonement.

The other interesting discussion was Eric Nielson’s talk on spirit birth (discussed quite a bit at BCC before Eric even gave his paper). It was followed up by a joint effort between David Paulsen and Martin Pulido. I think Paulsen established fairly convincingly that the idea of silence regarding heavenly mother is a myth. It was interesting though that the focus on mother in heaven by them was primarily motherhood relative to teenagers and twenty somethings. That is a characterization of motherhood in terms of a kind of nurturing but largely independent of biology. Eric on the other hand focused on biology. To me there are lots of problems with the biological literalism Mormons have been prone to relative to God. That said the other interesting thing is that there appeared to be almost two movements: a biological one and a Freudian one.

Eric had one great comment that stuck with me. Drawing off of Stephen Peck’s presentation yesterday (which I missed) on evolution, Eric noted a functionalism of the body. That is parts of the body play a role in their context. Eyes are for seeing. A heart is for pumping blood. Difference is tied up with function. So if there is a division of sexes (whatever that means) then there has to be a functional role. So the idea of a spirit birth, even if it isn’t that analogous to biological reproduction, makes a lot of sense. This is a kind of transcendental argument of sorts.

Blake Ostler and Keith Lane both had talks on Kierkgaard which were quite interesting. However Blake’s is largely similar to his Element article. So I’ll comment on that in a little bit. I’d wanted to raise some questions at the Q&A but ran out of time.

Related posts:

  1. SMPT Conference: Thoughts
  2. Some Quick Thoughts on Derrida and Plotinus
  3. Leiter on the Supreme Court
  4. More Beck and Social Justice
  5. Bleeding Heart Libertarians
  6. Beck and Social Justice

Comments

13 Responses to “Quick Thoughts on the SMPT Conference”

Clark, thanks for the write-up, would have loved to be there.

2 Eric Nielson on March 28th, 2010 3:59 pm

You make me sound smarter than I am. Thanks. It was good to meet you.

Clark,

I wish I would have known that was you asking the question! I was there and hoped to meet you but had to leave shortly after that talk. Dang it.

The give away that it was Clark was that it was a Derrida question. :)

I enjoyed the conference. This is my first SMPT conference but I have been to a number of academic conferences. I think that more time should be left for questions and discussion. Make papers available beforehand online for those that want to read the whole thing. Then, at the conference have the presenter outline main arguments with more detail on original aspects of the paper. Maybe have a pre-assigned discussant who can get things started. Maybe I am way off, but the feedback is most interesting to me as a presenter and as an observer.

Clark, thanks for your impressions. Like others, I wish I could have been there.

6 Martin Pulido on March 28th, 2010 7:06 pm

Yeah, Stephen’s presentation on Friday organized my thoughts on the question of resurrected gender. He claimed that the most general biological treatment of the meaning of a body is that: (1) the body exists in a whole-part relationship, and (2) that those parts have functional meaning. Thus, if resurrected bodies are gendered, are sexual, what functional meaning do the engendered parts play? Claiming that they were somehow necessary for a spiritual birth (or some other form of procreation, depending on how you interpret D&C 132) provided an answer, though not the only possible one. I think it is an interesting thought.

Martin:

It was good to meet you, and be on the stand with you at the conference. I wish I has went to Stephen’s presentation, it looked quite full so I attended the one downstatirs.

I think the issue is less resurrected bodies since you could always just make the case our resurrected bodies resemble ours because of our sense of identity but that we could make them anyway we want. If you stop and think about it for a moment that makes the most since as even ignoring ontological increases in God’s power just having all scientific knowledge would entail he could biologically engineer anything he wants.

Which takes me to one thing I couldn’t put my finger on but which has coalesced since then. I think the real 800 pound Gorilla in the room that no one mentioned wasn’t gender equality, the 50 years of polygamy in the 19th century or the like. Rather it was a tendency to over-limit God’s power. I halfway wonder what Kevin Hart thought of it all. I don’t just mean some limits, which clearly Mormons do, but limiting God well beyond even what conservative future technology ought be able to do within a few thousand years.

I think you can see that in the fear about “spirit pregnancy.” Heck, even if spirit creation was analogous to sexual reproduction (which is a huge if) why on earth couldn’t they create an artificial womb?

I didn’t see the session on “transhumanism” (which I’m honestly pretty skeptical of) but I think it probably would have been quite relevant. For all the philosophical naivete in that movement (especially the tendency to assume Functionalism as a correct view of the mind) they at least are grappling with obvious future technological innovations. (Even if many are more than a little bit too optimistic about the speed with which it will arrive)

BTW – two other blogs posted on SMPT. Zelphehad’s Daughters and Small and Simple. Lloyd Ericson put his presentation up at his blog.

I should have up my comments on Blake’s presentation soon. It really solidified why I just don’t buy Kierkegaard and why I’m more than a little uncomfortable with Mormon appropriation of him.

It seems that for a Mormon this very notion of “robbing” is tied to the notion of an economy.

In order for the idea of justice to make any sense, there must be an underlying economy. Otherwise there are no real injuries, and no equity to restore, whether by operation of justice or by gift.

This is what disturbs me most about the idea that God is strictly omnipotent. If he were, there would be no economy other than the one he made up and could suspend at will. If there is no economy, justice and grace are meaningless.

11 Martin Pulido on April 1st, 2010 2:56 am

Hey Clark, I wanted to comment on your remarks but have been a little busy. I wanted to agree with you that that is an 800 pound gorilla. Another I had thought about was that at least in botany, sexual reproduction only tends to occur in environments where there is a competition of resources or where change is frequent (and so dangerous for a set of organisms that have the same set of genes, so that one pathogen could wipe them all out). Otherwise, reproduction is asexual. So what are we saying about environments (or something else about the universe), which makes sexual reproduction beneficial in the eschaton for resurrected humans (admitting of course the big if)?

I have also thought about the artificial womb, and agree with you that it seems ridiculous to think that God can’t do what we ourselves can do with our own (or soon to be) biotechnology. So if one is going to use analogical reason with biology between earthly and heavenly reproduction, they need to face these facts. And if one is going to make it more metaphysical (like Taylor’s emanationist spirit birth), the law of correspondences breaks down, so that it becomes difficult to see how it relates to earthly births at all. And then it enters a realm of even further wishful thinking.

I am no sure about making your resurrected body anyway you want (I read this as suggesting shapeshifting), as it seems quite likely that our bodies would have some necessary internal structures that would have to be so configured to maintain the kinds of beings that we are. Could I really shapeshift into a koala or a flee? Maybe this is my naive thinking, but of course I don’t know how resurrected bodies are organized, what is necessary to them and what is not. But perhaps you were making a statement more of, “whenever we get our resurrected bodies, they could be engineered to look however we liked for us to enter into them,” instead of making a shapeshifting statement. In fact, after rereading your comment, I am almost certain of it.

As for the transhumanists, thanks for the tip. If their video is posted online on the smpt site, I will be sure to see if they have anything to say upon the matter.

Martin, yes there probably would be some limits of that sort. But I was more thinking of what speed limits there are for God for information transfer. (i.e. is there a practical speed of life limit?) If not then God could easily create avatars of many shapes and sizes anywhere in the universe.

Personally I’m not sure how to take the speed of light limit and God – that’s one of the few places I might limit him but it depends upon how a multiverse shakes out. In general while I accept that most Mormon theologies of necessity have a more limited view of God than Protestants I also think Mormons tend to go overboard a bit too much in an unwarranted fashion. So I’m loath to really put too many limits on him if only because we just don’t know what the ultimate laws of physics really are. (Which of course determines the technological possibilities)

Put an other way I think Mormon philosophers sometimes play the limit card more than is justified.

So I’m loath to really put too many limits on him if only because we just don’t know what the ultimate laws of physics really are

It doesn’t matter what the ultimate laws of physics really are, what matters is that they are laws.

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