Merry Christmas and happy holidays to everyone. Here's also to remembering the real spirit of Christmas. Sometimes it is lost in the hustle and bustle of shopping, spending time with relatives and cooking. Yet let's not forget the events in the manger that matter most. That came to me while opening presents. My family was down from Canada visiting. One of my mother's presents was a copy of Gibson's The Passion which made me remember just how Christ-centered Christmas is.
I realize how important it is to be inclusive to others at this time, whether they be Jewish, Buddhist, atheist, or some other faith. Yet it is also sad to see every year the very source of the word Christmas become more and more diminished. I find silly those attempts by some, such as Fox's Bill O'Reilly, to make it a celebration of the "philosopher Jesus." Clearly it is a religious holiday. Yet at the same time, I find it sad that it has become more and more generic with time. One thing I love as I travel to other places is feeling their culture and enjoying their religious celebrations. I think it sad that we, as a nation, are loosing that expression of religion in the public sphere. I certainly understand those who want no public religion as a way of accommodating others. I personally think it a case of good intentions gone astray.
So hopefully I can add but one voice to the cry to remember the origins of Christmas.
On the other hand, over at Philosophical Fortnights there is a very good discussion on Christmas and inclusiveness. It starts off on a riff concerning the whole "save 'Merry Christmas'" movement. (Which I confess I'm quite sympathetic to, even if some go overboard) It's a rather different take from my own, and is quite worth reading.
It may be that some of the anxiety, if it is real, about Christmas is owing to the tendency to mingle tolerance and inclusiveness. Tolerance says: I don’t agree with you but I’m not going to harm you on that account. Inclusiveness, on the other hand, can be realized in the earnest attempt to find common ground or to rationally persuade people that their disagreements rest on unfounded prejudice; or, less happily, in a Mixmaster approach to culture: a little bit of Christmas, a little bit of Hanukkah, a little bit of Kwanzaa, and presto! a universal holiday—the religious version of Presidents’ Day. But that does not accord with the way many religions view themselves. To be a believing Jew or Christian is to affirm what others deny and vice versa. People of one religion sometimes believe and do things that those of other religions regard as sinful, abominable, unclean, & so forth. Those are differences you can’t split; there is no harmonious whole. Tolerance is possible, but not inclusion.
Um, and what about being open to the other as other? Are tolerance or inclusion really the only options here? How quaint.
I think that's an excellent question Matt, which I had upon reading it as well. It seems a common fallacy to break everything up into an essential dichotomy. I think that the author of that blog is certainly doing this though.
The question that one might raise, however, is what treating the other as the other consists of. Can one do that without violence of any sort? (Meaning violence in the abstract near semiotical sense up through more real kinds of violence) It seems that in one sense the difference between tolerance and inclusion are merely the kinds of violence done to the other. What exactly is this third way?
Merry Christmas Clark. I hope you enjoy the Passion as much as I do.
Well it must be anything but a third way (in the Clintonian sense)--that seems clear enough. I think it has to do with language, first of all. The violence of a certain unexamined language.
But isn't language always violent in the Levinasian sense? When we trust language then we do violence to the thing spoken of, since there is always that "more and less" in language that is different from the thing spoken of.
That point seems to be the basis of the return to the questioning of negative theology that characterizes the so-called theological turn in French phenomenology.
I suspect that they way out of this is a certain openness to the "beyond language." (Which isn't to say that we can get beyond language, merely that we are open to the coming that always comes through future language)
How does this relate to the discussion of Christmas though? In one sense it seems both sides are focused on language as violence. Both tolerance and inclusion define the other in terms of what has already been said. They close down that future. Thus the conservatives, worrying about Christmas being turned into a purely sectarian holiday, attempt to close down any future re-creation (or revelation) of what the meaning of Christmas is. They make Christmas a dead holiday. A said, rather than a saying. The "sectarians" who are trying to libralize Christmas and make it open to all are doing the same thing, only by making it a dead holiday in terms of what is common to all at this time.
Of course that's somewhat simplified, since I think that both sides are open to changes to the holiday to a certain degree. Yet both claim mastery over the holiday and don't want it to live on its own terms.
If there is a third way, it seems simply "letting be." Let the holiday develop on its own terms according to its own natural evolution rather than imposing on it. (i.e. excluding the Christian aspects of the holidays or excluding the non-Christian aspects of the holidays)
I think that assuming that the other is (by hypothesis) other does violence to the other. Not only is this violence disconcerting, but it's terribly ineffective. It seems to be (a) never ending, and (b) never resultant in actual deaths (would that it were, since that, too, would put an end to the violence--wouldn't it be nice if we could just kill the other and get it over with?).
Perhaps its better to say that language tortures the other, but again, that is too severe. Presumably, the torture couldn't continue indefinitely because it would lead the other to have a breakdown.
I guess we'll just have to be content with the notion that language annoys the other.
If the other isn't other doesn't that imply they are the same? Or are you arguing for a third way between other and same?
I recognize you're just playing a bit, but I think it an interesting question. Indeed I think it an important one that is behind the Derrida - Searle debate and the Derrida - Gadamer debate.
I don't actually think much about the other. Since I believe in Russell's theory of acquaintance, it makes no sense to me. Moreover, I have a few other reasons to dislike the other.
Once I spent weeks trying to convince some friends that philosophy was really interesting. I had them convinced that Berkeley was actually ingenious, had some very interesting things to say about how perception worked, and wasn't just playing parlor tricks. We'd been going over Plato and how his realism is incorporated into the assumptions that we make about how property and knowledge works. Then there was an open lecture on animal rights, and I thought that this would be the perfect opportunity to show them a practical application of philosophy.
Boy was I wrong. The professor launched into this long harangue about animals as the other. This talk about the other was baffling and exclusionary to my friends in a way that could never redeem philosophy. Before, I thought that some peoples tendency to talk in terms of the other was just a peculiarity to be tolerated. This experience made me put such talk in a different light. And though I disagree with them about their verdict on philosophy in general, I must agree them on their assessment of all this talk of otherness. Saying that something is other is a pedantic way of placing something in a privileged position by obfuscating what can seriously be said about it. This, in turn, creates otherness among those who would otherwise be listeners.
Talk of the other is the absolute worst that philosophy has to offer. It is filth, pure and simple, and I should be ashamed of myself if I ever represented philosophy in such a light.
Ah Dave, spoken like a true positivist. Takes us back to the old Carnap critique of Heidegger. (grin) I do agree, however, that talk of otherness does bring us to a kind of ethics. Indeed that was the whole point of the talk of otherness by Levinas.
Yes, Clark. Carnap's critique of Heidegger is a thing of great beauty
I am somewhat familiar with Levinas's notion of other (as opposed to, say, Sartre's); indeed, I'm more familiar with continental philosophy than I generally let on--after all, what else is one to study at BYU when Dr. Carter is on sabbatical? But I avoid arguments about Continental philosophy, because I find it to be sub-mental. Perhaps voodoo medicine men in primitive man-tribes once grunted to each other about such drivel, but I really don't see how it can be taken seriously by modern thinkers.
Oops. That preceding post was by me.
I've closed comments in order to avoid spam since I don't check this older blog as much anymore.
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