ReligiousLeftLaw.com

Reading Žižek

       

I am reading a couple of books by Slavoj Žižek, who is difficult for me to read (in part, because of my unfamiliarity with many of his cultural references), indeed, he sometimes makes me feel quite (and inexcusably) ignorant, wondering whether I am reading him correctly or not: is the problem at my end or is he just a bit too obfuscatory and too clever? … or perhaps it’s both. One obstacle to my comprehension is probably owing to the fact that his favorite philosopher (or second favorite, after Marx) is Hegel, one of the modern philosophers I never warmed up to, although I have not given up trying! Now that is clearly a problem at my end, although it’s one I share with more than a few contemporary philosophers. Secondly, Žižek is a devotee, if you will, of Jacques Lacan, while I happen to find him more obscure and frustrating than Žižek himself! Of all the “post-Freudian” psychoanalysts, he interests me the least (I won’t here detail the reasons, as this is more about Žižek than Lacan), although, again, I have not given up on trying to understand what he might add to the psychoanalytic tradition.

       

So Žižek, who often is rhetorically provocative if not downright silly, yet in some respects intellectually brilliant, invokes Hegel and Lacan in his interpretation of Marx’s works toward a theoretical elaboration of a profoundly relevant Marxist theory, that is, one uniquely fit for our time and place. In my assiduous effort to make sense of the books I am reading by Žižek I have resorted to relying on two dictionaries: Dylan Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 1996), and Rex Butler, ed., The Žižek Dictionary (Acumen, 2014). Thankfully, I do not need a Hegel dictionary! I also have a few works that might be described as “for” and “against” Lacan that I occasionally look to for more details. The fact that I am proceeding in this manner makes the reading and note taking quite laborious and unusually slow. I am willing to make the effort largely for one reason: I once listened to an interview with Žižek in which I agreed with virtually everything he said, even doing a bit of (virtual) intellectual and political cheer-leading. Yet reading Žižek makes one appreciate that much more the pellucid prose and clear arguments of the so-called analytic Marxists, especially Jon Elster and the sorely missed G.A. Cohen. For better and worse, I persevere.

Islamic Humanism: An Introductory Reading Guide

       

“There is another Islam, tolerant, pluralistic, cosmopolitan without triumphalism and spiritual without repression. It too is an authentic expression of Islamic ideal, and a worthier expression of the compassion and generosity that flow through Islamic texts and traditions, as they do through the texts and traditions of the sister religions of Judaism and Christianity. [….] Historically it has often been suppressed. But over the centuries its spirit has inspired marvels of art and literature, philosophy and law. It has been a leaven to institutions that have allowed and encouraged human beings and their communities to flourish. This other Islam is not purist and xenophobic. Like any civilizational phenomenon, it has been nourished in part by practices and ideas that sprang up elsewhere and that took on new and creative forms in their interactions with the ancient and familiar. [….]

Islamic humanism is neither an oxymoron nor a redundancy but a theme, a possibility, an authentic strand of meanings and values to be discovered in a rich, often neglected past, a religious and philosophical way of being that individuals and communities can build on in the present and the future. [….] [This humanism] is not the same as the humanism of the Quattrocento, nor is it the humanism of our twentieth-century secularists. Even Rāzī, a hands-on clinician and a skeptic as to special revelation, is a theist and a creationist. I count him as a humanist for his independence of mind, his striking affirmations of progress, individualism, and intellectual equality. Miskawayh, with his courtly and literary values, his scholarly tastes, pragmatic interests in the past, and commitment to character and its refinement, comes closer to the Renaissance ideal, which in many ways he anticipates. But he too is a committed Muslim….

[….] Perhaps part of what binds together figures like Miskawayh, Fārābī, Avicenna, Hamadhānī, Ibn Tufayl and Ibn Khaldūn is their ability to examine the tradition they live in, to look at it both sympathetically and critically, and to select, develop, and combine values and ideas that are conducive to human understanding, human growth, and human flourishing.”—Lenn E. Goodman, Islamic Humanism (Oxford University Press, 2003): 23-27.

        

• Ali, Kecia. Sexual Ethics and Islam: Feminist Reflections on Qur’an, Hadith and Jurisprudence (Oneworld, 2006).
• Azadpur, Mohammad. Reason Unbound: On Spiritual Practice in Islamic Peripatetic Philosophy (State University of New York Press, 2011).
• Brockopp, Jonathan E. and Thomas Eich, eds. Muslim Medical Ethics: From Theory to Practice (University of South Carolina Press, 2008).
• de Bellaigue, Christopher. The Islamic Enlightenment: The Struggle Between Faith and Reason, 1798 to Modern Times (Liveright Publishing, 2017).
• Diagen, Souleymane Bachir. Open to Reason: Muslim Philosophers in Conversation with the Western Tradition (Columbia University Press, 2018).
• Elias, Jamal J. Aisha’s Cushion: Religious Art, Perception, and Practice in Islam (Harvard University Press, 2012).
• Fakhry, Majid. Ethical Theories in Islam (E.J. Brill, 1991).
• Goodman, Lenn E. Islamic Humanism (Oxford University Press, 2003).
• Goodman, Lenn E. and Richard McGregor, trans. The Case of the Animals versus Man: Before the King of the Jinn (A translation from the Epistles of the Brethren of Purity) (Oxford University Press in association with The Institute of Ismaili Studies, 2009).
• Groff, Peter S. Islamic Philosophy A-Z (Edinburgh University Press, 2007).
• Hashemi, Nader. Islam, Secularism, and Liberal Democracy: Toward a Democratic Theory for Muslim Societies (Oxford University Press, 2009).
• Hourani, George F. Islamic Rationalism: The Ethics of ‛Abd al-Jabbār (Oxford University Press, 1971).
• Hourani, George F. Reason and Tradition in Islamic Ethics (Cambridge University Press, 1985).
• Kelsay, John and James Turner Johnson, eds. Just War and Jihad: Historical and Theoretical Perspectives on War and Peace in Western and Islamic Traditions (Greenwood Publ. Group, 1991).
• Kermani, Navid. God is Beautiful: The Aesthetic Experience of the Quran (Polity Press, 2015).
• Khadduri, Majid. The Islamic Conception of Justice (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984).
• Leaman, Oliver. An Introduction to Classical Islamic Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 2nd ed., 2002).
• Leaman, Oliver. The Qur’an: A Philosophical Guide (Bloomsbury Academic, 2016).
• Leaman, Oliver. Islam and Morality: A Philosophical Introduction (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019).
• March, Andrew F. Islam and Liberal Citizenship: The Search for an Overlapping Consensus. (Oxford University Press, 2009).
• Nusseibeh, Sari. The Story of Reason in Islam (Stanford University Press, 2017).
• Ramadan, Tariq. Radical Reform: Islamic Ethics and Liberation (Oxford University Press, 2009).
• Ramadan, Tariq. Islamic Ethics: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2016).
• Sachedina, Abdulaziz. Islamic Biomedical Ethics: Principles and Application (Oxford University Press, 2009).
• Sajoo, Amyn B. Muslim Ethics: Emerging Vistas (I.B. Tauris, 2004).
• Sajoo, Amyn B., ed. A Companion to Muslim Ethics (I.B. Tauris, in association with The Institute of Ismaili Studies, 2010).

See too: Islam Study Guide ... and for further research, these bibliographies (embedded links) should prove useful, although a few of them have a scope beyond Islam proper:

• The Modern Arab World
• The Bedouin
• Modern Iran
• Islam, the Arts, and Aesthetic Experience
• Islam and Jurisprudence
• Islam and Muslims in the United States
• Islamic Studies
• The Prophet Muhammad
• The Qur’ān (Translations, Commentaries, Studies)
• Sufism
• Theology and Philosophy in Islamic Traditions

Ten Titles on Happiness

       

“As one writer insisted, ‘Don’t mistake pleasures for happiness. They’re a different breed of dog.’ Certainly, upon first reading, ‘pleasure’ may sound disreputable, whereas ‘happiness’ sounds morally acceptable, thanks in part to the famous, if ill-understood phrase in the Declaration of Independence guaranteeing the citizen’s right to ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’ Perhaps because of the Declaration’s lofty aspirations, few have troubled to think through the connotations attached to the words ‘happy’ and ‘happiness.’ True, there is an idea behind Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness index, that money can’t buy enough contentment, just as ideas spur UC-Berkeley’s ‘Science of Happiness’ project and the academic revival of interest in phenomenology. But evidently, the modern preoccupation with happiness is a symptom of the industrializing and industrialized world. To today’s smart thinkers who equate ‘happiness’ with ‘being satisfied with one’s life as a whole’ (a state of being, rather than a response to a given stimulus), the early thinkers who are my subject would have replied that seeking such an ambitious and unattainable goal would likely end in dissatisfaction and greater unhappiness. Indeed, sheer overreach may have brought about the current Euro-American paradox; ergo talk of happiness is most prevalent in the very populations heavily reliant upon anti-depressants and opiates. It is moreover hard to ignore the disturbing racist and culturalist overtones of recent ‘Happiness’ projects, lodged in the universalist presumption that all cultures everywhere have replicated the same set of emotions and emotional triggers as US citizens today. …[T]he vocabulary for several American virtues relating to happiness (the virtue of ‘cheerfulness,’ for example [I would add ‘positive thinking’ and being an ‘optimist’]) do not seem to exist in the classical writings in China, though an absence of literary evidence does not insure that cheerfulness was absent from daily life.

The Ancients with clear-eyed, even brutal frankness noted the manifold ills to which all people are prey: sickness, decrepitude, death, natural catastrophe, and slander among them. Fully cognizant of the level of destruction that ill luck, bad timing, or vengeful powers can wreak upon the innocent, the thinkers discussed in these pages advised followers to devise and adhere to programs and practices that promised a fair chance of shielding people, as much as humanly possible, form the worst slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Each person, they said, can learn to give and take pleasure, despite the calamities that beset ordinary lives. In addition, those already favored by fortune may learn how to magnify their blessings. The closest counterpart to the modern tropes linking autonomy to pleasure is the continual profession by Chinese elites of their determination to avoid enslavement to other people and things. This admirable clarity about life’s constraints—so greatly at odds with American positive thinking—precludes mindless optimism. In consequence, no writings in classical Chinese, so far as I know, denote or connote ‘happiness’ either in its older Western sense of ‘favored by fortune’ or in its modern connotation of ‘a free state of blissful autonomy.’ The thinkers reviewed in this book would mock the fond hope that one can ‘stumble upon happiness.’” — Michael Nylan, The Chinese Pleasure Book (Zone Books, 2018)

The following titles represent different and sometimes radically conflicting views on happiness. My own view, for what it is worth, is close to that of Nylan above (her book, however, is not on happiness as such) as well as Daniel Haybron in The Pursuit of Unhappiness (2008).

• Bortolotti, Lisa, ed. Philosophy and Happiness (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
• Davies, William. The Happiness Industry: How the Government and Big Business Sold Us Well-Being (Verso, 2015).
• Feldman, Fred. What Is This Thing Called Happiness? (Oxford University Press, 2010).
• Griffin, James. Well-Being: Its Meaning, Measurement, and Moral Importance (Clarendon Press, 1986).
• Haybron, Daniel M. The Pursuit of Unhappiness: The Elusive Psychology of Well-Being (Oxford University Press, 2008).
• Kahneman, D., E. Diener and N. Schwarz, eds. Well-Being: The Foundations of Hedonic Psychology (Russell Sage Foundation Press, 1999).
• Lane, Robert E. The Loss of Happiness in Market Democracies (Yale University Press, 2000).
• Lobel, Diana. Philosophies of Happiness: A Comparative Introduction to the Flourishing Life (Columbia University Press, 2017).
• Noddings, Nel. Happiness and Education (Cambridge University Press, 2003).
• Wallwork, Ernest. Psychoanalysis and Ethics (Yale University Press, 1991).

For those with a strong appetite for philosophy, see too Daniel Haybron, “Happiness,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2020 Edition), Edward N. Zalta, ed. And should the above list prove intimidating, you could do far worse than read another item by Haybron, Happiness: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2013).

Hear Ye! Hear Ye!

An urgent message to those (presuming literacy and a minimal capacity for human agency) who refuse—sans any medical warrant, that is, a sufficient reason—to be vaccinated during the COVID-19 pandemic

The exercise of your liberties and freedom are constrained (justifiably or necessarily limited) at the point where they interfere with, block, or diminish the equivalent exercise of these same liberties and freedom by others (this falls under what the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes called the ‘reciprocity theorem’ of natural reason or rationality). In other words, liberty or freedom is not absolute, all liberties and freedom are limited by moral principles, legal rules, and democratic legislation, as well as those rules and norms that are unequivocally enshrined in the Constitution. Furthermore, we frequently hear, ad nauseam, that the decision as to whether or not one should get a vaccination against the various and virulent strains of the COVID -19 virus is “purely” a personal decision, as if one makes that decision in a solipsistic vacuum or within the bounds of narcissistic self-interest. In other words, as if such a decision affects oneself alone and thus nobody else, as if the consequences of that decision do not ramify outside one’s skin, beyond the boundaries one’s body. Your right to make such a decision is not without constraints or consideration of consequences. To believe otherwise is patently and painfully irresponsible to the point of moral and legal recklessness. In brief, exercise of rights take place within a moral and legal world of corresponding and sundry responsibilities, duties, and obligations. Any exercise of rights outside that world is irrational if not indicative of some species of madness or psychosis.

There is no justifiable or warranted or human, moral, legal or constitutional right to act, to make a decision, that arbitrarily and substantially increases the risk of substantial (physical and psychological in the first instance) harms to others (hence torts and criminal law)—with whom one comes in intentional or incidental or accidental contact—harms the nature of which can extend to the point of the possible and probable deaths of others. At this point in the global pandemic, one’s motivated or willful ignorance (owing, say, to wishful thinking, denial, self-deception, illusory or delusory thinking and phantasies, what have you) on the nature and scope of this medical and epidemiological risk and its possible and probable harmful effects on others on this score is utterly indefensible and inexcusable and, in a fairer if not more compassionate world, would bring legal liability and swift moral opprobrium.

The Ministerial Exception and More

My colleague Nelson Tebbe has a brilliant article forthcoming in the Harvard Law Review. I suspect we agree on most Establishment Clause issues. We tend to disagree on free exercise issues. One area we agree on is the ministerial exception. I think that the Catholic Church should be able to confine the priesthood to males - even though I think the restriction is appalling. But suppose the Unitarian Church in downtown Ithaca discriminated against females. Although the Unitarian church has few binding doctrines, it is certainly no part of the Unitarian faith to discriminate against females; yet the ministerial exemption would allow them to do so - perhaps to avoid a governmental determination of the content of a religion or a broad conception of autonomy. Neither Nelson, nor I would extend the exception this far.

Similarly, I would rarely compel an individual to violate his or her conscience (Nelson less so), but I would give less constitutional weight to impinging on religious practices not required by conscience. I am not sure where Nelson stands on this, but it has the same worry about government establishing what a religion stands for. I would accept that cost. Consider religious fraud. The Supreme Court has ruled that an individual can be prosecuted for mail fraud when he claimed that he shook hands with Christ in St. Louis. The Court evaded the Establishment Clause issue by saying that the ruling was about intent, not about the truth of the religion. Yet no jury could fail to consider intent given the improbability of the Christ meeting with the defendant.