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Failure Is Freedom

https://www.martinessig.com

32 episodes

1 hour ago

The connection between Jean-Luc Marion (1946-present) and Paul Ricoeur (1913-2005), besides both being French, Catholic philosophers who each taught at the University of Chicago Divinity School, is "indeterminable hermeneutics." Ricoeur's work at the University of Chicago preceded Marion's, and they were certainly aware of each other but neither directly referred to each other's work in majorly significant ways. Ricoeur developed a sort of theology of hermeneutics by changing the project of H...

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Religion & Spirituality,

Society & Culture,

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The connection between Jean-Luc Marion (1946-present) and Paul Ricoeur (1913-2005), besides both being French, Catholic philosophers who each taught at the University of Chicago Divinity School, is "indeterminable hermeneutics." Ricoeur's work at the University of Chicago preceded Marion's, and they were certainly aware of each other but neither directly referred to each other's work in majorly significant ways. Ricoeur developed a sort of theology of hermeneutics by changing the project of H...

Show more...

Religion & Spirituality,

Society & Culture,

Episodes (20/32)

Failure Is Freedom

The Self as Another

The connection between Jean-Luc Marion (1946-present) and Paul Ricoeur (1913-2005), besides both being French, Catholic philosophers who each taught at the University of Chicago Divinity School, is "indeterminable hermeneutics." Ricoeur's work at the University of Chicago preceded Marion's, and they were certainly aware of each other but neither directly referred to each other's work in majorly significant ways. Ricoeur developed a sort of theology of hermeneutics by changing the project of H...

15 hours ago

1 hour 18 minutes

Failure Is Freedom

The Semantic Advent of the Becoming of Being

It has long been noticed that there is a similarity between how the mind knows the world and how the physical world appears. For those in the Idealist camp this similarity is because our minds reflect the mind-like structures of reality. But modern physical sciences are based on the total rejection of any subjective interference with "objective" knowledge. And so those in the Realist camp base knowing about the Universe on the purification of observations from any taint of subjective or persp...

4 days ago

1 hour 10 minutes

Failure Is Freedom

God's Love Proceeded God.

The Epistle of John famously states that "God is Love." For Jean-Luc Marion this means that God's love came before God. Love is "God without Being." Love intends existence, but it doesn't exist in the way that things exist. Love "as" God-without-being isn't a unified intention because it is the intention not to be one, but rather, to be many. It is the self-emptying of oneness, so that through this self-differentiation and self-distantiation there might be the differential relation of continu...

1 week ago

1 hour 24 minutes

Failure Is Freedom

The Appearance of the Invisible "As" the Non-Object

According to Acts, Paul went to the Aeropagus in Athens to preach to the Greek philosophers who apparently just sort of hung out there talking shit all day. He conveniently found a placard to an unknown god to illustrate the main point that he wanted to make to them about how the God that he worshipped was beyond their fancy Greek philosophical knowledge. They were mostly true to their sophistic reputations, but they at least condescended to converse with him before rejecting his Gospel, espe...

1 week ago

1 hour 10 minutes

Failure Is Freedom

Too Much Aboutness

When too much is given to the intention, there is too much aboutness, which is what Jean-Luc Marion calls a Saturated Phenomenon. Saturated Phenomena overwhelm us with too much aboutness to reduce to either a visible object or to the conceptual understanding, so that there is a mismatch between what intentionally appears and what we intuit about an experience. Marion breaks this too-much-ness into the four categories of Kant's a priori experiential necessity. Too much quantitative aboutness i...

3 weeks ago

1 hour 16 minutes

Failure Is Freedom

Mystical Vision: When the Invisible Appears

How does the mystic see ultimate reality? She sees it through analogy, as we have been discussing. Analogy is an indirect way of knowing through the prepositional "as," which connects something known to something unknown without making an equality or an eidetic identification. It is analogy's productive failure to identify in a complete or total way that makes analogy the proper approach to the divine. But how might analogical knowing give one a direct experience of the unknowable as the myst...

4 weeks ago

1 hour 18 minutes

Failure Is Freedom

How Does Love Give Itself "As" Itself?

Love is always becoming other than itself because love is characterized by self-emptying (Kenosis). Love opens possibilities, so it must clear away cancerous repetitions of the same, or as the phenomenological "Epoché" would have it, it must "bracket presuppositions," in order to let what gives itself in love appear "as" itself. Love knows through an intercourse that does not reduce the "otherness" of the "Other," which is to unify without the equivalences of identification or of o...

1 month ago

59 minutes

Failure Is Freedom

How Is What Is Unknowable Represented?

The mystic uses analogy to have a direct experience of the divine, which is, of course, a paradoxical, if not an altogether nonsensical thing to say. Nonetheless, Analogy is a sort of immediate mediation of God's ultimate nature as love itself for the mystic. Love like God is not good because it is the ground of whatever there is including goodness. Love is what makes any other intention appear, so love's intention is that being be an indeterminate becoming, which is a becoming without the de...

1 month ago

1 hour 10 minutes

Failure Is Freedom

Mysticism's Semiological Nature is Analogy

Any predication that is made of God, such as "God is a rock," both discloses and hides God. As Meister Eckhart preached, "As God reveals Himself, he hides more deeply in His mystery. The central tenet of mysticism is, as Epistolary John wrote, "God is love," and it is this predication that requires any description of God to be inadequate to its divine referent. Love must be indeterminate because coercion or compulsion isn't love. If there is such a thing as love, it is freely chosen. There mu...

1 month ago

1 hour

Failure Is Freedom

The Numinous and the Noetic in Religious Experience

One of Jacques Lacan's most important discoveries was the relation between the desire to articulate in the register of the Symbolic and the failure of articulation in the Register of the Real. The Real is that which resists symbolization absolutely. This resistance can be construed negatively as a lack of articulation. Or this negativity can be positivized as too much to articulate. Lacan adumbrated this disjunction as the distinction between "having" in the register of the Symbolic and the f...

1 month ago

1 hour

Failure Is Freedom

Mysterium Tremendum et Fascinans

Rudolph Otto explained that the "numinous" was an experience of something that was not reducible to rational explanation. These uncanny experiences were both terrifying and compelling. For Jacques Lacan the effect of the Real on the Symbolic also produced an uncanny mismatch between what could be known and what resisted semiotic revelation. No signifier could contain all of the meaning of whatever it purported to disclose through language, especially the intention of the Other, which was a re...

1 month ago

47 minutes

Failure Is Freedom

Would You Prefer the Purity of Piety or the Debasement of Love?

The concept of unconditional love is a non-transaction that nonetheless transfers what is valueless, or perhaps, invaluable to the Other without any countable worth, and without any guarantees or rewards. Unmerited grace has been a stumbling block not only for Catholics, but also for the Protestants who claim it as the cornerstone of their faith. Unmerited grace is defiled by the economics of "works righteousness" but also by the economy of belief. Whatever is traded for salvation, whether it...

1 month ago

41 minutes

Failure Is Freedom

Why Does the Mystic Walk into the Dark Night? Part Two

This is the episode in which I finally get to use the word "Mereology," which is the study of part-whole relationships. The word "holy" came into English through the Proto-Germanic root "haling," which meant whole, but it can be traced even further back to its Proto-Indo-European root "Kailo," which also meant whole but also "uninjured" and even "wealthy." However, the sense in which wholeness connotes being set apart is how it came to be associated with the sacred. Making whole is a semiotic...

1 month ago

1 hour 1 minute

Failure Is Freedom

Why Do Mystics Walk into the Dark Night?

Mircea Eliade believed that the religious impulse was to foreground the sacred against the background of the profane, which for him meant to differentiate an object from within a continuous homogeneity. He gave the example of someone drawing a circle in the midst of the endless repetition of a desert landscape. The circle was a sort of marking of a sacred space, which was set apart by its divergence from the profanity of the same. But marking can be ambiguous as religious history has shown. W...

1 month ago

59 minutes

Failure Is Freedom

How Is the Profane made Sacred?

Homo Religiosus's intention is that the profane world be made sacred. But how is this accomplished? Mircea Eliade's answer in his The Sacred and the Profane was that she marks it as different. For Eliade what is homogeneous is profane and what is heterogeneous is holy. Eliade's prime example was drawing a circle amid a homogenous landscape, which marks that space as different from the rest. But this is also the primary move in phenomenology as well. Maurice Merleau-Ponty noted that the m...

1 month ago

55 minutes

Failure Is Freedom

The Problem with the Perennial Philosophy

Mircea Eliade's The Sacred and the Profane and James George Frazer's The Golden Bough have been profoundly criticized for being Perennialist. The Perennial Philosophy sought unity among religious experiences, mythologies, practices, and systems. For example, the concept of the "dying god" and its "eternal return" seems to be found as a repeated theme through many religious and cultural traditions. However, the problem with comparison in religious studies, as Johnathan Z Smith famously po...

1 month ago

47 minutes

Failure Is Freedom

How Did the Underground, Electronic Music of 80's Conceptualize the Inconceivable?

Here it is, the original sin of comparative religions. I recklessly compare my "religious" experience at underground warehouse parties in the early 90's to the religious experiences of those participants at the festivals and religious rites at Gobekli Tepe over 10,000 years ago. This comparison is a part of my effort to outline two different types of religious experiences. The first is religion as a binding to the Symbolic order, but the Second is religion as a binding to what breaks our bond...

2 months ago

46 minutes

Failure Is Freedom

Were "Underground" Warehouse Parties Religious Experiences?

Gobekli Tepe was closed up around 10,000 years ago. It was mysteriously, perhaps lovingly, preserved by filling in each of its otherworldly chambers with sediment. And after it was closed around 8,000 BC, it lay hidden just beneath the surface like an unconscious fantasy for millennia waiting for its uncovering and subsequent reintroduction to the modern world. When uncovered in the Mid-Eighties by Klaus Schmidt and his team, it didn't fit the categories of how human progress had been previou...

2 months ago

39 minutes

Failure Is Freedom

The Religio-Aesthetic Impulse of Gobekli Tepe

There are two basic religious impulses. One is for control and the other is to lose it. Most religious expressions of modern times are to subordinate the other and elevate the chosen ones. Marx believed that "religion is the opiate" of the masses because our lives were so terrible that only the promises of a better world after you die could get us through this one. Nietzsche wrote that the Judeo-Christian tradition was a reactionary revenge narrative in which those on the bottom got to fantas...

2 months ago

52 minutes

Failure Is Freedom

Rad as F**k Archeological Find! Gobekli Tepe!

Yes, Gobekli Tepe! This one really rocked the anthropology and religious studies worlds. I'm so psyched to get to tell you about it. And I'm glad to be getting into some proper history of religions stuff. I love using music examples because they're what I've really felt in terms of my own spiritual experiences. But the main thrust of all of my life's work has been to develop a theology of a sort of religious experience that is about encountering what cannot be known. I've found this in my lif...

2 months ago

40 minutes