questions and answers

The saying isn’t quite correct that “There are no stupid questions, only stupid answers.”

What is meant is, “There are no stupid questions, only poorly articulated ones.” The questions are poorly articulated not because the questioners can’t express thoughts clearly, but because they are using the wrong categories or are being misled by prior examples or the misleading logic of language itself.

Thus it is particularly useful when a book appears that is all about asking the wrong questions and then coming to even less apt conclusions from the initial questions.

One such book is Olav Hammer’s Claiming Knowledge: Strategies of Epistemology from Theosophy to the New Age. Epistemologically speaking, the book is a weird hybrid itself, because it approaches what Hammer considers the “religious kitsch” of alternative and occult thought from 1875 to 1999 from a perspective that is both unsympathetic and hermeneutical: in other words, Hammer wants to set forth succinctly what these people believe, and then say what’s wrong with it both conceptually and aesthetically. (Actually, the latter question is left for the next book: why the Romantics’ approach to borderline experiences gave rise to great art—also, à la Richard Holmes’ recent book The Age of Wonder, to great proto-science—while the New Age and its precursors' approach to borderline experiences gave rise to kitsch. This book is about why we got pseudo-science instead of proto-science.)

( more? )

a preview of coming attractions, or perhaps present attractions never to arrive

The 2010 compilation from a 2006 conference Hermeneutics, Politics, and the History of Religions: The Contested Legacies of Joachim Wach and Mircea Eliade contains some marvelous meditations on Adorno's mix of individual psychology and society, base and superstructure (contrasted with Eliade's view of same), on the biographical background of Eliade's notion of history as a force that holds only terror for smaller countries and cultures that are fated never to make history but only to suffer it (with all the stratagems of the powerless that that entails), and from Carlo Ginzburg, a negative re-assessment that is not based on his purported and to some degree unjustly exaggerated right-wing politics, but on his simplistic models of history. My sense that Eliade's scholarship, always contested, is probably no longer of much use, but that his fantasy novels are, is at least not contradicted by all of this.

There is much else that may be of interest only to academicians, or ex-academicians like myself.

It does make me want to revisit my posts on the encyclopedic attempts of Eliade and Joseph Campbell and the lack of any comparable enterprise that would incorporate the revised perspectives of the past two decades. Perhaps we are in a pluralist position where no one thinks there is any point to describing the doings of the whole planet since the Paleolithic, even though one of the writers in the volume points out that Eliade "decentered and 'provincialized' Europe" decades before postcolonial writers did so in those terms (however problematic his way of accomplishing it).