Disinterestedness

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 10:53 pm By Peter Leithart

Adorno sees disinterestedness as a necessary stage in the development of aesthetic experience, but says that it has to be transcended by a recognition of the “interest inherent in disinterestedness.” Disinterestedness applies only to certain kinds of works, he says. Try reading Kafka and remaining in disinterested contemplation: Kafka’s novels “call forth in us responses like real anxiety, a violent drawing back, an almost physical revulsion. They seem to be the opposite of desire. Yet these phenomena of psychic defence... Read more

Aesthetic enjoyment

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 10:45 pm By Peter Leithart

Adorno writes that enjoyment is not the be-all of art. Certainly it isn’t for the producers of art: “If you ask a musician if he enjoys playing his instrument, he will probably reply: ‘I hate it’ . . . People who have a genuine relation to art would rather immerse themselves in art than reduce art to an object. They cannot live without art, but its individual manifestations are not so many sources of pleasure for them.” Adorno sees a... Read more

Soteriology in time

Last updated on: September 7, 2017 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Soteriology is eschatology, and that means soteriology has to have an already/not yet structure. Rejecting either justification by faith or judgment according to works breaks the bond of eschatology and soteriology. Another way to say this is soteriology is about what happens in time . The alternatives are: 1) Antinomian: We got saved; we’re in, and can do what we please between now and judgment day. Already without not yet. Time doesn’t matter at all. 2) Legalism: We’re not in... Read more

God acknowledging God

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 11:42 pm By Peter Leithart

Commenting on the “seal” in Song of Songs 4:12, Luther writes, “In the same way we Christians are now sealed by the Word, Baptism, and the Sacramental of the Altar, by which we are distinguished from all other races, not just before the world, but rather in God’s own judgment.” The last phrase is critical: These are not merely social marks, but rather mark us as different in God’s sight. How could it be otherwise? How could God place a... Read more

Film, actors and audience

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 11:41 pm By Peter Leithart

In his classic essay on the “work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction,” Walter Benjamin made some trenchant observations on the way film affects actors and audiences. Importantly, he believes these effects are not the result of some perversion of the medium of film, but inherent in it. The actor, he notes acts in “many separate performances” rather than in a single connected period of time, and not before an audience but in front of a mechanical... Read more

Adam and Elohim

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 10:45 pm By Peter Leithart

Paul Niskanen has an insightful analysis of Genesis 1:27 in the latest JBL . He starts with the question of whether Barth’s view that the image of God is found in relationality and specifically in sexual difference has any exegetical support. He reviews the current discussion, and notes that there is a “virtual consensus” that views dominion as the content of the image of God, with the corollary that relationality and sexual difference are not essential to the image. Niskanen... Read more

Heidegger’s hermeneutics

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 11:43 pm By Peter Leithart

Ouch! Schaeffer again, this time on Heidegger’s interpretive methods: “Paraphrase, translation, dismantling of the syntax, making the text autonomous with regard to the concrete subject who utters it, absolute silence regarding the poetic form: to these five characteristics we must add hermeneutic authoritarianism,” the last of which “postulates an opposition between what the poem seems to say and what it really means.” Read more

Hegel the pietist

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 11:43 pm By Peter Leithart

Still further evidence that a) Hegel can’t get away from Kant’s pietism and b) Hamann would have been as right about Hegel as he was about Kant. Jean-Marie Schaeffer writes of the impact of the incarnation on history: “it is through God’s becoming man, through the life and passion of Christ, that interiority comes to know itself in its own finitude. Hegel distinguishes two stages in what is for him the central event of universal history . . . .... Read more

Music and modernity

Last updated on: September 7, 2017 at 12:10 am By Peter Leithart

Andrew Bowie ( Aesthetics and Subjectivity : From Kant to Nietzsche ) challenges the typical postmodern characterization of modern philosophy by highlighting music. Heidegger views “the growth of the importance of music in modernity as grounded in an attitude to art based just upon feeling ‘which has been left to itself,’ and he links this to the notion that modern culture is the result of a decline from something greater.” In contrast to poetry and thinking, music “lacks the seriousness... Read more

Scapegoat

Last updated on: September 7, 2017 at 12:02 am By Peter Leithart

Esau is a “hairy man” ( sa’iyr ), something we learn only when Jacob dresses himself in goat hair to approach his father (Genesis 27:11, 23). Jacob becomes a hairy one, subbing in for his brother. The only other use of the word in Genesis is in 37:31, where it describes the “kid” killed to fool into thinking that Joseph has died. Both passages involve substitution, and both involve deception of a father. Leviticus 16 is the great chapter about... Read more