I suppose there's some deep lesson in that, but it's still a bit disappointing. We'll shape the future but, will do it indirectly,
since we'll be looking sideways and backwards but rarely forward. I'm thinking of Hegel's "owl of minerva [which] only spreads its wings at dusk," and of Benjamin's "angel of history":A Klee drawing named “Angelus Novus” [1920, left] shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe that keeps piling ruin upon ruin and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress. (Walter Benjamin, Ninth Thesis on the Philosophy of History)
As it happens, I alluded to both Hegel and Benjamin in my position paper (though not the messianic apocalypticism of Benjamin, which I think it self-important for people in our more banal era to appropriate), but neither my suggestions about the near future nor my larger question about whether the philosophy of religion is irremediably backward looking was taken up for long. I can't complain - that was the fate of all of our papers and their suggestions - but I'm still a bit sad about it because mine was the only paper which really tried to get us to think about the future and why we don't think about it well. At least in this iteration, our symposium showed how it is that younger scholars disgruntled with the time-worn "business as usual" of a field end up returning to and fertilizing that "business as usual" - albeit our "business."
I'm not commenting here on my fellow symposiasts, all of whom were engaging and thoughtful and open, but on what happened to us as a group. I suppose I should be glad that the symposium organizer had not invited a bunch of the hotheads whose every intervention is to start the field anew, dismissing "the field" the way Jesus drove the money-changers out of the temple! And yet, couldn't we have faced - might we not next year find a way to face - a future which we know will be very different from the recent past, a future which is already happening all around us? I refer here to two issues I mentioned, expecting everyone else to be thinking about them too (they're hardly new insights): the end of an age in which western thought is the privileged site for study, and the worldwide resurgence of religion, a resurgence none of the the central thinkers of western modernity expected or even thought possible. People outside the philosophy of religion are thinking about this - why don't we?
At dinner last night, my old friend J, a new friend T and I felt our way around what it would mean to be part of a specific a generation of scholars, a generation now or soon to be called to take on a leading role in academe. (This was a more rhetorical question for me than for T, who seemed to think the world of philosophy of religion very small, and our group among its clear leaders - I see a field that's vanishing and deserves to if it doesn't face the realities of present and foreseeable future.) Slowly but steadily the generation of our teachers is leaving the field - how strange to think of people our age being in charge one day, let alone soon! (Like the woozy-making thought of a president in his 40s - which seems troubling in a way it wasn't in, say, 1992, when people in their forties seemed like grownups!) Maybe the turn to "business as usual" happens as we find ourselves not on the margins of established practices but their caretakers?
The other symposiasts are all at well-established, indeed famous, universities, and are members of departments full of smart colleagues in religious studies. Part of me is terribly envious of that, but another part isn't quite so sure. The non-stop roller coaster which is my school doesn't allow me to imagine the status quo - any status quo - continuing substantially unchanged. I get freaked out by the rapid changes around us but at least I know they're happening. As to which of us will make better compost for the future, I can't say... they've written more books!
