Letting Mary-Jane Rubenstein's Pantheologies guide a course of reading is delicious. Students are preparing presentations on three areas she touches on in her chapter on "Matter" this week and I'm prepping too. Fun to return to the Preoscratics and Lucretius, nice to have a reason finally to read the essay where A. Irving Hallowell coins the phrase "other-than-human 'persons'," but the greatest delight was having a chance to read Giordano Bruno's dialogue On Cause, Principle, and Unity, 1584, which is both more intellectually radical and more enjoyable as a piece of writing than I could have imagined. Who knew that the "new animism" has this European precedent?!
But an earlier 16th century text was the star of another occasion, a short series of lectures on "Philosophy in an Age of Imperial Decline" by the always compelling Cornel West. Here he is being introduced by our university president, Dwight McBride, in the 12th Street Auditorium in what may be The New School's first big public event
in two years! The 16th century text Cornel commended was Erasmus' Praise of Folly. Published in 1511, not twenty years into what he calls the Age of Europe (1492-1945), Cornel read this text as foreseeing the catastrophes which colonial expansion would bring to peoples around the world, and the intellectual bankrupty it will produce in the colonial metrople. Cornel used this to provide a tradition for philosophers trying not to accommodate themselves to the ideologies of empire - religious or secular, professional or commercial. Its "holy folly" is consonant with the "tragicomic" stance of Chekhov and the Blues, which define a way to keep striving for justice and joy even while recognizing calamity will never end.
Heady, and historic themes!
