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Touching Philosophy, Sounding Religion, Placing Education.
SCHROEDER, Steven
Amsterdam/New York, NY, 2002, vi, 122 pp.
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Series:
Value Inquiry Book Series 136
Philosophy of Education
This book redefines religious studies as a field in which a plurality of disciplines interact. A social science when understood as a body of knowledge, religion is also marked by discovery, appreciation, orientation, and application—an interplay of the arts and sciences. Teaching religious studies involves the question of the occupation of territories and disentangling occupation from violence.
CONTENTS
FOREWORD by David Belcastro
PREFACE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ONE Carried Away
1. The Temptation of Space
2. Against the Hegemony of Vision
3. Separation
4. The Religious Function of Home
5. Every Map Is A Myth
6. A Masterpiece of Structural Tenacity
7. Spatialization of Place
8. Cultural Systems
9. Three Themes
TWO The Necessity of Theory
1. Observation As Action
2. Objectivity
3. Cognitive Linguistics
4. Phenomenological Geography
5. Ecological Psychology
6. The Body Is An Act
THREE The Displacement of Society
1. Home and Exile
2. The Power To See
3. A History of Powers
4. Perception
5. Getting Ourselves Together
FOUR A Moral Dimension of Place
1. Loaded Symbols
2. Making An Impression
3. Aesthetics and Ethics
4. Tapestries Woven of Power
FIVE The Body Politic
1. Constructing Coherence
2. Culture
3. Intelligence
4. Perception, Again
5. Play, Possibility, and Power
SIX Perceiving God Perceiving
1. Perception, Finally
2. A Twisted Universe
3. Philosophical Correspondences
4. Education and Distance
SEVEN A Laboratory for Civil Discourse
1. Experiment
2. City Speech
3. The Classroom As City
REFERENCES
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
INDEX
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Steven Schroeder lives and writes in Chicago, Illinois. He is the author of four previous books, including The Metaphysics of Cooperation: A Study of F.D. Maurice and Between Freedom and Necessity: An Essay on the Place of Value, Volumes 84 and 99 in the Value Inquiry Book Series.
FOREWORD
When I was asked to write a foreword for Touching Philosophy, Sounding Religion, Placing Education, I straight away remembered the numerous conversations that I had shared with Steven Schroeder during his years on faculty at Capital University. It was not, however, specific occasions or particular subjects that came to mind but rather an experience of conversation that I had come to appreciate and enjoy.
There are four significant characteristics that impressed a hallmark of excellence on my memory of those conversations. First, the conversations were refreshing experiences of intellectual freedom. I was always impressed with how Schroeder responded to the ideas presented by myself and others, diverse and sometimes conflicting, with an honest appreciation that was able to recognize what was of value for the common good. This is not to suggest that he was without an opinion of his own but rather that he was a person who valued, practiced, and encouraged freedom of thought. Second, the conversations were invitations to participate in a constructive process. Consequently, there was usually a certain sense of play in the talks (as Schroeder would sometimes say, “a play of mindfulness”) that allowed us to create something of our own out of the information, insights, and questions that were on the table. Third, the conversations tended to happen on the “margins.” Influenced by Virginia Woolf’s description of a “society of outsiders” and bell hooks’ choice of the margin as a place of radical discourse, Schroeder liked to draw us away from the maddening crowds of corporate America that had found their way into the halls of our university to rediscover the lost world of liberal education and there to consider matters that were of real importance for the well being of humankind. Lastly, the intellectual freedom, constructive process, and marginality just mentioned inevitably led to a sense of authentic community; a community that would emerge without fail in his classrooms or while walking with him across campus or when enjoying a cup of coffee across the street. It should be noted that all of this happened every time we met and with a certain familiar beauty of its own that I had come to associate with the work and friendship that Schroeder graciously offered to colleagues and students.
While the written word is not the same as the spoken word, especially when the context for the spoken word is a free exchange of ideas between friends, the extended essay that is here presented is none-the-less a conversation that invites the reader to participate in the exploration of an idea. In the manner articulated above, the author engages us in a series of questions and lines of inquiry that promise to unfold into valuable insights regarding the kind of classrooms we might create for an exploration of the field of religion.
David Belcastro
Capital University
EXCERPT
1. The Temptation of Space
We are, Taussig says, “tempted” by space. But space is not so much an object—or a subject—that tempts us as the act of temptation that takes us out of ourselves (Taussig, p. 34), not the thing that tempts but the tempting. As temptation, it is inextricably connected with otherness, the alterity of Taussig’s title: it literally moves us from one place to another. Taussig, like Hélène Cixous, counters colonial occupation with a casual “slipping into otherness, trying it on for size”—and getting carried away in the process, not as settlers but as tourists (and, as Cixous would insist, cross-dressers). This is occupation with a difference. Getting carried away—spacing out—is essential to consciousness. Taussig locates sentience in the displacement of self: the perception of similarity is in every case bound to an instantaneous flash—and the perception of dissimilarity. We are transported from moment to moment across boundaries that mark same and other.
This amplification of Cage’s off-hand invocation of the “tourist” metaphor deepens its contrast with the “settler” metaphor that guided much of European interaction with the rest of the world in the nineteenth century and exploded in so many ways in the twentieth. From the standpoint of the early twenty-first century, there is no compelling reason to believe that these explosions will die down any time soon.
The contrast is critical, but “tourist” is not the only metaphor available with which to draw it. The critic as “nomad” is a familiar figure, more often invoked than the potentially quirky tourist of Cage and Taussig. There is no reason to render “tourist” and “nomad” mutually exclusive, since both metaphors have great creative potential. But the “tourist” metaphor is uniquely suited to the matter at hand, because, while it involves travel, it downplays the semi-permanent dynamic mobility that characterizes nomadism. On the road, the nomad is at home in a tent or a yurt, in temporary scenes pitched along the way. But, while she or he may pitch tents and make scenes, the tourist is not at home until she or he gets off the road.
This is one of many instances in which Cage, an acknowledged master of chance operation, demonstrates a cagy ability to compose chance with care. In this case, a reference—tourism—that invites chance encounters in exotic places also imposes a set of distinct possibilities. It is entirely possible for tourists to orchestrate their travels in such a way as to avoid the experience of leaving home (to visit Paris without ever feeling as though you’d left your most comfortable armchair, to borrow an image from The Accidental Tourist). But a tourist (even a tourist who has carefully orchestrated his or her entire trip) can get lost in ways that are virtually unimaginable for the nomad, who almost always knows, at least in the short term, where he or she is and is going—and often (certainly more often than the tourist) knows the language of both places well enough to carry on without a translator or a phrase book. It is also important to distinguish the tourist and nomad metaphors from a cluster of metaphors related to homelessness with which both are related but from which both are distinct.
The tourist has a home to go back to and has chosen to leave it for a limited time. That makes him or her a likely bearer of likely stories. Presumably, one of the reasons tourists travel is because traveling gives us stories to tell—and home gives us a place in which to tell them. More on that later. For now, let us be cagy enough to embrace the potential for surprise—and to remember (as Cage almost certainly did) that the “grand tour” was long considered an indispensable part of the tourist’s education.
In his analysis, Taussig emphasizes the tactile, which he associates with habit, over the visual, which he associates with contemplation. We do not come to know a territory by gazing at it but by wandering in it, touching it, exploring it, until we can do it with our eyes closed. There is an obvious difference between being a tourist and looking at tourist brochures. Our feet more than our eyes are means by which we come to know a territory. It is interesting that our eyes may conspire with tourist brochures to get us somewhere and that, once there, we may spend more time looking than anything else. But it is when we start walking that the space before our eyes becomes a place we can write home about, a place that has become familiar enough to enable us to talk about it with some degree of intelligence. Drawing on Walter Benjamin, Taussig notes that tasks which cannot be mastered by optics are gradually mastered by habit under the guidance of touch. Without ceasing to look, we come to know by walking.
In spite of his presymbolic, prelinguistic bent, Taussig turns to the storyteller, who
embodied that situation of stasis and movement in which the far-away was brought to the here-and-now, archetypically that place where the returned traveler finally rejoined those who had stayed at home. It was from this encounter that the story gathered its existence and power, just as it is in this encounter that we discern the splitting of the self, of being self and Other, as achieved by sentience taking one out of oneself—to become something else as well. (Taussig, p. 40)
The storyteller is “the symbol of god incarnate” (Taussig, p. 41). Derrida writes in The Gift of Death, with the clever turn of phrase readers have come to expect from him, tout autre est tout autre, “every other is wholly other” (Derrida, pp. 87ff.). To say that the storyteller is the symbol of God incarnate is to connect the wholly other with an other who is not wholly because she or he is in the flesh and, more importantly, in language. The key is the addition of connection to otherness in the claim that God takes on flesh in the telling (and, symbolically, in the teller) of tales. The tale and the teller bring an audience back home into contact with others who are there only in the teller and the tale. Because the storyteller and the tale are born in migration and return; because migration, return, and staying at home always involve both freedom and coercion; and because God is born in the telling of tales; the birth of God and the origin of religious language are matters of coercion and freedom—not one after the other, but always both at the same time.
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