Just Curious

Compline at the Appleton Chapel

Just came back from the Compline (evening prayer) service at the Appleton Chapel of the Harvard Memorial Church. It was an aesthetically pleasing experience. Every month, congregants would sing evening prayers in the Chapel, holding candles in their hands.

Here's the paradox. Deep down I know I have a deep distrust of the "Establishment." You know, the Northeast "Liberal" Establishment represented by men like John Lindsay, Eliot Richardson, Kingman Brewster, George H.W. Bush and oh yes Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr...on the other hand, culturally I am somehow drawn to their practice...

In the meantime, I'm also trying to reconcile the ontology of Hegel-Marx, as interpreted through Kojeve, with that of Kant and the Christian Existentialists. Apparently according to Kojeve they are quite fundamentally different. While Kant would relate Concept (sum total of all concepts) which is eternal (a priori?) with time (Christian notion of God-incarnate in man?), Hegel (and therefore Marx) equates Concept with Time, and posits a world that is a synthesis of an eternal natural world and a temporal human world through the dialectic of the two (the human world essentially transforms the natural world.) The difference in their implications lies here: whereas for Hegel/Marx the human historic world is God, and that the end of humanity lies in the achievement of absolute knowledge at the end of history; for Kant and the Christians it is possible for an enlightened individual to have a glimpse of absolute knowledge (God, in this case) at any given instance of time.

The practical implication for the Christian could also be serious. In a sense if at any given instance of time I were able to attain absolute knowledge through communion with God, I no longer have much incentive to effect *essential* change in the natural world and move the human world from one era into another through "action" or "negation" so that I might finally attain absolute knowledge at the "end of history"...This paradox exists in the Judeo-Christian Scriptures too, for on one hand the Prophets stressed the immediacy of the Divine Communion, on the other hand they simultaneously look forward to the End of History...What is the point though? Isn't one a perfect substitute of the other?

Well, Kojeve even drew little compound circles to represent all these. I think it was a little crazy of him, but he made a valid point. It makes me rethink Fromm's notion that there is a coherent golden thread that ties Christ to Kant to Hegel to Marx to Erich Fromm...

posted by James Chang @ 10:54 PM