PhD Student, Philosophy of Religions (Divinity) & Philosophy, UChicago

This workshop will focus on a pre-circulated paper, which can be accessed here (please contact us for password), and the event will be largely discussion-based. We hope to see you there!

It is generally agreed that Meister Eckhart was an original thinker, and that, with a striking variety of expression in both Latin and the vernacular, he enjoined a certain form of life to his readers and listeners.

Eckhart’s appeals are grounded in his view that it was possible ‘in this life’, so to speak, for his readers and listeners to achieve some form of union with the divinity. Eckhart repeatedly insists that we must live out of a recognition that every created thing is so inferior in comparison to God that it is best considered “nothing” in itself. To live in such a way will be to follow the course of “detachment” (abegescheidenheit), where we give up everything that binds us to the created order of things, and we will become one with God.

Beyond his teaching something like this very minimal set of facts and value judgements, however, it has proven difficult for scholarship on Eckhart to agree on his ideas about even those themes to which he most devoted his attention. Among points of controversy are, for instance: whether it is proper or desirable to say that ‘God is’ or is ‘good’; in virtue of what in the human soul is union with God possible; whether union with God is produced through his own grace or through our compelling God to unite with us; and many other issues of equally fundamental importance to Eckhart’s work, as well as to first philosophy and Christian theological doctrine.

The reason for this scholarly disagreement, I claim, is that Eckhart is profoundly inconsistent on such matters of primary philosophical and theological significance. This paper will, due to limitations of space, explore just one particular site of inconsistent statements on Eckhart’s part, in order to make the case that the fact that many of Eckhart’s writings are contradictory is not at all detrimental to his purposes. Indeed, a study of that very contradictoriness can guide us in understanding what his purposes actually were, what the philosophical virtues of his methodology in pursuing those purposes are, and how his work can and ought to be considered ‘systematic’.

The Workshop on the Philosophy of Religions is committed to being a fully accessible and inclusive workshop. Please contact Workshop Coordinators Danica Cao (ddcao@uchicago.edu) or Taryn Sue (tarynsue@uchicago.edu) in order to make any arrangements necessary to facilitate your participation in workshop events.

The Workshop on the Philosophy of Religions is committed to being a fully accessible and inclusive workshop. Please contact Workshop Coordinators Danica Cao (ddcao@uchicago.edu) or Taryn Sue (tarynsue@uchicago.edu) in order to make any arrangements necessary to facilitate your participation in workshop events.

TUESDAY, October 17th, 4:30 PM, Swift 207

Hosted by the Philosophy of Religions Workshop at the University of Chicago.

The Workshop on the Philosophy of Religions is committed to being a fully accessible and inclusive workshop. Please contact Workshop Coordinators Danica Cao (ddcao@uchicago.edu) or Taryn Sue (tarynsue@uchicago.edu) in order to make any arrangements necessary to facilitate your participation in workshop events.

The Japanese public intellectual Takeuchi Yoshimi (1910-1977) is particularly interesting to us today because through reading China, he constructs a critique of Eurocentrism that anticipates postcolonial discourse.  However, he does so at a time when socialism continued to be a powerful ideal.  For this reason, if we examine Takeuchi from our present historical conjuncture, we can grasp some of the tensions between postcolonialism and Marxism and, in particular, the tension between universalism and particularism.  In this context, Takeuchi uses Lu Xun as a lens to understand political actors such as Sun Zhongshan and Mao Zedong.  While most works on Takeuchi have touched on his reading of Lu Xun, they have rarely dealt with his attempt to understand Mao Zedong.  Consequently, they have failed to grasp the relevance of Takeuchi’s work for Marxist theory both historically and theoretically.

During transition from wartime to postwar Japan, Takeuchi constantly returns to Lu Xun and Mao Zedong to develop a vision of Asia as an alternative to a modern world dominated by abstraction and alienation.  Through Lu Xun and Mao, he rethinks the relationship between intellectuals and the people in way that he believes would be a new path for Asia.  In short, he envisions the people as an amorphous force that cannot be quite subsumed under capitalism and the state.  With respect to Marxism, Takeuchi’s work anticipates recent postcolonial attempts to question the Eurocentric nature of Marxism, while at the same time rethinking concepts such as the people and the working class. Takeuchi’s work might seem obsolete today with the passing of Mao’s China.  However, since his death in 1977, scholars have built on elements of his legacy.  Towards the end of my presentation, I will touch on how themes of Takeuchi’s work live on in the work of the Japanese sinologist Mizoguchi Yūzō and the Chinese critical intellectual Wang Hui.

Viren Murthy teaches transnational Asian History and researches Chinese and Japanese intellectual history in the Department of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  He is the author of The Political Philosophy of Zhang Taiyan: The Resistance of Consciousness (Brill, 2011) and The Politics of Time in China and Japan: Back to the Future, (Routledge, 2022). He is also co-editor with Joyce Liu of Marxisms in East Asia (Routledge, 2017), co-editor with Fabian Schäfer and Max Ward, of Confronting Capital and Empire: Rethinking Kyoto School Philosophy (Brill, 2017) co-editor with Axel Schneider of The Challenge of Linear Time: Nationhood and the Politics of History in East Asia (Brill, 2013), and co-editor with Prasenjit Duara and Andrew Sartori of A Companion to Global Historical Thought, (Blackwell, 2014).  He has published articles in Modern Intellectual History, Modern China, the Journal of Labor and Society, Critical Historical Studies, Frontiers of History in China and Positions: Asia Critique and the International Journal of Asian Studies. and his book Pan-Asianism and the Legacy of the Chinese Revolution, will appear in University of Chicago Press, in 2023.

PhD Student, Philosophy of Religions, Divinity School

The Philosophy of Religions Workshop is proud to host a discussion with Prof. Stephen S. Bush of Brown University, a leading scholar on the philosophy of religions, religious ethics, and the theory of religion.  His 2014 monograph Visions of Religion has become a modern classic in the academic study of religion, and his next book, William James on Democratic Individuality, was a novel study of the title thinker’s notoriously obscure political philosophy.  Prof. Bush will be discussing a chapter from his upcoming book manuscript Beauty and Solidarity: The Aesthetics of Political Ecology titled “Reimagining Solidarity.”  Prof. Bush describes the “heart of that project” as “the proposal of a notion of political beauty that is relevant for emancipatory, pluralistic politics,” and draws from thinkers including Iris Murdoch and Emmanuel Levinas, and in this chapter especially, from Georges Bataille.