Philosophy Instructor Profile:
Daniel Kynaston
I currently teach PHL 205, Introduction to World Religions, and PHL 231, Modern and Contemporary Philosophy. Over the past three years of teaching in the philosophy department here at Oakton, I have also taught HUM 127, Introduction to Philosophy, and HUM 122, Contemporary Culture and the Arts.
In conjunction with my course load at Oakton, I am also finishing my Ph.D. at the University of Chicago Divinity School where I am writing my dissertation in philosophical theology. In this work, I look at the possibility of naming God while taking seriously the requirements of post-modern, critical thought that understands language to be a culturally constructed set of meaning operations that are socially and historically located. The result of this understanding is that anything that is commonly labeled the “truth” or the “universal” or “god” cannot escape the particular conditions in which the naming of something as true, universal, or god occurs. In a word, nobody follows error; therefore the truth is what one agrees with, and not necessarily something objectively true as such. In fact, according to many modern philosophers (most notably Nietzsche, but also Derrida, etc.) something as certain as Truth is but a figment of one's imagination; wishful thinking by those who wish their opinions to have the weight of an ultimately meaningless authority.
We need not look far with the question of religion to see that the implications of this insight into language and meaning operations are staggering. Fundamentalisms of all kinds offer views of god that resemble the belief systems of those groups. God becomes, alternatively, a warrior against the West, a warrior against the Middle East , the guarantor of capitalism and the American way of life in general, not to mention supposedly offering views against all sorts of minority groups, all the while upholding moralities that offer nothing but hate. It is no surprise that religious appropriations of the name of god have been used to support racism, sexism, homophobia, and such. The question is whether or not it is the idea of god that is the problem—that is, does god hate?—or is it the idea of god in the hands of those who hate that is the problem?
Philosophically and theologically, the task of naming god is first to disclose the idolatry inherent in all meaning operations surrounding the concept of god in order to show the self-serving socio-political purposes of religion as such. Stopping with such a move, however, remains strictly deconstructive in nature. In essence, my proposal is that there can be other namings of god that escape the metaphysical and idolatrous pitfalls inherent in the history of religion. This task involves both the elucidation of phenomenological structures that subvert the binary-laden meaning operations of descriptive predication (here named the event), and the reformulation of language in terms of semantic function, whereby to authentically name god—that which by all religious accounts must escape human conceptual thought as such—one must turn to the types of language that disrupt meaning as such, which is nothing other than poetic discourse.
In addition to the dissertation and my teaching, I have been participating in the faculty-student seminar on Marxism. Participation in this fruitful seminar has dovetailed with my increasing interest in Buddhism as a philosophy and psychology. Specifically, I am interested in how Buddhism as an individualistic spiritual discipline might impact the important quest to expose and transform suffering and injustice caused by many of the world's socio-economic, political, and ideological systems. That is to say that the problems of human injustice from a Marxist perspective have always been analyzed in terms of social divisions: proletariat, bourgeoisie, etc. But it seems to me that the fundamental, root causes of such injustice stem not from the social level, but from the individual. If this is the case, and if one follows a Buddhist way of thinking, this means that for any social transformation to be possible, the individual must also be transformed (and while Marx clearly saw this, the mechanism by which the individual could be transformed remains muddy at best). Thus it is not enough for a Marxist social-based program to be offered since one cannot expect to successfully transform society without transforming individuals, but by the same token, any effort to transform individuals will bog down without a coherent social theory. Thus, I argue, Buddhism and Marxism can operate dialectically with each system able to support the other in the effort of human liberation with grassroots education programs becoming the place of meeting for both modes of thought.
I am also working on a paper based on a course I recently co-taught at the University of Chicago on psychology and biography. In an effort to shore up and apply their respective psychological theories, psychologists such as Sigmund Freud, Erik Erickson and others have turned to famous figures in the Western intellectual tradition (Leonardo da Vinci, Martin Luther, Abraham Lincoln) and offered psycho-biographies, that is, psychologically informed biographical sketches whereby these psychologists claim to have gained unprecedented insight into the mental lives of their subjects. However, upon closer inspection it becomes clear, as I argue with Erickson's analysis of Martin Luther, that the subject matter of the person's life is more often than not altered to fit the psychological theory used as the method of analysis. That is, in Luther's case, the events of Luther's life are squeezed through the lens of Erickson's theory of child and adolescent development so that Luther looks like Erickson's theory rather than a 16 th century German priest and theologian whose life was in fact shaped—agonizingly at times— by the church and the social forces of the late Middle Ages. In other words, psychobiographies fit data to pre-existing theories rather than deriving theories from the data thus marking them as mere interpretations at best, and spurious scholarship at worse.
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