Jean-Pierre Dupuy
Stanford University

Edited by Peter Y. Chou
WisdomPortal.com

Class Presentations Kirsten reported on Hans Jonas's "The Concept of God after Auschwitz: A Jewish Voice" (1984). Ingrid reported on Dupuy's paper "Religion: Natural or Supernatural" (2009). She also summarized the viewpoints of four authors who wrote popular books that are anti-religion and anti-God.

Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (2006)

Pascal Boyer, Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origin of Religious Thought (2001)

Daniel Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (2006)

Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (2007)

Two authors not covered in her presentation were:
Scott Atran, In God We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion (2004)

Sam Harris, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason (2004)

Slides from Professor Dupuy's PowerPoint Presentation:

(#1)

T.S. Eliot, The Hollow Men (1925)
	We are the hollow men We are the stuffed men Leaning together Headpiece filled with straw. Alas! Our dried voices, when We whisper together Are quiet and meaningless As wind in dry grass Or rats' feet over broken glass In our dry cellar Shape without form, shade without colour, Paralysed force, gesture without motion

(#2)

T.S. Eliot, The Hollow Men (1925)
	This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper. Commentary: T.S. Eliot (1888-1965) "The Hollow Men" (1925) Complete Online Text
Commentary on Artwork: In his latest series of work Howard Penning has used T. S. Eliot's poem "The Hollow Men" as a jumping off point to explore his own ideas around the corporate business world. The poem seems to be an almost perfect metaphor for the modern corporate world. The business suit becomes the symbol of a hollow man, the red "power tie" becomes a fatal gash. Individual personalities and voices become lost in a larger corporate identity. As the corporate world view pushes the planet closer to social, economic and environmental collapse where are the individuals who make up corporations left? Can their lives be reconciled with their jobs or do they become hollow "yes men"? (ClusterFlock: Posted by Kathy Hilen-Smith). Commentary on Cosmological End of the Universe: Timothy Ferris, "How Will The Universe End? (With A Bang or A Whimper?)" (Time, April 10, 2000). "Universe will end with a bang, or a whimper, says Vatican astronomer" (Physorg.com, 1-27-2006). "Heat Death & Cold Death of the Universe" (Ask Experts @ Physlink.com). Also Robert Frost's poem "Fire and Ice" (1920).

(#4)
René Girard's Oeuvre
• Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque, Paris, 1961
  [Deceit, Desire, and the Novel]
• La violence et le sacré, Paris, 1972
  [Violence and the Sacred]
• Des choses cachées depuis la fondation du monde, Paris, 1978
  [Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World]
• Le Bouc émissaire, Paris, 1982
  [The Scapegoat]
• Shakespeare: A Theater of Envy, Baltimore, 1990
• Achever Clausewitz, Paris, 2007
Wikipedia: René Girard
YouTube: Imitation Conference: Girard on Mimetic Theory

(#12)

Deconstruction of Freud's Theory of the Crowd [1921] The leader is produced by the crowd although the crowd believes itself to have been produced by him.

To construe the leader as an endogenous fixed point is to note that he does not gain his central position because of any intrinsic features, such as his supposed narcissism or charisma, as Freud thought. Rather, this position emerges when the autonomous system of the crowd loops back upon itself. The leader gives the impression of not needing the others' affection, but this is only an illusion. We believe he could do without this affection only because he has already acquired it. Self-love is only possible to the extent that the love of others is possessed.

(#13)

Power and the illusion of power are one and the same thing

Commentary: Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), Leviathan: The Matter, Forme and Power of a Common Wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil, (1651) concerns the structure of society and legitimate government, and is regarded as one of the earliest and most influential examples of social contract theory. Hobbes argues for a social contract and rule by an absolute sovereign. Hobbes wrote that chaos or civil war— situations identified with a state of nature and the famous motto Bellum omnium contra omnes ("the war of all against all")— could only be averted by strong central government. He thus denied any right of rebellion toward the social contract, which would be later amended by John Locke and conserved by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The Parisian Abraham Bosse created the book's frontispiece after lengthy discussion with Hobbes. The upper part shows a giant crowned figure emerging from the landscape, clutching a sword and a crosier, beneath a quote from the Book of Job "Non est potestas Super Terram quae Comparetur ei" (There is no power on earth to be compared to him), linking the figure to the monster of the Bible. The torso and arms of the figure are composed of over 300 persons, in the style of Giuseppe Arcimboldo; all are facing inwards with only the giant's head having visible features. The lower portion is a triptych, framed in a wooden border. The center form contains the title on an ornate curtain. The two sides reflect the sword and crosier of the main figure— earthly power on the left and the powers of the church on the right. Each side element reflects the equivalent power— castle to church, crown to mitre, cannon to excommunication, weapons to logic, and the battlefield to the religious courts. The giant holds the symbols of both sides, reflecting the union of secular and spiritual in the sovereign, but the construction of the torso also makes the figure the state. (Enlarged Image)

(#14)

Deconstrution of Freud's Theory of Panic

The same mechanism of self-externalization [or bootstrapping] is at work in the phenomena of panic. Although the leader has disappeared in the panic, another fixed point representing the collectivity takes his place and appears to transcend the members. This fixed point is nothing other than the movement of the group itself, a movement that acquires distance and autonomy in relation to the individual movements. Yet this movement is merely the result of individual actions and reactions. As Durkheim well noted, in these moments of "effervescence" the social totality assumes all the features men attribute to the divine: exteriority, transcendence, unpredictability, and inaccessibility.

(#15)

The Orator according to Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912)

"His language has a sort of grandiloquence that would be ridiculous in ordinary circumstances; there is something dominating about his gestures; his very thinking is impatient of proportion and easily allows itself to go to every sort of extreme. That is because he feels as if he were overflowing with an abnormal plethora of forces that tend to spread out from him; sometimes he even has the impression that he is dominated by a moral power that transcends him and of which he is but the interpreter... Now, this exceptional surplus of forces is quite real: it comes from the very group that he is addressing. The feelings that his words arouse come back to him, but swollen, amplified, and they reinforce his own feeling to the same degree."

(#17)

David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739)

"The minds of men are mirrors to one another." Commentary: David Hume (1711-1776) was a Scottish philosopher, economist, historian and a key figure in the history of Western philosophy and the Scottish Enlightenment. In the introduction to A Treatise of Human Nature, Hume writes "the science of man is the only solid foundation for the other sciences," and that the correct method for this science is "experience and observation"; i.e., the empirical method. Because of this, Hume is broadly characterised as a champion of empiricism. Until quite recently, Hume was seen as a forerunner of the logical positivist movement; a form of anti-metaphysical empiricism. According to the logical positivists, unless a statement could be verified or falsified by experience, or else was true or false by definition (i.e. either tautological or contradictory), then it was meaningless.

(#18)

Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759)

"Though our brother is upon the rack, as long as we ourselves are at our ease, our senses will never inform us of what he suffers. They never did, and never can, carry us beyond our own person, and it is by the imagination only that we can form any conception of what are his sensations. Neither can that faculty help us to this any other way, than by representing to us what would be our own, if we were in his case. It is the impressions of our own senses only, not those of his, which our imaginations copy. By the imagination we place ourselves in his situation, we conceive ourselves enduring all the same torments, we enter as it were into his body, and become in some measure the same person with him, and thence form some idea of his sensations, and even feel something which, though weaker in degree, is not altogether unlike them [...] That this is the source of our fellow-feeling for the misery of others. [Ibid.] Sympathy, therefore, does not arise so much from the view of the passion, as from that of the situation which excites it."

(#19)

Wealth is everything that is being desired by the spectator

"For to what purpose is all the toil and bustle of this world? What is the end of avarice and ambition, of the pursuit of wealth, of power, and pre-eminence? Is it to supply the necessities of nature? The wages of the meanest labourer can supply them. [...] do they [those who are fortunate] imagine that their stomach is better, or their sleep sounder, in a palace than in a cottage? The contrary has been so often observed, and, indeed, is so very obvious, though it had never been observed, that there is nobody ignorant of it. From whence, then, arises that emulation which runs through all the different ranks of men, and what are the advantages which we propose by that great purpose of human life which we call bettering our condition? To be observed, to be attended to, to be taken notice of with sympathy, complacency, and approbation, are all the advantages which we can propose to derive from it. It is the vanity, not the ease, or the pleasure, which interests us." —Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759)

(#20)

The Origin of Wealth in Mimetic Desire

Adam Smith (1723-1790)

Self-love can take the form of self-interest, of the economic motive, the desire to improve one's material condition, to increase one's wealth. Not because the riches acquired would be in themselves a source of satisfaction— as a good Scot, Smith has no words harsh enough to express his scorn for this notion— but because they would have the property of attracting to their possessor the sympathy [a mixture of admiration and envy] of those who lack them. These people mistakenly attribute virtues to wealth that it does not have. But it is because they are mistaken, and because they covet it, that in the end they are not mistaken. Wealth indeed has the virtues with which it is credited, but only because it has been credited with them. It is this fool's game, a giant variation on the theme of sympathy, that generates the Wealth of Nations and what we call the economy— but not without causing grave harm to morality.

(#21)

Commentary: Professor Dupuy did not show this slide in class. I wish he did to counteract all the readings, slides and films shown about evil this semester. I imagine these were photos he took when visiting Monument Valley where John Ford and Anthony Mann shot many of the panoramic scenes of their Western films. While watching some of these Westerns where evil bandits go on their rampage of shooting innocents, one is amazed at human violence amidst the grandeur and beauty of Mother Nature silent and eloquent in her majesty. The stark contrast of these opposites make one wonder about why there is so much evil in this world. Perhaps this world is a mirror of our mind. With all the news media focusing on evil and corruption, our mind becomes polluted likewise. If we focus more on beauty in nature and art, perhaps our mind experience more of goodness and benevolence. The cellist Pablo Casals (1876-1973) wrote: "For the past eighty years I have started each day in the same manner. It is not a mechanical routine but something essential to my daily life. I go to the piano and I play two preludes and fugues of Bach. I cannot think of doing otherwise. It is a sort of benediction on the house. But that is not the only meaning it has for me. It is a rediscovery of the world of which I have the joy of being a part. It fills me with an awareness of the wonder of life, with a feeling of the incredible marvel of being a human being... I do not think that a day has passed in my life in which I have failed to look with fresh amazement at the miracle of nature." When Casals at age 93 was asked why he continued to practice the cello three hours a day, he replied "I'm beginning to notice some improvement." No wonder Pablo Casals was so wonderful in his craft of music. Both Michelangelo and Renoir said on their deathbed "I'm learning to paint." Beautiful minds such as these tell us that evil is but an illusion, and that the only essence is goodness. A search in Google Images for "Beauty of Nature" (without quotes) shows 23,300,000 images of scenic shots of Nature that are awe-inspiring. When we immerse our mind in the beauty of nature and art, goodness beckons us at every turn and we find heaven on earth.

(#42)

The Cross
"Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword." — Matthew 10.34

(#46)

Religion: Beliefs or Practices
Claude Lévi-Strasuss and French Structuralism • Devaluation of ritual • Cognitivist interpretaion   of myths

(#52)

Henri Hubert et Marcel Mauss, Essai sur la nature et la fonction du sacrifice (1899)
	"It is criminal to kill the victim because it is sacred, but the victim would not be sacred if it were not killed."

(#53)

Durkheim's Way Out
	"At bottom the concept of totality, that of society, and that of divinity are very probably only different aspects of the same notion." — Les formes élémentaires      de la vie religieuse (1912) Transcendence is nothing other than the transcendence of society in relation to individuals that comprise it.

(#54)

Evans-Pritchard's Critique (1965)
Is transcendence • The "always already" present   transcendence of the social order? • Or the transcendence brought   about by rituals of disorder   (of the Mardi Gras Carnival type)?

(#55)

The Structuralist Rupture
• Devaluation of Ritual. • Cognitivist interpretaion   of Myths. • Universality of the   Incest Prohibition.

(#61)

Oedipus and the Crucified
Commentary: The painting at left is Oedipus and the Sphinx (1864) by Gustave Moreau at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. The painting at the right is Golgotha (1893) by Nikolai Ge at the State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. The scene depicts the spot where Jesus was crucified (Matthew 27.33). Golgotha or Calvary was a little knoll rounded like a bare skull. When Oedipus met the Sphinx at the gate of Thebes, there were a pile of skulls from passerbys who failed to answer the Sphinx's Riddle which Oedipus finally solved.

(#62)

Jean Tibéri, Mayor of Paris, October 2000
	"They want to make me look like a scapegoat, but I won't let them."

(#63)

The fact that the deterrence will not work with a strictly positive probability ε is what allows for the inscription of the catastrophe in the future, and it is this inscription that makes the deterrence effective, with a margin of error e.