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Insurrections: Critical Studies in Religion, Politics, and Culture
Strange Wonder The Closure of Metaphysics and the Opening of Awe by Rubenstein, Mary-Jane [Columbia UP,2010] (Paperback) Reprint Edition
Strange Wonder confronts Western philosophy's ambivalent relationship to the Platonic "wonder" that reveals the strangeness of the everyday. On the one hand, this wonder is said to be the origin of all philosophy. On the other hand, it is associated with a kind of ignorance that ought to be extinguished as swiftly as possible. By endeavoring to resolve wonder's indeterminacy into certainty and calculability, philosophy paradoxically secures itself at the expense of its own condition of possibility.Strange Wonder locates a reopening of wonder's primordial uncertainty in the work of Martin Heidegger, for whom wonder is first experienced as the shock at the groundlessness of things and then as an astonishment that things nevertheless are. Mary-Jane Rubenstein traces this double movement through the thought of Emmanuel Levinas, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Jacques Derrida, ultimately thematizing wonder as the awesome, awful opening that exposes thinking to devastation as well as transformation. Rubenstein's study shows that wonder reveals the extraordinary in and through the ordinary, and is therefore crucial to the task of reimagining political, religious, and ethical terrain.
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First published February 20, 2009
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October 21, 2020
Based on its ideas alone, “Strange Wonder: The Closure of Metaphysics and the Opening of Awe” by Mary-Jane Rubenstein is a five star book – which I have given 4 stars. So let me start this review by explaining my one reservation.
Strange Wonder is, in my opinion, an unnecessarily difficult read. I’m a smart, educated guy. I recognize that Mary-Jane Rubenstein is a professor and Strange Wonder is an academic work. I read lots of academic works written by professors. But rarely in even the most intellectually challenging prose do I find brain (and tongue) twisters like this:
“Stripping Dasein of the raw material for its techno-ontological adventure, Gelassenheit, moreover, signals an abandonment of the will-toward-fixity that seeks to consolidate the transcendental subject, it’s objects, and its God into mutually stabilizing monads.”
Quite the philosophical word-salad, with pretty much zero “context clues” to help the smart reader intuit the meaning of jargon. You’re just expected to know. So I kept Google open like a decoder ring while reading to look up German words and unfamiliar terms, and took the time to reinterpret and reread passages until I felt confident I understood before moving on. Which made reading much of Strange Wonder a real slog... But which also, in the end, brought me to the final page smarter and better educated than when I started. Credit where credit is due. But was all that really necessary? Could the same concepts not have been explained in plain language? Really?
That said, I’m glad I read this book.
Strange Wonder is a deep dive into the role *the experience of Wonder* played in the birth of philosophy, but also, in the present, the key role wonder must play in overcoming our cultural programming and living more authentic lives.
The book opens with a dialogue between Socrates and his student Theaetetus. Socrates explains that, while every day he gains new knowledge of geometry and astronomy and music, he can’t quite grasp what on earth *knowledge* really is. Theaetetus offers three theories of the nature of knowledge, each of which Socrates exposes as a “wind-egg,” a demonstrably flawed wrong opinion. When his third and final “wind-egg” is burst, Theaetetus experiences *wonder* – which is nothing like childish glee at spotting a unicorn (an example of how badly wonder’s meaning has devolved in our time). Wonder for Theaetetus and for Socrates is the fruit of a profound emptiness of wrong concepts in the simultaneous absence of “right concepts,” of a deep encounter with uncertainty, a sudden essential glimpse of a question, thing or being *as it is*, no longer obscured by the concepts/explanations we previously accepted in place of the thing itself.
The rest of Strange Wonder is an exploration of theories of Being (existence), found in the work of four philosophers – Martin Heidegger, Emmanuel Levinas, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Jacques Derrida. They approach, in different ways, the question of how beings (lower case “beings,” us) lose awareness of/separate from Being (upper case “Being,” existence *as it is*) by (I’m reading some of my own esoteric studies into this) exchanging our experience of the world *as it is* for the descriptions and explanations of the world offered to us by the culture of our time and place. We trade reality for “wind-eggs” and surrender authenticity, even true aliveness, in the process. We become automatons running cultural programs instead of free-willed living beings. And worse, we rarely even notice this has happened.
The solution is the disciplined bursting of our own “wind-eggs,” and our rebirth in the womb of wonder.
Each philosopher in Strange Wonder approaches this bursting differently – Heidegger prescribes “shock and awe,” Levinas “passivity beyond passivity,” Nancy “Being With” (singular plurality), and Derrida “real Decision.” But they each draw a map to the same location, that place where our programs crash and the opportunity for authenticity momentarily appears.
I found Derrida’s deconstructionist prescription the most useful:
First, we must recognize that almost everything we call real is at root a myth, a story about existence that does not possess its own existence. Think of things like nations, borders, laws, politics, governments, corporations, education, history. These are all made-up stories we tell ourselves and each other, but which, because we mythologize them into life, are enabled to act like real, existing beings in the world. They impact everything we do. And yet they are mere stories. Exposing those stories, bursting those “wind-eggs,” is the goal of deconstructionism. Only when we reach the bottom of all the stories, including the most pernicious story of all, the one we call “I,” the culturally programmed automaton we identify as our “Self,” does the opportunity arise to glimpse (with wonder) the true nature of Being/being.
Derrida offers a clear example in his concept of *real Decision*.
Most of what we call “decisions” are not decisions at all. Most apparent choices we make are the inevitable result of our cultural programming, and if we’re just running programs, we’re not really deciding anything.
I’m writing this review in October 2020, two weeks before the November 3rd Presidential election in America. Millions upon millions of Americans will cast their vote, ostensibly “deciding” between the proffered candidates. But very few voters, if any at all (certainly not me), are making any real choice. My basic values, which I learned growing up (and which are therefore cultural programming) make it impossible that I would ever vote for the candidate who actively transgresses every good my automaton holds dear. It’s already “decided” I won’t vote for that candidate. But my automaton is also programmed to believe voting is my civic duty. So I will vote for the other candidate. The whole thing is an automated process that requires no authentic will, or even conscious awareness, on my part. And that’s how most of our so-called “decisions” are made.
For Derrida, the possibility of *real Decision* only appears when we face “impossible decisions.”
Say my wife calls me at work: “Come home right now or I’m leaving you.” The second I hang up the phone, it rings again. It’s my boss announcing: “Attend this meeting right now or you’re fired.” Let’s say I love my wife and I love my job. I am deeply invested in not losing either of them. Yet now I must choose to lose one or the other. My cultural programming is of no use to me. I have no habit from which to respond. I am thrown to my own devices, and for one brief moment the possibility of making a *real Decision* opens to me. Without programming to direct me my automaton faints. My authentic being awakens to find itself trembling in the throes of shock and awe, the twin poles of wonder.
My education is in English Literature, rather than philosophy. In that discipline, the wonder Mary-Jane Rubenstein explores in Strange Wonder reminds me of what the Romantic Poets meant by the term “Sublime” – another word that has been bastardized in our time (“Oh, that lemon custard was sublime...” Ugh).
For the Romantics, “sublime” meant that emotion experienced most often in the face of wild Nature, but also in poetry, music and art, in which what is experienced simultaneously expands the soul while crushing the ego. Picture standing alone before a vast mountain range, at once inspired by the majestic beauty of the scene, while also being shaken to your core by the landscape’s ancient grandeur, its timeless proclamation of your own ephemeral mortality. Or being adrift on the ocean during a thunderstorm, simultaneously awed by Nature’s fury and terrified by its indifference to your existence.
That’s “sublime.” I think it is also wonder, an opening to an authentic experience of being (Being) alive.
“Strange Wonder The Closure of Metaphysics and the Opening of Awe” is a difficult, worthwhile read. 4 Stars.
Strange Wonder is, in my opinion, an unnecessarily difficult read. I’m a smart, educated guy. I recognize that Mary-Jane Rubenstein is a professor and Strange Wonder is an academic work. I read lots of academic works written by professors. But rarely in even the most intellectually challenging prose do I find brain (and tongue) twisters like this:
“Stripping Dasein of the raw material for its techno-ontological adventure, Gelassenheit, moreover, signals an abandonment of the will-toward-fixity that seeks to consolidate the transcendental subject, it’s objects, and its God into mutually stabilizing monads.”
Quite the philosophical word-salad, with pretty much zero “context clues” to help the smart reader intuit the meaning of jargon. You’re just expected to know. So I kept Google open like a decoder ring while reading to look up German words and unfamiliar terms, and took the time to reinterpret and reread passages until I felt confident I understood before moving on. Which made reading much of Strange Wonder a real slog... But which also, in the end, brought me to the final page smarter and better educated than when I started. Credit where credit is due. But was all that really necessary? Could the same concepts not have been explained in plain language? Really?
That said, I’m glad I read this book.
Strange Wonder is a deep dive into the role *the experience of Wonder* played in the birth of philosophy, but also, in the present, the key role wonder must play in overcoming our cultural programming and living more authentic lives.
The book opens with a dialogue between Socrates and his student Theaetetus. Socrates explains that, while every day he gains new knowledge of geometry and astronomy and music, he can’t quite grasp what on earth *knowledge* really is. Theaetetus offers three theories of the nature of knowledge, each of which Socrates exposes as a “wind-egg,” a demonstrably flawed wrong opinion. When his third and final “wind-egg” is burst, Theaetetus experiences *wonder* – which is nothing like childish glee at spotting a unicorn (an example of how badly wonder’s meaning has devolved in our time). Wonder for Theaetetus and for Socrates is the fruit of a profound emptiness of wrong concepts in the simultaneous absence of “right concepts,” of a deep encounter with uncertainty, a sudden essential glimpse of a question, thing or being *as it is*, no longer obscured by the concepts/explanations we previously accepted in place of the thing itself.
The rest of Strange Wonder is an exploration of theories of Being (existence), found in the work of four philosophers – Martin Heidegger, Emmanuel Levinas, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Jacques Derrida. They approach, in different ways, the question of how beings (lower case “beings,” us) lose awareness of/separate from Being (upper case “Being,” existence *as it is*) by (I’m reading some of my own esoteric studies into this) exchanging our experience of the world *as it is* for the descriptions and explanations of the world offered to us by the culture of our time and place. We trade reality for “wind-eggs” and surrender authenticity, even true aliveness, in the process. We become automatons running cultural programs instead of free-willed living beings. And worse, we rarely even notice this has happened.
The solution is the disciplined bursting of our own “wind-eggs,” and our rebirth in the womb of wonder.
Each philosopher in Strange Wonder approaches this bursting differently – Heidegger prescribes “shock and awe,” Levinas “passivity beyond passivity,” Nancy “Being With” (singular plurality), and Derrida “real Decision.” But they each draw a map to the same location, that place where our programs crash and the opportunity for authenticity momentarily appears.
I found Derrida’s deconstructionist prescription the most useful:
First, we must recognize that almost everything we call real is at root a myth, a story about existence that does not possess its own existence. Think of things like nations, borders, laws, politics, governments, corporations, education, history. These are all made-up stories we tell ourselves and each other, but which, because we mythologize them into life, are enabled to act like real, existing beings in the world. They impact everything we do. And yet they are mere stories. Exposing those stories, bursting those “wind-eggs,” is the goal of deconstructionism. Only when we reach the bottom of all the stories, including the most pernicious story of all, the one we call “I,” the culturally programmed automaton we identify as our “Self,” does the opportunity arise to glimpse (with wonder) the true nature of Being/being.
Derrida offers a clear example in his concept of *real Decision*.
Most of what we call “decisions” are not decisions at all. Most apparent choices we make are the inevitable result of our cultural programming, and if we’re just running programs, we’re not really deciding anything.
I’m writing this review in October 2020, two weeks before the November 3rd Presidential election in America. Millions upon millions of Americans will cast their vote, ostensibly “deciding” between the proffered candidates. But very few voters, if any at all (certainly not me), are making any real choice. My basic values, which I learned growing up (and which are therefore cultural programming) make it impossible that I would ever vote for the candidate who actively transgresses every good my automaton holds dear. It’s already “decided” I won’t vote for that candidate. But my automaton is also programmed to believe voting is my civic duty. So I will vote for the other candidate. The whole thing is an automated process that requires no authentic will, or even conscious awareness, on my part. And that’s how most of our so-called “decisions” are made.
For Derrida, the possibility of *real Decision* only appears when we face “impossible decisions.”
Say my wife calls me at work: “Come home right now or I’m leaving you.” The second I hang up the phone, it rings again. It’s my boss announcing: “Attend this meeting right now or you’re fired.” Let’s say I love my wife and I love my job. I am deeply invested in not losing either of them. Yet now I must choose to lose one or the other. My cultural programming is of no use to me. I have no habit from which to respond. I am thrown to my own devices, and for one brief moment the possibility of making a *real Decision* opens to me. Without programming to direct me my automaton faints. My authentic being awakens to find itself trembling in the throes of shock and awe, the twin poles of wonder.
My education is in English Literature, rather than philosophy. In that discipline, the wonder Mary-Jane Rubenstein explores in Strange Wonder reminds me of what the Romantic Poets meant by the term “Sublime” – another word that has been bastardized in our time (“Oh, that lemon custard was sublime...” Ugh).
For the Romantics, “sublime” meant that emotion experienced most often in the face of wild Nature, but also in poetry, music and art, in which what is experienced simultaneously expands the soul while crushing the ego. Picture standing alone before a vast mountain range, at once inspired by the majestic beauty of the scene, while also being shaken to your core by the landscape’s ancient grandeur, its timeless proclamation of your own ephemeral mortality. Or being adrift on the ocean during a thunderstorm, simultaneously awed by Nature’s fury and terrified by its indifference to your existence.
That’s “sublime.” I think it is also wonder, an opening to an authentic experience of being (Being) alive.
“Strange Wonder The Closure of Metaphysics and the Opening of Awe” is a difficult, worthwhile read. 4 Stars.
January 2, 2021
Rubenstein is brilliant and it is an awe-ful delight to read her thinking-through of things. Her chief aim here is to reopen and problematize the primordial sense of wonder that begins philosophy by making the ordinary strange, which rapidly metastasizes into a howling void under even the firmest of our terrae, but also forms the groundless ground of thought itself. In her deft hands, critical readings of Heidegger, Levinas, Nancy, and Derrida (among others) use deconstruction to remove any stable place to stand and regard the world, but to then make the double movement of recognizing the absolute necessity of that impossibility as the ground of all possibility.
In the process, she out-Derridas Derrida, showing that he badly misreads Kierkegaard by trying to ground Abraham's act in an economy of sacrifice that ends at infinite resignation, rather than making the absurd movement of faith to nevertheless expect it all back in this life (not some fairy-tale heaven or next life). Her close reading of Derrida to show the internal inconsistency of his failed nerve is both dazzling and funny. Also amusing is a long section working through the metaphorical implications of a hedgehog thrown into a highway: you gotta read it to believe it, and even then, you won't.
Rubenstein's commitment, so to speak, is to an ethic of radical openness: she wants to hold us in the gap of wonder, rather than re-collapsing it into the Subject, Transcendence, the circumscribed "I" who can exist distinct from the Other, or any other name you want to give to seeking a place of certainty rather than trusting oneself to the whirlwind. She advocates for living in between shock and awe as a metaphysical and ethical stance, and it's quite terrifying, lovely, impossible, and necessary.
In her hands, "wonder" is a pharmakon, both that which saves and that which destroys, and an alchemical alkahest that undermines all concepts but also reinscribes them as themselves by establishing what they are not. In short, her project is a marvel and a wonder, and its own effort to acknowledge their trace in our post-wonder world. I freaking loved it. That said, I didn't love it quite as much as her other book on multiverses, which was one of the best academic works I've read. This one does tend more to the abstruse and the technical. Perhaps inevitable given the subject, but it can get a little dizzying even for those with large appetites for deconstructive excess. If you are someone troubled by such hunger, you'll find an inexhaustible banquet here.
In the process, she out-Derridas Derrida, showing that he badly misreads Kierkegaard by trying to ground Abraham's act in an economy of sacrifice that ends at infinite resignation, rather than making the absurd movement of faith to nevertheless expect it all back in this life (not some fairy-tale heaven or next life). Her close reading of Derrida to show the internal inconsistency of his failed nerve is both dazzling and funny. Also amusing is a long section working through the metaphorical implications of a hedgehog thrown into a highway: you gotta read it to believe it, and even then, you won't.
Rubenstein's commitment, so to speak, is to an ethic of radical openness: she wants to hold us in the gap of wonder, rather than re-collapsing it into the Subject, Transcendence, the circumscribed "I" who can exist distinct from the Other, or any other name you want to give to seeking a place of certainty rather than trusting oneself to the whirlwind. She advocates for living in between shock and awe as a metaphysical and ethical stance, and it's quite terrifying, lovely, impossible, and necessary.
In her hands, "wonder" is a pharmakon, both that which saves and that which destroys, and an alchemical alkahest that undermines all concepts but also reinscribes them as themselves by establishing what they are not. In short, her project is a marvel and a wonder, and its own effort to acknowledge their trace in our post-wonder world. I freaking loved it. That said, I didn't love it quite as much as her other book on multiverses, which was one of the best academic works I've read. This one does tend more to the abstruse and the technical. Perhaps inevitable given the subject, but it can get a little dizzying even for those with large appetites for deconstructive excess. If you are someone troubled by such hunger, you'll find an inexhaustible banquet here.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews