More comments from this…

Interesting…I had no idea there was a LDS faithful, continental strain at BYU. Of course, I would have believed there were continental philosophers there but without any necessary allegiance to Mormonism as Catholic Universities like DePaul have fantastic programs in continental philosophy but from my personal experience there I knew none that thought of themselves as Catholics much less do apologetics for it.

I did read some of the links you pointed me towards. It does appear that these thinkers are comfortable with Heidegger, Derrida Levinas, etc. – I did not see anything on Nietzsche though – hmm. What would LDS philosophers think of Nietzsche – he did seem to have a lot of criticisms of Christianity and postmodernists seemed to have found him essential, Heidegger in particular…and Derrida.

This brings up another point. I also read that these LDS philosophers think of the apostate church (everyone not LDS) as rooted in the paganism of Greek thought. I certainly understand the ‘Platonism’ (Neo-Platonic) of the Latin world. However, Heidegger thought of this as a corruption of the Greeks and I agree. I am sure I need not remind you of his warnings of onto-theologizing. Any kind of other start from the Greeks would certainly not be a mere replay of the history of metaphysics. Heidegger even gave up the word ‘Being’ to make sure others knew he was not making Being, God. This lapse back into the reifying of presence (meta-language of conscious, Heidegger’s early thinking of Plato’s Ideas, substance, etc.) made the nous (ratio, reason) absolute, infinite, omniscient, omnipresent, etc. -the logos, and produced the unifying canon of violence that Derrida wrote so much about. I suppose I do not think Christians were corrupt because of Greek thinking but Greek thinking was corrupted by Christianity. I think this is the direction of Heidegger and Derrida for sure. Nietzsche went much further than this in thinking of decadency, the ignoble, the ingenious manipulation of Christian sheep by their Sheppard priests, etc. (The Antichrist, Beyond Good and Evil, Zarathustra, etc.). It seems to me the whole idea of continental postmodern thinkers is that God is dead – we have totally played out that metaphysical hand historically speaking.

Certainly, we know from Of Grammatology (and Gadamer) that writing ‘supplements’ speech by overturning and playing with it from the margins. I suppose this could give one liberty to find other readings of the text that are equally absurd (from the point of view of truth) as the canonical reading. However, if the reading once again ends up affirming logocentrism wouldn’t this iteration of the text simply ignore deconstruction altogether and simply once again affirm meta-theology? I suppose it could be done in irony with postmodernism in mind. However, I fail to see how anyone could take LDS seriously if this is the case. In any case, I found it very interesting that the discussions I read were not fatally shot done by the ‘chosen’ as would have been in fundamentalism…maybe, it is so far out they do not bother with it. Anyway, let me know if there are any postmodern, Mormon congregations in Boulder Colorado – would love to check it out.

With regard to Clark’s latest comment…

“I think when one is going through the texts doing phenomenology that the phenomena ends up being the same.”

I suppose this makes me think that Derrida might think about the ‘same’ here as the im-possiblity of the ‘same’ as he does of the im-possiblity of justice. We must decide in this impossibility as if justice were possible. I suppose we must think of irreconcilables in terms of phenomena; the impossibility of a meta-language to ‘justify’ the ‘same’ and yet we must. In “The Gift of Death” Derrida writes about the “messianic without the messiah”. He calls this the secret. Apotheosis arrives as the impossible event without theosis. He thinks of death in this fashion – the gift of death is its event in the face of its impossibility. I think the almost instinctive need to think the ‘same’ as the event of meta-language is a similar ‘gift’.

I must confess I am a bit curious about you and this site…in light of what you know about the impossibility of metaphysics ( a meta-language), how do you come by Mormonism and metaphysics? I have had interesting theological discussions with Mormons but none have ever tried to think Mormonism from post-modernism…seems to me like it is a bit like a curious twilight zone episode. Is this a case of you must? If so, I wonder how your brethren respond to this approach. Is there an official church position regarding alternate philosophical approaches to Mormonism? In orthodoxy, it seems to me this would simply be deemed heresy.