John D. CaputoCritiques

John Caputo's book, "Truth" is good. It is a good book to read, and it helps that his style of writing is lucid and easy.

In general, I fear reading philosophical texts, because most authors believe it is essential, they kill the reader with boredom. John Caputo avoids this approach, and I thank him for it.

The introduction is brilliant, in particular, the way he uses the words 'sedentary' and 'pedestrian'. From there, he moved to a discussion of truth, as the ancients perceived it, as well as religious texts.
Then, he explored some "Enlightenment" philosophers, some "Modern" philosophers" as well as "post-modern" ones.

There is no absolute truth. We know this. In Vedic/Hindu philosophy, we have the Goddess Maya who casts a veil over us. In the rock opera "Jesus Christ Superstar", Jesus asked Pilate - "what is truth? is truth a changing law? what is truth? is mine the same as yours?"

It's possible to skip the entire book and just focus on those lines in the opera. However, then you'd miss a super romp through the 'history of truth'.

Keep one thing in mind: he has explored only Western philosophers.

In other parts of the world, we used to have a more nuanced view of concepts like 'truth'. Not anymore, sadly.

This was a great book. The interview or conversation with Derrida is very short - disappointingly short. The commentary by Caputo is most of the book. Caputo is very entertaining, though. I thoroughly enjoyed his commentary. His enthusiasm for Derrida definitely shines through. He made me laugh a few times, always a good thing.

I'm new to Deconstruction and I probably still couldn't tell you what Deconstruction is in a nutshell, though I could say "yes, yes" if you asked me. I did learn quite a bit. I had no idea just how metaphysical theory could get. I had originally assumed Deconstructionism was merely literary theory but I was wrong on that - this book applies it to law, to politics, to religion.

I have liked what I have understood of Derrida. I realize how he could be unpopular, but I think, from what I understood of what he was saying, he is putting into words thoughts that I've had but couldn't articulate - or even understand - very well. I know a lot of people with very conservative viewpoints - this is the only way there is, this is it, we have arrived, no more to learn, threatened by outside influences - and I haven't agreed with that, so I was very interested in learning about being open to the other, come, yes, yes.

An amazing book. One that should be re-read every year.

My first book-length foray into Caputo's work was challenging, enriching, and entertaining. He's an excellent stylist and presents a compelling argument for Derrida's contribution to a theology that is not defined or ever fixed. Caputo gave me a lot more hope and playfulness than I'm used to when reading theology and has laid rigorous and thoughtful groundwork for entering into way of conceiving religion without religion (thank God?).

John Caputo's introduction to Kierkegaard is engaging, thoughtful, and most of all comprehensive. The breadth of this short work is a helpful orientation to Kierkegaard's thought and ranges from discourse on pseudonyms to his ideas about the individual self as a fundamental component of existence. I appreciated Caputo's wit and delineation of the various modes of thought that have taken up Kierkegaard's work, while also being upfront about his own deconstructionist background.

Caputo's slim treatise is insight, erudite, and full of genuine wit and humor. Not coming from a philosophical background, I found it helpful that Caputo provided a philosophical and historical context for his ideas and the different conceptions of religion pre- and post-enlightenment. Admittedly I'm drawn to any theologian who advocates for truth (with a lowercase "t") and who is also still engaged and intent on being curious and in the throes of desire for life.

This little book took me a lot longer to read that I expected. Caputo explores this concept of the "unconditional" that was new and surprising to me. I found myself asking "but why does this distinction matter" often throughout the book, but as some of his thoughts have settled in my head, I'm understanding the answer to that question a bit more.

To me, this exploration of the unconditional is one of exploring the depths of what it means to be dead to the world (and ourselves) and alive in Christ.

There is so much more to say and consider, but where to start? I'll just leave it at this: I enjoyed this book and in glad I read it.

Can Hope survive with the collapse of epistemology certainty? Is God necessarily existent for spiritual experience? Can the nihilism of our age open us up to the possibility of grace? Phenomenologist and deconstructionist John D. Caputo wrestles with these questions and more in his intellectual memoir, Hoping Against Hope (Confessions of a Postmodern Pilgrim). The book is a spiritual autobiography of sorts, but it only reveals the broad contours of Caputo's life, focusing on the development (or deconstruction?) of his thoughts on God, faith and certainty.

Caputo was raised in a devout Catholic family. He spent four years as a De LaSalle monk, before his illustrious career as a philosopher and theologians (thirty-six years as professor of Philosophy at Villanova University and professor of philosophy of religion at Syracuse University for seven years). In Hoping Against Hope he gives voice and personality to these various stages of his intellectual development. As a child Caputo was an altar boy in pre-Vatican II Catholicism who had memorized the Baltimore Catechism. Caputo refers to this younger self as "Jackie." "Brother Paul," is the monk Caputo who grew callouses on his knees in an attempt to learn prayer and had a love for the mystics. The professor, "John D.," is the the philosopher who's tongue was loosed by Jacques Derrida (the other Jackie) and the French Postmodernists.

Caputo writes:

My life as a philosopher gas taken place in the distance between theology and philosophy. Like everyone else, however far forward I thought I moved, I was always circling around my origins. I soon found that the audacity of the philosophers who "dare to think" according to the Enlightenment motto, fails them when it comes to theology. There they panic, in fear of contamination. They treat the name of God like a terrible computer virus that will corrupt all their files, or like a real one, like the Ebola virus, where the odds of recovering are against you. So, mostly at the beginning of my professional life, when "John D." stepped forth and responded to the title "professor," while telling Jackie to stay at home, I was worried that they would say, "This is not philosophy, this is just his religion." But my religion is between me and Brother Paul and Jackie and several others. How can they know anything about that? (104-105).

With the Continental Philosophers, Heidigger, Derrida, Lacan, Lyotoard, Levinas, and others, Caputo thoroughly rejects the narrative of the Christian tradition and the official line of the Roman Catholic church. He dismantles dogma, expresses his antagonism toward the afterlife and a God that is either ' the Prime Punisher and the Royal Rewarder (64). He also regards the arguement between atheism and theism to be wrong-headed. With a Zen-Koan-like-air he proclaims, "God does not exist. God insists" (114). He gives fresh and unique interpretations of scripture and imagines the textual variants he wishes to one day uncover. Caputo's thoughts run far a field from classic Christian orthodoxy.

But his project isn't wholly negative. Caputo upholds active service to the poor and marginalized and the non-religious religion of love. He says his idea of nihilism is stolen from the mystics and he employs insights from Miester Eckhardt and Marguerite Porete (both mystics ran a foul from official church teaching). What Caputo proposes is a religion of the Rose--"The rose is without why; it blossoms because it blossoms; It cares not for itself, asks not if it's seen" (27). He brings this verse from Angelus Silesius into conversation wiht Lyotard's religion of the smile and posits a nihilism where all of life is received as a gift (with or without a giver), where all of life is received without condition (181).

As an intellectual memoir/spiritual autobiography I give this three stars and thought it was an interesting read. I especially loved the 'short nocturnal dialogue' where Caputo imagines a dialogue with himself at his different stages of faith and intellectual development. I appreciate how Caputo's postmodernity leads him to pluralism and relativism without the need to posit an underlying universal faith in God. However, I am unconvinced by Caputo's theological vision and see his radical (or weakness) theology as incompatible with the Christian gospel of grace. I was aware of Caputo before reading this book, so wasn't particularly surprised by what he says here. I have read him before and have seen him lecture. I find him fascinating. I also find it ironic that I received this book from Cross Focused reviews. If Caputo mentions the cross at all (and I don't remember that he does in this book), it is clearly not his focus. Anyway, I received this book in exchange for my honest review. ★★★

 

Caputo is so extremely articulate and engaging in his interaction with theology and post-modernism. "What do I love when I love my God?" is his central question and at the same time his central theological treatise, that we are the questions that we ask, and this question holds the most significant meaning of any questions. While I am not as post-modern in my theology as Caputo, I appreciate the depth and tone Caputo writes in, and am encouraged by a theology that highlights love of God and Justice as central to 'true' faith.

Eurgh. Read for my Philosophy of Religion class, and while I don't mind the concept of deconstruction, it was hardly explained significantly and/or succinctly in this book. I understand that deconstruction is a hard philosophical concept to grasp, but expanding on several of its key points without initially laying the foundations of the assumptions of deconstruction made this a poor choice for introducing the concept to people.

You don't often encounter a humble scholar, or even one who fakes it well, and that by itself is enough to recommend this book. But there's more.

I can't say I know yet what to make of this thing, but started out reading it for (amateur) scholarly reasons and ended up reading for pleasure, without pencil, highlighter, sticky-notes or notebook, and not wanting it to end like you don't want a good novel to end. Except this one I can read again. With a thorough background in Heidegger, Kierkegaard, Jewish and Christian Bibles, Husserl Nietzsche--not so much Derrida and I had never heard of Levinas--I came in pretty well armed but pretty soon just threw away everything I thought I knew and went along for the ride. It was a good ride. I have no idea if anything in it is true, I don't have any idea if there is a single verifiable assertion in it, but it's a trip you should take.

Without a pretty good knowledge of "strong theology" and Continental philosophy of the last hundred years or so this volume might make no sense at all and might not be any fun to read, be warned, but if you have a little of that background and like to see idols toppled (or windmills tilted at, I'm not sure which) pick this ont up. I've been swimming in that cold philosophical sea for decades even long after losing all hope I would find what I sought and this has made me dive in anew, and deeper and with the same sense of fun and coming good times I has as an undergraduate, decades ago.

This is an excellent introduction to Kierkegaard, and an essential work for any student of Existentialism.

For anyone who read Radical Hermeneutics and was expecting another good read, you won't be disappointed. Caputo is thought provoking as always, and expands on several of the themes presented in his earlier writing. For anyone who hasn't read anything by Caputo, you will be treated to a style of writing that blends the tropes of continental philosophy with the "conversational" style of Richard Rorty.

The title is somewhat misleading: Caputo is not really "against" ethics, but is trying to counter the tendency of ethics (and "philosophy", by which Caputo means the metaphysics-of-presence style philosophy) to seek for and produce formulas and principles that will safeguard ethical decision making--counter this with a "poetics of obligation" that is, in an fairly unabashedly rhetorical way, trying to valorize open-ness to the call of the other (not Levinasian, infinite Other, but a personal, proper-named other), to the suffering of the other.

If this makes no sense to you, you may not get as much out of the book until you've read some Heidegger/Nietzsche/Derrida/Levinas, but I suspect it will nonetheless at least pique your interest. This book really is a "poetics" rather than an "ethics" or a "philosophy of obligation": Caputo, in a way that wood make Rorty proud, sets out to make obligation and attention to the particulars of situations look as good as possible, and to make (philosophical) Ethics look bad. If you want the hard arguments behind Caputo's work in this book, you'll have to turn to other sources, including Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida, for a spelling out of the critique of metaphysics and ethics which Caputo adopts.

I think Caputo does a good job, and the only reason I haven't given this book five stars is that he tends to ramble and repeat himself in ways that don't add anything new or enlightening. Also, I found the "lyrical discourses" bit in the middle of the book, where Caputo introduces certain texts signed by pseudonyms that were sent to him "anonymously", just annoying and rather silly, and skipped it.