
Beauty At Work
Beauty at Work expands our understanding of beauty: what it is, how it works, and why it matters. Sociologist Brandon Vaidyanathan interviews scientists, artists, entrepreneurs, and leaders across diverse fields to reveal new insights into how beauty shapes our brains, behaviors, organizations, and societies--for good and for ill. Learn how to harness the power of beauty in your life and work, while avoiding its pitfalls.
Beauty At Work
Ecology and Agency with Dr. William Barbieri (Part 6 of Symposium on Spiritual Yearning in a Disenchanted Age)
This episode is the sixth presentation in our series from the international symposium on Spiritual Yearning in a Disenchanted Age.
Dr. William Barbieri teaches in the Religion and Culture and Moral Theology/Ethics programs in the School of Theology and Religious Studies and directs the Peace and Justice Studies Program at The Catholic University of America. He is also a fellow of the Institute for Policy Research and Catholic Studies and of the Center for the Study of Culture and Values. In addition to his monographs Ethics of Citizenship: Immigration and Group Rights in Germany (Duke University Press, 1998) and Constitutive Justice (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), he has edited From Just War to Modern Peace Ethics (with Heinz-Gerhard Justenhoven; De Gruyter, 2012) and At the Limits of the Secular: Reflections on Faith and Public Life (Eerdmans 2104). He has also published articles in the areas of human rights, comparative ethics, peace studies, Catholic social teaching, and German studies. His current research addresses the historicity of morals. A member of the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Christian Ethics, he has also served on the boards of the Peace and Justice Studies Association and the Institut für Theologie und Frieden in Germany. Barbieri is a past recipient of an Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship and a Fulbright German Studies Fellowship. After studying religion and comparative area studies at Duke University, he received a doctorate in religious studies from Yale University in 1992.
In his talk, Dr. Barbieri talks about:
- How agency is ecological
- Contextualizing agency through social, historical, and material dimensions
- The way values can be mediated visually
- The interconnectedness of people, history, and the earth
- Secularism and excarnation
- How the moral life requires perceiving things beyond ourselves
To learn more about Dr. Barbieri, you can find him at:
Website: https://trs.catholic.edu/faculty-and-research/faculty-profiles/barbieri-william/index.html
Email: barbieri@cua.edu
Publications
Constitutive Justice: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1057/9781137263254
Ethics of Citizenship: Immigration and Group Rights in Germany: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-World-Cannot-Give/Tara-Isabella-Burton/9781982170073
Here in Avalon: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Here-in-Avalon/Tara-Isabella-Burton/9781982170097
Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World: https://a.co/d/gOwySUy
Self-Made: Curating Our Image from Da Vinci to the Kardashians: https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/tara-isabella-burton/self-made/9781541789012/
This episode is sponsored by:
John Templeton Foundation (https://www.templeton.org/)
Templeton Religion Trust (https://templetonreligiontrust.org/)
Brandon: I'm Brandon Vaidyanathan, and this is Beauty at Work — the podcast that seeks to expand our understanding of beauty, what it is, how it works, and why it matters for the work we do. This season of the podcast is sponsored by John Templeton Foundation and Templeton Religion Trust.
Hello, everyone. This is the sixth episode from our International Symposium on Spiritual Yearning in a Disenchanted Age. Our speaker is Dr. Will Barbieri, who is Professor of Ethics at The Catholic University of America where he directs the Peace and Justice Studies Program. He's also the Director of the Center for the Study of Culture and Values. Let's get started.
Dr. William: All right. So I'm trying to honor the time here. It's a little ironic to write an abstract or presentation when just reading the abstract will take more than 10 minutes. I've boiled down my intervention to five propositions. Some of them are drawn from my own research project that I'm really just getting underway with, and some of them are responses to the very stimulating contributions that we've already heard.
Proposition number one is one of two ideas that I set out in my abstract for this meeting, namely, agency is ecological. What do I mean by that? I've been working recently on a critique of contemporary models of agency where most tend to be highly individualized. Our philosophical conception, misconceptions of moral agency often tend to focus on individual moments of decision or choice. So our exercise of freedom becomes decontextualized socially. But more importantly, it becomes decontextualized from our relationship to the Earth. So my argument is that we need to decenter the role of the individual and our understandings of how agency works, and recast our attention toward these additional dimensions that are essential, that are in ineliminable from what it actually means to exist as a free being. So that means that agency has to be contextualized in social environments, that it has to recognize that agency is enacted only in narratives, in ongoing stories. It has to recognize a historical dimension. But most importantly, for my purposes, we have to affirm the material. Not just preconditions but participants in agencies. Some people write about assemblages. Jane Bennett, for example, has written about vibrant matter as something that we interact with. That is, again, not just sometimes part of it but always a substrate of our capacity to act. So that's my first point here.
My second point, my second proposition, is that values can be mediated visually. Now we have here Charles' wonderful book about poetry. And poetry provides a certain type of language that enables certain sorts of experiences that might arguably be different from other discursive forms of language. What I've been working on though for quite a while is the field that's known as visual ethics and the idea that images, that visuality, affords encounters, perhaps knowledge, or perhaps a grasp of values in ways that aren't always mediated by words. And I include here this image. This is only — well, this is most of the full image. This is a picture that some of you might recognize as coming out of the civil rights, the recent Black Lives Matter movement in the US. I don't want to say anything about this image, other than to ask you to react to what you see. In the first place, I could give you all kinds of context about this image, and I could point to ways in which how we interpret the image is largely shaped through interpretive, discursive frameworks that we bring to it. But I still want to say that there are certain features. And again, I'm sorry. It's not quite the full image. But there are just things in the posture, in the juxtapositions of facial and other features, that we respond to even arguably before we begin to further interpret what is going on. It's a powerful image, and it's one that captures a number of different things. But my contention here is that we can unpack this in ways that attune us to value their, again, arguably non-discursive or pre-linguistic. There are many different ways in which visual images can embody what we can think of as ethical or moral content. We have this wonderful poem that interpreted Klimt's painting of Hope through poetic language, which gave us a kind of double mediation of what is a virtue, a theological virtue, of a moral virtue, hope.
Third proposition: disenchantment and, going along with it, the language of, in Charles's book, of connections, or sometimes he speaks about reconnections, reconnections to the cosmos can be a counterproductive framework for thinking about our condition. Why do I say that? There are a couple of reasons. The main one is that the idea of disenchantment is rooted in and, again, arguably reinforces a kind of dualism, a way of thinking about humans and their surroundings, humans and nature, humans in the cosmos as fundamentally separate and in need of connection, where connection is problematic. My counter proposal would be that, we always are already connected but that we simply don't necessarily see that, or we have convinced ourselves. Or otherwise, I'm not sure here if we should use the language of alienation. But we've covered over or bonded ourselves to a view that doesn't recognize our earthiness, as I'm saying, the way that we are dependent on, bound up with other people, the Earth, history and so on. If we think about disenchantment, the term itself, we note the root, the idea of enchant — Tara, I'm sure, can tell you much more about this than I know — it's related to the French "chante," to sing or to chant. The idea here, the image here, is of becoming spell bound, of somehow being separated from the normal run of things. So disenchantment becomes a kind of negation of a negation, if you will. But enchantment itself interposes a distance between ourselves and our environment. It's probably not incidental that this emerged at a certain point in late medieval history as a way of characterizing how we can become bound up through a process of casting a spell from our normal state. Now I would also say that the idea of disenchantment, in the Weberian sense, is one more of what Charles and others and elsewhere called a subtraction narrative. So we're tempted to think of disenchantment as a process of removing magic from the world around us. But again, my argument is, we should think about flipping the script a little bit and think of it more as imaginatively removing ourselves from the world. That the task is not somehow re-enchanting the world; it's liberating ourselves from the illusions of separateness, the illusion that nature is something fundamentally distinct from culture or from humans. And we find this movement going on in a lot of post-Humanist or new Materialist thinkers right now. I think that's a valuable clue to follow.
My fourth proposition is that secularism is a process of flattening and excarnation. It was interesting to me, Charles, that that word "excarnation" played a very important role in A Secular Age, but it doesn't come up again in Cosmic Connections. Because I think a lot of the issue here is that there's an attempt to return to our bodily presence in the world. That's one of the things that poetry can do for us. A Secular Age had an interesting analysis of excarnation, because it is a removal from a complex of things that include our bodies but also our history, our society and, ultimately, our relationship to God. Now, the secularization process involves excarnation, and it brings with it a flattening of experience through a number of different realms.
My fifth and final proposition goes to the question of how to respond to what I'm describing as a flattening. I think that the moral life requires a sense of difference, a sense of otherness, a sense of contact to things that are beyond us and, in some sense, higher than us. That sense is what makes a kind of humility and a kind of de-centering of our own interests possible.
So I look at the proposition this way. Brandon just referred in his presentation to the idea of something missing. Habermas famously wrote about An Awareness of What is Missing. My proposition would be that the "something missing" is actually there and that the problem is not restoring it somehow but recovering our awareness of it. So if morals, morality, ethical progress depends on de-centering the self, part of that process is developing our resources for what Michel de Certeau called heterology—our grasp of what is different from us and of how those relationships constitute us. But it also involves the overcoming the illusion of independence and see our co-existence but, more importantly, interdependence than other people with history, with the earth systems in particular. That's where my new ecological agency comes in, and ultimately with higher powers. Charles spoke about the impact of Gandhi. And Gandhi's insight was into the power of interdependence. His notion of ahimsa as a law of love was a recognition of the way that our interdependence with others is actually a fact in our lives that we can tap into in order to improve our moral awareness.
Just a couple of closing thoughts about ways to accentuate our sense of our own ecological agency, our own interdependence, our own pre-existing, always existing connection to the cosmos. One topic that I'm exploring in my own work is the way in which certain kinds of gardens or gardening experiences can foster this. I noticed that Charles mentioned in Cosmic Connections at a couple of key points how gardening was one way in which one could feel like one was restoring a connection to nature. An interesting book I've been reading recently is Edward Casey and Michael Marder's book, Plants in Place: A Phenomenology of the Vegetal. They write about how plants and our interaction with plants, in gardens, and in other settings provides an emplacement for us, or maybe a read and placement would be the appropriate term there.
Two more quick thoughts. One is a response to Charles, to your earlier remarks about your own biography and the impact of the Nouvelle théologie in your upbringing. I think that Ressourcement, that approach of de Lubac and Congar, is something that can be maybe reconfigured and applied in this context. We are re-grounding ourselves in the sources that are already there and, at a certain level, on which we already depend and even, one could argue, practice a kind of faith. Yes, those sources, our relationships to others, our relationship to the earth, to life, and perhaps to other powers beyond that. We also see — this is my final brief comment — in the field of environmental humanities, in which I work, a growing emphasis on looking at indigenous communities which are closer to, were more aware of these connections that I'm talking about. They talk about traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) as an important resource for us to tap into in shifting or transforming, not the world, not re-injecting magic or spirituality to the world but transforming our own outlook or awareness through a process of ecological transformation or, as Pope Francis calls it, ecological conversion. So I'll wrap up with that. Thank you very much.
(outro)
Brandon: Alright, folks. That's a wrap for this episode. If you enjoyed the episode, please share it with someone who would find it of interest. Also, please subscribe and leave us a review if you haven't already. Thanks, and see you next time.