Listening to a talk on famous philosophers' deaths by Simon Critchley this afternoon helped crystallise a thought.
Simon was unwilling to engage the question of modern disciplinarity as shaping what professionalised academic philosophy is. Yet once one thinks about that, it seems to me, his rather romantic, quasi-religious interest in philosophers' ars moriendi begins to reveal its full nostalgia.
At least the talk clarified the degree to which I am committed to the centrality of institutions both analytically and socially. This is probably a conservative commitment since it stands against liberalism and anarchism and the whole anti-state thematic. Paine was wrong radically to divide society from government in the first pages of Common Sense, since society is in fact always governmentally incorporated.
At the same time, I am also committed to historicism, which largely accounts for my beef with most contemporary 'theory' whose founding gesture is the banishment of history.
But the history of some institutions is not simply history: it is also tradition.
It is at the intersection between time and insitutionality that Anglicanism becomes fascinating. As a tradition; as a framework nestled inside both civil society and government, but with supernatural edges.
I am not a Christian, however.
So I'm interested in the articulation between the history/traditions/liturgies of the Anglican institution (the visible Church) and its credal aspects (the invisible Church (an interesting concept)) in so far as these intersect with secular and in particular literary culture and its temporalities, and especially as they, brought together, can operate as a model for an impossible unity and stability. For the socializing of the transcendent.
To take this thought into Anglicanism without believing, which is very tempting, is to play out the logics of a Straussian double truth.
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