We say: my great-grandfather died for this dirt, my grandfather died for this dirt, my father died for this dirt, I would die for this dirt, but I hope my son never has to die for this dirt. Instead of questioning why your family died for that dirt and trying to make the world a place where your son doesn’t have to die for the same patch of dirt that claimed your clan, you stick to your foot in that dirt and hope that your stand will be that last stand. However, with history as a prologue, your son and maybe even his son will sadly die for that same patch of dirt. Watching the new horrors of drone warfare beamed directly to my phone from the battlefields of Ukraine in 1080p; it’s evident that as I watch a soldier beg for his life while being chased down by the high-pitched hum of a $10 drone, there’s a real chance you and your son die for that dirt without ever seeing who valued you, and your divine spark, so little.

It will always be this way. Maybe it doesn’t have to be, but maybe the reality is that though we think concepts like feudalism died, we find ourselves in a new version of it. Our banner lord Amazon calls us up from the fields to push back the invaders – the enemy, Nvidia, is raising the price on processors for the new data center – sally forth, seize the day, and thank the lord for another beautiful day tending the land and two-day delivery. Looking back, maybe developing nuclear weapons was the best thing we could’ve done for humanity – mutually assured destruction made it so our appetites for ending others had to be tempered by the fear that they could end us – after all, an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind. Human ingenuity knows no bounds. We have to bloodlet a little – those people who have the same attributes as us, but in a different shade, need to be stopped before they do x or y or z to you and me – think of the children, but not their children.

Humans are wonderful beings. Though we can empathize nine times out of ten, that tenth time, we are far better at another ability, rationalization. The rationalization that though that person may appear like us, may have a beautiful family, may have similar hopes and dreams to me, they come from a different patch of dirt, making them less than me. We must be able to rationalize that; we must have strength in numbers, we need the echo chamber, and we need to know that we alone don’t have these dark thoughts. We can overlook that the person fighting beside us may look like the enemy – they are draped in the same cloth as me, and that makes them friends, not enemies.

But as we pivot into remote-controlled warfare, the ethical landscape shifts beneath our feet. Consider the drone operator: sitting in a climate-controlled room, far removed from the chaos of the battlefield, watching the world through a screen. Their job is to decide who lives and dies, with the press of a button unleashing death from above. The emotional and psychological detachment is staggering. This operator doesn’t see the fear in the eyes of their target, doesn’t hear the cries of pain and loss – or they do, but a lifetime of Call of Duty had deadened the concept of real life – the act of killing can become as sterile as deleting an email.

Here, the teachings of Jean-Paul Sartre come to mind – Sartre posited that individuals are condemned to be free and burdened with the responsibility of their choices and actions. For the drone operator, this freedom is both a shield and a sword. They are shielded from the immediate horror of their actions, yet the weight of their decisions may haunt them in ways unseen. The screen (or even their youth) that separates them from their targets does not absolve them of their humanity, but it may be the thing that provides that pivotal extra layer of psychic disconnect from their actions.

This detachment creates a dangerous potential for moral disengagement. When killing becomes a task performed from the comfort of an office chair, the moral gravity of taking a life can be easily forgotten. The philosopher, Hannah Arendt’s concept of the “banality of evil”, comes into sharp focus here. Arendt argued that ordinary people can commit atrocious acts simply by following orders, detached from the human consequences of their actions – we also see that as part of the Milgram Experiment, where people delivered levels of electric shock to another person when ordered to. There was a definite willingness to, under orders, provide fatal levels of shock to people – drone warfare risks normalizing this detachment, making the extraordinary act of killing alarmingly mundane.

Moreover, the implications for international law and the rules of engagement are profound—for example, can a combatant surrender to a drone? Drones operate in a grey zone, often outside the traditional boundaries of war. Their anonymity and ease of deployment can lead to an escalation in conflicts, as nations may resort to drone strikes without fully considering the repercussions. This new era of warfare challenges us to rethink the frameworks that have guided us through centuries of conflict.

Yet, in this bleak analysis, there is a glimmer of hope. Awareness and discourse can spark change. By confronting these ethical dilemmas head-on, we can strive to create a framework that upholds the sanctity of human life, even in the most technologically advanced theaters of war. Granted, that seems like an oxymoron, but the call for empathy, ethical reasoning, and moral accountability is louder than ever.

Ultimately, our technological advancements must be matched by our moral and ethical progress. As we navigate the complexities of drone warfare, we must remember that each action taken from a distance still reverberates in the heart of humanity. The challenge is not just to wield our power responsibly but to ensure that in doing so, we do not lose sight of our shared human essence.

These are the concepts we have wrestled with since Cain killed Abel. We are beautiful because we are flawed. We can descend to darkness, but we can also elevate to greatness—that is the blessing and the curse of humanity. We are depraved, but in that depravity, there is a cyclical nature to the beast. It was the Alan Moore character, Dr. Manhattan, who said it best: “Without condoning or condemning, I understand.”

The post Echoes of Conflict – The Allure and Abyss of War appeared first on The Miskatonian.

A reputation for unending drizzle notwithstanding, the city’s dreariness reveals itself more fully, not amid any of its unrelenting rolling fogs or misty rains, but in a far deeper layer of atmosphere. Charged with a palpable eeriness, it is the very air itself that unambiguously attests to the reality that nearly everyone there has resigned himself glumly to a life believed to be unfolding beneath the shadow of the death of God.

“I can see how it would get really lonely here,” a visiting American friend of mine said to me one night immediately after arriving at the bus stop beneath a lamp post whose beams of light were bouncing off the thick mist in vain. If the lamp light could not penetrate the secret of the night’s darkness, my friend’s eye had. Yes, a loneliness. But one of anguish, the loneliness of a place that knows itself to be haunted by its estrangement from God.

This intensely secularized mood—this awareness that faith no longer resides at the heart of civic and academic life as it once had—is felt nowhere more acutely in Oxford than at Christ Church. Established by King Henry the VIII in 1546, the college enjoys a reputation for having produced some of the brightest theological luminaries over the centuries. The college cathedral, for instance, boasts a plaque commemorating John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, who organized the “Holy Club” during his days as a student at the House. Then of course, there is also the college’s list of distinguished philosophers such as John Locke, among others. Nor is its legacy slight on great writers. Lewis Carroll and W. H. Auden were both college fixtures. The trouble, however, is that everything just mentioned about the college’s history is just that—history.

During the Medieval period in which they were first organized, the universities such as Oxford operated as kingdoms unto themselves, the intellectual work associated with the vita contemplativa occurring in isolation behind cloistered walls that exempted the monkish scholars from the practical exigencies of the town’s daily life. Whatever partition that used to be separating the respective affairs of university and society fell down long ago. But be that as it may be, it is a sobering indictment of general society’s spiritual malaise—and the university system’s too—that the nearest thing to a cultural achievement that an Oxford college of Christ Church’s stature can adduce is the fact that its Great Hall served as the architectural inspiration for Harry Potter’s Hogwarts. Once a seat of great scholarly erudition and spiritual devotion to God, the college has largely been reduced to a visitors’ attraction, profiting off its gift shop’s Alice in Wonderland memorabilia.

Thus, when a decade ago I arrived at Christ Church to begin studying philosophy that Michaelmas Term, I did not yet know that the state of affairs would be as bleak as described. Of course, I knew enough to know that I would not be stepping into a time machine that would return me to the Middle Ages. But even so, I severely underestimated how little of a resemblance the place would bear to what one might imagine. What awaited me, I found, was a university college that was the complete inversion of what one would traditionally expect. (The open anti-Christian animus would not have surprised me if I had known then, as I learned later, that the statue of Mercury in Tom Quad, the largest quadrangle in all of Oxford, is the exoteric name for Cush, father of Nimrod. An esoteric commemoration of the Tower of Babel standing in Oxford’s grandest quad? Anyone who shrugs it off as a coincidence stands no chance of ever truly understanding the place. Nor will one understand until one recognizes that, although centuries ago Oxford at the very least had to pay lip service to faith in Christ, even then there must have been those who sought, if only discreetly, to attack that esprit de corps from within the city gates. If the rot has not always been coming from within, how else to explain the ensuing fall, that an institution originally named in honor of Christ can now openly and proudly promote the opposite of his teachings?) Owing to my longstanding interest in existentialism, I came to Oxford intending to dedicate my doctoral studies to delving into how the tradition of phenomenological philosophy might provide the necessary resources for working out an account of faith’s essential existential structures. Owing to my ignorance, to my surprise, this philosophical project was deeply discouraged, to put it mildly. Might Christian faith crucially inform the task of phenomenology? Might phenomenology itself have something constructive in turn to say about faith? The phenomenologists were not willing to let these questions breathe.

The intellectual staleness was largely due to the fact that nearly everyone I encountered (students and dons alike) in the philosophical circles I frequented simply assumed that philosophy should take atheism as its point of departure, if not its last word. They were in thrall to the mantra of the death of God. And what of the theologians? Surely, they would be different? Alas, no. So deeply was this belief entrenched—and unquestioned—that even the theology students whom I met believed the atheist dogma, even if they denied it privately at dinner parties. Everywhere, there was a dissonance between life and intellectual theory, for no one among the ranks of the theologians dared begin one’s work on the firm foundation of faith—even the work that sprung from a nominally Christian outlook was saddled with timid qualifications, endless caveats, and tepid half-starts. It was impossible not to see what was going on. All the intellectual rhetoric about how subtle and complex the theological issues at hand were was really a practical obfuscation—reading the room, the students recognized that, if they were serious about currying favor with the dons and landing an academic job, it would be more advantageous to produce lukewarm theology, rather than strive to translate their faith into something academically acceptable. The calculated choice to descend into rank careerism didn’t induce the kind of consternation or guilt one might think such an overt bargain with the world would in budding theologians. Then again, there had been no real fire in most of them, anyway. Among the philosophical cadre of those interested in existential phenomenology—particularly Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Heidegger—naturally things were no better.

The question arises: how is any of this of relevance outside the Oxford cloisters—why bother recounting it? Answer: Oxford’s secularism (exemplified in its theology students who claim to believe in God but whose work does not reflect the power of the faith they profess to hold) is an illustrative microcosm of a widespread cultural attitude.

Just consider the fate of existentialism itself, the very philosophical movement responsible for bequeathing us the motto that “God is dead.” Or better, consider the manner in which it has been presented in popular media. The image of the existentialist philosopher given to the public is one of the despairing Bohemian smoking at the cafe in his beret and black turtleneck.

But this archetype is really a myth. As anyone familiar with the current philosophical scene in Paris knows, this cultural image—brought to fame by Woody Allen, among others—is outdated and misleading. Beginning in the 1980s, there has been a “theological turn” in phenomenology in France. Although the whole history of the intellectual and institutional trajectory responsible for this movement’s radical development would require multiple book volumes to trace, the basics do admit of a sketch. At the turn of the twentieth century, Husserl founded a new philosophical school he termed “phenomenology.” For three decades, students flocked to Göttingen and Freiburg to study under the master. His vision of philosophy as a “rigorous science” was one entailing teams of collaborators who would be working away on the particular phenomenological fields they were assigned—consciousness, aesthetics, ethics, and even religion. Heidegger, Husserl’s most promising student, whom Husserl saw as a protégée, was assigned the vital task of working out a phenomenological philosophy of religion. In the mid 1920s, however, shortly after converting from the Catholicism of his youth to Protestantism, Heidegger underwent a sort of de-conversion, evidently losing his faith altogether. Consequently, his subsequent magnum opus, Being in Time, published in 1927, hardly says a word about God. And in the important lecture “Phenomenology and Theology” from the year after, Heidegger states vehemently that philosophy is not supposed to be in the business of addressing the matters of faith and God. Instead, phenomenology is to remain methodologically atheist, bracketing God entirely. Thus, although certain prominent theologians of his day, such as Rudolf Bultmann, tried to read Heidegger’s existential analytic as a complement to Christian theology, the writing was on the wall. In Heidegger’s hands, phenomenology was to be an atheistic enterprise.

Then, in the 1930s and 1940s, the thought of Husserl and Heidegger migrated to France, where it began to garner international acclaim through the use to which Levinas, Merleau-Ponty, and Sartre put it. In the wake of the slaughter of the Second World War, works such as Sartre’s Being and Nothingness and Existentialism is a Humanism found fertile ground, captivating a disillusioned reading public that was receptive to the message that human existence was absurd, and that humanity was forsaken in a godless cosmos. As Sartre said, “Man can will nothing unless he has first understood that he must count on no one else but himself; that he is alone, abandoned on the earth in the midst of his infinite responsibilities, without help, with no other aim than he sets himself, with no other destiny than the one he forges for himself on earth.”[1] The existential philosophy of Sartre (and also Beauvoir and Camus) appeared to demonstrate the truth of what Nietzsche a century before had proclaimed, when the latter stated that “God is dead.” Appearances, though, sometimes can be deceiving.

For things changed dramatically within phenomenology itself shortly thereafter, even if this paradigm shift remains virtually unknown to anyone outside the small community of scholars who have kept apprised of the movement’s progress. Beginning with the publication of Jean-Luc Marion’s The Idol and the Distance and God without Being, phenomenological philosophy underwent what its critic Dominque Janicaud termed a “theological turn.” Others also entered the fray: Jean-Louis Chrétien, Michel Henry, Jean-Yves Lacoste, Rémi Brague, Jérôme de Gramont, Emmanuel Housset, and Emmanuel Falque. Suddenly, phenomenology in France was making ample room for faith and the God of the Bible. No longer was it philosophically acceptable, as was the case during the heyday of atheistic existentialism, to merely assume that Heidegger, Camus, and Sartre had pronounced the last word on the human condition. There is now a body of philosophical works showing that God never died—the atheistic philosophers of the twentieth century who had mesmerized the public by saying so were proved mistaken.

When, then, university students today are in accordance with secular custom solemnly initiated into the teachings of Nietzsche and Sartre, the resulting intellectual picture of phenomenology they are given is inadequate, for the picture in question is incomplete, partial, and obsolete. Frozen in time, as though history ended at Les Deux Magots in 1943, discussions in existentialism class carry on as if the credo “God is dead” is settled philosophical fact.

Yet this other myth is just that: a myth. The Christian existentialist Gabriel Marcel, for one, was among the few to have argued so at the time when the death of God was first beginning to be taken as gospel. Marcel’s efforts met with unsuccess during his own lifetime, as he found himself dwarfed by the great celebrity of Sartre and Camus. Today, however, after over a century of phenomenological philosophy, it is possible to assess the question of the relation between faith and reason, religion and philosophy, revelation and phenomenology, from an historical perspective that takes on board work such as Marcel’s which was marginalized originally. For although existential phenomenology was taken to be tantamount to atheism, it is actually quite possible to do Christian existential phenomenology. Rather than bracketing God to provide an atheistic description of how the world appears to the one who does so, it is possible to do phenomenology before God, by providing a description of life in the Spirit.

Existential phenomenology, thus, is a philosophical tradition that insists thought must remain responsive to life itself. In leading a life, proof is not at issue. And neither is it proof at stake in doing phenomenology, which, when done truly, is an exercise of the very life it expresses and describes. What matters when doing phenomenology is not what one can prove, but what one knows and can show. This is why a good phenomenological demonstration is a matter of showing the truth, not merely arguing for it.

The indicated approach raises questions concerning the meaning and very purpose of writing philosophy. Why does one write? Does what one has to say matter? Whom, if anyone, will benefit by one’s words? To whom is one writing when one writes?

Many arguments have been advanced to show that such an effort is fundamentally misconceived. Critics of the “theological turn” in phenomenology claim that philosophy must be methodologically atheist. To proceed by faith, they think, would result in a phenomenology in name only. But by reflecting on the methodological scope and ambition of phenomenology’s promise, it becomes apparent why methodological atheism’s reasons for bracketing God can be dismissed. The existential atheism of Sartre and Heidegger needn’t have the last word.

To show how atheistic existentialism gets the human condition wrong fulfills what is already a biblical injunction: “Be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear” (1 Pet 3:15). The hope Peter had in view is that of the Resurrection, one itself grounded in the belief that Jesus Christ is the savior of the world. Here, the hope is more modest, namely that there exists a legitimate phenomenological means of explicating the first hope, that it is indeed possible to describe what appears to the eyes of faith. It is not necessary to rehearse here the responses available to those who, such as Janicaud, have contended that phenomenology is incapable of fulfilling this hope. The metaphilosophical disputes over phenomenological method are important. But phenomenology must never lose sight of the fact that ultimately its task is to show what one sees, by describing what one sees in a way that does those things justice. A phenomenology of faith, for its own part, must thus not limit itself only to defending its concern with what lies beyond the visible world. Having established that revelation is a viable phenomenon of phenomenological concern and attention, it must get on with the work of describing the invisible.

Does this entail that phenomenology must accordingly say nothing but of God? No, not every phenomenological analysis must concern itself directly with what faith sees. It is possible to provide an analysis of how a melody is constituted in time-consciousness, or to explicate the horizonal structure of perceiving a cube. But it would be foolishness to undertake these analyses without an acknowledgment that it is divine things that alone matter ultimately. As Husserl himself said at the very end of his life, when turning one’s attention to the visible and attempting to explicate the structures of what one sees, one must do so with an orientation grounded in an abiding faith in God, lest such analyses succumb to vanity, and the life of the one who undertook them to despair: “I know that this way of proceeding might be a danger to me, if I myself were not a man deeply united to God and attached to faith by Christ.”[2]

What, then, to make of where we find ourselves at this moment in phenomenological history, with Christ exalted among les nouveaux phénoménologues? Spellbound by the popular mantra that “God is dead,” our culture for the time being nevertheless remains captive to the nihilism that results from its having rejected God, unaware that its decision to continue to do so rests upon atheistic presuppositions and prejudices that have since been challenged, and successfully so. Will any wider change come from this change within phenomenology? However unlikely that this may be, it remains possible. Even the most significant moments of intellectual history take time to leave their marks, if they do. In light of this future no one can foretell, the individual choice to dedicate one’s time to doing existential phenomenology before God derives its exigency from hope, in trust in God that all things done according to his purpose indeed work to good. To put pen to paper and to say the words one feels called to say, is to believe they matter, if only because the word of God inspiring them does not return void. Phenomenology itself becomes an act of faith: “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” (Heb. 11:1).

The rest of the first verse of psalm twenty-seven from which Oxford draws its motto reads, “The Lord is my Light; whom shall I fear? The Lord is the strength of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?” Oxford no longer follows these words. Having lost its way, it is no anomaly in this regard. All our civic institutions lie in darkness. Here, however, existential phenomenology reminds us of an essential and important truth. One is free, and so there is always individual choice. One can choose to follow Christ, rather than the world’s folly.

[1] Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay in Phenomenological Ontology, trans. Hazel Barnes (New York: Citadel Press, 1956), 60.

[2] Emmanuel Housset, Husserl et l’idée de Dieu (Paris: Cerf, 2010), 105. This claim of mine—that phenomenology must in some way be grounded in faith—is one that demands further defense than I shall provide here. I simply wish to observe that it is a conclusion Husserl himself reached at the end of his own life’s work. For his part, Jean-Luc Marion offers an argument as to why a phenomenology not rooted in such faith always remains subject to “vanity” in The Erotic Phenomenon, trans. Stephen E. Lewis (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2006). My own view of the matter would largely follow his.

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