My attitude towards the assigned readings for this class fluctuate on grid lines of cheer or chore. As my blog entries will show, I have a tendency to focus nominal on the articles discussing related topics, or talk only about the article. This week, I thoroughly enjoyed the reading, so this entry will be of the latter- though more boring than the former.

Of particular interest is Eueben’s discussions of spirituality and technology in the context of Islam, and the binary of post-enlightenment western rationality, and Islamic modernity she presents. However, Euben’s paradigm shift is not solely based on juxtapositions, rather she problematizes the incongruent ‘essentialism’ within both streams of western and Islamic rational thought, and reads them as critical ambiguities. She thus call for an approach that returns to the morals and values that religion provides, with the aid of scientific processes, rather than the hindrances of it.

Throughout her essay, the tone of contest against western reductionalism sounds like a call to pack our bags up and go. However, rather than abandoning one side of the binary for the other, she proposes a hybrid of “horizons”, and a shared “expressed ambiguity” that does not dismiss religiosity (rather than secular spirituality) or science, that can utilize rationalism as points of merger rather than failure.

Interestingly, like many other theorist we have read, Eugen leaves us with the challenge of finding “the middle way”, but provides us no map or compass for our travels. Yet, this investment of hybridity in her article, a pithy conclusion of two pages or so, does illustrate nicely the complexities and tensions such a hybridity entails, yet the necessity of it.

A problem then, as explored by many of the theorist we’ve read in class, is how to re-orient our binaristic mode of thinking, when according to Derrida, our systems of meaning function on a mode of difference and deference of binaries. How can we stand in the in-between of knowing, and not knowing- or rather, how can we deal with the inherent attitudes of violence, apathy, and frustration in these spaces of knowing-and-not-knowing? How do we find this fulcrum of accepted ambivalence, and the courage to act with certainty? And, perhaps most important to me, how do we experience this ambivalence, and what can we learn from it? To Kant, experiencing the limitation in both faculties of reason and imagination is a moment of the sublime.