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Lecture: John Milbank on ‘The Politics of the Soul’

IN SEARCH OF THE GOOD SOCIETY

Lecture Series – For the full lecture series schedule, see here [1] [PDF]

The Politics of the Soul
Prof John Milbank
Research Professor of Religion, Politics and Ethics, University of Nottingham
Author of Theology and Social Theory and The Future of Love

Thursday 1 November 2012
The Lincoln Centre, 18 Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London wc2 3ed
6.30 for 7pm

Public belief in the reality of a spiritual dimension is essential to a politics that recognises the importance of the person, of free association and of relational reciprocity. But for the last two hundred years we have been dominated by the assumption that all that we share objectively in common is material and biological existence. This is the common factor in racist, class-based, statist and neoliberal or economistic ideologies. To resist these things we need to re-enchant the world and insist on the reality of the soul. Otherwise there can be no recognised public pursuit of virtue. But an immanentist re-enchantment on some oriental models will not allow us to see the unique significance of the human within the natural order, nor of the irreplaceable worth of every individual. For this we need to link re-enchantment with transcendence. At the same time, we should not confuse this significance of the human with a mere will to power over nature, which would be again materialist in character. Therefore and conversely the orientation to transcendence must be re-enchanted. Neoplatonic and Christian Platonic traditions – as many of the Romantic generation already saw – in consequence hold the key to the future recovery of the Western legacy.

There is an admission charge of £5 or £3.50 concessions

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