My interest in it, you mean? It was always there, though I moved East to West, from Taoism through Sufi Islam before finally becoming interested in Christian mysticism as well. My default state was pantheistic for about a decade--it was basically unexamined New Age stuff, but I think helpful in terms of approaching theistic ideas from outside the normal channels.
The problem is that I can be surprisigly materialistic for someone who thinks that materialism is a complete disaster. I find mysticism really attractive, but the skeptic in me worries that it's just brain chemistry.
My skepticism is really in conflict with everything, though. It's primarily an emotional rather than an intellectual issue--I could not rationally deny theism at this point, but it's not something that "feels" true, and so the skepticism rears up and starts smashing around. The fact that I have gotten myself wrapped around Christianity and cannot make heads or tails of it doesn't help.
Oh, I would say that Pascal came first, actually. I got knocked around by Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky years ago, pretty much just said, "Hey, I'm not an atheist after all," and segued into some sort of incoherent pantheism for a while. I was interested in mysticism and meditation, but it was always something I was going to look into tomorrow, and tomorrow never came. Because low-intensity, low-commitment pantheism was never going to push me towards anything.
There is only one revealed religion on the table for me: Christianity. I tried to keep my distance but failed miserably--it's just such a powerful mixture of contradictions that I was kind of drawn to it despite myself. And then finally, I had a bit of a meltdown after the 2016 election, abandoned secular humanism, and lunged at the Social Gospel instead.
I tried the Pascalian approach at first, but I didn't have any intellectual foundations at that point due to all of my religious influences being fideistic, and started grappling with the philosophical issues involved until I finally came across Hart and Feser and realized that there was more to natural theology than the Kalam and a lot of bad design arguments. Then I took a second look at the Greeks, started to actually understand Plato, ran across Plotinus for the first time, and started to worry that what I thought I saw in Christianity might have just been the echo of Neoplatonism.
Now I have trouble moving in any direction except circles. I'm too Christianized to walk away, but it still "feels" like a myth. I compartmentalize, and end up taking a Platonic approach, where it's just the way I've chosen to conceptualize things, while simultaneously thinking that the religion falls apart if its claims aren't actually true. If I could approach it objectively, I'd be better off in terms of evaluating those truth claims, but that sort of objectivity is beyond me so I mostly get angry and refuse to leave the deep side of the natural theology pool. Which leaves me pretty lopsided without any clear idea of how to approach the practical side of things. I would
like to take the Wager, but that seems impossible when I can't trust myself on the issue at all.
I think this is a good question, and I haven't actually read Derrida firsthand so I can't really answer it. But I see it as something that comes up quite a bit with Wittgenstein as well, where what is actually a sort of apophatic mysticism gets taken for krypto-atheism instead. I think one of the problems is that people seldom really understand the
via negativa, especially in those contexts where you see it outside of a revealed religion. I am unconvinced that the
via negativa can work if you refuse to say anything at all about God--even invoking ideas like absolute simplicity and beyond being involve identifying the un-identifiable in some way, but it's impossible to reach into the head of an apophatic thinker to figure out precisely what they're thinking.
Thanks for the heads up! We've got Salt of the Earth at the local library--is that one of those four interviews or something separate?
