Posted on facebook, June 10, 2013
If you think Old Testament religion, with its emphasis on law (or more accurately, on the covenant), its violence, its mysogyny, its ethnocentrism, etc., is "wrong," then you haven't fully realized Jesus's "Judge not" in all its radicality. Judge not. Do not judge. Have no judgment. Maybe the Old Testament is right; maybe it is wrong; do not judge it to be either.
Ayn Rand called this a "moral blank check," and thought it was absolutely morally bankrupt. She wished to replace it with a new motto: "Judge, and prepare to be judged." If you think she's wrong, then you haven't fully realized Jesus's "Judge not" in all its radicality. Judge not. Do not judge what is right and wrong. Don't even try.
And when the Westboro Baptist Church seems to be judging people, saying "God Hates Fags" and so on, if this seems like hypocrisy to you, don't judge. Don't judge anyone who's gay, and don't judge the Westboro Baptist Church, either. Don't judge anyone.
And this isn't about being polite: it's not good enough to refrain from saying that someone is wrong or evil to their faces, or even behind their backs. You must not judge them, at all, even in the depths of your own soul / mind.
Don't even judge yourself! And that is perhaps the hardest of all. How can one refrain from judging one's own actions, one's own persona, one's own "authenticity," one's own being?
Kant wrote his famous Critique of Judgment, in which he discusses several forms of judgment - aesthetic judgment (the capacity to judge something - a piece of art, for instance - as "beautiful," or as "agreeable" (like, this food tastes good) or as "sublime"), ethical judgment, teleological judgment (judging the ultimate end or goal or purpose of something). But there's no such thing as "good judgment," as a person who exercises good judgment, as judiciousness, as juridical efficacy, as justice.
But how can we function without judgment? How can we function without judging (for instance) whether it would be wise to walk out in the middle of traffic?
Okay: notice that Jesus does not say, "Judgment is wrong." That, in itself, would be a judgment. He simply says "Judge not." It's not a judgment, it's a commandment. It's not a statement of fact or of opinion. It's simply an order. He's not making any statement about you. But there is that second half: "Judge not, lest ye be judged." It's almost an exact reversal of Kant's famous "kingdom of ends" - whereas, for Kant, the ethical world is the one in which we are all ends, Jesus tells us (quite paradoxically) that to assume the position of an end may itself create a further end, a final end, for which we exist, and according to which we are judged.
This is comparable to Hegel's critique of Kant and of Fichte's interpretation of Kant: the very act of striving for an "I" that ensures one's entire phenomenal manifold - what Fichte calls the "fact-act" of the "I" - itself creates the necessity for something that it cannot explain... the very romantic demand for "immediacy" itself necessarily creates its own kind of mediation.
On the Myers-Briggs personality test, the opposite personality type to "judging" is "perceiving." Simply perceiving, without judgment. This has a parallel with a certain (somewhat mysterious) kind of decisiveness. Acting - without the need for judgment. You do not need to know what is true - even of yourself. If we are to follow Jesus, we can strive to be like him: not judging, but simply commanding, commanding as harshly and as brutally as the generalissimo of an army, without any moral or ethical judgment of our own actions (or anyone else's).
One might call this "faith without belief." Belief always implies a kind of judgment. It involves judging that ones own belief is true. Which means judging oneself capable of making that kind of judgment. Including the ability to judge others, and judging their ability to judge you, and to judge your judgments.. and so on. Faith has nothing to do with any of that.
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