As I've indicated, my objection is purely empirical: my point is that by defining evolution as narrowly as you do, its you who is 'telling scientists how to define their fields'. The point is precisely to leave that definition open and not narrowly constrained to artificial philosophical debates over 'nature', 'culture', 'technology' and so on.

So sure, technological changes to DNA is evolution in the broad sense. I'm questioning whether it's biological evolution in the scientific sense of how life diversified on Earth from the earliest life form. — Marchesk

And what makes you think 'the scientific sense' of evolution is so narrowly defined? What empirical fact would sanction such an artificial definition other than pure prejudice?

Evolution is nothing but a process of change, wherein the unit of change is a developmental system (see: http://paulgriffiths.representinggenes.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/publications/B1_9.pdf). The mechanisms of that change are entirely open, as is the scope of that change. This is particularly the case insofar as we are dealing with a question of science, that is, empirical questions. Science doesn't get to decide, in advance, what is and is not part of evolution - least you give up any pretension of empiricism and lapse into full blown dogmatism.

I don't care to answer any of these counterfactuals unless you provide a reason, in principle, why these can't be considered part of evolution. Otherwise we'll be here all day. Let's discuss reasons not an endless variety of hypotheticals.

Then you haven't heard of niche construction, one of the basic mechanisms of evolution?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niche_construction

Again what you call 'collapsing things' is just basic science.

To the degree that the unit of evolution is a developmental system, then yes, there is nothing in principle that would rule out technology from being part of the process of evolution.

Ok, thanks for joining.

Cite a reason, in principle, why it isn't. The onus is on you here. Your disbelief means nothing.

Yes I disagree. The Nature/culture divide is bad philosophy spliced onto perfectly indifferent science.

Why? Provide a reason, not just just state an opinion.

I don't understand. Isn't a population composed of individuals? The collective drama must be, invariably, played out at the level of the individual. Am I wrong? — TheMadFool

Yes you are wrong, as far as evolution is concerned. Individual genetic 'defects' mean nothing evolutionarily unless they come to define a species as a whole. Moreover, they are 'defects' precisely to the extent that by definition, they do not do so. So your entire line of reasoning is analytically wrong. Further, the fact that you don't understand the difference between evolution and natural selection - a basic distinction crucial to evolutionary theory - shows that you lack the some very basic understanding of the facts involved.

No, evolution does not 'pit one's genetic composition against the environment' because individuals and 'people' are not the subjects of evolution. Populations of species, or more specifically, developmental systems are. 'Particular genetic defects' are only relevant to evolution once they begin to manifest at the level of speciation, otherwise they are totally evolutionarily irrelevant.

There are no such things as 'evolutionary rejects' - or rather, the only 'evolutionary rejects' are dead species. If you're alive, you're winning. That's the game.

The whole idea of 'evolutionary rejects' or that medicine and social innovations have somehow 'interfered' with some supposedly more 'natural' course of evolution is junk science and needs to be discarded at once.

The index of 'evolutionary success' for a species is simply survival. It's a numbers game, that's it. The 'living conditions' of that species is irrelevant, and if the environment is changed to the extent that we are no longer fit to survive in it, than that isn't anti-evolutionary, that's exactly how evolution is meant to play out. Evolution is dynamic, not static - what may have been the most fit in one situation may not be when that situation changes.

Evolution is indifferent to what is 'natural' or not: if the results of evolution happen to be a bunch of intelligent apes who can invent things like seat-belts that happen to save lives, then so be it - they are the species best adapted to survival in their environment. 'Natural' doesn't come into it, except as an extrinsic consideration from without the process of evolution itself.

Note also that evolution is indifferent to 'valuing' different species: stupidity has nothing to do with it. If, for argument's sake, there were to be a new plague that would wipe out everyone with an IQ over 80, all those that are left would be the most fit for their environment. There is no teleology of values in evolution (only, perhaps, a teleonomy of increasing complexity - where more complexity <> better).

The best thing I ever read on love was in Adriana Cavarero's - Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood; she touches on it only on a couple of pages near the end of the book, but it's just brilliant, if you can get your hands on it.

Otherwise, you might want to check out/add to your list:

Robert Solomon - About Love: Reinventing Romance for Our Times
Mari Ruti - The Summons of Love
Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt - Commonwealth (they employ 'love' in this book as a matter of revolutionary politics)
Alain Badiou - In Praise of Love (a very small book <80 pages).

There's also Kelly Oliver's article "The Look of Love" published in Hypatia but avaliable at academia.edu if you have an account.

Hannah Stark has also wrriten on Love in the context of Deleuze's philosophy, you can find her essay 'But We Always Make Love with Worlds' online as well if you look.

Hope this helps.

^Edit: Aboslutely Kierkegaard's Works of Love as well!

Eleni Ikoniadou - The Rhythmic Event: Art, Media, and the Sonic
Paul Patton - Deleuze and the Political
Hannah Arendt - The Life of the Mind

At the level of sheer textual fidelity, the line is explicitly that the meter rule is neither a mater long nor not a meter long. Neither/nor, not both/and. Second, it's simply trivially wrong to say that an instance is insufficient to establish a rule. Third, that something has been around for a while speaks to nothing about the issue of the general and the particular, so I do not see the relevance of what you've said.

Examples of a class can only be picked out once we know how the class is defined, no? — John

The issue is to pay attention to the generation of classes, which always takes place by reference to a paradigmatic instance which is then subsequently taken to be a particular among others. The point of the thread is to pay attention to this moment 'before' the singular has 'sedimented' into the particular, and to consider what kind of philosophical consequences follow if we consider singularity 'outside' of any general-particular schema. On this view, the understanding according to which 'examples of a class can only be picked out once we know how the class is defined' is a kind of ex post facto view: not 'false', per se, but misleading in certain lights.

Yes, but that's not quite what's at issue here, which turns on the 'qualitative' difference that examples exhibit compared to ordinary instances of language, as it were. In particular, the issue is about the 'undecidable' or anomalous status of the example with respect to the class of which it is said to be an example 'of'. On the one hand, examples belong - in the set theoretic sense - to the class among which they are one instance of. On the other hand, the example defines the very class which it is supposed to be subsumed under.

Agamben puts it thus: "the example is characterized by the fact that it holds for all cases of the same type, and, at the same time, it is included among these. It is one singularity among others, which, however, stands for each of them and serves for all. On one hand, every example is treated in effect as a real particular case; but on the other, it remains understood that it cannot serve in its particularity ... Neither particular nor universal, the example is a singular object that presents itself as such, that shows its singularity." (The Coming Community). In other words, examples have a self-referential function.

Hence, you might recognize in the example the same status that Russell's barber has: he only cuts the hair of all those who do not cut their own hair: but does he cut his own hair? This same indeterminate status holds, mutandis mutatis, for the example: does it, or does it not belong as an instance of the type that it seemingly belongs to? This undecidable status - like Wittgenstein's meter rule - is itself symptomatic of the fact that examples 'qualitatively' differ from other instances of language use by virtue of the fact that they draw attention to their own exemplarity, their own singularity that cannot be properly subsumed indifferently under a general rule or type. It's this self-referentiality that threatens any regime of formalization (which is why Russell - and modern logicians today - try so hard to excise self-referentiality from logic - a philosophical disaster in every possible way).

Without attending to this specificity of the example - if the example here is treated as just another instance of language use - duck/rabbit, it's all the same - the point is missed. Which is not to say that it isn't just another instance of language use - only that there's more going on here than just that.

Adam Kotsko just published a very well received book on the subject, The Prince of This World, which will be an excellent starting point for your research. If you can get your hands on it, you should find plenty of contemporary citations for you.

Actually we're all iterations of mod-bot. We're not real people.

Heh, admittedly it's kind of obscure, and not the easiest of topic to really follow up on. But the cool thing - I think - is that something as 'pedestrian' as the example can have massive ramifications for our normal habits of thought.

Public forums as these are, I actually don't think it is reasonable to expect that threads will or ought to remain on topic. At the very best, a threadstarter is a curator: he or she sets out the themes that they would like to be followed up, but it's in the hands of the respondents after that, among whom the threadstarter belongs to after the post has taken off. If we even want to pretend to aspire to practise philosophy, we ought to follow wherever ideas take us.

On the other hand, I think it is fair that whatever path a thread may go down, it ought to remain open to people to engage with. That is, the criteria ought to be 'public robustness', as it were: to what extent does this 'sub-debate' invite contributions from others to participate and further the discussion? If the digression happens because two people are bickering over some tangental debate that no one but the two people discussing can possibly have a stake in - well, that's a matter of dragging down the quality of public discussion. That kind of derailment pleases no one, and is generally another name for a shit-fight.

But that's just my take.

Haven't read all of these newfangled moderns, but I liked how Madoka Magica dealt with it. General principles can be novel, and are generated with particular exemplars, but the principle then retroactively effects the past as if it were present all along, and projects into the future. — Wosret

Ha, well I haven't watched MM, but I think this temporal consideration is exactly right: generalities are always generated, and whatever force they exert is always derivative of more primordial processes that underlie their operation. Problems arise when these 'generality-effects' are mistaken for causes. It's also this issue that underlies the famous 'rule following paradox' in Witty's PI, in which "no course of action could be determined by a rule, because every course of action can be brought into accord with the rule." That is, every singularity can be made out to be in accordance to a generality said to co-arise with it.

Problems with it is that if we want to keep things at the level of the apparent, or physical, then to become exemplary is to follow a certain path, as it were, to reproduce material circumstances, and conditions. The preciser the conditions, the closer the result.

I don't think this is exactly the case; in fact, I'd say that thinking it terms of the exemplary is what allows to escape exactly this sort of thinking. On an intuitive level, to say that Jimmy is an exemplary student is not to ask that every student in the class 'become Jimmy'; at issue is not a question of identity: it is to ask that the other students emulate a certain 'manner' of being. This is why, in the history of philosophy, the exemplary has always belonged to the sphere of the aesthetic, which itself is defined by it's inability to be thought of in terms of identities which are subsumed under general rules. Here is Kant from the Critique of Judgement, speaking about the kind of necessity involved in what he calls 'aesthetic judgement':

"As a necessity that is thought in an aesthetic judgment, it can only be called exemplary , i.e., a necessity of the assent of all to a judgment that is regarded as an example of a universal rule that one cannot produce." Thus for Agamben, the particular kind of logic proper to the exemplary is not logic per se, but the ana-logical: "The domain of this discourse is not logic but analogy ... And the analogon it [the exemplar] generates is neither particular nor general. Hence its special value." This, in turn is important because the analogous operates not on the basis of identity (X=X), but similarity. Hence - the class ought to be similar to Jimmy, without 'becoming Jimmy'.

Turning back to ethics, the similar, as a category, has the precise advantage of never simply 'settling' into the identical: it sustains the tension between the is and the ought which it instantiates, as it were. Hence also a reformation of ethics in terms of it's original meaning as 'ethos': custom, habit or dwelling place. The ethical, in it's proper meaning, has never been some sort of sphere separate from, and set over and against the facticity of 'that which is'; rather, ethos has always been a way of being, a manner of dwelling, which is directly 'ethical' from the very start.

I don't at all follow. You just seemed to have slapped on a bunch of labels using a vocabulary nowhere entailed by the previous discussion. Exactly what difference they make, you seem to have left entirely unspoken.

By what standard does a difference become a significant difference? — Wosret

Clearly the standard of significant difference here is affective capacity: something's capacity to affect and be affected. The flea is affected by light, heat and texture: anything outside of this it is indifferent to. These are the differences that make a difference for it. Below certain velocities, wind will not exert an affect upon a rock. The rock is indifferent to wind (below a threshold of velocity, all things equal). The only reason to drag intentionality into this is because you're projecting ingrained semantic associations onto these words. But there's no reason to.

Ok. Because nothing in nature makes a difference to anything else unless it has a disposition. Got it.

Like I said, if you take these terms to simply mean a difference which makes a difference, you can empty them of psychological baggage. It's just not as neat to have to spell out each time that 'wind is a difference that makes a difference if and when...'; just, 'wind is significant if...'

How about in-significant? Wind might be insignificant for a rock unless it reaches a certain velocity, depending also on the rock's weight, the force of gravity (what planet is under discussion?), the way in which it is perched, the particular direction of the wind, etc etc. To de-anthropormise here, just think of 'difference' as 'that which makes a difference', that affects a change. No intentionality required.

Indifference from the perspective of constituted differences and similarities. It might well be the case that viewed from the 'process' side of things, 'difference' and 'similarity' are simply not very appropriate words to use; grammatically unfit to get at 'what's really going on' - or at least, of use only in a circumscribed and limited fashion (unless, as some philosophers have done, one undertakes a very through reworking of what 'difference' means, apart from our usual understanding of the term).

But it's not that 'everything is different', it's that 'everything is different (or similar!) with respect to....' Without this 'with respect to', its very hard to talk about this stuff. What's necessary to take into account here is the primacy of indifference. The world of the flea, for instance, is entirely indifferent except for three things: the light which indicates the end of a branch, the smell of a mammal below it, and texture of skin that allows it to figure out where to burrow (not near a hair follicle!). Beyond these, there is neither identity nor difference for the flea.

That, at least, is the first step. The next step is to recognize that these parameters are themselves subject to change: a flea embryo will have different markers of identity and difference (different things will be significant for an embryo) such that these notions are not static, but developmental. They themselves are the results of developmental processes - ecological, biological, molecular - which sustain or undo these parameters of similarity/difference. So these notions can't be thought of statically - it's not there there simply are 'differences' or 'similarities' out there, 'in themselves'; rather, these notions come into being and are sustained by dynamic processes that underlie them, or bring about their undoing (the flea dies...).

Perhaps the most immediate result is that in this model, the self loses any inherent epistemic privilege to itself: i.e. the self is an object of knowledge like any other. Or to put it somewhat starkly, the 'problem of the external world' applies to the self no less that that world: there is just as equally a problem of the internal world. This is why I said that Kant institutes a new transcendental topology: the relations of what counts as 'inside' and 'outside' are irrevocably changed after Kant. Gabriel: "The self becomes an object among others as soon as it is drawn within the sphere of representation." This on is own is pretty significant, overturning the naive tendency - operative pretty much everywhere still - to assume that we have an immediate epistemic relation to ourselves. No one who has properly read and understood Kant could subscribe to something as stupid as rational choice theory, for instance.

Another ramification has to do with the nature of thought itself: against the image of thought as the activity of a willing subject, thought equally becomes a matter of passivity with respect to the self (no different, again, from the way in which we are passively affected by things 'external' to me): "The activity of thought applies to a receptive being, to a passive subject which represents that activity to itself rather than enacts it, which experiences its effect rather than initiates it." As Deleuze rightly notes, this is the key to Kant's 'Copernican revolution': not the banal change of perspective wherein the object must conform to the subject, but rather the radically changed status of the subject itself: "Time signifies a fault or a fracture in the I and a passivity in the self, and the correlation between the passive self and the fractured I constitutes the discovery of the transcendental, the element of the Copernican Revolution."

This passivity in turn entails that thought can only ever take place by means of an encounter with what exceeds it: the imperative to thought only ever comes from beyond it: "Thought is entirely reliant on contingent encounters, which is to say, on events. Its necessity lies in its being forced by an event, which is to say by an encounter with the world, with something that does not depend upon us. Thought always implies a forced movement..." (Kieran Aarons, The Involuntarist Image of Thought). Contrary to the image of thought as something 'internal' to a thinker, the passivity of thought as recognized by Kant entails that thought itself is only ever guaranteed by such encounters; contra Descartes, it's not thought that guarantees the substantiality of the cogito as a thinking substance, but the encounter which guarantees the necessity of thought that happens 'to' a radically passive subject. The implications here can be explored endlessly, but I'll leave it at the above for now.

Another quirky implication of understanding error to be internal to thought is one with respect to the future of AI: if Kant is right, then any AI that can be said to 'think like a human' must have an 'in-built' risk of going mad. In fact, the whole question of the inherence of madness to thought has a huge literature in itself - there's a very famous debate between Derrida and Foucault on this, following precisely from the question of the Cogito in Descartes and Kant - and of course Zizek's whole oeuvre deals, in a sense, with precisely this problem (hence his constant linking of psychoanalysis to Kantian philosophy). There's more - a great deal more - that follows from Kant's conception of thought, but the above just captures a couple of points that follow. Again, if you don't see how 'this changes anything', I'd simply suggest that you pursue the literature here. There's plenty of it, and I would be careful not to mistake your unfamiliarity with these debates for a lack of significance.

Edward Campbell - Music After Deleuze
Alessandro Ferrara - The Force of the Example: Explorations in the Paradigm of Judgement
Bonnie Honig - Emergency Politics: Paradox, Law, Democracy

That which conceptualises also conceptualises its own nature. I don't see anything revolutionary here... — Agustino

Conceptualizes it's own nature how? Pre-Kant, the general tendency to posit an immediate link between the thinker and the thought (Descartes is paradigmatic here: I think therefore I am; yet one can also mention Hume's pre-established harmony between nature and thought, or even Socrates, for whom error is a case of mis-recognition, and evil a case of ignorance: in every case what maligns thought is external to it). Post-Kant, the thought and the thinker herself are split down the middle, without even immediate access to her own thoughts: the rigour of Kant's idealism means that not even the subject that thinks is excluded from the form of representation; the thinker is only ever a "I or He or It (the thing) which thinks" which only knows it's own thoughts through it's own representations of them.

Markus Gabriel puts it like this: "The constituting activity of experience is as a result put out of reach. We have no grasp of that which constitutes our world even though it is we who perform said constitution. The uncanny stranger begins to pervade the sphere of the subject, threatening its identity from within. Kant is thus one of the first to become aware of the intimidating possibility of total semantic schizophrenia inherent in the anonymous transcendental subjectivity as such." (Gabriel, The Mythological Being of Reflection.

Deleuze, attending to the manner in which temporarily is introduced into thought by Kant (against Descartes) puts like this: "The entire Kantian critique amounts to objecting against Descartes that it is impossible for determination to bear directly upon the undetermined. The determination ('I think') obviously implies something undetermined ('I am'), but nothing so far tells us how it is that this undetermined is determinable by the 'I think' ... Kant's answer is well known: the form under which undetermined existence is determinable by the 'I think' is that of time ... The consequences of this are extreme: my undetermined existence can be determined only within time as the existence of a phenomenon, of a passive, receptive phenomenal subject appearing within time. As a result, the spontaneity of which I am conscious in the 'I think' cannot be understood as the attribute of a substantial and spontaneous being, but only as the affection of a passive self which experiences its own thought its own intelligence, that by virtue of which it can say I - being exercised in it and upon it but not by it." (Difference and Repetition)

Zizek, also attentive to the passivity of the thinker inherent to Kant's conceptualization, frames it thusly: "if one reads Kant's reference to Copernicus closely, one cannot fail to notice how Kant's emphasis is not on the shift of the substantial fixed Center [i.e. from object to subject -SX], but on something quite different — on the status of the subject itself ... The precise German terms ("die Zuschauer sich drehen" —not so much "turn around another center" as "turn/rotate around themselves") make it clear what interests Kant: the subject loses its substantial stability/identity and is reduced to the pure substanceless void of the self-rotating abyssal vortex called "transcendental apperception." (Zizek, An Answer To Two Questions).

I cite this literature - and there's a lot more - to show that there is a rich and complex engagement with this question, and much of what is written traces out the not inconsiderable consequences that follow from such a conception of the subject. There's probably a bit too much to go into here, but the point is that your inability to see the difference is an issue that's largely, well, yours.

It's a question of the nature of that which is 'doing the conceptualizing'; it's the reflexive impetus of the critical philosophy. No one can claim to understand Kant until they recognize it's significance.

Late to chime in, but with respect to Kant, his most significant contribution, it seems to me, is the doctrine of the transcendental illusions: those illusions internally engendered by the operation of thought itself. Whereas previously, error was taken according to a model of the failure of thought, in Kant, error becomes internal to thought as such, such that one can speak of the 'legitimate' and 'illegitimate' employment of Reason. Kant institutes a kind of transcendental topology of cognition that complicates any simple partition between that which is and is not proper to thought. It seems to me that this is the specific twist to his transcendentalism, which properly marks it's originality, and without which none of his other considerations can be properly assessed.

Zizek remarks on the break here that takes place with respect to the metaphors employed when thinking of reason: "This is what changes with the Kantian revolution: in the pre-Kantian universe, humans were simply humans, beings of reason, fighting the excesses of animal lusts and divine madness, while only with Kant and German Idealism, the excess to be fought is absolutely immanent, the very core of subjectivity itself (which is why, with German Idealism, the metaphor for the core of subjectivity is Night, "Night of the World," in contrast to the Enlightenment notion of the Light of Reason fighting the darkness around). So when, in the pre-Kantian universe, a hero goes mad, it means he is deprived of his humanity, i.e., the animal passions or divine madness took over, while with Kant, madness signals the unconstrained explosion of the very core of a human being." (Zizek, The Ticklish Subject)

Deleuze too makes a similar assessment: "There is an even greater change when Kant shows that thought is threatened less by error than by inevitable illusions that come from within reason, as if from an internal arctic zone where the needle of every compass goes mad. A reorientation of the whole of thought becomes necessary at the same time as it is in principle penetrated by a certain delirium. .. In the classical image, error does not express what is by right the worst that can happen to thought, without thought being presented as "willing" truth, as orientated toward truth, as turned toward truth. It is this confidence ... which animates the classical image ... In contrast, in the eighteenth century, what manifests the mutation of light from "natural light" to the "Enlightened" is the substitution of belief for knowledge - that is, a new infinite movement implying another image of thought: it is no longer a matter of turning toward but rather one of following tracks, of inferring rather than grasping or being grasped. Under what conditions is inference legitimate? Under what conditions can belief be legitimate when it has become secular?" (Deleuze, What Is Philosophy)

That particular Kantian lesson, to this day I think, hasn't been fully absorbed yet.

But even more to the point, the medieval nominalists (Ockham, Bacon, et al) were really the precursors of the later empiricists and indeed crucial figures in the development of science; and among the consequences, was the denial of universals ( or of what was then 'scholastic realism') which ultimately entailed the dissolution of metaphysics proper (also discussed in Richard Weaver's influential 1948 book 'Ideas Have Consequences'.)

Which is why, I think, Scholasticism is making a comeback - because medieval nominalism and the mechanistic views of early modern philosophy have been shown to be metaphysically threadbare.

I agree with this, with the caveat that Ockham's nominalism remains committed to a substance-accident model of being which, for all his radicalism, nonetheless places him firmly within the ambit of Aristotelianism. The failure of nominalism - which is ultimately a radicalization, and not a break from Scholastic tradition - ought to speak to a rejection of that model tout court, rather than a swing from one of it's poles to the other.

And in a real way, this is what is happening: the rediscovery of universals is taking place on grounds other than those of the scholastics, such that one can speak - in a way that would have been anathema to medieval thinkers - of emergent universalities, or universals which are results of processes which subsequently have retroactive effects on those processes ('top-down causation'). Not a simple return to universals but a total rethinking of them is at stake in the apparent 'return'.

I had the idea that the reason why Christianity engenders (which I prefer to 'secretes') atheism, is because of the compulsory nature of belief that it requires. Right from the outset of the early Church Councils, which thrashed out the Nicene Creed and the other articles, there was an emphasis on what belief is required of the professing Christian. — Wayfarer

I think you're right to hit on belief as the hinge upon which this turns, and I think indeed it's a matter of 'practice' which is at stake here. The context of that Deleuze quote on the secretion of atheism in fact comes from a discussion of belief, specifically that of Kierkegaard and Pascal, each of whom transpose belief from the transcendent to the immanent:

"We have seen this in Pascal or Kierkegaard: perhaps belief becomes a genuine concept only when it is made into belief in this world and is connected rather than being projected. ... Kierkegaard leaps outside the plane [of immanence], but what is "restored" to him in this suspension, this halted movement, is the fiancee or the lost son, it is existence on the plane of immanence. Kierkegaard does not hesitate to say so: a little "resignation" will be enough for what belongs to transcendence, but immanence must also be restored. Pascal wagers on the transcendent existence of God, but the stake, that on which one bets, is the immanent existence of the one who believes that God exists. Only that existence is able to cover the plane of immanence ...whereas the existence of the one who does not believe that God exists falls into the negative." (Deleuze, What Is Philosophy?)

This is further connected to the soteriological element of Christianity, it's messianic core which aims at a restored future only if driven by the present. In other words there is a very specific temporarily that is proper to Christianity which always always brings it's belief back to bear on the present. Giorgio Agamben has written quite eloquently on this, especially with respect to the question of 'choice': "Contrary to the contemporary eschatological interpretation, it should not be forgotten that the time of the messiah cannot be, for Paul, a future time. The expression he uses to refer to this time is always ho nyn kairos, 'now time'. As he writes in the Second Letter to the Corinthians, "Idou nyn, behold, now is the time to gather, behold the day of salvation" (2 Cor. 6.2; 231) ... Living in this time, experiencing this time, is thus not something that the Church can choose, or choose not, to do. It is only in this time that there is a Church at all.

....[T]he Church can be a living institution only on the condition that it maintains an immediate
relation to its end. And - a point which we would do well not to forget - according to Christian theology there is only one legal institution which knows neither interruption nor end: hell." (Agamben, The Chruch and the Kingdom - note that Agamben rather sneakily gave this speech in the presence of the bishop of Paris at Notre-Dame, the whole thing being a rather pointed critique of the Church's currently existing institutional practices). All of this serves to continually make Christianity 'world-directed' rather that 'Heaven-directed' as it were (think here too of Weber's The Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism). Or in Deleuze's words, "when we take pride in encountering the transcendent within immanence, all we do is recharge the plane of immanence with immanence itself".