Philosophy as slow thinking

According to the French philosopher Alain Badiou,

Our world is marked by its speed: the speed of historical change; the speed of technical change; the speed of communications; of transmissions; and even the speed with which human beings establish connections with one another. . . . Philosophy must propose a retardation process. It must construct a time for thought, which, in the face of the injunction to speed, will constitute a time of its own. I consider this a singularity of philosophy; that its thinking is leisurely, because today revolt requires leisureliness and not speed. (Infinite Thought, p. 38)

I like the idea that the refusal to react to the latest news with a superficial soundbite is a revolutionary (or, at least, subversive) action.

It also occurs to me that something similar might be said about Christian spirituality (at least, as understood within Orthodoxy). The process of deification (of growth into Christlikeness) is not something that happens suddenly. On the contrary, it is a slow, lifelong process. Those who suggest otherwise – that there is a shortcut or a technique (usually involving obedience to the person making the suggestion) that will bring you rapidly to Christian maturity – are lying or are have themselves be taken in by the kind of counterfeit Christianity Stanley Hauerwas alluded to in the quotation I blogged the other day.