The Glory of Kings: A Festschrift for James B. Jordan

Fyodor Dostoevsky
(Christian Encounters Series)

Athanasius
(Foundations of Theological Exegesis and Christian Spirituality)

The Four: A Survey of the Gospels

Defending Constantine: The Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Christendom

From Behind the Veil: The Epistles of John

Deep Exegesis:The Mystery of Reading Scripture

Jane Austen
(A Biography)

Solomon Among the Postmoderns

The Baptized Body

1 & 2 Kings
Brazos Theological Commentary

The Promise Of His Appearing: An Exposition Of Second Peter

A Great Mystery: Fourteen Wedding Sermons

Deep Comedy: Trinity, Tragedy, And Hope In Western Literature

Miniatures & Morals: The Christian Novels of Jane Austen

The Priesthood of the Plebs: A Theology of Baptism

A Son To Me: An Exposition of 1 & 2 Samuel

Against Christianity

From Silence to Song: The Davidic Liturgical Revolution

Ascent to Love: A Guide to Dante's Divine Comedy

Blessed Are the Hungry: Meditations on the Lord's Supper

A House For My Name: A Survey of the Old Testament

Heroes of the City of Man: A Christian Guide to Select Ancient Literature

Brightest Heaven of Invention: A Christian Guide To Six Shakespeare Plays

Wise Words: Family Stories That Bring the Proverbs to Life

The Kingdom and the Power: Rediscovering the Centrality of the Church

« Previous Entries in Category | Next Entries in Category »

Philosophy: What is Phenomenology For?

In his contribution to A Companion to Phenomenology and Existentialism (Blackwell Companions to Philosophy), Steven Crowell summarizes the aims of phenomonology: it is “descriptive” rather than “constructive”; it aims at “clarification, not explanation”; it is “eidetic and not a factual inquiry,” which means “it is not concerned to describe all the properties of some particular thing but to uncover what belongs to it essentially as a thing of that kind.

Most importantly, it is “reflective”: “it is not concerned directly with entities, as are the natural sciences, but with our experience of entities. It is committed to the view that descriptive clarification of the essential conditions for being X cannot be achieved by abstracting from our experience of X but only by attending to how X is given in that experience.”  This is the aspect of phenomenology that Crowells finds “richest in implications” since “For it challenges entrenched philosophical theories about “mind” and “world” and demands that we attend to how ‘the things themselves,’ as Husserl put it, show themselves.”

He claims that its “more fundamental achievement” is the “recognition that meaning (Sinn) is the proper topic of philosophical inquiry, one that cannot be grasped with traditional categories of mind and world, subject and object. Here phenomenology shares a motive with the ‘language-analytic’ philosophy that emerged simultaneously with it. Both movements sought to break free of traditional philosophy, and for the same reason: in order to do justice to meaning. In contrast to early analytic philosophy, however, phenomenology does not see meaning as primarily a linguistic phenomenon. Rather, it comes into its own when Husserl takes the ‘important cognitive step’ of extending terms like meaning and signification ‘to all acts, be they now combined with expressive acts or not.’”  Phenomenology consistutes a break “with mentalism and representationalism and explore meaning as encountered directly in the world of our practical and perceptual life.”

Philosophy: Transcendental

In his German Idealism: The Struggle against Subjectivism, 1781-1801 (p. 138-9), Frederick Beiser offers this lucid explanation of “the transcendental” in Kant: “Rather than reducing experience down to the level of individual consciousness, the critical philosophy makes both the subjective and objective- understood as the representations of inner and outer sense – equal and coordinate parts of a single intersubjective structure or form. This normative order is neither mental nor physical but transcendental, the necessary condition for the possibility of any rational being equipped with a human sensibility. Its extramental and extraphysical status becomes apparent as soon as we recognize that it is the condition under which we identify anything as mental or physical, as an object of either inner or outer sense.  In other words, as the norm that governs or regulates the mental and physical, it cannot be mental or physical itself. Indeed, its normative status remains unaffected whether it governs what is inside me in time or what is outside me in space. Both spacial objects outside me and temporal objects inside me are equal instances or cases of its neutral and inescapable laws.”

This helps Kant, he thinks, overcome the problem of subjectivism:

Continue reading…

Philosophy: Cartesian Moses

According to Dermot Moran’s account (Introduction to Phenomenology), Husserl’s phenomenology was an effort to arrest “cultural fragmentation and relativism, brought about by deep uncertainties about the nature and project of reason in the twentieth century. Husserl saw himself as a visionary pioneer, approaching his themes with an almost religious fervour, even comparing himself to a Moses leading his people to the promised land.”

To secure knowledge, he followed Descartes’ lead.  Husserl concluded that “consciousness is the basis of all experience and its mode of appearing seemed to be inextricably linked to the nature of time itself. Indeed, no experience would be possible without time consciousness; it enters into every experience.”  At the same time, “out of this living flux of consciousness come the ‘achievements’ (Leistungen) of ideal, timeless meanings, the graspings of transcendent objects and truths.”  Because consciousness is always the consciousness of someone in particular, the philosopher can only investigate this process of “meaning-origination” by beginning with his own consciousness.  Like Descartes, Husserl began “with the rigorous self-examination” that he described as “the standpoint of ‘transcendental solipsism.’”  This was not the end of philosophy, but Husserl thought it the necessary beginning, which would enable him to lead European civilization out of Egypt.

Hermeneutics Philosophy Theology - Trinity: Perichoretic imagination

Gadamer waxing (Hegelian and) perichoretic (quoted in Gadamer’s Hermeneutics: A Reading of Truth and Method, p. 159): “Life is defined by the fact that what is alive differentiates itself from the world in which in which it lives and to which it is bound, and preserves itself in such self-differentiation. The self-preservation of what is alive occurs in that it takes into itself things that are outside it. The fundamental fact of being alive is assimilation. Differentiation is thus at the same time non-differentiation. The alien is appropriated.”

Knowledge too is a perichoretic exitus-reditus: The being of self-knowledge “consists in the fact that it knows how to make anything and everything the object of its knowledge, and yet in anything and everything it knows, it knows itself. As knowledge it differentiates itself from itself, and as self-consciousness it is at the same time a comprehension that unites itself with itself.”

Hermeneutics History Philosophy: Coherence of history

As Weinsheimer (Gadamer’s Hermeneutics: A Reading of Truth and Method, p. 150) explains, Dilthey like every other theorist of historical hermeneutics is haunted by the Hegelian ghost he tries to escape.  For Dilthey, the problem is to prove the coherence and unity of history.  He points to experience: We don’t experience atoms of life but life as a coherent flow.  Problem is, it is hard to see how that works at a macro-level: We don’t experience history-in-general at all, much less as a coherent unity.

To make his anti-Hegelian historicism work, Dilthey leans back to Hegel: “To explain the possibility of understanding the larger wholes that no historical individual can understand, Dilthey is forced to posit a ‘logical’ subject of experience instead of actual individual subjects.”  That puts him back in “speculative idealism,” but Weinsheimer doesn’t think he ever really left: “the foundation of his historical theory is the identity of subject and object [the historian who studies history is himself historical], which is the premise of idealism.”

Does every notion of a historical “whole” require a transcendent “logical subject”?  Do we have here a historicist proof for the existence of God?

Hermeneutics History Philosophy: Historicism’s dilemma

Weinsheimer (Gadamer’s Hermeneutics: A Reading of Truth and Method, p. 144) neatly summarizes the dilemma of anti-Hegelian historicism, influenced as it was by the hermeneutical theories of Schleiermacher and later Dilthey.  Here’s the problem: Historicism rejects the Hegelian notion that history has a definable end.  But hermeneutics works in a circle or an oscillation between parts and whole.  If, as historicists tend to say, history is a kind of “text,” then its parts have to be understood in terms of a whole.  But they’ve rejected Hegelian closure, so there is no whole to related dialectically to the parts: “insofar as the truths of history are still to be learned, history is necessarily incomplete; yet only insofar as it is whole can any part of it be ultimately understood.”

Two observations: First, does this mean that we all must be “Hegelians” of some sort?  Put differently, must we all assume an eschatological goal if we are to understand or learn anything from temporal events?  Second, it is not hard to see how the dilemmas of postmodernism naturally arise from the dilemma of historicism: Chuck Hegel, and you chuck eschatology/teleology; chuck teleology, and you’re adrift with Derrida.

Hermeneutics Philosophy: Understanding understanding

Gadamer (Truth and Method (Continuum Impacts), p. 180) says, “We begin with this proposition: understanding means, first of all, understanding one another.  Understanding is first of all having come to a mutual understanding.  People understand one another immediately for the most part, or they communicate until they reach unity and agreement. Understanding, then, is always coming to an understanding about something.”

Seems pretty colorless, but Weinsheimer (Gadamer’s Hermeneutics: A Reading of Truth and Method, pp. 137-8) notes that this is a direct and fundamental challenge to the “romantic” hermeneutics deriving from Schleiermacher: “For Schleiermacher . . . understanding is not understanding one another: it is one’s understanding of the other – unilaterally. It is not coming to an understanding regarding a topic of common concern, but rather understanding the other regardless of what he is concerned about.”  The problem is that Schleiermacher invokes hermeneutics because of common misunderstanding; he begins with “alienation.”  What Schleiermacher describes is real: When after a long discussion, you and I still cannot come to a mutual understanding, you and I both begin to “reconstruct” how the other could have come to such a (mistaken) opinion.  But this is not the process of understanding as such.  Beginning with alienation, Gadamer charges, Schleiermacher can’t even understand understanding.

Hermeneutics Philosophy: Linguistics of Martyrdom

In warning his readers against bowing to idols in his Exhortation to Martyrdom (Origen: An Exhortation to Martyrdom, Prayer, and Selected Works, p. 75), Origen finds that he has to address an issue in the philosophy of language.  If “names are merely conventional and have no relations to the things for which the names stand,” then a Christian might be tempted to say “I worship Dios/Zeus,” thinking that they haven’t actually abandoned Christ.

Such people have to be taught some decidedly non-nominalist linguistics (non-modern too!): “They must be told that the subject of names is something very deep and recondite and that if someone understands it, he will see that if names are merely conventional, then the demons or any other invisible powers when summoned would not obey those who know their names and name the names that have been given.  But as it is, certain sounds and syllables and expressions, aspirated or unaspirated and with a long or a short vowel, when they are spoken aloud, by some unseen nature immediately bring to us those who are summoned.  If this is so and names are not merely conventional, then the first God must not be called by any other name than the ones by which the worshiper, the prophets, and our Savior and Lord Himself named Him.”  In a Jensonian vein, he offers examples: “Sabaoth, Adonai, Saddai, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.”

Hermeneutics Philosophy: Absolute Relativism Beyond Relativism

Gadamer takes play and games as the starting point of his discussion of the ontology of art, and then asks what happens when we introduce an audience and make the game repeatable, when play becomes a play that can be played-for over and over again.

Joel Weinsheimer (Gadamer’s Hermeneutics: A Reading of Truth and Method, pp. 108-9) offers this helpful explanation of Gadamer’s intentions: “A play is not there – it does not exist, is not fully itself- until it is performed. Performance is not something ancillary, accidental, pr superfluous that can be distinguished from the play proper.   The play proper exists first and only when it is played. Performance brings the play into existence, and the playing of the play is the play itself.” Gadamer wants to extend this to art in general: “An artwork is to be represented. Representation is its mode of being. Thus the work cannot be differentiated from the representations of it since it exists only there, only in the flesh. It comes to be in representation and in all the contingency and particularity of the occasions of its appearance.”

Doesn’t this imply an absolute relativism?  Weinsheimer initially says Yes: “Not merely the meaning but the very existence of the work is relative to interpretation.”  But it’s a very different sort of relativism:

Continue reading…

Hermeneutics Philosophy: Reproduction

Critiquing Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics, Gadamer (Truth and Method (Continuum Impacts), pp. 166-7) says that his effort to reconstruct the setting of the original work in order to divine the creative act of the creator is impossible: “We may ask whether what we obtain [from reconstructing the conditions of a work] is the meaning of the work of art that we are looking for, and whether it is corect to see understanding as a second creation, the reproduction of the originla production.”

He thinks not: “Reconstructing the original circumstances, like all restoration, is a futile undertaking in view of the historicity of our being.”  We have moved on, and we cannot move back.  What we get instead is “not the original,” but a reproduction.  But that’s what we get anyway, whether we try to reconstruct the original setting or not.  Reproduction is what all interpretation ends up with, and Gadamer insists that this is not a problem to be overcome but simply the nature of historical, temporal existence.

Art Philosophy: Event of being

Gadamer consistently speaks of works of art as “events of being.”  Is this anything more than Heideggerian mumbo-jumbo?  I think so.  Gadamer appears to mean at least two things.

First, with regard to the art work itself: The art work brings something into existence that wasn’t there before.  The landscape that Constable painted was there before Constable himself and before Constable painted it.  But the particular presentation and representation of the landscape did not exist before; the painting aims to express some truth about the landscape that wasn’t expressed before the painting was made.  This is an “event of being” not only because something new comes into concrete existence because some meaning is expressed afresh.  For Gadamer too, each encounter with the work involves an act of interpretation, and thus has the character of a “performance” of the work.  And for that reason, the work is not only an event of being at its creation but also in every event of encounter with the work.

Second, with regard to the original of which the art is a representation:

Continue reading…

Art Philosophy: Sacred/Profane

Gadamer says in his discussion of the ontology of art in Truth and Method (Continuum Impacts), “It is quite in order that the opposition between profane and sacred proves to be only relative.  We need only recall the meaning and history of the word ‘profane’: the ‘profane’ is the place in front of the sanctuary. The concept of the profane and its cognate, profanation, always presuppose the sacred.  Actually, the difference between profane and sacred could only be relative in classical antiquity, where it originated, since the whole sphere of life was sacrally ordered and determined.”

But Gadamer sees a shift with the New Testament: “Only with Christianity does profaneness come to be understood in a stricter sense. The New Testament undemonized the world to such an extent that an absolute contrast between the profane and the religious became possible.  The church’s promise of salvation means that the world is always only ‘this world.’”

This could be taken wrongly to imply that Christianity contains the seeds of secularization in the modern sense, Gadamer himself suggests this later in the same paragraph.   That’s a mistake, but Gadamer is right that Christianity simplified the religious landscape by eliminating grades of sacredness.  The stark distinction of sacred and profane, of inside and outside with no threshold or profanum for the semi-insiders, is a result of the gospel’s reorganization of priestly, sacred space.

Hermeneutics Philosophy: Language, Nature, Translation, Man

Wilhelm von Humboldt gives this profound explanation of the role of language in human life: “Just as the individual sound intervenes between object and man, the entire language does so between hum and nature acting upon him both externally and internally.  He surrounds himself with an ambient of sounds in order to assimilate and process the world of objects. These expressions do not in any way exceed the measure of simple truth. Man lives principally, or even exclusively, with objects, since his feelings and actions depend upon his concepts as language presents them to his attention. By the same act through which he spins the thread of language he weaves himself into its tissues.  Each tongue draws a circle about the people to whom it belongs, and it is possible to leave this circle only by simultaneously entering that of another people.”

To that he immediately adds this about translation and learning foreign languages: “Learning a foreign language ought hence to be the conquest of a new standpoint for the previously prevailing world-view of the individual.  In fact, it is so to a certain extent, inasmuch as every language contains the entire fabric of concepts and the conceptual approach of a portion of humanity.  But this achievement is never complete, because one always carries over into a foreign tongue to a greater or lesser degree one’s own viewpoint and that of one’s mother tongue.”

Classics Philosophy: Aristotelian and Christian self-sacrifice

In a 2006 article in Modern Theology, J. Warren Smith offers this summary of the Aristotelian argument for self-sacrifice for friends on behalf of the man of Noble Soul: ”Aristotle . . . establishes the relationship between self-love and self-sacrifice. In his words one hears the echo of Achilles’s dilemma: whether it is better to live a short but glorious life or to live a long but mean existence. For Aristotle the answer is clear for the one who aspires to be noble. He defines the virtue of courage (andreios) as bravery in the face of death. Not every death, however, is the occasion for courage, but for Aristotle, the soldier who suppresses his fear and voluntarily faces death in battle embodies true courage. The motive for this courage and sacrifice is the same for the courageous man and for the self-lover. ‘The courageous man is proof against fear so far as man may be. Hence although he will sometimes fear even terrors not beyond man’s endurance, he will do so in the right way, and he will endure them as principle dictates, for the sake of what is noble; for that is the end at which virtue aims.’”

Thus, “laying down his life for the sake of his friends and the welfare of the polis, the self-lover makes the ultimate sacrifice that secures for himself that supreme nobility that is the object of his aspirations. It is love of self, which desires above all else to be the best, that is the primary motive for acts of self-sacrifice. The Noble Soul is precisely such a self-lover. . . . The Noble Soul sacrifices his life because through the great benefits his death brings to the state he is exalted and gains for himself a preeminent nobility.”  Behind this Smith discerns a Nietzschean will to power: “self-love, as the chief motive behind sacrificing one’s life, is an expression of the will to power because self-love is the desire for individual greatness through service to the state.”

Smith discerns similar motivations in early Christian martyr theology, but interprets the Martyrdom of Polycarp, which contrasts the evangelical martyrdom of Polycarp to the self-aggrandizing efforts of Quintus, as a very different sort of self-sacrifice.

Continue reading…

Hermeneutics Philosophy: Interpretive play

Weinsheimer explains how Gadamer can think of interpretation as “play” while avoiding the bogeyman of an interpretive “free-for-all”: “In playing, we do not stand over against the game; we particular in it.  A  player who does not get fully involved in the game is called a spoilsport, because toying with or playing at a game spoils it.” In short, games are not “objects” over there that we examine from a safe distance: “taking a game seriously entails belonging to it, and this belonging in turn precludes treating the game as an object.”

Neither is the game simply a subjectivist utopia: “in the same process of playing that prevents objectifying the game, players lose their status as subjects. As part of the game, participants play parts that are not merely themselves insofar as they have been assigned roles to perform.  Playing consists in a perfromance of what is no object, by what is no subject.”

If interpretation is play, “then it always involves something like performing a drama, for the player who takes the play seriously interprets it from within, by belonging to and playing a part in it.”

Hermeneutics Philosophy: Objective subjectivism

Joel Weinsheimer (Philosophical Hermeneutics and Literary Theory) neatly summarizes Gadamer’s argument that objectivism and subjectivism are the same thing: “Governing itself by rule, objectivity tries methodologically to eliminate bias, prejudice, and all the distortions that go by the name of subjectivity. This Cartesian endeavor assumes that a methodologically purified consciousness guarangees certainty.”

And that’s where the quest for objectivity turns subjective: “On one level, objectivity consists in humble self-effacement, but on another, it is marked by a distinct arrogance insofar as it makes individual self-consciousness the locus and arbiter of truth,” that is, the purified consciousness.  Thus, “though it is by definition not subjective . . . objectivity as an ideal derives from a highly subjectivist epistemology.”

Following Heidegger, Gadamer insists that “consciousness always is more than it knows,” and it is thus self-contradictory to think that this “more” can be discovered “by trusting solely to the self-governance of consciousness.”  Method cannot purify the consciousness.  But self-consciousness can be grasped, if not wholly, by attention to tradition, because “consciousness belongs to historical tradition.”  Interpretation within a tradition, then, can understand “the truth that exceeds self-consciousness.”  In short, if there is “truth that exceeds what can be methodologically certified, its disclosure invariably requires an interpretation of tradition from within a tradition,” a circular interpretation that is neither objective nor mere subjectivism.

Hermeneutics Philosophy: Intuition v. Interpretation

Westphal asks why Christians are hesitant to affirm the inevitability of interpretation, and answers that denying the necessity of interpretation seems to be the easiest way to affirm truth as correspondence and to preserve objectivity.  If interpretation intervenes into every act of knowing, then it doesn’t seem that we can actually know what’s out there, we can’t actually know what’s in the text.  Objectivity seems to diffuse into subjective interpretations.

One of Westphal’s responses is to show that “the whole idea that some construals are subjective interpretations while others are objective intuitions is itself a particular (contested) tradition within philosophy.”  That is, the view that rejects the necessity of interpretation in the act of knowing is dependent on an interpretive (philosophical) framework to make the distinction between interpretive and non-interpretive acts of knowing.  The distinction between “just seeing” what’s objectively there and “interpreting” is not itself “just seen.”  The opposition of intuitions and interpretations collapses because it is self-refuting, dependent on epistemological assumption that the theory wants to deny.

Hermeneutics Philosophy: In defense of Kant

Merold Westphal (Whose Community? Which Interpretation?: Philosophical Hermeneutics for the Church (The Church and Postmodern Culture)) notes that “realism begins as the claim that the world (the real) is ‘out there’ and is what it is independent of whether or not we might think about it.”  But this simple claim is not all that is involved in realism since “no one actually denies this.”  The further claim is that “we can (at least sometimes) know reality just as it is, independent of our judgments about it. In other words, our thoughts and judgments about the world correspond to the world, perfectly mirror it.”

Kant affirms the first claim (the world is out there) but denied the second, and this is “the paradigmatic antirealist.”

Continue reading…

Art Philosophy Theology - Christology: Sublimes

In his highly readable The Sublime (The New Critical Idiom), Philip Shaw lucidly summarizes the standard distinction between the sublime and the beautiful: “The sublime is greater than the beautiful; the sublime is dark, profound, and overwhelming and implicitly masculine, whereas the beautiful is light, fleeting, and charming and implicitly feminine.  Where the sublime is a divisive force, encouraging feelings of differences and deference, the beautiful encourages a spirit of unity and harmony.  In political terms, the impulse of the one . . . is individualistic, even dictatorial, that of the latter is social and democratic.”

He is also clear that there is not one sublime, but various sublimes.  Of the difference between Romantic and postmodern conceptions, he writes,

Continue reading…

Philosophy: Defined spirits

Thomas wrote, “Being is two-fold: material and immaterial. In material beings, which are limited, each thing is only what it is; this stone is this stone, nothing more. But in immaterial beings, which are vast and, as it were, infinite, not being limited by matter, a thing is not only what it is, but in some fashion it is other things as well.”

Several observations: First, souls are immaterial things that are both themselves and also other things.  For the soul that knows the sun and grubs and towers “in some fashion” becomes sun, grub, and tower.  Second, this Aristotelian-inspired comment shows why angelic natures became so central to late medieval metaphysics, for angels are immaterial beings that have definite, limited natures.

But one wonders if Thomas’s starting premise works.  Is it true that “this stone is this stone, nothing more”?  A stone doesn’t have the ontological elasticity of a human soul or mind, but might not a stone become something more than a stone by, for instance, becoming part of a narrative (a stone that gives water in the wilderness), by its position in relation to other stones, by its use in a construction project?  Are those “accidents” not part of what the stone is?  Whatever we might say about stones, sure we cannot say of material human bodies, “this body is this body, nothing more.”  Human bodies bear the scars of suffering, the stoops and bends of age, the hair crown of wisdom.  Without minimizing the differences between material and immaterial, might there not be more similarities than Thomas acknowledges?

 

« Previous Entries in Category | Next Entries in Category »