I've been doing a little reading this weekend, and the question I am asking myself is how postmodern I really am. I'm not interested in having a certain cool label. Nate Crawford has brought up Gadamer and the merging of horizons--I've never really clicked with the two horizons thrust, but maybe it's because I don't fully understand it. This is on my agenda for this week.
Here are four issues where I raise the question: how postmodern am I?
1. Descartes: I actually invoke Descartes, the father of modernism, in my epistemology. I agree that you can legitimately doubt the truth almost everything.
However, I don't arrive at the conclusion that "I" am the only thing I can't doubt. I conclude that something exists, the thing I am calling "thought." It has something to do with what I call "I."
And my enterprise is not to establish certainty in knowledge, which was Descartes enterprise (to lay "foundations" for truth). My enterprise is more to establish degree of doubtability. To what extent am I unsure rather than to what extent am I sure. I normalize faith as the essential ingredient in all "knowledge." The question is the amount of faith required for anything known.
2. Most fundamentally, I operate with the distinction between subject and object, between myself and external reality. Hegel, Heidegger, and Derrida, each in their own way (and Derrida most extremely), rejected any "correspondence" model of truth, where truth is when my idea corresponds to that which is outside me.
This is the point where Derrida might simply label me a modernist. I operate with meta-language, with the distinction between sign and signified.
But I do so only because it seems necessary as a heuristic tool in the name of pragmatic realism. And I don't have any narrow correspondence understanding of truth. I might say, "Watch out for that carpet nail" in hope that my daughter won't step on it and bleed. But I have no real sense of what these words really correspond to outside of myself. What I know is that these words potentially work to change the course of things I think of as real world "events." In that sense, the correspondence test for truth for me is really little more than the pragmatic test for truth--does the "concept" work in the course of human events?
So I am content to say that I also do not know what the external "truth" of the meta-language such as this post is (this is a meta-post, and that a meta-comment on the post, and that a meta-comment on the meta-comment on the post, and that...). But some will nodd at my comments or believe they "understand" them. I think I am saying something too. To that extent the subject-object model of epistemic operation seems to "work," even though we do not really know what is "really" going on.
3. Third, I agree with Kant that it works to say by faith that things in themselves exist. Yet we only know them as our minds organize them. Does this critical realism make me a modernist?
But I do not agree with Kant on the rules for our minds or with the universality of the categories of our minds. Unlike Kant, we know that the brain stands behind such unities of consciousness, and these functions of our brains seem to derive overwhelmingly from physical organ structures and chemical interactions. Neurophysiology (not to mention cultural anthropology) seems to knock the wind out of Kant's sails.
4. Lastly, I believe it is important for a historic Christian to acknowledge the "objective" existence of God beyond this universe. Derrida would take a via negativa, where God is only defined in terms of what He is not rather than what he is.
But I start with the assumption that God is outside this universe and thus that 1) we mostly know him negatively, even though by faith we affirm His existence beyond our frame of reference (again noting that this language works without us really knowing what we are saying) and 2) by analogy as He has revealed Himself to us, particularly in Jesus Christ.
Am I postmodern?
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17 comments:
Yes ... maybe ... although a real postmodern wouldn't label themselves that way ;-)
Quick question. I'm not going to pretend that I understand everything you said about reality and the such ... but ... if I have an understanding and you do as well, and both of us seem to agree ... can we say that at least, both of our understandings are so close that we may assume that reality is the right one?
The key to me is the eternal footnote: "You should not assume that these comments correspond closely or directly to the 'way things are.' But what we are calling 'language' seems to work because we both think we basically agree and both think we basically 'understand' each other."
Schenck, to invoke Derrida, I think you are participating in the New Enlightenment - meaning that in some sense, you are postmodern.
I'd have some quibbles with some of what you say. There are subjects and objects, but the subject always participates in a living way with the object. There is not a distinction where I can take an object and study it apart from myself - I am intimately part of what I am studying. (I would even go so far as to say that if I was not, I am not studying anything that is "real").
And on the two horizons front - basically, what Gadamer is doing (as much as I understand it) is saying that when we interpret a text, we necessarily bring our horizon to the horizon of the text. We ask questions that our horizon necessitates us to ask (a major one for you is if women are allowed to be ordained). The text at times may not seem concerned with these questions, but they are the questions we are asking. And for Gadamer, to find answers requires a reading of the text in its historical world (as much as that is possible) so that we can bridge the two horizons of our world and their world.
This may be a bit convoluted. Sorry.
Peace in your journey.
It's important to me that we talk about objects as "ontologically" distinct from us. I realize that I commit a cardinal postmodern sin to invoke the very idea of metaphysics, but I do so in quotes, thus invoking the eternal footnote. Epistemologically, the object is never distinct from the subject, I agree. And for me, this meta-discussion is ultimately a heuristic tool necessary for any discussion of this sort, but with the eternal footnote.
So I agree with your "observation" that women in ministry is a major part of me as a subject approaching the biblical "horizon." But I recognize that this issue is not a part of the biblical horizon at all and that I am "selecting" data in a scheme that is a part of my horizon.
So where is this Gadamar guy? I've been thinking something along those lines for the last two years but not been able to support my thought with anyone elses.
A few weeks ago in Sunday School, a question was brought up, assuming that the Jewish author (Matthew) writing primarily to other Jews would answer a question in his text about Jesus' afterlife. I can't remember the exact question, but I remember explaining to the class that I think we have to answer that with Paul, because I don't think Matthew even thought about the content of the question. I was practically deemed a heretic with the stares...I love Sunday School.
So when you guys are done with this postmodern blogging, let me know how in the world I'm supposed to use the conclusion without getting shot.
Where exactly inside are you when you talk about the world outside? Are "you" inside your pineal gland, like Descartes believed?
And where exactly does Heidegger reject the correspondence model of truth? In what I've read, he agrees with it, but goes on to discuss other models of truth, which address matters correspondence does not.
I used "subject-object" only to "mean" that things "exist" apart from my body. In an earlier post I distanced myself from Descartes' "I." "I think therefore something exists" was my version.
The myth I operate under goes something like this: something I call light passes through something I call my cornea and stimulates something I call my retina. Eventually something I call my cerebrum has a complex electrochemical reaction. In this myth, what I call "I" is the ongoing and complex interaction of these physical structures with energy and chemicals (subject) in distinction from the physical events taking place outside my body (object). But it is all a myth to express matters of the eternal footnote.
My limited understanding of Heidegger was that he was one of the first to identify existence with difference rather than presence, that ontology is a matter of that which is beyond the horizon and thus just out of sight.
Ken, I don't think that it is a myth as much as it is a limited part of the picture. All the physiological events that go into the perception of, say, a ping pong ball must be contextualized in the world in which they appear--the world of ping pong tables, ping pong players, leisure time, people with arms and hand-eye coordination, people who can move and interact with objects, etc. It is because of this wider background wherein the being appears as a ping pong ball that it can be meaningful in the first place. If this is the case, than the "I" that is speaking in your post is more than just "the ongoing and complex interaction of these physical structures with energy and chemicals (subject) in distinction from the physical events taking place outside my body (object)." It is the "I" that can establish contexts (and IS the context, in Heidegger's later thought) wherein beings can appear as something-or-other (ping pong balls, pens, computer screens, people, etc.). Heidegger's point (well, one of them) is that you need this world as the very basis of questioning/doubting, therefore Descartes was wrong in his scepticism--you cannot doubt the background that makes doubt itself possible.
Thanks Kevin... my knowledge of Heidegger would fit on a Post It note. For some reason I have never been able to connect with the phenomenologists. I've not given up yet.
Myth is one of my pet categories. To me it is something (I've expanded my definition beyond stories) that expresses (rather than explains) a mystery. So I consider scientific equations to be very precise myths.
In general, if I can consider subject-object language as myth, then I can "get around" reality better and with greater precision than the phenomenologists can while not presuming any naive metaphysic. Whether this is coherent in the light of late twentieth century philosophy, I do not know yet. I call it a "pragmatic epistemology," taking off of Rorty's pragmatic realism.
I don't blame you. I took my first Heidegger class about 3 years ago and didn't understand a word of it during the entire semester (with a horrible final paper that showed my ignorance; thankfully my teacher was graceful in his grading). It wasn't until about 4 more months of my own study that it began to click. Since then I've spent countless hours on it, with what I hope is some success. If it will click, it will take some time; if it won't click, well, find something else that resonates with you. :)
With that, Heidegger's critique of the subject-object distinction does not entirely invalidate the distinction. For Heidegger a subject is a subject-for-an-object; we do not have extant subjects and extant objects that are then somehow combined. Rather, we have the essential 'belonging together' of man and being (or subject and object). This is where Descartes got it wrong: he tried to extract himself from objects and posited a subject that can exist apart from objects/beings, even though this relationship is the essential and necessary (in an existential, not logical, sense) background on which such extracting is possible (and made impossible).
The question of the object's relation to the subject is also altered (or seen as what it is): that an object requires a subject to be what it is. This is an important distinction: it is not that it requires a subject to be, but to be a what. What the object is--a baseball, a galaxy, a mountain, etc.--requires a being that is capable of making certain aspects of it salient and is able to situate it within a context whereby it can get its meaning. It does not have some immutable and immaterial essence that makes it what it is, but because it is contextualized (essenced/essencing, as a verb) by a subject.
If any of this makes sense (I wouldn't be surprised if it doesn't), the subject-object distinction is understood in a radically different way. Subject and object (as something-or-other) essentially belong together and cannot exist apart from each other.
I would resonate with a good deal of this, Kevin. For example, the idea that a lamp might "be" apart from me yet not be a "lamp" apart from me is quite a good expression of what I "think," if Heidegger and you are saying something similar to what I think I mean. But perhaps I do not understand because I formulate this almost as a Kantian dualism minus his categories and concept of mind.
I also do not think you can separate me as a knower from the way I know the world, but I still speak of the world as distinct from me. Frankly, I feel a little uncomfortable speaking of this in subject-object terms. I'm just not sure how else to do it right now. I think of myself as an object, and at this point wonder how post-modern or even modern I am.
What I mean is, while I recognize that the "I" of me is the location of knowing (along with all its egocentric predicament) I tend to view myself from some location outside myself. I see myself as a collection of nerves and impulses. In practice, what I've been calling a subject object distinction is really an object-object distinction viewed from the perspective of some implied, "ideal" human subject beyond myself.
"What I know is that these words potentially work to change the course of things I think of as real world 'events.'"
-For some reason this reminds me of God using words to call things into existence. It is as if the words themselves call things into context. It makes me wonder if all words are "living" words ... even those spoken/written by humans.
"In practice, what I've been calling a subject object distinction is really an object-object distinction viewed from the perspective of some implied, 'ideal' human subject beyond myself. "
-I think you could strike the "human" from this sentence. This makes me think that reality demands a "grand contextualizer". Is this what "for you created all things, and by your will they were created and have their being" means? I mean, isn't God the "ideal subject" in which all objects find their context?
... I'm probably missing the boat entirely.
Daniel, I thought about putting God, but that's part of the conundrum--no human really has access to God's mind in anything like a literal sense. I'll fully admit that my attempt may not make much sense at all though.
Actually Kant is a decent place to start in understanding Heidegger as he takes a quasi-Kantian stance on these issues (there are many differences, though). Much of Heidegger's early work (pre-1930s) deals with Kant and primordially appropriating his thought. Here's a relevant quote I just read this morning:
"The question of being [in Being and Time] is therefore reformulated as a question about the conditions for the accessibility or intelligibility of things. The constant references to Kant in the essays that follow (espcially in those by Hoy, Dostal, and Frede) show how this project can be seen as a continuation of Kant's 'Copernican revolution,' the shift from seeing the mind as trhying to hook up with an antecedently given world to seeing the world as being made over in order to fit the demands of the mind. But Heidegger's analytic of Dasein also marks an important break from Kant and from German Idealism generally. For Heidegger brackets the assumption that there is such a thing as a mind or consciousness, something immediately presented to itself in introspection, which must be taken as the self-evident starting point for any account of reality. Instead, though it is true that the first-person standpoint is basic (as Hoffman clearly shows), it is not the mental that is basic but rather what Taylor calls 'engaged agency.' We start out from a description of ourselves as we are in the midst of our day-to-day practical affairs, prior to any split between mind and matter. Our inquiry must begin from the 'existentiell' (concrete, specific, local) sense we have of ourselves as caught up in the midst of a practical world (in the 'life-world' sense of this term fround in such expressions as 'the world of academia' or the 'business world')."
Charles Guignon, "Introduction," in The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, 6.
This will be spoken of in slightly different terms with slightly different nuances in Heidegger's later thought, but the general thrust is there: there is no person-in-himself, but a person-in-the-world and person-among-other-persons. Later Heidegger will give more emphasis on being, in order to make it ontologically level with man (who, in his earlier work, is given at least slightly more priority).
This is long enough, so I'll end with this: I'm not sure about how to give meaning to your "object-object distinction." If every being--e.g. a lamp--is what it is in virtue of its being appropriated by a person (a Dasein), then some sort of distinction is still needed. Perhaps in your desire to escape traditional presuppositions you are going too far in the other direction? Just a thought from someone who is entirely unfamiliar with you and, hence, could be completely off base... :o)
You make Heidegger sound very attractive to me.
Is that a good thing or a bad thing? ;o) :oP
For whatever reason, I have not wanted to identify with Husserl, Heidegger, or Gadamer. But the more I understand of Heidegger and Gadamer, the less I feel I can object to... Maybe our horizons are merging ;-)
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