Note: In this post, when Truth is capitalized it refers to the absolute, conceptual notion; personal truth is not in capitals.
The idea that everything is symbol in need of interpretation really resonates with me. The unreliability of the epistemological process is something I have always found troubling. Post-modernism embraces and validates this uncertainty as justified, and goes even further by making it an essential part of the human experience. We never perceive things as they are, we interpret them through our filters and limitations. As I mentioned before, these ideas are not new to me (or anyone, really), but Westphal is fairly poetic in the way he discusses them.
When you have grown up in a closed system that has rules about what is True and what is False, these ideas can be terrifying. Our inability to experience objectivity means that we never fully experience Truth. People on all sides of the ideological spectrum have taken this and distorted it to their purposes. Atheists will take the unavailability of Truth to mean that there is no Truth at all, and that religion, with all its claims to special insight, is categorically wrong. All absolutes are out, including the divine. These kinds of arguments are the exact ones that Christians use to accuse philosophers of denying the existence of Truth and of promoting an "anything goes" kind of relativism. But really, post-modernism doesn't deny the existence of Truth, it just comments on our ability to access it. Postmodernism isn't trying to say that there is no God or that there is no Truth. It just commenting on the way we experience it. "We can call our beliefs "true" when we apprehend the world as we should; but they are not "True," since that would require us to apprehend the world as we can't."
Now, many would argue, from a religious perspective, that these ideas do not take the supernatural nature of divine revelation into account. And while the idea of revelation is certainly something that I want to discuss at length later, we must remember that revelation still needs to be interpreted; "The divine character of revelation does not cancel out the human character of my attempt to say what it means." This is especially true about anything that enters the realm of language (which everything does, many would argue). Holy scriptures are subject to these limitations most of all: divinely revealed misinformation about God." It almost sounds blasphemous until you begin to think about all the commentary, cultural explanation, and personal conviction that it takes to glean wisdom or applicable rules from texts like the Bible.
However, "that religious people are often, even always, idolatrous, worshipping a god created in their own image and in conformity with their own interests, does not mean that there is no God." In summary, the ineffability of "the thing" does not necessarily negate the existence of "the thing," it just means that experiencing pure "presence" is impossible. So far, I have seen no contradiction to this in the Bible, per se. Taken as a metaphor for this idea, when Moses climbed Mount Sinai, God could not appear to him in full because Moses would have been unable to take it.
I'll end with this quote by Westphal, which I find intriguing and hopeful:
"[the fact that we cannot access Truth] does not entail that the Truth has no access to us, or that we should abandon the attempt to determine how best to think about what there is."
The idea that everything is symbol in need of interpretation really resonates with me. The unreliability of the epistemological process is something I have always found troubling. Post-modernism embraces and validates this uncertainty as justified, and goes even further by making it an essential part of the human experience. We never perceive things as they are, we interpret them through our filters and limitations. As I mentioned before, these ideas are not new to me (or anyone, really), but Westphal is fairly poetic in the way he discusses them.
When you have grown up in a closed system that has rules about what is True and what is False, these ideas can be terrifying. Our inability to experience objectivity means that we never fully experience Truth. People on all sides of the ideological spectrum have taken this and distorted it to their purposes. Atheists will take the unavailability of Truth to mean that there is no Truth at all, and that religion, with all its claims to special insight, is categorically wrong. All absolutes are out, including the divine. These kinds of arguments are the exact ones that Christians use to accuse philosophers of denying the existence of Truth and of promoting an "anything goes" kind of relativism. But really, post-modernism doesn't deny the existence of Truth, it just comments on our ability to access it. Postmodernism isn't trying to say that there is no God or that there is no Truth. It just commenting on the way we experience it. "We can call our beliefs "true" when we apprehend the world as we should; but they are not "True," since that would require us to apprehend the world as we can't."
Now, many would argue, from a religious perspective, that these ideas do not take the supernatural nature of divine revelation into account. And while the idea of revelation is certainly something that I want to discuss at length later, we must remember that revelation still needs to be interpreted; "The divine character of revelation does not cancel out the human character of my attempt to say what it means." This is especially true about anything that enters the realm of language (which everything does, many would argue). Holy scriptures are subject to these limitations most of all: divinely revealed misinformation about God." It almost sounds blasphemous until you begin to think about all the commentary, cultural explanation, and personal conviction that it takes to glean wisdom or applicable rules from texts like the Bible.
However, "that religious people are often, even always, idolatrous, worshipping a god created in their own image and in conformity with their own interests, does not mean that there is no God." In summary, the ineffability of "the thing" does not necessarily negate the existence of "the thing," it just means that experiencing pure "presence" is impossible. So far, I have seen no contradiction to this in the Bible, per se. Taken as a metaphor for this idea, when Moses climbed Mount Sinai, God could not appear to him in full because Moses would have been unable to take it.
I'll end with this quote by Westphal, which I find intriguing and hopeful:
"[the fact that we cannot access Truth] does not entail that the Truth has no access to us, or that we should abandon the attempt to determine how best to think about what there is."
4 comments:
Again, love this stuff. If you ever want to go crazy theologically on this: Barth's Rpistle to the Romans
Glad you are enjoying the blog. I wondered if anyone was reading it, haha.
Maybe I'll pick up barth one of these days... but the jump from philosophy to theology seems huge right now. Hopefully sometime soon.
Thanks for the recommendation and the opinions though. I value my friends's wisdom as much as my books.
Good stuff here, Ryan! I forgot about your blog for, well, a few years. Then I bumped into it on Google. It looks like I have some catching up to do. I'll start here.
You quote Westphal as saying, "We can call our beliefs "true" when we apprehend the world as we should; but they are not "True," since that would require us to apprehend the world as we can't." I'm struggling to make sense of this. (Philosopher's sidebar: that's just a gentle way of saying that this doesn't make sense, at least as stated.) Part of Westphal's view is that there is a distinction between signs and things signified. So, when someone has a belief about something, there is surely a chance that the belief is true because there is a chance that the way one believes things to be is, in fact, the way things are. Maybe we shouldn't be too assertive about our beliefs because our beliefs might be false: fine. But that says nothing about how the world is--and Westphal seems to be trying to say something about how the world is.
Hey Greg. Welcome back. Yeah, I struggle with some of those same issues when it comes to this line of thinking, though in Wesphal's defense, me taking his quotes out of context and trying to put them into my own thoughts doesn't help his cause very much, haha.
Post a Comment