England - Postmodernism 5

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46. I have mentioned a number of my friends in England so far--Neil Evans, Helen Fox, David Fox, Rachel Leonard, James Quirk, David Morton. Another friend was David Mossley, who was working on his doctorate in philosophy.

I have always liked philosophy. Sometimes I daydream about getting another PhD in philosophy. I would love to write some real philosophy book. I did write what I think is a mighty fine introduction to philosophy from a Christian perspective. David was a real philosopher.

It is fairly common to invoke postmodernism as some kind of trendy boogie man that threatened us twenty years ago but that thankfully faded away. I read a paper not too long ago by someone who casually labeled relativism, romanticism, and empiricism as postmodern. Thus post-modernism had come to be an overarching label for anything but absolutism. In fact relativism is modernist and romanticism was a late eighteenth/early nineteenth century phenomenon. Empiricism is certainly modernist and some would even describe Aristotle as an empiricist.

There was an intellectual vastness that was part of my England days. These were days where truth was truly the aim. My own thinking on Hebrews was of course limited by my own limitations. I did my best and I think some of my resulting work was good. I would go for five mile runs out South road to Darlington Road to Neville's Cross and back, thinking all the while about some exegetical decision I needed to make.

In this time I found discussions on postmodernism most stimulating with David Mossley. I already knew Derrida from my literary studies. I never had any sympathy or interest for him. Meaning happens. Derrida is thus a footnote, a reminder that language divorced of context is mere lines and squiggles without meaning. If you specify a language for the lines and squiggles--a general context--a sentence becomes polyvalent and ambiguous, but it takes on certain more probable meanings in a word cloud. But since words can have metaphorical meanings, the polyvalence is still practically infinite. Only in a specific context does the waveform collapse into a specific meaning.

My philosophy of language and meaning has become refined over the years. Wittgenstein has been my greatest partner on this quest. I stopped at Frege's house for a reference but he didn't make sense. J. L. Austin was helpful but was really only clarifying Wittgenstein. Paul Ricoeur gave me language to express the situation very nicely. If I ever write a real philosophy book, it will be on this subject matter.

47. It was from Mossley that I learned names like David Davidson, W. V. O. Quine, Hilary Putnam, and Richard Rorty. Perhaps I had heard one or two of these but knew practically nothing of their contributions. Except for Derrida and perhaps John Rawls, I knew little of philosophy beyond the existentialists. [1]

The focus of our philosophy discussions, as I recall, was Michel Foucault, who had died ten years earlier in 1984 in France of AIDS. In my mind, Foucault is an extension of the fundamental ideas that Thomas Kuhn set out in science. However, Foucault applied these ideas to history and culture.

The problem I see with Kuhn and Foucault is of course the problem with postmodernism in general. They make it difficult to say that any way of understanding reality is truer than another. When I read Tom Wright's The New Testament and the People of God, I was quite taken with the construct of critical realism--the world is real and exists but our apprehension of it is skewed in our perspective.

This is a little different from Rorty's pragmatic realism, which is agnostic on the question of any underlying reality. Rather, some conceptions of reality "work" better than others. Sometimes I have wondered if my approach became a certain "pragmatic epistemology." By faith I accept the underlying reality. I believe there are constructions that are true and false, certainly ones that are more true and less true. But our language and paradigms are constructions, not das Ding an sich.

I didn't have those things worked out much in my head at the time. That would take teaching philosophy my first couple years at Indiana Wesleyan.

48. I found Foucault's thought fascinating. It had a ring of truth. :-) For example, his book Madness and Civilization showed how societal constructions of insanity had changed over the years. In ancient times, the insane were sometimes viewed as touched by the gods--"Whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad." Insanity was thus seen as a divine action. Even today we can sometimes think of insanity as a kind of genius.

Many have wondered whether some of those Jesus healed in the Gospels were mentally ill or schizophrenic. If so, demon possession would be another paradigm by which those at the time of Christ processed certain types of mental illness.

The "ship of fools" might have suggested to some in the late medieval period that the minds of the insane were wandering on a journey. They are looking for their place in the world but cannot find it. Then we went through a period where we locked up the insane, such as in One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest. Currently, the insane are viewed as having an illness that needs to be treated.

Kuhn's notion of paradigms is very helpful here. The current paradigm is a medical one. Where my critical realism takes over is our sense now that insanity has an underlying biochemical, perhaps even brain structural cause. But this is not just another equal paradigm. It corresponds much more to physical reality and can even be treated by real chemical reactions. Some paradigms thus work better than others.

49.  Foucault also did a three volume History of Sexuality and a work called Discipline and Punish. I never plowed through them, but my cursory knowledge of them has again, I believe, brought me insight. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault talks about the shift from execution as a matter of public shaming to its current "revenge" form.

This perspective fit insights I gained from Bruce Malina. His work The New Testament World: Insights from Cultural Anthropology is a classic that helped attune me to the fact that the ancient world was an "honor-shame" world rather than an individual guilt world. The cross was not primarily about punishing Jesus. That's the way we process executions. The cross was meant to humiliate Jesus and to tell everyone who walked on that path into Jerusalem what happened to people who crossed the Romans.

In England I tried to brush up a bit on my British history. Why were "political" figures assassinated publicly outside the Tower of London? To humiliate and to warn everyone what happened when you opposed those in power.

Now Western culture has shifted toward individualism, away from group identity and collectivist personality. Execution is now focused on paying the individual for what he or she has done. Foucault saw modern executions as private revenge ceremonies. Of course the paradigm has shifted again in the current trend away from capital punishment altogether.

In all these things Foucault and Kuhn gave me a good sense of how any society operates on the basis of paradigms that they think are intrinsic to the world, "the way things are," when in fact we are largely driven and tossed by the winds, ignorant of the forces on us.

This is no bit less true in the church as in broader society. We think we are standing on the Bible when in fact we have no idea of the forces leading us to interpret certain passages certain ways. Sometimes we believe things vehemently and we don't hardly even have a passage.

50. Foucault catalogs similar shifts with regard to sexuality. He posits that sexuality as a category of human identity is a fairly recent development. I have not read his work so my examples may or may not be in his books. As an example, I understand that King James may actually have been what we would call "gay" today. Yet he was married and had children. Foucault suggests that this was the norm prior to recent times.

Foucault thus suggests that homosexual acts were seen as something certain individuals might do on the side within a marriage in earlier times. The idea first of a diagnosis in the eighteen hundreds (a medical condition) and then as a fixed orientation that someone might have in the nineteen hundreds are both changes in paradigms.

Yet without insight into one's cultural glasses, one will inevitably project your current paradigm onto a book like the Bible. Homosexual acts are mentioned in the Bible, but it is not clear that homosexuals are. The story of Sodom and Gomorrah is about an attempted gang rape but not at all clearly about homosexuality. There are other cultural elements here that were equally or more significant in ancient times, such as the way one treats a visitor to your city.

I used to make fun of such interpretations because they seemed to miss the "obvious." It took some time to realize that in fact certain interpretations were obvious to me because of my cultural paradigms and that, in fact, I was ignorant of the cultural influences on me and my own inability to listen to the text on its own terms.

51. I might mention the work of Mary Douglas here, Purity and Danger. This book opened the book of Leviticus to me like never before. We have a tendency to interpret the food laws of Leviticus in terms of food safety because it makes sense to us in our paradigms. Douglas unfolds possible ways of processing purity and such things in more likely cultural categories.

I have come to call this aspect of the Levitical paradigm, "kind" theology. The ancient Israelite priestly worldview processed the world in terms of certain "kinds" of things. Certain characteristics went in the bird box. Others went in the sea creatures box. Surrounding peoples ate pig, but the Israelites were shepherds. To eat pig was thus to be a traitor to your people and to your God, Yahweh. While I will not say these interpretations are certain, they fit much better in the Ancient Near East than our weak attempts to make these laws fit within our modern paradigms of hygiene.

This period opened up a dimension to the biblical texts to me that I liken to seeing a third dimension to Scripture that I had never seen before in church. It made understanding the Scriptures a profound thing. I do not expect this third dimension from preaching. A sermon is good to me if it helps people on their journey with God through life.

[1] It is noteworthy that the Principal of St. John's prior to David Day was Tony Thiselton. Through knowledge of him and his work I was introduced to Gadamer (cf. The Two Horizons).

Historical Theory 3

This should be the last of this specific section.  Previous posts include:

Ranke
Troeltsch

Now, Collingwood and Foucault.
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In the mid-twentieth century, we look to Roger Collingwood for the next major moment in the philosophy of history.  First, Collingwood calls the historical method prior to modern times a “scissors and paste” method. [1] To present a particular moment in history, these historians found an appropriate figure from the time they wished to describe and “pasted” an appropriate quote from that figure as an authority on the event.  One problem, as we have already seen, is that these "pre-modern" historians largely did not take into account the biases of the people they were quoting.  Collingwood sees a move forward when such individuals were seen as sources rather than authorities on the day.

His main claim in The Idea of History is that the task of the historian is to “re-enact the past in his [sic] own mind.” [2] It is to bring the past into the present by reliving it.  To do so, one must go well beyond the “outside” of an event, the individual facts. [3] The historian must instead get into the “inside” of the event, what the thoughts and intentions were of the individuals who took part in these events.  Why did they do the things they did?  Collingwood wanted to get beyond simply thinking of cause and effect as a matter of events and get into the minds of the individuals participating in the events.  What was the human question to which the action was the answer?

As we look back at Collingwood, his focus on human intentions seems a bit ambitious and perhaps overstated.  On the one hand, his sense that we only have access to the past in the present is potentially insightful for the historical task.  Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900-2002) would later argue that we do not really have access to the intentions of the authors of texts (let alone the thoughts of people from the past themselves).  We only have the effects of texts as they have played out over time and reached us in the present. [4]  And even then, we come to the text with our own socio-cultural influences.  Reading a text is thus a process of “fusing” two horizons, our horizon with that of a text as it comes to us (see chap. 4).  We have no certain way of knowing how well that fusing relates to the original intentions of the authors of those texts.

Colingwood’s focus on human intention also seems myopically focused on ideas.  What of the experiences of people and their feelings as the events of the world play themselves out in their lives?  Why make rational intentionality the primary focus? [5] More recent times have seen a focus on narrative as more fundamental to human ways of identifying ourselves and thinking about the world.  Arthur Danto’s 1965’s An Analytical Philosophy of History rightly argued that the historical significance of any event can only be unfolded in the context of a story because “history tells stories.” [6] Story seems potentially to capture in proper perspective all the elements that previous historians sought to incorporate and balance—including ideas, intentions, and natural cause and effect. We will return to this potentially fruitful idea at the end of the chapter.

Surely to bring the philosophy of history current we must at least engage the thinking of Michel Foucault (1926-84), whom we will look at in our final chapter as one of the main figures of postmodernism.  Predictably, Foucault resisted labels of this sort, and we wish to discuss him from our perspective rather than from his own.  In particular, Foucault saw his discussions of history mostly as discussions about language as an expression of power and certainly not "what really happened."

From the critical realist perspective we have adopted in this textbook (see chap. 8), what Foucault is helpful for is in calling our attention to historical paradigms and how they shift over time.  He helpfully moves us from merely thinking of individuals and their intentions (Collingwood) to the societal assumptions and matrices by which we assign meanings to events.  Further, he helps us see how structures of human power affect the way we look at the world and at history.

Foucault’s historical studies included topics like how societal understandings of punishment, insanity, and sexuality have changed over time. For example, at one point insanity or "madness" was almost considered a blessing from the gods. [7] In the 1400's, a common image was that of a "ship of fools," where society saw the idea of a wandering ship going unpredictably from port to port on the water an appropriate image of the wandering minds of these "mad" individuals on the borders of society.  Foucault then pursues changes in conceptions of madness until he reaches modern society, where we diagnose and try to treat insanity as an illness.

With regard to sexuality, Foucault argues that the very category of sexuality as we think of it is a recent invention. [8] In previous days, people did not divide human sexuality into the categories of hetero- and homosexual with distinct “orientations.” Homosexual activity was exactly that—sexual activity that some people engaged in. However, such individuals would likely have been married and have children as well. To use our language, earlier generations would have assumed that everyone was a heterosexual but that some people engaged in homosexual behavior as well. But they did not have a category “heterosexual” in their mind.

A good deal of what Foucault had to say about such things seems to work when we apply them to history. For example, the Bible arguably never addresses the question of homosexual orientation—attraction to the same sex.  It only seems to address homosexual activity.  The category of a “homosexual” arguably did not exist until the 1800’s.  It is our contemporary way of thinking about sexuality that leads us to assume that the men of Sodom and Gomorrah must have been homosexuals because they want to have homosexual sex.  In the thought world of Genesis, these are more likely men who want to rape the angels.  Judges 19 confirms this conclusion because in this very similar story, the men of the city go on to rape a concubine to death. [9]

Foucault thus corroborates what the cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz (1926-2006) taught when he advocated what he called a "thick description" of culture.  Indeed, as Collingwood indicated, true historical understanding cannot think it has explained the meaning of some event by telling the facts of what happened and certainly not if we simply assume the key players thought exactly the way we do.  This is a major issue when we as Christians read the Bible.  When we read of a biblical figure doing something or even saying something, we must explain the meaning of those actions and words in terms of the socio-cultural matrix in which they were done or spoken, which will not at all likely be the same as our socio-cultural matrix.  Further, this warning applies even to the very nature of the narratives themselves--we cannot assume that we are seeing a straightforward presentation of what happened in the biblical narratives, since this is also an assumption of modern historical narratives.

A second caveat with which Foucault has bequeathed us is the fact that "history is told by the winners."  In a set of public lectures in 1976, Foucault indicated that those who emerge the winners in societal struggles have a tendency to try to eliminate competing versions of the past.  Paul Ricoeur (1913-2005) put it even more accurately: "We carry forward at the same time several versions of history... We turn to them, abandon them, resume telling them much like a chess player who plays several games at once, now playing one game, then the another." [10]  Those in power have a tendency to use their power to support their version of the past in order to support who they are in the present and what they wish to do in the future.

[quote from Orwell's 1984--"He who controls the present, controls the past.  He who controls the past, controls the future.]

We end our treatment of historical theory with brief mention of new historicism, which is not so much a movement in historiography as a movement in literary theory. [11] As a perspective on literature, new historicism represents a return to trying to read literary texts in terms of their original meanings, although not from the narrow historicism of the past but an understanding of history that takes on board Foucault's "insights" into how broad cultural dynamics and power structures affect meaning.  While it is known significantly for its interest in "lost histories" and mechanisms of repression and dominance, it can represent for us a "chastened" approach to historical inquiry that has learned from the postmodern critique without abandoning its sense that we can still legitimately investigate the past and come to valid conclusions.

[1] The Idea of History (Oxford: Oxford University, 1994 [1946]).  I am thankful again here in what follows for Day’s presentation of Collingwood in Philosophy of History, 16-18, 121-29.

[2] Idea, 282.

[3] Idea, 213.

[4] Truth and Method

[5] A similarly, almost bizarre ideological perspective on history was that of Arthur O. Lovejoy (1873-1962), who might be considered the originator of a field known as the "history of ideas."  In his The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (1936), he laid out the notion of a "unit-idea" or individual concept.  Like an atom of thought, he saw the history of thought as the assembly of such unit ideas into various combinations.


[6] An Analytical Philosophy of History (1965), 111.

[7] Madness and Civilization (1961).

[8] History of Sexuality, 3 vols (1976, 1984).

[9] Indeed, if we look at the way Jesus discusses Sodom and Gomorrah in the light of the socio-cultural categories of the day (Matthew 10:15), the way Sodom treated guests is the most significant wrong in the story.  The context is talking about cities and villages that might reject the disciples, just as Sodom and Gomorrah rejected God's messengers. The wrong of the homosexual act in the passage compounds the wrong to be sure, but it is only our current cultural paradigm that makes this act the central point of the passage.

[10] History and Truth (1965), 186.  As usual, I have paraphrased him to give his thought greater clarity.

[11] Stephen Greenblatt (1943-) is generally considered the originator of the movement.