Jacob’s (Jacques) Gate: Rhetoric, grammar and pragmatics in Derrida’s Deconstruction

In several previous posts, I pondered on the literary theory of “deconstruction.” (See here and here). It was Jacques Derrida, the Jewish French philosopher (1930-2004, who coined the term “deconstruction.” The question is, “Is deconstruction merely a fancy term for “destruction” where, after digging beneath its archaeological sedimentations, all I find are etymological bones.

The discussion is divided into two parts: 1. What is deconstruction, and 2. Rules of language, which show up the weaknesses in deconstruction.

Part 1 – Deconstruction

“Here or there, says Derrida, the French Jewish philosopher I have used the word deconstruction which has nothing to do with destruction. That is to say, it is simply a question of…being alert to the implications, to the historical sedimentations of the language which we use – and that is not destruction.

(Derrida, J. 1972 Structure, Sign and Play. In: Macksey, R. & Donato, E. (eds.) The Structuralist Controversy. Baltimore, P. 271).

In Derrida’s deconstruction, language is the sediment of the desire to mean, to communicate, and has no locatable centre nor retrievable origin; its existence is a network of differences between signifiers (sounds or written symbols signifying meaning), each tracing, tracking, leaping over the other, where the story of reality consists in nothing more more than pseudo-stable signs (signifiers and signifieds) chasing after one another’s enigmatic tales.

In deconstruction there is no necessary connection between the desire to signify (to mean) and the signifiers that evoke that desire.

“[I]f language is not inherently determined by a set of univocal (single) meanings, then language use, given an unlimited number of contexts over an indefinite period of time, becomes an unrestricted interaction of signifiers, the Nietzschean affirmation of free play without nostalgia for a “center” or for ‘origins’” (J. Derrida 1981, Dissemination. Translated by Barbara Johnson. London: Athlone, 278-93).

But surely, if you give a specific chunk of discourse an unlimited number of contexts, no communication is possible. For example, if it is true that language has no locatable centre, and all is free play, I would be free to allocate any meaning I desire to Derrida’s paragraph above, and in so doing bury myself in nostalgia for the time when language was not an “unrestricted interaction of signifiers,” but I should, advises Derrida, not pull my syntactic sinews and semantic flesh together, for to do so will only result in the return (nostos) of suffering (algos).

This kind of linguistic free play is linguistic foul play. I say this because, all deconstructionists are at bottom constructivists. A constructivist believes that knowledge is not discovered but constructed. In other words, reality is not  “given” (existing out there), but  “taken” (from your constructive imaginations). 

Part 2 Rules of language and the weakness of deconstruction

Derrida, however, insisted that you could only understand deconstruction if you obeyed the rules of grammar, rhetoric and pragmatics.

“What I, on the other hand, must recall to your attention – and I will remind you of it more than once – is that the text of an appeal obeys certain rules; it has its grammar, its rhetoric, its pragmatics. I’ll come back to this point in a moment, to wit: as you did not take these rules into account, you quite simply did not read my text, in the most elementary and quasi-grammatical sense of what is called reading.

(J. Derrida. 1986. But beyond…(Open letter to Anne McClintock and Rob Nixon). Translated by Peggy Kamuf. Critical Enquiry, Autumn, pp.155-170, p.157)

The context of the above quotation is Derrida’s response to McClintock and Nixon [1986] whom he rebukes for misunderstanding the context in which he was using the term “apartheid” and for gross distortions, according to Derrida, of his theory of deconstruction. (McClintock, A. & Nixon, R. 1986. No Names Apart: The Separation of Word and History in Derrida’s ‘Le Dernier Mot du Racisme.’  [The lawst word in racism], Critical Enquiry, Autumn, pp.140-154).

Therefore, it is Derrida himself who insists that his writing obeys certain rules, the abuse of which leads to misreading his intentions. Accordingly, Derrida does believe in communication, i.e. codes that mean (Lawlor 1983; Scholes 1988). But for codes to mean, they must mean something particular, that is, they must be connected to a particular (specific) context – or contexts. Contexts can be plural but should, surely, never be unrestricted. Recall (above) Derrida’s description of “deconstruction” as an unrestricted interaction of signifiers, the Nietzschean affirmation of free play without nostalgia for a “center” or for ‘origins.’” Typology is an example of plural contexts; for example, from the Christian perspective, the exodus is an historical event in itself, and so it unfolds within a historical context, but the exodus also points to the believer in Jesus passing through the “waters” of regeneration (Catholics would say the literal waters of baptism).

Derrida cannot have his cake and eat it; he can’t have a communication, a message, a specific interpretation, and his free play at the same time. It goes without saying (it too much) that although interpretation are imperfect vessels of meaning, they nevertheless mean. (See my Tower Derrida’s Tower of Babel).

What are these rules of “grammar, rhetoric and pragmatics” to which Derrida refers? “Grammar” refers to how words are used in sentences, “rhetoric” refers to the art of discourse, which aims to improve language facility in speaking and writing in the the different functions of language such as transacting (providing) information and persuasion.

Now, when we say language means something, we mean at least two kinds of meaning: sentence meaning (what Geoffrey Leech calls “semantic meaning”) and meaning beyond the sentence (in linguistic terms, suprasentential, intersentential meaning). This intersentential meaning is called “pragmatic meaning” (Leech), that is, the way sentences are used in larger chunks of discourse (Language use). So, there is a difference between sentence meaning (semantic meaning) and the meaning of a discourse as a whole (pragmatic meaning).

(Leech, L.G. 1983. Principles of pragmatics.London. Longman.1983].

The sentence in isolation from a functional (sociolinguistic) context only has potential meaning. It is this potential meaning which has to become actualised in language use. What is meant by the potential meaning of sentences?

It is obvious that every sentence in isolation from its functional context must contain meaningful units. For example, each of the three words in the sentence I am reading is a meaningful unit. These three units are combined into a larger meaningful unit, namely, the sentence.

The sentence, in turn combines, with other sentences to form an even larger unit called discourse. And it is only at the discourse level that parts of sentences and sentences come alive. Meaning at the sentence level and below is referred to in linguistics as semantic meaning, while meaning at the discourse level is referred to as pragmatic, or sociolinguistic meaning. So, from the point of view of discourse ( language use), the sentence has potential meaning only.

The distinction between semantic and pragmatic meaning can also be explained in the following way (Leech 1983):

- the meaning of X, which is the semantic or sentence meaning,

and

what you mean by X, which is the pragmatic or sociolinguistic meaning.

The sentence “I am reading” means that there is somebody, namely me who is reading. This meaning is the semantic or sentence meaning.

We use “I am reading” in a life situation:

Student A is sharing a room with Student B. Student A is reading in the room while Student B is out. Student B returns, sees Student A bowed over a book, and shouts: What are you doing? It is obvious to Student A that Student B is not requesting information as to whether Student A is reading a book – it is obvious that this is so.

Suppose Student A’s answer is I’m reading. The semantic meaning of this utterance is clear, namely, Student A is not eating, or sleeping, but reading. But what does Student A mean by I’m reading and what does Student B mean by What are you doing?

Here are a few possibilities of the pragmatic meaning of these two sentences, one a question, the other the answer to the question:

Question: “What are you doing?”

1. Hey, what are you doing in my bed?”

2. What a miracle, you’re reading a book!

3. We’ve been looking all over for you, and here you are all the time, rotting at your desk.

Answer: “I’m reading.”

1. I vant to be alone.

2. It’s no good, I’ll never speak to you again.

3. I’m so bored, the TV is not working; what else is there to do but read – yawn.

4. Who the blazes do you think you are to speak to me like that?

5. You illiterate idiot, go back to your comics.

So the pragmatic context of language does not merely go beyond the sentence meaning, it actually makes the sentence meaningful, and actual meaning (enacted in language use) is the only kind of meaning that we can live by. (See my Structure in Grammar and in Function: A Marginal Note).

Let us now return to the sentence we started with, namely, Derrida’s definition of deconstruction (keeping in mind that this definition is far from exhaustive).

“Here or there I have used the word deconstruction which has nothing to do with destruction. That is to say, it is simply a question of…being alert to the implications, to the historical sedimentations of the language which we use – and that is not destruction.”

Deconstruction, therefore, deals with the dregs of what language used to mean, while grammar, rhetoric and pragmatics deals with language use, what it means on this page. 

And, unsurprisingly, there are no mistakes in deconstruction, because, reality is a taken, not a given; in other words, you construct your reality, and if you do so using the historical sedimentations of language as your foundation, you would be doing deconstruction. Here is an example, which, again unsurprisingly, originates in the confusion of tongues at Babel. The example is Derrida’s “mistaken” view of the origin of the very term “Babel.”

We read Derrida writing about reading Voltaire. Voltaire makes the following assumption about the etymology of “Babel”:

BA = father BEL = god

We follow Derrida following Voltaire. Derrida refers to Voltaire’s observation that Babel besides being a proper noun has, as a common noun, two further meanings, namely (1) disorder, and (2) perplexity, i.e. the perplexity which confronted the architects before the interrupted work. All these senses, he claims, became confused. This is so. But watch what happens.

We observe Derrida in his “Des Tours de Babel” imitating Voltaire’s interpretation of Babel as “father-God”. But Voltaire is wrong, for BEL has nothing to do with God; Babel derives from BAB-ILU and does not mean “father-God”, but “God-gate”.

(J. Derrida. 1985. The Tower of Babel. In: Graham, J.F. (ed. and Trans.). Difference in Translation . Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Here is another edition. The English translation“The Tower of Babel,” of the French “Des Tours de Babel” loses the play on words of “detour” and “des tours”).

What does Derrida’s “Des Tours de Babel” lose in taking the wrong detour? Not much is lost on the BA(B) because what Derrida considers to be the father seme does not disseminate into the remains of his tortured text. But it is the unbeautiful gate ILU, mistaken for BEL (God) which ties the rest of “Des Tours…” into an unsacred knot (p.203-4 of “Des Tours…”).

Towards the end of his detour in “Des tours…”, Derrida is upset in the saddle of his own interventions: an unstrategic spillage, displacing the displacement of his own pluralities. I’m reminded of Walter Brueggemann’s “pluriform” versions of the “big story”.  He gives the example of Mark’s Gospel. “Luke came along and said that’s (Brueggeman’s emphasis) not the way the story is put together and so from what I understand from New Testament scholars, he put it together very differently…there is a big story but it is profoundly pluriform.”

 He gives the example of the “pluralism of our faith”: you’re a new pastor whose moved to town and you don’t know any of the families. A mother dies and and you ask the five daughters what their mother was like. You’ll get five contradictory stories where they’ll say “she wasn’t like that at all.” And you’re the pastor and have to weave that altogether. (My transcript of part of the Q&A session of the 2004 Emergent Theological Conversation with Walter Brueggemann. (The audio and the Brueggemann’s theses can be found here).

To return to Derrida. The law/lore of deconstruction imposed on the text sanctions (which can mean either “commands” or “forbids,” but in deconstruction means both! depending on which detour you want to take) Derrida to pass the gate off for God; ILU for (B)EL. The question is whether this disclosure of the sediments of repetition and reversal of gate and God weaken the foundations of deconstruction? On the contrary, it is these very fortuitous (strategic?) repetitions and reversals – every loss is always aGAIN – which make more explicit the hidden sedimentations of language.. I try and show why this is so:The gate re-opens (is it the same gate?), revealing a path (the same path?), a track, a trace, departing from the tower of Babylon and arriving at a stairway in Bethel. The stairway rests on the earth and reaches up to heaven. On the stairway, angels coruscate up and down. At the top of the ladder stands the God of Genesis; at the bottom, Jacob, the heEler of God; asleep:

I am the Lord the God of your Ab[FATHER]raham and the God of Isaac [LAUGHTER]. I will give you and your descendants the land on which you are lying. Your descendants will be like the dust of the earth, and you will spread out to the West and to the East, to the North and to the South. All people on earth will be blessed through you and your offspring.

Jacob awakes; filled with awe he bursts into worship and praise:

Surely the Lord is in this place, and I was not aware of it…How awesome is this place. This is none other than the house of God; this is the gate of God.

Jacob’s gate is the gate of El, while Jacques’ gate; well, that’s his BEL.

(For a fuller explanation of Derrida’s error see Babel: Can Derrida’s Tour (Surprisingly) Translate Us Anywhere?

Certainty and Fidelity in Biblical Interpretation: The Deconstruction of Walter Brueggemann

Part of my title is ambiguous: “The deconstruction of Walter Brueggemann.” Do I mean that I am going to deconstruct Brueggemann or that I am going to examine Brueggemann’s deconstruction of hermeneutics? I leave the reader to decide on the (re-)interpretation. After all, it’s Brueggemann’s thesis that every text must be continually reinterpreted. Besides, I think I’m (relatively) better at talking about deconstruction than deconstructing.

 I offer a few thoughts on Walter Brueggemann, the biblical theologian, for whom theology and Bible interpretation is not a matter of certainty but of fidelity; fidelity to the divine office of creative imagination. One of his books is entitled, An Introduction to the Old Testament: The Canon and Christian Imagination

 Here is a transcript of part of the Q&A session of the 2004 Emergent Theological Conversation with Walter Brueggemann. (The audio and the Brueggemann’s theses can be found here). There are four Q&A sessions. In this discussion, I deal with Session 1.

QandA Session 1 (Parts in brackets have been added)

Question:

 How do you live with the ambivalence of biblical narrative.

Brueggemann

 “We all have a hunger for certitude. The problem is the Gospel is not about certitude, it’s about fidelity. So, what we all want to do, if we can, is immediately transpose fidelity into certitude, because fidelity is a relational category, and certitude is a flat mechanical category (such as systematic theology, says Brueggemann in his theses ). So, we have to acknowledge our thirst for certitude, and then to recognise that if you had all the certitudes in the world, it would not make the quality if your life any better because what we must have is fidelity. …It all went haywire in the 17th century with Lutheranism and Calvinism when we tried to outscience science and switch into categories of certitude …Fidelity is like having a teenager in the house and you never get it settled for more than three minutes, and you’ve got to keep doing it again or you don’t have a relationship.

Questioner 

“Part of the job of the pastor is help people see the difference between the two (certitude and fidelity), or to deconstruct their certitude.”

Brueggemann 

“Yes, that’s right; to realise that the promise for certitude that is given by any voice is a phoney promise that cannot be kept. There’s not enough certitude to make us happy and make us safe.”

If Brueggemann believes that the Bible has no certitude, then, deconstruction is definitely up his street. We need to know, though, that “deconstruct” is not at all the same concept as “take apart,” or any of the many other wrong understandings of it. It’s far more complicated (and confusing) than man could ever dream. It’s a specialist term invented by the Jew, Jacob (Jacques) Derrida.

In Derrida’s deconstruction (there is no other kind of deconstruction), language – the sediment of the desire to mean, to communicate – has no locatable centre nor retrievable origin; its existence is a network of differences between signifiers (sounds or written symbols signifying meaning), each tracing and tracking the other. In deconstruction there is no necessary connection between the desire to signify (to mean) and the signifiers that evoke that desire. Desire for such a connection results in nostalgia; the return (nostos) of suffering (algos):

“[I]f language is not inherently determined by a set of univocal meanings, then language use, given an unlimited number of contexts over an indefinite period of time, becomes an unrestricted interaction of signifiers, the Nietzschean affirmation of free play without nostalgia for a “center” or for ‘origins’” (J. Derrida 1981, Dissemination. Translated by Barbara Johnson. London: Athlone, 278-93).

Now, if signifiers, namely, what words appear to mean, are continuously jumping, bumping toppling over one another, this does not mean, according to deconstruction, that they are doing so in order to arrive at some specific meaning, or essence. Indeed, deconstruction attempts to reverse the Platonic (no, nothing to do with no-sex, this time) notion that “essence is more valuable than appearance. In deconstruction however, we reverse this, making appearance more valuable than essence,” where “essence” connotes a specific meaning, which deconstruction eschews.

Neuralgia, nostalgia. Non-deconstructionists are painfully aware that the dictionary meaning of “nostalgia” has nothing to do with its etymological meaning of a “return (nostos) of suffering (algos)” (Derrida above). So, we must be careful of getting bogged down in the historical sedimentations of language, as is the wont of deconstruction. And where did – I suspect – Derrida find his deconstructive inspiration? Surely, from the letters of Hebrew fire – the depth and death of meaning and the different levels of meaning PaRDes:

Peshat (פְּשָׁט) — “plain” (“simple”) or the direct meaning.

Remez (רֶמֶז) — “hints” or the deep (allegoric: hidden or symbolic) meaning beyond just the literal sense.

Derash (דְּרַשׁ) — from Hebrew darash: “inquire” (“seek”) — the comparative (midrashic) meaning, as given through similar occurrences.

Sod (סוֹד) (pronounced with a long O as in ‘bone’) — “secret” (“mystery”) or the mystical meaning, as given through inspiration or revelation.

I elaborate on Brueggemann’s distinction between “certitude” and “fidelity.”

For Brueggemann, any interaction between 1. certitude, which he considers limited because it is restricted to a single meaning (univocity) and 2. fidelity, should be frowned upon. We should, therefore, be open, as Derrida says (above), to “an unlimited number of contexts over an indefinite period of time,” and thus unrestricted interaction – if I understand Brueggemann – between suffering persons desiring to tell their personal stories. For Brueggemann and Derrida, and all poststructuralists (who believe there is no metaphysical centre, no fixed structures), there exists no such entity as Being, no such entity as essence, no such thing as a True story, but only (human) beings telling their true-ish stories, which are the only stories that ultimately matter. And if the Bible stories are able to buck – and back – them up, thank you Holy Spirit.

Jesus: The Truth will make you certain and free.

Brueggemann: The Truth will make you uncertain and flee.

The Truth necessarily brings suffering and makes you feel very unsafe. Unsafe in the world, yes; for the supernatural reason that the biblical story clashes with the world’s story/stories (the world system). 

En passant, much of rabbinical Judaism, but certainly not all, resonates with the idea that life is mainly about what makes us happy and safe. We still, though, don’t know what Brueggemann means by “fidelity.” He explains: “The symbol of that (fidelity) is the way of the cross. The way of the cross is always to be departing certitudes so that we may be in the company of Jesus.”

According to Brueggemann, therefore, fidelity means being in the company of the crucified Jesus, but this can only become a reality if we “depart” from our “certitudes;” If language has consensual meanings, I presume Brueggemann means by “certitudes,” all certitudes. Surely, though, if we are to be faithful (fidel) to the way of the cross, as Brueggemann suggests, we need to be certain that “Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures” (1 Corinthians 15:3).

What Brueggemann is advocating, in different words, is that we shouldn’t be cocksure about anything, even about, “Verily (surely, certainly, truly) I say unto thee, that this night, before the cock crow, thou shalt deny me thrice” (Matthew 26:34).

Derrida, Jean Paul Sartre, Andre Gide, Albert Camus, as well as every postmodernist, poststructuralist, deconstructionist, in fact, anyone who doesn’t believe in Certitude, would ask the question: “What fun’s left once you find the Messiah, once you’ve found the “Cross?” After all, the ideal, says Renan, is fundamentally a utopia. What is more ideal than Truth? 

Brueggemann is on a journey; never arriving, always departing; a sitting on suitcases, all packed and ready to leave for the next departure lounge. That, as I said elsewhere, is deconstruction. But doesn’t Jesus himself make his disciples uncertain? Here is Brueggemann:

“And Jesus doesn’t make any of his disciples certain. I think that’s why essentially teaches in figures and parables and enigmatic statements that always have to be reinterpreted… When you’ve emptied everything out to make it plain and clear and unambiguous, you’ve emptied it out of what’s happening in the transaction.”

Jesus did, in contrast to Brueggemann’s assertion, make his disciples certain (much of the time). The Bible certainly states:

“And with many such parables He spoke the word to them as they were able to hear it. 34 But without a parable He did not speak to them. And when they were alone, He explained all things to His disciples” (Mark 4:33-34).

I’m emptied out. And it’s also time to pack my suitcase for the next departure lounge.

(To be continued – at the next departure lounge).

Thomas Aquinas: Philosophy and Education in the Middle ages

In Catholic seminaries, three of the first four years of study is devoted to Greek philosophy, mainly Aristotle. Aristotle is central to Catholic theology because the bulk of it derives from the dazzling intellect of Thomas Aquinas (1225 – 1274) who built his theology on Aristotle.

Thomas Aquinas by Fra Angelico

Aristotle ostensibly demonstrated that the universe could be understood without recourse to religion and its associated divine revelation. This understanding, however, was not concerned with ultimate questions about existence and about God, which other religions such Judaism, Hinduism and Buddhism are concerned with.

For example, the Greek gods had a modest influence over mankind compared to the God of the Hebrews. For one, when the Greek gods arrived in the universe, the universe was already all there. In contrast, the God of the Hebrews not only pre-existed the universe, He created it. Also, the Greek gods had no control over human (random) fate , whereas the central teaching of the Bible (Old Testament and New) is that God is a sovereign ruler and sustainer of all things. Greek religion had its ceremonies and rituals and its – believed, if not perceived – benefits. But it didn’t matter one iota whether you attended the ceremonies or practised the rituals. Greek religion couldn’t conceive – and if it did, probably wouldn’t have cared – that religion could give you a purpose in life, or that it could “renew your mind” (Romans1:2). Such an idea was totally foreign to the Greek mind. You don’t renew your mind, you expand it, you unfold it. The creation account in Genesis, for example, or the theological disputes in Christian theology would be regarded with amusement, even disdain. In this regard, the modern mind is very similar to the classical mind. When a Greek citizen took time off from his busy banqueting schedule to meditate on deep issues, he’d take a dip into philosophy for answers; Greek philosophy, naturally. Anything else was trivial. The modern secular mind is very similar to the classical mind in their disdain of theology and faith, which they consider to be not only delusional piffle but “lethally dangerous” (Dawkins, Richard, November 11, 2001, “Has the world changed?“. The Guardian).

Aristotle, like all Greeks, hadn’t read, nor would he have cared to read, the Hebrew Scriptures. It would’ve been beneath his Hellenic hubris and Attic dignity to do so. Attic Greek is the prestige dialect of Ancient Greek that was spoken in Attica, which includes Athens. Of the ancient dialects, it is the most similar to later Greek, and is the standard form of the language studied in courses of “Ancient Greek” (Wikipedia).

Aristotle, like all the Greek philosophers before and after him, were preoccupied with the idea God. Theology, the study (logos) of God (theos) could be undertaken purely through the natural means of reason and ordinary experience. Revealed theology wasn’t necessary to know God, because natural theology could do the job. The Christian view is that God is there, but he is not silent. (“He Is There and He Is Not Silent” is the title of a book by Francis Schaeffer. This book deals with the philosophic necessity of God being there and not being silent). The classical view is that although God is – supernaturally – there, he is indeed silent, and would – naturally – remain so.

After the final demise of the Roman Empire in 476 (there are 210 theories on why Rome fell, and more keep cropping up), interest in classical literature waned until it was largely forgotten. But in later centuries, classical literature and philosophy began to see a resurgence. Its pagan worldview, however, was a threat to Christianity. The idea that God could be discovered without the aid of scripture was seen as a threat to Christian tradition. In several instances there was fierce opposition, which sometimes triggered riots, and even heresy trials.

It was only in the 9^th century, under Charlemagne’s (King of the Franks. 747 – 814) educational reforms that opposition to the classics melted away.

In the Middle Ages, theology was well established as the queen of the sciences, and philosophy was its handmaiden. “Science” in the Middle Ages up to the Enlightenment of the 18^th century signified any systematic recorded “knowledge” (Latin scientia). “Science” had the same broad meaning as “Philosophy” (Greek philo “love” and sophos “knowledge, wisdom”.

The Enlightenment is a period in Western culture and philosophy that divested itself of religious beliefs and resuscitated the the classical faith in reason. The Enlightenment resuscitated the Aristotelian idea of the primacy of reason. The difference between the Reformation and the Enlightenment is that on the Reformation view, justification is by faith alone; whereas on the Enlightenment view, justification is by faith in reason alone. Though “faith in reason” is an oxymoron” (Greek oxy “pointed”, moron “silly”), it is not for practical purposes a contradiction. I explain:

How do we know, how do we prove that our noggins are rational? That’s easy; use your noggin. This, however, is no solution, because you can’t use your noggin to prove you have a noggin, that is, you can’t use your reason to prove that your reason is rational. If we cannot prove our reason is rational, this does not stop us living out our practical lives. So, although the foundation principle of our knowledge may remain out of reach, this does affect the practical uses of knowledge. It’s a bit like God; we may ignore or be ignorant of Him, yet this does not affect the comfortable life of being a professor of theology or Greek philosophy.

When Rome fell, Greek literature and philosophy had been largely forgotten in Medieval Europe. The Medieval Church in Europe did not only encourage the study of Greek philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle, but also encouraged Muslim philosophers such as Avicenna and Averroes. It was Muslim scholarship, mainly Avicenna (Ibn Sina) and Averroes (Ibn Rushd), that introduced Greek philosophy to the West. There was also the great Jewish philosopher, Moses Maimonides. Aquinas had a great respect for Maimonides. There is written on Moses Maimonides’ tombstone: “From Moshe (Moses) to Moshe (Moses Maimonides) there was none like Moshe.” A Catholic might want to add “until Thomas.

Thomas Aquinas was called “the dumb ox” at school. He was very fat, and suffered from dropsy, and one eye was much bigger than the other. (This feature is not clear in the Fra Angelico picture above). In his youth, he was lethargic, introspective, spoke little, and most of the time was lost to the world.

When he was 18, he had set his mind on becoming a friar in the Dominican order. A monk. A vow of poverty. On his way to Rome, he was nabbed by his brothers, who brought him home. He was kept prisoner for more than a year.

No threats, no entreaties, no prayers, no enticements could deter him. What about an Abbot? Or a Bishoprick? Ok, then, an Archbishoprick; there’s one going in Naples. Even a prostitute secreted into his chambers could not dampen his resolve.

His family finally relented, and Thomas was sent to Cologne to study under Albertus Magnus (Albert the Great)’ “Magnus” because he was the greatest scholastic philosopher in Europe. Thomas went to Paris where he studied and obtained his Master’s degree. He also wrote some of his works there. In about 1261, Pope Urban invited him to come and teach in Rome. About 10 years later he returned to Paris. Soon after, he founded a new studium generale in Naples. A studium generale is the medieval name for an education institution of international excellence. The universities of Paris, Oxford and Cambridge, which were established in the early 13^th century were three other studia generalia.

Thomas is called Doctor Angelicus, which the Roman Catholic Church translates as “Angelic Doctor”. This does not mean that he was angelic but that he was an expert on angels, a “doctor of angels.”

Aquinas was the greatest of the “Scholastics” (Schoolmen). Scholasticism is a medieval Catholic school of philosophy and theology. The roots of Scholasticism go back to the 8^th century educational reforms of Charlemagne (Charles the Great; 747 – 814), King of the Franks. Education was called the “liberal arts”; “liberal” because education was open only to freemen (Latin: liber, “free”), and not to slaves.

The modern term ‘liberal arts’ is a curriculum aimed at developing intellectual abilities, in contrast to a vocational, professional, or technical curriculum. In ancient Greece and Rome (the classical period), the term designated the education appropriate to a freeman as opposed to a slave. In the feudal system of the Middle Ages, education was open only to the privileged few – the equivalent of the classical freeman of Greece and Rome. Education was limited to those who didn’t need to make a living.

The education curriculum consisted of two main divisions. The trivium (“three”) and the quadrivium (“four”). The trivium consisted of three language subjects: “grammar”, “rhetoric” and “dialectic”. The quadrivium consists of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music. Let me say more about the trivium of “grammar”, “rhetoric” and “dialectic”.

The classical and medieval meaning of “grammar” was not restricted to the rules of language. “Grammar” consisted of rules as well as literature, for example, poetry and drama.

“Rhetoric” is the art of persuading an listeners or readers to feel, think or act a certain way. “Rhetoric” also has the ordinary (non-academic) meaning of “empty words”, “hot air”, as in “He’s all rhetoric and no substance.” “Rhetoric” in this sense is the most trivial of the trivium.

The third component of the trivium was “dialectic”. “Dialectic was another name for logical reasoning, or simply, “logic”. The classical philosophers as well as the Medieval theologians based their intellectual practice on the assumption that all mentally healthy humans are endowed with the same rules of logic: the rules of my mind are the same as the rules of everyone else’s mind. The dialectical method is also called the Socratic method, because it came down to us through Socrates via Plato. (Plato, a pupil of Socrates, preserved and expanded his teacher’s thought in the “Platonic dialogues”).

The Socratic method takes the form of a debate. Participants in the debate explore one another’s positions in a stimulating, rational and illuminating way. The Socratic debate, however, doesn’t merely involve a sharing of ideas. The crux – and the fun -of a dialectic debate involves cutting and thrusting through contrary points of view. Each participant tries to lead the other to contradict himself. You don’t try and prove how clever you are; that only strengthens your opponent’s resolve. Instead, you let your opponent kick the ball into his own scrotum.

Plato, in his “Socratic dialogues”, portrays Socrates asking questions that elicit other questions. Socrates may know the answer, but pretends he doesn’t. In this way, the teacher does not lord himself over his pupil. The art is to cross-examine without making the other person peeved; to weed out without making the other person feel a weed, to uncover contradictions without making the other feel naked.

The Socratic method is not only applicable in the formal teaching situation; it is also applicable – and admirably so – in the home. I may talk till I’m blue in the face to my children about all these wise how-to’s, but what ultimate good does it do if I don’t do it myself. My daughter Beccy has often berated me for rubbishing her views.

The aim of both dialectic and rhetoric is to persuade. But dialectic restricts itself to rational persuasion, whereas “rhetoric” covers all kinds of persuasion such as how to feel and act. “Rhetoric” is often a one-sided matter. Somebody talks and somebody listens. Dialectic, in contrast, aims to persuade through rational discussion, through dialogue, the (objective) truth of a matter.

Although scholasticism developed a poor reputation during and after the Renaissance, scholastic writers had produced useful philosophical ways of explaining Catholic doctrine. Aquinas used the Aristotelian terms of “accidents” and “substance” to explain the most important of Catholic doctrines, the “real presence”, which is called transubstantation. In transubstantiation, the substance of bread and the wine changes into the substance of the body and Spirit of Christ. Although the senses can only detect the “accidents” (taste, texture, smell, sight), the communicant – claims the dogma – is eating the actual flesh and blood of the living Christ sitting at the right hand of the Father.

The Catechism of the Council of Trent expands this belief by stating: “In this sacrament are contained not only the true body of Christ, and all the constituents of a true body, such as bones and sinews, but also Christ whole and entire”. Christ whole and entire is contained not only in the body but also in the blood.

Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae covers almost the whole of Catholic theology. He stopped working on it the year before he died in 1274.

Now, fellow Protestants, don’t give Protestantism a bad name by saying that Aquinas believed that all he had written was straw. He didn’t say that. This is what he said: “I cannot go on…. All that I have written seems to me like so much straw compared to what I have seen and what has been revealed to me.”

Enlightenment, modern style: Bums on suitcases, all packed and ready to leave for the next departure lounge

“The need to get away? The desire to arrive?”

 (Herman Hertzberger, “Space and the Architect” in “Silent Wounds of the family,” a proposal for the conversion of the Great Synagogue of Pretoria building to a family court.)

In 1961, I was a student of philosophy at the University of Cape Town and in love with Aristotle, especially his “Golden mean”; if it is possible, that is, to go weak at the knees over equanimity:

“The concept of Aristotle’s theory of golden mean is represented in his work called Nicomachean Ethics, in which Aristotle explains the origin, nature and development of virtues which are essential for achieving the ultimate goal, happiness (Greek: eudaimonia), which must be desired for itself. It must not be confused with carnal or material pleasures, although there are many people who consider this to be real happiness, since they are the most basic form of pleasures. It is a way of life that enables us to live in accordance with our nature, to improve our character, to better deal with the inevitable hardships of life and to strive for the good of the whole, not just of the individual.”

(The person who wrote this has got Aristotle right on the button in spite of the fact that his lewd URL seems to suggest otherwise; http://www.anus.com/zine/articles/draugdur/golden_mean/)

Aristotle believed that virtue was the means to life’s goal, which – plus ça change… – is happiness. Virtue strives for happiness and the good, the good of all. Indeed, Aristotle’s happiness (and Plato’s for that matter) IS the good. In Aristotle, every human life has a departure and a destination; the reason why you travel is – surely – to arrive at a specific place. That place, for Aristotle, is here, in this world. Since the 19th century, the place to find happiness hasn’t changed, but what has changed since the “Enlightenment” is that its all about departing and no more about arriving unless arriving at another departure lounge.

Always departing never arriving. Never standing still, always moving. Bums on suitcases, all packed and ready to leave for the next departure lounge.

In the same year that I was basking in the academic glow of the Golden Mean, Martyn Lloyd Jones was giving one of his wonderful sermons in Westminster Chapel, London. Here is part of that sermon:

“The Victorians said,’To travel hopefully is better than to arrive.’ Stuff and nonsense. If that were true no one would get married, they’d say courtship is better than marriage. But you see this is the sort of phrase that fascinates people and it sounds so wonderful. Ah, they say, we don’t want any of your Christian evangelical dogmatic certainty. We are seekers after truth,we like the great quest after reality. There was no such thing as the knowledge of truth; that was the nonsense they talked, based on nothing but sheer ignorance.” (“By faith, Abraham”).

God called Abraham out of Ur, promised him an inheritance, but told him nothing between the departing and the arriving. Does this mean that the world in between doesn’t count for much? Yes, but in the way that school counts as preparation for life. We are pilgrims in this world. Pilgrims are not children of the “Enlightenment” who are always arriving at the next departure lounge; they (pilgrims) are, in contrast, children of the promise of a glorious inheritance looking for a better country:

“Through faith also Sara herself received strength to conceive seed, and was delivered of a child when she was past age, because she judged him faithful who had promised. Therefore sprang there even of one, and him as good as dead, so many as the stars of the sky in multitude, and as the sand which is by the sea shore innumerable. These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off, and were persuaded of them, and embraced them, and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth. For they that say such things declare plainly that they seek a country. And truly, if they had been mindful of that country from whence they came out, they might have had opportunity to have returned. 16 But now they desire a better country, that is, an heavenly: wherefore God is not ashamed to be called their God: for he hath prepared for them a city” (Hebrews 11:11-16)

“Christ, the Messiah, the Lord delivered them who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage” ( Hebrews 2:15).

Don’t run aimlessly. Don’t box as one beating the air (1 Corinthians 9:26).

“Let our path, then, be upward; let us gather around us the trailing garment, casting away whatever impedes our progress; and leaning upon our Beloved and our Friend, hasten from all below, until we find ourselves actually reposing in the bosom upon which, in faith and love, in weakness and sorrow, we had rested amid the trials and perils of the ascent. There is ever this great encouragement, this light upon the way, that it is a heaven-pointing, a heaven-conducting, a Heaven-terminating path; and before long the weary pilgrim will reach its sunlit summit” (Octavius Winslow).

In the living light the silent wound of the soul is healed.

Jewish mysticism and Absorption into the Universal Soul

Christianity teaches that God created the world out of nothing. It bases this doctrine on the first words of the Hebrew Bible: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” In Genesis 1:26, “God said: ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness (Hebrew root dama, from which we get ADAM).

What does the Bible mean by man being created in the image, in the likeness  of God? What is certain – if we accept that God is Spirit (in Christianity, when the Word was made flesh, the picture changes, of course) -  is that man is a composite of spirit and flesh, while God is pure Spirit. Genesis 1:26 does not specify what it means by man as the “image of God.” When a Christian examines the rest of scripture, the following human attributes emerge, which man shares with God: creativity, power to reason, power to make decisions, moral conscience and personal relationships. These are called the communicable attributes of God. The attributes that God does not share with man are God’s incommunicable attributes, for example, his omniscience (all-knowing), omnipotence (all-powerful) and eternality (no beginning), immutability (unchanging).

Traditional Judaism of which a large part is mystical Judaism (Kabbalah, Chassidim) teaches that man’s soul (neshamah) is a piece of God. Some parts of the Talmud say that only the Jewish soul is a piece of God. Most Jews maintain that the Talmud says no such thing. But see here. Reconstructionist Judaism, in stark contrast to traditional Judaism, says that traditional Judaism has got it all back to front. So, to put the record straight, a little reconstruction is needed: Man is not a piece of God; God is a piece of man (God is a human construction). (See Logotherapy, Torah Judaism and Reconstructionist Judaism: God, man and God-man).

I’d like to focus on two prominent rabbinical scholars of Kabbalah: Rabbi Jacob Immanuel Schochet and Rabbi Akiva Tatz. In his “Mystical Judaism,” Rabbi Schochet sets his sights on donkey scholarship:

“The sterile type of life and ‘scholarship’ of the “donkey loaded with books,” unfortunately, is quite symptomatic of the modern age and its method of alleged rational inquiry, of ‘logical positivism’ and its atomizing games of linguistic analysis. The mystical dimension forcefully counters this and bears a pervasive message of special relevance to modern man. With this message we are able to extricate ourselves from the contemporary mind- and soul-polluting forces that threaten to stifle us, and to find ourselves. For it is the tzinor, the conduit connecting us to ultimate reality. It is the stimulant causing “deep to call unto deep” – the profound depth of man’s soul calling unto the profound depth of the Universal Soul to find and absorb itself therein. Thus it brings forth and establishes the ultimate ideal of unity, of oneness, on all levels” (p. 36).

 For Rabbi Akiva Tatz, the tzinor does not only connect human beings to ultimate reality, but every else in the in the universe as well. In his Thirteen principles, part 5, 45th minute:

“The worlds above are like water, sometimes described as light…but if you take the world of water in the upper spheres. Water is undifferentiated, all the parts look the same. Imagine water in a bath. Underneath the bath there are small holes. What happens is inside the bath the water is all one, but outside it is flowing in specific channels, which are called tzinorot (צינורות) … a pipeline. You have the undifferentiated oneness in the higher world, but it comes into this world as specific differentiated channels that bring it down. Each channel is bringing an object into existence, or an event or a phenomenon. And of course you don’t need to look at the object, you can look at the channel and you will know more or less how the object will be or what will happen.”

All religious systems, by definition, assume a close connection between “ultimate reality” (Schochet) and the universe, which consists of human beings, objects and other (invisible) beings. Schochet and Tatz derive their views from the Kabbalah/Zohar, of course. While Schochet’s tzinor (pipeline, conduit) connects the human soul to the “Universal Soul to find and absorb itself therein,” Tatz’s tzinor connects ALL created beings to “the world of water in the upper spheres,” which is a different description of Schochet’s “Universal Soul.” The two descriptions – ”Universal Soul” and “the world of water in the upper spheres,”are metaphors for the “Endless One” (En Sof).

Schochet’s “Universal Soul to find and absorb itself therein,” is Buddhism – or Pythagoreanism – without idols. Kabbalah and Pythagoras have much in common. This does not necessarily mean that Pythagoras, or a similar system, influenced Jewish mysticism, for what is more expected than human beings wanting to become absorbed in the ”Universal,” or “Upper Waters.” Jews often insist that Greek and Jewish thought are poles apart. On the contrary, Jewish mysticism, Greek mysticism, Eastern mysticism, or any other kind of mysticism all sing the same absorbing universal tune.

How can a Perfect God create the potential for imperfection?

I received the following comment on my Yin Yang, God and the devil: A cosmic chess game?

 The respondent writes:

My issue is this: If “God” created and allows all things… then “God” also created Satan and the potential to become Evil. The potential must have existed within “God” at least as a thought/possibility or it never would have come into existence. Another way to word it is: How could something “imperfect” come from something “perfect”?

My basic assumption, which seems to be the same as the respondent, is that the only perfect being that exists – that could possibly exist – is God. Based on this assumption, I think it is also reasonable to assume that nothing perfect can arise from something imperfect. The  respondent’s problem is: how can imperfection arise from a perfect God? He provided the example of God creating another perfect being – an angelic being – with the potential for evil; a potential that monotheists such as Christians, Jews and Muslims claim does not exist in God Himself.

I would like to change the example from Satan to man, which does not change the basic issue, which is, if God creates beings with the potential to become evil, why does this potential for evil not exist in God, in his nature, or his essence.

I focus on the term “nature.” There is the nature, or essence, of an entity, which distinguishes the identity of one entity (being) from another. Every created being, living and non-living, has its own nature; Humans, lions, roses, trees, diamonds, and so on. The uncreated God, of course, also has a nature (uncreated in the Bible implies that He must be the creator of all entities, which by defnition, must be different to His nature.

God’s creation, however, is not part of his nature. Here is an analogy: the potter is not part of his pot (unless he’s potty). The analogy goes only so far, because both the (human) potter and what he makes (the pot), are imperfect, for they are both God’s creation. They both do not, therefore, share in God’s nature. The Talmud and Jewish Kabbalistic writings teach that man is a piece (spark) of God, but that is certainly not in the Bible, nor is it good exegesis to find it there.  (See Rabbi Tani Burton).

I shall not discuss man as the image of God because that would take us too far from our main focus, which is how a perfect God can create the potential for imperfection, specifically, evil.(I discuss man as the image of God  elsewhere).

After God had created everything Adam, He “saw everything that he had made, and, behold, it was very good (TOV M’OD) (Genesis 1:31). ”Very good” implies complete, whole, harmonious. And those are the connotations of Hebrew word, which is translated into English as ”perfect.” For example,

Gen 17:1 And when Abram was ninety years old and nine, the LORD appeared to Abram, and said unto him, I am the Almighty God; walk before me, and be thou perfect.

Deut 18:13 Thou shalt be perfect with the LORD thy God.

Mat 5:48 Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.

“Perfect” (Hebrew: tam/tamiym) here does not mean “flawless,” ”impeccable” (incapable of sin – Latin peccatum) but “whole,” “complete;” as far as it is possible for a human being to be complete. When Jesus says, Mat 5:48 “Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect,” He is not saying that his disciples must aspire to share in God’s perfect nature, but rather that they must try to remain faithful to their new status as children of God, which is done by keeping His commandments. If they do not remain faithful, they (their wholeness) will fall apart. More accurately, if they do not remain faithful, this shows that ”they went out from us, but they did not really belong to us. For if they had belonged to us, they would have remained with us; but their going showed that none of them belonged to us” (1 John 2:19).

I mentioned that after God had created the pinnacle of his creation, Adam, He “saw everything that he had made, and, behold, it was very good TOV M’OD (Genesis 1:31). At the beginning of Chapter 2, we read:

 ”Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. And on the seventh day God finished his work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work that he had done. So God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it God rested from all his work that he had done in creation” (Genesis 2:1-3).

Something’s missing, or rather somebody – Eve. She’s not included as part of the original ”very good” creation, because she was formed after and from Adam. Which I think was also very good, even if it doesn’t say TOV M’OD.

Now, to the issue of how imperfection can result from God’s perfection. The Christian answer is that God created the first human beings (Adam and Eve) with the ability to disobey Him. They were created complete (“perfect”). They, however, decided to disobey God. This sin resulted in their “Fall,” which sowed the seeds of radical corruption ( Latin radix ”root” ) and death. (The rabbinical view rejects radical corruption, and describes sin as more akin to a soiled face than a corrupt heart.

Why God would create a world where He knew man would become radically corrupt is not something we can ever know. If you think about it, who are we tell God how to run his creation? “Let God be true, and every man a liar” says Paul, on behalf of the Jew, and addressed to both Jew and Gentile:

1 What advantage then hath the Jew? or what is the profit of circumcision? 2 Much every way: first of all, that they were intrusted with the oracles of God. 3 For what if some were without faith? shall their want of faith make of none effect the faithfulness of God? 4 God forbid: yea, let God be found true, but every man a liar; as it is written, That thou mightest be justified in thy words, And mightest prevail when thou comest into judgment (Romans 3:1-4).

The majority of Jews rejected their Messiah. This lack of faith did not only smudge their face, it polluted their soul. The million shekel question, which my respondent could have asked, is: Why did God choose the Jews (or anyone else) if He knew that he would only save a remnant (the ancient prophets make it abundantly clear that only a remnant will be saved)? The answer is because the Bible teaches that if you love God’s word, you love everything He does. Outside of God’s word, unbelievers end up where they started; on the rickety bridge of philosophy – or whatever grabs their imperfect fancy.

My title is  ”How can a Perfect God create the potential for imperfection?” ”Can” in the title has the meaning of ability. So we can rephrase the question so: ”Is it within God’s power to create something imperfect?” I argued that this is possible. There is another question my respondent did not ask, to which I only gave a partial answer. It’s a question that relates more to the moral side of God’s character than to His omnipotence: ”Why would/did God create the potential for imperfection, for sin, for evil, for damnation? A comprehensive answer to that question can be found in the scriptures.

Addendum

Earlier I said:

“Why God would create a world where He knew man would become radically corrupt is not something we can ever know.”

But then I said:

”Why would/did God create the potential for imperfection, for sin, for evil, for damnation? A comprehensive answer to that question can be found in the scriptures.”

One of my respondents pointed out the contradiction. He is correct; I am contradicting myself. The second statement is my position. Let me rephrase the first statement:

“Why God would create a world where He knew man would become radically corrupt is not something we can ever know from natural wisdom.”

 

Faith and Understanding: the Biblical view

What comes first, faith or understanding (reason). God created both. So, which is the cart, and which the horse, which comes first? Is it true that Credo ut intelligam – I believe that I may understand? ["Credo ut intelligam (alternatively spelled Credo ut intellegam) is Latin for "I believe so that I may understand" and is a maxim of Anselm of Canterbury, which is based on a saying of Augustine of Hippo (crede, ut intelligas, "believe so that you may understand") to relate faith and reason. It is often accompanied by its corollary, intellego ut credam ("I think so that I may believe"), and by Anselm's other famous phrase fides quaerens intellectum ("faith seeking understanding")." (Wiki)]. Would it be more correct to say that I don’t believe IN Jesus but simply BELIEVE him? No, because it is both. Similarly, a believing Jew, I suggest, believes in God as well as believes God. What is important is that believing logically precedes believing in (trust). There is no need to prove his Emunah (belief and trust). “In the beginning” (Genesis 1:1) should be enough, and if not, then the man doesn’t have, according to Martin Buber, a genuine biblical bone in his body. “Biblical man, says Martin Buber, is never in doubt to the existence of God. In professing his faith, his EMUNAH*, he merely expresses his trust that the living God is near to him as he was to Abraham and that he entrusts himself to Him” (“Two types of faith” 1962). Abraham, Augustine and Anselm (and Buber, I presume) had this in common: “I believe that I may understand.” The Jew or the Christian who relies on tradition (oral or written) as the foundation of his/faith has not understood, for the simple reason that credo ut intelligam. Scripture comes alive because God gives it life, and thus it is God who opens the eyes that we may understand. This opening of the eyes is faith. One spends the rest of one’s life adjusting the eyes to the light, keeping in mind that in His light we see the light (Psalm 36:9). What a contrast to Dylan Thomas’ “Rage against the dying of the light.” Who hath put wisdom in the inward parts?or who hath given understanding to the heart? (Job 38:36). *EMUNAH comprises both Assensus (belief in the sense of mental assent) and Fiducia (trust, personal commitment). Here is an example of a Jewish misunderstanding of Christian “belief.” In Rabbi Moshe Shulman’s anti-Christian commentary on Isaiah 53, which he considers “the fullest explanation and discussion of the subject that now exists anywhere,” he says: “To receive this atonement one must believe that this death was for that purpose. You may be familiar with the doctrine, and know that people believe it, but if you don’t believe in it, then you are not saved.” A Christian apologist comments: “This statement comes somewhat closer to the truth. Yet, it needs correction and completion. For if one merely believes that Jesus’ death was for the purpose of atonement, he will not receive that atonement. Only the rebirth, which has the faith as a result, is sufficient. One has not merely to believe the doctrine of atonement in general, but also with a personal appropriation. Not merely ‘Christ has died for sinners,’ but also ‘Christ has died for me, and has atoned for me’.” http://www.iclnet.org/pub/resources/text/m.sion/shul53-1.htm (See also Assensus and Fiducia at http://onedaringjew.wordpress.com/2010/11/19/two-conversions-the-mind-and-the-heart-of-faith-in-blaise-pascal/)

Atheism, evil and purpose

A favourite atheistic argument is that God cannot exist because of the evil in the world. Yet, An atheist cannot use this argument that evil proves that God does not exist, for the following reason: the atheist believes that the universe has no purpose, and if no purpose then evil cannot exist, because evil is a “purpose-driven” concept.

Humanism spends much energy on trying to prove that the universe has no purpose while also advocating that the greatest purpose for man is to do good. What kind of meaningful life is this – meaningful because the desire to do good is surely meaningful? I answer an absurdly meaningful life, or perhaps it is better to say a meaningless absurd life.

Theological Aphasia and Language as Communion

There is language as communication and there is language as communion. The difference between the two is that the second is always personal. For those who believe in a personal God, language as communion is possible between both man and God. I describe some of the issues of human language in the secular and theological context.

The three paramount concerns of language, or aims of discourse, are the creation, expression and communication of meaning, which could be summarised as “learning how to mean” ( Halliday, M.A.K. Learning how to mean. London, Arnold, 1975). ”Functions” of language is the major dimension of language study ” (Kinneavy, 1983:131) because the functions of language tell us about the why (content), the where (context) and the how (well) of language use.

Roman Jacobsen defines the different functions of language:

The Referential function (transactional, informational) corresponds to the factor of context and describes a situation, object or mental state.

The Expressive (“emotive” or “affective”) function relates to the addressor (speaker) and refers to utterances that do not change the denotative (informational) meaning of an utterance but adds information about how the addressor feels about something.

The Conative function involves influencing or trying to change the Addressee’s (listener) behaviour.

The Poetic Function focuses on “the message for its own sake” (Jacobsen) as in literature and slogans. The Phatic function (the term was coined by Bronislav Malinowski) involves language in interpersonal/social interaction; for example, greetings and casual chat. (”Phatic” from Greek phatos ”spoken.” Aphasia is a speech defect). The Phatic function is the “getting to know you (better)” function; small talk, where the emphasis on the communication of information is small, while the emphasis on the communication of feelings is big.

The Metalingual (“metalinguistic” or “reflexive”) function – what Jakobson calls “Code” – is language used to think about, discuss, describe itself. (See my “Cognition and Language Proficiency”).

Chomsky suggests that expression, not communication, is the central function of language (Chomsky, Language and Responsibility, 1979:88). Ryle (1959), in a similar vein (at the end of his introduction to “The concept of mind”), states: “Primarily I am trying to get some disorders out of my own system. Only secondarily do I hope to help other theorists to recognise our malady and to benefit from my medicine.”The “purgative” (“suppository”) function of language is one function that did not occur to Jacobsen; and neither to Chomsky – I suppose.

Consider Devitt and Derelny’s view on the origin and functions of language. (Devitt, M., and Sterelny, K. 1987. Language & reality: An introduction to the philosophy of language. Basil Blackwell). Devitt and Derelny (1987) are committed to “physicalism”, that is, people are nothing but complex parts of the physical world. Devitt and Derelny (1987:127) maintain that language originated out of a need to understand the environment and ourselves in order to use and control the environment. Primitive man conveyed meaning through body language such as grunts and gestures. Grunts and gestures caught on out of which linguistic conventions were born. The capacity to think – according to Devitt and Derelny – is borrowed from those who created these conventions and thus primitive thought was made easy. The drive to understand leads to more complicated thoughts, to more complicated speaker meanings to more complicated conventions.

“If this sketch is right, we have, as individuals as a species, engaged in a prodigious feat of lifting ourselves up by our own semantic bootstraps…The picture is of a language of thought expanding with the introduction into it of a public language.” (Devitt & Derelny, 1987:127).

Devett and Derelny’s description echoes the modern atheistic-Darwinian view of the origins and function of language. Contrast this view where the main emphasis of language is theological:

“God speaks humans, like the rest of creation, into being. “Then God said, ‘Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness’…” (Genesis 1:26). In the creation stories in Genesis God’s speaking is God’s doing. “Then God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light” (Genesis 1: 3). The relationship between God and creation and the relationship in particular between God and human beings is mediated by the Word. God creates by speaking and humans are to listen and then in light of what they bear address God and one another. Human speech, therefore, is neither exclusively nor even primarily a social phenomenon between neighbors, but first and foremost a theological reality. Speech has something to do with who God is and what it means for humans to live, first, before God, and second, in communion with one another” (“Before God:” A Crisis in Sin and Redemption” by George Stroup).

(The excerpts above are from one of Stroup’s lectures. This lecture has been fleshed out in his book “Before God”).

The language of theological reality in Christianity  is the biblical narrative, which is at enmity with the worldly narrative. Here is the biblical communicative relationship between addressor and addressee:

“In biblical narrative humans are called to listen because it is God who speaks first. Human speech, therefore, is true when it responds obediently to the prior reality of God’s Word and God’s address. False speech—the lie—is not simply the distortion of the truth, although it is that, but, more significantly, it is speech that is not obedient to the Word by which it has been addressed, but an attempt to find some ground, some basis, other than the reality of God’s Word and God’s address…To live before God and to be truly and faithfully human is, first, to allow oneself to be addressed by God, and, second, to speak truthfully to God. It is listening to and speaking obediently to God that is also the basis for allowing oneself to be addressed by and to speak truthfully to one’s neighbor.”

In sum, those who reject the theological priority of language suffer from theological aphasia. The Apostle John provides a scriptural basis for Stroup (above):

“That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we looked upon and have touched with our hands, concerning the word of life—the life was made manifest, and we have seen it, and testify to it and proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and was made manifest to us—that which we have seen and heard we proclaim also to you, so that you too may have fellowship with us; and indeed our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ” (1 John 1:1-3 ESV).

In the phatic function of language, says Malinowski, ”The breaking of silence, the communion of words is the first act to establish links of fellowship, which is consummated only by the breaking of bread and the communion of food.” For the Christian, communion – which is the gathering of believers to break bread before the Lord’s Table – is the consumate theological emphasis on the Word made flesh.

Life, life, eternal life: The word made Fish

Towards the end of Albert Mohler’s “Thinking in Public” podcast, “Why we can’t all just get along: A conversation with Stanley Fish” (Jan 11 2011), Fish, a legal scholar and literary critic, and Mohler are discussing Fish’s latest book “How to read a sentence and write one,” in which Fish describes the marks of a good sentence. He ends his book with some of his favourite sentences. Fish tells Mohler that his favourite sentence is from Bunyan’s “Pilgrim’s Progress.” Here is his description:

“I end the main body of the book with my favorite sentences from the book which is a sentence from Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress and that sentence describes the moment when Bunyan’s hero Christian having discovered that he is burdened with original sin and mourning to rid himself of it starts to run from his village toward a light that he barely sees and now here is the sentence, “now he had not run far away from his own door.  But his wife and children perceiving it began crying after him to return.  But the man put his fingers in his ears and ran on crying ‘life, life, eternal life.’” That is both a great sentence absolutely amazing sentence, the way in which it is structured and a lesson in what it is that sentences can and cannot do.  Sentences can send us in the direction of something greater than they and therefore greater than us so sentences in a way perform their best office when they turn us in the direction of life, life, eternal life.

[Fish calls Bunyan's delectable chunk of discourse, a "sentence." As we all know, a sentence ends  with a full stop (period)].

Mohler:   I have to end by asking you the question that came to my mind at the end of your latest book. In a secular age is it perhaps true that for most sentences are all that remain?

Fish:  Yes.  And that is what I call in the book at a certain point the religion of art.  And when the liberal ethos doesn’t so much as give up religion but puts it in a corner it has to worship something. And what it usually worships is art, and one form of that art are sentences.  But I believe that the sentences that really matter don’t, neither invite nor allow that worship but in fact encourage you and invite you to search for something greater. (Podcast transcript can be found here).

Fish reminds me of Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, which studied in my French course at university. Brian Simpson writes on Flaubert’s novels in the John Hopkins magazine:

“The novel on your bedside table did not spring fully formed from the head of its maker. It was mulled over, massaged, fleshed out, scratched through, revised, set aside, and revised some more.”

Simpson quotes Flaubert: “When I’m finished with my novel . . . I’ll bring you my complete manuscript. . . . You will see through what complex mechanics I manage to make a sentence.”
(Gustave Flaubert in an April 15, 1852, letter to his lover Louise Colet).

As in Flaubert, so in Fish; language, not the plot, counts; because all that matters is what natters.

“Flaubert, Simpson continues, rewrote each page of Madame Bovary at least four or five times, and many a dozen times. In an 1855 letter to Louise Colet, he confided, “Last week I spent five days writing one page.” At the end of such weeks, he had finished only 500 words. But they were 500 perfect words.”

And for Jacques Neefs, an authority on Flaubert, “the vision is in the revisions.”

That’s Fish all over: vision is revision. Never standing still, always moving; never arriving always departing. Art for art sake, L’art pour l’art, in it’s many forms: language for language sake, painting for painting sake, sculpture for sculpture sake, where language, the supreme art form, cuts, not through, but into the Word – made, not flesh, but Art. The reason why there is no attempt to cut through language is because for Flaubert and Fish, there is nothing outside Art, outside the Art of language. Only sentences remain (Fish above), only sentences live, only sentences are eternal, only sentences live eternally. Sentences, says Fish, must be religiously nurtured (“the religion of art”- Fish), for they are the springboard to newness of life, to a newness of more sentences. There’s no centre, no arriving, no presence, no God; always departing never arriving. All these men remind me of Jacques Derrida and my friend, Bill, who asks: “So what’s the deal with having a messiah who’s arrived?  There’s a question for you. Where is the mystery once he’s exposed and had his say?”

The Word was made flesh (the Messiah), and the flesh was made fish (the word). There’s the Fisher of men and the fisher of words. For the fisher of words, there will be – unless something changes – no resurrection from the boggy sediments of language, but only a sentencing to an eternity of sentences – “one has to worship something” (Fish above). Or perhaps there will only be a sentencing to a single phrase, drumming over and over and over in those finely tuned literary ears: Bunyan’s “life, life, eternal life.”

Towards the end of Albert Mohler’s “Thinking in Public” podcast, “Why we can’t all just get along: A conversation with Stanley Fish” (Jan 11 2011), Fish, a legal scholar and literary critic, and Mohler are discussing Fish’s latest book “How to read a sentence and write one,” in which Fish describes the marks of a good sentence. He ends his book with some of his favourite sentences. Fish tells Mohler that his favourite sentence is from Bunyan’s “Pilgrim’s Progress.” Here is his description (my italics and underlining):

“I end the main body of the book with my favorite sentences from the book which is a sentence from Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress and that sentence describes the moment when Bunyan’s hero Christian having discovered that he is burdened with original sin and mourning to rid himself of it starts to run from his village toward a light that he barely sees and now here is the sentence, “now he had not run far away from his own door.  But his wife and children perceiving it began crying after him to return.  But the man put his fingers in his ears and ran on crying ‘life, life, eternal life.’” That is both a great sentence absolutely amazing sentence, the way in which it is structured and a lesson in what it is that sentences can and cannot do.  Sentences can send us in the direction of something greater than they and therefore greater than us so sentences in a way perform their best office when they turn us in the direction of life, life, eternal life.

Mohler:   I have to end by asking you the question that came to my mind at the end of your latest book. In a secular age is it perhaps true that for most sentences are all that remain?

Fish:  Yes.  And that is what I call in the book at a certain point the religion of art.  And when the liberal ethos doesn’t so much as give up religion but puts it in a corner it has to worship something. And what it usually worships is art, and one form of that art are sentences.  But I believe that the sentences that really matter don’t, neither invite nor allow that worship but in fact encourage you and invite you to search for something greater. (Podcast transcript can be found here).

Fish reminds me of Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, which I read in my French studies at university. Brian Simpson writes on Flaubert’s novels in the John Hopkins magazine:

“The novel on your bedside table did not spring fully formed from the head of its maker. It was mulled over, massaged, fleshed out, scratched through, revised, set aside, and revised some more.”

Simpson quotes Flaubert: “When I’m finished with my novel . . . I’ll bring you my complete manuscript. . . . You will see through what complex mechanics I manage to make a sentence.”
— Gustave Flaubert in an April 15, 1852, letter to his lover Louise Colet

As in Flaubert, so in Fish; language, not the plot, counts; because all that matters is what natters.

“Flaubert, Simpson continues, rewrote each page of Madame Bovary at least four or five times, and many a dozen times. In an 1855 letter to Louise Colet, he confided, “Last week I spent five days writing one page.” At the end of such weeks, he had finished only 500 words. But they were 500 perfect words.”

And for Jacques Neefs, an authority on Flaubert, “the vision is in the revisions.”

That’s Fish all over: vision is revision. Never standing still, always moving; never arriving always departing. Art for art sake, L’art pour l’art, in it’s many forms: language for language sake, painting for painting sake, sculpture for sculpture sake, where language, the supreme art form, cuts, not through, but into the Word – made, not flesh, but Art. The reason why there is no attempt to cut through language is because for Flaubert and Fish, there is nothing outside Art, outside the Art of language. Only sentences remain (Fish above), only sentences live, only sentences are eternal, only sentences live eternally. Sentences, says Fish, must be religiously nurtured (“the religion of art”- Fish), for they are the springboard to newness of life, to a newness of more sentences. There’s no centre, no arriving, no presence, no God; always departing never arriving. All these men remind me of my Jacques Derrida and my friend, Bill, who asks: “So what’s the deal with having a messiah who’s arrived?  There’s a question for you. Where is the mystery once he’s exposed and had his say?”

The Word was made flesh (the Messiah), and the flesh was made Fish (the word). There’s the Fisher of men and the fisher of words. For the fisher of words, there will be no resurrection from the boggy sediments of language, but only a sentencing to an eternity of sentences – “one has to worship something” (Fish above). Or perhaps there will only be a sentencing to a single phrase, drumming over and over and over in those finely tuned ears: “life, life, eternal life.”

Analysis of the Modern Evangelical Mind and the Lost Art of Boxing

Before I begin my mind-walk, let me say something briefly about the knotty  term “evangelical.”

David Bebbington in his “Evangelicalism in Modern B

ritain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s” mentions four key marks of “evangelicalism”: conversionism, biblicism, crucicentrism (the cross) and activism (activity).” (See review of Bebbington and Al Mohler’s “Thinking in Public: in conversation with David Bebbington). Bebbington lumps the Puritans together with Arminians (e.g. Methodists) where he gives more weight to Wesleyan Methodism than to the Puritans (Calvinists). When I refer to the “modern evangelical” mind, I am referring to the Arminian evangelical who thinks that thinking about Jesus can get in the way of believing in Jesus. I now examine one of these “modern evangelical” minds.

Walking with Jesus, all Christians would agree, often involves talking to others about Jesus. Talking, naturally, involves thinking. The main operation of thought is categorising. Many modern evangelicals rebel against “boxing in” Jesus into categories. My aim in this post is to argue that “boxing in” and “boxing,” (categorising) are not the same process.

To describe one’s beliefs, or anything, you have to use words, which is the usual human way of expressing thoughts. Some words are more important than others. These are called “key” words. Problems arise in communication because of contradictory definitions of these key words.

When Calvinism is contrasted with Arminianism, what first comes to mind is God’s role and man’s role in coming to faith. The Calvinist says that man plays no cooperative or contributive role in coming to faith, while the Arminian says that man cooperates with God in that man turns his heart to God, that is, exercises his will to come to faith. In Calvinism, God first regenerates the sinner and then gives the sinner the gift of faith, while in Arminianism, regeneration follows the sinner’s acceptance of God’s offer of salvation. Faith, for the Arminian is something the believer does, not something God gives, as Calvinism understands it.

Here is a typical comment I received from and evangelical Christian on one of my posts about Calvinism and Arminianism:

“Can I make a suggestion, because these terms – Calvinian, Arminian.. etc.. – have never occurred to me in my walk with our Lord, Jesus Christ – I don’t even know who Spurgeon is (and I’m sure many others can say the same) this kind of thing can just spread confusion with different followings. I’d suggest we continue to Humbly study the Word, and do what is commanded of us. That is to spread and teach the gospel; to continue to seek the Kingdom of God first; to ask Forgiveness and to repent of our sins… but all the time to remember that God sees and weighs up the heart – so whatever we do or say, may it be with an examined heart, or we could fall into a trap ourselves. Using terms like Arminian and Calvinism is putting people in boxes – this is the thing the world does. We don’t do this – because its putting man-made limits and assumptions up. I believe that God, in his sovereignty, does as He pleases. Has mercy on whom He pleases, gives understanding to whomever he wants at whatever time suits Him and his ultimate plan.”

“I think that some understanding and having our eyes opened brings us to the point where we can do nothing but be humbled, quietened, moved by our God. A seeing person can only be effected and touched by what he sees. Maybe its like a person who is slowly gaining strength back in his/her legs… he can do more and more each day that his strength is renewed. But, that person with the weak legs has to go to the doctor first to get worked on. Jesus Christ didn’t just go to people and spontaneously heal them. The people came to and called on Him. These man-made terms and translations mean nothing to me personally – I wont be put into a box. Its like the rest of the world.. if you’re like this, you’re Aries or a Dragon.. Fill in these questions that our Well Learned Psychologists have put together and we will tell you Who you are and What Category you fit into….. harumph! No thanx.”

The problem with this view is summed up in the writer’s last paragraph, specifically the misunderstanding of the term “category”:

“These man-made terms and translations mean nothing…I wont be put into a box… Fill in these questions that our Well Learned Psychologists have put together and we will tell you Who you are and What Category you fit into…” (My italics).

Categorizing is the mother of all mental processes. What do we do when we categorize? Here is a thesaurusful (I emphasise “analyse” because I use this term later on):

Words related to (that is, the semantic field of) Categorise

“analyze, ascertain, distinguish, characterize, classify, collate, decide, demarcate, determine, diagnose, differentiate, discriminate, estimate, figure out, identify, judge, know, label, mark off, pinpoint, place, qualify, recognize, select, separate, set apart, set off, sift, single out, singularize, sort out, specify, spot, tag, tell apart.”

Now, obviously, the writer does not advocate that when we study the Bible or talk to others about it we should not differentiate, select, diagnose (something psychiatrists do very well), sift, and so on.

The writer says:
“I’d suggest we continue to Humbly study the Word, and do what is commanded of us. That is to spread and teach the gospel; to continue to seek the Kingdom of God first; to ask Forgiveness and to repent of our sins… but all the time to remember that God sees and weighs up the heart – so whatever we do or say, may it be with an examined heart, or we could fall into a trap ourselves.”

This is good advice. My question is: How is one going to teach the Gospel to enemies of the Gospel, which all human beings are in their natural state? The writer asks: “Why try to analyze it all? God is not subject to any laws or rules.”

I answer: the fact of the matter is that the writer and I understand a key doctrine of scripture in opposite ways, namely, I hold the Calvinist view that sinners play no cooperative or contributive role in coming to faith, while she says that sinners cooperate with God by turning their hearts to God, that is, by striving (exerting their will, with help from God – “prevenient grace”) to come to faith. Her view is Arminianism. In Calvinism, God first regenerates the sinner and then gives the sinner the gift of faith, while in Arminianism, regeneration follows the sinner’s acceptance of God’s offer of salvation. Faith, for the Arminian is something the believer does, not something that God gives, as Calvinism understands it.

Obviously there is much sifting, demarcating, differentiating, categorising, analysing going on.  In “Analysis,” we break things down, where we move down the ladder of abstraction from the  general to the particular.  Here is Hayakawa’s graphic explaining the ladder of abstraction. (S.I. Hayakawa, Language in Thought and Action, George Allen & Unwin, 2^e edition (1973, London).

(See here for further clarification).

Here is an example from scripture. A large section of the New Testament deals with explaining what is meant by Jesus is the Son of God; for example, in John’s Gospel and Paul’s epistles. Paul spends much effort – mental, analytical effort – explaining what “Jesus the Son of God” means. Three thousand years ago, the psalmist asks:

[1] Why do the nations rage and the peoples plot in vain?

[2] The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together,

against the LORD and against his Anointed, saying,

[3] “Let us burst their bonds apart and cast away their cords from us.”

[7] I will tell of the decree: The LORD said to me, “You are my Son; today I have begotten you.”

Why do the unbelievers rage when they hear: “You are my Son; today I have begotten you.” The reason, the Bible explains, is that their “hearts” are darkened. “Heart” in the Bible refers to man’s internal(ised) determination to disobey God, and what better way to do it, says the modern man, than to deny that God has a Son, or worse, God does not exist.

Now, a follower of Christ like the Apostle Paul or like many modern Christians will want to – indeed are commanded to – defend the truth that Jesus is the Son of God. To do that you’ll have to use your noggin and not your bottom – unless you’re sitting down. And that is where “analysis” is pretty useful.

Definition of analysis

1580s, “resolution of anything complex into simple elements” (opposite of synthesis), from M.L. analysis, from Gk. analysis “a breaking up, a loosening, releasing,” from analyein “unloose, release, set free; to loose a ship from its moorings,” in Aristotle, “to analyze,” from ana “up, throughout” (see ana-) + lysis “a loosening,” from lyein “to unfasten” (see lose). Psychological sense is from 1890.

(Synthesis, the opposite of Analysis, is putting things together).

Walking with Jesus will have to also involve thinking about Jesus and how to explain to non-believers how to think about Jesus and Jesus as the Son of God. To do so does not mean that you have to talk about ladders of abstraction and other such theoretical concepts. Nonetheless, when you do explain a biblical doctrine such as the divinity of Jesus, you are trawling – in your noggin – with Jesus up and down the mental ladder of abstraction. Theology, the science of God, is based on the same principles as Hayakawa’s ladder of abstraction above. To return to “Jesus is the Son of God. In 1, Moving from the bottom up, we move from Jesus through Son to God. But it is not a simple as that, for in 2, we see that “Son” only applies to Jesus, and not to other sons; the Son is God and the Father is God.

My explanation is “analytical.” So walking with Jesus should also involve analysing Jesus (the concept) for ourselves and (unless we do it ourselves we can’t do it) to others. “Analyse” means use your reason to give reasons for the faith that you have received, and defend the body of teachings (doctrines) that pertain to this faith. The Bible is clear: “Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect” ( 1 Peter 3:15). There are many examples of Jesus and Paul reasoning (analysing, and synthesising) with their listeners. One important topic in this regard was the authenticity of the historical events in the scriptures. Paul was a master “apologist” (defender) of the Gospel. “Apologetics” is a very important part of learning and teaching the faith.

Having established that we need categories to know how to “apologise” (defend) for our faith, that is, walk the walk with Jesus, I can safely say that we also need categories to establish how a person comes to Christ – the Arminian or the Calvinist way (or, what is very bothersome, the Calvinist-Arminian and the Arminian-Calvinist way) which is closely bound up with what is meant by the “Sovereignty of God.”

They (people who don’t read – books) say that books aren’t everything. But that does not mean that books are nothing. Similarly with the mind; “the mind isn’t everything” does not mean that the mind is nothing. Actually when it comes to living the Christian life, reading (and thinking that is required to read) are important. As is very clear from the scriptures, minds can be darkened by more than lack of information. For example, the Gospels are very clear that most, if not all, the disciples, were “slow of heart” to understand Jesus. Peter got it most in the neck from Jesus. Jesus kept on telling the disciples that he was to suffer, die and rise again, but they couldn’t take it in because they didn’t want to; they were not expecting a suffering Messiah but a victorious one.

Happy analysing, in other words,  bottoms up.

(See A Jewish view of a French Bottom)

1S.I. Hayakawa, Language in Thought and Action, George Allen & Unwin, 2^e edition (1973, London)

Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s

If anything exists, says Gorgias, it cannot be communicated. Struth!

The “Gorgias” is one of Plato’s Socratic Dialogues. Plato pits the rhetorician, Gorgias, whose area of expertise is persuasion, in opposition to the philosopher, whose speciality is dissuasion and refutation. Gorgias (487-376 BC) was a presocratic rhetorician and a nihilist. His nihilism is articulated in three propositions: 1. Nothing exists. 2. But, if anything does exist, it cannot be known. 3. However, if anything does exist and can be known, it cannot be communicated.

I, Bography, am on the Academy intercom with Gorgias

Bography: What’s that, Gorgias! Run that by me one more time.

Gorgias: Ok. Let me try again.  If anything does exist and can be known, it cannot be communicated.

Bography: What do you mean?

Gorgias: What’s wrong with you; are you a post-structuralist post modernist? Have you been reading Jacques Derrida! Raphy Bog, “I must recall to your attention – and I will remind you of it more than once – that language obeys certain rules; it has its grammar, its rhetoric, its pragmatics. As you did not take these rules into account, you quite simply did not understand or want to understand, in the most elementary and quasi-grammatical sense, what I am saying.[1]

---

[1] “What I, on the other hand, must recall to your attention – and I will remind you of it more than once – is that the text of an appeal obeys certain rules; it has its grammar, its rhetoric, its pragmatics. I’ll come back to this point in a moment, to wit: as you did not take these rules into account, you quite simply did not read my text, in the most elementary and quasi-grammatical sense of what is called reading” (Jacques Derrida 1986, p. 157, But beyond…(Open letter to Anne McClintock and Rob Nixon). Translated by Peggy Kamuf. Critical Enquiry, Autumn, pp.155-170. (See Can Derrida’s Tour (Surprisingly) Translate Us Anywhere?).

The Deconstruction of Messiah: Always Arriving Always Departing

The great mistake of Jesus for Renan was to forget that the ideal is fundamentally a utopia (Philip Schaff).

Jacques Derrida Reading

I was in conversation with someone who said this about Derrida’s view of truth and a Messiah:

“

The question of the messiah seems eternally interesting.  Derrida opined that the point about having a messiah is the promise, the hope, the aspiration, NOT that (he) comes. So what’s the deal with having a messiah who’s arrived?  There’s a question for you. Where is the mystery once he’s exposed and had his say?”

Derrida writes that there is no centre, no arriving, no presence, no God. A student of postmodernism describes the absence of presence this way:

“…if we were to bring Derrida into the discussion, then it becomes pretty clear that religion is the carrier of a metaphysics of presence par excellence. Religion banks on nothing less than the presence of ‘God,’ or the divine, or whatever. And then when you think about the importance of the ‘Word’ in religion–you know, the whole ‘revelation’ thing—Derrida’s deconstruction of logocentrism (logos “meaning”) is pretty devastating.”

But what is so postmodern about rejecting the “whole ‘revelation’ thing?” Wasn’t that the “Enlightenment’s” claim to fame two centuries or so ago? Derrida is the epitome of man-centredness, which, in essence, is no different from Frank Sinatra’s “I did it my way.” The Christian view is that the Bible has a centre, an “arriving” (salvation). Brian Walsh says:

“The problem is that ‘the end of religion’ and ‘the death of God’ are modernist, Enlightenment dogmas. They are the ultimate conclusion of the modernist blind faith in human autonomy. In the hubris of a modernist world-view, the voice of God and the experience of spirituality gets drowned out by the self-assured, arrogant voice of ‘rational men.”

The modernist– a product of the European Enlightenment – replaces revelation as a source of truth with induction. By induction, I mean observation of the material data (phenomena) from which we derive a principle, or “law.” For a materialist (the majority of scientists), this rational approach, which is not necessarily a reasonable approach, is not only the best method, but also the only method that can yield universal truth. Here is Diderot, one of the great luminaries of the Englightement,  on “la raison” (reason):

“First, I notice something that both the good and the wicked agree upon; it is that one should reason about everything, becxause man is not merely an animal, but a rational animal; which means that there are ways of discovering the truth; and the one who refuses to look for it forfeits to be called human, and should, therefore be treated by the rest of his species as a wild animal. Once the truth is found, whosoever refuses to conform to it is deranged or morally wicked.” (Diderot, “Natural law,” Encyclopédie, Volume V pp. 115—116, paragraph iv. My translation. The original appears in brackets below).

(vi. J’aperçois d’abord une chose qui me semble avoué par le bon et par le méchant; c’est qu’il faut raisonner en tout, parce que l’homme n’est pas seulement un animal, mais un animal qui raisonne; qu’il y a par conséquent, dans la question dont il s’agit, des moyens de découvrir la vérité; que celui qui refuse de la chercher renonce à la qualité d’homme, et doit être traité par le reste de son espèce comme une bête farouche; et que, la vérité une fois découverte, quiconque refuse de s’y conformer est insensé ou méchant d’une méchanceté morale.” Droit Naturel, Encyclopédie, Tome V, pp. 115—116.

Contrary to the modernist, the postmodernist rejects both the Christian and modernist approaches to truth and reason. According to the postmodernist, truth is not universal, is not objective, is not absolute. Instead, truth is socially constructed, manifold, and relative. “Your truth, my truth” means that truth is not found; it’s manufactured. Facts, on this view, are not givens but purely and solely “takens;” that is, the mind decides what is real. Reality for a postmodernist is a mental (de)construction (See my Schizologia: Internal Testimony versus Inspiration of Scripture)

Deconstruction is a literary movement invented by the Jew, Jacques Derrida. What is deconstruction? No one really knows, but everybody thinks they know – “to take apart,” “to unpack” (an idea). It doesn’t mean that at all. Deconstruction – as I understand it – is a journey; never arriving, always departing; a sitting on suitcases, all packed and ready to leave for the next departure lounge. How does my description of deconstruction compare with Brian Walsh’s?

“To understand deconstruction, we need to know what deconstruction is not. Derrida is no nihilist. Deconstruction is not a theoretical cover for a simplistic nihilism out to destroy and tear down just for the hell of it! Derrida says that what gives deconstruction its movement is “constantly to suspect, to criticize the given determinations of culture, of institutions, of legal systems, not in order to destroy them or simply to cancel them, but to be just with justice, to respect this relation to the other as justice.” Justice has always been the ethical drive behind deconstruction. It is what deconstruction affirms.”

Derrida’s favourite is apouring over flaws (aporias “without passage,” “no thoroughfare”). The flaw in the search for justice, Derrida argues, is that as soon as you think you understand justice, you’ve lost it. What comes to mind is the logocentric (meaning-centred) Plato, for whom justice was also of primary concern. But for Plato, whose most famous dialogue, “The Republic,” is all about justice – justice ultimately boiled down to: “do your job and cork up.”

Did Derrida really want to find justice or the Messiah? And if he didn’t want to, was it because, once found, justice and the Messiah would no longer be of any value. Is it true – as my friend (above) says – that Derrida believed that “the point about having justice or a messiah is the promise, the hope, the aspiration, NOT that justice or the Messiah comes;” because “what’s the deal with having a messiah who’s arrived?  There’s a question for you. Where is the mystery once he’s exposed and had his say?” As the “Discovery Channel” puts it: “If we had all the answers, there’d be nothing left to discover. Ignorance is bliss.” Now go and renew your TV licence. But seriously, modern man (I’m generalising) thinks, “if God exists, all man can do is think God’s thoughts after Him. Perish the thought!”

Most people believe that objective truth exists but, they say, no one can be sure what it is. André Gide  advised:  “Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it?”Gide’s words suggest that he doesn’t believe in “truth.”What Gide meant by “doubt,”I suggest, is scepticism about objective truth.

The question is, how does one do science without a coherent, stable reality? Indeed, how can one have an intelligent conversation if words and thoughts keep toppling into one another?  Scientists seek to know what’s going on, not only in their heads, but also outside their heads; mostly outside their heads – theologians too. Everybody – including Derrida – hopes, if not believes that Truth exists. And a messiah? Is Derrida waiting for a messiah? If so, what kind of messiah of messiah? A Theodor Herzl. Jacqueline Rose relates the following story:

“In 1896, at a mass meeting in Sofia, when Weizmann saw him for the first time, the chief rabbi proclaimed him (Herzl) the Messiah. “Perhaps,’ suggested Moritz Güdemann , chief rabbi of Vienna, who would later turn against Zionism, “you are the called of God.”…By the end of his life, Herzl, himself, was more cautious: “Our people believe that I am the Messiah. I myself do not know this, for I am no theologian.” (J. Rose. 2005. The Question of Zion. Princeton University Press, p. 31).

Herzl needs to be a theologian to know for sure. The Messiah needs to be a theologian to know for sure. He needs to be told by those waiting for him to come who he is. Voltaire, or any good restaurant, fits the Messianic bill much more than Herzl. At least (we know that) Voltaire was a deist. One would think that the Messiah would at least believe in a deity of sorts, if not in the God of the Torah. Derrida’s Messiah is not only far removed from the God of Genesis but also from a deistic power that created the universe that set it in motion, turned its back on it and went on to greener pastures. Derrida’s Messiah is an “opening of experience” and a cry for justice. Here is Brian Walsh again:

“We are waiting for someone to come, for the opening of experience, says Derrida. Indeed, the constant word, the sentiment that pervades deconstruction, says Caputo (Derrida’s disciple), is “come, viens.” This fearful invitation, this call, this impassioned cry to the Messiah to come is at the spiritual heart of postmodernity. Even though such a coming scares Derrida, the Messiah must come, because the terror cannot go on. There must be a justice rooted in hospitality–a real, embodied justice, a healing river of justice. Biblical faith has a response for such an honest longing, even when that longing is made tentative by fear. For Scripture responds to the human heart crying out for justice to come, for healing to come, indeed for the Messiah to come, with its own invitation (Rev. 22:17, 20):

The Spirit and the Bride say, “Come.”

And let everyone who hears say, “Come.”

And let everyone who is thirsty come.

Let anyone who wishes take the water of life as a gift.

The one who testifies to these things says,

“Surely I am coming soon.”

Amen, come soon, Lord Jesus.

Derrida is dead, and eternally cut off from the Messiah, but not from presence, from His Presence. When I gaze on his strong Jewish face, I feel very sad; sad for all my Jewish brethren who, having passed into eternity, fell over the stumbling stone of Yeshua haMashiach.

We return to the question that occasioned me to write this piece: “What’s the deal with having a messiah who’s arrived?  Where is the mystery once he’s exposed and had his say?”

It is unremarkable, unsurprising that sinful man would ask such a question? Undergirding this question is not the fear that a Messiah, a Judge, exists, neither is it the conviction that Truth can never be found. What such a question implies is rather the chutzpa (hubris) that nothing higher than man has the right to exist, for man is the measure of all things. Satan asks Adam “Did God really say?” (Genesis 3:1). And therein lies the genesis of the question “What’s the deal with having a messiah who has arrived -unless he’s arrived at another departure lounge?”

In conclusion, I’d like to bring together what I said about André Gide’s doubt of ever finding the truth  with my earlier definition of Deconstruction. Gide  advised:  “Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it?”Gide’s words suggest that he doesn’t believe in “truth.” I said (earlier) that what Gide meant by “doubt,” was scepticism of ever finding objective truth. I think there was something deeper than his doubt ; it was his perhaps his desire that he himself be Ultimate Truth. In what does this ultimacy consist? In, as I said earlier,  the Deconstructive journey of never arriving, always departing, a sitting on suitcases, all packed and ready to leave for the next departure lounge. This restlessness is not only the grist of Deconstruction but the gristle of the postmodern mind, ever thinking its own thinking after itself, ever running, ever asking: “What’s the deal with having a Messiah who has arrived.” Let’s, at all costs, not have a boring messiah; boring exactly because he arrives. Let’s rather have one who is ever arriving, ever departing, “always learning and never able to arrive at a knowledge of the truth” (2 Timothy 3:7 ESV). Never able to arrive because they will not to.

Güdemann

Translation, transflation and betrayal: Plato’s Gorg(i)as

“Translation” is the process of decoding the ideas of one language (the source language, say, French) and encoding them into another (the target language, say English). In A Jewish view of a French bottom, I discussed the French expression de fond en comble, which the Head of Modern Languages at the University of South Africa translated as “from top to bottom.” I alerted him to the fact that it didn’t mean “from top to bottom” but “from top to toe.” As anyone who is on nodding terms with human anatomy should know, your bottom is nowhere near you toes, unless you’re a midget.

Had the Professor been betrayed. Betrayed? By what, by whom? Was I to blame for being de fond en comble (from top to bottom; to toe?) impossible? Or is the impossibility of translation to blame? Is it true that traduttore, traditore :“to translate is to betray?”  Is Robert Payne, Chairman of the Translation Committee of the American PEN Organization, correct when he says:

“The world’s languages resemble infinitely complicated grids, and the basic patterns of these grids scarcely ever coincide. [Except] on some rare occasions translation does succeed – beyond all possibility.” [1]

And:

“Whenever we translate exactly and accurately it is a coincidence–in the sense of the purest accident. And the task of the translator is to move sure-footedly among these accidents, he cannot do it by logic.”[2]

If Robert Payne is right, this would mean that the structure of a language defines the structure of thought. In his study of the differences between Hopi and English, Edward Sapir was ostensibly the first to propose this idea.  His associate, Benjamin Lee Whorf picked up the idea and developed it into his system of “linguistic determinism,” where a language determines what we think, which implies that differences in language reflect differences in world view. In such a “linguistic relativity” view, human beings are like Orwellian zombies (Orwell’s “1984″) who are conditioned to think only what the language of  “Newspeak” dictates.

There is much research to show that traduttore, traditore “to translate is to betray” is not as radical as the above writers claim. I think there is a bigger problem than the translation between languages; the main problem lies with translation within languages. What I mean is the miscommunications and misunderstandings (often wilful) between people speaking the same language. Betrayal, therefore, does not only occur between languages, but also within languages, which often means between personalities.

As I said earlier, the usual meaning of the term “translation” is decoding the ideas of one language and encoding them into another. But there is another meaning of “translation” that only involves one language.  “Translation” has the literal meaning of  trans “across” and latus “carry”. “I can’t get across (transfer my thoughts) to you”,  is a familiar complaint.Here is an example from the university of Fort Hare where I taught English language and Applied Linguistics:

I now want to consider cultural differences (i.e. differences in the way one symbolises and constructs one’s world) in the educational domain. I present one example of how academics who share the same mother tongue (in this case English) can disagree. The example is of lecturers’ judgements in the evaluation of a student’s writing.

When I asked some of my Practical English students at Fort Hare to write a definition of culture, they invariably came up with rote textbook descriptions culled from their other subjects: “Culture refers to the norms and values…” etc. Now, norms and values are the kind of “objective” things that do indeed belong to specific groups, which an individual has to conform to. But let us for a while suspend this traditional definition of culture and consider it anew.

Here is an (uncorrected) extract from an essay of one of my more imaginative Practical English students. The title was “Home is where the hope is”. I have substituted “culture” for “home” in the student’s text:

“In a universal perspective home [culture] may be defined as an individual continent or world, where its inner circumstances is perfumed and gorgeoused by the sounding existence of happiness created by freedom of religion, personal custom, uncramped dignity, norms and values. The happiness which permits its development, a compounded feeling which proves itself to be only love which is strong as death, that love which many waters cannot quench, nor the floods drown, beside which the passion usually by called by the name is evanescent as a dream.”

I asked (separately) two Practical English lecturers and one philosophy lecturer for their judgements. I quote:

First Practical English lecturer: “What a lot of nonsense. It does not make sense.”
Philosophy lecturer: “I like it. I would give it a good mark. A bit flowery.
Second Practical English lecturer: “He has imagination. Creative. A good effort.”

One other lecturer’s comment on the text was “celebration” – it seems that from these lecturers’ comments above that there are two broad ways of looking at text (and life): celebral or cerebral.

I discussed the above student’s passage with the first Practical English lecturer and the philosophy lecturer together. Here are two quotes, one from each of them:

First Practical English lecturer (addressing the philosopher and me): Both of you are philosophers. You are used to extending boundaries. I like to impose them. My training is in the legal field. It is different to yours. I look for the limits of things. You look beyond the limits of things.

Philosophy lecturer: If you think this passage is meaningless you should try Derrida for size.

(See more in my Culture, Conceptual Frameworks and Academic Ability: A Biocultural Perspective).

So, betrayal (traditore) does not only occur in translation (traduttore) between languages, but also within languages. We saw that “translation” has the literal meaning of  trans “across” and latus “carry”. Plato’s dialogues illustrate this miscommunication problem. One Greek (Socrates, for example) tries to get another Greek (Gorgias, for example) to see his (Socrates) point of view, all the time convincing Gorgias that his (Socrates’ point of view) was Gorgias’s real thoughts screaming to get out. Finally, they do see eye to eye – but not without some clever engineering  on the part of the master of dialectic, himself, Socrates. What  happens, though, when Gorgias hasards to direct the dialogue? It goes to potty; Gorgias transflates into Gorgas: Trans-latus ends up as trans-flatus.

Earlier, I mentioned the “linguistic relativism” of Whorf and Sapir (the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, or “Warp and the Woof” hypothesis), which, by definition, is “cognitive relativism,” where speakers of different languages think different thoughts. “Postmodernism” goes beyond – goes below the belt of linguistic/cognitive relativism.  If you think “inarticulate, meaningless, fragmentation, incoherence, let’s have fun with nonsense”, you’ll get an articulate, meaningful, unified, coherent, sensible picture of postmodernism. Here is one of Cornelius van Til’s favourite illustrations of modern philosophy (from 17^th century onwards): Imagine an infinite number of beads with no holes in them, and an infinite length of string.[1] Now, let me take Van Til’s necklace and try and make a postmodern necklace for your Mother – and then translate her tongue into French.

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[1] This is one of Cornelius van Til’s favourite illustrations of modern philosophy (from 17^th century onwards). Van Til is a Christian philosopher and theologian in the Reformed tradition. His critique of Karl Barth’s idea of history is incomparable.

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[1] 3. Payne, Robert. “On the Impossibility of Translation”, The World of Translation. New York: PEN, 1971, pp 361-4.

[2] Ibid, p.363.

Purgatory: The Greatest Doctors Go There

(This is a follow-on from Deconstruction: Onederringjew’s glorious route to nowhere).

The problem for interpretation, translation and communication that Derrida poses is whether it is possible to ever know what one’s mother tongue is made of through all the pulling and tearing at her syntactic joints and semantic flesh (Johnson 1985). Can the mother tongue (the source language) ever communicate her meaning through translation into another language (the target language). The problem lies deeper than the differences between languages; it lies in the mother tongue itself. How many times have you not confronted someone who speaks the same mother tongue as you –  your mother? – with “what do you mean!” The blogosphere may justifiably be described as the bogosphere : your bog and my bog; which is one of the reasons – very minor – why my blog user name is “bography.” (See my B(i)ography of truth).

What do you think is the primary function of language? Unless you’re smoking something or are the greatest linguistic scientist of all time, you will probably reply “communication” or something to that effect. But what does the greatest linguist¹ and one of the ten most quoted people of all time say? The central function of language is not communication but expression (Chomsky. 1979. Language and Responsibility. Sussex: Harvester Press). “Expression,” of course, means self-expression. And Chomsky (like Derrida), of course, is Jewish. As my mother would have said of Derrida and Chomsky: they are greste dokteirim “great doctors,” but lacking one thing, the main thing; they’re not medical doctors.

Self-expression usually entails a purging. For Gilbert Ryle, this purging reaches into the very bowels of his mind – into the “ghost in his machine.” At the end of his introduction to “The concept of mind” (1959), Ryle says: “Primarily I am trying to get some disorders out of my own system. Only secondarily do I hope to help other theorists to recognise our malady and to benefit from my medicine.” Ryle’s main reason for writing is to purge his system. I suggest that this urge to expurge is also true of Chomsky and Derrida.

“Help us, O God of our salvation, for the glory of thy name: and deliver us, and purge (כפר kaphar) away our sins, for thy name’s sake (Psalm 79:9).”

“How much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without spot to God, purge ( katharizō “catharsis”) your conscience from dead works to serve the living God?” (Hebrews 9:14).

1“Linguist” has two meanings: the non-academic meaning of “someone who knows (how to speak) several languages, and the academic meaning of someone who is a specialist in the linguistics (linguistic science).



Deconstruction: Onederringjew’s glorious route to nowhere

Deconstruction is a literary movement invented by Jacques Derrida, a Jew, naturally. What is deconstruction? No one really knows, but think they know. They think it means “to take apart,” “to unpack” (an idea). It doesn’t mean that. This is what I “think” it means. Deconstruction is a journey; never arriving and always departing; a sitting on suitcases, all packed and ready to leave for the next departure lounge.

In contrast to deconstruction, I’m reminded of the Christian theologian and philosopher, Jonathan Edwards (quoted in R.C. Sproul’s “Sitting on suitcases): “No person who seeks to go on a pilgrimage to a glorious and exotic place will take up permanent residence at an inn along the way.” The person Edwards describes is like a sojourner who gets stuck along the way because he loses sight of his glorious destiny. The deconstructionist, however, doesn’t believe he is stuck in a rut, not only because there is, for him, no such thing as destiny or glory, but also because there is nothing to stick to. Here is Derrida’s definition of deconsruction:

“Here or there I have used the word deconstruction which has nothing to do with destruction. That is to say, it is simply a question of…being alert to the implications, to the historical sedimentations of the language which we use – and that is not destruction” (Derrida 1972: 271′ my italics).

What does Derrida mean by “historical sedimentations.” The meaning of a word can be studied in two ways:

1. What the word means now (called “synchrony” in linguistics; Greek syn “together” + chronos “time”),

and

2. What the word meant in the past – the history, the etymology (called “diachrony” in linguistics; Greek dia “through” + chronos “time”). “Nice” is a nice example. Here are its layers of “historical sedimentations” from an etymological dictionary.

“late 13c., “foolish, stupid, senseless,” from Old French nice “silly, foolish,” from Latin nescius “ignorant,” lit. “not-knowing,” from ne- “not” (see un-) + stem of scire “to know.” “The sense development has been extraordinary, even for an adj.” [Weekley] — from “timid” (pre-1300); to “fussy, fastidious” (late 14c.); to “dainty, delicate” (c.1400); to “precise, careful” (1500s, preserved in such terms as a nice distinction and nice and early); to “agreeable, delightful” (1769); to “kind, thoughtful” (1830). In 16c.-17c. it is often difficult to determine exactly what is meant when a writer uses this word. By 1926, it was pronounced “too great a favorite with the ladies, who have charmed out of it all its individuality and converted it into a mere diffuser of vague and mild agreeableness.” [Fowler].

“Deconstruction appeals to history, to the historical sedimentations of language. In language use, speakers/writers try and find common (univocal) meanings to the words they use. OnedeRRingjews like DeRRida think otherwise. He says:

“if language is not inherently determined by a set of univocal meanings, then language use, given an unlimited number of contexts over an indefinite period of time, becomes an unrestricted interaction of signifiers, the Nietzschean affirmation of free play without nostalgia for a “center” or for “origins”. (Derrida 1981a: 278-93. Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. London: Routledge, Kegan & Paul).

According to deconstruction, language has no locatable centre nor retrievable origin, where there is no necessary connection between meaning (the signified) and words (signifiers). Well that’s at best silly, at worst, words fail me. Deconstruction plays with language only to prey on language. So then “where can deconstruction lead us, if anywhere?” asks Merrill 1984:126. (Merrill, F. 1984 Deconstruction Meets a Mathematician: a-semiotic Enquiry. American Journal of Semiotics 2(4): 125-152).

Deconstruction leads us to the via rupta? Via rupta means a way cut through the forest, or broken by a plow, wheel, travel or other means. “Route” and “rut” are derivations of via rupta. And that’s deconstruction: a ripping apart of “syntractic joints and semantic flesh” (Barbara Johnson) en route to the glorious mystery of nowhere. Nice.

P.S. I had a paper published on deconstruction (1997). The full paper can be read here).

A b(i)ography of Truth

Truth interests me more than feelings. Perhaps that is why someone said my writing needs to be “more rich and human”. By “truth” I mean something that doesn’t depend on how I feel about it; something that really exists.  But aren’t feelings also real, and therefore true? Aren’t my feelings part of who I really am? Yes they are, but the question is whether what I am is what I ought to be. And is what I feel what I ought to feel? For many, “ought” is at best a figment, at worst, pointing a finger. I once had a phone conversation with one of my nieces. She was having a bad time where everything seemed to be going wrong. I broached the topic of the Christian faith.  She responded, “It’s not MY truth”. She was using “truth” to mean the way she feels. I didn’t pursue the matter because it’s very hard to convince someone – especially over the phone – that there is meaning outside the “I”, that, indeed, it is the meaning outside the “I” that gives the “I” meaning.

Doesn’t there exist, though, in every person a bundle of different feelings that clash, that  brood, that quiver, that prickle, that harass, that swarm? Without feelings, there would be no poetry, no art, no music, and no love. But more important, who’d want to be near someone who felt nothing? Who would want to read a biography that was no more than a catalogue of colourful events? The event itself may be of interest, but if the writer does not describe feelings, the biography won’t be about bio “life” but merely a history textbook. Historical novels are more popular than history books because they attempt to describe feelings and thoughts where the event itself serves as the scaffold on which these thoughts and feelings hang – and be hanged if you don’t get it right; no one will read you.

In an autobiography, feelings have “I” as the centre; not only the “I” of the writer, but also the “I” of the reader. There’s good reason, therefore, for retaining the “I” in (auto)biography. Why then do I call my story a “bography”; why did I cut out  “I” from my (auto)biography? In “Onedaringjew: a bography” – the very beginning of this autobiography – I wrote: “When i becomes the self-obsessed I, the biog turns to bog.” This is correct, but obsession with “I” in an autobiography is the exception rather than the rule. “So, if what I say is true – and not merely “my” truth – I should explain why I call my (auto)biography a “bography”? Is it just a language game?

I do enjoy playing with language. Play is crucial to learning and discovery, for when we play, we enjoy; and the more we enjoy, the more we learn. What is learning mainly about? It’s the creative act of discovery, of discovering the hidden connections between things.

For those who appreciate language – writers, poets, theologians, philosophers – language play is enmeshed in creativity. Playing with words may be foolery, at worst, wit, at best. But playing with language can also mean serious digging into the hidden sediments of language and thought. Language and thought are two sides of the same coin.

I have given several reasons why I changed “biography” to “bography”. There may be a deeper reason -  related to feelings. I said that truth interests me more than feelings do. There’s the rub. Perhaps that is the main reason why I’m  anxious – even obsessed – to rub out the “I”. The opposition between “truth” and “feelings” only holds if you reject objective Truth and accept only the subjective “my truth”. In such a view (of rejecting objective truth in favouR of subjective truth), Truth appears cold and remote, whereas “my truth” feels close and personal. If Truth, however, does exist, and the “I” is opened to receive it, it becomes a consuming fire.

“My truth”, in contrast to Truth, is a muddy thing. I suppose, though, if you believe you emerged out of the slime, then “my truth” would be the only way to go. If, however, Truth did not spontaneously generate from the mud, but rather generated the mud in the first place, then the Truth can indeed be found, unless you believe that though there may be such an entity as the Truth, no one can be sure when they have found it. Is this what André Gide  meant by:  “Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it?”   I don’t think so, because those who doubt that Truth can be found are also the ones that don’t believe it exists. So, I am saying that Gide’s words tell me that he doesn’t believe that there is such a thing as Truth. What Gide meant by “doubt”, therefore,  is that he didn’t believe that objective truth exists at all. But this is really silly, for without any coherent reality, there can be no science,  no discourse;  Scientists seek to know what’s going on not only in their heads, but outside, and mostly outside, their heads – theologians too. But what if  “inside” and “outside” do not really exist, as the pantheists say. According to J.C. Ryle it is not atheism but pantheism that is the great enemy of truth. He says:

I feel it a duty to bear my solemn testimony against the spirit of the day we live in, to warn men against its infection. It is not Atheism I fear so much, in the present times, as Pantheism. It is not the system which says nothing is true, so much as the system which says everything is true. It is not the system which says there is no Savior, so much as the system which says there are many saviors, and many ways to peace! It is the system which is so liberal, that it dares not say anything is false. It is the system which is so charitable, that it will allow everything to be true. It is the system which seems ready to honor others as well as our Lord Jesus Christ, to class them all together, and to think well of all.

It is the system which is so careful about the feelings of others, that we are never to say they are wrong. It is the system which is so liberal that it calls a man a bigot, if he dares to say, “I know my views are right.” This is the system, this is the tone of feeling which I fear in this day, and this is the system which I desire emphatically to testify against and denounce. From the liberality which says everybody is right, from the charity which forbids us to say anybody is wrong, from the peace which is bought at the expense of truth – may the good Lord deliver us!

~ J.C. Ryle

Knots Untied, “Only One Way of Salvation” [Cambridge, England: James Clarke & Co., 1977], pp. 30 -31.

Ryle wrote the above more than 100 years ago. The more things change, the more they remain the same.

The Bible says the Truth does exist. It also says that Truth is not an “it” but a Person – Jesus, the Person, called the Christ. Twenty or so years ago Alvin Plantinga, the philosopher spoke of “self-referential incoherence.” I like very much C. Baxter Kruger’s explanation of this concept:

“…‘self-referential incoherence’ is a profound insight into the problem of ‘the fall.’ For the most part we have been taught to think of sin as primarily a moral problem. I think sin is fundamentally a reference problem, followed, of course, by all manner of other rippling relational, social and moral issues. In the fall, Adam’s reference point moved from God to himself. He became self-referential, and thus developed a perception of himself, God and the world from a center in himself and his terrible fear. From that point the human race was trapped in its own way of seeing. If it does not ‘make sense to us’ it cannot be true. Our way of perceiving a person or a situation is the way it is. And that is the problem fraught with utter impossibility. Even the Lord’s presence and self-revelation, and indeed his way of thinking and saving, has to pass through Adam—and our—way of thinking, and thus the Lord himself and all his ways are subject to our judgment. He must make sense to us, or He is not correct, and thus dismissed. So we invent a god in the image of our own self-reference—which, of course, from the Lord’s perspective is utterly incoherent—and judge God’s presence and action by it.”

I mentioned that Alvin Plantinga used the term “self-referential incoherence.” The term, however,  comes from Sextus Empiricus (circa 160-210 AD). The irony is clear. The empirical (experimental) method of modern science relies on observation, yet is largely ignorant of  the epistemological underpinnings of “I,” the one who observes. And who do we have to thank for this original insight? Empiricus. He could, naturally, only go so far. The Christian looks further -  to the revelation of Jesus the Christ, who said,  “I am the way, the truth and the life.” Raphy’s “I” is baptised into the eternal, invisible, infinite, unfathomable, rich Bog of Truth. (“Bog” in Russian is “God”).

(My user name is “bography”. How did this name come to be? Rapha-el in Hebrew means “doctor/healer of God.” But I am not literally a rapha (a medical doctor) not even a linguistic doctor of el; so I have opted for a more modest user name “bography” (Dr bog). What is the Russian for God? Bog. What is the Russian for doctor of God? Raphabog. In changing from Rapha-el to Rapha-bog, all I’ve done is change the Hebrew “El” to the Russian “Bog”. 

 

 

 

 

Reason, Experience, and God’s Truth: Where do I start?

In his “Messianic Jewish Musings,” Derek has an interesting article on Abraham Joshua Heschel’s “God in search of man.”  Heschel believes that the God of the Prophets is the source of reason. Reason, however, according to Heschel, is not able to find God, let alone experience Him. The Prophets taught that the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob was also the source of everything, including experience of Him, and that the only right way to experience Him is through the Hebrew scriptures. Christianity is an extension of this belief.

Here are a few excerpts from Derek’s article followed by my comments.

“But if we approach God by experiencing him, why start with the Judeo-Christian scriptures? Why not start with some other metaphysical or religious ideas? Doesn’t experience open the door to any experiential belief? You could, actually. I’m not saying I recommend it. But you could seek to experience the Hindu notions of deity and meaning or approach meaning through paganism.”

This raises the relativism of all roads lead to “home,”  which would contradict the notion that the Creator of human reason (the God of the Tanakh), who is also regarded in the Tanakh as the creator of the heavens and the earth, is the creator of the Truth. He is not the creator of “my truth, your truth.” Truth connotes who God is as well as how we know/experience Him. As I said elsewhere,  by “truth” I mean something that doesn’t depend on how I feel, that is, something that really exists; that originates outside of me.  But aren’t feelings – which are, by nature personal to me -  also real, and therefore true? Yes they are true, but the question is whether what I am is what I ought to be. For many, “ought” is at best a figment, at worst, an insult.

Derek then asks: “Does your experience through these other revelations cohere with your knowledge of who you are? Do the claims of these other systems fit with your own sense of being? You could test it.” This method is not in harmony with the God of the Prophets. It also relies on too many subjective criteria. For example, many Jews, as well as non-Jews, feel that Eastern thought fits in with their own “sense of being” (Derek).

The NT teaches that unless God opens your dead eyes, you will never see the Truth (Ephesians 2:1-10. That truth, the NT teaches, is Jesus/Yeshua, in whom “the fullness of Deity dwells in bodily form” (Colossians 2:9).

Derek advises:

“But meanwhile, there is no fault in starting with the tradition that has come down to those of us who are Jews and Christians. And it just may be that you will find a sense of his Presence as you do this.”

The NT teaches that if you don’t find a sense of His (the God of the Bible) presence, it’s because He has not (yet) opened your dead eyes.

Ephesians 2:

1 As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins, 2 in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world and of the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient. 3 All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our flesh and following its desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were by nature deserving of wrath. 4 But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, 5 made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions—it is by grace you have been saved. 6 And God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus, 7 in order that in the coming ages he might show the incomparable riches of his grace, expressed in his kindness to us in Christ Jesus. 8 For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— 9 not by works, so that no one can boast. 10 For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.”

But, of course, Derek is correct; why not start with what you have? After all, it’s God – the God of the Bible that gave you that start. For the Christian, it is Christ working in you from start to finish: “Being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus” (Philippians 1:6).

My title says “Where do I start.” Deeper still is why do I start, why would I start? Here is the answer:

37 All those the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never drive away. 38 For I have come down from heaven not to do my will but to do the will of him who sent me. 39 And this is the will of him who sent me, that I shall lose none of all those he has given me, but raise them up at the last day (John 6).

The Father does not give you to the Son because you came. No, no, that is a terrible misunderstanding. The scripture says that the reason why you come is because you have been given. The giving to the Son causes the coming; the coming doesn’t cause the giving.

Derek Leman at “Messianic Jewish Musings” responded:

“To be clear: I’m not saying all paths lead to God. I do believe the Bible is the self-disclosure of God. But, I’m less apt than you to disdain the “subjective.” We are whole people, not walking brains. Heschel emphasizes the subjective (so it’s not as if I simply made that part up). I don’t believe that pantheism will satisfy the searcher like Judeo-Christian theism. Pantheism is not true to who we are. I simply don’t believe that one has to begin from Judaism or Christianity, as if God limits his search for men and women to those who begin in this sphere.”

I replied:

“Derek, I agree with you entirely that one doesn’t have to start from Judaism or Christianity, or any other religion, or any thought system, or an experience of any kind. What I mean is that you can only (begin to) come to THE truth – which I believe is only to be found in Jesus/Yeshua – when He draws you to Himself. Salvation is entirely a work of God. So when you say: “Do the claims of these other systems fit with your own sense of being? You could test it,” I don’t think you can test it without the measuring rod of the Word of God (the Bible). That measuring rod is a gift from God.”

In a nutshell, the biblical position is this: “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” So, all our own efforts to find the way the truth and the life are worthless. So, philosophy, for one, is out; and mysticism/meditation, for two, is also out – as ways to find God – the God described in the Bible.

“And you, who were once alienated and enemies in your mind by wicked works, yet now hath He reconciled, in the body of His flesh, through death, to present you holy and unblameable and unreprovable in His sight” (Colossians 1:21-22).

On a Theme of Mendelsohn: Relativism, Truth and the Need for Love

Unless you’re a cynic or a relativist, or my niece, truth counts. Not, though, all the time; for example, if I asked you, a stranger, “How are you?” Would you have the chuzpa to reply with the question, “Have you got an hour?” or with something deep: “Don’t you mean, ‘Why are you?’” Unless someone has just bought you a new car or you’ve won the lottery, or had a great meal and/or drunk yourself under the table, you’ll probably trot out something trite like “fine.” But, in most situations, the “How are you? Fine” inanity has nothing to do with getting close, and everything to do with staying closed.

Ok; we all lie. But I don’t want to talk about lies but about truth. In my first line I lumped together the cynic, the relativist and my niece as those who believe – deep down in their tripes – that “truth” is not on their radar.

By “truth” I mean something that doesn’t depend on how I feel about it; something that really exists; that originates outside of me.  But aren’t feelings – which are, by nature personal to me -  also real, and therefore true? Yes they are true, but the question is whether what I am is what I ought to be. For many, “ought” is at best a figment, at worst, an insult. I once had a phone conversation with one of my nieces. She was having a bad time where everything seemed to be going wrong. I broached the topic of the Christian faith.  She responded, “It’s not MY truth”. She was using “truth” to mean the way she feels. (See my “Biography of truth”). She’s a relativist.

I began by saying that relativists don’t believe in “truth.” I should have said that relativists don’t believe in objective truth. Of course, practically, they can’t live without it. (Supermarket: “What should I eat tonight, sushi or beans?) But when it comes to things such as values, the relativist speaks of “My truth, your truth”. Truth is what “I” feel it to be. Contrary to the relativist, I believe that meaning does exist outside my “I” (From the practical point of view, everybody, including the relativist, must agree that meaning must exist outside his eye). Indeed, it is the meaning that exists outside my “I” that gives my “I” meaning. “My eye!,” responds the cynic/relativist. Here’s  the paradox: I have a point of view. “Point of view,” by definition, is self-centred, in the sense that, among millions of other self centres, it radiates out from the centre of an individual self. This description of self-centredness is about how we know things, and not about how selfish or selfless we are.

There’s inside and there’s outside. How do we distinguish what comes from inside ourselves and what comes from outside? To ask the question another way: how much of the smell is in the nose, and how much in the rose? How much comes from inside, how much from outside. I’d like to consider this question in terms of the following short discussion, which followed the posting of a video by Bob Mendelsohn on his conversion to Yeshua/Jesus. All the participants are ethnic Jews.

Lwetter  (A Messianic Jew): “The man (Bob Mendelsohn) seems earnest to a point. I myself flipped over for need of love I never had. If you came from the family that I had you might consider that as my reason. His, well I haven’t heard the whole story. It was his choice. It was also my choice to finally love, respect and observe my Jewish roots by forgiving my long since dead family. Finally seeing that resentment of my family was a huge part of my reason for switching faiths. It’s a balancing act but for me accepting both is my only way to feel at peace and love with my God.”

Bubby (an ex-Messianic Jew): “Lwetter, you flipped to jesus because you had a need for love? I am sorry to tell you that you flipped for something that is not relevent to jews. Lwetter, I suppose you think that christians don’t have any dysfunctional family lives? Plenty of people have horrible family lives; not a good reason to choose a false deity.”

Me  (Bography – my user name): “Good point Bubby. Lwetter, peace and love are universal desires, across all religious and philosophical systems.”

Gev (to Bubby): “In any case he found something that was true & worked for him in the worst of times & continues to be true & work for him in the best of times.”

Gev sounds like my niece (above): “your truth,” “my truth.” And if it works for you, (I left Gev long ago) I’m very happy for you; as long as you don’t try and worm your way into my  innards (inner space).

As I said in my discussion of the psychiatrist Gerald Jampolsky’s “Love is letting go of fear,” the source of love, for Jampolsky, resides within the eternal inner man, and when you discover that source – through transforming your consciousness, through switching on your inner light – your fear will cease to hold you hostage. For Jampolsky, the “common Self” (we all share) is the light, which, for those with an untransformed mind, lies obscured under the dysfunctional covers of resentment and fear.

What is the source of light in the Christian world view?

“The eye is the lamp of the body; so then if your eye is clear, your whole body will be full of light. “But if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light that is in you is darkness, how great is the darkness! (Matthew 6:21-23).

In Christianity, the source of true light comes from outside, from the Saviour, the Son of God. And so, if your eyes are clear (alive to light), the Saviour will fill your  inner man with that light. If, however, you have the chuzpa to think you, yourself -  your inner man – is the source of that true light, you are deceived, because this “inner light” is nothing but darkness, a darkness that your  fallen consciousness transforms into deep darkness. But there is more, which is not spelled out in the above passage: all men are born blind.  It is the Saviour, Jesus the Christ, who opens the dead eye that it may see – and believe. Jampolsky’s Yogic “transformation of consciousness” is called the “renewing of your mind” in Christianity, which occurs only after the regeneration of the deadened soul (dead to God):

“As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins,  in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world and of the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient. All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our flesh and following its desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were by nature deserving of wrath. But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions—it is by grace you have been saved (Ephesians 2:1-5).

“Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is–his good, pleasing and perfect will” (Romans 12:2).

The Torah Jew and the Christian are both enemies of relativism. They differ in this: The Torah Jew says he doesn’t need to believe, because he knows. How does he claim to know? He says that the whole Hebrew nation witnessed God at Sinai. He, of course, wasn’t at Sinai, and so has to believe that the national revelation at Sinai really happened.  Although, there was,  of course, no national Christian revelation, there were many witnesses to the words and deeds of Jesus.  But now I am straying into the  topic of the nature of faith, which I dealt with elsewhere.

Love, Fear and the Foundation of Inner peace: Gerald Jampolsky’s “Love is letting go of fear.”

Is it possible to have peace without letting go of fear? Is it possible to love without letting go of fear? This question is from the title of Gerald Jampolsky’s, “Love is letting go of fear,” which is based on “A course in miracles” (published by the Foundation for Inner Peace). Jampolsky’s thesis is that once we learn to love without fear, we will find inner peace. But first we have to find our inner selves; we have to look within.

Before, I comment on Jampolsky’s solution to spiritual illness, let us get more acquainted with him. Here are a few excerpts from his “Love is letting go of fear,” (1981 Edition, Bantam books):

“We have been given everything we need to be happy now. To look directly at this instant is to be at peace now (p. 7).”

“Today there is a rapidly expanding search for a better way of going through life that is producing a new awareness and a change of consciousness. It is like a spiritual flood that is about to cleanse the earth. This transformation of consciousness is prompting us to look inward, and as we explore our inner spaces, we recognize the harmony and at-one-ment that has ALWAYS (Jampolsky’s emphasis) been there. As we look inward we also become aware of an inner intuitive voice which provides a reliable source of guidance…listen to the inner voice and surrender to it…In this silence…we can experience the joy of peace in our lives” (p. 11. my underlining).

Deep below the dark regions of discord and strife lies the treasure without price longing to find you, the real you. Transform your consciousness and you will find your true self. This “transformation of consciousness” is the “foundation for inner peace” (which is also the name of the publisher of “A course on miracles” on which Jampolsky’s book is based). The “transformation of consciousness” is, of course, also the foundation of Eastern thought systems such as Buddhism and Yoga, which has become a key ingredient in Western psychotherapy. “Hatha Yoga brings about the Unity of the mind, body and spirit. Through this practice, the body is toned, strengthened and healed so that a transformation in consciousness can occur.”

Jampolsky’s “Love is letting go of fear” has the same aim as the physical practices of Hatha Yoga and of the Buddha (“Peace comes from within. Do not seek it without”) of Mahatma Ghandi (“Each one has to find his peace from within. And peace to be real must be unaffected by outside circumstances”).

Jampolsky’s “transformation of consciousness” is not about, meditation, navels and third eyes. It’s about the singular goal of achieving peace of mind through giving:

“In brief, this is a book about self-fulfilment through giving (p. 13).” “To give is to receive is the law of love (p. 51).“Peace of mind as our single goal is the most potent motivating force we can have. To have inner peace we need to be consistent in having peace of mind as our single goal” (p. 23). These sentiments echo one of the biggest American best-sellers, “Peace of Mind” by another Jewish psychiatrist, Joshua Loth Liebman.

I am reminded of Philip Yancey’s remark about “peace through giving” on the radio programme “Unbelievable,” where he was discussing his book “What good is God”:“You don’t find your life by accumulating more and more; you find it by giving it away in service to others.”

Here is Jampolsky again: “To give is to receive is the law of love” (Jampolsky, p. 54). And what is the most important part of giving? Forgiving: “With peace of mind as our single goal, forgiveness becomes our single function ( Jampolsky, p. 24).

So far, I have described Jampolsky’s (moral) values. Next, I examine the philosophy on which Jampolsky bases those values. All values are based on a world view, on a philosophy. Whether the term refers to a world view, or an academic discipline, “philosophy” deals with three main questions:

A. How should we treat one another? (moral values, ethics) 

B. What are we and the world made of? And is there any “force” (or “God”) beyond the material world (Existence, or “being”).

B. What can we know and how do we arrive at what we know (principles of knowing).

How we treat one other depends on what we know about one another and about “God.” And what we know depends on the how we learn about it.

Jampolsky’s moral values of giving and forgiving are shared by all religious and psychological systems. What about his view of “God” on which he bases these values? For Jampolsky, love is another name for “God.” But “God” for him is not a personal God, which is the God of the Bible.

The source of love, for Jampolsky, is within the eternal inner man. When you discover that source – through transforming your consciousness – you will discover that your fear was a mere figment. Here is Jampolsky:

“…wouldn’t our lives be more meaningful if we looked at what has no beginning and no ending as our reality. Only love fits this definition of the eternal. Everything else is transitory and therefore meaningless…..fear can offer us nothing because it is nothing (p. 17)…all minds are joined…we share a common Self, and that inner peace and Love are in fact all that are real…Love is letting go of fear (.p.18)…we can choose our own reality. Because our will is free, we can choose to see and experience the truth (p. 21).”

Jampolsky’s God is the “Eternal common Self,” which is, of course, an Eastern metaphysic. “We can learn to receive direction from our inner intuitive voice, which is our guide to knowing (p. 28). The “inner intuitive voice” is the voice of the eternal common Self. And the essence of that self is love: “Let us awaken to the knowledge that the essence of our being is Love and as such are the light of the world (p. 131).The essence of God is also love. So, for Jampolsky God is the “Eternal common Self,” which resides in every human heart.

I’ve read something similar in Viktor Frankl, another Jewish psychiatrist:

“… whenever you are talking to yourself in utmost sincerity and ultimate solitude — he to whom you are addressing yourself may justifiably be called God” (Frankl’s “Man’s search for ultimate meaning,” p. 151). (See my Logotherapy, Torah Judaism and Reconstructionist Judaism: God, man and God-man).

The nub of Jampolsky’s philosophy is this: Once we learn to love without fear, we will find inner peace. But first we have to find our inner selves; we have to look within. And here’s the rub – summarised by the Hindu guru, Swami Muktananda: “Kneel to yourself. Honour and worship your own being. God dwells within you as You.” As you transform your consciousness, you will begin to realise that you are God, and others are God, that “I” am “you”, which are sparks of the same eternal “I.” In this way you hone your giving, your forgiving, your love, and find peace.

Many of Jampolsky’s values are also Christian values. But the source of his values are not Christian at all. For one, ‘I know that in me, that is in my flesh, dwells no good thing” (Romans 7:18). Jampolsky says that “I” am the light of the world. But Jesus said that He is the light of the world. “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life” (John 8:12). The New Testament describes human beings as dead in sin, in need of a Saviour, a Saviour who is outside the inner man. (See Tony Pierce on “Yoga and new trends in Christianity”).

In the Christian world view, how does the light and the treasure without price relate to each other?

“But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys, and where thieves do not break in or steal; for where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. ” The eye is the lamp of the body; so then if your eye is clear, your whole body will be full of light. “But if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light that is in you is darkness, how great is the darkness! (Matthew 6:21-23).

I understand this to mean that the source of true light comes from outside, from the Saviour, the Son of God. And so, if your eyes are clear, the Saviour will fill your  inner man with that light. If, however, you think that your inner man is the source of that true light, you are deceived, because this “inner light” is nothing but darkness, a darkness that your  fallen consciousness transforms into deeper darkness. But there is more, which is not spelled out in the above passage: all men are born blind.  It is the Saviour, Jesus the Christ, who opens the dead eye that it may see.

That Saviour is also the Creator, who creates out of nothing:

Then the LORD answered Job out of the whirlwind and said, “Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge? “Now gird up your loins like a man, and I will ask you, and you instruct Me! “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell Me, if you have understanding, Who set its measurements? Since you know (Job 38:1-5).

Finally, what about Jampolsky’s main thesis that the foundation of inner peace is love without fear? The Christian response is twofold, where the one response is balanced – by the grace of God – in constant tension with the Other.

The one response is: “In the world you have tribulation, but take courage; I have overcome the world” (John 16:33b).

And the Other (Psalm 111:10):

“The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom; (with regard to fear)
A good understanding have all those who do His commandments;” (with regard to love)

and so I conclude with the end of verse 10:

His praise endures forever.

Boris Sidis, Stuart Chase and Friedrich Hegel on the language of love

Ever since Darwinism gained a hoof-hold onto many organs of academia, the gap between science and philosophy has been growing wider. And to such an extent that many modern scientists “drivialize” philosophy. In the last two decades, the most famous spokesman of this view is the swashbuckling biologist, Richard Dawkins. In the 1930-40s, it was the economist-sociologist, Stuart Chase who, arguably, wore the same mantle that Dawkins wears today. Here is Stuart Chase on the 18^th century German philosopher, Friedrich Hegel. Hegel claimed that his philosophical system surpassed all previous systems of philosophical thought. Stuart Chase in his personal philosophy, “I believe”, writes:

“A correspondent has sent me a quotation; Hegel’s definition of love. “Love is the ideality of the relativity of reality of an infinitesimal proton of the absolute totality of the Infinite Being.” (in “I believe. The Personal Philosophies of twenty-three eminent men and women of out time,” 1952 (first published 1940), London, George Allen and Unwin, p. 56).

“This, said Chase, sounds alarmingly like nonsense, but the influence of Hegel is profound…Whatever he meant, he was unable to communicate it to me. I doubt if it has ever been communicated to anyone. The verbal structure itself forbids communication. I could spend my life contemplating this string of symbols and receive no more reward than in contemplating “X is the A of the B of the C of an infinitesimal portion of the D of the E.”

“So, Chase continues, I cease to contemplate it. I pass it up, I pass up all such talk, from Aristotle to Spengler. It saves a lot of time. But the talk of Einstein and Planck I do not pass up. I do not understand all of it , but I know by diligence I could come to understand it. The symbols connect with real things. The talk checks with observable phenomena. Nobody can do anything but obfuscate himself with Hegel’s symbols about love…In reading, in listening, I try to separate talk which goes round and round from talk which refers to something outside my head.”

In sum, science is useful, philosophy is useless.

Stuart Chase and many others heckle at Hegel’s “tyranny of words.” Boris Sidis, a contemporary of Stuart Chase, and one of America’s most celebrated psychologists of the 20th century (and Jewish, of course) thinks that Hegel warrants a good laugh and so includes Hegel’s definition of love in his “The Psychology of laughter,”

We saw that Chase quoted Hegel’s definition of love:

“Love is the ideality of the relativity of reality of an infinitesimal part of the absolute totality of the Infinite Being.”

Sidis also quotes this definition, but with not exactly the same wording:

“Love is the ideality of the relativity of reality of an infinitesimal part of the infinite totality of the Absolute Being.” ( Sidis or Chase have switched “infinite” and “absolute” in the definition).

Whatever the correct “Hegelian” definition, Chase and Sidis would regard either as nonsense. Actually, the first definition contains more nonsense than the second, because “absolute totality” (first definition) makes no sense in either philosophy or science, whereas “infinite totality” (the second definition) makes good scientific and philosophic sense.

But wait. There is a difference between Chase’s and Sidis’ criticism. Chase believes that he is bashing Hegel’s definition of love. Sidis, in contrast, is knocking merely a “semi-Platonic, semi-Hegelian definition of love”, in other words, something that Sidis thinks could have come from the right half of Hegel’s brain, but is, however, not in fact from Hegel. Here is an important point: before making judgments, we need to ensure that we have the required background knowledge. With regard to higher learning such as science, linguistics, history and philosophy, each discipline has its own technical language (“jargon” if you hate the “tyranny”of words – recall Stuart Chase), which you need to master. With regard to Hegel’s philosophy, the demands are even greater, because he coined many neologisms (new terms), and with it came a swathe of difficult concepts.

Hegel’s “Idea-lism tried to synthesise the relative and the absolute in such a way as to explain the totality of being. As love is part of that totality, one could say the “Hegelian” definition of love (of this discussion) might apply. For Hegel, the love that carries greatest weight is the love that is “outside of myself and in the other.” (Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion). The question whether love is merely an infinitesimal part of the totality of being as in the definition, to wit:

“Love is the ideality of the relativity of reality of an infinitesimal part of the infinite totality of the Absolute Being.”

If we accept Hegel’s definition of (the purest kind of) love, namely, the love that is outside of myself and in the other, then perhaps “infinitesimal” does apply, because (total) selfless love is a rare.

Boris Sidis was a behaviourist in the mould of John Watson (1878 – September 25, 1958). Watson is famous for this dictum:

“Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I’ll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select – doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors. I am going beyond my facts and I admit it, but so have the advocates of the contrary and they have been doing it for many thousands of years” (Behaviorism (1930), p. 82).

Sidis believed that with the right upbringing, you could make a genius of any child. Sidis’ son William turned out to be the greatest child prodigy of his time. He ended up a misfit and a wreck, and died at the age of 46; a prodigiously wasted – seemingly loveless – life. And Hegel? Was he better off devoting his genius to the Absolute Idea, to pure Ethical freedom? Let Augustine of Hippo have the last word:

“My weight is my love. Wherever I am carried, my love is carrying me. By your gift we are set on fire and carried upwards: we grow red hot and ascend. We climb “The ascents in our heart” (Ps. 83:6), and sing “the song of steps” (Ps. 119:1). Lit by your fire, your good fire, we grow red-hot and ascend, as we move upwards “to the peace of Jerusalem” (Ps. 121:6). “For I was glad when they said to me, let us go to the house of the Lord” (Ps. 121:1). There we will be brought to our place by a good will, so that we want nothing but to stay there for ever” (Book 13 of the Confessions).

Nothing Exists, Peter Atkins Insists?

 

Kiergegaard

Wintery Knight has a video of Peter Atkins insisting that nothing exists. Søren Kierkegaard, like

Atkins, was no fan of objectivity. Kierkegaard unlike Atkins was no fan of abstract thinking. Kierkegaard rejected rational proofs for God’s existence. With regard to his own existence, Kierkegaard didn’t need any proof of that. Kierkegaard was concerned with how subjective experience revealed in emotion and feelings relate to the will. His philosophy was called “existentialism.” He is credited with being the father of that movement.

Permit me to amplify “existentialist” to refer not only to human existence but to all of existence. Now, what can we call Peter Atkins, who insists that the “universe is an  engagingly re-organised form of nothing?” An Insistentialist. “I insist, therefore I’m not.”

Yin Yang, God and the devil: A cosmic chess game?

In “Yin Yang dualism, CS Lewis and Christianity,” I examined the question whether Christianity has an equivalent philosophy to Yin Yang? I examined this question in terms of CS Lewis’ discussion of dualism.

Within the Mandala (circle) of Yin Yang, here are two opposite forces of equal power in the universe, a kind of bitheism (two supreme gods), a  kind of cosmic indeterminism, where even the two greatest of all gods don’t know how things are going to PAN out. In certain movements in Christianity (Arminians, but not necessarily all Arminians), there’s a great battle going on between God and the Devil, where God loses some of the battles but ultimately wins the war. The worst for this kind of Christian is to be caught up in one of these battles on the losing side, which does not necessarily involve the ultimate loss – the loss of eternal life, but possibly loss of a job, house, loved one, health, or of one’s earthly life “before one’s time.”

Is it true, though that God and the devil are battling it out for the souls of men – or for whatever? No at all. The devil is God’s devil. God rules the heavenly as well as the earthly roost. With regard to salvation, we also hear stuff like “God is for you, the devil is against you – you decide.”  This is plain silly. Satan can do nothing without God’s permission; as we read in the Book of Job:

7 And the LORD said unto Satan: ‘Whence comest thou?’ Then Satan answered the LORD, and said: ‘From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it.’ 8 And the LORD said unto Satan: ‘Hast thou considered My servant Job, that there is none like him in the earth, a whole-hearted and an upright man, one that feareth God, and shunneth evil?’ 9 Then Satan answered the LORD, and said: ‘Doth Job fear God for nought? 10 Hast not Thou made a hedge about him, and about his house, and about all that he hath, on every side? Thou hast blessed the work of his hands, and his possessions are increased in the land.

11 But put forth Thy hand now, and touch all that he hath, surely he will blaspheme Thee to Thy face.’12 And the LORD said unto Satan: ‘Behold, all that he hath is in thy power; only upon himself put not forth thy hand.’ So Satan went forth from the presence of the LORD (Job, 1:7-12).

A very popular book on the God versus the devil theory is “God’s Strategy in Human History” (1976) by Roger Forster and Paul Marston. In his review of the book, John Piper refers to the theme that I am dealing with:

“A great spiritual battle is raging in history now but we may be assured that “the Lord Omnipotent reigns” (109.9) and that evil will be destroyed and the church will be brought to glory (103.5). “So God’s plan is finally achieved; his great project is accomplished.”

For Forster and Marston, there’s certainly no game of cosmic chess going on; no game at all over human souls – it’s all out war. But God is bound to ultimately win because the devil is not as wise or powerful as God. Human beings are no pawns but participants in this battle. Those who choose God find their strength in Him; those who choose the devil, find their strength in the devil.

The central theme of Forster and Marsden is a critique and rejection of the view that “God orders and ordains all things” (41.1), or that “God’s will is always done and is never impeded by the will of any creature” (40.3). See Piper’s full review. Also listen to Curt Daniel’s “Objections to Predestination.”

Yin Yang may play cosmic chess with each other, but the God of the Bible does not play cosmic chess or fight any battles with the devil.

By the way if – at the moment – you’re into Yin and Yang and want to increase your concentration, you can get a free Mandala here. Not to be confused with “Free MandEla.”

Yin Yang dualism, CS Lewis and Christianity

(See follow on post  “Yin Yang, God and the devil: a cosmic chess game”).

Does Christianity have an equivalent philosophy to Yin Yang? I examine this question in terms of CS Lewis‘ discussion of dualism.

Yin Yang is a “dualistic” philosophy that teaches that there are two equal principles in the universe. Yin Yang is not itself a power or a substance. It’s merely a description of the universal principle of opposites that exists in both the material and spiritual realm.

In my poverty (Yin)  is my wealth (Yang); in my wealth (Yang) is my poverty (Yin). The Yin of death generates the Yang of life; the Yang of life generates the Yang of death. If life disappears, so does death; if death disappears so does life. Yin and Yang are locked in an eternal cyclic dance (battle?).

I remember one of my Greek philosophy courses where I was very interested in one of these early dualistic systems; that of Empedocles‘ “Love and Strife.” This is equivalent to the “light and dark” opposition in gnosticism, which is also found in the Yin Yang philosophy.

In Christianity, there is much about “light” and “darkness” but  darkness  is not equivalent in power too light; it is an absence of light. Now who would have thought that “absence” could create so much strife!

Here is C. S. Lewis on dualism (Mere Christianity, Chapter 7):

A universe that contains much that is obviously bad and apparently meaningless, but containing creatures like ourselves who know that it is bad and meaningless. There are only two views that face all the facts. One is the Christian view that this is a good world that has gone wrong, but still retains the memory of what it ought to have been. The other is the view called Dualism. Dualism means the belief that there are two equal and independent powers at the back of every thing, one of them good and the other bad, and that this universe is the battlefield in which they fight out an endless war. I personally think that next to Christianity Dualism is the manliest and most sensible creed on the market. But it has a catch in it.

The two powers, or spirits, or gods–the good one and the bad one–are supposed to be quite independent. They both existed from all eternity. Neither of them made the other, neither of them has any more right than the other to call itself God. Each presumably thinks it is good and thinks the other bad. One of them likes hatred and cruelty, the other likes love and mercy, and each backs its own view. Now what do we mean when we call one of them the Good Power and the other the Bad Power? Either we are merely saying that we happen to prefer the one to the other–like preferring beer to cider–or else we are saying that, whatever the two powers think about it, and whichever we humans, at the moment, happen to like, one of them is actually wrong, actually mistaken, in regarding itself as good. Now if we mean merely that we happen to prefer the first, then we must give up talking about good and evil at all. For good means what you ought to prefer quite regardless of what you happen to like at any given moment. If ‘being good’ meant simply joining the side you happened to fancy, for no real reason, then good would not deserve to be called good. So we must mean that one of the two powers is actually wrong and the other actually right.

But the moment you say that, you are putting into the universe a third thing in addition to the two Powers: some law or standard or rule of good which one of the powers conforms to and the other fails to conform to. But since the two powers are judged by this standard, then this standard, or the Being who made this standard, is farther back and higher up than either of them, and He will be the real God. In fact, what we meant by calling them good and bad turns out to be that one of them is in a right relation to the real ultimate God and the other in a wrong relation to Him.

The same point can be made in a different way. If Dualism is true, then the bad Power must be a being who likes badness for its own sake. But in reality we have no experience of anyone liking badness just because it is bad. The nearest we can get to it is in cruelty. But in real life people are cruel for one of two reasons–either because they are sadists, that is, because they have a sexual perversion which makes cruelty a cause of sensual pleasure to them, or else for the sake of something they are going to get out of it–money, or power, or safety. But pleasure, money, power, and safety are all, as far as they go, good things. The badness consists in pursuing them by the wrong method, or in the wrong way, or too much. I do not mean, of course, that the people who do this are not desperately wicked. I do mean that wickedness, when you examine it, turns out to be the pursuit of some good in the wrong, way. You can be good for the mere sake of goodness: you cannot be bad for the mere sake of badness. You can do a kind action when you are not feeling kind and when it gives you no pleasure, simply because kindness is right; but no one ever did a cruel action simply because cruelty is wrong–only because cruelty was pleasant or useful to him. In other words badness cannot succeed even in being bad in the same way in which goodness is good. Goodness is, so to speak, itself: badness is only spoiled goodness. And there must be something good first before it can be spoiled. We called sadism a sexual perversion; but you must first have the idea of a normal sexuality before you can talk of its being perverted; and you can see which is the perversion, because you can explain the perverted from the normal, and cannot explain the normal from the perverted. It follows that this Bad Power, who is supposed to be on an equal footing with the Good Power, and to love badness in the same way as the Good Power loves goodness, is a mere bogy. In order to be bad he must have good things to want and then to pursue in the wrong way: he must have impulses which were originally good in order to be able to pervert them. But if he is bad he cannot supply himself either with good things to desire or with good impulses to pervert. He must be getting both from the Good Power. And if so, then he is not independent. He is part of the Good Power’s world. he was made either by the Good Power or by some power above them both.

Put it more simply still. To be bad, he must exist and have intelligence and will. But existence, intelligence and will are in themselves good. Therefore he must be getting them from the Good Power: even to be bad he must borrow or steal from his opponent. And do you now beg to see why Christianity has always said that the devil is a fallen angel? That is not a mere story for the children. It is a real recognition of the fact that evil is a parasite, not an original thing. The powers which enable evil to carry on are powers given it by goodness. All the things which enable a bad man to be effectively bad are in themselves good things-resolution, cleverness, good looks, existence itself. That is why Dualism, in a strict sense, will not work.

But I freely admit that real Christianity (as distinct from Christianity-and-water) goes much nearer to Dualism than people think. One of the things that surprised me when I first read the New Testament seriously was that it talked so much about a Dark Power in the universe–a mighty evil spirit who was held to be the Power behind death and disease, and sin. The difference is that Christianity thinks this Dark Power was created by God, and was good when he was created, and went wrong. Christianity agrees with Dualism that this universe is at war. But it does not think this is a war between independent powers. It thinks it is a civil war, a rebellion, and that we are living in a part of the universe occupied by the rebel. End of Lewis.

It would be interesting to compare Lewis’ “third thing in addition to the two Powers” (his 3rd paragraph) with the TAO (Ultimate) from which the twins of Yin and Yang arise. Yin Yang originate together. Thus, Yin and Yang spring arm in arm out of the TAO – out of the ULTIMATE – into existence. If Yin disappears, Yang disappears. Yang is the masculine principle and Yin is the feminine principle. They can’t live without each other. Even monks needs a woman to get born – if not to get born again.

Yin and Yang thus originate out of the overarching principle of the TAO, which is ULTIMATE Being. If this is the theory, then it follows that there is a Third (Lewis’s “third thing”) overarching principle that creates the other two, namely, Yin and Yang.

Yin produces (what we call) the “bad”, the negative, and Yang the “good”, the positive.” The problem is that “bad” cannot be conceived as anything other than “not good”. The question now is: “What rule did the TAO use to produce the opposites of Yin (“bad”) and Yang (“good”). It couldn’t be a “good” or “bad” rule because the TAO is supposed to transcend the good and the bad. If the TAO is either “good” or “bad” then the TAO could not have produced Yin (“bad”) or Yang (good) because this would mean that the TAO itself is either Yin or Yang. It would then follow that Yin or Yang created Yin and Yang – which is daft.

Wait! I’ve got it. Yang is the good, Yin is the bad – and the TAO is the UGLY.

CIAO for NIAO.

(See follow on post “Yin Yang, God and the devil: a cosmic chess game”).

 

 

Related articles

• Yin Yang (jilljoy2.wordpress.com)
• Yin & Yang: The Nature of All (sintozen.wordpress.com)

Omnipotent Impotence: Bertrand Russell’s Free Man’s Worship

After spending a long life flitting between the clamourings of boisterous philosophers  – Hegel, Moore, Bradley, Plato, Wittgenstein – Bertrand Russell went to his “rest”.  At one period he was into mind-matter dualism, then into neutral monism (no, not “neural” monism – he22222 had more than one brain cell). He ended his life a materialist. The distressing thing about materialism is that it cannot offer any consistent account of  experience. It’s all talk. Matter ends up as natter.

In his “Why I am not a Christian”, Russell rejects the Christian belief in an ultimate reality. That is not to say that he didn’t spend much of his life in the quest for ultimates. The two ultimate philosophical questions are, first, how do we know what we know?, and, second, “how should we live?” Russell was  only interested in the first. As for the second, he lived as he pleased.

He was never sure about how we know anything. Why then was he so certain that Christianity was wrong? Whatever his reason, it couldn’t have had anything to do with Christ’s claim that “I am the way the truth and the life,” because if Russell didn’t know what was true, or what truth was (except “my truth, your truth”) how could he be so sure that Christianity was not true? The reason is that he loathed all religion, and Christianity in particular. In the preface to his “critical essays”, he says, “I am as firmly convinced that religions do harm as they are untrue.” Why, reasoned Russell, throw reason to the dogma?” Religion, Russell said, neither advances civilization nor can it cure any of the world’s troubles. Besides, he says, there’s no life beyond the grave. Is there!

In his article “A Free man’s worship” (1903), he concludes: “Brief and powerless is man’s life; on him and all his race the slow sure doom falls pitiless and dark. Blind to good and evil, reckless of destruction, omnipotent matter rolls on its relentless way.”  Russell didn’t reject worship per se, for he worshipped the “empire of chance”. Out with the shrine not built with human hands[1] and in with the “shrine I have built,” says Russell. Here is Russell on the “free man’s worship”: “to worship at the shrine his own hands have built, undismayed by the empire of chance.” Imperious matter will have its chance. As Lady Catherine de Burgh imperiously chirped: “I will have my share.”[2]

“Brief and powerless is Man’s life (laments Russell); on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark. Blind to good and evil, reckless of destruction, omnipotent matter rolls on its relentless way.”  (Bertrand Russell’s, “A Free Man’s Worship”).

The free man caught up in the chance intrigues of “omnipotent matter” - omnipotently impotent. R.I.P?

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[1]  So Paul, standing in the midst of the Areopagus, said: “Men of Athens, I perceive that in every way you are very religious.  For as I passed along and observed the objects of your worship, I found also an altar with this inscription, ‘To the unknown god.’ What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you. The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man,  nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything (Acts 17:22-25)

[2] Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice.”

Of goads and nails

Alvin Plantinga, the Christian philosopher, did his graduate work at the University of Michigan. At Michigan he considered the most important philosophical question to be “what is the truth about this matter?”. His question was often greeted with disdain and as extremely naïve. The specific matter was not what mattered to the scoffers; what mattered was that one would think that truth about any matter mattered.

We use the mind in our socialising, working, playing and many other activities. But, what is the human mind ultimately meant for if not searching for truth – THE truth?

God holds people accountable not only for what they believe but also for how deeply they think about what they believe. My posts are considered by some to be too “intellectual”. Isn’t it possible that deep discussion is confused with “intellectual” (that is, “high”, “scholarly”, “academic”)? The Bible teaches – it commands – in many places to know and understand truth. Commands? Yes. How can Christians obey the command to understand when such a thing is not expected of the “world”? Because when Christ comes to in live them, the Spirit of truth comes to dwell within. If “within” then deep within.

“If you love me, you will keep my commandments. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Helper, to be with you forever, even the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, for he dwells with you and will be in you (John 14:15-17).”

The Spirit of truth is not like a magic potion, which, once ingested, automatically garnishes the gut with divine wisdom. In Christianity, eurekas are rare. The psalmist says “I wait for the Lord, my soul waits, and in his word I hope (Psalm 130:5). Why does he wait for the Lord? Because he knows that the Lord’s word is true, that his hope in the Lord will never be futile. How does he know that? Because he knows God’s word. How did he get to know God’s word? He obeyed it. And you can’t obey something you haven’t studied.

“Study (be diligent) to show yourself approved unto God, a workman that need not be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth” (2 Timothy 2:15). Where is the word of truth (the word of God) to be found? In the One True Shepherd. Christians need to be like nails firmly fixed onto the words of the One True Shepherd – Jesus Christ.  if you are a Christian, how much of your time is devoted to studying the God’s word  – the Scriptures? How much time do you spend on books of which “there is no end?” (King Solomon).

“The words of the wise are like goads, and like nails firmly fixed are the collected sayings; they are given by one Shepherd. My [child], beware of anything beyond these. Of making many books there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh. Ecclesiastes 12:11-12.