Thursday, March 27, 2008
"Reality is nothing but a meaning, and so can be changed
to meet the needs of history, when history demands the subversion
of the foundations of civilization as we know it" .
-- Roland Barthes "Historical Discourses," in Social Sciences Information 6, 4, August, 1967.
What do you think?
Is history only a "meaning" and thus open to manipulation?
Or does some truth exist "out there" that can be known?
Do any of our disciplines have access to some universal reality,
or is each one merely an interest group pushing the tribal interests of the individuals in control?
Even if all this is true, and everyone is corrupt, need we resign to that inevitability? Or can we break out of the Matrix? Just how much of a fool, or a hero, is Neo, anyhow?
Food for thought................
The Subjective School: a quick look
(author uncertain)This includes such great thinkers as Luther, Pascal, Lessing, Kierkegaard, Brunner, and Barth. They usually express doubt that the unbeliever can be "argued into belief." They stress instead the unique personal experience of grace, the inward, subjective encounter with God. Such thinkers seldom stand in awe of human wisdom, but on the contrary usually reject traditional philosophy and classical logic, stressing the transrational and the paradoxical. They have little use for natural theology and theistic proofs, primarily because they feel that sin has blinded the eyes of man so that his reason cannot function properly. In Luther's famous metaphor, reason is a whore.
Thinkers of the subjective school have a keen appreciation of the problem of verification. Lessing spoke for most of them when he pointed out that "accidental truths of history can never become the proof of necessary truths of reason." The problem of going from contingent (i.e., possibly false) facts of history to deep, inward, religious certainty has been called "Lessing's ditch."
Kierkegaard complained that historical truth is incommensurable with an eternal, passionate decision. The passage from history to religious certainty is a "leap" from one dimension to another kind of reality. He said that all apologetics has the intent of merely making Christianity plausible. But such proofs are vain because "to defend anything is always to discredit it."
Yet, for all his anti-intellectualism, Kierkegaard still had a kind of apologetic for Christianity, a defense developed strangely out of the very absurdity of the Christian affirmation. The very fact that some people have believed that God appeared on earth in the humble figure of a man is so astounding that it provides an occasion for others to share the faith. No other movement has ever suggested we base the eternal happiness of human beings on their relationship to an event occurring in history. Kierkegaard therefore feels that such an idea "did not arise in the heart of any man."
Even Pascal, who discounted the metaphysical proofs for God and preferred the "reasons of the heart," eventually came around with an interesting defense of the Christian faith. In his Pensees he recommended the biblical religion because it had a profound view of man's nature. Most religions and philosophies either ratify man's foolish pride or condemn him to despair. Only Christianity establishes man's true greatness with the doctrine of the image of God, while at the same time accounting for his present evil tendencies with the doctrine of the fall.
And we are told that, in spite of his energetic Nein! there is an apologetic slumbering beneath the millions of words in Karl Barth's Church Dogmatics.
