Episode 112: Ricoeur on Interpreting Religion

0:07 Mark: You are listening to the Partially Examined Life, a philosophy podcast by some guys who were at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 112 is something like how does one actually apply this art of interpretation called hermeneutics, like say, to the Bible? And we read a two part set of essays by Paul Ricoeur from 1973, the Critique of religion and the language of faith. You can join the discussion, get the texts and let's More information@PartiallyExaminedLife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer talking to you from Madison, Wisconsin.

0:38 Seth: This is Seth Paskin being suspicious in Austin, Texas.

0:42 Wes: This is Wes Alwan in Boston, Massachusetts.

0:45 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey in Middleton, Wisconsin.

0:47 Lawrence: This is Lawrence Ware from the Snowpocalypse in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma Law.

0:52 Mark: Welcome back.

0:53 Lawrence: Hey guys, it is good to be here with you yet again.

0:56 Dylan: Welcome back.

0:57 Seth: How long has it been?

0:58 Lawrence: I believe two years. Two years or something.

1:02 Mark: It was two years for an idea that we had almost immediately after recording the first film. We said, yes, let's do that soon.

1:09 Lawrence: But you guys have blown up. You guys are celebrities now.

1:13 Wes: What makes you say that?

1:14 Lawrence: Oh, man, you have like Sandel on and you have people from Slate on. I'm surprised you guys are even inviting me to come back on here. You guys got. I get emails from people saying, I heard you once. I can't believe that they invited you, you know. Oh my God. Oh, wow.

1:31 Seth: Well, you know that Sandel guy, he'll talk to anybody.

1:35 Lawrence: He's a. Whoa, hey, hey, hey. We like that guy. We like him. I use his book in my Intro to Philosophy class.

1:42 Mark: Last time you were on because you had just taught a class on philosophy and race, but you've also done a lot of stuff in the theological realm. What are your creds here?

1:51 Lawrence: I'm an assistant pastor in Oklahoma City. It's a largely African American denomination, Progressive Baptist Convention. I went to seminary for it and Ricoeur was a very important thinker for as I was thinking about preaching because as a philosopher, obviously I have critical thoughts about texts and the Bible and whatnot, and the Bible in particular. And being a Protestant with the Bible being so central to them, I needed to really be able to think critically about the Bible. And so reading him was really a revelation for me. When I was in school.

He really opened the door for me about how to think about text in general. But obviously he's a Christian thinker as well. So how to think about the Bible critically. And so I use Ricoeur really, on a weekly basis. Like, for example, before I was talking to you guys, I was working on a sermon that I'm preaching on Sunday. I am on a weekly basis wrestling with how to communicate the truths that I see in this text to people who are not in the cultural time period where these texts were written. So it's a very existential issue for me. On a weekly basis.

2:51 Mark: Yeah. So I know after our Gadamer discussion last time, we had a thirst to see how to actually apply hermeneutics. And a lot of what I'm seeing in Ricoeur here either comes right out of Gadamer seemingly, or reflects. Well, Jaspers. We had just covered a few episodes ago. And the things he has to say about symbol and myth and what gets lost by reducing everything to an instrumental worldview, the worldview of science. And of course, that's the same argument, basically, that's in Heidegger's question concerning technology as well. So this is just continuing the discussion we've had for those. At least those past two episodes.

3:25 Lawrence: Yeah, and that's a real existential concern for me. We have a lot of discussions amongst my friends who are ministers. There are many Protestants who think that you should read the Bible as though everything that's in there is. Is just absolutely true. Right?

3:37 Mark: Absolutely true. In a literal sense. In a literal sense, these are historical events that actually happened.

3:41 Lawrence: Absolutely.

3:41 Mark: The miracles and blah, blah, blah.

3:43 Lawrence: And so one of the things that we wrestle with as clergy persons who are educated, making sure that we're not getting ahead of the text. Right. That we're not reading into the text, making sure that we're also not too busy staying behind the text, as Ricoeur says, only speaking about what the authors intended, but trying to find some balance in between all of that.

4:04 Mark: Anybody else have some opening thoughts?

4:06 Wes: I really enjoyed these readings.

4:08 Lawrence: Oh, did you really? Oh, yeah.

4:10 Wes: This is right up my alley with Freud and Nietzsche and Marx. Three statues that I do you bow, give offerings to every morning.

4:21 Mark: So since you bring that up, the simple structural overview of these two essays is. In the first one, he's dealing with this, what he calls an external critique of religion by Freud, Nietzsche and Marx, and characterizing what they have in common and saying that actually, yes, we have to take that seriously. That if religion can go through the fires of that kind of critique, it will emerge as something much more respectable, much more palatable to modern tastes. To the modern. I don't want to say taste, but the modern critical mind, a more mature take on religion.

And then the second Half is in some ways Ricoeur's response to that critique, which is, yes, we can take that under account. But we also have to look at where when people dismiss religion or the Bible on grounds that, you know, that just doesn't make sense, that's just irrational, that's just very unlikely that it violates the laws of science. Part of the hermeneutic job is not just analyzing the text according to these modern norms, but analyzing the modern norms themselves. This should sound like Gadamer. You put the modern norms at risk in this interaction.

5:19 Wes: Yeah. So maybe we should say what he thinks he calls Marx, Nietzsche and Freud masters of suspicion. And in some ways they are, you know, there are tensions between them obviously. Right. For Marx, for instance, Marx's conception of ideology is roughly that a more powerful class will represent its own interests as if it were in the interests of all. So it's natural, it's part of the natural order of things that you're the worker and I'm the capitalist or something like that. But for Nietzsche that ideological effect runs in the opposite direction.

Right. So Genealogy of morals. The idea is that it's the least powerful who produce the dominant ideology within the culture, which is morality, in order to essentially defang the more powerful. And then for Freud there's no explicit talk of ideology. Exactly. But it's the way in which there's a sort of cultural effect or cultural component of repression. And so anyway, he wants to unify these three, so how does he do that?

6:12 Dylan: Well, isn't part of that them each having a take on false consciousness?

6:16 Mark: Right, that's a term from Marx, but he thinks that it can be generalized to, you know, if Descartes thought that consciousness was transparent, consciousness is what it thinks it is, then these three guys all had a critique of that.

6:29 Dylan: Yeah. And in fact, in some ways Descartes represents the thing against which all three are aligned. And Ricoeur wants to align himself against the Cartesian concept of rationality.

6:41 Wes: Well, with Descartes, doubt extends only to things. Right. Consciousness itself can't really be doubted. And that's the problem.

6:48 Dylan: It's the understanding of doubt that Ricoeur wants to highlight in the case of Marx, Freud and Nietzsche against Descartes. That the kind of doubt that he wants to save is one that. Well, I guess it's where the word suspicion comes in as opposed to the kind of rational doubt that can be saved by clear headed mathematical thinking that Descartes would point to.

7:11 Lawrence: Right. Because he's very careful to not say that they are masters of skepticism. Let's say, but rather he wants to call them masters of suspicion, which is a particular term for him that speaks to something different. So they're not just deconstructive, but they're also building their own systems. He does disagree, ultimately with Marx and his utopian ideology and whatnot, but he is interested in the method that they use in trying to ask questions about consciousness and false consciousness and things of that nature.

7:40 Wes: Yeah, because that method is inherently hermeneutical. Right. To be suspicious is to say the text and the subtext are actually different. What you're saying and the underlying hidden meaning or hidden agenda are different. So the interpretive task is to make that subtext emerge.

7:57 Seth: One of the other key things that he says is that while all three are masters of suspicion, each one is applying that technique and that suspicion to a particular sphere of life. So you already mentioned Marx is in capital, Nietzsche is for the will, and Freud is for desire or the psyche. But we have to understand all three of them together. And this comes out in the second essay, I think, more than in this one, that because each one of them is uncovering an aspect of what is a total construct of both culture and the individual which is going to be required for this talk about hermeneutical interpretation of the Bible. We have to keep all of them in mind simultaneously. As we do that, I'm wondering if

8:36 Mark: we can try to make this really concrete in terms of what would it mean if you're taking the side of one of these masters of suspicion and trying to convince a religious individual today that they're full of crap, how would you go about it? What's the argument?

8:48 Lawrence: I think one way you could go is, I mean, because Marx is actually the easiest of them, right? With the whole the opium of the masses kind of thing. I think one way that you could approach it is by talking about how Marx says, you know, okay, well, the people are in power, the bourgeoisie. They're using religion as a way to keep the proletariat focused on an afterworldly life. Or the slave owners are using religion as a way to keep the minds of the slave off of their existential experience. And so they're focused on hereafter. And so what? It requires black folks, then.

Right? If that's the context in which black folks received, Christianity requires black folks to ask the question, well, why do we think so much about the afterlife? Why are we focused so much about this sweet by and by, you know, why are we focused so much about God's going to make a way somehow without really wrestling with the reality of our existential conditions as it relates to economics and racism. And so the question that you would ask people, and I do ask my parishioners, oftentimes this question is I say, okay, why are we thinking this way?

What are these questions? You know, where do these assumptions come from? What kind of pre understandings, to use a Heideggerian term that you bring to the text? How might this be used in an improper way? What's the intent of the author? What is the historical circumstances that he's writing in? What's his, if you will, who's the audience that he's writing it to? Right. These are the questions that I oftentimes use in a church kind of context to kind of get them to think about the text in a suspicious way, if that makes any kind of sense.

10:09 Seth: So Ricoeur spends some time talking about each one of the three Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, bringing out specific things that each suspicion and critique brings to the table. And about Marx, he says Marx is the one who saw and exposed the hidden relation that connects ideology to domination. And he says theology or religion, as an event of Western culture, insofar as it's an ideology, then is implicated in domination. Then he goes further to say that domination itself has, on the flip side, submission. Because if there's going to be domination, there has to be submission. And I think at that first part of the essay, that's about as much as he brings out. But he says that's Marx's contribution to hermeneutics, is that capital is a structure that's ignorant of its own creation of value.

10:54 Wes: Yeah. And he also calls religion a coded language of domination and submission. Obviously, it's on one level, submission to the father or to God. But on the reading of it as false consciousness, it's a matter of submission to the powers that be within a society.

11:08 Mark: False consciousness sounds like you don't believe what you think you believe. And it seems like when we get into the details, it's a matter of you're not aware of the origins of your belief. You think you just accept this belief because it makes sense or something like that. But if you look into, you know, of course, it's hard not to be aware of the fact that people tend to embrace the beliefs that they were brought up with so that it's not just yours, it's yours and your family's people in your situation's belief. So maybe a social or group psychological or some other kind of explanation like that is called for in trying to explore why might this group have those beliefs?

11:45 Lawrence: Right.

11:46 Wes: Yeah.

11:46 Mark: So it's not so much like you think you love Jesus, but in fact you're just angry at the world or something like that. Like, that's a very simplistic, pseudo Freudian thing. That is why people get insulted by these kind of. These kind of critiques.

11:59 Wes: Finish. It's explicit, right? It's not that when you say you don't believe what you say you believe. It's not that they're lying, of course. It's a conflict, conflict between unconscious belief and belief. So subtext and text. So for Nietzsche, oh, you say you love your neighbor and all that, but really it's ressentiment, which is unconscious revenge fantasy, really. You're using religion to defang the powerful. So again, it runs interestingly in the very opposite direction of Marx. For Marx, it's a tool of the powerful. For Nietzsche, it's a tool of those without power.

12:29 Mark: But it's interesting that his account is also given as a historical genealogical account. It's not given as this is necessarily at work in the psyche of every single believer right now. It's that as a whole. The reason that this kind of belief caught on is because of these very understandable psychological factors at work among masses of people, given the situation that they were in and what became of that. He can point to individual particular Christians, vilified Christians in movies, the evil priest character who's totally corrupt or whatever, spilling bile.

You know, you say your religion of love, but that's obvious, just hate coming out of your mouth. So you could point at a lot of people like that. But Nietzsche's critique is supposed to be more global than that. It's not just that individuals are doing this, it's that it's sort of at the root of the ideology of the religion itself. Whether or not you have hate in your heart right now or not.

13:18 Lawrence: Right.

13:19 Dylan: In part. For Nietzsche, it's because he judges Christianity a religion of the weak. Right. It glorifies weakness than strengthen will.

13:28 Wes: Yeah. Once the stronger, however that is defined, because it could be defined in a lot of different ways. Once the more powerful segment of society buys into religion, that's morality instead of might makes right. It's you do the moral thing, which means if you do have the advance in terms of might, you don't exercise that. But for Nietzsche, this is all will to power. It's passive aggression in a way. It's not an explicit use of the will to power in the way that it would be if you were a blond Beast, as Nietzsche puts it, a knight running around killing serfs. It's a more passive expression of that through ideology.

13:57 Seth: Ricoeur is saying that Nietzsche is actually doing hermeneutics in the Genealogy of Morals. He does, and in precisely the way he wants to do it, which is Nietzsche basically questions and is suspicious of the set of values that we've inherited and we've forgotten its origin. So he goes back and he says essentially, this hermeneutics, that is the genealogy of morals, is a philosophy of culture where we take the value set that we're given and we question it, and then he destroys it in order to uncover an original or a more rooted sense of values, meaning where those values came from. So it's important not just that he shows that culture can be read as a text, which is one of the key moves, but also that he's actually doing the hermeneutical enterprise, maybe before it was fully articulated elsewhere.

14:42 Wes: Yeah, there's this positive side for Nietzsche as well, this revaluation of value. So he's not just a destroyer. Nietzsche is not a nihilist. And he's not simply trying to destroy values. He's trying to solve the problem of nihilism, which is really the hermeneutic task here, and find some way to restore meaning. He does that through the superman and the Eternal Return and all that stuff. So whatever you think of this, how successful that is, but he has that positive side to things.

15:05 Mark: Right. So the quote here, talking about Nietzsche recourse, says it was he who first had the insight that philosophy as philosophy of culture was a hermeneutics, an analysis of significations. Can we just draw on. We've had three Nietzsche episodes now, what significations in particular might you have in mind there? Like the plays of Wagner. You know why those catch on? I mean, I can say he talks about cultural products, but how are they significations?

15:28 Wes: Well, no, just take heaven and hell the way he does in the Genealogy of Morals. So the idea of heaven is a place where the real meaning of heaven is that you get to watch everyone else burn in hell. It's ressentiment. It's revenge. And so the surface level tries to conceal the revenge aspect of things. The interpretive level brings that out. It brings out the real unconscious revenge part.

15:51 Mark: I just actually saw the new comedy special by Bill Burr.

15:55 Wes: Yeah, I love that. Yeah, I've watched all those.

15:58 Mark: And he was talking about how heaven, you're expected to have a good time and be hanging out there, even though presumably some of your friends and family are burning in eternal torment.

16:09 Wes: Yes, I love that bit.

16:13 Mark: No, that's the point is Nietzsche's response. Yeah, you're supposed to have some glee out of that. Anyway, that's the kind of analysis Nietzsche has given. Any more on Freud, we should probably

16:29 Seth: just say what he says, since these are the three key figures. Right. So we're going to need to understand ideology, culture as a text. And then with Freud, this one's a little harder to understand. But I think ultimately he might owe a lot more to Freud than the others. He says that Freud's genealogy is of desire and really more importantly, how a cultural phenomenon pertains to the history of human desire.

16:53 Wes: Could you read a little bit more on that? Because the history of human desire is about this idea of objects that substitute for lost primitive objects. The history of desire is transference. It's the transference from the initial and by itself. Freud means by object, object of desire, which is initially primarily your primary caretaker, usually your mother, which sets a pattern for desire, desire, the way your interactions with other people are patterned on that initial relationship. So that's the history where desire gets transferred from one object to another. So the substituted object for the lost primitive object, what forces that is prohibition or inhibition, frustration, fear. Right. All the things that cause repression and that causes that shift, that desire to shift from one thing to another. That's its history.

17:40 Seth: Let me go ahead and read that section because this is important enough that we see if his words bring some more of that out. He says it is through the psychiatry that he exercises his critique. But at the bottom, it is a critique of the ideals and the values of this culture to the extent that they no longer pertain to a genealogy that will, as in Nietzsche, but a genealogy of desire. The interest of Freud is always to wonder, faced with a cultural phenomenon, how this cultural phenomenon pertains to the history of human desire, be it as substituted object for lost primitive objects, be it as a factor of prohibition, of inhibition or frustration or fear.

And in this sense, his critique of religion is perfectly legitimate. Any dispute with this critique can be made only on its own terms. It is necessary to accept these terms as they have been designated and marked off in the great books by Freud on the origins of morals and religion, namely totem and taboo, Moses and monotheism and the future of an illusion. And he says this critique concerns religion as far as it is effectively for us a compensation stemming from fear or substituted for prohibited pleasures.

18:47 Wes: In other words, it's a way of maintaining maturation is about loss of A certain type of parental relationship. It's loss of being taken care of in that complete way and having everything you want if you have a good enough childhood. So that loss, that religion is a way to. For Freud to make up for those. God is your father.

19:08 Lawrence: That's exactly it. And so now I don't have to have any kind of responsibility for any of the actions that I take. And so I don't have to wrestle with the freedom, right? The responsibility that comes with my freedom. If I can use Sartre here.

19:21 Wes: Right.

19:21 Lawrence: But rather, if something bad happens, it's not my fault, right? God is in control. And so it's now all in God's hands. And so I now have this heavenly Father that looks out for me in this Father kind of figure to make up for the lack of the Father that I actually have that's no longer paying my bills. Now, right now God pays the bills. I think that is a completely valid critique, and I think he's right on. On that one.

19:45 Mark: Well, even more than that, at least God sets the standards.

19:48 Lawrence: That too.

19:49 Mark: Yeah, you'd say that the version that you just gave is sort of a very obviously immature take on religion, of using it to dodge responsibility or something.

19:59 Lawrence: Well, hold on, wait a second. Listen, I'm in the church, man. I hear this all the time. You know, if it's bad, then it's not my fault. Then God wanted this to happen. I'm telling you, man, on the ground, I hear it all the time. This is something that frustrates me to no end. So you're right, it's an immature reading of it, but it's. But it's a lie. It is a. I will guarantee you probably 60 to 70% of the people who are in that church are thinking that way. Right. Not just in my church, but just in general in the Christian context.

20:22 Mark: Well, then merely in addition.

20:24 Wes: In addition.

20:24 Mark: There you go.

20:25 Lawrence: There we go.

20:26 Mark: The thing that Sartre would most directly object to is just the fact that God is setting the standards, that we don't have to have the responsibility for creating our own values as Nietzsche recommends. Or the vertigo that goes with not having a sort of set order that at least we could use our free will to avoid fitting into. But at least the order, the structure is there. The moral imperatives are there that we can just ignore or follow.

20:50 Lawrence: Right.

20:50 Dylan: When I was reading this, I latched onto the second essay a little bit more. Once I got the setup of the false consciousness and the critique of Descartes, the one piece that I think we haven't talked about yet is what the role of myth and what he means by myth is he wants to preserve in hermeneutics a way of getting meaning out of something without having it be a simplistic journey towards certainty. And in that, I think he. In the section on demythologization, the way in which I began to understand what he meant by doubt being non cartesian, is that this suspicion that he points to with Freud and Marx and Nietzsche that he wants to preserve is that it's a doubt that's not born out of experience.

So he characterizes Descartes as being able to solve the problem of doubt just by looking to the world and looking to experience. But suspicion is not something that's born directly out of experience in this.

21:50 Wes: It requires the interpretive.

21:52 Dylan: Yes.

21:53 Wes: Is that what you're saying?

21:54 Dylan: Okay, there was a kind of, for me, an awkwardness about it. And now as we go along, I'll talk a little bit about it too. Is there's a way in which these essays, which I really enjoyed, read as philosophy, but they also read as a kind of prep school for preaching and are kind of reflective.

22:12 Lawrence: Oh, yeah, absolutely.

22:14 Mark: Where was the publication of these originally? Do we know? I mean, these are just. We got them in this collection of Ricoeur essays. And this is a section on religion.

22:22 Lawrence: I do know that the Critique of Religion comes from the book. I think the name of it is Marx Freud. It's probably Marx, Nietzsche and Freud. I think it's like a philosophical analysis or something like that. What you guys received were edited essays, so they don't flow as well. So you'll notice at some points there's like ellipses at the end of certain kind of sections. So these are like part of a smaller one. Now, the second essay, I'm not sure where it comes from. It may come from the symbolism of evil. I didn't get a chance to double check that. But yeah, these are kind of excerpts of larger text. It's one of those things where they kind of just kind of edited it together to give it to us the way that they.

22:58 Mark: Okay. The reason I brought it up is just. Is that they read like they were published in a journal for priests or something or for preachers. It's a much different audience than his general philosophical work.

23:08 Lawrence: Yeah, it is. I don't think he was writing it directly to preachers, but I do see why, for example, if you guys go to seminary. So, you know, if you guys ever decide to accept your call to ministry and go to seminary, we'll send you guys.

23:21 Wes: This is our ministry law. This is it.

23:24 Lawrence: We'll go and send no more then. But you guys, if you go to seminary at some point you're going to read Ricoeur. And the reason why is because while there's a whole bunch of guys out there doing hermeneutics, what he does with his hermeneutics of suspicion is really, really great for preaching. It's just outstanding for preaching. So while he's not writing for preachers, preachers, almost all of us are reading this stuff. Because what he does here, it's just perfect for what we do. And even further, he talks about a first naivete and a second naivete.

The first naivete is the way that a person approaches a text with no kind of critical thinking that everything that they read is true. There is no real kind of question, no real criticism, no hermeneutical thought about intentionality. Am I reading into the text? There's something that you learn in school called exegesis, obviously, versus what's called eisegesis E I S E Jesus.

24:19 Dylan: Right?

24:20 Lawrence: G E. And we joke around and say that I see Jesus is like I see Jesus. And the reason why you say that is because in eisegesis you read into the text, you read all kind of stuff into the text. An example would be Isaiah where he says, by thy stripes I am healed, or something like that. And it's clear for some people that that is just talking about Jesus. And maybe. Right, but what that says to me is that you're bringing all kinds of pre understandings to this Old Testament text that may not be there. Right. And so, you know, some people will say that the Old Testament is Jesus concealed and the New Testament is Jesus revealed. Well, that's completely isegetical statement. Right. You're reading all kinds of stuff into the text. You're not letting the text speak.

25:02 Mark: Was that Augustine that came up with that?

25:03 Lawrence: I believe so I think that's Augustine who says that. And Augustine is a great eisegetical thinker.

25:08 Seth: Just for the record, the Jews in the room have another name for that.

25:12 Lawrence: What's it called? What's the other name for it?

25:15 Seth: To even use the term Old Testament. Right. It's not Old Testament, it's the Hebrew Bible.

25:18 Lawrence: Absolutely. Yeah. It's not old to me.

25:25 Seth: If you're reading that in a way so you can try to figure it, how it prefigures the coming of Christ and what comes up in the New Testament, that's a hermeneutical exercise of some sort for sure. But it's also bringing a particular set of values to the text in advance.

25:40 Lawrence: Absolutely. And so you devalue the quote, unquote, Old Testament. Right. And you don't view it as the Hebrew. You know, for example, I make my parishioners, all of them don't do it, but I try to make them call it the Hebrew Bible. But the Old Testament is the way that you have been taught to think about it.

25:55 Seth: Sure, it's the parlance. Yeah, yeah.

25:57 Lawrence: And so what happens is that when you go through the fire of hermeneutics, Right. So you wrestle with the masters of suspicion, then you develop for Ricoeur a second naivete, one that is mindful of what the masters of suspicion have to say, but that still give you some truth, even though they may not hold facts in this text. Right. So there's truth to latch onto, but the factual nature of this text, you can kind of let go of that. Right. That's the reason why this guy kind of helped me to not become an atheist. You know, he helped me to think critically about the Bible, but still hold on to some semblance of faith at the end of my wrestling with it.

26:39 Mark: Why is it a naivete? It sounds very not naive.

26:43 Lawrence: The first naivete has to do with obviously you are naive about the text. The second naivete, what he's talking about, is that you're now open. So you've wrestled with the hermeneutical task, but you're still open to the fact that you are still naive when it comes to certain things about God. Right. So you're still open to new experiences. Right. So it's a different kind of naivete, if that makes any kind of sense.

27:04 Wes: I have a question here. You know you say held onto your faith. Uh oh, how metaphorical is your faith? How interpretive is it? I mean, so you could go to like a universalist church and there's no mention of Jesus, for instance.

27:19 Seth: So when they sing that song, do they go, it's just all right with me, it's just alright?

27:26 Lawrence: Oh yeah, yes, that's the way they sing. Whenever they have a church, you should

27:29 Wes: go to a service. It's like they read from Emerson and stuff and. Yeah, at least in my experience. So for instance, does faith still mean believing literally in, for instance, the belief in the divinity of Christ? Or is it simply you are hermeneutically engaged with these texts at some level, take certain interpretations as well? I don't know. How would you have to take. Yeah, it's unclear to me what faith you know, at which. Do you see what I'm saying?

27:57 Lawrence: No, I do see what you're saying. Yeah, I wrestle with that. A good friend of mine, Eric Rayton, he says that any thinking person can look at the evidence, and ultimately, based solely on the evidence, the best he thinks you could come up with is probably agnosticism. And so you have to make a decision, once you look at just the facts of life, about which way you're going to go. Are you going to be agnostic? Are you going to make this? You know, and so with me, coming from the tradition that I come from, where race comes in a little bit, with me, you know, I have to look at the tradition that has helped black folks survive in horrible conditions.

And the Nation of Islam is one way that you can go. But really, for me, what makes the most sense is Christianity. That there is something there that maybe I cannot articulate with any kind of philosophical rigor that would be satisfying, but there's something there. In the existential sojourn of black folks in America, as Cornel west talks about and George Yancy talk about, that there's just something there that sustained them in their difficult times. And so I make the decision to go with what sustained black folks. And I find meaning in those religious moments.

Not always. Not the same level of meaning always, but there is meaning there. There is something there. Right. And so I make the decision to go there now to talk about faith. That's a little bit more complex for me because I have way too many questions. But in wrestling with just what makes sense existentially, I'm willing to go down the path of Christianity because of what it has meant for me, what it's meant for my people, for black folks, I'm willing to go down there, but I don't go down that path in an exclusivist way. I don't make the claim that this is the only way that you can go.

I don't do that. I just say that this is what helps black folks. This is what helps me. This is what helped my family. And so I go down. So for me, it's more of a cultural engagement with this kind of belief system, even as I try as best I can because I think there are truths in the Bible. I think there's good truths there in the Bible. And so even as I try to explicate those truths in an understandable way to the Christian congregation that I serve. See, Ricoeur, for me is very important because Ricoeur speaks to. How do I engage this text, that if it's read one way, it can endorse slavery, but if it's read another way, it can fight against slavery.

If it's read one way, it endorses the mistreatment of people who are homosexual. And if it's read another way, it speaks to their defense. Ricoeur helps to kind of wrestle with that. Right. So for me, Ricoeur has real existential weight and real existential meaning. And so those are the things I'm kind of wrestling with. And that's the reason why Ricoeur speaks so clearly to me, because he gives me those tools to raise questions while still maintaining some kind of faith.

30:37 Mark: Instead of going further along interrogating you, let's try to get at what Ricoeur means by faith.

30:44 Lawrence: Right? Yeah, let's do that.

30:45 Mark: And then we can return to how that relates to your understanding. Maybe at, you know.

30:49 Lawrence: Sounds good.

30:49 Seth: Sounds good.

30:49 Wes: Well, I actually thought that was a good segue into this idea of rupture and the sense in which we are alienated culturally from the expressions of the Gospel because they're ancient and weird, both Old and New Testament.

31:01 Dylan: Ricoeur says just before the second section of the first essay, in referring to the next essay, he says that he will try to show that to smash the idols is to also let the symbol speak. And that seems to me to be at the center of what I hear you talking about law and the way in which there would be a deconstruction of the text and even the understanding, but that it would allow it to also be full and speak in its own way as much as possible.

31:35 Wes: Ultimately, that means. Right. Not taking things literally, this process of demythologization he talks about, to interpret things purified of their mythological vestments, we get rid of the literal belief in the mythological part of things, and we retrieve something through interpretation, through treating things as symbols.

31:55 Dylan: Yes, exactly. And in the second essay, he's very clear. He has a couple sections where he's very explicit about symbolic interpretations and not necessarily simply allegorical, but. But to understand. Well, it's definitely not literal as a kind of factual, historical, scientific account.

32:13 Mark: And Ricoeur sets himself up in here as building on Rudolf Bultmann.

32:17 Lawrence: Yes.

32:18 Mark: And. Yeah. And then Locke provides us with this essay that I'll post for folks. This Kerygma and myth. Is that how to pronounce it?

32:24 Seth: Kerygma.

32:24 Lawrence: Yeah, Kerygma. And we should probably be clear about what kerygma means. Obviously, the Kerygma is an announcement of proclamation, a message. And so in his context, he's talking about the Christian message or the message

32:33 Mark: of God, and just. I'll recommend that to people. I'm not going to spend time. It's just. But that it really lays out in a very straightforward way. Here are all the things that are obviously a part of the mythical character. In other words, the cosmology of the ancient people, that even just the idea of heaven and hell and there being miracles and virgin birth, pretty much all the stuff that was floating around in other ancient sects at the time. And Boltmann even says there have been many attempts to do this before. And maybe the innovation that Boltmann and Ricoeur are giving over the past attempts is that the past attempts, the sort of more straightforward enlightenment attempts, just were about banishing the myths, were about, like, who was this historical Jesus and what did he have to say?

Just look at the actual texts and the stories in the Gospels as being a collection of myths by superstitious people long ago. And Bultmann and Ricoeur don't want to throw that much of it away, but it still seems like they do want to throw away quite a lot. Like if Bultmann is starting by saying the cosmology of heaven and hell is an ancient world thing is when people didn't actually know what was in the sky, and so they actually thought maybe when you die, your soul is up in the sky, and if you dug physically far enough, you would find hell. And now that we know that that's not the case, then that's one of the things that we can't read literally.

That was an interesting take for me because I usually thought that, okay, you don't read it literally as a place that a plane or a flying saucer could reach, but you still might think there is another, you know, another plane that we warp to another possible reality. It's still a physical place in some sense. So I. It looks like what Ricoeur and Bultmann are suggesting is something even more radical than that.

34:13 Wes: Yeah, in a way, it's not whether it's historically true that matters. It's the fact that through a naturalistic lens, through this objectified way we look at the world, or through science, it seems weird to us. The idea of miracles, for instance. They don't speak to us in the same way. To some people, I think they still do. But for many of us, a miracle could, hundreds of years ago, mean something much more deeply than it can to a modern person for whom there's just no room for that, really. There's no room for the idea that someone is going to Be resurrected after three days and things like that.

34:47 Lawrence: Yeah, Bultmann actually, in Kerygma and Mythos, man, he went so far because the kind of criticism that he's using is what's called form criticism. And so the criticism he took so far that he even called into question the historical value of some of the gospels, calling them so mythologized that they obscure the Kerygma. So Bultmann was a very controversial figure in his time, and even now, just a crucial person. If you're gonna wrestle with hermeneutics, you have to wrestle with Bultmann. He's right there on the level of a Ricoeur.

35:22 Wes: And I'm reminded of our Spinoza episode where Spinoza rejects miracles as being theologically useful things. Let's say, say. And that's another sense in which you could say, well, the miracle doesn't even help us if we want to extract some meaning from these things.

35:37 Seth: So we're kind of touching on the central question. Right. The Kerygma is the announcement or the proclamation of the good news.

35:46 Lawrence: Is the good news.

35:47 Seth: It's the.

35:47 Mark: Here we go.

35:49 Wes: Yeah, it's the letter you sent to the Romans.

35:53 Dylan: It's the announcement of victory in the games.

35:56 Lawrence: Sorry.

35:57 Seth: Is the apostolic proclamation of salvation through Jesus Christ. And that salvation hinges on the understanding or the belief that Christ died for your sins and was resurrected and ascended. And so the key question here, and I think this is a perfectly legitimate one, is from our scientific. From our modern worldview, if we can't accept the myth that Christ died and arose again, how do we maintain the integrity or how do we reconnect with this message that is the Kerygma? So it's not just that we're talking about trying to find a way around the mythology, it's that for this particular mythology, it's inextricably bound up with the power of the message.

And that's what these guys are wrestling with, which I hope gives a sense to the listeners of why this is such an important question for these people. And I think you'll also see that your first instinct might be to do something like we did when we talked to Flanagan a couple years ago. Flanagan was undertaking this thing that he called Buddhism naturalized, where he was trying to get rid of all of the Buddhism, by the way, is chock full of deities and myths and all that. And he was trying to find some way to extract the psychological insights and the moral teachings from Buddhism, but not take on all of the mythological baggage.

Your first instinct might be to Take the same tact here. And Bultman and Ricoeur both address that as a strategy, right. And find it wanting.

37:29 Lawrence: Bultmann, what he wants to do, he thinks that the evangelical task, if you will, is to strip away all 1st century mythical world picture stuff, right? Because that's going to alienate modern people from the Christian faith. We are not in their zeitgeist. We have different expectations. We know about science. We don't need to explain thunder and lightning by talking about God bowling and stuff. You know, we don't need that. And so the evangelical task for Bultmann is to strip that stuff away and find a way to proclaim it in a way that the modern thinking person can accept it. And let me just be honest with you, that's a tough thing to do, man. That is hard to do to try to figure out a way to express this to a person who doesn't already have some kind of metaphysical attachment to it, some kind of cultural attachment to it.

38:18 Mark: It.

38:18 Lawrence: And that's why people who do what I do for a living in the ecclesiastical world, right, they like Bultmann, they like Tillich, right? They like Barthes, they like Ricoeur. Because these guys are trying to do that to varying levels of success.

38:34 Mark: And we should say in the language of faith in the chapter that here that we actually read. Ricoeur doesn't actually do that. He doesn't give us an interpretation. He really sets up a research program pretty much, right? So the last few pages, you know, we really need a whole system. You know, I need to Protect produce a 3,000 page book about what mythos and what symbolism is. And he produced that many pages on this subject. I think he read that he had 200 articles he published in his life, plus a whole bunch of books, a couple of which I got out of the library and are just these fat, fat.

39:05 Lawrence: He's a dense writer, he's a tense writer and he's prolific man. He's written all kinds of stuff. You're right.

39:10 Dylan: I had not come across the word kerygma before, and especially in the way it was central to understanding Christianity. And the way you just were talking about it a minute ago as being particularly associated with evangelical Christianity made sense to me, but it contrasts to me. The word that leaps to mind next is logos as word and the word of God and Jesus is the word and as some way an understanding of Christianity and faith. And then also the way in which you do a hermeneutical analysis of those things that going down the kergmatic road versus The Logos road might end you up in different places. And I'm wondering if there was at least some tension in that from your perspective or not.

40:03 Lawrence: Ricoeur did write extensively about John chapter one. Okay, so when you look at John chapter one, it begins with, in the beginning was the Word, and Word was with God, and Word was God, blah, blah, blah.

40:14 Dylan: And Word is always Logos, Word is

40:15 Lawrence: Logos, Word is Logos. Right. Logos is the.

40:18 Dylan: Is the Greek word for word and rationality.

40:21 Lawrence: Right. And so Ricoeur wrote extensively about this. There's a chapter in this book called the Philosophy of Jesus where a modern philosophical thinker kind of talks about just how deeply Ricoeur wrote about the Logos. And so Logos has to do with rationality, it has to do with structure. It seems as though it would be in tension with the Kerygma, but for Ricoeur, not so much. Not really. The logos would be the rational articulation of the kerygma, but the kerygma is still there, if that makes any sense. Right. So those two things are in concert.

They're in conversation with one another. There are two different ways to really talk about the same thing. And so for Ricoeur, all these things are fair play. You know, he touches upon all these things. I don't think he would see tension. I don't remember him ever explicitly writing about there being tension, but I can see how there could be tension. If you go down the Kerygma road, where there's this proclamation, this truth that needs to be accepted by faith, and you go down the Logos road, which is something that has to do with rationality and the Word, and also a

41:25 Dylan: kind of tension which listeners who've listened to our Heraclitus podcast would know that the word logos is dearly loved by Heraclitus as well, and is manifesting that rationality in terms of a relationship, a ratio between things, the speaking of the universe in terms of ratios. But Ricoeur doesn't talk about Logos at all.

41:47 Seth: In the next section, Bultmann mentions it briefly in the essays. If you didn't get around to that, he does have a little bit.

41:53 Dylan: Okay.

41:54 Mark: But Ricoeur does address very explicitly, in much the same way that we talked about Gadamer as expressing what we take reason to be now and how we need to. He doesn't talk about it in the way Jaspers did, that we have to expand reason to talk about reason and as getting at the limits of the thinkable, that when we say, you know, be reasonable, we're thinking like science. If it's not about facts that can be verified and that are concrete in some way, then we have no use for it.

42:24 Wes: Yeah, so there's scientific and the objectifying way of knowing the world, and then there's. I think he uses this word understanding in a way consistent with Gadamer. Right. And Heidegger. So we are returning to something more primordial, ultimately through symbolic language. So it's about literal language, which attempts to be specific, versus symbolic language, which allows us to understand ourselves, our existential situation, by providing what he calls a surplus of meaning. He starts the second essay with this whole problem of the objectifying extension of rationality to all different domain.

You know, from the domain of things to human beings as well. So the problem becomes the sense in which you objectify human beings. You treat human beings as if they are part of nature, which he uses this phrase expelling. There's an expulsion of what he calls the cosmic and psychic sacred. I take these to be. He's sort of referring back to Kant's cosmological. And so the cosmic sacred I take to be. Have something to do with God or a creator, something that stands outside the cosmos. Cosmos. And then the psychic would be the soul. So we saw the same theme in Kant as well.

Those become problematic when you try to treat that sort of category of things as if they were scientific objects.

43:39 Lawrence: Yep.

43:40 Dylan: Do we want to get started on the second one?

43:42 Wes: Sorry, I was jumping into that language of faith.

43:45 Mark: If the Bible is a kerygma or even just the message of Christianity, whether you're taking the Bible as the sole source of that or something else, it's an address, it's a proclamation. It's supposed to speak to us directly as individuals. And so how do we make that connection? Well, we have to do some of the. This historical correctiveness and maybe some demythologizing that we've talked about. But we also, as I said at the beginning, have to put our own sense of rationality, our own standards of judgment at risk. Somehow you have to be open minded.

And that doesn't mean, well, maybe there are miracles after all, or something. The important part he puts is the question, what is it to be saved or to be lost? The fact that that question doesn't make sense to us anymore. And if that's the case, if the scientific viewpoint makes it so this question doesn't make sense, then we just want to delve deeper into that. Like where did the scientific viewpoint come from such that it would have that result? He's not saying science is bunk and you just have to take things on faith. But he wants us to delve more into this.

44:44 Wes: So we should keep in mind here that this two part thing that Mark mentioned, the demythologizing process or deconstruction, essentially opening up our discourse, he sort of devotes himself to that in part one of this essay. And then the second part part, this reinterpretation, recollection thing, the positive side of it is part two of the essay. But Mark, what you were getting at, I thought of his. He sort of gets at. But why are we worried about all of this anyway? And this is in part one, and it's this question of meaninglessness. So the effect of this objectification, or the secularizing process is we lose the sense, as you pointed out, of what it means to be lost and saved. And so life becomes hollow and talks about existential senselessness and things like that.

45:30 Mark: We should explain that further. I don't think the listener is going to.

45:33 Wes: Well, I was hoping someone else would jump in and explain that.

45:38 Seth: Which part specifically are you talking about?

45:40 Lawrence: I think it's page 225.

45:42 Dylan: So in the middle of the secularization. The traits of secularization.

45:46 Mark: Yeah. And just what it is to challenge secularization.

45:49 Wes: Yeah. So he gives these two traits of secularization. Then he moves on to this problem of meaninglessness. So this hollowness of our existence is portrayed vividly in the novel, the film and the contemporary theater, revealing from every angle of the kind of existential senselessness which is the sly counterpart of the universal, available, universal objectivity.

46:09 Seth: We probably shouldn't skip over the secularization, because I think that gives the context for him saying that. So the secularization has two aspects. One is the extension of rationality into all levels and all areas of reality, which is universal objectification. And it reduces the mysterious to the problematic, which I thought was a really nice turn of phrase that he borrowed from Gabriel Marcel. And what he says is the sacred gives way to the transparency of the object. The second aspect is that the autonomy of man is an agent of his own history.

So if you have everything moves from being mysterious to problematic, meaning it can ultimately be solved and that human beings are agents with complete control of their destiny, then what happens is we have universal objectification, an area in which we exercise domination. And he says, what's interesting about this then is a couple things. One is birth and death are eliminated as significant experiences in human life, whereas previously, because birth is a miracle and death is a mystery, there's obviously a lot of ritual and rite and mystery and mythology.

Built up around those sorts of things.

47:22 Wes: Not just that they're a mystery, but that we can't control them in any way.

47:25 Seth: Way. Yeah. And we can't control them. But another thread that comes through this essay, and I don't remember if it's exactly here, is he says this transition is a transition from a worldview where human beings are not in control. And it's not just that they're not in control in the sense that they have no agency, it's that just what we were talking about earlier law with your parishioners. The sense of human beings are moved and driven by forces beyond their control, whether it be God's will and fate, or it be demons. And so in that sense, that's the existential crisis.

And I think his point is, if you follow this through the fact that we have total domination over the world and complete agency, AKA the existential situation described by Sartre, when he talks about total freedom, what he's saying is we should have. Have full responsibility and there should be a sense of existential ease that comes with knowing we have control, but in fact, quite the opposite.

48:25 Lawrence: Anxiety, right? Absolutely.

48:27 Seth: It's anxiety. We live in this state of constant anxiety precisely for this reason.

48:31 Wes: Yeah. Can I reiterate what you just said, Seth? Since it's so good, just.

48:37 Lawrence: Sure. I feel like I'm at church where like the preacher says something and then someone's like, amen. That's right.

48:43 Wes: I want to say Amen. And I'm going to say it all almost as briefly as that.

48:47 Lawrence: Okay, go ahead.

48:48 Mark: Well, as long as we are demythologizing

48:50 Seth: the amens, I think it's okay to

48:52 Mark: use the term amen, and we should use it often on every episode.

48:55 Lawrence: Hey man, I think you should just record me saying amen and just throw it in anytime in a future podcast.

49:02 Mark: Put it on my sampler.

49:06 Dylan: Amen.

49:08 Lawrence: Oh my God.

49:10 Seth: Please, please don't give Mark any ideas.

49:16 Wes: So the, the. The meaninglessness is twofold and there's this two pronged part of objectification that Seth was describing. So I mean, the twofold source of the meaninglessness is the reduction of the mysterious to the problematic that you get when you treat human beings and soul psyche as if they're part of the natural world. It's the lack of mystery once we start controlling and having knowledge of the world. And the second part is this sense in which fate provides a. A form of significance for us. The idea of a larger fate or destiny determining our lives once we are put in the driver's Seat, so to speak, we lose that form of significance. I thought that was worth reiterating.

49:57 Mark: I do feel like we should read some of the actual text here because his example is kind of amusingly dated.

50:02 Wes: My birth control.

50:03 Mark: I'm concerned.

50:04 Seth: Yeah.

50:05 Mark: Yes. So the paragraph before that. This is bottom of 225. The age of science appears to us not only as a consequence of science, but also as a new way of existing. If there has always technology, more or less today, technology is no longer an accessory of our existence. It is the access of it. Technology is a way of viewing the world as a means to practice it as a universal manifestation of the available. In this sense, technology represents a new ontological regime.

50:29 Lawrence: Clearer.

50:30 Wes: Yes.

50:30 Mark: That's so much clearer than Heidegger's question concerning technology. But that's. That's the. Exactly the point.

50:36 Seth: Yeah, yeah.

50:37 Lawrence: Take for example. Come on, go. Go for it, brother.

50:39 Mark: Take a phenomenon of the culture as important as birth control in affirming the birth of a being is no longer an act of fate, but an event one can plan.

50:52 Lawrence: How dare they.

50:53 Mark: We treat life as a segment of the available with all the ambiguity that that entails. It is at the same time the conquest of a responsibility and the elimination of a certain experience of destiny. We try to treat death in the same way, be it in seeking to hide it as death under euthanasia, of which we all more or less dream.

51:08 Lawrence: I can't wait for it.

51:10 Mark: Or be it in eluding it and in general treating it as the loss of a tool grown useless. Death is no more than an accidental rupture which happens to be available. Birth and death are eliminated as experiences and as instructive destiny.

51:21 Wes: But I, you know, I don't see this as if he's a conservative, implying that he's calling for, you know, at some point he says we can't go back because control over death is as simple as eliminating diseases. And, you know, of course, he's not objecting to the way in which technology. But it's just that there's a cost to that spiritually.

51:38 Dylan: The cost is really the experience of necessity. Right. And the notion of submission of ourselves to the world. And there's going to be that boundary somewhere. And there's a kind of nostalgia, right, for, you know. Well, there's the good kind of necessity right back in the day, you know, going on when we walked uphill both ways in the snow. The funny thing is it's always going to be true.

52:03 Mark: I feel like I want to modernize it. Like I. Like a Little what he says at the end about death here, that we deny death, we kind of paste over it and we pretend that it's not. Like that's absolutely true. And I don't see anything comparable in birth. Like, birth is still a big fre deal. Like maybe we don't feel as terrified that the woman is going to die in childbirth and the baby is going to die.

52:23 Dylan: Oh, darn.

52:24 Mark: You know, that's absolutely out of our control. And so, you know, birth control is somehow. I don't see any downside with birth control out of that. So it's very difficult for me to make the case that he wants to out of that.

52:34 Wes: There's no practical downside. This is like saying suffering provides us with meaning because it connects us to something larger than ourselves. You know, this is Dylan talking about necessity and. And in my day, we had to trek through the snow and all that. That's on one level, it's people boasting about how hard they had it and how formidable they were in the face of that. But the more important meaning is that life was more meaningful back then because there were larger circumstances to struggle against. It's like the meaningfulness, you've heard this story many times, of troops at war and the fact that when they come back from war, there's that existential crisis, that loss of meaning, because they are no longer struggling with their comrades against this outside force.

53:18 Dylan: Submission and constraint forces the generation of meaning.

53:24 Lawrence: That's good.

53:25 Dylan: Or it can be a catalyst for the generation of meaning. So that's one of the reasons why you would also talk about that genuine freedom comes from the embrace of constraint.

53:37 Wes: Yeah.

53:38 Mark: All right, so I can take this as the Viktor Frankl thesis of suffering, you know, so you could apply the same thing. Thing in the same way that there's no real downside materially to having birth control at our disposal. There's no bright side to the Holocaust. But yet. But yet, what came out of it is a lot of deep spiritual reflection. And so in that way, suffering certainly brings about contemplation about the meaning of life at the very least. And that's what he thinks is missing from this technological worldview.

54:07 Dylan: Law brought up the question of slavery and the role of Christianity in the African American experience. How much is the suffering involved with that? Which seems like there would be no way you would say, well, that was a good thing. Right.

54:21 Lawrence: For example, let's go to a text. All right, so let's talk about a biblical text here. So the formative thing that made the people of Israel that kind of unified this disparate group of people would be the Exodus. And of course, no one wants to be enslaved, but there can be good that comes out of the. That experience. Right. And so that, for them was the unifying thing. And then in the same way that African slaves. I think that the history of black folks in America is defined by the experience of slavery. Right. So when you talk about soul food, for example, you talk about chitlins and whatever.

Right. That is something that comes out of a negative experience. And they, in their creativity and their brilliance, find a way to give us the blues, to give us soul food, to give us, you know, the spirituals. And so I think that there is good that can come out of it, but that is not for us to say. That was necessary for that good to come, if that makes any sense.

55:15 Wes: Can I correct myself there just because I think I put us a little bit on the wrong track with the idea that it's suffering. So suffering is just a signifier for that relationship to something larger than us.

55:27 Lawrence: Yeah.

55:28 Wes: So it's not just that we become more deeply spiritual because of suffering, but so Freud, for instance, thought that one of the reasons people were masochistic is that they wanted to retrieve this relationship to necessity. They punished themselves because you retrieve that relationship to necessity, to fate, to destiny. And that relationship is always evocative of the relationship to parents. So it is about retrieving meaningfulness through a relationship to a higher power. And suffering is just a means to that. And also, I wanted to mention his talk of the available. I take that to be. It's a way of getting at the twofold sense here. The available is just what is no longer mysterious and also what we can manage and control. And it's those relationships to birth and death that rob them of their meaningfulness.

56:13 Mark: It's just interesting that immediately after this example of birth control and euthanasia. And euthanasia bringing that up, he says this available extends therefore from the realm of things to the human realm and immediately jumps into. Because we have this attitude toward technology and that is extended to control over when birth happens and when we die, then that means we use human beings merely as a means. And basically we then violate Kant's categorical imperative all over the place. That that's sort of part the scientific worldview.

56:44 Wes: Wait, where does he say that?

56:46 Lawrence: Am I overreaching that at the top of 226, he kind of touches upon that. So immediately after that, he says, one can certainly foresee experimentation in human biology extends to human economy, planned economy, and reasonable politics.

56:58 Mark: Yeah, all right, so I'm overstating what he says. You know, it certainly pushed a button to me that he ties the science to these things, to immorality. He's probably saying something more subtle, but it jumped out at me. As I'll say, dated is a nice way of putting.

57:13 Wes: Doesn't seem dated to me. To acknowledge the psychical cost of these things. It's like Louis CK's bit on cell phones preventing us from feeling our feelings or sadness. It's the same sort of idea where the availability of technology and immediate gratification and control over things can rob us of certain kinds of experiences that are actually required for meaning and for an authentic relationship to our ourselves.

57:38 Lawrence: And as you said, I mean, just to kind of quote the text about how he says we can't go back. And he says that even the biblical text tells us that. So on page 226, he says, you know, it is an immense fact that it's not possible for us to dream of drawing back, of returning to another age. Skipping forward a little bit in a certain way is the destiny of man to dominate over all things and perhaps even over his life. This great enterprise seeking to desacralize, to profane the universe and its cosmic, biological, and psychic aspects. Aspects is in line with a certain destiny proclaimed in the Hebrew Bible.

Although he says the Old Testament, right, man is called to dominate over all things. Psalm 8 mentions that. And then he goes down further in the next paragraph. It is not therefore, against this given culture, but in its very heart that we have to rediscover the question of to be lost or to be saved. So he's saying that now that we have desacralized all of these things, we now have to wrestle with, what do we mean by being lost? What do we mean by being saved? And that is where he tries to take us next.

58:35 Mark: So it's just an interesting move that, just like Heidegger said, we don't ask the question of being. Ricoeur is saying we don't ask the question of being lost or being saved. I think he thinks that that question falls straight out of the question, does life have a meaning? Right. If everything is just facts, everything is just science, then the question of meaning doesn't even come up. Like, it just doesn't make sense to ask, what are we supposed to be doing? Am I fulfilling my meaning? Or something like that. Am I fulfilling my destiny? Yeah, but once you ask that, then you could think that you could fail, and that would be to be lost. At least lost and saved is one way of describing an answer to that.

59:11 Wes: Yeah. And later on in the essay, he gives us reason to believe that those are synonyms for good and evil. Right. So it's about the loss of value of it's, you know, the age old story of a loss of morality or, you know, the idea that morality no longer makes sense in this objectified concept context.

59:28 Lawrence: And if I can say amen here, you know, I think that can't be overstated for the person who is a Christian or religious person that when these things have become desacralized.

59:39 Wes: Right.

59:40 Lawrence: What does it mean to be lost? That's a huge question that will make you have a crisis of faith, really. Right. When you realize that all these things have been desacralized and you can't go back to the way that you used to be, you can't go back to that first naivete. This is what, what that first and second naivete parallels this right here. And you can't go back to that right now. You've lost that. That is not a place. That's that place of safety that Sunday school plays, that place where, you know, things made sense and everything was. Was nice and roses and perfect. You can't go back there now. You have to figure out a new way of being like that cannot be overstated. The level of anxiety and angst that that brings up for a person.

1:00:17 Seth: Can I just ask a question? Are we kind of at part two? Did we?

1:00:21 Wes: No, we still have to hit these pre understandings. The one.

1:00:24 Seth: Okay, so you're not there yet.

1:00:26 Wes: Okay, so we've kind of set the stage for the problem. And the way out is through this preliminary to the kerygma or these pre understandings.

1:00:37 Mark: So page 227. To preach is not to capitulate before the believable and the unbelievable of modern man, but to struggle with the presuppositions of his culture in order to restore this interval of interrogation in which the question can have meaning. Which sounds like. Like the clearing of being, the clearing in which being can appear as itself. It sounds like Heidegger, but it's an interval, not a clearing.

1:01:00 Seth: Here

1:01:03 Dylan: in this first one, he begins saying something that I wanted to bring up when he says comprehension is then a struggle against the deceit which progresses along with our knowledge and action. A step towards the primitive, the primordial, the original. And he brings this up several times where the hermeneutical act is an act to accessing the primordial, the original. And I guess I found that turn confusing given the other actions of demythologizing and stuff. Because when you make that turn saying that your hermeneutics is going to get you to the original, the primordial, the root, it's just like another version of the same thing everybody else is talking about all the time.

Time. I'm going to get to the true meaning of it by getting out to the. Follow it down the right path to its root somewhere, which is different to me than a hermeneutical act that adds meaning to something rather than uncovering it.

1:02:04 Wes: Hey, where are you reading?

1:02:05 Dylan: The quote that I read is on page 228.

1:02:08 Lawrence: Perception is not only one function among others which serves to prepare scientific knowledge, but it is is an access to the manifestation of the world. I see what you're wrestling with there.

1:02:18 Wes: Can you state your objection again?

1:02:19 Dylan: Why is it primordial and original, which clearly means to be the true right or the more true at the very least.

1:02:27 Wes: So he sets this up with this. He wants a philosophical anthropology that critiques science by showing how science takes place within, how it's comprehended by the human condition, and how it has an objectifying effect that essentially makes us more opaque to ourselves. And the way it makes us more opaque to ourselves selves is by distancing us from our original and primitive selves. Essentially the more rational we are in that sense, the more we lose. So for the Nietzsche theme, it's this tension between science and instinct. And for Freud it's between the more rational parts of ourselves and instinct or the more culturally determined parts of ourselves and instinct. So I think that's related here through hermeneutics. We're trying to get back to a experience of ourselves that is undone by this more objectifying relationship to the world.

1:03:16 Mark: It's more just that there's something missing when we let this one viewpoint of science take over everything. It's not that science is wrong or something, it's just that it is one interpretation. And when you're used to applying this one interpretational view to everything, then it blocks out other very fruitful ones that you think that Mark, I think, is

1:03:37 Dylan: way stronger than that Mark.

1:03:39 Seth: What Mark just said is kind of the Heideggerian thing that he and I went through when we did the close reading of on the Essence of Truth. Ricoeur here is much more directed towards. He's done two things. One is he's tied the idea of Kerygma to somehow finding an understanding of human existence. And then he's Saying that scientific knowledge will not give you any insight into human existence. It describes the world objectively, but it doesn't give meaning to our experience in that world. And so what I'm seeing here, Dylan, is just him saying what is there under this layer of objective knowledge and all that means here to me.

And I want to keep it in the context of the fact that he's talking about this particular enterprise of doing hermeneutics on the revealed word of God, that he's saying that scientific knowledge is a form of knowledge, but it's not that it's one form of knowledge amongst others, it's that specifically it does not give us any insight into our existential way of being in the world.

1:04:43 Mark: For more information, listen to the Jaspers episode, who I'm now calling Jaspers.

1:04:47 Dylan: There will be at least one person on the Internet who thanks you for that.

1:04:53 Wes: I think what Seth just said is convincing, although I was inclined to be on Mark's side at first because I was trying to think of Ricoeur in parallel to Nietzsche where there's a sort of call for a fusion of the scientific and artistic. Right. Gay science. I think gay science does actually have something to do with hermeneutics, but I'd have to think more about that. I think it is an interesting problem. I think, you know, Dylan is right about that tension. You know, the hard sciences can't put us in contact with the existential. But it seems to me hermeneutics is also at least partly a rational activity. So in a broad sense a kind of scientific activity. So I think there really is that tension.

1:05:28 Dylan: Well, especially when we get to the notion of exegesis. Right, right, right.

1:05:32 Lawrence: I know that many theologians like to listen to this. So just so we're clear that what we're dealing here is what in systematic theology is called anthropology, obviously. Right. So the problem of humanity to which the proclamation of God is trying to be the answer to. And so one of the central questions that we're trying to wrestle with is, you know, as we said, you know, what does it mean to be saved, what it means to be lost. And ultimately he's explicating here what he thinks humanity is wrestling with, particularly in light of what this Kerygma tries to bring. So just for those theologians that are listening, I just got an amen from them just now.

1:06:03 Wes: And just one more thing about what he means by this primordial thing, this returning in the very last part of this part one of the. On top of H229, he says, I think that everything with which awakens this kind of primordial reading of our birth, death, existence, decision, communication with others in some. All that restores the primordial, the primitive existential belongs to the domain of pre understanding. He goes on about time in the last sentence. The last sentence is good too. Yeah.

1:06:29 Dylan: All that restores the primordial tissue of existential comprehension re establishes the first soil in which the question of the meaning of being created, lost and saved can be found.

1:06:40 Mark: Tissue and the soil, that old chestnut.

1:06:47 Lawrence: Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

1:06:49 Dylan: When I first read that, it just sounded to me the same kind of thing as we're talking about in terms of alienation in general, though, the experience might feel different than if you're coming at it as a believer and then have a crisis such that you then feel lost, as opposed to I maybe being a rationalist and then having a crisis and feeling alienated or being a. I don't know, being a capitalist. I mean, any of those experiences, but they all seem to me to be very related consciousness. And I didn't know if there was a distinction that we ought to draw between the notion of being lost, as Ricoeur is talking about it, as opposed to being alienated or drawn to nihilism or something.

1:07:33 Lawrence: In my reading of Ricoeur, I think there's some parallels to all of those. I. I don't think there would be a line that we would draw. What do you guys think?

1:07:40 Seth: I'm kind of fixating right now on Dylan using the word alienation.

1:07:44 Lawrence: Why is that?

1:07:45 Seth: Well, because it's in retrospect, referencing Mark, referencing Freud to some extent, Heidegger for sure.

1:07:53 Lawrence: He references Kierkegaard as well, with anxiety.

1:07:56 Seth: Yeah. You would think alienation and authenticity would come up, but they.

1:08:00 Lawrence: They don't.

1:08:01 Seth: They don't.

1:08:02 Dylan: Not in these essays. But apparently he wrote a lot about authenticity.

1:08:06 Seth: I'm sure he must have.

1:08:07 Lawrence: He did write about them, but I don't remember them being big hallmarks of his religious thought though.

1:08:14 Mark: Right. He describes earlier sort of what the positive to come out of the master of source of suspicion is, which is as much as atheism can offer, if anybody wants to find that quote. If you listen to our Nietzsche episodes and you can get the idea that what you're describing in terms of the existentialist solution, I think Ricoeur is equating with an atheist solution that you take control, you try to live authentically. There's some version of that for all the existentialists. And that what Ricoeur is going to end up proposing as a Christian alternative is to.

Well, I'm not entirely clear. He contrasts the amor fati embracing necessity explicitly in Nietzsche and. But you can also see that in Freud and Marx that yes, we are controlled by these forces of culture and such, but if we can understand them, if we can see where this false consciousness was coming from, then we can gain some sort of freedom within that deterministic system. So we're still determined, but we're kind of aware of it and can. Can do it. I don't know. We can love our fate is the way he puts it. Whereas the Christian alternative is more reflecting on the endless unknown mystery of human potential.

Something like that. And so I think he doesn't see that as the existentialist solution. Well, let's keep going. We'll eventually get to the quote where we get what positive comes out of here. It's very sketchy, not sketchy in terms of suspicious, but it is not well drawn in this particular essay.

1:09:39 Wes: So I'm still trying to think about whether being lost actually is related to alienation, because I thought alienation actually is no longer being lost or being saved isn't even a question. This actually does kind of give us a lead into section two though, where he's talking about economics because he talks about evil and salvation in the context of Marxism. So that's sort of our more practical, everyday example of being lost in saved. So the confrontation with theology, with Marxism in particular, will bring us to rediscover the question of evil and the question of salvation in a reading of the great forces which regulate our economic life, our political life and our cultural life.

This second section, this is the second one of these pre understandings. It involves a hermeneutical approach to institutions and structures, economics, politics and art, in terms of evil and salvation. So we're returning to these things. We're recovering being lost and being saved in these domains in these context. And that's the economics one was one example. Evil economic policies that make people miserable. Even when we lost the sense of being lost religiously, we can understand what it means for an underclass to be lost, let's say. So he says at the end of that paragraph.

We would not be going very far in our understanding of being lost or being saved if we could not read this condition in the great stories told by institutions and by structures. So he gets into the Kantian trifold distinction of the having power and worth, which end up being about economics, politics and art.

1:11:06 Mark: Are you talking number two or Roman numeral two?

1:11:08 Wes: What page number Two in part re

1:11:11 Seth: establishing the question of humanity taken as a whole. Page 229.

1:11:15 Wes: Yes. This is a section where he's trying to re establish some meaning for the ideas of being lost and saved, but in a secular context through these institutions.

1:11:24 Seth: Part of what's happened with the worldview we have now, which doesn't accept the mythology of the revelation or that is required for the Kerygma, is that we don't see humanity as a whole or we don't see our humanity as totality anymore, that we've narrowed our vision to the individual. So he says it is not doubted that Christians have in the course of history, bit by bit, abandoned this domain which was once very familiar to the Fathers of the Church, to Tertullian and to Augustine when he wrote the City of God. I don't know those references, but what I do know is that I was thinking, I wrote down on my notes I that here Judaism and I put quote chosen people. So my big closing speech is going to be about how Ricoeur is just suggesting that Christians read the Bible the way Jews do and that that's going to solve all your problems.

1:12:12 Lawrence: Are you serious?

1:12:14 Mark: Is aimed at. Specifically at them, you mean?

1:12:16 Seth: No, no, just simply that there's a form of hermeneutics, rabbinical hermeneutics, that have been in place for thousands of years around the way that Jews interact with the Bible as a text that keeps it a living document.

1:12:27 Wes: Yeah, but there's also tradition, you know, similar tradition within Christianity.

1:12:32 Seth: Well, yeah, I'm sure there is for the scholastics. But one of the things that's underwritten, I think the ability of the Jews to take that approach is this idea that they never have lost the sense of Jews taken as a whole. So this number two that's really important to him is that Christians don't see themselves as a unity anymore. But for Judaism that's kind of the central tenet is the tide of the tradition. And the central of being chosen is something that forms an anchor that makes the hermeneutical enterprise, so to speak, viable. And so I wonder if there isn't some of that in here. I don't think it's exactly the same thing.

1:13:08 Lawrence: And so what you're saying is you guys read the text never losing sight of the fact that you are a part of the whole. Right. And so that informs the way you interpret a text.

1:13:21 Seth: Absolutely. There's several pre understandings in the way that the historical of Jewish biblical interpretation. But one of the key things is that we are a Community that has a sense of responsibility and obligation to each other and that to text as given is given to the entirety of the community.

1:13:38 Lawrence: It's given to the community. Wow. You may be onto something here, because one of the things that has been a problem historically in the Christian tradition has been always compartmentalizing your approach to a text. And so this text is speaking to them, but it's not speaking to me. And so that opens up the door for slavery, that opens the door for economic exploitation. And so it's that hopscotching through the text or that compartmentalizing certain parts of the text. And so what you're arguing is that maybe what he's up to here is saying, never lose sight that you are a part of the whole. That, you know, you should be interpreting this, applying your hermeneutical lens as a people of a whole.

1:14:17 Wes: See, I saw this as he's. He's saying here right now, he's saying, I don't want to just concentrate on individual individuals. I want to do sociology or I want to look at humanity as a whole. I want to think about groups of human beings. I want to think about institutions. The whole point of the Tertullian and Augustine thing was that we gradually got to the point where we looked at salvation in terms of the isolated individual. And he wants to think about salvation in terms of institutions. That's the point of this section, I think.

1:14:45 Mark: I think there's a fundamental ambiguity in the phrase question of humanity taken as a whole. I don't think that any of the interpretations of that falls in line with as a people, in other words, as being a member of a community, the way Seth put it. But one of the ones is definitely what you just said, Wes, that it is not just me as an individual, but all people. But reading more in the context here, he talks about the whole human adventure. I read, not humanity taken as a whole. Doesn't mean me and all the other people.

1:15:14 Lawrence: It means.

1:15:14 Mark: Means my life, my entire humanity taken as a whole. Sort of the way Emerson talked about,

1:15:20 Lawrence: okay, you know, oh, we're just humanistic.

1:15:22 Mark: You're just a farmer. You're just a whatever. And in everything we should do so, as he elaborates throughout the section, like, well, yeah, if we want to understand what power is, don't just look at power sort of in your own life or something. Look at the genealogy, the history of power. Read Plato and Machiavelli and Hobbes about it to understand that to me sounded like when Emerson was saying, saying, don't just Say farming is my job. Look at yourself as man farming with a capital M and a capital F as the human experience, the big mf. Yes,

1:15:55 Seth: I'm going to have to disagree on that one. I mean, let's reset the context in which he's saying this. Okay, so he's saying this is on page 227.

1:16:03 Lawrence: Okay.

1:16:04 Seth: I would, in the context of the first analysis, simply place a few signposts in the direction that. That I've called pre understanding. I see three directions in which, according to the taste and competence of each individual, it would be possible to conquer or reconquer this pre understanding. This is part of the hermeneutical move. He's saying. I want you to bring this to this question. We're trying to get to the point where we don't simply think, well, we live in a scientific age, and the Kerygma and the time it came from is completely outdated.

So what's one thing we have to do is we have to do the negative move of destroying or forgetting our biases in the value system of science or modernity, which is probably more accurate. Not science, but just talk about modernity, since it encompasses technology and a bunch of other things, and say we have to acknowledge the fact that we've inherited this value system from modernity that tells us that this thing has no value or that it's dated or it's historical. The second thing we have to do is we have to bring. We struggled with this when we talked about Gadamer, about is it intentionality or is it something?

But we're going to bring some set of assumptions to the text, one of which is there's something of value, there's something of meaning. And I think these three points, the philosophical anthropology, the re establishing the question of humanity taken as a whole, and the level of language those three pre understandings are. What he's saying is it's a structured form of bringing a set of assumptions, so to speak, to the text that are really assumptions about the text having some kind of meaning.

1:17:37 Lawrence: Meaning.

1:17:38 Wes: Well, I'm taking this because of this line about we would not be able to go very far in understanding being lost or being saved if we could not read this condition in the great stories told by institutions and structures. This means to me that this whole idea of humanity as a whole means he wants to apply hermeneutics to institutions and structures. And then he goes on to describe those institutions having power, worth, economics, politics and art. And they broadly parallel, parallel Marx, Nietzsche and Freud. I'm not sure. Where we disagree. Exactly. I just wanted to reiterate that. That's what I thought he was doing here.

1:18:12 Mark: Let's work the point about that.

1:18:14 Wes: I was going to say, let's do that.

1:18:15 Mark: Okay, so the last paragraph of this section. Similarly, if the question of having must be deciphered in the economic world and the question of power in the political world, that of worth, must be deciphered in all images of man which are born not in a singular imagination, but by the means of literature and the image arts. When Van Gogh paints a chair, it is a figure of man, which is to say that. That this tableau on which man is not represented is a view of the world which denounces a certain man, which dismisses a certain man capable of inhabiting this world.

When I speak of the images of man, it is not simply a question of the express representation of man, but of imaginative projections of creation in which is implied as from behind, as a virtual image, man himself. Himself. It is evident that not only through a critique of man as an economic being or as a political being, but a man is a carrier of culture and the inventor of signs of culture, that this pre. Understanding can be exercised in which the fundamental question of man, of a destiny or of one destined can be raised. Well, that's a hard freaking paragraph compared to the rest of this essay.

1:19:19 Lawrence: Yes, it is.

1:19:21 Wes: So what is this figure of man that stands behind the chair? You know, that's sort of implied by the chair. I thought it might be the artist or some purported maker of the chair. You could think in Marx's terms of the objects that we work on being sort of imbued with something of the human being.

1:19:37 Mark: What's the name of the painting that he's referring to? It's definitely one of the famous Van Gogh paintings. That there's a chair in the middle of it. It comes to mind immediately.

1:19:44 Wes: Yeah, there's a room. There's an empty room.

1:19:46 Dylan: Yeah, it's called Van Gogh's chair.

1:19:49 Mark: So man is not represented in it. And it's a view of the world which denounces a certain man, which dismisses a certain man capable of inhabiting this world. What? Because it's like a drab and ugly looking room. And it seems kind of a contentious interpretation that he's giving of this painting without actually giving this.

1:20:09 Wes: I don't understand. Yeah, that dismisses a certain man capable of inhabiting the world.

1:20:14 Seth: Okay, so I would gloss that particular sentence in that. Even that whole paragraph, because he's talking here about art and this Ties to, he says. I will use three examples drawn from the anthropology of Kant. Somehow. He refers to Kant a lot. Great human passions, he says, revolve around three main things. Having power and worth. Okay, so if you talk about having, then you're talking about property. You're talking about possession. Economics, which is economics, which is Marx. If you're talking about power, you're talking about the state. State, political power.

And that supposed to tie back to Nietzsche somehow, I think. And when you're talking about worth, in this case, he says art, which I think is supposed to tie back to Freud, which is about human beings projecting onto the world or projecting their inner life onto their outer life. So I thought when he was talking about the Van Gogh painting, he was just saying, even when there's a painting, if it's not a painting of a human being, it's still an artifact, so to speak. It's still of man and about man, even though it's a painting of a chair.

1:21:18 Wes: Well, there's this phrase imaginative projections of creation in which is implied as from behind, as a virtual image, man himself. So here it's ambiguous between whether he means the creation of the chair or the creation of the painting. It's unclear to me whether he's thinking of an art object as giving us the figure of a man in the sense of the artist. Or in the sense that when we represent an artifact, even in a still life or in some painting where there's a chair or something, whether there's an implied human presence because it's a chair, that someone made something like that.

1:21:53 Mark: So I just read it as. Without caring about the specifics of even which painting he's talking about, that somehow the representation of this room with the chair is supposed to make us reflect on. On man's fundamental relationship to his environment or something. So this just points to my Emersonian interpretation of this whole section. That rather than seeing things purely scientifically or whatever, we are reflecting on the larger existential question, our relationship to the world.

1:22:18 Wes: Well, the critique of man as artists, critique of man as carrier of culture and inventor of signs of culture. So it's not just critique of man as an economic being or a political being, but critique of man as. As a art creating being.

1:22:33 Mark: Let's keep moving. I don't know what else we could do here.

1:22:36 Lawrence: Yeah, we're in the weeds on this one. Yeah.

1:22:37 Wes: This third pre understanding involves expanding our language, which tends to narrow itself into a technical range, which I think he's thinking of scientific or descriptive language. And to try to Preserve alongside scientific language, the language of the imagination, the language which awakens possibilities.

1:22:56 Dylan: I understand, in fact, I agree. The way in which. Which scientific language ends up being a proxy for technical language. I would point out that at least for early modern scientists, the language of science was actually an opening up of the world into a revealing of the world that had been hidden before, as opposed to a straight jacketing of it into merely technical language.

1:23:24 Wes: Yeah, yeah.

1:23:25 Dylan: A lot of scientists, particularly mathematicians, would continue to view it that way. That the language of science, particularly mathematics, is a opening up of the world and that the language of science is a revealing of possibility. In fact, it's a very creative act of revealing that is not merely technical and not. Yeah, I want to make that point without completely disagreeing with the goal that he has of cultivating imagination. But he does have kind of a merely technocratic understanding of the scientific enterprise presented.

1:24:04 Wes: I don't know whether he would disagree or not, but I don't think he would necessarily disagree because I think he has something very. He might not specific in mind here. This use of the word imagination and opening possibilities. This is about the idea of symbolic language that has multiple meanings and the use of metaphor and things like. Like that. So, yes, science is creative and imaginative. I mean, it's just. He means something quite specific by that. It's a certain kind of creativity.

1:24:31 Dylan: And particularly pointing to the notion of symbolic language. And I agree, the only reason I wanted to bring it up was the power of language and the power of finding languages. If you want to consider in particular mathematics as a language for understanding the world, world, as Galileo would say, that the world is written in the language of mathematics. From his perspective, it made me think of that.

1:24:55 Seth: There's a point towards the end of the third section, I think he says scientific language objectifies, technical language disposes, and the language we seek understands and awakens possibilities. So there's definitely space for all three things. Of course, it's hard not to read any of these things when you use the word objectify and objectification and all that. To not think that there's a negative connotation for sure.

1:25:18 Wes: Stop objectifying reality, Dylan.

1:25:20 Mark: Soon you're going to be selling my organs, aren't you?

1:25:26 Dylan: I'm taking bids right now, mark.

1:25:28 Lawrence: I got $5 on it.

1:25:31 Seth: All right, part two.

1:25:33 Mark: So, part two. How do we restore meaning? How to return to the contemporary discourse a language which does not pertain to the same cultural circle as mine? How do we do it?

1:25:43 Wes: Extend hermeneutics to more than texts, to

1:25:47 Dylan: culture the Oneiric, cosmic and poetic right.

1:25:52 Seth: I had to look up Oneric. I'm not ashamed to admit it.

1:25:55 Wes: Dream related, sleep related.

1:25:57 Seth: I should have known from context.

1:25:59 Mark: So this is where he lays out his research program, that it's the task of validation or justification of symbolic language. We need to get it in our heads that ambiguity is not always bad. Yes. If you're trying to use it for instrumental purposes, if you're trying to use it to accomplish something, if you're trying to have an argument, he said, that assumes that everybody means the same things by the words, and the words mean the same thing every time they're used. That straightforward declarative use of sentences is not the only kind of sentence there is.

And if you're talking symbolically, then we have to give an account of that. It's a sentence that means more than it actually says. It's not just an ambiguity of meaning, it's an excess of meaning. Meaning that interpreting a symbol is not just a matter of getting at the right meaning, it's a matter of an inexhaustible engagement with the hermeneutic object, with the symbol.

1:26:48 Wes: So one example he gives early on is this stain as symbolic of sin,

1:26:53 Mark: which they should use more in laundry detergent commercials. They should use that.

1:26:57 Lawrence: If you want to go show my men, use Thai.

1:27:02 Seth: All right. So he says that to do this,

1:27:05 Mark: taking the blue dress into the dry

1:27:06 Lawrence: cleaner, oh, my gosh, that's horrible.

1:27:08 Seth: To restore this meaning, to try to access this thing, we have two steps, validation and arbitration. Validation, exegesis. This is a quote, the task of validation or of justification of symbolic language. Seems to me that the dimension of language in which preaching is deployed in symbolic language. And the key is, if you look at symbolic language, you're not supposed to just say, oh, it's symbolic, therefore it nonsensical or somehow not referring or not descriptive in the way that scientific language is. You know. He says, instead, the task of philosophy, a philosopher can study the structures functioning and validity of symbolic language in relation to objects.

So he gives an example of. We say, our Father who art in heaven. We see the word sky as a sort of double meaning for the firmament of the sky, in which the characteristics of elevation, distance, and inaccessibility are dominant, dominating. Consequently, we make these associations. So when we say our Father who art in heaven, what we mean is God, who is distant and elevated above us and inaccessible to us, right? In a certain sense. And he says, this type of activity where you take the symbols and you do this kind of work is a proper philosophic activity, and it's the proper way to approach symbolic language.

And he says, and every symbol has a triple root. And here we go back to. To our three guys.

1:28:30 Lawrence: Right, Right.

1:28:31 Seth: I'll read it. A basically psychic root of desire of the libido, as Freud said. And therefore in the archaeology of human desire, which comes to the surface in oneiric language, a cosmic root by its liaison to appearances or apparitions of the universe. And finally, it is born in the relation of image to language, in the words of the poet.

1:28:51 Wes: So the reason why he's connecting desire to dreaming is because. Because the way symbols happen in dreams, according to Freud, are through the dreams becoming a tool of wish fulfillment, of fulfilling one's desires. And the way that happens is that impulses that are forbidden have to get a substitute satisfaction through something that's symbolic. Me slicing an apple in two in a dream may be the symbolic manifestation of me beheading someone, for instance. And that's the sense in which you get symbolic slip due to desire being forced to a different channel.

We talked about some of this with Lacan, and I think the importance of appearance is just this. The signifiers are material things within the realm of appearance. The semantic structure of language, he says later, is that through which something material is used to represent something else. In his particular case, something existential, like so, for instance, stain for sin.

1:29:43 Mark: So we get the first kind of examples of how he would look at some of the things in the Bible here, like the Genesis story of creation. If you're on a demythologizing project, it's obvious bunk in terms of what we know about physics, that specific order, and it happening on seven days. And, you know, all the things that creationists like to conclude about the age of the earth and how dinosaurs must have lived. No, that's the wrong way to read it.

1:30:08 Lawrence: According to Ricoeur, this is the bottom of page 235, for example, the Adamic account as a function of existential exploration. Exploration, since it permits us, through the sort of great hero culpability, resembling the hero of a tragedy, to read all of human history. So Adam is not the story of one particular person, but Adam is a story of all of humanity, which is a very catholic approach to it, or keep on going, he says. One could say that the figure of Adam represents what Hegel calls a concrete universal. It means that I read a psychological frame, the significance of the human adventure, a singular experience, that of the exile of Israel, becomes a universal experience by way of Myths, where do they have

1:30:52 Mark: the thing that puts us at the center of existence?

1:30:54 Wes: That's actually in the previous section where he gives his little interpretation of Genesis as a kind of metaphor of the process of objectification and secularization itself. Because first you have light and then you have objects. The objects, in a way, block the light. So this is at the very end of Part 1.1.1, the Phil. Philosophical anthropology section. That's where he gives his first little jab at Genesis.

1:31:20 Dylan: So page 228, the second paragraph from the end.

1:31:25 Mark: There's no possibility of squaring this account of creation with a scientifically organized universe. But if we understand that the first account of creation is actually the theological reading of a phenomenology of perception, everything has meaning. This account is the progressive portrayal of the theater of our existence. Light appears here as the medium of vision. Visibility with the progressive portrayal of the world of plants and animals intrudes what is manifested in this light. Thus is articulated the original theater of our existence for which we moderns fashion a scientific explanation. Okay, so this is not in this. In the context that I thought it was. It's earlier I read this is. This is the kind of reading he's recommending that we give to Genesis. Is that right? This is kind of.

1:32:03 Lawrence: Yeah, that's exactly what he's doing. And it's parallel to what I mentioned earlier. And what it reminds me of is a. He was part of what's called the Jesus Seminar. His name is Marcus Borg. Passed away about a couple months ago. He was a philosopher at Oregon State University. And he used Ricoeur to kind of talk about a way for a thinking person to approach the Bible and take it seriously, but not take it literally. So Adam then becomes not a person in history, but rather Adam becomes all of us coming to knowledge of self or coming to knowledge, knowledge of the world or coming to knowledge of the ambiguity of life.

And so he used that approach, which is, to be honest, a really useful approach in preaching and teaching, both homiletically and hermeneutically, because it equips you to view a text through a mythological lens and find a way to speak to the existential experience of the people that you're talking to. Right. And so now you're not talking about something historical, but you're saying this is what the story is trying to. To communicate to us, and this is how it is applicable to your life today. So that's the reason why Ricoeur is so beloved by people who are actually working in the churches.

1:33:15 Mark: I think I remember in something I read, Jaspers giving a similar account of Jesus, that Jesus is pointing at the divine in all of us would Ricoeur, have a similar take because that sort of denies the literal divinity of Jesus in favor of we are all divine. There's no fundamental distinction between Jesus and us, which is not. Which is way less orthodox than I would imagine anything anybody who calls himself a Christian would want to be. Jaspers does not.

1:33:40 Lawrence: So I think Ricoeur does have what we call a relatively low Christology. So within the context of theological articulation, you have your high Christology, you have your low Christology. The high Christology means, you know, Jesus is the Son of God, he is the actual embodiment of God. And then you have your low Christology that Jesus is a symbol. Jesus is maybe not even existing, you know, maybe he didn't even exist. Within the Christian tradition there are people who have your high Christologies and low Christologies. This is not unusual whatsoever, although it is unusual for people who are just not aware that this is happening in theological discourse.

1:34:13 Mark: Can I just say I love how these terms from religion are made into technical sounding terms by putting on suffixes.

1:34:19 Lawrence: That's great.

1:34:20 Mark: Christology. Adamic. I was reading stuff for the next episode and there was like Lukian and Mattian, you know, referring to Apostle Luke.

1:34:30 Lawrence: There's clear demarcation between how Luke approaches the text with his kind of humanistic approach and your Johannine approach. I'm sorry, but that's how you talk about it, which has a high Christology and your Markian approach has a low Christology. But anyway, so all these things are coming out of Ricoeur though.

1:34:46 Wes: I want to bring us back to this passage because Mark said the interpretation was crazy and I thought it was ingenious because he's reading Genesis because in a way, Genesis is about putting human beings at the center of the universe. Right. Even if you reject that literally, you accept that on the level of subject, the idea that it's a sort of parable of the phenomenology of perception is to say that first comes light, first comes consciousness, then come the plants and animals, then come the objects. That's the sort of way we come at the world, the process of objectification which becomes parallel to the fall. You get farther and farther away from yourself and the focus goes to the objects. So I thought that was a ingenious reading. Genesis, of course you could see it as a parable of a lot of other things, of, you know.

1:35:33 Mark: So is it appropriate if given this kind of Account to object, for instance, that. No, I think phenomenologically, other people are primary. And we could look back at Lacan or something like that, too. Everything is an undifferentiated buzzing, blooming confusion, mass. And out of that, the first thing that stands out is the caregiver developing this relation to another person. Only then after that, would we pick up on objects or something. Something like that. I'm not saying that's an accurate account either, or that's a good summary of Lacan. I just don't understand. If you're giving this kind of interpretation of Genesis, what are you doing exactly? You're trying to provide some sort of insight. But I don't understand if it's not a theory, which it's appropriate to argue

1:36:13 Wes: against, because you're saying it reflects, because it carries some unconscious subtext from the mythmaker. And that subtext certainly is the idea that human beings are at the center of the universe. I don't see how that particular subtext can be denied. The import of the cosmological myth is not just that the literal creation of a world, but the sense in which human beings are at the center of the world. And then he's making the connection from the standpoint of subjectivity. That's the way we experience the world. We experience it principally through our own eyes first. What objectivity calls us to do is to experience the world through the eyes of others, in a sense, or through some sort of universal standpoint. But that can't come first. That's definitely come second. So I think it's a legitimate parallel.

1:36:58 Mark: What I'm gathering from what you're saying is that the point of what Ricoeur is doing here in laying out these things is to give us a hermeneutic of understanding the text. That's the first step. He doesn't say sort of where the task of evaluation comes in, or if it's even appropriate to evaluate. If you've come at something with an evaluative stance, then you're by necessity not going to be open to actually listening well enough. One of the symbols that was brought up was the connection of stains to sin. Sin is one of the most objectionable parts of the package, as far as I'm concerned.

And comparing it to stain, making it more vivid in that way makes it even worse, or like, you know, points out exactly how actually inappropriate I think the term sin is as compared to our actual experience of right and wrong. I would have to pursue that much further to make a coherent argument there. But I'm Just I'm wondering at this stage is. Is it even part of the game to make arguments with the text?

1:37:55 Lawrence: Here's what he's doing with Genesis, all right? So what he's doing is he's essentially writing a sermon. I mean, that's kind of how I. Because I could see someone taking this text that he's given us, this pericope, this small text here, and using that pericope to illuminate what he's articulating. And what he's doing there is what this thinker by the name of Paul Tillich says we should do is he's using the text to speak to the existential situation, right? And so he's kind of illuminating. And so when you get behind a text, right, is when you.

You're worried about what the author is trying to say here, right? But what he's doing is he's using what the author may not have intended to say to illuminate something that is universal, that everyone can relate to. And so I think that's. He's trying to walk that fine line. Because hermeneutics is both a science and an art. The idea is that there is some facts there. There's some things there that are at the kernel of what you're trying to express, right? What the author intended, that's behind the text. Right? You're trying to look through to what the author was trying to say, but at the same time, what he's trying to reserve, he's trying to open the door for someone to approach a text in an artistic way where you're still able to have some leeway to get in front of that text and apply it to the people that are listening.

And so that's how I read. When he's up to here in this

1:39:18 Wes: particular section, I would think I would still make my stronger defense of this, which is that part of this hermeneutical task is you're getting at this part of. It's like an emotional subtext.

1:39:29 Lawrence: You're right about that.

1:39:30 Wes: There are certain automatic emotional associations in a story, which is sort of, in some sense, about the human beings being at the center of the universe. And then if you notice an isomorphism to the predicament of subjectivity, subjectivity comes first and objectivity comes later. I think the task of interpretation is to notice that isomorphism and important metaphorical connections. And if those connections are systematic enough, then your interpretation is successful. You don't even have to say, oh, the author intended this. This is why I called it unconscious meaning, which Maybe, but it's a matter of something being a good metaphor for something else, a good picture of something else.

Thinking about Wittgenstein. So General Genesis is in some sense a good picture of the phenomenology of subjectivity then. It is. And a good interpretation acknowledges that. It's just to knock down that interpretation, you have to say no, actually the metaphor breaks down really quickly. You know, you may have this particular similarity, but it's not explanatorily valuable.

1:40:29 Mark: So I think maybe the result is that you should take the text as a sort of a piece of philosophic art, that it's not like a philosophic text where you say this is what this section is means. And I disagree with the claim made by that meaning, because of course there are multiple possible and very legitimate interpretations for a given section. And he says explicitly that it's supposed to serve to open the floods of creativity in some way. And this open endedness is supposed to point to the open endedness of the human possibility and to inspire us in various ways.

So it's not just a matter of, you know, it's more like a piece of art in that way. You know, in fact, it's supposed to be something sui generis. It's not a piece of art either. It's not merely a piece of art because he thinks it's. This is something that could serve as the basis of a religion that would make it presumably different than Shakespeare. As awesome as Shakespeare is, it's almost

1:41:18 Lawrence: like theological poetry, if you will, but not quite in the way that like Psalms, you know, the psalms are. But rather there's something going on inside of the text, right, that we bring to it. But there's still truths that are being communicated inside of this text that are metaphorical in nature. But it requires this hermeneutic to get to the heart of it. Right. It requires us to simultaneously be suspicious, but also open to what the text has to say to us.

1:41:44 Mark: And it could be that the truths themselves are not really the kind of thing that could be communicated any other way. That if you just turn it into a treatise, you know, if you take one of the interpretations and write it out as an essay, yeah, it becomes con. I think it's just not going to actually mean the same thing. It's not going to be saying the same thing.

1:42:03 Lawrence: I agree.

1:42:03 Wes: It robs it of emotional impact. It robs it of the primary primordial relationship to which we're trying to return. Metaphor is a great way to return to this, to the garden to this more immediate connection to something meaningful and

1:42:18 Mark: the connection to being that which cannot be captured in any particular sentence.

1:42:23 Dylan: It makes me think about connecting to rawness. And therefore that opens up the possibility for interpretation. So you have. The scientist in me. Makes me think, well, I have raw data. So the raw data is what it is. But it could be analyzed and interpreted in a number of different ways. I could understand it as the force of two things acting upon one another. I could understand it as joint objects all acting with their own energy, potential and kinetic, attaining the lowest state of being in total energy. I could look at it in a number of different ways, but the raw data is still the same. Where they are, how fast they're going to something like that. That's what it makes me think of, this primordial business. Because, again, I'm.

1:43:09 Lawrence: You're wrestling with that man, I hear. I can tell. Well, I don't.

1:43:11 Dylan: You know, it just sounds just so nostalgic to me.

1:43:17 Lawrence: Yeah, I can see that.

1:43:19 Dylan: And I guess I don't like the word because it. To me it's saying, I need to find the egg out of which I grew up. And it's different to me than a genealogy. Maybe even it's different than source because the source would imply all the different kinds of forces and actions and interpretations that would come to turn the river in different ways. Primordial. It's like state of nature theory to me. And that's what I'm reacting against.

1:43:55 Wes: If you think about this in a little bit more in Freudian terms, you might think about the process of objectification as a process that alienates us from ourselves, leaves us less acquainted with ourselves in some sense, or turns us into a language that we don't understand. That language, for an obsessive compulsive, might be flipping on a light switch 12 times before. Every time they walk into a room in order to avoid unbearable anxiety. And they have to figure out the meaning of that. And that meaning isn't going to be something that happens at a discursive cognitive level.

To some extent. It's a meaning that packs too much emotional importance. It's about reconnecting affect or emotion with its right symbol. So that's where the process of interpretation comes in. So I think of this whole idea of the primordial part of it is about. Even about becoming reacquainted with one's own desire. So a lot of times people will go into psychoanalysis or therapy. They don't know what they want. If you want to think of the Opposite of primordial. That's it. Of being completely confused about what you want. And so I'm trying to give a very simple example here of what it would mean.

Mean to return to the primordial knowing what you want, what's in accord with your character and who you are. Once you've deciphered the own little mini culture that is your character with its own customs, its own language. Once you have actually reacquainted yourself with that, that's the primordial effect of figuring out what you truly want and doing it, for instance, just to give a sort of everyday example.

1:45:23 Dylan: See, that's interesting because that's not how I was understanding primordial. I was understanding primordial as more of a quote question than an answer, as being more a source getting down to the root that needed to be then reinterpreted as opposed.

1:45:39 Mark: Yeah, it is rediscovering a question.

1:45:41 Dylan: Yes, rediscovering a question.

1:45:43 Wes: I was giving you the Freudian example, which is making the unconscious conscious. But you could do this. Getting back to the primordial is related to the dispelling of false consciousness. Right. So it's about getting rid of ideology. You could do it in the Marx way and the neighborhood Nietzsche way or the Freud way. I think we ultimately have to relate it to one of those three.

1:46:01 Dylan: Yeah, I guess on the one hand I feel very sympathetic to the notion of primordial as being a getting back to raw stuffs. What I find confusing in the case of this hermeneutics, but also I'm a little bit skeptical about is the way in which getting to the primordial becomes a proxy for getting to the understanding. And in some kind of simplistic terms. Well, I figured out the primordial origins or whatever. When to me, that masks what is surely the more important thing that's going on, which is a renewed act of interpretation that's happening. And this language in some of the sentences presented make it sound as if this origin is somehow. Now I found the self evident and. And that to me seems to be the sort of opposite of the hermeneutical act.

1:46:54 Wes: I don't interpret this word primordial in the same way as you.

1:46:58 Mark: Okay, can we move to the last page so we can make the final point that he makes and give our closings? So the quote that I was referring to before, on this, the last full page here, 237, he talks about first what the positive side that Nietzsche and Freud and Marx were trying to put put forward at the Core of their critique is not suspicion, the reduction of ideologies and illusions, but the affirmation of man in the recognition of necessity. Amor fati, love of fate, said Nietzsche. We are thus brought to say that the stake of any discernment at the heart of ourselves between the authentic and the inauthentic, is the meaning that we give to the affirmation.

What do we affirm? What is our source, our resource of affirmation? It is at this ultimate level that I confront the three princes of necessity. Man, they say, must come to love necessity, to love fate, to love things that as they are, and accept the fact that his life disappears, that reality continues anonymous and silent. Such is the atheistic affirmation of my culture. Alright, so here's his alternative. But the question I pose to myself then is what are the place and origin of possibility? Faced with this ascetics of necessity, I see the moment in the other hermeneutics when I encounter the problem of what I will call the grace of imagination, the surging up of the possible.

How is man a possible, not a necessary reality? All right, so it's nice that at least he doesn't say, but ultimately Nietzsche and them are a bunch of nihilists and they don't believe in anything. No, they offer a positive thing. And you know, at least quoting Nietzsche about amor fati is not a total distortion. But he's saying, still we can do better. He's saying that in the next sentence, in the next paragraph, as I understand it, man is always sustained by his mythical poetic core. He was always created and recreated by a generative world. The fundamental theme of revelation is this awakening and this call into the heart of existence, of the imagination, of the possible.

There you go. So that's what faith ultimately is. It's not. Well, I'm gonna buy this proposition that I could not otherwise prove. It's to admit that, well, he says at the very end of this that man is a mystery. We can't say for sure that man is a bunch of unconscious drives. You know, we can't give a Freudian or Nietzschean picture. You know, those are all very insightful, but if you take them, or any other mechanistic picture that would determine causes and effects about people as giving you an understanding of man. Again, reducing the mysterious to the problematic, to the merely problematic.

Right. There's things about the human brain that we don't understand yet, but eventually we'll do a lot more studies and we'll be able to. We'll know everything there is to Know that goes straight against the idea we got in Jaspers.

1:49:35 Wes: I don't think he's seeing Nietzsche and Freud and Marx as engaged in that task. I think he sees him as gauge in the hermeneutical task.

1:49:42 Mark: Okay, well he still thinks that his way.

1:49:44 Wes: His way is better.

1:49:45 Lawrence: You're right.

1:49:46 Mark: Yeah.

1:49:47 Wes: Not that I fully understand practically what he's. In a vague sense, I get it. But

1:49:54 Mark: law. Did this speak directly to you? Does this hook up with what you mean by faith?

1:49:58 Lawrence: In a way it does. In a way it does. I mean because what really spoke to me was the very last sentence, right? Because, okay, the very last sentence of this particular essay. So he uses the euangelion, which is the Greek word for the good news. Right. The gospel and is not the good news, the instigation of the possibility of man by creative word. I hope it is. Right? I hope it is. I mean, so, so yes, this without a doubt.

1:50:21 Wes: What do we mean by that?

1:50:23 Mark: By possibility?

1:50:24 Lawrence: Yeah, well, I mean the fact that what this word, this creative word that is articulated, this kerygma, should open up the possibility of man. You know, it should open up within us, the better part of us. It should inspire us to greatness. And so I think that's part of what he's getting at, right? That the good news is the instigation of that which is possible within us. Right. These texts can be used for horrible means and we've seen that happen in history. But the reason why these texts persist is because they also, I hope at their best open up that possibility of man by this creative word.

1:51:00 Mark: So on this account, the Bible is not a set of stories to give you doctrines. It is almost like a theory, therapy, a creative therapy, something with which you engage and that it causes an upswing within you to make you a more awesome person.

1:51:14 Lawrence: I mean individualized, sure. But I think collectively if we keep in mind the whole. The totality of humanity. Right. That it can inspire all of us to be better, to do better, to pursue justice not just for ourselves, but to pursue justice for those who are marginalized. The least of these, as Jesus, Jesus said.

1:51:32 Wes: So is this sense of possibility, this is about the ability to recreate ourselves as in the creative word. Or it's about being able to move along a direction of self actualization in something like an Aristotelian sense.

1:51:47 Lawrence: Or that's what I'm maybe in an Aristotelian sense. Insofar as he kind of lines up with this thinker called Tillich. Paul Tillich argued that we ought to pursue the actualization of our potentialities. And so when I was reading that line, Tillich kind of came to mind, you know, the idea that we have this potential within ourselves that if left, you know, untapped, then it's wasted potential, you know, and there's nothing sadder in life.

1:52:11 Wes: No, I was just reminded now of Nietzsche's talk of becoming ourselves and the.

1:52:15 Lawrence: Absolutely.

1:52:16 Wes: These sort of parallels there between Nietzsche and Aristotle. Yeah. And its relation to amor fati.

1:52:21 Lawrence: Yeah, I think he's tapping into that.

1:52:23 Dylan: He uses a very similar phrase of being who we are. It was more Heideggerian, where being and doing become equal. This is in the first essay, the

1:52:36 Wes: bottom of page 18.

1:52:39 Dylan: We can appropriate what Jaspers called a combat of lovers. It is the battle of lovers that we must mediate not simply with the brute negations of one or the other, but rather with their enterprise of deciphering and finally with their fundamental affirmation. If we can follow them this far, we will understand the positive function of the dispute with relig by all three because they have a common fight of idols that is against the gods and the gods of men. And keep reading.

1:53:07 Lawrence: Because he goes on to say that to smash the idols is also to let the symbol speak. You have to smash those idols that you have constructed in order to hear what the symbols are trying. We're too busy with the cacophony of the idols that we have constructed. What we think these temperatures text mean. That's what it means again, to use this language that he uses to get ahead of the text. Right. We're too busy hearing what we've always heard. A preacher always used to say before he got up to preach that if he was preaching something that people were familiar with, he would always say that.

I pray that the familiarity with the text doesn't rob us of what the text may say to us. And that's essentially what he's saying. Right. That oftentimes we bring these pre understandings to text and our pre understanding understandings rob us of what the text may say to us. And so we have to break down those idols. We have to become iconoclastic and break down those idols to actually hear them anew.

1:54:02 Wes: It's also a matter of not being so focused on the literal truth. So to let the symbols speak is to be able to write, see Genesis as a metaphor for something or other as opposed to simply being stuck with the literal, if that's all that's important to you.

1:54:17 Lawrence: But people are so tied to their interpretation of a Text that they'll find fight you the moment that you begin to deconstruct it. Because they're not interested in truth. They're interested in maintaining their understanding of truth.

1:54:28 Mark: So this is supposed to speak both against members of a sect that have a particular interpretation of the Bible or some parts of the Bible that according to Ricoeur is unsupportably rigid, but then also to those of us who have been disgusted by the Bible because we read and we focus on the parts like in Genesis or the genocide in the Old Testament and other things that just like, seem opposite, obviously bullshitty or savage or whatever, and say, the hell with this. This is an overrated text. So I'm not going to give it any of my time.

1:55:00 Lawrence: Did you say an overrated text?

1:55:02 Wes: Overrated critique, Goodbye. Well, that's overrated.

1:55:07 Mark: I'm just trying to channel myself from like, episode one or two of our podcast here before I had calmed down.

1:55:14 Wes: Yeah, no, I. I have the same

1:55:17 Mark: relationship to it to make us open our hearts.

1:55:19 Wes: And it's, you know, I thought he discussed that really well with this idea of being alienate, this cultural alienation.

1:55:26 Lawrence: And so both the person who is culturally alienated from the text and the person who is too tied to a particular interpretation of the text suffer from the same problem in his eyes. Right. And both need to have their idols broken apart so that they can hear the text, text anew.

1:55:43 Mark: Seth, do you have any last thoughts?

1:55:46 Seth: I really enjoyed the reading a lot. And I think his writing style was, in these essays is very good. I think there's a lot of succinctness and a lot of interesting connections that he makes. And just coincidentally, I've been occasionally picking up this volume of essays I have by Levinas to see if I'll ever get around to finding something that we might reach read by him. And he did a series of what he called Talmudic readings. And I read one called the Pact, which is him giving a lecture where he's explaining how the rabbis argue about how the commandments are given and the way the commandments are announced to Israel and then how they swear to them, so to speak.

And it was funny that I was just reading that at the same time as I was reading this because it from the outside. And I think to somebody who didn't take into account a. All of the things that we talked about here tonight as far as the hermeneutic approach, but also is sort of foreign to the rabbinic stuff and Jewish culture, it would seem like a completely insane and bizarre discussion. But for me, it was very fulfilling in a certain way. And it's a great example of what Ricoeur is talking about when he says, says you have multivocal and univocal signification, and that univocal signification is intended to point out the meaning of something.

And that's science. That's technological language. But at multivocal signification is meaning that points to more meanings. And we've had this conversation many times on this podcast about meaning versus truth. But in that essay by Levinas is an example example. The proliferation of meaning is a way to honor the text because it's a recognition that if there was revelation and the revelation was static, if it simply signified something, then once we discovered that thing, there would be no point to come back to it. Just like what Law was saying about, hey, if you've already heard this, you think you already know what it means, try to put that aside because you might find something else.

Else. That the activity of engaging with the text is to constantly make it a living thing so that you explore and are able to generate more meaning out of it. But that enterprise is underwritten by something that I think we've talked about before, too, that. That Jews take for granted that Ricoeur is struggling with, namely the fact of revelation, as it were, and this sense of community, being bound by that thing.

1:58:21 Mark: Any last thoughts for anybody else?

1:58:24 Wes: Ricoeur is fantastic.

1:58:26 Lawrence: I'm happy you guys like it. I am very happy that I came across Ricoeur when I did, because Ricoeur is very helpful for a person who comes from a Protestant tradition where, because of Luther, the text is so crucial for some Protestants, they can make an idol of the biblical text. And so what Ricoeur does is he gives you a way to think about a text where you take it seriously, but you don't feel as though you are indebted to taking it literally. And although he uses three thinkers that typically have a bad reputation in religious circles, he uses their method to really illuminate something that is absolutely useful for people who are serious about thoughtful engagement with biblical texts and really any kind of text, but particularly biblical texts and the texts that people consider to be divinely revealed.

And so I encourage those who are interested in trying to understand how to think about these texts. Because you feel as though you'll lose your faith or whatever because the text may not be literal. Ricoeur gives you a way around that to still take the text seriously, but not literally. Love this dude. I would have bought him a drink.

1:59:46 Mark: Is there a comparable modern figure that takes the writings of the New Atheist and says, yes, they're making a lot of valid criticisms and we should have a robust religion that sidesteps those, you know, and takes the positive spin on it the same way that he did with Freud and Nietzsche here.

2:00:05 Lawrence: And yeah, his name is Snoop Dogg, AKA Snoop Lion. No, I have no idea. I don't think, I really don't think there's anyone working on that level yet. I mean, there are people who are trying to respond to the New Atheist by trying to point out that they're wrong, but have yet to take what they say seriously and try to find a way to be constructive without being, you know, oh, you're wrong because of this. That would be a good project for someone to undertake.

2:00:30 Mark: This was an inspiring enough reading. And then I noticed the next chapter in this collection of Ricoeur essays is Listening to the Parables of Jesus. Oh, great chapter, great chapter. For a long time time about actually trying to do for an episode, part of the Bible to do the parables specifically, because those are simple. I learned them as a kid. I did a stop motion animation to the Mustard Seed. I remember in Sunday School, Davey and Goliath.

2:00:54 Lawrence: Did you really?

2:00:57 Mark: It wasn't claymation. It was like colored construction paper moving around. I wonder if that still exists somewhere.

2:01:04 Seth: Claymation, this is. You did a Harryhausen like Jason and the Argonauts version.

2:01:18 Mark: And actually this is what we want to do next is we want to read the parables and read this thing by Ricoeur. It's just a short essay. And then we'll read some other essays by other philosophers, theologians about the parable so we can sort of compare. We would love you to rejoin us for that, Law, if you are up for it.

2:01:34 Lawrence: Dude, I'm down, man. I love, love, love the parable Rivals love them.

2:01:38 Mark: All right then you can keep my asshole tendencies in check. Thanks so much for joining us this time la. Thanks everybody for listening in Listening land. Thanks to the many donors as well as the people that have become partially examined life citizens, part of our member site. Folks that don't want to give us money can still participate in our Facebook group, can still follow us on Twitter, can still write us emails. Look at the blog partiallyexaminedlife.com I know something that will definitely, definitely entertain you is to go on the iTunes store and give us a nice rating. Thank you and good night.

2:02:15 Wes: Good night.

2:02:15 Dylan: Good night.

2:02:16 Lawrence: Thanks Law.

2:02:16 Seth: Thanks la.

2:02:17 Dylan: It was awesome.

2:02:17 Lawrence: Thanks a lot guys. I appreciate it.

2:02:35 Mark: I'm caught in a trap. Oh yeah, because I love you too much baby oh, why can't you see what you doing to me. Of what I'm saying. We can't together with. I try to hello When I still see. These tears

2:03:51 Lawrence: Time

2:03:54 Mark: we can go on together. Tears from your unemployment. Because I know you do my favor. When you don't believe on what I'm saying. Rain. Wrote that one last week.