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On Paul Ricoeur's "The Critique of Religion" and "The Language of Faith" (1973).
Last episode taught us about hermeneutics, but how can this best be applied to the text for which hermeneutics was originally developed, i.e. the Bible? For Ricoeur, it's a two-way street: We need to change our understanding of the text (i.e. read it historically, recognizing for example that it was common to mythologize heroes in texts at the time), but also "put at risk" our own evaluative presuppositions, which under the tutelage of science have blinded us to symbolism and so left us unable to even sensibly ask the question "what is it to be saved?"
The regular four are joined by Lawrence Ware to figure out what this "hermeneutics of suspicion" is all about. Read more about the topic and get the essays.
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End song: A live performance (recorded via camcorder) by Mark Lint and the Fake from Dec. '98 in Austin, TX of the Elvis tune "Suspicious Minds."
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The Ricoeur picture is by Sterling Bartlett.
never bought into the idea that one can create a sort of mythic-experience thru texts but still find some value in the existentialist notion that engineering has it’s limits, at least one pragmatist alternative to a kind of
techno-utopianism (solutionism as @evgenymorozov diagnoses it)
is the work in social theory on “wicked” problems:
http://www.uctc.net/mwebber/Rittel+Webber+Dilemmas+General_Theory_of_Planning.pdf
I think the interesting, yet oft overlooked aspect of Biblical hermeneutics is that Christ IS the hermeneutic by which we view the Bible. Jesus himself says as much in John 5:39 “You study the Scriptures diligently because you think that in them you have eternal life. These are the very Scriptures that testify about me…” Once you understand that, the Bible moves out of a ‘do this, don’t do that’ moral prescript that has baffling implications for how to live life today and into a ‘this isn’t about me, but it’s for me/us’ perspective.
I also really appreciated the brief discussion of the community aspect of the text, but found it falling short from the guest’s articulation. Being in community is in line with the imago dei, being created in the image of God. A Trinitarian God is necessarily in community and it’s God’s stated purpose that the point of salvation is to restore the conditions that allow a Holy God to remain with us. So much so that Immanuel means ‘God with us’.
Once you understand this, the semiotics become a lot more clear. Christ as a greater Noah being swallowed for three days, a better Hosea redeeming a straying bride (the church), a better Adam through whom all of humanity was redeemed instead of condemned, a better healing staff lifted up redeeming us from the snake bite of sin that occurred in the garden. It also has familial implications as well through the symbology of Israel. Israel is a family of the elect through whom Christ comes, and ‘true Israel’ becomes a family of believers that recognize Christ since there is a pointing back to Christ and pointing forward to his return. The ‘already, but not yet’.
Anyway, it’s fascinating.
part of what post-Holocaust minded theologians were wrestling with was the disastrous effects of:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supersessionism
There’s nothing implicitly disastrous about that notion at all. God is covenantal. Adam related to God through a covenant, Noah related to God through a covenant, Abraham related to God covenant, Moses related to God through a covenant. All of these were successive. The Jews themselves were the result of the Abrahamic covenant which preceded Moses. They make that claim to Jesus in John 8:39. It’s internally consistent that Jesus would represent a covenant.
The disastrous thinking that you cite in the link is only so when it presupposes that the covenant justifies you.
Just cause you’re with the band, doesn’t mean you are the band, to put it in layman’s terms.
The Venn diagram of Christianity is simple, God; Man, the place at which they overlap is Jesus.
The idea that The Church “replaces” the Jewish people can hardly be called Christian. The New Testament is clearly against such “replacement”, maintaining the unity of all believers. This is obvious in many places, for example Romans 11.
Is there a text in this class?
http://www.english.unt.edu/~simpkins/Fish%20Acceptable.pdf
Lawrence Ware is awesome–he brings so much sincerity, genuineness and fun to the discussion. Was great on both podcasts–I’d love to hear one where you guys just focus on MLK but I’d love to hear Mr. Ware again on any topic on this podcast.
Lawrence was a fantastic guest as always!
What I found really interesting was listening to him talk about the philosophy regarding his religious practices after having listening to your race podcast recently. The manner in which he talked about the two subjects was quite different, and enlightened me to the manner in which religion is approached by religious philosophers. (I’ve often found it quite hard to understand religion at all after studying philosophy).
Though I’m still not exactly sure what religion brings to the table that a personal philosophical outlook on the world wouldn’t – is it a community or a practical thing or something like this? He mentioned that religion had helped those around him in a positive manner. I’m still not sure I understand the motivation behind trying to extract philosophical meaning out of a specific text (again, other than the communal/political significance of the text) when you could just do philosophy.
Thanks for the episode as always guys!
Well done. Philosophical tolerance of religion is about as rare as Religious tolerance of philosophy. I guess Ricouer got it started by the brilliant concept of using the three major figures which have critiqued religion, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, as screens to interpret religion (the Bible) . It was a little hard to get at exactly how to employ that interpretation in each of the three instances from just a listen, but I think the same technique should apply to philosophical texts as well. I think Nietzsche actually provides the foundation for critiquing the metaphysical, while Marx provides the concept of critiquing the social/economic and Freud provides the concept for critiquing the intrapersonal of desire. While providing a tripple hermeneutic basis for suspicion, Marx and Freud both need further hermeneutic suspicion for the ideological excess of their own systems (as provided in Anti-Oedipus). The concept of freeing up any text in favor of the symbolic, a living entity is a awesome. Law artistically straddled the philosophical and theological masterfully. Will be interesting to see if Seth can get Levinas included on a podcast–the Talmud is all about hermeneutics. A more current term for hermeneutics, or reading suspiciously, is deconstruction. The parables ought to be quite a hermeneutic task. My dad always talked in parables, and I’m still trying to figure out what he meant.
I forgot to mention: “Bleeding of substance into the sacred” which is a quote of Freuerbach from the reading has a new trend which shows up now as Atheism secreting the Sacred and its corollary that the Sacred secrets Atheism. In other words, these tendencies are intricately tied to one another due to opposing ideologies: watch out for the Big Other no matter what side you are on.
According to Ricoeur, if I were to speak to an assembled crowd once a week with a 30-foot swastika at my back, waiving around a copy of Mein Kampf as they chant “Heil Hitler” in unison, have I committed any intellectual or moral error as long as my sermons substantively and sincerely revolve around themes of equality and social justice?
I for one am getting really sick of these unsophisticated militant “New A-Nazi-ists” who keep going after the “low-hanging fruit” of people who take texts literally. You could even say, they’re more totalitarian than the totalitarians! They should “engage” Hitler’s writings with “the hermeneutics of suspicion” until they’ve figured out how to smear enough Vasoline on the lens, cherry-pick passages, and clunkily mix metaphors until all six blind men have grabbed the elephant and decided it’s completely unproblematic to shoehorn secular liberal values into any old text that some community can’t let go of for nostalgic reasons.
Yea, that’s pretty much my impression too. The whole project seems like a very ambitious, elaborate, and desperate rationalization. It’s hard to imagine that the masters of suspicion would approve of such a project.
The atheists have their place. Literal interpretation of Christian Doctrine is close to, if not the sole reason for laws and Alabama judges opposing marriage equality or employers like Hobby Lobby denying female employees health coverage for birth control. As long as literalism is prevalent enough to generate actual significant prejudicial and stupid policy, the atheist response including its unsavory simplistic rhetoric is understandable.
I have worked extensively on Ricoeur’s non-religious philosophical work from the 70s onwards and I’m a pretty diehard atheist. I haven’t actually read the text in question, but I’d say that to talk about ‘shoehorning values’ into old texts is to totally misunderstand Ricoeur – for him it was never about trying to say ‘But what the author REALLY meant was this…’ or ‘What the text is really saying is this…’, but rather about trying to find value in all texts, and especially those which have exerted a major influence on the cultural/historical context we inhabit. While, like you, I am naturally hostile to religion than Ricoeur, as I understand it, and certainly in his later work, the value he sees in religious texts is not dissimilar to the value he sees in reading fiction, which he called an ‘ethical laboratory’.
A ‘mythical’ reading of religious texts might involve some ‘cherry-picking’ of passages that confirm your biases to a certain extent, but positing contemporary humanistic values and emphasizing their value in religious texts over the importance of the nasty stuff is a pretty timely project, wouldn’t you say? Dogmatic, literalistic readings of scripture often lead to some serious horribleness, but there ARE moral values in most religious texts which, though not exclusively religious of course, are worth keeping and fighting for. Maybe in an ideal world nobody would feel the need to be religious, but since that is not the case and it’s hard to see that it will be any time soon, why not try to make religious belonging a force for good?
You mention Mein Kampf – do you really think there is nothing to be learned by reading Mein Kampf? It allows you to inhabit the perspective of one crazy, resentful MF – for most people, reading it is not about ‘rehabilitating’ Hitler, but rather that it serves as a cautionary, and very human, tale of how we can lose our humanity.
It’s worth pointing out that in finding values in texts like this Ricoeur in some ways is retracing the approach of Heidegger when Heidegger appropriates texts. (Typically of major philosophers – sometimes read in a positive way such as with Kant or arguably Aristotle in Being and Time but also in a negative way as he frequently did with Plato or Descartes) In a certain sense this way of reading is to take up the question rather than the answer as one re-reads and engage in a phenomenological originary experience as one reads. I think that this is very much what Ricoeur is trying to do with scripture.
Now I do like how the panel, especially in the subsequent episode on the parables, notes how this ties into debates of the historical Jesus. Effectively one is demythologizing so one can remythologize the text in a new originary fashion. However the danger in this is that one has simply adopted a certain secular stance and the attempt to recapture the experience of the past is an illusion because one discounts certain key aspects incompatible with a more naturalistic stance. (Interestingly Brian Leiter has a critique of Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of suspicion from a naturalistic and perhaps nearly positivist stance)
‘Taking up the question rather than the answer’ is a good way of putting it. Personally, I don’t see the issue with readings which veer towards the naturalisation of religious texts, perhaps because I’m not religious, but there is definitely something to be said for Ricoeur’s ability to bring out the primacy of properly philosophical/metaphysical values expressed by religion, particularly via an adaptive, historically situated method of actively reading scripture – ie not treating it as a static instruction manual, but rather *critically* applying it in concrete situations with a sufficient dose of contextual sensitivity.
By the way, I should make it clear that when I mentioned Mein Kampf I was just responding to the earlier poster’s comment about it, and certainly wasn’t suggesting that it is comparable with the Bible.
Staircaseghost:
Perhaps you missed Ricoeur’s primary purpose to convey meaning through proper hermeneutics, the interpretation of written text with the idea of bringing kerygma, or his belief in the meaning of revealed truth into dialogue with the secular which has presuppositions based on science, as well as with the sacred which has presuppositions based on literalism–both in need of suspicion, or deconstruction so that there is a common middle ground of the symbolic by which to communicate kerygma Just because you check your presuppositions does not mean that your main goal is to speak of equality and social justice as an excuse to avoid intellectual or moral error, that is just your personal criticism which does not reflect much textual awareness, let alone comprehension.
David Buchanan: of course the masters of suspicion would not approve of such a project as they were not coming from a position of revealed truth, kerygma, nor was Ricoeur using the masters to affirm his project, but just to be used as screens, check points on metaphysics, economics and desire.
Right, the masters of suspicion were not coming from a position of revealed truth. But why should any serious thinker come from a position of revealed truth? Isn’t that a rather conspicuous and egregious form of question begging? That’s what I mean by complaining that this project is an elaborate rationalization. How can we fairly assess the meaning such texts if we assume from the start that the text not only contains the truth, but “revealed” truth, i.e. God’s own truth. That strikes me as intellectually dishonest, to say the least.
My purpose in speaking of revealed truth was to counter Staircaseghost that he was only a liberal with no value system any better than Mein Kampf. The beauty of Ricoeur’s position is that he restrains his imposition of revealed truth on the reader by submitting the text to hermeneutical screens responsive to the primary critiques of religion/Christianity: Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, resulting in the symbol as communication with respect to not only the excessively sacred, but to also the excluded secular. Open-mindedness is what Ricoeur is presenting despite his position of revealed truth. Even Staircaseghost has a “revealed” truth in his sarcasm and whatever position that represents, but he hardly reveals the hermeneutical suspicion or tolerance of Ricoeur.
For what (very little) it’s worth, I’ve ceased listening to podcasts after checking in to determine which work of the philosopher under discussion is being treated. A (necessarily) partial listing of major leave-outs includes:
Aristotle: The Metaphysics (no real point in continuing the podcast until this has been handled)
Schopenhauer: The World as Will and Representation
Kierkegaard: Concluding Unscientific Postscript
Sartre: Being and Nothingness
Merleau-Ponty: Phenomenology of Perception
Gadamer: Truth and Method
Derrida: Of Grammatology
Whitehead: Process and Reality
I entirely get what a monumental task reading ANY of the above represents. However, that’s why the rest of us have you guys. I’ll keep checking in.
If you google image search for Van Gogh’s chair you’ll see two chairs for which he is best known. Can’t upload here, but I always considered the simpler of the two akin to the “Johnnie Chair” which some of you may be familiar with, as former St. John’s College alums. A third picture, which I have never seen before this google search, IS of a man in a similar chair. Provides interesting food or image for thought concerning the quote discussed at apx. 1:20hr into the podcast.
Links of images below:
1. https://s.hswstatic.com/gif/vincent-van-gogh-paintings-from-the-yellow-house-4.jpg
2. http://www.vggallery.com/painting/f_0499.jpg
3. http://www.clker.com/cliparts/2/a/3/8/12604999902042333558vincent_van_gogh_-_old_man_in_sorrow_(on_the_threshold_of_eternity).png
Awesome, the mobile ad at the bottom of the page is: ‘Revelation from Jesus’
‘Need direction in your life? Receive your personal prophecy now!’
For some reason I found this funny, in context (not complaining).
Here’s what I think is going on with Van Gogh’s chair: in a hermeneutical reading (as per Gadamer) the chair is being co-created by the onlooker. It’s that aesthetics of conversation again. So anything that is clearly a text – a thing that is being read – is implying or even (the tricky part) *creating* its own reader.
That’s the hidden man here. (See also Grover, “The Monster at the End of This Book”, for a more complex encapsulation, transitioning as it does from Freud to Lacan. )
P.R. and Gadamer weren’t offering us object-oriented philosophies, to the degree there is a “conversation” to be had in relation to a chair/painting/etc it is more along the lines of Heidegger on what ‘they say’ and tool-use.
I’m not entirely sure I follow here – the conversation is how Gadamer saw understanding working (it was the kind of open secret of Plato… the idea that the dialogues were illustrating how a mind encounters stuff).
There’s a bit on that summarized in the Stanford Encyclopedia on Gadamer: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/gadamer/#DiaPhr
and an especially pertinent bit in this essay collection:
http://bit.ly/1DzZkbc
The conversation is the figure that makes sense of the “fusion of horizons” (Horizontverschmelzung) that’s sort of the place where understanding happens: the limits of my experience fuse with the limits of some text’s new or alien experience, and understanding unfolds in that Venn diagram’s in-between space.
My understanding is that Ricoeur wasn’t as fond of that figure (the text talking back to the reader), but I’m not as up on him as I want to be… and anyway, in the puzzling thing with the chair, the person is absent. I’m thinking he was getting at the literal absence of the person the chair was made for (it’s an empty chair in the picture), but also the literal absence of Vincent Van Gogh, and of any human agent within the painting. It was painted once, but that’s done, and now we have to interface with the text itself, which is not a person. It’s personless… except inasmuch as we can reconstruct some kind of context around its being made.
and how does one go about reconstructing a context?
Well, Gadamer’s proposition is the context is reconstructed through a process of question and answer.
Here’s section of *Truth and Method* (hopefully not too Swiss-cheesed by Google Books) that gets into that:
http://bit.ly/1HHCoo9
There’s an implication that the context is never completed – the horizon is always receding, the dialogue is ongoing.
As far as I can tell, that is….
Sorry, this is a better link – the section is called “The Logic of Question and Answer”:
http://bit.ly/1Oeda4L
Why are your podcasts so huge? 118.2MB at 128kbps is very big. Other professional podcasts use 96/64kbps and sound fine.
This was a refreshing and appropriate episode in terms of how to interpret religion. Many people are tired of seeing theistic literalism and new atheistic scientism in the media, polemics that are two side of the same (hermeneutic) coin: how to (re)interpret religion in a way that makes sense in our technological society. To analogize in that light, I like to think of religion as an app that reconnects us to “religious experience” (to use William James’ phrase—after all, “religio” means “re-linking”). We need our apps (what atheists tend to miss), but we can’t use outdated ones (what literal theists don’t understand). So the work of thinkers from Kierkegaard to Ricoeur is important for at least getting us on the right track.
As Ricoeur says, we should take into account how technology introduces a “new ontological regime.” I believe Mark in this episode mentioned how contemplation gets lost in technological society. What I’d add here is that digital media is often too fast paced to allow for more reflective cognition. Going back to books and practicing hermeneutics at least exercises more reflective cognition, which can promote more contemplative practices (interestingly, “religio” may also mean “re-reading”).