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Violence of Theories

11/04/2005 11:44:11

In the middle of the muddle of a large project about the alignments of secularism in evolution debates, the word "theory" turns up everywhere. Evolution is just a theory! some people say, or intelligent design is not even that. What do you mean by theory? And once said, what with it do we do.

Somewhere (tell me where!) I caught the phrase "the violence of the theory." To me this means that every theory one invents is the destruction of a previous one. The structuralist project of my religious studies department celebrates this method. A quasi-scientific process of finding new theories, discarding their predecessors. Under the guise of a scientific method, the colleage's book can be toss'd away, with no hard feelings, ever in pursuit of truth. Truth must be sought at all costs!

Yet the categories of religion are not natural science. Precisely, I believe, what separates Religious Studies from, for instance, anthropology or sociology is the option for a consiously constructive nature in the enterprise. The subject matter it chooses to limit itself to is itself a nonnatural form and as a result all religious studies is premised on invented thought in an invented field. The categories it creates are not for observing or predicting so much as for inhabiting.

As a result, to invent a theory, and to defend it by decimating everybody else's, takes on an eerily illiberal activity. We are destroying somebody else's home!

How then can a work be created, a thought be developed and elaborated, in a neighborhood rather than a landfill? The method of discourse we have inherited from our own pretentions to the authority of science makes us lonely pariahs, each with a theory, a little home, vigilantly sitting on the porch with a shotgun.

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re: Violence of Theories - 11/04/2005 11:46:22
Posted by nathan

I think it was Berger who said that he is glad that he's a sociologist because sociologists, unlike philosophers, can be happy when their theories fail. They are closer to the truth!

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re: Violence of Theories - 11/04/2005 12:08:35
Posted by Eli

The progress of a discipline is to be judged by the number of discarded theories. Okay, and the progress of a criminal justice systems is to be judged by the number of executed criminals. And an morgue... discarded bodies?

Maybe the discipline is better judged by progress, but by the ability to criticize itself. Because not every new theory is a better theory, and not every development is a progression, and not every excuted person - should I dare say? - was the culprit.

Just a thought.

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re: Violence of Theories - 11/07/2005 23:35:38
Posted by BT

2 mini-thoughts:

-- Maybe the "violence of the theory" phrase you ran into was somehow obliquely derived or appropriated from Derrida's "Violence and Metaphysics" (~1967?) essay? ...Especially if phrase was from a literary theory or a broad cultural studies context?

-- Whitehead on the problems of the "on the porch with a shotgun" spirit:
". . . In an intellectual age there can be no active interest which puts aside all hope of a vision of the harmony of truth. To acquiesce in discrepancy is destructive of candour, and of moral cleanliness. It belongs to the self-respect of intellect to pursue every tangle of thought to its final unravelment. If you check that impulse, you will get no religion and no science from an awakened thoughtfulness. The important question is, In what spirit are we going to face the issue? . . . The religious controversies of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries put theologians into a most unfortunate state of mind. They were always attacking and defending. They pictured themselves as the garrison of a fort surrounded by hostile forces. All such pictures express half-truths. That is why they are so popular. But they are dangerous. This particular picture fostered a pugnacious party spirit which really expresses a lack of faith. . . ."
-- A. N. Whitehead, "Religion and Science" (_Science and the Modern World_)

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