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"Had we but world enough, and time..." *
Orders of Terms
4/26/2006 17:53:10
A professor of mine pointed out today a thing that I hadn't thought about really, or at least that hadn't struck me before in such a way... We were talking about the terms and assumptions of a course about orthodoxy and heresy in antiquity, wondering about the use of these as second-order terms borrowed from first-order ones. By first order I mean that ancient sources being studied use them and believe in their meaning. By second order I mean that modern readers doing the studying use them, inspired by the ancient usage but extended beyond them by comparison or theorizing, allowing their meaning to be contested, the very subject of debate. Of course the problem is that so often (read Eliade), what we think are second-order terms become definitely first-order ones. I argued that this is the case when we take orthodoxy essentially as a socio-literary construct rather than a theological one; we make a nod to a different criterion for satisfaction and reality.
Anyway: what he reminded us of is that in religious studies, virtually all of our terms have this dangerous provenance. These are the terms that construe our entire work, all the way up to "religion" itself.
Our terms themselves are a dialog with the texts, a process of internalization and reinvention.
At first I suggested that we need new terms to avoid confusion. But then, remembering Eliade, it occured that this very tension is the only thing that can keep our techinical terms genuinely second-order, if we are constantly redefining them and being confused by them - only then do we recall their necessary contention, their argumentative purpose. If we separate ourselves totally from the language of our sources, we do nothing but create a fresh first-order lexicon, a separate metaphysics and ontology.
This is fine, but we need to know what we are doing while doing it. Otherwise our ancestors and friends who used other first-order language just come out sounding like idiots.
Then: can believers use second-order language faithfully?
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re: Orders of Terms - 5/21/2006 11:28:01
Posted by BT
"Then: can believers use second-order language faithfully?"
I'd say: yes, there's no other option really but to make due using second-order language with some measure of good faith -- but do you mean use terms faithfully with respect to the presumptions of a given academic or historical analysis, or faithfully with respect to communicating one's own faith/beliefs per se? ...For me all the issues involved could only ultimately be resolved by a metaphysics of language and consciousness that would give both Truth (at the very least, believers' "belief" in Truth) and the contingencies of history each its due, but to do that would have to presuppose a non-discursive, non-linguistic Truth as a highest level (since even Revelation itself can't but irrupt into a given situation, and the "Word" in the mystical sense is always beyond human language in any common, instrumental sense). ...Makes me think of W. Benjamin's essay "On Language As Such and on the Language of Man," and a book review comparing & contrasting Karl Barth to Derrida (!) re: language...
Anyhow, I guess my main thought is just that the the issue of "believers" being a separate case is ultimately a non-issue -- that is, if the Truth is ultimately non-linguistic (which the very orthodoxy of the mystic Word itself demands), then believers & everyone else are still stuck in the same boat when it comes to everyday human language, academic/historical or otherwise... But I think that's actually a good thing, since at best it humbles believers to try to speak carefully and take the language and terminology issues seriously...
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re: Orders of Terms - 6/06/2006 08:22:26
Posted by Nathan
I definitely appreciate your remarks, particularly in the last paragraph of the comment. The conversation in religious studies has certainly been set up in a way whereby nonbelievers (defined against particular beliefs, but likely with no more objective claim than that) set themselves apart from belief, and claim a priviliged vantage point looking back down on belief. I do not do well to accept this structure so casually.
This observation, I think helps to resolve the problem of your first paragraph, on the relation between the discourses of "academic analysis" and "faith/beliefs per se." This is similarly a false dichotomy. When it is made, it is a sub-dichotomy. Scholarship, particularly about subjects of human culture, is always an expression of the scholars' culture, beliefs, assumptions, and so on. We should embrace this rather than pretend it is not the case, and understand our position in our societies accordingly.
I think we approach the details of the solution quite differently. I shy away from constructing presumed metaphysics because they can easily be lost or forgotten but more because they do not feel necessary. We should be able to say our words simply and unreservedly, I think, and imbed our metaphysics in the simplest and plainest of terms, if metaphysics ought to exist at all. Iris Murdoch does a great job in Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals of describing the whole project under the arc of aesthetics, rather than dismissing it entirely the way her Oxbridge teachers did.
If any assumed groundwork is to be allowed, I am coming to suspect it should be a theory of performance, which retains the possibility of plain words while reminding us that these words fit into a particular kind of discourse. It also pays particular attention to location, by which we can mean church, academy, or wherever.
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re: Orders of Terms - 6/17/2006 18:27:39
Posted by BT
Thanks for the post; I must not have seen it for a couple weeks now...
I don't disagree with you comments per se, since any expressed metaphysics (or any other theory) inevitably runs into the order-of-terms issues you raised. I guess those foundation questions can never be 100% consistently resolved in theory, but only in practice by acknowledging them to whatever extent. It made me wonder though how a theory of performance could ever resolve the issues any further, instead of just differing them to yet another "meta" level of theory or terms? But I can see why it could be useful in an academic religious studies context. (Maybe I'm just too preoccupied with the "Truth"?!)
For me thinking of religious claims in terms of aesthetics is sort of courting danger, but maybe it's just the associations I've developed over "aesthetics"? In other words, it's hard for me to see how the presumption of an aesthetic level of comparison would be any less of an imposition upon whatever matters are at hand than using some sort of comparative metaphysical level of analysis (at least as far as the foundational terms are concerned) -- since "aesthetics" itself, as a distinct aspect of or approach to thinking-through experience, is already defined by a long history within Western thought... But I guess I should look into Murdoch's stuff sometime to get a better sense of that use of aesthetics!
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