So. Are you gonna take a stand on something, or what?

Where does this leave us? How do we know what is true and what isn't true? Is there even an objective truth that exists? Is it possible for there to be a "your truth" and a "my truth" which are different and yet both true?

My assertion is that we gain knowledge in a combination of ways. The appropriation of knowledge is a complex process. I suppose that I am more postmodern than not. That is to say that if I had to pick one of the epistemological criteria described in my previous posts as the most significant, I would say that it is our subjectivity.

One of the most, perhaps even the most, fundamental reality of human existence is the fact that we are subjective beings. From the moment we become human (and identifying that is a discussion for another years worth of days, but we'll get to it eventually), we find ourselves located in space and in time, with a body and, more specifically, a brain to which we will be joined for the remainder of our life. Our experiences change our biology: at a minimum, they create neural pathways in our brain every moment of every day. Sometimes, though, they can change other parts of our biology, as well. When I was in the sixth grade, I received an injury to my lower back which impacts the kinds of physical activities in which I am able to engage, even now. Even if we are more than our physical bodies (again, a topic for another day or so), our bodies and especially our brains are an essential part of who we are.

As a result, whenever we engage in attempts to learn about the world in which we live, the people, animals, plants, fungi, and unicellular organisms that populate it, and the God who may or may not have created it and/or continue to sustain it, we can only see that world from wherever it is we are located. When I sit down to have a conversation with someone, I can only see a part of the room in which we are sitting at any given moment. My conversation partner may well know what is happening behind me, but I can only learn that by changing my field of vision. Some rooms I can stand just outside of and see the entire area inside it, other rooms are so large that no matter where I stand I can still only see a very small part.

When it comes to literal rooms and physical reality, we are much better at taking stock of to what information we really have access, of what is outside our field of vision, and of what objects impact our access to visual data. We are much less adept at noticing these same features of more abstract landscapes. How, for example, does our cultural frame of reference teach us to interpret a person who is yelling at us? Here, in Minnesota (and throughout much of America), we would most likely be insulted or threatened. In Israel, it might be part of an incredibly productive business meeting. Even the way in which we understand knowing is culturally informed. In our individualistic culture, subjectivity of the individual is seen as significant. In a more collectivistic culture, knowledge may be filtered through what is best for the group or what a leader perceives to be best.

Please note that I do not mean this emphasis on subjectivity to degenerate into solipsism or nihilism. I cannot refute either position on a rational basis. Both perspectives are ultimately untestable. I do reject them, though, from a purely pragmatic perspective. The simple fact is that I refuse to believe that my existence ultimately does not exist. I similarly refuse to believe that I live in a world that is purely the twisted product of my own mind. (Obviously, since I am aware of typing this, I am the one who would truly exist in such a world.) There are many things about this world that would be different if I could simply change it by an effort of my will. Perhaps my Arete is simply not high enough. (Some of you will get that joke).

So, what am I asserting, in that case. I believe that there is an objective reality in which we are immersed and of which we are a part. I believe that any knowledge we have about any part of that reality, however, including self-understanding, is filtered through our subjective frame of reference. As a result, what we learn is not some sort of undistorted truth which is equally true for all people. It is located within a time and within a place.

Now, in order to more accurately gain a picture of the reality around us, it is imperative that we turn to other people so that we can learn what the world looks like from their own frame of reference. This will involve turning to people with different experiences than our own. Teachers, for example, hopefully have a significant amount of experience in the discipline they teach. We can learn from their experience by listening to what they have to say. (Note that this is essentially the premodern approach of learning truth from authority.) We can also listen to people who view the world differently than we do (perhaps because they are situated in a different cultural, economic, life stage, or gender locus than we are). Here the person is not an authority on the matter, simply someone sitting in a different part of the room. We must always remember, however, that those to whom we are listening are also subjective beings and we would be wise to consider what their subjective frame of reference is.

Another way we can gain a more accurate picture of reality is that, when we make observations about reality, we can attempt to limit the number of variables which will influence the outcome of a particular event. This helps us to more clearly understand the relationships among different aspects of reality. (Note that this is the way in which scientists test their theories in accordance with the scientific method: the quintessential expression of the modernist worldview.) By restricting variables, we can limit the number of potential interpretations of a specific event, which gives us a better chance of finding a more accurate interpretation.

In the end, every moment of our life is steeped in interpretation. When we see things, our brain interprets electrical impulses which proceed from our eyes in response to light hitting our retinas. We then interpret the significance of what we see, hear, smell, taste, and touch and give each piece of data some sort of meaning. We don't hear people walking up behind us, we hear the sound of hollow sound of shoes on a marble floor, each percussion louder than the previous one. We interpret these discrete events and come to the conclusion that a person is approaching us.
We interpret the tempo and the rate at which the volume increases to determine how fast the person is moving. Next we answer other contextual questions. Where are we? Why are we there? Are we permitted to be there? Are we expecting someone? All of these questions give us clues to who is approaching and what their response to our presence might be.

This is far too short a treatment for so complex an issue as the mechanics of knowing, but it gives, hopefully, enough of a sketch for us to move forward. I look forward to any dialogue which this may prompt. The comments section is just below. I only ask that you be willing to take ownership of your words by having an account to identify you.

In my next post, barring some significant clarification to this post which further discussion might prompt, I will address some of the implications that arise from this proposal.

The Story of Knowing Continues

The next step in the story of epistemology is, ironically, a step back to David Hume. As I discussed in my previous post, Hume asserted that the only things that a particular person can know are the things that person experiences. Kant, in his synthesis of Enlightenment philosophy's different streams, agrees with Hume in principle, but acknowledges that, in practice, humans need epistemological frameworks, such as causality, substance, and relationality to make sense of the world. He agrees, however, that it is only possible for humans to know absolutely those things which can be directly observed, he calls this class of information phenomena. Non-observable things, such as causality, substance, relationality, and non-physical aspects of reality, are things which can be discussed and about which humans can make conjectures, but which we cannot absolutely know. He calls this class of knowledge neumena. Later thinkers, such as Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche, would be even more skeptical of neumena than Kant.

Kierkegaard embraced Kant's conception that the transcendent cannot truly be known. For Kierkegaard, it is this very doubt, this suspicion that it all may be for nought, which is the basis for faith. Acceptance of a truth claim which can be concretely established would be knowledge, not faith. It is only in the presence of an overwhelming doubt which penetrates to the core of one's being that one can truly experience faith: a commitment to that which one believes to be true, but which is not ultimately based on rational arguments. For Kierkegaard, certainty is the end of faith. It is only through establishing oneself in relationship to God, despite the inadequacy of reason to pave the way, that one becomes fully who one is.

The suspicion of neumena did not only extend to God, but to all non-observable categories: even to truth. For Kierkegaard, objective truth (that which is actually the case) is ultimately bound up in an individual's response to that objective truth. This led him to write "subjectivity is truth". Two people may both accept the same facts, e.g. that there are people who are poor. Truth, though, is grounded in how they respond to those facts, i.e. do they choose to help or not? Truth, then, can only be perceived internally to a given individual.

By contrast, Nietzsche pushed Kant's skepticism even further. Not only were neumena utterly ineffable, they were non-existent. In light of this reality, Nietzsche seized upon some of the objections to atheism set forth by Blaise Pascal in his posthumously published Pensées that in the absence of any transcendent reality (i.e. God), that life would be ultimately meaningless and boring. Any accomplishments which one might attain would be rendered utterly without merit at the moment of death when a person would cease to exist. For Pascal, this was reason enough to believe in God. Nietzsche saw a challenge. Nietzsche realized that, in the absence of any transcendent reality to provide meaning for life, it was up to the individual to create a meaning for his or her own life. This is the essence of the will to power: creating one's own purpose and meaning for one's life and living it regardless of what purpose or meaning another may try to force on one.

These themes established in Kierkegaard and Nietzsche make up the foundation of the existentialist movement, which itself developed into the postmodern movement. The quintessential statement of postmodernity was made by Jean-François Lyotard when he said (during the first year of my life), "Simplifying in the extreme, I define postmodern as an incredulity toward metanarratives." Pascal's greatest fear has been realized: there is no longer any standard by which one person can legitimate their view over against any other. There is no God. If there is any objective reality, humans have no access to it. The only thing which one can know is that which one perceives.

This is not necessarily the same as nihilism, which asserts that there is no objective reality, at all (although it is almost necessarily the epistemology of those who accept nihilism). It is also not the same as solipsism (which asserts that reality revolves around the individual perceiving it), although they are certainly brothers and in its most extreme form, postmodernity can become solipsistic. It is simply the belief that there is no over-arching framework to which anyone can ground their views. Subjectivity has become the privileged epistemic criterion.

This history lesson completed, in my next post, I will move on to advancing my own thoughts about knowledge. What do we know and how do we know it?

First things first!

My stereotype of most theologians suggests that, when they set down their theological perspective, they begin by describing God and construct their theology down (?) from there. I see a huge problem with that: it completely ignores the question of how we can know things about God. In order for me to talk about how we know things about God, though, I must first examine how we go about knowing things in general. This is the discipline philosophers call epistemology.

So, how do we know anything at all? At different points in history, different sources of knowledge have been placed in a privileged position. Throughout most of human history, people in positions of authority were privileged over other sources of knowledge. Old ideas were preferred over new ideas simply because they were older. Within the early Christian tradition, the source of truth was the ultimate authority: God. Divine revelation served as the ultimate authority. This system of recognizing truth is known as premodernity.

From the earliest attempts at Christian theology (possibly as early as the fourth gospel), the Greek philosophical tradition known as Neoplatonism became the norm for understanding reality. One of the features of Neoplatonism was a mind-body dualism. Physical matter was viewed as, at best, a shadow of actual realities, known as the "Forms", from which all objects received their attributes. At the other extreme, matter was viewed as intrinsically evil and the non-physical realities were viewed as the highest good. As a result, leading thinkers created elaborate theological systems based purely on either speculation or on previously established views from respected authorities; there was little effort to examine the world to gain knowledge because the world was inherently corrupt.

During the High Middle Ages (about AD 1000-1300), the works of Aristotle re-entered Western philosophy's awareness via Muslim scholars and commentators. Aristotlian philosophy asserted that an object's essence was internal to that object. Any given object had two attributes: its substance (what the object actually is) and its accidents (what the object looks, tastes, smells, sounds, and feels like). [This belief was the basis for the Roman Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation. The accidents of the elements remained those of bread and wine; the substance of the elements became those of the body and blood of Jesus.] This emphasis on matter's intrinsic reality led to a movement toward observing natural reality.

One of the early Christian adopters of Aristotle's worldview was Albertus Magnus (ca 1200-1280). He was an avid naturalist who left numerous written descriptions of such varied phenomena as an apple from peel to core, the leaves of a mistletoe, and which spiders spin their webs where. He began a sequence of events which would eventually lead to Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler.

As the Middle Ages came to an end with the Reformation, people on opposing sides of the Reformation had different ideas about what constituted divine revelation. This led thinkers to seek a different set of criteria. There were two distinct attempts to resolve this conflict. René Descartes sought to find the truths which one could arrive at by rational proofs from absolutely knowable facts. Ultimately, the only absolutely knowable fact for Descartes was the reality of his own existence. From this point, he constructed an elaborate metaphysical system. His work established a stream of philosophy known as Continental Idealism.

Simultaneously, English philosophers followed Aristotelian philosophy toward its inevitable conclusion. This stream of philosophy, known as English Empiricism, was David Hume. Hume asserted that the only truth humans have access to is through their sense data. This would mean that even such concepts as causality are not knowable truths. Immanuel Kant provided a synthesis of these two traditions. Educated as an Idealist, Kant found Hume's empiricism compelling. His Critique of Pure Reason is a vigorous and systematic critique of traditional metaphysics. Unlike Hume, though, Kant recognizes the importance of categories such as causality and possiblity and found a place for them in his Critique of Practical Reason.

From this period forward, empirical observations were given the privileged position in epistemology. This is a system called modernity. The modernist tends to believe that objective truth is fully accessible as long as one employs the correct tools. The challenge for the modernist, then, is to develop the correct tools: the scientific method, in studying Scripture one seeks the correct hermeneutic tools.

In my next post, we will follow the story of epistemology into the present as the trend shifts from modernity to postmodernity.