Conversation with Dr Robert M Price on Deconstructive Preaching
Posted: Mon Jul 03, 2017 7:20 am
As a subscriber to Dr Price's Patreon page, I was pleased to read his subscriber article on Deconstructive Preaching in which he uses Derrida's method of deconstruction to analyse the Bible.
While you will have to pay to read his long and fascinating discussion, you can read my response here for free. Note this is not an actual conversation, but rather my thoughts (RT) in response to the quoted texts from Dr Price's essay (RMP). I would be happy to take the comments below as a standalone post, and to explain or discuss anything you like.
RT: Hello Dr Price, thank you for this essay, which I have read with great interest as it touches on many of my own intellectual interests. Just firstly, before responding to some of your specific points, I would like to comment on the general theme of deconstruction in the Bible. To my reading, the best example is where Jesus explains the real meaning of the parable of the sower, deconstructing the stony, thorny, paved and fertile soil to mean corresponding attitudes to the word of grace. This deconstruction of the parable appears to be a paradigm for how we should read all the symbolic language of the Bible, seeing miracles as parables with real ethical lessons, not as literal examples of divine intervention on earth.
RMP: “"Deconstruction" as a term is derived by its greatest practitioner Jacques Derrida from Heidegger's term "Destruktion." It means not destruction but rather the analysis of something by taking it apart into its component pieces. The idea is to understand it better as a result of seeing the relationship of the parts.”
RT: The key deconstruction in Heidegger’s Being and Time is of the Cartesian Cogito, the claim that systematic philosophy can be built upon the indubitable observation that ‘I am a thinking thing’. For the existential standpoint of being in the world advocated by Heidegger, the cogito establishes a myth of an isolated individual that fails to recognise that existence is primarily with others in relationships of care. But this deconstruction of Descartes by Heidegger is very different from the use Derrida made of this concept.
RMP: “says Derrida, … all meaning is ultimately differential, not referential”
RT: Unfortunately, that is a claim that to me has never made the slightest sense, because it establishes cultural relativism as a paradoxical absolute, denying the possibility of systematic thinking and logic. When we say a word refers to a thing, we make an absolute claim of meaning. The foggy concept of the ‘differential’, on the rocky road to the total vague-out of ‘differance’, rejects this simple theory of meaning as reference.
RMP: “one-for-one correspondence between a word and the object it refers to…become ambiguous or inadequate”
RT: It surprises me Bob that with your sympathy for conservative values you give credence to such confusing claims. Science is about the use of logic and evidence to remove ambiguity, explaining clear and distinct meanings, and has been immensely successful in this project. It is true that there are grey areas of uncertainty, but these are primarily in the realm of values rather than facts, and should not detract from the vast factual knowledge that presents unambiguous basis for coherent systematic thinking. Where science has uncertainty about facts it tends to admit it.
It is worth noting how very much Heidegger differs from Derrida on these matters around the correspondence theory of truth. While it is true that Heidegger distinguished between truth as disclosure of being and the more usual adequation of idea and thing, Heidegger also rejected ambiguity, at least in his philosophy, holding that a core value in philosophy should be authenticity, which is undermined by ambiguity. As well, Heidegger presented a systematic ontology, grounded in Parmenides’ distinction between unitary truth based on logic and the uncertainty of appearance, while Derrida is at the origin of the postmodern view that systematic thought is impossible.
RMP: “. Different cultures and subcultures carve the pie of perception differently, and perception itself is governed to an astonishing degree by our categories of expectation, inherited from our culture. ”
RT: Yes, but we can assess the worth of different cultures, as to whether their perceptions are accurate and sensible or not. Science is a gold standard for accurate sensible perception, while unscientific beliefs tend to be unreliable.
RMP: “supposedly foundational talk about presuppositions or premises on which any system of thought might be based is undermined and subverted”
RT: Here we encounter the problem of relativism in epistemology. Socrates criticised Protagoras for his claim that man is the measure of all things. Logically, the claim that we can make our own truth implies the irrational belief that a statement can be true and false, a fallacy that flows directly from the denial of objective truth.
RMP: Derrida points out that Descartes raised one possibility he could not successfully dismiss: what if Big Brother were deceiving him about logic itself? ”
RT: Questioning logic is dangerously crazy. Without basic axioms that Kant called necessary conditions of experience, life is not possible. For Kant, these axioms, termed synthetic a priori judgements, include causality, logic, space and time. The alternative is nihilistic solipsism, an immoral and incoherent attitude, but that is what Derrida promotes here. By the way it is untrue to say Kant was refuted by Einstein’s paradigm shift from Newton’s view that space and time are absolute. Modern science still assumes that space-time is real, and broadly assumes the universe exists and obeys consistent orderly laws of nature.
RMP: “What if what seems so obvious to the rational mind were nothing more than Hume would soon say it was: a coincidental association of ideas? ”
RT: Then as Kant explained, our experience would not be possible. Hume’s scepticism about causality and morality opened the modern path to nihilistic rejection of any possible certainty. Astronomy, as the great scientific source of knowledge of the universe, has much certain knowledge, proved by the fact that if causal theories such as gravity were untrue then man would not have been able to fly to the moon, etc.
RMP: “The mere fact that it does not occur to us to doubt something hardly proves there are no flaws we have not found.”
RT: Consider the example of doubting the moon landings. That doubt is nothing but crackpot nonsense which is immediately dismissed by all sensible people. Science does not know everything, but it is a fallacy to infer from that observation that therefore all knowledge can be doubted legitimately.
RMP: “what seems true to us in our oh-so-rational consciousness is a heavily censored and carefully edited product of the subconsciousness.”
RT: Yes, but we can distinguish what is certain from what is uncertain. The false implication of Derrida’s argument is that this distinction is impossible.
RMP: “Sanity is the tip of the iceberg of madness.”
RT: Perhaps, but as Aristotle argued, philosophy can separate the true from the false, and the sane from the insane. People err, but knowledge builds upon precedent, and is generally reliable. Without good reason we should not question the sanity of facts that make existence possible.
RMP: “The gospels partake of the Western complicity to silence disorder, differance, and the terrible secret that sane reason is but a minor mutant strain of madness.”
RT: Systematic ethical philosophy aims to promote good over evil. Derrida appears to believe there is no way to distinguish good from evil. Religion, in its meaning as a rebinding between earth and heaven, aims to discern the order of the cosmos and reflect that in ethical values. This underlying goal has been badly distorted and corrupted, but charging the gospels as complicit in this corruption seems to me to wrongly assign the errors of Christendom to the original texts of Christianity.
RMP: “the thing that makes faith something else, something additional beside certainty, is precisely doubt, that which would first appear to be its opposite! In a strange way, faith is revealed as being somehow the same as its opposite!”
RT: No, that does not make sense. Faith is confidence in things unseen, whereas certainty only applies to things that are seen, or directly and scientifically inferred from what is seen. Faith operates more in the domain of values, whereas certainty operates in the domain of facts. The fundamentalist error is to assume that faith can be a basis for knowledge of facts.
RMP: “Here is an instance of what we often find in deconstructive criticism, the dismantling and upsetting of hierarchies. Traditionally we have operated with sets of opposites and always evaluated one as good, the other as bad. Spirit is good, flesh is evil. Men are good, women are evil. The one is good, the many are evil.”
RT: This shows the legitimate and important task in theology to deconstruct traditional authoritarian claims as unreliable and culturally bound. The Biblical sources usually turn out to conceal allegorical meaning or social convention behind the literal surface claim. But that does not mean we should extend beyond this proper political use of deconstruction to cast doubt on certain scientific knowledge, which is an implication of Derrida’s approach. Science has its own methods to deal with uncertainty, and the deconstruction of paradigms and values is a separate thing from casting doubt on scientific facts.
RMP: “We commonly think that a text means what its authors meant to convey”
RT:Yes, but with the Bible, the sieve of Christendom makes it hard to discern the original intent. A process of cultural archaeology is needed to sift through the rubble of tradition to reconstruct the most plausible story of origins of the texts. For example, it is more plausible that the Gospels arose from Gnostic mystic secret societies as works of fiction, and were only later interpreted as infallible history, contrary to the author’s intentions.
RMP: “Should God himself tell us what a text meant, how could this be other than merely one more opinion on the matter?”
RT: The story of religion is that when a broad social consensus holds sway over the meaning of a text, a community of faith believes it has access to the mandate of heaven, and its philosophical paradigm reigns with unquestioned assumptions. As these assumptions gradually come under challenge, the old paradigm starts to falter and fall apart, but is only replaced when a superior story claims the mandate of heaven. It seems we are now in a cusp situation between an old consensus and the possible future emergence of a new vision uniting heaven and earth, within the framework of scientific knowledge. Such a new consensus on religious meaning would only be more ‘than merely one more opinion’ if it commanded universal assent as a compelling explanation, a new paradigm satisfying Ockham’s criteria of simple clarity.
RMP: “Deconstruction, in my opinion, destroys once and for all any notion of a regulative meaning of the Bible as an authoritative text.”
RT: ‘Once and for all’ is a big claim. If we find that mythicism provides a more coherent explanation of all the facts than literalism, it is conceivable that mythicism could generate an authoritative regulative meaning of the Bible. For example, it is a remarkable example of human depravity and fall that people could invent and believe the story of the incarnation, if in fact it is untrue.
RMP: “If the writer or the reader has a subconscious, so does the text!”
RT: This is a point that Jung made in Aion, that the fish symbolism in the New Testament could have arisen to such prominence due to subconscious association with the precession of the equinox through Pisces over the Christian Aeon.
RMP: “In any act of writing, the text escapes from the control of its writer because every use of language lets loose uncontrollable forces of signification unintended by the author.”
RT: Yes, and the ‘sorceror’s apprentice’ escape of the Gospels from an original Gnostic allegory into orthodox literality looks like a classic case in point. The popular resonance of the Jesus story was so great that the hopeful philosopher king-gnostics who invented Jesus could not control the mass sentiment sparked by their creation.
RMP: “what is the parable trying to do? It seems to want to help you to avoid the fate of the goats. "Help the needy, dear reader, because now you do know what's at stake!" But isn't the parable thus inculcating the very self-seeking it condemns?”
RT: No, that is just wrong. Feeding the hungry and the other works of mercy are not self-seeking. The relationship between faith and works means salvation is the result of faith, not its objective, contrary to your inference. And salvation itself is a term in great need of deconstruction. A more coherent reading of the doctrine of salvation in the parable of the sheep and goats is to mean evolutionary survival of humanity on earth, through a shift of social values to mercy, rather than the traditional idea of going to heaven after we die.
RMP: “shameless self-seeking of one's own eternal bliss.”
RT: That is a caricature of the humble love enjoined by the gospels as the narrow path to transform humanity from its present state of corruption to a state of grace.
While you will have to pay to read his long and fascinating discussion, you can read my response here for free. Note this is not an actual conversation, but rather my thoughts (RT) in response to the quoted texts from Dr Price's essay (RMP). I would be happy to take the comments below as a standalone post, and to explain or discuss anything you like.
RT: Hello Dr Price, thank you for this essay, which I have read with great interest as it touches on many of my own intellectual interests. Just firstly, before responding to some of your specific points, I would like to comment on the general theme of deconstruction in the Bible. To my reading, the best example is where Jesus explains the real meaning of the parable of the sower, deconstructing the stony, thorny, paved and fertile soil to mean corresponding attitudes to the word of grace. This deconstruction of the parable appears to be a paradigm for how we should read all the symbolic language of the Bible, seeing miracles as parables with real ethical lessons, not as literal examples of divine intervention on earth.
RMP: “"Deconstruction" as a term is derived by its greatest practitioner Jacques Derrida from Heidegger's term "Destruktion." It means not destruction but rather the analysis of something by taking it apart into its component pieces. The idea is to understand it better as a result of seeing the relationship of the parts.”
RT: The key deconstruction in Heidegger’s Being and Time is of the Cartesian Cogito, the claim that systematic philosophy can be built upon the indubitable observation that ‘I am a thinking thing’. For the existential standpoint of being in the world advocated by Heidegger, the cogito establishes a myth of an isolated individual that fails to recognise that existence is primarily with others in relationships of care. But this deconstruction of Descartes by Heidegger is very different from the use Derrida made of this concept.
RMP: “says Derrida, … all meaning is ultimately differential, not referential”
RT: Unfortunately, that is a claim that to me has never made the slightest sense, because it establishes cultural relativism as a paradoxical absolute, denying the possibility of systematic thinking and logic. When we say a word refers to a thing, we make an absolute claim of meaning. The foggy concept of the ‘differential’, on the rocky road to the total vague-out of ‘differance’, rejects this simple theory of meaning as reference.
RMP: “one-for-one correspondence between a word and the object it refers to…become ambiguous or inadequate”
RT: It surprises me Bob that with your sympathy for conservative values you give credence to such confusing claims. Science is about the use of logic and evidence to remove ambiguity, explaining clear and distinct meanings, and has been immensely successful in this project. It is true that there are grey areas of uncertainty, but these are primarily in the realm of values rather than facts, and should not detract from the vast factual knowledge that presents unambiguous basis for coherent systematic thinking. Where science has uncertainty about facts it tends to admit it.
It is worth noting how very much Heidegger differs from Derrida on these matters around the correspondence theory of truth. While it is true that Heidegger distinguished between truth as disclosure of being and the more usual adequation of idea and thing, Heidegger also rejected ambiguity, at least in his philosophy, holding that a core value in philosophy should be authenticity, which is undermined by ambiguity. As well, Heidegger presented a systematic ontology, grounded in Parmenides’ distinction between unitary truth based on logic and the uncertainty of appearance, while Derrida is at the origin of the postmodern view that systematic thought is impossible.
RMP: “. Different cultures and subcultures carve the pie of perception differently, and perception itself is governed to an astonishing degree by our categories of expectation, inherited from our culture. ”
RT: Yes, but we can assess the worth of different cultures, as to whether their perceptions are accurate and sensible or not. Science is a gold standard for accurate sensible perception, while unscientific beliefs tend to be unreliable.
RMP: “supposedly foundational talk about presuppositions or premises on which any system of thought might be based is undermined and subverted”
RT: Here we encounter the problem of relativism in epistemology. Socrates criticised Protagoras for his claim that man is the measure of all things. Logically, the claim that we can make our own truth implies the irrational belief that a statement can be true and false, a fallacy that flows directly from the denial of objective truth.
RMP: Derrida points out that Descartes raised one possibility he could not successfully dismiss: what if Big Brother were deceiving him about logic itself? ”
RT: Questioning logic is dangerously crazy. Without basic axioms that Kant called necessary conditions of experience, life is not possible. For Kant, these axioms, termed synthetic a priori judgements, include causality, logic, space and time. The alternative is nihilistic solipsism, an immoral and incoherent attitude, but that is what Derrida promotes here. By the way it is untrue to say Kant was refuted by Einstein’s paradigm shift from Newton’s view that space and time are absolute. Modern science still assumes that space-time is real, and broadly assumes the universe exists and obeys consistent orderly laws of nature.
RMP: “What if what seems so obvious to the rational mind were nothing more than Hume would soon say it was: a coincidental association of ideas? ”
RT: Then as Kant explained, our experience would not be possible. Hume’s scepticism about causality and morality opened the modern path to nihilistic rejection of any possible certainty. Astronomy, as the great scientific source of knowledge of the universe, has much certain knowledge, proved by the fact that if causal theories such as gravity were untrue then man would not have been able to fly to the moon, etc.
RMP: “The mere fact that it does not occur to us to doubt something hardly proves there are no flaws we have not found.”
RT: Consider the example of doubting the moon landings. That doubt is nothing but crackpot nonsense which is immediately dismissed by all sensible people. Science does not know everything, but it is a fallacy to infer from that observation that therefore all knowledge can be doubted legitimately.
RMP: “what seems true to us in our oh-so-rational consciousness is a heavily censored and carefully edited product of the subconsciousness.”
RT: Yes, but we can distinguish what is certain from what is uncertain. The false implication of Derrida’s argument is that this distinction is impossible.
RMP: “Sanity is the tip of the iceberg of madness.”
RT: Perhaps, but as Aristotle argued, philosophy can separate the true from the false, and the sane from the insane. People err, but knowledge builds upon precedent, and is generally reliable. Without good reason we should not question the sanity of facts that make existence possible.
RMP: “The gospels partake of the Western complicity to silence disorder, differance, and the terrible secret that sane reason is but a minor mutant strain of madness.”
RT: Systematic ethical philosophy aims to promote good over evil. Derrida appears to believe there is no way to distinguish good from evil. Religion, in its meaning as a rebinding between earth and heaven, aims to discern the order of the cosmos and reflect that in ethical values. This underlying goal has been badly distorted and corrupted, but charging the gospels as complicit in this corruption seems to me to wrongly assign the errors of Christendom to the original texts of Christianity.
RMP: “the thing that makes faith something else, something additional beside certainty, is precisely doubt, that which would first appear to be its opposite! In a strange way, faith is revealed as being somehow the same as its opposite!”
RT: No, that does not make sense. Faith is confidence in things unseen, whereas certainty only applies to things that are seen, or directly and scientifically inferred from what is seen. Faith operates more in the domain of values, whereas certainty operates in the domain of facts. The fundamentalist error is to assume that faith can be a basis for knowledge of facts.
RMP: “Here is an instance of what we often find in deconstructive criticism, the dismantling and upsetting of hierarchies. Traditionally we have operated with sets of opposites and always evaluated one as good, the other as bad. Spirit is good, flesh is evil. Men are good, women are evil. The one is good, the many are evil.”
RT: This shows the legitimate and important task in theology to deconstruct traditional authoritarian claims as unreliable and culturally bound. The Biblical sources usually turn out to conceal allegorical meaning or social convention behind the literal surface claim. But that does not mean we should extend beyond this proper political use of deconstruction to cast doubt on certain scientific knowledge, which is an implication of Derrida’s approach. Science has its own methods to deal with uncertainty, and the deconstruction of paradigms and values is a separate thing from casting doubt on scientific facts.
RMP: “We commonly think that a text means what its authors meant to convey”
RT:Yes, but with the Bible, the sieve of Christendom makes it hard to discern the original intent. A process of cultural archaeology is needed to sift through the rubble of tradition to reconstruct the most plausible story of origins of the texts. For example, it is more plausible that the Gospels arose from Gnostic mystic secret societies as works of fiction, and were only later interpreted as infallible history, contrary to the author’s intentions.
RMP: “Should God himself tell us what a text meant, how could this be other than merely one more opinion on the matter?”
RT: The story of religion is that when a broad social consensus holds sway over the meaning of a text, a community of faith believes it has access to the mandate of heaven, and its philosophical paradigm reigns with unquestioned assumptions. As these assumptions gradually come under challenge, the old paradigm starts to falter and fall apart, but is only replaced when a superior story claims the mandate of heaven. It seems we are now in a cusp situation between an old consensus and the possible future emergence of a new vision uniting heaven and earth, within the framework of scientific knowledge. Such a new consensus on religious meaning would only be more ‘than merely one more opinion’ if it commanded universal assent as a compelling explanation, a new paradigm satisfying Ockham’s criteria of simple clarity.
RMP: “Deconstruction, in my opinion, destroys once and for all any notion of a regulative meaning of the Bible as an authoritative text.”
RT: ‘Once and for all’ is a big claim. If we find that mythicism provides a more coherent explanation of all the facts than literalism, it is conceivable that mythicism could generate an authoritative regulative meaning of the Bible. For example, it is a remarkable example of human depravity and fall that people could invent and believe the story of the incarnation, if in fact it is untrue.
RMP: “If the writer or the reader has a subconscious, so does the text!”
RT: This is a point that Jung made in Aion, that the fish symbolism in the New Testament could have arisen to such prominence due to subconscious association with the precession of the equinox through Pisces over the Christian Aeon.
RMP: “In any act of writing, the text escapes from the control of its writer because every use of language lets loose uncontrollable forces of signification unintended by the author.”
RT: Yes, and the ‘sorceror’s apprentice’ escape of the Gospels from an original Gnostic allegory into orthodox literality looks like a classic case in point. The popular resonance of the Jesus story was so great that the hopeful philosopher king-gnostics who invented Jesus could not control the mass sentiment sparked by their creation.
RMP: “what is the parable trying to do? It seems to want to help you to avoid the fate of the goats. "Help the needy, dear reader, because now you do know what's at stake!" But isn't the parable thus inculcating the very self-seeking it condemns?”
RT: No, that is just wrong. Feeding the hungry and the other works of mercy are not self-seeking. The relationship between faith and works means salvation is the result of faith, not its objective, contrary to your inference. And salvation itself is a term in great need of deconstruction. A more coherent reading of the doctrine of salvation in the parable of the sheep and goats is to mean evolutionary survival of humanity on earth, through a shift of social values to mercy, rather than the traditional idea of going to heaven after we die.
RMP: “shameless self-seeking of one's own eternal bliss.”
RT: That is a caricature of the humble love enjoined by the gospels as the narrow path to transform humanity from its present state of corruption to a state of grace.