The Hopeful Midwife, pt 4

In my last note, I walked through a pattern in the biblical text (Job, the tower collapsing and killing people, the man born blind, Jesus on the cross). I pointed out how, in each of these stories, humanity's knee jerk reaction was to establish a cause-and-effect rationale for these occurrences. In each of these stories, God debunks this rationale, and does not replace it with anything ultimately satisfying. Instead, he provides humanity with a down payment of sorts. He climbs up on a tree and nails himself there. It's a gesture of solidarity, a narratological signal flare fired off which resonates down through history: "There are no answers (yet?), but take heart." It is the green light on Daisy's dock which shines dimly through the fog at the end of The Great Gatsby. There is no adequate answer to the why, but there's a who which manifests itself in all our meta-narratives, whether this who be labeled the Absolute Spirit, Allah, Brahman, the Real, the universe, or Yahweh.

When Moses asks to see Yahweh in his full glory, God more or less obliges: "And it shall come to pass, while my glory passes by, that I will put you in the cleft of the rock, and will cover you with My hand while I pass by" (Exodus 33:22). Moses is shielded because, as a subjective being, he cannot witness the fullness of God.

For atheists/existentialists, the experience is the same. When standing in front of the Niagara Falls, it is the sense of awe (the Sublime) at experiencing something so much more expansive than our minds can grasp. It is an emotional measuring stick of the distance between the bottom half of the diagram in my first note and the top half. If the Sublime is a testimony that there exists an objective reality independent of our subjective perceptions, aesthetics (beauty) is our compass. Even if all aesthetics can be reduced to evolutionary/ biological drives designed to help us choose a healthy mate, "healthy" is defined as that which endures, that which is sound, that which will increase the probability of healthy progeny, that which makes the midwife's job easier. Beauty helps to reveal the character of the Real. It is a compass, a hint as to where we might try our footing as we attempt to cross the chasm.

Just as Jesus' resurrection provides a down-payment toward managing suffering for Christians, Douglas Porpora points out that secular humanism has received its share of down-payments: "In our postmodern era, any suggestion of progress is suspect. Yet, is it really so outrageous to see some moral progress in our history? Although it may persist in some places, the evilness of slavery is now almost universally taken for granted."

The point of all this is to allay what I perceive to be humanity's greatest fear, perhaps best expressed by Frank Kermode: "[world] and book, it may be, are hopelessly plural, endlessly disappointing; we stand alone before them, aware of their arbitrariness and impenetrability, knowing that they may be narratives only because of our impudent intervention." Yet even Kermode must couch his statement in the "may be," he must leave that last line of escape, that wild Hegelian hope that all of reality is an attempt to realize a magnificent idea, that the unfolding of reality is a creative process.

Even for those like Richard Rorty who would take epistemic relativity to an extreme and claim that there is no "way things really are," hope must substitute "for the sort of knowledge which philosophers have usually tried to attain," hope for a better future, hope "that the future will astonish and exhilarate."

As a midwife, allow me a homiletic moment: Take hope. Take wild hope. Let the Sublime be your evidence. Let progress be your down-payment. Let beauty be your guide as you find your footing across the tight-rope which stretches between Derrida's irreconcilable interpretations of interpretation.

The Hopeful Midwife, pt 1

For those of us who think words are important, Jacques Derrida delivered what is arguably the most important lecture of the 20th century entitled "Structure, Sign, and Play" in 1966. At the end of his lecture, Derrida noted that there are two ways in which we can approach the written word: "[The] one seeks to decipher…a truth or an origin," "the other…affirms freeplay and tries to pass beyond…the reassuring foundation." I have tried to create a diagram to help explain what I think he means. The top half is the first "way," the bottom half is the second:



How is this relevant to you? If you're an academic in the field of literature, it's the question of whether or not there are ever objectively better interpretations of a given work. If you're in philosophy, it's the question of whether or not the Real can ever be understood or represented in any universal fashion. If you have religious beliefs centered around a sacred text, it's the question of whether or not you can discern what the author's intended meaning was for you in your religious life.

If you answered "yes we can" to any of the questions in the above paragraph, you probably feel more comfortable with the top half of my diagram. If you answered "no we can't," you prefer the bottom. Unfortunately, Derrida claims that we can't camp out on either half. If you prefer the top half, there will always be inconsistencies, there will always be exceptions to the universal. If you prefer the bottom, you'll always be haunted by nostalgia for transcendent meaning. Unless, of course, you prefer to be blind. There are Christian fanatics who refuse to wrestle with the implications of the fact that God commanded the nation of Israel to commit genocide in Deuteronomy, or that the high priest Jesus mentions in Mark 2:26 (Abiathar) is not the same as the one mentioned in 1 Samuel 21 (Ahimelech). There are atheists who adamantly insist that all religious experiences are mass delusions, despite the fact that over 90% of the world's population adheres to one religion or another. If I may make an evaluative statement, I think this kind of blindness on both sides of the fence is naive and the source of many of the world's ills.

Derrida states that "[we] must first try to conceive of the common ground [between these two perspectives], and the difference of this irreducible difference." In describing the work of finding the common ground, Derrida does so "with a glance toward the business of childbearing." In a sense, Derrida is asking us to become champions of the middle, to become expert midwives. A good midwife knows that only the mother is capable of giving birth, that being a midwife is about setting things up, making straight the path, and waiting with hope.

This is the project I am most interested in at present. The next few notes will map out my explorations of this middle ground. I hope you'll join me in discussing whether Derrida's dichotomy is sound, whether I'm extending it appropriately, and whether or not you think people must fit in one category or the other.