Pseudo-Dionysius redux

I have this term in a reading group been reading the influential mystical writer Pseudo-Dionysius. I have been experiencing alternatively bafflement and excitement in reading his stuff: perhaps more bafflement to tell truth. As Bertrand Russell once pointed out, it is hard to tell sometimes between a profound paradox and complete nonsense.

Here is a classic Dionysian passage, from his letter to Gaius:

Darkness disappears in the light, the more so as there is more light. Knowlegde makes unknowing disappear, the more so as there is more knowledge...However, think of this not in terms of deprivation but rather in terms of transcendence and then you will be able to say something truer than all truth, namely, that the unknowing regarding God espcapes anyone possessing physical light and knowledge of beings: His transcendent darkness remains hidden from all light and concealed from all knowledge. Someone beholding God and understanding what he saw has not actually seen God himself but rather something of his which has being and which is knowable. For he himslef solidly transcends mind and being. He is completely unknown and non-existent. He exists beyond being and he is known beyond the mind. And this quite positively complete unknowing is knowledge of him who is above everything that is known.

Is it just me, or is there a bit of slippage in the use of the word 'knowing' here? Is this utterly orthodox, or is it heterodox mystical neoplatonism? Is the knowledge of God which is revealed to us (ie John 1:1-14) in fact some kind of unknowing knowledge? What the?

Experts, Climate Change, and Religious Knowledge

Oxford is basically as I write floating away. It always has been one of the dampest places on earth but today it resembles Kevin Costner's Waterworld - and we know what a success that was.

Anyhow, as usual, climate change is being blamed. And I have to say any mention of this kind of environmental science leaves me head-scratching. Why? Because it is so inherently dependent on experts for information. We are utterly reliant on them one way or another. And if you want to oppose climate change thinking you have to produce your own expert. This is because the reasoning involved is way beyond the ordinary person, even the educated ones. I am not a climate change sceptic: but I am an expert sceptic (as in, I am sceptical of experts). I hate being so reliant on people whose knowledge I can't test, and yet I guess it is a fact of modern life (see Anthony Giddens on this). What alternative have I? But I can't help noticing the way climate change talk feeds into our primeval apocalyptic fears so well (and into the general English pessimism too!). It is what we want to hear, strangely enough. And it is coated in the priestly/sacred language of science, with all its totemic power.

This feeling of bewliderment and disempowerment is however something that many people feel towards theological and religious questions. They can see that there is a lot of disagreement; they know that there is an industry devoted to specialised knowledge that they could never hope to master; and they haven't time to go further. I remember teaching a bright class of 17 year olds - one boy threw up his hands in exasperation and said 'how can I know what is true when there is so much to know and there are so many different answers!' I guess having people like me studying away at university becoming experts doesn't help matters either...

The gospel however is not a piece of expert information. It isn't shrouded in the darkness of arcane knowledge that it takes years to acquire. Christians and their theologians have a call to present it not as a piece of expert knowledge but as something else...

Alasdair MacIntyre: encyclopaedia and geneaology

Simon and a French goat. They seem pretty much the same as other goats.

MacIntyre's Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry begins with a narrative about the creation of the Gifford lectures themselves - which is a brilliant, almost funny, self-referential move. The conceit is 'should these lectures really be given'? - which of course, MacIntyre undoes by, well, giving them.

The 19th C. Scottish academics with whom MacIntyre begins are exemplars of the 'encyclopedic' view of truth and knowledge. The genre that represents what they assumed best is the encyclopedia article - comprehensive, conclusive, prolix, 'scientific', based on facts, authoritative, 'expert'. This was not a discussion of authoritative texts, but rather was its own authoritative text.

The geneaologist on the other hand, of whom Nietzche is the supreme example, repudiated the very structures of knowledge and the institutions that produced it - and furthermore, the genres that represent it. So, Nietzche's personal journey led him away from the academy and into the Alps. His writing became prophetic, allusive, even self-contradictory, proverbial and with the appearance of incompleteness.

As MacIntyre points out: the geneaologist has (in his book) won a decisive victory over the encyclopedist in exposing his/her assumptions and pretensions. However, it is not clear how the geneaologist has escaped the charge that he has levelled at his opponent. Foucault, for example, undoubtedly a neo-Nietzchean, became more an icon of academic authority as his career went on, and did not dissuade his very deferential interviewers from their sycophancy, nor shatter his own idol once it had been built.

I have yet to read about the third rival version, namely 'tradition'. However, it strikes me that Kierkegaard could be an interesting mediating figure here, though perhaps on the geneaological side. It further strikes me that in Christian theology there remain those who take an encyclopedic approach and those who take a more 'geneaological' approach. They are as apparently incommensurate in this context as they are in philosophy...

Lyotard on 'perfomativity'...

As Jean-Francois Lyotard describes it, the validity of narrative knowledge has been denied in the modern period and replaced by ‘science’, based on ‘facts’ and producing ‘truth’. However, science cannot point to a unitive function and so requires an external source of legitimation. And so, almost sneakily, science turns to ‘meta-narratives’ to legitimate itself. Despite the insistence of the scientist that narratives are childish and primitive and not subject to argumentation or proof, scientific knowledge itself appeals to narratives for its legitimation: for example, that humanity is a hero of liberty and has a right to science; and that progressive measures to liberate it from the oppressive hand of churches and tyrants will lead humanity to fulfilment; or that humanity is the hero of absolute knowledge, and will more and more depict accurately and efficiently master the world according to its actual nature. Scientific knowledge thus delegitimates itself by referring itself to what it already excludes as invalid: narrative.

This self-refutation has led to a crisis enough; but in addition, the new technology of knowledge has shifted the character of knowledge further. Computerisation has meant acknowledging that human observation is limited; and a new, pragmatic emphasis not on the criterion of truth but on efficiency. The construal of science as a ‘true/false’ game has become an ‘efficient/inefficient’ game instead. This new postmodern discourse, however, does not require external legitimation in the same way that the modern scientific discourse did/does.

Lyotard labels this new basis for knowledge as ‘performativity’ (sounds like management jargon, no?) The goal of knowledge is no longer Truth, which necessitated reference to grand narratives, but now rather efficiency, which is self-legitimating.