Does Language Constrain or Liberate?

Christianity is sometimes criticized for the language it insists on employing. For example, Christians are expected to assent to, recite, and perhaps even memorize, certain carefully formulated Creeds. Christian leaders are often conservative with their use of language, insisting on employing a central list of locutions and phrases from by-gone eras (e.g. phrases like ‘of one substance with’), and being wary of new ways of speaking and of new methods of explanation.

I do not think that this is a very powerful criticism, since every philosopher since Wittgenstein has acknowledged that people are socialized into a language, and every community and field of inquiry has certain semantic horizons within which it gets by and communicates. But it does raise the interesting question: Do you think language constrains or liberates?

This may be a way too abstract question to have any bite on you, so here are two quotes representing the two sides of the issue to try to bait your interest.

Foucault suggested that what you are is dependent upon the categories you are required to use to describe yourself in…which are not self-chosen, but accepted on the authority of ‘experts’.

– Gary Gutting, Foucault: A Very Short Introduction (2005), pp. 93-94

As it happens, I am still committed to the idea that the ability to think for one’s self depends upon one’s mastery of the language.

– Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1967), p. 123

Foucault thought that as long as society, or really anyone other than yourself, invents the terms, concepts and categories which you use to describe yourself, you are in some sense constrained. Author Joan Didion thought that the only way for pathetically under-equipped youth to flourish and develop meaningful communities and lives was to learn the language which everyone is speaking and within that learn to think for themselves.

These quotes, although not on the subject of religion, are a good catalyst for philosophizing about Christianity’s conservative use of language. Do you think that learning and insisting upon using a certain vocabulary is limiting or freeing?

Sydney University Summer School 2010

In January-February 2010 I am going to be delivering some lectures for a philosophy course being offered at Sydney University Summer School. The course is a first-year introductory subject called ‘Reality, Ethics, and Beauty’. I will be teaching the ‘Beauty’ component of the course, presenting 8 lectures on aesthetics and the philosophy of art.

If you are free, come along, I’d love to see you at some of my lectures! The course costs some $2000-3000 to take, but the lectures are public (free), so feel free to drop by if the time works for you. More details to come closer to the date.

Aesthetics is a very interesting part of philosophy, and an easy (and not too intimidating) way to begin to think about philosophical problems. My lectures will (probably) cover big issues in philosophy like objectivity, meaning, truth, interpretation, ethics, politics, and deal with some of the greats of philosophy such as Plato, Immanuel Kant, David Hume and Michel Foucault.   

Any suggestions for books I should read, topics I should touch on, or artworks I should try to discuss?

Against Individualism in Ethics

And so Saint Paul continues, ‘I may speak in tongues of men or of angels, but if I am without love, I am a sounding gong or a clanging symbol. I may have gifts of prophecy, and know every hidden truth; I may have faith strong enough to move mountains; but if I have no love, I am nothing.’ (1 Corinthians 13.1-2, NEB). In reading these familiar words we must be alert to the context of discussion in which they are situated: the greatest achievements which Paul thinks meaningless without love are gifts of the Spirit, vocations, particular callings to which one is summoned individually, which will distinguish this man’s service from his neighbor’s and will mark his history out as a unique and personal history. It is not that Paul deprecates the individual and personally distinctive; it is not that he suspects all striking manifestations of it a secret hypocrisy.

His point is simply that a life considered solely as the fulfilling of a personal destiny, the working-out of an individual charisma, is a vacant abstraction. The particularity of vocation must serve as a window through which the universal character of all Christian life may appear. Just as the variety of voices within the church are unified in a common confession, ‘Jesus is Lord’, so the variety of forms of life are unified within a common form of life according to God’s order, the life of love.

– Oliver O’Donovan, Resurrection and Moral Order (1986), p. 222

Individualism is a pretty attractive idea. We tend to admire people who manage to achieve some sort of individualism against the odds. We admire people who think for themselves, who refuse to be defined by the society or tradition they are a part of. Rogue figures like Friedrich Nietzsche, Michel Foucault and Marcel Proust (or Elizabeth Bennet) insist on not fitting into any predefined role society may have had for them, and of not letting any group, institution or one perspective tell them who they really are, or tell them what they ought to aspire to. As Samuel Coleridge once said, heroes invent the terms and categories by which their life will be judged.

This leads to the question – what is the opposite of individualism? If the Nora from Ibsen’s A Doll’s House who leaves and slams the door is a heroic individual, what would we say of the Nora that stayed?

The quote above from O’Donovan suggests that the opposite of individualism need not be ‘conservatism’, ‘submissiveness’, ‘resignation’ or ‘ordinariness’. He suggests that the opposite of individualism is seeing your life not as the subjective expression of a unique take on life, but as the subjective expression of something universal. If individualism is the subjective expression of the particular, the contingent, the unique, the self-constructed then it’s opposite is the subjective expression of the universal, the fixed, the necessary, the received. Construing things this way shows that it is not the moment of subjective ethical expression which is under threat, but the source of this expression.

O’Donovan argues that all Christian ethics needs to be an expression of love. Christians are free to perform ethical action and engage in ethical reasoning and to still call what they are doing Christian so long as it seeks to be an expression of love, particularly the kind of love that God displayed on the cross. The person who speaks in tongues of angels, does so from love. The person who prophesies, does so from love. The person who lives in faith, does so from love. The Christian who buys only Fair Trade chocolate, does so from love. The Christian who befriends someone who is utterly different to them, does so from love. The Christian who takes a position on abortion, war, torture or sexual ethics, does so from love.

This quote from O’Donovan draws attention to an important and unique characteristic of Christian ethics. Christians hold that the ethical life has a certain shape – the life of love. Amongst all the complexity and subjectivity of contemporary life Christians hold that ethical living is living which is built on and shaped by a particular non-negotiable – love. Henry David Thoreau once said that living well, living ethically, is a matter of ‘dwelling as near as possible to the channel in which your life flows.’ Christianity replies, there is only one channel. Life which aspires to fulfill a personal destiny is vacant abstraction, and morally speaking is neither here nor there. Life which attempts to embody something universal, is good.

To many, this idea of subjectively expressing something universal is much more attractive than subjectively expressing something of your own making. Which idea are you more attracted to as the task of ethical living?

How a Novel Can Save the World

[Political progress] is to be achieved not by inquiry but by imagination, the imaginative ability to see strange people as fellow sufferers…This process of coming to see other human beings as ‘one of us’ rather than as ‘them’ is a matter of detailed description of what unfamiliar people are like and of the re-description of what we ourselves are like. This is a task not for theory but for genres such as…the novel. Fiction like that of Dickens…gives us the details about kinds of suffering being endured by people to whom we had previously not attended. Fiction like…Henry James, or Nabokov gives us the details about what sorts of cruelty we ourselves are capable of, and thereby lets us re-describe ourselves. That is why the novel, the movie, and the TV program have, gradually but steadily, replaced the sermon and the treatise as the principle vehicles of moral change and progress.

– Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989), p. xvi.

In this fascinating excerpt Richard Rorty makes a few large claims. First, he claims that societies make progress in the most important sense not from the results of inquiry, but through imagination. Because of this, art, literature and film take on an enormously important political role, which leaves philosophy and other areas of inquiry relatively sidelined. Rorty believes that art is able to change and affect the way we see the world in a way which inquiry is never able to. It is important in both educating a society about the ‘other’ and in affecting their sentiments towards this ‘other’ such that reconciliation is not only a possibility but is put forward as the most attractive and human option. Through the telling of a story, a novel is able to affect the way in which you see the world. It catches you and your limited point of view up in its narrative and tells you about people and place in new ways which leave you changed. This is similar to what Foucault thought the purpose of descriptive history was – to show you hidden complexities and anomalies about the world you thought you knew, and in the process, to show you hidden complexities and anomalies about yourself.

Given this, I’m surprised at Rorty’s quick dismissal of the sermon as a vehicle of cultural change. Actually, I’m not surprised since Rorty is no fan of formal religion, least of all Christianity, but I think this statement is in tension with the really interesting point he is making. Christianity has a rich tradition of story telling. It tells a story about hope, love and overcoming otherness. A story which millions of people have listened to and have heard echos of their own story in, and which has gradually re-described the world and the self to them. A story which through re-describing the world and what it is to be a human has compelled many to the positive social and political activity of caring for the forgotten and despised, and of reaching out to the other. Two quotes put this in a nice light.

English Bishop Tom Wright has said,

[Scripture] is not, for a start, a list of rules, though it contains many commandments of various sorts and in various contexts. Nor is it a compendium of true doctrines, though of course many parts of the Bible declare great truths about God, Jesus, the world and ourselves in no uncertain terms. Most of its constituent parts, and all of it when put together whether in the Jewsih canonical form or the Christian one, can best be described as story.

– N. T. Wright, Scripture and the Authority of God (2005), p. 19

American theologian Stanley Hauerwas has said,

Too often we have conceived of salvation – what God does to us in Jesus – as a purely personal decision, or a matter of finally getting our heads straight on basic beliefs, or of having some inner feelings of righteousness about ourselves and God, or of having our social attitudes readjusted. I suggest that salvation is not so much a new beginning but rather a beginning in the middle, so to speak. Faith begins, not in discovery, but in remembrance. The story began without us, as a story of the peculiar way God is redeeming the world, a story that invites us to come forth and be saved by sharing in the work of a new people whom God has created in Israel and Jesus. Such movement saves us by (1) placing us within an adventure that is nothing less than God’s purposes for the whole world, and (2) communally training us to fashion our lives in accordance with what is true rather than what is false…

The little story I call my life is given cosmic, eternal significance as it is caught up within God’s larger account of history. ‘We were Pharaoh’s slaves…, the Lord brought us out…that he might preserve us’. The significance of our lives is frighteningly contingent on the story of another. Christians are those who hear this story and are able to tell it as our salvation.

– Stanley Hauerwas and William H. Willimon, Resident Aliens (1989), p. 52, 55.