Religious Education and Critical Realism

Knowledge, Reality and Religious Literacy

Andrew Wright

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781135236052
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy of Religion

Religious Education and Critical Realism: Knowledge, Reality and Religious Literacy seeks to bring the enterprise of religious education in schools, colleges and universities into conversation with the philosophy of Critical Realism. This book addresses the problem, not of the substance of our primal beliefs about the ultimate nature of reality and our place in the ultimate order-of-things, but of the process through which we might attend to questions of substance in more attentive, reasonable, responsible and intelligent ways. This book unpacks the impact of modern and post-modern thought on key topics whilst also generating a new critically realistic vision. Offering an account of the relationship between Religious Education and Critical Realism, this book is essential reading for students, scholars and practitioners interested in philosophy, theology and education.

1 The epistemic fallacy

Our planet is spherical and does not change its shape in response to our shifting beliefs. The fact that in the past many believed it to be flat does not mean it once was flat. Ontological realism recognises, correctly, that reality trumps our epistemic beliefs about reality: the world does not change in order to conform to our beliefs; rather, it is our beliefs that must change in order to conform to the world. The epistemic fallacy forces reality into the straightjacket of our preferred ways of knowing, despite the fact that the primacy of ontology over epistemology requires us to allow reality to shape our epistemic endeavours. The inversion of the proper relationship between the knower and the object of knowledge leads directly to forms of alienation and pathological behaviour, since imagined worlds inevitably clash with the actual world. This is why there is an intellectual, moral and spiritual imperative to pursue truth and truthful living in harmony with the ways things actually are in reality. This chapter narrates a story of the progressive impact of the epistemic fallacy on post-Enlightenment Western thought, speech and action: from the assertion of the sovereignty of consciousness, via epistemic foundationalism and the ensuing displacement of fact from value, to the emergence of a pervasive and hegemonic secular liberal ontology.

The sovereignty of consciousness

Rational autonomy is a critical marker of modern identity. René Descartes insisted that we are fundamentally rational creatures: cogito ergo sum, I think, therefore I am. Immanuel Kant maintained that the proper exercise of reason requires our independence from any external constraint: sapere aude, have the courage to think for yourself. On this reading, reason and autonomy constitute the fundamental principles of modern selfhood, tempered only by the responsibility to act tolerantly towards others whenever the exercise of rational autonomy leads to a clash of interests. Viewed from the vantage point of post-modernity, the modern notion of human beings as rational, dispassionate, self-reliant and self-possessed seekers after truth and truthfulness appears little more than an ephemeral dream. Michel Foucault’s genealogical account of the construction of the modern self seeks to demonstrate that the notion was largely arbitrary, the product of the chance configuration of a variety of socio-cultural power structures. This claim, coupled with the failure of the modern self to fulfil the emancipatory hopes of the Enlightenment, lead Foucault to conclude that ‘we have had to abandon all those discourses that once led us to the sovereignty of consciousness’ (Foucault 1972: 202). Though ‘you may have killed God beneath the weight of all that you have said’, he cautions the advocates of modernity, ‘don’t imagine that, with all that you are saying, you will make a man that will live longer than he’ (ibid.: 211). For post-modern philosophers the constructed self of modernity is merely ‘a momentary “fold” in the fabric of knowledge, an episode brought about by the enlightenment need to think of man as the rational, autonomous dispenser of his own moral laws’ (Norris 1987: 221). As such, it is destined to be ‘erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea’ (Foucault 1989: 387).

In Madness and Civilization Foucault charts the emergent polarisation of madness and sanity generated by the triumph of modern reason (Foucault 1971). The medieval Christian understanding that all human beings are loved unconditionally by a gracious God, despite the fact that all fall short of perfection when measured against divine standards, meant that the dividing line between madness and reason was not firmly drawn. Because the outcasts, sinners and demon-possessed took pride of place in the Kingdom of God, Christendom celebrated the court jester and proverbial village idiot as ‘holy fools’, set apart from society by virtue of their paradoxical closeness to the divine. A litany of Renaissance texts, from Brant’s The Ship of Fools through Erasmus’ In Praise of Folly and Shakespeare’s King Lear to Cervantes’ Don Quixote, together with the woodcuts and paintings of Bosch and Dürer, testified to the fact that ‘folly held pride of place in the catalogue of human weakness’ (Boyne 1990: 22). The displacement of Christian faith by secular reason led to a loss of this sense of the sanctity of unreason: insanity was no longer deemed a ‘space of pure vision’, and madness no longer constituted ‘a primitive force of revelation’ (Foucault 1971: 38ff.). Instead reason now sought to illuminate and control ‘the fantastic and terrible territory of the Other’ (Boyne 1990: 16). Where previously a discourse between reason and madness had flourished, this was now replaced with a ‘monologue of reason on madness’ (Sarup 1988: 69). This resulted first in policies of incarceration designed to protect society from the mentally ill, and then in the humanitarian treatment of the insane through various emergent medical and therapeutic practices.

The transition from medievalism to modernity was the product of a diverse range of interlinked causes: the Renaissance oversaw the recovery of pre-Christian classical culture; the Reformation, with its commitment to the priesthood of all believers, challenged the authority of the Roman Catholic hierarchy and nurtured dreams of individual freedom and responsibility; the notion of the divine right of monarchs to rule gave way to notions of representative government by and for the people; exploration and colonisation served to relativise the supposedly normative status of European culture; the scientific revolution undermined the Christianised Aristotelian worldview of scholastic natural philosophy; economic developments paved the way for a transition from feudalism to capitalism; advances in literature and the fine arts, financed by the emergent mercantile classes, undermined the hegemony of the Church’s previous monopoly on culture.

Such changes were prefigured and precipitated by the nominalist turn in late medieval philosophy and theology. William of Ockham dismissed the received scholastic synthesis of faith and reason on the grounds that any attempt, however limited, to make God accountable to human reason risked compromising divine sovereignty (Ockham 1983, 1990; cf. Freddoso 1999; Spade 1999). His nominalist distinction between the reality of particulars and non-reality of universals effectively drove a wedge between the historical Jesus and the Christ of faith. Though this enabled him to assert the absolute transcendence, otherness and freedom of God, it also denied theological discourse any secure purchase on reality. For Ockham, ‘the idea of divine omnipotence thus means that human beings can never be certain that any of the impressions they have correspond to an actual object’ (Gillespie 1996: 18). This undermined confidence in the Christian account of an all-loving and all-gracious God intimately involved with his creatures in the person of the incarnate, crucified and resurrected Christ. Some Protestant Reformers inferred from Ockham’s dual insistence on the absolute sovereignty of God and utter inability of human beings to engineer their own salvation the doctrine of double-predestination, according to which God – in a manner that from the human perspective appears utterly arbitrary – elects some to eternal life and others to eternal damnation. This opened up the visage of a nihilistic world, devoid of any ultimate stability and security, and administered by an all-powerful, arbitrary and unpredictable divine despot. Once the ‘holy fool’ is dislocated from the orthodox Christian belief in the unbounded grace of an all-loving God and associated instead with an omnipotent tyrant, she ceases to be an object of reverence and becomes instead a potential demonic threat.

It is here that we encounter a key source of modernity. If the failure of reason leads not to a loving God but to an arbitrary despot, then reason must not be allowed to fail. Hence the philosophers of the Enlightenment,

facing the possibility that all their given reality and perception were illusory, arbitrary and liable to negation at any moment by the Creator, decided to assert themselves and make stable their values, thereby securing a world that a perverted theology had so explicitly abandoned.

(Blond 1999: 234; cf. Wright 2004: 12)

Descartes’ Meditations take the form of spiritual confession, in which the Cartesian soul contemplates human finitude and struggles with the very real possibility of a descent into chaos:

The terrifying quality of the journey is reflected in the allusions to madness, darkness, the dread of waking from a self-deceptive dream world, the fear of having ‘all of a sudden fallen into deep water’ where ‘I can neither make certain of setting my feet on the bottom, nor can I swim and so support myself on the surface’, and the anxiety of imagining that I may be nothing more than the plaything of an all-powerful evil demon.

(Bernstein 1983: 17; cf. Descartes 1967a: 149)

Descartes’ spiritual pilgrimage drives him into an intellectual wilderness in which he must confront the arbitrary God of late-medieval nominalism and wrestle with the demons of madness and chaos.

Reading the Meditations as a journey of the soul helps us to appreciate that Descartes’ search for a foundation or Archimedean point is more than a device to solve metaphysical and epistemological problems. It is the quest for some fixed point, some stable rock upon which we can secure our lives against the vicissitudes that constantly threaten us.

(Descartes 1967a: 18)

The potential menace underlying this Cartesian anxiety is such that Descartes is in no position to compromise: ‘Either there is some support for our being, a fixed foundation for our knowledge, or we cannot escape the forces of darkness that envelop us with madness, with intellectual and moral chaos’ (ibid.: 18).

In the First Meditation Descartes sets out, in the light of ‘the multitude of errors that I had accepted as true in my earliest years’, to make ‘a clean sweep for once in my life, and beginning again from the very foundations … establish some secure and lasting result’ (Descartes 1970: 61). He employs a method of systematic doubt, a hermeneutic of suspicion, an epistemology of deconstruction in his attempt to identify a secure foundation both for himself and for his knowledge of the world. Suppose, he argues, in response to Pierre Gassendi’s objection, a man

had a basket of apples, and fearing that some of them were rotten, wanted to take those out lest they make the rest go bad, how could he do it? Would he not turn the whole of the apples out of the basket, and look over them one by one, and then having selected those which he saw were not rotten, place them again in the basket and leave out the others?

(Descartes 1967b: 282)

Descartes’ Discourse on Method begins by proclaiming the Cartesian soul’s emancipation from history, tradition and any received intellectual authority. In ‘noticing many things that seem to us extravagant and ridiculous, but are none the less commonly accepted and approved’, he learned ‘not to believe too firmly anything that I had been convinced about only by example and custom’ (Descartes 1970: 13). He offers a negative evaluation of his scholastic education tempered by Renaissance humanism, as delivered by his Jesuit teachers, and questions the value of his study of languages, classics, oratory, poetry, mathematics, ethics and theology. ‘And yet I was in one of the most celebrated schools in Europe; and I thought there must be learned men there, if there were such in any part of the globe’ (ibid.: 9). He concludes:

But as soon as I had finished the whole course of studies at the end of which one is normally admitted among the ranks of the learned … I found myself embarrassed by so many doubts and errors, that it seemed to me that the only profit I had had from my efforts to acquire knowledge was the progressive discovery of my own ignorance.

(ibid.)

According to Ernst Cassirer, ‘it is customary to consider it a major shortcoming of [the Enlightenment] epoch that it lacked understanding of the historically distant and foreign’, so that ‘in naive overconfidence it set up its own standards as the absolute, and only valid and possible, norm for the evaluation of historical events’ (Cassirer 1951: x). In rejecting the authority of received tradition it affirmed the sovereignty of the consciousness of the isolated self, abstracted from the world, dislocated from tradition, and reliant on its own standards of rationality. Thus according to Kant, ‘Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity’, an immaturity marked by ‘the inability to use one’s own understanding without the guidance of another’ (Kant 1997: 54). However, there were tensions inherent in this negative reading of the past. As a child of the Renaissance’s rediscovery of classical antiquity, the Enlightenment combined a fascination for the past with a concern to establish a critical distance from it. It was not any lack of interest in, or insensitivity towards, the past that was a hallmark of the Enlightenment, but rather the way in which the past was used (Cobban 1960). Peter Gay argues that it is entirely wrong to ignore the Enlightenment’s recognition of the past as both ‘useful’ and ‘beloved’: it juxtaposed a reverence for classical antiquity with an antipathy towards the Judaeo-Christian tradition (Gay 1973a: 31ff.). Though classical antiquity could not be trusted as a valid source of knowledge, it nevertheless provided the philosophers of the Enlightenment with a certain sense of congeniality: just as a dominant stream of the Enlightenment sought to replace Judaeo-Christian faith with secular philosophy, so pagan antiquity offered – especially in the writings of Lucretius and Cicero, forerunners of the modern ‘spirit of criticism’ – a historical example of the triumph of reason over myth. Though the earlier triumph of classical reason had subsequently been undermined by the scholastic synthesis of medieval Christianity, the time was now right to forge a new victory of science over myth, reason over faith, and philosophy over religion. Far from being insensitive to the past, the Enlightenment’s use of history to undermine the epistemic authority of the received testimony of religious myth was eminently sophisticated.

No longer reliant on the testimonial authority of received tradition, Descartes was free to appeal to first person testimony and confession:

Certain paths that I have happened to followed ever since my youth have led me to considerations and maxims out of which I have formed a method; and this, I think, is a means to a gradual increase in my knowledge that will raise it little by little to the highest point allowed by the mediocrity of my mind and the brief duration of my life.

(Descartes 1970: 8, my emphasis)

The hermeneutic of suspicion, in dislocating the self from its cultural heritage, forces the Cartesian soul back onto its own resources: the more he doubts the authority of tradition the more he is separated from it, and the more he is separated from it the more he must rely on his own cognitive resources. This process is replicated in Descartes’ empirical experience of the physical world, including that of his own body. Though he is aware of sense data in his mind, he cannot be certain that it derives from physical objects in the external world: the Kantian distinction between the noumenal realm of things-in-themselves and the phenomenal realm of things-as-they-appear-to-us is already present here in embryonic form. Since there are times when his empirical sense experiences clearly deceive him, he cannot be certain that they do not deceive him all of the time. Though he holds out the possibility that ideas generated by his sense experiences might be true – if not the composite ideas of sirens and satyrs, then at least those of cats and dogs – he has no way of knowing for certain whether or not they are merely the illusionary products of a dream. Hence his turn from external experience to internal reflexivity and from complex to simple ideas:

At this rate we might be justified in concluding that whereas physics, astronomy, medicine, and all the other sciences depending on the consideration of composite objects, are doubtful; yet arithmetic, geometry, and so on, which treat only of the simplest and most general subject-matter, and are indifferent whether it exists in nature or not, have an element of indubitable certainty.

(ibid.: 63)

The fact that two plus three equals five is surely true, whether he is awake or dreaming. But what if he is being deceived on this point by a malignant demon? What if two plus three actually equals seven? What if the apparently ordered world of mathematics is ultimately lawless? What if reality is not grounded in an all-powerful and all-knowing God, the benevolent dispenser of natural and moral law? What if our language is purely nominal and utterly disconnected from an ordered, structured and meaningful reality? What if there is no line of demarcation between madness and reason? What if all is anarchy and chaos? And here we arrive at the heart of the matter: even if this were the case, Descartes himself would have to exist in order to be deceived in this way. Whatever the extent of disorder in the world, so long as Descartes is able to question the limits of his knowledge and the extent of his sanity, he must exist to do so: ‘I am’, ‘I exist’, ‘I am something’ (ibid.: 67). Here, in the assertion of the inalienable sovereignty of immediate self-consciousness, lies the foundation and possibility of both intellectual certainty and spiritual security; here, in its self-assertive and self-protective response to Cartesian anxiety, the modern rationally autonomous self engineers its own creation; here, in the drive to impose internal reason on the external world, lies the source of the modern version of the epistemic fallacy.

Epistemic foundations

In affirming the sovereignty of consciousness Descartes claimed to have identified the basic self-evident truth that would provide a secure foundation for the positive reconstruction of indubitably certain knowledge in the wake of the termination of the negative deconstructive programme of systematic doubt. However, his use of the phrase cogito ergo sum makes a number of assumptions – about language, meaning, communication, thought, identity and being – that appear to have been artificially protected from the hermeneutic of suspicion. As Anthony Kenny points out:

It is notable how much of Cartesian metaphysics is latent in the arguments for Cartesian doubt … the sceptical arguments gain their full force only if the reader is prepared to entertain the Cartesian system as possible from the outset.

(Kenny 1968: 38f.)

Despite this, the image of the dislocated mind seeking to reconnect with the world in a manner that avoids any subjective distortion of objective reality came to pervade Western philosophy from the Enlightenment onward: ‘there can be little doubt that the problems, metaphors and questions that he bequeathed to us have been at the very center of philosophy since Descartes’ (Bernstein 1983: 17). Richard Rorty picks up this theme:

It is pictures rather than propositions, metaphors rather than statements, which determine most of our philosophical convictions. The picture that holds traditional philosophy captive is that of the mind as a great mirror, containing various representations – some accurate, some not – and capable of being studied by pure, non-empirical methods.

(Rorty 1980: 12)

The dislocated mind seeking to reconnect with the world is envisaged as a mirror capable of reflecting reality; the task facing philosophy is to ensure that the images of reality contained in the mind are properly understood and comprehended, and the burden of responsibility for achieving this rests with the mind itself.

Without the notion of the mind as mirror, the notion of knowledge as accuracy of representation would not have suggested itself. Without this later notion, the strategy common to Descartes and Kant – getting more accurate representations by inspecting, repairing, and polishing the mirror, so to speak – would not have made sense.

(ibid.)

The very real danger of the mind projecting its own subjective assumptions onto reality meant that the process of reconstructing knowledge must proceed with extreme caution. Because the affirmation of the sovereignty of consciousness could not r...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• 1 The epistemic fallacy
• 2 Critical realism
• 3 The subjugation of Transcendence
• 4 Theological realism
• 5 The fragmentation of education
• 6 Educational realism
• 7 Liberal religious education
• 8 Critical religious education
• Bibliography
• Index