SUNY series in American Philosophy and Cultural Thought

A Perspectival Theory of Truth and Value

Donald A. Crosby

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781438471358
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Epistemology in Philosophy

In this book, Donald A. Crosby defends the idea that all claims to truth are at best partial. Recognizing this, he argues, is a necessary safeguard against arrogance, close-mindedness, and potentially violent reactions to differences of outlook and practice. Crosby demonstrates how "partial truths" are inevitably at work in conversations and debates about religion, science, morality, economics, ecology, and social and political progress. He then focuses on the concept in the discipline of philosophy, looking at a number of distinctions that are taken to be strictly binary—those between fact and value, continuity and novelty, rationalism and empiricism, mind and body, and good and evil—and demonstrates how in all of these cases, each on its own can offer only an incomplete picture. Partial Truths and Our Common Future invites ongoing dialogue with others for the sake of mutual enlargements of understanding rather than mere civility, and provides incentive for continuing open-minded and shared inquiries into the important issues of life.

Chapter 1

RELIGION

Religion is at its best when it helps us to ask questions and holds us in a state of wonder—and arguably at its worst when it tries to answer them authoritatively and dogmatically.

—Karen Armstrong1

The first chapter of this book is on religion, because I think it is here that the major thesis of this book—that all stated truths are at best partial truths and need to be acknowledged as such—is most obvious or should readily be admitted to be so. Yet, in the field of religion, or perhaps even more so here, this thesis is commonly overlooked, impugned, or denied. The focus of all of the major religions of the world is on persons, presences, powers, attunements, or goals deemed to be radically transcendent—and thus to lie forever beyond full comprehension, description, depiction, or attainment. Wariness, tentativeness, and humility are the moods that must necessarily accompany an abiding sense of this radical transcendence.

Most important of all in religion is the haunting wonder of which religious scholar Karen Armstrong speaks in this chapter’s epigraph. The religious sense of inexhaustible wonder, as she rightly points out, means that an attitude of certainty or close-mindedness with regard to fundamental religious claims is “misplaced, and strident dogmatism that dismisses the views of others inappropriate.”2 To put her point a different way, it is inevitably the case that all religious claims, no matter how hoary or well-thought-out and defended, are at best partial truths. What is the case in this regard for spokespersons of other religious traditions is also necessarily the case for one’s own most cherished religious outlooks, convictions, and commitments—especially to the extent that one’s religious outlook is centered on some sort of radically transcendent religious ultimate.

I shall expand on and defend this idea through the rest of this chapter. I do so by discussing four paradoxes. The first is the paradox of the Dao and other religious ultimates that cannot be spoken. The second is the paradox implicit in faith in a God of all creation and all peoples. The third is a paradox of transcendence that relates to the radically immanental religious outlook I personally espouse, namely, Religion of Nature. And the fourth is the paradox lurking within what I call existential certitude.

The Dao and Other Religious Ultimates that Cannot Be Spoken

Here is how the Daodejing, the famous ancient Daoist text attributed to Laozi, begins:

The way that can be followed

Is not the eternal way;

The name that can be named

Is not the eternal name.

That which is without name is of heaven and

earth the beginning;

That which is nameable is of the ten thousand

things the mother.3

The transcendent, ineffable, unnameable character of the Dao or “Way” in Daoism is clearly stated in this well-known passage. But despite its insistence that the Dao, as the ultimate focus of Daoist religion, cannot be characterized or named, texts such as the Daodejing, the Zhuangzi, and others talk of the Dao at great length. What this initially puzzling phenomenon amounts to, in my judgment, and the way in which the paradox can be interpreted, is to understand that the Dao or Way that shines through and is made manifest in all things (e.g., the “ten thousand things” in the passage quoted) is not exhaustively or adequately made known in any or all of those things. To speak of the Dao exhibited in them is therefore to speak a partial truth. Similarly, to point to the unnamed and unnameable Dao is also to speak of a partial truth because the Dao is both concealed and revealed, hidden and manifested in the things of the palpable world of day-to-day experience.

The unnameable that is the source and sustainer of all things—the radically and inexhaustibly mysterious Way—is also nameable and knowable in the things that arise from it and are granted their being by it. Hence, one can write books about the nameable Dao, as Laozi, Zuangzi, and others do, even while constantly reminding the readers of those books that its nameability is only a partial truth, just as its total concealment must also be seen as a partial truth. Thus, each of these two partial truths contains important, never to be neglected information. Neither is to be overlooked or ignored. Neither should be rejected in favor of the other. The tension between them comes closer to being the adequate truth of the matter than either is by itself. But a tension or paradox is not a consistent statement of truth. It points beyond itself to a kind of truth for which no final, adequate, complete, or consistent statement is possible. It can be felt, sensed, intuited, or experienced, but it cannot be clearly spoken or rendered into completely intelligible language.

Later Islam developed two tendencies of thought when contemplating the names or attributes of Allah provided in the Qur’an and elsewhere in Islamic lore. These tendencies turned on the ideas of “difference” (mukhalafala) and “removing” (tanzih). Allah is radically different from anything in this world, so faithful Muslims should recognize and continually stress this difference. They can do so by removing from Allah’s true nature any confusion with the natures of his creatures. The first tendency insists that names and phrases associated with Allah can still convey something of what Allah is like, and thus, when carefully qualified, can be usefully employed to bring to the mind of faithful Muslims important aspects of Allah’s character and relations to his world. The second tendency is to advocate a kind of via negativa and to assert that what the names or traits associated with Allah in the Qur’an and tradition actually mean we cannot know and should not be so presumptuous as to inquire. How, then, should Muslims think and live? A common answer to this question is that Muslims should simply accept and affirm the teachings of the Qur’an and other traditional authorities as the basis of faith and not try to understand them more fully. They should place no trust in their intellects with respect to such matters.

In these two tendencies in Islam we can see the conflict between what is sayable and is thus thinkable about Allah and what, in the very nature of the case, can never be adequately understood. There is truth in both tendencies, we can assume, but neither can count as the whole truth. These two are partial truths; each must be held in tension with the other. Islamic faith, like the faith systems of all the major religions, must have conceivable, assertible content to be believed in and lived by. Without such content, there would be no religious path to set out upon or followed. But such faith must also constantly guard against taking this content too literally and thus foolishly regarding Qur’anic and other traditional language concerning Allah too anthropomorphically. To do so would mean thinking that the yawning gulf of difference between Allah and his creation can somehow be adequately bridged with puny human language or with conceptualizations derived from the world of Allah’s creation.4 It would mean commission of the grave sin of idolatry (shirk), that is, associating Allah with alleged other gods or things of the finite world.

The essence of idolatry or sacrilege in any high religion is to confuse the infinite reach and reference of powerful religious expressions with an alleged complete human apprehension and rendering of their infinite meaning. To do so is to mistake partial truths for whole truths, distorting and misconceiving the partial truths in the process. Such a mistake is akin to the error of a child who, fascinated by a shimmering soap bubble floating in the air, tries eagerly to capture and contain it, only to destroy it.

The radical transcendence attributed to the Dao and Allah is echoed in other religious traditions. It is seen in the stupendous revelation of Vishnu’s awesome, inconceivable majesty, might, and glory in the Bhagavad Gita, as disclosed by the avatar Krishna to Arjuna. It is made clear in the distinction between the Brahman with qualities (Saguna Brahman) and the Brahman without qualities (Nirguna Brahman) in Advaita Vedanta Hinduism. It is forcefully disclosed to Job in the biblical Book of Job when Yahweh challenges him, a mere man, to even begin to comprehend the ways of the majestic, mysterious, all-encompassing creator and sustainer who has laid the foundations of the earth, brought forth its myriad creatures, and. stretched out the heavens above them.

At the same time, there is the avatar Krishna and his revelation of the mind-boggling reality of Vishnu. There is the Saguna realm of maya that manifests the presence of Brahman in all things. And there is Yahweh’s gracious disclosure of himself to Job, in response to Job’s plea for vindication of Yahweh’s reality, justice, and sovereign reign over the earth and its creatures. In all three of these cases there is both hiddenness and revealedness. To opt for either to the exclusion of the other is to confuse, on the one hand, a partial truth with a whole truth and, on the other, to reject a partial truth on the ground that it is only partial. To go either way is to be guilty of a grave distortion and dangerous error—or so I shall continue to argue in this book.

The mistake is a distortion of truth because it fails to allow a partial truth to be accompanied by another partial truth that rightly calls it into question and saves it from being confused with a larger, more adequate truth. As I indicated above, the larger truth lies in the tension between the two partial truths, not in a choice between them. To neglect the partial truth of the radical transcendence of the ultimates in all the major religious traditions, including the ultimate of one’s own faith, is to be tempted to make an absolute truth out of a partial one. If my religion is absolutely rather than partially true, it follows that other religions—to the extent that they disagree with it—must be absolutely false.

To ignore or deny the transcendence of a religious ultimate and the final inadequacy of all claims regarding it is to veer toward unquestioning authoritarianism, blind credulity, and haughty intolerance of religious traditions other than one’s own. Human history is drenched with bloody gore flowing from this kind of one-sided, dogmatic, and potentially hateful religious perspective. To assume such a view is also to insulate oneself against what can be learned from other religious perspectives or other outlooks on the world and to deprive oneself or one’s religious tradition of the kind of ongoing growth, adjustment, refreshment, and renewal needed in a rapidly changing and globally interacting world.

To reject the partial knowability and assertibility of a particular religious ultimate, on the other hand, and to insist without qualification on its complete transcendence and consequent unknowability is to deprive one’s religious tradition and one’s own religious outlook of meaningful conceptual content. It is to deny to the intellect any significant role in one’s faith and to reduce faith itself to an unquestioning, uninquiring, uninformed sheer act of the will. It is to leave one defenseless in the face of conceptual challenge or criticism and incapable of dialogue with other points of view.

There can also be great danger to oneself and to others in unqualified insistence on the radical transcendence of the religious ultimate of one’s own tradition, making matters of religious faith immune to questioning or critical reflection. Constructive, sane, engaged, compassionate religion requires continuing critical thought and open-minded interaction with those of different religious persuasions. Insisting on the absolute transcendence of one’s own religious ultimate makes such interaction impossible. Absence of effective communication among people of different faiths can lead—and often has led in human history, as I noted above—to alienation, hostility, and violence. This point holds as much for interactions within historical religious traditions and institutions as it does for interactions of proponents of different religions with one another. Transcendence and knowability are not opposites. Neither are openness and conviction. These are two sides of the same coin of relevant, meaningful, and humane religious faith. Each side is an important partial truth.

A God of All Creation and of All Peoples

If one’s religious faith centers—as does the faith of Jews, Christians, and Muslims—on a single God of all creation and of all peoples through the whole history of humankind, then the following questions present themselves. What can be believed concerning the outlooks of peoples who existed before these three religions arose? What can be believed regarding major religious traditions that differ today from these three monotheistic religions? And what can be believed, given that there are these three distinctive monotheistic traditions, each of which conceives of God and of God’s putative revelations in significantly different ways? The universality of God seems to contradict the diverse cultures and traditions that do not focus on such a God or that do not focus on the same conceptions of such a God. Why would a supposedly universal God not ensure that all peoples of all times and all nations would conceive of him in the same or at least closely similar manner?

One way in which Jews, Christians, and Muslims have responded to this seeming conundrum is to argue that God has made Godself known in manifold compelling ways throughout history but that many peoples have rejected God and God’s perspicuous natural and supernatural revelations of Godself. These peoples do not acknowledge and respond to God’s claim on them, it is argued, because of their prideful close-mindedness and sin. Monotheists who make this accusation take for granted that their conception of God is the right one and the only right one. In other words, they assume without question that their conception of God is absolutely true and that all differing religious outlooks are, by this unquestioned standard, absolutely false. Defenders of the absolutely true view of God have the obligation to spread their view throughout the earth in the hope of saving the apostate others from sinful ignorance and perfidious pride.

A way to deal with the conundrum of differing ideas about God and his revelations in the three Abrahamic traditions is to argue that one’s own monotheistic outlook and tradition is the culmination, fulfillment, and completion of the other ones. Thus, Christians have typically claimed that their religion is the culmination of Judaism, and Muslims have claimed that theirs is the completion of a history of divine revelation that incorporates and builds on but also goes beyond the revelations of Allah made known in Judaism and Christianity. In this way, or so it is believed, the finally true supplants the relatively true, and the possessors of final truth have the right and obligation to guide or even to rule over the proponents of mere relative truth. They also have the right, or so it can be believed, to persecute those who differ from them and reject the finality of their religious claims.

Thus, Jonah of the Hebrew Bible was sent by Yahweh to preach to the pagan peoples of Nineveh; Christians felt called to throw out the lifeline of Christianity and so-called Christian civilization in the Middle East, Asia, and other parts of the world; and Muslims set out on their path of righteous conquests both to the East and to the West of Arabia. In some cases, those judged to be unrepentant heretics or pagans were subjected to ostracism, fire, or sword in the name of the one true God. This practice was justified on the ground that it effectively warned others against pernicious beliefs and practices that threatened the integrity of divine revelation and the hope of their own salvation.

The same sort of reasoning can be applied to those who adhere to non-Abrahamic forms of religious faith. They may have ideas and insights pointing toward the true God in various ways, but they lack the benefit of a final revelation of God’s awesome majesty and saving power. Judaism, Christianity, or Islam can claim to offer this final revelation in their own respective ways, a revelation that for each of them has been made known progressively throughout human history.

At the other extreme from the two absolutist or exclusivist approaches I have so far sketched in this section is radical relativism, that...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Chapter 1 Religion
• Chapter 2 Science
• Chapter 3 Morality
• Chapter 4 Economics and Ecology
• Chapter 5 Philosophy
• Chapter 6 Humanity
• Chapter 7 Perspectives
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index
• Back Cover