It's a long post, and its going to take me a couple of minutes to get through it all.
I think that's where you break with postmodernism. Once you assert that something, someone, whether God or anything else, is external, you're rejecting the postmodern notion that there is no clean distinction between the external and the internal. It's fine to believe in something real that is external to us (most of us do), but if you accept postmodern ideas, that belief tends to unravel itself.
I don't think so. The distinction is merely that whatever is external is inaccessible. I think that postmodernism is quite a broad movement - and is difficult, if not impossible to narrowly define. If all we are concerned with is deconstruction, you might be right. But, I am fairly certain that postmodernism can allow something quite external to us to exist, and at the same time, to assert our inability to get at that external thing in any unmediated fashion. So while we can talk about the existence of God within a postmodern world view, we cannot talk about understanding God in any kind of real way, or about God as the source of some knowable absolute - or even the related issues of absolute morality or ethics.
I like this idea, but it really isn't compatible with postmodernism. But even so, if God can communicate with us outside of language, that means we have the ability to understand that is likewise outside of language. I'm not sure I agree with that. This would be akin to mfb's idea of "instantly apprehensible truth," which has never really made sense to me.
I disagree with you on this point - that it isn't compatible with postmodernism. And I am not sure that I agree with the conclusions that you draw.
If we step back for a minute, and look at the speech act, we are always communicating to a idealized audience. Assuming that we are perfect in our communication (which isn't the case), our audience will understand our intention to the extent that they (the real audience) resembles our idealized audience. With God, and the assumption of something resembling omniscience, God can (when speaking to a specific audience of one - a person, at a particular place and a particular time) make His idealized audience identical with the real audience. This is an aspect of communication on the part of God. That is, he can predetermine how a communication will be understood - i.e. how it is mediated by the person receiving it. This doesn't mean that it is perfect knowledge, or absolute truth, merely that the communication can be expressed in a way that the intention is fully realized in the audience.
This communication would not be realized in such a way if the same communication were given to another. It would not even be realized if the same person were to receive that communication at another point in time (that would be a different person effectively). And it certainly doesn't mean that the communication isn't mediated. Which is a way of saying that while we can receive communication perhaps in this way, it doesn't mean that what we get is a representation of absolute truth.
We could talk about this notion a great deal I suspect, but I will suggest that revelation which is received generally cannot be effectively communicated (i.e. we can receive it, but we cannot pass it on in any incredibly meaningful way). It cannot be reduced to language. And if we want to call this "understanding", then I think that we have to redefine what we mean by "understanding". I also want to point out that while we can talk speculatively about this, we don't actually get this far generally in our religious literature. People do have epiphanies. They can change people incredibly. And this is hard to attribute merely to language. Within Mormonism, there is this stress on personal revelation that trumps all sorts of other language. Within the Book of Mormon, for example, it is Laman and Lemuel who ask for an interpretation of the vision. It is Nephi who asks for the vision - and the vision is the same (perhaps) as his fathers, but a completely different communicative act because Nephi is quite different from his father.
Taken to a reasonable conclusion (but much farther certainly than orthodoxy would be willing to go) pluralistic views of truth that allow for people to have radically different and even contradictory revelations of truth from God. I certainly embrace this idea. And this is where I would run smack into a wall with your professors that you mention below.
I'm not sure the inability of spoken or written language removes experience from depending on the structures of language. That something is ineffable, it doesn't mean that the experience itself was pre-linguistic, or free of all language constraints.
True, but the expression in the Book of Mormon, which is a text which is very concerned with language on the whole, is interesting, don't you think? And if I were producing a postmodern reading of the text, it certainly sticks out.
I agree. The Book of Mormon's injunction to "like then scriptures" to our own lives seems an implicit acknowledgment that language is fluid and context-sensitive, so it doesn't inherently "mean" anything until it is processed by the individual.
And Nephi goes much further than this "liken the scriptures" when he tells us quite explicitly that the author is not a valid point of reference - that he refuses to teach his children how to read Isaiah like Isaiah was (as far as he knows) intended to be read - forcing them to liken it unto themselves. The deconstruction of Nephi though leaves us with the very beginning of the text: "I Nephi" and the assertion that what he writes is true. What he writes is reliable, what others have written not so much. He can't have it both ways. Either we can ignore Nephi in our reading of the text, or he can't count out the author's intentions in Isaiah. There is a lot of tension there.
I can agree with that. What sparked my essays was the use of postmodernism in some quarters to deride certain forms of knowledge-seeking in favor of the One True way to truth. As you note, that's a misuse of postmodernism.
Yes, the most common flaw of those who parrot postmodernism is their failure to recognize that postmodernism itself is, at its core, the worst enemy of postmodernism. It denies itself as the best way to find truth, and on some level, if we claim to be postmodernists (which I have done), it is at best a flawed label (and yet I use it because it is useful).
Your approach is pretty similar to mine. Again, what I was responding to was an assertion quite different from that.
Which I recognize from your other comments - but again, one of the issues which has to be addressed from a postmodern perspective is that there is no objective measure by which we can differentiate different truths. Mormonism has and does make the claim that some truths are more important than others. Postmodernism doesn't recognize this kind of claim as valid. Religion doesn't like this assertion any more than science does.
I go back and forth on this. It is sort of a nonsensical statement, but then the D&C refers to the church as "true," so it's difficult to criticize people for following scriptural precedent.
There is no need, I think to criticize. There is a need (if we feel differently) for us to express ourselves in ways that are truer to our personal beliefs.
Fair enough, but again you are suggesting a sort of provisional truth that, in my view, isn't particularly compatible with Mormonism, at least from a postmodern perspective.
But Mormonism isn't postmodern. And most of its members have no idea what postmodernism is. And my point was merely to point out that from different perspectives, most most Mormons would find your comments to be confusing at best. And my point is that I can be a postmodernist, without the issue of the statement "the church is true" having a significant impact on me.
I'm quite aware that there aren't many postmodernists in the church (you're a rare individual). It's in the privileging of metanarratives where I see the problem with the church: Moroni's promise is what works. Spiritual communication with God is not only the privileged source of truth, it is in many ways the only source of truth.
I think that the Book of Mormon as it is structured, is a marvelously postmodern text. It starts with the assertion of an author, and his intention. Then it deconstructs the author. And in the end, with Moroni's promise, we get the assurance that the text itself is merely a way to move us to a point where real knowledge (of some kind) can begin - an abandonment of the text in favor of direct communication with God.
That is a uniquely Mormon perspective, I think. This notion of being able to get at what is real and true that is external to language doesn't make a lot of sense if one accepts postmodernism. That's why I think you do what I do: you accept the implications of postmodernism up to a point. It's like the statement made that we can shift all paradigms but one: the gospel is true. What I see you doing is acknowledging the messiness of language and existence and getting around that by suggesting a communication free of language. When I was in grad school at BYU, we were discussing the text as the interaction between author, text, and reader and how you can't ever transcend that. The professor stated that the only way to break through that triangle was through the spirit: it alone communicated truth independent of language. That's what I see you doing. Again, that's what I would do if I were still a believer, but it's not really a postmodern stance.
I think that this is a bit of a complicated subject. On the one hand, I don't believe that communication from the spirit is free of mediation. Which I think might alter your perception of my views here. On the other hand there is always a bit of a conundrum. We want to seek truth, we are looking for better truth. There is nothing wrong in this search. We may find conflicting truths. How do we decide which is better? This is a somewhat personal decision in many ways (at least in a postmodern world view) - but there is nothing in postmodernism that suggests that we shouldn't make judgment calls, or that we cannot make judgment calls (even if we know all along that we make those calls with something). So I wonder if your definitions aren't a bit too narrow - if they aren't practical, or useful. I am reminded of something Peter Ochs once wrote (The Postmodern Jewish Philosophy Network, Vol. 4, No. 1 - Feb, 1995):
"Ehyeh imach," says God to Moses out of the Burning Bush, "I will be with you"; and being-with is a postmodern theme, in three senses: We don't read alone. This means, first, that the text we read is not a naked text whose meaning displays itself to anyone who would see it. It is a text that speaks in certain ways to certain groups of people. We read with-others as part of some groups. That is a rabbinic rule of reading that is being repossessed by postmodern scholars. A second meaning is that, even when reading individually, we read with. As shown by late modern analysts of interpretation theory, we read with presuppositions. A text doesn't simply mean something, but means something with respect to the beliefs and pre-understandings which we bring to the text. Postmodern reading may be distinguished from modern reading, however, by its assumptions that there is an ultimate presupposition without which reading is not the reading we have in mind: namely, that we are reading with-God (even if Jewish readers are not accustomed to enunciating this partnership so explicitly.) This third meaning, we might say, is the biblical ssumption recovered by postmodern readers. We read with others, we read with our assumptions, and we read with God's presence.
On some level, every postmodernist is welcomed (by postmodernism) to embrace a plurality of paths to truth. And we have to make choices. So none of us (myself included) would be seen as strictly or purely postmodern. But at the same time, postmodernism would reject this as some kind of objective. Postmodernism doesn't want to set itself up as the metanarrative. So we want postmodernism to play a role in how we understand things, but we don't want postmodernism to be an end to itself.
I have thought about writing a piece on how Joseph Smith seemed to take an almost postmodern approach to language and text, and your quote there seems to support that. For most religious people, scriptural text, once written, is set in stone, and it is an affront to God to revise it. Joseph, however, freely rewrote, erased, and emended not only revelations but the Book of Mormon itself. To me, that suggests a much more fluid approach to text than most people give him credit for.
And like most of us who embrace on some level postmodern thought, Joseph Smith seemed to recognize the conflict that this creates. He decries the limitations of texts all the while producing them. And any postmodern philosopher who has the gall to actually write a book about postmodernism would understand that.
And when I speak of how postmodernism and Mormonism are compatible, it isn't because Mormonism is somehow consistently postmodern (because it isn't), it is because Mormonism allows for such views, and even embraces the conflict that they create. I think it causes a healthy base for theological discussion and thought - although most people simply cannot tolerate that which they say as trying to nail jello to the wall.
Ben M.