One whose world lacks friendship will fail to make friends. His environment will be a closed space filled up with dumb, obedient objects and noisy, disobedient bodies.

Over the weekend I stumbled upon two passages that reminded me of one another.

1) From Clifford Geertz’z “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight”:

Early in April of 1958, my wife and I arrived, malarial and diffident, in a Balinese village we intended, as anthropologists, to study. A small place, about five hundred people, and relatively remote, it was its own world. We were intruders, professional ones, and the villagers dealt with us as Balinese seem always to deal with people not part of their life who yet press themselves upon them: as though we were not there. For them, and to a degree for ourselves, we were nonpersons, specters, invisible men.

We moved into an extended family compound (that had been arranged before through the provincial government) belonging to one of the four major factions in village life. But except for our landlord and the village chief, whose cousin and brother-in-law he was, everyone ignored us in a way only a Balinese can do. As we wandered around, uncertain, wistful, eager to please, people seemed to look right through us with a gaze focused several yards behind us on some more actual stone or tree. Almost nobody greeted us; but nobody scowled or said anything unpleasant to us either, which would have been almost as satisfactory.

 If we ventured to approach someone (something one is powerfully inhibited from doing in such an atmosphere), he moved, negligently but definitely, away. If, seated or leaning against a wall, we had him trapped, he said nothing at all, or mumbled what for the Balinese is the ultimate nonword – “yes.” The indifference, of course, was studied; the villagers were watching every move we made, and they had an enormous amount of quite accurate information about who we were and what we were going to be doing. But they acted as if we simply did not exist, which, in fact, as this behavior was designed to inform us, we did not, or anyway not yet.

This is, as I say, general in Bali. Everywhere else I have been in Indonesia, and more latterly in Morocco, when I have gone into a new village, people have poured out from all sides to take a very close look at me, and, often an all-too-probing feel as well. In Balinese villages, at least those away from the tourist circuit, nothing happens at all. People go on pounding, chatting, making offerings, staring into space, carrying baskets about while one drifts around feeling vaguely disembodied. And the same thing is true on the individual level. When you first meet a Balinese, he seems virtually not to relate to you at all; he is, in the term Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead made famous, “away.” Then-in a day, a week, a month (with some people the magic moment never comes) – he decides, for reasons I have never quite been able to fathom, that you are real, and then he becomes a warm, gay, sensitive, sympathetic, though, being Balinese, always precisely controlled, person. You have crossed, somehow, some moral or metaphysical shadow line. Though you are not exactly taken as a Balinese (one has to be born to that), you are at least regarded as a human being rather than a cloud or a gust of wind. The whole complexion of your relationship dramatically changes to, in the majority of cases, a gentle, almost affectionate one – a low-keyed, rather playful, rather mannered, rather bemused geniality.

My wife and I were still very much in the gust-of-wind stage, a most frustrating, and even, as you soon begin to doubt whether you are really real after all, unnerving one, when, ten days or so after our arrival, a large cockfight was held in the public square to raise money for a new school.

2) From Yirmiyahu Yovel’s “Converso Dualities in the First Generation: the Cancioneros”:

Often, when we are disposed to read them that way, the novels and poems of another era can serve as cogent historical documents. Whether realistic or ironic, equivocal or crudely direct, complexly symbolic or outright vulgar, or a mix of the above, works of fiction will reward the curious intruder with knowledge, illustration, and insights of a kind that “factual” records and the no-less-tendentious chronicles often lack.

A particularly telling genre is the fifteenth-century Spanish Cancioneros: collections of vivid, popular poems that flourished parallel to the first converso generation (Spanish Jews who converted to Christianity, mostly by force or harsh pressure). The Cancioneros were often coarse and satirical but also on occasion speculative and intimately personal. Using unadorned language and simple rhyme, the poems dealt, sometimes irreverently, with current events, people, social habits, and institutions, and they also served their authors to quarrel, flatter, defame, and supplicate.

To the willing reader,4 the Cancioneros offer illuminating glances into the converso situation and its early dualities. Surprisingly, many authors of these poems were conversos of the first generation, as was the first compiler of their work, Juan Alfonso de Baena; a former Jew who had been converted to Catholicism during the riots of 1391. Several poems abound in Jewish concepts and Hispanized Hebrew idioms, which readers were presumed to understand. A good many poems attack and defend conversos, voice feuds among conversos, and otherwise articulate their mental and social complexities.

In one poem, the count of Paredes attacks an aspiring converso author, Juan Poeta (Juan of Valladolid), and in so doing offers a vignette of the converso poet, his many faces and unsettled identity:

Each of the following is his name – Juan, Simuel [Shemuel] and Reduan [Arabic name]. A moor, so he won’t be dead, A Christian, so he’ll have more worth, But a Jew he is for certain, As far as I can know.

This hostile image is not altogether incredible. The ending is quite revealing. The writer does not claim that Juan is a genuine Jew who merely puts on false masks but that all of his faces constitute his identity; although his Jewish persona appears to be dominant (or at least the most “certain”), this claim is immediately qualified (“as far as I can know”), for the converso’s most distinctive characteristic is that no one can know exactly who he is – perhaps not even himself.

For a while I thought conservatism was excessively masculine. Then for a while I thought conservatism was excessively feminine. Now I think conservatism is both at once: its ideal is maximum sexual divergence. In conservatism the men try to be as traditionally masculine as possible and the women as traditionally feminine as possible.

The divergence is far more exaggerated divergent than nature produces on its own (which is really no argument against it) and perhaps more divergent than is beneficial to culture (which is a very arguable argument, but one worth having).

In liberalism the men and women both attempt to synthesize the traditional qualities of masculinity and femininity.

The androgyny might be as unnatural as the conservatives sexual roles, but really – so what? We are human beings, and that being is naturally artificial. When we try to “be natural” there’s something artificial about it. Don’t most self-consciously natural people seem a little full of shit?

Pointing at the caricatures doesn’t accomplish anything. There are embarassing fakes and hypocrites on both sides.

It comes back to the arguable argument. What is our cultural ideal? What does amplifying sexual divergence accomplish? What does cultivating androgyny accomplish? Do we need one or the other, or do the two together have some integral purpose?

*

The Androgyne is a traditional symbol of primordial unity.

Have you ever been in a conversation like this?

You are trying to make yourself understood to another person. He is listening very carefully, responding point by point, and each point makes sense… but somehow you know you are not really being heard.

You attempt to express this feeling. The response is something to the tune of: “So, if I don’t agree with you, that means I don’t understand?”

At which point you try to defend yourself, stammering, groping, struggling for coherence. You know there’s something unfair about that characterization, but you can’t seem to answer it. You’re not persuaded at all that you are wrong, nor that the other is right, but you do not know how to argue your position. What you are trying to say eludes you, and it feels as if the elusiveness of your point is being exploited. You can’t prove that, either. You listen to yourself and hear how poorly you are representing yourself and you begin to despair.

Eventually you concede just to make the conversation end, just to avoid hearing yourself sound like an idiot.

“Excellent!” He says, “We have reached an agreement.”

This “agreement” is filed away like a Supreme Court decision. It will be used to settle future cases.

You were never persuaded, though. You were only somehow, mysteriously prevented from communicating. The more this happens the less you want to keep arguing. Silence is taken for agreement, but the silence is estrangement.

What is going on there?

You wanted dialogue, but what you got was debate.

*

Dialogue is an attempt by two or more parties to reach mutually persuasive common ground. One party or the other might be persuaded to the other’s original position, or they might arrive together at some kind of middle ground, or a synthesis might be discovered that transcends both positions. Each party goes out to the other and tries to see the other’s position in the best possible light (that is, as a whole, from its own perspective), including, most importantly the legitimate reasons why the other party prefers their own position.

Debate is an attempt by two or more parties to represent one’s own position as superior to that of the other. In general, the arguments are intended less for the opponent and more for the audience. The debater wishes to put his opponent in a position that will demonstrate to his supporters that their position is indeed the right one, and secondarily to undermine the the resolve of his opponents and weaken their resistance. Each party fortifies itself against the other and tries to put the other’s position in the worst possible light, to delegitimize it, and sometimes to cast doubt on the other party’s true intentions.

*

In dialogue:

1. The parties involved speak directly to one another.
2. The parties involved try to see the other’s position in the best light.
3. The intention is to arrive at a mutually beneficial outcome.
4. The process aims at unanimity.
5. The process is creative: it generates new possibilities.
6. Each party believes the best way to reach a satisfactory conclusion is to yield as much as they can to the other.
7. Trust is necessary and presupposed.
8. Often, the parties believe in pluralism – that multiple, legitimate ways to see the situation can exist side by side, with none being the sole or even objectively superior perspective

In debate:

1. The parties involved speak through one another to an audience, and primarily to those who share one’s perspective and  already actively or latently in agree.
2. The parties involved try to put the other’s position in the worst light.
3. The intention is to promote one’s own favored outcome, at the expense of the other
4. The process aims at convincing an overpowering majority.
5. The process is destructive: it eliminates flawed, weak or underdeveloped possibilities.
6. Each party believes the best way to reach a satisfactory conclusion is to win as much ground as possible from the other.
7. Trust is not necessary and sometimes active distrust is presupposed.
8. Often, at least one of the parties believe in objectivism – that the truth of a situation is what it is, and that conflicting opinions signal that someone is mistaken about, or is misrepresenting or distorting the objective truth.

*

Debate – ORIGIN Middle English : via Old French from Latin dis– (expressing reversal) + battere ‘to fight.’

Dialogue – ORIGIN Middle English : from Old French dialoge, via Latin from Greek dialogos, from dialegesthai ‘converse with,’ from dia ‘through’ + legein ‘speak.’

*

Debate is pursuit of coersion without bloodshed. Dialogue is the pursuit of friendship.

Debate can win an argument, but it cannot win friendship.

*

A debate with no audience – what does that mean? Who does he mean to persuade, if not you, the partner in this discussion? Is he persuading himself that you are unreasonable and that dialogue with you is impossible?

*

A debate before a reasonable audience is won through reason. A debate before an unreasonable audience is lost through reason.

*

Am I arguing for dialogue? Obviously.

Am I arguing dialogicially for dialogue? Obviously not. This post is a one-sided debate. I am speaking to those who already agree with me. Dialogue with the unreasonable must be imposed. They must be politically forced to practice dialogue. As long as an unreasonable man believes he can undermine and circumvent dialogue, he will continue to attempt it.

*

I consider the defense of dialogue a chivalrous and deeply androgynous act.

*

Martin Buber:

I had a friend whom I account one of the most considerable men of our age. He was a master of conversation, and he loved it: his genuineness as a speaker was evident. But once it happened that he was sitting with two friends and with the three wives, and a conversation arose in which by its nature the women were clearly not joining, although their presence in fact had a great influence. The conversation among the men soon developed into a duel between two of them (I was the third). The other ‘duelist’, also a friend of mine, was of a noble nature; he too was a man of true conversation, but given more to objective fairness than to the play of the intellect, and a stranger to any controversy. The friend whom I have called a master of conversation did not speak with his usual composure and strength, but he scintillated, he fought, he triumphed. The dialogue was destroyed.

Sometimes we fail to find what we seek because we’ve pictured what we are seeking and reject what does not conform to that image.

When seeking objects or object-form knowledge (episteme), picturing what you are seeking is a good idea.

Wisdom – sophia – is different. Sophia is not graspable like episteme. Sophia is transcendence-form. Sophia is relational. You are in it, it exceeds you while involving you.

Transcendence-form is, by definition, radically surprising. If your destination is radical surprise,  preconditions equal preclusion. You’ll never arrive at the unexpected if reject it for failing to conform to your expectations.

*

Idol – ORIGIN Middle English : from Old French idole, from Latin idolum ‘image, form’ (used in ecclesiastical Latin in the sense ‘idol’ ), from Greek eidolon, from eidos ‘form, shape.’

Ecstasy – ORIGIN late Middle English: from Old French extasie, via late Latin from Greek ekstasis ‘standing outside oneself,’ based on ek– ‘out’ + histanai ‘to place.’

*

Many people work on their lives as a pre-memory. They dwell in future perfect tense (a future past-tense).

When they are happy they are literally beside themselves:”Here I am, in this happy situation.”

Everything that happens to them is a story they’ll live out later while they’re telling it. They are only real as the presenter of who they mistake themselves for.

They need witnesses to their self-sufficiency, independence and wisdom to feel themselves self-sufficient, independent and wise. If you managed to bust them on it, they’d feel ashamed, but of precisely the wrong things.

*

“Borges and I”

The other one, the one called Borges, is the one things happen to. I walk through the streets of Buenos Aires and stop for a moment, perhaps mechanically now, to look at the arch of an entrance hall and the grillwork on the gate; I know of Borges from the mail and see his name on a list of professors or in a biographical dictionary. I like hourglasses, maps, eighteenth-century typography, the taste of coffee and the prose of Stevenson; he shares these preferences, but in a vain way that turns them into the attributes of an actor. It would be an exaggeration to say that ours is a hostile relationship; I live, let myself go on living, so that Borges may contrive his literature, and this literature justifies me. It is no effort for me to confess that he has achieved some valid pages, but those pages cannot save me, perhaps because what is good belongs to no one, not even to him, but rather to the language and to tradition. Besides, I am destined to perish, definitively, and only some instant of myself can survive in him. Little by little, I am giving over everything to him, though I am quite aware of his perverse custom of falsifying and magnifying things.

Spinoza knew that all things long to persist in their being; the stone eternally wants to be a stone and the tiger a tiger. I shall remain in Borges, not in myself (if it is true that I am someone), but I recognize myself less in his books than in many others or in the laborious strumming of a guitar. Years ago I tried to free myself from him and went from the mythologies of the suburbs to the games with time and infinity, but those games belong to Borges now and I shall have to imagine other things. Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him.

I do not know which of us has written this page.

– Jorge Luis Borges

*

There’s a peculiar shame to many writers’ personae.

*

Episteme grasps. It can grasp physical objects (the gross) and the types of knowledge that a mind can contain and comprehend (the subtle).

Sophia relates our own finite being to what contains us and transcends our comprehension. Sophia does not grasp – it feels the grasp that unifies the being and articulates the beings that constitute our world.

No self is epistemically known.

*

Eden was lost when we took episteme for sophia.

*

Facts about wisdom are not wisdom.

The conventional wisdom that warns us against living in the future or past and urges us instead to live in the present is unclear, confused and potentially misleading.

The present is essentially the dialogue of memory and anticipation. A present that excludes memory as past and anticipation as future is nonsensical.

To live in the present means to allow the past to be memory and to allow the future to be anticipation.

What we should avoid is a sense of past dominated by disappointed anticipations and a sense of future consumed with hope for happier memories of now.

*

We memorialize a person by preserving his tangible forms: his name, his image, the historical facts of this life.

We immortalize a person by living his spirit: his meaning, his way of seeing and loving.

An immortalized person will pull along his memory in his wake, because his memory will be loved.

An unloved memory will fade into oblivion. Nobody loves names, images and facts for their own sake.

“That the truth is only realized in the form of system, that substance is essentially subject, is expressed in the idea which represents the Absolute as Spirit (Geist [which is also translated as ‘mind’) — the grandest conception of all, and one which is due who know spirit to be for itself, to be objective to itself; but in so far as spirit knows itself to be for itself, then this self-production, the pure notion, is the sphere and element in which its objectification takes effect, and where it gets its existential form. In this way it is in its existence aware of itself as an object in which its own self is reflected. Mind, which, when thus developed, knows itself to be mind, is science. Science is its realization, and the kingdom it sets up for itself in its own native element.

A self having knowledge purely of itself in the absolute antithesis of itself, this pure ether as such, is the very soil where science flourishes, is knowledge in universal form. The beginning of philosophy presupposes or demands from consciousness that it should feel at home in this element. But this element only attains its perfect meaning and acquires transparency through the process of gradually developing it. It is pure spirituality as the universal which assumes the shape of simple immediacy; and this simple element, existing with no apparent necessity for doing so. Let science be per se what it likes, in its relation to naïve immediate self-conscious life it presents the appearance of being a reversal of the latter; or, again, because naïve self-consciousness finds the principle of its reality in the certainty of itself, science bears the character of unreality, since consciousness ‘for itself’ is a state quite outside of science. [See Kuhn.] Science has for that reason to combine that other element of self-certainty with its own, or rather to show that the other element belongs to itself, and how it does so. When devoid of that sort of reality, science is merely the content of mind qua something implicit or potential (an sich); purpose, which at the start is no more than something internal; not spirit, but at first merely spiritual substance. This implicit moment (Ansich) has to find external expression, and become objective on its own account. This means nothing else than that this moment has to establish self-consciousness as one with itself.

*

If you want to spare your eyes and your mind,
Follow the sun from the shadows behind.

– Nietzsche

Bullshit/chickenshit theory started as a work joke, but it has become very useful.

Bullshit – Meaningful, inspiring ideas that that seem to promise practical action with desirable outcomes, but never fulfill that promise and never find application.

Chickenshit – Practical actions that seem like they ought to serve some meaningful purpose, but in fact are meaningless and performed for no reason.

Bullshit is meaning without application. Chickenshit is application without meaning.

The voice of the marginalized is the password at the gate.

*

You walk through, and the door closes behind you. Did you lock yourself in or out?

*

Freedom is not being locked in or out on the right side of the door; freedom is being able to pass through.

*

Pandora’s box was a tesseract. Inside the box was not-Eden.

*

Turn Eden inside-out and it is an object you can possess and consume.

Analogy points at a pattern of likeness.

The likeness is emphasized over the unlikeness. Analogy establishes a schema of relevance.

Category labels the analogy.

Analysis of the analogy yields criteria.

Criteria clarify a category’s schema of relevance.

One of my core beliefs: Being arises through language. An individual is cohesive, reflective and whole, not because he is a biological unity, but because he is a dialogical unity.  He is a dialogical unity thanks to the running conversation constantly unfolding in his mind. The quality of that conversation is bound up with the seriousness with which his inner voices pursue comprehensive, enduring, respectful agreement among themselves.

Talking to yourself does not mean you are insane. On the contrary, talking to yourself clearly and respectfully is sanity itself.

The same holds true for groups of individuals: a group is cohesive, reflective and whole thanks to the running conversation that takes among its members. The quality of that conversation is bound up with the seriousness with which the members pursue comprehensive, enduring, respectful agreement among themselves.

Individuals and groups go wrong for the same reason: Voices are suppressed, humanity denied.

*

I am going to pull together a number of thematically related passages from the ancient world.

1.

Chuang Tzu, one of the principle thinkers of Taoism, told this famous story:

Once Chuang Chou dreamt he was a butterfly, a butterfly flitting and fluttering around, happy with himself and doing as he pleased. He didn’t know he was Chuang Chou. Suddenly he woke up and there he was, solid and unmistakable Chuang Chou. But he didn’t know if he was Chuang Chou who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was Chuang Chou. Between Chuang Chou and a butterfly there must be some distinction! This is called the Transformation of Things.

2.

The Dhammapada opens with the Buddha (which means the “awakened one”) saying:

All the phenomena of existence have mind as their precursor, mind as their supreme leader, and of mind are they made. If with an impure mind one speaks or acts, suffering follows him in the same way as the wheel follows the foot of the chariot’s drawer.

All the phenomena of existence have mind as their precursor, mind as their supreme leader, and of mind are they made. If with a pure mind one speaks or acts, happiness follows him like his shadow that never leaves him.

3.

Around the same time one of the earliest Greek philosophers, Heraclitus made some cryptic statements about something he called Logos:

Although this Logos is eternally valid, yet men are unable to understand it — not only before hearing it, but even after they have heard it for the first time. That is to say, although all things come to pass in accordance with this Logos, men seem to be quite without any experience of it — at least if they are judged in the light of such words and deeds as I am here setting forth.

My own method is to distinguish each thing according to its nature, and to specify how it behaves; other men, on the contrary, are as neglectful of what they do when awake as they are when asleep.

…

We should let ourselves be guided by what is common to all. Yet, although the Logos is common to all, most men live as if each of them had a private intelligence of his own.

…

Although intimately connected with the Logos, men keep setting themselves against it.

…

Listening not to me but to the Logos, it is wise to acknowledge that all things are one.

4.

In the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus (who is himself called the Logos, “The Word”) said:

If the flesh came into being because of spirit, that is a marvel, but if spirit came into being because of the body, that is a marvel of marvels…

5.

The author of the fourth Gospel, John, opened with this famous passage:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God; all things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

A student of phenomenalism or existentialism might at this point be tempted to say with Solomon: There is nothing new under the sun.

*

Mind arises through logos and mind is the basis of all being. Spirit is synonymous with mind.

*

dialogue: from dia– “across, through” + legein (logos) “speak, word.”

diabolic: from dia– “across, through” + ballein “to throw.”

*

Try this on: Dialogue, “through words”, unifies subjectivities. The diabolical “throws across” the boundary of the individual’s own mind all other subjectivities. The diabolical subject takes himself to be the sole subjectivity. In other words, the essence of the diabolical is solipsism.

Diabolism refuses to acknowledge subjectivity beyond one’s own, not only theoretically but practically. The practical consequence of denying other subjectivities is refusal to engage in dialogue.

The practical consequence of acknowledging other subjectivities is dialogue.

*

From Milton’s Paradise Lost, Satan’s monologue:

Is this the Region, this the Soil, the Clime,
Said then the lost Arch Angel, this the seat
That we must change for Heav’n, this mournful gloom
For that celestial light? Be it so, since hee
Who now is Sovran can dispose and bid
What shall be right: fardest from him is best
Whom reason hath equald, force hath made supream
Above his equals. Farewel happy Fields

Where Joy for ever dwells: Hail horrours, hail
Infernal world, and thou profoundest Hell
Receive thy new Possessor: One who brings
A mind not to be chang’d by Place or Time.
The mind is its own place, and in it self
Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.
What matter where, if I be still the same,
And what I should be, all but less then hee
Whom Thunder hath made greater? Here at least
We shall be free; th’ Almighty hath not built

Here for his envy, will not drive us hence:
Here we may reign secure, and in my choyce
To reign is worth ambition though in Hell:
Better to reign in Hell, then serve in Heav’n.

*

Returning to the original point, an individual can be solipsistic, but it is also possible for a group to be collectively solipsistic, to view its own self-understanding to be the sole understanding, and to agree among itself that its self-agreement is license to refuse dialogue with other groups or individuals beyond its horizon. Behind this anti-dialogical attitude is a belief that it can use coercive force as a substitute for agreement. They say: “I will not reason with you. I do not have to reason with you. Your desires and objections mean nothing to me.” Have you heard this before? Whether an individual says it, or a couple says it, or a group says it, or a whole nation says it: whoever says it undermines dialogue and incarnates the anti-logos.

When minds gather in the spirit of logos, each regarding the other as “thou”, as a fellow subject like himself, and allows dialogue to do its miraculous horizon-fusing work and the conversation has itself through them: whoever does this overcomes the darkness of the diabolic and incarnates the logos.

… I just finished Bernstein’s Beyond Objectivism and Relativism. Bernstein’s thesis is that modernity has lost consciousness of higher orders of reason, and that the best postmodern thought, beneath all apparent chaos and contradiction, is a shared concern for trying to recover that higher reason and figure out how to put it back into practice. The fact that this is a shared problem that belongs to our time is as important to him as the content of that problem. This is Bernstein’s ethic, and I love it. It gives his writing warmth and generosity. He’s always asking: How do we agree? What are our shared concerns?

In Bernstein’s view modernity confuses all reason with episteme and all practice with techne. He argues that above all determinate reason and method is phronesis, which is a far more open mode of reasoning, which justifies rather than proves, and resolves in dialogue. While episteme tends toward determinacy, phronesis tends toward pluralism. Since phronesis provides episteme much of its ground, episteme loses its coercive force once phronesis enters the picture. It turns out that phronesis governs not only the humanities and the social sciences but also the hard sciences, most conspicuously when science goes into crisis and revolution. The revolution is resolved when scientists are able to leave the too-human deliberation of phronesis and return to the comfortable determinacy of episteme and experimental techne.

Bernstein suggests that postmodernism’s real telos – or best telos – is not relativism but the reestablishment of awareness and practice of phronesis in our culture. I’m sure Bernstein would admit that it’s pretty obvious that many postmodernists are charlatans inclined toward relativistic readings. The real horror of relativism is not that they deprive us of the solidity and stability of truth, but that they deprive us of the ability to appeal to reason. Relativism undermines dialogue, always at first in the name of defense against rational coercion. Every belligerent nation calls its military its “defenses.” The telos of relativism is escaping rule of reason and replacing it with alternate forms of social and political coercion. This also seems to be the telos of most forms of absolutism, including perennialism. The perennialists use gnostic claims to destroy dialogue, and that is why I resist them even while I agree with them superficially on their metaphysical conceptions.

To put it in dialectic form, there’s objectivism/absolutism that claims that truth is determinate and existent, there’s relativism that claims that determinate truth is non-existent and that pluralistic opinion is all that exists, and there’s the synthesis that transcends objectivism/absolutism vs relativism by asserting that episteme is determinate, but that truth is more than episteme. When episteme is brought under phronesis in dialogue, truth becomes both reasonable and pluralistic. A new, truer opposition emerges: 1) dialogue, and 2) anti-dialogue sustained by the false dichotomy of absolutism versus relativism.

I’ve come to the point where I see Christ as the embodiment of dialogue. Dialogue requires mutual respect: seeing your neighbor as yourself, essentially a fellow subjective being who as such deserves consideration – who in dialogical “fusion of horizons”, where the conversation has itself through its participants, your dialogical partner can be seen not only as like yourself (a fellow subject), but literally as yourself while your being is bound up in the being of dialogue). This happens only where two (or more) are gathered in the spirit of reason to come to an agreeable resolution through dialogue (dia- ‘through’ -logos ‘speech, reason’) rather than appealing to coercive force. As long as disrespect and willingness to coerce is lurking in the background, dialogue cannot happen. Using coercive force against dialogue = anti- + through-logos = antichrist … and so on.

When I think of Judaism as a tradition that 1) under the pressure of its many crises, developed an ever-increasing sensitivity to differences in perspective (particularly across lines of power and powerlessness, being at home and being the homeless, alien other) and 2) learned the enormous importance of intersubjective appeals established by formal law to preserve solidarity (which is of particular importance to the weak and vulnerable) and continuity of their tradition – and then in that light, consider Christ’s message that the telos of the tradition and its law is (or ought to be) the understanding of other human beings as essentially subjects/mind/spirit, I am able to make more immediate and coherent sense of Christianity and of our own culture. To put it in Gadamer’s terms I’m able to appropriate the tradition that has formed me and bring it to conscious life.

One other point of interest you: Bernstein sees American Pragmatism as a key to emerging from postmodern anarchy with our reason intact. I’ve found numerous connections between Nietzsche’s thought and the the ideas of the Pragmatists. It seems that the pragmatic insights were central to the zeitgeist of the mid- to late-19th Century.

…

A very inspiring passage from Bernstein’s Beyond Objectivism and Relativism:

Each of these thinkers [Gadamer, Habermas, Rorty and Arendt] points, in different ways, to the conclusion that the shared understandings and experience, intersubjective practices, sense of affinity, solidarity, and those tacit affective ties that bind individuals together into a community must already exist. A community or a polis is not something that can be made or engineered by some form of techne or by the administration of society. There is something of a circle here, comparable to the hermeneutical circle. The coming into being of a type of public life that can strengthen solidarity, public freedom, a willingness to talk and to listen, mutual debate, and a commitment to rational persuasion presupposes the incipient forms of such communal life.

But what, then, is to be done in a situation in which there is a breakdown of such communities, and where the very conditions of social life have the consequences of furthering such a breakdown? More poignantly, what is to be done when we realize how much of humanity has been systematically excluded and prevented from participating in such dialogical communities?

We know what has been a typical modern response to this situation: the idea that we can make, engineer, impose our collective will to form such communities. But this is precisely what cannot be done, and the attempts to do so have been disastrous. Such failures occur when we restrict ourselves to the horizon of technical reason, to the mentality of fabrication, or confine ourselves to the perspective of purposive-rational action.

. . .

But where does this leave us today in confronting our historical situation? I think Habermas is right when he declares that our situation is one in which “both revolutionary self-confidence and theoretical self-certainty are gone.” But like Gadamer, Habermas, Rorty, and Arendt, I want to stress the danger of the type of “totalizing” critique that seduces us into thinking that the forces at work in contemporary society are so powerful and devious that there is no possibility of achieving a communal life based on undistorted communication, dialogue, communal judgment, and rational persuasion. What we desperately need today is to learn to think and act more like the fox than the hedgehog — to seize upon those experiences and struggles in which there are still the glimmerings of solidarity and the promise of dialogical communities in which there can be genuine mutual participation and where reciprocal wooing and persuasion can prevail. For what is characteristic of our contemporary situation is not just the playing out of powerful forces that are always beyond our control, or the spread of disciplinary techniques that always elude our grasp, but a paradoxical situation where power creates counter-power (resistance) and reveals the vulnerability of power, where the very forces that undermine and inhibit communal life also create new, and frequently unpredictable, forms of solidarity.