Interview with theologian David Tracy
July 7, 2007
I read with great interest this now, somewhat dated, interview with University of Chicago theologian David Tracy. I am interested in other’s responses to the interview, in particular his reflections on the meaning of fragments. My friend Matt Roberts is a Phd student in comparative literature at Emory University and he and I discussed a tension he perceived between ethical pragmatism and the unknowable God. This discussion arose from our reading and discussing the Tracy interview. Some of Matt’s observations (which I will post below) were in response to how I personally combine pragmatist ethics with postmodern theology but I think they really pertain to a more general observation about how a pragmatist, secular politics can accomodate postmodern faith.
Matt Roberts says,
“On the one hand, you were arguing for the excessive and unemployably positivity of an experience signified as religious, which would be void of all utility but on the other hand your ethical disposition seemed to be all about utility, that is, what means could you employ to create a certain end (ie, bashing Nietzsche and asking “how does he help me tell a parent their child is dying” requires a certain utilitarianism or at least pragmatism that the theoretical and experiential things you were telling me about your belief in god could not maintain without undoing itself). ”
Matt Richards responds, “I guess my first push-back would be to your claim that religious experience or “the religious” somehow stands in tension with pragmatist ethics or “utility.” I see the human character as essentially religious and therefore as necessary to a pragmatist ethics. More than anything, I am guided by a deep reverence/respect for ordinary experience and by extension, ordinary people who negotiate the terrors of life and summon the deepest of internal resources to confront the terror of being. I generally loathe metaphysical or ontological arrangements which project the desires of the subject (that is, Kant’s gardener but not Kant) over and against some transcendental reality which inevitably stands in tension with it. The historical pattern of philosophers trivializing/attacking/critiquing the edifying day dreams of the peasant is tiresome and obnoxious. I cannot imagine academic philosophy separate from its hardly veiled resentment for the “common man” and the various narratives which allow him to rise to meet the challenge of his life.
To suggest, as I believe you do, that the religious is somehow consigned to the realm of metaphysics or “the unknowable,” (and hence in tension with pragmatism) indicates that you do not see the human character as constitutively marked by the religious as an essential category of human experience. Or, that you see the unknowable as incongruent with a calculating, utilitarian ethics. For me, religious experience is both center to the human and expressly marked by a feeling of being overwhelmed/terrified/mystified by a presence which cannot be metabolized. If the experience of an other which cannot be fully known is central to ordinary experience, then it seems we cannot meld pragmatism only to what is comprehensible and easily calculable. If the human is essentially oriented towards what is incalculable/unknowable, then an ethics which attends to what is most true/organic/amplified within the human, must attend to this as well.
The irony of much academic phenomenology and pragmatism is that it ignores the basic religious drives/energies which the vast majority of the human population for recorded history have deployed. It misunderstands these drives by subjecting them to transcendental criteria rather than regarding them as indicative of something (possibly) immutable and undeniably true within our structure (James does this in his book on religious experience.) When I express concern for the mother of the dying child, I am insisting that what she most deeply needs in that hour will become manifest in her response. And I believe those desperate gestures point toward a presence which cannot be known but can be intimated. Semantically, this terrain cannot be captured through speech. I believe Tracy uses words like “unknownable” as if they were sacraments–they allude to a presence which they can only mimic. And yet, it would be decidedly dehumanizing to ignore the call of words, the urge of representation, or the recourse to speak loudly about what we only dimly apprehend.
Suggesting, that there is an other–which we experience as imcompleteness–does not, in my mind contradict my pragmatist leanings. I think the challenge for pragmatism will be in learning how to procedurally deal with the incalculable–that is, how to delineate criteria through which we can honor this dimension of the human while still buffering ourselves against religious fascism. Habermas’ political atheism may represent a credible attempt. ”
I’m curious what others think about Matt’s question and about David Tracy’s reflections on the unknowable God. Is there a tension between a God which can be experienced as incomplete and yet remains ultimately unknowable?
Posted by MATT 
Posted in Continental Philosophy, Posts by Matt, Queer / Theology
July 7th, 2007 at 2:03 pm
Tony, i’m curious about your discomfort with “religious experience.” At least for me, this is fundamentally the experience of a reality which is as undeniably present as it is incomplete. I’m not sure what avenues we would have for apprehending the wholly Other as the wholly Other except through human perception–unless you are privileging some special mode of relation which is not human (like revelation.) I’m also inclined to believe that the human mediation of revelation renders it inescapably human anyways. When “God allows it and reveals it” to whom is this disclosure occuring? I’m conceding the fundamental fallibility of human perception, its incompleteness, etc. but I do very much trust the apprehension of a force which cannot be stabilized but toward which we orient ourselves. So, i’m struggling to understand how the purity of wholly otherness can be preserved when it must manifest itself before the human. Maybe you can run with that and help me understand.
July 7th, 2007 at 2:30 pm
Matt: My issue with religious exp (and I think we are not defining this term in the same manner) is that it seems to allow what anyone wants to feel about God or sense about God to take place as Truth about God. I do agree that knowledge of God is always mediated by a human body (e.g., Jesus) and I would gladly admit that God has revealed God’s self to the whole world (and in this sense is not hidden)…but it seems that I, as a Christian, cannot take as truth exps. of God that do not take seriously the God revealed in Scripture. If by religious exp. you mean a capability of the human to sense the wholly Other, I am not sure I can even go there. But I think if by religious exp. you mean a reception of the wholly Other, made im/possible by the wholly Other, in a way that is mediated via the human body, yes, I like this option.
July 7th, 2007 at 2:42 pm
First, when I speak of pragmatism, I do not intend for this to be understood as an ethics of convenience or biological idealism or something. Generally speaking, I am not at all comfortable with this transcendental conception of the totally unknowable God. I want to do away altogether with a conception of God that does not involve how humans experience it. This is not to deny that God is must larger, different, nuanced, etc. than we may imagine it to be but it is to say that I see how humans experience God as inherently valuable. This Barthian distrust of religious experience reminds me of modernist philosophy’s degradation of the human senses. The human is denigrated over and against some totally unknowable and yet posited transcendental reality. But on what basis do we even talk about this transcendental reality anyways–philosopher’s give us mind/body–you give us . . . ? I’m not sure how you negotiate that, again i’m curious about how that is navigated.
As for your concern about narcissicism and religious experience–this is really not reserved for “the religious” but a more general concern about any epistemology that privileges experience. Experience is assumed to become a vehicle of the narcissistic imagination and precludes some experience of alterity. What I am arguing is that it is possible to experience the incompleteness of God. And if we are doing away with the human experience of God, then for me “God” becomes yet another intellectual abstraction which can get thrown onto the heap with all of the other modernist ontologies. But again, I guess I need to understand how this wholly other God communicates and becomes known if not through human experience.
July 7th, 2007 at 3:36 pm
Dear All,
perhaps what might be of some use is to attempt to define the terms of the discourse? in other words, for example, what do the terms “religious” and “religious experience” signify and, moreover, the sorts of ethical paradigms employed, that is, “pragmatism” and “utilitarianism.” The other question I would want to push at is to ask how does this human understanding of god work? In other words, and I agree that this might be a revelation or experience proper to a singularity, individual, or community, but in talking of this sort of experience do you mean to say that the community, singularity, or individual experiences the “signified” of the signifier “god”, in other words, there is an experience of that which matches some sort of quasi-immanent understanding of the transcendental or is the signifier “god” employed to signify rather than refer back, or better, does the term signify the inability for signification to take place in reference to a signified. The example of this would be an experience of excess where signifying practices always fail to correspond or correlate to the experience and hence there is some X which escapes, remains outside, and incapable of being signified as anything but that X, that is what one might call god or the divine?
I suppose what I am worried about is the almost immediate slip from an experience of the divine into saying something about it and qualifying it. If this religious experience is an experience of an unemployable positivity and that is what differentiates it from other experiences and I do think I am accurate in using the term “unemployable positivity” here, then how does one go from that to almost immediately claiming that the god experienced is the Christian god and any other god for that matter and then how would one proceed to talk about theology and liturgy and catechism in a way that would not always do violence to the religious? I think that is part of the equation here, in other words, there is always a sacrifice, always some violence, always some bloodshed when one proceeds from the experience of that which exceeds logic, comprehension, rationality, understanding, etc., and the ways in which such excess both writes itself and is written into discourse, which by its very nature, in order for it to signify and be language, attempts to wrestle the excess into logic, comprehension, rationalaity, and understanding even if it fails to accomplish such a gesture. Do not get me wrong, this is a necessary event, I think; in other words, one never escapes that violence for it is not only a violence that hides itself and is hidden through the act of mutual differentiation between religious experience and religious discourse (once again, the beginnings of what might be my Derridean schtick here), but it is a violence that is the condition of possibility for both religious experience and religious discourse. And here, I know, we are very very far from pragmatism and more in the realm of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Derrida if some names help as to where I will go with this thought next time. The thing I would say, however, which gets us back to the pragmatist question, is to ask how does one judge or evaluate the usefulness of a statement or act without immediately escaping from the framework that act jutsifies itself in? In other words, if it is a question, for example of thinking of and saying something to comfort another person, that might be a pragmatic thing to do, but the content of that action, indeed the real action of the action, is not determined from any pragmatic framework or from within the terms and logic that pragmatism constitutes itself. I think that one only every really says something responsible when one recognizes that the response to the sort of situation previously described (the parents and dying child) is always a failure, always a sort of violence inflicting itself on those people, there is a rupture, and an interjection and I think that one can only ever really say something helpful when one takes into account the necessary possibility that one’s words will fail, even backfire, but it is that failure, that backfire, that violence that one has to be in, as it were, in order to say anything that might create some sort of comfort. I find that to be linguistically accurate, but also phenomenologically and experientially accurate.
Best,
Matt Roberts
July 7th, 2007 at 5:40 pm
i recently wrote about an unemployable positivity, but i think an unemployable negativity might also be at work or involved in the religious experience or in what is called the religious if we are to agree that there is a certain loss of self and subjectivity which happens by way of those “visions of excess”, which need not be visions, categorized as religious. I suppose I am trying to take into account a phenomenological implication here, which I find most resonate in Bataille’s discussion of the religious, which on the one hand provokes joy and laughter (what would be associated to what I called an unemployable positivity, which would both reveal/conceal itself in the way that there would always be an incommensurability between the signifiers that refer to the unemploayable positivity, ie, joy and laughter, and the X, pure affect, etc., proper to the ‘experience’) and anguish and tears (which would be the loss of self, finitude seeping in, the idea of unemployable negativity here and again the same incommensurability at stake in the above problem works here is well, hence the unemployability of both terms).
Also, the idea of the religious experience as an experience seems to be weird for me…we are getting into reason’s Levinas and Blanchot would want us to confront because to say experience for them assumes that there is some I that experiences the experience and its precisely the loss of the I and hence of an I that could experience the religious that I think needs to be taken seriously. It is not difficult to see here another avenue where my schtick on violence would be of importance…
I am not sure what I think about this because it seems to be logicall paradoxical, but then again it coincides with what I have been discussing with you elsewhere. Take into account the other email where I wrote the following:
“Bataille wants to set up a certain rhetorical work, at least where I am interested in, revolving around eroticism, which destroys the hegelian dialectic and demonstrates a fundamental trembling within the human being. This you might like given your interest or former interest in Kierkegaard (who is amazing), but that i read this trembling Bataille names as the teeter totter operative in ‘human experience’ and all that other stuff we toss up to being human…as the teeter totter of the immanent and transcendent. I think we has humans exist as the axis of the teeter totter, though most of the time unaware of it, and we are the very trembling catalyzed by these two terms that qualify existence and experience.”
Perhaps the terms unemployable positivity and unemployable negativity refer to a trembling operative with the transcendental, I am unsure if that helps, but I think that once again there is an axis between both terms, which is where we as humans sorta hang out and we go into both places to be sure, its the going to and fro and that is the movement of trembling i supposed and if thought is supposed to make us tremble, then it must move us into both places and into saying yes to both for without such an affirmation there would be nothing to tremble ‘about.’