"Compelled to Culturing," Esther L. Meek

Reading postmodern philosophers Jean Francois Lyotard and Michel Foucault reminds me that our on-the-street understanding of knowledge effectively eclipses its normative dimension. These philosophers call us back to this biblical insight.

It’s still broadly presumed that facts and values belong to distinct and opposing categories, for example. Students still show up at college already programmed with the default setting that knowledge is passively registered information. People take this default setting to church and Bible studies, too. We think that AFTER we get the information, only then do we apply it. Hear the implicit divorce between theoria and praxis?

Had we been more savvy (to quote my favorite pirate) about knowledge, we might not have thought the postmoderns were obliterating truth when they rightly named its normative dimension. All knowledge is embedded in prescriptive rules that constitute a language game, says Lyotard. (“Knock, knock!” I say; you say…See?) Sentences should be seen as moves in a game; you never should be, or should leave your hearer, or your world, in the same place at the end of the move. Foucault recommends an awareness of good kind of power/knowledge (two sides of a coin) that is like blood traversing the earthy veins of the human world (my analogy).

It also puts me in mind of Nietzsche’s wry comment, that if you need to appeal to reasoned argument, you are already weak. And Hannah Arendt’s notion of authority as that which influences with no physical strength or exterior control.

Long years ago, as a student of theologian John Frame, I learned that knowledge always has three dimensions: our lived selves, the world, and…what Frame called “the normative.” Western philosophy and culture first construed knowledge as primarily about the world (the Classical era), and then about the self (the Modern era); with the postmodern, we might be said to be finally getting around to the normative.

I have pondered and worked with the Framean insight for years and still do not feel that I have plumbed its rich depths. Good things seem to come in threes: Frame’s three dimensions stem partly from three ways in which the LORD is Lord: control, authority and presence (and one person of the Trinity especially Lord in each); or king, prophet and priest. We are called to image God in these three dimensions.

Frame’s teacher, Cornelius Van Til, said that the role of prophet involves us in interpretation: bringing the personed word to bear sensitively and shapingly—normatively—on the world. We don’t interpret as a second, optional, stage; and we don’t interpret only because we are sin-broken. We were born to interpret, and, as the postmoderns say, it’s interpretation all the way down.

But that’s just what prophets do. When God said, “Let us make man…male and female…in our image,” he fashioned humans to be “Let us”-sayers. He mandated us to shape the world (Genesis 1:26-27) only after hard-wiring us to do so.

All human action and knowing involves us in normative, prophetic, interpretive culturing. We are compelled to culturing. We can’t not culture. Our choice is only between blessing and cursing.

I think if we call to mind how we operate interpersonally and what we understand in the context of getting along with other people, we have a better sense of how verbal comments unavoidably shape both the sender and the recipients. And in the world of business we have a better sense of how ours and others’ verbal comments shape our company, and the world. It is our daunting privilege to bless and not curse, to the end of creating, combating evil, redeeming, restoring, and shalom.

All knowledge must be understood to have this normative dimension. --Ain’t no such thing as passive, unshaping, uninterpreted, uninterpreting, knowledge. One cannot extract from knowledge the interpretative and interpreting dimension and have any knowledge left. Every act of knowing leaves knower and known in a new place. Every act of knowing is a responsible and risky “Here I stand…” To deny this is…to practice cursing rather than blessing. To affirm it responsibly is to engage the world truthfully (covenant language) with compassion and joy.

Culturing is our unavoidable lot. May we go about it with intentionality and virtuosity.

Comments

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You might enjoy "Searle and Foucault" by CG Prado--you can use the search function on my blog to find my summaries of it, should you be interested. Prado also tackles Richard Rorty's "change of subject" argument--he thinks he doesn't really solve epistemological problems, just flees them--and tries to rescue Foucault from the poststructuralists.

On a side note, I don't know that Frame's perspectivalism, which presupposes that we can join perspectives (they're interdependent and in *principle* unifiable, if only from god's perspective) and that we can approach the truth with revelation, is going to fit, ultimately, with Foucault's notions...seems like the former is more like a geometric metaphor, having limited angles on a whole, whereas the latter problematizes *truth* itself--such as truths about sexuality, guilt, shame, insanity and punishment. The Bible and every event of its repetition is subject to untangling grids of association and the "norms" constructed by medicine, the family, religion, etc. There is nothing but perspective and the surfaces of statements (Archaeology of Knowledge) are at angles in reality, not just because of our human mirror.

Anyway. Sorry. Lengthy comment! If you're ever at UT Austin (where I'm starting my PhD in the fall), drop by and we could continue in person.