Objectivity and Religious Symbol.
This was my Ph. D. Thesis in the Department of
Theology, Bristol University, supervised by Dr Denys Turner (now Professor at
Cambridge), and completed in 1981.
It is quite a dry academic work containing lots
of philosophy, but it laid the foundations that appeared in rather more popular
form in Holy Ground.
A hard copy is available at Bristol University
Library, and I hope to make an electronic version available if there is
sufficient demand registered in
emails to me. You can click to view the
Synopsis or the
Contents.
I argue the failure of empiricism to account
for knowledge of objects existing in an objective (external) world, showing how
various revisions of this defect are destructive of the empiricist enterprise of
basing knowledge on sense-experience alone. I then expound an alternative view
of experience as an activity of relating to real topics of assertion. The
concept of objectivity arises, not as an a priori idea, but in the fact that we
already are objects operating in the world. I develop the concept of the model,
showing how through models we extend our skill of knowing to disclose natural
causes operative in unfamiliar levels of reality.
It emerges that we cannot rule out the questions of the universe's ultimate
cause, of a real focus of interaction encompassing all experience, and of the
ultimate ground of the real structures of knowing; God is advanced as one
conceivable answer to these inevitable questions. I ask how we might interact
with such a God, and develop the notion of religious symbol, as combining the
model-process with a new 'image' function. I try to answer the criticism that
such 'religious symbols' would simply represent the false objectivisation of
subjective relations which Marxists expose as ideological. On the contrary,
religious symbol emerges as the alternative to ideology, by virtue of the
objectivity required by the 'image' function, whereby those religious symbols
called sacraments may be 'signs which effect what they signify'. However, the
sacraments depend on God's Incarnation, a subject which lies beyond the scope of
the thesis.
I: Experience and Objectivity
- The shattering of Symbolic Realism
- Empiricism and Occam's Nominalism
- Empiricism and the Cartesian doubt
- The Root Model of Empiricism
- Hume: on Scepticism with regard to the Senses
- Ayer and Quine: Objects as Theories
- Conclusion: The Demise of the Empiricist Model
II. Real Interaction as the Ground of Objectivity
- Appearance, Reality and the Act of Experiencing
- Experience of Ordinary Objects: reflections on Kant
- Reidentification and Space-Time: reflections on Strawson
- Topics of Transformation: Real Natures and Causes
- Real Interaction
- The Flesh of the World: Merleau-Ponty
- Conclusion
III: The Use of Model in the Extension of Objectivity
- The Concept of the Model: Rom Harre and others
- Rom Harrh: Natural Necessity as disclosed by Models
- The Regress of Explanations
- Karl Popper: the Biology of Knowledge
- Michael Polanyi: the Art of Knowing
- Summary of Chapters I - III
IV: The Conceivability of the Ultimate
- Question One: Causation
- Question Two: Integration
- Question Three: Intelligibility
- Towards God
- Conclusion
V: Religious Symbol and the Knowledge of God
- The Way of Negation and the Way of Integrity
- Symbols: Models and Images
- Religious Symbol and Religious Language
- Image and Analogue in Religious Symbol
VI: Mystery and Mystification
- Social and Ontological Dimensions of Religious Language
- The Marxist Critique of Ideology: Marx
- The Marxist Critique of Ideology: Althusser
- Ideology and Objectivity
- Liberation and Redemption
VII: The Body of the Real
- Are there any Religious Symbols?
- What Images Disclose
- The Language of Sacrament
- Concluding Remarks: Prolegomena to any future Theology
You can also download the Section on
The
Language of Sacraments.
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