I don't think too many of us on this list still regard our
calling as the search for static permanent universal truths, but
many of us may:
(1) mistake faith as something that must be of that sort (as it
did become it seems in many Christian traditions, very likely
under the influence of Hellenistic neo-Platonism, and not
irrespective of the social conditions of the European Middle Ages
where stability of _everything_ was very much in the interest of
a tiny feudal aristocracy trying to hold its own against a not
very docile peasantry), and
(2) regard skepticism as a progressive, scientific attitude for
scholarship, and not only in matters of 'ultimate concern'
perhaps not having considered the kinds of alternatives which a
dialectical view of life might offer us on both counts.
Skepticism says that we should not have any faith, not only that
we should reject all certainties (until proven, but none ever
are), but that we should expect even probable truths to have
their warrants eroded, or their conditions of possibility changed
out from under them. Our view of dynamics may be that hypotheses
once established as reasonably likely can only come historically
to be seen as less warrantable, or to become irrelevant to new
concerns or new conditions. But we do still go on, most of us. We
do still take the risk of wasting our lives in a vain project of
passing on useful ideas and information to others and to an
uncertain future. Every day we commit to this agenda ... so we
must indeed have some sort of dynamic faith, a faith that is
contingent, but also renewable from day to day, act to act,
commitment to commitment.
A dialectical _praxis_, then, is not at all one that is assured
of making a better world tomorrow, but only of aiming to do so
today. We cannot, I believe, know the consequences of our
interventions, whether for good or ill in the longer term. But we
can try today to do something that seems good now, and one of
those things, for me, is to find ways to intervene more
successfully. I suppose that is hybris, and rationally it is
really folly (becoming able to make bigger mistakes!), but still
there is a contingent faith that if these things are not done
others will do more ill, as they do now. (If there were no evil
in the world, would doing good seem so necessary?)
This is, of course, in my cultures, an uncomfortably masculine
anxiety: to fear that if we do not dominate (through good), other
(males) will dominate (us) through evil. That, too, has been writ
large in some of our religious systems. I can see the appeal of a
Third Force, a God, who does not end this game but does play in
it (and not as referee but as unpredictable partner). I wonder
though what remains in our traditions of (and I do not believe
this is myth, perhaps on faith) the pre=patriarchal cultures,
where Torah was, like Gaia and the Mother, a female (was there
then a feminine? probably not as we understand it) force for
order, not an enforced order like Yahweh's, but a natural order
that gave without being forced to yield up, a bountiful earth and
womb that did not need to be raped/controlled, but only adjusted
to.
That natural order was never stable either, but dynamic, with its
own dialectic, but not one built mainly on contradictions and
conflicts (the masculine preoccupation), but on the bringing
forth of new possibilities out of the rich potential of a ground
made up of all that had been brought forth before. I'm not quite
up to trying to construct even an imaginary Gaian dialectics ...
but this too ought to be part of our dialectics of dialectics, to
bring forth another possibility that might help us adjust a
little better to a world we do not and never shall control. JAY.
--------------------
JAY LEMKE.
City University of New York.
BITNET: JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM
INTERNET: JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU