This post is more likely to display my ignorance/misunderstanding than anything else, but it's been on my mind lately, so I'm going to spit it out.
In postmodernism there has been quite a stir about the nature of language. Folks like Louis Althusser and Michel Foucault came to the realization that the way we think about things is sculpted through various institutions like family, media, religious organizations, and education. Then, structuralists like Ferdinand de Saussure informed us that such ideologies are transmitted foremost via language -- proving quite literally that the pen is much mightier than the sword. Somewhere in the mix of genetics, institutions, and language a human being is formed. It is the lattermost influence that has captured my thoughts most recently.
Language is such a strange beast. We have almost completely arbitrary sounds which correspond with concepts whose existence/importance are determined by culture. Take for instance the word "umbrella". In our culture it conjures an image of a rather fragile, black object which dramatically expands and which we hold over our head to keep it from getting wet. In other cultures, the same object was intended as a symbol of high class -- as the root "umbra" (shade) suggests, it was something that kept the sun off of rich people's heads, and instead of being black and gloomy, it had a light and dainty connotation.
Language is also inherently connected with ontology. This becomes evident when you break the object the word is referring to. Umbrella refers to the object described above, but what happens when the umbrella breaks? What do you call that object? While the most obvious answer is the phrase "broken umbrella," there are other answers as well. You can call it trash. But more importantly, once freed from its most obvious function, an infinity of possibilities opens up. If the shaft is still intact, the Broken Umbrella is now a walking cane. The Broken Umbrella is a fire poker. It's a sparring weapon.
Suddenly it becomes necessary to make a distinction between the physical object and all it's potential uses/names. Martin Heidegger gave long, strange German names to these things: the physical object itself is the vorhandenheit (roughly translated as ready-to-hand) and its potential use is the vorhandensein (present-to-hand). Linguists and fiction writers recalled the Genesis account and how Adam gave names to each creature. They played with the idea of recovering such an "Edenic" language where each word exactly represented a given object or concept, a language where words referred to a given object in its ready-to-hand state, a language without the present-to-hand.
No one put much more thought into the Edenic Language Project. While it seemed like an interesting (if not impossible) enterprise, in order for these new words to accurately convey a given object, they must either be a verbal conglomeration of each of that object's possibilities (which would make for awfully long, unusable words), or they must be words that inherently map to this conglomeration in the minds of each of the participants in the conversation. The problem with this is that recalling every possible context and function for an object renders it irrelevant to the here and now. It is like trying to make a key that fits into every keyhole in existence. The resulting key would be nothing but a needle, and completely useless for opening doors.
The "moral of the story" of the Edenic Language Project appears to be that while acknowledging the ontological reality of an object in its ready-to-hand state is healthy, in order for that object to be accessible and therefore useful, it must be found in a context and must be given a function.
[The following paragraph is my application of the ideas of language into the context of theology. I am attempting to say something about God, so it will be inherently flawed.]
This is one of the reasons why God, the headwater of all ontology, the ultimate, omniscient, omnipotent ready-to-hand Object is so difficult for us to wrap our minds around. This is also why, when God chooses to interface with humanity, he does so in a specific context with a specific function in mind. He resolves Himself down into the present-to-hand (whether as Jesus Christ, Scripture, the Spirit, etc.) in order to tell us a specific thing about a specific situation. This ties back to Greg's post and tells us how critical it is that when we attempt to be the incarnation of Christ among people, we must try to remember where we are, and to apply appropriate teachings to appropriate contexts. That is not to say that there aren't Universal Truths or teachings which are relevant for every situation. But once you get more narrow than The Greatest Commands, it is important to remember who you are, who your audience is, and what, exactly, you are trying to say.
The Broken Umbrella
Thursday, June 22, 2006
Thursday, June 22, 2006
8 Comments:
Vorhandenheit is not "physical object" nor is vorhandensein its "potential use". Those words describe one's mode of involvement (or relationship) with things, and does not refer to the things themselves.
Mr./Ms.? Enowning,
Briefly perusing your blog reveals that you are quite the Heideggerist. If I reworded this sentence:
"Martin Heidegger gave long, strange German names to these things: the physical object itself is the vorhandenheit (roughly translated as ready-to-hand) and its potential use is the vorhandensein (present-to-hand)."
Such that it read:
"Martin Heidegger gave long, strange German names to these things: the mode of being in which the physical object exists outside of any function is the vorhandenheit (roughly translated as ready-to-hand) and its mode of being once put to use is the vorhandensein (present-to-hand)."
Would that be more accurate? I appreciate you taking time to offer your critique.
The key distinction between the two is Dasein's involvement. The ready-to-hand is used automatically; e.g. using a hammer to hammer nails while thinking about what to wear to the club tonight. While present-at-hand means conscious involvement; e.g. when the hammer breaks, the mind focuses directly on the hammer as an object. In that sense, during vorhandensein the object is no longer being used in the familar way it is intended to be used.
Senhor Enowning
I suppose that makes sense given Heidegger's ideas about mindfulness. But is it not accurate to say that when you are not mindful of the hammer, it is in a sense in some waiting place, waiting to resolve down into the specific use you intend? This is what I mean when I use vorhandenheit. It is the mode of being where an object is stripped of any context or function.
Bryan,
Read your blog from a link off another blog that I was reading that was really fantastic. I enjoyed your and lookforward to reading more.
thanks man.
One entertaining aspect of theology is the appropriation/distillation of philosophical discourse for use as God-talk. We have proceeded in that way since the beginning. So much of Lindbeck and subsequent theology is indebted to linguistic philosophy it is almost inconceivable---and an unfortunate escape hatch for the anti-philosophical. By the way, I don't think such application results in inherently flawed discourse, though your humility is laudable.
Anyway, another common phrase used in theology to discuss what is at issue here is "correspondence to reality." This usually means that a statement (doctrine) is ontologically true. For too many, a doctrine either corresponds to its vorhandenheit or it does not. The alternative approach considers coherence the test of truth. The intrasystematic coherence of beliefs makes those beliefs true, correspondence aside. This is patently relativist, but revealing nonetheless.
When the insights available here are applied, the outcome is not that there is a partial correspondence or that a "potential use" is at stake. Such coherent truth has nothing to do with the ontology of a thing. What you have discussed seems to me a sort of via media between the two theories, akin to what washes out in Lindbeck's project. The function of doctrine in religion is manifestly one of coherence. But by shifting the coherence to an outside standard (the Narrative in the case of Christianity) that is taken to correspond to God, it is as though a mix of the two theories is achieved. A doctrine must cohere with truth, whether or not it fully corresponds. It must also cohere with other doctrines that must cohere with truth, which synergistically creates more correspondence in a sort of checks and balances way.
Am I right to think that a present-to-hand use would cohere, so to speak, with an object's ready-to-hand total potentiality or essence but not necessarily correspond to that totality?
after slowly reading your comment, i will answer yes to your last question. as a visual person, i use the classic example of a group of blind men surrounding an elephant. one of them feels a tusk and says that the object is smooth and cool to the touch. another feels one of the legs and says it is warm and wrinkly. another feels the head and says it's furry. while they all seem to contradict each other, they are all correct, only not in totality. it helps to think of God as one enormous elephant in a world full of blind folks :)
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