Crossover Queries: Dwelling with Negatives, Embodying Philosophy's Others

Chapter 22: Facts, Fiction, Ficciones

22 Facts, Fiction, Ficciones Truth in the Study of Religion What is it that we ask for when we ask for truth in the study of religion ? Before trying to link the two key terms of this inquiry, truth and religion, let me tell you a story, a tale about truth in which the idea of fact but not yet of religion figures prominently. Absent in the narrative I am about to recount is the romance of the story. What must be repressed in the telling is that facts are objects of our desire, of a certain Sehnsucht, not because by nature we want to know, as Aristotle maintained, but because we long for presence and certainty. We have a yearning for the viva vox of events both recent and long past, the recovery of the texture of things in all of their Leibhaftigkeit , their living presence, even as they drift away. The pathos of the past is its irrecoverability, the pathos of the present, the slippage , the always already pastness of the present. We seek an immediacy inherently unattainable, an imagined plenary presence, one whose real pleasure is generated by the aura of melancholy that clings to the impossibility of repossessing the past. ‘‘You fill up my senses,’’ John Denver’s popular song exults—time held at bay in a moment of sensory inundation. Getting at the facts is the Enlightenment’s way of living the myth of immediacy. The Enlightenment account of time promises a full recovery of events by stationing the observer outside of time or placing the observer in control of time by making time part of her computational scheme. In this view, time is made up of homogeneous units, 345 so that it does not matter where the observer stands. The price is immediacy. The direct apprehension of a luminous object of contemplation or the sensory flooding of conscious awareness gives way to accuracy, the manner of being of the represented object. The study of religion is involved in this romance of facts in a special way. The object of attention, religion, the linguistic and ritual articulations of communities in their concern with the sacred, gives the study of religion, when seen as the quest for facts about religion, its ineluctuable pathos. The student of religion must inquire of the artifactual, literary, and oral archives of religious communities, ‘‘What luminous object or what dark and terrifying thing did the worshippers see when they saw it?’’ but know that, qua observer, she stands at an unbreachable distance from these arcana. I can think of no one who has expressed this better than the poet John Ashberry, when he writes: And when these immense structures go down, no one hears: a flash and then it’s gone leaving behind a feeling that something happened there once, like wind tearing at the current, but no memory and no crying either. There was no one to tell us what it meant when it meant what it did.1 The Facts To return to the tale about facts after this brief excursus into romance , I invite you, to use Umberto Eco’s phrase, to take an ‘‘inferential walk,’’ to ask some leading questions about facts and truth. In demanding the truth about something, are we not asking for a description of the object just as it is, of the facts, whatever these are? But what do we mean by ‘‘the facts’’? Facts are what settle matters. Each day’s heat and clammy dampness, for example, is a fact that, taken together with numerous successive and similar meteorological phenomena, supports the generalization that one lives in a tropical climate. Facts, in this reading, are the atomic constituents of our beliefs , the elementary bits that no reasonable person could dispute, what brooks no disagreement. This view of facts works from the bottom up, as it were, from part to whole. Using the same ontological presuppositions, we could proceed from whole to part. In that view, facts are the sediment that remains after the whole that is to be studied is subjected to scrutiny in the 346 The Art in Ethics light of some stipulated end. We want to know, for example, why the forests of Europe are vanishing. Eliminate numerous co-present phenomena—temperature changes, the appearance of certain plant diseases, and the like—and take note of what is left: only with the advent of acid rain do we...