The Fullness of Knowing: Modernity and Postmodernity from Defoe to Gadamer (review)

“Although postmodernism has shown the inadequacies of Enlightenment approaches to knowledge, its alternatives are often unpersuasive.” Mr. Ritchie’s contention with conventional histories of knowing actually extends much further than this quotation from his Introduction. His study demonstrates that a comprehensive history of knowing has not yet been established, and it views much of the Enlightenment’s perceived legacy as limiting. Unique in its comparative approach, The Fullness of Knowing mostly juxtaposes an eighteenth-century view with its postmodern reception and/or extension. It works through points, counterpoints, and parallels. Most of Mr. Ritchie’s epistemologies reconcile knowledge to faith-based inquiries.

The enthusiastic reception of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe is evidence of an a priori way of reading, one in which fiction and the Bible impart theological revelation and forms of self-knowledge. These have been devalued in recent years by postmodernism’s rejection of the “grand narrative,” as epitomized in the reactionary work of Jean-Francois Lyotard and Richard Rorty. Thus, the Puritan approach to fiction indicates a spiritual quest in reading that has been omitted in most considerations of Crusoe’s continued popularity.

Moving from private forms of devotion such as reading and study to public forms like singing and liturgical prayer, Mr. Ritchie sees the publication of Isaac Watts’s Hymns and Spiritual Songs (1707) as initiating a major change in worship and subsequent individual and communal ways of knowing. Challenging both the dominance of the Psalter and the new empiricism, Watts’s inspired knowing counters Locke’s approach. Hymns suggests “social and aesthetic modes of attaining knowledge” that stand in opposition to both the Protestant devaluation of art as errant and evidence-based understandings. Looking to the present day church, Mr. Ritchie sees Watts’s approach epitomized in the best of present-day evangelical worship.

His early chapters are devoted to asking “how do we know?” but his examination of Swift in Chapter Three signals a shift to the ethics of knowledge. Mr. Ritchie views information overload as posing two main problems identified in Gulliver’s Travels. He laments, first, the commodification of knowledge, and second, the dehumanization of the person. Interestingly, he looks to the learning process when he considers how new technologies alter teacher-student relationships. The postmodern component of this discussion includes the work of Wendell Berry and Jaron Lanier, and he is eloquent on what is “lost” when human relationships are unnecessarily supplanted by virtual ones.

The book also includes chapters beyond the Scriblerian’s purview—on such figures as Smart, Burke, and Cowper. Knowing offers an alternative narrative to the hard and fast empiricism that the eighteenth century made famous. The issues Mr. Ritchie identifies in the eighteenth century are also present in postmodern thinkers. Unfortunately, women’s voices, either in the form of eighteenth-century writers or twenty-first century thinkers (Martha Nussbaum, Carol Gilligan, Elaine Scarry, Mary Field Belenky), are absent, as is the tradition of feminist scholarship addressing similar epistemological concerns.

I disagree with Mr. Ritchie’s analyses of Gay Pride, Women’s History, and Black History celebrations, all of which he uses as examples in Chapter Five to highlight the extremism of recent political correctness. He compares the calendar reforms of the French Revolution to the installation of such events as Vagina Day, Kwanzaa, and the 2005 Minneapolis Gay Pride March. Such inflammatory gestures will necessarily alienate. More surprising, none is central to Mr. Ritchie’s compelling history; one wonders why they were included.