Aesthetics and Analysis in Writing on Religion: Modern Fascinations

7. Aesthetic Objects and Objective Knowledge

113 chapter 7 Aesthetic Objects and Objective Knowledge The dilemmas presented to writers on religion by questions of truth, validity , and objectivity can sometimes seem extreme. Dealing with diverse religious and scholarly worlds, interpretive writers may find it hard to escape the conclusion that specific religious beliefs are in an important sense relative. Seeing those beliefs in their respective contexts, moreover, interpreters may also be all too aware of the ways these can become entangled in social structures and political programs. Religious belief, it would seem, like much knowledge, is constructed from experience and economic interest, accident and exploitation; epistemes vary by history and culture. At the same time, though, interpretive writers, fascinated by their material, continue to see some human value in what they study. They are not, on the whole, ready to dismiss the fruits of others’ traditions and their own collective scholarship as simply (pace Geertz) class interests and cryptotheology all the way down.1 Because the path of absolute relativism has been popular—indeed fashionable —at the turn of the twenty-first century, the surprise may be that more interpretive writers have not followed it more closely to its end. But their hesitation makes sense when we consider the poles of their basic modern dilemma. In both science and religion—toward which interpretive writers have been in different ways pulled—truth is taken very seriously indeed. A predisposition toward some sense of real truths in the midst of obviously relative worldviews may thus, I think, easily be characteristic of an interpretive writer.2 Discussing the virtues of philosophical realism, 114 Two Truths Thomas Nagel suggests its literally pivotal role in helping us try to “climb out of our own minds.”3 To the extent that interpretive writing has been a way for scholars to try to get beyond themselves personally, it may involve a sense of the real in its science as well as in its religion. Still, if an attempt to get beyond oneself by writing on religion appears as a quasi-religious effort, it is also a naturalized and (usually) liberal one—requiring truths that are significant but less than absolute. One viable attitude toward these statements’ possible truth might best be described as fallibilist: we see them as representing a reality out there but aren’t quite sure if we’ve got it exactly right; we are open to revision and expect there to be some. This kind of fallibilism may suit the temperament of scholars prone to take problems of both science and religion seriously but who also regularly encounter the relativities and contingencies of belief. It also has an important practical similarity with some current social constructivist, neo-Nietzschean stances. One of the main intellectual virtues of a radically critical philosophical constructivism is to make us actively question our own and others’ presuppositions; but an attentive fallibilism can do this too, and its hopefulness may, for scientists of religion, be more energizing.4 The problem for interpretive writers here can become complicated, however, by the ways in which the apparent importance of any philosophically realist claims found in their scientific statements depend on an aesthetic constructivism in their writing. The significance of interpretive statements as truth seems to derive in part from the crafted religiohistorical constructs of which they form a part: their objectivity depends on the firmness of those constructs, and the aesthetic depth of these enhances those statements’ profundity. The aesthetic objects discussed in part 2 thus reappear here as vehicles of a sort of scientific objectivity, while aesthetic depth reappears as depth of thought. What can these two multivalenced concepts—objectivity and depth—tell us about the ways in which the aesthetic dimensions of interpretive writing inform the qualities of its scientific truths? In examining these two concepts I will adopt a stance sympathetic to what I read as the characteristically fallibilist temperament of religionists, but most of what I have to say should also make sense from a constructivist point of view. objectivities and subjectivities In realist philosophies, objectivity generally has an ontological significance , denoting a reality distinct from the subject, but in common usage Aesthetic Objects, Objective Knowledge 115 the term objectivity is also employed in three other senses important for religious studies. The least consequential of these we can call descriptive objectivity. When we talk about a description as objective, we usually mean that it is unadorned and bare, bereft of any personal...