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

1. Learning to Read, Learning to Listen in Robinson Crusoe

9 LEARNING TO READ, LEARNING TO LISTEN IN ROBINSON CRUSOE 1 I expected every Wave would have swallowed us up, and that every time the Ship fell down, as I thought, in the Trough or Hollow of the sea, we should never rise more; and in this Agony of Mind, I made many Vows and Resolutions, that if it would please God here to spare my Life this one Voyage, if ever I got once my Foot upon dry Land again, I would go directly home to my Father, and never set it into a Ship again while I liv’d . . . and I resolv’d that I would, like a true repenting Prodigal, go home to my Father. (Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, 8) At the heart of postmodern theory is the critique of the metanarrative . No explanation outside of a story can give it final authority. All one has is the story. Enlightenment thinkers, from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries, approached the truth of narrative from a different angle. These thinkers assumed that truths about the universe and human nature could be reduced to explanations that anyone could accept, regardless of his or her culture and its particular stories. The truth of a narrative, then, depended on its conformity or contribution to these universal explanations—metanarratives— whose authority lay outside the narrative itself. Buoyed by the success of Sir Isaac Newton and his followers , the prestige of physics soared during the 1700s. After all, everyone could see the truth of the law of gravity, Christian or Jew, Englishman or Turk. Many thinkers hoped that all fields of Q Q 10 The Fullness of Knowing knowledge, including politics, moral philosophy, and religion, could enjoy the success and apparent certainty of physics. Once national prejudices and political traditions were laid aside, they believed, all people would agree that just government was based on propositions about human equality, consent, and freedom. Moral philosophy would be freed from the stories of particular cultures and be based on Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative, to “act only according to that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.” Religious truths would be based on universal religious experience or on logical propositions about God and the human soul, rather than on the authority of particular Scriptures or the traditions of particular communities. Intellectual authority would come instead from enlightened individuals who took Kant’s challenge, and “dared to know” by dint of their own efforts. Like most pre-Enlightenment figures, Daniel Defoe assumes a unity among various ways of knowing—specifically among theological , historical, and personal knowledge. He illustrates that unity in his first novel, Robinson Crusoe, published in 1719.1 Yet the two sequels to that book illustrate the changes that were taking place during his era, changes that destroyed that unity. Defoe presented Robinson’s story as a historical one. The theological and personal meanings that Robinson took from his experience were inseparable from his fictional, personal history. Under pressure from curious readers, however, Defoe was quickly forced to abandon the pretense of a Crusoe who was “historical” in the modern sense. In the sequels, Defoe ultimately separated the fictional “history ” of Crusoe from the “meaning” of Crusoe’s life. The truth of Robinson Crusoe lay in its moral meaning, Defoe eventually maintained , but not in the story. Its truths, he wrote, could be extracted from its fictions. Defoe’s response to his readers mirrors the emerging Enlightenment tendency to see fiction and fact as opposites. That view is apparent in a number of Enlightenment movements, but it emerges with particular clarity in the treatment of Scripture.2 Biblical critics were beginning to separate the factual, empirically verifiable elements of Scripture from their figural meaning. A biblical story like that of Abraham and Isaac for instance, could still be meaningful as myth or allegory, but one could no longer have true knowledge of its historical veracity. Only a “higher criticism,” Q Learning to Read, Learning to Listen 11 which adhered to the scientific standards for knowledge, could yield the truth about the Bible. Defoe was by no means self-consciously aware of these cultural shifts or the profound consequences they would have. Even the biblical scholars who contributed to the shift did not appreciate the consequences of their thought.3 Yet the split between “fiction” and “historical fact,” which was beginning to open...