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

6. Tradition as a Way of Knowing in Edmund Burke and Hans-Georg Gadamer

155 TRADITION AS A WAY OF KNOWING IN EDMUND BURKE AND HANS-GEORG GADAMER 6 In my teaching I often encounter students who say that we can never escape our prejudices. They are not just criticizing the prejudices of the past as outworn beliefs that have been put behind us. They are also including their own opinions, frequently prefacing their comment with a phrase like, “Speaking from my own biased point of view. . . .” Earlier in my career this troubled me. “Why bother with school at all,” I wondered, “if your education cannot penetrate to the level of your deepest beliefs?” Now, however, I think my students are on to something important, something that goes beyond the modern assumption that the best learner is someone who approaches his subject as a blank slate, or someone who sees her past as a weight to be cast off. It is not as though the modern assumptions have vanished. When the speaker at a recent Ivy League commencement congratulated the graduates for having left behind many of the prejudices with which they entered college, I looked around at the parents there, wondering how they took this estimate of their childrearing. College curricula often encourage students to “wrestle with [their] own prejudices and biases” and urge students to think critically.1 Rare is the U.S. school that acknowledges the value of rooting one’s critical thought in a tradition.2 Q 156 The Fullness of Knowing Q These trends are a result, in part, of the power of majority opinion: it is difficult for anyone, including academics, to buck the antitraditionalist tide. In part, they reflect the lingering Enlightenment assumptions held by baby boomers, who will continue to run U.S. institutions for a few more years. Many of these men and women still accept the Enlightenment assumptions that reject forms of knowing that do not measure up to rationalistic or empirical standards.3 The next generations, however—Gen X, the millenials, and their successors—have not accepted their parents’ critique of the past. They are unlikely to believe, as some baby boomers did, for instance, that it is wise to raise children entirely outside of a religious tradition so that they can choose a particular religion freely, on the basis of pure intellectual assent. In my opening example, my students were not just acknowledging the cultural and personal limits with which they entered any conversation , they were also affirming the value of their background for acquiring new knowledge. Their instincts are generally sound, I believe. Moreover, if assumptions need to be challenged, as of course they must, one such assumption is whether it is desirable or even possible to lay aside one’s past at the outset of any serious learning. The first chapter of this book has already established the difficulty of doing this, for if we gain knowledge from the past stories of which we are a part, then our past is a necessary resource in acquiring new knowledge. The second chapter, on worship, suggested an increased openness to tradition in the emergent church’s use of icons and liturgies. This chapter will look at a division within postmodern thought on how to approach the past. On the one hand, many dominant postmodern thinkers have regarded past writings with suspicion. The “hermeneutics of suspicion” has become a methodological tool in many postmodern approaches to literature, from feminism to postcolonial and new historicist treatments, which typically assume that a primary task of interpretation is to uncover and criticize the prejudices embodied in earlier literature.4 On the other hand, Hans-Georg Gadamer, whose emphasis on the limits to knowledge has certain affinities with postmodern thought, has done more than any recent thinker to show the necessity of embracing one’s history and even the “prejudices”—or prejudgments —with which we enter any discussion.5 Q Tradition as a Way of Knowing 157 First, however, I will go back to the eighteenth century to look at a set of questions surrounding tradition in Edmund Burke’s critique of the French Revolution. I will begin with a significant aesthetic issue, literary allusion, and then move to a historical one, the British Constitution. The Constitution was crucial to Burke’s view of history and politics, and allusion is one of his major rhetorical tools, though neither one comes close to exhausting Burke’s aesthetic practice nor historical thought. These two issues are central...