Damon Linker, editor of First Things magazine is this week's guest blogger at Times and Seasons. First Things is a very well edited conservative Catholic journal with a focus on both theology and the social impact of religion. It is what I think many Mormon bloggers hope to achieve for Mormonism in our various blogs. His first post is questioning why so many faithful Mormon intellectuals are postmodernists. What is the attraction?
It's an interesting question and something I noticed reading LDS-Phil over the years. There are surprisingly few analytic philosophers among those Mormon philosophers with a focus on theology. Many seem to come from either the pragmatic tradition, with a focus on William James, the existential tradition with Nietzsche or Kierkegaard, or the Heideggarian tradition. One of the only notable figures I know of who was much more in the analytic tradition was Dennis Potter.
Now some cynics, I note, have tended to think that this is due to a kind of thorough-going anti-intellectualism. Obviously I disagree quite strongly with this perspective. While postmodernism is unfortunately anti-intellectual in its encounter in American humanity departments, its philosophical manifestations are far more rigorous. Of the Mormon intellectuals I've encountered, most have a strong familiarity with logic, science, and are if anything strong Realists. While it is a convenient argument to say that postmodernism simply allows Mormon intellectuals to hold to "irrational" beliefs, it simply isn't true in my experience. Further, I'd note that analytic philosophers like Plantinga seem quite able to do apologetics for the general Christian position. I don't see why Mormons would be any different.
I'd add, as well, that Mormons are very anti-Relativism, believing quite strongly in the concept of Absolute Truth. While we may differ with others what that truth is, we don't generally deny the place of truth. This might be seen as making us odd partners with postmodernism. After all the common charge against postmodernism is that it at best encourages Relativism and at worst denies truth entirely. I don't think this a fair charge regarding postmodernism. Certainly some, mainly careless readers in English or Literature departments, do move in this direction. But I don't think postmodernists do.
Why then do we move towards postmodernism? I can't speak for everyone in general. I offered a few thoughts over on the Times and Sesons thread. But I'm not really convinced of my own views on why so many adopt postmodernism. I secretly suspect it is just the fad of the moment combined with too few analytic philosophers at BYU. Originally I'd written up a few paragraphs of speculations along these lines. I've deleted them and instead will simply put my own "evolution" of ending up with a library with a lot of books by "postmodern" philosophers like Heidegger, Levinas, Derrida, Ricoeur, Caputo, Nietzsche and others.
My original background was physics and I went into physics because I wanted to know the secrets of the universe. My father was a physics professor and never hesitated discussing ideas with me regardless of my youth. I remember fondly discussing ideas around the campfire as a kid. I had a natural mathematical nature, wanted to know what the basic nature of the universe was, and didn't really imagine that there wasn't an answer. (Obviously I was also more than a little naive) Prior to going on my Mission, I was probably somewhat close to being a Russell-like empiricist verging on positivism. Not that I was really that sophisticated and the only philosophy book I'd read was Mill's On Liberty. But I had a lot of ideas and they pretty much did correspond to the philosophy of the very early 20th century in America and Britain.
After my mission I'd thought about religion a great deal and then took Chauncey Riddle's Epistemology class at BYU. That was a six credit combination philosophy and religion class. All things considered, it really wasn't a great philosophy class in that we didn't really focus on philosophical ideas from history in any kind of rigorous fashion. However we did think about ideas in a fairly critical fashion adopting a very Socratic method. By the end of it I'd really thought about religion a lot although I was still very naive philosophically. I'd probably moved to something akin to Russell's bundle theory in which there were no substances but only bundles of properties.
The big change came the next year. I took a religion class from Dr. Stephen Ricks (famously of FARMS) who wanted us to read a book unrelated to the Old Testament (our topic of study). I'm not sure why he wanted this, but it ended up being fruitful. I picked Thus Spake Zarathustra by Nietzsche. Why? I'd read in Dialog an article comparing Nietzsche and Mormonism - specifically the notion of the Superman. Now that article is actually a fairly poor comparison completely overlooking the subtleties of Nietzsche's position. But it was good at getting me to read Nietzsche. I really loved the book even if I didn't really fully understand it. I also encountered briefly the American pragmatists at this time and bought a reader. I was most interested in James at the time, although I read a bit of Peirce and Dewey.
Now at the time I was getting a philosophy minor, but was more properly studying physics and math. But I had the bug. After I graduated I ended up coming into semiotics after reading a few of Umberto Eco's non-fiction books. (I'd been enchanted by Name of the Rose and Foucalt's Pendulum) Around the same time Dennis Potter started up LDS-Phil. (He was in Riddle's Epistemology class the year after I was and I'd actually TAed that section) It was really from Eco that I encountered postmodernism. In reading numerous of his books, but most especially Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language, I encountered various postmodern thinkers. Now I'm not sure Eco was the best introduction, but that approach did make me come to postmodernism from a more linguistic and semiotics approach. From there I read Derrida's On Grammatology - well before reading any Heidegger, Levinas or others. I fortunately encountered Jim Faulconer on LDS-Phil who patiently answered my dumb questions and guided me in literature. I approached postmodernism, not because of religious reasons, but more because of linguistic reasons and a way of reconciling my basic scientific realism with those linguistic issues.
So, am I unique? I don't know. Perhaps linguistics is an odd way to come to things. And to be honest, despite a few comments on Speech Act theory, I've not really done much in linguistics for some time. I have a whole shelf of books oriented around philosophy of language but have more recently been considering the more religious implications of postmodernism. But, to be honest, I'm not sure what they are. It seems that how traditional Christians who are postmodernists view the religious implications is radically different from how Mormons do, precisely because of how we view God. God and Being are completely different for Mormons whereas for more orthodox Christians they are much more closely tied together. For Mormons the interesting question is in how each mind as Other parallels God as Other, to follow Levinas. But I think that the religious implications of postmodernism are, to a Mormon, perhaps overstated. They simply are religious issues in my mind.
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