ADAM AND EVE ARE FOUNDATIONAL for most western religions. Whether the theology accords them a literal existence (as Mormonism does) or more figurative or purely symbolic roles, the Adam narrative is archetypal for religious existence. The Mormon tradition in many texts but especially 2 Nephi 2 plays up the fundamental opposition that Adam's choice in the garden faced. One might say that unlike most other conceptions of the narrative, the Mormon view is that existence is brought about by making a decision in the midst of paradox. Quite a few years ago I'd last considered this in any great depth. I've posted my thoughts from then in a separate page. They seem to me now as if I were still in the process of coming to a conclusion. So, as written, they are not fully formed. However some might find them of interest. I'd also point people to Jim Faulconer's paper in Journal of Philosophy and Scripture which touches on some of the same themes. (Only much better thought out than my own)
MORE CHANGES AT LDS-PHIL. Apparently the list server at topica is blocked by the firewalls at several universities including BYU. (Presumably too much spam was originating from there) Ben Huff has apparently gotten permission to keep the mailing list at Notre Dame. So the old original address is the one to use. I still plan on making the archives available online sometime over the next month or so. However Christmas is fast approaching so I may not get to it until after the holidays.
In other mailing list news, I thought I'd list a few other mailing lists I enjoy. The first one is Peirce-l. Unlike many mailing lists, Peirce-l has some of the top scholars on the topic present. It has been relatively quiet the last month or so, but I've thoroughly enjoyed reading the threads. There is an archive of posts as well.
One that I'm in the process of joining, but which may be of interest to Mormons is the Reformed Epistemology list. This is a discussion list concerning the reformed epistemology approach of Platinga, Alston, Wolterstorff and others. I know Dennis Potter in particular has considered Mormonism in light of some Alston's writings, although I don't believe he has published anything yet. Reformed epistemology is interesting as it offers a way to ground religious belief as being justified. Not everone agrees, of course. As the title for one of Platinga's articles suggests, "Religious Belief without Evidence," not all aspects of reformed epistemology may be reconcilable to Mormonism. For one many point out that it offers no way of deciding between religious beliefs. For Mormons both these problems are avoided in that "evidence" from the Holy Ghost is typically taken as a key aspect to a testimony of Christ.
One last one that I rarely post to but which I thoroughly enjoy reading is HOPOS-L. This is a low volume but always informative list regarding philosophy of science. It really doesn't have much application to Mormonism, although I sometimes forward relevant posts off to Eyring-l. Like Peirce-l, I'm always impressed with the quality of posters and their own frequent place in the significant literature of the genre.
MORMON EPISTEMOLOGY IS A RARELY DISCUSSED TOPIC. At least in print. I was to write a brief summary of LDS epistemology for an encyclopedia of Mormon thought last year and had a most difficult time tracking down any article or book which discussed the topic in any depth. There are several articles in Dialog which mention epsitemological issues, but do not do so in terms of most of the issues in philosophy. One summary of a lot of the kinds of considerations that any Mormon epistemology must account for can be found in article by Truman G. Madsen. I don't think it can be said to really get into the epistemology. It does raise some very interesting points though. One of the most interesting is the idea that revelation may not consist in some phenomena that is interpreted. Rather the revelation may be in the act of thinking about various things. This is quite significant since it suggests a participatory way of thinking in which the boundary between self and God breaks down.
While this transgressing of the boundaries of "self" is characteristic of certain classes of "mystic" experience, I think that the way Mormons consider it is different. I suspect that one way to consider the issue loosely is in terms of "the given." I don't want to push this too much, since I agree with Sellar's critique of "the myth of the given." Rather I just want to point out that when we speak, we don't typically consider what English word is appropriate. There is no "translation" from some meta-language of thought into the words we say. It simply happens. In one way it is us that speaks. In an other it is something beyond my conscious self that speaks. The same occurs in interpretation. As I read these words the ideas typically come unbidden to my mind. Only in the case of a failure of this process do I become aware of the process.
I think that the revelatory phenomena as understand in Mormonism is quite similar. At some point this "unconscious" is not simply the unconscious of the self but becomes the collective unconscious of the spirit. This is not to say that we can not deal with a more traditional subject - object or interpretation - phenomena dichotomy. It does suggest, however, that we must be careful on relying on the stability of any such divide. At a minimum it suggests that the simple notion of a self that empiricism depends upon may be unreliable.
I'VE BEEN THINKING ABOUT TRANSCENDENCE AND DERRIDA FOR SEVERAL YEARS NOW. The part of Derrida I have been trying to understand is all wrapped up into the issues of fundamental ontology. Many philosophers have dealt with this. Those most interesting the past century or so have been Derrida, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Levinas and more recently Marion, Caputo, and Hart. The fundamental issue, as I see it, ends up being a kind of neoPlatonism and how we ought to consider the One or Being that Plotinus speaks of.
Being must not fluctuate, so to speak, in the indefinite, but must be fixed by limit and stability; and stability in the intelligible world is limitation and shape, and it is by these that it receives existence. (Plotinus, Enneads, V.1.7)
Each of the things which are being thought brings out along with itself sameness and otherness... Therefore the thinker must apprehend one thing different from another and the object of thought in being thought must contain variety. (ibid, V.3.10)
Plotinus can thus be seen in many ways as anticipating certain late 19th and early 20th century advances in semiotics. Like Saussure's semiotics, Plotinus sees signs (things being thought) as wrapped up in a matrix of differences and oppositions. Derrida sees himself in opposition to Plotinus and more particularly the pseudo-Dionysus and the tradition of negative theology. (Or speaking of what one can not speak) The fundamental "difference" comes down to the issue of what Being ought to be "seen" as. Derrida considers negative theology as speaking of a hyper-ousia or a beyond being, a superior, ineffable superior mode of being. Yet Derrida's "conception," that he calls différance. is seen as less than being. This "debate" over Being lies at the heart of a lot of recent work in Continental philosophy. It has often been called the "theological turn" in philosophy for its parallel to many considerations in medieval philosophy and theology. Marion, in particular, has brought forth a new consideration of Anselm's "ontological" argument so as to shed "light" on the problem.
There are several considerations to this dialog concerning Being that turn us back to Plotinus once more. We should remember that for Derrida, the analysis of Being and particularly metaphysics brings us to the role of presence. Philosophy has traditionally considered "entities" or "things thought" as complete. The goal of language in particular is to represent things. Taken literally it re-presents them or brings them back into presence. Derrida's break was to argue not only can we not re-present things (as required by language's basis in repetition) but that things never are in presence. We have but traces rather than entities themselves. The reasons for this are somewhat complex and go back to the earlier fact that we find "things" within a matrix of differences and oppositions. Derrida's full argument can be found in On Grammalogy. We won't repeat it here. Derrida'a critique of negative theology and by extension Plotinus is that it requires a kind of presence, even if it isn't a presence for us. It is an absolute origin. However it is interesting to consider Plotinus' own words in this regard.
For all things are not an origin, but they came from an origin, and this is no more all things, or one of them. (ibid III.8.9)
Some philosophers see in Plotinus, as well as the pseudo-Dionysus, not an opposition to Derrida but a recognition of the same logical requirements of philosophy that Derrida brings to light. For instance Eric Perl in "Signifying Nothing: Being as Sign in Neoplatonism and Derrida" argues for this harmony. (And several of the points above I borrow from him) To him both Derrida and Plotinus have in Being the explicit lack of an origin or of a ground. Perhaps a quote from the neoPlatonist Damascius can illustrate the issue. Those familiar with Derrida will instantly see in the discussion Derrida's discourse of différance.
No name will be able to convey the meaning of the transcendent, since a name belongs to a system of reference. One must finally deny the [name of the transcendent] as well. But even denial is a form of discourse, and that make what is denied an object of discourse, but the transcendent is nothing, not even something to be denied, in no way expressible, not knowable at all, so that one can not even negate its negation. Rather the only way of revealing that of whcih we speak is simply the deferral of language and of conceptions about it. (Deamscius, Doubts and Solutions Concerning First Principles I.21.12-18 as quoted in Rappe, Reading NeoPlatonism, 212)
In one way, [the term] "The Ineffable" is apophatic. By this I do not mean that the term designates anything positive at all, but that this term is not even a negation: it is complete removal. It is not merely not-a-thing (since what is not-a-thing is still something) but it absolutely has no reality. So we define this term, "ineffable," in such a way that it is not even a term. (Damascius, Doubts and Solutions Concerning First Principles I.42 as quoted in Rappe, Reading NeoPlatonism, 209)
Into this prepratory explanation, I wish to include a recent post from LDS-Phil I made to Jim Faulconer. I'll indent and color his comments so as to distinguish them from my own. I'll start by quoting the email of mine he is responding to.
"While Jim may disagree with me, I believe Derrida explicitly takes the view that this transcendence is nothing. ('There is nothing outside of the text, or there is no meaning outside of context') Exactly how this "nothing" is to be taken is debatable. I know that there is a common view in more mystic philosophies that see it as "nothing" as in not-a-thing. A kind of primordial chaos."
As is often the case, I'm not sure that I disagree with you, and if I do I'm not sure how. However, I think you're right to point to mysticism's understanding of the nothing as "not-a-thing," if "thing" means something specified by language, a meaning.
This is actually where I think my position has changed somewhat the past few months. I think *both* views can be found in mysticism. Put more simply there is a kind of mysticism that sees the neoPlatonic "One" or notions similar to it as a kind of hyperousia which is not a thing. Whether that is some formless void or not it still "exists" without being expressible in language. (Imagine "exist" with a big X through it) The other tradition, also found within the neoPlatonic tradition and probably in the east as well, is taking nothing quite literally. It isn't just not-a-thing but literally emptiness.
Both readings, for instance, can be found of the pseudo-Dionysus. This is where Derrida's criticism of negative theology runs into trouble. He assumes that the notion that negative theology is merely replacing nothing with not-a-thing which is still conceptualized as a thing.
This is why he bring up the metaphor of the Khora which is less than real rather than more than real. It is also, I think, why he uses the term undecidability rather than indeterminacy. Indeterminacy, while still ambiguous, tends to have the connotation of a formless void from which reality comes about. I am coming instead to see Derrida as saying something more akin to a "creation ex nihlo" in the sense of the expansion of context. Context changes, "things" becomes newly defined. But there is no source from which this arises.
This isn't just a problem of language, as some take it. Rather it is the rejection of anything in any sense of the word. It is, I think, the acceptance that change rests upon a basis that can't be explained. There simply is change without why. Any attempt to speak of not-a-thing really is just to invoke a hidden discourse in which thingness re-emerges.
I think Derrida parts company with mysticism in that he takes our encounters with things-in-themselves in the world seriously: we encounter the things we intend and language doesn't capture that encounter, but the encounter is of some thing, an in-itsel that exceeds language.
You see I think Derrida parts with mysticism (or at least the popular forms of it given my caveats) but that the positions are completely reversed from what you assert. I think it is the mystic who accepts seriously our encounters with things in themselves. I think it is Derrida who rejects anything like a Kantian conception. Rather I think he moves more to a Nietzschean conception in which things-in-themselves only make sense in an "eternal recurrence" sort of view. i.e. we can speak of things, but we must recognize that the things are not yet finished.
To speak of a thing-in-itself is simply to suggest in a hidden way that there is some "in itself" transcending time and that the progression (or determination through time) of a thing is merely the manifestation of this hidden presence. Yet it is just that presence that Derrida (and perhaps even Nietzsche) reject.
To me it is the temporal issues that are key. I think there is a way of viewing Platonism which sees eternal forms as already complete. There is always a hidden presence. I think a different approach is to see them as pure potential. The potential of all potential differences. (Which of course gets one into transfinite numbers in that all potential differences is itself infinite) The question then is whether in speaking of a thing we are speaking of potential or the thing as it is, has been and will be.
It is this point (obviously relevant to Mormonism) that is where I think we may differ, given previous conversations. When we speak, do we refer to potential — to that particular conception of Platonism, do we refer to some actualized presence in that particular conception of Platonism, or do we refer to a thing, recognize that the thing is not yet complete. i.e. that our reference refers in an undecidable way.
Put more simply, what is it that is undetermined in the act of reference? I think that Derrida is arguing that it is our conscious (individual or collective) act of referring. i.e. that reference is not a once and for all act, but an act that is endlessly repeated but with each repetition always different and redefining of the reference. This is significant since it implies the defining and determination are not and never can be expressed in terms of things-in-themselves. There is no thing-in-itself. Rather things are determined via referring (emphasis on the -ing) This entails that the objective/subject divide breaks down and existence itself is always participatory. I am defined and exist not by some hyper-textual soul, but by an encountering within the universe. Put simply once again, we must take literally the "there is nothing outside of context." And any claim that there is a beyond — some "thing-in-itself" — is to have that beyond actually within context.
This is radically important for Mormon theology as it entails that any soul must be conceived of materialistically (in the broad sense of materialism) We can not have an Aquinas-like Soul, as say Moreland would have us do. This is perhaps a more proper conception of Nietzsche's inverted Platonism. It is inverted by the denial of a dual world in any sense. All that is, is the material universe. (Meaning by universe the "all," including the scientific sense of multiverse) This not just a linguistic issue but an issue within realism.
I'm not sure whether I want to say that language makes possible ordinary experience — i.e., experience that is part of an order and, so, experience in which the things we encounter are what they are in virtue of their relations to other parts of the order--or whether language is one instance of the ordering of experience among others. I lean toward the former view, but there are enough questions about that view that I don't know how committed I am to it.
I think there is one alternative you missed which is far more radical, but I'm coming to believe, more characteristic of Derrida. That is that existence itself is linguistical - in the very broad sense of language. Put more accurately, existence is in terms of signs. Existing is signifying. There is nothing outside of signification.
In this reading Derrida is actually moving towards a general conception of semiotics as reality. In this he is actually closer to what Peirce conceived of in the 19th century.
This also explains Derrida's text. If existence is semiotic, then any text can be deconstructed within the semiotic system of the text because the meaning of the text must contain the "all." (All context) Any sub-text (i.e. any actual philosophical text) implicitly limits the semiotic reality to the sub-text itself. Deconstruction is the de-limiting of the boundaries of the text. It is possible because of a general project of semiotics itself. (Or in Derrida's terms, grammatology)
To the degree that we encounter things in the world by means of ordinary language, we encounter them in an "impoverished" way. [...] That impoverishment is necessary; without it we couldn't function as human, cognitive, rational beings,
Put a different way what you call ordinary is but one example of a sign-system. But what you say is true of all sign-system. They are impoverished due to the temporal requirements of existence itself.
However, that language cannot transcend itself and that ordinary experience is not in-itself transcendent do not imply that there is no transcendence.
That is true. But it also doesn't follow that there is transcendence in the sense of a hidden presence. I believe what transcendence "is" is the recognition of the temporal aspect of existing.
In fact, the Derridean/Heideggerian (and, I believe, Levinasian and Marionian) view is that the non-transcendence of ordinary experience and language belie a transcendence that they do not capture but that makes them possible. The simplest example of that transcendence is found in deixis, pointing of various kinds.
I'll not speak to Heidegger, as I think he is inconsistent on this matter. I think the latter Heidegger (to the degree I've read him) is like Derrida on these matters. I think the logic of Being and Time points this way but from what I've read I'm not sure Heidegger accepted it at that time or even in his middle period.
I think that Marion, Caputo, and many others reject this conception for a kind of hidden Platonism of presence. I rather suspect Levinas does as well, although I'd have to read more of the latter Levinas again before making that claim.
Heidegger argues that we encounter transcendence, the thing-in-itself, in the experience of the work of art. The work of art points to something in-itself, something particular.
The issue, in this context, is thus whether we accept that this "pointing to" ought to be accepted, or if it is a lie that our logical conception of intentionality requires. i.e. does intentionality (or more accurately the language of intentionality) demand the impossible.
This is once again the same issue we see in the pseudo-Dionysus merely manifest a different way. In other words does the aporia suggest that there "is" an inconceivable that is necessary? Or does the aporia suggest that what belief necessitates is impossible, thereby demanding the rejection of the belief.
Put simply again, does the aporia speak of a beyond language or does the aporia demand the rejection of a beyond language.
This is not a trivial point and gets us into the very theological conception of logic and God. Is God's ousia bound by logic? The history of that question is the history of differance in a way.
Marion argues that the experiences of art works, persons, and religious symbols are experiences of things-in-themselves rather than only ordered things; these are experiences of what exceeds language, events in which something points beyond itself to some thing-in-itself.
Yes, and in this I think Marion reverts to a kind of hidden mystical Hegelism.
So, is transcendent knowledge possible? It depends on what one means by "knowledge." If we mean "assertions about the world with propositional content," the answer is "not fully." All propositional knowledge is impoverished: it points beyond itself but can never succeed in doing more than that.
Yes. Which then raises the temporal issues. I'll not go into this, but if propositional knowledge of all particulars in the future is possible, if there is a "whole" in the Nietzschean sense of "eternal recurrence" as a proposal in the realist tradition, what does that say about Derrida.
It is this issue, entirely wrapped up in the notion of transfinite numbers, that I am now trying to think through. i.e. given physics, is there an "all" after all.
I recognize that Nietzsche's arguments in this regards and his reworking
of Stoicism are often neglected or discounted. But as I've been working
through the logic of Derrida's position, I find that eternal recurrence keeps
popping up... But, unlike I think for Nietzsche, in the context of transfinite
numbers rather than a simple infinity of 
. (Which I suspect was
not something Nietzsche was familiar with) The question then becomes what
we can speak of in a realist materialistic project of transfinite numbers.
This, however, gets back into physics and I'm not at all prepared to head down that avenue just yet.
and Theology
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