The Historicity of Knowledge Claims
(with an introduction by his son, Jerry Soneson)
Introduction to My Father’s Reports from the Midnight of the Soul
On June 28, 1992, my father had a serious stroke while vacationing at his summer home in northern Minnesota. After spending about a week in the hospital in Brainerd, he was transferred to the Sister Kenny Institute for Rehabilitation in Minneapolis. One part of his rehabilitation was speech therapy. The two pieces below were delivered orally by my father to his speech therapist, his wife, and two sons. They were recorded on tape and have been transcribed without revision. The first speech was delivered 14 days after his stroke, on July 12, and the second about three weeks later, on August 6. The speech therapist wisely challenged him to discuss his sense of vocation before and after the stroke. “Talk to me about your innermost feelings about this experience. Do you still think of yourself as a teacher?” That inspired him to speak as though he had an audience in an introduction to Philosophy course.
My father has insisted that these speeches remain unedited. As a university teacher concerned about the quality of college writing, I was at first puzzled by this request. Surely these words, I thought, could use a sharper focus and better organization. Yet this was to miss the point. Indeed, upon further conversation with my father, I realized I had missed several important points.
The first thing is that both of these speeches or lectures constitute historical records of my father’s pilgrimage. He is not delivering eternal and unchangeable propositions about the world but is examining and assessing himself and his worth. People who have had a stroke know how it can plunge one into the very midnight of the soul. Stripped of abilities previously taken for granted, utterly dependent on others for meeting even the most basic needs, one feels useless, a mere victim of powers beyond one. My father talks of this experience as being “felled” like a tree, for his sense of self-identity and worth as a productive member of the community had suddenly and unexpectedly and cruelly been cut out from underneath him. These two speeches mark significant events in my father’s ensuing struggle with this problem of self-worth. In articular, they are both successful attempts to understand who e was within these particular debilitating circumstances, and what possibilities there now were for meaningful activity in the future. We may regard them, I think, as historical reports of light from the midnight of the soul, reports which really ought to stand with all their hope and human imperfections.
The second thing is that these are examples of speech events that have been so important to my father as a teacher. For my father, the spoken word has always been more important than the written word. The written word, for all its polish and sophistication, is always cold and artificial next to ordinary speech. Disembodied, detached from historical context by its perfections, it too often simply pronounces, telling others what is the case or what to believe and do. All of this has its place, of course, but not in my father’s heart. For him, the joy of life and teaching has always been interchange, challenging others and being challenged on matters of ultimate concern, matters having to do with speaking and knowing and truth and goodness and God. This sort of verbal interchange on these matters is of great value to my father for what it does, for it makes possible the discovery and growth of meaning and purpose which my father calls the “‘self.”
This is related to a third point that can be made. It is common to read an article and look for a key point, reducing the written word to that point. Although speaking can also assert a point or points, it lends itself more readily than writing to what Kierkegaard calls “indirect communication.” This sort of communication has been the method my father has used in all his teaching, and it can be seen in these speeches. He does not directly assert claims about what is the case with the world. For him, stories, like the story of the bricklayer, and provocative claims, like the claim that “all claims are subject to discussion, including this one,” and especially questions — questions about goodness and truth and knowledge and so on — all of these doings are indirect in the sense that they are meant to encourage others to think for themselves, to examine their own presuppositions, their own beliefs of matters of ultimate concern. “What do you think?” he is asking in all of this. “Where do you find meaning? What kind of meaning do you find? What use is this meaning? What difference does it make? Is it good? Is it reliable or will it fail you? How do you know?” These sorts of questions, of course, are familiar to his students, but they have often been misunderstood by others as skepticism or a mere irritant. But that is foolishly to miss the point of these speech acts. As with the work of Kierkegaard, the aim of all of this, from beginning to end, has been religious in nature: Above all, it has been an indirect acknowledgment of the mystery and grace and goodness of God in human life, for it assumes that this grace of God will be made visible by encouraging others to work out and appropriate the Christian tradition for themselves, organizing it into meaningful patterns that they can live. The quality and pattern and continuity of meaning and living, after all, are not things that can be handed over directly to someone else; rather, they are matters of personal discovery, the discovery by each person of religious meaning and fulfillment which can be encouraged and supported and enhanced by stories and provocative claims and questions. This is what speaking with another can do, and it is why speaking — in its immediate and unaltered form — has been and still is so important to my father.
After his second speech, the speech therapist at Sister Kenny commended my father and gave him a passing grade for comprehension and delivery. Then she said that she had a question to ask. As my father puts it, “That was the best commendation of all, indirectly communicated.” — Jerry Soneson, The University of Northern Iowa.
Mel’s Reports
I: July 12, 1992
The discipline which I teach is philosophy, primarily philosophy of language and of religion. I have pursued it rather vigorously, not only because it intrigues me in terms of curiosity, but also because it intrigues me in terms of my own sense of religious expression. I have worked assiduously with the various philosophers and tried to put them together in my own thinking so that I have a sense of my own self and my own identity in relation to the religious claims of my tradition. It is in this sense that I have followed the various modern ways of looking at philosophy and of looking at how philosophy affects our thinking — not only the thinking of a religious person, but also the thinking of the person who is aware of the various dimensions of our culture and what our culture has contributed to our own sense of self-identity.
When I was going to the University of Minnesota, I always worked construction in the summertime. I was a hod carrier and brick carrier. I carried these supplies to the men who were laying the brick for the building. I would climb way up and walk across the scaffold. It was a little difficult for me to get used to the scaffold, but that was the way I had to go. And when I would bring up the brick and bring up the mortar, they would want to have it done a certain way. The mortar had to be a certain consistency and so forth, They might say, “OK, this is all right,” but more often they would say, “C’mon now, mix it up much better.”
Well, I was somewhat intimidated by those bricklayers. However, I can recall one time when one of the bricklayers said, "Now I want this mortar to be good.”
“Good,” I said, “What do you mean by good?”
He said, “Well, you know what I mean when I say good.”
Then I shifted just a little bit and said, “What does it mean to do a good act?”
He said, “Well, you sure know what that is, don’t you?”
I said, “Well, do you?” I kept asking him this, and that was my undoing.
The bricklayer started to get a little disturbed by my pestering him about the meaning of the word good. All at once he said “Good? You know what good is. Everybody knows what is good.”
“Well, I just would like to have you explain it a little for me,"
I said. About this time, I realized that I had really gone too far.
He had a big trowel that looked almost like a sword and he came right at me (I was up on the scaffold, remember) and said “Do you know what good is? If you don’t know what good is, you’d better get off this scaffold.”
I said, “OK, OK.” I sort of learned my lesson at that point. Don’t try to get people to explain too much what they are saying. I guess I was lucky to get off the scaffold alive. But I still do have trouble with the word “good.”
II: August 6, 1992
I should like to address the topic of the historicity of all claims to knowledge, including this one — this claim to knowledge that I make when I say, “All claims to knowledge have historicity as their source.”
It may sound rather trivial to use the word historicity and claim it as the basis for the development of the claims to knowledge. I should like to try to explain a little bit what I mean by it. Another way of stating it is that all claims to knowledge are subject to discussion, including this one. That is to say, that I along with others would like to discuss the issue that all claims to knowledge are relative or historical in nature.
The way that I wish to describe it is by using an understanding of language. From an understanding of language, I wish to develop the notion that the claims to knowledge are relative historically — that is, that they arrive in time. Now i@ opposite notion comes to us basically from Socrates through Plato that all ideas have an eternal character to them. In this view, ideas exist independent of time and history, and we would not have the ideas if they were not eternal. That is to say, the words that are representative in our language, such as “table” and “chair” and any object, have an eternal form. This is the claim. And, from this we derive the knowledge that we have. Plato has been very influential historically in emphasizing the point that all knowledge claims finally have an eternal character to them. That is to say, that the language of the claim to knowledge is itself, finally, of an eternal nature.
The idea or the notion of mathematics, of course, provides the model for this. Mathematics provides the source, you might say, of our understanding of the precise things in the world. That is to say, it is as if numbers and the forms of mathematics and algebra claim to have an absolute character to them that need not be talked about or questioned. One just accepts them because they are real. This was the model until the middle of the last century for knowledge claims. The interesting thing is that this was utilized by the Christian Church to form the basis for the absolute truth of the claims of the Church. This has come down to us in a very, very strong form and influence on our thinking. Alfred North Whitehead says that the claims to truth based upon these presuppositions by religion led to obscurantism in the medieval period.
Today, claims to absoluteness and eternal significance are b on science, because there is a character of certainty abou science that you don’t have in the other humanities. It is in this way that the claim that all things — including ideas and truth — are historical has, I have said, a character of triviality about it, because anybody knows that this language came from here and that language came from there and words are always to be understood in terms of their historical derivation. We can say that, theoretically, all knowledge is historical, but we may not believe it. Because they are so much a part of our thinking, we may not see how the claims to know are the claims by which we live. So we usually conclude that science, after all, is much more certain than any other form of knowledge, and so we make science a norm for all language. Because of this scientific way of thinking in our culture, the process of developing our knowledge is within the context of a norm for knowledge that is primarily scientific in nature. So much so, that claims of religion and claims of politics can usually be reduced to science and scientific language. If the claims are not reducible to scientific language, we begin to be skeptical about them.
There has been a struggle throughout the history of western civilization between the idea of the eternality of truth, of which science is the most recent example, and the historicity of truth. This is so because of a word that has become absolute in our history. The word is empirical. We say, “After all, that is empirical.” And, by saying that, we almost say eternal in nature. Why do we say that? Well, we say it because it has been the norm of our activity. We recognize technology, of course, and the wonderful achievements of science in terms of what has been needed for the development of medicine and for scientific investigation of space and all the wonderful things that are recognized as being very significant in our culture. As a result, there are institutions that become surrounded by or enmeshed in scientific certainty. What we recognize in the institutional social life is that the institution is in itself somewhat of a certainty because we do have the knowledge that it is a part of our acting and we can observe it empirically.
But we find in any civilization that the real problem is the problem of change. We do hear about one thing at one time being absolutely the way it should be. The conservative says, "We got to keep this now.” And the liberal says something to the effect that, “Well, we have to change.” This is right at the core, you might say, of our present political scene. The issue for many people is that we should recognize that change is very much a part of the meaning of democracy. And here again, we see that the word of a language that expresses democracy is a wonderful word, especially for nations that have been under tyranny for many years. All at once the word democracy has become the word whereby they can become free. And so we see that one of the huge parts of our demand for institutions is the freedom from the claims of knowledge that were the basis for the institutions of the past. Like any attempt at revolution, any attempt at reformation is an attempt to say that the present culture demands freedom from those kinds of restrictions that have been identified with the institutions of the past. Well, that helps to explain further how influential our language is. Language is retained through institutions, whether political or religious in nature, through any social organization that means something to people.
Now having said all this, I raise the question: Am I saying something that means something to you, whether historically or particularly, in present life? I would like you to see that the political and the religious institutions are fighting to retain the very character of their institution of the past. Would you say, for instance, that there is something about the historicity of language and of institutions that rests on the basis of claims to knowledge? If you recognize that as being the case, would you say there must be some eternal language, some eternal truth? Truth of course is a big word. It is truth for which we all say we are searching. When President Bush says, we have the truth in family value, do you know what he is talking about, finally? Do you see that truth is a word of very high emotion? We can talk about the truth basically because we know that whenever we untangle it we see upon analysis that it is based on some presupposition as to the nature of language and of the truth of claims to know.
Finally, what I am advocating in this whole business, my son has written about in a book that has just been published. In this book, entitled Pragmatism and Pluralism, which is based upon the study of John Dewey, Jerry Soneson argues that language is the product of history. Pragmatism is the word that becomes more influential and means a great deal to me. Some realize the importance of Pragmatism, and others think it is the basis for what is a highly emotional word. That word is relativism, which means that claims to knowledge are relative to what other people say.
Most everyone understands relativism — in the sense that the people of Iraq understand the world differently than we do and that their language is different from ours and that their religion is different. But, somehow or other, we feel that we have the absolute claim to knowledge. This is the reason why we can’t get along, in terms of the issues of the past that strike so forcefully. We think we know exactly what is the truth, what is the value, what is the way the human being should live. It is pretty hard to shake us of our belief about a problem, and so we are willing to go to war to take care of it. In such a situation, most of us say it is right that we impose our way of life and our idea of truth and our idea of of morality upon the rest of the world. After all, we know that is the white man’s burden.
Why can’t we live with pluralism? Why can’t we function in the way that says, “Why sure, their understanding is different because they arose historically different than we did.” Even within our society, we recognize these kinds of differences. Well, my point is, finally, that the issues of relativism and pluralism have their source in claims to knowledge that are inherent in all of our thinking. If we fail to make any analysis of these claims and the historical basis of these claims, we fail to see what these differences really mean. The issue again is what is the character, what is the nature of language? As my final point, I think the work of Wittgenstein in philosophy of language is perhaps the most significant in terms of this very point. The historicity of the development of language reveals that language is developed only in terms of its use, and use is historical. As Whitehead says in his book Modes of Thought, we all are subject to what is called the fallacy of the perfect dictionary.