Appropriating the Atheists (Part 1)

Merold Westphal is professor of philosophy at Fordham University. The author of History and Truth in Hegel’s Phenomenology; God, Guilt, and Death and Suspicion and Faith, he is codirector of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy and a past president of both the Hegel Society and the Kierkegaard Society of North America.

Last summer Westphal directed a Calvin College Faculty Seminar in Christian Scholarship on the topic “Postmodern Philosophy and Christian Thought,” made possible by a grant from the Pew Charitable Trusts. The seminar explored the hypothesis that, in spite of the intentions of its major proponents, postmodern philosophy is not inherently secular but open to possibilities for appropriation by Christian thought. (A book based on the seminar, Appropriating the Post- modernists, edited by Westphal, is forthcoming from Indiana University Press.) The interview took place in the Hekman Library at Calvin College.

There is much confusion as to what postmodernism might possibly mean. How do you use this term?

When I use the term postmodernism I use it in a narrow sense to refer to a fairly small group of contemporary philosophers. What they have in common is a repudiation of certain themes that are not inappropriately referred to as modern.

As far as a larger cultural phenomenon, it’s hard to make postmodernism work as a description of it. I’m tempted to play with the notion that, if there is a transition from modernity to postmodernity, it would be a cultural shift from faith in science to faith in technology. Put in Nietzschean terms, that would mean a shift from the quest for truth to the quest for power–not just in social and collective ways, but in personal and individual ways.

Frederic Jameson, in Postmodernism, Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, writes: “It is safest to grasp the postmodern as an attempt to think the present historically in an age that has forgotten how to think historically in the first place.” This attempt to write a history of the present, which Foucault finds so significant in Kant’s little essay “What Is Enlightenment,” seems characteristic of postmodern ways of thought. What does it mean to write a history of the present?

I think the first step in writing a history of the present is a recognition of the present as historically produced: the realization that the way we do things now is neither natural nor eternal nor inevitable but the product of historical developments that are shot through with contingencies and worse, so that one learns to see oneself and one’s culture as a particular moment in the historical process. I think the kinds of historical critical analysis that Foucault has done, the kinds of historical critical analysis that people in various dimensions of the Marxist tradition have done, are the sorts of things that need to be done, and one needs to appreciate the ways that these can be seen as insightful from a Christian perspective even if the people who have done them aren’t operating out of Christian frameworks of thought.

How would you write a history of the present in the context of the Christian scholarly community vis-a-vis the postmodern?

I’m not sure I know. I think the Christian scholarly community, like the larger scholarly community, is recognizing that certain Enlightenment ideals of certainty and clarity and objectivity have become problematic. And I think everyone is scrambling, including Christian scholars, to try to find a way to formulate a conception of reason and reasonableness that does not involve inflated claims that cannot be fulfilled and that, on the other hand, doesn’t see cynicism as the alternative to that kind of Platonic or Cartesian optimism.

You stand in a curious relationship to these two modes of discourse. Readers might be interested to know that as active as you have been in the Society of Christian Philosophers, you have also been extremely active and influential in the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy, which no one has ever accused of being particularly interested in Christian philosophy. You stand in a peculiar position in both camps.

I was enormously helped some years ago when Al Plantinga gave his inaugural lecture at Notre Dame and reminded us all that, as Christian scholars, or more particularly Christian philosophers, we belong to two communities: on the one hand, to the Christian church, and on the other hand, to the academy. And we have different responsibilities; overlapping, but different insofar as we are citizens of those two kingdoms. I do think of my work as addressing two distinct audiences, sometimes at the same time, and having a different impact in relationship to them. I find secular thought to have a critical bite that Christians should be taking seriously, and I say to my Christian friends,  Hey, we’ve got to attend to this. And I say, at the same time, to my secular friends, Look, you don’t have a monopoly on these critical insights; other people can put them to uses quite different from those in which you are most interested.

Do you ever feel schizophrenic?

No, not really. I sometimes feel like I’m getting shot at from both sides, but I don’t feel incoherent in myself.

Following the lead of Paul Ricoeur in his pathbreaking book Freud and Philosophy, where Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud are identified as the modern “masters of suspicion,” your recent work has focused on the surprising relationship between suspicion and faith. You wrote a book by this title in which you try to appropriate insights from these three famous atheists, insisting that we take suspicion seriously, and demonstrating the religious uses of atheism. (Suspicion and Faith has not been completely unsuccessful in this regard; I heard that a local pastor was using the book as the basis for Lenten meditations.) I have three questions in this regard: How did you come to this project, what do you mean by suspicion, and what do you see as the benefits and limitations of such an approach?

I came to this project by accident or by Providence. I discovered in the very early days of my teaching after graduate school that in Marx and Nietzsche–and somehow Freud got into the picture there, too; I don’t know just how–there were insights that were compelling and that illuminated my own personal life and the social life of which I was a part. I found myself saying, Hey, my job isn’t to refute these insights, but to recognize their force. Gradually it dawned on me that what these thinkers were doing was reflecting on the fallenness of human nature, though they didn’t use that vocabulary. So I came to refer to them along with some others, like Sartre, as “the great secular theologians of original sin,” as the ones who showed the way in which pride, personal and corporate, which is the heart of human fallenness, works itself out in the particulars of the modern world. Once I came to see them as theologians against their will, I became intrigued in the possibility of presenting them in this light, and that was the origin of the project of Suspicion and Faith.

What I mean by suspicion is something different from skepticism. The skeptic asks about religious beliefs, Are they true? Is there enough evidence?

Suspicion asks a different sort of question. The atheistic masters of suspicion start with the assumption that the beliefs are false, and they don’t usually bother even to argue that. But they ask a different kind of question. They ask, What kinds of motives would lead people to hold these beliefs? What kinds of uses do these beliefs have in the lives of individuals in communities that hold them?

The suspicion is that the motives and functions to which religious beliefs are put are not reputable from the standpoint of Christian values. There is a great deal of will to power, and manipulation, and Phariseeism at work in the functions that these beliefs play in the lives of believers and believing communities; and there is a kind of internal incoherence between what religious communities profess and the way in which they structure their systems of belief in practice. One consequence of this is that one can’t defend oneself against the charge of suspicion by arguing in the fashion of traditional apologetics that the beliefs in question are true. Because even if they are true, the role that they play in the lives of individuals and communities may be problematic.

(First of two parts; click here to read Part 2)

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