Debating topics

[Chaerophon]

Well, my quote is certainly oversimplified for the sake of not starting an entire new discussion. An excerpt that you may be interested to read (or not :)):

EDIT: Added reference at the bottom.

The Language of Christianity: Interpretation as Power Base

The question of the language appropriate to a proper understanding of things is particularly important for a comprehension of the history of Christianity, too, because, as we all know, Christianity takes as its central text a book full of poetry, narrative, imagery. And faith in what this book "means" or what it "reveals" about the nature of the divinity is a central part of being a Christian. Many of the most urgent and contumacious disputes in the history of Christianity have arisen out of the metaphorical nature of this holy text: since metaphors and metaphorical narratives are inherently ambiguous, they need interpretation. And whose interpretations are decisive in any disagreement becomes a vital concern.

Controlling the text and maintaining the authority to determine interpretations of the holy text were always a central imperative of the medieval Catholic Church, which recognized very clearly and correctly that to give people (even parish priests) access to the Bible would result in interpretative anarchy. Hence, the Catholic Church's strict control of the book, its refusal to distribute it widely or to translate it into the common language of the people, and its insistence that the basis for popular sermons should be, not the Bible itself, but the clear and unambiguous official interpretations authorized by the Vatican.

The Church's suspicion of the anarchy that would follow upon any general access to the Bible revealed itself as correct once Luther's Reformation made the holy text generally available in translation. All of a sudden, the enforced interpretative consensus dissolved, and scores of competing sects arose, each claiming a correct version of the truth derived from an interpretation of the metaphorical constructions in the Bible. An extreme (but not altogether uncommon) example was the war between the followers of Zwingli and the followers of Muntzer, two Protestant leaders, over whether the communion wafer was the body of Christ or symbolized the body of Christ and over the interpretation of baptism. Many thousands died in the quarrel over these interpretative questions.

Said Zwingli to Muntzer,
"I'll have to be blunt, sir.
I don't like your version
Of total immersion.
And since God's on my side
And I'm on the dry side
You'd better swing over
To me and Jehovah."

Cried Muntzer "It's schism
Is infant baptism.
Since I've had a sign, sir
That God's will is mine, sir,
Let all men agree
With Jehovah and me
Or go to hell singly"
Said Muntzer to Zwingli.

And each drew his sword
On the side of the Lord.
(Phyllis McGinley)

Today such issues which involve killing others over the ontological status of a biscuit or bathwater may seem ridiculous, but the issue is not. An authority which derives from a poetical metaphorical text must rest, not on that text, but on a particular interpretation of it. And whoever is the spokesperson for the official interpretation has official power. Thus, from this point of view, one can interpret the religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as quarrelsome interpretation run amok.

The Enlightenment Call for Linguistic Clarity

Certainly, the conclusion of the religious wars brought with it a demand to clean up language, to be wary of metaphors and especially of writing that was highly metaphorical, and to place our verbal understanding of the world and ourselves on a more rationally clear basis in a language more appropriate to such a requirement.

It's no accident that the period following the religious wars (the mid-seventeenth century) marks the beginning of an interest in dictionaries (whose major goal is to promote accuracy of shared denoted meanings), a revival of interest in Euclidean geometry, a growing distrust of political and philosophical arguments based upon scripture, a rising criticism of extravagant rhetorical styles (like those of Shakespeare or John Donne or "enthusiastic" preachers), the beginning of a concerted attempt to understand moral and judicial questions mathematically, and a rising demand for a language as empty of ambiguous metaphor as possible.

We witness this in a number of writers, above all in Hobbes. As we discussed, Hobbes' major concern in Leviathan is to recommend practices which will minimize a return to the civil chaos of the religious wars and the English Civil War. And Hobbes is centrally concerned about language. Over half of Leviathan is concerned with religion, above all with the question of interpretation of scripture. For Hobbes is deeply suspicious of literary interpretation and has a clear preference for the language of geometry, the argumentative style of Euclid--not necessarily because that language provides a true description of the nature of the world (although many people claimed and still claim that it does) but rather because only that sort of deductive clarity--based on clear definitions and fundamental principles of deductive logic--can win wide agreement, can, that is, promote social harmony essential to political peace and "commodious living."

The reason for this preference in Hobbes seems clear enough. Metaphorical language breeds arguments over interpretations; such arguments breed civil quarrels; civil quarrels lead to a break down in public order and foster a return to a state of nature. A different language, one based on the precision of geometry, can foster agreement, because we all can share a common understanding if definitions are exact and the logic correct.

One of the attractions of the new science (although there was considerable argument about this) was that it offered an understanding of the world delivered in the most unambiguous way, in the language of mathematics rather than of scripture. Newton's equations, for those who could follow the mathematics, did not promote the sorts of arguments that arose from, say, the text about Ezekiel making the sun stand still or Moses parting the waters of the Red Sea or God's creating the world in a week. And what disagreements or ambiguities Newton's explanation did contain could be resolved, and were resolved, by a further application of the method he demonstrated (in the "normal science," as Kuhn calls it, which took place in the generations after Newton).

And throughout the nineteenth century, the rising success of the new science seemed to be delivering on the promise of an exact description of the world. And the application of this spirit of empirical observation and precise, unambiguous description to an understanding of history and morality, of the sort offered by Karl Marx, set up the hope of a triumph of the language of philosophy (as defined earlier) over the language of poetry (in spite of the objections of the Romantics).

It was an alluring vision, because it promised to lead, as Hannah Arendt points out, to the end of traditional political argument. Since we would all have a full and shared understanding of the way a just state really does work, we wouldn't need to argue about it (any more than we argue about the Pythagorean Theorem). Anyone could govern, since governing, traditionally the most challenging task in human affairs, would be simply a matter of applying known and agreed upon rules, something a technician could do. As Lenin observed, governing would be for cooks, because the truths of political life would be expressed in a language coherent to anyone, a language which did not require interpretation of any sort.

There was an enormously arrogant confidence or, if we think in terms of classical tragedy, of hubris about this, especially among some scientists and social scientists, who firmly believed that many of the most contentious moral, political, and scientific questions would soon be settled for all time. The future of physics, said A. A. Michelson in 1894, will consist of little more than "adding a few decimal places to results already known."

Nietzsche's Sense of Language: "Truth" as Metaphor

Nietzsche, as we have already seen, sets his sights firmly against such a confidence that language, any language, can provide an accurate description of the truth. That was, in the nature of things, impossible, because language is inherently metaphorical, it is an invented fiction, with a history, a genealogy, a contingent character.

For Nietzsche, the belief that the sort of language developed by Euclid or the new science­­with its emphasis on precision and logical clarity--is somehow "true to nature" is, like beliefs that any system is true, plainly erroneous. All language is essentially poetry, inherently metaphorical, inherently a fiction. Those who, like so many scientists, make claims that their descriptions of the world are true or even more accurate than alternative languages are simply ignorant of the metaphorical nature of all language.

In other words, for Nietzsche there is no privileged access to a final definitive version of life, the world, or anything else, and thus no privileged language for achieving such knowledge. Truth is, in Nietzsche's pregnant phrase, "a mobile army of metaphors," a historical succession of fictions, which does not, as Kant and Marx claimed, reveal any emerging higher truth, like progress or the march to a final utopia or a growing insight into how reality really works. In Nietzsche's view of language there is no final text available to us; there is only interpretation, or, more accurately, an unending series of freshly created interpretations, fresh metaphors.

Thus, as Rorty has observed, Nietzsche is announcing the end of the ancient war between poetry and philosophy by indicating that all we have in language is metaphor. We were mistaken in believing that the language of Euclid was anything other than one more fiction. It is not. Therefore, it has no special preeminence as the language most appropriate to a description of reality.

Since there is no privileged language and since accepting as true any inherited system of metaphor is limiting oneself to a herd existence, our central purpose is the construction of new metaphors, the assertion of new values in a language we have made ourselves. Hence, central to Nietzsche's vision of how the best human beings must live their lives is the insistence that individuals must create for themselves a new language, fresh metaphors, original self-descriptions. To escape the illusions of the past, to release the arrow in flight, these activities are linked to the creative ability to construct in one's life and language new metaphors.

Johnston, Ian. 2000. "There's Nothing Nietzsche Couldn't Teach Ya About the Raising of the Wrist" (Monty Python) A Lecture in Liberal Studies. http://www.mala.bc.ca/~johnstoi/introser/nietzs.htm.