edenism

The defining feature of modernity is the rejection of existing perspectives (religious, traditional, artistic, etc.) and the desire to create new perspectives from synthesis and innovation. Postmodernism, then, is something like an Incompleteness Theorem for philosophy. Any unified perspective is necessarily incomplete. Of course, the challenge then is to construct something useful despite these limitations. This leads us to metamodernism, which can be described simply as “pluralism of perspective.” One can think of a New Age scientist who practices chemistry by day and Wicca by night or the increasing popularity of astrology by people who profess not to believe in it.

But is such pluralism unique to the last century?

I would like to refer again to Matthew 7:15-20 (which I quoted in https://write.as/edenism/belief-as-a-tool), where Jesus leaves open an opportunity for pluralism by suggesting that we judge beliefs by their impact. Under such a guideline, there seems to be no harm in an anxious student consulting a horoscope for relief or a cancer patient choosing to believe they will be cured.

There is a phenomenon in America, where every conversation about Buddhism quickly converges to a discussion about whether or not Buddhism is a religion. The popular claim is that Buddhism is not a religion because it does not explicitly require any belief in supernatural phenomena, and does not have strict imperatives, but rather suggestions for mitigating dukkha. In other words (according to this account), Buddhism does not require belief in things that cannot be known.

For one thing, it is worth noting that Jesus, in passages like Matthew 5:32, demonstrates that what matters is the principles behind the commandments, rather than the commandments themselves. In this way, it may be possible to claim that Jesus was to Judaism as the Buddha was to Hinduism.

For another, we should, as pluralists of perspective, consider whether religion really makes any requirements of our knowledge at all. Is it necessary to know that there was a man named Jesus whose body rose from the ground after three days any more than it is necessary to know that there was a man named Siddartha who was prophesied to be a spiritual leader? If we are to take the perspective that beliefs should be judged by their beneficence, then the question is irrelevant.

The (mis)application of dilemmas of knowledge to religion can be demonstrated by the current popularity of declaring, if you are not a theist, that you are not an atheist but rather an agnostic. Any reasonable person, theist or atheist, should be agnostic unless they think they are personally privy to divine knowledge.

If, as I suspect, this concern with knowledge is an artifact of the scientific revolution, then it is possible that the problem of religion was never one of knowledge to begin with. In other words, the ancients were already metamodern with respect to religion.

(Of course, it would be ridiculous to claim that the average ancient had a plurality of perspectives, but this is no different from the fact that the average American in 2019 has a pre-modern perspective.)

There is a challenge inherent in attempting to hold a plurality of perspectives; the intellectual tradition extending from the Enlightenment is incompatible with such a construct. This, then, is the work ahead. Perhaps the solution lies in the reification of Discourse.

Update 4/16/19:

I started reading Pragmatism as Post-Postmodernism: Lessons from John Dewey, and it suggests the same point I wrote about above, including the reference to Matthew:

”...[William] James called Pragmatism 'a new name for some old ways of thinking.' He was alluding to a famous saying in the Christian Bible. In the parable of the fig tree related in Matthew 7:16-20...”