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Theory-Making, Transference, and Anthropology: on D. Z. Phillips’ Rejection of Nonfoundationalist Theorizing

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 September 2014

Tiina Allik
Tiina Allik*
Affiliation:
Loyola University, New Orleans
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Abstract

The article argues that the motivations for Phillips' construal of all theory-making as necessarily foundationalist go beyond the epistemological debate about foundationalism vs. nonfoundationalism and that his construal is rooted in the anthropological assumption that the subjectivity of human persons is inevitably violated by analyses in terms of objective categories that are not derived from the self-understanding of the subjects under study. The article uses the distinction between etics and emics in linguistics and cultural anthropology and a psychoanalytic understanding of the inevitability of transference and countertransference in order to argue that an appreciation of human finitude and contingency should lead Phillips and others to anthropological views in which the inevitability of theory, transference, and the experience of the otherness of oneself and others is construed as not only inevitable but as pleasurable, i.e., as part of the goodness of created human nature.

Type
Articles
Information
Horizons , Volume 22 , Issue 1 , Spring 1995 , pp. 29 - 48
Copyright
Copyright © The College Theology Society 1995

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References

1 see, e.g., the discussions of the development of Western thought in Stout, Jeffrey, The Flight from Authority (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981)Google Scholar, and Rorty, Richard, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979).Google Scholar For a discussion of the relevance of nonfoundationlist philosophy for theology, see Placher, William C., Unapologetic Theology: A Christian Voice in a Pluralistic Conversation (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox, 1989).Google Scholar

2 See Tanner's, Kathryn description (God and Creation in Christian Theology: Tyranny or Empowerment? [New York: Basil Blackwell, 1988])Google Scholar of the tendency of modern discourse to decontextualize (to search the truth “by holding in abeyance the prejudices of place, the traditions of the past, and the authority of books” [124]) and to reify abstract distinctions (to regard distinctions that are “the products of a particular method of human inquiry” and that are drawn “for the promotion of certain interests” as “the already given features of reality itself which need only to be discovered by ‘direct grasp and envisagement’” [129]).

3 See Murphey, Nancey and McClendon, James, “Distinguishing Modern and Postmodern Theologies,” Modem Theology 5/3 (04 1989): 191–214Google Scholar for a description of three axes which they use to describe modern thinkers One axis is the epistemological axis, whose positive pole is foundationalism and whose negative pole is skepticism. They note that it might also be useful to add to their three-axes schema a “rhetorical” axis, whose positive pole would be detachment or objectivity and whose negative pole would be subjectivity or self-involvement (198, n. 28). This fourth axis was suggested to them by Terrence Tilley.

4 For discussions and critiques of the ideal of objectivity in modern Western philosophy see, e.g., Bordo, Susan R., The Flight to Objectivity: Essays on Cartesianism and Culture (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1987);Google ScholarSchott, Robin May, Cognition and Eros: A Critique of the Kantian Paradigm (Boston: Beacon, 1988);Google ScholarKeller, Evelyn Fox, Reflections on Gender and Science (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985);Google Scholar and Haraway, Donna J., Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991).Google Scholar

5 For a concise description of how this assumption manifests itself in different types of theological anthropologies, see Kelsey, David, “Human Being” in Hodgson, Peter C. and King, Robert H., eds., Christian Theology: An Introduction to Its Traditions and Tasks, revised and enlarged ed. (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1985), 167–93.Google Scholar

6 See note 4 above.

7 The work of Carol Gilligan and Nancy Chodorow in psychology, sociology, and psychoanalytic theory exemplifies this kind of approach and has also been a basis for thinkers in other fields.

8 See Mitchell, Stephen A. and Greenberg, Jay R., Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983);Google ScholarMitchell, Stephen A., Relational Concepts in Psychoanalysis: An Integration (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988);Google Scholar and Mitchell, Stephen A., Hope and Dread in Psychoanalysis (New York: Basic Books, 1993).Google Scholar

9 Examples of recent theorists who use relational models are Robert Stolorow, Thomas Ogden, and Jessica Benjamin.

10 For Phillips' views on the role of philosophy and theory in ethics see Phillips, D. Z., Interventions in Ethics (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Phillips, D. Z. and Mounce, H. O., Moral Practices (New York: Schocken, 1970).Google Scholar For Phillips’ views on the role of philosophy and theory in religion, see Phillips, D. Z., Wittgenstein and Religion (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11 Phillips, D. Z., Faith after Fourtdationalism (London: Routledge, 1988).Google Scholar

12 Ibid., 131-224.

13 This contrasts with the claims of some critics that Phillips and other Wittgen-steinian fideists are relativists and give up, among other things, the religious believer's claim of making objectively true statements about external realities.

14 See, e.g., ibid., 177ff.

15 For a brief description of the distinction between emics and etics and its relation to debates about objective and subjective categories in cultural anthropology and biblical criticism, see Brett, Mark G., Biblical Criticism in Crisis? The Impact of the Canonical Approach on Old Testament Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 15–21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar For discussions of issues related to the emics vs. etics distinction in sociology and anthropology, see Feleppa, Robert, “Emics, Etics, and Social Objectivity,” Current Anthropology 27 (1986): 243–55;CrossRefGoogle ScholarCurtis, James E. and Petras, John W., eds., The Sociology of Knowledge: A Reader (London: Duckworth, 1970);Google Scholar and Harris, M., The Rise of Anthropological Theory: A History of Theories of Culture (New York: Harper & Row, 1968).Google Scholar

16 See Phillips, D. Z., “Lindbecks's Audience,” Modern Theology 4/2 (01 1988): 133–54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

17 Berger, Peter, A Rumour of Angels (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1970), 66Google Scholar, cited in Phillips, , Faith after Foundationalism, 179.Google Scholar

18 See Placher's, discussion of anthropologists’ predilection for “pure” cultures (Unapologetic Theology, 65–67).Google Scholar

19 See Kelsey, , “Human Being” in Christian Theology, 167–93.Google Scholar

20 For a discussion of the history of different construals of the function and meaning of countertransference in analysis, see Feiner, Arthur, “Countertransference and the Anxiety of Influence” in Countertransference, ed. Epstein, Lawrence and Feiner, Arthur H. (New York: Jason Aronson, 1979), 105–28.Google Scholar

21 For a discussion of how Freud is both a man of his times and someone who broke out of the conceptual frameworks of his time, see Breger, Louis, Freud's Unfinished Journey: Conventional and Critical Perspectives in Psychoanalytic Theory (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981).Google Scholar

22 Phillips, D. Z., Through a Darkening Glass: Philosophy, Literature and Cultural Change (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982), 82–88.Google Scholar

23 Ibid., 88.

24 Lindbeck, George, The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1984), 36.Google Scholar

25 Winch, Peter, The Idea of a Social Science and Its Relation to Philosophy (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1958), 48.Google Scholar

26 As Lindbeck puts it, prereflective symbol systems (unconscious structures of meaning) are a “quasi-transcendental” a priori because they are culturally formed and maintained. This is a way of looking at the structure of the unconscious that opposes Freud's tendency toward essentialism in some phases of his development of psychoanalytic theory, i.e., the view that the unfolding development of the drives internal to the individual itself determines the structure of the mind and its unconscious contents, aside from the objects provided for the drives by the environment.

For an excellent discussion of how Freud's theories construe the development of psychic structure both as the result of the development of the innate content of the drives and as the accretion of structure due to relationships with external objects in the environment (see Greenberg and Mitchell, Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory).

27 One of the virtues of Ricoeur's, PaulFreud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1970)Google Scholar and Time and Narrative, vols.1–3 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984–1988)Google Scholar is his consistent affirmation of the simultaneity of the objective force and the subjective meaning of the contents of the unconscious.

28 See Tracy, Laura, “Catching the Drift”: Authority, Gender, and Narrative Strategy in Fiction (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1988), 1–23Google Scholar, for a discussion of the role of transference and countertransference in the analysis of textual meaning. According to Tracy, the author of a work fiction, in structuring a text, transfers “both conscious and unconscious needs, desires and conflicts onto the imagined reader” and thereby “places that reader in the relationship system he or she experienced as a child.” She says that “the position offered the imagined reader makes visible both personal and cultural necessity” (11). Although Tracy's subject matter is the interpretation of fictional texts, her discussion demonstrates how unconscious structures, categories, and interpretative schemes in the writing and reading of texts function as implicit theory.

29 The theme of the acceptance of human contingency as equivalent to the recognition of God's grace is a leitmotif in Phillips’ discussions of literature. See, e.g., Dilman, Ilham and Phillips, D. Z., Sense and Delusion (New York: Humanities Press, 1971).Google Scholar In his response to Ilham Dilman's analysis of Tolstoy's “The Life of Ivan Ilyich” (40-61), Phillips focuses on the accidental quality of Ivan's illness. For Phillips, Ivan has quested all his life for control and permanence and it is at the point where he realizes the contingency of human life that he becomes capable of a réévaluation of his former life. His disagreement with Dilman is over the issue of whether there is a theoretical way to bridge the moment at which Ivan experiences a revelation of the meaninglessness of his former life with his prior experience of himself. For Phillips, there are no categories which bridge these two states of mind, for the change in Ivan is itself a gift, a matter of grace or contingency. For similar discussions, see Phillips, D. Z., From Fantasy to Faith (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1991).CrossRefGoogle Scholar For example, when Phillips discusses Flannery O'Connor's story, “The Artificial Nigger” (212-21), he again dwells on the characters’ rejection and acceptance of human contingency as the equivalent of the rejection or acceptance of a common humanity.

30 See Dilman, and Phillips, , Sense and Delusion, 40–61Google Scholar for Phillips’ response to Dilman's analysis of Tolstoi's story, “The Life of Ivan Ilyich.”

31 For a discussion of the acceptance of the role of contingency in the formation of our highest capacities and values, see Rorty, Richard, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

32 For a discussion of the more object-like aspects of human existence, see Nussbaum, Martha C., The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).Google Scholar