09/13/2023 – Interreligious Dialogue: Fallibilism?

Much of what passes for interreligious dialogue is not dialogue says J. R. Hustwit. So J. R., what is interreligious dialogue? Let’s see what he says. Check this out. This is TenOnReligion.

Hey peeps, it’s Dr. B. with TenOnReligion. If you like religion and philosophy content one thing I really need you to do is to smash that sub button because it really helps out the channel. The transcripts are available at TenOnReligion.com and new episodes are posted about every two weeks, around noon, U.S. Pacific time, so drop me some views.

J. R. Hustwit is a former classmate of mine. He’s a professor of religion and philosophy and is currently the Dean of the College of Arts, Humanities and Sciences at Methodist University. His book published in 2014 titled Interreligious Hermeneutics and the Pursuit of Truth is a fairly short book at only 118 pages, but it packs a punch. He gets into the issues surrounding the connection between interreligious dialogue and hermeneutics. He addresses some serious concerns head-on. So, let’s get into it.

Philosophical hermeneutics explains the process of interpretation of religious, political, and other classical documents and texts from the past, but has also expanded its scope to include art and many other forms of human understanding. The problem is, language about religion often involves transcendent realities and thus operates beyond traditional human limits of understanding. Yet, religious truth claims remain live options for many people. When we become aware of our own finitude, we see that different religious worldviews have similar moral constructs as our own, thus we should take the beliefs of others as seriously as our own. Some like to denounce the religious claims of others by reinterpreting them in a non-religious way, but this involves as much imposition of one’s personal categories of understanding as judging a claim to be true or false. For example, Hustwit describes a popular false dilemma whereby only one religion’s claims are true or all religious beliefs are relative. Both of these are false because religious truth claims are hybrids of revelation and cultural constructions. But let’s talk about interpretation and hermeneutics for a minute.

Interpretation is a characterization of the way our minds process information. Three quick points as this relates to religion. First, the hybridity of understanding makes us ask how much of our understanding is the real world and how much comes from us and our own categories of understanding? Second, the distance between self and object, or ourselves and another religion, makes us ask is interreligious dialogue ultimately incommensurable? Third, the communal solidarity of meaning makes us ask what does it mean for a religious claim to be “true”? Understandings of a religion changes when it spreads geographically from one community to another because it depends on worldviews of interpreters. People simply understand something new in terms that are familiar to them, which changes from culture to culture. Interreligious dialogue, even if communicating in a shared language, usually straddles two different sub-cultures. But what do we mean by the phrase “interreligious dialogue”?

Dialogue means to speak across. Interreligious situations often display not only speaking across, but also writing and acting across. In a conversation, each party can clarify and guide the other towards intended meaning. Written texts are not the same. They are alienated and liberated from the circumstances of their creation and thus they have more autonomy in meaning. Actions are also liberated from their actual performance because the meaning is a matter of interpretation by the witnesses and later hearers or readers of the event through another’s second-hand interpretation. Hustwit refers to this, especially as it relates to writing, as the intentionalist fallacy whereby understanding seeks to reconstruct the author’s intentions. We can never stand in the exact same historical or cultural situation as another person. Yet we can and do use dialogue to expand our own horizons and transform our own perspectives. We are not prisoners within the bounds of our own traditions. But can we really understand another religion?

Hustwit describes three positions. Incompatibility is when two competing expressions stand in logical contradiction to each other, such as a geocentric versus a heliocentric model of the solar system. But the competing expressions must still share a common logical framework. We all know and agree what a solar system is. Incommensurability is when no comparison is possible because the difference exists at the level of rationality. An individual coming from the perspective of Enlightenment, or Western, rationality very often has trouble communicating with someone with the background of Buddhist rationality. Last, what Hustwit calls piecemeal commensurability, is when no common or pre-established formal criteria exist in comparing a relation in totality, but a partial or fragmentary comparison is possible. Now, we have to mention a couple of more things, and the first is unpacking what we mean by this word “truth.”

There’s a difference between a definition of truth – what we mean when we say that a claim is true – and criteria for truth – tests we use to determine the truth value of particular claims. What we believe to be true is some combination of subject and object, and this creates the content of our experience. Hustwit delineates four different options in how subjectivity and objectivity can be combined, or co-constituted. The first is mysteriosophy where human subjectivity is maximized and the world, or objectivity, is minimized. In this model religious truth claims cannot really compete because they are mostly constructed by an interpreter’s conceptual scheme. What is really real is beyond the interpreter. Second, internalism is the position that truth is a notion entirely contained within a perspective or linguistic horizon. The truth about reality is basically our best interpretation. Third, critical realism is a class of positions in which a certain degree of subjective bias is attributed to human knowledge that causes dissensus and disagreement, but can, in the end, be overcome. Subjectivity, though fractured, can be corrected through dialogue, reflection, and scientific inquiry. The fourth position of reticent realism is Hustwit’s position. Language potentially refers to uninterpreted objects, but due to hermeneutical finitude the reference relation itself is impossible to conclusively verify. Despite this, in some cases, certain pragmatic criteria can give us reasonable assurance of successful truth claims. This is known as fallibilism: the belief that though certainty and objectivity are unattainable, movement toward these ideas is possible. But how does one navigate postmodern critiques of knowledge?

In the last chapter of his book, Hustwit dives into the deep end of the pool to deal with some weighty postmodern attacks from some heavy hitters. The French philosopher Lyotard offered perhaps the most well-known and well-accepted definition of postmodernism when he wrote that postmodernism was skepticism toward those metanarratives that seek to legitimate the exercise of political power implicit in the dissemination and production of knowledge. Whoever defines truth and the criteria for genuine knowledge is in a position to manage and control political and economic “realities.” Hustwit answers this by stating that the value of fallibilist hermeneutics is that once it comes to consciousness and individuals become aware of their own finitude and situatedness, such self-consciousness leads to increasing sensitivity to difference. Derrida, however, most known for deconstruction theory, represents a more threatening critique against the stability of meaning and the universality of hermeneutics. Stories can mean whatever we want them to mean. We enter into the middle of the history of interpretation of any given story or event and we further that interpretation by changing and adapting it to the needs of our interaction with the world. In Derrida and Gadamer’s famous debate, Gadamer held the view that hermeneutics has a chance of being productive when both parties had a good will, but Derrida dissented stating that it is much more often the case that the desire or will to understand are missing from both parties. In this scenario, interreligious dialogue becomes suspect because no mutuality is present. Many religious communities are not interested in productive dialogue with other religions. Hustwit continues to defend the universality of hermeneutics despite these critiques because he believes it is a decentered system of interconnections with no single foundation. People do legitimately have a desire to be understood. Even apparent rejection of communication is still some form of communication.

So where do we go from here? A hermeneutics of interreligious dialogue is never complete. It possesses a self-recognized status of being tentative and fallible, containing within itself the capacity to criticize and revise itself. In dealing with the perspectival origins of all systems, such as religions, one has two options. Either get rid of all systems, or attempt to create increasingly adequate systems. Since we are intersubjective about many things regarding the way the world works, the idea of dispensing with all systems doesn’t make much sense. It’s ultimately conceptually incoherent. Airplanes fly. Banks do business. Hospitals provide medical care. Systems do work to a large extent. So too in religion. But in the second option, disagreement is required to provoke and lead towards revision and reconstruction. A fallibilist hermeneutics is also less ominous and more accommodating of diversity than its competitors.

So that’s J. R. Hustwit and a more philosophical account of interreligious dialogue. Do you think a fallibilist hermeneutics works as a model for interreligious dialogue? Leave a comment below and let me know what you think. In the next episode we’re going to get into Benjamin Chicka’s book God the Created. Until next time, stay curious. If you enjoyed this, support the channel in the link below, please like and share this video and subscribe to this channel. This is TenOnReligion.

J. R. Hustwit, Interreligious Hermeneutics and the Pursuit of Truth. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014.