The masters of suspicion sought to decode "false consciousness," to explain how our conscious ideas, values, and beliefs are caused by social, historical, and psychological dynamics that ordinarily elude our conscious knowledge. Each of them, to one degree or another, sees religion as a product of false consciousness. With Barth, however, we see religious thinkers integrating such suspicion — to a degree — into their theological efforts, acknowledging the ways in which religion can foster illusions and false, mystifying comforts. The philosopher Paul Ricoeur shows how such an approach to suspicion and religion can invigorate and deepen "the language of faith" by understanding it as symbolic language that opens up new possibilities for human existence.
Outline
I. In reviewing the contributions of the masters of suspicion to modern religious thought, it is useful to reconsider Marx's view of false consciousness.
A. Modern philosophy, beginning with Descartes, placed great trust in the clarity and transparency of human consciousness.
B. But the masters of suspicion question consciousness at a radical level, in particular, rejecting the autonomy and transparency of consciousness and, thus, the ability of consciousness to completely clarify and correct itself.
C. The philosopher Paul Ricoeur summarizes Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud as follows:
1. For Marx, consciousness, as ideology, mystifies the social origins of alienation and domination.
2. For Nietzsche, consciousness is a reflection of the will to power.
3. For Freud, consciousness is shaped by the repression of desire.
II. We can make some useful comparisons among the masters of suspicion on the issue of religion.
A. Freud is a tragic thinker because he believed that the psychic conflicts uncovered by psychoanalysis were an integral part of the human psycho-social condition: "Every civilization must be built up on coercion and renunciation of instinct."
B. Freud and Marx are more resolute and clearly anti-religious in almost all senses of the word, though Marx's utopianism certainly shares in a biblical vision of history.
III. As we see in Barth, however, we also need to acknowledge theological forms of the suspicion of religion.
A. One might argue that such suspicion has always been a part of biblical religion.
1. The 20 -century American theologian H. Richard Niebuhr, influenced by Barth's view of God's transcendence, noted a principle he called "radical monotheism."
2. Monotheism requires its adherents to claim that theirs is the only true God.
3. Monotheism is also a criticalprinciple that aims suspicion at those who would make themselves or their particular set of allegiances, whether family, community, nation, or set of dogmas and rituals, the ultimate value instead of God.
B. Kierkegaard, Barth, and Niebuhr stressed God' s transcendence in part to push people to recognize that their views of God are always ultimately inadequate, only analogies, approximations.
C. Paul Ricoeur argues that "atheism concerning the gods of men pertains hereafter to any possible faith."
D. Ricoeur is looking for a hermeneutics of suspicion that can destroy idols in order to create space where we can hear and listen to the word of God.
Suggested Reading:
Rico:ur and DeFord, The Critique of Religion.
Williams, "The Suspicion of Suspicion"
Questions to Consider:
1. Although Ricoeur, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud are all masters of suspicion, why might we want to distinguish Nietzsche's suspicion from that of the other two?
2. How does Ricoeur seek to integrate suspicion into the theological project?
Lecture Twenty-Four — Transcript
Theology and Suspicion
Over the past six lectures, we've been talking about suspicion. We first explored the anti-religious suspicion of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud — and then, in the last lecture, Barth's theological suspicion. So, in this lecture, I want to explore these forms of suspicion in a little more detail. I want to first focus on the idea of false consciousness in the masters of suspicion — and then draw some comparisons between Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. Then, I' ll turn to the idea of theological suspicion, and I'll be looking at that particularly in the context of the work of the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur.
In the lecture on Marx, I introduced the idea of false consciousness, and this is a concept that is central to the Marxist tradition of social analysis — and it's a concept that Ricoeur locates at the heart of the project of suspicion. Let me remind you of some of the key points. When Descartes begins his philosophical project with "I think, therefore I am" — with what we have called the "cogito" — he initiated a way of thinking about consciousness, about knowledge and philosophy that's had an enormous influence. This is a conception of consciousness as self-grounding and transparent — that is, it's a concept of consciousness, where consciousness finds its origin in its own act of thinking itself — this is Descartes' "I think" and thus, only has to examine itself in considering how it is that it can know the world.
So, we can think about Descartes pursuing clear and distinct ideas or Kant trying to discover what he called "the transcendental conditions of knowledge and experience." Both these philosophers saw their task as one where consciousness sort of turns back on itself to look at itself — and to discover exactly how it worked and how it could know things. The masters of suspicion questioned this whole project of consciousness turning back to look upon itself. They directed their suspicion at consciousness itself — and particularly at the idea that consciousness grounds itself and can become transparent to itself. What they argued is that consciousness is shaped by processes beyond consciousness. It's shaped by social interactions and the workings of our bodies — and so for them, it was not enough for consciousness to examine itself, but it was necessary to think about consciousness in and through the study of culture, of society, and even of biology.
The problem that they saw is that consciousness usually masks these links to that which is outside of consciousness. So, the idea of false consciousness refers to the fact that while our consciousness tells us one thing about the world or about ourselves, something else on the level of society or the unconscious is really going on. Consciousness, in short, not only knows and reveals, but hides and conceals. In one sense, then, this is to say that consciousness is not "ours" — right? It' s not something that we as conscious or self-conscious agents control and possess, but it's something that — in some respects — happens to us, that is shaped for us. This is precisely where Ricoeur sees the masters of suspicion coming together: For each of them, in a different way, consciousness is shaped in a dynamic of revealing and concealing.
So, we can think about Marx. For Marx, consciousness is shaped by social, political, economic history. In contexts of domination, people's consciousness are shaped in ways that prevent them from seeing this domination — and from seeing the real causes of their oppression and their suffering: This is what Marx calls "false consciousness," the way consciousness masks these things that are going on outside of it. Religion, of course, is one of the crucial ways that consciousness does this. Religion is a perfect example, for Marx, of false consciousness because it mystifies the social origins of alienation and domination with ideas such as sin and salvation. With these kinds of ideas, it turns concrete historical situations of alienation into some kind of metaphysical reality. Rather than understanding that a particular historical form of production causes our alienation, we believe that it happens because we've sinned or that there's some fundamental flaw in the human condition.
For Nietzsche, consciousness is a reflection of the will — and of the will to power, in particular — and so it's a reflection of one's strength or weakness, or one's sickness or health. As in Marx, for Nietzsche, religion masks domination, but in his case, it does not mask the domination of an economic elite, but rather the moral domination of the priest and of those who can't affirm life in this world, except to see it as a bridge to another life. As we've seen in Nietzsche, this morality is a form of false consciousness: The priest and his followers can' t admit to themselves that their morality is a strategy to gain power.
In Freud, finally, consciousness is shaped by desire and by the conflicts between the force of desire and the force of social restraint that is the super-ego. In Freud's case, religion is not so much an issue of domination, as it is in Marx and Nietzsche, but it's rather a matter of psychosocial traumas and desires that can't be acknowledged and so must express themselves in coded or compulsive ways.
A final point to make about false consciousness is that the masters of suspicion obviously do believe that we can, to some extent at least, deploy the resources of consciousness and reason to overcome false consciousness. They, like their philosophical predecessors, do think that there are certain methods that we can use to do this, but in their case it's less a matter of rendering consciousness transparent to itself once and for all than a matter of decoding particular manifestations of false consciousness — treating them as symptoms to be traced back to their causes in society, or in the body, or in past traumas.
Before leaving the masters of suspicion I'd like to offer some comparisons between them with respect to their views on religion, because although all three emphasize the way that religion can and usually does mystify the reality of the human condition, there are some interesting and important differences between them that are worth highlighting.
I've described Freud as a tragic thinker because he believes that the psychic conflicts uncovered by psychoanalysis are inherent to the human psychosocial condition.
Given beings with our psychic makeup, the demands of society and civilization will inevitably produce deep psychic conflict. Remember that a similar conflict between reality and happiness played a key role in Kant's claim that we needed to postulate God and immortality. So, for Kant, we acknowledge the tragedy of human finite life — that is that virtue and happiness will not come together, but we then postulate God and immortality to overcome this tragic vision.
Freud will have none of this. Commenting on the possibility of a human golden age, Freud remarks in his book The Future of an Illusion that "it is questionable if such a state of affairs can be realized [for it] seems rather that every civilization must be built up on coercion and renunciation of instinct." For Freud, we can ameliorate this condition by facing this fact and accepting the need for instinctual renunciation, but we can never overcome it.
Marx, by contrast, believes that the fundamental forms of alienation that he diagnoses can be overcome. Because alienation results from historical and social conditions and not the biological or psychic makeup of human beings, alienation can be overcome by changing social and economic conditions. Thus, even though Marx rejects the idealism of Hegel and what he sees as the inadequate materialism of Feuerbach, he still — like both of these predecessors — foresees a utopian reconciliation of humanity with itself in a kind of secularized version of the Kingdom of God. He calls this, as we've seen, "human emancipation."
Nietzsche, as I've already indicated, offers us something very different from both Marx and Freud. Like Freud, Nietzsche is a tragic thinker. Indeed, as I've indicated, many of Freud's claims about the pain of human psychic life are anticipated, often quite explicitly, in Nietzsche's thought. But where Freud thinks that maturity means resigning one's self to this pain, facing it soberly, and doing the best one can with it, Nietzsche seeks to affirm it — even to celebrate it.
One must, as we have seen Nietzsche say, be the "eternal Yes to all things," or — as he also puts it — we must learn to love our fate. So, Nietzsche, like Marx and Freud, insists that human beings have always consoled themselves with illusions about reality and must now face reality squarely — but of the three, he is by far the most effusive and imaginative about the need to love and celebrate this reality.
I've touched briefly on what this might mean for Nietzsche. Although he professes an undying hostility to Christianity and often to religion more generally, it's hard not to see a kind of religious sensibility alive in this insistence on affirmation and love. Freud and Marx, then, are more resolute and clearly anti-religious in almost all senses of the word — though Marx's utopianism does echo at least the
biblical vision of history,
In the lecture on Barth, I argued that we can see a kind of hermeneutics of suspicion operative in his work, and I indicated that this should not come as too much of a surprise since a certain suspicion has always been part of biblical religion.
We can think about, in addition to the biblical echoes of suspicion in Barth's work, we can also think about the principle of what the American theologian H. R. Niebuhr called "radical monotheism." Monotheism requires its adherents to claim that theirs is the only true God, and this no doubt has been a significant factor in the intolerance and triumphalism that Jews, Christians, and Muslims can display toward people of other faiths. At the same time, though, monotheism—especially in its radical form—is also a critical principle that aims suspicion at the way God's own people tend to make anything but God — whether that is the self, or family, or community, nation, or even religion — their ultimate value. This view of monotheism, of a radically transcendent God, is emphasized strongly by 20th-century thinkers such as Niebuhr, Barth, and also Paul Tillich — who I' ll discuss in the next lecture.
I think one of the things that Kierkegaard saw and that these 20th century theologians were trying to recover by stressing God's radical transcendence was a sense of God's mystery and, therefore, the imperative to recognize that our views of God are always ultimately inadequate — they' re only analogies; they' re only approximations.
So, this leads these kinds of religious thinkers to stress human sin particularly in terms of the general tendency of human beings to anxiously grasp after security, and comfort, and consolation amidst the challenges of life and, therefore, by grasping after this consolation, this security, therefore to fall into illusion and fantasy. This isn't to say that specific transgressions are unimportant when we talk about sin, or that God does not console — but it is to say that our need for control and security is one of the major reasons we latch on to specific, convenient, and usually self-aggrandizing and illusory conceptions of ourselves and God.
Barth's view of human religiosity emphasizes this aspect of our religion, and it's at the basis of his rejection of liberal theology as more a kind of reflection of the self-satisfaction of Western culture in the 19'" century than true worship of God. More generally, this kind of radical monotheism, far more than offering an opportunity for people to firm themselves over against other people—we believe in the true God, and you don't — rather than doing this, radical monotheism serves as a principle for relativizing, criticizing, all human projects, even religious ones, and this is the root I think of the importance of suspicion in Barth's work.
There is perhaps no one who has done more to think about this form of theological suspicion than the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur.
So, I want to turn to Ricoeur in this lecture, and in doing so — for the one point in this lecture series — I'm stepping out of chronological order, and I'm doing this because I think Rocoeur in many ways articulates the project of this lecture series with respect to the issue of suspicion — and, therefore, sets the framework for these lectures. He not only coined the term "masters of suspicion"and "hermeneutics of suspicion," but he also, influenced by Barth, thought carefully about what I am calling "theological suspicion."
So, just a little bit of background on Ricoeur: He was born into a Protestant family in heavily Catholic France in the second decade of the 20 century. During World War II, he spent five years in a German prisoner of war camp — where, oddly enough, he had the opportunity to begin some of the philosophical work that would get 'him his doctorate soon after the end of the war. He became one of the most important French philosophers of the second half of the 20'" century—working not only on religion, but on questions of metaphor, time, narrative, and identity.
On the question of religion and suspicion, Ricoeur had this to say:
I think ... that hereafter a critique of religion, nourished by Feuerbach and these masters of suspicion pertains to the mature faith of modern man. In this sense, one can say that this atheism concerning the gods of men, pertains hereafter to any possible faith.
In other words, a mature faith cannot be based on fantasy and the desire to escape from reality, and so it must incorporate in some way a hermeneutics of suspicion. The masters of suspicion have shown us the importance of confronting necessity — confronting our will to power, our economic exploitation, the reality of our deepest desires — and they've shown us how these can work to distort our religious lives. So, mature faith has to be forged in and through what Ricoeur describes as the "ascesis of the necessary" — that is, the discipline of examining and cultivating one's faith in the light of the realty of finite, fallible human life. Note that in this passage I just read, Ricoeur refers to the atheism of the masters of suspicion as "atheism concerning the gods of men."
This atheism, from a theological perspective, is directed against "idols" — that is, those values or things that human beings treat as divine out of fear or out of a desire for self-aggrandizement. For Ricoeur, these methods of suspicion, in other words, can help us — as we saw in Barth — to explore in detail the complex ways in which human beings set up idols for themselves to worship, and thus deafen themselves to the Word of God. Ricoeur claims:
any modern hermeneutics is a hermeneutics with a double edge and a double function. It is an effort to struggle against idols, and consequently, it is destructive ... [it must be] aimed at disalienation, at demystiflication.
So, on the one hand, it's a hermeneutics of suspicion that destroys idols, On the other hand, he goes on to say that this hermeneutics also:
pertains ... to the act of listening, which is finally the positive side of hermeneutics. What we wish is to hear through this destruction [this destruction of idols] a more original and primal word, that is, to let speak a language which though addressed to us we no longer hear, which though spoken to us we can no longer speak.
So, in short, what Ricoeur is looking for is a hermeneutics of suspicion that can destroy idols in order to create space where we can hear and listen to the Word of God.
In the remainder of this lecture, I want to consider two ways in which Ricoeur thinks about how this might happen. The first of these I'll treat under the concept of demythologization. Ricoeur, as I' ve said, was much influenced by Karl Barth and also by Barth's contemporary, the biblical scholar Rudolf Bultmann. Like Barth, Bultmann was a critic of liberal theology, and, as a biblical scholar, he was particularly critical of the way that liberal theologians had appropriated biblical scholarship in their efforts to identify what they called "the historical Jesus."
As I've mentioned, for someone like the theologian Ritschl, this historical Jesus was the key to understanding the true Christian message. But other biblical scholars disagreed with this project of finding the historical Jesus. They claimed that the real Christ is the Christ that is preached in the New Testament by his followers, and it is this message — the Good News — that each Christian, in his or her own time and place, must recover. Bultmann sided with these later thinkers and argued that faith depends not on finding the true history hidden in and by the Bible, but by encountering Christ in the present through the Bible or through the Word being preached.
But it's not easy to encounter the Word today — in part because, for Bultmann, it's so easy to misunderstand the Bible. A major reason why in the modern period we have difficulty understanding the Bible is because of the cultural and historical distance between us and the place and time in which the Bible was written. So, Bultmann developed a way of interpreting the Bible that he thought would help close this gap: He called it "demythologization."
Bultmann's basic idea is that much of what we today find unbelievable in the Bible is the mythical ideas — we have a world created in six days; we have a world in which miracles occur, where angels speak to human beings, where there is literally a heaven and a hell, Bultmann argued that these ideas are a reflection of the mythical thinking of the time in which the Bible was written, but it' s not at the core of the biblical message. So, to demythologize the Bible is, first, to translate this mythical language into terms that can make sense to us today. For Bultmann, this meant translating it into the terms of existential philosophy.
But the second point and the one I want to emphasize here, is that this demythologizing translation does not in the end simply render the Bible clear to the modern mind. Yes, it clears up what Bultmann and then following him Ricoeur, it clears up what they call the "first scandal of the Bible," its mythical language that sort of leads us astray, but in doing so, in demythologizing that language, it only throws into sharper relief a more central and difficult scandal — what Bultmann and Ricoeur call "the real scandal of the Bible," that is, the proclamation that Jesus was the Christ who died on the cross and was resurrected.
This second scandal, Ricoeur says, was just as unbelievable 2,000 years ago as it is today, and this is the difficulty we must face — this is the word we must hear. So, like Kierkegaard, Ricoeur is seeking to bring us back to an encounter with the paradox of God entering history. So, demythologization seeks to free biblical discourse from an outdated cultural vehicle or world-view in order to allow the core language of the Word, the genuine scandal of Christ, to reach us.
What does this have to do with suspicion and theology? Ricoeur thinks that Bultmann's demythologizing effort was crucial because it enabled the Bible to speak to us as modern human beings. But, he asks: Who exactly are we? Who are we as modern human beings? For Bultmann, the answer to this question seemed self-evident, for in many ways — despite his critique of liberal theology — he did not really question modern ideals of progress, and technology, and science. He took modernity as a given.
But Ricoeur thinks that we have to ask questions of modernity. He' doesn't believe that we can just be satisfied with saying that the Bible needs to speak to us in the terms we find believable today. He also wants to ask why it is we find certain things believable today and not others.
In short, what he's saying is that we have to direct a certain suspicion against ourselves and modernity, not just against the cultural vehicle of the world of the early followers of Jesus. We have to be suspicious of our own cultural vehicle. More specifically, Ricoeur wants to ask why we have forgotten, as he thinks we have, the question of salvation. For him, at the center of modernity is the assertion of human autonomy, and this is an assertion that precludes, as he understands it, precludes from the start the idea that human beings could be dependent on anything outside of themselves for fulfillment or for righteousness. Thus, in the course of the modern period, reason has increasingly been put in the service of the explanation and control of the world, and this leaves us, Ricoeur argues, with an ideology that seeks mastery over every aspect of life — and, he argues, it leaves us with a drive to objectify, dominate everything, and it's this that leads us to forget what he calls "the origin and the meaning of our life."
Here, I can't address all the different ways in which Ricoeur talks about this issue, but I do want to briefly mention one of them, and this concerns Ricoeur's views of revelation and poetic language.
Through his examination of poetic language, and specifically the poetic language of the Bible, Ricoeur claims to uncover a "primitive" and "originary" form of meaning through which we can encounter new possibility, the new life, promised by the Gospel. In Ricoeur's view, poetic language, poetry itself, but also fiction, and drama, and other forms of symbolic and metaphorical discourse — this kind of discourse creates new worlds and new possibilities through which we are able to explore our existential situation. That is, these forms of discourse re-describe the world for us. They give it new plots, new ways of seeing, and so they construct possible worlds that we can inhabit. We can project ourselves into these worlds in terms of what Ricoeur describes as our "own most possibilities" — that is, we can explore the possibilities for ourselves in terms of these new worlds. They call to us, these new worlds. They appeal to us to imagine ourselves in them — and to this extent, they can shake us out of our ordinary ways of experiencing ourselves and the world and, again, lead us to experience the world in a new way. To the extent that they allow us to see ourselves and the world differently, such texts are, for Ricoeur, revelatory — they reveal something to us.
So, it's not surprisingly, then, when Ricoeur talks about the Bible, and Christianity in particular, he brings this way of thinking about the creative power of language to his theological thought. So, we can draw a parallel between the poetic creativity of poetic text and the creative Word of God. When it comes to the Bible, God's revelation, for Ricoeur, works by opening our imaginations to this new world of the Gospel, the Kingdom of God.
It's this emphasis on imagination and revelation — on what Ricoeur calls the "grace of imagination" — that he says separates him, finally, from the masters of suspicion. They, as we've noted, preach the love of necessity or of fate — the necessity of coming to terms with material, worldly reality and leaving fantasy and illusion behind. But we have to be very careful about this claim to reality or this claim to necessity because throughout history oppressive, inequitable human relations have been considered necessary. They are just the way things are. They are a function of our nature or our biology, and so the appeal to reality, even in someone like Marx or Nietzsche, always has to be subject to critical scrutiny. One way such scrutiny works is through our imagination of other possibilities. When Nietzsche or Marx says this is the way it is — this is human nature this is how history works — one way of thinking critically about that is to say: "Well, what other possibilities are there for thinking about human nature or history?"
So, this is where Ricoeur's interest in the way poetic language opens up new meaning and new possibility comes into play; it's not an either/or — right? Ricoeur is not saying it's all imagination and no necessity. What he wants to say is that we need to confront necessity. We have to take seriously religious hopes and possibilities, because they, too, quickly can turn into fantasy. We must be suspicious, but we also need the openness of possibility that can shake up sedimented beliefs about what is necessary. So, one might argue, in other words, that it is only by taking possibility seriously that one can really encounter necessity. Thus, Ricoeur says that we have to take seriously what he calls "the grace of imagination."
In talking about Ricoeur's views on poetics and imagination, I focused mostly on what he called "general revelation" — that is, the, idea that really any poetic text can manifest a new world for us. But again, Ricoeur wants to talk more specifically about biblical revelation — a revelation that interrupts the autonomy of the modern world-view, a revelation in the face of which human beings must learn to "let go of the self' and allow it to be constituted by something that comes from the outside.
More specifically, when confronted with the world of the Bible, with the Kingdom of God, at issue is the claim that in a series of historical events, God — the eternal source of all creativity, of all possibility has revealed himself. So, to let go of the self in the face of this world is to accept, as Ricoeur puts it, that "[we are] being led by and ruled by the interpretation of external signs which the absolute gives of itself' — that is, God has manifested God's self in history, and we have to see how that has happened and give ourselves up to it.
We're back here with Kierkegaard and the idea of the paradox that the eternal has made itself known in and through the historical. As Kierkegaard says, we have to recognize that ultimately this paradox cannot be explained, cannot be resolved by reason, but must be accepted in faith.
For Ricoeur, however, this is not a simple surrender to the world of the Bible, but what he describes as a "trial"; it's an engagement with the testimony of the Bible that puts you, as a self, on trial as you examine yourself, this new world, and your possible destiny. But what, in the end, makes it possible for one to give up one' s autonomy, one's self-dependence, to let oneself go in the face of this new world, is not something that philosophical discourse can explain or justify. We'll return to Ricoeur's reflections on revelation in a later lecture to see how they've been developed and expanded in the work of the theologian Rowan Williams.
But at this point, I want to conclude by pointing ahead to our next lecture, in which we'll see how two Protestant theologians rework the tension between faith and suspicion that we find in Barth and Ricoeur. We'll look at Paul Tillich, who picks up on and elaborates this tension — and we'll look at Carl Henry, who rejects it.
