I attended a lecture with the above titleyesterday afternoon after work. It reminded me of why I'm not going into professional academic philosophy. While they may be very logical and actually have meaning, I think there's many ways in which phrases like "epistemic primacy" and "in-cohering mutual intelligibility" miss the heart of the matter. The speaker was talking about Christ as having epistemic primacy for the Christian, and usingColossians 1 and the prologue to the gospel of John as an example of how Christ both claims authority over all that is known and sets up an example of how we should know, one marked by participation between the knower and known. This example of participation is predominately based on the idea of Christ "was God and he was with God". This 'intersubjectivity' between knower and known, subject and object, I think has some truth to it, and I think the speaker was right in describing reality as something God helps illuminate, and in which we are actively participating, both knowing and being known at the same time. But it seems to lose some of its truth when it is so thoroughly abstracted and transformed into academic jargon, full of 'ontological or epistemological necessities,' and when this epistemology – which is something that we do, or embody, he seemed to argue – becomes nothing but a game of linking together various phrases from philosophers throughout the centuries (or in this case, mostly from Thomas and Aquinas). If knowing or learning in a certain way is something we actively live, then it seems that such language and discourse just doesn't capture the actual experience of it, nor – even though it seems to imply a certain moral responsibility on the part of a Christian to think about their 'epistemology' in a specific way – actually inform how we go about making choices to embody knowledge in this way. (I am curious about, though I have read very little, anthropology of knowledge, which seems as though it might have the descriptive tools to talk more meaningfully about the average person's experience of knowledge vs. the academic philosophical logical construction of knowledge.)
I was also disappointed by the lack of attention given to what I think are primary epistemological questions for the Christian. Several Biblical passages were used as a starting point to tell us what our epistemology should look like, but it seems that this jumps past the whole step of dealing with how we know anything about these passages to begin with, and what their fuller relationship is to everything else we know in general. Does the 'epistemic primacy' of Christ trump other epistemic claims from the Bible? Or do they share the same 'epistemic primacy' because Christ is the Word, and the Word is the Bible? If we do equate them, it seems we are reducing Christ, in some ways, to an exhaustive amount of knowledge (or at least number of texts) and to a human, physical object, and leaving out the potential for any new things to be known. (I would say this sort of reductionism, and its very narrow circumscribing of knowledge, is a large part of what is problematic about fundamentalist Christianity, and what leads to many of the other troubles many people have with fundamentalism.) But, essentially, what is our epistemological model before we encounter the Bible? It seems that if we claim such a model exists, it must be pre-Biblical, as there were whole generations of Christians before there was the Bible. Some might respond that it is the Church, in its form as an body aiming to represent God on earth; but this similarly limits God to a human institution, and leads (or at least has led) to the creation of doctrine and possibly even a more narrowly-defined amount of knowledge in the terms of creeds. There have been other Christian responses to this, of course, such as the Quakers, who bypassing both Church and Bible (though not entirely the latter) have argued for what might be a purer form of this 'primacy' of Christ in showing us what we know; the notion that "Christ has come to teach his people himself," as Fox said. And I wonder if Quakerism doesn't actually also answer to this need for participation in knowing and being known; to know truths "experimentally," to live such truths out, and thus know them better;' to be guided by "the inner light" of Christ (which seems very 'mutually participatory').
Wrestling with these religiously-oriented epistemological questions is what has actually led me to learn more about Quakerism recently; Ben and I have checked out the 57th Street Meeting a couple times. We're not entirely sure what we think yet, but we might continue visiting for a little while.
