MDDM World-as-text

[Paul Mackin]

jbor wrote:

> As soon as a person writes or says or thinks or senses (or paints or dances
> or whatever other form of expression) that "the world is this or that", he
> or she is creating a text, a representation or interpretation, of the world.
>
> The argument is not that the world doesn't exist. And "textual" isn't meant
> as a synonym for "verbal".
>
> I would have thought the idea of the world-as-text was quite a familiar one
> to most Westerners:
>
> En arche en ho logos, kai ho logos en pros ton theon, kai theos en ho logos.
>
> "In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was
> God."

Jesus as the word, idea, reason, controlling principle of God. Wonder if it
might be possible to extend (project into the future) the "word" connotation of
logos to text, reflection, image. Jesus as God's text. Jesus as the World's
text.


Brought out in the J. Bottum article (which Otto pointed us to) was the fact
that in the Medieval Christian world getting beyond the text,  to knowledge of
the thing itself as they would have it, wasn't the problem  it is today because
they had something called the final cause, the final cause being God.

Bottum says several times that knowledge is impossible without God. He has
several quite clever ways of putting it so as to allign the premoderns with the
postmoderns.  For example,  "only for a brief period in the history of the
West--the period of modern times--did anyone seriously suppose that the human
beings could hold knowledge without God.
(true perhaps but, as Bottum not only admits but rather emphasizes, no reason
in itself to believe)

There does at any rate  seem to be a Christian analog to the postmodern insight
that there is nothing beyond the text. The postmoderns of course focus on
linguistic ideas rather than Aristotelian concepts of causality.

None of this changes anything. Modernity happened and postmodernity did too.

P.