KARL JASPERS FORUM

TA60 (Grandpierre)

Commentary 17

( JASPERS AND RELIGION )
by Greg Nixon
27 December 2003, posted 11 January 2004

<1>
Question for Wood : Without another harangue, can you tell us just what you -- you, Glenn Wood, not Karl Jaspers or Teilhard de Chardin -- think on all the topics you accuse the rest of us of misunderstanding.

<2>
I trust you're aware of the insights derived from literary theory, especially the zone some have called reader response theory: different readers will interpret the same text in different ways. Within some approximation of reason & sympathy, there is no final, correct, or exact interpretation. The meaning is not in the text, waiting to be discovered by the "properly receptive" reader who "gets" the intended meaning. When any of us write, we write toward· our meanings yet never arrive -- that's what keeps us writing. We end up writing only our metaphoric intention, which (like all metaphors) is open to interpretation & never complete. (Yes, this is part of Derrida's neologism for neverending meaningmaking or meaningfinding as "la différance".) Generally, the more abstruse the text, the more widely divergent the possible understandings. Whether we speak of high philosophy, theological dogma, or Dagwood Bumstead funnies, the ·meaning· of a text is never already there in the text (or, more gently, not in the text alone). Textual meaning is intertextual, that is to say, intersubjective (including the subjectivity of minds that no longer exist), like the meaning of language itself. Moreover such intersubjectivity is a process of perpetual motion (& e-motion) toward a destination at which the train of thought never arrives. Whether reading Dr. Jaspers or Dr. Seuss, the interpretation is never closed, the story is never ended.

<3>
Though I sincerely appreciate your obvious Jaspers scholarship (as well as your own arch but articulate style), I take some offence at your continual Jeremiads against HM's Jaspersianism, as though yours were the only canonical version. Like some latter day Don Quixote come to knock the wind from our mills, you seem to feel that every contributor is somehow on the wrong track, depending on misguided FIRST PRINCIPLES ("evolutionists", creationists, transcendentalists, constructionists, etc.), but I what I miss in all your tilting is exactly where you stand. Without getting "convoluted", why is it you seem to think evolutionism is as misguided as transcendentalism, or fundamentalism more pure than constructivism ? Are you merely a Jaspersian through & through, or have you your own stance ? What are your first principles, Glenn Wood ?

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Greg Nixon

When over the paper the pen goes writing

in any solitary hour,

who drives the pen?

To whom is he writing, he who writes for me,

this shore made of lips, made of dream,

a hill of stillness, abyss,

shoulder on which to forget the world forever?

(Octavio Paz)