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Ontological and Theological Bases of Pluralism
| Article
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10754 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
1 / 1986 |
7,519 Words |
| Author
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Robert P. Scharlemann
Robert P. Scharlemann is professor of Religious Studies at the
University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Va. This paper is
published by permission of Paragon House. |
Plurality is a contemporary fact with which discussions of unity or commonality need to begin. This is not to say that heterogeneous aspects of the human race and human thinking were not known before; but it is to say that that heterogeneity plays a much larger role in our consciousness than was the case when communication was more restricted than today. Not only is that the case with our consciousness of heterogeneity; it is also true that recent philosophy and theology, particularly that part of it influenced by dialectical theology of the 1920s and by Heidegger's reading of the ontotheological tradition in Western thought, has been explicitly concerned with providing a categorical place for otherness, for the "not" and the negative, which cannot be accommodated in a metaphysics of identity. These developments put questions of unity and quests for community into a framework in which unity needs to be sought not with the intention of producing uniformity but with the hope of finding a community which prevents diversity from being mere chaos and makes heterogeneity creative instead of destructive of human understanding. Broadly viewed, the last two centuries seem to have produced more diversity than unity: not only has the unity of ontotheological metaphysics been broken, the sciences have also become, since the nineteenth century, independent of philosophy as well as of theology, and, within the particular sciences, branches have developed that tend toward separation from their own roots. Institutions and intelligence thus lead toward diversity and isolation. No longer does philosophy provide the basic concepts upon which the sciences draw. Rather, the empirical sciences in the main fashion categories, when they need new ones, from the language of everyday understanding; they do not draw upon articulated cosmologies or metaphysical systems. Hence, the pluralism of the modern world includes both a consciousness of heterogeneity and diversity that is due to the possibilities of worldwide communication and also an isolation that is due to the independence of units within the whole. A quick survey of contemporary thought might indeed make one think the diversity so great that any quest for unity is foredoomed to failure. What keeps the quest alive is, nevertheless, that along with theoretical, practical, and institutional diversification has also come a greater sense of an underlying oneness, however inarticulate it be.
In its consciousness of pluralism our age is different from that of the Enlightenment, when there was an underlying conviction that human subjectivity is universal and uniform, so that what is rational anywhere is rational everywhere. In the meantime, a historical consciousness has been developed which calls into question such a conviction. This is not to say that anyone seriously disputes
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