Charles Winquist

Charles E. Winquist
Born (1944-06-11)June 11, 1944
Toledo, Ohio, U.S.
Died April 4, 2002(2002-04-04) (aged 57)
Syracuse, New York, U.S.
Nationality American
Known for contributions in philosophy, theology and religion (e.g., modern and  postmodern religion).
Title Thomas J. Watson Professor of Religion, Syracuse University
Academic background
Education University of Toledo
University of Chicago
Influences Friedrich Nietzsche, Jacques Derrida, Paul Tillich, Evangelos Christou, Robert W. Funk, Paul Ricoeur, Carl Jung, Sigmund Freud, James Hillman
Academic work
Institutions Syracuse University
California State University, Chico
Union College, Barbourville
YMCA Community College, Chicago
Main interests Associate Editor, Journal of the American Academy of Religion (1983 – 2002); Sub-network Editor, Religious Studies Review (1980 - 2002); Member, Board of Trustees, Scholars Press (1978 – 1985); Executive Director, American Academy of Religion (1978 - 1982).
Notes
Exceptional Merit Service Award, California State University, Chico (1983); Professional Achievement Award, California State University, Chico (1982 - 1986); Outstanding Professor, California State University, Chico (1985).[1] [2] [3]

Charles Winquist (June 11, 1944 – April 4, 2002) was the Thomas J. Watson Professor of Religion at Syracuse University, and is known for his writings on theology, contemporary continental philosophy and postmodern religion.[2]  Before he assumed his position at Syracuse University, he taught religious studies at California State University, Chico, from 1969 to 1986.[4]

Education

Winquist received his B.A. in philosophy from the University of Toledo (1965), his M.A. in theology from the University of Chicago (1968), and his Ph.D. in philosophical theology from the University of Chicago (1970).[5]

Work

Winquist's work is tactical as well as theoretical, showing what kind of work theology can do in contemporary society. He suggests that theology is closely akin to what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari refer to as a minor intensive use of a major language. The minor intensive theological use of language, Winquist argues, pressures the ordinary weave of discourse and opens it to desire. Thus theology becomes a work against "the disappointment of thinking." [6] But because contemporary religious thinking is often mired in disputes over the exact meaning of religion and theology there is a problem. Serious groups generate ideas periodically that despite their best efforts create conflicting interpretations that diminish, rather than improve the philosophical, dialectic and social scientific foundations of theology. These communities are not isolated groups of the privileged few, but rather people across the world who experience their lives as meaningful and important. A minor intensive theological literature is not what Winquist calls "Sunday-school theology," but rather an effort to weave together daily discussions between the spaces in communication. Communication makes everyday life divine, Wiquist argues (citing Huston Smith). Smith called it divine ordinariness, which came from his understanding of Zen Buddhism. Theology acts on the everyday existence of the overriding secular discourse in communities.[6] [7]

Thus, appeals to the world's mythological traditions and religious customs — as a way to reach people throughout communities worldwide — is not problematic because of the traditions themselves, but rather through secular dominance that has overridden traditions, limiting their value in daily life.[6] To think about God, even if there is no name for God spoken or written, is an act of transcendence. Winquist noted that René Descartes wrote, in his third Meditation, that God transcended subjective dominance. The very thought of God's attributes create doubt about the innate ability of human nature to even comprehend the existence of God. Thinking formulaically about God takes us beyond ourselves. Traces of the divine, or even another human being, identifies a discourse of thinking that remains a part of us. Thinking transcends itself and disrupt its own "recording surface." [8] And while there is no escape from our individual perceptual limitations, which Winquist calls a "knot" in theological discourse,[6] phenomenology is humiliated by consciousness, which peaks when encircled by meaningful nuances that transcend the control of consciousness itself.[9] Thus Edmund Husserl's "phenomenological reduction," a sort of bracketing (phenomenology) that allows the suspension of noema so phenomena can be seen as given to consciousness (as well as transcendental idealism), is essential to understanding Winquist's work. Maurice Merleau-Ponty should also be considered, and while it is debated whether or not he truly rejected "reductionism",[10] Merleau-Ponty did call it a perpetual philosophical beginning ... a pointless effort in an ever-renewed experiment in making its own beginning.[11]

Winquist believed concerns about beginnings, and endings, were "fictive productions of heuristic strategies," stating that we were still in the middle, and should not resist being in the middle. [12] When we put ourselves (or find ourselves), in another person's experience and empathize with, or "simulate" his or her perspective in their personal, surrounding world, it coincides with ours, even though other factors under which "the other" represents their world must be different, we know the objects in our world exist independently, despite the "knot" of our perceptual subjectivity and particular experiences. The objective order is troubled by God's relationship to the subjective world, and posits true knowledge can only come from objectivity. Husserl researched the problem, and gradually adopted a more creative approach he called (transcendental idealism). [13]  The astronomical numbers of unperceived and unexpected features become evident, "intuitively presented," only by further observation.[14]  Winquist argued these observations should be done from the middle.[12] Metaphysical categories (the first principles of things, including abstract concepts such as being, knowing, substance, cause, identity, time and space), however, are not the essence of meaning. Experience is not reduced to these categories, they are exemplified and enlarged by experiencing the world and its traditions that connect us all.[9] Consciousness takes an object (the "other"), and the act of focused purpose cannot be detached from the renewed
or, arguably, revived understanding of the perceiving subject.[15] [9]

Winquist was an early proponent of weak theology — a controversial concept that has created a rift between traditionalists [16] and deconstructionists [17] — and was deeply engaged in the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, Jacques Derrida, Paul Tillich, and Mark C. Taylor, among others. Winquist argues in Desiring Theology, for example, that Derrida's deconstructive criticism is not "wild analysis," but the very careful reading of texts. Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) was the founder of "deconstruction," a way of criticizing not only literary and philosophical texts, but also political institutions. Derrida rejected Platonism, which is defined by the belief that existence is structured in terms of oppositions (separate substances or forms) and that the oppositions are hierarchical, with one side of the opposition being more valuable than the other. Deconstruction attacks such believes by reversing hierarchies between the invisible or intelligible, the visible or sensible, essence and appearance and voice and writing. Derrida even rejects hierarchies between the soul and the body, or good and evil.[18] This is why deconstruction is often confusing: it explores what is hidden, not only in written texts, but in ordinary daily language and life. Because we borrow language, it has meanings beyond individual people and cultures. It has a semantic life of its own, and its content can never be fixed. Sounds and syntax come into our minds uninvited, with one word leading to still more words.[19]  Understanding this is a reflection that replaces the source of the reflection — us — and opens up meaning beyond self.  In Derrida's impenetrable Glas (book), and others he has written, The Truth in Painting ,[20] for example (and creative works in general) Winquist argued, return us to the "other" and the "beyond" of multiple expressions in the human need for an absolute savor ("the savior absolu"). [12]

Thus, deconstruction explores what is "known and immediate," but not readily available, or even understood. A simple word or phrase, for example, spoken between two people, can have multiple meanings. The idea is that different communication styles ("languages") will have the same words, but the way they are used will have different meanings.[21] [6] Winquist argues that the inability to access this "hidden text" does not invalidate the experience, or the other viewpoint. This is the significance of the exchange, par excellence. Something Winquist calls a "critique," which reveals alternative explorations by shaking up and dislodging "sedimentation," ridged interpretations in the surface content. Simply, in theology, as in life, the problem is not that God is missing, or the feelings and experiences of another, but that the "shadows" opening up in deconstructive work, just as the reality of the other in his or her experience, are already there.[22]

Winquist said that while the focus of deconstruction work is about the text, the text itself is not the aggregate of all understanding. Thus all thoughts are based on an external point of reference; deconstruction is deeply concerned with the "other" of language, and we are imprisoned if we are not actively deconstructing. [23] [6] Deconstruction is not concerned with digging or looking behind the curtain, but seeing "otherness" itself, traces of alterity that validate existence. Dissatisfaction in modern-day theology comes from explorations that miss the depths in the wide-ranging scope of understandings already established. Skipping across the surface obscures and denigrates the qualitative nature of experiences hidden within, becoming rote and unavailable to daily concerns. Winquits calls this a "literalized, hermeneutical gap," spaces between the past and present, insights that human collaboration keeps hidden. Self-satisfaction is partly to blame: It renders renewed meanings mute. But shadows revealed in deconstructive work are as real as what is readily available on the surface. This "knowledge gap," once revealed, renews understanding, and can never be exhausted by continued exploration.[6] Perhaps philosophers such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty, or the knowledge derived from sense-experience, stimulated by the rise of experimental science, forced on us a hermeneneutics of suspicion against traditional values.[22] [24] New understandings contort traditions seeking new meaning. The chaotic, "sparkling new" discovered in the shadowy contrasts between the literal and the "other" leads to a renewed theory of knowledge more detailed and whole, best delineated through images, much like a gestalt, where the whole is more than the sum of its parts and can even become metaphorical.[22] Winquist's archetypal writings help clarify this:

Archetypal patterns should be viewed as connected procedures between actual feelings and forms of possibility that have evolved through the collective history of culture. Thus, archetypes are not identifiable with the realm of formal possibilities but are the residue of decisions that make patterns available for the integration of formal possibilities with actual feelings. To feel possibilities is to feel their embodiment in actual relationships. The discernment of an archetypal situation is a consciousness of a relational pattern that is present within the ecology of experience passed through the collective history that contrasts with the immediate pattern of individual decision or with a prevailing cultural pattern. [25]

Archetypal patterns are not just words and stories, but living truths and psychological realities that build upon human connections — "soul," according to Carl Jung — and use symbolic language. [26] The life of the other, Winquist argued, functions symbolically and it is in the encounter with this life that generates the contrasts at the foundations of new consciousness. [25] Paul Ricoeur, an influential philosopher in Winquist's work, said the creation of new meanings, in connection with the advent of a new manner of questioning, places language in a state of semantic deficiency; lexicalized metaphor (adding words, set phrases, or word patterns to add depth of meaning) must intervene to compensate for this lack, although many philosophers argue this requires a trope,[27] which supplements words lacking in language for certain ideas. In short, catachresis is called for; moreover, it can be metonymy or synecdoche as easily as metaphor.[28] Thus, Ricoeur preferred a universe of discourse kept in motion by an interplay of attractions and repulsions that ceaselessly promote the interaction and intersection of domains whose organizing nuclei are off-centered in relation to one another; one that never comes to rest in an absolute knowledge that would subsume the tensions. [28]

Life itself is a part of this process, but nothing superior in creation revealed to us, Yahwah, the Lord, Allah (عليه الصلاة والسلام), Buddha, is subject to the "controlling rules" of verification contemporary society demands ad nauseam. Theology, from the secular perspective is made to look naive, if not outright foolish and stupid. The future of theology is not defined exclusively by the text being read and studied. It is unveiled by showing the possibilities in what Winquist called our "existential elements," which belong to the situation and a creation that goes all the way back to the beginning of time. These questions are answered in balance with the structures of creation, the very source of our existence.[12]

Positions held

Winquist was professionally active at the national level. He held several offices in the American Academy of Religion, including the office of executive director (see information box).

Bibliography

  • (1972) The Transcendental Imagination
  • (1975) Communion of Possibility
  • (1978) Homecoming
  • (1980) Practical Hermeneutics
  • (1986) Epiphanies of Darkness
  • (1990) Theology at the End of the Century
  • (1995) Desiring Theology
  • (1999) Epiphanies of Darkness: Deconstruction in Theology
  • (2003) The Surface of the Deep

Articles

  • "Theology and the Manifestation of the Sacred," Theological Studies, 32/1, March 1971
  • "The Sacrament of the Word of God," Encounter, 33/3, Summer, 1972
  • "Reconstruction in Process Theology," Anglican Theological Review, LV/2, April 1973
  • "The Act of Storytelling and the Self's Homecoming," Journal of the American Academy of Religion, XLII, March 1974
  • "Altered States of Consciousness: Sacred and Profane," Anglican Theological Review, LVI/2, April 1974
  • "Practical Hermeneutics: A Revised Agenda for the Ministry," Anglican Theological Review, LVII/4, October 1976
  • "Scientific Models and Symbolic Meanings in Altered States of Consciousness," Journal of Drug Issues, 7/3, Spring 1977
  • "The Subversion and Transcendence of the Subject," Journal of the American Academy of Religion, XLVIII/1, March 1980
  • "The Epistemology of Darkness: Preliminary Reflections," Journal of the American Academy of Religion, XLIX/1, Spring 1981
  • "Interpretation and Imagination," JAAR Thematic Studies, XLVIII/1, Scholars Press, 1981
  • "Metaphor and the Accession to Theological Language," JAAR Thematic Studies, XLIX/1, Scholars Press, 1982
  • "Practical Hermeneutics and Pastoral Ministry ," Theological Field Education: A Collection of Key Resources, Vol. I, 1982
  • "Theology, Deconstruction and Ritual Practice," Zygon, Vol. 18, Number 3, September 1982
  • "Ministry: Post-Critical Reflections," The Christian Ministry, September, 1983

See also

References

  1. ↑ Faculty File Photo (1986) California State University, Chico, Meriam Library Special Collections (from collection UAC 005, 2017-025).
  2. 1 2 (2002, April 29) "Memorial service for professor winquist will be held may 4," Syracuse Record, p. 3 (Syracuse University Libraries Special Collections University Archives, November 28, 2017).
  3. ↑ Curriculum Vitae (Syracuse University Libraries Special Collections Research Center University Archives, November 28, 2017).
  4. ↑ (2002, April 11) "Charles Winquist." The Post-Standard (Syracuse University Libraries Special Collections University Archives, November 28, 2017).
  5. ↑ Curriculum Vitae (Syracuse University Libraries: Special Collections Research Center University Archives, November 28, 2017) p. 1.
  6. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 "Desiring Theology" (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
  7. ↑ "The World's Religions" (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1991).
  8. ↑ Winquist, Charles. (1994). "Theology: Unsettled and Unsettling," Journal of the American Academy of Religion, LXII/4.
  9. 1 2 3 "Homecoming: Interpretation, Transformation and Individuation" (Missoula, MT. Scholars Press, 1978).
  10. ↑ Smith, Joel (2005). "Merleau-Ponty and the Phenomenological Reduction" (PDF). Inquiry.
  11. ↑ Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. "Phenomenology of Perception" (PDF). London and New York: Routledge.
  12. 1 2 3 4 "The Surface of the Deep" (Colorado: The Davies Group, 2003).
  13. ↑ Dupré , Louis. (1968). "Husserl's Thought on God and Faith," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 29, No. 2, pp. 201-215.
  14. ↑ "Edmund Husserl". Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
  15. ↑ "The Logos of the Soul" (Vienna: Dunquin Press, 1963).
  16. ↑ "Grace Communion International".
  17. ↑ "Westar Institute".
  18. ↑ "Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy".
  19. ↑ Sturrock, John (13 September 1987). "The Book is Dead, Long Live the Book!". The New York Times.
  20. ↑ Willette, Jeanne. "Jacques Derrida and Deconstruction". Art History Unstuffed.
  21. ↑ "Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus" (New York: HarperCollins, 1992).
  22. 1 2 3 "Epiphanies of Darkness: Deconstruction in Theology" (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1986).
  23. ↑ Sturrock, Richard. "Dialogues with Contemporary Continental Thinkers". Manchester University Press, pp. 120 – 126.
  24. ↑ "Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy".
  25. 1 2 "Fair use in accordance with American Academy of Religion guidelines" (PDF) (in Studies in Religion 18, "Homecoming: Interpretation, and Transformation and Individuation" Missoula MT. Scholars Press 1978).
  26. ↑ "Jung's Approach". The Oxford Companion to the Bible. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1993.
  27. ↑ "Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy" (in the existence of "tropes" the world is seen as consisting of ontologically unstructured abstract particulars).
  28. 1 2 "The Rule of Metaphor" trans. Robert Czerny with Kathleen McLaughlin and John Costello (Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1977).
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