A Useful Question: Critical Reflection and God's Presence
An Essay by Ed Watson
About the author: Ed Watson is a PhD candidate at Yale University, focusing on questions of theology and conceptualization. He is currently working on a dissertation exploring the relationships between Christian talk of grace and racial difference.
It is easy to get stuck. This is true in the course of life, true in the course of feeling, and true in the course of thought. I might find myself unable to escape an emotional loop as I keep feeling compelled to return to a source of pain. I might find myself unable to break a pattern of behavior, driven by I know not what. Or, as happened this month, I might find myself stuck while writing a piece for an online magazine, unsure of how to take the next step.
As easy as it is to get stuck, it can also be hard to get unstuck and quite frequently impossible to do alone. There are certain things we can do to make life easier, however, and across the course of my life—whether struggling to understand what I'm trying to think or trying to navigate confusion in friendship—I've found that asking a particular question can be particularly helpful: namely, what do I have to assume for what I'm thinking to make sense?
Focusing for now on the work of thought, it is not uncommon for me to feel paralyzed by closed-door questions. “Is [X] good or bad?”, for example, usually functions as a closed door, and to open things up, I try to remind myself to ask instead, “What does [X] allow, and what does it preclude? How can [X] be used to cause harm, how can it be used to heal?” These are questions with practical answers, and so they can provide solid ground for moving forward.
While writing this month, I accidentally came up against another closed-door question. Halfway through my planned piece for God Here and Now, I realized that I was asking, “How can I give an account of [X] that escapes my own critique?” This is often a paralyzing question, not least because most critiques worth making are worth making because they can be brought to bear on worthwhile thoughts. And so I had to take a step back. Rather than asking after a pure and unassailable concept, I had to reflect on what I was assuming in both my critical and my constructive efforts. I had to ask what I was assuming in order to make sense of what I was trying to think.
Asking this question helped me get unstuck. It also made me realize that I needed to give my planned piece more time to simmer—and so I thought it worth instead taking a moment to trace both the logic of the question and how it can has illuminated God's presence in my life.
To begin with the logic of the question: other than God, nothing exists or occurs without presupposition. My breathing presupposes oxygen, lungs, and heart. My standing presupposes both the existence of a floor and the continued functioning of the fundamental laws of physics. My seeing presupposes the impossibly intricate functioning of my eyes, and my reading presupposes a work of understanding that takes place behind the eyes. Whenever I see anything, I can as such ask two specific question. First, what do I see? Second, what makes it possible for me to see this thing? Everything I think then assumes those same processes, with an added dimension of activity that renders what I see as meaningful. And so whenever I think, I can ask these same two question. First, what do I think? Second, what makes it possible for me to think this thing?
The first of these questions covers almost everything that can be asked of either thought or an object of thought, of knowledge or an object of knowledge. The second question asks after that which makes thought or knowledge possible. Immanuel Kant asks a version of it in his efforts to frame the categories of thought. Wittgenstein gestures towards it when he remarks, "I would like to say: 'I must begin with the distinction between sense and nonsense. Nothing is possible prior to that. I can't give it a foundation.'"1 Barth thinks with this question whenever he asks after the doctrinal presuppositions that make an intractable argument seem inevitable. Each of these thinkers bears witness to the fact that before thought there must be meaning, even if only so that nonsense can be thought as nonsense—and meaning does not emerge ex nihilo. It is created by the movement of bodies, the work of the senses, the syntheses of intuition, and the often unthought work of reflection.
When thinking feels stuck, it can as such be helpful to ask "what do I have to assume in order to even ask what I am asking, in order to even try and think what I am thinking?" To give an example, I have known a great many, myself included, who fear at the level of both thought and feeling that they can only be loved if they are not truly known. A variety of loving responses can be given to this fear, not least “that's not true” (and it is not). The difficulty is that this is precisely what feels impossible to believe, and so this reassurance can itself feel painful as one continues to fear something known to be false.
Here, however, the question can be asked: what must I assume in order for this fear to make sense? There can be many answers to this. But among them—I must assume that I am not already truly known; I must assume that love is given on the basis of worth; I must assume that I can be loved without being known. In more honest moments, I might even be able to admit to myself that I have in fact assumed these things. In my experience, the next step is not to deny these assumptions but to turn them into questions. Am I truly known? Is love given on the basis of worth? Can I be loved without being known? These are questions that can perhaps be answered, or at least be generatively explored. And in this they can perhaps unsettle the foundations of my fear.
This brings me to God's presence. To my mind, everything I have written so far has been theological—not simply because the possibility of thought ultimately comes back to “I believe in God, creator of heaven and earth,” but because I have felt God most closely in my life where I have felt possibilities of thought and action shift, often in retrospect, sometimes in the moment, always with a sense of awe. When I ask what I must assume in order for what I am thinking to make sense, I often find that I am asking what I have assumed about God. Have I assumed that God does not know me? Have I assumed that God's love is based on worth? Have I assumed that God can love me without knowing me? The answer to these questions may be “yes,” and I may be unable to change these assumptions as a matter of fiat. But even naming them as questions can illuminate a possibility that I have been unable to see because I have closed it off from the realm of meaning. And when I can think through these questions in the loving company of others, be it a seminar room or a local bar, I feel God at work beyond what I can possibly think.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Grammar (University of California Press, 2005), 127.