Rowan Williams on "The Suspicion of Suspicion"

Rowan Williams, the recently- retired Archbishop of Canterbury, is a rigorous academic theologian who has written extensively on the intellectual viability of Christian belief in our post modern context. He is also a respected commentator on the history of Christian spirituality. 

    I am intrigued by a chapter titled "TheSuspicion of Suspicion" that appears in "Wrestling With Angels: Conversations in Modern Theology," where he looks at the way Freud, Wittgenstein, and  Paul Ricoeur address critical issues in contemporary philosophy. Freud's weakness,  according to Williams, is his tendency (in common with much of modern thought) to see "truth" as lying "underneath" the surface of reality, as being a matter of complexes, syndromes, drives, and pathologies that are hidden from ordinary view and accessible only to experts, analysts, and technicians. Freud's strength, on the other hand, comes from his appreciation for the symbolic value of dreams as a legitimate"language" of its own. "Our lives," writes Williams,"thoughts, acts, imaginings...have the nature of a dramatic script being enacted." 

   A great part of my formal education was spent in learning the particular methods by which  the various disciplines "dissected" their subject matter so as to explain the "objective truth" that always lay "beneath" what meets the eye. 

Freud's notorious version of this was to explain almost all human activity as disguised sexuality. Reductionism of this sort is recast in every school of thought that systematically regards reality with suspicion, whether it  looks for the "true story" in terms of economic forces, sexism, communist or Zionist conspiracies, or the work of Satan. 

      In a careful, academic way, Bishop Rowan, along with such intellectual heavyweights as Wittgenstein, Ricoeur, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, is calling us to a new appreciation for "the profundity of surfaces", to what Ricoeur has famously called a "second naïveté," and to do so without compromising a commitment to scientific method and the achievements of modernity. This calls for "the suspicion of suspicion," a kind of ultra-skepticism that leads to something like faith. 

   Perhaps we need not"...suggests Williams, "...be left with the bald alternativest of false naïveté...and manipulative reductionism." Ricoeur leads us, he believes, to a place of "fruitful and irresoluble  puzzlement."