Image description: A hand is holding a Tarot card outdoors in the early evening summer sun and there’s grass in the background. The card is Three of Pentacles by Pamela Colman Smith from the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot. In the image, three people with special areas of knowledge—a sculptor, an architect and a monk—have come together in a space to discuss a collective project. In addition to their specialities, each person has limitations, incomplete knowledges that inform their particular efforts. Efforts which are partial, but which come together to yield something greater than would be possible alone.
Registration is open for the Deconstructing the Tarot: Toward Unusual Knowledges workshop, which will be held virtually on July 1. There are only a few spots left but I do plan to offer it again if you’re not able to make this round.
This week I listened to a conversation between two people that I’ll describe vaguely as eco-philosophers talking about climate catastrophe. The conversation was full of language like “if we don’t do x then y” and “the reality is…” and all these really certain statements that left me a little annoyed and also wondering, what makes these people so sure?
When I consider what bothers me about statements like these in times of trouble, I come up with two things. One, there’s an implication of certain, complete knowledge that I don’t feel anywhere close to despite how hard I try and how relentlessly I seek. And two, the suggestion brings up a sense of inadequacy coupled with a feeling that objective truth is out there, I just don’t have access to it.
Thankfully, there are a lot of brilliant people who have really effectively argued complete knowledge is not an individual human possibility. And what this might mean is that there’s something those of us who feel overwhelmed by what we don’t know are aligning with and valuing, when we resist the siren song of certainty and of closure. Of either making absolute statements, or uncritically buying into them.
This week where I live we couldn’t safely breathe the air. I’ve been struggling, like we all do, with problems for which there are no easy-to-name solutions. It’s been really supportive to continue reading Grace Jantzen’s Becoming Divine, which critiques traditional religious philosophy and more specifically its fixation on absolute truth claims.
Jantzen takes aim at the way traditional religious philosophers have uncritically valued neutrality and objectivity, assuming a “view from nowhere” and the possibility that knowledge could stand apart from the environment, social landscape and a knower’s location within it.
This is similar in my field. I remember feeling really affirmed in my choice to study social work—rather than marriage and family therapy, or counseling—when I ordered the textbook for my first class, and it had the word ecology in the subtitle.
The book did talk a lot about the person-in-environment theory on human development which is exactly what it sounds like. As the program wore on, I noted an enduring emphasis on the ethical obligation to utilize evidence-based practices in therapy. And it isn’t that I don’t get why that matters. I feel like I do.
But because science, in Jantzen’s words, will “‘bear the fingerprints’ of the social group from which it springs,” the issue for me is taking for granted the broad applicability of evidence-based practices without critically examining what constitutes evidence. Jantzen continues, “What counts as evidence cannot be disentangled from who gets to do the counting.”
Which is to say something I’ve said many times: Being in the mental health field has involved a lot of grappling. My grappling looks a lot of ways and one of the big ones is reading. I’ve been so interested in reading theology and particularly constructivist theology, because of that field’s emphasis on metaphor and symbol, which have been such important routes toward understanding, for me.
I might be wrong, but I feel like there’s a lot more emphasis in theology on understanding the foundational metaphors and symbols of the field than there is in psychology as a whole. The theologians I’ve been reading—Shelly Rambo, Grace Jantzen, Ivone Gebara, Catherine Keller—have taken great pains to identify and name the metaphors that are so influential in their field like resurrection and salvation, and then to problematize and trouble them as a move toward social change.
These last weeks I’ve been in the thick of some ongoing struggles which I’ve at times felt exasperated by. I have longed for closure, despite the impossibility of closure at this time. When I heard Catherine Keller’s description of apocalypse as “not a closing down of the world, but an opening up,” and wrote about it in the June Offering, that helped. This week, when I read Grace Jantzen’s words on partial and incomplete knowledges, that helped too. Not only as a balm, but a fortifying aid.