Paul Tillich's "Notes Toward A Supreme Fiction"

In The Courage To Be, Paul Tillich argued that the "ontological nature of reality" (a redundant phrase if ever there were one) can only be described "ontologically"--a circular argument if ever there were one. An ontological description of reality uses "some realm of experience to point to characteristics of being-itself which lie above the split between subjectivity and objectivity and which therefore cannot be expressed literally in terms taken from the subjective or the objective side" (25). He then asserts that being qua being "transcends objectivity as well as subjectivity" but, in order to approach it cognitively, "one must use both." This feat is accomplished by the use of analogy (ibid).

How analogy helps one here is, at best, unclear. What is clear is that Tillich wishes to posit a "realm" of reality that is not exhausted by either "objective" or "subjective" approaches to it. In this regard, he appears to be indicating an apprehension of reality that eludes ordinary modes of descriptive discourse and borders upon the "apophatic speech" of the mystic--what Michael Sells has termed "mystical languages of unsaying."

I would suggest, however, that such uses of language are inherently literary and fictional: they do not rise "above the split between subjectivity and objectivity" but, rather, manage to straddle the two. Their credibility (if that's the right word) is a function of the degree to which they persuade us through their mimetic qualities--and this is where "analogy" or other modes of metaphorical speech come in. Dickens's character Charles Gradgrind is "believable" to the extent to which he successfully "embodies" the sort of individual or individuals I have encountered in my life who think, talk, and behave as (simile) this character in the novel Hard Times.

The so-called science of ontology is best appreciated by the Stevensian conceit of "notes toward a supreme fiction." Religion, as Harold Bloom reminds us, is "spilled poetry." It supplies us, as Northrop Frye argued, with "myths to live by" and "metaphors to live in." Indeed, as Frye insists, "imaginative structures contain a vast amount of truth about the human condition that it is not possible to obtain in any other way" [Frye, The Double Vision, 37] but we must not understand these figures of speech "literally" in the sense that we should expect to find a birth certificate on file in some county clerk's office that would serve as proof that the Charles Gradgrind of Dickens's novel was a living, breathing, eating, defecating, love-making, laboring, and eventually dying, individual.

For all of that, however, Charles Gradgrind lives, has lived and, alas, shall live on: we have met him on many occasions and in numerous guises. And wherever we have met him he has always presented himself in a manner that is true to his novelistic form: a soul-withering adding machine for whom everything--and everyone--has a price.

With the proper adjustments--i.e., by substituting "notes toward a supreme fiction" for the various references to ontology that appear in Tillich's work--we can begin to appreciate Paul Tillich as a stimulating philosopher of culture and intellectual history.