Book Review: The Fullness of Knowing: Modernity and Postmodernity from Defoe to Gadamer

Abstract

The Fullness of Knowing, Modernity and Postmodernity from Defoe to Gadamer. By Daniel E. Ritchie. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2010. ISBN 978-1-932792-17-1. Pp. ix + 281. $54.95. Daniel E. Ritchie's The Fullness of Knowing: Modernity and Postmodernity from Defoe to Gadamer attempts to connect epistemological questions raised by postmodernism to similar questions asked by eighteenth-century figures in response to the rise of the Enlightenment. Chapter five is an exception, however, as it compares the worst excesses of the French Revolution to what Ritchie believes are the worst excesses of the political correctness movement in U.S. universities. Ritchie's Fullness of Knowing is strongest in its treatment of eighteenth-century material and in exploring confluences between his eighteenth-century material and his twentieth, but weakest with his twentieth-century material, especially when he is engaged in polemic against it. Chapter one juxtaposes the epistemological conflicts surrounding Defoe's Robinson Crusoe with Lyotard's claims about knowledge in The Postmodern Condition and Rorty's later extension of these claims. The epistemological question considered in this chapter is about the nature of the provided by narrative. According to Ritchie, Enlightenment thinkers assume that each narrative's veracity is determined by its ability to contribute to and be understood within the confines of a metanarrative. This view is, of course, contradicted by Lyotard's and Rorty's postmodern distrust of grand narratives. Ritchie considers whether or not Defoe's early claim that Crusoe was real falsifies all of its claims for and the implications of this question for Biblical interpretation. If a story is not demonstrably factual, thus contributing to a scientific grand narrative, can it still also be true? Enlightenment hermeneutics assert that if Scripture is taken as literally true, it must also be historically verifiable (12), leaving interpreters with a choice between defending the historical verifiability of Scripture or seeking a nonhistorical meaning of the scriptural text, separate from its either in existentialism, myth, or religious experience (12). Therefore, a narrative's literal truth must be proven by empirical investigation undertaken by a detached, rational observer for the narrative to have any value (17). According to Ritchie, Defoe's changing positions toward Robinson Crusoe's historicity model these options and illustrate the ways in which Enlightenment assumptions crippled Defoe's ability to understand the nature of his own achievement. Because Defoe initially claimed that Robinson Crusoe was a factual account, the first novel suggests that the theological and meanings that Crusoe derived from his experiences were inseparable from his fictional, personal history (10). Later, however, as Defoe had to back down from his claims about Robinson Crusoe's historicity in his sequels, he separated the 'history' of Crusoe's from its meaning, which to him was moral in nature (10). Ritchie is dissatisfied with Defoe's resolution of the crisis of Crusoe's historicity as it fails to acknowledge the possibility of a fictional narrative being true because, following the example of narrative theology, he found his life story answering to the patterns of biblical stories and images (12). This third way rejects postmodern approaches to narrative that Ritchie criticizes, ultimately, only for being self-contradictory while he also rejects the limitations of Enlightenment approaches. Ritchie's treatment of this subject seems muddled at points because he ignores the existence of similar questioning about the of narrative prior to the Reformation. Catholic interpreters from Origen to the present have made clear distinctions between literal, ethical, and spiritual interpretations of Scripture, a tradition that can be traced back to Plato. …