Toward an Ontology of Relativism

Abstract

Despite the significant impact of the awareness of perspectival relativism on the religious imagination, recent philosophers and theologians have rarely subjected epistemological relativism to careful scrutiny. This paper attempts to overcome the current theological impasse by a careful exploration of the metaphysical implications of relativism. The central thesis of the essay is that truth is relative because meaning is contextual and being is relational. Contextualized meaning and relational beingjoin to form relative truth disclosed through symbolic awareness. The roots of contemporary relativism lie deep within eighteenth and nineteenth century philosophical movements and are inseparably entangled with the psycho-social pluralization endemic to the process of modernization. The efforts of Neo-orthodoxy, polytheism, and the scientific study of religion to resolve dilemmas posed by epistemological relativism are inadequate. What has gone unnoticed is that the discovery of truth's relativity is the realization of its inherently dialectical character. This insight begins to emerge when it is recognized that meaning is contextual and context is semiophantic. Principles identified in Hegel's logic, in MerleauPonty's phenomenology of temporality, and in Ricoeur's and Gadamer's hermeneutics disclose that meaning assumes form through dialectical interrelationship in which co-implicates mutually constitute each other. The synchronic and diachronic dimensions of relationality reveal the inexhaustability and perpetual revisability of meaning. The problem of semantics, however, is inseparable from the question of ontology. Ontological reflection leads to the conclusion that being itself is dialecticalfundamentally social or essentially relational. Determinate identity is born of ontological intercourse with otherness. Relations are not external and accidental, but are internal and essential to being itself. Identity and difference, unity and plurality, oneness and manyness are thoroughly corelative, joined in a dialectical relation of reciprocal implication. This pluralized unity and unified plurality is the ontological matrix of truth's relativity.