Abstract
This chapter returns to the notion of trust. Ulrich Schmiedel argues that trust troubles any concept of identity which presupposes a strict separation between the non-trustworthy outsider and the trustworthy insider. Discussing the phenomenological–philosophical accounts of trust developed by Arne Grøn and Claudia Welz, Schmiedel suggests that a togetherness of trust requires neither trust without suspicion nor suspicion without trust, but suspicion within trust. The truth of trust manifests itself in a hermeneutical search for truth which includes critical and self-critical moves. The truth of trust manifests itself in practice.
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Notes
- 1.
Bauman, Community, 16. See also my analysis in Chap. 5.
- 2.
See Arne Grøn and Claudia Welz, ‘Introduction: Trust in Question,’ in Trust, Sociality, Selfhood, 1–9.
- 3.
See Arne Grøn, ‘Trust, Sociality, Selfhood,’ in Trust, Sociality, Selfhood, 13–30; and Arne Grøn, ‘Grenzen des Vertrauens: Kritische Bemerkungen zur Rede von “Grundvertrauen”,’ in Grundvertrauen, 145–158.
- 4.
Erik H. Erikson’s distinction between ‘basic trust’ and ‘basic mistrust’ inspired these concepts. For critical comments see also Welz, Vertrauen und Verschuchung, 71–75. Brigitte Boothe, ‘Urvertrauen und elterliche Praxis,’ in Grundvertrauen, 67–86, has offered a convincing reinterpretation of Erikson’s theory. She argues that the trust of a child is generated in the parental practice of entrusting their child.
- 5.
See again Grøn, ‘Trust, Sociality, Selfhood,’ 13–30; and Grøn, ‘Grenzen des Vertrauens,’ 145–158.
- 6.
Grøn, ‘Trust, Sociality, Selfhood,’ 17. On the notion of eccentricity, see also Grøn, ‘Grenzen des Vertrauens,’ 148–149: ‘eccentricity’ points to the structure of subjectivity in which the subject is outside of the subject. According to Grøn, trust is a way to cope with this structure. See also Chap. 3.
- 7.
Grøn, ‘Trust, Sociality, Selfhood,’ 16.
- 8.
Ibid.
- 9.
Ibid., 21.
- 10.
Ibid., 14.
- 11.
See The Philosophy of Recognition: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Hans-Christoph Schmidt am Busch and Christopher F. Zurn (Lanham: Lexington, 2010).
- 12.
Grøn, ‘Trust, Sociality, Selfhood,’ 16 (emphasis in the original). For Grøn’s account of the ethics of vision, see Arne Grøn, ‘Ethics of Vision: Seeing the Other as Neighbour,’ in Dynamics of Difference, 63–70. For a diverse discussion on the ethics of in-visibility, see the contributions to Ethics of In-Visibility: Imago Dei, Memory and Human Dignity in Jewish and Christian Thought, ed. Claudia Welz (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2015). A short summary can be found in my review, ‘Rezension zu Claudia Welz (Hg.), Ethics of In-Visibility: Imago Dei, Memory and Human Dignity in Jewish and Christian Thought,’ Theologische Literaturzeitung, 140/11 (2014), 1272–1274.
- 13.
Grøn, ‘Trust, Sociality, Selfhood,’ 28 (emphasis in the original).
- 14.
Ibid. The ‘strong notion of alterity’ is what I approached through the terms ‘transcendence’ and ‘transformation’ in Chap. 3.
- 15.
Grøn, ‘Trust, Sociality and Selfhood,’ 13–14, 26–29.
- 16.
Ibid., 24.
- 17.
Ibid.
- 18.
Grøn and Welz, ‘Introduction,’ 3 (emphasis in the original).
- 19.
Grøn, ‘Trust, Sociality, Selfhood,’ 27.
- 20.
Ibid.
- 21.
Ibid., 13–14, 26–29.
- 22.
As far as I can ascertain, Grøn has not discussed James’s concept of trust.
- 23.
See Welz, Vertrauen und Versuchung.
- 24.
Ibid., 5; see also 91–93. For a detailed discussion of the openness of trust, see also Welz, ‘Trust as Basic Openness,’ 45–64.
- 25.
Welz, Vertrauen und Versuchung, 33–68.
- 26.
Ibid., 38.
- 27.
Ibid., 39.
- 28.
Ibid.
- 29.
Neither James’s philosophy nor James’s psychology of trust are engaged with in Vertrauen und Versuchung; nonetheless, Welz comes close to the Jamesian circumscription of the circle of trust.
- 30.
See Welz, Vertrauen und Verschung, 57.
- 31.
Thus, Welz counters those concepts of trust which are inspired by rational-choice theory, such as Diego Gambetta, ‘Can We Trust Trust?,’ in Trust: Making and Breaking Cooperative Relations, ed. Diego Gambetta (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), 213–237.
- 32.
Welz, Vertrauen und Verschung, 57.
- 33.
I am not demanding a ‘blind’ trust in the other. As I will explain below, the trust which is always appropriate is a trust which includes rather than excludes suspicion about the other.
- 34.
Welz, Vertrauen und Versuchung, 60–67.
- 35.
Ibid. It could be argued that Welz clarifies Dalferth’s notion that trust is ‘truly’ trust when the trustee who is trusted by the truster is not trustworthy (examined in Chap. 3). See again Dalferth, ‘Vertrauen und Hoffen,’ 418.
- 36.
See also Dalferth, ‘In God We Trust,’ 143–146.
- 37.
See Welz, Vertrauen und Verschung, 61–62, where she emphasizes that the success of one’s own orientation ought not to be the criterion according to which one does or does not give trust. Otherwise one would not trust the other, but one’s evaluations and expectations of the other.
- 38.
Ibid., 60–67.
- 39.
See the detailed discussion of the ‘trial of faith (Glaubensprüfung)’ in ibid., 158–177.
- 40.
Ibid., 201. My formulas of ‘trust without doubt’ and ‘doubt without trust’ are based on the discussion of doubt which Welz offers in ibid., 192–202.
- 41.
Ibid.
- 42.
Ibid., 133–134. See also Welz, ‘Vertrauen und/oder Gewissheit,’ 345–380.
- 43.
Identifying the im/possibility of hospitality, Jacques Derrida has pointed to the dilemma of trust without doubt and doubt without trust. In order for hospitality to be hospitality, he argues, there can be no qualitative distinction made between the hostile other and the non-hostile other because such a distinction reveals preconceived notions of who or what the other is, thus turning hospitality into inhospitality. He points to the term hostis, which is the Latin root for both hospitality and hostility, to stress the ambivalence in any such hospitable encounter with the other. Derrida, then, points to what I have called the prejudice of trust. See Jacques Derrida, Of Hospitality: Anne Dufourmantelle invites Jacques Derrida to Respond (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000).
- 44.
Welz, Vertrauen und Verschuchung, 134–135, 144–146, 202–209.
- 45.
Welz describes trust as a ‘groundless ground (grundloser Grund)’ (ibid., 113); however, she stresses that her combination of ‘ground’ and ‘groundless’ is not paradoxical. On the one hand, trust is groundless because one always already lacks the ‘grounds (Gründe)’ to reason for trust: what is grounded with reasons is mistrust as opposed to trust. On the other hand, trust is grounding because reasons for trust and mistrust are offered on the ground of trust which is itself not grounded by these reasons. Hence both ‘trust and mistrust are grounding precisely because they are groundless, which is to say, they cannot be caught by arguments’ (ibid.).
- 46.
See Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. revised Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (London: Sheed and Ward Limited, 1989), 265–306. Welz does not refer to Gadamer; however, she, like Gadamer, develops the rehabilitation of prejudice in critical conversation with Immanuel Kant. See Welz, Vertrauen und Versuchung, 43–54.
- 47.
For a succinct account of Gadamer’s hermeneutics see Jeanrond, Theological Hermeneutics, 64–70.
- 48.
See ibid, 67–77, where Jeanrond refers to Jürgen Habermas and Paul Ricoeur. Ricoeur, of course, is the thinker who took both sides—the prejudice and the critique of prejudice—into account when he coined the concept of the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion.’ See esp. Ricoeur’s ‘Hermeneutics and the Critique of Ideology,’ in Paul Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, 63–100.
- 49.
For a summary of Jeanrond’s three-dimensional concept of interpretation, see Schmiedel, ‘(Instead of the) Introduction: Open to the Other,’ 1–16, esp. 2–6.
- 50.
Jeanrond, Theological Hermeneutics, 110.
- 51.
See Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor: The Creation of Meaning in Language, trans. R. Czerny (London: Routledge, 2003), 376–377. For a comprehensive account of Ricoeur’s philosophy, see Bengt Kristensson Uggla, Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and Interpretation (London: Continuum, 2010). Particularly for Ricoeur’s hermeneutics, see Jeanrond, Theological Hermeneutics, 70–76. Jeanrond explains how Ricoeur reworked the distinction between primary and secondary naïveté through the concepts of ‘prefiguration,’ ‘configuration’ and ‘refiguration’ (ibid., 191–192n. 92).
- 52.
See Werner G. Jeanrond, Text and Interpretation as Categories of Theological Thinking, trans. Thomas J. Wilson (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1988), 68–71.
- 53.
See ibid., 68–71, 74, 120–128. See also Jeanrond, Theological Hermeneutics, 113–117.
- 54.
Ibid., 5–6.
- 55.
See Paul Ricoeur, The Conflict of Interpretations (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1974). In the chapter, ‘“As Books Should be Read”: Philosophy of Action and the Death of the Author: Paul Ricoeur,’ in Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and Globalization, 9–29, Kristensson Uggla gives a succinct summary of Ricoeur’s understanding of the production and the reception of texts within the conflict of interpretations.
- 56.
The notion of truth as manifestation which is significant for hermeneutics can be traced back to Martin Heidegger. For a succinct summary of notions of truth in the history of hermeneutics, see Kristensson Uggla, Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and Globalization, 32–40. I have taken the term ‘truth as manifestation’ from David Tracy, Dialogue with the Other: The Interreligious Dialogue (Louvain: Peeters, 1990), 43–45.
- 57.
Austin, How To Do Things With Words, 3.
- 58.
See Matthias Petzoldt, ‘Wahrheit als Begegnung: Dialogisches Wahrheitsverständnis im Licht der Analyse performativer Sprache,’ in Matthias Petzoldt, Christsein angefragt: Fundamentaltheologische Beiträge (Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 1998), 25–50.
- 59.
Gadamer, Truth and Method, 101–134. See also Jeanrond, Text and Interpretation as Categories of Theological Thinking, 20–21.
- 60.
Gadamer, Truth and Method, 103.
- 61.
Ibid. Gadamer points to the etymology of Spiel which can be traced back to ‘dance,’ thus emphasizing the movement in-between the players (ibid.).
- 62.
Ibid., 102. See also Gaetano Chiurazzi, ‘Truth Is More Than Reality: Gadamer’s Transformational Concept of Truth,’ Research in Phenomenology 41/1 (2011), 61.
- 63.
Chiurazzi, ‘Truth,’ 61.
- 64.
Gadamer, Truth and Method, 106.
- 65.
Ibid., 105. Selfsurrender—to recall my analysis in Chap. 1—means the jump of the self out of the self. Hence, selfsurrender is provoked by the play in which the players lose themselves.
- 66.
Ibid., 111. Gadamer refers to the ‘transformation into structure’ which is propelled by play: ‘Thus transformation into structure means that what existed previously exists no longer. But also that what now exists, what represents itself in the play …, is the … true’ (ibid.).
- 67.
Ibid., 112.
- 68.
See ibid., 102.
- 69.
Ibid., 113.
- 70.
Ibid., 114 (emphasis in the original).
- 71.
Chiurazzi, ‘Truth,’ 69 (emphasis in the original).
- 72.
Ibid., 70.
- 73.
Jeanrond, Text and Interpretation, 21, characterizes Gadamer’s concept of truth as ‘revelatory.’
- 74.
For Gadamer, Truth and Method, 140, truth is ‘increase in Being (Zuwachs an Sein).’ He explains it with reference to the Neoplatonic notion of emanation: ‘Essential to an emanation is that what emanates is an overflow. What it flows from does not thereby become less … For if the original One is not diminished by the outflow of the many from it, this means that being increases’ (ibid.). See also Chiurazzi, ‘Truth,’ 66. Hence, Gadamer’s notion of transformative truth differs from my notion of transformative transcendence which understands transcendence functionally rather than substantially. However, the experience of transformative truth and the experience of transformative transcendence are strikingly similar: transformation implies the experience of a difference.
- 75.
See Chiurazzi, ‘Truth,’ 70. Strangely, for Chiurazzi, the contrast between existential and explanatory truth is not a cause for concern. He makes no mention of the critics of Gadamer who called for a rehabilitation of the critique of prejudice in addition to the rehabilitation of prejudice.
- 76.
See Kristensson Uggla, Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and Globalization, 32–40.
- 77.
Jeanrond, Text and Interpretation, 21.
- 78.
James, The Principles of Psychology, vol. 1, 216–218. For James’s pragmatic concept of truth, see Hermann Deuser, ‘Zum Religions- und Wahrheitsbegriff bei William James,’ in Religionsphilosophie: Historische Positionen und systematische Reflexionen, ed. Matthias Jung, Michael Moxter and Thomas M. Schmidt (Würzburg: Echter, 2000), 151–164. Strikingly, Deuser stresses that, for James, truth includes that which escapes complete conceptualization (ibid., 162).
- 79.
James, The Principles of Psychology, 217.
- 80.
See Gadamer, Truth and Method, 383–491. To James’s concept of language as a source for the contamination of experience, Gadamer would respond: ‘It is from language as a medium that our whole experience of the world … unfolds’ (ibid., 457, emphasis in the original).
- 81.
Jeanrond, Text and Interpretation, 21.
- 82.
Austin, How To Do Things With Words, 101–102.
- 83.
See again Chap. 1, where I summarized Jacques Derrida’s notion of deconstruction. Tacitly, deconstruction also appears to run through Rowan William’s account of difference and deferral in the practice of communication.
- 84.
See David Jasper’s mesmerizing meditation on ‘betrayal’ at the center of community in David Jasper, The Sacred Community: Art, Sacrament, and the People of God (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2012), 31–44.
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Schmiedel, U. (2017). Chapter 7 The Trouble with Trust. In: Elasticized Ecclesiology. Pathways for Ecumenical and Interreligious Dialogue. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40832-3_8
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