from god's eye

Gill, Sam, Native American Religious Action, (Columbia, University of South Carolina Press, 1987) p. 45.

Or else we must retire to a quiet hermitage in existential impotence.

Putnam, Hilary, Reason, Truth, and History, (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 49-50.

To begin this discussion, we must set a few ground rules.

The crisis in representation proceeds from a presupposition

that there is a gap (a chasm perhaps) between

lived experience

and

representation.

I am referring primarily to our inability to forge the chasm between the world as it exists as an existential object and our knowledge of it, having come to realize that:

"There is no God's Eye point of view that we can know or usefully imagine; there are only various points of view of actual persons reflecting various interests and purposes that their descriptions and theories subserve."

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And that: "What appears to us as an uninteresting background may be to others the ground against which reality gains orientation and human meaning. What we must first realize is that there are many ways of looking; then, that understanding is shaped by where you put your eyes."

While there is a world, whose existence we must at least superficially affirm, our knowledge of "it" is dependent ourselves. "It" is dependent upon our being embodied, upon our cultural conditioning, our knowledge structures, and upon our historical location as inhabitants of the late, post-modern, twentieth century, and much more.