43. REASON REVISITED

    Aquinas provides a prime example of a theologian who failed to realize the implications of the supposition that human beings are rational animals.  Thus, in his use of the medieval metaphor of the Two Books, Aquinas assumed that an autonomous Book of Nature authored by a rational and purposive Creator could be read by "the natural light of reason."  In so doing, he was blithely unaware that he endowed a literary construct with the power to compel assent to descriptive formulations and consent to moral judgments which satisfy its dictates.

     From a postmodernist perspective, however, this construct was clearly designed to resolve issues raised by the interiorization of the detachment inherent in reading and writing as an interrogatory stance.  The central issue: because an interrogatory stance licenses endless questioning, it posits an empty literary space whose hollow center can be filled by communications which reduce dialogue to a meaningless babble or by rhetorics centered in the dictum, "Might makes right."  As the product of a literary tradition, it is hardly natural.

      Historically, the hollow center of the interrogatory stance was filled in different ways by the Hellenic and Hebrew literary traditions.  The ancient Greeks filled the center with a metaphorical One which wedded (1) the totalizing thrust of languages governed by the logic of continuous prose and (2) the model of an enduring, bounded, changeless text written in continuous prose.  In marked contrast, to process Israel's historical experience, the ancient Hebrews forged a literary form whose narrative structure guaranteed that any story could be endlessly retold in ways that reveal that human history is an open-ended process which cannot be consigned to a single text written in the past or present.

      Evidence of the rule of the One over the Hellenic literary tradition can be found in distinctions which emerged once literary languages took on lives of their own.  For our present purposes, two such distinctions are particularly significant.  One, as texts replaced memory as the repository of the past, philosophers (and dramatists) were able to use an awareness of how the present differed from the past to envision future states of affairs to be produced through human agency.  Two, literary works provided a detached perspective on the interplay among the workings of everyday languages, the flux of experience, and the different ways that cultures carved up reality.  In this context, the One promised to transform endless questioning into focused inquiries which enabled mute nature to answer well-formed questions.  More importantly, an intertextual dialogue among the pre-Socratics, Plato and Aristotle fostered the supposition that reason was needed to govern unruly and disruptive passions and desires.  As a result, ethical analyses of moral discourse gradually replaced the use of tragedies and comedies to process the everyday experiences of life in emerging city-states.  Presumably, the rule of the One could yield definitive judgments which imposed closure on endless questioning and thereby precluded lapses into arbitrariness, conventionality or the will to power celebrated by the dictum, "Might makes right."

    Quite obviously, any detached perspective operates on a second level.  In this context, Logic, a language about language, decreed that analyses of the workings of everyday languages must be generated and governed by a logical principle of identity (or a principle of non-contradiction).  Quite obviously, this principle privileges the totalizing thrust of language.  (In the twentieth century, the rule of the One became suspect when efforts to formulate an ideal language revealed the impossibility of constructing a purely formal framework for analyses of language and experience which would yield a comprehensive and complete language capable of revealing the workings of nature transparently.)

    With regard to the enduring reality underlying the flux of experience, Plato and Aristotle provided competing visions.  Plato's seminal works grounded everyday language in a timeless realm of interpenetrating Ideal Forms, while Aristotle's appropriation of Plato simply implanted these forms in a conception of the potency of prime matter bounded by a finite universe.  And in this context, Aristotle wove the idealist and naturalist conventions into a correspondence theory of truth which promised that analyses of everyday experiences generated and governed by reason would ultimately provide an ideal language which revealed the whole of reality transparently, in depth and detail. 

    Here, I simply note that both philosophy and theology are second-level disciplines.  From this perspective, Aquinas' frequent references to "the natural light of reason" can serve as a paradigm example of the philosophical tradition's uncritical acceptance of the authority of reason.  On a broader canvas, Aquinas made no secret of his desire to wed philosophy and theology forever in a hierarchical framework which depicted philosophy as the handmaiden of theology.  To legitimate his willingness to baptize Aristotle as the Philosopher, he inscribed the rule of reason in the conception of a rational and purposive Creator who authored an autonomous Book of Nature and supplemented this god-term with the assumption that human beings made in the image of their Creator were rational animals.  And from these assumptions, he proceeded to forge a constrictive belief-system which, not surprisingly, continues to evoke frantic efforts to save the authority of Aquinas from the postmodernist resurgence of the interrogatory stance.

     In effect, the interplay between an interiorized interrogatory stance and the totalizing thrust of the logic of continuous prose ensures that, whenever one dominates, reason will recoil upon itself.  Descartes' transformation of the interrogatory stance into a methodical doubt provides a clear example.  To introduce this method, Descartes described constrictive medieval belief-systems as edifices erected on sand.  To clothe the method with the mantle of authority, he filled the hollow center of the interrogatory stance with a narrative structure designed to provide a certain starting point for inquiries capable of yielding definitive judgments.  As a narrative, this starting point functioned as a myth of pure beginnings.  But the myth merely re-centered the rule of the One in an abstract conception of solipsistic thinking beings.

    In fact, the rule of the One was already present in Descartes' awareness that he needed an ontological argument for the existence of a Creator of all else to support his insistence that the autonomous Book of Nature was written in the language of mathematics. the existence of an infinite Creator of all else.  As a perspective, the rule of the One played both sides of the street.  As an interrogatory stance, it generated the "Cartesian chasm" between subjectivity and objectivity which, in turn, implied that solipsistic individuals faced one another as the Other.  But as the voice of thinking beings, it inscribed vestiges of the traditional privileging of the universal over the individuals in the assumption that thinking beings could occupy a detached, disinterested, dispassionate, god-like perspective interchangeably.  (The rule of the One reappears in this notion of interchangeability.)

    Today, the hermeneutics of suspicion which propels the postmodernist movement is a hybrid which fills the hollow center of the conception of solipsistic thinking beings with Nietzsche's exposure of the ways that rationalism disguises a will to power.  To expose the operation of this hidden will to power, this hermeneutical theory encodes a critical apparatus which shows (1) that, far from conferring on individuals the power to escape entirely from the formative power of everyday languages, these languages are repositories of violence and (2) that no critical apparatus can eliminate prejudice, conventionality and the operation of disguised wills to power.

    To present themselves as literary heirs of traditional liberation movements, postmodernist critics insist that a hermeneutics designed to translate the interrogatory stance into a stance of suspicion is liberating without re-introducing god-terms designed to authorize judgments of any sort.  In effect, they respect the contributions of the rule of the One to the development of language over the centuries, yet refuse to re-inscribe a Cartesian subjectivity in a version of the conception of the autonomous individual which functions as the god-term in the myth of Modernity.  As a result, they offer readings of (1) texts, (2) languages indebted to literary traditions, and (3) everyday experiences textured by these languages which extend a relentless critique of the authority of reason to a subversion of authority in any shape or form.  And in so doing, it supplements Nietzsche proclamation of the "death of God" with its own proclamation of the "death of the author."

    As a literary heir of the western philosophical tradition, however, the postmodernist movement exploits the empty literary space projected by the Babylonian epics consigned to writing in the second millennium, BCE.  And the will to power of its adherents is quite evident in the fact that they can only fill the hollow center of this space with a hollow voice of prophetic protest against the violence enshrined in the distinctions and boundaries which are foundational to the depiction of human existence implicit in the political, economic and religious rhetorics which are allowed to frame moral issues uncritically in the United States today.

     In this vein, the gurus whose texts gave shape and form to an otherwise amorphous movement pretend that their protests against enshrined violence not only wrest the mantle of prophecy from Nietzsche, but also justify their self-presentations as prophets of a movement of liberation.  On my part, however, I find that Wittgenstein's analysis of the workings of language is far more fruitful than those offered by Derrida, in particular.  Recognizing the collapse of efforts to delineate an ideal language capable of presenting reality transparently, Wittgenstein replaced his earlier fascination with the assumption that language is a formal system with the thesis that everyday languages transmit many forms of life, each designed to realize a distinct human purpose, rather than a vision designed to legitimate definitive descriptive and moral judgments.

    Wittgenstein's insight enables me to re-read the readings generated by a hermeneutics of suspicion with suspicion.  On the one hand, it reveals forms of life capable of authorizing truly prophetic protests against the violence legitimated by everyday language, but derive them from forms of life which are conducive to the quest for a fully human and uniquely personal existence.  As such, it, too, can function as a voice of liberation.  And the perspective it offers leads me to suspect that those who espouse the reading strategies encoded in a hermeneutics of suspicion seek to liberate themselves from the need to explore the prophetic calls inscribed in the metaphors of intimacy projected by Israel's great prophets.

    In effect, I suggest that the hermeneutics of suspicion liberates postmodernist readers from the demands of a literary tradition centered in the search for a language capable of translating an elusive longing for a more fully human and uniquely personal existence into a realizable quest.  Presumably, the pretense that this reading code enables them to speak anonymously absolves them of the need for vulnerable self-revelations which would enable them to voice their protests against violence in their own voices.  If so, they ignore the distinction between liberation from [sic] and liberation that proponents of contract-theories of society must respect.

42. LIFE AS STORY

  

    The implications of a metaphor depicting life as a story supplements the biblical theme which depicts life as a perpetual journey into the unknown.

     Here, the difference between conjunctive and continuous narratives is worth noting.  [Note: By “conjunctive narrative,” JJ means a story that proceeds from one moment to the next without any kind of plot.] Since life has a flow, narratives introduce artificial demarcations between events in order to probe them in depth and detail.  In this context, the myths which transmitted culture prior to the invention of writing were stories which traced the prevailing social norms and the practices conducive to survival to acts of deities in a timeless past.  Since these deities acted arbitrarily and capriciously, the stories were conjunctive narratives consisting of discreet events.  As a result, the languages they promoted lacked an inner logic which invited language-users to formulate a comprehensive and coherent view of the course of human history or the lives of individuals.

      The detachment inherent in writing and reading ruptured the illusory sense of immediate presence, fullness and totality fostered by orality.  And when texts displaced memory as the repository of the past, emerging distinctions among past, present and future generated a sense of history.  In this context, storytellers derived conventions from alphabetical writing which enabled them to compose continuous narratives designed to  enabled authors to compose continuous narratives designed formulate an understanding of history as the unfolding of a flow of events.

     Through its incorporations of the logic of continuous prose,  a metaphor depicting life as story allows arbitrary demarcations among events, but insists that the meaning of past events depends on how they are woven into our responses to future events in our personal histories.

     The point at issue can be situated between two extremes.  On one extreme, I have known Friars who allowed resentment over a transfer to define their lives for years.  However, since that reaction had a history, the tragedy lies in their inability or unwillingness to undertake an inner journey which healed wounds in the past which made it impossible for them to let go of the pain evoked by the decision of a person in authority over them.  As a result, they remained trapped by their histories and stuck in what could otherwise be a step in the grieving process.

     At the other extreme, I have been involved with individuals when the buried memory of being sexually abused as a child surfaced years later.  As they entered the grieving process, they shared with me their present experience of excruciating pain, devastating shame, eruptive outrage and struggles with the suicide option.  This willingness not only to identify and feel these previously buried feelings, but to share them with me enabled them to let go and give free rein to care, compassion, playfulness, and joy in living.  And as the free play of all their deepest feelings enriched their involvements with loved ones, their willingness to go through the grieving process endowed events which had wounded them deeply with new meanings in a wide range of situations.

     Examples which lie between those extremes abound.  For my present purpose, the most revealing examples can be found in marriages in which two unique individuals commit themselves to a shared journey to deepening intimacy.  The commitment, if genuine, plunges them into a process.  On the journey, they will blow events, but the vulnerable self-revelations evoked by these wounding interactions yield new and deeper understandings.  And, as they experience the new life made possible by the grieving process, they become comfortable with the fact that there is no way through it but through it.

     More importantly, they abandon the assumption that we can author our own stories.  Or, more precisely, they discover that they become more fully human and more uniquely themselves when they co-author the unfolding story informed by their commitment to a journey to deepening intimacy with another person.

    Thus, from a sociological perspective, we enter life as world-open.  On the one hand, children deprived of face-to-face interactions are overwhelmed by the stimuli which bombard them.  On the other, children who are nurtured set forth on a journey into the unknown better equipped to find their way through life.  If they have been seduced by the promises of the myth of Modernity, they may believe that they have created their personal identities and are therefore authors of their own stories.  In ways they cannot realize, the supposed creation was largely governed by a pervasive process of socialization.

    I suggest, therefore, that entering involvements which call us to co-author a story we share with others evokes the longing for a more fully human and uniquely personal existence and transforms the longing into a realizable quest.  As a distinctive form of life, it has generated a language capable of teaching us how to be passionately, vulnerably, respectfully and faithfully involved with others.  Once we understand the point at issue, we can use the language to probe the internal turmoil triggered by events which tap feelings we had buried alive in a naive belief that we were controlling them.

    Bluntly, until we are to embrace a deepening person-to-person involvement, nothing could tap those buried feelings.  As such involvements deepen, events in which we find ourselves at cross-purposes with a loved one complicate our efforts to be honest about what we feel and think, real or imagined.  For many of us, until we abandon the assumption that we speak from a detached, god-like perspective which guarantees the objectivity of our judgments, we continue to express our inner turmoil through silent struggles or dramatic confrontations.  In effect, we continue to assume that our account of the event is the authorized version, i.e., the version which told the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.  In my own case, creative responses or angry reactions from people I loved exposed flaws in my "authorized versions" of events.  Gradually, in ways that I cannot reconstruct, I came to see that I had to master a literary construction, a fictive narrative voice, if I was to discover why my good resolutions did not prevent me from lapsing into reactions that were clearly counterproductive.

This narrative voice enabled me to voice vulnerable self-revelations which invited vulnerable self-revelations in return.

    I remember my first awareness that a vulnerable self-revelation on the part of a loved one revealed more about me than about her.  My reaction to an event had wounded her deeply.  As usual, I pleaded good intentions.  After framing her response with an admission that she was making a mountain out of a molehill, she relived with me some painful memories of events in her childhood that were tapped by my thoughtless reaction.  Somehow, she sensed that her sharing evoked a burden of guilt in me, and she hastened to assure me that she was not accusing me of being insensitive.  As a result, though insights it evoked, this exchange became a transforming moment in my life.  And in small and simple ways, it was woven into the ways we co-authored the story of our friendship.

     In sum, though I must take responsibility for my story, I cannot author it alone.  If I fail to engage in intensely personal interactions, deeply buried tangles will not be tapped.  And if I will not allow these tangles to be tapped, I will never be able to discern the insidious ways they control my involvements with others, to embrace life fully, and to speak in my own voice.

          (Addendum:  This thesis also.  In this context, the postmodernist hermeneutics of suspicion generated the slogan, "the death of the author".  The supporting argument was quite straightforward. Even the most original of authors wait until they have completed a composition before writing a Preface designed to govern readings of the text.  Regarding the writing of the text, the creation was in the doing, and even the most original texts were not created out of nothing.  Rather, as heirs of a literary tradition, authors were subject to the workings of languages which have taken on lives of their own.  In writing, however, they are not subject to the events encountered by individuals who seek to author their own existence.  So how could individuals take total credit for a unique identity when they are obviously shaped and formed by a particular language, a pervasive process of socialization, and a continuous flow of events in their personal histories?  (The same answer follows from the unanswerable question, "Whose voice is language?".)

            Sadly, the hermeneutics of suspicion which generated the proclamation of "the death of the author" is designed to deflect attention from the prophetic call to address moral issues through vulnerable self-revelations and a sympathetic imagination.  To achieve this goal, it targets "reason" as a rope-like word which codifies a critical apparatus indebted to repeated eruptions of an interiorized interrogatory stance.  Through learned archaeologies of knowledge, they expose the literary origin of a critical apparatus which promises that a detached perspective on the workings of language, experience and reality transforms the endless questioning legitimated by this interrogatory into focused inquiries governed by the rule of the One.  In marked contrast, the narrative voice appears in hidden ways in the early stories in the Hebrew tradition which gave voice to the eruption of self-consciousness indebted to literacy's rupture of orality's illusory sense of immediate presence, fullness and totality.  In the Hebrew narrative tradition, it situated later storytellers who pretended to offer the authoritative definition of Israel's positive and distinctive identity in the midst of the interplay among the workings of all three.  Through a contention among storytellers who vied for authority of the narrative tradition, it fostered inquiries designed to probe the historicity of human experience in ways that provided fruitful glimpses into previously inarticulate human depths.  Despite its introduction of the issue of authority, however, it filled the hollow center of a narrative voice with a structure which subverts the rule of the One.

    In short, respectful analyses of the personal dimensions of experience must be able to probe the mystery of human freedom without mystification.  (By definition, psychological theories enshrine theories of motivation designed to provide analyses of experience which will render human behavior predictable and, therefore, controllable.)  To do so, they replace obedience to the dictates of a logical principle of identity with obedience to the dictates of a narrative structure.  This structure can be easily delineated.  Minimally, the storyteller must set a scene, populate the scene with human agents, demarcate an event involving these agents, assign the agents roles in the interaction, and indicate short-term consequences of the event in question.  Quite obviously, each of these requirements guarantees that any story can be retold in ways that endow the event with radically different meanings.  E.g. one can trace the scene to events in the past, add details to the setting of the scene, introduce other agents, offer distinctive accounts of the motivations of the agents by redefining the roles they played in the original version, or emphasize different short- or long-term consequences.  As a result, pretending that one tells the authorized version is blatantly arrogant.  (I wish that those who pretend to tell the authorized version of the meaning of the story of Jesus would become aware of their arrogance.)

    In conclusion, individuals who are willing to co-author the unfolding story of a shared journey to deepening intimacy discover that vulnerable self-revelations which satisfy the dictates of the narrative structure are both revelatory and liberating.  And I dare to suggest that vulnerable self-revelations which invite a response in kind are the only way to come to the self-knowledge promised by the Socratic method. 

         (Addendum:  In my analyses of intimacy as a form of life capable of realizing a distinctive purpose, I discuss the dynamics of disillusionment and mounting pressure in depth and detail.  To pass through this crisis, those committed to the quest for ever-deepening person-to-person involvements must abandon judgments and agendas in favor of vulnerable self-revelations.  In so doing, they learn how to co-author a story which satisfies the dictates of a continuous narrative.)

41. FORGIVENESS

     Forgiveness is a painful process, and there is no way through the process except through it.

     I encountered the workings of the process vividly even before I understood the grieving process.  I was meeting with a woman unable to escape from the grip of a suffocating depression.  As we prayed together, she blurted out:  "I can't forgive him, and I won't."  Somehow, talking to God spontaneously had tapped a long-buried memory of being sexually abused by a neighbor who was regarded by her parents as a virtual grandfather to their children.

    Somehow, I resisted the temptation to assert that she should forgive, if she wanted to be a good Christian, or that she must forgive, if she wanted to find a way out of her depression.  Such responses would have pressured her to re-bury the pain, shame, rage and anxiety that had ruled her life for far too long.  And somehow, I realized that the significance of my conviction that Jesus' healing and life-giving love for each of us comes to us through one another.

    As that realization sunk in, I heard the call to walk through that dark valley (the valley of death) with her, without judgments or agendas.  Sometimes, I wanted to rescue her from the excruciating pain she voiced as she relived the horrible experiences of her childhood.  At these times, I must have heard echoes of Jesus' cry in the Agony of the Garden, "Father, if it be possible, let this chalice pass from me, but not my will but thine be done", since I responded simply with compassion and understanding.

    After several months, she moved from "I can't forgive him, and I won't" to "I want to forgive him, but I can't."  Two separate dynamics were at work.  On the one hand, she wanted to be free of the pain, rage, shame and anxiety that had plagued her for so long, so that she could get on with her life.  (When this urge reached fruition, forgiveness of him would be a gift she gave to herself.)  On the other, she started to refer to him as a pathetic, lonely man, not a monster, as her compassion was freed from the rule of rage.

    A few months later, she spoke of rejoicing in the freedom she felt in her involvements with loved ones and with God.  And I realized that the process of forgiveness is never complete until wounds have been healed in ways that enable us to embrace our flawed existence as human beings with joy.

     Summary:  A student framed this process accurately in a concise statement:  "Men never forgive;  they regard forgiveness as a sign of weakness.  Women forgive too easily;  they want desperately to be nice, and they shouldn't have bad thoughts."

      Here, I find myself grieving once again over the conclusion reached by a Conference sponsored by the Roman Curia.  The manifesto produced by this gathering of like-minded theologians attributed the virtual disappearance of the Sacrament of Reconciliation to a loss of a sense of sin.  Here, I simply suggest that a sense of guilt cannot voice a call to enter the grieving process which moves from "I can't forgive, and I won't" to "I want to forgive, but I can't," to a renewed embrace of one's deepest longing for a fully human and uniquely personal existence and for intimate interactions with the Father, Jesus, the Holy Spirit and loved ones.

40. TEXTURED EXPERIENCES

     In his Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche showed that human experiences are today textured by languages generated by literary traditions.  In this text, Nietzsche presented himself as the prophet who proclaims the imminent arrival of supermen who will live beyond good and evil.  As the god-term in an evolutionary process which would inevitably produce these supermen, he offered a reading of the western literary tradition designed to show the workings of an all-pervasive will to power.  To transform this thesis into a narrative, he populated this primordial state of nature with individual human beings who are endowed with a greater or lesser quantum of this will to power.  And for the structure of the unfolding narrative, he appropriated the dialectical structure popularized by Hegel.

    Thus, in the primordial state of nature, individuals with a greater quantum of the will to power simply assumed that, "Might makes right."  However, since these life-affirming "nobles" lacked a developed language of human interiority and of scientific inquiry, they expressed their desires crudely and were unable to master nature effectively.

    For the transvaluation of values that functioned as an anti-thesis, he characterized Christianity as a life-denying religion which, paradoxically, generated a rich language of human interiority.  Since this was his concern, he developed his reading of the moral discourse generated by Christianity from the insistence of Israel's great prophets that morality was voiced by the cries of the oppressed, the abused, the cripples, and the silenced.  But to account for the triumph of a life-denying discourse over a life-affirming "Might makes right," he asserted that priests had quanta of the will to power equal to that of the nobles, but willed the void.

    The transvaluation of values which functioned as the synthesis followed directly.  The evolutionary process was about to produce supermen who would live beyond good and evil, yet be able to use the language of interiority generated by Christianity to texture their passions exquisitely and gratify their desires effectively.

    

    Centuries earlier, Hume had set forth a far less contentious framework for the fact that everyday languages carve up reality differently.  As the champion of experimentalism, he pointed out that, in any detached observation, we learn only how that entity interacts with carefully controlled conditions.  In the twentieth century, Operationalism reduced this insight to two pregnant formulations.  (1)  Every entity in the universe interacts with every other entity.  (Otherwise, it would not be a universe.)  (2)  Consequently, to know everything there is to know about any entity, we would have to know how it interacts with every other entity.  Consequently, even theory-laden words do not present entities transparently or sort out interactions exhaustively.

        (Addendum:   Kant had anticipated the insights of Operationalism in his response to Hume's empirical critique of rationalism.  To eliminate consideration of unknowable consequences from moral issues, he granted Hume's theses that human beings are detectors bombarded by innumerable stimuli, that a usable language enables us to identify and respond to some of these stimuli, but that no language will ever be able to identify and control all the factors involved.  And he used this insight to locate morality exclusively in the intention to do one's duty.

       In the twentieth century, Logical Positivists began with the assumption that experiments produced hard data which they referred to as bare facts.  But the collapse of the movement from within revealed that facts are theory-laden and gathered with difficulty.)

     In recent decades, adherents of the postmodernist movement use the hermeneutics of suspicion (1) to expose the formative power of everyday languages on passion, desire, perception, imagination, thought-patterns, motives, intentions and aspirations and (2) to reject the supposition that reason provides a detached, god-like perspective on the interplay among language, experience and reality and the myth of pure beginnings promised by Descartes's methodical doubt.  In effect, they view language as a repository of violence and as an inescapable original sin.  But their deconstructive readings of texts, linguistic formulations, and everyday experiences are highly literary and often exquisitely textured.

    In popular culture, their subversion of authority offers no solution to the inability of students to read complex texts, to probe moral issues in depth and detail, and to texture their experiences with one another in ways conducive to deepening intimacy.

    In this regard, Nietzsche might well suggest that we are undergoing another transvaluation of values in which the cultural relativity of values is replaced by a relativity of values defined by individuality.  And he would undoubtedly approve, since it would allow the new Sophists to use textured languages to justify the way that they prey on the unsuspecting masses.

39. THE MYTH OF MODERNITY

   

    As the bearer of the ideals of the Enlightenment, the myth of Modernity presents autonomous individuals as creators of their own unique identities, masters of the universe through the knowledge provided by scientific advances, co-authors of ideal societies, lords of history, and arbiters of their own destiny.

     As a literary construct, it interweaves idealist conventions forged by Plato, Aquinas' formulaic depiction of God, the myth of pure beginnings generated by Descartes' methodical doubt, Rousseau's romantic insistence that human beings are made unique, free and creative by nature rather than by God, and Kant's abstract conception of the autonomous individual who is the sole author of the text which inscribes his autobiography.

     The role of conventions derived from Plato's realm of Ideal Forms is particularly evident in the confidence that reasonable beings will co-author a social contract capable of constituting an ideal society.

     The appropriation of Aquinas' depiction of God is equally obvious.  In his Summa Theologica, Aquinas presented God as a rational and purposive Creator of unique individuals who shared a universal human nature, the master of the universe, the author of a hierarchically structured social order, the lord of history, and the arbiter of human destiny.  To lend authority to their myth, Enlightenment authors simply replaced this abstract conception of God with Kant's equally abstract conception of the autonomous individual.

     To counter the traditional belief that God is active in human history, the myth placed autonomous individuals in a primordial state encoded in Descartes' myth of pure beginnings.  As Sartre's articulation of the human journey into the unknown dramatized, individuals who entered each moment of the journey of life as a pure beginning not only could, but had to create the sort of unique identities celebrated by a Rousseauean romanticism.  And since the replacement of God by autonomous individuals was seemingly accredited by the way that scientific advances conferred the ability to harness nature to human purposes, the equation of scientific knowledge and power by Roger Bacon accredited the belief that autonomous individuals were masters of the universe.

     The appropriation of the depiction of God as the Lord of history was more complicated.  Histories written by human beings are narratives designed to integrate the experience of memorable events in a coherent vision.  In this context, idealist conventions derived from Plato's posit were to legitimate ideologies which decreed that history moved, inexorably, toward a determinate end.

         (Paradigm examples of this dubious argument can be found in the works of Hegel and Marx.  Marx forged a hermeneutical theory capable of standing Hegel on his head because it revealed that the course of history was propelled by a dialectical structured matter.  With this peculiar conception of matter as his god-term, Marx developed a vision which defined the end of history as an ideal society governed by a single principle, "From each according to his abilities;  to each according to his needs."  And since history is the record of conflict among individuals, history would come to an end in an enduring state of eternal bliss.)

     At the dawn of the twentieth century, however, intellectuals who expected an imminent fulfillment of the promises of the myth of Modernity were profoundly disillusioned by World War I, a war to end all wars, and, in the following decades, by the eruption of World War II triggered by Hitler's seductive ideology and especially by the Holocaust.  To process this experience, Kafka and Beckett composed seminal texts which voiced this disillusionment long before philosophers became aware of the sterility of a myth which celebrated the autonomous individual and the workings of a detached, dispassionate voice of reason.  On this literary stage, however, Nietzsche's insistence that his exposure of the cultural relativity of prevailing moral discourses revealed the working of an all-pervasive will to power forced intellectuals to recognize that the celebration of personal autonomy deprived their protests against random eruptions of violence and concentrations of power in impersonally operating institutions of any semblance of moral authority.

    Decades later, adherents of the postmodernist movement exploited the fear that a moral discourse which promised a more fully human and uniquely personal existence could at best generate yet another -ism.  To expose the will to power inherent in judgments of any sort, the gurus of the movement entered an arena framed by the Protestant tendency to encode protests in slogans.  In this context, because the Protestant slogan, "sola Scriptura", invoked the conception of an autonomous text, it provided an easy target.  In effect, these critics used Nietzsche's slogan, "God is dead", to sound the death-knell for belief-systems, ideologies and theories centered in a god-term.  And from this starting point, they expanded their critique to include the authority accorded to the texts which had acquired canonical status in literature, philosophy and theology.  In the process, they added Barthes' announcement of the "death of the author" to Nietzsche's slogan, "God is dead."

  

    From my perspective, Nietzsche's slogan sounded a long overdue death-knell for Aquinas' baptism of Aristotelian metaphysics as the framework for theological inquiries concerning a relationship between grace and nature.  At the dawn of the Modern Era, Descartes' geometrization of the universe replaced the hierarchical and teleological structure of Aristotelian metaphysics with an empty literary space.  Without the need for added commentary, this revolutionary revision exposed the anthropomorphism inherent in the belief that a rational God had to inscribe his moral purpose in a teleologically structured Book of Nature.  And since my introduction to the philosophy of science had led me to welcome Nietzsche's proclamation of the death of Aquinas' conception of God for some time, I was far more intrigued by a slogan which sounded the death knell of Kant's conception of autonomous individuals who could author the stories of their lives in splendid isolation.   

    From a critical perspective, I agree with the insistence (1) that everyday languages exert a formative power on longings, passions, desires, perceptions, imagination, thought, motives, intentions and aspirations and (2) that a fictive voice of reason cannot provide a detached, god-like perspective on the interplay among language, experience and reality capable of liberating reasonable beings from that formative power in a way that allows a pure beginning.  As a result, I agree with the postmodernist deconstructions of the use of metaphors of individuality generated by Descartes' methodical doubt which converged in Kant's effort to ground moral discourse in an abstract conception of an autonomous individual.  Indeed, working backwards from a moral discourse generated by a metaphor of intimacy, I agree with the postmodernist subversion of each of the five promises of the myth of Modernity.

       I.e., experience has taught me that I am not and cannot be the sole creator of my personal identity.  But it has also taught me that fidelity to committed involvements which invite me to co-author a single story of a shared journey into the unknown evokes vulnerable self-revelations in which I speak in my own voice.  To discern the hold of the will to power enshrined in everyday English, I welcome the critical apparatus encoded in the hermeneutics of suspicion, but I cannot allow it to subvert repeated efforts to speak in my own voice.  Paradoxically, to speak in my own voice, I must not pretend that I have the authority to impose my judgments and agendas on others.  But if my vulnerable self-revelation speaks as a life-giving voice, it will speak for itself to those who are willing to listen.

38. HERMENEUTICS

The conception of reason which dominated the western philosophical tradition involved the interplay between the interiorization of literacy as an interrogatory stance and the inner logic of the totalizing thrust of the continuous prose generated by alphabetical writing.

    (A)  Metaphysics:  From the very beginning, metaphysical inquiries were designed to provide objective grounds for imposing closure on the endless questioning licensed by an interiorized interrogatory stance.  For centuries, the focus of these inquiries was governed by the idealist and naturalist conventions designed by Plato and Aristotle.  (Plato's realm of interpenetrating Ideal Forms has the characteristics of a bounded, changeless, enduring text consisting of clear and distinct conceptions woven together by the logic of continuous prose.  On his part, Aristotle implanted those forms in a teleologically and hierarchically structured natural order.)

         The role assigned to metaphysical inquiries rested on the assumption that one must know the structure of reality in order to understand the workings of natural forces in contingent events.  Two examples illustrate the point at issue:  (1)  Aristotle's supposition that the natural order has a teleological structure led him to argue that objects thrown into the air fall to the ground because they seek their natural place.  (2)  The Hellenic fascination with form privileged universals over individuals, since individuals resist easy categorizations.

         Plato and Aristotle played leading roles in the triumph of literacy over orality as the foundation of culture.  That triumph generated an awareness that languages generated by literary traditions took on lives of their own.  At roughly the same time, exiles returning to Judea from the exile in Babylonia set in motion a process which led to a widespread characterization of adherents of an emerging Judaism as the People of the Book.  Centuries later, as Christianity spread throughout the Mediterranean area, Christians appropriated the Jewish Scriptures as an Old Testament in order to claim that the Christian Scriptures, as a New Testament, provided a code for laying bare how God was active in Israel's history.  And as they sought to reconcile a traditional belief in exclusive election with the belief that Christianity had universal import, they assumed that a creative tension between faith and reason could yield definitive readings of the text.

         In the Middle Ages, these assumptions and beliefs were woven into a metaphorical reference to Two Books, the Book of Nature and the Scriptures.  In this context, both were enduring, changeless, bounded texts governed by the logic of continuous prose.  Since the Book of Nature was supposedly authored by a rational and purposive Creator, anyone endowed with "natural light of reason" could read the moral will of God inscribed in a teleologically structured natural order.  And since the Scriptures supposedly spoke as God's own description of his saving activity in human history, they must be truth-telling. 

          Since medieval authors accepted without question the traditional dictum, "Grace builds on nature," they used this metaphor to validate a theory of interpretation which accorded primacy to the Scriptures as the revealed Word of God, but promised that a knowledge of God's creative will supplied by metaphysical inquiries would contribute significantly to the interpretation of difficult passages.

    (B)  Epistemology:  Ockham stood the medieval pre-dilection for metaphysical inquiries on its head with a simple assertion:  "There are individuals;  how do we form valid universal concepts?"  In its own right, that question asks:  "How do we move from noting similarities and differences between individuals to categorizations such as `human beings' and to conceptions which describe human beings as `rational animals'?"  And, more generally, "How do we know that we know?"

    (C)  Methodology:  At the dawn of the Modern Era, Descartes was convinced that his methodical doubt could resolve epistemological issues by providing a certain starting point for the acquisition of an equally certain knowledge.  In and through this method, he privileged the interrogatory stance inherent in the interiorization of literacy over the logic of the totalizing thrust of continuous prose.  As a mathematician, however, he regarded an intuition of the infinite as a positive notion and used that notion in an ontological argument for the existence of a God who authored the Book of Nature as an autonomous text written in the language of mathematics, not the language of Aristotelian metaphysics.    (Presumably, an infinite God would not create individuals who could be deceived by their senses.)  And in this context, he used the methodical doubt (1) to generate a geometrization of the universe which decisively undermined the medieval belief in a hierarchically and teleologically structured universe, (2) to posit a myth of pure beginnings on the part of solipsistic thinking beings, and (3) to support his description of medieval belief-systems as edifices erected on sand.

          (Supplementary addendum:  The Hellenic literary tradition interiorized the detachment inherent in literacy as an interrogatory stance.  To transform endless questioning into focused inquiries, it embraced the rule of a metaphorical One.  As the framework for analyses of the interplay among language, experience and reality, the One filled the hollow center of inquiries structured by a logical principle of identity with a fictive voice of reason.  Presumably, inquiries governed by reason would ultimately generate an ideal language which could be consigned to an autonomous text.

         In marked contrast, the Hebrew literary tradition interiorized the detachment inherent in literacy as an eruptive self-consciousness.  To explore the depths of newly self-conscious individuals, authors who used stories to process the belief that an incomprehensible God had been intimately involved with Israel's memorably unique patriarchs and matriarchs forged a literary form, the prose narrative.  This form inscribed a narrative rather than a timeless structure and a narrative voice rather than the dispassionate and disinterested voice of reason.

         Consequently, Descartes not only transformed the interrogatory stance into a methodical doubt.  Through his metaphorical description of medieval belief-systems as edifices erected on sand, he fused the restructuring of thought in the Hellenic tradition with the narrative structure of the Hebrew tradition.  Thus, as one applied the methodical doubt, one presumably eliminated one's own peculiar prejudices, pre-conceptions and assumptions as well as the conventions supporting the edifice to be deconstructed.  In the end, the promise that stripping all this away would yield a certain starting point effectively posited a timeless myth of pure beginnings, while the use of reason emerged as the guarantor of objectivity.  But rationalism's triumph was a hollow victory, since the introduction of the narrative structure evoked the emphasis on self-consciousness which was largely responsible for the unbridgeable Cartesian chasm between subjectivity and objectivity.)

    (D)  Hermeneutics:  In the twentieth century, Logical Positivism and Phenomenology took the fascination with methodology to its logical extremes.  (Logical Positivism claimed to delineate the scientific method.  Phenomenology was more indebted to the focus on self-consciousness encoded in the early stories in the Hebrew narrative tradition, but it, too, promised to lay bare the core of conscious experiences without interpretation.)  Despite the collapse of both Logical Positivism and Phenomenology from within, however, most academic philosophers ignore Nietzsche's exposure of the will to power hidden in the rule of reason over metaphysical, epistemological, methodological and ethical inquiries.  The reason is not hard to find.  If they acknowledged the validity of Nietzsche's critique, they would have to abandon the assumption that a literary construct provides a detached, disinterested, dispassionate, god-like perspective on the interplay between language, experience and reality which reasonable beings can occupy interchangeably.  By extension, they would have to abandon the pretense that they, as masters of the use of reason, speak anonymously, yet exercise a god-like authority over past, present and future readings of an inter-textual dialogue among the three strands in the western literary tradition, literature, philosophy and theology.

          In his re-readings of the western philosophical and theological tradition, Nietzsche exposed the literary origins of the assumption that the use of reason is morally neutral.  In effect, he revived the issues of infinite divisibility and infinite regress which the restructuring of thought centered in a metaphorical One had presumably resolved.  To expose the arbitrariness of distinctions and boundaries enshrined in everyday languages, he insisted that analyses of language and experience must address the implications of a dictum, "Nothing is true;  everything is permitted."

         In his Genealogy of Morals, in particular, Nietzsche deconstructed the literary foundations of Aristotle's correspondence theory of truth by advancing an evolutionary theory and filling the hollow center of its structure with an all-pervasive will to power.  In this and other texts, Nietzsche forged two distinctive literary forms, the archeology of knowledge and the genealogy of morals, which he used to show, beyond question, that the language which transmits western culture is the product of a literary tradition.  In their own right, these literary forms encoded a hermeneutical theory capable of competing with the hermeneutical theories advanced by nineteenth century Protestant biblical scholars.  To move beyond protests against the power-structure enshrined in the institutional Church at the dawn of the Modern Era, these scholars hoped to set forth transparent readings of the Scriptures which could speak as an immediate word of God, devoid of human interpretation.  In this vein, Nietzsche sought to set forth a reading of the western literary tradition which uncovered the pervasive workings of an impersonally operating will to power.  His goal was obvious.  If a reading of the literary tradition laid bare an evolutionary process propelled by a will to power, the reading strategies he authored would replace the literary conventions invoked by proponents of traditional metaphysical, epistemological, methodological, and ethical inquiries.

           To accomplish his purpose, Nietzsche wove critical conventions generated by the interplay between rationalism and empiricism into distinctive literary forms which supplement the interiorized interrogatory stance invoked by Descartes with a reading code designed to expose the literary origins of the languages which texture the experiences of inhabitants of western cultures.  In and through these literary forms, he (1) extended Descartes' description of medieval belief-systems as edifices erected on sand to include everyday languages, (2) derived strategies designed to "deconstruct" both the rationalist assumption that reason speaks with authority and the literary foundations of these languages, and (3) integrated these strategies in a hermeneutical theory.

        (Addendum:  To my knowledge, Nietzsche never acknowledged a debt to the hermeneutical inquiries of Protestant biblical scholars in the mid-nineteenth century.  These scholars were determined to "save the theory" inscribed in Luther's use of the slogan, sola Scriptura, to counter the Catholic tradition's emphasis on Scripture and Tradition.  Though few were aware of the fact, this slogan committed them to inquiries governed by the medieval metaphor of the Two Books.  And this commitment demanded that, if they hoped to live with intellectual integrity, they had to find a code for reading a sprawling text as a revealed Word of God capable of speaking timelessly and immediately, without ambiguity or interpretation, to human beings in any age or culture.

        Since they were thoroughly versed in the critical standards which governed research in German Universities at the time, they realized the magnitude of the project they embraced.  That project:  To show that the Judaic-Christian Scriptures were indeed a single text which contained within itself the means to strip away the interpretations imposed on it over the centuries and thereby allow the text to speak for itself.  In effect, they recognized the need to show that a sprawling text was self-interpreting and, if it were to speak the Word of God immediately, self-referential.

        In my scattered readings of the dialogue among them, I found no awareness of the issues raised by the transition from orality to literacy as the foundation of Christianity in the Modern World.  On the one hand, they embraced the immediacy of face-to-face communication celebrated in Luther's emphasis on Paul's dictum, "Faith comes through preaching."  On the other, they were confident that they could successfully replace traditional theories of interpretation with a hermeneutical theory capable of letting the Scriptures speak for themselves.  But their growing awareness of the role played by literary conventions in the composition of messages consigned to writing illuminated critical differences between face-to-face communications and proclamations inscribed in texts written by unique individuals for an imagined audience.

        Today, I can understand why they could not yet recognize that the conception of a self-interpreting and self-referential text was the product of the rule of reason over the western philosophical and theological traditions.  But I am also convinced that the polar oppositions between faith and reason, reason and revelation, faith and works, and the sacred and the profane posited by Luther provided a pernicious foundation for their belief that an understanding of the workings of literary conventions would enable them to set forth readings in and through which the Scriptures spoke for themselves.

         This belief was immensely fruitful, but only in the way that a bad theory is better than no theory at all.  In effect, the theory implicitly recognized that fact that the anxiety of authorship experienced by authors of original visions and projects was centered in the need to invent literary conventions to supply for the absence of the tacit clues that supplement oral-aural communication.  Implicitly or explicitly, these scholars hoped to identify the literary conventions utilized by biblical authors to guide and govern the understanding of their texts.  Presumably, they could use a knowledge of the workings of these conventions in any passage to lay bare a core message which spoke as an immediate Word of God without interpretation.

         One of the reading strategies they explored in depth was generated by the dawning awareness of the use of a variety of literary forms (genres) by authors whose texts were incorporated in both the Jewish and Christian Scriptures.  In its own right, the strategy promised that an understanding of the conventions inscribed in these literary forms would guide readers to the core message of the passage.

              (Addendum:  In the United States, Bultmann's promise that demythologizing the Scripture through the use of a hermeneutical theory indebted to Heidegger would enable the Scriptures to speak as an uninterpreted Word of God was gladly embraced by Christians held captive by the slogan, sola Scriptura.  Here, I merely note that Heidegger's hermeneutical theory was designed to evoke a stance of open responsiveness to a creative and gracious Being in which all somehow participated.  Understandably, a stance of open responsiveness seemed to provide a contemporary framework for Bultmann's revival of Luther's insistence that only those who were willing to stand naked before God through a confession of utter sinfulness could receive justification by faith alone,)

        Over time, this seminal project yielded the critical apparatus developed in greater detail in the theories which dominated literary criticism in the twentieth century.  In short, once they recognized the textualization of the polemics between Catholic and Protestant theologians, biblical scholars developed a sophisticated classification of distinctive literary forms (genres) used by the storytellers and prophets whose texts were stitched together by redactors in Babylon.  When readings governed by the use of these literary forms could not resolve all issues, they recognized that the choice of a distinctive literary form as the framework for a distinctive message forced them to speculate concerning the intention of the author.  From there, it was a small step to efforts to rescue objectivity through a theory of historical criticism, with its promise that the core message could be laid bare by a recreation of the workings of culture at the time when the passage in question was composed supplemented by a recreation of the concerns of members of the community addressed by this passage.

        Today, the collapse of the project from within forces biblical scholars who are honest searchers to admit the impossibility of forging a hermeneutical theory capable of showing that the Scriptures can be read without interpretation.  In effect, the collapse confirms that any pretense that the Scriptures can be read literally rests on polar oppositions between faith and reason and between reason and revelation.  On my part, I would add, quite explicitly:  The collapse also dramatizes the fact that abandonment of a search for intellectual integrity involves hidden exercises of the will to power exposed so relentlessly by Nietzsche.

    I suggest, therefore, that Nietzsche's critique of rationalism effectively replaced traditional metaphysical, methodological and ethical inquiries with a focus on a code for re-reading the western philosophical and theological traditions.  However, since few could share Nietzsche's worship of naked power, Heidegger was the continental intellectual who made hermeneutical issues respectable.  Heidegger did not deny that a will to power was at work in the evolution of the western literary tradition, but he replaced Nietzsche's use of a will to power as the god-term which lend coherence to his hermeneutical theory with the notion of Being forged by the pre-Socratics prior to the emergence of significant distinctions among language, experience and reality.  In his hermeneutical theory, he supplemented Nietzsche's concern with the textuality of experience with his own emphasis on the historicity of experience and used the participative character of human existence implicit in this notion to transform the Cartesian distinction between subjectivity and objectivity into an interplay between understanding and interpretation.  (The pregnant metaphor:  "Language is an abode in which we dwell suspended over an abyss.")

        Turning to an analysis of the workings of language, Heidegger fashioned a metaphor which depicted language as a vehicle for the revelation of the meaning of Being.  To support this metaphor, he noted that, when we struggle to express our deepest concerns, we find ourselves searching for words.  And to unpack the metaphor, he asserted (1) that language, not the language-user, speaks, (2) that language speaks Being, and (3) that "language reveals; language conceals".  And in this context, he transformed the search governed by Aristotle's correspondence theory of truth into a search for an authentically human stance toward Being.

         In effect, Heidegger replaced a privileging of a compelling power of reason with a reading code designed to voice prophetic calls for open responsiveness to the unfolding of a creative and gracious Being at work in the western literary tradition.  (The contrast with Nietzsche's call to welcome supermen who would live beyond good and evil is obvious.)

          Earlier, I noted Heidegger's influence on Rudolph Bultmann.  His influence can also be found in the writings of Karl Rahner.  But the postmodernists were the first to recognize that the use of god-terms by both Nietzsche and Heidegger offered ample evidence that their hermeneutical theories were indebted to a desire to escape from the rule of reason.  In their appropriation of Heidegger's hermeneutical theory, they embraced Heidegger's assertion that language speaks, that language conceals as well as reveals, and that the use of reason generates rationalizations that conceal as well as reveal.  And to support the pretense that they themselves speak from nowhere, they insist that their hermeneutics of suspicion does not invoke or require a god-term.

          For the workings of a reading code authorized by a hermeneutics of suspicion, see Reflection 39, on The Myth of Modernity.  In this Reflection, I suggest that the myth of Modernity is the primary target of deconstructive readings generated by a hermeneutics of suspicion.

37. JUSTICE

[Editor’s note: I find it helpful to translate JJ’s term “a form of life” as “a script.” A script is a plan for a sequence of behaviors—a script as it is used in drama is a perfect example.]

     In a reflection in my Third Installment, I argued that justice is a moral notion with a hollow center, much like the notion of "a common good."  I realize now that my criticism was inspired by a peculiar difficulty.  Clearly, the longing for intimacy generated a distinctive form of life whose language could be used to process experiences in ways that transformed the longing into a realizable quest.  But I could not see how justice could be transformed into a form of life with a realizable purpose.

    As I analyzed the workings of references to "a common good," however, I became aware of profound differences between this notion and the notion of justice.  As a moral notion, justice concerns relationships between and among detached individuals.  (As a form of life, intimacy focuses on intensely personal interactions.)  In Wittgensteinian terms, its functioning can be compared to a rope woven from many strands, with no strand running all the way through, and, therefore, as a word whose meaning depends on its use in a form of life.

    As a word laden with many meanings, justice encodes a cluster of moral notions which function as principles designed to structure relationships between and among detached individuals, including impartiality, equality, fairness, rights, common decency, and mutual respect.  Taken separately, any of these strands can be used for very different purposes.  Affirmative action provides an example.  To promote the program, proponents argue that those who have been systematically disadvantaged by the prevailing social (power) structures deserve the special consideration needed to provide them with equal opportunity with those who have long benefitted from the system.  From this perspective, affirmative action is a matter of justice.  But opponents of the program counter that those deprived of positions awarded to the so-called disadvantaged are victims of reverse discrimination.  And since any sort of discrimination is unjust, reverse discrimination is unjust precisely because it denies equal opportunity to those who are better prepared to fill the position.

    In its own right, the fact that a moral notion can be used for very different purposes is hardly surprising.  Love provides a paradigm example.  The language of love enables lovers to transform a longing for intimacy into a realizable quest.  But seduction is also a form of life, and seducers use the language of love for very different purposes.

    In this vein, I came to see that the meaning of justice depends on its use in a form of life.  On the one hand, echoes of a language of rights in appeals for justice render its use in the quest for deepening intimacy counterproductive.  Intimacy calls for vulnerable self-revelations, not moral judgments or self-protective strategies.  But there is also a need for moral notions which address issues arising between and among detached individuals.  And in this arena, radically different ways of using justice can be seen in the uses made of the strand in the notion developed in the language of rights.

    An analysis of ways that individuals invoke the right to freedom of speech illustrates the point at issue.  This language was generated in response to the dramatic emergence of a sense of self in a culture still dominated by the previously unquestioned assumption encapsulated in the dictum, vox regis, vox Dei [the voice of the king is the voice of God] .  Kings were kings by divine right of birth, and submission to their dictates was submission to the will of God.  As the language of rights developed, however, the meaning of politically recognized rights was increasingly determined by the purpose of the language-user.  In this vein, many individuals in the United States today regard the right to freedom of speech as a personal possession which must be jealously guarded and vigorously defended.  In effect, they use the invocation of a right to freedom of speech for two purposes, one, to render themselves invulnerable and, two, to justify a refusal to enter into a respectful dialogue concerning the point at issue.  Quite obviously, if everyone shared this belief, we would dwell within a litigious society akin to Hobbes's war of all against all.  But the meaning of this right is very different if it calls me to defend your right to speak freely because I can trust that you will defend my right, if I, too, am threatened by the powers-that-be.  Here, a language of rights calls us to stand together, in a shared vulnerability.

    In this vein, I suggest that justice as a moral notion can be used for either moral or immoral purposes.  It functions as a moral notion rather than a rationalization of a will to power when, and only when, it is used in a political discourse whose moral import is indebted to a language which respects the personal dimensions of human experience.

    As I show in detail elsewhere, this language calls for passionate, vulnerable, respectful and faithful interactions.  In a political discourse which grants priority to the personal over the impersonal, this call differs in degree, but not in kind. 

    To illustrate the point at issue:  I am passionately committed to Lincoln's insight that the United States is a society conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all are created equal.  Consequently, I espouse an understanding of the language of rights which evokes a passionate awareness of shared vulnerability which in turn evokes a passionate rejection of the belief that rights are somehow personal possessions to be jealously guarded and passionately asserted.  And this stance of shared vulnerability forces me to be respectful of positions I abhor, and I hope that I will respond faithfully to the call enunciated in the reconstitution of the American enterprise first formulated so succinctly by Lincoln in his Gettysburg Address.

    In this Address. Lincoln dared to insist that the enterprise is as full of peril as of promise.  In so doing, he implicitly centered political discourse in the prophetic tradition which demanded that citizens nurture a sympathetic imagination which enables them to hear the cries of those who are oppressed, dispossessed, marginalized and silenced by the prevailing power-structures and concentrations of power in the hands of the powers-that-be.

    In a moral discourse designed to promote the quest for a fully human and uniquely personal existence, the language of intimacy enables honest searchers to hear the cries of pain from their own depths and from the depths of others.  It also reveals that an economic system which promises the full gratification of desires for those who commit themselves unreservedly to its dictates can ignore the price paid by children in less developed countries who must work long hours for barely subsistence wages.  Ideologies have that effect on true believers.

    In sum, though I cannot find a way to derive a form of life with a realizable purpose from justice as a moral notion, the cluster of concepts and principles it encodes do voice moral protests against forms of life whose rhetorics assume that a metaphor of power and judgment rather than a metaphor of intimacy endows them with moral authority.

36. APOLOGY FOR REVISITING ISSUES AGAIN AND AGAIN

     Quite obviously, my determination to limit these reflections to a single page has failed miserably.  I have only one excuse for revisiting the same issues from different perspectives;  I am still striving to escape from the malignant hold of linguistic formulations which the Baltimore Catechism presented as timelessly revelatory.

     As a philosopher of language, I am a Wittgensteinean rather than a Heideggerian.  But I embrace Heidegger's metaphorical description of the workings of any language:  "Language reveals; language conceals."  In this context, my critique of the language of the Baltimore Catechism is designed to expose the insidious ways that it legitimates judgments and strategies which violate my god-given longing for intimacy with loved ones and with God. 

     Repeatedly, I find that the formative power of a language whose god-term is a conception depicting God as a God of Power and Judgment was so deeply ingrained in me that I will undoubtedly be involved in exposing its crippling influence until the day that I die.  In the meantime, however, I now rejoice in small and simple transforming moments.  (In my better moments, I am no longer his majesty the baby who wants it all and wants it now.)

35. UTILITARIANISM

    Echoes of the "common good" can be heard in the principle which functioned as the god-term in Bentham's utilitarianism.  Bentham addressed issues raised by a transition from the  medieval belief that God demanded conformity to a divinely ordained social order to an enthusiastic embrace of the promise that the industrial system enabled human beings to harness nature to their purposes.  To deal with the massive disruptions produced by an inexorably advancing industrialization and the dehumanizing slums produced by an unrestrained exploitation of individuals, Bentham posited the formula, "the greatest good of the greatest number," as the god-term in a moral discourse designed to harness the mastery over nature to social ends.

    In effect, Bentham realized that the competition which propelled the Industrial Revolution could result in a Hobbesian war of all against all.  In his response, he wedded the metaphor of individuality forged by Locke to the assumption that the industrial revolution was irreversible.  Echoing the assumption that individuals act out of enlightened self-interest, he re-centered moral discourse in a disinterested calculus designed to distribute the goods produced by an emerging capitalism as fairly as possible.  And he was willing to ground moral discourse in an economic system in which some would inevitably be losers.

        (NB:  Even a cursory analysis of the political discourse in the United States reveals its debt to an amorphous utilitarianism.  For the most part, Democrats act pragmatically.  On their part, Republicans claim to work from principle, but the principles they advocate are little more than rationalizations of policies designed to protect the privileges of the wealthy and powerful.  They win advocates only as long as they are useful for the purpose that rules the party.)

    To escape from a moral discourse which required some individuals to submit to exploitation, John Stuart Mill presented utilitarianism as a vision, not a calculus.  As a young man, he had suffered a breakdown which evoked in him an intense awareness of the personal dimensions of experience.  Later, as a literary heir of the biblical tradition, he placed the notion of "use" at the center of the prophetic vision which located God's moral will in the cries of the oppressed, dispossessed, marginalized and silenced.  In effect, he espoused a traditional moral discourse designed to promote the quest for a fully human and uniquely personal existence for all.  And from that cultural heritage, he envisioned a society which trusted that free individuals would gladly use their abilities to the fullest.  As a supplement to this inherently political discourse, he also suggested that addressing the increasingly complex issues generated by the Industrial Revolution would evoke the fullest use of anyone's abilities.

    Marx, in turn, echoed Mill's vision in his vision of a society governed by the formula:  "From each according to his abilities; to each according to his needs."  During the decades dominated by the Cold War, Marx's use of Mill was the kiss of death for Mill's critique of utilitarianism from within.  I find that very sad.

    Lest I go on endlessly, I merely note that an ethics of intimacy renders moral discourses centered in various versions of the common good irrelevant by centering political discourse in a shared vulnerability, not a struggle for power.  In this context, no one can pretend to offer an authoritative definition of what constitutes the "common good."