5. Moral discourse

Everyday English transmits a moral discourse which enables individuals to transform the longing for a more fully human and uniquely personal existence into a realizable quest.  In a supplementary way, this discourse encodes a critical apparatus capable of exposing the will to power hidden in rhetorics which pretend to define what it is to be fully human or to exist as a unique individual.

In this context, a moral discourse which delineates human existence as a quest is centered in the narrative structure of the Exodus-theme used by Jewish storytellers to process Israel’s historical experience.  As a result, it echoes the Yahwist’s vision of unique individuals endowed with unfathomable depths and a mysterious freedom.  In marked contrast, ethical theories designed to generate definitive moral judgments assume that a rigorous use of a literary construct, the conception of reason, will yield deterministic analyses of human motivations and intentions and of the consequences of human actions.  To validate that pretence, they must assume that this abstract conception provides a detached, disinterested, dispassionate, god-like perspective which individuals can occupy interchangeably.

My analysis of moral discourse is grounded in my conviction that the detachment inherent in literacy ruptured an illusory sense of immediate presence, fullness and totality fostered by orality.  To appreciate the revolutionary result of this rupture, we do well to begin with the awareness that words in orally transmitted cultures were transitory events whose meaning depended on consensual validation and that, since memory was the only repository of the past, languages lacked the means to distinguish between past and present.  As literacy gradually displaced orality as the foundation of culture in ancient Greece and ancient Israel, however, languages consigned to texts took on lives of their own, and dialogue was increasingly textured by a discourse which encoded increasingly complex moral issues in words laden with meanings through their use by authors to formulate distinctive visions or promote distinctive purposes.

As texts displaced memory as the repository of the past, distinctions between past and present states of affairs become obvious.  And as the power of language increased, authors enamored with the workings of literary languages gradually realized that human agency could produce future states of affairs different from past or present.  Inevitably, the contention among adherents of contending visions fostered the emergence of tangled moral issues, and languages which had taken on lives of their own replaced consensual validation with moral discourses which textured questions raised by the awareness that some actions were conducive to the quest for a fully human existence, while others were dehumanizing.  In effect, these moral discourses encoded questions concerning the promises and perils inherent in changing conditions of life.

The Tests Which Transform Metaphors into Forms of Life

In the western literary tradition, authors in ancient Greece and ancient Israel wove words laden with meanings into metaphors with testable implications.  Over the course of centuries, metaphors which generated languages capable of transforming longings and aspirations into realizable purposes took on lives as distinctive forms of life.  Since these forms of life are preserved in everyday English, they evoke a sense that the use of this language to process everyday experiences plunges language-users into journeys into the unknown as naked pronouns in search of metaphors capable of transforming their uniquely personal longings, desires, dreams, hunches and aspirations into realizable purposes.

From this perspective, it is obvious that the reach of metaphors initially exceeds their grasp, that we need many forms of life designed to realize a distinctive purpose to promote the quest for a fully human existence, and that there is no reason to suppose that all possible purposes have been formulated.  As a result, the moral discourse encoded in everyday English transmits textured distinctions among the purposes at the core of the natural, personal, social, political, economic, aesthetic, historical and religious dimensions of life.     

In sum, honest searchers do well to embrace a code for re-reading the philosophical  and theological strands in the western literary tradition which recognizes the revolutionary import of Ong’s analysis of the gradual triumph of literacy over orality as the foundation of western culture and Wittgenstein’s analysis of the workings of everyday languages.

First and foremost, a re-reading the interplay between the philosophical and the biblical tradition governed by this code shows (1) that the misplaced debate between Catholic and Protestant theologians has more to do with Aquinas’s wedding of philosophy and theology than with an unbiased return to the biblical tradition, (2) that forms of life transmitted by everyday English are derived from two over-arching metaphors, a metaphor of power and judgment (exploited by the philosophical strand in the western literary tradition) and a metaphor of intimacy (introduced to the biblical strand in this tradition by Israel’s prophets), and (3) that forms of life generated by both metaphors over the course of centuries are conducive to the quest for a fully human and uniquely personal existence.  But it also shows that moral discourses in which the metaphor of power and judgment rules are inherently dehumanizing and depersonalizing.

This revelation raises the obvious question:  Which of these foundational metaphors is used to frame the quest?

The Biblical Tradition and the Religious Right

Tragically, voices identifiable as the Religious Right use a moral discourse derived from the metaphor of power and judgment to politicize the issues to be addressed by voters in the United States.  Shaped and formed by the metaphor of individuality championed by Luther, they ignore moral issues voiced by the prophetic metaphors of intimacy.  The latter imply that a moral discourse designed to promote the quest for a fully human and uniquely personal existence must be grounded in the anguished and often inarticulate cries of the oppressed, dispossessed, abused, marginalized and silenced individuals.  As prophetic voices, these cries call for a willingness to approach moral issues with a sympathetic imagination situated in the existential experience of a shared vulnerability rather than a moral discourse derived from a metaphor of power and judgment.

Though these voices of the Religious Life may pretend to find grounds for the politicizing of moral issues in a literal reading of the Word of God, they echo the rationalist assumption that the moral discourse they espouse enables them to impose  universally valid judgments on others without exercising a hidden will to power.   As a result, they perpetuate a bias in favor of dehumanizing and depersonalizing structures, norms and practices which legitimate the privileged positions of the powers-that-be. And they do so by using reason to offer rationalizations for their hidden agendas.

(Historically, the ethical strand in the western philosophical tradition supposed that, since the use of reason provided a perspective which individuals could occupy interchangeably, it possessed the power to compel universal consent to its dictates.  In point of fact, the rule of reason over moral discourse has been used (1) to license rhetorics which dictate submission to a totalitarian form of government or to an economic system supposedly guided by an “invisible hand”, (2) to justify the use of the language of rights or a commitment to law and order to clothe litigious defenses of a form of life derived from a traditional metaphor of individuality with moral authority, and (3) to foster the belief that the dimensions of human existence can be protected and  promoted by the vigilant assertion of a virtually solipsistic existence disguised as personal autonomy.

In each of these instances, ethical analyses are supposed to ground moral judgments in a way that frees them from prejudice, arbitrariness or conventionality.  In point of fact, the assumption that the rule of reason provides a detached, dispassionate, disinterested, god-like perspective on the workings of language and experience is itself quite untenable.  Moreover, its use tempts theories to invoke a single dimension of existence as the god-term which accredits the judgments they accredit.  (The advocates of these theories agree with Kant’s assertion that morality resides in judgment.)

In this regard, the political rhetoric of the Religious Right offers a clear example of the workings of a will to power at the core of any moral discourse designed to privilege a single dimension of existence.  On the one hand, the rhetoric targets moral issues designed to resonate deeply in the consciousness of true believers.  For its authority, it privileges the religious dimension of existence through a pretence that it expresses a literal reading of the Judaic-Christian Scriptures.  For evidence that its rhetoric calls for a theocracy in which crucial distinctions among the personal, social, political, moral and religious dimensions of life are shamelessly erased, see my analysis of the immorality of members of the Catholic hierarchy and clergy who have politicized the abortion-issue as  though it trumped all other moral issues.  See also the analysis of the metaphorical reference to a moral center.

Summary

In western culture, distinctively personal, social, economic, political, aesthetic and religious discourses which have taken on lives of their own ensure that a tangle of moral issues lies, inextricably, at the core of any human action and assertion.  On the one hand, inhabitants of these cultures enter their own journeys into the unknown as naked  pronouns in search of fruitful metaphors.  On the other, the everyday language they acquire through a pervasive process of socialization exerts an almost indiscernible formative power on their longings, passions, desires, perceptions, imagination, motives, intentions and aspirations.  As a result, individuals can use everyday English to rationalize almost any judgment or agenda.  From this perspective, analyses which center  moral discourse in a longing for a fully human and uniquely personal existence reveal that the rationalist tradition is framed by a metaphor of power and judgment encoded in a fictive voice of reason.  As the product of the western philosophical tradition, this literary construct weds the interiorization of literacy as an interrogatory stance and the confident belief that the inner structure of totalizing thrust of languages is governed by a logical principle of identity.  As such, the interrogatory stance can be celebrated as a means to liberate individuals from the formative power of the past, while the rule of the One empowers them to live as unique individuals.

 (Regarding tensions between freedom and the use of power, rhetorics designed to promote the agendas of activists reveal the way that the interrogatory stance and the totalizing thrust of languages which have taken on lives of their own evoke instances in which reason recoils upon itself.  E.g., in the midst of chaos, political conservatives who embrace Locke’s thesis that freedom is an inalienable right elect politicians who promise a reign of law and order.  I suggest, therefore, that reason recoils upon itself whenever the totalizing thrust of language threatens to silence the interrogatory stance or a metaphor of individuality licenses the will to power exposed so penetratingly by Nietzsche.  Moreover, in this context, ideologies which promise that the course of history will end in an ideal state of existence offer intriguing examples of the way that ideologues can harness the recoil of reason upon itself to their own purposes.  In this vein, Marx  integrated the interrogatory stance and the totalitarian thrust of language in a dialectically structured materialism.  On the one hand, he used the interrogatory stance to protest against the dehumanizing and depersonalizing violence inherent in the totalitarian import  of a laissez faire Capitalism.  On the other, he used the totalitarianism inherent in the rule of reason to promise that a cataclysmic expropriation of the appropriators would create conditions in which the state would wither away and unique individuals would be able to use all their abilities to the fullest.  In the end, however, Marx’s reductive definition of human beings as homo economicus offers a prime example of the way that each of these promises of a fullness of life grounds the judgments it legitimates in a god-term which privileges a distinctive dimension of human existence.)

To escape from the will to power hidden in rationalizations posing as universal, definitive and authoritative moral judgments, moral discourse must be centered in person-to-person involvements, not a mythical existence in which detached individuals face one another as the Other.  The point at issue can be clearly formulated.  The use of reason as a detached, disinterested, dispassionate, god-like perspective on language and experience grounds moral discourse outside of human reality.  Quite explicitly, the pretense that such discourses offer an objective description of a fully human and uniquely personal existence devalues passion.  And the pretense becomes pernicious when a metaphor of individuality implies that one’s uniqueness is already given and must be jealously guarded.  In marked contrast, the longing for deepening person-to-person involvements inevitably reveals that our emotional reactions to individuals and events offer glimpses of buried depths, crippling woundedness, distorting fears and self-protective flights from vulnerable self-revelations. As such, they evoke in those who enter a dialogue informed by a sympathetic imagination a profound longing for a uniquely personal existence and expose the many ways that we ourselves violate or silence that longing.  By extension, they reveal that, without intensely personal  involvements with other tangled human beings, we remain blind to what aborts or distorts our quest for a fully human and uniquely personal existence.       

Hosea was the first prophet to compare God’s covenant with Israel to a marriage-union.  In subtle ways, his metaphors of intimacy countered a judgment licensed by the Deuteronomic tradition which asserted that the coming exiles were God’s punishment for Israel’s failures to  observe the prescriptions and prohibitions of the Mosaic Law.  In the jumbled text that preserved his utterances, he recorded the process through which his temptation to punish and even abandon his unfaithful wife, Gomer, revealed to him how passionately, vulnerably, respectfully and faithfully he loved her.  Quite obviously, this intensely personal experience evoked his awareness that God loves each and every human being in this way.

In my long experience with married couples, the moral discourse implicit in Hosea’s metaphor will soon account for the sad fact that spouses who believe that marriage is an involvement designed to unite two people into one by erasing differences  will attempt to realize that unity through the use of manipulative and capitulative  emotional reactions.  But they are in for a rude awakening if they fail to discover that the judgments which trigger the strategies encoded in emotional reactions do violence to the commitment to an ever-deepening person-to-person involvement.  They may not  immediately recognize the consequences of judgments and strategies designed to realize purposes generated by a metaphor of power and judgment, but, in instances in which they are at cross-purposes, invocations of a language of rights designed to protect their unique individuality will force them to admit that such reactions abort or distort the quest.

On a positive note, a commitment to a shared journey to deepening intimacy will teach them that vulnerable and respectful self-revelations set in motion a process of individuation.  E.g., I may try to be honest when I tell my version of an event in which I find myself at cross-purposes with a loved one, but I cannot discern the  multi-dimensional ways that this story is shaped by the formative power of everyday English and by events in my personal history.  If my loved ones and I have a personal history, they will be sensitive to the judgments and strategies enshrined in the long-practiced emotional reactions which hide my deepest feelings from me.  Consequently, since their version of the event will assign me a different role in the event than the role I assign myself, their stories will tap buried feelings, question well-meaning intentions and expose acquired prejudices.  And the interaction will, in effect, invite me to try once again to speak in my own voice and to listen with a sympathetic imagination.

In sum, the process of individuation sketched in the preceding paragraph is the process encoded in the moral discourse indebted to Israel’s great prophets.  That moral discourse locates the quest for a fully human and uniquely personal existence in the ability to listen with a sympathetic imagination to the cries of the poor, the oppressed, the abused, the marginalized and the silenced and to respond creatively to those cries.  And it calls for  this stance in the personal, social, political, economic and religious dimensions of life.

(Addendum:  The hermeneutics of suspicion is designed to target authority in any shape or form.  In their re-readings of the western literary tradition it generates, postmodernist critics expose the violence enshrined in the distinctions and boundaries transmitted by everyday languages and in appeals to authority.  And to deprive pronouncements and judgments of authority, they expose the literary foundations of forms of life generated by the metaphor of power and judgment, including the form  encapsulated in the conception of the autonomous individual and the many forms legitimated by the purportedly compelling power of the fictive voice of reason.  But its devotees do not pretend to erase the conception of the self entirely.  Instead, to avoid re-inscribing authority in their texts and utterances, they are content to speak in a hollow voice of prophetic protest against the violence they expose.

I rejoice in their relentless critiques of purportedly definitive conceptions of a fully human and uniquely personal existence invoked by the powers-that-be.  As a  philosopher of language indebted to Nietzsche, I must protest against the will to power hidden in such conceptions.  (As one who had to find my way out of the moral discourse which ruled my formative years in the Catholic tradition, I can attest to the violence that this moral discourse did to my longing for intimacy.)  But I must also protest against their exclusive focus on forms of life generated by the metaphor of power and judgment which blinds them to the ways that the literary tradition has exploited the literary form of the prose narrative and the metaphors of intimacy used by the ancient Hebrews to process Israel’s historical experience.

Tragically, the postmodernist movement does recover the prophetic insight (1) that moral discourse must evoke a response to the cries of the oppressed, marginalized and silenced first voiced by Israel’s prophets and (2) that, as a result, tangled moral issues lie, inextricably, at the core of every human action and assertion.  But Israel’s prophets  derived this insight from a metaphor designed to transform the longing for deepening person-to-person involvements into a realizable quest.  From this perspective, the hollow voice of prophetic protest legitimated by the hermeneutics of suspicion inscribes a hollow conception of the unique individual.

In this context, Gergen’s metaphor, “the saturated self,” functions as both a factual description of the existence fostered by a life governed by a hermeneutics of suspicion and an intriguing effort to legitimate this existence as a state of immediate presence, fullness and totality.  In an age in which the medium of instant communication across boundaries reigns, individuals can fill their everyday existence with textual or oral-aural stimuli at will.  But the cost of this version of a participative existence is horrific.  This cost is most evident in individuals whose identity is defined by the last contact they had through their cell-phones.  If this is the form of life which they embrace, they lack a language of interiority capable of evoking a longing for intimacy, with its call for vulnerable self-revelations of one’s tangled depth.  Like the promise encoded in Luther’s doctrine of justification by faith alone, it promises instant intimacy.  But that is a contradiction in terms.  And any form of life which lends credence to such a promise condemns those who embrace it to an existence devoid of a moral center.