Classical rationalism assumed that reason
provided a detached, disinterested, dispassionate, god-like perspective on the
interplay among language, experience and reality. But the literary origins of this belief
become apparent when one begins with an understanding of certain features of
communication in orally transmitted cultures.
First and foremost, the participative existence inherent in face-to-face
communication was supplemented by a host of tacit clues. By extension, words were transient events
whose meaning depended on consensual validation, and memory was the only
repository of the past. And since the
past lived only in the present, the languages which transmitted these cultures
lacked the means to mark significant distinctions among past, present and
future and between language, experience and reality. As a result, orality fostered an illusory
sense of immediate presence, fullness and totality.
This illusion was irreparably ruptured by
the detachment inherent in writing and reading.
This rupture evoked a tension between oral and written communication
that persists to this day. Here,
however, I wish only to address the literary origins of the belief that the use
of reason can compel assent and consent to the objective judgments accredited
by the critical apparatus encoded in the purportedly god-like perspective.
From the very beginning, authors who wished
to guide the understanding of readers had to invent literary conventions
designed to supply for the absence of the tacit clues that supplemented oral
exchanges. Over time, to avoid the need
to continually re-invent the wheel, later authors simply adopted literary
conventions which were already intelligible to their increasingly literate
audiences. In this project, they were
aided by the literary conventions derived from the continuous prose that was
fostered by alphabetical writing.
In this context, the gradual displacement
of memory by texts as the repository of the past had three important
consequences. (1) Significant distinctions among past, present
and future emerged. (2) Languages generated by literary traditions
gradually took on lives of their own.
(3) Words were transformed from
transient events whose meaning depended on consensual validation to signs laden
with meanings implicit in their use for different purposes by authors of
original visions of past, present or future.
In ancient Greece, the convergence of these
consequences found expression in the insight that an understanding of the
workings of literary languages could be used to process the flux of experience
in ways that revealed the operation of impersonally operating forces of
nature. And this insight set in motion
the process which Murray referred to as the disenchantment of nature, the
desacralization of society and the twilight of the gods. And as authors sought to break the hold of
epic poems which celebrated violent warfare, the process was supplemented by
the fascination with form and a suspicion of passion and desire which later
found expression in the supposition that passion and desire are eruptive and
disruptive forces which must be subjected to the rule of reason.
Prior to the introduction of significant
distinctions among language, experience and reality, the pre-Socratics added a
new level of detachment to the contention between orality and literacy for
foundational status in the emerging culture.
In often cryptic linguistic formulations, they introduced what were once
regarded as the perennial problems of philosophy, being and becoming,
permanence and change, time and eternity, and the atom and the continuum. In so doing, they brought to the forefront
the two issues which the conception of reason was designed to resolve, (1) the
interiorization of literacy as an interrogatory stance and (2) the totalizing
thrust of a language consigned to a bounded, enduring text written in
continuous prose.
Paradoxically, the Parmenidean One played
the central role in the emerging conception of reason. On the one hand, Parmenides realized that the
endless questioning licensed by an interrogatory stance would reduce
communication to a meaningless babble.
On the other, he somehow anticipated Nietzsche's insight that judgments
designed to impose closure on questioning were hidden expressions of a will to
power. To resolve the issue, he used a
metaphorical One endowed with all the traits of a bounded, enduring text
written in continuous prose to deny the reality of change. In effect, as a champion of literacy, he
endowed the One with orality's illusory sense of immediate presence, fullness
and totality.
In this context, Plato located the
Parmenidean One in a realm of eternal, interpenetrating ideal Forms. And in centuries to come, ethical analyses of
moral discourse continued to promote the use of the idealist conventions
encoded in this posit to echo Plato's insistence that reason must rule unruly
passions and desires. As a literary
offspring of Plato, Aristotle's interest in biology is apparent in his
restructuring of Plato's idealism. This
interest informed his practice of defining the nature of enduring entities in
terms of genus and specific difference.
An enduring example of this practice can be found in the definition
which placed human beings in the genus, "animal", and added
"rational" as the specific difference. And in its own right, the practice fused
idealist and naturalist conventions in a way that contributed significantly to
the supposition that a literary construct, reason, could provide a detached,
disinterested, dispassionate, god-like perspective which rational beings could
occupy interchangeably. (The supposition
that passion, desire and reason are naturally operating forces whose inseparable
operation constituted human beings as a distinctive species won out. By implication, if humans failed to subject
passion and desire to the rule of reason, they would descend into a virtual
existence as brutes.)
Over the course of centuries, philosophers
as diverse as Aquinas, Hobbes, Locke, Adam Smith and Kant adopted this
conception of human nature without criticism.
In recent decades, however, postmodernist criticism delights in
deconstructive readings of the western philosophical tradition which subvert
the authority of reason by exposing its literary foundations. In sum, these readings reveal that
"reason" is an abstract literary construct resting on questionable
foundations.
An Earlier Version
My understanding of the issue is indebted
to Ong's analysis of the transition from orality to literacy as the foundation
of western culture as well as the critical apparatus encoded in the
postmodernist hermeneutics of suspicion.
Ong's imaginative reconstruction shows that, since memory was the only
repository of the past, languages prior to the invention of writing were laden
with memory aides, including poetic formulations, formulaic clusters, frequent
repetitions, and the like. For my
present purpose, however, a focus on the myths used to transmit the prevailing
cultures is particularly revealing.
These myths had the structure of a conjunctive narrative. The deities did this and that and that, and
there need be no connection between the events, since the deities were arbitrary,
capricious and impulsive. But all that
changed dramatically with the invention of alphabetical writing which generated
narratives written in continuous prose.
Orality had fostered an illusory sense of
immediate presence, fullness and totality, but at the cost of
"creating" a small world surrounded by chaos. That illusion was irreparably ruptured by the
detachment inherent in writing and reading, and the rupture was magnified when
literacy was interiorized as an interrogatory stance. But the invention of the alphabet generated a
continuous prose whose recovery of the totalizing thrust of language tamed the
threat that endless questioning would reduce dialogue to meaningless
babble. And as an added bonus,
continuous prose demanded that gaps in conjunctive narratives be bridged in
ways that lent coherence to the story, and the call for coherence generated
questions of human motives and intentions.
As texts written in continuous prose
replaced memory as the repository of the past, radical differences between past
and present states of affairs became obvious.
In response to this awareness, the ancient Greeks appreciated both the
liberating power of the interrogatory stance and the discovery that the
totalizing thrust of language could transform endless questioning into focused
inquiries which allowed mute nature to answer well-formed questions. In this context, original writers dared to
envision future states of affairs different from past and present ones and to
endow reasonable human beings with the power to realize the vision espoused by
the author.
The resulting restructuring of thought and
inquiry transformed the detachment inherent in literacy into an abstract
conception which projected "reason" as a disinterested, dispassionate,
god-like perspective on the workings of language, experience and reality. And once human beings were regarded as
rational animals, they could all presumably occupy this perspective
interchangeably. But a number of
assumptions provided the stage for this leap of faith, including assumptions
(1) that the use of a logical principle of identity (a product of the
totalizing thrust of language) would generate a language of clear and distinct
conceptions in a consistent, coherent, comprehensive and closed system, (2)
that this language would present the whole of reality transparently, in depth
and detail, and (3) that this language could be inscribed in an autonomous
text, self-interpreting and self-referential.
However, to use the critical apparatus which
promises an escape from the formative power of everyday language on our
longings, passions, desires, perceptions, imagination, motives, intentions,
purposes and aspirations, we must rely on the language as a whole. As a result, claims to speak from a god-like
perspective merely hide an immoral will to power. Reason, therefore, is a useful tool, but a
violent master.
Moreover, the Hebrew authors who used
stories to process Israel's historical experience forged a literary form which
restructured thought and inquiry in a radically different way. In and through it, they used a narrative
structure centered in an eruptive self-consciousness to depict human existence
as an open-ended journey into the unknown.
Here, the critical issue emerges as the difference between analyses of
language and experience governed by a logical principle of identity and those
governed by a narrative structure. The
former promises judgments devoid of arbitrariness and conventionality through
inquiries designed to explore impersonally operating forces of nature. The latter guarantees that genuinely
revelatory accounts of person-to-person involvements can be retold in ways that
resist closure on endless questioning.
As such, the narrative structure reveals that the use of inquiries
governed by a logical principle of identity to probe eruptions of
self-consciousness in interpersonal interactions disguises the will to power
hidden in judgments they accredit.
See also: No. 37:
Reason Revisited
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