12A. THE AUTONOMOUS TEXT

  

    Protestant fundamentalists realize that the belief the Judaic-Christian Scriptures speak without interpretation as the revealed word of God commits them to a doctrine of biblical inerrancy and the need to insist that they read this sprawling text literally.  In effect, they assume that the Scriptures are a self-interpreting text which, since it speaks as an immediate word of a truth-telling God, is also self-referential.

    This assumption encodes an obvious paradox.  On the one hand, the pretence that the Scriptures can be read as an autonomous text invokes an abstract conception forged by the rationalist strand in the western philosophical tradition.  On the other, despite the debt of this conception to literacy's triumph over orality as the foundation of western culture, they pretend that their readings of the Scriptures recover the illusory sense of immediate presence, fullness and totality fostered by orality which a sin of Adam had irreparably ruptured.  To neutralize the implications of the paradox, they reduce the interiorization of literacy as an interrogatory stance and an eruptive self-consciousness to an original sin which severed a natural relationship between Creator and creatures which could only be repaired by the sacrificial death of the Word incarnate.

    As a literary construct, the conception of an autonomous text integrates a cluster of metaphors, conceptions and issues.  It emerged when the displacement of orality by literacy as the foundation of western culture validated the use of literary conventions which dramatized significant distinctions among (1) past, present and future and (2) language, experience and reality.  Factors conducive to a process which encapsulated the rupture inherent in the detaching power of literacy in these distinctions include (1) the gradual displacement of memory by texts as the repository of the past, (2) languages generated by literary traditions which took on lives of their own, and (3) a fascination with the workings of literary languages which enabled literary virtuosos to move from the recognition that the present differed in significant ways from the past to visions of future states of affairs to be realized through human agency.

    In ancient Greece in the first millennium, BCE, the interiorization of literacy as an interrogatory stance threatened to reduce communication to meaningless babble by licensing endless questioning.  At the same time, the continuous prose generated by the invention of the alphabet gave form and structure to the totalizing thrust of language which had fostered orality's illusory sense of immediate presence, fullness and totality.  In this context, Heraclitus and Parmenides formulated metaphors designed to resolve the tension between the interrogatory stance and the totalizing structure in intriguingly different ways.

    To appreciate the sensitivity to issue raised by a hidden contention between orality and literacy for foundational status in Greek culture. we do well to remember (1) that they projected the metaphors of the Logos and the One prior to the emergence of significant distinctions among language, experience and reality in the inter-textual dialogue of their literary predecessors and (2) that they used the discourse forged by that dialogue in metaphors whose reach initially exceeded their grasp.

   

    The Heraclitian Logos:  As the champion of the participative existence fostered by orality, Heraclitus clothed an all-encompassing notion of Being with an equally all-encompassing god-term, the Logos.  As a metaphorical projection, the Logos was designed to lend coherence to inquiries generated by the interrogatory stance by wedding the fluidity of orality and the flux of experience with the totalizing thrust of literary languages.  As such, it implied that language, experience and reality were in a constant state of transformation, and as a god-term which centered inquiries in the middle, an all-encompassing Logos neutralized the threat of endless questioning by keeping the interrogatory stance and the workings of the totalizing thrust of language in a constant interplay.

    In marked contrast, Parmenides was more concerned with the detaching power of literacy than with Heraclitus' effort to save the participative existence fostered by orality.  With penetrating insight, he realized that there is no way to impose closure on questioning generated by a detached perspective.  In and through his metaphorical One, he emerged as the unwitting champion of the totalizing thrust of languages governed by the inner logic of continuous prose.  In effect, his One resolved the problem of endless questioning by ruling out questions entirely.

    One might wonder why Parmenides was willing to assert an eternal, bounded, changeless, indivisible, continuous and circular One so categorically.  By reducing change to an illusion, it invalidated experience entirely.  I suggest that he derived these characteristics from the model of a bounded, enduring text written in continuous prose.  At any rate, this metaphor is clearly foundational to rationalism's insistence that, to avoid imposing an arbitrary or violent closure on questioning, descriptive and evaluative judgments must be generated by a master-term (god-term) which grounds inquiries in something unquestionable.  And its role as the seminal conception enshrined in the medieval metaphor of the Two Books is obvious.

        (Addendum:  The Parmenidean One resounds in the texts and utterances of rationalists who pretend that inquiries generated and governed by reason will ultimately restore the sense of immediate presence, fullness and totality lost through the interiorization of literacy as an interrogatory stance.  In this regard, the law of conservation of matter/energy is clearly indebted to the roles played by the Heraclitean Logos and the Parmenidean One in the rationalist strand of the western literary tradition.  The law of matter-energy which constantly undergoes transformations remains unchanged.)

    In this context, Plato's Dialogues contributed to the distinction among language, experience and reality.  To escape from the endless questioning licensed by the Socratic method, Plato grounded his fascination with the workings of a literary language which had taken on a life of its own in an eternal, changeless realm of clear, distinct, ideal and inter-penetrating Forms.  Quite obviously, this abstract realm possessed the characteristics ascribed to the One by Parmenides.  Clearly, Plato realized that judgments capable of imposing closure on questioning had to be grounded in something changeless and enduring.  But he also had to incorporate the Heraclitian Logos.  To do so, he invoked a metaphorical Fall which he used to depict individuals as flawed instantiations of many inter-penetrating forms who retain memories of a prior existence in the realm of Ideal Forms.

    In Plato's system, the metaphor of an unaccountable Fall devalued experiences designed to yield discoveries.  Presumably, since we could never find anything if we did not know what we were looking for, we acquire knowledge by stripping away the distractive power of experience in order to recover memories of a participative existence prior to the Fall.  But it continues to evoke ideal language programs.

       The Cluster of Conceptions, Metaphors and Issues

    The hermeneutics of suspicion which propels the postmodernist movement voices an intriguing question:  "Whose voice is language?"  In the history of philosophy, rationalists use the interrogatory stance at the core of their conception of reason to liberate individuals from the formative power of everyday languages, but subject questioning to the totalizing thrust of language to justify the imposition of closure on questions which might expose judgments as rationalizations.  In effect, they view language as the voice of reason.

    In the same vein, ideologues invoke literary conventions derived from Plato's realm of Ideal Forms to lend authority to descriptions of the unfolding of history which they seek to impose on others.  In effect, they echo Plato's assumption that language is the voice of an eternal realm of Ideal Forms to persuade individuals that the course of history moves inexorably from a fallen state to their particular definition of a final return to a state of immediacy, fullness and totality.

 

    Plato's Role in the Search for an Ideal Language:  Here, however, I want to emphasize the role that Plato's realm of Ideal Forms played in both the emergence of significant distinctions among language, experience and reality and, much later, the ideal language programs indebted to Descartes.  As honest searchers, proponents of these programs agreed that an ideal language (1) would have to be able to express without ambiguity whatever any language-user would ever have occasion to say and (2) to satisfy the dictates of reason.  As honest searchers, they also realized that a claim to comprehensiveness had to be supported by an argument which demonstrated that the language in question was complete and that a claim to completeness required a conception of language capable of inscribing closure without arbitrariness or ambiguity.  To resolve that issue, they adopted Descartes' assumption that, to deconstruct the literary foundations of medieval theological edifices built on sand and to accommodate the geometrization of the universe, they had to situate their analyses of the workings of everyday languages in a purely formal framework which provided a detached, disinterested, dispassionate, god-like perspective on language, experience and reality.  Presumably, this formal framework provided an empty literary space for the workings of a critical apparatus capable of generating clear and distinct ideas woven into a coherent, consistent, comprehensive and closed system.  And such a linguistic system would clearly satisfy the criteria derived from the conception of an ideal language.

    Aristotle's Role in the Imposition of the Parmenidean One on Reality and in the Formulation of Correspondence Theories of Truth:  As a literary heir of Plato, Aristotle used his insights into distinctions among language, experience and reality to stand Plato's realm of Ideal Forms on its head.  In his revision of the hierarchically structured vision inscribed in Plato's Allegory of the Cave, ideal forms were somehow present in the pure potentiality of prime matter, waiting to be realized in concrete instances through the interplay among formal, material, final and efficient causality.  And since every event has a cause, one could ground analyses of the dynamic operation of this finite reality in an unmoved Mover.  Reality, then, legitimated the rule of the Parmenidean One over inquiries.

    More aware than Plato that literary languages had taken on lives of their own, Aristotle used his belief that reason provided a detached perspective on the workings of language to formulate Logic as a distinctive inquiry.  In its own right, Logic is a language about language.  In Aristotle, it functions as a critical apparatus in which the Parmenidean One reigns as a generative and governing principle of logical identity.

    In this context, Aristotle enshrined the rule of the Parmenidean One over inquiries into the workings of language and reality in his correspondence theory of truth.  Over the course of centuries, philosophers who embraced the theory forged many metaphors designed to probe the posited correspondence.  Among the most prominent:  imitation, representation, one-to-one correspondence between descriptive and referential uses of words.  But the proponents of ideal language programs in the twentieth century realized that such a language would have to present the whole of reality transparently, in depth and detail.

    The Conception of the Autonomous Text:  These literary origins yielded the conception of an autonomous text in a simple and direct way.  Presumably, reason enshrines a critical apparatus centered in a principle of logical identity.  Applied rigorously to the workings of everyday languages, reason presumably generates closer and closer approximations of an ideal language capable of presenting reality transparently.  Presumably, this language could also be consigned to writing.  As the repository of a clear and distinct ideas woven into a coherent, consistent, comprehensive and closed system, the resulting text would be self-interpreting.  And as a text which presented the whole of reality transparently, it would be self-referential.

                       

                        Summary

    To save the power of reason to compel assent to judgments which imposed closure on questioning, Parmenides endowed the One with the characteristics of a bounded and enduring text written in continuous prose.  Since he projected this metaphorical One prior to the emergence of significant differences among language, experience and reality, the One presumably presented the whole of reality transparently.  Over the course of history, therefore, it functioned as the seminal formulation of the conception of the autonomous text.

    The realm of Ideal Forms posited by Plato introduced this seminal conception into the literary dialogue that constitutes the western philosophical tradition.

    In the Middle Ages, it surfaced in the metaphor of the Two Books, the Book of Nature (which could be read by a natural light of reason) and the Sacred Scriptures (viewed as the revealed Word of God).  This metaphor implied that, since these Books were authored by God, they could be used to interpret one another.  In Aquinas' Summa Theologica, however, the use of both was supposed to present clear and distinct doctrinal formulations woven into a consistent, coherent, comprehensive and closed system.  And such a text would presumably speak as an autonomous text, self-interpreting and self-referential.

    At the dawn of the Modern Era, Luther targeted any voice which pretended to offer a definitive interpretation of the word of God.  To frame his famous rallying cry, sola Scriptura [“reason alone”], he defined reason and revelation as polar opposites.  As a child of his age, he believed that God would have had to reveal clearly how his saving activity worked.  As Calvin's doctrine of eternal pre-destination dramatized, the stakes were high, since those who failed to respond to the gift would suffer eternal damnation.  On his part, he was convinced that human interpretations of the Scriptures had obscured this clarity.  To ensure that the Scriptures spoke as an immediate word of God rather than the word of a human interpreter, he demanded assent to the slogan, sola Scriptura.  Once he had done so, however, he discovered that his rallying cry could be supplemented by a popular slogan, "private interpretation of the Scriptures".  And he reacted badly to the fact that this slogan licensed readings of the text which differed radically from his own.  (NB:  Today, this issue forces Protestant fundamentalists to present the Scriptures as an autonomous text which can be read literally.).

    In the Modern Era, scientists were also seduced by the quest for certainty.  Laplacean determinism provides the clearest example.  Reduced to a formula, this interpretation of Newtonian physics asserted that a knowledge of the present position and momentum of each and every atom in the universe would enable physicists to predict every future state of the universe and retrodict every previous state of the universe.  Presumably, the results of these inquiries could be inscribed in an autonomous text.

    In the United States today, the conception of the autonomous text is alive and well in the rhetorics of Protestant fundamentalists.  Intriguingly, they do not all read (interpret) the Scriptures in the same way.

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