14. MY DESCRIPTION OF HUMAN REALITY

    I reject the supposition that human beings are rational animals on many grounds.  To create an empty literary space for my own description of human reality, I appeal to the critique of an abstract conception of reason in no. 6.  To frame that empty literary space, I suggest that the Exodus-theme at the core of the Hebrew narrative tradition offers a revelatory context for the understanding of human reality, since it depicts human existence as a perpetual journey into the unknown.

    My delineation of human existence notes that we enter life as linguistic beings, not rational animals.  To process our experiences, we begin as naked pronouns in search of fruitful metaphors.  (We do not know whether we are male, female, gay, lesbian, individuals, I, we or they.)  In the course of human history, however, the ability to formulate fruitful metaphors awaited the emergence of literary languages which took on lives of their own.  In these languages, words laden with many meanings could be woven into metaphors whose reach initially exceeds their own grasp, yet ruptures the closure implicit in the totalizing thrust of the prevailing language.  And since these many meanings endowed such linguistic formulations with testable implications, some metaphors yielded forms of governance and forms of life capable of transforming longings, passions, insights and aspirations into realizable purposes.  As conditions change, however, these forms of governance and of life endure only as long as they continue to attract adherents, and there is no reason to suppose that we have yet succeeded in formulating all purposes conducive to the quest for a fully human and uniquely personal existence.

     The metaphors of intimacy projected by Israel's great prophets provide a revealing case in point.  Individuals who inhabited primary oral cultures lacked languages capable of giving voice to the murky depths of human interiority or laying bare the dynamic interaction of natural forces.  Somehow, at a time when alphabetical writing gave rise to the Hebrew narrative tradition, early storytellers forged a narrative structure designed to explore interactions between an incomprehensible deity and unique individuals endowed with unfathomable depths and a mysterious freedom.  At the time of the Exiles, Hosea, Micah, Isaiah and Jeremiah implanted this narrative structure in metaphors designed to promote ever-deepening involvement of true Israelites with Israel's God and with each other.

    Logically, the metaphors of the prophets implied that God's moral will spoke in and through the cries of pain voiced by the oppressed, dispossessed, marginalized, silenced, outcasts and strangers.  Since they encode the Exodus-theme, they do not offer a definitive description of human existence.  But, by offering glimpses of the ways that the prevailing power structures are dehumanizing and depersonalizing, they call for transformations in these power structures which are more conducive to the longing for a fully human and uniquely personal existence.  And the call issues from the powerful sympathetic imagination of the prophets, not from the dictates of a fictive voice of reason.

    Over the course of centuries, metaphors of intimacy continued to attract adherents (1) because they generated a form of life in which the elusive longing for intimacy could be transformed into a realizable quest and (2) because the language of this form of life enabled poets, dramatists, novelists and literary critics to expose the dehumanizing and depersonalizing import of philosophical or theological positions legitimated by the totalizing thrust of language (and, therefore, the rule of the One inscribed in a principle of logical identity.)

    As a result, the language of intimacy owes more to literature than to philosophy or theology.  In this context, it implies that human beings are passionate, imaginative, linguistic and purposive and that these traits interact inseparably in the quest for a fully human and uniquely personal existence.

    A final note:  Husserl's phenomenological method was designed to lay bare the intentional structure of human consciousness.  Since this analysis can be used to argue that no human action is merely "doing what comes naturally", I incorporate it in my selection of "purposive" as a characteristic trait revealed by a moral discourse designed to promote the quest for a fully human existence.  But a methodology centered in the intentional structure of an eruptive self-consciousness is far less revelatory than the use of a narrative structure by the dramatists and novelists whose compositions speak across the ages.

 

                     _________________