Before the advent of literacy,
communication was limited to face-to-face dialogue, memory was the only
repository of the past, languages were inherently fluid, and words were events
whose meaning depended on consensual validation. In this participative existence, there was no
way to question prevailing beliefs, values and practices.
With the spread of literacy, detached
individuals could communicate through texts.
Through mostly hidden struggles, texts gradually replaced memory as the
repository of the past, words were laden with many meanings through the uses
made of them in texts with diverging analyses of experience, literary languages
took on lives of their own, and distinctions among the political, social,
economic, aesthetical, moral and religious dimensions of life emerged. In this context, the inter-textual dialogue
which constituted a literary tradition situated face-to-face dialogue in
languages which, as they took on lives of their own, encoded issues encountered
in each dimension of life. In this way, dialogue
among increasingly detached individuals were implicitly governed by distinctive
discourses.
Moral discourse provides a clear example of
the process in question. The illusory
sense of immediate presence, fullness and totality fostered by orally
transmitted cultures precluded questions concerning traditional values or
practices. As enduring texts revealed
striking differences between past and present cultures, authors dared to
envision future states of affairs to be realized through human agency. In the work in progress that I will never be
able to finish, I describe the difficulties they faced as the anxiety of
authorship, and I center that anxiety in the need to invent literary
conventions capable of functioning in much the same way as the tacit clues
which supplement oral-aural communication.
Without such conventions, they could not hope that the original visions
they projected and the practices they proposed would be intelligible to
readers.
To diminish this anxiety of authorship, even
the most original of authors utilized literary conventions invented by authors
of earlier texts in an emerging literary tradition. And over the course of centuries, these
conventions were woven into two distinctive literary forms, the autonomous text
and the prose narrative, which transformed the anxiety of authorship into the
issue of authority.
In effect, these literary forms functioned
as arena in which authors of original visions and proponents of distinctive
projects vied with one another for authority over interpretations of the past
and passage to the future. This issue of
authority encoded tangled questions regarding values and practices. In ancient Greece, a fascination with forms
of government evoked by the metaphor depicting the city as the cradle and
crucible of civilization centered questions of authority in the challenge
voiced by the dictum, "Might makes right", while an equal fascination
with a devotion of reason generated ethical theories designed to replace
culturally relative values with universally valid moral judgments. At the same time, storytellers in ancient
Israel centered questions of authority in person-to-person interactions between
and among unique individuals endowed with a mysterious freedom. And when the literary form of the prose
narrative which they forged was supplemented by metaphors of intimacy projected
by Israel's prophets, the Hebrew tradition generated a moral discourse which,
by exposing the tangle of moral issues at the core of any human action or
assertion, generated a profound suspicion of judgments which claimed to speak
with universal import.
As these responses to the issue of
authority were encoded in everyday languages, face-to-face dialogue was
increasingly textured by a moral discourse which, like the languages which
transmitted it, had taken on a life of its own.
In this context, the ethical theories which
subjected moral discourse to the rule of reason were a mixed blessing. On the one hand, to impose closure on endless
questioning, each theory invoked a god-term designed to accredit its claim that
the judgments it generated spoke with moral authority. In each instance, however, the god-term in
question generated inquiries designed to explore a distinctive dimension of
human existence in depth and detail. On
the other, each of these god-terms grounded moral discourse outside of human
reality, in some abstract or idealized conception of human reality, in an
inexorable march of history, or in a fictive voice of reason. Predictably, theories generated by a rigorous
application of these god-terms encode a will to power with dehumanizing and
depersonalizing consequences.
To avoid these consequences, postmodernist
critics argue that a hermeneutics of suspicion is the only way to set forth a
moral discourse without foundations. In
intriguing ways, the search for such a discourse recovers an insight first
formulated by Israel's great prophets.
Simply put, the insight acknowledges that tangled moral issues lie,
inextricably, at the core of any human action or assertion has two
implications: (1) Moral judgments generated by a purportedly
dispassionate and disinterested voice of reason do violence to some or all of
these issues. (2) Human discourse is moral discourse, because
human reality is moral reality.
Working within this literary context, I am
convinced that a metaphor of intimacy has generated a moral discourse capable
of evoking the deepest, yet most elusive longing of the human heart and of
transforming that longing into a realizable quest. But this moral discourse does not seek to
ground the language of intimacy outside of human reality in a vain effort to compel
assent to its descriptive import or consent to its resounding call. It can only voice an invitation which speaks
for itself.
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