The postmodernist hermeneutics of suspicion
is often presented as a method of deconstruction. The term, deconstruction, has linguistic
roots in Descartes' use of a biblical metaphor which referred to a house built
on sand To set the stage for his
methodical doubt, Descartes referred to Scholastic philosophy as a towering
edifice grounded in sand. Naively, he
supposed that his methodical doubt could strip away vestiges of the past in a
way that yielded his own myth of pure beginnings. On their part, postmodernists begin with the
awareness that it is quite impossible to escape entirely from the formative
power of the language we acquired through the process of socialization or
through an introduction to an academic discipline. To subvert the authority of any such
language, however, they used a reading code indebted to Nietzsche's archeology
of knowledge and genealogy of morals to expose the literary conventions which
structured the edifice and the literary foundations which supported it. Metaphorically speaking, they used a
hermeneutics of suspicion to deconstruct the foundations and structures of
literary constructs. (A paradigm
example: The exposure of the literary foundations of the assumption that reason
provided a god-like perspective on the interplay among language, experience and
reality.)
Though Thomas Kuhn is an historian
concerned with the sociological nature of scientific inquiry, not a
postmodernist critic, his The Structure
of Scientific Revolutions illustrates the workings of Nietzsche's archeology
of knowledge better than Nietzsche's own texts.
To target the pretense that the prevailing depiction of the physical
sciences as a linear-progressive advance from ignorance to knowledge, he used
Wittgenstein's insistence that languages consist of many distinctive forms of
life to marshal evidence designed to show that science was in fact a communal
enterprise which progressed by fits and starts.
In effect, it invited those who sought to understand the workings of the
scientific method to view traditional
histories of science and contemporary understandings of the scientific method
with suspicion, without denying the fact that knowledge acquired by scientific
inquiries enhances our ability to harness nature to our purposes.
Nonetheless, Nietzsche's archeology of
knowledge has been influential in literary circles precisely because the
critical apparatus it codified exposed the literary origins of the foundational
texts of the western philosophical tradition and thereby revealed that languages
generated by this tradition now texture the everyday experiences of those who
dwell within western cultures. But when
Nietzsche's own archeology of knowledge is viewed from the perspective provided
by his genealogy of morals, it is obvious that he forged this distinctive
literary form because it enabled him to expose the workings of a hidden will to
power in a rationalist tradition which assumed that the totalizing thrust of
language promised comprehensive knowledge and definitive judgments.
In this regard, the critical apparatus
encoded in this distinctive literary tradition was indebted to previous
instances in which the interrogatory stance at the core of a conception of
reason was used to subvert the totalizing thrust of language. (Elsewhere, I describe instances in which the
constrictive rule of the totalizing thrust of language provoked recourse to the
interrogatory stance as instances in which reason recoiled upon itself.) I.e., Nietzsche encoded the exteriorization
of literacy as an interrogatory stance in a hermeneutical theory designed to
deconstruct the literary conventions and foundations of the assumption that the
use of reason could generate a language which satisfied criteria derived from
the totalizing thrust of language. But
he did so for his own purpose, and that purpose is evident in his determination
to replace voices which endowed reason with the power to compel assent to its
judgments and consent to its dictates with his own god-term, an all-pervasive
will to power.
The workings of this god-term are obvious
in Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals. In this text, his aphorisms target the
insidious ways that rationalists obscure distinctions between methodologies
designed to resolve epistemological issues and ethical inquiries which promise
to resolve issues raised by the cries of the oppressed, dispossessed, crippled,
and marginalized. Since he traced the
moral discourse generated by the Christian tradition to the metaphors of
intimacy projected by Israel's prophets, he implicitly contrasted this
discourse with (1) the rationalist assumption that reason must rule passions
and desires and (2) the natural law theory of ethics forged by Aquinas. But he used his purposive reading of the
moral discourse generated by the Christian tradition as a call for compassion
for his own purpose. That purpose is encoded in his use of a distinctive
literary form, the genealogy of morals, to endow his own analysis of moral
discourse with a dialectical structure which he named "the transvaluation
of values." For the first stage of this evolutionary process, he
celebrated ancient nobles as life-affirming individuals who assumed that might
makes right. To introduce the positive
contributions of the Christian tradition, he noted that the lack of a rich language
of human interiority and human agency condemned these nobles to crude eruptions
of passion and equally crude gratifications of desires. For the second stage, he sought to impose his
authority on readings of the Christian tradition by characterizing the moral
discourse it generated as a necessary stage in the development of a language of
human interiority.
I find Nietzsche's reading of the Christian
tradition both revealing and amusing. In
revealing ways, it traces the development of moral discourse in the tradition
to the prophetic proclamations that God's moral will speaks in and through the
cries of the oppressed and dispossessed.
By implication, it exposes the will to power at work in arguments
designed to ground moral discourse in the will of a God who is Lord, Lawgiver
and Judge. Most importantly, it gives
due prominence to the role of the prophets in the emergence of a moral
discourse which faces individuals with questions concerning their motives and
intentions and nurtures a sympathetic imagination. But I am amused by his insistence that
priests are individuals endowed with the same massive will to power as the
nobles they criticize, but differ from these nobles because they will the void
rather than a fullness of life. And I am
also amused by Nietzsche's desire to present himself as the prophet who
announces the third and final stage of the transvaluation of values.
In this stage, Nietzsche suggests, the
workings of an all-pervasive will to power are about to project supermen who
will live beyond good and evil. In
effect, these supermen will be like the early nobles who give free reign to
passion and desire. But because they now
dwell within the language generated by the western literary tradition, they can
now texture their experiences exquisitely.
I use the literary forms of the archeology
of knowledge and the genealogy of morals to generate readings which suggest
that two metaphors, a metaphor of power and judgment and a metaphor of intimacy,
have generated the many forms of life which enable individuals to transform an
elusive longing for a fully human and uniquely personal existence into a
realizable quest. And I also suggest
that Nietzsche's reading of the Christian tradition accurately exposes the
hidden will to power that perpetuates the misplaced debate between Catholics
and Protestants. Clearly, the debates'
polemical structure holds participants captive to the massive self-deception
inherent in any pretense that one's tradition tells the whole truth and nothing
but the truth.
Finally, if I were tempted to counter
Nietzsche's suggestion that I will the void, I question whether he was even
capable of committing himself to an ever-deepening person-to-person
involvement.
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