Aquinas provides a prime example of a
theologian who failed to realize the implications of the supposition that human
beings are rational animals. Thus, in
his use of the medieval metaphor of the Two Books, Aquinas assumed that an
autonomous Book of Nature authored by a rational and purposive Creator could be
read by "the natural light of reason." In so doing, he was blithely unaware that he
endowed a literary construct with the power to compel assent to descriptive
formulations and consent to moral judgments which satisfy its dictates.
From a postmodernist perspective, however,
this construct was clearly designed to resolve issues raised by the
interiorization of the detachment inherent in reading and writing as an
interrogatory stance. The central issue:
because an interrogatory stance licenses endless questioning, it posits an
empty literary space whose hollow center can be filled by communications which
reduce dialogue to a meaningless babble or by rhetorics centered in the dictum,
"Might makes right." As the
product of a literary tradition, it is hardly natural.
Historically, the hollow center of the
interrogatory stance was filled in different ways by the Hellenic and Hebrew
literary traditions. The ancient Greeks
filled the center with a metaphorical One which wedded (1) the totalizing
thrust of languages governed by the logic of continuous prose and (2) the model
of an enduring, bounded, changeless text written in continuous prose. In marked contrast, to process Israel's
historical experience, the ancient Hebrews forged a literary form whose
narrative structure guaranteed that any story could be endlessly retold in ways
that reveal that human history is an open-ended process which cannot be
consigned to a single text written in the past or present.
Evidence of the rule of the One over the
Hellenic literary tradition can be found in distinctions which emerged once
literary languages took on lives of their own.
For our present purposes, two such distinctions are particularly
significant. One, as texts replaced
memory as the repository of the past, philosophers (and dramatists) were able
to use an awareness of how the present differed from the past to envision
future states of affairs to be produced through human agency. Two, literary works provided a detached
perspective on the interplay among the workings of everyday languages, the flux
of experience, and the different ways that cultures carved up reality. In this context, the One promised to
transform endless questioning into focused inquiries which enabled mute nature
to answer well-formed questions. More
importantly, an intertextual dialogue among the pre-Socratics, Plato and
Aristotle fostered the supposition that reason was needed to govern unruly and
disruptive passions and desires. As a
result, ethical analyses of moral discourse gradually replaced the use of
tragedies and comedies to process the everyday experiences of life in emerging
city-states. Presumably, the rule of the
One could yield definitive judgments which imposed closure on endless
questioning and thereby precluded lapses into arbitrariness, conventionality or
the will to power celebrated by the dictum, "Might makes right."
Quite obviously, any detached perspective
operates on a second level. In this
context, Logic, a language about language, decreed that analyses of the
workings of everyday languages must be generated and governed by a logical
principle of identity (or a principle of non-contradiction). Quite obviously, this principle privileges
the totalizing thrust of language. (In
the twentieth century, the rule of the One became suspect when efforts to
formulate an ideal language revealed the impossibility of constructing a purely
formal framework for analyses of language and experience which would yield a
comprehensive and complete language capable of revealing the workings of nature
transparently.)
With regard to the enduring reality
underlying the flux of experience, Plato and Aristotle provided competing
visions. Plato's seminal works grounded
everyday language in a timeless realm of interpenetrating Ideal Forms, while
Aristotle's appropriation of Plato simply implanted these forms in a conception
of the potency of prime matter bounded by a finite universe. And in this context, Aristotle wove the
idealist and naturalist conventions into a correspondence theory of truth which
promised that analyses of everyday experiences generated and governed by reason
would ultimately provide an ideal language which revealed the whole of reality
transparently, in depth and detail.
Here, I simply note that both philosophy
and theology are second-level disciplines.
From this perspective, Aquinas' frequent references to "the natural
light of reason" can serve as a paradigm example of the philosophical
tradition's uncritical acceptance of the authority of reason. On a broader canvas, Aquinas made no secret
of his desire to wed philosophy and theology forever in a hierarchical
framework which depicted philosophy as the handmaiden of theology. To legitimate his willingness to baptize
Aristotle as the Philosopher, he inscribed the rule of reason in the
conception of a rational and purposive Creator who authored an autonomous Book
of Nature and supplemented this god-term with the assumption that human beings
made in the image of their Creator were rational animals. And from these assumptions, he proceeded to
forge a constrictive belief-system which, not surprisingly, continues to evoke
frantic efforts to save the authority of Aquinas from the postmodernist
resurgence of the interrogatory stance.
In effect, the interplay between an
interiorized interrogatory stance and the totalizing thrust of the logic of
continuous prose ensures that, whenever one dominates, reason will recoil upon
itself. Descartes' transformation of the
interrogatory stance into a methodical doubt provides a clear example. To introduce this method, Descartes described
constrictive medieval belief-systems as edifices erected on sand. To clothe the method with the mantle of
authority, he filled the hollow center of the interrogatory stance with a
narrative structure designed to provide a certain starting point for inquiries
capable of yielding definitive judgments.
As a narrative, this starting point functioned as a myth of pure
beginnings. But the myth merely
re-centered the rule of the One in an abstract conception of solipsistic
thinking beings.
In fact, the rule of the One was already
present in Descartes' awareness that he needed an ontological argument for the
existence of a Creator of all else to support his insistence that the
autonomous Book of Nature was written in the language of mathematics. the
existence of an infinite Creator of all else.
As a perspective, the rule of the One played both sides of the
street. As an interrogatory stance, it
generated the "Cartesian chasm" between subjectivity and objectivity
which, in turn, implied that solipsistic individuals faced one another as the
Other. But as the voice of thinking
beings, it inscribed vestiges of the traditional privileging of the universal
over the individuals in the assumption that thinking beings could occupy a
detached, disinterested, dispassionate, god-like perspective
interchangeably. (The rule of the One
reappears in this notion of interchangeability.)
Today, the hermeneutics of suspicion which propels
the postmodernist movement is a hybrid which fills the hollow center of the
conception of solipsistic thinking beings with Nietzsche's exposure of the ways
that rationalism disguises a will to power.
To expose the operation of this hidden will to power, this hermeneutical
theory encodes a critical apparatus which shows (1) that, far from conferring
on individuals the power to escape entirely from the formative power of
everyday languages, these languages are repositories of violence and (2) that
no critical apparatus can eliminate prejudice, conventionality and the operation
of disguised wills to power.
To present themselves as literary heirs of
traditional liberation movements, postmodernist critics insist that a
hermeneutics designed to translate the interrogatory stance into a stance of
suspicion is liberating without re-introducing god-terms designed to authorize
judgments of any sort. In effect, they
respect the contributions of the rule of the One to the development of language
over the centuries, yet refuse to re-inscribe a Cartesian subjectivity in a version
of the conception of the autonomous individual which functions as the god-term
in the myth of Modernity. As a result,
they offer readings of (1) texts, (2) languages indebted to literary
traditions, and (3) everyday experiences textured by these languages which
extend a relentless critique of the authority of reason to a subversion of
authority in any shape or form. And in
so doing, it supplements Nietzsche proclamation of the "death of God"
with its own proclamation of the "death of the author."
As a literary heir of the western
philosophical tradition, however, the postmodernist movement exploits the empty
literary space projected by the Babylonian epics consigned to writing in the
second millennium, BCE. And the will to
power of its adherents is quite evident in the fact that they can only fill the
hollow center of this space with a hollow voice of prophetic protest against
the violence enshrined in the distinctions and boundaries which are
foundational to the depiction of human existence implicit in the political,
economic and religious rhetorics which are allowed to frame moral issues
uncritically in the United States today.
In this vein, the gurus whose texts gave
shape and form to an otherwise amorphous movement pretend that their protests
against enshrined violence not only wrest the mantle of prophecy from
Nietzsche, but also justify their self-presentations as prophets of a movement
of liberation. On my part, however, I
find that Wittgenstein's analysis of the workings of language is far more
fruitful than those offered by Derrida, in particular. Recognizing the collapse of efforts to
delineate an ideal language capable of presenting reality transparently,
Wittgenstein replaced his earlier fascination with the assumption that language
is a formal system with the thesis that everyday languages transmit many forms
of life, each designed to realize a distinct human purpose, rather than a
vision designed to legitimate definitive descriptive and moral judgments.
Wittgenstein's insight enables me to
re-read the readings generated by a hermeneutics of suspicion with
suspicion. On the one hand, it reveals
forms of life capable of authorizing truly prophetic protests against the
violence legitimated by everyday language, but derive them from forms of life
which are conducive to the quest for a fully human and uniquely personal
existence. As such, it, too, can
function as a voice of liberation. And
the perspective it offers leads me to suspect that those who espouse the
reading strategies encoded in a hermeneutics of suspicion seek to liberate
themselves from the need to explore the prophetic calls inscribed in the
metaphors of intimacy projected by Israel's great prophets.
In effect, I suggest that the hermeneutics
of suspicion liberates postmodernist readers from the demands of a literary
tradition centered in the search for a language capable of translating an
elusive longing for a more fully human and uniquely personal existence into a
realizable quest. Presumably, the pretense
that this reading code enables them to speak anonymously absolves them of the
need for vulnerable self-revelations which would enable them to voice their
protests against violence in their own voices.
If so, they ignore the distinction between liberation from [sic] and
liberation that proponents of contract-theories of society must respect.
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