46. WHOSE VOICE IS LANGUAGE?

  

        At first glance, the question, “Whose voice is language?,” might seem meaningless.  As a question implicit in the postmodernist critique of distinctions entrenched in everyday languages and of authority in any shape or form, however, it exposes the disguises which authority has assumed over the course of centuries, and it challenges honest searchers to forge a voice which reveals their own moral centers.

         (NB:  A prime example of distinctions entrenched in everyday languages:  Male - female.  Over the course of centuries, this distinction was mapped onto prevailing power-structures in ways that legitimated and perpetuated male domination.  In a broad sense, men who use this language to silence women seek to perpetuate their privileged roles in a political, economic or religious structure.  By exposing the hollow center of the distinction, the postmodernist critique demands that anyone who supports male domination must admit they are making a power-move which does violence to women and to themselves.

          In my use of the postmodernist critique of authority, the homophobic reaction of so many Christians to same-sex marriage reveals far more about their deeply rooted fears of sexuality (and, often, fears concerning their own sexual identity) than about homosexuality or homosexuals.  Their denominations may ignore the way that their acceptance of divorce undermines a supposedly natural institution of marriage.  But they hide behind the insistence that marriage is an institution validated by some natural order.  Presumably, they are thereby absolved of any need to voice vulnerable self-revelations of the turmoil the issue triggers in them.  And despite the insistence of Israel’s prophets that God’s moral will is heard in the cries of the oppressed and marginalized, they allow their prejudices to silence the cries of homosexuals who have suffered excruciating agony at their hands.

          Sadly, many Christians, Catholic and Protestant, invoke the authority of Scripture to justify their prejudices.  In so doing, they endow a patently biased interpretation of the gospel message with a spurious and even blasphemous authority.)

    A.  Answers to the question that have had significant play in the western literary tradition:

        1.  Language is the voice of reason:  Rationalism has functioned as the dominant strand in the western philosophical and scientific traditions.  For its god-term, it invokes a literary construct which weds the interrogatory stance inherent in the interiorization of literacy and a totalizing thrust of a language governed by the logic of continuous prose.  The detachment inherent in its uses of “reason” promises a god-like perspective on the interplay among language, experience and reality which is capable of penetrating the flux of experience in ways that reveal the dynamic interactions among underlying and enduring natural forces.

            In ancient Greece, this detachment first surfaced as a rupture of orality’s illusory sense of immediate presence, fullness and totality.  But once an interiorized interrogatory stance was wedded with the inner logic of continuous prose, Plato and Aristotle, in particular, assumed that the use of reason to generate and govern analyses of everyday languages would yield linguistic formulations capable of describing (or even presenting transparently) the workings of reality as a whole.  And in the Modern Era, the literary construct indebted to their reflections promised to replace orality’s illusory sense with a language which reasonable beings could use to predict future states of affairs, retrodict the primordial state which produced the present state of affairs, and enable them to transform nature into an environment conducive to the fulfillment of one’s wildest dreams.  (NB:  This pretense was fostered by the discovery that well-formulated questions could evoke answers from mute nature which conferred power over nature.)

            Summary:  Rationalists believe (1) that analyses of language and experience generated and governed by reason will ultimately yield a language consisting of clear and distinct ideas in a consistent, coherent, comprehensive and closed formal system, (2) that this language will reveal the whole of reality transparently, in depth and detail, (3) that this language can be consigned to a bounded text which is self-interpreting (because the language is consistent, coherent, comprehensive and complete) and self-referential (since it presents reality transparently).

        2.  Language is the voice of a rational and purposive Creator:  In his Summa Theologica, Aquinas wedded reason and revelation in his version of the medieval metaphor of the Two Books, the Book of Nature and the Judaic-Christian Scriptures.  To resolve issues of interpretation which threatened the traditional belief that the Scriptures spoke as the revealed word of God, he presented philosophy (reason) as the handmaid of theology (faith seeking understanding).  But the structure of the Summa imposed the rule of reason on his theological inquiries.

             First and foremost, the rule of reason (as the vehicle for the totalizing thrust of a language written in continuous prose) is evident in the supposition that a text could inscribe clear and distinct formulations of dogmas woven into a consistent, coherent, comprehensive and complete belief-system that revealed God’s activity in human history transparently.

              Secondly, Aquinas obviously believed that his account of the interplay between Aristotelian philosophy and Tradition would provide definitive interpretations of all passages in the Scriptures.  In this regard, carefully selected quotations from texts of the Fathers of the Church played a more prominent role in arguments designed to establish his authority over Tradition than quotations from the Scriptures.

             Thirdly, Aquinas’ account of the interplay among philosophy, Tradition and the Scriptures can be found in the argument he derived from the metaphor of the Two Books.  That argument can be succinctly stated.  God’s creative will can be read off the Book of Nature by the natural light of reason.  God’s saving will is revealed in the Scriptures.  And since there can be no conflict between God’s creative and saving wills, each Book can be used to guide readings of the other.

              Finally, the rule of reason over Aquinas’ thought is most evident in the conception of God he invokes to justify the juridical structure of the natural law theory which Thomists (and Pope Benedict) try to impose on Catholic moral theology to this day.  Succinctly stated, Aquinas’ argument asserts that, to be true to his own divine nature, a rational and purposive God would have to create a universe with a teleological structure which would enable human beings, made in the image of such a God, to read God’s moral will off of nature by a “natural light of reason.”  By extension, the language generated by this reading was the voice of a rational and purposive Creator.  (On any count, however, the natural law is not the language of love, since there is no formula for loving interactions between unique and complicated persons.)

        3.  Language is the voice of a just and merciful God who speaks in and through the Scriptures:  Aquinas situated traditional distinctions between faith and reason, reason and revelation, faith and works, nature and grace, Scripture and Tradition, and the sacred and the secular in the interplay of two books, the Book of Nature and the Scriptures.  Consequently, his Summa can be read as an extended commentary on the traditional belief that grace builds on nature.  To voice his protest against a hierarchically structured institution which presented itself as the guardian of Tradition, Luther transformed these distinctions into polar oppositions and filled the hollow center of these polar oppositions with the slogan, sola Scriptura (“Scripture alone”).

            As a child of his age, Luther proposed a metaphor depicting the relationship between the unique individual and the incomprehensible God without recognizing that the reach of any fruitful metaphor initially exceeds its grasp.  As the source of a rhetoric designed as a voice of protest, his belief-system voiced a rejection of both Tradition and the constrictive medieval belief-system as valid interpretations (readings) of Scripture.  In the empty literary space created by the rejection, it imposed a literal interpretation on the traditional metaphor which characterized the Scriptures as the word of God.  But the problem here is obvious.  If true believers grant that even a single passage in the Scripture requires interpretation, they can no longer insist that the Scriptures speak as the revealed word of God without ambiguity.  Whether they like it or not, they must answer the question:  Who determines which passages require interpretation and which passages voice God’s word clearly?

             Today, Christian fundamentalists who insist on the inerrancy of the Scriptures and who pretend that they read the Scriptures literally are the true literary heirs of the commitment encoded in Luther’s slogan, sola Scriptura.  To foster the pretense that the Scriptures speak as a self-interpreting and self-referential text which contains answers to all possible questions, they must regard language as the voice of a God who speaks immediately through the Scriptures.  (See the crazy efforts to legitimate Creationism as an intellectually respectable alternative to evolution.  From my perspective, a commitment to Scripture alone reveals a determination to maintain Luther’s doctrine of justification by faith alone at all costs.)

            4.  Language is the voice of thinking beings:  To subvert the hold of constrictive medieval belief-systems, Protestants framed the issue as a dispute between a commitment to Scripture and Tradition and a commitment to Scripture alone.  Descartes invoked the interrogatory stance at the core of a fictive voice of reason to legitimate his conviction that medieval belief-systems were edifices erected upon sand.  Transformed into a methodical doubt, this interrogatory stance stripped away “the hold of the dead hand of the past” as thoroughly as Luther’s rejection of Tradition.  And according to Descartes, all that remained were solipsistic thinking beings.  (According to Descartes’ geometrization of the universe, God wrote the Book of Nature in the language of mathematics, not the language of Aristotelian metaphysics baptized by Aquinas.  Thereafter, scientific inquiries were freed from the hold of the hierarchical and teleological structure of Aristotelian metaphysics.  And with this deconstruction of the foundations of Aquinas’s natural law theory, there was no longer any reason to believe that reason could provide analyses of experience which proved the existence of a rational and purposive Creator.)

             5.  Language is the voice of autonomous individuals:  Since Kant’s conception of the autonomous individual functioned as the centerpiece of the myth of Modernity, the philosophical position which regards language as the voice of such individuals calls for an extended commentary.

                 Historically, to avoid being dragged before the Inquisition, Descartes explicitly refused to explore the moral implications of the metaphor of individuality generated by his methodical doubt.  Equally explicitly, Kant wanted to rescue reason as the voice of authority from Hume’s empirical critique of rationalism.  Later, to show that his use of reason could resolve all moral issues, he offered an analysis of morality which replaced Descartes’ solipsistic conception of a thinking being with his own conception of the autonomous individual.

                 To endow this conception with moral authority, Kant interwove (1) Plato’s metaphorical depiction of the tri-partite soul, with its assumption that reason must rule disruptive passions and desires, (2) the central role played by internal turmoil in Augustine’s Confessions and Luther’s doctrine of original sin, (3) classical rationalism’s depiction of reason as a disinterested, dispassionate, god-like perspective on language and experience, (4) his own rejection of medieval references to  “the natural light of reason,” (5) Descartes’ thesis that thinking beings face one another across an unbridgeable chasm between subjectivity and objectivity, (6) Hume’s empirical critique of rationalism, (7) the assumption of Newtonian mechanics that, though we cannot know what gravity is, idealized Laws of Motion enable physicists to discover how gravity works and to use that knowledge to harness the motion of entities to human purposes, (8) Rousseau’s insistence that human beings are made unique and free by nature, not by God, and (9) his own use of Hume’s empirical critique to deprive Utilitarianism of moral authority.

                 The literary foundations for Kant’s analysis of morality can be found in his earlier Critique of Pure Reason.  This text introduced a chasm between nature and reason which replaced the supposition that reason is a natural trait of humans with the recognition that reason is a construct.  To support its argument that this construct could compel assent and consent to judgments, he invoked Newtonian physics as the paradigm example of a use of reason compatible with Hume’s empirical critique of classical rationalism.  To introduce categorical imperatives which functioned in a manner analogous to Newton’s Laws of Motion, he supplemented the thesis of the Critique of Pure Reason which depicted `reason’ as a construct designed to bridge the unbridgeable chasm between experience (subjectivity) and reality (objectivity) with the promise that this construct provides the only critical apparatus capable of making sense of experiences resulting from bombardment by constantly changing stimuli.

               In his application of the Critique to moral issues, Kant began with a radical distinction between descriptive and moral inquiries.  In this context, he used Hume’s critique of rationalism and his own reduction of passion and desire to purely natural motivations to replace the naturalist fallacy inherent in Aquinas’s argument that moral laws could be read off the impersonal operation of natural forces.  To formulate this replacement succinctly, he advanced the dictum, “`Is’ does not imply ‘ought’.”  Then, to counter Utilitarianism’s exclusive focus on the consequences of actions, he posited two maxims.  The first, a principle of universalizability, was designed to show how moral maxims function in a manner analogous to Newton’s Laws of Motion.  Subjected to the assertion that “is” does not imply “ought,” it served to deprive care and compassion for individuals of moral authority, since they violated the impartiality demanded by a detached perspective which reasonable beings could occupy interchangeably.  The second, “Always treat reasonable beings as ends in themselves, never merely as means,” was designed to show (1) that actions which used other individuals to gratify one’s desires, because they were urged by natural motivations, were inherently immoral, (2) that, in light of Hume’s empirical critique of rationalism, the Utilitarian focus on consequences could not generate authoritative moral judgments, and (3) that the resulting critique of Utilitarianism centered moral issues exclusively in the intention of the agent.

                 In truly important ways, therefore, Kant was the first philosopher determined to avoid grounding morality outside of human reality.  His argument can be succinctly stated.  In the modern world, unique individuals who face moral questions inherent in constantly changing conditions of life cannot predict or control the long-term consequences of any course of action or sort out the tangled motivations which incline them to act in a particular way.  To become free and to act with intellectual integrity, they must learn how to subject passions and desires to moral ends.  The process begins with their awareness of the inner turmoil so vividly evoked by Augustine’s inner turn and Luther’s doctrine of original sin and is brought to conclusion when the analysis of this inner turmoil governed by the two maxims noted above yields the experience which Kant referred to as a sense of duty (“oughtness”). But I cannot agree with his conclusion that only actions performed with the intention of doing one’s duty are moral. And this disagreement signals my critique of his thesis that the use of these maxims to process the experience of inner turmoil in a way that centers moral judgments in human reality yields categorical imperatives (not moral laws or lists of duties or virtues) which autonomous individuals dictate to themselves.

                 Since I frame moral discourse with a metaphor of intimacy rather than a metaphor of power and judgment, I view Kant’s argument as both a coherent configuration of the theses noted above and a conceptual quagmire.  Taken as a whole, the configuration endows reason with the power to compel the sort of assent and consent to judgments which generate categorical imperatives.  Presumably, because the analyses which yield such judgments are rational responses to an internal turmoil provoked by changing conditions of life, they escape the solipsism inherent in the metaphor of individuality generated by Descartes’ methodical doubt.  But the elimination of passion as a moral motivation devalues the personal dimensions of involvements between and among individuals, and this devaluation reveals how thoroughly the conception of the autonomous individual remains captive to the inner logic of Descartes’ conception of the solipsistic individual.

                 As an answer to the question, “Whose voice is language?”, therefore, Kant’s analysis of morality implies that language is the voice of the autonomous individual.

         6.  Language is the voice of the Absolute Spirit:  To impose his authority on the western philosophical tradition, Hegel began with the categorical assertion, “The real is rational, and the rational is real.”  To validate the literary origins of the use of reason implicit in this dictum, he grounded his secularization of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity in an ontological argument indebted to Descartes’s insistence that a mathematical intuition of the infinite revealed that the infinite was a positive notion rather than the product of the negation of a conception of the finite abstracted from the experience of finite entities.  Presumably, this ontological argument demonstrated the existence of an Infinite devoid of finite forms.  In his hands, it supported an all-encompassing vision of a course of history generated by an Absolute Spirit which operated exclusively as a negating force at the center of this otherwise empty Infinite.  From this perspective, the negation of a formless Infinite generated finite forms, worked within them to fully realize them, and then moved to negate the limits of any finite form in ways that generated other finite forms.  The conclusion is obvious:  The process will presumably continue until the Absolute Spirit has filled the empty Infinite with all possible finite forms, each fully realized, and the language which incorporates and transmits all these fully realized forms of life is the Word incarnate.  Language, then, voices the inexorable march of the Absolute Spirit through history.

        7.  Language is the voice of an all-pervasive will to power:  Nietzsche was determined to establish his authority over Hegel.  Hegel’s identification of the activity of the Spirit as a negating force implied that the Spirit used individuals ruthlessly to realize its purposes.  And though Hegel would never have used this term, the result would be an autonomous text, self-interpreting and self-referential.

            To validate his triumph over Hegel, Nietzsche encoded his critique of rationalism in two distinctive literary forms, the archeology of knowledge and the genealogy of morals.  The archeology of knowledge generated a code capable of exposing the arbitrariness and pretensions enshrined in the supposition that reason provides a god-like perspective.  The genealogy of morals generated a code which exposed the ways that the use of reason generated rationalizations designed to legitimate the claim to authority voiced by the powers-that-be.  In sum, the judgments they licensed were little more than thinly disguised exercises of a hidden will to power.

            Consequently, though the gurus of the postmodernist movement pretended to speak from nowhere, their insistence that no one can escape entirely from the formative power of everyday language echoes Nietzsche’s conviction that the hermeneutical code derived from the literary forms he forged revealed the operation of an all-pervasive will to power in nature and in the western literary tradition.  Presumably, this code generated re-readings of the texts which were kept alive in the transmission of the western literary tradition which, in the final analysis, revealed that language is the voice of this all-pervasive will to power.

        8.  Language is the voice of Being:  Before their disillusionment with the promises of the myth of Modernity, continental intellectuals were scornful of the hermeneutical theory which Nietzsche used to present himself as the prophet who announced the imminent arrival of supermen who would live beyond good and evil.  As a result, his deconstruction of the literary foundations of traditional metaphysical, epistemological, methodological and ethical inquiries awaited Heidegger’s determination to wrest the mantle of prophecy from him.

            To lend authority to his appropriation of Nietzsche’s hermeneutical code, Heidegger addressed the revolutionary question inherent in Nietzsche’s re-reading of the western literary tradition:  “What does an understanding of the workings of the western literary tradition reveal?”  To answer the question, he adopted the notion of Being projected by the pre-Socratics as the god-term in a hermeneutical theory designed to reveal workings of an all-pervasive creative and gracious Being rather than an all-pervasive will to power.

             In the inter-textual dialogue among the pre-Socratics, Being functioned as a detached perspective on the workings of a literary language which was taking on a life of its own at a time when significant distinctions among language, experience and reality had not yet emerged.  In Heidegger’s hands, Being functioned as the framework for analyses of ways of being human in the modern world which privileged a participative existence over relationships among solipsistic or autonomous individuals and replaced methodologies governed by the rule of reason with an existential stance toward Being.

            To frame his analyses of the workings of language, Heidegger insisted that unique individuals (dasein) are linguistic, not rational, and passionate, not detached.  In short, if we were not linguistic, we could not learn everyday languages which sort out experiences and carve up reality in very different ways.  And since Heidegger did not share the fashionable fascination with the promise of an ideal language, he supplemented Nietzsche’s insistence on the textuality of languages generated by literary traditions with a metaphor which depicted language as the vehicle for the revelation of the meaning of Being.

             In this context, languages which had taken on the status of “things-in-themselves” bridged the Cartesian chasm between subjectivity and objectivity which had such pernicious implications for the rationalism generated by Descartes’ methodical doubt.  And as revelatory vehicles, they replaced philosophical –isms. In its own right, it clearly replaced rationalism’s suggestion that language is the voice of solipsistic or autonomous individuals with the use of Being as the god-term in a hermeneutical theory designed to expose the workings of the western literary tradition.

              Like Hume’s empirical critique of rationalism, Heidegger’s existentialist critique is simple and direct:  Empirical evidence that supports the awareness that, as we strive to express even the most uniquely personal visions, insights or cries from the depths, we find ourselves searching for words.  Consequently, we are not masters of literary languages which have taken on lives of their own or of the formative power of everyday languages on our thought and aspirations.

             In a late essay, Heidegger supplemented the depiction of language as the vehicle for the revelation of the meaning of Being with a metaphorical depiction of everyday language as “an abode in which we dwell suspended over an abyss.”  From this perspective, everyday language effectively bridges the Cartesian chasm over continental rationalism.  As the voice of a creative and gracious Being, however, everyday languages both reveal and conceal.  Consequently, analyses of language and experience must be framed by a hermeneutical code which privileges glimpses of the workings of an open-ended process over rationalizations which, by imposing closure on questioning, pretend to offer authoritative interpretations of texts and analyses of experience.

        9.  Language is the voice of a hermeneutics of suspicion:  Neither Nietzsche nor Heidegger escaped entirely from the rule of reason.  Both filled the hollow center of their hermeneutical theories with god-terms (the will to power and Being), and both were determined to assert authority over past, present and future readings (interpretations) of the intertextual dialogue which constitutes the western literary tradition.

             In the middle of the twentieth century, an originally amorphous movement now referred to as postmodernism took Nietzsche’s and Heidegger’s readings of the western literary tradition one step farther,  Its adherents agreed with Nietzsche’s exposure of the workings of a will to power in any claim to speak with authority, but were horrified by Nietzsche’s fascination with violence.  Many took the Holocaust as an unspeakable obscenity which revealed that both the myth of Modernity and Heidegger’s call for open responsiveness were unable to produce what they promised.

              As the movement evolved, it coalesced around a hermeneutics designed to subvert authority in any shape or form.  Certain contenders for the mantle of authority were easily targeted:  (1)  The supposition that reason spoke with authority because its god-like perspective on the interplay among language, experience and reality was capable of liberating individuals from the formative power of everyday language;  (2)  Rationalism’s promise of an ideal language which, because it presented reality transparently, could be inscribed in a self-interpreting and self-referential (autonomous) text;  (3)  The myth of Modernity, with its promise that autonomous individuals could create their own unique identities, co-author an ideal society, harness nature to their purposes, and thereby become lords of history and arbiters of their own destinies;  and (4) The promise that a hermeneutical theory or a theory of literary criticism could yield a definitive interpretation of a text.

               To expose (deconstruct) the literary foundations of these positions, the gurus of the movement appropriated critical apparati indebted to the resurfacing of the interrogatory stance at the core of reason whenever the rule of the totalizing thrust of language became oppressive.  In their desire to avoid becoming merely another -ism, they wove these critical apparati into a hermeneutics designed to subvert authority without re-inscribing authority in their own texts and utterances.  To that end, the hermeneutics of suspicion personifies (1) the interiorization of literacy as an interrogatory stance which licenses endless question, (2) Descartes’ methodical doubt, but without the myth of pure beginnings it generated, (3) strategies for reading texts, cultures and textured experiences derived from the literary forms forged by Nietzsche, the archeology of knowledge and the genealogy of morals, (4) the elimination of metaphors of individuality encoded in Heidegger’s dasein,  (5) Derrida’s strategy of putting god-terms “under erasure” as a means to evoke a creative tension between the discourse generated by the rule of any god-term and suspicion of its promises, (6) the use of this strategy to replace the role played by “bracketing” in Husserl’s phenomenological method for analyzing data of consciousness with a focus on discourse rather than consciousness, and (7) a code designed to expose the arbitrariness of distinctions, rupture the continuity promised by the logic of continuous prose, and transgress boundaries of any sort.

             In sum, the suspicion embraced by postmodernist critics encodes a critical apparatus which subverts any and all efforts to fill the hollow center of interiorized interrogatory stance with a god-term.  As a result, this code authorizes readings without re-inscribing authority in them.  As a by-product, however, it denies a voice to a longing for deepening person-to-person involvement which generated a distinctive literary code, the prose narrative, which enables individuals to learn how to speak in their own voices.  To bolster that denial, it supplements the exposure of the impossibility of a god-like perspective on language, experience and reality with the charge that everyday language is a repository of violence.

             Sadly, though the postmodernist depiction of human existence echoes the metaphors of Israel’s great prophets which locate morality in the cries of the oppressed, marginalized, silenced and outcast in any society, those who pretend that a hermeneutics of suspicion enables them to speak anonymously can only speak in a hollow voice of prophetic protest.

        10.  Language is the voice of the longing for a fully human and uniquely personal existence and for intimate involvements with loved ones:  Many philosophers and theologians ignore the challenge inherent in the postmodernist hermeneutics of suspicion rather than address its charge that they endow the god-term they espouse with authority in ways which inscribe and rationalize a hidden will to power.  On my part, I welcome Derrida’s call to put these god-terms “under erasure,” since it recognizes that forms of life and distinctive moral discourses generated by the metaphor of power and judgment are full of both promise and peril.  On the one hand, they have contributed to the quest for a fully human and uniquely personal existence.  On the other, when they are used to legitimate moral judgments, they sow seeds of violence.

             In this context, my answer to the question, “Whose voice is language?”, is indebted to the form of life generated by the metaphor of intimacy.  This form of life encodes a language capable of processing person-to-person interactions in ways that transform a longing for deepening intimacy into a realizable quest.  But its promise that passionate, vulnerable, respectful and faithful interactions will foster trust stands in polar opposition to a postmodernist celebration of suspicion (and irony).  (The fidelity which fosters trust is essential in an involvement in which vulnerable self-revelations are the only sort of interactions which yield deepening person-to-person involvements.)

             An analysis of the workings of this form of life reveals that a committed quest for intimacy is the only way to fulfill the longing for a fully human and uniquely personal existence and the longing for intimacy.  The dynamics can be succinctly sketched.  Genuinely person-to-person involvements plunge us into a journey into the unknown.  As the involvement deepens, interactions tap buried tangles created by a pervasive process of socialization and events in our personal histories.  At this time, couples who committed themselves to a shared journey into the unknown discover that they married a stranger and that they are strangers to themselves.  Implicitly, they realize that they do not know how to speak in their own voices.  But an involvement which calls for vulnerable self-revelations is a constant invitation to sort out the tangles and place them respectfully and faithfully in each other’s care.  And in and through such self-revelations, both begin to be able to speak honestly in their own voices, and both learn how to co-author the story of their shared journey into the unknown.

            Since ethical analysis is designed to show how a purpose is realizable, there is an ethics of intimacy.  This ethics analyses experiences of those who commit themselves to the quest for intimacy.  And this analysis reveals that passionate, vulnerable, respectful and faithful interactions are the only path to deepening person-to-person involvements and that any recourse to exercises of power or judgment aborts or distorts the quest. In Kant’s terms, this analysis supports a hypothetical rather than a categorical imperative.  I.e., if you want to be intimately involved, you must listen to the call for passionate, vulnerable, respectful and faithful interactions, and you must avoid disguised recourse to judgment and power.  But any pretense that an individual is compelled to seek intimacy violates the call for vulnerability and respect.

           As the bottom line, therefore, the language of intimacy can evoke the longing and show how to transform the longing into a realizable quest.  But the calls it voices do not pretend to speak with authority, since they can only speak for themselves.

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