Eric Vogelin Institute

Sight, Sound, and Postmodernity:

The Role of Speech in Reconstructing Ethical Discourse

Copyright 2000 Murray Jardine

Nature, Speech, and Modernity

I will begin by stating that I believe present-day Western societies are indeed experiencing a moral crisis, and that this crisis is in fact far more profound than most of the combatants in the current "culture wars" realize. The best way to characterize this moral crisis would be to modify slightly Friedrich Nietzsche's famous formulation and say that what we are living through in the twentieth century is the death, not of God, but of nature. What I mean by this can best be understood by placing our current situation in a longer-term historical perspective.

Over the past five hundred and especially the past two hundred years, human beings have discovered that they have a much greater capacity to understand, control, and even change their environment than they had previously recognized. The modem age has thus been characterized by a series of technological revolutions that have profoundly changed the conditions of life for people in Western (and more recently, non-Western) societies: the invention of the printing press and the corresponding expansion of literacy at the beginning of modernity; the first industrial revolution in steam power, steel manufacture, and textile production in the eighteenth century; the second industrial revolution, beginning in the nineteenth century, based on electricity and the internal combustion engine; and in our own time what is sometimes called the third industrial revolution in computers and related technologies. These technological revolutions certainly hold out the possibility of improving human life, and undoubtedly in certain ways they have, but it must be admitted that their overall effect has been rather ambiguous. Aside from the fact that our technological capacities have actually created the possibility of destroying ourselves--either through nuclear war (admittedly an unlikely prospect at the moment) or through some kind of ecological catastrophe--every one of the modem technological revolutions has been followed by social dislocations and political upheavals that have caused horrifying destruction, suffering, and loss of life: over a century of religious wars following the invention of the printing press; another wave of revolution and war after the first industrial revolution; and the unprecedented mayhem of the two World Wars following the second industrial revolution. A continuation of this pattern would lead us to expect another round of disturbances as the current revolution in computers and biotechnology takes effect--and indeed, if the pattern just described holds, these disturbances would be more violent and destructive than ever. It seems that whatever benefits modem technology might offer, we have had great difficulty establishing political, economic, and social institutions that can use that technology in constructive ways.

Of course, it has been argued that the pattern just described will not continue, because the worldwide triumph of liberal capitalist democracy (or some approximation thereto) has resolved the class and national conflicts that led to the upheavals of the past, and will usher in a new era of peace and prosperity based on the spectacular productive capacities of the new computer technologies. This view is of course most famously associated with Francis Fukuyama and his writings on the "end of history."¹For reasons I will shortly explain, I regard this view as not just wrong, but positively dangerous in the complacency it engenders. First however, some further background.

The pattern of upheaval just described can, I believe, be understood in terms of the basic structure of Western moral and political reasoning. Specifically, one of the most fundamental dichotomies in the history of Western moral and political thought and indeed in the entire Western conception of reality is that either there exists an unchanging natural order independent of human agency from which moral and political principles can be derived or else all conceptions of morality are merely arbitrary human conventions. From an epistemological standpoint, knowledge claims grounded in experience of the natural order are objective and therefore correct while those not so grounded are subjective and thus illusory. This conception is developed prototypically in Plato and can be seen, in different forms, all through the history of Western thought. As modem technological capacities have increasingly destroyed the idea of an unchanging natural order--that is, have destroyed the idea of a fundamental reality independent of human agency or interpretation--modern moral and political theory and practice have been characterized by an ever-growing confusion about how to establish any kind of moral limits on human action, or in epistemological terms, a thoroughgoing subjectivism that sees all knowledge claims as relative projections of the human will.

To explain somewhat more specifically, in the classical conception of political order as articulated paradigmatically by Aristotle, reality is understood as a given, hierarchical order independent of human agency in which every being has a place and a function. Human happiness comes from participating in this natural order by fulfilling the purpose appropriate to one's place. The political community is concerned with teaching individuals the virtues appropriate to their places in the community and thus in nature. Individuals achieve happiness by virtuously fulfilling their naturally ordained role. As modem technology breaks down the idea of a natural order independent of human agency, extreme confusion about the individual and collective roles of humans, and therefore of the virtues necessary to fulfill those roles, results. The modem age can be understood as a series of increasingly frantic attempts to understand what it means to be a human being in face of the collapse of the natural order that had previously established human identity.

Modem liberalism, of course, attempts to deal with the modem age's increased realization of the extent of human agency by taking as its basic principle the idea of individual freedom. Liberal political theory and practice try to sidestep the issue of the natural role of humans by simply attempting to maximize the freedom of each individual person compatible with an equal level of freedom for every other person, or, to put it differently, by establishing neutral rules or rights (in the form of laws) that limit individual actions in a manner that does not favor any individual or group over any other. Unfortunately, if the subjective human agency that is the basis for the liberal idea of freedom is taken with full seriousness, it ultimately becomes impossible to determine any common standards for, or limits upon, human actions. The limitation that individuals should be free to pursue their own goals as long as they respect the equal freedom of others to do the same is ultimately of no help, since two individuals may, precisely because of their subjective freedom, have radically different understandings of what this actually means. The conception of autonomous individual agency upon which liberalism is based leads logically to a situation where individuals can have utterly different, incompatible perceptions of reality and therefore of what constitutes an imposition on the rights of others. Early liberalism could only appear to have resolved this issue by understanding human agency in a very narrow manner, that is, essentially in terms of economic productivity, and indeed by retaining elements of premodern social order, such as the patriarchal family. To put it another way, the neutral rules of liberal theory simply turn out to be remnants of the classical conception of nature, and as such will break down into a clash of subjective wills once the full extent of human agency is apparent.

Nietzsche, writing a little more than one hundred years ago, was the first to recognize this situation, which he called the "advent of nihilism." He understood that the collapse of the classical conception of nature (which is what he seems to have meant when he talked about the "death of God") would leave humans with increasing power to control and destroy but with no moral constraints on the use of that power and indeed no clear understanding of the purposes that power should be used for. It seems to me that since Nietzsche wrote there have been two manifestations of this moral crisis. The first of these was the wave of totalitarian movements in the first half of this century with their stated goal of using modem technology to fundamentally transform human beings and human society and their utter ruthlessness in attempting to do so. The second, and in the long run, I believe, potentially even more dangerous manifestation, is present-day global capitalism, which leaves the deployment of the new and truly awesome computer and biological technologies, especially genetic engineering and cloning, entirely up to the market, with absolutely no moral regulation. Or rather, it would be more correct to say, perverse moral regulation: the basic cultural ethos of contemporary consumer capitalism, which might be described as aesthetic self- expression, or to use Robert Bellah's term, "expressive individualism,"²which superficially appears to create tolerance for diverse "lifestyles," in fact bears a very strong resemblance to Nietzsche's ethos of artistic selfcreation, which Nietzsche understood as the only logical possibility following the collapse of nature and which he recognized would lead, in the long run, not to tolerance and diversity but to ruthless domination of the strong (the truly creative) over the weak. In this sense, Fukuyama's "end of history" thesis is partly correct, except that the end of history looms as a ghastly free-market version of the Brave New World.

With regard to present-day political debate, this analysis can explain why contemporary Western societies seem to be characterized by a profound sense of unease and even cultural malaise (as indicated, for example, by the extremely low birthrates in Europe and North America), at a time of peace and prosperity. Both elites and masses sense that something is not right, that we are perhaps headed toward an abyss of technological nihilism, but lack the conceptual vocabulary to articulate this.

If, then, our current moral crisis results from the death of the classical conception of nature, or rather from the nature-convention dichotomy, which leaves no alternative to the idea of a natural order but arbitrary human will, or more specifically Nietzschean self-creation, is there any other way to construct a model for ethical and political practice? One attempt to do so is represented by recent developments in the philosophies of language and science, both of which have been heavily influenced by the later work of Ludwig Wittgenstein by political theorists such as Eric Voegelin and Hannah Arendt, whose work in certain ways parallels and even anticipates these developments, and by more recent political theorists such as Jurgen Habermas Alasdair MacIntyre, and Charles Taylor, who have explicitly or implicitly built on Wittgensteinian foundations.³ Recent philosophy of language and science have begun to construct a conceptual vocabulary to describe human action that, when applied to moral and political questions, can allow us to go beyond the dichotomy of nature and convention, and the political theorists just mentioned have, I believe, begun to do so.

Specifically, the theorists whom I have just mentioned differ significantly, but it can be said that the model of moral and political reasoning emerging from their work implies that human communities can order themselves not through a natural hierarchy, as in classical political theory, or through neutral rules, as in modem liberalism, but through communicative activities, or in other words, through speech. For Habermas, this means paradigmatically debate about the common good, and much of his theoretical attention has been directed at an explication of how to structure such debate. Taking a somewhat different approach, MacIntyre and theologian Stanley Hauerwas have been concerned with reviving virtue as a central ethical category, and have argued that the stories that make up a community's history can provide examples of virtuous action which can guide the individual members of the community. This model of political order is similar to Aristotle's, except that the historical narratives of a community take the place of his functional natural order. In this understanding, political order is not something given in the eternal structure of nature, but rather something humans speak into existence, just as human activities generally are not governed by any natural telos, but instead are structured by communicative contexts. These theorists, in different ways, seem to be saying that the human capacity for speech contains the resources for constructing a new understanding of moral order. They can be understood as attempting to articulate aspects of the human speech act which can provide a model for human roles and corresponding virtues which does recognize the extent to which humans can change their environment and the extent to which reality is more generally subject to human interpretation, and in so doing, beginning the project of reconstructing ethical discourse on the rubble of late modem subjectivism.

In this paper I want to analyze the foundations for such a communicative, or speech-based, model of ethics and politics. Specifically, I will attempt to gain a clearer understanding of what such a communicative ethics must accomplish by examining the experiential basis of the nature/convention dichotomy it seeks to transcend. More specifically, I will argue that the modem version of the nature/convention dichotomy has two sources: first, the super ordination of visual experience brought about by literacy, and second, the incoherent synthesis of biblical and Greek (or more generally, pagan) concepts that took place within Christianity in late antiquity and the middle ages. Or, to put it another way, the modem version of the nature/convention dichotomy, which ultimately results in a thoroughgoing subjectivism, can be understood as the result of the effect of print literacy on a culture--late medieval Europe--that embodies both biblical and pagan elements.

My starting point is that there does exist, in fact, a body of literature which can give some indications why the approach just mentioned may be able to transcend the nature/convention dualism, and indeed, which can give at least a partial explanation of where the nature/convention dualism came from in the first place. Over the past two generations, anthropologists, psychologists, and literary critics have written extensively about the differences between oral cultures, which have little or no writing, and modem literate cultures, in which, thanks to the printing press, all or most people have at least basic reading and writing skills.⁴ One implication of these examinations of the two types of cultures indicates that the superordination of visual experience brought about by literacy provides a very powerful experiential source for the nature/convention dichotomy. Recall that the essential idea in both the classical and modem conceptions of nature is that reality ultimately consists of some kind of eternal, impersonal structure, independent of human agency. Classical philosophy conceived this natural structure in functional terms, while modernity has conceptualized it mechanistically, but the core idea is the same in both cases. Such a conception of reality is precisely what the stasis, impersonality, and independence of the written, and especially the printed, word, tends to encourage. Before I explain in more detail, let me qualify my claim. First, I am not claiming that literacy is the only source of the nature/convention dichotomy, a point I will in fact return to later in my discussion. It can, however, be regarded as an important source because it affects our thought processes in very subtle ways at very fundamental levels. Second, I am not arguing that there is an inevitable chain of causation from literacy to the nature/convention dualism; literacy only makes this dualism probable. That is, literacy creates an experiential context in which this dichotomy becomes more likely. I am certainly not making a deterministic claim. Finally, the fact that I will emphasize some of the ways in which literacy can restrict our imaginations should not be taken as an indication that I want to romanticize oral cultures or advocate anything so absurd as returning to a nonliterate state. My purpose is to point out some potential limitations imposed on our thinking by literacy, so that we can be more aware of these limitations and use that knowledge as a starting point for further reflection.

With these caveats in mind, I will elaborate the claim made above: the crucial connection between literacy and the nature/convention dichotomy is that with literacy, people tend to take objects in three-dimensional visual space--that is, objects similar to the written or printed word--as their model of what is "really real" (that is, "natural"), and tend to regard other kinds of experience, and other forms of knowledge, as derivative or even unreal (that is, "conventional"). (This, incidentally, partly explains why oral cultures are more "spiritual" and modem literate cultures are more "materialistic." Religious symbolisms, which draw on oral motifs and address experiences that cannot be reduced to objects in visual space, tend to be opaque or even unintelligible to literate individuals with a heavily visual orientation.) More specifically, with literacy, people tend tacitly (or even explicitly) to conceive of reality as a large but finite "text" and thus think that language gets its meaning by somehow "corresponding" to this text, so that each word has a specific, contextless "meaning-in-itself. " (This conception is sometimes referred to as "language realism," and was first articulated by Plato.) Adequate knowledge thus consists in constructing statements which correspond correctly to discrete states of affairs in the objective world (that is, which correspond correctly to the text). This, of course, is what is entailed in the classical conception of nature and its modem modifications--knowledge claims must have an exact correspondence to specific objects in the eternal, independently-existing "real world." It further follows that if such correspondence cannot be established, then linguistic statements become mere conventions, and are, as such, arbitrary.

In contrast to the understanding of language and knowledge just described, recent philosophy of language and science have argued that language gets its meaning, and knowledge is generated, from specific, concrete contexts of human action. On this understanding, perhaps the single most important feature of the Western philosophical conception of nature is that it attempts to abstract meaning and knowledge from concrete contexts. This is the main point in recent criticisms made by language philosophers of the correspondence model of language described above. Similarly, recent philosophers of science have pointed out that one of the principal failings of positivism (probably the most prominent modern version of the nature/convention dualism) was its tendency to understand science in terms of the static, completed body of knowledge making up classical mechanics rather than in terms of the actual process of scientific discovery at the leading edge of various scientific disciplines, which is to say that it attempted to understand knowledge abstracted from the context of discovery. What recent investigations of oral and literate cultures indicate is that the central difference between oral and literate/visual orientations is the vastly greater capacity for abstraction from context brought about by literacy, illustrated paradigmatically by the correspondence theory of language just mentioned. Hence by examining this principal difference between oral and literate orientations I will argue that the nature/convention dualism may be something (at least partly) generated from the heavily visual orientation produced by literacy.

I have already indicated that literacy tends to superordinate visual experience over oral experience and in so doing can cause us to think in terms of a dualism between the "real" uninterpreted reality "out there" and mere human convention. In fact, this is a simplification. As Walter Ong, probably the most well-known scholar in this field, points out, literate people do not use their eyes more than nonliterate people; people in "primitive" cultures are generally much better at visually detecting details than highly "civilized" people. What is different is that writing, and particularly printing, links a particular kind of visual experience to verbalization and communication, a situation quite different from what prevails in oral cultures. Specifically, for the literate person, the relative stasis of the written or printed word--its status as an object in three dimensional space--becomes paradigmatic for visual experience, so that through vision the dynamism of the world can be stopped and subjected to detailed description and analysis. Nonliterate people, lacking the paradigm provided by the written word, cannot abstract themselves from the world's dynamism, which results in the apparently paradoxical situation that, although they are usually very good at noticing visual details, they have a difficult time giving accurate verbal descriptions of visual phenomena. Hence the fundamental difference between the oral and literate noetic situations is the centrality of a particular mode of visual experience for literate perception, communication, and thought processes.⁵

Because of the limitations on visual experience peculiar to the nonliterate, that is, because visual experience is not linked closely to verbalization, the crucial feature of an oral culture is the centrality of sound to all thought and communication. Sound is irreducibly dynamic; although it is possible to conceive other kinds of perception, especially vision, in static terms, this is impossible with sound. This is because the dynamism of sound (and specifically the spoken word) is not that of an object moving through three- dimensional space but rather the dynamism of continuously passing into and out of existence. An oral culture can hardly conceive of words as labels of some sort, as literate people tend to do, since spoken words are not "things" which can be picked up and "attached" to other things; a word must be an event or an action. Further, sound for oral peoples is dynamic also in the sense that it is linked to power: it must be driven by power from a source of some kind, which is why words (that is, dynamic actions or events) themselves are understood to have great, even magical, power .⁶ Another fundamental implication of sound based communication is that, since words are always produced by a concrete person, oral cultures generally conceive the world in personal terms. At the same time, this feature of sound-based communication means that oral cultures will be highly communal, with more highly externalized, less introspective personality types. ⁷ Eric Havelock points out that the dynamic nature of sound has perhaps its most fundamental effect in that, lacking any way of storing information outside of actually existent persons (since spoken words are not things which can be picked up and put away somewhere), oral cultures must rely on memory and direct communication to organize existence. Thus the thought processes of oral cultures will be structured by these features. Speaking, and thus thinking, in oral cultures must always be closely related to actual existential contexts (especially in the form of narrative), will tend to be rhythmically oriented, and will tend to be highly formulaic in content. All of these features aid memory.⁸

For my purpose, that is, the question of literacy's relationship to the nature/convention dualism, the discussion can be limited to the most fundamental phenomenological feature of oral communication just mentioned. Since oral cultures communicate mainly through sound, which is irreducibly dynamic, they lack the capacity to "stop" the dynamism of the world and subject it to abstract analysis. Oral thought processes, in other words, are always highly contextual. Only literate people, using the relatively fixed written or printed word as a paradigm, can conceive the world as a kind of "snapshot" and abstract elements of this world from their context and analyze them. Oral cultures have only minimal capacities for abstraction and decontextualization.

A. R. Luria's classic study of peasants in the Soviet Union illustrates this point well. In one case, subjects were presented with drawings of four objects, such as a hammer, saw, log, and hatchet, of which one fitted into a different category than the other three, and asked to group them. Although the subjects with some reading ability were able to group the objects "correctly," that is, according to abstract conceptual categories, the illiterate peasants attempted to group the objects according to how one would use them in actual everyday situations. In the example just mentioned--the hammer, saw, log, and hatchet--the illiterate subjects were baffled, since all the items seemed to go together: one might chop the log with the hatchet, saw it with the saw, and so forth. Separating the log from the tools made no sense, since then there would be nothing on which to use the tools. Similarly, the illiterate peasants resisted giving abstract definitions of such objects as trees, instead expressing surprise that anyone should ask such a bizarre question as "What is a tree?" The fundamental difference between the literate and nonliterate peasants was that the literate peasants were capable of abstracting the items from concrete situations and understanding them in terms of conceptual groupings, while the nonliterate peasants could understand the items only in terms of concrete, specific actions.

In another striking example of the heavily contextual nature of the oral world, the same illiterate subjects typically had difficulty with articulate self-analysis, normally deferring to the community for an evaluation of their own characters. This is because the capacity to think abstractly, that is, non- situationally, is what allows introspection; one can only analyze oneself as oneself by (partly) abstracting oneself from the specific situations in which one always finds oneself.⁹

This examination of oral cultures, then, provides some definite evidence for the claim that literacy can be a prime source of the nature/convention distinction by virtue of the capacity it brings about for abstraction. Oral cultures necessarily think in highly contextual terms, and hence would appear to be much less likely to conceive knowledge and reality generally in the decontextualized manner characteristic of the Western philosophical tradition. In order to elaborate this initial formulation, I will now explain further how literacy restructures thought processes.

To do this it will be necessary to examine in more detail different forms of literate and postliterate media of communication. I have already noted that it is a simplification to say that literacy superordinates, visual experience over oral/aural experience; the crucial aspect of this superordination is the way a particular aspect of vision is linked with verbalization. But even this simplifies, since different types of literate media link vision and verbalization differently, or to different degrees. Early forms of writing, such as hieroglyphics, which employ picture-symbols, do this only to a limited extent. Pictographic writing systems such as this still retain a great deal of the sound dimension of words because they must represent each word with a picture of some concrete thing or event which exists or occurs in the oral world, so that the meaning of the word can only be understood by reference to its existential context, which in turn means that words will still tend to be understood as events rather than signs or referents.¹⁰

The really fundamental change in this regard comes with the invention of the alphabet, or, to be more exact, the Greek alphabet, which contains vowels as well as consonants. Since each letter represents only one sound (or at most a few related sounds), rather than entire words, the crucial connection with the oral world is broken, or rather, drastically attenuated; a written word as written word has no obvious connection to anything in the life world. With its connection to existential events broken, an alphabetically written word becomes a set of abstract symbols in static space, rather than a dynamic event. The context which is so important to oral communication and still relevant to pictographic writing and even the Semitic alphabet (which does not indicate vowels in the same way as the Greek alphabet does, and thus leaves the identity of a given written word somewhat ambiguous and therefore dependent on existential context), tends to recede greatly into the tacit or even unconscious background. Once this happens, situational thinking will tend to be replaced by abstract thinking and modes of expression will be less closely linked to the oral world and more oriented toward abstractions. For example, we have seen that oral people inevitably understand the world in personal terms, since for them communication is always tied to an actually existent, and present, person. Writing dissolves the immediate link between a person and his or her words and thus allows the reader to understand words, and thus reality generally, in an impersonal fashion, that is, abstracted from the personally spoken words which give reality meaning. At the same time, separated from actually existent persons and locked into abstract visual space, words themselves can tend to take on a life of their own in a way they cannot in an oral culture. Specifically, with literacy comes the possibility of what I earlier called language realism, that is, the idea that reality is in some way a large but finite "text," and that language gets its meaning by somehow "corresponding" to this text. Such a correspondence or referential understanding of language would be inconceivable in an oral culture. ¹¹ Ong gives a very useful illustration of the spatializing effects of the alphabet. The alphabet implies that words are present all at once, rather than in a dynamic fashion, and that they can be cut up into little pieces, which can even be written forwards and pronounced backwards: "part"-- that is, "p-a-r-t"--can be pronounced "trap." Of course, if you put the word "part" on a sound tape and reverse the tape, you do not get "trap," but a completely different sound, neither "part'' nor "trap."¹² The game of asking someone to "say 'part' backwards" would be unintelligible and unimaginable without alphabetic literacy. Thus with the alphabet comes a crucial step in bringing about the spatialization of language barely begun with pictographic writing.

The discussion so far has begun to indicate how the decontextualization. brought about by literacy can be an important factor in bringing about the Western philosophical conception of nature. The effects of literacy remain relatively limited, however, as long as writing remains the most advanced method of communication. There are several reasons for this. First, literacy itself will continue to be relatively limited. In societies where pictographic writing systems are employed, very few people can learn to read and write because of the huge amount of time and effort necessary to learn these complicated systems. The alphabet makes reading and writing much easier to learn, but as long as reading material remains in relatively short supply because it must all be produced by the slow process of writing, much of the population will remain nonliterate and thus still tied to the oral world. Further, the literate elements of the population will remain in contact with illiterates and thus in contact with the oral mentality. Also, the scarceness of written resources means that literates will in many situations still use oral methods of dealing with the world (for example, oral memory devices) rather than using writing for such purposes. Indeed, in a society with writing but no printing, literates retain much of the oral orientation even while using writing. Since written manuscripts are frequently difficult to read, reading is normally done aloud, so it can be done slowly enough to decipher the text. Silent reading has only been generally cultivated since the advent of printing, with its uniform and easily readable texts. (Anyone who has read St. Augustine's Confessions will recall his wonderment at St. Ambrose's habit of reading silently.) And of course reading aloud does not allow one to spatialize and decontextualize words as thoroughly as silent reading does. The retention of oral thought processes in a literate culture is referred to as "oral residue," and can be found even today in (socially or geographically) isolated areas of the most modem societies.¹³

Printing, then, is the final step necessary for the complete triumph of a literate mentality, and for reasons I have to some extent just indicated. It makes reading material readily available, thus encouraging universal literacy and more general use of literate artifacts. This in turn can allow greater accumulation of information through such things as encyclopedias. The uniformity of printed items makes indexes possible, meaning that information can be found faster. (Indexes would make little sense if only written manuscripts were available, since all the labor of creating an index would have to be repeated for every single book produced.) The accumulation of information made possible by printing is the crucial step in destroying the memory-oriented features of an oral or partly oral culture. Knowledge can be remembered--or rather, stored--even when it is abstracted from its existential context, so the highly contextual, formulaic, rhythmic, and narrative-oriented approach to knowledge characteristic of oral cultures tends to whither.

In terms of the perceptual effects discussed earlier, the uniformity of print also makes silent reading much easier and its elimination of personal idiosyncrasies (that is, different writing styles) from the text decontextualizes words more relentlessly than ever, thus intensifying the crucial effects of literacy already mentioned. The spatialization of language, begun by pictographic writing and accelerated by the alphabet, takes a quantum jump with printing. In terms of the history of Western culture, then, although classical Greece shows the definite effects of a significant level of alphabetic literacy, it is not until after the invention of the printing press that literacy exerts its full force on the Western mind. ¹⁴ Not coincidentally, modernity has made the nature/convention distinction even more rigidly than classical philosophy--for Plato, conventional knowledge claims, or opinions, can at least be a starting point for finding the truth of the natural order, while for modem positivism, opinion and the facts of nature are conceptually incommensurate.

By recognizing the extent to which various communications media push us in the direction of a literate/visual orientation, we should now have a clearer idea of how literacy can facilitate the overabstraction which may be the primary cause of the nature/convention dichotomy. The essential problem is that a literate culture provides a subtly pervasive environment of decontextualized knowledge, vocabulary, and most importantly, everyday visual experience which can cause us to forget context entirely. Although the capacity for abstraction is in many ways very enabling (since systematic analysis of any kind requires a certain degree of abstraction, and it would be impossible to do science without the abstraction involved in an impersonal vocabulary), it will become quite possible, if one's vocabulary has been formed by intense immersion in the relatively decontextualized experience of a literate culture, to forget, when reflecting upon our thought and knowledge processes, and how they relate to social activities such as ethical behavior, that knowledge is always derived from a specific context. Indeed, in the extreme case, decontextualization can result in utter fragmentation of knowledge and thus of the world. The literate world has a tendency to become a jumble of mutually unconnected, reductively-conceived "facts." This is precisely the logical outcome of the nature/convention distinction. I have already mentioned a specific example of this particular pitfall, the (explicit or tacit) language realism that results when one starts to imagine that words have a life of their own, that is, that they can be abstracted from the context of speech (or writing), something that can only happen to a literate person. Similarly, such a high level of abstraction can cause us to commit the error of mistaking the impersonal vocabulary of physical science for an actual description of what the scientist is doing when he or she does science, or to conceive of morality as a set of abstract rules rather than as the ongoing story of living responsibly in a community of other people.

I should at this point briefly mention that there is also beginning to develop a literature which argues that recent media such as television and computers dramatically intensify our visual orientation and are bringing about what might be best described as a postliterate visual culture of images. In terms of primary perceptual effects, the available evidence seems to strengthen, or perhaps extend, my thesis. Briefly, it appears that a postliterate visual orientation offers the worst of all possible worlds--that is, it embodies the worst aspects of both oral and literate cultures. Neil Postman argues that as passively- received images replace the text which the reader must actively examine, analytical capacities decrease. At the same time, however, the capacity of television to present a rapid succession of often very different images intensifies the literate tendency toward abstraction from and fragmentation of the world. People in a postliterate electronic image culture lose the capacity for analytical thought brought about by literacy while retaining--indeed, enlarging--the literate tendency to see the world in fragmented, reductionistic terms. It might be said that if a literate culture is characterized by a naturalistic rationalism, a postliterate visual culture, consisting of a chaos of unconnected emotive images, can be best described as one of conventionalist irrationalism. Just as subjectivist relativism is derivative of the nature/convention dichotomy, the new electronic media are derivative of literacy, so the developing postliterate conventionalist orientation can be seen as the logical culmination of the earlier literate conception of nature. ¹⁵

With this basic insight about visual and oral orientations developed, we can now return to the alternative model of ethical and political practice discussed earlier. To the extent that theorists such as Habermas, MacIntyre, and others focus on human speech-capacities as an alternative to the traditional Western philosophical conception of nature, the literature on oral-literate differences can show two things. First, if the abstraction of the nature/convention dichotomy is caused at least partly by the visual orientation produced by literacy, a consideration of human speechcapacities may allow us to escape that dichotomy and its nihilistic results in ethical and political theory. Second, if the tendency to think in terms of the nature/convention dualism is the result of pervasive decontextualized visual experience in our everyday lives, then rebuilding ethical and political practice would require at least a partial redirection of our everyday experience away from vision and toward speech and hearing. If my analysis so far is correct, we cannot hope to regain a sense of virtuous action that contributes to meaningful human communities without at least partially recapturing a sense of face-to-face oral/aural experience. (I should repeat here that I am not recommending that we somehow return to a purely oral condition, but only that we redress somewhat the current extreme imbalance in our sensory orientation.) This, of course, is something that local communities based on oral narrative traditions and debate about the common good might accomplish.

In the remainder of this paper I want to elaborate my first conclusion. Specifically, I want to employ an analysis of the properties of the spoken word to argue that the modem manifestation of the nature/convention dichotomy, and especially the thoroughgoing subjectivism of late modernity, is more complicated than the discussion so far would indicate. My starting point is that although the literature on oral and literate cultures can explain a great deal, it cannot explain everything. For example, it cannot explain why different oral cultures, for example the ancient Hebrews and their pagan neighbors, could have radically different worldviews, nor why two different literate individuals, for example, Plato and Thomas Hobbes, could have such dissimilar understandings of reality. To further clarify our situation, it will be necessary to reconsider a question that has received considerable attention from political theorists in the twentieth century: the theoretical structure of the specifically modem worldview, or to put in the terms used above, the specifically modem version of the nature/convention dichotomy. I will do this by reconsidering, not explicit metaphysical and political doctrines, but rather the fundamental metaphors by which humans have understood reality. I will use this method to argue that modernity, or again the modem manifestation of the nature/convention dichotomy, can be best understand as the result of the effect of print literacy on a specific type of culture, that is a culture of (what might be crudely described as) platonized Christianity, or in other words a culture where the fundamental Hebraic or biblical metaphors for reality have been distorted or corrupted by Greek, or more generally, pagan,

metaphors. Print literacy, in other words, might have had a very different impact on a different type of culture, for example one where these two different sets of metaphors had not become mixed.

The idea that modernity is the incoherent result of compromises between Christianity and paganism is hardly original, of course. This argument has been made many times, by Reinhold Niebuhr, Karl Lowith, and others. ¹⁶ But this argument, because it tends to focus mainly on explicit doctrines, is also unable to answer a number of important questions, such as why the specifically modem form of consciousness, if it is indeed an outgrowth of Christianity, took so long to develop, and what experiences shaped the specifically modem worldview. My analysis, by examining both the fundamental biblical and pagan metaphors for reality and the experiential effects of literacy, will attempt to indicate some answers to these questions.

I will proceed by sketching out (one understanding of) the differences between the Hebraic and the Greek (or more generally pagan) worldviews and the likely outcome when these understandings are synthesized in the context of a mainly oral culture. I will then indicate the likely effects of print literacy on this mixed metaphor. I will finally illustrate my thesis more concretely by briefly showing how this mixed metaphor works itself out in the Protestant work ethic and modem capitalism. More specifically, I will argue that the critical difference between the biblical understanding of humanity and the pagan anthropology is that the biblical model implies that humans have a creative power--that is, a power to actually change the world--in their capacity for speech, something that is unrecognized in the pagan worldview. The synthesis of Greek and Hebraic formulations (using this conceptual move as a shorthand for the political and social consequences of the importation of Greek philosophical concepts into Christian theology and the practical compromises with paganism made by the medieval Church) might result in a situation where the biblical concept of human creativity would be repressed by the Greek elements in Christianity, causing--as repressions always do--its re-emergence in distorted or even demonic forms, or, more specifically, in the subjectivism of modernity, that is, in the breakdown of any "natural' limits to human actions. English-speaking liberalism could be understood as the manifestation of this creativity in mildly distorted form, while the more radically subjectivist modem ideologies, most obviously revolutionary Marxism, would be examples of the same concept in a state of extreme deformation. Print literacy would be the experiential key to this distorted re-emergence.

As with the first part of my discussion, I will need to issue a caveat. Since the subsequent discussion will cover quite a bit of ground in a short time, it will of necessity quite sketchy. A proper treatment of these issues would require extensive historical background and detailed textual analysis. I think he schematic outline below will, however show that this thesis has sufficient plausibility to be pursued further in subsequent research.

MY analysis will be substantially derived from the work of the late William H. Poteat. Applying the insights of the literature on the differences between oral and literate cultures, Poteat argues that the fundamental model of reality for the ancient Hebrews was the spoken word (as indicated, most obviously, in Genesis 1), while the Greek philosophers understood the world on the model of the written word. I will eventually want to modify Poteat's formulation, but what is critical to the analysis is his discussion of the properties of the spoken word. For Poteat, the spoken word has two properties which are essential to understanding the biblical model of reality and humanity. First, the spoken word is dynamic: reality, then, if like the spoken word, must be some kind of ongoing, dynamic process. Second, and even more importantly, the spoken word is creative: for Poteat, J. L. Austin's claim that words create a world is true in the most direct sense possible. The world as we articulately experience it is created by our speech acts. This is true not only of social institutions and conventions, but even of nature. "And the world of nature," asks Poteat, "insofar as it is a reflected reality among men, does it have its existence other than by the utterance of the words of common sense, of physics, chemistry, biology, geology?"¹⁷

If we take the spoken world as our model of reality, as the ancient Hebrews did, then reality itself will be an ongoing, dynamic, creative process, with infinite possibilities, like the spoken word; and humans, since they have the creative capacity of speech, actually have a role to play in this creative process, although human creativity is of course limited, since we are also creatures (that is, created beings). This is to say that humans can not only understand, but can actually change, the world, and indeed do so with every speech act. Our words create a dynamic succession of worlds.

At this point it might seem that Poteat is saying something quite similar to various postmodernists who argue that all knowledge is socially constructed. There is, however, a crucial difference. While postmodernists regard socially constructed knowledge claims as radically contingent, that is without any necessary grounding, and thus ultimately tools of domination created by constellations of power, Poteat argues that the worlds created by our speech acts are indeed subject to a kind of necessity. This is because in any given speech context, although we may say an infinite number of things, only some things will be appropriate to that speech context, since human creativity is limited and the speech context is therefore connected to, or limited by, previous speech contexts. This formulation is of course similar to Austin's argument that in order for a performative speech act to have its effect, certain felicities, or conditions, themselves derived from previous speech acts, must exist.¹⁸

Another way to state this idea would be to say that a given speech situation constitutes a place from which we can orient ourselves and understand which speech acts are appropriate, or faithful, to that context. The worlds we create with our speech acts are "real," or ordered, that is, make sense, only to the extent that our speech acts are faithful to their contexts. ¹⁹

In this situation, the biblical concept of God is, in a sense, a kind of logical deduction from the model, or, rather, what is necessary to complete the "picture" implied by the basic metaphor. Although our particular speech acts often fail to be faithful and thus create disordered worlds, we nevertheless proceed with a tacit confidence that reality is ultimately ordered every time we speak (something that might be termed a kind of absolute necessity inherent in our world-creating speech acts), which implies that our speech acts tacitly assume something like a world created (that is spoken into existence) by an ever-faithful speaker--one who never breaks promises. In the biblical anthropology, this is indeed our only real place--as a responsible speaker before God. Whereas individuals in Aristotle's political theory have a place in the natural order and therefore in the hierarchical social order derived from nature, the key characters in the biblical narratives are wanderers, with no fixed geographical place and even no place in society.

Quite likely the model I have just described will somehow seem inadequate as a grounding for human knowledge and action; the "necessity" it provides seems rather "soft," and not really different from the radical contingency posited by postmodernism. Poteat in fact argues that our unease with this speech- model of reality is very much a function of literacy. We only think of the world created by our words as being less real, less substantial than the "natural" world, because of the (tacit) model of an essentially unchanging reality--that is, of a "hard" necessity--provided by the written or printed word:

[T]he pejorative characterization of performatives as governed only by "felicities no more palpable than the insubstantial fabric of social usage" can come to mind only against the background picture that lends a more substantial grounding for constatives than the "mere felicities embodied in social usage." And what is this picture? Why the conception of an order more stable than the lively, convivial oral-aural fabric in which "felicities" govern all, viz., the conception of a very large, eternal text by reference to which the meanings of the words and expressions we speak are sustained and by corresponding with which, if they are constatives, they may be judged to be (eternally) true or false.²⁰

Present-day postmodernists, in other words, are best understood as disappointed Platonists, in that their discovery of the non-existence of the eternal structure of reality posited by Plato causes them to conclude that reality is radically contingent, their literate visual orientation leaving no other possible understanding of necessity.

By contrast with the biblical model, the Greek philosophers, according to Poteat, understood the world as being like the written word. Here Poteat follows Ong, Havelock, and others in arguing that if one's perceptions are strongly (even if only tacitly) influenced by the experience of literacy, then one will tend to conceive reality as being like a written word--that is, a finite, ultimately unchanging structure, the particulars of which can be (at least in principle) beheld at once, like a written text. Nature, that is the fundamental structure of reality, as conceptualized by both Plato and Aristotle (whatever differences they may have had), is understood according to this model. Necessity for the Greeks is given not by the faithfulness of speakers but by the unchanging structure of the natural order, which humans, although they can (partly) understand it, cannot change. Political order will thus tend to be understood hierarchically, since some individuals understand the natural order better than others.²¹

If we accept Poteat's formulations, then, we can see that if the speech-based biblical model is modified, or corrupted, by the visual Greek model, a thoroughgoing subjectivism--that is, a breakdown of the nature/convention dichotomy into pure conventionalism--is a very likely result, since one possible outcome of such a corruption would be the retention of the biblical model of humans as creative speakers but--if the visual Greek model of necessity becomes predominant-- the loss of the speech-based necessity of this model.

Before pursuing this line of thought further, however, I want to indicate one crucial place where I think Poteat's analysis needs to be modified. Poteat contrasts the Hebraic model of reality as a spoken word with the Greek philosophical concept of nature, which he assumes is derived from literacy. But the prephilosophical (that is, preliterate) Greeks, and indeed, all the pagan cultures, had something like a concept of nature--that is, the various gods who represented, or who actually were, what we modems would reductionistically call "natural forces." The major differences between the Greek philosophical concept of nature and the pagan gods is that nature is more abstract, impersonal, and orderly-- differences that can be understood as results of literacy. But both the pagan gods and the philosophers' natural order share one absolutely critical feature: they are ultimately unaffected by human agency. The crucial difference here then would seem to be not between the Hebraic oral orientation and the Greek visual orientation, but rather between the fundamental Hebraic model of reality, the spoken word, which implies a (limited) human creative capacity, and the fundamental pagan model of reality, the rhythms and processes of the natural world (whether understood as personal and unpredictable, even chaotic, as with the pagan cultures lacking an internalized literacy, or as relatively impersonal and orderly, as with the literate Greek philosophers), which implies no human creative capacity, only a capacity to discover and perhaps rearrange what already exists.

I want to argue that the conceptual incoherence of modernity derives ultimately from the attempt to synthesize (again using this term as a shorthand for vastly more complicated social processes) these incompatible models of reality. Specifically, we might say that the Christian synthesis ended up conceiving of humans as neither natural beings (as in paganism) nor as simultaneously creators and creatures (as in the biblical model) but rather as creators and natural beings, that is, as creators in the sense of creating a world through speech and also as natural beings in the sense of being parts of an ultimately finite, unchanging natural order. But this conceptualizationis obviously incoherent. We cannot be both. Hence it can only be resolved through either some kind of mind/body dualism or through conceiving of humans as creators only-- that is, the radical subjectivism of late modernity.

I think an argument could be constructed that this is indeed what happened in medieval and modem thought and practice. Medieval Catholicism tended to conceive of humans as creators and natural beings in that humans were free to act righteously or to sin, but only within the context of an unchanging natural order, where human ends were given and unchanging, so that humans are still in effect primarily natural beings. This is clearly the position of Thomas Aquinas, at least as he is conventionally interpreted.²² As a result, the medieval political and social order, despite the biblical concept and even the explicit Christian doctrine of fundamental human equality, had much the same structure as the hierarchical pagan societies, although some movement did take place in the direction of working out some of the biblical worldview's implications, such as the slow progress toward democracy in the English constitutional tradition and the beginnings of modem science in the monasteries. The Protestant Reformation had the effect of shifting the balance of this dualism, so that early modernity also understood humans as creators and natural beings, but now with the emphasis on the element of creativity. This can be seen in a somewhat negative way in the concern of Martin Luther and John Calvin with sin, that is the misuse of human freedom. It can be seen even more obviously in John Locke's extension of the Protestant work ethic in his theory of property: for Locke humans can actually create new wealth (an idea never developed in any systematic way in the ancient world) through their labor on the natural order. The incoherence of Locke's position is immediately obvious, since if an immutable natural order really exists, it cannot be possible for humans systematically to transform it using labor. Karl Marx is the key transitional figure in the development of the thoroughgoing subjectivism of late modernity. Marx begins with Locke's incoherent conceptualization of humans, i. e., that we are creators who are nevertheless part of the natural order, and then makes the conceptualization coherent by understanding human history as an evolutionary process in which humans gradually become completely free of natural necessity--that is in which humans become creators. Nietzsche merely pushes Marx's logic to its final conclusion, regarding humans as always having been radically creative but only recently having discovered the fact. The logical progression can be captured in the following diagram:

Creator/Creature                                    Natural Being

Creator/NATURAL BEING

CREATOR/Natural Being

CREATOR

We can also understand this process in terms of the concept of place discussed above. If on the one hand our consciousness and practice are formed by the pagan idea of a human place in the (hierarchical) natural order, but on the other hand the biblical model implies that there is no natural order, one possible outcome--if the biblical concept of the human place as a responsible speaker is corrupted into something more like a place in the natural hierarchy-- is a loss of any sense of place.

Notice that this scenario can explain an extremely important feature of modernity. Specifically, it can explain why the English speaking societies have generally dealt more effectively with the increased understanding of human agency than the continental European societies; since they began to modernize first, they were more able to rely upon remnants of the classical concept of nature (as in, for example, early liberalism's concept of natural rights) which were simply not available to societies that began to modernize later, when such remnants had more thoroughly broken down.

In any case, in order to address the issues originally set out here, it will be necessary to explicate this highly schematic conceptual model in terms of concrete human experience. Specifically, we must be able to explain three things: (1) why, experientially, Christianity developed the initial incoherent "creator/natural being" anthropological metaphor; (2)why, experientially, the Reformation and early modernity shifted the emphasis in this metaphor; and (3) why, experientially, nature disappeared from the equation in late modernity. I think the first and third question can be answered relatively easily. The tendency to introduce Greek philosophical concepts into Christian theology and for the Church to engage in numerous practical compromises with paganism can probably be understood in terms of the fact that in any pre-industrial social order, "nature"--understood as an order independent of human agency--is, or rather seems to be, such an overwhelming feature of everyday life that its existence is almost impossible to question. (Or to put it in terms more appropriate to an oral culture, in an agricultural society with limited technology, faced with the daily experience of relative human powerlessness before the forces of nature, the existence of the gods is almost impossible to question, a fact that indicates how amazing the breakthrough achieved by the ancient Hebrews really was.) Similarly, late modernity's complete destruction of any concept of nature, and therefore--within the basic framework of modem thought-- any limits to human action, can be understood as the consequence of the full recognition of the extent of human agency wrought by modem technology.

The second, and most important, question is the most difficult. I think it could be argued that the shift toward a greater sense of human agency found in the Reformation can be understood as a result of the gradual recognition of the extent of human freedom implied in the biblical model, and certainly the reformers understood themselves as attempting to recapture the original biblical formulation. If this is the case, though, why did they not succeed, but instead only shifted the emphasis of the incoherent medieval model? Here literacy would appear to play a critical role. A more thoroughly internalized literacy may have the negative effect of preventing the complete abandonment of the concept of nature for the same reason that it helped to establish the concept of nature among the Greek philosophers in the first place: its tendency to create a perception of reality as an eternal finite text. Thus, the reformer's attempt to break out of the incoherent medieval synthesis--or to put it differently, to eliminate the pagan elements in medieval Christianity--could be (partly) thwarted by the effects of literacy.

It is important to recognize that this tendency might not have the same effect in a different culture, one where the concept of nature did not weigh so heavily; if print literacy had developed in a culture based on the original biblical formulation, that is, a culture that had somehow managed thoroughly to break away from the pagan gods, that culture's thinking would presumably become more impersonal, abstract, and analytical, but it might not develop the concept of "nature." That is to say, although literacy may have, in certain ways, made it more difficult to break out of the incoherent medieval synthesis, the incoherent medieval synthesis remains as the initial problem. Hence, to answer the question raised at the beginning of this discussion, the key to understanding the structure and internal dynamics of modernity would be neither only the effect of print literacy on Western consciousness nor only the incoherent synthesis of biblical and pagan elements in medieval Christianity but both: the effect of print literacy on a culture attempting to break out of the incoherent medieval synthesis--that is, to fully break away from any concept of "nature"-- might well be to prevent such a breakout and simply shift the emphasis within that synthesis.

As mentioned earlier, in order to be satisfactorily demonstrated, such an analysis would have to be applied in great detail to the key Reformation texts, and at least as importantly, to the historical record of the conditions of everyday life at the time of the Reformation, but the above schematic outline does, I think, show that this thesis has sufficient plausibility to be pursued further.

To illustrate the potential power of this analysis, I will conclude by using this model to sketch out very roughly an understanding of the practical effects of the Reformation's shift in the balance of the creator/natural being model. I think it could be argued that the anthropological ambivalence of the Reformation appears in Luther when he argues that the highest manifestation of Christian ethical life is not monasticism, with its withdrawal from the world, but rather service to one's neighbor, but then understands Christian service largely in terms of labor, that is, activity directed toward the natural order. What is critical to the Protestant ethic as it later developed, especially in Calvinism, is that, although it contains a greater sense of human agency in the idea that labor can improve the human material condition, it still contains remnants of the pagan concept of nature, so that the world is tacitly conceived both as abundant (as the biblical model implies) and stingy (as the pagan model implies), which means that we can produce abundance, but only at the price of an intensely disciplinary attitude toward ourselves, an intensely competitive attitude toward our neighbors, and an intensely confrontational attitude toward our environment. The possibility that abundance could be achieved with less discipline, less competition, less confrontation, and more joy is never really considered in Calvinism or the capitalist economy that derives from it. The eventual result of this incoherent understanding of the human situation is that since the world is indeed abundant, capitalism quickly develops a problem of overproduction, which, since it is unresolvable in terms of the Protestant ethic, can be dealt with only by the creation of a consumer economy in which consumption actually becomes a kind of work requiring intense discipline. Consumer capitalism, which advertises commodities as necessary tools for creating one's own life as a work of art,' can be understood as the final manifestation of radical subjectivism that results from Christianity's mixed metaphor.

Finally, I will very briefly describe what I think are the implications of the foregoing schematic analysis. If the source of the nature/convention dichotomy and its eventual degeneration into the thoroughgoing subjectivism of late modem is simply an extreme visual orientation, as writers such as Ong suggest, then the obvious task would be to recover a more oral orientation, as I discussed earlier. But if, as I have argued here, the problem is more complicated--if literacy only exacerbates, or activates latent perverse possibilities already existing within, an incoherent worldview, or, as I have termed it, a mixed metaphor--then the solution is also more complicated. To escape the rampant subjectivism of late modernity and its political manifestations, it would not be enough to reorient ourselves toward speech and hearing; establishing limits on human action when the true extent of human creative capacities has become manifest would require that the fundamental metaphors that we use to comprehend our world would have to be more systematically, and more self-consciously, reconstructed. Specifically, our religious, philosophical, scientific, ethical, and political concepts, and their practical social embodiments, would have to more accurately articulate the source of that creative capacity--the spoken word.

in the thought of Husserl, Voegelin, and Ricoeur

Copyright 2000 Peter A. Petrakis

Whereas Plato incorporated everything-nonsense, reason and myths-our philosophers admit nothing but nonsense or reason, because they have closed their eyes to the rest. The mole is meditating. Albert Camus, Lyrical and Critical Essays.

Edmund Husserl Eric Voegelin and Paul Ricoeur all refute the position that the scientific method or positivism is the only way for discerning knowledge and/or truth(s). Although their approaches and conclusions differ, all three attempt to demonstrate that what is often dismissed as " subjective experience' is not only important philosophically but crucial for politics and ethics. This is not a new insight. Indeed, the dismissal of the subjective as unscientific and therefore unimportant did not become orthodoxy until the rise of positivism. And although the death of behavioralism as a species and modernity as the genus is much discussed, the past is not easy to escape. Indeed, as Eric Voegelin admits when he abandons his History of Political Ideas, the conceptual and methodological tendencies of modernity are subtle and infused in our consciousness. This essay explores the attempts of three thinkers to generate a more suitable science, one that does not rely, at least not solely, on what frequently passes for empiricism, objectivity, and reason. During this analysis it will become apparent that the dichotomies and conundrums associated with modernity are not easily avoided and that representation plays a pivotal role. Indeed, following the lead of Voegelin and Ricoeur, this essay concludes with a call for a more aesthetic approach to the science of politics. 

Husserl
Husserl's writings are dense and diffuse. And although he is due considerable praise for his contributions to phenomenology and epistemology, his work lacks coherence. This is due, in part, to his work habits. Husserl edited and reworked his manuscripts numerous times before allowing them to appear in print. Frequently, by the time a work was published, he had changed his philosophic position substantially. His penchant for editing meant that much of his work was not published during his lifetime. The Husserl archives in Louvain house over 40,000 pages of shorthand notes and numerous volumes have been published since his death. Scholars sympathetic with Husserl have, in the past, pointed to these vast archives to deflect criticism. To complicate matters further, Husserl often utilized methods and techniques years before systematically discussing them. Thus, his early works often must be re-read in light of his later works. The main reason for the lack of coherence in Husserl's work, however, lies in the character of phenomenology itself. Phenomenology is more a method than a doctrine and, as such, it is "a prolegomenon to a philosophy, but is not itself the undertaking of an established philosophy."¹ Furthermore, "[a]ll of phenomenology is not Husserl, even though he is more less

¹Eric Voegelin, "Letter from Voegelin to Alfred Schutz on Edmund Husserl," September 17, 1943, included in Faith and Political Philosophy: The Correspondence Between Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin, 1934-1964, trans. and ed. Peter Emberley and Barry Cooper, (University Park: Pennsylvania State Press, 1993), p. 20. 

its center,"² and numerous subsequent philosophers have used phenomenology as a tool without embracing all of Husserl's conclusions. These elements make interpretations of Husserl complicated. Indeed, Ricoeur remarked that a careful study of Husserl reveals that he "abandoned along the way as many routes as he took. This is the case to such a degree that in a broad sense phenomenology is both the sum of Husserl's own variations and the heresies issuing from it." ³ 

Despite these difficulties, there is one element that unites all of Husserl's work-his desire to establish objective or verifiable truth.⁴ His notion of objectivity and verification, however, must be distinguished from the natural sciences. For Husserl, 'truth' cannot depend upon physical reality; after all, Descartes demonstrated the unreliable character of observations derived from the senses. Furthermore, the scientific method demands that observations be confirmed or verified by others. This, in turn, requires language and/or symbols. Husserl sought a purer form of knowledge; knowledge that was direct and unmediated.⁵ 

Husserl had two main goals in Logical Investigations. First, he wanted to distinguish philosophy from psychology and he did this by pointing out its connection to the natural sciences. At the beginning of the twentieth century, when psychology was a sub-field of philosophy, psychology attempted to become more rigorous by adopting the techniques and methods of empiricism and the scientific method. For Husserl, this had the opposite effect and meant that psychology could only attain approximations or estimates of the mind. Husserl devotes the first section of Logical Investigations to refuting psychology as a method for discovering truths about the human mind. His second aim was to establish pure logic, which for Husserl required separating out the general conditions or laws which govern deduction. Yet supplying the formal rules regulating and constraining logical thought was insufficient. Husserl wrote 

An act of judgment which violates these conditions [formal logic] can never result in truth .... But on the other hand, even if it satisfies the requirements of these laws it does not thereby attain its goal .... Accordingly, this insight compels us to ask what must be added, over and above these formal conditions of the possibility of truth.... These supplementary conditions lie on the subjective side, and concern the subjective characteristics of intuitability, of self-evidence, and the subjective conditions of its attainment.... The problems of logic are ... twosided .... On the one side we have the question of the constitution of forms and 

²Paul Ricoeur, Husserl: An Analysis of His Phenomenology, (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1967), p. 3.

³Ibid., p. 4 

 ⁴For an interesting discussion of this topic see Leszek Kolakowski, Husserl and the Search for Certitude, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975).

⁵It should be noted that Husserl, like so many great thinkers of this period, was initially trained as a mathematician. His first philosophic works, to fulfill his Habilitationsschrift, were devoted to mathematics and demonstrate the powerful influence of Bretano. 

their laws and, on the other, that of the subjective conditions of the attainment of self-evidence.⁶  

But how can the subjective side of consciousness serve to ground truth? This hinges on Husserl's theory of consciousness in general and his notion of perception in particular. Husserl maintains that all consciousness is intentional, and by this he means several things. First, intentionality is a directional term. A subject's consciousness is oriented toward some particular object. But Husserl intends another meaning by intentionality. Following Bretano who in turn was guided by the Scholastics, intentionality also describes the content of consciousness. Intentionality refers to that which is immanent in a subject's consciousness and, it is important to
note, that this content differs from that which is 'real' or physically present.⁷ For Husserl, phenomenological reality is distinct from the natural world. "Perhaps the greatest single doctrinal innovation to emerge in the Logical Investigations is Husserl's rejection of mereological adequacy, and his adoption of a radically new account of intentionality. Far from allowing the content and the object of a mental act to coalesce, the hallmark of the new theory is that, with respect to any particular mental act, content and object never coincide."⁸ This conception of consciousness has certain advantages, such as mediating the idealism/realism dichotomy. For
example, in that the otherness of all objects can never be overcome, all objects transcend consciousness; yet when objects are the target of an intentional consciousness, they become immanent in the consciousness.

In an effort to explain how consciousness interacts with a completely other natural world, Husserl asserts the primacy of perception over intentional acts. He contends that perception presents objects before consciousness immediately and without need of mediation. Perception is presupposed. Ricoeur observes that this position provides him with both a description and a critique. phenomenology carries out a frontal attack on a conviction belonging to all Galileans. The first truth of the world is not the truth of mathematical physics but the truth of perception; or rather the truth of science is erected as a superstructure upon a first foundation of presence and existence, that of the world lived perceptually. Husserl can thus maintain the transcendence of the perceived with respect to consciousness by a criticism of the critique of "secondary qualities," all the while denying the existence in-themselves of the things perceived. This difficult and original setting up of the problem of reality is phenomenology's
essential philosophic contribution.<sup>9

6</sup>Edmund Husserl, Experience and Judgment Investigatins in a Genealogy of Logic, ed. L. Langrebe, trans. J. S. Churchill and K. Ameriks, (London: Routledge, 1973), p. 17.

⁷See Theodore De Boer, The Development of Husserl's Thought trans. Theodore Plantinga, (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1978), pp. 7-9, and 3 5 -45.

⁸David Bell, Husserl, (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 115.

⁹Ricoeur, Husserl, p. 9


This "difficult and original" approach requires philosophers or scientists to reject the "natural thesis or standpoint" and "see" the world phenomenologically. In other words, rather than focusing on physical objects, philosophers must concentrate on the activities and objects occurring within consciousness. Only these objects are unniediated and therefore true. This shift in focus is the famous phenomenological reduction or the reduction of all consciousness to the meanings and processes within consciousness. Put differently, the phenomenological method reduces, brackets, or suspends that which is transcendent in order to reveal that which is immanent and thereby disclose the proper subject matter of science.¹⁰

This unique and powerful tool yields some valuable insights into the nature of the human mind and consciousness. Yet, as Husserl's conception of intentionality and phenomenology develops, a serious problem emerges. As phenomenology changes from descriptive, to perceptual, to transcendental, it becomes solipsistic. In Cartesian Meditations, Husserl attempts to deal with solipsism by situating phenomenology within the history of philosophy; yet for Husserl, Descartes is the true beginning of philosophy. According to Husserl, Descartes' greatness was creating a philosophy that was both a science and a grounding of all other sciences; but Descartes did not go far enough. "Descartes betrayed his own radicalism for the doubt should have put an end to all objective externality and should have disengaged a subjectivity without an j absolute external world."¹¹ Determined to extend Descartes, Husserl's theory of consciousness becomes more than an epistemological study, it takes on ontological implications. "The world is not only 'for me' but draws all of its being-status 'from me.' The world becomes the 'world-perceived-in- the-reflective life.''¹² In the Cartesian Meditations, Husserl's theory of consciousness becomes egological. "This is a philosophy where being not only never gives the force of reality to the object, but above all never founds the reality of the ego itself. Thus, as an egology it is a cogito without res cogitans, a cogito without the absolute measure of the idea of infinity, without the unique cogitatum which would be the mark of an entirely different foundational subjectivity."¹³ In short, Husserl's search for a fundamental science has ended in solipsism; and, as with any form of solipsism, the major problem is how to account for others.

Husserl confronts the problem of the other in his "Fifth Cartesian Mediation" and the fact that this essay is nearly as long as the previous four combined hints at the seriousness of the problem. No matter how internally coherent a philosophy may be, solipsism is always confronted with serious common sense objections. For example, how can a solipsistic philosophy account for history, tradition, and diversity? Ricoeur's humanist approach to the problem is equally challenging when he observes that "according to common sense the other egos are not reducible to the representation that one has of them. They are not even represented objects, unities of 

¹⁰Jeffrey Bell, The Problem of Difference: Phenomenology and Poststructuralism, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), pp. 65-67.
¹¹Ricoeur, p. 83.
¹² Ibid., p. 10.
¹³Ibid., p. 84.



sense Others are other than 1; they are other egos." Yet if Husserl is to remain faithful to
phenomenology, others can be "real" only through and because of one's consciousness. Ricoeur
maintains that Husserl was aware of the insoluble nature of this problem and "this is why
reduction to the sphere of ownness constitutes in no way a dissolution of the Other into me but
rather the recognition of the paradox as paradox. "¹⁴ Husserl attempts to resolve this
paradox-accounting for others-by means of analogy.

Let us assume that another man enters our perceptual sphere. Primordially reduced, that signifies: In the perceptual sphere pertaining to my primordial Nature, a body is presented, which, as primordial, is of course only a determining part of myself an "immanent transcendency". Since in this nature and in this world, my animate organism is the only body that is or can constituted originally as an animate organism (a functioning organ), the body over there, which is nevertheless apprehended as an animate organism, must have derived this sense by an apperceptive transfer from my animate organism, and done so in a manner that
excludes an actually direct, and hence primordial, showing of the predicates belonging to an animate organism specifically, a showing of them in perception proper. It is clear from the very beginning that only a similarity connecting, within my primordial sphere, that body over there with my body can serve as the motivational basis for the "analogizing" apprehension of that body as another organism. ¹⁵
Husserl distinguishes between analogies that "go from object to object in the same sphere of experience" and the type of analogy which accounts for others. The latter analogies function on "the level of 'passive genesis,' as when we understand a new reality with one already known: the new understanding proceeds from an antecedent experience which furnishes a sort of originary institution." Although analogies are not the end of the procedure-they only furnish the intentionality of the other, which must in turn be fulfilled in one's consciousness by appresentation-they serve an important mediating function. Fulfilling a role much like perception, analogies account for others in a "process of prereflective, antepredicative, experience."¹⁶

Analogies perform a vital function for Husserl. They ameliorate problems connected to his solipsism by conveying knowledge or a "new understanding." This is significant. Voegelin and Ricoeur argue that certain forms of representation-myth, symbol, metaphor, and narrative-are the only way to express the inexpressible, to convey the experience of paradox. Yet Husserl is not using analogies in this manner. For Husserl, analogies are not to be thought of as a particular type of signification, whether semiotic or semantic. Husserlian analogies are contained within a single consciousness; they do not bridge the gap between self and other. One

¹⁴Ibid., pp. 116-119.

¹⁵Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, trans. Dorion Cairns, (Hague: Martinus Nihoff Publishers, 1960), p. I 10.

¹⁶Ricoeur, p. 126.

understands an other through reduction. I perceive that this other animate object appears to be similar to me and therefore I attribute, via analogy, it objectivity or immanence within my consciousness. In short, Husserl's egology is maintained. Husserl's inattention to the characteristics and potential of analogical representation is to
be expected. He was still under the spell of Enlightenment thinking and/or modernity. Seeking an unequivocal foundation for his science, Husserl maintains that authentic knowledge must not be mediated. It must be pure and avoid the vagaries of language and representation. Such a desire is destined to be frustrated. There is no unequivocal beginning point, a moment when knowledge is pure and untainted, upon which one can erect a science that will absolve human experience of doubt, of paradox.

Voegelin
Although Voegelin is highly critical of Husserl, there are some striking similarities. One
need only look at the title and "Introduction" of Voegelin's best known work, The New Science
of Politics: An Introduction, to illustrate this point. The NSP, which is an effort to retheorize the
science of politics, was necessary because of the "destruction of science which characterized the
positivistic era in the second half of the nineteenth century"; and like Husserl, Voegelin points to
the rise and success of the natural sciences and mathematics as the chief culprits.¹⁷ Furthermore,
his definition of positivism as "the intention of making the social sciences 'scientific' through the
use of methods which as closely as possible resemble the methods employed in sciences of the
natural world," is akin to Husserl's attack on psychology. Indeed, Voegelin acknowledges this
when he writes "[tlhinkers like Husserl or Cassirer, for instance, were still positivists of the
Comtean persuasion with regard to their philosophies of history; but Husserl's critique of
psychologism and Cassirer's philosophy of symbolic forms were important steps toward the
restoration of theoretical relevance."¹⁸ Furthermore, Voegelin's attack on "value-free" science,
as well as his theory of consciousness, philosophy of history, and focus on symbols, are efforts to
reconsider the objective/subjective dichotomy so prevalent in the social sciences. Voegelin writes:
The notion of a value-judgment (Werturteil) is meaningless in itself, it gains its meaning from a situation in which it is opposed to judgments concerning facts (Tatsachenurteile). And this situation was created through the positivistic conceit that only propositions concerning facts of the phenomena] world were "objective,"
while judgments concerning the right order of the soul and society were
"subjective. "¹⁹

These comments must not obscure the important differences between the two thinkers. Voegelin's comments and criticisms of Husserl are varied but the most sustained remarks come from two sources-Anamnesis and Voegelin's correspondence with Alfred Schutz, in particular a

¹⁷Eric Voegelin, The New Science of politics: An Introduction, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952), p.4.

¹⁸Ibid., p. 11.

¹⁹Ibid., p. 11.

letter written September 17, 1943 .²⁰ In both instances, Voegelin's criticism centers on Husserl's philosophy of history. A thorough account of this critique is beyond the scope of this paper and not particularly necessary. For although Voegelin's critique is profound, he did not take Husserl to task on the basis of language and the role of analogical forms of representation. This is surprising given that symbols play such a crucial role in Voegelin's efforts to develop, or more accurately recover, an authentic science of politics and philosophy. 

Voegelin's interest in symbols is grounded in his disaffection with modernity in general and positivism in particular. Deeply concerned with the political implications of modem conceptions of reason and science, initially Voegelin embarked on a history of political ideas in order to recover a suitable science of politics and theory of man. As Voegelin writes: 

The "History of Political Ideas" had started from the conventional assumptions that there are ideas, that they have a history, and that a "History of Political Ideas" would have to work its way from Classical politics up to the present. Under these assumptions, I had humbly worked through the materials, and a manuscript of several thousand pages was in existence.

Still, the various misgivings that had arisen in the course of the work now crystallized into the understanding that a "History of Political Ideas" was a senseless undertaking.... Ideas turned out to be a secondary conceptual development, beginning with the Stoics, intensified in the High Middle Ages, and radically unfolding into concepts which are assumed to refer to a reality other than the reality experienced. And this reality other than the reality experienced does not exist. Hence, ideas are liable to deform the truth of the experiences and their symbolization.... The interest, thus, moved from ideas to the experiences of reality that engendered a variety of symbols for their articulation.... I had to give up the "ideas" as objects of a history and to establish the experiences as the reality to be explored historically. These experiences, however, one could explore only by exploring their articulation through symbols. The identification of the subject matter and, with the subject matter of the method to be used in its exploration led to the principle that lies at the basis of all my later work: i.e., the reality of experience is self-interpretive. The men who have the experiences express them through symbols; and the symbols are the key to the understanding of the experience expressed.²¹ 

INTERIM DRAFT

ZUBIRI. LEVINAS. VOEGELIN Beginning a Conversation
Copyright 2000 Paul Caringella