Overcoming The Other (2) Paul Ricoeur explains that "myths and symbols are carriers of meaning which escapes this alternative of illusion as ‘a representative to which no reality corresponds." Gianni Vattimo said, Gademers vision of hermeneutics refer to "an analogy ‘of attrition’ between experience in general and linguistic experience." Yet if there is an analogy of attributes, there is also an analogy of distribution, analogues of distribution and distinction. An analogy of distinction, for example, through words which, on the one hand, appear to us as tradition. Yet, on the other hand, disturbances disturb us into new wisdom. Up in the place of impish implication, we use the act of de-con-re-structuring tradition (or thoughts up the place with impish imperatives in the act of de-con-re-structuring tradition (or thoughts about the scope or limitation of tradition). The issue of heteronomy or autonomy need not arise for in choosing a particular story (and even radical conversions which, in the thinking subject can at any point be rejected or accepted) the subject matter either aggress to all principles of the story or merely agrees to modify the behavior and/or reinterpretation of the story. The entire tradition of rabbinic obedience is the tradition of autonomy and freedom. Truth is truth and that which is true, is for everyone. Stories do not raise the issues of truth, but inspiration or compassion or explanation. To claim relativism and therefore dismiss stories is to assume a university where it does not exist. There is no story of stories which explain all that is fact. Overcoming otherness is at once opposing ossifying thought stories. Fiction is the inebriating on that which is on its way to reality. The tale is a way for us to express our alienness, our alienability. This can only be accomplished by the existence of external otherness, which evidently looses its alienness (and hence its otherness). This can only occur through hearing stories which are not my own; hearing them as ours. Conflict resolution occurs through seeing things from the opponents’ point of view. This is difficult as long as the opponent is speaking directly against you. But when the opponent is speaking the stories of his/her tradition, and these stories are not against me, they are more early consumed, assimilated, and so on. The Other, without a guiding form which would allow us to perceive otherness in terms other than hostile, obnoxious, deviant forms. Our stories are perceptions of otherness. We read, tell, perceive, and think, about that which is different. This is especially the case in religious stories whose ultimate concern is especially the Absolute Other, called Father, or Mother, or Friend, or Good. All people want, if they are "normal" to be unique. Each person has if developed some character trait, level of intelligence, way of perfuming tasks which is different from others. Difference is a good characteristic. It allows new and unique events to occur and, while is does many things, one thing it goes is prevent the boredom. Even something which seems as "normal" as that every day, virtually every minute occurrence of language is unique, especially when happening in a foreign country. We should not speak the language of the other (and insofar as language participates in an intimate relationship with an entire culture cannot speak the language of the other). What we can and should do, is delve deeper into our own language and, with it, our culture in other to elucidate the culture of the other. This elucidation may occur in our pockets of ambiguity (which we will want to extinguish) or in our highest moral impulses to treat everyone with loving-kindness, justice, and the benefit of doubt, and so on. Granted, in practice "Some people ain’t no damn good: you can’t even trust them, you can’t even love them." Yet this serves only to show that we need to bring our highest principles into a more intimate, more cogent practice, when our relationships with the other does not occur out of the pocket of ambiguity (which any living creature+ in its wake assumes in its vestment and assimilates in its aftermath), it must occur specifically through our highest moral impulse. We need the help of fiction to organize life after the fact. We have always borrowed from fiction to shore up our historical accounts. History is not fiction but just fictionalized in, for example, every school boy’s essay. The other always has a different fiction, a different history, a diffident culture, a different feature of face than every other human being. When twin brothers and sisters and not perfectly aligned. We can be as accommodating to the other as we wish. Our sensitivity is baseless unless we read their. For us to read their stories and understand them, we must read then ourselves, we should read them ourselves, placing our own experiences in their reign. Otherwise our sensitivity toward the other wills either vanish or we become other to our tradition. The point is to preserve otherness, not laugh at it, but to louse ourselves in the smile. Certain kinds of stories allow a return to the past which is not a regression. When these stories allow a return which propels us forward, or as return which subsequently explains our present, they are called classics. Bible stories, which announce the future in a number of non-prophetic ways, are forms of Talmudic stories which have us now standing on Sinai. Likewise the Talmudic here, now will apply when the future occurs. Events which are not re-told are generally not remembered and, do not become history. On the other hand, events retold are affected by the telling, in fact, numerous telling and, events remembered, are affected by memory. Stories do not compose our experience. We can do nothing with real stories except either just read them or, after an experience reflected on the experience in terms of these are worthwhile endeavors, the creation of stories finds its genesis in and through our experiences. Reading and reflecting are two acts of similarity reflect positive activity. The God who exists in stories, as it were, exists passively; that is not like the God of the fundamentalists. This is analogy, by way of, to the existence of people we know in tales told about them. We may repeat a particular story over and over again and the more often it is repeated the less it is truly descriptive of characteristics of the living person, about whom it is told. And what is told? In stories all of life is told. In a single experience, we may come to know more about God, or aunt Toby than any number of other tales about God and aunt Toby. Lacking that experience, or more correctly, lacking the overwhelming experience of God (but not a number of compensatively minor experiences), we are drawn closer to God or the overwhelming experience of God as we recite and create more and more stories which not only reflect post experience but propel us through new experiences. Texts are "inherently unstable since they contain within themselves the treads of their own unraveling. Language is always slipping." Stories play fast and loose with truth. Stories, in other words, treat truth as familiar, beneficial, applicable to situations not imagined by, or not available to the ‘original’ perpetrators of truth statements. Stories treat truth as more extensive than, say, mere utterances. Stories in coherent units, treat truth as an envelope, familiar and friendly from which a may approach truth and make more truthful utterances. This photogram, "where stories are, the other is not" sounds remarkable close to the Greek assertion "Where you are, death is not and where death is you are not." Ultimately, the analogy will break down for it is only the rhetoric structure which is similar. The structure will break down because the Greek saying premises absolute contraries which can never co-exist at once while stories and others may exist at one and the same time. Indeed, while we would say that stories compel is to regard the other as other (only the others debilitating features disappearing), the superficiality of the analogy does contain some same insight: where stories are, death is not, including the death which resides in ands emanates from the other. In other words, stories may be more or less meaningful. Story theologians grew out of the narrative school of literary criticism and the narrativology of philosophical discourse. These methods ultimately hark back to, because they fundamentally begin with, an eye into/out of the Bible. A story always occurs within a tradition which is always investigating a single story which processes through internal analysis or, at best, comparison of that particular story with either element of tradition or a composite statement of the tradition. Internal analysis alone limits what can be said to the terms of the story. We have no justification to say, "The story does not say this" or the author did not think that." Comparisons of a particular story to limit elements of tradition may allow us to say something significant about ether the story or the tradition or both, but whatever we say is tentatively useless or until we have an accumulation of statements of the tradition. When we do have an accumulation of statements of an entire tradition, analogizing of the particular story will allow us to say weather the story is coherent in terms of tradition, and we may engage in a second order of analyses to where the story is not coherent and, subsequently critique the tradition through the story. What none of the above possibilities allow us to do is regard one story as a self contained entity which brokers no analytic distinction. In every case, the story is either coherent or incoherent and is always in comparison with tradition. Even when we utilize the story to critique or criticize the tradition, our fundamental assumption will remain no matter what any particular story purports to tell us. The case is not much different when we compare one story from one tradition with another story from the same tradition. Again, tradition is the fundamental arbitrator thought which we would judge a story and, if we yet retain it for our heritage and give it prominence, do so despite tradition. Things change, on the other hand, when we compare one story from one tradition with one story from a separate and distinct tradition. In this case, each story is allowed to assert itself without being limited by, condemned by, or commended by the tradition, which preceded the genesis of the story. Furthermore, each story is just as likely to be subject to analytic criticism, indeed, is to be criticized through the elements of diversity from the other story, but the criticism need not be contributed to proving, or informing some third entity (tradition). ‘ Rather, mutual criticism would intend to allow both stories to release their innermost distinction; unlimited by any outside violence, each story becomes a tradition in itself, (or act like an independent tradition in its ability to muster strength of concentrative argument). The result is not defense of tradition, nor even defense of the particular stories, but a third thing. An accruement of a new tradition of critique based on analysis of stories, a third entity does not harm either tradition. How freely we assign the term ‘myth’ to the stories of peoples who, if not oppressed at the moment are certainly when compressed with another’s achievement. Whereas we have wonderful explanatory "texts", losers have myths. Much art takes place in "the shifting foreground in the anticipating mind of the observing and the realizable image in the work itself" If we fail to see that Biblical writers "took pleasure in exploring the formal and imaginative resources of their fictional medium, perhaps sometimes unexpectedly capturing the fullness of their subject in the very play of exploration, we shall miss much that the biblical stories are meant to convey. While there is no serious doubt as to the historical facts of the crucifixion but no concrete evidence about the day Jesus was born, it is interesting that Easter, occurs in a ‘movable’ day while the legendary event is fixed. In any analysis, the terms of the derived analysis eventually begins to dictate the terms of the perceived analytic elements. The tools are eventually told they are (only) tools, or what kind of tools they are. A screwdriver is occasionally a wedge, and if there is no wedge available, the screwdriver is the wedge. Some work is necessary to regard the screwdriver as only a screw driver and see the work might better be accomplished by obtaining a wedge. This is an argument not for the limited our access to tools, but for expanding the number of tools available Stories are tools. There are not only screwdrivers but wedges; we also need wedges which are not screwdrivers and screwdrivers not wedges. Saint Augustine once said that when we behold God in the world, it is God who sees through our eyes. In a similar way, when we address the literary logos through critical response, it is the logos that speak through us." If even our felloes can tell is that revelations which go against the grain (that is, effectively prophecies) are revolutionary, and revolt is scary. Typically, suppression is the reaction of revelation. Stories, too, are a form of revelation; most of the time they are not frightening. The most difficult thing is to call the literature of another group "sacred." At first, it is (whatever words we use) that tormenting, scary corpus of incoherent writings. At best, it is those other peoples striving after the divine. Sometimes it is holy literature, but in the sense of mysterious and foreboding possibility sufficient for them, but really to be avoided. In a sense, their work are like them; a nuisance; a disease; a misunderstanding. Once we pass that stage of our ignorance, we might test the saying that the literature of the other is indeed sacred and find that lightening from our God does not strike us dead; fiends do not think we are pseudo-others, the world does not collapse. What we have in fact done is to admit another friend to the realm of the holy, sacred, divine, expanding the theater of religiosity and discovered a world where we will be stimulated to think about even our religious and expand and develop truths we hold as sacred. What we have done is, while not becoming other, admitted depth to ourselves. We know from biblical criticism stories which have been canonized are an agglutination of editorial and redactional comments. Biblical scholars spend a good deal of their time separating strata from the conglomerate text. Likewise, in an even more agricultural form, less discernable, and therefore more ‘holy,’ traditional stories are acts of growth from one generation to another (or even within generations) or from one community to another. In this sense, stories represent shared memory. Story telling demands a community to exist but it may be a sudden and unexpected one created. So, for example, Richard A. Horsley and John S. Hanson assert that Josephus must be read for a realistic account of the Baptists death but the New Testament must be read to derive the significance of the Baptists political activity to cause the execution. This example indicates more than the necessity of accumulating and weighing sources and profiles. Rather, what is suggested is that truth resides only in the collective which is then arbitrated. It is interesting to compare this thought with the Hegelian dialectic wherein Hegel kept his eye on progress and development (which is also one of our concerns), the dialectic found in the real as the rational, and the rational as the real. We are concerned with a factor which is not apparent in Hegel’s formula: the truth. We ought not to regard Hegel as overly concerned with truth, but Hegel thought truth was present in the rational, i.e. the real. In fact truth proceeds the real and the rational, and, if you will, in-form (forms in) them. Truth is, thus, not only the assertion of everything we ought to possibly say (an asserting that which transcends the real and includes utterances, poetry and humor, for example) but also generates the very conditions of the dialectic. Rilke, in his Duino Elegires says: "as for us, each time we mean something entirely we feel another things display itself." Or, as if against De Quinceys remark that "all action in any direction is best expounded, measured, and made apprehensible by reaction "which suggests opposition and contraries, the principle of story telling is d different. Story telling is apprehension by conflation, plot apprehended to hyperbole." Metaphor disingenuously, playful, then habitually correct to diverse phenomena. Later, human activity may connect diversity in poetic allusion. Allusion eludes illusion. Later, rhetoric will evacuate evocation in order to evoke now time worn senses and practicalities. Metaphor, to be metaphoric (rather than a new logic) requires hyperbole to reside as it’s under girth. In metaphor, one must be able to say both "this" and "that" as well as "this is really no it that." Hyperbole allows, requires, the standing forth of paradox. Not only identifying (analyzing, distinction, recognized thought assessment) but identifying with portions of a story (if not the while story itself) is the act of identifying being the story that which relates us. One is related in a story and the story, allows others to relate. The trace is preserved (because pre-served) in a passage of the literary work. The Levitation traces denote a passage of presence (a past which, gone, leaves behind: which is going forward). This leaving forward of a passage is the classic of a story, This leaving forward of a passage is the futurasl return to origins which is denoted, compacted in the term "eternal." A trace is not an effect. An effect is produced by (current things), is, in other words, set in the casual chain of events. A trace is necessarily beyond cause and effect. It is mystical, is "from nowhere," is in-spirited. The signifying of the trace is made in "signifying without making appears," and having relationships which are ethical and personal. "This signifyingness lies in, for example, the writing and the style of a letter, in all that brings it about driving the emission of a message, which we capitulate on the basis of the letters language and its sincerity, someone passes, purely and simple." "An orientation which goes freely from the Same to the Other is a work." But a work is neither a pure acquaintance of merits nor a pure nihilism." A work is rather "a relationship with the other, who is reached without showing itself torched. A work which could be characterized with the Greek term "litany’ [service to people in the general interest] (pg. 92) where, although Levinas does not say as much, litany is generally read in song, a reading which is an extension of the Scripture which grounded it (slow it down). But a liturgy which occurs after my death yet by my hands is precisely a writing, an interpretation, a storied extension which I perform. Narrative is reverence to Scripture; story is celebration of Biblical. Narrative passes on, is the transcendence of the tropes of being. We transcend yet again when we compose ourselves (as individuals and community) in terms which stories may be told, legendary, even fabulous. To live in this manner is to live as an example. To live as an example is to transcend (as oneself, as ones community) the limitation we ideologically place on ourselves and call "human nature." These tales, exemplary and/or fabulist, realistic, or surrealistic, historical of hypothetical, are literary means of elucidating our selfhood. The "ex trav ag ant" movement of going beyond being or transcendence toward an immemorial antiquity we call the idea of infinity. The infinite is an inaccessible alertly, a difference and ab-solute pas with respect to everything that is… "comtemporarized" with him who understands." This term "de - con - struct" is a post modernist jargon adding immediacies to Ricoeur’s project. The transcendence we may possibly know is not an infinite forward or an infinite upward. The encompassing is the goal as well as the action. When we engage this transcendent, we perform a destruction. In attempts to dis-cover what the classic says, we admit what was obvious to us, (and what was protected, fed, housed, and clothed. When we engage in the text, then, we enter a familiar world of burning bridges and fallen temples, being created from the earth and rods turning into snakes. When we are in the classic, however, it is no longer classics in the given sense but a text, that is, an assembly of words which will have to be re-made in an ensemble which will make sense. Again and for the last time, as a classic. We are in, in other words, a world of language (of the otherness of words). What we deconstruct, then, de-and-con -struct is that which lies, invisible as it were, behind the language. While criminating with the language, the mother language, to discover what is behind the language, we fall thought the realm even of language with all its instability, to the pure land of Buddha, the peace of Janist’s, the holy of the Lord, the obliteration of Shiva, the ontological realm of continental thinkers and the epistemological realm of analytic thinkers. We are, behind everything, behind even Ozian a curtain, at the city of the coming-to-be-which already is in the form of each of those modalities attempting to locate the forward in the past: stories. Before writing, there was no history. This is not only in the sense that once writing was given to thinking beings could events be recorded, but also in the sense that oral history would have been difficult to remember as easily to forget. Did one person act as the rememberer - for the community? An accidental death or war would have wiped out all memory of the tribe. With writing come scribes, only as the first memories are designed a classic which, on the one hand ought to be remembered by all, and therefore perpetuated in repetitive renditions and, on the other hand, a classic which perpetuates other writings. "Genesis" required "Exodus," which requited "Leviticus." The Books of Samuel requited Chronicles which themselves required Psalms. Elsewhere the writings of Mark required Mathew, which requited Luke. Likewise the synoptic required John and so on (and under and thorough). No book is known until written and once written, the book can be better understood if and when is it compromised with all related texts. If we have accomplished the goals we establish in the first part of this study, we have done little more than analyze the existence of the other as an epistemological problem; a problem which exists for us was developed because we do not have an appropriate handle with which to approach the other.
Copyright © 2004 G David Schwartz |