https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2748-4650
ABSTRACT
Five authors have written a response to my article ‘Obstacles to Moral Articulation in Interreligious Engagement’. I here summarise their responses and offer a thematically arranged response.
I am grateful for the five thoughtful and generous responses by Petruschka Schaafsma, Ariën Voogt, Sophia Höff, Dominique Gosewisch, and Rob Compaijen. I propose to summarise their responses and to offer a thematically arranged response.
Petruschka Schaafsma asks whether a more constructive elaboration of the paradox of ethics is possible. This is identified by her as a priority given the widespread suspicion of ethics in the current moral climate. Our current social contexts are marked by a cocktail, or perhaps bin-fire, of relativism, cynicism, and polarisation. Perhaps there are those who seek common ground, and perhaps there are associated dangers, but by far the more dominant phenomenon is a refusal even to entertain common ground, because of a relativistic belief that there is no higher good, a cynical belief that moral discourse is a shill for powerful self-interest, or more widely the production of culture war oppositions that pit groups against each other. In such a context, to warn of the dangers of seeking common ground seems not just a misplaced focus but a premature abandonment of fragile reparative possibilities. Worse, it is likely that relativists, cynics, and trolls (a shorthand for those who create and magnify polarisations) can make good use of my arguments: ‘sure, I think attempts to articulate fundamental values fail, but Adams suggests they are not just doomed but harmful’. Schaafsma issues a prophetic warning: our urgent challenges require forms of moral deliberation that aid much-needed action, not (it is implied) pleasant reflections on tragic dramas that furnish new reasons for doing nothing.
This uncompromising diagnostic phase of the argument is followed by reparative proposals shaped by engagement with an essay on values by Eberhard Jüngel. Jüngel, too, is prepared to offer a critique of values as an abandonment of truth, which may have an analogy to my complaint about a turn to ethics as an abandonment of theology. For Jüngel, following Nicolai Hartmann and Carl Schmitt, the contest of values both generates oppositions between communities and eclipses the pursuit of truth, perhaps resembling my critique of the forced articulation of values, but offering a more detailed, more constructive, and thus more practically useful, societal diagnosis.
Jüngel offers a solution in Schaafsma’s account: against a dogmatism of values, which makes polarisation worse, there is ‘truth as interruption’. To be human as such (so, not to be Christian or a member of any specific tradition) is to be open to interruption, and to have ‘an experience of truth’. To be a Christian (so, not to be a human as such) is to experience interruption not as threat but as ‘new life’. This is, for Schaafsma, not a denial of an existential threat, but an embrace of practical action, a chance to become renewed. Christian ethics (so, perhaps, not other kinds of ethics) is different from rules, consequences, values. It is gift, freedom, love. Instead of rule-bound calculation, it is ‘spontaneous love’. This is trust grounded in Christ, in whom God participated in the existential threat of non-being. But it is also grounded in a general (so, not restricted to Christians) ‘experience of interruption’. This interruption breaks moral certainties, and this is linked to its being ‘the transcendence of the good’. To take this seriously is to admit that one cannot claim it as a possession, and to accept that one cannot put it into words. Jüngel’s account provides an alternative to mere warnings about forced articulation: it offers the possibility of a new attitude that serves ‘what needs to be done’.
Ariën Voogt draws attention to the limited, and even anti-Hegelian, use I make of Hegel’s Owl of Minerva insight. Voogt emphasises that for Hegel the vocation of philosophy is its service of public articulation: of making deep reasonings public. The costs of articulation are real, but non-negotiable: the alternative is obfuscation, secretiveness, solipsism. Worse: it is inhuman, insofar as to be human is to embrace Mitsein which, in English, are things that begin with com-, such as communication and community. In Hegel’s account this is accompanied by differentiation and progressive change. There is a difference between premodern cultures, which are marked by unreflective practices and a corresponding lack of public articulation, and modern ones in which reflection makes possible a reasoning public. There is progress from one to the other: cultures develop from the non-reflective and pre-articulate to the reflective and articulate. The engine for such change are crises such as those rehearsed in Antigone. This engine is unstoppable: premodern cultures are ‘bound to’ become reflective under such pressures caused by such crises. Voogt notices that I obstruct this narrative of inevitable progress by noting that it is Creon’s decision, and not some inevitable world process, that causes the crisis and the reflection. (Voogt could also have noticed that I further obstruct it by pointing out that Hegel has to misrepresent the action in the play in order to get the outcome he wants.)
Voogt argues, with Hegel, admittedly with circumspection about Hegel’s Eurocentrism, racism, and colonialism, that communication and dialogue depend on reflection. But can one not have the benefits of reflection without the vices of Eurocentrism, racism, and colonialism? Voogt draws attention to my circumspection about issues of authority and force in relation to reflection, and to my cautions about overgeneralising from particular cases of authority and force. But can one not have the benefits of reflection without the vices of misused authority and coercion? To these questions Voogt notices that I offer a qualified ‘yes’ in the practice of scriptural reasoning, (which I have elsewhere described as a practice of making deep reasonings public), which Voogt accepts in part. But he poses a sharp challenge: ‘We should not expect this form of discourse to be easily translatable to other discursive domains’. This challenge is sharp because most of us inhabit, most of the time, such other domains. Is there no reflection, and thus none of its benefits, to be had in them?
Rob Compaijen considers the Hegelian theme of reflection and the accompanying social practice of publicly giving reasons. Instead of Hegel’s account of the ‘sociality of reason’ (Pinkard), Compaijen favours Christine Korsgaard’s more recent account of the transition from compulsive desires to compelling reasons. By distancing oneself from one’s mere impulses, and instead of blindly following them, one is able to decide whether to follow them, and rationally to commit to them. He adds to this a therapeutic insight: this reflective distancing also has the capacity to loosen the hold that unreflected emotions have: by reflecting on what causes envy, for example, I am no longer in its grip, and gain new freedoms. Taken together, reflection makes possible both commitment (rather than mere impulse) and contemplation (rather than being overcome by something). Compaijen suggests that the conversion of moral necessities into ethical possibilities is not an ‘occult’ process, as I describe it, but the quite easily describable business of reflection and its accompanying practices of public articulation.
The proposal that reflection loosens the impulsive grip of desire in order to make free commitment possible has other benefits, Compaijen notices. I can consider my desires and ask whether I should desire something; I can consider my loves (such as Cordelia’s love for her father) and ask whether I should love someone. If I decide to (possibility) rather than compulsively (necessity) desire something, or if I decide to rather than unreflectively love someone, then these desires and loves are in fact improved, Compaijen suggests, because they have withstood the test of reflection. The transition from compulsion to commitment, from necessity to possibility, is actually a strengthening of moral ideas, because an idea that was at risk of loss as soon as it is considered rationally has been through the fire of reflection and is no longer at risk of loss. Compaijen considers and answers a challenge to his Korsgaardian proposal. The challenge is from Bernard Williams, who suggests that someone who needs reasons to save his wife’s life has ‘one thought too many’. The answer is to concede that some impulses do not need an extra thought, but that others do or might. Compaijen doubles down on the benefits of reflection: it is not even true, as I suggest, that possibilities cannot become necessities. Things are only necessities through habit, after all, and if one adopts a new habit, in the light of reflection, it can in time become second nature, and thus itself necessary. Reflection is certainly disruptive, but it need not be destructive.
Dominique Gosewisch experiments with my claims and gives one of them an unrestricted form: as soon as one tries to articulate a moral claim, it is falsified. Gosewisch suggests against this unrestricted claim that, on the contrary, articulation of moral claims is indispensable for moral formation. She supports this with reflections from Aristotle to Zagzebski, tracing various paths in which reflection and its accompanying articulation serve positive ends.
Sophia Höff focuses on the relationship in Walter Benjamins’s post-romantic essay on language between fallible human language and its ground, which is variously named ‘language as such’, ‘true language’, ‘the pure medium of knowledge’, or ‘God’s word’. The link between them is obscure, and it shows up – if at all – in unforced, spontaneous moments, such as Proust’s famous account of a childhood memory triggered by the aroma of a madeleine. Höff suggests that Benjamin’s contrast between ‘human’ and ‘divine’ language can do double duty as an analogy for the relation between transcendent and merely human goods, and for my claims about forced articulation. Höff suggests that just as for Benjamin access to the ground of language cannot be forced in reflection, so for me fundamental values cannot be forced in articulation. A third analogy is offered in relation to Scriptural Reasoning. Just as ‘involuntary memory’ furnishes an indirect relation to the ground of knowledge, so the practice of Scriptural Reasoning furnishes an indirect relation to the ground of participants’ interpretive actions. There is some uncertainty in this analogy as to whether there is something significant (or even unique) about scriptural texts, or whether (as the analogy with Benjamin and Proust suggests) anything can trigger a kind of mini-revelation in relation to actions’ obscure ground.
Several themes are visible in these responses. They include the relation of grounds to thoughts and of impulses to commitments; the urgency of ethical action in a climate of moral scepticism; the over-generalisation of limited valid insights; interruption rather than destruction; the many and varied benefits of reflection, including the transition from blind impulse to free commitment.
One of the threads running through these responses is perhaps the idea that my essay is more stimulating as an analysis of various problems and less satisfying as a set of practical outcomes. That is, its diagnostic phase is more persuasive than its reparative phase. My diagnosis is that under certain conditions forcing the articulation of fundamental values can in certain cases have destructive effects. My repair is to seek forms of practice which do not force the articulation of fundamental values, and which thus avoid those destructive effects. I offer Scriptural Reasoning as an example of such a practice. Because my respondents are for the most part concerned with diagnosis, I propose to limit my treatment of the themes to those questions and to leave to another occasion the matter of repair.
‘Under certain conditions’. ‘In certain cases’. These are important restrictive clauses for my diagnostic claims. The two dramatic cases are Cordelia’s trial of love in King Lear and Antigone’s trial of piety in Antigone. The two conditions are Lear’s requirement for Cordelia to articulate her love and Creon’s prohibition on Antigone’s burying her brother. The real life case is interfaith dialogue in which various parties, including Muslims, are invited to participate. The real life condition is the requirement in such interfaith dialogue that participants must satisfy certain social and academic criteria and the prohibition on such things as ‘extremism’, ‘fundamentalism’, and ‘exclusivism’. My diagnosis is that the lessons of Cordelia and Antigone suggest that imposing requirements and prohibitions on partners in interfaith dialogue, and especially on Muslims who form significant minorities in European and North American cities, may and does lead to bad outcomes. I do not spell these out, but they might include attracting unreliable religious ‘representatives’ to interfaith dialogue, either because they are not trusted by their communities or, if they are trusted, because they might under duress not accurately or genuinely articulate their communities’ reasonings.
The deeper philosophical issues concern actions and the ground of actions. I briefly rehearse the views of Schelling and Schleiermacher, as interpreted by Andrew Bowie, that grounds are not accessible to articulation. I believe these views to be defensible, but for reasons of space did not defend them. Given the significant number and intensity of the discussions of the benefits of reflection, especially in the responses by Voogt, Gosewisch, and Compaijen, some further clarifications are needed, and I briefly offer some here.
My claims are restricted in scope. I do not argue that reflection is impossible and that articulation is bad. I claim (but do not argue) that grounds are resistant to reflection and claim (and argue) that articulation is sometimes bad. I willingly concede that often articulation is good. I agree with Voogt that a properly functioning public sphere requires the public articulation of reasons; I agree with Gosewisch that moral education often requires the articulation of moral exemplars; I agree with Compaijen that articulation enables freedom for moral commitments and from libidinous compulsions. I would restrict these claims, however: in certain cases and under certain conditions these goods may obtain. Further, in these cases no ‘grounds’, in the German philosophical sense, are being articulated. Certainly some unspoken things become spoken, but not everything unspoken is a ground. Those who act out of selfishness often do so without saying so: their selfishness is a tacit motivation and it can be articulated, either confessed by themselves or in accusation by another. Selfishness is probably not a fundamental ground, however: it might be a disappointing route to a deeper goal such as survival or respectability or happiness. Even these deeper goals arise from some deeper need that is itself resistant to articulation. I freely concede that there is a hierarchy of grounds: that is in part why I am interested in the demand that members of moral communities should articulate their ‘deepest’ values, and why I identify some of the hazards that (in some cases under certain conditions) may accompany such demands.
The idea that articulation might be more fruitfully considered a matter of interruption than of destruction arises for Schaafsma, Höff, and Compaijen. For Schaafsma, following Jüngel, this is a matter of the human condition: to be human is to have one’s being interrupted, either as a threat (as for Heidegger, for Jüngel) or as a promise (in Jüngel’s characterisation of the Christian tradition). For Compaijen, this operates on a more modest scale: articulation merely interrupts actions that I had not thought about and, having thought about them, I might be able to perform such actions better. These cases, and their scales, are significantly different. Jüngel’s proposals seem to me to introduce additional hazards. It is central to his account that there is an existential threat to one’s being, and that a Christian way of seeing things furnishes the possibility of recasting it as a divine promise. But this claim, like many theological claims of this kind in this period (the late 1970s), is boldly asserted, and the reasons given to support it would only be accepted by those who share his theological (and Heideggerian philosophical) commitments: they are not, and perhaps are not intended to be, compelling for a wider reading public. Christians may affirm, with good scriptural warrant, that death has been defeated and that Christ offers living water so that those who accept it may have life in abundance. But these claims are radically restricted in scope: they only have validity for those who accept the authority of scripture and of the traditions that interpret it. They do not have validity more widely in the public sphere, or in interreligious dialogue with traditions that do not accept such authorities. I would issue a counter-challenge: how can such an argument, with such limited validity, aid us in a climate of moral scepticism? For Höff, scriptural reasoning offers the possibility of interruptions, flashes of insight, that relate to an otherwise obscure ‘divine’ ground. That is a fascinating way of interpreting the practice, and merits further investigation. For Compaijen, things operate somewhat more individualistically: his examples are the as-yet-not-articulated experiences and practices of the individual who envies or trains athletically, or pities. This complements the ‘sociality of reason’ arguments of Voogt and Gosewisch. I note in response that the goods of articulation, as defended by my respondents, play out differently depending on whether they are conceived as communal or individual in character.
It is surely significant that my cases are those of certain kinds of interfaith dialogue whereas those of Schaafsma, Voogt, Gosewisch, and Compaijen are respectively those of moral debate, the public sphere, moral education, and the forming of moral commitments. Only Voogt and Höff are significantly interested in the interreligious case. I would say in response that different cases call for different diagnoses. My objections to certain kinds of interfaith dialogue, and the destructive effects both on those who participate on them and indeed on truth (insofar as communities are forced to misrepresent themselves), are not I think adequately met by articulating the benefits of a public sphere, of moral education, or of forming moral commitments.
I do not know what conclusions can reliably be drawn from the relative lack of importance accorded to interfaith dialogue in some of my respondents’ remarks. A benign interpretation might be that some perceive in my account a general threat to any and all forms of articulation. This is most obviously the case in Gosewisch’s response, in which she strips my claims of all restriction of scope. This perceived threat perhaps prompts a robust defence of articulation in the domains of moral debate and moral formation. This is most obviously the case in Schaafsma’s and Gosewisch’s responses. A less benign interpretation might be that it is conceded that there are damaging effects for non-white minorities in European cities, but these are a price worth paying for the benefits of a public sphere, of moral education, and of moral freedoms, at least for the majorities in those cities. It may be significant that minorities show up in my diagnosis but not in the responses to that diagnosis. Where did they go? Doubtless they are casualties of restricted space and the demands of other priorities. But it is striking that minorities are such casualties. It seems to me that were we to continue this conversation, this might be a fruitful point of focus. I offer this stimulus to further reflection. The burdens and consequences of articulation are often borne by the vulnerable. They are women in my dramatic rehearsals (and, strikingly, in the example of the threatened wife in Bernard Williams’ example). They are minorities in my example of interfaith dialogue. I suggest that any defence of the goods of articulation, but without a reckoning with the uneven distribution of its costs, itself stands in need of repair. That task seems to me a worthwhile shared endeavour in the field of philosophical theology.
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Nicholas Adams
Nicholas Adams (University of Birmingham) is the author of Habermas and Theology (CUP 2006) and Eclipse of Grace: Divine and Human Action in Hegel (Wiley-Blackwell 2013), as well as articles on the relationship between philosophy and theology, and on philosophical problems in interreligious engagement, with a focus on the practice of scriptural reasoning.