Studies in Rhetoric & Communication

The Health of the Lived Body, Narrative, and Public Moral Argument

Michael J. Hyde

• Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781611177084
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Rhetoric
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

In a world of ever-increasing medical technology, a study of the need for wisdom, truth, and public moral argument

In this provocative and interdisciplinary work, Michael J. Hyde develops a philosophy of communication ethics in which the practice of rhetoric plays a fundamental role in promoting and maintaining the health of our personal and communal existence. He examines how the force of interruption—the universal human capacity to challenge our complacent understanding of existence—is a catalyst for moral reflection and moral behavior.

Hyde begins by reviewing the role of interruption in the history of the West, from the Big Bang to biblical figures to classical Greek and contemporary philosophers and rhetoricians to three modern thinkers: Søren Kierkegaard, Martin Heidegger, and Emmanuel Levinas. These thinkers demonstrate in various ways that interruption is not simply a heuristic tool, but constitutive of being human. After developing a critical assessment of these thinkers, Hyde offers four case studies in public moral argument that illustrate the applicability of his findings regarding our interruptive nature. These studies feature a patient suffering from heart disease, a disability rights activist defending her personhood, a young woman dying from brain cancer who must justify her decision, against staunch opposition, to opt for medical aid in dying, and the benefits and burdens of what is termed our "posthuman future" with its accelerating achievements in medical science and technology. These improvements are changing the nature of the interruption that we are, yet the wisdom of such progress has yet to be determined. Much more public moral argument is required.

Hyde's philosophy of communication ethics not only calls for the cultivation of wisdom but also promotes the fight for truth, which is essential to the livelihood of democracy.

CHAPTER 1

The First Interruption

“Science tries to document the factual character of the natural world, and to develop theories that coordinate and explain these facts. Religion, on the other hand, operates in the equally important, but utterly different, realm of human purposes, meanings, and values—subjects that the factual domain of science might illuminate, but can never resolve.”

Stephen Jay Gould, Rocks of Ages

Where did we come from? When did it all begin? And why? And how? Human beings are obsessed with beginnings. This obsession is driven by a desire to know as much as possible about who we are as inhabitants of the universe. We seek completeness in our lives. Another word for completeness is perfection. More often than not, “good enough” will do for most people. But good enough is not good enough for those whose calling requires them to get to the heart of the matter, to the beginning of it all. It’s a long journey. Anthropologists, archeologists, and historians, for example, are invaluable in getting us under way. Religion scholars, philosophers, and cosmologists keep us going. Their professional training obliges them to do so. Their ending is the beginning. Philosophers inform their colleagues that the journey is likely to be an endless task. The philosopher Martin Heidegger’s consideration of the matter is a case in point. Although what he has to say regarding the beginning may require more than one reading to deal with his way with words, his insight is instructive:

The beginning does not at first allow itself to emerge as beginning but instead retains in its own inwardness its beginning character. The beginning then first shows itself in the begun, but even there never immediately and as such. Even if the begun appears as the begun, its beginning and ultimately the entire “essence” of the beginning can still remain veiled. Therefore the beginning first unveils itself in what has already come forth from it. As it begins, the beginning leaves behind the proximity of its beginning essence and in that way conceals itself. Therefore an experience of what is at the beginning by no means guarantees the possibility of thinking the beginning itself in its essence. The first beginning is, to be sure, what is decisive for everything; still, it is not the primordial beginning, i.e., the beginning that simultaneously illuminates itself and its essential domain and in that way begins.¹

Religion and science remain undeterred.

Please keep in mind that the following discussion of religion is not intended as an argument for the correctness of its worldview. I am telling a story about the interruption that we are, and religion demands attention given what it says about the topic. When I turn my attention to science, the story changes dramatically.

Religion

The Bible begins with a story about the beginning, with the first interruption to ever happen: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light and there was light” (Genesis 1:1–3). Put another way, God interrupted a state of nothingness and thereby brought about a state of somethingness. The power of interruption became an instructive force of the universe. God makes use of this force, for example, with a simple question directed at Adam, who, having broken God’s law against apple-eating, was attempting to hide from sight: “Where art thou?” (Genesis 3:9). Questions are interruptive in nature. They break the continuity of some action or event (for example, hiding) and encourage pause for thought. In Adam’s case, the pause was quick: “Here I am!”

The philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer has this to say about the interruptive function of questions: “The essence of the question is to open up possibilities and keep them open.… To ask a question means to bring into the open. The openness of what is in question consists in the fact that the answer is not settled.… Every true question requires this openness.”² God’s question certainly brought Adam into the open, but his possibilities were already determined. There was no room for further conversation. God’s question is rhetorical; it’s a call for confession. This is not to say, however, that God’s question totally fails the test of being a “true question.” The question leaves open the possibility of choosing to answer a call, which Adam does when he confesses, “Here I am!” With this confession Adam acknowledges the presence and power of God. God calls for acknowledgment throughout the Bible. The act of acknowledgment is what enables us to open ourselves to whomever or whatever God is and to remain open to the One who on the sixth day of creation acknowledged the worth of bringing humankind into being. What God gave us is what God wants in return. God’s rhetorical question to Adam is an interruption that serves a legitimate purpose.

The Judeo-Christian tradition makes much of how “interruption is God’s invitation” to awaken us from the everyday routines that blind us to the ways of self-improvement and serving others.³ If only for a moment, interruptions grant us time to heed God’s command “Walk before me and be thou perfect.” Christ repeats the command in his sermon on the mount: “Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect” (Matthew 5:48). The command is meant to interrupt the lives of those who walk the “crooked paths” of sin (Isaiah 59:8). And notice, too, that the command itself contains an interruption. In order to abide by the command, we need to answer an essential question raised by the command: What exactly is perfection? The command doesn’t say. It’s an open question. It’s debatable. In Gadamer’s terms, it’s a “true question.” The One who makes the command calls for acknowledgment. Are we acknowledging God as we struggle to answer the question and as we most likely interrupt each other in the process, believing at least for the moment that we can offer the best possible response? Why else would God make a command that leaves a crucial term undefined? The meaning of perfection is ambiguous. Ambiguity is a rhetorical device that encourages discussion and debate and the practice of rhetoric, which facilitates these communicative transactions. The need for public moral argument is born. God’s command regarding perfection places us in a rhetorical situation. Indeed, as the philosopher Hans Blumenberg points out, “Lacking definitive evidence and being compelled to act are the prerequisites of the rhetorical situation.”⁴ We have been interrupted by rhetoric that calls for additional rhetoric intended to decipher the truth and tell the story of perfection. The need for the rhetorical construction of a narrative is born.

Rhetoric is at work whenever language is employed to open people to ideas, positions, and circumstances that, if rightly understood, stand a better than even chance of getting people to think and act wisely. Orators are forever attempting to create these openings, for this is how they maximize the chance that the members of some audience will take an interest in what is being said and thus become more involved in judging the truthfulness of the orator’s discourse. Neither persuasion nor collaborative deliberation can take place without the formation of this joint interest. Interests take form only to the extent that we develop emotional attachments to things happening in our environments. Aristotle offers the first detailed analysis of this fact of life in Book Two of his Rhetoric. The rhetorical practice of moving ideas to people and people to ideas is dependent on the ability of orators to attune their discourse to the emotional character of those being addressed.

Acknowledgment happens as the orator is successful in accomplishing this interest-developing activity. The good speaker is always seeking acknowledgment from some audience whose good members are also waiting for the speaker to acknowledge their interests in some meaningful way. In short, rhetorical competence has a significant role to play in providing places (openings) where acknowledgment can be received and, in the best of possible worlds, the truth can be told. To tell the truth is to make the best possible use of the perfectionist impulse of language. Rabbi David Wolpe has this point in mind in telling the story of Moses: “Moses has to wrench words from inside himself. He cannot simply summon the phrase that would placate and please. Rather than the gentle comfort of rolling phrases and smooth oratory, God’s leader has to prove by his inner struggle that he shares the people’s plight. The leader must also have a catch in his throat, not spread ready rhetoric like a salve over all wounds. Moses cannot lead by means of the easy fluency of the demagogue. His is a hard-earned eloquence. His is less the mastery of the word than the heroism of the word.”⁵

Hard-earned eloquence: I understand this to mean a form of rhetorical competence that one acquires not simply by knowing and talking theory but instead by being open and devoted to God’s call and willing to enact the effort that it takes to spread the word in a convincing and honest way. Moses is set on a path where the acquisition of rhetorical competence must take place in the practical world of everyday existence.

Rhetorical competence is called for by the interruptive nature of God’s command regarding perfection. Left undefined, perfection, and all that it entails, becomes a matter open for debate. As the debate begins and progresses, the One who created this opening with an all-important question receives acknowledgment. To participate in the debate is to say “Here I am” to God. Participants also receive acknowledgment as they feel good about what they are doing. God makes possible this feeling, having gifted human beings with the capacity to appreciate the goodness of their actions. God tells us what this gift is: “I will give them a heart to know me, that I am the Lord” (Jeremiah 24:7). The gift is otherwise known as “conscience” (Latin: conscientia: con [with] scientia [knowing]), a gift that facilitates a knowing-with God about matters of importance (for example, perfection). Moreover, gifted with a heart, our lived bodies provide God a “dwelling place” (Hebrew: makom) where God’s presence can be felt in times of need.⁶ The health of the lived body is born, as is living a good life.

The more wholehearted people are when engaging in activities that enable them to experience the presence of God in their lives, the more they can feel good about their efforts. Judaism emphasizes the importance of being wholehearted. The Hebrew word for this particular emotional capacity of the lived body is tamin, whose primary meaning is “perfection.” Dealing with the question of perfection in a wholehearted manner is a perfect thing to do. The effort is a demonstration of what is being called for when God commands, “Walk before me and be thou perfect.” The interruptive nature of this command is educational. God is teaching us how emotion and acknowledgment are related and how this relationship can have a positive effect on the health of the lived body. Rhetoric plays an important role in achieving this result. God employs the rhetorical device of ambiguity to initiate the interruption that makes us wonder about all that perfection entails.

I think it is fair to say that what is going on here is a particular use of the perfectionist impulse of language, the use of the right word, to perfect our ability to understand what God is said to be: perfection. And all of this being the case, I also think it is fair to say that God warrants acknowledgment for demonstrating a high level of rhetorical competence. God is an orator of the first degree. Following God’s ways, we thus have an obligation to perfect our ability to be rhetorically competent; interruptions that necessitate the performance of this skill can happen anytime. Fulfilling the obligation also requires knowing how to make the best possible use of the perfectionist impulse of language. With God as our audience, not considering this matter is out of the question. The truth of perfection, of God, is on the line.

Those whose faith is based on a literal interpretation of Scripture are likely to find what I am saying about interruption, God, and perfection to be inappropriate and unneeded. They might say something like this: “To be perfect in God’s eyes, just do what God says and does. It’s all there in the Bible.” So members of a Pentecostal church in the mountains of North Carolina, my home state, live by the word of God recorded in Mark 16:18: “They shall take up serpents.” And in Luke 10:19, these snake handlers are reassured that “nothing shall by any means hurt you.” Last year a leader of the church was bitten by a snake while holding it during a service. Luke 10:19 didn’t work. So much for a perfect reading of the Bible. And while the man lay dying in agony, he refused any treatment because that was not God’s way. Where does God say that? With all due respect to his family and fellow church members, the question of perfection is still up for grabs. And then consider this. The story of Noah and the ark tells of how God acted early on when God took exception to the sinful ways of humankind. And God declared, “I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth … for it repenteth me that I have made [him]” (Genesis 6:57). The flood came, and humankind was extinguished. There is a word for what God practiced: eugenics. It makes me cringe to say it, given the term’s horrendous history, but that’s what God chose to do. Speak about an interruption. God was the first eugenicist. Must we do what God did in order to be perfect? The ancient Greek term for eugenics is eu (good) genes (birth). With this understanding of the term, one could say that God extinguished humankind so to bring about a better breed of humankind. Still, God is a eugenicist. Just how sinful were our ancestors to warrant mass murder? Personally, I would like to hear a bit more debate about what a perfect interruption is.

I am telling a story about interruption. The Judean-Christian tradition tells us the story begins with God’s interrupting creation of all there is. There would be no reason to turn to the Judean-Christian religion when telling my story if, in the beginning, God was content with God’s own perfection and left well enough alone. The nineteenth-century philosopher Frederick W. J. Schelling has this possibility in mind when he asks: “Has creation a final purpose at all, and if so why is it not attained immediately, why does perfection not exist from the very beginning?”⁷ For Schelling, the answer is clear. Perfection takes time: “God is a life, not a mere being. All life has a destiny and is subject to suffering and development. God freely submitted himself to this too, in the very Beginning.… All history remains incomprehensible without the concept of a humanly suffering God. Scripture, too, … puts that time into a distant future when God will be all in all, that is, when He will be completely realized. For this is the final purpose of creation: that which could not be in itself, shall be in itself.”⁸

Schelling holds to an evolutionary metaphysics: the notion of an evolving God who has it all together but still needs the thinking and acting of human creatures in order to complete the task of all being One with the cosmos. An earlier version of this theory is developed in the Judaic tradition of Kabbalah (the mystical core of Judaism and ultimately of Christianity and Islam). The theory is based on the teachings of the sixteenth-century rabbi Isaac Luria. His interpretations of the five books of Moses and the Zohar (a mystical commentary on these books) give rise to a cosmological myth intended to clarify the workings of the self-manifestation of divinity and how human beings come to play a fundamental role in sustaining this holy happening. The myth calls into question the fundamental belief of older rabbinic theology that God’s own well-being is not contingent on human action. Luria insists, on the contrary, that the Creator does need our help. Luria thus creates a new narrative that redefines the traditional understanding of God’s perfection. In so doing, he provides an appreciation of interruption that differs significantly from a traditional Christian understanding of the matter. A brief summary of Luria’s teachings is sufficient for my purposes.⁹

According to Luria, the Creator’s first act was not the interruptive event of “revelation” but rather withdrawal, the creation of an opening, a “void” or empty place within the Creator’s infinite presence and perfection. Ein Sof, the “endless light” of the Creator, withdrew “from Itself into Itself” in order to make room in the midst of Itself for the entire cosmos to come into being. This act of withdrawal is the Creator interrupting Itself. The action is the ultimate act of self-effacement. Otherness is granted priority in God’s workings, a giving way to a place, an infinite dimension of space-time, which allows for life and its development. The essential nature of the Creator is that of sharing and compassion, a desire to give of Itself. This entire process occurs before God’s interrupting avowal “Let there be light!” The creation of the cosmos presupposes a more primordial creation: with the Creator’s withdrawal there arises an absence, a “nothingness,” a vacated place where something other than God can flourish under God’s care. Only then can God’s next interruption occur.

Luria teaches that before this second interruption took place a crisis occurred in God’s creation process. The result of this crisis becomes evident when Moses first stands in God’s light and is told that the Jewish people have a future. When Moses asks for God’s “Name,” he is told, “Ehyeh-asher-ehyeh.” English renders this reply in a static way: “I am who I am.” In Hebrew, however, the dynamic of being open to the future is unequivocal: “I shall be who I shall be.” According to Rabbi Lawrence Kushner, “Here is a Name (and a God), who is neither completed nor finished. This God is literally not yet.”¹⁰ The crisis in the creation process was that the dynamic operations intrinsic to God’s perfection were flawed. God’s perfection entails imperfection. God needs a future to achieve completeness; hence God’s reply to Moses, which admits as much. The perfection of God’s bei...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. The First Interruption
• Chapter 2. Existence and the Self
• Chapter 3. Existence and the Other
• Chapter 4. The Right Word
• Chapter 5. The Self as Other, the Other as Self
• Chapter 6. A Good Showing of a Bad Situation
• Chapter 7. Our Posthuman Future
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Index