Practical Moral Philosophy for Lawyers Story Readings Sam Keen, To A Dancing God 85, 97, 71 (New York: Harper & Row, 1970):
[T]he identity of traditional man was based upon his ability to find his way in the forest, to light the fire, to say the prayer, and to tell a story that placed his life within an ultimate context. By the fire of sacrifice, by the practice of prayer, or by the use of some other technique of transcendence, the will of God or the gods could be determined and man could live in harmony with the powers of the overworld that exerted a mysterious influence on his existence. Each people had its own cycle of stories which located the individual within the tribe, the tribe within the cosmos, and cosmos with the overworld. Modern man has lost his way in the forest, he cannot light the fire or say the prayer, and is dangerously close to losing his ability to see his life as part of any story.
* * * * In telling stories, traditional man was affirming the unity of reality. The individual, the tribe, nature, and the cosmos fit together in concentric circles of integrated meaning. All of the parts were necessary to form a coherent and artistic whole. Past, present, and future were, likewise, bound together in a thematic unity. Thus, the individual standing on the ever-disappearing point of present time could affirm that the meaning of his existence was not destroyed by the passage of time. He took courage from his knowledge that he had roots in what has been and that his memory and deeds would be preserved in what would be. In effect, the story affirmed that the reality of the individual was not reducible to the present moment of experience but belonged to a continuity of meaning that the flow of time could not erode. With this faith the individual could act with a sense of continuity and perspective; his spontaneity was tempered by memory and hope.
* * * * Until recent years the keystone of personal identity was participation in the shared stories, legends, and myths of a tribe, nation, cult, or church. The past, present, and future of the individual were bound together by the memories and hopes of a people to which he belonged. With the birth of secular, pluralistic, technological society, a new type of man has emerged--the man without a story, the rootless, protean man living without the stability of a tradition which he remembers with pride or a future he awaits with longing."
Lynda Sexson, Ordinarily Sacred 26, 28, 29, 30, 34 (New York: Crossroad, 1982):
Whatever we do in our lives, we make text of our lives. Whether or not our stories belong to the shared patterns of the great, true stories--the myths--they are the texts from which we find out our relation to the divine, to one another, and to the self.
* * * * The stories we tell, even the ones we forget, might be called the making of sacred text. And text is giving shape to the universe.
* * * * Long before writing was invented, human beings read their world. They interpreted their dreams and the flights of birds. They read the intestines of sacrificial animals and the memories of their ancestors. They read the things that surprised them, or the things that reminded them of something else. Most of all, they read in the places where there were holes--spaces--gaps. They filled up the blanks of the universe, as though they were pages with writing.... The making of a life is similar to the making of a text. We live by reading our own stories. We read by recall and imagination. A sacred text is made by making up what is felt to be already there, just like a life. A sacred text is an impression in stone, or imagination filling up the maker of the space.
* * * * A sacred text is a means of divining one's inner self and one's relationship to the world of meaning. A sacred text reveals to us our own identity, interpreting our present and calling up our future all in terms of our past --in terms of the old story.
* * * * Our culture may find itself alienated from its textual tradition, but human beings are never textless--we cannot help making text, formulating our images into phrases, our dreams into lives.
* * * * We may lose--as we have--ritual, the sacred place, the holy words, but the power of text persists through memory and imagination, through telling the story. Text, etymologically, refers to weaving; and it is the weaving of imagination and discovery, of the divine and the human, of the past and the present, that creates the fabric of our existence. We all have bits and scraps of experience, dream, and thought out of which we weave the texture, the story, of our lives. The metaphors within which we reside link us to the symbolic quality of the divine.
Secular history tricks us into believing that we are completely demythologized or lost to story, that because we cannot light the fire, speak the prayers, know the place, we cannot remember (or make up) the story. Secular history itself is a making up (or remembering) of the story. It is a familiar tale, similar to its sacred displacement. Secular history resembles those myths in which the gods depart, withdraw, become obscure.
Gerard Fourez, Liberation Ethics 70-71 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982):
The way in which different people talk about their existence and interpret meanings also provides "frames of reference" for interpreting other lives. Thus, any existence is a kind of poem that can be read and interpreted. Everyone can also make their own existence into their own poem and, to express that story, fragments of other poems are used. To the extent to which the story of someone else's life in particular is used, it can be said that somebody is living the poem or the mysteries of the other person's life. For example, a person who has been struck by the life of Buddha and his "compassion" will start interpreting his or her own life in those terms, and will perceive the life of Buddha as a call and will make a value out of that virtue.
Seen in this light, the meaning of people's lives can no longer be considered as morally indifferent. Reading one's own life or the life of others always implies starting from a choice, the choice of the poem or the call that will give meaning to existence. Each individual's story asserts its own meaning through the variety of stories, poems, and calls carried in a given society, and each individual's story implies a stance vis-a-vis this multiplicity. It may find its place, for example, as a story of self-sacrifice or as a story of the accumulation of wealth. Different choices produce different societal histories and meanings. Human actions are therefore never morally neutral; they carry ethical meaning because they represent stances taken up before a variety of possibilities.
Maxine Greene, Landscapes of Learning 147-157 (New York: Teachers College Press, 1978):
Albert Camus once wrote a novel called The Stranger about a young man, a French Algerian, given to drifting indifferently through his life, making no judgments, scarcely making a single choice. Meursault has a job that means nothing to him. Once when offered a new post in Paris, he refused it because he said he had no ambition, that "one life was as good as another." In many respects, his is a good life--full of sunlight, weekend swimming, movies, football games, nights with young women. When his mother dies, he gives no evidence of being particularly disturbed. He takes his girl friend swimming the day after the funeral and even to a comic movie that night. He is prone to say things like, "I didn't see why not," or "I didn't care one way or another." When Marie asks him to marry her, all he says is that he would if she wanted him to that it means nothing anyway.
Living in that fashion--an attractive young man, unconstrained, he probably is neither happy nor unhappy. Before he kills an Arab on the beach, for no reason apparently, except that the sun was glaring in the sky--he clearly was a free man, left alone, with no one stopping anything he wanted to do, and no one judging what he did do. Of course, after he kills the Arab, he is confronted with society's judgment--and sentenced to death, not really because he killed an Arab, but because he does not feel like pretending to the court that he grieved for his mother or cried at her funeral. He simply refuses to say the expected things; he strikes his judges as strange, worse than a parricide, one of them says.
When the prison chaplain comes and asks him to repent, Meursault is outraged and says that he was absolutely right in the way he lived his life, that nothing meant anything anyway in the wind of death that blew from his future, leveling out "all the ideas that people tried to foist on me. . . . What difference could they make to me, the deaths of others, a mother's love--or God--." Nothing made any difference, he now says, looking back. He has lived a life; he was free.
* * * * [C]ompare Meursault with another of Camus's characters, Dr. Rieux, in The Plague, confronting a terrible epidemic in the town of Oran, a sickness for which there is no cure. Most of the townspeople have resigned themselves to hopelessness, denial, and despair; a few, including Dr. Rieux and his friend Tarrou, have formed sanitary squads to fight the plague--believing it is their duty to do whatever can be done. The narrator writes:
Many fledgling moralists in those days were going about our town proclaiming there was nothing to be done about it and we should bow to the inevitable. And Tarrou, Rieux, and their friends might give one answer or another, but its conclusion was always the same, their certitude that a fight must be put up, in this way or that, and there must be no bowing down. The essential thing was to save the greatest number of people from dying and being doomed to unending separation. And to do this was only one resource: to fight the plague. There was nothing admirable about this attitude; it was merely logical.
Some time later, when asked why he struggles so hard, when there is so little anyone can do, Dr. Rieux says, "It is a matter of common decency." He does not say, "I didn't care one way or the other," although he might have without being thought strange. He and his friends are not compelled to do what they are doing; they are, in many ways, as free--in the sense of being unconstrained--as Meursault. Since most of the townspeople believe nothing can be done, not even public opinion demands the formation of sanitary squads. Moreover, Dr. Rieux knows as much as Meursault does about the indifference of the sky. He understands that there will always be the danger of plague and that joy will always be imperiled, that there are no guarantees. Nevertheless, he and his friends freely choose to exert themselves and fight the plague. We learn something in time of pestilence, says the doctor, "that there are more things to admire in men than to despise."
It is the contrast between Meursault's attitude and Dr. Rieux's that I find my theme. I associate an unreflective, sometimes benign and drifting life with what I am arbitrarily calling the "new freedom"; I associate a reflective and committed way of acting with what I am calling the "moral life." I want to stress the fact that the Meursault character or those who in some way resemble him is not, are not evil. He does no harm to anyone deliberately. In addition to that, he is a wholly honest young man--so honest that he will not tell the conventional lies even to save his life. He simply says, quite spontaneously, what he thinks; he acts the way he feels. So he is not, in any traditional sense, a bad man--at least before he kills the Arab (a killing, as you know, without intent).
Dr. Rieux is not following any absolute code of values; he does not, for example, even mention the Hippocratic Oath. As he himself says, he does not see anything admirable about what he does; it is simply logical--as clear as 1+1=2. I see him acting consciously on his freedom, creating values as he lives.
* * * * It seems to me that the new freedom we are witnessing is linked to a terrible alienation, what used to be called anomie. I think that many, many people are moving through their lives as strangers, in the sense that Meursault was a stranger. They are not reflecting; they are not choosing; they are not judging; in some sense, they have nothing to say
* * * * The moral life is not necessarily the self-denying life not the virtuous life, doing what others expect of one, or doing what others insist one ought to do. It can best be characterized as a life of reflectiveness and care, a life of the kind of wide-awakeness associated with full attention to life and its requirements. I have an active attention in mind to life in its multiple phases, not the kind of passive attention in which one sits and stares--not the kind of focalized attention that permits one only to see the track ahead of one or the distant light or the clasping hand. In active attention, there is always an effort to carry out a plan in a space where there are others, where responsibility means something other than transcending one's own speed, or one's own everyday.
A person is not simply located in space somewhere; he or she is gearing into a shared world that places tasks before each one who plays a deliberate part. It is only in a domain of human expectations and responses that individuals find themselves moved to make a recognizable mark, to make a difference that others see. And so they trace out certain dimensions of the common space that are relevant to their concerns: music or painting, repairing machines, caring for children, espousing the cause of the African people (or Chile, or Israel, or human rights), working against pollution, or inspecting dams. In the course of acting in the light of what is taken to be relevant, the individual tests himself or herself, tests his or her potency. This does not have to be undertaken by means of employment in the ordinary sense. And it ought in some way to go beyond the realm of privatism, self-improvement, "narcissism" (although it need not wholly exclude self-mastery in the contemporary vein).
* * * * A kind of critical consciousness is also necessary if people are to overcome all the forces that thrust them into indifference and inertia, the forces associated with a depersonalized society like our own. We have to come to understand that the reality we inhabit is an interpreted one and that we need to be wary about acceding to what is officially defined, interpreted, and named. We are too seldom challenged to think about the ways in which we have come to understand the meanings of bureaucracy, say, or the federal presence, or clocks, or movie lines, or auditoriums, or the roles of women and men. We have too seldom been asked to think about the ways in which we have learned to order the multiplicity around us, or even whether we have ever been given the right to make our own kind of sense. We have agreed (usually without realizing it) to accede to, to accept not only traditional descriptions of clocks and presidents and church bells, but all sorts of patternings, including those that make our life situations seem solidified, even when they are not (as various oppressed peasants have, and abandoned women, and the sons of successful men). Without underestimating the efficacy of the modes of domination that abound, we must still hold in mind that, if we knew how to identify openings in our lived situations, if we could actualize what we recognize to be our preferences, we would multiply our occasions for choice.
Literature is full of enactments having to do with . . . awakenings, with transitions from half-life to action on the world. Let me offer an extreme example of what may be meant by inaction and what may be meant by the demand that some changes be made. This is from a vignette about a man who built a robot named Charles to instruct him in complacency:
I called him my friend and thought of him as my friend. . . . He sat there, the perfect noncombatant. He ate and drank and slept and awoke and did not change the world. Looking at him I said to myself, "See, it is possible to live in the world and not to change the world." He read the newspapers and watched television and heard in the night screams under windows thank God not ours but down the block a bit, and did nothing. Without Charles, without his example, his exemplary quietude, I run the risk of acting, the risk of risk. I must participate. I must leave the house and walk about.
The moral life may be achieved through active attention and through walking about among other human beings and through the acknowledgment that signifies responsibility. Even as we demand respect for our formal freedoms and protection from encroachments, we need still to look for more. Somehow, persons must be enabled to discover that they are sometimes able to do something other than what they are doing, that they are even able (at many junctures) to direct the course of their own lives. The ability to act in such a fashion depends to a large degree on the sense of personal agency we associate with autonomy; it depends as well on the capacity to break with the notion that the world around is finished and predefined. It ought to be possible to learn how to identify interstices, openings, spaces in which one can move. It ought to be possible, under diverse circumstances to learn to identify alternatives.
Autonomous people are the ones who manage to be actively attentive to the world around and aware of what they are choosing when they confront situations in which they can perceive alternative courses of action. They are likely to be guided by the principles according to which they--and those with whom they are involved--have freely chosen to live. I have in mind principles like regard for fairness, respect for others, concern for human integrity. There are many persons who live this way, persons who do not have to decide on each occasion how they ought to behave. This is because they have chosen, at some time and at some level of their beings, to keep their promises, to listen to others' viewpoints, to respond to requests for help, to do their work as decently as they can.
Without the principle he called "common decency," what would have moved Dr. Rieux to decide to organize sanitary squads? Was he not choosing for human decency, as much as for the reduction of suffering? In Andre Malraux's novel, Man's Fate, there is Kyo Gisors, a middle-class scholar, who gives up a life of relative comfort to play some part in a revolution--in order to relieve human pain. "His life had a meaning," he thinks at one point, "and he knew what it was: to give to each of these men whom famine...was killing off like a slow plague, the sense of his own dignity." He too is responding to the summons of his conscience, even as he is acting in terms of his own preference, his own personal choice.
The situations in which such choices take place are, quite obviously, social ones; indeed, it is unimaginable for a moral decision to be made outside some realm of social life. A moral decision, ordinarily, is taken between right and right or good and good. (Kyo does not have to decide whether or not to deprive a hungry peasant of his food. He has to decide between the good of scholarship and what he believes to be the good of arming insurgents for a rebellion yet to come.) The individual, perceiving a situation as one that offers two or more possible courses of action, has to choose the course that appears to be most desirable, better from as many points of view as the individual can summon up in his or her own mind.
* * * * I would return to The Plague in conclusion and recall the situation created by the sickness--a situation that (for "fledgling moralists") left no one free to do anything. As the townspeople saw it, moral consideration simply did not exist. Dr. Rieux and Tarrou, however, posited the situation as one in which there were indeed alternatives, possible courses of action involving conceptions of good and right. It was a situation that struck them as profoundly deficient in many ways. Not only was the plague itself wholly impersonal and random in its attack; not only were the citizens acquiescing in that impersonality. No human voice was making itself heard; no one was intervening, if only to the extent of saying that there was more to admire in men than to despise. So people were dying unattended, as if indeed they were brutes, as if their deaths did not matter.
If Tarrou and Rieux had not found such a situation unbearable, if they had not already chosen to do something about the plague, they would not have conceived conditions as they did. Because they were so intent on stopping the infection, the impersonality itself became an obstacle to them, as it could not have been if they had not cared so deeply. When Tarrou explains why he cares so much, he speaks of the many decent people who consider their peace of mind more important than a human life. He tells how he had decided to speak and act quite clearly, "since this was the only way of setting myself on the right track. That's why I say there are pestilences and there are victims, no more than that. . . . That's why I decided to take, in every predicament, the victim's side, so as to reduce the damage done. . . . "He explains that he is trying to gain peace and that the only path for attaining peace is the path of sympathy. Like Rieux, he is a person whose chosen end-in-view has already illuminated the situation on which he intends to act, with respect to which he has decided to take a stand.
This, for me, is what freedom ought to signify, this release of human capacity, this power to reflect and to choose. If educators, whoever we are, can become challengers to impersonality in this fashion, challengers to suffering and lack of care, if we can take initiative, we can begin to recreate a space in which meanings can emerge for persons as they take the risk of risking and begin choosing the moral life.
Drucilla Cornell, Beyond Tragedy and Complacency, 81 Nw. U. L. Rev. 693, 715 (1987)
We must dream of a better world from within the confines of what has been given to us in language, and in the stories and fables of the past. However, stories as patchworks can always be reassembled. Memory is creative, precisely because she bears within herself the promise of the future.
Course Readings
