Journal of the American Academy of Religion LXIVII

Sight, Sound, And Epistemology: the Experiential Sources of Ethical Concepts*

MurrayJardine

&CHARD BERNSTEIN HAS RECENTLY argued that much of postWorld War I1 thought can be understood as an attempt to get beyond the dualism of "objectivism and relativism." By objectivism, Bernstein means roughly the idea that all acceptable knowledge must take the form of exact, impersonal, context-neutral "facts." Relativism is simply the flip side, or logical conclusion, of objectivism, since if we take the objectivist model of knowledge as our standard, we will eventually conclude that, since no knowledge claims meeting this standard can be found, there is no true knowledge, or at least that rival knowledge claims are incommensurable. Objectivism has been the dominant epistemological model of modernity, and the relativism of late modernity is, as Bernstein sees it, the logical outcome of this paradigm (Bernstein).Ethically and politically, as the twentieth century has witnessed, objectivism has often resulted in hyperrationalistic technocratic tyranny or, as it has deteriorated into relativism, destructive irrationalistic nihilism (Spragens, MacIntyre). To a large extent, current debates in philosophy, theology, and related disciplines have been concerned, at least implicitly,with escaping the objectivist/relativist dichotomy by developingnew models of knowledge and new modes of discourse.
Murray Jardine is visiting Assistant Professor of Political Science at Louisiana State University, Baton
Rouge, LA 70803-5433.
"This article is based on the revision of a chapter in the author's Speech and Political Practice (State
University of New York Press, forthcoming); used here with the permission of SUNY Press.

Journal of the American Academy of Religion

In this essay I will sketch out one possible approach to this project by applying the literature on the differences between oral and literate, and more recently, electronic-image cultures.' This literature has many important implications for philosophy and theology but has received surprisingly little attention from writers in these fields2 I do not intend to discuss it systematically, but I will employ some of its most basic findings. The crucial implication for my argument is that the heavily visual modes of consciousness typical of literate and postliterate cultures can make an objectivist paradigm highly probable. That is, in a literate culture, objectivist conceptual frameworks are likely to manifest themselves in many, often very subtle, ways. Hence, any attempt to escape the objectivistlrelativist dualism must address the question of the fundamental sensory orientation of a culture and thus the experiential basis of its epistemological assumptions and the ontological,ethical, and political vocabularies that those assumptions influence. I will apply this insight to recent discussions of the role of narrative in ethical reasoning and practice. Narrative has been given considerable attention as an ethical model by theologians, philosophers, and political theorists such as Stanley Hauenvas, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Hannah Arendt. If escaping objectivism implies, among other things, a partial redirection of our sensorium away from vision and toward the orallaural, then oral narrative traditions may contribute to such a reorientation, and in this sense narrative may be said to offer an epistemological alternative to the dominant modern conception of knowledge. The discussion will have two main parts. First, I will briefly make the first argument introduced above, i.e., that a literatelvisual culture is likely to conceive knowledge in objectivist terms. I will not pretend to give an exhaustive demonstration of this claim, since this would require a much longer discussion than space permits here, but I will attempt to show a plausible connection between literacy and objectivism. Then I will apply the argument to ethics by giving some examples of how a literate/objectivist framework has affected philosophical discourse and by sketching very roughly some ideas about how an oraVaura1 narrative orientation could provide an epistemological basis for resolving some fundamental
The basic textbook in the field is Ong, 1982. See also Ong 1958, 1967, 1971, 1977, 1981. Next to Walter J. Ong the best known writers in the field are probably Eric A. Havelock and Jack Goody. See Havelock 1963,1976,1978,1982,1986;Goody 1968,1977, 1986,1987. Other seminal works in the field include Carothers: Lord; Boman; McLuhan. In general, only a few scattered references exist in philosophical and theological journals. An excellent treatment of Ongk work is Walhout, although this discussion focuses on broader issues than just oral-literate differences. Other recent works that apply this literature include Achtemeier; Conners; Crusius; Jung; Kelber; Kurz; Lentz; Waugh; Wiebe.

Iardine: Sight, Sound, and Epistemology

dilemmas in contemporary ethical theory and practice. My main purposes are to make scholars in such disciplines as philosophy and theology aware of some of the findings about oral-literate contrasts and to indicate one of their many possible applications. Essentially, I will argue that the superordination of visual experience brought about by literacy provides a very powerful experiential source for the objectivist conception of acceptable knowledge. The crucial connection between literacy and objectivism is that, with literacy, people tend to take objects in three-dimensional visual space as their model of what is "really real" and tend to regard other kinds of experience, and other forms of knowledge, as derivative or even unreal. 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" (at least when it is purged of the sloppiness and vagueness of everyday speech and usage) to this text, so that each word has a specific, contextless "meaning-in-itself."(This conception is sometimes referred to as "language realism" and has its origins in Plato, at least as he is conventionally interpreted.) Adequate knowledge consists in constructing statements that correspond correctly to discrete states of affairs in the objective world (i.e., ones that correspond correctly to the text). This, of course, is essentially what is entailed in the objectivist paradigm. Further, if such correspondence cannot be established, then, logically, language cannot have meaning, and a relativistic stance toward the possibility of knowledge ensues. Perhaps the single most important feature of objectivist modes of thought, as critiqued by recent philosophers, is that objectivism attempts to abstract knowledge from concrete contexts. This is the later Wittgenstein's main point in his critique of his own earlier picture of language as correspondence. Similarly, revisionist philosophers of science have pointed out that one of the principal failings of positivism 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. Conversely, the various attempts to construct a non-objectivist ethical paradigm, such as those of MacIntyre and Hauenvas, all recognize the fundamental importance of context. The central difference between oral and literatelvisual orientations is the vastly greater capacity for abstraction from context brought about by literacy, illustrated paradigmatically by the correspondence theory of language mentioned above. Hence, by examining this principal difference between oral and literate orientations I will argue that the

Journal of the American Academy of Religion

objectivistlrelativist dualism may be something (at least partly) generated from the heavily visual orientation produced by literacy. From this basic insight it can be concluded that one way to begin to escape the objectivist paradigm and its inevitable relativist denouement is to redirect our sensory orientation away from vision and toward oraVaural experience, with a corresponding restructuring of our espistemological, ontological, ethical, and political vocabularies. If this is our objective, it follows that oral (although perhaps not written) narrative traditions can be an important model for and experiential source of such a reorientation. Both MacIntyre and Hauenvas have stressed that a recovery of morality and civility will require the formation of local communities informed by narrative traditions. My argument gives an epistemological account of why or how such communities could be successful-because, or to the extent that, they actually do recover a sense of the oraVaural from the concrete practice of developing a narrative tradition, they can escape the experiential basis for the objectivist paradigm that has destroyed our capacity to understand what morality is about. I should note immediately that the above brief description may strike many readers as counterintuitive, since the work of Jacques Derrida and others has identified writing as something that breaks up, rather than causes, an objectivist orientation. I shall discuss this matter briefly later in the essay, but for now I will simply point out that scholars who have studied oral-literate contrasts agree that, in this respect at least, Derrida does indeed seem to be mistaken. Finally, before I begin a detailed discussion, I should mention that my examination of oral and literate cultures and of the effects of literacy is quite simplified. Specifically, I have drawn mainly on the work of the first generation of scholars in this area, represented by classicists Milman Parry, Alfred Lord, and Eric Havelock, anthropologist Jack Goody, and especially literary critic Walter Ong, whose work in part has synthesized the main early lines of research. The earliest writers tended to emphasize quite sharply the differences between oral and literate cultures and to present the effects of literacy as a matter of linear causation. A second generation of scholars has urged that the claims of Havelock, Goody, and others need to be qualified and has given considerable attention to the ways in For which oral and literate modes of communication intera~t.~ my limited purposes, however, the simpler model of the earlier writers is probably adequate, partly because it will keep the discussion to a manageable length, and partly because it will bring out most clearly my main points.
See Graff 1979, 1987a, 1987b; Cole and Scribner; Scribner and Cole; Finnegan; Street; Thomas.

Iardine: Sight, Sound, and Epistemology

What follows, then, should be read with several caveats in mind. First, I am not claiming that literacy is the only source of objectivist thinking. Clearly there are many sources. Nevertheless, literacy can 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 objectivist thinking; literacy only makes objectivism probable. That is, literacy creates an experiential context in which objectivist modes of thought become more likely. The arguments that follow are not intended to be interpreted deterministically. 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 the knowledge thereof as a starting point for further reflection.

SOME SALIENT CHARACTERISTICS OF

ORAL COMMUNICATION

I have already indicated that literacy tends to superordinate visual experience over oraVaura1 experience and in so doing can cause us to think in the kinds of categories characteristic of objectivism. In fact, this is a simplification.As Walter Ong 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 lifeworld 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 lifeworld's dynamism, which results in the apparently paradoxical situation that, although they usually are very good at noticing visual details, they have a very 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 (Ong 1967: 49-50).

jardine: Sight, Sound, and Epistemology

oraVaura1 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 cuneiform or hieroglyphics, which employ picture-symbols, do this only to a limited extent. Pictographic writing systems such as these are not the same thing as mere pictures, because a given picture could mean many things or many words, whereas writing systems "determine the exact words that a reader can generate from the text." But these writing systems 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 that exists or occurs in the oraVaura1 lifeworld, meaning that the meaning of the word can only be understood by fairly direct reference to its existential context, which in turn means that words will still tend to be understood as events rather than signs or referents (Ong 1982: 83-93; Havelock 1976: 9-43). 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 oraVaura1lifeworld is broken, or rather, drastically attenuated; a written word as written word has no obvious connection to anything in the lifeworld. With its connection to existential events broken, an alphabetically written word becomes a set of abstract symbols in static, quasi-permanent space rather than a dynamic event. The context, which is so important to oral communication and still relevant to pictographic writing and even syllabaries and the Semitic alphabet (which do not indicate vowels in the same way as the Greek alphabet does, and thus leave 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 lifeworld and more oriented toward abstractions. For example, we have seen that oral people inevitably understand the world (including nature) 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, i.e., abstracted from the personally spoken words that give reality meaning (Ong 1967: 166-169). At the same time, separated from actually existent persons and locked into abstract visual space, words themselves

10

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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 termed language realism, i.e., 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 quite unimaginable in an oral culture (Ong 1982: 88-93, 101-103; 1967: 35-47; Havelock 1976: 22-50; Goody 1968: 38-44). 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, that they "can be cut up into little pieces, which can even be written forwards and pronounced backwards: 'p-a-r-t' can be pronounced 'trap'." He continues: "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"' (Ong 1982: 91). 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. Another way to illustrate this point is to examine the claim sometimes made in deconstmctive criticism that words "move around" in that they do not unambiguously refer to or correspond to one thing. This claim may seem at first to contradict the idea that literacy allows people to take the relative stasis of the written word as a paradigm for visual experience. Clearly, however, to speak of words as "moving around is to conceive of a word as an object in three-dimensional space, and the dynamism invoked is one of visual space, which is quite different from the dynamism of the oraVaura1 world, where words are sound events in time that are always passing into and out of existence. Hence, the claim that words move around or that they "carry" an indeterminacy of meaning is parasitical upon the relative stasis of the written word and the resulting capacity to conceive of a word as an object in three-dimensional space. The discussion so far has begun to indicate how the decontextualization brought about by literacy can be an important factor in bringing about an objectivist orientation. 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

Jardine: Sight, Sound, and Epistemology

11

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. (We are all familiar with Augustine's wonderment at 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 (Ong 1982: 93-101, 103-116; 1967: 53-63, 76-87). 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 io be repeated for every single book produced.) The accumulation of information made possible by printing is the crucial step in destroying the mnemonically-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 wither. In terms of the perceptual effects discussed earlier, the uniformity of print also makes silent reading much easier and its elimination of personal idiosyncrasies (i.e.,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

12

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level of alphabetic literacy, it is not until after the invention of the printing press-indeed, some considerable time after this, as a significant oral residue remains with even the most educated classes until the eighteenth century-that literacy exerts its full force on the Western mind (Ong 1982: 117-135; 1967: 47-53, 63-76; Eisenstein). In any case, by recognizing the extent to which various communications media push us in the direction of a literatelvisual orientation, we should now have a clearer idea of how literacy can facilitate the overabstraction that may be the primary feature of objectivism. The essential problem is that a literate culture provides a subtly pervasive environment of decontextualized knowledge, vocabulary, and, most importantly, everyday visual experience that 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 processes of thinking and knowing, that knowing takes place in a 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, reductivelyconceived "facts."This is precisely the prime failing of objectivism. 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, i.e., 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 discussed earlier of mistaking the impersonal vocabulary of physical science for an actual description of what the scientist is doing when he or she does science. A particularly striking example of how subtle and pervasive this aspect of literate consciousness can be is given by anthropologistJack Goody. We have seen that oral cultures, for a variety of reasons, must locate knowledge in the context of narratives, formulaic saymgs, etc. Only with writing (and especially printing) can knowledge be abstracted from these contexts and converted into the forms of (relatively) context-neutral lists, tables, etc., which could never be remembered in oral form (Ong 1982: 33-36, 57-62, 69-71). Anthropologists frequently attempt to understand the cosmologies and other beliefs of primitive peoples by means of such tables that show correspondencesbetween various elements of the tribal worldview. As Goody points out, however, tables, as literate artifacts, spatialize

jardine: Sight, Sound, and Epistemology

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knowledge and turn words into referents in ways that are quite foreign to the nonliterate mind. Their use is thus likely to be misleading at best (Goody 1977: 52-73). The anthropologists here are suffering from a problem common to all literate people: literacy so deeply imprints certain patterns in our thinking that we normally find them entirely "natural" and can scarcely imagine anyone not thinking in these ways. By the nineteenth century, Western societies, or at least their dominant elements, had become thoroughly visualist in orientation, due mainly to an almost exclusive reliance on writing and especially printing as means of communication. In the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries, however, a number of technological innovations-telephone, radio, and television being the most notable-have occured that may have increased the extent to which Western culture relies on hearing for communication. This has prompted certain commentators, most notably Marshall McLuhan, to argue that we are entering a new age of "secondary" orality, which will recapture many of the elements of earlier "primary" oral cultures. Ong and other writers have considerable doubts about this proposition, for a number of reasons. First of all, the new sound-oriented media of communication themselves are products of a literate culture and require literacy and visual constructs generally to make them work. Indeed, many of the new electronic media, such as the computer, are not sound-oriented but work mainly through print. Second, the new types of electronic media actually increase our use of print and stored information, so that oral memory, such a fundamental feature of primary oral cultures, becomes even less important to us. Ong argues that the electronic media of this century have actually increased to new levels our visual orientation (1982: 135-138; 1967: 87-92, 256-260, 290-291, 301-303), and, indeed, there is beginning to develop a literature which argues that television, far from increasing our oral orientation, as McLuhan thought, dramatically intensifies our visual orientation and is bringing about what might be best described as a postliterate visual culture of images. As with the literature on oral-literate differences, a thorough discussion of the literature on electronic-image media is beyond the scope of this essay, but 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 points out 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

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of the relevant historical context. When Havelock analyzes various features of Plato's thought, e.g., the Forms, as products of an emerging literate consciousness, he employs conventional interpretations of Plato. His innovation consists in his thesis about the origns of the Forms in literate consciousness,not in any new idea about what Plato meant by the Forms. Whether or not such interpretations are what Plato really intended, they are the way literate people have understood him. Thus it can be concluded that, whatever Plato meant, the conventional interpretations of him show the effects of literacy on our thinking. What could be regarded, then, as the foundation of objectivist thinking, is, one way or another, at least partly the product of literacy. Mention of Plato's critique of writing can lead to an examination of the effects of literacy in contemporary attempts to escape objectivism. Since literacy tends to induce objectivism in subtle ways, we may actually still be thinking in objectivist terms precisely when we think we have escaped such an orientation. Perhaps nowhere is this more true than in the work of Jacques Derrida and the deconstructionists. Derrida's work attacks objectivism as it manifests itself in what he calls "logocentrism," which corresponds closely to what I have termed language realism. Derrida and other deconstructionists argue that the written (or printed) text breaks down logocentrism by showing the extent to which words do not unambiguously correspond to or refer to objects of some sort, since words in a text can take on many meanings or have many implications. Logocentrism itself, however, is, according to Derrida, derived from "phonocentrism," which takes the spoken word as in some way fundamental and in some way corresponding or referring to objects. The Western philosophical tradition has made a fundamental error in debasing writing compared to speech, thinks Derrida, because a focus on writing can break up such a referential conception of language in the manner described above. As Ong points out, however, "recent work on the oralityliteracy contrasts . . . complicates the roots of phonocentrism and logocentrism beyond the textualists' [i.e., deconstructionists'] account" (1982: 167). Specifically, the description of the spoken word given by Derrida is one that only a literate person would hold; nonliterate people attribute fundamental importance to spoken words, but they understand them as events or actions, not as referents of some sort. What Derrida calls phonocentrism results from projecting a literate language realism onto the spoken word. That is, Derrida's criticism of the Western philosophical tradition for taking the spoken, rather than the written, word as a model misses the point, because the philosophical tradition was actually taking the written word as a model and imputing its

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properties to the spoken word. Derrida's criticism of the philosophical tradition-for focusing on the spoken word, because it supposedly escapes the ambiguities of the written word-is misleading, because while it is true that words spoken from one person to another are typically less ambiguous than words written for no one in particular (Ong 1982: 101-103), the notion that words could somehow correspond unambiguously to fixed objects is, as we have seen, very much a product of a literate consciousness and would be quite foreign, if not unintelligible, to the oral imagination. The philosophical tradition understood the spoken word as privileged over the written word precisely because it imputed to it the qualities of the written word. Logocentrism causes phonocentrism, not the other way around, as Derrida thinks. As Ong puts it, "it would appear that the [deconstructionist] critique of textuality . . . is still itself curiously text-bound. . . . [It] derives its appeal in part from historically unreflective, uncritical literacy" (1982: 168-169). What this means is that the deconstructionists have succumbed to objectivism just as they have thought they had escaped it. Another way to see this is to consider the deconstructionist notion that because language is not characterized by ultimately unambiguous reference, there must be an irreducible random or chaotic or ironic element to it. This conclusion only follows if one has already tacitly made the objectivist assumption that either language must contain some kind of exact correspondence with reality or else it ultimately fails to have meaning. But if one drops this assumption, there are other possibilities. Language can have ultimate meaning without having some kind of translucent "correspondence" with "reality" These examples should at least suggest that not only has literacy played a principal role in forming the objectivist conception of knowledge and communication, but also that it has profoundly affected even explicit attempts to escape this framework. Hence, I believe the conclusion can be drawn that any attempts to escape the objectivist/relativist dichotomy, thus developing new modes of discourse which can be applied to ethical life, must deal with the effects of literate and electronic media of communication on consciousness and must attempt, at least to some extent, to recover aspects of an oral orientation. This conclusion, in turn, implies that the recovery of narrative-or at least oral narrative-as a primary form of ethical discourse can be a very powerful tool for such a reorientation-which is to say that narrative may well provide a nonobjectivist epistemological paradigm for ethical and political theory and practice. To illustrate this more concretely I will conclude by sketching very roughly one possible approach to this project.

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ORALITY AND PLACE

We can gain an appreciation of what it might mean to use narrative as a means of reorienting our ethical vocabulary by considering the human sense of place. It is a common theme of twentieth-century social analysis that whereas premodern people had a strong sense of place, i.e., of having a location from which to orient themselves in the overarching functional order of the cosmos, in a particular geographical location, and in the hierarchical social order, modern people are displaced and thus disoriented by the collapse of a sense of an ordered cosmos and by unprecedented geographical and social mobility The collapse of the premodern cosmos and its attendant sense of place is itself in substantial measure the result of modern objectivism, which discredits the ritualistic basis of older senses of place. It seems unlikely, however, that the ordered, hierarchical cosmos of the past can be recovered, and, indeed, despite the disappointments of modernity, it seems unlikely that we would ever find such a recovery desirable. An alternative possibility for recovering a sense of place may reside in certain features of oraVaura1 experience. For example, MacIntyre's discussion of narrative traditions is essentially, as he points out himself, an attempt to find a substitute for the functional cosmos that provides the context for Aristotle's ethical theory. And just as Aristotle's cosmos provided a place for humans, the narratives discussed by MacIntyre also give each individual a conception of a place in the community An extremely important difference, however, between MacIntyre's conception of narrative and Aristotle's cosmos, is that, while the classical cosmos is essentially static and unchanging, narratives are dynamic-a difference corresponding, of course, to the differences between the written and spoken words. One possible direction, then, for contemporary ethical and political theory would be to articulate the features of a sense of place grounded in an oral narrative, i.e., to develop a conceptual vocabulary appropriate to the ethical and political place implied in being a member of a narrative-based community The project adumbrated above would require a far more detailed examination of oraVaura1 experience than I have given here, but a possible indication of what such a vocabulary might imply could be found by considering one of the main objections to the idea of grounding virtue in a narrative tradition as opposed to an unchanging functional cosmos. The obvious question that MacIntyre or someone like him must answer is, how can we tell a good story from a bad story?After all, the Nazis had stories too. Another way to put this is to ask what limitations on human action a narrative tradition can provide. It seems that we can tell a story

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that will justify almost anything. The discussion so far can indicate how this question could be answered. From an objectivist standpoint, limitations on individual or group actions would have to take the form of some kind of general rule or guideline, independent of any particular story or narrative tradition-a universal, acontextual standard, such as is provided by modern liberal theories of individual rights. Such standards invariably turn out to be not universal after all and thus susceptible to deconstructive criticism as tools of domination, oi. else so limited in content as to be inapplicable in any concrete situation-or both. But from the discussion of oral, non-objectivist orientations given so far, with its emphasis on the contextual nature of the oral world, it would seem that it would be precisely something in the specific context of the narrative that would set limits to our actions. As the later Wittgenstein and others such as J. L. Austin and John Searle demonstrated, it is the context of a given speech situation that determines what can appropriately be said in that situation. Similarly, it might be the case that a narrative or narrative tradition limits human actions by providing a context in which only certain acts are appropriate. That is to say it is precisely the particularity of a narrative tradition, or the context it provides, that can provide limits, though not the kind of universal, acontextual standard objectivism seeks. This would be perhaps the most fundamental implication of my discussion. An orallaural, contextual framework can possibly provide an internal standard, or set of limits, for the actions of communities and individuals within those communities. I will elaborate this idea by examining one of the main themes of the biblical stories. Here characters such as Abraham-and even more so Christ-are wanderers with no fixed geographical or social place but rather only the place of responsibility to God. In the biblical understanding, the fundamental human place is that of a responsible or faithful speaker. And what determines whether or not a particular action is actually a responsible or appropriate one is the narrative context of the action. Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac, for example, could have been a responsible, faithful, and appropriate act only under the highly specific circumstances in which he found himself, while under those circumstances, it was the only responsible, faithful, and appropriate act. My place as a responsible speaker is formed precisely by the contingencies of the specific narratives within which I have developed. This is to say that one is faithful or responsible by not abstracting oneself from one's contingent situation. Thus a speech-based articulation of place would set limits not by establishing fixed, unchanging institutional structures in a geographical location or social hierarchy but rather by explicating the dimensions of responsible or faithful response to other speakers in contingent situa-

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tions, that is, by delineating what would count as appropriate actions or inappropriate, abstracted actions. The fundamental ethical and political "standard" derived from a consideration of oraVaura1 experience is that one not abstract oneself from the context necessary to comprehend one's possible actions, a standard congruent with the epistemologcal critique of objectivism that emerges from an examination of the oral world. A place in this sense would be an orientation of attunement to the everchanging ambiguities and nuances of one's narrative context, as they appear in the persons of other speakers. From this, in turn, narrative traditions could be judged on the basis of whether they actually do provide such places of responsibility There is at least one striking implication of this kind of place in relation to the places implied in Aristotle's functional cosmos. While in general a speech-based place would require the cultivation of habitual virtue, it is also possible that habit could itself become a type of abstraction, as the context of one's actions changes. Aristotle lacks the resources to deal with Abraham's situation. Only a conception of place based upon the dynamism of the spoken word is adequate for a contingent world. This is why a speech-based understanding of place does not necessarily imply rigid social hierarchies, tribalistic territorial loyalties, or ideological fanaticism. It is also why a narrative tradition that does provide places of responsibility may have the capacity to critique and transcend itself. Attunement to one's narrative context, as opposed to abstraction from it, implies an appreciation of its own contingency This conclusion, of course, is very similar to what Stanley Hauenvas has argued (1981, 1983), except that it includes one crucial additional element-an epistemological grounding for such a contextual standard in the distinctive features of oravaural experience. If my argument so far is valid, we are much more likely to develop such an appreciation of the contingency of our situation and what it implies for ethical practice if we can partly recover an oraVaura1 orientation through oral narrative. An understanding of the extent to which a literatdvisual orientation encourages objectivism, and of how orality may partially combat it, is one possible way to join narrative ethics to larger epistemological issues. Or, as I stated when outlining my argument at the beginning of this essay, an appreciation of the characteristics of the spoken word, and thus of oral narratives, can give epistemological reasons for thinking that the formation of local communities based on narrative traditions could successfully recover morality and civility. Although the above themes have been elaborated very briefly, I think they can provide some indication of the implications of my discussion for contemporary religious, ethical, and political discourse. A recognition of

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Journal of the American Academy of Religion

the typical characteristics of oral and literate thought processes can provide both a critical account of (one aspect of)the development of modern objectivism and also constructive intimations of possible alternatives. A reorientation of our sensorium may potentially allow us to develop a new and very different ethical language. Oral narrative may provide a nonobjectivist epistemological practice from which a non-objectivist ethics can

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