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Category Archives: Evil

Hans-Georg Moeller defends Amorality

26 Saturday Dec 2009

Posted by Deane in Ethics, Evil

≈ 3 Comments

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amorality, Hans-Georg Moeller

“Imagine a family in which moral values dominate everything else, including the affection the family members feel for each other: life in such a family will probably be quite miserable and thus somewhat “sick.” In short, I argue that a high degree of moral language and a highly moral mindset is not an indicator of the “health” of a person or a society, but, to the contrary, a worrisome symptom of tension and uneasiness.”

“It seems to me that ethical communication has almost reached a pathological level in our society, bringing about, in Hegel’s words, a certain “frenzy of self-conceit.””

“Interestingly enough, there have always been a number of philosophers who were highly suspicious of ethics; Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, for example. I follow these thinkers rather than the likes of Kant or contemporary ethical theorists who believe that they are able to identify what is “really” good. The attempt to define criteria for moral goodness has often ended in grotesque failures. I cite a number of examples of “shocking” or ridiculous ethical demands by some of the great heroes of today’s academic ethics, such as Kant’s moral defense of murdering “illegitimate” children or Bentham’s “scientific” suggestion of measuring weightlifting abilities in order to establish people’s strength for tolerating pain so that the moral quality of certain policies that might inflict pain on them could be objectively assessed. I argue that the history of “philosophical” ethics accounts for not much more than a series of unwarranted academic presumptions.”

(Hans-Georg Moeller, author of The Moral Fool: A Case for Amorality)

Have you read this? What do you reckon?

The Minds Which Seduce Us: On First Reading E. M. Cioran’s The Temptation to Exist

11 Sunday Oct 2009

Posted by Eric Repphun in Biblical Studies, Continental Philosophy, Death, Ethics, Evil, God, Hebrew Bible, History, Language, Philosophy, Reference, Religion, Rhetoric, Texts, Theory

≈ 2 Comments

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America, Confession, E. M. Cioran, Exile, Job, Judaism, The Temptation to Exist

One of the most palpable pleasures of the academic life is to find a new thinker, a new author who challenges, excites, infuriates, or simply makes one prick up one’s ears.  So much the better to stumble upon a thinker who has a long list of books just waiting to be explored, deconstructed, and enjoyed.  My recent encounter with Emil Cioran’s collection of essays, The Temptation to Exist[1], is the intellectual equivalent to my first listen to Tom Wait’s Closing Time as an undergraduate, where the joy of discovery is only deepened with the knowledge that there are – in the case of Waits – albums like Rain Dogs and Bone Machine waiting in the wings.  Unlike Waits, Cioran is no longer living and working among us, so his body of work is bounded in time, but there is still a lifetime of writing to anticipate reading.  I’ve got two more of his books waiting for me at home already.  I’ve come to Cioran by recommendation of Deane, who is, according to one commenter, The Dunedin School’s ‘archblogger’, who has yet to recommend to me a bad book, which is in itself rather remarkable.

E. M. Cioran

E. M. Cioran

Cioran, born in Romania in 1911 with a Romanian Orthodox priest for a father, took to philosophy early in life, travelling to Berlin in 1933, where he developed a certain sympathy for the Nazis and for the Romanian nationalistic organisation The Iron Guard, despite the fact that violence of any kind made him uncomfortable.  Cioran spent much of his adult life working and living largely as a hermit in France and he would eventually repudiate all of his ties to the political right, expressing his regret clearly in later interviews.  He died in 2005, leaving a mass of unpublished work that is still tied up in the French courts.   Reading Cioran is maddening, joyous, and difficult.  Understanding him is, if anything, even worse.  Writing in the aphoristic philosophical tradition that includes such diverse figures as Nietzsche, Baudrillard, and Wittgenstein, Cioran is one to read and to ponder in mad, great lumps or in discrete bites.  I can’t pretend to have mined any of this with any thoroughness, but I’ve included some highlights, some things that caught my attention, that pricked up my ears.

Cioran, in ‘Thinking Against Oneself’, betraying his history of sympathy to fascism (which, though this is a troubling thought, does not mean that he is wrong):

Almost all our discoveries are due to our violence, to the exacerbation of our instability.  Even God, insofar as He [sic] interests us – it is not in our innermost selves that we discern God, but at the extreme limits of our fever, at the very point where, our rage confronting His, a shock results, an encounter as ruinous for Him as for us (33).

In the same essay, on Christianity:

But the Christian virus torments us: heirs of the flagellants, it is by refining our excruciations that we become conscious of ourselves.  Is religion declining?  We perpetuate its extravagances, as we perpetuate the macerations and the cell-shrieks of old, our will to suffer equalling that of the monasteries in their heyday.  If the Church no longer enjoys a monopoly on hell, it has nonetheless riveted us to a chain of sighs, to the cult of the ordeal, of blasted joys and jubilant despair … No sage among our ancestors, but malcontents, triflers, fanatics whose disappointments or excesses we must continue (34-35).

Wherever there is suffering, it exhausts mystery or renders it luminous (39).

The only minds which seduce us are the minds which have destroyed themselves trying to give their lives a meaning (45).

From ‘On a Winded Civilisation’ on the intellectual life (and this hits very close to home):

The tired intellectual sums up the deformities and the vices or a world adrift.  He does not act, he suffers; if he favors the notion of tolerance, he does not find in it the stimulant he needs.  Tyranny furnished that, as do the doctrines of which it is the outcome.  If he is the first of its victims, he will not complain: only the strength that grinds him into the dust seduces him.  To want to be free is to want to be oneself; but he is tired of being himself, of blazing a trail into uncertainty, of stumbling through truths.  ‘Bind me with the chains of Illusion’, he sighs, even as he says farewell to the peregrinations of Knowledge.  Thus he will fling himself, eyes closed, into any mythology which will assure him the protection and the peace of the yoke (57-58).

The future belongs to the suburbs of the globe (64).

In ‘A Little Theory of Destiny’ and ‘Advantages of Exile’, Cioran explores the idea of exile and living as an expatriate, which is very much on my mind on as I am on a short trip back to my American hometown of Boulder, Colorado (the New Age capital of the universe), a place I love and hate in equal measure – and his writing captures some of the essence of my experience so well that is almost chilling:

The aspiration to ‘save’ the world is the morbid phenomenon of a people’s youth (66).

Hating my people, my country, its timeless peasants enamored of their own torpor and almost bursting with hebetude, I blushed to be descended from them, repudiated them, rejected their sub-eternity, their larval certainties, the geologic reverie.  No use scanning their features for their fidgets, the grimaces of revolt: the monkey, alas! was dying in them.  In truth, did they not sprout from the very rock?  Unable to rouse them, or to animate them, I came to the point of dreaming of an extermination.  One does not massacre stones.  The spectacle they offered me justified and baffled, nourished and disgusted my hysteria.  And I never stopped cursing the accident that caused me to be born among them (70).

It is a mistake to think of the expatriate as someone who abdicates, who withdraws and humbles himself, resigned to his miseries, his outcast state.  On a closer look, he turns out to be ambitious, aggressive in his disappointments, his very acrimony qualified by his belligerence.  The more we are dispossessed, the more intense our appetites and our illusions become (74).

On poetry, an analysis that fits New Zealand, a decidedly minor nation that is very fond of poetry, like a glove:

Consider the production of any ‘minor’ nation which has not been so childish as to make up a past for itself: the abundance of poetry is its most striking characteristic.  Prose requires, for its development, a certain rigor, a differentiated social status, and a tradition: it is deliberate, constructed; poetry wells up: it is direct or else totally fabricated; the prerogative of cave men or aesthetes, it flourishes only on the near or far side of civilization, never at the center.  Whereas prose demands a premeditated genius and a crystallized language, poetry is perfectly compatible with a barbaric genius and a formless language (76).

In ‘A People of Solitaries’, which on occasion strays dangerously close to an unformed, casual anti-Semitism, Cioran offers as astute, troubling look at Judaism in European history:

To be a man is a drama; to be a Jew is another.  Hence, the Jew has the privilege of living our condition twice over.  He represents the alienated existence par excellence or, to utilize an expression by which the theologians describe God, the wholly other (80).

However grave its consequences may have been, the rejection of Christianity remains the Jews’ finest exploit, a no which does them honor.  If previously they had walked alone by necessity, they would henceforth do so by resolve, as outcasts armed with a great cynicism, the sole precaution they have taken against the future (85).

On Job, a frequent guest here at The Dunedin School (turn the pages and stop here and here):

The tragic hero rarely seeks an accounting from a blind, impersonal Fate: it is his pride to accept its decrees.  He will perish, then, he and his.  But a Job harasses his God, demands an accounting: a formal summons results, of a sublime bad taste, which would doubtless have repelled a Greek but which touches, which overwhelms us.  These outpourings, these vociferations of a plagued man who offers conditions to Heaven and submerges it with his imprecations – how can we remain insensitive to such a thing?  The closer we are to abdicating, the more these cries disturb us.  Job is indeed of his race: his sobs are a show of force, an assault.  ‘My bones are pierced in me in the night season’, he laments.  His lamentation culminates in a cry, and this cry rises through the vaults of Heaven and makes God tremble.  Insofar as, beyond our silences and our weaknesses, we dare lament our ordeals, we are all descendents of the great leper, heirs of his desolation and his moan.  But too often our voices fall silent; and though he shows us how to work ourselves to his accents, he does not manage to shake us out of our inertia.  Indeed, he has the best of it: he knew Whom to vilify or implore, Whom to attack or pray to.  But we – against whom are we to cry out?  Our own kind?  That seems to us absurd.  No sooner articulated than our rebellions expire on our lips … Job has transmitted his energy to his own people: thirsting like him for justice, they never yield before the evidence of an iniquitous world.  Revolutionaries by instinct, the notion of renunciation fails to occur to them: if Job, that Biblical Prometheus, struggled with God, they would struggle with men (99-100).

There is so much more that could be said about The Temptation to Exist, but it is late and I will leave you with a final note, from ‘Some Blind Alleys: A Letter’, in which Cioran, writing decades before the rise of the now dominant therapeutic ethos and the repellent spectacle of reality television, sees into the future with a striking clarity:

The confessional? a rape of conscience perpetrated in the name of heaven.  And that other rape, psychological analysis!  Secularized, prostituted, the confessional will soon be installed on our street corners: except for a couple of criminals, everyone aspires to have a public soul, a poster soul (109).

Never have I wanted more to be a criminal, and more ashamed to be working – with these very words – towards a public soul.


[1] E. M. Cioran, The Temptation to Exist, translated by Richard Howard, with an Introduction by Susan Sontag (London: Quartet Encounters, 1987).  All page numbers cited in parenthesis refer to this version of the text.

(Incidentally, The Dunedin School has been ranked #35 on the Biblioblog Top 50 list this month, which is kind of funny, as some of us aren’t even Biblical scholars, though we are constantly running into that damned thing.)

The Prosaic and Authoritative Parts of Job make it interesting

22 Tuesday Sep 2009

Posted by Deane in Ethics, Evil, God, Hebrew Bible

≈ 6 Comments

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authority, divine retribution, Job, no reason whatsoever, prosaic, satan

The poetry between Job and his friends is just a nice distraction. The really interesting innovation in Job occurs in the prologue, divine speeches, and epilogue. For while Job protests against divine retribution as much as one can, he ultimately keeps within the system upheld by his friends. That’s why he’s still looking for a Redeemer in the god who is tormenting him. He doesn’t seriously consider any other option. For all its facade of dissent, Job 3-31 is, in the main, an argument carried out within the system of divine retribution, in the well-worn mode of other ancient Near Eastern conversations.

But compare satan’s point in Job 1:9-11 and 2:3-6. The satan is challenging the very system of divine retribution itself. Do people serve God for reward, or only for God’s own sake (for no reason at all)? Now this is true innovation. And then the divine speeches refuse to give any reason for obeying God. The ground for obeying God is moved to a whole new level. Retribution is not the whole story, and it isn’t the most important principle of divine ethics anymore. Now, this is interesting! It removes God’s actions from any possible human scrutiny, asks the question Job did not ask (and was ignorant of; 9:17 is still dominated by expectations that divine retribution is the norm), and makes the protests of Chs. 3-31 beside the point. Protest against God requires at least some guaranteed grounds of his ethical actions, but once he is free of any knowable principle for action, protest is futile – Job can only keep silent and withdraw. Divine retribution can be used to justify almost anything as ‘good’, from the fall of a proud man to the holocaust of an entire people. But the transcendence of God lets him do absolutely anything he wants. And with any such totalising move, this results in an endless supply of suppressed voices to recover. Submission to the discipline of absolute authority is so exciting to think about! The prose and the authoritative divine speeches provides the really interesting departure and development within the book of Job.

It’s now gone 5:00 a.m. I should really stop thinking about Job when I’m in bed (proof-text: 4:12-16).

Job, A God Not Quite Beyond Good and Evil, Unlimited Semiosis and Limitations of Meaning: Or, James Harding is Wrong, Wrong, Wrong, Wrongity Wrong

21 Monday Sep 2009

Posted by The Dunedin School in Ethics, Evil, God, Hebrew Bible, Violence

≈ 17 Comments

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Dostoyevsky, James Harding, Jean-François Lyotard, Job, Roland Barthes

(loosely continuing this conversation.)

Some of the individual sections of Job – especially Job’s speeches – open up the ethical imagination, giving rise to an endless chain of questioning by generations of subsequent readers. One of the main reasons for this is not hard to find: the book provides one of the most fundamental challenges to and protests against God’s actions in the Hebrew Bible, and one of the most puzzling (non-)resolutions to these challenges and protests. There is a story about some nineteenth century author – I forget who, but he was irreligious, and I’m guessing it was either Mark Twain or Oscar Wilde – who stayed up all evening reading the book of Job, immersed in its poetic passages, in awestruck appreciation of its artistry. For him, it was the only thing worth reading in the Hebrew Bible.

But Job doesn’t just open up ethical questions. It also closes them down. Reading Job requires that we take notice of both its open and its authoritative voices. For Job, as a whole book, shuts down the conversation as much as it opens it up. Job must be appreciated in the straitjacket of its full dimensions as well as in light of the counterhegemonic voices it contains.

The attempt to control and restrict the meaning is not something that occurred when the book was canonized. Already, the prologue, epilogue, and divine speeches provide Job with an authoritative voice within the writing of the book itself. Does it succeed in closing down the meaning completely? Not at all. But like a canon, authoritative voices obscure and replace the earlier forms with new meanings, tainting the whole, reconstituting its emphases and intertexts rather than completely silencing the text. (And these authoritative voices also fail to be quite as comprehensive as they try to be, the necessary failure of hegemony that preserves the voices of dissent, and makes us smirk at power…)

The final effect of the book of Job (in the perspective of its disharmonious totality) has its closest parallel in Dostoyevsky’s novels, where I always find the dissenting voices more interesting than the whole into which they are forced. There is room for seeking out these conflicting voices, but against the Romantic claims of ‘polyphony’ (or worse, a text which ‘deconstructs itself’, whatever that means), this is a job for interpreters to do, to read the text against its dominant and dominating grain. Barthes was right (in S/Z): truly open (writerly) texts are nowhere to be found; conversely, the classic texts were never multivalent, they are only ‘moderately plural (i.e., merely polysemous).’

But there is an ever-present risk in attempting to flush out these suppressed counter-voices. In straining to find the useful, liberating parts, do we necessarily and consequentially redeem the text? Is this not a further way that the hegemonic voice assimilates dissent (e.g. ‘anybody can become President of America, because Capital gives everyone an equal chance!’)? Isn’t this the problem with Trible’s project, if it is left there? Her mosaic (of Miriam) is quite brilliantly constructed, but turning it into a Mosaic (with an upper-case ‘M’) not only reinscribes the dominant ideology, but appears to redeem the text. The same can be said for the recent flurry to find isolated verses in the New Testament which demonstrate its amazing power for political liberation from colonial and imperial power. Or, again, the current greening of scripture, you know, that book which begins with the command to rape and pillage the Earth. (And yet, a nagging doubt: why do these uses all seem to come along after the secular movements which inaugurated them, if they were to be found in the Bible all along?) Do these endeavours really liberate, or are they ways in which hegemony accommodates dissent so that it cannot explode into real opposition?

But more concretely… Job 21:5 would be a wonderful verse to support an ethical response based on the Other… if it weren’t in Job. Unfortunately, though, it is. And it comes immediately after Job 21:4, which notes that Job’s problem is not with other people, but with God himself, and with a doctrine of retribution that Job (the person) never challenges (he only challenges what he sees as God’s poor implementation of retribution, first in relation to himself, and, when this doesn’t convince his friends, belatedly in relation to others: the poor, the victims). The immediate ethical response to an Other, the face which appears before us, has to be read against the grain in Job. The reason Job thinks that his friends should put their hands on their mouths is that Job (a righteous man) is being punished (the retributive punishment for the unrighteous). This is the mouth-covering horror of it. It is this theological, reflective consequence – utterly removed from any personal ethical response – which is in view here. It is ethics subsumed under human-divine relations, not human-human relations. Job’s instructions to his friends to put their hands over their mouths has the double purpose of getting them to shut up so he can take his hand off his own mouth and accuse God of causing unjust punishment for a righteous man (21:3; cf. 7:11), and letting them know that their proper response should be horror rather than blame at the failure of retribution (21:6-7 & ff).

blake-jobIf God were merely amoral and capricious in his divine speeches, that woud be one matter. But God attempts both to insist on his righteousness and also insist on his superior knowledge. It is this combination that results in a further injustice, what Lyotard terms ‘absolute injustice’, in that Job is not only arbitrarily punished – but his very ability to protest has been taken away from him. Coming at the end of the book of Job, after all Job’s speeches, the divine speeches always have this ‘higher’ ethical purpose in mind. If Job is at all associated with ancient Near Eastern wisdom, I don’t think one can separate out God’s appeal to cosmic order from ethical order. See, for example, chapter 28. And God certainly doesn’t separate the two in his divine speeches. To the contrary, he links his withholding of light with punishment of the wicked (Job 38:15) – a strange action for an ‘amoral’ God. When he cross-examines Job in the interlude to the divine speeches, it is ‘good’ and ‘evil’ which is explicitly at stake (40:8) – unspeakably, Job’s goodness and God’s evil. If God were just claiming to be amoral, that would not leave the book of Job so haunted with injustice. We would simply conclude that God abdicates any ethical responsibility. Fair enough, it’s a big task. But because God is claiming to follow some moral law that is above any earthly comprehension, especially Job’s, he becomes absolutely injust: Job is not only dealt with arbitrarily, but has been robbed of his ability to protest. This is not only a silence in which Job’s complaints are unanswered by God in Job’s own terms, but a silence which has rendered all protest unanswerable. ‘Yhwh’s revelation to Job does not promote dialogue; it ends it’ (Morrow 2006: 145).

As Philip Davies concluded, it is fine to take ethical points from the Hebrew Bible, but only if accompanied by the realization that we are cutting and pasting according to our own standards. Otherwise, such an approach faces the risk of redeeming the text and legitimizing its dominant ideology, an ideology which is, in large part, simply banal.

– Deane

The First Academic Conference on U2

16 Wednesday Sep 2009

Posted by Deane in Angels, Biblical Studies, Conferences & Seminars, Evil, Music, Reception

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

fallen angels, The Hype and the Feedback, U2

Unusual conferences are great! In a couple of weeks I’ll be flying out to Durham, North Carolina to take in the first academic conference on U2.

U2: The Hype and the Feedback

The conference program is here and includes stuff from a whole range of different disciplines. I’ll be presenting on fallen angels in U2’s music, and the interrelationships with ancient Jewish and Christian accounts – and mixing it up with some thoughts on how to avoid the ‘original versus deviant copy’ approach to reception history.

If you’re intrigued, come along! Registration is open to anybody who’s interested.

Job, Adolf Hitler, and the Ethics of the Hebrew Bible: Or, why Philip Davies and Deane Galbraith are More or Less Wrong

15 Tuesday Sep 2009

Posted by James Harding in Biblical Studies, Death, Evil, God, Hebrew Bible, History, Religion

≈ 18 Comments

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Adolf Hitler, Deane Galbraith, Gilgamesh, Job, Philip Davies, Qumran

Job is, as St Jerome understood well, the slipperiest of the biblical books. It is also one of the rare moments when the Hebrew Bible truly approaches literary and philosophical greatness. In this it ranks alongside the Epic of Gilgamesh as a treasure from the ancient Near East. Its complexity scares me, which is why I have a monograph worth of drafts still sitting unpublished on my hard drive. As a corollary of its complexity, it fascinates me that so many generations of readers have felt compelled to close down its ambiguities and to redeem its horrors: for the god this book offers us is truly a monster. No wonder there is so little evidence of its authority in the sectarian scrolls from Qumran (except perhaps in the Hodayot) or in the New Testament (except perhaps in Romans), no wonder the rabbis debated its meaning so vigorously, and no wonder its reception history is one that reflects the endless attempt to own its meaning. Job becomes patient, he becomes a type of Christ, and so on.

Marc Chagall's 'Job's Despair'

Marc Chagall's 'Job's Despair' (1960)

I have here the modest aim of offering a footnote to Deane Galbraith and Philip Davies, via a slight detour through a revisionist approach to the personality of Adolf Hitler. In a recent interview in Der Spiegel, Birgit Schwarz has suggested we need to reconsider Adolf Hitler’s conviction that he was an artistic genius. This is the theme of her book Geniewahn: Hitler und die Kunst (Böhlau, 2009). For Schwarz, Hitler’s conviction that he was a genius misunderstood by those who rejected his art was at the centre of his worldview. Along with his deep inner conviction he needed a community of admirers, of which Josef Goebbels was a fine example, to bolster this delusion. This delusion of genius carried with it the conviction that Hitler was above morality and thus permitted to do anything: “The genius has outstanding ideas, and they must be implemented, even if they are completely amoral.”

The Yahweh of the book of Job is a Genie in the Hitlerian sense. That is, he is utterly amoral by virtue of being an artistic genius above the banalities of the human world in which puny, scabby little Job finds himself mired. This is how he answers Job in Job 38:1-41:26. “Will you condemn me that you may be justified?,” asks Yahweh in 40:8. He asks this in the context of asserting that because he is such a genius that he can create the marvellous cosmos, from the morning stars to the dumb ostrich, he is in no way bound by the kind of morality Job understands. In this I suggest Deane Galbraith is slightly missing the point by suggesting that Yahweh “simply demands obedience without justification.” That, perhaps, was always to be read between the lines of Job 23:12, but the focus in the Yahweh speeches is on Yahweh’s genius, not Job’s obedience. Job submits after a fashion to this dreadful god, but his obedience is not quite the point. It is that to whatever little world of justification Job may feel himself to belong, Yahweh is too much of a genius to worry about it. He can treat Job as a pawn in his cosmic game of oneupmanship with the Accuser without scruple.

But to leave the matter there would be to do an injustice to another genius, the greatest of all ancient Hebrew poets, from whose stylus this masterpiece has proceeded. (S)he was a genius in our sense of an extraordinary talent, not in Hitler’s. This is obvious, given that her name and personality have vanished behind her creation. This creation has much to teach us in the ethical sphere. If there truly exists a god such as the one portrayed in Job, He has nothing to teach us about ethics. As Job himself learns, true ethics begins when we face one another and acknowledge our common humanity (Job 21:5). Here Philip Davies is far too simple in his rejection of the Hebrew Bible. The problem lies as much in the sphere of textuality and the nature of Scripture as in the sphere of ethics in sensu stricto.

Marc Chagall's "Job Prays"

Marc Chagall's 'Job Prays' (1960)

Davies’ reflections have much to commend them. It does seem prima facie that it is ridiculous to suggest that the religions of the world have given humans ethics that bestow value on human life: frequently the effects of these traditions have shown the opposite. The “divine command” approach to ethics so fundamental to the Hebrew Bible and to many communities of its readers is arguably not a question of “ethics” at all. For a start, it is inseparable from ancient Near Eastern treaties, in which people were compelled under threat of torture, genocide, and exile (see Deuteronomy 28 for a particularly edifying example) to obey the suzerain king. Such treaties offer the framework for biblical ideas of covenant, and are the reason biblical ideas of covenant are inseparable from ancient Near Eastern notions of kingship. The Yahweh of the Hebrew Bible was created in the image of an ancient Near Eastern despot. If we focus on “codes” of law in the Hebrew Bible, we are more or less lost with respect to ethics. As in Job 1-2, we are surely unable to serve Yahweh gratuitously, because if we fail to serve him he will afflict us with blight and mildew (or at any rate a gruesome skin disease).

But is this all? It seems to me at least that part of the purpose of the book of Job is precisely to deconstruct the covenant on which such a hideous and inadequate moral code is based. It deconstructs it by exposing the unspeakable deity at its root. If, however, we shift our attention from Job 38:1-41:26 and look at the dialogue, we see an attempt to negotiate an approach to ethics that is based not on obeying the random precepts of a capricious (and generally invisible) deity, but rather on attention to the suffering of the Other. Job commands his friends to look at him and be appalled (Job 21:5) – that is, engage with him as he is, rather than explaining his place in an irrelevant and dehumanizing ethical system that buys divine righteousness at the price of human dignity. An ethic that begins with Job 21:5 cannot be a matter of a code of law but must be negotiated in the mess of human life.

For this we need not simply a text but a community of readers, and this is where the problem lies with Davies. He reifies the text in a manner more akin to some (by no means all) of the advocates of theological hermeneutics to which he is so implacably opposed. Scripture only exists, however, in its recognition as such and in its consequent use in the context of an interpretive community. We receive Scripture through the lens of Talmud (in Judaism) or apostolic tradition (in Catholic and Orthodox Christianities). While these traditions provide frameworks that are used to limit the meaning of Scripture, the availability of Scripture to an infinite readership means that its meaning cannot be controlled. There can be no “biblical values” without a community to pick and choose from the smorgasbord of biblical options, yet at the same time there can be no limit on a given reader’s reclamation of Scripture from those who would construe such “biblical values” as the hermeneutical key to scriptural interpretation. More simply, Scripture can be taken to mean (almost) anything; consequently it actually means nothing. The range of possible construals is radically open.

Back to ethics. Job 21:5 can be construed as the key to the deconstruction of the ethical system that the Job of the prologue had taken as read. In the canon of the Hebrew Bible as a whole, it is perhaps Leviticus 19:18 that has that honour. This is because to command someone to love their neighbour as they love themselves is to command something that cannot really be codified. While “love” in the context of ancient Near Eastern treaties tends to be a matter of unquestioning obedience, what might it mean to love one’s neighbour in that sense? The radical openness of this command, not to mention its resistance to definitive codification, is arguably what made it so central to the ethics of the synoptic Jesus and of the Hillel portrayed in b. Shabb. 31b, as well as the command on which much of the work of Emmanuel Levinas could be construed as an extended commentary.

So readers make Scripture, and readers make biblical values. Davies is right that it is to some external set of values that such readers in fact make appeal when they attach themselves to “biblical values.” But it is in the engagement between readers, interpretive communities, and the sacred texts that are constituted by them that such values emerge, and in this more complex sense it could just be asserted that “religion” (on some level) has, by an extended process of extrapolation, given us ethical values we can live by.

Philip Davies on Divine Command Theory: ‘Ethics out of a can’

09 Wednesday Sep 2009

Posted by The Dunedin School in Ethics, Evil, God, Hebrew Bible, Politics, Relativism, Violence

≈ 4 Comments

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Ethics, Jean-François Lyotard, Just Gaming, Philip Davies, torture

In a recent article, “Are There Ethics in the Hebrew Bible?“, Emeritus Professor Philip Davies answers the question he poses in his title, in the main, with a resounding ‘no’.

Davies reasons that much of what passes for ethics in the Hebrew Bible involves only sets of “rules that are imposed and expected to be obeyed”. But this is the kind of approach to ethics we might take with children. By contrast, the internalisation of ethical reasoning – which is expected of an adult – is markedly absent throughout most of the Hebrew Bible. But “[e]thics develop in a society where individuals have to make their own moral judgments about intrinsic goodness.”

Cherem

Why does the Bible fail to develop any depth of ethical reasoning, except for a few limited exceptions? “Because the Bible is culturally totalitarian—unsurprisingly, because it emanates from a totalitarian world of monarchic societies.”

We see this in the divine speech at the end of the book of Job. God appears and simply demands obedience without justification, thwarting the more sophisticated attempts at ethical reasoning in earlier parts of the book.

The French philosopher, Jean-François Lyotard says the same thing about the god of the Hebrew Bible in Just Gaming. Lyotard describes the Hebrew god as a god who never reveals the rationale for the obligation under which he places humans. And he’s funny:

“God commands. One does not know very well what he commands. He commands obedience, that is, that one place oneself in the position of the pragmatic genre of obligation. Then he commands a whole slew of small, unbelievable things: how to cook lamb, and so on. Which is surprising, because one does not expect God to hand out kitchen recipes, and it takes the Jewish people by surprise also.”

(Lyotard, Just Gaming, 52).

The practical upshot of all this is that the Bible doesn’t provide many very good solutions to ethical issues in the real world, unless its interpreters are prepared to cut and paste the bits of the tradition that they find useful… utterly subjectively.

“I am not sure the Bible would worry too much about torture: its god is quite comfortable with the idea… Now, I treasure the Bible. And I even think that religion does have many advantages. But ethics is not one of religion’s gifts to humanity, and the Bible cannot serve a modern democracy as a moral guide—unless of course we decide ourselves, on or own ethical principles, which bits of it we will follow and which ones we will not. Come to think of it, though, isn’t this really what most of its believers actually do? So why not come clean and stop pretending that our Western culture is built on “biblical values”: for, thank god, it isn’t!”

(Philip Davies, “Are There Ethics in the Hebrew Bible?”)

– Deane

A Bible Commentary on The Book of Job

19 Wednesday Aug 2009

Posted by The Dunedin School in Evil, Film

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Tags

Evil, Job, theodicy

This video fairly much nails the key elements of the Book of Job, a text which both informs and confounds every attempt to consider ‘the problem of evil’.

“[Job’s friends] debated back and forth until God himself, literally, couldn’t take any more of their shit.”

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