Appeal and Attitude: Prospects for Ultimate Meaning

6. Attitude in the Axial Age

118 six Attitude in the Axial Age We worship the Good Mind of the Lord . . . and the Good Faith, the good law, and Piety the ready mind within your people! —Zarathushtra1 The Axial Age Initiative of Attitude Thinking We have already used Jaspers’s conception of a mid-first-millennium bce ‘‘Axial Age’’ to frame an account of appeal thinking. The same approach is needed to enter understandingly into attitude thinking, its close companion, since another of the compellingly relevant novelties of Axial Age teaching is the project of explicitly defining a right attitude of the subject responsive to supreme appeal. Axial Age teachers show that the most promising orientational strategies for relating effectively to great appellants are great appeals in their own right. But we must proceed under a warning flag. Although attitude engineering is manifestly a central Axial Age concern, there is no Axial Age word that can accurately be translated ‘‘attitude.’’ Like value and appeal, attitude is a modern concept that presupposes, among other things, the modern state of historical, psychological, and sociological interest in a pluralism of norms. Ancient people certainly were concerned about changes of mood, differences of temperament and character, alternate basic states of motivation, and deep issues in the justification of intentions, and they did regularly use terms corresponding to Attitude in the Axial Age 119 terms we use for specific attitudes. They did not, however, set about surveying and correlating these things with an emphasis on the variable as variable. That is our modern emphasis. About a hundred years ago, we rather suddenly began to ask the term attitude to carry a large part of the psychological and normative load of our effort to think through pluralism, and we have been speaking of attitude remarkably often ever since. A good example of the oldest documented attitude thinking will be found in the ‘‘Sumerian Variation of the ‘Job’ Motif.’’ One modern translator assures us it was ‘‘composed, no doubt, for the purpose of prescribing the proper attitude and conduct for a victim of cruel and seemingly undeserved misfortune .’’2 Clearly there is a righteousness motif in the text. Significantly, though, the text’s primary focus is a prosperous relationship with a god rather than a good attitude for its own sake: Let a man utter constantly the exaltedness of his god . . . Let his lament soothe the heart of his god, (For) a man without a god would not obtain food . . . ‘‘I am a young man, a discerning one, (yet) who respects me prospers not, My righteous word has been turned into a lie . . . You have doled out to me suffering ever anew, I entered the house, heavy is the spirit, I, the young man, went out to the street, oppressed in the heart, With me, the valiant, my righteous shepherd has become angry, has looked upon me inimically . . . My god, you who are the father who begot me, [lift up] my face, Like an innocent cow, in pity . . . They say—the sages—a word righteous (and) straightforward: ‘Never has a sinless child been born to its mother’ . . .’’ The righteous words, the artless words uttered by [the young man], his god accepted, The words which the young man prayerfully confessed, Pleased the . . . flesh of his god, (and) his god withdrew his hand from the evil word, . . . which oppresses the heart . . . The encompassing sickness-demon, which had spread wide its wings, he swept away . . . He turned the young man’s suffering into joy, Set by him the . . . good . . . spirit (as a) watch (and) guardian, Gave him . . . the tutelary genii of friendly mien. To us it seems obvious that by praying the young man adjusts his balance and perspective so that he can live more happily in a morally challenging world. The final provision of a ‘‘good spirit’’ of ‘‘friendly mien’’ fits this interpretation perfectly. But what the speaker explicitly worries about is whether he is on friendly or inimical terms with a powerful god. He avows his sinfulness not to modify his sense of himself but to ‘‘please his god.’’ We might suppose that the Appeal and Attitude 120 ‘‘good spirit’’ that will help him is a figure for his own attunement, but he himself—as far as we can tell—thinks of it as a real, separate being. Even as the translation nudges the speaker’s understanding nearer to our own at key points, we can readily see...