Moral Finitude and the Ethics of Language: A New World Response to Gianni Vattimo

Morality has often been thought to be grounded in some access to an ultimate truth, an infinite experience, a sublime authority with which the individual identifies and that the individual is able to draw upon or claim. ¹ Instead, I would like to suggest that a moral position may be one that disclaims any such identification. Instead of grounding a moral stance in access to the absolute, we might define it as a positive acceptance of one's own finitude, limitation, circumscription. What characterizes a moral position may not be identification with, or claims to speak from or for, any absolute authority or infinite understanding, but rather the denial of just such claims or possibility. It may be in our self-retraction—in our recognition of human fallibility and lack of total understanding—that morality resides.

These suggestions generally accord with those of Gianni Vattimo's contribution to this symposium ("Ethics without Transcendence?"), although with differences in formulation and emphasis. I share Vattimo's sense of the "risks run by any ethics claiming to be 'natural,' any ethics claiming to be founded in the nature of humankind and the nature of things," and I share as well his skepticism of ethical modes that presuppose an "essentialist metaphysics." I admire his support for "an ethics of negotiation and consensus rather than one of immutable principles that speak identically to all." I admire also his support for an ethics in which recognizing "that our reasons are not absolute tends to make shared criteria available instead." However, I would propose a somewhat different formulation of the notion of transcendence (as distinct from postmetaphysics, terms he seems to use alternatively), and would situate "individual conscience" in other terms than he does. I think too that the stance of moral finitude may find expression and enactment in particular modes of language, where language itself is revealed to have an ethical dimension, to deploy, define, and project ethical attitudes and commitments.

To develop this notion of moral finitude and a corresponding ethics of language, I prefer to appeal to an American tradition in politics, culture, and literature, and specifically to a poetic tradition as represented in the work of Robert Frost. Poetics affords an intensive view into the ethics of language in that it, above all other literary modes, makes the forms of language its first attention, its particular, self-conscious reflection. In Frost, linguistic self-reflection with specifically ethical implications is clearly rooted in, and speaks for, a tradition of American discourses, institutions, and experiences. To make this claim is not to say that an ethical poetics and moral understanding like Frost's are central to every American context or writer or even poet, although I do think that their extent in the literary tradition may be larger than might first appear. Nor is it my claim that the sorts of linguistic commitments central to Frost are exclusively American. Yet Frost can speak on behalf of a strong tendency of American culture and American poets, for which and for whom a commitment to moral finitude is central and defines both poetic practices and the poetic address to aspects of the surrounding world.

This commitment to moral finitude, to embracing one's own finitude as a moral position, is (for Frost and the poetic tradition from which he emerges) concretely situated within American contexts. Especially relevant is the lack of an established church, which is to say that the anarchy and hence freedom of religious activities in North America are pertinent. ² The tradition of individualism as the fundamental unit of any social contract or communal commitment has roots in American Protestant experience and takes on its own specific forms within the community and authority of the various churches. ³ This mode of religious individualism has in turn complex historical, political, and theoretical connections to other American individualist modes, including both political republicanism...