Percy-L: Literary, Religious, Scientific, and Philosophical Discussion of Walker Percy

[Thomas Gollier <tgollier AT gmail.com>]

Mike,

Good to hear from you.

You brought me up short with your reference to me teaching a "rhetorical skill set," since I'm adamantly opposed to
mixing rhetoric, in the sense of persuading others, with critical thinking. However, the standard of "consistent and
complete" — I not sure where "elegant and cohesive" came from — is the basis of persuading others, but critical
thinking, while it uses the same standard, is more concerned with persuading oneself as to what one should believe
is true. Critical thinking, at its best, is a self-conscious back-and-forth collective effort toward discovering
truth. While "consistent" may be deductive, however, "completeness" is inductive, so regardless of how sure we may be
that we've tp what's true, it never flips over into The Truth once and for all. Every conclusion, having better or
worse reasons for believing it is true, is open to debate. This is, I think, is the inescapable predicament of
finite bodies that think in an infinite universe.

What I found more interesting, though, and that you find, presumably on the basis of an objective moral code, both
"Lance *and* Margot to be untrustworthy in serious ways." If that's Lance's confession, it sounds more like a kind
politician's unapologetic "apology" to me. I really don't see how it could warrant any kind of absolution or
release. At first, their relationship was "transactional." He offered the Southern aristocracy; she offered Texas
money. And, they did seem to share the common objective of refurbishing of their house. But when the house was done,
he remarks, she seemed to be done too. If the relationship were purely transactional, the transaction was completed,
and each could have simply moved on. But no, the confession consists in the explanation or recounting of how
something more had formed in their marriage, what I am calling a "moral bond" between them, and that she, not Lance,
had betrayed it. He even seems to try to convince himself that the sexual infidelity should not be such a big
deal, but it is, and it irrevocably broke that bond between them with such finality that he must have video evidence
of the act itself. His "confession" is a matter of coming to understand the causes and consequences of what had
happened, the crimes he had committed, so as to find the absolution or release that would allow a restart to his
life. Is that even possible after such crimes?

Personally, what I really like about this novel is that it sharpens the contrasts and contours of Percy's
existentialism, and in the process it, somewhat paradoxically, makes his personal Catholicism more comprehensible to me.
He seems to take the "confession" — the thing that apparently attracted him to Catholicism in the first place — and
makes it into something different from the repentance and forgiveness (that is not forgiveness) it is within the
Church. I would argue more generally that he rejects the depersonalizations of abstract Gods and Churches, the
illusions of an objective moral code or truth. Perhaps that's a bit speculative? But he does, I think, try to the
bring or give what truth those things can have for us to bear on our actual existence.

Thanks
Tom

On Wed, Jul 29, 2020 at 1:35 PM Michael Larson <larsonovic AT gmail.com> wrote:

Tom,

You're not annoying me. I appreciate the dialogue. I'll try to respond.

I'll start with your question: " How does the notion of a 'hierarchy of subjectivity' come from the possibility of infinite subjective interpretations and the fact some of those interpretations are better than others?"

It comes contained in the last part of your question itself: "... the fact that some of those interpretations are better than others." If some interpretations are better than others, a hierarchy is by nature already established and an objective standard is likewise already implied.

When you speak of how you grade student writing, you are talking about evaluating their display of a rhetorical skill set, not about their grasp of the truth. Those are two different things. Either one can be judged hierarchically. Elegance and cohesiveness of communication make a scale that is independent of what is true. One person may offer an elegant defense and plenty of cohesive reasoning as to why the earth is flat. Another person might stumble through a weak defense of the spinning globe. We might rank the former ahead of the latter in the skill set of rhetoric, but we might rank the latter ahead of the former in his apprehension of the truth as to the physical nature of the earth.

The same is true when we look at a piece of literature: one person might write beautifully about something that goes quite astray of what the story means while another person might struggle in attempting to articulate what is essentially a deep understanding of that same story. Of course, we are most pleased when the two skills--communication and apprehension--are joined in a single work. Take, for example, Tolkien's marvelous essay (a lecture, actually), "The Monsters and the Critics." Prior to that lecture, many well-known scholars had failed to grasp both the artistic genius and the deep layers of meaning in Beowulf. In fact, they disdained many of the very things that Tolkien was able to rescue--and not because his subjective interpretation was more popular. It wasn't. In fact, it wasn't fully known until he put it into words, but when he did, many objective truths about the poem were made manifest to anyone who cared to see them and especially to those who had always had a sense for them but lacked the articulation. In short, Tolkien's interpretation was better than that of prior critics, and people knew it. They knew it because it is possible for humans to recognize when something is objectively true, especially when it provides relief against that which has been less than fully true.

What I am asserting here seems in direct opposition to what you say a little later in your post: "I propose to my students that the reason for objectively seeking out different interpretations is not to pick the right one." My first thought about this is that there might not be a "right one." The presence of several interpretations is no guarantee that any of them has a good grasp on what is being interpreted. Alternatively, they might all be basically "right," more or less, though perhaps with differing levels of rhetorical effectiveness. In any case, I would always encourage my students to compare and contrast, to evaluate arguments, to measure what they read against reality, insofar as they have access to it. When the object is truth, then everyone--critics and readers--is essentially working together toward the same goal, though some with more success than others.

But it sounds like, for you, the object is not so much truth as it is to work out a kind of subjective average in one's own mind. You say, "[The reason for seeking out different interpretations] is to get a non-objective sense of the center and most comprehensive comprehension of all those various interpretations." There is nothing wrong, of course, with understanding a variety of interpretations, but if the end of that understanding is merely to find the center of that variety, then we have diverted our gaze from the object under consideration and shifted it to the amalgamated opinion of the considerers. This is not exactly pure subjectivism, which would be interested only in one's own opinion, but it is a kind of preoccupation with potential means rather than the use of those means toward their natural end: to arrive at truth regarding the object under consideration.

In your paragraph about morality, I'm not sure I follow the shift from moral code to moral bond. To recognize a moral code, whether subjective or objective, is a different mental act than to trust a neighbor not to harm you. The former is concerned with classification (i.e. this is good, this is evil) while the latter is concerned with prudential judgment (I predict that you will not burn my house down). So once again, both acts can be present: I can judge (whether accurately or not) that someone's burning down my house would be an evil act even as I also judge (whether accurately or not) that I do not think you will commit this act. Then if you do actually burn down my house, I will know that my trust was misplaced; the house will go up in smoke, but the classification of arson as evil will be quite untouched by those flames.

It's true that if this happened, I would no longer trust you not to burn my house down. And yes, it's also possible, depending on how much I trusted you to begin with, that I might start to doubt, in general, my judgment of who is trustworthy and who is not. But to lose trust in others or in one's ability to assess the trustworthiness of others is not the same as losing the sense that some things are moral and that other things are immoral.

I too find Lance and Margot to be untrustworthy in serious ways. The acts that reveal their untrustworthiness are also acts I understand to be objectively immoral. I would argue further that to even speak of trust and distrust once again implies an objective sense of morality in the one who trusts or distrusts. What makes us trust someone are typically things understood to be morally good: honesty, forthrightness, patience, stability, etc.. What makes us distrust someone are typically things understood to be morally bad: lying, deception, short-temperedness, fickleness, etc.. We know these things. Deep down.

Mike