Professional Documents
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METAPHILOSOPHY
Vol. 28, Nos. 3, July 1997
00261068
For many scholars breathing the rarefied air of literary theory and philosophy, the world of communications technology is light years away and has
seemingly little to do with the more pressing issues of human identity and
agency in an age of moral relativism. But like many of my colleagues in
the humanities, facing the beginning of my career in these extreme times
of uncertainty, I have become increasingly dependent upon new modes of
communication, new ways of transmitting my work, and new forms of
leisure activity. And I am also witnessing an increasing disparity between
the theoretical issues of my scholarly work and the realities of life in the
electronic age. There are some questions in my field that are not being
answered, indeed, not even being posed. First, postmodernism problematized identity; then, cyberspace simplified postmodernism; and so what,
now, is becoming of personal identity as we know it? And more importantly, how are the moral and political moorings contingent upon that definition of personal identity loosening in an era transformed by information
technologies?
Armed with keyboard and mouse, we face a screen to which we are
wedded and in which we are losing ourselves, for better or worse. The
* I am grateful for comments by Terry Bynum, Martin Matusk, Sherry Turkle, Sanda
Golopentia, Inge Wimmers, and I. C. Bupp as well as the participants of ETHICOMP96
(Universidad Pontificia de Salamanca en Madrid, Nov. 68, 1996), where this essay was
originally presented.
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of cyberspace? Virtual reality, the endless proliferation of cybercommunities, and the increasing dependence upon online text will slowly begin to
impact the cultural privileging of plot and the human need for unity. The
infinite tangential nature of hypertext, web links, and the ever quickening
pace of infomania cannot help but transform the essence of Ricoeurs
narrative identity. By assessing Ricoeurs critique of and possible selfimplication in the modernist view of identity, one must look forward not
only to the restructuring of self as other within the conceptual framework
of the new communications technology, but more importantly to its ethical import.
Ricoeur, according to his critics, ultimately implicates himself in the
modernist tradition he is supposedly critiquing by taking the path of a
transcendental idealist on the subject. Despite his distinction between the
ipse (an essential selfhood) and idem (the sameness inherent in static
conceptions of selfhood) of personal identity, there remains a self-same
entity which supersedes, though ulitmately beckoned by, the Other. Thus,
unlike the French philosopher Emmanuel Lvinas who privileges ethics
before ontology, Ricoeur strives for a compromise between an answering
I to be held accountable (ipsit) and the radicality of the wholly Other.
One of Ricoeurs staunchest critics, Pamela Anderson, contends that
Ricoeurs position is not radical enough to dissassociate him from the
tradition of Descartes, Kant and Hegel, and thereby points to a need for
further dialogue between his hermeneutics of the self and philosophies of
difference, such as that of Lvinas (1993a,b). She asks: in ultimately
returning to an ontology of the (self)-samecontra-Lvinasin which
Ricoeur claims to explore the being of self, we must ask: does Ricoeur
intend a direct challenge to Lvinas own deliberate move beyond onotology . . .? (1993a, 245).
I argue that inherent in Ricoeurs ultimate argument for ontology before
ethics is an assumption of the way in which narrative unity informs
personal identity, an assumption which may no longer be valid as technology introduces new ontological ground, new schemas for the intersection of time and space, and thus new criteria upon which to configure an
ethics of narrative identity. Ricoeur engages in a chain of assertions beginning with the understanding of oneself as an interpretive act. The second
and, as I see it, problematic step involves the derivation of the selfs interpretation from the structure of narrative plot; in other words, the self-interpretive act is mediated by the historically unifying act of narrative (1992,
113139).
Ricoeur is not alone in his quest for understanding human agency and
all of its moral contingencies through the mediation of narrative. However,
contemporary discussions about the role of imaginative literature in the
realms of moral and political philosophy have tended towards an insufficiently critical view of narrative. Philosophers such as Alasdair MacIntyre,
Martha Nussbaum, Richard Rorty, and Charles Taylor have explored the
The Metaphilosophy Foundation and Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1997
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ular difficulties with regard to human agency. However, when the strivings
for objectivity are denounced in favor of so many petits rcits, is not a
similar ideological foundationalist claim reproduced in this new allegiance to particularism? Telling stories needs to be balanced with a continued commitment to theory: we should not fall prey to an either/or choice
of our own devising.
While some of those discourses of postmodernism which emphasize
the Other, the dynamic process of becoming, and the excesses of meaning
inherent in any linguistic expression are intellectually exhilarating, there
remains a stinging question whose solidity refuses to melt into air. Moral
and political urgencies which have resulted from the deeply penetrative
inquires by postmodern theorists require us more than ever to expand our
conceptualization of the individual. I believe that a chiasmatic relationship
between theory and imaginative narratives (including those virtual
[ir]realities) will yield the most deeply penetrating insights in the ethical
issues of our increasingly global community.
We need to begin to examine some of the difficulties that have surfaced
in the liberal/communitarian debate, and the bearing that debate has on the
futureand ethical importof the literary imagination. Narrative ethics
and ethical theory pose the same questions of what constitutes the good
life and how we should conduct ourselves within the framework of our
own individual lives. The actual form of narrative, however, invites us as
readers to involve ourselves in a sort of mental journey during which
certain ways of viewing ourselves, our lives, and others are subjected to
multiple, intertwining perspectives belonging to one or more characters.
Thus, right away the very act of reading a narrative text is in some ways
an invitation to self-exploration.
But perhaps the concept of the literary imagination could be broadened to include the inner workings of the individual mind in relation to
different texts it encounters and/or coproduces, whether those texts
appear in print or electronically.5 With the humanities currently under
siege in the United States, the active, dynamic role of the literary imagination must be expanded and clearly articulated beyond the confines of
the academy. Martha Nussbaum recently has clarified the integral role
literature can play in public policy formation and in legal affairs (1991).
But if it is true that within the decade leisure time will be spent increasingly in front of a computer screen rather than the television screen (most
likely a merging of the two will erase the distinction), then we need to
expand our notion of how the literary imagination becomes operative.
5
An example of this is the MultiUserDomain, hereafter referred to as a MUD, in which
participants log on as a self-created character, interacting with other such characters in a
community-developed narrative. Sherry Turkle offers the following definition: text-based
MUDs are a new form of collaboratively written literature. MUD players are MUD authors,
the creators as well as consumers of media content (1995, 11).
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