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Copyright © 2003 by Duke University Press. All rights reserved.
Common Knowledge
9.3 (2003) 406-423
[Access article in PDF] 
Moral Finitude and the Ethics of Language
A New World Response to Gianni Vattimo
 
Shira Wolosky 
Morality has often been thought to be grounded in some access to an ultimate truth, aninfinite experience, a sublime authority with which the individual identifies and that theindividual is able to draw upon or claim.
1
Instead, I would like to suggest that a moralposition may be one that disclaims any such identification. Instead of grounding a moralstance in access to the absolute, we might define it as a positive acceptance of one's ownfinitude, limitation, circumscription. What characterizes a moral position may not beidentification with, or claims to speak from or for, any absolute authority or infiniteunderstanding, 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—thatmorality resides.These suggestions generally accord with those of Gianni Vattimo's contribution
[End Page406]
to this symposium ("Ethics without Transcendence?"), although with differences informulation and emphasis. I share Vattimo's sense of the "risks run by any ethics claiming tobe '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 "essentialistmetaphysics." I admire his support for "an ethics of negotiation and consensus rather thanone of immutable principles that speak identically to all." I admire also his support for anethics in which recognizing "that our reasons are not absolute tends to make shared criteriaavailable instead." However, I would propose a somewhat different formulation of the notionof 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 thestance 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 toappeal to an American tradition in politics, culture, and literature, and specifically to a poetictradition as represented in the work of Robert Frost. Poetics affords an intensive view intothe ethics of language in that it, above all other literary modes, makes the forms of languageits first attention, its particular, self-conscious reflection. In Frost, linguistic self-reflection withspecifically ethical implications is clearly rooted in, and speaks for, a tradition of Americandiscourses, institutions, and experiences. To make this claim is not to say that an ethicalpoetics 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 thanmight first appear. Nor is it my claim that the sorts of linguistic commitments central to Frostare exclusively American. Yet Frost can speak on behalf of a strong tendency of Americanculture and American poets, for which and for whom a commitment to moral finitude iscentral and defines both poetic practices and the poetic address to aspects of thesurrounding 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 withinAmerican contexts. Especially relevant is the lack of an established church, which is to saythat the anarchy and hence freedom of religious activities in North America are pertinent. 
2
The tradition of individualism
[End Page 407]
as the fundamental unit of any social contractor communal commitment has roots in American Protestant experience and takes on its ownspecific 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 toother American individualist modes, including both political republicanism and economicliberalism. Political traditions of distinct states balanced against federal authority, of distinctbranches of government balanced against each other, of separation of church and statecreating neutral public spaces: all of these in complex interaction open a negative space of retraction, the observance of which constitutes a positive moral commitment.This history involves intricate and sometimes surprising relations between religiousstructures and a morality of limitation. The idea of moral finitude may perhaps be extendedtoward a corollary notion of religious finitude, and I would like to show how the extension isfundamental to genuine religious sensibility and commitment. I hope, that is, to claim thatunconditional claims to authority transgress what is defining in religious commitment: theawe before a transcendence that one can never command or possess and in terms of whichthe self emerges as a finite person unable to—indeed forbidden from—asserting commandand possession. Here the notion of transcendence is not identical with or subsumable intometaphysics as a category, a distinction that Gianni Vattimo does not draw in his piece.Instead, the notion of transcendence asserts limits to what we can grasp and therebyobviates claims to know a metaphysical reality. Vattimo's distinction between thepostmetaphysical ethics of others—the ethics that he himself proposes—and the Levinasianethics of the Other (as if this were "conceived in terms of laws that stem from essences andmetaphysical structures") misses, I believe, some of Levinas's force. The Other and othersare not simply oppositional. The Other announces not a metaphysical category or "transcendent entity," but rather its remotion. Levinas's idea of otherness establishes arelationship that removes from any self a right of incursion into any other self. Each other remains reserved, which is to say sacred, in this structure of transcendence—a structurethat, however, is not metaphysical (either as realm or as claim) but rather acts as a limit tosuch realms and claims.The relation of moral finitude (as a concept) to religious tradition is complex.
[End Page408]
The sense of human limitation or retraction proposed here has some common groundwith what has traditionally, in religious contexts, been called humility. I would distinguish,however, finitude from humility in that humility has tended to imply an act of submission or subordination within a hierarchy of authority that ultimately could or does make veryexpansive, if not infinite, claims. Yet finitude, if it is to mean anything, ought to deny anysuch claims to any person in any position; nor should it entail utter subordination to anyother finite person in a hierarchy. Each self remains his or her own center of moral authority.Finitude affirms, not a subjection, but a limitation, a self-limitation or self-retraction, as amoral stance. Self-retraction also stands distinct from traditional ideals of self-sacrifice,which carry, in my view, a self-contradictory element. What self is acting if the self issacrificed? Self-limitation or retraction, in contrast, does not ideally eliminate the self: agentselves who respect and make room for other selves are, more or less by definition, affirmed.Finally, moral finitude may suggest or recall some traditional conceptions of humanity asfallen or sinful. But finitude, in the sense in which I am treating it, is not a defect that requiresrecovery or rescue: it is, rather, a proper and appropriate condition to be acknowledged andembraced. There may, however, remain important connections to and yet differences fromwhat has been referred to as self-transcendence. Still, transcendence, in the context thatVattimo's and my contributions here seek to establish, is not a realm or state one can enter.Instead, transcendence stands for what cannot be entered, what remains ever beyond one'sown finitude, marking its proper boundaries. A formula of the consequent religious positionmight be that: the reason to believe in God is to remember that you are not yourself God,that you cannot claim to see or know as He does, and above all that you cannot venture toenact for God or in His name what you imagine He wills or intends, especially if doing so
 
would impose on others.Self-transcendence, understood in this way, accepts a boundary to the self and experiencesawe before what stands beyond it, outside the reach and possession of the self. Whatstands beyond is marked as transcendent Other but experienced in every other thattranscends each selfhood. Finitude, again, is not sin. Yet there remains a possibility of sin bythe definitions that Vattimo proposes. There is "the pretense that value is given uscategorically as an object—this is sin." There is also, as sin, the "inability to suspend totaladherence to the present object." And, as Vattimo adds, "recovery from sin would be anopening to other voices and other possibilities that would free us from the submissivenesswith which the given and the actual tend to subjugate us." I would add, though, thatVattimo's formulation is refracted through the lens of a European-centered tradition and itsconcerns. He distances himself from an Other as metaphysically conceived, "thundering itscategorical imperative to the private individual conscience," and Vattimo aligns himself instead with a Heideggerian distrust of 
[End Page 409]
humanism as "subjective, relating tothe limited individual conscience." Moreover, Vattimo describes the "very essence of ethics"as "endless attenuation of the self," which seems to express a desire for release from thehuman boundedness that is, for me in any case, the site of human responsibility and hencemorality. Self-retraction is not an endless attenuation of the self, but rather a firm centeringin the self as bounded: as acknowledging those boundaries in relation and respect to others,yet also in relation and respect to the self. Without self, there is also no other and no moralagency.A formulation of moral finitude like the one I have been sketching may seem to raise or issue in problems of moral skepticism or relativism. Disclaiming access to the absolute maybe said to render impossible any moral position at all. Conversely, it might seem that thecommitment to moral finitude may render impossible any sort of joint action, mutualcommitment, or common life, isolating each individual in finite selfhood. In response, verybriefly, I would suggest that the notion of moral finitude be regarded as self-regulating: anyaction that fails to respect the moral finitude of others and impinges upon them may beconsidered immoral and rightly resisted. This approach, of course, follows the sort of formalreasoning familiar from the Kantian tradition. However, instead of resting on a concept of impartiality that erases the particular differences between the selves making moral judgments, the notion of moral finitude assumes that each finite self remains defined by thespecific histories, communities, and families that gave him or her birth and definition. Theself I have been describing is no "unencumbered self": relationship is part of what it meansto be (and again, to acknowledge being) finite and to act out of that finitude.
4
In this context,it is not the universal common nature of human beings that is morally fundamental. 
5
What iscalled for is to recognize the inevitable and irrevocable differences between us, such thatone must not project oneself onto others but instead respect everyone as ultimately unique.Each moral finitude is by nature not negotiable—protected, defended, and entitled to besustained.Of course, just how to balance the different claims and defenses of each finitude, each self,would have to be adjudicated case by case. Vattimo's vision of an "ethics of negotiation andconsensus rather than one of immutable principles that speak identically to all" points atonce in philosophical, ethical, and political directions. Here he approaches a scene of Habermasian negotiation. The scene of discourse, however, would not be idealized asHabermasian discourse
[End Page 410]
theory idealizes it, nor imagined as (in ThomasMcCarthy's description) a "general and reciprocal perspective taking."
6
Negotiation wouldbe between
un
common interests, each distinct from the others. Yet more than the purelynegative liberty of Isaiah Berlin's definition seems required for an ethical vision. As Vattimoposes it, an ethics "must propose specific content as well. As a citizen," he asks, "whatvalues, precisely, do I profess and what reasons should I put forward for preferring them?"Each moral finitude must have positive responsibility for each other finitude, at least theresponsibility of establishing conditions for each one's (finite) moral agency and (finite)sphere and interests. Not accidentally, a standard of praxis for this balance betweennegative and positive would be James Madison's in
Federalist 
10, where he argues that, notunity, but a greater multiplicity of interests in mutual negotiation, is the most pragmatic mode
of 00

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