Interiority and Epiphany: a Reading in New Testament Ethics

Common to a good deal of contemporary philosophical reflection on human identity is the conviction that we are systematically misled, even corrupted, by a picture of the human agent as divided into an outside and an inside— a ‘true self’, hidden, buried, to be excavated by one or another kind of therapy, ranging from the intellectual therapy of the post-Cartesian tradition (the modern ‘philosophy of mind’, the epistemological struggle) to the psychological therapy of another ‘analytic’ tradition, the tradition inaugurated by Freud and still flourishing in various serious and more popular forms. Modern ethics and theology alike have been haunted by a presence usually called the authentic self: an agent whose motivation is transparent, devoid of self-deception and of socially conditioned role playing. As a therapeutic fiction, this is a construct of great power and usefulness. I suspect, though, that it is also a fiction that is intellectually shaky and, in the last analysis, morally problematic. It plays with the idea that my deepest, most significant or serious ‘interest’ is something given and something unique; it brackets the difficult issue of how we are to think through our human situation as embodying a common task, in which the sacredness of the authentic self’s account of its own interest is not the beginning and the end of moral discourse. ‘No depth exists in subject until it is created. No a priori identity awaits us ... Inwardness is a process of becoming, a work, the labour of the negative. The self is not a substance one unearths by peeling away layers until one gets to the core, but an integrity one struggles to bring into existence.’ This sharp Modern Theology 13:1 January 1997 ISSN 0266-7177