Tales of creation and obligation

Relevant Māori proverb:  Kāore te kūmara e korero mō tōna ake reka - the kūmara (NZ sweet potato) doesn't speak of its sweetness.

It's almost impossible to avoid self-display as we let our worlds be massaged/pummeled by the medium of internet. I need to keep a portion of my reading/writing/thinking offline, lest the whole kit and caboodle fall into the clutches of the "I share therefore I am" mentality. Which is back to the garden, I guess.

 

I'm swinging back to thinking the whole "good girl/good boy" thing does more harm than good - totalising identity conclusions and all that. "Good" can easily have no content other than obedience in a clout-driven society. Then once you have clout you do what you want. As you say, a more principled approach can hopefully be brought to the matter

 

Speaking of identity conclusions, here's a quote from Richard Kearney distinguishing the "narrative identity" approach from our usual idea of identity as permanent substance:

 

Ethics, in other words, presupposes the existence of a certain narrative identity: a self which remembers its commitments to the other (both in its personal and collective history) and recalls that these commitments have not yet been fulfilled. This narrative self is not some permanently subsisting substance (idem). It is to be understood rather as a perpetually self-rectifying identity (ipse) which knows that its story, like that of the imagination which narrates it, is never complete. It is because it is inseparable from the activity of a poetical-critical imagination which sustains it, that the self’s commitment to the other—the other who addresses me at each moment and asks me who I am and where I stand — is never exhausted. The identity of the narrative self is, consequently, one that cannot be taken for granted. It must be ceaselessly reinterpreted by imagination. To reply to the question ‘who?’, is to tell one’s story to the other. And the story is always one which narrates a relation to the other, a tale of creation and obligation that never comes to an end. .... [The model of narrative identity] constitutes the self as the reader and the writer of his own life. But it also casts each one of us as a narrator who never ceases to revise, reinterpret and clarify his own story—by relating himself in turn to the cathartic effects of those larger narratives, both historical and fictional, transmitted by our cultural memory. The notion of personal identity is thus opened up by the narrative imagination to include that of a communal identity.   

 

Richard Kearney, The Wake of Imagination

 

By the way, I really admired the way you made yourself available to let The Brothers Karamazov  make a moral claim on you.