Document Type
Book Chapter
Publication Date
1992
Abstract
In choosing what I call "the ethics of meaning" as the subject of this chapter I bring together two of the most complex and difficult terms in our language. To begin with "meaning", few things are harder to talk about than the complex and tangled process by which what we say - or do - takes on a meaning for another. Meaning is a mixture of conscious intention and subconscious wish, of expectation and imagination, of varying and often incompatible perceptions of context, and this on the part of both writer and reader. As for "ethics": it involves nothing less than our understanding of the possibilities for goodness in human life, and how far, in a particular instance, they are achieved. Obviously, I shall not in this chapter try to work out conclusive definitions for either term or try to say anything final about the relation between them. Rather, I hope to trace out a single line of thought that connects them, less with the idea of arriving at conclusions than with the hope of defining a set of questions in such a way as to suggest how they might be worth pursuing.
I wish, that is, to draw attention to a single strand of the tangle I have described, which I shall call the ethical dimension of meaning. The thought that I wish to elaborate is a very simple one, namely that every text or utterance is a form of action, and that as such it is an ethical performance, calling for ethical judgment. This is so in at least two respects, for in every text the speaker acts both upon what I shall call her language - by which I mean all the resources of meaning her culture affords her - and upon her audience, by which I mean all those people whom her text addresses or speaks about.
Publication Information & Recommended Citation
White, James Boyd. "The Ethics of Meaning." In The Happy Couple: Law and Literature, edited by J. Neville Turner and Pamela Williams. Annandale, Australia: Federation Press, 1994.