God is (sort of) Great

All three texts that we have read so far have made arguments which appealed to invisible authorities. This sort of appeal is perhaps most clearly present in Martin Luther King's "Letter From a Birmingham Jail," in which King posits God's moral law as the foundation of the justice with which man's law ought to align itself ("A just law is a law that squares with the moral code of God," - "of" here denoting both the moral law that belongs to God and the moral code that God is). We can find similar moves in Hecuba, where Odysseus justifies the sacrifice of Polyxena ("'of' here denoting...") on the grounds that it is the wish of Achilles', who functions as a kind of absent presence in the Hellene's arguments. Kant too posits "Nature" and "her secret" as being the driving forces behind human history as a way of interrogating the shape that such a history might take.

Appealing to an invisible authority, whether it be God, ghost, or Nature, seems to be a particularly tricky strategy as it allows the rhetor to fabricate an essential piece of the argument (I wonder too, what it says that in all three arguments this kind of appeal, which I think is at base an ethos appeal, is so central.) By "fabricate," I mean something like this: when Martin Luther King explains that he urges people to follow the law regarding the Brown v. Board decision because it is morally right, but to break the law in other cases that are morally wrong, is he not saying: obey God's law whether or not it coincides with federal, state, county or municipal law? In this argument, he entirely side-steps any law other than the law of God, in whose absence King will explicate. The appeal to a lacking authority grants the rhetor the power speak ethically in that authorities name.

It is also worth noting however, that none of the three arguments noted above rely solely on the invisible authority they invoke for their ethical effect. In the same paragraph that I quoted from King's letter above, he goes on to characterize God's law as being something that appeals to the dignity inherent in every human being - a very different kind of ethos move. Similarly, Odysseus buffets his argument with a claim about the undesirable effect that sparing Polyxena will have upon the Greek soldiers, and indirectly, upon Troy itself (an argument behind which lies brute, patriarchal, force as we discussed in class.) And while Kant uses claims about Nature to try and prove the rest of his case about human history, he tries to prove that his claims about Nature are true with a pathetic appeal to the effect that their being false would have upon the human subject.

Thus it seems that in a strange way these appeals to an absent, invisible, or otherwise lacking authority, are supported by appeals to present, tangible, utterly available subjects. In other words, an appeal to God sometimes conceals an appeal to humanity.