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Austin, John L. (1911-60)

Austin was a leading exponent of 'analytical' or 'Ordinary Language' philosophy. He taught at Oxford for most of his life, and practised this method there from 1945 until his death in 1960. His essay 'Other Minds' (1946) introduced the category of PERFORMATIVE UTTERANCES by distinguishing such first-person utterances as 'I promise', 'I warn' from merely descriptive sentences (in Philosophical Papers, Oxford: Clarendon, 1961, 44-84, esp. 65-74). His 1955 Harvard lectures on performative utterances are published as How to Do Things with Words (Oxford: OUP, 1962; 2nd edn, 1975).

An utterance such as 'I promise' performs an action in the very saying of it: 'by using this formula ... I have bound myself to others, and staked my reputation' (Philosophical Papers, 67). Similarly 'I know' also entails giving 'others my word; I give others my authority for saying "S is P"' (ibid.). 'I promise' or 'I know' is 'quite different' from 'he promises' or 'he knows'.

Nevertheless 'the term "performative" will be used in a variety of cognate ways' (How to Do Things with Words, 6). Performatives are effective or ineffective, 'operative' or void, rather than true or false. 'We do not speak of a false bet or a false christening' (ibid., 11). Most performatives presuppose accepted conventions and regimes that words are uttered to appropriate persons in appropriate circumstances.

It no longer constitutes an operative performative to say, 'My seconds will call on you' if or where the conventions of duelling are no longer accepted. Would the utterance 'I baptize this infant 2704' constitute an operative act of baptism? (ibid., 35). Since presuppositions are entailed 'for a certain performative utterance to be happy, certain statements have to be true' (Austin's italics, ibid., 45).

Like WITTGENSTEIN, Austin notes the 'asymmetry' in logical terms between first-person uses and third-person uses of such verbs as 'I believe', 'we mourn', 'I give and bequeath', 'I bet', 'I forgive' and 'I promise' (ibid., 63). These cannot be detected, however, by grammar alone.

At the heart of Austin's work lies the destination between 'locutions' (roughly uttering a sentence with a meaning), illocutionary acts' (which perform acts in the saying of the utterance) and 'perlocutionary acts' (which perform acts by the saying of the utterance: ibid., 1-10, 114-16).

Perlocutions often, perhaps always, involve the use of quasicausal power rather than convention. Thus 'I persuade' usually embodies perlocutionary, rather than illocutionary, action. Austin rightly focuses on illocutions as most fertile for philosophy or conceptual clarification. Thus 'I praise', 'I welcome', 'I repent', 'I promise' come within this latter category. These require and repay clarification concerning the conditions for their operative currency or effectiveness.

RELEVANCE TO THE PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION

The consequences of Austin's work for LANGUAGE IN RELIGION are too numerous to list in a short article. First, he offers a semantic or performative approach to truth. 'It is true' is more like adding my signature than stating a fact.

Second, much religious language is indeed the performing of an action. Sincerely to say 'I repent' constitutes an act of repentance; it is not an attempt to inform God of a state of mind that God may already know. 'We believe' constitutes a declarative act of nailing one's colours to the mast, as well as a declaration of cognitive content. It depends on and exhibits (to use the term employed by D.D. Evans) the logic of self-involvement.

Third, it also entails what WOLTERSTORFF calls 'count-generation'. An utterance may count as the performing of an action, as when the raising of an umpire's finger may count as a declarative verdict.

Fourth, Austin established the huge variety of types of illocutionary acts that language may perform. Verbs such as reckon, grade, assess, rank, rate, may, in the first person, constitute 'verdictives'. 'I command', 'I proclaim', 'I pardon', 'I announce', 'I appoint' may function as 'executives'. 'I promise', 'I covenant', 'I pledge myself', 'I guarantee' are 'commisives'. 'I thank', 'I welcome', 'I bless', 'I curse' are behabitives (ibid., 150-60).

However, post-Austinian critics have offered improved and more coherent clarifications (notably John SEARLE). Further, Austin has been severely criticized for classifying logical force in terms of English verbs. Performatives cannot adequately be grouped in accordance with stereotypical examples or verbs in the English language.

Even so, nothing can detract from the foundation laid by Austin. Searle, Wolterstorff, F. Recanati, Daniel Vanderveken and many others have built upon, and modified, his work.

Some American and German writers on biblical HERMENEUTICS (e.g. Robert Funk and Ernst Fuchs) have over-loosely used the term 'performative' to denote any kind of dimension of action or force without taking account of the rigour and care with which Austin distinguishes different types of force and action and their basis-in situations, conventions and life. He has opened a fruitful field for further research.

authority

In the era of ENLIGHTENMENT rationalism the concept of authority appeared to generate conflict, or at least tensions, between some religions or theological doctrines and philosophical enquiry. Almost all religions entail such notions as the lordship or kingship of God (or of Christ or of a divine figure) who has authority to decree, to require obedience, to commission agents or to forgive sins. On the other hand, philosophical thought has often assumed the importance of the autonomy of the self (with Kant), and accorded it special privilege.

Neither the concept of autonomy nor the concept of authority is as simple as might appear to be the case. If it means anything to call God, Allah, or Christ 'Lord' or 'King', Christians, Jews and Muslims thereby accord to God a de jure authority, i.e. an authority of legitimate right. If they accept this authority in practice, this is also a de facto authority.

Problems arise, however, when agents or intermediaries, often in the form of sacred writings, clergy or other ecclesial officers, are invoked. What kind and degree of authority are these 'penultimate' writings or persons to be accorded?

WOLTERSTORFF points out that in everyday life we are familiar with the 'delegated authority' of a vice-chairperson or even personal assistant who acts on behalf of a director, chairperson or president (Divine Discourse, Cambridge: CUP, 1995, 37-54). Thus sacred texts and apostles may be authorized or 'commissioned to speak in the name of God' (ibid., 41 and 51, his italics). Judaism, Christianity, Islam and some other religious traditions view sacred writings as holding effective and justified power if and when they speak as the word of God.

This does not remove from religious communities the freedom and responsibility of interpretation, practical application, and examining issues that arise from the recontextualizing of sacred texts in a later age. In part this entails the discipline of responsible HERMENEUTICS. The notion that sacred texts are to be read like engineering or scientific textbooks is broadly a 'fundamentalist' tradition within several of the major world religions.

Moreover, the ready abuse of appeals to authority has been unmasked with relish by NIETZSCHE (1844-1900) and other philosophical critics. Kant (1724-1804) held to the notion of the absolute authority of the categorical (moral) imperative, but urged that divine authority is not merely one of raw power and threat, since God respects the dignity, responsibility and freedom of human persons.

Kierkegaard (1813-55) represents a way of thinking that readily holds together the importance of religious obedience with an insistence that religious faith is not a matter of responding to second-hand inherited doctrines and rules, but of appropriating faith for oneself in personal self-involvement and SUBJECTIVITY. The two emphases are not incompatible.

On the other hand, FREEDOM of enquiry and freedom to respond are not sheer 'autonomy'. TILLICH (1886-1965) argued for a middle path between 'heteronomy' (a law imposed by another from without) and autonomy. To accept as 'a law' only what come from within one's own nature (autonomy) constitutes a denial of the transformative nature of religion, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer so strongly urged. Tillich calls this middle way 'theonomy'.

Freedom of philosophical enquiry denotes not a 'liberty of indifference' as if the enquirer began always A PRIORI with a blank sheet. Freedom of thought allows for a personal integrity that resists the oppression of social, religious, political or secular totalitarianism. Nevertheless it does not preclude a careful assessment of the claims of traditions and communities in relation to individual consciousness.

GADAMER (1900-2002) perhaps did more than any to rehabilitate the rational basis of respect for authority. In conscious opposition to the complacent individualism of Enlightenment rationalism, Gadamer asserts: 'Authority ... is ultimately based not on the subjection and addiction of reason but on an act of acknowledgement and knowledge . . . namely, that the other is superior ... in judgement and might ... It rests ... on an act of reason itself which, aware of its own limitations, trusts to the better insights of others' (Truth and Method, 2nd Eng. edn, London: Sheed & Ward, 1989, 279).

Gadamer alludes primarily to what has been tested in historical traditions. However, in religion the principle may apply to prophetic or apostolic witnesses as well as to traditions of wisdom, narrative and sacred teaching. Much of the old, now dated, over-sharp dualism between authority and reason has dissipated with the recognition of the part played by communities and traditions. However, if individual reason is undervalued, the issue reaches a self-contradictory situation of the kind that emerges in more radical versions of POSTMODERNISM. Both authority and reason are placed under radical criticism and undervalued.

© 2002 Oneworld Publications All rights reserved.

Tags: Religion and Spirituality

About the Author

Anthony Thiselton is Emeritus Professor of Christian Theology at the University of Nottingham, and Canon Theologian of Leicester Cathedral and Southwell Minster, UK. His academic career has involved fellowships in both the UK and the US, he has lectured around the world, and has published seven books and over 50 papers.