Patient Authority and Enduring Novelty: Pragmatizing Robert W. Jenson on Time and Language

Abstract

One of the most paradigmatic functions of authority is to render judgment— not only to judge those who face it (whether these find themselves on authority’s bad side or need to appeal to authority’s good side), but perhaps more significantly to judge the direction of the future for those in its grip, thereby shaping their present and defining the point of their past. In this way, authority rests on judgment and time. In this essay, I approach authority by attending to time rather than judgment as the fundamental issue. I take it that, on a conventional understanding, this order is usually reversed: the purpose of authority is to provide security against the ravages of time. The point of judgment becomes the management of time, and authority legitimates itself to the extent that it controls time. I intend to articulate authority as a dynamic embedded within time, and so vulnerable to its vicissitudes. According to this articulation, the point of judgment is to evoke the unmanageable future, such that authority is legitimated only as its judgments become legitimated over time. Authority may accept this reality of timeliness, and so exercise itself patiently, or impatiently deny it and sputter around in its doomed attempt to master time.