The preacher today talked about Huck Finn. He built the sermon around Huck’s moral dilemma–whether or not turn in his friend, the escaping slave Jim. For Twain, he argued, the shore of the Mississippi represents society and everything wrong with it. The raft they travel on, on the other hand, represents the individual and freedom from society. Unfortunately, he reasoned, we cannot stay on the raft forever; eventually we must return to shore. The trick, then, is to return to the raft whenever we are able.

Huck’s redemption, he argued, came when he stopped to think about his friendship with Jim, tearing up the letter he had written turning him in. The individual alone in thought thus represents the epitome of human goodness. But, as the preacher noted, Twain had no more illusions about the individual and his conscience than he did about civilization and society. Even for Huck, it was his conscience that encouraged him to turn in Jim, a conscience that spoke on behalf of society, that spoke with a voice not Huck’s own. As the preacher noted, Twain believed the conscience could be trained to advocate any “awful sacredness” if just enough time and effort were applied, a belief Twain seems to share with Foucault.

Since it was his friendship with Jim that brought him away from his wrongdoing conscience, wouldn’t it be relationship–not thinking–that is primary? Wouldn’t the raft–inhabited by both Huck and Jim–symbolize that relationship? The constructed–or torn–self is too closely related to society to be held up as the epitome of human goodness. It is society’s creature. And it’s too busy, too harried, besides. Couldn’t it be that what Henry Nelson Wieman called the “original self”–that is, the untorn self–is what engages in deep relationships? Couldn’t it be that unadulterated friendship is what we must return to whenever we are able?