To whom does an author's authority pass when the author dies?

An authority obtained through authorship, or being an author because one is an authority. Both have their own gains and losses for human history. Without doubt, in the past, authorship was out of the question for people who had not gone through a certain education, who were not possessed of learning and refinement, who had not reached the point of overflowing with things to tell people. Entering the position of authorship required a long and arduous spiritual journey that was not open to everyone, and very few people could enter it.

Today, however, we have a civilization that boasts of the fact that everyone can easily enter this process. How many and how varied the books published are is seen as one of the sources of pride and indicators of a country's cultural and literary life. If many authors means many authorities, one must expect that this will bring with it a great pluralism in the field of truth, and thus that the phenomenon of authority will also be thoroughly eroded.

Authorship, since it also opens room for deciding easily what to write, does not require a very special authority. Just like high art, authorship too can be considered to have become thoroughly public property. From the standpoint of the Socratic perception of philosophy, it is perhaps a serious revolution that has taken place. As is known, Socrates said that truth is in fact loaded in everyone's heart and mind, and that what falls to us is to bring it out with the right questions. In this no one had any superiority over anyone. Yet in his time philosophy was something only the aristocratic stratum could do. For only they possessed the authority to speak, to be able to express the truth.

By saying that it was Socrates who expressed within the Greek philosophical tradition that truth is something all people experience, we are of course not going to say that truth began in Greece. While the fashion of gazing in admiration at the most primitive nonsensical ideas of the Greeks as if they were giant steps for humanity has recurred this time among our novice-authoritarian philosophers, it is obligatory for us to throw a small fishbone in its way. This wise attitude of Socrates was an attitude of wisdom already known and lived within all traditions.

Truth is of course an experience that every human being lives and can live. Reaching it, on the other hand, does not always come about by going through great methodological procedures, as is supposed. Opening the eye and ear of the heart is enough. On the contrary, it is quite possible to remain far from truth even while working meticulously through all rational and methodological procedures. Having a broad accumulation of knowledge that everyone looks at with envy, and then bringing that accumulation and burying it in an ignorant attitude, is quite possible and commonplace. The example is something that can be encountered always and everywhere.

That Walid ibn al-Mughira, regarded as an Arab genius and sage, turning the verses of the Qur'an over and over, measuring and cutting them here and there, thinking and pondering, came by a damnable decision to the point of saying "these are tales of the ancients," is a typical case. In fact the situation he faced was not a "cannot-be-decided" situation; on the contrary, all the data, signs and verses to decide in the opposite direction were before him. But there, a very bad use of the position of authority he held through his knowledge is at issue.

That people whose every word carries because they are authorities misuse this authority, that they begin to make people pay dearly for their most nonsensical and cheap ideas, is also among the customs of the relationship between speech and authority. But what is customary becomes ever more commonplace. For we live in an age in which authority, like many other things, can after a while become a serious industrial product.

Authority exercised by regarding oneself as independent of existence cannot save itself from becoming the object of a more ambitious political profit. This of course did not fail to occur in the past either. But today we can say that it has become a subject of industry.

The transformation of the authority arising from authorship into a simple industrial instrument in the face of political authority is the present-day manifestation of the most archaic Balaam typology. Those whose reason was born in Greece and stayed there, or who in fact have in our day discovered Greece as if it were something precious, may, if they wish, not be deprived of seeing this there too. They may reconsider the professionalism of the Sophists, who tied everything to rhetoric and put all the authority they obtained from philosophy as a profession at the service of anyone who wanted it.

Today, we may be glad that everyone's access to authorship has perhaps democratized authority and eroded unjust authority. But we certainly cannot say that it has prevented the reproduction, by other means or ways, of the stratification and hierarchy that formerly arose on account of authorship.

That everyone who takes a computer or phone keyboard in hand and pours out aphorisms on social media regards himself as an author and on that account aspires to authority still does not destroy the impulse, within everyone, to submit to higher authorities (call it, if you like, the feeling of servitude to a fellow creature).

Thus the "death of the author" is at the same time completed by the rebirth, at another level, of another author, of the relations of authority and submission that bring the author into being.

But of course the matter is not that simple or that bad. Wherever an evil emerges, a power and will that aspires to freedom, and is capable, also emerges against it.