Philosophy and the Human Paradox: Essays on Reason, Truth and Identity [1 ed.] 0367423111, 9780367423117

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Philosophy and the Human Paradox

“Montefiore’s is a unique voice with a message that is permanently of value – deep-reaching and disconcerting. Philosophy and the Human Paradox may destabilize many readers’ convictions and it may well induce readers to re-read philosophical works in a new way.” – Steven Lukes, New York University, USA This book collects essays by Alan Montefiore on the role philosophy plays in the formation of the self and how philosophical questions regarding the nature of reason, truth and identity inform ethics and politics. It offers a comprehensive overview of Montefiore’s influential, non-dogmatic philosophical voice. Throughout his 70-year career, Montefiore sought to bridge the analytic/ continental divide and develop a new way of thinking about philosophy. He defines philosophy as the search for a higher-order understanding of whatever the situation or activity in which one may be involved or engaged, an understanding which may be achieved and expressed by and in a variety of different forms of philosophical persuasion and which may serve to shed new light on particular problems. The book’s essays, half of which are previously unpublished, are divided into three thematic sections. The first focuses on the nature of philosophy, the second on the tension between reason and paradox, and the final section addresses the relationship between philosophy and moral and political responsibilities. Philosophy and the Human Paradox will be of interest to philosophers and students who work on ethics, Kantian and post-Kantian continental philosophy and political philosophy. Having been a student at Balliol College, Oxford, from 1948 to 1951, Alan Montefiore spent the next ten years as a lecturer in philosophy at the then new University College of North Staffordshire (later to become the University of Keele). In 1961 he returned to Balliol as a tutorial fellow in philosophy, retiring just over 30 years later. Since then, he has, among many other things, served as the first president of the Forum for European Philosophy, now the Forum for Philosophy. Danielle Sands is Lecturer in Comparative Literature and Culture at Royal Holloway, University of London and Fellow at the Forum for Philosophy, LSE. Her monograph, Animal Writing: Storytelling, Selfhood and the Limits of Empathy, was published by EUP in 2019.

Philosophy and the Human Paradox Essays on Reason, Truth and Identity Alan Montefiore Edited by Danielle Sands

First published 2020 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Taylor & Francis The right of Alan Montefiore to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. The right of the editor to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-0-367-42311-7 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-85348-8 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by ApexCovantage, LLC

Contents



Editor’s Introduction

1

DANIELLE SANDS

PART I

The Nature of Philosophy13   1 Doing Philosophy (In One Way or Another)

15

  2 The Idea of “Crisis” in Philosophy

32

  3 Frontiers of Philosophy

48

PART II

Reason and Paradox61   4 Kant, Paradox and Meta-Paradox: Problems of Self-identity

63

  5 Reason and its Own Self-Undoing?

85

  6 Reason and Reasoning: Truth, Truthfulness and Integrity

99

  7 The Universal and the Particular: A Kantian Account of the Elements of Self-identity

113

PART III

Values and Responsibilities127   8 Levinas and the Claims of Incommensurable Values129

vi  Contents

  9 The Political Responsibility of Intellectuals

145

10 Doctrinal Commitments and Ecumenical Partnership162

An Inconclusive Conclusion

178

Index191

Editor’s Introduction

Philosophy at the Frontiers At the beginning of a paper which he would write and rewrite in numerous forms over many years, Alan Montefiore cites Professor Yosef Hayim’s disarming introduction to a University of Washington lecture.1 “What I have to say is ultimately quite personal,” Hayim discloses, qualifying, “I trust that, by the time I have done, the personal will not seem merely arbitrary” (Montefiore, 2020, 260). That the personal is neither arbitrary nor irrelevant is reinforced repeatedly by Alan across his work; here, it takes the form of “a simple semi auto-biographical statement” (Montefiore, 2020, 169), which he regards as essential preliminary reading for anyone who seeks to understand his philosophical concerns. Such an approach presupposes a particular view of philosophy: that it is not an elitist pursuit with little relevance for the majority, but rather the gateway to a certain sort of life. One’s path to philosophy and one’s aims in philosophising are inevitably derived from one’s own personal concerns. As Alan articulates in “Doing Philosophy (In One Way or Another),” to do philosophy is “to try and get into a position from which to see the world, or that part or aspect of it with which one may be more particularly concerned, in the most appropriate or illuminating way” (Montefiore, 2020, 36). It was a set of parallel concerns – again located where the philosophical intersects the personal – that generated my connection with Alan. We are both interested in the links between accidents of birth, chiefly religious and cultural, and individual responsibilities: in the frontiers of philosophy with its numerous “others,” and in the social and cultural functioning of “religion” in a climate where belief appears to have waned. When we met, I had just begun what was to become a long and arduous doctoral project – motivated by the desire to understand a Catholic upbringing with which I no longer wholly identified – on the work of Jacques Derrida, a long-time friend of Alan and a thinker whose later work turns fascinatingly on the often-disavowed overlap between the philosophical and the personal. Now long-time companions to my own thinking, both

2  Editor’s Introduction Alan and Jacques have taught me that certain philosophical problems cannot be thought without also being lived. For Alan, philosophy is a frontier discipline, “an essentially interdisciplinary subject” which “lies surprisingly close to its frontiers with other forms of thinking” (Montefiore, 2020, 79). He is not the stern philosophical purist presented and criticised by Derrida, for whom “meaning is before or beyond language” and therefore unproblematically translatable, a perspective which leaves philosophy a world away from literary discourses (Derrida 2006, 120). Rather, Alan’s perception of philosophy – itself a frontier perspective conditioned by experience of its European and Anglo American borders – takes it as read that philosophy’s embeddedness alongside literary disciplines (most notably in the former tradition) would entail that “the art of rhetoric remains of major importance to anyone concerned with the activity of reasoning” (Montefiore, 2020, 69). This, Alan suggests, should lead us both to acknowledge rhetorical approaches as alternative modes of philosophical argument, rather than dismissing them as sophistry, and to cultivate a healthy suspicion of philosophy which assumes or declares its own transparency. Whilst we might continue to regard philosophy and literature as two distinct ways of thinking, it is clear that the frontier between them is shifted, displaced or even multiplied by certain practices of writing.2 In this sense, Alan’s work is perhaps best read as a persistent engagement with two questions: What is philosophy? And who is the philosopher? In his examination of the relationship between philosophy and literature, Derrida refuses to side with the former, associating it with a specific approach which, in its aspiration towards universal truth, disingenuously denies its reliance on particularity and the vagaries of the human. In Alan’s hands, philosophy becomes a messier and more intimate pursuit, constituted by the tension between its aim to identify and establish universals and the particular personal motivations behind the desire to philosophise. It is no surprise that a conversation with Alan about philosophy very quickly becomes a conversation about lived identities. We can read this both as a tension within philosophy and as a source of opportunity. As Simon Glendinning writes in reference to Alan, philosophy is both the name for a love of the universal and for a particular role within society (Glendinning 2011, 107). For Alan, this takes a Kantian gloss, revealing the tension between our autonomy as rational beings and our inability to escape embodied existence. Alan does not claim that we can escape these tensions within philosophy: between the universal and the particular, between different historical traditions, and between our divided and conflicting responsibilities and impulses. Rather, that philosophy has a responsibility – whether philosophical or ethical – to acknowledge and examine these tensions and, in so doing, to challenge or even displace the most reductive of these oppositions. Here again, there is a strong link between philosophical and literary practices; philosophy, it seems, offers a way of reading and responding to the world.

Editor’s Introduction 3

Kant, Reason, Paradox Immanuel Kant is the thinker to whom Alan returns most often. He serves as a marker of certain historical and theoretical frontiers: the divergence between analytic and continental philosophy, the relationship between philosophy and morality and the historical moment where philosophy begins to distinguish itself from religion. Perhaps most importantly for Alan, Kant addresses the tensions and paradoxes of philosophical practice and interrogates the nature of the human and its responsibilities. The tensions implicit within the human experience – the human being both inherently divided and denied direct access to its rational nature – are, for Kant, irresolvable, and this is magnified by philosophical inquiry, which names, for Alan, a process which is sandwiched between two realms of puzzlement. The first, that of ordinary quotidian puzzlement, is, to some extent at least, resolved by intellectual inquiry. The second, on the other frontier of philosophical thought, is a zone of almost mystical puzzlement, “a realm of perhaps ultimately unavoidable intellectual, but not exclusively intellectual, adventure” (Montefiore, 2020, 92). It is worth noting that, by this framing, philosophy is not a discourse of mastery, but one whose interminable engagement with the limitations of the human should stimulate both perseverance and humility. The Kantian project is characterised by its ambivalence toward reason, with Kant so clearly setting the terms of debate for the philosophers who would follow him. Whilst reason is that which is unique to the human, theoretical reason is both limited and inevitably driven to overreach its limitations by making claims regarding that which is unknowable to it. Alan cites the Kant of the First Critique: Transcendental illusion . . . does not cease even after it has been detected and its invalidity clearly revealed by transcendental criticism. . . . We take the subjective necessity of a connection of our concepts . . . for an objective necessity in the determination of things in themselves. This is an illusion than can no more be prevented than we can prevent the sea appearing higher at the horizon than at the shore . . . here we have to do with a natural and inevitable illusion, which rests on subjective principles, and foists them upon us as objective. (Kant in Montefiore, 2020, 129) A refreshing counter to the misconception that sufficient philosophical rigour will eliminate illusion, this nonetheless commits Kant to an apparently contradictory position, to meta-paradox. Of Kant here, Alan notes: That is to say that he is, on the one hand, committed to the conviction of Enlightenment Reason that, one way or another, it must always be possible to find a solution (or dissolution) of even the seemingly most

4  Editor’s Introduction deep-rooted contradictions within one’s philosophical thinking – yet equally committed, on the other hand, to the recognition that, in one form or another, such contradictions will always recur. (Montefiore, 2020, 91) This is clearly a problem – that of the impossibility of completing the philosophical project – which cannot be solved by philosophy. In fact, it cannot be solved at all. Rather, it must be lived, in the sense that we must continue to postulate things whose existence we cannot rationally demonstrate, in the service of our practical embodied lives. This accounts for the “unstable stable position” (Montefiore, 2020, 145) that Alan identifies with Kant, which describes not a paradox within reason which can be resolved by an appeal to reason, but rather “a paradox of a higher order, as the mark of an ultimately unresolvable tension within the human condition” (Montefiore, 2020, 130). That the philosophical project is not accurately characterised as the development of a philosophical system becomes clear here; rather, it is identified with an awareness of the self-undermining nature of systematicity, from Kant’s identification of antinomies to Derrida’s depiction of deconstruction as the revelation that “what has made it possible to effect a system is nothing other than a certain dysfunction or ‘disadjustment,’ a certain incapacity to close the system” (Derrida 2001, 4). In his emphasis on the complexity of philosophy’s relationship with reason and the ways in which this is connected to lived experience, Alan undermines the characterisation of philosophy as unproblematically allied with reason and preoccupied with disembodied concerns. He also challenges the division between philosophers who endorse reason and those who are suspicious of it: “The idea,” he notes, “that all philosophers are to be understood as belonging fairly and squarely either to one side or to the other is surely just an illusion” (Montefiore, 2020, 141). Kant is obviously the paradigm here, serving both as an Enlightenment figure for whom reason is the key to agency, autonomy and political progress and as a critic or challenger of reason, for whom it is a “source of inescapable paradox and . . . self-frustration” which “leads as of necessity to necessarily mutually irreconcilable answers” (Montefiore, 2020, 141). Kant is certainly not unique in this position. Rather, the more carefully and critically we read, the more obvious it becomes that many philosophers who appear, at first, to be suspicious of reason, actually, like Kant, occupy the “unstable stable position” of both endorsing and challenging reason. Adorno, overtly critical of certain legacies of the Enlightenment, nonetheless takes some of its procedures as foundational to his philosophical practice. Derrida, again, explicitly wary of the fetishisation of reason, follows Kant in both endorsing its importance and exploring its limitations. Whilst this appears to be the (paradoxical) philosophical position, it is not one whose tensions are in any way resolvable. Rather, for Kant, and

Editor’s Introduction 5 for Derrida after him, it entails an interminable and irresolvable shuttling between the two positions, resulting, ultimately, in a divided position, which, inevitably, cannot be fully conceptualised. That this situation is one which is exposed by Kant’s writing, rather than a flaw in his position, is strongly argued by Alan, who observes the many failed attempts to purge the problematic features of Transcendental Idealism. The important question, he suggests, is whether paradox (and ultimately, the metaparadox of accepting both the commitment to reason as that which will provide a resolution to paradox, and the understanding that paradox will inevitably return), can ever really be eliminated from thinking. Alan’s implicit answer is no, and this is underscored by his claim that even the most vehement attempts at philosophical demystification return to Kant in gesturing toward a paradoxical, pre-temporal, pre-meaningful realm from which all meaning and experience originates. Alan reads Kant’s position in terms of its implications for subjectivity and self-identity. The Kantian system presupposes, or even creates, a certain kind of subject, “necessarily a moral subject,” which cannot escape its participation in two different realms (Montefiore, 2020, 179). For Alan, this is of interest due to its implications for the lived “problem of human self-identity” (Montefiore, 2020, 176), which he frames, via Kant, with reference to the relationship between the universal and the particular: Particularity or individuality, therefore, is essentially bound up with this world of appearance and its framework of spatio-temporality. Each of us is individuated through reference to his or her particular body and its own particular path through the history of the spatiotemporal world; we are, each of us, a particular or individual embodiment of universal reason, subject in our particularity to all the laws of causal determination, but committed as a necessary presupposition of our capacity for language and thought to the presumption of an ability to impose on the temporal sequences of our lives patterns having their ground in the essentially non-temporal order of rationality. (Montefiore, 2020, 181) So rationality, though universal, is only ever embodied in the particular. In this sense, identity begins from the recognition of each individual as an embodiment of reason. Accordingly, one’s responsibilities to oneself and to others are equivalent and run parallel, both deriving from the moral obligation to treat rational subjects as ends, not means.

Philosophy, Responsibility and How to Live That these issues which, at first sight, appear to be philosophical abstractions, have personal and political purchase is never in doubt for Alan.

6  Editor’s Introduction The instability of the human condition – that we rational, embodied creatures who are bound by a figure or force of reason to which we have no direct access – results in what Alan deems an “irreducible penumbra of uncertainty” (Montefiore, 2020, 252). This inflects not only the possibility and mode of our philosophising but, inevitably, the possibility and nature of one’s relationship with oneself and with others. This has two main implications. First, that philosophy has set itself an impossible task; whilst it cannot escape the “penumbra of uncertainty,” its goal is to find a position from which to see the world and our lives more clearly; in short, we might say, to teach us how to respond to the impossible challenges of living. The second, a little less bleak, is that the shared condition of philosopher and non-philosopher means that the problems experienced by the latter – if addressed “with sufficient tenacity” (Montefiore, 2020, 89) – are, in effect, philosophical problems. Again, philosophy is perceived as a lived and living practice. For Alan, this means both that philosophy has a wider public relevance and that intellectual responsibility is more widely shared. In Alan’s parlance, “everyone must be considered to have . . . something of the intellectual in them” (Montefiore, 2020, 214), given that an intellectual is anyone who has “a committed interest in ideas, an interest which goes beyond a mere fascination with the possibilities that they may offer of fanciful play, but one which extends to a serious concern with their truth or validity” (Montefiore, 2020, 219). In “The Political Responsibility of Intellectuals,” Alan expresses these ideas in terms of a broad call for the public more generally to acknowledge their abilities and responsibilities as rational and moral beings. There are explicitly Kantian overtones here as Alan tracks the relationships between philosophy, morality and politics in order to sharpen our understanding of responsibility. Unsurprisingly, this is yoked to reason: our responsibilities to other humans derive not from some contemporary sense of rights or anything else, but from our awareness of “ourselves and all others – as the living embodiments of Reason” which should lead us “to seek always to safeguard the necessary practical conditions for the communication and sharing of truth and valid argument” (Montefiore, 2020, 222).3 Like most commentators, Alan concludes that Kant’s attempt to derive a normative moral system from reason is ultimately a failure, but he does not see this as sufficient reason to disregard the Kantian connections between reason, reflection and morality. Rather, he reminds us that, although the Kantian problems are rich with theoretical complexities which we may not understand (and which necessarily, as the Kant of the Groundwork to the Metaphysic of Morals tells us, can only sketch out the limits of their incomprehensibility), this lack of clarity doesn’t extend to the practical issues. Rather, Alan insists: “respect for persons as Reason’s own respect for itself in all its particular dualaspect embodiments must mean (among other things) respect not only for the truth and validity of whatever it may have to communicate to

Editor’s Introduction 7 itself throughout its embodied dispersion, but – necessarily – respect also for the causal conditions of communication” (Montefiore 2020, 153). It may be fair to say, however, that since Kant, the reason why rationality is linked to responsibility and morality is no longer clear and needs explanation, even defence. Perhaps the most interesting 20th-century response to this question along Kantian lines is the challenge posed by Hannah Arendt to the perceived separation between ethics and ontology. Arendt argues that totalitarianism laid bare the susceptibility of all prescriptive moral schemata to immoral substitution and that the only reliable moral resistance derives from a practice of thinking – as a kind of inner dialogue – which is rooted in the ontological, rather than the explicitly ethical. She develops Socrates’s claim that the thinking human is an instrument whose internal disharmony proves personally intolerable into a specifically moral claim: the thinker acts morally, not for explicitly moral reasons, but because the disharmony of acting immorally would make their continued existence unbearable. She counters Socrates to Kant here: “In the case of Kant, conscience threatens you with self-contempt; in the case of Socrates, as we shall see, with self-contradiction” to demonstrate that morality is not about making a choice – not as a precedent to a moral action, at any rate – but of becoming the sort of person who is unable to behave immorally (Arendt 2003, 78). Critical ambivalence to Arendt’s claims here illustrates their boldness. Alan performs a similarly tricky manoeuvre in “The Public Responsibility of Intellectuals,” arguing that because truthfulness is essential for effective communication and necessitates a kind of responsibility or self-respect, then it is both a philosophical and a political virtue. We might want to ask whether philosophy, the practice and tuning of these skills, is therefore inherently good. Alan resists offering a direct answer to this question; however in his work we can perceive both a continued insistence on the importance of the moral (in response to a widespread claim that, in order to be radical, one must favour the political over the moral) and the development of a theory of what morality is and how it is connected to philosophy. Alan rejects the Marxist claim that morality is a symptom of bourgeois ideology and therefore contained within the political sphere, not least because the two are co-constituted and therefore he strongly insists that no clear line can be drawn between morality and politics. Alan’s denial of the pre-eminence of politics over morality is allied with an endorsement of philosophy, not as the source of normative guidelines for living the “good” or “moral” life, but as both the denial that these things exist in any simplistic way and the concomitant affirmation of the moral life as one which acknowledges and accepts the inescapable uncertainty of our existence. Alan explores these questions in “Levinas and the Claims of Incommensurable Values.” His starting point with regard to Levinas is threefold: he is interested in human responsibility, the tension at the heart of the human

8  Editor’s Introduction condition, and the “unmeetable demands” (Montefiore, 2020, 189) of morality and politics. The article both reinforces the claim that such demands exist and – via Levinas explicitly and Kant ­implicitly – begins to consider how we might address them. The question of “unmeetable demands” requires that we clarify the nature of the moral and its relation to reason. But can this clarification arrive through rational argument? And should rational argument always be the privileged starting point for philosophical investigation? Levinas is ambivalent on this, maintaining both that his interest in theological issues is in how they speak to reason and that thinking does not necessarily begin with reason. Rather, he contends that “a truly human thinking has to start with the recognition of the ethical” (Montefiore, 2020, 193). Obviously, this is a tension which cannot be resolved by reason: either one begins with argument (a position which cannot be argued) or begins with ethics (again, if argument is secondary, a position which cannot be argued). This results in an understanding of the groundlessness of reason, which is reinforced, in turn, by Heidegger and then Derrida. The tension here is recognisable as the one we have already encountered in Kant between the universal (reason) and the particular (associated with the inevitable natural specificities of embodied human life). For Kant, however, this is a tension between the human drive to act morally and the distractions of embodied life, rather than a tension between the conflicting moral demands of the universal and the particular (the latter, of course, making none). Arendt, too, shares Kant’s wariness of the particular, prone as it is to promote divergence from reason. Following Kant, however, Arendt acknowledges the inescapability of this tension, which she perceives as being staged in the thinking process. “Thinking,” she writes, “always ‘generalizes,’ squeezing out of many particulars – which, thanks to the de-sensing process, it can pack together, for swift ­manipulation – whatever meaning may inhere. Generalization is inherent in every thought, even though that thought is insisting on the universal primacy of the particular” (Arendt 1971, 199). Alan, too, is preoccupied with the tension between the universal and the particular; however, unlike Kant and Arendt, he implies that the particular – in the sense of the specificity of our embodiment and our socio-cultural identifications – might be more than just a distraction from the claims made upon us by reason. Here he draws attention to the numerous types of situations “in which these two kinds of demands and claims, those on our universally common humanity and those on our particular tribal or national allegiances, may clash” (Montefiore, 2020, 196) and proceeds, in his discussion of Emmanuel Levinas, to begin to challenge the Kantian conflation of morality with the universal. As Alan tracks him, Levinas is remarkably Kantian here, in the end declaring that “[u]niversalism has a greater weight than the particularist letter of the text; or, to be more precise, it bursts the letter apart, for it

Editor’s Introduction 9 lay, like an explosive, within the letter” (Montefiore, 2020, 204). Justice, discussed specifically in relation to the horrors of recent Jewish history, is described as “a sombre virtue” (Montefiore, 2020, 204) and conceived as a giant set of scales whose ultimate balancing is more important than collateral damage on either side. That this is an unsatisfactory conclusion which minimises the significance of individual suffering in favour of universal justice is clear to Levinas as well as his readers and results in some back-pedalling. Levinas notes that: “What remains after so much blood and tears shed in the name of immortal principles is individual sacrifice, which, amidst the dialectical rebounds of justice and all its contradictory about-faces, without any hesitation, finds a straight and sure way” (Levinas in Montefiore, 2020, 205), leaving Alan to conclude that “[f]or all the explosive power of Universalism, what remains is the image of the Particular” (Montefiore, 2020, 205). Whilst there is scope to critique Levinas on the grounds of this apparent inconsistency, Alan is more interested in exploring what this tension reveals about the relationship between the universal and the particular, or the inescapability of “[i]ncommensurable values” (Montefiore 2020, 129). Levinas’s retreat from this inconsistency is frustrating, as it would appear to provide grounds for a challenge to the Kantian conflation of morality with the universal. Alan doesn’t mention him here, but Derrida, writing about justice in “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority’ ” (at his least Kantian and perhaps most Kierkegaardian), is a useful counter. For Derrida, justice is identified with the insatiable demands of the particular, to which the universal can never fully respond. Here, therefore, it is singularity which has moral purchase and universality (in the form of a law which is accountable to justice), which can never prove itself sufficient. Derrida’s account serves as a corrective both to the dangers of a totalising universalism and to the derogation of the body implicit in the Kantian account of the human condition. The confusion which arises in Levinas, as Alan identifies, is that it is unclear whether the universal is associated with the political or the moral. Alan describes: In the version with which Levinas presents us in this text, the universal (virtue of justice) may seem to stand on the side of the political, that of a properly ordered kingdom and its people, and the particular (virtue of personal compassion) on the side of the moral. However, one must be wary of the dangers of yielding to the temptation to fall back on what will turn out to have been deceptively over clear-cut dichotomies. (Montefiore 2020, 142) Alan’s response to the challenge of “incommensurable values,” which emerges in Levinas, is to appeal to Isaiah Berlin’s account of value

10  Editor’s Introduction pluralism. For Berlin, society must tolerate the plurality of incommensurable values, given that it can provide no failsafe grounds for endorsing one over the other. The situation which comes to light in Levinas is different, however. For Berlin, incommensurable values co-exist due to individuals’ differing preferences and the lack of a failsafe mode of adjudicating between them. For Levinas, following Kant, incommensurable values present an insuperable problem for the individual for whom the demands come from different orders (for Berlin’s value pluralism, de-deified, if you like, all demands come from the same order), and one cannot discern which takes precedence. In the end, we are left with the question of where and how philosophy situates itself. It seems to me that Alan’s identification of the “unstable stable position” of the philosophical subject is normative as well as descriptive. In fact, the positioning of the philosophical subject in this way serves as a model for the positioning of all subjects. At its best, philosophy shows us what is at stake in this uncertainty and shows us how to respond without trying to evade or circumvent it. In this sense, philosophy doesn’t just explain and describe the positioning of the subject, but when we look at it more closely, it enacts the process of subject formation. We might be forgiven here for wondering whether the “unstable stable position” which Alan, via Kant, endorses, is ethical or meta-ethical. Is philosophy necessarily value pluralist? Or should it ally itself with a particular ethical or political position? These, perhaps, are the wrong questions; in describing the primary orientation of the subject, the “unstable stable position” perhaps cannot be reduced to a particular political alignment. Nevertheless, Alan’s endorsement of the value pluralism of Isaiah Berlin is allied with the way in which philosophy enables us to come to terms with “the radical imperfection and imperfectibility of the world” (Montefiore, 2020, 208). The historical philosophical search for a metanarrative has proved mistaken and, as both Berlin and Arendt reveal, in its association with political totalitarianisms, inherently dangerous. Here the potential for a courageous philosophy emerges – one which persists in trying to improve the world without being seduced by the hubris of believing that philosophy can fix it. As Alan acknowledges, philosophy provides knowledge “that there are no definitive answers to be found, no ultimately objective ground to be finally secured, no absolute or ‘Godseye’ perspective to be attained; and yet also the knowledge that the existence of all of these remains an indispensable postulate and as the goal of a never to be abandoned search” (Montefiore, 2020, 145).

Post Scriptum: On Religion A late addition to this collection is the essay “Doctrinal Commitments and Ecumenical Partnership,” written at the end of 2015. Reading this

Editor’s Introduction 11 essay returned me to the intersection of the personal and philosophical with which I began this piece and to the shared interest in the philosophical questions raised by religion which first brought Alan and me together in conversation. Developing from childhood curiosity about the nature and implications of his Jewishness, questions regarding the relationship between belief and practice, the implications of affiliating oneself with a religious community and the disjunction between a desire for ecumenism and commitment to the unique “truth” of one’s own religion have continued to engage Alan and emerge, ever more explicitly, in his work. Naturally, his interest in Kant, particularly in how we might respond philosophically when intellectual enquiry reaches a point which cannot be resolved rationally, is stimulated by these issues. “Doctrinal Commitments and Ecumenical Partnership” interrogates the stakes of religious commitments, asking, via Karl Rahner’s notion of the “anonymous Christian,” whether the drive toward ecumenism exposes the myth that belief contains any meaningful cognitive content. Alan suggests that, whilst each religion must enforce its own doctrinal commitments, the value of that religion cannot be determined by the “truth” – usually indeterminate – of these commitments. Rather, and here he approvingly cites Adam Kirsch’s description of an ecumenism which is allied with pragmatism, “a true faith is one that empowers its believers, regardless of the literal truth of its scriptures and doctrines” (Kirsch in Montefiore, 2020, 255). Alan and I share the desire to make philosophical and personal sense of the religions into which we were born and which made, or continue to make, varying kinds of demands on us. When I began my doctoral work on Derrida, religion was for me both a source of claustrophobia and curiosity. I was less interested in the “traditional” questions of philosophy of religion – God’s existence and characteristics, for example – than in what discussions of “God” and “religion” revealed about the limits of human knowledge and experience and in the tensions which the monolithic noun religion so obviously concealed. What I discovered in those strange, slow, disarmingly intimate texts in which Derrida speaks of religion (and, of course, the texts to which they led me) was a religious genealogy which defies religious institutions and the enforced cohesion of a collective history. “Religion” became a site of tension between a radical thinking which approaches the limits of human knowledge and conceptuality and one which is inevitably recuperated by reactionary logics. For the ethical and political purchase offered by the former (to say nothing of its philosophical implications), “religion” should continue to interest us, irrespective of the truth or falsity of its dogmas. For the insight into my own past and future that this offers, “religion” continues to interest me. The two are no doubt connected. In his “Inconclusive Conclusion,” Alan speaks of the impossibility of doing philosophy “without getting one’s feet wet” (Montefiore, 2020,

12  Editor’s Introduction 265). This, like much of Alan’s work, is a reminder that philosophy doesn’t arrive fully formed, that it emerges from the disorder of human lives and human relationships. Rather than leading to a diminishment of philosophical value, this leads to a better understanding of our philosophies and ourselves. For this reminder, which liberated me to call myself a philosopher, and for the great pleasures of intellectual kinship, I am enormously grateful.

Notes 1. Curiously, this version is undated and twice titled: first, “The Universal and the Particular: A Kantian Account of Self-Identity” and underneath: A Liberal Identity – The Identity of a Liberal.” 2. On this, see Derrida: “I hesitated between philosophy and literature, giving up neither, perhaps seeking obscurely a place from which the history of this frontier could be thought or even displaced – in writing itself and not only by historical or theoretical reflection” (Derrida 1992, 34). 3. Interestingly, this is where Kant and Derrida part ways: for Derrida, it is the particular that is of moral interest, not the universal (although the two are, of course, inextricably linked).

Works Cited Arendt, Hannah. 2003. “Some Questions on Moral Philosophy.” In Responsibility and Judgment, edited by Jerome Kohn, 49–146. New York: Schocken. Arendt, Hannah. 1971. The Life of the Mind: Thinking. San Diego: Harvest. Derrida, Jacques. 2006. The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation. Edited by Beverley Bie Brahic. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Derrida, Jacques. 2002. “Force of Law: On the ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority.’ ” Translated by Gil Anidjar. In Acts of Religion, edited by Gil Anidjar, 230–298. London: Routledge. Derrida, Jacques. 1992. “This Strange Institution Called Literature: An Interview with Jacques Derrida.” Translated by Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby. In Acts of Literature, edited by Derek Attridge, 33–75. London: Routledge. Derrida, Jacques, and Marizio Ferraris. 2001. A Taste for the Secret. Cambridge: Polity Press. Glendinning, Simon. 2011. “As Ever.” In Life and Philosophy: Essays to Honour Alan Montefiore on His 85th Birthday. Oxford: FEP Publishers. Montefiore, Alan. 2020. Philosophy and the Human Paradox: Essays on Reason, Truth and Identity. Edited by Danielle Sands. London and New York: Routledge.

Part I

The Nature of Philosophy

1 Doing Philosophy (In One Way or Another)

What is one doing when one is “doing philosophy”? What, indeed, have I been doing, first as student and then as teacher of philosophy, during the greater part of my life? One might think that there must be something wrong if, looking back, I now find it difficult to provide a ready and straightforward answer to such a question. Yet the question itself is not after all as straightforward as might first appear. In what follows, I try to explore some of its assorted complications in the hope that, in so doing, I may provide some sort of ostensive (and characteristically reflexive) exemplification of what “doing philosophy” may involve. So what sort of activities may count as “doing philosophy”? And how might this question relate to the probably more familiar “What on earth is philosophy?” “Doing philosophy,” of course, is not to be understood as referring to just one specific type of activity alone. Gilbert Ryle used to distinguish between what he called simple and complex dispositional terms. To call anyone a smoker, to take one of his own characteristic examples, is to say that he is someone who, from time to time and on an indeterminate number of occasions, indulges in episodes of smoking. If someone is a grocer, on the other hand, this does not and cannot mean that he ever indulges in episodes of grocing, for there is no such specific activity. Grocers deal in such commodities as tea, sugar, butter, cheese etc., and “dealing in a commodity” in turn breaks down into such more specific activities as buying, selling, stocking and so on. This distinction is, evidently, a relative one. We should not seriously expect complex dispositional or activity terms to be eventually analysable out into sets of atomic or basic actions. And the prima facie simple act of smoking can itself, of course, be instantiated in a whole number of different ways: in smoking cigars rather than cigarettes; and, if cigarettes, in smoking one brand rather than another, in inhaling or not inhaling; and, if inhaling, in doing so more or less deeply and so on and so on. No matter. That a distinction cannot be made hard and fast on its margins does not mean that there is no worthwhile distinction to be made. And while the description “giving a philosophy lecture” may cover a wide variety of performances in a wide variety of different circumstances, it is clear that the giving of

16  The Nature of Philosophy a lecture is only one way of doing philosophy – if indeed it is always to be counted as such – to be set alongside such other activities as reading books of philosophy, writing papers or books, giving or attending tutorials, taking part in meetings of philosophical societies, discussing philosophical problems with others and even, no doubt, just thinking about such problems. It is, of course, a commonplace that in performing any one given type of action, one is ipso facto also performing an in principle indefinite number of others, of not all of which one may or even in principle could be aware. This is simply to say that anything that anyone does could quite properly be brought under an in principle indefinite number of different descriptions, including some whose conceptualisation might not be available in the language, let alone the consciousness, of the agent himself or herself. In speaking to you now about what I take to be a philosophical issue in what certainly presents itself as a philosophical context, I may – hopefully – be interesting or, on the other hand, boring you, making a fool of myself, speaking audibly or inaudibly and goodness knows what else besides – including, of course, trying to make a living in the following of a certain sort of career (or, if retired, trying perhaps a little desperately to maintain a certain professional self-image of myself). But I might also, of course, be doing any of these other things in many other contexts than that of presenting an invited paper to a philosophical society or, indeed, in one of “doing philosophy” in any of its range of recognisable instantiations. So here is one central connection between the questions “What is one doing when one is doing philosophy?” and the apparently more direct “What is philosophy?” It would seem that one needs at least some elements of an answer to this latter question if one is to be able to distinguish out that which makes of the writing of a given paper, the giving of a particular tutorial, the puzzling over a certain problem an instance of doing philosophy. Two other points – questions – that should be noted at this stage in order to make sure that they are not lost sight of. The first is whether there is any other type of activity – any other action-description – which is closely tied to the activity of doing philosophy – so closely linked to the description “doing philosophy” – that, in doing philosophy, any properly self-aware agent should always take account of the implications in his or her given context of those other aspects of his or her combined act as, in effect, an integral part of the philosophical act itself. I think, for example, of the claim, once very widely made and by no means totally abandoned today, that all philosophical activity has ipso facto a political dimension to it, but this is not, no doubt, the only possible example. The other point would seem to be a very different one. The natural translation of the English verb to do would, in many other languages, be in terms of a verb which, when translated back into English, broadly covers both to do and to make: the French faire, the German machen, the Chinese tsuo,

Doing Philosophy (In One Way or Another) 17 the Malay bikin and so on. It seems worth asking what difference, if any, it might make to our English-language understanding of our question if we asked instead “What is one making when one is making philosophy?” In a contribution to a conference on “The Crisis in Analytic Philosophy,” I expressed my view of the nature of the overall philosophical enterprise as being “rooted in the endeavour to achieve what may be called a higher-order understanding of whatever the situation or activity in which one may be involved or engaged, both at the most general level of the human situation as such and at the unendingly varied more specific levels at which we may be engaged in one form of activity or another. This understanding”, I added, “may be achieved and communicated either through the deployment of explicitly formulated logical argument or through persuading people – who may be the philosophers concerned themselves – to see things in some appropriate new light; or through some combination of the two.”1 As general formulations of this sort go, this is one that I should be prepared to stick with – except that I should certainly have added (and do hereby so add) a reference to the importance of a philosophical (i.e. reflexive) understanding of what one may take the proper nature of understanding to be. My formulation was intended to capture the peculiarly reflexive nature of the philosophical enterprise while leaving appropriately open for debate and inevitable disagreement the crucial (and no doubt controversial) question of that in which understanding may or should be understood to consist. In one view, that of the philosophical tradition into which I was myself first inducted as a student, one achieves full understanding only when one is able to put into explicit propositional or cognitive form one’s grasp of whatever it may be that one seeks to understand. If one cannot say it to oneself in a form susceptible to justification by valid and validatable argument and to being acknowledged as recognisably true, then, according to this view, one cannot claim properly to have understood it. The language of understanding is thus to be seen as the language of explicit rational argument and exposition. What one has understood will be in principle communicable to others; one’s own understanding is then testable in the light of such arguments as others in turn may produce. In seeking understanding of what one may be doing when engaged in, say, physics or history or mathematics, one is doing philosophy of mathematics, history or philosophy, and, if one manages to do so successfully, one is “making” a contribution to a certain body of knowledge: that is to say, to philosophy. (One cannot be said to know that which one has not properly understood.) To do philosophy in accordance with this view of what understanding consists in is, then, to participate in the construction of a body of reflexive knowledge, a body of knowledge to which it is proper to give the name of philosophy. Naturally, a great deal of this activity will consist in the probing and criticism of what have been presented as possible contributions to this body

18  The Nature of Philosophy by others, including, of course, such contributions as one may have proposed oneself, and so many of the conclusions put forward as the result of such work may appear to be of an essentially negative nature. To do philosophy in this way is, broadly speaking, to think and to work within the great classical tradition, of which, no doubt, analytic philosophy is one fairly directly derivative branch. But this is not, of course, the only possible view of what it is to achieve understanding. There are at least three other main views, though I certainly would not claim this list to be in any way exhaustive. They are: 1. There is a view of understanding which sees it as consisting in “seeing something aright” or “in seeing it in a way that makes perfect sense.” It is to be noted that these two metaphors of vision do not necessarily amount to the same thing. Two different people may “see” something in two quite different and even frankly incompatible lights, each of which make to them apparently perfect sense.2 A third person may see the “same” situation in a way that enables him at the same time to see how it is possible for it to represent itself in two such incompatible yet sense-making ways to different observers or participants; this third person may claim indeed that to see this, too, is itself an indispensable part of seeing the whole matter aright.3 There is also the possible (if naturally disputable) case of someone claiming somehow to “see” the limits of articulatable understanding, the limits, indeed, to any possibility of making the kind of perfect sense that can be put into clearly stateable propositional form and communicated as such. 2. There is the view according to which intellectual understanding is only one part of a full or genuine understanding. This, it is claimed, can only come with an understanding both rooted and manifested in one’s whole (integrated) being – that is to say that, as well as being intellectual, it must comprise also its affective, bodily, behavioural aspects; indeed, the intellectual component might play only a comparatively minor or auxiliary role. There are those who will say that this is a more characteristically Eastern or Asian view of what understanding consists in: typical, for instance, or so I understand, of at least certain varieties of Buddhism. However, it would also seem to have certain clear affinities with the old Socratic doctrine according to which virtue is knowledge or, again, with a more practice-­orientated view which takes understanding to be shown in the capacity to do things aright – a view which can be extended so as to cover, at least in appearance, the ability to do and say the right things in such matters as the exposition of theories or the running through of calculations.4 3. Another view of understanding is that it is essentially a matter of being able to place that which is to be understood in a context of

Doing Philosophy (In One Way or Another) 19 intelligibility. This may be thought of in terms of a general fit or gestalt, as when one appreciates how things fit together as in some complex jigsaw puzzle. More specifically, and very importantly, it may be “seen” as a matter of placing that which is to be understood within the context of an historical tradition – which, so far as the philosopher (rather than, for example, the historian) is concerned is likely to involve situating himself or herself – reflexively once again – within the tradition in question. Clearly, each of these different views or forms of understanding may be so interpreted, their characteristic vocabularies so extended, as to appear, at least to some varying extent, to cover or to take account of the others. Indeed their various overlaps may go some way beyond mere appearance. The point of immediate interest, however, lies in the differences that they may make to our understanding of what might be the “essentially” or – to put it less provocatively, perhaps – the characteristically philosophical aspect of all the diverse other things that one might also be doing at the same time as and by virtue of “doing philosophy.” I have already suggested that on the classical or neo-classical analytic view of the matter, to do philosophy may be seen as making oneself acquainted with, pondering over, passing on, subjecting to scrutiny some would-be contribution to a body of rationally articulated and assessable body of reflexive knowledge – or, centrally, as attempting to make one’s own contribution to such a body. Where understanding is taken to be essentially a matter of seeing things aright or of seeing things as they are, any possible transition to an idiom of “making” is likely to prove less plausible and less helpful. If, on such a view, it is going to make sense to speak of the philosopher as making anything at all, the metaphor of sight would seem to suggest that the object to be made must be some sort of picture. But just how, or in what form, might such a picture be instantiated? As something that one might actually – or, as it were, physically – see? The suggestion has only to be made for its implausibilities to become apparent. The “normal” object of philosophical production is, of course, a text of some sort or another – though it is also possible to speak of producing disciples or, in a teaching institution, pupils or students. Texts may, of course, include pictorial elements of a variety of sorts or, in certain cases, may themselves be configured in some pictorially relevant way. But – the case hardly needs to be argued – the understanding of a text is typically very unlike the understanding that one may have of what a picture may represent or perhaps signify in some other, non-representative way. Insofar as philosophers may be engaged in trying to influence, probably in a new direction, the way in which they themselves and/or others may understand something by seeing it in an appropriate light, they are not so much trying to make anything – be it an argument or a contribution

20  The Nature of Philosophy to propositionally expressible knowledge, still less a picture in any but a metaphorical sense – as trying to act on potential seers or beholders themselves. They may do this by suggesting novel analogies, by evoking unexpected comparisons or, for example, by a use of language apt to call to mind a range of associations normally belonging to some quite different context. They may also, of course, make use of argument sequences, put together not so much as contributing to the validation of some overall assertible thesis, but rather as devices designed to divert the attention from its more habitual focus, as a way of leading us by way of rational argument to a reasoned acceptance of what nevertheless cannot be stated as a fully coherent rational conclusion. So on this view, to do philosophy is, very broadly speaking, to try and get into a position from which to see the world or that part or aspect of it with which one may be more particularly concerned, in the most appropriate or illuminating way and to so work on others as to help them to see it likewise – by whatever discursive or “literary” means may be best adapted to such an end. Wittgenstein is, I suppose, one obvious example of a philosopher generally regarded by analytic philosophers as belonging to their own tradition who, in his second phase at any rate, sought to change his readers’ or his listeners’ mindsets by the use of a whole range of different imaginative devices. But so, in a different tradition, did Heidegger.5 Derrida, too, may be taken as an example of one who seeks to exhibit – to cause us to see – the limits within which rational understanding is constrained, limits which lie within the very nature of its own procedures. Before them, Kant, of course, set out to show us how our own powers of reason lead us, by virtue of what he called the Dialectic of Reason, to construct apparently irrefutable lines of argument which nevertheless end up by running into inevitable collision with each other. What has one understood when one has understood such an apparently self-contradictory demonstration? In the special context of moral understanding, Kant summed up the situation this way in the famous penultimate sentence of his Groundwork to the Metaphysics of Morals: While we do not comprehend the practical unconditional necessity of the moral imperative, we yet comprehend its incomprehensibility, which is all that can be fairly demanded of a philosophy which strives to carry its principles up to the very limit of human reason. (Kant 1948, 131) What of those who do philosophy in the conviction that intellectual understanding is only one part of a full or genuine understanding, something which can involve one’s whole (integrated) being, including most notably its affective, bodily and behavioural dimensions, and for whom a proper understanding of the “real” nature of the situation or activity with which one is concerned ipso facto carries with it an understanding

Doing Philosophy (In One Way or Another) 21 of how to deal with or to face up to it? Such a philosopher may indeed be thought of in the ancient traditional way as a lover of or seeker after wisdom – after wisdom rather than, let us say, of knowledge thought of as consisting in the acquisition of great learning and scholarship. Indeed, a man may know a great many things and be a master of erudition while nevertheless living his life in an evidently foolish or even morally unacceptable manner. So, if to gain understanding is a matter of acquiring wisdom, the philosophical enterprise is to be thought of as a search for how one should live – as the pursuit, one might say, of moral or practical rather than of theoretical truth. It goes without saying that this way of thinking of philosophy is far removed from the dominant contemporary and broadly speaking AngloSaxon version at least of the Western tradition of professional scholarship. The overwhelming majority of contemporary professional philosophers – in Western or Western-influenced contexts, at any rate – would take it to be evidently possible to be a first-rate philosophical scholar and at the same time a most unsatisfactory human being and, conversely, to be a morally excellent person and yet entirely innocent of philosophy. And yet . . . there remain traces, perhaps, within the thought of certain philosophers of this tradition of an older view of the connection between true knowledge and right action. I think, for example, of my old departmental head in my first post as a member of the department of moral and political philosophy at what was then still the University College of North Staffordshire (later to become the University of Keele), Professor Ernest Teale – not, it has to be said, one of the best known or most typical British philosophers of his generation, but for all that no mean scholar in his own way. Teale was convinced that once one had properly understood what was involved in a view of the world that was right or true (such, of course, as he took his own view to be), one could not but adopt it as one’s own. Failure so to adopt it must therefore be a sure sign either that one had not fully understood it after all or that one must be perverse to the point of near wickedness. Since he clearly did not take me to be either blockheaded or wicked, he was accordingly much perplexed by the fact that, while I seemed to be able to expound his views to students unable to follow his own exposition of them much more effectively than he could manage to do himself – in terms, moreover, which he readily acknowledged were wholly faithful to them – I nevertheless continued to argue my dissent from them. A better-known example of the persistence into modern times of the ancient conviction that virtue is knowledge is to be found in the philosophy of R. M. Hare, who was in his day the philosopher more than any other responsible for restoring to moral philosophy the respectability of the logical analysis of argument structures. Here I refer, of course, to analytic moral philosophy, though, truth to tell, there was at the time – Hare’s The Language of Morals was published in 1952 – very little other.

22  The Nature of Philosophy (How and why this should have been so is, of course, another story.) In that book – his first of three – Hare made very clear his commitment to what is known as the Socratic Paradox: that is to say, to the thesis that there can be no such thing as deliberate and clearsighted wrongdoing. His commitment to this view was indeed deeply embedded in his account of what he took to be the logic of moral discourse. It may be worth recalling – very briefly indeed – just how this worked. According to Hare, value judgments – including, of course, moral value judgments – are both universalisable and prescriptive, which means, on Hare’s view, that they entail imperatives. In the last resort, he was prepared to make this true by definition (Hare 1952, 168). Now, if p entails q, one cannot be understood as genuinely or sincerely assenting to or holding that p unless one assents also to q. But in the case where q is an imperative, it is, as Hare there put it: a tautology to say that we cannot sincerely assent to a second-person command addressed to ourselves, and at the same time not perform it, if now is the occasion for performing it and it is in our (physical and psychological) power to do so . . . In the case of first-person commands (“Let me do so and so”) and resolves (“I will do so and so”), which are closely similar to one another, affirmation and assent are identical. (Hare 1952, 20) From this, it follows that anyone who claims to believe (or a fortiori to know) that he ought to do x and yet fails to do x on the appropriate occasion cannot really believe (let alone know) that which he claims. (So some other explanation has to be found for his apparent incoherence – hypocrisy, self-deception, weakness of will or so on, explanations which, Hare says in The Language of Morals, belong not to the philosophical study of the logic of moral language, but rather to “that tangled subject known as moral psychology” (Hare 1952, 20) – a subject to which in his later Freedom and Reason he nevertheless returns in the chapter on “Backsliding” (Hare 1963). Of course, the philosophical claim that anyone who sees the good will necessarily follow it does not in itself involve any pretension to be able to show what that good actually is. (Indeed, so far as Hare himself was concerned, everyone had to accept the responsibility of determining for themselves just what principles of conduct to adopt.) Nevertheless, the “Socratic” view does claim to establish a crucial connection between understanding how one should behave and actually trying at least to behave according to that understanding. Here I am reminded of the reactions of the students at Nanyang University, the then-Chinese-language university in Singapore, whom I met when giving a seminar there as far back as 1968 and who explained to me that they did not think that their

Doing Philosophy (In One Way or Another) 23 philosophy teacher – responsible for teaching them traditional Chinese philosophy – could possibly be a very good or reliable philosopher in view of the discrepancies between his own personal conduct and the content of his teaching; he was, they told me, living in an unmarried state with one of his students! (Their point was not so much one of disapproval of his line of conduct per se as of seeing it as incompatible with his good standing as a teacher of the kind of philosophy that he was supposed to be teaching them.) But one may think, too, of the (typically Wittgensteinian) view that to understand a practice is simply to be able to participate in it correctly. To get someone to understand something would be, then, “simply” to train them, to enable them to join in and to carry on for themselves in ways that already-existing practitioners would accept as appropriate. Given my own background, it is no doubt unsurprising that I should find all sorts of intellectual difficulties in such a view of reflexive understanding and of the nature of the philosophical enterprise. It is nonetheless a widely and often deeply held view. From this perspective it would seem that, in pursuing their subject, philosophers, and more particularly perhaps moral and political philosophers, should see themselves as seeking an understanding that would include as an integral aspect of itself the adoption of an appropriate attitude to life – or at any rate to those aspects of life with which they are more especially concerned. It would be interesting to know how many members of philosophy departments in contemporary “Western” universities would think of what they are doing when “doing philosophy” in any of its possible modes in this dedicated light. What, finally, of the view that philosophical understanding is primarily a matter of placing that which is to be understood in a context of intelligibility? This, I noted, may be thought of in terms of a general fit or gestalt, as when one appreciates how things fit together as in some complex jigsaw puzzle. But, more specifically, it may be “seen” as a matter of placing that which is to be understood within the context of an historical tradition – which, so far as the philosopher (rather than, for example, the historian) is concerned must involve situating himself or herself within the tradition in question. This latter point calls for its own special note of emphasis. It is one thing to seek understanding by placing the object of one’s enquiry – for example, the presuppositions and methods of scientific research or the principles underlying the ordering of political governance and organisation – within a context of historical intelligibility. It is another, however closely interrelated, thing to try and signal where and how one situates oneself and one’s efforts at achieving such understanding in relation to the historical context of one’s own philosophical formation and experience: that is to say, the context within which one is working and within which one may expect to find one’s principal audience. It is this reflexive (and thus characteristically philosophical) sense of the need so

24  The Nature of Philosophy to situate oneself which may be seen as one of the most notable features of so much philosophical work in the so-called “continental” tradition – be it in the work of writing or that of teaching philosophy, in the work of established masters or in that by which students of the subject have to serve their apprenticeship. I do not, of course, mean by this that the history of philosophy does not figure in important ways in the curricula of the analytic or, as it is sometimes called within continental circles, the “Anglo-Saxon” tradition. Still, in my time as a student and at least for some time beyond, one was routinely encouraged in the belief that to engage in the history of philosophical ideas and to do so in philosophy itself was to engage in activities as different (if not quite as effectively unconnected) as, say, those involved in carrying on research in contemporary physics or chemistry and those involved in working on the history of those subjects. Anyone working in the field, say, of contemporary particle physics would of necessity be trained in the complexities of modern physical theory and in an understanding of its supporting technology; for these purposes, he would have no need for any special knowledge or understanding of the often-circuitous history of the physics of bygone times and of how present theory had evolved. In the Preface to his widely influential book on Descartes, Bernard Williams emphasised this version of the distinction between the history of philosophy qua history and work in philosophy as such, in only apparently different terms, when characterising his own book as a “study in the history of philosophy rather than in the history of ideas. . . . The history of ideas”, he went on, “is history before it is philosophy, while with the history of philosophy it is the other way round. . . . For the history of ideas, the question about a work what does it mean? is centrally the question what did it mean? . . . The present study . . . prefers the direction of rational reconstruction of Descartes’ thought, where the rationality of the construction is essentially and undisguisedly conceived in a contemporary style” (Williams 1978, 9–10). As a student I was taught, as, on the whole, students in departments of analytic philosophy are still taught, that the mark of a good philosopher was the ability to articulate the relevant problems, to propose solutions to them and to be able to back up his proposed solutions with clear and cogent arguments. In these tasks he (or, of course, she) might indeed find precious stimulus and help in the works of philosophers of the past, but he might in principle, and very often in practice, equally well accomplish them through the exercise of his own good wits.6 Of all the things that I take myself to have learnt from philosophers from the other side of the English Channel, that which, it now appears to me, should have seemed so obvious as not to have needed discovery in this way, was the importance of a proper understanding of the nature of the problems which one finds oneself as if called upon to confront, of not taking the terms in which they present themselves, as if they were,

Doing Philosophy (In One Way or Another) 25 or indeed could be, transparently understandable without any reference to the history of debate out of which they had in one way or another evolved. Let me give one short anecdotal example of the sort of thing that I am getting at. A few years back I found myself a member of a committee of the subfaculty of philosophy in Oxford which had been asked to recommend possible changes in the set text for the philosophy component in the preliminary examinations for PPE and a number of other smaller joint schools in which philosophy was also involved. The proposal before us was that we should, for the next few years at any rate, make use of Hume’s First Enquiry, which, so certain of my colleagues maintained, would immediately present beginners with a significant number of problems central to and characteristic of philosophical enquiry in general and which would thereby constitute for them a clear and challenging initiation to philosophical thinking. I remember trying to argue that before letting beginners loose on Hume, one should first direct them to read at least some Descartes, so that they might get some sense of how it could possibly have seemed so fundamentally obvious to the empiricist line of Cartesian succession that, as the doctrine emerges in the version given to it, for example, by Hume, all our ideas have to be understood as being derived in one way or another from essentially atemporal and mutually independent impressions and to present themselves as present to the mind in a similarly discrete succession. Without this background understanding, it seemed and still seems to me to remain very largely mysterious why anyone should pose the problems of how properly to understand the concept of causation or the nature of our awareness of apparently persisting “external” bodies in such prima facie arbitrary terms. I no longer remember exactly how the argument went in this committee. I do, however, remember losing it, the majority agreeing that the important philosophical problems were already presented plainly enough in Hume’s text and that to add any requirement to study, say, Descartes’s Meditations as well would be seriously to overload the syllabus. Thus, the “problem approach” to the nature of the philosophical enterprise was once again reaffirmed, not only as providing the proper model for our understanding of what as philosophers we should conceive ourselves to be doing, but also, as a natural corollary, in the far-reaching pedagogical practice of the examination requirements. All-embracing generalisations about the differences between such large-scale and most probably increasingly mythical conglomerate entities as “continental” and “analytic” philosophy are never to be trusted entirely. But it does seem to be on the whole true not only that those brought up in continental schools of philosophy receive a much more rigorous training in the history of their subject, but that they learn at the same time to respect and to rely on it as forming both the basis and the contextual framework on and within which alone they can understand and seek to satisfy the

26  The Nature of Philosophy demands of their own work. It has, certainly, been my own personal experience that students from the broad continent of Europe will generally tend to know much more of the history of their subject than do their Anglo-Saxon counterparts at similar stages of their careers, while being notably more cautious in advancing and arguing for their own opinions as such without being able to point to the support of preceding authority, and I believe this experience to have been widely shared. This is not, of course, to say that Anglo-Saxon philosophers, students and practising professionals alike, are not in general equally ready to back up their claims by way of reference and quotation. (At this point of my own present paper, I have already furnished it with several such supporting footnotes). But these will more typically relate to contemporary or near-contemporary sources; students will probably be keener to show that they are abreast of the very latest books, or even more frequently articles, that have been contributed to current debates than they will be to establish their own broad historical credentials. So far as my own background and competences are concerned, I have to confess myself a typical Anglo-Saxon. My continental opposite numbers simply have a much greater and more cultured knowledge than I do about the broad history of our subject. Let me note, incidentally, that it is no accident that over the last few paragraphs I have slipped into using the superficially racist term “Anglo-Saxon” rather than the more common philosophical label “analytic.” This is because, while there has undoubtedly been a quite significant recent increase in the number of those identifying themselves as analytic philosophers or who would, at any rate, be very knowledgeable in the fields of analytic philosophy, in all the continental European countries including the Latin ones, nearly all continental analytic philosophers still have the same characteristic continental relation to the history of philosophy as do their (perhaps not yet analytic) colleagues. How is one to explain this difference in how philosophers set about doing whatever they may do as philosophers on either side of the intellectual channel? In order to understand the difference properly, one needs, no doubt, to set it in its turn in its own context of historical intelligibility. There are, of course, any number of stories that one might seek to tell, with varying degrees of competing or complementary plausibility, of the sources and context of this divergence. One might try to restrict one’s account to the evolving course of philosophical debate itself, but any fuller explanation would certainly have to take account of other historical and institutional factors, cultural, educational and, in the very broadest sense, social, religious and political.7 Here, however, since we are primarily concerned with what is involved in “doing philosophy” (and because I have anyhow been going on for long enough), I shall restrict myself to just one or two possible features of a possible philosophical story.

Doing Philosophy (In One Way or Another) 27 First, let me recall the point that I made earlier: namely, that insofar as a philosopher may be trying to influence the way in which one may best understand something by setting it in an appropriate context of intelligibility, “they are not so much trying to make anything – be it an argument or a contribution to propositionally expressible knowledge, still less a picture in any but a metaphorical sense – as trying to act on potential seers or beholders themselves.” Where the context in question belongs to the history of philosophy itself, they may do this, of course, by way of explicit quotation and interpretive argument. But there are also many other, less explicit ways in which they may suggest what they wish to be seen as appropriate historical precedents and continuities: for example, by a use of terminology and of turns of phrase apt to call to mind the philosophical tradition within whose protective authority they seek to situate themselves. And, as we have already noted, the use of such varied discursive and literary devices, though by no means exclusive to it, is also more typical of the ways of proceeding of continental than of those of analytic philosophers (and here I deliberately use the term “analytic” in preference to the term “Anglo-Saxon”). So let me finish – not, it has to be admitted, very conclusively, but finish at any rate this instalment of my story – by referring to just two ultimately deeply interconnected considerations to be found embedded in the history of philosophy that – according to my version of it – may help render more intelligible how these aspects of the continental/analytic divergence may have come about and thus how and why it is that what it is to “do philosophy” may look rather different to many of those who inhabit opposite sides of the philosophical channel. In my preferred version of the story, then, the divergence has its philosophical origins in certain implications deeply embedded in the philosophy of Kant and in differences in the ways in which different philosophers reacted to the dilemmas with which it confronted them. Kant, himself, of course, has to be understood as reacting to the Cartesian heritage as it came to him in its two great contrasting versions, those of the “rationalist” and the “empiricist” traditions respectively. I shall not here attempt to re-enter into any of the detail of this chapter of the story. Suffice it to note two main points. The first is that, with Kant, time enters into the very constitution of meaning itself. For the Cartesians, including very notably the great British empiricists, the basic units of meaning were, as Locke put it, “whatsoever is the object of the understanding when a man thinks” (Locke 1996, 6) present to it in what, as we have already noted, can only be construed as a sort of instantaneously timeless way. For Kant, meaning is a matter of the mind’s powers of conceptualisation, and concepts for Kant are rules of recognition and classification. A rule, however, is something which must in principle be applicable to more than one instance, which is as much as to say that

28  The Nature of Philosophy it must be applicable over a certain period of time, while the applier or appliers of the rule must themselves, by the same token, be taken to persist over the same period of time. Time, in Kant’s well-known view, is “the form of Inner Sense”; it is also, though Kant himself in effect left it to his successors to draw out the further implications of this corollary, the form of history. But whatever exists or takes place in time is subject to the laws of nature, which, on Kant’s view of the matter, are, of course, necessarily causally fully determinate, even though our knowledge of them is of equal necessity always open to revision and the future course of events correspondingly never predictable with 100 percent certainty. All this suggests the conclusion, even though it may not formally entail it, that the very concepts that we find ourselves now employing, in the formulation of our philosophical problems as elsewhere, must be what they are as the outcome of a certain historical development and that a full understanding of their import must consequently depend inter alia on a proper awareness and understanding of that history. The most obvious way of seeking to relate the manner in which present problems present themselves to that of preceding debates is by explicitly reasoned reference back to their history. However, there are, as we have noted, a number of other ways in which such lines of evolving continuity may be indicated, a number of other devices by use of which the philosopher may focus his thought and his reader’s (or interlocutor’s). Reasoned argument, so classical philosophers and their analytic successors have always taught and been taught, is one thing; causally effective manipulation and direction of attention is another. (The alleged confusion of the two was one of the main reasons Hare was so shocked by C. L. Stevenson’s version of emotivism).8 Kant himself would no doubt have whole-heartedly agreed. And yet if one takes the dual-aspect doctrine of Transcendental Idealism more seriously than Kant himself was perhaps ever quite able to take it, inasmuch as every step in thought that a rational agent may undertake must, qua event in his or her life, actually take place in time, it, too, must ipso facto find expression in some sort of a temporally locatable event. In other words, a reason, when given expression in an act of reflecting or of communication with others, must find parallel expression, as it were, within some interlocking network of causes and effects. The gap between reasoned argument and other, more directly causally effective devices of literary discourse remains, but the linkages across this gap are such that some sort of passage backwards and forwards is made not only possible, but intellectually both natural and respectable, and even, in the last resort, unavoidable. I do not at all wish to claim that anyone, least of all Kant himself, actually argued out (or otherwise gave expression to) these further implications of his arguments. My suggestion is only that with him the way to these developments was opened up. What can be said with much greater certainty is that the general reaction of the philosophical world of his

Doing Philosophy (In One Way or Another) 29 time to the apparently non-negotiable and rationally rebarbative Kantian commitments to an in principle unknowable realm of noumena or thingsin-themselves that was at once irrelevant and indispensable, and to the resulting incomprehensibilities referred to in the sentence that I have already cited from the very end of the Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, was to regard them as intellectually altogether unacceptable. The reaction in its thus negative aspect was on both sides of the channel the same. But while – very broadly speaking once again – on the AngloSaxon side it took the form of a going back to Hume and to the great empiricist tradition and to a repicking up of the threads from there, on the continent, and in the first instance in particular in Germany, it took the form of an insistence that Kant had allowed himself to get stuck at too early a stage in his own thinking and of a resolve to seek a resolution by pushing on yet further. And so the great divergence began. And so philosophers, finding themselves in either branch of the divergence, may have been encouraged to see themselves as being properly committed qua philosophers to engaging in the performance of quite different and even diverging ranges of different discursive activities. For my part, I believe that the real mistake lies in too unbending an insistence on sticking in too unbending and exclusive a manner to either side of this doctrinal divide – a divide that is, I am inclined not only to hope but now actually to believe, beginning at any rate to narrow – before, perhaps, finally fading away.9 A pure problem approach to philosophy which fails to see that what it takes to be its problems and their terms of reference are embedded in the history of their own development blinds itself unnecessarily and unhelpfully to a significant part of the rationale of its own intellectual activity. An historical approach which allows itself to forget that the history of philosophy is the history of an ongoing series of attempts to come to grips with a developing set of problems, ipso facto, allows itself to forget what this history is really about. By the same token, no writers – above all no self-reflective writers of philosophy – should ever allow themselves to suppose the manner and language of what they are engaged in doing to be irrelevant to the messages that they may, whether intentionally or unintentionally, convey to others or, indeed, back to themselves. But nor should they allow themselves to become so obsessed with this insight as to forget that, in the last resort, the whole edifice of philosophy is built on and around would-be rational argument structures whose underpinning rests on the values of truth and validity. So, if not a wholly distinctive third way, at least a middle one. And I hope that, however rambling, this piece, which is now at last on the very point of stopping, may in itself have provided, by precept, by exemplification and also maybe by a little suggestive nudging, some wandering instance of what its message is supposed to be.

30  The Nature of Philosophy

Notes 1. My own contribution was in fact devoted to an examination of the idea of crisis in philosophy itself, be it of the so-called analytic or any other variety. 2. The concept of what the late Stephan Körner called “theoretical ­incommensurability” – that is, the idea that two theories can be contradictory without either of them being false – is by now a familiar one in philosophy of science. See, for example, his Experience and Conduct. 3. Jonathan Rée, among others, has written most interestingly about the power that the metaphors of vision have exercised over our understanding of understanding; see his I See a Voice: A Philosophical History of Language, Deafness and the Senses. (One has only to think of such expressions as, for example, “I see what you mean.”) 4. One is reminded here of the puzzles presented by John Searle and his parable of the translator situated within his black box, able to perform all the appropriate transformations from one language into another but without any “inner” understanding of what any of their sentences might mean. 5. See David Cooper’s striking joint review of the English translation of his Beiträge zur Philosophie (vom Ereignis) – Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning) – and of Herman Philipse’s Heidegger’s Philosophy of Being: “Philipse reasonably demands of Heidegger’s followers that they “explain what kind of speech acts [he] is performing if he does not make assertions.” . . . If, he argues, Heidegger is not making assertions, then he is saying nothing true or false, hence “nothing to discuss.” This is too quick. The same argument could show that there is “nothing to discuss” in most poetry, few practitioners of which see themselves in the business of making assertions or propositions. Heidegger does, moreover, indicate what “speech acts” he is performing: they “intimate,’ and “attune” or “prepare” us for ways of experiencing being” (Cooper 2000, 12). 6. The texts of past philosophers are, of course, widely studied and taught in departments of analytic philosophy and by top-class analytic philosophers. But the characteristic form the enquiry would tend to be “Was Aristotle” – for example – “right in arguing in such and such a way?” rather than “What was the point in his own time and context of his saying what he is to be understood as having said?” (See Leszek Kolakowski’s review of Zbigniew Janowski’s Cartesian Theodicy: “Time and again Zbigniew Janowski shows that we cannot understand Descartes’s texts without referring them to their cultural context, past and contemporary, to Molinists, Oratorians, Jansenists, Thomists, as well as to Aquinas, Duns Scotus, Augustine and ancient thinkers. This is not how analytic philosophers proceed; they read classic texts and ask whether the arguments are sound and what is the logical structure of a doctrine. They are not interested in the cultural context (I suspect they are lazy), and for this reason their contribution to the study of seventeenth-century “Continental” philosophy is less than impressive” (Kolakowski 2000). I do not think that this is wholly true of all whom one might call analytic philosophers, but Kolakowski certainly has a point. 7. It is, for example, striking that the historically unselfconscious, problem-orientated approach has taken most natural root in the lands of a broadly Protestant, individualist and anti-authoritarian (or anti the authority of institutions) culture while respect for the weight and authority of historical traditions has been more characteristic of philosophy as pursued in lands of a broadly Catholic commitment to respect for the historically constituted authority of the Church. 8. “We may tell someone, either that something is the case, or to do something: here there is no attempt at persuasion (or influencing or inducing . . .). If the

Doing Philosophy (In One Way or Another) 31 person is not disposed to assent to what we tell him, we may then resort to rhetoric, propaganda, marshalling of additional facts, psychological tricks, threats, bribes torture, mockery, promises of protection, and a variety of other expedients. All of these are ways of inducing him or getting him to do something; the first four are also ways of getting him to believe something; none of them are ways of telling him something” (Hare 1963, 14). See also C. L. Stevenson, Ethics and Language, Chapter XI. 9. The evidence is to be found on both sides of the intellectual channel – which has its branches, of course, within both the “Anglo-Saxon” and “continental” areas of dominance.

Works Cited Cooper, David. 2000. “Lucifer and the Light of Being.” Times Literary Supplement, August 25. Hare, R. M. 1963. Freedom and Reason. Oxford: The Clarendon Press. Hare, R. M. 1952. The Language of Morals. Oxford: The Clarendon Press. Kant, Immanuel. 1948. The Moral Law or Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. Translated by H. J. Paton. London: Hutchinson’s University Library. Kolakowski, Leszek. 2000. “How Good a Christian Was Descartes?” Times Literary Supplement, August 18. Körner, Stephan. 1976. Experience and Conduct: A Philosophical Enquiry into Practical Thinking. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Locke, John. 1996. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Edited by Kenneth P. Winkler. Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett. Rée, Jonathan. 1999. I See a Voice: A Philosophical History of Language, Deafness and the Senses. London: Harper Collins. Stevenson, C. L. 1944. Ethics and Language. New Haven: Yale University Press. Williams, Bernard. 1978. Descartes: The Project of Pure Enquiry. London: Penguin Books.

2 The Idea of “Crisis” in Philosophy

My first experiences in what one has, I suppose, to call professional philosophy go back to my days as a student in Oxford at the very end of the 1940s, when one came very naturally to acquire the reflex of commencing each new enquiry or tutorial essay by checking on what the Oxford English Dictionary might have to say about the terms in which the discussion was to be couched or those of the essay title that one had been given. It feels thus appropriate that I should start now by looking at what the dictionary has to say about the term crisis. The first context to which it refers is that of pathology; here, a crisis is said to be “The point in the progress of a disease when a change takes place, which is decisive of recovery or death; also any marked or sudden change of symptoms, etc.” There follows the context of astrology: “Said of a conjunction of the planets which determines the issue of a disease or critical point in the course of events.” Finally, we have the transferred and figurative sense: “A turning-point in the progress of anything; also, a state of affairs in which a decisive change for better or worse is imminent.” And for the sake of comparison, it may be worth citing the somewhat terser Chambers: “A crucial or decisive moment; a turning-point e.g. in a disease; a time of difficulty or distress; an emergency.” I do not know which, if indeed any, of these senses those who were organising this conference had most clearly in mind when settling on its title theme.1 Presumably, they were at least thinking of the present time as being one of a major change of some sort, be it for better or for worse, in the way in which analytic philosophy perceives itself or is perceived, either by its adepts or its opponents, to be carried on. But what of the reference in both these major dictionaries to a disease? One wonders whether analytic philosophy is to be thought of as presently in the grip of some possibly mortal disease or whether the suggestion is not rather that it is itself to be identified as the disease, one from which philosophy taken more generally is suffering and from which, if the disease is not somehow checked, it may fail to recover. One might not have to travel very far from these shores – or even, indeed, within them – to discover people ready and eager to support either or both of the theses implicit

The Idea of “Crisis” in Philosophy 33 in these two possible interpretations. My own view of this most general aspect of the matter, for what it may here be worth, may be summed up very briefly and roughly as follows: 1. The overall philosophical enterprise is rooted in the endeavour to achieve what may be called a higher-order understanding of whatever the situation or activity in which one may be involved or engaged, both at the most general level of the human situation as such and at the unendingly varied more specific levels at which we may be engaged in one form of activity or another. This understanding may be achieved and communicated either through the deployment of explicitly formulated logical argument or through persuading ­people – who may be the philosophers concerned themselves – to see things in some appropriate new light or through some combination of the two. 2. That the forms of philosophy recently and currently still dominant in the English-speaking world have come collectively to be characterised as “analytic philosophy” would seem to be best understood as the outcome of a number of historical accidents. Hume, of course, that most influential of the classical British empiricist exponents of the philosophy of “ideas,” was already a practitioner of a certain model of analysis – of complex ideas in terms of their simpler components and of the elements of experience, the impressions, from which he took them to be derived. As is very well known, “Anglo-Saxon” philosophy, as it – (whatever exactly this “it” might be!) – is generally known in France, has seen major divergences, not to say conflicts, between proponents of different ways or methods of pursuing philosophical understanding; there have been and are Wittgensteinians and anti-Wittgensteinians, champions of so-called ordinary language analysis as compared with and often opposed to those who prefer to buttress their analyses with the techniques of formal logic. It is nevertheless broadly fair to say that across this family diversity there runs a common assumption that philosophical investigation and communication are to be understood and deliberately practised as taking place on the plane (plain?) of explicit reflection, suggestion, argumentation and the diagnosis and resolution – or dissolution – of problems. 3. In all this, analytic philosophy (so-called, as maybe one should continue to add) would seem to remain in more evident continuity with the classical tradition than much – but not, it must be emphasised, all – of what goes on under a number of the alternative banners that have been unfurled in comparatively recent times. So if analytic philosophy is indeed in crisis, this should, one may think, be regarded as a crisis that has manifested itself within one ongoing development of the arguments and preoccupations characteristic of the philosophical tradition as such.

34  The Nature of Philosophy It is here, indeed, that I come to the question, or set of questions, lying behind the title that Denis MacManus and I negotiated for my contribution to this conference – “The ‘Idea’ of Crisis in Philosophy.” For in thinking about the overall theme suggested by the (at least superficially more restricted) title chosen by its organisers for the conference itself, I found myself being referred back to Edmund Husserl and to his great, and in many ways completely extraordinary, last work The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, the principal manuscript of which dates back to the years 1935–36. I have to confess that I have been rereading this not in the original German – my German is inadequate to a task that for me would have become far too laboured – but in the French translation by Gérard Granel, published by Gallimard in 1976. It is worth quoting at slightly generous length from Granel’s preface to his translation: All that is necessary, I believe, is to allow oneself to muse on what is so striking about Husserl’s project in the Krisis and the dates of its undertaking, or more precisely in the relation between the project and its dates. 1935–1936: Nazism has been in power in Germany for already two years, antisemitism is rampant, Mussolini has been dominating Italy for the past six years with the invention of a type of society and a form of power of which no analyses – Marxist analyses included – had been able to provide an intelligible account, Franco is preparing to conquer Spain, while the liberal democracies are fraying at the edges as they prevaricate and await their collapse into cowardice. For its part socialism has turned into Stalinism, without anyone realising – as even today there is still a failure to realise – how, on this slippery path, it is only following that strange and horrible shifting of the ground which is sweeping away Europe, or, as Husserl was to put it, “European humanity.” For, if “the Crisis” is anywhere it is here: in the unnamed/unnameable way in which the balance of a world was tipping over, a world which took itself at that time to be The World, which, indeed, in a sense it was.2 Granel goes on to talk of “those great Humanists, such as Cassirer and Husserl, who tried to oppose the rise of fascist ‘barbarianism’ by their different attempts at reviving a modern rationalist philosophy. . . . For this,” he says, “was the project, made explicit in the Krisis: to awaken (and to establish once and for all) in the form of an absolute philosophy of transcendental phenomenology, that immanence of reason to humankind, which defines its very identity.” Husserl himself, indeed, makes it abundantly clear that what he saw as the crisis in philosophy was at the same time and ipso facto a crisis of the “European” spirit and way of life. As he saw it, however, philosophy came

The Idea of “Crisis” in Philosophy 35 first, and it was on the terrain of philosophy that the struggle to overcome the crisis, as indeed the struggle for survival itself, had to be fought: Scepticism with regard to the possibility of metaphysics, the collapse of any faith in the possibility of a universal philosophy which might serve as a guide to contemporary mankind, this signifies quite precisely the collapse of any faith in reason, understood in terms of the opposition that the Ancient Greeks established between Epistèmé and Doxa. In the last resort it is Reason that gives a meaning to everything that claims “to be,” to all “things,” “values,” “ends,” in that it is Reason that relates them normatively to that which, from the very beginning of philosophy, has been designated by the term “Truth” – truth in itself – and correlatively by the term “Being” – “ontos.” By the same token, faith in an “absolute” Reason is also lost, that Reason from which the world derives its meaning, faith in any meaningfulness in history, in any meaning in humanity, in its liberty understood as man’s capacity to give a rational meaning to his individual and collective existence. That man should lose this faith means neither more nor less than that he loses faith “in himself,” in his own true being. Husserl, living, as he only too evidently did, in a time of increasingly menacing crisis in the fullest social and political sense, not only understood the wider historical situation as reflecting a crisis in the whole philosophical tradition of the West – for him the philosophical tradition as such – he actually ascribed to what he saw as the crisis in philosophy a certain quasi-causal responsibility for the wider disasters that threatened. (I say somewhat cautiously only “quasi-causal” for it may well be that the consequences of even a loss of faith in the powers and relevance of reason must still be thought of in terms, precisely, of consequences rather than in terms of effects.) At all events, if the philosophical enterprise is, as I have suggested, to be understood as being “rooted in the endeavour to achieve what may be called a higher-order understanding of whatever the situation or activity in which one may be involved or engaged [including] the most general level of the human situation as such,” then it is not surprising that in a time of general crisis and of both individually and collectively self-defeating behaviour, philosophy should, either explicitly or implicitly, directly or indirectly, both reflect on and reflect that crisis as one of the rationales of philosophy itself. Husserl’s own diagnosis of the crisis was in terms of his vision of a philosophy that would establish man as a being of reason, both rational and reasonable, as one might say, and of Reason (with a capital R) as capable of giving a sense – of unity, meaning, direction and purpose – to the world in which man lives.

36  The Nature of Philosophy What, if anything, might we make of all this today? (That the question, put in this form, is at once almost overtly question-begging – for to what identity group does its “we” refer? – is a point to which I shall try to come back later.) The “collapse of any faith in the possibility of a universal philosophy” of which Husserl spoke was not, of course, to be understood as some merely contingent catastrophe, bringing about an as it were de facto devastation of the philosophical tradition such as might be produced by some outsize object from outer space suddenly falling upon some great centre of civilisation such as Paris or Rome or even London or New York. The philosophical tradition’s loss of faith in itself and in its own mission has, on the contrary, been brought about as a result, or at any rate a consequence, of the development and following through of certain arguments deeply rooted within the tradition itself. It was Kant, of course, who had characterised Pure Reason as constituting the very “Seat of Transcendental Illusion,” but even Kant had found it difficult, perhaps even impossible, to take on board the full extent and implications of his commitment – by virtue of the deepest thrusts of his own deepest arguments – to paradox and, beyond that, to meta-­paradox. By this I mean his commitment, on the one hand, to lines of argument, which, though judged to be separately ineluctable, when brought together nevertheless end up in such terms of conflict with each other as jointly to constitute stark contradiction and yet, on the other hand, to Universal Reason’s own overriding principle of noncontradiction. He thus finds himself committed both to paradox and to the presumption that, in principle, paradox must always be susceptible of a rational resolution. But, of course, this is a philosophy whose very principles will not allow it to remain satisfied with the “mere” comprehension of an incomprehensibility; the classical Enlightenment could not, after all, allow itself this sort of reasonable complicity with mysticism. And so, by following through the arguments as they lead further along this road, we find the grand philosophical tradition ending up by showing that the very principle on which it is founded can in principle, the very self-same principle, no longer command the respect on which it nevertheless continues nostalgically to insist. (Husserl, of course, as one of the last great representatives of the tradition of rational enlightenment, was among those who sought most vigorously to resist this development.) This self-undermining of reason by itself we may – indeed, perhaps even must – think of as a crisis in philosophy, one generated, as it were, from within philosophy itself. It was not my intention, when setting out to reflect on this theme, to embark on some version of what Richard Rorty might perhaps license as an outline of some would-be grand story of a possible history of philosophy of the last two or three centuries or so. Still, we may perhaps think of that only too recognisable, if not easily definable, split and subsequent stand-off between the two inappropriately termed worlds of

The Idea of “Crisis” in Philosophy 37 “continental” and “Anglo-Saxon” philosophy as having their origins in the crisis brought about by the way in which the classical tradition has seemed to turn back upon and, in the end, against itself. Since then there have, of course, been other, more local moments of internally generated crisis, when a particular philosophical enterprise has seemed to conclude by demonstrating, on the basis of its own animating principles, the logical impossibility of arriving at what it had set out to establish: in other words, when it has seemed that an enterprise undertaken in order to establish a certain thesis or theme within philosophy must itself lead to the conclusion that the enterprise is doomed to failure. One may think, for example, of Russell’s discovery of the flaw within Frege’s use of the concept of “class” in his attempt to define that of “number,” or, to take a very different and doubtless still controversial example, one may think of the problems which arise when a line of argument which seeks to expose the multiple non-rationalities underlying and even governing all purportedly strictly rational lines of argument then finds itself brought back to reflect the same subversive analysis upon itself. And in all these cases, the overall and the local, and whether we hang on to or jettison the reference to disease, we have instances of crisis in the dictionary-approved sense of “a turning-point in the progress of anything; a state of affairs in which a decisive change for better or worse is imminent” for if anything is clear about, or indeed in, these moments of philosophical self-frustration, it is surely that philosophy must either find some new way of self-release – as provided, for example, or so it must have seemed, by the Theory of Types – or in effect simply mark time and eventually peter out. But there is perhaps something wrong with my examples as I have proposed them. For, one may well ask, is not the second of my so-called local examples in effect simply a repeat of what I took to be the quite general crisis in “the grand philosophical tradition. . . . brought about by the way in which the classical tradition seemed to turn back upon and against itself,” a movement anticipated perhaps by Hume in the appendix to his Treatise, when he recognises his own inability to account, on the basis of his own fundamental principles, for the origin of the idea of “personal identity” and brought, however reluctantly, much closer to the surface of explicit formulation by, as we have just noted, Kant? So, to return to the mode of the grand story, we may perhaps adjust our vision of analytic philosophy to see it as an obstinately sustained attempt to remain within the bounds of the grand tradition of explicit and ever-more-refined argument and of the rituals of would-be “rational” debate while, in the terms of that same story, we may see at any rate one central and complex strand of contemporary “continental” philosophy as a carrying forward and deepening of the suspicions which the same grand tradition had itself generated as to the reliability of its own credentials. Is this to be read as a suggestion that, at the present time, a natural, if not necessarily the only, solution to Husserl’s crisis is to be found in

38  The Nature of Philosophy a gathering around the standard of analytic philosophy and, even more particularly perhaps, around the standards of those who, within that disconcertingly indeterminate field, would see the only ultimate criterion of philosophical acceptability to lie in the strength of recognisable argument structures – and some of them, of course, only in that of such structures as are susceptible of convincing translation into the formalisms of symbolic logic? We can be reasonably confident, of course, that in so far as a self-generated crisis is seen to arise within the development of a technically articulated philosophy, someone will sooner or later devise a technically workable way of transforming the crisis into a problem and then of resolving or evading it. Such are the refinements of an encroaching scholasticism. In Anthony Quinton’s interesting review of Randall Collins’s recent book The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change, he refers to “his doctrine of three kinds of stagnation (forgetting cultural capital, dominance of past classics, and technical over-refinement, our present malady)” (Quinton 1999). One might argue about the question as to whether stagnation (in the context of philosophy at any rate) amounts to a crisis in any of the dictionary-approved senses of the term with which I began. Certainly, a state of stagnation will be less easy to diagnose than one of manifest self-contradiction or of equally manifest pragmatic paradox, and its diagnosis is bound to prove more controversial. In particular, the really committed practitioners are, very naturally, likely to be less inclined than anyone else to recognise the context of their practice as being one of stagnation. However, it seems to be by no means implausible not only that Quinton – certainly, no technical fanatic himself – may be right in his characterisation of the present situation in the world of analytic philosophy as being one of the stagnation of over-refinement, (if, as one may suppose, this was indeed the world to which he was referring), but that his characterisation might be extended to cover much of the world of “continental” philosophy as well, particularly perhaps in its self-consciously self-deconstructionist phase. Certainly, one can well understand how any of these versions of philosophical stagnation might constitute or at any rate lead to a crisis in and of philosophy understood, in Husserl’s words, as “the collapse of any faith in the possibility of a universal philosophy which might serve as a guide to contemporary mankind,” philosophy no longer being recognisable as including, to quote now an earlier expression of my own, “the endeavour to achieve . . . a higher-order understanding . . . of the human situation as such.” But, of course, it may also be that this philosophical “collapse of any faith in reason” to which Husserl refers does in fact reflect only too well the prevailing state of affairs in the wider world which provides the context of production for all contemporary philosophical endeavours. Simply to reflect a context or a situation, however, is one thing; to exert any influence on the way in which it may evolve is evidently very much another. (Which is not to say that the two may

The Idea of “Crisis” in Philosophy 39 not be connected; to provide someone with a reflection of himself may sometimes have a very powerful effect on him.) No-one, I take it, would suppose that philosophy or philosophers, speaking or writing as such, could on their own have any direct leverage over the directions taken by the wider social developments in the societies to which they belong. Nevertheless, they may have some real contribution to make, however hard it may be to assess its importance, to the background conditions that determine the nature of the contexts within which social movements arise, take form and evolve. Husserl himself had, evidently, a rather grand view of the nature of this contribution and hence of the way in which he thought philosophers should conceive of their own calling. At this point I am tempted to quote in full the last section (Section 7) of the opening Chapter of the Krisis, were it not too long. However, even a truncated (and, I have to say, fairly freely translated) extract may serve to convey something of its flavour: But what, now, of we philosophers of to-day? What can, what must be the significance for us of reflections of the type that I have been developing here? . . . Can we simply, then, go back to our desks and take up our work where we had left it, on this or that “philosophical problem,” in other words go on working out our own personal philosophy . . . when we know quite certainly in advance that this personal philosophy, like all other such both past and present, will have no more than an ephemeral existence among the vast crop of philosophies which are continually coming into existence and passing away . . . We have become aware, at least in a general sort of way, of the fact that, within the whole field of human existence, human philosophising is in no way to be thought of as having a merely private cultural purpose or one that is in some way restricted. For how could we forget that we are, so to speak, the Civil Servants (“les fonctionnaires”) of Mankind. The wholly personal responsibility that we bear to the truth of our own being qua philosophers . . . carries with it a responsibility to the true being of humanity, which is but drawn towards a Telos that it can actually reach, if indeed it can, only by way of philosophy – that is by way of ourselves, provided that we take our role as philosophers seriously. Is there not in this “provided that” a certain evasiveness? And if there is not. what must we do in order to be able to believe, we who do believe; for we can no longer continue in all seriousness to philosophise as we have done up to now in a way which offers the prospect not of Philosophy itself but only of different philosophies. I do not know how many professional philosophers of today – whether already tenured or aspiring to be so – would regard themselves as belonging to the Civil Service of Mankind. Nevertheless, however reduced,

40  The Nature of Philosophy however limited the contribution of philosophy to non-professional thinking and attitudes may be – including, of course, those of professional philosophers in the non-professionally philosophical aspects of their lives, it is almost certainly true that, indirectly rather than directly, it may – under favourable circumstances, one has cautiously to add – play a real contributory part in forming the patterns and habits of thought and attitude of those who in any way belong to the wider or narrower milieu in which it is carried on; partly, and most importantly, through the impact it may have on those for whom it plays a major part in their education – and we have to remember that there are countries where virtually everyone who completes their secondary education will have had a full year of philosophy – and partly, of course, through a complex process of more or less informed osmosis with the general surrounding culture. But even supposing that this is the case, we may well still be at a loss to know how to answer Husserl’s somewhat desperate question: “What must we do in order to be able to believe, we who do believe?” “We who do believe.” Who exactly is this “We” and what exactly – or perhaps not so exactly – do “we” believe? For Husserl, it seems clear enough, the “We” is to be taken as covering all those who “take our role as philosophers seriously”; but then it is far from being immediately clear whether even all those who are attending this conference – presumably in their capacity as, in some sense, philosophers – would come to any quick or easy agreement as to how to understand or to formulate their “role.” Still, we may be entitled to suppose that whatever doubts we may have, either collectively or severally, about the nature or even the concept of our “role,” the simple fact of our going on doing whatever it is that we go on doing under the very general head of “doing philosophy” – teaching it, writing and struggling to finish theses and to publish, reading (at least some selection) of each other’s productions, taking whatever part we may take in the varied institutional arrangements of philosophy, etc. – shows that we are serious enough about these engagements to consider them at least worthwhile and maybe even important. I realise only too well, of course, that this is not necessarily true of all of us; there are, alas, those who, having started out on a philosophical career, become virtually stuck in it, but can see no practical way out. But probably, hopefully at any rate, this will be true only of a minority. Of the majority, we may, I would suppose, be entitled to assume that they “believe in” the value and point of articulated and communicable reflection, communicable, that is to say, to all those who either already do or who can in principle be brought to share a similar belief; and that “we,” who take ourselves to belong to this majority, will surely be prepared to argue, must, in principle at least include all fellow human beings capable of membership of a speech community; and this must, of course, be true of the overwhelming majority of human beings.

The Idea of “Crisis” in Philosophy 41 But this, needless to say, is very far from meaning that it would still be possible today to find a majority, or even a substantial minority, of philosophers, whether of the analytic or Anglo-Saxon or of the so-called “continental” variety, ready to affirm with Husserl a faith in the in principle “possibility of a universal philosophy” or in a “Reason that gives a meaning to everything that claims ‘to be,’” to all “things,” “values,” “ends,” in that it is Reason that relates them normatively to that which, from the very beginning of philosophy, has been designated by the term “‘Truth’ . . . that Reason from which the world derives its meaning.” “The possibility of a universal philosophy”? Well, perhaps at any rate in the sense, that I have just indicated, of a higher-order reflection on “at the most general level [the nature of] the human situation as such” and at more specific levels on that of the unending variety of activities in which we may be engaged – a higher-order reflection that is both adequately articulated and in principle universally communicable as such. Once again, of course, the “in principle” has to be heavily underlined. Obviously enough, people’s capacity for (linguistic) understanding can be a wildly fluctuating variable – as, indeed, can be different philosophers’ capacity for readily understandable formulations of their thoughts; and it is likewise obvious that there will be, certainly in practice and arguably even in principle, all sorts of problems of translation to be reckoned with. Universal communicability is, of course, a very different matter indeed from universal agreement. Not only is this far from being guaranteed even by full mutual understanding; there are, on the contrary, contexts in which, the more clearly and fully one understands one’s interlocutor’s position, the clearer and sharper may become one’s disagreement with it. Nevertheless, and with these all-important qualifications, I myself should, as I have already indicated, be prepared to argue for universal communicability in principle. However, a “Reason that relates normatively” [everything that claims “to be”] “to that which, from the very beginning of philosophy, has been designated by the term ‘Truth,’ ” clearly belongs to a very different story. Today there can be few, if any, philosophers, who would still join in affirming, however desperately, their belief in Reason, with a capital ‘R’, as playing this sort of sovereign role in the constitution of our world. If indeed we have to recognise it as constituting a crisis in philosophy that, as a result of developments within philosophy itself, “faith in an ‘absolute’ Reason is also lost, that Reason from which the world derives its meaning, faith in any meaningfulness in history, in any meaning in humanity, in its liberty understood as man’s capacity to give a rational meaning to his individual and collective existence,” we have also to face the fact that we cannot hope to overcome or transcend this crisis simply by way of a return to an unreconstructed version of the faith that has been lost. Moreover, if it is also true that the fact that “man should lose

42  The Nature of Philosophy this faith means neither more nor less than that he loses faith ‘in himself,’ in his own true being . . .,” then the gravity of the crisis will, as Husserl thought, have implications stretching far beyond the bounds of philosophy itself, even if his own recommendations for meeting it no longer have any plausibility for us. (And as I have already argued, we may quite reasonably suppose that, even if the general influence of philosophy is more modest than Husserl may have presumed or hoped, it may still “play a real contributory part in forming the patterns and habits of thought and attitude of those who in any way belong to the wider or narrower milieu in which it is carried on.” So, to repeat Husserl’s question once more, “What must we do in order to be able to believe?”) In fact, it seems to me that over the last few years there have been already a whole number of signs of different people trying to work in their different ways in the general direction in which “we” must go. Perhaps the main thing that needs doing – and, it goes without saying, there would be no point in trying to do it, were there not independently good philosophical (i.e. “rational” or “intellectual”) reasons for doing so – is to work towards an account of reason which knits it in more closely to and with other aspects of human subjectivity – the emotions, feelings, the imagination and the various forms of judgment. As soon as one says this, of course, one is reminded of Kant and of his repeated efforts to provide some coherent account of the interlocking relations between the faculties which the basic structure of his theory sets initially so far apart: atemporal and autonomous Reason, on the one hand, and the spatio-temporally situated and hence causally determined Senses on the other hand, with Imagination having as its not easily comprehensible role the provision of some effective link between the two. Much of the recently renewed interest in the Critique of Judgment, and more generally in the very notion of “judgment,” may be understood in this context. So that is one thing: to work towards an account of the human subject in which its capacities for language and for reasoned or reasoning reflection are better integrated with all the other known and knowable aspects of human subjectivity and the human situation. (This is, of course, something which Husserl himself and certain of his main followers have already, in their own ways, attempted to do.) But this means among other things, of course, that we have to continue either to work towards some convincing account of the relations between the goaldirectiveness of rationally motivated behaviour on the one hand and the already determinate course of causally explicable behaviour on the other hand or, if this seems impossible of achievement, of some convincing account of why it is that we touch here on ultimately irresolvable paradox or mystery. And this amounts to saying that we almost certainly need to revive another Kantian enterprise, that to which he gave the title of a philosophical anthropology: in other words, to see if we cannot produce a coherent account of what it is to be a human being, endowed with the

The Idea of “Crisis” in Philosophy 43 capacities for goal-directive and norm-responsive activities on the one hand, including most notably those for reflective communication with all other human beings, and subject to all the causal constraints and limitations of the body and its physical (and, indeed, social) environment on the other hand, an account, moreover, that, in applying to human beings as such, yet allows full room for all the culturally-dependent variations that humanity as a whole exhibits. Such an account naturally needs to be able to accommodate whatever new causally relevant information becomes available concerning, for example, the infinitely subtle different ways in which what goes on at the level of the brain determines what may or must happen at the level of all forms of behaviour – including most notably linguistic behaviour and the capacity to understand and interact with others – and yet still allow for the ways in which action-behaviour may take the form that it does in virtue of the goal-seeking reasons that lie behind it. In other words, we need a fully rounded account of what it must be to be a naturally embodied but rational animal. Another way of looking at this need for an account of man as a rational animal that balances a proper concern with analysis of all the subtleties of the structures of rational argument with an equal concern for the understanding of the diverse ways in which man may function (or malfunction) as an animal that reasons – would be to seek an adequate representation of the relation between reason and reasoning. The order of the argument structures provided by reason is, of course, an atemporal one; the proposition that, for example, ([p>q].p)>q is not an event of any sort. But the act of reasoning this through, whether as a case of working it out for oneself or as one of demonstrating it to someone else is, qua action, something that takes place in time, at a particular time and place, in the language of a particular speech community and from the perspective of a particular culture – (to use, for the sake of brevity, an almost unusably imprecise term). It thus has its place in the network of causal production. We are all more or less clearly aware of the fact that if our reasoning is to be effective as well as valid, (effective in its impact on those with whom we reason, whether with others or, indeed, with ourselves), the manner and timing of its presentation will be at least as important as the logically constraining force of its argument. The valid­ ersuasiveness – ity of my reasons will be unaffected by the elegance or p or lack of both – with which I may put them; but the efficacy of my reasoning as a practical activity may be even alarmingly dependent upon them. The art of rhetoric remains of major importance to anyone concerned with the activity of reasoning; and, if they want their messages to win acceptance, the most rigorous of logicians may have much to learn from a study of the appropriate forms of literature. Reason may indeed be universal in its claims; but if they are to be made out, due account has to be taken of the many particular forms in which they must find themselves expressed.

44  The Nature of Philosophy Thus, if “Reason” is universal in its claims and potential communicability, acts of reasoning are inevitably – necessarily, if one prefers – particular both in their expression and in their execution. One way of reading those notoriously difficult eight pages of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason known as the Schematism is to see them as a focus of his struggle somehow to account within the framework of his philosophical anthropology for the way in which the universal and the particular – that is, the temporal and the atemporal, rationality and causality – are held together within and by human knowledge and experience. One may well doubt whether there can in principle be any stable solution to this nevertheless unavoidable problem. Nevertheless, it may well be that when philosophy is led so to insist on its emphasis on one side of this impossible but indissoluble pairing as virtually to eliminate the other that crisis, in the Chambers dictionary sense of “A crucial or decisive moment; a turning-point e.g. in a disease; a time of difficulty or distress; an emergency,” ensues; and it is perhaps only too easy to see how one might go on to elaborate a story of how a downgrading of reason in favour of causality, of the universal in favour of the particular, might manifest itself as a crisis not only in philosophy but in the wider world beyond as well. There are two other points of which it worth taking especial note. They both concern Husserl’s reference to “Reason that gives a meaning to . . . ‘values’ [and] ‘ends’, in that it is Reason that relates them normatively to that which, from the very beginning of philosophy, has been designated by the term ‘Truth’ ” It is, of course, so well known as to have become a commonplace that one of the most powerful intellectual factors in the loss of faith in “that Reason from which the world derives its meaning, faith in any meaningfulness in history, in any meaning in humanity” has been the widespread and vigorously argued conviction that it is logically impossible to construct any validly constraining move from statements of fact or from the propositions of “merely” theoretical – including, of course, philosophical – analysis to either imperatives to action or judgments of value; or in Hume’s less exact, but more memorable formulation, from “is” to “ought.” This conviction or claim has, as is well known, been formulated in a whole number of different ways; and, as is just about equally well known, has by now been not merely resisted, but closely contested in probably an equal number of different ways. My own view on this multiply complex matter is very roughly as follows. We have, certainly, to accept that on any given view of what the facts of a given state of affairs may be, it will always be (logically) possible that different people should adopt individually different attitudes, whether of approval or disapproval, of concern or lack of concern, of liking or dislike towards the state of affairs in question. This possibility is, I take it, ultimately founded on the status of the fact that confronts us as a necessary whether-we-like-it-or-not check on our would-be use of a sound, mark or gesture as a norm-governed symbol when engaged in the

The Idea of “Crisis” in Philosophy 45 basic moves of apprenticeship to language; but an adequate spelling out of this story would take us far beyond the bounds of presently available space or time. However, the whole range of normativity – if we may call it by that name – covers much more than the expression of attitudes of individual approval and disapproval, of individual preferences of like and dislike, interest and disinterest and so on. A most important, if not perhaps the most important, stretch of that range covers the ground of the diverse normative commitments into which anyone enters simply by virtue of embarking on and persisting with certain types of project. These are norms which one has in general to respect unless one is willing and able to give up on the project altogether. The most general and least easily escapable of such projects is doubtless that involved in membership of a speech community, whereby articulated communication with others is made possible – but only subject to common observance of the same norms of symbolic usage. (Which is not to say that it is altogether impossible to turn wholly away even from this project.) There have been, of course, a number of different attempts to give more or less explicit expression to these norms, and even to press them into service as providing a basis for some sort of “liberal” morality of mutual respect. This does not seem to me to offer any logically compelling line of response to Husserl’s appeal for renewed philosophical support and solidarity. One has, certainly, to respect certain norms if one is to communicate successfully with others; but not only may one have occasion to communicate with others for whom one feels a profound antipathy, there are many forms of exploitation and cruelty that actually depend on successful communication for their effectiveness. Even that overall consistency of linguistic behaviour that must certainly figure most prominently among the norms underpinning such success, has no necessary carry-over to a consistent treatment of others in other respects, be it for consistently better or for consistently worse. We are returned, then, to the never fully certain, never fully secure relationship between the rational and the reasonable, those two great branches of the metaphorical tree of “Universal Reason” and to the question of whether it may not be possible so to elaborate the notion of the reasonable as to show it to be something more than one of a resolutely drab and unadventurous prudence devoid of any feeling for passion or romance. It would seem to me that any adequate account of the (humanly) reasonable – adequate, that is to say, to serve as the basis of a response to Husserlian need – must make allowance, within itself so to speak, for the paradoxical idea that it may sometimes be reasonable to act unreasonably; sometimes, but not at all times and in all ways, for there are some forms of unreasonableness which must always be unacceptable. Indeed, it may well be that the reasonable is better adapted than the rational to make proper allowance, within the overall territory of Reason, for that

46  The Nature of Philosophy element of paradox, which, so it seems to me, can never be wholly driven out from any thoroughgoing account of the human situation. The remaining point is this. In that quotation to which I keep returning Husserl links his reference to that “Reason that gives a meaning to . . . ‘values’ [and] ‘ends’ ” to the (evidently, the same) “Reason that relates them normatively to that which, from the very beginning of philosophy, has been designated by the term ‘Truth.’ ” What, we have finally to ask, may we understand today to be “that which, from the very beginning of philosophy, has been designated by the term ‘Truth’ ”? (Here I find myself staggering from one major philosophical minefield to another – which may indeed be a symptom of a serious crisis of some sort!) Let us suppose that we may agree that every linguistic or conceptual perspective must include some at least implicit acknowledgement of some version of a principle of objectivity; that is to say, some recognition that the basis of meaningfulness itself lies in the fact that how things are is on at least a significant number of occasions independent of how they may seem to us or of how we may want them to be – in other words, some recognition of facticity. It does not and could not follow from this there must be any one definitive way of recording the independent way-it-is of the world. If this independent way-that-it-is is what is designated by the term “Truth,” it is a “Truth” that can never be captured in any one universally definitive formulation; it is simply that in virtue of which all false or mistaken statements may be assessed as just that – false, mistaken or in some other way inadequate to the “Truth.” But what relation does this “Truth” as principle of objectivity bear to such “values” and “ends” as Husserl may have had in mind? For it is clear that the “Truth” of which he speaks is not restricted to the principle of objectivity alone. To quote him again one last time: For how could we forget that we are, so to speak, the Civil Servants (“les fonctionnaires”) of Mankind. The wholly personal responsibility that we bear to the truth of our own being qua philosophers . . . carries with it a responsibility to the true being of humanity, which is but drawn towards a Telos that it can actually reach, if indeed it can, only by way of philosophy. “The truth of our own being as philosophers” – this may, certainly, be taken to include the “truth” of our own commitment to whatever we may take to be the norms governing our activity, our project, of philosophising; that is to say, the activity of studying, producing, maybe teaching philosophy and of attempting more generally to communicate, in all the diverse ways in which such communication may take place, the results of our thinking about its problems. Such an activity is, of course, very closely analogous to that of reasoning, and it stands to philosophy as product very much as reasoning stands to the structures of rational argument. And here, we may say, if we still like to put it that way, that

The Idea of “Crisis” in Philosophy 47 “Reason” (with a capital ‘R’) relates the “values” or norms to which we are committed as practising philosophers to the truth about the nature of the philosophical project itself. But what, then, of “the true being of humanity”? Can we plausibly or even fully meaningfully say that simply to be capable of recognising oneself as a human being among other human beings is to find oneself committed to a project governed by certain norms? If I had a convincingly positive answer to this question, I should be a better and more important philosopher than I am. All I can suggest, having got to this point, is that we, “we philosophers of today,” we to whom Husserl was appealing from the darkening years of the later 1930s, and who have to recognise ourselves as belonging still to a very far from “reasonable” community of mankind, should continue to reflect not only on the nature of the norms to which we ourselves find ourselves committed by virtue of our commitment to the project of philosophy, but equally on the norms to which we have to presume those others to be committed whom we may – perhaps must – think it worthwhile and even important to try and draw into philosophical communication and reflection, the norms to which we must presume them to be committed by virtue of our own commitment to philosophical communication with them. At the very least, we must presume respect for these norms to constitute one possible value for them; and it then stems from our own commitment to philosophical Reasoning that we should make it one goal of that activity to find ways of persuading them that this possible value is one that they will find it worthwhile to embrace. If Husserl, whatever we may now think to be the limitations of his own philosophical approach, was yet fundamentally right in taking philosophy to be in some sort of crisis, a crisis both reflective and part of a wider crisis in contemporary man’s belief in his own humanity, it may yet be possible to find in the entanglements of these reflections some suggestion as to how, both theoretically and in terms of a return to wider forms of philosophical communication, the crisis might be faced.

Notes 1. This paper was first delivered at a conference at the University of Southampton in 1999. 2. All quotations from Husserl are the author’s own English translations of Granel’s French.

Works Cited Husserl, Edmund. 1976. La crise des sciences européennes et la phénoménologie transcendantale. Edited and translated by Gérard Granel. Paris: Gallimard. Quinton, Anthony. 1999. “My Son the Philosopher.” New York Review of Books, April 8.

3 Frontiers of Philosophy

There is no doubt about it: philosophy is in many ways an odd sort of subject, especially when thought of institutionally as just one sort of academic discipline among others. I am tempted to say that it should be seen as an essentially interdisciplinary subject; but then, as would almost certainly be the case with any other condensed characterisation of philosophy that I or anyone else might produce, I find myself immediately led to qualify it. For one thing, many of the subjects with which I would, as things now are, see it as having important interdisciplinary relations, were in earlier times considered to be part of philosophy itself; (and if one followed that trail of thought far enough back, one might be tempted to the megalomania of seeing philosophy not as one subject among others, but rather as a sort of wholesale container-subject of all other and more locally bounded ones – and perhaps even to the further megalomania of taking it to be philosophy’s responsibility to determine the proper boundaries between them for them.) Philosophy is peculiar too in being an essentially reflexive subject; that is to say that the question of its very nature is itself one for proper philosophical enquiry and dispute. No one would suppose that questions of the nature of, say, chemistry or mathematics were themselves chemical or mathematical questions. One might, perhaps, argue that the question of the nature of politics as a subject of study is of itself an issue of inevitably potential political debate. But in so far as this is so, I should be inclined to reply that it is because this question is fundamentally one of political philosophy (and as such essentially reflexive) and that political philosophy is an indispensable aspect of any properly understood study, or even conception, of politics. Philosophy is also often thought of, in this country at any rate, as a subject fit only for a certain kind of specialist, as something dry and abstract, at once remote and forbidding. But in fact, or so it seems to me, it lies surprisingly close to its frontiers with other forms of thinking – and not only in virtue of its interdisciplinary relations. There are, on the one hand, what I might call the frontiers of entry, frontiers that anyone might cross – typically without even noticing it – as they try to think their way

Frontiers of Philosophy 49 more persistently and systematically than they might usually do into and through some issue that is causing them peculiar puzzlement and concern. This may present itself as what appears, at first sight at least, to be some relatively local breakdown or failure of understanding. Or, of course, it may present itself as some version of the much more general sort of discomfort that may find expression in the question “What is the point of it all?” There are those – perhaps even many – to whom there comes a time when they find themselves asking themselves what exactly they may have been doing, and may still be doing, with their lives and why? For many this may be a time of mid-life, or even later; up to that point most will probably have been simply too busily and too exhaustingly engaged in doing whatever they may have been doing to pause to reflect on its whys and wherefores. In an essay in Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline, a collection posthumously edited by Adrian Moore, Bernard Williams describes philosophy as “part of a more general attempt to make the best sense of our life. And so of our intellectual activities, in the situation in which we find ourselves” (Williams 2006, 182). Whilst philosophy can offer no rationally or as it were logically magical and conclusive resolution to all of life’s tensions and inconsistencies, its provision of an understanding of these and why, indeed, they remain an ineliminable feature of life, may itself be accounted as some sort of resolution. When people start to ask themselves questions arising from a sense of general perplexity or even anxiety concerning the very “meaning of life,” they may be under the impression that these are precisely the issues that philosophy is supposed to address; and many will no doubt be disappointed by the answer proposed by Adrian Moore – an answer with which, as I say, I can only and fully agree. The entry frontiers which I have in mind, however, are rather those to which anyone may at one time or another in their lives find themselves so unnoticingly close as to be led in to venturing across them without any conscious awareness of so doing – relatively local situations of nevertheless intense puzzlement or impasse rather than some very general one of “What is the point of it all?” These situations may present themselves in a whole number of different contexts, but let me here give you just two examples of a sort of bafflement of mutual understanding that may lead those who come up against it to persist in trying to think their way through to a point where it might fairly be said that they have in effect been led into thinking in characteristically philosophical mode. They are examples of failures in communication in contexts in which what may have been experienced as some sort of deep and mutually incomprehensible disagreement has its roots in certain systematically different ways of understanding and of moving about the network of concepts principally involved. They also happen to be examples of discordances in understanding in which I have myself been caught up at one time or another – breakdowns of understanding

50  The Nature of Philosophy between people who each appear to the other to be speaking the same language, but for whom it appears somehow to mean strangely different things. And both are examples of a puzzlement that has its roots in differences in the ordering of certain crucial conceptual structures, but differences that escape ready notice in that each of the divergent orderings, while establishing different relationships among its principal terms of expression, nevertheless uses the same overall vocabulary as the other. Finally, I shall try to say something about how a certain manner of philosophical understanding, of thinking or of “doing” philosophy, as one might say, may bring those who do it in this way to cross over a different sort of frontier beyond which what they may find themselves doing is, though related certainly enough to philosophy as such, nevertheless best thought of as something else again. My first example of such an entry frontier concerns certain problems bound up with what philosophy professionals have often called “The Socratic Paradox.” What is one to make of someone who claims to be setting out freely and deliberately to do what he or she nevertheless genuinely believes to be wrong? Socrates believed that anyone who really knows what is good will necessarily set out to seek it; from which it follows directly that no-one would ever embark on a course of action believing it to be clearly wrong; and there are those who, without having ever thought – or perhaps even heard – about Socrates, would view things in the same way. But there are, it seems, many more who would say that deliberately to set out to do something while knowing it perfectly well to be wrong is simply typical of an all too common human perversity. The disagreement would appear to be straightforward and a pretty fundamental one at that. Yet when I have tried to explain this problem in discussions with some very different groups of people, most of them non-philosophers as such, and asked them what they thought, the result (when the group in question has been of any significant size) has not only reflected this apparently clear difference of opinion – with a (variable) majority, in nearly (but not quite) every case of my limited and admittedly unsystematic experience, showing themselves to be convinced of the existence of deliberate wrongdoing as an only too natural human perversity and a (correspondingly variable) minority holding to one version or another of the Socratic view that nobody would set out, or indeed could possibly be understood as deliberately setting out, to act in a way that they genuinely believed to be wrong. The disagreement is in itself striking enough. But what has always struck me as most remarkable about this difference in moral understanding has been, (a) the fact that until it is drawn to their attention, most people seem to be quite unaware of the very existence of the opposite view to their own; and, (b), that when the fact of its existence is drawn inescapably to their attention, they find it virtually impossible to make any good sense of it at all.

Frontiers of Philosophy 51 What is one to make of such a situation? A main reason why this prima facie fundamental difference in the ways of judging such matters seems quite generally to fail to make itself evident may lie in the fact that those who take a naturally Socratic view of the matter have a number of different ways in which to make their own sense of claims to deliberate wrongdoing. They may, for example, suppose that anyone claiming to know, or at any rate to believe, that what he or she is setting out to do is actually wrong must be engaged in some form of more or less conscious, more or less self-deceiving hypocrisy. Or that when those who present themselves as deliberate wrong-doers accept, or may even insist, that what they intend to do is indeed wrong, they may be understood to be using that term in a purely factual or, as it were, quotational sense, meaning only that their deliberately intended behaviour would no doubt be seen as wrong by commonly accepted (or conventional) standards, but that these are standards which they do not themselves accept (and are thus prepared not just to defy, but to challenge as genuine or proper standards of right and wrong). Or, again, it may be that the agent in question is to be understood as suffering from some kind of weakness of will, and that when he/she speaks of his/her action as deliberate what he/she really means is that he/she knows quite well that it is, in no doubt regrettable practice, all that he/she can bring himself/herself to do in the face of his/ her inner compulsions. The networks of concepts thus deployed in these different possible redescriptions or assessments of what I, for instance, as a “natural” member of the non-Socratic majority, would, in non- or pre-philosophic mode, almost certainly have for the most part regarded as cases of straightforwardly bloody-minded deliberate wrongdoing, are all of them characteristically problematic: indeed, the concepts of hypocrisy, self-deception and, more particularly, weakness of will have themselves all been subject to much perplexed and perplexing philosophical analysis and debate. Moreover, the question of how best to think of a condition presenting itself as weakness of will quickly runs over into the further notoriously and endlessly vexed questions of how the many and various causal influences, both physical and psychological, to which we may be subject, may impact upon or limit our capacity for “free will,” that is to say our capacity for behaving in ways for which we may properly be held to be morally and/or legally responsible. You will hardly need reminding that these are all questions with a long and complex philosophical history. They are typically philosophical, moreover, in the ways in which, when pursued to any serious depth, they all turn out to be entangled with each other; and so how any one philosopher may seek to deal with them will naturally tend to differ depending on his or her whole approach to the most general business of philosophy and to the terms in which, whether implicitly or explicitly, he or she may

52  The Nature of Philosophy conceive of that business. (Kantians and Humeans, for example, dualists and anti-dualists of whatever sort will naturally tend to deal very differently with these matters.) These are, one may fairly say, questions with a long history of ramifying philosophical complexity. They are also, of course, questions of very great practical significance. The concept of “weakness of will” may be thought applicable, in one way or another, to a disconcertingly wide range of cases. These may range from mental disability (which may itself be of many different and far from evidently assessable kinds, resulting from congenital issues in one case, or from more or less advanced dementia in another) to compulsive addiction, (whose origins and controllability may be equally hard to assess). Clearly, anyone who finds themselves actually faced with having to weigh the attribution of moral and/or legal responsibility in contexts in which issues of this sort are in question, and who tries to think them through as fairly and as searchingly as possible, may be led, in so doing, into areas of characteristically philosophical reflection and, indeed, controversy. These are, then, questions of great practical as well as philosophical importance, and anyone pursuing them at any serious and determined length is bound to find themselves having to grapple with issues that have puzzled – and indeed divided – philosophers throughout the history of the subject. They are evidently questions of a detailed complexity far beyond any possible scope of our present discussion. My immediate point, however, is simply this – if one can properly think of such a point as being a simple one: namely, that whatever view one may end up by taking (and indeed acting on) so far as attributions of responsibility are concerned, there is already something largely sufficient to challenge one to a certain type of characteristically philosophical thinking not only in the fact that there can exist such a deep division of views about what to make of cases of prima facie deliberate wrongdoing, but more especially in the associated fact that the proponents of both views seem to be generally unaware of the very existence of the opposing one until it has been brought explicitly to their attention – and that they appear to have great difficulty in making any real sense of it, even when this has been done. One does not have to be a philosopher as such to feel a need to think a way through to an understanding of the nature and origins of this puzzle of a mutual misunderstanding that may in general not even be fully recognised, let alone understood, as such; and anyone sufficiently persistent in trying to do this will naturally be led – without noticing it, as it were – to traverse the frontier between what we might call ordinary puzzled thinking and a kind of thinking in which one seeks to work out more clearly and systematically how the leading concepts of some relevant network may be related to each other and what might be the (possibly overlapping, possibly conflicting) criteria for their proper application – a kind of thinking that is, of course, of a typically philosophical character.

Frontiers of Philosophy 53 So much – however briefly – for my first example. My second example is that of a perhaps even more striking instance of a case in which divergent uses of certain key concepts may so structure our understanding of the world as to bring about deeply misunderstood misunderstandings of each other. It too is one of which I myself once had a certain more than somewhat baffled experience; and even now I am less than altogether sure of having got my thinking about it properly straightened out. And it does, indeed, take some explaining. The example that I have in mind is one of how deeply differing assumptions as to how facts and values may relate to each other may lead to the sort of disagreement in which each side has genuinely very great difficulty in understanding how the other can possibly believe what he or she appears to be maintaining. Philosophers have, of course, long been concerned in one way or another with the question of how judgments or statements of fact may be related to what have tended to be lumped together as judgments or affirmations of value, that is to say to judgments of what is good or bad, right or wrong, obligatory or rightfully forbidden; and, more specifically, to the question of whether there can be any rationally compelling move from the recognition of an indisputably given fact to a judgment of value, such that anyone who accepts the facts as being what they are, is rationally or logically bound thereby to the acknowledgement of certain responsibilities, obligations or, in short, certain values. (Or, as Hume is often understood, no doubt somewhat over-colloquially, to have put it, whether there can ever be a logically compelling move from an “Is” to an “Ought.”) On the face of it this may seem to be a matter of somewhat dry concern for specialists in the techniques and formal structures of logically valid argumentation. It has in fact profoundly individualist implications. Facts – in so far as they can be established, of course – are something that we have to accept whether we like them or not. We may be able to act so as to modify them, but only if we first accept them as being whatever they may be; to think otherwise is a sign of serious mental disturbance. If values (including our obligations) have the status of facts, then they too will have to be accepted as being whatever they are – and whether we like it or nor. If, on the other hand, no amount of facts, incontestable as they might be, can determine my values and obligations for me – facts about who I am, about my own existing tastes or preferences, about the prevailing expectations and values of my family or my society, etc., then not only do I, as an individual, remain logically autonomous and free to take my own evaluative stand there where it seems right to me to do so, but also and by the same token I remain ultimately responsible for whatever stand I may, or may refuse or fail, to take. For individuals brought up in a predominantly liberal and culturally Protestant society and who have learnt to speak and to think within the terms and assumptions of its conceptual frameworks, it can seem to go

54  The Nature of Philosophy without saying that it is up to themselves to determine the values by which they will live; and they may find it find it hard, to say the least, to understand how anyone could seriously think otherwise – just as those who do think otherwise will find it hard to understand how anyone could seriously think that individuals were ultimately free to determine their own basic values for themselves. Such a failure of mutual understanding can be no light matter. Consider, to take just one example, the potentially catastrophic misunderstandings that may exist between sons or, perhaps more especially, daughters of certain (very often immigrant) families and their relatives of (for the most part?) older generations who may believe that, given their identity within the family, its younger members have indisputable obligations to marry (or, equally, not to marry) along certain traditionally given lines. Both parties to disputes of this kind will no doubt understand only too well that they are in deeply entrenched disagreement with each other; what each is only too likely to be incapable of understanding is how the other can suppose their view of the matter to be the only honestly thinkable one and be thus unable to admit the possibility of any rationally tenable alternative. The “traditionalist” can, certainly, understand perfectly well that the dissenting son or daughter may, as he sees it wilfully choose not to abide by what they must nevertheless surely see to be their indisputably given obligations – just as the son or daughter in question will understand only too well that the upholders of family tradition set greater store by the maintenance of that tradition than by respect for the moral autonomy of the (most probably) younger generation. The problem is rather that while the opposing sides in conflicts of this sort may speak the same language and appear to understand its terms in the same way, they nevertheless do not share the same concept of (individual) moral autonomy – that is, of each individual’s own ability to determine the values by which they should live and their responsibility for doing so. So how might one set out to think one’s way through such a conflict? In my very brief sketch of where the source of this particular divergence may very typically lie, the key reference was that to the relevant individual’s “given identity within the family.” But what exactly is given to anyone as their identity within “their” family, and is there any sense in which it may be open to them to decide whether to accept or to refuse such a gift – if, indeed, “gift” is still the right word? It is true that there may sometimes be cases of great practical uncertainty as to the actual biological facts of someone’s parentage and birth. But such facts – known or, as they may be, unknown or, possibly, a matter of active dispute – must be whatever they may be, and are in no way open to any sort of preferential choosing. It is equally true that in different societies and in different contexts the notion of what constitutes a family and membership of it may not necessarily be determined by biological facts alone; and it is, certainly, possible that disputes may arise over such a question as, say, whether

Frontiers of Philosophy 55 an adopted son or daughter should really be counted as “belonging” to the family proper or not. (One can, for instance imagine cases in which such a dispute might in practice turn around what are to be considered legal or moral rights of inheritance.) Again there might in certain cases be dispute as to whether an alleged adoption had proper legal validation or not; and while it should in principle be possible in these sorts of cases to establish the facts of what exactly had taken place, of what procedures had been followed and so on, disagreements may always persist as to just who had or had not the proper authority to conduct and to certify them. Such disagreements may also, of course, concern matters of the utmost practical importance. One may think, by way of comparison, of the manifold disagreements between Jews of different entrenched persuasions as to which conversions by Rabbis of which degree of Orthodoxy should be allowed to count for such matters as the legitimacy (and inheritance rights) of the off-spring of any resulting marriage or for immigration to Israel for those who might wish to exercise the so-called Right of Return. But though, in cases of these sorts, one might well find it difficult to understand how anyone could actually hold to beliefs so very different from one’s own, there is no particular difficulty in understanding what their commitments are and why, therefore, they may take a very different view from one’s own as to the rights and responsibilities at stake. The problem, so far as family traditionalists are concerned in the sort of case I have in mind, is not so much that they do not understand that the wayward son or daughter has no intention of following the path of family obligation as generally understood tradition would have it, but that they genuinely cannot comprehend how the “renegades” can in all honesty fail to see that, whether they intend to fulfil them or not, that is where their responsibilities and obligations do really lie, and that there is no sense in which they can simply decide them not to be what “in fact” they are. Conversely, the son or daughter (in my only too plausible example), while painfully aware of what the traditionalists take to be the given case concerning family obligations, finds it equally hard to understand how they can genuinely fail to see that everyone has in the end to determine their own value commitments for themselves, whether that means a decision to abide by tradition or, on the contrary, to act in such a way as in effect to flout it. How might one deal with a disagreement, a conflict, of this sort? Both sides may agree on the biological facts of the relationships in question, as indeed on the facts of what have been the family and community traditions so far. The disagreement concerns the question of whether, taken together, these two sets of acknowledged facts have to be taken as giving in effect independently factual status to the obligations that according to the traditions in question are incumbent on certain individuals in virtue of their identities as recognised by those traditions. And the answer to this question will depend on how one conceives of

56  The Nature of Philosophy the relationship between what one may call the indisputably factual and the evaluative elements within the concepts through which the individuals at the heart of such disputes may be picked out and identified as standing in relation to the family to which in one sense or another they may belong. Any serious attempt to think one’s way through the conceptually deeply entangled roots of such failures of mutual understanding will lie on the very frontier of typically philosophical enquiry; and any sustained effort to try and work out how the facts of one’s identity within one’s family, (in whatever terms that may be represented), may stand in relation to the obligations and responsibilities which tradition may hold to go along with those facts must inevitably lead one up to this frontier – and, if one is persistent enough, to cross it. Not, of, course, that one should expect to find on the other side any immediately straightforward solutions such as should meet with ready acceptance by all concerned. Nor is this an occasion for attempting to plunge back into the multiple entanglements of such concepts as those of “fact” and “value” with all their more or less close varied associates. My point here once again is simply to note that there are certain sorts of problems which anyone may face in the course of their “ordinary” or “non-philosophical” lives which, when they try to think their way through them with sufficient tenacity, may lead them into areas of characteristically philosophical reflection – and often, it is only fair to add, of characteristically philosophical perplexity, though, I should also be prepared to argue, it is the very encounter with this perplexity and the effort to understand what lies behind it that may be in the end the most enlightening. In relatively recent times R.M. Hare has been one of the moral philosophers most powerfully insistent on what he saw as the strict logical impossibility of deriving any sort of logically binding evaluative (or, as he would have argued it, “prescriptive”) conclusions from purely factstating premises alone; and there is a fascinating passage in Freedom and Reason in which he first makes explicit reference to the possibility that fundamentally different ways of looking at the world may have become so deeply embedded in the conceptual structures of one’s thinking as to pass all conscious notice, and then flatly denies that his own understanding of moral language provides an instance of it. It is worth quoting at some length: A suggestion has even been made about the content of the attitudes that are incapsulated in the concepts of people like myself. It is said that we, because we are “liberals” and “protestants,” have written into the logic of moral language, as we interpret it, some features which merely reflect our own moral attitudes. We have . . . recommended the adoption of a language in which only our own opinions

Frontiers of Philosophy 57 can be expressed – or at least one in which different opinions from ours are indefensible . . . Now there is this much of truth in these allegations, that I am a liberal and a protestant in some senses of those words . . . But it is simply not true that the things which I have said about the logic of moral language are peculiarly tied to any particular moral standpoint. To say that moral and other value-judgements are prescriptive and universalisable is not, by that alone, to commit oneself to any particular moral opinion. (Hare 1963, 192) As I have tried to illustrate, however, it is not only philosophers in the course of their theorising who may find themselves confronted with the puzzles and misunderstandings that may have their roots in differing ways of conceptualising the relations between facts and values; and this provides another and potentially acute example of the frontiers across which people may find themselves moving, however unsuspectingly, in to certain areas of typically philosophical thinking. I promised, however, to end by noting the existence of another and very different kind of frontier, the crossing of which may lead certain philosophers out of philosophy properly so called and into other forms of expression. (Though let me at once acknowledge in passing that what may or may not “properly” be held to be philosophy is itself a matter of entirely proper philosophical debate.) There are, for example, philosophers who are above all impressed by the endless intricacies of language, by the multiple and constantly shifting ways in which its terms call to and relate to each other, by what they see as the consequent impossibility of pinning down arguments or conceptual analyses to bear any one determinate meaning and by the unavoidable reflexive implications of this obstinately residual linguistic indeterminacy for the expressions of their own arguments as they attempt to characterise it. Others are above all impressed by the ways in which even their most systematic attempts to arrive at a rationally coherent dissolution of ancient puzzles – such, for instance, as that of how to reconcile what would seem to be the inescapable presumptions of universal causal explicability (in the macro-physical world at any rate), on the one hand, and of the possibility of free responsibility and of rule following, on the other – seem to lead into the paradox of rationally inescapable contradiction. Kant, as I read him at any rate, seems to be overall committed to what I am inclined to call the frontier sign of meta-paradox. That is to say that he is, on the one hand, committed to the conviction of Enlightenment Reason that, one way or another, it must always be possible to find a solution (or dissolution) of even the seemingly most deeprooted contradictions within one’s philosophical thinking – yet equally

58  The Nature of Philosophy committed, on the other hand, to the recognition that, in one form or another, such contradictions will always recur. A full commitment to any such meta-paradox must include full commitment to each of its conflicting branches; and this, it would seem, must make it impossible for anyone with such commitments to reach for the apparent comfort of affirming meta-paradox as the position in which to end up. For, precisely – or, perhaps better, imprecisely – there can be no such ending up. At any rate, I would certainly not go so far as to suggest that Kant himself ended up by affirming any such resting point. (Nor, indeed, do I myself think that there is any such point of rest available for any definitive finding.) So what might a philosopher do when faced with what he may take to be the unavoidable limitations and ultimate breakdowns of explicit analysis and argument, and/or the impossibility of giving a definitively secure and explicit formulation of what he nevertheless takes to be his more important insights? There may be, no doubt, a moment of temptation to conclude, as Wittgenstein so famously did, that one must remain silent, but definitively structured arguments and explicit conceptual analyses are not the only forms through which it may be appropriate to speak. Rational argument does not necessarily have to be conclusive in order to be worthwhile. There are also philosophers to whom it may seem to be more relevantly effective to resort to a variety of indirect and less deliberately rational ways of conveying, by showing or suggesting rather then by trying explicitly to state, the nature and significance of the limits of reason as such. In so doing, their writings may be thought of as straddling the boundaries between philosophy “proper” as a form of strictly conceptual analysis or of argument from rationally adopted premises to rationally determinate conclusions, on the one hand, and a literary, not to say aesthetic, enterprise, on the other hand, an enterprise that aims at the exploration, evocation and expression of a truth (or truths) ultimately resistant of any determinate formulation – (the nature of this resistance being part of that very truth and so, by definition as one might say, being ipso facto reflexively or meta-resistant to fully explicit formulation). To embark on thinking or writing of this sort is also, so it seems to me, to cross a frontier between philosophy and an essentially different – less explicitly rationally argumentative – form of discourse. But this is a very different sort of frontier from that across which anyone might be led to move from the territory of “ordinary” but extraordinarily persistent puzzlement into that of philosophical enquiry as such. To move across that frontier is in effect to enter into the realm of philosophy, whereas to cross the frontier between properly philosophical reflection and argument and the horizons of the only indirectly expressible is, I would myself argue, to move out of it again – into a realm of perhaps ultimately unavoidable intellectual, but not exclusively intellectual, adventure. It may be suggested that the distance between the frontier of entry and that of exit is after all not so very great – or even that there may be those who find

Frontiers of Philosophy 59 their way in through the more normally exiting gate. But for most people, I would think, the first frontier would provide the more natural crossing point of entry.

Works Cited Hare, R. M. 1963. Freedom and Reason. Oxford: The Clarendon Press. Williams, Bernard. 2006. Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline. Edited by A. W. Moore. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Part II

Reason and Paradox

4 Kant, Paradox and Meta-Paradox Problems of Self-identity

In this paper I try first to set out as clearly as the nature of the case permits some of the implications that I take to be embedded deep in Kant’s attempt at an account of the human situation – according, at least, to my own reading of Kant. In so doing I fully accept that, exegetically speaking, my own reading of Kant may be challenged on the grounds both that it is overly idiosyncratic and that what I take myself to have read out of his texts is only a more Kantian-flavoured version of what I had myself read into them in the first place. It may also be said – not altogether unfairly no doubt – that this is an old man’s paper, self-indulgent and lacking most of the proper academic decencies of detailed scholarly underpinning. It is true that my concern here is not so much exegesis as to work out the implications of a certain way of understanding some of Kant’s deepest insights. I do, however, believe that it would in principle be possible to show with proper reference to the texts, not, certainly, that Kant would himself necessarily have been happy to be understood in this way, but that this is nevertheless an understanding that has genuine roots in his own thinking (as I understand it). However, here I shall for the most part be content to set out what it is that I believe to be thus justifiable without taking up the space that would be needed for any full-scale attempt at such a justification. Whatever their other differences, none who have attempted to come to grips with the philosophy of Kant would regard it as being in any way simple. Nevertheless, let me start by laying things out as simply as I possibly can. I take it to be a fundamental Kantian thesis that the human situation and that of morality are but one and the same. To take seriously the central Kantian doctrine of Transcendental Idealism is to see human beings as irreducibly “dual-aspect” creatures. They are self-evidently endowed with the capacities of Reason and of conceptualisation. At the same time they belong, equally indisputably, to the world of nature. To belong to this world is to be bound by all the conditions of space and time, or, as one might say – in terms of Kant’s own arguments indeed – by the conditions of space-time. This, among other things, means that any and every thing that human beings do or experience must constitute an

64  Reason and Paradox event among other events within the overall spatio-temporal nexus, and as such must be deemed to be explicable in natural scientific terms; and this, in Kant’s view, must mean that everything that they do must be seen as ipso facto subject to a thoroughgoing causal determinism. All their knowledge of and every aspect of their ongoing interaction with their world of natural experience is mediated through their senses; and the operation of the senses, being likewise a natural phenomenon, is equally subject to strict laws of cause and effect. From this point of view and to this extent the situation of man is no different from that of any other animal. Animals, however, have only an arbitrium brutum, that is to say a wholly causally determined will, while purely rational creatures, if indeed there are any such, would have what Kant calls a “holy will.” The human will lies at the intersection between these two; and it is this that makes the human situation at once a moral and yet a deeply paradoxical one. Kant takes human beings, then, to be decisively different from all other inhabitants of the natural order in their possession of the capacity to reason. It would be a failure to do justice to the very enormity of this difference as seen from a Kantian viewpoint were one to content oneself with returning to the famous old characterisation of man as “a rational animal.” From a Kantian perspective, man qua animal (and every aspect and episode of his behaviour) must be as wholly subject to the (causal) laws of nature as any other animal. Indeed, man’s very ability to conceptualise the ongoing sequence of his experiences, and so to make any sense, let alone achieve any knowledge, of them, depends on this necessary assumption of the causally determinate structure of the whole world of natural phenomena. This means that anyone with full knowledge of all the relevant causal laws and, also, of all the relevant initial conditions would in theory be in a position to predict with infallible certainty exactly what was going to happen – exactly how any given animal, including any human animal, was going to behave – in any particular given set of circumstances.1 It is thus a crucial Kantian claim that our ability to make any conceptualised sense at all of the world of our natural experience is wholly dependent on the assumption that whatever event occurs in any given place and at any given time does so in virtue of what has already taken place in other places and/or at other times in accordance with strict causal rules. Our knowledge of the precise content of these rules is, of course, always open to revision in the light of further experience; but of their existence as part of the very structure of our world we may have an equally necessary a priori certainty. When reasoning, on the other hand, we are equally committed to the assumption that the future course of events is sufficiently open for our reasoning, be it faulty or correct, to make a difference to what would otherwise be going to happen next or to what might otherwise be going through our minds – in other words that in cases where one has reasoned one’s way through to a decision to

Kant, Paradox and Meta-Paradox 65 do one thing rather than another, the occurrence of whatever event takes place as the outcome of that decision cannot be fully explained by reference to preceding and/or surrounding events alone, but that key reference has also to be made to the rationally determined and thus autonomous decision of which it was the outcome. But, it may well be asked, is not the activity of reasoning itself but one kind of event among others? The somewhat embarrassing answer, the Kantian answer – as I understand it at any rate – has to be both Yes and No. So far as Kant himself is concerned, there are a whole variety of reasons why he does not and indeed cannot regard Reason, or our capacity for reason, as belonging simply to the spatio-temporal order. A full account of the whys and wherefores, the pros and cons, of these reasons would call for an attempt at a much more exhaustive Kantian exegesis than would be possible or appropriate here. For the moment suffice it to note the two following points. Firstly, that the logical order of a valid chain of reasoning is not to be identified with the temporal order of events or stages by which one may work or set it out. In a valid argument structure, the order in which its several premises are set out, articulated or reflected upon makes no difference to the validity or invalidity of the move to what one may take to be their jointly entailed conclusion. The successive steps of a logical argument do not succeed each other in time – though the actual acts involved in following such an argument through will not only take time, but will be performed by different reasoning agents with a greater or lesser degree of speed. Secondly, reasoning is a norm-governed and goal-directive activity – Kant himself wrote in terms of attributing purposes to Reason – and there are notoriously serious problems in the way of seeing how the most basic assumptions underlying one’s engagement in reflective choice and/or the norm-guided attempt to get things right rather than wrong can be squared with those embodied in the schema of causally determinative explanation. The whole question of the relations between reasons and causes is, of course, a famously difficult and controversial one. The typically Kantian version of the problem turns around the fact that while the series of events that together make up any actually given instance of rationally reflective activity obviously take place in time and so belong to what Kant takes to be the order of causally determinate nature, the reflecting reasoner is committed by his very engagement in such activity to the implicit presumption that whatever he may decide to do as a result of his reflections will initiate a “new” series of events – “new” in the sense that its occurrence is not yet already fully inscribed within the ongoing causal structures of the world in which it will take place. And yet . . . and yet in as much as this somehow “new” series of events is nevertheless still a temporally successive series of events taking place within the natural order, the conceptualising human thinker is equally committed to the presumption that, from this point of view, it too (together with whatever consciously aware experience he might have

66  Reason and Paradox of it) has to be understood as following on certain preceding events in accordance with some causally determining rule. We are thus brought up against one of the great Kantian – but not only Kantian – paradoxes, perhaps the most central paradox of all. It is with this paradox that Kant wrestles at embarrassed and almost embarrassing length in the Third Antimony of his Critique of Pure Reason. We should note, moreover, that the tensions which it generates and represents, whether ultimately resolvable or not, lie at the very heart of the human situation as depicted by Kant. Man, as a being possessed of the powers of rational reflection and of deciding on his own course of action in the light of those powers, cannot but presume himself to be at least in part determining, and thus capable of bringing about, events that would quite simply not have occurred if he had not decided to initiate them. Yet at the same time he knows that the events that he initiates, and even the sequential processes of reflection through which he comes to initiate them, take place within the order of time and of nature; they must, therefore, all of them, including the occurrence of those very moments of conscious reflection, be open to natural – and hence fully determinate – causal explanation. Each and every one of his acts of (rationally) autonomous thought must have its causally determinate analogue within the naturally observable and experiential world. He thus finds himself – and this is perhaps the most appropriate way of putting it – at the point of intersection of these two radically different and prima facie incommensurable and incompatible orders, committed to the paradoxical understanding of himself as instantiating or “embodying” both of their rival principles. The human situation, seen in this light, is one of internalised paradox. As Kant himself says at the end of his Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, we can understand both how and why we are thus committed to understanding ourselves to be causally determinate creatures while “at the same time” presuming ourselves to be autonomous rational agents, and also understand just why these are mutually conflicting presuppositions; what we cannot understand is how this can possibly be so: “Thus, while we do not comprehend the practical unconditioned necessity of the moral imperative, we do comprehend its incomprehensibility”, and this, thinks Kant at this stage of his thinking at any rate, is all that one can reasonably ask for (Kant 1948, 131). The imperative to which Kant here refers is, of course, the Categorical Imperative, that command which, according to Kant, Reason issues to itself as it encounters itself in all its several embodiments. Purely rational beings – such, he thinks, as we might suppose angels to be – would have no call to command themselves always to follow the dictates of reason. This they would do automatically, there being nothing else that might conceivably incline them in any other direction; within such an angelic realm the very notion of a command would be in effect redundant. By way of direct contrast, Kant thought, animals are wholly creatures of

Kant, Paradox and Meta-Paradox 67 nature. They nevertheless resemble angels in this one respect, namely, that they can never be faced with having to choose between alternative courses of action. As creatures belonging wholly to the natural order, whatever they may do will be entirely determined by the causal laws which go to constitute its structure; within the order of nature understood in this way, an act of “commanding” will constitute a causally situated event like any other – if it occurs, it does so as an outcome of antecedent events and neither its occurrence nor whatever effects may follow from it are to be thought of as introducing any radically “new” factor into the causally determinate order of the world. Man alone finds himself in the dual-aspect situation of belonging, as a necessary presupposition of his own capacity for self-awareness, to both orders at once, the spatio-temporal and causal order of nature and the timeless and the autonomous order of reason. It is this very duality that defines the human situation as a moral one, and both together as fundamentally paradoxical. The moral situation, then, is that of a being subject to two radically different kinds of motivating incentives at once, those of the Moral Law – which is no other than the law of universal Reason itself, as it presents itself to each individual, or particular, dual-aspect being within whom it is instantiated – and those of natural inclination. It is in this sense that the human situation – the situation of every “normal” human being – is ipso facto a moral one. The human situation is a moral one in as much as, being subject to both kinds of incentive, human beings have to “choose” between them. But this can only be thought of as a very special – and once again notably paradoxical – form of choice. At this level, it is not so much a matter of choosing between committing oneself to this course of action rather than to that, between doing A rather than B, as one of choosing oneself to act as a rationally reflective being would act or choosing oneself to behave in the way in which a being of merely natural inclinations would behave. Kant talks as if this were a matter of choosing one’s own disposition or character, that is in effect to say of choosing what sort of person to be. Once this choice is made, everything else must follow. If one chooses for oneself a disposition of respect for the incentives of the moral law, then necessarily one will do whatever one’s reason decrees to be right or at least permissible. If one opts for the incentives of natural inclination, then one will behave in whatever way one is causally motivated to behave. Either way, once whichever disposition is chosen, choice effectively drops out of the picture.2 It would seem that dual-aspect man – the man of Kantian Transcendental Idealism – must thus find himself endowed or faced with the possibilities of at least three quite distinct forms of freedom. The first and most fundamental, but also the most mysterious, of these is the freedom of “elective” (or, as one might also put it, “existential”) choice. This is the foundational choice of what sort of person to be, the choice of

68  Reason and Paradox oneself as belonging either to the order of rational autonomy or to that of natural causal determinism. At this deep and deeply mysterious stage, a certain kind of choice is thus still very much of the essence. But, as we have just seen, whichever way this “first” choice goes, choice effectively ceases thereafter to be an issue of primary concern.3 The freedom of rational autonomy might seem, no doubt, to have close conceptual connections with what has become generally, if not always very precisely, known as “positive” liberty; while the freedom from so-called “external” constraints that may be left open to the natural inhabitants of the natural causal order, might seem to have closer connections with what has become known as “negative” liberty. Once again, however, to follow up these associated threads in any systematic way would take us too far off course. The more immediate concern must be to see what may happen when one comes to try to make coherent sense of this “founding” notion of “elective” or existential” choice. And here one seems to find oneself drawn back yet again within range of the logical black hole of unresolvable paradox. Once more it seems to be a matter of being able to understand only what it is that we are unable to understand; and why, although we are committed to it, we are yet unable to understand it. In other words, we once again find ourselves brought up against the very limits of rational understanding. Why is this so? The problem is here made manifest in the fact that the existentially foundational position of this crucial first choice cannot properly be regarded as one of temporal priority; nor, for that matter, can it be understood as being made at any one determinate moment of time. Time and space, we have always to remember, belong to the order of natural, experiential phenomena; this means that everything that takes place at some given moment of time can only be understood as standing in causally determinate relations to all other such temporally occurring events. (To occur simply is to occur at some moment of time.) But the “elective” choice with which, as a human being, one is faced is one of whether to place oneself wholly within this order or not. It cannot, therefore, be an act or event of choosing that is already situated within it as one following in causally determinate fashion on some other event “in accordance with a rule.” It has thus to be quasi-understood as a non-temporally situated act of choice, but at the same time not yet one commanded by reason. For, to repeat the point, the choice here is one between situating oneself in the order of nature or, on the contrary, in the order of reason; it must accordingly be both pre-causal and pre-rational. Nevertheless, whichever way it goes, it will have its “resulting” consequences in terms of what one actually does. Either way we find ourselves returned to one variation or another on the theme of basic paradox. For if the choice goes in favour of taking up into one’s disposition, as Kant puts it, the incentives of natural inclination, this can only be another case of a pre-temporal choice or decision intervening in the natural sequence

Kant, Paradox and Meta-Paradox 69 of events with effects that must nevertheless also be understood to have their causal antecedents in that very same order, and into which one has “just chosen” oneself. If, on the other hand, the choice goes in favour of the order of reason, we have, first, the perhaps not so obviously paradoxical instance of a pre-rational (and in that sense prima facie arbitrary) choice in favour of a commitment to reason. But given that it is here a matter of the commitment to reason of a dual-aspect, human being, it amounts, in Henry Allison’s terms, to a commitment to “prioritize in a certain way the basic incentives of morality” (Allison 2001, 608); and these once again are non-causally conditioned incentives to produce certain effects within the field of natural phenomena. We find ourselves once again confronted with the paradox with which Kant struggles in his Third Antimony; and we are once again called upon to comprehend the essentially “incomprehensible” interplay of that which is timelessly universal and the network of spatio-­temporally situated particulars. There is another reason why it would seem impossible to identify the “moment of elective choice” with any particular moment of time. Suppose, for example, that one elected to “take up into one’s disposition” the incentives of natural inclination. This would amount to electing oneself into the causally determinate natural order, which should in principle mean that from that moment on, every move that one made would follow as an effect of antecedently determining causes. But if the act of elective choice itself belonged to the temporal series, this would appear further to mean, (a), that the very act of choice must itself have been causally determined, and, (b), that once one had chosen, there could be no going back; for how could there be a causally determined decision to choose oneself back out of the causal order within which that “decision” had been made or had somehow occurred? If, on the other hand, one had elected to “take up into one’s disposition the incentives of morality,” if, that is to say, one had elected oneself to be a member of the order of reason, analogous arguments would apply; one could not in principle find a reason for resigning from one’s chosen rationality. In fact, of course, neither of these suppositions makes proper sense. For to interpret “elective choice” in this way would be to suppose that human beings as dual-aspect creatures might choose to renounce one of their two aspects; and so, in choosing themselves out of the order of humanity, transform themselves into either angels or mere animals. Nor are we here at the end of our puzzles, for we have also to try and understand the nature and status of the self or subject thus responsible for choosing which basic orientation to give to its own disposition or character. We have already seen why it cannot readily be identified with either of the two subjects between which it has to choose, that is to say either with the autonomous moral agent, the self-determining subject of Reason, or with the causally determinate inhabitant of the temporal order of nature. It is rather the subject who has to choose with which of

70  Reason and Paradox these two others to identify itself. But if we have now to recognise further aspects to our original paradoxical duality, it remains very unclear just how many others aspects we should be ready to take into account. In so far as we may try to follow the Kantian texts, it would seem that in addition to, 1. “The Subject of Elective Choice,” Kant himself was prepared in effect to envisage, at one point or another at any rate in his critical philosophy, at least the following: 2. ‘The Rational Subject’: this would be the subject corresponding to the rational side of the dual-aspect creature that is man. It is the subject that, in this aspect at any rate, is autonomous, self-determining and, in this sense, free. 3. “The Empirical or Natural Subject”: this would be the subject or self that one comes across within the framework of spatio-temporally ordered experience, whether that experience be one of observable behaviour or of one’s own psychological introspection, (in which case, of course, its immediately observable ordering will appear to be basically temporal alone). This would be the subject corresponding to man’s other aspect.4 4. “The Subject-in-Itself”: Kant has been much criticised for the apparent (and allegedly incoherent) suggestion that we have to suppose that behind every object that may present itself to our experience, there must lie an object or thing-in itself, as its “real” but in principle never directly knowable ground.5 Whatever one may make of this proposal, parity of reasoning would suggest that the subject or self that we are in one way or another aware of in our experience must have a similar ground. 5. “The Noumenal Subject” (so-called): Kant has another line of argument according to which it is possible to form for ourselves the idea of an object of which we might have direct unmediated knowledge by virtue, so to speak, of a form of purely intellectual intuition or “Nous.” The object of such an intellectual intuition may called the “noumenal object.” Again, parity of reasoning would suggest that it must be equally intellectually possible to envisage a “noumenal” subject. (Whether or not the noumenal subject is to be thought of as identical with the subject-in-itself would seem to be an in principle unanswerable question.6) 6. “The Transcendental Subject”: The “Transcendental Object” is, one might say, that principle or form of systematic and rule-governed unity through which one is enabled to think one’s essentially openended series of sense-experiences as constitutive of the “natural” experience of actual objects. It is a crucial part of what it is to be an object that its nature and very existence in the spatio-temporal domain should be at least partially independent of the ways in which it might appear in the conscious experience of any observer

Kant, Paradox and Meta-Paradox 71 (or, indeed, set of observers) at any particular time or times. Kant argues – as many, including, most notably, Wittgenstein, have in one way or another argued after him – that it is a fundamental presupposition of any (conceptualisable) experience at all that it should be so structured as to be objective in this sense. We have then similarly to suppose on the side of the subject of experience, an active principle or power of holding together (or “synthesising”) this open-ended and temporally successive series in such a way as to anticipate what is (most likely) to come and to retain what is already past; without such a power the natural inputs of one’s senses could never be other than fleeting and fragmentary and incapable of giving rise to any (conceptually) meaningful experience. This aspect of oneself can never, of course actually appear in experience as part of it; it is not something that could possibly present itself in time, being rather that in virtue of which we are able to impose a certain unity on the temporal flow of our successive moments of experience. The “Transcendental Subject” is, then, not so much an object of possible experience as a presupposition of it. Kant’s own most frequent term for it is “The Transcendental Unity of Apperception,” a somewhat intimidating expression no doubt, but one that one can be roughly glossed as “The Presuppositional Unity of Reflective (or Conceptualisable) Experience.” It may, perhaps, go without saying that a power to unify cannot itself be fragmented, but must rather itself be a unity. Moreover, it is to be presupposed, as it were, as a centrally unifying and universally underlying power of every “normal” particular or individual Human Subject. (The expression “The Human Subject” is not – so far as I know at any rate – to be found in the Kantian texts; it would not in any case be appropriate to include it in the above list, for, as we shall see, the Human Subject has rather to be considered as a complicated function of at least two, if not more, of those that do figure in it.) It is again not easy, indeed even in principle impossible, to decide how many, if any, of these differently entitled “subjects” may be regarded as being “really” one and the same.7 Not easy, certainly, because, as Kant pursues his different lines of argument at different points in his texts, he is not always rigorously consistent in the uses that he makes of his key terminology. But it would seem to be even in principle impossible, because the question of whether different names or definite descriptions have one and the same reference or not only has sense in contexts where there are in principle criteria for differentiating numerically different items. However, the categories of “Unity” and “Plurality,” through which alone it is possible to make sense of the notion of distinguishing between different distinct individuals or particular items, are limited in their properly meaningful employment to the spatio-temporal order of the world of natural experience, while the only “Subject” on the above list that comes under these categories is the “Natural or Empirical Subject.” From

72  Reason and Paradox a self-­consistently Kantian perspective, therefore, it can no more make direct sense to suppose of the prima facie different “subjects” (or subject aspects) that are not to be located in the order of nature, that they form a unity than that they are distinct from each other. Nevertheless we do seem now to be committed to acknowledging at least three distinguishable aspects to what we initially took to be the dual-aspect human subject; for, as we have seen, the subject of “elective choice” cannot be simply identified with either of the two different “subject-aspects” between which its choice is to be made. Even this cannot be a wholly satisfactory way in which to express the situation. For given that the moral situation is not that of such purely rational beings as the hypothetical angels, but of the dual-aspect human being subject both to the forces of natural inclination and to the commands of reason, the “moment” of choosing what one’s character or disposition is to be can only be understood as one of choosing between a single (and purely natural) and a dual-aspect status.8 The situation of morality is that of a subject who is wholly committed to strive to respect the demands which it, as a being possessed of the powers of autonomous reason, imposes upon itself while, qua creature of the natural order, it is wholly determined in all that it does by external contingencies together with the forces of its own natural inclinations. A choice for the exclusively rational would thus be a choice to release oneself from the constraints of temporality and, in so doing, to (re-)join the realm of the universal – within which neither particularity nor individuality, nor indeed morality itself, has any properly intelligible place. But such a choice is, of course, impossible; indeed, even the attempt to envisage its possibility can scarcely be given any fully coherent sense. That we should find ourselves at this point caught up in such entanglements is only to be expected. To those who enter the world of paradox, entanglements of this sort should come as no surprise. Kant, however, was not one to be content to remain trapped in such a world without a struggle, as if resigned to the incoherencies that must inevitably lie within it. It is true that in that already quoted passage from the end of The Groundwork of a Metaphysic of Morals, he presents himself as ready to accept that the best that we can hope for is to comprehend what it is that is incomprehensible and why it must remain so. But in general each time that he runs, more or less directly, into a manifestation of paradox, he struggles to reassure himself that there is somehow a resolution of it to be found within the framework of Transcendental Idealism. It is as if each time that paradox makes felt its power of always recurrent resistance, he somehow manages to push it back down beneath the surface of his thought only for it to bring him up short once again at some point further down his road. (One is reminded of Peer Gynt’s encounters with the Button-Moulder and of his warning to Peer that “at the next crossroads” they would – inevitably – be meeting once again.)

Kant, Paradox and Meta-Paradox 73 It is, surely, no accident that Kant should be thus committed to this kind of deep-seated running ambivalence. For Kant is a philosopher the rational aspect of whose nature makes its demands felt with peculiar clarity and force. Paradox may be regarded as a form of contradiction, peculiar among contradictions in that we find ourselves rationally and inescapably committed to accepting the truth of both (or all) of its separately unrenounceable, but together radically conflicting components. Its basic logical form is nevertheless inescapably that of a contradiction; and no essentially rational subject can lightly tolerate a contradiction as it seems to arise within the development of its own reasoning. So if Kant (and we) are committed to affirming both of two mutually conflicting theses, each presenting itself as an indispensable presupposition of reflective experience in general, he (and we) must be equally committed to seeking a way of reconciling them. Moreover, the commitment remains even as our own reasoning assures us that no stable or final reconciliation is possible. He (and we) are thus further committed to the meta-paradox of affirming both the irreducibility of first-order paradox and the rational necessity of its ultimate reducibility nevertheless. At this point of persistently deepening complexity and ramifying patterns of potential confusion, we need to pause to take stock. From a Kantian perspective, then – as I understand it at any rate – man is an irreducibly dual-aspect creature, a particular embodiment within the natural and causally determinate order of space and time of the essentially timeless principle of universal reason. Being at once subject to and subject of these two radically different orders, he finds himself, and whether he likes it or not, to be a moral subject, that is to say one subject to the demands of morality i.e. to the demands that his own autonomous rationality makes upon him in a situation in which he is also subject to the causally motivating forces of natural inclination. It is hard, even in principle, to see how reason and natural sentiment might be able effectively to interact, whether their interaction might be one of positive reinforcement or one of negative interference; and yet we know that somehow they must. Not least of the puzzles or paradoxes thus inherent in the duality of the human situation lies in the fact that every inwardly or outwardly observable element of reasoning or rational activity must find expression in some spatio-temporally and therefore causally situated piece of behaviour. But we come up against what is perhaps the most puzzling feature of this initially apparent duality when we are brought to the realisation that it cannot after all be thought of in terms of just two aspects alone, but that we have also to postulate at least a third – an aspect which, depending on the line of argument pursued, may go under such different titles as “The Power of Elective Choice,” “The Transcendental Unity of Apperception,” “The Noumenal Subject” and so on. Furthermore, when we find ourselves led on to ask whether these different titles really refer

74  Reason and Paradox to just one extra aspect or whether there are more of them lurking in the wings, we find that, strictly speaking, we cannot even give a determinate sense to our own question. From all this it would seem to follow that if the human situation is ipso facto a moral one, it is also one with all the powers and frustrations of paradox lying at its very heart. (Although this is a realisation that Kant himself would almost certainly have fought to ward off, his own basic line of argument seems nevertheless to drive him inexorably towards it.9) And if all this is right, it would also seem to have potentially far-reaching implications for the whole idea of self-identity so far as any individual human being may be concerned; “potentially” far-reaching not in the sense that it remains in any way uncertain whether they would be farreaching or not, but in the sense that the implications of paradox must necessarily always carry with them a certain logical/illogical air of “take it or leave it” – as a matter, so to speak, of “logically elective choice.”10 As I “choose” to see it, then, the argument carried by these implications might be taken to work in at least the following way. Particular individuals or persons, we may take it,11 can only be differentiated and identified as the particular individuals that they may be by virtue of existing (or of having existed) within the bounds of certain spatio-temporal (or bodily) co-ordinates. Within the framework of the fundamental Kantian arguments, this must mean that, in being so identified, they are by the same token identified as necessarily belonging to a causally fully determinate network. This condition must hold for any case of individuating identification, including those of self-identification and of one’s own understanding of one’s own personal self-identity. Identification, however, is or involves an act of conceptualising thought, and whoever performs such an act does so under the necessary presupposition of his or her own rationally self-directive freedom or autonomy. That is to say that even as one identifies oneself as the individual human being that one is, one does so under the mutually conflicting twin assumptions of both aspects of one’s dual-aspect being. It is evidently impossible that one might ever succeed in renouncing completely either one of these aspects of one’s own self-identification. In differing personal or historical circumstances, however, one may choose (or be led to choose) to place more, or even much more, emphasis on the one rather than on the other of them. In thus determining the balance of one’s own identity, one is in effect exercising the same power of elective choice that one is called upon or calls upon oneself to exercise when determining the order of incentives, those of the reason that is within one or those of one’s natural inclinations, to be taken up into one’s governing disposition. Indeed, there is clearly a very close relationship between determining one’s one own identity and choosing one’s own basic character, even if they do not come to altogether the same thing.

Kant, Paradox and Meta-Paradox 75 When discussing the background and origins of the modern conception of self-identity in his Sources of the Self, Charles Taylor expresses his understanding of this conception in the following way: To know who I am is a species of knowing where I stand. My identity is defined by the commitments and identifications which provide the frame or horizon within which I can try to determine from case to case what is good or valuable, or what ought to be done, or what I endorse or oppose. In other words it is the horizon within which I am capable of taking a stand. (Taylor 1989, 27) This way of putting the matter may be read as embodying in effect an acknowledgement of the complexity of the ways in which the different strands of self-identification come – more or less – together. There is the autonomist strand of my efforts to “determine from case to case . . . what ought to be done, or what I endorse or oppose.” But there is also the given strand of “the horizon within which I am capable of taking a stand,” and my horizon is bounded by the empirical (i.e. causally determinate) reality of the psychological, social and historical situation within which I find myself. To determine what ought to be done is not yet, however, to take a stand. I may after all determine what (from the moral point of view) ought to be done, but – pace Socrates – nevertheless elect to allow myself to be taken over by my natural inclinations to do something quite different. Once again my identity as the individual human being that I am seems to be a variable function of three distinguishable factors, my “rational” or reflective capacity to determine what is right and wrong, the de facto limits of my given empirical situation (which will include, of course, as well as my own psychological states, the facts of the ways in which others choose to identify me) and my ability to determine where to take my stand in the light of such understanding as I may (believe myself to) have of the first two factors. If I have to recognise this paradoxically unstable structure of identity in my own case, I have equally to acknowledge it as being the identity­structure of all other dual-aspect creatures – that is, of all other (“normal”) human beings. Kant’s own argument to this effect may be construed as running roughly as follows. The most basic command of that Reason of which individual human beings are so many particular instantiations is that it, Reason, is in all circumstances to be respected; this means obedience to its imperatives and respect for the necessary conditions of its effective autonomy in all its embodied instantiations. Reason, Kant might have said, sets itself as its own end. Thus for every rational being it is, as such, a matter of simple self-respect to show the very same respect to all other rational beings, namely, to treat them never

76  Reason and Paradox merely as means to the achievement of some other end, but rather as persons who are ends in themselves. But, of course, one only ever encounters other persons within the space and time of one’s own and their embodied experience. To respect them, then, as embodied rational agents is ipso facto to acknowledge them as possessing the same human structure of identity as oneself. One might add that, although human individuals may differ widely in their different and only too often conflicting natural inclinations, yet in as much as they are also embodiments of Reason and, as such, partake in that which is universal, they must qua rational agents all be understood to be willing the same thing. The problem for man, of course, being also subject to the incentives of his natural inclinations, is to determine what, in each particular context, that same thing amounts to; and, in so doing, to cling on to his recognition of the fact that what he, in common with all other rational agents may be willing at the appropriate level of generality, is unlikely in detailed particularity to be the same thing as what he or they may naturally want or desire. He can, however, be assured that, as a member of human society, he is caught up in a whole network of reciprocal relations between persons, all of them fundamentally committed, always qua rational agents, to pursuing the same highlevel goals. In other words, he finds himself, in his rational aspect, to be, in Kant’s expression, a member of a “Kingdom of Ends.” Nowadays there exist, of course, other more explicitly language-based versions of this general line of argument. Among the most notable of them would be the Habermassian “Ideal Speech Community Argument” and one extended version or another of the Wittgensteinian “Anti-Private Language Argument.” What they all have in common is the consideration that meaningfulness – both the meaningfulness of conceptualisation and that of the use of signs as symbols – rests on that respect for shared norms that is a fundamental feature of meaningful rule-governed behaviour. I shall attempt later on to show how it is a further consequence of arguments of this form that the human situation is not only a moral one, but that it is also and inescapably a social and political one as well. And if all these themes do in fact go together, it must follow that this situation too is shadowed by the characteristic and incurable tensions and instability of one that has paradox at its heart. First, however, we should return to the problems posed by the fact of a fractured, paradoxical and hence inherently unstable human identity. We have already noted how Charles Taylor’s way of summing up the situation manages, almost as if without noticing that it does so, to encapsulate the basic tension between the autonomy of the (morally) self-determining subject and the constraints of the empirically given situation within which he may find himself. It might be objected that in reading his definition in the way in which I did three paragraphs ago I was somewhat forcing the text; and certainly it contains its own hidden tensions within it. My horizon, I said, “is bounded by the empirical reality of the psychological,

Kant, Paradox and Meta-Paradox 77 social and historical situation within which I find myself.” According to Taylor’s own way of putting it, my horizon is provided by [a certain set of] “commitments and identifications.” One might, of course, be tempted to read this reference to commitments and identifications in a wholly autonomist, not to say voluntaristic, way, on the assumption that only I, the autonomous subject, can take a commitment upon myself by some act of my own free and autonomous will. But this assumption soon finds itself caught up in a whole series of problems of its own. Is the proper extent of my commitments, responsibilities and identifications with this or that other person, group or cause really simply a matter of what I myself determine them to be? On the first face of it, it would seem that for any dual-aspect, Kantian-type subject the answer must be Yes. For what after all is it for anyone to have, let alone to recognise, a commitment? It is to be bound by respect for some relevant rule or norm (itself derived, Kant would say from my own fundamental rational respect for the law of that Reason which is within one) to try, so far as one can, to act in certain ways rather than in others in some more or less specifiable set of contexts on some more or less specifiable number of future occasions. But how exactly is one to construe the key notion of “trying” in the case of purely empirical subjects, embedded within the natural network of interlocking causal determinism? Suppose, for example, that we come across a dog tugging at a bone protruding through but nevertheless trapped by some sort of metal bars. Kant himself would no doubt have said that we can only understand its behaviour by seeing it as if it were designed to achieve a certain end, in this case no doubt that of freeing the bone so that the dog may carry it off either to gnaw or to bury it. “As if,” however, is all very well, but how “really” does it fit in with the assumption, to which, as Kantians we are committed, that the natural order of the world of our observable experience is necessarily structured by a thoroughgoing causal determinism? For on that assumption it would seem that we have to suppose that the dog behaves as it does in response to a complex set of stimuli arising in part from its own in-born constitution, in part from the ways in which this constitution may have been modified by the dog’s past experience and in part from the circumstances of its immediate context. In other words, it does what it does in virtue of what, in all its complex detail, it is and that of the situation in which it presently finds itself; and given all these circumstances, there simply is no other way it could have reacted or behaved (without forcing us to revise our supposed knowledge of the relevant causal laws – an eventuality which, of course, can never be completely ruled out). What if we change the example to one of a higher ape “trying” to free a banana trapped just beyond the bars of its cage? Or to that of a small child “trying” to get hold of a toy caught behind the bars of its cot? Or again to that of a man working (apparently) to free a lock that has jammed? So long as we take ourselves to be dealing with all these

78  Reason and Paradox “subjects” as strictly natural or empirical ones, none of these changes can in principle make any difference. So what are we to make of this situation? A first inclination might be to try and make some relatively minor (though still far from insignificant) adjustments to one’s basic assumptions concerning the sharpness of the distinction between man and all other (animal) inhabitants of the natural order. In any case there is nowadays an increasing body of well-attested and well-weighed evidence to suggest that the ability to communicate symbolically, and with it a capacity, however limited, for some form of reasoning, should not be considered to be an exclusive, still less a defining, characteristic of man. So might not the capacity for Reason together with an at least dual-aspect constitution of some sort be taken to be a matter of more or less rather than one of an absolute distinguishing mark, and so certain animals at least be admitted as (maybe only second-class or apprentice) members of the kingdom of ends and the moral community – second-class perhaps only in the sense of being possessed of rights without carrying the responsibilities of any correlative duties. And although Kant would no doubt not agree, there is no doubt a great deal to be said in favour of treating man as situated towards one end of a continuum of graduated rationality and, to that extent, in favour of blurring the distinction between him and the rest of animal creation. But far from doing anything to resolve the paradox inherent in the very notion of a dual-aspect existence, this would simply extend its reach beyond the bounds of the human domain as such. The basic issue here, of course, one that is as old and as apparently unresolvable as the status of philosophy itself, is that of how to come to terms with the apparent conflict between causal determinism and free will. As we have already noted this conflict is probably the acutest and most evident form of the fundamental Kantian paradox, the form in which Kant himself wrestled with it in his drawn-out attempts to find a rationally acceptable resolution to his Third Antimony. At this point we have once again to resist any temptation there may be to rehearse the whole long and varying history of the debates concerning the whole question of the nature and status of free will and of the arguments that have been advanced on one side or another of these debates. There is, however, one typical and recurrent pattern of argument which it will be instructive to follow through at least in broad outline. The key move here consists in denying that there is any necessary conflict between responsible free will and causal determinism as such, a denial which is closely tied up with a rejection of any form of radical dualism, including Kant’s own peculiar dualism and his theory of the dual-aspect constitution of man. Many more modern proponents of this general sort of theory refer back to the version of it which they find in Hume and to his distinction between what he calls the liberty of spontaneity and the liberty of indifference. This latter form of liberty, if it existed, would

Kant, Paradox and Meta-Paradox 79 consist simply in the absence of causation and would amount to no more than randomness or pure chance. The morally responsible person has to be thought of as the causal source of his or her own actions – it is only on such a basis that his actions can be ascribed to him as their author – but in such a way as to avoid confrontation with the Kantian challenge of having to account for the way in which a non-temporally situated “event” may nevertheless somehow initiate a whole new temporally sequential series, a series which moreover already had its own causal origin in some other and quite normally temporal occurrence. The next move, then, has to consist in marking out a distinction between those (types of) causes which can properly be regarded as “internal” to the agent and those which are to be seen as external, as impinging upon him from the “outside,” as it were, and as thus constituting some kind of constraining factor. There are two main points to be noted here. The first is one of essentially incidental interest to our immediate primary concerns, but nevertheless worth noting. This is the – perhaps only too obvious – point that there is in principle nothing which might constitute an indisputable (or “objective”) frontier between what is internal and what is external to human personal identity as such. For example: on one historically-speaking immensely influential view of man – of which, it goes without saying, the Kantian version is, in its own complex way, a particularly striking example – it is the capacity for reason that is the peculiar mark of man qua man, while the forces of passion, emotion and feeling of all sorts are seen as essentially external and thus threatening to such powers of self-determination as he may possess. As we have already noted, however, Reason does nothing to individuate or to distinguish different personal identities from each other. For this the spatio-temporal particularities of corporal embodiment are needed, and with it whatever the particular range of passions with which each body’s own inheritance and experience may have endowed it. Thus, on a view of man that lays great stress on each individual’s experience of himself or herself as, precisely, an individual, it will be rather the “impersonal” voice of Reason that may be seen as external to what would be each person’s own peculiar identity; and to act with true freedom will be to act in response to one’s own deepest sentiments or emotions. In one of the many senses of each of these terms, this may be regarded as a contrast between a Classical and a Romantic vision of life, between a vision of a truly human life as one of measure and balanced restraint on the one hand, and one of the spontaneous expression of characteristically individual feeling and passion on the other. Any frontier between causal factors that may be adjudged to be internal to the agent and those which may be adjudged to be external and, as such, constraining is, then, more a matter of cultural perspective than of independently “objective” difference. Wherever one may be led or may think fit to draw this line, however, the state and nature of whatever

80  Reason and Paradox factors are taken to be agent-internal must be assumed to be what they are in virtue of their places in the wider overall network of interdependent causal determinism that, on Kantian grounds at any rate, one has to assume to constitute the structure of the natural order. This means that whatever is taken to be thus (relatively) “internal” to any given natural system must be recognised to be ultimately causally derivative from factors that can only be counted as (relatively) “external.” Common English idiom provides in fact a clear enough illustration of how the lines of causal dependence across any such prima facie frontiers may allow for a colloquially working distinction between that which occurs “freely” in response to purely internal conditions and that which occurs as it does as result of external constraints or impediments – ­without there being any suggestion that the outcomes are any more or less causally conditioned in the one case rather than in the other. Consider, for example, the case of a wagon-wheel running along, say, a railway track and wobbling as it does so. The wobble may be due to the fact that one or more of the spokes, or the rim itself, has been bent. Alternatively, the explanation may lie in the presence of certain imperfections or obstructions in or on the track. Either way, there is nothing in the least mysterious about what is causing the wheel to wobble. Yet if the wobble is due to some feature of or “internal” to the wheel itself, we would still have no hesitation in saying that the wheel was running freely; it is only the existence of “external” impediments that would lead one to speak in terms of something impinging upon or preventing the free running of the wheel. It is, of course, true that the thesis of universal causal determinism would in general no longer be maintained at the level of contemporary fundamental science; and true too that there have been since the time of Hume more elaborate and logically sophisticated attempts than his to present the laws of nature as statements not so much of constraining necessities as of contingently highly reliable, but still simply de facto regularities. But the attempt to construe cases of rational self-­determination as instances of otherwise highly improbable irregularity remains deeply unconvincing. Whatever refinements or adjustments may be called for, the basic Kantian contention of the existence of an apparently fundamental incompatibility between the twin necessary assumptions of a thoroughgoing causal (or perhaps quasi-causal or “statistical”) regularity obtaining in the realm of natural events and states of affairs and, on the other hand, of a non-causal self-determination in cases of behaviour stemming from rational (or possibly only “would-be” rational) reflection on the part of thinking agents would still seem to hold us in its grip. Which brings us back to the unavoidable and unavoidably embarrassing question of how to maintain our hold on two such conflicting but equally inescapable sets of presuppositions.

Kant, Paradox and Meta-Paradox 81 The first crucial consideration must lie in the acknowledgement and acceptance of the fact that, even taking each of them separately, this hold is not and can never be rationally one hundred per cent assured or secure. The ordinary dual-aspect inhabitant of the natural order is no doubt unlikely to be consciously aware, let alone have any real grasp, of the reasons why his ability to organise his experience of the world in terms of descriptive recognisability is necessarily underpinned by certain assumptions about its causal or at least quasi-causal regularity. Those involved in the search for scientific understanding and explanation of why the macro-physical world at any rate is as it is and of why things happen in the way that they do, are typically much more explicitly aware of the strength of their commitment to some such sort of assumption. At the same time, as they reflect on such matters (and seek perhaps even to give some natural “causal” account of the occurrence of such exploratory reflective processes as, for example, their own), they cannot help proceeding on the assumption that whatever may determine, and validate or invalidate, their argument-progress from one reflective consideration to another cannot simply be a representation of the ordered sequence of their considerations as they occur within the overall network of spatiotemporally adjacent (and progressively remoter) events as these ramify outwards and back from whatever may be considered to be “internal” to their own scientific and human selves to the increasingly obviously “external.” From this point of view, the next move that they may make in their reasoning necessarily presents itself not as a causally determinate instance of some natural regularity, but rather as a response to some other and essentially non-temporal principle of ordering. Does this mean that this mental move is causally completely undetermined? The paradoxical answers have to be both Yes and No, both of them, moreover, being equally firm – the paradox of this firmness lying in the fact that in neither case can it serve to exclude the other and, apparently, logically incompatible answer. In brief, the most careful rational reflection on the indispensability of the assumption of universal causal or quasi-causal regularity presupposes its own escape from any such “determinism”; while the most careful empirical investigation of the conditions underlying the occurrence of sequences of thought-processes, including those involving such rational reflections, cannot but proceed on the assumption that these conditions will be found to exhibit causal or quasi-causal regularity. The logical core of a paradox – at least in the sense in which I am using the term – takes the form of a contradiction. But, of course, not every contradiction involves or constitutes paradox. The overwhelming majority of contradictions present themselves either as instances of that peculiar frustration of communication whereby someone cancels out that which he has himself affirmed; or as simple blocks to the passage

82  Reason and Paradox of rational argument; or, again, as sources of ramifying disorganisation within it. (Inasmuch as from a contradiction, any proposition whatsoever may follow, a contradiction may be likened to a malignancy that appears within the body of an argument, spreading throughout the system and reproducing itself ad infinitum with the result that the very argument as such is destroyed.) It stands to Reason, then, that when confronted with a contradiction, one should strive one’s utmost to resolve or to remove it. There are, of course, special contexts in which the contemplation of contradictions may be used as a technique by which to bring those who are induced to contemplate them to a realisation of what may be seen – from within the perspectives of certain world-views – as the distorting limitations of Reason and the need to humble the arrogance of its pretensions to define man’s place in the universe. But only those who are prepared effectively to abandon all attempts at fully articulate communication with others and to limit their own existence either to a form of inarticulate contemplation or to the following of some non-conceptualising ritual practice – which can provide no answers, however tentative, because no questions can be coherently asked, can afford to put aside the demands of Reason in this way. This is not to say that a properly coherent account cannot in principle be given of the rationale of a way of life which has as an ultimate aim that of an emptying of the self, understood, precisely, as the locus of conceptualisation and thus of all self-aware desire, frustration and suffering. But so long as one is committed to any form of thinking enquiry or finds it simply impossible to renounce the very possibility of systematic reflection, contradictions can only regarded as prima facie stumbling blocks in one’s path and, as such, to be overcome in whatever may be the most appropriate way. The peculiarity of those very special types of contradiction to which I have here given the title of “paradox” lies, one might say in recognisable echo of Kant, in the fact that Reason itself is insistent that neither of their mutually conflicting component parts can be given up without fatal damage to the rationally required underpinning of certain indispensable features of one’s very capacity for knowledge of one’s natural environment or for self-reflective thought. Nevertheless, even though we may follow Kant in finding ourselves driven to recognising the sheer unavoidability of our comprehension of the incomprehensibility of this situation, we cannot easily remain peacefully undisturbed and content with it. Our Reason tells us – that is to say that, as beings endowed with a capacity of reason, we know – that it is a fundamental demand of thought that contradiction has always somehow to be removed by the modification or abandonment of at least one or both of their conflicting components. We know this; and yet we know also that in these cases of last resort this cannot in all consistency be done. It is thus that we find ourselves brought face to face with Meta-paradox, that is to say the higher-order paradox arising from the commitment to

Kant, Paradox and Meta-Paradox 83 the rational necessity, amounting in effect to a rational certainty,12 of its being in principle possible to overcome all such obstacles to Reason as may be presented by contradictions of a lower order coupled with the equal rational certainty that whatever success one may have in the dissolution of this version or that of lower-order contradiction, further contradictions will always reappear in some apparently new form a little further down the road. Paradox, as we have already noted, resembles Peer Gynt’s Button-Moulder in its ever-repeated disappearances only to lie once more in wait for us as we come to “the next cross-roads.”

Notes 1. There was indeed a time when empiricist-minded philosophers generally thought it possible actually to define the doctrine of universal causal determinism in terms of predictability in principle. As an exercise in definition this was a move in a wrong direction. For one thing, the calculations involved in any act of genuine prediction, even when carried out with the aid of advanced computers, capable both of operating at very high speeds and of taking account of data relating to their own internal states, necessarily take some finite amount of time to perform; and, whatever the current degree of computer sophistication, it will always in principle be possible to specify some event the outcome of which will take place too soon for the fastest computer of the day to be able to produce its prediction before this has become in effect an explanation a posteriori. More importantly, no doubt, one would need to specify the kind of principle in virtue of which events were held to be predictable, and it would seem impossible to achieve the relevant specification without already making reference to notions of causal determinism. nor, of course, could one ever know with irrefutable certainty that one really was in command of absolutely all the relevant initial conditions. 2. Except perhaps in those cases where the reasons for or against doing either A or B are absolutely equally balanced, or where reason only commands one to act in either one or other of these ways, but where there are no reasons at all in favour of one of them rather than the other. In such cases as these, the choice between the two simply does not matter; its status is reduced to that of a mere toss-up. 3. It may be that when, operating under the direction of Reason, one is faced with having to settle for one of two alternative course of action, the rational pros and cons of which are perfectly equally balanced, one’s Reason will tell us that the only rational course to take will be to “choose” one of them, no matter which, on the basis of an arbitrary toss of a coin rather than to remain as if paralysed after the manner of Balaam’s ass. But if this is the only room left for choice, it is a very restricted room, removed, as it were, to the outer margins of relevance. 4. As Kant himself notes in the B edition of his Transcendental Deduction, “How the “I” that thinks can be distinct from the “I” that intuits itself . . . and yet, as being the same subject, can be identical with the latter . . . these are questions which raise no greater nor less difficulty than how I can be an object to myself at all.” (Kant 1950, B55). 5. Given that the categories of unity and plurality are said to have application only to the data of natural sensory experience, it is indeed difficult to see

84  Reason and Paradox what could properly be meant by speculating in this way about an apparent plurality of non-experienceable things-in-themselves. 6. The caveat expressed in the previous footnote must surely apply again here. 7. Cf. the two preceding footnotes. 8. In electing to opt for a moral disposition, one cannot be electing to remove oneself altogether from the temptations of natural inclination; for to do so would per impossibile be to release oneself from one of one’s defining aspects as a human being and so to quit the domain of the moral for that of what Kant calls the “holy’. 9. Witness, for example, his whole account of what he calls the Dialectic of Pure Reason. 10. In embodying a logical contradiction, a paradox will imply any proposition whatsoever, and so reproduce itself as contradiction a logically endless (and timeless) number of “times’. As there will, and can, be no reason to endorse one branch of such a sub-contradiction rather than another, whether to endorse either or none of them can only be a matter of interpretative choice. 11. It may be thought, no doubt, that this point needs arguing. I believe, certainly, that it can be argued; and the argument has, of course, been set out in a number of different versions in the relevant literature. To attempt to rebuild it here would, however, constitute too much of an immediate diversion. For the moment we may content ourselves with the reminder that Peter Strawson’s book Individuals presents one very powerful version of it – a book which, in spite of its thoroughgoing rejection (very much in the modern spirit) of Transcendental Idealism with its associated dualisms, is nevertheless very much in what such a rejection may leave of the Kantian spirit itself. 12. Reason has to proceed on the assumption that “ought” does here imply “can’, even though this can once more lay claim only to the status of an assumption, there being no possible guarantee that this assumption will always hold. Indeed, even as, necessarily, one makes it, one knows that it will not.

Works Cited Allison, Henry E. 2001. “Ethics, Evil and Anthropology in Kant: Remarks on Allen Wood’s Kant’s Ethical Thought.” Ethics, 111.3 (April): 594–613. Kant, Immanuel. 1950. Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by Norman Kemp Smith. London: Macmillan and Co. Kant, Immanuel. 1948. The Moral Law or Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. Translated by H. J. Paton. London: Hutchinson’s University Library. Strawson, Peter. 1959. Individuals. London: Methuen. Taylor, Charles. 1989. Sources of the Self. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

5 Reason and its Own Self-Undoing?

It may well be that Reason with a capital ‘R’ – or, it may perhaps be better to say, the human capacity for reasoning – always ends up by getting itself into a mess – always has and always will.1 However that may be, it would seem that the last century has provided overall a particularly striking example of this. Of course, Reason, being what it is, always struggles to extricate itself from the mess; so it is wrong, no doubt, to speak of it ending up in one. There is and can be no conceivable end to its struggles with and against itself. Nevertheless the last century (or so) has provided what to many has appeared as a peculiarly distressing version of them, if to others perhaps a no less strangely liberating one. The story of Reason’s conflict with the emotions, or with bodily instinct, is a very old one, familiar through many different retellings. The more recent twist to this ancient story, however, is one of Reason’s own stubborn undermining of itself. This tendency towards its own self-undoing has its roots further back, of course. Or rather, for Reason is not to be thought of as a temporally situated actor upon some spatio-temporally situated stage, the evident roots of this tendency towards self-frustration are already to be discerned deeply embedded within the apparently all too reasonably rational philosophy of the Enlightenment. Hume was very well aware of the way in which desires or passions could run counter to each other, including “that reason, which is able to oppose our passion; and which we have found to be nothing but a general calm determination of the passions, founded on some distant view or reflection” (Hume 1896, 297). As is well known, these tensions come most evidently to the surface within the philosophy of Kant, and nowhere more explicitly so than in his discussions, recurrent within the latter half of his Critique of Pure Reason, of what he calls “transcendental illusion’. For example: Transcendental illusion . . . does not cease even after it has been detected and its invalidity clearly revealed by transcendental criticism . . . We take the subjective necessity of a connection of our concepts . . . for an objective necessity in the determination of things in themselves. This is an illusion than can no more be prevented than

86  Reason and Paradox we can prevent the sea appearing higher at the horizon than at the shore . . . here we have to do with a natural and inevitable illusion, which rests on subjective principles, and foists them upon us as objective . . . There exists, then, a natural and unavoidable dialectic of pure reason . . . one inseparable from human reason, and which, even after its deceptiveness has been exposed, will not cease to play tricks with reason. (Kant 1929, A297-298/B353-354) Kant himself, of course, in obedience to the principle of Reason within him, looks for a coherent way of explaining the illusions and of somehow resolving the prima facie irreconcilable contradictions into which that very Reason seems irresistibly to lead him; he tries to take the sting out of these tensions and to unmask what he sees as being no more than simply illusory, through an insistence on his crucial distinction between appearances or phenomena, that is to say our sensory experiences of the natural order, on the one hand, and noumena or things in themselves, on the other – the underlying reality of which we cannot prevent ourselves from positing, but to the “concepts” of which we can give no proper meaning and of which, therefore, we can in principle have no genuine knowledge whatsoever. The problem is, of course, that his account of the natural order as a strictly spatio-temporal and causally conditioned one and his characterisation of the realm of Reason as one of noumena or things in themselves and as being, therefore, equally strictly non-temporal, leaves him unable to give any logically intelligible account of how the two might interact – as interact they must if he is to be able to give any coherent sense to the notions of rationally guided or morally motivated action. (As Kant himself puts it, “Transcendental freedom is thus, as it would seem, contrary to the law of nature, and therefore to all possible experience; and remains a problem” (Kant 1929, A803/B381). Reason tells him, as it were. both that he must and yet that he will never finally be able to resolve these paradoxes. And this itself may be seen as a paradox of a higher order, as the mark of an ultimately unresolvable tension within the human condition. Kantian insight or Kantian confusion? His immediate successors, of course, finding the situation in which he seemed to have left them to be philosophically intolerable, tended either to try somehow to transcend the tensions inherent within his philosophy by showing how Reason was after all in the end “cunning” enough to resolve them or, on the other and more typically Anglo-Saxon hand, to retreat to some more logically sophisticated version of what they saw, not altogether accurately perhaps, as robust Humean common sense. It was, no doubt, in the differences between these two reactions that some of the most important seeds of divergence between the so-called “Continental” and “Analytic” or “Anglo-Saxon” branches of the Western philosophical tradition were

Reason and its Own Self-Undoing? 87 sown. Any attempt to follow through the historical details of this story would be far beyond the scope of the present paper. For the moment let it suffice to recall two highly significant features of it. Firstly, if Kant, both directly and indirectly, was one of the dominant philosophical influences of the nineteenth century and, of course, beyond it, so too, it would seem, has been Jacques Derrida in the twentieth.2 He is most probably best and most widely known for his introduction of the term and notion of deconstruction – if, indeed, one may be allowed the use of the term “notion” in such a context. In its most generalised form, deconstruction may not unreasonably be understood as the work of showing how, when appropriate pressures are applied, every form of discourse can be shown to contain within itself the mutually conflicting elements of its own self-undoing. What is one to understand by this? One – tangentially Kantian, if slightly cryptic – way of putting it would be to say that the threat of antinomies is to be found lurking within every attempt at an organised body of discourse, however would-be systematic it may be, and however internally consistent it may have appeared to those who designed it. That is to say that it will always be possible to find latent within it the starting points for lines of argument that, if developed, may be shown to undermine each other and thus, taken together, to generate contradictions; and this is tantamount to saying that all wouldbe rational constructions may be shown in the last resort to generate their own characteristically recurring irrationalities. (It is not clear to me that Derrida himself would construe/pursue the claims – or threats? – of deconstruction to such a completely unrestricted or generalised extent. If I have understood him correctly, he would, nowadays at any rate, regard the discourse of justice, for example, as being somehow immune to such a development.) The second point is in effect an even more general one. If the deconstructive claim is indeed in principle applicable to every form of argument or of discourse, it must equally apply – reflexively – to any line of argument that purports to support it.3 In this, its apparently self-refuting reflexivity, it resembles that other great bugbear of latter day thinking, the disarmingly persuasive claim that the validity of all points of view or pretensions to theoretical insight have to be understood as limited to the cultural or conceptual contexts within which they are expressed. There can, it would seem, be no plausibility to any general claim that all claims except this one alone are thus strictly relative or that they must inevitably be couched in language containing the seeds of its own logical undoing. To the relativist version at any rate of this seemingly paradoxical reflexivity, there would seem, broadly speaking and at first sight, to be two possible reactions, each standing in diametric opposition to the other. On the one hand, the relativists may be tempted to respond by accepting that they can no more provide any wholly context-independent justifications of their arguments, their criteria of validation, the senses of their key

88  Reason and Paradox terms than can any of their opponents – that we are all indeed in the same relativist boat; but that, he may add, is, of course, just his point. On the other hand, the anti-relativist may claim – and many of them have done so with one degree of sophistication or another – that relativism’s avowal of its own self-relativity amounts in effect to its own self-refutation. In fact, neither of these responses seem to me to be altogether satisfactory. An important part of my own response – broadly speaking once again – would be to argue, first, for the impossibility of dispensing with some version or other of a transcendental presupposition of objectivity as a necessary condition of the acquisition and intelligibility of any language within which one might find it possible to communicate – including most notably the very language in which one was trying to set out and communicate this very argument. I would then seek to extend the argument to any other languages that might be encountered by showing that anyone’s ability to recognise any other sustained pattern of signs that they might come across as actually constituting a symbolic system or language must always in the last resort depend on their being able to work out at least some partial intertranslatability between that language and their own. Clearly, this condition cannot apply to anyone’s very first entry into membership of a speech community. As the infant first catches on to the acquisition of language it has ex hypothesi no already available resources into which to translate its newly (and at first uncertainly) acquired capacity for symbolisation. It is, of course, true that those who go on to acquire relative fluency in a second language typically learn to use and to understand certain of its expressions and sentences, which they find to be strictly and obstinately untranslatable into the language from which they started, but whose meaning they are nevertheless able to explain in it. It is, perhaps, just conceivable that someone might come to learn a second language in exactly the same way as that in which they had acquired their first, that is to say, by direct interactive contact with speakers of that language and without any mediating reference to the language with which they were already familiar. (Even to begin to make sense of such a hypothesis, one would need to suppose it possible that the circumstances in which the second language was acquired contained absolutely no features for which terms of the first language might be recognisably applicable, and it is in fact far from clear that such a possibility can coherently be fleshed out.) But it is virtually impossible to see how one and the same person might properly speaking possess two distinct languages while being strictly unable to relate them in any way to each other by way of partial translation or at least by interpretive explication. And inasmuch as such passage between them must of necessity be assured, then – or so I should argue – the transcendental supposition of objectivity will apply as much to the one as to the other; and inasmuch as this is so, the wilder claims of subjective relativism may be shown to be wilder than can be sustained.

Reason and its Own Self-Undoing? 89 These are, certainly, arguments that call for much detailed working out before they can be made to stick. In any case, however, and even if one takes them to be successful, they only deal with part of the problem. Let us assume, for present purposes at any rate, that arguments can indeed be made out to the effect that any language – starting with “my” own and extending therefrom to any others of which I may, one way or another, learn enough to be able to recognise them as languages – must contain within its constitutive presuppositions that of an “objectivity thesis’. By this I mean the assumption, (which I take to be, in spirit at least, characteristically Kantian), that the world which I come to grasp through the organising structures with which my language or languages provide me, is in general the way in which it is, in at least partial independence of how it may seem to me to be at any given moment. As Terry Eagleton has noted in a recent review article, “there are many competing versions of how it is with the world, including the Postmodern belief that it is no way in particular” (Eagleton 2003, 17). It is in fact quite plausibly arguable that the Postmodern belief, when formulated in this way, is basically correct. That is to say that it may very well be true that there is no one way of describing the world, or even any particular part of it, that is uniquely “true to the facts,” all other descriptions being “false’. But this should not, and indeed cannot, seriously be held to mean that no descriptions or would-be statements of fact can ever be shown to be decisively false. To take just one simple example, there are languages in which I cannot straightforwardly assert that I have just one brother without making it clear by the term that I use in formulating my assertion whether the brother in question is an elder or a younger one. But whatever the way in which I seek to describe my family situation, my assertion could be shown to be demonstrably false if it turned out that my only sibling was either an elder or a younger sister. All that the “objectivity thesis” is designed to show is that it is a condition of the meaningfulness of any symbolic system that its terms can be used incorrectly as well as correctly, that (in a significant proportion of cases at least) assertions made through the deployment of its terms may in principle turn out to be falsifiable through meeting with the resistance of relevantly recalcitrant facts and that neither the correctness nor incorrectness, the truth nor the falsity in question should depend always and entirely on how the matter appears to the subject or speaker. One might perhaps sum up the situation by saying that if truth is always in some sense (conceptually) relative, falsity must at least sometimes be absolute. And this, one may add, must hold true, however otherwise relative the symbolic or conceptual system from within which the world of experience may be characterised. Arguments concerning the cultural relativity of concepts and their reflexive implications, however, are one thing. Arguments concerning the limitations of Reason and the irreducible deceptiveness of reasoned

90  Reason and Paradox arguments, though analogous in their potentially threatening reflexivity, are nevertheless another. If rational argument is to be trusted, one may reasonably hope to show that the idea that any and every representation of the state of the world or account of its causal structure may, so long as it is internally consistent, have to be recognised (and therefore respected) as being as good as any other, belongs in effect to the psychopathology of epistemology. But what if the very criteria of rational argument, including even the Law of Non-Contradiction, are themselves to be understood as no more than culturally relative? What if any pretention to assess the beliefs of some so-called “primitive society” as prima facie selfcontradictory has to be acknowledged as no more than a manifestation of “Western” cultural imperialism? Or what, again, if that same Law of Non-Contradiction is to be seen as only the most centrally protected element in a continuous ensemble of propositions, those nearest the surface, so to speak, being the most directly exposed to the risks of modification or abandonment in the light of the non-propositional evidences of experience, but all of them ultimately liable to modification or even rejection, should the costs of abandoning certain of the most highly valued outer elements be judged or felt to be too high, even if the price of their preservation be that of a far-reaching re-adjustment of the very innermost elements of the system? Even some of the most professional and hard-headed philosophers of the century just past found themselves led at one time or another to take such hypotheses with the utmost seriousness. Peter Winch and Quine were, of course, among the most notable of these. It is at least equally significant, however, that each of them was led subsequently to retreat from such extreme undermining through cultural or logical relativisation of the Law of Non-Contradiction. For once contradiction is allowed free and unrestricted entry into a language or discursive system it can spread as might a sort of symbolic cancer, ultimately destructive of any possibility of coherent assertion, of translation from one language to another and, in the last resort, of meaningfulness itself. It may go without further saying that all such reasons as might be put forward in support of such a radical downgrading of the status of this very central principle of both rational and reasonable meaningfulness cannot but carry with them the seeds of their own dissolution. Kant himself, of course, never suggested that the “natural and unavoidable dialectic of pure reason” might lead to such dire and universally disabling discursive consequences as this. On my understanding of his understanding of the matter, we are left not so much in a situation of a quite general and generally crippling inability to decide between any and every pair of prima facie mutually contradictory propositions as in one in which we seem to be faced with equally strong sets of reasons for holding each of two directly conflicting affirmations concerning the status, structure and origin of the world, affirmations of a very high and far from everyday

Reason and its Own Self-Undoing? 91 level of generality. Even, then, Kant, of course, thought that once we recognised the distinction between the phenomenal and noumenal realms, we should be able to see this apparent conflict of reason with itself as the dialectical illusion that it was – an illusion which we could no more dispel, however, than the traveller in the desert is able to banish what he may know to be nothing more than a mirage vision of the oasis that seems to present itself before him. No doubt, the Transcendental Idealist way of rescuing Reason from its own tendency to self-inflicted paradox gave rise in its turn to notorious puzzles of its own – in particular, of course, that of understanding how a rationally determined action can be at once self-initiated and yet, qua spatio-temporally situated event, stand in fully determinate causal relations to all other such events. Even so, Kant made it clear that he did not so much see this deeply rooted tendency of Reason to turn back upon itself as potentially destructive of all attempts at reasoning, but rather as constituting some sort of barrier or limit to the natural human drive to push the achievements of rational understanding ever deeper and further. As he put it in the last sentence but one of the Groundwork, “we can at least comprehend the incomprehensibility” (Kant 1948, 131) of the situation; and this, he thought – at that point at any rate – was as much as anyone could fairly or sensibly demand of human reason. The deconstructive worry – not just that it is of the very nature of rational enquiry that it should lead us into making rationally unsubstantiatable claims in answer to certain rationally unsatisfiable but rationally insistent demands, but that “every form of discourse can be shown to contain within itself the elements of its own self-undoing” – insinuates itself as an apparently more general and thus even more destabilising one. As in the case of Transcendental or Dialectical paradox, the suggestion is not that so-called rational arguments can never be secured as valid within the contexts of their particular construction, but rather that these contexts are always limited and can never themselves be finally secured against all possible rival overlapping contexts. If too much weight is placed on any key term or terms central to any given body of discourse, this will tend to give way to a kind of dispersal of its constitutive semantic elements, each of them straying off into a diversity of associations, all of them different and some of them in the last resort irreconcilable with each other. One may think by analogy of trying to walk through an area of marshy land, characterised by relatively resistant tufts of bog-grass interspersed with patches of waterlogging moss. If one keeps on moving as one passes from tuft to tuft, one may hope to keep one’s feet dry; if, however, one looks to rest with both feet firmly placed on one and the same tuft with all one’s weight thus resting upon it, one finds it sinking beneath one. There are no foundations on which one might ultimately rely – or, as it is often put when the question is one of analysing bodies of discourse rather than of walking through bogs, there are no ultimately first origins.4

92  Reason and Paradox (It is evident that the term “discourse” is no more immune to the pressures of what has been called “dissemination” than is any other apparently key term. To allow myself a purely anecdotal personal memory, I remember asking Michel Foucault once what exactly he understood by “discourse,” a term of which he had made some not inconsiderable and well-known use. His reply was that, finding himself with a need for some such general term (of art rather than of science, as it were), he had realised that while nearly all the other potentially available expressions – “conceptual scheme,” “weltanschaung,” “language,” “symbolic system” and so on – had already acquired their own type-cast identities, “the term “discourse,” on the other hand, still seemed to be relatively unencumbered and available; and so “discourse” it was. What I have called the deconstructive worry, then, does not so much present itself as one that calls into question the possibility of establishing compelling sequences of valid argument within particular contexts or structures of discourse in so far as they may be taken as given and the meanings of the key terms of the argument may be taken as locally stable. Rather it calls into question the stability or reliability of any such ­context-boundaries as such – including, of course, those of the very context within which this worry is itself raised. The implication seems to be that the choice of contexts, (of discursive viewpoints, conceptual frameworks or whatever), from within which to characterise the world and one’s field of action within it, is simply up for grabs. But here we seem to be doing no more than return, after a set of variations, as it were, to a restatement (if perhaps in a different key) of the central relativist theme. Whatever the aspect of the world with which we may be concerned, ours will not be the only way in which it may be characterised; as the world itself is never going to come down decisively in favour of one characterisation rather than another, each may have equal claim to be true relative to the perspective from which it is proposed. What, then, may justify the suggestion that two different characterisations may yet apply to one and the same aspect of the world other than the evidently unsustainable assumption that it may be possible to identify aspects of the world independently of any and all of the ways in which they may be characterised? The answer lies somewhere in the fact that, however different the characterisations of the world by people coming from different cultural (or ideological) backgrounds may be, no-one would or could remark on these differences other than on the fundamentally inescapable assumption that they do after all live in the same world. We come back once again to the facts that two different characterisations of a world – of an aspect of the world – can only present themselves as potentially rival alternatives to each other in so far as they overlap to at least some significant degree; and that overlaps there are bound to be as a necessary condition of anyone actually being able to recognise the very existence of a characterisation – a discourse, a language – other than his or her own.

Reason and its Own Self-Undoing? 93 What all this amounts to, then, is something like this. We have to accept both that there can in principle be no one account of the way that the world is which is uniquely “true to the facts” in a way that entails that all other accounts must be erroneous or “false’; and that there can in principle be no chain of reasoning whose validity depends on the meanings of the key structural terms of its argument that may not be liable to slippage when attempts are made to deploy it universally across all possible identifiable contexts. We have, furthermore, to accept that these limitations hold reflexively even for the very same argument which purports to make them explicit. Nevertheless, this does not and can not mean that “the way that the world actually is” may not always be capable of showing an account of how it is supposed to be, to be in fact incontrovertibly false – and that no matter the perspective from which that account may be proposed. No doubt, anyone really determined, or in some sense compelled, to hold on to such a would-be world-descriptive and explanatory account, may always be able to find available within it resources enabling them somehow to “show” that what appear to be falsifying facts are either not what they seem to be or are not really falsificatory. But if discursive communication of any sort is to maintained, there must always be, if not a theoretically definitive, at any rate a practically effective limit to such apparent “resourcefulness’. Where that limit comes will depend on the essential practical needs or purposes of the person or people concerned and on how close the bearing of the world-description in question on the nature of the outcomes that would make for the success or failure, satisfaction or neglect of these needs and purposes concerned. In the last resort, however, both social and physical survival depend on the ability to adapt to the way which the world shows itself to be, whatever the categories and concepts through which one culture, or world-view, or another may have come to represent it as intelligibly describable. If this sounds like a return to simple common sense – or perhaps to simple common scientific sense, that no doubt is what is it. But it would be quite mistaken for common sense to feel so reassured as to relapse into complacency. The whole history of philosophy is there to teach us that scepticism concerning the existence of the so-called external world, however implausibly far removed it may seem to the philosophical eyes of basic common sense, is never finally and definitively beaten. And rationally based scepticism as to the powers and trustworthiness of Reason itself will surely prove itself to be at least equally resistant and resilient. One (philosophical) reason for this lies in the fact that the reasons for doubting the apparently universal power of Reason are curiously seductive in their appeal to Reason itself. This, however, is but one side of the story. It has become almost a commonplace to note the extent to which the last century has fallen under the influence of the great “masters of suspicion,” Marx, Freud and (in one of the most influential of his many possible readings) Nietzsche, all of whom, of course, had their

94  Reason and Paradox roots firmly in the nineteenth century, but whose influence came to what may well turn out to have been its fullest flowering in the twentieth. The lesson that they all seemed to teach, in each their own way, was that the reasons that men and women give themselves for their actions can never safely be assumed to be their “real” motivations, and that people are in general self-mystified. It is only too easy to see how this form of argument too can be given a reflexive and thus a self-undercutting turn. There is even a prima facie common sense version of this general theme of distrust of conclusive reason and subject-independent truth; for truth and conclusive reasoning, it may quite plausibly be argued, are simply matters of what works best in the majority view of the relevant community. The most influential representative of this version of suspicion of the wouldbe universal is no doubt Richard Rorty. But once again even his brand of pragmatism has its roots in the nineteenth century. At the level of philosophical theory, one of the most closely argued episodes of recent times in this no doubt unending struggle between reason and its would-be suicidal doppelgånger is that which is fought out in Bernard Williams’s book Truth and Truthfulness (to which Rorty himself devoted an attentive and more than respectful review in The London Review of Books). The stakes, however, are by no means only theoretical. There is undeniably a certain very real sense of liberation and exhilaration to be found in casting off the “constraints” of reason and in giving oneself over to the release of one’s emotions, whether in individual passion, in the forgetfulness of self that comes with the feeling of belonging, as a mere part, to a greater whole of instinctive solidarity or in those forms of self-forgetfulness that are to be found in one or other of the many techniques of self-intoxication. (None of these possibilities, moreover, is exclusive of any of the others.) There is a clearly romantic version of this abandonment of reason to passion. There is an even more clearly sinister version, one that has been exhibited and experienced far too often and on a monstrous scale over the last century. One way of reacting to what may very naturally and easily be perceived as the irrationalism of the philosophical and associated discourses of suspicion is to see them as both an expression of and, in no doubt quite unintended effect, a further encouragement to these ultimately catastrophic excesses. It is against this background that one may most naturally understand the rooted opposition to all such discourses of a philosopher such as Habermas, who has experienced what it is to grow up in such an excessive society, and his unvarying persistence in defence of an ideal of rational communication premised on the assumption that, with sufficient patience and a sufficient faith in its possibility in principle, mutual understanding may be a real practical – moral, social and political – possibility for all who are prepared to seek it. (It goes without saying that in practice such mutual understanding can never be taken for granted or assumed to be definitive or complete.)

Reason and its Own Self-Undoing? 95 What, then, one may ask, of the prospects for mutual understanding between the philosophers of reason and those of rational suspicion of reason and “too much” rationality? This is itself, however, a questionbegging question to ask. It is true that, at first sight, it may in general appear to be fairly clear which philosophers are on the one side and which on the other. On the one hand, for example, we would seem to recognise a Derrida and on the other a Habermas, on the one hand a Rorty and on the other a Williams; and it would not be difficult to continue the list. But the idea that all philosophers are to be understood as belonging fairly and squarely either to one side or to the other is surely just an illusion. Kant – on my reading of him at any rate – may be seen as standing on both sides of the fence, if not at once, at any rate in unavoidable and ever repeated succession. There is the Kant of the Enlightenment, the Kant for whom the possession of Reason was at the very core of the essentially human capacity for autonomy and for an ever-advancing organisation of knowledge – a Reason, moreover, that demanded a rationally acceptable answer to all the questions that were of its very nature to put. Equally insistently, however, there is the Kant for whom this very Reason leads as of necessity to necessarily mutually irreconcilable answers to some of its most crucial questions, a Reason which was thus itself the source of inescapable paradox and of the self-frustration contained in the knowledge that ultimately the only attainable certainty was to be found in the knowledge of its own ineluctable limits. On such a reading, Kant, for one, is to be seen rather both as a philosopher of reason and as one of rational self-suspicion. Should one allow oneself the stylistic gloss of saying “at one and the same time both a philosopher of reason and one of rational self-suspicion?” Most probably not, and this for two characteristically Kantian reasons. The first is that for anyone who takes Transcendental Idealism seriously, reasoning has itself to be reckoned an inherently paradoxical “activity’. For reasoning, as something which one does as opposed to the structures of argument that one may hope will result, has surely to be understood as an activity taking place in the successiveness of time, moving on from whatever its starting point through subsequent stages to whatever may present itself as a conclusion. But on Kant’s account of knowledge and of the world of experience, whatever takes place in time has necessarily to be understood as standing in relations of causal interdependence with all other temporally situated events or phenomena. The Reason “within him,” however, is precisely that whereby man knows himself to share in the domain of autonomy and of freedom from “merely” causal determination. Thus, to characterise Kant over-simply as both a philosopher of reason and one of rational self-­ suspicion at the same time is to risk softening the sharpness of the paradox inherent in this double characterisation to the point of losing it altogether. The second reason may be seen as yet another reflection of the fundamental and essentially self-conflictual Kantian commitment to paradox.

96  Reason and Paradox It is to be remembered that there is nothing half-hearted about him either in his role as philosopher of reason or in that of one of rational self-­ suspicion. In the first of these roles, it is impossible for him to countenance flat and outright contradictions. But to assert the positions of confident Enlightenment rationality and of already post-Enlightenment rational self-suspicion in one and the same conjunction – to maintain them at one and the same time – is precisely to commit oneself to an explicitly self-contradictory position. And this is something which Kant in the first of his two roles clearly cannot do. So the question of the prospects for mutual understanding between the philosophers of reason and those of rational suspicion of reason turns out to be in effect the same as that of the self-understanding of a philosopher such as the Kant of my reading of him. There can in principle, it would seem to me, be no one conclusive answer to be given to this question in either of its two versions. For what after all can be meant by “understanding” in this sort of context? Should one be thinking of the kind of (rational) understanding whereby one may see how a given argument works and why its conclusion follows validly from its premises; or of that whereby one may grasp the nature of the causal impacts that conspire, or may be so organised, as to bring about some given state of affairs; or, again, of that understanding, more akin to a certain kind of human insight, whereby one may appreciate how and why a given human being – who may, of course, be oneself – sees and feels the world in the way that he or she does (without necessarily approving or supporting the attitudes involved)? And what might any of these have to do with what one may have in mind when speaking of people reaching a common understanding with each other in the sense of seeming at least to come to some sort of common accord? Many people must have had the experience of finding equally convincing the arguments leading to opposite and mutually incompatible conclusions and being quite unable to come to any rational decision between them. One may, moreover, find each of these incompatible conclusions to be both theoretically and practically equally attractive – it is after all an uncomfortably common and very human experience to find oneself in a position of wanting both to have one’s cake and to eat it. And although such an outcome may appear to be both theoretically irrational and practically unattainable, it may be not at all difficult to see what are the causal factors that lie behind and explain the existence of this split-minded state of affairs. In one’s own case such self-insight may exist without its necessarily having any tendency whatsoever to bring about a resolution of the conflict. Where the conflict is one between one’s own beliefs or preferences and those of another, the fact that one believes oneself to “understand” both the reasons and the effective causes of the other’s beliefs and commitments would equally seem to have no necessary bearing on either one’s instinctive or practical attitude towards the disagreement. One may sympathise or even empathise while yet continuing to disagree and even

Reason and its Own Self-Undoing? 97 to oppose, or one may strongly disapprove and feel a possibly violent antipathy, while yet refraining from any active opposition – just, indeed, as one may simply accept one’s own inability to decide between the alternatives in question or, on the other hand, feel strongly self-critical or even disgusted with one’s own rational or psychological inability to decide. Thus a Kant who had been somehow persuaded of the rational untenability of his own key distinction between the phenomenal and noumenal realms, might then find himself completely stuck in the position of being unable to reject either of the mutually incompatible but apparently compelling conclusions of his various antinomic arguments; and he might, indeed, understand very well both just why it was that he was stuck and the psychological factors that might perhaps lead him, if he was forced in practice to choose, to opt for the one solution and his interlocutor for the other. But once again – though for different reasons – what he cannot in principle do is at one and the same time remain stuck in a position of both trying to reason his way forward and yet of accepting that Reason can do no more for him but has run into its dead end. Either he continues to look for rational accommodations; or he despairs of the search. Or so it might seem. In fact, of course, the Kant of my reading does do both of these things, but not at one and the same time. What he does know – however uncomfortably – at one and the same time, as it were, is that he is fated always to be moving on, forwards and back; and then forwards and back again. This is not a knowledge to which he can give properly coherent expression either in the temporality of his own thinking as he experiences it or in the non-temporal mode of a conjunctive proposition. It is the knowledge that there are no definitive answers to be found, no ultimately objective ground to be finally secured, no absolute or “Gods-eye” perspective to be attained; and yet also the knowledge that the existence of all of these remains as an indispensable postulate and as the goal of a never to be abandoned search. And if this is the unstable stable “position” of the Kant of my preferred reading, it does after all provide the ground for a sort of hard to articulate self-understanding; and with it the possibility at least of arriving at a common understanding between a philosopher who has chosen to take his stand in the name of Reason and one who, at that particular moment at any rate, is committed to exposing its many possible weaknesses and deceits. For although each of them may at that point find themselves unable to declare it, they may each of them yet share the unstateable knowledge that by the time they have turned the next corner they may have found themselves to have exchanged positions.

Notes 1. This chapter was first published in the 2004 volume Defending Objectivity: Essays in Honour of Andrew Collier. Thanks to Taylor and Francis for permission to reproduce the chapter here. 2. In saying this, one has not, of course, a comparable benefit of historical hindsight.

98  Reason and Paradox 3. In practice, of course, most deconstructionist writing avoids making general theoretical pronouncements of this sort, but applies itself rather to the detailed examination and deconstruction of particular texts. 4. The Bible tells us that “In the beginning was the word,” and certainly practising Derrideans place immense emphasis on the actual words of the texts with which and on which they work. But if the concept or notion of a word is taken to include that of its meaning, then the words of a text can provide no more secure or non-disseminating foundations for their work than can anything else; and if the meaningfulness of a word as such is not to be included in the very meaning of the word “word’, then we are left talking of “mere” physical inscriptions, the “merely” contingent vehicles of possible readings.

Works Cited Eagleton, Terry. 2003. “Kettles Boil, Classes Struggle.” London Review of Books, 25.4 (February): 17–18. Hume, David. 1896. A Treatise of Human Nature. Edited by L. A. Selby-Bigge. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Kant, Immanuel. 1948. The Moral Law or Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. Translated by H. J. Paton. London: Hutchinson’s University Library. Kant, Immanuel. 1929. Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by Norman Kemp Smith. London: Macmillan and Co. Rorty, Richard. 2002. “To the Sunlit Uplands.” London Review of Books, 24.21 (October): 13–15.

6 Reason and Reasoning Truth, Truthfulness and Integrity

In the time of Descartes, philosophers and men of culture on both sides of the English Channel inhabited the same universe of discourse, were concerned with the same range of questions and argued about them in mutually intelligible ways.1 Descartes’s own central concern, of course, was with questions of certainty, knowledge and truth; as Anthony Kenny has put it, “his whole philosophy can be described as ‘the search for truth’ ” (Kenny 1968, 193). Within the world of analytic philosophy students of my generation were brought up with very much the same view of what philosophy should be about. Given the basically empiricist commitments of our training, however, we were unable to give much credence to claims made on the basis of so-called direct rational insight, but were taught to insist rather on conceptually or logically compelling demonstration of the soundness of recognisable argument structures. Reason in philosophy was thus for us essentially a matter of explicit argument and careful conceptual analysis. Good students sought to mark themselves out by their ability to detect and to criticise arguments in the texts that they had to study and to produce effective arguments of their own; these were, and to a very large extent still are, the main criteria (apart from a proper knowledge of their material) on the basis of which they must expect to be assessed in examinations at whatever level. Of course, the content of their arguments had also to be relevant to the topics treated, their starting points well-chosen and their conclusions interesting and insightful; while it was evident that valid and well-structured argumentation could not on its own be regarded as constituting a sufficient condition of success, it was very much a necessary condition of it. Thus, when, in the hope of challenging our own established authorities, we turned to the locally ostracised writings of so-called “continental” philosophers, we were in general both baffled and frustrated to find ourselves unable to work out just what they were trying to argue. (It goes without saying that in the strongly problem-oriented and largely non- or even anti-historical context in which we were philosophically brought up, we were scarcely aware of, let alone well read in, the admirably well-argued works of the

100  Reason and Paradox great continental academic traditions of scholarship in the study of the history of philosophy.) This assumption – that philosophical productions were to be judged on the basis of the argument structures that they contained – was fundamental to our understanding of the very nature of philosophy. We were familiar, of course, with disagreements as to the criteria on the basis of which such structures were properly to be recognised as such; were they to be limited to those of formal logic alone, or should we be ready to recognise a whole variety of modes of informal logic, of contextual implications, of material rules of inference, of conversational implicatures or whatever? All were agreed, however, that without some such controlling framework of rules of argument, anyone might say or write anything that came into his or her head in an entirely arbitrary manner; for nothing would then count as a better or worse reason for any one affirmation rather than another. This alone goes a long way towards explaining why, for example, we felt in general so uncomfortable with texts which started out with much talk of “the phenomenological method,” but then proceeded to present a series of descriptions of one sort and another without, so far as we could detect, also producing any methodically set out arguments designed to justify those descriptions as correct or true.2 (As any sort of overall assessment of “continental philosophy” this was, of course, no better informed or more generally illuminating than the similarly summary and dismissive assessments that most “continental” philosophers of that time would have provided of the sort of philosophy that was then being produced in the so-called analytic world as so much superficial word-play.) If, then, one conceives of the rationality of philosophical discourse as thus depending on fine conceptual distinctions and on the logical status of the argument structures around and on which it is built, and of the order of these arguments as being determined by properly atemporal rules of inference, whether formal, informal or material, it is not surprising that one should find difficulty in appreciating what is going on in the texts of those for whom the rationality of such discourse is to be understood rather in terms of the (inevitably) situated practice of reasoning. By this I mean something other than “the practice of reason” understood as referring to the working out of some sort of principle of rationality in human history in general. To this we infant analytic philosophers would also have found it difficult to attach any clear sense. Brought up, as in general we were, to think of philosophical rationality in terms of respect for the structures of valid argumentation and of the capacity for building or criticising such structures, and to distrust any talk of abstract general agency, we took it as evident that reason as such does not do anything, but that it is people who do things – more or less rationally, as the cases may be. Thus, we also found it difficult to deal seriously with much of Hegel’s writing or with the writings of that large body of more recent

Reason and Reasoning 101 “continental” philosophers who, to one degree or another, have stood or who continue to stand under his influence. By “the actual practice of reasoning,” however, I here refer to nothing more obscure than to the fact that the production and presentation of rational argument has inescapably to be recognised as constituting a temporally ordered sequence of events, and as such to be understood as a causally structured sequence, even if what the sequence issues in is the production of an atemporally, logically ordered structure of argument. No-one, I take it, not even the most analytically minded of philosophers, would find any difficulty in recognising this fact, (though they might, no doubt, disagree as to how the notion of a causal structure is properly to be understood). The difficulties start to arise, however, with the question of the implications that this recognition may – or may not – have for one’s own understanding and ongoing pursuit of one’s own philosophical activity. That the production of any form of discourse or any sort of text whatsoever is bound to have all sorts of causal effects on those to whom it is addressed, or who, not being addressed, nevertheless intercept it, over and above those of the communication of whatever may be its rational or explicit informational content, is, of course, extremely well known. The point is not infrequently made by saying that any text whatsoever may be read as a form of literature. Traditionally, of course, philosophers, unlike the producers of other and perhaps grander forms of literature, have been not so much concerned with the varied concomitant effects that the manner or “style” of their speech or writing might produce in their readers or listeners as with the “rational” structure and drift of their arguments. (Though Hume and Kant, for example, in their different ways, both expressed fears that the manner of their expression might interfere, or might have interfered, with the reception of their philosophical views.) In this, it may seem that analytic philosophers have in the main kept much closer to the classical tradition than most of those whom they would regard, rightly or wrongly, as most characteristically “continental” among their colleagues. By this I do not mean, of course, that they have not in general been in any way concerned about their style. Hume, as we have just noted and to whom as students we were taught to look back upon with such respect, certainly was; so, evidently, to take two distinguished examples from among more recent philosophers, were both Gilbert Ryle and John Austin. But neither of them would have thought that either the validity of their arguments or the truth of their conclusions was in any way dependent upon the “literary” or “rhetorical” qualities of the language in which they were expressed. But this is to take for granted the possibility in principle of establishing some clear distinction between the argument content or message of a given text and the medium of its expression. Or, to put the point in the language of speech act theory, it is to take for granted the possibility of establishing some clear and workable distinction between meaning and force.

102  Reason and Paradox That any adequate overall theory of language must allow for some broad distinction between meaning and force may be allowed to call for no detailed argument here; when I point out that in standard contexts the primary force of my uttering such an expression as “Sit down there” is effectively the same as would be that attaching to my utterance of the expression “Asseyez-vous là” or “Setzen sie dort,” it is clear that in this context I am not actually telling or inviting anyone to sit down anywhere in particular, but also that it would be impossible for me to provide this piece of linguistic information if these expressions did not bear the same meaning in the contexts both of use and of mention. It is equally clear that the standard prescriptive force of the use of such expressions is closely bound up with whatever exactly we may define as their meaning; and clear more generally that proper learning of a natural language must always involve the mastery both of the meanings of its terms in their various combinations and of the forces attaching to their use in at any rate the most common and standard contexts. (Some of the most comical and yet too easily damaging misunderstandings between native and non-native speakers of a language may occur when the nonnative speaker has done so good a job in learning the meanings of his or her acquired language as to give the impression of being entirely at home in it, while having failed to master the different forces involved in using its expressions in one context rather than another.) So what is one to be understood, what is one to understand oneself, as trying to do in producing philosophy philosophical texts, philosophical papers or lectures, philosophical teaching, philosophical reflection, whether solitary or in communing with others, in short in producing philosophical discourse? Is one seeking rationally convincing answers to rationally formulated questions, answers that may carry satisfactory conviction to oneself or secure, maybe, the rational assent of others? Or is one trying to persuade, to modify or to sustain certain dispositional beliefs and other attitudes by all the devices at one’s disposal? (There are nowadays many who would argue, or at any rate seek to persuade us, that this is the only “reasonable” way in which to construe the philosophical enterprise.) Or, to put the point another way, is one simply concerned with conceptual content and the relations (essentially atemporal, as one might say) between meanings, relations of implication, entailment or exclusion by virtue of contradiction, or should one be concerned with all the (causal) forces at work in the place and time of the production of one’s arguments? Again, I take it that even the most rationally minded of analytic philosophers would readily acknowledge that such forces must inevitably be at work whenever they give a tutorial or a lecture, publish a text or otherwise engage in the business of “doing philosophy’. But most would insist that it was no part of their business as philosophers to try to take account in the shaping of their teaching, writing or lecturing of any such causally contingent and, as such, “non-rational” forces. There

Reason and Reasoning 103 might well be political reasons, or reasons of human solidarity, for, say, a French, British or American philosopher going to discuss his (or her) work in one of the locally illegal seminars that so-called dissident intellectuals used to hold in their own apartments in countries of the now defunct Eastern bloc, but, on this understanding of the matter, they could have no strictly philosophical reasons as such for so doing. None of this is to say, of course, that there have not been significant attempts on the part of (let us say) Anglo-Saxon philosophers to provide causal analyses of belief, of meaningful signs or of the ways in which intentions or reasons may also be understood as efficient causes of events. There are also examples of philosophers, very well known within the analytic field, who quite explicitly set out to influence those to whom they address themselves not so much by the logically constraining force of their arguments as by nudging them into addressing certain problems or puzzles from a different perspective than that to which they are accustomed. Such philosophers characteristically proceed not by setting out explicit theses and seeking to establish them as true on the basis of rationally compelling argument, but by encouraging people to look at matters in such and such a way rather than in some other. But, it is fair to say, for the most part this intellectual “therapy” proceeds by raising questions and adducing considerations designed to cast what may reasonably be called rational doubt on the tenability of long-held assumptions and to incite to the elaboration of fresh conceptual approaches, that is to say by offering fresh material for discursive thought. And to the extent that the characteristic style of writings in the manner of, say, the later Wittgenstein, is to be considered as integral to the exercise of the philosophical influence that the texts may exert, it is also fair to say that this way of conceiving the task of the philosopher has proven to constitute an exception that the world of analytic philosophy has in general found hard to digest. To sum up this stage of my argument, then: It would occur only to a tiny minority of philosophers working within the tradition within which I was myself brought up to try and construct their lectures or their texts in the light of such awareness as they might have of the probable wider causal impacts of their “speech performance.” Or if they did so, it would be, as they would see it, with other than strictly philosophical purposes in view. (Lecturers may prefer to keep their audiences amused; it tends to make for less drowsiness and also for greater popularity. Or, as I say, they may go to meet with dissident philosophers living under totalitarian governments for avowedly political reasons without thinking that these reasons have anything at all to do with the philosophy that they go to discuss with them.) Rational arguments, as we have noted, may be checked according to criteria of validity; if valid, they will be so with logical universality. The atemporality and universality of (‘pure’) reason go “naturally” together, as do, on the other side of the coin, the spatiotemporality, the contingent particularity and the causal situatedness of

104  Reason and Paradox (‘practical’) reasoning. The criteria by which the use of performative forces may be assessed are accordingly altogether different; such a use may be appropriate or inappropriate, successful or unsuccessful, or, as Austin might have said, happy or unhappy, depending on the particular contingent purposes and circumstances of their employment. In practice, of course, if I, qua analytic philosopher, want to ensure the best possible chances for a successful communication of my views on how the arguments concerning some particular problem should go, then, rather than thinking of myself as addressing an imaginary “ideally rational audience,” I need to think of the likely reactions of my actually given audience or readership to one way of putting them rather than another. What may be clear to one may be deeply obscure to another, and I should be foolish, to say the least, not to take account of such things. But this is still in effect to think of the medium as strictly instrumental to the successful transmission of the message, and hence of the message as in principle wholly disentanglable from it. What might happen, though, if I start to take seriously, in its implications for my own philosophical activity, the thought that no-one could ever – in principle – either transmit or receive a message that was not encoded in some particular historically contingent medium? If I remind myself of the irrationality of not taking such account in my work as I may of the context in which I am working, of the forces that must play upon my own efforts, including those which are built in to the accepted meanings of the very medium or language of my own thinking, as well as those which, through the more or less contingently associated effects that they may have on my interlocutors, must play their part in shaping the message which actually gets through? At this point I may find myself struck by an awareness of a potential conflict between two or even three different ends that up to now may have been indistinguishably implicit in my philosophical undertaking, that of building a valid rational argument logically sufficient to establish as proven the conclusions towards which I have been arguing and those of securing “your” assent to those conclusions and, more generally, those of securing “your” reception of my discourse as pertinent, interesting, well presented and strongly rooted in a cultivated knowledge of the relevant background and context – in short, as Austin might have put it, of securing a certain kind of uptake. And, aware now of all this, I may conclude that, since what I have taken to be my concern with the rational working out and communication of the views that I hold to be correct can only find practical expression as reasoning and the attempted bringing about of appropriate states of mind and/or belief in my readers or listeners, the only “rational” way of proceeding must be by using the means best calculated to bring about these ends (without doing anything to hide from my audience [or myself] the nature of the means that I am using).

Reason and Reasoning 105 As all concerned, then, start to take effective note of the fact that the production of a rationally argued line of argument can constitute but one thread among the whole weave of forces at work in any philosophical, as in any other discursive, performance, and not necessarily the dominant one at that, so they are likely to become more and more sensitively aware of the, say, personal and political stakes involved – and given that we are talking now of the impact of forces rather than of the logical implications of conceptually distinguishable sets of reasons, it is only too easy for the personal and the political to become run together. As the focus of concentration shifts in this way, so it is only natural, only “reasonable” indeed, that philosophers should design their discourse in such a way not only as to give most effective play to the forces that they themselves wish to exert, but also to provide themselves with advance cover from the forces of possible counter-attack. In such a perspective – within a tradition that has come to take on such a form – to set out one’s arguments in a way that makes one own position too clearly explicit, too easy to pin down, is in effect to expose oneself. It may thus be safer, as well as carry greater weight, to present one’s position by setting it within a play of forces such as may be provided by a marshalling of appropriate references to wellknown authors and texts, which may fulfil the function of providing an effective protective screen of learning, culture and authority. What I have been sketching is, it goes without saying, only the barest outline of an argument that may – or may not – lead the philosopher who follows it to seek to bring its conclusions back to bear upon his own philosophical enterprises as he shapes and pursues them. By this I do not mean to suggest of any particular philosophers, of course, that they were led to write as they may have written by having some version of such an argument explicitly in mind. Moreover, the undermining of what we may call reason’s confidence in its own authority has many other sources. There has been, as Paul Ricoeur, among others, has well pointed out, a whole sequence of highly influential “masters of suspicion”, as he has called them, who in their different ways have sought to show us how and why, when we may have thought that we were simply reasoning, we were certainly doing many other things as well, many of which may in the given context have been much more important either to us or in their general effects or both. Many of the reasons given for this mistrust of reason and rationality – and they are typically put forward as reasons – have their roots in certain of those arguments whereby Kant looked to work his way free of the essentially insoluble problems inherent in the Cartesian assumption of our power of direct and immediate insight into the fact and contents of our own conscious experience as thinking beings. There is no doubt something prima facie paradoxical about an argument that, when it turns back upon itself, ends up by undermining its own very status as argument; but paradoxical or not, its

106  Reason and Paradox seriousness is not to be underrated. However, it is not to my present purpose to rehearse this argument once again; nor, for that matter, to seek to assess the rational checkability and rival merits of the very different ways of presenting a position, or of justifying a description, other than those based on explicitly formal or informal logical inference, such, for example, as setting it against the background of certain historical precedents rather than against that of others and thus affecting the interpretive light in which it is to be seen. (The elaboration of structured argument does not have to be seen as the only recognisably “rational” justificatory procedure; one might take an equally “rational” way of checking such interpretive realignments to consist in the further close examination of whatever historical texts are in question, together with the relevant citing of alternative and competing precedents). Suffice it to note that these are significantly different discursive practices, the skills and habits of which, while being by no means exclusive of each other in principle, nevertheless require and derive from different formative habits of disciplined training and thought.3 The immediate question is rather that of what difference it might make to how one views the standards to be observed in one’s philosophical work, once one looks upon what one is producing, in and through the activity of one’s philosophical reasoning, as first and foremost a certain kind of spatio-temporally situated performance rather than as an essentially atemporal structure of purely rationally ordered argument.4 It may be taken to be a constitutive presupposition of discourse in general, be it written or spoken and be it directed to oneself or to others, that its governing purpose or point must lie in the production of certain primarily communicative effects. From this point of view – from the perspective of seeking to produce certain kinds of effects – the overriding normative concern of those who persist in believing philosophy to be an essentially rational and truth-orientated endeavour, must shift from one directed primarily to the validity of their argument structures or the truth of their theses to one directed primarily to the truthfulness of their attempts to communicate and to the integrity of their argumentation. This is in no way to deny that truth and truthfulness are interrelated concepts, and that I cannot, under normal circumstances, properly be said to be truthful in my performance if I am knowingly aware that it contains anything false or that my arguments contain some hidden fallacy. But to be truthful in the saying of whatever one says and in the writing of whatever one writes it is not enough simply to believe that one’s arguments are sufficient validly to establish “the strict truth” of what one is saying. Or, as one might also put it, if universality is the mark of one’s attainment of truth or validity, it is not sufficient to guarantee the truthfulness of one’s saying or writing in the always particular context of communication. For communication is always a relationship between at least two terms, even in the limiting case where one is in effect trying to communicate with

Reason and Reasoning 107 one’s own present or future self. There will always be some element of untruthfulness in any prima facie act of communication that includes no effort to take account of the conditions of receivability of the putative intended message.5 Broadly speaking, these conditions relate, (1), to the receiver’s capacity for picking up and interpreting a message, and, (2), to those assumptions which receivers may reasonably be entitled to make, whether by virtue of some mutually recognisable convention or of some feature contingent on the particular context, as to the intentions with which or the state of mind in which the sender has transmitted his or her message. Broadly speaking again, the first set of conditions may be thought of in terms of the truthfulness of transmission and the second in terms of the integrity of the transmitter.

1. Truthfulness Communication can only be truthful in so far as the sender of messages seeks to transmit nothing that he or she does not in fact believe to be true. Everyone knows, however, that there are many ways in which it is possible to make deceptive use of arguments leading validly enough from true premises to true conclusions in order to obfuscate or mislead. If one wishes to assure truthful communication, one has to make as sure as one can that the language and manner of one’s communication is adequately adapted to what the audience may be capable of understanding, not only by way of capturing its meaning but also of reacting appropriately to the forces that its terms may carry both in general and in the particular context of the communication in question. It is notoriously only too often possible to turn aside embarrassing enquiries by providing a host of true statements on only marginally relevant issues. Again, if I have acquired a sufficiently solid reputation as a liar with a given person or body of persons, I may know that my best chance of leading them away from the truth may be simply by stating it very emphatically. In other cases, relations between myself and my audience may be such that there is no immediate way in which I am going to be able to convince them of what I nevertheless know to be true. In such cases, I have somehow to reestablish certain basic conditions of trust, the basic conditions of truthful communication, before I can hope to succeed in conveying my message; to act as if these conditions are fulfilled, when I have every reason to know that they are not, is not to act in good faith. In cases where the sender of a message has good reason to believe that his intended audience will almost certainly take as true the opposite of whatever he says, there is even a certain paradoxically limiting sense in which truthfulness, as the effective communication of what the sender believes to be the truth, may indeed best be secured by asserting its very opposite. In short, if the truthfulness of an act of communication lies in principle in the seriously conceived intention of would-be communicators to secure the uptake of

108  Reason and Paradox that which they believe to be true, it must in practice depend upon their readiness and ability to adapt their message to the contingently particular conditions of its context of transmission. Thus, if truth aspires in some sense to the universal, truthfulness is bound in its expression to the ­particular – and if it is to be true to itself, as one might say, must recognise itself as so bound.

2. Integrity A number of those who have written on the question of what we might call – somewhat grandly – the transcendental presuppositions of standard discourse (Paul Grice, Patrick Nowell Smith) have pointed out that the hearer or reader is normally (or defeasibly) entitled to presume the speaker or writer himself to believe what he asserts to be true; in other words, that standard discourse proceeds (as it must proceed, if new speakers are ever to learn the language) on the assumption of the truthfulness of those who speak. (It may well be argued that this assumption is ultimately rooted in the reciprocally constitutive relationship, however exactly it should be formulated, of meaning and truth conditions; but that is another story, too long for the re-telling here.) The lessons of learning to speak, to participate in the common discourse of one’s speech community, necessarily include lessons in the recognition of those conventions which serve as signals that a particular discursive context is to be taken as in some way non-standard and that in it the normal assumption of truthfulness is not to be taken to hold. For example, when young children are first taken to the theatre, they not infrequently take the actors actually to be the characters that they are representing and, hence, actually to believe, in propria persona as it were, the assertions provided for them by the script; but it is clear that no experienced theatre-goer would ever make such a mistake. However, to assume the truthfulness of one’s interlocutor is also, in effect to make at the same time a certain number of further assumptions about him. If someone tells me of his belief in the validity of a certain line of argumentation and in the truth of the conclusions to which it leads, I am less likely to lend credence to him if he has only yesterday assured me of a contrary belief; and even less likely to do so, if I see no reason to suppose that tomorrow he will be likely still to believe in the validity of the same set of arguments or in the truth of the same conclusions. It is not so much that I should be led as of necessity to suspecting him of a lack of truthfulness as that to lay claim to a belief is to commit oneself in certain ways, which is in turn to presume to a certain kind of stability through time. This stability is not to be confounded with a stolid cognitive immobility. There are many propositions whose truth I should now be prepared to affirm while being quite ready to acknowledge that I may come sooner or later to change my mind. But for my present affirmation to count as one of a serious belief, there has to be a reasonable

Reason and Reasoning 109 assumption that, should I in fact come to change my mind, it will only be on the basis of some equally serious reconsideration of the grounds on which my previous belief was based. This, of course, is also to presume an appropriate weight of continuity between my present self as believer in the truth of p and my hypothetical future self, who may have come, on the basis of a certain follow-through of reflection, to reject that belief. These presumptions may very appropriately be regarded as amounting in sum to a presumption of integrity. “Integrity” is a term that has recently seen a remarkable degree of not always very precise public use. The Oxford English Dictionary provides us with the following account: “1. The condition of having no part or element wanting; unbroken state; material wholeness, completeness, entirety. 2. Unimpaired or uncorrupted state; original perfect condition; soundness. 3. a. Innocence, sinlessness. b. Soundness of moral principle; the character of uncorrupted virtue; uprightness, honesty, sincerity.” (It is to be noted, incidentally, that none of the quotations given to illustrate these different usages date from later than 1678.) By way of comparison with the French, Le Grand Robert gives us: “1. Etat d’une chose qui est dans son entier, complète, intégrale . . . qui est donnée intacte, inaltérée . . . (Intégralité est plus qualicatif qu’intégralité, réservée généralement à ce qui est mesurable). 2. Etat d’une personne intègre. Voir honnêteté, incorruptibilité, justice: probité . . .” The underlying theme of both accounts is that of an original wholeness, and the consequential theme of moral soundness is that of someone who is, as the English idiom has it, “all of a piece,” whose fundamental honesty and reliability spring from the fact that he (or she) has no hidden discordances such as to make for an unpredictable changeability over time or from one context to another. In highlighting the reference to origins both dictionaries are doubtless faithful to the origins of the concept of integrity itself. Nowadays, however, it would probably be more common to think of the wholeness of integrity as a task or a goal at which to aim rather than as a state from which one has fallen away, even as one knows that there can be no possible assurance that one has ever definitively achieved it. (Nor has it necessarily to be supposed that a man of integrity will never dissemble. A secret agent, for example, may be professionally committed to a life of deception, but such commitments may be entered into on the basis of, precisely, a more fundamental commitment that provides the framework of constancy to his life.) There is, as we have just noted, no necessary loss of integrity involved in the mere fact of changing one’s mind, so long as the change is made on seriously reflected grounds; on the contrary, a man of integrity must be prepared to change his mind when confronted with convincing evidence that he had previously been mistaken. The soundness and stability of integrity are not to be confused with mere immobility or rigidity as such; they are rather a matter of constancy of underlying principle and purpose, of steadiness of direction, and of reliability through changing c­ ircumstance – in other

110  Reason and Paradox words, of a certain self-integration (or what Kant might have called synthesis) through time. (It is here, incidentally, that we may look for the underlying connection between the notion of integrity and a certain idea of personal identity; but that, once again, is another and further story.) Seen in this light, it is clear that the conditions of truthfulness and those of integrity are closely bound up with each other. Truthful communicators, those who are concerned to secure uptake to what they believe to be true messages, based on sets of properly valid arguments, will seek to encode their messages in terms to which their audiences may be expected to respond in the appropriate manner. But they can only count on securing this response in so far as their audiences take them to be communicators of integrity, that is to say persons who not only seek to communicate what in the moment they believe to be true, but persons who are not lightly going to switch to another view the moment after, people who remain reliably themselves through time, and whose successive stages of life, whose different aspects of personality and different relations with different people, together with their conceptions of the norms by which such relations should be governed, are so self-integrated as to constitute coherent, stable and reliable wholes. The truthful communicator, then, will seek to adapt the terms of what he has to say to the needs of the particular context of its intended or likely reception. It may be that, as in the case of my own philosophical upbringing, what is thus called for is explicitly set out argument, where one can be reasonably confident that its recipient will automatically seek to distinguish the manner of its setting out from its cognitive content and set it aside as so much incidentally pleasing or displeasing decoration. But there may be other and locally more effective ways of setting out, in the sense of establishing, a philosophical position, ways that it is quite reasonable to characterise as rational – by locating it in relation to other historically familiar positions by way of suggestive reference and quotation, both directly and also indirectly by one’s own choice of expression, and in relation not only to other philosophical positions but in relation also to the visions expressed in other forms of literature and even, indeed, of art more generally. To display a position in this way may be both to provide for it a form of justification, not by proving anything, but by thus showing just how well it fits in to a recognisable pattern, and a form of authentication of one’s own right to speak with authority by providing the evidence of one’s own learning. So, to return to the themes of our starting point, one way of trying to make sense of what, when we look at it in the light of earlier history, must strike us as the quite extraordinary gulf of mutual incomprehension and disdain that has come to divide the world of western philosophy, and which is only now starting to be tentatively and partially re-bridged, is to see it as resulting from two different chains of reactions and counterreactions to a line of argument that has its roots in the peculiar form of

Reason and Reasoning 111 Transcendental Dualism to which Kant was led as he attempted to find a way of avoiding the paradoxes to which his Cartesian predecessors had been drawn. Both chains start from a sense of the unacceptability of Transcendental Idealism’s strictly unintelligible but equally strictly unavoidable disjunction of the human subject into its phenomenal and noumenal aspects. Very broadly speaking, the philosophers of the ­English-speaking world reacted by simply withdrawing from what they saw as an uncontrolled and uncontrollable mess of theoretical speculation, while their “continental” colleagues reacted by trying to push the Kantian arguments still further – beyond the point at which they saw Kant as having got stuck and in the end, as we have noted, to a point where rational argument ends up by undermining itself (and thus, incidentally, the central Kantian thesis of Reason’s necessary respect for itself) and by transferring the emphasis to a concern with the non-rational aspects of the overall activity of reasoning. At this point, the criterial norms by which the formal products of reason are to be assessed tend to give way to those by which one may assess even “philosophical” discourse as literary, political or some other pertinent form of performance. In the (never definitively to be concluded) end, however, we have to remember that the two perspectives, that of Reason as the power to create and to assess cognitive argument structures and that of Reasoning as the staging of a complex performance are, whatever the tensions between them, fundamentally interdependent. Whoever would be truthful in their performance must retain their grip on the distinction between truth and falsity and on the relation, whatever its proper formulation, between truth and meaning; whoever seeks to communicate with integrity must retain their grip on the distinction between acceptably valid and unacceptably invalid argument. It is true, of course, that we can never hope to construct or encounter a universally valid argument that is not couched in the terms of one particular speech community or another, terms that will carry all their own locally peculiar illocutionary and potentially perlocutionary forces. But this, it would seem, is a tension from which we may aspire, but should not hope to escape. Indeed, we may end up by finding ourselves unable to maintain sufficient grip on the crucial structures of validity and truth if the prevailing culture does not once again encourage us as philosophers to insist, within the contexts of our philosophical performances, on being allowed to discount, even as we acknowledge their existence, the impacts of the “illocutionary” and “perlocutionary” forces that such performances may always carry or take on in the course of our active exchanges. The point has, it seems to me, been admirably well put by Susan Haack in a chapter on “Multiculturalism and Objectivity,” and I can do no better than make the conclusion of her article my own: Genuine inquiry is so complex and difficult, and advocacy “research” has bcome so commonplace, that our grip on the concepts of truth

112  Reason and Paradox and reason is being loosened . . . This is much to be regretted; and not least because honest, thorough inquiry – reasoned pursuit of the truth – is the best defense against racist and sexist stereotypes. (To the anticipated objection that reasoned pursuit of the truth is a “Western” ideal, I shall say only that “Western” or not, it is an ideal of nearly incalculable value to humanity.) (Haack 1998, 146–147)

Notes 1. This chapter was first published in the journal Enrahonar: An International Journal of Theoretical and Practical Reason (1999), 177–186. Permission to reproduce it is given under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International. 2. As Husserl himself characteristically put it in his Preface to the English edition of Ideas: “Eidetic phenomenology is restricted in this book to the realm of pure eidetic “description’, that is to the realm of essential structures of transcendental subjectivity immediately transparent to the mind . . . Thus no attempt is made to carry out systematically the transcendental knowledge that can be obtained through logical deduction” (Husserl 1962, 12). 3. There is also, of course, a powerful current of thought, which likewise perhaps has its distant roots in Kant and his development of the distinction between Reason and Imagination, which ends up by seeing Reason as essentially hostile to any form of creative life or thought. For example, in their Le mythe nazi (pp. 36/37) Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy quote Heidegger’s affirmation that “Reason, to which so much importance has been attached over the centuries, is the most unremitting enemy of thought.” 4. The atemporality (not, incidentally, the “timelessness’) of the order of argument structures as such has, of course, nothing to do with the (obvious) fact that the material out of which such structures may be built – and even many of the principles underlying their construction – may only have become available at the time of their construction thanks to the causal interplay of a whole range of historically determined cultural forces. 5. This point has in effect been amply recognised by a number of recent political philosophers and philosophers of education working in the analytic tradition in its implications for what has come to be recognised as the sphere of public reason within a pluralistic democracy, but as yet less so, it would seem, in its potential reflexive implications for the manner of their own philosophical discourse.

Works Cited Haack, Susan. 1998. Manifesto of a Passionate Moderate: Unfashionable Essays. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Husserl, Edmund. 1962. Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology. Translated by W. R. Boyce. London: Gibson George Allen and Unwin. Kenny, Anthony. 1968. Descartes: A Study of his Philosophy. London: Random House.

7 The Universal and the Particular A Kantian Account of the Elements of Self-identity

At the beginning of his four lectures on Jewish History and Jewish Memory delivered in 1980, Professor Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi made the following avowal: What I have to say is ultimately quite personal. It flows out of lingering preoccupations with the nature of my craft, but I do not presume to speak for the guild. I trust that, by the time I have done, the personal will not seem merely arbitrary. I would add only that although, as a historian of the Jews, I am concerned primarily with the Jewish past, I do not think that the issues to be raised are necessarily confined to Jewish history. Still, it may be that this history can sometimes set them into sharper relief than would otherwise be possible. And with that we may begin. (Yerushalmi 1982, 6)

1 I am in no way, neither professional nor amateur, an historian, but a philosopher. As philosopher I am not concerned with any specifically Jewish issues as such. Nevertheless, and although the issues to be raised here are of essentially universal import, I think that they have a more particular point when given a more specific focus. It may be that, in this case too, attention to the universal can help to sharpen one’s focus on the ­particular – and vice versa. At any rate in my uncertainty as to just how to set about my topic, I found Professor Yerushalmi’s avowal to provide a welcome comfort. With the shelter that, mutatis mutandis, it seems to offer, I too may begin. And let me begin, indeed, with a simple semi-autobiographical statement. I was born and brought up within an Anglo-Jewish family in the clearly explicit and unquestioning conviction that we were both British and Jewish, British by nationality and Jewish by religious commitment, and that there was in principle nothing more complicated about this than

114  Reason and Paradox being, say, French and Protestant or Irish and Catholic. (Which is not, of course, to say that finding oneself so situated might not in practice involve all sorts of very real complications.) In my own family context it was the transmission of my grandfather’s understanding and articulation of this outlook that had the most marked influence on me. He, Claude Montefiore, was, of course, a founder of the Liberal Jewish Movement in Great Britain – though as a matter of fact we, that is to say my brother and I, were always taken to the Reform Synagogue at Upper Berkeley Street, of which our father was President. My grandfather was also very well known in his day as a leading anti-Zionist – though it is important to add that he died (at the age of 80) in 1938, and that to have been antiZionist in the days when he was most actively committed to that position carries no direct implications as to what might have been his attitude in relation to the state of Israel had he lived to see its establishment after all the horrors of the years preceding it. There can be no doubt that a full understanding of the roots and significance of his anti-Zionism would have to take account of his background as a product of the upper-class Victorian enlightenment: (and certainly of many other factors as well). But none of this, naturally enough, played any part in my own conscious awareness of these matters. What I understood of his objections to Zionism was that it involved a confusion of matters – of nationality and of religion – that should in all purity of principle be kept as clearly as possible apart; and that it might tend in practice to encourage the potentially dangerous Gentile suspicion of Jews as incapable of dependable, unflawed loyalty to the country of which they claimed to be citizens. Even as a boy, however, I was more or less aware of the fact that my grandfather had not simply plucked his views out of the air. On the contrary, we were also brought up to take pride in our (indirect) descendance from that earlier and more widely celebrated Montefiore, Sir Moses – or Moshe. Moshe himself had no children; but my grandfather’s father was his nephew – and so, if I stuck on enough “greats” before the word, I could end up by claiming him as one of my uncles. There can be no need to add anything by way of illustration or emphasis of Sir Moses’s commitment to the Holy Land and to the welfare and advancement of the Jewish communities living within it. But the image that made the most impact on me is very well captured on the inside cover of the book by my cousin, Myrtle Franklin and Michael Bor, Sir Moses Montefiore 1784–1885: “Sir Moses Montefiore was a passionate Jew and a passionate Englishman. He was much loved and admired by the nation and his co-religionists for the manner in which he rendered these two interests compatible.” And he himself undoubtedly saw things in this way. For example, in 1837 in his speech of inauguration as Sheriff of London and Middlesex he affirmed that: “It is gratifying to find that, though professing a different faith from the majority of my fellow-citizens, yet this has

The Universal and the Particular 115 presented no barrier to my desire of being useful to them in a situation to which my fore-fathers would in vain have aspired; and I shall hail this as a proof that those prejudices are passing away, and will pass away.” Over forty-five years later he was replying to an address presented to him by the City of London on the occasion of his ninety-ninth birthday “with a fervent prayer for the health and long life of our gracious Queen, whose beneficent sway over the great and free country has caused so much happiness to all classes of her subjects . . .” Against this family background – and before any judgment of whether rightly or wrongly – it is perhaps not too surprising that as I grew up even in the thirties and forties I was still able to take it for granted that to keep clear this distinction between nationality and religion was not only essential to any understanding of the purity of religion itself, but was moreover of crucial importance to the full acceptance of members of the Jewish religion by what Sir Moses had called their fellow-citizens of different faiths.

2 Let me turn now to pick up the very different and much more “theoretical” main thread of my argument; and the point at which I pick it up is to be found in a highly schematic reminder of the Kantian view of what it is to be a human being. (It goes without saying that no account of Kant’s views can fail to be controversial in one way or another; and the more schematic, the more controversial, no doubt.) Kant’s view of the human situation may be seen as rooted in his attempted solution to the problems of how to understand the nature of knowledge and experience which, as he saw it, were to be found embedded in the work of his predecessors. Descartes was no doubt right to take it that experience must at bottom consist simply in whatever experiencers might be aware of experiencing, and that truly certain knowledge must, strictly speaking, be based only on what they might be directly conscious of. Moreover, possible Cartesian doubt must affect with radical uncertainty not only the presumed nature but even the very existence of any past or future moment in the life of any experiencing subject – of any moment, that is to say, other than that of immediate present experience. This means that every such moment of immediately present experience must be conceived of as given in its own self-completeness; if the very existence of past and future are both radically uncertain, the given present must be as it presents itself to be independently of any reference that it might appear to make to anything external to itself, whether in time or in space. We are, so to speak, given the contents of each present moment of experience only one at a time.1 The empiricist successors of Descartes were in their turn to be taken as having been right in their assumption that for creatures such as us – and

116  Reason and Paradox we could have no knowledge of any others – the contents of experience could only be given through the senses, both inner and outer; and that for Kant meant that in one way or another the manner of presentation of whatever might be so given must in all cases bear the marks of temporality and, in many cases, those of spatiality as well. They, the empiricists, must have been wrong, however, in thinking that all our ideas must have been derived exclusively from their prior presentation, whether in whole or in subsequently re-assembled parts, in what had been thus given. Kant himself, indeed, said that it was his reading of Hume’s attempted account of the origins and nature of the idea of causation that first “awoke him from his dogmatic slumbers.” But in the text of Hume’s own Treatise of Human Nature, it is with his attempt to account for the idea of selfidentity that the fundamental incoherence of this whole line of analysis really comes to the surface; and it is when, in the Appendix that he looks back at this aspect of his work that Hume himself – though he only partly understands just what has gone wrong – nevertheless sees that there is something seriously amiss and declares himself at an impasse. The idea of self-identity contains an essential reference to a certain unity – and, when it is identity through time that is in question, to a certain continuity. But how can the ideas of unity or continuity be derived from experience, if experience itself consists in nothing but a series of irreducibly discrete and discontinuous perceptions? Kant’s celebrated answer to this celebrated conundrum lay, of course, in pointing out that there are certain strategic ideas for which it makes no sense to look for their derivation from experience alone, since they have to be understood as being among the presuppositions of the possibility of (any self-conscious) experience itself. First and foremost among these presuppositions is, indeed, the idea of a unitary subject, a subject identical with itself throughout the whole span of its own experience. To point the argument in Hume’s direction, only a subject that was still the same self-subject could furnish itself with ideas by copying previously received impressions; only a subject that remained itself over time could come to form habitual expectations; and only a subject identical with itself throughout could succumb to the “illusion” of a continuity that might be produced by the reception of an however rapidly succeeding series of radically discrete impressions, But, and here the argument becomes more difficult, it would be impossible for a subject to become aware of itself as such, or to form for itself any conscious conception of any aspect of its experience, were it unable to distinguish within that experience between its own subjective impressions and the objects from which they were derived or to which they might be directed. It is not only that the argument is here becoming more difficult; there must also be something wrong with the way in which I have just tried to put the point. For if the experience of a human subject is always given to it through sense perception, it can make no sense to suggest that it must somehow be able to perceive

The Universal and the Particular 117 a distinction between its own perception and their objects. Kant’s argument is rather that the thought of this distinction is always and necessarily implicit in our any and every act of recognition of whatever our experience may bring; it lies at the base of whatever concepts we may use through which to render whatever may be given to us recognisable and thus thinkable. To recognise anything, to think, is to recognise or to think it in one way rather than in another; it is thus – necessarily – to relate it to other actual or possible elements of our experience. But the acts or activity through which we may thus introduce ordered relations into the otherwise “rhapsodic” manifold of our sense perceptions, can be no arbitrary matter of individual whim. It is after all the activity of an essentially thinking, conceptualising and capable-of-reasoning mind, which, in holding together (or “synthesising’) the discretely given elements of its experience, can but follow the principles and procedures of its own intrinsic rationality. The relations which we introduce into the otherwise unordered sequence of what is given to us provide the structure of our experience. The forms of this structure are, Kant argues, but the temporal analogues of the forms of logical judgment; it is the structure which results from the mind’s application of its powers or “functions” of (relational) unity not to logical, but to temporally given elements. It is only in so far as they are locatable within this structure that such elements can be recognised or thought; and it is our necessary structuring in this way of the temporal and spatial elements of our experience that ensures its overall objectivity as an indissociable aspect of our conceptualisation of it. This is a hard argument even to state, and even harder to follow through in an attempt to make it out in full and proper detail. This – happily – is not to present purpose, for which it may be enough to agree to take it as being at any rate prima facie plausible that even subjective self-awareness (awareness of oneself as a conceptualising subject of experience) is possible only to a subject aware of itself as confronted by an essentially objective experience. That said, there remain a number of points which we need to try and bring out in Kant’s overall account of this objectivity: 1. This is an account which, if it works, relieves us of the impossible task of making sense of the necessarily basic objectivity of our experience as if it had to be understood as lying in some crucial relation between what is given in consciousness and a something-I-knownot-what that is to be presumed to be lying behind and beyond and hence directly inaccessible to any conscious experience whatsoever. The content of conscious experience, Kant has agreed, is given to us through our senses; but its objectivity lies in the structure which “we ourselves” contribute to it through those very general concepts or categories by which we render it conceptually recognisable or thinkable. The structure of objectivity being a contribution of mind, it is thus accessible to it.

118  Reason and Paradox 2. A very special contribution to the objectivity of experience is made through the categories of causal sequence and causal inter-connection. If in recognising any given content of experience as being of one sort rather than another one had to think of its appropriate classification as depending entirely on the nature of one’s reaction to its immediately present appearance, one would be faced with the collapse of any distinction between what was in fact appropriate and what one simply decided in one’s reaction of the moment; all classification would thus become purely arbitrary and “re-cognition” deprived of all sense. Where anything goes, nothing is more right than wrong. To think of something as recognisable, that is to think of it being that kind of thing rather than anything else, is already implicitly to think of it as having been determined in the time, place and nature of its appearance by something over and above the mere manner of one’s subjective awareness of that appearance. But, so the Kantian argument goes, one has to presume this (necessarily presupposed) causal determination of all experienceable phenomena to be rooted within the overall structure of thought itself – that is to say that rational capacity for “synthesising” conceptualisation whereby all appearances are rendered thinkable only by virtue of their relations to each other. In other words, that objectivity in experience in necessary virtue of which my use of any concept of would-be recognition may be either appropriate or inappropriate, turns on the fact that I have to think of (nearly) all that appears to me as being whatever it is not only in terms pf how it happens immediately to strike me, but also in terms of how it is related to anything and everything else which might at some other moment come or have come into my field of awareness. According to this argument, then, the objective, empirical reality of anything that can be thought of as figuring within the natural world within which the human subject may be aware of himself or herself as active subject of experience is thus bound up with its conceivability only as determined both in its nature and its occurrences by their relations to what has gone before and to what is collateral with them, that is to say by their place in a thoroughgoing causal structure. 3. Causal sequences, causal relations in general indeed, are essentially temporal in nature. There is also, however, an important sense in which to think of any present perception as the causally determined successor of some previous event or events is to be committed to a certain understanding of space and of one’s own place within it. For any such previous event has ex hypothesi to be thought of as having taken place outside of my immediate conscious experience. But the thought of an event that must have had its own previously given place in the overall causal sequence carries with it something more than a reference simply to some presumed antecedent state of my own consciousness. A memory claim is something more than a mere

The Universal and the Particular 119 present thought about an imagined past, guaranteed to be true by virtue of its own immediacy, as it were; it refers rather to a state of affairs that will have been whatever it was independently of how my “memory” may seem now to present it. The would-be objectivity of present memory claims, the very ability to conceptualise and to recognise alteration in the temporal sequence of my moments of awareness, is as much tied to the acknowledgement of externality (and thus of space) as it is to that of causal determination in time. Space and time are, on Kant’s view, the two forms of human sense experience; but he provides in effect already his own deep conceptual reasons for having to regard them as constituting an experiential continuum. 4. If objectivity is thus crucially bound up with the spatial dimension of the space-time continuum of our experience, and not only with the categorially determined structure in which all its elements are to be situated, it is once again to be thought of as an integral aspect of all experience – including our own bodily self-experience – rather than as anything somehow distinct from it. Space is no independently existing “container” of experience within which objects might have their own independently objective existence – independently, that is to say, of any reference to possible subjective experiences of them. It is, rather, a form of subjective experience itself. Let me try at this stage to sum up the main features of the argument so far in a way that may point up their relevance for the problem of human self-identity. Self-awareness is, then, only possible on the assumption of a certain awareness of objectivity – (as providing, it may be added, an ultimate and ultimately indispensable foundation for all claims to both meaning and truth). Awareness of objectivity is only possible on the assumption that its conditions belong to the form and structure of subjective awareness and understanding themselves. These conditions include externality (or space) as one of the forms of sensory receptivity, and the active conceptual organisation of all sensory inputs through the most general categories of rational understanding. The whole world of our natural experience, actual and possible alike, is unthinkable other than as conforming to these conditions. And since they include the thoroughgoing causal inter-determination of all possible phenomena, the natural world with all that it contains, or that occurs within it, has to be understood as governed by strict laws of causal determination. It must at some stage be of evidently crucial relevance to this argument to consider how far it must be taken to stand or fall as a whole – and, most importantly, what reply it might be possible to make from a generally Kantian stand-point to the challenge that such an argument would seem to have to face from the rise of a modern non-determinist physics. (How, for example, might one best understand the relation between the macro- and the micro-physical world, and what implications might such

120  Reason and Paradox an understanding have for arguments of this generally Kantian type?) What calls for more immediate consideration, however, is the way in which the whole strategy of this argument would seem to commit one to an account of the human situation that is through and through dualistic – so thoroughly dualistic, indeed, that, judging from the developments of his texts at any rate, Kant himself seems to have real difficulty in remaining wholly consistent in his fidelity to all its implications. (Though it may also be argued, no doubt, that he himself was only too aware of the impossibility in the last resort of maintaining any such fidelity.) The roots of Kant’s dualism may, then, be seen as lying in his account of the nature of knowledge, experience and conceptual awareness in the case of “creatures such as us,” creatures, that is to say, whose experience of the world is given to them through their senses. We, creatures of this sort, know ourselves as belonging to the order of nature. Our awareness of ourselves, whether of our mental states or of our bodily conditions and adventures, comes to us through our so-called “inner” and “outer” senses – as a result in many cases at least of the causal impact upon our bodily organs of other bodies in our surrounding environment. To act is to give rise to the occurrence of events taking place in our spatio-temporal physical context; to refrain from acting is by the same token to cause it to be the case that the course of events already underway is left undisturbed by any impact from us. To speak is itself to cause certain characteristic series of events to take place; even to think is to produce temporally ordered sequences of events having their own place within the overall causal order of the world. And yet all such knowledge of the world and of ourselves as acting and being acted upon within it, is, according to this account, possible only on the basis of our constitution of the knowable world as such through our own rationally conceptualising activity. Indeed, it is from this activity that the causal structures of the world themselves derive. But if this is so, it would seem to be in strict principle impossible to represent this very activity as itself consisting in a series of temporally successive and causally determinate events as one would have to think of it if we were to suppose it to be taking place within the world of nature for whose constitution it is itself in large and essential part responsible. Where, then, might one situate the “place” of such activity? “Place” is itself already a term that one has to use here with some circumspection. For clearly the place of this sort of constitutive synthetic activity can itself have no already spatio-temporal co-ordinates; it is not to be located within the world whose structure and constitution as such derives from this very activity. One has rather to understand such “activity” as being of no assignable time or place at all. But this is not to say that it is not rigorously ordered. The order of rational argument is not as such a temporal, but rather a logical one, the principles of which are intrinsic to rationality itself.2 Indeed, the guiding principle of all would-be rational activity as such must be that it be as faithful to reason as possible – that

The Universal and the Particular 121 is to say, as faithful as possible to oneself qua rational subject – that is to say, that one’s activity should be self-ordered, autonomous or free. At the same time – if in such a context that is a permissible expression – the actual development of a rational argument, (such, I hope, as the working out of this present text), is something that only too evidently takes place in time. As such, it must belong to the order of nature, which is to say that it must “have its place” within a network of determining causes, in which its own sequence has to be understood as determined through its relations to a whole series of factors wholly external to itself. For it is only in so far as it is thus given phenomenal or natural expression that rational argument could come to the conscious awareness of oneself or of anyone else. In short, for “creatures such as us” all rational argumentation has necessarily to be given natural, temporally sequential and causally conditioned expression within the context of some particular location or another; while its nevertheless being the case that its rationality as such much wholly escape all such determination. According to this general line of argument, then, knowledge (as, indeed, experience in general) is only possible on the assumption that the natural world owes its order and structure to the activity of mind, but that the embodied yet rational human beings that inhabit it must have also this not fully comprehensible footing within this other non-locatable domain, of which we can, and even must in a sense, form the thought, but of which we can in principle have no thinkable knowledge. But in characterising the subject of human experience in this way, we have come to find ourselves embarked on a description of the Kantian moral subject. Within the terms of Kantian philosophical anthropology, indeed, the human subject of experience – the subject of human experience – is necessarily a moral subject, bound to a peculiar awareness of itself as belonging at once to two different and incommensurable realms. On this view the life of a being belonging simply to the order of nature is to be understood as explicable on the basis of causal ordering alone. Such are animals, sentient beings, no doubt, but, so Kant believed, without any power of conceptualisation and self-conscious thought, and lacking, therefore, any capacity for rational self-direction. Such beings cannot be judged by the standards of morality; they are what they are and they do what they do “simply” as a result of all those many factors, both internal and external to them, that together determine them in their nature and in their behaviour. Those beings, on the other hand, if any such beings there are – angels, we may call them, who may be free from all embroilment in the world of natural phenomena and thus from the causal play of natural instinct and desire, and whose purely rational will provides through its own rationality the sole ordering principle of all their action, are to be seen as possessed of a “holy will,” a will that acts as reason directs it, for it is itself indeed nothing but reason in action. Such a being, a being possessed of such a will – if any such being there be, will likewise be beyond

122  Reason and Paradox all consideration of morality. But the human subject finds itself, impossibly but undeniably, in the incomprehensible situation of belonging to both orders at once. This situation, in which one has to recognise oneself as subject both to determination by natural causes and to the commands of one’s own reason, is precisely the moral situation. It is also, although so far as I know Kant devoted very little explicit attention to the issue, the situation in which the problems of human self-identity are to be encountered, thought through and lived. One of the many deeply puzzling aspects of the human situation – the moral situation, as Kant thus characterises it, may be formulated as the problem of how reason can be practical. If reason is to be obeyed, if rational thought is to give rise to rational or reasonable action, it must be capable of exercising some influence on what actually happens in the world. But if whatever happens in the world is already fully determined by the relations in which it stands to events that have gone before it, reason has to be presumed capable of initiating from its own non-temporal starting point, a temporal sequence of events that was on its own “level” already under fully determinate way. “Puzzling” would seem to be much too mild a term for such a situation; “paradoxical” might be distinctly more appropriate. Another aspect of what is at bottom the same puzzle or paradox lies at the heart of Kant’s often imperfectly understood doctrine that the whole of the Moral Law is to be found in Reason’s self-command to every rational being to obey the bare form of Reason as such – the famous Categorical Imperative. This has to be understood as the command which every rational being lays upon himself or herself simply in virtue of his or her own rationality; it is the command, or resolve, of the rational subject to itself to obey none but itself and hence to realise itself as autonomous or free. One’s natural desires, on the other hand, belong all to the spatiotemporal nexus of natural causal determination. So wherever the goals of action are set by natural desire, there, even though the technical choice of means may be rationally decided upon and thus conditionally free, the very principle of action, its telos or rationale, is still to be found within the realm of causality. But if one’s moral duty lies in the pursuit of that rational self-realisation which is to be found only in the performance of actions undertaken out of respect for reason alone, what concretely is to be done? How in principle can one hope to derive specific content from the mere form of rational law alone? That Kant actually attempted to do so, is, of course, well known; that it can be done without incoherence or even disingenuity is altogether more doubtful. Both of these puzzles or paradoxes may be regarded as springing from what Kant in effect presents as our inescapable commitment to a grasp of our own self-identities in at once universal and particular terms, Man, as it is so often said, is both rational and an animal. Even though human experience and behaviour is constantly at the mercy of a-rational and

The Universal and the Particular 123 reactive forces, we are the human animals that we are in virtue of our strange capacity to conceptualise, to think, to engage in discourse and to reason. Reason, however, is essentially universal and, as such supplies no principle of individuation. It would make no sense to ask at a meeting – at a lecture or at a seminar, for example – how many reasons were present, though one might very well ask for the number of (more or less perfect or imperfect) embodiments of reason were in attendance. In fact Kant treated both Unity and Plurality as categories of thought, and as such strictly only applicable to the constituted world of phenomena or of nature, and not to that undifferentiated and undifferentiable world of thought-objects, noumena or things-in-themselves, as he also called them – “objects” which we are driven to suppose, however incomprehensibly, to stand somehow as “intelligible” ground of our world of naturally determinate appearance. Particularity or individuality, is thus essentially bound up with this world of appearance and its framework of spatio-temporality. Each of us is individuated through reference to his or her particular body and its own particular path through the spatiotemporal history of the world. We are, each of us, an individual or particular embodiment of universal reason, subject in our particularity to all the laws of causal determination, but committed, as a necessary presupposition of our capacity for language and communicable thought to the presumption of an ability to impose on the temporal sequences of our lives, patterns having their ground in the essentially non-temporal order of rationality. This way of conceiving of human self-identity is, of course, by no means peculiar to Kant. There is, for instance, that important strand of traditional Christian theology which takes the relation of body to human soul as being that of matter to form; the soul, the principle of divinity within us, is essentially universal, while our bodies, as our several particular parts of spatio-temporally extended matter, serve to individuate us. That is, no doubt, why we may need to have our bodies restored to us at the last day – even if in suitably glorified form. (Hence all those fascinating, but perplexing discussions as to the state of the body that may be restored to those who had happened to die very young or to those who had continued to live until their ordinary body had become very tattered and dilapidated.) Our soul, however, that principle “within” whereby we partake in the divinity of God, is thereby a principle of union between us. On this earth in our spatio-temporal existence we are necessarily divided in our bodies and separated through their always potentially conflictual desire – but in God we are all One. This is significantly different from the perhaps more easily graspable “Cartesian” type view of the body as constituting the container, as it were, of the soul, and of the soul as partcaptain, part-captive of the body. On what I take to be a Kantian-type view, however, one might say rather that the body just is the soul in its temporal or natural manifestation.

124  Reason and Paradox This Kantian-type view, at any rate in the epistemological version on which I have tried to present it as having its base, is, of course, largely derived from an attempt to respond to some of the deeper difficulties in the Cartesian tradition. But, as we have already noted, certain assumptions continued as such for Kant, most notably, for example, that according to which the contents of experience are always given in what are in themselves temporally discrete moments of consciousness, which need, therefore to be brought into unity or synthesised. Another important assumption is that the consciousness of man as a subject capable of discursive thought is essentially reflexive – that is to say that it is always in principle capable of a certain kind or self-consciousness or reflexivity, of the ability to distinguish between whatever it may be experiencing and itself as subject of that experience.3 There will, of course, be contexts enough in which the primary concern will be that of establishing the identity of certain human individuals in terms of their parental and other origins and subsequent spatio-temporal continuity, quite independently of any kind or level or consciousness of which they may or may not be capable. Thus we may say that while subjects capable of conceptual thought and of taking whatever part in conceptualising exchange must always be presumed capable of identifying themselves as such, their resulting self-identities, linked though they may very well be, are to be distinguished from those that are based rather on consideration of spatiotemporal origins and continuity.

3 I noted at the outset that in offering a reminder of the Kantian view of the human situation, I could do no more than propose a highly schematic account. I noted also that any account of Kant’s overall philosophy, whether schematic or not, is bound to be controversial and open to scholarly dispute, dispute both as to the appropriate reading or further elaboration of his writings, and as to the viability of different parts or aspects of his arguments as one may believe oneself to have recovered them from the varied entanglements of his texts. It is, I fear, far beyond my capacity to enter properly into these controversies here – or indeed anywhere else. There is, however, one central and particularly controversial issue that does call for some further remark, an issue that concerns – not ­surprisingly – his account of the human subject as making its own indispensably active contribution to the objective structuring of that world of nature in and of which its experience takes place, an experience the fundamental objectivity of which is, in its reciprocal turn and as we have seen, a necessary condition of the possibility of its own self-­awareness. This major aspect of his doctrine goes under the title (his own) of Transcendental Idealism. There are those who would argue this whole way of speaking of a non-empirical activity, and of an as it were

The Universal and the Particular 125 “pre-empirical” subject, involves a commitment to hopeless confusions, confusions from which indeed Kant sought painfully to extricate himself. So what is one to make of Transcendental Idealism? And why has it been found so often to be so undigestible? In broadest outline, then, we may note four main grounds of objection, namely: (1) T.I.’s own internal incomprehensibilities, contradictions or paradoxes (whichever way one may prefer to characterise them); (2) its presentation of the human subject as belonging at once to two different and altogether incommensurable realms; (3) its characterisation of one of these realms as being unknowable and strictly indescribable, yet characterisable both as non-spatio-temporal and rationally thinkable: and (4) its postulation of a realm which, while being incapable of self-consistent characterisation, is nevertheless to be seen as the ground of the natural order and, in particular, of all free and rational thought. Within the world of Anglo-Saxon analytical philosophy (from which, of course, I myself emerge), these objections were for a time felt to be so powerful as to make Kant fit for specialist historical study alone. That time is clearly past.

Notes 1. For the point about time see, for example, Descartes’s Third Meditation; for that about space, see the whole of the Cogito argument. 2. Kant himself points out towards the beginning of the last Chapter of the Groundwork to the Metaphysic of Morals, for instance, that to engage in the construction of a rational argument is to act under the presupposition that the order of one’s activity is to be determined by principles internal to one’s own nature as a rational subject. 3. It would seem to be an implication of any form the so-called anti-private language argument that any participant in language must be able to distinguish between himself or herself and any other (actual or potential) participant in exchanges of the same language.

Works Cited Franklin, Myrtle, and Michael Bor. 1984. Sir Moses Montefiore 1784–1885. London: Anthony Blond. Yerushalmi, Yosef Hayim. 1982. Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory. London and Seattle: University of Washington Press.

Part III

Values and Responsibilities

8 Levinas and the Claims of Incommensurable Values

I have to confess that I do not find Levinas’s strictly philosophical texts at all easy to read.1 (On the one occasion on which I found myself involved in the effort, the struggle even, to translate one of them, I, not surprisingly, found this task even more difficult, nor did I really receive much help in it when I went to consult Levinas himself on how he wished to be reproduced in English.) On the other hand, his Talmudic writings are admirably clear. There is one of them in particular to which I have found myself repeatedly drawn back, and it is this one – entitled “Envers Autrui” (‘Toward the Other” or maybe “In Relation to the Other’) – which I shall take as my text here.2 First, however, let me also make it quite clear that I no more have pretensions to being any sort of Talmudic scholar than I do to being a Levinas scholar. It has always seemed to me, however, that the great Rabbis managed to preserve a faithful respect for the continuity of traditional authority at the same time as maintaining a proper freedom to express their own sometimes highly distinctive views by combining a total respect for the letter of their predecessors’ texts with a very considerable liberty in their readings of them both in terms of interpretation and of selective emphasis. I propose to exercise a similar discretion in allowing myself to concentrate here on three main themes among those to be found in this particular text, all of them very characteristic of Levinas’s thought: that of the network of responsibility in which each one of us finds himself or herself in regard to his or her fellow beings, that of the humanly irresolvable tension that lies at the heart of the human or moral situation and that of some of the ways in which fundamental moral-cum-political values may impose unmeetable demands on us. (These latter themes may both, of course, be seen as variations upon the dominating theme of Levinas’s text, namely that of the ever recurrent tension between the claims of universal principle and those of particular, individual humanity.) Let me add that I make no apology for the fact that I shall be quoting rather extensively from this text of Levinas towards the end of what I have to say; I make no apology, for, after all, faithful respect for at any rate the

130  Values and Responsibilities letter of the text is, as I say, among the most characteristic virtues of Talmudic debate. It goes without saying that Levinas has in general to be seen as a very non-analytic philosopher. There are, however, points of striking overlap to be found between certain of his most characteristic themes and themes to be found embedded within analytic or, as the French often say, Anglo-Saxon philosophy. Indeed, the convergences and divergences of these themes as they appear within both traditions – ­divergences of argument and, of course, of tonality – constitute another of my own subthemes here. One of these overlapping themes occurs in a short passage where Levinas addresses himself to the question of “how could speech cause harm if it were only flatus vocis, empty speech, “mere word’?”, and answers himself by saying “The original function of speech consists not in designating an object in order to communicate with the other in a game with no consequences but in assuming towards someone a responsibility on behalf of someone else. To speak is to engage the interests of men. Responsibility would be the essence of language” (Levinas 1990, 20–21). We do not need to take with any literal seriousness the reference to an “original function of speech.” The exact conditions under which our remoter ancestors evolved into language-using creatures is still a matter of (some would say inevitably and unduly speculative) debate; it is in any case hardly likely that the very earliest users of something that might be called language would have been capable of forming such a complicated concept as that of assuming a responsibility towards someone on behalf of someone else. Nevertheless, there is an interesting and strong argument to be made for the claim that such reciprocal assumptions of responsibility are not so much a function as indeed a basic presupposition of the very constitution of language as a system of symbolic communication and of the access to it of any new participants. The argument, which will be readily recognisable as being broadly Wittgensteinian in inspiration, falls briefly and roughly, into two parts. Part One consists of a version of certain central aspects of the so-called anti-private language argument. The use of a sound, a mark or indeed any other feature of the experienceable world as a vehicle of meaning – as distinct from its production as a mere sound, mark or whatever – depends on its being somehow understood that there is some basis for distinguishing between its use on appropriate occasions and its use (or misuse) on inappropriate ones. Children, learning to speak and to grapple with the interpretation and production of new sounds, have to acquire a sense of what their effective or “correct” uses are as distinct from their ineffective, “incorrect” or merely random ones; so too, at a later stage and a more explicitly conscious level, do any of us who struggle to acquire foreign languages. But, so the argument continues, there can be no sense to any such distinction for one who in principle can have no means of telling

Levinas and the Claims of Incommensurable Values 131 whether he (or she) has succeeded or failed in getting it more or less right. It is impossible, however, for anyone to succeed in providing such a test for themselves alone; for where there is – in principle – no opposition to be encountered or to come up against, one’s own word goes through automatically; though if this argument is correct, it would not in fact be a word, a symbol, a bearer of meaning, but nothing more than a mere sound or some other physical configuration. Nor is any opposition to be encountered in the essentially silent, non-speaking natural environment. The only place where potential resistance to one’s own production of some would-be symbol is to be found is in the possible encounter with some other speaker, with some other participant in the same form of discourse. Not that the test provided by such an encounter could ever constitute any final guarantee of correctness, for other speakers must always be as liable to error as is oneself. So the point is not one of relocating the ultimate source and basis of all certainty from where Descartes placed it in the inner recesses of the essentially solipsistic Cogito to place it instead in the mysteriously authoritative word of “the other’; the ghost to be laid is rather that of any ultimately guaranteed or guaranteeable certainty and the replacement is to be found in an always fallible check, a check in the double sense of that which does at least provide some sort of prima facie criterion and of that which holds one up and makes it impossible for one’s own say-so to go through without even the possibility of impediment. Here ends Part One of the argument. As with all good arguments of inner complexity, Part Two builds upon Part One. The encounter with another speaker, that provides not only the point of learning-entry into a language, or, indeed, into discourse in general, but also the necessary potential check of Part One of our argument, is to be found in the confirming or disconfirming response that he (or she) gives me. But such response, such confirmation, will be of no avail if I am unable to rely on it for its constancy and consistency; my language teacher, he or she who may confirm me in my efforts to manipulate the sounds that I produce, is thus responsible for my progress and beyond that, in the last resort, for my maintenance within the network of communication. In that sense, we are indeed all responsible to and for each other in the multiple reciprocity of our responses; and we may conclude, so it may seem, with Levinas, that “Responsibility would” indeed “be the essence of language.’ But if this does indeed present a point of convergence or overlap between Levinas and analytic philosophy, it would, I think, be misleading to present it as more than that. Analytic philosophy – as least in my version of one of its arguments – arrives at the conclusion that a certain reciprocity of responsibility would be, so to speak, the essence of language by way of an essentially epistemological argument, or one that might be said to belong to the philosophy of language. Without a great deal of further, and no doubt very problematic, argument, it must remain

132  Values and Responsibilities far from clear to what extent, if any, the responsibility to which this argument points is one of any genuinely ethical import, commanded, as Kantians might say, by a categorical rather than by a merely hypothetical imperative. (If you want to remain within the network of communicative discourse, you have to accept a certain minimum degree of responsibility of communicative response towards a certain minimum number of your potential fellow members of the network; if, on the other hand, you don’t want to accept this responsibility, then, unless you can get away with remaining a free rider, you have to face the possibility of dropping out from the network of communication. But, one has in all honesty to add, it is wholly possible to remain firmly within that network, while doing a very great deal of harm to those with whom one communicates perfectly consistently and, in that sense, “responsibly’; indeed, there are forms of harm which it is only possible to inflict on those with whom one does effectively communicate. And, of course, a language community may be able to accommodate a relatively large number of free riders before being threatened with collapse.) I do not say that all attempts at such further argument, designed to draw an ethics out from the commitments of communication, must be doomed to failure; merely that we should not presume the success of any of them without careful scrutiny of the arguments put forward in their support. Levinas’s démarche, on the other hand, is avowedly ethical in its starting point and in its very conception; for him philosophy starts from the recognition of our most fundamental commitments as ethical. So the question is, one might think, whether any argument can be given, or built out from the basis of earlier arguments, in justification of such a starting point. However, the deeper question may be rather whether argument, rational argument as such, should be given such a status of exclusive privilege among the starting points of philosophy. It is true that Levinas says at the outset of this Talmudic commentary that “My effort always consists in extricating from this theological language meanings addressing themselves to reason” (Levinas 1990, 14), but his overall view is rather that while argument has its place, indeed its necessary place, among the various strategies of reflective thought that have come to be known as philosophy, a truly human thinking has to start with the recognition of the ethical: The ideal, the rational, the universal, the eternal, the very high, the trans-subjective, etc., notions accessible to the intellect, are [God’s] moral clothing. I therefore think that whatever the ultimate experience of the Divine and its ultimate religious and philosophical meaning might be, these cannot be separated from ultimate experience and meanings . . . Religious experience, at least for the Talmud, can only be primarily a moral experience. (Levinas 1990, 15)

Levinas and the Claims of Incommensurable Values 133 One of the most obvious problems with putting the matter this way is that there would seem to be no possible response that did not immediately amount to a begging of the very question at issue. For if one looks for arguments on which to base, or with which even to contest, an answer, one would seem already to have come down on the side of the priority of rational argument; whereas if, on the contrary, one bases one’s answer on a prior ethical commitment, one will already have come down on the side of ethics as constituting the proper point from which all argument has to start. Certainly it is possible to start by arguing that there can be no ethics without a modicum of communication and no communication without a modicum of what may properly be called reason. It is, as I have already suggested, the reverse argument that is the difficult, perhaps even impossible, one to present as argument without effective self-contradiction – though various attempts have, of course, been made at it in the history of philosophy. However, the more useful question is one of whether any such attempt is called for or even in order. What exactly, though, are we talking about when we speak of ethics in this way? This brings us to the second of the points that I want to pick up from this text “Rabbi Joseph bar Helbe”, Levinas points out: thus opposes the thesis of the Mishna with a thesis that will seduce many a modern person. The doctrine . . . which exalts the exclusive value of the universal awakens an echo in our soul . . . The tears and laughter of mortals do not count for much, what matters is the order of things in the absolute . . . Rabbi Joseph bar Helbe is sceptical regarding the individual. He believes in the Universal. An individual against an individual has no importance at all, but when a principle is undermined, there you have catastrophe . . . There is no idea capable of reconciling man in conflict with reason itself. The text of the Gemara . . . is against this proposition, which puts the universal order above the inter-individual order. God’s forgiveness – or the forgiveness of history – cannot be given if the individual has not been honoured. . . . Peace does not dwell in a world without consolations . . . [T]he harmony with God, with the Universal, with the principle, can only take place in the privacy of my interiority, and in a certain sense, it is in my power. This is the language of tension between the universal and the particular, a tension which is in many ways definitive of what it is to be a human being. Put thus starkly, this may sound an obscure and pedantically technical affirmation. It is nevertheless one which has been explored in many different versions, one of which may be set out, briefly and after all not too obscurely, as follows. It is a prime characteristic of human beings that they possess language and are capable of rational thought and of (discursive or symbolic) communication. Reason is essentially universal

134  Values and Responsibilities in its logical claims and commitments, that is to say that if reasons hold good for one person, they hold good for all others finding themselves in the relevantly same situation – and universal also in the sense that it does not serve to individuate, to mark out or to identify any one given individual or set of individuals as distinct from any other. It makes no sense, for example, to ask how many reasons there are in a given room; one asks rather how many (more or less imperfect) embodiments of reason there may be there. This reference to the body is no mere quirk of idiom. In the last resort some sort of reference to spatio-temporal co-ordinates is always needed to secure unique individuation, and nothing about one is more firmly spatio-temporally unique than one’s body. So as individual human beings we are all tied to the demands of the universal by virtue of our participation in rationally structured discourse (or, to use Levinas’s way of putting it in this text, we all of us share in the responsibility towards each other that would be the very essence of language), while we are at the same time subject to all the particular desires and needs that belong to the particular situations of our respective embodiments as well as to the particular claims on our loyalty that go along with our membership of and identification with particular families and/or other particular socially or historically determined groups. And it becomes clear, as soon as we start to think about it, that there may be only too many sorts of situation in which these two kinds of demands and claims, those on our universally common humanity and those on our particular tribal or national allegiances, may clash. We may note in passing that this way of putting the matter may be said, broadly speaking, to reflect a generally Kantian way of understanding the human situation. If, as Kant himself put it, we were purely rational beings (such as angels, he thought), then we should automatically and of our purely rational nature respond to and fulfil all the demands of reason, without ever having to face issues of choice. (There is, of course, a problem in the way of understanding how we might meaningfully speak of a plurality of angels, given that the sole principle of individuation that we have to work with resides in the particularity of the spatio-temporally situated body – a problem with which medieval theologians wrestled with only problematic success.) If, on the other hand, we were incapable of rational reflection and our nature and behaviour were governed by the laws of nature alone, natural causal explanations would suffice to account for our doing whatever we might do; for such purely empirical creatures no questions of reflective choice could arise. Angels, said Kant, would have a “holy will,” mere animals a mere “arbitrium brutum.” Only beings such as ourselves, torn between the demands of “our own” reason and the pressures arising from our more naturally determined motivations, between the claims of the universal and those of the particular, are called upon to face ethical and

Levinas and the Claims of Incommensurable Values 135 moral-political dilemmas. If this is a tension definitive of what it is to be a human being, it is by the same token definitive of that situation as a moral-cum-political one. We have returned to Levinas, if by a seemingly different route. There is one other thread to this argument that should be tied back into it, before I leave my second point. If there is any religion which commits its adherents to facing the full force of the tension existing in the conflicting pulls of the universal and the particular, it is surely Judaism, the religion of a Universal God, the father and Creator of all mankind, who has nevertheless entered into a Covenant with one particular, historically situated people. Jews, as, so I take it, most of us – including, surely, Levinas himself – understand or understood the tradition (within the limits of our means of understanding it), are charged both with a universal responsibility to all our fellow human beings in virtue of their very humanity and yet with a particular responsibility towards our fellow Jews as such simply in virtue of their being Jews – and, what is more, a special responsibility to maintain our particularity as Jews across and down through the generations. But, of course, every member of every particular family, national or analogous group may likewise be seen as bearing a universally particular responsibility to all fellow members of the same particularity as himself or herself. What can be the rationale for this? Can it be the meaning of the Covenant, for example, that Jews are more important in the eyes of God than other people or, to put it in more universal terms, that the maintenance of whatever may be our own family, tribal or national particularity may be more important than love or compassion for another human being? It is not to my present point to suggest answers to these dilemmas, even by innuendo, but, (a), simply to emphasise the suggestion that if it is the inner nature of the human situation to live in the tension between the universal and the particular, and if it is here too that the source of ethics is to be found, then we may perhaps better understand the source of the peculiar involvement of Jewish religious thinking with the dilemmas of ethics; and, (b), to suggest, once again and, of course, very unoriginally, how characteristically Jewish is Levinas’s thinking in this respect too.3 I come now to my third and final point. This concerns one of the central themes of Levinas’s text, and is a matter of clearly crucial, indeed painfully crucial, importance to Levinas himself, namely the question of forgiveness and its relation to justice – forgiveness even in such a context as that of the German responsibility for the Holocaust or Shoah. We are confronted with this issue in a peculiarly dramatic way in Simon Wiesenthal’s book The Sunflower (first published in 1969), in which Wiesenthal recounts how he himself was confronted by it when, during his time at the Janowska concentration camp (as it seemed to him later that he so remembered), he found himself together with a dying SS officer,

136  Values and Responsibilities 21 years of age and blinded by his wounds. I quote not in fact from The Sunflower itself, but from Hella Pick’s biography of Wiesenthal: The man gave his name and mother’s address and confessed to Wiesenthal with graphic detail how he had gunned down Jews fleeing from a house set on fire by his SS unit. He told this to a stranger because he wanted to be forgiven by a Jew. Without an answer, the SS officer said that he could not die in peace. “I have longed to talk to a Jew and beg forgiveness of him,” Wiesenthal remembered hearing, “Only I didn’t know whether there were any Jews left. I know what I am asking is almost too much for you, but without your answer I cannot die in peace.” . . . Wiesenthal, who had not witnessed this man’s crimes, and had not personally suffered at his hands, walked away from the hospital bed without responding . . . Even where there is recognition of wrongdoing, Jews believe that man is not entitled to act alone, or on God’s behalf, to grant absolution – the only exception being forgiveness by a victim to the actual perpetrator . . . Even so Wiesenthal tortured himself with the thought that his refusal to give absolution reflected a desire for revenge . . . Had he shown a lack of compassion? But should compassion even be allowed to enter the equation? . . . Has every religion its own ethics, its own answers? . . . Before publishing the story, [Wiesenthal] sent his manuscript to some of the more eminent thinkers of the time, those who were preoccupied by the moral and ethical issues raised by the Holocaust . . . Those who did respond to [his] request took [the tale] seriously as a parable that posed fundamental issues in a memorable, accessible form . . . The replies, incorporated in The Sunflower as a symposium, offer a rainbow of views on the book’s challenges . . . Wiesenthal has sought to deal with [his dilemma] by circumventing the issue of forgiveness with the precept of “justice not vengeance,” which he maintains has guided his actions and his attitude throughout his pursuit of Nazi criminals. (Pick 1996, 77–80) Wiesenthal’s problem here is that of the apparent paradox – moral, religious, or perhaps even conceptual – involved in the idea of a person being called upon to forgive the perpetrator of some evil in a situation where the evil in question has been visited upon another. At one end of the scale it hardly seems to make sense to suppose that I might claim or be called upon to forgive someone for a wrong done not to me but to some third party. On the other hand, where the ties of stretched identity (or identification) between myself and that third party are felt to be sufficiently close, they will tend to carry with them bonds of vicarious responsibility, obligation and right; and these may include what one may call a claim to vicarious forgiveness together with a vicarious responsibility

Levinas and the Claims of Incommensurable Values 137 for the giving or withholding of forgiveness. For the basic function of forgiveness is as a form of absolution, and it is here that the tradition is concerned with the tangle of relationships, discussed in some detail by Levinas in the first part of this text, between God and man. But the many problems concerning the frontiers of identity and the nature and limits of individual identity will also be easily recognisable as belonging to even the most “rigorously” analytic domains of philosophy. This encounter between Wiesenthal and the dying SS man, the parable constituted by its recounting and the emotions aroused may be set not so much in parallel as in strange counterpoint to the episodes reported and discussed in the Gemara, the Bible and the Talmud, and further discussed by Levinas himself in the text here in question. Rab Hanina bar Hama, so we are told in the Gemara, never forgave Rab for the offence that Rab had caused him by refusing to go back to the beginning of his commentary on the text that he was reading when Rab Hanina came in late, and this in spite of the fact that for thirteen years Rab went to him every year on the eve of Yom Kippur to seek his forgiveness.4 In this refusal or inability to forgive – and although indeed the offences and issues involved were clearly very different – Wiesenthal and Rab Hanina would appear to have been at one. But both Wiesenthal and Levinas are left manifestly unhappy and “ill at ease” (“mal à mon aise”) by such apparent lack of compassion and generosity of spirit. So both of them turn to consult others, Wiesenthal to some of the “more eminent thinkers of the time, those who were preoccupied by the moral and ethical issues raised by the Holocaust” and Levinas to “the young Jewish poet, Mrs. Atlan”. The solution, as he calls it, that Mrs. Atlan suggests to him draws on a broadly psychoanalytic view of the person and suggests on the evidence of a dream – not, incidentally, Rab’s own dream, but that of Rabbi Hanina himself – that “Rab, without knowing it, wished to take his master’s place.” Given this, Levinas continues, following through Mrs. Atlan’s suggestion, “Rab Hanina could not forgive . . . There are two conditions for forgiveness: the good will of the offended party and the full awareness of the offender. But the offender is in essence unaware. The aggressiveness of the offender is perhaps his very unconsciousness . . .” Here we find ourselves faced once again with yet another characteristically philosophical issue of quite fundamental and fundamentally problematic importance. Many people – including a great many philosophers, indeed – hold that some version or other of the principle often summed up in the slogan “Ought implies Can” lies at the very basis of our (contemporary? Western?) understanding of morals, the principle according to which it is not simply unfair, but more strictly speaking senseless to hold people responsible, whether in praise or in blame, for whatever would not have been in their power to do or to cause to have been otherwise. But on any psychoanalytic-type understanding of the matter at any rate we cannot normally be said to have any direct or conscious control over

138  Values and Responsibilities the workings or desires of our Unconscious. They are what they are; and unless and until they can be brought to some effective sort of consciousness they are as much forces at work within us as are our normally automatic digestive processes. But what sense does it make to talk of forgiving someone for something for which he or she can not be held responsible? Does it make any sense to talk of forgiving or refusing to forgive someone for having a defective liver, for having Alzheimer’s disease (which can certainly make those who suffer from it aggressive at times) or for being a schizophrenic? Does it make sense to blame or to refuse to forgive someone for harbouring a wish of which he or she is genuinely unaware? Once again we have here a whole entanglement of issues of a sort which have, of course, been much debated in analytic moral philosophy and philosophy of mind. What is it exactly to attribute an unconscious desire or wish to someone? Can this be understood in simply straightforward analogy with the attribution of conscious desires or aspirations? (And in any case, can one reasonably be held responsible for one’s wishes, irrespective of whether one means to act on them or not? Or, as we might also put it, is the morally responsible person to be identified with his or her unconscious – or again, as in the cases of ageing war criminals, is the person, present and perhaps much transformed that we have before us, to be identified with the person that he or she may have been in the now remote past?) Is the most appropriate way of thinking of someone to whom one may be led to attribute a wish of which he or she is apparently unaware, that of taking him or her to be suffering from some form of self-deception? There is also the problem of how to understand the nature of self-deception itself, with its well-known paradoxical implication (or at least apparently paradoxical implication) that the alleged self-deceiver must somehow be aware of the facts into the ignorance of which he seeks to deceive himself, if his motivated self-deception is ever to get off the ground. Of course, if we can reasonably represent a man’s state of ignorance of his own wishes as deriving from such an act of “voluntary” self-deception as he might have chosen to refrain from, then there is in principle no reason why we should not hold him responsible for so deceiving himself, an act which would then be comparable to one of deceiving others and in regard to which the question of forgiveness might quite coherently arise. If, however, we have to conclude that there is no plausible way of representing ignorance of certain aspects of one’s own state of mind as voluntary or deliberate, then maybe we have to look again at the exact nature and status of the principle that “ ‘Ought” implies “Can’ ”. After all, the Ancient Greeks held Oedipus, (as he indeed held himself), to unforgiving account for having killed his father and gone on to marry his mother, even though the whole sequence of events – of the nature of which he was, of course, quite unaware at the time – had been “fixed” for him by the Gods or by Fate (or, if one prefers to see it that way, by his own genetically and environmentally determined character).

Levinas and the Claims of Incommensurable Values 139 Obviously, this is neither the place nor time to try and argue out once again the complex but potentially momentous detail of these questions. I note simply that they are all directly or indirectly raised by Levinas’s text, and that Levinas himself seems to show a proper hesitation, not to say discomfort, as he faces them. For, after having canvassed the “solution” suggested to him by Mrs. Atlan, he goes on, not altogether consistently: But perhaps there is something different in all this. One can, if pressed to the limit, forgive the one who has spoken unconsciously. But it is very difficult to forgive Rab, who was fully aware (my italics) . . .” (And then turning back somewhat abruptly to his topic of underlying preoccupation . . .) “One can forgive many Germans, but there are some Germans it is difficult to forgive. It is difficult to forgive Heidegger. If Hanina could not forgive the just and humane Rab, because he was also the brilliant Rab, it is even less possible to forgive Heidegger . . . (Levinas 1990, 25) But the uncertainties arising from the collision of “Ought” and “Cannot” do not end here. For it is also clearly impossible for anyone to fulfil two genuinely incompatible obligations at once.5 The Levinas text ends with a somewhat uncomfortable coda, consisting of a discussion of Chapter 21 of the Second Book of Samuel, which “reports that there were three years of famine in the time of King David. The king asked the Eternal about it and found out that ‘this was because of Saul and that city of blood and because he put the Gibeonites to death.’ ” The further details of this particular incident are too complicated to go into here. The upshot, at all events, was that David concluded that the Gibeonites had a genuine grievance against Saul and that he was therefore in all justice bound to accede to their demand that seven of Saul’s descendants be handed over to them to be “put to death by nailing them to the rock on the mountain of Saul.” Levinas then goes on as follows: The book of Samuel then goes on to tell that David went and took from Rizpah, daughter of Aiah, Saul’s concubine, two of her sons, that he also took five sons from Michal, daughter of Saul . . . David took pity on Mephiboseth, son of Jonathan. [But] the seven unfortunate princes, given over to the Gibeonites were nailed to the surfaces of a rock. But Rizpah, daughter of Aiah, stayed with the corpses from the season of the first fruits of barley (from the day after Passover) until the first rains (the time of Succoth). Each evening she covered the bodies of the tortured with bags, protecting them from the birds of the air and the beasts of the fields. (Levinas 1990, 26)

140  Values and Responsibilities To which Levinas adds: Do admire the savage greatness of this text, whose extreme tension my summary poorly conveys. Its theme is clear. it is about the necessity of talion, which the shedding of blood brings about whether one wants it or not. And probably all the greatness of what is called the Old Testament consists in remaining sensitive to spilled blood, in being incapable of refusing this justice to whoever cries for vengeance. (Levinas 1990, 26) Levinas is nevertheless very clearly uneasy at the “savage greatness” of this insistence on justice at all costs. For while, on the one hand, he asks, “How could David have spared Mephisbosheth? Doesn’t pity lead to the exception, to the arbitrary to injustice?” and answers: “The Talmud reassures us. David was not being partial at the moment of the selection of the victims. It is the Holy Ark which separated the guilty from the innocent sons among Saul’s descendants. It is an objective principle.” He nevertheless returns again to the question “But then what happens to David’s pity, which the biblical text nonetheless mentions?” To this he replies: “It is a prayer to save Mephibosheth. Let us take a general principle out of this pious text: To recognize the priority of the objective does not exclude the role of individuals; there is no heart without a reason and no reason without a heart” (Levinas 1990, 27). (Which I am inclined to gloss as “There is no particular without a universal and no universal without a particular.”) Thus Levinas seems able to reassure himself that: To punish children for the faults of their parents is less dreadful than to tolerate impunity when the stranger is injured. Let passers-by know this; in Israel, princes die a horrible death because strangers were injured by the sovereign . . . The image of God is better honoured in the right given to the stranger than in symbols.” For justice makes universal claims and, as Levinas goes on, “Universalism has a greater weight than the particularist letter of the text; or, to be more precise, it bursts the letter apart, for it lay, like an explosive, within the letter. (Levinas 1990, 27–28) So this part of his discussion ends with the reflection that justice is a sombre virtue, as indeed the human condition itself is sombre, and that there is a “cruelty inherent in rational order (and perhaps simply in Order).” And again, “The Talmud teaches that one cannot force men who demand retaliatory justice to grant forgiveness.” And yet “strict justice, even if flanked by disinterested goodness and humility, is not sufficient to make a Jew. Justice itself must already be mixed with goodness. It is this mixture that is indicated by the word Rahamim, which we have badly translated

Levinas and the Claims of Incommensurable Values 141 as ‘pity.’ It is that special form of pity which goes out to the one who is experiencing the harshness of the Law. it is no doubt this pity which the Gibeonites lacked”, a lack, which Levinas affirms, explains just why 1 Samuel 21:2 reports that “The Gibeonites were not part of the children of Israel but of the rest of the Amoreans . . .”. So as he closes, Levinas returns once again to the ever persisting tension between the universal and the particular. For “what remains is the image of this woman, this mother . . . what remains after so much blood and tears shed in the name of immortal principles is individual sacrifice, which, amidst the dialectical rebounds of justice and all its contradictory about-faces, without any hesitation, finds a straight and sure way.” For all the explosive power of Universalism, what remains is the image of the Particular; and Levinas concludes: “what rises above the cruelty inherent in rational order . . . is the image of this woman, this mother, this Rizpah Bat Aiah, who, for six months watches over the corpses of her sons, together with the corpses that are not her sons . . . the victims of the implacable justice of men and of God. What remains after so much blood and tears shed in the name of immortal principles is individual sacrifice, which, amidst the dialectical rebounds of justice and all its contradictory about-faces, without any hesitation, finds a straight and sure way” (Levinas 1990, 28–29). But if in this particular text it is the particular that seems to have the last word, who can suppose that either should ever have a final one? In fact, what is perhaps most striking in this reading by Levinas of passages from the Mishna, the Gemara and the Bible itself, is the way in which he is led to affirm the ultimately overriding claims both of universal justice and of compassion for the particular case. The conflict between them, always potential, becomes, on contingent occasions such as that exemplified by the situation in which King David found himself, only too actual; it is this conflict that constitutes the problem with which Levinas is here wrestling. Nor, as he presents it, is this conflict one which would admit of any negotiated mediation, based upon a comparative weighing of the competing claims of these mutually conflicting duties, an assessment of their comparative worth in terms of some acceptable common currency – for example, the classic utilitarian currency of the production of pleasure and the diminution of pain, or the more voluntaristic currency of observable consumer preference (in any one of its several versions). It is rather a conflict of strictly incommensurable values. Levinas himself uses the term when, speaking of Saul, he affirms that “Merits and faults do not enter into an anonymous bookkeeping, either to annul each other or to increase one another. They exist individually. That is, they are incommensurable, and each requires its own settlement” (Levinas 1990, 27). Incommensurable values. One is reminded of that other notably Jewish thinker, Isaiah Berlin and his insistence on the existence of a plurality of

142  Values and Responsibilities values essentially incommensurable with each other. The recognition of such a plurality constitutes an acknowledgement of the radical imperfection and imperfectibility of the world. It may also, perhaps, be understood as a version of the more characteristically Christian doctrine of original sin, that mark of man’s radical incapacity to avoid doing wrong in one way or another in virtue precisely of his choice of which of two or more incompatible, but nevertheless inescapable duties to comply with and which to leave unfulfilled. In the version with which Levinas presents us in this text, the universal (virtue of justice) may seem to stand on the side of the political, that of a properly ordered kingdom and its people, and the particular (virtue of personal compassion) on the side of the moral. However, one must be wary of the dangers of yielding to the temptation to fall back on what will turn out to have been deceptively over clear-cut dichotomies. The call of compassion for the individual is not wholly easy to disentangle from that of the need for reconciliation between ancient enemies, however bitter the past; and the need for Franco-German reconciliation has, of course, been one of the major political – as well as, in a deep sense, moral – themes of the last fifty or more post-war years. Indeed, the deeper lesson is surely that there is here certainly no sharp antithesis nor even any very clear line of demarcation between the domains of the political and the moral. That the public policy of Israel should be one of equal justice for the stranger is also a matter of moral obligation. At the same time, and, one might say, by the same token, the human condition is one not only of moral, but equally of political imperfectibility. It may be thought that in presenting Levinas as a value pluralist I am trespassing somewhat beyond the boundaries of his text. It is true that, so far as my avowedly limited and insecure knowledge of the whole body of his writings goes, he does not formulate his view of the human situation in that rather general and abstractly theoretical way. It was, indeed, not his way of writing philosophy. Nevertheless, I believe that, to adapt an already quoted expression of the very letter of his text, his fundamental value pluralism “bursts the letter apart, for it lies, like an explosive, within the letter.” And if this is right, it brings us back to yet further political considerations. Here – for I have by now been going on more than long enough – I can do no better than refer you to a suggestive article by William Galston, “Democracy and Value Pluralism.” Galston formulates his overall thesis as follows: If there are good reasons to take value pluralism seriously (and I believe that there are), then it becomes impossible to accord democracy normative authority over all other claims’ public and non-­public. Not only is the scope of democratic political authority restricted;

Levinas and the Claims of Incommensurable Values 143 certain alternatives to democracy within the sphere of politics must be taken more seriously than they usually are. (Galston 2000, 255) Galston goes on to elaborate on this formulation in considerable detail, detail which it is not possible to follow through here. But here too we come across the message: both moral and political values are the values of human ways of behaving to and with – and, yes, also against – each other; many of them may be found to clash irreconcilably with each other; yet while it is possible, no doubt, to distinguish between these different values, this does not and cannot mean that they are not at the same time inextricably intertwined. And this, surely, Levinas would have endorsed as a message in the true Rabbinical and Talmudic spirit.

Notes 1. This chapter was first published in the journal Parallax 8.3 (2002), 90–102. Thanks to Taylor and Francis for permission to reproduce the chapter here. 2. This text is in fact that of a reading given in the context of a colloquium on the subject of “Forgiveness” held as far back as October 1963, the proceedings of which were published under the title La conscience juive face à l’histoire: le pardon (Paris: PUF, 1965). Its English translation is to be found in Nine Talmudic Readings. 3. It is interesting to compare what Rabbi John Rayner had to say on this matter in his address to the Convention of the World Union for Progressive Judaism held in Paris in 1995: “It is a commonplace to say that in Judaism there has always been a tension between [particularism and universalism]. But tension is not equilibrium. In Rabbinic Judaism, though both were present, particularism was a great deal more pronounced than universalism. In Classical Reform there was a tendency to go to the other extreme. This is no longer true of Progressive Judaism. In the fifty years since the Holocaust we have veered considerably towards particularism. Surely nobody can any longer doubt our commitment to the Jewish People and the State of Israel. What needs now to be re-emphasised is the universalism . . .” This text was republished in European Judaism, 29.2 (1996). It is, of course, possible to formulate as a straightforwardly universal principle an injunction that every people should give priority to its own, its own survival and the welfare of its own members, for instance. But to claim a special obligation on some given people, say the Jews, to give priority to Jews just because they are Jews (and/or because God, singling them out from all other peoples, has a special covenant with them or given them a special mission) is quite clearly to assert an obligation on the basis of a claimed particularity. 4. Levinas quotes from the Gemara: “Rab was commenting upon a text before Rabbi. When Rab Hiyya came in, he started his reading from the beginning again. Bar Kappara came in – he began again; Rab Simeon, the son of Rabbi, came in, and Rab again went back to the beginning. Then Rab Hanina bar Hama came in, and Rab said: How many times am I to repeat myself? He did not go back to the beginning. Rab Hanina was wounded by it. For thirteen years, on Yom Kippur eve, Rab went to seek forgiveness, and Rab Hanina refused to be appeased” (Levinas 1990, 13).

144  Values and Responsibilities 5. Schematically speaking, we are thus left to deal, as best we logically may, with the following situation: although “p” and “q’, taken separately or on their own, are each to be affirmed, the conjunction “p and “q” can not be – (where “p” and “q” stand for jointly unfulfillable obligation claims). (Sir David Ross, for example, famously distinguished between what he called “prima facie duties” and “duty sans phrase” or “duty proper”.)

Works Cited Galston, William A. 2000. “Democracy and Value Pluralism.” Social Philosophy and Policy, 17.1 (Winter): 255–268. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1990. Nine Talmudic Readings. Translated by Annette Aronowicz. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Pick, Hella. 1996. Simon Wiesenthal: A Biography. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.

9 The Political Responsibility of Intellectuals

The political responsibilities of intellectuals: what in this context should one understand by “political” and what by the term “intellectual’?1 The domain of the political I take to be that of public policy; and the domain of public policy I take to be that of such policies as may in principle affect all or any members of the relevant collectivity and which may therefore be said to be of their proper concern. It is important to note, however, that the domain of the public does not exist as one simply determinate realm, but that it has to be understood as being always relative to the collectivity concerned. That is to say that just as certain collectivities or institutions may be contained within others of wider scope, so matters which may be of proper and public concern to all members of the more restricted institution or collectivity may be held to be their own private business in relation to the wider one or ones. Thus, for example, matters which are of proper public concern to the members of, say, a given university institution, or to those of a given political party, may be held to be private to them and not the proper business of those who are not among their members. One may speak quite properly of university politics, family politics and even internal party politics as well as of politics in the wider national and international contexts. (We may understand the presently dominant doctrine of national sovereignty as embodying an insistence on regarding a wide range of matters belonging quite properly to the domain of national politics as being essentially private to the nation concerned and hence as being none of the business of the wider international community.) It goes fairly evidently without saying that questions of the proper relations between such interlocking or internally related institutions or collectivities may give rise to intense political debate and even conflict within and between any of the wider or more restricted institutions or collectivities thus interrelated with each other. To take one example alone: all or nearly all states will recognise the need to provide space and support for universities to flourish within them and, conversely, universities can hardly expect to exist, in today’s world at any rate, in total independence of the jurisdiction and at least tacit support of the state within whose boundaries

146  Values and Responsibilities they are situated and educational policies they most typically serve. But there are widely differing, and sometimes fiercely opposing, views to be found on the question of how far, and which, matters of university policy and administration are at the same time the proper business of the appropriate institutions of the wider political community. In short, the notion of the public and its dependent notion of the political, together with their proper boundaries, are both complicated and always potentially controversial.2 Their determination in any given case is to be acknowledged as a matter for judgment rather than for one of abstract theoretical deduction. In what follows this must constantly be born in mind. To whom may we be referring when we speak of intellectuals? There are, of course, cultures in which the term has come to have a familiar use with reference to a relatively identifiable social group; and others in which it carries a much less determinate reference, if, indeed, any at all. I take it here to refer to all who have a committed interest in ideas, an interest which goes beyond a mere fascination with the possibilities that they may offer of fanciful play, but one which extends to a serious concern with their truth or validity. This is, no doubt, a stipulatively broad definition of the term; but not so broad as to apply without discrimination to everybody. There are clearly a great number of people, not all of them necessarily unintelligent, who would, as they themselves may readily agree, have no particular interest in ideas as such, but who, in so far as they may be concerned with them at all, are so only for the practical uses to which they may be put, irrespective of their truth or falsity. There are also those who may be fascinated by the play of ideas in whose truth or validity as such they have little or no direct interest. Nevertheless, or so I argued in my contribution to the 1990 volume, and am still inclined so to argue, virtually everyone, and whether they are aware of it or not, has some sort of committed interest in the maintenance of an overall respect for the norms of truth and validity and hence – however paradoxical the claim may appear – there is a sense in which everyone may to that degree be held, perhaps even despite themselves, to have something of the intellectual in them. This is a pivotal point to which I must return. For the moment, however, we may let it pass in order to look first at the question of what might be the political responsibilities of anyone thus committed to the maintenance of respect for the norms of truth and validity. Political responsibilities are those which one bears within and in respect of the public domain of the collectivity or collectivities of which one is properly speaking a member. We should note in passing that this notion of membership (or of “belonging to”) is yet another which can give rise to all sorts of questions, uncertainties and controversies. There are bodies of one sort and another of which one can only gain membership by virtue of formal election and from which cessation of membership, whether by resignation or expulsion, is marked by equally determinate formal procedures. Again, the rules of kinship, different though they may be

The Political Responsibility of Intellectuals 147 in different societies, are usually sufficiently clear as to provide reliable criteria by which to determine, at least in central cases, who is a member of a given family and who is not. But there are other societies of which rights of membership, outside the centrally obvious cases, may be not only to varying degrees uncertain, but even highly disputed. These complications are not unimportant when it comes to determining the political responsibilities of given intellectuals in given cases. But let that too pass for the moment. So let me suggest as my first main thesis that all those who have a committed concern for the truth and/or validity of ideas have a responsibility to see to the maintenance of respect for these norms in the public sphere of whatever collectivity to which they may belong – with the further gloss that this may quite properly be called a political responsibility. This does not mean, of course, that they have any sort of responsibility to go around giving public and explicit expression to everything that they believe to be true and relevant to every public issue of which they may have cognisance. Everyone knows that there can be truths which can safely be left unstated – or even best so left – at least on a given occasion and to a given audience; and everyone will probably be able to think of contexts whose exceptional circumstances may justify the telling of actual untruths. Moreover there is, of course, never any such thing as the one definitive version of the truth, just one way in which to conceptualise and to formulate it, which is positively and demonstrably more accurate than any other. But this is by no means to say that falsehoods are never recognisable as definitively false, inaccuracies as definitively inaccurate, fallacies as definitively fallacious. So my first main thesis may be restated as the claim that all those who have a committed concern for the truth and/or validity of ideas have a responsibility to see to the restriction of falsehood and fallacy in the public sphere to whatever may reasonably be judged to be the indispensable minimum; and that this is properly to be seen as a political responsibility. (It is clear that in asserting this thesis I am committed to taking some view as to what should be understood by this reference to “reasonable judgment.” A proper discussion of this crucial concept would, I fear, demand at least another whole paper. So for present purposes I must restrict myself to the brief dogmatic claim that, in broad contradistinction to the concept of the rational, that of the reasonable is intimately connected with those of prudence and even of happiness, most notably indeed that of the general happiness; and above all with that of ­judgment – a judgment, which, being human, must always, even in the best case, be admitted to be properly debatable, revisable and, in the nature of the case, fallible.) For the moment, however, we must at least take note of yet a further essentially unavoidable complication. This lies in the fact that respect for truth and respect for truthfulness, though intimately interconnected, do not amount to exactly the same thing. Truth, as philosophers of language

148  Values and Responsibilities know very well, is tied very closely to meaning. It is a necessary condition of speaking truly that one should use one’s chosen words with the meaning – whether set by recognised convention or by recognisably explicit stipulation – that they actually bear in the relevant language. Truthfulness is tied not only to sincerity, but also to the conditions of communication prevailing in the relevant context. Once again everyone must know of circumstances in which it is strictly impossible to get the true message across to its intended recipient or recipients by the simple assertion of its truth. There may be all sorts of reasons why this should be so. The recipients may have been conditioned by past experience to react with counter-suggestibility to whatever message is addressed to them by this particular source. Or they may have become peculiarly allergic to messages with a certain unwelcome content or expressed in terms whose force (as speech act theorists might put it) has for them more impact than has their meaning. No matter. The hard fact is that if I want someone to believe what I take to be the truth of what I seek to convey, I may on occasion need to convey it by saying something that I do not believe to be literally or strictly speaking true. Here again it is wise judgment that is called for rather than any sort of automatic calculation. While we no doubt have to acknowledge the existence of this complication, it is important to recognise the limits which must be set to any sacrifice of truth in the interests of truthfulness. For this there are two different kinds of reasons. The most fundamental, no doubt, are based on the nature of the connection between truth and the establishment and maintenance of meaning. But the other kind of reasons are equally of very great importance from what might be called the practical moralcum-political point of view. In what follows we shall be returning to the arguments underlying both sets of considerations. I have said that I take the term “intellectual” to refer to “all those who have a committed interest in ideas, an interest which goes beyond a mere fascination with the possibilities that they may offer of fanciful play, but one which extends to a serious concern with their truth or validity.” In his introduction to our 1990 volume, Peter Winch acknowledged that: the moral case for the sort of responsibility Montefiore (following Havel) ascribes to the intellectual is a powerful one. Now a large part of its power, it seems to me, derives precisely from the fact that an “intellectual” (in the normal sense of the term) is one who has, in a sense, chosen a certain life: one which involves a commitment to certain values and which, therefore, if those values come under attack, demands that they be defended. If such a person tries to evade that demand, he or she invites the rejoinder: “Look, you chose to live this life; now accept the consequences of your choice.”  (Winch 1990, 13).

The Political Responsibility of Intellectuals 149 I would certainly agree with Peter Winch that the moral case is a notably strong one. It consists, however, of something more than a simple exhortation to accept the consequences of an earlier voluntary choice. And if it is indeed a moral one, it is, by the same token, one with strong and inescapable conceptual underpinnings. Let me try to illustrate the point through consideration of a particular example. There is, of course, no good reason to take all teachers to be explicitly or consciously committed intellectuals in any plausible sense of the word, including that which I have stipulated for the purposes of our present discussion. For many of them their job and the responsibility carried with it consists in the passing on of certain given bodies of information and/or in the effective training in the application of certain techniques – those, for example, of reading, writing and arithmetic or, let us say, of accountancy or motor mechanics. There is, it must be emphasised, absolutely nothing wrong with that. Questions of the truth or validity of ideas as such – questioning questions, as one might say – hardly arise in the context of their job for those who are employed to teach children (or, indeed, adults) to read and write. But – to take my example from the other end of the scale – it surely belongs to the very role of a teacher of philosophy at whatever level to have and to communicate a care for the truth of the ideas and the validity of the reasonings that form the content of his teaching; this, as I understand the obligations attaching to the role of a teacher of philosophy, is a care that goes beyond that for the accuracy of his ascription of the ideas that he has to teach to whoever their historical authors may have been and of the account that he gives of them. Indeed, as I understand it, there is a strong Chinese tradition according to which it further belongs to the role of a teacher of philosophy to exhibit that care by seeking to live in conformity with his (or her) understanding of the truths that he (or she) teaches. And whether one goes that extra distance in one’s understanding of this role or not, it is clear that in so far as it is indeed taken to include the obligation to exhibit a visibly practical concern for the validity of the ideas that it is the teacher’s duty to teach, and in so far as the teachers’ own personal identities may be said to be in part bound up with their occupancy of this role, they would be being less than “true to themselves” were they not to show any such care.3 So what is one to say of those teachers of philosophy who, for whatever reason, abandon their vocational commitment to a concern for the truth of whatever they may be teaching? We all know only too well that they may continue in their paid employment as teachers – or should one say rather “instructors’? – of what their job description may designate as philosophy. But one can well understand the point of view of those who would say that they can no longer be considered as genuine philosophers or as genuine teachers of philosophy.4 Nor is this simply a matter of the most appropriate labelling. It is very well known that there is a

150  Values and Responsibilities close and complex relationship between a person’s job, their recognised role in society and what is now commonly called their identity. Again, any adequate discussion of the notion of identity would call for at least a whole paper on its own. But, to quote just one leading writer on the topic, Charles Taylor has put it as follows: To know who I am is a species of knowing where I stand. My identity is defined by the commitments and identifications which provide the frame or horizon within which I can try to determine from case to case what is good or valuable, or what ought to be done, or what I endorse or oppose. In other words, it is the horizon within which I am capable of taking a stand. (Taylor 1989, 27) It is clear that on such a view people’s identities, whether those of their own standing in their own eyes or those of how they are identified by others, is a matter of the utmost moral significance. So what is at stake in the challenge to accept the consequences of stands once taken, of commitments once entered into, is on this view a matter of one’s own essential (moral) identity. As Peter Winch said, the moral case for the sort of responsibility that I ascribe to the intellectual is a strong and evident one in the case of what we may call vocational intellectuals; and all the stronger for the ways in which the concepts through which people may identify themselves as the kinds of people that they are, are also brought into play. And likewise, of course, the concepts through which they may be so identified by others, the two being intimately connected; as Jonathan Rée has recently put it, “Self-consciousness . . . is endlessly reciprocated recognition” (2000, 166). This brings me to my second main thesis, which is that, since virtually everyone has some sort of committed interest in the maintenance of an overall respect for the norms of truth and validity, there is a sense in which everyone may to that degree be held to have something of the intellectual in them; and that everyone thus has a certain share in the political responsibilities of the intellectual in this most general sense of the term. It was to this thesis that Peter Winch objected: The (desired) effect of Montefiore’s extension of the term “intellectual” is that everyone, simply by virtue of living a human life, is subject to the same demand. But now, can it be plausibly maintained that every human being “chooses to live a human life” in anything like the sense in which one may choose to live the life of an intellectual? (Winch 1990, 13) The straightforward answer to this question has to be no. It is already doubtful whether those whom we have called vocational intellectuals will

The Political Responsibility of Intellectuals 151 all have chosen to find themselves in the positions which they occupy in any very clear and determinate sense of the concept of choice. But however this may or may not be, there can be no doubt that human beings all find themselves already living some version of a human life long before any question of choice in the matter could possibly have arisen. So the question is one of whether I can justify my second main thesis by showing how people may find themselves already caught up in certain commitments into which they never – and indeed could never – have deliberately entered. In my 1990 article I tried to establish this position by reference to three different types of argument. The first made use of certain Kantian-type considerations concerning the nature of the human subject; the second was based on considerations drawn from a generally Wittgensteiniantype thesis concerning the nature of language; and the third on some of Václav Havel’s writing on what he has called “living in the truth.” In none of these cases was I attempting any sort of textual exegesis, but rather using these sources to construct possible lines of argument. In any case this is not the place in which to try once again to follow them out in any detail; I shall restrict myself rather to the very barest of reminders as to how they might – hopefully – go. Kant’s own understanding of the nature of human awareness – awareness of self and awareness of the world in which we find ourselves – is of notorious difficulty; and, as he himself was aware, his efforts to give expression to it were of a nature to compound the difficulty. In the roughest of nutshells, my understanding of his thesis is this. We human beings are essentially “dual-aspect” creatures, that is to say that, while all the content of our awareness of ourselves and the world is given to us through our senses, and thus in spatio-temporal form, we are only able to discriminate among the different elements of this content, that is to say to experience or even to think of any one of them as being either the same as or different from any other, by virtue of our own ordering powers of reason and conceptualisation. It is through the exercise of the most general of these ordering powers, the categories, that we provide a structure within which our sensory awarenesses are brought into determinate relations with each other in such a way that we are enabled to make the crucial distinction between that which is objective in our experience – i.e. that which is whatever it is in at least relative independence of the way in which it may appear to us to be at any particular moment of our experiencing it – and that which is mere subjective appearance. This distinction is crucial to our ability to employ concepts at all; (for to employ a concept is to employ a rule of classification, and no sense can be given to the notion of employing a rule if no basis can be found for the distinction between its correct and incorrect application.) Thus we are at one and the same time (so to speak!) bodily inhabitants of the spatio-temporal and causally determinate world of nature,

152  Values and Responsibilities equipped with those senses through which the content of our experience of this world is given to us; and yet possessed also of a reason whose ordering powers are essentially non-temporal and whose exercise both in our more practical as well as in our theoretical activities is of its very nature based on the search and uncompromising respect for truth and validity in whatever form they may take. Purely rational beings, if they existed (such, Kant thought, as angels) would necessarily – automatically, one might say – always act according to the purest standards of rationality. Animals, altogether lacking, Kant thought, the powers of reason, do whatever they do simply in response to their own causally determined instincts or drives. Only man, that mysteriously dual-aspect creature, is somehow subject both to the demands of reason and to the causally derived urges and responses of his own bodily nature. And only man, by virtue precisely of his dual status, is subject to the demands of morality; indeed, the situation in which he finds himself at these motivational crossroads, just is the situation of morality. Although Kant himself did not properly grasp the full implications of this account of the make-up of the human subject, one of them must surely be that from Reason’s intrinsic commitment to respect for truth, truthfulness and validity it must be impossible to derive any formula either for the discovery of particular truths about the state of the world or for determining exactly what one should do in any given particular situation. The demands of Reason as such are universal and empty of any determinate content. This does not mean that they carry no practical force. The imperatives of respect for truth, respect for truthfulness and respect for the norms of valid argument command one to adopt and maintain certain very definite attitudes; what would count in any given situation as the proper embodiment of these attitudes can and must remain a matter of (in principle debatable) judgment. But, of course, these three imperatives are but different versions of the one basic moral imperative (Kant’s Categorical Imperative), whereby our Reason enjoins us to a respect in all things for Reason itself. What in practice can this mean for us human beings? We can never come across Reason existing, as it were, in a state of pure non-spatiotemporal disembodiment; nor can we attach any possible experiential sense to the idea of Reason coming across itself in such a state. We can only know Reason as it exists in more or less imperfect instantiation in one human embodiment or another. So the way to understand Reason’s self-command of self-respect can only be as the command which, as beings endowed with Reason, we all find within ourselves to respect the values of truth and validity wherever they are in question, to respect persons – ourselves and all others – as the living embodiments of Reason (and this is, of course, an explicitly Kantian doctrine) and, we may add on Kant’s behalf, to seek always to safeguard the necessary practical conditions for the communication and sharing of truth and valid

The Political Responsibility of Intellectuals 153 argument, that is to say to seek always to assure the necessary conditions of truthfulness. It goes without saying that there are deep difficulties and obscurities to be found in the Kantian arguments, difficulties and obscurities into which this is not the place to enter. Maybe paradox and an ultimate limit to understanding is an unwished for main point of the whole Kantian enterprise. But for those who accept some version of this general picture, this message would seem to be clear enough: respect for persons as Reason’s own respect for itself in all its particular dual-aspect embodiments must mean (among other things) respect not only for the truth and validity of whatever it may have to communicate to itself throughout its embodied dispersion, but – necessarily – respect also for the causal conditions of communication. We have already noted that, if the conditions necessary to the proper reception of the message are lacking, to speak what is true is not a sufficient condition of truthfulness. Such conditions include the appropriate personal abilities and state of mind of the recipient and existence of appropriate relations between him or her and the speaker. But they include also the existence of a public context of communication generally recognised and felt to be appropriate to the speaking of what is true. Otherwise, the truth may have to be coded or even distorted if it is to be communicated at all – even in part; in the worst cases it may have quite simply to be suppressed. And since, according to the Kantian argument, every human being is, as such, a more or less imperfect embodiment of Reason, so, according to this argument, all of us, simply qua human beings, find ourselves with a built-in commitment to have a care to the public conditions of truthfulness, that is to say with a certain “always already” built-in political responsibility. So much, then, for my Kantian line of argument. Clearly, it would need a great deal of further elaboration, filling in and, most probably, of detailed modification. But this would be the direction that it would take. What next of the “Wittgensteinian” one? Wittgenstein’s famous anti-private language argument turns essentially around the point that language, and indeed all discursive thinking as such, involves the use of symbols; and that a symbol is simply some physically identifiable item – say, a sound, a mark or a gesture produced in accordance with some not necessarily very precise rule or normatively orientated social practice.5 When in a given context I produce, say, some determinate sound, if there is no distinction to be made between my having produced it either appropriately or inappropriately to the context in question, then I might just as well have produced any other sound for all the difference that that would have made; which is as much as to say that the sound in question was devoid of any recognisable symbolic meaning – recognisable by myself as much as by anyone else. So the very notion of a symbol involves that of a norm or rule; while the notion of a norm or rule involves that of the distinguishability between its appropriate and

154  Values and Responsibilities inappropriate application. But – and this, as one knows, is the first of two crucial Wittegensteinian moves – the notion of the distinguishability between an appropriate and an inappropriate application of a rule involves in turn that of a check, something that would, so to speak, hold up the transaction and prevent it from going through come what may by making it impossible for any producer or would-be interpreter of a sound not to notice that something might have gone wrong; one is checked when one is confronted by something that one has to recognise as being “objectively” or “truly” what it is, whether one likes it or not. In the absence of any possibility of a check on the would-be producer of a symbol or meaning-bearing mark or sound, it would, for all that anyone could tell, make no difference that one should produce any one sound or mark rather than any other. In Wittgenstein, of course, this second crucial move comes with the argument designed to show that only the reaction of another speaker, a fellow member of the relevant language community, can in principle serve as the necessary check.6 The core of this argument is by now very well known and I shall not try to rehearse it once again. It is one of its further implications that is of crucial relevance here. The linguistic actions and reactions of the different several members of a language community can only serve as checks on and for one another on the assumption that they are in general using and understanding the sounds and symbols of their language in ways which, according to the norms or rules of their language, are appropriate to the facts of the situations in which they are using them – that is to say that they are using them to say what, in the terms and meanings of their language, is true to the apparent facts. Were this not so, it would become impossible to rely on the necessary stability of the norms or rules governing the meaningful use of the sounds and symbols of the language – necessary, that is, to the possibility of maintaining any ascertainable distinction between the appropriate and inappropriate application of those rules. This can be seen with particular clarity in the case of every new learner of the language. For how could one catch on to the way in which any given sound or mark should properly be used if those from whom one was attempting to learn the language did not display the necessary minimum truthfulness and stability of appropriate use in the contexts and on the occasions on which they themselves used the terms in question? However, the problem is not just one of learning the language, the indispensable vehicle not only of communication with others, but equally one of self-communicating discursive thought itself. For in the longer run, the very structure of meaning and conceptualisation would collapse were its terms not in general to be used in truth-reliable (and “truth-checkable’) ways. It is in that sense, then, that all of us languageusers find ourselves with a committed interest in and hence responsibility for the necessary conditions of the long-term preservation of truth and truthfulness as belonging to the indispensable conditions for the preservation of meaning itself.

The Political Responsibility of Intellectuals 155 Once again, this is but the outline of the direction which an argument should take. In any attempt to fill it in, we should somehow take account of at least the two following prima facie counter-considerations – both of which formed part of Peter Winch’s criticism of my 1990 version of these matters – as well as of one other possible objection. The first of these two counter-considerations we may call the “Free Rider Objection.” Free riders are those who take advantage of the fact that most other people are in general respectful of the rules of whatever game or practice may be in question in order to flout them to their own greater benefit. Clearly, the general framework of whatever language may serve as our medium of communication is not going to be put at risk of breaking down simply because one or even a small number of its speakers systematically misuses its terms to refer to states of affairs to which they do not in truth apply. It may indeed be that they have an interest in the majority of fellow members of their language community continuing to use and to understand the terms of their common language in the normal truth-preserving way; indeed, the very possibility of deceiving them through the various stratagems of untruth depends on the terms of discourse being understood in their normal meanings and on what is said being taken up as if it were true. But, so the objection runs, to say that I have an interest in other people continuing to obey the rules of the game is in no way to imply that to do so is in my interest or that in following my own interest I am neglecting my responsibilities. Part of this contention has to be accepted straightaway. Wittgenstein himself did not, of course, seek to argue that people, qua language-users, ought in general to respect the norms of truthfulness and of valid argument. His concern was rather to point out that people did in general behave in this way and that their doing so was one of the indispensable supports of the whole institutional structure of meaningful discourse. In so far as free riders wish, for whatever purposes of their own, to go on availing themselves of the resources of language and the powers of conceptualisation, they must naturally have a concern for the continuing overall truthfulness of the majority of their fellow participants in their language community. But it does not follow from this that they must have the same concern for truthfulness in their own speech and behaviour. There are, obviously, many contexts in which people may quite rationally take it to be in their own interests not to act in fulfilment of their responsibilities as members of the community or collective, but to rely rather on other members fulfilling theirs. Indeed, they may simply fail to recognise what their responsibilities, or even their own longer-term interests, really are. But that people either fail or even openly refuse to recognise their responsibilities does not mean that they do not have them. In any case, it makes perfectly good theoretical – and in certain circumstances, no doubt, even good practical – sense for someone to accept a political responsibility for seeing to the establishment and long-term maintenance

156  Values and Responsibilities of the conditions for truthful communication in the community at large, while judging it necessary, in order to do so, to indulge in various forms of perhaps even systematic falsification themselves. My second main thesis, however, was not that everyone had so much of the intellectual in them as to bear a responsibility for their own personal truthfulness, but rather that “virtually everyone has some sort of committed interest in the maintenance of an overall respect for the norms of truth and validity.” It is, indeed, precisely this reference to the conditions of an overall respect in the community at large that gives this responsibility its political dimension. And while it is no doubt true that it is in general more difficult to contribute towards assuring an overall respect for truthfulness in the community, while failing in such respect in one’s own behaviour, the political argument for an obligation to personal truthfulness would on these grounds be the derived obligation to adopt the means (generally) necessary to the attainment of an implicitly obligated end. At this point, however, we have to face the second counter-consideration. In its most fundamental form, this may be called – no doubt a little over-familiarly and imprecisely – the “No ‘Ought’ from an ‘Is’ Objection.” This is based on the well-known claim that there can never be any logically compelling passage from mere statements of fact to any sort of evaluative or normative judgment, such, for evident example, as an attribution of responsibility. Any even partly adequate elaboration and discussion of this essentially individualist doctrine would, it goes without saying, also call for an extended paper in its own right. Here again I can but restrict myself to a bald statement of my own view: namely, that to find oneself a member of a language community – and to be “always already” in the position of a member of a language community is a necessary condition of being able to find oneself in this sense at all – is to find oneself already caught up in a network of reciprocal responsibilities deriving from the constitutive normative conditions of the establishment and maintenance of any such community. It is true that no-one is ever in any position to make a prior individual choice as to whether to participate in such a community or not; and true too that it must in principle be logically open to anyone to choose either to opt out of it by an individual act of either physical or “merely” intellectual suicide or even to abandon the whole community to its own possible complete disappearance as such. But, and it at this point that I should myself wish to give a Kantian twist to the argument, one that Wittgenstein himself would most probably have resisted, so to opt out of the whole domain of language and discursive thought is to fly straight in the face of one of the most characteristic aspects of one’s own nature as a human being, that of the capacity for language, for discursive thought and for norm-governed social relations. One can not only envisage, one can indeed make such a choice; but to do so is to do undeniable and irredeemable violence to oneself. The third possible objection – the “Empty Formalism Objection” – did not in fact figure among those raised by Peter Winch. It is, however,

The Political Responsibility of Intellectuals 157 one which is quite commonly raised; and though it is in my view based upon a misunderstanding, both it and the misunderstanding in question are so often to be met with that it is important that they be faced. The objection alleges that to speak of a quite general commitment to respect for the norms and conditions of truth and/or truthfulness is to speak of a responsibility so devoid of any determinate content as to amount to no more than an empty formalism. (The same sort of objection is often raised against Kant’s primary formulation of his Categorical Imperative.) It is, of course and necessarily, true that to recommend an attitude, or to try and encourage a disposition, is not to provide any precise instruction or recipe for specific action on any specific occasion. The misunderstanding lies in the apparent assumption that to recommend the adoption of an attitude remains an empty gesture unless instruction is also provided as to how the attitude in question is to be exemplified or instantiated on specific occasions. But to expect this is to expect an impossibility. Between a general precept and its specific application lies the whole necessarily problematic space of human judgment. One may not know in advance just how one must behave in order always to show respect for, say, other human beings; but an attitude of respect is totally different, and points in an altogether different practical direction, from one of general disregard for others in the pursuit of one’s own interest. (It is perhaps strange that Kant, who after all was very aware of the crucial role of judgment in human affairs, seems to have fallen into this very misunderstanding in attempting per impossibile actually to deduce from his Categorical Imperative an apparent list of quite specific perfect and imperfect duties.) The line of argument that I based on considerations drawn from some of the writings of Václav Havel was a frankly practical i.e. moral and political one.7 Havel, now (that is to say in the year 2000) President of the Czech Republic, was at the time of writing his essay on The Power of the Powerless still living a life of harassed exclusion as a so-called dissident under the peculiarly repressive regime of his predecessor, President Husak. This was a regime that not only exercised virtually all-pervasive power over the lives of its citizens, but which insisted on their giving expression to certain assertions that everyone (including members of the regime itself) knew very well to be false and to refrain from saying a great number of other things which everyone likewise knew equally well to be true. Why should the regime behave in this prima facie extraordinary way? Havel argued that, in a would-be all-controlling system which has become so complex that even those occupying its apparently most influential roles may be virtually powerless to modify its ways of functioning in any serious way: that complex machinery of units, hierarchies, transmission belts . . . which insure in countless ways the integrity of the regime, leaving nothing to chance, would be quite simply unthinkable without ideology acting as its all-embracing excuse and as the excuse for each of

158  Values and Responsibilities its parts . . . [Ideology] is, in the post-totalitarian system, something that transcends the physical aspects of power . . . and . . . is one of the pillars of the system’s external stability. This pillar, however, is built on a very unstable foundation. It is built on lies. It works only as long as people are willing to live within the lie. (Havel 1985, 29–32) In such circumstances, as Havel subsequently put it, once he himself had become the President of Czechoslovakia, “Telling the truth under oppression is itself a political phenomenon” (Kearney 1995, 69). When people are constrained to live in this way, the level of self-humiliation, interpersonal distrust and consequent unremitting stress ends up by bringing about such a corruption of the public domain as to drive them back into an ever more constricted private sphere, where mutual suspicion and distrust threaten, even there, to become the norm. This produces a situation which is not only morally intolerable for individuals forced into the double-bind of having constantly to distort those very links between meaning and truth which underpin their grasp of language itself and of the coherence of their own no longer confidently shareable thought; but a situation which renders the regime itself politically and absurdly vulnerable to the expression of even the most banal of everyday recognisable truths. As I try once again to think through my views on this problem of the political responsibility of intellectuals, I am struck above all by two points of which I failed to take appropriate notice in either of my two earlier efforts. The first is an extremely simple one and can be made with corresponding brevity. I should have made it explicit from the beginning that I am in no way concerned to claim that the responsibility to truth and to the public conditions of truthfulness is the only political responsibility to which intellectuals may find themselves committed. It is, I think, their most basic and general responsibility, one which in varying circumstances may take varying forms – sometimes demanding little more than watchfulness, sometimes implying much more difficult demands; but as circumstances differ, so they may, of course, find themselves committed, by virtue of this basic responsibility. to much more specific and institutionally determinate forms of action. In particular – so it seems to me – their responsibility for the safeguard of (respect for) a public sphere of truth and truthfulness further commits them to taking a firm stand against all forms of sectarianism and narrow nationalism; and each of my three lines of argument can be further developed in this direction. The second point comes, to me at least, as a more surprising one. It is that I seem in effect to have been engaged in reviving a very old pattern of argument, one which depends in the last resort on the possibility – in so far as it still exists or may somehow be rehabilitated – of giving an essentially normative account of human nature. In such a context “nature” is, of course, a term to be used only with extreme caution. I am tempted,

The Political Responsibility of Intellectuals 159 for example, to speak of the Kantian account of human nature, but then “nature” is a term which, within the Kantian discourse, would seem properly to be applicable to only one of the two aspects of what I should otherwise feel more comfortable in calling the nature of man – and properly speaking, moreover, not at all to that rational aspect on which the main weight of my argument depends. I seem also to have been arguing that man is by virtue of his nature a language-learning and language-using creature and as such “naturally” committed to certain norms of meaningfulness and truthful communication. One can see well enough why Wittgenstein, and with him Peter Winch, might have objected to any suggestion that he might be found providing support for any such view. Havel might more plausibly, perhaps, be represented as holding the view that man is by nature unsuited to “living in the lie’; but Havel’s argument, is, of course, an openly moral and political rather than any sort of a conceptual one. Nevertheless I am at present inclined to stick to my newly discovered guns. So if ever I find myself led to write upon this subject again, I should perhaps pluck up the courage to do so under the fuller title of “The Nature of the Human and the Political Responsibility of Intellectuals.” Meanwhile, I find some reassurance in the thought that Confucius himself may perhaps be construed as basically sympathetic to my main theme. For did he not say, as translated at any rate by D.C. Lau, that: If something has to be put first [in the administration of the state], it is perhaps the rectification of names . . . [For] when the names are not correct, what is said will not sound reasonable; when what is said does not sound reasonable, affairs will not culminate in success, rites and music will not flourish; when rites and music do not flourish, punishments will not be exactly right; when punishments are not exactly right, the common people will not know where to put hand and foot. Thus when the gentleman names something, the name is sure to be usable in speech, and when he says something this is sure to be practicable. The thing about the gentleman is that he is anything but casual where speech is concerned. (Confucius 1992, 13.3)8 The Confucian gentleman, it would seem, is first and foremost concerned with the basic proprieties of meaning and truth as being among the conditions necessary to the successful administration of any well-run state and of its public affairs.

Notes 1. This is the third time that I have tried to write about what I see to be the political responsibility of so-called intellectuals. My first attempt (Montefiore 1990) was my contribution to a book of that title, of which, together with the late Peter Winch and Ian MacLean, I was one of the joint editors, and which was the outcome of a long-term project bringing together “intellectuals” from

160  Values and Responsibilities what was then still known as East and West Europe under the aegis of the Institut für die Wissenschaften von Menschen in Vienna. The second much more recent attempt was that of my contribution to a conference devoted to the work of Peter Winch, held in Bristol in September 2000. In that paper I took advantage of the occasion to pick up the threads of a debate which Winch himself had initiated in his Introduction to the 1990 book, in which he criticised one of the arguments central to my own contribution to that book. Whichever of us may have been right or wrong in the disagreement between us, the issue was and remains an important one. But first let me take grateful advantage of this opportunity to rethink my views on this important and difficult topic from the beginning, as it were, and without looking back in any detail to my earlier formulations. 2. They may also be said to come into the class of what have been called essentially contestable concepts. These may be understood as being concepts whose proper determination raises questions of a nature to which the concept in question is itself appropriately applicable. Thus, the question of the bounds and limits of the political is itself a political question, that of the bounds and limits of the public is itself properly open to public debate . . . and so on. 3. The complexity of the connections between the concepts of “role” and “personal identity” are such as to deserve at least a whole further paper to themselves. Here I can do no more than indicate the general nature of the connections that may be involved. 4. In real life, of course, people’s situations are rarely so clear-cut as that. There may, for example, be many reasons why they may feel themselves constrained to teach a set of ideas, whose truth they do not themselves accept, and yet continue to maintain a critical and committed concern for truth and validity in their non-professional lives. But for the sake of brevity, we may stick here to the clearest cases. 5. There has been much debate around the question of whether the concept of a rule is altogether appropriate to the context of this sort of analysis. The important point, however, is not whether the term “rule” is more or less appropriate than “norm” or some other more or less equivalent expression, but whether the production of the item in question is open to assessment as being correct or incorrect, appropriate or inappropriate, “happy” or “unhappy” in or to the context. 6. This argument is not, of course, designed to show that the reactions of another speaker do, or indeed could possibly, provide any sort of guarantee as to what the correct usage or meaning must be. There are no such guarantees to be found, no resting places of finally assured certainty. Nevertheless, in as much as the reactions of others have to be recognised as being what in fact (or in truth) they are, they do give inescapable pause and so provide genuine and indisputable checks. 7. See especially (Havel 1985). 8. The proper interpretation of this passage is, of course (and almost inevitably?), a matter of dispute among Confucian scholars; but I am assured by some of them at least that my understanding of it is not an unreasonable one.

Works Cited Confucius. 1992. The Analects. Translated by D. C. Lau. Hong Kong: Chinese University of Hong Kong Press. Havel, Václav. 1985. The Power of the Powerless. Edited by John Keane. New York: M. E. Sharpe Inc.

The Political Responsibility of Intellectuals 161 Kearney, Richard. 1995. States of Mind. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Montefiore, Alan. 1990. “The Political Responsibility of Intellectuals.” In The Political Responsibility of Intellectuals, edited by Ian Maclean, Alan Montefiore, and Peter Winch, 201–228. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rée, Jonathan. 2000. “Apocalypse Unbound.” New Left Review, July–August. Taylor, Charles. 1989. Sources of the Self. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Winch, Peter. 1990. “Introduction.” In The Political Responsibility of Intellectuals, edited by Ian Maclean, Alan Montefiore, and Peter Winch, 1–16. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

10 Doctrinal Commitments and Ecumenical Partnership

There have always been committed members of one socially embedded religious tradition or another who understand the tenets and practices of their faith, and of their faith alone, to contain the fundamental truth concerning the meaning and ultimate end of human existence. It is thus natural that anyone committed to such a belief should take it to be a primary responsibility to his or her fellow beings to do everything possible to bring them to a sharing in that faith and an obedience to it. At the same time, many such believers are nevertheless unable to accept the prima facie direct implication of their belief that those who do not so share it, whether members of other religious traditions or of no religious faith at all, but who both in principle and in practice do share their fundamental moral values, should find themselves excluded from salvation or from whatever may be regarded as its equivalent. Taken together these two convictions, once one allows oneself to think about their conjunction, must present a potentially serious source of tension in belief and associated practice – not least, indeed, for those who are committed to the partnership of ecumenical exchange and working together. What follows is a tentative and somewhat sketchy attempt to look at something of the complexities of this tension with some special reference to Karl Rahner’s notable, if controversial, attempt at a resolution. Not all socially institutionalised systems of belief and practice, of course, that may be thought of as “essentially religious” in nature carry with them a call for universal acceptance; and it may be that such a call is more typical of belief systems based on reference to a Supreme Deity of some form or another and/or to some prophet claiming to speak in that Deity’s name. Be that as it may – and fully recognising the fact that just exactly what should be understood by the characterisation of a belief system as “essentially religious” is very much open to debate – it goes without saying that such institutionalised systems of belief are very much more than “mere” systems of cognitive acknowledgement and assertion.1 On the contrary, the often elaborately prescribed practices, together with the affirmations of doctrinal commitment with which they may be bound up, play a major part in the constitution and maintenance

Doctrinal Commitments and Ecumenical Partnership 163 of the many different social and, typically, trans-generational structures within which people may live and give a sense to their lives. It is no doubt inevitable that there should develop both within and between the resultant groupings conflicts of political and economic dominance and subordination; and there is a well-known history – only too evidently unfinished – of adherents of different religions, and even of different branches of what might be thought to be the same overall religion, relating to each other with outright, and sometimes even murderous, hostility. In many cases, certainly, such conflicts of religious commitment and belonging have been at the same time conflicts of and for both social and political power and material advantage. But the forms that these conflicts have taken have indisputably turned also around genuine incompatibilities of doctrinal and interpretative commitment, conflicts between people bound by their own beliefs not only to assert and to practise them, but also to do their utmost to bring others to their public endorsement and associated performance, whether by missionary persuasion or, if necessary, by methods of what may euphemistically be called persuasive constraint – and this, apart from all doubtless very real considerations of this-worldly power, for a variable mixture of concern for the presumed good of those whom they would convert and for the greater glory of whatever version of the Deity they were to be brought thus to acknowledge. For many people their very identity in continuing relation to their own past and future as well as to those others, both known and unknown, with whom that past and future is and will have been most closely bound up, may be understood – both by themselves and by ­others – as being fundamentally dependent on a shared acknowledgement of the Supreme Deity as represented in and through the doctrines and traditions of their own given (or adopted) religion and on obedience to what are taken to be that Deity’s ordinances or commands. It is not surprising, then, that they should seek to bring others to the “salvation” that, according to those doctrines and traditions, is only to be found in their full-hearted practical acceptance. It would indeed be peculiar – and prima facie religiously selfish, as it were – that one should not so reach out to others; and, just as one might see it as one’s own duty to bear witness to the Truth as expressed in and by one’s own religion, so might one see it as belonging to that same duty to seek to bring others to accept and to bear like witness to it. (One might add that, in counterpoint to such missionary religious believers, there are secularists who are similarly pro-active in their opposition both to belief in the existence of any such Supreme Being and to the temporal embodiments of such a belief in its varying associated forms of social [and political] powers and institutions.) I have already noted that not all religious believers or institutions are committed by virtue of their own self-conceptions to what they may see

164  Values and Responsibilities as the spiritual duty of positive missionary activity. Some are quite prepared not only to accept that there can be no one way of capturing the nature of ultimate Truth, but to acknowledge even that their own version can provide but one perspective on it among an in principle unknowable number of others.2 (Similarly again, as well as those secularists who are actively opposed to religion in all its forms, there are others whose own religious non-belief in no way commits them to showing, or indeed feeling, any form of active hostility to religious belief or practice as such.) Nevertheless, many sincere religious believers do understand the doctrines and commitments of their own faith to carry with them an inescapable obligation to strive as best they may to bring others to share in that belief and in obedience to what they may understand to be the Supreme Deity’s commands – or, if they are found to be incorrigibly resistant to such persuasion, in certain extreme cases to eliminate them altogether. So if, at the same time they believe also that what matters most about their fellow human beings is not so much what they may or may not believe about the existence and/or nature of a Supreme Deity as the values that they exhibit in the ways in which they try to live their lives, the conflict between these two beliefs has the potential for becoming a source of peculiar discomfort. This is not by any means a new problem – there is indeed a long history of intense and learned theological debate about the whole entanglement of this and closely related issues.3 One of the most striking of more recent attempts to square this circle must be that of Karl Rahner, the distinguished and widely influential Catholic theologian, with his theory of so-called “anonymous Christians.” I am myself, of course, no sort whatsoever of a theologian and certainly no scholar in the niceties of Rahner’s thinking, for which, I have to say, I have relied above all on an article by the Reverend Norman Wong Cheong San. To put it simply, Rahner’s theory arose from a deeply felt effort to reconcile what he took to be two equally indisputable facts, namely that: first, the possibility of supernatural salvation and of a corresponding faith . . . must be granted to non-Christians; and secondly, that salvation cannot be gained without reference to God and Christ, since it must in its origin, history and fulfilment be a theistic and Christian salvation. (Rahner 1979, 218) What this seems to amount to is that a person’s religious standing, including their prospects of salvation, is not to be understood as one of crucial dependence on whatever might or might not be their explicitly expressed or, indeed, consciously held beliefs or disbeliefs concerning the nature, demands or even the existence of a or the Supreme Deity. Nor, of course,

Doctrinal Commitments and Ecumenical Partnership 165 was Rahner alone in holding – in one version or another – a view of this general import. Indeed, as he himself put it: The Second Vatican Council has recognised the possibility that even non-Christians, polytheists and atheists can live in a subjective state of freedom from serious sin . . . So the possibility cannot be denied to any other group of men, whatever their externally verifiable attitudes and beliefs. (Rahner 1979, 202) (This is, indeed, a view which, in one formulation or another, seems to have been reiterated by the present Pope Francis himself – though the exact and proper interpretation of what he has said on the matter has been, as one might expect in such a case, subject to a good deal of controversy.) It would seem, then, that according to Rahner’s theory of anonymous Christianity, all of us, (always provided, of course, that we are in what may be called sufficiently good moral standing), may turn out to be Christians after all – whatever we ourselves may take our beliefs, disbeliefs or fundamental uncertainties to be. However, and so far as I can see, he seems also to have shared a widespread religious scepticism as to the possibility of ever being able to formulate any determinate content at all for beliefs about God, let alone for knowledge of Him. As Thomas Sheehan, himself an admittedly controversial theological figure, put it, Rahner held rather that man is: driven toward the unlimited and the incomprehensible, which is usually called “God” . . . In Rahner’s philosophy there are no proofs for the existence of God, only indications that man moves endlessly into mystery without ever abandoning the world. This mystery, [Rahner writes] “presents itself to us in the mode of withdrawal, of silence, of distance, so that speaking about it, if that is to make sense, always requires listening to its silence.” In fact, says Rahner, man knows about God not by trying to peer ahead into the mystery but rather by experiencing himself as the constant process of self-transcendence. (Sheehan 1982) And yet Rahner himself – in his faithfulness to the traditions of his Church, if perhaps less so to the stricter demands of overall conceptual consistency – remained insistent that: It would be quite foolish to think that this talk about “anonymous Christianity” must lessen the importance of mission, preaching the

166  Values and Responsibilities Word of God, baptising and so on. Anyone who wants to interpret our remarks about anonymous Christianity in this way has not merely fundamentally misunderstood them, but has not read our exposition of them with sufficient attention. (Rahner 1973a, 396–397) What is one to make of this sort of attempt at squaring an apparent circle? It is, no doubt, largely true that most faiths have traditionally regarded each other as rivals “competing,” as Rabbi Jonathan Romain has put it, “for people’s souls and insisting on the exclusive truth of their version of God” (Romain 2014, 26), and that the abandonment, or at best limitation, of the claim to exclusivity that full and equal respect for members of other faiths would seem to carry with it, is bound to cause problems for those whose faith has been and is bound up with trust in and fidelity each to their own uncompromisingly differing traditions. Karl Rahner’s theology seeks to provide one way of confronting these problems. There have been and are, of course, others. The Bahå’i faith, to take just one example, founded by Bahå’u’llåh as recently as in the 19th century, offers another and very different one. As their website puts it: Bahå’is believe that there is only one God, the Creator of the universe [and that] throughout history God has revealed Himself to humanity through a series of divine Messengers, each of Whom has founded a great religion. The messengers have included Abraham, Krishna, Zoroaster, Moses, Buddha, Jesus and Muhammad . . . [and] Bahå’u’llah, Who is the latest of these divine Messengers.4 It is far from uncontroversially clear, however, that all the messages said to be thus carried are readily compatible with each other, not least that of Bahå’u’llah himself, with its claim that the revelation enshrined in the newly founded faith, though it somehow includes those of all its alleged predecessors, nevertheless transcends them – a claim that has certainly been quite emphatically ill-received by, to take one rather extreme example, the Islamic authorities in Iran. More recently, Jonathan Romain went on to note, “The arrival of inter-faith dialogue has had an enormous impact. Clergy [have] worked together in areas of joint concern, while laity [have] met in mutual respect” (Romain 2014, 26). It should, one may hope, be beyond doubt that this arrival of dialogue and co-operation in a whole range of practical matters, is to be greatly welcomed. At the same time it does bring with it certain more or less pressing problems of principle – more or less pressing depending on the nature and traditional interpretations of the main doctrinal commitments of the faith communities concerned. One of the most obvious of these problems is, indeed, that faced by Karl Rahner, namely – and put in more general terms – that of how to reconcile,

Doctrinal Commitments and Ecumenical Partnership 167 (a), a committed acceptance of the uniquely particular doctrinal claims of one’s own faith community concerning the nature and demands of the Supreme Being with, (b), a recognition that there are many humanly admirable persons who hold quite different doctrinal beliefs – or who may be unaware of holding any beliefs concerning such matters at all. But here we find ourselves stumbling into another whole set of problems, problems which are typically philosophical and which have their own long-standing history of complex debate. For what exactly is it to hold – or to be without – beliefs of one sort or another? Wong quotes Rahner as saying: We might therefore put it as follows: the “anonymous Christian” in our sense of the term is the pagan after the beginning of the Christian mission, who lives in the state of Christ’s grace through faith, hope and love, yet has no explicit knowledge of the fact that his life is orientated in grace-given salvation to Jesus Christ. (Rahner 1973b, 283) It might seem that this is to be taken as meaning that he must, in some sense, have at least implicit knowledge or belief containing, in some form or other, an acknowledgement of the relevant religious commitment. But, if all awareness of any such acknowledgement is lacking or even consciously denied, what sense or significance is to be found in any such attribution of faith, or belief as being nevertheless implicit? In fact, and as I have already noted, Rahner himself seems to have had serious doubts as to the intellectual possibility of being able to settle on any one determinate formulation, exclusive of all others, for beliefs about the Nature of God, let alone for true knowledge of Him, His Purposes and Commands. In any case, it is not unreasonable to suppose that those whose sense of their own identity is closely bound up with membership of their given or chosen religious community, may be wholly conscientious in observance of its traditional practices without that observance necessarily indicating a self-conscious personal acceptance, endorsement or even understanding of its institutionally asserted doctrines. One may very well ask, indeed, just how far it is possible to be sure of what anyone, oneself included, may “really” believe as distinct from what they be found to say in any given context and from how they may be observed actually to behave. This will evidently depend on what one may take it to be “really” to believe anything, and to this there is among philosophers no easy or generally agreed answer. The Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy has a characteristically helpful article setting out the main lines of professional philosophical divergence concerning the best analysis of the concept of belief – of how it is most commonly understood and of the criteria on the basis of which ascriptions of belief may most plausibly be made. The

168  Values and Responsibilities competing arguments presented in favour of the differing analyses are, as one might expect, both detailed and complex. They range, at opposite extremes, from, on the one hand, a broadly behaviourist analysis, according to which there is nothing more to belief than the disposition to speak and to behave in appropriate contexts in certain predictable and essentially goal-directive ways to, on the other hand, one according to which to believe any given proposition is to give to it one’s inner consent when presented with it either by others or, as it may be, by oneself. But even this very broad-brush contrast is subject to at least two far from minor complications: (a), that the meaning of what people may say or write in one set of circumstances or another must be open to always potentially disputable conceptual analysis: and, (b), that there would be far from unanimous philosophical agreement as to the proper analysis and employment of goal-directive concepts.5 Thus not only are there quite widely acknowledged problems in the way of ascribing any determinate content to propositions concerning the nature of a Supreme Deity and His (or Her) presumed commands: it may anyway not always be at all clear as to just what is to be taken as constituting a clearly understood personal endorsement of any such doctrinal proposition. Indeed, one might quite plausibly understand the utterance in appropriate contexts of certain traditional expressions – more particularly in contexts of collective or institutionally consecrated utterance, but also perhaps in certain contexts of repetition just to oneself – as a verbally extended form of traditional practice rather than as a sign of committed cognitive assent. Is the pronouncement of a traditional formula of grace at the beginning or end of a family or collegiate meal, for example, to be taken as signifying genuine belief on the part of whoever pronounces it (or, for that matter, endorses it by way of an “Amen’) in the existence of the Deity to whom the grace makes explicit appeal, let alone in that Deity’s potential concern? Or might it not be more plausible to regard it as no more (but also no less) than a verbally expressed participation in the ritual practices traditionally recognised as appropriate to this sort of occasion? It is no secret that there are Ministers of more than one established religion, leaders often of their congregations, who would readily acknowledge (at any rate unofficially) their own at least intermittent agnosticism, if not indeed their positive disbelief in the existence of the personal God in whose reality they may regularly express their institutional confidence in the course of the services which they are called upon to conduct. There are, indeed, a variety of reasons why it can be intellectually tempting to construe the concept of belief in terms of a disposition to behave in certain in principle observable ways, including a disposition to say certain sorts of things, to oneself as well as to others, on appropriate occasions. There are also circumstances in which it may seem more natural to construe what may present themselves as statements of

Doctrinal Commitments and Ecumenical Partnership 169 truth-affirming belief less as affirmations of personal cognitive commitment than as the verbal performances expected of people in the roles which they occupy in accordance with the traditions of the communities to which they belong. Nevertheless, and even if the distinction between belief and practice (including verbal practice) is in many ways problematic, and the line dividing the one from the other far from sharp or easy to articulate, it does not seem right to suppose that it might be given up altogether. For one thing there are a great variety of situations, of which one has to make convincing sense, in which people might conceal what they are later found to have “really” believed. Thus, to take just one well-known example, the Wikipedia entry for Marranos reports that “Under state pressure in the late 15th century, as estimated 100,000–200,000 Jews in the Iberian Peninsula converted to Christianity.” This move was, as one knows, intended as a public signal of their abandonment of their previous Jewish religious beliefs and practices and the adoption in their place of (a Catholic version of) certain key Christian ones. But it would seem that in many cases their acceptance of the public formalities of conversion, with all the accompanying professions of doctrinal conformity, was but a performance undertaken with a view to avoiding the otherwise dire consequences of religiously driven persecution – a performance that necessarily carried with it a whole set of changes in publicly observable practice, but by no means necessarily any genuine re-conversion of inner doctrinal commitment. It may well be that among those thus publicly converting some were at the time uncertain as to whether or not they had really come to believe whatever it was that they were telling the constraining world, and maybe even themselves, that they did, and who only came to any sort of self-certainty in the matter in retrospect, so to speak. But here once again the proper interpretation of any such cases lies on the both practically and conceptually uncertain frontier between inner belief and observable practice – including the practice of what one may on occasion find oneself saying to oneself. To re-cap, then. There is on the face of it a clear difficulty in the way of holding on to both of the following views at once: (a), that the traditional doctrines of one’s own faith contain the essential and fundamental truth as to the nature and commands of the Supreme Deity, that the universal acknowledgement of their truth is a matter of supreme importance, and that one is thereby bound, in accepting their truth, to strive one’s utmost to secure their acceptance by everyone else; and, (b), that morally admirable men and women of other faiths or of none are to be regarded as worthy of as much all-round respect in their allegiances as are those of one’s own. One way of looking to reconcile these apparently conflicting beliefs might indeed be that of ascribing to those who belong to other faiths, or even to none, some less than self-aware version of the very beliefs that they may perhaps explicitly reject or of which they may

170  Values and Responsibilities have no conscious awareness at all. This is the way taken by a theory such as that of Rahner’s “anonymous Christianity.” Or, perhaps, one might hold to some version of the view that all of the world’s great religions, and whatever their intermittent aberrations of worldly intolerance may be or have been, are to be understood as stages in the progressive self-­revelation of one and the same ultimately Supreme Deity, and their adherents thus to be understood as being after all – did they but know it – worshippers of the same God. Different though they are in many important ways, both of these stories of how one might justify an unreserved mutual respect and forbearance across differences of religious commitment, would seem to present those who may hold to them with some pretty formidable conceptual (that is to say, essentially philosophical) problems concerning the question of what it is to believe, and the relations between belief and practice. So however uncomfortable it may be for faithfully committed adherents to their traditionally distinctive established doctrines and for those with leading responsibility for maintaining the institutional structures of their faith communities, they may nevertheless find it both intellectually and humanly more acceptable to go down the route of allowing that it cannot after all matter too much what you may or may not take yourself to believe concerning the existence and possible nature of a Supreme Deity so long as you are a person of true moral standing with appropriate attitudes of respect for life and for the universe at large. After all, Rahner’s own way of dealing with the concept of religious belief would seem to suggest a form of it with hardly sufficient overt or explicit doctrinal content to make for any ultimately significant difference between adherence to one religious tradition rather than to another, or even to none at all. To return to that quotation from Thomas Sheehan, man, according to Rahner is “driven toward the unlimited and the incomprehensible, which is usually called ‘God’ ”. It is indeed hard to see how or why respect for “the unlimited and the incomprehensible” as such should, or could, commit anyone to belief in a doctrine with any particular, or indeed any determinately comprehensible, content beyond the adoption of an attitude that is both reverential and in some way grateful. And one may seem to find further support for a view of what might be called doctrinal indeterminacy in the replies given to Gary Gutting by Alvin Plantinga, a distinguished logician as well as a philosopher of an equally deep, if very different, Christian commitment from that of Karl Rahner, in an interview published in 2014. As he put it, “The most important ground of belief is probably not philosophical argument but religious experience. Many people of very many different cultures have thought themselves in experiential touch with a being worthy of worship” (Plantinga in Gutting 2014). The fact is, of course, that different versions of the view that the propositional language of purported truth to the facts has in the end to be accepted as inadequate to any determinate characterisation of the

Doctrinal Commitments and Ecumenical Partnership 171 Supreme Deity, (if such there be), are to be found all over the religious place – however central such language may be to established tradition,. (One notably sensitive discussion of these issues may be found, for example, in Rowan Williams’s recent book On the Edge of Words: God and the Habits of Language.6) But, equally of course, this view has not in practice seemed to lead to any general conclusion to the effect that, as Wittgenstein famously put it in the concluding words to his Tractatus, “whereof one cannot speak, thereof must one be silent”; nor indeed need it be understood as calling for any such overall silence, for much may be said in relation to a (or the?) presumed Supreme Deity other than claims to be speaking – stating – some sort of fact-affirming truth about Him, Her or It. As N. N. Trakakis has put it: There is an important message here for philosophers of religion . . . If God cannot be represented, appropriated or assimilated to our creaturely habits of mind, then our language about God will have to reflect this in terms of its iconoclasm and “negativity,” that is, its refusal of conceptual idols and its denial of our desire to understand God in the way in which we understand and talk about ordinary things in the universe. If theology (like poetry) is the attempt to say what cannot be said, then writing theology will always be like walking a tightrope, continually at risk of falling off into unintelligibility and nonsense. (Trakakis 2012) Different religious communities, in their theological accounts of the practices that are of such traditional importance to their holding themselves together across the generations, may talk to themselves and to their members in strikingly different ways. But since contradictions can, strictly speaking, only be shown to arise between one set of truth-functional set of propositions and another, to understand the enterprise of theology in such strikingly nuanced terms must surely leave room for a wide and diverse range of properly religious, if essentially non-cognitive or non-propositional discourses. At the same time, moving away from the ­battle-grounds of doctrinal contradiction and direct logical incompatibility would seem to offer the necessary possibility of an intellectually acceptable basis for reciprocal respect and recognition between committed members of different faith communities with their conflicting histories of deeply entrenched and prima facie incompatible doctrinal expression and practice – provided, that is, that they are able to understand their apparently competing doctrines in some non-fact-affirming way.7 This is, certainly, a by no means inconsiderable proviso, calling, as it would, for some sort of meta-philosophy-cum-theology that could in principle serve as a template of interpretation for the self-understandings of each of the major partners to any serious ecumenical alliance – a

172  Values and Responsibilities partnership that might perfectly well include such disbelievers in the existence of a Supreme Deity as may share the appropriate attitudes towards the universe. For if the traditional doctrinal commitments of those who are committed to the affirmation of belief in the existence of a Supreme Deity are reinterpreted in some less than strictly propositional way, they may expect to find themselves with more in common with “religiously” inclined agnostics and even atheists than one might initially have supposed. But the story that would here need to be told would, of course, call for a good deal of detailed underpinning. Theologically speaking, I have to admit to lacking virtually all the seriously scholarly qualifications necessary for embarking on such a task. Philosophically speaking, it seems to me that any attempt to arrive at a proper understanding of just what “the appropriate attitudes” might consist in must lead us to confront in turn a number of other major issues as obstinately long-standing as that, already encountered, of the analysis of what it is to believe – among them most notably, the status of fundamental moral values, the question of how broadly one may understand the reach of the concept of “truth” – in particular, its connections with that of “given fact” – and, as already noted, the problem of how to understand the relation between the prima facie contrasting presumptions of goal-directiveness and of overall causal explicability. However, this paper has been primarily concerned with possible ways of avoiding or neutralising the latent potential for doctrinal conflict between committed partners in ecumenical endeavours – and most notably, no doubt, between those with major social and institutional responsibilities within and for communities structured around differing ideas of the nature and/ or very existence of a Supreme Deity. As such it is already more than long enough. So for now there may remain just time and space enough for a short concluding paragraph, followed by two detachable post-scripts with reference to recent versions of what might be called religious atheism or agnosticism. First, however, let me just conclude by suggesting that a more systematic (and more seriously scholarly) following through of the above scatter of considerations might support a reasonably compelling case for a need for the theologically qualified partners to any serious ecumenical movement – including, hopefully, secularists of a somehow “religious” attitude or inclination – to put their minds to working out, in proper alliance with philosophy (and perhaps also sociology and social psychology), the elements of what they might be able to accept as a common (if possibly “meta-) theology.” In doing so, they will naturally recognise the social, and even indeed political, value of continuing in due observance of such traditions as belong to the very framework of what has held their respective communities together across the generations in the face of their diverse and often stressful, not to say conflictual, histories. These differing traditions undeniably include much that presents itself

Doctrinal Commitments and Ecumenical Partnership 173 as adhesion to beliefs of mutually incompatible doctrinal commitment. But, so the argument goes, much of what thus presents itself as claiming settled cognitive status can be re-thought of in terms of traditional, but not strictly cognitive practice – and while practices may differ, they need not, as such and unlike assertoric propositions, be thought of as directly contradictory of each other, but rather as different forms of expression of the same fundamentally religious or spiritual attitudes. After all, and as I remarked earlier on, “Karl Rahner’s own way of dealing with the concept of belief in religious contexts would seem to suggest a form of belief with hardly sufficient cognitive content to make for doctrinally significant difference between adherence to one religious tradition rather than to another.” And if indeed I am right in suspecting that we are all ultimately committed to the bafflement involved in the combination of a rational refusal of contradiction with a yet after all recognition of the ultimate limit of reason signified by the threat (or promise?) of contradiction’s eternal recurrence, we should look for an acceptable way of being not too worried by the conflicting doctrinal commitments of different religious traditions with their prima facie cognitive claims to mutually incompatible versions of theological truth, falsity and – dare one say it? – intellectual fantasy.

Post Scriptum 1 A striking example of a plea in favour of what might fairly be called an atheistic but religious world-view is to be found in Ronald Dworkin’s last book, Religion Without God.8 Dworkin was above all concerned to argue for an “objectivist” account of the foundations of morals and, although unable to believe in the existence of God, was explicit in maintaining that he based this account on what he called “the religious point of view.” As Michael Rosen has put it in his review of Religion Without God, “Dworkin still wants to call his attitude ‘religious’ because, although he does not believe in the existence of God, he does ‘accept the full independent reality of value’ and hence rejects the naturalistic view that nothing is real except what is revealed by the natural sciences or psychology.” Rosen goes on to quote Dworkin as admitting: I will not have convinced some of you. You will think that if all we can do to defend value judgments is appeal to other value judgments, and then finally to declare faith in the whole set of judgments, then our claims to objective truth are just whistles in the dark. But this challenge, however familiar, is not an argument against the religious worldview. It is only a rejection of that world-view. It denies the basic tenets of the religious attitude: it produces, at best, a standoff. You just do not have the religious point of view.

174  Values and Responsibilities Rosen himself then adds: This expresses precisely my own reaction. I cannot see that describing the target of our disagreements about value as existing in a fully independent, objective realm is anything more than religion-lite – the religious idea of eternal goodness without the miraculous elements of omnipotent divine will and personal immortality. Yet I am at one with Dworkin in thinking that even a fully secular thinker should contemplate the universe not just with curiosity and wonder, but with reverence and gratitude. Still behind me I hear a voice – a Nietzschean voice, perhaps – that tells me that what Dworkin and I are looking at is no more than a penumbra, the few rays that remain in the sky after the sun of revealed religion has set. If that is so, then the coming night may be dark indeed. (Rosen 2014) One might well ask what it might mean – without insisting on asking what exactly it might mean – to speak of “the religious idea of eternal goodness without the miraculous elements of omnipotent divine will and personal immortality”? What, for that matter, might it be for a “fully secular thinker [to] contemplate the universe not just with curiosity and wonder, but with reverence and gratitude” – and could anyone contemplating the universe in that way rightfully be accounted as being “fully secular’? So far as “religion” is concerned, Giles Fraser is among others to have emphasised the point, noted earlier on, that it “has become an unstable concept, with fuzzy edges” (Fraser 2014) and judging by the intensity as well as the variety of responses that his claim elicited – in disagreement as well as in agreement – it would certainly seem to qualify as what many would call an essentially contestable one. (He quoted too Lord Toulson who, when faced with the question of whether scientology should or should not be counted as a religion for the purposes of the Law, concluded that the term “should not be confined to religions that recognize a supreme deity”.) There is, indeed, plenty of evidence to show that it has been and is used often enough to cover systems of belief and practice that do not include – and which may positively exclude – recognition of anything or anyone that might plausibly go under that title. But “reverence and gratitude” and not “just curiosity and wonder”? “Reverence” and “gratitude” might, of course, be taken simply as stylistic equivalents for those of “awe” and “thankfulness,” terms that may remind one of the accounts that philosophers of the German idealist tradition in particular have given of man’s experience of what has been called the sublime. But without wishing to place too much weight on what might be thought of as a merely verbal shift, the move from “thankfulness” and “awe” to “reverence” and “gratitude” does seem, implicitly

Doctrinal Commitments and Ecumenical Partnership 175 at least, to be one from spectator to recipient of what in some way or another is to be understood as being offered as a gift, and that if the gift is not to be understood as being that of a Supreme Deity, then the intentionality of its provision is, in effect, being ascribed to the universe itself. And whatever the pros and cons may be for judging such an attitude to be an essentially religious one, it does evidently return us to face once more the many and long-standing debates around the question of how to understand the relation between the presumptions of goal-directiveness and those of overall causal explicability. It is evidently impossible to go into any of the ins and outs of those debates here. My own general view would be that Kant got it basically right when he argued that the assumption of a thoroughgoing causal determinism was a necessary condition of our ability to make conceptually ordered sense of our sense-given and fundamentally temporal experience of (an at any rate macro-physical) external reality, but that the contrasting assumption of a goal-directive power of thought and reason as we make our way about this world was an equally necessary condition of our being able to reflect and aim at doing anything at all. Given that everything that we do or plan to do necessarily takes place within the realm of that causally determinate external reality, the question is bound to arise of where and how it could allow room for a future open to the possible determinations of a (rationally) directed purposiveness. Kant, as one knows, thought of rational goal-directiveness as based in another realm, that of so-called noumena or things-in-themselves, leaving us with the question of how these two realms might possibly be related. (In effect, the same question at a “higher” philosophical level.) My own view – which I have argued for elsewhere and will not attempt to argue for again here – is that we are indeed committed by the very conditions of our self-awareness as thinking human beings to accept the duality of our somehow belonging to (or participating in) both these two prima facie incompatible realms or orders of being; and thus committed to what intellectually no doubt involves confronting a perhaps constantly retreating, but always reappearing contradiction as a recurring limit to the claims or pretensions of “pure reason.” As the anthropologist Albert Piette has put it “It is probably an essential dimension of Homo Sapiens: the fact of assenting to contradictory propositions was a first step towards bringing about a [more] relaxed manner of existence.”9

Post Scriptum 2 It was only after having written the main body of this paper that I came across a review by Adam Kirsch of Philip Kitcher’s book Life after Faith: The Case for Secular Humanism, and although I clearly have no space left in which to quote from or, even less, to discuss it in the paper as such, much of it is so clearly concerned with just the same range of problems

176  Values and Responsibilities that I cannot resist including from the review a moderately extensive quotation in a second and final post-script: Kitcher sees that this claim to exclusivity, which is each individual faith’s strongest attraction, is a dangerous scandal for all faiths considered collectively. For it is plainly impossible for every religion’s claim to be correct . . . To Kitcher, this critical argument is sufficient to dispose of the exclusive truth claims of every religious tradition. Still, if no religion has a monopoly on truth, it is possible that religions are equally true in a certain way – that is, metaphorically. The stories told by Islam, Hinduism and Greek paganism may all be just that, stories; yet they may converge on a common truth, which shines through the veil of myth and fable. (Kirsch 2015) This is the position taken by advocates of what Kitcher calls “refined religion”. Refined religion worships not this or that god, but the “transcendent,” and “the world’s religions can be appreciated as invoking an aspect of reality – the transcendent – that exceeds any human ability to describe it in literal language.” This ecumenism goes hand in hand with pragmatism: a true faith is one that empowers its believers, regardless of the literal truth of its scriptures and doctrines.

Notes 1. For an interesting discussion of whether or not such institutionalised belief systems as Confucianism and Taoism are best seen as religions, see, for example, Yang 2008. 2. So far as my very limited understanding of it goes, Jainism would seem to provide one good example of this form of religious non-exclusiveness. 3. I am, alas, very far indeed from being anything remotely like an expert in these matters, but see, for instance, Marenbon (2015). 4. The Bahå’I website, the section Spiritual Truths, sub-section “God, Faith and Immortality.’ 5. One should perhaps also note, that there are those who would argue that it is an implication of certain of the so-called epistemic paradoxes that the concept of belief has to be understood to harbour the potential for an ultimate indeterminacy in certain contexts as to whether what may present itself as a belief can really be logically accountable as one or not. (For a summary, but still extensive, discussion of the epistemic paradoxes, see, for example, the article under this head in the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy.) 6. See Johnson 2014, for a response to some of these issues. 7. It is notable how often entrenched social or communal groups of one sort or another tend to take a much severer view of those whom they were once able to count among their members, but who have left them for a different faith or allegiance, than they do of those who had never belonged to them – or shared in the practice or practices of their “beliefs” – in the first place. To the extent that religious groups react in this way, this would seem to reinforce the view

Doctrinal Commitments and Ecumenical Partnership 177 that a primary function of doctrinal as of other forms of ritual performance is that of reinforcing the bonds of collective tradition that play such a crucial part in holding communities together across the time of successive generations rather than that of giving public expression to what are to be understood as individually convinced assertions of what is taken to be supernatural truth. 8. There are, of course, not a few other examples of such a view, ranging from Jacques Derrida’s so-called “religion without religion’, a theoretically sophisticated development of his overall theme of deconstruction, to the attempts, conceptually very different, but in the end perhaps of similar spirit, made by certain ecologically minded thinkers to show how and why “Nature” should be seen as embodying an essential element of the sacred, coupled with the claim that the recognition of its status as such should be understood as a fundamentally religious attitude. See, for instance, Hurand and Larrère. 9. “C’est probablement une dimension essentielle d’Homo Sapiens; le fait de donner un assentiment à des énoncés contradictoires a commencé à générer une manière relâchée d’exister” (Dubos and Piette 2013, 1).

Works Cited Dubos, Anne, and Albert Piette. 2013. “Le voile du croire: Entretien avec Albert Piette.” ThéoRèmes, 5: 1–14. Fraser, Giles. 2014. “Loose Canon: Religion’s Conceptual Shape-Shifting Is Maybe Its Survival Mechanism at Work.” The Guardian, February 14. Gutting, Gary. 2014. “Is Atheism Irrational?” The New York Times, February 9. Hurand, Bérengère, and Catherine Larrère (eds.). 2014. Y a-t’il du sacré dans la nature? Paris: Les Publications de la Sorbonne. Johnson, Daniel. 2014. “Doctrine, Dialogue and Truth.” Standpoint, November 25. Kirsch, Adam. 2015. “Is Reason Enough?” New York Review of Books, April 23. Marenbon, John. 2015. Pagans and Philosophers: The Problem of Paganism from Augustine to Leibniz. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Rahner, Karl. 1979. Theological Investigations 16. London: Darton, Longman and Todd. Rahner, Karl. 1973a. Theological Investigations Volume 6. New York: Crossroad Publishing Company. Rahner, Karl. 1973b. Theological Investigations: 14 (In Dialogue With the Future). New York: Crossroad Publishing Company. Romain, Jonathan. 2014. “The Last Word . . .” Common Ground: The Magazine of the Council of Christians and Jews (Winter): 26–27. Rosen, Michael. 2014. “Beyond Naturalism: On Ronald Dworkin.” The Nation, February 11. Sheehan, Thomas. 1982. “The Dream of Karl Rahner.” The New York Review of Books, February 4. Trakakis, N. N. 2012. “Doing Philosophy in Style: A New Look at the Analytic/ Continental Divide.” Philosophy Compass, 7.12 (December): 919–942. Wong Cheong San, Norman. 2001. “Karl Rahner’s Concept of the ‘Anonymous Christian’: An Inclusivist View of Religions.” Church and Society in Asia Today, 4.1. Yang, Xiaomei. 2008. “Some Issues in Chinese Philosophy of Religion.” Philosophy Compass, 3.3 (May): 551–669.

An Inconclusive Conclusion

Danielle takes as starting point for her introduction to this collection my own introduction to a paper that I must have written very many years ago. In that paper I had myself started by quoting the opening words of a lecture given by Professor Yosef Hayim at the University of Washington: “What I have to say”, he made clear at the outset, “is ultimately quite personal . . . though I trust that, by the time I have done, the personal will not seem merely arbitrary.” And it seems to be in more than one way appropriate that I should return to that theme as my most probably final re-starting point here. Why, then, in more than one way so appropriate? Not, certainly, for the sake of any stretch of autobiography as such, but rather because it marks in my case a long-standing belief that one of the deepest and most natural roots of philosophical thinking lies in the urge, felt at one stage or another of their lives by so many, whether intellectuals by vocation or not, to seek some better understanding of the situation in life in which they may have come to find themselves. For each and every one his or her personal situation will be marked by its own interplay of the particular and the universal, both of features peculiar to their own situation and of those characteristic of the human situation as such with all its varied physically and socially determining possibilities, limitations and vulnerabilities. Once anyone starts to question the nature of the situation in which they find themselves in this way, they can hardly not be struck by how many different layers of inter-complexities will have gone and go into its making – including the ways in which other people may conceive of it, and how their possibly very different and conflicting understandings may contribute to making it to be whatever it is. To think seriously about such more or less background, but often determining, complexities, and about how they may relate to and overlap with each other, demands a more systematic effort of thought than that for which most people may at most stages of their lives have either the time, the training or the capacity to sustain. “Ordinary” or pre-philosophical thinking, as one might say, tends to stop at the point of just a general sense of these complexities and their multiple inter-relations. To go further, and whether one thinks of it

An Inconclusive Conclusion 179 in that way or not, is to embark on an exploration of what I take to be a characteristically philosophical nature. For many to engage in thinking of this sort may be a very personal enterprise, remaining an essentially individual and private one. Thinking carried on with oneself in this way may be thought of as a form of meditation. One may, of course, have a deep sense of the complexities of life without having any good idea of how to express or to share it with others or, indeed, of how to record and, perhaps, develop it for oneself. But to look for ways of doing this is already to find oneself on the road to “doing philosophy.” Philosophical thinking may start, one might say, as a form of would-be shared, or at any rate sharable, meditation – of debate and discussion whether with others or even just with one’s no longer solitary and inarticulate self. It may, quite certainly, take many and sometimes very different forms. But in being in principle communicable, it is as such dependent on one style or another of conceptualised and conceptualising thought. Those who come to engage in such a search for better understanding are likely each to have found his or her own point of entry into the discussion in some feature or features of his or her own particular situation as it presented itself. So if discussion, or meditation in common, is to proceed in any effective way, it will be as well for the participants to understand where each other are coming from. Each will have had his or her own particular point of entry into a debate one of whose aims must, in principle, be to show how the natures of all such particularities are to one extent or another constituted by the relations – both immediate and background – in which they stand to each other. So the “autobiographies” of the particular starting points may, when taken together, lead on to a realisation of something deeply true of the human situation as such, namely that it is characterised by lying at a point of ever recurrent tension between the competing calls of the particular, on the one hand, and of the universal, on the other. For this reason too, to start once more with a recognition not merely of the general and anecdotal, but of the properly universal relevance of the autobiographical, is indeed peculiarly appropriate. As I look back over the scatter of my writings extending over so many years, some of them published but others just stored away in my files, I am struck by the persistence of so many of their main themes – and this in spite of the quite considerable range of topics to which those writings claimed to be primarily addressed. This is, no doubt, in large part a significant reflection of the way in which, as I have come to see it, nearly every topic of major philosophical interest sooner or later, but in the end virtually always, calls for consideration of, if not necessarily every other one, then at least a very high proportion of them. Thus the tension between the calls of the particular and the universal – at any rate in the forms in which I saw it as presenting itself in so much

180  Values and Responsibilities of Kant’s writings – is one of the principal themes to be found popping up all over the place. Another to which Danielle draws attention is that of what I have called, somewhat inelegantly, “a stable unstable position.” Inelegant as this expression may be, however, it does somehow express a fair sense of something that has been a pretty constant underlying element in my efforts at thinking “philosophically.” This is a sense of being confronted by questions to which one cannot simply give up all attempts to find rationally satisfactory answers, while having at the same time to recognise that to the search for such answers there can be no rationally definitive conclusion. So far as my memory goes, I first found myself led to thinking in this way at somewhere around the age of eleven, when, one of my then closest friends and I tried to work out together what it was about the differences in our respectively inherited religious belief commitments that meant that I, as the only Jewish boarder in our small preparatory school, was allowed, or in effect directed, to stay reading in the school library, while he, along with all the other boys, had to attend services in the school chapel. I still quite clearly remember how we engaged in intense discussions of this mystery after “lights out” in our small dormitory, discussions which were illicit in that after “lights out” had been declared we were supposed to resign ourselves to silence and to sleep, and intense in that, while we had no idea as to how to justify them, we understood only too well that our commitments to these differing Jewish and Christian beliefs were, like it or not and though we would no doubt not have known to put it that way, somehow inextricably bound up with our different (and potentially conflicting) identities. And I further remember how the Headmaster, having come across us still reading by torchlight and talking together long after we were officially asleep, summoned us the next day, one after the other, to his study to interrogate us in an effort to find out what we had really been up to; and how, when finally and somewhat incredulously convinced that we had indeed been engaged in our own version of quasi-theological debate, he actually commended us for our concern with such questions, while instructing us that we should in future pursue our discussions at what we should recognise as being a more appropriate time, with – more interestingly – the warning comment that we should not expect to find any finally compelling argument to settle such conflicts of belief in such a manner as all serious thinkers should find themselves obliged to accept. It would be absurd, certainly, to suggest that my reaction to receiving this warning was already one of starting to wonder – philosophically, as it were – about the implications of having perhaps to accept that, even in principle, there might be no final resolution of certain conflicts of deeply rooted and inescapably important beliefs. (In fact, my more natural immediate reaction, so far as I can remember it, was simply one of relief that we were not after all going to find ourselves in further disciplinary

An Inconclusive Conclusion 181 trouble.) Nevertheless the point must somehow have stuck: that there were certain questions that, once one started thinking about them, one was bound, by the very terms of one’s own thinking, to pursue even in the face of apparently rational certainty that they could have no rationally determinate answer. And it is perhaps notable that my first encounter with such questions, questions at once so insistent and yet so ultimately undecidable, was in the context of only too evident (and too evidently potentially bothersome) differences of religious commitment and belief. To accept that the pursuit of such questions is bound always to lead round and back to a recognition of their ultimate unanswerability is itself to achieve an outlook of a certain sort of stability – but not the sort of stability which might absolve one from all further worrying about them. In as much, moreover, as philosophy results from this characteristically human urge to arrive at some sort of understanding of (what one may call) “the human situation in general” and of one’s own particular situation within it, it has at the same time to address the question of what is to be counted as understanding. One has also to come to terms with the fact that the key terms of one’s own attempted analyses of those of whatever the arguments or texts that one may be considering must in their turn be open to a similar probing for possible ambiguities and slippages; and that there can be in principle no definitive stopping point to this reflexive regression. Words do not carry their meanings with them on the basis of their own sole responsibility, as it were; they are fixed, in so far indeed as they can be fixed, by virtue of their relationships within a whole network of other words in an open web of always potentially – and often actually – shifting meanings and usages. What happens within such a network, or overlapping series of networks, will have, of course, its own history, a history of which the terms of one’s own analysis of that history may in due course become a part and, as such, subject to subsequent analogous testing and analyses. Thus even in cases where the pronouncement of some past authority is deemed to embody some infallibly fundamental truth, it must always remain open to each succeeding generation to ask and to re-ask the question of just how the terms of that pronouncement are rightly to be understood. One of the things that I think of myself as having learnt from trying to work out what is going on in Derrida’s challenging, but (to me at least) frequently far from transparent, work is the way in which the key terms of any argument, terms on which the argument may essentially pivot, can in general be so deconstructed as to disclose hitherto unsuspected relationships with terms belonging to prima facie different networks of associated meanings, and thus to shift the thrust of the argument in question in unforeseen and not easily controllable directions. To use a simile that I have used before: trying to pin down precise meanings of terms (others than those fixed by local definition within strictly formal systems) is like trying to walk through semi-marshy land without getting one’s feet wet.

182  Values and Responsibilities So long as one keeps moving from one tuft of grass to another this may be manageable. But if one pauses hoping to rest, putting all one’s weight on any one particular tuft, one will find it giving way and oneself sinking in. To keep dry, one has to keep moving. To maintain a balanced sense of the potential meaning-spectrum of a key term (or concept), one needs to keep in view its relations, both positive and negative, to a whole series of other terms more or less closely associated with it – relations which, inevitably, tend to shift as time goes on, and as people’s ways of conceptualising change with the changes in their ways of living. And the same will be true in their turn for these associated terms (and concepts). There is no assured stability, no guaranteed way of keeping one’s feet dry, to be found in standing still; but one can be to all intents and purposes confident in what one is doing or saying so long as one is properly prepared for the constant possibility of a need for further re-adjustment. That a position of fully assured and as it were static stability is thus unattainable does not mean, however, that there is no worthwhile degree of stability at all to be obtained. Anyone planning to work at the top of a high ladder knows the importance of making as sure as possible that it is properly secured on a reliably stable base. But a crucial part of proper working practice lies also in an alert awareness of the never entirely eliminable possibility of unforeseen, and even to all intents and purposes unforeseeable, threats to that base of prima facie stability. That a position of presumed stability is always open to potential risk does not mean that one is constantly at actual risk of falling. Similarly, the recognition, implicit in the theory of one’s own deconstructive practice of reading, that the very terms of that reading must in principle contain the same potential for instabilities of meaning as may lie within those of any text whatsoever when subjected to appropriate pressure, does not of itself mean that one has no right to feel confident in one’s reading as such. Nor, incidentally, do the facts that there can be no way of arriving at a communicable representation of the world other than through the conceptualisations available to one in whatever the language or languages of one’s thinking, and that there could always be other ways of representing the world than one’s own, mean that the world is not in general “objectively” just how it is independently of whatever the ways in which it may be represented – and thus always in principle capable of exposing as false any given account of it. Derrida’s writings certainly show him to have had an exceptionally extensive grasp of texts both literary (in the widest sense of that word) and philosophical; and whatever latent instabilities of meaning that the texts that he studied and their key terms may have been shown to contain under the pressures that he applied to them, there was in principle never any call to doubt just what the terms of those texts actually were. Indeed, the very analyses of such underlying instabilities as the terms constitutive of such texts might be shown to contain must

An Inconclusive Conclusion 183 depend on the assumption of a justifiable confidence in knowing what indeed the terms in question are. “A stable instability”: or as one might equally if not all that much more elegantly put it, an unstable stability? Either way, the thought is that of a mode of philosophical enquiry that discovers, as it moves on in its attempt to make some sense of the human situation in general and of one’s own particular situation within it, that it has to learn how to come to (conceptually communicable) terms with the fact that while, as philosophy, it is not open to it to give up on its ongoing search, that search will always, and by one path or another, bring it back to confront some renewed version of the very questions from which it will have started out. Moreover, the implications of reflexivity carried by the ineliminable potential for shifts in their conceptual frontiers of the terms used in the thinking and formulations of any text whatsoever, including inevitably one’s own, do not constitute the only source of what, perhaps misleadingly, I called instability in what may be an otherwise generally stable philosophical position. Another, and perhaps deeper, source lies in those tensions which some of the most searching attempts to characterise the basic features of the human situation would seem to reveal, tensions which would seem to lead such attempts into one form or another of what I am still inclined to name as “meta-paradox” – a name which, it now seems to me, might well stand for a central, if for the most part, underlying theme of many of my efforts to think through to a certain understanding of what it is to be a human being. I started this response to Danielle’s Introduction by recalling an old paper of mine which had itself started by quoting from a lecture by Professor Yosef Hayim, who had himself set out by acknowledging that what he had to say was ultimately quite personal. As I come now to re-read this by now quite long ago effort, it strikes me as being in many ways one of my most characteristic attempts at working out what I should think – though I am embarrassed to have to confess that I have no longer any recollection of just when, for what occasion or for whom it was intended, or even, indeed, whether it was intended as a paper at all rather than as an opening to a possible much longer project. Be that as it may, I seem to have given it, before storing it away in my filing cabinet, two alternative titles, the first “A Liberal Identity – The Identity of a Liberal,” and the second “The Universal and the Particular – A Kantian Account of the Elements of Self-Identity.” In fact, the theme referred to by the first of these titles makes its only explicit appearance at the very end of what, if it was indeed to be “just” a paper, would have been already a very long one. That it should have been stored away under both titles is after all perhaps not inappropriate in that it touches in one way or another on many of the themes that have been closest to my perplexities over the years that I have been trying to think “philosophically.” So let me here

184  Values and Responsibilities try once again to pick up the threads of the main (or meta-) theme of this web of themes in as brief and, hopefully, as clear a fashion as I can now manage. As the second of those apparent titles indicates, I started in that paper from my own reading (or re-construal) of Kant. I certainly would not want to claim that Kant provides the only or even necessarily the best starting point for such an exploration of basic perplexities; (and still less do I have any claim to serious Kantian scholarship). He just happens, for a variety of essentially contingent reasons, to have provided me with mine – though it is of the nature of the case that there might have been many others. It so happened, however, that, on arriving in Oxford to read PPE, my own first lessons in philosophy centred on Descartes and on the attempts of his main empiricist successors to deal with the problems that they saw him as having left them; and when those first lessons led on to Kant, I found myself fascinated by his attempted response to the difficulties which he in turn found so deeply enrooted in that whole way of trying to account for the nature of our thinking experience of the world and of ourselves as acting and thinking beings within it. Descartes is above all known, of course, for his concern to find a proper basis for knowledge that, in order to count as such, must present itself as impregnably certain. Nothing that might be open, however implausibly, to logically possible doubt could for these purposes count. But, so the Cartesian-type argument goes, one can never be one hundred per cent certain as to what the next moment might bring, nor even whether there was going to be a next moment at all; nor could one place one hundred per cent confidence in one’s seeming memory of what may or may not have happened in even the most recent past. Indeed, one could not even be irrefutably sure as to whether there had really been any past at all and that one’s apparent memories had not just started from the present moment as peculiarly convincing illusions; nor, for that matter, could one be sure that one’s present moment of conscious awareness was going to be followed by any future awareness of anything at all. Thus, so it seemed, the only thing of which one could be properly certain was that of which one was conscious at any one moment of present time; there could in short and in principle be no way of being genuinely sure of anything beyond what lay in one’s own field of immediate consciousness. As against this Kant sought to prove, as he put it in that short section of his Critique of Pure Reason called “Refutation of Idealism,” that “inner experience in general is possible only through outer experience in general” (Kant 1950, 247). Just how satisfactory the somewhat tortured detail of Kant’s attempts to justify this claim may be judged to be is, no doubt, all too open to equally detailed scholarly dispute. It is, of course, closely tied up with the claim that a subject’s ability to experience itself as the subject of its own experience, distinct from whatever the contents of its consciousness might be at any particular moment, is dependent

An Inconclusive Conclusion 185 on its being able to conceive that it might at some other moment be or have been conscious of some other experience content. Thus, the whole Kantian argument depends in the last resort on his account of how we, as experiencing subjects, stand in relation to ongoing time, and of the fundamental temporality of all that of which we may be self-consciously or conceptually aware. In the arguments of the Second Analogy he had already attempted to establish as structurally necessary the assumption that everything that we may ourselves experience in space and above all in time must be understood to be governed by strictly deterministic laws of cause and effect. So while we may never have guaranteed as certain knowledge of exactly what these laws may be, and of just what the next moment of experience may bring, we do have an a priori and conceptually necessary assurance of its overall causally determinate nature. Which means that we have to think of the different elements of our experience, the successive contents of our consciousness, as being whatever they may be not just in virtue of how they may now appear to us, but in virtue of how they may stand in relation to a whole causal network of factors antecedent to and beyond those of our immediate consciousness. Which is, crucially, to say that the very possibility of “inner” or subjective experience is tied up with an implicit reference to the general “objectivity” of the world from which our experience is derived. Just how far the text of these Kantian arguments can be reconstructed into the detail of an argument of sufficient clarity and cogency is a matter for doubtless controversial scholarly debate. For myself, I confess to having been always more tempted by a characteristically Wittgensteinian version of what I take to be the same general line of thought, that is to say by some version of what has become known as the “Private Language Argument.” According to this argument, the very ability to employ concepts, that is to say the ability not only to react to one’s experience, but actually to think and to speak of it as being of whatever kind one may take it to be, depends on the assumption that one might encounter something in that experience to show that one might have made a mistake in taking it to be of that kind rather than another. But this, of course, amounts to the assumption of a possible distinction between how things may seem to be and how they may really be or have been – which, again, is an assumption of the “objectivity” of the world, as a “transcendental” or necessary presupposition of any conceptually ordered experience at all. Whether or not one may be justified in reading back an earlier, if admittedly somewhat tortured, attempt at articulating such an argument into the Kantian text, what surely strikes one most forcibly is the way in which his arguments, when taken together, see him as committed, however unwillingly, to a philosophy not so much of uncompromisingly or exhaustively rational enlightenment as to one of recurrent paradox. If everything that takes place within the spatio-temporal framework of our experienciable world has to be presumed to be governed by structurally

186  Values and Responsibilities necessary laws of cause and effect, this must apply as much to events consisting in our deliberately undertaken actions, even indeed to our very movements of thought, as to any other. But while thinking is itself an action with its own inherent temporality – and as such to be presumed to stand in relation to preceding events in accordance with rules of causally determinate necessity, Kant was also quite clear that in thinking about what to do or to say, one is ipso facto committed to the equally inescapable and necessary presupposition of one’s own freedom or rational autonomy. How can one possibly hold to both positions at once? Kant’s own celebrated answer, in the concluding words of his “Concluding Note” to his Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, was that “while we do not comprehend the practical unconditioned necessity of the moral imperative, we do comprehend its incomprehensibility. This is all that can fairly be asked of a philosophy which presses forward in its principles to the very limit of human reason” (Kant 1948, 131). Whatever one may or may not make of the details of Kant’s arguments as he pursued them through his successive texts, it is hard not to be struck by the tenacity with which he continued to hold to the values of a reason capable in fundamental principle of finding a rationally acceptable way of overcoming every prima facie seriously indissoluble contradiction to which its own enquiries might seem to give rise – while yet making it apparent that as rational enquiry continues, further versions of contradiction are always going to reappear. If deeply rooted contradiction may well be thought of as paradox, the higher-order contradiction involved in the joint commitment to reason’s ability to resolve all such contradiction and to the recognition that, in one form or another, contradiction is always going to reappear, may fairly be called “meta-paradox.” And the “stable instability” so characteristic of it lies in the impossibility of ever settling definitively on one side of this meta-contradiction or other. Here once again I find myself drawn back to the neither very new nor very original view, that a major source – if not, indeed, the major source – of meta-paradox lies in the deep and humanly inescapable tension between the demands of the particular and the universal. We are all of us individuated as the different human beings that we are by each our own particular (macro-physical) embodiments as we trace our own distinctively individual paths through space and time. As such physically identifiable particulars – to pick up the terms of the Kantian argument without embarking on any attempt at a detailed analysis of those terms, we have to assume that anything that happens to or through our identifying embodiments must in principle be accountable for in causally fully determinate terms; while as (in the cases of most of us at any rate) embodiments endowed with the potential for conceptualisation and for self-directing, but in itself non-individuating reason, we find ourselves having ipso facto to presume ourselves to be autonomous. We are once again brought back to that old confrontation between the presumptions

An Inconclusive Conclusion 187 of causal determinism and those of self-determining free will – a confrontation thus rooted in our duality as particular beings with a somehow embodied capacity for universalising rationality, for deliberative thought and for conceptually encoded communication with each other. The tensions generated by this confrontation can, of course, present themselves as underlying all sorts of only too practical dilemmas. In the making of judgments of moral (and indeed criminal) responsibility in cases where – in addition to the general presumption of the overall causal determination of all that is empirically observable – there seems to be convincing evidence to show just what specific set of causes may have been at the origin of the behaviour in question. In knowing what comparative weights one should (indeed reasonably could) assign to the competing claims on one’s material and affective resources of those who are in one way or another close to one as against the claims of those who are not, but who may be in far greater, not to say desperate, need. In seeking to reconcile the pretensions to universal truth of the doctrines of one’s own particular traditional faith community – including, very typically, a belief in the absolute importance for mankind of obtaining a universal acceptance of that truth – with a recognition of the apparently indisputable “moral” or human worth of so many of those for whom the doctrines in question are anything but compelling and, perhaps, do not even make properly intelligible sense. The relevant literatures – philosophical, theological, legal and political – are full of attempts to struggle with such dilemmas, all of them in their different ways outcomes of the fundamental and “natural” human experience of knowing ourselves each in terms of our own individual belonging to some one or more groups as compared with (or even against) the particular belongings of others, while recognising at the same time that to be rooted in the multi-particularities of one’s own identity – and thus in its exclusions as well as its inclusions – is a truly universal dimension of that experience. I have noted before, both often and unoriginally enough, that a sensitivity to the tensions involved in being thus held between the conflicting pulls of the universal and the particular is a central and maybe defining feature of what I must call (without fully knowing what exactly I may mean by so doing) my own Jewish identity. Judaism as a religion claims to present the nature of the Divine in a form of universal validity for all mankind at the same time as it enjoins in its own considerable detail a set of practices to be followed by a particular people. How to reconcile both the particularity of that people with the universal import of its message has long been, as indeed it still is, a matter for anxious and complicated debate. There is also, of course, room for prolonged and intense debate as to the crucial-or-less than-crucial importance for the establishing and maintaining of a clearly Jewish identity of adherence to, or at least respect for, the beliefs and practices of Judaism as a religion – not to mention the well-known disagreements as to which forms or interpretations of that

188  Values and Responsibilities religion are to be recognised as properly authentic. My own view in a nutshell is that were religiously practising Jews (of whatever denomination) to disappear altogether, the notion of a secular Jewish identity would, in the no doubt very long run, tend to become indistinguishable from that of a closer and closer association with a characteristically particular Israeli community. However, there can hardly be any doubt, I would suppose, that I myself belong – by uncontroversial virtue of my birth and by perhaps just slightly less uncontroversial virtue of my upbringing in a Liberal and wholly non-Orthodox context – to a group, (a people, a community or whatever), that is totally divided within what most would nevertheless recognise as itself as to where its boundaries as a group should properly be held to lie and just who, therefore, should properly be held to belong to it or not. One important part – or, better perhaps, one aspect – of what is now so commonly, and often so confusingly, called one’s identity is certainly to be understood in terms of one’s relations to and with other people, to the group or groups of which one takes oneself and/or is taken by others to be a member. But in finding problems with knowing just how to establish the criteria of group identity – whether those of entitlement to membership or of recognisable continuity of the group as such throughout the changes which time may have brought, Jews are once again like everybody else, if perhaps, and as the saying goes, only more so. There are many purposes, of course, for which groups of one sort or another may seek to formalise their conditions of membership so as to be able to determine just who, for instance, has, or has not, the group-recognised right to vote on matters of group policy; or who, to take another example, is to be acknowledged the right, according to the traditions of the group in question, to marry whom. One way or another, however, such efforts can never entirely eliminate the possibility of disputes over just where the properly acceptable margins of interpretation may lie – and/or over where final authority may rest so far as the determination of those margins may be concerned. Given that background, it is not surprising to discover, as I look back, how often I seem to have found myself puzzling over what may quite generally be called questions of identity and of the responsibilities which some would assume to be bound up with what they may take the relevant identity to be. Any and every human being, identifiable as such by virtue of bearing the logically universal characteristic of having been born to a human mother, will also be both identifiable and, in principle, ­re-identifiable as being one and the same individual by virtue of the overall spatio-temporal continuity of its particular path throughout the everchanging time of its bodily existence. But one is “the person” whom one may one take oneself, or be taken by others, to be not only by virtue of the in itself anonymous particularity of one’s individual spatio-temporal continuity, essential though that continuity may be to securing one’s

An Inconclusive Conclusion 189 individual particularity. Notoriously, the question of whether the identifiably same individual human being is in all its changing circumstances properly identifiable as the same person is much more problematic, and will depend on just what in the relevant culture are taken to be the essential attributes and values of personhood – in so far, that is to say, as the culture in question actually possesses anything that can be reckoned to be properly translatable as equivalent to the concept of a person that “we” may on the whole take ourselves to possess. Memory, as Locke so famously saw, is of evidently prime importance in estimations of personal identity over time, as too is personal character and the values by which one may seek to stand – but neither are assured either of matching the continuity through time that may be shown by the empirically identifiable body or, for that matter, of the particularity that is necessary to identifiably unique individuation. Continuity of identity – as the same individual human being, as the same person, as the same institution or group, as the relevant case may be – is also necessary to the attribution of responsibility for both achievements and for misdeeds. (And here the dilemmas created by the pressures of incompatible conceptual commitments may come to reinforce those rooted in the conflicting presumptions of, on the one hand, the causal explicability in principle of all empirically identifiable particular behaviour and, on the other, the ultimately inescapable responsibility of “subjects” endowed with the transcendentally assured possibility of autonomous rational choice.) So under what concept can I, as I come to the writing of this finally inconclusive paragraph, best think of myself as having the identity of being the same continuing “whatever” that I was over now more than eighty odd years ago – or, if it comes to that, as “I” was seventy, sixty, forty or twenty years back or at any other point in past time – or, indeed, as “I” may (or may not) be at some possible point in the future? The question is one that seems to carry with it the presumption that there must be some definitive answer in terms of a “self,” a “subject” or a “something, I know not what” that will have persisted and will maybe continue to persist as an identity of some sort, whatever the changes it might have undergone or have still to undergo throughout its passage through time. Yet it seems – at the same time, as it were – to be a question to which there can in principle be no forever definitive and certain answer. Or perhaps this is in some sense the answer: that the human situation is indeed one of fundamental meta-paradox and mystery, a mystery to which we are committed to search for a resolution while knowing that the only resolution to be found lies in knowing that there is no such conceptually definitive resolution for us to find. As he came to the end of his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Wittgenstein famously concluded by maintaining that “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence” (Wittgenstein 2001, 89). It may well

190  Values and Responsibilities be, however, that we are nevertheless condemned to carry on trying to speak of it all the same.

Works Cited Kant, Immanuel. 1950. Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by Norman Kemp Smith. London: Macmillan. Kant, Immanuel. 1948. The Moral Law or Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. Translated by H. J. Paton. London: Hutchinson’s University Library. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 2001. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Translated by D. F. Pears, and B. F. McGuinness. London and New York: Routledge.

Index

1 Samuel 141 2 Samuel 139 Adorno, Theodor W. 4 Allison, Henry 69 analytic philosophy 3, 18, 21 – 22, 24 – 25, 27, 32 – 33, 37, 86, 99, 103, 131 animals 64, 66 – 67, 69, 78, 121, 134, 152 “anonymous Christianity” 11, 164 – 165, 170 antinomies 4, 66, 69, 78, 87 “Anti-Private Language Argument” 76, 130 – 131, 153 – 155 arbitrium brutum 64, 134 Arendt, Hannah 7 – 8, 10 arguments: argument structures of philosophy 99 – 100, 105 – 108, 132 – 133; deconstructive claims 87 – 91; philosophical 19 – 20; rational arguments 91, 103, 111, 120 – 121, 132; reasoned argument 20, 28, 43, 58 Austin, John 101, 104 Bahå’i faith 166 belief 167 – 170, 173 Berlin, Isaiah 9 – 10 Bor, Michael 114 Buddhism 18 Cartesian doubt 115 Categorical Imperative 66, 122, 132, 152, 157 causal determinism 64, 68, 74, 77 – 81, 95, 175, 187 causal inter-connection 118

causal ordering 121 causal sequence 118 choice 66 – 83 Christian theology 123 Collins, Randall 38 compassion 9, 135 – 137, 141 – 142 Confucius 159 contextual understanding 18 – 19, 23 continental philosophy 24 – 27, 37 – 38, 86, 99, 100 continuity 116, 189 contradiction: Law of NonContradiction and 90; paradox of 36, 57 – 58, 73, 81 – 83, 96, 125, 186; within philosophical thinking 4, 102, 171, 173, 175; resolving 86 – 87; types of 81 – 83 Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, The (Husserl) 34 Critique of Judgement (Kant) 42 Critique of Pure Reason (Kant) 66, 85 – 86, 184 David, King of Israel 139 – 141 deduction 146 “Democracy and Value Pluralism” (Galston) 142 – 143 Derrida, Jacques 1 – 2, 4 – 5, 8, 9, 11, 20, 87, 95, 181 – 182 Descartes, René 24 – 25, 99, 115, 131, 184 desires 85, 122, 134, 138 Dialectic of Reason 20 “discourse” 92 – 93, 100 – 102 doctrinal commitments 162 – 172 doctrinal indeterminacy 170 Dworkin, Ronald 173

192 Index Eagleton, Terry 89 ecumenism 11, 171 – 173, 176 Edge of Words, On the (Williams) 171 “elective” choice 66 – 83 “Empirical/Natural Subject, The” 70 “Empty Formalism Objection” 156 – 157 facts 44, 53 – 57, 75, 89, 92 – 93, 154, 156, 164, 170, 182 “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority’ ” (Derrida) 9 forgiveness 135 – 141 Foucault, Michel 92 Franklin, Myrtle 114 Fraser, Giles 174 freedom 67 – 68 Freedom and Reason (Hare) 22, 56 – 57 “Free Rider Objection” 155 – 156 free will 51, 78, 187 Frege, Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob 37 Freud, Sigmund 93 Galston, William 142 – 143 Gemara 137, 141 Gibeonites 139, 141 Glendinning, Simon 2 God 11, 123, 135, 167, 173; see also Supreme Deity Granel, Gérard 34 Grice, Paul 108 Groundwork to the Metaphysic of Morals (Kant) 6, 20, 29, 66, 72, 186 Gutting, Gary 170 Haack, Susan 111 – 112 Habermas, Jürgen 76, 94 Hanina bar Hama 137 Hare, R. M.: Freedom and Reason 22; Freedom and Reason (Hare) 56 – 57; Language of Morals, The 21 – 22 Havel, Václav 151, 157 – 158 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 100 Heidegger, Martin 8, 20 Holocaust/Shoah 135 – 137 Holy Bible 137, 141 “holy will” 64, 121, 134 Hume, David 25, 37, 53, 78, 85, 101, 115 Husserl, Edmund 34 – 40 “Ideal Speech Community Argument” 76 identity 37, 53 – 56, 74 – 77, 187 – 189

imperatives 22, 44, 75, 152; see also Categorical Imperative incommensurable values 9 – 10, 141 – 142 individualist doctrine 156 integrity 108 – 112 intellectuals: definition of 146, 148; intellectual understanding 16; political responsibility of 6 – 7, 145 – 159 intelligibility 23 – 24 inter-faith dialogue 166 Judaism 135, 143, 187 judgments 53, 117, 146 – 147, 152, 157, 173 justice 9, 135 – 142 Kant, Immanuel: activity of reasoning 64 – 66; Categorical Imperative 66, 122, 152, 157; causal determinism 64, 68, 74, 77 – 81, 95, 175, 187; Critique of Judgement 42; Critique of Pure Reason 66, 85 – 86, 184; doctrine of Transcendental Idealism 3, 5, 28, 63, 72, 95, 111, 124 – 125; “doing philosophy” 27 – 29; First Critique 3; Groundwork to the Metaphysic of Morals 6, 20, 29, 66, 72, 186; meta-paradox of 3 – 4, 36, 57 – 58, 82 – 83, 186 – 187; Moral Law 67, 122; nature of knowledge 115 – 122; normative moral system 6 – 8; paradox of 36, 66 – 83, 95 – 97, 153, 184 – 186; philosophical discourse of 101; Schematism 44; Second Analogy 185; self-identity 5, 75 – 77, 116 – 124; theory of dual-aspect constitution of man 28, 63 – 64, 67 – 70, 72 – 75, 77 – 79, 81, 151 – 153; “transcendental illusion’ 85 – 86; view of what it is to be a human being 115 – 124, 151 – 152, 158 – 159 Kenny, Anthony 99 Kirsch, Adam 11, 175 Kitcher, Philip 175 – 176 knowledge 18, 21, 70, 120 – 121, 184 – 185 language 20, 57, 87 – 89, 100 – 102, 130 – 132, 153 – 155 Language of Morals, The (Hare) 21 – 22 Lau, D.C. 159 Law of Non-Contradiction 90

Index  193 Levinas, Emmanuel 7–10, 129–135, 137, 139–143  liberty 78 – 79 Life after Faith (Kitcher) 175 literary discourse 28 literature 2, 187 Locke, John 27 logical judgment 117 MacManus, Denis 34 Marx, Karl 93 meaning 27, 44, 46 meaningfulness 35, 41, 44, 46, 76, 89 – 90, 159 memory claims 118 – 119 Mephibosheth 140 meta-paradox 3 – 4, 57 – 58, 186 Montefiore, Claude 114 Montefiore, Moses 114 – 115 Moore, Adrian 49 morality 6 – 8 Moral Law 67, 122 moral value judgements 22 mutual understanding 95 – 96 Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm 93 “No ‘Ought’ from an ‘Is’ Objection” 156 normativity 44 – 45 “noumenal object” 111 noumenal realms 91, 111 “Noumenal Subject, The” 70 objectivity 117 – 119 Oedipus 138 original sin 142 “Ought implies Can” principle 137 – 138 paradox 36, 66 – 83, 95 – 97, 153, 184 – 186 particular 5, 8, 22, 69, 133 – 134, 179 – 180, 186 – 187 passions 45, 79, 85, 94 Peer Gynt (Ibsen) 72 phenomenal realms 91, 97, 111 philosophical understanding 17 – 19, 23 – 24 philosophy: activity of 15 – 17, 24, 33, 35, 46 – 47, 49 – 50; analytic philosophy 3, 18, 24 – 25, 27, 32 – 33, 99, 103, 131; argument structures 99 – 100, 105 – 108, 132 – 133; calling of 39 – 41; continental philosophy 3, 24 – 27, 37 – 38, 100; crisis in 32 – 47;

doctrinal divide of 28 – 29; “doing philosophy” 15 – 29, 50, 178 – 179, 181 – 189; doing philosophy “without getting one’s feet wet” 11 – 12; frontiers of 48 – 59; as lived and living practice 6; loss of faith in itself 35 – 36; philosophical discourse 100 – 105; “problem approach” to doing 25 – 26; Socratic Paradox 22, 50 – 52; stagnation in 38; subject of 48 – 49; “unstable stable position” of 10, 180 – 183 Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline (Williams) 49 Pick, Hella 136 Plantinga, Alvin 170 “Plurality” 71, 123, 134, 141 – 142 political responsibilities: of intellectuals 145 – 159; notion of 146 – 147; personal truthfulness and 156 Power of the Powerless, The (Havel) 157 – 158 pragmatism 176 principle of non-contradiction 36 “Private Language Argument” 185 Pure Reason 36 Quine, Willard Van Orman 90 Quinton, Anthony 38 Rahner, Karl 11, 164 – 167, 173 rational arguments 91, 103, 111, 120 – 121, 132 rational autonomy 68, 73 “Rational Subject, The” 70 reason: abandonment to passion 94; activity of 43 – 44, 46 – 47, 99; demands of 152; dialectic of 20; human subjectivity and 42; meaning and 35 – 36, 44, 46; meta-paradox of 3 – 5; Moral Law and 67, 122; paradox of 95 – 97; practical 104, 122; reasoned argument 20, 28, 43, 58; relation between reasoning and 42 – 44, 85, 91, 93; responsibility and 6 – 7, 133 – 134; self-undoing 36, 85 – 97; “Truth” and 44, 46; values and 35, 41, 44, 46 – 47 reasoning: activity of 2, 46 – 47, 64 – 66, 73, 78, 95, 100 – 101, 106, 111; causal determinism and 81; conclusive 94; parity of 70; practical 104; relation between reason and 42 – 44, 85, 91, 93

194 Index “refined religion” 176 religion 11, 162 – 176, 187 Religion Without God (Dworkin) 173 responsibility: to all fellow human beings 135; Categorical Imperative of 132; moral case for 148, 150; political responsibility of intellectuals 145 – 159; reason and 6 – 7, 133 – 134; reciprocity of 131 – 132; towards our fellow Jews 135; with unconscious 138 rhetoric 2, 43, 101 Ricoeur, Paul 105 Rizpah Bat Aiah 141 Romain, Jonathan 166 Rorty, Richard 36, 94, 95 Rosen, Michael 173 – 174 rules 27 Russell, Bertrand 37 Ryle, Gilbert 101 Saul, King of Israel and Judah 139 – 140 self-awareness 67, 117 – 120, 124, 175 self-contradiction 7, 38, 133 self-deception 22, 51, 138 self-identity 5, 74 – 77, 116 – 124 Sheehan, Thomas 165 Sir Moses Montefiore (Franklin and Bor) 114 Smith, Patrick Nowell 108 Sociology of Philosophies, The (Collins) 38 Socrates 7, 50, 75 Socratic Paradox 22, 50 – 52 soul 123, 133, 166 Sources of the Self (Taylor) 75 space 119 speech 130 – 131 speech act theory 101 Stevenson, C. L. 28 “Subject-in-Itself, The” 70 Sunflower, The (Wiesenthal) 135 – 136 Supreme Deity 162 – 164, 168 – 172, 174 – 175; see also God Talmud 132, 137, 140 Taylor, Charles 75, 76 – 77 Teale, Ernest 21 time 27, 64, 68, 116, 118 – 119 Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (Wittgenstein) 189 Trakakis, N. N. 171 Transcendental Idealism 3, 5, 28, 63, 72, 95, 111, 124 – 125

“transcendental illusion’ 85 – 86 “Transcendental Subject, The” 70 – 71 Treatise of Human Nature (Hume) 115 “Truth” 29, 44, 46, 106, 111, 146 – 150, 152 – 153, 156 Truth and Truthfulness (Williams) 94 truthfulness 7, 106 – 108, 110, 147 – 148, 156, 158 understanding: contextual 18 – 19, 23; intellectual 16, 18, 20 – 21; mutual 95 – 96; philosophical 17 – 19, 23 – 24; reflexive 23 – 24; seeing 18 – 19; views of 17 – 19 unitary subject 3, 116 “Unity” 70, 71, 116, 123, 124 universal 5, 8, 22, 69, 133 – 134, 179 – 180, 186 – 187 universal reason 5, 45, 67, 73, 123 “unmeetable demands” 8 untruthfulness 107 validity 29, 93, 103, 108, 111, 146 – 150, 152 – 153, 156 value pluralism 9 – 10 values: belief in existence and/or nature of Supreme Deity and 164; facts and 53 – 57; incommensurable values 9 – 10, 141 – 142; moral 162, 172; moral-cum-political 129, 143; of personhood 189; reason and 35, 41, 44, 46 – 47; of truth and validity 29, 46, 148, 152 virtue: of contradiction, 102; of justice 9, 140, 142; as knowledge 18, 21, 70; of personal compassion 9, 142; responsibility as 7, 158; uncontroversial 188; uncorrupted 109 Wiesenthal, Simon 135 – 137 will 22, 50 – 52, 64, 70, 78, 121, 134, 137, 174, 178, 187 Williams, Bernard: on history of philosophy 24; Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline 49; Truth and Truthfulness 94 – 95 Williams, Rowan 171 Winch, Peter 90, 148 – 149, 159 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 20, 58, 76, 153 – 155, 159, 185, 189 Wong Cheong San, Norman 164 Yerushalmi, Yosef Hayim 1, 113, 178, 183