Author: john mcgowan

Gaita 3: Examples and Conversation

I want now to discuss the other two ways that Gaita thinks one might achieve “moral understanding,” i.e. move from blindness concerning the infinite worth of each individual human being to an intense awareness of that “absolute” fact. That awareness would then be the most fundamental determinant of how one acts in the world, in how one orients one’s being-in-the-world (to use Heideggerian language that Gaita does not deploy).

What we might call Gaita “a-rationalism” when it comes to “moral understanding” underwrites his turn to examples. “[D]eepened moral understanding is a movement towards necessity, of the world becoming, as Iris Murdoch puts it, ‘compulsively present to the will.’ The example reveals that a deepened understanding of the nature and reality of evil is not always a deepened understanding of the reasons for not doing it, and why it is a mistake to believe that reflection on the nature of good and evil is always, or even most importantly, reflection on a certain class of reasons for action, of considerations which may have a legitimate speaking-voice in a piece of practical reasoning” (234). (I will want to contest the appeal to “necessity” here in a future post.)

I assume the hedge of “not always” in the passage just quoted is to guard against “performative contradiction.” After all, Gaita’s book is an extensive, very reason dependent, argument about the limits of reason. So he has to acknowledge some role reason might play in moral deliberation.

Still, he wants to claim that examples—seeing someone act in ways that display their care for another human being in ways that inspire admiration and emulation–are central to developing moral understanding. What it means to care for someone, to enact one’s valuing of them qua human being, has more to teach us about, to lead us to, goodness than all the generalizing treatises of the intellectuals. “We do not discover the full humanity of a racially denigrated people in books by social scientists, not, at any rate, if those books merely contain knowledge of the kind that might be included in encyclopedias. If we discover it by reading, then it is in plays, novels, and poetry—not in science but in art” (335). [The touching faith of certain philosophers—Cavell, Nussbaum—in the efficacy of art stands in stark contrast to the despair so many artists feel as they accept Auden’s resigned conclusion that “poetry makes nothing happen.”]

The example is concrete, individual, and has a real presence in the world in ways that generalized statements do not. There is a kind of ontological nominalism here; only the particular is real, is actually instantiated—and thus it has the potential to impact us in ways that mere words (or mere reasons made up of words) cannot.

Like many others, Gaita follws Kant here—and suggests that the Critique of Judgment, ostensibly about aesthetic judgments, actually also offers a better account of morality than Kant’s rationalist account of practical reason does. When it comes to ethical judgment:

“[T]here is . . . discussion and argument, but it should be argument informed by the realization that it cannot, discursively, yield a standard, or set of standards, in the light of which all examples are to be judged. No example is self-authenticating, but it does not follow that their place in our judgments is merely to guide us to discursively established principles of which they are intuited instances. Nor can any example play a role akin to that of the standard metre, for that would distort the necessarily provisional place they have for those whose judgments they have inspired and shaped. That is reasonably evident in aesthetic cases, and I think it is the same in ethical ones. When I speak of examples, I am thinking primarily of what has moved us in the speech and actions of others and because of which we stand in certain judgments and reject others. Philosophy has been suspicious of the fact that we learn by being moved because of a mistaken conception of thought that judges this [i.e. being moved] as its [i.e. thought’s] desertion” (270, Gaita’s italics). “I acknowledge that [the} acceptance of [such] judgments as judgments depends upon a richer conception of critical thinking and of the relation between thought and feeling than is presently available in the mainstream philosophical tradition” (41).

It is but a small step from this claim that we are more likely to be moved, to learn, from examples (presumably both positive and negative ones) to coming down on the Humean side of viewing “sensibility” as more crucial to one’s ethical posture in the world than any kind of Kantian rational procedure. “The corruptions of Raskolnikov’s [main character in Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment] remorse were not merely a result of his failure to understand properly what he had done, nor were they merely in self-deceiving service to such a failure of understanding. They were a form of his failure to understand [i.e. his reflections and remorse did not focus on the humanity of his victim]. Such interdependence of understanding and response is what I want to stress . . . It is sometime conveyed by the word ‘sensibility.’ Most forms of moral corruption are corruptions of sensibility” (35). I take it that this claim means that it is not reasoning poorly or in faulty ways that makes one morally corrupt, but by having the wrong dispositions, the wrong orientation to the “condition” of being a human who occupies a world with other humans.

And it is in shaping such a sensibility that Gaita places the efficacy of examples. The love displayed by “saints” in their actions in the world “has a revelatory role. Sometimes we see that something is precious only in the light of someone’s love for it. Love’s capacity to reveal is, in part, a function of the authority of the lover. It also depends on our openness to this kind of authority. . . . The love of saints depends on, builds on and transforms, [a] sense of individuality. It deepens the language of love, which nourishes and is nourished by our sense that human beings are irreplaceable and, because of that transformation, it compels some people to affirm that even those who suffer affliction so severe that they have irrecoverably lost everything that gives sense to our lives, and even the most radical of evildoers, are fully our fellow human beings. As with the love it transforms, the love of saints plays a constitutive and revelatory role” (xxiv).

The educative role of the example—and its relation to “feeling and character”—is stressed when Gaita writes (again, the italics are his): “Aristotle was closer to the truth when he said if we want to know what justice is then we should turn to the example of the just man—but we must have eyes to see. For Aristotle, the education of feeling and character was an epistemic condition of right judgment on what could only be discussed as authoritative example” (46). From Wittgenstein, Gaita derives the conviction that “[k]knowledge that another person is in pain is not an achievement that can be characterized independently of certain affective dispositions” (176).

To place such a strong emphasis on “sensibility” and “affective dispositions” and “feeling and character” is to end up with 1) fairly bald assertions when it comes to trying the see why some people have “moral understanding” while others do not and 2) trying to find the mechanisms (remorse, examples) for moving people toward moral understanding (i.e. the topic of this post and my previous one).

Here’s the bald assertion: “Moral understanding requires that those who would claim to have it should be serious respondents to morality’s demands. Someone who cannot be responsive to morality’s demands is one for whom morality has no reality. The ‘reality” of moral values is inseparable from the reality of it as a claim on us, and serious responsiveness to that claim is internal to the recognition of its reality” (59). [I will have much to say about the ways “seriousness” is deployed by Gaita in his book in subsequent posts. The term is close to a tic in his writing, trotted out every time his argument hits a nodal point where sheer assertion is offered.]

The example does something reason, as the philosophers understand it, cannot do. It inspires emulation. I think in fact, that Gaita often verges on saying that the example compels emulation. Certainly, that explains his concern with “authoritative” examples. But he hasn’t much to offer as to what would actually lead someone to be properly “responsive” to the example, to accept (through its offices) the “authority,” the “reality,” of “moral values” and their “claims” upon him. It seems obviously, trivially, true that a moral person takes moral values seriously. And it seems at least plausible to say that examples can work to move a person toward taking moral values seriously. But there is still the mystery of why examples “move” some people, but fail to move others.

The final means toward moving someone to moral understanding that Gaita offers is “conversation.” The transformation conversation offers is not (emphatically) our “need to learn from others only because of our limited epistemic and logical powers” (275). Rather, what conversation can open our eyes to is “the reality of other human beings” (277),–that is, to the fundamental truth that Gaita has hammered on as the most important plank for a human morality. Here is the full description of how conversation is to effect this realization. (Thus, conversation like love, and the examples of saintly and dastardly action, is revelatory.)

“Conversation promises and threatens surprise. Martin Buber said that ‘talking to oneself’ is utterly different from talking to someone else, and that the difference is marked by the fact that one cannot be a surprise to oneself in the way that another can be. [Here we get a long passage of Buber’s.] The surprise Buber speaks of is not conditional upon routine or ignorance. It is a kind of shock at the realization of how other than, and other to, oneself another human being can be. It is the shock of the reality of other human beings, and the strange and unique kind of individuality of their presence. . . . It is in connection with such as sense of reality that we should understand Socrates’ insistence on conversation and the kind of presence he required of himself and his partners” (277).

Conversation, then, stands for a full encounter with the other, the kind of encounter which brings home forcefully the other’s reality as other. That, of course, does not guarantee that I will then value that other (although Gaita seems to assume some kind of equivalence between recognition of otherness and valuing the other’s irreplaceable individuality.)

But I don’t mean to sneer here. One of the dilemmas in current day America is how to communicate across divides that have become entrenched, how to even have any communication take place at all when everyone is locked into their own echo chambers. The inefficacy of general (broadcast) media to shift hearts and minds is all too obvious (even accepting the influence of Fox News). Gaita’s discussion of conversation is still too abstract—we want the dialogue to lead to more nuanced, particular, convictions than some general affirmation of the other’s otherness. On the other hand, even getting that far would be very welcome. And it certainly does seem that face-to-face encounters are more likely to “move” people from entrenched stances than anything they are going to get from the non-face-to-face flows of opinion and information from the news media or from social media. How to enable potentially transformative conversations does seem to me a vital question for our times. To pooh-poo in advance the possible effectiveness of such interactions is to throw in the towel before even making any attempt at betterment.

Enough for today. I want to make a detour into talking more directly about hatred and violence in the next post—before returning to Gaita’s Socrates-inspired understanding of a meaningful life.

Evil: Remorse and Moral Understanding (Gaita 2)

I am envisioning four or five posts on Raimond Gaita’s book, Good and Evil: An Absolute Conception (Routledge, 2^nd edition, 2004). This is the second of those posts.

The topic today (and in at least one subsequent post) is how Gaita thinks one might achieve moral understanding, where that understanding is 1) a realization of the other’s preciousness (with the corollary of understanding evil as treating a person in a way that violates his/her preciousness) and 2) not a kind of knowledge, i.e. not a fact owned as an intellectual possession (the way I know that Paris is the largest city in France), but instead is experienced as an orientation, a fundamental disposition, that infuses everything I think and do and feel. It is primary and absolute, the most important determinant of how I am in the world, of how I treat others, and of how I understand myself.

Since it is obvious that many people lack that understanding, that they treat others as mere things, there must be some way to think about how one might be moved from dispositional states that enable evil deeds (where evil is defined as mistreating others either physically or psychologically.) James Baldwin speaks in his essay “Equal in Paris” of those for whom “the pain of the living is not real.” Gaita associates evil with exactly the sort of imaginative lack that Baldwin notes. We might, following Wittgenstein, call this failure “aspect blindness.” Evil is done by those who blind themselves, either willfully or involuntarily, to the reality of the other person as fully human, fully capable of the kinds of pain, aspirations, goodness, and worth as myself. One way that Gaita expresses this idea is to say moral understanding recognizes the other “as an intelligible object of someone’s love” (146). {I will, inspired in part by Baldwin, want to talk about “hate” presently.}

Gaita offers three ways in which someone who lacks that imaginative grasp of the other as fully human might come to understand it. 1) Remorse; 2) example of goodness; 3) “conversation.” I will be examining each of these in turn. From the outset, let it be noted that stated baldly each of these looks remarkably feeble. How could they even remotely be up to the task? But think about the usual recourses in efforts to “convert” the perpetrator of evil. Here’s the four I can think of.

1)Moral injunctions, stated either as commandments or principles.

2) Legal constraints, i.e. sets of strictures that attempt to establish guardrails against various kinds of behavior deemed unacceptable/harmful, underwritten by sanctions against those who trespass against those strictures.

3) Persuasion via rational argumentation (i.e. moral philosophies that set out to “demonstrate” by one means or another) that evil is bad, so you shouldn’t do it.

4)Violent coercion, either through various forms of punishment (exile, confinement [prison], ostracism, or corporeal harm) or through extermination (execution, war).

The limits of #3, persuasion, are all too obvious. #4, Violence, doesn’t so much address the conversion issue as conclude, despairingly, that no conversion is possible, so evil doers must not be tolerated and should be punished—with the well known effect that violence becomes reciprocal and escalates. Violence does not solve anything; it just leads to more violence. #2, legal constraints, are an attempt to structure coercions in ways that stop short of violence in at least some cases (where voluntary compliance can be achieved for the vast majority) and to establish safeguards against arbitrary exercises of power. The “rule of law” is not to be sneezed at; in a highly imperfect world, the law is about the best expedient we have come up with to reign in some of human beings’ worst impulses/failings. The chaos endemic to “failed states” makes the achievements of legal realms precious. But the ability—and endless efforts—of people to twist the law to their own advantage means that it is very hard to credit the law with the kinds of “moral understanding” that Gaita aspires to. The law is always only a “second best,” a prudent response to the despairing conclusion that humans are everywhere prone to evil and that we need to safeguard against that proclivity. And it prove a tricky task, one that is very often not successfully achieved, to keep the law from being simply a disguised and apparently more “civil” version of violence. The link between the law and punishment is the bridge from the legal to the violent. Finessing that connection is difficult indeed–especially for someone, like me, who wants to believe that the law does not necessarily reduce to violence, that it can have a legitimacy and an efficacy separate from its deployment of violence in certain instances. Finally, #1, moral injunctions (whether arrived at through philosophical reasoning such as found in Kant or Bentham, or announced as commandments that come from on high) hardly seem very effective when weighed against the atrocities of human history. Ages of faith (such as the Middle Ages are sometimes claimed to be) hardly seem more free of abuses of fellow humans by the faithful than ages deemed decadent because obedience to divine commandments is lacking. No set of beliefs in either principles developed by moral philosophy or in commandments proffered by religion seems to insure virtue or to prevent doing grevious harm to others. As is often noted, such principles and commandments are all too often used to justify harming others–as heretics, reprobates, or not fully human.

In short, Gaita’s list of transformative possibilities only looks excessively feeble if we have some exalted (and, to my mind, unrealistic) idea of other possible means of moving the evil-doer to goodness. It is certainly worth noting that Gaita’s bias here is very individualistic. His antipathy to “principle” and to rationalist arguments means that he is uninterested in general remedies, eschewing (quite explicitly) what might be called “systematic” or “overarching” approaches.

This individualistic bias is, in fact, central to his whole approach to morality. The preciousness of the other can only, for Gaita, be experienced meaningfully in the individual instance. We experience (understand) humanity’s preciousness only through the encounter with an individual we recognize as precious. He has no truck with generalized sentiments about universal brotherhood or loving all human kind. He deems those notions “sentimental” and is scathing throughout his book about the delusional, self-deceiving, and non-lucid fatuities of sentimentalism. (See pages 306-307).

Remorse is absolutely central to Gaita’s whole book because it focuses in on the individual—both the individual who does the harm and the individual who has been harmed. Remorse generates moral understanding through the lens of the individual experience of having done harm and now feeling remorseful about it. “Remorse teaches us what it is to wrong another. I would put the point more generally like this. . . . It [remorse] discloses the fundamental determinant of our understanding of what it is to be a human being. It is fundamental because it radically transforms what conditions it. What it is to be a friend, what it is to be a husband, what it is to be a lover, what it is to be a respondent to another’s call to seriousness—these are transformed under the shock of what a human being is disclosed to be in serious remorse” (151).

My first reaction to this passage is to summon up a word Gaita never uses: vulnerability. What makes a human precious, or at least what Gaita terms an “immediately intelligible object of remorse,” is the fact of how vulnerable that human is to being hurt (by what I or another might do). The “condition” that remorse causes to come dramatically into view is that susceptibility to being hurt. Humans are fragile creatures—and evil is taking advantage of that fragility, sometime for reasons of gaining certain advantages, and sometimes for the sheer pleasure of harming another. Remorse is being repulsed by the vision of the hurt one has caused. That vision brings home the fact of the other’s vulnerability—and, thus (in Gaita’s view), not only a reaction against my having exploited that vulnerability, but also a more general recognition of the “condition” of vulnerability I share with all other humans. Some essential element (“fundamental” Gaita says) has been “disclosed” through this individual experience of remorse.

“When we ask what makes . . . an obligation a moral obligation–then I think we should seek at least some part of the answer in the kind of elaboration we give when we express most seriously our sense of what it means to wrong someone. Nowhere is that sense more sober than in lucid remorse. ‘My God what have I done. How could I have done it?’ Those are the typical accents of remorse. They do not (I argue) express an emotional reaction to what one has done, but a pained, bewildered–or perhaps, better, incredulous–realisation of the full meaning of what one has done” (xxi). My italics–because I want to return to these issues of “meaning,” “lucidity,” and “seriousness” in subsequent posts. For now, I just need to highlight that remorse entails a “realisation” of 1) what doing wrong to another means and 2) a recognition that I am the one who did this wrong.

Gaita places a huge emphasis on the way that remorse is connected to “haunting.” “One way of characterising remorse in its difference from some other moral reactions is to say that it is possible only over what has the power to haunt us. That power is a certain kind of individuality . . . . [It would] be a form of her humanity becoming manifest to him, of his seeing her as ‘another perspective on the world’ (in the sense in which we use that expression to remind ourselves, and others, of the reality of another human being)”.(157). The concrete example (which explains the use of the pronoun “her”) is of a man who has raped a woman. Remorse would entail his being “haunted” by that rape—and would entail her now being “manifest to him” as another human being. Similarly, Gaita returns several times to the idea of a murderer being “haunted” by his victim. “A murderer’s remorse is as it is because he murdered a human being, but in order for him to understand that, his victim must remain with him in his distinctively human individuality, for that is what it is to be a human being in any sense that makes the murder of a human being an immediately intelligible object of remorse. . . . He is haunted by the particular being that he murdered” (149; 148).

What can we say about this “haunting”? It is all so Dickensian, conjuring up pictures of Jonas Chuzzlewit in the throes of the maddening aftermath of committing murder. Are murderers and rapists really haunted by their misdeeds—and, even more to the point, by their victims? I suspect, in the case of rape at least, that the victim is much more likely to be haunted by the crime than its perpetrator. Is PTSD triggered by having killed—or by having been wounded or by having been a witness to the killing of one’s comrades? I mean this as an open question. But it is one that has Socratic implications (to be explored in subsequent posts) because Gaita is deeply committed to–and tries to explain as best he can–the Soctratic claim that it is worse to do evil than to suffer evil. Some kind of “haunting” (the exact nature of which I will need to tease out) appears necessary to this notion that the consequences of doing evil are dire.

Maybe worrying about the absence of any haunting in so many case just points to the obvious fact that many fail to achieve moral understanding, they (I) never have the full reality of another human being come home to them. And, of course, being haunted by the harm one did to one’s spouse is quite different from being haunted by the harm one did to someone deemed (by whatever line of reasoning) an “enemy.” Remorse—and its concomitant haunting—is all too rare. To rely on it to combat evil seems a forlorn hope.

Yet. What can bring home to anyone the realization that doing harm to another is repugnant? Gaita will spend lots of time thinking about the harm one does to oneself when inflicting harm on others, the Socratic position. I will get to that. But for today I want to end with two final considerations.

First, Gaita usefully distinguishes between regret and remorse. In my own case, I can illustrate this by saying I have no regrets about the end of my first marriage. In every imaginable way, I think that my not remaining married to my first wife was a good thing for both of us. I have no regrets at all that we ended up divorced. But I am full of remorse for the pain I caused her as we made our way toward that divorce. I don’t know how I could have avoided causing her that pain, but I hate the fact that I did cause it. Am I haunted by the image of the “me” who inflicted that pain and by the image of the “she” who was its victim? That seems a fair characterization of the way those memories inhabit me. Am I more haunted by the harm I did than she is by the memory of the harm done to her? I sure hope so (but have no way of knowing since I have had no contact with my ex-wife since our divorce.) Has my remorse increased my “moral understanding” or made me a better person? I would say that it is hardly in my hands to answer that question. I certainly would like to think it has influenced how I have behaved in my second marriage. But I would hardly claim that it transformed me wholesale. I still have fallen into habitual patterns of relating to my partner that are harmful—and not radically different from ways I interacted with my first wife. All of which might only be a way of saying that transformation is hard, is rarely (ever?) very radical, and that our tendency toward evil (toward a failure to imagine the other as a full-bore human being) is always there and always very difficult to overcome. Transformation, especially imagined as located in one epiphanic moment, an eclat, seems to me more the stuff of theater (with those Aristotelian moments of recognition and/or reversal) than of how most lives unfold. Remorse is more endemic (at least in my experience) than marking some clear boundary before and after its arrival.

Second, I want to think briefly about hatred. Gaita (inspired particularly by Iris Murdoch and Simone Weil, both of whom he invokes many times) wants to activate what he calls “the language of love” (119) as a much more adequate way to think about a “moral understanding” of our desirable relationship to others than the vocabularies offered by the various extant moral philosophies (Kant, Bentham, and Aristotle for short). That’s why Gaita gravitates toward Socrates (along with Weil and Murdoch), because Plato places such a strong emphasis on love (in the Symposium obviously, but in other places as well).

What to say then about hatred? Gaita basically doesn’t mention it. Evil for him is blindness to the other’s humanity. But what about an active, hate-generated, desire to harm the other? A desire that might, in fact, revel in the fact of the other’s humanity, since it is precisely the fact of that humanity that makes one’s intended victim so susceptible to harm. I am thinking of torture here in all its possible manifestations. It makes little sense to torture an animal because we don’t have as extensive a sense of the kinds of suffering an animal can experience. (This might very well be a mistaken understanding of the range of animal sensations, but it remains the case—I would argue—that you cannot torture an animal by describing in full detail ahead of time what physical suffering you intend to inflict on him.)

Hatred would seem to rule out remorse, not because you deny to the one you hate full humanity, but because you believe him to be a depraved example of humanity. I have been led to think about hatred because I have been reading James Baldwin, specifically his earliest collection of essays, “Notes of a Native Son.” In that collection (all essays written between the ages of 24 and 31), Baldwin openly states that he hates white people and that he hates his stepfather. In fact, Baldwin says, having been turned by racism into a hater is one of the worst things racism did to him. “Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated and this was an immutable law” (Notes of a Native Son, 84, Library of America edition of Baldwin’s essays). Baldwin desires to purge himself of hatred (and in later writings after this volume will move to talking a lot about love), but not because of any concern for those he hates—only because of what hatred does to him.

It seems to me, however, that hatred is much easier to explain than evil; hatred is not “mysterious” the way evil can seem to be. Hatred, I would suggest, has three prerequisites: 1) an ongoing injury or harm, 2) lacking the power to either end or otherwise escape that harm being done to one, and, finally, 3) an ability to identify a specific person or persons who is inflicting the harm. (Yes, you can hate someone who has harmed you in the past but no longer has the ability to harm you. But it seems to me that hatred in such a case is unlikely to lead to action. The harmed one has managed to escape the infliction of harm and, thus, can let it go. But I am perhaps very much underestimating the strength of the desire for–and the pleasures of–enacting revenge.)

Despair rather than hatred might best describe the case where the first two requirements are met—i.e. a continuing harm one is powerless to alleviate—but where identifying the perpetrator seems impossible. (I take it this is the case for many of the economically exploited. Who concretely and specifically to blame for having a dead end job that doesn’t pay enough to afford the rent? Who to focus one’s hatred on?)

When there is a focus for the hatred, then inflicting harm can be a pleasure positively to be desired—even if the infliction of harm has little to no chance of alleviating the conditions that generated the hatred. Hence the actions of the suicide bomber or the sadism of ethno-nationalism. The desire to lash out is strong—and can prove to dominate over other desires.

I do think Gaita’s book suffers from neglecting this “positive” incentive (or driver) toward inflicting harm on others. His thinking is dominated by the “negative” driver, by the lack of an imagination capacious enough to recognize the full humanity of the other. But that lack is often willful—or, even more disturbing, not lacking at all. Instead there is a hatred of that other and a fully deliberate decision to take advantage of the other’s sharing the human condition of vulnerability.

Evil

I have finally (after more than three months) finished reading Raimond Gaita’s Good and Evil: An Absolute Conception (Routledge, 2^nd. Edition 2004). It is a dense, brilliant, and in many ways, wise book. It was very much worth reading it slowly—not just because of the intricacy of many of its arguments, but also to give myself time to ponder their implications before hurrying on. The book is, in many ways, a mess; Gaita chases any number of hares and their relevance to his central concerns are often tenuous at best. Plus he is full of prejudices—some of which lead him into taking positions that are egregiously wrong and are simply asserted, not argued for. In addition, he likes to argue against positions others are claimed to have taken without even naming who these mistaken souls are, and having his representation of their views stand as accurate since they don’t get to speak for themselves.

All these flaws are readily forgiven because there is something to stir reflection on just about every page. And now that evil (after the Hamas assault and Israel’s response) is being pondered as it was in the aftermath of 9/11, a book offering its “absolute conception” of that term should be welcome.

On one reading, Gaita’s absolute conception is awfully thin. His starting point (at least as I see it) is to accept the Kantian prescription that there is a non-negotiable obligation to respect the other; that human beings are only to be treated as ends in themselves, never as means to some other end. What Gaita adds is that this obligation is “absolute”—and that philosophers are badly mistaken when they think they can argue their way to making that obligation rational, or binding, or some such substitute for its simply being obligatory.

He presents this first assertion by way of an argument against Kant. Basically, he says it is a travesty of the sort to which only a philosopher could subscribe to think our obligation to help a suffering human being is based on a rationally arrived at conclusion that I could not will that everyone neglect that suffering person (i.e. Kant’s categorical imperative). The direction of obligation runs in exactly the opposite direction. The appeal to me to help that person is direct; it does not go through the detour of a rational calculation (of either a Kantian or a utilitarian—or even a virtue ethics—kind.) I don’t think of what the consequences of my helping will be, or what I owe myself as a rational being, or what action would reinforce my virtuous character. I am called to simply respond to the need of another. That call is absolute. Nothing more to be said.

Except of course there are 300 plus pages of more to be said. But let me first offer some of the ways Gaita strives to express this “absolute” notion of good and evil. This vision of “goodness” is grounded on “the inalienable preciousness or the infinite preciousness of every human being” (xv). “Sometimes I speak of seeing the full humanity of someone” (xv). Moral probity entails “an understanding of the distinctive kind of limit another human being should be to our will” (xix). “When we say that we are treating someone as a means to our ends, we mean that his reality as a human being does not limit our will as it should. Or, to put it more accurately,: it is part of our sense of the reality of another human being, that he be the kind of limit to our will that we express when we say that he must never be treated merely as a means to an end but as an end in himself. We express this more simply when we say we must treat him as a human being. To acknowledge the reality of another human being is to have our will engaged and limited” (278). Gaita is fond of recalling Iris Murdoch’s understanding of the “ethical task” as “seeing the world as it is,” with the primary requirement of “coming to see the reality of another person” (211), which means seeing that person as a “human being” with claims upon us. But an adequate undertaking of that task is not a matter of correct knowledge or correct principles or of following a rational procedure of either observation or decision-making. Rather, it “depends on what we attend to and on the quality of our attention” (269); such qualitative attention is best characterized as “love,” and best understood as “not prompted by love as an investigation might be prompted by curiosity, but . . . [as] itself an expression of love” (211). Goodness is a way of being in the world, a stance of careful (in every sense of the word) attention to all that occupies the world apart from one’s own self, especially attentive care of other humans.

Evil, then, is the failure to acknowledge, and actions that follow upon that failure, the preciousness of the other. A failure to attend to and to care for the other. “Because evil, as I understand it, requires a conception of preciousness violated, and because people can do evil for banal reasons, the concept of evil (that I develop) has little or no place in the characterization of people or their motives. For that reason, people who say that the concept of evil does not help explain the actions of evildoers are right. Sometime, however, appeal to the concept is necessary to characterize adequately people’s responses—the person whose remorse is informed by a sense of his victim was infinitely precious, or a spectator who responds to wrongdoing in a way informed by that same sense” (xxvi).

We might conclude from this statement that Gaita’s whole project is hopelessly abstract since it will not offer any help in solving the “mystery” of evil (i.e. how it is that people can do evil things). But what Gaita does think long and hard about is how people might be brought to “an understanding” of how others are precious or should be a limit on their own will. He calls that realization “moral understanding” and is especially good on how such understanding does not coincide with what most philosophers would understand as “knowledge” or as “justified belief.”

Thus, he wants to reject both sides of the cognitivist/non-cognitivist argument in meta-ethics. To understand the preciousness of other human beings is not like knowing that water is H2O because moral understanding is not definitive or conclusive; it doesn’t end an inquiry but in fact opens one up. How am I to act on that understanding in the almost infinite varieties of my encounters with other people? And the way I do act on that understanding is constitutive of my own character, my own way of living a life. The understanding, and how I act on it, is therefore individuating. I have not gained some general truth in reaching that understanding; I have instead been given the puzzle of how to instantiate the understanding. The ethical “task is one that cannot be completed in the sense of issuing in results that could count of the realisation if its end(s) (291). There is no recipe or formula that answers the relevant questions and gives me a blueprint for how to proceed. I can’t ever “know” all there is to know about how to act ethically. How to live a good life, one that eschews evil, means taking into account at every turn the obligation I have toward treating others as precious. What that means in different circumstances is something I need to discover in the specific instance. And there are other considerations besides avoiding evil that influence my choices about how to live—just as there are different circumstances that offer widely various options for actions that are “good.”

In short, Gaita is arguing that “true” means different things within different discourses or different “conceptual spaces” (a term he likes). His point is derived from Wittgenstein. The cognitive/noncognitive choice is forced upon us by a too rigid positivism; that false choice derives from an overly constrictive account of what counts as “true” or “real.” Either we must join the cognitivist and say that the statement “murder is bad” is “true” exactly in the same was that 2 +2 = 4 is true—or we are trapped into saying that “murder is bad” is not cognitive because it cannot meet that positivist standard of “true.” Appeals to “ordinary language” do no good here; either they are used to say moral assertions come with a claim to truth and thus underwrite “moral realism,”, or to say that people making moral assertions are just in “error” and need philosophers to show them that their truth claims are unjustified. Gaita is surely right (in my humble opinion) to say we should avoid this whole unproductive and wrongly framed debate. The whole empirical tradition from Hume through to Dewey that aspired to articulate moral truths that would be as non-contestable as mathematical ones simply failed to see that the standards of truth internal to the edifice of mathematics could not be transferred wholesale over to the standards of truth for moral statements. The canons of persuasiveness, evidence, argumentation etc. are very different in the two discursive domains.

Of course, Gaita’s “absolute” conception of good and evil means he can look very much like a non-rationalist. That is, he does seem at time to be saying that the preciousness of each human being is not something open to argumentation, to refutation by way of rational or philosophical argument. His final chapter offers a very unconvincing (to me) claim that the moral skeptic cannot be “serious”–and therefore should not be argued with. To argue with the skeptic is to already cede the terms of debate to him. Instead, the “absolute” position of an a-rational or pre-rational preciousness of every human being must hold the floor since no one (Gaita implausibly states) really denies that position. (I will have more to say about this stance in subsequent posts, partly because it returns us, I think, to the “mystery” of evil.)

Oddly in light of this grounding claim about the preciousness of the human being, Gaita insists that his argument is non-foundational. “[My] book is marked, on the one hand, by its strong opposition of fondationalism and, on the other, by its equally strong commitment to a version of the Socratic claim that an unexamined life—a life that does not rise to the requirement to be lucid about its meaning(s)—is unworthy of a human being”(xxii). What he means is that “my affirmation [of preciousness] is as firm and unreserved as it is metaphysically groundless” (xxvii). There is no philosophical demonstration available to prove that each of us is precious—just as there are no conclusive arguments to show that one fails to live a “worthy” human life is one is not “lucid” (a favorite Gaita word) about what one is doing with that life. And there is no ontological claim about the status of human beings apart from how human beings regard (and attend to ) one another. Gaita calls his position “non-reductive humanism” (xxiv); that is, the assertion of human preciousness does not “reduce” to something else. It is absolute in and of itself; self-standing, not resting upon something underneath or more fundamental than itself. Morality, he is claiming, can only rest on this absolute; attempts to ground morality on other bases—reason, consequences, notions of virtue or of flourishing, or some metaphysical reality—obscure what is actually (and awfully, in the fullest sense of that word) at stake: our treating others and ourselves in a way that attends (in the deepest and fullest possible way) to our humanness, which is given to us absolutely (no rationale for why one exists instead of not existing, and no rationale for what humans are capable to doing with that existence they have been given.)

One last point and I am going to leave it for today. The result of all this can seem like Gaita spends much of his book hectoring us (in the fashion of his hero Socrates) for not living up to the full possibilities our humanity affords us. It is true that it would hard to read this book without feeling that one has failed to live up to snuff. The other side of that coin, however, is that Gaita has an inspiring view of what a life worthy of being human could (should) look like. Much of the book plays out this vision of what can seem like super-human virtue. Far better, it seems to me, to take it as inspiring than to respond defensively to its portrait of one’s shortcomings. I will try to take that approach in future posts on the book—even as I am afraid that I will also be arguing at points that he asks more of humans than they are capable of delivering. And following that second line will bring Hamas and Israel back into focus.

Novak Djokovic and George Eliot: On Great Books (3)

I find myself compelled to return to the topic of great books as a result of reading Middlemarch with one of my reading groups. To recap: I have argued that 1) our judgments of books changes over time and is context sensitive (cultural standards and sensibilities change); 2) that institutional inertia and imprimatur mean that a canon gets established and remains stable over long periods for “elite” or institutionally embedded opinion; revolutions in taste happen suddenly after long resistance to the revolution (akin to the idea of a “tipping point” or Thomas Kuhn’s notion of a “paradigm shift”); and 3) it hardly makes sense to rank order a set consisting of all novels since there is such variety within the set (what could it mean to compare Moby Dick to one of the Jeeves novels?) and that what is deemed “best” in any context is relative to the purposes that drive the judgment or choice. Wodehouse is better than Melville on some occasions and for certain purposes. In short, variety (diversity) reigns—both in the objects being judged and in the purposes that would underline any specific act of judgment.

Then I started reading Middlemarch and wondered if I simply was wrong. That there are some achievements of human agents that simply make one shake one’s head in wonder: how could a human being be capable of that? The breadth of vision in Middlemarch, the ability to imagine a whole world with an astounding cast of characters, startles—and humbles. It seems a feat only one person in a million could pull off. It is, in short, a masterpiece. And masterpieces are all too rare.

Now it is possible to say Wodehouse also wrote masterpieces—given his aims and the genre in which he was working. And it is certainly reasonable to prefer reading Wodehouse to Middlemarch on many occasions. We get to one sticky issue here, the one best represented by Matthew Arnold insisting that Chaucer was not top drawer because his work lacked “high seriousness.” One prejudice in the “great books” canon-making is some notion (vague enough) of profundity. This is why tragedy has always been ranked above comedy, why King Lear is generally deemed greater than Twelfth Night despite each being of high quality in its chosen genre.

I don’t have anything that strikes me as worth saying about this profundity issue. I only think it should be acknowledged as a standard of judgment—and that it should be acknowledged that it is only one among many standards. And I don’t think it should be a standard that trumps all the others. Let’s discuss King Lear’s greatness in a way that specifies the standards by which we deem it great—and not indulge in meaningless comparisons to Twelfth Night, a play whose greatness is best understood in relation to other standards.

But—and here’s the rub, the reason for this blog post—I still find myself wanting to talk about the greatness of these Shakespeare plays. Just sticking to Shakespeare, comparing apples to apples, I am going to say Twelfth Night is better than Two Gentlemen of Verona; and that King Lear is better than Coriolanus. There are cases where the things to be compared are within the same domain—and one can be judged better than the other. In the realm of realistic novels that aspire to a totalizing view of a certain social scene, Middlemarch is better than Sybil. Of course, one is called upon to provide the reasons that undergird these judgments.

All of this brings me to Novak Djokovic—and the core doubt that drives this post (and this re-vision of my two earlier posts on “great books”). What is astounding about Djokovic is the gap between him and most of the incredibly talented men’s tennis players in the world. The twentieth best tennis player in world has almost no chance of beating Djokovic (especially in a five set match). There are, in fact, only (at absolute most) ten players in the world who could beat him—and even in that case he would win the match against them well over half the time.

My point is the extreme pyramid of talent. That the gap between the tenth best player in the world and the absolutely best player is so wide defies explanation and belief. It seems much more plausible to expect that the top rung of talent would be occupied by at least a group. There are, after all, many aspiring tennis players and novelists who have put in the hours (Malcolm Gladwell’s famous “ten thousand hours”), yet do not reach the pinnacle. Why is extreme talent, extreme achievement, so rare? I have no answer here. Talent is a mystery, what Shakespeare would have called “fortune”–unearned, simply implanted in the person. Of course, it is possible to waste one’s talents, just as it is crucial to nurture and hone one’s talents. But it is nonsense to think Djokovic’s supremacy is the product of his working harder and being more monomonaically dedicated to being the best tennis player in the world than his competitors. There are plenty of people just as dedicated to that goal as he is. They just lack his talent.

Could it be, then, that the term “great book” makes sense if used to designate those instances of extreme achievement, those cases where we encounter a work of human hands that awes us because it is so far beyond what most humans, even ones dedicated and talented in that specific field of endeavor, ever manage to accomplish?