Charles Larmore

The Morals of Modernity

Part I. Modern Ethics: 1. The right and the good 2. Beyond religion and enlightenment 3. The secret philosophy of Leo Strauss Part II. Beyond Naturalism: 4. Nietzsches legacy 5. Moral knowledge Part III. Liberalism and Modernity: 6. Political liberalism 7. Pluralism and reasonable disagreement 8. Carl Schmitts critique of liberal democracy 9. Modernity and the disunity of reason 10. The foundation of modern democracy: reflections on Jurgen Habermas.

Liberal and republican conceptions of freedom

Freedom has a number of different senses. One of them is the absence of domination, which neo-republican thinkers have helped us to understand better. This notion of freedom does not, however, provide an alternative to political liberalism, since its proper articulation depends on distinctly liberal principles.

The Idea of a Life Plan

When philosophers undertake to say what it is that makes life worth living, they generally display a procrustean habit of thought which the practice of philosophy itself does much to encourage. As a result, they arrive at an image of the human good that is far more controversial than they suspect. The canonical view among philosophers ancient and modern has been, in essence, that the life lived well is the life lived in accord with a rational plan. To me this conception of the human good seems manifestly wrong. The idea that life should be the object of a plan is false to the human condition. It misses the important truth which Proust, by contrast, discerned and made into one of the organizing themes of his great meditation on disappointment and revelation, A la recherche du temps perdu : The happiness that life affords is less often the good we have reason to pursue than the good that befalls us unexpectedly.

The Concept of a Constitutive Subject

Against all appearances, the concept of a constitutive subject does not belong solely to the more arcane regions of modern philosophy. Kant’s transcendental philosophy did, of course, introduce the concept and provided the impetus for later attempts to think through explicitly and systematically all that that concept involves. The vast quantity and difficulty of the writings that Husserl left behind testify to the unending rigour that he thought such a task required. But the concept of a constitutive subject is not just a philosophical one, any more than perhaps any philosophical concept. For the concept embodies a response to a problem that arose along the borders between philosophy and the other domains that, in the early modern era, underwent profound revolutions. The problem was how we should make sense of the fact that man finds accessible large new areas of experience, unhoped-for discoveries, and the thorough reorganisation of his economic and political way of life, once he resolves to lay down, on his own, the conditions for experience, instead of permitting them to be dictated by the world outside.

REFLECTION AND MORALITY

Morality is what makes us human. One meaning of this common saying is plain enough. Refraining from injury to others, keeping our word, and helping those in need constitute the elementary decencies of society. If most of us did not observe these practices most of the time, or at least give one another the impression of doing so, no one would have the security to pursue a flourishing life. Even a life of basic dignity would be impossible if we found ourselves continually at the mercy of aggression, treachery, and indifference. Morality makes us human by providing rules of mutual respect without which there can be neither social cooperation nor individual achievement. However, another meaning suggests itself as well. It has to do not with morality’s function, but with its source. Other animals are like us in being able to show deference and feel affection, even to the point of sacrificing themselves for those whom they love. But morality, insofar as it involves looking beyond our own concerns and allegiances in order to respect others in and of themselves, lies beyond their ken. Does not then our very ability to think morally point to a peculiarly human power of selftranscendence, a power that we alone among the animals have of regarding ourselves from the outside as but one among others, and that finds in morality, if not its only, then certainly its most striking expression? This question engages our attention far less than it should. When people, philosophers included, wonder about the nature of morality, they tend to focus on what reasons there may be to be moral, what acting morally entails, or in what sense, if any, moral judgments count as true or false. All of these are important issues. But often the taken-for-granted deserves the greatest scrutiny. That we should be able at all to view the world impersonally, recognizing the independent and equal standing of others, involves an overcoming of self that is no less remarkable for having become largely second-nature. Among philosophers, Immanuel Kant was one of the few, and certainly the most famous, to argue directly that morality is, in this sense, what makes us human. “Duty! Sublime and mighty name, what is an origin worthy of you?” Only a freedom, he replied, that “elevates man above himself as a part of the world of sense . . . a freedom and independence from the mech-

Back to Kant? No Way

In 1798 Kant was challenged to reveal his thoughts about the recent claims of Reinhold and Fichte that they had recast the true spirit of Kant’s philosophy in a more perspicuous and better-argued form. ‘There is an Italian proverb’, Kant replied, ‘May God protect us especially from our friends, for we shall manage to watch out for our enemies ourselves’. Karl Ameriks quotes this remark at the very beginning of his marvelous and provocative book, Kant and the Fate of Autonomy,* and there is no mistaking his fundamental agreement about the relationship between the Critical Philosophy and the various movements of the succeeding decades, usually labeled ‘German Idealism’, which claimed inspiration from Kant at the same time as they sought to go beyond him. Kant, of course, did not live long enough to become acquainted as well with the writings of Schelling and Hegel. Nor can it be said that these four post-Kantians marked out similar paths in their attempts to move beyond the inadequacies they perceived in Kant’s thinking. Nonetheless, Ameriks maintains that they were at one in failing to appreciate the complexities of Kant’s own transcendental idealism, and that their failure had a common source. It was Reinhold’s image of the Critical Philosophy, his conception of what Kant had been up to and of where he had fallen short, which set the agenda for the developments that came afterwards. Ameriks has written his ‘prolegomenon to a rehabilitation of orthodox Kantianism’ (p. 269) in order to rescue Kant from the massive distortions which Reinhold, in his view, bequeathed to his successors – Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. His point is not that German Idealism was simply a mistake. But the achievements of post-Kantian German philosophy are better measured, so he believes, by the new themes and ideas it introduced than by its criticisms of Kant (p. 339). Where Reinhold, Fichte, and Hegel found fault with the master, they were largely in the wrong. Kant himself, by contrast, was on to the truth, or so it would appear from Ameriks’ deeply sympathetic account. His book adds a new and important strain to the century-old cry, ‘Back to Kant!’.

Selbstwissen und Selbstfestlegung

Abstract The only knowledge we have of our own minds is knowledge acquired in the same third-person way in which we acquire knowledge of other people’s beliefs and desires. True, when we say on the basis of reflection that we believe or desire this or that, it seldom makes sense to challenge what we say. Yet such statements are not expressions of self-knowledge. They have instead the character of avowals, expressing our commitment to think and act in appropriate ways. Such avowals do attest to an intimate relation we have to ourselves alone. But this self-relation does not consist in our being immediately acquainted with the contents of our own minds. It consists in the fact that we alone - no one else in our place - can commit ourselves to thinking and acting in various ways.

Zur Ethik des Lesens

Abstract In this article, Charles Larmore lays out the idea of an “ethics of reading”. Its concern does not lie with the consequences of reading, but rather with our very relation as readers to what we read, with our responsibility as readers to a text in interpreting what it says. Larmore discusses at length the nature of textual interpretation in order to show that this relation of responsibility is indeed ethical in nature since it consists in a relation to another person: what a text says or means is what the author effectively intended it to say or mean. Yet the ethical nature of the reading relation is special in kind since it relates us directly, not to the author, who is absent, but to the text, which unlike a person is unable to object to how it may be mistreated - that is, deliberately or negligently misread. In this fact there appears the ultimate import of the ethics of reading: it exemplifies the very essence of ethical thinking. The moral point of view consists in seeing in another’s good a reason for action on our part, apart from all consideration of our own good. As a result, our moral character shows itself most clearly in the way we treat the vulnerable, those with little power, few resources, or no social standing, who cannot make it in our interest to treat them well. In this regard, the ethics of reading does not have to do merely with one ethical relation among others. It points to the very heart of the moral point of view.

The holes in holism

This book is Ronald Dworkin’s most ambitious work, far more ambitious than its title suggests. One might suppose that it deals essentially with justice, inferring from the allusion to Isaiah Berlin’s famous essay, ‘The Hedgehog and the Fox’, that its principal aim is to offer a grand theory of this subject. Berlin, it will be remembered, used Archilochus’ line, ‘the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing’, to contrast two different intellectual attitudes toward the world: the fox, like Berlin himself, recognizes that life gives rise to many diverse and sometimes conflicting ends, which have to be balanced or held together in an uneasy truce, whereas the hedgehog believes that all our proper ends find their place in a single, overarching system. Dworkin is certainly a hedgehog in this sense. However, the unitary vision he develops in this book embraces muchmore than the nature of justice. His ambition is to tie together into one comprehensive theory all the different domains of value – both ethics, or how we ourselves are to live well, and personal morality, or howwe as individuals are to treat others, no less than political morality, which concerns howwe are to treat others, justly for instance, as members of a political community. Even the nature of interpretation, as practiced in history, law, and literary criticism, is included, because of its dependence on values. ‘Value’, Dworkin announces at the beginning of the book, ‘is one big thing’ (p. 1). Justice for Hedgehogs is not primarily a book about justice, even if justice is its ultimate target. So capacious is the theory Dworkin presents that the entire first half of the book is devoted to laying out, as an integral part of the more substantive discussions to follow, an account of the nature of value judgments in general and of what it means for them to be true or false. Generally, philosophers distinguish such ‘meta-ethical’ or second-order questions about ethics and morals from the first-order questions of ethics and morals that concern what things are in fact good and bad, right and wrong, and they often suppose that these two sorts of questions can be addressed

Einsichten und Hemmungen eines Nachmetaphysikers

Zusammenfassung Jürgen Habermas: Philosophische Texte. Studienausgabe in fünf Bänden. Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt/M. 2009, 2167 S.