Raymond Geuss

A world without why

Preface ix 1. Goals, Origins, Disciplines 1 2. Vix intellegitur 22 3. Marxism and the Ethos of the Twentieth Century 45 4. Must Criticism Be Constructive? 68 5. The Loss of Meaning on the Left 91 6. Authority: Some Fables 112 7. A Note on Lying 135 8. Politics and Architecture 144 9. The Future of Theological Ethics 163 10. Did Williams Do Ethics? 175 11. The Wisdom of Oedipus and the Idea of a Moral Cosmos 195 12. Who Was the First Philosopher? 223 13. A World without Why 231 Notes 237 Index 257

Realism and the relativity of judgement

E.H. Carr contrasts ‘realism’ with ‘utopianism’ in his major work in theorising international relations, but he ought to have contrasted it with ‘moralism’, which is a complex set of attitudes that give unwarranted priority to moral considerations in explaining and justifying human action. ‘Moralism’ is a flawed approach to politics. One should distinguish it from ‘utopianism’, which is made up of different strands, not all of which are equally problematic. One strand which has been historically important was centred around an attempt to describe and realise a perfect unchanging society, and Carr seems to have this in mind primarily when he speaks ‘utopianism’. However, there has been another strand which has focused on the social construction of ‘impossibility’ in politics, and our potential ability to undo that construction. Such utopianism is compatible with realism.

Political Philosophy: The View from Cambridge

This article reports on a conversation convened by Quentin Skinner at the invitation of the Editors of The Journal of Political Philosophy and held in Cambridge on 13 February 2001.

Economies: Good, Bad, Indifferent 1

Abstract There has been a strong tendency in economic thought to try to take human wants, desires, and preferences as the basis for deciding how to act. This essay argues that “needs” constitute a distinct category which cannot be reduced to preference. The reductive strategy is partly connected with a philosophical mistake about the relation between the subjective and the objective. The distinction between needs and wants must be central to any continuing form of human action, but it may also not be understood in such a way as to posit some purely objective (perhaps biological) needs that can be specified independently of peoples wishes and desires; nor can those desires be specified outside the context of an account of the various ways in which they arise out of, are embedded in, and are directed to “objective” features of our world.

The Moral Legacy of Marxism

Abstract Marx would not have anything much to contribute to contemporary discussions of ‘normativity’, because he would reject various of the assumptions on which they rest. Thus, he does not believe it possible to isolate ‘moral normativity’ as a distinct object of decontextualised study so as to derive from it rationally grounded imperative to individual action. This does not mean that Marx can provide no orientation for human action, but this has a different nature and structure. Marx suspicions of ethical theories are well founded, but his own productivist assumptions should be revisited.

The actual and another modernity. Order and imagination in Don Quixote

Two strange figures confront one another in one of those barren, timeless, imaginary landscapes in which gross anachronism is admissable. An elderly Spaniard, his hand resting on the hilt of his rusted sword, is undecided: who is the elegantly clad young man who bars his way? This unfamiliar young man is also armed with a sword. On his head he wears a plumed hat of black satin, with a white feather and gold embellishments. Nonetheless, there is a decidedly clerical look about him. Is he a nobleman? Or perhaps a cleric of some considerable standing? The Frenchman wipes his face, slightly reddened from his morning devotions at the altar of the God Bacchus. He is equally baffled. The comical eccentric who is examining him so closely is fiddling, for no apparent reason, with the visor of his old-fashioned helmet, which has been patched together from various bits and pieces. Does he perhaps intend an assault on him? No chronicle or tale recounts this meeting between the ingenious knight Don Quixote of la Mancha and the formidable Abbot formerly known as ‘‘Brother John the Butcher’’ (Jean des Entommeures) from Thélème monastery, an institution founded by King Gargantua. No record exists in the Grandes et inestimables Chroniques de l’énorme géant Gargantua, nor in the Segundo tomo del ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha compuesto por el licendiado Alonso Ferdinández Avallaneda. We do not therefore know the course that this meeting might have taken. But it is more than an idle thought experiment, thinking out a possible outcome for the meeting. It forces one to choose a position in the enduring debate on the nature of modernity; for since early Romantic times Don Quixote has been regarded as the first and archetypical modern novel, in whose structure one should also be able to read off the defining characteristics of the epoch. The belief implicit in early Romantic thought, that the analysis of a literary work did in some circumstances provide particular insight into important features of modernity, is perhaps less mistaken than it at first appears, if the constitution of modernity is itself linked to a particular kind of imagination.

Martin und Fritz Heidegger: Philosophie und Fastnacht, H.D. Zimmermann. Munich, Beck (2005), ISBN: 3 406 52881 3

The small town of MeXkirch lies in the extreme south of the present state of BadenWürttemberg, Germany, roughly halfway between Lake Constance and the Swabian Alps. During the first half of the 20th century, this region was still overwhelmingly rural and Catholic. Politically MeXkirch and its surrounding villages was a bastion of the (Catholic) Centre Party, which, together with the SPD, formed one of the central components of the continuing coalition of parties that kept the Weimar Republic in operation during the 1920s. In the elections of 1932 the Centre Party received an absolute majority of the votes cast in MeXkirch, and in the final election before the war (March 1933) it was still the largest single party (45% of the vote; the National Socialists received 35%; other parties the rest) (pp. 48–9). In the small towns of this poor and isolated area various traditional practices were retained into the 1960s that had elsewhere disappeared. Thus, Carneval (Fastnacht) was elaborately celebrated as a ‘Week of Fools’ during which people dressed in outlandish costumes, told jokes, and enjoyed some relaxation of the usual rules of moderation, decorum, and social docility. The high point of the week was a banquet at which Town Fools gave public speeches from a raised dais in front of the town hall. The speech of a Town Fool was expected to be a virtuoso linguistic display, full of puns, humorous metaphors, and witty juxtapositions of incongruous items. In this ultra-Catholic region where the Counter-Reformation had struck extremely deep roots, the Carneval speeches were directed as if to a particularly crude peasant audience and they were often informed by a religiously based gallows’ humour. Why worry about taxes, social advancement, or the harvest when in a quarter of an hour you could all be dead and gone to eternal damnation anyway? As in Athenian Old Comedy, the Town Fools’ speeches were full of references to local people and events, and frequently had a distinctly satirical edge that could easily veer in the direction of a kind of primitive political dissidence, although the exact nature of the dissent being registered was often hard to discern. During the 1930s, 40s, and 50s MeXkirch had an especially brilliant Town Fool, Fritz Heidegger, who was known far and wide for his quick wit, his verbal dexterity, and his sharp sense of satire. Oddly enough, he was—as it were ‘in civilian life’—both the head teller at the local bank and a serious stutterer. Heidegger’s father was a man of extremely limited means—he had a small workshop making buckets and barrels, and was sexton of the local Catholic Church—and so there had been no question of his being able to provide the necessary financial support for any form of further education for his children (pp. 14–5). In early adolescence, however, the highly gifted Fritz Heidegger obtained a scholarship from the Church authorities and went off to the Archepiscopal boarding