Kindle Notes & Highlights
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June 29 - October 3, 2018
A little or very concerned about the opacity of this chapter but as I continued to plod on, I can see the value.
Aquinas’ thesis shines through in that a unified discourse held together by some authority political or religious provides a bedrock on which inquiry and judgment can take place.
Turning on SCOTUS and Eckhardt he shows how the destruction of the Aquinas’ synthesis was ignored and destroyed. From the former we have the separation of theology and philosophy, and where philosophy became independent and institutionalized. This led to fragmentation which eventually led to the dethronement of philosophy in the 19 th century and which continues today -
From Eckhardt he shows that rhetoric replaces reason and theology, and rightly condemned by the Church. Leads to populism which is also fragmentary and unavailable for judgment. While there is something rationality, all statements must be brought together for this judgment.
even now the organized institutions of the academic curriculum and the ways in which both enquiry and teaching are conducted in and through those institutions are structured to a significant degree as if we still did believe much of what the major contributors to the Ninth Edition believed.
refer to the belief that every rationally defensible standpoint can engage with every other, the belief that, whatever may be thought about incommensurability in theory, in academic practice it can safely be neglected.
The point and purpose of rational debate was to establish truths and only those methods were acceptable which led to the conclusive refutation of error and vindication of truth.
The accepted standards of rationality, insofar as they are generally shared, provide contemporary academic practice with only a weakly conceived rationality,
We can thus contrast the various Enlightenments’ strong conceptions of rationality with this contemporary weak conception.
So we also need to proceed by raising critical questions for encyclopaedists and genealogists, not in our terms, but in theirs. Just such a problem is posed for the genealogist, so I shall suggest in the ninth lecture, by his or her conception of personal identity. And in the encyclopaedist’s idiom no expression invites such questions more obviously and more insistently than ‘morality’ itself.
good or just action is one which “conforms to a law imposing an obligation.”
“general ideas of certain duties without which society could not sustain itself.”
but its independence is made explicit in his emphasis upon its independence of religious faith.
Moreover the truths of morality are more certain than those of faith.
The plain person, so conceived, apprehends what morality requires in a way that is compatible with those apprehensions being elicited in the course of his or her psychological development.
By contrast, for the thinkers of the Enlightenment generally the only role left open for theory is the vindication and clarification of the philosophically uninfected plain person’s moral judgments, so as to protect them against false theory.
But for the majority of Enlightenment theorists, at least as regards moral fundamentals, just because morality secures the same agreement to the same rules and conceptions of duty and obligation in all societies, it has no history. It is incapable of development.
To the moral philosopher therefore there falls a constructive task, that of organizing and harmonizing the moral beliefs of plain persons in the manner best calculated to secure rational assent from the largest possible number of such persons, independently of their conflicting views upon other matters.
It is out of the beliefs and judgments only of the civilized that rational consensus is to be constructed.
“elementary notion”
there can be rational consensus in large areas,
was the claim that the late nineteenth century’s conceptions of duties and obligations are both morally and rationally superior to the conceptions of taboo which inform alien ‘primitive’ and ‘savage’ cultures.
Indeed the various customs observed by Frazer under the rubric ‘taboo’ are for the most part abstracted and studied in isolation from the systems of thought and practice in which they were or are embedded.
they appear altogether arbitrary and meaningless.”
Thus the allocation of the rules of ritual uncleanness to one category and those pertaining to genuine holiness and moral insight to another reflected Robertson Smith’s late nineteenth-century moral attitudes, something projected into and not drawn out of the subject matter of his enquiries.
And so once again this focus upon taboo rules as negative prohibitions
ought to remind us of Franz Steiner’s thesis that in that categorizing and conceptualizing of alien cultures as different from each other as those of ancient Israel and of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Polynesia, in which contributors to the Ninth Edition were engaged, observation and explanation were structured in terms of the moral beliefs of those who observed and explained.
by invoking their own standards and not the standards of the ‘primitive’ and the ‘savage’ and by identifying as its failures and limitations what are failures and limitations in their terms, not in its.
This is why Aquinas systematically begins by setting out on any particular issue the strongest arguments yet advanced from any rival point of view against his own positions.
enter imaginatively
In this respect of course the contributors to the Ninth Edition were no different from those explorers, traders, and missionaries who had first encountered the idiom and practice of taboo rules.
The detachment of European moral rules from their place within an overall theological moral scheme, embodying and representing a highly specific conception of human nature, corresponds to the similar detachment of taboo rules.
The authors of the great canonical encyclopaedias just because they insisted upon seeing and judging everything from their own point of view turned out to have had no way of making themselves visible to themselves.
Sidgwick had argued that the only ultimate good to be sought rationally by human beings consists in happiness, that is, in the pleasant states of individual persons.
For if with Sidgwick one holds, and once one has conceded Sidgwick’s premises and methods it would be rationally impossible not to hold, that whenever the requirements of Universal Happiness conflict with those of Egoistic Happiness the choice as to what and how much to grant to each has to be understood as an arbitrary preference, then every rule as held by each individual has a prospective indeterminacy of indefinite range, for each rule is vulnerable to whatever range of exceptions each particular individual may make in his or her own favor.
Judged by its own standards and in its own terms, the project of the major contributors of the Ninth Edition failed;
The first is the pretension involved in the unwitting elevation of the culturally and morally particular to the status of what is rationally universal.
continuity of the moral enterprise.
In one respect encyclopaedist and genealogist, Sidgwick and Nietzsche agree.
history with a single subject matter and genuine continuity.
Notice that there is no word correctly translatable by our modern word ‘morality’ in any ancient or medieval language.
Embodied in that history would be the claim that, as a result of that disruption through which morality became distinct and largely autonomous, morality was rendered vulnerable to the genealogical critique.
The ability to have philosophical beliefs which extend to the universes of science-fiction is, I strongly suspect, the ability only of the inhabitants of one particular type of culture or subculture.
It is only by belonging to a community systematically engaged in a dialectical enterprise in which the standards are sovereign over the contending parties that one can begin to learn the truth, by first learning the truth about one’s own error, not error from this or that point of view but error as such, the shadow cast by truth as such: contradiction in respect of utterance about the virtues.
It is only within a community in which to some large degree shared beliefs embodying this fourfold scheme are presupposed in everyday practice–whether or not they are made explicit at the level of theory–that the concept of systematic accountability for one’s utterances and one’s actions can also inform the shared life of a community.
And that initiation has to take the form of a reappropriation by each individual of the history of the formation and transformations of belief through those practices, so that the history of thought and practice is reenacted and the novice learns from that reenactment not only what the best theses, arguments, and doctrines to emerge so far have been, but also how to rescrutinize them so that they become genuinely his or hers and how to extend them further in ways which will expose him or her further to those interrogations through which accountability is realized.
impersonality of the nineteenth-century encyclopaedia
Strategies,
From Foucault’s analysis of discourse we had already
inferred the difficulty for Foucault of giving any account of the identity, unity, and continuity of the self.
incommensurability
surprised and painfully shocked to discover that in 1940 and 1941 de Man had published articles consonant with and supportive of Nazi and anti-Semitic ideology, especially in their praise of a highly dubious conception of organic community as that from
In the late 1930s and early 1940s a great many people in Europe of right and of left, drawn from almost every point of view, temporarily lost their moral and political bearings, while a great many others of precisely the same points of view exhibited extraordinary heroism.
