Re-Thinking The Ethics Of Parsimony, Part One: On Not Cheating Contingency

By Michael W. Payne

[Michael Payne is Professor of Theology and Ethics at Reformed Theological Seminary in Jackson, Miss.]

I. Introduction

There is a growing interest in and reflection upon the relationship between epistemology and ethics in recent scholarship. In many ways, each discipline is wrestling with similar concerns. Unfortunately, these concerns are largely centered upon “getting it right,” that is, procedural questions which can insure correct belief in the former and correct acts in the latter. The question that begs to be answered is “are we even asking the correct questions”—whether they are epistemological or ethical?

Commenting on the apparent confusion of contemporary ethical reflection, Cora Diamond notes that “our habits of classification of ethical theories and modes of ethical thought.. . [often] impede our understanding and distort our perception.” According to Diamond, this is due to our “false and over-simple notions of the aim of ethics.”[1] The frequent abstraction of ethics into categories of “obligation” (deontology/Kantian formalism) or its opposing reduction to “ends-means” (teleology/utilitarianism) questions, flows from what Bernard Williams describes as the characteristically Western, post-Enlightenment tug-of-war between a broadening conceptualization of the “ethical” or a narrowing toward the “moral” (subject-centered).[2] Each trajectory generates its own picture and criteria of the ethical.[3]

Epistemologists likewise have begun to wonder about their own discipline’s emphases and the tendency toward polarization reflected, for example, in the internalist/externalist debates.[4] Recently, Linda Zagzebski has focused on the relationship between our theories of ethics and corresponding epistemological methodologies. Zagzebski argues that most theories of knowledge (which are belief-based) are analogous to act-based moral theories rather than virtue-based theories.[5] Thus, according to Zagzebski, “it is no surprise that the type of moral theory from which these approaches borrow moral concepts is almost always an act-based theory, either deontological or consequentalist.”[6] Zagzebski notes, as a result, that epistemologists, like ethicists, tend to focus their questions in one of two areas: “(1) Does the belief violate any epistemic rules or any epistemic duties, that is, is it epistemically permissible, within one’s epistemic rights? (2) Was the belief formed by a reliable process for obtaining the truth?”[7] All of this, according to Zagzebski, is to the disadvantage of epistemology that suffers in the end from a fixation upon rules (procedures) and individual beliefs and belief-states, to the neglect of the more complex way in which beliefs are formed and maintained—ways that she argues encompass both cognitive and noncognitive dimensions of knowing and doing[8] After all, in the process of making such reductive moves, we have neglected any emphasis or reflection upon such categories as understanding and wisdom. Are these concepts not compatible with our epistemological theories? If they are not, have we perhaps developed an epistemology of parsimony?

Martha C. Nussbaum’s recent work on emotions and ethics further highlights the growing concern among some ethicists that there has perhaps been a devaluing of all ethical matters not easily qualified as discursive or reducible to syllogism.[9] Where Zagzebski asks concerning the absence of virtue, wisdom, and understanding in epistemology, Nussbaum asks, “Where is the appropriate emphasis upon imagination and emotion in ethics?” Her work is a continuation in many respects of the seminal work of Iris Murdoch whose essay “Vision and Choice in Morality” was published in 1956.[10] In an attempt to offer an account of moral subjectivity, that is, the legitimate but often overlooked dimension of the role of the subject in moral living, Murdoch sees the divide between ethical reasoning falling either on what she calls the Liberal (represented by Kant among others)or the Natural Law (Hegel) side. The former argue in terms of the self that constitutes its world through its acts and choices apart from any determination (influence) from an existing antecedent order of value. The latter, who are the natural offspring of Hegel, believe that whatever aims or purposes an individual has are in fact constituted by that individual’s natural, social, and historical existence in particular communities. What remains is the absence of any mediating position that would situate man (ethically speaking) in terms of a metaphysical framework.[11] Either position is unacceptable, according to Murdoch. On the one hand, one has the self positing itself, that is, the individual being the ultimate source of all value. On the other hand, the Natural Law view encapsulates the subject in an inescapable framework that in the end becomes more about the system and less about the agent himself. If our choices are only these two extremes, it would again appear that we are left with only an ethics of parsimony.

Regardless of the genealogy one draws, whether the subject is epistemology or ethics, more and more recent scholarship is advancing the same conclusion: there is an impoverishment of moral reasoning and understanding. Both in its Kantian and Utilitarian forms, moral reasoning has been constructed in a one-dimensional way, leaving little or no room for the development of a more fully integrated view of ethics. This tendency to relegate one aspect of the moral experience to the role of the “outsider” is no better exemplified than by the non-existent or subordinate role given to imagination, perception, passion, desire, or emotion. Consequently, conceptualizations of the moral life are narrower and narrower, becoming largely procedural or calculative in nature, and once the shape of practical reason is determined a priori to function this way, the range of issues relevant to moral living are by definition already delimited. There is simply no room left for anything else to intrude.[12] Of course, neither of the previous ways of formulating the important issues (formalism or utilitarianism) is inherent in ethics qua ethics! Rather, according to Diamond, “we shape what the ethical discussion is in part by what we choose to bring together, by the patterns of resemblances and differences in ethical thought that we trace and dis-play.”[13]

In this article I will pursue the suggestive insights of Cora Diamond, Linda Zagzebski, Martha C. Nussbaum, Iris Murdoch, and others regarding the insinuation of act-based moral theory as it obscures a more robust vision of Christian living (ethics)—producing what I am referring to as an ethics of parsimony.[14] In doing so, I will attempt to lay a foundation for the recovery of a dramatic understanding of the Christian life—what I will refer to as a thick version of Christian morality—which includes a “storied imagination” as central to the development of understanding and wisdom, two essential components of moral living.

To accomplish this I have divided the article into two parts. In Part One, I will first provide a brief overview of the increasing interest[15] on the part of philosophers in reconstructing the moral-ethical landscape particularly as it relates to the role literature and the imagination might play in the work of ethics.[16] In Part Two, I will first (1) argue that the attractiveness of rules and “act-based” ethics is inherently misguided. Its appeal is based, among other things, on an impoverished understanding of moral reasoning that is predicated on a fallacious view of moral concepts and terms as univocal and literal. I will argue secondly (2) that this misunderstanding leads inevitably to an oversimplification of moral living, one that fails to encompass the full range of interconnected faculties that constitute the believer as a moral agent construed in a way most consistent with Scripture. Pursuant to this end, I will examine the suggestive use made by the apostle Paul of the cluster of terms dokimazo, aesthesis, and aestheteria as they illustrate the complex nature of moral judgment and the role of imaginative discernment in Christian living. It is hoped that this discussion will provide a preliminary attempt to re-think ethics from a more robustly Christian and theological perspective.

II. Ethics and Literature: A New Turn toward the “Literary”

Martha Nussbaum notes that philosophy, and in particular ethics, has taken a new turn beyond the “linguistic” to the “literary”[17] As David Parker describes it, “Literature has become for ethics what mathematics is for physics, a sort of necessary handmaiden.”[18] Extending Coral Diamond’s earlier comments, we might say that this shift marks a renewed interest in and awareness of certain dimensions of ethical reflection and discourse that have been overlooked in our previous quest for “objectivity” and instrumental and procedural certainty[19] There are at least two trajectories in this direction that we may chiefly classify as the pragmatic (ironist) line, for example, Richard Rorty[20] and the Aristotelian (virtue theory) line, for example, Martha C. Nussbaum. Both of these approaches have something to teach us concerning the role of the imagination in making moral judgments. The pragmatist (Wittgensteinian) approach is especially helpful in coming to terms with the nature of language (particularly its under deter mined quality) and the function of rules. The Aristotelian approach draws us closer to the need for engaging with the particularity of human experience and the role of character in making sense out of the variety of choices the virtuous person faces in moral living. We begin with Wittgenstein and the ironist line.

A. The Wittgensteinian Paradigm

1. The Designative (Representationalist) and the Expressive

For the purposes of brevity let us distinguish what have been referred to as “designative” and “expressive” views of language and meaning[21] Utilizing the relationship between language and meaning we can then begin with a brief explanation of the nature of each of these approaches in terms of their appeal and their contours. Then we can proceed to view the historical development as One over takes the other in importance, a shifting of tides relative to both epistemo-logical as well as linguistic considerations. This is essential for properly understanding the work of Wittgenstein.

2. The Distinction Itself

Designative theories of language are those which begin with the correlations that exist between words, terms, expressions, and so forth, and things, objects or states of affairs in the world. Words then “designate” things, or objects in the world, and the meaning of sentences likewise is found in the correspondence they have to such states of affairs either obtaining or not obtaining in the world (e.g., the role of truth conditions). Such theories “make meaning something relatively unpuzzling, unmysterious.”[22] Designative theories are compatible with the very nature of modern scientific thought where there is the intention of avoiding “subjectivity” at all costs. Expressive theories, on the other hand, are inherently mysterious since according to such theories, there is no way to extract the subject (the part) from the expression (the whole). Taylor writes: “The meaning of an expression cannot be explained by its being related to something else, but only by another expression. Consequently, the method of isolating terms and tracing correlations cannot work for expressive meaning. Moreover, our paradigm-expressive objects function as wholes.”[23]

Expressive accounts cannot and do not attempt to avoid the “subject-relatedness” of meaning, since expression is after all the very power of a subject. Expressions “manifest things, and hence refer us to subjects for whom these things can be manifest.”[24] Its meaning cannot be paraphrased or translated into some objective language, that is, it simply cannot be explained in terms of something else.[25] Expressive accounts of language and meaning give no purchase to scientific theories of language or of the possibility of creating objective accounts of meaning. Designative theories, on the other hand, which build on a more or less atomic notion of reality as constituted by “bits” of facts can produce or be identified objectively and thus can provide a model which fits with natural science. In the end, designative theories demythologize or demystify language and meaning, thus finding a home in what will be seen to be the positivist environment of both language and science in the early twentieth century.

3. Historical Roots

What is needed, however, is a historical account of this development, a development that, as will be argued later, is based on an unnecessary dualism between designative and expressive, one that unfortunately drives the movement of philosophy and science as well as ethics into the contemporary setting of the century in which we now find ourselves living. Where do we begin?

The Greeks are usually the starting point for all things philosophical, and there was some discussion of these matters by Plato in his Cratylus.[26] The Cratylus is concerned with the correctness of names (383a4-b2) and is particularly interested in considering whether their correctness is by nature or by convention. For Plato, there is, contrary to the Protagorean (coventionalist) view, something about external reality itself that makes it right to classify things in one way rather than another. Hence, taking ousia (being) as an illustration, to subscribe to the conventionalist perspective would make the ousia of things private to each person (385e5), thus denying stability to ousia. This simply won’t do. More importantly the framing of the question regarding language and the Greeks (in particular Plato) is largely one which defers to their understanding of reality as a whole as the larger environment in which any discussion of language and meaning can be made intelligible. This is reflected in the use of logos itself—a word whose root means “to say” (legein). There was an inextricable link in the Greek way of thinking between “saying, language and reason.”[27] Thought was thus characterized along the lines of discourse itself and expressed the same things as language generally does. Hence we note the duplicity of logos, used by the Greeks for both reason and reasoned account. By extension, the Greeks viewed reality as a kind of discourse. Plato’s Ideas are what grounds the world of sensible things, and whatever we do (be it discourse/speak/describe, etc.), it should accord with the nature of reality. Hence the emphasis upon phusei (nature) as opposed to convention in Plato’s understanding of words and reality.[28]

Implicit in this theory is a view that finds greater articulation later, from the Neo-Platonists, the early Fathers, Augustine, and beyond.[29] This view is one embedded in Plato’s understanding of the world of sensible things as a copy of an Ideal world, the world of Forms or Ideas. The world thus follows the pattern of logos and is the extensional expression of these Ideas. Plato has no doctrine of God as that to which the Christian tradition bears witness, that is, the triune, tri-personal, creator God. However, Plato is clearly echoing a familiar biblical theme, the world as the “speech of God.” Thus for Augustine, the divine Verbum (Word/Logos) is expressed in the creation itself. Hence, everything is a sign (signifier) for something else, that is, the thoughts of God Himself. Men likewise employ/utilize signs (words/language) as the clothing of our thoughts.

What emerges is a theory of language and meaning that is linked directly to ontology, to an understanding of the nature of reality itself. Since God is an “expressivist,” so to speak, our approach to language and meaning will follow an expressivist line. Our expectations that this will be the case are fulfilled in the Medieval and Renaissance periods of history, where “semiological ontologies” which pictured the world as inscribed by the Creator with order (like a giant text!) prevail. This view of the world as a meaningful order designed in its various domains to reveal or embody the very thoughts of the Creator will continue to hold sway until the seventeenth century (with precursors in late medieval nominalism) and the so-called scientific revolution.[30]

It was against such ontologizing (realism) that nominalism rebelled, a rebellion which promoted a designative view of language—one which elevated the importance of words and language to new heights. Nominalism (medieval) thoroughly rejected any notion of reality as predicated by the Platonists or the Augustinians (seen often erroneously as furthering a purely Neo-Platonist cause) where the thoughts of God (universals/essences) were embedded in the world of everyday language and practice (particulars). For Nominalism there are no universals or essences. The fact that men tend to think in such categories is purely a matter of practice (efficiency) and habit. Universals are nothing more that linguistic habits, formed and sustained by practice. Generalities and universals are no longer constitutive of the real world, but rather find their home in our language. As a result, language has a purely designative sense. This is a conclusion that is predicated upon a rejection of the previous (expressivist) view of the world and the universe itself. Words simply name things, in the absence of which (things) there is simply no meaning. Gone is a vision of the world as a “meaningful order,” endowed with this order as the very speech of God.

A new picture of the world emerges which correlates with this view of language and meaning—a view of the world as “objective,” “ machine-like.”[31] Medieval theologians, such as William of Occam and others who were inspired by their purported desire to protect God’s freedom (a freedom easily extended to man the creature as well), opted for what they believed was an anti-Aristotelian view of the world, that is, non-teleological and non-realist. Although initially intended to “protect” God’s freedom (voluntarism) by positing His absolute license to act by fiat whenever and wherever He chose, such a world picture eventuated in a world which operated autonomously according to observable rules and processes independent of God’s power or presence.

This is reflected in Descartes and the revolution he inspired in epistemology building unwittingly (?) on the Nominalist’s foundation. The activity of the thinking subject, not the connecting of the mind to the order present in the world, prevails in Descartes’ methodology. In framing representations of the world according to established canons of rational thought, Descartes was thus granting the warrants for certainty in knowledge to the functioning of the mind itself, not to God! Here the development of the role of the mind as mirror, or its primarily representational function, emerges to supremacy.[32] To understand the world, we must first disassemble the phenomena and reassemble them in our thought. As Thomas Hobbes would later put it in De Cive (11.14):

For everything is best understood by its constitutive causes. For as in a watch, or some such small engine, the matter, figure and motion of the wheels cannot be well known, except it be taken asunder and viewed in its parts; so as to make a more curious search into the rights of states and duties of subjects, it is necessary, I say, not to take them asunder, but yet that they be so considered as if they were dissolved.

How does this express itself in a theory of language? Words assist us in performing the tasks described above. To avoid falling prey to the duplicity of words (their polysemic qualities), we must opt for transparent language and terms. The language must fit the subject, and since the world is more and more conceived of as process and machine-like, our terms and language must follow suit. There can be no mystery in our language, since the very terms we employ must aid and abet our reflection of the true course and nature of the world we describe. Thus, a designative connection must follow. This is in fact what gives the word its meaning.

The rationalist slant of Descartes is paralleled by the empiricist orientation of Locke in the seventeenth century and Condillac in the eighteenth century Locke’s notion of what constitutes understanding reveals precisely how language is to be understood.[33] In accord with Locke’s rejection of any notion of “innate ideas” on the basis of redundancy, that is, why would God make us the way we are (creatures who through the use of our senses acquire our basic ideas) and then stock us with a set of innate ideas, we are left to gathering and collecting individual particulars of experience into coherent wholes (and creating a lexicon of meaningful terms in the process!). The unanswered question is “what is each sensation ‘about’?” That of course poses the fundamental dilemma of “reflection,” which will eventually supply Kant (1724–1804) with his critique of empiricism altogether.[34] After all, if each individual impression is taken as a piece of potential information, what is the background understanding that lies under all of our perceptual discriminations? The sensation has to be about something—what Kant will eventually call “intentionality.” The subject (knower) must be able to “place” the sensation (particular) somewhere, that is, give it a location in a world that is already familiar to the knower. Without this, Kant says, “it would be possible for appearances to crowd in upon the soul, and yet to be such as would never allow of experience.” One’s perceptions “would not then belong to any experience, consequently would be without an object, merely a blind play of representations, less even than a dream.”[35]

If the empiricists are correct, language would be the collection of otherwise independently introduced words, or “sounds” (atomism), without the necessary framework (the linguistic dimension itself) being elaborated. Such a designative view (representational) of language lays the groundwork for the later logical ato-mists and positivists who will initiate the linguistic turn in the twentieth century.

4. The “Heyday of Words”

We can fast forward to the twentieth century and begin to see where the turn toward language begins to emerge with greater force and implications. The connection between what has been described earlier, regarding the designative and expressive views of language, is now further elaborated by the development of logical atomism and the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951). It is primarily the designative theory of language and meaning (or what will now be referred to as representationalist or depictive theories) that takes hold of the scientific mindset in the early part of the century with a vengeance. Although expressivism was rekindled by the work of Herder, Hamman, and others in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the form of Romanticism, it was eclipsed by a resurgence of enlightenment scientism or what came to be known as positivism in the twentieth century.

What seems to drive the placing of increasing importance on language, and in particular the continuation of a particular representational or depictive view of language, in the early twentieth century? The question is particularly perplexing when we consider the insights of Nietzsche (as well as the pragmatism of James and Dewey) in the nineteenth century, insights that militate against any repristination of representationalist views of knowledge and language. It is perhaps best to see the Positivist (early Wittgenstein) period as a parenthesis, bracketed by Nietzsche (1844–1900) on the one side, with the “later” Wittgenstein on the other. It was Nietzsche who portended the collapse of the Kantian resolution to the Cartesian and Empiricist conundrum. Kant, you recall, wanted it both ways, a vigorous “ego-subject” which constitutes (by virtue of the structures and operations internal to the mind) human knowledge, and alongside this, an ineffable Ding-an-sich, the “thing-in-itself,” that is supposed to anchor our representations (a policing function). Nietzsche observed that however functionally important this Ding-an-sich was for Kant, it was only a postulation, a wheel that when turned, turned nothing else because it wasn’t in actuality a part of the mechanism itself. It performs no “real” function, thus it could be eliminated without effect. All we are left with is one representation after another which in effect destroys the very meaning of the term itself, for the metaphor of representation relies upon the possibility of there being something to represent. Wittgenstein describes this futile enterprise as comparable to buying several copies of the same newspaper to verify the accuracy of its frontpage headline. Without the anchor, which was only a fabrication anyway one needs a new metaphor. Nietzsche suggests that the metaphor for the new age is interpretation and man is the willful imposer of meaning. As Nietzsche put it, “‘Interpretation,’ the introduction of meaning—not ‘explanation.’. .. There are no facts, everything is in flux, incomprehensible, elusive; what is relatively most enduring is—our opinions.”[36] Nietzsche’s ideas would not carry the day however. His insights would be eclipsed by a renewed emphasis in philosophy and logic on empiricist methodologies and representationalism. Nietzsche’s criticisms of metaphysics did not apply to those known as the Vienna Circle— philosophers committed to satisfying an unquenchable thirst to “explain.” In the vacuum created by the anti-metaphysical bias of Nietzsche and his successors arose the scientism of Logical Postivitism. What emerges is a kind of “joyous nihilistic positivism”—an attempt to secure finiteness, which is itself grounded in the awareness of the infinite, an awareness that must be reconfigured according to the joyful positivity which only an absolute historicism can provide. It is this move toward positivity that propels the linguistic turn. Under this regime, “Truth” becomes only a property of logical form and language where the emphasis upon formalization via mathematics can reproduce the mechanics of the world and the mind.[37]

Recall our earlier reflections on the emergent nominalism associated with the rise of representationalist (designative) theories of language and meaning. Among the motivations lying behind this nominalism (and there are many!) one was to find an adequate language of science. One of the primary concerns of Locke, for example, was to ground our picture of the world in the foundations provided by the so-called clear and unequivocal definitions of basic terms. How was one to do this? The goal was correct representations that would enable one to affirm a true knowledge of the object. A primary issue was epistemological, that is, to sift out any contributions the knowing subject might make in the actual representation of things that the knowledge acquired was supposed to be about. This becomes the overriding concern in twentieth-century inquiries regarding language, namely, how language can be a vehicle of knowledge as modern epistemology conceives it.

B. The Ideal Language Approach

As Richard Rorty describes the history, two approaches emerge in the early twentieth century to address the issue of language: the Ideal Language School and Ordinary Language Analysis.[38] The first, Ideal Language, is closest in form, structure, and interest to the early Wittgenstein.[39]

In his “Notes on Logic” written in 1913, Wittgenstein states that “Philosophy consists of logic and metaphysics: logic is its basis.”[40] In the Tractatus, he develops this idea, namely, that language is a mirror of reality, and that logic is the essence of language. For Wittgenstein, reality has the same form or structure as logic, that is, it bears a logical form. He writes, “How can logic—all embracing logic, which mirrors the world—use such peculiar crotchets and contrivances? Only because they are all connected with one another in an infinitely fine network, the great mirror” (T, 5.511). This is in many ways a reflection of what is known as logical atomism, a view codified in Russell and Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica. Logical Atomism is a theory according to which reality is ultimately composed of atomic facts, each distinct from any other. These atomic facts are essentially empirical data, and combined together they form molecular facts which are then “truth-functional.” By this is meant that these atomic facts are represented by atomic propositions, and the molecular facts by truth-functional compounds of atomic propositions. Philosophy is then set upon the task of “explanation” and “clarification” of these facts and their corresponding propositions. Thus genuine philosophical problems are really confusions that derive from a disjunction between the way we articulate (speak), what Rudolph Carnap referred to as the “grammatical syntax,” and the “logical syntax” that reflects the true nature of things.[41] It is this logical syntax which is at the heart of language as it is meant to be understood (at least in terms of its bearing any relation to truth or falsity).[42] As Wittgenstein describes the matter, the world is made up of simple objects (atoms) which are the basis of all analysis, and this is what prevents indeterminacy, that is, the rule of absolute contingency. Thus, without these objects (and the worldview implied in such a theory), “it would be impossible to frame any picture of the world (true or false)” (T, 2.0212). This is what prevents an infinite regress in terms of propositional knowledge; otherwise there could be no definite meaning (T, 3.23). Without “reference” there is no “meaning.” Why? In the absence of “reference” there would only be convention, which is fundamentally arbitrary. The “simples” (that is, simple objects) thus supply what Russell referred to as the “furniture of the world.”

Building from this point, Wittgenstein develops his tractarian views in the Tractatus. These “simple objects” create “states of affairs” (Sachverhalt), either “possible” or “actual.” Wittgenstein describes it, “Each thing is, at it were, in a space of possible ‘states of affairs”’ (T ,2.013). The possibilities are fixed for each thing. This is the “form” of the object. The Tractatus maintains that the world as a whole has a form, that is, a fixed number of possible states of affairs: “The existence and non-existence of states of affairs is reality” (T ,2.06). Thus, “the sum total of reality is the world” (T ,2.063). Granting this “picture” of reality, philosophy can now give a complete analysis of the world in terms of propositions: “A proposition is a picture of reality” (T ,4.01). A proposition has “sense” if it pictures a possible state of affairs. Its truthfulness or falsity is determined by empirical verification. Thus, Wittgenstein’s views on the nature of language and the role of philosophy can be summarized as follows: (1) Ordinary language is inherently vague and ambiguous (T, 4.014-015, 4.002). (2) Clarity and accuracy are appropriate to sentences which “picture” or “record” facts (or states of affairs)—this form is “logical” and not grammatical—and, where there is a correspondence between the content of the sentence and that which it represents, (3) the role of philosophy is to remove misunderstandings which are the direct result of linguistic confusions.[43]

1. The “Heyday of Sentences”

In many ways, Wittgenstein’s later works on language philosophy reflect a shift that began at least as far back as Immanuel Kant and continued through the so-called Romantic period in philosophy (Herder, Hamann, etc.). The shift I am referring to is that which arose in reaction to the empiricist and rationalist philosophies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in particular the ideas of Descartes, Hume, and Locke.[44] Two primary features characterize modern rationalism as embodied in these philosophers: disengaged reason and proceduralism.[45] By disengaged reason, we mean a construal of the thinking subject as occupying a “proto-variant” of Thomas Nagel’s “view from nowhere.”[46] By being “from nowhere,” this subject occupies no known space, has no history, no culture, no “world” so to speak. This individual is really an information-processing being, taking in bits of information and collating them is some fashion in order then to construct a manageable, usable, livable world in which then to live. What results—proceduralism—is an “atomism of input with a computational picture of mental function.” This picture is completed by distinction between “fact and value” and its correlate of neutrality. However distinguishable the views of Descartes and Locke vis-a-vis their methods and strategies, “both views call for reflexive self-policing in the name of a canonical procedure.”[47] These views also redefined what post-Cartesian “science” and “scientific thought” consisted in, namely, it became all about the pursuit of objectivity. However, objectivity itself was redefined. “Objectivity” is achieved only as we eliminate any possible distortions and take in the world as it “really” is. Thomas Nagel puts it aptly as follows:

The attempt is made to view the world not from a place within it, or from the vantage point of a special kind of life or awareness, but from nowhere in particular and no form of life in particular at all. The object is to discount for the features of our pre-reflective outlook that make things appear as they do, and thereby to reach an understanding of things as they really are.[48]

However advantageous the attempt to scrutinize carefully our observations and calculations in terms of possible distorting forces (a view which would not constitute very much controversy!), this was not in fact what the modern rationalists were up to. The fatal error was in defining the mind qua mind as functioning as it was intended to function only in such a disengaged way, absent from any context or situation.[49] Whether in its more purely dualistic or positivistic (mechanistic) forms, thinking (knowledge), in order to provide useful results, must take place outside any form of engagement. Secondly it must follow a trustworthy procedure (although there was no agreement on exactly what that procedure should be).

What is absent of course is any articulation of the essential role “background” plays in this entire enterprise. What must be the case for any one perception to be counted as a perception? As noted earlier, it was Kant’s transcendental deduction and, in fact, various other arguments found in the Critique of Pure Reason that constituted a turning point in this regard. Kant noted that there must be a conferring of intelligibility and that such a context conferring intelligibility is what makes any single perception intelligible. What Descartes and Hume along with Locke had done in their various attempts at describing the process was to make invisible this very context of intelligibility. However, for something to be intelligible is for it to count as intelligible, and for it to count as intelligible, there are certain conditions that must be met.

In many ways, Wittgenstein builds on a similar notion in his later reflections on language.[50] We could say that the transition in Wittgenstein’s philosophy is one that moves from an emphasis upon lines of projection to one emphasizing methods of projection.[51] The earlier Wittgenstein was preoccupied with the implications of his own logical atomism and the ontology it seemed to imply, namely, either words could be shown to refer to substances that existed independently of language, or truth and falsity were mere constructions of an endlessly regressive process of signification. The former referential emphasis in the early Wittgenstein was predicated on what seemed the only alternative to absolute free play in terms of meaning. Once Wittgenstein succumbed to the ontology of atomism (logical simples), truth functions then depended on the demonstration of logical form operating pictorially as language mirrored states of affairs in the world of objects. Thus, logical form captures lines of projection between propositions and the world they purport to represent. In the later Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein reflects upon his earlier direction as representing a gross misunderstanding of the way language actually works in the world. A desire for simples leads to a label view of language that assumes that the principal function of language is simply to correctly identify or name objects. We can refer to this phase as the “explanation fixation” in the early Wittgenstein. In the earlier Tractatus, there is an emphasis upon the need to have “determinate” sense, that is, a fixed notion which comports with the simple “objective” view of reality it is premised upon. What Wittgenstein discovers in his later work is that “sense” is more ad hoc and derives not from correspondence with objects per se, but as constituted by a variety of language games. Thus, meaning and sense are produced in and by practices and life-forms.

In other words, the former reductionistic approach based upon lines of projection between logical simples and states of affairs failed to appreciate the mediated character of naming and defining. Such naming itself presupposes any number of categories and procedures that make identification possible. As Wittgenstein put it, “Only someone who already knows how to do something with it can significantly ask a name” (PI, 31). Wittgenstein discovered that basic facts cannot be discovered independently of methods of projection which guarantee their status as facts. He realized that there are many ways of dealing with the facts in the world, many ways for language to project a relationship to the world. Thus, what should concern the philosopher is not whether a statement “pictures” the world, but rather the way utterances and descriptions fit in specific contexts or operations, and fit as a matter of appropriateness to specific forms of acting on objects. Wittgenstein introduces language game to explain the relation of language to the world. He writes, “I shall call the whole, consisting of language and the actions into which it is woven, the language game.. .. To imagine a language means to imagine a form of life” (PI, 7, 19). Gone now are any pristine notions of some pure idealized connection between mind and nature. Philosophical problems arise “when language goes on holiday” (PI, 116), when there is a “false and idealized picture of the use of language.”[52] Gone is the addiction to “explanation,” which is the attempt to speak from a position that resides outside language. Philosophy can only “describe” what is going on, or as Wittgenstein puts it: “Philosophy may in no way interfere with the actual use of language; it can in the end only describe it” (PI, 124). What is possible (and needed) is “description.” Philosophical problems are really “direction problems,” that is, not knowing our way about (PI, 123). Description thus makes a way of escape from the philosophical problem by showing “the fly the way out of the fly-bottle” (PI, 309). An emphasis upon “explanation” leads to a set of false problematics, the result of more or less ungrammatical applications of language that seek resolution outside language itself. As Wittgenstein stated, “Our illness is to want to explain.”[53] Our “addiction to generality” is the result of our attempting to move beyond the particular toward the general—a characteristic of the explanatory approach. A kind of therapeutic description will help us overcome this addiction. Wittgenstein insists, “We may not advance any kind of theory. There must not be anything hypothetical in our considerations. We must do away with all explanation and description alone must take its place” (PI, 109). “Description” is about what “is” and decries metaphysical justification as a “pre-linguistic” notion altogether. In its place is the far more complex game of life. Among the multiple games (contexts, grammars) we participate in, there are multiple methods of projection (lebensform) which affect every line of projection imaginable. As attractive as the world of the Tractatus may have once appeared, it was a world impossible to actually live in and communicate in. As Wittgenstein describes it, “We have got on to slippery ice where there is no friction [the world of the Tractatus] and so in a certain sense the conditions are ideal, but also just because of that, we are unable to walk. We want to walk so we need friction. Back to the rough ground” (PI, 107).

C. Nietzsche, Rorty, and Pragmatism

Paralleling the development of the “later” Wittgenstein, philosophers of science began to recognize that it was simply impossible to disentangle fact from value as if to achieve some pristine or immaculate realm of fact. Values and facts were interconnected, interlaced, one with the other such that finding an “absolute”[54] or as Nagel refers to it, a “view from nowhere,”[55] became the never-ending quest of but a few. With the later Wittgenstein and ordinary language analysis,[56] the attention to genre and speech-act theory in Austin and Searle,[57] and the move from semiotics to semantics in Ricoeur,[58] to name only a few, language has been released from a kind of philosophical captivity which worked against the legitimacy of religious and ethical discourse as anything other than languages of projection. It was now acknowledged that all language, whether scientific or moral, was value-laden.

All of this bodes well for the view that ethical language is cognitively meaningful, but there seems to be a downside as well. We seem to have entered a new paradigm where all language is seen in terms of pure immanence with a denial of any kind of “extra-linguistic” reality toward which our language might be said to refer, resulting in what Kai Nielsen has termed a “Wittgensteinian fideism.”[59] The tribunal for determining what is “good,” “ true,” or “meaningful” is to be found entirely within communal or intersubjective experience with no additional court of appeal residing outside language which is, after all, according to this view, of purely human convention.[60] Since, according to this view, there is no “essential” reality, there is only “contingent” reality.[61] As such, there is only perspective, or “perspective seeing” as Nietzsche described it in On the Genealogy of Morals, and to attempt to ignore this is to “castrate the intellect."[62] Derrida picks up on this Nietzschean theme and describes the desire for “essence” as a misguided metaphysical quest, one seeking a “centered structure” where whatever contingency or “play” there is, “[it] is based on a fundamental ground, a play constituted on the basis of a fundamental immobility and a reassuring certitude, which is itself beyond play”[63] Such quests for Derrida and other deconstructionists are illusory at best. In the end, Nietzsche’s “strong poet” prevails over the scientist![64]

What is the result of this renewed attention to contingency? In the words of Hillary Putnam, “the greatest pretensions of philosophy have collapsed!”[65] A great “leveling” has occurred. There is no privileged status to which philosophy can appeal in the adjudication of truth claims. “Truth” or value is now nothing more than the function of sentences which of course are strung together by people, the very people who create language![66] Ethics like science is just one more area of discourse (language game) which deals with a different area of inquiry. Just as language is severed from any connection with external reality, so in other domains of inquiry we are freed from the impossible quest for foundations whether in ethics or science.[67]

Thus we can see how the shift toward the ethical and the shift toward the literary now converge in the pragmatist line. Ethics is no longer a second-class discourse due to its subject matter but rather one of many discourses each equally relevant to their own semantic domains. The emphasis in ethics is upon description rather than prescription, since to be prescriptive is to assume a universality which is unjustifiable given the purely immanent character of all reflection and knowledge.[68] Thus, according to Richard Rorty—identifying pragmatism as the heir apparent to the now deceased representationalist paradigm—what we have before us is a major paradigm shift, a la Kuhn.[69] He writes:

Pragmatism, by contrast, does not erect Science as an idol to fill the place once held by God. It views science as one genre of literature—or, put the other way around, literature and the arts as inquiries, on the same footing as scientific inquiries. Thus it sees ethics as neither more “relative” nor “subjective” than scientific theory, nor as needing to be made “scientific.” Physics is a way of trying to cope with various bits of the universe; ethics is a matter of trying to cope with other bits. Mathematics helps physics do its job; literature and the arts help ethics do its.[70]

Gone, according to Rorty and the modern Pragmatists, is any quest for “objectivity” and along with it any interest in epistemology or metaphysics. The old Platonic distinction between the realm of knowledge and opinion which led to the Positivist split between empirical and transcendental, a split that harbored ill-will toward the non-empirical, languished in the field of “correspondence,” a weedy bed that offers no rescue. Where the Positivist failed to extract herself from the dualisms of epistemology, the Kantian transcendentalist simply made the reverse error of hypostatizing Thought, and was left with only a quasi-Platonic worldview. Pragmatism, it is thought, frees us from both errors. Contrary to Positivism, the Pragmatist “drops the notion of truth as correspondence with reality altogether, and says that modern science does not enable us to cope because it corresponds, it just plain enables us to cope.”[71] We are left with our language and there simply is no way to assume some position from outside to judge or determine adequacy. As Rorty states, “It lets us see language not as a tertium quid between Subject and Object, nor as a medium in which we try to form pictures of reality, but as part of the behavior of human beings."[72] Labels like “truth” and “goodness” are simply metaphysics, which only leads back to the Plato-Kant continuum—a continuum made vacuous by the critique of Nietzsche. Ironists (like Rorty) celebrate nominalism and historicism. The ironist searches for new vocabularies “not as a way of getting something distinct from his vocabulary right.” After all, “they don’t take the point of discursive thought to be knowing, in any sense that can be explicated by notions like ‘reality’ ‘real essence,’ ‘objective point of view,’ and ‘the correspondence of language and reality”’ For the ironist, the final vocabulary doesn’t settle things once and for all, as if there were some criteria of adequacy. “Criteria, on their view, are never more than the platitudes which contextually define the terms of a final vocabulary currently in use.”[73]

Literature for the ironist serves an entirely different purpose than it does for the person operating out of the common sense perspective. In the quest for a better final vocabulary, the ironist is not hoping to discover but to create (make); the goal is “diversification and novelty rather than convergence to the antecedently present.” These vocabularies are “poetic achievements.” Orwell, Proust, D. H. Lawrence, along with others, are to be treated “not as anonymous channels for truth but as abbreviations for a certain kind of vocabulary and for the sorts of beliefs and desires typical of its users.” One must play with the images each of these authors creates. Words like should, ought, good, and bad “name properties of sentences, or of actions and situations”;[74] they are not extra-mental realities to which our words or actions conform. In consistently Darwinian fashion, language and meaning are fundamentally adaptive strategies, so that “what is rational for us now to believe may not be true, [this] is simply to say that somebody may come up with a better idea ... a whole new vocabulary may come along”[75] and change things.

The Pragmatist emphasis upon the radical contingency of both self and community emphasizes or rather de-divinizes the world. As Rorty somewhat poetically puts the matter:

Once upon a time we felt a need to worship something which lay beyond the visible world. Beginning in the seventeenth century we tried to substitute a love of truth for a love of God, treating the world described by science as a quasi divinity Beginning at the end of the eighteenth century we tried to substitute a love of ourselves for a love of scientific truth, a worship of our own deep spiritual or poetic nature, treated as one more quasi divinity.[76]

According to Rorty, Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, and others have freed us from such delusions to the point “where we no longer worship anything, where we treat nothing as a quasi divinity, where we treat everything—our language, our conscience, our community—as a product of time and chance [emphasis in the original].”[77] Opposed to the possession of final vocabularies—the futility of such a project the history of philosophy serves to illustrate—Rorty and the Pragmatists are concerned with the development of new and ever-changing vocabularies. We are all about “self creation” and coming to understanding this is what constitutes self-knowledge. “The process of coming to know oneself, confronting one’s contingency, ... is identical with the process of inventing a new language—that is, of thinking up some new metaphors.”[78] We should not accept someone else’s description of ourselves (the prevailing language game) since that would be to discover oneself as only a “copy or replica.”[79]

1. Irony vs. Common Sense

According to Rorty, each of us embodies a final vocabulary, a stock of words “which we [they] employ to justify their actions, their beliefs and their lives.” These are the words one employs to tell “the story of their lives.” It is a “final” vocabulary in the sense that “if doubt is cast on the worth of these words, their user has no noncircular argumentative recourse.” There is nowhere else to go, except perhaps to force. This vocabulary is made up of “thin” and “thick” terms, the former represented by words like “good,” “ truth,” “ beauty,” and so forth, whereas the latter consists of words such as “decency,” “ cruelty,” and “kindness.”[80]

People fall into one of two classes with respect to this notion of final vocabulary: They are either ironists or they are committed to some form of common sense strategy. An ironist is one who accepts the contingency of her final vocabulary, one who has “radical and continuing doubts about the final vocabulary.” This is usually a result of ongoing encounters with other vocabularies either in actual persons or in books. She is also one who realizes that the mere appeal to her vocabulary will not settle the incommensurability present in the encounter with others. Lastly, the ironist is one who understands that her vocabulary is no closer to some objective reality than any others. In other words, for her, there is no “metavocabulary” to measure one proposal off against another.[81]

Common sense is the label Rorty attaches to those who “unselfconsciously describe everything important in terms of the final vocabulary to which they and those around them are habituated.” When challenged by alternative vocabularies, this person responds by appeals to criteria, to standards of evaluation, as if there were some permanent, essential quality behind our evaluative terms. For the ironist, this is simply a return to hors presence, redescribing ourselves using their vocabularies in the hope that “by this continual redescription, [we might] make the best selves for ourselves that we can.” We are thus continually “revising” ourselves and in the process “doubts about our own characters or our own culture can be resolved or assuaged only by enlarging our acquaintance. The easiest way to do that is to read books [emphasis mine].”[82]

III. The Aristotelian Renaissance in Ethics—Virtue and Reading

It would not be an exaggeration to say that apart from the modern pragmatist’s interest in literature and morality, the principal charge toward literature in ethics is being led by those working out of the Aristotelian tradition,[83] where ethics is not narrowly construed as the articulation and justification of rules and obligations, but rather the pursuit of the question “how should one live?”[84] Their shared interest in the literary, however, is where the unity ceases. Perhaps the best representative of marriage of literature and ethics from an Aristotelian perspective is that found in the work of Martha C. Nussbaum. In addition to her interest in the role of literature in explicating the moral experience, she has also taken pains to distance herself from the position of Rorty and the so-called “ironists.” This is humorously illustrated in her citation from Plato’s Phaedrus:

We’ll let Teisias and Gorgias continue sleeping. For they noticed that plausible stories win more public honor than the truth. And so they make trivial things seem important and important things trivial through the power of their discourse, and they dress up new views in old language and old views in new language, and they have discovered how to speak about any subject both concisely and at interminable length.[85]

Nussbaum concludes her assessment of the contemporary discussion of moral and ethical thought (with Rorty and Stanley Fish in mind): “The sophists are among us once again.”[86] Unlike Rorty, she sees the discussion of ethics and morality requiring more seriousness and greater attention to such old-fashioned categories as “truth” and “objectivity.” As Nussbaum notes, “For if we are talking about real things, it does matter, and matter deeply, whether we say this or that, since human life, much though we may regret the fact, is not simply a matter of free play and unconstrained making.”[87] Rorty and others with his pragmatic inclinations, have succumbed to the all-too-easy temptation to conclude that if ethics can’t be about representation (correspondence theories), it must be about subjectivity, namely, the will to power. Nussbaum will have nothing of that. For her the answer lies in reconsidering the approach suggested by Aristotle in answer to the problem of ethics and practical rationality.

In what does “moral judgment” consist? The search for an answer to this question guides Nussbuam in her work on ethics. Her primary adversary in most of her writings on this subject is the position she feels is best illustrated by Plato’s conception of practical reasoning as “scientific.” According to Nussbaum, not only is practical reasoning not scientific, it cannot be made to be so without suffering irreparable damage. As she describes the situation, “Aristotle’s position is subtle and compelling. It seems to me to go further than any other account of practical rationality I know in capturing the sheer complexity and agonizing difficulty of choosing well.”[88]

According to Nussbaum, the Aristotelian model provides this largely from its emphasis on “perception” and “discernment” in the moral life which sets him apart from the more Platonic emphasis upon ethics as a “scientific” enterprise.[89] This is part of what Nussbaum sees as a three-fold emphasis in Aristotle, which was in antithesis to the prevailing opinion toward ethics in Greek philosophy in general and in Plato in particular.[90] The three are: (1) an attack on the claim that all valuable things are commensurable; (2) an argument for the priority of particular judgments to universals; and (3) a defense of the emotions and the imagination as essential to rational choice.[91]

Nussbaum characterizes the Platonic error as follows: According to Plato,[92] what is needed is a science of measurement, which will free the moral agent from what otherwise would be an impossible situation of diverse and often contradictory choices. Plato writes, “whereas the art of measurement would render the appearance ineffective: by making clear the truth, it would cause the soul to be at peace by abiding in the truth, and so save our life” (356e).[93] Plato delineated this “science” in terms of four basic constituents: (1) metricity, (2) singleness, (3) consequentialism, and (4) pleasure. According to the first, there is the recognition that there is only one homogenous “good” or “value” which differs from situation to situation only in amount or quantity. By using a single rule or measure, the agent applies the principle of metricity to the determination of quantity of value. The “singleness” principle refers to the universality of the metric or measure that is applied in every situation. Thirdly whatever the choice in a given situation, the end is the same, and this is after all the goal— producing the consequence desired, namely, optimization of the “good.” The agent is therefore to act so as to maximize the quantity of good produced in any action. Lastly the nature or content of the “good” is “pleasure” for Plato.

I want to focus my initial comments on the second and third advances made by Aristotle as a prelude to a more narrowly constructed analysis of the importance of literature for ethics.[94] I will return to the singleness and metricity questions under our discussion of “rules” in the second part of this article.

As Nussbaum sees it, (1) Aristotle gives priority to the particular over Plato’s “universal,” as well as (2) defending the role of the emotions and imagination in the ethical life. For Aristotle, “... a young man can [not] have Prudence. The reason is that Prudence includes a knowledge of particular facts (ta kath’hekasta), and this is derived from experience, which a young man does not possess.”[95] Our concern at this juncture is not with the role rules play in Aristotelian ethics generally but with the priority he gives to the particular in the process of deliberation, as opposed to subsuming all ethical judgment under the more general or universal rule.[96] We shall let the following excerpts from the Nicomachean Ethics suffice in illustrating Aristotle’s concern with “perception”:

Let this be agreed on from the start, that every statement concerning matters of practice ought to be said in outline and not with precision, as we said in the beginning that statements should be demanded in a way appropriate to the matter at hand. And matters of practice and questions of what is advantageous never stand fixed, any more than do matters of health. If the universal definition is like this, the definition concerning particulars is even more lacking in precision. For such cases do not fall under any science (techne) nor under any precept, but the agents themselves must in each case look to what suits the occasion, as is also the case in medicine and navigation. (NE, 1103b34-1104a10)

Thus, Aristotle concludes that for at least three reasons, ethics cannot be reduced to the level of science or technique. For one thing, rules only offer generalizations based on what has come before, and hence are limited by definition. Secondly the very nature of the practical speaks to its indefiniteness and indeterminacy. Lastly the ethical situation, being oftentimes “ultimately particular,” that is, non-repeatable, simply does not fit under any pre-existing category or rule. As Nussbaum describes this, “This is in part a function of the complexity and variety already mentioned: the occurrence of properties that are, taken singly, repeatable in an endless variety of combinations makes the complex whole situation a non-repeatable particular.”[97] Aristotle comments further:

And it is clear that Prudence is not the same as Scientific Knowledge: for as has been said, it apprehends ultimate particular things, since the thing to be done is an ultimate particular thing. (NE, 1142a23ff) 

All these qualities. .. Considerateness, Understanding, Prudence and Intelligence. .. all these faculties deal with ultimate and particular things;. .. and a man has understanding and is considerate, or considerate of others when he is a good judge of the matters in regard to which Prudence is displayed.. .. All matters of conduct belong to the class of particular and ultimate things. (NE, 1143a25ff) 

Consequently the unproved assertions and opinions of experienced and elderly people, or of prudent men, are as much deserving of attention as those which they support by proof; for experience has given them an eye for things, so they see correctly. (NE, 1143b6) 

The person who diverges only slightly from the correct is not blameworthy, whether he errs in the direction of the more or the less; but the person who diverges more is blamed: for this is evident. But to say to what point and how much someone is blameworthy is not easy to determine by a principle. .. : nor in fact is this the case with any other perceptible item. For things of this sort are among the concrete particulars, and the discrimination lies in perception. (NE, 1109b18-23)

From all of this, Nussbaum concludes that “practical insight is like perceiving in the sense that it is noninferential, nondeductive; it is an ability to recognize the salient features of a complex situation.”[98] This particular advance in Aristotle is perhaps best captured in his notion of “practical judgment” or phronesis. Again, contrary to Plato’s conceptualization, where contemplation of the right order of things, that is, the cosmos, is linked inextricably to determining the right order of life (it is given priority in the Republic), Aristotle regards knowledge of the order of things as reflecting science and the scientific method. The cosmic order is eternal and unchanging in Plato. Judgment in the moral sense is a knowledge of the constantly changing, where particular circumstances and situations can never be known exhaustively. This explains Aristotle’s “rule of thumb” understanding of the norms or rules for behavior illustrated by his emphasis on the Lesbian rule (NE, 1137b–30-32). This helps us to understand why for Aristotle, “The practically wise man (phronimos) has a knowledge of how to behave in each particular circumstance which can never be equated with or reduced to a knowledge of general truths. Practical wisdom (phronesis) is a not fully articulable sense rather than a kind of science.”[99]

Practical judgment for Aristotle is possible only for the virtuous man: “Virtue makes the prohairesis (choice) right.. .. Virtue makes the project right” (NE, 1144a20; 7–8). Right judgment can only issue “from the deliberations of those whose formed character is the result of the systematic disciplining and transformation of their initial desires.”[100]

According to Nussbaum, the last advance over Plato made by Aristotle regards the role he attached to the emotions and imagination in the ethical life, what Nussbaum refers to as "the non-intellectual components.”[101] Contrary to Plato’s more antagonistic stance toward the passions,[102] where they are portrayed as “corrupting influences,”[103] Aristotle saw them as “closely linked with our ability to grasp particulars in all of their richness and concreteness.”[104] He develops this idea in concert with his discussion of “imagination” (phantasia) and its role in voluntary movement, which Nussbaum describes as “that human. .. capability. .. of focusing on some concrete particular, either present or absent, in such a way as to see[105] (or otherwise perceive) it ‘as’ something, picking out its salient features, discerning its content.”[106] Along with the imagination, the emotions are viewed as “responsive and selective elements of the personality.”[107] This is reflected in two passages from the Nicomachean Ethics:

As then the object of choice is something within our power which after deliberation we desire, Choice will be a deliberate desire of things in our power; for we first deliberate, then select, and finally fix our desire according to the result of our deliberation. (NE, 1113a10-12) 

Hence Choice may be called either thought related to desire or desire related to thought; and man, as an originator of action, is a union of desire and intellect. (NE, 1139b3-5)

Nussbaum notes that the emotions do not simply play a supplemental role as in offering aid, but rather, in fact, constitute appropriate response.[108] For example, according to Nussbaum, “to have a correct perception of the death of a loved one is not simply to take note of this fact with intellect or judgment. If someone noted the fact but was devoid of passional response, we would be inclined to say that he did not really see, take in, recognize, what had happened; that he did not acknowledge the situation for what it was [emphasis in the original].”[109] Here the whole personality sees the situation for what it really is. Thus, “the emotions are themselves modes of vision, or recognition,” apart from which one cannot be said to truly “recognize” or even “know.”[110]

From all of this Nussbaum and others conclude that Aristotle provides a starting point that does not preclude the inclusion of a variety of areas for consideration in ethical criticism. It makes “no a priori demarcation” between areas of relevance or irrelevance for morality. Unlike Kant or the utilitarians, who focus exclusively on questions of “duty” and “utility,” a more inclusive approach represented by Aristotle addresses the moral life “as a continuous process which goes on before and after there is any question of conscious volition.”[111] This is reflected in the way I “attend” to people and circumstances. Ethics then is not simply concerned with materials which identify “acts and choices, and choice-guiding words together with the arguments which display the descriptive meaning of these words,” but much, much more.[112] The question that emerges from these insights is obvious, “what then can be said to engage and sharpen my attentive powers?”

After surveying the development of ethics and literature from both the Pragmatist and Aristotelian streams, one thing that becomes obvious is the attention being paid by both to the deeply subjective component in all ethical experience. Rather than viewing ethical and moral experience in a mechanical or behavioristic fashion, both Rorty and Nussbaum think attention to the role of the agent or “self” is of utmost importance. After all, as Charles Taylor has noted, having desires is not what demarcates man from the animals, but “what is distinctively human is the power to evaluate our desires, to regard some as desirable and others as undesirable.”[113] The “free play” of Rorty’s ironist rests in the radically contingent nature of that determination, as one act in a long series of acts which constitute self-creation. For Nussbaum, attention to the subject is not a radically contingent affair but one which is designed to approximate virtue after careful deliberation. For Rorty, there is no telos for man in his or her ethical/moral experience, whereas for Nussbaum there assuredly is one.

Both philosophers in one way or another recognize that “rationalism purchases a third-person standard for the good at the cost of first-person predicates that capture the stakes in being ethical at all.”[114] They reject the Enlightenment construal of ethical and moral life, but for very different reasons. In Part Two of this article, we will explore the implications of both the “later” Wittgenstein and “virtue” ethics (Aristotle) for re-thinking the ethics of parsimony in an attempt to promote a more robust conceptualization of ethical living in light of the meaning given to such living by the Scriptures themselves.

Notes

1. Cora Diamond, Losing Your Concepts, Ethics 98, no. 2 (1988): 255.
2. Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (London: Fontana Press, 1985), 6.
3. Alasdair MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopaedia, Genealogy, and Tradition (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990); Jeffrey Stout, Ethics After Babel: The Languages of Morals and Their Discontents (Boston: Beacon Press, 1988); William Schweiker, Power, Value and Conviction: Theological Ethics in the Postmodern Age (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 1998); J. B. Schneewind, The Invention of Autonomy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
4. In this regard see Hilary Putnam, Reason, Truth and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 50–74; in addition one should consult John McDowell, Mind, Value, and Reality (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), 95–218, and Bernard Williams, “Internal and External Reasons,” in Moral Luck (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981).
5. Linda Zagzebski, Virtues of the Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). She further distinguishes between what she refers to as “weak virtue” theory and “pure virtue” theory Broadly speaking, Zagzebski defines the mark of a “virtue theory” as “where the primary object of evaluation is persons or inner traits of persons rather than acts. To describe a good person is to describe that person’s virtues, and it is maintained that a virtue is reducible neither to the performance of acts independently identified as right nor to a disposition to perform such acts. There is both more and less to a moral virtue than a disposition to act in the right way. There is more because a virtue also includes being disposed to have characteristic emotions, desires, motives, and attitudes. There is less because a virtuous person does not invariably act in a way that can be fully captured by any set of independent normative criteria” (p. 16). A “weak virtue theory” is one which determines what is right based on “what a virtuous person would do. .. this is the best criterion for what is right.” A “pure virtue theory” is one “that treats act evaluation as derivative from the character of an agent. Roughly, an act is right because it is what a virtuous person might do” (p. 16).
6. Zagzebski, Virtues of the Mind, 7–8.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid., 1-29.
9. Martha C. Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: T he Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
10. Iris Murdoch, “Vision and Choice in Morality,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Supplement 30 (1956): 32-58.
11. A more complete and nuanced articulation of this can be found in Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (London: Penguin Books, 1993).
12. Mark I. Johnson, Moral Imagination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).
13. Diamond, “Losing Your Concepts,” 255. In a similar vein, see the work of Mark Johnson, Moral Imagination: Implications of Cognitive Science for Ethics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). Specific application to medical ethics can be found in Anders Nordgren, “Ethics and Imagination: Implications of Cognitive Semantics for Medical Ethics,” Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 19 (1998): 117-41.
14. In many ways, the essay by Kevin J. Vanhoozer, “The Trials of Truth,” in To Stake a Claim: Mission and the Western Crisis of Knowledge (ed. J. Andrew Kirk and Kevin J. Vanhoozer; Maryknoll, N.Y: Orbis Books, 1999), 120–56, is a similar attempt to “re-think” the apologetical in light of an expanded epistemology like that suggested by Zagzebski and others.
15. The reader should notice that I did not say that this interest was new. At least since Socrates’ association of morality with “living,” in other words, “how should we live?” as opposed to “what ought I to do?” the role of “poetry” or other imaginative literature has been in dispute as to its either positive or negative part in the matter.
16. Clarence Walhout, The End of Literature: Reflections on Literature and Ethics, ChrLit 47, no. 4 (Summer 1998): 459-76. Also see John Barton, “Reading for Life: The Use of the Bible in Ethics and the Work of Martha C. Nussbaum,” JSOT207 (1995): 66-76.
17. Martha Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 168–94, although one should note that the entire volume is evidence of this shift. Again, Nussbaum’s works attest to the not altogether “newness” of this shift, especially when considered against the background of the place of Greek Tragedy in the development and work of moral reflection. Likewise, the reader should consult the following: Charles Altieri, Canons and Consequences: Reflections on the Ethical Force of Imaginative Ideals (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1990); Wayne C. Booth, The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality and Tragedy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979); Diamond, “Losing Your Concepts,” 255–77; Richard Eldridge, On Moral Personhood: Philosophy, Literature, Criticism and Self-Understanding (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1989); S. L. Goldberg, Agents and Lives: Moral Thinking in Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Geoffrey Galt Harpham, Getting it Right: Language, Literature and Ethics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); J. Hillis Miller, The Ethics of Reading: Kant, de Man, Eliot, Tollope, James and Benjamin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987); David Parker, Ethics, Theory and the Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Leona Toker, ed., Commitment in Reflection: Essays in Literature and Moral Philosophy (New York: Garland, 1993); Brian Stock, “Ethical Values and the Literary Imagination in the Later Ancient World,” New Literary History 29, no.1 (1998): 1-13; Wayne Booth, “The Ethics of Teaching Literature,” College English 61, no. 1 (September 1998): 41-55; Frank Palmer, Literature and Moral Understanding: A Philosophical Essay on Ethics, Aesthetics, Education and Culture (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992).
18. Parker, Ethics, Theory and the Novel, 34. For Martha Nussbaum the literary is elevated even higher—for her, literature is moral philosophy.
19. Here see the magisterial work of Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
20. Richard Rorty Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
21. I am following closely the work of Charles Taylor, Language and Human Nature, in Philosophical Papers, Vol. 1: Philosophy and Human Agency (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); see also Taylor, Philosophical Arguments (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), esp. 61–99. Another singularly important work in this regard is George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976). For further explorations in the matter, see John Milbank, “The Linguistic Turn as a Theological Turn,” in The Word Made Strange: Theology, Language, Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998): 84-122.
22. Taylor, “Language and Human Nature,” 220.
23. Ibid., 221.
24. Ibid., 222.
25. This is the later Wittgenstein’s criticism of “philosophy” as the failed attempt to “explain” or service “explanations.” In the end, all philosophy can and is allowed to do is to offer “descriptions.”
26. Plato, Platonis Opera (ed. E. A. Duke; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).
27. Taylor refers to this as a discourse-modeled notion of thought (‘ Language and Human Nature,” 222).
28. Milbank, Linguistic Turn as Theological Turn, 88.
29. See especially Milbank, “Linguistic Turn as Theological Turn,” 84–122. The point that needs to be made is how one’s theory of God, the world, and language are interrelated! For illustrations in Augustine on this subject, see On Christian Doctrine, 1.8; 1.2.2; 2.10.15; 3.59; 3.10.14.
30. See here the work of Louis Dupre, Passage to Modernity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993); also see the fascinating analysis provided by R. K. French and Andrew Cunningham, Before Science: The Invention of the Friars’ Natural Philosophy (London: Scolar Press, 1996).
31. For a fuller explication of the implications and genesis of these ideas, see Francis Oakley “Christian Theology and the Newtonian Science,” CH 30 (1961): 433-57.
32. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979).
33. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (New York: Dover Publications, 1959), 145–46 [2.2.2].
34. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (trans. J. M. D. Meiklejohn; London: Bell, 1987), A 104, 112.
35. Ibid., A111, 112.
36. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power (ed. W. Kaufmann; trans. W. Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale; New York: Random House, 1967), section 604.
37. Steiner, Ater Babel, 6.
38. Rorty, introduction to The Linguistic Turn: Essays in Philosophical Method (ed. Richard M. Rorty; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 15–24.
39. I am not interested in pursuing the issue(s) surrounding the notion of development or “change” relative to the “early” and “later” Wittgenstein. There is sufficient “continuity” as well as “discontinuity” to validate a variety of positions on the matter. For further considerations on the subject, one should consult John Koethe, The Continuity of Wittgenstein’s Thought (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996); Norman Malcolm, “Nothing is Hidden”: Wittgenstein’s Criticism of His Early Work (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989); John W. Cook, Wittgenstein’s Metaphysics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
40. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Notebooks, 1914–1916 (ed. G. H. von Wright and G. E. M. Anscombe; trans. G. E. M. Anscombe; 2d ed.; Oxford: Blackwell, 1979), 106.
41. Rudolph Carnap, Logical Structure of the World (1928; repr., Berkeley: University of Calif ornia Press, 1967), 327–28. A brilliant (if misguided) analysis of similar considerations is to be found in Gilbert Ryle, “Systematically Misleading Expressions,” reprinted in The Linguistic Turn, 85–100.
42. Carnap develops what is referred to as a semantic theory of truth which differentiates between those sentences capable of being “true,” for example, “object sentences” or “token sentences,” and those which are not, namely, “psuedo-sentences.” The latter would include “metaphysical” utterances, for example, religious, ethical, etc. See also Rudolph Carnap, Introduction to Semantics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1942), and Meaning and Necessity: A Study in Semantics and Modal Logic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1947).
43. Dudley Shapere, “Philosophy and the Analysis of Language,” in The Linguistic Turn, 279–80.
44. The reader should consult previous chapters in The Linguistic Turn for greater elucidation of the contours of each of these philosophers’ ideas and projects.
45. Taylor, Philosophical Arguments, 61–78; see also Taylor, Sources of the Self, 143–76.
46. Thomas Nagel, The View From Nowhere (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).
47. Taylor, Philosophical Arguments, 64.
48. Thomas Nagel, Mortal Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 208.
49. Taylor, Philosophical Arguments, 66. Suchan ontologizing of reason and the rationalist methodology is canonized in the work of the Port Royal Logic in seventeenth-century France.
50. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (trans. G. E. M. Anscombe; New York: Macmillan, 1958).
51. Peter Winch, “The Unity of Wittgenstein’s Philosophy,” in Studies in the Philosophy of Wittgenstein (ed. Peter Winch; New York: Humanities Press, 1969), 1–19.
52. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Grammar (ed. R. Rhees; trans. A. J. P. Kenny; Oxford: Blackwell, 1974), 211.
53. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarkson the Foundations o Mathematics (ed. G. H. von Wright, R. Rhees, and G. E. M. Anscombe; trans. G. E. M. Anscombe; 2d ed.; Oxford: Blackwell, 1956), 333.
54. See Williams (Ethics, 132–55) for his distinction between absoluteness and truth, a distinction which is meant to prise off a realm of “objective” fact which is somehow non-perspectivally true, from that which is “true” in the sense that it is “rightly assertable” within a specific language-game.
55. Nagel, View From Nowhere.
56. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations.
57. J. L. Austin, How to Do T hings with Words (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), and John Searle, Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969).
58. Paul Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning (Fort Worth, Tex.: Texas Christian University Press, 1976); also John B. Thompson, ed., Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences: Essays on Language, Action and Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), and Mario J. Valdes, ed., A Ricoeur Reader: Reflection and Imagination (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf 1991).
59. Kai Nielsen, “Wittgensteinian Fideism,” Philosophy 62 (1967): 191-93. This consequence is most profoundly reflected in the works of Richard Rorty for example, Contingency. Not all agree with Nielsen’s analysis and his charge of fideism.
60. Rorty refers to this ancient preoccupation with truth’ and the invisible as the disposition to use the language of our ancestors, to worship the corpses of their metaphors” (Contingeny, 21).
61. The use of “essence” is burdened with all kinds of metaphysical freight which ultimately blurs our ability to see language do more than function self-referentially This is developed more fully by Ricoeur in Interpretation Theory.
62. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals (ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 92.
63. Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ly/oj, 279.
64. More on this can be found in Alexander Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985).
65. Hillary Putnam, aking R ules Seriously—A Response to Martha Nussbaum, ew Literary History 15 (1983): 199.
66. As Nietzsche poetically frames it in On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense, in he Portable Nietzsche (New York: Penguin Books, 1968), 46–47: “Truth is a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms—in short a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people.”
67. This misguided quest produced the Cartesian Anxiety as Richard Bernstein labels it in Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics and Praxis (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983).
68. Arthur Allen Leff, “Unspeakable Ethics, Unnatural Law,”Duke Law Journal 6 (1979): 1233-34.
69. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (2d ed.; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970); also Mary Hesse, Revolutions and Reconstructions in the Philosophy of Science (Brighton, England: Harvester Press, 1980).
70. Richard Rorty Consequences of Pragmatism (Hemel Hempstead, England: Harvester Wheat-sheaf, 1991), xliii.
71. Richard Rorty, “Pragmatism and Philosophy,” in After Philosophy (ed. Kenneth Baynes, James Bohman, and Thomas McCarthy; Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996), 30–31.
72. Rorty, “Pragmatism,” 32.
73. Ibid., 74-75.
74. Ibid., 27.
75. Richard Rorty Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 23.
76. Rorty, Contingency, 22.
77. Ibid.
78. Ibid., 27.
79. Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973).
80. Rorty, Contingency, 73.
81. Ibid.
82. Ibid., 79-80.
83. For example, Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral T heory (NotreDame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981).
84. For a concise analysis of the variety of ways in which philosophy has both enabled and disabled ethical pursuits, see Williams, Ethics.
85. Plato, Phaedrus, 267a6.
86. Martha Nussbaum, “Sophistry About Conventions,” in Love’s Knowledge, 220.
87. Nussbaum, “Sophistry,” 220.
88. Martha Nussbaum, “The Discernment of Perception: An Aristotelian Conception of Private and Public Rationality,” in Love’s Knowledge, 55.
89. Nussbaum discusses this in “Discernment,” 54–105. This is a recurrent theme of her works beginning with The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), and subsequently in The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).
90. Martha Nussbaum, “Consequences and Character in Sophocles’ Philoctetes,” Philosophy and Literature 1 (1976–77): 25-53.
91. Nussbaum, “Discernment,” 55.
92. Nussbaum builds her characterization of Plato around her reading of Protagoras. All references cited here are from The Dialogues of Plato, Vol. 3: Ion, Hippias Minor, Laches, Protagoras (translation and comment by R. E. Allen; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 169–223.
93. Plato, Protagoras, 217.
94. The first two areas (singleness and metricity) are ultimately combined in the analysis of “particularity” in Aristotle where homogeneity and heterogeneity form the background against which discussions of universal and general rules take place, cf Nussbaum, “Discernment,” 66.
95. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1142a. Quotations are taken from the Loeb edition translated by H. Rackham, hereafter cited as NE.
96. What follows is largely influenced by Nussbaum and the work of David Wiggins, particularly the latter’s “Deliberation and Practical Reason,” in Essays on Aristotle’s Ethics (ed. Amelie Oksenberg Rorty; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 221–40.
97. Nussbaum, Fragility of Goodness, 304.
98. Nussbaum, “Discernment,” 74.
99. Taylor, Sources of the Self, 125.
100. Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988), 136. The quotation from Aristotle is suggestive of the relationship between aretaic theory and epistemic justification. This is pursued somewhat by James A. Montmarquet, Epistemic Virtue and Doxastic Responsibility (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1993), 99, where he writes: “A person S is justified in believing p insofar as S is epistemically virtuous in believing.”
101. Nussbaum, Fragility of Goodness, 309.
102. Iris Murdoch, “The Fire and the Sun: Why Plato Banished the Artists,” originally published in 1976, reprinted in Existentialists and Mystics: Essays in Philosophy and Literature (London: Allen Lane, 1998), 386–463. With application to Kant, see also by Murdoch, “The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited,” in Existentialists and Mystics, 261–86.
103. Nussbaum, “Discernment,” 76.
104. Ibid., 77.
105. Nussbaum deviates from the standard translation of “phantasia” as “imagination” opting for “appear.” See Martha C. Nussbaum, “The Role of Phantasia in Aristotle’s Explanations of Action,” in Aristotle’s De Motu Animalium (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), 221–70.
106. Nussbaum, “Discernment,” 77; also Nussbaum, “Role of Phantasia.” Nussbaum discusses these themes further in Fragility of Goodness, 277ff.
107. Nussbaum, “Discernment,” 78.
108. See the stimulating analysis by L. A. Kosman, “Being Properly Affected: Virtues and Feelings in Aristotle’s Ethics,” in Essays on Aristotle’s Ethics, 103–16. Kosman comments regarding Aristotle’s idea of virtue that it is best seen as "a complex disposition in the sense that its actualization is complex, and specificially in that its actualization consists of a characteristic set of feelings and a correspondent characteristic set of actions” (p. 109).
109. Nussbaum, Fragility of Goodness, 309.
110. Nussbaum, “Discernment,” 79.
111. Parker, Ethics, Theory and the Novel, 37; cf. Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good (London: Rout-ledge, 1970), esp. ch. 1, “The Idea of Perfection.”
112. Iris Murdoch, “Vision and Choice in Morality,” in Existentialists and Mystics, 79.
113. Charles Taylor, “What is Human Agency?” in Philosophical Papers, 1:15–16.
114. Charles Altieri, “From Expressivist Aesthetics to Expressivist Ethics,” in Literature and the Question of Philosophy (ed. Anthony J. Cascardi; Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 135.