I will read the final book by Professor Bernard Williams (which is concerned with somewhat distant political and ethical questions) probably before I complete the essay below and soon in any event.
By "distant" I mean in terms of Professor Williams' usual metaphysical interests. Williams was no denier of the "reality" of ethical life nor a simple ethical relativist and certainly not a nihilist. Professor Williams would have been the last person to endorse the amoralist views urged against me in The Philosophy Cafe. Williams was also a sharp critic of utilitarianism. Williams devoted several chapters of his works to refuting the philosophical amoralist.
My discussion is informed by readings of Isaiah Berlin, P.F. Strawson, Stuart Hampshire, John Rawls, Ronald Dworkin, John Finnis, Robert Nozick, Iris Murdoch, Phillipa Foot (the "doctrine of double effect" helps me). Other philosophers -- whose names will turn up in my discussions sooner or later, like Simon Blackburn -- have also provided valuable assistance in constructing my arguments.
I wish to bring together Williams' writings dealing with the phenomenon of "moral luck" with his interest in personal identity in terms of imagination or aesthetic creativity in the construction of the self.
Jacques Derrida and Paul Ricoeur have also examined the metaphysics of identity as a hermeneutic problem. ("Jacques Derrida's Philosophy as Jazz.")
Williams, Foot, and MacIntyre were lumped together during the late eighties as, somehow, re-establishing the Aristotelean tradition of virtue-based, character-driven ethical thinking in opposition to a kind of Kantianism associated with Rawls, Nozick, and others. In fact, Williams and the other "Virtue Theorists" are not all that distant from some of Kant's positions -- especially as the Critical Theory evolved in Kant's final works -- works concerned with aesthetics and religion.
Thomistic reasoning is very close to the mature thought of Bernard Williams. To my knowledge no scholars have pursued the associations between the writings of, say, John Finnis and Bernard Williams.
I am aware of areas of disagreement between Williams and Aristoteleans as well as Kantians concerning ethical rationalism, for example, as distinct from the rationality of ethical principles. Nevertheless, Williams rejects Rorty's skepticism in no uncertain terms:
" ... we cannot think about the world without describing it in some way: the world cannot present itself uncategorized. [Kant] Moreover, there is no way in which the world simply describes itself, or presents itself in terms that could not themselves be the subject of inquiry, reflection and alternative proposals. Those claims, in themselves, are not too upsetting. They still allow us to think that there is an independent world that we are trying to describe, and that what it is actually like can control the success of our descriptions."
Bernard Williams, "Auto-da-Fe: Consequences of Pragmatism," in Alan Malachowski, ed., Richard Rorty (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), p. 26.
Nothing in quantum mechanics need alter this conclusion by Professor Williams.
Much the same may be said of the recent, excellent, and (for me) instructive work of Professor Charles Larmore, The Autonomy of Morality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008) which may not be as opposed to Kant as is usually supposed. For example, see Paul Guyer's discussion in Kant (New York & London: Routledge, 2006), pp. 177-207 then turn to Christopher Norris, "Can Logic be Quantum-Relativized?: Putnam, Dummett and the 'Great Quantum Muddle,'" in Quantum Theory and the Flight From Realism: Philosophical Responses to Quantum Mechanics (London & New York: Routkledge, 2000), pp. 194-230.
The conception of "independent reason" as essential to moral life arising from the practical requirements of sociability is fundamental to one understanding of Critical Theory.
I am referring here to the so-called "Conservative" reading of Kant.
If there are "Left and Right Hegelians" then why not "Conservative and Liberal Kantians"?
Larmore is the opposite of a nihilist or denier of the objectivity and universality of ethics. The Brown University philosopher's views are among the closest to the positions that I have defended in "Why I am not an ethical relativist."
As an insult, I believe, a brief introduction to jurisprudence was suggested to me by a "friend." In reading that book I find some strange errors in the summary of natural law which I plan to discuss elsewhere. I specialized in legal theory and culture in my elective law school subjects and did exceptionally well in this area. I have read steadily concerning legal and political theory since my graduate student days, that is, well over three decades.
Williams' latest work is helpful for law students and others concerned with these philosophical issues. Perhaps I should suggest to a medical school graduate and "former" Emergency Room physician that he or she read A Very Brief Introduction to Human Anatomy?
Philosophical discussions of identity provide a point of intersection between phenomenology, hermeneutics, Marxist theory, and linguistic or analytical as well as pragmatist philosophy. Richard Rorty, Jurgen Habermas and Hans-Georg Gadamer are playing in the same field with Williams, also Martha Nussbaum (Love's Knowledge is still my favorite of Nussbaum's books), Robert Nozick and Mary Midgley, along with many others.
I begin with a brief biography of Williams. I then discuss "moral luck" by turning to the issues of identity to which Williams' essay leads. I offer comments and criticisms from an American Continental perspective. I conclude with suggestions for directions to follow in continuing discussions of these themes emerging in ethics, politics and jurisprudence. I will refer to Opera and films -- both were great favorites of this British thinker -- whose sense of fun is evident in his writings. Williams is not a "philosophical grocer" despite his rigor and clarity. ("G.E. Moore's Critique of Idealism.")
A recent biography of John Stuart Mill is recommended to all of those who see themselves, proudly, as "philosophical grocers." F.H. Bradley's destruction of Mill's ethics has persuaded me that Mill -- while an admirable and forward-looking Victorian intellectual -- is not a first rate metaphysician or epistemologist, nor is Mill a great logician. Nevertheless, the always astute Adam Gopnik's perceptive essay-review of this biography in a recent issue of The New Yorker will clarify Mill's importance and worthiness. Accordingly, both the review and the book under discussion are recommended to readers.
To suggest that "in the beginning was the deed," as Williams does, is also to recognize that this primal "deed" is, necessarily, an instantiation of an entire metaphysics and ontology. (See "G.K. Chesterton's Heresy is Orthodoxy" and "Is it rational to believe in God?")
I am sure that Williams is closer to John MacMurray or F.H. Bradley than to Mill. This is fortunate for the likely future prospects of Bernard Williams as a philosopher of identity:
"Hedonism is bankrupt," Bradley says of Mill's utilitarianism, "with weariness we have pursued it, so far as was necessary, through its various shapes -- from the selfish doctrine of the individual to the self-sacrificing spirit of modern Utilitarianism. We have seen that in every form it gives an end which is illusory and impalpable. We have seen that its efforts to compromise with the moral consciousness are useless; that in no shape will it give us a creed that holds water, and that it will justify to the inquiring mind those moral beliefs which it is not prepared for the sake of any theory to relinquish. Whatever we may think of those who embrace the doctrine, [John Stuart Mill,] whatever may be its practical results, yet, theoretically considered, we have seen, I trust, that it is immoral and false, ... "
F.H. Bradley, "Pleasure For Pleasure's Sake," in Ethical Studies (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1951), p. 64.
We forget that -- while it is true that Mill was quite advanced and admirable in many of his political and social views -- much of Mill's working life was spent in the service of the East India Company advancing the interests of the British empire whose civilizing mission Mill never seriously doubted.
Political correctness or "inclusiveness" are not a valid or "utilitarian" criteria for assessing philosophical systems.
I can not resist providing an example of Bradley's rapier-like wit and penetrating insight in a famous illustrative footnote:
" ... I will produce an example or two of cases where Hedonism gives no guidance. If in certain South Sea Islands the people have not what we call 'morality,' but are very happy, is it moral or immoral to attempt to turn them from their ways? If by an immoral act, which probably will not be discovered, I can defeat a stroke of pernicious policy on a large scale, what am I to do? Is prostitution a good or a bad thing? To prove that it is bad we must prove that it diminishes the surplus of pleasant sensations, and is not this a fair subject for argument? Do I or do I not add to the surplus of 'grateful feeling' by a given act or acts of sexual irregularity? This is a serious practical question, and I know that in many cases it is honestly answered in the affirmative; and in some of these cases, so far as such impalpable questions can be judged of, I should say the affirmation was correct. ... "
Ibid., at pp. 51-53.
These words were written in 1875. Ethical Studies appeared in 1876 followed by a revised edition in 1927.
I am a battle-scarred Internet warrior. I am "well-seasoned" in philosophical debates with self-admiring interlocutors. I am always astonished to discover the easy assumption that there is simply a "way things are." The so-called "real world" and life "as it is" are recommended to us.
There are indeed hard realities. I am living with many of them. Yet these realities and most other "worlds" or "realities" that we inhabit -- our nations, languages, professions, clubs and communities -- are or may be human creations that immediately take on a life, objectivity, independence and truth of their own. ("'Inception': A Movie Review.")
Like the material world our human "realities" or discoveries are not as "material" as they used to be nor as immutable, even if they are no less "real." ("John Finnis and Ethical Cognitivism.")
This insight and what it means in terms of our moral fortunes and identities is Williams' greatest philosophical concern.
Before I find myself censored and obstructed, again, in my communication efforts for saying these things I will turn, briefly, to Williams' life "story." Consider the difference between a mode of discourse that arises from "necessity" and one that is merely "relative" to a fleeting wish for reward or attention in some community of like-minded persons. (Compare "Hilary Putnam is Keeping it Real" with "Richard Rorty's Ethical Skepticism.")
Biography.
"Bernard Arthur Owen Williams (1929-2003) was educated at Chigwell School, Essex, and Balliol College, Oxford, he "taught in London and Oxford, before being appointed professor of philosophy at Bedford College, London (1964-67). He became a professor of philosophy at Cambridge in 1967, and provost of King's College, Cambridge in 1979. He has held many visiting positions in universities in the USA, Australia and Africa, and in 1987, emigrated to become professor of philosophy in the University of California at Berkeley a much-publicized addition to the [British] 'brain drain.' He returned to the UK to become professor of philosophy at Oxford in 1990. [Williams] chaired the Committee on Obscenity and Film Censorship which produced the Williams Report in 1979. He was married (1955-74) to the politician Shirley Williams." A second marriage to Patricia Williams took place shortly after the first had ended. Magnus Magnusson, K.B.E., ed., Chambers Biographical Dictionary (London: Chambers Harrap, 1990), p. 1563.
Williams is usually regarded as a fine ethicist. I am certain that he was, in fact, a superb metaphysician and -- only incidentally to his metaphysical views -- a reluctant ethicist.
Williams was not a moralizer. You will not find advice for how to cope with your divorce in his pages. However, because Williams studied and taught philosophy at a time when metaphysics was regarded as a form of necromancy, he usually refrained from describing his primary philosophical interests as "metaphysical" which (I believe) they were. ("The Return of Metaphysics.")
Williams will be remembered as a fine contributor to our tradition of metaphysical and ontological speculation, particularly regarding the problem of personal identity and selfhood, where his efforts are exceptional and still not very well understood, especially by philosophers, to say nothing of so-called psychologists. Richard Wollheim and Adam Phillips should be read alongside Williams. Compare Richard Wollheim, The Thread of Life (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), pp. 162-197 and Adam Phililips, Equals (New York: Perseus, 2002), pp. 32-44 with Bernard Williams, Problems of the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), pp. 207-230.
There are important ways in which Williams is unusual and still controversial. Williams is closer to the idealists than members of his generation of philosophers were likely to be (except for Michael Oakeschott, of course, whose Conservatism suggested insanity in Oxbridge circles).
Williams' work reaches back to Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, Spinoza, even his dreaded adversary Kant and the much more dreaded Hegel have left their marks on his thinking, along with Russell, Moore, especially Wittgenstein and (surprisingly) Iris Murdoch.
Williams reveals a unique bundle of influences being equally attracted to American philosophers of the pragmatist school and bizarre eccentrics of all varieties. I am sure that Williams read both Peirce and Santayana.
Perhaps this fondness for bizarre persons and events explains Williams' interest in Opera and British politics. After all, the costumes worn by performers in these areas of human endeavor seem nearly identical to say nothing of the UK's legal world.
Curiously and (perhaps) distressingly Williams possessed and occasionally displayed a sense of humor.
Simon Blackburn's indulgence in wit is even more troublesome and academically suspect for a British philosopher.
Samples of these English philosophers' "peccadillos" include, Simon Blackburn, Lust (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 127-132 ("Overcoming Pessimism" through sex?) and Bernard Williams, "Plato," in R. Monk & F. Raphael, eds., The Great Philosophers (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 39-77. (Plato is nearly British according to Williams.)
Philosophical "grocers" will object at this point that Williams was a "relativist" opposed to all system-builders. No philosopher interested in metaphysics and epistemology is anti-systematic. Let us allow the forces of British common sense and the "Man on the Clapham Omnibus" -- in the form of Simon Blackburn! -- to have his say then we will bring the light of reason to bear on these matters:
"Williams is known for a subtle relativistic position" -- Simon Blackburn writes -- "in moral philosophy that rejects both Aristotelean and Kantian promises that virtue arises from the exercise of rational propensities in the mind. He also rejects expressive and projective theories, arguing instead that ethics cannot be what it seems to be, if it is based only on contingent sentiments and passion. ... "
Dictionary of Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 399.
Anyone for whom the essence of ethical life is about cultivating "virtues" of mind and heart -- for whom ethical thought and action must be character-driven -- is indebted to Aristotle.
The degree to which one accepts humanity's capacity to rationally determine (or control) such dispositions is debatable. Reasonableness may be preferable to rationalism in such matters. Few philosophers recommend the abandonment of reason. The crucial issue is how rationality is understood or becomes "reasonable" in various contexts. ("Is it rational to believe in God?")
For Williams, writing after the events of the Second World War, rationalism as distinct from reasonableness in the determination of character and "dispositions towards the good" (Thomas Aquinas) is less important than it may have been for an earlier generation of philosophers, such as F.H. Bradley and J.M.E. McTaggart, in their Edwardian splendor and comfort or ease.
Bradley had doubts about reason and more about rationalism based on biographical considerations, relying on feeling to, as it were, "fill the breach."
The difficulty is that "feelings" may not always be the noble sentiments of British gentlemen of an earlier age, but the passionate hatreds of, say, Germans resentful of a perceived betrayal leading to defeat in World War I and directing that hatred to Jews in their society.
Williams is no denier of the reality of ethical obligations nor of the partial or potential objectivity of ethical judgments and truth.
Defenders of rationalism in our time include Stuart Hampshire ("Spinoza's freedom") and Christopher Peacocke (the "a priori basis of rationality"). ("Stuart Hampshire and Iris Murdoch On Freedom of Mind.")
For Williams ethical truth and community arise from within human life "internally" to every person's biography. Goodness is expressive of human desires and needs (human nature). This places Williams at the recent culmination of a tradition of philosophers concerned with the possibilities of human ethical realization in community (Aristotle, Aquinas, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Royce, Rawls, Dworkin).
Williams is a kind of "postmodern" Modernist and not all that distant from Bradley or any of the moralists of "self-realization" in the idealist camp:
"We should recall the idea of human beings arriving at an objective foundation of ethical life; or, to put it in a way that will be most helpful here, of their arriving at an ethical life they know to be objectively founded. This may not be a likely prospect, but there is something more to be learned from the idea of it. The process would involve a practical convergence, on a shared way of life. [Kant-Hegel, Bradley-McTaggart.] In the case of science, my account of objectivity involved the idea of a convergence that would be uncoerced [truth must not be about brutality or naked physical power] if it were not uncoerced, we could not explain it as a process that arrives at the truth. In the practical, ethical case convergence would need to be explained in terms of basic [human] desires or interests, and this also requires the process to be uncoerced. ... "
Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, p. 171. ("How Can We be Moderns Again?")
My old copy of this book is dog-eared at this passage -- and several others -- where Williams clearly rejects anything that might be called "nihilism."
In responding to the nihilist and skeptic concerning morality the young Williams says:
"I do not see how it could be regarded as a defeat for reason or rationality that it had no power against this man's [the skeptic's or nihilist's] state; his state is rather a defeat for humanity."
Morality, p. 4. ("The Wanderer and His Shadow.")
Such a "defeat for humanity" is sufficient to establish "irrationality" -- and certainly "unreasonableness" -- as far as I am concerned when it comes to all nihilistic conclusions:
"This, finally, might be the point at which a philosopher who had been arguing with the subjectivist all this time might at last turn round and say: of course the contrast exists; morality is not to mirror the world, but to change it; [Marx] it is concerned with such things as principles of action, choice, responsibility. The fact that men of equal intelligence, factual knowledge, and so forth, confronted with the same situation may morally disagree shows something about morality -- that (roughly) you cannot pass the moral buck on to how the world is.'
This, essentially, is the Kantian view of the matter. Rational agency in practical reason requires the "Categorical Imperative," but this is not to say that 'Goodness' exists, objectively/independently or empirically, floating around in the universe. Kant is an ethical cognitivist who is not a moral realist. ("Immanuel Kant and the Narrative of Freedom" and "John Finnis and Ethical Cognitivism.")
"But that does not show (as subjectivism originally seemed to insinuate) that there is something wrong with it." (By "it" Williams means moral reasoning.)
Ibid., p. 33. ("Why I am not an ethical relativist" and, again, "John Finnis and Ethical Cognitivism.")
Morality yields truth, "objectively," internally to the human experience of "communities" as well as "practices" by being reflective of universal human needs (Kant) and personal projects (Hegel, Bradley) -- most especially, as Kant would insist, this very social need and disposition to be free as well as rational, equally free and rational, objectively, even absolutely.
This dialectic between values, I believe, is at the heart of American Constitutionalism. (See "Manifesto for the Unfinished American Revolution.")
As for Aristotle,
"The importance of harmonization of desires in Aristotle, and of practical reason in securing this, [Kant's "Critique of Practical Reason"] is illustrated in a backhanded way," Williams writes, "by his notable failure to deal with one problem of reconciliation which, in his own terms, must be important. The 'reason' that we have so far referred to is practical reason, which applies to particular actions and desires and which is the ground of what Aristotle (or rather his translators) call 'virtues of character' -- that is to say, those dispositions to right action which involve motivations of pleasure and pain. There is also, however, theoretical reason, the power of thinking correctly about abstract questions of science and philosophy, which Aristotle is disposed to regard as yet higher expression of man's nature: the most excellent form of human life, accordingly, is one devoted to a fair degree to intellectual inquiry. He makes it clear that since man is man, and not a god, his life cannot solely be devoted to this, and he must also have a life to which the virtues of character are necessary."
Ibid., p. 56.
Williams sees goodness as quite real because it is deeply expressive of what we are and need to be, which is "fully human." A true nihilist or evil individual is, therefore, someone deformed or warped in his or her development as a person. Evil persons are spiritual monsters. This is true regardless of physical appearance. Please refer to Oscar Wilde's masterpiece The Portrait of Dorian Gray.
This is a position very close to Thomism, as expressed in the writings of John Finnis and various forms of Hegelian-Kantianism in Husserl's phenomenology (Paul Ricoeur) that draw on the early and, even more, the later works in the Critical philosophy and its developers, notably on the writings of John Rawls and Ronald Dworking in America.
Dworkin and Rawls served as sparring partners for Williams. Nevertheless, this fundamental and foundational level of agreement between all of these philosophers on the genuineness of goodness as a value in human life should not be ignored. ("Drawing Room Comedy: A Philosophical Essay in the Form of a Film Script.")
Despite important differences between American and British political or legal thinking -- also within various "factions" (to use James Madison's term) in these nations -- fundamental unity concerning core issues of justice and human dignity should not be forgotten.
It is with regard to such fundamental issues that America and Britain, in my opinion, must stand together in the world.
Standing together in defense of a hard-won form of political liberty is what I understand by the "Special Relationship."
I can only hope that Mr. Trump will not destroy that relationship. I apologize for America's current president and thank Brits for their patience and tact in putting up with Mr. Trump on his occasional visits to the UK.
Americans promise to "endure" the presence of Boris Johnson when he visits our shores.
The Anglo-American partnership will also endure because it is needed. This partnership is especially needed by some of the poorest and most oppressed dissidents in many places in the world.
The Anglo-American agreement on tolerance for minority views and liberty of expression as well as other fundamental rights in the world may be thought of as the real "BBC America."
Among those areas of fundamental agreement between Americans and Brits (pre-Trump), I hope, is continuing tolerance of bizarre dissenters, allowance for differences, respect in disagreement, even a right to be wrong (or absurd) in one's opinions from the point of view of others.
What is "moral luck?"
A. "Persons, Character and Morality."
Williams' essay "Moral Luck" is a justly famous introduction of a number of difficult issues into English language philosophical discussions centering on the role of luck in our moral lives.
One of the problems surrounding the discussions of Williams' analysis which has the effect (I suggest) of limiting the scope not only of ethics but also of individual responsibility is the failure to attend to the placement of this essay in a collection that began with a crucial introductory essay entitled "Persons, Character and Morality."
"Moral Luck" is usually read and discussed separately from this introductory essay and the others in Williams' original collection.
In what follows I will do exactly the opposite and read the essay as a section of an integrated argument presented through seemingly disparate essays or chapters.
It is also important to notice the distinctions set forth by Williams between "extrinsic and intrinsic regret" and "agent and spectator regret."
I examine these distinctions in the final portion of this section of my essay for reasons that will become apparent only when I enter my final discussion of Williams' theory of personal identity.
My daughter explained that the Chinese word for "luck" is the same as for "fish." If you think of someone trying to catch a fish with his or her bare hands while standing in water then you will have a "feel" for the image and insight in this usage.
Williams' would have appreciated this point. If this linguistic fact were not known to him it should have been.
My differences with Williams and Thomas Nagel -- both of these men are outstanding philosophers who have taught me a great deal -- concern our respective understandings of Kant's Critical Theory and, more importantly, our respective "feeling" for tragedy.
I am sure that actors -- especially Shakespeareans -- have much to teach philosophers concerning these matters as to fortune and character as destiny. ("Shakespeare's Black Prince.")
Ernest Hemingway said: "A man can be destroyed but not defeated."
Williams challenges this intuition or conclusion by arguing that moral luck may well defeat one's life-projects as opposed to one's social or ethical obligations. However, if true, this possibility says nothing about whether moral luck can defeat our humanity by undermining our agency in choosing conduct consistent with a personal moral project. This is a task Williams sees as essential to individual identity.
The choice of a life-project is only made possible by those abstract universal qualities of persons that allow us to "succeed," morally, even as we face the ravages of fortune.
Kant is inescapable if we grant the reality of human freedom. A human life is -- and must be -- a "dual-aspect" phenomenon. Compare "The 'Galatea Scenario' and the Mind/Body Problem" with John Finnis, Fundamentals of Ethics (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1983), pp. 26-55.
If "Jack" can rescue "Rose" as the Titanic is sinking then both Kant and Christianity describe Jack as "successful." So would I.
If "Jack" struggles, mightily, at the cost of his life for his love -- being destroyed in the end, not knowing whether Rose is safely on shore -- then Jack still "succeeds" by remaining true to his moral vision, a vision which is made possible by a willing recognition of every other person's right, freely, to choose life-projects and loves.
What is most abstract and universal -- Jack's humanity -- is instantiated in a lived-project of "love as self-becoming" (John MacMurray), which is shared with those few persons close to Jack together with all others in a community.
Jack will be right to struggle until the last second of his life to realize his life-project. Jack will never give up.
"Ethical beliefs express themselves, also, in rejection or hostility toward those (at least in the locality) who have the wrong ethical sentiments or none, and if morality is to limit genuinely moral comment to blame, and blame to what is available to the rational deliberator, it is faced with a vast epistemological demand, to show (as Kant appropriately thought) that the correct ethical demands are indeed available to any rational deliberator [rational choosing agent] -- as Kant was disposed to put it, 'as such' ... "
Bernard Williams, "Postscript," in Daniel Statman, ed., Moral Luck, p. 257. (Response to critics and defense of his philosophy.)
Please see again my comments concerning Charles Larmore's philosophy.
The Continental tradition comes to the rescue by developing the idea of identity unfolding as an adventure in time. Narrativity is seen as defining this adventure. Notice Williams' identification of the three issues that concerned him in Moral Luck. Allen Speight, Hegel, Literature and the Problem of Agency (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 11-65 ("Hegel's novel ... 'The Phenomenology of Spirit'.") and Richard Poirier, Norman Mailer (New York: Viking Press, 1972), pp. 19-20 ("Malraux says that what all men are willing to die for tends to justify their fate by giving it a foundation in dignity.") Finally, a recent discovery for me, Jaroslaw Anders, translation of Kazimiers Brandys, Rondo (New York: Farrar, Straus Giroux, 1982), pp. 231-232 ("Sometimes when we accept an invitation to dinner, we are accepting an invitation from fate.")
To accept "an invitation from fate," of course, means that we are "forced" to interpret "freely" what it all means. I am aware of the paradox in this formulation. Paul Ricoeur, "Life in Quest of Narrative," in David Wood, ed., On Paul Ricoeur: Narrative and Interpretation (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 20-34 ("... all the knowledge acquired in the past few decades concerning narrative ... appears to distance narrative from lived experience and to confine it to the region of fiction.")
These "fictions" (nationality, gender, cultures, histories, politics) allow us to create particular or lived meanings in our lives as "stories we tell ourselves about ourselves." (P.F. Strawson on "Individuals" is next as reviewed by Bernard Williams in Problems of the Self.)
Williams seemingly renders persons immune from blame on the basis of luck by narrowing the scope of ethics in life. This depends on Williams' interpretation of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, a unique view of Wittgenstein, along with a neglect of thinkers casting a shadow on so much of Williams' other works, such as Bradley, Strawson, Murdoch, and the later Kantian texts:
"The capacity for moral agency is supposedly present to any rational agent whatsoever, to anyone for whom the question can even present itself. The successful moral life, removed from considerations of birth, lucky upbringing, or indeed of the incomprehensible Grace of a non-Pelagian God, is presented as a career open not only to the talents, but to a talent which all rational beings necessarily possess in the same degree. Such a conception has an ultimate form of justice at its heart, and that is its allure. Kantianism is only superficially repulsive -- despite appearances, it offers an inducement, solace to a sense of the world's unfairness."
Moral Luck, p. 21.
Kant's Critical Theory -- like Bach's music -- is formal and yet not at all cold or lacking in passion.
The talent which (I hope) all rational beings possess, necessarily and in the same degree, is capacity for humane identification with others.
Humanity then makes personal projects, identity, within our individual constraints possible.
We can choose our goals because we are rational moral agents. What we choose given our undeniable limitations and options is and will always be different, that is, better or worse in some lives than in others. Spiritually, however, our situation is equally blessed and difficult. We must become the persons we are. This "becoming" is only made possible by universal concepts (fictions?) of agency and free will. ("Beauty and the Beast.")
Williams misunderstands the Kantian Categorical Imperative, set forth in the Second Critique, as a prescription for life. In fact, Kant offers us the invitation to choose or create our own lives -- the meaning of our fates -- by entering the moral realm and becoming fully human. By owning our humanity, through reasoning, we can decide who we will be: "Dare to use your own reason."
The Categorical Imperative is only a precondition for the possibility of an individuated moral identity.
Hamlet (as a "text") by William Shakespeare is the precondition for the experience of something vital and unique that happens on stage when a group of actors make the work "come alive."
It is your job to make yourself "come alive" by choosing to love others and being loved in return as an expression of your freely-written "narrative of life" within universal rational constraints even at the cost of physical self-destruction if necessary:
"One area in which difference of character directly plays a role in the concept of moral individuality is that of personal relations, and I shall close with some remarks in this connection. Differences of character give substance to the idea that individuals are not inter-substitutable. [There are no substitutes for persons I love.] As I have just argued, a particular man so long as he is propelled forward does not need to assure himself that he is unlike others, in order not to feel substitutable, but in his personal relations to others the idea of difference can certainly make a contribution, in more than one way."
"Persons, Character and Morality," in Moral Luck, p. 15.
Williams fails to appreciate fully John Rawls' powerful Kantian insight that "a rational individual is always to act so that he need never blame himself no matter how things finally turn out."
A man or woman can be destroyed, Professor Williams, but never defeated. See generally A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), pp. 422-423.
Defeat only happens when you abandon your quest for justice and love, however you may define these values, to "accept" or surrender to the dispositions of fate or the will of others. Notice that Williams' connects character (Aristotle, Aquinas) to identity (Bradley, Parfit) by way of our moral lives.
Jack is his love for Rose and a few others because Jack's loving is his moral project in (or as) his life. Ethically, if Jack can will such a love or choice for all others he is and will remain in compliance with the Categorical Imperative.
Christianity also gives Jack a "seal of approval."
Judaism, probably, approves of Jack's sacrifice as guided by the moral law.
I can also quote Islamic law in support of this proposition.
Jack can and will "be" only in his love. This is close to what Williams means by "self-realization." (See my essay, Paul Ricoeur and the Hermeneutics of Freedom (North Carolina: Lulu Press, 2004) and "Drawing Room Comedy: A Philosophical Essay in the Form of a Film Script.")
I will apply these idealist concepts to examples drawn from Williams' favorite books and Operas. I will use illustrations from Robert Bolt's "Sir Thomas More" in A Man for All Seasons and the final duet from Umberto Giordano's Andrea Chenier.
I have not read Williams' book on Opera. I certainly plan to do so.
Williams need not worry about the tendency to detach ourselves from our particular contexts in order to reach an abstract state providing "indeterminate" guidance for our moral lives.
What is most universal and widely shared about any of us is what makes individuality possible. (See Moral Luck, p. 29 and Nicholas Rescher's, "Moral Luck" in Daniel Stedman's collection of critical papers commenting on Williams' essay.)
For a drama illustrating these Romantic ideals in the context of a gay love please see Mel Gibson's "Gallipoli." Another example of such a gay love may be seen in William Hurst's performance in the film of Manuel Puig's "The Kiss of the Spider Woman." ("Is there a gay marriage right?")
I will now pause to establish Williams' important distinctions in Moral Luck before turning to the discussion of personal identity where the writings of Martha Nussbaum and Judith Jarvis Thomson may prove useful.
B. Distinctions that make a difference.
The constitutive thought of regret in general is something like "how much better if it had been otherwise," Williams writes, "and the feeling can in principle apply to anything of which one can form some conception of how it might have been otherwise, together with consciousness of how things then would have been better. In this general sense of regret, what are regretted are states of affairs, and they can be regretted, in principle, by anyone who knows of them. [spectator regret] But there is a particularly important species of regret, which I will call 'agent-regret,' which a person can feel only towards his [or her] own past actions (or, at most, actions in which he regards himself as a participant). In this case, the supposed possible difference is that one might have acted otherwise, and the focus of the regret is on that possibility, the thought being formed in part by first-personal conceptions of how one might have acted otherwise. 'Agent-regret' is not distinguished from regret in general solely or simply in virtue of its subject-matter. There can be cases of regret directed to one's own past actions which are not cases of agent-regret, because the past action is regarded purely externally, as one might regard anyone else's action. Agent-regret requires not merely a first-personal subject-matter, nor yet merely a particular kind of psychological error, but also a particular kind of expression." ("'Inception': A Movie Review.")
Moral Luck, p. 27.
Jack could well regret that Titanic is sinking even if he does not regret his own actions in that desperate situation. However, the captain of the Titanic must regret both the event -- collision with an iceberg -- and his own responsibility as the chief officer on the vessel whether he was on deck and navigating the ship or happened to be fast asleep when the accident occurred.
Nothing excuses official misconduct (inaction) because of the unique role-responsibilities assumed by the captain of the Titanic as well as the moral obligations attaching to his office and person. (See "Terry Tuchin, Diana Lisa Riccioli, and New Jersey's Agency of Torture," "What is it like to be tortured?" and "New Jersey's 'Ethical' Legal System.")
The writings of Charles Fried ("The Lawyer as a Friend") and Ronald Dworkin ("Hard Cases") are highly relevant to these discussions.
Rose may be pained at the obligations and strictures of a society that suffocates her humanity and spirit and feel no regret about her own life-choices -- after surviving the tragedy -- a tragedy symbolic of life's journey and pains as well as of the catastrophe that would engulf an entire civilization during the adult lifetimes of Titanic's few survivors with the rise of Nazism and the Holocaust.
We are guilty if we survive when those we love do not.
We are guilty if we do not survive.
We are guilty if those we love are not equipped to survive such tragedies even if they manage to live through them.
We are always guilty.
Cobb's "guilt" at a failed "inception" explains the paradoxical presence of his "wife," Mal, in his subconscious limbo or a kind of hell. ("'Inception': A Movie Review" and "'The English Patient': A Movie Review.")
This "mortal stain" (Philip Roth) of guilt is the condition of fallen man and woman in a Judeo-Christian cosmos that -- like the Titanic -- was about to disappear beneath the waves.
No one anticipated that with the disappearance of religiously-centered Western civilization, humanism, identity, spirituality and psychological as well as cultural meaning would be threatened as never before.
It is the deepest challenge and wisdom of the film "Titanic" that "survival," as persons, is only possible for those who suffer and strive to love -- who choose the agony of love -- love even for those who are vanished.
Not to know the whereabouts or existence of our fellow passengers on this navis stultorum, the "Ship of Fools" in which we live our lives is the worst fate of all. (''Westworld': A Review of the TV Series.")
Worse than suffering is to cease to exist as a person, living without surviving, a locus of meaning and freedom with a conscience, becoming something sub-human, a zombie, a mere animal. (B.F. Skinner's psychology only became possible or popular after the Holocaust.)
Against even such a tragic fate as dehumanization -- a fate ("Fortuna") worthy of the great Greek tragedians -- we must always struggle.
That very struggle, I suggest, may be the solution to the mystery of personal identity for Williams drawing on the Greeks (Agon) and Nietzsche ("become the person you are").
Who you are is defined by your personal struggle in life. ("'The Stepford Wives': A Movie Review.")
Before turning to Williams' discussion of the issue of identity I wish to ponder the words of George Steiner in order to give a small sense of the infinite and eternal quality of this struggle (jihad) which overlaps with what I call "love":
" ... the potentialities for the enactments of evil look to be perennially unbounded. The cruelties, mental and bodily, exercised towards one's immediate kin, the abuse, fitful or systematic, of women and children, the torment and humiliation of animals, permeate existence like an intractable stench. Psychological 'triggers,' mimetic impulses, much studied but little understood, can provoke in otherwise ordinary individuals spasms of utter sadism. These can rapidly grow habitual. Killing and torture, the abjection of fellow human beings can become a rapidly acquired taste. [Malbus?] Even though they were at risk of no retribution if they refused or abstained, great numbers of German men and women turned bestial, inventing, on their own initiative, and when the war was clearly lost, novel modes of derision and torture for their Jewish victims." -- To imagine the children of those victims doing the same to others is painful beyond words for me. -- "Nor is there much evidence that other nations or ethnic communities would not, given the informing context of collective purpose, act otherwise. So far as we know, the human psyche in which libido ... erotic-sexual desires and fantasies do not comprise sadistic and masochistic elements, do not contain sharp splinters of savagery, is exceptional. A primordial ferocity lies close to desire, and even to love. ... "
Errata (New haven: Yale University Press, 1997), p. 122. ("Protecting Sex Workers" and "Psychological Torture in the American Legal System" then, again, "Drawing Room Comedy: A Philosophical Essay in the Form of a Film Script.")
Does this explain the actions of persons still engaging in computer crimes against me?
Cruelty and delight in secret or anonymous power over others is essential to the experience of being raped. Rape is not something one leaves behind, or "moves on" from in order to become a used car salesperson. Rape is a permanent deprivation, loss, invasion of the psyche and "body" of victims. It is a part of the rape victim's life, every day, and for the rest of one's life. The enormity of the violation involved in such a criminal act(s) is compounded when the victim is blamed for the offense or assigned to a category of persons "worthy" of rape, like the categories of the "unethical" or subhuman, and even for some monsters the category to which ALL women, children and powerless persons are assigned.
Rapists say of their victims: "They enjoy it."
Alternatively, rapists insist: "They deserve it."
Rapists are far from "ethical" persons who must always see their victims as "unethical" or "sub-human" just as Nazis saw all Jews as "inferior" to "genuine" persons.
Given these horrifying realities of the human condition against our lingering capacity for self-giving love with creative effort -- together with spirituality -- our most fundamentally human identities must choose us, if we are to realize our spiritual and moral as well as animal natures in our particular settings and times.
This being "chosen" is a matter of "moral luck."
There are situations for the "unfolding" of human lives that make any ethical (or dignified) existence almost impossible for persons.
Syria today may provide one example. There are many others.
Personal identity is our never-ending interpretations and reactions to the "situation" in which we are placed or where we "find" ourselves.
The self as a narrative that is always unfinished until death is a way of describing the "hermeneutics of freedom." ("Manifesto For the Unfinished American Revolution.")
An actor must interpret his/her text. "Interpreting" is creating his/her text.
Luck may be good or bad. This will have great bearing on whether recipients of luck are good or bad persons without invalidating the objectivity or utility of the terms "good" and/or "bad."
I suspect that this connection between narrativity and identity is the theme of the film "Salt." ("Why I am not an ethical relativist" and "John Finnis and Ethical Cognitivism.")
Williams' work is helpful concerning this process of assessing good and bad qualities in persons together with deciding on the origins of psychological-cultural qualities in characters both in fiction and life, identity and identities.
"The Identity Club."
The problem of personal identity is one aspect of the metaphysical "problematic" of the one and the many, universals and particulars.
Williams expects that the reader will bring knowledge of the history of philosophy and wide cultural references to this hallowed discussion in metaphysics, psychology, ethics and jurisprudence.
One reason why even so clear a writer as Professor Williams can appear difficult is the assumption made by philosophers (including Williams) that readers have absorbed as much theory or read as much as their philosophers. ("John Rawls and Justice.")
Highly intelligent people may have no talent for theoretical or abstract thinking because they lack the wide base in reading across disciplinary boundaries that supports this type of discussion or they may simply regard such abstract debates and inquiries as pointless and time-consuming in a world of pressing practical crises and dilemmas to say nothing of the always urgent need to earn (or accumulate) wealth. ("The Heidegger Controversy.")
Part of my challenge in writing is to demystify much of this material -- which is usually readily accessible -- if it is explained to people in ordinary terms and to suggest that there is a great "practical" importance and utility to even very obscure philosophical discussions.
You can understand this material. You may have wonderful ideas to contribute to this necessary discussion regardless of whether you have studied philosophy at universities or religious institutions:
"Questions at this level about persons are, in a metaphysical sense, questions [concerning] what or who a person is. Such questions can themselves be related to ethics and politics, in a number of ways. They can bear, for instance, on the ethics and politics of euthanasia. [Kant on the "Groundwork" defining humanity and ethics. Abortion?] But there is another kind of ethical and political question that can be expressed by asking the question 'what am I?' This kind of question concerns one's identity as a person who belongs to a certain family, group, or race; they are questions of social identity." [Hegel on Stillichkeit.]
From the individual to the social as a continuity, legato; then back from the social to the individual, dialectically. Williams shifts gears and moves into the fast lane in his essay:
"In these connections 'identity' has a sense which, ... relates to a type or a general thing. A gay or lesbian identity, a native American identity, or that of a Lombard as opposed to an Italian, are all type things, because such an identity is shared. Indeed, it is particularly important that it is shared, and an insistence on such an identity is an insistence on the ways in which it is shared.
Bernard Williams, "Identity and Identities," in Henry Harris, ed., Identity (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), pp. 7-8.
All universals -- like "Law" or "Justice" -- must be shared. Universals are social-ideational or linguistic-conceptual spaces for working through collective definitions of value and meaning in shaping a people's social identity and destiny. Compare "Richard A. Posner on Voluntary Actions and Criminal Responsibility" with "Manifesto for the Unfinished American Revolution."
Ironically, my two examinations of American legal theory and freedoms have been vandalized on several occasions.
My experience of censorship may be a truer description of American legal reality today, sadly, than my theoretical hopes for law and politics.
Thomism, late Wittgenstein, Anscombe, Finnis, Nussbaum and Thompson, Marx -- all can be plugged in right here.
A universal, like the "typical male psyche," is contested territory where we struggle to provide a definition and never something settled forever or definitively. ("Good Will Humping.")
What is this "sharing" in collective conceptual or cultural spaces?
Jack and Rose on the Titanic "share" something that changes both of them forever. This something is important to who they are and must be in addition to their unique personal qualities. This sharing extends beyond them to include a larger number of others (and entities) in their world that are bound to them so inextricably that the sharing survives even great catastrophe.
This is to approach the concept of community. Spinoza's similar ideas also provide an analogy to this discussion. Sharing in a common identity, as a "couple," may survive even the death of a partner.
For some reason "commonality of identity" is a subject that interests Mr. Di Caprio since the theme recurs in a number of his choices of roles in films. ("'Inception': A Movie Review" and see The Departed.)
Rose will continue to be bound to Jack, as a woman in her eighties -- regardless of her relationships with other men who have entered her life -- because of her loss and pain, through her memories and journey in time. Rose is or becomes, partly, this pain that is her remembered love.
This is also to approach theology and aesthetics because substance demands form. Identity must be expressed and memory captured, for example, in words or film, pigments on canvas or music, movement or stone, scientific discovery or even in Williams' philosophical prose.
In "Titanic" this form is symbolized in the jewel that the elderly Rose throws into the sea. The jewel is herself, as a dying woman, and her love. This is also the symbol for the movie we are seeing. The audience takes home that jewel when the film is concluded. ("What is memory?" and "'In Time': A Movie Review.")
Identity is always the "shape" of this sharing, or form, within the subject and in the world. I have suggested that this "form" will take on or express characteristics of struggle. (See "'Brideshead Revisited': A Movie Review" and "The English Patient': A Movie Review," then "David Hume's Philosophical Romance.")
"Mailer's brand of existentialism finds its personal meaning within the personal-literary problem ... and it should be investigated, it seems to me, not as an idea so much as a way of coping with personal-literary problems. ... Having said that 'form is the physical equivalent of memory,' he goes on to make a distinction between memory and an event: 'An event consists not only of forces which are opposed to one another but also of forces which have no relation to the event. Whereas memory has a tendency to retain only the opposition and the context.' Under this dispensation, there is no obligation to the past except as one chooses to reconstruct it. [A hermeneutics of freedom?] The past is that part of the self that one recognizes in the present as belonging to a dimension of time other than the future. Meanwhile yet another self is being formed in the present, but this self will not be recognizable until the present has also become the past. ["The owl of Minerva takes wing only with the falling of the dusk," Hegel tells us.] Until the self has moved on to a ["shared"] future and decided again to discover what has survived its past. Form, that is, is the destiny that awaits any present event or experience [or self?]."
Richard Poirier, Norman Mailer, pp. 51-52. ("What is memory?" and "Why Philosophy is for Everybody.")
What I am is always a "not yet." Completion arrives only with the closure of narrative in death.
Form is the sharing of the self's projects in time. Form is the place of "meeting" in aesthetic or spiritual space. This is to find ourselves speaking of love. ("Is it rational to believe in God?" and "What you will ...")
This is to discover dual aspects of our natures as animals living in time experiencing events in the empirical world then interpreting (and re-interpreting) those events in order to construct our meanings socially.
We are "spirits in a material world":
" ... one distinguishes existence as what is stated in a proposition from existence as an actuality in the world, and then further notices that the existing of a substance as an actuality in the world always consists in some activity. [Loving?] Thus, for instance, we discover from science that the rock which appears to exist purely statically, as if its existence over a period might be merely the continuance of an existence which it might have instantaneously for a single instant only, in fact involves a massive pulsation of activity of an enormous number of protons, neurons, and electrons in dynamic relation involving continuous change and movement -- so that the idea of the instantaneous existence of substance within time is not only unimaginable and linguistically meaningless but also scientifically foolish. ... "
Even a rock is a "narrative" of particles in motion. Even a rock is a kind of "spinning top." ("'Inception': A Movie Review.")
Human life is "being-in-the-world-with-others" towards the transcendent realization of our selves. Identity is how each individual lives out or gives "form" to this struggle.
I am my loving of several others which is the expression of my freedom and always incomplete for as long as I live because it must be a kind of struggle as well as self-giving.
The idea of "self-realization" unites Neo-Thomism with idealism, phenomenology with hermeneutics, or Marxism and Nietzsche with liberation theology and it is also central to Williams' philosophy of personal identity that is indebted to British idealism. (Again: "Drawing Room Comedy: A Philosophical Essay in the Form of a Film Script.")
Hamlet is a communal entity that includes audiences. Williams is one of the philosophers whose theory lends itself to Christian, Jewish, Islamic and other religious as well as secular interpretations provided that we understand religions as narratives or metaphorical "messages" concerning ethics. David Braine, "The Human Being as Spirit," in The Human Person: Animal and Spirit (Indiana: Notre Dame, 1992), pp. 535-536.
Compare Martha Nussbaum, Love's Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 3-54, pp. 365-393 and Judith Jarvis Thomson, Rights, Restitution & Risk: Essays in Moral Theory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), pp. 78-117 ("Killing, Letting Die, and the Trolley Problem"), with Martha Nussbaum, "Luck and Ethics," and Judith Jarvis Thomson, "Morality and Bad Luck," in Daniel Statman's Moral Luck. Also recommended is Alasdair MacIntyre, Marxism and Christianity (Indiana: Notre Dame, 1968), pp. 1-29.
We need others to love and who will love us in order to fulfill our human natures. Any isolated and/or socially estranged "personality" disintegrates.
Would Rose have been the person she became without Jack? I doubt it.
"Rescuing" is always an "alternating current" as Octavio Paz expresses it. "Rescuing" is always mutual.
Whatever you may say about Jack's life no one can claim that it was meaningless. ("'The Reader': A Movie Review.")
Professor Nussbaum is most important in developing these themes for contemporary Americans in a direction that will be attractive to feminists and secularists -- who may feel no need for organized religion -- even as they desire the loving presence of others in their lives welcoming values of community traditionally regarded as religious (or spiritual) but that may now be seen as aesthetic or ethical and expressed in entirely secular terms:
" ... my concern [is] with certain problems: with the role of love and other emotions in the good human life, with the relationship between emotion and ethical knowledge, with deliberation about particulars. No claim about novels in general, far less about literature in general, could possibly emerge from this book. But I believe that these larger questions can best be approached through the detailed study of complex particular cases -- all the more since it is the importance of complex particularity that we shall, in these studies, be trying to make clear."
Love's Knowledge, p. 23.
I am a complex particularity.
I suspect that, if you are a person, then you are also a complex particularity.
I cannot be reduced to a feminist, New Age, political, advertising, or other "slogan." What makes my complex particularity possible is certain universal characteristics of persons, such as freedom and the virtues, especially love, together with my concrete circumstances. ("Stuart Hampshire and Iris Murdoch on Freedom of Mind.")
This brings me to the examples that Williams would appreciate, I am sure, Sir Thomas More in A Man for All Seasons and the Opera Andrea Chenier.
We may now say goodbye to Jack and Rose on "Titanic" leaving them to party with the passengers in the lower decks.
Before turning to my examples, however, I wish to return (briefly) to Williams' argument. In addition to all of this "sharing" identity ...
" ... may be constructed. ... by social processes, ... some of the construction may be demonstrably fictional. ... The difference between an identity which is mine and which I eagerly recognize as mine, and an identity as what someone else simply assumes me to be, is in one sense all the difference in the world."
"Identity and Indentities," p. 8. (Compare "Judith Butler and Gender Theory" with "The 'Galatea Scenario' and the Mind/Body Problem" then "David Hume's Philosophical Romance" and "'The Stepford Wives': A Movie Review" and "Ex Machina: A Movie Review.")
There are struggles in which one's objective is for the other person to win.
Hamlet is the gift of poet and actors to audiences "completing" the work. The actors' struggle is for the audience to "win" by getting the meaning of the play. ("Shakespeare's Black Prince.")
Raising a child is one obvious example of struggling "for" the other. Marriage. Genuine therapy -- which excludes torture or information-gathering for the State -- may be another example. All relations with clerics also should fit into this category. "Loving," Aquinas by way of Thomas Merton explains, "is and must be for the other." ("The Soldier and the Ballerina" and "Beauty and the Beast.")
I believe that acting and all of the arts partake of this quality of "self-giving." Theater and cinema, music and painting, writing -- all are "for" the other. For a work of literature exploring these themes, see Susan Howatch, The Heartbreaker (New York: Ballantine, 2003) and Susan Howatch, Glamorous Powers (New York: Fawcett Crest, 1988). ("Images and Death.")
I suppose the essence of a genuine political revolution (1776) must involve a commitment to this sort of project. Revolutions are for the future.
Great actors, I believe, give of themselves to audiences as well as to other actors. Back to Williams:
"An essential part of the idea of social identity is that a particular human being can find or lose identity in social groups. [Lawyers, Doctors, Plumbers.] Henri Tajfel, the founder of modern social identity theory, defined social identity as 'the individual's knowledge that he or she belongs to certain social groups together with some emotional or value significance to him or her of the group membership.' ... "
Ibid., at p. 9.
This leads to a powerful conclusion:
" ... the will may be exercised in coming to coincide with something that I already unchangeably am."
Ibid., at p. 10.
To "become what one is" today may involve coming to terms with our uneasy placement between Modernity and Postmodernity, or between a number of crumbling (or challenged) distinctions (boundaries) such as "masculine" and "feminine" and/or other so-called "binary oppositions":
"All of this helps us, perhaps, to see why the politics of identity should be so essential to our life now. Ever since the Enlightenment," Williams writes, "a recurrent aspiration of distinctively modern politics has been for a life that is indeed individual, particular, mine, within the reach of my will, yet at the same time expresses more than me, and shapes my life in terms that mean something because they lie beyond the will and are concretely given to me. It is the politics, if you like, of self-realization. [F.H. Bradley] That term contains in itself obvious difficulties: it is even grammatically ambiguous between activity and passivity, and illuminatingly so. Those obscurities are the product not of mere semantic inefficiency, but of unresolved political and personal tensions about philosophical problems of identity, that if we find it systematically hard to know what to say, the problem lies probably not in our words but in our world."
Ibid., at pp. 10-11. ("Charles Taylor and Modernity.")
Turning, once more, to Mr. Mailer:
"Once decide, however, that the men were to blame and there was hope: a revolution of women could open every social disease to the beneficent examination of a new human light. No choice then but to remind himself that he had not set out to collect the most entertaining exhibits of a new intellectual fashion but rather to explore the revolutionary ideas which emerged from these collective pamphlets, books, and bible of Women's Lib, and explore them with all awareness that they were twentieth century ideas, and so might be artfully designed to advance the fortunes of the oncoming technology of the state. What a paranoid supposition was this! Yet how reasonable. Paranoia and common sense come together as the world goes insane."
The Prisoner of Sex (New York: New American Library, 1971), pp. 38-39.
I call your attention to the dedication of Mailer's Prisoner of Sex: "for Carol Stevens."
Conclusion.
Sir Thomas More in Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons is forced to test his "adamantine sense of self," identity, against the strictures of his society. Expediency in light of a mad king's fearsome will to power and obedience is contrasted with conscience expressed in individual moral life. Perhaps these are themes that we appreciate in contemporary America. Tudor England was secure from dissenters and "Popish terror." Henry's kingdom was, however, a society in which the rule of law was gravely endangered. Most of Henry's subjects went along with his commands, for safety's sake, or maybe out of a "fear of his supporters." ("'This is totally amazing!' -- Donald J. Trump.")
Bought and paid for witnesses, pressure from the state's willing executioners as well as spys, had little effect on More.
More refused to "adjust" or "accept" the unacceptable. He did not wish to be told "what to believe" for the common good. More would not "go along ... for fellowship."
When those persons whose conscience allowed for "acceptance of authority" were sent to "heaven" -- in other words, when they were deemed to have become themselves -- and More was not, because he failed to act on his own conscience, none would accompany him "for fellowship."
The law allows for no secrecy, public lies, or double standards in evaluating lies. Law is not a "sometime" thing to be set aside for "good reasons" that are unexplained to its victims. A Constitution is everything in a free society or it is nothing.
More was executed.
More was destroyed.
More was not defeated.
More's life is a kind of VICTORY of the individual moral conscience against oppressive political power. Regardless of whether or not one is religious it is impossible to fail to recognize and respect More's humanity which allowed for his transformation of tragedy into vindication.
Sir Thomas More at least in Robert Bolt's version of history achieved his humanity becoming himself.
Much the same story may be told through the biography of Giordano Bruno where the Church may be transformed into the villain. The issue was similar for these men as it is for Arthur Miller's protagonist in the "Crucible": conscience against conformity.
An unwillingness to become the instrument of another, a refusal to accept values imposed upon us by others as a form of brutal "adjustment" to a despicable status quo demands that we have the courage to be free.
What is at stake in such a confrontation with power for authenticity is one's very identity. For Thomas More there was also the reality and meaning of law, due process of law and justice:
MORE: "The law is not a 'light' for you or any man to see by; the law is not an instrument of any kind. [so much for Judge Richard Posner's "law and economics."] (to the FOREMAN) The law is a causeway upon which, so long as he keeps to it, a citizen may walk safely. (Earnestly addressing him) In matters of conscience -- "
A Man for All Seasons (New York: Vintage, 1960), pp. 88-89. ("Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech ...")
The affirmation of humanity, respect for identity and the reality of personal values even as we face destruction is captured in the final duet of Giordano's Romantic masterpiece Andrea Chenier which seems so distant from contemporary beliefs: Man and woman celebrate their love as a kind of victory over the tragedy of the human condition by welcoming what becomes a self-chosen death for both lead characters.
No wonder this was a favorite Opera for Bernard Williams.
Each person's death -- whenever and however it arrives -- must be self-chosen or accepted, that is, welcomed as part of one's love and the completion of life. Celebrated and not only accepted. In dying we allow suffering and loss to be only one side of our loving, living, or being, rather than the totality of what for some is a spiritually empty existence.
This has been called the Christian-Romantic "defeat" of death. Please refer to the writings of Roberto Mangabeira Unger.
It is in this sense that Dr. King achieved (or created) his "beautiful soul" because Dr. King became the values that he lived for and conveyed to others.
Bernard Williams' would agree, perhaps, that this is to recognize humanity's ultimate moral invulnerability to luck in our final achievement of human dignity, peace, fulfillment that is the only true "success" in life.
Sources:
Bernard Williams, Morality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), entirety.
Bryan Magee, "Conversation With Bernard Williams: Philosophy and Religion," in Modern British Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), pp. 187-206.
Bernard Williams, Problems of the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), pp. 1-64, pp. 207-266.
Bernard Williams, "Mind and Its Place in Nature," in Descartes: The Project of Pure Enquiry (London: Penguin, 1978), pp. 278-303.
Bernard Williams, Moral Luck: Philosophical Papers 1973-1980 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univesity Press, 1981), pp. 1-40, pp. 132-173.
Daniel Stallman, ed., Moral Luck (New York: SUNY, 1993). (Papers commenting on Williams' work by -- among others -- Thomas Nagel, Nicholas Rescher, Steven Sverdlik, Judith Jarvis Thompson, Martha C. Nussbaum, together with a response and commentary by Professor Williams.)
Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), pp. 30-71, pp. 120-197.
Bernard Williams, "Auto-da-Fe: Consequences of Pragmatism," in Alan Malachowski, ed., Reading Rorty (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), p. 26.
Bernard Williams, "Identity and Identities," in Henry Harris, ed., Identity (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), pp. 1-13. (Parfitt, Harris, Ruse, Cave are also recommended.)
Bernard Williams, In the Beginning Was the Deed: Realism and Moralism in Political Argument (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2005), entirety.
