Will D. Desmond

I want to thank Professor Wang for a very interesting and informative paper. It is especially informative to one who is relatively ignorant of the complex history of China's involvement with notions of modernity, and the variety of its contacts with Western influences. On the whole, the paper offers much valuable information about significant historical landmarks, and the diversity of ways that Chinese intellectuals and leaders have responded to them. Overall, four phases or periods are differentiated for comment and elucidation.

Desmond: Talking to Richard on the way over, I proposed that our discussion would focus on the theme of autonomy and embeddedness or relatedness. This is a recurrent concern in all of Richard’s writing. I thought it would be a good idea to look at this issue of autonomy and embeddedness in a variety of different forms, in relation to different philosophers that have influenced the work of Richard, but also in a variety of different domains such as ethics, aesthetics or literature, romanticism.In the latter the question of the interplay between art and religion also comes up as a very important consideration. Another central theme in Richard’s work is the tension between aspiration and disappointment, between longing and the failure to reach a desired completion. Disappointment and the fact of failure are not, I would say, absolutized. Disappointment becomes the occasion of a possible renewal of striving or aspiration rather than marking a sceptical outcome in a merely negative sense.

There is a sense of doing justice prior to the juxtaposition of theory and practice, accounting for an ontological vulnerability prior to both social power andsocial vulnerability. Justice in the sense of “being true” involves fidelity to truth that we neither possess nor construct, preceding all efforts to enact justice. The charge to be just precedes any just act. There is a “patience of being,” or a receiving of being before acting, which we must then actively take up. All this has implications for the practices of philosophy, including transcending the will to power by not clinging to one’s own place in History. The philosopher stands back and enters the void space of the human soul which is vulnerable, both terrorized and capable of terrorizing. This void is a “porosity of the soul” rather than pure nothingness. Though it is no particular project or activity, it allows all openness, receiving, and self-transcendence, and out of it comes the practical energy that feeds activity. The poverty of philosophy means relinquishing meaningless activity of construction in a purposeless universe by a willingness to be nothing, understanding the patience of being before servility and sovereignty, and the justice beyond them.

This is a special edition of Ethical Perspectives devoted to the issue of autonomy. While the issue of autonomy has its own particular form in Anglo- American discussion, the essays in this issue focus, in the main, on questions arising in the more continental tradition. The essay by William Desmond examines certain dialectical equivocities in the notion of self-determination. These are related to an underlying sense of valuelessness marking modernity’s feeling for the ethos, to a propensity to privilege self over other in the process of self-determination, and to a temptation to evade the question of transcendence as other to human self-transcendence. These dialectical equivocities are explored especially with reference to such major thinkers as Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche.

Richard Kearney's Dialogues attempts to speak across the divide between Anglo-American philosophy and recent Continental thought. The book does not sound any fashionable fanfares regarding rapprochement between these two traditions. More soberly, it tries to introduce to Anglo-American philosophers certain European thinkers who have recently exerted significant influence. Unlike a more conventional approach that would anthologize some representative writings of these thinkers, Richard Kearney here takes a different, more direct approach. He tries to let these thinkers introduce themselves through dialogue. The result is a very interesting introduction that preserves something of the human voice of the conversational occasion. In some cases also, given the directness of the questions put by Richard Kearney, we are offered a revelation of the authors not always vouchsafed by their written, hence more controllable, works. A further benefit to those already initiated into the written works of these thinkers is an additional perspective on the written works themselves. Hence the work will be of interest to those familiar with the thinkers interviewed and to those coming to recent European thought for the first time.

The current issue of Ethical Perspectives is a double issue reflecting significant discussions of ethical issues that occurred in Leuven in the very recent past. The volume is composed in the main of two seminars, one led by Michael Walzer, the other by Bernard Williams. These well-known and highly respected thinkers were guests at Leuven in the past year. Michael Walzer was the holder of the Multatuli Chair, while Bernard Williams was the holder of the Mercier Chair at the Institute of Philosophy. In addition to the responsibilities of offering a public lecture or lectures, both were generous with their time, and open to critical discussion of their work. The results are to be found in the intellectually stimulating seminars published here.Michael Walzer's contribution is threefold. First, we publish here the lecture he delivered to a wide public, as the holder of the Multatuli Chair. This was entitled: International Society: What is the Best We Can Do? The lecture was delivered on May 1, at a time when the whole issue of the international community and its moral and political responsibilities was widely discussed, with reference to the war in Kosovo. That war, and other considerations, might suggest something too optimistic about such discussions of the international community. Walzer is no stranger to the topic of war, as those familiar with an earlier work, Just and Unjust Wars, will know. Walzer's title, on the present occasion, indicates the modesty of his proposal: what is the best we can do? With a theme that might seem to include too much, his discussion offers a sober and ordered approach, which works towards its goal by strategic steps from the left and right extremes of a continuum of possibilities. Second, in addition to this Multatuli lecture, a workshop was convened on the theme of The Power and Impotence of Multilateral Organizations. Marc Hooghe and Bart Pattyn had prepared in advance papers bearing on the work of Walzer. Marc Hooghe wrote of: “The Notion of Complex Equality and the Beauty of Alcibiades”. Bart Pattyn offered: “Two Questions about the Meaning of Meaning.”Subsequent to his response to these, the discussion was again wide-ranging, touching on the themes of the Multatuli lecture, as well as Walzer's other works. This seminar was held at the Institute of Philosophy, but Walzer's third contribution was a further seminar on the themes of his work, this time in the Faculty of Theology, and among the participants were students and teachers who had just spent time carefully studying his work. Among other things, the issues discussed here reflected Walzer's own interest in biblical themes, with repercussions in religion, but also beyond.The seminar with Williams was ordered around the questions of a number of participants who had prepared some questions on the basis of their study of his work. Williams responded impromptu, and as the reader will see the terrain covered is extensive. Williams has been an influential philosopher in the Anglo-American world, notably with reference to his explorations in Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy.The seminar reflected some of the themes of that work. Williams raises questions about the obsession with theory in ethics, and seeks to explore a domain more ecumenical, so to say, than morality, understood in a more restricted sense, such as we find in forms of utilitarianism and Kantianism. The neutral universal is not enough. Or as he says pithily here: “I'm not living my life in order to exemplify a mathematical theory.” Ethics points to something more inclusive, and moreattentive to the nuances of concrete details and situations.This is not entirely unlike forms of thinking we find in Greek culture, whether among the philosophers, such as Aristotle, or among the poets and tragedians. Something of the latter is explored in Williams's Shame and Necessity. Among the many issues touched on in this discussion was the issue of universality, and as the reader will notice the seminar closed with an exchange with Jaap van Brakel over the nature of the `we.' The reader will find an extensive discussion of `we' in the paper that follows, indicating perhaps also that the `we' of the seminar itself had a post-seminar life.All in all, these different contributions provide us with lively and thought-provoking dialogue, from a diversity of ethical perspectives.

The new introduction to the second edition of Habits of the Heart is a very helpful reminder of the main points of the first edition. Moreover, it is very useful in situating, indeed resituating the book’s concerns, given the lapse of time since the book’s first appearance. It provides new insights made possible by second thoughts, as well as by the questions and criticisms of others. The problem of individualism and the slackening, not to say refusal, of traditional communal ties, has accelerated in American society since the first writing. We find phenomena such as middle class ‘cocooning,’ as well as an often low grade civil war, let us say the culture wars. There is a widespread disquiet — to the left, to the right, in the anxious middle — about the future direction of society. One thing is noted from the beginning as common across the divisions, namely, a certain view of the economy. Correspondingly, the authors themselves seem more insistent on issues of class than they were previously: “the festering secret that Americans would rather not face.”I will confine myself to two points: first, the issue of economy in terms of more basic metaphysical assumptions in the whole notion of ‘use.’ I will suggest some connections between serviceable disposability and the culture of autonomy, and between these and the equivocal relation to the other that besets the identification of freedom with autonomy. I work towards the question: must not our communal relations to others be placed in a deeply ambivalent position, if economic relations are dominated by serviceable disposability and freedom as autonomy is idolized?Second, I want to remark on how far we dwell in an ethos of will to power of which use and autonomy serve as masks. I must summon to our discussion the roaming, uninterred ghost of Nietzsche. Whence comes the spell that spoils our taste for the good? Whence comes this, this blandness of the good? The issue of nihilism and religion cannot be buried. Is this issue even more urgent than Bellah and his collaborators, in their essential decency, acknowledge?

The contributions in the current issue of Ethical Perspectives mainly derive from a conference on Catholic Intellectual Traditions organized jointly by the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven and the Erasmus Institute, University of Notre Dame, and held at Leuven from November 10th to the 11th, 2000. As the reader can see from a quick perusal of the table of contents, the contributions cover a diverse range of topics. The reader might well ask what such contributions have to do with a journal concerned with ethical perspectives. What do contributions bearing on religious themes from literature, or reflections on mystical love, or on Catholicism and modern scholarship, have to do with a journal devoted to ethics? Surely we have all learned to our benefit from Kant that ethics is entirely autonomous with respect to religion. If there is a relation, it is one that must respect that autonomy, and not muddy the waters by bringing back the outmoded promiscuity of religion and ethics, and especially it must guard against religion trying to sly its way back to dominion over ethics once again.A reply to this line of reflection would be that Ethical Perspectives is concerned not only with perspectives, not only with what happens within perspectives, but with ethical perspectives as themselves coming to articulation within contexts that contain all the richness of human life as lived. Such contexts cannot be considered apart from serious reflection on religion as expressing the sense of ultimate worth that humans understand and try to live diversely. Contexts have to do with the ethos within which ethical perspectives, and our determinate address to specific ethical dilemmas occur. The practice of a religion, or the absence of it, or indeed the rejection of such practice, communicates something of our sense of the most ultimate ethos of being, and its goodness.Clearly this communication will also be effected in a diversity of ways: for instance, in the understanding we have of the economy and the state as serving, or despoiling, the worth of human life; or in the art and literature that offer us images of significant human possibility set forth for imaginative contemplation with a forthrightness more integral than the confused flux of everyday life allows; or in the secret love of prayer that draws the human soul towards its most extreme abandonment and adoration. Ethical perspectives do not make full sense in the determinate terms they overtly set forth, but draw from sources of value that more often than not remain implicit and intimate to the perspectives themselves. Full ethical reflection requires mindfulness of these more intimate sources, and an honest address towards our religious being is demanded by such reflection. Such honesty is asked of a non-believer as of a believer. Both indeed may be differently called into question by that honesty.If the conference was organized with reference to Catholic Traditions, does this indicate a kind of sectarian narrowness for the intellectual, despite what the word `catholic' might betoken? It will be evident from the contributions that no such narrowness is here at work. Quite the opposite: it is the rich diversity that is striking. One does hear reference to the `ghetto' of Catholic ways, perhaps Church ways, perhaps Christian ways generally. This is a very interesting word: `ghetto'. The discerning reader will note in some of the contributions a strong sympathy for Judaism. But in some instances we will be urged to get out of our `ghetto'. It might seem that as `Catholics' or `Christians' we are already `Jews'. Who put us into the `ghetto'? Is this self-incurred? It seems there are some who have consigned themselves to their own `ghetto', but while this may be true, are there not `ghettos' of religion that are the afterlives of certain Enlightenment ways of thinking about religion, afterlives internalized by those religious who would get out of this now self-imposed ghetto, and make their accommodation with more enlightened ways. How delightfully tangled it all is! We preach repentance and wonder at the end who it is that needs to repent, perhaps we the preachers! One thinks of Lear telling the judge to bring the lash to himself. I don't believe Lear was a Catholic, but he certainly was not an Enlightenment intellectual.There is a question worth asking here, in that for not a few the notion of a `Catholic intellectual' or `Christian intellectual' is an oxymoron. To be a real intellectual is not to be affiliated to an organization that already knows in advance what the truth is. One is reminded of those debates earlier in the 20th century between Bertrand Russell and Frederick Copleston. Russell: You are a Catholic, ergo you already know the answer, ergo you cannot honestly ask the question, ergo what you do cannot be philosophy, that is, free thinking.Very clever, of course, and not without some truth. Do we have to agree with Heidegger that a Christian philosophy is a round square? The problem here, of course, is philosophical. I would say: to be a philosopher is to be able to ask about anything, including religion. But the how of the asking is very important. The asking about religion might well seek a confirmation for what is held beforehand. But this holds true of the critics of religion as much as the sympathizers. The shoe is sometimes on the other foot. It is not only the apologetic Catholics who bring presuppositions to bear on the asking of a question, but so also do those critics who, mirabile dictu, strangely often find their own presuppositions confirmed once again. How easy to accuse the other of not being a `real' intellectual; how galling when it turns out that one's own practice of the free intellect mirrors one's chained opponent.The lesson I take: we inevitably bring fundamental presuppositions to bear in the asking of determinate questions. And it is these presuppositions we need to understand as much as the determinate questions and determinate answers. We are all put to the test. This is more catholic than the offensive critic or the defensive apologist. But you must have trust in mind to be willing to let one's thought be thus open. Such trust cannot be accounted for fully in the determinate ideas one explores or defends. It is interesting also that this trust, in the how of asking questions, mirrors the trust in the how of a person's faith or hope in God. This trust bears on this and that situation or difficulty, but it is in excess of this or that determinate situation or difficulty. It concerns sources of expectation in truth and goodness that are more than we can determine in advance. They are more than we can ever determine completely, since they make our determining possible. We are given to be in this expectation which we cannot completely determine through ourselves alone. And one might say that religion is the way we are given to keep open our communication to these sources of ultimate trust. Russell's cleverness is admirable, but that cleverness will not do to deal with the issue. If the issue concerns ethos or context in the sense implied above, cleverness will never do justice to that. While religion has the power to make us more discerning here, there is a cleverness that tends to make us obtuse.Of course, we intellectuals and academics love cleverness, since we think we are very clever ourselves. Here is one of our sources of difficulty with religion. People who are not clever like us also seem to be religious. If so, one might be tempted to say: being religious then cannot be the same as being clever; it might not even be clever to be religious; ergo to be a truly clever intellectual and academic, I must leave religion in my youth, and put on adult ways of thinking. One might even add to the clinching argument: for ethical reasons we must leave that behind, for just as our thinking must be autonomous, so we must our being ethical become entirely autonomous. Adieu religion!There is an argument here, but one wonders if there are also hints of the operation of a sly process of shaming. We now live in a time where processes of embarrassment are often at work in the initiation of young academics and intellectuals. I hear it said, or rather I hear the significant silence saying this: “It is not that we argue against religion, it's just that well, we real intellectuals don't talk about such things anymore”. We may speak at the top of our heads as post-modernists who have robustly deconstructed the Enlightenment ideal, but at the level of the more elusive and intimate embarrassment we are unself-conscious children of the Enlightenment. But did not the Enlightenment tell us no longer to be children. But now, with our heads we postmoderns tell ourselves we no longer want to be children of the Enlightenment, but in our hearts with regard to religion we are still such children — I mean children of the Enlightenment. Is it not time for that child also to grow up. If I were allowed to prophesy — and of course I am not allowed, since prophecy is now said not only to be inadmissible but impossible — I would inadmissibly and impossibly have to say that at the end of that growing up being religious might again wait gently for this stout child. How galling this will be, I do not prophesy, since we will then have to make our peace with all those people there who are not as clever as we are.We all know Kant's remarks about Enlightenment freeing us from self-incurred tutelage. And of course, our servility to spiritual despots and priestly powers was part of that tutelage. And so we have become autonomous thinkers. What if this autonomy comes to mean that we substitute for self-incurred tutelage a kind of self-incurred spiritual mutilation? If God is the distinguished thing, this may be so; and no amount of self-exculpation, not even ethical self-exculpation, in terms of our being denizens of the epoch of the death of God, will quite exonerate our blasé lack of urgency about divine ultimacy.

This is a relatively short book but its brevity is certainly no index of poverty of thought. Quite to the contrary, within its brief compass it offers us a finely concentrated philosophical essay. Its analytical style is economical and consistently clear-headed. It exhibits a sensitivity to necessary detail without loss of the larger picture. It also balances a certain austerity of conceptual discourse with a very discriminating sense of the concrete context of philosophical issues in human experience.