agree that the philosophies I am criticizing here prejudge them irrevocably. 'Ibis they do not because they are inspired by one side but because this inspiration is hidden, where it can't come up for debate. The human centredness is then unassailable. It appears in the (supposed) defining characteristics of moral theory, such as the maximization of general happi ness, or action on a maxim that can be universalized, or action on a norm that all participants could accept in unconstrained debate. The claims of the non-human (or at the very outside, of the non-animate)18 cannot be heard in frameworks of this kind.
This is another one of those cramps which philosophies of obligatory action, and I would also claim neo-Nietzschean theories, put in our moral
thinking, of which I spoke at the end of the last chapter (section
3 . 3 ) .
Ingeneral, they are blinkers which prevent us from acknowledging the force of goods, leave us unmoved by them, or, if we are moved, induce us to misidentify this as some non-moral emotion. The negative focus on the good as a source of crushing guilt or, alternatively, of a smug sense of superiority ends up making us unwilling to admit how a constitutive good can interpellate us, move us. empower us.
All this speaks strongly in favour of the attempt to articulate the good in some kind of philosophical prose.
4.3
That is what I want to try to do in what follows. But to do so is not easy. It will not after all be a matter of just recording for examination already stated positions. Sometimes these may be available, but often it will be a question precisely of articulating what has remained implicit, the moral outlook which underlies certain of those modern philosophies which have made it a point of honour not to admit to any such outlook. One has not just to record but to invent language here, rather presumptuously claiming to say better than others what they really mean.
But there is one great recourse here, and that is history. The articulation of modern understandings of the good has to be a historical enterprise; and this not just for the usual reasons valid for any such enterprise, viz., that our p,resent positions are always defined in relation to past ones, taking them either as models or as foils. There is ample evidence of both in the modern World-from the civic humanist tradition which has defined itself in relation to the paradigm models of the ancient republic and polis to the philosophy of the Enlightenment which defines itself in opposition to a past dominated by religion and tradition. The very fact of this self-definition in relation to the past induces us to re-examine this past and the way it has been assimilated or repUdiated. Very often, understanding how this has in fact come about gives
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I D E N T I T Y A N D TH E G O O D
us insight into contemporary views which would not be otherwise available. In understanding our differences from the ancients, we have a better idea what our assimilation of their paradigms of self-rule actually amount to for us; and in looking more closely at the "traditions" which our Enlightenment thought supposedly repudiated, and at the forms that repudiation took, we may come to see the difference between the two opposed terms in a new light, and consequently to take a new view on contemporary philosophy.19
But the recourse to the past is even more necessary in the case of these modern naturalist views which suppress their own underlying visions of the good. Tracing their development from earlier religious or metaphysical views through the partial repudiation of these is not only important in order to define more clearly what kind of a transformation gave rise to them. We also have to recur to these earlier views in order to get some model of the kind of sense of the good which was still openly avowed then, but is suppressed from awareness now. For instance, I believe that the modern naturalist-utilitarian hostility to 'higher' goods and defence of ordinary, sensuous happiness emerge from what I have been calling the affirmation of ordinary life, which in early modern times brought about a similar repudiation of supposedly 'higher' modes of activity in favour of the everyday existence of marriage and the calling. The original form of this affirmation was theological, and it involved a positive vision of ordinary life as hallowed by God. This life itself is seen as having a higher significance conferred on it by God, and this is what grounds the affirmation. But modern naturalism not only can't accept this theistic context; it has divested itself of all languages of higher worth. Nevertheless I want to claim that some such sense of the worth of the ordinary still animates it and provides the powerful moral motive for its widespread acceptance. In articulating this suppressed element, we are forced to turn to its predecessor; and also to raise the question to what degree it is still living from the spiritual insights of this predecessor which it claims to have utterly repudiated. For it draws on a somewhat similar spiritual energy, of which it nevertheless has no account itself. Can it offer an account consistent with its own metaphysical premisses? Or is it really drawing implicitly on something it explicitly rejects? The strength of biblical spiritual imagery even in the most secularist quarters of our lay civilization should perhaps make us suspicious, as it did Nietzsche-even though we might not draw the same conclusion he did.
In any case, what this shows is that the path to articulacy has to be a historical one. We have to try to trace the development of our modern outlooks. And since we are dealing not just with philosophers' doctrines but also with the great unsaid that underlies widespread attitudes in our civilization, the history can't just be one of express belief, of philosophical theories, but must also include what has been called 'mentalites'. We have to