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Show Chapter I. General Introduction to the Project: The Enterprise of Socratic Metaethics 8 Thus this ideal can have meaning only for someone for whom basic psychological and spiritual needs for self-worth, and moral needs for the affirmation of self-rectitude are not so pressing that every dialectical encounter with others - whether written or conversational - is mined for its potential to satisfy them. So when we say of such a person that he is civilized, we may mean, among other things, that in conversation he is disposed to be generous in according credibility to his opponent's view, gracious in acknowledging its significance, patient in drawing forth its implications, and graceful in accepting its criticism of his own. Someone who has mastered this new moral virtue of high civilization is someone for whom philosophical practice expresses an ideal of personal civility; a civility made possible only by the control and sublimation of instinct, impulse, desire, and emotion. The higher pleasure of doing philosophy in the style Hampshire describes is then the disinterested pleasure of thinking, considering, learning and knowing as ends in themselves, and of giving these pleasures to and receiving them from others involved in the same enterprise, in acts of communication. Plato was surely right to suggest that we are driven to seek erotic pleasure from others by the futile desire to merge, to become one with them. Erotic desire is ultimately futile for reasons of simple physics: we are each stuck in our own physical bodies, and you cannot achieve the desired unity by knocking two separate physical entities together, no matter how closely and repeatedly, and no matter how much fun it is to do the knocking. Intellectual unity with another is a different matter altogether, however; and the kind Hampshire describes is particularly satisfying because it does not require either partner to submerge or abnegate herself in the will or convictions of the other. It does not require sharing the same opinions, or suppressing one's own worldview, or deferring or genuflecting to the other in order to achieve agreement with him. Rather, the enterprise is a collaborative one between equals who pool their philosophical resources. By contributing questions, amendments, refinements, criticisms, objections, examples, counterexamples, or elaborations in response to the other's philosophical assertions, we each extend and enrich both of our philosophical imaginations past their individual limits and into the other's domain. There are few intellectual pleasures more intense than the Aha-Erlebnis of finally understanding, after long and careful dialogue, what another person actually means - unless it is that of being understood oneself in this way. The ground rules for succeeding in this enterprise are ethical ones. By making such assertions as clearly as I can, I extend to you an invitation to intellectual engagement; and I express trust, vulnerability and respect for your opinion in performing that act. I thereby challenge you to exercise your trained philosophical character dispositions - for impartiality, objectivity, and hence transpersonal rationality - in examining my assertions; and to demonstrate your mastery of the enterprise in the act of engaging in it. This is © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
