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Show Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Volume I: The Humean Conception 7 mindedness in discussion is to be associated with extreme literal clarity, with no rhetoric and the least possible use of metaphor, with an avoidance of technical terms wherever possible, and with extreme patience in step-by-step unfolding of the reasons that support any assertion made, together with all the qualifications that need to be added to preserve literal truth, however commonplace and disappointing the outcome. It is a style and a discipline that wring philosophical insights from the English language, pressed hard and repeatedly; as far as I know, the style has no counterpart in French or German. As Nietzsche suggested, cultivated caution and modesty in assertion are incompatible with the bold egotism of most German philosophy after Kant. This style of talking, particularly when applied to emotionally charged personal issues, was a gift to the world, not only to Bloomsbury, and it is still useful a long way from Cambridge.4 The writer is Stuart Hampshire, and in this passage he describes as an historical fact a more recent ideal of philosophical practice that speaks to some of the motives and impulses that attract many into the field. The essence of the ideal remains Socratic: clarity and truth as a goal, with patience, persistence, precision, and a nonjudgmental openness to discussion and contention as the means. Hampshire is right to describe this ideal as a "new moral virtue ... of high civilization." It is a moral virtue because it imposes on one the obligation to subordinate the egocentric desires to prevail in argument, to shine in conversation, or to one-up one's opponent to the disinterested ethical requirements of impartiality, objectivity and transpersonal rationality in discussion. And it is a virtue of high civilization because it is not possible to achieve this virtue - or even to recognize it as a virtue - without already having cultivated and brought to fruition certain civilized dispositions of character, tastes and values that override the desire to prevail. Thus this moral virtue stands at the very center of a "slave morality" that sublimates the desire to prevail to the imperatives of reason and the spirit. These imperatives, in turn, find expression in what Mill calls the higher pleasures of the intellect and moral and aesthetic sensibility. They presuppose the victory of "slave morality" in subjugating instinct and the egocentric exercise of power to the rule of reason and its attendant ethical values of fairness and impartiality in thought and action. This virtue of high civilization, then, presupposes both its participants' transpersonal rationality and also their achievement of a mutually equitable balance of power - however the material and social instruments of power may be distributed. Stuart Hampshire, "Liberator, Up to a Point," The New York Review of Books XXXIV, 5 (March 26, 1987), 37-39. 4 © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
