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Show Chapter I. General Introduction to the Project: The Enterprise of Socratic Metaethics 10 And when Kant says that Achtung "impairs [Abbruch tut] self-love," he does not mean that Achtung crushes our egos or makes us feel ashamed of being the self-absorbed worms we know we are. He means, rather, that the value, significance, and power of the thing that compels our attention compels it so completely that we momentarily forget the constantly clamoring needs, demands and egocentric absorptions of the self; the object of our respectful attention overwhelms and silences them. For that moment we are mutually absorbed in the object of contemplation, or in actively responding to it - by acting, or by articulating it, or by evaluating its implications, or by reformulating or defending it - rather than trying to mine the discussion for transient satisfactions of our psychological cravings for self-aggrandizement. Achtung is an active, conative response to an abstract idea that overrides and outcompetes our subjective psychological needs as an object worthy of our attention. These are the rare moments of intellectual self-transcendence in which together, through "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 the 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," we succeed in fashioning an idiolect subtle and flexible enough to satisfy and encompass all of the linguistic nuances we each bring to the project of verbally communicating our thoughts to each other. It is then that we achieve the only genuine unity with another of which we are capable. Alcibiades' drunken and complaining encomium to Socrates was also a eulogy to his own transient victory in achieving - even momentarily - the intellectual self-transcendence Socrates demanded. 3. Philosophical Rationality: Transpersonal or Egocentric? Now I said that Hampshire described this Anglo-American update on the Socratic ideal as itself an historical fact. But is it? Here is a competing description of the same historical circumstance, from a rather different and less high-minded perspective: Victory was with those who could speak with the greatest appearance of clear, undoubting conviction and could best use the accents of infallibility. Moore ... was a great master of this method - greeting one's remarks with a gasp of incredulity - Do you really think that, an expression of face as if to hear such a thing said reduced him to a state of wonder verging on imbecility, with his mouth wide open and wagging his head in the negative so violently that his hair shook. "Oh!" he would say, goggling at you as if either you or he must be mad; and no reply was possible. Strachey's methods were different; grim silence as if such a dreadful observation was beyond comment and the less said about it the © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
