The Intense
We’ve been talking about passion, commitment, feeling, grievance, sincerity – about the whole idea that intensity of feeling is some sort of index of validity. Eve Garrard put it clearly: ‘do you think that one possible reason why Eagleton and (many) others are so impressed by the passion and commitment of suicide bombers, and think it must be in the service of justice and freedom, is some deep underlying moral subjectivism, ie the belief that moral claims just are validated by the sincerity and passion with which they’re held?’ I do think that, along with thinking that most people who hold that belief don’t hold it with full awareness. That it’s perhaps not so much a belief (properly so called) as a vague association, an absent-minded linkage. I’m not at all sure of that. I’m also not at all sure if that’s a charitable reading, or on the contrary an uncharitable reading that rests on the thought that people who believe anything so damn silly are the kind of people who don’t examine their beliefs carefully enough to have beliefs properly so-called.
At any rate, it all reminded me of what Mill said about his father.
For passionate
emotions of all sorts, and for everything which bas been said or
written in exaltation of them, he professed the greatest contempt.
He regarded them as a form of madness. “The intense” was with him a
bye-word of scornful disapprobation. He regarded as an aberration of
the moral standard of modern times, compared with that of the ancients,
the great stress laid upon feeling. Feelings, as such, he considered
to be no proper subjects of praise or blame.
Also of a remark of Hume’s in a letter.
For the purposes of life and conduct, and society, a little good sense is surely better than all this genius, and a little good humour than this extreme sensibility.
And Yeats’ familiar line ‘the worst are full of passionate intensity.’
Arguing (or at least speaking) for the other side, there is Keats’ ‘the excellence of every art is in intensity’. But then he was talking about art, not political thought.
This is also the argument between Elinor and Marianne in Sense and Sensibility – the novel, not the fillum. Marianne would be a suicide bomber. And yet – she has her good qualities. Intensity and passion do have their good qualities. But – ah well. Just ‘but,’ that’s all.
Yes, but as you’ll recall from reading Mill’s autobiography (and I know you must have read it, Ophelia), John Stewie believed that the strictly utilitarian, Gradgrindian, Spock-like (that’s Mr. Spock, not Dr. Spock) upbringing his father gave him had nearly ruined him. Remember it was poetry that saved him–that and the love of a good woman.
But still. Yeah. What you said.
This is what has me shouting at the TV when Tony Blair seeks my support for his Orwellain “counter-terror” legislation by simply asserting that he “believes” it is necessary.
So what?
Nick S
“Indigence” is the probable effect on the individual of an excess of government. “Indignation” is an appropriate response to it.
Charlotte Bronte said that ‘Jane Austen was a complete and most sensible lady, but a very incomplete and rather insensible (not senseless woman)’, and she may have been right in saying this. Intensity is good for lots of things, and it may even have epistemic advantages, in that the intensely committed person may notice things not visible to the indifferent one. But none of that entails that intensity or sincerity or authenticity guarantee *truth*, not even in the moral domain, except for subjectivists who think that morality just is a matter of personal choice or approval or commitment, so that a correct moral judgement is one which the speaker genuinely endorses. I think you’re right, Ophelia, in saying that those whose admiration for intensity is based on some form of subjectivism often don’t really realise that that’s what they’re buying into. This is a pity, since it’s such an implausible and obnoxious meta-ethical view.
Eve Garrard:
On the other hand, preferences, intensity, commitment, these are all aspects of moral behavior, no? Doesn’t moral behavior involve an acceptance of the risks of one’s position that no calculus of consequences can wish away? Deriding such considerations as mere subjectivism doesn’t serve to make a moral objectivism any more tenable. (Also, it’s doubtful that moral judgments could be true, rather than valid, as rightness or justness do not reduce to referential states-of-affairs.) Doesn’t morality concern rather the intrinsic conflict between perspectives? I think it was to avoid the category mistake of mislaid pretensions to objectivity, which might only serve to foster an occluded moral disengagement, that the term “exteriority” was invented.
Karl, yes, I know. You will notice I craftily refrained from agreeing with Papa Mill, I just said he said it. I was going to quote more (the Autobiog is on Project Gutenberg and out of copyright so quotable at length) but what follows immediately is all about the suppression of feeling etc…so I simply left that part out.
“Charlotte Bronte said that ‘Jane Austen was a complete and most sensible lady, but a very incomplete and rather insensible (not senseless woman)’, and she may have been right in saying this. Intensity is good for lots of things”
Indeed she did. That’s a subject that has fascinated me for years. I tend to think she wasn’t right – at least in some senses. But that gets into a great long discussion of Austen, C Bronte, and E Bronte, and which conveys intense feeling better, along with many other things. Anyway I agree that intensity is good for lots of things. As I say, Marianne has her good qualities – and Elinor can be quite tiresome. And I think Austen probably set things up that way on purpose. She was neither as insensible nor as invariably elegant and genteel as she can seem on a first reading (which, I think, is all Charlotte B ever gave her). Stop me before I go on all day!
“This is a pity, since it’s such an implausible and obnoxious meta-ethical view.”
Indeed. And along with implausible and obnoxious, so pervasive.
“Deriding such considerations as mere subjectivism”
Now, John – I’ve taken issue with you on this score before. You see derision where there is no derision. You insert ‘mere’s to weight your case. Not a legitimate tactic.
Emm…”it’s such an implausible and obnoxious metaethical view.” Not to get my metaethics wrong, but what gets lost from view when one abstracts to the level of systematic generalization involved in “metaethics”? [ed]
Hmm. What does integrity mean? What does respect mean? What does ethical comportment mean? What does possible mean? What does notice mean? And what does ‘it is quite possible to respect the integrity of someone’s ethical comportment’ mean?
Those are not rhetorical questions, they’re real. The whole formula seems to me extraordinarily vague. Programmatically vague. Now, I know we’ve been going round and round for more than a year (at intervals) on the merits or demerits of vagueness – but I guess we just have to go round again. That sentence looks to me like a dressed-up way of saying something either obvious or wrong. Which is one of the problems with vague language – it seems to encourage or allow people to do that; sometimes both.
The obvious would be something like ‘it is possible to notice that Xs are brave or consistent or dedicated’ or all those and other characteristics that have to do with ‘integrity’ – with wholeness. Granted; but what of it? And who said otherwise?
The wrong would be – I don’t know what, because of the vagueness problem, but something more than the obvious.
In short, I don’t understand what this ‘moment of modern moral consciousness’ is. It looks to me like just wind, frankly. Dressed-up wind.
There you go again, Ophelia, with your shallow clarity. Can’t you let go for once in your life and just feel the deepness of the ontological murk? Sheesh, I’ve had it with you soulless secularists and your passionless, uncommitted lives. I’m off to join the Taliban and drink life to its fullest. How’s that for integrity?
I’m sorry, but there’s nothing particularly vague about that sentence. Of course, a sudden access of skepticism about meaning is always helpful, if one doesn’t want to depart from one’s own (narrow) terms of reference or framing of an issue, or consider anything that might complicate the matter or involve disagreement with one’s view, or get beyond imputing muddled thinking to putative imaginary others rather than considering that there might be some real basis for different strains of thinking by real people who must inevitably live in and face up to a real world. (If anything is vague here, it’s your initial post.) As for that “moment” of modern, (i.e. differentiated), moral consciousness, IIRC, I once made a similar point at CT citing the figure of the “old Commandant” in Kakfa’s “In the Penal Colony”, as an early, if gruesome, exemplar. Nor is that matter criterionless, (hence, under one construal, “vague”), as not every and any claim for ethical conduct, no matter how “obviously wrong”, would suffice for such “respect”, but only when there is a distinct recognition of a coherence between belief and conduct in the acceptance of their consequentiality. (Hence “possible”!) But ethical “worlds” are not all of a piece, since they may well involve differing projections of potential and conceptions of the good, and something being “obviously wrong” does not thereby put one “in the right”, unless it be in the service of an abstractive disengagement that shields the judgments of one’s point of view in an imaginary superiority. A good part of ethics, after all, consists in the recognition that others are not reducible to one’s own preferences and identifications, but live out irremediably and uncontrollably separate lives.
John,
You sometimes do give the impression that you think universal human rights is only figleaf for insidious control and a recipe for monoculture. Don’t you think it’s possible to promote a liberal conception of universal rights while still allowing wide variety of cultural expression? Or is it that you think Ophelia is being disingenuous, that she has a hidden agenda? Or that she’s a dupe for some faction with a hidden agenda? Please spell out your position more clearly and forthrightly.
Karl:
Just a short answer, since I’ve got to go to work. It’s just that I believe in taking account of the limits and constrants in things. One could follow Habermas in taking a formalist-proceduralist turn on such questions, but the more inclusive, hence “universal” that becomes, the thinner, to the point that its so abstract that it fails to capture any of the motives involved. Something similar was said of Knat’s ethics, somewhat inaccurately as the “Triebfeder” of “Ehefurcht” was the distinctive mark of the moral law, but validly enough, since when it comes to specifying any particular ethical act, no actual motive could be sufficiently moral. But perfect clarity is only attainable, if one cherry-picks one’s cases, by, e.g., treating the most extreme instances as paradigm cases, thereby excluding most of the field. But, in moral, as opposed to political, argument “putting oneself in the right” is a false move. And it not that I think reductively that moral claims are a “fig-leaf”, but rather that I think conflict in moral values is real and shouldn’t be dodged by fiat.
OB:
My original comment was addressed to Eve Garrand’s. I meant to suggest that their could be more moral perceptiveness in the stigmatized notion of “intensity”, which you wished to put down to a muddleheadedness that is incapable of reflection and could scarcely qualify as belief, and ask after the implied, but unstated alternative to “moral subjectivism”, (since I don’t believe that subjectivism vs. objectivism is at all an adequate framework for such issues). You chose to respond and solely in terms of condescending nitpicking. I thought my statements were articulated enough. If you can’t understand them, fine. But it’s not as if your responses to views traverse to your own indicate any good faith effort.
John,
In other words, there are too many shades of gray, so any attempt at defining universal rights would inevitably be simplistic. Well, you could make the same complaint about any legal system: The law is an ass. So what? Legal definitions and procedures can be refined and elaborated over time, as they in fact are. Meantime, you can start with some basic ones that have worked well in longstanding democracies. Can you give me some concrete, real-life instances in which instituting basic human rights has made things worse for a nation and its people? Would it really be such a tragedy for the Pakistani society, for instance, if they stopped stoning women to death for adultery?
John, I have to second Ophelia’s plea for precision. You say that ‘ I meant to suggest that their could be more moral perceptiveness in the stigmatized notion of “intensity”, which you wished to put down to a muddleheadedness that is incapable of reflection and could scarcely qualify as belief’. I precisely did *not* say that intensity was muddleheaded, incapable of reflection, or not qualifying as belief (I couldn’t have said that, since it doesn’t seem to me to make sense. I’m assuming you mean something like ‘those views held intensely don’t qualify as beliefs’, and I certainly didn’t say that, since I think it’s manifestly untrue.) Furthermore I explicitly accepted that intensity might have some epistemic advantages, so I don’t know why you’re claiming that I’ve ignored the possibility of its leading to moral perceptiveness. What I claimed was that intensity didn’t guarantee *truth* (or validity or correctness or whatever alternative you prefer for the moral domain) except for those who hold the meta-ethical view called subjectivism. Please can we aim at a bit more precision if we’re to discuss these things? There’s no point in throwing around cloudy inaccurate objections – it doesn’t get the debate any further forward.
Eve Garrard:
I’ve just returned from a nasty, grueling 11 hour shift and am due back in 11 hours, so I’ll be brief. The sentence you cited was directed to OB, and refers to the bottom of the first paragraph of her post. Crossed wires. I didn’t miss your qualifications, with respect to acknowledging a value, “epistemic” or otherwise, to “intensity”. But it was not clear what you meant by “moral subjectivism”- perhaps it was meant to imply a pernicious relativism- and I think there is more to the matter of “authenticity” than you seemed to allow for. Obviously intensity of feelings does not confer validity on beliefs and I do not think that there are too many imaginary persons who actually think so. But equally moral responsiveness involves commitment to the validity of beliefs that arouse distinctive feelings. Oddly, “authenticity” amounts to a kind of epistemic criterion, since it is an analog to truthfulness, and I think that that is a legitimate component of modern moral consciousness, yes, a real achievement, that is not to be facilely poo-pahed. As for “metaethics”, ethical acts bear implications for second-order considerations of the ethical frameworks in which they occur and the emphasis on such second-order reflection is also a feature of modern moral consciousness. In fact, a demand for full and “free” responsibility for such second-order choices is a kind of sine qua non. But I think that first-order ethical acts and choices and the responsibility that accrues to them can never be fully constituted in such terms. Partly for that reason, but also because I hold to a “conflict” view of practical reason, as utterly distinct from any form of theoretical reason, I tend to take a dim view of easy and self-congratulatory condemnations. That’s a bit of my “metaethics”.
Karl:
Maybe later. I’m going to bed.
Hmm. It was clear to me what Eve meant by moral subjectivism, for one thing because she defined it in the process of citing it – “subjectivists who think that morality just is a matter of personal choice or approval or commitment, so that a correct moral judgement is one which the speaker genuinely endorses.” Seems pretty clear to me.
Furthermore. John, I’ve said this before, and I’m getting tired of saying it. Stop with the pejoratives. Stop accusing people of ‘deriding’ things when they’re not, of ‘easy and self-congratulatory condemnations’ and all the rest of it. I’m going to start editing your comments again if you don’t do it yourself.
And I wasn’t condescendingly nitpicking, I genuinely did not know what you meant by the words you used (that’s why I stipulated that my questions were not rhetorical but real), and I still don’t, because you didn’t answer my questions. You never do. That’s fairly condescending, easy and self-congratulatory. I’m also going to start editing or deleting your posts if you keep refusing to respond. It’s rude, and I’m tired of it.
Oy vey! Again.
“subjectivists who think etc…”- The subject of that clause is “subjectivists” tout court. It seems to imply some broader family of views. And note the function of “just” in the clause. Such usage usually implies some depreciation and not just specification. Compare:”people who think morality is just a matter of right and wrong…” Of course, morality concerns right and wrong, but there’s also more to it than that. So the narrow construal of that clause does involve some question begging. Are there really such people, whose thinking can be so narrowly and implausibly characterized? More to the point, the clause implies an alternative account of moral adjudication, which is nowhere stated, recommended by its absence. (Yeah, metaethics does the trick.) Attitudinizing about attitudinizers is still attitudinizing.
As for the sentence of mine you earlier objected to, all the words in that sentence were standard, ordinary words and I thought the sentence was clear enough. So I was not about to launch on the infinite regress of a self-referential treatise on the distinctive meanings I assign to the ordinary words I use. Perhaps you did not understand what the sentence said or perhaps you disagreed with what it said. Your habits of mind like to rely on an implicit appeal to the self-evidence of evidence and the ready universality of your own point of view. But I don’t think it was unreasonable on my part not to take such questions as in altogether good faith. It was a piss-poor gambit. Rather than taking issue with what was said in plain English, you simply effectively denied that anything construable might have been said.
Your proprietary rights remain in force, but I’m not convinced that I am the one who was unmitigatedly rude here, nor that rudeness is the worst of moral offences, rather than the frictional cost of doing business.
OB:
If the issue was “integrity”, then you should have plainly stated so. I received instead an irritating blurry of questions. I could blather on and on about how “integrity” or “wholeness”, as you tried to paraphrase it, is an issue precisely because it is lacking, because fatal limitation is constitutive for moral subjects. But I’ll just cut to the chase and ask: can someone have integrity, while doing something awful? (Suicide-bombers is not an instance, since I don’t think it remotely morally justifiable, as oppose to discussing the issue in a framework of tactics/strategy. But, I think examples could be found plentifully elsewhere.) Since I don’t think moral judgments can be grounded in a “foundation”, the question follows: is it not still possible to recognize moral behavior “across the void”?
That point about self-congratulation, by the way, was just a small point of moral rigor,- (yes, it’s not all about you),- since self-congratulatory or otherwise self-serving motives are of no account in moral thinking: “disinterestedness”, consideration of the perspectives of others, is the point of the exercise. The paired point about easy condemnation refers to a) the appeal to extreme instances which invite universal agreement, but equally might obscure the real terrain of moral conflict and b) that the focus on wrongs “in the other” can serve to put oneself “in the right”, whereas, morally, one is never in the right with respect to the other. (The line is so ancient as to be commonplace, but “judge not, lest ye be judged” is not a piece of advice about adopting a non-judgmental attitude.)
And my id wants to know: why are we talking about suicide-bombers rather than the systematic torture policy of the U.S. government? Is it because we can’t believe such a thing exists?
If you’ll refer back to my initial (non)offending comment, its suggestion was that notions such as “authenticity” might not be so readily put down to “mere subjectivism” and an obvious lack of rigor. I’ve made some other scattered comments on this thread that could be drawn together to show why that might be the case. But I’ll leave that as an exercize for the reader.
Karl:
I’m not sure how you drew your inferences from my comment, but suffice it to say that I do not think that the world is just shades of grey: obviously, I think that there are shades of black, as well. But do they really loll about in Pakistan waiting to stone women? I’m not well informed about the country, but it seems to me that, though stereotypes are generalizations that may contain a grain of truth, they are also an ossified and self-restricting mode of perception. And simply claiming that universal human rights are intrinsic will do nothing to make them so.
Well, I don’t know if they exactly “loll about…waiting to stone women”, but they do in fact stone women in Pakistan for adultery. And I’m not sure how you drew your inferences from my comment, but I certainly don’t think that “simply claiming that universal human rights are intrinsic” will make them so. Recognition and advocacy of universal human rights, however, is the very first step towards realizing them. As I said before, it’s a long, long struggle, one that probably will never end.
As far as I know a version of Sharia was instituted by the Zia al Haq regime as part of an effort to legitimate the dictatorship. But I’m not aware of the current state of play of that and have not come across any reports about stonings,- (in northern Nigeria, yes, and reports of sundry abuses coming out of Iran)- though they may taken place. But how prevalently, since that’s hardly an effective “solution” to regulating social relations in a crowded society? The point is that such reactionary impositions should be viewed as political moves to counter failed development. At any rate, similar injunctions are to be found in the Old Testament, yet you’ll scarcely find a Rabbi to advaocate for them, so I would wonder how essential they are to the consideration of the Islamic world. We’ve been over this ground before, so I’ll just add the the comment about “intrinsic” rights was made from the consideration of “exteriority”. Though the moral intuitions objecting to barbaric violations may be impeccable, rights require enforcement to be institutionalized and that also means that they occur within a field of conflict. Also “rights” are not simply to be identified with “freedom”: think of the checklist of your rights that you recieve when you are entangled in dealings with a bureaucracy, or think of the operations of property rights, which some in the U.S.A. think are the only rights that matter. But that long struggle for rights will primarily be conducted by people who live in much different material conditions than we do and hold conceptions different in many respects from our own assumptions. The case-by-case work is to the point, but not if it ignores the broader matrix in which the issues of rights occur. My point is not to gainsay considerations of human rights, but rather to complication reflection on them, so as to better understand the projection of their realization, and it is aimed at the harmonizing conceptions of rights espoused by classical liberalism.