References
- Norman Malcolm, Ludwig Wittgenstein, A Memoir (London, Oxford, and New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), p. 39. I am indebted to Galen K. Pletcher for this reference.
- Malcolm, p. 32.
- (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1986), hereinafter referred to as “S.”
- Whatever Bradford may have meant by this famous sentence, it is not the most reliable expression of a consciousness alive to the moral imperative which it is used to illustrate. Consider, for instance, Bertrand Russell's report in “An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish”: “Sometimes, if pious men are to be believed. God's mercies are curiously selective. Toplady, the author of Rock of Ages, moved from one vicarage to another, a week after the move, the vicarage he had formerly occupied burnt down with the great loss lo the new vicar. Thereupon Toplady thanked God; but what the new vicar did we do not know. Borrow, in his Bible in Spain, records how without mishap he crossed a mountain pass infested by bandits. The next party to cross, however, were set upon, robbed, and some of them murdered; when Borrow heard of this, he, like Toplady, thanked God.” The Essential Teachings of Bertrand Russell, ed. Egner and Denonn (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1961), pp. 75–76.
- Robert Sokolowski, Moral Action: A Phenomenological Study (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), p. 123.
- Signes (Paris: Gallimard, 1960), p. 56.
- See, for example, the Nicomachean Ethics, III: 10–12.
- Jean-Paul Sartre argued in L'Être et le néant that sadism and masochism are already fundamentally identical structures of consciousness. An interesting critique of this claim may be found in Philip Hallie, Cruelty (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1982), pp. 48–49.
- Law, Liberty and Morality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963), p. 71.
- Law, Liberty and Morality, p. 71.
- This analogy eventually does break down, though, in that—as Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty have shown a long time ago—there can be a pure perceptual seeing as a result of a great effort and as an artificial state of mind produced under, say, laboratory conditions. I do not know what, if anything, its moral analogue could be.
- Hallie, p. 33. Hallie also cites (at p. 17) David Garrick's inscription on Hogarth's tombstone which shows much the same thought:
- Farewell, great painter of mankind
- Who reach'd the noblest point of art;
- Whose pictur'd morals charm the mind
- And through the eye correct the heart.
- Hallie, p. 17.
- Hallie, p. 33.
- Walden Two (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1948; Macmillan Paperbacks Edition, 1962), p. 114.
- This is a particular and much stronger case of Locke's view of what “moves the mind in every particular instance”: “the motive to change, is always some uneasiness”. Essay Concerning Human Understanding, abridged and edited by A. S. Pringle-Pattison (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1969), II: 28, p. 142.
- For these and other similar examples, see Dierdre Golash, “Exploitation and Coercion,” The Journal of Value Inquiry, 15: 319–28 (1981).
- The New York Times, Sunday, February 5, 1989, p. 3.
- Dickens’ works come to mind here, of course, as well as Charlotte Brontës Jane Eyre. Compare with her fictional heroine's experiences the author's journal description of her own life as a govemness: “Am I to spend all the best part of my life in this wretched bondage, forcibly suppressing my rage at the idleness the apathy and the…stupidity of those fatheaded oafs and on compulsion assuming an air of kindness?” (my emphasis). Useful and depressing examples are to be found as well in John Boswell's The Kindness of Strangers (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988). George Steiner's review of this volume puts the main point more succinctly (and quickly) than Dickens ever did: “In concluding pages that derive intimately from the work and vision of Foucault but have their own sombre vehemence, Boswell excoriates the illusion of progress inherent in invisibility. Behind the walls of orphanage and charitable institutions, abandonment was made a macabre mystery. The children became utter strangers to the strangers who, in metallic charity, paid for their minimal upkeep and exploitation. ‘Mostly they died,’ Boswell says.” The New Yorker, February 6, 1989, p. 105.
- I have written about this in another place. See my article, “Language and Abnormal Behavior: Merleau-Ponty, Hart and Idling,” The Review of Existential Psychology & Psychiatry, Vol. XVIII, Nos. 1,2, & 3, (1982–83; but published in 1985), 181–203.
- “‘Pricks’ and ‘Chicks’: A Plea for ‘Persons’”, in Richard Wasserstrom, ed., Today's Moral Problems (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., 1975), pp. 152–86. See especially pp. 157–61.
- “The justification of Reverse Discrimination,” in W. T. Blackstone and Robert Heslep, eds., Social Justice and Preferential Treatment (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1976). Reprinted and cited in Joel Feinberg and Hyman Gross, eds. Philosophy of Law, 3rd edition (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1986), p. 464.
- For a summary of his arguments, see William S. Hamrick, An Existential Phenomenology of Law: Maurice Merleau-Ponty (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1987), Chapter III (“Ethics”).
- Philip Hallie provides almost identical arguments in “From Cruelty to Goodness,” The Hastings Centre Report, Vol. 11, No. 3, June 1981, pp. 23–28; and Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed: The Story of the Village of Le Chambon and How Goodness Happened There (New York: Harper & Row, 1979), pp. 279–80.
- Cited in the translator's Introduction to Henrik Ibsen, Four Major Plays, trans. James McFarlane and Jens Arup, with an Introduction by James McFarlane (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), p. ix.
- Translator's Introduction in Ibsen, pp. x-xi (emphasis in the original).
- Translator's Introduction in Ibsen, p. viii.
- Ibsen, p. 78.
- Ibsen, p. 80 (emphasis added).
- Ibsen, p. 83.
- “Exploitation, Force, and the Moral Assessment of Capitalism: Thoughts on Roemer and Cohen,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, Volume 16, Number 1 (Winter 1987), 3–41, at p. 16. Rciman's own conclusion about invisible coercive force in a capitalist society runs as follows: “When Marx wrote that the wage-worker ‘is compelled to sell himself of his own free will’ (C, I, p. 766), he was not being arch or paradoxical. He was telling us both how force works in capitalism and why it is unseen. Indeed, I contend that what Marxists call capitalist idceology boils down to little more than the invisibility of structural force. And libertarian capitalism is the theory that results when the love of freedom falls prey to that invisibility” (p. 16).
- Translator's Introduction in Ibsen, p. viii.
- Translator's Introduction in Ibsen, p. x.
- Translator's Introduction in Ibsen, p. i.
- This is partly why Merleau-Ponty quotes Hegel approvingly that “Terror is Kant put into practice.” Humanisme et terreur (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), p. 160 (my translation). An interesting case in point may be found in Kant's “casual altitude toward a mother's killing of her illegitimate child.” Hugo Adam Bedau, “Capital Punishment,” in Tom Regan, ed., Matters of Life and Death, second edition (New York: Random House, 1986), p. 204. Kant argued, as Bedau there indicates, that “A child bom into the world outside marriage is outside the law…, and consequently il is also outside the protection of the law.” The Metaphysical Elements of Justice, trans. John Ladd (Indianapolis: Library of Liberal Arts Press, 1965), p. 106.
- Ibsen, p. 113.
- Ibsen, p. 123.