There was a crack, a kind of canyon

View fullsize

Call looked out the window at the grasslands, as the plains opened around them. Teresa whispered to him, trying to get him to talk; but he could not bring himself to speak, at least not often. There must have been a lot of rain that winter, for the cover was abundant. It would be a good year for the cattle herds.

The Captain could not imagine what he was going to do, in the years ahead. He would have to live, but without himself. He felt he had left himself far away, back down the weeks, in the spot west of Fort Stockton where he had been wounded. He had saddled up, as he would have on any morning. He had ridden off to check two horses, as he would have on any morning, as he had ridden on thousands of mornings throughout his life. He had been himself; a little stiff maybe, his finger joints swollen; but himself. He scarcely heard the gunshots, or felt the first bullet. That bullet and the others hadn't killed him, but they had removed him. Now there was a crack, a kind of canyon, between the Woodrow Call sitting with Teresa on the train and the Woodrow Call who had made the campfire that morning and saddled his horse. The crack was permanent, the canyon deep. He could not get across it, back to himself. His last moments as himself had been spent casually—making a campfire, drinking coffee, saddling a horse.

Then the wounds split him off from that self, that Call—he could remember the person he had been, but he could not become that person again. He could never be that Call again. Even if he had kept his arm and his leg, he knew it would be much the same.

Of course, having the arm and the leg would have been a great convenience, for he could earn a living if he had them. He could be far less of a burden. But even if he had kept the arm and leg, he could not have returned to being the Call who had made the campfire and saddled the horse. The first bullet had removed him from that person. That person—that Call—was back down the weeks, on the other side of the canyon of time. There was no rejoining him, and there never would be.

— Larry McMurtry in Streets of Laredo (1993)

Till the wreck of body

“Now shall I make my soul,
Compelling it to study
In a learned school
Till the wreck of body,
Slow decay of blood,
Testy delirium
Or dull decrepitude,
Or what worse evil come—
The death of friends, or death
Of every brilliant eye
That made a catch in the breath—
Seem but the clouds of the sky
When the horizon fades;
Or a bird’s sleepy cry
Among the deepening shades.”

— W. B. Yeats in The Tower (1926)

Truth, rational acceptability, values, and dialogue

The position I have defended is that any choice of a conceptual scheme presupposes values, and the choice of a scheme for describing ordinary interpersonal relations and social facts, not to mention thinking about one's own life plan, involves, among other things, one's moral values. One cannot choose a scheme which simply 'copies' the facts, because no conceptual scheme is a mere 'copy' of the world. The notion of truth itself depends for its content on our standards of rational acceptability, and these in turn rest on and presuppose our values. Put schematically and too briefly, I am saying that theory of truth presupposes theory of rationality which in turn presupposes our theory of the good.

‘Theory of the good', however, is not only programmatic, but is itself dependent upon assumptions about human nature, about society, about the universe (including theological and metaphysical assumptions). We have had to revise our theory of the good (such as it is) again and again as our knowledge has increased and our world-view has changed.

It has become clear that in the conception I am defending there is no such thing as a 'foundation'. And at this point people become worried: are we not close to the view that there is no difference between 'justified' and 'justified by our lights' (relativism) or even 'justified by my lights' (a species of solipsism)?

The position of the solipsist is indeed the one we will land in if we try to stand outside the conceptual system to which the concept of rationality belongs and simultaneously pretend to offer a more 'rational' notion of rationality! (Many thinkers have fallen into Nietzsche's error of telling us they had a 'better' morality than the entire tradition; in each case they only produced a monstrosity, for all they could do was arbitrarily wrench certain values out of their context while ignoring others.) We can only hope to produce a more rational conception of rationality or a better conception of morality if we operate from within our tradition (with its echoes of the Greek agora, of Newton, and so on, in the case of rationality, and with its echoes of scripture, of the philosophers, of the democratic revolutions, and so on, in the case of morality); but this is not at all to say that all is entirely reasonable and well with the conceptions we now have. We are not trapped in individual solipsistic hells, but invited to engage in a truly human dialogue; one which combines collectivity with individual responsibility.

– Hilary Putnam in Reason, Truth, and History (1981)

An adequate conception of the better

Imagine a society of farmers who, for some reason, have a total disinterest in the arts, in science (except in such products as assist them in farming), in religion, in short, in everything spiritual or cultural. (I don't mean to suggest that actual peasant societies are or ever have been like this.) These people need not be imagined as being bad people; imagine them as cooperative, pacific, reasonably kind to one another, if you like. What I wish the reader to imagine is that their interests are limited to such minimal goals as getting enough to eat, warm shelter, and such simple pleasures as getting drunk together in the evenings. In short, imagine them as living a relatively ‘animal’ existence, and as not wishing to live any other kind of existence.

Such people are not immoral. There is nothing impermissible about their way of life. But our natural tendency (unless we are entranced with Ethical Relativism) is to say that their way of life is in some way contemptible. It is totally lacking in what Aristotle called ‘nobility’. They are living the lives of swine – amiable swine, perhaps, but still swine, and a pig's life is no life for a man.

At the same time – and this is the rub – we are disinclined to say the pig-men are in any way irrational. This may be the result of our long acculturation in the Benthamite use of 'rational' and ‘irrational', but, be that as it may, it is our present disposition. The lives of the pig-men are not as good as they might be, we want to say, but they are not irrational.

We do not want to say that it is just a matter of taste whether one lives a better or worse life. We don't see how we can say that it is rational to choose the better life and irrational to choose the worse. Yet not saying some such things seems precisely to be saying that 'it's all relative'; the ground crumbles beneath our feet.

Perhaps some of the corrections to Benthamite psychology suggested by Bernard Williams will help with this case. Let us assume the pig-men are born with normal human potential (if they aren't, then their lives aren't worse than they might be, and we are not justified in feeling contempt, but only, at most, pity). Then they might be led to appreciate artistic, scientific, and spiritual aspects of life; to live more truly human lives, so to speak. And if any of them did this, they would doubtless prefer those lives (even though they might be less fun) to the lives they are now living. People who live swinish lives feel shame when they come to live more human lives; people who live more human lives do not feel ashamed that they did when they sink into swinishness. These facts give one grounds for thinking that the pig-men are making the sort of error, the sort of cognitive short-fall, that Williams discussed; grounds for thinking that they have overlooked alternative goals, and certainly grounds for thinking that they have never made vivid to themselves what realization of those alternative goals would be like. In short, one cannot really say that they have chosen the worse life; for they never had an adequate conception of the better.

– Hilary Putnam in Reason, Truth, and History (1981)

An invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country

“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country ... We are governed, our minds are moulded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society ... In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons ... who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.””

— Edward Bernays in Propaganda (1928)