Abstract
There is a pause at the beginning of the second book of the Republic, just after Socrates so deftly muzzles Thrasymachus. Suddenly Glaucon, eager for more, disturbs the calm and attempts to restore Thrasymachus’s argument on a sounder footing. Thrasymachus, it will be recalled, foundered because his spirited glorification of injustice was seen to collide with his concern for how he looked to others: the sophist proved to be a sheep in wolf’s clothing. Glaucon tries to remedy the deficiencies in Thrasymachus’s position by confronting the problem of appearances, and in two ways. In the first place, he confesses to Socrates and the others that his own vindication of injustice is not what it seems. He does not propose to furnish a just argument on behalf of the unjust, but only to provoke from Socrates more fulsome praise of justice. As regards the substance of his argument, secondly, Glaucon resorts to the conceit of Gyges’ ring in order to establish that human beings avoid injustice and do the just thing only out of fear of being found out. The spirited young man supposes that justice is successfully defended only if it can be shown to be good “all by itself,” i.e., good for a perfectly just man who appears in every way to be unjust. Socrates hints that there is something very contrived about this supposition: Glaucon in fact wants the invisible to be made intelligible, the wholly “in itself” to be also “for us.” Nevertheless, he seems perfectly willing to honor the young man’s request.
[I]t is not as easy to see the beauty of soul as it is that of body. —Aristotle, Politics 1254b38
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Republic 350c–351a, 357a–361e, 368c–369a. One can scarcely fail to notice that Glaucon’s position proves in its own way to be as contradictory as was Thrasymachus’: the substance of his argument is undercut by the purpose it is meant to serve. But see n. 43 below.
Consider, for example, his review essay of Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, “That Old Time Philosophy,” The New Republic, 4 April 1988, 28–33. “For [us] Deweyans, the theoretical questions ‘Did Socrates answer Thrasymachus?’ and ‘Can we answer Hitler?’ get replaced by practical questions like ‘How can we arrange things so that people like Thrasymachus and Hitler will not come to power?’” (33). It is a point of dogma with Rorty and his kin that “theoretical questions” have nothing to do with the existence of such men.
Thus “Rawls and Dewey have shown that the liberal state can ignore the difference between the moral identities of Glaucon and Thrasymachus,” for which see “The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy,” in Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth. Philosophical Papers, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 192.
Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 73; cf. 3–22. Rorty’s eponymous but also strangely epicene hero is the “liberal ironist,” a person devoted, groundlessly on its own reckoning, to the refinements of private pleasure and the avoidance of public cruelty (xv, 91). This figure admits out of concern for the young the importance of not going public about its dispositions (87), but it cannot really muster the will to do so. Thus the bridge it seeks to build between the private and the public must be constructed wholly upon private footings, namely, the obscure pleasures derived from a missionary commitment to non-committal “liberalism” (189–190). On this last point see Leo Strauss, “An Epilogue,” in Liberalism Ancient and Modern (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1968), 220–223.
I say “unknown,” because Rorty is unable to decide whether to worship ruthless exteriority— “we treat everything… as a product of time and chance”-or personal whimsy, i.e., “self-creation.” One is led to suppose a “god” because either possibility is shrouded in mystery or unintelligibility. Cf. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, xiv, 22, 44, 50, 65, 67, 73, 188. It is equally unclear how one is to reconcile either alternative with his pious profession of atheism (22).
The Prince, tr. Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1985), 71.
This history has been ably summarized from a phenomenological standpoint by Richard Cobb-Stevens in Husserl and Analytic Philosophy (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1990).
Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, xv–xvi, 42–44, 55, 61, 80: On his own admission Rorty retreats into what Machiavelli would call an “imaginary republic.”
Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, tr. James W. Ellington (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1981), 19.
Utilitarianism, ed. George Sher (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1979), 11.
The most notable exception to this tendency would seem to be Hegel. But see Leo Strauss, On Tyranny, revised and expanded, ed. Victor Gourevitch and Michael S. Roth (New York: The Free Press, 1991), 192, 231–233;
and Jacques Taminiaux, “Hegel and Hobbes,” in Dialectic and Difference: Finitude in Modern Thought (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1985).
Moral Action. A Phenomenological Study (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985). Further references to this work will appear in the body of the text.
For example, despite the use of countless examples, Moral Action does not examine a single instance of a “moral dilemma.” The hard case, so dear to Machiavelli because it sanctions strong arms, and to us, because it excuses soft laws, is studiously avoided by Sokolowski. The “innocence” of this procedure is certainly meant to be disarming.
Consider Alisdair Maclntyre’ s dismissal of phenomenology as unduly formalistic in After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), 2–3. Maclntyre remedies his initial disregard for the formal, but only to a degree, in Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988).
Note also, somewhat surprisingly, Max Scheler’s rejection of formalism in favor of a “materielle Wertethik,” in Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values, trans. Manfred S. Frings and Roger L. Funk (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 46–47, 54, 79 (against which see Sokolowski’s critique of “values,” 59–60, 151–152, 158, 189, n.1).
Finally, see Leo Strauss’s reservations about “natural law” in “The Law of Reason in the ‘Kuzari’,” in Persecution and the Art of Writing (Glencoe: The Free Press, 1952), 95–141;
Leo Strauss in Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952), 162–164;
and as restated by Harry Jaffa in Thomism and Aristotelianism (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1952). Strauss appears to follow Aristotle in holding that there are at best general rules of action but no truly universal form of natural right. See Nicomachean Ethics 1134b 17–35.
Harry Jaffa “What is Moral Action?” in Pictures, Quotations, And Distinctions: Fourteen Essays in Phenomenology (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992), 268.
For example, see the “Kaizo” lectures, the “Fünf Aufsätze über Erneuerung,” Aufsätze und Vorträge (1922–1937), Husserliana XXVII, ed. Thomas Nenon and Hans Reiner Sepp (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989), 3–43. Certainly these, as well as the lecture courses on ethics he gave at various times (portions of which have been published), repay careful study; see Vorlesungen über Ethik und Wertlehre (1908–1914), Husserliana XXVIII, ed. Ullrich Melle (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1988). In general, however, Husserl does not in his ethical investigations really heed his own advice where it would seem most appropriate, namely, to draw on history, art, and poetry as propaedeutic to eidetic investigation. See Ideas I, tr. Fred Kersten (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1982), §70, 160. For a criticism of Husserl’s published stance towards the problem of human action consider Leo Strauss, “Philosophy as Rigorous Science and Political Philosophy” in Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1983), 29–37; and Richard Velkley, “Edmund Husserl,” in History of Political Philosophy, 3d ed., ed. Leo Strauss and Joseph Cropsey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 870–887.
Politics, 1269a10.
The Prince, 61.
See 41,96,120. It is this same awareness that no one profile of moral action exhausts its being that provides the basis for Sokolowski’s criticisms of the Stoics, Abelard, St. Thomas, Kant, the consequentialists, and others. Consider by way of comparison the seven loosely connected parts of Husserl’s Logical Investigations, the unity of which is not surpassed by any subsequent publication by him. Similarly, Aristotle’s Politics “begins” at least four times (cf. 1260b35, 1274b30, 1323al5).
Compare Nicomachean Ethics, 1123b20 with 1169M0.
Cf. Alisdair Maclntyre, After Virtue, 67: “we ought to have learned from the history of moral philosophy that the introduction of the word ‘intuition’ by a moral philosopher is always a signal that something has gone badly wrong with an argument.”
1005b35–1009a5 together with Eudemian Ethics, 1214b29–1215a7.
This is not to say that “feelings” or “sentiments” have no place in the constitution of agency. It is only to reject modern sentimentalism, according to which the moral good is compatible with stupidity. See Moral Action 25,70, 8; and Alisdair Maclntyre, After Virtue, 145. On HusserFs rejection of sentimentalism, see R. Philip Buckley, Husserl, Heidegger, and the Crisis of Philosophical Responsibility (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1992), 136–137
That the detachment we are speaking about involves both “will” and “intellect,” as they are classically named, is especially clear in actions that concern the human good as such (cf. 15, 30, 146, 175) But it is true that there is a “volitional” component to all psychic achievements, even those that are purely theoretical. As Sokolowski indicates, the desire for the good permeates all thinking (cf. 157). See also his Presence and Absence: How Words Present Things (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), 25–27;
Sokolowski “Some Preliminary Remarks on ‘Cognitive Interest’ in Husserlian Phenomenology,” Husserl Studies, 11 (1995): 132–152.
On the “self-othering” at work in all thoughtful experience see Robert Sokolowski, “Displacement and Identity in Husserl’s Phenomenology,” Husserl-Ausgabe und Husserl-Forschung, ed. Samuel I Jsseling (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1990), 173–184.
Namely, “good is to be done and pursued, and evil is to be avoided,” Summa Theologiae I-II, 94.2 c. See also Summa Theologiae I-II, 18.10 c for Thomas’s view that “form” is what establishes the meaning of a moral act as such. The form Sokolowski proposes would seem initially to be even more basic or formal than the first precept of the moral law insofar as it does not yet enjoin what should be done or avoided, but only describes what constitutes a deed in the strict sense (cf. 151–152). On the other hand, when, out of sheer thoughtlessness, a human being simply fails to consider the question of the good (or bad) of others, or indeed even his own good (or bad), this is surely a moral failing in the broad sense. The failure to acknowledge the human good as such is surely a moral failure (cf. 112). For this and for other reasons, one might wonder whether, contra Sokolowski, it is possible to provide a fundamental account of the human good that is not couched in prescriptive, as opposed to purely descriptive, terms. Otherwise stated, granted that there are ontological reasons for not couching the basic moral categorial simply in terms of a divine “command” (cf. 157), nevertheless, there might still be reason for casting that form in the imperative mood.
The Prince, 61.
The moral basis of the “metaphysics of presence” is identified by Nietzsche in his “Preface” to Beyond Good and Evil, in Basic Writings, tr. W. Kaufmann (New York: The Modern Library, 1968), 193–195.
Compare Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), xiii–xxi.
See also “Knowing Natural Law,” in Pictures, Quotations, and Distinctions, 284.
For a discussion of the co-implication of presence and absence see Sokolowsk’s “The Issue of Presence,” Journal of Philosophy 11 (1980): 631–643;
also Rudolf Bernet, “Is the Present Ever Present? Phenomenology and the Metaphysics of Presence,” Research in Phenomenology 12 (1982): 85–112;
and Thomas Prüfer, “Husserl, Heidegger, Early and Late, and Aquinas,” Recapitulations: Essays in Philosophy (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1993), 72–90.
See in addition Alisdair Maclntyre’s account of the unavoidable obscurities surrounding moral action in After Virtue, 89–95.
The Prince, 68–71, inter alia.
Jacques Maritain advances similar considerations in “The End of Machiavellianism,” The Range of Reason (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1952), 134–163.
For example, 16, 19, 21, 26, 52, 79, 127, 153. Doubtless a forerunner to what is in this regard Sokolowski’s Heideggerian ethics is Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1958). See esp. 175–236.
As Thomas Prufer puts it in “Husserl, Heidegger, Early and Late, and Aquinas,” in Recapitulations: Essays in Philosophy, 80.
Formal and Transcendental Logic, trans. Dorion Cairns (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1978), §105, 278.
Leviathan, ed. C.B. Macpherson (London: Penguin Books, 1968), 120, 160–161. Strictly speaking, Hobbes does think a certain formalizing of the good occurs in the quest for “power”; but that quest involves no essential departure from the perspective set by immediate desire. “Power” is that which would put me in a position to satisfy any desire whatsoever, whenever it should arise. As a result, the form of the good in Hobbes is able to embrace mutually exclusive instantiations.
Leviathan, 85–118.
Politics 1262b20–23 with 1280al3, 1318b6–9.
Sokolowski adverts to the connection between Hobbes’s political science and his account of the being of appearances in Eucharistie Presence: A Study in the Theology of Disclosure (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1994), 184.
On this point see especially Leo Strauss, “On the Basis of Hobbes’s Political Philosophy,” in What is Political Philosophy? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 170–196.
See Richard Cobb-Stevens, Husserl and Analytic Philosophy, 40–42.
For some preliminary reflections on Aristotle’s pedagogy see Harry Jaffa, Thomism and Aristotelianism, 49–66; and more recently, Carnes Lord, in The Foundations of Aristotelian Political Science, ed. C. Lord and D. O’Connor (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991) 1–5;
and Walter J. Thompson, “Aristotle: Philosophy and Politics, Theory and Practice,” Reason in History: Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, 1995: 109–124.
The gap between what Glaucon demands from Socrates, and the argument he voices in order to provoke Socrates to satisfy him, suggests that he has somehow already divined this difficulty.
Nicomachean Ethics 1105b13; cf. 1172a34-b8.
An approximate solution to this difficulty is achieved by the laws, which assist those who are not virtuous to act as if they were. The laws fulfill this task in virtue of being a kind of public but impersonal thoughtfulness, since they call to mind for all the good of the other as such. What is more, those who obey the law understand that it is good for them to do so. Yet the law is also essentially coercive: laws without the threat of punishment are not laws. And this is a sign that acting under law would not meet Glaucon’s demand. Under law there is only a coincidence, and not a genuine identification, of my good with the good of another because the moment I make that identification for myself I cease to act merely in obedience to the otherness of law’s reason (cf. 111, 115, 174–182).
Republic 347a-b.
On these last two virtues see Kevin White, “The Virtues of Man the animal sociale: affabilitas and Veritas in Aquinas,” The Thomist 57 (1993): 641–653.
This is nowhere more evident than in Kant. Kant does allow that the beautiful is a “symbol of morality.” But this means that nothing beautiful can ever be experienced as a example of the moral. One does not overstate the matter in saying that for the critical philosopher, morality is noble precisely because it is not visible: the noble is a mark of the will’s hidden triumph over nature. As he explains, “the idea of freedom is inscrutable, and thereby precludes all positive exhibition whatever.” Consequently Kant sternly censures the ancient philosophical appeal to eidetic intuition, which refuses to separate the intelligible and the beautiful, as morally reprehensible. He contrasts his “pure, elevating, and merely negative exhibition of morality” with “fanaticism, which is the delusion of wanting to see something beyond all bounds of sensibility, i.e., of dreaming according to principles (raving with reason).” Critique of Judgment, tr. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1987), §29, 135; cf. §59, 225–230. On Kant’s denial that the noble is a radiation of the form of the moral good, see Peter Simpson, “Autonomous Morality: the Idea of the Noble,” Interpretation: ajournal of political philosophy, 14 (1986): 353–370.
See. E. A. Goerner, “Letter and Spirit: The Political Ethics of the Rule of Law versus the Political Ethics of the Rule of the Virtuous,” The Review of Politics 45 (1983): 572–574.
See Annette Dumbach, Shattering the German Night: the Story of the White Rose (Boston: Little, Brown, 1986).
Compare Kant’s harsh assessment of the place of the noble in moral pedagogy, Critique of Practical Reason, tr. Lewis White Beck (New York: Macmillan, 1993), 160–164.
The Citizen 1.2, in Man and Citizen, ed. Bernard Gert (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1991), especially 112–114. Vain-glory poses such a threat in Hobbes’s view because of the use it makes of empty doctrine, particularly in religion, to secure its dominion over others. Cf. Robert Kraynak, History and Modernity in the Thought of Thomas Hobbes (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 69–94. Aristotle is critical of the identification made by “refined and practical men” of happiness with honor (Nicomachean Ethics 1095b 23–30). However, he does not call honor per se into question. Rather, he faults the refined and the practical with being “superficial.” That is, they reduce moral substance to its surface. To dismiss this reduction is not to argue that moral substance has no surface. For other reasons Aristotle does not dwell on the pernicious use of theorizing as an instrument of rule. Note, finally, Augustine’s observation that contempt of vain-glory can itself be vain-glorious, Confessions X, 38 (63), trans. Henry Chadwick (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 217.
T.S. Eliot, “Choruses from ‘The Rock’,” in The Complete Poems and Plays (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1952), 106.
For an indication that this dream has an “ancient” analogue see Lessing, Ernst and Falk, Dialogues for Freemasons, a translation with notes by Chaninah Maschler, Interpretation: a journal of political philosophy, 14 (1986) 14–49, esp. 19, along with the translator’s “Introduction,” 1–13, esp. 2–3.
The question of the extent to which this capacity obtains among human beings governs Aristotle’s discussion of the place of the rule of law in political life. See Nicomachean Ethics 1179a33–1180b28.
On Husserl’s view that ethics is essentially concerned with the form of human life as a whole, see Husserliana XXVTI, 27–40. James Hart has explored that form on the basis of Husserl’s own texts in The Person and the Common Life: Studies in Husserlian Social Ethics (Kluwer Academic Publishers: Dordrecht and Boston, 1992).
My thanks are due to Kurt Pritzl and Kevin White for their comments upon an earlier draft of this essay.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1996 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
McCarthy, J.C. (1996). Keeping Up Appearances: The Moral Philosophy of Robert Sokolowski. In: Drummond, J.J., Hart, J.G. (eds) The Truthful and the Good. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 23. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-1724-8_9
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-1724-8_9
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-94-010-7272-4
Online ISBN: 978-94-009-1724-8
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive