A World Without Why - Hardcover

Geuss, Raymond

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0691155887 ISBN 13: 9780691155883

Verlag: Princeton University Press, 2014

Inhaltsangabe

Why the human and natural world is not as intelligible to us as we think it is

Wishful thinking is a deeply ingrained human trait that has had a long-term distorting effect on ethical thinking. Many influential ethical views depend on the optimistic assumption that, despite appearances to the contrary, the human and natural world in which we live could, eventually, be made to make sense to us. In A World without Why, Raymond Geuss challenges this assumption.

The essays in this collection—several of which are published here for the first time—explore the genesis and historical development of this optimistic configuration in ethical thought and the ways in which it has shown itself to be unfounded and misguided. Discussions of Greco-Roman antiquity and of the philosophies of Socrates, Plato, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and Adorno play a central role in many of these essays. Geuss also ranges over such topics as the concepts of intelligibility, authority, democracy, and criticism; the role of lying in politics; architecture; the place of theology in ethics; tragedy and comedy; and the struggle between realism and our search for meaning.

Characterized by Geuss's wide-ranging interests in literature, philosophy, and history, and by his political commitment and trenchant style, A World without Why raises fundamental questions about the viability not just of specific ethical concepts and theses, but of our most basic assumptions about what ethics could and must be.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Raymond Geuss is professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of Cambridge. His books include Politics and the Imagination and Philosophy and Real Politics (both Princeton).

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"Raymond Geuss exhibits in this unique collection an intellectual courage, rare today, in radically undermining current beliefs and preoccupations so that a new, surprising view is disclosed. By doing this with respect to some of the most demanding political questions of our times, Geuss contributes more to the unfinished project of critical theory than most of its self-acclaimed followers."--Axel Honneth, Columbia University

"The impressively bleak view of the world presented so elegantly in these essays puts in question some widely shared agreements--about politics, ethics, clarity and truthfulness, the tragic. The artfulness of these essays is that the style of Geuss's questioning is as subversive as the subject matter."--Alasdair MacIntyre, author of After Virtue

"A World without Why is a fascinating collection of essays by one of the most original, witty, profound, passionate, and erudite philosophers alive today."--Wendy Brown, author ofWalled States, Waning Sovereignty

"These essays are, as always with Geuss, engagingly written, challenging, and extremely interesting."--Daniel Brudney, author ofMarx's Attempt to Leave Philosophy

Aus dem Klappentext

"Raymond Geuss exhibits in this unique collection an intellectual courage, rare today, in radically undermining current beliefs and preoccupations so that a new, surprising view is disclosed. By doing this with respect to some of the most demanding political questions of our times, Geuss contributes more to the unfinished project of critical theory than most of its self-acclaimed followers."--Axel Honneth, Columbia University

"The impressively bleak view of the world presented so elegantly in these essays puts in question some widely shared agreements--about politics, ethics, clarity and truthfulness, the tragic. The artfulness of these essays is that the style of Geuss's questioning is as subversive as the subject matter."--Alasdair MacIntyre, author of After Virtue

"A World without Why is a fascinating collection of essays by one of the most original, witty, profound, passionate, and erudite philosophers alive today."--Wendy Brown, author ofWalled States, Waning Sovereignty

"These essays are, as always with Geuss, engagingly written, challenging, and extremely interesting."--Daniel Brudney, author ofMarx's Attempt to Leave Philosophy

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A WORLD WITHOUT WHY

By Raymond Geuss

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2014 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-691-15588-3

Contents

PREFACE, ix, 
1. Goals, Origins, Disciplines, 1, 
2. Vix intellegitur, 22, 
3. Marxism and the Ethos of the Twentieth Century, 45, 
4. Must Criticism Be Constructive?, 68, 
5. The Loss of Meaning on the Left, 91, 
6. Authority: Some Fables, 112, 
7. A Note on Lying, 135, 
8. Politics and Architecture, 144, 
9. The Future of Theological Ethics, 163, 
10. Did Williams Do Ethics?, 175, 
11. The Wisdom of Oedipus and the Idea of a Moral Cosmos, 195, 
12. Who Was the First Philosopher?, 223, 
13. A World without Why, 231, 
NOTES, 237, 
INDEX, 257, 

CHAPTER 1

Goals, Origins, Disciplines

In 1894 Wilhelm Windelband, who was Professor of Philosophyat the university of Straßburg, gave the annual rector's Addressto the assembled members of the university. He took as his topicthe structure and classification of the sciences. It is superficial, heclaimed, to try to divide the sciences by reference to their subjectmatter into sciences of nature on the one hand and sciences of spirit(or culture) on the other. A physical object like Mont Blanc or a speciesof plant or animal can be the subject of aesthetic analysis andevaluation, but such analysis is not part of natural science. Similarly,any human artistic activity has a psychological and eventually a neurophysiologicalor biochemical basis, but this does not make a studyof the brain activity of Michelangelo while he was painting part of"the humanities" (as we would call them). Neither is it the case thatthere is some specific method or set of characteristic methods usedby the natural as opposed to the cultural sciences (or vice versa). Preciseobservation is equally important everywhere, and the basic formsof logical inference and evidentiary argumentation are similar in allscientific disciplines. Nevertheless, Windelband argued, there is animportant distinction between the two basic kinds of "science"; it ismerely that the distinction is not in terms of methods or subject matterbut in terms of goals or aims. Sciences, after all, are systematichuman constructs, and most organized human activity is guided bysome goal or other. We categorize things in different ways dependingon our different purposes. A practical field guide to identifyingthings that fly in the night sky in a certain region of the earth mightappropriately include both owls and bats, although according to anotherclassificatory system that is widely used in biology, owls andbats do not belong very closely together because the first are birdsand the second mammals. The field guide is not wrong to includebats and owls (though it would be wrong if it asserted that bats belongto the biological order aves or owls to the order mammalia). Similarly,a survival manual might perfectly reasonably group togethersome kinds of mushrooms and insects in one chapter, "Things humanscan eat," and distinguish them from a group containing poisonousmushrooms and other "Things humans cannot eat" in anotherchapter, even though this division cuts across recognized biologicalcategories.

One reasonable human goal is to learn to deal with the world byrecognizing the recurrent regularities it exhibits. Sciences with thisgoal Windelband called "nomothetic." All mushrooms that look likethis are poisonous, and if you eat them you will become very ill indeedand perhaps die. On the other hand, as human beings we areinterested not only in laws, regularities, and recurrent features of theworld but also in certain striking singularities. So, for instance, weare interested not just in the ways Mrs Dalloway is one more novelexhibiting the features all other novels exhibit but also in what makesit different from other novels or even unique. An account aimed atexhibiting the singularity of an object or event was to be called"idiographic."

The period of the Second German Empire (1871–1919) was aGolden Age for the discussion of classificatory problems. This is probablynot unconnected with certain aggressive imperialist ambitionsthat were widely entertained by the political classes of the time, whichin turn were mirrored in the dominance of neo-Kantianism. Kantwas notoriously almost pathologically obsessed with intellectual (andmoral) tidiness, with making sharp and clear distinctions that wouldallow one to divide the world up into easily cognizable objects andsectors. For the neo- Kantian the question of the autonomy, distinctiveness,and principles of division of different kinds of human activitywas of the very greatest concern. Sometimes these were nothingbut turf wars, but sometimes more substantive issues were in play.Thus the discussion of economics between the so-called historicalSchool and the followers and associates of Carl Menger had ostensiblyto do with the role that institutions and history should play in thestudy of economics, but that disagreement clearly mirrored differencesin the conception of the way economic development would,could, or should take place. Could the industrial structures of Manchestersimply be replicated in Germany, or would economic developmentneed to take a very different course given the differences inhistory and institutions between Germany and Britain?

Windelband, of course, writing in late nineteenth-century Germany,did not have at his disposal the concept of "the humanities" butwould have had to speak of the Geistes- und Kulturwissenschaften.Actually his rectoral Address is entitled "Geschichte und Naturwissenschaft,"though at one point he also refers to les belles lettres.Even if one cannot take seriously Windelband's specific theory aboutthe nomothetic and idiographic, his point that what is at issue aredisciplines as human constructs, not simply unvarnished, contrastingblocks of material, is well taken. When we talk about the humanitieswe are talking about a set of disciplines, human constructs, and wecan undertake the construction of these disciplines in a variety ofdifferent ways, as well as classify the kinds of constructs that result ina variety of different ways.

Windelband's two basic questions, then, are what sorts of thingsdo we as humans generally want to know about, and why? one way oftrying to answer these questions is by observing that there is a stronghuman tendency to want to know about the origins of things, as ifthis allowed one a special access to understanding them. What is probablythe oldest extant document of Western literature provides severalinstances of this tendency. In the Iliad (book 6, lines 119–236)Homer describes an encounter on the field of battle between twowarriors who do not know each other. Before they fight, one, theGreek diomedes, son of tydeus, asks the other, who turns out to bean ally of the trojans named Glaukos, who he is ([TEXT NOTREPRODUCIBLE IS ASCII]). Glaukos replies by embarking on agenealogy reaching back five generations, which contains a series ofelaborate narrative accounts of what his father and grandfather andsome of his ancestors did at various points in their lives:

High-hearted son of tydeus, why ask of my generation [[TEXT NOTREPRODUCIBLE IS ASCII];]?

As is the generation of leaves [[TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IS ASCII]], so is that of humanity.The wind scatters the leaves on the ground, but the live timberburgeons with leaves again in the season of spring returning.So one generation [[TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IS ASCII]] of men will grow while anotherdies. Yet if you wish to learn all...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Princeton University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2014
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0691155887
• ISBN 13: 9780691155883
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 264
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Princeton University Press; https://press.princeton.edu/books; ; 7th Floor, New South Building; PRINCETON; NJ; 8544; USA
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