Transcendental Guilt: Reflections on Ethical Finitude

Transcendental Guilt

Transcendental Guilt Reflections on Ethical Finitude Sami Pihlström

LEXINGTON BOOKS A division of ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC. Lanham • Boulder • New York • Toronto • Plymouth, UK

Published by Lexington Books A division of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 http://www.lexingtonbooks.com Estover Road, Plymouth PL6 7PY, United Kingdom Copyright © 2011 by Lexington Books All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Pihlström, Sami. Transcendental guilt : reflections on ethical finitude / Sami Pihlström. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7391-6436-5 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-7391-6705-2 (ebook) 1. Guilt. 2. Ethics. I. Title. BJ1471.5.P54 2011 170—dc22 2011001111 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America

Contents

Preface

vii

1

1 7 9 10 12 14 19 23 26 31 37 38 40 44 48 51 59 61 66 69 71 75 76 77

2

3

4

5

Introduction Notes Transcendental Guilt Why Is Guilt Fundamental? Guilt and Remorse The Transcendental Significance of Guilt Moral and Metaphysical Guilt Guilt, Ethics, and Literature Some Methodological Remarks Notes Guilt and Ethical Solipsism Morality “from Within” Wittgenstein and Transcendental Solipsism Acknowledging Otherness Our True Motives? Notes Ethical Unthinkabilities and Philosophical Seriousness Benatar’s Arguments and Their Problems Cultural Unthinkabilities The Integration of Ethics and Metaphysics Notes A Meaningful Life in a Meaningless Cosmos? The Basic Challenge Our Two Options and Their Historical Contexts v

vi

Contents

How to Choose between the Alternatives? A Non-perspectival Perspective? Meaning and Guilt The Transcendental and the Transcendent A Transcendentally Constituted Transcendence? Notes 6 Constructing Moral Identity Implied (Philosophical) Authors and Readers Understanding a Text and Understanding Its Author The “I” of a Philosophical Narrative: Confessing One’s Guilt Reflexivity Variations of Transcendental Subjectivity Transcendental Self-Deception: Who Am I? Notes 7 Concluding Reflections Moral Tragedies—and a Short Argument Concluding Remarks on Morality, Religion, and Original Sin Notes

79 82 84 87 93 95 103 104 106 107 109 110 112 114 117 117 119 122

Bibliography

125

Index

131

About the Author

135

Preface

This book emerges out of a concern not only for the present state of the world and humanity but also for the state of moral thought reflecting on that state. Neither seem to be very promising. What we need, in short, is moral seriousness. Taking up the task of providing a critical reflection on how to achieve a new kind of seriousness in moral thought, the present volume is the first book-length examination that I know of focusing on the concept of guilt in a “transcendental” way (in a sense to be spelled out in more detail in due course). While I have written a monograph, not a collection of essays, a note is needed on the background of the chapters. Chapters 1, 6, and 7 remain previously unpublished; however, some previously published material has been used in chapters 2-5. An early version of chapter 2 was presented in a conference on the self, others, and emotions at Åbo Akademi University, Finland, in August 2005, and later published in the Blackwell journal, Journal of Religious Ethics 35:1 (2007) (© The Journal of Religious Ethics, Inc.). A version of chapter 3 was presented in the seminar “History, Memory, Politics” at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, Finland, in March 2010; there is also some overlap with a paper appearing in Cosmos and History 7 (2011). Chapter 4 is based on an article published in another Blackwell journal, Metaphilosophy 40:5 (2009). Chapter 5 is based on an article published in the online journal, Cosmos and History 3:1 (2007), but the chapter also contains significant previously unpublished material. I am grateful to the journals and publishers just mentioned for the permissions to use material which first appeared elsewhere. In any case, this work is a unified monograph, not just a collection of articles, even though the chapters are to some extent based on essays that were originally written as independent contributions. vii

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Several colleagues and other friends have been instrumental to the development of the views put forward in this volume. I particularly want to acknowledge the following: Hanne Appelqvist, Leila Haaparanta, Jaana Hallamaa, Sara Heinämaa, Heikki J. Koskinen, Jussi Kotkavirta, Heikki A. Kovalainen, Arto Laitinen, Olli-Pekka Moisio, Ilkka Niiniluoto, Henrik Rydenfelt, Juha Sihvola, Peter Swirski, Thomas Wallgren, and Kenneth R. Westphal. Moisio’s comments on a number of earlier versions of some of the chapters have been particularly important for me. Discussions of chapter 3 in the above-mentioned seminar organized by Dina Khapaeva and Nikolay Koposov were also highly valuable. I also want to thank Lexington Books, the Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, and particularly Jana Wilson most warmly for their strong support for this project. An anonymous reviewer made very important critical comments that shaped both details and the overall argument, for which I am deeply grateful. Finally, the greatest support—and the greatest feelings of guilt—are, as always, due to my family.

Chapter One

Introduction

This book will argue that the concept of guilt is fundamental to moral philosophy and to our self-understanding as moral agents. Because I emphasize the constitutive role played by this concept, or by the corresponding moral emotion (or, more precisely, our capacity of experiencing such emotions), I will label the both ethically and metaphysically fundamental kind of guilt to be discussed below transcendental guilt. However, the book will not merely illuminate this specific ethical concept. It also has a broader aim: I hope to be able to intensify our understanding of the nature of moral thought itself, especially of what I call the seriousness of the moral point of view. Thus, I am putting forward this volume as a challenge to our ethical self-conceptions, and also to our philosophical attempts to understand them. It is crucially important to distinguish the approach of this study from more standard approaches in moral philosophy. I must emphasize, right from the beginning, that in this book I am not aiming at a new ethical theory. Rather, the book is critical of the very idea of ethical theory, especially if by ethical theory we mean a systematically organized structure setting us universal or absolute moral norms and principles. Nor am I engaging in metaethical theorizing about the meaning of ethical concepts such as “good,” “bad,” “right,” or “wrong.” While my discussions will have connections to broadly metaethical issues such as moral realism and moral objectivity, these are not primary topics of the book, either. In fact, the reader of this volume will immediately notice that I won’t pay much attention to the traditional distinction between normative ethics and metaethics. It would be highly misleading to classify the thoughts to be developed here as belonging to either category (let alone “applied ethics”). 1 Avoiding these traditional categorizations, I would like to say that the chapters that follow will be exercises in moral reflection, which is something 1

2

Chapter 1

significantly broader than (meta)ethical theorizing. In moral reflection, we are not establishing theoretically justified normative principles (such as utilitarianism or deontological ethics), or constructing theories about the meaning of moral language and its relations (or the lack thereof) to “moral facts” (or something similar); instead, we are reflecting on our finite human lives—our lives with other human beings—as presenting us with personal yet fundamental moral demands. This reflection is unashamedly normative, though not a piece of normative ethics as traditionally conceived: it is concerned with how we ought to view, understand, or conceptualize our moral lives. This “ought,” I should add, is above all something that I (must) find myself committed to, and I will try to express this in the following pages; whether this can also set a normative “ought” to others is, ultimately, for my readers to judge. The moral reflection practiced in the book is both historically informed and philosophically systematic. My main aim is not to interpret any classical or recent philosophers, but I do to some extent engage with important ethical thinkers such as Immanuel Kant, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Emmanuel Levinas, Raimond Gaita, and Tzvetan Todorov. The method of this volume could thus be described as the method of “philosophizing historically.” 2 I do not think that (moral) philosophy itself and its history can be strictly separated from each other; again, it would be misleading to characterize this book as belonging to just one of these categories. Furthermore, it should be understood that the scope of the book is both highly broad and general—our moral life as a whole, or what may be called the moral perspective, i.e., what morality is all about and what it means to us—and strictly focused, as I will primarily emphasize the concept of guilt as constitutive of the moral perspective. Obviously, I am not going to review the existing literature on the notion of guilt in any detail; for example, psychological studies on guilt clearly fall beyond the scope of my undertaking, as do investigations of other (related) moral emotions, such as shame. I am confident that my focusing on guilt yields a sufficiently balanced discussion that is nevertheless able to illuminate the general significance of morality for us—in a way that might, possibly, implicitly contribute to increasing our understanding of shame and related concepts as well. One may also say that I will, instead of presenting a straightforward argument, propose a certain way of thinking about ethics (or morality), one that in important ways conflicts with received views about the foundations of ethics. This does not mean, however, that I would not intend this volume as an exercise in philosophical argumentation at all. The argument to be presented is, in a sense, a transcendental argument (see also the methodological remarks toward the end of chapter 2 below). Starting from the premise that morality is a serious concern for us, I will argue that a necessary condition for the possibility of this seriousness is a certain way of thinking about the

Introduction

3

place of guilt in our ethical discourse and commitments. As more standard transcendental arguments, this strategy moves from a human actuality that is beyond any meaningful doubt to identifying a necessary condition for the possibility of that actuality. There will, undoubtedly, be significant gaps in the explication of this argument; yet, I trust they can be filled in by (at least a sympathetic) reader. Moreover, I would like to view the present undertaking as an attempt to offer not just an argument but a certain kind of philosophical “vision” about morality. That both arguments and visions are needed in philosophy has been emphasized by a number of thinkers in the pragmatist tradition, in particular. 3 In articulating a “vision” of the place of guilt in moral life, I will not give up argumentation; otherwise, the proposed vision would be empty. However, without such a vision, arguments would hardly be directed at any particular (or even recognizable) goal; they would, to continue alluding to Kant’s famous comment about concepts and intuitions, be blind. There are of course a number of previous academic philosophical studies on guilt, 4 but none of them, as far as I know, adopt the “transcendental” approach in the way I do. Thus, the vision to be articulated in what follows does not really find much support in them. I also find some recent works on the concept of evil relevant to my concerns here, but I cannot in this volume examine that topic in any detail. 5 On the other hand, my discussion will explicitly connect with key writings by well-known moral thinkers, for instance, Gaita and Levinas. Accordingly, the potential audience of this book is large, as anyone interested in not just academic moral philosophy but the place of morality in our lives might be interested in what I will in the following pages say about guilt. The discussion is not limited to scholarly comments on other thinkers; yet, also scholars specializing in, say, Wittgensteinian moral philosophy could, I hope, find much of the discussion relevant. The text, though not strictly speaking popular, is written at a level accessible not just to professional scholars but also students, even undergraduates, and possibly informed general readers as well, although I believe that some of my more abstract considerations (for instance, the discussion of the concepts of the transcendental and the transcendent in chapter 5) will be primarily interesting from an academic point of view. 6 Let me at this point summarize the main argument of what follows. The purpose of this first, introductory, chapter is just to offer a brief description of the contents of the more substantial chapters (2-6), and to outline the approach of the book (that is, “moral reflection” instead of ethical or metaethical theorization) roughly in the way presented above. Chapter 2 will then introduce the most important concept of the book, transcendental guilt. It will be argued that guilt, as an irreducible moral category, has a constitutive role to play in our ways of conceptualizing our relations to other people. Without experiencing guilt, or being able to do so, we would be incapable of

4

Chapter 1

employing the moral concepts and judgments we do employ. Elaborating on this argument, the chapter, as the entire book, offers a reflection on what may be described as the “metaphysics of guilt.” More generally, it will be suggested, through this examination of the concept of guilt, that a moral theory avoiding naïve emotivism yet emphasizing the role of emotions in morality can and should pay attention to the transcendental status of emotions such as guilt—emotions constitutive of our concept of moral seriousness. Instead of “psychologizing” moral emotions, the chapter will employ Gaita’s Wittgenstein-inspired way of examining the place of concepts like guilt and remorse in our ethical language-use. (Gaita’s ideas will be revisited in some of the later chapters as well.) Finally, some methodological remarks on the very possibility of transcendental reflection in moral philosophy will be presented, adding to the brief characterization of moral reflection already provided above. Moreover, while it is certainly not necessary to commit oneself to any specific religious tradition in order to emphasize the constitutive role of guilt in the way to be suggested, it turns out that the moral depth of this concept requires that one is at least open to religiously relevant ways of using moral language. In the fundamental metaphysical sense to be examined, guilt is a concept whose “home language-game” is, perhaps, religion rather than secular ethics. (However, I cannot in this volume engage in the philosophy of religion in any detail, apart from some brief comments on the relation between the concepts of guilt and sin, highlighting the perhaps ultimately only religiously expressible—and therefore presumably ultimately inexpressible—sense of the “depth” of transcendental guilt.) Chapter 3 will continue the discussion of the constitutive role played by the emotion of guilt, or the capacity of experiencing such emotions, in our moral life. It will now be suggested that the deeply personal nature of moral guilt (or, to employ Gaita’s favorite terms again, remorse) leads to the problem of ethical solipsism: it seems that guilt can in the end concern—not just primarily but exclusively—me, not anyone else, in the morally profound sense. Echoing Dostoevsky, especially the themes of The Brothers Karamazov, the truly ethical thinker ought to acknowledge that everyone is guilty in front of the entire humankind, “and I more than anyone else.” This problematic feature of our moral perspectives on the world will be examined through comments on a number of authors, including Kant, Wittgenstein, Levinas, and Todorov. While we do need to avoid the absurdities of solipsism, there is an important “truth” hidden in it: morality, while being a social and cultural phenomenon, is something that we are individually and personally deeply responsible for. It structures our finite lives, and mine, not just human life in general. This is a key result of moral reflection that can be brought to the fore by emphasizing the concept of guilt, in particular. Together chapters 2 and 3 will thus offer, I hope, a penetrating moral reflection on what our human finitude, ethically speaking, means for us.

Introduction

5

Chapter 4 goes somewhat more “metaphilosophical,” defending a controversial thesis: it is not immediately obvious that “the best argument wins” in philosophy, especially the kind of moral philosophy—moral reflection—that this book as a whole seeks to promote. Certain philosophical views, e.g., extremely controversial ethical positions, may be simply morally intolerable and impossible to take seriously as contributions to ethical discussion, irrespective of their purely intellectual argumentative merits. As a case study of this metaphilosophical issue, the chapter will deal with David Benatar’s recent thesis that it is, for everyone, harmful to exist. It will be argued that ethical and cultural “unthinkabilities” set limits to philosophical reasoning that even the most insightful arguments cannot transcend. This view, again, has crucial consequences relevant to our understanding of moral life and its requirements. That there are such unthinkabilities is a result of moral reflection on our “ethical finitude.” Our finitude—the fact that we face the challenge of morality as concrete, individual human beings always already struggling to act in the world, not as mere spectators of the world viewing ethical ideas and arguments from a purely theoretical perspective 7 —is manifested in our lacking a “God’s-Eye View” on the world and on what would be beneficial and/or harmful in our lives. The concept of guilt can again be brought into the focus of this discussion by emphasizing the fact that we are always potentially guilty of forgetting our finitude, of attempting to climb out of our human predicament. In order to be able to maintain the seriousness of the finite ethical perspectives we are confined to in our lives and practices, the only kind of perspectives we are able to adopt on those lives or on the world in general, we must be able to view those lives (and the world) “under the aspect of” guilt. After having rejected, in chapter 4, the unthinkable view that it would always be, for everyone, harmful to exist, I will, however, in chapter 5 discuss the ancient problem of meaningful life. Given the amount of evil and absurdity in the world around us, how can human life be experienced as meaningful at all? Two traditional approaches to this issue will be identified and critically discussed: the life of action and the life of contemplation. It will be argued that neither of these can resolve the problem in a satisfactory manner. Subsequently, the notion of guilt is briefly taken up once again as one potential source of meaning—or of the fact that life can lack meaning and that this lack can be experienced as a genuine or serious loss. Finally, the relation between the notions of the transcendental and the transcendent will be considered. Both notions must be used in the kind of reflection on the meaning of life I am defending, and engaging in, here, but they must not be confused. Chapter 6, the last substantial chapter of the book, will be concerned with the ways we construct our moral identities through the kind of moral reflection examined and practiced in the previous chapters. I will, more specifical-

6

Chapter 1

ly, discuss the narrativity and narrative structures of philosophical (especially ethical) thought and writing, attempting to throw light on a phenomenon we may call the philosophical construction of the moral self. By writing, especially writing reflective ethical or generally philosophical texts, we are continuously in the process of constructing our own (philosophical, philosophizing) selves. This is, more generally, part of the construction of one’s identity as a person, of one’s life as a whole, of a kind of intellectual—but clearly not only intellectual—self-conception. Once more, it must be pointed out that the concept of guilt (and even the one of sin) is highly central in the tradition of confessional philosophical literature. Confessions of guilt may be part of my identity-construction. Seeing oneself as fundamentally guilty, and acknowledging such guilt, with remorse, may be crucial (yet remain implicit) in one’s ethical writing and reflection: I have done wrong, or at least may always do, and by acknowledging this I am continuously constructing my moral identity. This identity-construction may also be understood in terms of redescription, as a creation of novel “vocabularies,” as emphasized in Richard Rorty’s writings: whether to describe (to oneself or to others) one’s experience of guilt in religious terms (perhaps employing the concept of sin) or in merely secular terms—that is, whether to construct not just a moral but also a religious identity—can be seen as a question of how best to (re)describe the most fundamental commitments of one’s life. The same applies to the loss of such commitments: just as religious identities can surely be lost, also one’s moral self may suffer fragmentation. Extreme experiences of guilt and remorse may play a distinctive role here. Discussing the redescription of our identities finally leads me to take up not only the ways in which we may engage in self-deception regarding our identity-construction but also the possibility of (re)describing variations of the concept of transcendental subjectivity, the subject(ivity) “whose” guilt we are examining here. Yet—recalling the distinction between the transcendental and the transcendent from chapter 5—this subjectivity is not transcendent, or otherworldly, but a perspective on, or an aspect of, our very own subjectivity whose (guilty) existence is a concrete, natural, and eminently this-worldly matter. I will conclude, in chapter 7, that our moral lives are, metaphysically speaking, tragic. We are always, at least potentially, guilty. As I hope the previous chapters demonstrate, this is not an epistemic point about our not knowing, or not being able to know, what is the right thing to do in a given situation; nor is it a semantic point about the meanings of such words. Thus, again, my reflections and their conclusions ought to be carefully distinguished from ethical and metaethical theorizing, as standardly practiced. I am, rather, making a metaphysical point about the human condition, in the sense of “metaphysical” signifying fundamental traits of human existence. 8 There is no easy way of being moral. If one carries moral responsibility at

Introduction

7

all—if one is a morally serious person—one has no chance but to experience guilt. This is what “transcendental guilt” means. Before moving on to the actual discussion, a word should be added on my sources. While the problems I will discuss, focusing on guilt, are universal and as old as our human history—just think about, say, Oedipus’s guilt and other treatments of guilt in Greek tragedies, about the close tie between sin and death in the Bible, 9 or about Christian philosophers’ like Kierkegaard’s discussions of sin and anxiety—I will mainly cite twentieth (and twenty-first) century authors. My aims are not those of historical interpretation. Moreover, one might argue that it is only in and after the twentieth century that we have seen, and may remember (and have a duty to remember), such an amount of evil and suffering that we can think of our human guilt as having reached properly “transcendental” dimensions. I will not be able to explicitly connect my discussions with the “ethics of memory” and the politics of history, or other topics whose importance seems to be increasing. 10 Yet, hardly anyone can deny that the duty of remembering such events as the Holocaust is crucial to our experience of guilt. Moreover, the impossibility of remembering all the suffering that ought to be remembered, and ought to be prevented from taking place again—the human necessity of forgetting—will be one more source of, and one more reason for, guilt. We are inevitably guilty of forgetting. That, again, is one aspect of our ethical finitude that we will now seek to understand in more detail. NOTES 1. For some critical reflections on “applied philosophy” generally, see Sami Pihlström, Pragmatic Moral Realism: A Transcendental Defense (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2005), chapter 4. Let me note, furthermore, that in the present volume I often use “ethical” and “moral” more or less interchangeably, speaking about moral concepts (and emotions) as well as ethical concepts (and emotions). I do subscribe to the standard usage of “ethics” as denoting “moral philosophy,” that is, the field of philosophy focusing on moral matters. However, as one of my aims is to challenge our ways of viewing the tasks of this academic field, I have taken the liberty of using the concepts “ethical” and “moral” in a somewhat looser manner. From the perspective of the goal of enhancing our understanding of what I will call “moral seriousness,” it matters little whether we speak about moral or ethical seriousness. 2. See Peter H. Hare (ed.), Doing Philosophy Historically (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1988). 3. Cf. William James, Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (1907), eds. Frederick H. Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers, and Ignas K. Skrupskelis (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1975), especially Lecture I introducing the concept of a “philosophical temperament” (comparable to the concept of a philosophical vision, a way of seeing or looking at things); among more recent pragmatist defenses of the idea that we need to integrate argument and vision, see Hilary Putnam, Realism with a Human Face, ed. James Conant (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1990); and Richard J. Bernstein, The Pragmatic Turn (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010).

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Chapter 1

4. See, among many interesting works, P.S. Greenspan, Practical Guilt: Moral Dilemmas, Emotions, and Social Norms (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). In this book, I unfortunately do not have sufficient space to deal with the representatives of mainstream moral philosophy in any great detail; I will focus on thinkers I find helpful in articulating the “way of thinking,” or vision, I hope to defend. 5. For recent discussions of evil, see, e.g., the two important books by Richard Bernstein: Radical Evil: A Philosophical Interrogation, and The Abuse of Evil (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002 and 2005, respectively); as well as Peter Dews, The Idea of Evil (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008). I will cite more literature on evil in relevant contexts below. 6. One of the background works relevant to the present volume is my own previous book, Pragmatic Moral Realism (cited above). No familiarity with that volume will be required, however; nor am I going to repeat the arguments of that book in the present one. Only the general approach—the idea that moral problems are deeply personal yet demanding a kind of absolute commitment—is something that this book shares with its predecessor. Also, chapter 3 below is related to my book-length study on the problem of solipsism, i.e., Solipsism: History, Critique, and Relevance (Tampere University Press, 2004), but again no familiarity with that work is needed. While many of my earlier writings have been largely concerned with the tradition of pragmatism, this is not a key topic in the present work (though I would be prepared to claim that the conception of guilt to be developed here is compatible with pragmatist moral philosophy, too). 7. My pragmatist background (see the previous note) is, I guess, visible when I formulate the notion of finitude along these lines. We should, I think, firmly reject what John Dewey called the “spectator theory of knowledge”—especially in ethics. See Dewey, The Quest for Certainty: A Study on the Relation between Knowledge and Action (Boston: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1960; first published 1929). On the other hand, as will be suggested in chapter 5, the somewhat unpragmatic “contemplative” attitude to life does have practical considerations in its favor, too; so, again, this is an issue calling for further moral reflection, not just pragmatist theorizing. Generally, no theory vs. practice dichotomy should be presupposed here. 8. The very concept of metaphysics would obviously require a much more extensive critical examination than is possible here. For a view of metaphysics as an inquiry into basic features of the “human world” (rather than the world taken to exist independently of human perspectives and categorizations), see Sami Pihlström, Pragmatist Metaphysics: An Essay on the Ethical Grounds of Ontology (London and New York: Continuum, 2009). 9. An excellent discussion of the connection between guilt and death in religion, examined from a phenomenological perspective, with a focus not only in Western traditions but other religious frameworks, too, is offered in Merold Westphal, God, Guilt, and Death: An Existential Phenomenology of Religion (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1984)—to be cited in relevant contexts below. 10. Cf., e.g., Avishai Margalit, The Ethics of Memory (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2002); Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2004).

Chapter Two

Transcendental Guilt

In this chapter, I will begin my reflections on the ethically crucially relevant interpersonal emotion of guilt. It will be argued that guilt, as a central and irreducible moral category, has a constitutive role to play in our ways of conceptualizing our relations to other people. Without experiencing guilt, or being able to do so, we would hardly—if at all—be capable of employing the moral concepts and judgments we do employ in our lives. 1 Elaborating on this argument, this book deals with what may be described as the “metaphysics of guilt,” not primarily with guilt as a psychological concept denoting a (moral) feeling—even though I must hasten to add that I do not want to draw any fundamental dichotomy between the ethical and the psychological. More generally, it will be suggested, through a study on the concept of guilt (an exploration to be continued in later chapters), that a moral theory avoiding naïve emotivism yet emphasizing the role of emotions in morality can and should pay attention to the transcendental status of emotions such as guilt—emotions that seem to be constitutive of our concept of moral seriousness. Thus, instead of simply psychologizing moral emotions, the present chapter, as well as the one following it, employs Raimond Gaita’s Wittgensteinian way of examining the place of the concepts of guilt and remorse in our ethical language-use. 2 It should be clear throughout my presentation that my perspective on the concept of guilt (or remorse), and on the nature and tasks of moral philosophy in general, is, like Gaita’s, a Wittgenstein-inspired one, although I do not want to identify my position with any particular view defended within the so-called “Wittgensteinian moral philosophy”—for instance, by such ethical thinkers as Rush Rhees, Peter Winch, D.Z. Phillips, or Lars Hertzberg (whose views I will not be able to comment upon here in any detail). I will use Gaita’s work primarily as an example of the kind of perspective on concepts such as guilt and remorse that I find promising; I could 9

10

Chapter 2

easily have chosen other examples. 3 Toward the end of the chapter, I will, however, have a few words to say on the methodology of moral philosophy, continuing the preliminary account of “moral reflection” given in the introductory chapter above. WHY IS GUILT FUNDAMENTAL? In The Brothers Karamazov (which I am using as a source for inspiration but do not even try to comment upon in any scholarly detail here), Dostoevsky returns over and over again to the significance of guilt, especially to its uncompromising first-person character. Each of us is said to be guilty “in front of all the others,” guilty of all human sins, of the sins of the entire world and of all human beings. Phrases like these are repeated throughout the volume by various characters; their overall effect can be compared to a theme or a motive in a symphony or an opera. Moreover, our guilt is not symmetrical or democratic. While everyone is guilty and deserves punishment, I am more guilty than anyone else, “the worst human being in the world.” The metaphysical character of the concept of guilt can be approached by taking a quick look at the traditional problem of evil and the related problems of the nature, origin, and justification of (unnecessary) suffering. Why is our world such that there is moral evil and guilt in it? People who believe in an omnipotent benevolent God—but also people who don’t—have throughout centuries posed this question to themselves, finding no satisfactory answers. Evil seems to be intractable, impossible to fully understand or even conceptualize, a challenge to reason, intelligibility, or comprehensibility itself. 4 While the theological and philosophical literature on evil is intellectually sophisticated and profound, the problem has seldom received as compelling a formulation as in Ivan Karamazov’s revolt against God and His world-order. Ivan refuses to acknowledge the forgiveness and atonement that a divinely established eternal harmony promises. The innocent suffering and tears of a single child are sufficient to demonstrate the ethical unacceptability of such a promised harmony. Even if all such sufferings were eventually forgiven, even by those who have innocently undergone them, it is a fundamental ethical demand for Ivan not to accept, not to acknowledge, a world in which such things happen, nor its Creator (should there be one). The problem is not that God’s infinite goodness and mercy could not, sub specie aeternitatis, relieve and provide atonement for all the evil, suffering, and guilt in which humans have lapsed. Of course it can—according to the one who believes in God. Otherwise, we would not be dealing with an infinite, all-encompassing, omnipotent goodness, which, by definition, is the

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goodness believers ascribe to God. The problem is that it is this idea of atonement and forgiveness itself that must be regarded as unethical, or ethically unbearable, given the full reality of evil we cannot deny. No positive outcome, no everlasting harmony, can be so important and rewarding that it could ever justify the evil humans have to go through in their lives. No ultimate forgiveness—however divine—of our fundamental guilt could be morally acceptable. If the problem of evil is faced by claiming, with thinkers seeking a “theodicy,” that human beings must know what evil is and be able to engage in evil actions in order to live a genuinely free and responsible human life (that is, in order to be capable of doing good things as well), then Ivan Karamazov will go on to press his point: why do we have to learn to know this good and evil, as the price of such knowledge is so high? This knowledge is not worth the tears of the child, Ivan argues. There is in the entire world no one who would have the right to forgive the one who causes innocent suffering. Our love for humankind requires that we abandon harmony. Guilt, on my reading of Dostoevsky, is not mystical and fundamental because God has declared that the guilty deserve punishment and that they can only be liberated through mercy (this being presumably mystical in some deep sense), but because even denying God’s existence—appealing to another recurring thought of Dostoevsky’s, namely, that “if there is no God, then everything is permitted”—will not set us free from our guilt. In front of other human beings, we will inevitably be guilty for the evil we cause or the evil we do not, because of our selfishness and laziness, help to oppose. As long as we conceptualize ourselves as ethical agents at all, we will never be able to give away our responsibility, or the guilt and anxiety resulting from our never being able to completely meet the requirements of that responsibility. 5 Even though ethical thought is, obviously, concerned with notions such as obligation, right, happiness, and well-being—with enormous differences among ethical theories regarding the proper relations between them—these and other ethical concepts would remain empty abstractions without the perspective of moral seriousness that the concept of guilt opens for us. For this reason, moral reflection on guilt is required for us to be truly entitled to such ethical concepts, and to the theories that may be constructed by employing them. Of course we need not take Ivan Karamazov’s worries on evil as the last, indisputable word on the matter. They can be questioned by philosophers and theologians, as any account of evil and guilt can. They will, however, set the tone for the investigation that follows. We have, by taking a quick look at The Brothers Karamazov, arrived at the need to pay attention to guilt as a fundamental concept characterizing the very idea of moral responsibility itself. To be human is to acknowledge the impossibility of being thoroughly liberated from one’s guilt, to refuse to accept an eventual harmony in which

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all evil would be eternally forgiven. This picture of guilt—and of humanity—should now be enriched by means of more philosophical examinations. GUILT AND REMORSE Gaita prefers to focus on the concept of remorse rather than on the one of guilt. Guilt and remorse are not the same concepts but they are intimately related; indeed, if “guilt-feeling” is a “pained acknowledgment of the wrong one has done,” then there is, between such a feeling and remorse, no significant difference. 6 In A Common Humanity, Gaita simply characterizes remorse as “the pained acknowledgment of one’s guilt.” 7 He also says that in remorse people “suffer in guilty recognition of what they have become”; remorse is “the suffering recognition and acknowledgment of one’s guilt.” 8 A more detailed definition says that remorse is “the pained recognition of the significance of our guilt, guilt being the condition of one who is a wrongdoer.” 9 These characterizations suggest that one cannot suffer remorse without actually being guilty—without being in the relevant kind of condition— and without (painfully, sufferingly) acknowledging one’s guilt, that is, experiencing a certain self-reflective feeling, emotion, or attitude. Guilt and the ability to recognize it are, then, necessary conditions of remorse. The converse does not hold, however. Objectively speaking, there is, undoubtedly, a sense in which one can be guilty (that is, be in the relevant condition) without experiencing remorse; this, however, is not the ethically fundamental sense of guilt we are interested in here. When emphasizing the ethical significance of the emotion of guilt (or the dispositional property of being able to experience such an emotion in appropriate circumstances), we should primarily focus on remorse, as Gaita does. Another closely related emotion is shame, and to some extent the reflections that follow might be formulated in terms of shame instead of guilt. I cannot, however, in any detail analyze the relations between shame and guilt in this book. Following Gaita, I will now focus on remorse, with a crucial link to guilt. In the preface to the second edition of his penetrating Good and Evil, Gaita further describes the experience of remorse “not as a psychological response to wrongdoing” but as a “pained, bewildered realisation of what it means (in a sense interdependent with what it is) to wrong someone”; when lucid, remorse is “an astonished encounter with the reality of the ethical.” 10 In other words, remorse often comes with a “horrified discovery of the significance of what we did.” This experience is trivialized, if one claims, following traditional moral theories, such as Kant’s, that doing evil is, say, the same as being a “traitor to Reason.” The problem with such theories is, precisely, that they are theories. A “horrified” realization or discovery along

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the lines of, “My God, what have I done? I have been a traitor to reason. I have violated rational nature in another!” yields a parody of moral seriousness. 11 Gaita argues, then, that remorse is a more fundamental experience than any principles one might adopt from typical academic ethical theories. Moral reflection, as suggested in the introductory chapter, is the way to arrive at the significance of such experiences. Literature, as much as philosophical argumentation, can yield such reflective truths. Gaita’s conclusion is, indeed, very close to the one we may draw from Dostoevsky: the experience (emotion) of guilt, or remorse, is primary to the more sophisticated, but less fundamental, intellectual (philosophical or theological) responses to the questions of right and wrong, or good and evil, that we may develop. In addition to theoretical overintellectualization, another possible corruption of the concepts of guilt and remorse is the failure to notice their personal character. In “common guilt,” all are guilty and no one is. “Someone who is true to her remorse will always reject, as inappropriate, consolation that is based on her recognition of the guilt of others,” Gaita tells us, adding that the knowledge that others are guilty, too, will provide only a “corrupt consolation.” 12 Putting together Gaita’s and Dostoevsky’s insights, we may argue that this kind of corrupt thinking fails to acknowledge the sense in which I am, from the perspective of my ethical reflection, always more guilty than any other person—I am the one whose guilt is ethically prior to any other’s. True guilt or remorse is not self-centered, but recognizes, often with a shock, the “reality of the other” (as Gaita puts it); yet, it is, in a way, ethically solipsistic: my being guilty is what ultimately matters in moral evaluation. 13 Insofar as this solipsistic formulation sounds too strong and perhaps misleading, we may also express the same idea by saying that my relation to my own guilt is always, necessarily, different from my relation to anyone else’s guilt, as my own guilt (or its continuous possibility) is the only guilt to which I can have an active and immediate relation. Indeed, an excessive focus in one’s moral thought on other people’s guilt may also be seen as a symptom of a corrupt sense of guilt. 14 This personal status of guilt leads to the idea that guilt (or remorse) is, as Gaita seeks to show, a condition for the possibility of finding something a “moral matter”: “we cannot say that something is morally wrong unless it is an intelligible object of remorse.” 15 Now, this has the structure of a transcendental argument, in a (broadly speaking) Kantian sense: something can be done, that is, in this case, something can be said to be morally wrong, only if something else is acknowledged, namely, that what is claimed to be wrong is an intelligible object of remorse. It is implicitly suggested here that we do judge, and cannot avoid judging, certain things as morally wrong. Finding something an intelligible object of remorse is thus not optional; this is a presuppositional necessity built in the very possibility of the ethical. As Gaita notes, his argument “depends upon a certain understanding of remorse as

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expressive of the seriousness that is inseparable from a certain sense of morality.” 16 While he does not adopt the transcendental terminology I am employing, he does say that “remorse is a central and inexpungeable determinant of what it is for something to be a moral matter.” 17 This can be read as a statement about remorse being transcendentally constitutive of something’s being a moral issue or problem. What we have here is a necessary condition for the possibility of morality. 18 While we need not be faithful to all the details of Gaita’s position, this transcendental reading of his argument provides a picture of what the argument of my entire approach generally speaking looks like. Insofar as one trusts the resources of transcendental reflection in moral philosophy—though not necessarily in the service of foundationalist attempts to demonstrate apodictically certain “first principles” 19 —it does not require much imagination to read Gaita’s theory as a transcendental account of a condition for the possibility of regarding something as a moral matter. But it is extremely important to avoid misdescribing the transcendental guilt I am considering in foundationalist terms. 20 The kind of moral philosophy Gaita seeks to develop through his discussions of remorse, love, truth, and other “big” notions, discussions abundant in empirical and literary examples, is very far from a universal ethical theory with systematic principles and rules. Insofar as we find his account of remorse and guilt compelling, we should not attempt to construct such a theory. Moral philosophy ought to be sensitive to the personal character of ethical problems, including guilt and remorse. At the same time, it can engage in something like a transcendental setting of “limits” for genuine (uncorrupt) moral agency and moral concepts, as in Gaita’s demarcations between genuine and corrupt forms of guilt. Moral reflection can be transcendental in this specific sense, combining a transcendental argument with a moral “vision” (see chapter 1 above). THE TRANSCENDENTAL SIGNIFICANCE OF GUILT A natural (re-)interpretation of the position Gaita develops is, then, the one according to which the concepts of guilt and remorse, whatever their exact relation to each other eventually is, play a transcendental role in being constitutive of what is (or can be), for us, a “moral matter,” or a possible object of ethical thinking, evaluation, and motivation. We could not engage in moral deliberation at all, or find anything a moral problem requiring such deliberation, were we incapable of the kind of emotions, attitudes, and reactions these concepts (purport to) describe; but we can and do so engage; hence, these concepts do really play the role I have attributed to them in our moral thought, or in any thinking and language-use we—within our present (histor-

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ically changing) language-game or form of life—can claim to be genuinely ethical. Guilt, we learn from Gaita’s discussion, is the “condition” of the wrongdoer, a condition acknowledged in remorse; this, we learn from Dostoevsky, is our general human condition, something that characterizes our existence as such, and mine more profoundly than anyone else’s. Now, if guilt (or remorse) is, as I suggest on the basis of these ideas drawn from The Brothers Karamazov and from Good and Evil, seen as a transcendental requirement of the possibility of morality, or of ethical seriousness, it cannot be a merely practical notion, tied to the factual situations of life we encounter. Guilt, or the capacity of experiencing guilty feelings, is not just contingently present in moral life. In an everyday, somewhat trivial or shallow sense, one is of course always guilty of something specific, if guilty at all; one’s moral guilt necessarily relates to what one has done or has failed to do, that is, which facts one has, by means of one’s actions, caused or failed to cause to obtain (overlooking here all the difficult problems with agent causation). Here we must remember, though, that thoughts and feelings are in a sense deeds, too; they do change the world, and the everyday sense of guilt does cover guilty thoughts and other mental states. In contrast, in any event, transcendental guilt is more metaphysical, 21 even mystical—though not for that reason other-worldly or transcendent. It is not concerned with particular worldly actions, nor even with thoughts or feelings understood as psychological states or mental goings-on in the empirical world. Moreover, if we follow the cryptic remarks to be found toward the closing of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, maintaining that we cannot really change the way the world is, or the facts that contingently obtain independently of our thought, will, and actions, and thus understanding ethics as being primarily about the (transcendental) metaphysical subject’s relation to the world, seen as a holistic totality, 22 then our guilt regarding contingent matters of fact is indeed of minor importance in comparison to the guilt embedded in our sheer existence as such. The moral philosopher certainly does not have to follow the early Wittgenstein here. However, the Tractatus, as well as Wittgenstein’s famous 1929 “Lecture on Ethics,” 23 does offer a sublime picture of the absolute seriousness of the ethical attitude to the world. If ethics is concerned with absolute value, as Wittgenstein claims in the “Lecture on Ethics,” then the guilt that follows from our never being able to meet the absolute demands that ethics sets us will be absolute and all-embracing as well— transcendental in my sense. We may find transcendental guilt a concept worth developing quite independently of whether we find Wittgenstein important as an ethical thinker, though. The significance of this concept need not be tied to any philosophical (or theological) theory but may arise even from quite non-theoretical and personal moral reflections. On the other hand, transcendental guilt, even as abstracted from situations in which a person is guilty of something in particular, does presuppose that

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we actually do something. It is precisely our moral agency that this transcendental concept is constitutive of. In the transcendental sense, we are (potentially) guilty, whatever we do (given that we cannot help doing something, engaging in some activity instead of some other), also when abstaining from specific actions and attempting (per impossibile) to adopt the point of view of a mere passive spectator. 24 The latter should be regarded as a fundamental form of guilt resulting from the fact that, in Emmanuel Levinas’s words, “[t]he I is the very crisis of the being of a being […] in the human […], because, being myself, I already ask myself whether my being is justified, whether the Da of my Dasein is not already the usurpation of someone’s place.” 25 I should be able to see myself as being guilty simply by being (t)here. Indeed, the Dostoevskyan idea of my being more guilty than all the others finds its philosophical expression in Levinas’s asymmetrical conception of my infinite responsibility to the mortal and vulnerable other, of my always having “one responsibility more” than the other. Moreover, it is only this fundamental guilt resulting from such an asymmetry, not unrelated to—but certainly not to be confused with—the religious concept of primordial sin, that might eventually turn to a crucial source for my being able to experience my life as meaningful, or as something always threatened by potential meaninglessness. 26 The concept of primordial sin is of course misleading, if it means that every human being, even a newborn child, has done something specific, that is, has been committed particular morally wrong acts, even (paradoxically) before birth. This would amount to a confused and superstitious banalization of a religiously loaded expression onto the level of everyday life. The transcendental guilt I am trying to understand is a secular cousin of the religious concept of primordial sin; both can be seen as ways of describing a necessary condition enabling us to perform (or to abstain from performing) particular acts which may make us guilty, or not guilty, in a more mundane sense. 27 If Levinas is right, I should always, at any moment, be prepared to put my entire life, my Dasein, in question, problematizing my right to exist. Paradoxically, this insight might lead me to view each and every moment of my life as uniquely meaningful. I might find my existence meaningful in a profound sense precisely because I will always fail in my attempts to do what I ought to do, because I will have the inexhaustible task of doing my duty always before me. I will always remain infinitely far removed from having fully performed my obligations toward others. To put it in Kantian terms, whether I like it or not, whether I plan to or not, I will inevitably treat my fellow human beings as mere means. The infinity of my responsibility to the other, as described by thinkers like Levinas, thus again leads us to appreciate the central place of guilt in our ethical system of concepts. It justifies our reserving a fundamental role in ethics for the concept of guilt. It is in the light of this concept that we should learn to see our lives as (at least potentially)

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ethically unbearable, constantly requiring reorientation. This is something we may appreciate through a close reading of thinkers like Kant and Levinas. 28 The concept of guilt can be interpreted both as an empirical, factual concept, in which case it is closely connected with the actions we de facto perform, characterizing our practical being-in-the-world, and as a transcendental concept, structuring our ethical seriousness as such at a meta-level, providing a background or framework without which no moral deliberation or search for humanly significant actions makes sense. This, roughly, is the sense in which I am claiming that guilt plays a transcendental role in our ethical vocabulary, constituting the very meaning of the “ethical” we must assume in our moral deliberations. A further meta-level issue should, however, be raised in the light of these thoughts. How, we may ask, could a mere emotion, such as guilt or remorse, or a disposition to experience such emotions, play a transcendental (constitutive) role as a condition for the possibility of morality (or, generally, of ethical relations to other humans)? Propositions, principles, reasons, judgments, or arguments can be considered transcendental 29 —but can emotions? Aren’t we committing something like a category mistake when attributing the property of being “transcendental” to the emotion of guilt, or to the human capacity to feel guilt (or remorse)? An easy reaction to this question would be to note simply that it is the concept of guilt, or perhaps the linguistic ability to say (seriously, meaningfully) the words, “I am guilty,” that plays the transcendental role I have ascribed to guilt. On the other hand, a stronger interpretation of “transcendental guilt” would grant that role to the emotion, or potential emotion, itself. The dichotomy between emotions and judgments should, if this alternative is chosen, be critically scrutinized, 30 just like the age-old dualisms between facts and values and between the transcendental and the empirical ought to be. By no means do I want to claim that the “mystical” transcendental guilt is sharply distinguishable from the factual, empirical instantiations of guilt that are painful enough in our lives. 31 Without factual manifestations of guilt, there can hardly be the kind of moral reflection giving rise to the very concept of transcendental guilt—and this is precisely why guilt is transcendental, too. It could now be argued that a notion such as guilt, or remorse, can have a transcendental status precisely because of the pragmatic functions of the appropriate emotions within the actual—albeit humanly inescapable— language-games of morality we engage in, and that even these emotions themselves (as distinguished from the corresponding concepts) can be involved in this role, because they do constitute the ways we commit ourselves to morality within those language-games. 32 We have now reached a stage in the argument that enables us to spell out more clearly the metaphysical status of transcendental guilt, and the related distinction between transcendental and “ordinary” moral guilt. As transcendental guilt, in the sense described above, is not based on any particular

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guilty actions or thoughts but on one’s (my) life (or world) as a whole, there are important possibilities of comparison that might illuminate its metaphysical status. First, Kant’s famous “radical evil” is also something that does not concern individual actions per se but is a tendency toward evil (Hang zum Bösen), a tendency to choose maxims that set one’s own happiness or wellbeing prior to the requirements of the moral law, that is, a tendency to choose maxims contrary to the categorical imperative. 33 This tendency is deep in us—“rooted,” as the Latin word radix, the etymological source of “radical,” indicates. Secondly—and this is even a more important comparison, metaphysically speaking—transcendental guilt (as well as the Kantian “radical” tendency to choose evil maxims) can be seen as a “real general” in the sense of Charles S. Peirce’s “scholastic realism.” According to this theory, generals (universals) such as laws, habits, tendencies, dispositions, and possibilities are real, though they do not exist in the way particulars do. 34 As a general tendency, transcendental guilt “goes through” our life (or world) as a whole, instead of being reducible to any particular action(s), or groups of actions, within that life (or world). While real generals, such as transcendental guilt, cannot be said to “exist” in the way sticks and stones exist, they are nevertheless real in the way in which, say, the law of gravity is real—really operative in nature— independently of any of its particular applications. The Peircean real generals do not enjoy a Platonic existence over and above worldly entities; on the contrary, postulating Platonic transcendent Forms would be nominalistic instead of being realistic in Peirce’s sense. The transcendental guilt I have invoked is not a Platonic Form, either; it is not something self-subsistent and transcendent that concrete cases of guilt merely incompletely reflect or participate in. It is, rather, really at work in real-life cases of guilt, operative in the way in which laws and general habits are operative in our lives. 35 A potential critic might, in order to question the notion of transcendental guilt I am defending, propose a thought experiment: couldn’t there be agents just like humans with the exception that they would have no concept or feelings of guilt, even though they did have moral reasons for acting, such as the pain they know themselves and other members of their group to be capable of feeling? Guilt would not be “operative in their lives” in the way I am suggesting that transcendental guilt is in ours. I am, however, entirely unmoved by such a potential counter-argument. The imagined creatures’ reasons for their actions could be described as truly moral only by us who do have the concept of guilt. For us their moral reasons, insofar as we could really understand their form of life in the absence of any concept of guilt (or any suitably similar concept playing an analogous role), would lack seriousness. As a whole, their lives would thus be completely different from ours. Their moral vocabulary would presumably even seem incoherent by our lights, if they had the concept of a moral reason for an action (for example, a

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reason not to cause pain to someone who can feel it) but lacked the concept of guilt in a situation in which they had not acted in accordance with such a reason. This, I believe, amounts to viewing their form of life as morally incoherent from our perspective. MORAL AND METAPHYSICAL GUILT I have described transcendental guilt as “metaphysical,” and I have even briefly suggested how to account for its metaphysical status in terms of Peirce’s realism of “generals.” In order to further illuminate the notion of “metaphysical” here, I will for a moment turn to a discussion of guilt tied to a particular concrete historical situation, namely, the analysis of the basic varieties of guilt by Karl Jaspers that have their background in the German experience of guilt after World War II. Jaspers’s thin but thought-provoking volume, Die Schuldfrage (1946), based on his lectures on the spiritual state of Germany in 1945-46, very interestingly thematizes the concept of guilt. 36 Its relevance is by no means restricted to its specific historical context but extends to the universal problem framework of guilt. 37 Jaspers’s analysis is somewhat more fine-tuned than the one provided above, because he distinguishes not only two but four different concepts of guilt: 38 (1) Criminal or juridical guilt (Kriminelle Schuld) amounts to an objective breaking of unambiguous laws. This form of guilt is, obviously, dealt with in the court by lawyers and other experts. (2) Political guilt (Politische Schuld) is related to the actions committed by the leaders of a state (or other politically powerful people), actions whose objects are, typically, the citizens (who, of course, are partly responsible for the ways in which they are governed). This form of guilt is dealt with in terms of the sheer power of the stronger—for example, the winner of the war 39 —that is, by the winner’s will and (possibly) violence. (3) Moral guilt (Moralische Schuld) is, however, something more important. Each one of my actions is subjected to moral evaluation, which, according to Jaspers, takes place in my conscience and in my communication with friends and other people close to me, those who are “interested in my soul.” Finally, (4) metaphysical guilt (Metaphysische Schuld) is the most fundamental of all the different varieties of guilt. Its basis lies in the solidarity between human beings just because they are human beings, something that was thoroughly fragmentated in, say, Nazi Germany. I can be guilty in the metaphysical sense simply by being there, as a spectator, not being involved in what is done, even though I could not be claimed to be guilty or responsible either criminally, politically, or even morally. Jaspers writes:

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Chapter 2 There is a solidarity between human beings as human beings, which makes everyone responsible for all wrongness and injustice in the world, particularly for crimes that take place in one’s presence or known to her/him. If I fail to do what I can to prevent them, I am a companion in the guilt. If I fail to devote my life to preventing the murdering of others, but just remain standing there, I feel myself guilty in a way that cannot be conceived in terms of juridical, political, or moral measures. The fact that I am still alive, while something like that has taken place, sets an irredeemable guilt into me. 40

In reflecting on metaphysical guilt, Jaspers comes close to the kind of Dostoevskyan themes I have above tried to capture by speaking about transcendental guilt. Metaphysical guilt is too profound to be responded to from the perspective of the courtroom, the political power of the stronger, or even one’s ethical conscience. Its depth is, according to Jaspers, adequately expressible only by means of religious concepts. Only in her or his relation to God can a human being be metaphysically guilty—or be liberated from such guilt. The instance in which metaphysical guilt is dealt with is “God alone”: “Instanz ist Gott allein.” 41 If this form of guilt is regarded as transcendental (which is not Jaspers’s way of putting the matter, though), we should maintain that the commitment to the existence of a transcendent God is itself a transcendental condition for a certain humanly possible mode of experience. The transcendent and the transcendental must of course never be confused with each other, as the former concept refers to something going beyond (transcending) the limits of human experience (or meaning) and the latter to those limits themselves, but in some cases a commitment to transcendence may itself play the role of a transcendental condition of a given human actuality, for example, by making a specific way of using language possible. 42 On the other hand, the notion of transcendental guilt sketched in the previous sections can be secularly construed; at least it does not presuppose the theistic framework Jaspers operates in, although it can certainly be thematized by employing religious concepts. 43 If it were possible for us to set ourselves free from metaphysical guilt, we would, Jaspers tells us, be angels rather than humans, and the other three concepts of guilt would be gegenstandslos, lacking object. 44 Jaspers appears to be saying that metaphysical guilt is the ground of all guilt. This idea is very close to the view, held by Dostoevsky (and later by Levinas), that I am guilty in front of the entire humankind, for everybody’s actions. It is my own guilt that makes it possible for me to ascribe guilt to others. On the other hand, unlike Dostoevsky and Levinas, Jaspers does not seem to maintain that guilt is asymmetrical. At least, he does not clearly state that my guilt would be greater than all the others’. In this sense, both Dostoevsky and Levinas are more radical metaphysicians of guilt than Jaspers. However, the personal character of guilt is a major theme in Jaspers, too: an entire nation or other collective (such as the totality of Germans after the war) cannot, as such, be

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considered morally guilty. It is only the individual, not the group, that should be morally evaluated. 45 In a profound sense, guilt—both moral and metaphysical—is something that matters to an individual, to me. One problem in Jaspers’s position is the sharp distinction he draws between moral and metaphysical guilt. This distinction may, indeed, be argued to be too sharp. Someone—say, a Wittgensteinian philosopher like Gaita— who emphasizes the autonomy and “overridingness” of the ethical point of view can hardly agree with Jaspers that metaphysical guilt is more fundamental than moral guilt. On the contrary, it is moral guilt itself that turns out to be “metaphysical,” because the requirements of morality are so high that we can never adequately respond to them. This is a natural line of thought, if one shares Wittgenstein’s view that ethics is ultimately about the meaning of life and God—or about how one’s subjectivity (will, soul) is in relation to the world it cannot govern. Accordingly, while Jaspers occasionally arrives at formulations closely resembling Dostoevskyan-Levinasian (or Wittgensteinian) reflections on guilt, these latter thinkers (including followers of Wittgenstein, such as Gaita) seem to regard moral and metaphysical guilt as identical, rather than distinguishable in Jaspers’s manner. It is morality itself, or the moral requirements we are faced with in our lives, that ought to be seen as absolute, infinitely demanding, impossible to ever fully satisfy. Perhaps, however, this is only a terminological difference. Perhaps moral guilt, when interpreted as “transcendental” in the way I have proposed, just is metaphysical guilt in Jaspers’s sense, while the kind of moral guilt (as distinguished from its metaphysical counterpart) defined by Jaspers is only “ordinary,” everyday, empirical, factual, non-transcendental moral guilt, for example, guilt described in terms of some more standard philosophical moral theory. My concept of transcendental moral guilt is “metaphysical” precisely because it is intended as more basic than standard moral theories—and it is for this very reason that moral reflection emphasizing transcendental guilt (or remorse) must deny the possibility of grounding morality in any allegedly more fundamental (for example, metaphysical) reasons. Our guilt lies in our life itself, in the fact that we are alive at all: “Dass wir leben, ist unsere Schuld,” Jaspers says 46 —and this is obviously something that Dostoevsky or Levinas could have said as well. On the other hand, in a certain sense—though not in a sense of relieving our own guilt—“everyone is guilty.” The ground of metaphysical guilt is our common humanity. 47 But basing our own guilt on the universal guilt of human beings should not provide us with any kind of relief; on the contrary, it should lead to an increasing depth of guilt. Otherwise, we are in the grip of a “corrupt” picture of guilt (to borrow Gaita’s terms employed above). At this point, Jaspers even employs the concept of “original sin” (die Erbsünde). 48 Crime or political guilt can be forgiven or otherwise wiped

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away through punishment, reconciliation, or some other method, but in the case of moral and metaphysical guilt this is impossible. These dimensions of guilt have no end point; instead, they denote a process lasting through one’s entire life. 49 The one who does not grasp this distinction between the more ordinary forms of guilt and the more fundamental one(s), simply has no clear sense of what it means to be morally (and metaphysically) guilty. This is something I find crucial in Jaspers’s reflections. Jaspers, like Gaita or Levinas, can be read as reminding us of the fact that human life is through and through an ethical project, a project that must (and this, again, is itself an ethical “must”!) be accompanied by (potential) guilt and remorse, from beginning 50 to end. This uninterrupted possibility of being guilty is, I have argued, a necessary condition for humanly possible ethical thought and action. In this basic transcendental or metaphysical sense, moral guilt can never be regarded as having been “wiped away.” Just as Kant held that “I think,” “Ich denke,” must be able to accompany all my representations—which amounts to the famous synthetic unity of transcendental apperception, the starting point of Kant’s transcendental deduction—I am here suggesting that “I am guilty” must analogously be able to accompany all the moments and experiences of my life, at least insofar as I can self-reflectively and coherently conceive of myself as a genuine moral agent. While the notion of transcendental guilt is thus intimately connected with the very notion of moral agency, a notion without which our engaging in moral practices and deliberation would be incomprehensible, it is also important to realize that there are interesting forms of “non-agency guilt.” For instance, survivor’s guilt is a familiar phenomenon after major accidents, as well as genocides such as the Holocaust. The survivors, even if they did nothing in particular that made them survive instead of the victims, 51 may experience profound guilt, in many cases (especially among the Holocaust survivors) so deep that they later take their lives. This phenomenon comes close to Jaspers’s metaphysical guilt: the mere fact of having been there, of having been around and survived, is sufficient to cause enormous guilt. It may be helpful to distinguish, analogously to our general distinction between transcendental guilt and ordinary, everyday moral guilt, also the transcendental and everyday (empirical) varieties of survivor’s guilt. In a transcendental sense, one may experience “survivor’s guilt” even if there is nothing in particular—no major catastrophe—that one actually survived while others perished. It is sufficient that there have been cases, not involving oneself, in which not everybody has survived. And we are all “survivors” in this extended sense. Surviving, while not everybody survives, being alive while not everybody is, is a source of transcendental guilt. This kind of survivor’s guilt makes life serious and thereby again constitutes key dimensions of moral agency itself.

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The same can, it seems to me, be said about the notion of conscience, another important ethical concept related to the concept of guilt. 52 One may again employ a perfectly ordinary notion of conscience, connected with guilty feelings about something specific one did or thought. But one may, transcendentally, experience the voice of one’s conscience even if there is nothing in particular that one has done. This voice may be a response to one’s life as a whole, instead of any particular moment or fact within that life. In the transcendental sense, both (bad) conscience and survivor’s guilt may actually be constitutive elements of full moral agency, precisely because they need not involve any specific acts. We are all survivors. GUILT, ETHICS, AND LITERATURE It may be, ultimately, in literature (or art in general, and perhaps religiously inspired art in particular) rather than in philosophy that the importance of guilt in our relations to others, as well as the specific role(s) played by this concept (and related ones, including conscience), and by the relevant emotion(s), in our ethical vocabulary and moral experiences, can be effectively demonstrated. In addition to drawing attention to philosophical treatments of guilt, such as Gaita’s or Jaspers’s, I want to note that there are, in my view, three particularly compelling studies on guilt in the tradition of Western literature (and I am hardly the only one who would mention these three works among the most important sources for the kind of concept of guilt we seem to need in our ethical thought): the Book of Job in the Old Testament, Kafka’s The Trial (Der Prozess), and a novel I have already briefly discussed, Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. 53 By appreciating the philosophical significance of these works (overlooking their enormous stylistic and cultural differences), moral guilt can be regarded as something (lacking a better word) mystical, that is, inexpressible in ordinary language, yet fundamental and metaphysically irreplaceable in human life, even as a condition for the possibility of experiencing life as meaningful—or for the possibility of experiencing life as something in which the lack of meaning can be considered a genuine lack. Literary works such as these may, then, make us appreciate the points made above on the inexpressibility and mysteriousness of guilt as a fundamental attitude constitutive of our sense of the ethical. The principal contribution of the concept of guilt to moral reflection may lie in the way in which it (perhaps by means of examples taken from literature instead of artificial philosophical thought experiments) draws our attention to the groundlessness and irreducibility of the ethical. “Why be moral?,” a question we occasionally hear even professional moral philosophers asking, is a question that leads us out of morality, 54 whereas “What have I

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done?,” like “I am guilty,” is an irreducibly ethical expression of genuine moral commitment. No response to the “why” question can be ethically acceptable, because presenting an answer, and even seriously asking the question, presupposes that there is something more fundamental than morality itself, something on the basis of which our commitment to morality would be justified or made reasonable (or, in an appalling economistic banalization of ethics, economically rational). Morality makes its demands on us only because of its own internal logic 55 —not because of any further reasons or grounds, but just because it is the most fundamental perspective on life we may adopt. (If it were not the most fundamental one, it would be odd to use the label “morality” at all.) It is right here, in the traditional conception of moral reasons as “overriding” and autonomous, that the concept of guilt, as I have described it, finds its natural home language. Nothing extra-moral— say, nothing economic or prudential, or even metaphysical or theological— can ever fully relieve moral guilt, or if it can, then that guilt has not been understood as moral guilt at all. This argument is both ethical and conceptual—with no strict demarcation between these aspects. The “reasonableness” of morality cannot be discussed from an allegedly more fundamental point of view lying outside morality, because then the reasonableness of morality would no more be in the focus of the discussion; in that case, morality would be turned into a mere means for something else, for something that would (per impossibile) be found more significant. The one who thinks that our commitment to morality, and hence our attempts to deal with our moral guilt, could be based on something other than morality itself, something merely prudential or even something metaphysical (or religious), can hardly be said to fully understand what it is to be committed to morality, and what it is to be morally guilty. 56 Moreover, the impossibility of engaging in pseudo-ethical reasoning about the extra-moral “point,” “ground,” “justification,” or “foundation” of morality is not merely a conceptual but also an ethical impossibility. What we have here is a transcendental limit, arrived at through moral reflection, to what we can intelligibly do in our moral deliberation, or how we can ethically think. The one who attempts to reach a perspective higher than morality can eventually only be morally criticized, even though she or he will then no longer regard the critic’s perspective as a justified one. 57 This, in fact, is what it means to set the limits of morality only “from within,” as any properly transcendental investigation should seek to do. Analogously, we may read the Book of Job in such a way that we end up rejecting the attempt to morally justify God’s acts on both conceptual and religious grounds (again, without strictly separating between these). As a being created by God (which is something he never questions), Job meaningfully cannot, and in a religious sense ought not to, seek to justify—or ask God to justify—the world-order He has created. Otherwise, he will end up

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with both contradiction and blasphemy. By invoking this analogy, I do not, of course, mean to say that morality could be grounded in religion; on the contrary, from an ethical perspective religion itself requires an ethical basis, as Kant (among others) compellingly argued, and religious views can and should be criticized on ethical grounds. However, in the absolute sovereignty of God, as encountered by Job, we may notice a sublime metaphor of the fundamental seriousness of moral duty—and of our own finitude, incompleteness, and guilt. The deep ethical message of the story about Job has been argued to lie in the fact that we humans can only describe as amoral the way God works in creating the world-order and human beings as parts of it. 58 His acts cannot be assessed by human standards, neither justified nor judged as immoral. Human beings are tiny, insignificant, ineliminably guilty; in comparison, the demands of morality are as absolute, infinite, and unfulfillable, and even linguistically indescribable, as God himself (whether He exists or not). If someone really believes in God, as Job obviously does, and is willing to subordinate both her or his guilt and (innocent) suffering to God’s mercy, it is not only incoherent but also blasphemous to ask whether God’s creation is just or unjust—which is something that Job finally realizes, as is emphasized in John Wilcox’s reading. 59 To ask such questions is to break out of the language-game in which religious concepts such as “God” or “mercy” (or “evil” and “suffering,” religiously understood) have their proper use. It is, therefore, misleading to read the Book of Job as a story about the significance of the human being in relation to God, as a story appealing to a “humanistic” mentality criticizing God who arbitrarily sends us fortunes or misfortunes. 60 The author of the Book of Job was clearly no “secular humanist.” God, if one believes in Him, remains beyond human ethical measures, but God’s greatness (which can be understood metaphorically without any metaphysical commitments to theism) does picture the inexhaustibility of our entirely human questions about the morally right and wrong. 61 For Job, mercy is eventually available, as soon as he realizes that he is only a finite human being who must not, and meaningfully cannot, try to hold God as morally responsible for whatever takes place in the world, including unnecessary, innocent suffering. Josef K., however, should not expect such mercy. His world is unintelligible and has irrecoverably lost its significance. There may be no good reasons for us to think of our own world as essentially different from his. However, the complex, “polyphonic” (to borrow a term from Mikhail Bakhtin) relations between guilt and mercy we find in Dostoevsky’s works are perhaps even more profound than the achievements of the two other literary texts whose importance I have emphasized. No final resolution ever arrives in The Brothers Karamazov; no theodicy is offered; yet, the human condition is not described as hopeless and meaningless in Kafka’s manner. In Dostoevsky, guilt is meaningful in a way it can never be in Kafka (which, however, is not to say that Kafka’s perspective would not

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throw light on certain aspects of guilt not manifest in Dostoevsky), although it is certainly not meaningful in the sense that human suffering and evil would receive any easy explanation or justification in terms of theodicies. SOME METHODOLOGICAL REMARKS I have not in this chapter discussed the reasons for or against religious belief, although I have taken up religious concepts (sin, mercy, God) in my treatment of guilt as “transcendental.” The ethical problem framework of evil and guilt will stay with us, whether or not we adopt a religious faith or form of life. This ineliminability, I have suggested, is a central feature of the concept of guilt, rendering it transcendental. No doctrine, religious or non-religious, will set us free from the metaphysical moral guilt I have investigated, from the fact that we have to take full responsibility for our lives in front of other human beings, and that, as a result of our fundamental finitude, we will always remain infinitely far from having really taken that responsibility. Guilt is, then, an essential background of both religious and non-religious ways of living, something without which full humanity would be hard or impossible to achieve, something that is built into our very lives with other human beings. One might say that I have, by describing (with the help of Gaita, Jaspers, and others) how we should place the concept of guilt in our moral vocabulary, engaged in something like “philosophical anthropology,” 62 though I am well aware that many philosophers might resist using such a label. It is important to perceive that guilt, even as transcendentally conceived, is an emotion (or concept) constitutive of a contingent human moral form of life. More generally, transcendental concepts are designed to describe, from within our contingent perspective, some of the necessary conditions that need to be invoked, should that perspective be possible at all. This is the deep connection between transcendental philosophy and philosophical anthropology. I am not saying that these two fields of philosophical investigation are identical, because philosophical anthropology—if understood as general philosophical study of humanity—can be engaged in without employing anything like the transcendental method, but I do believe (and hope that my examination of guilt to some extent shows) that plausible philosophical-anthropological insights into the “human form of life” can be reached by employing transcendental concepts, utilizing transcendental argumentation. Conversely, transcendental philosophy is best understood as a philosophical inquiry into the necessary conditions for the possibility of certain humanly actual—even natural—phenomena, such as morality. Both are elements of moral reflection, as I understand it in this study. 63

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In my philosophical-anthropological discussion, I have not, strictly speaking, followed Gaita’s Wittgensteinian “grammatical” method, although I have employed his arguments in order to point out certain features of the kind of language-use required as a condition for the possibility of regarding a thought or an action as ethically serious (or seriously ethical). I fully agree with Gaita when he argues that “a certain conception of remorse is internal, partly grammatically constitutive of a certain conception of what it is for something to be morally right or wrong and what it is for a concern to be a moral concern,” 64 and when he tells us that he is trying to display the “grammar” of a certain understanding of remorse. 65 Gaita further describes his method as follows: “When I say that we would not find this or that intelligible or when I appeal to certain reductios, I am not making assertions about our common understanding, but rather, I am inviting agreement with my interpretation of a common, but by no means universal, understanding of morality.” 66 In a way, I am trying to do the same. But I am “inviting agreement” by appealing to a widely known and appreciated, though certainly not universally shared, tradition of philosophical analysis and argumentation, viz., the “transcendental tradition.” 67 I am thereby attempting to render philosophically more structured, and perhaps more transparent, the “we” invoked in Gaita’s remark that “we all understand […] that when a person grievously wrongs someone, she might feel that she could no longer live with herself. Remorse might haunt her all her days.” 68 This “we” will, in the last analysis, refer to the transcendental (moral) subject, to us who (must) 69 take morality seriously (and who understand, or ought to understand, this requirement itself as an ethical one), although developing this analysis further cannot be my task in this chapter. 70 I am, then, convinced that we can, by beginning from an examination of how we use ethical (or any) language and of what is grammatically constitutive of the conceptions such language-use enables us to commit ourselves to, arrive at philosophical-anthropological—and thereby transcendental—insights into the way in which our lives with language are structured, into the human condition, into what is not merely grammatically but also (ipso facto) transcendentally constitutive of humanly possible thoughts and actions. The fact that the concept of guilt can be seen to play such a transcendental (and philosophical-anthropological) role provides, thus, further support for the more general transcendental account of “Wittgensteinian moral philosophy” I have defended elsewhere. 71 This leads me to the final points of this chapter. Gaita is careful to avoid mixing ethical and psychological concepts or phenomena (although this is what his critics occasionally accuse him of doing) when he notes that guilt and remorse in his sense are not psychological phenomena and that they are beyond the scope of moral psychology. 72 When I claim that they play a transcendental role, even qua emotions, or as dispositions to feel certain

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emotions in appropriate circumstances, I might be criticized for speaking about something psychological. This accusation might be strengthened when I go on to describe my project as a “philosophical-anthropological” one, aiming at an account of certain features of “human nature.” However, my concept of the “transcendental,” as well as my concept of “human nature,” ought to be understood within a broadly Wittgensteinian conception of the kind of conditions that make meaning possible, conditions rooted in our habitual, yet gradually changing, ways of using language—in short, in our forms of life. Our human nature is inseparable from the ways in which certain meanings and concepts are embedded in our practices and hence available to us in our lives. It is in this sense that I intend my thesis about the transcendental role played by certain concepts and emotions (and about transcendental subjectivity) to be taken. This transcendental role is continuously reshaped as our forms of life themselves evolve. To take up one more difficulty my approach needs to address, it should be asked whether guilt (or potential guilt) is best conceived as a transcendental condition for the possibility of morality, as I have suggested, or merely as a necessary constituent of our moral lives and language-use. This question can be generalized to other allegedly transcendental conditions for the possibility of taken-for-granted actualities. Now, I am not defending any essentialist definition of transcendental conditions. Something can be both a necessary condition for the possibility of something else and a necessary constituent of it. 73 I am, thus, treating notions such as “transcendental condition” or “transcendental argument” as family-resemblance notions that may receive different interpretations in different contexts of transcendental inquiry. 74 To be sure, this might threaten to trivialize the very idea of transcendental argumentation. I can, however, only note here that the relevant kind of transcendental conditions are the ones that have been, and still are, investigated in the open-ended tradition of transcendental reflection—the “transcendental tradition,” as we may say following Carr 75 —in which the necessary conditions for the possibility of such phenomena as cognitive experience, meaningful language, or moral agency have been examined. It is only this historical practice of transcendental argumentation and investigation—a practice I want to extend to moral reflection—that rules out trivial cases, such as the “transcendental” conditions one might invoke as the conditions for the possibility of playing chess. A critic might, indeed, ask how the claim to identify guilt as a transcendental condition of morality or moral agency differs from, say, the claims that (i) the ability to move pawns is a “transcendental condition” for the possibility of playing chess, or that (ii) the ability to breathe is a “transcendental condition” of staying alive. Here, (i) deals with a practice that is, arguably, too specific to be accounted for transcendentally in any interesting sense, though nothing in principle prevents us from formulating a transcen-

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dental account of the conditions for the possibility of chess (which, of course, would have to be done at a meta-level, that is, outside the chess board and its rules). In contrast, (ii) deals with a practice that is too broad or, better, is no practice at all, but merely a natural form of behavior, something that is not seen under the aspect of normative rule-governedness at all (as practices must be). Thus, our transcendental tradition ignores these cases, with good reason. On the other hand, certain breathing techniques, for instance, might be seen as normative practices in their own right, and the game of chess might be, as it often is, understood as an analogy to or a representation of some humanly relevant normative practices, say, warfare. 76 Again, we must keep in mind that transcendental inquiries into the necessary conditions for the possibility of some given actualities, including transcendentally proceeding moral reflection, always begin from within a practice or a form of life already defined by those actualities. They do not aim at justifying those practices or forms of life from a transcendent “God’sEye View” (as will be further demonstrated in chapter 5 below, with a more explicit criticism of such an idea of transcendence). This is a principle of utmost importance in the methodology of transcendental philosophy. It is in this sense that transcendental inquiries are reflexive; they are reflections on what we are committed to in our practices, including the practice of transcendental inquiry itself. In the case of moral practices, or any human practices involving moral agency, I have claimed that guilt plays the role of such a transcendental condition, to be reflexively arrived at through the kind of transcendental argumentation we examined above (drawing from Gaita’s and others’ reflections). But I have not claimed, and no transcendental ethical thinker should claim, that any transcendental argument could provide reasons for engaging in the moral practice from the outside, as it were, any more than any such “external” argument could provide reasons for someone to play chess. There is no external point of view from which we could demonstrate that morality is inescapable for us. We can, however, demonstrate this only from within our moral practice itself, or from the point of view of our already engaging in (several) practices, in many ways intertwined and overlapping, that crucially involve moral agency, and then we would not be providing a “demonstration” at all anymore but rather a reflection on the commitments at work in the kind of morally concerned life we cannot step out of in any case. 77 In “playing the language-game” of morality, we cannot step out, as we can step out of a chess game; or if we (try to) do so, we will—for moral reasons—face justified moral criticism. Hence, we should take very seriously the idea that a transcendental investigation of the conditions we find necessary for the possibility of morality already assumes an ethical perspective, a practice that cannot be adequately described in non-ethical terms, or more generally in non-normative ones.

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This ethical practice is one we must already find ourselves engaging in. To think of transcendental philosophy as a way of justifying an entire practice “from above,” or grounding it from a standpoint more fundamental than that practice itself, is to confuse the “transcendental” with the “transcendent.” It is, again, only from within the normatively governed (yet historically changing) practices we engage in that we can draw, and are constantly (re)drawing, the (transcendental) limits between normative practices—that is, practices whose normative structure does admit of a transcendental account—and mere non-normative behavior which is not describable in terms of transcendental concepts. In this sense, the question of what kind of practices should be transcendentally investigated will be kept permanently open and negotiable. I have in this chapter argued for the irreducible, fundamental, and hence transcendental character of guilt in our moral experience—and the argument will continue in the next chapter. Through this exploration, I have made general observations on the need to reconstruct moral philosophy as a transcendental investigation of humanly unavoidable conditions. I hope to have thereby been able to characterize my notion of “moral reflection” somewhat more substantially than in the introductory chapter above, in which I offered only a very preliminary account of this (admittedly very loose) “method” that I will be employing throughout my investigation. However, I certainly do not expect Wittgensteinian thinkers such as Gaita to share the transcendental vocabulary I have recommended. I am entirely happy with the fact that what I am prepared to label transcendental truths about the human condition, or even about human nature, can be described in different ways from different perspectives, employing different conceptual frameworks. It is not necessary for the moral philosopher, even if she or he is trying to illuminate the place of guilt in our moral vocabulary, to adopt the transcendental perspective. I have only suggested that this perspective is promising, because it provides us with a more nuanced picture of guilt and its role in the network of ethical concepts than some other perspectives seem to do. I am also happy to admit that those moral philosophers (like, again, Gaita) who base their arguments on both empirical historical cases, thought experiments, and imaginary situations drawn from literature can offer us ever deepening perspectives on these truths, often much more enriching ones than my somewhat pale philosophical account in transcendental terms is ever capable of communicating. By no means do I wish to reduce moral philosophy to an abstract transcendental analysis. Still, the latter, too, is worthy of consideration, as an attempt to understand philosophically some of the most problematic features of human existence. It can also be a genuine part of moral reflection. Finally, let me once more emphasize that I am not, by means of moral reflection on guilt, justifying or “grounding” any moral principles in the

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sense of putting forward a new ethical theory, let alone a theory based on something more fundamental (metaphysical, conceptual) than ethics itself. As Peter Dews argues, the enormous efforts of theoretical grounding work in contemporary moral philosophy, seeking to establish moral principles—manifested, for instance, in recent versions of Kantian constructivism—are “out of all proportions” compared to considering the “inner constitution” of the moral subject, including the subject’s tendency to evil. 78 I fully agree: what Dews says about evil is, roughly, what I am trying to say about guilt. In this chapter, and in the following ones, I have tried and will try to contribute to the examination of this inner constitution through a moral reflection on guilt. NOTES 1. It is compatible with this view to admit that the concept of innocence may be equally constitutive of our (ethical) self-understanding. See Laurence M. Thomas, “Innocence, Genocide, and Suicide Bombings,” in John K. Roth (ed.), Genocide and Human Rights: A Philosophical Guide (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), pp. 181-191, especially pp. 184-185. 2. Raimond Gaita, A Common Humanity: Thinking about Truth and Love and Justice (London and New York: Routledge, 2000); Gaita, Good and Evil: An Absolute Conception, rev. ed. (London and New York: Routledge, 2004; 1st ed. 1991). 3. I could have used, for instance, D.Z. Phillips’s Interventions in Ethics (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992). For my previous treatment of Wittgensteinian moral philosophy, see Sami Pihlström, Pragmatic Moral Realism: A Transcendental Defense (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2005), chapter 3. 4. On the distinction between natural and moral evil, epitomized in the names of “Lisbon” and “Auschwitz,” respectively, see María Pía Lara (ed.), Rethinking Evil: Contemporary Perspectives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); Susan Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002; paperback ed., 2004). On the incomprehensibility and intractability of evil, see, in addition to Neiman’s work, also Richard Bernstein, Radical Evil: A Philosophical Interrogation (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002). 5. This, obviously, is a theme familiar from existentialism, especially Jean-Paul Sartre. 6. Gaita, A Common Humanity, p. 34. 7. Ibid., p. 93. 8. Gaita, Good and Evil, pp. 48-49. One may have “become” something quite unintentionally. As Henry Staten notes: “Banal or not, metaphysically free or not, Eichmann was hanged for his crimes, and hardly anyone doubts that he deserved it.” (Staten, “‘Radical Evil’ Revived: Hitler, Kant, Luther, Neo-Lacanians,” in Alan D. Schrift [ed.], Modernity and the Problem of Evil [Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2005], pp. 12-27 [originally published in Radical Philosophy 93, 1999]; see p. 24.) This, of course, is not to claim that Eichmann would have experienced anything like remorse. More generally, the crucial distinction between having done something and having intentionally done it is, as Staten acknowledges, emphasized in, e.g., Bernard Williams, Shame and Necessity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), p. 69. Moreover, one may be “transcendentally guilty” quite independently of having done, or “become,” anything in particular; this will be a major topic of the discussion that will unfold. 9. Gaita, Good and Evil, p. 51. 10. Ibid., p. xiv.

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11. Ibid., p. 33; see also Gaita, A Common Humanity, p. 32. Kant has important resources to offer to our moral reflection in later chapters, however (cf. especially chapters 3 and 5 below). 12. Gaita, Good and Evil, pp. 47-48; see also Gaita, A Common Humanity, p. 98. 13. This topic will be addressed in chapter 3 below. However, genuine guilt is not appropriately described as a strategic, “self-enhancing” self-punishment, which in a way punishes the self before any others will be able to do so (cf. Robert C. Solomon, “The Politics of Emotions, Revisited,” in Ylva Gustafsson et al.[eds.], Proceedings from the Conference Emotions, Others and the Self[CD-ROM; Åbo, Finland: Åbo Akademi, Department of Philosophy, 2005], p. 10); if a guilty feeling is not corrupt, it is not self-enhancing at all. 14. I am grateful for these suggestions for reformulation to the anonymous referee. 15. Gaita, Good and Evil, p. 60. 16. Ibid., pp. 60-61. 17. Ibid., p. 61. 18. Note also that this is not to say that avoiding guilty feelings would have to be—or even could be—the main motivation for moral actions. Such a prudential or even egoistic reason for, say, saving someone who is in danger could hardly be described as moral at all. It is one thing to claim that something (for example, guilt, or the capability of experiencing guilt) is a necessary condition for morality, and another thing to claim that this something would have to be present as the main (or even as a morally relevant) motivation of moral actions. 19. Pace Charles Illies, The Grounds of Ethical Judgment: New Transcendental Arguments in Moral Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 20. Another misunderstanding, a variant of the “foundationalist” one, would be to imagine that guilt is the transcendental ground of morality. Transcendental arguments locate necessary conditions, not sufficient ones, and there may always be more than one necessary condition of a given phenomenon. For comparison, consider the necessary transcendental conditions of experience, as articulated by Kant: space and time as forms of pure intuition (Anschauungsformen) are necessary for (human) experience to be possible, but these are not even jointly sufficient, because the categories (for example, causality) are required as well. Similarly, the capacity for experiencing guilt is a necessary condition for the possibility of morality, but genuine moral agency requires other conditions, too—arguably, for example, a language rich enough for making systematic normative distinctions, etc. Yet another misunderstanding would be the claim that morality or ethical standards of evaluation can be reduced to the concepts of guilt and/or remorse. In maintaining that morality presupposes (the possibility of) guilt and remorse, I am not at all implying that these moral emotions would not in turn presuppose that the one who is capable of experiencing them already lives in a community or form of life constituted by moral relations. Thus, the position I am sketching is in no way a reductionist one. 21. Perhaps, we could here talk about the grounding (or “groundwork”) of the metaphysics of morality in the sense of Kant’s famous work, Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten. 22. These ideas, developed in the closing pages of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus LogicoPhilosophicus, will be revisited in more detail in chapter 3 below. 23. Ludwig Wittgenstein, “Lecture on Ethics,”Philosophical Review 74 (1965), 3-16. 24. Transcendental guilt may also include elements of the concept of shame, which I will not discuss here, however. In distinguishing between guilt and shame—“shame is about who we are for having done what we did,” whereas “[w]e feel guilty for having done what we did but not for being who we are”—Michael L. Morgan (in his “Shame, Holocaust, and Dark Times,” in Roth [ed.], Genocide and Human Rights, pp. 304-325; see p. 308; see also p. 321) seems to rely on the everyday, non-transcendental meaning of guilt. In his view, we ordinary people (unlike, say, the leaders of powerful states) cannot, for instance, feel guilty about not being able to prevent genocides, though we can be ashamed of being citizens of states that have not been efficient enough in preventing genocides (ibid., p. 315). In the transcendental, “metaphysical” sense of guilt, we can, however, be (and even feel) guilty about such matters, even though as powerless individuals we have not been able to do much. 25. Emmanuel Levinas, Alterity and Transcendence, trans. Michael B. Smith (London: The Athlone Press, 1999), p. 28; see also p. 64. 26. This view will be developed in chapter 5 below.

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27. There is an important theological background for these notions in the debates over free will in the Christian tradition, going back (at least) to Augustine. On the “essential and ineradicable” feeling of guilt, the “perpetually ‘guilty’” nature of free will in these debates, see also Staten, “‘Radical Evil’ Revived,” cited above. 28. Some background for this can be found in their conceptions of evil, in particular. For Levinas, no less than for Kant, evil is a matter of not just irresistible natural forces, such as desires, but of responsibility. In this sense, engaging in evil actions is not just a natural process but a “sin,” whether or not we have any use for religious notions in their more standard meanings. See Peter Dews, The Idea of Evil (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008), p. 174 (for Dews’s extended discussion of Kant, see chapter 1 of his volume). This close relation between the notions of evil and guilt, epitomized in the concept of sin, is an important remedy against simple naturalisms that tend to reduce the moral significance of the phenomena we are examining to mere empirical processes taking place in the ultimately physical world thoroughly described and explained by natural science. 29. See again Illies, The Grounds of Ethical Judgment. On transcendental philosophy and its current challenges more generally, see Sami Pihlström, Naturalizing the Transcendental: A Pragmatic View (Amherst, NY: Prometheus/Humanity Books, 2003); and Pihlström, “Recent Reinterpretations of the Transcendental,” Inquiry 47 (2004), 289-314. 30. See Kathleen Wallace, “Reconstructing Judgment: Emotion and Moral Judgment,” Hypatia 8:3 (1993), 61-83. Here, again, pragmatist criticism of traditional dichotomies (e.g., along the lines proposed by John Dewey and other classical pragmatists) would be highly relevant. 31. I would even be willing to consider dropping the notion of the “mystical” altogether here. But it easily keeps reappearing, if one phrases one’s discussion in Wittgensteinian and Dostoevskyan terms, as I have done. In any case, the transcendental as such is by no means mystical; we should follow the Kantian tradition in making a clear distinction between the transcendental and the transcendent, although transcendent assumptions (arguably, the somewhat transcendent and mystical postulation of an all-embracing presence of guilt in human life) can play a transcendental role, too. See chapter 5 below for an elaboration of this point. 32. This suggestion hardly commits us to any particular theory of what emotions are, although the view (defended by Robert Solomon, among others) that emotions are cognitive— more precisely, that they are some kind of judgments by means of which we cope with, or engage in, the world, particularly the social world we live in—might be a natural choice here. 33. See Kant’s discussion of radical evil in the first chapter of Immanuel Kant, Religion innerhalb der blossen Vernunft (1794), in Wilhelm Weischedel (ed.), Immanuel Kant: Werke in zehn Bänden (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1983). For excellent commentaries, see Bernstein, Radical Evil; and Dews, The Idea of Evil (cited above). 34. For Peirce’s most important writings exploring real generals and “extreme scholastic realism,” see Charles S. Peirce, The Essential Peirce, 2 vols, The Peirce Edition Project, eds. Nathan Houser et al. (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1992-1998). While some of the early essays, including the famous 1871 Berkeley review, already play a key role in the emergence of Peirce’s realism about generals (see vol. 1 of The Essential Peirce), the topic is more strongly in the focus of some of his later writings (collected in vol. 2). For a discussion acknowledging the transcendental character of the Peircean generals, with plenty of references to secondary literature, see Sami Pihlström, Pragmatist Metaphysics: An Essay on the Ethical Grounds of Metaphysics (London: Continuum, 2009), chapter 6. 35. In a similar way, Max Scheler’s conception of tragic characters might be compared to this: there is something general in the character of a tragic person (as distinguished from anything particular s/he did) that accounts for what s/he is ultimately like and what her/his life as a whole amounts to. See Scheler, “Zum Phänomen des Tragischen,” in Scheler, Vom Umsturz der Werte (Leipzig: Neue Idee, 1919). 36. Karl Jaspers, Die Schuldfrage (Heidelberg: Lambert Schneider, 1946). 37. Obviously, war and genocide in general and the Holocaust in particular offer rich examples of different varieties of guilt and remorse. In addition to Gaita’s works already cited, see, for example, Jonathan Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2000); Roth (ed.), Genocide and Human Rights, cited above.

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38. Jaspers, Die Schuldfrage, pp. 31-32. 39. In more everyday cases, a politician may of course have to face the consequences— carry the political responsibility—of her or his actions by having to leave her or his office after elections. 40. Jaspers, Die Schuldfrage, pp. 31-32 (my translation). The original reads as follows: “Es gibt eine Solidarität zwischen Menschen als Menschen, welche einen jeden mitverantwortlich macht für alles Unrecht und alle Ungerechtigkeit in der Welt, insbesondere für Verbrechen, die in seiner Gegenwart oder mit seinem Wissen geschehen. Wenn ich nicht tue, was ich kann, um sie zu verhindern, so bin ich mitschuldig. Wenn ich mein Leben nicht eingesetzt habe zur Verhinderung der Ermordung anderer, sonder dabeigestanden bin, fühle ich mich auf eine Weise schuldig, die juristisch, politisch und moralisch nicht angemessen begreiflich ist. Dass ich noch lebe, wenn solches geschehen ist, legt sich als untilgbare Schuld auf mich.” 41. Ibid., p. 32. 42. See Sami Pihlström, “Recent Reinterpretations of the Transcendental,” as well as chapter 5 below. 43. Arguably, however, the religious sense of guilt has a kind of depth that may not be easily accommodated by a purely secular account of guilt. See, e.g., Merold Westphal, God, Guilt, and Death (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1984), pp. 42, 73ff. I am convinced by Westphal’s attempt to view guilt and death as fundamental problems of the meaningfulness of human life—as one integrated problem to which religion may be a solution—and I will briefly return to it in the chapters to follow. 44. Jaspers, Die Schuldfrage, p. 33. 45. Ibid., p. 38. 46. Ibid., p. 65. 47. This is Jaspers again: “The basic fact that we are all human beings entitles us to this guilt for being human in general. We are imbued by the passionate yearning to remain bound to human beings as human beings, or to find such a binding again.” (Ibid., p. 85. Originally: “Die Grundtatsache, dass wir alle Menschen sind, berechtigt uns zu dieser Sorge um das Menschsein im ganzen. Wir sind beseelt von dem leidenschaftlichen Drange, verbunden zu bleiben oder Verbindung wieder zu gewinnen mit den Menschen als Menschen.”) And further: “When we trace our own guilt into its origin, we run into humanity, which in the German case took the shape of a peculiar, terrible guilt, but is the possibility of the human as human. // It is said, when speaking about the German guilt, that it is the guilt of everyone—that evil everywhere is responsible for the outbreak of evil in this German place.” (Ibid., p. 87; my free translation. Original: “Wenn wir unsere eigene Schuld bis in ihren Ursprung verfolgen, so stossen wir auf das Menschsein, das in deutscher Gestalt ein eigentümliches, furchtbares Schuldigwerden angenommen hat, aber Möglichkeit im Menschen als Menschen ist. // Es wird wohl gesagt, wenn von deutscher Schuld die Rede ist: es ist aller Schuld—das verborgene Böse überall ist mitschuldig an dem Ausbruch des Bösen an dieser deutschen Stelle.” 48. “The question of original sin must not lead to a way of evading the German guilt.” (Ibid., p. 88. Originally: “Die Frage der Erbsünde darf nicht zu einem Wege des Ausweichens vor der deutschen Schuld werden.”) 49. As Jaspers (ibid., p. 101) puts it: “However, the essence of moral and metaphysical guilt, which alone are conceived as one’s own by the individual in her/his community, is such that they are not atoned for. They will not come to an end. The one who carries them steps into a process lasting her/his life.” (My translation; the original quote: “Aber moralische und metaphysische Schuld, die allein vom einzelnen in seiner Gemeinschaft als die seine begriffen wird, werden ihrem Wesen nach nicht abgebüsst. Sie hören nicht auf. Wer sie trägt, tritt in einen sein Leben währenden Prozess ein.”) 50. Of course, I am not saying that small babies could feel guilty. What I mean by claiming that (potential) guilt should accompany human life “from beginning to end” is that as soon as a child gradually starts to acquire linguistic abilities and becomes enculturated, the concept of guilt (and thereby remorse as well) will, or at least ought to, begin to dawn on her/him. It is compatible with this normative claim to admit that some human beings may de facto be unable to learn the concept of guilt, at least in its full sense. Even some otherwise intellectually

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advanced adults may lack this concept. Many may lack its philosophically deep (transcendental) dimensions. 51. Of course, in many cases the survivors actually did something that they may feel more ordinary moral guilt about, for example, take others’ food in order to stay alive. 52. Historical discussions of the development of the concept of conscience are obviously beyond the scope of this inquiry. 53. Again, I do not claim to explore these works of literature in any detail. There would certainly be room for literary scholarship on the issue of guilt in these and other important literary works. 54. This is argued in more detail in Pihlström, Pragmatic Moral Realism. 55. See Phillips, Interventions in Ethics, cited above. 56. It is easy to see, from this perspective, why I find Jaspers’s above-discussed distinction between moral and metaphysical guilt problematic. 57. See again Pihlström, Pragmatic Moral Realism, chapter 3. 58. See John T. Wilcox, The Bitterness of Job: A Philosophical Reading (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992). 59. Ibid. 60. This interpretation has been proposed in an essay in Finnish by Markku Envall. 61. It is impossible for me, in this context, to engage in the vast debates over different interpretations of the Book of Job in Old Testament theology, for example, the comments on Job to be found in Walter Eichrodt’s and H. Fingarette’s works. I am referring to the Book of Job (and Wilcox’s The Bitterness of Job) primarily as a point of comparison that might help to set my earlier remarks on transcendental guilt to a proper perspective. 62. Cf. Sami Pihlström, “On the Concept of Philosophical Anthropology,”Journal of Philosophical Research 28 (2003), 259-285. 63. Let me at this point add that psychologistic and in that sense reductive notions of guilt, such as the ones famously discussed by Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud (in the context of their complex views not to be examined here) are not sufficiently transcendental for playing the role of guilt in our moral experience and discourse that I have emphasized. This is not to say that such notions would not enhance our understanding of certain dimensions of guilt; however, as should be clear by now, my investigation is more metaphysical and can thus be categorized as (transcendental) “philosophical anthropology.” Furthermore, a position like P.F. Strawson’s (see his Freedom and Resentment and Other Essays [Methuen: London, 1974], in particular) is also too strictly non-metaphysical, given its attempt to disentangle the use of moral concepts, such as resentment, from metaphysical debates over determinism. I do not maintain that such metaphysical puzzles ought to be solved before one is entitled to employ moral concepts; on the contrary, I see metaphysics itself as a deeply ethical enterprise. However, this is very different from avoiding metaphysics. Rather than maintaining that our moral vocabulary is available to us in a thoroughly non-metaphysical way—whether we seek to avoid metaphysics on the grounds of Nietzschean perspectivism, Strawsonian ordinary language philosophy, or postmodern deconstructionism—I would urge that the moral and the metaphysical go together here, precisely as I suggested in the discussion of Jaspers’s notions of guilt above. The metaphysical pursuit of understanding our being in the world is morally driven, while the moral “drive” it has is itself metaphysical in the sense of focusing on fundamental questions about the world and our place in it. 64. Gaita, Good and Evil, p. 57; emphasis added. 65. Ibid., p. 61. 66. Ibid. 67. See David Carr, The Paradox of Subjectivity: The Self in the Transcendental Tradition (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). See also Pihlström, Naturalizing the Transcendental, cited above. 68. Gaita, Good and Evil, pp. 340-341; emphasis added. 69. Given the ungroundedness of the ethical perspective, as emphasized above, this “must” ought to be interpreted as an ethical imperative. 70. See, however, chapter 6 for further discussion of transcendental subjectivity.

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71. Pihlström, Naturalizing the Transcendental, chapter 7; “On the Concept of Philosophical Anthropology”; Pragmatic Moral Realism; see also Jonathan Lear, Open Minded: Working Out the Logic of the Soul (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1998). 72. Gaita, Good and Evil, pp. 49-50, 113, 148-149. 73. For example, again, the Kantian categories are constituents of experience in the sense that any (possible) experience is about a causally structured reality, while also being necessary conditions of experience. 74. See also Pihlström, “Recent Reinterpretations of the Transcendental.” 75. Cf. Carr, The Paradox of Subjectivity, cited above. 76. On the “philosophy of chess,” see Arto Siitonen and Sami Pihlström, “On the Philosophical Dimensions of Chess,” Inquiry 41 (1998), 455-475. 77. As already remarked above, asking the question, “Why be moral?,” or seriously trying to provide an answer to it, is to step outside morality, and invites a moral response (Pihlström, Pragmatic Moral Realism, chapter 3). 78. Dews, The Idea of Evil, p. 27.

Chapter Three

Guilt and Ethical Solipsism

Immanuel Kant remarks, in a famous footnote to the First Critique, that [t]he real morality of actions (their merit and guilt), even that of our own conduct […] remains entirely hidden from us. Our imputations can be referred only to the empirical character. How much of it is to be ascribed to mere nature […] no one can discover, and hence no one can judge it with complete justice. 1

Although commentators have drawn attention to this important passage, 2 its full significance still deserves substantial consideration. So does the significance of another famous Kantian remark, according to which, for each one of us, “the depths of his own heart (the subjective first grounds of his maxims) are to him inscrutable.” 3 In this chapter, I will suggest that these remarks by Kant should lead us to take seriously the problem of ethical solipsism in relation to the morally central concept of guilt—a concept already examined at some length, and in a Kantian-like transcendental setting, in the previous chapter. Through a discussion drawing from Kant among others, I now want to raise a systematic issue regarding the attributability—and the apparently resulting inscrutability—of moral guilt: is only my own guilt ultimately truly morally relevant, even though guilt would seem to be a social ethical notion (and/or emotion) par excellence? By examining this question in the context of the problem of solipsism, I will continue my attempt to enhance our understanding of the role played by guilt as a concept and human emotional capacity constitutive of what we may call the moral point of view, and thereby constitutive of our being human beings. My approach is distinguished from mainstream moral psychological theories of guilt 4 by being more metaphysically oriented; however, this undertaking may also be described as belonging to “philosophical anthropology,” insofar as it reflects on some of the basic features characteriz37

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ing our morally oriented form(s) of life, that is, human life as we know it (see the concluding section of chapter 2 above). Indeed, some of the literature I will cite, including Levinas’s, Gaita’s, and Tzvetan Todorov’s ethical reflections, might quite appropriately be categorized as philosophical anthropology in this sense. In any event, while I am framing my problem in a Kantian way, I am not committed to Kant’s ethical theory; as insisted since the opening remarks of chapter 1, I am in this book engaging in moral reflection instead of ethical theory-construction. MORALITY “FROM WITHIN” As every first-year student of philosophy learns, one of the main points of Kantian moral philosophy is that morality belongs to the realm of pure practical reason. There is, thus, a sense in which it is something that takes place solely “within” the moral agent. The external circumstances or the actual results or outcomes of our actions are morally irrelevant. The only morally relevant issue is whether or not an action is motivated by the agent’s pure respect for the moral law (the categorical imperative). We may see Kant’s deontological ethics as the culmination of a long development that started out in antiquity, the process of moving the moral value of our actions from external matters to internal ones. Our moral self is something deeply, or even absolutely, “internal” to us. It is, eventually, for Kant the person conceived as a legislating citizen of the Kingdom of Ends, understood as a noumenal self rather than an empirical, psychological, flesh-and-blood person in nature. The same holds for moral guilt. We are guilty not simply—or perhaps, in a philosophically important sense, not at all—because of having performed (or having failed to perform) some particular actions. Rather, guilt is something that concerns the inner state of one’s soul (lacking a better term), which may be manifested, instead of specific actions or omissions, in the character of one’s life in general. Moreover, according to Kant, we “radically” have a propensity for evil—and are thus potentially guilty. 5 Insofar as we can know nothing about noumena, as Kant maintains, it seems that we can know nothing about our own moral selves and our true moral guilt—or about anyone else’s. As moral agents, we are things in themselves, not appearances; famously, we can only act “under the idea of freedom,” and no natural entities tied to the deterministic causal laws governing the empirical world can be free in that sense. 6 That is, as beings committed to the moral law, or as beings who, by reason’s demands, are required to be thus committed (whether or not we are actually capable of acting morally at all), and who are, hence, morally accountable for their actions, we are something

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quite different from mere causality-bound natural creatures. We belong to the “higher,” transcendent sphere of noumena—and so does our moral guilt. Even if we could, by means of some kind of transcendental introspection, take a look at our own “soul” in order to determine whether a given action of ours is motivated from genuinely moral grounds or not, or (conversely) whether we are guilty in a morally deep (“transcendental”) sense, we can hardly do this in the case of another human being. The “inner life” of others is closed from us. Therefore, a kind of ethical solipsism seems to follow from relatively basic Kantian premises. Note, however, that by “ethical solipsism” I do not mean any extreme subjectivist position privileging certain noncognitive ethical states of mind or some subjective characteristics of individual moral agents. Such non-cognitivism or subjectivism, e.g., emotivism, would be far from any Kantian ethics, and it is unclear whether any profound notion of guilt could be accommodated by such a view at all. 7 Nor do I mean anything like Cartesian solipsism, according to which it is a matter of skeptical doubt whether other minds or anything external to my mind exist at all. (The difference between the solipsistic considerations of this chapter and such more familiar forms of solipsism will become clearer in due course.) Rather, the ethical solipsist in my Kantian-like sense insists that my will is the only ethically relevant one; the moral world, the normative sphere in which ethical orientation is required, is “my world,” and I can only assess my own moral thought and conduct, never really that of any others. Therefore, any guilt that can be spoken about in a truly moral sense is mine. My moral agency is thus special—for me. Dostoevsky’s novels, already reflected on in the previous chapter, emphasize these ideas perhaps more strongly than any philosophical texts. In The Brothers Karamazov (which I am again only using as a source for inspiration but am not even trying to comment upon in any scholarly detail), Dostoevsky returns over and over again to the significance of guilt, especially to its uncompromising first-person character. Each of us is said to be guilty “in front of all the others,” guilty of all human sins, of the sins of the entire world and of all human beings. Phrases like these are repeated throughout the volume by various characters; their overall effect can be compared to a theme or a motive in a symphony or an opera. Moreover, our guilt is not symmetrical or democratic. While everyone is guilty and deserves punishment, I am more guilty than the others, “the worst human being in the world.” 8 There is a Christian analogue to this view. Recall Jesus and the Sermon on the Mount: “Judge not, that ye be not judged. […] And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?” 9 The relevance of ethical solipsism from the standpoint of Christianity may be considerable, as the Christian believer should, whenever deliberating ethically, be primarily worried about the state or quality of her/

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his own soul, about her/his own guilt that is, to echo Dostoevsky, greater than anyone else’s (though of course always presupposing a relation to God and other human beings, hence without any ontologically solipsistic assumptions). 10 Moreover, in the Judeo-Christian tradition, the concept of original sin may, as also already observed in chapter 2, can be seen as a close relative of the kind of deeply personal guilt invoked here. Even though I have done nothing in particular, I may still be guilty in the “original”—transcendental— sense. Similarly, there is an analogue to Stoicism, another classical ethical framework, which is perhaps a better candidate as a precursor of ethical solipsism than any standard form of subjectivism. Unlike the ancient Sophists, who clearly were subjectivists or relativists of their own kind, the Stoics held that the inner state of the soul is ultimately all that matters, ethically speaking, and that the “sage” is first and foremost concerned with maintaining the inner harmony of her/his soul with the logos of the universe. Neither Jesus’s teachings nor the Stoic ideal of the sage can be reduced to what I am here calling ethical solipsism, but certainly there are deep similarities in their accounts of what it means to be ethically committed. In particular, ethical solipsism says that it is not only impossible but unethical to judge others morally. I can, and ought to, judge my own soul merely, my own guilt. Our practically inevitable habit of judging others is, then, yet another reason for our own guilt. Thus, according to ethical solipsism, all evaluative judgments are in the end about me (that is, about my will or character), not about any allegedly morally valuable objects in the world existing independently of me. Any value—or guilt—there may be depends on my valuational acts or attitudes, the way I relate to the world around me. The coherent ethical solipsist, therefore, need not, and presumably cannot, be a solipsist in an ontological or an epistemological sense, but a form of transcendental solipsism, a view pertaining to the basic meaning or significance of the world for us, is a natural background of the kind of ethical solipsism I am here trying to understand. 11 WITTGENSTEIN AND TRANSCENDENTAL SOLIPSISM In the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Wittgenstein noted that reward and punishment are irrelevant to ethics, except insofar as they “reside in the action itself.” 12 He thereby made a profoundly Kantian point. 13 It is only the inner motivation one has for performing an action that counts, morally speaking. The moral point of view does not focus on the consequences of our actions, nor on the external rewards or punishments those actions may bring

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about, but “internally” just on the action itself and its performer’s inner state of soul. Whatever reward and punishment there may be, they must lie in the action itself. 14 As Wittgenstein elsewhere put it, anything that can be done out of ethically noble motives can also be done out of selfishness and cowardice. 15 The action itself, externally viewed, does not wear its moral qualities on its sleeve. What is ethically relevant, again, is just the motivation deep within the moral agent, and there is no way of empirically determining whether the agent, qua moral subject, is worthy of moral reward or punishment. This can only be “known,” if at all, by the agent her-/himself from within the moral life s/he leads. And it is a special kind of “knowledge” indeed, because, according to Wittgenstein, our moral selves do not merely lie outside the cognitive sphere, as Kantian-like incognizable noumena, but remain outside the sphere of meaningful language-use. What cannot be spoken about must be passed over into silence. 16 In its deepest sense, therefore, moral guilt is also beyond (ordinary) knowledge and linguistic description. The ways in which the empirical world is are irrelevant to the “higher” perspective of ethics. What Wittgenstein says about the irrelevance of reward and punishment applies, arguably, to guilt. Not even fear of punishment can be identified with guilt. In Kantian terms, we may say, following Merold Westphal, that the person who experiences guilt experiences not just (or perhaps not at all) unhappiness as such but unworthiness of being happy. This highlights the intimate connection between moral guilt and religious experience of sin, already hinted at in the previous chapters. 17 To get a glimpse of the depth of our problem, just consider a simple example: I may donate a small amount of money to help the starving people of the third world. No one will ever know whether I did this for genuinely moral reasons or not. I may have done it out of vanity, out of wanting to look like a person who is “good” and thoughtful. I may have done it without telling about the action to anyone, to be sure, but even so I may have done it because I want, in general, to be “looked at” as a good person, or because I want to avoid being looked at as a selfish person who does not care about others. 18 I may not even know myself what my ultimate motive for the action was. If Kant is right, I cannot know this. My true motive is deeply hidden in the depth of my soul, visible not even to my own empirical self but only to my transcendental, intelligible, noumenal self. Insofar as there is a way for me to conceive of myself as such a self, I can to some extent examine my motives, my ways of being a moral agent, but this possibility is, solipsistically, absolutely closed to all others. Again, the same holds for guilt: only my own moral guilt, and not the guilt of other people, can be determined—and only by me, by me alone, transcendentally speaking. Insofar as I feel, or am, guilty (especially in the transcendental sense characterized in the previous

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chapter), my consideration of myself as unworthy of happiness may, again, be inaccessible and incommunicable to others. From a Wittgensteinian point of view, the moral subject’s relation to the world conceived as a totality is the only thing that ethically matters—and, astonishingly, there is only one such subject, me. In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein seems to have sympathized with a transcendental form of solipsism, according to which “the world is my world,” and “world and life are one.” 19 Famously, the world of the “happy man” is different from the world of the “unhappy man.” 20 This is not the right place to deal with the various interpretations of these solipsistic-sounding remarks by Wittgenstein. 21 Nor shall I discuss later neo-Wittgensteinian moral philosophers’ views, according to which moral problems are highly personal problems and cannot be settled with reference to any general moral theory—even though there is a hint of the seriousness of the solipsism issue in this conception (shared by a number of Wittgensteinians) of morality as something deeply personal, truly available only from the first person point of view. 22 I am, rather, interested in the question of whether the Kantian-Wittgensteinian line of thought—the proposal to identify the genuinely moral perspective, including any serious perspective on guilt, with the inner life of the subject, the life of the soul, so to say—inevitably entails something like ethical solipsism. I cannot see how such a conclusion, however unwelcome both intellectually and morally, could be avoided, if only the moral will, motivation, or law within the subject can be taken seriously as the ground for determining whether a given action is ethical or not, or whether a person (i.e., me) is morally guilty or not. Wittgenstein, in the Tractatus, seems to have been not only a transcendental solipsist about the objects of linguistic description (i.e., the world given to the subject that is its “limit”), but also an ethical solipsist roughly in the sense indicated above. The metaphysical subject as the “limit of the world” 23 is the ultimate ground for any ethical evaluation there may be; in this sense of ethical “ultimacy,” guilt is also something that concerns, and can concern, only such a metaphysical or transcendental subject. It concerns only the subject whose life as a whole—and, hence, whose entire world—is at stake. 24 Only the self is good or evil, not the independent world, or anything in it (that is, any particular object or state of affairs). 25 Wittgenstein points out that good or evil acts of the will cannot alter the facts of the world (that is, what can be expressed in language) but only the limits of the world, so that the world may become “an altogether different world.” 26 The world itself—its contingent facts—contains nothing ethical, nothing that is valuable in the absolute sense. 27 However, value and the valuing subject are nothing transcendent, either, even though Wittgenstein says in some places that ethics is “supernatural.” 28 Wittgenstein’s statement (in the Tractatus) about ethics being, like logic, transcendental (instead of “transcendent”) should be taken seriously; a thinker of Wittgenstein’s caliber could hardly have made a

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simple terminological mistake here. Despite his mysticist tendencies—indeed, the Tractatus is a magnificent piece of mystical literature—he did not claim that ethics lies “outside” the world (and life) 29 in any literal sense. It lies, rather, at the limit of the world, because ethics, like religion and aesthetics, provides a view onto the world as a limited whole, perhaps valuable in some “higher” sense, but nevertheless limited by the subject who values it. This is the view sub specie aeternitatis, but neither the valuing and willing subject nor the value s/he (or it) 30 imposes on the world are transcendent entities mysteriously located outside the empirical world. Ethics is essentially about the subject’s perspective or attitude to the world and life, a perspective constituting a condition for the possibility of the world, as perspectivally structured by the subject. The subject, itself at the limit of the world, views her/his/its world as a whole under the aspect of ethical (or aesthetic) value. The crucial insight here is that this viewing may take place under the aspect of guilt. Paraphrasing Wittgenstein, we may say that the world of a guilty person is different from the world of an innocent one. It is a guilty world, a world deeply structured by the phenomenon of guilt. The notion of guilt is so fundamental for our ways of taking seriously our ethically challenging task of being in the world with other human beings that it may guide and “color” our experience of “having” a world at all. It may open us to a world in which we may not only be unhappy (“the world of the happy man is different from the world of the unhappy man”) but also unworthy of being happy. No transcendence is involved here, but only transcendentality, in a sense resembling Kant’s: the subject’s perspective, together with her/his attitude to the world as a totality arising from that perspective, is a necessary condition for the world being a possible object of experience and linguistic representation. The moral subject, then, is not external to the world within which we (it) are (is) required to act morally. Instead, Wittgenstein’s view of ethics as transcendental construes “the ethical” as an “inner” feature of the world. Wittgensteinian ethical solipsism may even be compatible with (internal) moral realism, insofar as the former is construed at a transcendental level and the latter at an empirical one, just as transcendental idealism and empirical realism are compatible—and mutually required—according to Kant. 31 Ultimately, then, our question concerns the very possibility of ethics as a human way of facing and engaging in the world, of being in the world, as a perspective on the world we live in. Obviously, insofar as adopting a truly ethical point of view leads to solipsism, it is not clear that we should, or even could, adopt that point of view. It seems that a radically anti-solipsistic move must first be made in order to make ethics possible. Even more strongly, if guilt is a feature fundamentally constituting the (transcendental) subject’s way of facing her/his/its world, it is unclear whether the ethical solipsism that seems to be required by this first-personal approach makes sense at all: guilt

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definitely seems to presuppose the full reality of others whom one can harm and who can also be seen as moral agents capable of harming others. 32 But then, again, as soon as we admit that our actual deeds and omissions in the world ought to be seen as morally relevant, after all, we are back with the situation in which we can never be sure whether a given action is genuinely ethically motivated or not. Any human action, even the most “saintly” one, may be motivated by selfish desires; conversely, any action, even the most “beastly” one, may be motivated by high moral principles (though it may be difficult for us to see how). We can never escape the need to reflect on the depths of our souls, the innermost motivations we have for performing any actions we perform. Such reflection must be as infinite as our metaphysical guilt may be deep. Nor can we, therefore, escape our (potentially) fundamentally guilty condition. Guilt, just as the world, is mine—and by taking seriously this thought I am already deeply puzzled by the tension between the primacy of the first person (solipsism) and the presupposition that there must always already be others in the world for me to be able to be guilty (anti-solipsism). ACKNOWLEDGING OTHERNESS We have already seen, however, that one can (attempt to) make sense of the “transcendental” role guilt may play in our moral vocabulary without making any solipsistic assumptions. I must here briefly recapitulate some of the points made in the previous chapter. Raimond Gaita may again lead our inquiry here. As we saw, he prefers to focus on the concept of remorse rather than on the one of guilt. These are not the same concept but they are intimately related; if “guilt-feeling” is a “pained acknowledgment of the wrong one has done,” then there is, between such a feeling and remorse, no significant difference. 33 As we recall, Gaita characterizes remorse as “the pained acknowledgment of one’s guilt,” 34 maintaining that in remorse people “suffer in guilty recognition of what they have become”; remorse is, then, “the suffering recognition and acknowledgment of one’s guilt.” 35 He also describes the experience of remorse “not as a psychological response to wrongdoing” but as a “pained, bewildered realisation of what it means (in a sense interdependent with what it is) to wrong someone”; when lucid, remorse is “an astonished encounter with the reality of the ethical,” 36 arriving with a “horrified discovery of the significance of what we did.” The crucial point to be re-emphasized here—in the context of the solipsism issue—is that a possible corruption of the concepts of guilt and remorse is the failure to notice their personal character—that is, the failure to notice the relevance of the problem of solipsism in relation to guilt we started out

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from. In “common guilt,” all are guilty and no one is. “Someone who is true to her remorse will always reject, as inappropriate, consolation that is based on her recognition of the guilt of others,” while the knowledge that others are also guilty will provide only a “corrupt consolation.” 37 Putting together Gaita’s and Dostoevsky’s insights, we may argue that this kind of corrupt thinking fails to acknowledge the sense in which I am, from the perspective of my ethical reflection, always more guilty than any other person—I am the one whose guilt is ethically prior to any other’s. True guilt or remorse is not selfcentered, but recognizes, often with a shock, the “reality of the other” (as Gaita puts it); yet, it is, in a way, ethically solipsistic: my being guilty is what ultimately matters in moral evaluation. Now, as also argued in chapter 2, if guilt (or remorse) is seen as a transcendental requirement of the possibility of morality, or of ethical seriousness, it cannot be just contingently or factually present in moral life. In an everyday, somewhat trivial or shallow sense, one is of course always guilty of something specific, i.e., what one has done or has failed to do. In contrast, transcendental guilt, being solipsistic, is more metaphysical, existential, or even mystical. This, however, does not mean that it is completely different from moral guilt; instead, the kind of guilt I am trying to describe and whose place in the context of the solipsism issue troubles us, is precisely moral guilt. It is moral guilt itself that turns metaphysical (as suggested in chapter 2 above) when we look at it in the transcendental way I have suggested, finding our sources in Kant and Wittgenstein, among others. 38 Gaita’s discussion may here be interestingly compared to Tzvetan Todorov’s distinction between heroic and ordinary virtues, which he analyzes in the context of moral life in concentration camps. 39 In particular, I find it highly plausible to suggest that the transcendental notion of moral guilt I have discussed concerns primarily our failure—the constantly possible failure—to act in accordance with the quite ordinary virtues that make human life with others possible in the first place, such as dignity and (especially) caring, in relation to our individual fellow human beings. No guilt needs to follow from the failure to be heroic, although it may. (Few of us are capable of heroic virtues even in exceptional circumstances.) Arguably, we may be said to be morally required to act virtuously in the “ordinary” sense, even though no such requirement extends to heroic action. The duty to care for other individuals is set to us as a very simple human demand, whose simplicity makes our transcendental guilt all the more deep-seated. 40 The obviously unwelcome solipsistic conclusions arrived at above may be avoided, if—perhaps only if—the (solipsistic) ethical subject makes, possibly through the simple attitude of caring, something resembling a Kierkegaardian “leap” toward the other human being, a leap into the dark. By making such a leap, one gives up one’s (instinctive) solipsism and simply acknowledges, as an ethically motivated action, the reality of others, particularly the

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reality of other experiential and willing perspectives on the world. Giving up solipsism is, then, itself an ethically motivated act. It may be an act of adopting toward others an “attitude towards a soul,” understood as not requiring a metaphysical theory of the existence of souls, or an epistemological one about their cognitive accessibility, but as a fundamentally ethical attitude prior to both epistemology and ontology. 41 However, even here transcendentally solipsistic difficulties remain; solipsism cannot be just easily dropped out of the picture when we are considering our attitude to our own moral agency at the deepest level. One problem here is that guilt loses its above-described ethically deep meaning if it is shareable with others. If we acknowledge the full ethically pregnant reality of other subjects, we must also acknowledge their being (or at least being capable of being) guilty. Then my guilt is no longer the moral center of human guilt. My being guilty no more provides the world (which is no longer “mine”) with its guilty “form,” its disharmony with the requirements of morality. It is not obvious that this situation would not require a considerable sacrifice in the significance we attribute to our experiences of moral guilt, the kind of experiences that Dostoevsky seems to have in mind when declaring that I am more guilty than anyone else. The depth of the Wittgensteinian picture of ethical (transcendental) solipsism may be lost. Another problem is that even if ethics is claimed to be primarily about the subject’s relation to a transcendent Other, as Levinas puts it, the problem of solipsism can hardly be completely avoided. Levinas says in so many words that I am the chosen one, the one bearing all the world upon my shoulders. It is, then, ultimately me who is constantly set into the infinite responsibility to and for the Other, the responsibility from which ethics originates. Again, my guilt for failing to carry my responsibilities toward the Other is ethically fundamental, constituting the reality of the ethical. This is a kind of ethical solipsism all over again. 42 Let us briefly take a look at how Levinas becomes entangled with the problem framework of solipsism, despite his admirable effort to emphasize the ethical primacy of the Other and our infinite responsibility for the Other. The key issue here is the unshareability of my responsibility (clearly paralleling the primacy of “first-personal” guilt in Dostoevsky): it is me, and me only, who enters a morally problematic position through sheer existence, through my inevitably occupying someone else’s potential “place” in the world with “the Da of my Dasein.” 43 I am “non-interchangeable,” because “I am inescapably responsible,” “the unique and chosen one,” in the face of the Other, as a “hostage” for the Other. 44 The word “I,” for Levinas, “means here I am”; I am a “sub-jectum,” responsible for everything, uniquely substituting myself for the Other. 45 This ethical relation to the Other is, as we have seen, asymmetric: the Other is not responsible for me in the sense in which I am responsible for her/him, and no one can substitute her-/himself for me,

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although I (must) substitute myself for everyone. 46 Thus, again, I am guilty, and if the Other is guilty as well, then I have always “one guilt more” on my shoulders. This is because I am responsible even for the Other’s responsibility: To be oneself, otherwise than being, to be disinterested, is to bear the wretchedness and bankruptcy of the other, and even the responsibility that the other can have for me. To be oneself, the state of being a hostage, is always to have one degree of responsibility more, the responsibility for the responsibility of the other. 47

Levinasian ethics can, then, be understood as the subject’s—my—continuous struggle with justifying my right to be, in the fundamentally ethical situation in which my own being is called into question by the vulnerable and mortal Other. I am constantly guilty in relation to the Other. It seems to me that even Levinas comes close to being an ethical solipsist in the sense that he singles out me, the ethical subject, as the unique and chosen locus of all moral responsibility. Perhaps all deep moral thinkers taking the notion of guilt seriously at least have a temptation to solipsism. The (pre-)original responsibility he locates in me, and me only, is also transcendental, as it is prior to any empirical, factual encounter between me and other human beings. It is a fundamental precondition of ethics, and therefore Levinas’s writings intriguingly resonate with Kant’s ethics. My simply being there (being here) makes me morally suspect, and this guilty condition of the moral subject—the inescapably suspect subject—is prior to any ethical theory about what makes our empirically describable actions right or wrong, or to anything that makes one guilty in a factual sense. My relation to the Other, according to Levinas, is not just a matter of my thinking that s/he is, but of my speaking to her/him— particularly of the “impossibility of approaching the other without speaking,” 48 which is readily comparable to the “attitude towards a soul” that Wittgenstein invokes in the Investigations. It is, first and foremost, my responsibility for her/his mortality, my ethical impossibility of abandoning her/ him to die alone. 49 In this non-shareability of ethical responsibility Levinas comes close to Kant’s account of the noumenal moral subject and Wittgenstein’s somewhat mysticist transcendental ethical thought. This triumvirate, then, offers us a picture of what ethical solipsism might look like, when applied to the concept of moral guilt. There is, however, also something almost inhuman in the idea that I am alone responsible for all evil taking place in the world. Todorov offers a voice of common sense against such ethical solipsism: Must we each […] take upon ourselves all the suffering in the world, ceasing to sleep peacefully so long as there remains somewhere in the world even the slightest trace of injustice? […] Of course not. Such a task is beyond human strength […]. We can, however, set ourselves a more modest and accessible goal: in peacetime, to

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Yet, even this more modest goal is set first and foremost to me, in the context of my life with other human beings. OUR TRUE MOTIVES? According to Wittgenstein, the human body is the best picture of the human soul. 51 This might be read as a statement about the soul being always already inevitably turned toward others, toward the world in which it lives, out of its apparently solipsistic predicament. However, here we must recall the Kantian remark with which I began this chapter. Whenever we try to critically examine our innermost motives, including the motives we have for avoiding solipsism and for turning toward others and ethically acknowledging them, we should be cautious in making any strong statements about our true motives. It is not clear that even our anti-solipsism 52 is really a result of ethically laudable motives. We may just want to seem a bit more ethical, to look like being morally committed—to ourselves and to others around us—even if we “really” aren’t. As we remember Wittgenstein pointing out, anything that can be done out of morally laudable motives can also be done out of selfishness. It is never obvious that our ethical deliberations are genuinely ethical, nor that our investigations of our own soul reveal what we truly are, morally speaking. There is a deep truth (even for atheists) embedded in the Christian idea that only God sees into the bottom of our hearts (or souls). This is a further reason why the perspective of guilt, even if it remains a perspective of potentiality, is constitutive of our moral lives. We may always be guilty, even if we “factually” are innocent. This “may” calls for some further remarks, though. Recalling Todorov’s discussion of ordinary virtues, there is no reason to doubt, skeptically, the virtuousness of someone who, for example, joins another individual to her/ his death because of her/his care for that person. This care and the act based on it could be, at bottom, selfish, but then again the external world could, for all we know, be just an illusion, or a figment of our imagination. Skepticism has its limits here, and these limits are marked by the “truth” of ethical solipsism. We cannot, and should not, seriously entertain skeptical doubts about people’s ethical motives when they are willing to sacrifice their lives. Or better: we just don’t. Our not doing so is part of our being engaged in moral life in the way we more or less naturally are. By way of conclusion to this chapter, I want to emphasize once more that our problem concerns the very possibility of ethics; it is a transcendental

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problem pertaining to the conceptual foundations of one of the most central—arguably the most central—human institutions. The challenge of ethical solipsism cannot be escaped by philosophical, argumentative means by providing a theoretical demonstration about certain “objective” criteria determining the moral worth of our actions. There is no such objectivity to ethics (which is not to say that ethics is simply subjective). Above all, we should perceive that there is no intellectual—or any other—foundation to ethics, no other foundation than ethics itself. Morality can never be grounded in anything more fundamental than morality itself. 53 Guilt is one of the fundamental ethical notions that may be invoked in order to make this point more explicit. The permanent possibility of guilt, revealed by transcendental examination, makes it impossible for us to escape the requirements of morality— unless we are prepared to, for instance, see the kind of depersonalization Todorov discusses as an escape from morality in the sense of being an escape from the kind of unified personality or selfhood that any morality (or, a fortiori, guilt) requires. 54 Moreover, we need to be able to experience guilt even in order to be capable of being morally good (which I am not denying we sometimes are). Todorov quotes approvingly Hannah Arendt’s remark that “[g]oodness can exist only when it is not perceived, not even by its author.” 55 Moral goodness, or virtuous life—however we want to call it—requires that the virtuous person does not present her- or himself as an example to others. Somewhat paradoxically, we may return to Kant and argue that even though the moral subject knows a priori that her/his maxims are bound by the categorical imperative, s/he can never know whether her/his own actions are actually motivated by her/his respect for this moral law or by something else. Therefore, an acute sense of the possibility of one’s own guilt—the continuous possibility of one’s not subjecting oneself to the moral law but to empirical, perhaps ultimately selfish motives—is required for a person’s being able to understand her-/himself as a moral subject in the first place. This, as I see it, is a profound link between guilt and goodness; yet, it must not be misunderstood as the absurd suggestion that anyone who feels guilty is actually good. One may feel guilty also because one just is (factually, empirically) guilty. The key idea here is that even if one isn’t, one ought to be able to experience guilt in the more fundamental transcendental sense. While we, as Todorov notes, must not forget the crucial difference between the guilty and the innocent, we must also understand that the horrible evils that, say, concentration camp commandants were capable of are “not as foreign to us as we might wish.” 56 The mere modal fact that Arendtian “banal evil” could, at any time, be our own makes us transcendentally guilty. This fact, like the mere historical fact that the Holocaust took place, may make us ashamed of being human beings. 57

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Our morality and its requirements may, of course, be disturbed and fragmented. Again, we can never know that our actions (or our guilt) are based on an undisturbed moral perspective. My argument amounts, then, to a recognition that we are, in this sense, in an inescapably tragic situation. There is, indeed, a sense in which no one of us ever does, and no one ever can do, what is the morally right thing to do—and recognizing this is, again, crucial to understanding what morality truly means for us (see further chapter 7 below). This is, moreover, not an epistemic point about our not knowing, or not being able to know, what is right in a given situation; nor is it a semantic point about the meanings of such words. It is a metaphysical point about the human condition. Given this condition, there is no easy way of being ethical. If one carries moral responsibility at all—if one is, or can be regarded as, a morally serious person—one will have no chance but to experience guilt at the transcendental level. One might also say that this reflection on what I just called the human condition is on the one hand historically, empirically informed by the facts of human history, and on the other hand “cosmic,” existential, metaphysical. This recognition of the metaphysically tragic nature of morality might perhaps be illuminated by means of a simple argument drawing attention to the inevitably conflicting moral demands our lives set us: as our moral duties often conflict, we can never be sure that we have done what we are ethically required to do (see also chapter 7 below). To be sure, such an argument might be countered by appealing to the well-known principle that ought implies can. However, in this special context—a metaphysically and metaphilosophically relevant context of ethical reflection—this principle lacks force. It is part of the infinity of our moral task—and thus part of the seriousness of morality and the overriding nature of the moral perspective—that we never fully can meet the requirements of morality, that we never can do what we ought to do. Here, definitely, ought does not imply can. We, or even I, ought to have, per impossibile, been able to render Auschwitz non-existent. This is, or would have been, our duty, or mine, and it is our cosmic, yet also historical, shame, or mine, to live in a world in which it did happen. 58 These notions, again, come close to the traditional Christian one of original sin. Morality and religion are in the end perhaps closer to each other than we usually want to admit in our secular culture. We cannot appreciate the infinity of our moral duty and our constant failure to be moral without appreciating this crucial link. Thus, in a sense, my reflections—just as those by Gaita, Todorov, and others I have cited—ought to be read as intended against moral hubris of any kind. They are moral reflections on our finitude, epitomized in our guilt, urging us to beware of any attempts to overcome our ethical finitude by identifying or grounding moral principles that would once and for all deliver a solution to the moral dilemmas that our human life with other people presents us with.

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The argument showing that no one ever does, or can do, what morality requires one to do, if sound, would in a way make morality illusory or superfluous. Moral nihilism, and perhaps even metaphysical nihilism, threatens us at this point. At the same time, the argument I have imagined (not defended!) enables us to appreciate what is really deep in ethical life. Morality is, for us, a profoundly paradoxical phenomenon. Reflecting on the paradoxes it yields, we have seen that ethical solipsism expresses a truth, to a certain extent: we can never know what our ethical state “really is,” at least not that we have been able to meet our moral requirements. This, however, is not a skeptical conclusion. Fundamentally, neither our guilt nor the foundation of our moral life is (primarily) a matter of knowledge but a matter of what may be described as our personal being in the world, a way of being that again includes both historical (factual) and cosmic (metaphysical) dimensions. 59 What remains, then, instead of the multitude of implausibly foundationalist philosophical theories of what is right or good from a for us unimaginable, transcendent God’s-Eye View, is just the moral life we lead in any case, the life always already situated in an ethically demanding context transcendentally structured by guilt. It is our continuous task to make this life morally better, making (morally better) sense of it, 60 better appreciating “our common humanity,” thus continuously facing the irresolvable yet paradoxically unproblematic “problem of life”—a problem itself deeply connected with guilt—that Wittgenstein saw as irreducible to any scientific or everyday (or any other linguistically expressible) questions about the world, 61 the fundamental and inescapable problem we repeatedly need to engage, either solipsistically or anti-solipsistically. NOTES 1. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), A551/B579n (original: 1st ed. 1781, 2nd ed. 1787). I have also used the German original, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, ed. Raymund Schmidt (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 3rd ed., 1990). 2. See, e.g., A.W. Moore, Noble in Reason, Infinite in Faculty: Themes and Variations in Kant’s Moral and Religious Philosophy (London and New York: Routledge, 2003; paperback ed. 2005), p. 111. 3. Immanuel Kant, Religion within the Limits of Mere Reason, Akademie-Ausgabe (AA), 6:51. For illuminating discussions of this inscrutability—in particular, the inscrutability of evil—see Richard Bernstein, Radical Evil: A Philosophical Interrogation (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002); and Robert B. Louden, “Evil Everywhere,” Sats 9 (2008), 7-27. (The German original for the term “inscrutable” is “unerforschlich.”) As Louden summarizes Kant’s position, ultimately “free actions—whether for good or for evil—are fundamentally inexplicable” (ibid., p. 13).

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4. Thus, my discussion differs significantly from, say, P.S. Greenspan’s; see Greenspan, Practical Guilt: Moral Dilemmas, Emotions, and Social Norms (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). 5. Kant’s famous theory of “radical evil,” formulated in the first chapter of the Religionsschrift (AA, vol. 6), falls outside the scope of this chapter. See Bernstein, Radical Evil, and Louden, “Evil Everywhere,” for up-to-date discussions. 6. Obviously, this chapter is not the right place to discuss in any detail Kant’s complicated theory of freedom, let alone his moral philosophy as a whole. (Moore’s book, cited above, is one of the best recent readings, in my view.) I tend to read Kant as a compatibilist, which is well in line with a “one world” interpretation of Kant’s famous transcendental distinction between things in themselves and appearances: freedom and determinism are compatible with each other in the sense that all empirical events in the natural world are (causally) determined, while some of those very same events—namely, human actions—can be seen from an entirely different perspective, or conceptualized from another standpoint, that of morality (which requires freedom as a “postulate of practical reason”). Whether such compatibilism is acceptable depends on whether Kant’s doctrine of the “two standpoints” can be accepted. See, e.g., Christine M. Korsgaard, Creating the Kingdom of Ends (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1996). 7. A critic might ask here whether I am concerned with the notion of guilt or with guilt itself, the phenomenon or emotion that notion designates or refers to. A short answer is that I am concerned with both. I am inquiring into the role the notion of guilt plays, or ought to play, in our moral thought, but this is simultaneously an inquiry into the ways in which our moral lives themselves are structured by this wide-reaching phenomenon. As a human-made practice and conceptual system, morality is an area of life in which “real” phenomena and the concepts by means of which those phenomena are understood and categorized cannot be neatly separated. Our moral life largely consists of the ways in which we conceptually categorize our being in the world with others. 8. At this point, guilt might be compared to a closely related, though distinguishable, notion or phenomenon, shame. An experience of shame may be part of one’s experience of being guilty; indeed, one’s being guilty and one’s recognition of one’s guilt may cause shame. 9. Matthew 7: 1, 3. 10. A distinction must, therefore, be drawn between ethical solipsism and the more standard metaphysical (ontological) and epistemological (skeptical) versions of solipsism maintaining that (for all we know) the world is “my world” and/or that my experiences and thoughts exhaust reality. See Sami Pihlström, Solipsism: History, Critique, and Relevance (Tampere: Tampere University Press, 2004). 11. In addition to the transcendental solipsism we might ascribe to Wittgenstein, to be commented on in the next section, the solipsism issue in the phenomenological tradition, especially Edmund Husserl, may be described as transcendental. See ibid., chapter 3. 12. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921), trans. David F. Pears and Brian F. McGuinness (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974), § 6.422. 13. For Kant, the “reward” one may get for acting morally—or better, what one may hope for insofar as one acts on the basis of the moral law—is the eternal life of the immortal soul, guaranteed by God. Immortality, like God’s existence, is a postulate of practical reason. For Wittgenstein, eternity amounts to “living in the present” (Tractatus, § 6.4311); there is, accordingly, even a hint toward solipsism of the present moment in Wittgenstein, though I cannot deal with that aspect of the Tractatus here. 14. Ibid., § 6.422. 15. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, trans. Peter Winch, eds. Georg Henrik von Wright and Heikki Nyman (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 48. 16. Wittgenstein, Tractatus, § 7. 17. Merold Westphal, God, Guilt, and Death: An Existential Phenomenology of Religious Experience (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1984), p. 76 (see also pp. 86-87). Guilt, understood in this way, is a form of self-consciousness: “We have seen conscience as the self saying to itself, Thou art the man” (ibid., p. 81). Westphal summarizes this view as follows: “Objectively guilt is (1) liability to punishment. Subjectively it is (2) fear of

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punishment, and (3) approval of my own punishment, or, more carefully stated, approval of the other’s disapproval of me which may render me liable to punishment.” (Ibid., p. 89; see also p. 118.) Religion both intensifies guilt—it becomes guilt before God—and offers salvation. Furthermore, Westphal argues that, especially when considered from a religious perspective, there is an intimate relation between the problems of guilt and death, and their human significance. In guilt, we may feel that our entire life has been in vain. For Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilich, “the question of death is also the question of guilt” (ibid., p. 93); these are essentially a “single concern” in religious life (ibid., p. 251). When reflecting on our guilt from the perspective of our worthiness for happiness, we inevitably reflect on our life as a whole, on whether we have lived in vain. This brings the issue of death on the agenda, and I find Westphal’s comments on the connection between these two fundamental issues highly important. The challenge is to deal with the threatening ethical nihilism and existential anxiety (cf. ibid., pp. 99-101): our entire life, our guilty and mortal life, may lack meaning and worth in a fundamental sense, and this is something that the notion of transcendental guilt (in my vocabulary, not in Westphal’s) is intended to express. It is right here, according to Westphal, that the religious sense of these problems turns out to be decisive: guilt and death represent “spiritual needs”—needs that are “higher” and “deeper” than more mundane needs of happiness, such as health and wealth—linked in Luther’s view that “[i]f sins are forgiven, death is gone” (ibid., p. 108). In different ways, different religious traditions (a phenomenological description of which is Westphal’s main goal) attempt to deal with these problems: “the religious life is attractive to the believing soul largely because of the hope that through a proper ‘relation’ to the Sacred guilt and death can be overcome” (ibid., p. 160). 18. Cf. Jean-Paul Sartre’s well-known discussion of the Look, developed in Being and Nothingness: A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology (1943), trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Philosophical Library, 1966). 19. Cf. Wittgenstein, Tractatus, §§ 5.62-5.63. 20. Ibid., § 6.43. The happy life and the “happy world” of a happy person are discussed somewhat more comprehensively by Wittgenstein in his pre-Tractarian Notebooks 1914-1916 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1961); see the entries on July 8, 29, and 30, in 1916. For a fresh discussion of these issues, see Moore, Noble in Reason, Infinite in Faculty. 21. There is plenty of commentary literature available. See, e.g., P.M.S. Hacker, Insight and Illusion: Themes in the Philosophy of Wittgenstein, rev. ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986; 1st ed. 1972); Heikki Kannisto, Thoughts and Their Subject: A Study of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, Acta Philosophica Fennica 40 (Helsinki: The Philosophical Society of Finland, 1986); David Pears, The False Prison: A Study of the Development of Wittgenstein’s Philosophy I—II (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987-88); Richard J. Brockhaus, Pulling Up the Ladder: The Metaphysical Roots of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1991); Sebastian Lalla, Solipsismus bei Ludwig Wittgenstein: Eine Studie zum Früh- und Spätwerk (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2002); Pihlström, Solipsism, especially chapter 3; as well as the special solipsism issue of European Journal of Philosophy 4 (1996). In particular, I will here set aside the debate between the “New Wittgensteinians” and the more traditional (e.g., Kantian) interpreters on the question of whether it is correct to ascribe any philosophical theses, such as solipsism or its alternatives, to Wittgenstein. Cf. Alice Crary and Rupert Read (eds.), The New Wittgenstein (London and New York: Routledge, 2000). Whatever the status of Wittgenstein’s “solipsism” is, it is clearly no “ordinary” solipsism; in particular, it cannot be put to words but its (unspeakable) “truth” can only “show itself” in our life with language (cf. Tractatus, §§ 5.62, 5.64). Indeed, a key idea of the present discussion is that its “truth” may be manifested in the way we think, or ought to think, about the notion of moral guilt. 22. For contributions to this discussion, see, e.g., Peter Winch, Ethics and Action (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972); D.Z. Phillips, Interventions in Ethics (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992); Paul Johnston, The Contradictions of Modern Moral Philosophy (London and New York: Routledge, 1999); Rush Rhees, Moral Questions, ed. D.Z. Phillips (London: Macmillan, 1999); Raimond Gaita, Good and Evil: An Absolute Conception, rev. ed. (London and New York: Routledge, 2004; 1st ed. 1991); Sami Pihlström, Pragmatic Moral Realism: A Transcendental Defense (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2005); as well as chapter 2 above. The idea of moral problems and actions as profoundly personal is certainly not restricted to the

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Wittgensteinian tradition. For example, Tzvetan Todorov argues that “an action is moral not in itself but only in relation to its author, a specific time, and a particular place.” See Todorov, Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps, trans. Arthur Denner and Abigail Pollak (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1996; French original 1991), p. 118. Todorov also concludes, on the basis of his comprehensive discussion of moral life in the concentration camps, that moral action is subjective in the sense of being “one that the individual takes on himself” and personal in the sense of being “directed toward one or more individuals”; accordingly, the moral action par excellence is what he calls caring (ibid., pp. 287-288). (I will have a chance to return to Todorov’s views below.) 23. See again, in addition to Tractatus, § 5.641, Wittgenstein’s somewhat more elaborate remarks on the metaphysical subject in the Notebooks (entries on August 2, 5, and 7, in 1916; and on September 2, 1916). 24. See again Westphal, God, Guilt, and Death, for an exploration of the religious connection between guilt and death. 25. See Wittgenstein, Notebooks, entry on August 5, 1916. 26. Wittgenstein, Tractatus, § 6.43. 27. On Wittgenstein’s distinction between the absolute ethical value and trivial everyday value, see Ludwig Wittgenstein, “Lecture on Ethics” (1929), Philosophical Review 74 (1965), 3-16 (reprinted in Wittgenstein, Philosophical Occasions, eds. James Klagge and Alfred Nordmann, Hackett: Indianapolis, 1993). 28. See especially the “Lecture on Ethics,” cited above. Wittgenstein’s ethical subject is in my view misleadingly characterized as transcendent (instead of transcendental) in, e.g., Dale Jacquette, “Wittgenstein on the Transcendence of Ethics,”Australasian Journal of Philosophy 75 (1997), 304-324. For a more promising approach recognizing the significance of the notion of the “transcendental” (though curiously distancing this from the notion of the transcendental subject), see Cora Diamond, “Ethics, Imagination and the Method of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus” (1991), in Crary and Read (eds.), The New Wittgenstein, pp. 149-173. I will return to the distinction between the transcendental and the transcendent in chapter 5 below. 29. Famously, Wittgenstein claims that the world and life “are one” (Tractatus, § 5.621; see also Notebooks, entry on July 24, 1916). 30. It is a problem whether the transcendental subject can even be referred to by a personal pronoun. But then how can guilt be fundamentally “first-personal” (mine), if the transcendental subject it concerns is impersonal, not a human being at all? In some not easily articulable way, the subject Wittgenstein is talking about, in order to be relevant to our discussion of guilt and solipsism, must be human. We should, presumably, construe it as a perspective on ourselves, rather than any distinct entity in its own right. Compare here the discussion of the “paradox of subjectivity” in phenomenology and the transcendental tradition: David Carr, The Paradox of Subjectivity: The Self in the Transcendental Tradition (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). See also chapter 6 below. 31. The analogue between Wittgenstein’s transcendental solipsism (“the world is my world”; cf. Tractatus, § 5.62) and Kant’s transcendental idealism, as well as the compatibility of both with empirical realism—with the view that the solipsistic subject “shrinks” to a point without extension, leaving us just the world (cf. Wittgenstein, Tractatus, § 5.64)—is emphasized in Kannisto’s above-cited work, Thoughts and Their Subject. 32. Obviously, we should not infer from the fact that I am the only one whose actions I have direct moral responsibility for (and that my own moral agency is therefore, for me, special) the further (more strongly solipsistic) idea that I would be the only one capable of suffering, or of being harmed. 33. Raimond Gaita, A Common Humanity: Thinking about Love and Truth and Justice (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 34. 34. Ibid., p. 93. 35. Gaita, Good and Evil, pp. 48-49. Analogously, one is in the need of, and is able to receive, mercy only if one has sinned and acknowledges this. In a juridical context, only if a criminal confesses her/his crime, pleading guilty, is an authority (say, the President) able to mercifully liberate her/him from her/his punishment. 36. Ibid., p. xiv.

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37. Ibid., pp. 47-48; see also Gaita, A Common Humanity, p. 98. 38. In this sense, my treatment of the metaphysics of (moral) guilt crucially differs from Karl Jaspers’s (see his Die Schuldfrage, Heidelberg: Lambert Schneider, 1946). As we saw in chapter 2, Jaspers distinguishes between juridical, political, moral, and metaphysical guilt. The last is based on our simply being human, on our sharing humanity with others, including in particular the victims of atrocities we may have witnessed but have been unable to prevent (such as, paradigmatically, the Holocaust). It is the guilt of the bystanders. In the metaphysical sense, we are guilty just by being there, by existing. Having attempted to describe our basic problem with the attributability of serious moral guilt as the problem of ethical solipsism, I have so to say attempted to soften the dichotomy between the moral and the metaphysical. The kind of moral guilt I have tried to characterize is itself metaphysical. See also Todorov, Facing the Extreme, pp. 231 ff.; on the passive spectators’ (onlookers’) moral responsibility, see pp. 238 ff. 39. Todorov, Facing the Extreme (cited above). 40. Todorov’s book (ibid.) is an extraordinarily interesting examination of the possibility of moral life in the camps. It is important to note that he discusses not just different virtues but also vices, such as fragmentation, depersonalization (of others and of oneself), and the enjoyment of power—all of which are relevant both in ordinary and in extraordinary circumstances. Moreover, he perceptively notes that the kind of ordinary virtues he distinguishes (dignity, caring, “the life of the mind”) may conflict with each other (see pp. 103-107); thus, again, they may produce guilt simply by being extremely ordinary virtues demanded of us in daily life. Neither his list of ordinary virtues nor the corresponding list of vices is, Todorov reminds us, exhaustive; both are just intuitively collected traits encountered in readings on “life in the camps” (ibid., p. 185). 41. See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1958; 1st ed. 1953), Part II, Section iv. 42. A similar problem arises in William James’s insistence on avoiding the “instinctive blindness” toward the inner perspectives of others, their ways of viewing the world. James’s 1899 essay, “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings,” reprinted in William James, Essays in Religion and Morality, eds. Frederick H. Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers, and Ignas K. Skrupskelis (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1982), can be seen as setting this requirement first and foremost to me—to each and every individual, to be sure, but to each one of them strictly from their own subjective perspective. On James’s struggle with the solipsism issue, see Sami Pihlström, “The Trail of the Human Serpent Is over Everything”: Jamesian Perspectives on Mind, World, and Religion (Lanham, MD: University Press of America [Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group], 2008), chapter 5. 43. Emmanuel Levinas, The Levinas Reader, ed. Séan Hand (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), p. 82. See also Emmanuel Levinas, Alterity and Transcendence, trans. Michael B. Smith (London: The Athlone Press, 1999), pp. 28, 164. See also the brief discussion of Levinas in chapter 2 above. 44. Levinas, The Levinas Reader, p. 84; see also pp. 116, 181. 45. Ibid., pp. 104-106. 46. Ibid., pp. 115, 243. 47. Ibid., p. 107. See also p. 226: “I always have, myself, one responsibility more than anyone else, since I am responsible, in addition, for [the Other’s] responsibility. And if he is responsible for my responsibility, I remain responsible for the responsibility he has for my responsibility.” Cf. further ibid., pp. 245-246. This Levinasian conception of the asymmetrical nature of responsibility may be hard to swallow, but it does, I think, illuminate the morally demanding character of the concept of transcendental guilt. 48. Emmanuel Levinas, Entre Nous: Thinking-of-the-Other, trans. Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav (London and New York: Continuum, 2006; French original 1991), p. 6. 49. See ibid., pp. 124-125, 160-161. 50. Todorov, Facing the Extreme, p. 253. 51. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, Part II, p. 178. For a philosophically very interesting literary treatment of this idea, see Oscar Wilde’s famous novel, The Picture of

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Dorian Gray, as well as Colin McGinn’s reading of it in McGinn, Ethics, Evil and Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). 52. I am assuming that we are all anti-solipsists, that is, that despite the compelling picture of the first-personal character of guilt, and of moral problems and concerns generally, we inevitably do assume that there are other human beings around us and that their ethical perspectives and experiences, including guilt, do matter. Still, the tension between solipsism and antisolipsism the notion of guilt invites one to deal with is uniquely one’s own. 53. This view is developed at some length in Pihlström, Pragmatic Moral Realism (cited above). 54. See Todorov’s chapter on “Depersonalization” in his Facing the Extreme, pp. 158-178. However, it might also be suggested that morality does not require a unified personality. We might be able to engage in moral action and deliberation even if our personality strictly speaking does not stay the same. Metaphysical speculations concerning the identity criteria of persons are beyond the scope of the present discussion. However, I would be willing to admit (this was raised by an anonymous referee) that it is certainly not obvious that unified personality is a requirement of morality. On the other hand, it can also be argued (and here, too, I am indebted to the referee’s insightful comments) that my very identity, my unity as a self, might itself be constituted by what I feel, or am able to feel, guilty about. Guilt, in the transcendental sense, may be a condition not just of moral seriousness and moral agency but of the very self that is the subject of these characteristics. It may, in some cases, lead to the fragmentation of the self whose guilt is at issue (though, again, I must avoid here psychological and/or psychologizing discussions of the fragmentation of the self as a result of, say, certain kinds of traumatic experiences; my issues are philosophical, and I am not aiming at any explanatory psychological discussions of human emotional capacities). Accordingly, while a relatively stable self seems to be in a more or less everyday sense a condition for the possibility of one’s engaging in moral deliberation at all, it is perfectly possible that in some extremely challenging moral situation (e.g., combat in war) the self suffers fragmentation, yet is in philosophically relevant ways capable of engaging in moral actions, as well as capable of being guilty. I do not want to take any stand on the difficult question concerning the degree of fragmentation (or the required degree of stability) that would still allow for something like moral agency. 55. Ibid., p. 115. The quote is from Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1958), p. 74. Todorov points out, furthermore, that “in fact, as a rule, the legally guilty feel they are innocent while those who are truly innocent live in guilt” (Facing the Extreme, p. 263; see also p. 270). These comments, I think, strikingly resonate with the Kantian approach of the present discussion. 56. Todorov, Facing the Extreme, p. 137. Nor am I recommending the unrealistic and even somewhat inhuman turning away from the concrete fight against evil and focusing on one’s “inner perfection” that Todorov criticizes in Etty Hillesum’s writings (ibid., pp. 198 ff.). On the contrary, we might also be guilty because it may be too easy for us to accept various forms of evil (cf. ibid., p. 204). 57. Notice again the connection (here left largely implicit) between guilt and shame. Todorov (ibid., p. 265) refers to Primo Levi’s (one of the best-known Holocaust survivors to write on his experiences) feeling of guilt “at being a man, because men had built Auschwitz,” to “the feeling of guilt that such a crime should exist,” comparing this form of guilt to the one Jaspers calls “metaphysical” in Die Schuldfrage. Cf. here also, for related reflections on absurdity, mortality, and suffering, C. Fred Alford, After the Holocaust: Primo Levi, the Book of Job, and the Path to Affliction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 58. Compare this to what was briefly noted on survivor’s guilt in chapter 2 above. 59. This is a kind of moral realism (cf. Pihlström, Pragmatic Moral Realism), though perhaps it would be best to avoid the terminology of “realism” and simply speak about the seriousness of the moral point of view, the binding nature of moral obligation, or something similar. 60. On the notion of our making sense of things, a notion deeply entangled with ethics, see Moore, Noble in Reason, Infinite in Faculty. In relation to this project of “making sense,” the ultimate threat of meaninglessness—the existential anxiety in which death and guilt are inte-

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grated—seems to be a key issue to be faced by any adequate project of moral reflection. I will return to this in chapter 5. 61. Wittgenstein, Tractatus, § 6.521.

Chapter Four

Ethical Unthinkabilities and Philosophical Seriousness

When a mentally disturbed teenager shot nine people and finally himself at Jokela High School in Finland in November 2007—apparently imitating the famous school shootings at Columbine High School in the United States— and when he was in turn imitated by another school shooter at another small Finnish town, Kauhajoki, in September 2008, a lively debate ensued in the Finnish media over the possible role played by philosophy in these tragic events. Some people suggested that having been exposed, at school, to Friedrich Nietzsche’s somewhat misanthropic ideas, or even to Plato’s Republic and its anti-democratic views, might have caused these young men’s hatred toward humanity. Philosophy, it was argued, may be dangerous to the young—and thereby potentially to everyone. Others, of course, resisted these suggestions, defending Plato and Nietzsche, and their place in the school curriculum. I am not going to argue for or against Nietzsche (or Plato) in this chapter. Nor am I willing to speculate about school shooters’ bizarre pseudo-philosophical ideas. I want to examine the metaphilosophical question of whether some philosophical views might be dangerous or culturally harmful, even to the extent that there might be good reasons for ethically responsible thinkers to ignore them, that is, to refuse to tolerate them or even to discuss them philosophically. This issue requires extremely subtle treatment in a political context in which the freedom of speech is an inviolable right—a crucial political right that, obviously, I am not questioning here—and responsible thinkers are expected to defend their ideas in public discussion by means of arguments whose credentials can be relatively objectively evaluated. In philosophy, in particular, we are accustomed to thinking that anything can be seriously put forward as a philosophical view or thesis, and that it will then 59

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be up to the arguments to decide the matter. There is hardly any philosophical view so crazy that it has never been propounded by anyone, as has famously been remarked. 1 And there is hardly any philosophical view so crazy that no arguments at all could be found to support it. We are, moreover, despite the empirical evidence demonstrating that emotions play a crucial role in our thinking, accustomed to the idea that the best argument wins. Philosophy is an argumentative game; this is what we philosophy professors teach to our students (and are certainly expected to do so). However, sometimes—especially when people put forward, and argue for, views that are ethically intolerable, whether or not they lead to school shootings or mass murders—it might be argued, at a meta-level, that argumentation is not the only game in town. Perhaps there are ideas dangerous enough not to deserve serious argumentative attention. Perhaps there are philosophical ideas and arguments that ought to be left aside precisely because they violate some human values and ideals that are, and ought to be, cherished more deeply than the ideal of sound argument itself. In suggesting that this might be the case, I am, to be sure, arguing. We will see, hopefully toward the end of this chapter, how far my argument reaches; in any event, my arguments are put forward within a wider moral reflection, and hence this chapter continues, by distinguishing between ethically engaged reflection on the limits of argumentation and the argumentative project of theoretical (or applied) ethics, the search for an appropriate perspective on ethical issues that I have already been involved with in the previous chapters. I will examine, as a case study, a particularly challenging philosophical thesis and the arguments supposedly supporting it, namely, David Benatar’s recent book, Better Never to Have Been, constituting an argument to the effect that it is, for sentient beings like humans, always harmful to exist. 2 It is through this example—a very good example directly leading to the metaphilosophical problems I want to take up—that I will examine the question of whether we should always follow the best argument, wherever it leads. My main goal is not simply to dispute Benatar’s view, which is in my view too far off the humanly possible moral scale to be seriously even disagreed with. 3 My main goal is, rather, to use this special case to enlighten the issue of whether argumentation is the most important thing in (moral) philosophy. In addition to arguments, we need, I will suggest, a culturally sensitive study of what we, within our form(s) of life, are able to regard as seriously thinkable and what we must ignore as an “ethical unthinkability” defining the limits of the form of life that makes it possible for us to think about ethical matters at all. Such studies are, again, parts of moral reflection, as I have used that concept in this book. My discussion of Benatar will, I hope, also lead us to appreciate the moral demand that truly serious philosophizing should not only be argumentatively and intellectually skillful but also a humanly, or even existentially, honest activity. 4 There is a peculiar kind of

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dishonesty (hardly intended but nevertheless implied) in arguments like Benatar’s—or, if not dishonesty properly speaking, at least a loss of moral seriousness. I will try to show this by means of an argument that I am again willing to describe as transcendental, locating a fatal self-reflective problem in Benatar’s approach (and, by implication, analogous ones). 5 Benatar, though I am sharply opposed to his approach, and thereby to his entire way of doing philosophy, touches a philosophical issue of great human significance, both ethical and metaphysical. (This, admittedly, is to his merit.) Ultimately, by discussing this issue, we will be led to question the standard order of these philosophical disciplines. Contra Benatar and many others, I suggest that we should not seek to first settle the metaphysical ideas (e.g., about personhood, sentiency, etc.) and only afterwards take a look at what follows at the ethical level. On the contrary, our inquiry into what it is like for us to be, or exist, at all as the kind of beings we are is all the way from the start ethically loaded. 6 Therefore we cannot accept Benatar’s conclusions, nor his approach. Or, better, we cannot even seriously start considering whether they would merit our acceptance. BENATAR’S ARGUMENTS AND THEIR PROBLEMS It would be impossible to summarize here all the arguments Benatar carefully puts forward to support his views. I will remain at a relatively general level, explaining his basic position. I must, for instance, ignore the metaphysical complications of his ideas, having to do with the notion of “possible people.” 7 I will focus on the relevance of his argument to how we (may) view the tasks of moral philosophy. By arguing that “coming into existence is always a serious harm” (p. 1), Benatar turns the traditional “evil of death” discussion upside down. Philosophers have, since Epicurus, been interested in the question of whether death is bad for us. 8 Now Benatar tells us that it is not death that is bad for us but life—or, more precisely, birth, one’s coming to have a life, coming into existence. According to Benatar, we always seriously harm people by bringing them into existence (p. 2). The basic argument is simple: those who do not exist do not suffer any harm, while those who do exist can suffer (and they will, at least, eventually suffer from the harm of having to die); we cannot say that non-existence harms the one who does not exist, while we can say that the many sufferings of life—all of which can never be avoided by anyone who exists—harm the ones who do. Relying on this asymmetry of the harmfulness of suffering and the non-harmfulness of non-existence, Benatar arrives at his devastating conclusions. All of us would be better off, had we not been born, and it is a duty not to bring any new children, new people,

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to the world. 9 It would be a good thing if fetuses were aborted at an early stage (and according to Benatar, we even have a moral obligation to do so, though not a legal one), and it would also be a good thing if the human species became extinct, sooner rather than later. 10 One way of observing the basic problem with Benatar’s discussion is by noting that his text is replete with economic metaphors. Coming into existence, he says, constitutes a “net harm” rather than a “net benefit” (p. 1); sentient existence comes “at a significant cost” (p. 2); “coming into existence is never worth its costs” (p. 13). It is as if we “bought” something, existence, by paying a price—too high a price, according to Benatar. He even playfully speaks about “kilo units” of positive and negative value (p. 63). But this is not the way we ordinarily think about our lives. We are not bought and sold; we do not have a price. 11 Insofar as we reject Benatar’s basic picture of the intrinsic harmfulness of existence as inhuman, we also have good reasons to reject the very economic discourse he employs (even though he, admittedly, employs it more or less metaphorically—perhaps without fully recognizing how important such metaphors are to how we view our lives). We may be well advised to reject such metaphors even in contexts in which they do not explicitly lead to as radical reductions of the value of human life as they do in the present one. The problems with Benatar’s position are not restricted to his use of economic discourse. His difficulties lie at a very deep, reflexive level—at a transcendental level, I would say. Consider, for example, his way of defending (perceptively, I must admit) immigration in contrast to procreation. “Should somebody’s freedom to create a person be more inviolable than somebody else’s freedom to have a friend or family member immigrate?” he asks (p. 12). I agree that there is an important political issue here. However, Benatar’s appeal to friendship is curious (to say the least) in this context. In his ideal world, there would be no human beings—or even no sentient beings. If one seriously adopts such an ideal, seeking to promote it by means of philosophical argumentation, it is highly unclear and, I believe, unlikely that one can coherently make sense of the very idea of friendship. The notion of friendship is applicable in a world in which people care about each other’s lives. In a world from which we could seriously hope everybody, including ourselves and the people nearest to us, to disappear, there would be little room for anything like friendship as we know it in and through our actual lives in this world—or for any concern with people’s rights to immigrate, for that matter. Benatar’s way of appealing to friendship is thus merely a rhetorical move in his argument. The argument itself may be worth considering further, though; by no means is immigration an easy political issue. Benatar’s difficulties are certainly not restricted to an isolated example like the one of friendship and immigration. In his introductory chapter, Benatar says: “Sound though I believe my argument to be, I cannot but hope that I

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am wrong” (p. 13). This is a revealing statement. It may seem that Benatar honestly hopes he is wrong. But if he really does so, it is not clear why he even presents the argument he does. If he genuinely believes the argument to be sound, and if he believes that it ought to be taken seriously, if sound, then it is unclear what role his “hope” can possibly play anymore. There is room for such a hope only in a world in which human beings care for each other to the extent of being willing to procreate new life, or at least willing to value others’ willingness to do so—in a world, in short, in which the extinction of the human race is not the desired outcome. Consider, for the sake of argument, a world (or even a local community) in which people generally believed, really believed, that Benatar is right and had adopted his moral recommendations for anti-procreation and abortion. Arguably, no hope would be possible in such a world, not in the sense in which we are able to speak about, and perhaps maintain, hope even in the most hopeless of circumstances in a world in which human life is generally valued, or in which violations against its fundamental value are considered horrendous. Moreover, it remains unclear what would constitute Benatar’s “being wrong” within his own system. If he is serious, as I believe he is (and as he reminds us himself), then his book is simply too far removed from any recognizably human ethical discussion to be regarded as a candidate for being right or wrong. The question of his being right or wrong does not even arise, because his position cannot be evaluated by any normal human standards we could recognize as ours. The very possibility of drawing and maintaining (however contextually and revisably) our ordinary distinction between what is good and bad for us—or for people we care about—presupposes a common human world from which we cannot rationally hope everybody to disappear. Perhaps my criticisms can be expressed as follows. Benatar is arguing from an imagined God’s-Eye View, not from a human perspective within our form(s) of life. From the latter, his totalizing comparisons between the goodness or badness of various states of affairs could not be made at all. He helps himself to an allegedly meaningful notion of goodness (as contrasted to harm) while trying to avoid the background commitments that make such a notion meaningful for us. Even when supposedly discussing the “quality” of life, he speaks about the good and the bad as being more or less quantitatively “distributed” in life (e.g., p. 62), strikingly ignoring the fact that a life with “bad” experiences, or a lot of harm (for instance, martyrdom), might nonetheless be experienced as deeply meaningful. In general, he neglects, when considering the good and the bad there may be in a life, the internal, experiential perspective of the one who leads that particular life. This simplified attitude to the good and the bad in human life is also manifested in Benatar’s assumption that “one cannot be mistaken about whether one is, right now, experiencing a positive or a negative mental state” (p. 74). Of course one can,

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unless one is a robot with no genuine experiential states at all. It may often happen that a human being is uncertain about whether her or his (mental or physical) state at the moment ought to be described as positive or as negative. For example, recalling the discussion of the previous chapters, one can—for perfectly good Kantian reasons—be highly uncertain about whether one has acted out of genuinely ethical motives or not, and thus about whether one is “worthy of happiness” or not—which may, of course, crucially affect one’s being (un)happy. Moreover, one’s experiencing guilt may itself be meaningful. Our life, then, is much more complicated, its goods and ills much more complexly intertwined, than Benatar admits. Nor can the meaning (or the lack thereof) of death and mortality be adequately conceptualized within Benatar’s quantitative approach (cf., e.g., p. 218). It is only from within a mortal life—a life whose mortality is understood as a deep problem, albeit not automatically therefore a “harm”—instead of any God’s-Eye View that we may truly examine such a fundamental issue. Benatar is, hence, simply inattentive to basic facts about our finitude. In short, he questions some of the most fundamental assumptions about the value of human life constitutive of those forms of life we are (currently) able to see ourselves as inhabiting and sharing with others, so fundamental that it becomes impossible to argue about the view he defends. Accordingly, he writes himself out of the candidacy of being right or wrong. Note that this is importantly different from claiming that his arguments do not succeed or that they are invalid. They may, for all we know, be deductively valid and even based on relatively plausible premises. But the very structure of argumentation he engages in is so remote from truly humanly considerable, humanly “thinkable,” thought structures that he writes himself out of the game. His self-reflective paradox, vulnerable to exposition by transcendental argumentation in a way analogous to, say, the exposition of radical skeptics’ selfreflective paradoxes, results from his rhetorically helping himself to some central concepts and values (e.g., the avoidance of suffering) belonging to the “normal” human form of life from which he takes his radical departure. His way of arguing for the moral duty not to procreate any (further) human life eventually renders his employment of the idea of avoiding suffering unintelligible. It is unintelligible in the context he has chosen, because it is fully intelligible only within (what I call) a normal human life inevitably committed to promoting life. Few of us could really imagine themselves putting Benatar’s allegedly moral statements into action. One must be at least a little bit “pro-life”-oriented—though of course not “pro-life” in any, say, religiously conservative anti-abortion sense—in order to find Benatar’s allegedly philanthropic considerations (ending up with “pro-death” and “anti-natal” rather than any “pro-life” views, especially when it comes to abortion) worthy of philosophical investigation. Then, para-

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doxically, they cannot be worthy of philosophical investigation any longer. In order to be able to find Benatar’s arguments possible candidates for acceptance, one must already stand outside them. Furthermore, consider once more Benatar’s basic argument, relying on the asymmetry mentioned above. “The absence of bad things, such as pain, is good even if there is nobody to enjoy that good, whereas the absence of good things, such as pleasure, is bad only if there is somebody who is deprived of these good things,” he writes (p. 14), 12 arguing that “the avoidance of the bad by never existing is a real advantage over existence, whereas the loss of certain goods by not existing is not a real disadvantage over never existing” (p. 14). Ingenious as this argument is, it overlooks the necessary context of human life needed for any such distinctions between the good and the bad. It is only in the context of (finite) life itself, within a form of life in which certain assumptions about the value of life are already in place, that we can make the kind of distinctions he makes. One must exist in order to be able to compare what is good and what is bad. This is what I mean by saying, as I did above, that Benatar attempts, desperately, to argue from a God’s-Eye View. 13 From a human-scale perspective, such an argument (typical of consequentialist moral philosophy, such as utilitarianism, more generally) is a hopeless non sequitur, because its basic premises lack justification, or even full intelligibility, in the context in which they are employed. Indeed, Benatar repeatedly invokes concepts and examples that make sense only if life is already assumed to be fundamentally valuable (see, e.g., pp. 21, 220). How else could, say, “caring” for others matter to us at all? Benatar claims to be “philanthropic,” but one can hardly avoid the impression that his “concern” for those potentially harmed by coming into existence (p. 223) is little more than sham concern, a kind of pretense, very far from genuine caring. In contrast to Benatar’s views, we might attempt to phrase our moral reflection in terms of the following kind of relatively straightforward transcendental argumentation. First, in order to be able to make distinctions between certain experiences of life (or entire lives) being good or bad, or beneficial or harmful, to the one who lives, or to others, we must live a human life—though, possibly, one day computers could live a life we now find exclusively human. Secondly, it is possible to live a human life with a capability for normative distinctions like the ones invoked in the first premise only within a (social, cultural) form of life in which certain assumptions about valuing the lives of others (and oneself) are cherished. Therefore, a philosophical argument seeking to establish that there should be no human life at all cannot rely on the kind of conceptual distinctions invoked in the first premise. Therefore, Benatar’s “pro-death” views are conceptually (and ethically) confused, not just false. Maintaining such views is ultimately impossible, at least for a “normal” human being, 14 and it is unclear whether even Benatar can genuinely maintain them. Moreover, and more importantly,

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maintaining such views is morally wrong, as they violate fundamental moral structures of our common humanity, including the humanity of those individuals who do suffer from their existence (and about whom Benatar thus is, in a sense, correct). CULTURAL UNTHINKABILITIES Conceptual confusion may indeed here be closely related to, or even inseparable from, what might be called ethical confusion. Disentangling certain ethical and conceptual confusions to which we might be tempted is a key feature of the somewhat amorphous “Wittgensteinian tradition” in moral philosophy, established by Wittgenstein’s pupils and followers like Rush Rhees and Peter Winch. Ben Tilghman—one of the more recent representatives of this Wittgenstein-Rhees-Winch tradition of moral reflection 15 — argues not against the kind of views Benatar favors but against reductive materialism (such as a complete neurophysiological reduction of the human cognitive faculty to what goes on in the brain) on the grounds of our ethically loaded task of understanding other human beings: “At the edge of materialism we reach one limit of language. Were we to venture beyond that edge our lives would be unrecognizable.” 16 I interpret this as a qualified transcendental argument: a reductive neuroscientific redescription of human cognition would make our understanding of and interaction with other human beings impossible; there are, thus, limits to how (scientific) language can be meaningfully used in discussions of what humans are and do, or at least to how such language can be used in a manner that will enable us to maintain our capacity to understand ourselves and each other as human beings. A different but equally relevant engagement with the limits of language in relation to ethical concerns is typical of the work of Gaita. 17 He argues that philosophical argument cannot, and should not, lead to what is ethically “unthinkable,” e.g., to the toleration of eating dead people or (pace some notorious arguments by Peter Singer) of killing three-week-old babies. 18 Presumably, Benatar’s above-described views could be added to this list of what we (given the kind of beings we contingently are) cannot but find unthinkable. Cultures, according to Gaita, are defined and distinguished from each other by what is unthinkable in them; a moral reflection on such unthinkabilities from within a framework in which they are unthinkable is, in my terms though not in Gaita’s, a quasi-Kantian transcendental reflection paralleling the discussion of what is meaningless from the point of view of some actual practice of meaningful language-use, or a reflection on what cannot be known from the point of view of our actual cognitive system. It is, arguably, part of our “commonsense realism” about other human beings and the com-

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mon world we live in to inquire into the limits and unthinkabilities that constitute our finite, culturally situated, historically changing human condition, conceptual and ethical alike. Such an inquiry is transcendental and may even lead us, like Gaita, to explore the “mystery” of our acknowledgment of other humans, although, once again, we should avoid the temptation to construe such a mystery in terms of some specific transcendent or supernatural property that humans share. 19 Now, Benatar’s approach leaves little room for such a mystery, or for the acknowledgment of the inherent (mysterious) value of another human being. His sharp intellectual exercise makes it impossible for any such value to emerge. This is why we—given the cultural unthinkabilities defining who we are—cannot follow him into his arguments and their conclusions. In the world we contingently live in, in a world in which mass murders of a larger and smaller scale have taken and continue to take place, all the way from Auschwitz to Kauhajoki and beyond, there are indeed culturally loaded ethical limits to what we may truly think and still remain human beings. That is, there are moral limits to what we may think and argue, even in philosophy. There are things we should not, morally speaking, say in philosophy (even though, as Benatar himself repeatedly notes, one need not believe that everything one considers morally wrong should be prohibited by law: certainly I do not think that Benatar should not have been allowed to write his book). The conceptual, or transcendental, “cannot” and the moral “should not” (“must not”) go hand in hand here. Benatar wonders why creating new people is rarely thought to require a justification (p. 2). 20 Well, perhaps this is because it is such a deep feature of human life as we know it—of the form of life we contingently lead—that it cannot be justified by any philosophical means (and cannot therefore be put into question either). It is just “there—like our life.” 21 Does life require justification? Do we have to justify the way we live? This depends. We do have to justify specific actions (and omissions), our buying certain kinds of goods instead of others, for instance. We may even, with Levinas, doubt our very right to live, to take the place from someone else (see chapter 3 above), and regard this possibility of doubt as a necessary condition for our being able to lead an ethical life, a life continuously reflecting our infinite duty toward and responsibility for the other. 22 We can in that sense “regret” our existence (cf. p. 204), not just because of the harm it contains but because we always, just by existing, fall infinitely short of being good or virtuous enough. But we can hardly meaningfully set out to justify life itself; nor can we overlook the fact that there is always a moral question (presupposing life) that we need to answer regarding the justification of our being there—here— instead of someone else. Our lives may ultimately not be justified, and they may even be something to be “regretted,” but life itself is the context within which justification (or the lack of it) and the possible regret make sense.

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Therefore, Benatar can hardly mean what we do when employing words like “deeply regrettable” (e.g., p. 208). Such expressions, again, acquire their meaning in a context valuing life, a context necessarily invoked (in Gaita’s terms) through “our common humanity.” Lars Hertzberg once remarked that the truly vast moral difference, considering the fictional scenario of saving three lives by killing an innocent healthy person and giving her/his organs to the three sick people who would otherwise die, lies not between those who would and those who would not be willing to engage in such a terrible action but between those who seriously consider this case morally relevant (and would, for instance, use it in teaching ethics classes) and those who do not. 23 Similarly, when Benatar (p. 3, n1) criticizes the defense of eating meat based on the idea that otherwise some animals would not be brought into existence at all by arguing that the same argument would render it acceptable to bring into existence human babies just in order to eat them at a later stage, he steps on the other side of a vast moral gulf. It is, once again, impossible to take seriously his comparison between the meat-eating argument and the imagined “baby-eating argument,” even as a fictional construction for sheer argumentative purposes. The latter “argument” is simply too far off the scale, too far removed from any even remotely humanly serious ethical position to be employed in philosophical argumentation about how we ought to justify our actions. When cultural unthinkabilities are (unreflectively, irresponsibly, immorally) “thought” (entertained, considered), it will no longer be possible to evaluate whether the arguments presented are “right” or “wrong”—pace Benatar’s suspicion that people will believe, and hope, that he is wrong (p. 16). The departure from our common standards of rightness 24 is so radical that no such evaluation is possible anymore. Benatar thus demands something impossible when intellectualistically requiring that one “has to examine the arguments for the disliked conclusion” (p. 203). This is indeed “reason gone mad,” as he himself (p. 203) fears to be read. 25 This concludes my transcendental argument against Benatar. As any transcendental argument, including Kant’s original ones, the present argument does not conclusively “prove” anything. Kant never proved that skepticism is false. What a transcendental argument can do here, however, is to examine—and to offer to throw some light on—the way(s) in which we are committed to living the kind(s) of lives we do live. Such an argument, as a piece of moral reflection, can illuminate our form of life, to employ a Wittgensteinian expression again. In the present case, I hope to have been able to illuminate a certain kind of seriousness belonging to the moral point of view. While the concept of guilt, emphasized in the previous chapters, has not been a central topic in the present one, there is a clear connection. In particular, it seems to me that the tendency to escape the human perspective, to step outside the boundaries our finite form(s) of life set(s) us, is a (hopeless)

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human attempt we are constantly potentially guilty of. The notion of guilt should, then, be brought back into the current discussion by noticing the unavoidable potential for guilt here. We are always already potentially guilty of attempting to be something other than the morally finite human beings we are. We are guilty of attempting to “know better,” to adopt—not just hopelessly but meaninglessly—the “God’s-Eye View” in our arguments and reasoning. Moreover, the “seriousness” we have found lacking in the kind of argument presented by Benatar is precisely the fundamental moral seriousness I have tried to capture in the previous chapters by employing the concept of transcendental guilt. The considerations of this chapter have therefore been an important addition to the moral reflection of the earlier chapters. THE INTEGRATION OF ETHICS AND METAPHYSICS As I already remarked, I have not examined Benatar’s views in order to express disagreement with them. If I said I disagreed with him, that would be like calling the Grand Canyon “pretty” or the Holocaust a “naughty” thing to do. 26 Language would betray us. For the purposes of this chapter, Benatar’s arguments have been studied as symptoms of something more profound that disturbs me and ought to disturb us all. Therefore, my criticism has been deliberately—and unavoidably—ambiguous between the claim that a view like Benatar’s is confused and the claim that such a view is in an important way immoral. It is both. These are two dimensions or aspects of the very special way in which such views are confused about the nature of our life and ethics. There is one more topic that needs to be considered before concluding this chapter. A metaphilosophically crucial issue here is the relation between ethics and metaphysics. Benatar joins those—undoubtedly the majority of philosophers today—who prefer to settle the metaphysical issues first and then look and see how the ethical ones can be settled. However, if my considerations are correct, an approach like Benatar’s is unethical from the very start (and perhaps also “unbiological” in an evolutionary sense). This observation is closely related to the claim that his position is not just conceptually but also ethically confused, vulnerable to a transcendental, reflexive critique in the manner presented above. It is unethical because it breaches some of the most fundamental (though, admittedly, historically changing and only contextually established) transcendental assumptions and limits constituting our form of life, thereby also breaching, by invoking “cultural unthinkabilities,” the criteria of responsible philosophical argumentation. This is why it fails also metaphysically and conceptually, not “only” morally.

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We should, instead of following Benatar’s arguments, join Gaita and other Wittgensteinians in insisting that it is not the case that the best, or the most intelligent, argument should always be followed. Philosophy is argumentation, but it is much more. It is a serious attempt to reflect on the lives we lead in this world, surrounded by other people—contingently, in a world in which mass murder is a reality and from which we cannot explain away evil and suffering. 27 Indeed, it is a major task for any responsible thinker encountering Benatar’s position to resist it without in any way “justifying” the suffering there is. We cannot justify the bad things that befall people in this world; there is no ethically responsible theodicy available, for instance. But if we attempt to fight against evil and suffering, we must first value human life. No such fight is possible if we too radically depart from the form(s) of life valuing life itself. I am not at all saying that this is an easy attitude to maintain. After all, there is a troublesome reflexive issue involved here: I have discussed, argumentatively, a view I think—and have argued—should not be discussed. How can we argue against discussing something without actually discussing it? Far from believing that we have found a satisfactory solution, I do remain puzzled here; we all should. (And even this is a philosophical view, requiring argumentative treatment. When saying what I am saying here, I cannot step out of the argumentative game of philosophizing.) In any event, I am arguing that not every argument, even if valid, should or even can (if I am correct) be pursued. There are limits to what we may legitimately and responsibly argue in philosophy (and elsewhere). Embracing (historically contextualized) cultural unthinkabilities and crossing the limits they set to responsible thought ought to be seen as a philosophical failure as much as, or even much more seriously than, a purely intellectual argumentative flaw is a philosophical failure. Any argument, including a supposedly purely metaphysical one about the nature of personhood (applicable to, say, the abortion issue), ought to be examined in a thoroughly ethical context; there is no ethically neutral context for metaphysical argumentation at all. 28 This is the broader metaphilosophical moral we may draw from our consideration of Benatar’s confused position. Moreover, given the considerations of the previous chapters, it should be emphasized that the ethical context is largely colored by the perspective of guilt. It is not clear, I have suggested, that we should even tolerate an argument like Benatar’s—although I must admit that I do not know what exactly it would mean not to tolerate it. I am not saying that Benatar’s book, or similar ones, ought to be burned; of course, I am not at all requiring that, politically, the freedom of speech and opinion should be restricted. After all, as Heinrich Heine famously remarked, if one starts burning books, one will eventually burn human beings. What I am suggesting is that moral philosophers should be extremely cautious even in starting to follow—to read and think about—

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arguments like Benatar’s. What may initially seem as a more or less plausible premise will turn out to lead to dangerous, ethically monstrous conclusions. Yet, again paradoxically, we must be able to think what we ultimately realize is unthinkable, and we are deeply responsible for maintaining and developing our capacities for such thought. We must be able to argue against arguing about—either for or against—certain unthinkable, unthinkably monstrous, views. There is no easy way out of this tension. The philosophical task of using reason, come what may, is neither an ethically neutral task nor an easy one. Perhaps it is not even possible for beings like us, for reasons that may be described as “philosophical-anthropological” (see chapter 2). Benatar finds the neonates’ cry at the moment of their birth as “ironically appropriate” (p. 5, n5), given his meek view of the “net harm” of existence. I do share this attitude: the neonate’s cry can be seen (by us, not by the neonates themselves) as an expression of the human existential anxiety in being “thrown into” the world which is more or less absurd—a world, we may add, that promises us all an ineliminably guilty existence. However, human life itself is, again, the condition for the possibility of this “thrownness,” of Heideggerian Geworfenheit. We cannot solve our anxiety or guilt by ceasing to be. We have to be there, here, in order to be anxious enough to be able to argue ethically about anything, including our right to be, and in order to be concerned about our guilt. Being here, and to some extent valuing that being, is also required for our being able to examine our paradoxical situation as both thinkers committed not only to reason and argumentation but also to the ethical requirement of finding some things more important in life than reason and argumentation. NOTES 1. Just think about the claims that there is no external world, or no other minds, independently of my mind (solipsism), that we know nothing or have no justified beliefs (global skepticism), that no word has a definite meaning (meaning skepticism), that all ethical statements are false (“error theory”), that mental or other non-physical objects and events do not exist (eliminative physicalism), and so forth. 2. David Benatar, Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006; paperback edition, 2008). Unspecified page references in the text (in this chapter) will be to this volume. 3. More precisely, I cannot find myself disagreeing with Benatar, because I would have to share a sufficient common ground with him in order to be able to either agree or disagree. His position, for me, is not a “genuine option” (to use a term coined by William James in his 1896 essay, “The Will to Believe,” reprinted in James, The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy, eds. Frederick H. Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers, and Ignas K. Skrupskelis [Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1979; first published 1897], chapter 1)—not a candidate for acceptance—and therefore I can neither accept nor (reasonably) reject it. The bulk of this chapter consists of a meditation of why this is the case and of what follows.

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4. See, e.g., Sören Stenlund, “Philosophy and Honesty,” in Christoffer Gefwert and Olli Lagerspetz (eds.), Wittgenstein and Philosophical Psychology: Essays in Honour of Lars Hertzberg (Uppsala: Uppsala Philosophical Studies 55, 2009), pp. 1-11. 5. For further recent (quite different) discussions of the relevance of transcendental argumentation in (meta)ethics, see Charles Illies, The Grounds of Ethical Judgment: New Transcendental Arguments in Moral Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003); Sami Pihlström, Pragmatic Moral Realism: A Transcendental Defense (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2005); and chapters 2-3 above. 6. The same holds for the inquiry into transcendental guilt in chapters 2-3 above. This metaphilosophical view, the entanglement of the ethical and the metaphysical, cannot be developed in this chapter in any detail, though. Cf. Sami Pihlström, Pragmatist Metaphysics: An Essay on the Ethical Grounds of Metaphysics (London: Continuum, 2009). It might also be suggested that the talk about our life “as the kind of beings we are,” normatively employed throughout this chapter, should be cashed out in evolutionary terms (I am grateful to Peter Swirski for raising this point). There is no doubt that there is an evolutionary history at the background of our form of life, including its deepest ethical commitments. I deliberately avoid this vocabulary, however, in order to avoid reductionist misinterpretations. 7. Wisely enough, Benatar avoids Meinongian overpopulated metaphysics by refusing to claim that “the never-existent are literally better off”; the claim is just that “coming into existence is always bad for those who come into existence” (p. 4). “There clearly are not any never-existent people,” he notes (ibid.). Well, David Lewis might dispute this (see his On the Plurality of Worlds [Oxford: Blackwell, 1986]), though less wildly speculative metaphysics of modalities probably wouldn’t. In the Lewisian concretely existing possible worlds, there definitely are people who are from the perspective of our actual world merely possible. But then again, it is unclear whether those merely possible people would really be better off in the worlds they live in. If Lewis were right, there might also be worlds in which every sentient being is completely happy. On the other hand, combining Lewis’s (incredible) view that all possible worlds exist and actuality is merely indexical with Benatar’s conception of the harmfulness of existence might even yield the absurd conclusion that even possible existence, because actual in some world, is harmful. Only “impossible people” existing in no possible world would then, per impossibile, be well off. (Are there such entities in any sense?) Accordingly, Benatar’s thesis of the harmfulness of existence must be restricted to the actual, empirical world we do exist in. 8. See, e.g., the papers pro and contra Epicureanism in John Martin Fischer (ed.), The Metaphysics of Death (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993). Benatar considers the Epicurean controversy in his final chapter, pp. 213-221. 9. This argument is developed at greater length in chapters 3-4 of Benatar’s book. 10. See the latter parts of Benatar’s volume, especially chapters 5-6, for the development of these wildly counterintuitive arguments. 11. From a Kantian point of view, for instance, one could argue that as human beings we do not have any economically measurable value but a much more fundamental valuableness simply based on the fact that we are humans (Menschenwürde). This is connected with one of the formulations of the categorical imperative: we must not treat either ourselves or others as mere means but always also as ends. 12. See Benatar’s chapter 2 for further reflections on this asymmetry. 13. A God’s-Eye View is also problematically implicated in Benatar’s allegedly straightforward distinction between a merely seeming (apparent) transformation or improvement of life and an actual one (p. 80). He says himself that he is viewing the goods of life objectively, sub specie aeternitatis, contrasting this with a sub specie humanitatis view (pp. 82, 86-87). It is this hubristic metaphysical realism (as we may call it, keeping in mind that Hilary Putnam famously charged metaphysical realism of a commitment to the “God’s-Eye View”) that leads Benatar to his catastrophic position. As the possibility of sincerely viewing once’s life sub specie humanitatis, with no higher perspective available at all, is blocked, there is no way of learning to accept one’s life from within, with its harms. For Putnam’s criticism of metaphysical realism, see especially his Realism with a Human Face, ed. James Conant (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1990); for his more explicit acknowledgment of the ethical dimen-

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sion of this critique, see Hilary Putnam, Jewish Philosophy as a Guide to Life (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2008). 14. I am using “normal” not just in a statistical but also in a normative sense, with an intended contrast to abnormal or pathological—and therefore in an important sense unacceptable—cases. 15. It would be impossible to discuss this Wittgensteinian tradition in moral philosophy in any detail here. For a recent contribution, also relevant to the present discussion, see Alice Crary, Beyond Moral Judgment (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2007). As Crary, I see problems in mainstream moral philosophers’ assumptions that moral discourse is specifically tied to explicit moral judgments. If we follow Crary and other Wittgensteinians in understanding language itself as a profoundly moral acquisition, then it is not at all clear that Benatar can coherently use the vocabulary of caring, good, harm, etc., in the way he does, given his radical departure from some of the most fundamental moral ideals, such as the value of life, to which most people inside the form(s) of life we (seem to) know “from within” are committed. 16. Ben Tilghman, “Morality, Human Understanding, and the Limits of Language,” in Thomas McCarthy and Sean C. Stidd (eds.), Wittgenstein in America (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), pp. 237-249; see p. 249. 17. See Raimond Gaita, A Common Humanity: Thinking about Love and Truth and Justice (London and New York: Routledge, 2000); as well as Gaita, Good and Evil: An Absolute Conception, rev. ed. (London and New York: Routledge, 2004; 1st ed. 1991). Cf. my discussions of Gaita’s ideas in chapters 2 and 3 above. 18. Gaita, A Common Humanity, pp. xxviii, 181-183. There is no denying of the fact that in some special circumstances people may be hungry enough to eat dead bodies. Then, however, we have stepped beyond a framework of argumentation, and no cultural (hence normative) unthinkabilities are at work any longer. 19. For related Wittgenstein-inspired reflections on the ethically fundamental status of the other, see Soren Overgaard, Wittgenstein and Other Minds (London and New York: Routledge, 2007); as well as Sami Pihlström, Solipsism: History, Critique, and Relevance (Tampere: Tampere University Press, 2004), chapter 5. 20. His chapter 4 discusses this issue in more detail. 21. On the broad philosophical significance of this slogan, taken from Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe and Denis Paul (Oxford: Blackwell, 1969), see Rush Rhees, Wittgenstein’s On Certainty: There—Like Our Life, ed. D.Z. Phillips (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003). 22. See Emmanuel Levinas, Entre Nous: Thinking-of-the-Other, trans. Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav (London and New York: Continuum, 2006; French original 1991). For a discussion, see, in addition to the two previous chapters of this volume, also Pihlström, Pragmatist Metaphysics, chapter 6. 23. This is discussed by Hertzberg in a paper published in Finnish, “Voiko etiikkaa soveltaa?” [Can One Apply Ethics?], niin & näin 4/2000. I have failed to locate any writing of his in English invoking exactly the same point. For related ethical reflections by Hertzberg, see, however, his The Limits of Experience, Acta Philosophica Fennica 56 (Helsinki: The Philosophical Society of Finland, 1994). 24. Our standards, including our valuing of life, may change in the course of the development of our form(s) of life. But this would ultimately redefine “us,” possibly beyond recognition. 25. “Which view we adopt must depend on the evidence,” we are told (p. 210). Fine, but there is no neutral evidence available here. Any evidence we may gather regarding philosophical theses on the scale of Benatar’s must be deeply committed from the very start. 26. Examples like this come from D.Z. Phillips, “The Holocaust and Language,” in J.K. Roth (ed.), Genocide and Human Rights: A Philosophical Guide (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005), pp. 46-64; and Phillips, “Mastery, Indeterminacy, and Conversation,” in Gefwert and Lagerspetz (eds.), Wittgenstein and Philosophical Psychology, pp. 157-172 (see p. 167). 27. In addition to the Wittgensteinian moral philosophers I have cited, one might here invoke William James’s discussion of the clashes of “philosophical temperaments” in Lecture I

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of Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (1907), eds. Frederick H. Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers, and Ignas K. Skrupskelis (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1975). For James, philosophical temperaments, far from being refutable (or justifiable) by means of mere argumentation, are the contexts or standpoints enabling us to engage in argumentation. This, however, does not mean that we would not be responsible for a continuous self-critical examination and development of our temperaments. On the contrary, our moral duty to reflect on what we are saying, in philosophical contexts and elsewhere, extends to the core of our identities. An essential question then is: can I really commit myself to what I am saying; can I, here and now, really maintain the view I am putting forward? (Reflection continues: who am I, or what kind of a person am I, if I can, or cannot? See chapter 6 for further elaboration.) 28. On the relation between ethics and metaphysics, see again Pihlström, Pragmatist Metaphysics (cited above).

Chapter Five

A Meaningful Life in a Meaningless Cosmos?

We all seek meaning in our lives. While anything like the meaning of life may be hopeless to find, at least if that expression denotes an all-encompassing, overarching meaning of one’s life as a whole, meaning(s) in life may, we are entitled to hope, be available in careful philosophical reflection and evaluation. 1 The meaning of life might, for instance, be regarded as the function of a design constructed by someone else than us, presumably by an external God who created us and thereby provided our lives with meaning. If so, there is little hope in the search for the meaning of life in the absence of theistic commitments, unless one attaches some kind of a mystical metaphysical significance to the natural order of things as a totality. The meaning (or meanings) in life, by contrast, invokes the committed perspective of an agent always inevitably situated within her/his life; to experience life as meaningful is to perceive certain specific meanings in one’s life. Thus, meaning in life is as much constructed as found; it must be literally made through one’s living one’s unique life. No external Creator or Designer is required for this process of meaning-construction to take place. The experience of guilt, or of the permanent possibility of guilt, as examined in chapters 2-3—as well as the experience of being unable to seriously reflect on moral life, or the world generally, from a God’s-Eye View, as examined in chapter 4 above, in particular—may seem to threaten our experiences of, and search for, meaning. I now want to add another perspective to this threat.

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THE BASIC CHALLENGE My aim in this chapter is to examine a fundamental challenge to the possibility of viewing human life as meaningful (even in the “meaning in life” sense). This challenge, very simply, arises from the amount and intensity of evil and suffering we cannot fail to notice in the world around us—and it is a challenge not only for those who must, sadly, undergo such suffering but for everyone else as well. How could human life in this miserable world be (experienced as) meaningful? More precisely, given the unbelievable sufferings of our fellow human beings, and given our own unavoidable transcendental guilt in the face of that suffering, how could our experiences of meaningfulness, or the meanings we claim to construct by living through our lives, be anything but illusory? The cosmos does not seem to care for our aspirations at all; in particular, it could not care less for our search for meaning. Is the concept of meaning even applicable to, say, the life of someone who recognizes that some of her/his fellow humans have gone through Auschwitz? Can the process of constructing meaning in and through life even get started in such a person’s life? It is, after all, meaningless suffering that is usually presented as a fundamental challenge for the value of life, and hardly anyone can deny that the world as we know it is full of meaningless suffering. 2 This is one way of saying that the cosmos, as we limited humans experience it, seems to be fundamentally meaningless. The search for meaning in life, and the attempt to understand and live with (apparently meaningless) evil, is both metaphysical and ethical. As Susan Neiman puts it in her important book on evil in modern philosophy, “[w]e ask about the point of making theoretical sense of the world when we cannot make sense of misery and terror.” 3 Do we have to “deny philosophy” if we take evil seriously, admitting that it cannot, and perhaps even should not, be theoretically analyzed? 4 These worries go to the heart of the problem of justifying a theoretical, intellectual, or contemplative attitude to life—an attitude that seems to underlie the very issue of the meaning of/in life. But it is not merely the theoretical attempt to understand life’s meaning and value that is threatened by evil. The fact (if it is a fact) that “the world contains neither justice nor meaning” is a threat both to our acting in the world and our understanding it. 5 Philosophy, according to Neiman, begins—and threatens to stop—with questions about “what the structure of the world must be like for us to think and act within it” (rather than beginning with purely theoretical skeptical issues that largely seem to define our philosophical tradition). 6 Just like the problem of evil inseparably entangled with it, the problem of finding meaning in life is “fundamentally a problem about the intelligibility of the world as a whole,” forming a tight link between ethics and metaphysics. 7 It is twentieth-century evil, in particular, often captured in

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the single word “Auschwitz,” that seems not only to challenge all rational efforts to understand the world and our life in it but to render evil thoroughly “intractable” and unintelligible, to undermine “the possibility of intellectual response itself.” 8 I will discuss two quite different options in the pursuit of meaningfulness amidst undeniable, apparently meaningless evil: the life of action and the life of contemplation (as I will call them). I shall briefly take up a couple of examples in order to illuminate the hard choice between these two, but my main emphasis will be on the difficult meta-level question of how to choose. It will turn out that it is by no means clear that even a coherent methodology for seeking meaning in life is available, if one recognizes the tension between the alternatives I analyze. Toward the end of the chapter, I will consider two potential ways of dealing with the tension: Thomas Nagel’s account of the absurdity of life, as seen from an objective point of view, and—once again— the concept of guilt, which I find crucial for developing an adequate view on this complicated matter. The chapter will then conclude with reflections on a closely related issue, the relation between the transcendental and the transcendent, something that has already been referred to in passing in earlier chapters but needs to be revisited. OUR TWO OPTIONS AND THEIR HISTORICAL CONTEXTS Should we orientate in this world of evil and suffering—this meaningless cosmos in which we desperately seek meaning for our lives but find only guilt—primarily through thought or through action? And how should we choose, if we have to focus on one of these alternatives? What, in short, does this choice mean for us? Let me first describe, in extremely broad strokes, the life of action. This ideal can be claimed to be common to traditions and idea(l)s as diverse as the Aristotelian notion of praxis, Marxism, pragmatism (especially John Dewey’s pragmatic naturalism), Kantian deontological ethics, critical theory, existentialism (especially Sartre’s doctrine of radical freedom), and recent trends in applied ethics (e.g., environmental ethics). All of these very different frameworks picture us as active agents capable of changing the world we live in. We can, and should, take our destinies into our own hands. We should do whatever we can in order to turn the world into a better place to live (whatever that ultimately means—and here, of course, the available theories differ significantly from each other). The cosmos is not pre-arranged in any fundamental, unchangeable way; we can at least try to change it through active engagement. Irrespective of what ethical duty actually amounts to from these very different theoretical standpoints, the life of action

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imposes on us the duty to actively shape the world, to render it more meaningful by rendering it more just or happy (in a sense the different theories specify in very different ways). In a word, the life of action pictures us first and foremost as ethical agents. It is the framework that we must adopt, if we (as we presumably ought to) find morality as the most important sphere of human life. The traditional conflicts between, say, deontological and consequentialist ethical theories are minor skirmishes compared to the basic conviction, common to these schools of ethics, that the world ought to be made better, and life more meaningful, by acting in it. The alternative, the life of contemplation, invokes the Aristotelian notion of theoria (instead of praxis); this ideal can be found, for example, in Stoicism, in certain Christian (especially mystical) traditions, and in twentieth century thinkers such as Simone Weil and Ludwig Wittgenstein. This is the view according to which we should (even if we never fully can) liberate ourselves from what Wittgenstein called “the problem of life,” 9 calmly learning to “take what comes” (as a Stoic might put it), and to utter (with Christians), “thy will be done.” The one who seeks meaning in her/his life through contemplation attempts to view life sub specie aeternitatis, as a (limited) whole, nevertheless finding her/himself inevitably within that whole—or, if Wittgenstein’s discussion in the Tractatus is pertinent here, at the “limit” of the world and life, which are “one.” If one finds happiness in and through one’s life of contemplation, then one’s life is entirely different from the unhappy person’s life; “the happy man” lives in a different world from that of the unhappy man. 10 Alternatively, one might, invoking Simone Weil’s vocabulary, try to locate the source of meaning in the decreation or de(con)struction of one’s self, in “de-selfing.” 11 All these ideas have an undeniably religious ring to them; it might even be suggested that the life of contemplation is essentially religious (even if it is not based on any of the historical world-religions), in contrast to the essentially secular ethical structure of the life of action. Now, should we go on living our lives on the basis of the ideal of action or, rather, that of contemplation? How should we rationally and non-question-beggingly make the choice between these two (admittedly only very loosely defined) alternatives? Before these questions can even be posed, we must pause to analyze what it would mean to make a choice here. This analysis must, again, be understood as a stage in moral reflection. Suppose, such a reflective analysis might begin, that you are inclined to adopt the perspective of contemplation rather than that of action. Suppose you have read the Stoics, or perhaps Wittgenstein’s cryptic remarks on God, destiny, and the meaning and value of life, and have ended up with a determinist or even fatalist position, contemplating the cosmos sub specie aeternitatis. What would it mean to really adopt this view as your considered, reflected, “view of life,” or Lebensanschauung?

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You may think that life will be easy and peaceful, and in a sense meaningful, if you just know how to “take what comes” and utter “thy will be done” whenever you have the illusion of finding yourself in a difficult situation. You may then decide to act on the basis of this position, to take it as your leading maxim in life. But in this case you will already have relied on “the life of action.” You have actively decided in favor of—indeed, argued for— the adoption of the contemplative (in this case, determinist or even fatalist) principle. You may even have invoked explicitly ethical reasons for the adoption of the contemplative orientation, insofar as you may have noticed that a mystical, religious conviction that ultimately “all is well” motivates you to help others, to alleviate suffering, and so forth. If you have thus justified your adoption of the life of contemplation on the grounds of principles belonging to the life of action, on the basis of the crucial difference that choice makes in your practices of life, then you cannot be said to have really adopted the life of contemplation as your overarching ideal, after all. This argument leads us to the problem I want to pursue in the rest of this chapter—the problem of how to choose and what “choosing” here means. Again, we are here dealing with an issue that calls for serious moral reflection on our human finitude. The choice that is set to us here troubles us precisely because we are finite agents lacking a God’s-Eye View to the world. HOW TO CHOOSE BETWEEN THE ALTERNATIVES? If we are to make a reasoned choice at all in the case I have described, it seems that it will have to be made on the basis of the life of action. Choices, in short, are human actions; they are something we make. Reasons and arguments are something that we actively present or provide. We have to do something in order to qualify as having chosen. Thus, it seems that action is primary to contemplation at a meta-level. We cannot seriously choose contemplation as our leading principle of life, unless we already tacitly rely on the principles of action. We might imagine a pragmatist—or a representative of some related line of thought, say, a Marxist or an applied ethicist 12 — arguing in this manner. Isn’t this “pragmatist” reasoning, as we might call it, slightly superficial, however? From the point of view of the life of contemplation, any choice we make, including the one between action and contemplation, is in a way illusory, or mere surface. This is because ultimately we can, according to the ideal of contemplation, only think about, (re)conceptualize, our lives and world, never genuinely change them, even by choosing the contemplative orientation. Evil or suffering, in particular, cannot be defeated, at least not

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“in this world”; they can only point toward the fundamental mysteries of life, or perhaps God’s mercy—as someone like Wittgenstein or Weil might persuade us to think. Our attempts to change our circumstances in any fundamental manner will inevitably be frustrated. Accordingly, far from presupposing the life of action, the life of contemplation uncovers the illusoriness of any allegedly world-transforming actions and practices. We seem to end up with a stalemate. For the “man of action,” thinking, even contemplation, amounts to action, and it is, in particular, a most important action for all of us to choose between an active and a contemplative (and thus passive) mode of life. For the “man of contemplation,” acting is secondary to thought not only in the sense that the latter is more important but also in the sense that the latter is more real, leading us to the ultimate heart of things in comparison to the actions that merely keep us on the surface of the world (and life). Both perspectives validate themselves, from within themselves, but they fail to persuade the one stubbornly insisting on the superiority of the other perspective. This situation might be described as an endless dialectic between action and contemplation. No final solution, from either point of view, can be found for the one who is equally open-mindedly looking for sources of meaning in both. Couldn’t we then just opt for both? We hardly can, because both frameworks judge themselves as superior to the other. If we opt for the life of action, we cannot simultaneously relativize that choice, rendering it only relatively important. If we are serious about ethics, we must realize that ethical duty is overwhelming, even more fundamental than religious contemplation. But if we are serious about religion, and find contemplation “from the perspective of eternity” our ultimate goal, then we cannot find our practical actions (and the moral duties they may be based upon) as equally ultimate or fundamental. Perhaps we should, if we also take seriously the ethical challenge of acting in the world, but we hardly can. Our problem becomes particularly obvious if we straightforwardly, if also slightly misleadingly, construe the life of action as life guided by morality and the life of contemplation as life guided by religion. Both institutions or practices, both perspectives on the meaningfulness of human life, are from their own perspective fundamental, basic, autonomous, and irreducible. For the moralist, religious views and practices may and should be ethically evaluated, just like all other human ways of thinking and acting. 13 For the true believer, the morally right or good depends on, or is determined by, God’s will and becomes inconceivable if conceptualized in any other way. Alternatively, the opposition may be construed in terms of the concept of guilt (and thereby more explicitly connected with the main topic of this volume): religion, or the life of contemplation in general, ultimately promises to liberate us from our moral guilt (traditionally through some kind of atonement process); on the contrary, the life of action never does so, because there is always more

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we could do to help others, to alleviate suffering, to do what we ought to do. For the moralist, we have never done enough, and we therefore cannot entirely get rid of guilt as our fundamental (“transcendental”) moral condition. Guilt is constitutive of our moral identities and defines what we are like qua ethical agents, as has been argued repeatedly in the previous chapters. The kind of craving for absoluteness I have described—the tendency to validate a perspective or an idea from within itself, subordinating rival perspectives—is, we might say, a transcendental condition for the possibility of both practices or perspectives I have distinguished. If either of these overarching ideals of meaningful life is to make sense as such an ideal, it cannot be relativized or watered-down in order to accommodate the other one, too. An inescapable condition for the possibility of ethics is the overridingness, absolute superiority, of the ethical point of view—and the same obviously holds for religion. There is, then, no neutral ground for making the choice, not even for choosing both. For the moralist, even the choice between ultimate foundational (“bedrock”) practices or perspectives on life must be made on ethical grounds; making such choices in any other way, for allegedly primary non-ethical reasons, would be immoral, because that would amount to subordinating ethical reasons to something more fundamental—and from the ethical point of view nothing can be more fundamental. 14 For the religious person, again, God’s grace is the ground of all our being, including our ability to engage in morally motivated actions. Our capacity for moral reflection is also, according to the believer, a gift from God—if also, paradoxically, something demanded of us by God. 15 Either way, the choice must already have been made, insofar as either framework can present itself as a rationally justifiable one, or one we could legitimately choose instead of the other. There seems to be no neutral point available for us to rationally choose the most fundamental framework we operate with. Because no neutral, “purely rational” choice is possible in this dialectical situation, that is, because either the life of action or the life of contemplation seems to be always already “transcendentally” presupposed in any choice we make, in any lebensanschaulich framework we find ourselves in, are we on our way to a kind of perspectivism or relativism? 16 Should we just declare both perspectives or frameworks as relatively valid, non-absolutely correct, each from their own perspective? But subscribing to this compromise would amount to a choice in terms of the life of action, insofar as we would choose or decide to view both valid “in their own terms.” What is more, such a relativizing move would hardly satisfy the demands of either ideal, because both, as already explained, see themselves as primarily important and fundamental. Thus we would not be able to occupy a neutral ground by this maneuver, either. A tension remains, if not an outright paradox. 17 None of the fundamental frameworks briefly described here can, without begging the question, legitimate its ultimate status to those who consider the other frame-

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work more fundamental, and no external philosophical analysis, or relativization, can settle the issue on a neutral ground. A NON-PERSPECTIVAL PERSPECTIVE? We might try to avoid the problem I have described by insisting on the possibility of finding a fully objective way of looking at things, a perspective devoid of our subjective idiosyncracies (whether inclined toward morally motivated action or passive religious contemplation). Here we might expect some help from Thomas Nagel, one of the relatively few analytic philosophers to have written at length on the problem of the meaning of/in life. According to Nagel, the major source of difficulty here is a certain dialectics between our subjective and objective points of view on the world and on ourselves. 18 From a highly objective point of view, my life (including my birth and my expected death) is thoroughly insignificant and unimportant, and so is everyone else’s. This is the point of view we might feel justified in adopting on the basis of the enormous success of natural science. This objective, non-perspectival view seems to tell us that our subjective perspectives, from which life may (at least occasionally) appear as meaningful and from which it is extremely hard to imagine either that my birth (which, objectively speaking, was thoroughly contingent and inessential, on a cosmic scale) would never have occurred or that I will certainly die at some point in the future, are deeply illusory. There really is no meaning or significance in one’s life at all, absolutely objectively speaking. Our real condition is the absurd, pretty much as existentialists like Sartre and Camus assured us in the mid-1900s, disillusioned by the extreme absurdity of the war they had experienced. Nagel argues that it does not help us to claim that we should not be too objective and that we should take seriously our subjective points of view, too: “we can’t abandon the external standpoint because it is our own.” 19 We have to occupy both perspectives. Nagel arrives at the conclusion that while “the absurd is part of human life,” this cannot be regretted, as “it is a consequence of our existence as particular creatures with a capacity for objectivity.” 20 Nagel, then, does not provide us with any easy solutions. He maintains, rather, that in a sense our problem has no solution, because the objective standpoint cannot be fully “domesticated” by us. 21 The absurdity of our situation results from a “collision within ourselves”: we are subjectively committed to our individual lives, and to our search for meaning within them, but the objectifying step is also a “natural” one for us to take. 22 It is we ourselves who take this step and thus detach ourselves from the particularities of our situation; life therefore seems absurd to us, not just to some

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outside detached spectator. One of Nagel’s somewhat skeptical conclusions at this point is that it may simply be hopeless to unify the subjective and the objective standpoints. The “aim of eventual unification” itself may be “misplaced”; the “coexistence of conflicting points of view, varying in detachment from the contingent self,” may be an “irreducible fact of life.” 23 However, instead of revealing the insignificance of our lives, Nagel’s objective perspective might be claimed not to “take in” significance at all. 24 The very idea of a life being significant or insignificant might just not be available from the so-called objective perspective. On the other hand—and here we arrive at something not emphasized by Nagel—even our subjective perspective of practical action may lead us to a point at which our edifice of meaning collapses. Let us recall the following words by James, whose active, life-celebrating pragmatism was always surrounded by a full realization of the fragility of our human projects: Must not something end by supporting itself? Humanism [one of James’s words for the kind of pragmatism he defends] is willing to let finite experience be self-supporting. Somewhere being must immediately breast nonentity. Why may not the advancing front of experience, carrying its immanent satisfactions and dissatisfactions, cut against the black inane as the luminous orb of the moon cuts the caerulean abyss? 25

That is, even if we do succeed in seeing our lives as subjectively meaningful, insofar as the “meaning in life” is our own pragmatic creation, whether through active (ethical) action or through more passive (religious) contemplation, we must realize that it is in the end “self-supportive,” something made by us in and through our action and/or thinking, with no higher authority supporting or grounding or justifying it. This perception, by itself, may lead to a collapse of meaning, to the inability of viewing anything in our finite lives as truly meaningful. James, the pragmatist, was also a protoexistentialist accurately observing the absurdity of the human condition, yet refusing to give up the search for meaning, or the “will to believe” in the ultimate triumph of meaningfulness. 26 In any event, Nagel’s analysis of the dialectics between the subjective and the objective standpoint, whatever its philosophical merits, does not remove our problem. If anything, it deepens it. If it is we who must settle the problematic relation between these two standpoints, oscillating from one to the other and back again, then we have to ask whether this is best done by means of action or contemplation. We also have to do this even if we believe that the notion of significance (or insignificance) cannot be approached from the objective perspective at all. Thus, we are back with our original issue. While religion or mere contemplation is certainly not a serious option for Nagel, 27 it might be for someone who follows James’s religious mysticism. But the main point here is that even religious commitments would not help. Even if

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religion is an option for us, it does not remove the problem of finding meaning in life. Nor, as is well known, can it remove the problem of evil—from which we started our reflection on the problem of meaning. It may be as difficult to justify one’s belief in God as to justify one’s belief in meaning (whether or not these ultimately come down to the same thing) in a world in which there is as much evil, suffering, and guilt as there is in ours, in a world that seems as meaningless, cosmically, as ours does. Arguably, the problem of evil was one of James’s principal arguments against rationalist versions of theism, 28 and this problem should never be overlooked by anyone seeking to understand what the issue of “meaning in life” is all about. 29 MEANING AND GUILT I have already suggested, if only in passing, that a source of meaningfulness might nevertheless be found in the humanly inescapable, yet puzzling, concept of guilt. I want to continue this reflection by raising a couple of thoughts related to this concept, thus also briefly returning, once more, to the relation between ethics and religion. It has been argued in the previous chapters that guilt is such a fundamental moral category that it plays a constitutive role in the ways in which we conceptualize our ethical relations to others: without experiencing guilt, or being able to do so, we would hardly be capable of employing any ethical concepts or judgments. We have to be able to acknowledge guilt, to see ourselves as guilty, in order to acknowledge full responsibility for our actions. The concept of guilt, then, plays a transcendental role in our ethical vocabulary, I have suggested, insofar as it is a necessary condition for the possibility of the kind of moral seriousness we (at least sometimes) regard ourselves as capable of. Now, the two options in our search for meaning that I have identified also differ in their ways of accounting for guilt. For the one subscribing to the “life of action” ideal, guilt is primarily practical, tied to the factual situations of life we encounter. One is always guilty of something specific; moral guilt necessarily relates to what one has done or has failed to do, i.e., which worldly facts one has, by means of one’s actions, caused or failed to cause. 30 The meaning in one’s life will then lie in the way in which one succeeds, or fails, in promoting the good, or doing one’s duty (depending on the moral theory one holds). For the contemplative person, on the other hand, guilt is more metaphysical and mystical: because one cannot really change the way the world is, or the facts that obtain independently of one’s thought and action, one’s guilt regarding such practical matters of fact is of minor importance in comparison to the guilt embedded in one’s sheer existence as such, in the fact that, in Levinas’s already familiar words, “[t]he I is the very crisis

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of the being of a being […] in the human […], because, being myself, I already ask myself whether my being is justified, whether the Da of my Dasein is not already the usurpation of someone’s place.” 31 This fundamental guilt, not unrelated to, yet not to be confused with, the religious concept of primordial sin, might then be a source for my experiencing my life as meaningful. I should always, at any moment, be prepared to put my entire life, my Dasein, in question, problematizing my right to exist. Paradoxically, this insight might lead me to view each and every moment of my life as uniquely meaningful. Accordingly, just like our search for meaning itself, the concept of guilt at its core can be interpreted both as an empirical and factual concept, tied to our actions, characterizing our practical, worldly existence, and as a transcendental one, structuring our ethical seriousness as such at a metalevel, providing a background or framework without which no search for meaning makes sense. The difficult choice between the two options I have distinguished must then be faced by the one who seeks meaning in guilt. One way of redescribing the problem I have been preoccupied with above is perhaps in terms of the following questions: Could religion (including the religious-contemplative attitude to the concept of guilt), for us, play the role of what Charles Taylor has (invoking Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and MerleauPonty) called the “background,” the implicit, inarticulate source or enabler of whatever makes sense for us in our explicit lives (our thought, language, etc.)? Could religious contemplation, that is, be part of what makes our form of life coherent, as seen from within? 32 If so, religion might function as the background of morality, and contemplation could be the background of action, rendering the latter meaningful for us. In particular, a religious contemplation on our metaphysical or transcendental guilt could then function as a condition for the experience of meaningfulness that might lead us to ethically motivated actions. But, again, such a Taylorian line of thought can only get started by first advancing religious contemplation as the more fundamental ideal of life, thereby again already having made a choice in favor of one of the alternatives, inviting charges of question-begging from those operating within the other framework. How would the religious person respond to the critic who asks her/him to justify, in an ethically acceptable manner, the reliance on the “background” s/he (perhaps implicitly) invokes, and the conception of guilt embedded in it? Again, I believe we have emptied our resources for dealing with this question. All we seem to have been left with is the endless dialectic between the perspectives or fundamental frameworks we started with. No Nagelian fully objective, non-perspectival “view from nowhere” is available for us, if we recognize, as this reflection hopefully helps us to do, our human limitations—our finitude. We cannot—though perhaps a non-human being, such as God, can, if there is such a being—avoid the choice between two different

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perspectives simply by seeking to view our world and lives non-perspectivally, on a cosmic scale. Meaning is a human (and therefore always perspectival) category, not a category of the non-human, objective world itself. 33 Yet Nagel may, therefore, be correct in emphasizing the absurdity of our condition. Given that even the methodological issue of how to deal with the different choices we can and must make in our search for meaning will be left unresolved, it is obvious that the question of meaning itself will also be left unanswered. Referring to The Brothers Karamazov, Neiman writes (and I tend to agree with her here): Dostoevsky underlined the idea that the problem of evil is not just one more mystery. It is so central to our lives that if reason stumbles there, it must give way to faith. If you cannot understand why children are tortured, nothing else you understand really matters. But the very attempt to understand it requires at least accepting it as part of the world that must be investigated. Some hold even this much acceptance to be unacceptable. Thus the rejection of theodicy becomes the rejection of comprehension itself. 34

The problem of evil—not as a theological puzzle but as a deep human problem entangled with guilt—is, then, a real test case for any views that may be defended regarding the issue of meaning. If no meaning can be found in a world of evil and suffering—in a world in which children are led to gas chambers—then the only ethically acceptable reaction might be to give up the intellectual, rational search for meaning altogether and to adopt a religious faith instead, thus moving from action to contemplation. This might, moreover, be the only decent way to live with one’s inescapable guilt, with one’s being part of a world in which children are tortured. But, again, such a move could also be ethically (and perhaps even religiously?) challenged. Would the move from ethics to religion really be a move beyond the life of action, if religious faith were chosen because of its potential ethical results, viz., because it would enable us to avoid an ethically problematic overintellectualization of our situation? Would such a faith be genuine? Our deepest questions, again, will be left unanswered. 35 The possibility remains, however, that someone—perhaps a pragmatist of sorts—might find this frustrating situation itself meaningful. That is, the fact that no final answers, substantial or methodological, to our worries about meaningfulness have been or ever can be given (as far as we can see, on the grounds of the considerations I have provided), as well as the fact that we (insofar as we are able to identify ourselves as ethically concerned agents) inevitably find ourselves guilty (and that if we don’t, we ought to find ourselves guilty at a meta-level), might be taken to be among the key potential sources of meaning in our lives. These might be fragile and definitely less

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than fully consoling sources of meaning, but they might be sources nonetheless. It is with this moderately promising thought that I should like to close this chapter. Yet I cannot. There is one more related issue we need to examine at this point. THE TRANSCENDENTAL AND THE TRANSCENDENT It is, as is well known, a feature of utmost importance to Kant’s transcendental philosophy that the concepts of the transcendental and of the transcendent are strictly kept separate. 36 The latter refers to something that lies beyond human experience and knowledge (such as things in themselves, or the unknowable objects of the “ideas of pure reason” critically analyzed in Kant’s Transcendental Dialectic, i.e., the soul, freedom, and God), whereas the former denotes the limits and/or conditions of experience and knowledge, particularly the necessary conditions for the possibility of cognitive experience that Kant examines in his Transcendental Aesthetic (i.e., space and time as Anschauungsformen) and Transcendental Analytic (i.e., the pure concepts of understanding, or the categories). 37 We should of course avoid overlooking the fact that we are speaking about quite different forms of unknowability or incognizability when invoking such different transcendent principles or “entities” (lacking a better word) as God, the Kantian thing in itself, or the Wittgensteinian ultimate value (to be discussed shortly). Nevertheless, I am confident that a careful consideration of the general distinction between the transcendental and the transcendent is important for the purposes of understanding the concept of transcendental guilt discussed in the previous chapters, as well as the related problem of the meaning or significance of life taken up earlier in this chapter. Moreover, this relatively abstract and heavy issue will reconnect my moral reflection on guilt to the tradition of transcendental philosophy. One of Kant’s most emphatic formulations of the distinction between the transcendental and the transcendent is the following: We will call the principles whose application stays wholly and completely within the limits of possible experience immanent, but those that would fly beyond these boundaries transcendent principles. But by the latter I do not understand the transcendental use or misuse of categories, which is a mere mistake of the faculty of judgment when it is not properly checked by criticism, and thus does not attend enough to the boundaries of the territory in which alone the pure understanding is allowed its play; rather, I mean principles that actually incite us to tear down all those boundary posts and to lay claim to a wholly new territory that recognizes no demarcations anywhere. Hence transcendental and transcendent are not the same. The principles of pure understanding we presented above should be only of empiri-

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From the Kantian point of view, then, a transcendent principle more radically transgresses the boundaries of human experience than a transcendental one (or one transcendentally and non-empirically employed); it not only (tries to) step outside the limits set for the empirical employment of the principles of understanding (or categories) but removes the very limitation itself, or at least seeks to do so. There are a number of other passages in the first Critique in which Kant tries to spell out what he means by the “transcendent.” For example, we are told that there is no adequate empirical employment for transcendent principles. 39 Kant himself, however, may be claimed to, at least occasionally, obscure his own terminology by being slightly careless with the transcendental vs. transcendent distinction. The “pure concepts of reason” examined in the Dialectic are “transcendental ideas” (transzendentale Ideen), while their employment is, typically, “transcendent.” 40 Another passage, from the conclusion of the Antinomies chapter, is somewhat clearer: As long as we, with our concepts of reason, have as our object merely the totality of the conditions in the world of sense, and what service reason can perform in respect of them, our ideas are transcendental but still cosmological. But as soon as we posit the unconditioned (which is what is really at issue) in that which lies outside the sensible world, and hence in that which is outside all possible experience, then the ideas come to be transcendent; they do not serve merely to complete the empirical use of reason (which always remains an idea, never to be completely carried out, but nevertheless to be followed), rather they separate themselves entirely from it and make themselves into objects whose matter is not drawn from experience, and whose objective reality rests not on the completion of the empirical series but on pure concepts a priori. Such transcendent ideas have a merely intelligible object, which one is of course allowed to admit as a transcendental object, but about which one knows nothing; but for the assumption of such an object, in thinking it as a thing determinable by its distinguishing and inner predicates, we have on our side neither grounds of its possibility (since it is independent of all concepts of experience) nor the least justification, and so it is a mere thought-entity. 41

The objects of transcendent ideas, or of ideas and principles whose employment is transcendent, thus remain “mere intelligible objects,” mere Gedankendinge, comparable to Kant’s famous noumena. Roughly, Kant’s picture is that the transcendental ideas of soul, freedom, and God can be employed either immanently or, if they are “taken for concepts of real things” (if “sie für Begriffe von wirklichen Dingen genommen werden”), in a transcendent manner: “For in regard to the whole of possible experience, it is not the idea itself but only its use that can be either extravagant (transcendent) or indige-

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nous (immanent) […].” 42 The transcendental ideas of the Dialectic may, moreover, have a legitimate regulative employment, but they can have no constitutive employment in the way in which the transcendental conditions of experience to be found in sensibility and understanding do; that is, they cannot be used to constitute a transcendent rationalist system of knowledge. 43 Yet, famously, they do have an important employment as “postulates of practical reason.” I have quoted Kant extensively in order to provide some context for the reflections with which I will conclude this chapter; yet, my purpose in this book is not to settle the historical question of what Kant meant by the notions I am examining. The relation between the transcendental and the transcendent does deserve philosophical scrutiny even in our own time, however, especially in the context of moral reflection. Indeed, this distinction is all too often overlooked today—and overlooking it may cause confusion especially if we want to examine the kind of problems discussed in the first half of this chapter. We easily find otherwise insightful and careful thinkers somewhat carelessly using these two terms more or less interchangeably, or at least without making clear what their meanings are. We also find philosophers deliberately blurring the distinction: for instance, A.W. Moore passes over Kant’s distinction “for the sake of simplicity,” while inaccurately claiming that transcendental idealism postulates a transcendent (non-empirical) dependence of “some aspects of the form of that to which our representations answer” on “some aspects of the representations.” 44 In many cases, including perhaps Moore’s, using the word “transcendental” would suffice; the talk about transcendent entities or transcendence often leads to trouble. 45 It would, however, be too simple just to drop the transcendent and stick to the transcendental, because in some cases no adequate understanding of certain specific transcendental conditions—such as, perhaps, guilt—is possible without reference to what is seen as transcending the limits set by those conditions. I will, in the remainder of this chapter, briefly examine the possibility of maintaining a commitment to something that is taken to be transcendent from the perspective of certain kind of experience, or form of life, 46 as a transcendental requirement for the intelligibility of that kind of experience or form of life. In Kantian terms, the question is whether the legitimate employment, or perhaps regulative employment, of a certain transcendent idea or principle can itself be transcendentally defended or vindicated. We will, thus, notice a puzzling but philosophically interesting interplay, or what may be called a dialectic, of the transcendental and the transcendent. It is at this point worth the while to add a few remarks on the relation between religious and ethical language, as conceived by Wittgenstein. This again leads us to the problem of the relation between the transcendental and the transcendent. Perhaps we can say that both are present in Wittgenstein’s

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views on ethics: the ethical thinker’s commitment to transcendent, ineffable moral values (e.g., “the right way” in “The Lecture on Ethics”) is a transcendental condition for the possibility of serious ethical life and thinking. One might argue, again with a Wittgensteinian tone of voice, that unless ethical value is something transcendent and absolute, in comparison to our always relative and transitionary human projects, it is not ethical in any deep sense. Similarly, while it may turn out that the notion of transcendental guilt requires the framework of contemplation, with its transcendent assumptions, our commitment to that notion (and that framework) may itself be transcendental. This, however, still needs some further elaboration. In a couple of famous remarks toward the end of the Tractatus, 47 Wittgenstein tells us that ethics and aesthetics are one, that they are based on the will of the subject (“my will”), and that they are, like logic, “transcendental.” 48 The 1929 “Lecture on Ethics” continues along similar lines. Having described ethics as an inquiry into what is valuable or really important or into the meaning of life or what makes life worth living, Wittgenstein says that these expressions can be used in a trivial and relative sense or in an absolute and ethical sense. 49 The value judgments of ethics are absolute, not relative, and therefore they lie beyond what can be stated in language. The absolutely good or the absolutely valuable has no more literal sense than the experience of being “absolutely safe” has; thus, in ethics we necessarily misuse language. 50 Ethical value, in short, is not on a par with worldly facts (which include relative values, means for certain ends). People who try to write about ethics or religion “run against the boundaries of language.” 51 As the Tractatus puts it, there can be no ethical propositions (or sentences, Sätze), because nothing “higher” can be expressed in propositions or sentences; ethical value, or the “meaning” (Sinn) of the world, must lie “outside the world.” 52 Ethics, then, is something sublime, otherworldly—transcendent. Or is it? Dale Jacquette reads Wittgenstein as subscribing to the thesis that ethics “transcends the natural world.” 53 This is so because, according to Wittgenstein (in the Tractatus), the “metaphysical subject” is a necessary condition for any ethical value and this subject transcends the natural world. 54 The subject itself, as transcendent, is thus the source of the transcendence of ethics. The result is that ethics belongs to that which must be passed over into silence according to the famous final proposition of the Tractatus. There can be no (deep, interesting, or non-vulgar) talk about ethics or values at all—but only trivial, shallow, relativized value-talk. As Jacquette puts it, “there is only the transcendence of ethical attitude and practice that colours the world of objective fact with ethical-aesthetic value in subjective experience grounded by the world-transcendent metaphysical subject.” 55 Jacquette’s (and many other interpreters’) way of speaking about the transcendence of ethics and about the subject as transcendent may, however,

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be subjected to critical scrutiny. Wittgenstein’s statement that ethics (as well as aesthetics) is transcendental should be taken seriously; 56 given his Kantian-Schopenhauerian background and the generally extremely carefully constructed text of the Tractatus, it is implausible to suppose that Wittgenstein would simply have ignored the Kantian distinction or have made a slip of pen here (see also chapter 3 above). Despite Wittgenstein’s undeniably mystical bias, there is, arguably, a sense in which ethics does not, according to him, lie “outside” or “above” the world (and human life) in any literal sense of these words. It lies, rather, at the limit of the world, for ethics, like religion and aesthetics, provides for Wittgenstein a view to the world as a (limited) whole, as something valuable in a higher sense. In short, given Wittgenstein’s discussion of the metaphysical subject as a “limit of the world” in the Tractatus, 57 one may say that ethics is essentially about the subject’s perspective or attitude to the world and life, a perspective constituting a condition for the possibility of the world. This position is compatible with, or may even require, the “transcendental solipsism” one finds Wittgenstein developing in the Tractatus: the subject (as the limit of the world) sees her/his world as a whole under the aspect of ethical or aesthetic value, sub specie aeternitatis. There is no (clear) “transcendence” here—but only transcendentality. 58 I am not sure, however, whether this transcendental yet non-transcendent interpretation of ethical value and of the ethical (metaphysical) subject as conceived of by Wittgenstein can really be carried through. The above-cited formulations in the “Lecture on Ethics,” in particular, seem to affirm a picture according to which ethics is a (desperate) attempt to speak about something that lies beyond the boundaries of language, steps over the legitimate limits within which meaning is found. One option might be to interpret Wittgenstein as offering a transcendental argument in favor of certain transcendent assumptions. This could then be applied to guilt more specifically. Perhaps the detailed interpretation of Wittgenstein’s early views on ethics and ontology by Martin Stokhof may help us here. 59 Referring to the discussion of the will in the Tractatus, Stokhof does speak about the “ineffability of value” 60 and about the “transcendent nature of the will with regard to the world and the concomitant transcendent nature of ethics.” 61 He immediately adds, however, that this transcendence is logical, not ontological: “All our acting takes place in the world and hence our will, our ethical attitudes, are immanent at the same time.” 62 Values, although they do transcend the world, should not be sought in an “ontologically transcendent realm,” because the world is primarily a linguistic notion, rather than an ontological one. 63 True, the (ethically) good “in an absolute sense” can—or should, according to Wittgenstein—be seen as “an attribute of God’s Will,” but even here the transcendence involved is not absolute but is “tied to the world,” given Wittgenstein’s identification of God with “how things stand.” 64 Stokhof thus

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argues that the distinction between the individual, psychological subject and the metaphysical (willing, ethical) subject—a distinction between two different perspectives from which the world can be viewed—is not a distinction between two separate ontological realms, that is, between empirical reality and otherworldly transcendence. 65 Through Wittgenstein’s linguistic turn of the “Kantian program,” the notion of transcendence is transformed, rearticulated as an essentially linguistic notion: So, ethics is transcendental not because values are outside the world, in some otherworldly, platonic realm, nor because they cannot be grasped in thought, but because ethics “cannot be said.” There are values and they are in the world, but not in the same way as contingent objects and situations are. And they are accessible, also for the individual subject, albeit not by means of its discursive powers of language and thought. […] By placing ethics outside the realm of the meaningful, Wittgenstein tries to safeguard it from argumentation and disputes, dogmatism and feuds. There is absolute value, but it is not accessible for the discursive mind and the corresponding linguistic ways of interacting with the world. 66

According to Stokhof, Wittgenstein is saying that we can view the world from the point of view of logic and ontology, “from the midst of things,” but also sub specie aeterni, “as a limited whole, of which the limits are determined by the ethical will.” These, again, are not two different ontological spheres but two ways of viewing the same thing or two ways of interacting with the world. 67 They are two perspectives from which the world can be seen in a very different “light.” We can compare these perspectives to the ways in which, as I have suggested above, we can view our lives and whatever is contained in them both from the perspective of empirical (factual, ordinary) moral guilt and from the perspective of transcendental guilt—the latter corresponding to the sub specie aeterni view. As Stokhof further explains his conception of the peculiar sense of transcendence involved in Wittgenstein’s position: Ethical value is in the world. It is an intrinsic aspect of our actions and our actions are clearly part of the world. In this sense the world has an ethical dimension and value is immanent. But these intrinsic ethical properties cannot be expressed in language and hence in the world as it appears in our language, and hence in our thought, value is not to be found. In that sense value is transcendent. Immanence and transcendence are logical and not ontological categories, since the world and its limits is a logical and not an ontological notion. Only in this way can the Tractatus be read as a coherent whole. 68

Stokhof believes that his reading of Wittgenstein, with the qualified sense of ineffability and transcendence involved, may save a “down-to-earth,” practical way of dealing with moral problems, and that the value of the Tractatus may even lie in its invitation to lead a fundamentally ethically concerned

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everyday life. 69 I am not sure whether his interpretation can secure such a result—although I do see surprising similarities between Wittgensteinian moral philosophy and (neo)pragmatism in ethics. 70 Be that as it may, it seems to me clear that Stokhof’s reading is superior to Jacquette’s, which leaves the crucial concepts of the transcendental and the transcendent largely unexplained. Stokhof, thoroughly familiar with the Kantian context of transcendental philosophy from which Wittgenstein’s inquiries take their departure, succeeds in showing how Wittgenstein’s remarks on ethical value and the ethical (metaphysical) subject actually yield a rearticulated notion of the transcendent. Insofar as God is involved in Wittgenstein’s project as “fate” or the way the world really is (as seen sub specie aeterni), a crucial link between the concerns of the philosophy of religion and moral philosophy has also been established. In both, a rearticulation of the traditional Kantian distinction between transcendentality and transcendence is urgently needed. This reading may thus also help us in our search for meaning and in our attempt to locate the notion of transcendental guilt in that search. Analogously to what Stokhof says about value and the subject, the concept of guilt is also perspectival. For an ethical subject, guilt is a way of being in the world, a way of viewing one’s life in the world. It necessarily requires the ethical agent’s perspective on the world; it is not something that can just be theorized about from an imagined God’s-Eye View. There is, moreover, just this world, no transcendence in an absolute metaphysical sense; yet there is continuous transcendence of mere worldly facts and events in our guilt, and this realization is transcendentally necessary for us from within our commitment to moral life. This dialectics between the transcendental and the transcendent is vital for our continuous search for a sufficiently deep (metaphysical, or perhaps quasi-religious) meaning of guilt—along with related notions such as the meaning in life I started out in this chapter, as well as notions like evil, sin, or (perhaps) soul—for a search not strongly committed to any religious doctrines yet attempting to maintain something from their peculiar kind of depth. 71 A TRANSCENDENTALLY CONSTITUTED TRANSCENDENCE? We have, through a study of ethical language-use, ended up with the need to acknowledge, in addition to the transcendental limits of meaningful language, the transcendental role played (at least on some occasions) by the transcendent. We have reached this conclusion through a relatively simple example; yet, this should be sufficient to make the claim that a commitment to the transcendent may play a transcendental role in our linguistic practices.

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On the other hand, no alarming commitment to any pre-critical (non-Kantian) form of metaphysical idealism follows, because the transcendent is here relativized to the transcendental limits of the particular language-game in question, such as the religious discourse on evil or the ethical discourse on values and guilt. In such a given language-game, conversely, the transcendental limits are partly set (through our historically changing practices) by something’s being acknowledged, by the relevant participants in the practice, as transcendent. This is a circle, of course, but hardly any more disturbing than the reflexive circularity inherent in virtually any employment of a transcendental method. We might at this point draw a distinction between absolute and relative notions of transcendence, suggesting that the former lies beyond any human limits (of sense, of cognition, etc.), while the latter remains relativized to some particular language-game and might not be transcendent from the point of view of some other language-game. This distinction becomes elusive, however, as soon as we note that it is only against the background of, or relative to, some particular practice or language-game that anything (even, say, divinity) can be said to transcend all human limits. Thus, the “absolutely transcendent” can be conceived as such only from the perspective of one or another relativizing practice. This is perhaps to say that a genuinely transcendental approach has no use for the notion of absolute transcendence, though it is able to—or indeed must, as I have suggested—accommodate relativized forms of transcendence. 72 If our commitments to the transcendent are, then, inevitably, humanly relativized and (as I have suggested) “perspectival” ones, the final question arises whether we, because of our (supposedly) transcendental need to postulate the transcendent, actually construct the transcendent. Does the transcendent, if real, ultimately depend on us for its reality—on our human, especially ethical or ethico-religious, perspectives, interests, needs, and perspectives? And if so, is it still possible to describe it as “transcendent”? Could any humanly intelligible notion of transcendence be reinterpreted in such a relativized fashion, or is only an absolute transcendence transcendent enough? I must admit that, through the discussion of my chosen examples, I have hardly found any final or general answers to the questions I have raised in this chapter. But I hope that a pragmatic view of the role played by transcendental conditions in various areas of our lives, even by transcendentally established commitments to transcendence, may offer some help in highlighting the specific nature of such conditions and commitments. 73 So will, I believe, a philosophically adequate reflection on the morally vital role played by the concept of guilt. This concept, as explored in this book, crucially contains both transcendent and transcendental dimensions.

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NOTES 1. I recall a helpful conversation on this distinction with Professor Ingmar Pörn back in the mid-1990s. 2. Evil and suffering intensify our problem but do not exhaust it, because mere mortality may be taken to deprive life of meaning. These problems are, of course, connected, as death itself can be, and has often been, regarded as something evil—even though the contrary view, according to which immortality would be meaningless, has also been advanced. The present chapter does not directly address the issues of death and mortality; see, however, Jeff Malpas and Robert C. Solomon (eds.), Death and Philosophy (London and New York: Routledge, 1998); as well as Sami Pihlström, “Death—Mine or the Other’s? On the Possibility of Philosophical Thanatology,”Mortality 6 (2001), 265-286. As Merold Westphal has noted, in connection with existential phenomenology of religion, there is a profound relation between death and guilt: existentially, my mortality leads me to ask (or at least should) whether I have lived, or am living, my life in a right way. See Westphal, God, Guilt, and Death: An Existential Phenomenology of Religion (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1984), especially p. 101. 3. Susan Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002; paperback ed., 2004), p. xviii. 4. See ibid., p. 42. On the “intractability” of evil, see also Richard Bernstein, Radical Evil: A Philosophical Interrogation (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002); and Bernstein, The Abuse of Evil (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005). Both Neiman’s and Bernstein’s books can be read as reminding us of the problem of evil as the challenge for any reasonable or rational attempt to evaluate philosophically the meaningfulness of life, for our inescapable quest for understanding the human condition. Other insightful recent contributions to the understanding of evil include, among others, Adam Morton, Evil (New York and London: Routledge, 2004); Alan D. Schrift (ed.), Modernity and the Problem of Evil (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2005); Phillip Cole, The Myth of Evil (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006); John Kekes, The Roots of Evil (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007); and Peter Dews, The Idea of Evil (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008). Unlike most other theorists of evil, Cole actually argues against the reality of evil, specifically against our being able to explain human actions in terms of this notion—in any non-mythological way—and thus suggests that we would do better without the very concept of evil. Nevertheless, he notes that the fundamental question of “the meaning of humanity” lies behind our attempts to understand the meaning(s) of evil (Cole, The Myth of Evil, p. 19). Moreover, Cole acknowledges the value of myths and literature in the task of conceptualizing those human actions that might seem to require the discourse of evil. This rich theme cannot be discussed here; see also, e.g., Colin McGinn, Ethics, Evil, and Fiction (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997); and Richard Kearney, Strangers, Gods, and Monsters: Interpreting Otherness (London and New York: Routledge, 2003). On the other hand, a number of other authors have sought ways of properly employing the concept of evil—and saving something from its quasi-religious “depth” even in modern secular culture. As Schrift’s volume, Modernity and the Problem of Evil, makes clear, a certain kind of interplay between the natural and the theological seems to be a major issue in a number of contributions to the problem of evil, with different authors seeking ways to develop a philosophical concept of evil without “falling into a theologically motivated discourse” (Schrift, “Introduction,” ibid., p. 9). My project of saving the (quasi-theological) depth of the concept of guilt—comparable to the religious concept of sin—without explicitly religious or theological commitments clearly parallels this. Furthermore, Lars Svendsen’s recent discussion of evil in his book, A Philosophy of Evil (trans. Kerri A. Pierce, Champaign and London: Dalkey Archive Press, 2010; Norwegian original published in 2001), is worth recommending in this context. While he does not deal with the concept of guilt in any substantial way, he does point out, in the context of his discussion of Kant’s theory of evil, that our only access to the moral law, from a Kantian perspective, is through a feeling of guilt: “I’m guilty, and therefore I’m free.” (Ibid., p. 116.) This clearly corresponds to the suggestion made in the previous chapters about guilt being constitutive of moral agency. Moreover, we all “potentially bear” the kind of guilt resulting

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from engaging in banal evil that people like Eichmann do (ibid., p. 190); contrary to the frequent suggestion that there are purely good and evil people around, we are all both good and evil, and we should also recognize that only the one who is (potentially) guilty can be innocent (ibid., p. 196). Without guilt, there would be no morality. We are not all guilty or evil in the religious sense of having participated in something like the original sin; yet, in quasi-religious terms, Svendsen’s point could be expressed by saying that the state of the human race is “fallen.” This, again, challenges our ability to find our existence meaningful. What we need in this situation, amidst evil and guilt and absurdity, is, however, moral reflection, instead of, say, supernatural grace; as Svendsen repeatedly recognizes, we only have our reflective moral judgment to rely on when fighting the evil there is in the world. 5. Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought, p. 7. 6. Ibid., p. 5. Thus, Neiman’s project is to lead philosophers back to the “real roots of philosophical questioning” (ibid., p. 13), redescribing the tradition of modern philosophy as a struggle with the problem of evil (rather than, say, with the problem of external world skepticism). The details of Neiman’s story do not concern us here, but I am, generally speaking, very sympathetic to her project of redescription. Again, we might say that my project in this book is a comparable one: I am trying to lead moral philosophy back to its roots in a continuous reflection on guilt (just as the “roots” of religious ways of experiencing life might be seen in the reflection on one’s sins). 7. Ibid., pp. 7-8. This link could be strengthened by following Wittgenstein in regarding the world and life as, ultimately, “one.” See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921), trans. David F. Pears and Brian F. McGuinness (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974), § 5.621; for a useful commentary regarding this matter, see Martin Stokhof, World and Life as One: Ethics and Ontology in Wittgenstein’s Early Philosophy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002). 8. Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought, p. 256; cf. the other works on evil cited in note 4 above. 9. Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, e.g., § 6.521. 10. Ibid., § 6.43. See also the discussion in Sami Pihlström, Pragmatic Moral Realism: A Transcendental Defense (New York and Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005), chapter 5. We should remember that Wittgenstein’s engagement with the “riddle of life” was not confined to the Tractatus but extends through—or at least forms a sub-plot of—his entire philosophical career. See Frank Cioffi, “Wittgenstein and the Riddle of Life,” in Danièle Moyal-Sharrock (ed.), The Third Wittgenstein: The Post-Investigations Works (Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004), pp. 193-209. It should be noted that, according to Cioffi, Wittgenstein’s riddle of life, and of existence as such, is independent of any theodicy: sheer existence is mysterious, just like the “I,” the limit of the world, is. For Wittgenstein’s description of the experience of wondering at the existence of the world, see, again, his famous “Lecture on Ethics” (1929), The Philosophical Review 74 (1965), 3-16 (reprinted, among other places, in J. Klagge and A. Nordmann [eds.], Ludwig Wittgenstein: Philosophical Occasions 1912-1951 [Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993]); see also the treatment of the solipsism issue in the early Wittgenstein in Sami Pihlström, Solipsism: History, Critique, and Relevance (Tampere: Tampere University Press, 2004), chapter 3, as well as chapter 3 above. 11. See Simone Weil, La pesanteur et la grace (Paris: Plon, 1947). The affinities between Wittgenstein’s and Weil’s views are remarkable, and it is no accident that Wittgensteinian moral philosophers such as Rush Rhees and Peter Winch have also been interested in Weil’s thought. This comparison does not concern us here, though. 12. I am not implying, of course, that pragmatism would be committed to either Marxism or applied ethics, or that these philosophical orientations would have to be based on pragmatism. I am using the word “pragmatism” extremely inclusively here, to cover any philosophy emphasizing practical (habits of) action and locating even the most theoretical pursuits within action or practice, broadly conceived. 13. Think, for instance, of Kant’s way of arriving at the justification of religion only through the demands of morality. Or think of the ethical concerns at work in William James’s reflections on religion: cf. Sami Pihlström, “The Trail of the Human Serpent Is over Everything”:

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Jamesian Perspectives on Mind, World, and Religion (Lanham, MD: University Press of America [Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group], 2008). 14. For some reflections on this, see Pihlström, Pragmatic Moral Realism, chapter 3, as well as chapters 2-4 above. 15. One possible way to capture this difference is to say that the moralist, or the one living a life of action, may (if s/he finds religious faith acceptable) develop a moral theology, as Kant did, whereas the one for whom religion (and/or contemplation) is primary to moral action can only operate with a theological ethics, subordinating the ethical to the religious. Regarding the problem of evil, the Kantian position is complex (as Bernstein’s discussion in Radical Evil, as well as Neiman’s in Evil in Modern Thought, demonstrates); however, an interesting feature of it is that, according to Kant, “solving” the problem of evil by coming to know the connection between moral and natural evils would not only be impossible but immoral, undermining the very possibility of morality (Neiman, ibid., p. 69). Our standpoint, for Kant, simply is not God’s, and we should not try to overcome the transcendental limits of our human condition. This indicates that the kind of moral reflection on our human finitude that I am defending (and, indeed, attempting to practice) here is a deeply Kantian enterprise. 16. For a discussion of relativism as a problem in post-Kantian transcendental philosophy more generally, see Sami Pihlström, Naturalizing the Transcendental: A Pragmatic View (Amherst, NY: Prometheus/Humanity Books, 2003), chapter 1. Let me once again note that my conception of transcendental arguments and transcendental methodology in moral philosophy crucially differs from the strictly foundationalist and apodictic project of justifying fundamental ethical principles, as defended in the tradition of Karl-Otto Apel’s and his followers’ transcendental pragmatics, recently championed, e.g., in Charles Illies, The Grounds of Ethical Judgement: New Transcendental Arguments in Moral Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). While I agree that the constitutive commitments of moral life and thinking can be transcendentally analyzed, as conditions for the possibility of adopting an ethical point of view, I doubt that any such analysis can end up with justifying “first principles” or apodictic certainties, thus “grounding” morality in some fundamental (and ultimately ethically neutral) philosophical truths. On the contrary, I would be prepared to argue that such a project of foundationalist grounding is in the end (again) both impossible and immoral, seeking to locate the sources and foundations of morality in something allegedly more fundamental (metaphysical). If ethics itself is a “first philosophy” (as Levinas famously argued for decades: see, e.g., the writings collected in Emmanuel Levinas, The Levinas Reader, ed. Sean Hand [Oxford: Blackwell, 1989], and in Levinas, Entre Nous: Thinking-of-the-Other, trans. Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav [London and New York: Continuum, 2006]), no such metaphysical grounding can succeed, while preserving the full sincerity of the ethical. Consequently, I see transcendental ethical thinkers like Illies as misdescribing both ethics and transcendental argumentation. On the other hand, I must admit that my own “softer” conception of transcendental methodology does invite the problem of relativism, though it need not and should not simply give up to it. 17. I find the tension I have located in this choice between two fundamental frameworks analogous to the one Richard M. Gale perceives in James’s thought between his “Promethean pragmatism” and “passive mysticism”; here, the former would naturally be compared to the life of action and the latter to that of passive (mystical) contemplation. Cf. Gale, The Divided Self of William James (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), and The Philosophy of William James: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). For criticism of Gale, see, however, James Pawelski, The Dynamic Individualism of William James (Albany: SUNY Press, 2007). 18. See Thomas Nagel, Mortal Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), and The View from Nowhere (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). A very different challenge to the meaningfulness of life is presented by John Kekes, who argues that absurdity is less problematic than the facts that most people live in “brutal circumstances” and that we sometimes experience “internal disharmony,” or a “failure to identify with our projects.” See Kekes, “The Informed Will and the Meaning of Life,”Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 47 (1986), 75-90. See also Kekes’s book, The Examined Life (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press; London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1988). 19. Nagel, The View from Nowhere, p. 215.

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20. Ibid., p. 223. 21. Ibid., p. 231. Contrast this, however, with Kekes’s statement that while the universe is, cosmically speaking, indifferent to human projects, nevertheless “just as a storm outside enhances the comfort of being inside, so the indifferent physical world enhances the importance of the human world” (“The Informed Will and the Meaning of Life,” p. 90). Nagel’s response might be that the objective, detached, meaning-destroying perspective is part of, or arises from within, our comfortable human world, after all. 22. Nagel, Mortal Questions, pp. 17, 21. 23. Ibid., p. 213. One of the questions one might ask at this point is whether this “fact of life” is itself subjective or objective (or, if this is a pseudo-issue, in what specific sense it is misguided to pursue it). That is, should we view our recognition of the absurdity of our condition subjectively or objectively—is the objective insignificance of our lives itself objectively important or unimportant? For some related reflections on Nagel, see Sami Pihlström, Pragmatism and Philosophical Anthropology: Understanding Our Human Life in a Human World (New York: Peter Lang, 1998), chapter 8. 24. Once again, I am here indebted to an insightful suggestion by the anonymous referee. 25. William James, The Meaning of Truth (1909), eds. Frederick H. Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers, and Ignas K. Skrupskelis (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1978), pp. 55-56. This passage is also quoted, in a similar context, by Edward Craig in his The Mind of God and the Works of Man (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), p. 271. 26. See also James’s discussion of the riddle of existence, of why something (this contingent world) rather than nothing exists, in William James, Some Problems of Philosophy (1911), eds. Frederick H. Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers, and Ignas K. Skrupskelis (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1979), chapter 3. 27. Despite his worries about the absurd, Nagel can be described as a thinker committed to the life of action, given his insistence on the irreducibility of moral reflection and moral reasons. See his more recent book, The Last Word (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). There Nagel argues that moral reasoning cannot be reduced to anything more basic (such as individual or social opinions) and that moral objectivity is grounded in “firstorder” normative moral judgments and reasons themselves (see ibid., chapter 6). While I do not share Nagel’s strongly realist metaphysics, I do find this anti-reductionist argument plausible (cf. also Pihlström, Pragmatic Moral Realism, chapters 2-3). 28. See Pihlström, “The Trail of the Human Serpent Is over Everything,” chapter 4. 29. Again, see Bernstein, Radical Evil, and Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought, for relevant reflections. 30. I must overlook here all the difficult problems related to agent causation. 31. Emmanuel Levinas, Alterity and Transcendence, trans. Michael B. Smith (London: The Athlone Press, 1999), p. 28 (see also p. 164). 32. For Taylor, surely, religion is largely an implicit background, rarely explicitly thematized in his philosophical writings but always to some extent present. Cf. the closing pages of Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). On the concept of the background, see especially Taylor, Philosophical Arguments (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1995), and Taylor, “Rorty and Philosophy,” in Charles Guignon and David N. Hiley (eds.), Richard Rorty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 33. Cf. Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought, p. 328. 34. Ibid., p. 325. 35. Let me note that while I find Neiman’s (ibid.) rewriting of the history of modern philosophy in terms of the problem of evil highly interesting and plausible, her distinction between the traditions of theodicy and of “condemning the architect” does not correspond to my distinction between action and contemplation. Both theodicists and anti-theodicists may, in principle, choose either reaction to the issue of meaning—and will then have to face the corresponding problems, roughly in the way I have sketched. 36. The remainder of this chapter focuses on the concepts of the transcendental and the transcendent only in post-Kantian philosophy. Thus, I will set aside the medieval discussions of

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transcendentalia, that is, such concepts as Being, One, True, or Good, which were thought to apply to all beings. 37. See Immanuel Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, ed. Raymund Schmidt (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1990) (A = 1st ed., 1781; B = 2nd ed., 1787). I have also used the translation by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood, Critique of Pure Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). The older Kemp Smith translation (1929) can also be found as a searchable electronic edition: see http://humanum.arts.cuhk.edu.hk/Philosophy/Kant/cpr/. 38. Ibid., A295-296/B352-353 (original emphases). The passage is from the introduction to the Transcendental Dialectic. The original quote runs as follows: “Wir wollen die Grundsätze, deren Anwendung sich ganz und gar in den Schranken möglicher Erfahrung hält, immanente, diejenigen aber, welche diese Grenzen überfliegen sollen, transzendente Grundsätze nennen. Ich verstehe unter diesen nicht den transzendentalen Gebrauch oder Missbrauch der Kategorien, welcher ein blosser Fehler der nicht gehörig durch Kritik gezügelten Urteilskraft ist, die auf die Grenze des Bodens, worauf allein dem reine Verstande sein Spiel erlaubt ist, nicht genug achthat; sondern wirkliche Grundsätze, die uns zumuten, alle jene Grenzpfähle niederzureissen und sich einen ganz neuen Boden, der überall keine Demarkation erkennt, anzumassen. Daher sind transzendental und transzendent nicht einerlei. Die Grundsätze des reinen Verstandes, die wir oben [i.e., in the Transcendental Analytic] vortrugen, sollen bloss von empirischem und nicht von transzendentalem, d.i. über die Erfahrungsgrenze hinausreichendem Gebrauche sein. Ein Grundsatz aber, der diese Schranken wegnimmt, ja gar sie zu überschreiten gebietet, heisst transzendent. Wir wollen die Grundsätze, deren Anwendung sich ganz und gar in den Schranken möglicher Erfahrung hält, immanente, diejenigen aber, welche diese Grenzen überfliegen sollen, transzendente Grundsätze nennen. Ich verstehe unter diesen nicht den transzendentalen Gebrauch oder Missbrauch der Kategorien, welcher ein blosser Fehler der nicht gehörig durch Kritik gezügelten Urteilskraft ist, die auf die Grenze des Bodens, worauf allein dem reine Verstande sein Spiel erlaubt ist, nicht genug achthat; sondern wirkliche Grundsätze, die uns zumuten, alle jene Grenzpfähle niederzureissen und sich einen ganz neuen Boden, der überall keine Demarkation erkennt, anzumassen. Daher sind transzendental und transzendent nicht einerlei. Die Grundsätze des reinen Verstandes, die wir oben [i.e., in the Transcendental Analytic] vortrugen, sollen bloss von empirischem und nicht von transzendentalem, d.i. über die Erfahrungsgrenze hinausreichendem Gebrauche sein. Ein Grundsatz aber, der diese Schranken wegnimmt, ja gar sie zu überschreiten gebietet, heisst transzendent.” 39. Ibid., A308/B365. For explicit uses of the term “transcendent” (transzendent) in relation to traditional metaphysics, see B427, A771/B799 on rational psychology (employing the transcendent concept of the soul), and A420/B447-448, A456/B484 on rational cosmology (employing the concept of the world, or transcendental ideas as Weltbegriffe). It is easy to see how such transcendent postulations may be relevant to the contemplative search for ultimate meaning. 40. Ibid., A327/B383. 41. Ibid., A565-566/B593-594 (original emphases). The original passage is this: “Solange wir mit unseren Vernunftbegriffen bloss die Totalität der Bedingungen in der Sinnenwelt, und was in Ansehung ihrer der Vernunft zu Diensten geschehen kann, zum Gegenstande haben; so sind unsere Ideen zwar transzendental, aber doch kosmologisch. Sobald wir aber das Unbedingte (um das es doch eigentlich zu tun ist) in demjenigen setzen, was ganz ausserhalb der Sinnenwelt, mithin ausser aller möglichen Erfahrung ist, so werden die Ideen transzendent; sie dienen nicht bloss zur Vollendung des empirischen Vernunftgebrauchs (der immer eine nie auszuführende, aber dennoch zu befolgende Idee bleibt), sondern sie trennen sich davon gänzlich, und machen sich selbst Gegenstände, deren Stoff nicht aus Erfahrung genommen, deren objektive Realität auch nicht auf der Vollendung der empirischen Reihe, sondern auf reinen Begriffen a priori beruht. Dergleichen transzendente Ideen haben einen bloss intelligiblen Gegenstand, welchen als ein transzendentales Objekt, von dem man übrigens nichts weiss, zuzulassen, allerdings erlaubt ist, wozu aber, um es als ein durch seine unterscheidenden und inneren Prädikate bestimmbares Ding zu denken, wir weder Gründe der Möglichkeit (als unabhängig von allen Erfahrungsbegriffen), noch die mindeste Rechtfertigung, einen solchen Gegenstand anzunehmen, auf unserer Seite haben, und welches daher ein blosses Gedankending ist.”

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42. Ibid., A643/B671 (original emphases). “Denn nicht die Idee an sich selbst, sondern bloss ihr Gebrauch kann, entweder in Ansehung der gesamten möglichen Erfahrung überfliegend (transzendent), oder einheimisch (immanent) sein [...].” In the Methodenlehre, Kant speaks about the “censorship” (Zensur) of reason which should lead to doubting the transcendent use of principles (A760-761/B788-789). Close to the conclusion of the entire Critique, in the section on the Architectonic of Pure Reason (a later section of the Doctrine of Method), Kant distinguishes between transcendental philosophy (also labeled “ontology”) and the “physiology of pure reason” as subdisciplines of metaphysics, describing the latter as a rational study of nature. He further elaborates on the divisions within this physiology: “Now, however, the use of reason in this rational consideration of nature is either physical or hyperphysical, or, better, either immanent or transcendent. The former pertains to nature so far as its cognition can be applied in experience (in concreto), the latter to that connection of the objects of experience which surpasses all experience. Hence this transcendent physiology has either an inner connection to its object or an outer one, both of which, however, go beyond possible experience; the former is the physiology of nature in its entirety, i.e., the transcendental cognition of the world, the latter that of the connection of nature in its entirety to a being beyond nature, i.e., the transcendental cognition of God.” (A845-846/B873-874; original emphases.) This is the original quote: “Nun ist aber der Gebrauch der Vernunft in dieser rationalen Naturbetrachtung entweder physisch, oder hyperphysisch, oder besser, entweder immanent oder transzendent. Der erstere geht auf die Natur, so weit als ihre Erkenntnis in der Erfahrung (in concreto) kann angewandt werden, der zweite auf diejenige Verknüpfung der Gegenstände der Erfahrung, welche alle Erfahrung übersteigt. Diese transzendente Physiologie hat daher entweder eine innere Verknüpfung, oder äussere, die aber beide über mögliche Erfahrung hinausgehen, zu ihrem Gegenstande; jene ist die Physiologie der gesamten Natur, d.i. die transzendentale Welterkenntnis, diese des Zusammenhanges der gesamten Natur mit einem Wesen über Natur, d.i. die transzendentale Gotteserkenntnis.” See also A799/B827. 43. Cf. especially the closing of the Transcendental Dialectic: ibid., A702-703/B730-731. 44. A.W. Moore, Points of View (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), pp. 116, 122n8. See also Moore, “Human Finitude, Ineffability, Idealism, Contingency,” Nous 26 (1992), 427-446. 45. This criticism, of course, is not directed against those who carefully use the concepts of the transcendental and the transcendent in a manner related, but not identical, to Kant’s. An example of such a usage is provided by Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology, in which the “transcendence” of external objects is part of the transcendental structure of the meaningbestowing transcendental self, ego, or consciousness, to whom those transcendent objects are given in experience. Consciousness, for Husserl, is transcendental precisely because of its intentional relation to transcendent objects (in contrast to immanence)—and the same seems to hold for, e.g., Sartre’s reflections on the “transcendence of the ego.” On Husserl’s place in the “transcendental tradition” starting with Kant, see especially David Carr, The Paradox of Subjectivity: The Self in the Transcendental Tradition (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). See also, e.g., John D. Caputo, “Transcendence and the Transcendental in Husserl’s Phenomenology,” Philosophy Today 23 (1979), 205-216. 46. I am deliberately using this Wittgensteinian expression. For some discussions of whether, and how, Wittgenstein’s (later) philosophy should be interpreted as a form of transcendental inquiry, see Sami Pihlström, Naturalizing the Transcendental: A Pragmatic View (Amherst, NY: Prometheus/Humanity Books, 2003), chapter 2, and Pihlström, “Recent Reinterpretations of the Transcendental,”Inquiry 47 (2004), 289-314. 47. Wittgenstein, Tractatus, §§6.373 and especially 6.4 ff. 48. “Ethics is transcendental.” (Ibid., § 6.421.) 49. Wittgenstein, “A Lecture on Ethics,” Philosophical Occasions 1912-1951, p. 38. 50. Ibid., p. 41. 51. Ibid., p. 44. 52. Wittgenstein, Tractatus, §§ 6.42 and 6.41. Note also the reference to the “metaphysical, transcendent” feature of happy and harmonious life in Ludwig Wittgenstein, Notebooks 19141916, eds. G.H. von Wright and G.E.M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1961; 2nd ed. 1979), entry on July 30, 1916 (cf. Tractatus, § 6.43).

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53. Dale Jacquette, “Wittgenstein on the Transcendence of Ethics,”Australasian Journal of Philosophy 75 (1997), 304-324 (here pp. 306-307). 54. Ibid., p. 313. 55. Ibid., p. 320. Jacquette is careful to remind us that this by no means implies ethical nihilism but only a non-theoretical attitude to ethics and aesthetics (ibid., pp. 322-323). 56. Cf. also Heinrich Watzka, Sagen und Zeigen: Die Verschränkung von Metaphysik und Sprachkritik beim frühen und beim späten Wittgenstein (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2000), pp. 100-101. 57. Wittgenstein, Tractatus, § 5.632. 58. The reading of Wittgenstein’s transcendental solipsism upon which these thoughts are based is developed in chapter 3 above and more fully in Pihlström, Solipsism (cited above). In that book, I develop the connection between solipsism and ethics in chapter 5, in particular. (See Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, §§ 5.6-5.641, for the extremely condensed line of thought culminating in the qualified endorsement of solipsism.) I have here learned a lot from Richard J. Brockhaus’s reading, according to which no otherworldliness (viz., transcendence in the standard sense) should be read into Wittgenstein’s views, ethical or any other views: see Brockhaus, Pulling Up the Ladder: The Metaphysical Roots of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus LogicoPhilosophicus (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1991). For a very different overall reading of Wittgenstein but for a similar rejection of transcendent otherworldliness (without rejecting the term “transcendental”), see Cora Diamond, “Ethics, Imagination and the Method of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus” (1991), in Alice Crary and Rupert Read (eds.), The New Wittgenstein (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), pp. 149-173. Even more misleadingly than Jacquette, Linhe Han assumes that Wittgenstein places ethics and the metaphysical subject in a transcendent, otherworldly “domain”: cf. his paper, “Philosophy as Experience, as Elucidation and as Profession: An Attempt to Reconstruct Early Wittgenstein’s Philosophy,” Grazer Philosophische Studien 51 (1996), 23-46; see here pp. 26, 40-42. 59. See Martin Stokhof, World and Life as One: Ethics and Ontology in Wittgenstein’s Early Thought (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), especially chapter 4. It may be worth pointing out that Stokhof generally reads Wittgenstein in a Kantian context, as examining, transcendentally, the question of how meaning is possible. (Unfortunately, Stokhof does not comment on Jacquette’s 1997 paper, cited earlier in this section.) 60. Ibid., pp. 210-212. 61. Ibid., p. 208. The crucial passage referred to is Tractatus § 6.43: “If good or bad willing changes the world, it can only change the limits of the world, not the facts; not that which can be expressed by language.” (I am here quoting Stokhof’s own translation, which is slightly emended.) 62. Ibid., p. 209. 63. Ibid., p. 238. 64. Ibid., pp. 215-216. (See Wittgenstein, Notebooks, entry on August 1, 1916. Another notebook entry on July 8, 1916, identifies God with “fate” and with “the world” as independent of our will.) 65. Ibid., p. 235. See also p. 245. 66. Ibid., p. 236. 67. Ibid., p. 237. Stokhof’s “one-world” reading of the Tractatus could be compared to analogous one-world treatments of Kant’s distinction between appearances and the thing in itself, e.g., in Henry E. Allison, Kant’s Transcendental Idealism: An Interpretation and Defense—Revised and Enlarged Edition (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2004; 1st ed. 1983). I discuss Allison’s project, and related ones, in Pihlström, Naturalizing the Transcendental; as well as Sami Pihlström, Pragmatist Metaphysics: An Essay on the Ethical Grounds of Ontology (London and New York: Continuum, 2009). 68. Stokhof, World and Life as One, p. 238. 69. Ibid., pp. 245, 249. 70. This is a comparison I undertake in Pihlström, Pragmatic Moral Realism. 71. As indicated above, the same kind of search for a proper perspective and appropriate meaning can be perceived in the ongoing debates over the concept of evil (see also note 4 to this chapter). While religion or theology cannot be the foundation for either concept—guilt or

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evil—they can still act as “energizing” background frameworks that cannot be completely ignored. Here, I believe, we should take seriously what Peter Dews says in his “Disenchantment and the Persistence of Evil: Habermas, Jonas, Badiou” (in Schrift [ed.], Modernity and the Problem of Evil, pp. 51-65; here p. 56): “[…] under the conditions of a pluralistic culture, our fundamental moral vocabulary cannot afford to remain dependent on specific religious doctrines or sources of revelation, although it may continue to be energized by them. The task of philosophy is to translate religious insights and impulses into terms that are capable of a shared discursive justification.” (Similar ideas are developed in Dews, The Idea of Evil.) It is in terms of such a project of translation that my remarks on transcendental guilt (as a secular successor concept to original sin) and on transcendence (as transcendentally postulated) ought to be understood. However, it is very difficult to succeed in such translations. If there are moments of theological transcendence even in Hannah Arendt, as Robert B. Pippin suggests (see Pippin, “Hannah Arendt and the Bourgeois Origins of Totalitarian Evil,” in Schrift [ed.], Modernity and the Problem of Evil, pp. 148-166, especially p. 164), it is almost impossible for anyone, I guess, to avoid lapsing into an obsession with the problem of evil—or the problem of guilt— that should, perhaps, be just rejected in our secular culture. Instead of rejecting such quasitheological problems altogether, I have here attempted to make them (or at least the issue of guilt) understandable from a philosophical perspective that is not as such tied to any theological assumptions. Even so, avoiding theological assumptions is compatible with acknowledging the profound ways in which religious metaphors and ways of speaking and understanding are still with us, however secular we are. As has been repeatedly urged in this volume, notions such as evil and guilt have part of the special kind of weight they do have in our moral lives precisely as a result of being ineliminably tied to certain ways of understanding the world, and our place in it, that are perhaps only adequately describable (if describable at all) in something like religious terms. Therefore, I have also found it important to connect my discussions of guilt and meaning, in this chapter, to the Kantian notion of the transcendent (as contrasted with the transcendental), because Kant—just like Wittgenstein later—is a thinker deeply sensitive to the religious and/or theological dimensions of ethical issues, while never suggesting that ethics could be reduced to or based upon religion or theology. It is this fundamentally Kantian thought that I hope to have been able to carry over to the current discussion of guilt. 72. It should be easy to note the similarity of this issue with the one this chapter started from, namely, the confrontation of the perspectives of action and contemplation. 73. Thus, even pragmatist philosophy, whose very aim is to render abstract philosophizing relevant to human life, is not an enemy of, but actually needs, the concepts of the transcendental and the transcendent.

Chapter Six

Constructing Moral Identity

Just as we may find philosophical ideas and arguments in literary texts, 1 we may also apply ideas and concepts drawn from literary theory, for instance, structuralism or narratology, to texts that are primarily considered philosophical. Continuing the reflections on guilt, especially its deeply personal nature, of the previous chapters, this chapter will discuss the narrativity and narrative structures of philosophical writing from this perspective. I will attempt to throw light on a phenomenon we may call the philosophical construction of the self—especially the philosophical construction of the guilty self. By writing philosophically and, more generally, by engaging in philosophical or intellectual reflection, including of course moral reflection, we are continuously in the process of constructing our own (philosophical, philosophizing) selves. This is, more generally, part of the construction of one’s identity as a person, of one’s life as a whole, a kind of intellectual—but clearly not only intellectual—self-conception. 2 Moral reflection on the ways in which the phenomenon of guilt “colors” one’s life, as its transcendental feature (roughly as explained in the previous chapters), may be a very important element of a more general narrative reflection on one’s identity. In particular, confessing one’s guilt, or one’s potential guilt—which is surely something we can, and perhaps must, conceive as a kind of narrative—may thus be vital to one’s becoming the individual person one is. A particularly interesting case of constructing one’s self is the case in which a person, either gradually or by way of a sudden conversion, creates one’s religious identity (or one’s anti-religious identity, for that matter). In such cases, the confession of one’s guilt will come to resemble the religious person’s confession of her/his sins. Indeed, when thematizing the transcendental status of guilt in the chapters above, I already occasionally hinted at 103

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the possibility of comparing transcendental (metaphysical) guilt to the religious, particularly Judeo-Christian, notion of “original sin.” While the general issue of narrativity in philosophical writing can, of course, be treated separately from these more specific issues—certainly not all narration relevant to the construction of one’s personal identity needs to take the form of a confession—the case of religious self-identity will be kept on our agenda in what follows (even though I must again point out that this book is not primarily intended as a contribution to the philosophy of religion). When writing on one’s religious life and options, including one’s (actual or potential) sins and one’s own ability to confess and acknowledge them, one must keep on asking who it is that is actually speaking: whose life is at stake—mine? Or someone else’s? Philosophy, especially ethics and philosophy of religion, can in this sense be said to be fundamentally about me, “work on oneself,” as Wittgenstein pointed out. IMPLIED (PHILOSOPHICAL) AUTHORS AND READERS We may apply classical narratological structures, such as the concepts of an implied author and implied reader (developed by Wayne Booth, Seymour Chatman, and others), 3 to (at least some) philosophical texts, such as books and articles whose main authorial intentions are philosophical. 4 This helps us to avoid both (i) naïve realism (or, better, what may be seen as the equivalent of naïve realism concerning the relation between philosophical language-use and reality), according to which a philosophical text is simply intended to present statements about reality that are purportedly true in a metaphysically realist correspondence sense, and (ii) what I call (lacking a better expression) radical postmodernism or poststructuralism, according to which there is no truth to be reached either in philosophical texts or elsewhere but only an unrestricted play of words, after the “death of the author” and the relativistic collapse of any normative structures that were once thought to guarantee objective meaning and truth. 5 The implied author, according to theorists like Booth and Chatman, is the unifying principle of a literary work. S/he/it is postulated to make sense of the work as a whole. The narrator is (typically) a fictional figure within the text, while the implied author is the agent responsible for the work’s possibly ironic stance toward the narrator(s) and his/her/ its (their) statements—yet something distinguishable from the “real” author, the person who physically wrote the text and legally entered into a publishing contract. We need not dwell on the intricacies of these sophisticated developments in literary criticism and theory. I just want to make a very simple suggestion, to be here employed within the overall argument of this book. There is, in a

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philosophical text, for example, a book or an article, an implied author roughly in the same sense as there is, according to narratologists, such a narrative agent in a fictional literary text. A philosophical text may have a “narrator,” too, but it is important not to confuse the narrator(s) with the implied author. To take a simple case, the narrator of a philosophical text may tell a story, suggesting a thought experiment, for instance (e.g., Hilary Putnam’s famous Twin Earth), while the implied author is the one who is responsible for the use of that story in the overall position explored or defended in the work. 6 Furthermore, the need to distinguish the implied author of a given philosophical text from the “real” philosopher her- or himself— that is, the person who submits the article to a journal or the manuscript to the publisher, who signs the publishing contract, who teaches the contents of the work in her/his classes, who gets royalties for the publication (if s/he does!), and so on—becomes obvious when we note that a philosopher may write a philosophical text defending a position that s/he does not personally hold. The implied author of a text can, say, be a determinist, while the philosopher—the real person—remains an indeterminist. The work may have been written in order to test the strongest arguments that can be considered against the philosopher’s “real” position. Also, the philosopher might simply change her/his views, as is demonstrated by cases like Putnam’s—or, in earlier twentieth century philosophy, Bertrand Russell’s. The implied authors of individual works remain what they were, while the person comes to think differently. Now, what I am suggesting is that the construction of one’s philosophical and/or ethical identity is the ongoing construction of implied authors for the philosophical (and other) texts one authors. This suggestion is, obviously, to a great extent an idealization. One’s philosophical views and ideas may become explicit not only in publications but also in public presentations, conversations, and even in private meditations. In any event, if something is written down or orally presented, however “privately,” it is in principle public, open to everyone, even when actually remaining unpublished forever. 7 We can at least for theoretical purposes imagine that something equivalent to the implied author is at work in all those in principle public pronounciations of one’s philosophical ideas and arguments. Applying these thoughts to the present case, the writing of this book, is also pretty straightforward. When writing this book, I am constructing its particular implied author, which differs from all other implied authors I have constructed in my previous writings (and will construct, hopefully, in future ones). While the narrative perspectives in a piece of writing might to some extent vary (though in this case they hardly do), the implied author holds all the threads together and acts as a unifying principle of the work. This implied author advances the philosophical views on guilt (and related topics) I have been concerned with. However, I myself, as a “real” human person, may

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change my views on guilt, and related matters, while the implied author of this work will remain unchanged—at least as long as this book will continue existing as a “cultural entity.” 8 Even when I am gone, when I no longer exist as a flesh-and-blood individual human being, the implied author of this particular work of moral reflection will, I trust, “exist” as the subject of what once were my views on guilt. UNDERSTANDING A TEXT AND UNDERSTANDING ITS AUTHOR We may now take up an example hopefully illuminating the general points just made. Let us briefly consider the so-called “New Wittgensteinian” approach to the reading of Wittgenstein, particularly of his controversial early work, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. 9 The leading neo-Wittgensteinians, James Conant and Cora Diamond, have suggested that we must separate the understanding of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus from the understanding of its author, Wittgenstein himself. Achieving the latter kind of understanding requires, in their view, acknowledging that the former understanding is not available at all, because the Tractatus is “sheer nonsense” (einfach Unsinn), as Wittgenstein himself states in the preface to the book. 10 However, there are narrative and narratological nuances that tend to be missed here. In particular, it is doubtful that one can understand an author in abstraction from understanding her/his works. It is part of our understanding Wittgenstein the person to understand the Tractatus (and his other works), however difficult that is. 11 The interpretive point advanced by Conant, Diamond, and others is that the Tractatus lacks any meaning that could be understood. Only the propositions forming the “frame” of the book, in contrast to those included in its “body,” have meaning; others are simply nonsensical, and there is only one kind of nonsense. In particular, there is no “deep” nonsense that could somehow embody or imply hidden truths about anything; nothing can be “shown” (about, say, ethics or the transcendental subject) by nonsense that cannot be put to words. 12 Now, one problem is that if this is what the Tractatus somehow attempts to convey, there is hardly any coherent implied author in the work at all. To understand an author is to understand the (various) implied author(s) s/he has constructed in her/his work(s). The object of literary—and philosophical—interpretation and the resulting understanding is the unifying principle of the work, namely, the implied author. (The theoretical construction on the readers’ side corresponding to this constructed entity is the “implied reader,” the imagined ideal audience of the implied author’s views.)

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To claim to understand only Wittgenstein himself, the real person, while acknowledging the impossibility of understanding the alleged nonsense that constitutes the text interpreted, is to miss the narratologically crucial distinction between the narrator and the implied author. The narrator(s) of the Tractatus, if there can be any sense in which we may talk about such entities, may utter sheer nonsense (assuming that nonsense can in some sense be “narrated”), while the implied author must have some interpretable “use” for those strictly speaking nonsensical strings of words. Putting them into that use is to invest some “meaning” in the work, after all; consequently, the work itself does mean something. The implied author, we may say, is the agent responsible for that meaning. Even the strictly speaking nonsensical Tractatus, then, does have some kind of meaning, even if it cannot be interpreted even nearly as straightforwardly as many other philosophical (and of course non-philosophical) texts. The implied author is the (constructed) agent ideally responsible for that meaning, and the real-life author himself, Ludwig Wittgenstein, constructed different implied authors for different theoretical purposes, corresponding to his early (Tractarian) and later philosophies. 13 Or so we, his readers, can interpretively hypothesize when examining his works. Not only in the case of Wittgenstein studies, but more generally, the narratological distinctions between the narrator, the implied author (and, correspondingly, the implied reader), and the real person authoring the work ought to be taken seriously when considering whether a given text, or its author, or both, can in some sense be understood, or whether they can have, or lack, a “meaning.” This holds, specifically, about any “confessional” piece of writing, including of course moral reflections on guilt. THE “I” OF A PHILOSOPHICAL NARRATIVE: CONFESSING ONE’S GUILT These thoughts lead us to consider the identity of the philosophically writing “I.” This notion, which I above tried to illuminate in narratological terms, may again be compared to the notion of a transcendental subject—already encountered in earlier chapters above. Such an “I” is, potentially, anyone— or, when writing in the “we”-mode, “we” are whoever we are or might be— yet necessarily someone in particular. A traditional literary “I” in a firstperson narrative is also someone in particular, yet yielding “general truths” or generally interesting perspectives on human experience and the world. Obviously, there is a great philosophical tradition of first-person writing, the confession, manifested in different ways in writings by thinkers as diverse as, say, Augustine, Descartes, Rousseau, and Wittgenstein. Possibly, any serious philosophical writing might to some extent take the form of a confession. 14

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Now, the concepts of sin and guilt (and even evil, also briefly touched in the previous chapter, in particular) are central in the tradition of confessional philosophical literature. Confession may be a part—a very important, or even the most important, part—of my identity-construction. Seeing myself as fundamentally guilty, and acknowledging such guilt, with remorse, 15 may be crucial (yet remain implicit) in my philosophical writing: I have done wrong, and my philosophical reflections are needed to acknowledge this—not to accept it, of course, but to recognize it and especially to acknowledge the (potential) victims of my (actual or potential) wrongdoings. Given that we now have the above-introduced narratological concepts at our disposal, we may, however, pose a fundamental problem that might, and perhaps should, permanently torment us. When confessing my (potential) guilt—or, should I engage in religious confession, my sin(s)—in philosophical or non-philosophical writings, am I really confessing my own guilt (or sin), or am I just constructing an implied author for that purpose, an abstract if not ultimately fictional agent whose guilt (or sins) are not “real,” after all, or (even if in some philosophically construed sense real) are not really mine? It would be too easy a way to get rid of one’s guilty state to simply write a book about it, forwarding the sins to the constructed implied author who as the unifying principle of the confession acts as the organizational center of the work. In a way or another, my writing, my moral reflection, even when it involves the construction of an implied author, should be a way of confessing my own guilty state. In some non-trivial sense, such a confession ought to be about me, not about someone else—nor even about human beings in general. This requirement is not easy to meet, if we operate on the basis of the narratological structures identified above—structures that I find generally useful for understanding and interpreting texts of different kinds. My identity-construction, or my attempt to acknowledge my guilt, may also be understood in terms of redescription, or changes of “vocabularies,” as emphasized in Richard Rorty’s work: 16 for example, the question of whether to describe one’s experience of guilt (to oneself or to others) in religious terms, perhaps employing the concept of sin, or in merely secular terms— that is, whether to construct not just a moral but also a religious identity—can be seen as a question of how best to redescribe the basic commitments of one’s life. The same applies to the loss of such commitments: just as religious identities can surely be lost, also one’s moral self may suffer fragmentation. Extreme experiences of guilt and remorse may play a role here. One may, upon reflection, end up redescribing one’s life, including one’s guilty condition, not just in terms of ethical finitude, as emphasized in this book, but more strongly in terms of the loss of meaning and significance. One may come to realize that one’s sins, or perhaps only one’s potential sins, are so great that nothing can redeem them. One may then come to realize that it is impossible to continue even pursuing anything like meaningful life. 17 Again,

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however, one must ask whether this meaningfulness, or its impossibility, is something that really concerns oneself—the real person writing the confessional work—or whether it only concerns the implied author, a principle operative within the work. Redescriptions are relative to contexts, and one might argue that by redescribing one’s moral (or religious) identity one does not get out of the text; one simply produces new textual principles and agents, shouldering one’s guilt and sins on them. This can only amount to a hopeless pseudo-redemption, never to a real one. The worry, in short, is that our moral reflections may ultimately lack a point. They may lack the kind of seriousness they were intended to promote (or save) in the first place. REFLEXIVITY A philosophical writer, when constructing her/his narrators and implied authors, must above all reflect on her/his own life and its possibilities. Philosophy of religion—in addition to moral philosophy, the main focus of this book—provides us with interesting examples here: one must, when writing about religion and related issues (including ethical ones), continuously consider whether they are one’s own religious options: “could I be a believer/ non-believer—and who am I, after all, when responding to such a question?” This is especially clear when we are examining personally deep philosophical problems regarding religion, sin, guilt, evil, death, etc.—problems that could also be said to belong to the “philosophy of life” (whatever that ultimately means), or to one’s fundamental conceptions of oneself and one’s place in the world. When writing about such topics, I cannot just assume the standpoint of a neutral observer but engage myself, examining carefully what I find—perhaps transcendentally—possible or necessary for me. However, just as the author of imaginative literature may invent (a) fictional narrator(s) and an implied author, a philosopher can, as we have seen, also construct a perspective or a standpoint, the philosophical implied author organizing the piece into a structured whole. It may be hard to tell from the outside whether a given perspective or discourse is truly its “real” author’s own or not. Wittgenstein once wrote in his Notebooks: “The I, the I, is deeply mysterious!” This applies with full force both to the transcendental subject of philosophical reflection and the narratological subject of philosophical writing, between which I am here attempting to draw a deep-seated analogy. Another Wittgensteinian slogan (already referred to above), the one about philosophy being “work on oneself,” must also be drawn attention to here, especially if we are examining concepts like sin and guilt in the “confessional” philosophical setting. It is, indeed, this ultimately mysterious subject, the first person,

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that is the object of our—often frustrated—reflexive transcendental attempts at deeper understanding. This Wittgensteinian theme has been developed, in many variations, all the way from Socrates 18 via the transcendental tradition (with Kant and Husserl examining the reflexivity of the transcendental ego and transcendental inquiry) up to, and including, twentieth century philosophical traditions like pragmatism, both classical and contemporary. 19 When elaborating on the notion of transcendental guilt in earlier chapters, I have attempted to keep this reflexive perspective in focus. When considering such a fundamental notion, we are always, inevitably, concerned with our own options and possibilities, with the various features our own lives can or could take. We may have to express our views with the help of theoretical constructs such as an implied author, to the extent that the question arises whether the relevant piece of writing, however confessional, in the end concerns us at all. However, the need to reconnect one’s theoretical reflections with one’s own life and its practical dimensions and possibilities is something that a genuine moral reflection (as I have called my method in this book) ought to recognize. The very idea here, as I explained in the beginning of the book, is not to produce yet another ethical theory. Rather, the purpose of my writings on guilt has been to offer reflective, and thus necessarily self-reflective, or reflexive, perspectives on a phenomenon of general human importance—which, however, is something the importance of which can only emerge from individual (singular, concrete) points of view. VARIATIONS OF TRANSCENDENTAL SUBJECTIVITY Having emphasized the reflexivity characteristic of the analyses of subjectivity within the transcendental tradition, in the context of which the reflections on guilt and other topics earlier in this volume have also been placed, I should say a few more words on the somewhat different conceptions of subjectivity we may see being at work in this tradition. This will hopefully help us to appreciate the task of reflexivity necessary for narrative explorations and redescriptions of moral identities. Perhaps the main thing to observe here is that although my discussion of transcendental guilt is crucially indebted to Kant, as any transcendental philosophizing must inescapably be, the subject to whom this concept of guilt can be applied cannot be strictly speaking the Kantian transcendental subject whose cognitive structures (forms of intuition and pure concepts or categories of the understanding) are responsible for generating the empirical world of experienceable phenomena. I am invoking Kant’s transcendental terminology while distancing myself from the philosophical details of his views, whether in “theoretical” or “practical” philosophy. As explained in chapters

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2 and 3 above, what I mean by the transcendental nature of guilt is that guilt is a necessary condition for the possibility of moral experience, that is, that without this notion—and its permanently possible applicability to my/our own case—we cannot understand moral seriousness at all, the kind of seriousness that defines, for us, the moral perspective on the world and on our lives. In this sense, it is hardly necessary to postulate anything like the transcendental subject as an entity over and above the perfectly this-worldly subjectivity we have (or are), in order to make sense of the binding nature of moral obligation. On the contrary, moral duty and moral guilt concern us right here, in this world and this life. We are morally responsible, and therefore at least potentially morally guilty—and in the need of confession—just by being the kind of beings we are in this natural, empirical world. The ethical perspective is ubiquitous in our lives, and this is roughly what the transcendental nature of guilt seeks to signify. There are different variations of the notion of the transcendental subject to be found in the tradition of post-Kantian philosophy. Husserl and other phenomenologists, for instance, invoked their version of the transcendental ego, or transcendental consciousness, to examine the essential features of consciousness and experience. Wittgenstein, in turn, in a sense theorized about the transcendental subject both in the Tractatus (given that it can be understood and interpreted at all!), within a form of transcendental solipsism, 20 and in later works like Philosophical Investigations, with a more social and historical “form of life” taking the place of the individual transcendental subject. These variations are very important additions to the narrative of the “life” of the transcendental subject. The Kantian beginning of the story is indeed only the beginning: we must feel free to add new ideas and aspects to this problematic philosophical postulation as our reflections unfold. In terms of transcendental guilt, I have hoped to redescribe not just the notion of guilt but the notion of the transcendental subject as well—as the kind of philosophically constructed structure or postulation or principle (not entity!) that it is. We may, then, think about the narrative about the transcendental subject as a collectively written philosophical story to which individual thinkers can add their novel perspectives. Does a collective story have its own implied author? One of the advantages of this narratological notion is that nothing prevents us from saying so. If there is a sufficient degree of unity to the story—which is always debatable—we may say that the implied author of the story of the history of the transcendental subject is the unifying principle of this particular narrative, with the elements to be found in Kant’s, Husserl’s, Wittgenstein’s, and other philosophers’ works providing only particular narrations (with their own structures of narrators and—lower-level, specific—implied authors). It is to this collective construction of the implied author of this overall story that I am now adding my own modest contribution, strongly (re)connecting the

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concept of transcendental subject(ivity) with the concept of guilt, and with moral reflection more generally, hoping that I have been able to redescribe these notions, and thus to add to the telling of the story, in successful ways— though this of course is not for me to judge. There is also another worry that needs attention at this point. How can the deeply personal, even solipsistic, nature of transcendental guilt (see especially chapter 3 above) be integrated with a social account of transcendental subjectivity? 21 Recall Raimond Gaita’s views on “common guilt” as a corrupt form of guilt and remorse. 22 Perhaps such an integration is impossible in the end—and our inability to develop an adequate notion of a transcendentally guilty subject may itself be a source of guilt. We may ultimately have to resort to something like “common guilt,” insofar as we develop a sociohistorical notion of transcendental subjectivity, and hence it may be difficult for us to avoid moral corruption. We might be guilty of corrupting our guilt. And even when saying this I am illegitimately appealing to common guilt, aren’t I? Shouldn’t the meta-level guilt of corrupting the notion of guilt be, again, primarily mine? There seems to be no end to this kind of reflexive questioning that always turns back to the priority of the first person. TRANSCENDENTAL SELF-DECEPTION: WHO AM I? I am tempted to suggest that the person who overlooks, forgets, or fails to take seriously one’s own transcendental moral guilt—the kind of perspective on moral life that this book as a whole has sought to illuminate—in an important sense engages in self-deception, even in something that could be labeled “transcendental self-deception.” 23 Generally, self-deception is usually characterized in terms of belief: the one and the same self, when selfdeceptive, both believes (or knows) that p and at the same time believes (or knows, perhaps somehow unconsciously) that not-p. The major philosophical theories of this phenomenon propose different answers to the problem of how such an apparently contradictory doxastic state is so much as possible; some philosophers are even willing to announce self-deception to be impossible or conceptually incoherent, while others attempt to construct a coherent account of the notion. 24 Self-deception has obviously been an important issue in moral philosophy, with Sartre’s notion of “bad faith” as a standard point of reference. 25 The key idea I am aiming at here can be expressed by saying that I am engaging in ethical self-deception, if I forget the human condition presupposed by my being a human person or self in the first place, that is, a condition structured by moral responsibility toward my fellow human beings and the world as a whole, epitomized in the ineliminable potentiality of

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moral guilt—a potentiality whose ineliminability makes it not just moral but metaphysical, too. If the self lacks recognition of such fundamental (though often primarily potential rather than actual) guilt, it ethically self-deceives. This follows from the argument, developed in the previous chapters, that guilt is transcendentally necessary as constitutive of the very perspective or framework that we are able to understand as ethical. From the ethical point of view, now enriched by concepts like narrativity and self-deception, we should take very seriously the identity of the reflexive transcendental self (whose different variations were briefly explored above) and what may, more metaphysically, be called the “existential” self, which according to my analysis inevitably finds itself guilty. Both selves, in a “naturalized” account of transcendental philosophy and transcendental subjectivity, must be understood as “worldly”—world-embedded and embodied, not immaterial Cartesian egos. Both are in der Welt, to use a Heideggerian phrase, as well as amidst other human beings that are also in der Welt. Both selves are also capable of self-deception or bad faith. Both, if the argument concerning transcendental guilt is on the right track, are fundamentally ethically oriented. They are, in the end, one and the same self. Neither of them should be (self-deceptively) confused with a Cartesian-like substantial soul or any other immaterial entity of traditional metaphysics. The transcendentally guilty moral self whose true nature we should not self-deceptively hide from ourselves is a point of view on the world rather than an object in the world; it is a point of view whose constant challenge is to be able to view the world in a truly ethical light. This is a challenge of achieving an undistorted “moral vision,” so to say. Insofar as this challenge is forgotten or given up, what results is precisely the kind of forgetfulness that transcendental ethical self-deception consists in. This forgetfulness, moreover, amounts to a habit of overlooking our human finitude, an (itself deeply human) tendency to try to transcend our limitations that define our human condition. Just as the argument about transcendental guilt in earlier chapters should be understood as “moral reflection” rather than standard ethical theorizing, the reflections I have engaged in in this chapter ought to be distinguished from more standard theoretical discussions of narrative conceptions of personal identity (though they are, undeniably, in many ways related to such theories). 26 The reflexivity of this particular piece of philosophical writing must therefore finally be taken up. Who is the present author, the self reflecting on the self, guilt, narrativity, and self-deception in these pages? Who am I, when writing down thoughts and ideas such as the ones presented in this book? By writing this chapter and book, by adding my own very small contribution to the “story” of the transcendental subject, I am myself continuously in the middle of a narrative construction, an incomplete and fallible one, of not just the transcendental subject but also myself as a philosophical

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writer—and thereby also as a morally reflective person faced with the challenge of recognizing himself as a guilty human being. Perhaps I am also in the middle of a self-deceptive process, which can only be yet another source of guilt. There is, then, a sense in which I am also confessing something (but what exactly, to whom?) by writing a text like this. Does my confession succeed? Could it ever succeed? Moreover, is it really mine, or does the implied author implicitly constructed through what I have written act as its subject? Am I, again, just deceiving myself by eventually liberating myself from the transcendental guilt I am solemnly burdening not just myself but basically all human beings with? There can, it seems, be no ultimate end to these questions that need to be asked repeatedly by anyone trying to understand her- or himself as a human being. Indeed, the possibility—and even the necessity— of posing and continuously reconsidering such questions is part and parcel of the transcendental reflexivity that I have here emphasized as the key method of my explorations. NOTES 1. Cf., e.g., Jukka Mikkonen’s recent work on how philosophical ideas can be expressed in literary writing, for instance, his very interesting paper, “Philosophical Fiction and the Act of Fiction-Making,” Sats 9 (2008), 116-132. 2. See also Neil Gross’s sociological analysis of an analogous phenomenon in his magnificent book on Richard Rorty’s philosophical development: Gross, Richard Rorty: The Making of an American Philosopher (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). The kind of construction of one’s intellectual self(-conception) that Gross studies in Rorty’s case is obviously social and cultural, not just individual. 3. Probably the two most influential classical references are Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983; 1st ed. 1961); and Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978). An essential theoretical concept in Booth’s pioneering narratological theory is the unreliable narrator; however, as we are not primarily concerned with interpreting fiction here, we need not pay attention to the reliability of narration; in most cases, the “narrators” of philosophical texts are not unreliable in the sense that fictional narrators in a novel often are (though they might be). 4. See also my discussion of these theories in the context of pragmatism and ontology in Sami Pihlström, Structuring the World: The Issue of Realism and the Nature of Ontological Problems in Classical and Contemporary Pragmatism, Acta Philosophica Fennica 59 (Helsinki: The Philosophical Society of Finland, 1996), chapter 5. In that discussion, my main concern is the application of the philosophical issue of realism to the theoretical postulations of narratology (taken up as an example of theoretical postulations in the humanities, as contrasted to the postulations of theoretical entities in natural science). This is an issue I must now set aside. Nor am I involved in theoretical debates within narratology; I am just using this framework to illuminate a topic in moral reflection. In particular, I cannot here take any stand on the question concerning the “reality” (vs. fictionality) of these postulated narratological agents. Nor can I deal with problems such as fictional truth, the “existence” of fictional entities, or the cultural significance of fiction and narratives generally; on these and related topics, see the fascinating recent work by Peter Swirski, especially his Of Literature and Knowledge: Explorations in

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Narrative Thought Experiments, Evolution and Game Theory (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), and Literature, Analytically Speaking: Explorations in the Theory of Interpretation, Analytic Aesthetics, and Evolution (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010). 5. At this point, the reader is (unsurprisingly) referred to the relevant writings by Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, and others; also, the critical work by Richard Rorty on Derrida and “philosophy as a kind of writing” is relevant here: see Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism (Hassocks: The Harvester Press, 1982). 6. On the importance of thought experiments in both literature and philosophy, see Swirski, Of Literature and Knowledge, especially chapter 4. For Putnam’s “Twin Earth,” see Hilary Putnam, “The Meaning of ‘Meaning,’” in Putnam, Mind, Language, and Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975). 7. Just think about Wittgenstein’s “private language argument” to become convinced of this. This famous argument is available in Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958 [first published 1953]), especially §§ 198 ff. 8. Again, the ontological status of cultural entities is something I cannot discuss in this work. See my Structuring the World, chapter 5, for some pragmatism-inspired thoughts about the matter. 9. This is also a relevant example because some interesting “New Wittgensteinian” work has recently been directed toward Wittgenstein and fictional literature. See, e.g., Rupert Read, “Wittgenstein and Faulkner’s Benjy: Reflections on and of Derangement,” in John Gibson and Wolfgang Huemer (eds.), The Literary Wittgenstein (London and New York: Routledge, 2004). This fascinating yet troubling paper discusses William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. Just as there is, according to the “New Wittgensteinians,” nothing to understand in “nonsensical” works like the Tractatus, there is in an important sense literally nothing to understand in a seriously deranged person’s utterances. 10. See Conant’s and Diamond’s contributions to Alice Crary and Rupert Read (eds.), The New Wittgenstein (London and New York: Routledge, 2000). For both sympathetic and critical perspectives to the “New Wittgensteinian” approach, see Sami Pihlström (ed.), Wittgenstein and the Method of Philosophy, Acta Philosophica Fennica 80 (Helsinki: The Philosophical Society of Finland, 2006). 11. Of course, Wittgenstein is a special case in many ways, and as most of his oeuvre was prepared for posthumous publication by editors, instead of himself, the authorship might in some cases be legitimately questioned. However, this hardly concerns the Tractatus, which, as an early work, was prepared for publication by the author himself. 12. In my references to Wittgenstein’s early philosophy in the previous chapters of this volume, I have tacitly assumed that there are important philosophical points made in the Tractatus, that is, that the book is not sheer nonsense. In particular, the discussions of solipsism and the ethical subject (see chapter 3 above) in that book and in the “Lecture on Ethics” from 1929 should be seen as, if not literally “meaningful” in the same way as ordinary discourse, still pieces of substantial philosophical argumentation instead of einfach Unsinn, however difficult it is to put them into words in terms of ordinary (or scientific) discourse. 13. I do not want to engage in controversies regarding the periodization of Wittgenstein’s thought, however. For example, I would be happy to admit that there is, in addition to the early and late Wittgenstein, also the “third” Wittgenstein whose most important work is On Certainty. Let us, however, leave that matter for other discussions. 14. This point has been developed by Stephen Mulhall in his insightful discussions of Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard; cf. especially Mulhall, Inheritance and Originality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). 15. See the remarks on remorse, inspired by Gaita’s writings, in chapters 2-3 above. 16. See Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 17. See here the discussion of the problem of the meaningfulness of life in chapter 5 above. 18. Cf. Thomas Wallgren, Transformative Philosophy: Socrates, Wittgenstein, and the Democractic Spirit of Philosophy (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books [Rowman & Littlefield

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Publishing Group], 2006), on the only seldom noted connections between Wittgenstein and Socrates. 19. See William James’s treatment of “philosophical temperaments,” arguably inevitably influencing the kind of writing or narration a philosopher is capable of: James, Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (1907), eds. Frederick H. Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers, and Ignas K. Skrupskelis (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1975), Lecture I. See also my previous discussion of this aspect of James’s thought in Sami Pihlström, Pragmatism and Philosophical Anthropology: Understanding Our Human Life in a Human World (New York: Peter Lang, 1998), chapter 10. For an analogy drawn from contemporary pragmatism, consider Rorty’s many remarks on the “we”—these are different “first person plural” reflections on what our lives, morally and epistemically, are like, captured in phrases like “we postmodern bourgeois liberals,” “we Kuhnians,” or “we pragmatists.” Rortyan pragmatism should, however, be reflexively criticized: Rorty loses the distinction between genuinely having a view about something and “just saying something”; this is part of his more general loss of normative distinctions (as argued in Pihlström, ibid., chapter 7). Thus, the Rortyan rhetorically employed “we” should not be conflated with pragmatist reconstruals of a properly transcendental subjectivity. While it might seem to bear some resemblance to the kind of social subject of human forms of life that could be rearticulated as transcendental in Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, for instance, the Rortyan “we” (as employed in the kind of phrases quoted above) is merely the subject of a contingent ethnos or vocabulary, and its relations to other such social subjects is simply causal; for Rorty, there are in the end only causal clashes between vocabularies, no rational, normatively governed processes of replacing one vocabulary with another. For Rorty’s last reflections on this kind of reductive neopragmatism, see Richard Rorty, Philosophy as Cultural Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Note, however, that while I am sharply critical of what seems to me to be Rorty’s total reduction of normative notions to non-normative (causal) ones, I do think that he has done an important service to the philosophical community by re-emphasizing the importance of pragmatist thinkers such as John Dewey. 20. See chapter 3 above, as well as Sami Pihlström, Solipsism: History, Critique, and Relevance (Tampere: Tampere University Press, 2004), chapter 3. 21. It should be noted, however, that solipsism and (social, cultural) relativism are in many ways analogous philosophical positions. Cultural relativism has even been described by Hilary Putnam (see his Renewing Philosophy [Cambridge, MA and Oxford: Blackwell, 1992]) as “solipsism with a ‘we’ instead of an ‘I.’” 22. Gaita’s comments on this—drawn from Raimond Gaita, Good and Evil: An Absolute Conception, rev. ed. (London and New York: Routledge, 2004; 1st ed. 1991)—were discussed in chapter 2 above. 23. On the both metaphysical and moral aspects of what I call transcendental self-deception, see Sami Pihlström, “Transcendental Self-Deception,” Teorema 26 (2006), 177-189. 24. See, for different theoretical perspectives, Brian P. McLaughlin and Amelie O. Rorty (eds.), Perspectives on Self-Deception (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), especially Robert Audi’s contribution, “Self-Deception, Rationalization, and Reasons for Acting” (pp. 92-120); as well as K. Bach, “An Analysis of Self-Deception,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 41 (1980), 351-370; and J. Mitchell, “Living a Lie: Self-Deception, Habit, and Social Roles,” Human Studies 23 (2000), 145-156. Self-deception is often taken to be a logical or epistemic challenge to our very notion of rationality (and related notions) and to lead to interesting paradoxes: see Jean-Paul Dupuy (ed.), Self-Deception and Paradoxes of Rationality (Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications, 1998). 25. See, e.g., M.W. Martin, Self-Deception and Morality (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1986); cf. Pihlström, “Transcendental Self-Deception.” The locus classicus of Sartre’s discussion of bad faith is of course his Being and Nothingness: A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology (1943), trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Philosophical Library, 1966). 26. For relatively recent discussions of narrative theories of the self, see, e.g., Galen Strawson (ed.), The Self? (Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell, 2005).

Chapter Seven

Concluding Reflections Does Anyone Ever Do What Is the Right Thing to Do?

I believe I could, on the basis of what has been said in the previous chapters of this volume, conclude by arguing that no one ever does, nor ever can do, what is the morally right thing to do—on the grounds that guilt, or potential guilt, is something that concerns us all (albeit me first and foremost) at each and every moment of our lives, potentially framing any action we perform, and is therefore a transcendental—and hence ubiquitous—feature of our existence as ethically oriented creatures. But I won’t argue this. I will only, by way of conclusion, once more examine this thesis “for the sake of argument,” primarily metaphilosophically, hoping through this final piece of moral reflection to illuminate a larger meta-level issue I take this book to indirectly deal with, namely, what I have elsewhere called the limits of philosophical argumentation. 1 MORAL TRAGEDIES—AND A SHORT ARGUMENT Our moral lives are, metaphysically speaking, tragic. As has been repeatedly argued in the previous chapters, we are always, at least potentially, guilty— and this potentiality constitutes our moral lives, particularly their depth and seriousness. Even more strongly, we cannot understand moral seriousness at all unless we acknowledge this potential guilt. This—what I have called transcendental guilt—is, as I have emphasized, not an epistemic point about our not knowing, or not being able to know, what is the right action in a given situation; nor is it a semantic point about the meanings of such words. 117

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Nor is it a reliance on religious dogmas about original sin. While it is certainly connected with semantic and epistemic considerations, as well as religious or theological ones, it is, I am tempted to say, primarily a metaphysical claim about the human condition. There just is no easy way of being moral; adopting a genuinely ethical perspective is a demanding task—perhaps even the most demanding task of human life. If one is able to assume moral responsibility at all—if one is, or is seeking to become, a morally serious person— one will have no chance but to experience guilt. This insight is, once again, firmly rooted in Dostoyevskian ideas we have encountered above: I am the most guilty person in the world, carrying the entire humankind’s guilt on my shoulders. Variations of this theme have been formulated by thinkers as diverse as Sartre, Levinas, Wittgenstein, and Gaita. Now, the thesis expressed in the subtitle of this concluding chapter could perhaps be defended by means of the following very simple but uncompromising argument: 1. There are always conflicting moral demands set on us. That is, we ought to do X but we also ought to do Y. For example, we ought to help the sick, starving children of Haiti but we also ought to help, say, Finnish handicapped children. 2. We should always do everything that is set on us as something that we morally ought to do. 3. There is no single thing we ought to do but always a plurality of such things. There are many more “oughts” than we are able to meet. X and Y are (often) impossible to do at the same time, or by the same person. 4. We cannot do conflicting things (a trivial logical point based on the law of contradiction). 5. No one ever does what is the right thing to do. The argument might be countered by appealing to the well-known principle that ought implies can. However, in this special context—a metaphysically and metaphilosophically relevant context of ethical reflection—this principle lacks the force it may have in more restricted and more standard contexts of ethical theorizing. It is part of the infinity of our moral task—and thus, again, part of the seriousness of morality and the overriding nature of the moral perspective—that we never can do what we ought to do. Yet, this infinity is something that we can perceive and appreciate only from within our finite moral lives. It is one outcome of the reflections on our moral finitude that we may, and must, engage in. In this sense, definitely, ought does not imply can. We, or even I, ought to have, per impossibile, been able to render Auschwitz non-existent. It is our duty, or mine, and our shame, or mine, to live in a world in which it did happen. Evil, it has been suggested, can be construed in terms of “the unjus-

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tifiable,” as “that which absolutely should not have occurred.” 2 We are guilty of living in a world in which there are unjustifiable evils. Our example can be taken to show that argumentation eventually plays only a relatively limited role in moral reflection. 3 In our most serious cases of reflection, a deep moral individualism reigns: our issues are personal—to the extent that solipsism threatens, as we have seen (cf. chapter 3), challenging us to both continue argumentative discussion with other individuals and to acknowledge the limits of argumentation. CONCLUDING REMARKS ON MORALITY, RELIGION, AND ORIGINAL SIN The notions we are reflecting on, we can now once more observe, come close to the traditional Christian one of original sin. Morality and religion are, I believe, much closer to each other than we usually want to admit. We cannot adequately appreciate the infinity of our moral duty and our constant failure to be moral—our finitude—without appreciating this crucial link. 4 Thus, in a sense, my reflections are intended against moral hubris of any kind, and in some cases religion, at least healthy forms of religion, might also protect us against such hubris. 5 I find myself in agreement with Peter Dews who argues that conflicting— theological and naturalistic or secular—approaches to evil have generated deep tensions in contemporary culture, and continue to do so. 6 I see my own reflections on guilt as analogous to his reflections on evil at least in this sense: we should find a “third way” between traditional religious beliefs and fully secular approaches, which somehow seem to miss the point. 7 There is a kind of depth in the concepts of evil and guilt which presupposes that we take seriously the religious background ideas framing both concepts. Transcendental guilt is a secular version of original sin—that is, it is not a religious or theological notion—yet its religious and theological undercurrents must not be hidden. They must be understood in order to retain the full (potential) meaning of that concept in our attempts to understand what I have called the human condition. Just as Dews proposes to “re-work formerly religious conceptions of evil, and religious versions of the hope for its overcoming, in more strictly philosophical terms,” 8 I have (I hope and believe) tried to rework some of the religious intuitions that have led people to employ the concept of original sin in more strictly philosophical terms in order to maintain the seriousness of moral guilt that perhaps only the religious notion of sin can ultimately maintain. Indeed, this seriousness is so deep that it might lead us to argue, as imagined above, that no one is ever able to do what ought to be done. This is pretty much like saying that everyone is, by religious or

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metaphysical necessity, a sinner. I am even prepared to say that, yet I must insist—to move on to the secular side once again—that any religious and metaphysical necessities we might be tempted to embrace are here fully “naturalized” as moral necessities. They presuppose metaphysically nothing beyond our “human nature,” whatever that is. 9 But human nature is richer and deeper than reductive naturalism could ever allow. Toward the end of his discussion, Dews quotes Theodor Adorno’s important words, and I want to repeat here what I find most crucial in that quote: Guilt reproduces itself in each of us […] since we cannot possibly remain fully conscious of this connection at every moment of our waking lives […] even if we have done nothing wrong […]. [I]f one were fully aware of all things at every moment [e.g., Auschwitz], one would really be unable to live. One is pushed, as it were, into forgetfulness, which is already a form of guilt. 10

We are, thus, transcendentally guilty of continuously forgetting our (transcendental) guilt, even though that forgetfulness—and the resulting inevitability of guilt—is also part of our “human nature.” I believe Dews makes an extremely important point when concluding that political practices aiming at better life for human beings and societies must “begin from a sense of fault, from ‘healthy culpability,’” that is, from the understanding that (contra, say, Kantian constructivist moral theorists such as Christine Korsgaard, who aim at grounding moral principles by means of reason) “we are what’s wrong with the world.” 11 What Dews argues by focusing on the concept of evil comes very close to what I have been arguing by focusing on the concept of guilt. The view that “we are what’s wrong with the world” can be captured in the argument demonstrating that no one ever does what is the right thing to do, which is equivalent to a transcendental demonstration of the ubiquity of (potential) guilt in human affairs and in any genuine moral agency. 12 However, it cannot be denied that the argument allegedly demonstrating that no one ever does what ought to be done, as presented above, if sound, would in fact make morality illusory. Full-bodied moral nihilism, and perhaps even metaphysical nihilism, threatens us at this point. At the same time, the argument I have imagined (albeit not defended!) enables us to appreciate what is really deep in morality and our ethical lives. This, by the way, is one way in which a philosopher can, by means of inventing a (fictional) narrator—the imaginable person presenting the argument—entertain and defend philosophical ideas unimaginable to the narrator her/himself (cf. chapter 6 above). These considerations leading up to a recognition of the depth of the notion of guilt in our lives might be phrased in more metaphysical terms by saying that the facts and objects we encounter in the world—whatever exists

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in the humanly experienceable world—are not, as phenomenalists like George Berkeley and John Stuart Mill suggested, permanent possibilities of sensation, 13 but, as Hilary Putnam somewhat playfully proposes, “permanent possibility[ies] of obligations,” 14 and hence, due to our ethical finitude and the infinity of our ethical obligations, permanent possibilities of guilt. This is not only a slightly revised formulation of the notion of transcendental guilt that has emerged out of the discussions of the previous chapters, but also, I hope, an accurate (re)formulation of what Putnam has called the fact-value entanglement. 15 Not only do all facts involve (moral and other) values, and vice versa; their involving values entails, together with the basic fact of our finitude and the resulting impossibility of living up to the values that any given situation demands us to live up to, that they—the facts—are inevitably “colored” by the perspective of guilt, at least whenever we encounter, experience, or examine any worldly fact. 16 Accordingly, any fact in the human world challenges us ethically; any fact may make us, or me, guilty. Moreover, this formulation should be compared to the Peircean idea briefly suggested in chapter 2 above: guilt, transcendentally conceived, is a “real general,” not itself any particular fact, event, or object. It could also be connected with a broader view shared by as different philosophical orientations as, say, pragmatism and phenomenology: the way the world is for us—the way it is given to us—is not as a collection of objects of mere representation and/or spectation but as a field of activity and experience. Thus, the human world is a “field” of guilt even in the absence of specific guilty actions or events. Indeed, most of us—readers, colleagues, and others—especially in the socio-economically developed countries, should view our lives as deeply unsatisfying—ethically unsatisfying—and therefore guilty. Today, again, we consider which rich, rewarding, life-enhancing, meaning-bestowing, significant (and so on) actions or activities we might undertake or engage in tomorrow. In contrast, most people in the world just suffer from day to day. Their lives amount to a constant struggle with obstacles most of us could hardly bear a single day. We are to a great extent guilty of this state of affairs. Moreover, when noticing this, one must immediately realize that an abstract reflection such as this book will not change these circumstances—which is yet another reason for feeling guilty. That this is our common guilty situation should only make us more guilty, because we have no choice but to find guilt a collective phenomenon here. Common guilt is, we recall, “corrupt.” And so are we, being helplessly tied to this common fate. We are, due to our human nature (again, whatever that ultimately means) tied to the forgetfulness Adorno describes. Yet, I do hope to have taken some steps toward an indirect appreciation of the ever more pressing need to alleviate suffering, and thereby to alleviate our common, always corrupt, guilt. It should be understood that there can be no end to this task of appreciation. This is again one

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important sense in which our ethical challenge is infinite, in striking contrast to our finitude. Accordingly, morality is, for us, a profoundly paradoxical phenomenon, which should never be, and can never be, taken easily. This—instead of the illusoriness of the moral point of view—is what ought to be seen (a moral “ought”!) as the outcome of the argument imagined above. It is for this reason that this exercise in philosophical imagination is, I believe, a good way to conclude the reflections on ethical finitude I have engaged in in this volume. If I have in this book been able to take even a single step toward a deeper appreciation of the fact that morality cannot and must not be taken easily, I think I have to some extent succeeded. NOTES 1. I am here also crucially indebted to Kenneth R. Westphal’s many insightful papers on rational justification and its fallible, socio-historical nature in the Kantian-Hegelian tradition. As Westphal has repeatedly noted, rational justification in non-formal domains cannot be infallibilistically construed, and the same holds for the kind of argumentation on the foundations of ethics I have been engaging in, or imagining. Westphal maintains that Hegel actually showed, in connection with his analysis of recognition, that acknowledging the social and historical dimensions of rational justification is a necessary, transcendental, condition for our being able to rationally justify our judgments. See, for some of his recent accounts of this, Westphal, “Mutual Recognition and Rational Justification in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit,” Dialogue 48 (2009), 1-47; and Westphal, “Urteilskraft, gegenseitige Anerkennung und rationale Rechtfertigung,” in Hans-Dieter Klein (ed.), Ethik als prima philosophia? (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2010). I do not want to take any stand on Westphal’s reading of Hegel—or Kant—but I am impressed by the conception of justification he develops through that reading; nor do I assume that Westphal would approve of the particular transcendental reflections presented in this book. 2. Peter Dews, The Idea of Evil (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008), p. 8. Dews finds this idea in Jean Nabert’s book Essai sur le mal (1955). 3. See also chapter 4 above, and compare this to the discussion in Sami Pihlström, Pragmatism and Philosophical Anthropology: Understanding Our Human Life in a Human World (New York: Peter Lang, 1998), chapter 10. 4. Here we should be reminded of the often maintained idea that no one should ever claim oneself to be a morally virtuous person. I do not know if this view, repeated by a number of thinkers, can be originally attributed to someone in particular. Ethical virtue remains only when it is not perceived by the one who has it. 5. This is related to the need to distinguish (however difficult that might be) between genuine religiosity and pseudo-religiosity (or superstition), which I discuss in Sami Pihlström, “Religion and Pseudo-Religion: An Elusive Boundary,” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 62 (2007), 3-32. 6. Dews, The Idea of Evil, p. 13. 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid. 9. For a discussion of transcendental philosophy as ultimately in the service of philosophical anthropology, or philosophical theorization about “human nature,” see Sami Pihlström, “On the Concept of Philosophical Anthropology,” Journal of Philosophical Research 28 (2003), 259-285. See also chapter 2 above.

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10. Theodor Adorno, Metaphysics: Concepts and Problems (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001), p. 113. For the quote, see Dews, The Idea of Evil, p. 230. 11. Dews, The Idea of Evil, pp. 231-232. 12. Lars Svendsen makes similar points in his A Philosophy of Evil (trans. Kerri A. Pierce, Champaign and London: Dalkey Archive Press, 2010). 13. This, of course, is the famous Berkeleyan doctrine that “to be is to be perceived,” esse est percipi. 14. Hilary Putnam, Realism with a Human Life, ed. James Conant (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 115. Putnam says here that if he dared to be a metaphysician, he would create a system in which there would be nothing but obligations. Cf. my brief discussion of this in Sami Pihlström, Pragmatist Metaphysics: An Essay on the Ethical Grounds of Ontology (London: Continuum, 2009), pp. 115-116. 15. In addition to Realism with a Human Face cited above, see Hilary Putnam, The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2002); cf. Sami Pihlström, Pragmatic Moral Realism: A Transcendental Defense (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005). 16. In this book, I do not want to take any stand on the general issue of realism concerning the question of whether there in any sense are facts or objects that are completely independent of our perspectives of experiencing and/or representing them. For pragmatist reflections on this issue, see Pihlström, Pragmatist Metaphysics.

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Index

absurd(ity), 5, 77, 82, 83, 85. See also existentialism action vs. contemplation, 5, 77–81, 86 Adorno, T.W., 120, 121 anxiety, 71 Appelqvist, H., viii applied: ethics, 1, 77; philosophy, 7 Arendt, H., 49 Augustine, 107 Auschwitz, 50, 76, 118. See also Holocaust Bakhtin, M., 25 Benatar, D., 5, 60–71, 72, 73 Berkeley, G., 120 Bernstein, R., 95 birth, 61, 82 Book of Job, 23, 24–25, 35 Booth, W.C., 104 Camus, A., 82. See also existentialism care (caring), 48, 65 Carr, D., 28 categorical imperative, 17, 49. See also moral, law categories, 87, 88. See also Kant, I. Chatman, S., 104 Christianity, 39 commonsense realism, 66 Conant, J., 106 concentration camps, 45. See also Holocaust

confession(s), 5, 107–108, 114 confusion, 66 conscience, 23 constructivism, 30 contemplation, 77–81, 85 Crary, A., 73 critical theory, 77 death, 7, 34, 52, 61, 64, 82, 95, 109; of the author, 104 depersonalization, 48, 55 Descartes, R., 107 Dewey, J., 77, 116 Dews, P., 30, 101, 119–120 Diamond, C., 106 Dostoevsky, F., 4, 10, 11, 12–13, 14, 20, 21, 23, 25, 39, 44, 46, 86 emotions (moral), 3–4, 9, 17, 23, 26, 27, 33, 60 emotivism, 3, 9 Epicurus, 61 ethical: solipsism, 4, 37, 39, 40, 43, 44, 46, 47, 48, 51, 55; subject (see also moral, subject[ivity]), 92–93; unthinkabilities (see unthinkabilities [cultural/ethical]) evil (problem of), 5, 10, 11, 18, 24, 25, 26, 30, 33, 70, 76–77, 79, 83, 86, 93, 95, 96, 98, 101, 108, 109, 118, 120; banal, 49, 95; radical (see also Kant, I.), 17, 33 existentialism, 77 131

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extinction, 62 fact-value entanglement, 120. See also Putnam, H. finitude (ethical, human), 4–5, 50, 64, 79, 85, 97, 113, 119, 120–122. See also mortality freedom of speech, 59 Freud, S., 35 friendship, 62 Gaita, R., 2, 3, 4, 9, 12–14, 21–22, 23, 26–27, 29, 30, 37, 44–45, 50, 66, 67, 70, 112, 118 God, 10, 20, 21, 24–25, 48, 75, 78, 79, 80–81, 83, 91, 92 God’s-Eye View, 5, 29, 51, 63, 65, 68, 72, 75, 79, 85, 93 goodness, 49 groundlessness, 23 guilt: common, 13, 44, 112, 121; criminal (juridical), 19; metaphysical, 19, 19–22, 26, 34, 43, 103; metaphysics of, 9; moral, 19–22, 23–24, 26, 34, 38, 45–46, 80, 92, 110, 112; non-agency, 22; political, 19, 21; survivor’s, 22; transcendental, 1, 3, 9–30, 45, 68, 72, 76, 85, 87, 89, 92, 101, 103, 110–111, 112, 112–113, 113–114, 117, 119, 120 Haaparanta, L., viii Hallamaa, J., viii Hegel, G.W.F., 122 Heidegger, M., 85 Heinämaa, S., viii Heine, H., 70 Hertzberg, L., 9, 68 Holocaust, 7, 22, 49, 69, 55. See also Auschwitz; concentration camps human nature, 119, 120, 121 Husserl, E., 111, 100. See also phenomenology idealism: metaphysical, 93; transcendental, 43, 89 ideas of pure reason, 87. See also Kant, I.; transcendental, ideas immigration, 62 immortality, 52

implied: author, 104–107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 114; reader, 104, 106. See also narratology innocence, concept of, 31 Jacquette, D., 90, 92 James, W., 55, 71, 73, 83, 96, 97, 116 Jaspers, K., 19–23, 26, 34, 35, 55 Jesus, 39–40 Kafka, F., 23, 25 Kant, I., 2, 4, 12, 16, 17, 24, 32, 37, 37–38, 43, 45, 47, 49, 68, 87–89, 95, 96, 97, 99–100, 101, 110. See also evil, radical; moral, law; transcendental, philosophy Khapaeva, D., viii Kierkegaard, S., 7 Koposov, N., viii Korsgaard, C.M., 120 Koskinen, H.J., viii Kotkavirta, J., viii Kovalainen, H.A., viii Laitinen, A., viii Levi, P., 56 Levinas, E., 2, 3, 4, 16, 20, 21, 22, 37, 46–47, 67, 84, 118 Lewis, D., 72 life, 61; form(s) of (see also Wittgenstein, L.), 60, 63, 64, 65, 68, 111, 116; meaning of/in, 5, 75–84, 87, 90; of action vs. of contemplation, 77–81; philosophy of, 109; problem of (see also Wittgenstein, L.), 51, 78; riddle of, 96 literary theory, 103, 104 Marxism, 77 meaning, 27, 75–84, 106–107. See also life, meaning of/in memory, ethics of, 7 Merleau-Ponty, M., 85 metaphysical subject, 42, 90–91, 101. See also transcendental, subject(ivity) metaphysics, 8, 69, 76 Mill, J.S., 120 Moisio, O.-P., viii Moore, A.W., 89

Index moral: agency/agent(s), 14, 15, 22–23, 28–29, 38–39, 41, 56, 96, 120; duty, 110; guilt (see guilt, moral); hubris, 119; identity, 5, 110; individualism, 119; law (categorical imperative) (see also Kant, I.), 38, 49; necessities, 119; nihilism, 120; objectivity, 98; practice(s), 29; principles, 30, 120; problems, 42; psychology, 27; realism, 43, 56; reasoning, 98; reasons, 18, 23, 29; reflection (ethical reflection) (see also transcendental, reflection), 1, 3, 5, 9, 12, 21, 23, 26, 29, 30, 60, 65, 66, 68, 78, 89, 95, 97, 103, 105, 107, 108, 109, 113, 117, 118, 119; self, 38, 108, 113; seriousness (see seriousness [moral/ ethical]); subject(ivity), 30, 40, 42, 43, 47, 49; theology, 97; tragedy/tragedies, 6–7, 117; vision, 113 mortality, 47, 64, 95. See also death; finitude Nagel, T., 77, 82–83, 85 narrative/narrativity, 5, 103, 107, 113 narratology, 103, 114 narrator, 104, 107, 109, 111, 114, 120 naturalism, 119 Neiman, S., 76, 86, 95, 96, 98 Nietzsche, F., 35, 59 nihilism, 51 Niiniluoto, I., viii non-cognitivism, 39 nonsense, 106–107, 115 noumena, 88. See also Kant, I.; things in themselves vs. appearances Other, the, 46. See also Levinas, E. otherness, 44 Peirce, C.S., 18, 33 perspectives (points of view), 82 perspectivism, 81 phenomenology, 95, 100, 120 Phillips, D.Z., 9 philosophical: anthropology, 26, 35, 37, 122; argumentation, limits of, 117; temperament(s) (see also James, W.), 73, 116 Plato, 59

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possible worlds, 72 postmodernism, 104 poststructuralism, 104 postulates of practical reason, 88. See also Kant, I. pragmatism, 77, 92, 96, 114, 116, 120 procreation, 62 Putnam, H., 72, 104, 120 real generals, 18, 33, 120 redescription, 5, 108–109 reflection, moral/ethical. See moral, reflection; transcendental, reflection reflexivity, 109, 110, 114 relativism, 81, 97, 116 religion, 3, 24, 50, 80, 85, 86, 98, 109, 119. See also God; theism remorse, 3, 5, 9, 12–15, 22, 27, 32, 44–45, 108, 112 responsibility (moral), 46–47, 50, 117 reward and punishment (in ethics), 40–41 Rhees, R., 9, 66 Rorty, R., 5, 108, 114, 116 Rousseau, J.-J., 107 Russell, B., 104 Rydenfelt, H., viii Sartre, J.-P., 77, 82, 100, 112, 118. See also existentialism Scheler, M., 33 scholastic realism, 18, 33. See also real generals school shootings, 59 self, 103; moral, 5, 108. See also metaphysical subject; moral, subject(ivity); transcendental, subject(ivity) self-deception, 5, 112–113, 116; transcendental, 112, 113 seriousness (moral/ethical), 1, 3, 7, 9, 11, 13, 15, 17, 18, 24, 50, 56, 60, 68, 84, 85, 109, 110, 117, 118, 119 shame, 12, 32, 52, 56 Sihvola, J., viii sin (original/primordial), 7, 16, 21, 33, 39, 41, 50, 84, 93, 96, 101, 103, 108–109, 117, 119 Singer, P., 66 skepticism, 48

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solidarity, 20 solipsism. See ethical, solipsism; transcendental, solipsism soul, 93 Staten, H., 31 Stoicism, 40, 78 Stokhof, M., 91–93, 101 Strawson, P.F., 35 subject. See metaphysical subject; moral, subject(ivity) suffering, 7, 10, 24, 25, 61, 64, 70, 76, 79, 80, 83, 86, 95, 121 Swirski, P., viii, 114 Taylor, C., 85, 98 theism, 83. See also God; religion theodicy, 25, 70, 86, 96, 98. See also evil (problem of) things in themselves (Dinge an sich selbst) vs. appearances, 52, 88. See also Kant, I. Tilghman, B., 66 Todorov, T., 2, 4, 37, 45, 47, 48–49, 50, 53, 56 transcendence, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 101 transcendental: analysis, 30; argument(s)/ argumentation, 2, 13, 26, 28, 29, 32, 64, 65, 66, 68, 97; concepts, 30; condition(s), 28–29, 81, 89, 94; consciousness, 111; ego, 109, 111; guilt (see guilt, transcendental); idealism, 43, 89; ideas, 88; inquiry, 28, 29, 100, 109; investigation, 29, 30; method(ology), 93, 97; philosophy, 26, 29, 30, 87, 100,

110, 113, 122; reflection (see also moral, reflection), 3, 14, 66, 122; self (see also self-deception, transcendental), 41, 113; solipsism, 40, 42, 52, 54, 90, 101, 111; subject(ivity) (see also metaphysical subject), 5, 27, 42, 43, 54, 106, 107, 109, 110, 110–112, 113; tradition, 27, 28, 109; truths, 30; vs. transcendent, 5, 20, 30, 33, 42, 54, 77, 87–93, 98, 100, 102 unthinkabilities (cultural/ethical), 5, 60, 66, 66–67, 68, 69, 70 value(s), 42, 89, 91–92, 93, 120; ineffability of, 91 view from nowhere, 85. See also perspectives virtues, 45, 48, 55 Wallgren, T., viii Weil, S., 78, 79, 96 Westphal, K.R., viii, 122 Westphal, M., 41, 52 Wilcox, J.T., 24 Wilson, J., viii Winch, P., 9, 66 Wittgenstein, L., 2, 4, 15, 21, 40–43, 45, 47, 48, 53, 54, 66, 78, 79, 85, 89–92, 96, 100, 101, 103, 106, 107, 109, 111, 115, 116, 118 Wittgensteinian (tradition in) moral philosophy, 9, 27, 66. See also Gaita, R.; Hertzberg, L.

About the Author

Sami Pihlström (PhD, University of Helsinki, 1996) has been professor of practical philosophy at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland, since 2006. He is also, since 2009, the director of the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies at the University of Helsinki, Finland. He is the author of several books and dozens of articles on metaphysics, ethics, philosophy of religion, and related topics, both in English and Finnish. His recent books include Naturalizing the Transcendental: A Pragmatic View (2003), Pragmatic Moral Realism: A Transcendental Defense (2005), “The Trail of the Human Serpent Is over Everything”: Jamesian Perspectives on Mind, World, and Religion (2008), and Pragmatist Metaphysics: An Essay on the Ethical Grounds of Ontology (2009). He is also the editor of Wittgenstein and the Method of Philosophy (2006) and the Continuum Companion to Pragmatism (2011), as well as one of the executive editors of Sats: North European Journal of Philosophy and the book review editor of Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society.

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