Reflections On How We Live

288 Pages·2009·3.13 MB·English

by  Annette Baier

Refl ections on How We Live
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Reflections on How
We Live
Annette C. Baier
1
3
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp
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© Annette Baier 2009
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First published 2009
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Baier, Annette.
Refl ections on How We Live/Annette C. Baier.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-19-957036-2 (hardback: alk. paper) 1. Ethics. I. Title.
BJ21.B35 2009 170–dc22
2009034145
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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
und forzugehn: wohin? Ins Ungewisse.
(Rainer Maria Rilke, “Der Auszug des
Verlorenen Sohnes”)
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Preface
This book is about ethics in a broad sense. Some of its later chapters are
essays in the old sense, rather than professional philosophical papers. David
Hume, after turning to essay-writing when his long, three-book Treatise
failed to gain appreciative readers, wrote a short piece on essay-writing,
which he later withdrew, as in it he had appealed to women, as the leaders
of the “conversible world,” to read essays like his and Addison’s, rather than
romances. He can be seen, in this piece, as taking up Swift’s “Hints for an
Essay on Conversation,” since Hume’s essay is as much about conversation
as about essay-writing. He had good reason to withdraw it, but, before his
offensive gallantry to the ladies, he had said a little about what he thought
the essay genre was suited to. It would indulge “an Inclination to the easier
and more gentle Exercises of the Understanding, to obvious Refl ections on
human Affairs, and the Duties of common Life, and to the Observation of
1
the Blemishes or Perfections of the particular Objects, that surround them.”
This is not a bad summing up of the themes of the essays I have included in
this volume, though the duties of common life may have been somewhat
neglected.
When I was a schoolchild, I wrote essays on all sorts of topics, usually
provided by my teachers, and I enjoyed doing this. Then I became a phil-
osophy student, and learned to write with an eye to professional assessment,
so some fi ne literary fl ourishes had to be given up. In one of my fi nal MA
exams I was given a choice of topics for a three-hour essay, chose “mysti-
cism,” and examined the principle that like knows like. Arthur Prior was
external examiner, and although he had little time for mysticism, he liked
what I had written, so that I ended with a scholarship to Oxford. There
I wrote a B.Phil. thesis, under J. L. Austin’s eagle eye, on precision in poetry,
so my love of fi ne writing continued, even if it took the form of a thesis
about the precise and the accurate. It was mainly metaphors I looked to, for
examples of precise poetic expression, and indeed I had earlier tried my
1 David Hume, Essays, Moral, Political and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics,
1985), 534–5.
viii preface
hand at poetry. The fi rst thing I published was an encyclopedia entry on
nonsense, written for Arthur Prior (and Paul Edwards), and later much
mocked by graduate students at the University of Pittsburgh, who would
recite it aloud as if it were a comic opera. It was very concise, and sounded
quite good, aloud. It took me quite a while to learn how to write a philo-
sophical paper, how to get a topic of the right size, with suffi cient links to
what others had recently written about to make them have some interest in
what I had to say. I eventually became all too adept at that. At fi rst I was
reactive, querying what others had said on action and intention, but eventu-
ally I did venture to introduce new topics, and with what I said about trust
I could almost be said to have begun a whole new industry.
I had always preferred those philosophers whose texts were a pleasure to
read, so Plato, Descartes, and Hume had from the start been my favorites.
I tried, when I myself wrote, to achieve clarity and also some literary polish,
though I have always benefi ted from sympathetic copy-editors, as well as
from critical input from colleagues and former students, and I continue to
get great benefi t from that. Some of the essays in this volume have been read
in draft by writers such as Alastair Galbraith and Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson
who are not philosophers (Alastair writes songs, and Jeffrey writes books
about animals and commentaries on Sanskrit vedas), and I was especially
pleased to have their approval, since I, like Hume, am delighted if I have a
readership beyond my own profession. The essays on faces, friendship, and
alienating affection are more solitary meditations on how I have lived than
engagements with other philosophers. Others, such as those on honesty, on
self-knowledge, and on hope and self-trust, engage more with other phil-
osophers, though that on self-trust engages most with my own past views,
but also with the views of others, including those who have reacted to mine.
Some of the essays are enquiries into much discussed moral issues such as
what we owe future people, and what toleration we should have for killing,
and some of them may sound a slightly hectoring note. But as Anthony
Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury, pointed out in his “Soliloquy:
Advice to an Author,” the only person there is any point in advising is
oneself. Other people are unlikely to take our advice, and we make offensive
displays of superiority if we offer it unasked. The essays on faces, on friend-
ship, and on alienating affection are personal refl ections, not theoretical
conclusions on how anyone else should live. And “Other Minds,” the last
essay, is, like this Preface, unabashedly autobiographical. All the essays are
preface ix
refl ections on our human condition, and our proclivities, good and bad. My
earlier book of essays on ethics, Moral Prejudices, contained much about trust,
and when I surveyed what I was fi rst intending to include in this book,
I found that only one, Essay 10, directly concerned trust. If I had been right
that trust is at the heart of ethics, then how could I write about ethics
without bringing it in? This was the beginning of Essays 11 and 12, for I still
believe our capacity for trust, and where necessary for distrust, is basic to the
way we live, and live together.
I am indebted not only to the many people who helped in the original
writing of the essays, but also to those former students who have expressed
special preference for some of the republished ones. Rob Shaver liked the
honesty essay, Chris Williams the friendship one, while Donald Ainslie
thought those on future generations merited republication. I thank Jeffrey
Moussaieff Masson for encouragement with the recent essays on patriotism
and on faces, and Livia Guimaraes, Herlinde Pauer-Studer, and David Wiggins
for help with that on killing. For that on sympathy and self-trust, I thank Anik
Waldow, with whom I have recently been considering sympathy, and also
Rebecca Holsen, who long ago criticized my tendency to apologize. (Dare I
apologize, Rebecca, for this acknowledgment?) I also thank Victoria McGeer,
who provoked my rather sour refl ections on hope. And I thank those at OUP
who have worked with me on this book, Peter Momtchiloff, for his encour-
agement, and Laurien Berkeley for her sympathetic copy-editing.
The dust cover image of Courbet’s grain sifters, which I saw when the
Hume Society met at Nantes, was chosen because it expresses both our
active life, in fi nding and separating out what we think will sustain us, and
also our more restful and refl ective absorption of that.
This book is for my daughter, Sarah, who seems to know better than most
of us how to live and what will sustain us (and certainly did not learn it
from me, since she was adopted at birth, and we met again only when she
was 33), and who seems to have passed on that knowledge to my four
grandchildren. Sarah, you have shown me what matters.
Dunedin A.B.
March 2009