A Note on Plain Speech and Transparency

Abstract

Recent writings, a flood of them, take up the legitimacy of moral philosophy. They revisit a question formulated with the advance of secularism in the eighteenth century: can rationally cogent grounds be found for ethical pronouncements? The possibility of devising a political moraity, however speculative, and avoiding disastrous positivisms or political religions, is also the latest cottage industry of the law schools. Wittgenstein concluded that there were matters philosophy should not attempt to justify by its procedures; and many feel the same about validating on propositional or logical grounds specific interpretations of art. My concern with “authenticity” and “spirit” is a way of linking ethical talk to art once more, while taking into account the contextual historical pressures art articulates in its own way. The aesthetic response, seen by some as an avoidance or escape, may be as much foreknowledge as response. Like philosophies of history inspired by Hegel, but less discursively, art raises the issue of human freedom: of the self-determination of the individual, or sometimes of the collective with which the individual identifies. The persuasiveness of art needs the supplement, however, of a hermeneutic that includes art itself rather than being applied to art from the outside. How does imagination become a reality-principle? How does the unreality of art’s imaginaire lessen the sense of unreality that so often invades us? Ideology, however grand, is not adequate as a reality-system. The Christian conflation of spirit and freedom, for example, and the secularhumanistic pairing of truth and freedom — two great ideologies that merge in Hegel — reduce to empty cliches if we neglect the historical controversies that, for example, led Cardinal Newman in his Apologia to adopt an “antagonist unity” as his persona. Newman is not only aware, before the letter, of the principle of positionality; he also knows that some role-playing is inevitable, even in non-fictive autobiography. The unreal real tends to prevail unless two conditions are satisfied.