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Between Freedom and Necessity.
An Essay on the Place of Value.
SCHROEDER, Steven
Amsterdam/Atlanta, GA, 2000, XIV, 131 pp.
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Series:
Value Inquiry Book Series 99
This extended essay joins an old conversation at the intersection of freedom and necessity. Though it takes place at the beginning of the twenty-first century by the “Christian” reckoning that has become an integral part of European identity, it will at times read like a conversation between classical Greece and nineteenth-century Europe. The cast consists of characters drawn from Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Plato as well as the authors themselves - Plato, Aristotle, Locke, Hume, Kant, Kierkegaard, MacIntyre, and Nussbaum. Some of these writers have been associated with displaced, displacing claims of universality; but each is in place and in time in ways that are instructive for ethics. Myth, the matter of stories, becomes also the matter of critical reflection, which in turn is subjected to critical reflection. Every fragment of philosophy is a contribution to the reflection, and it is nothing if it is separated from the matter - the stories, the myths, and the characters (including us) who both make them and live in them.
CONTENTS
FOREWORD by Thomas Magnell
PREFACE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ONE
Walking Backwards
1. From Is to Ought: The Place of Value
2. Freedom and Necessity
3. Orientation
TWO
A Labor Theory of Value
1. Alienation and Objectification
2. Symbols and Signs
3. Possibility and Play
THREE
The End of Ethics
1. A Principle of Utility
2. Silence
3. Activity, State, and Habit
FOUR
Virtue in Action
1. Two Arts
2. A Science of Measurement
3. Living Life and Saving It
4. Numbering and Knowing
5. Knowledge and Desire
FIVE
The Shape of Character
1. Prudence
2. The Order of That Which Has Parts
3. Vulnerability
4. Active Desire
5. Perception and Passion
6. The Necessity of Experience
SIX
The Shape of the City
1. A Hunt
2. A Poetics of Particulars
3. Culture and Nature
4. Entropy and Art
SEVEN
Nature and Human Nature
1. The Way of Revolution
2. The Language of Rights
EIGHT
Cultivating Rules
1. Practical Reason
2. Moral Development
NINE
Rule and Relationship
1. The Soul of Tragedy
2. The Temptation of Knowledge
TEN
Confession and Community
1. Status Confessionis
2. Profession
ELEVEN
Practicing Value
1. Kenosis
2. Reading the West
3. Embracing the World
REFERENCES
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
INDEX
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Steven Schroeder lives and writes in Chicago, Illinois. He is the author of three previous books, including Metaphysics of Cooperation: A Study of F.D. MauriceVolume 84 in the Value Inquiry Book Series.
FOREWORD
Value inquiry takes in a number of fields of thought on matters of value, disciplinary fields such as ethics, aesthetics, and economics. Certainly the disciplinary fields may be explored individually and in detail with the eye of a specialist. They may also be viewed for formal features of value that they may share, an activity of meta-disciplinary value inquiry that itself calls for a certain type of specialization. But value inquiry may also bring together reflections from several disciplinary fields for insights that they may provide on one or more of them. This is interdisciplinary value inquiry, an activity that cuts across areas of specialization. It is the activity that Steven Schroeder is engaged in here. He has essayed a thought-provoking work on ethics which is not limited to discussions of ethics.
If the very notion of ethics presupposes the possibility of freedom of action, then the realm of moral value is bounded by the limits to liberty, necessity, and chance. Within those bounds lies a broad range of conduct, more or less subject to suggestion, direction, guiding, goading, restraint, and constraint. Some incursions on freedom are inevitable in order to live well, and even, odd as it sounds, for their instrumental value in extending freedom. The limits that property rights impose on what we might do, make it possible for us to dispose as we decidedly want to do. Traffic lights that regulate the actions of drivers increase the prospect of crossing intersections free of collisions, even in New York. Of course this may go too far, with imposition and regulation in the name of freedom coming at too high a cost to freedom itself or to other values.
It should be plain that a broad range of conduct can enter into discussions of ethics. The conduct may be affected by moral values, even if the moral influence is not always as great as it should be. But the conduct may also be affected by all manner of other values, whether aesthetic, economic, pedagogic, historic, scientific, or religious. Steven Schroeder considers values, or dimensions of value, of all these types in discussing issues of moral concern. His multifaceted approach will engage an active reader. May it also spur more forays in interdisciplinary value inquiry.
Thomas Magnell
Drew University
EXCERPT
1. From Is to Ought: The Place of Value
Academic discourse is sometimes encountered in a distorted form that is not a conversation at all, but a one?way dispensation of theory—from the head of the teacher into the head of the student. This is ballroom dancing without a partner, not recommended as a technique for dancing or for learning.
In ordinary experience, theory emerges out of practice and is usually submerged in its smooth execution. Academic conversation often reverses this by starting with theory. In this case, walking backwards involves reconnecting particular theories with particular practices out of which they emerged. This acknowledges the descriptive function of theory and may help us, like the umpire, get a good look at the play. That is a legitimate task, but it is not the whole story. Theories are almost always put to prescriptive use as well, most effectively when they are most thoroughly submerged.
The dancer dancing backwards may not be able to articulate a theory of dancing and would probably not be well served as a dancer by the attempt to do so. Less dramatically, the walker walking backwards would probably be hard?pressed even to describe the process of walking forward. Articulating such a description would be a distraction that might very well cause both dancer and walker to stumble. To walk or dance smoothly requires that theory be completely integrated into practice.
If an accomplished dancer becomes a choreographer, this can be both strength and weakness. The dancer may tease a theory out of his or her practice, but what does that theory have to do with somebody else’s dance?
It may become prescriptive in a number of ways, the most destructive of which would discourage creativity in the next generation of dancers and, in the long run, diminish the dance.
The shift from description to prescription—from is to ought—is essential to discussion of value, which in academic settings is most likely to occur under one of three rubrics: ethics, economics, or aesthetics. There may be reasons for distinguishing these as three different species of the genus value, but it would be a mistake to ignore the genus: what is common to all three, and what light does it shed on the relationship between description and prescription?
All three describe individual and social behavior and its results. Two of the three, ethics and economics, sometimes aspire to be described as sciences, while the third, aesthetics, rarely makes such a claim. One of the three, economics, sometimes aspires to be described as a natural rather than a social science.
These aspirations are interesting. They locate discussion of value in three contexts: in the humanities, on the border between the humanities and the social sciences, and on the border between the social and the natural sciences. Description of behavior and its results ranges from the human through the social to the natural, which are not mutually exclusive categories. Traditionally, that range has been understood as moving from freedom at the human end toward necessity at the natural end. This is likely reflected in the level of confidence at each of the three steps in the range: from aesthetics, where “there is no accounting for taste”; through ethics, where accounting is more often than not an argument; to economics, where there is nothing if not accounting. The least prescriptive of the three, and the one where description is most disputatious, is aesthetics. The most prescriptive, and the one where description is most homogeneous is economics.
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