16.2.2010
1) At the beginning of Ethics and the Limits of
Philosophy[1], in a chapter entitled 'Socrates's Question', Bernard
Williams claims that "philosophy in the modern world cannot make any special
claim to reflectiveness" (3). The situation thus is different from that of
philosophy in ancient Greece: then "it was a special feature of philosophy
that it was reflective and stood back from ordinary practice and argument
to define and criticize the attitudes involved in them. But modern life is
so pervasively reflective, and a high degree of self-consciousness is so
basic to its institutions, that these qualities cannot be what mainly
distinguishes philosophy from other activities" (2-3).
Now I'm not much interested in distinguishing marks — I don't
see why something absolutely unique about philosophy should be required
to make it worthwhile. Perhaps there's nothing there; it would still be
worth doing. But Williams's line of thought doesn't seem right for yet
another reason: his examples of practices in modern life that have
reflection deeply built into them are strangely abstract. He mentions
medicine, fiction, and the law (3).
But who is reflective in the primary sense, the sense in which Socratic
ethics (the entry point at which Williams starts) encourages reflection,
are people. When you start looking at your life as a whole, you
start to reflect. You ask yourself about your priorities, your goals, and
character traits. Ethical philosophy, in this tradition, provides you
with concepts, arguments, and quality standards that help to improve
your reflection skills; it offers a framework to structure your
approach to questions of this kind; and the masters of the field have
built paradigms of successful thought systems to answer them. But all
this elaborate machinery is there for people, with the goal of helping
them to understand and improve, change and shape lives — it's those
people who reflect, and it's their own lives on which they reflect.
2) In contrast, for medicine to be reflective means something
different. It means that it is part of the discipline as it is taught and
practiced to incorporate insights about the workings of the discipline
itself. Practicing medicine means also to know about historical mistakes
and breakthroughs (including of course recent history, and perhaps in the
case of medicine, more of recent history than remote history; that might
be somewhat different for the law and possibly even more different for
fiction); it means to be aware of a pool of accumulated insights and
experiences, and to add to that pool continuously. In other words,
medicine as a discipline in modern societies does not only include healing
people and preventing illness, but also looking at the practice of medicine
itself, with the aim of improving it. It certainly is reflective in that
sense. Still, it's unclear in what way this replaces or obsoletes the need
for ethical development — at least as it is understood in the Socratic
enterprise.
3) Partly in order to drill more deeply into this (I think),
Williams goes on to note that cultivation of the virtues, as a goal
of ethical reflection, as "a first-personal and deliberative exercise" (11),
means to put the focus in the wrong place. It's on yourself in a way, but
it's from the outside in, as it were, rather than from the inside out as
it should be: "Thinking about your possible states in terms of the virtues
is not so much to think about your actions, and it is not distinctively
to think about the terms in which you could or should think about your
actions: it is rather about the way in which you think about the way in
which others might describe or comment on the way in which you think about
your actions" (11).
Note first that Williams doesn't ascribe, to the reflecting person, a
concern with what others might think about her actions. (He doesn't
criticize a virtue-centered reflectiveness from an act-centric perspective.)
What he ascribes is a concern with other people's views about your
reflections themselves. In other words, if you're reflecting virtue-centric,
this reveals an undue concern with others' judgment of your reflections.
That's a much more dangerous attack, for reflection has itself a dialectical
structure that could only be formed in an interchange with someone else,
thus depends indeed on the availability of a counterpart.
Still there is a difference between a conversational (or dialectical)
counterpart and someone whose judgment you simply accept. Valuable input
from an independent, skilled counterpart in philosophical discussion, which
would be the ideal constellation for reflection of the ethical kind which
we're talking about, wouldn't have to take the form of simply a rigid
verdict or criticism that you have to accept and incorporate in your
behavior, would it? On the contrary, it would be a mark of successful and
self-assured reflectiveness on your part to take a stance of careful and
cautious examination towards any input thus received. Far from merely
striving to get favorable comments or descriptions from others of your
way of thinking about your actions, you'd take a stance of valuing them, but
sovereignly deciding on their merits yourself. (Without, of course, on the
other hand falling into the "priggishness or self-deception" that Williams
rightly identifies as the inverse danger, 10.) Look at it this way, and
the lesson is no longer that "the importance of an ethical concept need not
lie in its being itself an element of first-person deliberation" (11).
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[1] Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1985. Quoted with page numbers in
the text.
