20.2.2010
(To continue collecting some thoughts about the notion and role of
reflection.)
In my previous post
I discussed briefly Bernard Williams' claim that reflection, as something
that is brought into our lives by ethical philosophy, is nothing special in
our modern world: because it is already part of so many institutionalized
practices, such as fiction writing, medicine, or the law. I noted that in
these practices it's not people who reflect about their lives —
it's rather that part of the codified activities within such practices are
made up by reflective activities, such as examining the history of the
field, or measuring its success against certain criteria. And although that
is a form of reflectiveness, I said that it is not what is imported into our
lives from ethical philosophy, and thus it's not by any means a replacement
for that.
I doubted, then, that the fact that reflection is built into practices
such as medicine or the law would obsolete the Socratic enterprise of making
your own life and character a better one by ethical reflection. Here's a
couple of remarks I'd like to add.
1) One of the reasons why we shouldn't assimilate reflection,
in the Socratic sense, with reflection as an activity in societal practices,
such as medicine, is that in the latter there is specialization.
There are professional historians of medicine, and actually their field
is a subfield of the general area of medicine. Of course, it's part of the
training for every professional in the field of medicine to receive at least
some general overview of the historical background; that is exactly what
warrants Williams' statement that reflection is built into the practice.
Likewise, there is a requirement for professionals in the field to keep up
with the latest relevant science (and indeed, for many professionals in
medicine in particular one stage in their career is to make a contribution
to scientific research, typically by achieving a doctorate). But while the
discipline as a whole can be said to incorporate reflection in that sense,
it is usually only a group of specialists who "step back from ordinary
practice and argument to define and criticize the attitudes involved in
them" (2), as Williams puts it.[1] It's historians and university teachers
who do that, not doctors in their daily work. Thus there is division of
labor, to a certain extent, between professionals in medicine; just to
remind you that one of Williams' other examples is the practice of fictional
writing: there the segregation is even more pronounced, for normally
literary critics, historians of literature and philologists are not the same
as those who contribute to the stream of literary works, i.e. poets,
novelists and playwrights.
If that is the sort of reflectiveness exhibited in practices like
medicine, the law or literature, then again nothing in it will encourage
personal reflectiveness in its practitioners: the sort that makes you
look at your life as a whole, decide on your goals and priorities, and
determine where you are right now with respect to them. It's not as if,
because you are a literary critic or a doctor, you automatically gain
that sort of reflectiveness — merely from being part of
practice that has reflectiveness (in the sense described above) built
into it.
True, ethical philosophy shares a structure with these practices, and in
this sense Williams is right to say that it can't lay any special claim to
reflectiveness: by virtue of that shared structure, philosophy and these
practices are alike. But they are not alike in that ethical philosophy makes
you reflect personally about your own life and character, which is not at
all guaranteed by being part of those other practices. There is a sense,
then, in which philosophy can lay a special claim. (Though perhaps
philosophy isn't unique in that respect either: you might say
that there is religion, or psychology, which both may have similar aims in
forming your view of yourself and your place in reality.)
2) On the other hand, Williams notes (correctly, in my view),
that philosophy's claim is an abstract and general one: philosophical
insight into how one should live is not simply personal, in the sense that
it applies to you (and only you), and has to make sense for you (and to you)
only. Any philosophically relevant insight on that topic, on how one should
live, must be applicable to people and lives in general. "The implication is
that something relevant and useful can be said to anyone, in general" (4),
and the question how one should live is "not immediate; it is not about what
I should do now, or next. It is about a manner of life." (4) These two
aspects together are what make the fundamental Socratic question (the
entry point to ethical philosophy) a reflective question: "it stands
at a distance from any actual and particular occasion of considering what
to do." (19)
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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.
