1 - Deepening the self

Summary

After twenty-five years of confusion and denial, literary criticism in English is starting to rediscover literature as a distinctive mode of thought about being human, and to regain confidence in itself as a manner of attending to that thought. Valuable support in this process of recovery has come from the diverse group of moral philosophers surveyed in this chapter, who have been critical of the dissociated conceptions of language and the self delivered to us, or imposed on us, by the Enlightenment. Even these philosophers, however, have too seldom seen that, and hardly ever shown how, it is literature which has actually been the principal mode of thinking about this problem since the seventeenth century.

For thirty or forty years now there has been a steady flow of criticism from a group of English-speaking moral philosophers, directed at what they see as the two dominant and interlocking traditions in modern Western moral philosophy. The first of these traditions, predominantly Anglo-Saxon, empirical and utilitarian, derives from Bacon, Locke, and Bentham. It has been represented this century by G. E. Moore and his various ‘intuitionist’ and ‘emotivist’ inheritors, especially H. A. Prichard, David Ross, C. L. Stevenson, and R. M. Hare. The other tradition is principally a Continental European one, deriving from Descartes and Kant, with its own twentieth-century incarnations, especially in existentialism.

The origins of the modern group of moral philosophers critical of these two traditions lie, I believe, in three seminal essays: ‘Fallacies in Moral Philosophy’, by Stuart Hampshire; ‘Vision and Choice in Morality’, by Iris Murdoch; and ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’, by G. E. M. Anscombe.