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Patricians, Patriots and Practitioners
PAUL GILBERT
What should be a philosopher’s relationship to the social world in which they live?
Ronald Paterson’s provocative new book [1] challenges philosophers to be patricians —
to espouse the values of individuality, self-transcendence, resolution, self-confidence
and idealism and to maintain a steady grasp on what is worthwhile for its own sake.
The plebeian is one who largely lacks these qualities. Yet, Paterson believes, recent
moral philosophy has contributed to what he describes, with Nietzschean disdain, as
the plebeianization of social life by its deference to the moral consensus and failure to
set forth patrician values. Paterson acknowledges here an affinity with Heidegger’s
attitude to the temptations of ‘average everydayness’ — an attitude whose dangers are
clearly revealed in Herman Philipse’s study [2]. But it is, I suppose, the parallel
between Paterson’s challenge and the call voiced two centuries ago in the Enlightenment that is so striking. And it is the Enlightenment demand for autonomy — dwelt on
in Ian Carter’s A Measure of Freedom [3] — that is so pervasive a feature of Continental
thought and so comparatively lacking in English-speaking philosophy, not just recently
either. Curiously, this theme which might have been expected to structure any history
of the last two hundred years of European thought surfaces but seldom in The Edinburgh Encyclopedia of Continental Philosophy [4], which aims to provide just this. It does,
though, provide the essential context for Sebastian Gardner’s guide to Kant’s First
Critique in the Routledge Philosophy Guidebooks series [5]. What relevance, however,
can Enlightenment injunctions have today, when the Enlightenment faith in universal
reason — not clearly compatible with the development of individuality — has come
under such attack?
Wittgenstein, not mentioned by Paterson, would clearly count as a patrician philosopher in the heroic mould. Both Laurence Goldstein’s racy Clear and Queer Thinking [6]
and Stuart Shanker’s quixotic Wittgenstein’s Remarks on the Foundations of AI [7] bring
out how Wittgenstein’s stress on the rootedness of our thinking in particular forms of
life constitutes a critique of Kantian presuppositions about reason. It is a theme popularised by Peter Winch, of whom Colin Lyas has provided an interesting intellectual
biography [8]. Robert Kirk’s Relativism and Reality [9] investigates theoretically how
far such a critique can go. But how much in practice are philosophers confined by the
cultures within which they find themselves? Paterson raises this question and wonders
whether a patrician can be a patriot. They can, he concludes, because they hope their
country will become ‘a true democracy nourishing the spirits of free men buoyant in
their individuality’ (p. 92). This value of democracy, among other, and the relation
between democracy and the configuration of states are explored in two useful collections, Democracy’s Value [10] and Democracy’s Edges [11]. The latter calls into question
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P. Gilbert
the picture of separate delimited cultures which May Thorseth’s tightly focused, Legitimate and Illegitimate Paternalism in Polyethnic Conflicts [12], for instance, works within.
Yet undoubtedly there are acute cultural differences: we are constantly reminded of
them by resurgent nationalisms, touched upon in such diverse volumes as The Politics
of Toleration [13] and Philosophies of Place [14]. To what extent can the philosopher
transcend such cultural frames, as the Enlightenment hoped they would?
This question, worryingly vague in its general formulation, gets some specific bite if
we think of how philosophy should relate to practice in, say, law or medicine. Naturalists, whether of an Aristotelian [15] or Humean [16] stamp, will not have a problem
here: their difficulty is only that of knowing what transcultural facts there are which
determine best practice. But are not rootedly cultural facts relevant here? Is it enough,
as Helga Kuhse and Peter Singer seem to do, to take a rejection of cultural relativism
as licensing the exclusion of cultural considerations from, say, bioethics [17]. They
are not alone. Among many recent volumes in Ruth Chadwick’s useful ‘Professional
Ethics’ series, Michael Parker’s [18] is unusual in including a chapter on the relevance
of cultural diversity to health care. Matt Matraver’s collection on punishment [19]
includes a similarly motivated treatment of the intercultural justification of legal penalties, while Christopher Hood’s book on public administration argues that cultural
differences will always produce divergent approaches [20]. Perhaps it is easier for
lawyers, with their tradition of legal positivism — discussed in two recent volumes [21]
— to acknowledge such differences. But does acknowledging them remove them from
the scope of ethical critique, as positivism tends to imply? Many, including the authors
of two other new books in legal philosophy [22], would argue not. For them the
problem then arises of how critique might proceed, if the “descriptive meaning” of
evaluative terms is culture relative — a question taken up several times in Richard
Hare’s latest collection [23].
This brings us back to our original question about the role of philosophers: how
should they relate to the consensus underpinning social practices and how can they
bring critique to bear? On a formal level Derek Walton has added to his earlier Appeal
to Expert Opinion a companion volume on appeals to popular opinion [24]; but this sort
of clarificatory study does not take us far towards an answer. For that we need to
reflect on the role of philosophers within the academy, as do Michael Davis’s Ethics
and the University [25] (also in the ‘Professional Ethics’ series) and Harold Swardson’s
aptly titled Fighting for Words [26], and also upon the culture of the academy itself,
brutally exposed by Pierre Bourdieu [27]. Is it, anyway, a common culture, as an essay
in David Carr’s Education, Knowledge and Truth [28] pertinently asks?
The great merit of Paterson’s challenge is that it forces philosophers to undertake
such self-reflection as a necessary preliminary to determining their wider role. Most
philosophers, especially in Britain, have escaped the ‘culture wars’ that such selfreflection has induced and which provide the cue for some sharply contrasting recent
books [29]. Perhaps the more heroic — the patrician — course is to get involved in
these wars. Patrician values are doubtless culturally rooted ones, but they are values
which demand acknowledgement of the contingency of that culture and militate against
confusing the consensual and the canonical with the universal.
Paul Gilbert
University of Hull
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NOTES
[1] R. W. K. P (1998) The New Patricians: An Essay on Values and Consciousness (Houndsmills,
Macmillan).
[2] H P (1998) Heidegger’s Philosophy of Being: A Critical Interpretation (Princeton, Princeton
University Press).
[3] I C (1999) A Measure of Freedom (Oxford, Oxford University Press).
[4] S G (Ed.) (1999) The Edinburgh Encyclopedia of Continental Thought (Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press).
[5] S G (1999) Kant and the Critique of Pure Reason (London, Routledge).
[6] L G (1999) Clear and Queer Thinking: Wittgenstein’s Development and His Relevance to
Modern Thought (London, Duckworth).
[7] S S (1998) Wittgenstein’s Remarks on the Foundations of AI (London, Routledge).
[8] C L (1999) Peter Winch (Teddington, Acumen).
[9] R K (1999) Relativism and Reality, A Contemporary Introduction (London, Routledge).
[10] I S and C H-C (Eds.) (1999) Democracy’s Value (Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press).
[11] I S and C H-C (Eds.) (1999) Democracy’s Edges (Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press).
[12] M T (1999) Legitimate and Illegitimate Paternalism in Polyethnic Conflicts (Göteborg, Acta
Universitatis Gothoburgensis).
[13] S M (Ed.) (1999) The Politics of Toleration: Tolerance and Intolerance in Modern Life (Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press).
[14] A L and J M. S (Eds.) (1998) Philosophies of Place (Lanham, Rowman &
Littlefield).
[15] E F P, F D. M J and J P (Eds.) (1999) Human Flourishing (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press).
[16] H. O. M (1999) Hume’s Naturalism (London, Routledge).
[17] H K and P S (Eds.) (1999) Bioethics: An Anthology (Oxford, Blackwell).
[18] M P (Ed.) (1999) Ethics and Community in the Healthcare Professions (London, Routledge).
[19] M M (Ed.) (1999) Punishment and Political Theory (Oxford, Hart).
[20] C H (1998) The Art of the State, Culture, Rhetoric, and Public Management (Oxford,
Clarendon Press).
[21] M H. K (1999) In Defence of Legal Positivism: Law without Trimmings (Oxford, Oxford
University Press).
D D (Ed.) (1999) Recrafting the Rule of Law: The Limits of Legal Order (Oxford, Hart).
[22] P M (1999) Thinking Without Desire: A First Philosophy of Law (Oxford, Hart).
P S (1998) The Enchantment of Reason (Durham, NC, Duke University Press).
[23] R. M. H (1999) Objective Prescriptions and Other Essays (Oxford, Clarendon Press).
[24] D W (1997) Appeal to Expert Opinion: Arguments from Authority (University Park, PA,
Pennsylvania State University Press.
D W (1999) Appeal to Popular Opinion (University Park, PA, Pennsylvania State University
Press).
[25] M D (1999) Ethics and the University (London, Routledge).
[26] H S (1999) Fighting for Words: Life in the Postmodern University (Essen, Dic Blaue Eule).
[27] R S (Ed.) (1999) Bourdieu: A Critical Reader (Oxford, Blackwell).
[28] D C (Ed.) (1998) Education, Knowledge and Truth, Beyond the Postmodern Impasse (London:
Routledge).
[29] B A and J V (1999) Polemicization: The Contingency of the Commonplace
(Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press).
H L. S (1998) Reclaiming the Canon: Essays on Philosophy, Poetry, and History (New Haven,
Yale University Press).
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