Know Your Limits

有时候，尤其是在我们经历羞耻和内疚、骄傲和爱的时候，我们似乎发现自己不得不承认自己是谁，在一个特别基本的意义上，这与我们的道德品质有关——我们可以称之为“道德身份”。伯纳德•威廉姆斯（Bernard Williams）用一句典型的隐晦短语指出，这种承认“不仅是一种发现，当然也不仅仅是一种决定”。威廉姆斯的想法是，在确定我是什么样的道德事物时，就像在那个典型的爱情宣言的例子中，“有些东西是被给予的，即使我必须选择接受它”。“我爱你”不仅仅是我发现的东西，虽然它是，但它也是我必须踏入的东西。这不是一个凭空而来的宣言：它根植于我感到感激的某些（心理）事实，但同时它也不仅仅是对这些事实的承认。有时候，这种信念所依据的不仅仅是我自己的心理，我可以从别人那里了解到——他们可以向我展示给我自己，这一点在羞愧中最为明显，我认为大多数内疚和后悔的例子也是如此；但用理查德•莫兰（Richard Moran）的话来说，我必须“能够在别人声称已经获得的知识中找到（我的）自我”。我对自己的信念，我的自我概念，以这种方式渗透到别人对我的概念中。渗透性概念的关键是信任。只有当我相信别人能正确地看待我时，我才会向他袒露自己，对他对我的理解敞开心扉。在这里，我们又找到了爱，因为信任的最高表现是在爱中，这是千真万确的，在爱中，我的自我概念最深刻地渗透到我的爱人对我的概念中（即使是被“我”挑出来的东西，也可以以一种使它与“我们”相对不可分割的方式被构想出来，它是“我们”的一部分）。然而，信任在这里的作用最为明显，不是作为一种本体论的关系，而是作为一种认识关系：我相信，从道德上讲，他人所拥有的是对我是什么的知识，甚至他可能比我自己更有资格了解这一点。相反，正如海伦·林德所指出的，当别人对我的道德状态的看法与我自己的自我观念相冲突时，信任就会受到威胁。我可以失去信任我和我自己的了解自己的能力,或失去信任,并关闭自己从他因此,我可能如果最终我来到世界找到他的照片,和我自己,足够的疏远,他或多或少被认为在一个彻底的方式超出了我社会苍白:不再一个实际的或可能的co-knower,一个实际的或可能参与该企业知道自己。如果威廉姆斯关于承认的概念是正确的，那么在这种情况下，我不仅没有发现自己在别人对我的印象中，而且我不会。也就是说，在某种意义上，这取决于我，在某种意义上，我可以根据标准做出决定这些标准本身可能通常不被认为是认识论的，但这与我的感觉是一致的，就像我的普通信念一样，我发现了一直存在的东西。让这一切变得清晰易懂的道路是漫长、曲折和相当困难的。这个决定在多大程度上是正确的？在什么方面？什么是我能决定的，什么是我不能决定的；如果我确实有选择的余地，那我到底有什么选择呢？,为什么?谁说的?为了回答这些问题，这些问题本身会产生更多的问题，我建议把认识论，心理学和政治史的一些线索结合起来，特别是，我们不仅在经典哲学文本中发现它们，而且在文学和历史文本中发现它们交织在一起。

There are times, not least in our experiences of shame and guilt, pride and love, when we seem to find ourselves having to acknowledge something about who we are, in a particularly fundamental sense that relates to our moral character - what we might call our 'ethical identity'. This sort of acknowledgement, Bernard Williams suggests in a quintessentially cryptic phrase of his, "is neither a mere discovery nor, certainly, a mere decision". Williams' thought is that in identifying what sort of ethical thing I am, as in that particular instance of the paradigmatic declaration of love, "something is given, even though I must choose to take it up". 'I love you' is not just something that I find out, although it is that, but it is something too that I must step into. It is not a declaration merely plucked from the air: it is rooted in some sorts of (psychological) facts to which I feel beholden, but it is at the same time more than mere recognition of those facts. Sometimes, as is most obviously true in shame, and I think it is true of most instances of guilt and regret too, it is not only facts about my own psychology upon which such belief rests: here there is something about which I can, and generally do, find out from others - they can show me to myself; but I must, in the words of Richard Moran, be "able to find [my]self in the knowledge that others claim to have achieved". My beliefs about myself, my self-conceptions, become in this way permeable to others' conceptions of me.Crucial to the notion of permeability is trust. Only when I trust another to see me aright do I lay myself bare to him, open, as it were, to his construal of me. Here we find love again, for it is quite true that trust's supreme manifestation is being in love, in which my self-conception is most deeply permeable by my lover's conceptions of me (and where even what is picked out by that 'me' can be conceived in a way that makes it relatively inextricable from the 'us' of which it is a part). Trust functions here most clearly, though, not as an ontological but as an epistemic relation: I trust that what the other has is knowledge of what I am, ethically-speaking, and even that the other might well be better placed than I am myself to know it. Conversely, as Helen Lynd has noted, trust is threatened when the other's conception of my ethical state conflicts with my own self-conception. I may either lose trust in myself and my own capacity to know myself, or lose trust in the other, and close myself off from him accordingly, as I might if ultimately I come to find his picture of the world, and of myself in it, sufficiently alienating that he is to be thought of in a more or less thoroughgoing way as beyond my social pale: no longer an actual or possible co-knower, an actual or possible participant in this enterprise of knowing myself. If Williams' notion of acknowledgement is right, then it is not only that in this scenario I do not find myself in the other's picture of me, but that I will not. That is, there is a sense in which it is up to me, a sense in which I might make decisions on the basis of criteria that might not themselves ordinarily be thought of even as epistemic, but which is nonetheless consistent with that sense I have, as in ordinary belief, of making a discovery of something that was there all along.The path to making all of this quite intelligible turns out to be long, winding and rather difficult. To what extent is this decision? And in what respect? What are the limits of what is up to me, and what is not; and if I do have some element of choice here, what exactly do I have a choice about? And why? Who says? To start at an answer to these questions, which themselves produce further questions, I propose to bring together some strands of epistemology, psychology and political history, in particular - not only as we find them laid out in classically philosophical texts, but as we find them woven too through texts literary and historical.