Know Your Limits

有些时候，尤其是在我们的羞耻和内疚，骄傲和爱的经历中，我们似乎发现自己不得不承认我们是谁，在一个特别基本的意义上，与我们的道德品质有关-我们可以称之为我们的“伦理身份”。伯纳德威廉姆斯用他的一句典型的隐晦的话暗示，这种承认“既不只是一个发现，也不只是一个决定”。威廉姆斯的思想是，在确定我是什么样的伦理事物时，就像在爱的范式宣言的那个特定例子中一样，“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。这不是一个仅仅从空中摘下来的宣言：它植根于我感到感激的某种（心理）事实，但同时它不仅仅是对这些事实的承认。有时候，就像在羞耻中最明显的那样，我认为在大多数内疚和后悔的例子中也是如此，这种信念不仅是基于我自己的心理事实：这里有一些东西我可以，而且通常是这样做的，从别人那里发现-他们可以向我展示自己;但我必须，用理查德·莫兰的话来说，“能够在别人声称已经取得的知识中找到自我”。我对自己的信念，我的自我概念，通过这种方式变得可以渗透到别人对我的概念中。渗透性概念的关键是信任。只有当我相信另一个人能正确地看待我时，我才会向他袒露自己，可以说，向他对我的拥抱敞开心扉。在这里，我们又找到了爱，因为信任的最高表现确实是在爱中，我的自我概念最深地被我爱人对我的概念所渗透（甚至是被那个“我”挑选出来的东西也可以以一种使它与它是其中一部分的“我们”相对不可分割的方式来构思）。然而，信任在这里的作用最为明显，它不是作为一种本体论的关系，而是作为一种认识论的关系：我相信，从伦理上讲，他者所拥有的是关于我是什么的知识，甚至他者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，当他者对我的伦理状态的概念与我自己的自我概念相冲突时，信任就会受到威胁。我可能会对自己和自己认识自己的能力失去信任，或者对他人失去信任，并相应地将自己与他隔离开来，如果我最终发现他对世界的描述，以及我自己在其中的描述，足以疏远他，以至于他被认为或多或少完全超出了我的社会范围，我可能会这样做：不再是一个实际的或可能的共同认识者，一个实际的或可能的参与者，在这个认识我自己的事业中。如果威廉姆斯的承认概念是正确的，那么在这种情况下，我不仅没有发现自己处于他人对我的描述中，而且我也不会这样做。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，这些标准本身甚至可能不被认为是认识性的，但这与我的感觉是一致的，就像在普通的信念中一样，发现了沿着存在的东西。使所有这些都变得非常容易理解的道路是漫长的，曲折而又相当困难。这一决定在多大程度上？在什么方面？什么由我决定，什么不由我决定的界限是什么;如果我在这里确实有一些选择的元素，我到底有什么选择？为什麽？谁说的？为了回答这些问题，这些问题本身又产生了更多的问题，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--不仅是因为我们发现它们在古典哲学文本中有所体现，而且因为我们发现它们也交织在文学和历史文本中。

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.