Know Your Limits

有些时候，尤其是在我们羞愧、内疚、骄傲和爱的经历中，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--我们可以称之为我们的“伦理认同”。伯纳德·威廉姆斯在他的一句典型的隐晦的短语中表示，这种承认“既不只是一个发现，也当然不只是一个决定”。威廉姆斯的想法是，在确定我是一种什么样的伦理事物时，就像在爱的典范宣言的那个特定实例中一样，“有些东西是被给予的，尽管我必须选择接受它”。“我爱你”不只是我发现的东西，虽然是这样，但它也是我必须涉足的东西。这不仅仅是凭空捏造的宣言：它植根于某种(心理)事实，我觉得这些事实是有责任的，但同时它不仅仅是对这些事实的承认。有时，正如羞耻中最明显的事实，我认为大多数内疚和后悔的情况也是如此，这种信念不仅建立在关于我自己心理的事实上：这里有一些我可以--通常也是这样--从别人那里发现的东西--他们可以向我展示我自己；但用理查德·莫兰的话说，我必须“能够在别人声称已经取得的知识中找到[我的]自我”。我对自己的信念，我的自我概念，通过这种方式渗透到别人对我的观念中。渗透的概念关键是信任。只有当我相信别人会正确地看到我时，我才会向他敞开心扉，可以说，是对他对我的解读。在这里，我们又找到了爱，因为信任的最高表现是在爱中，这是非常真实的，在爱中，我的自我概念最能被我爱人对我的概念所渗透(在这种情况下，即使是那个‘我’挑选出来的东西，也可以以一种使其与它所属的‘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，从伦理上讲，他人所拥有的是对我是什么的了解，甚至相信其他人很可能比我自己更有资格知道这一点。相反，正如海伦·林德所指出的那样，当他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。我可能会失去对自己和自己了解自己的能力的信任，或者失去对他人的信任，并相应地将自己与他隔绝，就像如果我最终发现他的世界和其中的我自己，充分疏远了他，以至于他或多或少被彻底地认为超出了我的社交范围：不再是实际的或可能的共同知情者，不再是认识自己的这项事业的实际或可能的参与者。如果威廉姆斯的承认概念是正确的，那么在这种情况下，我不仅发现自己不在他人的画中，而且我不会。也就是说，有一种感觉是由我决定的，在这种感觉下，我可能会根据标准做出决定，这些标准本身可能不会被通常认为是认识论的，但它仍然与我的意识一致，就像在普通信仰中一样，发现一直存在的东西。让这一切变得相当容易理解的道路被证明是漫长、曲折和相当艰难的。这个决定在多大程度上是一个决定？在哪方面呢？由我决定的界限是什么，什么不是；如果我在这里确实有一些选择的因素，我到底有什么选择？为什么？谁说的？从回答这些问题开始，这些问题本身就会产生更多的问题，我建议将认识论、心理学和政治史的一些线索结合在一起--不仅是我们在古典哲学文本中发现的它们，而且我们发现它们也在文学和历史文本中交织在一起。

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.