This review of John Kekes, The Art of Life, (Cornell University Press, 2002) is via Lawrence Blum. This book is a step away from philosophy as abstract theorizing in academia towards the particular and concrete.
The Kekes book is a development of the idea of philosophy as a way of life. That idea of philosophy is one of a life of examination---both of one's own life and an examination of the culture in which one lives. The point of this self-reflection and the art of living well is to achieve a good life that enables human and non-human flourishing.
The Kekes book takes this further. In the first part of the book Kekes gives five types of concrete good lives of personal excellence: those of self-direction, decency, moral authority, depth and honour. Part two examines in four chapters the general conditions for practising the art of life and develops some of the ideas which emerged from the examination in part one. Part three, the final chapter, draws together the threads of the various arguments to provide 'one possible and reasonable approach to living a good life?.
Judging from the review, the limitation of this book is the absence of "the political" as well as "politics". If we talk about about living a good life and accept that there is a deep conflict about what constitutes the good life (eg., wealth creation versus sustainablity) then we step into the political. Often we get roadblocks to the need to turn to the political. We stay with economics in the public sphere and sideline living the good life to the private sphere.
The conception of philosophy as living well at philosophy.com is a more Aristotlean one, in which there is structuring a good life around a dominant end, with living well being that end. Living well involves, living with a specific tradition, shaping a certain character based on moral virtues, freedom as self-realization, and a sustainable mode of life. Living well, is bound up with being within a political community and using political power to establish the conditions for living well.
This gives us a different kind of rationality to the instrumental reason of the market place. phronesis and it involves an engagement with the rationality of ends. Recall the dead end John Quiggin had ended up with his account of rationality. In his first entry on rationality he avoided giving any content to rationality. Subsequently, he gave two accounts of economic rationality. The first referred to a form of critical and sceptical economic thinking:
"...'economically rational'[ was] used to describe the arguments of the group in the Labor Party, including Whitlam himself, who sought reductions in protective tariffs and agricultural price support schemes. By implication, opposing claims were regarded economically irrational. A little later, the term 'economic rationalists' was used to describe the supporters of free trade within the Labor government. [It meant] policy formulation on the basis of reasoned analysis, as opposed to tradition, emotion and self-interest."
John then gave some content to economic rationality by spelling out what is meant by the popular conception of economic rationalism. (This is what is usually called neo-liberalism). John's account of this form of economic rationalism in Australia states that it stood for:
"... a dogmatic, indeed, quasi-religious, faith in market forces and the private sector. More and more, economic analysis was based on deductions from supposedly self-evident truths, which were effectively immune from any form of empirical testing. Many of the beliefs that are now central to 'economic rationalism' would have been regarded as irrational prejudices by the first generation of economic rationalists.
By the 1980s, economic rationalists had largely adopted the microeconomic views of the Chicago school, rejecting ideas of market failure in favour of the belief that the simple neoclassical model of perfect competition was a good description of the economy, or would be in the absence of undesirable government intervention."
Christopher Shiels highlights the trick played by the economic rationalists in the public sphere. He says:
"A crucial role in our local history has been played by the rhetorical trick that John Q highlights, i.e. 'if you aren?t an economic rationalist, you must be an economic irrationalist'. Ok, it?s now a tired retort; relying on the truism that there are many ways of rationalising, but no camp will wish to hold to irrationalism. Yet, it has also been a neat sound bite for the policy advocates. In the age of marketing, most would trade on a catch like that, if it fell their way."
Shiels notes that 'economic rationalism's final resting home is as a dinky die swearword in public policy. True. It is no longer used by politicians. In the late 1990s they moved onto neo-conservatism. This leaves us with John's first account---- critical and sceptical economic thinking based on neo-classical economics as the rationality of the public sphere. It also leaves us with utilitarian egoism firmly in place.
What is of interest here is Quiggin's assumption that economics is rationality per se, and that anything else is not rational it is tradition, emotion and self-interest. It also leaves us with scientific knowledge as the only form of knowledge.
This is a standard ploy in an economics that has been seduced by the modernist dream of finding a set of "universal" principles that would unify the diverse practices of social inquiry. This universal colonizes rationality for itself and so scientific knowledge becomes the only form of knowledge. What it rejected as waste product----tradition and emotion---is considered by definition to be the opposite of rationality. And no attempt is made to engage with a rationality that is structured around emotion and tradition, eg. phronesis or a practical knowing.
No attempt is made to consider the "empirical-analytical" rationality of the social sciences and the "historico-hermeneutic" rationality of philosophy into a dialogue over rationality. This leaves the critics of economics in public policy embattled and besieged by a host of technical economic thinkers in a technocracy. We are thrown into, and confronted by a world in which there is a hegemony of technology based on science; a false idolatry of the professional expert; 'a scientific mystification of the modern society of specialization, and the domination of nature and a too easy acceptance that science is a substitute for lost cultural orientations of religion.
What is lost by a high modernist social science is the connection of the ethical and the political by the Romans and the Greeks.
In Rome, phronesis as practical judgement and knowledge developed into the vir bonus ideal of public life. Calvin McGee says that this ideal held that:
"...all Roman citizens should strive to be "good men" able to "speak well" when they were called upon to give advice in the public interest. In Greece, the impulse of practical philosophy developed into the vision of the phronimos, a person imbued with practical wisdom who is able to bridge the life of the mind and the life of the polis."
This is a different and alternative tradition to Quiggin's utilitarian one. What I am suggesting is we appropriate the 'truth' of what this through acknowledging that ourselves have been shaped by this effective history. So it isnot a nostalgic return to Greek/Roman r is advocating, but rather an appropriation of Aristotle's own insights to our concrete situation. . . . We come to understand what Aristotle is saying and at the same time come to a deeper understanding of our own situation
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at June 22, 2003 11:42 AM | TrackBack