‘I am glad,’ wrote the acclaimed American philosopher Susan Wolf, ‘that neither I nor those about whom I care most’ are ‘moral saints’.aeon essay on wolf
I thought of the opening to Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code
"Renowned curator Jacques Sauniere staggered through the vaulted archway of the museum's Grand Gallery."
I have to say that I had never heard of Susan Wolf so I thought 'maybe I’d better read the text itself’, upon which I discovered it was well cited and studied. It was published in 1982 when she was 30 which in philosopher years is young, toddlingly so.
moral saints
Some remarks:
Moral Saints seems pleonastic. Are there ‘immoral saints’? Presumably she means moral perfection and whether it is an ideal to be sought after and achieved by taking on heroic tasks to the absolute exclusion of everything else that is good in life. There is a recruiting tone of being the best you can be to this project. She rejects it and proffers an epicurean stance as though there was no other concept of a life well lived. What of the faithful fulfilling of the duties of your station in life? Doesn’t that sound very class ridden, Victorian Christianity. Try this:
Son of Kunti (Arjuna), a man should not abandon the work he was born into, even if it is faulty, for just as fire is wreathed in smoke all undertakings are attended by faults.
(B.G. 18:48)
F.H. Bradley in:
Ethical Studies
writes on My Station and Its Duties (essay 5). Strongly anti-individualist and anti-utilitarian he stresses the primitive given of being born into a community, finding your place in it adapting that place to your capacities, your Dharma. Excuse this long citation but Bradley requires it: (Bradley was also a mere 30 years old when he published Ethical Studies but then Victorians were born at the age of 10)
He learns, or already perhaps has learned, to speak, and here he appropriates
the common heritage of his race; the tongue that he makes his own is his country's language, it is (or it should be) the same that others speak, and it carries into his mind the ideas and sentiments of the race (over this I need not stay), and stamps them in indelibly. He grows up in an atmosphere of example and general custom, his life widens out from one little world to other and higher worlds, and he apprehends through successive stations the whole in which he lives, and in which he has lived.Is he now to try and develop his "individuality," his self which is not the same as other selves? Where is it? What is it?Where can he find it? The soul within him is saturated, is filled, is qualified by, it has assimilated, has got its substance,has built itself up from, it is one and the same life with the universal life, and if he turns against this he turns against himself;if he thrusts it from him, he tears his own vitals; if he attacks it,he sets his weapon against his own heart. He has found his life in the life of the whole, he lives that in himself, "he is a pulse-beat of the whole system, and himself the whole system."
And furthermore:
Leaving out of sight the question of a society wider than the state, we must say that a man's life with its moral duties is in the main filled up by his station in that system of wholes which the state is, and that this, partly by its laws and institutions and still more by its spirit, gives him the life which he does live and ought to live. That objective institutions exist is of course an obvious fact; and it is a fact which every day is becoming plainer that these institutions are organic, and further,that they are moral.
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