Reasons and Persons
Ferre, Frederick
compelling. Teaching can be a profession of immense variety, autonomy, community, and a sense of usefulness, a setting in which one's own interests are valued -- because it is from the stuff of...
...Parfit is just leaving the harbor...
...Parfit's style of reasoning is at the REASONS ~ pr-IlIOS Derek Parfit Oxford/Clarendon Press, $29.95, 543 pp...
...the sea, our sea, lies open again...
...Granted such teaching is not an everyday event in most places, but it does occur, and a discerning film is needed to give this to us...
...As a twenty-six-year-old making his first trip through America, he wrote of the capital city of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania: "This place is ugly...
...Belloc, who sat in the .British Parliament in the years shortly before the First World War, was to interpret that wa~ ultimately as a struggle between Catholicism and Barbarism...
...Belloc, for all his hideous exaggera5 October 1984:539...
...They didn't sell well in their time and are all but unobtainable today...
...Critically-minded readers may want to take up his 1922 text The Jews and decide for themselves...
...Outside of it -- and he meant outside the specifically Roman Catholic expression of it -- all else was Night...
...And on at least two occasions he inadvertently reverses his meaning by using what, in context, turns out to be one "not" too many, e.g...
...Belloc replied, "Go to hell...
...There are riches upon riches for those who persevere...
...His virtuosity in ethical theory needs a better metaphysical ground before Theory X can be developed...
...This is where he employs his fecund imagination best of all, with profusions of thought-experiments that must finally lay the Cartesian ghost to rest...
...Belloc: the hyperbolic mentor I HILAIRE BELL0C A.N...
...Books: A NEW OXFORD ETHIC T HIS is a book of ideas, but it begins as a pleasant physical experience...
...On neither option can he see why there is any moral difference between future events, not yet Commonweal: 538 lit by time's searchlight, ~d past or present ones...
...The book ends on an unresolved note, looking for, but not finding, a "Theory X" that will interpret how individual persons defined as societies of occasions (to use Whitehead's language rather than Parfit's reductionist terminology) should be conceived in communal terms...
...In a readable, well-paced text, the author, literary editor of the Spectator, novelist and biographer of Milton, shows us the bright and dark sides of Belloc, contemporary and friend to the likes of Chesterton, Shaw, and Wells...
...While Cardinal Henry Manning had an influence on Leo XIII's writing, of course, to say that Rerum Novarum "was really written by Manning" is probably to say too much...
...That Would, however, be a shame...
...Perhaps the most arresting initial impression is made by the photograph on the cover of the dust jacket, showing a boat setting out from harbor in the misty dawn...
...It is frustrating that Oxford philosophers like Parfit tend to have so few resources beyond the range of their normal conversation-partners and such a narrow repertoire in the history of philosophy...
...Parfit is immensely ingenious, but his palette of philosophical options is limited...
...Again a knowledge of whitehead would have widened Parfit's horizons and would inevitably have affected his ethical analysis...
...He never considers the possibility that temporal becoming involves the actual creating of events rather than the mere revealing of them...
...Unfortunately, sometimes, especially early in the book, he gets trapped in his own over-complex style of reasoning, which typically embeds multiple conditionals and negatives, e.g., "Since this is so, it cannot be true that we will cause these aims to be best achieved only if we do not follow this theory...
...I'm sorry, sir," said the sacristan, "I didn't know you were a Catholic...
...The genius of this book is indeed in its detail...
...Wilson Atheneum, $17.95, 386 pp...
...Another intimately related issue is the question of what persons are...
...Roman Catholic pulpits today "are themselves hardly ever used...
...a need, perhaps for a little more finetuning on historical context...
...Perhaps what Parfit needs most is a more adequate theory of reality, one that includes time, physical events, living organisms, and human institutions in a comprehensive vision...
...He calls his view the Reductionist position, which I find an unfortunate label...
...It will be fascinating to follow his voyage...
...The implications for public policy with regard to pollution, population, and war are made abundantly clear...
...There is no doubt about it: in life and in death, Hilaire Belloc has' never failed to fascinate people...
...Also, a single editorial addition about the post-conciliar church by the author might well be welcome...
...In a carefully nuanced panegyric delivered in Westminster Cathedral in August, 1953, Father Ronald Knox had said of Belloc that conflict was his destiny...
...As Wilson admits, the aggressively preconciliar Mr...
...perhaps there has never yet been such an "open sea...
...God made it the night after a debauch when His ideas were neither many nor interesting . . . . Here I lecture to horrible people...
...Wilson takes on, in a way that I, at least, did not find in Speaight, the hard question of why Belloc has not ultimately "survived" as, say, Chesterton has...
...If policy-makers the world over could be convinced by this book, we would have grounds to hope for a safer future...
...Is the "passage" of time across events merely an illusion, he asks, or does it really pass...
...but I think the position .correct...
...More of Belloc's "disastrous habit of backing the wrong horse," as Wilson describes it...
...Rarely are there moments in this film which capture, even in passing, what might make teaching and schools wonderful and interesting...
...To capture either the man or the fascination with him is a tall order...
...The new biography by A.N...
...Additionally, in a volume that seeks to be definitive, a bibliography would most likely be in order, even though it is to be found in Speaight...
...He discusses time, for example, without seeming aware that there are many more important options than he considers...
...In the course of his argument he rejects not only religious dogma, which on the whole he considers not worth discussing, but also the secular orthodoxies of self-interest theories, which he discusses at length and in detail...
...The very precise and carefully edited 1978 Church in a Secularized Society by Roger Aubert (Volume Five in the Christian Centuries series) lists Liberatore and Zigliara as primary writers of that landmark document...
...Parfit's extended treatment of personal identity is aimed at destroying the belief that there is some' 'further fact" about us (a soul, or the like) that matters in addition to the tapestry of physical and psychological relations that constitute us...
...There are some small annoyances...
...Repeated, short comments throughout the volume can run the risk of becoming intrusive: Manning's presbytery "since despoiled by modernist priests...
...Frederick Ferre same time elaborate, rigorous, and highly imaginative...
...Wells for the anti-religious drift of the mighty best-seller The Outline of History...
...Plus XII, "last of orthodox popes...
...For unless we can hold this alternative reality, even temporarily, in our heads, we have no capacity for substantial change...
...Ironically, if this way is taken it will lead Parfit not necessarily to traditional religion but to an organismic conception of the universe which includes a theoretical place for God as the final context for all reasons and persons...
...The book's size, its weighty feel, its good binding and clear typography all commend it...
...I f we are not Consequentialists, we shall be likely to believe that Clare's act would not have been not wrong...
...His was a personality that could mingle a keen theological appreciation of incarnational, sacramental, and moral instincts with eyebrow-lifting impieties...
...Part'it shows from several angles that it is not always reasonable to do what is "best for you...
...Selfishness as the ultimate policy for life is made even more unreasonable if selves are themselves shown not to be ultimates...
...DEBORAH MEIER (Deborah Meier is founder and principal of Central Park East School, a special public elementary school in East Harlem...
...Wilson has been able to draw on new source materials and thus supplement Robert Speaight's fine and careful biography of 1957...
...He played out that manifest destiny again in the late 1920s by being one of the few who relentlessly took up academic arms against H.G...
...Belloc himself always maintained, publicly at least, that he was a true friend of the Jewish people...
...Belloc, extraordinarily smug in his European cultural Catholicism, wrote what most Catholics today would consider not only "nonsense," but "violent and vitriolic" nonsense as well...
...What Derek Parfit wants in this book is to make a new beginning for ethics, venturing out, in the radical absence of religious authority, to-'find a reasonable replacement for our civilization's conceptions of what we persons are and what principles should guide our private and communal lives...
...I found this ending both winsom~ for its honesty I I III and a challenge for continued "venturing...
...He deftly handles various forms of Prisoner's Dilemma problems and expands them to the level of society at large...
...It is, as he notes, the Buddha's view, and it is the view taken by "process" philosophers who follow Alfred North Whitehead's account of things...
...A sacristan came up to him and whispered, "Excuse me, sir, we kneel here...
...So, on thumbing through, does the carefully prepared scholarly apparatus: a five-page analytical table of contents, ten appendices, twenty-eight pages of notes, a rich bibliography, and an index...
...It is the author's own photography, and it expresses his philosophical enterprise, also captured in an epigraph by Nietzsche placed opposite the title page: At last the horizon appears free to us again, even granted that it is not bright...
...Within the church, for all its troubles, Belloc perceived roof and hearth...
...In his study, Mr...
...In particular, Belloc is remembered for his "robustly anti-Jewish statements" that continued throughout his life...
...Belloc (1870-1953) wrote over 150 prose works...
...As early as the 1890s, Belloc had been, according to Dean Inge, about the only man in England who did not support the Jewish Colonel Dreyfus in the scandalous anti-Semitic affair that rocked France...
...I was inclined at the start to come down rather hard on such needless obfuscation, and I remain afraid that many readers will give up somewhere in the first fifty pages...
...Everyone who knew Belloc also knew that he was a Catholic from the cradle, of the scrapping, contentious, and not infrequently obnoxious sort...
...Wilson, styled definitive by the publisher, makes a steady and studied attempt to plumb the sources of the intrigue...
...Whitehead's way is one possibility...
...Clyde F. Crews H ILAIRE BELLOC was once in attendance at Mass at Westminster Cathedral and remained standing, Frenchfashion, throughout the service...
...The analysis is clear, crisp, and concise...
...at last our ships may venture out again, venture out to face any danger, all the daring of the lover of knowledge is permitted again...
...The principal benefit, besides the sheer mental enlargement that comes from considering Parfit's profusion of fascinating hypothetical examples (more entertaining than most science fiction), is the m~ssive and, in my judgment, conclusive assault on self-interest as the presumed "only reasonable" policy for individuals and societies...
...Teaching can be a profession of immense variety, autonomy, community, and a sense of usefulness, a setting in which one's own interests are valued -- because it is from the stuff of one's own interests that teaching at its best emerges...
Vol. 111 • October 1984 • No. 17
