Words and Values
O'Brien, Dennis
You are what you say WORDS AND VALUES Peggy Rosenttaal Oxford, $17.95, $7.95 paper, 250 pp. Dennis O'Brien TO PRAISE this brief book as a treasure of common sense will, I fear, have precisely...
...It would appear that every single self should invent morality and culture de novo...
...Who wants to read common sense...
...This is the argument of Words and Values, first published in 1983, now issued in paperback...
...Once firmly in place,' 'self' is viewed with considerable suspicion...
...The flat earth and all that...
...As we talk so shall we be...
...If morality is bound up in common sensing across the history of the race, then science may seem to reject the moral code of argument as firmly as any bohemian inventor of a new morality...
...Any thoroughly modern moral mentor should be able to sum up the total of deep life advice in a sentence using the entire array...
...Am I already a self or must I become a self...
...We are asked to fulfill ourselves with no suggestion that there may be better or Worse things to be full of...
...Moral discourse is remodeled on the discourse of artistic creation so that each moral individual becomes Gauguin inventing both a painterly and a life style...
...A mere list will identify all as superstars: individual, feelings, develop, growth, alternative, opinion, relationship...
...Rosenthal points out what is lost by the involuntary retirement of those antique players: There's no room for grace or gratitude in a world where reciprocal and observable relations are taken as the whole of what is meaningful and where we think we can have total control...
...No less an authority than The International Encyclopedia of Psychiatry, Psychology, Psychoanalysis and Neurology affirms the at-hand self...
...Does Rosenthal give too much weight to words...
...One can appreciate the problems raised by our incoherent leading words by noting former leading figures on the cultural platform: absolute, humility, transcendence, truth, wisdom, wonder, soul, sin, grace, gratitude, and God...
...We are to "actualize the self" — Commonweal: 154 which seems to call for some sort of concerted effort — but in the same breath we will be told that the self is a most immediate and natural item...
...Man is basically constructive, accepting, creative, spontaneous, open to experience, self-aware, and self-realizing...
...Augustine...
...This can be simply illustrated...
...Morality is a matter of genius not of intergenerational connection...
...Rosenthal's book is a treatise on and of common sense and common sense has had a hard time since circa 1400...
...It would seem that a simple gush of unrepressed feeling would get the self out of the closet and into actuality...
...In order to grow, individuals must develop their feelings so that by exploring alternative life opinions we may experience meaningful relationships...
...Thus the moral thrust of "This above all to thine own self be true...
...If the creative, accepting, etc., self is subject to natural development then there need be no pedagogy for its growth — except the negative task of deconstructing the culture...
...These powerful actors in our world are not, however, prime ministers or mullahs, they are the leading words of the day...
...We are invited to express our feelings with the assumption that human feelings are benevolent in essence...
...Many popular readings of the history of science, e.g., Carl Sagan on the tube, see science as a series of surprising discoveries overturning the simplicities of common sense...
...A firm believer in the al-myghty self will not think that there is a common sense which belongs to the words, the meaning is whatl intend...
...Is freedom a given or is there a pedagogy for liberty...
...What a surprise to Hobbes and St...
...Again that depends on whether you are a fan of common sense or not...
...Self-sensing subtly removes meaning from moral language...
...Self enters the language first as a reflexive (myself) and becomes a substantive only through a spelling accident about 1300...
...But common sense is the meaning, method, and metaphysics of Peggy Rosenthal's eminently readable biographical sketches of some of "the leading figures of our time...
...Is being a self pouring out my feelings in meaningful relationships or is it instructing and controlling emotion in order to establish loving commitment...
...This work is better than a profound discovery, it displays the common heart and sense of humanity...
...If the sense of self is evacuated, our ability to make moral sense disappears...
...Rosenthal demonstrates that we are rapidly talking ourselves into a quagmire...
...She notes: It's odd maybe to think of words working . . . apart from our awareness and conscious intentions: we're so used to assuming our control of everything . . . We assume that...
...Dennis O'Brien TO PRAISE this brief book as a treasure of common sense will, I fear, have precisely the opposite effect than intended...
...He/she who falls into the common morality of parents or society is common indeed...
...It is parental, societal, and cultural controls . . . which inhibit the otherwise natural development of self-expression and self-actualization...
...The problem with "self and the array of current value terms is that we do not know — or do not wish to know — whether they are givens or goals...
...Nor is there any place for sin in a positive self-image permitting only good feelings . . . I fear that in a time when the secret of the good life is discovered weekly like the elusive quark, Words and Values will just not have the pizzazz of the latest vegetarian diet book...
...Today it is the lord god al-myghty that is denied so that we may follow self through all the improvement books from jogging to T.M...
...The cultivation of the individual from the Renaissance through Romanticism leaves little value territory for the common...
...Who indeed...
...One would have to say that since its medieval introduction as an editorial mistake, "self has risen likeunto the famous middle class...
...It is a toss-up which is more hostile to a common sense: art or science...
...Example: we are urged to grow and develop but there is no sense that one might grow like a cancer or develop like a disease...
...language is our inescapable common sense of the world...
...It is the virtue of Rosenthal's common sense approach to show that this inspiring sentence is the merest mush...
...Rosen-thai begins with the word "self itself...
...If morality has suffered from being analogized to art it has also suffered from the rise of scientific method...
...Moral commands to be your (natural) self have the bizarre character of instructing one's gallbladder...
...If real thought is ingenious discovery, there is little room for passing on a common sense of how one ought to live a human life...
...The fate of the self parallels the fate of value words...
...On this fundamental issue our cultural instructors are frequently in a state of deep self-contradiction...
...The reason that this sentence is empty is that we do not live in an era of common sense but a time of self-sensing...
...This art-historical gloss on the moral life is itself a particular theory of art derived from the Renaissance and is not necessarily the only reading of art — not to mention morality...
...Oure own self we sal deny, and folow oure lord god al-myghty" (circa 1400...
...Following this curious logic of '' self,'' the rest of the power words in our popular moral literature turn out to be road signs to nowhere in particular...
...Nature will take care of its self without Spinoza...
...I am sure that Rosenthal is correct...
...we can simply "say what we mean" . . . That words can mean things apart from what we intend for them, that words say what they mean more than what we mean is indeed disconcerting...
...People are often light and loose in their talk but it is mere talk and won't we go on living a decent sort of life after 8 March 1985: 155 all the books are back on the shelf...
...The more's the pity...
Vol. 112 • March 1986 • No. 5
