Man and World 27: 335-341, 1994. © 1994 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

Book review

Robert C. Neville, The Puritan Smile: A Look Toward Moral Reflection. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1978. 248 pages. $49.50 (cloth); $16.95 (paper). A smiling Puritan face is an unusual sight in contemporary moral philosophy, in contemporary moral affairs, perhaps even in Puritan moral life. But the unusual possibility of a Puritan smile bespeaks the departure of Robert Neville's project from what has become common currency in twentieth century moral philosophy. Indeed, Neville's book is predicated on the observation that our current moral resources, in philosophical circles and in our lives, have become infertile: "There are times, such as our own, when the resources that have guided a culture's self-consciousness and moral reflection seem exhausted. The leading ideas seem inapplicable to obvious realities and become the ideological property of special parties. Moral discussion becomes hopelessly confused and degenerates into intellectual politics. ''2 This condition of exhaustion is the effect of Liberalism, as Neville sees it, reacting with "its dialectical offspring, Marxism" (p. 1) in an historical period which has moved beyond what the assumptions and objectives of Liberalism and Marxism can address. Neville's is a "new look" taken in an attempt to rescue culture from barrenness in moral reflection. Neville's method is resoundingly metaphysical, and therefore this book is not for the metaphysically squeamish. On the other hand, metaphysical squeamishness is one of the traits of contemporary moral discourse which Neville would alter. This "look toward moral reflection" is a prolonged argument against the adverse effects of certain "bad" metaphysical assumptions behind current moral resources, assumptions (for example, metaphysical individualism) which have been the cause of the cultural exhaustion from which we are in need of rescue. In short, Neville's metaphysically-informed foray into moral philosophy seeks to unify the worthwhile insights of the Puritan, Confucian, and Liberal traditions in order to lay the groundwork for an ideal of moral reflection which can speak in and to our age, an age conspicuously lacking a tradition of its own. Needless to say, such a synthesis involves a broad range of analyses: Neville treats of the social, political, scientific, philosophical and personal requirements and implications of his view of moral reflection. Though I will defend this synthesis in principle below, I think it fair to say that the weakness of the book lies in its compactness in dealing with what are without question issues of extremely broad scope. In the end, though, a reaction to Neville's view of moral reflection must be based on the rationale of his project, the five major elements of which I take to be: (1) the metaphysical vision itself and (2) the portrait of reflection, (3) moral discernment, (4) ironic stance and (5) conflict of ends engendered by the metaphysics. The attempt to defuse the criticism that a synthesis of elements of vastly different traditions is a great, if not impossible, task, is made early in the

336 book and is the occasion of the introduction of metaphysics as a staple of moral inquiry: Progress may be made with regard to integrating apparently contradictory resources by advancing a new metaphysics that picks up those elements in each tradition that would be desirable to bring along while excluding the undesirable elements .... The trick is to incorporate the good parts and trivialize the bad, and the difficulty is that the most basic judgments about the good and the bad are carried by the categories of the incorporating metaphysics itself .... Metaphysics should be practiced only in close connection with the many domains of experience and knowledge that bear upon it .... With regard to morals, there are a great many sources of judgment concerning what would be valuable to bring along as sources of moral reflection (p. 3). In other words, the selection of "good and bad" elements of traditions, and the value criteria by which this selection is made, are engaged simultaneously; to a great extent value-thinking is metaphysical thinking, and vice versa. Neville is concerned with a "practice" of metaphysics which involves the ongoing reflective appreciation of the real creation of values in various areas of human life. If there are recognizable "goods" residing in diverse traditions, Neville asks, how are we to think them together except through a non-provincial metaphysics aimed primarily at expanding and rejuvenating our moral resources? There is first the issue of exactly what is desirable in each of the three traditions in question. From Puritanism Neville wishes to retain three main features: a view of social participation in which there is no separation of individual and social interest, a strong commitment to political change (revolutionary if necessary), and most importantly, a perspective on personal responsibility that is relentless far-ranging. From Liberalism we may retain a respect for the individual, and the perspective gained through experience with technology and scientific advancement. From the Confucian tradition a transactionism whereby thought and action are thoroughly interconnected is borrowed and easily wedded to other Deweyan/pragmatic strains. Confucianism also lends: (1) the attentive concern with the entire range of possible effects (as opposed to merely intended effects) stemming from an act; (2) a deep appreciation of the "publicness" of life; (3) a serious attitude towards self-cultivation in the context of the other stances to be borrowed in our new metaphysics. Neville sees Confucianism as an "effective antidote to the alienation of late capitalism and bureaucratic communism" (p. 35),and notes that is shares with Puritanism a metaphysical practice which is primarily "the engagement of life" (ibid.). Melded to the Liberal commitment to freedom and creativity, these features, Neville suggests, should begin to revivify our moral world. How and why must this melding occur? The Puritan focus on personal responsibility is Neville's chosen reagent in the processes of value discernment constituting our social, political and personal life, and therefore in the process of tradition-melding now required by that life. Neville seems to require of moral thinking within these processes nothing less than omniresponsibility. For example, in the "social" dimension of his project, he

337 questions how one goes about making social obligations the personal responsibilities of the individual agents and replies that his "general and radical answer is to propose that everyone is responsible for all social obligations unless exempted by specific structures" (p. 19). Omniresponsibility replaces the Hobbesian war of all against all (as well as its purported Liberal and Marxist antidotes) in the attempt to reshape our thinking about life on late twentieth-century Earth. What makes this replacement possible is precisely the metaphysical thinking both choosing and being chosen in the fusing of elements of Puritanism, Liberalism and Confucianism. The type of moral thinking Neville seeks to overcome is that which is encumbered by a bad metaphysics of the individual, namely, that guided by the assumption of external connection. "The very distinction between private individuality and public life in the integrating social structures reflects the metaphysical foundations of modern science: on the one hand, an uneasy balance of atoms in the void, and on the other, universal laws more real and true than any contingent atoms they accidentally might govern. That modem metaphysics and its culture need to be transcended" (p. 72). In place of atomic individuality Neville proposes here, as in his earlier work, a view of the individual as a harmony of "essential" and "conditional" features. The conditional are relational features, constituted by the individual's continuities "with all surrounding, past, and future affairs" (p. 36), while the essentials are the existential features that make the individual uniquely his or her way of being a part of the temporal continuities. Essential features norm the engagement in conditional, relational features. This harmony of features is at once a program for integrity of personality and character (hence personal responsibility), and a program for the necessary involvement of the individual in the wider environment which includes the domains of social and political responsibility as well. Neville's concept of individuality as a temporal harmony of constituting features is one Of the better post-Whiteheadian attempts at giving definition to human existence via a process model, one that strikes upon a set of categories which deals with the specific ontology of humans, while maintaining applicability to the wider general processes within which human ontology occurs. Not only humans, but things in general are harmonies of the type just described, and to all such harmonies what Neville calls "norms" apply. The identification of what is normative in any situation is the major task of metaphysical and/or moral thinking as Neville would like to reconstitute them. Neville's argument is that if all reality is a process of ordering elements of the universe, then in any given ordering there is a "best" way that things can be ordered. Here Neville's dictum is "Can implies ought"; if things can be together in a best way then they ought to be. "Best" might refer to a parsimony of arrangement in simple things, or to highly complex harmonies of considerations such as are necessary when making moral decisions about recombinant DNA experiments. "Omniresponsibility" means that if the good can be identified (and with responsible thinking it can) then people have "some kind of responsibility to do it" (p. 46). This responsibility, stemming from the interconnection of individual and environment expressed in the harmony of essential and

338 conditional features, is in turn essential to the individual as such: "Being responsible is having a relation to a situation with normative elements such that the relation in part determines one's moral identity" (p. 54). Neville presses this relational responsibility of humans in the world about as far as it can go: "To the extent that people can modify various levels of the hierarchies making up their world, an extent greatly increased by scientific technology, they are responsible for living in harmony with the deepest powers of the universe" (p. 134). It is not easy to live in such a universe what kind of moral reflection makes it even possible? We must first be aware of what moral reflection is not. It is not metaethics, though it does critically consider what is necessary to ethical thinking (pp. 7-8); it is not ethical theory, though it defines theory as it is to be metaphysically employed in thinking about our world (pp. 85-87); it is not problem-solving technological mentality, though it is sensitive to special responsibilities raised by technological thinking (p. 23); it is not a process of deduction of obligations from some ground, though it is concerned with the worth of things and acts given their profoundest interconnections (p. 24). Reflection is, simply, precisely the recognition of the realities, hence norms, of any given situation. Reflection and normative description of reality work as one for human self-consciousness in a world in which a fact/value distinction does not apply (pp. 78-80). Moral reflection is a practice of thinking "that should be a dimension of life at all times" and its goal is "to know what to prize, actually and ideally, and how to respond to that" (p. 94). Reflection gathers the functions of intuition, imagination, and cognition in a single practice of axiologically sensitive thinking; Neville thus advances the comprehensive, synthetic, and normative view of thought he began in Reconstruction of Thinking (SUNY, 1981) to include the specifically moral sphere. The confluence of normative description and moral reflection is actually exercised through what Neville calls moral discernment. Through moral discernment we recognize objective differences in value between options for moral choice, and become habituated in doing so. Moral discernment is, hence, an aspect of character. Discernment is normative in the sense that we have a responsibility to try to be discerning, whether or not we are good at it; it is an essential feature of all responsible agents as such (p. 111). Neville has replaced the Kantian agent who acts according to the reality it perceives in itself, with a discerning agent who acts according to the reality it perceives in its moral environment. Since discernment involves the perception of the values presented in the real environment, and the values of the moral subject who is acting in that environment, there is always the possibility that values will be mutually exclusive. Indeed, Neville posits that the moral situation not only in fact sometimes involves the missing of one value in favor of another, but in principle our value-laden moral responsibility involves an incoherence that guarantees the thwarting of real value. On the one hand, "reality is infinitely complex and dense," while on the other hand, "the human interpretive response to reality is always selective, employing a finite set of signs to lift out certain aspects as important and connected, implicitly ignoring the rest" (p. 10). In an infinitely valuable world we make finite decisions. The internal incompleteability of our task inspires what Neville calls the

339 "existential attitude" of "irony." The ironic stance entails both the earnest pursuit of what is best, and a spirit of playfulness that saves us from the frustrated cynicism that can result from our finite decisions (p. 12). Irony is a morally reflective response to our metaphysical situation. Each selection of the best way for things to be is shot through with the pain of our intelligent sensitivity to what we have not been able to do. Beating in the center of the ironic moral life is the pulse of profound conflict among certain values we seek and hence our responsibilities. Genuinely discerned personal, economic, vocational, spiritual, political, and familial responsibilities are quite often at odds. Indeed, the very "ideal ends" which guide each of these spheres may in principle conflict. Without rehearsing Neville's excellent description of this conflict, let us note his suggestes response: that a certain "mediating ideal end" be recognized that can at least make an attempt at providing unity in a life divided by internal value-conflict. This mediating idea end Neville calls the "religious" (p. 194), and it is at least as complex as the situation of incoherent responsibilities it addresses - it refers to the ultimate existential dimension of our lives as such. The religious attitude, the ironic Puritan smile, asks the ontological question over and over again: "people face the religious ideal end with the fullness of their being; the ultimate ground of personal contingency is the source of individuation and of their integration in all respects" (p. 197). The religious is a constant check on the metaphysics of our individuality and responsibility. Since both metaphysics and responsibility are open to change according to the infinite density of the interconnected world, this "check" built into moral reflection is a necessary one. Since we are finite, we are bound at times to come up short on our check, and for this reason Neville posits as a further element in our moral character a spirit of forgiveness. Our omniresponsibility lays us open to the desire to be as gods, the old sin of pride raised here in a new guise. "To break the proliferating bondage of pride, one needs to accept forgiveness for even the most vicious failures and take satisfaction in the limited good one in fact does and enjoys" (p. 203). The concept of forgiveness is at once one of the most interesting in Neville's recasting of the moral life, and one of the most vague. One wishes for a more thorough examination of forgiveness as the response which is to continue to motivate us in our onmiresponsible moral life-journeys. For instance, the concept may require a variety of applications according to whether the transgression is social, political, familial, psychological, spiritual, and so on. Can forgiveness be the same thing in all these spheres, or does it need specification? What is the relation between forgiveness and punishment? One wonders if Neville's particular form of realism is in fact realistic about what can be expected or attempted by "human nature" as we have consistently encountered it in history. Where other moral theorists (such as Gewirth) seek to check the weakness of our nature with a resolving conceptual scheme which relieves the anxiety of deep conflict, Neville demands a naked admission of the sources of our anxiety and a commitment to work tirelessly within them towards the always partial, sometimes tragic, "best" in all situations. The possibility of this remains to be seen. On the other hand, Neville's look towards moral reflection is more concerned with the cultivation of human nature than with accepting what

340 human nature happens to be in an era which is conceptually impotent as to the moral life. Here I think it would be interesting to compare Neville's project with that of Iris Murdoch, who shares the concern to develop a moral vocabulary for reflection that "breaks the bondage of pride" and sets human nature on the path towards its fruition rather than its stagnation. Murdoch has argued against our "dangerous lack of curiosity about the real world," our lack of what Neville has described as moral discernment, and has called for "an enriching and deepening of concepts" that can provide "a new vocabulary of attention" for use in our sometimes "opaque" moral situations .2 Whereas Murdoch would develop her new vocabulary through moral cultivation via literature, and explicitly warns against metaphysics, Neville's metaphysical project shares Murdoch's concern for a revolution in concepts and thinking, a revolution awy from both ancient and peculiarly modem self-deceptive forms of order, and towards the recognition of the varied dimensions of value and conflict in which we live. This recognition is an essential element in a truly realistic attempt to counteract the traditional vices of pride and selfishness and substitute for them reconstituted versions of the traditional virtues of humility and other-directedness. Moreover, Neville's normative but non-deductive metaphysics may be an answer to the vague concept of "goodness" in Murdoch's non-metaphysical "attention" to the "real. ''3 Likewise, Neville has taken MacIntyre's suggestin that the answer to the "decline in modem moral reflection" is an informed return to a virtue-ethics, and moved beyond its suspicious "moral community" to a more encompassing view that takes account of the changing reality within which virtuous action must occur. Neville's metaphysics of virtue, as we might guardedly call it, provides for a wariness that virtues themselves may become blinders to various spheres of value to which we are (omni)responsible. It is important to compare Neville's project with like-spirited nonmetaphysical attempts to rejuvenate moral thinking, as it is the greatest danger to his view that he delivers it in a philosophical climate which is anti-metaphysical. How is the transition to be effected from the metaphysical arguments for value and obligation to public action in accordance with the virtues suggested by the metaphysics'? The enormous difficulty is not to be ignored, but here is where I believe Neville's equally enormous task of tradition-melding must be defended in principle. The lack of a moral tradition in the (post-) modem era is in large measure due to a lack of an embracing conceptual scheme articulating what the grounds and purposes of such a tradition might be. Ethics and meta-ethics have continued to move in this void to no avail, have attempted to be adjustments to an historical conceptual scheme which no longer exists either theoretically or culturally. Neville's gesture towards a n e w scheme is a first step towards filling what he sees as the need for "a new tradition" (p. 22). If what is objectionable about a metaphysically grounded tradition is that it hints of a foundationalism which sits uncomfortably with current mentality, then Neville escapes such objection. Neville's axiological metaphysics, developed by embracing what is best in historical traditions, is focused on the embrace of the best in and not on the historical fact of the earlier traditions. He has built the scheme from human raw materials drawn from various conceptions of

341 "humanity" in the interest of more robust and workable moral thinking. The deeper objection to Neville's project, the one I find most troubling despite my obvious sympathy with the objectives of his "new look," is this: can a self-consciously and methodologically non-traditional age even begin to entertain this shift of concepts? The post-modern world may be intellectually and culturally beyond the reach of Neville' s optimistic reshaping, and ready to defend itself as post-traditional. Certainly the concept of "religion" as presented here is not enough to convince both theorist and voter that a new tradition is around the bend. Perhaps it would be Neville's contention that post-modernism is yet another offspring of an earlier set of exhausted concepts, an offspring which will exhaust itself as well. Neville's problem, in any case, is to motivate a cultural overhaul within a culture which presently lacks or openly rejects the types of sensibilities necessary for the "new look."

Notes 1. Robert C. Neville, The Puritan Smile (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987). Page references are cited in text as: (page). 2. Iris Murdoch, "Against Dryness, a Polemical Sketch," in Revisions: Changing Perspectives in Moral Philosophy, ed. Stanley Hauerwas and Alasdair MacIntyre (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983), pp. 46, 49. 3. See "On God and Good," in Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good (New York: Schocken Books, 1971). Judith A. Jones Department of Philosophy Fordham University Bronx, NY 10458