A Philosophical Retrospective: Facts, Values, and Jewish Identity

introduction

This book has as its primary concern a reconsideration of two apparently quite distinct topics. The first is the question of whether the facts of who and what one is—if to take them simply as facts is indeed the proper way of thinking of them, the facts of one’s identity, in other words, do not constitute some sort of rationally compelling passage from statements of fact to certain value judgments and the second is the endlessly contentious subject of the nature of Jewish identity. There is, as may, I hope, become apparent, some small degree of genuine overlap between these two topics, but I have to confess that a large part of the explanation of why they here find themselves in juxtaposition lies in the fact that, although it does not pretend to be any sort of autobiography as such, this book certainly still bears many traces of its autobiographical origins.

When, well over half a century ago, I found myself embarked on a university career as a professional philosopher, a problem of major interest to me was that of how best to understand the relationship between values and facts—or, rather, as I had as a student already been brought up to think of it, as that between value judgments and statements of fact. In more recent times I have tended to focus rather on the nature and importance of concepts of identity—identity not primarily in the essentially formal sense which logicians and metaphysicians of a certain type struggle to pin down and to render more precise, but rather in whatever sense or senses underlie worries about the nature of personal identity as well as of those which may be taken to constitute the identities of the many different types of group or institution to which individuals may be taken, by themselves or by others, to belong. On the face of it, indeed, these may already seem to constitute distinctly different areas of concern; if one were to draw up student reading lists for them based on the standard literature in these two notably broad fields, there would not be too many evident overlaps. And yet there are certain very close connections between the two.

The first concern of this book is, then, with the question as to whether matters of personal identity are to be seen as falling on one side or the other of the so often alleged divide between values and facts or, on the contrary, as providing in effect an integrative bridge across it. Questions of the nature and status of the fact/value distinction and those concerning the significance of personal identity have been among my principal preoccupations throughout the time of my involvements with philosophy, and another underlying concern of this book has been a search for a better retrospective understanding of how it was that these philosophical preoccupations came to have had their roots in preoccupations of real life existing far below the evident academic or professional surface. The particulars of my own case are, of course, particular to me; the question of what may be the factors that lead philosophers to concentrate more especially on certain areas of their overall subject rather than on others is, however, of much wider interest. And, though there is certainly no good reason why it should be of interest to anyone else, I have also to confess that a further particular interest for me in returning once again to these questions has been to see how far, and why, I may or may not still agree with what I previously thought and have written about them. So, although they may not entirely justify, these latter considerations may help to explain the undeniably autobiographical tone that may seem to pervade certain parts of what follows.

There will, of course, be many different factors involved in leading philosophers to work more especially in one area of their overall subject rather than in another—not least the combination of peer and career pressures that happen to exist in any particular place and at any particular time. In general the weight of one factor rather than that of another as effective in leading them to whatever may be their area of special concentration is more likely to be of interest as a matter of their personal biographies, or, possibly, as one of general intellectual history, than of any specifically philosophical interest in itself. In some cases, however, a situation of puzzlement encountered, as one might say, in real, in no way obviously philosophical, life may turn out to have its deeper roots in some problem of typical philosophical complexity. To try and think out a way through such a situation of puzzlement is itself, and whether one is aware of it or not, to engage, however clumsily, in genuinely philosophical thinking. Thus, or so it seems to me, philosophy may very often start before it knows itself as philosophy—and, if and when it does come to know itself as such, it may risk scaring itself off into paralysis.

In my own case the question of whether in recognizing the facts of my own personal identity I might somehow be committing myself to endorsing certain values or to acknowledging certain obligations was intimately tied up with questions as to whether the indisputable fact that I was Jewish was inseparable from those of my own personal identity as such and, if so, what the implications of this might be; thus the much contested question of the nature of Jewish identity appears as the other central topic of this book. Unsurprisingly, my concern with this question goes well beyond its relevance, as an immediately illustrative example, to that of the overlapping relations between identity, fact, and value, central though this concern is to the book as a whole. At the same time, this book emphatically does not pretend to offer anything approaching exhaustive analyses or accounts of the existing literature on what it may be to be Jewish or, indeed, on any other of these notoriously complex topics. What is of major interest here, however, over and beyond that of these topics of primary concern for their own sake, are the ways in which they, and so many other topics of philosophical significance, are interwoven with each other and, beyond that, with the ways in which philosophical reflections may intersect with and contribute to considered reflection on one’s life as it may seem to confront one. And I hope that what follows may provide some support for what may be called an anticompartmentalizing view of philosophy and of philosophy’s relation to serious thought in general.

Chapter 1 starts out, then, by recalling, very briefly, the relevant aspects of what presented itself as my given personal identity at the time of my setting out on a university career, before going on to an equally brief consideration of what is to be understood by reference to the two key terms of fact, on the one hand, and value, on the other. Chapter 2 is given over to a consideration of the notion of identity, in particular that of role identity, and of the associated notions of belonging and responsibility. Chapters 3, 4, and 5 are all concerned with different aspects of the problem of Jewish identity. In chapter 6 I return to what has been the main guiding thread throughout these discussions, namely, the question of whether and when a role, which one may, as a matter of fact, occupy—or be held to occupy—in a given institution or community has to be accepted, together with all its associated obligations and responsibilities, as constituting an inescapably given aspect of one’s own personal identity or whether that identity should be seen as always in the last resort open to and even dependent on where one may oneself take (or fail to take) one’s stand as a matter of ultimately pure self-determination. Finally in chapter 7 I attempt, by way of conclusion to this particular version of the story, to show why there can in principle be no logically conclusive putting of an end to dilemmas and debates of these sorts and, by way of a scatter of very brief postscripts, to pick up on a few of the more important of its ancillary themes.

When I start to think of all the people to whom I am in one sort of debt or another for everything to be found in this book—other, of course, than for my own quite possibly idiosyncratic views and all such actual errors of fact or of reasoning as it may contain—I realize just how impossible a task it would be to set out to list them all. Students, former students, colleagues, friends—classes that happily very largely overlap—have all been of indispensable help with their questions and, often enough, objections, in getting me to think, and rethink again and again, about the issues that concern me here—as indeed about many others—and about how best to formulate my own thoughts. But there are just a few whose influence and support have been in one way or another so important that they stand out in my memory and gratitude.

The first of these—alas, now too long since departed from amongst us—was undoubtedly R. M. Hare. Dick, as I observe in passing in a note to chapter 1, was never my tutor at Balliol, though when in 1961 I returned there as a tutor in philosophy myself, I was fortunate enough to find him still there as a senior colleague and friend. As a student I had been a PPE undergraduate and he, Dick, was the philosophy tutor responsible for those reading Greats (or, to give it its proper title, Literae Humaniores). Many of my friends were, however, students of his—among them Bernard Williams and John Lucas, but also a number of other very gifted student philosophers—and I was allowed to join in some of the reading parties that he conducted in Anglesey. Dick’s passion for philosophy was very clearly as much a moral as an intellectual one; he was—paradoxically enough, as one might well think—inspired by the conviction that it was of the utmost moral importance to understand that no value judgments whatsoever (moral value judgements included) could be taken as validly following from nonevaluative premises alone—including not only statements of fact but also the conceptual analyses of his own metaethics. This tension between, on the one hand, a conviction that every individual was to be seen as in the last resort responsible for determining whatever should be his or her own overriding or moral values by virtue of some act of founding resolution or choice and, on the other hand, one of the deep moral relevance of this allegedly value-neutral thesis was to come ever closer to the surface in his successive books as his work progressed from The Language of Morals (1952), through Freedom and Reason (1963), to Moral Thinking (1981), and in his many articles on issues of very practical ethics. But this is not a tension to be simply written off as if it were nothing but some sort of contradiction; it is, on the contrary, and if I am right, one that is deeply inscribed within the fundamentally individualist and liberal view of the world—and, I suppose, one with whose implications I have never ceased struggling. In many ways, indeed, this book may be seen as the latest round in this, my personal, struggle.

For the emergence of this book in its present form I have, above all, to thank Akeel Bilgrami. When I told him that I had embarked on an extended (and, no doubt, potentially rambling) project of return to all the main topics of preoccupation about which I had written over the years to see how far I still agreed with my past self or not, he very sensibly suggested that I might do better to concentrate my efforts on topics connected with identity—and with Jewish identity in particular. Since then his repeated support and readiness to offer the hospitality of his series to the book which he has done so much to encourage has been a greatly appreciated incentive to buckle down and get on with it. I am also extremely grateful for the encouragement and suggestions for detailed improvement provided by Wendy Lochner, senior executive editor for religion, philosophy, and animal studies at Columbia University Press, and by their two anonymous readers; and very grateful too to Susan Pensak, senior manuscript editor at the Press, for her painstaking attention not only to the smallest needs of a hopefully final cleaning up of the text and to a checking of all references, but also, in my case, for all the detailed and repetitive work involved in converting the many characteristically British aspects of my spelling, my punctuation, and my turns of phrase into acceptable American. My research assistant, Danielle Sands, has throughout been of indispensable help both in spotting and getting me to disentangle overentangled or otherwise inadequately thought-through passages—if too many remain, that can only be due to my obstinacy rather than to any spotting failure on her part—and in helping to check so much of the detailed work of proofreading.. Finally, I am only too aware that I should almost certainly never have had the perseverance needed actually to complete something like this if it had not been for the constant support and encouragement and—far from least—the example of my wife, Catherine Audard, who in a similar space of time somehow manages to get through at least twice the amount of work that I seem able to manage myself. For her unfailing encouragement, support, and example, as for so much else, I am deeply grateful.

one

FACTS AND VALUES?

A fact, we may say, is something that presents itself as a feature of the world within which one finds oneself, some aspect of one’s given reality, something that has to be accepted whether one likes it or not;¹ a statement of fact presents itself as a proposition or, qua speech act, as an assertion that claims acceptance on similar terms. This is emphatically not to say that there is, or could ever be, just one uniquely appropriate way of articulating any given state of affairs, just one way of conceptualizing the way things are and, by so doing, of bringing it to a unique reflective awareness. For example, any full statement of my identity as the particular human being that I am will include the date of my birth, and this might equally well be given by reference to, say, either the Gregorian or the Hebrew calendar or, indeed, to a number of other possible calendars as well. The different ways of marking the relevant date can be shown to be equivalent; the one and the same underlying fact is conceptualized or picked out in notably (and notationally) different ways. The cultural significance of marking it in one way rather than another, however, may, in the relevant contexts, of course, be significantly different.

That the notion of a fact as something with which one is confronted, whether one likes it or not, is indispensable to any form of reflective thought or communication may be shown by reference to a familiar line of argument—associated most notably with the name of Wittgenstein, though elements of it are no doubt to be found elsewhere—concerning the necessary conditions of conceptualization as such. This, in very brief outline, may be summed up as follows.

To understand and to use a language, to master its most fundamental elements and through them gain access to conceptually articulate thought, requires an ability to symbolize (and not merely to respond to signs as triggers of appropriately conditioned reactions). But to be capable of using a sound, a mark (or, indeed, anything else) as a symbol, it is not enough to be able simply to produce or to recognize it as something already encountered; one must also be able to distinguish between its proper and improper—or purely random—use. In other words: one must be capable of recognizing the difference between a right and a wrong way of using it, between an appropriate and an inappropriate occasion for its production. The peculiarly Wittgensteinian turn to the argument comes with the claims 1. that the ability to recognize this difference is crucially bound up with the possibility of finding oneself confronted with indisputable evidence that something has gone wrong, and that someone, oneself or one’s interlocutor, must have made a mistake,² 2. that only the possibility of an encounter with another member of the same language community as one’s own could offer the indispensable check on one’s otherwise free but essentially meaningless production of the sound or mark in question. (It is worth noting in passing the two senses of the term a check; it may be understood as a verification or test or simply as something that may hold one up, that may cause one to pause in some otherwise unimpeded venture. Not that an initial check of this latter sort need necessarily be regarded as final, as providing a definitive proof of error, still less of showing where, if any, the error might lie. But a check is no less a check for not being definitive; it is enough that it should be capable of holding one up.)

In short, then, and whether or not the final antiprivate language turn of the argument can be made to stick, it is a condition of any form of conceptualized exchange or of conceptualizable reflection that one should be able to recognize something that confronts one as being what it is whether one likes it or not, in other words that one should be able to recognize some things as prima facie obstinately given fact.

If the notion of a fact is of that of some aspect of reality—of the world as given, which is as it is independently of whether one likes it or not and of which one has to take account as one makes one’s way through that world, a statement of fact is to be understood as claiming to present just some such feature. This may, of course, be describable—conceptualizable—in some other different, even very different, way, and it may be alterable from what it is now to become, in a shorter or longer time, some other state of affairs, but for a change to be brought or to come about is evidently not for it to be the case that the state of affairs that has undergone the change was not—or, more accurately, is not—a fact of the past. The whole point about facts is that one cannot make them be other than what they are by virtue of a simple preference that they should not be or should not have been so. So if there really are values that are bound up with certain facts as given—or if certain value judgments really do follow from certain statements of fact as a matter of logical entailment, then one must in all clear-sighted honesty accept that the values in question confront one in a similarly given and like-it or-not fashion as do the facts themselves.

But what exactly is to be counted as coming under the head of values and how wide may be the range of what may reasonably be counted as value judgments? It is clear enough that, in learning to speak, any normal native speaker of, for example, English will be taught and eventually come to understand that there is a significant difference between calling something good and saying simply that one likes it or wants it. Different philosophers have tried to give exact expression to this difference in a number of ways: by theologically based reference, for example, or by reference to standards of approval and disapproval generally recognized as binding within the community to which any given individual may belong as opposed to whatever might or might not be the personal preferences of the individual concerned or, as in the case of R. M. Hare, by claiming that a judgment is to be recognized as a genuine judgment of value only if its author is prepared to back it by reference to some set of criteria which he or she would be prepared to prescribe as having (logically) universal import. Alternatively, the whole weight of the alleged impossibility of deriving what others might characterize as value judgments from statements of fact might be laid on the in itself far from transparent concept of morality, the key impossibility being represented as one of deriving moral from nonmoral judgments, moral judgments themselves being thus allowed to retain their status as statements of fact, though admittedly a very special sort of (so-called non-natural) fact that was itself incapable of further analysis.

In G. E. Moore’s well-known version of the story,³ this key impossibility is presented as being that of providing an analysis (or, as he argued, definition) of goodness in any other terms. That a state of affairs should possess the property of goodness, or what he called intrinsic value, was for him a matter of pure non-natural fact, and any attempt to analyze the property of goodness in so-called natural terms would, he claimed, involve one version or another of what he famously called the Naturalistic Fallacy. Many of the key terms in Moore’s account of the matter have been criticized as being hopelessly confused, and he himself confessed much later to being unsure as to what exactly he might earlier have meant by referring to nature in this way.⁴ And, of course, the whole set of questions concerning the status of values and of value judgments appear in quite different conceptual guise when debated in terms of objectivity than when the attempt is made somehow to distinguish values from facts and to discuss just how they might be related to each other. Nor, it seems to me, is the task made easier by the contemporary move to talking of normative facts, for to do so is simply to reintroduce the old problems in terms of such distinctions as may be made and such relations as may or may not exist between them and different sorts of non-normative facts.

The extensive stories of the many different ways in which the terms value and value judgment, on the one hand, and moral and moral judgment, on the other, have been or might best be used or understood, together with the at least equally extensive stories of how one might best understand the associated concepts of fact and truth and truth conditions, are, however, both too long and too specialized