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play did not any longer correspond to his more mature thinking.
At the time that he received the Nobel prize he had declared to a
journalist his intention of writing a trilogy on love. What is this
love that he had in mind? We do not know. In l'Exil et Ie Royaume
solidarity with man fills his heart once more with joy,but at the
same time there is hovering over these stories the veiled presence
of sadness. The title itself means that the world is at the same time
man's kingdom and the country of his exile. Camus comes to
understand that love is useless, that often the outcome of love is
hatred and persecution, as is clearly shown in the instance of Daru's
disillusionment. In exchange for his love he receives hatred:' dans
ce pays qu'il avait tant aime, il etait seul '. The answer to this
dilemma was to be given by Camus in a novel, a play and the essay
Le My the de Nemesis. He was working at this trilogy when the
drama of Villeblevin brought the plan to a tragic conclusion.
l' Universite de Louvain
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.of the moral law is present, then the same scientific knowledge will
only create new possibilities for evil.
Mr. Hampshire has two main reasons for rejecting absolute or
trans~ndental moral principles. One is that the categories and
concepts of 'transcendental philosophy' are in fact derived from
-'the distinctions recognised by men', from 'limiting human interests,'
from 'the characteristics of the most excellent human knowledge '.
To attach value to any natural or supernatural entity is necessarily also to single out a human virtue which consists in the habit
of recognising these entities and in some form of active respect
for them (pp. 258-9).
The reasoning is familiar from Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. It will
not do at all. To be sure human thought is human thought; but
it. does not follow that it can think only human things. The whole
question is whether our human experience of ourselves, of the
world, of human relations, of values, can be fully comprehended
in human concepts, fully described in human language. If it cannot,
then our own 'distinctions', our 'human interests " the 'characteristics of our knowledge' compel us to acknowledge the existence,
within and beyond our experience, of a transcendental or ' supernatural' reality which we know at least through our inability to
,comprehend it fully or describe it adequately. To say that recognising and respecting reality is nothing but a human act of recognition
or respect, is a curious aberration on Mr. Hampshire's part. It has
surely been often enough argued in modern British philosophy
since Wittgenstein, that no act of knowledge is only an 'act of
knowledge'. Concluding Part I of the Philosophical Investigations,
Wittgenstein wrote:
Nothing is more wrong-headed than calling meaning a mental
activity! Unless, that is, one is setting out to produce confusion.
'In Mr. Hampshire, this is a particularly unexpected sort of error;
for it is sheer ethical naturalism. Reviewing the book in The
Observer, Mr. Anthony Quinton acutely spoke of 'that copingistone of naturalist ethics: the principle that values are dependent
on human interests'.
Mr. Hampshire's second reason for excluding moral absolutes
is, again, one that he shares with most of the Oxford Moral philosophers as well as with the atheistic existentialists. It may be called
the coping-stone of modern liberalism. It is the view that belief
in absolute moral truths entails intolerance, fanaticism, smugness
and hypocrisy, opposition to progress.
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For a man following a code of explicit and exhaustive instnictions,
moral issues would be matters of casuistry. He would be the type
of a fanatic because only certain already listed features of any
situation would be worthy of serious thought before action. He
would be governed by words, fitting words to facts, as lawyers
must (p.216).
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