Wittgenstein called upon one of philosophy’s most distinguished images of the inescapable problem of epistemology: the extent to which we, trapped as we are entirely within the internal space of our own experiential subjectivity, can have any reliable knowledge whatsoever of the outside world, or connect with the interiority of others.
What Collingwood tends to think of as the animal side of human nature – feelings, appetites, desires and, even, more contestably, the emotions – is something which it is not possible to know historically. There can be no history of love, only a history of thought about love; no history of dreams, only a history of dreams as consciously recounted. A history of the feelings is, then, close to being an oxymoron, since, as Collingwood writes in a dramatic passage, ‘we shall never know how the flowers smelt in the garden of Epicurus, or how Nietzsche felt the wind in his hair as he walked on the mountains; we cannot relive the triumph of Archimedes or the bitterness of Marius’ (IH 296).
“There exists in our society,” Arendt complained, “a widespread fear of judging.” The genuine statesman had no choice but to judge, and judgment, Kissinger said, demanded “character and courage . . . vision and determination . . . wisdom and foresight.” And where did correct judgment come from? Insofar as policy depended on nonquantifiable choices, there was no avoiding questions of morality. “All political action,” Strauss said, “implies thought of the good.” Kissinger wrote that “the great human achievements must be fused with enhanced powers of human, transcendent and moral judgment.” If artificial intelligence came to dominate or replace human thinking, “What is the role of ethics?”
The term “individualism” had no settled use. As an innocuous moral shorthand, it picked out four profound and well-attested convictions with long pedigrees in the common tradition. First of all, morally speaking, people mattered as people, not as men or women, Jews, Christians, or Muslims, blacks or whites, rich or poor. Nobody went naked in society. Everyone had to wear something. Their particular social clothes, however, were morally irrelevant. Second, everyone mattered equally. If social clothing was morally irrelevant, nobody could properly be excluded from society’s concern, denied its protections, or exempted from its demands. Third, everyone had a sphere of privacy that was no one else’s business and on which neither state nor society might intrude. And fourth, everyone had in them seeds of capability and personal growth, which could not be left untended without moral loss.
Arreguín-Toft then asked the question slightly differently. What happens in wars between the strong and the weak when the weak side does as David did and refuses to fight the way the bigger side wants to fight, using unconventional or guerrilla tactics? The answer: in those cases, the weaker party’s winning percentage climbs from 28.5 percent to 63.6 percent. To put that in perspective, the United States’ population is ten times the size of Canada’s. If the two countries went to war and Canada chose to fight unconventionally, history would suggest that you ought to put your money on Canada.
The three axes allow each tribe to assert moral superiority. The progressive asserts moral superiority by denouncing oppression and accusing others of failing to do so. The conservative asserts moral superiority by denouncing barbarism and accusing others of failing to do so. The libertarian asserts moral superiority by denouncing coercion and accusing others of failing to do so.
