Abstract
These two sections introduce you to the topic and the procedure of the book.
The book’s topic is the discovery of a secular absolute (that Steinvorth argues is the norm to be authentic) in philosophy, in particular by Kant, Hegel, and Heidegger. The introduction defines absolutes and secularism (used synonymously with naturalism) and explains why the focus is on three philosophers who are rightly known to be idealists rather than naturalists.
The book’s procedure is both systematic and historical. It aims at an answer to the question whether there is an unconditional norm obliging also naturalists, looks at claims on absolute norms in history, and concludes with its own claim on an absolute norm.
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The analytic philosopher Raimond Gaita tried to restore the absoluteness of norms and values appealing to Wittgensteinian ideas that yet are closer to Heidegger’s claims on authenticity. He claimed there is “a sense of absolute value”, “discovered in a sober remorse” and other “examples where the grammar of the applications of concepts” (1991: 8) shows the insufficiency of “academic moral philosophy” (1991:11ff), insisting that “morality has a dimension which is sui generis” (1991:88) and can be reduced neither to a social function nor the Stoics’ idea that virtues must be valued for their own sake (85f, 89). Though this dimension belongs to “the language available to her (a moral speaker, US) in her culture living and resonant with the authority of her disciplined enactment of it, in speech and in action” and is part of “What we call a ‘living culture’ or that in a culture which is ‘living’”, Gaita says the dimension presents an “absolute conception of good and evil” (125), arising from the interaction that Wittgenstein called language game. Yet he also suggests an argument for his absolute conception that is transcendental in the sense defined above in Sect. 1. Academic moral philosophy “abstracts … rationality as the morally salient focus of” the respect for human beings, but “the respectworthiness of rational nature” is something “higher” and “finer” than the mere “exercise of Reason” (1991:28f), “a lucid love”, “the spirit of truth in love”, “the passion for lucidity and … the despair at achieving it”. It is also expressed by the words “Ad maiorem Dei gloriam” that students used to mark out the unconditionality of their writings (1991: 30; as we may add, also the composer J.S. Bach and the Jesuits used these words to mark out that their efforts were purely devout). He also talks of a “kind of seriousness which is internal to our sense of good and evil” (32, cp. 77, 218) and of “moral seriousness” (95, 269, 318, cp. 105) or “ethical seriousness” (144).
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Steinvorth, U. (2020). Introduction. In: A Secular Absolute. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35036-9_1
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