Abstract
Having come this far, one undercurrent of the line of thought of this book still needs explication. A specific understanding of morality has shot up from our discussions, but it has not been given an independent treatment. One reason for discussing it is that this understanding seems to go against common conceptions of morality. For what is truthful, as regards the question about who I am, is not some specific answer but the life in which it is not asked, and since this truthful life is a morally good life, that life seems, on the one hand, not to be straightforwardly possible to give a description of but is, on the other hand, what our attempt at understanding self-knowledge and the question ‘who am I?’ ultimately concerns.
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Notes
For more about this understanding of morality and goodness, see Joel Backström, The Fear of Openness: An Essay on Friendship and the Roots of Morality (Åbo: Åbo Akademi University Press, 2007)
Hannes Nykänen, The “I”, the “You” and the Soul: An Ethics of Conscience (Åbo: Åbo Akademi University Press, 2002); Strandberg, Escaping My Responsibility; Strandberg, Love of a God of Love .
Karl Marx, ‘Kritik des Gothaer Programms’, in vol. 19 of Marx Engels Werke, 9th ed. (Berlin: Dietz, 1987), 20–1 (my translation).
One might want to explain this in terms of the ‘bipolarity’ of justice (see Michael Thompson, ‘What Is It to Wrong Someone? A Puzzle about Justice’, in Reason and Value: Themes from the Moral Philosophy of Joseph Raz, ed. R. Jay Wallace, Philip Pettit, Samuel Scheffler, and Michael Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), esp. sec. 1–2).
For this discussion of Žižek, see also Slavoj Žižek, ‘The Animal Gaze of the Other’, in God in Pain: Inversions of Apocalypse (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2012), 225–6.
(Das Unbehagen in der Kultur, in Fragen der Gesellschaft, Ursprünge der Religion, 10th ed., Studienausgabe, ed. Alexander Mitscherlich, Angela Richards, and James Strachey (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 2009), 9:242 (my translation):
The following example is inspired by Wolfram von Eschenbach, Parzival, ed. Gottfried Weber, 2nd ed. (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1963), 517–19 (XII.612,23–614,17).
Compare Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 2:
Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind: Thinking (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 175, 192.
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© 2015 Hugo Strandberg
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Strandberg, H. (2015). The Good. In: Self-Knowledge and Self-Deception. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137538222_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137538222_12
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