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Raymond Geuss, "Did Williams Do Ethics?", A World Without Why, pg 181
Williams used to say that the United States was the most eighteenthcentury country in the world; it was, he thought, politically, socially, and culturally caught in a kind of time-warp, an apparently eternal present that was actually represented by some point in time in the 1790s. Williams never expatiated on what exactly he meant by this statement—I assume that the reason for this was he thought that this was a particular kind of interpretative statement: if you did see the point of it, you required no further elaboration because it would immediately ring true to certain experiences you had had, putting them in a certain intelligible order; and if you didn’t see the point of it immediately, then no amount of further elaboration on his part would convince you. And then the statement might actually have a more potential long-term effect, if it was simply dropped so as to shatter on the floor like a huge bit of unwanted crockery and the noise was allowed to reverberate through the room sans commentaire. Presumably part of what he meant, though, was that the country had never been able to move beyond a particularly archaic form of the struggle of the Enlightenment with its enemies. Nothing after Adam Smith and Kant really survived the Middle Passage to take root on the western side of the Atlantic, so the culture was stuck in a state of trench warfare between a party that identified itself (in some way or another) with Enlightenment Reason (either through commitment to the ideal rationality of “free markets,” to technologically rational solutions to all problems, or to vapid Kantian “norms”) and an obscurantist religious fundamentalism that was all the more dark for defining itself in contrast to reason. Bernard Williams

May 17, 2025 at 9:14 PM

willowMay 17, 2025

Raymond Geuss, "Did Williams Do Ethics?", A World Without Why, pg 181

To say that the United States is an eighteenth-century country is to give a historical interpretation and perhaps also express an attitude, but it is not, of course, to make a moral judgement in the technical sense in which some have wanted to construe the term “moral judgement.” It is not to say that the population is vicious or the institutions corrupt. It is not the kind of statement one is liable to encounter in a book on “ethics” but rather the sort of thing someone like Herodotus would have said (if he had had a suitable concept of history and historical framework at his disposal). In his last book, Truth and Truthfulness, Williams tries to develop a theory about the relation between factual data and interpretation, which has always struck me as very close to the theory of the “constellation” one finds in Benjamin and Adorno. The stars that compose a constellation are physical objects of a certain kind and each has a set of empirically specifiable properties, a location in the sky, a certain relative magnitude, perhaps a colour. A constellation is not a mere collection but an organization of a set of stars into a recognizable and perhaps significant pattern: a bear, a hunter, a wagon, a set of twins. One cannot, of course, create constellations ad libitum, using stars that are not already there, putting together stars that are too far apart from the human eye to see synoptically, or creating patterns that make no sense to us. So we—and what we are, as the historically located creatures we happen to be—partly determine what constellations there can be (for us) by virtue of setting out the limits of what can make sense to us.

Raymond Geuss, "Did Williams Do Ethics?", A World Without Why, pg 182

“What can make sense to us” is neither completely pre-given nor fully indeterminate, and to the extent to which we can change it, this can be done only over time, and probably only collectively. The sheerly physical data about the distribution of stars does not require us to group them into this set of constellations rather than some other, and in fact does not require us to group them into any constellations whatever. We don’t invent or create stars by organizing them into constellations. Still—and this is the claim Adorno and Benjamin make—at any rate, in the realm of collective human action, culture, and politics, we are guided by constellations, not by the analogues of raw or theoretically manipulated astrophysical data, and there is no real alternative to that. It just is not possible to do without something like constellations. Similarly, Williams thought that there were facts that had the hard, unmalleable character we usually attribute to them and that could be discovered by “empirical” means (whatever they turn out to be). The U.S. Constitution had x-number of articles and article z was passed on such-and-such a day. On the other hand, the “positivist” dream that one could dispense with any interpretation and simply let the facts speak for themselves was just that—a dream. Similarly, no set of “facts” requires one to adopt a particular interpretation, but no interpretation that anyone would take seriously simply floats unconnectedly above the data or connects them in merely arbitrary ways.

willowMay 17, 2025

i was reluctant to post the follow-ups because i didn’t want the mucho texto to scare off people from reading root