Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Ethical crises old and new
- 1 Moral nihilism: Socrates vs. Thrasymachus
- 2 Morals and metaphysics
- 3 The soul and the self
- 4 Division and its remedies
- 5 Rules and applications
- 6 The past, present and future of practical reasoning
- 7 Autonomy and choice
- 8 Ethics and ideology
- 9 God and ethics
- Bibliography
- Index
4 - Division and its remedies
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 January 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Ethical crises old and new
- 1 Moral nihilism: Socrates vs. Thrasymachus
- 2 Morals and metaphysics
- 3 The soul and the self
- 4 Division and its remedies
- 5 Rules and applications
- 6 The past, present and future of practical reasoning
- 7 Autonomy and choice
- 8 Ethics and ideology
- 9 God and ethics
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
PSYCHOLOGICAL INCOMPLETENESS
If we are divided, less than complete wholes, it follows that we stand in need of completion, and it is further possible that we are incomplete ‘externally’ as well as ‘internally’. By ‘external incompleteness’ I refer to a need for some external ‘addition’ or external ‘factor’ by which we may complete ourselves, with presumably an accompanying internal reintegration. By internal incompleteness I refer to my being a compound of less than integrated parts and therefore a less than functioning whole. The two forms of incompleteness are thus complementary, at least insofar as external completion promotes internal integration. That is what both philosophers and non-philosophers have often supposed, and many (at least since Empedocles) have thought that ‘love’ (in some acceptation of the word) could be the remedy by generating the desired unity.
At the end of the fifth century BC the poet Euripides indicates a typical concern of the ‘Socratic’ age with a striking representation of acratic division in the Hippolytus where his character Phaedra struggles with her passion for her step-son, and eventually yields to it. She is portrayed as, in the later classic phrase, knowing the better and doing the worse, and it is she, Phaedra, and no-one else, who knows the better and does the worse.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Real EthicsReconsidering the Foundations of Morality, pp. 95 - 118Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2001