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Self and Subjectivity in Political Theory

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Marvin Zetterbaum
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Extract

To speak of the self is to fix one's attention inward; to speak of social and political things is to direct one's attention outward toward those with whom our life is mysteriously and often involuntarily bound. What do “they,” those fellow citizens, want from us? Shall we approach them openly, guardedly, or perhaps not at all? Shall we look away, turn inward and thus fulfill ourselves? What, precisely, is involved in responding to the others?

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 44 , Issue 1 , January 1982 , pp. 59 - 82
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1982

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References

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48 Idem.

49 Ibid., p. 272.

50 Ibid., p. 155.

51 Ibid., pp. 153–54.

52 Pitkin refers to Kenneth Minogue “who argues that whereas traditional moral philosophy seems ‘concerned either to discover or to analyze reasons why we ought to do the right thing,’ the real ‘moral significance’ of discourse about action ‘is found in the discoveries we make about ourselves in the course of our deliberations, the kind of temptations we encounter, and the moral character which is implied by the act when it is done’” Ibid., p. 154 fn. 56).

53 Ibid., p. 156.

54 Ibid., pp. 156–57.

55 Ibid., p. 156.

56 Ibid., p. 155.

57 Ibid., p. 237.

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66 Ibid., p. 237 (italics mine). In the penultimate paragraph of her work (p. 339), Pitkin argues that a Wittgensteinian approach requires us to take other cultures seriously, “that we become able to see from the perspective of another.” To the extent to which this can be accomplished, it would appear that individuals would no longer be trapped, each “in his own subjectivity.” I understand Pitkin to mean that this aspiration is desirable but ultimately unattainable.

67 Ibid., p. 326.

68 Ibid., p. 208.

69 Idem.

70 Ibid., p. 321.

71 Ibid., pp. 339–40.

72 Ibid., p. 217.

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