This paper, largely in this form, was given at the PSA Annual Conference, University of York, Easter 1995, in the Political Science Specialist Group Panel on "Judgement", and published in Contemporary Political Studies 1995, PSA UK, Belfast, volume 3.

Why should one love peace? it is so obviously vile to make war.
Loud peace propaganda makes war seem imminent.
It is a form of war, even, self assertion and being wise for other people.
Let people be wise for themselves. And anyhow
Nobody should be wise except on rare occasions, like getting married or dying.
It's bad taste to be wise all the time like being at a perpetual funeral.
For everyday day use, give me someone whimsical, with not too much purpose in life,
Then we shan't have war, and we needn't talk about peace.
D. H. Lawrence [From Peace and War]

Criticism of the prevailing order of things, has always at the very least involved disclosure of the ways in which exploitation and injustice tend to be justified. The modes of justification may vary and may indeed be so grounded in tradition and conventional thoughtways that they have a taken for granted character. But they may still be seen as more or less deliberate and conscious by critics, prophets, seers or saints, in that they rest on claims and arguments as well as being reinforced against challenge by an apparatus of inspection and control and held in place by the use of force. These claims and arguments, perhaps only partly explicit, and only articulated, perhaps with freshness and ingenuity, under challenge, constitute the leading public interpretations of the culture, politics or relations of stratification to which power holders or privileged elites turn in order to feel more comfortable with themselves or from which they may draw energy in pursuing their purposes, have in the modern period been thought of as constituting "ideology" and the task of bringing them clearly into the light of day as "critique". The history of critical theory from the Enlightenment period to the present with all its developments is such a project and is a large study in itself. But this enterprise is not confined to critical theory, nor is it the monopoly of the left, nor of the modern age, nor even of the west. In one way or another, the charge of hypocrisy, self deception, corruption, is part of the burden of all moral or political criticism of all periods. And the strain towards the emergence of new values, the struggle to convey ever deeper meanings is tied into the attempt to reveal the doom laden character of the present age, whatever that age may be.

In this sense there is a unity, or a sort of common theme that runs through all creative thought regarding the social order which is anything more than scientific. And even from within an entirely scientific cast of mind there is no less a weight of prescription borne within any "interpretation" of the world. Obviously this is so from the most conservative of viewpoints if so we want to understand, say Hegel, or the structural sociologists, or the most determinist thinkers such as some of the Marxists.

This is to suggest that we have become habituated to the view that the experience of life is generally seen as against a background of competing conceptions of the desirable, of differing ideas about how we ought to live, of what are sometimes thought of as competing ideologies, "value systems" or whatever. And to indicate that for the first time that idea has become transformed into something new. That background, for all the present day obsession with the relativity of values, that idea of genuine alternatives regarding the way in which we see life's possibilities has become something different. Lying within the horizons of modernity is the destruction of the conviction that conceptions of the desirable can be derived from anything, can be given a clear and demonstrable foundation. So much is this the case that it has come to be thought that modernity is the graveyard of belief. Certainly the modern condition, even seen in terms of the " triumph of the west " is from many perspectives thought to be a condition in which there is a deficit of meaning. But of course this does not in itself entail that moral conviction has actually declined or that we are entering a new barbarism.

For it could also be thought to be the case that under the impact of a constantly diffusing religiosity the resonances of enchantment in the present age have in fact increased at the level of general consciousness, that there has for slightly different reasons occurred a growth of tenderness and that modern people in contrast to quite recent times are more rather than less aware of the preciousness of personality and of social institutions. The moral deficit in this sense arises not from any process of coarsening, and if Elias is to be in any way relied upon the contrary is the case, nor from a flattening of sensibility arising from the ever deeper extension of democratisation, but from the accretion of new strains and difficulties coming from the growing demands of life experience both upon social institutions and individuals. In such a view, which is at least very plausible, the deficit of meaning, the sense of directionlessness, the species anxiety, has to do with new burdens new strains and tugs rather from a process of coarsening and mass superficiality. ( Baudrillard, for example, could here be taken to be pointing in quite the wrong direction.) In this sense the diagnosis of present day "pluralism" with respect to meaning has lost its way. In terms of various fashionable preoccupations, it can be thought that there has been a misestimation both of the continuing strains of modernity and the resources which it has at its disposal. It will further be argued that the attempts to find minimal solutions to the problems of modernity which step outside modernity and try to gain some independent vantage point upon it carry in themselves the possibilities of the generating the very barbarisms which they seek to ward off.

I

Since Socrates it has been clear that learning the meaning of the social observances which we may make involves developments within the self awareness of the person. Part of the Socratic challenge is to call into question ritualism in itself as the route to moral development or the means of reaching what it is we seek to achieve through piety. Such a questioning, as was fatally demonstrated, is to court impiety. But only through the process of dialectical questioning can piety be given life and thus mere prescription take on true meaning. Thus although we may all have fairly clear ideas about what would amount to being an admirable person, say, the good is not something which can be clearly prescribed. From this point of view moral growth as development is not a matter of following models even though it may be really important to have exemplars and ideals according to which it is possible to offer ourselves some kind of a standard to look up to, these models or exemplary cases may be shown in various ways, through dialectical questioning, to be inadequate, not only in terms of consistency but also because they do not in some way meet intuitions. To put this within a different emphasis. It may well be thought an easy matter to set out a series of desiderata upon which people might easily agree, within the limits of rational prudence and practical possibility regarding the ways in which we should live, derived from some standards which are fairly empty in terms of detailed content, which do not clash strongly with what rational and dispassionate individuals might be expected to believe in. Presently attention is constantly drawn to such standards in terms of acceptable levels of welfare, social efficiency, access to primary goods, reduction of exploitation with respect to class, gender, between nations and so forth. Further, the argument has gone a long way in trying to specify various assemblages of human rights and in signalling their violations. Again, attempts have been made to set out various notions of need wherein it is possible to specify, no doubt at a fairly high level of generality, more or less demonstrable shortcomings in the way we live. But all of this is more or less de-historicised and culturally transcendent. It does not seek to demonstrate what persons ought to feel. The sense of ought has to be weakened to the extent that it should not engage with sentiment if the search for justice without foundations is to be achieved. And yet it is by sentiment that the whole apparatus of morality is perhaps sustained,

II

From another point of view the natural attitude has deeply encroached upon the human sciences themselves, upon that is to say the speculative and interpretive social sciences as well as those behavioural sciences which always strive towards the natural attitude and for which positivism is central and foundational. And of course the natural attitude is never far away in any of the social sciences and still remains an aspiration for anyone who has been insufficiently hesitant in forgetting its founders. Indeed the aspiration to science within the speculative psychological and historical sciences, most notably Marxism and psychoanalysis, so frequently taken by positivists to have ended in failure and therefore to be the source of the entrapping and misleading character, in a way the ideological character, of those systems, was very largely and notoriously problematic not because of their aspiration to science but rather because they took science to be little more than an elaboration of the natural attitude. It is significant in this respect that Marxism lent itself immediately to Spinozism and became so in quite self-conscious ways with its degeneration into Diamat. Freud himself claimed that he so presupposed Spinoza as part of the intellectual atmosphere of his work that he found it an obvious and taken for granted fact that there was no need to elaborate upon the matter. At root both psychoanalysis and Marxism for all their emphases upon the civilising process and their deep stress upon individual emancipation, their deep humanism, rested their case upon the natural groundedness of human struggles for emancipation. An important link between Marx and Freud in this way reposes in the thought that human development arises with the struggle with or against nature which are inscribed in human nature. And in both tendencies a refusal towards presciptivism and idealism lies in this. Neither Freud nor Marx seem to doubt that once the path has been charted, it can so to speak be followed, that humanity may only advance through the encounter with necessity and that it is necessity which will form and transform individuals/classes into the agents of their self-emancipation. ( Or tragically, they will fail in the attempt) This is not to enter into the elaboration of the theory of practice but rather to say that development is seen in the main as a negative matter even allowing for the Hegelian debts of Marx and the Enlightenment core of both Freud and Marx.

What else might emancipation consist in than a purgation and attendant growth, than a struggle of consciousness against its entrapment and the self creation of individuals such that they ascend to levels of consciousness wherein they may review the pathway that they have taken and discern the contours of their new freedom and power? What other objectives could be worthwhile if confronted by such albeit as yet unknown vistas? Must not even failure or defeat be superior to not entering this struggle and therefore not to have sensed the reality of human possibility? Both Marx and Freud were of course cautionary and conservative and at any point more than likely to turn against any hint of triumphalism. In the war between classes no battle should be entered lightly, in the pursuit of common unhappiness not only could there be no final victory but nor should there be any ambitious quest for the source of pains which have no pressing currency. But even though mere ardour for emancipation should never dull the realistic sense of what might be achievable, for both Marx and Freud nothing can be more worthwhile nor more true to life than the search for the new world of self and society. The telos is discernible not simply within the meaning of human action but also as an externally inscribed aim which can be discerned through a natural enquiry. A view is being taken of "human nature" disavowals of any glibness notwithstanding, which may not take any strength from the question of why it is important to treat people as though they were human beings. The problem here is that any attempt to set out some kind of definition of the human, as in a theory of rights for example, some evocation of the moral law or whatever, fails once it is called for. And indeed any attempt to specify such a theory as a way of setting or prescribing limits to emancipatory striving feeds into the striving. Either normal people, including as Husserl put it the normal Chinese, know what is at stake in treating people as though they were human beings or they don't know. And this is revealed in the fact that within many cultures there is a necessity for exclusions. In the Aristotelian ethics the criterion of rationality, i.e. the capacity to govern ones self, does not extend the capacity to make moral judgements to the whole of humanity, and that thought has had a notorious history. But put more straightforwardly it is another way of saying that when we encounter an individual within our own culture who seems to be incapable of seeing the point of a standard which we share we may well initially be at a loss to know what to say to them. It is as though they were not fully within the human world, had not properly come of age or were through some extraordinary quality outside of the reach of normal human motivation, or asked more of themselves than may reasonably be asked of a person. And this general idea is intelligible regardless of the norms in question. It is so to speak a generalisable idea that we may be shocked or startled in the same kind of way at moral autism regardless of the stakes involved or the actual character of the social norms concerned. What makes a question into a moral question is, so to speak, always the same the world over even though the prescriptions or proscriptions at play may be radically different from one cultural system to another. The question of "understanding" other societies "primitive" or not, is a categorically different question from the matter of grasping whether another person borne within that culture is a good or admirable person or not. So that although it may be a matter of the greatest difficulty to divine how we should comport ourselves in accordance with rules that we do not understand or have not internalised or in the light of principles which have no place in our world we are quite able to see whether or not another person is exhibiting humanness. And this does not involve us in the idea that the human is a natural category. Indeed it means something rather the opposite. For although the fact that we can grasp the human qualities of another person in a rather unmediated way , unmediated that is to say through the detailed social forms which we hold in common, we come the better to understand the forms which render their conduct casually intelligible through our grasp of, trust in, perhaps love for, that person. What makes another person more fully human is the way in which they themselves live within the social forms of their own lives. It is their comportment which tells us what the social rules mean, as much as it is through understanding the social rules that their comportment is rendered intelligible. Any grown up inquiry regarding the ways in which other cultures subsist is in fact always a dialectical one. And we become more human by moving from particular instances to a broader insight. Perhaps this is why so many people speak of the deepening familiarisation with any form of life in terms of its being like learning a language. We learn how to live not by internalising rules but gaining some mastery of activities and thereby learning to do things our own way. Indeed one could go so far as to say that knowledge technically transmitted, what Oakeshott for example wishes to remove from the realm of the practical, is inherently dehumanising to the degree that it cannot be made truly ones own. The fact that there is something wrong with the ever reiterated idea that individuals are empowered by acquiring "skills" has to do with a reluctance to make the point that to be skilful is not a matter of trying to act such that explicable and consciously acquired techniques are deliberately and transparently applied - it is to have freedom of action. And to act humanly is act non-mechanically.

III

The notion of responsibility could be thought of as a scalar idea, as something which arises not from solitude, in the sense that humanity is constrained to create values for itself according to a resort to some form of naturalism, from an inspection of external endowments, but rather as something which grows coevally with the growth of understanding and the capacity for action. In that view, which seems to be taken by Hegel, to be responsible is to assume the mantle of obligation arising from higher levels of consciousness and technical mastery. It is something which flows from the development of the spirit as it gains greater actuality and definiteness through its progress in the world. The adult in this way has, as we see, more responsibility than the child, and this is recognised by all of us in the apportionment of responsibility to the superior and our reluctance to vest responsibility in others, at least from the point of view of censure, simply on the grounds of their innocent good conscience. But in what is being here suggested, growth and development in the individual arises from the dual process whereby in acknowledgement of finitude and limitation, in the recognition indeed of the impossibility of gaining command over the world through the heavy imposition of will, the individual may assume greater capacity to influence the world by thought, by feeling and by action.

IV

It is the inner significance which we attach to our being in the world which transforms the character of our being in the world. This "intentionality" as process, rather than as retrospective imputation, is the link between freedom and responsibility, carries with it the fact that responsibility itself is a matter of process and not something that can be carried within the age old controversies regarding the seniority of either motivation or outcome. In the same way that reason itself should be looked upon as a task rather than an attribute, so that both Kant and Hegel for all the greatness of their insight into the progress of enlightenment, lack the urgency which their moral discoveries should have revealed - unlike interestingly Leibniz who has so often and so cruelly been taken as the paradigm of moral complacency - so responsibility is something which can be thought from an active point of view as a disposition to be assumed rather than a condition to be ascribed. There is, as is well known, a good deal of light thrown on this question by the pioneers of depth psychology in the earlier part of this century within their therapeutic practice. In different ways Freud and Adler stressed the vital functions from the point of view of the mental health of the sufferer of their grasping the underlying responsibility that they might have for their condition and stressed that the contours of the neurotic formation were of their own construction and further for Adler that taking responsibility for collective well being or for the well being of others might release them from the carapace of their inferiority feelings. In fact this difference of emphasis between Freud and Adler draws out quite clearly the ways in which the teacher remained emphatically a liberal while the pupil reached towards socialism. Variations on this theme lie at the root of a good deal of existentialist thought. And again to return to the idea of critique, in the philosophy of practice generally and within humanistic Marxism in particular the idea of self emancipation through political commitment is characteristic. Some strands of feminist enquiry have drawn upon and in various ways developed these classical discourses. Typically, twentieth century modes of addressing the question of responsibility, seen in the light suggested, have tended towards the idea of what has come to called "consciousness raising" rather than acceptance and submission to the moral law, admission to the ethical life of a society, or recognition of the logic of historical necessity. The growth of the individualistic emphasis, associated with either the trials of modernisation or the struggle to deepen religious meanings does not necessarily involve a curtailment of the provenance of the self. It does not require a shrinking of the terrain on which the individual may have the freedom or the obligation to act, nor a narrowing of the domain in which the theme of responsibility may have relevance. Although very often such a narrowing, such a self restriction has been construed as the paradigm of liberalism and democracy as if in some kind of return to the earliest moments of the liberal and secular movement from community, the self as solitary captain of the separate soul.

V

In the context of art and expression, Kandinski once remarked," Don't look for the limits, the limits are there". It is clearly the case that the human condition is mercifully marked by individual finitude. That to be human is not to be able to do everything or to be everything. Or at least not all at the same time so to speak. But this does not entail that we can ever say, "Here are the limits of my responsibility and beyond this there is nothing in the world which may touch me." For to be touched by something is also to be able to touch it. Which is not the same as being able to dominate or determine it. So that within the idea of responsibility viewed as process there may be no limit which we are able to prescribe to ourselves at which we can say that at this point, beyond this specific boundary there can be no possibility that I may have an effect. Nor is this any claim, contrariwise, that individual capacities are infinite, a claim to infantile or ritualistic omnipotence. Neither powerlessness nor omnipotence constitute limits. Nor yet does the assumption of responsibility postulate the achievement of absolutes, for no other reason than that the sense of limitation is a pre-condition of striving within a rightful sense of responsibility. Such an idea as this is contained in Kant's remark that every human being is of inestimable value and that therefore we must be governed by the moral law while at the same time realising that we may not achieve the good in any absolute way, in the sense of reaching an absolute limit. But we may however, in Kant's own word approach the good "asymptotically", moving ever closer to it so to speak.

The idea that there may be no determinate limits regarding the boundaries to which responsibility may be assumed is an idea that from at least one point of view speaks of madness. Certainly the belief in the capacity to influence all and everything is, precisely, madness. Or at least in a variety of forms. And indeed the passage from assumed although probably unwitting covert omnipotence to the sense of genuine power, unmitigated by the growth of responsibility, is the foundation of unstable and manic conditions the morphology of which is rather well understood. Covert power in the form of ritualistic possessiveness of the secrets of the universe, so to speak, or in the form of ideologically sustained domination detached from its habitual object may be released in the form of great energy which now has no object and may spend itself in unsustainable projects, cyclically collapsing back into exhaustion and depression. The introduction of the mediating term, responsibility, opens spaces for reflection and learning which can however be prerequisite to transformations in the inclination of the self and its intentionalities reshape its active engagement with the world. The assumption of responsibility involves at the very least a stocktaking and an appraisal of the ways in which the power of the person has in general, and where the matter has urgency, in detail, been directed and employed.