Sublime

Far from being just an appeal to subjective sentiment, Burke’s conception of affective attachment shifts the focus to the ‘principled practice’ of mutual recognition based on human relationality upon which a prosperous market economy and a vibrant democracy depend.

People are not monads. A real, live human self is always already partial to certain, select others. Morality needs to take this essential fact about human selfhood into account rather than pretend to override it.

Philosophy, at least in Hadot’s reconstruction, thus rediscovers its original purpose: it is a discipline, or spiritual exercise, that trains your character to mesh with a set of moral principles.

As James Davison Hunter, the country’s leading scholar on character education, put it, “American culture is defined more and more by an absence, and in that absence, we provide children with no moral horizons beyond the self and its well-being.” Religious institutions, which used to do this, began to play a less prominent role in American life.

Lasch argued for a new conception of mutual obligation anchored in common culture and a sense of limits. Our first obligation is to respect natural, human and social limits.

We must begin to recover a moral language that is formed by Catholic moral doctrine rather than by liberal political theory. I am fully aware that it may be a quixotic effort. But the effort is worth the hope that we Catholics might once again be a witness to the integrity of faith, rather than participants in its demise.

As citizens, he argued, we need two essential moral “powers” or “capacities.” First, the “capacity for a conception of the good”—in other words, the ability to reflect on and pursue our own idea of how we want to live. Second, the “capacity for a sense of justice”—the ability to form our own view about how we should organize society, and to

ANDREW J. BACEVICH,

Paul Ricoeur and the Task of Political Philosophy