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eBook details
- Title: Is Love What We Need? Raimond Gaita's a Common Humanity (Book Review)
- Author : Arena Journal
- Release Date : January 01, 2000
- Genre: Religion & Spirituality,Books,Politics & Current Events,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 187 KB
Description
Readers of Quadrant will be familiar with much of this book (1) in the form of many articles published during that magazine's brief period of what used to be called 'wet toryism'. Raimond Gaita has reworked and added to this body of writing and produced a striking and reasonably coherent whole. Now that Peter Singer has left Australia for the United States and Gaita is still with us (halftime at the Catholic University while retaining his position as Reader at King's College, London), this book may help establish him as Australia's new public moral philosopher. His institutional affiliation should not lead the reader to think that this is a book of religious ethics, although, in a way, it is that; but there is a long standing debate about the interdependence of religion and morality that I will avoid here. I will simply say that anyone who believes that morality requires religion will gain comfort from this book. Gaita is not taking a position in the debate, however, and instead of the sacredness of human beings, we are proffered 'preciousness'. This is a high price to pay to avoid religious language, and Gaita is aware of how precious it may sound to speak of preciousness. It would have been better to focus directly on what seems implicit throughout--the issue of whether or not secularization, with its commitments to individualism and human rights, still makes available to us a conception of ourselves that will aid us in relation to the urgency we can hear in the words: 'We must love one another or die'. Gaita thinks that the secular heritage of the Enlightenment fails us here. Elsewhere he has avowed the conviction that mainstream academic discussion of ethics is crippled by the inheritance from the Enlightenment. Gaita is neoRomantic, while the mainstream is neo-Humean, neo-Kantian or neo-Aristotelian. As the romantics admired, even revered, Plato, so does Gaita. The strongest Platonist thread in Gaita's thought is the idea that wrongdoing (or evildoing) is, at bottom, a failure of understanding. Plato's thought here is echoed in the words 'Father forgive them, for they know not what they do.'