Gentleness as a political virtue

How to get out of our heads: gentleness as a political virtue


To epieikes hymôn gnôsthêtô pasin anthrôpois—Philippians 4.5

"The direction of attention goes against the grain. It is away from
the fat relentless ego and its preoccupations, out to the world beyond
us, and the ability so to direct attention is love." –Iris Murdoch,
The Sovereignty of Good


Abstract
This paper is a meditation on two different encounters with Jews from
which, I think, political philosophy and ethics have something to
learn: one is Hitler's, in Mein Kampf; the other is Patrick Leigh
Fermor's, in his Between the Woods and the Water. Hitler's encounter
with Jews famously led him to a rabid hatred; Leigh Fermor's quickly
leads him to something close to friendship. How so? I argue that the
differences lie in the detail of the two encounters. While it is all
very well to use Big Words like "love", or in a different vocabulary
"the politics of recognition", there is much to be learned from the
particularities of these encounters that could not possibly be learned
from the Big Words alone. It is unfortunate, therefore, that most
ethicists and political thinkers do not move from the level of the
generalities to that of the particularities.




That habitual non-church-goer Benjamin Jowett must occasionally have seen
the inside of a church. One such occasion evidently left him in rather
taciturn. Jowett was asked what the sermon had been about? "Sin." "And
what," persisted his questioner, "did the preacher have to say about sin?"
"He was against it."

Proposing to speak in favour of gentleness may give the impression of being
equally banal; almost as banal as being against sin or in favour of
niceness. I hope to dispel that impression. Attention to detail, and
avoidance of broad banalities, will in fact be a bit of a theme in this
paper. Another theme—a theme most famously enunciated in recent philosophy
by Bernard Williams; it is one that I keep pursuing in different ways—is
that there are more things for ethical thought to be than moral theory.
This paper supports that claim by example.


To begin with, then, notice the wording of my title. Something is a
political virtue when it is an excellent disposition of character that we
display in our dealings with each other in our polis, our community or
society. All political virtues are subject to an important problem: they
are needed for our life together, but they cannot be compelled by law. In
this sense politics is constitutively dependent on ethics, and our life
together upon the free choices that each of us makes, and cannot be made to
make.

In saying that gentleness is a political virtue I am saying something more
specific than just that it is a virtue in the general, ethical, sense
(though I think it is an ethical virtue too). And in saying that gentleness
is a virtue, I am, anyway, already saying something much more specific than
that gentleness is nice. Something is a virtue when it is an excellent
disposition of character relating to the will, and lying in a mean between
two extremes (softness and violence for gentleness, presumably).

There are interesting questions here about what it takes for a virtue to
"relate to the will": we want to say that temperance is a virtue because it
does relate to the will, but charm (probably) and good looks (certainly)
aren't because they don't, but exactly what notion of "relation to the
will" will deliver just these results is not entirely clear. Nor is it
clear, in fact, how the will and its dispositions are supposed to relate in
general. I mention two puzzles among quite a number that I could mention.

First puzzle: A disposition is supposed to be something that both
conditions the will, i.e. our choices, and is also conditioned by them.
Having a virtue is something that you need to choose—in some way, at some
level, you become temperate by deciding to be temperate. Yet having a
virtue also means that, whenever you choose, you already see your choices
in the virtuous way, the temperate way or the just way or whatever it is
(so, perhaps, the temperate man sees the option of a fourth glass of port
under the description overdoing it, not under the description going with
the flow of the moment). Clearly there is a chicken and egg problem here.
Aristotle's response to it was (forgive the switch of metaphors) solvitur
ambulando: he thinks that just actions move you towards justice, and
justice moves you towards just actions—a virtuous circle is possible, and
so too is a vicious one.

Second puzzle: I say that virtues are dispositions related to the will, but
we might wonder how much that means the virtues will show up in a virtuous
person's deliberation (or indeed in the justification of his actions). Do
we normally, when deliberating, cast about asking ourselves "Now what would
be the virtuous thing to do here?" (or the temperate thing, or the just, or
the gentle)? At any rate I don't deliberate like this, not in general
(though I might sometimes; e.g. perhaps on Valentine's Day I do ask myself
"Now what would be the loving thing to do here?"). What is much more common
than deliberation explicitly "through" the virtues is, interestingly
enough, deliberation through the vices: in prospect I say to myself "I
mustn't do that, it would be cowardly", or in retrospect I say "He was
wrong to do that, it was cruel". But such deliberation only rules out
certain possibilities; it does not (or not usually) determine us to any
unique course of action. How such determination happens, in virtuous agents
or others, is therefore not decided by looking only at what explicitly
occurs in conscious deliberation. What else is needed to decide it is, in
the current state of research on the virtues, an open, large, and
exceedingly interesting question.


But it is not my purpose to settle these puzzles here, though it will be
useful to bear them in mind as we turn to what I do want to talk
about—which, as advertised, is gentleness as a political virtue.

Consider the following two passages. I apologise for their length, but this
is necessary to bring out what I want to bring out.

(I)

"Once when I was walking through the inner city I suddenly came across a
being in a long caftan with black side-locks. My first thought was: Is that
a Jew? In Linz they did not look like that. I watched the man stealthily
and cautiously, but the longer I stared at the strange countenance and
studied it feature by feature the more the question in a different form
turned in my brain: is that a German?
...I could not well continue to doubt that here it was a matter not of
Germans of another religion, but of a separate nation; for as soon as I
began to study the question and take notice of the Jews, Vienna appeared to
me in a different light. Now, wherever I went, I saw Jews, and the more
strikingly and obviously were they different from other people...
Judaism suffered a heavy set-back in my eyes when I got to know of its
activities in the Press, in art, literature, and the drama... It was
pestilence, spiritual pestilence, worse than the Black Death, with which
our nation was being inoculated...
The more I contended with them the more I learned to know their dialectical
methods... Wherever one attacked such apostles, one's hand met foul slime.
If one smote one of them so crushingly that, with the bystanders looking
on, he had no course but to agree, and if one thought one had gained at
least one step, he merely showed great astonishment the next day. The Jew
entirely forgot what had been said the day before and repeated his shameful
old story as if nothing had happened... I was often left staring. One did
not know which to admire most, their glibness or their artfulness in lying.
I gradually began to hate them..."


(II)

"Here [in a log cabin in a forest], most incongruously seated at a table, a
bearded man in a black suit and a black beaver hat turned up all around was
poring over a large and well-thumbed book, his spectacles close to the
print. In a few years' time he would look exactly like one of the Elders in
the Temple by Holman Hunt and this is exactly what he was. Two sons about
my age, also dressed in black, were on either side of him, equally rapt.
They too were marked for religion: you could tell by their elf-locks and
the unshorn down which fogged their waxy cheeks... the man in the check
shirt [the foreman] was the Rabbi's younger brother and his cast of feature
might have been the work of a hostile cartoonist...
When the foreman led me to the group at the table, they looked up
apprehensively; almost with alarm. I was given a chair; but we were all
overcome with diffidence. "Was sind Sie von Beruf?" The foreman, anything
but shy, looked at me in frank puzzlement. "Sind Sie Kaufmann?" Was I a
pedlar? I felt slightly put out by the question... my interlocutors looked
bewildered when I tried to explain my reasons for not staying at home. Why
was I travelling?... I wasn't quite clear myself... When I found [the
words]'for fun' it didn't sound right and their brows were still puckered.
'Also Sie treiben so herum aus Vergnügen?' The foreman shrugged his
shoulders and smiled and said something in Yiddish to the others; they all
laughed and I asked what it was. 'Es ist a goyim naches!' they said. 'A
goyim naches', they explained, is something that the goyim like but which
leaves Jews unmoved; any irrational or outlandish craze, a gentile's
relish... it seemed to hit the nail on the head.
The initial reserve of the other dwellers in these mountains [the
Carpathians] had not lasted long; nor did it here; but the Jews had other
grounds for wariness. Their centuries of persecution were not ended; there
had been trials for ritual murder late in the last century in Hungary and
more recently in the Ukraine, and fierce deeds in Rumania and pogroms in
Bessarabia and throughout the Russian Pale. Slanderous myths abounded... in
Germany, meanwhile, terrible omens were gathering, though how terrible none
of us knew. They came into the conversation and– it seems utterly
incredible now– we talked of Hitler and the Nazis as though they merely
represented a... sort of transitory aberration, a nightmare that might
suddenly vanish. Sighs and fatalistic humour spaced out the conversation.
Everything took a different turn when scripture cropped up. The book in
front of the Rabbi was the Torah, or part of it, printed in dense Hebrew
black-letter that was irresistible to someone with a passion for alphabets;
especially these particular letters, with their aura of magic. Laboriously
I could phonetically decipher the sounds of some of the simpler words,
without a glimmer of their meanings, of course, and this sign of interest
gave pleasure. How did the Song of Miriam sound in the original, and the
Song of Deborah; David's lament for Absalom; and the rose of Sharon and the
lily of the valley? The moment it became clear, through my clumsy
translations into German, which passage I was trying to convey, the Rabbi
at once began to recite, often accompanied by his sons. Our eyes were
alight; it was like a marvellous game. Next came the rivers of Babylon, and
the harps hanging on the willows: this they uttered in unfaltering unison,
and when they came to 'If I forget thee, O Jerusalem', the moment was
extremely solemn... By this time the unworldly Rabbi and his sons and I
were excited. Enthusiasm ran high. These passages, so famous in England,
were doubly charged with meaning for them, and their emotion was
infectious. They seemed astonished– touched, too– that their tribal poetry
enjoyed such glory and affection in the outside world; utterly cut off, I
think they had no inkling of this. A feeling of great warmth and delight
had sprung up and the Rabbi kept polishing his glasses, not for use, but
out of enjoyment and nervous energy... I was brimming with excitement. I
had never thought I could get on such friendly terms with such unassailable-
looking men. The last time [I had seen Orthodox Jews] they had looked
utterly separate and remote and unapproachable; I could as well have asked
a Trappist abbess for a light."


(I) is fairly famous, or infamous: it comes from Chapter One of Mein Kampf.
Hitler is referring to his first encounters with Viennese Jews, five or so
years before the outbreak of the First World War; Hitler would have been
about twenty or twenty-one at the time.(II) is perhaps less famous, but if
so then undeservedly: it is from Patrick Leigh Fermor's Between the Woods
and the Water, an account published in 1986 of a journey that he made, as a
nineteen year old, through Hungary and Rumania in 1934.[1]

The differences between the two writers are, to put it mildly, obvious.
Fermor's book is a delightful mix of whimsy, sharp observation, history,
philology, and racy or even sexy anecdote; Mein Kampf, on the other hand,
is virtually unreadable. This is not so much because of its poisonous
dogma– at least not directly– as because of its boringness. Quite apart
from his prejudices, the repetitiousness and monotony and smallness of its
author's mind recalls nothing so much as the malodorous piffle of The Drunk
Who Might Turn Nasty, or of the kind of tramp you would pay to sit well
away from you on the bus. (The latter comparison fits: in Vienna in 1910
Hitler was a tramp.)

"At least not directly": in fact there is, as we shall see, a deep
connection between Fermor's variegatedness of matter and his humanity, and
between the monotony of Hitler's few and recurring obsessions and his
inhumanity. But let's begin with a different point, that the two passages
serve as an object lesson about the things that divide and the things that
unite human beings.

It is evident, after all, that both Fermor and Hitler initially find the
Jews whom they meet off-puttingly "alien and rebarbative"– these are
Fermor's words, not Hitler's. "The longer I stared at the strange
countenance... the more the question turned in my brain: is that a German?"
(Hitler); "I had never thought I could get on such friendly terms with such
unassailable-looking men" (Fermor). Both find the Jews' appearance strange
and rather unattractive: Fermor confesses elsewhere in his book to a
scandalous desire to shear off the seminarians' unfetching side-locks, and
Hitler's phrase "a being in a long caftan with black side-locks" seems
meant to do the work of pages of black propaganda. (Compare an unforgivable
turn of phrase that Evelyn Waugh manages somewhere: "On the station
platform were three men, two women, a dog, and a Jew".) Even the foreman's
"cast of feature"– remarks Fermor– "might have been the work of a hostile
cartoonist": if there was a cruel caricature extant of what European Jews
looked like in 1934 then, he hints, it was not based purely on thin air.

Moreover the feeling of reserve is evidently mutual in both cases. When he
first appears Fermor's Jews are apprehensive, alarmed, wary; given the
historical context, with good reason. (And consider how alien a blond Anglo-
Irish nineteen year old would look to a Rumanian Orthodox Rabbi.) Hitler
feels obliged to watch the Jew whom he sees "stealthily and cautiously",
presumably because that Jew does not or would not welcome his observations;
given who Hitler is or was to become, with even better reason. In both
cases there is a difficulty on at least one side about how to classify the
other side: "Is that a German?", "Was sind Sie von Beruf?"; in both
accounts we see everywhere the signs of uncomprehending suspicion, and of
that familiar irrational testiness about small and irrelevant features of
another's appearance that can so easily curdle into active dislike.

It is not then the initial impressions that make the difference between
Hitler's encounter and Fermor's. In both cases, these are unfavourable on
both sides. Rather, what makes the difference is what happens next.

What happens next in Hitler's case is, importantly, all in Hitler's own
head. It is that Hitler decides that the Jews of Vienna are so different
from those around them that it follows that they are not German. Hitler
determines within himself that their strangeness is what counts, and that
this strangeness is threatening, a strangeness against which he must strike
back—apparently out of fear for his own safety. This is one root of his
anti-Semitism; another is perhaps the following line of thought. Hitler
perceives Vienna as a place that is hostile to him personally, and infers
that Vienna is bad (notice the gross egocentricity of this move). Since
Vienna is bad, so is everything that distinguishes Vienna from Linz:
namely, leftishness, cosmopolitanism, and Jewishness. Indeed, he concludes,
these things are not only all bad; they are all aspects of one and the same
phenomenon. (As a small-town boy from backward Linz, it does not occur to
Hitler that the leftishness and cosmopolitanism that confront him for the
first time in Vienna do not have to be connected with the Jewishness that
also confronts him for the first time in Vienna.) From here on Hitler's
attitude to the Jews is one of violence, of hostile confrontation, of
hatred, of "contending" with the Jews and if possible "smiting them
crushingly": in pre-war Vienna, of course, only by beer-cellar rhetoric,
but at a later stage (alas) by more literal and more permanently effective
means.

Even inside his own head, incidentally, Hitler did not have to make the
first inference above, from different to not German. There are times when
the other most famous German nationalist, Hegel, rises above the obvious
differences between the three nations and writes as if being English and
being French were both ways of being German. (For example, Hegel writes
that "Only the Germanic nations in Christianity have come to the
consciousness that the human being as human is free"[2]. Hegel was hardly
unaware that his French and English contemporaries enjoyed greater
political liberties than the German-speaking peoples; so he can't have
meant only German-speaking nations when he used the term 'Germanic'.)
Without diverging at all from his German nationalism, Hitler might have
taken some similar attitude. He might, for instance, have taken it that the
Viennese Jews were the strangest part of the German nation, and as such to
be celebrated not only for their strangeness, but also for their
Germanness. But, for reasons that made little or no sense outside his own
head, he did not.

Contrast what happens next, after the initial repulsion, in Fermor's case.
What happens is not at all in Fermor's own head. Rather it is a gentle
joke, made by the foreman at Fermor's expense: "Es ist a goyim naches!". A
first barrier to communication is removed by the fact that the Jews find a
pigeonhole for what Fermor is doing there– one which is not threatening to
them personally, and which can be referred to jokingly; and another is
removed by Fermor's willingness to laugh at himself ("it seemed to hit the
nail on the head"), and his willingness to show that he not only sees their
joke, but sees that he is as strange in the Jews' eyes as they are in his.

This gets the encounter to the level of casual political small talk. How
does it get from that to the level of a passionate exchange of enthusiasms,
where it ends? On Fermor's side the transition is made possible by open
eyes, wide reading, and a gentle spirit of curiosity ("The book was...
printed in dense Hebrew black-letter that was irresistible to someone with
a passion for alphabets"); on the Jews' side it is made possible by their
pleasure in a sign of interest from an outsider, by a humility that
(despite their inbred suspicion and rejection of the gentile world) enables
them to bend to communicate their enthusiasm for their holy book even to a
goy: "They seemed astonished– touched, too– that their tribal poetry
enjoyed such glory and affection in the outside world.... A feeling of
great warmth and delight had sprung up..."

"We murder to dissect"; I mustn't do any more to spoil Fermor's fine
description of this encounter by too much close analysis. But I do want to
draw some morals from the comparison between this encounter and Hitler's.

The main moral is this. To put it flippantly, everybody knows that the
imperatives of political and social ethics, what is necessary if we are to
live together in a community, depends on our getting out of our heads, and
that this is to be done by recognising that other persons are persons too;
the only problem is, how this recognition is to be achieved. Here first-
order moralists can often be unhelpful. It is all too easy for philosophers
to talk in a loftily abstract way about "acknowledging the humanity of
others" (if they are Kantians), or "the virtues of friendship and charity"
(if they are Thomists), or "the politics of recognition" (if they are neo-
Hegelians), or "human values and human rights" (if they are standard-issue
liberals). My point is that if such grandiose pieties are to refer to, or
have a basis in, anything that is actually experienced, then what they
ought to refer back to is the kind of encounter that Fermor describes.
Acknowledging the humanity of others: 'recognising' them in Hegel's sense:
buying into human values: charity and friendship as virtues: if these
phrases have any meaning at all, then what they have to mean is taking
others seriously, being gently interested and inquisitive in one's approach
to them rather than aggressively and dismissively hostile; in brief, being
open to them, in the way that Fermor and the Jews he meets are open to each
other, and as Hitler and the Jews that he meets are not.

In this area, as so often in ethics, it is perhaps more use to have to hand
some paradigm cases of what we are trying to talk about, than to fish
around for formal definitions. This use of paradigm cases is one of the
reasons why philosophical ethics as a discipline might do better to
familiarise itself, not so much with the latest methods in mathematics and
logic, as with the stock of stories to be found in our literature, and
indeed in our history (surely there is an underused resource): logic and
metaphysics may well be sciences, but ethics is undoubtedly a branch of
humanity.

What I am suggesting is that Fermor's encounter with the Jews is a paradigm
case of recognition, and that Hitler's encounter is a paradigm case of non-
recognition. The suggestion has to be taken with a fairly light hand: it
would of course be ludicrous to suggest that there was anything perfect
about either paradigm. But that obvious point should not be allowed to
obscure the importance of the fact that the paradigms in question are at
least actual. (Perhaps their imperfection is the price of their actuality–
"The good will in the world realises itself by and in imperfect
instruments": Bradley, Ethical Studies p.183.) Nor should we let it obscure
the practical usefulness of such paradigms as input to our moral
imaginations.

This lays the basis for the following argument:

(1) if it is cases like Fermor's encounter with the Jews that we take,
as we should, as paradigms of the recognition and acknowledgement of
others' humanity;
AND
(2) if we take such instances of recognition, as we also should, as
together constituting an achievement of central political and ethical
importance;
THEN
(3) the personal characteristics that are necessary and/ or sufficient
for such instances to occur must be virtues of central political and
ethical importance;
AND
(4) the personal characteristics that are necessary and/ or
sufficient to prevent such instances from occurring must be vices of
central political and ethical importance.

What then are the virtues in question, and what are the vices? My thesis is
that these virtues are just the attributes that someone like Fermor has and
that someone like Hitler lacks. The surprise is what the attributes in
question are. The virtues are things such as Hitler lacked like– obviously–
an ability to get beyond gross egocentricity, to see that what seems
strange or hostile to me is not necessarily strange or hostile per se, even
to me. Then there are less obvious things like a willingness to laugh at
oneself, or indeed at anything apposite– a sense of humour. Also rather
surprisingly, self-confidence and a lack of introversion turn out to be
crucially relevant; so do things like the "open eyes, wide reading, and
curiosity" that I mentioned above. There is delight and pleasure when
others share one's own interests; diversity and particularity of
learnedness; a humility and generosity that bends to communicate an
enthusiasm; the ability to have more than one serious enthusiasm or passion
in the first place.

The words "humanity" and "culture" cover all of this, of course, as does
the phrase with which I have titled this essay, "gentleness as a political
virtue"; as also does that much-mentioned brilliance, Love. One way to
summarise what I am saying would be to say that there certain kinds of
knowledge of each other that are impossible without love; an Augustinian
thought, perhaps. But beyond a certina point we need to resist the
generalities. To cover can be to conceal the precise shape of: words like
"humanity" and "love" do not give us the detail– and the whole point at
present is that the devil is in the detail, that the difference between
woolly clichés about these indispensable ideals and something better about
them can only lie in greater specificity. If we truly want to get out of
our heads (and into other people's) then what we need is not so much Love
with a capital L– though doubtless that idea is in the background– as the
much more specific attributes just mentioned: and, of course, other
attributes that share this specificity[3].
Is it surprising that such character-traits should take their place among
the central virtues? Is it a conclusion that the ethicist can only reach by
a convoluted route through the intricacies of contemporary moral theory,
perhaps involving the invocation of 'agent-centred prerogatives' or some
such machinery? Perhaps it must be such to a Kantian, or to anyone closely
tied to the tradition of systematic moral theory of whatever form,
deontological or consequentialist or neither. But it is less surprising
when one recalls that Aristotle accounted affability among the virtues. Or
Susan Wolf's remark, in "Moral Saints", that it would be a serious loss (a
loss of value) if the world contained no one who can make great paté de
canard en croute. Or Iris Murdoch's remark, in The Sovereignty of Good,
that there can be something of crucial value (ethical value) even about a
humble gardener's pleasure in a potted plant;[4] or Bradley's argument, in
"My Station and its Duties", that the universal ethical substance is
particularised by the specific customs of a society's time and place, by
the specificity and individuality of each person in that society, and by
the specificity and individuality of each relationship of recognition that
occurs in it.

"The individual recognises the substance not only as his universal
outward existence, but he recognises also himself in it,
particularised in his own individuality and in that of each of his
fellow citizens... In all I contemplate independent beings, that are
such, and are for themselves, only in the very same way that I am for
myself; in them I see existing free unity of self with others, and
existing by virtue of me and by virtue of the others alike. Them as
myself, myself as them."
(Bradley, Ethical Studies p.186)

If there is a fault with what Bradley says here it is only, it seems to me,
a moderate dose of the family-failings of philosophical moralists, self-
consciousness, over-generality and abstraction.

To take self-consciousness first, it will of course be objected to what I
say here that it detracts from the goodness of an encounter like Fermor's
to be self-conscious about it. That is undoubtedly true (and it is why,
above, I quoted Wordsworth's "We murder to dissect"); on the other hand,
virtue has to start somewhere. Thanks to the misdirected ingenuity and the
misplaced piety of far too many generations of Victorian-minded moralists,
we are so used now to the idea that Morality is an uncomfortably holy
annexe to 'real life' that there is bound to be some unnaturalness for us
in the present thesis that characteristics like having wide interests and
enthusiasms are crucial moral virtues. All the same, it is better to have
(in Bernard Williams's phrase) a 'reflexively deformed' virtue than not to
have the virtue at all. Familiarly enough, what starts off as contrived,
voulu or vitiatingly self-conscious can become second nature through
practice. This is as true in the ethical life (that is to say, in life) as
it is in the practice of an art or in learning to drive a car.

I turn to over-generality and abstraction. Bradley gives us principles; but
Hitler too was a man of principles. To get at what Bradley is getting at,
we need more than he actually gives us here: we need cases, examples,
paradigms of what he is getting at. The reader who comes away from "My
Station and Its Duties" with a comprehending sympathy for Bradley's
position will almost certainly be the reader who has supplied such examples
for herself while reading Bradley. Bradley is hard to read just in
proportion as he fails to supply such examples; Hegel– by an unfortunate
irony, given his own stress on actualisation and concretisation– is
worse.[5]

The devil, to say it again, is in the detail; it is the detail that
discriminates the depiction of the principled man or woman of virtue from
that of the equally principled monomaniac and monster. (Remember how easily
Hegel's or Rousseau's political thought becomes sinister in the hands of
Popper or Berlin; or the 'idealism' of 1984; or Eichmann's professed
allegiance to the categorical imperative.) This is why it is detail that I
have been trying to give here. In the course of giving that detail, we may
have discovered that enthusiasm for detail is itself a virtue: along with
learning, curiosity, and what gets called 'culture' or 'human values' when
people are not attending sufficiently to detail.

Which seems like a tidy place to stop. Though as a melancholy postscript,
thrown in at no extra cost, one might perhaps wonder what happened to the
Jews that Patrick Leigh Fermor met in 1934, after Adolf Hitler's troops
occupied Rumania in 1940-41.[6]



-----------------------
[1] Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (London: The Paternoster Library, Number 2,
1933), pp.30 ff.; Patrick Leigh Fermor, Between the Woods and the Water
(London: Penguin, 1986), pp.196 ff. The Paternoster's flyleaf is
irresistible: "This new... series is designed to appeal to the
discriminating general reader who wishes to secure a steady supply of
interesting, informative and entertaining books...In choosing titles for
this library the publishers wish to cater for the most varied taste, but...
they intend to ensure that only books of real merit are selected." One
wonders what The Paternoster Library's Number 1 was, and whether it failed
to fit the Library's own criteria as spectacularly as Mein Kampf.

[2] Hegel, Die Vernunft in der Geschichte 62-63, quoted in Allen Wood,
Hegel's Ethical Thought p.25.

[3] Of course, a good person with the sort of attributes I mean might still
fail to make precisely the kind of contact that Fermor does because, for
instance, they have no interest in and know nothing about alphabets. Quite
true, but not an objection to the idea that it is an important virtue to
have interests of that kind: the person who lacked the sort of virtue that
I have in mind would lack not only that interest but (pretty well) all
interests of that kind. (So far as I know, Hitler's only interest of this
sort was a preoccupation with the precise operational specifications of
military hardware, a hobby which did not exactly get him away from his day
job.)

[4] Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1126b11 ff. Susan Wolf, "Moral Saints",
Journal of Philosophy 1982, p.422. Cp. p.432: "It is as rational and as
good for a person to take Katharine Hepburn or Jane Austen as her role
model instead of Mother Theresa". Wolf denies that doing so is equally
moral, but then her whole point, like mine, is to oppose this segregated
category of the 'moral'. Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good pp.85, 66:
"It is so patently a good thing to take delight in flowers and animals that
people who bring home potted plants and watch kestrels might even be
surprised at the notion that these things have anything to do with
virtue... [In a good person] the direction of attention is, contrary to
nature, outward, away from self which reduces all to a false unity [recall
the connections that the young Hitler makes in Vienna], towards the great
surprising variety of the world, and the ability so to direct attention is
love."

[5] Thus what a good commentary on Hegel needs to do to illuminate Hegel is
to use examples and applications to supply such concreteness where Hegel
does not: see for example Charles Taylor's Hegel or Terry Pinkard's Hegel's
Phenomenology: The Sociality of Reason or H.S.Harris's Hegel's Ladder.

[6] Thanks for comments to Laurence Goldstein, Michael Piret, Ralph Walker,
and audiences at Magdalen College, Oxford, and at London Metropolitan
University.