Add Your Own Egg

“Morality: An Introduction to Ethics by Bernard Williams.”

“I went quickly over the opening lines: “Writing about moral philosophy should be a hazardous business,” not least because in doing so “one is likely to reveal the limitations and inadequacies of one’s own perceptions.””

“I liked this man already, his air of unpretentious authority, and I read the whole book that evening.”

“It was barely a hundred pages long and went briskly through such questions as whether moral judgments are all subjective, whether morality needs God, whether life has a meaning, and whether what makes something the right thing to do is the fact that it maximizes general happiness.”

“On that last question, Williams allowed that any half-decent moral outlook had to pay some attention to “what men in fact find value in, or need, or want.” But he didn’t think this had to be happiness. He was drawn to a phrase of D. H. Lawrence’s: “Find your deepest impulse, and follow that.””

“Williams added:

The notion that there is something that is one’s deepest impulse, that there is a discovery to be made here, rather than a decision; and the notion that one trusts what is so discovered, although unclear where it will lead—these, rather, are the point. The combination—of discovery, trust and risk—are central to this sort of outlook, as of course they are to the state of being in love.”

“I went looking for the original quotation from Lawrence, but only found the less resonant “Resolve to abide by your own deepest promptings,” and “Try and find your deepest issue, in every confusion, and abide by that.” I preferred how Williams had put it, his prose there, as everywhere, pared down, elegant and uncynically perceptive. What did it for me was that “of course” in his last sentence, its appeal to shared experience, its air of solidarity, almost of collusion: it’s just us human beings here.”

“Unhedged with cautious qualifications, his sentences demand something beyond a knack for spotting the fallacy, not cleverness but a richness of sensibility. They goad you to distinguish what you actuallythink from what you think that you think (under the influence of some premature, dishonest generalization).”

“More than one reviewer complained that the compression of Williams’s prose made him dangerously easy to misunderstand. But Williams wouldn’t grant the assumption that one should write, as the Roman rhetorician Quintilian had recommended, so that one cannot be misunderstood. Williams thought this advice indeterminate—misunderstood by whom? One writes for an imagined reader with whom one shares something: intelligence, seriousness, knowledge and so forth. “But that reader will also have thoughts of his own, ways of understanding which will make something out of the writing different from anything the writer thought of putting into it. As it used to say on packets of cake mix, he will add his own egg.” A reader’s thought, Williams said, “cannot simply be dominated … his work in making something of this writing is also that of making something for himself.” ”