The perspective of the acting person: essays in the renewal of thomistic moral philosophy

9. Practical Reason and the Truth of Subjectivity: The Self-Experience of the Moral Subject at the Roots of Metaphysics and Anthropology

9 Practical Reason and the Truth of Subjectivity The Self-Experience of the Moral Subject at the Roots of Metaphysics and Anthropology Moral Subjectivity and the Question of Its Truth The fundamental question of every ethics has to do with the truth of subjectivity : is what I do, and what I think to be right and just, really right and just? And my conduct in general, as based on interior conviction—is it truly right and just? In more precise terms: what must I do or not do in order to be the person I really want to be? Moral questions are questions about the rightness of our will and action. The answers to these questions are founded on principles which emerge from the self-experience of the practical reason of the subject, and that means that in their origin they do not come from metaphysics or some other theoretical forms of knowing. This experience of the self, founded in the anthropological and cognitive primacy of reason, itself possesses an eminently metaphysical dimension. In fact, metaphysics and anthropology presuppose it. These are the key themes I would like to illustrate here. But first of all, it needs to be made clear that my entire discussion depends on what “subjectivity ” means. I am speaking of the subjectivity of every human being, classically de250 fined as animal rationale. It is not the subjectivity of an autonomous will in the Kantian sense, which seeks to affirm its own freedom as an independence from all inclinations and moving forces, as not subject, consequently, to the representations of good that arise from those inclinations, but only to the “ought” as stated categorically by rational imperatives superior to every inclination ; instead of this, I am thinking of the subjectivity of a living thing, distinguished by the possession of intellect and reason: the object of which, to the extent that it is practical reason, is properly the truth of the realization of its own being. This is precisely the subjectivity of a being whose nature is revealed in its inclinations and instincts, but also in the reason embedded in these inclinations and instincts which that reason regulates and orders; the basis of action and the principle of morality, therefore, is not the “ought” elevated over every good tied to the inclinations; rather, the good, conditioned by the inclinations, but as appearing to the reason, is the foundation of action and principle of morality. “Subjectivity of morality” is equivalent here to the “rationality of morality,” and precisely to a species of rationality that in turn consists in the objectivity of the “good-for-man,” the objectivity that is precisely the “truth of subjectivity.”1 Virtue and the Supremacy of Reason in Aristotle The category “truth of subjectivity” goes back to Aristotle who, in a manner still unsurpassed, located the subjectivity of the moral fact in ethics: the Nicomachean Ethics takes up the movements of subjectivity at its very outset. For Aristotle, the agent is fundamentally a being who aims for the good in all possible forms, so that “the good” will be defined as simply that to which everything aims. The very concept of the good as a practical good is the concept of that which is the object of some aim or seeking. This is why human seeking —and the action (praxis) which flows from it—are subject to deception. Practical judgments are necessarily conditioned by a pull of forces, which means that the good that we want to do and are able to do is always that which appears to us as good. The practical good is thus essentially an “apparpractical reason & the truth of subjectivity 251 1. For this position and developments of it see my book La prospettiva della morale: Fundamenti dell’etica filosofica (Rome: Armando, 1994); the expanded Spanish edition, La perspectiva de la moral. Fundamentos de la ética filosófica (Madrid: Rialp, 2000); and the even more expanded German edition, Die Perspektive der Moral. Philosophische Grundlagen der Tugendethik (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2001), which is forthcoming in English from The Catholic University of America Press. ent good” (phainómenon agathón).2 The appearance of the good can deceive us, since what appears to us as good is not always good in reality. The human being can be drawn into deception by the senses, by pleasure, and (only Augustine will explore this in its full profundity)3 by perversion, by the curvatio...