the city of luck, the alleys of loss, and the plain of gray: a meditation on the moral landscape

THE CITY OF LUCK, THE ALLEYS OF LOSS, AND THE PLAIN OF GRAY: A Meditation on theMoral LandscapeAuthor(s): Michael MendelsonSource: Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Vol. 83, No. 1 (Spring 2000), pp. 231-249Published by: Penn State University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41178939 .

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THE CITY OF LUCK, THE ALLEYS OF LOSS, AND THE PLAIN OF GRAY: A Meditation on the Moral Landscape

Michael Mendelson

Confidence

Qnce, there was confidence. It was a spring, or perhaps a summer, and it might have been a time of year, or it might have

been a time of life; perhaps it was a season of one's own, flowing through or discordant and out of synch with some larger piece of historical pageantry. More likely, it was and is altogether too complicated to reduce to formulas or patterns: the confidence that was can still be discerned in any number of places, in any number of crisscrossing and overlapping ways. Confidence often thrives in inverse proportion to its degree of warrant. This is part of its appeal. That, and the security it gives us.

It can be dazzling, and it is polychromatic, offering up landscapes richly textured and teeming with delineation. It is a pene- trating and discriminating light to the darkness of the vague and ill-defined, and it provides diverse, contrasting hues in place of monochromatic shades of gray. Here we would find what we need to battle whatever anxieties are bred by our doubt and disbelief; indeed, it can even assimilate our doubt and disbelief, placing their objects far off in the peripheral distance while bath- ing us in the warm light of the proximate and clearly visible. In- sight and moral strength: confidence not only enables us to go on; it gives us a sense of where we would have ourselves go, a map that captures so much of the finely etched detail that it enables us to perceive. In one of our more sentimental moments, it might even strike us as a gift of sorts that a lucky few possess in its fullest measure, a gift that would compensate for all those points

Michael Mendelson is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Lehigh University.

Soundings 83.1 (Spring 2000). ISSN 0038-1861.



232 SOUNDINGS Michael Mendelson

where instinct seems to fail conspicuously. There could be, one is inclined to think, no good reason to forsake such strength and comfort as this. The loss of this confidence would be more than a loss of will. It would be the loss of a world.

But, of course, it seems not so terribly difficult to lose at least some of the world that confidence gives us, to find ourselves in a world of a somewhat different sort. Our confidence can seem to be a tenuous presumption that would see the world in hues of its own devising: a trust that the patterns of circumstance are suffi- ciently aligned with the patterns of our care, that what matters most to us has a reliable chance of moving onward, safe, un- threatened by an Other.

And then there is the ubiquitous Confidence of Representa- tion, a form of confidence that is as enduring and as seemingly existentially necessary as any form of confidence ever could be. This is the confidence that the boundaries of the narratives we tell really do reliably map onto the features of the non-narrative world. And accompanying this form of confidence, there is the Confidence of Resolution, the confidence that whatever sort of situation, or problem, or dilemma, should confront us, there is in principle a solution to which and with which we can be existentially reconciled.1

The lure and appeal of confidence is all too obvious, and it is not easy to imagine that one might regard such confidence with indifference or that one might let it go, unconcerned for all the loss that would entail. Hence, it is all the more troubling that it is so easy to begin losing such confidence, so easy to begin losing the world it gives us and to begin replacing it with a world of a different sort.

There are as many ways to begin losing confidence as there are things for which we care, for each point of caring is a point of vulnerability, and vulnerability is the price we pay for having any world at all. And yet, to attempt to catalogue and taxonomize these points of vulnerability and all the different ways that confidence can be lost - that surely would be to miss the point. The complexity of the result would only serve to obscure the menac- ing simplicity of the problem. Here, stretching out before us, is a world in which so much matters in so many different ways. But there, dogging every aspiration and attainment, is the threat of that circumstantial shift, the ever-present possibility of a loss so



The City of Luck, the Alleys of Loss, and the Plain of Gray 233

great that all those old familiar and reliable boundaries will give way and crumble, littering our landscape as so much moral deb- ris, relics of a different time and a different sort of place. And if one adds empathy - if one has not yet embraced the moral re- treat to some sort of individualism that would protect us by sharply limiting the sphere of our concern2 - then the problem is all that much the greater. Now, the loss is not simply one's own, and the suffering at stake stretches outwards in all directions. It becomes a gray stain that creeps towards all horizons like some winter-borne death that cancels all traces of the spring and summer.

No wonder, then, that we cling to confidence as best we can, cherishing in an often unconscious sort of way all the boundaries and perspicuous distinctions that it enables us to perceive, boundaries and distinctions that yield a world with a liveable and morally reliable terrain. And no wonder we think so much about innocence and guilt and responsibility: we need such boundaries to hold our empathy in check. These boundaries are what can give us cause for indignation, or anger, or contempt, or even indifference rather than some gray empathetic sorrow that would threaten to drown out all the polychromatic comfort that our confidence can give us. No wonder the narratives we tell are so often narratives that portray the moral ugliness around us in a manner that stresses its avoidable, culpable nature, that presume a world where darkness is but the temporary absence of more permanent light.

Moral Geography

The Confidence of Representation and the Confidence of Res- olution: it is easy to misconstrue the centrality and depth of these two forms of confidence. Even to question them, it seems, is more often than not to invoke them, for they are to narratives as motion is to desire, as yearning is to hope; they are the minimal conditions for any moral landscape at all. Indeed, they are, it seems, the stuff of which moral landscapes are made, and even the landscape that initially seems most devoid of these forms of confidence is sometimes the one most eager to preserve their presence. Such, it seems, is the moral geometry that governs the conceptual contours of moral space.




Here, for example, is such a landscape, a landscape compris- ing two ostensibly disparate worlds, two worlds which in many respects are diametrically opposed, although genetically connected. It is in precisely this diametric opposition that we can begin to discern the depth of these forms of confidence.

Sprawled throughout the conceptual contours of moral space there is a world we may call the "city of luck." It is a world in which our pre-reflective values are, for the most part, regarded as a reliable guide to the geography of the moral landscape in which we reside. There is, to be sure, moral struggle that occurs, but it rarely involves the discernment of boundaries. Perhaps in some rare instances one might be unsure as to what course of action one ought to pursue, but seldom does this involve deep questions about the terrain itself. The struggle here is one of will, not perception, and the city of luck is, above all else, a realm of moral confidence, one wherein it is possible to raise one's children in such a way as to bequeath them a secure sense of the lay of the land.3

One should not infer from this that the inhabitants of the city of luck are necessarily blind to or sheltered from the dangers of circumstance. They too have to bury their dead, and sometimes even their children must be numbered among the dead they bury. Most of them know well what sadness is, and they also know about the sadness that transcends the moment, becoming the sorrow that extinguishes the very possibility of joy. They know about all this, but they also know about proportion, that grief, like all else, should have its occasions and its boundaries. And, yes, sometimes people are so consumed by such sorrow that they cannot return to the old, familiar pathways. Such instances, however, are mercifully rare. Those who do succumb to tragedy in such a manner reach a new, troubling level of otherness, and they are surely to be pitied in their own unreachable, inconsol- able sort of way.

In the city of luck, it is the scattered, episodic nature of suffering that makes it bearable. Fortunately, much, perhaps even most, of the suffering one encounters is of a deserved sort, the product of the wilful, culpable choices of those who saw fit to transgress the obvious, easily discernible boundaries that demar- cate the fundamental moral divide. And as for those who did stray in a moment of blindness, perhaps the blindness itself was




self-imposed, and perhaps the experience itself will restore the needed sense of vision. In the city of luck, they know full well that the world can be hard with us, but they know as well that most often it is not. Their security is in the company of those who, in varying degrees, share their goodness and their discernment, and there they find a safe arena within which their efforts can, for the most part, progress towards the chosen end. There they can protect themselves and their children from those on the other side of that moral divide.

Like all communities, the city of luck contains within it a pano- ply of voices. There are the supremely confident and secure, the indifferent but inertial, the slightly skeptical, even the cynical who are unaware of the depth of their own belief. In the city of luck, we can even find those who are convinced they have nothing to say to one another. But for all their differences, and for all the ostensible discordance, and for all the supposed degrees of disbelief, they share more than they know. They have their intuitions and their institutions to protect them, and these more often than not enable their fears and anxieties to recede reassur- ingly into the background. The city of luck is as richly textured and varied a city as there could be, and it is itself a monument to both the elasticity and the abidingness of an enduring intuition.

Moral geography being such as it is, however, the city's boundaries have a strikingly fluid nature, and spatial boundaries rarely serve as a reliable guide as to where those moral boundaries are to be found. Intermingled throughout the city of luck are the "alleys of loss," a world genetically connected and often spatially identical to the city of luck, yet a world somehow remote, a world in which it can easily seem as if otherness reigns. The alleys of loss are a world in which the prospect of loss is not viewed as a temporary aberration, and the very possibility of tragedy is often regarded as calling into question the most basic foundations of the city of luck. This is a moral region wherein circumstances have brought to the fore those questions about adequacy, a region where evaluative, criterial concerns can, and occasionally do, begin to emerge. It is here that questions can be asked con- cerning what often seems self-evident in the city of luck.4

In the alleys of loss, the seemingly scattered, episodic nature of suffering is not construed as a comfort. The randomness of loss seems to reveal something about the circumstantial dangers that




surround us. Nor is it regarded as convincing to suggest that much of the observed suffering is somehow a matter of just deserts. Even our perception of events is attributable to circumstantial chance, and our desires and impulses themselves often seem shaped by the unchosen environment in which they initially arise. Even the community itself, the seemingly stable context of the city of luck, is regarded as subject to the morally external influences of history, environment, and the random acts of others.

As in the city of luck, the attentive ear can discern a diverse array of voices. There are the wounded or numb who have become irremediably other; there are those who cannot return to the city of luck but in some deep sense wish that they could. And there are those who are angry and perhaps feel betrayed, sensing some kind of deep injustice without the promise of redress. And, of course, there are those who see the city of luck as based upon an illusory promise and who wish nothing more to do with it. As confidence is to the diverse voices of the city of luck, a deep sense of moral tenuousness is to the equally diverse voices in the alleys of loss.

Among the varied denizens of the alleys of loss, there are those who have permanently and explicitly renounced the assumptions of the city of luck, yet pursue a vision of something better, more existentially satisfying than the gloom-ridden alleys of loss. These are not, of course, visions of "progress," of the technological modification of circumstances. To find the notion that such an alteration of circumstances could really address the deepest sources of existential, moral discomfort, one must turn to the city of luck. Comfort, temporary respite, and convenience are not necessarily despised in the alleys of loss, but only those who reside in the city of luck (or long to return there) think that these could ever really penetrate to the heart of the matter. Here we have a different set of stories, stories that arise from the alleys of loss and seek to transcend them without ever denying that the alleys of loss are a permanent possibility of the moral landscape. Indeed, these stories seem to regard the alleys of loss as being the ultimate story upon which all other adequate stories must rely and which all stories, even those of the city of luck and its narrative progeny, must use as a point of departure.5




These narratives are often ones that press those evaluative, criterial questions, for here we find an awareness of the possible multiplicity of narratives and a conviction as to the hollowness of those that emanate from the city of luck. These stories indeed have their own amazing, seemingly discordant variety, and sometimes the storytellers become so consumed by the details of their stories that it seems as if they have forgotten why they are telling the stories in the first place, as if they have forgotten what the stories are supposed to be about Sometimes the stories will seem so odd as to inspire incredulity, not only among those in the city of luck but even among others in the alleys of loss.

For all the diversity and oddness, however, it is remarkable how much these stories have in common. With the alleys of loss as their backdrop, they tell a story of a broader context, one that encompasses and transcends even the city of luck, a story that provides a kind of framework that is supposed to redeem us from the ostensible tragedy that is the ground upon which the alleys of loss are constructed and upon which, they think, even the city of luck is unwittingly perched. The problem, these stories tell us, is not simply a problem of will as is suggested in the city of luck. Even deeper, they say, is the problem of perception, and a necessary part of the solution is to see the world in the right way, to resist the initial assumptions that run rampant in the city of luck.

One might well wonder whether the inhabitants of such different worlds, of such different stories, can even talk to each other and make sense of the various versions of the stories that each side of the divide produces. From the vantage point of the city of luck, the alleys of loss can seem little more than morbid, obses- sively and pitiably so; they seem to focus myopically upon the negative in a manner that precludes them from seeing the broader sphere of the normal. From the vantage point of the alleys of loss, there is a kind of moral blindness that enshrouds the city of luck, a failure to sense the very depth of the omnipres- ent fragility and risk that constitute the human condition. This seeming blindness can inspire resentment, even anger. And, in some cases, a sadness that yearns for transcendence. But, for all that, there is nonetheless a common ground upon which these ostensibly divergent landscapes rest. Hence, as always and as ever, we find the Confidence of Representation and the Confidence of Resolution; here we find that enduring intuition that there is a




narrative that we can recognize as the right narrative for us, a narrative that will save us from all that the narrative portrays as lurking on the wrong side of the narrative divide.6 The landscape our narrative portrays may or may not tell us that the resolution we seek is to be found "here," but if it is not to be found "here," then surely it will be found "there," wherever and however "there" is to be construed. But "here" and "there" are names of a sort, and wherever there are names, there is a problem of identity that needs to be addressed. Or, to be more precise, where there is a name, there is The Problem of Identity.

Identity

A name: more than a pattern of sounds, more than a single word. It is a multi-connected point within the complex weave of a story, the prism through which attention is focused. By means of a name, This is distinguished from That, and This - This -

emerges as woi-That, and there is now a story to be told about This versus That, about This versus all that is not-This, and stretching before one are the rudiments of a landscape with discernible landmarks and boundaries. A name occurs within a story, and with a story there is a landscape; to see a landscape is to be within a world. Not to have name is to be more and less than a problem; it is to lurk in the shadows, to glide ominously through the landscape, darkly and largely undetected. It is to be in a manner that is close to the manner of being that only non-being can ever be. It is confusion, we are sometimes told, unsayable and unthinkable.

Sometimes a name is a word, and sometimes it is a description, a larger yet still small piece of the story in which the named re- ceives its narrative locus. Sometimes it is the most meager of gestures, and sometimes it is an expansive act of narrative positioning. But always: it is the minimal condition of inclusion, the least that it takes to place one in a discernible position on our moral horizon. Even that which lacks a name of its own is ap- proachable only by means of a name of some sort, perhaps a bor- rowed name, perhaps some one of those minimal, attention- directing gestures.

Names of som^sort, it seems, are to be found everywhere we go, and whether we are in the city of luck or in the alleys of loss, we cannot completely divest ourselves of the legacy of those names.




To do so is to approach the place of Death, that place that is nowhere, that not-place where nothing is.7 And so, the problem that these names pose is a problem that is common to both the city and the alleys. Let us name this problem the "Problem of Identity."8

There can be no straightforward account of what The Problem of Identity is: it is not really a problem like other problems, for it does not arise within a specific sort of domain. Problems of a more familiar sort center on our awareness that the conceptual geography of the domain poses serious obstacles for the stories we are inclined to use in our attempts to navigate through that domain; these problems are reflections and results of our awareness that our attempts at moral and conceptual cartography do not work in quite the way that we want them to - that there are conflicts in our intuitions about where we want to go, that our intuitions are not up to the task of getting us there in a manner that does not undercut other intuitions about which we deeply care. But: The Problem of Identity is of a considerably deeper sort. It does not have a specific domain, and it does not have a specific domain because it is a problem that arises in the very project of fashioning a domain in the first place. There are, to be sure, some particular sorts of problems that can arise in relation to the concept of identity, but these are problems about identity that do not really capture The Problem of Identity. The Problem of Identity is not like other problems because it precedes all other problems in a manner that makes it a pre-condition of even having those other problems.

It is not difficult to understand why identity should loom so large on our existential horizon. There is, after all, the Necessity of Identity, the necessity of having some story or the other - however inchoate, fragmentary, or dissonant - that gives us some sense of our position within the moral landscape we inhabit. The demands of human agency are such that we must discriminate and divide as we move through this landscape, and these moral excursions generate and augment narratives of varying degrees of detail as to who and what is "me" and "mine," who and what is "alien" and "other," who and what "are" at all: the demands of agency are such that we must have some sort of map of the moral terrain in which we find ourselves, and that map defines and situ- ates the self in relation to what it perceives as the moral




landmarks of that terrain. This "map" is often a fluid one, provid- ing boundaries that will shift and be shifted in response to our agency and the agency of those whom our map happens to portray as being "other." In all this, we have an existential "necessity," one that can easily seem as "necessary" as our condition allows.

And then: there is the Comfort of Identity. Whatever moral warmth we discern in a landscape fraught with hostility or cold indifference is the result of our relation to that with which or with whom we feel some measure of affinity. The discriminations and divisions that agency entails are not simply exclusionary; they are inclusionary as well.9 They provide a region of moral space within which we find the familiar and the accessible, the recognizable and the potentially solicitous, a sphere in which the threat of isolation and a diremptive aloneness are staved off. In the closest and the most permeable of the boundaries we can find that which we discern to be the least "other," and there we find a domain that can provide us with a sphere of unity that protects us. Here is a sphere within which there can flourish an existential meaning that can speak to us in a language we think we can understand, thus lending support to the at times ostensibly tenuous conviction that our lives are indeed worthy of the effort. The Comfort of Identity is the positive, inclusionary side of the necessary discriminations and divisions, for it gives us a sphere within which we can find a unity with that which we perceive to be nevertheless capable of otherness, a sphere within which we find a kind of haven of moral safety and existential significance.

The Necessity of Identity and the Comfort of Identity go a long way in explaining why identity is important to us. They help explain why we devote so much energy to worrying about the details of our stories. And: they help to explain why disagreements over these boundaries can be so distressing, why they can become such visceral and aggressive affairs.10 Even so, they have not quite captured The Problem of Identity, although they have put us in a position from which we can begin to discern what The Problem of Identity is.




Moral Horror

This is The Problem of Identity: the Moral Horror that inevita- bly arises out of the Necessity of Identity. Unlike the episodic and contingent nature of tragedy, in which we can always conceive the opposite, here we have a necessity which is so much more rigorous and seemingly inescapable.11 The empathy that gives us the Comfort of Identity is an empathy that must always be re- stricted in order to preserve the boundaries that make possible the exclusions that make possible the inclusions we seek, and the more intense and discernible the Comfort, the more intense must be the restrictions, sometimes to the point where we are no longer even aware or can even discern those excluded; sometimes even to the point where the excluded have no name. Here is Moral Horror in one of its most chilling guises: An exclusion so entrenched that it is altogether incapable of seeing itself as such.

But the depth and unavoidability that bring Moral Horror most into focus are found when we turn to the conceptual terrain of innocence. Here we find what are seemingly the most indispensable of all boundaries that emerge out of the Necessity of Identity. Innocence is a relation, derived from the need to make assignations of responsibility by which we can segregate ourselves from those who bear the property of guilt. Here are relations that trace boundaries which might well seem even more significant than the Comfort of Identity, boundaries that emphasize just how great the Necessity of Identity really is. There is no humanly recognizable form of life that does not concern itself with the boundaries of innocence and guilt. It is hard to imagine a form of life that did not concern itself with the imposition and preservation of those boundaries and with the pursuit of those who transgress and threaten these boundaries. After all, innocence and guilt mark the boundaries that help signify for us what is most indispensable about our identity; they are the boundaries that signify the major points of our vulnerability.

The boundaries of innocence and guilt are themselves as tenuous as the boundaries of identity that they are meant to protect, but in even more disturbing ways. There is so much that is done in the name of these boundaries, so much that must done if they are to serve their purpose. Depending upon the depth and the extent of the transgression, there must be a response to it, one that is sometimes heavy and hard, and relentless. And the neces-




sity of these boundaries can seem incompatible with their tenuousness. If one were to pause and examine the landscape, surely the empathetic eye would seek an equal necessity on both sides - on the side of the identity we want to preserve and on the side of the terrain upon which the boundaries have been imposed. But, of course, no such assurance is forthcoming. In its place there is an eerie silence and the beginnings of a nagging, fearful doubt.12 Here we have a transitive tenuousness: just as the boundaries to which the Necessity of Identity give rise could be other than they are without necessarily altering the landscape upon which they are imposed, so too these boundaries could be drawn other than they are, these boundaries which we employ to challenge and reject, to confront and deter, to halt and to pun- ish, sometimes to silence and segregate, sometimes, even, to kill.13

Indispensable and yet somehow, in some larger sense that the eye of empathy can discern, indefensible. Perhaps, one might begin to fear, the sphere of that for which we are morally culpable is but an ever-so-small portion of the ever-so-much-larger, perhaps unmappable sphere of that to which we are causally connected, a sphere that seems to spread out in all directions, a web wherein each point bears an indispensable relation to the whole such that altering any point is to alter all else.14

The sphere of that to which we are causally connected: a sphere in which we come close to the genuine unity that empathy seeks, for here is a sphere in which every point bears a relation to all else and nothing is excluded. But surely, there is no comfort here. Here is a terrain too entangled, too inextricably unmappable and perhaps even, the closer one looks, altogether amorphous. Innocence fails altogether here as identity itself becomes tenuous, and so too fades the guilt that would serve as the point of contrast against which our innocence would be defined. And here is Moral Horror in its strongest, grimmest visage, one in contrast to which the notion of tragedy seems an almost sentimental comfort.15 Here empathy finds itself confronted by the possibility for which there is no alternative, one for which no opposite can be conceived, a possibility which is in fact a necessity: The sphere of causal contiguity seems somehow true in a way that the sphere of the morally culpable does not. The sphere of causal contiguity, in all its intertwined and amorphous relational




complexity, seems to capture something that really is a part of the landscape that confronts us. The sphere of the morally culpable, that ever-so-smaller circumscribed region of the causally con- tiguous, seems a desperate and futile attempt to impose order upon a complex nexus of relations that one can only distort and falsify in the attempt to render them accessible and intelligible. And yet: identity makes it necessary for us to direct our gaze away from the larger sphere of causal contiguity and to attempt to con- struct a more accessible sphere of moral culpability, a pragmatic move that is easily justified by the Necessity of Identity. To the empathetic eye, however, this can give us naught but a landscape drenched in the hues of Moral Horror.

Here, then, is a nightmarish divide between what agency demands and what the eye of empathy discerns.16 On the one hand, there is the perspicuous, polychromatic realm of Confi- dence, the landscape teeming with delineations that human agency entails, a moral landscape that reflects the Confidence of Representation and the Confidence of Resolution, a moral landscape that is crisscrossed with the boundaries required by the Ne- cessity of Identity and which yield the Comfort of Identity. On the other hand, there is an almost featureless realm of gray, the moral landscape that bears only the unmappably intertwined traces of relational complexity. Here is the landscape discerned by the eye of empathy rather than the demands of agency, the landscape discerned not in terms of the Confidence of Represen- tation and the Confidence of Resolution but in terms of a nagging sense that, but for the accidents of circumstance, the boundaries that our Confidence discerns would be very different indeed from what they seem to be. And here, then, is Moral Hor- ror: the inclusions which the Necessity of Identity gives us and the Comfort of Identity demands must always be accompanied by exclusions that are as tenuous as the landscape upon which they are imposed is unmappable. There is an existential necessity that propels us on, but there is also that which the eye of empathy can discern but which our agency itself cannot acknowledge: to create the moral landscape we need is necessarily to create and ex- clude others, and for every other we would include there is another that will be created and excluded, and the Comfort of Identity will always and of necessity be purchased at the price of conflict, a price that we and others must continually pay. The




Confidence of Resolution would have us ignore this given its unavoidability, but once again the eye of empathy can discern what our agency cannot acknowledge: here again is something for which the landscape on the other side seems to give no warrant, and here again we find ourselves confronted by a nagging feeling that the world might turn out to be a much grimmer, sadder, and darker place than we ever thought it could be. So now we can at least give a name to this grim and sad darkness: "Moral Horror," a legacy that we inherit and bequeath and that is, as well, inescap- ably our own. But, of course, to name it is, at that moment, to push it away by attempting to render it so much less than it really is, although it always remains as present as it ever was. This, too, is part of the nightmarish dialectic of that which we would call "Moral Horror."

Gray Waters

In the center: there is the city of luck, polychromatic, teeming with confidence and detail, a brightly lit place rich in boundaries and texture, abundant in patterns of inclusion and exclusion, a place where the Necessity of Identity and the Comfort of Identity are as one. Here is the place where the innocent can congregate to protect themselves from those who are not so innocent, where those with pure hearts and clear vision can protect themselves from predatory otherness.

Far off in the peripheral distance: there is the utter darkness of the place called Death, the place that is not a place, the not-place where nothing is. There is the darkness we cannot illumine, the darkness that stands ever-posed and ready to swallow all that matters to us. Here is the place where all the boundaries and all the patterns of inclusion and exclusion, all our richly textured discriminations and divisions, are finally extinguished and absorbed in a realm of unbroachable otherness for which there is no representation, true or false.

Between these two: there is the plain of gray, the place that empathy seeks, the place where the divisions and boundaries fade. Here, it seems, is the prospect, however fleeting, of an inclusion that is not purchased at the price of those exclusions we cannot defend and that our empathy ought not abide. The plain of gray is the moral landscape stripped of all the boundaries that the Necessity of Identity would impose, a place where all divisive-




ness is absorbed in the gentle lapping of the slow, thick, gray waters.

The city of luck must forever avert its gaze from the far-off darkness of the not-place called Death, nor can it acknowledge the monochromatic, featureless expanse of the plain of gray. But: adjoining and intermingled throughout the city of luck there are the alleys of loss, the home of those who, for so many varied reasons, can no longer embrace the confidence of the city of luck, the home of those who are drifting away from that brightly lit polychromatic center. Here, in the alleys of loss, we have the egress that leads away from the city of luck toward the plain of gray. And: in those tales of transcendence that emerge from the alleys of loss, we find ourselves invited to consider the prospect of some better place, some more empathetic place, some place where all that really matters can never be lost. Indeed, we are invited to consider the prospect of a place where the ones whom we love can never be taken from us, a place that can at times seem an awful lot like the plain of gray.

But what do we find here on the monochromatic, featureless plain of gray? We find a place to which empathy draws us, but a place from which the Necessity of Identity constantly lures us; a place devoid of the arbitrary divisions that the Necessity of Iden- tity demands, yet one lacking the boundaries that seem to provide the moral maps that enable us to navigate through our practical lives; a place devoid of the lie that is "innocence" and the subterfuge that is "guilt," but a place that cannot be a place for a form of life that we can recognize eis our own. But most of all: we find a place that provides a vista from which we can be- hold The Problem of Identity, the Moral Horror that transforms even the notion of tragedy into a sentimental comfort.

*****

On the plain of gray, there is always a mist swirling in a heavy night sky, and there is forever the gentle lapping of the slow, thick gray water. Off in the distant center is the vague glow from the city of luck and those alleys of loss that lead from the city into the plain; off in the peripheral distance is the utter darkness of the place called Death, the place that is not a place, the not-place where nothing is. And: if one could find one's way to this monochromatic plain, removed from the polychromatic confidence




and all the distinctions and divisions of the city of luck; and if one could maintain one's balance here in the ever-tilting middle, somehow resisting the lure of the city, somehow resisting the Ne- cessity of Identity; and if one could somehow discern all the tan- gled and intertwined contiguity that stretches out before one, then: perhaps for a moment one could embrace that whisper-like sadness that lurks in this gray place, and for some brief instant onç could embrace all the empathy that quietly calls out to one, all the empathy that the Necessity of Identity would oblige us to deny.

Until: a glint of bright color glistening in the distant center once again caught one's eye. And so, again one would drown in the light, slowly sinking into the Moral Horror that would give one a name of one's own.

NOTES

This essay is a very much shortened and aggressively edited version of selec- tions from the "Prologue," "Chapter One," and "Chapter Two" of a much larger work, Moral Horror: Tableaux in Philosophical Gothic. A slightly modified and slightly shorter version of the present essay was read at the Spring 1999 meeting of the Eastern Pennsylvania Philosophical Association at Muhlenberg College. I thank the organizers of the conference for the opportunity to present the pa- per, and, as so often, I owe a special debt to Gordon C.F. ¿earn. As always, my biggest debt is to my wife, Gale Viglio tti.

1 . Even Death, we are so very often told in so many different ways by so many different voices, need not be regarded as the viscerally unassimilable de- nouement that it so often seems. Here is the Confidence of Resolution in one of its most prominent and comforting guises.

2. Here, in one of its most unsettling if popular guises, the Confidence of Resolution once again reveals itself.

3. There are many voices that have held forth on behalf of the city of luck, extolling its virtues and implicitly reassuring us of its entitlement to the confidence that serves as its foundation. Aristotle, in his attempt to show that the philosophical life is a safe one that need not succumb to the intel- lectual eccentricities of his predecessors, is among the first to give a philosophically articulate voice to the city, but there are, to be sure, so many more. Locke, Hume, Kant, Moore, the later Wittgenstein, and Austin are just a few of those who come to mind. And: it is no wonder that Aristotle enjoys the kind of popularity he does among so many contemporary moral thinkers. Aristotle speaks with a confidence that they would have us take as our own.

4. Une might, with some justification, reter to this peculiar, narratively sell- conscious activity as "philosophy," and one might also glimpse here the beginnings of an account of how, in so many different places, in the midst of so many different cultural contexts, a peculiarly self-conscious narrative ac-




tivity such as this could arise in the first place. For all the other divergences we might observe, circumstantial adversity and the existential unease to which it gives rise are conspicuously trans-cultural.

5. Here, again, the voices are legion, and it is even arguable that these voices are philosophically and historically anterior to those that would provide a philosophical voice for the city of luck. After all, had not the resonant unease of the alleys been heard, there would be no reason to philosophically reaffirm what so often seems so self-evident to those who possess the confidence of the city.

The voice of the alleys is to be heard in all those who would draw our attention to the unreliability of that upon which we so often depend and who would urge us to see the world differently if we would see a landscape that could assuage the loss that seems our lot. Here, then, we can discern the voice of a Plato, an Epicurus, an Epictetus, a Plotinus, an Augustine, at times a Leibniz, a Nietzsche, a Lyotard. And here, of course, we discern precisely the voices from which those in the city of luck would urge us to turn away. Indeed, one could argue that here are to be heard even the voices of those who first pondered questions about necessity and justice and a moral reliability that might somehow be discerned in the tension-fraught landscape in which we find ourselves, i.e. an Anaximander, a Heraclitus, a Parmenides, among obvious others.

6. Just how deep the Confidence of Resolution goes can be discerned in the case of the skeptic. Rather than aggressively invoking the Confidence of Representation to yield resolution, the skeptic urges us to constrain the extent of our Confidence of Representation precisely in order to yield the resolution we seek. Moreover, in encouraging us to renounce any overly ambitious Confidence of Representation in order to relieve us from existential disquietude, it is noteworthy that the skeptic, be it a Sextus Em- piricus, a Montaigne, or a Hume, does not suggest that we completely renounce the Confidence of Representation. In order that we may have some sort of life of humanly recognizable agency, the distinction between the "evident" and the "non-evident" is ever-crucial to the skeptic, and however narrow the former may be, the Confidence of Representation, as well as the Confidence of Resolution, is still very much at work. As for some of the more recent, post-Cartesian versions of skepticism that attempt to address the sort of theoretical skepticism of Descartes' "First Meditation," there is even less that needs to be said. These, after all, have never really been more than an academic foil.

7. The Place of Death, the not-place for which there can be no representation, true or false. Whatever it is or is-not, we can have no confidence in our representations, no confidence that it is like anything else, no confidence that it ever could be represented. Any tale that we would tell would be im- mediately suspect as an attempt at circumventing and concealing the tran- scendent nature of the Otherness by casting it in terms of the more accessibly familiar. To speak of this region of darkness, we must rely upon the most refined resources of poetry, of metaphor, and this must always be done within the context of tales about more familiar terrain. And so, the not-place of Death becomes the Mirror of Death, a narrative context in which we have no choice but to gaze upon our own image, be it wittingly or not. Perhaps these will be admonitory components of the tales which cover more accessible ground - warnings of a seemingly inevitable sobering con- clusion, or perhaps allusions to the sort of hope that a region of Otherness can sometimes seem to hold out for us. We cannot pretend, however, that




we have begun to map the actual terrain or that we could even be confident of recognizing such a map were we ever to come upon it. This is the region that must forever humble our narrative endeavors, a region about which we can have, perhaps, a carefully circumscribed hope, but for which a war- ranted confidence seems ever out of reach. It is the outer, unassailable limit of all narratives.

8. As the preceding implies and as the following will attempt to make more evident, what is being referred to here as "The Problem of Identity" is not to be confused with the more familiar criterial and taxonomical problems that are customarily regarded as being "problems" about "identity." What is being referred to here as "The Problem of Identity" is existentially and conceptually anterior to these more familiar criterial and taxonomical concerns. As we will see, "The Problem of Identity" is not a "problem" in the customary sense, nor is it about "identity" in the customary sense. Why, then, refer to it as The "Problem" of "Identity"? Because: it is the ultimate existential problem from which the more refined and circumscribed sorts of problems arise.

9. It may strike some as conceptually trivial to assert that inclusion entails "exclusion" and vice versa, but as we will see, this rather obvious conceptual point has some very significant, if less obvious, existential consequences.

10. Indeed, it is important to note that, in many cases, were the disagreement not to become a visceral and aggressive affair, it would be widely construed as a lack of moral commitment, a troubling sign of indifference towards that about which one professes to care or that about which one ought to care.

1 1 . Regardless of whatever "necessity" we might impute to the circumstances underlying those sorts of events we label "tragic," we can always conceive of the "tragic" event as not having occurred, of being other than it is. There is, thus, something intractably "episodic" and "contingent" about "tragedy." It is crucial for an understanding of what is being referred to here as "Moral Horror" that one realize this is not the case here. Much of the "Horror" of Moral Horror is to be found in its unavoidability, its existential universality and necessity. This is, needless to say, part of the reason why the Confi- dence of Resolution poses such an obstacle to the discernment of Moral Horror.

12. And here is a prospect so seldom considered, yet one which lies at the heart of Moral Horror: what if ambiguity is not just a matter of narrative failure, what if it is not the case that the categories we employ often simply fail to "fit" the landscape, but instead this is the case: fluid ambiguity is a genuine feature of the landscape itself such that no imposition of categories could ever be of such a sort as to "fit" the way we want them to?

13. This is not, it is important to note, some species of "relativism"; the universality and necessity of Moral Horror preclude the shift in perspective that the relativist would enjoin us to adopt. Moreover, relativism, more often than not, relies upon a considerable Confidence of Representation all its own, and it too is often spurred on by a bold Confidence of Resolution, yet it is precisely these forms of confidence that the acknowledgment of Moral Horror undermines. For similar reasons, what is being discussed here is not, as already noted, some form of "skepticism." It is part of the "horror" of Moral Horror that, once we acknowledge it, our "isms" are unable to contain it and relegate it to some distant, peripheral region of the moral landscape in which we find ourselves.




14. Some notion of intertwined complexity, some relationally omni-directional causal contiguity seems to come as about as close as the resources of language can to capturing the point that is at stake here. As already noted above, to speak of the nameless is to come close to the confusion that is, we are often told, unsayable and unthinkable. And yet: in the silence that we ourselves must continually shatter, there surely seems to be something, al- beit something that cannot be, in itself, a "thing" for us at all. Perhaps it is here, at this liminal, peripheral point, that we are obliged to concede the necessity of consciously employing metaphor if we are to push on. Perhaps, again, we have reached a fundamental divide in the moral landscape. First it was from the city to the alleys; now it is from the alleys to a plain of gray. As before, not all will want or feel the need to move towards this darker region, and as before, we will often find it hard to know what to say to those on the other side of the moral divide. As before, perhaps one can only seek to catch the empathetic eye with some fleeting gesture of sorrow, knowing full well how little is left to be said.

15. In addition to its already noted episodic and contingent nature, there is yet another feature of our notion of "tragedy" and the "tragic" that is worthy of note: "tragedy" is paradigmatically something that happens to someone else. When one finds oneself in the midst of the sorts of circumstances and events that are called "tragic," it is hard to regard one's existential situation with the sort of conceptual tidiness that the label confers. Equally strange, it follows, is to imagine another as characterizing his or her own situation as "tragic." While there are, no doubt, other more culturally immediate concerns at work in Aristotle's depiction of "tragedy" in the Poetics, it is hard not to be reminded here of his largely voyeuristic portrayal of "tragedy" and his use of the genre as an emotional enema of sorts.

16. And it is from here onward that the empathetic eye must do all the work. We have reached the point in the moral landscape where agency itself is part of the problem. There is, it ever-so-chillingly seems, nothing that we can do, and the attempt to do anything at all can only reinforce the Moral Horror while rendering us that much more blind to its nameless and ubiquitous presence. Here, for a moment, we can only freeze in place while casting an empathetic eye towards what agency demands and empathy must mourn.



the city of luck, the alleys of loss, and the plain of gray: a meditation on the moral landscape

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