Anti-Climacus

QUOTE: I was reading an article by John Finnis ("The Foundations of Practical Reason Revisited" 50 American Journal of Jurisprudence 109) on the plane this weekend. I've always been skeptical of the 'human goods' argument Finnis, Grisez, and Boyle (among others) try to deploy, mostly because I distrust lists of the good in the first place. But at the end of this particular article, as Finnis is reflecting on part of a poem by Shakespeare ("Phoenix and Turtle"), his already fine writing increases in lucidity and elegance. To say much more would be to detract from what he has to say, so:

"[from the poem:]
Reason in itself confounded,
Saw Division grow together,
To themselves yet either neither.

Simple were so well compounded
That is cried, how true a twain,
Seemeth this concordant one,
Love hath Reason, Reason none,
If what parts can so remain.

'Love hath Reason' is here most carefully presented as expressing Reason's own insightful judgment. Anyone who accepts a position like the one I have been arguing for or re-presenting in this paper will want to take this statement in a sense that corresponds neither to the Humeian/Weberian 'desire creates reason' and 'confers value upon its object,' nor the Pascalian 'the heart has its reasons, which are unknown to reason.' May not this poet's 'Love hath Reason' be compatible with and perhaps even affirm the position that love of persons, each precisely for his or her own sake, has the reasons which the first practical principles pick out, the human goods towards which those principles direct us, each of these goods an aspect of the worth (in deprivation or fulfillment) of each human being?

Practical reason's first principles are, so to speak, transparent for the persons who can flourish in the kinds of way to which those principles direct us--so transparent that it is, in truth, those persons for whose sake we are responding when we respond at all to those reasons' summons. Such love goes all the way from the truly all-embracing 'Love your neighbor as yourself' to particular commitment to another--for example, the uniquely exclusive while outward-looking commitment constitutive of marital love--and is of the essence of all the practical normativity we call moral and, in proper case, legal. And for backsliders like us, the relatively few persons of heroic virtue can be a reminder to us, inspiring rather than depressing, that but for one's own--one's 'love's' and 'will's'--responsiveness to what these reasons summon us to, rational capacity would and will be for each of us nothing more than what Hume pretended it cannot but be for all, a slave of the passions that thus is, gives, and has 'reason none.' If the poet who was a self-effacing maestro of judgment, and whose artistry gets its deepest force in enactments of reconciliation and fellowship, concurs in denying that the highest or deepest imperium belongs to sightless desire or aversion, we have a telling witness or advocate (not precisely an argument); but whether his work is properly understood as such concurrence is obviously a quaestio disputabilis for another day. In any event, there may be some who find more persuasive the resonance of the articulated principles with lived experience, aspirations, and efforts, not least of those of poor and far upcountry villagers."