Page 225 - Communication and the Evolution of Society

202 Communication and Evolution of Society

tematic doctrines, but are works of high interpretive art that
suggest the truth of classical texts through interpretation, rather
than by grounding it.
Thus certain reductive forms of Aristotelianism have a better
chance. Withdrawing the theoretical claim of practical philoso-
phy, they reduce it to a hermeneutics of everyday conceptions of
the good, the virtuous, and the just in order then to certify that
an unchangeable core of substantial morality is preserved in the
prudent application of this knowledge. An example is Hennis’
use of Aristotle’s To pics for political science; another is Gadamer’s
interpretation of the Nzcomachean Ethics.

Philosophical ethics is in the same situation in which everyone finds
himself. What counts as right, what we consent or object to in judging
ourselves or others, follows our general ideas of what is good and
just; but it acquires genuine determinateness only in the concrete
reality of the case, which is not a case of applying a general rule....
The general, the typical, which alone can be said in a philosophical
investigation given over to the generality of the concept, is not essen-
tially different from what guides the wholly untheoretical, average
general consciousness of norms in every practical-moral reflection.
Above all it is not different from it insofar as it includes the same
task of application to given circumstances that belongs to all moral
knowledge, that of the individual no less than that of the statesman
acting in everyone’s behalf .5°
But if philosophical ethics and political theory can know nothing
more than what is anyhow contained in the everyday norm con-
sciousness of different populations, and if it cannot even know
this in a different way, it cannot then rationally [begruéndet]
distinguish legitimate from illegitimate domination. Illegitimate
domination also meets with consent, else it would not be able to
last. (One need only recall those days in which great masses of
people came together in the squares and on the streets, without
being pressured to do so, in order to acclaim an empire, a people,
and a leader—was that an expression of anything other than an
untheoretical, average norm consciousness?) If, on the other
hand, philosophical ethics and political theory are supposed to
disclose the moral core of the general consciousness and to re-
construct it as a normative concept of the moral, then they must