Customer Reviews

Law, Love and Language

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

In the wonderful 'Law, Love and Language' Herbert McCabe shows us that ethics is about all human action and interaction, and that we are intrinsically in conversation, all our action is response to others, and this economy of response determines our environment too. There is no split here between nature and culture (between `is' and `ought'). There is no particular need to attribute anything here to Aquinas or Wittgenstein, for McCabe is simply saying that we are not disembodied beings isolated from another in an inert or neutral or hostile world. McCabe's argument is simply good Christian theology, so he shows that we are not only embodied, but social and linguistic beings too. McCabe's version of ethics as all human action is therefore very much bigger than the usual accounts of morality investigated through a small number of difficult moral problems. Herbert McCabe replaces our modern dualist account of language and life (for every thing, a word timelessly exists, so language is simply the correspondence of word to thing) with a more supple dynamic (`aristotelian') account which allows that what we do really alters who we are, what there is and how we relate to it. What we think of things and how we name them is not just the (post-)modern power game of the individual. We inherit and inhabit our social world along with how we think of it, as we live and interact in interlocking sets of language-speakers and communities. This deflates the (post-) modern Cartesian view which makes naming an act of power by the individual who is above all relationship and responsibility. The effect of his book is to show how in hock we are to the disembodying pull of Cartesian thought, which turns us essentially a demonic eye that hovers just above the surface of world. In other words, McCabe has recovered important aspects of theological anthropology and the doctrine of creation.

Sick of liberals who believe "all you need is love" and conservatives who just think morality means "following God's law"? Sure there is something besides Mill and Kant? Read McCabe's utterly groundbreaking book, marginalized in 1968 (the year of Humanae Vitae), but now more vital than ever. McCabe argues that what proponents of law and proponents of "doing the most loving thing" fail to understand is how language works. McCabe then persuasively argues for the revolutionary significance of the Christian story in ways that will surprise most readers.

McCabe was one of a generation of deeply intelligent, clear-headed Dominican theologians and philosophers (including Cornelius Ernst and Victor White) who published little, but had a huge influence on post-war Catholicism in England and eventually around the world. In this book (first published under the title 'What is Ethics all about), McCabe seeks to provide a coherent account of ethics as the product of a kind of judgment that has much more to do with literary criticism's insights than those of logicians and lawyers. His 'grammatical' approach draws its inspiration from Wittgenstein in many ways, and foreshadows some of the concerns taken up by MacIntyre in later years.

McCabe is eminently readable as well as sensible. His other volumes still in print also offer great insight into ethical concerns, but in less sustained ways than this volume.