Everything includes itself in power
power and coherence in Engelhardt's foundations of bioethics
pp. 15-29
in: Reading Engelhardt, Berlin, Springer, 1997Abstract
A way of understanding an important theme in the history of ethics, at least since the Enlightenment, is to see it as an attempt to chain Shakespeare"s universal wolf. Somehow, power must be kept from dissolving without residue into will and appetite. Otherwise, we run the risk of various kinds of war, which few regard as an efficient way of achieving their ends, and fewer still desire for its own sake. Further, we lose what strikes me as a deep human hope: that there are ways of living that are legitimate. By this I mean that the circumstances and projects that form our lives are not merely expressions of a purely contingent play of historical forces with which we will have to either put up if we must or pull down if we can. Rather, we hope that our lives can be made to reflect, even if darkly, something that is true about the way things ought to be, quite independently of whatever you or I or anyone else might think or wish. The way things ought to be, according to this hope, will at least constrain and perhaps even guide our power, turning it to ends other than whatever we or others just might happen to desire, steering it toward what in fact we should yearn for. Should this hope fail, we face not only Hobbes" prospect of the war of each against all, but an even pro founder threat: the loss of a deeply important feature of our notion of ourselves as agents. For if there is only power, and only will and appetite to guide it, if there is nothing to be said for any goal or end or form of life that would distinguish it as more worth pursuing than any other, then what is to prevent us from slipping into a kind of inertness, in which all pursuits are comparatively indifferent, and any pursuit seems ultimately vain?
