Liberality.org

[Note: immediately after I presented a public comment at the 2/7/23 Duval County Public School Board Meeting, a DCPS staff member approached me to ask if I was aware of the Black history offerings in Duval Schools. Afterwards, I was heartened to discover about the County’s African American History Initiative, which provides an opportunity for students to study about and help generate course material for the school system.]

In this article, I express my concern about the current trajectory of education in Florida in terms of Black history, as well as some ideas on how to correct course. The Governor recently blocked an Advanced Placement Course in African American studies which was subsequently reintroduced with major topics and people deleted from the course. In addition, new Florida laws are compelling teachers to cover up or remove books until content specialists can review them, but this has created a huge backlog due to understaffing. One book presently not cleared to be shared, at least at the first grade level, is The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks. While this situation cannot be turned around overnight, the great historian Arnold Toynbee, urges us “not to be taken in by the superficial aspects of history, but rather to look to the “slower, impalpable, imponderable movements that work below the surface and penetrate to the depths.” [1]

The Florida Legislature and Governor’s effort to rigidly control educational content is misguided.  One of the greatest qualities of human beings is the ability to be self-critical, to continually take a fresh look at our thoughts, words and actions, and evaluate how they are steering our life. Being a professional musician I note that just as dissonance in music, a kind of harmonic tension, leads to a desire for consonance or resolution, so can the discomfort that arises when we encounter  perspectives different from ours and when others experience our familiar perspective as being foreign to them awaken a mutual desire to grow and appreciate our diversity. 

In that regard, I am reminded of the parable of the elephant and the blind men. [2]

A group of blind men hear that a strange animal called an elephant has arrived in town, and rush to encounter it. Curious, each inspects it with his hands. The person who touches the trunk  thinks it is like a thick snake, another who touches an ear concludes it is like a fan, a third who touches its leg concludes it is a pillar like a tree-trunk, another places his hand upon its side and perceives that it “is a wall”, yet another who feels its tail, describes it as a rope, and the last man,  who feels its tusk, believes it is hard and smooth like a spear.

Later, in conversation, the blind men learn of each other’s various perspectives, and realize that each is in possession of only a part of the truth.. Each person’s experience is limited, but by remaining respectful of and open to the experiences of their colleagues, they all acquire a much fuller grasp of the truth.

I fear that in its actions, the Florida legislature is ignoring “the elephant in the room,” the gross disparities that plague our state. As we are in the midst of Black History Month, it is important to acknowledge these disparities, such as the fact reported by the ACLU in 2020 that “racism and discrimination are prevalent in Florida’s criminal justice system and the disparities in Florida are greater than those across the nation,”[3] and that in 2021, researcher found that “Florida’s health care system performs much better for whites and Asian Americans than it does for Black, Latinx, and Native American residents.”[4]

The philosopher David Norton described liberality as “the cultivated disposition to recognize and appreciate truths and values other than one’s own.” Reminiscent of the parable of the elephant and the blind men, Norton argues that “ Nonexclusivity means that [having] good reasons for  [embracing our own] beliefs and patterns of conduct …[does]  not preclude the possibility that alternative beliefs and patterns of conduct are likewise supportable by [other] good reasons….“ The ultimate truth about anything is the composite of alternative aspects of truth about that thing, as disclosed in complementary alternative valid perspectives upon that thing.” (pp. 83-4)[5]

While enrolled in a course offered by Depaul University’s Value Creating Education for Global Citizenship program, I learned that a vigorous debate exists in academia on whether or not to teach contentious historical events.  Scholars sharing the view held by our legislature generally believe that we should let bygones be bygones. They maintain that  we should avoid studying such events or the individuals associated with them so we do not reignite old wounds and thereby interfere with the need to move past them. Instead, they hold, we should simply learn about and appreciate the unique contributions of the various cultures.

Scholar Marianna Papastephanou is a champion of the opposing perspective. She holds[6] that we need to find the middle ground between “excessive and obsessive memory of the past, on the one hand, and loss of historical memory,” on the other. She notes that  “History …nourishes many of our misconceptions, expectations, feelings and opinions about others,” [and] she argues that sidestepping difficult events neglects the truth that “the I and the Other have never really been disengaged… [because such] entanglement of histories and cultures manifest in the…[presently unfolding] dimension of cultural encounters,” They include “[not only] an ​exchange of cultural material but also violence, aggression and pain…. point[ing]  to… responsibilities and obligations, of one culture towards the other.”  Conflicts “do not belong only to the past so long as the debt they created remains still unpaid.”

She is confident that [borrowing from Paul Ricoeur], thoughtfully taught,  history enables the past to be constructively revised by the opposing parties as they become aware of one another’s “narrative identities and [thereby] enable “promises of [reconciliation from] the past which have not been kept’ to finally be realized. (Ricoeur, 1996, p. 9).

Forgiveness [helps ease] pent up emotions and unleashes “the positive potentialities of [day to day] encounters. It promises a better future.”

I am convinced that we need to create a world in which liberality is widely honored, and bequeath it to our children.

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[1] Civilization 213).Toynbee, Arnold J. Civilization on Trial. New York: Oxford UP, 1948

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant?wprov=sfla1

[3] https://www.aclufl.org/en/news/racial-disparities-floridas-criminal-justice-system-are-shameful

[4] https://wusfnews.wusf.usf.edu/health-news-florida/2021-11-19/a-report-from-the-commonwealth-fund-highlights-racial-inequities-in-floridas-health-care-system

[5] Norton, D. (1996). Imagination, Understanding, and the Virtue of Liberality. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc.

[6] Papastephanou, M. (2002). Arrows not yet fired: Cultivating fosmopolitanism through education.Journal of Philosophy of Education, 36(1), 69-86.

[Author’s Note: This posting is quite spontaneous, as I realized that today marks the 4th anniversary of my establishing this blog, but that since that time, I had not published a subsequent post]

During a weeklong heat wave in 1995 that reached 106°, Chicago had over 700 more deaths than normal. While 8 of 10 of the community areas with the worst death rates were predominantly African American, suffered from high poverty and were plagued by violent crime, so were 3 of the 10 neighborhoods with the lowest death rates. What accounted, then, for the huge disparities in outcomes in neighborhoods that were so similar demographically?

Eric Klinenberger, an American sociologist and scholar of urban studies, culture, and media, has devoted about 20 years to figuring that out, along the way assisting governments in revolutionizing how they operate. In Palaces For the People (2018), he shared his discoveries. The answer he found is something he has named social infrastructure, defining it as “the physical spaces and organizations that shape the way people interact…that determine if social capital develops” (p. 5), and that “promote civil engagement and social interaction” even, and especially, across group lines. Social infrastructure includes libraries, schools, playgrounds, parks and swimming pools. It also encompasses sidewalks, courtyards, community gardens and green spaces, and organizations such as churches, civic associations, and commercial establishments whenever they have an established physical space where people can regularly assemble.

Asserting that building real human connections requires a physical environment that is welcoming and accessible to people from all walks of life, Kleinenberg identifies what conditions in our common living spaces make it more likely that people will develop strong or supportive relationships as opposed to likely bringing about isolation and lonliness.

And how does this issue apply to the topic of liberality? One of the things that social infrastructure facilitates is conversation. Klinenberg (2018, p. 42) quotes Sherry Turkle of MIT emphasizing that conversing is how people “develop the capacity for empathy …[and]… experience the joy of being heard [and] understood,” and ‘advances self- reflection, the conversations with ourselves that are the cornerstone of early development and continue throughout life.”

As I shared in my inaugural blog post, David Norton (1996), established the term “liberality”, conceiving it as a virtue entailing “the readiness to affirm truth and value in systems of belief and patterns of conduct different from one’s own” (p. ix). And along those lines, he endorsed John Kekes view of imagination as “the internal exploration of what it would be like to realize particular possibilities…” (p.2). A crucial underpinning of “affirm[ing] truth and value” in belief systems and conduct different from ours is encountering them! Coming into contact with diverse others is important because, as Norton explains, “the personal properties that make up the actuality of the other are within each of us as possibilities”(p. 9). Social infrastructure promotes such crucial and formative interactions.

Klinenberg (2018) highlights how a library is one of the few institutions in which a senior citizen might reliably encounter a range of other generations. It is also a welcoming, family-friendly institution, which one can visit without having to purchase a product as would be the case at a coffee shop, for example. The author quotes of a librarian’s observation that “the library bestows nobility on people who can’t otherwise afford a shred of it” (p. 53).

In an online course I am taking through DePaul University offered by its Institute for Daisaku Ikeda Studies in Education, I learned of a book called The Good Society (Bellah et al. 1991) in the editor’s introduction to the Fall 2018 issue of Schools: Studies in Education (Kaplan, 2018). In it, he shares the authors’ definition of an institution as “normative patterns embedded in and enforced by laws and mores (informal customs and practices)” (Bellah at al 1991, 10–11),” going on to comment, “The patterns the authors have in mind consist of the ways in which we think, feel, and behave, and these ways in turn represent our complex interactions with each other and our experience of our heritage and traditions.”

One of the forms of social infrastructure, according to Klinenberg, is in fact the school. How can its impact become more positive? In the view of Gordon and Rajagapalan (2016), U.S. public schools’ established testing patterns need to be explored, and where necessary, modified. “In America today,” they write,” we test simply to assess the productivity of the educational system. This is not helping us improved the quality of education for our diverse student populations (p. 9). They also cite the Coleman et. al report (1966), “Equality of Educational Opportunity, which sought to understand the achievement gap between black and white students in the then-segregated schools, and add that about 50 years later,

we still struggle to achieve universal high-quality educational outcomes in diverse populations. We are only just beginning to understand diversity as a far more complex and universal phenomenon than black and white; today, American students come not only from many racial, ethnic, religious, and linguistic backgrounds but, like people in all societies, they also come from different socioeconomic backgrounds and family configurations, learn in different ways, and see the world through their own unique lenses (p.9).

While critiquing that “Some prevailing measurement models are anchored to our traditional commitment to meritocratic values rather than in pursuit of democratic opportunity and do not appear to be sufficiently engaging to or inclusive of students of different backgrounds” (p. 28), Gordon and Rajagopalan positively acknowledge the Common Core State Standards “for seeking to move the education effort toward the development of ‘deeper learning’ skills, which the National Research Council (2012) describes as thinking, problem-solving, teamwork, reflection, and communication, as these mental abilities are used in and outside of school” (p. 25).

From these brief thoughts, I hope the reader also agrees that social infrastructure is an important concept, and that supporting it deserves our serious attention.

References

Bellah, Robert N., Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven M. Tipton. (1991). The Good Society. New York: Vintage.

Coleman, J. et. al (1966). Equality of Educational Opportunity. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office.

Gordon, E. W., & Rajagopalan, K. (2016). The testing and learning revolution: The future of assessments in education. New York: Palgrace Macmillan. [Chapter 2]

Kaplan, A. (2018). Editor’s introduction: The essential institution. Schools: Studies in Education, 15(2), 195-201.

Klinenberg, E (2018). Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help FIght Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life. New York, NY: Crown.

National Research Council (2012). http://www.nap.edu/catalog/13398/education-for-life-and-work-developing-transferable-knowledge-and-skills

Norton, D. (1996). Imagination, Understanding, and the Virtue of Liberality. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc.

Illuminating the Critical Role of Fostering Imagination, Especially in Adolescents, in Creating a Humane World  (A Web Essay Examining the Thoughts of David Norton)

“If we humans hope to actualize a world in which mutual respect reigns and that maximizes personal development and social contribution, then we need to engender a renaissance in our capacity to imagine.”   Such is my summary from reading the late David Norton’s  posthumously published book, Imagination, Understanding and the Virtue of Liberality.  Norton hones in on one particular aspect of imagination (to which at times he supplements with the adjectives “moral” or “transcendental”)  whose description he attributes to John Kekes — “the internal exploration of what it would be like to realize particular possibilities, such as being very rich” (p.2).  Developing this idea further, he calls on each of us to utilize our innate ability to “lend oneself to the viewpoint of another” (p.1):

When I refer to “understanding” others I mean a direct acquaintance with the way they and their worlds appear to them….[B]y “the way they and their worlds appear to them”,  I refer to the meaning for them of whatever their experience presents to them, including themselves (and us, if we appeared to them).  To understand another person or people requires that we trade places with them by what Max Scheler called “participatory enactment” of their lives…[which] is not literal; it is imaginative.   (p.2)

 Norton believes that the reason we are able to trade perspectives is “because the personal properties that make up the actuality of the other are within each of us as possibilities”(p. 9),  and that “To be human is to contain within oneself all human possibilities.  Human beings differentiate themselves culturally and individually by actualizing different possibilities, but the possibilities that are actualized by other persons are within us as possibilities and are available for participatory enactment by transcendental imagination” (p. 4).[1]  Norton believes that comparing perspectives simply in order decide which seems superior is not the wisest method: “The point is to arrive at an understanding of other peoples and persons, as well as of ourselves….Reflexively, this provides the differentiae without which we cannot know ourselves as individuals, that is, as each a distinctive among others of our kind” (p. 6).    Later, he drives home this point:

What internal knowledge of alternatives affords is recognition that other’s commitments to course of life different to one’s own may likewise be supported by good reasons.  This … condition…, termed epistemic multiplism by Michael Krausz,…obtains when to a given question there are multiple ‘admissible’ answers, each of which is supportable by reasons that are good but not conclusive, which is to say, they do not preclude admissible alternative answers.

Norton explores Krausz’s idea later on, specifically on Krausz’s observation that different conductors can evince equally convincing interpretations of the same musical composition.  For example, one conductor might favor re-creating exactly the way the music would have sounded in the composer’s day by using instruments set up in the manner of the time period it was composed, while another conductor might embrace the advantages of better-projecting modern instruments and have genuine faith that the composer, were he/she alive today, would readily accept such adjustment as an improvement.

The heart of Norton’s argument is that adolescence is the ideal stage in life for drawing upon this crucial human potential.  Unfortunately, he notes repeatedly, far too few people understand how essential this life stage is, to the extent that parents and other adults, rather than nurturing development of imagination, stifle it in their rush to judgment that it is simply a period of immaturity.

The importance of adolescence in developing understanding of perspectives different from one’s native perspective

At the outset of the extended developmental period of childhood, maintains Norton, each child unquestioningly receives his or her particular culture’s perspective;  “Thanks to the essential dependence of childhood, [all children] must be taught what to believe before they have developed the capacity for independent thought…. Initially, a child mistakes the beliefs that it is taught for the only beliefs possible, because it knows no other” (p. 20).  The later adolescent period presents the ideal opportunity for openly reassessing and questioning the assumption of infallibility of that received perspective.  “The [adolescent] child discovers the existence of true alternatives to some of its beliefs and patterns of conduct”(p. 20).  In addition, he observes, the adolescent’s instinct for independence emerges as well as a spirit of adventurousness.

Initially, the differences the child discovers are perceived by him or her as unrelated to the self, much in the way a child observes the variety of creatures at a zoo.  The combined effect of autonomy and adventurousness is to convert disconnected ‘others’ into possibilities for the self.  Adolescence poses the unrelenting question, ‘What would it be like to be this other, and that other,’ because emerging autonomy from its beginning foreshadows the problem of eventually deciding upon one’s adult course of life. “(p. 21)

If fully supported in that developmental project by care givers, the adolescent is able to explore other values and ways of viewing the world in an imaginative process that entails substituting one’s received perspective with any number of alternate ones, ideally choosing one(s) that is already exist(s) and is/are sanctioned by one’s culture. Such a project requires what Norton describes as the virtue of “liberality.” (p. 71) In that pursuit, the child is guided by what Norton calls directional questions – what is a well-lived life, and what would be the ideal life for oneself?    He writes:

• Facilitated exploration in adolescence is the breeding ground of the virtue of liberality because, as was noted in Chapter 1, adolescence explores possibilities by participatory enactment, perpetually posing to itself the question, ‘What would it be like to be this other, that other?’ and so on. Participatory enactment discloses truths and values in alternative courses of life. Then when one in due time answers for oneself the directional question, ‘Which truths and values shall I be responsible for?’ one is positioned to acknowledge the validity of alternative courses of life whose truths and values are comparably the responsibility of other persons…. The exploration of adolescence is among possibilities regarded as candidates for eventual commitment, while adult exploration is primarily within the various strands of the individual’s chosen course of life.[2]   But, alike, the quality of one’s relations with others and the soundness of one’s self-knowledge require exercise in adulthood of the imaginative capacity for participatory enactment that a well-lived adolescence cultivates. (p. 113)

He references R.M. Hare’s position (p. 9) that reflection on what an ideal life would be is necessary for manifesting moral conduct.  To “put ourselves imaginatively in the place of others in order to judge the effects of our prospective conduct upon them…we must imagine that we are in their circumstances, not as ourselves but as others, for otherwise we cannot learn ‘what it is like for him.’”  If the perspective that that person holds is very different than one’s personal perspective, then it can be imagined only by substituting the other’s perspective for one’s own, because the two are incompossible (a word he coined), meaning they cannot be held simultaneously.  One of his examples of this concept is trying to imagine a married bachelor.  Someone could clearly take on either role, or both in succession, but not simultaneously.   Even if one has never been married, it would be possible to imagine what it might be like to be so (repeating the phrase quoted earlier), “because the personal properties that make up the actuality of the other are within each of us as possibilities” (p. 9).  This capacity assists a person not only in understanding others better, but also in self-understanding;

Internal understanding of others…provides the differentiae that are a logical requirement of our individuation; it affords fuller understanding of our own qualities by showing us how they appear to others; and it apprises us by participatory enactment of unactualized possibilities in ourselves that others have actualized….To be an individuals is to be a  distinctive one among others of one’s kind, and knowledge of oneself as such entails knowledge of what one is not – the ‘is’ and the ‘is not’ mutually implicate one another.   (p. 16)

He distinguishes between “possibilities” and “potentialities”, relating the latter to the subset of possibilities that is fully aligned with one’s unique personality, those pursuits that are ideal for the individual in generating whole-hearted commitment through an innate/inner drive Norton describes as “moral necessity.”   He ties this to the Greek idea of daimon, or genius, understood as awakening to the pursuit, or mission, that one should pursue to simultaneously pave the way for deep personal satisfaction and valuable service to those around us.

Fortunately, we have expanded access into Norton’s thoughts on the nature of genius from another of his writings, “Japanese Buddhism and the American Renaissance,” published in 1993 by the Institute of Oriental Philosophy, Tokyo, Japan. In it, he calls attention to views of genius involving rigorous effort, including Thomas Edison’s definition of it as “ninety-nine percent perspiration and one percent inspiration,” and Isaac Newton’s answer to how he discovered the physical laws of the universe : “By thinking about it night and day.” He continues by observing that Emerson and Thoreau likewise both “thought about the problems associated with worthy living night and day” (p. 3).  From this he draws the insight that

If we have begun to close the supposed gap between extraordinary and ordinary native endowments, doubtless we have at the same time opened a gulf between persons who are keenly interested in one or all of the dimensions of the lives they live, and persons who exhibit much less interest, or perhaps none at all.  Nevertheless, there is a difference between the two gulfs, namely that the first is unbridgeable, the second is not. It is reasonable to suppose that persons who are uninterested in the lives they lead might be keenly interested in one or another of the many alternative possible courses that are accommodated with diversified societies such as Japan and the United States…. Emerson affirms the connection between genius and compelling interest by speaking of the former as a person’s ‘calling’ or ‘vocation.’  In his essay, ‘Spiritual Laws’, he says, ‘Each mans has his own vocation.  The talent is the call.  There is one direction in which all space is open to him. He has faculties silently inviting him thither to endless exertion.  He is like a ship on a river; he runs against obstructions on every side but one, on that side all obstruction is taken away and he sweeps serenely over a deepening channel into an infinite sea.’…To speak more literally than Emerson himself does in the metaphor of the ship sweeping to the sea, his point is not that when we are living aw we ought we encounter no difficulties.  Rather, he is noting the important distinction between difficulties that are thrust upon a person and are essentially alien to him, and difficulties that are chosen by him and recognized as aspects of himself in his work of becoming… The course of living that is right for each person enlists in him or her the commitment that living it well requires.  When a person is truly committed to the course of life he lives, he recognizes the inherent problems and difficulties in that course of life as genuinely his problems, and works with them willingly(pp. 3-5).

From that perspective, he seems to be indicating that the work of adolescence is to discover one’s genius, that course of life that he or she can wholeheartedly commit to.

Concerning possibilities, three types stand out, commensurable, incommensurable, and one he coins called “incompossible”, by which he does not mean sources of earning money!   He uses the example of evolutionary change to illustrate commensurability, in which “the past is preparation for the present and the future.  Any surprise ‘is contingent, because what was unanticipated was in principle anticipatable, and the disparity that shock registers is merely apparent.’ ” (p. 50) He then contrasts that with incommensurability —  “an alien possibility,” one which is “discontinuous with the existing world by virtue of the ‘closure’ of perspectival worlds.  In such a situation, it would seem impossible to imagine adopting another’s perspective “when the other’s preferences and situations are ‘so unlike those of myself and my present situation.’” (Norton quoting R.M. Hare, p. 9)  And, in his own words, “incommensurability exists between two belief systems that cannot be simultaneously accepted.” (p. 32) He notes (p. 9 again) how Hare resolves this dilemma by proposing that “ ‘Putting myself in someone else’s shoes does not involve supposing myself to have simultaneously two incompatible sets of properties; it involves …supposing I might lose one set and acquire another.’ “(p.9) Norton views this process to be one of substitution.  “”By the imaginative actualization of other possibilities within ourselves, we have the option of entering alternative perspectival worlds by setting aside our ‘home’ perspective and our accustomed self-understanding” (p. 33).   This demonstrates what Norton coins as incompossibility, which while acknowledging the inability of two perspectives to coexist in the same subject at the same time, does allow for two perspectives to exist sequentially in that person. Conversely stated, (p. 30)    “Between the existing world and an alien possibility, discontinuity is not merely apparent but real. To apprehend an alien possibility is merely to notice an anomaly,” while “To entertain an alien possibility…constitutes revolutionary exchange of discontinuous perspectives “ (p. 50).  From a Nichiren Buddhist perspective, this could be viewed in terms of the Ten Worlds, various conditions inherent in all life, but which are experienced singly and consecutively rather than simultaneously.  Norton points out that such an incongruity is also the basis for humor.  In that vein he quotes Santayana: “ ‘ Against the verbiage by which man persuades himself that he is the goal and acme of the universe, laughter is the proper defence.’” (p. 54)

Liberality: a powerful concept for humanity

Turning our attention back to the concept liberality, briefly mentioned earlier, Norton views it as the foremost trait for an individual to exhibit for creating a positive, multicultural world.  I found scanning the entire book for an in depth look at his understanding of liberality to be a worthwhile project:

• It is “The readiness to affirm truth and value in systems of belief and patterns of conduct different from one’s own.” (p.ix) Acquiring this trait depends “upon the exercise by humans of the imaginative capacity to lend themselves to the alternate viewpoints of others.” He suggests that the reason this capacity is so frequently lacking is due to a general failure to realize the importance of fostering imagination for enabling an improved understanding of oneself and other, especially so for the sake of nurturing young people. To the extent that this essay contributes to highlighting the importance of imagination, it will have been a success.
• Noting George Santayana’s critique of an idea originating with Plato – “that human beings will only commit themselves to truths and values that they believe to be absolute and exclusive” (p. 55) – he argues that the road to self-fulfillment does not starts with the question, “What is the truth?”, but rather, “What truths and values shall I be responsible for?” (p. 55)   Such a quest embodies the virtue of liberality. He then comments: “Liberality expresses the…proportionality of finite lives that acknowledges their finitude.” (p. 56) Continuing his examination of Santayana, he shares that that philosopher gives the name chivalry to the virtue that conjoins skepticism with commitment, and believes that moral living springs from it by virtue of “an intelligent sympathy that acknowledges the good of others as they themselves experience it.” (p. 56)
• “By the virtue of ‘liberality’ I refer to the cultivated disposition to recognize and appreciate truths and values other than one’s own. The primary thesis of previous chapters is that where others’ truths and values are incommensurable with our own, recognition and appreciation of them as the truths and values that they represent require that we lend ourselves to the viewpoint of those whose truths and values they are – we exchange our perspectival world for theirs – by the exercise of transcendental imagination. This does not preclude criticism of others’ truths and values, either by standards internal to their perspectival world or by such external standards as their compatibility with alternative truths and values, which is a purpose of this chapter to delineate. The main purpose of this chapter [Chapter 4] is to present and defend the thesis that the virtue of liberality is essential to the human sensibility that changing conditions in the world require. …I must show that the virtue of liberality does not …. [eradicate] justification for particularized commitments by individuals and groups. “ (pp. 81-2)
• “The cooperative interaction that is thus mandated [by the global nature of many of the problems that imperil human beings] requires the abandonment of insular notions of absolute national sovereignty and of an ‘atomic’ core of individuality that is independent of social relations. Such cooperation depends for its stability upon the recognition by nations, peoples, and individuals of the distinctive worth of the contributions by other nations, peoples and individuals….The supplanting sensibility rests in an appreciation of diversity that must be substantive, and for it to be such requires experience of the perspectival worlds in which various alternative sets of truths and values are the operative truths and values. Such experience is gained by exchanging our ‘home’ perspectival world for alternative perspectival worlds through the exercise of transcendental imagination. “ (p. 82)
• “In the realm of thought and belief, the great enemy of a stable and appreciatively interactive diversity is dogmatic absolutism, by which I mean the claims of peoples, parties, and individuals to exclusive possession of the whole of ultimate truth and value…. The explosive charge in dogmatic absolutism is the hostility it provokes by denigrating every alternative to itself as false, misguided, perverse, or evil…. What is needed in the realm of thought and belief is a root-and-branch discrediting of dogmatic absolutism, and more generally a severance of the conceptual and psychological linkage of the notion of exclusivity to claims to the possession of truth and value…. I intend to show that … the warranted aspiration of finite individuals and groups is not possession of the whole but to aspects of truth and value. Nonexclusivity means that good reasons for the beliefs and patterns of conduct of a people or a person do not preclude the possibility that alternative beliefs and patterns of conduct are likewise supportable by good reasons.”   (p. 83)
• “The ultimate truth about anything is the composite of alternative aspects of truth about that thing, as disclosed in complementary alternative valid perspectives upon that thing. Accordingly the pursuit of the ultimate truth is inherently a cooperative enterprise. Complementarity provides the basis for cooperation among entities in which common ground is precluded by incommensurability. It exists among alternative perspectival worlds when the betterment of each contributes indirectly to the betterment of the others, or at minimum does not detract from others’ betterment.” (83-4)

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[1] (An interesting side note is a comment I heard by an author on C-SPAN’s Book TV, Martin Amis, of a novel about Hitler.  Amis stated his belief that it is not ever possible to truly understand Hitler’s perspective, that in effect he was an anomaly.)

[2] it is interested to note a perspective presented in the book Seasons of a Man’s Life, by Daniel Levinson, in which he argues that even adults continue to reflect upon their life’s direction, especially during key transitional phases, that culminate in varying “life structures” that either reaffirm prior answers to directional questions or reach new ones that result in significant changes in life direction.