On the Integrity of Life
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locality, or autonomy. Our sensibilities can be in conflict, as when (say) a demand for justice conflicts with sympathy or benevolence. The facts of finite life are such that basic goods often conflict with social goods; a range of desires arising in finite life – lust and greed no less than hunger or fear –
can undercut social relations. Starvation and threat of disease lead to social breakdown. The demand for social stability, as we know from totalitarian societies, can thwart reflective goods of meaningful cultural forms.oppressive societies there is the demand to accept social and political ideo- (^12) In
logy in order to survive and thereby to demean the human drive for under-standing. In an analogous way, highly consumerist societies stimulate reflexive processes through the media and the market in order to heighten the need for social, natural, and basic goods – they stimulate the desire for
recognition or the pangs of needs, for instance. These forms of technological, systemic, and reflexive overhumanization threaten the realm of goods needed for human and non-human life to flourish.It is the task of the humanist, of any sort, to resist and to expose these
evils. Edward Said correctly states that the humanist “intellectual is perhaps a kind of countermemory, with its own counterdiscourse that will not allow conscience to look away or fall asleep.”render people mute, silent, before concealed powers that structure the lived (^13) One has to combat forces that
experience of reality and therefore also bring to articulation the demands of life at their most resonant experiential level. While we can isolate a range of goods that saturate finite, social, natural, and reflective life as well as discern within them the pull, the claim, of moral requirements, actual life
is nevertheless riddled with conflict. The integrity we seek and desire is thwarted and thus life is wrapped in a sense of disintegration, the sense or taste of forms of death.This provokes another level of reflection. How might the various goods
and demands of life be integrated rightly? And how does this problem relate to the idea of the city to act as a whole within and beyond these conflicts, is there some prin-ciple of choice, an imperative of responsibility, which ought to guide human integrity of life? More pointedly, since freedom is the capa-
actions and relations?Responsibility and Spiritual Integrity
The conflicts among and between basic, social, natural, and reflective goods and the conflict between the often inarticulate motivations of life (pleasure/pain/sympathy; recognition/shame/benevolence; innocence/guilt/justice,