becoming more human by becoming more godlike 345
the ought: between the description of what our circumstance is, or
might become, and the defense of a way to live, given this circumstance.
By inferring a prescriptive conception from a view of the facts of the
matter— the truth about our identity and our situation in the world— we
would be violating a distinction indispensable to clarity of thought.
Th is supposed rule of inference is attributed, with only limited justifi -
cation, to Hume, who himself derived an ethic of altruism and fellow
feeling from a view of human nature but who rightly refused to let the
inference pass undisguised in the equivocal use of words about what is
and what should be.
As our beliefs about our identities and our situation in the world
become more comprehensive, the distinction between description and
prescription begins to lose pertinence. Th e only general reasons that we
could ever have for directing our lives in one way rather than another
are those that give us cause to accept, to resist, or to revise our wants,
desires, and aspirations, as we experience them. Such reasons give us
grounds for action by proposing or by presupposing a view of our na-
ture and of our place in the world. To root an existential imperative— an
orientation to life— in a vision of who we are in relation to the world
(even if it is an anti- metaphysical metaphysics, like the vision animat-
ing classical Confucianism) is a pervasive and per sis tent feature of our
religious experience, both aft er and before the emergence of the higher
religions. It becomes as well a characteristic of philosophy insofar as
philosophy comes to share in the concerns of religion or to conceive the
dangerous ambition of replacing it.
Th e eff ort rigidly to distinguish the is from the ought makes sense in
the setting of local arguments about what to do or not to do in a certain
circumstance, at a par tic u lar time. However, this distinction begins to
break down as we approach the horizon of comprehensive views about
our situation in the world and about how best to respond to it. One way
to understand why it breaks down under these conditions is to recall
the analogy to natural philosophy suggested in the fi rst chapter of this
book.
A dominant practice of explanation in the tradition of science inau-
gurated by Galileo and Newton is the distinction that this practice of
scientifi c explanation makes between stipulated initial conditions and
a confi guration space defi ned by those conditions. Within such a space,