beyond wishful thinking 57and vision provides a kind of answer to the incorrigible defects in our
circumstance. Th e answer recognizes the defects as more or less real,
and more or less susceptible to redress or response. It interprets their
implications for the conduct of life.
Th e vision acquires its power to guide because it addresses what is
most disturbing in our existence: that we must die although we feel that
we should not; that we seem unable, by the light of the understanding,
to place our lives in a reliable context of meaning; that we always re-
main at the mercy of desires that are both empty and unlimited and
that pursue us until our fi nal end; and that little or nothing that we can
do with our lives seems adequate to our context- transcending powers.
Th e position that we take with respect to these problems acquires pre-
scriptive authority. It enjoys such force both because of their intrinsic
importance and because the way in which we deal with them has con-
sequences for every other aspect of our experience.
Th e distinction between the is and the ought, between description
(or explanation) and prescription, has force with respect to views about
part of our experience. However, it ceases to be feasible and legitimate
when we must deal if not with the whole of our experience at least with
its general contours, with the limits that give it its disconcerting and
mysterious shape.
Any account of the irremediable defects in our experience will have
a pragmatic horizon. We cannot infer from such an account a canon of
rules and standards by which to conduct ourselves. It will nevertheless
orient our lives in some directions and away from others. It will appear
to us to be invested with the power of an existential imperative.
Conversely, any such imperative will presuppose or imply a way of
dealing with the major fl aws in our existence. Our practiced view of
how to live will reveal better than our professed doctrines how we un-
derstand our situation in the world and what we make of its defects.
Only when we shift the focus from the whole of a situation to a region
of our experience, only when we begin to address discrete problems
and to parse isolated arguments, will the distinction between the is and
the ought again start to make sense.
An analogy helps clarify the problem. In the tradition of physics in-
augurated by Newtonian mechanics, no distinction carries greater
weight in the structure of explanation than the diff erence between the