The significant concepts of Walter Kaufmann's book "Without Guilt and Justice." The New Integrity as a way to live one's life. Hopefully in an interesting and readable format.

1. WITHOUT GUILT AND JUSTICE
Walter Kaufmann. New York, NY: Peter H. Wyden,
Inc./Publisher, 1973.
(for Alexander Solzhenitsyn)

2. Decide-a-phobia
■ To those whose minds are not liberated, wars,
revolutions, and radical movements will never bring freedom but only an
exchange of one kind of slavery for another.
■ That is one of the most tragic lessons of the 20th century.
■ Liberation of the mind is no panacea, but without it angry rhetoric and
cruel bloodbaths are of no avail, and tyranny endures.
■ Most of those who see themselves as radicals and revolutionaries still
cling to decrepit ideas like justice and equality and
depend on guilt and fear, as our fathers and
mothers did.
■ What we need is a new, autonomous morality.
6/30/2018 jpgillis@umich.edu 2

3. Decide-a-phobia
■ Humanity craves but dreads autonomy. One does
not want to live under the yoke of guilt and fear.
■ Autonomy consists of making with open eyes the decisions that give
shape to one’s life. But being afraid to make fateful decisions, one hides
from autonomy and becomes side-tracked away from having to make
those decisions.
■ The difference between making these decisions (that govern our lives)
with our eyes open versus somehow avoiding this is all-important.
■ It is important to be specific and concrete. Talk of
“freedom” immediately invites irrelevant questions
about “freedom.” “Autonomy” has fewer associations.
■ The fear of autonomy is a nameless dread, which
leaves me free to coin a name for it: decidophobia.
6/30/2018 jpgillis@umich.edu 3

4. Ten Strategies of Decision-Avoidance.
1. Religion. Religion liberates people from having to make fateful
decisions. The most obvious illustration of this is monasticism.
2. Drifting. Instead of choosing how to live, with whom, where, what
to do, one simply drifts along in the status quo. Sometimes one needs
alcohol or tranquilizers to cope. Or one drops out. Not guided by
tradition, one lives from moment to moment. Camus: The Stranger.
3. Allegiance to a movement. “Of necessity, the party man becomes a
liar,” said Nietzsche. “By lie I mean: wishing not to see something that
one does see; wishing not to see something as one sees it.”
4. Allegiance to a school of thought. Unlike with a movement, this one
is quite unselfconscious and perhaps even denied outright. Hard to say
what exactly they believe, but they rarely find it difficult to say who
does not belong to their school of thought. Interpretation is important.
6/30/2018 jpgillis@umich.edu 4

5. Ten Strategies of Decision-Avoidance.
5. Exegetical thinking. Interpretation is inevitable; exegetical thinking
is not. Exegetical thinking assumes that the text that one interprets
is right. The interpreter is sometimes wrong, but never the text. This
thinking permits the exegete to read his own ideas into a text (like
the bible or the constitution) and get them back endowed with authority.
6. Manichaeism. The Manichaean insists on a decision, but the decision
is loaded and practically makes itself. All good is on one side, all evil
on the other. Falsification of history is used as a crutch; and
uncomfortable arguments are discredited as coming from the forces of
evil. Black & white.
7. Moral rationalism. This claims that purely rational procedures can
show what one ought to do. No room is left for tragic quandaries or
fateful choices. An inadequate conception of reason and responsibility.
6/30/2018 jpgillis@umich.edu 5

6. Ten Strategies of Decision-Avoidance.
8. Pedantry. Creeping microscope-ism; as long as one remains
absorbed in microscopic distinctions, one is in no great danger of
coming face to face with fateful decisions.
9. The Wave of the Future. Actually, the faith that one is riding the wave
of the future. Always backed up by force majeure. To avoid this
dizziness, people have always found it tempting to believe in a divine
government, the stars, or “History.” Solzhenitsyn calls upon his readers
to reject the false faith in the wave of the future and to make decisions
for themselves, fearlessly.
10. Marriage. The man who boasts of making all the big decisions while
leaving all the small ones to his wife may admit (when asked) that big
decisions concern what we should do about China; small decisions deal
with such matters as buying a house and where to live.
6/30/2018 jpgillis@umich.edu 6

7. The Autonomous Person
■ The autonomous individual does not treat his own conclusions and
decisions as authoritative but chooses with his eyes open, and then keeps
them open. He (or she) has the courage to admit that he may have been
wrong about matters of the greatest importance. He (or she) objects to the
ten strategies (of decision-avoidance) not on account of their
psychological origins but because they preclude uninhibited self-criticism.
■ “The autonomous individual, striving to realize himself and prove his
worth, has created all that is great in literature, art, music, science, and
technology. The autonomous individual, also, when he can neither realize
himself nor justify his existence by his own efforts, is a breeding call of
frustration, and the seed of all the convulsions which shake our world to
its foundations.
6/30/2018 7
Walter Kaufmann
“A very popular error: having the courage of one’s
convictions; rather it is a matter of having the courage
for an attack on one’s convictions.” Nietzsche
Eric Hoffer
jpgillis@umich.edu

8. Autonomy
■ The first major task of adulthood is to establish autonomy. An
individual’s ability to achieve personal autonomy is crucial for personal
maturation. James Fowler, a developmental psychologist describes
personal autonomy as:
■ …a person who has a sense of independence, an ability to stand alone,
if necessary, on matters of principle. She has clear identity boundaries
that make it possible to say a clear no or a clear yes, without undue
coldness and distance on the one hand or an excessively compliant
closeness on the other hand. (Fowler)
6/30/2018 jpgillis@umich.edu 8

9. Two Examples of Autonomy
■ Eleanor Roosevelt did not let her difficult marriage to one of
the strongest personalities in the world destroy her own will
and spirit. She never simply accepted his political or moral views, nor
those of the Democratic Party. She kept her own counsel and after his
death showed all the world what it meant to be autonomous, using
every resource at her command for the benefit of those who needed
help.
■ …and Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Rarely has it been so difficult for any
man to stand alone, utterly alone, without a prop of any kind. The First
Circle, Cancer Ward, Solzhenitsyn: A Documentary Record,
and August 1914 show how he succeeded in resisting all ten
temptations, making one fateful decision after another against
seemingly insuperable odds.
6/30/2018 jpgillis@umich.edu 9

10. Guilt and Justice
■ The road to autonomy is blocked by a two-headed dragon. One head is
Guilt, the other is Justice. Justice roars: “You have no right to decide for
yourself; you have been told what is good, right, and just. There is one
righteous road, and there are many unrighteous ones. Turn back and seek
justice.”
■ Guilt has a thousand eyes to swallow you,
and the lids above and below each are lined
with poison fangs. Turn back: autonomy is
sacrilege.
6/30/2018 jpgillis@umich.edu 10

11. Retributive Justice
■ Punishments can never be just.
■ Even if a punishment could be proportionate, it would not follow that it
should be imposed.
■ The preoccupation with retributive justice is inhumane.
6/30/2018 jpgillis@umich.edu 11

12. Retributive Justice
■ The conception of justice that underlies retributive and distributive justice
is the same: distributions and punishments are considered “just” when
each gets what he (or she) deserves, and unjust when this is not the case.
■ When Napoleon was in St. Helena, Thomas Jefferson said of him, in a
letter:
6/30/2018 jpgillis@umich.edu 12
The penance he is now doing for all his atrocities must be
soothing to every virtuous heart. It proves that we have a god
in heaven. That he is just, and not careless of what passes in
this world. And we cannot but wish to this inhuman wretch, a
long, long life, that time as well as intensity may fill up his
sufferings to the measure of his enormities. But indeed
what sufferings can atone for his crimes…!

13. Retributive Justice is Dying
■ There is a Manichaean streak in the Gospels: the enemy is
beyond the protection of proportionality. “If he will not listen, the worst
punishment is still too good for him.”
■ Liberals are appalled by such cruelty and favor a sense of
proportion, certainly as far as rewards are concerned; but when
it comes to punishment, they are confused. It certainly should
not be disproportionate.
■ But liberals prefer to think of justice as having nothing to do
with anything as unpleasant as punishment. In one context
they uphold the superiority of love and speak of justice as transcended by
Christianity. In another, they are all for justice and associate it with causes
they believe in. In short, they usually opt for distributive justice.
6/30/2018 jpgillis@umich.edu 13

14. Why Retributive Justice is Dying…
■ First, attitudes towards criminals have changed to the point where the
demand not to hate them but to remain mindful of their humanity no
longer sounds utopian.
■ Second, we have developed a kind of second sight. To say that we
have become more perceptive in psychological matters would be an
understatement, not because our age is so perceptive, which it is not,
but rather because the psychological obtuseness that prevailed until
quite recently is almost unbelievable.
■ It is not surprising that this (second) insight is much less popular than
the first approach, which goes so well with the liberal faith in humanity.
But even where this second approach is not accepted explicitly, it has
come to color our way of thinking.
6/30/2018 jpgillis@umich.edu 14

15. Why Retributive Justice is Dying…
■ The crucial point is that the admission that some punishments are cruel
and unusual does not commit one to the view that for every crime there is
a proportionate and hence deserved and just penalty. I will try to show in
the next chapter that there is no just punishment for any crime.
■ Moral rationalists “reason” that certain crimes demand certain penalties.
■ Moral irrationalists rely on authority – God’s revelation or the law.
■ An autonomous human being uses reason to eliminate various
alternatives, but finds that still he (or she) is left with several positions
from which he must make a choice.
■ He (or she) may have little doubt that his choice is better than many that
are clearly inferior, but he will not have the arrogance to claim that the
penalty he chooses is the one that is proportionate, deserved, and just.
6/30/2018 jpgillis@umich.edu 15

16. Why Retributive Justice is Dying…
■ Neither primitive tribes nor antiquity match the cruelty that gradually
developed in the penal codes of Christian Europe. Ancient Rome went the
same way, and was far crueler in the end than in early days.
■ In Mexico none of the earlier civilizations matched the cruelty of the last
one, the Aztecs. And the five books of Moses have no inkling of the
Gospels’ eternal torment or the tortures of the Inquisition.
■ The last point that needs to be made about retributive justice can be put
into three words: desert is incalculable. Not only is it impossible to
measure just desert with the sort of precision on which many believers in
retributive justice staked their case, but the whole concept of a man’s
desert is confused and untenable.
■ This claim is as fatal for distributive justice as it is for retributive justice.
6/30/2018 jpgillis@umich.edu 16

17. Now an Attack on Distributive Justice…
6/30/2018 jpgillis@umich.edu 17

18. Attack on Distributive Justice
■ Justice has been the heart of traditional morality.
■ The death of the traditional justice marks the end of the old morality.
But it also creates an opening for a new, autonomous morality.
■ What is wrong with the concept of desert? The answer is that it is not
clear whether desert should be determined in accordance with ability,
need, or merit, or whether all men ought to be treated equally.
■ Here are seven “in accordance” categories to consider:
 The first category is what one is. Treating people differently on
account of their sex or ethnic clearly can be unjust, but it is far from
obvious that these two characteristics are always irrelevant.
 The second category is what one has. Here one may include
property, family, and abilities. All three are often relevant.
6/30/2018 jpgillis@umich.edu 18

19. Attack on Distributive Justice
■ Justice has been the heart of traditional morality.
■ The death of the traditional justice marks the end of the old morality.
But it also creates an opening for a new, autonomous morality.
■ What is wrong with the concept of desert? The answer is that it is not
clear whether desert should be determined in accordance with ability,
need, or merit, or whether all men ought to be treated equally.
■ Here are seven “in accordance” categories to consider:
 The third category is what one does – not only at work, but also in
public life, in one’s family, and on one’s own.
 The fourth category, what one needs, includes one’s needs for
oneself and for one’s dependents. Four subheads: for subsistence,
for comfort, for a particular project, and for optimal development.
6/30/2018 jpgillis@umich.edu 19

20. Attack on Distributive Justice
■ Justice has been the heart of traditional morality.
■ The death of the traditional justice marks the end of the old morality.
But it also creates an opening for a new, autonomous morality.
■ What is wrong with the concept of desert? The answer is that it is not
clear whether desert should be determined in accordance with ability,
need, or merit, or whether all men ought to be treated equally.
■ Here are seven “in accordance” categories to consider:
 The fifth category, what one desires, is ignored in most cases. This
is clearly relevant in some cases, unless we assume that a person
often deserves a reward though he does not desire it at all.
 The sixth category is what one has contracted. If one has
received a formal contract or a promise, this category is relevant.
6/30/2018 jpgillis@umich.edu 20

21. Attack on Distributive Justice
■ Justice has been the heart of traditional morality.
■ The death of the traditional justice marks the end of the old morality.
But it also creates an opening for a new, autonomous morality.
■ What is wrong with the concept of desert? The answer is that it is not
clear whether desert should be determined in accordance with ability,
need, or merit, or whether all men ought to be treated equally.
■ Here are seven “in accordance” categories to consider:
 The seventh category is what one has done. (e.g., education,
military service, civilian jobs (kinds, longevity, achievements), public
services and offices, extracurricular accomplishments (lives saved,
publications, prizes), sufferings (since one may deserve extra
compensation for them), and crimes.
6/30/2018 jpgillis@umich.edu 21

22. Equal Opportunity
■ Equality of opportunity is a slogan, and those who employ it
are not really in favor of the means required to bring it about.
■ Men (and women) are not equal. Men (and women) should not be made
equal. Equality of opportunity is either a hollow cliché or a pernicious goal.
■ That equality is a myth does not entail any bigotry. On the contrary, bigots
assume that all Jews are equal – or all African Americans, Germans, or
women. My point is that no two men or women are alike. Each should be
considered as an individual.
■ Giving the same to all is not particularly reasonable, seeing that they are
not alike, do not have the same desires, and cannot all use the same
things or opportunities.
6/30/2018 jpgillis@umich.edu 22

23. Has Justice Been Done?
■ Problems of distributive justice do not arise unless
something that is desired by many is too scarce to
satisfy all. While it is possible to disappoint all, it is usually impossible to
please all.
■ And even if everybody should be pleased, it would not follow that each got
what he (or she) deserved.
■ Even when the decision about distribution is the same, it makes a
difference whether we tell those who are “not admitted” or “not promoted,”
that justice has been done, or whether we realize how absurd such a
claim would be.
■ In the latter case we might say: “These were our criteria, which are
obviously debatable. In time we shall probably revise them. Meanwhile we
have done our best.
6/30/2018 jpgillis@umich.edu 23

24. Has Justice Been Done?
■ Continual talk of a “just peace” is not merely
unproductive but positively harmful. Just solutions
are unattainable and cannot even be imagined.
■ Hence one can go on talking about justice and a just peace without
committing oneself to anything; and while holding out for a “just peace”
one usually feels that until one gets what one demands one is entitled to
go on waging a “just war.”
■ We know neither God nor the devil; we are beset by an endless number of
devils – “No worst, there is none.”* To fight evil without the illusion that it
is the greatest ever, to choose the lesser evil without the faith that it
surely is the least evil, to endure darkness without the boast that none
could be blacker, and to create more light without the comfort of excessive
hopes – that requires courage and autonomy.
6/30/2018 jpgillis@umich.edu 24
* Gerard Manley Hopkins

25. The Birth of Guilt and Justice
6/30/2018 jpgillis@umich.edu 25

26. Guilt and Justice
■ “It is perfectly true that you hardly ever actually beat me. But the shouting,
the way your face turned red and you hurriedly loosened your suspenders,
their lying ready over the back of the chair, were almost worse for me….
■ “When one has to live through all the preparations for one’s own hanging
and learns of one’s pardon only when the noose hangs in front of one’s
eyes, one may suffer from this experience for the rest of one’s life.
■ “Moreover, from these many times when, according to your clearly
manifest opinion, I deserved a thrashing but, owing to your grace, barely
escaped it, I accumulated a profound sense of guilt.”
6/30/2018 jpgillis@umich.edu 26
A passage from Franz Kafka’s “Letter to the Father”

27. Guilt and Justice
■ What is the origin of the notion that we sometimes deserve
punishments or rewards? What is the source of this idea of
justice? Is the idea of justice perhaps born of guilt feelings?
■ Suppose some penalties had been proclaimed for certain deeds, and then
the penalties were not inflicted, for whatever reason. Is it felt in cases of
this sort that some “negative event” is still required, or deserved. “You’ve
got it coming to you” sort of thing?
■ Or suppose you had been punished for something, but now someone has
done the same thing without being punished?
■ Here is the origin of justice. The source of the idea that a reward or
punishment is deserved is – a promise. And what is felt to be deserved, is
what was promised.
6/30/2018 jpgillis@umich.edu 27

28. Guilt and Justice
■ The notion that rewards or punishments can be deserved, and often
are deserved, is not born in the minds of sophisticated adults, nor is it the
result of careful critical reflection or painstaking inferences.
■ We acquire this notion as children, long before we have learned to think
critically about moral questions. What matters is that a child is given to
understand that one can count on some reward or punishment, and that
the child has some respect for the those who arouse this expectation.
■ What is essential is merely that one “looks up to” those who make the
crucial promise. Criticism and reproaches from those whom a child does
not respect tend to be shrugged off even when they are quite harsh, while
a casual rebuke from a person one respects greatly is felt to be crushing,
and often never forgotten.
6/30/2018 jpgillis@umich.edu 28

29. Guilt and Justice
■ The initial sense of what is deserved is usually unsubtle and
insensitive. It depends on some authority – a parent, teacher, priest, or
ruler – who tells people that this is the way things are, that if you do, or fail
to do, this, then you must expect and you deserve that.
■ This is the birth of justice – the beginning of the first stage of development.
■ Liberal parents inculcate guilt feelings in their children by telling them they
deserve to be punished, and then suspending the punishment. The usual
pattern is to say: “If I had done something like this, I’d have been punished
severely; and while that’s what you deserve, I’d never do that to you.”
■ If one wants to breed guilt feelings in one’s children, this is the surest way
to do it. But if one wants to liberate oneself and the future from the tyranny
of guilt, one has to understand how guilt is bred and born.
6/30/2018 jpgillis@umich.edu 29

30. Against Guilt
6/30/2018 jpgillis@umich.edu 30

31. Guilt
■ With the death of justice, the tyranny of guilt comes to
an end. For without justice there is no guilt.
■ To say that anyone is, or feels, guilty is to say that he
(or she) deserves or feels that he (or she) deserves,
punishment.
■ Once it is seen that nobody deserves punishment, it follows that nobody is
guilty or should feel guilty.
■ It may be a fact that in some cases a person is guilty. But that fact is that
he (or she) has done wrong – possibly a grievous wrong. It does not follow
that he (or she) “deserves punishment.”
■ As long as we continue to call people “guilty,” we shall not get rid of guilt
feelings.
6/30/2018 jpgillis@umich.edu 31

32. Assumptions (wrong)
1. Guilt feelings are necessary for the moral health of those who
have done something immoral. Remorse is held to be part of
the punishment they deserve, or at the very least a
prerequisite for reform. “Shame, shame, that’s your name…”
2. Guilt feelings are held to be something one owes those whom
one has wronged. Such feelings are supposed to restore, at least in part,
an interpersonal balance. “Hey, don’t feel guilty about it…no problem.”
3. Guilt feelings are necessary for the protection of society. If they did not
know that punishment was certain even if they should not be caught, it is
believed they would behave even worse than they do anyway. “If you
didn’t think you would be caught, what else would stop you…?”
6/30/2018 jpgillis@umich.edu 32

33. Yes, but…
■ “As the guilt feeling fell silent, Melanie lost the possibility of
atonement by way of a newly gained authentic relation to her
environment that would have allowed her best qualities to
unfold. The price paid for the annihilation of the thorn [of
remorse] was the irrevocable annihilation of the chance of becoming that
being which this creature, in accordance with her highest predispositions,
had been destined to become.”
■ Are guilt feelings a prerequisite of reform? No pain, no gain?
■ Guilt feelings are a contagious disease that harms those who harbor them
and endangers those who live close to them. Surely, self-criticism and a
social conscience can survive the death of guilt. The good effects that are
claimed for guilt feelings can be had without this poison.
6/30/2018 jpgillis@umich.edu 33
Martin Buber

34. Against Guilt
■ Those who assume they must feel guilty until someone else forgives them
are clearly not autonomous. They look to someone else to remove their
guilt. Others, refusing to lean on anyone else, find
nobody to grant them forgiveness and feel guilty for
the rest of their lives.
■ It is nobler to blame and resent oneself than to blame
and resent others, but it is nobler yet to rise above
resentment.
6/30/2018 jpgillis@umich.edu 34

35. Alienation
6/30/2018 jpgillis@umich.edu 35

36. “Growing Up”
■ Alienation in the sense considered here is part of growing up.
Self-consciousness cannot develop without it.
■ Not only is the world “other” (to that extent, alienation is entailed logically
by the development of self-consciousness), but the world is also
extremely strange and cruel. Hence, as perception increases, any
sensitive person will feel a deep sense of estrangement.
■ Seeing how society is riddled with dishonesty, stupidity, and brutality, he
(or she) will feel separated from society, and seeing how most of one’s
fellows are not deeply troubled by all this, he (or she) will feel separated
(or estranged) from them.
6/30/2018 jpgillis@umich.edu 36

37. “Growing Up”
■ The truth of the matter is that things are and have always
been terrible (in the world). And alienation has always
been the price of autonomy.
■ In brief, the sense of alienation has spread with the unprecedented
expansion of education. If the world and the societies we live in are, and
always have been, abhorrent, brutal, and cruel, then it follows that the
more one comes to know about them, the less one can feel at home in
them.
■ With an increase in self-consciousness and sensitivity, the sense of
alienation deepens.
6/30/2018 jpgillis@umich.edu 37

38. The Painted Bird
6/30/2018 jpgillis@umich.edu 38
In The Painted Bird, Jerzy Kosinski has
not only given us a shattering picture
of a peasant society, but also one of
the finest symbols of alienation to be
found in world literature. He tells of a
bird catcher who occasionally amused
himself by choosing the strongest bird
from his cages , painting it in rainbow
hues, squeezing it to make it twitter
and attract a flock of its own species,
and finally setting it free. One by one,
the drab birds would attack the
painted bird until it dropped to the
ground, soaked in blood.

39. Philosophers as Deeply Alienated Persons
■ Descartes lost his mother when he was one year old; Spinoza was six
when his mother died, and Leibniz six when his father died.
■ Nothing seems to be known about Hobbes’s mother, but his father
abandoned him when he was quite small, and he was brought up by an
uncle. Hume’s father died when he was three; Pascal’s mother when he
was three.
■ Rousseau’s mother died soon after his birth, and when he was ten his
father left him. Kant and Hegel lost their mothers at thirteen; Bentham lost
his at eleven. Schopenhauer was seventeen when his father committed
suicide after having shown for some time “symptoms of mental alienation.”
■ Nietzsche was four when he lost his father. Russell’s mother died when he
was two, his father two years later. And Sartre lost his father at two.
6/30/2018 jpgillis@umich.edu 39

40. The Stranger
■ In the discussion of decide-a-phobia, I showed how any
confrontation with fateful alternatives engenders dread, and
how the “craving for community of worship” is prompted by
the craving to eliminate such confrontations.
■ The stranger is an incarnate alternative. That goes not only for the Jew or
heretic in a Christian society, but also for the alienated individual in a
community.
■ Indeed, the “herd” man finds it easier to tolerate the nonconformists who
are members of another, smaller “herd” than to suffer those who stand
alone. The autonomous man (or woman) is a living provocation. Usually
he (or she) is forgiven only after he (or she) is dead.
6/30/2018 jpgillis@umich.edu 40

41. The New Integrity
6/30/2018 jpgillis@umich.edu 41

42. The New Integrity
■ In our time one concept of integrity is being replaced by another. This
development is at the heart of the contemporary revolution in morality.
■ The old idea was closely linked to justice, while the new integrity involves
autonomy.
■ The word comes from the Latin in and tangere and it means
“untouched,” “unimpaired” (i.e. whole).
■ Our first association with integrity is honesty. Intellectual integrity
is a synonym of intellectual honesty.
■ A misconception of honesty is that it is a synonym for sincerity. It is not.
It is also not frankness.
■ And true honesty, like courage, comes in degrees.
6/30/2018 jpgillis@umich.edu 42

43. High Standards of Honesty
■ High standards of honesty mean that a person has a conscience about
what he (or she) says and what he (or she) believes.
■ High standards of honesty mean that a person takes some trouble to
determine what speaks for and against a view, what the alternatives are,
what speaks for and against each alternative, and what (at the
end of the day) is the most acceptable view on these grounds.
■ This is the heart of rationality, the essence of scientific method, and
the meaning of intellectual integrity. I shall call it the canon.
■ The practice of the canon can become a habit, and become “instinctive.”
Virtues are habits. They can be acquired and developed by practice.
6/30/2018 jpgillis@umich.edu 43

44. The Canon
■ Confronted with a proposition, view, belief, hypothesis, or
conviction (one’s own or another person’s), those with high
standards of honesty apply the canon, which commands us
to ask seven questions:
1. What does this mean?
2. What speaks for it, and…
3. What speaks against it?
4. What alternatives are available?
5. What speaks for and…
6. What speaks against each alternative?
7. What is the most plausible action in the light of these
considerations?
6/30/2018 jpgillis@umich.edu 44

45. The New Integrity
■ The consideration of alternatives is crucial but often neglected. It is
pleasant to pay homage to the acute insights of others; it is less pleasant
to spell out the defects of significant alternatives, especially to their
advocates.
■ Those who live up to the canon criteria exemplify intellectual integrity.
But the new integrity requires one additional quality. One must put into
practice what one believes.
■ One might say: “This alternative stands up under scrutiny, and that one
does not; but I’m going to act according to the one that does not.”
■ Those who have the new integrity have intellectual integrity and also live
in accordance with it. Thus practice is integrated with theory.
6/30/2018 jpgillis@umich.edu 45

46. The New Integrity
■ The new integrity goes beyond any ordinary conception of honesty.
Even when honesty is not confused with sincerity or frankness, it could be
that a person did not take any pains to investigate a question and
therefore does not know the answer, but has an opinion anyway.
■ He (or she) may be lazy and reluctant to exert the effort.
■ The new integrity involves not only high standards of honesty, but also
enough courage and humility/ambition to apply the canon to the most
important questions facing us.
■ Thus the new integrity involves autonomy.
■ Autonomy consists of making with our eyes open the decisions which
govern our lives, and choosing responsibly means that one weighs
alternatives. One does not bow to authority. One decides for oneself.
6/30/2018 jpgillis@umich.edu 46

47. The New Integrity
■ Those who apply the canon do not have to believe that we
ought to act in accordance with an equal concern for all human
beings, or that all partiality to ourselves is irrational.
■ They might actually conclude that it is impossible to act with an equal
concern for all human beings, and that it is quite rational to give some
priority to one’s children, spouse, parents, friends, or pupils – and even to
oneself.
■ I have to see to it that I get some sleep; I cannot be equally concerned
that everyone else does.
■ My view is that the adoption of love as a cardinal virtue is tenable, but not
required by reason; that a social conscience is desirable though not
entailed by rationality; and that, in brief, autonomy is not enough.
6/30/2018 jpgillis@umich.edu 47

48. The New Integrity
■ The various strategies of decide-a-phobia are at odds with
integrity. But one can belong to a religion or movement without
sacrificing high standards of honesty.
■ Not all who belong conform; nor does belonging preclude alienation – one
can feel deeply alienated from one’s fellow members.
■ It is possible to imagine a society in which high standards of honesty
would be so greatly admired that those who lived by them would be
esteemed on that account, and not resented. But that is not how people
actually are, nor are there signs that within our lifetime people will become
that way.
■ Meanwhile it is a fact of life that people who live by the canon reap
alienation, and their nonconformity is resented.
6/30/2018 jpgillis@umich.edu 48

49. The New Integrity
■ Since the new integrity consists of asking seven questions,
it cannot rest content with a wholly superficial and one-
dimensional answer to the question: “What does this mean?”
■ Not only must we occasionally ask whether the claims of other people
mean more to them than they themselves realize, but we also have to
push this question regarding our own beliefs.
■ This is often difficult, but by no means impossible. People who never ask
themselves questions like this are not making enough effort to overcome
self-deception, and to that extent lack high standards of honesty.
6/30/2018 jpgillis@umich.edu 49
“Whoever has completed successfully the education for truthfulness
toward himself is permanently immune against the danger of immorality,
even if his standard of morality should differ in some ways from what is
customary in society.”
Sigmund Freud

50. The New Honesty
■ Honesty in the sense of a sustained attack on self-deception
is the most modern aspect of the new integrity. It is familiar in
the works of Gide and Sartre and a host of other 20th century writers.
■ We can trace it back beyond Freud and Nietzsche to Goethe’s
Mephistopheles, whose wit keeps exposing Faust’s romantic self-
deceptions.
■ Earlier than that, we find little of this ethos. Sophocles’ Oedipus is a
towering exception. The truth he seeks is the truth about himself, while
Creon, Tiresias, and his wife-mother keep advising him that his happiness
depends on not finding out. His high standards of honesty alienate him
from his environment, and his integrity proves his undoing.
6/30/2018 jpgillis@umich.edu 50

51. Are Autonomy and Happiness Compatible?
6/30/2018 jpgillis@umich.edu 51
Honor
Integrity
Having Fun
Seeking Knowledge

52. Are Autonomy and Happiness Compatible?
■ Definition of HAPPINESS
1 obsolete : good fortune : PROSPERITY
“…all happiness bechance to thee.”
—William Shakespeare
2a: a state of well-being and contentment : JOY
2b: a pleasurable or satisfying experience • I wish you
every happiness in life.
“I had the happiness of seeing you.”
—W. S. Gilbert
3: FELICITY, APTNESS • a striking happiness of expression
6/30/2018 jpgillis@umich.edu 52

53. Are Autonomy and Happiness Compatible?
■ Brief spans of happiness in the narrow sense are compatible with
autonomy. No matter how high a person’s standards, there is no reason to
doubt that he (or she) can relax occasionally.
■ One may see scenery of such extraordinary beauty that he (or she)
temporarily feels nothing but intense delight. Love also offers short spans
of such happiness, even though long-term it is more complicated.
■ And there are many less intense examples – an early morning walk,
seeing a flower or a fine tree, a drink of cold water, or biting into a crisp
apple.
6/30/2018 jpgillis@umich.edu 53

54. Are Autonomy and Happiness Compatible?
■ Always being happy in this way is not compatible with autonomy. It should
be fairly obvious that always being happy in this way is not compatible
with being human.
■ Pleasure depends on some contrast. Even as the same temperature may
be experienced as warm or cold, the same sensations may be
experienced as pleasant or unpleasant, depending on what went before.
■ The question still remains, however, whether a life dedicated to the
maximizing of pleasure and the minimizing of pain and discomfort is
compatible with autonomy?
■ It also could be put this way: Are liberty and the
pursuit of happiness (in this sense) compatible?
6/30/2018 jpgillis@umich.edu 54

55. Are Autonomy and Happiness Compatible?
■ Those who wish to escape as far as possible from pain and discomfort will
try to avoid alienation and seek membership in a community that makes it
unnecessary to face fateful and terrifying decisions all alone.
■ They will opt for some of the strategies of decide-a-phobia rather than the
new integrity. Thus the pursuit of happiness in the narrow sense is
incompatible with autonomy.
■ “Everybody wants the same, everybody
is the same: whoever feels different
goes voluntarily into a madhouse”* (or at
least to a psychiatrist.)
6/30/2018 jpgillis@umich.edu 55
* Nietzsche in Zarathustra

56. Are Autonomy and Happiness Compatible?
■ Cloudless contentment is not open to man, and if he (or she) trades his
freedom and integrity for it, the time will come when she feels cheated.
■ This does not mean that he (or she) will openly regret the bargain. Most
people have failed to cultivate their critical perception of their own present
position and of the alternatives they might have chosen; precisely this is
the trade that they made – this is what
they gave up for comfort and
contentment.
■ Now they feel cheated without knowing
how and when and why.
■ What they feel is a free-floating
resentment in search of an object.
6/30/2018 jpgillis@umich.edu 56

57. Are Autonomy and Happiness Compatible?
■ Having given up autonomy for happiness, they have missed out on both.
This strategy does not work. Renouncing freedom does not spell the
end of all frustration and all discontent; especially if, as a result, people
have to deprive themselves of much of their human potential.
■ This strategy is often supplemented with alcohol, tranquilizers, or other
drugs; but what people find is merely
relief, not lasting happiness.
6/30/2018 jpgillis@umich.edu 57

58. Happiness in the Inclusive Sense
■ The autonomous life is demanding and requires one to
stand alone at crucial moments, but this does not mean
that one’s life has to be miserable. Not only might one
seek one’s happiness in a strenuous life, but autonomy is
compatible with ways of life that large numbers of
admirable people have desired in the past and still desire.
■ Realizing that the narrow, hedonistic conception of
happiness is flawed, that those who pursue it do not find
it, and that the states people desire are so often
disappointing when they are attained, some of the greatest sages have
preached Nirvana. Even if one has no wish to catalogue large numbers of
different conceptions of happiness, Nirvana needs to be considered.
6/30/2018 jpgillis@umich.edu 58

59. Nirvana
■ The word is Sanskrit and means extinction.
■ The cause of suffering is, in the last analysis, desire or
attachment. The death of others need not grieve us if we
are not attached to them; the prospect of our own death
need not grieve us if we are not attached to life.
■ Ingratitude need not grieve us if we do not desire gratitude;
loss of possessions need not cause suffering to those who are not
attached to possessions; and loss of one’s youth and health need not
grieve those who are not attached to youth and health.
■ Hence those who learn detachment and extinction of desire will
experience the cessation of suffering.
6/30/2018 jpgillis@umich.edu 59

60. Nirvana
■ According to the Buddha, this noble goal was not to be
reached in an instant by an act of grace, but could be
reached by following the noble eightfold “middle” path: a
careful regimen of self-control, a life oriented entirely
toward the extinction of desire and the cultivation of detachment.
■ This truly noble idea of happiness is compatible with the new integrity. It
need not involve any self-deception; it is compatible with the canon; and it
does not commit one to any of the strategies of decide-a-phobia.
■ Many who are looking for Nirvana have given up the quest for the new
integrity, however. One could join the Zen or Jain religion, for example.
But the conception of happiness as Nirvana does not require one to do
that. This quest itself is compatible with autonomy.
6/30/2018 jpgillis@umich.edu 60

61. Creativity
■ The great alternative to Nirvana is the creative life.
Nirvana is negative freedom, freedom from; the
creative life is positive freedom, freedom to.
■ The creative life involves alienation from others and
from society. This alienation will sometimes be
experienced as acutely painful, but when one is creative that price does
not seem too steep.
■ When one’s creative powers flag and one is dissatisfied with one’s own
work, it may not seem worth it. But when one is creative, one would not
change places with anyone, except possibly one who is more creative.
■ All people really desire to be creative. That is an ambitious claim, but I
will try to establish that it is true.
6/30/2018 jpgillis@umich.edu 61

62. Creativity
■ The most important piece of evidence is play. All
over the world children play. And while it is difficult
to define play, it is of the essence that it is creative.
■ A little girl playing with dolls is a playwright, stage
designer, and director, an actress who may play as
many roles as she pleases, improvising to her heart’s content, and she
can begin and end performances whenever she feels like it.
■ Children create a world ex nihilo and after a few minutes, when they have
grown tired of it, they consign it back to nothingness. They people these
worlds with real and imaginary persons, beasts, and props, mixing reality
and fantasy according to their whims. That is how grandly we start out in
life!
6/30/2018 jpgillis@umich.edu 62

63. Creativity
■ It is so humiliating that we have fallen so low from
such noble beginnings that pride makes us forget
that we were once omnipotent creators.
■ For centuries this whole period of life was almost totally forgotten. Nobody
gave any thought to it. But even now each one of us tends to forget how
creative she (or he) was as a small child. It would be too embarrassing to
realize how uncreative our lives have become since.
■ What children create usually does not last. But that is immaterial.
Creativity is not tied to monuments that defy centuries. The creativity of
which I speak is much closer to children’s play.
■ Yet there is a continuum between the little girl with her dolls and
Shakespeare, who took no care to see that his plays would last. He wrote,
in fact, to please himself.
6/30/2018 jpgillis@umich.edu 63

64. Creative Apperception
■ “It is (the incorporated, fully conscious, creative perception)
creative apperception more than anything else that makes the
individual feel that life is worth living.
■ “Contrasted with this is a relationship to external reality which is
one of compliance, the world and its details being recognized, but only as
something to be fitted-in-with or demanding adaptation. Compliance
carries with it a sense of futility for the individual and is associated with
the idea that nothing matters and that life is not worth living.
■ “In a tantalizing way many individuals have experienced just enough of
creative living to recognize that for most of their time they are living
uncreatively, as if caught up in the creativity of someone else, or of a
machine.”
6/30/2018 jpgillis@umich.edu 64
D. W. Winnicott. Playing & Reality (London, UK: Tavistock Publications, Ltd., 1971) p. 65

65. Are Autonomy and Happiness Compatible?
■ The other two conceptions of happiness considered here
(Nirvana and the hedonistic life) are not what people really
desire most; they are substitutes, goals one settles for “faute de mieux”
(for want of something better).
■ What people really desire most is to live creative lives. This, in spite of all
the pain and discomfort involved in such a life, is preferred to both of the
other goals.
■ It is only when people come to feel that a creative life is beyond their
means, that they have not “got what it takes,” or that the cards are
stacked against them (or perhaps against all men) that they give up and
settle for “faute de mieux.”
6/30/2018 jpgillis@umich.edu 65

66. Are Autonomy and Happiness Compatible?
■ Creativity is not encountered in the arts only, but also in the
dimension of human relationships and in the practice of the
new integrity.
■ The new integrity involves autonomy: making decisions for oneself –
especially those decisions that mold our character and future. Thus the
autonomous human being makes himself (herself) and gives shape to his
(her) life.
■ She (or he) not only considers alternatives that others present to her (or
him), but uses imagination like a novelist or dramatist to think up
possibilities. The example of play, and perhaps also that of dreams, may
help to remind us that we are all born with a creative capacity.
6/30/2018 jpgillis@umich.edu 66

67. A Fourth Conception
6/30/2018 jpgillis@umich.edu 67
■ Now suppose that some men and women do not find
solace in creative work. Or rather, they do find happiness
while they are creative, but it comes in peak moments,
not in a steady stream, and between the peaks there are vast valleys of
despair. What then?
■ There seems to be another less romantic road to happiness. It can be
found through work that stands some chance of making the world a little
better – work that is worth doing well because it benefits humanity.
■ Does this life of service constitute a fourth conception of happiness – an
alternative to hedonism, Nirvana, and the creative life? I prefer to think of
it in conjunction with the creative life, because work of this kind can be
creative, and it can also be combined into a holistic creative life.

68. Creative Autonomy: The New Integrity
■ Life does not lead us into a bakery shop, telling us to choose
one piece of cake. If you confine your choices to the alternatives
presented to you in a given framework and do not question the framework
itself (considering alternatives to that framework) you are not liberated.
■ Autonomy involves reflection on alternatives. It requires a sustained effort
to liberate oneself from the cultural determination that, justifiable or not,
caused us to lose the noble creative freedom we had in our youth.
■ What is needed is exposure to different views – not merely to one “devil’s
advocate” but to a genuine variety of points of view and ways of
experiencing the world; and also some feeling for the less fortunate
(those who do not enjoy the privileges we tend to take for granted); and
also a feeling for the history of the world.
6/30/2018 jpgillis@umich.edu 68

69. The Serpent’s Promise
6/30/2018 jpgillis@umich.edu 69
The serpent was wiser than man and woman and asked them:
“Are you afraid?” They answered: “We have been told what
is good and evil, and if we disobey we shall die.”
But the serpent said: “You will not die, but your eyes will
be opened; you will see that all gods are dead; and you will
be as gods, deciding what is good and evil. Nobody is
almighty and knows everything.
“Your knowledge and your power will always be limited. Still
you can decide about your own life, and you need not accept
what you have been told.
“Fear not to stand alone! Nobody knows what is good. There is
no such knowledge. Once upon a time God decided, but now
that he is dead it is up to you to decide.”
They answered: “But what are we to do right now to make a
beginning?” The serpent replied: “You still want to be told what
to do. Perhaps your children will be ready for autonomy.”

70. 6/30/2018 jpgillis@umich.edu 70
This presentation was excerpted from
the book Without Guilt and Justice by
Walter Kaufmann. Peter H.Wyden, Inc.
/Publisher, 1973.
It was created by John Paul Gillis.
Walter John
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Kaufmann_%28philosopher%29
http://slideshare.net/micrimson