PASSIONATE KNOWLEDGE

By David Braine

I.

The point of view I want to put forward will be appreciated best if I present it by means of a
contrast—a contrast with the other points of view, to which it is sharply opposed. I will therefore
begin by sketching in a very rough brief way these opposed points of view, which I am going to
reject.

A.
Let me begin by introducing the notion of a matter of academic fact. I mean by a “matter of
academic fact,” any question which it is possible for a person to approach in a detached,
dispassionate, or so-called “objective” way, that is, in a way of such a kind that any connection
between the judgment he forms (the answer he gives to the question) and his attitudes, emotions,
and moral qualities is accidental, and which is of such a kind that evidence alone, evidence having
the same weight or validity for anybody else as it has for him, could determine his judgment, could
settle which answer he should give, and settle it in such a way that, if he refused to accept what the
evidence pointed to, we should regard this not as showing that he was deficient in any moral
qualities or in his attitudes but as showing that he was being irrational or that his intelligence or
intellectual ability was not high. I have in mind that I might be very reluctant to accept that I
weighed over 12 stone, and this might merely show me to be a bit vain about my appearance and
build, but if, after being weighed on a weighing machine in the context where there was abundance
of reason for assuming the machine reliable, I go on believing that I am only 11 stone, then this is
evidence of some irrationality on my part; and, if I am presented with a mathematical proof of some
proposition, which proceeds validly, but which I happen not to follow and whose conclusion I
therefore refuse to accept, then this is evidence that my intellectual ability in mathematics is less
high than it might have been. Thus, the questions answered by scientists and mathematicians,
amongst others, will count as matters of academic fact, in the sense with which I am concerned.

B.
Utilising this notion of a matter of academic fact, we can now give some statement to what
seems to be an exceedingly common, albeit highly objectionable, doctrine: namely, that the sole
province of the intellect or mind is to deal with questions about these matters of academic fact and
to understand their interconnections; and that the only proper way, or rationally approvable way,
for the intellect as such to function is by approaching questions in this sense detachedly so that the
judgment is determined solely by the evidence which exists, evidence which would weigh the same
for anybody considering the question in a detached or dispassionate way, and which has validity in
itself independently of any attitudes, emotions, or moral qualities which the person judging may
happen to have; the intellect is being used well on this view, just in so far as it is being used in this
way, and reliably gets at the right answers, just in so far as it is used like this.
This rather common doctrine then continues in the following way: moral questions, it says,
do not concern matters of fact, nor do questions about the continuance of personal existence after
death, or about God, or about whether man is a merely material being whose actions and course of
life are ultimately determined by his physical nature or whether he has some significant freedom to
choose what to do and how to live. According to this doctrine, then (a doctrine I will be rejecting),
none of these questions can be dealt with by the intellect—either they cannot be approached
dispassionately or in a detached way at all, and the judgments we form in regard to them are
inescapably influenced by or dependent on our attitudes, emotions, and moral qualities; or there just
is no evidence in existence such as could have validity or weigh independently of the attitudes of
the person judging, or none such as could determine his judgment in these matters one way or the
other; or both. Rather, when we choose a course of action, or a way of life, or if we hold to certain
moral convictions or to some particular worldview in regard to death, freedom, and God, then
according to this (I believe misguided) doctrine, we ought not to kid ourselves into thinking that
these choices or the holding of these convictions or this worldview are in some way justified, as if
ultimately there existed some justification for them which stood and was valid, independently of
the stance we individually have taken up. Rather, it is held that we should recognise, and be quite
frank and brave in recognising, that our choices, our convictions, our worldview, have no such
justification, and cannot be in any way properly supported intellectually at all—so that if we
continue to choose in these ways, or to hold these convictions or this worldview, then we should
recognise that this is the result only of choice or of a series of choices—the result, that is, of
ultimately arbitrary choice on the part of the will, perhaps influenced by various causes in our
physical or psychological nature, but not justified, or in reality even influenced by, any
considerations of a properly intellectual kind. Not indeed that we should refrain from such choices,
choices as to our principles, our values, our ultimate beliefs—rather we should choose, according to
the existentialist tradition in the anguished realization, and in the English-speaking tradition in the
unworried realization of a truistic necessary truth, but either way in the realization of some kind
that there simply is no reason for choosing one set of principles or convictions rather than another.
This doctrine represents the point of view which seems to be shared on the one hand by some
existentialists, although not by Kierkegaard and Marcel, and on the other hand by very many
English-speaking philosophical writers, both emotivists and prescriptivists, and according to Iris
Murdoch, by Hampshire: the view that the will and our moral life must proceed without any benefit
from the intellect (except in so far as technical questions of choosing suitable means for the
attainment of ends are concerned, and in so far as the consistency of the attainment of one wish,
e.g., as to what people should always do in a certain type of case, with the attainment of another
wish is concerned), and that the intellect functions properly only in so far as its conclusions are
uninfluenced by, and independent of, states of the will.

C.
This view seems to me to be in very many different ways intolerable, as well as being open
to rational objection along many lines, and being upon examination supported only by essentially
circular arguments, in which what is to be proved is surreptitiously assumed. However, I am not
concerned to criticise this view, but only to present one particular alternative to it.

1. One could hold that thought or belief was none the worse for being determined by a free
choice, or decision of the will, i.e., that a free choice, arbitrary in the sense of being not ultimately
grounded in any judgment based on reason, understanding, or intuition, can in these cases provide a
reliable or reasonable way of trying to get at the true or right answer to a question. This view, what
one might call a voluntarist view, seems to me a bit absurd—and no better than its predecessor—
merely making it sound better by describing it in what turns out to be an absurd form of words.

2. One could hold that moral questions and questions about death, freedom, and God, were
(contrary to what was commonly thought) matters of academic fact in the sense I explained—and
that a process of dispassionate reflection upon evidence independent of any attitudes in people
judging would establish the truth in morals, and in religion, just as it can in science, mathematics,
and supposedly in courts of law—and that holding these truths as matters of academic fact attained
in this dispassionate fashion can naturally influence men’s choices and attitudes, independently of
their previous attitudes and moral qualities. Now, it does seem to me that this view is better than the
previous two views, but nonetheless I do not think that it is quite right so far as morals are
concerned, and I hold it to be mistaken also where matters requiring religious faith are concerned
(though not necessarily always mistaken in regard to all religious questions). Sometimes this
position is naturalistic or rationalistic, but usually turns out to involve substituting for an arbitrary
act of the will, a supposed act of intuition (whereby the mind or intellect knows by intuition, or as it
were sees the truth of what it asserts—intuition and sight both being faculties whose exercise is
supposedly independent of attitudes, emotions, moral qualities, etc.), and at the same time
supposedly incapable of support by reasoning. Then we get the picture of one group of people who
see a moral truth or have the gift of faith, and another group who blamelessly fail to see the moral
truth or the truth of the religious doctrine, and the two can in no way argue. This seems to me a
false picture.
You notice that the common view which I sketched at the start involved the complete
divorce of intellect and will—first, the intellect was required to be completely uninfluenced by and
independent of the will, entirely detached—and second, the will or capacity to choose was
supposed to be exercised without any guidance from the intellect so far as choice of ends is
concerned—while these other two views operate by changing either the first or the second part of
this picture, but not both. Thus, in voluntarism, the first part is changed and the intellect becomes
directly subject to the will or choice, but the view of the will as essentially uninfluenced by the
intellect remains. In the last view I described, it is the second part which changes, the will being
declared to be directly moved by the intellect, while the first part, the view of the intellect itself as
occupied solely with matters of academic fact and in passing judgments dispassionately about
them, remains unchanged.

3. The view I propose will, unlike these two views, involve a change in both parts of the
picture: as in the last view, I take the will or choice to be capable of being influenced directly by
the intellect or thought, and so I reject the picture of the will as essentially arbitrary; but also (and
this is the crucial point) I take a different view of the intellect—not that it is directly subject to the
will or choice, as in voluntarism, but nonetheless that it can quite properly operate in some ways
which are not dispassionate, or detached, and that it can quite properly occupy itself with questions
which are not matters of academic fact. What I say is this: that as well as the impersonal
knowledge, understanding, reasoning, experience, conviction, and belief which arise when the
intellect occupies itself in a dispassionate or detached way with matters of academic fact, there is
also what I call for lack of a better label personal knowledge, understanding, reasoning, experience,
conviction, and belief, which arises when the person is intellectually occupied in a perfectly proper,
but nonetheless non-detached way with questions which are in common cases not matters of
academic fact.

II.

I have come now, at last, to this conception of what I call personal knowledge,
understanding, reasoning, experience, conviction, and belief. It is this which I want to explain,
drawing upon Kierkegaard and Marcel, and it is here that our real work, yours as well as mine,
begins.
Firstly, let us notice that there are many things which you might say to me, and about this
you might produce evidence and argument to show me that they were true, which I might be very
reluctant to accept; and my reluctance might be connected with some attitudes, emotions, loves and
hates, and good and bad qualities of character which I have. Thus, you might say to me that I was
not really to be relied upon by people who knew me, since in the end I would let them down if it
became inconvenient not to, and that Jones was by way of contrast a really reliable friend, and that
besides I was a bit of a coward when it came to standing by what I thought about a person I knew
when other people spoke against them, and that my friend Miss Snooks was really not worth
knowing, since although superficially likeable, she had involved half a dozen men before me, and
dropped them, and really she was just out for what she could get. And you might find that my self-
respect made me reluctant to accept your view of me as an unreliable friend, that my dislike of
Jones made me reluctant to accept your praises of him, and that my relationship with Miss Snooks
of whom (let us suppose) I had become rather fond made me see her life history in quite a different
light. And, if you then proceed to explain to me that living as an academic in a university was not
really achieving much good in the world, as if for all the good there was in academic research or
teaching I might just as well have been in advertising for 40 hours a week for 40 years of my
working life, and that if I was either to achieve anything worthwhile or, more important, if I was to
develop into a fuller person, worth more as a person, then I needed to find some other, different
occupation and some supposedly more taxing way of life, you might again find me with a certain
reluctance to accept your conclusions. Partly, this might be for certain good and identifiable reasons
which led me to think that some of what you said was highly questionable, but partly, this
reluctance might arise from a certain liking for my present way of life, or a fear of the upheavals
and uncertainties involved in change.
Now, in all these cases we tend to find, first, that agreement or assent is more difficult to
secure because my attitudes, my emotions, my dispositions to act, my habits, my personal
relationships with other people, i.e., in general, things relevant to my moral character are
influencing my judgment, and that sometimes because of this, agreement or assent is not secured at
all. Second, we find that, even if agreement or assent is secured, it may be more or less real.
Consider the case of Brown of whom it was said, “Any impartial observer would agree that
Brown’s boss had no choice but to sack him—no boss in his senses would have allowed him to
continue. When one talked to him, Brown agreed that this was so, and that it was entirely his fault
that he lost the job, and no boss could have been in the least expected to have done otherwise. But
Brown never really accepted this in his heart of hearts; in his innermost heart he always regarded
his losing the job as the result of his boss’s dislike of him; and he often referred to this dislike; and,
when his boss was praised, this always annoyed him; and when in his presence it was said that his
boss had acted reasonably, he was liable to fly into a rage.” Or again, “I said he had better watch
his step (lest he lose his job), and he agreed, but he never really accepted that there was any
genuine danger of his losing his job.”
And other times, we think that although there is perhaps genuine assent present, nonetheless
there is lack of understanding or lack of realisation of what is meant or involved. Kierkegaard gives
us a picture someone talking about death in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophy
Fragments:
“But when a man speaks about death, and of how he has thought it and conceived its
uncertainty, and so forth, it does not follow that he has really done it. Quite so. But there is
a more artistic way of finding out whether he lies or not. Merely let him speak: if he is a
deceiver, he will contradict himself precisely when he is engaged in offering the most
solemn assurances. The contradiction will not be a direct one, but consists in the failure of
the speech to include a consciousness of what the speech professes directly to assert.
Objectively the assertion may be quite straight-forward; the man’s only fault is that he
speaks by rote. That he also perspires and pounds the table with his fists, is not proof that he
does not merely patter; it only goes to show that he is very stupid, or else that he has a
secret consciousness that he is guilty of ranting. For it is exceedingly stupid to think that
reciting something by rote could properly stir the emotions; since the emotional is the
internal, while ranting is something external, like making water. And to imagine it possible
 to conceal the lack of inwardness by pounding the table, is a very mediocre notion of
deception.” (pp. 151-52)
This, then, is what Kierkegaard has to say. Now, in such a case, probably the man
understands all the words he has said, and he may quite well have adequate reason for accepting
each of the statements which he makes. Nonetheless, we say that he does not really understand the
things he is saying, and our reason for this is that his attitudes and emotions are wrong, or false, or
not those of a morally grown-up person. It is not necessarily that there is something missing on the
side of the statements he makes—he may after all have read and agreed with and learnt by heart all
that some genuinely wise man or saint has said on the same subject—but somehow he has not
really understood any of it, and this is shown primarily not by the statements to which he inwardly
or outwardly assents, but by whether there is present the moral or personal development
appropriate to the understanding of the statements, or to his having really accepted them, to his
really realising what they mean.
You will notice that we sometimes speak of the change from impersonal appropriation of
truth, not involving anything relevant to our moral character, to personal appropriation of truth,
involving certain qualities relevant to this, as a move from merely verbal or notional acceptance of
a fact to a position of really accepting or really knowing it—thus we speak of a person realising that
his loved one was really dead, or (at a later stage, and in slightly different situations) of his really
accepting that his loved one was dead. But you also notice that at other times we speak as if there is
a fact which a person already accepts to be a fact and knows, but which he does not understand, i.e.,
instead of his realising that his loved one was dead, we sometimes speak of his realising what his
loved one’s being dead really meant. There are many differences and distinctions here, but I take it
that in all of them, what is involved is some move from what I call an impersonal appropriation of
truth, an impersonal knowledge, understanding, or conviction not involving emotions and other
things relevant to moral character, to knowledge, understanding, or conviction which is in some
respect personal, i.e., which, in one of a variety of different ways, and different ways in different
types of case, does involve some of these things relevant to moral character.
The contrast between two types of assent or two levels of understanding is perhaps
particularly apparent in the religious case, which is the one Kierkegaard is peculiarly concerned
with. There are evidently many people who, from their youth up, have been able to listen with
equanimity and firm acceptance of what is said to things said in books and in sermons about
Christianity: e.g., things to the effect that there is nothing which it is not worth giving up for the
sake of God and his service, that one cannot serve both God and Mammon, that ultimately there is
no point for the individual in preferring any other thing or way of life to the way which puts God
first, that, apart from God, he can achieve nothing which is ultimately worthwhile, and so forth.
And yet, these same people often seem to show very little sign of these particular beliefs in how
they live. As it were, not only do they not resemble (say) St. Francis, but also they show practically
no trace of this resemblance. It is not just or even chiefly that their actions at this or that particular
time do not show the effects of these beliefs, but rather that their attitudes, emotional reactions, etc.
are not appropriate to these beliefs (and here I mean that even those attitudes and emotional
reactions which, while they may not determine action at this particular time, are liable to effect
action in the long run, are inappropriate).
A comparison may be drawn from the moral case: on the one hand, one can have a person
who accepts that what he is doing is wrong or foolish but still wants to do it, or still feels he has to
do it—it might be, e.g., in bombing Vietnam, or going through with some dangerous prank he has
undertaken, or keeping a date with the wife of a close friend—and he does it, but with some anxiety
and unease, not an irrational guilt, but an anxiety (in these cases at least) which goes with a
consciousness of why the thing is wrong or foolish and how wrong and foolish it is. This person is
liable (I do not say certain) because of this consciousness, in the long run to turn away from doing
this sort of thing. This person has some real or personal acceptance of the statement that what he is
doing is wrong, or that it is foolish, and presents a puzzle to Mr. Hare in Freedom and Reason only
because of Mr. Hare’s over-simple view which connects moral views necessarily with the will or
choice to act according to them, instead of connecting them with qualities, attitudes, and emotions
which indeed influence action but in more complex and less immediate ways. The person by whom
Mr. Hare ought to have found more reason to be puzzled is the very different, although no less
common, person who accepts the proposition that what he is doing is wrong or foolish, and even
has no tendency to swerve in his assent, since he may treat the thing as a matter of settled fact and
be unworried by it, but who nonetheless does the wrong or foolish thing without anxiety and is
untroubled by censure—the person of whom one would not say that his acceptance of these
propositions was so connected with things relevant to his moral character as to make him liable, in
the long run or the short run, to change his behaviour. And it need not be that the person is just
insensitive, callous, brutal, or stupid (this would be a third type of case—one which Mr. Hare does
not even touch on—the case of viciousness as opposed to incontinence). It may be just that he
rightly thinks that some things are right or sensible and some things are wrong or foolish, and that
the judgment of this or that person or group as to what is right, wrong, sensible, or foolish will be
correct, and as a result it may not occur to him to doubt that as a matter of fact what he is doing is
wrong or foolish. Likewise, in other cases it may not occur to him to doubt that what he is doing is
morally quite acceptable, and this he may again treat as a matter of fact in regard to which the view
of society or the church or of this or that group or of this or that person will be correct, a matter of
fact again in which he has no particular interest. And his views on non-moral questions of
relevance to how people live, e.g., about death and about God, may be formed in a similar way.
This then is the merely notional or verbal acceptance, which I say ought to be puzzling not because
it is impossible, but because, as Mr. Hare and Kierkegaard in their different styles observe, it is in
some way absurd. Mr. Hare holds the mistaken view that it is absurd in such a way as to be
impossible, and that all the man thinks is that what he is doing is what other people call “wrong” or
“foolish;” but this view does not seem right—the man knows what the words “right” and “wrong”
mean, and his view is that what he is doing is wrong in this sense. In considering this question, we
are not confronted with a type of situation which is absurd in the sense of being logically
impossible, and therefore of being incapable of occurring. Rather, we are confronted with a type of
situation which is quite possible, and indeed actually occurs very often, but which is absurd in a
different sense—namely, that it reveals an intellectual imperfection or deficiency or lack of
development of some kind in the person concerned. The person who assents to a proposition
without having the attitudes, etc., which are appropriate to that assent is in some way blind or
foolish, or “inconsistent”—not in that he holds two propositions which are inconsistent with each
other (though this often happens in human life), but in that his attitudes, etc., do not cohere with his
beliefs. In one sense, he understands quite well what he is saying when he says that such and such
is wrong or that such and such foolish: when I speak of “verbal” acceptance, I do not have in mind
the possibility of merely mouthing words without linguistic understanding, or even of speaking
with linguistic understanding but without inward assent, like the liar or like the man who speaks
merely to please or show conformity with others, but of an acceptance in which there is both
understanding at the linguist’s level of the statement made and inward assent to it. Yet, in another
sense, he does not understand the significance of what he is saying at all. And the same discrepancy
can arise where religious beliefs are concerned: the believer, the agnostic, the atheist, may all hold
positions which are in certain respects reasonable, but the man who holds that the whole matter of
whether or not what the believer says is true is of no interest, or who holds that what the believer
says is true but whose attitudes, emotions, dispositions to act in various ways are in no way affected
seems not at all reasonable, but mad. The intellectual defect here does not consist in the holding of
inconsistent or unreasonable beliefs, but in the failure to give them real acceptance or really to
realise their significance. This failure is shown primarily not in the statements which the person
will or will not accept or assent to, but in those attitudes, emotions, etc. which are liable to affect
action and are relevant to moral character (and which may sometimes by exhibited, as Kierkegaard
says, not in what the person says, but in how he says it, or just in his garrulousness)—not that the
person needs therefore to abandon these beliefs, which may in such a case be true and even
reasonable to hold on his part, but that he needs to change, develop, or grow as a person in such a
way that, as we would in ordinary life say, his understanding deepens and his attitudes, emotions,
and moral qualities on the one hand and his convictions on the other come into harmony—a process
which does not normally happen in a trice, but normally takes time, and sometimes by a change of
the attitudes, etc., sometimes by a development of belief, and sometimes by both.

A. Caveats
1. In much of what I am saying, I am over-simplifying; I am ignoring the role of images and
imaginings so emphasised by Newman (in the Grammar of Assent), under the mostly bad influence
of the introspectionist psychology of Hume, the psychology which Ryle in The Concept of Mind
does so well to attack, but about which more needs to be said; I am ignoring that emotion, often
false, which is unrelated to any disposition to action; I am ignoring the aesthetic; I am ignoring the
multiple divergences in degree and in the respect in which an assent may be personal, and ignoring
what differences there are in some cases between really understanding what it is for a situation to
obtain, and really accepting that the situation does obtain—not that these points could not be dealt
with or that they are not important, but that one ought not to try to fit a pint into a quart pot, and
there are more important points to deal with before I close.

2. I am, you will discover, swift to generalise: from talking about two kinds of assent and
two levels of understanding of the significance of a proposition or of what it is for a certain
situation to obtain, you will find me going on to talk about two kinds of knowledge, two kinds of
experience and two kinds of reasoning. I am indeed ready to go on in this way (a) because I see no
general reason to deny knowledge where real assent occurs, and our use of words like understand,
realise, see, etc. imply the existence of knowledge; (b) because experience is by the very meaning
of the word precisely something which gives rise to knowledge, understanding, or reasonable
conviction; and (c) because, if learning by means of experience is not purely intuitive, then it must
involve reasoning of some kind or other.

III.

We have now got some beginning of a conception of a kind of assent or acceptance, i.e., of
conviction or belief, a kind of understanding, a kind of knowledge, (a) which essentially involve
things (such as attitudes, emotions, and actions) which are relevant to moral character, and (b) of
which these things relevant to moral character serve as criteria (i.e., the presence or absence of
these things provides a way of judging whether this kind of intellectual state is present or whether it
is absent). A conception, then, of a kind of assent (the kind we earlier on called real assent), and of
a kind of understanding, knowledge, conviction, and belief, which we can reasonably call personal
because of the essential connection which it has in each case with those things which belong to a
human being precisely qua being with a moral character, i.e., precisely as a person—as some
people use the word person (i.e., precisely as a subject in the sense in which Kierkegaard uses the
word “subject” when he describes this kind of intellectual state, is one in which truth is subjectively
appropriated).
The next question is that of how intellectual states of this kind are acquired. And here one
can answer straight away, sometimes in two stages, so that a person first of all gives a notional or
inner verbal assent to a proposition without at all having the attitudes, emotions, etc. appropriate to
it, and then at a second and later stage comes to give a real assent to and deeper understanding of
what he earlier gave a merely notional assent to; and sometimes all in one stage so that a person
does not come to any kind of assent until his attitudes, etc. have so developed that he can come in
one step to a real assent and understanding involving both a change of things relevant to moral
character and something intellectual. Either way, the attitudes, emotions, etc. have to be affected in
some way, and therefore no process whose nature is only to influence the intellect, and which is not
of such a nature as necessarily or naturally to affect things relevant to moral character, will suffice
to bring about one of these intellectual states.
Gabriel Marcel makes a useful contrast between two kinds of knowledge, understanding, or
conviction. He thinks of the man who perhaps spends 15 years’ painstaking work, much of it
involving the exploration of blind alleys, and who in the end proves a certain mathematical theorem
or discovers a new chemical substance with such and such interesting properties. Then, he tells the
learned world of his discovery and they all perhaps appropriate it, in an hour, or anyway with
relatively much less labour. This is then, he thinks, a kind of knowledge to which the mode of
acquisition is largely or in many important respects incidental. And he thinks that we speak of
another kind of knowledge, understanding, or conviction, in the case of which the mode of its
acquisition is not thus incidental: e.g., if a person by a long and complex development, having a
diversity of experience of people and situations, and the growth of virtues connected (e.g.) with the
taking of sensible or far-seeing decisions for himself and for others, comes to be regarded as a wise
person whose advice is worth seeking, then the process of development is not accidental. If he tried
to boil the result down into statements such as he could teach and the mastery of certain teachable
techniques, then one would (supposedly) find that he failed to pass his wisdom on; the person who
learnt the lessons and techniques but had not passed through the requisite experience of situations
and personal relationships, and who had not made the same virtuous decisions for himself and
others, would prove to be less worth visiting for advice. And parallel remarks will apply to all the
cases where real assent or understanding is involved.
Accordingly, mere teaching in the sense of the passing on of information by means of the
making of statements, and the acquisition of knowledge or belief by the dispassionate or detached
consideration of evidence which can be brought into a single survey or viewed as a whole, cannot
by itself bring about this kind of state. That is, we can now say, the inadequacy of what
Kierkegaard calls the objective approach (i.e., the detached, academic, or merely scientific
approach) to questions in regard to which he thinks a subjective or personal approach is needed, is a
consequence of the fact that personal knowledge, understanding, and conviction involve or depend
on developments in things relevant to moral character. I.e., when he speaks of a subjective
appropriation of truth, the primary thing he has in view is the positive thing of the involvement of
the person as a person, as what he calls a subject with an ethical or moral existence, and the
negative thing of the inadequacy of what he calls the objective is merely derivative from this. (The
same connection is drawn by those moral philosophers who argue that, if a moral truth could come
to be accepted merely under the rational compulsion of some scientific or academic approach, then
it would be merely a matter of academic fact, and having accepted it we could say, “So what?”—
e.g., I say to you: “It is one of the facts which we have found out about acting with the intention of
killing the innocent, that it is morally wrong,” and you say to me: “So what?”)

IV.

The internal connection of the intellectual state with various dispositions relevant to moral
character is also apparent, if we consider not how these intellectual states are acquired, but how
they are lost—and what I have in mind here is the matter of forgetting, to which both Aristotle and
Ryle draw attention. The point here is that, where an intellectual state of this kind which I have
called personal is involved, it cannot be lost merely by forgetting, or, if forgetting does occur, then
it depends on changes in things relevant to moral character.
Thus, consider the statement “I forgot that I could trust her,” said by a man of his supposed
friend or his wife, and contrast it with the remark of an assistant who had not got Mr. Jones to do a
certain special job, “I forgot that we regarded Jones as a trustworthy person.” Or, consider, “I
forgot that taking the life of the innocent was wrong,” or Ryle’s examples: “I forgot what the
difference was between right and wrong,” “I forgot that malice was bad,” “I forgot that it was
worth giving one’s everything to God,” or “I forgot that God existed.” In all these cases, one can
see that the forgetting can only occur, if at all, if the assent has become merely notional, and in
cases of self-knowledge this is also true. I.e., I can only forget my vices if I have such a moral
character as to leave me unworried by them: imagine, for example, a person's saying, “Oh! I forgot
that I was a sadist at heart.”
We have here the paradoxical situation that differences which, from what we say, appear to
be clearly regarded by us as differences in the intellectual state of a person, inasmuch as we speak
of them as differences between verbally accepting and really accepting, as differences in the degree
to which a person realises or understands this or that, as differences between seeing that so and so,
and being blind to this or that (e.g., to our own faults or another person’s virtues or vices, or to the
possibilities in life) can be shown up, as much or more by a person’s actions or emotions, or by
other things relevant to his moral character, as by what the person would assert as representing
what he believes. And it seems to be this which has led many philosophers, unnecessarily and I
think wrongly, to suppose that an intellectual state of this kind could not exist, and that what one
has here is not an intellectual state the criteria or ways of testing for whose presence include things
relevant to moral character, but a complex of an intellectual state alongside a state of the will. For
they seem to have assumed without argument that moral character and action, together with
emotion and attitude so far as they are relevant to moral character, concern only the will, and that
they could not serve as criteria or ways of judging of the presence or absence of an intellectual
state. And this assumption seems not only unwarranted, but also to fly in the face of what we
ordinarily think. We need to take Ryle seriously when he finds in things related to action and
emotion, and not only in statement making, the signs or criteria for the presence of various
intellectual states—and not instead straightway deny that they are “intellectual” states. The
question is not, of course, of what we should do with the word “intellectual” itself; what matters is
whether or not we concede the existence of knowledge, understanding, experience, reasoning,
conviction, and belief, of the sort I have described. The question is of the appropriateness of the use
of these and a host of associated words in the kinds of cases I have been describing, not just of the
appropriateness of the certain use of the word “intellectual.” And there seems to me to be no good
reason for impoverishing our ways of describing human life in the way in which refusing to use
these words in these kinds of cases would involve.

V.

As to the kinds of knowledge, understanding, experience, and conviction in the case of

which some essential connection with things relevant to moral character arises, we have here, first
of all and most obviously, the sphere of morals, of what is right, wrong, worthwhile, worthless,
good, bad, etc.; and then either arising out of that or separate from it, the sphere of aesthetics, of
what is aesthetically worthwhile, good, bad, etc.; and then, closely connected with these, the sphere
of judgements involving that part of a person’s self-knowledge in which he cannot approach
questions detachedly, and that part of his knowledge of his friends and enemies which he cannot
arrive at by detached judgement. From these arises the moral wisdom, prudence so-called, or
phronesis of which Aristotle speaks, and which he takes as able to provide the rule or guide as to
how we ought to live and act.
Then, next, and closely tied up with all these, is whatever knowledge, understanding, or
conviction is involved in religious faith. About this, plainly people disagree, but in regard to it, the
Christian believer should, it seems, say this: that God’s plan has involved the giving of signs of his
Revelation sufficiently sure to allow a certainty of the truth of faith to be reasonable, but has
excluded the giving of these signs in such a way as to allow this reasonable certainty to arise by
means of a detached and merely academic approach as if to militate against the occurrence of a
merely notional assent unconnected with any appropriate moral dispositions.
And then, within this context, continuing to list kinds of knowledge, understanding, and
conviction of this personal kind, it seems right to point out that it is only if there exists a kind of
knowledge and understanding the main criteria of the presence of which lie in things relevant to
moral character, that it is at all possible to give a religiously acceptable account of the knowledge
and experience of saints like St. John of the Cross in what we may call mystical contemplation. I
say this because the principal criteria for the occurrence of the loving knowledge or awareness of
God of which St. John of the Cross speaks is not this stating of statements about God, since this
knowledge is said to be incommunicable, but (solely) the appearance of the emotions, attitudes,
preferences, and virtues which would be appropriate if a person were in such a state.
Any special introspectible experiences of the traditional empiricist thought are held by St.
John to be accidental and liable to be misleading, and have the status only of signs, and to be very
far from being themselves experiences of God. The experience of God is spoken of as being
something much greater, but not in the same way communicable, something which, in his works,
we detect rather from the outpouring of eloquence in poetry and prose and from the type of counsel
which he gives, as the outcome of this experience. We do not find any direct description of it, and
all this is something about which much more really needs to be said today because the inner
connection between mystical knowledge and personal and moral growth and development is
something quite essential to what mystical knowledge is. The notion of a growth in mystical
knowledge occurring independently of any previous moral predispositions in the individual just, for
instance, by the taking of drugs, would seem to be, if one really understands what the mystics are
on about, nonsense. Nor can one separate what is involved in a particular mystic’s experience from
the emotions, attitudes, preferences and virtues, and other character traits. It is useless to assume
that just because two experiences are both in some way incommunicable, that they are therefore the
same. The state of mystical mind is something in each case essentially bound up with the associated
emotions, attitudes, preferences, and so forth, and where these are not the same, there needs to be
some very special reason before one does assume that the nature of the experience is the same.
However, I cannot in this paper go any more into this. But in thinking of the Christian mystics, this
does bring us to thinking about knowledge of persons, and this knowledge of persons is something
of general importance from a philosophical point of view. We need to take seriously the view often
repeated, but never made use of, that knowledge of persons cannot be analysed into the having of
bits of information about them, and to take seriously also the conception recently voiced again by
Iris Murdoch (in Sovereignty of the Good) of a kind of knowledge about a person which is only
capable of being attained if their motive for wanting to gain the knowledge is love of the person to
be known.
At this point, however, let us return to more limited questions. Why, you might ask, have I
resorted to such a banal or flat word as “personal” in order to describe this type of knowledge
(especially as this word has been used in slightly different ways in the works of Michael Polanyi)?
Now, the answer is two-fold. In the first place, and chiefly, all the other words I could think of
seemed more misleading. Thus, I have avoided the words “subjective” and “objective” because of
the misleading associations of these words. If a philosopher today says that there is no objective
truth to be had in morals or religion, and that views in these fields are subjective, he does not mean
merely that the detached approach to these questions is impossible, inadequate, or inappropriate
( which is all that the position I have outlined involves). Rather, he means instead either (a) that
there are no right answers, no truth in existence for us either to know or to be ignorant of, or (b)
that even if there is truth to be known, it is systematically impossible for us to know it or to have
any reasonable belief, so that if the answers we give are ever correct, then this is as much an
accident as if we had been just guessing, or (c) that the matter is in some way private in the way my
likes or dislikes are in some way private. None of these three connotations of the words “objective”
and “subjective” are relevant to the position I am explaining—each would involve something
entirely opposed to the view I am putting forward.
I have also avoided the word “non-rational” in describing this kind of knowledge,
understanding, and conviction because it suggests that when judgments are made in a way in which
there is an essential connection between a person’s attitudes, emotions, and dispositions to act, then
they are made without benefit of reason, and therefore, either are in no way to be relied upon and in
no way yield knowledge, or else, if they are to be relied upon, are so only either because of the
benevolence of nature or of God causing our mind without any support of reasoning or experience
nonetheless hold to the truth, or else because of some fortunate intuitions. However, this seems to
me all a mistake, since the impossibility of a detached approach does not in strict logic imply the
absence of knowledge, or the absence of the influence of reasons. Reasons of a relevant kind
certainly exist in the case of religious faith, since they are often presented and seem relevant—the
difficulty is not that they do not exist, but in weighing them dispassionately or detachedly, which
does not seem possible. And in the case of morals, reasons are presented in abundance; the trouble
again is not the non-existence of reasons, but the impossibility of considering whether something is
to count as a reason and how it is to weigh against other reasons, entirely independently of things in
us relevant to our moral character; for when by a detached approach, we treat the question whether
something is to count as a reason or not, we never discover a disproof, but always find arguments
which are circular.
But there was also a positive reason for choosing the word “personal” to describe
intellectual states of these kinds—namely this: that we seem to regard them as coming from a
person himself, almost as if he were responsible for them, as opposed to being externals added on
to him and his as it were only by accident. And this is expressed metaphorically by those who
associate these kinds of intellectual state, along with actions, moral virtues, love, hate, friendships,
and enmities, with the heart—and to associate them with the heart seems to say simply to associate
with the person himself, as it were, as being most intimately and non-disownably his, belonging as
St. John of the Cross has it to the deepest part of the soul, or the substance of the soul. The word
"voluntary" has also been used to express that these things come from the person himself in some
way which he cannot disown. But what is the difference between “coming from the person himself”
and merely “being capable of being attributed to the person” (or merely “belonging to the person”)?
Now, about this, I note only this: that if one examines the matter carefully, the ways we talk
and think do reveal a very systematic cleavage between what we would naturally treat as part of
what a person is, or as depending on this or exhibiting or reflecting it, and on the other hand, what a
person has. Contrast my saying “I am bad-tempered” or “I am courageous” or “I am generous,” “I
am very sorry,” with my saying other things such as this: “I have a bad-temper, I have always had
it, it’s something I have to reckon with, and guard against and which you will have to make
allowances for, it is not really me, it is my bad-temper.” Or, “Don’t praise me, I can’t help it, it’s
just the temperament I have, I don’t feel fear.” Or, “It’s just the irrational impulses to give things
away I sometimes have,” “I have feelings of sorrow, but I mustn’t be carried away by them.”
Well! In some parallel way, the impersonal knowledge is something I merely have, and
which I can share directly with someone else simply by telling him, and then he has it, whereas the
personal knowledge and understanding a person has, e.g., his deep understanding of other people,
his wisdom and good sense in giving advice, the knowledge which he has of this or that person
only because of the sympathy and love he has shown, etc. are not like this. Rather, they reflect what
the person is—just as his actions, virtues, vices, and the depth of his friendships show what he is.
Now, some concluding remarks in summary.

A.
Some concluding remarks as far as moral philosophy in the sense of meta ethics is
concerned: The position I have put forward is in a way inconvenient in as much as it involves
holding (1) that there are indeed reasons in ethics adequate to yield knowledge, and (2) entirely
detached, or academic or scientific study. I.e., mere logic cannot decide what counts as a reason or
what weight this or that reason has (that seems an inconvenient enough, though I think correct,
combination of views).

B.
As to ethics proper, I think the following needs to be said: that it has paid too much
attention to the questions of the rightness and wrongness of individual acts (as if it was just fine if
everybody lived an average sort of life, merely avoiding wrong acts), whereas what needs to be
asked is not so much, “What ought I to do or not to do?” or “What acts are good or bad?” but “How
ought I to live?” “What sort of life is more worthwhile?” Then, one will find that, in one’s concept
of moral development, one is concerned with what makes a difference to what a person is (if you
like, with the Kantian problem of worth), and, within the sort of personal or moral development
with which we are here concerned, the growth in what I have called personal knowledge and
personal understanding has a key role—the growth in phronesis or prudence, for instance, being a
key part of this growth of the person as a whole.

VI. APPENDIX

The distinction between the dispassionate, detached, or objective approach and the non-
dispassionate or non-detached approach needs to be explained in a way which makes it quite
independent of the traditional distinction between “public” and “private.” No particular difficulty
need beset my being dispassionate and in this sense “objective” in approaching questions about
what foods I like, or about what I dreamt about last night, or about what my opinions about this or
that matter of fact happen to be. It might, of course, be that I had no opinions about this or that
question, or that there was no answer to be given to the question whether I liked raspberries better
than blackcurrants, or whether I liked them exactly the same—but this does not represent any kind
of absence of impartiality in the question, or the impossibility of a dispassionate approach to it. My
position in regard to my likes and dislikes, my opinions, my intentions, my dreams and perceptions,
is just the same as my position in regard to the likes and dislikes, opinions, intentions, dreams and
perceptions of another-person-in-so-far-as-he-tells-of-them, so far as objectivity or
dispassionateness is concerned, except that I cannot lie to myself.
Because I cannot lie to myself about them, it is somewhat easier to be objective about my
opinions and intentions than about other persons’. As to self-deception, this can occur both with
myself and with other people, and does make it more difficult to be objective or dispassionate about
oneself than about other people, but in most cases of likes and dislikes, opinions, dreams,
perceptions and intentions, the question of self-deception does not arise. This is because of the fact
that what gives rise to self-deception and removes dispassionateness is not privacy, but the
presence of some interest giving a motive for deceiving oneself. E.g., if I make a very cruel remark,
I may be deceiving myself when I think to myself, “After all, I didn’t intend to hurt his feelings, I
just wanted to set the record straight,” but this only happens when I have some interest personally
involving me, e.g., I hate him, or am jealous of him.