ABSTRACT

An insistence on the real presence of value in the world doesn’t mean, of course, that there are no facts; that there is no proper scientific enquiry into “how things are” in a “world that is there anyway,” independent of our perspectives. Value resides in the whole self among other whole selves, a “self in moral space,” as David Parker called it: not in some inner or deeper or more universal defining concept, some incomparable glassy essence of language or of the single self. If Shakespeare’s delight in manifold modes of being is as Murdoch thought “the beginning of the modern world,” then our failure to delight in them might be its end. What Parker once called “reified moral concepts,” often the agents of an ideology or a mere system of value, are the ghosts, the glassy essences, that turn an active, value-rich life-with-concepts into a mere machine.