The true and the good

reflections on the primacy of practical reason

Erazim Kohák

pp. 285-291

in: Robert S. Cohen, Alfred Tauber (eds), Philosophies of nature: the human dimension, Berlin, Springer, 1998

Abstract

The purpose of these pages is to sketch the outline of an extended argument which links the various studies that make up this book. Ultimately, I wish to claim that there is a fundamental asymmetry between life and death — of, if you wish, between being and not being — which endows life's world with a moral orientation not reducible to the preference and/or the consensus of individual subjects. Contrary to the claims of radical scepticism, ancient and modern, I believe this asymmetry and this moral orientation enable us to claim that at least some of our assertions can be non-trivially true, independently of our assent. Or, in another idiom, I wish to claim that what is said can be true or false — and that what is done can be right or wrong — because, prior to our reflection, something is good, something is bad, and something is evil. Scepticism, I believe, is ultimately false because this is a value indexed, not a value neutral cosmos.