Saving the lost ones

Glendinning, Simon ORCID: 0000-0002-2312-1839 (2022) Saving the lost ones. Oxford Literary Review, 44 (1). 89 - 109. ISSN 0305-1498

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Abstract

In an essay on the modern idea of political equality, Bernard Williams contrasts what he calls ‘the human point of view’ with a point of view marked by what he calls a ‘technical or professional attitude’. While the latter is concerned with conspicuous structures of someone’s life that might be by occupied by another, the former concerns an attitude towards a singular person, what Wittgenstein calls ‘an attitude towards a soul’ – an attitude characteristically exemplified in the relation to the other who is a friend. It is the one who is in view under such a singularising gaze that seems to be lost as soon as we start counting others, counting our friends. The paper explores the general haunting of the modern-Western idea of all people’s equality by the hazy spectre of what is disclosed by this singularising gaze, and asks how we might organise a response politically to the in each case unique and singular relation to the unique and singular other we call the friend – the one who is both altogether other and my equal.

Item Type:	Article
Official URL:	https://www.euppublishing.com/loi/olr
Additional Information:	© 2022 Edinburgh University Press.
Divisions:	European Institute
Subjects:	J Political Science > JC Political theory H Social Sciences > HX Socialism. Communism. Anarchism
Date Deposited:	29 Jun 2022 15:27
Last Modified:	12 Dec 2024 03:05
URI:	http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/115457

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