A Discriminating Vitner

If, as Pascal says (see Noli me Tangere post earlier), the right "distance" is needed in moral life, the question arises how we find that proper perspective in our relationships with others. If love entails unity, how do we find the unity commensurate with the charity we share with others? I recently read an article by Gilbert Ryle entitled "Jane Austen and the Moralists." (Chapter 20 in his Collected Papers). In it, Ryle says that Austen's characters depict differences in a specific quality she is interested in. For example, in Emma she is interested in asking how far one can go in influencing another's life. Where is the line between Meddling and Helping? All the characters are described "in terms of their different kinds or degrees of concernment or unconcernment with the lives of others." I won't go into where each character falls in the continuum drawn by Austen in this novel, I simply wish to say that, according to Ryle, Austen's novels may be viewed as an effort to give the reader, via a look at many characters in small English town, examples as to how such a calibration of perspective, of the proper distance in relationships, can be managed, and mis-managed.

Austen's answer is not "one thing or the other," but usually "both and." For example, in Sense and Sensibility the moral theme is "the relations between Head and Heart, Thought and Feeling, Judgment and Emotion . . ." Austen felt that Head and Heart need not be antagonists. "The best Heart and the best Head are combined in the best person." So perspective involves combining rather than dividing, and finding a balance among different qualities. Through balance we avoid extremes, which block out flavors in our personality which, if balanced in expression, we can experience positively in our lives and share beneficially with others.

Ryle described Austen as a vitner or wine taster who effectively displays the nuances of human character in her novels. In my opinion, it is a good description of a person with discrimination in the good sense of the term: a person who sees the world in proper perspective and who can thereupon calibrate his behavior with others to the good and in charity.