1/ This actually explains something I don’t think I’d understood before: the urge to resist metanarratives and to “view one’s life as a whole” is a resistance to “any measure of living well that ‘imposes itself’ on us. https://twitter.com/suzania/status/1289182317051707393

2/ Ie you don’t like having been made for a purpose you didn’t choose, with a way of being you well that you were born with, and which you are ... I won’t even say commanded to achieve, but which by your own nature you are invited to grow into.

3/ Even this more mildly understood ethical/natural imperative is frightening to a philosopher like Geuss, in part I think because at the back of it is the idea that you might fail, and the idea of judgment.

4/ That said, the link between these two-God’s judgment of the sheep and the goats on the one hand, & the invitation/command we experience to live out the selves we were made to be-is real. I don’t think there’s anything that can make the idea of judgment less scary. But:

5/ we can and must remember, in thinking about what it means to obey God, exactly what it was that Eve forgot: He is not interested is failing to fulfill our natures. Obedience is the opposite of oppressive: we are obeying the command to be ourselves well, skillfully.

6/ We’re supposed to do this creatively, but not creatively ex nihilo; delighting in the natures we have been give & not fighting them; finding out what they are by our own experience and by attending to God’s commands, which are prescriptive *but also* descriptive:

7/ descriptions of what lives well lived have in common: our specific and unique selves also share natures with each other, and in a way with all persons:

8/ though we don’t share our natures with angels (and let us recall they are not kinds; they don’t share natures with each other either; each angel is a one-off, made directly) we do share a moral universe and both they and we are made by a God with the same moral character.

9/ So the ethical part of our nature is in a way the most general: we share it even with spirits without bodies. But how those ethics play out in a human life is particular:

particular to whether that human is a man or a woman; particular to the place and time and family to which he or she was born. Finally, particular to each person— but in a way that is true to the higher level commonalities. Mr Rogers was right that You Are Special. But:

11/ your specialness will never be of such a kind that you live it out well by being an unfaithful friend or spouse, a liar, a cheat, etc. Temptations are temptations to not be *you* as well or as thoroughly.

12/ anyway I have a metanarrative and cranky pragmatists just gonna have to deal, sorry not sorry.

13/ ALSO, if anyone is interested in Gustav Landauer, whom Geuss (inexplcably) seems to like, here he is. But I’m not sure the man would carry much water for either pragmatists or critical theorists. https://www.plough.com/en/topics/justice/politics/who-was-gustav-landauer