Peter Goldie reviewing John Elster�s book on Strong Emotions says:

�Emotions are similar (to addictions) in this respect: the notion of being "emotionally obsessed" is as ethically loaded as is the notion of addiction. In saying that someone is emotionally obsessed, there is an assessment of the project or preference involved, and the proportionateness of the value which is attached to the project or preference. The judgement can also be influenced by moral luck. For example, we could agree that Mr. Casaubon was obsessed with his key to all mythologies; but we would hesitate to say that Vermeer was obsessed with the play of light on the surfaces of objects. �

Moral luck is a Bernard Williams� idea that the degree of praise or blame that attaches to how we happen to be or what might happen to us (or what we might do arising from �things�) can be enormous � indeed so great compared the triviality of the accidents which influence these critical factors that one best uses the idea of �luck� in thinking about it. This gives luck a moral dimension. One might start with Oedipus and who he bumps into on his trips. And then go on to Aldous Huxley. To be declarative � THE point about Brave New World is that it is clearly a matter of luck that the Savage has the curious upbringing that he does � the babies in bottles stuff is intended to throw this point into relief. Most people are born into a managed system where this randomness is reduced in BNW � this grand philosophy is currently going the rounds under the heading of �Six Sigma�. BUT the Savage is the only one who can relate to Dante and Shakespeare � indeed for whom their concerns become his own moral obsessions leading to his deep unhappiness and self destruction.

Rawls� central notion is that in order to judge or establish the best social arrangements we should withdraw behind the veil of ignorance. (I try to spend as much of my time there as possible � ho ho ho.) Behind the veil we don�t know what our endowment in life is going to be � what talents or disabilities we might be given or indeed how tragic irony will juxtapose circumstance and our failings. In this imaginary situation (says Rawls) we should then agree what kind of social arrangements we would most like to see prevail � given that in the society we may actually come out anywhere. This is a kind of �social contract� theory � also an attempt to disconnect �right and good� from interests � to counter the Marxist claim that rights are always deployed in the interests of the most powerful.

It is also a kind of high liberalism. One might add to the cocktail a class of practical reasoning which is amongst the host that have been formulated in the last ten years � from the synoptic article on PR:

�Korsgaard has recently suggested that a theory of practical reasoning should make room for a class of reasons that express one's self-conception or "practical identity," "a description under which you value yourself ...find your life to be worth living and your actions worth undertaking"�

This idea identity-based reasoning strikes me as fundamental � not least when it is compared with some of the �base case� versions of practical reasoning. One is the instrumentalist version � which can most easily be pictured in the supermarket. Roughly speaking it says that when we decide what to do � in this case buy � we examine all the (possible) contents of our basket and give them a number (which equates to satisfaction) � and we chose the basket containing the highest number aggregate within our budget constraint. This is maximisation or a linear programming problem. I won�t bore you with the zillion things that are terrible about this theory � it�s the kind of global reasoning that�s used to change the social arrangements in Russia so that male life expectancy drops like a stone in the 1990s on the assumption that because by the end of the decade there are more supermarkets, things will have obviously got better. (There was an interesting programme on Radio 4 where a sociologist who had been studying contemporary Russian youth culture � while the youth does what branded Western goods �Russian� now stands for emotional depth and high authenticity � I will be interested to see if James can get hold of some of this when he is working for Izvestia.)

But back to Kosgard � he is obviously right that a pre-condition of existence is that the individual has a self conception which is sufficient to make actions worth doing and life worth continuing. Many people lack this and are regarded as suffering from a serious disease. (A lot of these in the last decade were the Russian middle aged men who drank themselves to death � they were classed as unlucky.) You can debate what the most suitable treatment for these people is but at least one candidate would be a programme of practical self discovery which enabled them to discover a self description from which reasons for continuing to develop flowed. This is clearly a much better kind of practical reasoning than helping them optimise how they go round Tescos.

The idea that the big task is self realisation comes from high liberalism � say J S Mill and Matthew Arnold - and inter alia is embedded in the foundation myths of the Cambridge English faculty. The practical process to help achieve this idolised there is practical criticism � which I A Richards helped develop in the 1920s on the basis of some pretty weird theories that we will save for another time. Roughly the idea was that one refines one�s self conception in a beneficial and developmental way by confronting � in practical terms � some �valued� work from the past � this is a collective endeavour. The key technique is to identify one�s �response�. Works of art are such because they engender a response. So it seems to me that practical criticism might be an element of practical reasoning � reasoning designed to help form an identity which is self-sustaining in motivational terms.

(You might say that the Savage was especially unlucky in that he read his Dante alone � in a properly run seminar things could have turned out better for him.)

All one needs to do next is to step behind the veil of ignorance � and ask yourself to imagine that one does not know what kind of moral luck will apply to one�s life � whether one�s identity will naturally be securely fixed or whether it will require nurturing to emerge and be sustained. If you add this variant to the Rawlsian project of constructing social arrangements � well what a funny old world would fall out!

(I think Laurence�s idea of �reflection� is probably linked to the stream of thinking that formulated �practical criticism�. I can remember that in one heroically difficult exercise with the team of malformed pedagogues and Gradgrinds who were setting up OFSTED , having sent in the paras and failed , Laurence actually read them Dover Beach � M Arnold himself having been an inspector as a day job. The paras having prevailed at Goose Green against overwhelming odds were trying to get OFSTED to see that they might usefully reflect on fundamental aims and that the quality of the output from their processes was one such. No MCs this time.)

I had an interesting chat with Cathy about prac crit before she took her finals � she said that it had remained something of a challenge until she got taught by Ian Patterson � who I think edited J H Prynne�s collected works. Steve Pheasant enlisted Ian in the first Stony Ground which had a strong poetic representation � Totton and Wheeler were on the team . The visual arts were less well connected but Derek Ridgers was involved.)

The classic (and derided) liberalism of enhanced self definition is under threat in the pomo world partly because the variety of possible identities is now so great. I keep coming back to what the punk explosion meant in UK culture. It means that Derek�s career as a photographer takes the shape of recording people defining themselves � in visually challenging and inventive ways � to go clubbing. Many of the people who are most articulate at this form of self definition don�t live all that long � so perhaps in some Leninist view of social utility they are clearly investments. From behind the veil of ignorance we agree that if we draw that clubbing virtuoso straw we will be famous for fifteen minutes and then take a curtain call.

But punk criticises � some would claim fatally � the ideology of self definition which supports the authenticity of the improvised solo. The classic exponent here would be Miles � who constantly changed � who believed that it was a dereliction of duty to stand still � or indeed Trane whose music was always pressing down to a deeper level. There isn�t a single recollection of meeting him that doesn�t stress his profound commitment to probing the depths. People came out of quartet performances having done some strategic practical reasoning along the lines. These people are very serious about what they are doing. I am not yet as serious as them. Therefore I ought to postpone my artistic endeavour until I have developed to a point where I am more committed to my art. So in strategic terms they had confronted a paradigm of identity-work and repositioned their own projects accordingly.

There would also be some easy pointsa against the solo bringin in phallo-centrism from some quarters. Is the oceanic swell an expression of identity?

I get the impression that the generation of artists who most deeply buy into the authenticity of individual exploration are born in the 1920s � Feldman, Trane, Miles, Bird, Ginsberg. Hegel would say that this particular configuration of the worldspirit must undergo a dialectical transformation. One could ask oneself about people on a similar path born 20 years later � Dylan, Lennon, Hendrix � to see if that gave a clue ?

One thought might be that if Miles/Trane path looked difficult then the later examples look even more dangerous. So confronting the Star Spangled Banner we might stumble home and say to ourselves � the wire that man is on is too high for me and there don�t seem to be any safety-nets � and anyway he doesn�t seem to know who he is � he is just expressing his uncertainly in an extraordinary global and inspiring fashion. You can do that very so often but there isn�t room on the high wire for more than one at any one time � if that. From behind the veil of ignorance one says that if one draws the card with a left handed Stratocaster on it one must go back to the Renaissance, the birth of Humanism, and contemplate the idea that posthumous fame is one of the few truly great goods.

Hegel�s word for what happens next is �Aufhebung� � a kind of self-lifting to the next level. Maybe the pomo position is to have lost faith in Aufhebung. Say the Aufhebung from Labour to New Labour.

In Marx�s view the Soviet Union should have gone through an Aufhebung when the Berlin Wall fell � as I say the male life expectancy fell sharply in the next decade as the bandits ran off with the oil and minerals. So that narrative comes to a comic conclusion and we put the death of socialism on the same shelf as the death of god.

If you were debating materialism versus idealim � you might look at the test case of dialectical materialism versus dialectical idealism. And you might settle for the latter � because at least it allows the worldspirit to birth its next manifestation away from the corpse.

One final trope - the number of surviving Vermeer paintings is close to the number of surviving Drake songs.