The High Road of Humanity

Book excerpt: The High Road of Humanity is a cultural ethics. It is an exposition of the moral positions of the West, intended to accompany the intellectual positions of Western philosophy and society formulated in Levi's earlier Philosophy as Social Expression. In opposition to the nearly complete abstraction from actual moral life that is the common stance of the works in ethics in our time from positivism to applied ethics, Levi's aim is to take the process of moral thought back one step further from moral inquiry to its basis in the moral imagination. For Levi the moral life and moral discourse requires first of all an ideal that is shaped in the imagination, an image of the human. The seven ethical ages he discusses are the Greek aristocrat, Stoic sage, Christian saint, Renaissance prince, Enlightenment gentleman, the nineteenth-century merchant prince, and the professional man and women of today. He gathered the details of each historical figure or moral ideal and selected sculpture, paintings, and portraits to illustrate them. Levi's approach to moral philosophy is based on his lifelong study in the philosophy of culture. The foreword is by Donald Phillip Verene.