Correspondence: From Giles Clark

I think that McCurdy's review of Samuels's book needs a response and for two main reasons: 1) McCurdy takes up issues and criticises where there is no contention; 2) he does not seem to understand that the pluralistic attitude and pluralistic thinking are neither about an unrealistic tolerance nor (as he implies in his interpretation of the gender issue) a blending of positions.

As to the first objections let me indicate where some of McCurdy's critical points are covered by Samuels. For example, with regard to the issue of infinite tolerance and single-mindedness, Samuels deals with these matters clearly right from the beginning on pages 4, 6, 7 and 8; similarly, the difficulties of plural interpretation are described on page 55; he also emphasises both the equal value and mutality of moral imagination and original morality on pages 195, 199 and 200. And so on. It looks as though the reviewer is simply tilting at windmills.

But it is the whole issue of what McCurdy fears is the shadow of pluralism, namely, excessive tolerance, that I want to take up. Pluralism is combative and tense, and remains. Any authentic attitudinal and interpretative position I assume feels right in itself while I am in it. From it, therefore, I judge other (positions/people) to be wrong. I may then shift my focus of understanding and be intensely conscious that these changing perspectives are mutally exclusive, even conflicting; yet each view can still feel right and whole in itself. And although psychically I incorporate this complexio oppositorum, consciously I have to argue within myself to find a constant place—or range of places. Ultimately pluralism is about a capacity to realise how our differences (inside and between) are about the different possible relations between the one and the many. This means that it is not a conflict between monism on the one hand and a multiplicity on the other. It is about the relations in which each element of the many can be a unified and made while in it