Date: Thu, 17 Dec 1998 03:54:26 -0500 (EST) From: TMB <tblan-AT-telerama.lm.com> Subject: RE: Ethics and problematisation On Wed, 16 Dec 1998, Widder,NE wrote: > >This is why I think that Nathan's response is somehow locating the > >definition of the ethics in a dialectical relation at the level > >reference, or action. > > Well, I don't think I was trying to do that. I was simply trying to pose > the problem in terms similar to the way Schurmann poses them in his book on > Heidegger: what is involved in praxis if theory no longer means > establishing the iron-hard rules in thought and action as being measured by > its conformity to those rules. The point is that praxis need not fall into > the standard, idiotic reading given of Nietzsche, Foucault, Derrida, etc., > that "if there are no a priori standards, then every action has equal play, > and thus these guys are horrid nihilists who would counsel simple violence > or if they have an ethics then they are involved in some sort of > performative contradiction." > > On some level, the lack of foundations makes all action strategic. I > haven't yet worked out what that means, but it means at least in one sense > that the rules are not separate from the context in which action occurs. > Any strategist is doomed to fail if he/she has a set of rules and lacks the > flexibility to change them with the circumstances. As for the right/wrong > distinction, I admit I threw it into the last post with just a parenthetical > statement asking to separate it from good and evil, but one of the reasons > for throwing it in is not to say that what is right is good, safe, etc., > Right and wrong are both dangerous. Machiavelli could tell you that. > Machiavelli for that matter is also quite clear that a prince can do the > wrong actions and still survive, but he's surviving despite his actions, not > > Part of me wanted to just say "I agree with Tom's post", until he got to the > Nietzsche reading. It seemed there that Tom was reading a binarism onto > Nietzsche. Why call people enemies? Ok, we don't have to. But Nietzsche > doesn't divide the world into separate categories of friend and enemy. In > the friend one also has one's best enemy, Zarathustra says ("On the > Friend"). We shouldn't love our enemies insofar as this invokes a Christian > love which hides revenge, and so hides violence. That doesn't mean we > should just go around being violent -- Zarathustra, for one, isn't a thug. > Anyway, to put the matter in simple terms: Nietzsche says the nobles are > stupid brutes, he says that going beyond good and evil doesn't really mean > going beyond good and bad, and in the end, the overman doesn't fit entirely > into the category of noble, as outlined in the Genealogy, anyway. > Point taken. My reading was poor and kneejerk. I can't read well, nor can I simply "bow out of discussion". So I read like a starving person plays basketball, poorly, which makes it easier to dismiss what I have to say more genrally, not that that is your MO. How and whether the conditions of my own starvation belong in such a discussion remains, for me, an open question. Indeed. Your reading, from what I know, looks deft and cautious, sensible and mature. Tom > Nathan > n.e.widder-AT-lse.ac.uk > > ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- If you don't like this thread, rather than getting all upset or unsubbing, why not get off your ass and start a thread that *you* want to see? Lists are as good as you make them. Your mother doesn't run this list. Do something constructive, for cryin' out loud. (You know who you are...) -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
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