Date: Sun, 06 Apr 1997 13:52:00 -0700 From: mitchell wilson <lobster-AT-mail.utexas.edu> Subject: Re: Subjectivization Doug Henwood wrote: > > mitchell wilson wrote: > > >it seems that Foucault was saying that morality should not be > >communal. Rather that one should not demand of another commensurable > >ethical standards. > > Ok, I'm asking this seriously, and not in the spirit that Malgosia accused > me of a couple of weeks ago (i.e., of someone entering a Marxism list and > asking the participants to justify the Gulag). If morality shouldn't be > communal, then why wouldn't it be moral for me to kill you? Or gouge out > the eye of a passerby? Not in the legal sense, since obviously both would > be felonies, but in the moral/ethical sense. Nietzsche might not have a > problem with answering this, since there's one morality for slaves and > another for masters. Presumably most of us don't accept that. > > Doug Hold on! This is Mitch Wilson, and I was not proposing anything. I was merely responding to another subscriber's reading of a Foucault qoute: "That the search for a form of morality acceptable to everybody in the sence that everyone should submit to it, strikes me as catastrophic". (253-4) This subscriber (to this mailing list), whom I had responded to, had written this: The main question which strikes me here, is how can such an ethic be applicable in modern societies without becoming elitistic? Foucault refers to "the question of style in antiquity - stylization of the relation to oneself, style of conduct, stylization of the relation to others". (244) This 'Style of Existence' resembles the kind of ethics Nietzsche formulated for the kind of being which should overcome modern man. To me, this is a kind of ethics which is unaccessible for human beings already shaped by the techniques of morality imposed on them through a culture in which they 'always-already' exists. And so, if morality is subjective and not in a form that everyone should submit to, then, I asked, how could ethics become, as this person had written, "elitistic", which I understand as elitist? Is elitistic a word?
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