From: steve.devos-AT-krokodile.com
Date: Sun, 08 Jul 2001 17:10:04 +0100
Subject: Re: ethics


Eric

Just glanced at this - thinking -

Could you expand on your understanding of Lyotard's ethical positions? I'd
like to see a concise (mis)-reading of Lyotard's ethics... It seems to me
that there is some interesting ground we could explore in there - whilst
working out the irigaray position I re-read lyotard's 'two or three things
at stake in womens...'

Fancy that ?

regards

sdv

Mary Murphy&Salstrand wrote:

> Steve, Hugh, John and others,
>
> Steve writes of ethics in terms of the subject/other continuum. Levinas,
> as I read him, considers this subject as always already narcissistic.
> "The self-sufficiency of enjoying measures the egoism or the ipseity of
> the Ego and the same. Enjoyment is a withdrawal into oneself, an
> involution."
>
> It is only when the face of the Other confronts us with its need, its
> hunger and its destitution that an opening breaks though into this
> closed circle of the subject.  When such an event occurs, it is no
> longer the subject as I who enters into an asymmetrical relationship
> with alterity, rather it is the you who is obligated, the second person
> who is being addressed.
>
> Levinas refers to this as being held hostage by the Other. "I have
> always been at issue: persecuted.  Ipseity, in its passivity with the
> arches of identity, is hostage.  The word I means here I am, answering
> for everything and everybody."
>
> Thus, this being that is held hostage becomes the triangulation between
> the subject and the Other.  There are now longer merely two, but three
> who are present.  The subject becomes fissured, no longer capable of its
> dialectical, Hegelian moves towards totality. Its needs for enjoyment
> become transcended by a desire that can never be satisfied.  As Lyotard
> puts it; "saying yes to the gift of the undecipherable message, to the
> election that the request is, the (impossible) alliance with the other
> who is nothing, signifies the assumption of the I's fracture."
>
> Furthermore, as Lyotard also points out, any commentary upon this
> obligation runs the risk of replacing prescription with description,
> ethics with knowledge, converting the question of justice to the mere
> question of logical truth. And since this issue of misinterpretation
> lies at the very heart of alterity, it becomes the triumph of the Other
> over the Same.
>
> To quote Lyotard again: "The irony of the commentator easily goes so far
> as persecution: the less I understand you, he or she says to the
> Levinnassian (or divine) text, the more I will obey you by this
> fact....Satan would be God's best servant, if it is true at least that
> he disobeys Him.  For 'the disobedient man obeys in some way.'"
>
> So much for the privileging of ethics over the differend.  The pieties
> of religiosity are met with the impious laughter of the pagan.
>
> However, this notion of the hostage opens up a way that leads beyond the
> subject/object dichotomy.  It points to the risk the subject always runs
> of becoming an alien to its self, Unheimlichkeit, a stranger.
>
> The Greek word for happiness is eudaimonia.  It literally means
> possession by the daemon (as Socrates was) - God dwelling within us.
>
> There is also something noticeably different about ethics in this
> classical sense, as it is presented by Aristotle, Epicurus and Zeno.
> Such an ethics is more pragmatically concerned about the possibility of
> happiness than it is by the demand for obligation.  It is more like a
> map for the journey of life than a legal codebook of morality.
>
> One of the major questions raised by scholars about Aristotle's
> Nicomachean Ethics is concerned with this very concept of eudaimonia.
> As Thomas Nagel points out, does eudaimonia for Aristotle involve the
> full range of human life action, in accordance with the broader
> excellences of moral virtue and practical wisdom?  Or, does eudaimonia
> involve realizing the divine part of our nature through contemplation?
> Aristotle is ambiguous on this topic and gives excellent grounds for
> defending both interpretations.
>
> It is only with Epicurus, who came of age the generation after Aristotle
> that this tension becomes resolved.  The goal of ethics for Epicurus is
> clearly to reach a state whereby the divine part of our nature is
> realized.  Epicurus calls this condition ataraxia and defines this state
> as one of continuous pleasure in which one is free both of bodily pain
> and the anxiety of mind.  Here the gods act as simulacra, furnishing us
> with the images of blessedness we must contemplate in order to realize
> our own inherent godlike happiness.
>
> The end of our ethics here is consistent with the ideal Steve wrote of
> as "the construction of the human and non-human subject, language,
> cultural values that are perhaps worth respecting rather than using them
> simply as a resource, cultural values that would take care of bodies as
> nature, perhaps even spiritually but still understood as bodies. A state
> of being that is not reducible to alienation and reductionism."
>
> Furthermore, this notion of ethics as the realization of an inherent
> state of pleasure beyond social construction and conditioning is not
> egoic, at least in the sense that both Aristotle and Epicurus
> understood.  These philosophers posit friendship as concurrent with the
> good life and this ideal is not the impoverished notion of friendship we
> are familiar with today, but one that for the Greeks was intimately tied
> to the Polis and community.  In order to realize the state Epicurus
> called ataraxia it was also necessary to create the political conditions
> that would make this possible.  Epicurus found it necessary in the time
> of Alexandrian Empire to withdraw with others to create the community he
> called the garden.  Ultimately, ataraxia is a public, not a private
> affair.
>
> I want to connect this as well to Hugh's notion of the self as
> storytelling.  What is needed today perhaps is an ethics of stories,
> which act not so much as obligations but as invitations to conviviality.
> Here the pagan gods act as necessary fictions because in the telling of
> their stories, images of mad exuberant joy beyond the scope of reason
> unfold, and we swoon to delight and become hostages to bliss, possessed
> by the alien gods and goddesses. The categorical imperative is that I
> ought to be enraptured, therefore I can and this maxim is one I must
> practice as if it were universal for all.  The Critique of Practical
> Ecstasy as the rational foundation for ethical and political practice
> within the many worlds.
>
> As Luce Irigaray puts it: "Where can one's eye alight if the divine is
> no longer to be seen?  And if it does not continue to dwell in the flesh
> of the other in order to illuminate it, to offer up to the look the
> other's flesh as divine, as the locus of a divine to be shared?  For
> this exchange, do not figurative writing and art represent necessary
> articulations?  In particular to harmonize listening and seeing."