File spoon-archives/lyotard.archive/lyotard_2003/lyotard.0304, message 98


Date: Sun, 13 Apr 2003 19:06:21 +1100
From: hbone <hbone-AT-optonline.net>
Subject: Re: the fragility of goodness



Eric/All,

> Hugh wrote:
>
> For months, we have talked about mostly French postmodern authors, who,
> if
> I read our List messages correctly, have developed new ethics.   They
> are
> indicated by author's names and allusions, sometimes quotes. I haven't
> been
> able to understand those  rules, and their application.
>
> I look for something to compare with traditional ethics, as "Thou shalt
> not
> kill".,  "Love they neighbor as thyself", and "repair the world".  I
> think
> someone who studies these authors so diligently will one day write down
> some
> of the principles they have learned in
> plain language.  As an example of brevity, I think of  a sentence Camus
> wrote in Caligula:  "Man is unhappy and he dies"
>
> If someone could be explicit about the pomo ethics, I,  would have an
> opinion, admissive, or dismissive of the idea, not the writer nor the
> person
> who reads his work.

Eric/All,

Eric wrote:

> I find the above statements slightly ironic, given that Americans have
> now become the aggressors in a war that is obviously killing people,
> directly and indirectly, and it is a war that is widely supported by
> many people who would otherwise call themselves Christians.

No irony intended.

The commandment did not hinder Christians from slaughtering each other in
holy wars for centuries after Martin Luther came on the scene.
>
> To answer your main objections, however, I think the first problem is
> that we simply disagree upon the nature of what 'ethics' is.  If you
> want to define it merely as the application of rules that can be stated
> with brevity, I agree this may be true of the Sermon on the Mount, but
> it is hardly typical of even the mainstream Western philosophical
> tradition of ethics found in such thinkers as Aristotle, Spinoza, Kant
> and Bentham.

I agree that ethical behavior applies to innumerable situations of
inter-personal conduct of more than six billion people.

Killing with an H-Bomb means one act by one person can vaporize a city, and
any country in the world could have all its large cities destroyed by a few
dozen missiles.

Aristotle, Spinoza, Kant and Bentham had no idea that mankind would face the
possibilty of  H-Bomb destruction.  A city could be destroyed by accident.
With bombs ready in their silos, as they now are, ethics might not be able
to prevent accident.  Ethical action might in theory make disarmament
possible and abolish the threat.

> For example, if you meant to imply that in his discussion of the mean in
> "The Nicomachean Ethics" Aristotle intended to merely give us a simple
> rule to follow, I would argue that you are seriously misinterpreting
> him. His implicit arguments concerning rationality, justice and
> eudaemonia need to be taken into account in order to understand how this
> mean is to be realized. (Or are you implying that "The Nicomachean
> Ethics" is merely a marginal work on ethics?)

I don't mean to imply.  I haven't read that work.

> If you interpret ethics only in a religious sense, even here, I think
> you are shaky ground. Consider the Jewish Torah, which can obviously be
> interpreted as a set of moral and dietary rules. Why was it found
> necessary that such a vast amount of commentary needed to be written in
> the Jewish tradition in order to apply these rules to everyday life?

Was it necessary?  The rules went into the holy books, and being holy,
remained there,
just as millions of laws in the U.S. remain  on the books, but are
forgotten, obsolete, and ignored.  A Jewish friend said that if one observed
all those detailed laws there would be no time left for sinning.

> Actually, I think Lacan and Freud did make some very simple ethical
> statements that would meet your ethical guidelines (and I have explicitly
mentioned both > of these statements before in previous  postings.)  Freud
said: "Where it was, there I
> shall be."   Lacan said: "Never give up on your desire."

I don't understand the Freud statement.  Lacan may be saying : "Keep on
willing to live."
There are desires and desires, and "your desire" could be any one, or
several, or all of them.

> Of course, the rub is that to understand these simple statements (or
> even a statement of Jesus or Camus, for that matter) a certain amount of
> pre-conceptual understanding is needed in order to contextualize them.

Yes.

> "Support our troops" is certainly a simple ethical rule, but why should
> it necessarily obligate me?  What if our troops were committing an act
> of genocide or terror?

Good point.  In an ideal world, troops, governments and the indivduals you
love and trust would always be honest and never betray  you.
>
> To simulate further discussion and to give you a brief idea of where I
> am actually coming from in terms of ethics, let me lay out a brief
> schematic.
>
> Under Freud's tripartite structure of the psyche, one could argue
> (somewhat loosely) that there are different ethical structures for each
> element of the psyche.
>
> The ethics of the superego may perhaps be found in Kant and the
> traditional religions. It emphasizes duty, law, obligation and god.
> "Thou Shalt" and "Do it because I say so."

For believers, its not just because it is said, it's because it is a real
truth revealed by a real God.

> The ethics of the ego may perhaps be found in Aristotle, the
> utilitarians, and economists.  It states that we may obtain goodness or
> useful things of value through rationalization of our behavior,
> deferring immediate gratification and prioritizing our actions.
>
> The ethics of the id may perhaps be found in Lacan, Freud, and to a
> certain extent, in Lyotard.  It recognizes that libido, passion, desire
> is a strong component of who we are and that while repressing these
> things may make us ethically normative good citizens, if won't create
> what Camus once called "lucid joy."  The ethical question each of these
> thinkers raise is how can we do justice to this voiceless
> enfans/id/desire given the operational demands of contemporary society.

If contemporary society did not resort to killing, (especially war-killings)
and rewarded those who love their neighbors, its operational demands might
be more tolerable.

Confronting and finding an alternative to unjust demands would be an ethical
enterprise
that ultimately eliminated the obstacles to letting others live, and loving
neighbors.

Unfortunately, the masses  who deal person-to-person are subject to
tier-upon-tier of  laws.

> Unfortunately, such a question cannot be answered just by applying a
> simple rule....

How about a holy war against the terrorists who are embedded in
nation-states, transnational corporations, and other institutions who create
the "operational demands of contemporary society"?

Hugh



   

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