Reshef Agam-Segal
  • Home
  • Notes and Half-Thoughts - Blog
  • Publications
  • Contact

The transcendence of ethics – two views

6/2/2012

13 Comments

 
There are two very different types of views that stand in opposition to the notion of ethics as a subject matter alongside others. In both, ethics is ubiquitous; but this shows that saying that ethics is everywhere can be equivocal. Also, according to both views, ethics is transcendental; once more, the term here signifies two very different things.

The first type of view involves an idea of ethics as permeating everything we do. It is not a separable domain engulfing only some of what we do. According to this view, there is ethical responsiveness already present, embedded, in everything we say and think. The ethical is a kind of condition for thinking about things in the first place—a condition for making contact with them with our mind, in judgment and in action. This is the sense in which it is transcendental, on this view. Simply put, making intellectual contact with things—trying to understand them, talking about them, describing them, and so on—requires taking an interest; it is taking an interest. If we philosophically try to give an account for describing, thinking, questioning, trying to understand, judging, manipulating and so on, if we try to adopt a point of view “from within” and characterize these activities—their reality, their point—then part of what we’ll have to say is that these are all forms of taking interest in things, engaging with them. But now, taking an interest means caring; it means finding things important, or worthwhile engaging with, or interesting, or noteworthy, and so on. And this means that for us there is value everywhere in our everyday commerce with things—in judging, describing, trying to understand, manipulating, and in general making contact with things with our body and mind. Our forms of intellectual and practical engagement with things are at the same time forms of evaluating them. This is true, according to this first kind of view, whatever this value is and however mundane it may look or be. If ethics is the study of what we care about, then according to this first view, to study what we care about simply means tracing the cobwebs of forms that our contact with things takes. The whole of ethics, we can trust, the whole of ways we care about things, engage with them, is caught up in this cobweb—and not by accident. This is, after all, what this cobweb is for.

In the second kind of view, ethics has absolutely no room in the normal everyday commerce with things. If anything, ethics is a global attitude towards this commerce, coming as if from a place outside it. In this sense, in this second view, ethics is transcendental. There are different forms that the ethical attitude might take—chiefly, deep dissatisfaction and deep being-at-home-ness. These are, in Tractarian terms, the attitudes of the unhappy and the happy correspondingly. But in both cases, ethics is not a certain domain in the commerce with things—not a separable subject matter; it is rather a reaction to this commerce. Also, it is not a reaction to some of it—to some language games, to some forms of judgment, or to some practical and intellectual forms of contact with the world. It is rather global. The dissatisfaction of the unhappy is not with this or with that fact, or with this or that form of interest in things. It is dissatisfaction with the very normalcy, the very everydayness of this interest. It typically comes with a wish for something else, something higher—for a new sense of reality, or for a revelation of the true essence of things, which the unhappy expects will once and for all uncover what she feels as a deep falsehood and illusion that is everywhere, and which cannot be penetrated by the ordinary forms of commerce. In opposition, the being-at-home-ness of the happy is equally global. It is not a being-at-home-ness in this or that practice, this or that fact, this or that culture. It typically involves recognition of one’s own finitude, and an acceptance of it, perhaps in the form of willingness to find oneself again in the yet unknown: a willingness to learn, to practice, to feel, to do, to experiment, to change.

It is easy to confuse the attitude of the happy with the first philosophical view of ethics I mentioned above. It is easy to think of the “view from within,” endorsed by proponents of the first philosophical view as a kind of attitude towards language. But this is confused: The first philosophical view does not imply happiness; it does not imply acceptance (or conservatism). The first philosophical view is not—not even meant to be—a global attitude toward our practices, and the fact that ethics, as understood along the lines of this view, permeates language as a whole does not make it an attitude towards language. The first view rather draws attention to the reality of our practices—to their point as expressions of all sorts of care and interests—by formulating a transcendental condition for those practices: It draws attention to something that is embedded in those practices, and it matters not what our attitude is towards this fact—whether we like it or not, happy with it or not. Happiness, in opposition, is an attitude towards language, an attitude towards life, and the whole of human practice. It is a global attitude towards the cobweb of forms which our contact with the world takes. In this way it is like unhappiness; in fact it is its opposite. Both happiness and unhappiness view language and world “from side-ways on.”

The confusion between the two views of ethics can also happen in the other direction: happiness and unhappiness—qua attitudes towards the totality of life—may be thought of as particular practices or kinds of practices, particular language games or particular colors that practices can take or styles in which language game can be conducted, or as one more distinction that captures a difference of responsiveness to things, and at any rate as something that is already weaved into, and can only be seen from within our life with things. This falsifies things. The attitudes of happiness and unhappiness are not weaved into our life with things, and are invisible by any inspection of our practices. Morality, in the second kind of view, is otherworldly. From the point of view of our practices, the attitudes of the happy and the unhappy look like a big and deep confusion. They involve a “failure” to do anything in particular, to take part in any particular activity, to take any particular sort of interest in things. Even using the word ‘attitude’ to capture what happiness and unhappiness are seems wrong. For normally ‘taking an attitude towards something’ denotes some sort of activity. For similar reasons no word would fit. And appreciating this is appreciating something essential about what ethics, according to the second kind of view, is, and why it is no subject matter.

13 Comments

    RSS Feed


                    See my
    Academia.edu page



    Previous Notes

    Excluded Middle

    Moral Clarification


    The Will in the Tractatus

    Morality and Creation

    Moral Skepticism


    Understanding language and understanding music - The unity of a sentence, and the unity of a salad

    In what way secondary and absolute uses are nonsense (2)

    Another way of using nonsense

    Ethics as an Aspect of Philosophy - In what sense is there an ethical point to the Tractatus

    Interpretation as finding a way to say what the writer does - the Tractatus for example

    In what way secondary and absolute uses are nonsense

    Art is a matter of use - two claims, and a thought about the relation to ethics

    Both Aspects at the Same Time - in connection with Wittgenstein's early views on ethics

    Thinking and Willing Subjects in the Tractatus

    Two notions of "Family Resemblance" and a relation to Aspect-Perception


    The experience of thinking

    The Figurative and the Literal: two kinds of picturing: making reality thinkable

    What’s the Point of Figurative Language?

    ‘Juliet is the sun’ again – What kind of metaphor is it?

    Secondary and Absolute Uses of Terms – the Problem of Irresoluteness

    Secondary and Absolute Uses of Terms – the Problem of Examples

    Wrestling with Nonsense—A Protest: Absolute Senses, Secondary Senses, Gulfs between People, Difficulties of Reality, and Philosophy.

    What’s so bad about pain?

    Between Romantics and Anatomy: Religion and Pornography in Hanoch Levin

    The transcendence of ethics – two views

    Pain as form of behavior and pain as private object

    Archives

    November 2019
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2017
    November 2016
    June 2016
    July 2015
    May 2015
    January 2015
    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014
    February 2014
    January 2014
    December 2013
    November 2013
    October 2013
    September 2013
    August 2013
    July 2013
    June 2013
    February 2013
    January 2013
    November 2012
    October 2012
    August 2012
    July 2012
    June 2012
    May 2012
    April 2012
    February 2012
    April 2011
    January 2011
    April 2010
    March 2010
    December 2009
    November 2009


     -
    Blogroll

    Kelly Jolley - Quantum Est In Rebus Inane

    Duncan Richter - Language Goes on Holiday

    Matt Pianalto - Problems of Life

    Ben Pierce - Expensive Coffee

    Lars Hertzberg -
    Language is things we do

    Breaking the Silence - Israeli Soldiers Talk about the Occupied Territories

    Hans Sluga Blog

    Mists on the Riverss - Ed Mooney



    Tags

    All
    Absolute Sense
    Action
    Aristotle
    Art
    Aspect
    Biography
    Body And Soul
    Cavell
    Clarity Of Use
    Coetzee
    Consequences
    Crary Alice
    Ethics
    First Person Authority
    Flyers And Floaters
    Form And Matter
    Hanoch Levin
    Humor
    Imagination
    Intention
    Intentions
    Interpretation
    Irresoluteness
    Jonathan Lear
    Literature
    Logic And Ethics
    Meaning Experience
    Metaphors
    Mindlessness
    Moral Clarification
    Moralism
    Morality
    Myth Of The Given
    Nonsense
    No Subject Matter
    Objects Of Comparison
    Pain
    Philosophy
    Plato
    Platonic Ideas
    Pornography
    Pot Paradox
    Privacy
    Promissory Sense
    Real Need
    Relativism
    Religion
    Resoluteness
    Riddles
    Sanity
    Secondary Sense
    Seeing
    Self Examination
    Self-Examination
    Self-expression
    Self Knowledge
    Self-Knowledge
    Sideways On
    Sideways-on
    Skepticism
    Socratic Ignorance
    Sub Specie Aeternitatis
    Thing In Itself
    Thinking Experience
    Tractatus
    Tragedy
    Trancendental
    Wittgenstein

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.