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Adorno: back to Kant?

Can one say that Adorno returns to Kant to ground his moral philosophy?

In the third section of Part three of Negative Dialectics, called 'Meditations on Metaphysics', there is a passage entitled 'Metaphysics and Culture'. It begins thus:

After Auschwitz
"Hitler has imposed a new categorical imperative upon humanity in the state of their unfreedom: to arrange their thinking and conduct, so that Auschwitz never repeats itself, so that nothing similar ever happen again. This imperative is as unmanageable vis-à-vis its foundation as the given fact formerly was to the Kantian one. To treat it discursively would be heinous: in it the moment of the supplementary in what is moral can be bodily felt. Bodily, because it is the abhorrence, become practical, of the unbearable physical pain inflicted on individuals, even after individuality, as an intellectual form of reflection, is on the point of disappearing. Only in the unvarnished materialistic motive does morality survive."(p.361)

That phrase 'a new categorical imperative upon humanity' is very Kantian, and it refers to an expression of freedom and moral autonomy.

The phrase 'After Auschwitz' historicizes the categorical imperative. This gives us a reflection on the historicity of particular ethical problems.

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Animal/human#3

Instead of a divide between human and animal (eg., one is a sentiment being and the other is not) we can talk in terms of the threshold between the human and the inhuman.

For instance, rather than simply being a death camp, Auschwitz is the site of a biopolitical experiment, wherein 'the Jew is transformed into a Muselmann (ie., a 'living corpse') and the human into a non-human'.

Agamben argues that the Muselmann is not just put outside the limits of human and the moral status that attends the categorization. Instead the Muselmann signigies a more fundamental indistinction between the human and the inhuman, in which it becomes impossible to distinguish them from each other.

animal/human#2

In his The Open: Man and Animal Giorgio Agamben's concept of the "anthropological machine," refers to a political device for producing the recognition of the human.

He says that the classical ways of distinguishing humans from animals (rationality for the Greeks) are foreign to us, and most people don’t care about modern science and the way that it says that human beings differ from other primates in minor physiological ways.

Heidegger argues that human beings differ from animals not because of rationality or physiology, but because they are world-forming. That is, human beings are open to the world, or may question the world, in a way that animals cannot be or do.

animal/human

I am reading Giorgio Agamben's The Open: Man and Animal. In it he says that:

As is well known Heidegger constantly rejected the traditional metaphysical definition of man as animal rationale--the living being that has language (or reason), as if the being of man could be determined by means of adding something to the "simply living being".

Well, I didn't know that about Heidegger.

I do know that Aristotle initially made that distinction to establish the "human" as a distinct and superior type of animal. Latter on, with Descartes, language was used to establish the "human" as a kind of being that is essentially different from animal altogether.My preference is Aristotle's 'man is by nature a rational animal' as this suggests the continuity between animal and human, no matter how great the differences between them.

Dehumanization refers to the reducing of the human to the animal: "animalizing" humans.The mirror of this is the violence against the non-human: the cruelty torture and violence that is directed towards animals in slaughterhouses, experimental laboratories and factory farms.

At this point we begin to see the connections between the slaughterhouse and the concentration camp.

depression

K-punk has linked capitalism and bi-polar depression (manic depression with its suicidally depressed and delusionally manic mood swings). That post suggests that depression is more an illness of civilization, and not a biological disorder that is genetic in origin.

The medical solution? Gulp down a handful of pills every day makes you sane. Well, the daily dose of lithium may help you get your life under control.

Many argue that the chief problem under capitalism is not that people are getting treatment for mental illness and reconciling themselves to capitalism. It is that people cannot afford, or do not have access to, quality treatment that can enable them to lead a life that is productive (not only economically, but socially, politically, culturally and emotionally).

But that is not the end of the matter. We also have the medicalization of daily life. Thus psychiatry has a tendency to expand its diagnostic system so that more and more experiences are brought within its domain, whilst the pharmaceutical industry and psychiatry believe that deliberate efforts to synthesis new therapeutic compounds could alleviate suffering while generating profits.

By emphasising the biological (that is psychopathology is a consequence of inheritance and other constitutional factors) psychiatry has located the source of the problem in the individual. So, as treatment is directed at the individual, (psychiatry in effect is emptying symptoms of their possible moral, political, economic or social meanings because the symptoms have only biological significance. That is the discourse of psychiatry.

sophistry and rhetoric

According to Wikepedia:

Sophism was originally a term for the techniques taught by a highly respected group of philosophy and rhetoric teachers in ancient Greece. The derogatory modern usage of the word, suggesting an invalid argument composed of specious reasoning, is not necessarily representative of the beliefs of the original Sophists.

The key here is rhetoric.Wikepedia says that in Ancient Greece:

Rhetoric ....evolved as an important art, one that provided the orator with the forms, means, and strategies of persuading an audience of the correctness of the orator's arguments. Today the term rhetoric is generally used to refer only to the form of argumentation, often with the pejorative connotation that rhetoric is a means of obscuring the truth. Classical philosophers believed quite the contrary: the skilled use of rhetoric was essential to the discovery of truths, because it provided the means of ordering and clarifying arguments.

Badiou operates with the modern prejorative meaning: for him sophistry is a derogatory term for rhetoric that is designed to appeal to the listener on grounds other than the strict logical validity of the statements being made.

It does because it also appeals to the emotions and our commonplaces. But that need not mean that it does away with logic. Rather it wraps the logic (truth) up in metaphor and ornamentation etc so as to be be more persuasive.

Bad rhetoric is all about the metaphor, ornamentation etc without the logic or concern for truth. The Murdoch Press and Fox Television provide good everyday examples of this in terms fo the Iraqi war

Badiou: philosophy and sophistry

Badiou insists that philosophy is the discipline concerned with truth, and that any effort to detract philosophy from this concern is tantamount to sophistry.

It means that the philosopher must find a different way to be faithful to Plato’s insistence on a truth that is superior to mere doxa. If we put this in Platonic terms, the philosopher’s task is to transcend the marketplace of opinions (doxa) and appeal to universal truths that hold sway in any given context.

The argument is that, if statements can only produce effects to the extent that they have force in a language game, then the statements of philosophy have no special import. If so, then there is no hope of reorienting the rules of language games to prioritize, for example, the scientist's statements on global warming over those of the chat room fool, or the doctor's statements on illness over those of the quack. Hence the importance of truth to philosophy.

It is the negative conception of sophists that concerns me. As I understand it the sophists largely concentrated on teaching rhetoric and training the young politicians to persuade the multitude with a series of stock arguments.

Rhetoric is then given a particular twist. Sophists are seen to entangle, entrap, and confuse their opponents, by means of strange or flowery metaphors, by unusual figures of speech, by epigrams and paradoxes, and in general by being clever and smart.

The sophists had little concern with a concern for the truth as they used fallacious arguments knowing them to be such.

Badiou on love

Badiou is certainly an interesting philosopher. I have a tendency to see him as an analytic philosopher due to his set theory ontology, Platonism and conception of philosophy as a system. Yet he writes on variety of topics including love. A passage on Badiou:

Alain Badiou's concept of love stands in opposition to two traditional orientations. The first, the skeptical and classical one, which is still very powerful in psychoanalysis, is that love is only the disguise for sexual desire. Lacan gave it the following sophisticated form: love supplements the lack of a sexual relationship. The second, romantic one, postulates total fusion between the lovers, which is symbolized by their dying together. Badiou, on the other hand,considers that love is a process of truth. But what truth? A truth about the Two, about separation, about disjunction. A truth that is realized in a unique process but which has to do with difference. It is only in love that the difference between the sexes (regardless of whether the couple is homosexual or heterosexual or both) comes into the light of the True. That is why Badiou calls love "the Scene of the Two."

Badiou endeavors to think, and even formalize, this scene.

It is a worthwhile place to do philosophy as we, in our everyday life, swing between love as sex in consumerism and the romantic absorption on the loved other. It is very difficult to find somewhere else to stand. That is why I've always been troubled by the conception of love and its connection to human relationships and sexuality.

However I'm not persuaded that desire in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit can be simply coded as sexuality. Desire is the journey out to the 'other' in order to in order to know self through knowing the other. The relationship to the other is a power relationship. The movement of desire reveals a paradox, for the separate self is based on a movement of relation, albeit a negative relation. For Hegel there is no self-consciousness outside the mediations of the social.

against the sophists

I will be in Sydney for several days checking out my new job and I may not be able to post because I will be too busy.

So I will leave you with Alain Baidou's conception of philosophy. He says that:

"Philosophy is never the interpretation of experience.It is an act of Truth in regard to truths."

What of ethical experience?

Badiou's is a very Platonic understanding of philosophy? Does Badiou see truth as absolute or eternal? I'm unsure. But Truth is part of an explicitly anti-historicist system.

However the persons he places in the spotlight are the sophists (the poststructuralists?) as they impede the Truth.

Language is not reality is the argument against the sophists who supposedly reduce philosophy to nothing but a matter of language.For Badiou the modern Sophists are those philosophers who defend one of the three following theses (and sometimes all three at once):

(1) philosophy is nearing its end, it has exhausted its potential, the only possible philosophical posture today is to celebrate or regret its demise; (2) philosophy has undergone a linguistic turn (for Badiou, the arch-Sophist is Wittgenstein); (3) philosophy is about meanings, it is a kind of glorified hermeneutics (for him, the greatest of these philosophical hermeneutists is Heidegger).

Badiou's tone is a long way from the intellectual fashions in the humanities such as poststructuralism, postcolonial theory, feminism, and psychoanalysis which construct cultural studies that celebrates the fluidity and "hybridity" of sex, gender, and race.

According to Badiou, there are two underlying assumptions shared by the above distinct orientations: 1) negatively, they share
the assumption that philosophy is over, metaphysics is dead, and
metaphysical claims for truth are no longer possible; and 2) and
positively, all three assert that language is the only locus of meaning, and must now be the only site for questions of truth, now understood as radically limited, contingent, and historical.

Badiou's argument is that the insistence that language is the privileged locus and limitation of meaning precludes the possibility of addressing universal questions, then that leaves us enmired in the babble of multiple and untranslatable discourses, subjective positions, specialized disciplines, and private forms of life.

Does it? Why does that leave us ensnarred in multiple and untranslatable discourses.

Derrida, Heidegger, Spirit #5

This post returns to last year to pick up on a series of posts on Derrida's 'Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question', one of the more difficult of Derrida's texts.

That series of posts was left uncompleted because the text was complex and convoluted. We are wrestling with fine distinctions in the gray on grey in the borderlands. For though Heidegger forms part of the philosophical context in which Derrida works, in the 'Of Spirit' text Derrida tries to come to terms with Heidegger's Nazi connections, accommodations, and support for the Nazi's throughout 1933-4 by way of an extended reflection on Heidegger's use of the term "Geist."

Geist and history come together.It recalls Nietzsche and the way that the Platonic-Christian Spirit, now passes as the realm of organized religion to which is opposed spirit as the realm of freedom, humanness, authenticity.

Does the use of 'Geist' Spirit (or culture) counter biologism, racism and naturalism, or is it a 'spiritualisation' of biological racism? These are the interpretations suggested.

Derrida says:

Because one cannot demarcate oneself from biologism, from naturalism, from racism in its genetic form, one cannot be opposed to them except by re-inscribing spirit in an oppositional determination, by once again making it a unilaterality of subjectivity, even if in its voluntarist form. The constraint of this program remains very strong, it reigns over the majority of discourses which, today and for a long time to come, state their opposition to racism, to totalitarianism, to nazism, to fascism etc., and do this in the name of spirit, and even of the freedom of the spirit in the name of an axiomatic, for example, that of democracy or 'human rights'---which, directly or not, comes back to this metaphysics of subjectivity. All the pitfalls of the strategy of establishing demarcations belong to this program, whatever place one occupies in it. The only choice is the choice between the terrifying contaminations it asssigns. Even if all the forms of complicity are not equivalent, they are irreducible. The question of knowing which is the least grave of these forms of complicity is always there---its urgency and its seriousness could not be over-stressed---but it will never dissolve the irreducibility of this fact. This fact, of course, is not simply a fact. First, and at least, because it is not yet done, not altogether: it calls more than ever, as for what in it remains to come after the disasters that have happened, for absolutely unprecedented responsibilities of 'thought' and 'action'... In the rectorship address, this risk is not just a risk run. If its program seems diabolical, it is because, without there being anything fortuitous in this, it capitalizes on the worst, that is on both evils at once: the sanctioning of nazism, and the gesture that is still metaphysical.(pp. 39-40)

A complex passage, but the finger is clearly pointed at Heidegger.

So how it is a metaphysical sanctioning of nazism?

Prior to that passage Derrida addresses Heidegger's Rector Address, the enflaming of spirit, and the German character of the university. Spirit becomes German. It is here in this Address, Derrida says , that Heidegger lifts the quotation marks around Geist to celebrate Geist, and talks in terms of the destiny of the Germany people. This gives us the march of the German people towards their future between Russia and America.

Heidegger spiritualizes Nazism---- he speaks of the 'inner truth and greatness of National Socialism'.

There is a kind of contamination going on here from nationality, which is difficult to evade And it affects us today as in the war on terrorism, and the patriotism of the national security state. Borders place limits on our recognition, compassion and responsibility to ethical "other"

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Levinas: ethics without ontology

An ethics without ontology. Is that Levinas? If so what would that look like? A quote to help us:

"For Levinas, the irreducible foundation of ethics is my immediate recognition, when confronted with a suffering fellow human being, that I have an obligation to do something.To be sure, as Levinas is well aware, none of us can help all of the other suffering human beings, and the obligation to help a particular human being may be overridden by the obligation to help what he calls "the third." But not to feel the obligation to help the sufferer at all, not to recognize that if I can, I must help, or to feel that obligation only when the suffering person I am confronted with is nice, or sympathetic, or someone I can identify with, is not to be ethical at all, no matter how many principles one may be guided by or willing to give one's life for." (p.11)

It is from this text. (html version) It is Part One of a set of lectures on ethics without ontology.The author is unknown.

Latter on the lecture it is stated that:

"There are tensions between the concern of Levinasian ethics, which is situational in the extreme, and the concerns of Kant and Aristotle. Levinas's thought experiment is always to imagine myself confronted with one single suffering human being, ignoring for the moment the likelihood that I am already under obligation to many other human beings. I am supposed to feel the obligation to help this human being, an obligation which I am to experience not as the obligation to obey a principle, as a Kantian would, but as an obligation to that human being. Kant's concern, that I have at least one universal principle---the principle of always treating the humanity in another person as an end, and not merely as a means---a principle which I am not willing to allow to be overridden by considerations of utility, obviously pulls in a different direction, and both the Levinasian concern with the immediate recognition of the other and the Kantian concern with principle have been seen as being in conflict with the Aristotelian concern with human flourishing."

It is then added that we need not accept this conflictual way of seeing things:

"The tension is real, but so is the mutual support. Kantian ethics, I have argued (as Hegel already argued) is, in fact, empty and formal unless we supply it with content precisely from Aristotelian and Levinasian and yet other directions...And Levinas is right to remind us that even if the ethical person acts in accordance with the Categorical Imperative, her focus is not on the Kantian principle as an abstract rule, but on the particular other person she is trying to help. Most ethicists, however, down to the present day, still opt for one or another of the concerns I have listed, or perhaps opt simply for the Utilitarian concern with maximizing pleasure (the greatest pleasure of the greatest number for the longest period of time, or some successor to that formula) and try either to deny the ethical significance of the other."

Badiou: the return to philosophy

I picked up a copy of Alain Badiou's text, Infinite Thought: truth and the return to philosophy, yesterday afternoon from the Dark Horsey bookshop at the EAF in Adelaide. It was the 'return to philosophy' that caught my eye, not the 'infinite thought.'

Reurn to philosophy from what? From the modernist obsession with science? From its gradual elimination in the corporate university? Glancing through the text I noticed that it it places itself in opposition to the contemporary reduction of philosophy to nothing but a matter of language by poststructuralism, and the premature announcements of the end of philosophy by both the Heideggerians and the scientistic analytic philosophers.

A return to what kind of philosophy? Badiou sets himself against both analytic and continental modes of philosophy, and puts the traditional Platonic concerns of philosophy, truth, and being into play against the modern sophists of postmodernism. He sees mathematics as ontology and so his return to philosophy is to a systematic one based on the axioms of set theory.

Badiou should appeal to those modernists obsessed with academic postmodernism and in love with system. An article introducing Badiou over at Polygraph, which concentrates on the mathematical ontology. The link is courtesy of a Gauche

Levinas, ethics, home

In an earlier post I mentioned that one of Levinas' criticism of Heidegger's Being and Time was that the predominance of the ontological in this text is such that the relation to the other is no longer fundamental. According to this article this critique is explored in Levinas's Infinity and Totality.

Jacques Taminiaux says that:

The confrontation is, so to speak, condensed in Levinas' strong formula: "Metaphysics precedes ontology". Metaphysics has precedence over ontology. By contrast, Heidegger claims that metaphysics accomplishes itself in ontology, that is in the vision attainable by the human Dasein of what it means to be.

This is an ethics without ontology. As I understand it the theme at the center of Levinas’s philosophy is that all attempts to reduce ethics to a theory of being, or to base ethics upon a theory of being,(upon ontology) are disastrous failures.

However, I'm puzzled by the 'metaphysics precedes ontology'claim in the above paragraph, as I've always understood metaphysics to be ontology--it is the basic categories that we use to understand, and make sense of, being. Digging further it appears that Levinas uses metaphysics to stand for ethics. Hence we have ethics without ontology. Does not ethics imply an ontology--a conception of being?

So how does Levinas understand ethics as metaphysics?

Jacques Taminiaux says:

Metaphysics is a movement from a condition of being at home with oneself in the world towards an outside of oneself. To that extent metaphysics, before being a doctrine, is a desire for the other, as Plato has already acknowledged. But traditionally the desire for the other pervading metaphysics was taken to be a desire for another home. In other words being at home was at the beginning of the metaphysical movement and at the end as well. Accordingly the metaphysical movement was like an Odyssey, a circular movement longing for a return on a higher level supposedly offered to a view, thanks to which the desiring metaphysician, i.e. the human being as such, truly becomes itself. So understood the metaphysical desire is aiming to a full visibility through which thought reaches an achievement.

If ontology concerns itself with grasping the truth being apart from the plurality and density of actual existents, then it prevents us from maintaining the other's alterity. Consequently, ontology creates a self-contained system (the "same") that resists any intrusion that would call forth from us an existential response. Allowing the Other to disrupt the "at homeness" (chez-soi) of our own horizon is ethics.

The concern with being at home is a very Heideggerian theme and it is bought into play with Heidegger's criticisms of Nietzsche's subjectivism and isolation.

Nietzsche made a virtue out of the (Cartesian) subjectivist isolation in which he found himself. He held that each must take responsibility for the creation of the self and its world of meaning. This heroic individualism, with its pathos of distance separating the noble individual from the herd, is necessary for the nurturing of the sovereign individual and new values to live by. So Nietzsche celebrates homelessness, leaves home to wander the open seas, and becomes a nomadic self that is cut off from meaningful rapport with others, and becomes the strangest of all guests in a world that turned into a wasteland.

If complacency in homelesssness is the postmodern condition, then Heidegger alternative to such homelessness is the place of human dwelling.

Adorno: ethics & Auschwitz

Below is a nice quote that indicates how Adorno's negative conception of immanent critique depends upon tacit ethical commitments:

The figure of Auschwitz in Adorno's work should be understood as a synechdoche for the barbaric, inhuman and ultimately murderous treatment of other people that took place in the ghettos, the concentration camps and the death camps under the Third Reich. The significance of Auschwitz, thus understood, is twofold: it represents the simultaneous culmination and betrayal of enlightenment. Auschwitz is a betrayal of enlightenment because it violated the humanitarian ideals of the historical Enlightenment in a devastating manner. It is the culmination of enlightenment because in that very devastation it revealed what enlightenment always was: instrumental rationality, technological domination and social oppression masquerading as reason and freedom. Adorno's strategy is to confront Kant's ideas and postulates---the empty promises of enlightenment---with Auschwitz---the blind unreason of its content. This confrontation is supposed to undermine Kant’s rationalist metaphysics and simultaneously to release its truth moment.

The quote is from James Gordon Finlayson's Normativity and Metaphysics in Adorno and Hegel. Auschwitz is ethically bad, we know it to be bad, we consider it to be objectively wrong, and we are revolted by the evil. We resist Auschwitz because it stands for a world that is bad. Finlayson says:

"...Auschwitz is the paradigmatic instance of secular evil and Adorno obviously does not think that widespread spontaneous revulsion at what happened at Auschwitz is what makes it morally wrong. On the contrary the evil that Auschwitz objectively is, is what makes the shudder appropriate. In fact the figure of Auschwitz is the keystone of the normative framework of Adorno's social philosophy."

It is this tacit ethical commitment that enables Adorno to say that Auschwitz should never reoccur and nothing similar ever happen.

Adorno contra Hegel's ethics

Adorno's texts, including Negative Dialectics and Aesthetic Theory, express profound moral concern in the broadest sense of right living. Adorno criticises those elements of social life that threaten the autonomy of the individual and which encourage individuals to adopt instrumental relations to other people and things. The moral concerns arise in these texts because universal concepts,'mutilate', 'dominate' and 'liquidate' the concrete particulars they subsume, and because thinking stands accused of being in league with institutional and social structures of domination. However,the normative basis of his work remains obscure.

Whilst reading on, and around, Adorno's negative moral philosophy and its immanent critique of modernity I was suprised to find little engagement by Adorno with Hegel's ethics: the conception of ethical life, ethics as a form of self-actualization, the emphasis on the value of freedom, it's conception of self whose identity is expressed or embodied in action.

According to Gerhard Schweppenhauser's account of Adorno's negative moral philosophy in in The Cambridge Companion to Adorno Adorno judges Hegel in terms of the latter's apology for power as it evolves in the Philosophy of Right On this interpretation of Hegel, Hegel disregards individuals and their experiences in favour of the overwhelming force of the social and historical universal. Adorno sided with the individual against Hegel's false reconciliation of the individual with totality, and turns to Kant to affirm indiivdual autonomy.

Fair enough. But it is not much of an immanent critique of Hegel's historicized naturalist ethical philosophy, which in the Philosophy of Right, traces the way the self-knowing agent is a person possessing abstract right, then a subject with moral vocation, then in the the concrete spheres of ethical life as a family member, then a burgher and finally a citizen.

Where is the rational kernel in Hegel's ethics that an immanent critique undercovers? Adorno endorses Hegel's well known criticisms of Kant's moral theory and he accepts Hegel's denial that the task of philosophy is to "issue instructions as to how the world ought to be."

Adorno is silent On Schweppenhauser's account. Is this a reliable account? I have a copy of Adorno's Problems of Moral Philosophy to find out.

Levinas & Heidegger

The more I dig around the work about Immanual Levinas on the internet the more he appeals to me. He appears to be uncomfortably situated in the difference between Husserl and Heidegger's phenomenology, which heralded "the return to the things themselves". He appears to reason from the perspective of phenomenological ethics, breaks away from subjectivism of Kantian ethics, and questions the power of the subject's gaze that dominates the other.

My suspicion is that to counter and confront Heidegger Levinas returns to Descartes via Husserl. It strikes me that such a stepback is a return to subjectivism that Heidegger placed in question.

This article by Jacques Taminiaux indicates why. Taminiaux says that Totality and Infinity (scroll down for selections) is marked by a close attention to Heidegger's Being and Time, and the Heideggerian analysis of the structures of the comportment of human beings in everydayness: being there in the world, thrown in our own existence and temporally projected toward our end.

That close attention is combined with a critical resistance to Heidegger that highlights two flaws in Heidegger's new ontology of everydayness:
---the shutting of all windows upon the eternal;
---the fact that the predominance of the ontological is such that the relation to the other is no longer fundamental.

The last point is the one that interests me---the ethics. I'm not much concerned with the religious bit, even though I recognize that the ethical and the religious can, and do, intertwine.

What interests me about Levinas' resistance to Heidegger is that this resistance takes the form of a debate with Heidegger; not a polemical dismissal like that of Adorno; or a rejection of Heidegger by modernist liberals because of his Fascist politics but who give no indication of ever having read Heidegger's philosophical texts or acknowledge the hermeneutical circle they work within.

The characteristics of this eternal recurrence of the same are: the participants being oblivious to the history of interpretations they are thrown into; they are willing to dump the ethos of scholarship when it comes to rejecting Heidegger; the tendency to celebrate any text that affirms their prejudices; and a refusal to critically engage with Heidegger. The rejection of Heidegger's philosophy because of his politics mostly relies on second rate Anglo-American texts rather than texts like Derrida's Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question that engages with Heidegger's categories.

Is this more prejudices that the enlightened liberals refuse to confront? More prejudices functioning as gatekeeping to protect a defensive liberal culture from the intellectual viruses contained in foreign bodies of continental philosophy? Surely not.

So how does Levinas critically engage with Heidegger?

Jacques Taminiaux says that:

Levinas agrees with Heidegger as far as the concept of ontology is concerned. The task of ontology is not the task of a superscience defining the ultimate properties of all beings and characterizing their relations. The task is to ask what it means to be, a question that only makes sense for the human being, a question which points to a relation between a being, or an existent, and its Being or its existence.

But it is one thing to agree with Heidegger on this formal concept. It is quite another thing to agree with Heidegger's definition of the relation existent-existence in ekstatic terms.

What does that mean?

Taminiaux says that it refers to the relation between a being (an existent) and Being (existence) which Heidegger characterizes in ekstatic terms. What is being questioned in Heidegger's ontology is the move from existent to existence. This means from an existing human being who finds himself thrown among other beings and whose mode of being is at first determined from without and not properly his own (uneigentlich) towards a mode of being which is his ownmost possibility, and becomes authentic by facing his finite and mortal temporality.

Levinas draws attention to a relation to existence that is overlooked by Heidegger's emphasis on ekstasis; a relation of staying under the burden of 'the there, which escapes all intentionality, and can only be approached in situations which cannot be described according to the bi-polar structure intention-intended. Among those situations we find for example fatigue, laziness, insomnia. These situations have no place in Heidegger's analytic of Dasein for the simple reason that they escape all intentional project.

Okay. What then hangs on this? How do we interpret the significance of this? Taminiaux makes the following suggestion:

It is important to notice that in all those states the present is experienced as disconnected, resisting to a projection towards the future. In other words those situations are in no way ekstatic in Heidegger's sense. And indeed by referring to those situations, Levinas wants to detect the specific features of an hypostasis opposed to all ek-stasis.

What then are the specific features of hypostasis opposed to all ek-stasis?

The word hypostasis which is Greek literally means staying under. By naming hypostasis as the primary relation between an existent and existence, Levinas means that the human being emerges first of all from an anonymous flow of existence under which he stays, to which he is intimately submitted and which again and again is experienced by him as a load, a burden he has to sustain. Presumably fatigue is a burden that we have to sustain.

Fine. No problems. Yet Heiddegger's praxis was concerned with tacit embodied knowledge of our habitual practices in everyday life.

Does that Levinas' criticism open a window to introduce the unconscious into the debate. What it indicates is the closeness of Levinas' engagement with Heidegger---something that is rather unusual. Hence the attraction of levinas

escaping Hegel

This post picks up on some comments made here and here about experience. The quotes below are from a paper by Zeynep Direk entitled, 'On the Sources and the Structure of Derrida's Radical Notion of Experience'.

'Experience' is an old metaphysical concept and in Australia it mostly means or refers to subjectivity, or the conscious subjective of the body processing information. This is traditionally given an empiricist twist of a historical bits of sense data that come from outside the body to our inside (the consciousness of the isolated and ahistorical 'I'.) As the sense data are raw or outside of language, so the signs of language are "derivative" in that they are conceived as a modification of consciousness. Signs are worked up from linking sense data.

Derrida has characterised the traditional concept of experience in the philosophical tradition of the West as "the experience of presence," an absolute proximity to consciousness of that which is experienced. Derrida is working against the phenomeological tradition of Husserl and Heidegger but his thesis of the unification of presence and experience can apply to the empiricist conception of experience. Derrida argues that working beyond the logic of presence and founding it, lies the buried logic of the trace.

In his paper Direk says:

In "From Restricted to General Economy," Derrida interprets Bataille's relation to Hegel by putting the concept of experience at the center of his reading. He thereby articulates the difference between Hegel's concept of experience and Bataille's as the difference between a restricted economy and a general economy. In fact, Bataille can be said to follow a certain trend of Hegel criticism which asserts that "experience" is inexhaustible.

And further:

In its striving for homogeneity, Hegel's discourse, unjustifiedly though necessarily, reduces the accidental, heterological elements such as restlessness, eroticism, anxiety, laughter, and the mystical. Bataille insists on these experiences, since they do not constitute a dialectical moment in the Phenomenology. Hence, these resist the project.

Hegel's Phenomenology stands for, or is interpreted as, the prison of discursive existence from which Bataille wants to escape.He transgresses this by breaking the discourse in him. Ecstasy through sexuality and mysticism is a way of breaking from Hegel's discourse, which is seen as that of the Sage(God) at the end of history whose has complete knowledge of all that is (totality).

Adorno, Nietzsche, ethics+domination

I want to return to Adorno's ethics of the good life. This ethical counterpoint to instrumental rationality can only be addressed by way of negation---as a resistance to our heteronomous socialization, which represses our autonomy that provides the capacity for action and paves the way to freedom.

So how does Adorno's moral philosophy stand in relation to Nietzsche since both are critiques of morality, or a self-overcoming of traditional morality? According to Gerhard Schweppenhauser in The Cambridge Companion to Adorno Nietzsche stands for the cult of nobility and a new aristocratic morality. Hence Nietzsche's critique of conventional ideas of morality is transformed into an affirmative version of domination and social injustice.

So far this reads like a standard Marxist indictment of Nietzsche--eg., that of Lukacs. Does Adorno see, and acknowledge, a rational core in Nietzsche's ethics beyond the shattering of moral conventions? Both question the claim that philosophy is the 'discourse of mastery', as they understand the task of philosophy to disrupt any and every naturalization of the conjunction of the concept and the world as well as every unreflective naivety. Does Nietzsche go beyond this disruption (philosophizing with a hammer) to enable us to think and morally relate responsibly to concrete particulars?

Schweppenhauser says yes--behind the brutalities of Nietzsche's moral philosophy is a conception of the liberated person as a potential model of freedom or autonomy. Is this Nietzsche's free spirits or philosophers of the future? Schweppenhauser quotes a passage from Adorno's Problems of Moral Philosophy(PMP):

Nietzsche failed to recognize that the so-called slave morality that he excoriates is in truth alwys a master morality, namely the morality imposed on the oppressed by the rulers. If his critique had been consistent as it ought to have been, but isn't---because he was too in thrall to existing social conditions, because he was able to get to the bottom of what people had become, but was not able to get to the bottom of the society that made them what they are----it should have turned its gaze to the conditions that determine human beings and make them and each of us into what we are. (PMP, p.174)

Adorno's immanent critique of Nietzsche's ethics is a Marxist critique that understands morality as form of voluntary subordination that nevertheless holds the potential for autonomy.

It is a very minimal account or engagement with Nietzsche, even if it is more sophisticated than standard scientific Marxist accounts that dismiss ethics as irrelevant because a positivist or realist science is all that is necessary.

Levinas+ethics

This account in the Literary Encyclopedia helps me in my attempts to try and to make sense of what Levinas understands ethics to be in the concrete conditions of everyday life. It says:

'The word [ethics] does not mean what we ordinarily expect. It is defined very early in Totality and Infinity: "We name this calling into question of my spontaneity by the presence of the Other, ethics." (p.43) Ethics is a way of talking about the encounter between the self and the other. But what could it mean to start with a movement whereby the self is called into question?'

How is the self called into question? This suggests the pathway is the encounter with the face of the other:

"The encounter of the self with the Other, and specifically with the face of the Other. Face, like ethics, is for Levinas a technical term. It is "[t]he way in which the other presents himself, exceeding the idea of the other in me." (1967, 50) In the concrete conditions of everyday life, the encounter with the face of the other is the encounter with infinity because of the way in which the face always transcends what I has expected."

The way in which the other presents himself, exceeding the idea of the other in me. The idea of an asylum seeker that we Austrlaian citizens have that of the 'boat people' or 'queue jumper' but they present to us as a potential refugees or a refugee with human rights.

But why is this encounter ethical? We could continue to refuse hospitality. We could demand that they continued to be locked up or sent back to wher they came from.

Levinas: ethics as first philosophy

In his obituary for Emmanuel Levinas in Radical Philosophy Simon Critchley says:

"Levinas is usually associated with one thesis: ethics is first philosophy. But such an eviscerated statement risks creating more problems than it solves, and goes no way towards capturing the phenomenological richness and breadth of Levinas's work. For me, what remains essential to Levinas's writing (and his extraordinary style of writing should be noted here: strange, elliptical, rhapsodic, sensual) is not its contribution to arcane debates in moral philosophy, but rather its powerful descriptions of the night, insomnia, fatigue, effort, jouissance, sensibility, the feminine, Eros, death, fecundity, paternity, dwelling, and of course the relation to the other. To my mind, like Heidegger before him, but also like Merleau-Ponty, Levinas is concerned with trying to excavate the pre-theoretical layers of our intentional comportment towards the world, an archeology of the pre-reflective constitution of existence, a discussion that, in Autrement qu'Etre, [Otherwise than Being, 1998], leads to a quite radical account of the subject as substitution, hostage, persecution, obsession and trauma."

The return to the pre-reflective constitution of existence is a similar move to that of Heidegger and Adorno to concrete particularity of everyday life. Is that a return to experience? To lived experience? To pre-reflective experience? Does 'intentional comportment' refer to the phenomenological notion of experience with its close connection to life?

So far so good. I can hang in there.

But then we strike this:

"Levinas attempted to address the problematics of ontology by investigating and analyzing the 'face-to-face' relation with the Other. The Other is not known or comprehended as such, but calls into question and challenges the complacency of the self through desire, language, and the concern for justice."

That leaves me stumped.

Encountering Levinas

I'm just beginning to wake up to the fact that the concern with the ethical relation in French philosophy is to be found in the work of Levinas.

When I read Vincent Descombes' Contemporary French Philosophy (published in 1979) it made no mention of Levinas. Yet it claimed to give an overview of the French philosophical scene from 1933 to 1978. Much latter I read Derrida's 1964 essay 'Violence and Metaphysics' in Writing and Difference, But I didn't really understand what I had read, other than think that it had something to do with experience.But it was something different to the phenomenological account of experience.

In reading Derrida I was working with Hegel's concept of experience (in The Phenomenology of Spirit); experience in the sense of "undergoing experiences" as an account of what consciousness lives through, and in, history. The dialectical dramas of the shapes of consciousness took place in history and we, the readers of The Phenomenology of Spirit are engaged in appropriating a history already accomplished and philosophically understood by Hegel. What Derrida was doing in 'Violence and Metaphysics', and how this related to Levinas I had no idea. I could not get a handle on Levinas I quickly turned the pages of the essay.

As an aside, I presume that Bataille's Inner Experience (1943) can be read as a rethinking of the implications and consequences of his reception of Kojeve's interpretation of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. A rethinking that is a radicalization of experience of an unhappy life as an open wound. Bataille's concept of experience becomes one of a transgression.

In working with this weblog I had come across fleeting glimpses of Levinas here and there, and I understood that he signified a reversing of the direction of Heidegger's thinking. But I was not sure what the reversal meant other than an ethical focus on the Other. I'm not even sure if the Other is a person, such as a refugee seeking asylum in Australia.

historical amnesia

I saw this cartoon and it reminded me me how much our time is a time of historical amnesia:

Dwayne Booth

Historical amnesia is especially prevalent in the philosophy institution. There history seeps through the cracks of philosophy's cultural memory (of Hegel). It may well be an exaggeration to say that many analytical philosophers write dry, logical, semi-mathematical works marked by their physics envy, but philosophy does repress its own historicity; so much so that historical amnesia can be seen as is an abiding weakness of philosophy.

In the Anglo-Saxon academic philosophical tradition academic philosophers have often viewed themselves as elites, who turn away from (escape?) from society and politics and live a comfortable life in their Ivory Towers. Universities like Oxford and Cambridge are models of the practice of elitist academics living the scholarly life that is placed in oppostion to the common life they live as parents and consumers.