Virtue in Being

Towards an Ethics of the Unconditioned

Andrew Benjamin

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781438461632
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Phänomenologie in der Philosophie

In his last book, Towards a Relational Ontology, Andrew Benjamin provided a philosophical account of what he terms anoriginal relationality, demonstrating how this concept can be seen to be at work throughout the history of philosophy. In Virtue in Being, he builds on that project to argue for a new way of understanding the relationship between ontology and ethics through insightful readings of texts by Immanuel Kant, Hannah Arendt, and Jacques Derrida. Structuring the book around the themes of violence, evil, and pardon, Benjamin builds a convincing case for the connections he draws between thinkers not commonly associated with one another.

CHAPTER ONE

TOWARD THE UNCONDITIONED

Kant, Epicurus, and Glückseligkeit

Continuing demands a form of recapitulation. The nature of the overall project, as suggested at the outset, lies in the question: What if life were to be thought philosophically? The question does not pertain to biological life but to human life, namely, to that conception of life that folds biology into it but continues to be present, nonetheless, as that which cannot be reduced to the biological. To which it should be added that the possibility of such a reduction endures as the risk inherent in philosophical accounts of human life. In direct terms, the risk is either life’s equation with the biological or the use of the biological as a model for the explanation of human life. Holding human life apart from its biological registration is, from a specific perspective, what inscribes freedom into human life. Freedom depends both on a nondeterministic account of the will and equally on the proposition that one of the defining elements yielding the possibility of the judgment and the evaluation of human actions is the absence of the mechanistic. That absence locates the presence of the world as an indispensible element within judgment. Freedom has to be understood as constrained by the world. Within the “mechanistic” in which the brain figures as a “mechanism,” no matter how plastic the brain may be, the mechanistic still needs to be understood as the identification of a setting that refuses the presence of inconsistent and conflicting sets of values. What this means is that the brain as a self-organizing system is inherently apolitical. Though the claim that the brain provides any sort of model for understanding human behavior—a model that in the end obviates the need to engage with genuine conflict since the brain’s plasticity posited as a heuristic would not allow it to be thought—is of course inherently political, precisely because values marked by original conflict marks the presence of what has already been identified by the formulation “disequilibria of power.” And yet, judgments made in relation to life do not concern life as a given. On the contrary, it is present as a continuity such that life is—is what it is—in the continuity of its self-realization; that self-realization is that in which a distinction between actuality and potentiality is central. Life moves from the simply given or as that which can be incorporated into a biological model, such that as a result of this doubled movement, life has to be understood as inextricably bound up with the continuity of its being lived out. (That continuity is of course articulated within, though importantly is also the articulation of what has already been referred to as a constitutive disequilibrium of power.1) Life, therefore, human life, is already worldly once it is identified with life’s continuity. However, an integral part of the argument to be developed here is that continuity in harboring a potentiality means that continuity is only ever the possibility for forms of discontinuity. Were this position to be denied, which would be the refusal to think both the necessity and the exigency of discontinuity, then it would depend on the naturalization of continuity. The latter is, of course, the naturalization of the power relations constituting life. The naturalization of life is not just articulated within the retained centrality of an ontology of becoming, it assumes that located articulation. Arising here is a site of engagement. Working through possible forms that could be taken by the link between discontinuity and judgment is an essential element within the development of an ethics of the unconditioned and thus delimiting, by restricting, the hold of becoming.

1.

At the minimum human actions can be judged for two specific reasons: first, because such actions stem from the operative presence of the will, and second because any action could always have been otherwise. Their combination is integral to any definition of responsibility. These two reasons identify the possibility of judgment. And yet, what they don’t identify, or at least what they don’t identify initially, are the grounds of judgment. Consequently, an initial distinction can be drawn between judgment’s possibility and that in terms of which judgments can be made. This distinction is central and thus needs to be noted. To the extent that the distinction between possibility and the occurrence of judgment can be maintained, what then becomes significant is how to understand the relationship between judgment’s possibility and that in terms of which judgments occur. As will be seen this distinction and the differing determinations of time within it will continue to play a fundamental role in an ethics of the unconditioned. At this stage, however, it is the second aspect noted above, namely, the ground of judgment, that has to be addressed.

If it can be argued that the ground of judgment is intrinsic to human life, working here with the acceptance of the severance of human life from biological life, what is still to be furnished is any possible unanimity in relation to grounds of judgment. All that can be adduced thus far is that the locus in question is human life; the activity of life, thus the activity that is life. What this means is that the question of life—of human life—were it to be thought philosophically, at the outset, takes on an open quality. There cannot be an automatic response. (In part this occurs as a result of the abeyance of the biological and thus of the determinism of the epigenetic.) As a consequence, the initial element that endures as intrinsic to the question of human life is the maintenance of a certain interrogative force. However, given the presence of questions a space of response or responses is maintained as open.

As a result of the question that was posed at the outset—What if life were to be thought philosophically?—then once life is clarified as “human life,” the question can be taken as naming, at the beginning, a locus of contestation as to what would secure and thus establish the “good life” as a potentiality that is intrinsic to life. If the good life is a potentiality that is intrinsic to life, thus to the being of being human, such a setup attests to both the viability and the utility of the formulation, virtue in being. In addition, there is the attendant recognition that human being involves living within the presence of an original disequilibria of power. As a result the term good should not be identified automatically with the moral. The “good life” is not a life that is lived in one way rather than another (as though the “good life” were simply a matter of choice). Good here marks the possibility of that which is proper to life, where that involves both human life and then that life’s relation to all other forms of life. Holding to relationality does not exclude thinking the particularity of the being of being human. The possibility of the “good life” still insists within relationality. Given this context, what counts as the good life is to be understood as a locus of contestation, and while there will also be conflict concerning how agency is to be understood, what inheres in attempts within the history of philosophy to think “life,” is the recognition that this thinking cannot be separated effectively from a sense of propriety. This is a position that circumvents philosophical nihilism by rendering it impossible. This is even clear in Nietzsche. When Nietzsche argues in The Anti-Christ that a “free spirit” is already implicated in a “revaluation of values,” what is at work is a sense of propriety. In the case of Nietzsche, however, this is nothing other than the expression of a radical subjectivism that identifies freedom with the quality of a subject who attains this state through individual and individualizing actions. Even if Nietzsche writes we, and thus defines a position held by “we free spirits” (“wir freien Geister”) the state of “freedom” that results is no more than a grouping of freed individuals.2 A position reinforced by his underscoring of the self as the locus of transformation in the ascription of a productive power to a form of “selfishness” (“der Selbstucht”) in Ecce Homo.3

Present as a generalized term, the argument has to be that “propriety” is intrinsic to any thinking of a conception of life that differentiates that conception from an understanding of life as a given and thus as a reiterated generality. (The latter would be the conception of life within the primordiality of “eternal return.”) Even if what life is, is still to be discovered and established, it remains the case that what endures is the supposition of there being that which is proper to life. What this means is that there is a sense of propriety that is intrinsic to human being and consequently to the being of being human. As has been suggested at the outset, the result of such a positioning is that there is an anoriginal relation between the ontological and the ethical. The ontological does not precede it in any direct sense, nor should the ethical be added to it, let alone be protected from it. Propriety here depends on the possibility, perhaps the necessity of having to think the being of being human. What is meant by propriety in relation to existence is not mere existence, nor can existence be equated with any one historical or given determination of human being, hence propriety is not normativity, nor can it be reformulated in terms of historical relativity. Rather, the term propriety holds open the space in which the question of what it is that is appropriate to and thus proper to human being can be posed. Accepting the question of propriety as a question, and then in positioning the philosophical task as responding to it, has fundamentally important consequences. The most significant here concerns overcoming the way the relationship between the ethical and the ontological is conventionally understood. It is overcome because an insistence on propriety, or perhaps more accurately allowing propriety to insist, means that the philosophical task would never have been reduced to finding ways of connecting the ontological and the ethical. Indeed, the contrary is the case. That relation is always already present. In sum, again, there is virtue in being. Part of the overall position to be developed in the course of this undertaking is that the grounds of judgment are already present within the fact of existence when the latter is understood ontologically. There is an important reciprocity here. The ground of judgment cannot be separated from the fact of existence or the worldliness of the world. The existence of their inseparability, however, does not entail an equation between the ontological and the ethical. As a result of this setup it is their relation that has to be thought; in other words, the always already present relationship between ethics and ontology is that which determines this specific formulation of the philosophical task.4

The question then is how to begin to think the relation between the ethical and the ontological. The quality of that which is “already there,” understood as the anoriginality of commonality, relationality and place provides a point of departure. There isn’t an arché. Rather beginning occurs in medias rei. In sum, a beginning can be made with that which is already there, namely, the relationship between the affective and the fact of existence, since to be in the world is to have been affected. Affect is bound up with worldly being. To be affected is to be a subject of affect within the world. Even though being a subject is to have been affected, there is an additional element here, namely, time. Time, however, is not being adduced. The contrary is the case. Time has an original quality. While its presence can be assumed, time has a greater complexity than that which is revealed by what is given with this assumption. To evoke the world is to evoke the hold of time. Time is not an empty condition. With the advent of philosophical modernity, time is present as that which can be interrupted and challenged. Events occurring within time can be affirmed or disavowed in ways that have an effect on how time is understood. As a result time acquires an ineliminable complexity. Time is revealed to be originally complex. The themes of destruction, progress, recurrence, negation, and so on, each with a project for action that stems from the way these times work, work to denature time by undoing any attempt to identify time with either nature or chronology. (Hence, what is at work is a plurality of times.) Time is now subject to the possibility of both continuity and discontinuity. Within such a setting all that is now settled is the impossibility of time as a locus of contestation ever having a final resolution and thus of there being an image of the future. Time will have always been times. The image, to the extent that it is constrained by having to present time as a singularity, is pitted against the plurality of times. In other words, while the politics of time has an inevitability, the outcomes stemming from it are not just far from settled, they are equally the site of genuine contestation.5 As a result time is more complex than would be indicated by its complete identification with the present, were the latter to be thought as a singularity. Moreover, once destruction and inauguration are connected, and the possibility of finality as event or image is deferred, then the present as a site is defined by a founding irreducibility. Constructing that irreducibility, holding it apart from a setting structured by mere quantitative differences, depends on time harboring a potentiality. The latter, potentiality’s insistent presence, becomes time(s) within time. It is times within time that has already been recast as the now, where the now is thought in terms of a site of anoriginal irreducibility.

As has already been suggested, the potentiality noted above is the potentiality for what “is” to be otherwise; to become other than what it “is.” There cannot be an otherwise, that which will have become other, unless there is both the potentiality for it to occur, and a recasting of the present...