Against Ethics or Just Confused?

Comments Spurred by Reading Against Ethics, by John D. Caputo

I like John D. Caputo, I really do.  I like him the way he claims to "love" Levinas or Heidegger: he cites them, uses their work and then nimbly criticizes their excesses.  All to the good, with respect and gentleness.

I like John D. Caputo because he gets so much of what Deconstruction is about, and he wrote a really important book on Derrida (The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida) and also other really important and good books about being on the front (?) lines of philosophy as it attempts to cut a new regime of thinking into our discourse.  What could be a more difficult mission than that?

And so these comments, that claim my differences with John (he writes in a way that serves to minimize the propriety of a name, even his own name), are offered in the spirit of a fellow traveler who is out groping into the ....  well, that's the issue.

At issue in the contemporary scene, as I understand it, is what does a post-metaphysical engagement  entail, and what are the parameters (a what?  a how? a call or promise?) with, in and by means of which that engagement transpires?  And then, what does that engagement demand of us in terms of a disposition, a commitment, a construction of a world, and then, an ethic, and even a faculty or method?

John proclaims that our engagements occur in and with the abyssal.  In this vacuum, as I picture it, currents cross and mix and generate ephemeral events on which our sensibility can alight.  Those events, of themselves yield the flesh, which as a surging forth of this eventuation, obligates us to its dimensions, but prescribes nothing to us as to how to enact such an obligation.  "Love and do what you will," he proclaims. "Dilge  [from which the word "diligent" comes] and let events happen," he says. (p. 121)  "We are... all disasters, lost stars, lost in space," he says (p. 233).  And the flesh that obligates us is the eye that doesn't see, the tortured and diseased flesh of the ones who do not even rise to the law.  And then, "Beware of philosophers: they are too much occupied withy strong or healthy people, with autonomous agents and aggressive freedoms.  They miss the disasters." (p. 233-4).

To my ears this sounds like the atheist who clings to the powers of ego to get him through -- even if that ego offers the most ardent sympathy for and empathy with the weak and ill and despised among us.  We alone supply the love, we alone supply the notions and images that elucidate the obligations that rise up through the abyssal muck. It is a picture of the lone human in the dark and forbidding universe, the pre-established and spontaneously arisen creature of mind that conceives and constructs a habitat for himself.  And, yes, it is a very masculine image in my reading.  "Flesh clings to flesh in the anonymity of the night." (p. 247).  Say it ain't so, John.

So I, hardly a philosopher, but loving of the endeavor, offer this notion: The Breakout Creatives: what notion enshrines a greater strength than that?  They present experiments and venture new constellations into which we can follow.  What could be less dis-astrous than that?  So if I am a philosopher -- to beware of -- so be it.  I do not see that the human endeavor rises like a blister on the surface of a fleshed-over abyss.

I see it as a gathering, a singularization out of great and alive cosmic potencies (a la Schelling) that teem with energies that have been left in the wake of the great onwarding that expands the universe and opens new spaces, time/spaces that invites the singular, the events -- of all kinds, and everywhere -- to surge forth.  Some of them stick and organize;  some of these continue their own onwarding and insist on individuating, opening singularization to more expansive and more encompassing modes of engagement with that surging forth of occurrences into the expanses opened by pure cosmic onwarding.

Some of what occurs, as individuated moments -- reaching and groping in order to become more expansive and more encompassing -- are indeed of the flesh.  And this flesh is sometimes glorious and beautiful, and sensate and able to generate organization on scales never before imagined.  Yes, it is obligated flesh to flesh, but it is also response-able to response-able and so, thereby it promises to any occurrence that it will give way to what must needs occur for the event to unfold, for the happening to release and generate in an individuation of its own... and so forth.

Maybe John was in a mood inspired by a quantum vacuum or a Schrodingerian phase shift of superposition -- that was all the rage in the 90's when he wrote this book.  I suspect he has moved on, since he can write so clearly about a Derridian promise, which is anything but abyssally devastated flesh festered on a disaster.

But let me be clear:  the Breakout Creative Project envisions a universe teeming with self-organizing potencies and longings to individuate the spurts of singularities that bode forth in that great spatiation.  Our notion is an ethic, to be sure:  one of generativity, one that promises giving way for a "there" to arise, take and give affect, to rise as flesh and respond as the living boding forth.  Of this stuff, this great star dust, this great astral pleroma we are born and give way to what comes.  Yes, yes.

John, you must hear that by now.

Philosophy: Alive, Over the Rainbow

In the preface to his new book, The Grand Design, Stephen Hawking caused my jaw to drop: "Philosophy is dead," he declared.  He boldly, baldly  asserted that it was now "science" that was leading the way to discovery and philosophy was dead.

Well ensconced in his Anglo-American academic culture, I can certainly see how Hawking feels this way.  However, I would think that an astrophysicist would exhibit more caution, or at least modesty in making such comments.  After all, his sciences bloomed just as Lord Kelvin was pronouncing that all the problems of physics had been solved.  Except, that is, for a couple little nuisances, like Browning Motion and black box radiation.  These are the two problems that subsequently opened up to Einstein's theory of Special Relativity and then the quantum physics.  And these sciences have made Hawking's career possible.

But, that note aside, to a devotee of philosophy, the ignorance such a statement reveals is stunning.  Let me be clear:  philosophy is so far from dead, it is actively, competently, and most important, imaginatively, creatively and generatively taking up a role as momentous as that of its inaugural moments in ancient Greece -- from Thales through at least Plotinus.  At that time, philosophy inaugurated the formation of a new human mode of engagement with the world:  Reason.  Over the course of eons, Reason went from being a mythic demand for a new human way to a functioning faculty that could be comprehended, deployed and taught as a generalized, expected and standard-bearing capability.

Now, philosophy is mapping out the rudiments for a meta-capability:  the way of facultative development itself. The work that began with Hegel's noting of the procession of facultatively deployed life ways (shapes of consciousness), was developed in most explicit terms by Husserl, and then was taken up as a truly cosmic-level engagement of the human spirit by Heidegger, Levinas, Derrida, Deleuze, Blanchot, Nancy and their French brethren, this procession is now being studied as the very core of the human way.  Aided by notions of self-organization and ideas of "massively collective effects" in scientific discourses, philosophy finds itself indispensible, once again.

This new status may not be visible from the cloistered empircal/analytic caverns of some (especially Anglo-American) academic circles.  The work being done requires a suspension in acceptance of given formulations as being end states of reality;  it develops new languauge, words and grammar that pertain to states of generative cosmic life that may or may not even become "things" or "objects," and that hover on the fringes of becoming singular -- analogous to Hawking's own "event horizons" on the edges of black holes. The work of philosophy is not to make or render new objects, or prove their "existence."  Instead it is now at work in addressing the forming of the human psyche itself and framing new capabilities for encountering, enduring with and bringing forth what may or may not take a place in discourse.  It is now in a deep alliance with art (and the highest levels of theoretic mathematics as well), in plumbing that dynamics of that mode of "ownness," as Heidegger calls it, that rushes to singularization, in whatever form, and that may or may not make it through the vortex of becoming existent and standing among existents, as having its "being" come to be

This is a task worthy of philosophy.  Not justifying, analyzing or parsing the real, but probing what is wont to become real;  not demanding submission to logical gridlock, but teasing logic itself out to the most generative moments existents can endure.  Far from being dead, philosophy is instead taking its place in opposition to the dead, is taking up the task of being awake.  Its place, true enough, is at the edge of the horizon, where it may indeed fall off to obliteration;  but if this place is over the rainbow, it is what beckons.  If there is a "multiverse" it will take its place in our knowing capabilities, in our reasoning anticipations, because of where philosophy has dared to do its work.