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"I meet someone whom I have not seen for years; I see him clearly, but fail to know him. Suddenly I know him, I see the old face in the altered one. I believe that I should do a different portrait of him now if I could paint." - Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations
About Me
- Chris
- I am a doctoral candidate in philosophy at the Institute for Christian Studies in Toronto. I am in the process of writing a dissertation on forgiveness.
12 comments:
YOU POSTED! Yup. Good stuff.
I also posted on your sept 2006 comments ......too much mental processing is like too much cheese processing...all you get is velveeta...John Kennedy said something like "I cannot hear you because your actions are yelling too loud." Methinks you think too much....and yes, as a recovering intellectual I know it when I see it....Please read my comments on your sept 2006 essay on homelessness..I was ACTUALLY disturbed in my sleep thinking about poverty when I googled and found you...I am 50 years old and find hope in young minds like yours..have a good life...
I neither agree nor disagree with your contention.
I hope Canada's treating you well; don't let the exchange rate get you down.
Kevin,
I haven't done enough mental processing apparently. If too much mental processing gives me velveeta, I'll have to get some crackers.
Please explain why you think I think too much.
There are other alternatives to "God-command" ethics. The problem is that God, if he exists, is hidden. So GC ehics is a free ticket to self-interest. I like to think that both ethics and action need moral development. God-commandment morality was given a mortal blow by the pre-socratics.
Yet God-command ethis is the motivation of all fundamentalisys, no matter what affiliation. Bad stuff!!
Oldgianni,
I am not exactly clear on how some of your thoughts tie together, and that may be because of the brevity of the ideas you offer. It seems like each sentence of your post could be expanded and expounded upon to the point of at least a chapter in a book.
Perhaps we could start at the beginning of your comment. What are some of the other alternatives to God-command ethics that you have in mind?
Let me think on it! I was rather glib and have not thought it all out in detail.
For myself I do like the idea of moral developement. As I mature as a person, I become more empathic as a listener and more sophisticated in descerning humain issues.
Cris, I was only agreeing with your statement of just over thirty words.
I am an old guy of almost 82. Lighten up on me.
I need the kindness of strangers.
I hope that I didn't come off as cruel, my intention certainly wasn't to be. If I did, please forgive me. And you are right, my original post was rather glib, so I should only expect that someone will respond in a similar way.
I noticed that you have Kierkegaard's "Fear and Trembling" listed on your profile as one of your favorite books. This is a book that I finally got around to reading after I made this post. So I have been thinking a lot about how such an understanding of religion (which for Derrida is close to what Levinas means by "ethics") would fit into (or perhaps break up) what I wrote in the original post. Could Kierkegaard be seen as putting forward a "God-command" ethics (although he wouldn't use the term "ethics" here)?
Let me just say how I have started to understand ethics. I think ethics involves three (or more) moral poles, these poles make absolute claims on us and are always in tension with one another. The three poles, as I see them, are 1) the self (a la Arendt and Kant, among others), 2) the community (a la Hegel and Kierkegaard's understanding of ethics), and 3) God (or the Other, or the beyond, a la Kierkegaard's "religious" or Levinas' "Other"). So, all three of these poles make absolute claims on us and we can never satisfy all three of them, let alone one of them (and can never be a Knight of Good Conscience). We are always already stuck in the tension between them and negotiating the difference between them. This is ethics, for me. There are no pre-given answers we can look to, and therefore we are ethically responsible for our decisions. Perhaps we could call this an ethics of ambiguity (although Beauvoir has already staked her claim on that phrase). What do you think?
I like the idea of moral development. However, moral development seems to be something that happens between the first two poles, between the self and the community. We can never develop enough to be prepared for that which is beyond and calls the self and the community into question. We can only, perhaps, prepare for the the inbreaking of that which cannot be prepared for, that is, be open to difference.
I have probably rambled on for too long.
Again, forgive me if I came off as cruel. I, like you, need the kindness of strangers.
Blessings.
Thank you for being a compassionate man. I agree with the three way aporia. I have been puzzling about this for the whole month.
Your use of the word absolute leaves you open to questions of authority. Like Lessing’s God holding all truth in his right hand you don’t have a chance to do philosophy. You can’t do anything right. With the medieval idea of an absolute God, with the advent of Thales, and our secular world, the Absolute is gone.
Kierkegaard would not use the idea of an absolute God. He might use the words of the “Ultimate Value” which is a matter of one’s values that are overriding in our faith. Like your and my conviction that war is wrong. For that overriding conviction you would suspend the ethical. I don’t think that faith has a content of logos butt it has values like the values of Jesus.
Heidegger who followed SK insisted that morality, I. e. conventional morality, is inimical to Dasein. Buber using SK’s abandoning of Regina because of his mandate of being the single one. He could not do onto-philosophy if he had an attachment. Therefore a kind of solipsism results...This leads Livanas to say:
Kierkegaard and violence begins when existence is forced to abandon the ethical stage in order to embark on the religious stage, the domain of belief. But belief no longer sought external justification. Even internally, it combined communication and isolation, and hence violence and passion. That is the origin of the relegation of ethical phenomena to secondary status and the contempt of the ethical foundation of being which has led, through Nietzsche, to the anomalism of recent philosophies.
– Emmanuel Levinas, Existence and Ethics, (1963)
Kierkegaard is far from having a "God-command" ethics. Dostoevsky has the theology of community which he writes in story of the grand inquisitor. Notice the role of Jesus!
I need to stop. I will be glad to discuss any of this further. I could change my mind for something better.
Blessings.
I would like to speak to, and somewhat defend, my use of "absolute." I am not using "absolute" to qualify "God." That is, like what you said about Kierkegaard, I would not use the idea of an absolute God. I agree with Caputo when he says, in his "The Weakness of God," that God is a weak force, God is an unconditional call without force to back it up (I actually took a course with Caputo on this book this past summer, and when I was reading it in preparation for the course, I was extremely delighted that someone had finally wrote a book about what I have been saying for years). Anyway, God, as I see "him," is not the absolute God of the medievalists, but is only absolute in the sense that God is the unconditional call without sovereignty for love, forgiveness, life, etc. So by absolute, I mean unconditional without sovereignty. (But when it comes to the community as making an absolute or unconditional claim, the community does have force to back up this claim. But this might be another discussion).
I have read a lot of Caputo. I remember his not mentioning Alfred North Whitehead.
I was wrong.
I began by reading The Prayers and Tears of Jaques Derrida Then I purchaced many of his books. He did not like jean-luc Marion who was a diciple of Derrida.
It was wonderful to have taken a course with him.
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