Tag: ethics

54

generalising/expanding Badiou’s notion of the scandal – the notion that scandal is a [morality] device by which [an] ideology persuades people that particular problematic consequences of that ideology are in truth events that [morally] contradict that ideology and that thus don’t undermine/discredit it – thus a culture framing/interpreting events as scandals thus functioning as a kind of defense mechanism… or, in short: something being a scandal implies that it is an aberration – that things are normally not as bad, the scandalous event therefor noteworthy:

Morality and moral judgement/condemnation/prohibition in general perform the same function, just on a more abstract level – & especially what could be called progressive morality, by which I mean morality that continuously seeks/finds new moral frontiers to define[/re-define] itself with/along:

For a newly-emerging/visible domain of problematic consequences of an ideology, a new [phase of progressive] moral norm emerges, proliferates and predominates – which (pre-emptively or retro-actively) positions the ideology as standing in opposition to the bad stuff, as standing on the right side of emerging debate/struggle/conflict…

Furthermore: the morality that an ideology’s culture pushes most is an indication of the issues the ideology/culture is most fearful of discussing (instead of denying/repressing) – feels most guilty about.

This seems the principle/universal of which Badiou’s notion of scandal is the particular.

47

a somewhat daoist practical principle:

Only do what you know how to do.

(If you don’t know how, then don’t try to do it – & therefore instead simply relax and let your intuition/instinct/body take control/act/be – i.e. acting without doing, without deciding/willing/forcing/planning)

to understand this principle,

a) consider what it means to know how to do something. E.g. taken radically/strictly it implies complete confidence in acting/performing the task exactly correctly/fittingly/suitably.

&

b) consider what happens when one stops, relaxes and trusts in ones unconscious/body to guide ones behaviour/movement

So this prescribes a radically un-compromising duality: If one doesn’t know exactly how to do something, one simply doesn’t do it. But in practise this just means that ones waits until one finds an easier/simpler thing to do – one which ones knows how to do – before maybe again rationally considering the harder task…

So I don’t think this excludes learning, in fact i think this is an idea about learning: until one knows something, in other words until one has learnt it, one doesn’t DO it in the strict/rational/willful sense, instead one just plays at it, without pretending that one has the exact model, plan and ability for it – without premature discipline.


Don’t push if you don’t know what you’re pushing towards – if you don’t know where you’re going…. We don’t know where we’re going.


 

 

42

Horkheimer on instrumental reason, means and ends: selected quotation and comments

(aus: Gesammelte Schriften Band 6, 1991, p 27,28; Hervorhebungen etc. von mir)

“[…]dass vernünftige Dinge […] nützliche Dinge sind und dass jeder vernünftige Mensch imstande sein soll zu entscheiden, was ihm nützt. […] die Kraft, die letztlich vernünftige Handlungen ermöglicht, ist die Fähigkeit der Klassifikation, des Schließens und der Deduktion, ganz gleich, worin der besondere Inhalt besteht¹ – das abstrakte funtionieren des Denkmechanismus. Diese Art von Vernunft kann subjektive Vernunft genannt werden. Sie hat es wesentlich mit Mittel und Zwecken zu tun, mit der Angemessenheit von Verfahrensweisen an Ziele, die mehr oder minder hingenommen werden und sich vermeintlich von selbst verstehen. Sie legt der Frage wenig Bedeutung bei, ob die Ziele als solche vernünftig sind. Befasst sie sich überhaupt mit Zwecken, dann hält sie es für ausgemacht, dass auch sie vernünftig im subjektiven Sinne sind, d.h., dass sie dem Interesse des Subjekts im Hinblick auf seine Selbsterhaltung dienen – sei es die des einzelnen Individuums oder die der Gemeinschaft, von deren Fortbestand der des Individuums abhängt.² Der Gedanke, dass ein Ziel um seiner selbst willen vernünftig sein kann[…], ohne auf irgendeine Art subjektiven Gewinnes oder Vorteils sich zu beziehen, ist der subjektiven Vernunft zutiefst fremd, selbst wo sie […]sich Reflexionen über die Gesellschaftsordnung, betrachtet als Ganzes, widmet.

[…]diese Definition der Vernunft […] ist ein wichtiges Symptom eines tiefgreinfenden Wandels der Anschauungsweisen, der in den letzten Jahrhunderten im abendländischen Denken stattgefunden hat. Lange Zeit herrschte eine diametral entgegengesetzte Ansicht von der Vernunft. Diese Ansicht behauptete das Dasein der Vernunft als einer objektiven Welt – in der Beziehungen zwischen den Menschen und zwischen sozialen Klassen, in gesellschaftlichen Institutionen, in der Natur und ihren Manifestationen. […] auf einer objektiven Theorie der Vernunft begründet. Sie zielte darauf ab, ein umfassendes System oder eine Hierarchie alles Seienden einschließlich des Menschen und seiner Zwecke zu entfalten. Der Grad der Vernünftigkeit des Lebens eines Menschen konnte nach seiner Harmonie mit dieser Totalität bestimmt werden. Deren objektive Struktur, und nicht bloß der Mensch und seine Zwecke, sollte der Maßstab für individuelle Gedanken und Handlungen sein. Dieser Begriff von Vernunft schloß subjektive Vernunft niemals aus, sondern betrachtete sie als partiellen, beschränkten Ausdruck einer umfassenden Vernünftigkeit, von der Kriterien für alle Dinge und Lebewesen abgeleitet wurde. Der Nachdruck lag mehr auf den Zwecken als auf den Mitteln²,³. Das höchste Bestreben dieser Art von Denken war es, die objektive Ordnung des >Vernünftigen<, wie die Philosophie sie begriff, mit dem menschlichen Dasein einschließlich des Selbstinteresses und der Selbsterhaltung zu versöhnen.

[…]

Zwischen der Theorie, derzufolge Vernunft ein der Wirklichkeit innewohnendes Prinzip ist, und der Lehre, sie sei ein subjektives Vermögen des Geistes, besteht ein grundlegender Unterschied. Nach der letzteeren kann einzig das Subjekt in einerm genuinen Sinne Vernunft haben[…].”

comments:

¹ ‘Inhalt’ ist hier wohl Begriff- bzw Idee-inkludierend gemeint (was eigentlich allgemein der Fall sein sollte, da jeder Inhalt als Begriff gesehen werden kann)… Vom Inhalt abzusehen bedeutet eigentlich auch, dass man von den Begriffen absieht, sodass es eine [reine] Urteils-(lehre/logik/vernunft) ist, (bzw. sein soll)keine Begriffslehre… I think ‘Inhalt’, which means content, should here be read as: everything apart from the logical structure as per the formal logic( in which one abstracts specific concepts away, replacing them with predicates, i.e. stripped of internal structure/meaning and replaced by sets of objects of the reference domain.) I note this because this notion of reason becomes more radical/stark/abstract when one considers how it fits with the basic meta-philosophical distinction between philosophy as a structure of judgements and philosophy as a structure of concepts: Considering that logicians see only the logical form of a statement/argument as content-independent, with the logical form being such that the so-called predicates function independent of any specific identity of the predicate’s concept… ideas/concepts are thus counted to the realm of content and are ignored… So, indeed, this kind of reason is a mechanical system of deduction for external/abstract judgements like ‘true’, ‘conclusive’, ‘real’ or ‘useful’…

² Instrumental/teleological Ethics is all about judging/choosing something by whether it is a means to the end/telos… but this instrumental action/decision/thing  is judged/analysed/considered solely in relation to the telos, i.e. not per se…i.e. it is chosen through its instrumentalised abstraction, whilst the rest of its identity, relations & consequences are [deliberately] ignored!

³ …& thus paradoxically, in an E. that is about choosing means, any means are potentially acceptable – means are handled blindly…


after-thought:
choosing Urteilslehre [or Begriffslehre?]rests on the Urteil/Begriff dichotomy: on assuming that one can make a judgement within an objective, non-doxic concept framework… Which, given that, actually, each chosen concept is chosen,
amounts to the insane folly of believing that judgement can be independent of belief…

entry 24

a key concept/lesson in [philosophical] ethics

the catastrophic confusion between 2 types of *should*:

type I: as in expressing an ideal

type II: as in expressing a concrete duty or prescription in a concrete, practical situation of action/decision

A person’s actual behaviour and decisions can only theoretically conform to the ideal, because in reality, they are restricted – by reality, i.e. by the constraints imposed both by the nature of the individual person and of the reality in which the person is acting.

When actions and ideals don’t fit each other, which they practically never do, then confusing these two types of *should* leads to disappointment on the level of personal morality, judgement and psychology, and to systemic error on the level of inter-personal judgement and abstract ethical theory.

 

Ideals are something to strive or long towards, guiding practical action, not precisely determining and judging it.* Ideals are something to think about speculatively or abstractly. Ideals can be as general as basic deontological principles such as a principle of dignity or human rights. They can also be less theoretical and pertain to specific behaviour or action, permitting or prohibiting a general action or inaction of more or less specificity, such as don’t do anything that causes harm to other lifeforms, or, even more specifically, something like never resort to physical violence in a moment of anger.

And on the other hand, there is actual action, which is always a particular external and internal behaviour, and always exists in a unique practical situation. Factors that restrict an agent’s ability to match action to ideal: awareness of facts and relations relavant to a behaviour/action; the actor’s physical, mental and personal faculties in the precise moment; the person’s economic, material, social means; the person’s position within structures and systems of culture, society, reality, etc….

– In German, some philosophers utilize the difference between the two verb forms ‘soll’ and ‘sollte’: one can use ‘soll’ to indicate a concrete duty/prescription and ‘sollte’ to indicate expression of an ideal. This can be helpful, but doesn’t stop the confusion, as it is systemic:

The confusion is a systemic and often over-looked feature of rationalistic ethics, and by ‘rationalistic’ ethics I mean abstracting and generalizing actions out from their real-world, practical, particular context to the degree where one can consider the action in a vacuum** to enable manageable analysis/discussion. In other words, the unfathomable complexity of a real human acting and behaving within the constraints of themself and the real world are systematically ignored to enable analysis.

And all this makes the relevance of analysis to practical life and morality very questionable. And indeed, when philosophers are discussing ethics, speculating about what one *should* do, they often fall into over-looking this difference and taking their abstract speculations as exactly relevant to practical life. And not just philosophers, but also normal people who live under mainstream rationalist ideology that says that one’s actions should be in line with rational principles of action and that cool-headed, rational calculation/speculation should ultimately judge action.

* In a moment of reflection, one can remind oneself of an ideal, calling it into mind or imagining it whilst questioning how ones concrete actions and decisions align with this ideal, and then trying to re-align ones concrete plans and judgements with the ideal. (This is of course an endlessly difficult practical aspect of life, not something for a philosopher to solve – although many so-called philosophers think they can)

** with a much reduced number of relata of the predicate, logically speaking

entry 18

an easy way to spot racism & bigotry:

Whenever an ethnicity, religion, class or gender is blamed for something: just try to notice whether someone accepts this without considering whether the blamed group is just a scape-goat(De: Sündenbock). 

The phenomenon and concept of scape-goating is so familiar and obvious that, whenever there is some problem that is causing pain in society and a specific class or sub-set is blamed for the problem, any non-racist will naturally react by [first] asking themselves whether the blamed group is just being scape-goated.

And it is easy to notice the opposite – when someone accepts the blaming/judgement of an ethnic or cultural group without pausing to ask themselves whether this might just be another case of selecting and using a scape-goat to deflect discontent/resentment away from wherever the true responsibility lies.

scape-goating: There is a simple and broadly well-understood phenomenon of the master in a master-slave relationship using a slave or category of slaves as a scape-goat for problems that would otherwise impact the master’s standing in some hierarchy or power-relation, e.g. would reduce the respect or loyalty that the master commands. And this can be expanded beyond literal slave-masters to include individuals or groups or classes that control or preside over whichever processes/structures/institutions are actually* causing or contributing to the problems in question – or even just to the [economic, societal or other] structures themselves in cases where nobody is really in control and nobody really understands what’s going on or how we got here.  

* – at least in the minds of those people who are in control, as this subjective picture/model is what is causing them to feel a need to deflect blame – so this is actually independent of where the true cause is.