In what I take to be the "original Greek conception," ethics was considered the philosophy
of human action— and this meant every human action— the direct and integral,
put-up-or-shut-up response to the Socratic question "How should I live?" This means
Diogenes, living among the dogs, sleeping in bathtubs, masturbating in the public square;
Epicurus, released from death and hidden forces, into the Democritean field of pleasure,
integrity, and finitude; Protagoras bringing philosophy down from the Platonic heaven to
serve the affairs of Man, the measure of all things; and Socrates, pressing a reflective,
razorsharp dialectic against the necks of his fellow Athenians, sucking back hemlock like
a dry martini, and living a life equivalent to his ideas. I'm just syaing: these
these guys certianly had their shit together.
But this ethical vision was eventually eclipsed by a certain Judeo-Christian-Kantian ethical
project I am tempted to call "classical morality." An ethical vision more concerned with
goodness than greatness, prouder of its saints than of its heroes. A system that frets and
stresses over the tenets of moral duty rather than the possibilities of human desire. A system that dwells
only on the absolute and controversial, on obligation and prohibition, but nothing in between.
And— perhaps worst of all— a system whose proponents and flagwavers are unusually hellbent on
grounding its duties and demands into the plumbing of the universe, by way of some kind of
metaphysics, religious or otherwise. It is a morality that has dominated the Western
Hemisphere since the fall of Rome, soaking into every crevice of modern life. So
much so that freak tangents and ethical prototypes have trouble even being understood
as alternatives. It certainly seemed to be the case with me and my philosophical amateurism.
Professors— "professional" philosophers presumbably— would enter with their typical firstday
flourish and scrawl the Socratic question across the chalkboard, assuring the class that
philosophy was not about pedantic matters, ivory tower dealings but about matters of
Life and Death. But the moment I mention how I mixed Hegel with my breakfast cereal,
he glazes over. He meant, Brandon, Life-In-General. "What are my feelings on globalization?"
"What is the id and what is the superego?" He does not care about the rough-and-tumble
of daily particulars or the passage of Time. He does not care about your crap. When he says
"action" he means policy and politics- praxes and such, not your silly vignettes, self-directed
autobiography, and various run-ins with the university police department. This will never
be the firehot topic of insular academic journals, it is not a proper "object of study."
With my ventures, I wanted to make philosophy relevant to everyday life by making
"life-relevance" the cardinal criterion of philosophy, instead of trying to bridge the chasm
between empty speculation and unreflected experience. Giving the blue-ribbon answer to
the contemporary question "What is philosophy without metaphysics?" by living out my
squiggly response to the ethical question of Being. Fleshing out a bastardized version of
American pragmatism and making it into something wholly unrecognizable as "Academic
Philosophy." This was the drift of my modest projects. It did not seem that weird, that
obscure, to me.
But mired in metaethical groundwork, professionals asked "Don't you think that including all
actions into your definition of ethics, rather than just moral actions, makes it so broad as to
be useless?" All the while keeping a straightface when speaking of ontology, the study of
"What There Is." I could not understand the source of the confusion: this was not a science,
nor a reductionist program in any way. Why would breadth or proliferation jeopardize the
project any more than it would literature or history? New possibilities was what we were
shooting for, right, and plenty of them. I guess strategies for personal action are...
unprofessional? Too intertwined with idiosyncratic beliefs and desires? Poor candidates
for soaring and irresponsible universalization? Too close to home? Too messy?
Non-cognitive and therefore somehow useless? I wish I knew. The only thing I could glean
from the halls of academia, besides a few good meta-ethical pointers, was: the real
professionals are not interested in the Socratic question, really. It just sounds good,
rhetorically. It might be wise to take my business elsewhere.
But on the other front, closer to the unreflective Christian numbers than the
hairsplitting, deontological quasi-Kantians, troubles remained. You see,
since I figured the professionals were living in a world of their own, I was not particularly
worried about the armchair quarterbacks of the Land of Tenure. What bothered me
were the little old ladies, peer groups, elementary school teachers, parents, influential
loudmouths, situation comedies, Teen Beat Heartthrobs, Oprah, casual thrity-somethings:
the subtler evangelists of Common Sense. Those who embraced the Judeo-Christian
framework without a half-thought otherwise, and could not imagine life without its
metaphysics. "Surely, the Christian impulse has done us some good, Brandon."
Yes, the Christian impulse, the inward voice of love and compassion and magnanimity,
has done us tons of good. I would never interfere with the works of compassion. But the
morality that attempts to codify moral sense; the systems and legalism anchored in the
metaphysical mystery of Moral Authority— these have been nothing but trouble, a real
fucking pain, to my mind. Unlike Nietzsche, though, who considered the Jesus-Christian
pathos of infinite empathy to be inseparable from the pathologies of the Judeo-Christian
slave morality, I thought that goodness and greatness could coincide; that the fireball
superman could play the redemptive superhero by night.
This goodness was not proportional to any kind of purity. It was, in the Humean and
Rortyan cast, sentiment alone, a "sensitivity to the suffering of others." Or to put put as succinctly as possible: moral sense is the desire for human happiness.
A desire tha arouses certain actions. Actions that optimize human liberty and human happiness.
Actions that could let us forget the models of repressive moralities based on the authoritarian,
anti-democratic say-so of Nature, God, or Universal Law. Slick attempts to strip men of the
power of decision. Bad faith. Philosophical formulations of "because I said so, that's why."
A moral system incompatible with infinite diversity and the world-historical March of Freedom.
Moral sense goes the directly counter to these moral systems; it lends an ear and attempts to
transcend the simplicities of Good and Evil and other regrettable absolutes. Moral sense
means deciding for yourself each moment anew, but above all deciding for yourself.
In its infinite empathy, moral sense is, essentially, a communicative genius. It bridges the
islands of diverse value-systems. It feels the cruelty done to others. It seeks justification for the extraordinary, the exception,
human error, the unrecognizable; for misunderstandings, conflicts of interest, the slippery
and the silly— anything that was previously outside the comings and goings of a particular
ethos. For those with this ever-expansive moral sensitivity,
the unknown is welcomely colonized and communicated, since it promises the possibilities
of new forms of human happiness. This moral sense, this infinite empathy; this is what defines
goodness, not metaphysical approximations, not the crude right/wrong mandates of
moral autocracy, and certainly not the lashings and legalisms of the godfearing and
right-of-mind. The sensitivity, the impulse alone, is all we need (with maybe some
sense of reciprocity thrown in for good measure).
When asked for a metaphysical grounding, I would not or could not give one. Is a
metaphysical grounding necessary? If it was somehow revealed to be impossible or
unintelligible, as I believe it is, would you stop believing in human happiness? We
do not need the consent of the universe, or for that matter, the consent of any power
greater than ourselves. We do not need to justify our capacity for Love and Agape. Nor do
we need to explain it in terms common with Nature. So, yes, I am saying that the entire
notion of a systematic, commandment-driven, deontological morality should be done
away with. Leaving us time to worry about other, better things…
Beyond goodness though, and far beyond the slippery science of "global elbow room,"
there is the much-needed recovery of that ancient Homeric struggle to become "the speaker
of great words and the doer of great deeds," a struggle smothered under two-thousand years
of Christian humility and common sense. Greatness, the mastery of finitude— the heart and
center of a twenty-first century ethical outlook. I can hear the professionals wondering aloud
"What would I put on the syllabus?," but the Life of the Mind is not here to answer the needs
of the academy. It’s the other way around. An amusing daydream maybe, but I cannot
imagine the "strategy and transformation of everyday life" in the classroom setting, being
taught amidst Earth Science and rubber-band fights. I can, however, imagine it as a
hot-topic between friends, among restless spirits, on dinner dates, in moments of self-love
and self-loathing, or bouncing around the Culture-At-Large. "I mean— Jesus Fuck— What the
hell am I doing?"
It already is, to a certain degree. The difference is that it comes in an implicit,
decaffeinated, non-reflexive, unimaginative form, usually called socialization. It would
be the job of "ethical philosophy," then, to corrupt the young, and work against the stream
of Certainty. This means throwing into question all our previous answers to the question "How
Should I Live," answers most often secured at the edges by some brand of metaphysics
(usually of the religious variety). The new ethical vision suggests that goodness is simply
not good enough; that we should surpass the performance of our predecessors. Greatness,
not in the approximation of some golden moral ideal, but in the struggle against
twenty-first century boredom.
And the first lesson of the new ethics,
the first word scrawled across the blackboard? Restlessness.
