Other
In this work, notably inspired by Emmanuel Levinas, I make frequent use of ‘other’, ‘otherness’, and ‘Other’. The line drawn between these usages is rather nebulous and context dependent, since each usage conveys what cannot be or has not been reduced to the self. Generally speaking, ‘the other’ refers to other subjectivities, whereas by ‘otherness’ I have in mind what appears as different or inimical or mysterious (to the self), and can include phenomena such as natural disasters and death. When capitalized, ‘Other’ can evoke the numinous; but I use it principally to suggest simply the essence of what is different or otherwise. Whereas the other constitutes an-other self and therefore, in at least this respect, can be assimilated to one's own self, the Other cannot—it is ontologically other, to the point that it is ultimately irreducible, an alterity that stays undisclosed to quotidian human understanding. As regards the concept ‘self’, because of its centrality to the book's argument(s), this notion is developed throughout and therefore is scarcely in need of comment here. At this point of commencement, suffice it to say that my usage of ‘self’ is more or less in line with some of what passes for postmodern thinking on the ‘subject’, and that for me ‘self’ does not denote self-contained subjectivity but rather a peculiarly human and existential modality of fundamental ambiguity, in which the self remains, as a condition of its being, always other to itself. It thus describes a necessary sacrificial dynamic of becoming, a back-and-forth movement through which the self makes itself both by standing against the other and by alienating itself on behalf of the other. Put another way, every human being is the very movement through which the differentiation of self and other is made manifest.
Ethics
The word ‘ethics’ comes from the Greek ethos, for ‘moral character’, ‘habit, and ‘custom, the last-mentioned concept in particular communicating the profoundly socio-cultural nature of ethics. I use the word here to refer in the first place to the process of deciding the good or the valuable or the desirable (by contrast to the desired). This is basically in line with the Greek usage, right up through Kant. However, departing from the Kantian understanding, which emphatically makes autonomy a condition of ethics, I follow Levinas in construing the ethical capacitation of humans as primarily a matter of heteronomy: instead of the self constructing itself from scratch, it becomes self-responsible or ethical only in response to the other's entreaty. By ‘getting in one’s face, the other virtually ‘elects’ one—thus occasioning the ethical situation—to decide what is owing to the self and what to the other. Plainly, the Levinasian understanding, which informs the Greek with the Hebrew, consists with the social in a broad but fundamental way that arguably is lost to the Kantian theory. In the Hebrew tradition, it is the Other that ‘gets in one’s face'.
It follows from the emphasis on ethics as ‘deciding the good, that having to choose, in accordance with the ordinary Western acceptation of ‘morality’, between predetermined good and evil is simply one manifestation of ethics, and it is by no means the most elementary. Ironically, despite its understood invocation of principle, in practice such global predetermination of the good amounts to a commandingly instrumental manifestation. In fact, in my conception, precisely when the options are fixed before-hand as absolute, thus forestalling creative decision-making, the ethical process is, in a very substantial sense, undercut. In connection with this ultimately negative or self-defeating ethicality, whereby the fundamentally creative and processual impetus of ethics tends to be rendered as having been brought to completion, I speak of ‘moralism’. Still, since reproduction may be regarded as production once removed, the selecting of an encoded option still presents ethics as such. Therefore, under my usage, ‘morality’ remains a term of ethics, which is why at times, depending on context, I employ this word to convey the idea of ethics, for example, when I speak of ‘moral selection’ by contrast to ‘natural selection’.
In another departure from received philosophical usage, ‘ethics’, as I employ it, is not at bottom confined to one kind of decision-making; instead, it amounts to the quotidian and diacritically human conduct of deciding anything at all. This is in the spirit (but not, I think, the letter) of Levinas's thesis of ethics as the defining attribute of being human. Needless to say, most everyday decisions are scarcely of great moment. But even a decision, say, as to whether or not to take a cup of coffee in the morning has the potential to bring to the fore the decision's essentially ethical character. If, for example, one is concerned about the conditions of coffee field laborers or the effects of caffeine on an unborn child, then this choice of breakfast beverages is suddenly seen as belonging directly to the sphere of moral concern, for the economically exploited and the welfare of the fetus, respectively. Every decision, mutatis mutandis, is ethically charged in this way.
Explicitly instrumental decisions, which are classically regarded as separate and distinct from moral ones, are also essentially matters of ethics—and not just because they can have ethical consequences. The differentiating of a decision as merely instrumental is already an act of ethics, an understanding implicit in the (Nietzschean) postmodernist critique of rationality. Constructing, on the basis of instrumental rationality, a category of decisions that stand outside the realm of ethics is just a deceptive way of doing ethics by taking for granted the good of instrumentality or, more incisively, instrumentality as the good. Put another way, the inauguration of a clean, dualistic distinction between means and ends marks an ethical decision of immense moment implicitly made on the basis of instrumentality. Indeed, in the economizing of ethics, this distinction goes a step beyond moralism: instead of curtailing the ethical process by determining the bad and the good beforehand, this distinction precludes altogether an immense category of decisions from the very idea of ethicality. Instrumentality is of course unavoidable, and I certainly do not mean to suggest that it may be taken simply to define the bad. I leave that to the moralists. Rather, I am arguing that the sheer distinction between means and ends is, although epistemologically powerful, existentially deceptive and ethically insidious.
A principal thrust of my usage is that ethics enjoys a fundamental primacy over determinacy. Because all of our decisions ultimately rest on our decided agential capacity, in the end all must be a question of ethics. It is important to be clear, though, that this critical (Levinasian) thesis of ethical priority does not mean that the realization of the good is inexorable. Although I describe ethics as the human condition, when ‘ontology’ is taken in the strict sense—the deterministic sense in which it tells not only what but also that something is—the force of ethics is not exactly ontological. Obviously, an ethical injunction against theft, for example, does not hold that in reality nobody robs and steals. Rather, the priority of ethics means that human existence is always informed by discretion. Of course, the measure of choice being fundamentally limited, since the idea of wholly unconstrained choice is specious (absent worldly constraint or delimitation,