I use Facebook to journal philosophy and to offer thoughts about what I am currently thinking. I often cut and paste them here, but now I am telling people that these are just a list of those fragments since Levinas has been occupying a lot of my thoughts recently. I want to see if there’s something emerging here. Like many of the posts here, this is not a coherent essay. Just a way of exploring what may be emerging.
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While both Levinas and Scheler are against formalism in ethics regarding moral theory, what analytic metaethicists might call “anti-theory,” I think their insights are compatible with Brightman’s moral law system. In any renunciation of systematicity in philosophy is the potential for that thinker to be read systematically. I think this despite the opening line of Totality and Infinity is Levinas hoping we are not “duped by morality.”
Moral theories are often complicit with justifying the objectification of persons. Levinas’s opening asks us to reject everything we think regarding morality, its content, and the principles that shape deliberation of our reasoning about its content. All that is needed is the experience of another and here’s the phenomenological description as to why—that’s how I read Totality and Infinity.
Elevating the face of the other matters precisely because of his critique of any system of thought or theory that understands philosophy as an attempt to represent and conceptualize reality already involves transforming the target of that theoretical gaze into an object of thought. The theoretical capture idea of philosophy renders all into an order of objects for thought. I take this is also the basis of his critique of any moral theory, a theory of agency, or a theory of moral obligations. All of these efforts are counter to first and foremost letting the infinity of the other in the face be before us. So I may be claiming that the rejection of moral theory and a theory of norms follows from his larger critique of thinking metaphysics as first philosophy and why Levinas thinks (wrongly or rightly) that ethics is first philosophy. Ethics is first philosophy phenomenologically because it’s the only orientation that let’s the infinite givenness of persons actually matter. (I actually don’t know if that is reasonable or true, but I do think that’s what Levinas is doing). It does seem that Levinas is committed to either an ethics without ontology other than what admits of phenomenological description or that maybe Levinas’s philosophy inadequately approaches ethical ontology in the wrong way. The latter is still committed to a phenomenological approach, but I’d argue that Scheler’s phenomenological ontology should be incorporated for reasons to lengthy to list here.
I’ve been thinking about a book proposal. It ends ends on Beloved Community as the praxis for democratic life and culmination of a book on ethical personalism invites further reflection. Simply gesturing to Beloved Community as a concrete expression of infinite value of persons will require that I think more thoroughly about this philosophical vision as an aspect of democracy in a work after it. So, I am thinking of a backwards, quasi-transcendental argument in which the relations beyond personalism and abolitionist thought find expression not only in Bowne’s parents being Methodist abolitionists, but some enduring aspect of this vision in theology that incorporated the infinite value of persons in ways that I cannot anticipate (at the very least worthy of exploration). All meaningful abolitionist thought in New England might have been duly influenced by this idea in ways that should be brought to bear in a work on political theology that must be a book I write after the Levinas-Scheler-Brightman-Thurman-King one. Part of the historic argument must be that Goldwater’s embrace of segrationism, Nixon’s Southern strategy, Reagan’s courting of radicals, the Republican parties lack of any mention of race in their 2016 platform, the attack on DEI in higher education, critical race theory, and affirmative action, and Trump’s animosity and allegiance with Proudboys are all an explicit attack on the potential for Beloved Community from ever being achieved. I know this is the book that must come from me…eventually. If you know of a good historian that nobody has heard of doing this type of work, I will certainly welcome the invitation to read them, especially if you know good works on the intellectual history of abolitionist thought and authors in New England.
A few weeks ago, I free wrote about ten pages on Levinas with ink and paper. Part of what I am doing with Levinas is criticizing the tensions between the ethical and political and opening up the ways that the ethical should be reconciled with politics through personalism. Personalists don’t have solid ways of approaching the political because their ethical values are their approach to politics. There should not be a separation of I and other contrary to the asymmetric description of the other in his ethics and so keeping the infinite value of the other into politics, even if utopian, should inaugurate interrogating the ways we conceive of politics to honor that ideal in more reciprocal terms. King and Muelder are the correction to Levinas.
The Levinasian redefines ethics to be one of relation without fully embracing the accurate intuition that the relational character goes wholly all the way down in human life. There are some metaphysical gestures that never transgress the infinite value of persons, never rising to the level of “totalization”, and these gestures help us see Levinas’s ethical vision. In other words, the Levinasian mistake is to be so uncritical about metaphysical moves we make about any one person’s singularity that we resist conceptualizing the character of community that is needed to foster the very assymetry he sees at the heart of the ethical relation that sustains the radical singularity and infinite value of the person in question.Elevating the face of the other matters precisely because of his critique of any system of thought or theory that understands philosophy as an attempt to represent and conceptualize reality already involves transforming the target of that theoretical gaze into an object of thought. The theoretical capture idea of philosophy renders all into an order of objects for thought. I take this is also the basis of his critique of any moral theory, a theory of agency, or a theory of moral obligations. All of these efforts are counter to first and foremost letting the infinity of the other in the face be before us. So I am not sure I am actually disagreeing with you other than maybe claiming that the rejection of moral theory and a theory of norms follows from his larger critique of thinking metaphysics as first philosophy and why Levinas thinks (wrongly or rightly) that ethics is first philosophy. Ethics is first philosophy phenomenologically because it’s the only orientation that let’s the infinite givenness of persons actually matter. (I actually don’t know if that is reasonable or true, but I do think that’s what Levinas is doing). It does seem that Levinas is committed to either an ethics without ontology other than what admits of phenomenological description or that maybe Levinas’s philosophy inadequately approaches ethical ontology in the wrong way. The latter is still committed to a phenomenological approach, but I’d argue that Scheler’s phenomenological ontology should be incorporated for reasons to lengthy to list here.
I’ve been thinking about a book proposal. It ends ends on Beloved Community as the praxis for democratic life and culmination of a book on ethical personalism invites further reflection. Simply gesturing to Beloved Community as a concrete expression of infinite value of persons will require that I think more thoroughly about this philosophical vision as an aspect of democracy in a work after it. So, I am thinking of a backwards, quasi-transcendental argument in which the relations beyond personalism and abolitionist thought find expression not only in Bowne’s parents being Methodist abolitionists, but some enduring aspect of this vision in theology that incorporated the infinite value of persons in ways that I cannot anticipate (at the very least worthy of exploration). All meaningful abolitionist thought in New England might have been duly influenced by this idea in ways that should be brought to bear in a work on political theology that must be a book I write after the Levinas-Scheler-Brightman-Thurman-King one. Part of the historic argument must be that Goldwater’s embrace of segrationism, Nixon’s Southern strategy, Reagan’s courting of radicals, the Republican parties lack of any mention of race in their 2016 platform, the attack on DEI in higher education, critical race theory, and affirmative action, and Trump’s animosity and allegiance with Proudboys are all an explicit attack on the potential for Beloved Community from ever being achieved. I know this is the book that must come from me…eventually. If you know of a good historian that nobody has heard of doing this type of work, I will certainly welcome the invitation to read them, especially if you know good works on the intellectual history of abolitionist thought and authors in New England.
A few weeks ago, I free wrote about ten pages on Levinas with ink and paper. Part of what I am doing with Levinas is criticizing the tensions between the ethical and political and opening up the ways that the ethical should be reconciled with politics through personalism. Personalists don’t have solid ways of approaching the political because their ethical values are their approach to politics. There should not be a separation of I and other contrary to the asymmetric description of the other in his ethics and so keeping the infinite value of the other into politics, even if utopian, should inaugurate interrogating the ways we conceive of politics to honor that ideal in more reciprocal terms. King and Muelder are the correction to Levinas.
The Levinasian redefines ethics to be one of relation without fully embracing the accurate intuition that the relational character goes wholly all the way down in human life. There are some metaphysical gestures that never transgress the infinite value of persons, never rising to the level of “totalization”, and these gestures help us see Levinas’s ethical vision. In other words, the Levinasian mistake is to be so uncritical about metaphysical moves we make about any one person’s singularity that we resist conceptualizing the character of community that is needed to foster the very assymetry he sees at the heart of the ethical relation that sustains the radical singularity and infinite value of the person in question. Levinas’s is very aware this problem and his attempt to correct it via the contemporeity of the third with the other. As he says, “the third comes to me in the eyes of the other,” which means that the asymmetry of ethics is always already mitigated by the demands of justice.
I got into Scheler only after I was told to read the Kaizo lectures Husserl delivered and my grad seminar on Levinas. Like many, I was enthralled with the idea that there was a way to cash out ethics that didn’t rely on the formalism of Kant and ethical theory more generally (consider Railton’s sophisticated consequentialism as another example etc.). This set me up for Scheler’s non-formalistic ethics. Only now, I’m backsliding. Humans need shortcuts to be ethical; we need explicitly formulated moral principles to apply for action-guidance. Action-guidance is the desideratum of ethical theory (and perhaps the preserving element of pragmatism in theorizing). So now, the pragmatist in me is seeing the role various normative theories play is to supply us with principles of deliberation given how atrocious our public discourse is about values and what matters morally.
So if Scheler and Levinas are useful, then what does their anti-theory help with and how me we regard what’s useful in their thought as a way to supply or synthesize a principle or principles for action-guidance? The quick answer is Scheler and Levinas give us the ontological scaffolding to experience the infinite value of persons. However, there’s no concrete way offered on how to translate this idea into practice. I will argue that Brightman’s moral law system is a way to translate the infinite value of persons thesis. The irony is that pragmatically we need ethical theory to make sense of those philosophers who avoided it since the heuristic ethical theories supply to everyday thinking is a difference that makes a difference.
The Horizon and The Fringe 