W O J C I E C H M A J K A
MODERN MAN
IN SEARCII OF ETHICAL & SOCIAL I OUNDATIONS:
A PHENOMENOLOGY
WYDAWNICTWO NAUKOWE UNIWERSYTETU PEDAGOGICZNEGO
MODERN MAN
IN SEARCH OF ETHICAL & SOCIAL FOUNDATIONS: A PHENOMENOLOGYUniwersytet Pedagogiczny im. Komisji Edukacji Narodowej Prace Monograficzne nr 591
W O J C I E C H M A JK A
MODERN MAN
IN SEARCH OF ETHICAL & SOCIAL FOUNDATIONS:
A PHENOMENOLOGY
WYDAWNICTWO NAUKOWE UNIWERSYTETU PEDAGOGICZNEGO KRAKÓW 2011
Reviewer
prof. dr hab. Ewa Borkowska
© Copyright by Wydawnictwo Naukowe UP Kraków 2011 Editor Anna Ścibior-Gajewska Cover design Janusz Schneider ISSN 0239-6025 ISBN 978-83-7271-669-9 Wydawnictwo Naukowe UP Redakcja / Dział Promocji 30-084 Kraków, ul. Podchorążych 2 tel./faks: 12-662-63-83, tel. 12-662-67-56 email: wydawnictwo@up.krakow.pl
Zapraszamy na stronę internetową http://www.wydawnictwoup.pl
Desktop publishing operator: Janusz Schneider Print: Zespół Poligraficzny UP, zam. 36/11
Contents
Introduction 7Chapter I
A N EXISTENTIAL BA SIS O F ETH ICS
Sartre and Existential Contingency 13 Freud and the Eclipse of Civilization 16 Civilization as the Site of the Will to Power 25 Down-Going as the Basis of Social Existence 31 Ricoeur and the Ethics of the Post-Religious Stage 33
Chapter II
T H E F U N D A M E N T A L B A C K G R O U N D O F ETHICAL INQ UIRY
The Origin of Ethical Beliefs 43 The Dynamie and Static Morał Attitude 50
The Suspension of Belief 53
Religion as a Haven for the Scientific Worldview 59 Monotheism and the Morality of Power 61
Ethics and the Question of Evil 63 Morality and the Sin Dilemma 66
The Prejudice of Rationality 70
Arguments For and Against the Existence of God 78 Conclusion 85
References 89 Summary in Polish 93
Introduction
The main objectives that we are setting before ourselves here is to touch upon influential social, ethical and religious ideas that inspired major thinkers of the twentieth century (e.g. J.R Sartre, R Ricoeur, S. Freud, B. Russell or H. Bergson) who all appear to be indebted to Nietzsche’s oernre. Are there any ethical founda- tions that underlie the being and thinking of modem societies or is ethics itself already a thing of the past, in the sense that ethos was swallowed up by pragmatic existence and in this way ethical beliefs came to be regarded as nothing morę than legał regulations. From the pragmatist views of such thinkers as R. Rorty it would appear that all conduct is based on practical principles whose only merit is the promise of satisfaction of desire, and thus all our actions can be based on a normative theory in which we find ourselves do- ing nothing morę than fulfllling desires and satisfying our practical needs.
In light of the above, the sphere of the ethical must be sharply disconnected from its classical religious background. Rather, eth ics here is the consequence or the result of practical being-in-the- world, which is exactly what thinkers like J. Tischner would dis- agree with. Yet it is this view that is endorsed by the “existence precedes essence” motto that serves as the kemel of existentialist thought, at least in its Sartrean variation. From this perspective ethics is nothing morę than a way of evaluating action and thus bringing and sanctioning a certain division of power within society, which in tum is seen no longer as the revelation of God in man. Rather, social reality is the stage for the clash of powers that sepa- rate, in the Nietzschean sense, the world of the masters from that of the slaves.
The question that remains to be answered is if ethical actions are a sign of weakness or power, sińce they can be seen as a dem- onstration of both, depending on the perspective. If we, however, agree on such an existentialist and pragmatic evaluation of all hu- man acting, what we realize is that the privileging of human naturę is pushed even further into the background that it already occupied, on account of the revolutions that had taken place in science where we see man morę as a victim of being than its precious blossom.
Following the suggestions of P. Ricoeur, we need to think about the ethics of the post-religious stage and move beyond the accusa- tion - consolation characteristics that were said to stand in relief of classical religious thinking, and the ways in which it refers to man, his existence and God. The accusation - consolation foundation of all ethical thought is what the Christian world took over from the Jews, whose ethical system was the effect of the transvaluation of the morals, as it was observed by Kierkegaard and depreciated by Nietzsche.
Our critique here will also focus on the consequences of ratio- nalism and its applications to ethics and religion. Over the years, rationalists have developed a set of reasons why it is advisable or not to believe in some kind of an absolute. For our purposes, we will refer to the writings of such thinkers as A Flew and B. Russell who tried to approach the idea of the belief in God from the perspective of rationality. It is in this light perhaps a little surprising that af- firmed agnostics like Russell still have no problems with accepting and cultivating metaphysics, but they reject a being that could be said to constitute its source. Or perhaps, what we need to do is separate the sphere of ethics from the understanding of the ulti- mate naturę of God, who from the perspective of the Old Testament
came to be regarded as the ultimate source of morał value. If there is a generał feature that separates monotheism from the religions that came before it, it is the stress that it puts on morality that, as we find, was attributed to Yahweh by the ancient Jews.
Monotheism, however, opens up another problematic idea, that of personalization. Much as pre-monotheistic religions were based on a cult of the powers of naturę that were impersonal, monotheism
establishes a close connection between God and man who figures here as the elected being of God. It follows from this that the con- tact between God and man is guaranteed by the morality based on the polarity of good and evil.
The ąuestion that automatically imposes itself at this point con- cems the connection of metaphysics to a monotheistic vision of God. It seems that, much as earlier the essence of the gods was conceived in terms of the forces of naturę, in monotheism God no longer occupies the position of being here in the world, but rather, as Ricoeur understands the issue, his naturę is strictly connected with the abstract ethics of good and evil that automatically refers to the ąualities of accusation and consolation.
Chapter I
Sartre and Existential Contingency
Contingency is the conditio sine que non that determines individual existence. This is the conclusion that A Roquentin in Sartre’s nov- el Nausea reaches after contemplating his own being. He realizes that all being is enframed by absurdity in the sense that existence is directed at actually achieving nothing. Moreover, individually there is nothing universal and necessary about each and every one of us. This train of thought founded upon superfluity and absurdity is what causes Roąuentin to suffer from nausea. Hence, Roąuentin experiences life from the window of this characterological dispo- sition, i.e. for Roąuentin to exist means not to stand out and ac- centuate or cherish individuality but to regard being as a malaise inflicted upon the lucidity of the mind. From the Sartrean perspec- tive existential superfluity is what modem man has to leam to cope with in the sense that there is no fundamental purpose to our indi- vidual being:
And I myself-soft, weak, obscene, digesting, juggling with dismal thoughts- I, too, was superfluous. Fortunately, I didn’t feel it, rather it was a matter of understanding it; but I was uncomfortable because I was afraid of feeling it (even now I’m afraid-afraid that it might catch me behind my head and lift me up like a wave from the depths). I dreamed vaguely of killing myself to wipe out at least one of these superfluous existences. But even my death would have been superfluous. Superfluous, my corpse, my blood on these stones, between these plants, at the bottom of this smiling garden. And the gnawed flesh would have been superfluous in the earth which would receive my bones, at last, cleaned, peeled, as clean as teeth, it would have been superfluous: I was superfluous for eternity.
As we leam from Roąuentin, individual existence is veiled by the pall of meaninglessness. In these circumstances telos can apply only to collective existence in the sense of the being of the spe- cies, where we can see purpose in terms of attunement to reality. What we mean is that every species is attuned to its existential possibilities, the attunement being a priori. In terms of man, the essence of attunement, as Heidegger maintained, is understand- ing. He notes that “understanding is the existential being of the own-most potentiality of being of Dasein in such a way that this be ing discloses in itself what its very being is about” (M. Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 135).
The process of understanding is said to originate from our connection with the practical world; in other words, the practical world is the source of understanding as understanding is based on finding relations between things; how things are related to one another and primarily to the interests of man as Dasein. Thus we understand the thing by how it fits into the context of our con- cems but before we can appreciate this descriptive knowledge we have a pre-understanding of things, an intuitive pre-theoretical understanding of the way things exist. The practical understand ing of the world - the ąuestion of how - is called hermeneutical from the Greek hermeneuein, which means “to make something understandable”. In theoretical understanding thus knowledge is derivative of this practical, hermeneutical understanding. In other words, hermeneutical understanding is morę like intuition than understanding in the classical epistemological sense as we flnd, for instance, in Kant.
Retuming to Sartre we observe that the only meaning that life may seem to possess is that with which we inflate it ourselves. This only leads us to the pessimistic conclusion that there is no one way to be, think, behave, etc. All modes of being are relative and individually biased. The only hope for individual existence rests in responsibility, i.e. this existential mood can lead us to meaningful being. The world appears to be meaningful only after the realiza- tion of existential absurdity, or to put it differently, after we dis- cover that we are a part of an alien and indifferent universe and that
the only significance that our being can possess is strictiy connect- ed with the responsibility with which we affix it ourselves. In this way responsibility expresses itself in care, as we find in Heidegger (pp.292-293). In other words, responsibility leading to care is the only way in which we can escape from existential superfluity.
Responsibility also makes us aware of the fact that freedom is the ultimate context of our existence. Of course, in this case our understanding of freedom is ontological and not political. Man by definition “is condemned to be free”, or to put it differently, “l’existence prćcćde 1’essence”. Since freedom and responsibility are the foundations of being, this means that being always hap- pens in monadic isolation, which makes monadism the primordial condition of being. Additionally, being is also characterized by the relations that emerge between ourselves, the extemal world and other people. Here Sartre’s conclusion is rather pessimistic, sińce as Garcin in No Exit declares, “you remember all we were told about the torturę chambers, the flre and brimstone, the ‘bum- ing marł’. Old wives’ tales! There is no need for hot pokers. Heli is-other people” (J.P. Sartre, No Exit, p. 1825).
Our being with others does not have to, however, be charac terized by spiritual torturę, i.e. the essence of consciousness does not have to be conflict, like Garcin maintained. Our fundamental modę of being is freedom; we are free to construe a reality where our relations will not be based on what Nietzsche called the will to power but on the Heideggerian or Merleau-Portyian foundation of being-with-others. Ontologically consciousness is a breath of freedom (it is the representation of the principium individuationis) but ethically it is the effect of the struggle (with other forms of consciousness) for aseity. Sartre thus comments on the generał violence involved in human existence:
Nothing, in fact-neither wild beasts nor microbes- can be morę terrible to man than a species that is intelligent, flesh-eating, cruel, a species which would be able to understand and to thwart the human intelligence, a spe cies whose goal would be precisely the destruction of man. That species is obviously ours, taking hołd of every man among others in the environment
of scarcity. In any case, whatever society may be, this is the abstract and fundamental matrbc of all the reiflcations of human relations.
(J. P. Sartre, Violence, p. 440)
Therefore, as we leam from Sartre, identity is not so much a psychological affair as the culmination point, or the outcome of the will to power, i.e. the will over other forms of consciousness. Consciousness can understand the world only from the subject po- sition, which means that everything that falls outside its circumfer- ence is reduced automatically to object status.
Retuming once again to No Exit we see that heli does not pos- sess spatial attributes, but rather, it is the effect of the relations that hołd between individual forms of responsibility that characterize our private being. Garcin realizes that heli understood as a place of physical torturę is an illusion. Paradoxically, the psychological torturę that Inez, Estelle and Garcin orchestrate for themselves is greater and morę inhumane than all imaginable physical ordeals. The trio is trapped in the web of each other’s gazę. In heli there are no mirrors because they are not necessary, sińce the indmdual thoughts of the characters serve as imagos of identity. The nat- ural conclusion is that we are what other people wish us to be! Although our being is founded upon our private responsibility for existence, our identity is not really ours. It is our reflection in the looking glass of the other. We see, therefore, a rift between being and meaning. Being is our private domain, our indmdual responsi bility, whereas meaning is a contingent relation that holds between one consciousness and another. Additionally, from this perspective meaning is not so much a question of truth but of interpretation.
Freud and the Eclipse of Civilization
Sartre’s existential superfluity is to a certain extent anticipated al- ready by Freud, whose pessimism with regard to civilization flows from two directions: the intellectual influences of Schopenhauerian theory of the Will, which is roughly translated into the unconscious,
and the political chaos that dominated in Europę at the beginning of the twentieth century. Freud’s work Civilizałion and Its Discontents
vividly accentuates a skeptical attitude to the advances of the mod em world, a world morę and morę deflnable through its addiction to technology and science. The same techno-skepticism is also ex- pressed in the writings of Heidegger. Yet Freud, unlike Heidegger or Merleau-Ponty, does not see the world as being-with-others, but, similarly to Sartre, he considers civilization to be govemed by conflict. Civilization happens to be the site where conflicts await their dissolution. However, dissolution and tranąuility exist only as the in-between of one conflict and the next, for whenever one disappears another takes its place.
Conflicts arise as the conseąuence of the psychological consti- tution of man, who is said to be primordially unconscious, which means that his own-most goal is wish-fulflllment (the fulfillment of primordially repressed desires). Since individual existence is the effect of the strife of the ego and the id (the reality principle and the pleasure principle), the universal life of civilization must also at base be constituted by the relations that hołd between conscious- ness and unconsciousness, between that which is expressed, and therefore fulfilled, and that which remains repressed on account of its inappropriateness and which is, therefore, stifled by the su- perego. In this situation man is to be seen neurotic at base, sińce he is a reservoir of unfulfilled energies that remain suppressed for the well-being of society, whose fortunę depends on the sacriflce of individual freedom.
What becomes elear at this point is that violence and suffering are the chief dispositions that characterize civil being. The emer- gence of the repressed is a very violent process and it encroaches upon people’s overall happiness and freedom; it sentences them to suffering that finds its utmost incamation in religion. Religion alleviates suffering by inducing individuals into a collective illusion that adheres to the belief in the hereafter. Freud does not look at religion through the lens of ontology, however. He does not believe that religiosity is innate or that it is a mystical condition in which individuals feel connected with themselves and the world. Rather,
in the words of Romain Rolland, with whom Freud disagrees, reli- gion is seen as a modę of being (“an oceanie feeling”) that unites human beings with each other and with the world around them. Freud compares the oceanie feeling to infantile narcissism, a State in which the subject has not yet fully emerged. Freud notes:
...the part played by the oceanie feeling, which might seek something like the restoration of limitless narcissism, is ousted from a place in the foreground. The origin of the religious attitude can be traced back in elear outlines as far as the feeling of infantile helplessness... I can imagine that the oceanie feeling became connected with religion later on. The ‘one- ness with the universe’ which constitutes its ideational content sounds like a flrst attempt at a religious consolation, as though it were another way of disclaiming the danger which the ego recognizes as threatening it from the extemal world”.
(S. Freud, Civilisation and Its Discontents, p. 727)
The subject does not yet have a crystallized notion of othemess, of the objectivity of the world extemal to it. This primordial condi- tion, which in Lacan is called the real, i.e. the State of naturę, is tom asunder when the subject realizes that its existence is dependent on others and that to exist with others means to repress one’s own instinctuality, or to find altemative channels for the libido to flow through.
What puts an end to the narcissistic subjecthood are the experi- ences of repression, unfulfillment and lack which are an effect of the schematization of the world which we always try to order and regulate. The emergence of the wholeness of the world in the sub ject is quite a violent process that impinges upon its uniąueness. For this reason the world gets to be experienced primordially as a negation of fulflllment, as an object that threatens the subjecfs completeness and unity, sińce the opening of the subject onto the world will always be connected with the threat of dissolution in the sense that the subject realizes that its being is contingent. In this light to exist means to be unfulfilled which is equal to saying that to exist is to suffer. Existence understood along these lines is always
based on lack and unfulfillment that the subject is forced to replace by finding substitutes in the world that should compensate for the loss of the original unity. The objects that we surround ourselves with are always in the Lacanian sense “a little other” (objetpetit a),
which means that they never rebuild the original unity that we experienced in the real Q. Lacan, Ecrits, pp. 314-315). From this moment onwards the subject will spend its time looking for sub stitutes to compensate for its sense of disintegration; analogously, these substitutes are responsible for the formation of desires that blindly lead to others. In this way the subject will spend its days searching for a sense of completion that can only take place with the subjecfs death.
The evolution of identity is what Nietzsche, on the other hand, understood along the lines of the will to power; it is the desire for unity and self-control, a condition that will be always denied to the subject, as its existence is founded upon facing othemess that is rampant and disarranged. Retuming to the idea of the oceanie feel- ing that Freud abstracted from Romain, we see it to be the psy- chic residue of the narcissistic subject. At the same time, religion itself is considered to be the compensation of the primordial loss of unity; it is the ery for narcissism and protection. In other words, from the Freudian perspective just as the infant seeks protection in the arms of the adult, so the believer seeks comfort in the light of God (it is not a coincidence that monotheism is represented by the figurę of the father). Following this linę of reason we find self- transcendence to be the primordial ąuality that is connected with anxiety that we feel in the face of our own contingency:
We understand how a primitive man is in need of a god as creator of the universe, as chief of his elan, as personal protector. This god takes his po- sition behind the dead fathers [of the elan], about whom tradition still has something to say. A man of later days, of our own day, behaves in the same way. He, too, remains childish and in need of protection, even when he is grown up; he thinks he cannot do without support from his god.
Therefore, as we leam from Freud the belief in God is rooted mainly in anxiety, sińce, as it was already observed earlier, our whole existence happens in the incessant tension between the pleasure and reality principle (unconsciousness and conscious- ness). The satisfaction of desires eventually offers pleasure, yet we are obliged to realize that not all desires can be fulfilled on ac- count of our being-with-others and the inimical world of naturę. For this reason we must leam to renounce some of our instinc- tive narcissism. Renunciation is what introduces us into the real ity principle, it directs our attention to the fact that our freedom has limits.
As we see our contact with the world and others is mled by the frustration of instinctive freedom that Merleau-Ponty attributed to the body, “I regard my body, which is my point of view upon the world, as one of the objects of that world. My recent awareness of my gazę as a means of knowledge I now repress, and treat my eyes as bits of matter (M. Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, p. 81). In answer to this we have developed palliative measures to counter the displeasure that we encounter in being. For example, we have leamt to manipulate our organie States with the aid of Chemical substances (intoxication) or by means of “dis- placements of libido which our mental apparatus permits of and through which its function gains so much in flexibility. The task here is that of shifting the instinctual aims in such a way that they cannot come up against frustration from the extemal world. In this, sublimation of the instincts lends its assistance” (S. Freud,
Cwilisation and Its Discontents, p. 731).
Principally, Freud differentiated between three sources of suf- fering that we are vulnerable to: our body - its physical feebleness that leads to pain and death; the extemal world - naturę itself and its indifference to our individual existence; and lastly, our relations with others. Of the three the first two are unavoidable but it would seem that the last factor could, if not eliminated, at least be regu- lated morę effectively. Nevertheless, conflict in society is itself a re- flection of naturę in culture, i.e. the conflicts that occur in society are the reflection of the tensions that take place in the individual,
who, being the locus of naturę, is the embodiment of the struggle between Eros and Thanatos.
As we have seen, society is responsible for man’s suffering al- though its fundamental role is to protect humanity from the un- tamed, unpredictable forces of naturę. Organization is man’s de- fense against himself as well as the chaos of naturę and in practical terms it leads to and is based on the apportionment of power. By embracing civilization we have, therefore, exchanged safety for freedom; by the same token, life in the civil world comes to be expressible through the pursuit of quality, which is the effect of existence govemed by safety.
CMlization allows us to regulate relations that hołd between us and others through conventions that organize our interaction and put a construction on our practical existential possibilities. Nonetheless, as we have seen, individual existence finds itself always smothered by collectivity. This leads to a situation where a strong indmdual must subordinate himself to the morality of the weak, sińce morality, as Nietzsche maintained, was created by the weak for purposes of protection. The process - Nietzsche believed - frustrated what he famously called die Unschuld des Werdens -
the innocence of becoming:
As soon as we imagine someone who is responsible for our being thus and thus, etc. (God, naturę), and therefore attribute to him the intention that we should exist and be happy or wretched, we corrupt for ourselves the innocence of becoming. We then have someone who wants to achieve something through us and with us.
(F. Nietzsche, The Will to Power, p. 299)
Weakness here can be contrasted with existence that is struc- tured around the inauthenticity of what Sartre called “bad faith”, in other words, a form of escapism from individual responsibility into an impersonal public world. In this sense civilization could be seen as being “in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members” (R.W. Emerson, Self Reliance, p. 141) which it pre- tends to protect with its institutions that should, as it seems, aid us
in existence, but in fact the very same institutions only encroach upon our freedom and prove Emerson’s maxim of ne te quaesiveńs extra (do not seek outside yourself) if not wrong, then at least an existential ideał (Ibid., p. 138). We concede our freedom to society, sińce it offers a regularization, and thus a certain predictability, to existence. Hence, we repress immediate desires for the promise of protection and predictability in the long run. In this sense our desires are held in check and projected into the futurę
In Freud’s understanding civilization emerges as the product of Eros and Ananke (love and necessity). Freud maintained that the family, on which the whole of civilization is based, consists in the idea of materiał and existential protection that the woman receives from the man, who in return has the woman at hand for sexual sat- isfaction. The family is, therefore, the unspoken contract based on complementation: the woman compensates man’s sexual needs, whilst he complements her physical weakness.
In opposition to the caritative aspect of our being, the other im- pulse responsible for its formation is aggression, which Freud ex- emplifies with the murder of the father. This occurrence initiated all social organization. Freud had us assume that the weaker sons willingly organized themselves to commit patricide, unconsciously wanting to replace the father and assume his position and power. The murder, however, generated a sense of culpability that came to be later projected into the belief in God. For this reason, P. Ricoeur maintains that God, in Freudian terms, is strictly connected with the feeling of guilt and remorse (Religion, Atheism and Faith, pp. 438-439).
Eros, being the life drive, allows for the emergence of the gen erał caritative feeling between men, in other words, it is the drive for integration. Thanatos, on the other hand, is the drive towards dissolution and fragmentation; it is not based on Caritas but on ag gression and disintegration. In this way we may say that the death drive is the primordial drive that exists in the chaos of naturę; it is this chaos that we later have to order, sińce as Nietzsche holds “in our thought, the essential feature is fitting new materiał into old schemas” (F. Nietzsche, The Will to Power, p. 273); hence this
schematization happens on account of Caritas, i.e. taking respon- sibility for being. Every civilization is the corollary of the tensions that exist between these two drives just like the individual psyche is the site of the conflict between consciousness and unconscious- ness. Subsequently, every civilization has a specific character that is the result of the organization and equilibrium of these drives. This brings us very close to Heidegger and the conception of the truth of being and essence. In other words, before we start per- ceiving sensually, we are already equipped with a certain charac ter or mood that we are thrown into on account of our belonging to the being-in-the-world. Commenting on the issue in relation to art, H. Dreyfus observes:
For the Greeks, what showed up were heroes and slaves, for the Christians, they were saints and sinners. There could not have been saints in ancient Greece; at best there could only have been weak people who let others walk all over them. Likewise, there could not have been Greek-style he roes in the Middle Ages. Such people would have been regarded as pride- ful sinners who disrupted society by denying their dependence on God and encouraging everyone to depend on them instead.
(H. Dreyfus, Heidegger’s Ontology of Art, p. 415)
Retuming to Freud, however, we come to leam that the postula- tion of the death drive is very rigorously connected with the devel- opment of the superego whose function is to discipline and punish the ego, in other words, to impose a certain ideał representation for the ego to pursue and hołd on to. Thus idealism is brought close to totalitarianism as is the case with Hegel. Ad libitum, we can compare the superego to the conscience remembering that “conscience does make cowards of us all” (W. Shakespeare, Hamlet, III, 1,84), sińce it disciplines the ego by means of guilt and remorse. In itself, the ego ideał is the effect of the intromission of the image of the mother or father, in other words, it is connected with the dissolution of the Oedipus Complex. Subsequentiy, it is the effect of the accumulation of aggressive impulses that were not projected outwards, and which suddenly revealed themselves thus occasioning repression.
The amount of aggression that is directed inwards determines the power of the super ego, thus individuals who repress their ag gression are very freąuently those that receive the severest pun- ishment from the agency of the superego. The superego, there- fore, emerges due to the intromission of extemal authority and the repression of aggression against an entity that represents the authority and power (the father).
The superego is obviously very much linked with the sense of guilt which should be contrasted with remorse. The latter is what is felt after a deed had been actually completed, whilst guilt is in dependent of action, i.e. it can be said to predate action. It is con- cemed morę with the desire or intention to do evil than with actu ally committing oneself to such a deed.
The overall discontents that we feel with civilization is linked with the repression of instinctual life symbolized by the super ego that quiets the flre of naturę that bums in the heart of man. Existence in society means traversing the road from instinct to guilt. The activity of the superego (disciplinary and punishing), however, points to the masochistic tendencies dormant within the psyche. It is this masochism that keeps the psyche in its bounds creating channels for the flux of the libido. The superego, neverthe- less, is not an inbom faculty; rather, it is the result of the conflicts that form between the societal ordinances and an individual ego. The superego is, therefore, not really an entity, but rather a relation that holds, or connects us to reality. For this reason its structure and masochistic powers vary from culture to culture. Perhaps the notion of the superego can be loosely (to some extent) related to Heidegger’s notion of the cali of conscience, which he understood as the voice calling out to Dasein to embrace authentic modes of comportment. Dreyfus acknowledges:
Everyday guilt arises because Dasein, to cover up its unsettledness, takes over the cultural mores as binding. This gives one the comforting impression that there are morał norms that guide action. Failure to live up to such norms leads to a sense of guilt or debt to society that one calls conscience. Conscience becomes a double cover-up when further
interpretation disguises the fact that the ethical practices it enforces are merely a culture’s practices, by speaking in terms of what is uni- versally right.
(H. Dreyfus, Being-in-the-Worid, p. 306)
In the above both idealism and pragmatism converge, sińce for Heidegger (as also for R. Rorty) existential ideals do not belong to some metaphysical dimension but rather to everydayness, where they take the form of social norms. Thus pain and guilt are all re- sults of not achieving or not being able to live up to the standards that these norms are said to exemplify.
Civilization as the Site of the Will to Power
Freudian and Sartrean theory is greatly indebted to Nieztsche. Although Nietzsche died in 1900, and thus historically he cannot be classified as a modem thinker, his theory is really the founda- tion of all modem thought. Therefore, we allow ourselves to have one quick look at what he had to say in the sphere of ethics and morality, sińce his opinions served as a background for modem social and ethical theory.
Nietzsche sustained that our being in society is always marked by violence which is the consequence of the will to power. All our actions are underscored by the will to dominate others, and there fore, to reduce them down to object status. The will to power is, at the same time, the source of man’s individuation, as it marks off our aseity and underscores the importance of the ego in a typically Freudian sense. For Schopenhauer the will was mainly a biologi- cal force characterized by irrational behavior and responsible for suffering that accompanies existence; moreover, it was blind and indifferent to individual being. The individual was seen as a victim of the will rather than its manipulator. In other words, the will oc- cupied the subject position, whilst individuality was degraded to object level. For Nietzsche, on the other hand, the will is the af- flrmation of the will to power and does not merely reproduce itself
on the subjective level in the individual. It is also the driving force behind all organized social conduct:
So far the most powerful human beings have still bowed worshipfully before the saint as the riddle of self-conquest and deliberate finał renun- ciation. Why did they bow? In him - and as it were behind the ąuestion mark of his fragile and miserable appearance - they sensed the superior force that sought to test itself in such a conquest, the strength of the will in which they recognized and honored their own strength and delight in dominion: they honored something in themselves when they honored the saint. Moreover, the sight of the saint awakened a suspicion in them: such an enormity of denial, of anti-nature will not have been desired for noth- ing, they said to and asked themselves. There may be a reason for it, some very great danger about which the ascetic, thanks to his secret comforters and visitors, might have inside information. In short, the powerful of the world leamed a new fear before him; they sensed a new power, a strange, as yet unconquered enemy - it was the “will to power” that madę them stop before the saint.
(F. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, p. 65)
In other words, what we find in the above is that power, or bet- ter still the fear of power is the structuring principle behind all social enterprise. Having said that, let us briefly review Nietzsche’s position with regard to the issue.
On a political level nations are influenced by the will to power to the same extent as individuals. For this reason conflict is the ma jor existential mood that dominates the relations between societies
(understood on a politically correct level as competition). Outside of its collective organized naturę, society has another advantage over the individual. It does not have to operate with the side-effects of the superego, i.e. it is not oppressed by responsibility sińce, in prin ciple, society is an impersonal construct. In society the will to power is manifested through a division of power which contributes to an overall denial of responsibility, for acting under the umbrella of the State the individual does not have to take actual morał responsibility for his actions; rather, his only concem is that they are legał.
Nietzsche blames the Judeo-Christian morality for instilling a sense of weakness into the individual, for the individual is no longer to act on instinct but rather subjugate himself to morał rules which can be said to frustrate the will to power. By means of repression of the will to power in the individual (whose existence is pervaded with a fear of punishment) the impulse finds its reflec- tion in society that is free from a sense of guilt. Society suppress- es the freedom of the individual by means of the Judeo-Christian morality whose chief mood is that of obedience, i.e. it prevents individuals from experiencing freedom which for Nietzsche is the accentuation of the will to power (aseity) hence freedom is a ąuality that the individual can win for himself by acting on the will to power. Freedom, nevertheless, is only achievable through the will to power; through the overcoming of others in the strug- gle for existence. For this very reason Nietzsche’s favor, just like Emerson’s, lies with the individuals who are strong enough, or shall we say brave enough to transcend the social ethical codę. Yet just as Emerson praised individualism and non-conformism, Nietzsche pays tribute to non-conformism. Although we should protest against contemptible criminal acts, non-conformism is generally speaking a positive ąuality, sińce it asks society to re- valuate its social norms. Punishment dealt to criminals should, therefore, exercise a catharsic function like it did in the past, whereas today it is derogatory and deflnable through the idea of revenge:
One should reduce the concept “punishment” to the concept: suppression of revolt, security measures against the suppressed (total or partial im- prisonment). But one should not express contempt through punishment: a criminal is in any case a man who risks his life, his honor, his freedom - a man of courage. Neither should one take punishment to be a penance; or as a payment, as if an exchange relationship existed between guilt and punishment-punishment does not purify, for crime does not sully.
One should not deprive the criminal of the possibility of making his peace with society; provided he does not belong to the race of criminals. In that case one should make war on him even before he has committed
any hostile act (flrst operation as soon as one has him in one’s power: his castration).
(F. Nietzsche, The Will to Power, p. 392)
Nietzsche rejected all social Systems that were based on the premises of eąuality, including democracy and socialism, thinking them to promote commonness and averageness. He, instead, of- fered an aristocratic model in which exceptionally gifted individu- als can freely exercise their will to power, not being hindered in any way by the average voice of the herd.
The will to power is a force that encourages indmduals to pur- sue their instincts and fulflll them, sińce the generał fulfillment of instinctual life is what warrants happiness. Suffering, on the other hand, was not to be seen as the meaning of life, like in Schopenhauer, but rather as a necessary side effect of the will to power, express- ible through the will to pursue individual existence.
Weakness, so characteristic of the slave morality of the herd, exemplifies itself in blaming others for one’s own unfavorable ex- istential condition. Blaming the master morality for the evils that one was exposed to is according to Nietzsche only one example of looking for an idea that would justify the slave’s oppression. Der letzłe Mensch (the last man) puts the responsibility on others not wanting to come to terms with the idea that there is no reason and meaning to his suffering. There is yet another aspect connected with the idea of putting the responsibility on others, namely, that of revenge. Nietzsche finds this characteristic embedded in Christian morality. It is connected with the assumption that man’s actions are all conscious by naturę and hence they are intentional, as only conscious actions can be said to be punishable.
According to Nietzsche, the priestly class wanted to entitle themselves to take revenge on their former oppressors, therefore, they created a twisted understanding of responsibility. This means that responsibility for who we are is the product of ressentiment of those who are in a State of subjugation. For Nietzsche, as later for Heidegger, we are not responsible for our thrownness into the world. The problematics that we have just been outlining is what
Nietzsche called “the innocence to becoming” by which be means that as John Donnę poetically puts it: “trepidation of the spheres though greater far is innocent” (J. Donnę, A Yalediction Forbidding Mourning, p. 695). What follows is that the will to power does not find motivation for actions that are rooted in revenge and ressenti- ment but in innocence, in actions that accord well with one’s char- acter and instincts.
As we have mentioned before, Nietzsche praised individualism and repudiated democracy and socialism for neglecting the indi- vidual and favoring the masses; he scomed all feeling of empathy that was sublimated by Schopenhauer. He believed that empathy weakens the individual, as it diverts him frora the exercising of the will to power. Moreover, it threatens him with the feeling of guilt.
Both democratic and totalitarian societies restrict the freedom of the individual and the will to power. Just like the repressed in Freud, the will to power, however, cannot be fully subdued by means of guilt that is generated by the superego. Instead, through a process of re-channeling that Freud will speak of, the will to pow er leams to express itself in non-violent ways (non-instinctually). Subseąuently, consciousness, and its foundation rationality, is but an extension of the instinctive will to power, i.e. the pleasure prin- ciple, whose only care is the satisfaction of desire. The non-violent expression of the will to power flnds substitutive forms of expres- sion like empathy, for instance. For Nietzsche, however, empathy also originates in the will to power, thus in the subjugation of the other. Love, which is said to be linked with empathy, was believed to be rooted in the will to power as one of its disguises, “love, [is] a secret path to the heart of the morę powerful-so as to dominate him” (F. Nietzsche, The Will to Power, p. 406).
Thus in love the apparent weakness expressible through the act of complete givenness to the other is really at base the mani- festation of the will to power in which one will seeks to domi nate another by appealing to its sense of guilt, i.e. urging it not to express its will to power against it. For Freud, on the other hand, love was not the apex of our satisfactions but the most vul- nerable State in which we engage, sińce then the subject-object
division vanishes. In other words, in love the relation is not that of a subject to a subjugated object, sińce in this case the subject wants to merge with the object, and therefore, it lowers its de- fense mechanisms.
Nietzsche, realizing that the will to power in social being some- times encounters frustration, believed that it sometimes comes under disguise. The first disguised form of the will to power is the desire for freedom, independence, and peace, in other words, the will to self-preservation. We aspire after peace and independence so as not to be put at risk of enduring violent actions ffom others; additionally, we do not want to become enslaved or subjugated by others. The second disguised form is called enrollment. This form involves submission to those in power in order to acquire a certain aspect of control over them (cf. love). To achieve this, we make ourselves indispensable to our superiors thus forcing them into gratitude. We simply do what our superior asks of us and do it to the best of our abilities, so that our superiors begin to see us as vital and irreplaceable (Travis J. Dennenson, Society and the Individual in Nietzsche’s The Will to Power, [http://www. infidels.org./library/modern/travis_dennenson/power.html] last access 05.09.09).
Yet the most curious form of the re-channeling, or the disguise of the will to power, is the faculty of conscience that allows for the one who is in an interior position to enjoy a sense of dominion over the individual in power by creating a set of morals that they revere and live by and also holding their oppressors to be accountable to. This is the transvaluation of morals (Umwertung aller Werte)
that the Jews accomplished and which Nietzsche alluded to in The Genealogy of Morals:
Whatever else has been done to damage the powerful and great of this earth seems trivial compared with what the Jews have done, that priestly people who succeeded in avenging themselves on their enemies and op pressors by radically inverting all their values, that is, by an act of the most spiritual vengeance. This was a strategy entirely appropriate to a priestly people in whom vindictiveness had gone most deeply underground. It
was the Jews who, with frightening consistency, dared to invert the aristo- cratic value eąuations good/noble/powerful/beautiful/happy/favored-of- the-gods and maintain, with the furious hatred of the underpiwileged and impotent, that “only the poor, the powerless, are good; only the suffering, sick and ugly, truły blessed. But you noble ones of the earth will be, to all eternity, the evil, the cruel, the avaricious, the godless, and thus the cursed and damned.”
(F. Nietzsche, The Genealogy ofMorals, pp. 167-168)
Down-Going as the Basis
of Social Existence
The relation that holds between the individual and society is also the main theme of Thus Spake Zarathustra which also partly deals with the question of identity. This is, for example, reflected in the prologue in the persona of the “old man who had left his holy cot to seek roots” (F. Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, p. 4). In a metaphorical sense this man perhaps marks Zarathustra’s status in society. We remember that after spending ten years in the mountains (longer than Thoreau) Zarathustra decides to leave the mountains and share his wisdom with others who in this case are the sleepers; for he believes that wisdom is nothing, i.e. it is a useless commodity if it cannot be shared. In this way Zarathustra is a down-goer, as the down-going is all about sharing oneself with the world, influencing it but also (what is dangerous) exposing oneself to its influences.
In addition to exercising the ethics of down-going, Zarathustra is also an over-goer, as he must trespass all modes of conven- tional thinking. The saint perhaps can be said to symbolize the sort of wisdom that Zarathustra possesses and wants to share. However, the saint’s situation is that he was rejected or misun- derstood and for this reason - not wanting to participate in the affairs of der letzte Mensch - he lives in the Lichtung (clearing in the Heideggerian sense) of his being, i.e. in his cot in the woods which underscores his self-imposed alienation. In other words,
we are dealing here with an originary ethics not founded on so- cial norms and regulations but on inner necessity and freedom, for the saint praises God actively by creating and singing hymns and not by passively and indolently reciting ready-made public prayers. Nevertheless, a major difference here emerges between the saint and Zarathustra who believed that God is dead. Here Zarathustra’s thinking is object directed whereas the saint is free from representational thinking which thinks in terms of object representation. Rather, the saint’s thinking is morę meditative in the Heideggerian sense, as it marks not an empirical but an emo- tional bond with the world.
The path to enlightenment is, however, possible only on an indi- vidual basis, in other words, there is no systematic religion, or way of thinking that can aid one in achieving enlightenment; rather, it is only madę possible through individual endeavor which accentu- ates an emotional attachment to existence, not an abstract one that represents all forms of systematic thinking. To illustrate the point we can refer to the words of the saint who urges Zarathustra to “[g]ive them nothing, said the saint. Take rather, part of their load, and carry it along with them” Q. This alludes to what we have presented above, i.e. the load is the principium individuationis that must come to be exercised for enlightenment to occur. In other words, we must disaccustom ourselves from conventional thinking and stereotypical modes of being.
Nietzsche’s strong afflrmation of an emotionally - intuitive mood is expressed in his scom of traditional metaphysics in the Platonie sense. He vehemently declares that: “I conjure you, my brethren, remain true to the earth, and believe not those who speak unto you of super earthly hopes! Poisoners are they, wheth- er they know it or not” (Ibid., p. 6). The alluded-to poison is the illusion of metaphysics which prevents us from engaging actively in the life with which we were granted. Instead, as in Christianity, transcendence that is the product of a Freudian frustration of ful- flllment leads to the projection of life into illusion; in this way tran scendence is a form of escapism and at the same time, a neurotic relief from existence.
Ricoeur and the Ethics
of the Post-Religious Stage
As we see the idea of the will to power is also rooted in Zarathustra, sińce he symbolizes the ethics of releasement (Gelassenheit) as understood by Heidegger and developed by Ricoeur. His love of in- dividuality is reflected in his respect for “the great despisers” who are equipped with non-conformist authentic thinking that allows them to venture beyond convention, for Nietzsche declares that: “one must still have chaos in one, to give birth to a dancing star”
(Ibid., p. 10). Ricoeur believed that no one can live at the level of Zarathustra, not even Nietzsche himself, because of his hatred of Christianity. For this reason Ricoeur considers Nietzsche’s posi- tion to be that of “an accusation of an accusation” and in this way Nietzsche, instead of highlighting the will to power, focuses on a revenge ethics so characteristic to Christianity itself (R Ricoeur,
Religion, Faith and Atheism, p. 442).
Taking into consideration both Freud and Nietzsche and the atheism that is characteristic to both leads Ricoeur on the pursuit of the religion of the post-religious period. He focuses on both thinkers, as in his opinion they differ from the detached postulates of British empiricists, who simply busied themselves with prov- ing God to be non-existent, as well as the French positivists, for whom God was a generał concept void of any specific meaning. In Ricoeur’s understanding Freud and Nietzsche, however, do morę than criticize the existence of God, for they focus on the cultural drives that gave birth to the belief in God and religion in the first place. Ricoeur, therefore, decides to devote himself to the taboo and refuge naturę of religion, which he links with accusation con- nected with the fear of punishment, and consolation, which cor- responds to man’s desire for protection. The post-religious stage must, therefore, be characterized by a type of faith that would ven- ture beyond the ethics of accusation and consolation.
In RicoeuFs understanding both British empiricists and French positivists make the mistake of considering religion from a factual perspective, i.e. from a scientific one, whereas religious feeling
pertains morę to illusion than to matters of fact. In other words, the believer considers religion to be the way that leads him to a mystic reality - the true one - that is located beyond conscious perception, therefore, one that remains concealed. It is, therefore, an empty place from which all religious feeling emerges (in Freud the libido and in Nietzsche the will to power). For Nietzsche the emptiness from which religious feeling derives is occasioned by the State of weakness and dependency, which, at the same time, is the source of metaphysics that is based on the idea of projection of the slave morality. Subseąuently, the empty place is a nothingness that is produced by metaphysics which leads to the belief in a su- per-earthly reality that stands in opposition to naturę, instinct and power and which was brought about by the revaluation of morals.
Nothingness in Freud, on the other hand, has a different source, one that is not based on the relation between physis and meła-physis.
Rather, this source is the superego which in substance is a noth- ing, sińce it is really a guard that is self-produced by the ego; thus it is a bridge between the animal (the id) and the human (the ego), whose purpose is to exercise control by measuring out ideals for the ego to pursue. On a morę tangible basis, the superego is connected with the Oedipus Complex and its resolution, i.e. it is the primordial structure that marks the prohibition of incest. It is connected with the implantation of prohibition which is the deflning letter of the law. At the same time, it is also associated with the murder of the father and the process of mouming that in Freud produces the origin of divine feeling. The nihilism that we find in Nietzsche and the moum ing in Freud “are thus the two parallel ways in which the origin of values is restored to itself, i.e., to the will to power, to Eros in its central battle withThanatos” (Ibid., p. 440).
For Ricoeur the death of God as proclaimed by Freud and Nietzsche marks the demise of the onto-theological understand- ing of God that is rooted in metaphysics and theology. Both Freud and Nietzsche put an end to an ethical and morał understanding of God. The murder of this God finds its reflection in Nietzschean ni hilism and Freudian mouming respectively. The onto-theological understanding of God is found, for example, in Kant, who believes
that the most important function of religion is to observe the com- mandments of God as they come to be revealed in consciousness.
The murder of the onto-theological God brings nihilism and mouming that refers to the image of the primordial father. On the other hand, the fali of metaphysics is seen as the ultimate death of God. The post religious faith should, therefore, be Zarathustraian, i.e. originary in the sense of the return to the Judeo-Christian values. Looking for an originary ethics, Ricoeur advises us to look beyond the ethics of obedience that flows out of the kerygma (Kijpuyjua). In other words, he urges us to venture beyond the ethical, to the pre-conditional mood of ethics which he links with the overwhelm- ing power of logos. The ethical attitude that prevails, therefore, is not that of obedience to a customized set of regulations that form the essence of obedience. This primordial ethics is not founded on obedience but hearkening, thus an opening to the speaking of the word. Ricoeur links the primordiality of hearkening to the fact that in many languages hearkening is closely connected with obeying which succeeds it (cf. Polish posłuch=obedience, morphologically related to hearing):
The only way to think ethically is first to think non-ethically. In order to attain this goal, we must discover that place where the autonomy of our will is rooted in a dependence and an obedience that is no longer infected with accusation, prohibition, and condemnation. This pre-ethical situation is that of “hearkening” [1’ecoute], In hearkening there is revealed a modę of being which is not yet a modę of doing and which thus avoids the al- temative of subjection and revolt. Heraclitus: “Do not attach importance to my words, but heed the logos.” When word says something, when it reveals not only something about the meaning of beings but something about Being itself, as is the case with the poet, we are then confronted by what could be called the occurrence of word: something is said of which I am neither source nor the master.
(Ibid., p. 445)
The ethics of pre-obedience that flows out of hearkening accen- tuates a belonging to which perhaps we can compare the formative
stages of the oceanie feeling that Freud alluded to. The hearkening binds man together; it is a pre-religious modę of being character- ized by keeping silent and letting the word simply appear in the clearing (in the “da” of “sein”) rather than not listening to the word but already anticipating and abusing it, by forcing it into ready- made ethical structures of which obedience and fear are most primordial of all. In the Ricoeurian understanding hearkening, as madę possible by silence, leads to an understanding of God that is free of the prohibition-accusation dichotomy.
At the same time, hearkening is a pre-ethical modę of being that Ricoeur calls “an ethics of the desire to be or the effort to ex- ist” (Ibid., p. 447). In other words, this is the ethics of the what (of the word) not of the how (how the word is to be exercised). This ethics comes close to the Spinozian idea of conatus, i.e. our effort to be, which is comparable to our will to power. The ethics that we are now propounding involves a new attunement to being, sińce our desire to be has been overwhelmed by the ideał of how to ex- ist, an ideał that produced frustration and from which man always left with a sense of guilt or sin that is based on the ethics of value, which reveals itself whenever we contrast our will to power with our existential situation. In other words, value is the product of
conatus and its context. Ricoeur observes:
there is something that precedes the will and the principle of obligation, which according to Kant, is the a priori structure of the will. This some thing else is our existence itself insofar as it is capable of being modifled by word. This intimate connection between our desire to be and the power of word is a conseąuence of what we have referred to above as the act of hearkening, of paying attention, of obeying. This articulation, in tum, makes possible what we describe in ordinary terms as will, evaluation, decision, and choice. This psychology of the will is only the superflcial projection of a morę profound articulation between the meaning of our ex- istential situation, understanding, and discourse - to take up the principal notions of the Heideggerian analysis of Dasein”.
For Ricoeur the God that threatens is, however, the same God that consoles and offers protection. In other words, this is the fun- damental characteristic of the God behind the Judeo-Christian tradition, in which God is synonymous with morality. This is the God that offers providence and retribution. Thus Ricoeur’s under- standing of atheism wants to destroy the God of morality whose intemal structure we have seen to be composed of accusation and consolation.
Ricoeur proposes that we venture beyond traditional metaphys- ics that is based morę or less on the first cause argument. Instead, he suggests that we take up a positive ontology beyond the accusa tion and hate that we find in Nietzsche (in the face of Christianity). This positive ontology is to consist of what Nietzsche called “the innocence of becoming” or what Freud referred to as the reality principle. We ought to remember that for Freud religion simply compensated the meanness of existence; it created a haven for man in the midst of an indifferent universe.
It follows from the above that religion was a camouflaged form of the pleasure principle, sińce it offered the illusion of protection with the image of the father, which in this case does not accuse and invoke guilt but offers a sanctuary for man’s suffering. Thus if we are to move beyond the accusation - consolation understanding of God, we must renounce the father. In other words, the mouming work must be over and done with and we must reconcile ourselves to a fatherless world. Although this might lead to what St. John of the Cross called “the night of the soul” (the experience of lone- liness and desolation; a temporary loss of faith which, however, leads to a higher level of belief in the long run) it is achievable, if instead of focusing on accusation and consolation, we re-examine our relation to logos, which in Ricouer’s understanding puts accu- sation/consolation ethics in abeyance, at the same time, suspend- ing the ethics of desire that is rooted in the all pervasive belief in the powers of the subject. In other words, our relation to the word allows us to examine a higher modę of being, one that is free from subjective qualities. Hence, instead of listening to the narcissism of the ego, we let being be by allowing it to enter the clearing that
we all are. Ricoeur finds the impersonal coming to be of being in the manifestation of God in The Book of Job. Ricoeur interprets the words of God as the language of universal being that ignores man’s ethics, sińce God seems to be indifferent to the individual suffer- ing of Job, and instead manifests the power of being that is of his creation in which man is but a constituent.
The power of being in its non-ethical aspect, therefore, comes to be incamated in the word. The word is free from the ethics of ac- cusation and consolation. Thus being and word are one, and there fore, man can be said to participate in being on condition that he is a being that speaks, and as we know, we speak only hypothetically, sińce the real speaking is done by language. Our participation in the speaking of language allows us to free ourselves from an ethics grounded in fear and desire. An ethics of this kind is affiliated with the classic understanding of the subject that is especially visible in Descartes, i.e. the subject is seen as that to which the whole world pertains as representation. In other words, the subject is regarded as that which stands in opposition to being and reduces it to rep- resentations which emerge as the effect of the will of the subject. Therefore, the representation of being is the effect of the willing (the source of ethos) of the subject. If we refrain from representational thinking and the subject-object division that it entails, we will let our- selves be brought to language, the being that gathers by essencing the world. The kind of non-ethical consolation that we find in logos happens through the gathering aspect of language, which allows us to enjoy a sense of union with being, sińce logos and physis (being) in the pre-socratic period were closely related. Physis did not refer to the materiał properties of naturę but to generative gathering quali- ties of being that reside in language as the showing-saying:
Physis, Heidegger maintains, means originally heaven and earth, both stones and plants, both animals and human beings; human history as both human and God’s work; finally and first of all, the gods as fate. Physis means the emergence of what prevails and what is carried over through that prevalence.
Additionally, physis was that which surpassed everything else, whereas logos is that which gathers. Thus man’s consolation is in the unconcealment of being; in letting being be instead of the ego. This consolation through gathering is what Kierkegaard meant by repetition and which we can refer to as dwelling (in the Heideggerian sense) that involves taking responsibility and actively facing being. Ricoeur paraphrases Heidegger by stating that, “man dwells on earth insofar as a tension is maintained between his con- cem for the heavens, for the divine, and for the rootedness of his own existence in the earth” (Religion, Faith and Atheism, p. 461). It is a desubjectified modę of being that we attain through medita- tive thinking that leads to Gelassenheit, which allows us to surpass the calculative ethics grounded in opposition and representation. Hólderlin’s words “poetically man dwells on this earth” therefore gain a new meaning for us, for this means that man dwells only by means of creative being that finds its expression in poetry, in which language is not used for its representative aspects but for its show- ing-saying ąualities. It opens up the path to creative being that the saint articulated before Zarathustra. Therefore, consolation dwells in freedom not in metaphysics founded upon retribution.
Chapter II
THE FUNDAMENTAL BACKGROUND
OF ETHICALINQUIRY
The Origin of Ethical Beliefs
From the perspective of onto-theology, representation is the founda- tion of all western thinking (philosophy, religion and science). The difference between science and religion is that the former deals with or is based on perceptions, whilst the latter is founded upon feelings and emotions. In other words, just as science works with perceptions by organizing and analyzing them, religion tries to do the same but with reference to man’s emotional life. The data of scientiflc scrutiny are matters of fact, whilst the results of religious thinking founded upon value, which is the cradle of ethics, are hopes, fears, self-in- flicted consolations and pimishments. Most importantly, what dis- tinguishes ethical judgments from scientiflc ones is that the former cannot be proved or disproved. On the other hand, it is ąuestionable if scientiflc truths are objective in naturę, or if they are nothing morę than symbolic representations of the thinking of modem man as we find, for example, in Kuhn. H. Dreyfus observes:
For Khun, once one sees that the background practices determine what counts as true, sińce truth must be relative to current scientiflc practices, there can be no truth about how things are in themselves. Khun argues... that a given scientiflc lexicon of natural kind terms determines what can count as true, so that for Aristotle, for example, it was true that the sun was a planet and that there could not be a void, while for us Aristotie's assertions are neither true nor false because “planet” and “void" have different meanings in the lexicon of modem science. In generał, the assertions picking out the sort of things taken to exist at each stage of a science can be true at that stage, but are neither true nor false at some other stage in some other system of terms. Khun con- cludes that assertions can never be true of things as they are in themselves.
