A Passion for the Impossible: John D. Caputo in Focus

“O felix culpa,” This Foxy Fellow Felix: A response to Westphal

“O felix culpa,” This Foxy Fellow Felix: A response to Westphal John D. Caputo I have always been grateful for the light and good humor that Merold Westphal sheds on philosophical argument and now I find myself grateful for the illumination he sheds on me, I who am a question unto myself, as St. Augustine says. At the end of this excellent study he puts his finger on exactly what is at stake in Against Ethics. Earlier on, he had pointed out that by leaving “obligation” in place, Against Ethics leaves substantive ethical judgments in place—“racism is unjust”—having reorganized them chiefly in terms of minimizing suffering and evil, even as it has shown the door to “the epistemic metaclaims it [ethics] makes for those judgments.” These judgments, I am arguing, are on their own, and the search for an epistemic or metaphysical back-up for them is in vain, even as it can be in certain circumstances obscene. Just how many and what sorts of “arguments” do you require before you concede the horror of rape or murder? That means that a treatise on obligation should take the form of a “poetics,” not a noetics, an attempt to magnify the voice of wounded flesh, to lend it an ear, and to discourage cruelty. Westphal astutely points out that this is not to abandon philosophy for poetry but to give philosophy a different twist, to let it emerge more closely interwoven with poetry, narrative, and rhetoric than hitherto—rather than delivering it all wrapped up in geometry or the physical sciences in the manner of the Enlightenment or contemporary analytic ethics. On this point, he and Cleo McNelly Kearns see eye to eye. This approach to obligation also has, I might add, something of an Aristotelian pedigree , inasmuch as it sets out in search of a kind of “ethical” attunement (Stimmung ), of well-tuned feelings that take pleasure in the pleasure of the friend, and let us add, the stranger, and feel pain at their pain, rather than the approaches to ethics that emphasize rules and first reaching cognitive clarity about what the good is in order then to do it. But despite this sensitive reading of Against Ethics, I am, alas, forced to disagree with Westphal on a point very similar to the one that I made against Kearney and Ayres, who were reading Prayers and Tears. Westphal mistakes the status I assign to Nietzsche and to his poetic stand-in, Felix Sineculpa, who is a dramatis persona for Zarathustra, who is in turn a dramatis persona 171 for Nietzsche (I suppose). Felix has a liturgical name, or an anti-liturgical one. Just as Zarathustra came to preach the good news of the religion of the earth, Sineculpa preaches the innocence of becoming. But if Sineculpa is right, that would undermine the hymn in the Holy Saturday vigil that sings of Adam’s sin as a happy fault (O felix culpa)—for there would then be no fault which merited so great a redeemer and we would then not need Christ. But if there is no fault, there is no obligation, and neither a noetics nor a poetics of obligation, and the argument (or the “insistence”) of Against Ethics, that “obligation happens,” with or without the support or the objections of the philosophers, falls on its face. So when Merold Westphal decides that I prefer Nietzsche to Kierkegaard, that though I mostly hold an agnostic position, I occasionally let my Nietzschean belief slip out, which means I prefer the innocence of becoming to the me voici of Abraham, he has, I think, been beguiled by this foxy fellow Felix. That also brings Westphal’s position close to Kearney’s kettle argument: that I am an indecisionist (“he remains undecided between his two faiths”) who decides for khora or at least exhibts khoral tendencies, whereas I, a mere supplementary clerk of obligation, am simply trying to underline the underlying undecidability in which the movement of faith, here faith in obligation, transpires. For me the very appearance of “Felix” (and the other pseudonyms) is a Kierkegaardian ploy. If Radical Hermeneutics took its key from Repetition, my Against Ethics is meant as a kind of postmodern rewrite of Fear and Trembling . (Unlike Kierkegaard, however, I had neither the wit nor the money to publish them on the same day.) The undecidability is formulated by framing a string of discourses on obligation within the opening and concluding discourses of Felix, each voice...