Divine Enticement:Theological Seductions: Theological Seductions

3. Because Being Here Is So Much: Ethics as the Artifice of Attention

101 3 Because Being Here Is So Much: Ethics as the Art if ice of At tent ion Attention is a task we share, you and I. To keep attention strong is to keep it from settling. —Anne Carson, Economy of the Unlost: Reading Simonides of Keos with Paul Celan Attention must be paid. —Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman The very notion of seductive ethics is likely to give us pause, to seem more error than paradox. Ethics is more often than not conceived as the very resistance to seduction, if not in fact to any sort of pleasure (or bliss, which seems to undermine the ethical subject).1 It is dutiful, we think, a little bit ascetic (provided we don’t overly enjoy our asceticism ), rule-bound or abstemiously virtuous. And if seduction is about sustaining the possible, then to prescribe, whether character or behavior, 102 | Because Being Here Is So Much seems contradictory to it. But the prescriptions of ethics are not always a matter of foreclosure; they may direct us, for instance, toward the virtue that allows us to flourish, or toward attention—and attention, to begin with, to delight. Moving in such a direction, we might speak of an ethical discipline of pleasure. But of course, like a seductive ethics, a discipline of pleasure sounds peculiar to the contemporary ear. Discipline is what we do when we are grimly submitting to the unpleasurable, and pleasures are supposed to be easy. (Or else healthy, or educational, allowing us a small but smug sense of superiority over those who fail to, say, run, or read fine literature .) But the discipline of seduction and seducibility is precisely an ethical discipline—without ceasing to be what also threatens ethics. Our sense of delight’s decadence runs deeply. Even those who see such pleasurable traits as wit and the capacity for friendship as virtues (as Aristotle did, and later David Hume),2 or whose ethical rules are grounded in the search for the maximum of human happiness (as in a basic utilitarianism ),3 nonetheless end up saying no to at least some of the most seductive kinds of pleasures—pleasures to which we’re drawn because they are pleasurable , rather than pleasures that we derive secondarily from doing what’s right. This opposition appears at its most intense in someone like Kant, who worries that if we take pleasure in doing good, we cannot be sure that we are ethical rather than simply self-indulgent.4 Many religions, and certainly Christianity, are also thoroughly vexed by that drawing power of pleasure. Augustine is famously worried about pleasures, devoting long passages in the Confessions not just to the temptations of sociality and sexuality, but one by one to the pleasures of each sense, intellectual curiosity, and worldly honor.5 It is easy to interpret him badly on the subject. His worry is not, as it might at first seem, that pleasure is evil: we are right to delight in material creation, and nothing divinely created is bad. The problem is rather that we are too easily distracted by the immediacy of relatively minor pleasures, and so we turn all of our attention and desire to them, neglecting the more difficult, but more profound, joys of the infinite. This is not, however, an either-or. What simplistic readings neglect is that we reject the infinite if we reject all the finite things in which we read its signs. Thus, as I’ve noted, for Augustine we do not reach divine desire by rising above creation.6 We reach divine desire by deepening our desire in and for creation; we reach the divine only Ethics as the Artifice of Attention | 103 through a deeper desire for the world. In a somewhat less simplistic reading , Augustine seems to decide we must be moderate in our worldly indulgences , restricting them to what allows us best to flourish in the love of God. (This is particularly true of the pleasures involved in eating.) But here too some part of the point goes missing. What Augustine ultimately seeks is precisely a pleasure without any moderation at all, an infinite delight in an infinite “object” in his love of God. As Augustine does, I want to connect this sense of desirous and inquisitive goodness to our response to beauty, thus invoking the classic Platonic triad at the pinnacle of the eternal Forms—goodness, beauty, and truth...