Crossover Queries: Dwelling with Negatives, Embodying Philosophy's Others

Chapter 17: Exemplary Individuals

17 Exemplary Individuals Toward a Phenomenological Ethics Efforts to develop a phenomenological ethics have until now begun from two altogether different starting points. The first, a tack taken by Max Scheler, Nicolai Hartmann, and others, assumes that values are instantiated in the world and have properties that open them to intuitive grasp. Values are independent in being and accessible to us without being attached to things.1 The second starts with the embodied existent’s actual encounters with other persons and finds in these transactions an empirical locus for what is prescribed or forbidden in the moral realm. Levinas turns to the experience of the other to develop a phenomenology of social existence in which concrete interactions with others disclose a sphere of responsibility prior to ethical language or action (TI, 194–216). The first approach pre-supposes that values, like classes or kinds, are real, even if they are never actualized in particular objects or situations. Values may be simultaneously disclosed as universal and essential or as possibly but not necessarily inhering in specific phenomenologically revealed experiences . But once values are separable from concrete phenomena and can be intuited apart from context, they function as metaphysical constructs accounting for perceived identities. By contrast, the second phenomenological approach uncovers concrete social phenomena and precludes hypostatized values, a course that necessitates a language that disarticulates, ‘‘vibrates and disjoins’’ in conformity with what it manifests (VI, 10). The problem of generality is not 263 avoided, but a new mode of generality, which precedes the reification of universals—goodness, justice, and the like—is exhibited. I shall call this type of generality carnal generality, a conception developed nolens volens, as it were, in the work of Levinas and Merleau-Ponty, and I will call the phenomena that exhibit it carnal generals. Because carnal generality is rarely thematized in post-Husserlian phenomenology , it must be tracked down in the contexts in which it occurs, a process not unlike that through which carnal generality originally emerges. In what follows, I address three problems: first, using the phenomenological strategies of Merleau-Ponty and Levinas, I describe how the conditions of embodied existence make carnal generality possible . Second, I turn to paradigmatic lives both within and outside of recognized religious traditions and show how such lives function as carnal generals. Finally, I examine some competing claims that my own might mistakenly be thought to resemble—Nelson Goodman’s view that an account of samples can serve to show how conduct is exemplary, and Alasdair MacIntyre’s contention that a community’s consensus about what moral properties are to be prized, what are to count as virtues, can serve as the ground for resolving ethical disputes —and suggest reasons for preferring a phenomenological account of exemplary lives. Transcendental Structures of the Moral Life The notion of carnal generality arises in the work of both MerleauPonty and Levinas in connection with the search for access to meaning that cannot be incorporated in concepts because concepts presuppose a logos ‘‘more fundamental than the logos of objective thought endowing the latter with its relative validity’’ (PP, 365). For Merleau-Ponty, generality is inscribed in the incarnate subject, an ensemble of self-transcending acts and lingual capacities. By contrast , Levinas focuses on the alterity of other persons and its impact upon the self, an alterity that cannot be brought into conceptual focus by language. Both agree that the psycho-physiological primordium that is the incarnate subject expresses a generality of which universals and essences are derivative types. This distinctive mode of generality, carnal generality, is exhibited by context-specific complexes, carnal generals. It is important to distinguish the latter term from two others that influenced both Levinas 264 Nihilation and the Ethics of Alterity and Merleau-Ponty, with which it might therefore be confused: Hegel ’s concrete universals and Husserl’s material essences.2 Levinas provides a full account of Husserl’s philosophy of essences in The Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s Phenomenology.3 Carnal generality is not exhibited by concrete universals, self-particularizing or self-specifying universals, because these express the self-development of the whole, the Absolute, and as such do not require human corporeality as an unsurpassable condition for thought and language. Similarly, the term carnal general is not an equivalent for material essence, a designation for the structural limits of an object , which, when surpassed, entail the object’s destruction. The...