Nothingness and Desire: A Philosophical Antiphony

Morality

Morality 79 19the place of morality. Of themselves, nothingness and desire have no concrete ethical content. Their intersect occupies a place between those two orders—the is and the ought to be—whose conflict is a central concern of philosophy. It is the place we stand as we fear the finitude of our lives such as they are and from which we hope for a more desirable world. What we do about what we see there is another thing. Mythical stories of a primordially good world, the way it was before evil came into the picture, stand in the same place with the same ethical neutrality. The search for reasons to prefer one vision of the good life over another, and to act in accord with that vision, opens that middle ground up to moral praxis. But on what basis do we determine our preferences? To begin with, we need to raise a question we have avoided posing directly so far: Where do we stand when we speak of desire as a fundamental fact of the world, of nothingness as enveloping being and of no-self as enveloping self, of God as an absolute relativity manifest in desire? Is that standpoint in any sense universal? And is that universality any more than an empty abstraction? We have refrained so far from appealing to the authority of sacred or classical texts for rational proof, and we will continue to do so. The appeal to collective or personal “experience” as a universal ground would seem to require access to a “pure experience” stripped of personal, cultural, and epoch-specific modes of thought. Even if such a notion could be articulated, we would have to reinvest in the very specificities we had abstracted from in order to say it. In the end, there appears to be no other rational ground from which to verify universal assertions about nothingness , desire, no-self, and absolute relativity than that of socially accepted distinctions between being reasonable and being unreasonable. The same may be said of the search for universal moral principles. No doubt, traditional approaches that strap moral principles to transcendental metaphysics, divine revelation, or sagely wisdom are difficult to sustain except in a closed environment of premises agreed upon in advance. The more one moves back and forth across the East-West philosophical divide, the clearer this is. Moral principles, in the concrete or in their most rarefied form, do not travel well across civilizations and often not even across 80 | Nothingness and Desire time within a given cultural frame of reference. Loosening the straps brings us no closer to the common ground that rational moral praxis requires. Insofar as moral reflection is a rational enterprise, it cannot of course lay claim to a certitude that is denied to reason itself. But insofar as the locus of moral praxis is communal and normative, it cannot be reasonable without at least some claim to universality across time and space. There are two questions here, then. The first, and most foundational, asks after the rational grounds for rationality; the second, after the reasonableness of for moral ideals. We may agree that rationality cannot account for itself rationally, but this does not mean that all rational thinking has its two feet planted in midair , or that every attempt to be reasonable is too rooted in human interests and particular conventions to have anything universal to say. Wittgenstein concluded that the only escape from the conundrum was to consider reasoning—and the particular language games in which it is carried out— something inherent in the “human form of life” that is neither rational nor irrational. He likened it to the desire to protect ourselves from the dangers surrounding eating and drinking. Nietzsche called it an “authoritative need.” We reason because we have to, because the form of life that makes us human leaves us no choice. Our life does not oblige us reason one way or another, to have some thoughts rather than others, but it does oblige us to think reasonably . It is, we might say, a universal desire with no proper object. Moral ideals and principles cannot appeal to the same ground. They do not have, nor do they require, a universal foundation in order to serve as a reasonable orientation to a good life. They are like cornerstones for the construction of practical habits of thought and action, They are moved by the drive...