Ethics and Otherness: An Exploration of Diderot's Conte moral

Ethics and Otherness: An Exploration of Diderot's Conte moral DIANE FOURNY The philosophical climate of our twentieth-century fin de siècle shares certain intellectual affinities with the tumultuous closing decades of the European Enlightenment. Both periods seem lacking in what used to be called a dominant world view. And yet, each period considered or considers its era to be on the threshold of a new world order. Such times of paradigmatic shifting invariably bring with them certain controversies if not also a heightened polarization of positions. From opposing ends of the theoretical spectrum , conflicting stories of catastrophe and redemption are frequently emitted . The "thinkers of order" (those perceived by their counterparts as the ones still "stuck" in the misguided project of Enlightenment) denounce the threatened or real loss of system, law, and rational order; the most extreme among them decry the breakdown of social and religious values, traditional narratives, individual freedom, and so forth, blaming it on the fractious and immoral appearance of "fringe" groups who submit the will of the center to the desire of the margins.'At the opposite end, postmodem speculators warn that "an anonymous society without a subject" is replacing the self-oriented democracies of yesterday, the societies of high capitalism having exhausted all paradigms modernity had to offer. Indeed, they have adopted "exhaustion " itself as our sole remaining paradigm.2 However, these latter also take comfort in the "death" of the old order whose demise announces the arrival of a new age: that of the decentered subject who is liberated from the norma283 284 / FOURNY tive and ontological strictures of the past and newly empowered by the emergence of a radicalized freedom.3 As far apart as the two camps may seem, they nevertheless remain in curious agreement as to the causes of impending catastrophe: the utter otherness of a reality in which an Other produces, directs, and plays the leading role (villain or victim) in this doomsday scenario of societal and individual devolution.4 And it is here, curiously, that a revival of another sorts is taking place, that of enlightenment. In many respects the Enlightenment has proven to be the postmodernists' most fertile territory for speculation (some would say, for expropriation) given that it stands for the systematization of thought par excellence. First, the dismantling of the all-too-transparent ideal of Progress in the form of instrumental reason exposes the future hidden agenda of a modernity gone mad. Secondly—and all to the credit of many twentieth-century critical assessments of the Enlightenment—critics have uncovered the hidden internal critique Enlightenment carries out on itself by some of its own agents. By undoing enlightenment, critics point to the Enlightenment's "other": an ideology of "system" haunted by its very own principle of self-destruction. This exploration of the Enlightenment's darker side has highlighted inherent cracks in the progressivist doctrine—Sade's totalizing Reason or Diderot's chaoslike anti-systems—signaling the presence of articulated, yet irrational forces that dis-order rather than order the universe. Finally, the critique of Enlightenment has also meant the lifting (of the scandal) of Reason's "repressed": exposing the marginalized, non-conformist voices of the disempowered living at the edges of the West's nascent civil societies. Controversial conclusions drawn from these studies seem only the more obvious: the progressive ideal of a certain type of reason (instmmental reason) is itself an illusion. And in the aftermath of these negations of Enlightenment, we find philosophy's carcass: the end of philosophy, of history, of theory, of narrative, and so forth. Yet ending things hardly solves problems since to end philosophy, history, or theory most certainly means the demise of another type of reason, which Enlightenment thinkers deemed more than desirable: a reasoned ethics. For all its weaknesses and errors, Enlightenment system-builders did see themselves as promoters of order in the name of moral and social justice. Yet, by sapping these laudable intentions of any claim to tmth or sincerity, critics have incapacitated the Enlightenment's normative dimension in the area of ethical thought, conduct, and action. Ironically, this seems to have cleaved a new alliance; like their eighteenth-century counterparts, postmodernists are now...