Praxis and Form: Thirty Notes for an Ethics of the Future

We are inquiring [into] what virtue is, not in order just to know it, but in order to become good.

—Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, BK. 2

It seems, reading them [Heidegger and Wittgenstein], . . . that some moral claim upon us is levied by the act of philosophizing itself, a claim that no separate subject of ethics would serve to study. . . . [W]hat needs attention from philosophy, is our life as a whole.

—Stanley Cavell, "Thoreau Thinks of Ponds, Heidegger of Rivers"

What I propose, therefore, is very simple: it is nothing more than to think what we are doing.

—Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition

1. 1. Whether amazed, curious, angered, or beset by gnawing doubts, philosophy finds itself with something like Emerson's query, "Where do we find ourselves?" Recoiling even as it relies upon a given, philosophy is always orienting or, rather, reorienting itself; even first philosophies are responses to a world under way.

Among the many replies that Emerson's question solicits, one directs us toward conversations we cannot help but inherit (or "quote," to use Emerson's term). We ask, "Where do we find ourselves?" and we find that we are not the first to pose this question, and we discover that our reply will join many already ventured. Even first philosophies play the role, in part, of commentary. ¹

Another reply, equally inevitable, says: we find ourselves responding and thus find ourselves in the figure of a response. Whether to an experience or interrogation, Emerson's question, like all questions, like consciousness itself, is a response to a situation out of which it arises. And that response is far from initial; it responds to a situation already found in some sense or other, or more likely by several senses—for example, one of place, of balance, of history, of kinds of things, of relative welfare, and so on. Where do we find ourselves? Already under way, located, responding and finding, finding and responding (again and again), quoting, conversing.

1. 2. My hope for this venture is to look at one way we responsively find ourselves, namely, with ethical commitments. More particularly, I hope to outline a kind of language—or just the beginnings of a language—for conceptualizing and empowering that way of being-in-the-world. What follows is thus a kind of moral psychology, albeit one that reconstructs the psychological from the moral as much as it does the moral from the psychological. ²

2. 3. Permit me an opening phenomenological description. Turning back into my quoting relations, I find myself not merely addressed and addressing but also among beings whose welfare concerns me; that is, I find myself among beings that have a claim upon my attention, my concern, even my life, and in manners both negative and positive. I am committed not only to not harming them but to seeing them flourish. And in many cases, I even want to help them do so. In fact, how they fare in the course of their lives matters in a way that determines how I fare in the course of my life. If they suffer, I suffer. If they flourish, I flourish. My fate is bound to theirs. The point is not principally psychological, however. I am not claiming that I share psychological states with other beings. Rather, I am claiming that my sense of, my feel for, the relative state of my welfare reflects in part my sense of, my feel for, the relative welfare of others.

Now, in English, taking the welfare of another to be integral to one's own indicates the presence of an "ethic" or "ethics," what we might, in a very basic way, take to indicate a way of life in which other beings have something like moral standing (their welfare matters to us, lays a claim upon us), which we register in experiences of concern, experiences that English names "conscience." ³

1. 4. I have begun something of a phenomenology of ethical life—enmeshment in a world of moral standing is found in responsive events of conscience. But let us not forget the conversation...