I met Francesco Paolo Ciglia yesterday, at Beit Jala, at the Interseminary Meeting there. Ciglia is professor of philosophy at Pescara, and is currently teaching at the Redemptoris Mater seminary in Galilee. He specializes in twentieth century Jewish thought, I believe, especially that of Levinas. He is on the editorial board of Archivio di Filosofia, the review founded by Enrico Castelli and continued by Olivetti. He has been in contact with people like Ricoeur, Panikkar, Henrici, and now Jean-Luc Marion, who seems to be the current president of the association that runs the Castelli conferences. He said he had met Giovanni Sala, SJ, who had once presented something on Kant (and Lonergan).
Friday, 6 December 2013
Milbank, Christianity and the ethical
If ethics were conceived as not possessing something - not even one's good deed - but receiving the gift of the other "as something that diverts one's life," and offering one's life "in such a way that you do not know in advance what it is you will give but reclaim it retrospectively," then ethics becomes "a total exposure to fortune, or rather to grace." (116)
If it were simply a total exposure to fortune, then one heads to nihilism. All aporias of the ethical sketched by Milbank would still stand [would they?], "but one would simply embrace the impossibility of the ethical and yet the necessity of temporary ethical conventions." [An ethnocentric ethics, borrowing from Rorty?] With Derrida and perhaps Levinas, one might qualify this "with a mysticism of infinitely postponed hope for the arrival of the good." (116)
"However, the Christian construal of the total sway of moral luck is to understand fortune, as always, however disguisedly, the personal gift of grace: to believe therefore that only utter exposure constitutes the ethical." (116) [This is the complete opposite of ethics as autonomy and self-governance.]
No secularization of Christian ethics along the lines proposed by Patocka is therefore possible. The mere attitudes of patience, humility, etc. as things we ourselves can perform can turn out to the not ethical at all. They only assume an ethical complexion as a waiting on God: as a "meta-ethical trust that it will (beyond perpetual postponement) be given to us to be ethical, given to us again to receive and again to give in such a way that a certain 'asymmetrical reciprocity' or genuine community, will ceaselessly arrive (for now in part and eschatologically without interruption)." (116)
[The arguments seem seamless, but I am finding it difficult to accept the basic thesis here: no true ethical without Christianity, or at least the hope of resurrection.]
Original sin and death together prevent the ethical from coming to pass. We are all either wounded [original sin] or complacent or both, "capable only of valuing what is lost, obliged therefore to take measures to prevent future loss, congratulating ourselves on these measures (law) and so secretly celebrating loss as the occasion for our greatness, and instead of festively enjoying present loved ones, subject to boredom with them tending always to suspicion." (117) [Leontes King of Sicily is wounded, is faced with loss, and begins to love only in the face of this loss. Others may be complacent, and so incapable of truly enjoying loved ones.]
Loss is ineradicable. Milbank says he has shown that so long as there is loss, there cannot be any ethical, not even in any degree. (117) [Recapitulate this argument. I have forgotten what it was.] And concludes: "Hence hope, hope that it may be given to me in the next moment to act well, is inseparable from hope that there may be universal acting well, and at last a non-futile mourning: to be ethical is therefore to believe in the resurrection, and somehow to participate in it. And outside this belief and participation there is, quite simply, no 'ethical' whatsoever." (117) [The belief, if Milbank is right, is constitutive of the notion of the ethical: without it, no ethical. But is belief a necessary precondition to practice, to acting well? Is it, in other words, not sufficient "to somehow participate in it"?]
Thus there are three aspects to ethics:
1. The mundane, everyday hope that community is possible. Community: that people and objects "can analogically blend beyond identity and difference." [This is good! This is Trinitarian, and non-dual.] Both the living out and the search for community is neither simply eudaemonistic nor 'other-regarding', but 'ecstatic' (Spaemann). Such ecstasy is neither self-sacrificial nor sado-machochistic (both these are courses unto death), but rather passes through death, in hope of our return along with the return of others. "Thus to look for our collective participation in divine fullness of being is to transcend in an 'objective' and self-less manner either egotistic or self-sacrificial concerns." This ecstasy is epitomized by the feast, where we eat only because and when others eat, and yet we do not renounce ourselves, for we eat also. Thus the everyday ethical hope naturally leads to hope for resurrection.
2. The fall as suspicion rather than misdeed, as refusal of the field of action defined as giving with joyful uncertainty in faith. Christianity recognizes the fall - the universal tragic condition - but refuses to ontologize it, making the extraordinary move "of seeing the universal itself as but a contingent narrative upshot." Original sin is not necessarily deed, or misdeed. In Leontes' case, it is first suspicion of misdeed on the part of the other (his wife Hermione). "Here the fall is not an act, but rather a first mistrusting of the joyfully confident 'risk' and uncertainty constitutive of the field of action." Original sin is "refusal of the field of action itself, defined as giving with joyful uncertainty in faith, a refusal which commences in the suspicion that one does not, after all, receive a good gift from the other." (118) Original blessedness here is understood, not as deliberately 'doing good,' but as a state of good moral luck or reception of grace. (119)
3. The hope of resurrection.
Mercantile reality does reveal the raw truth of life in fallen time, but, unlike Derrida, Milbank refuses to ontologize this truth. He insists instead on the possibility "of imagining the counter-reality of resurrection, and the possibility that this world already mysteriously participates in that reality." (121) "Embracing this possibility leads us to hope, even now, after the fall and before the end, for the gracious arrival of something better and to act within this hope." (121)
Should our polity be restored by grace, the anxiety about our necessary preference for some not others, and our apparent sacrifice of some for others, would be eased "in the knowledge that we are to love our neighbors, because we know that others are loving theirs". (121) This means that even agape can only be fulfilled within a polis [community] where each of us has a particular role. Further, "if we lived in an economy of gift we would not be indifferent to the consequences of our acts... but we would 'go' with our gifts, and others in receiving them creatively would continue to care for us in this employment. Joyfully estranged from ourselves, we should sometimes find in this loss our gain, and always know that it would finally be so." (121)
If it were simply a total exposure to fortune, then one heads to nihilism. All aporias of the ethical sketched by Milbank would still stand [would they?], "but one would simply embrace the impossibility of the ethical and yet the necessity of temporary ethical conventions." [An ethnocentric ethics, borrowing from Rorty?] With Derrida and perhaps Levinas, one might qualify this "with a mysticism of infinitely postponed hope for the arrival of the good." (116)
"However, the Christian construal of the total sway of moral luck is to understand fortune, as always, however disguisedly, the personal gift of grace: to believe therefore that only utter exposure constitutes the ethical." (116) [This is the complete opposite of ethics as autonomy and self-governance.]
No secularization of Christian ethics along the lines proposed by Patocka is therefore possible. The mere attitudes of patience, humility, etc. as things we ourselves can perform can turn out to the not ethical at all. They only assume an ethical complexion as a waiting on God: as a "meta-ethical trust that it will (beyond perpetual postponement) be given to us to be ethical, given to us again to receive and again to give in such a way that a certain 'asymmetrical reciprocity' or genuine community, will ceaselessly arrive (for now in part and eschatologically without interruption)." (116)
[The arguments seem seamless, but I am finding it difficult to accept the basic thesis here: no true ethical without Christianity, or at least the hope of resurrection.]
Original sin and death together prevent the ethical from coming to pass. We are all either wounded [original sin] or complacent or both, "capable only of valuing what is lost, obliged therefore to take measures to prevent future loss, congratulating ourselves on these measures (law) and so secretly celebrating loss as the occasion for our greatness, and instead of festively enjoying present loved ones, subject to boredom with them tending always to suspicion." (117) [Leontes King of Sicily is wounded, is faced with loss, and begins to love only in the face of this loss. Others may be complacent, and so incapable of truly enjoying loved ones.]
Loss is ineradicable. Milbank says he has shown that so long as there is loss, there cannot be any ethical, not even in any degree. (117) [Recapitulate this argument. I have forgotten what it was.] And concludes: "Hence hope, hope that it may be given to me in the next moment to act well, is inseparable from hope that there may be universal acting well, and at last a non-futile mourning: to be ethical is therefore to believe in the resurrection, and somehow to participate in it. And outside this belief and participation there is, quite simply, no 'ethical' whatsoever." (117) [The belief, if Milbank is right, is constitutive of the notion of the ethical: without it, no ethical. But is belief a necessary precondition to practice, to acting well? Is it, in other words, not sufficient "to somehow participate in it"?]
Thus there are three aspects to ethics:
1. The mundane, everyday hope that community is possible. Community: that people and objects "can analogically blend beyond identity and difference." [This is good! This is Trinitarian, and non-dual.] Both the living out and the search for community is neither simply eudaemonistic nor 'other-regarding', but 'ecstatic' (Spaemann). Such ecstasy is neither self-sacrificial nor sado-machochistic (both these are courses unto death), but rather passes through death, in hope of our return along with the return of others. "Thus to look for our collective participation in divine fullness of being is to transcend in an 'objective' and self-less manner either egotistic or self-sacrificial concerns." This ecstasy is epitomized by the feast, where we eat only because and when others eat, and yet we do not renounce ourselves, for we eat also. Thus the everyday ethical hope naturally leads to hope for resurrection.
2. The fall as suspicion rather than misdeed, as refusal of the field of action defined as giving with joyful uncertainty in faith. Christianity recognizes the fall - the universal tragic condition - but refuses to ontologize it, making the extraordinary move "of seeing the universal itself as but a contingent narrative upshot." Original sin is not necessarily deed, or misdeed. In Leontes' case, it is first suspicion of misdeed on the part of the other (his wife Hermione). "Here the fall is not an act, but rather a first mistrusting of the joyfully confident 'risk' and uncertainty constitutive of the field of action." Original sin is "refusal of the field of action itself, defined as giving with joyful uncertainty in faith, a refusal which commences in the suspicion that one does not, after all, receive a good gift from the other." (118) Original blessedness here is understood, not as deliberately 'doing good,' but as a state of good moral luck or reception of grace. (119)
3. The hope of resurrection.
Mercantile reality does reveal the raw truth of life in fallen time, but, unlike Derrida, Milbank refuses to ontologize this truth. He insists instead on the possibility "of imagining the counter-reality of resurrection, and the possibility that this world already mysteriously participates in that reality." (121) "Embracing this possibility leads us to hope, even now, after the fall and before the end, for the gracious arrival of something better and to act within this hope." (121)
Should our polity be restored by grace, the anxiety about our necessary preference for some not others, and our apparent sacrifice of some for others, would be eased "in the knowledge that we are to love our neighbors, because we know that others are loving theirs". (121) This means that even agape can only be fulfilled within a polis [community] where each of us has a particular role. Further, "if we lived in an economy of gift we would not be indifferent to the consequences of our acts... but we would 'go' with our gifts, and others in receiving them creatively would continue to care for us in this employment. Joyfully estranged from ourselves, we should sometimes find in this loss our gain, and always know that it would finally be so." (121)
Thursday, 5 December 2013
Milbank's critiques of eudaemonism and altruistic ethics
According to Milbank, our two inherited notions of the ethical (he is of course speaking of the West) are both linked to the supremacy of self-possession and self-government. The first is classical eudaemonism, the other is 'other-regarding ethics'. Drawing on Spaemann, Derrida and Williams, he shows that both are subject to inner dialectical collapse or deconstruction, precisely in their attempts to manage and control fortune. (111)
1. Classical eudaemonism (111-2)
One cannot secure happiness in an abiding way. At most we have only 'virtual happiness.' Four reasons:
1. To open ourselves to the most happiness involves risk and so sorrow. For self-protection we must remain to a degree self-enclosed; and we are never free from the anxiety of what balance of adventure and security we must espouse. [And this is true.]
2. Happiness is not punctual. / It is rather the course of a whole life (Aristotle). [This, on the other hand, is a defining of the meaning of happiness. Perhaps in the East one might choose to regard happiness precisely as punctual. But that needs probing. I am thinking of the man being chased by a tiger: he falls off a cliff; manages to catch the branch of a bush; sees two mice gnawing at the roots; knows he must soon fall; and in this situation, reaches out and enjoys the berries on the bush.] Yet we never get to the end of our lives; we die 'before our time'; and only others will read our lives as a whole [and so determine whether or not we have been happy?]. (111-2)
3. Happiness is comparative. [This argument seems specious to me.] The shepherd in Arcadia does not know he is happy [but is that not his charm, as Vernet would say, quoting the spanish poet: the charm of a bowl full of beautiful roses is that they do not know they are beautiful]. His happiness is known only by another, and that knowledge in itself is not happiness. So happiness is nowhere in space.
4. Happiness is nowhere in time. The past is always contaminated by loss and mourning; the future by fear and anxiety.
In these ways, not only ordinary joys remain illusive, but also our enjoyment and realization of a consistent ethical excellence. (112)
Antiquity therefore underrated the contamination of morality by luck or fortune.
2. Other-regarding ethics (Kant - Bentham - Levinas - Parfitt)
2.1 As soon as we act with patience, humility, forgiveness, suffering unto death, we are liable to misinterpretation and abuse (Hegel's critique of Kant). It is no use considering such derelict, abandoned acts as 'perfect gifts' with Marion, who takes the content of a gift as a mere sign of the real ethereal gift of intention, or the self-giving itself. Milbank holds that intentions and passages have always instantiated in signs and gestures and are therefore always somewhat particular, content-specific. A duty that fails to make the other happy ceases to be a moral act. Milbank's point: "Other-regarding ethics cannot ignore happiness, [i.e., it has to take into account its content, and the result] yet happiness is often the child of whim and circumstance." (112) There other-regarding ethics is also undermined "by the self-implosion of the notion of pure duty."
2.2 Following this loss of duty comes loss of self. We cannot possess ourselves as ethical through a sacrificial self-offering in death, because this would mean that we need the misfortunes of others to demonstrate our worth. [This again seems specious to me - though perhaps I must not ignore the qualification "if this alone proves the good".] But this destroys the morality of the ethical self. (113)
2.21 And again, till we are martyrs, we can never be sure of possessing ourselves as ethical; and there is always the uncertainty, the possibility that in the last gasp we may despair and recant. The uncertainty - luck - continues having a part in being ethical. (113)
2.22 If the dying self is subject to uncertainty, much more so is the living self. The contingencies here are the needs of others. We are subject to "limitless persecution by the needs of others" who are regarded as somehow enjoying themselves. Such a 'bad infinite' haunts the ethics of both Kant and Levinas. "Modern ethics, just because it enthrones altruism, is pathological in its degree of obliteration of the possibility of consummation" - or at least of the beginning of beatitude. (113)
2.3 [Loss of the other.] Insofar as the other is alive, I will tend to take her for granted. Her otherness will emerge in her absence, especially in her death. (113)
Those who are wounded see (or learn to love) too late, and only through loss of the other - like Leontes of Sicily after the death of his wife, his heir, and the loss of his daughter. Those who are apparently innocent, on the other hand, are always infected by complacency, the non-realization of the fragility of the gift (of love that they have received and are in some way able to pass on) in its passage through time. "And since all are either wounded and complacent, or rather all are relative mixtures of both, since this is an exhaustive human typology, there exist no potential moral subjects at all." Neither the living beloved nor the dead can adequately fulfill the role of the other. (115)
3. There are no criteria to prioritize either the pursuit of self-fulfilling happiness or regard of the other. So when to live and when to give? (115)
A further dimension of luck enters the picture. (The example Spaemann gives of Gauguin, who chose his painting over his family.) / The giving of ourselves to one person or purpose frequently involves sacrificing other goods or people, and often without reason. There are no "publicly stateable reasons for lavishing devotion on one person rather than another - to the public gaze this will always appear excessively aesthetic or erotic."
1. Classical eudaemonism (111-2)
One cannot secure happiness in an abiding way. At most we have only 'virtual happiness.' Four reasons:
1. To open ourselves to the most happiness involves risk and so sorrow. For self-protection we must remain to a degree self-enclosed; and we are never free from the anxiety of what balance of adventure and security we must espouse. [And this is true.]
2. Happiness is not punctual. / It is rather the course of a whole life (Aristotle). [This, on the other hand, is a defining of the meaning of happiness. Perhaps in the East one might choose to regard happiness precisely as punctual. But that needs probing. I am thinking of the man being chased by a tiger: he falls off a cliff; manages to catch the branch of a bush; sees two mice gnawing at the roots; knows he must soon fall; and in this situation, reaches out and enjoys the berries on the bush.] Yet we never get to the end of our lives; we die 'before our time'; and only others will read our lives as a whole [and so determine whether or not we have been happy?]. (111-2)
3. Happiness is comparative. [This argument seems specious to me.] The shepherd in Arcadia does not know he is happy [but is that not his charm, as Vernet would say, quoting the spanish poet: the charm of a bowl full of beautiful roses is that they do not know they are beautiful]. His happiness is known only by another, and that knowledge in itself is not happiness. So happiness is nowhere in space.
4. Happiness is nowhere in time. The past is always contaminated by loss and mourning; the future by fear and anxiety.
In these ways, not only ordinary joys remain illusive, but also our enjoyment and realization of a consistent ethical excellence. (112)
Antiquity therefore underrated the contamination of morality by luck or fortune.
2. Other-regarding ethics (Kant - Bentham - Levinas - Parfitt)
2.1 As soon as we act with patience, humility, forgiveness, suffering unto death, we are liable to misinterpretation and abuse (Hegel's critique of Kant). It is no use considering such derelict, abandoned acts as 'perfect gifts' with Marion, who takes the content of a gift as a mere sign of the real ethereal gift of intention, or the self-giving itself. Milbank holds that intentions and passages have always instantiated in signs and gestures and are therefore always somewhat particular, content-specific. A duty that fails to make the other happy ceases to be a moral act. Milbank's point: "Other-regarding ethics cannot ignore happiness, [i.e., it has to take into account its content, and the result] yet happiness is often the child of whim and circumstance." (112) There other-regarding ethics is also undermined "by the self-implosion of the notion of pure duty."
2.2 Following this loss of duty comes loss of self. We cannot possess ourselves as ethical through a sacrificial self-offering in death, because this would mean that we need the misfortunes of others to demonstrate our worth. [This again seems specious to me - though perhaps I must not ignore the qualification "if this alone proves the good".] But this destroys the morality of the ethical self. (113)
2.21 And again, till we are martyrs, we can never be sure of possessing ourselves as ethical; and there is always the uncertainty, the possibility that in the last gasp we may despair and recant. The uncertainty - luck - continues having a part in being ethical. (113)
2.22 If the dying self is subject to uncertainty, much more so is the living self. The contingencies here are the needs of others. We are subject to "limitless persecution by the needs of others" who are regarded as somehow enjoying themselves. Such a 'bad infinite' haunts the ethics of both Kant and Levinas. "Modern ethics, just because it enthrones altruism, is pathological in its degree of obliteration of the possibility of consummation" - or at least of the beginning of beatitude. (113)
2.3 [Loss of the other.] Insofar as the other is alive, I will tend to take her for granted. Her otherness will emerge in her absence, especially in her death. (113)
Those who are wounded see (or learn to love) too late, and only through loss of the other - like Leontes of Sicily after the death of his wife, his heir, and the loss of his daughter. Those who are apparently innocent, on the other hand, are always infected by complacency, the non-realization of the fragility of the gift (of love that they have received and are in some way able to pass on) in its passage through time. "And since all are either wounded and complacent, or rather all are relative mixtures of both, since this is an exhaustive human typology, there exist no potential moral subjects at all." Neither the living beloved nor the dead can adequately fulfill the role of the other. (115)
3. There are no criteria to prioritize either the pursuit of self-fulfilling happiness or regard of the other. So when to live and when to give? (115)
A further dimension of luck enters the picture. (The example Spaemann gives of Gauguin, who chose his painting over his family.) / The giving of ourselves to one person or purpose frequently involves sacrificing other goods or people, and often without reason. There are no "publicly stateable reasons for lavishing devotion on one person rather than another - to the public gaze this will always appear excessively aesthetic or erotic."
Wednesday, 4 December 2013
Does being good involve a measure of good fortune?
Do we require 'moral luck' or good fortune if we are to be good? I've never really thought of this kind of connection, and I do not think that it has been reflected upon in any of the courses of ethics or moral theology that I have attended, or, for that matter, in the history of philosophy courses and readings - the idea seems to be Greek in its provenance.
John Milbank engages in a sustained reflection on this idea in the first part of his essay, "The Midwinter Sacrifice."
First of all, something that still might need to be debated or at least discussed, chewed, and appropriated: Morality for the Greeks concerned the attainment of the truly happy life. (108) Here we define one imponderable with the help of another, 'morality' by means of 'happiness.'
So what is happiness? "True happiness was regarded as secure, abiding happiness, impregnable to assault." (108-9) Happiness here is, or at least involves, self-possession and 'autarchy' or self-government, whether of the city or of the self, and increasingly of the immaterial soul, deemed to be free of need. (109)
The dominant notion here is happiness as the security of self-possessed good.
But, Milbank points out, there is an inherent and perhaps hidden tension. Since happiness "usually concerns reception of gifts from without," a total immunity would lock a person within a tower where neither sorrow nor joy would be able to enter. So Aristotle works out a compromise: the ethical life is to be found in the relative security of the city, and within the city, in the relative security of the well-born, good-looking man, owning a sufficient store of goods to allow him to exercise a virtuous generosity, and through this to sustain his relative power and independence.
So while the Greeks defined the ethical in opposition to fortune or luck, they were prepared to admit a degree of fortune or luck as a necessary precondition for the ethical. (Martha Nussbaum called this the 'fragility of goodness'.) For Aristotle, we need good fortune to begin to be good; we also need continued good fortune if we are to remain good.
At this point, Milbank mentions the radicalization of the above kind of thinking in Stoicism (in times of greater political turmoil, which means the inability to take the security of the polis for granted, and hence greater dependence on fortune): the Stoics and others sought a more absolute total security in the inner citadel of the soul. Such security, in fact, precludes both joy and sorrow; so the goal of happiness was redefined as 'passionless tranquillity.'
So how does Christianity stand w.r.t. this? Here Milbank outlines a position which is not his own, and then goes on to demolish it. First, the position. Christianity does not exalt Stoic security, nor does it regard an utterly passionless emotion-less life as desirable. Instead, 'to be good' is clearly dependent on 'fortune' in the guise of grace. Not only is such grace externally mediated in part, it also affects the inner citadel of the soul. The element of uncertainty here is excluded by the consideration that every person in every situation can respond [to grace? by grace?] in a moral fashion. But, it might be asked, does one not need the initial fortune to belong to the community of grace? This requirement also can be obviated by the consideration that "the church through typology and prolepsis is a universal reality." (109-10)
Milbank's demolition of this stance involves pointing out that it retains and even maximizes the requirement of security, yet wrenches it away from its original foundation in the pursuit of happiness, to the point of logical collapse. On a superficial level it seems to exalt pure altruism, to the point of self-surrender unto death. But this stance is really a maximization of the requirement of security, immunity to moral luck or good fortune: in order to be itself, such an ethical stance does not really require the other, or anything outside of oneself.
The problem, Milbank points out, is that if this is the Christian stance par excellence, it can be readily secularized, as Patocka seems to have argued: for the omission of any hope for resurrection will only purify the other-regarding motive. [I recall Sartre saying somewhere - in Existentialism is a Humanism? - that the true heroes and saints are the atheists, because they do good without hope for any reward.]
So Milbank's question: "Should one read Christian ethics as abandoning the antique concern with happiness, and yet sustaining its requirement for secure self-possession (even if this is now reduced to the will to the gesture of absolute non self-possession)?"
Milbank's response is to argue that Christianity retains the goal of happiness "through a novel abandonment of the goal of self-possession, even in its mode of ethical reduction," and that, along with self-possession, it abandons also self-achievement, self-control, and above all self-government. This, he says, will challenge "nearly all our inherited ideas of what is ethical." (111)
John Milbank engages in a sustained reflection on this idea in the first part of his essay, "The Midwinter Sacrifice."
First of all, something that still might need to be debated or at least discussed, chewed, and appropriated: Morality for the Greeks concerned the attainment of the truly happy life. (108) Here we define one imponderable with the help of another, 'morality' by means of 'happiness.'
So what is happiness? "True happiness was regarded as secure, abiding happiness, impregnable to assault." (108-9) Happiness here is, or at least involves, self-possession and 'autarchy' or self-government, whether of the city or of the self, and increasingly of the immaterial soul, deemed to be free of need. (109)
The dominant notion here is happiness as the security of self-possessed good.
But, Milbank points out, there is an inherent and perhaps hidden tension. Since happiness "usually concerns reception of gifts from without," a total immunity would lock a person within a tower where neither sorrow nor joy would be able to enter. So Aristotle works out a compromise: the ethical life is to be found in the relative security of the city, and within the city, in the relative security of the well-born, good-looking man, owning a sufficient store of goods to allow him to exercise a virtuous generosity, and through this to sustain his relative power and independence.
So while the Greeks defined the ethical in opposition to fortune or luck, they were prepared to admit a degree of fortune or luck as a necessary precondition for the ethical. (Martha Nussbaum called this the 'fragility of goodness'.) For Aristotle, we need good fortune to begin to be good; we also need continued good fortune if we are to remain good.
At this point, Milbank mentions the radicalization of the above kind of thinking in Stoicism (in times of greater political turmoil, which means the inability to take the security of the polis for granted, and hence greater dependence on fortune): the Stoics and others sought a more absolute total security in the inner citadel of the soul. Such security, in fact, precludes both joy and sorrow; so the goal of happiness was redefined as 'passionless tranquillity.'
So how does Christianity stand w.r.t. this? Here Milbank outlines a position which is not his own, and then goes on to demolish it. First, the position. Christianity does not exalt Stoic security, nor does it regard an utterly passionless emotion-less life as desirable. Instead, 'to be good' is clearly dependent on 'fortune' in the guise of grace. Not only is such grace externally mediated in part, it also affects the inner citadel of the soul. The element of uncertainty here is excluded by the consideration that every person in every situation can respond [to grace? by grace?] in a moral fashion. But, it might be asked, does one not need the initial fortune to belong to the community of grace? This requirement also can be obviated by the consideration that "the church through typology and prolepsis is a universal reality." (109-10)
Milbank's demolition of this stance involves pointing out that it retains and even maximizes the requirement of security, yet wrenches it away from its original foundation in the pursuit of happiness, to the point of logical collapse. On a superficial level it seems to exalt pure altruism, to the point of self-surrender unto death. But this stance is really a maximization of the requirement of security, immunity to moral luck or good fortune: in order to be itself, such an ethical stance does not really require the other, or anything outside of oneself.
The problem, Milbank points out, is that if this is the Christian stance par excellence, it can be readily secularized, as Patocka seems to have argued: for the omission of any hope for resurrection will only purify the other-regarding motive. [I recall Sartre saying somewhere - in Existentialism is a Humanism? - that the true heroes and saints are the atheists, because they do good without hope for any reward.]
So Milbank's question: "Should one read Christian ethics as abandoning the antique concern with happiness, and yet sustaining its requirement for secure self-possession (even if this is now reduced to the will to the gesture of absolute non self-possession)?"
Milbank's response is to argue that Christianity retains the goal of happiness "through a novel abandonment of the goal of self-possession, even in its mode of ethical reduction," and that, along with self-possession, it abandons also self-achievement, self-control, and above all self-government. This, he says, will challenge "nearly all our inherited ideas of what is ethical." (111)
Tuesday, 3 December 2013
Lonergan in India
Lonergan people in India:
Lonergan events in India:
Articles and books:
- Valentine Ekka, SJ, PhD, Boston College.
- Thomas Chacko, SVD. PhD, Dharmaram, Bangalore.
- Thomas Naickamparambil, Through Self-Discovery to Self-Transcendence: A Study of Cognitional Self-Appropriation in B. Lonergan
- Robert Pen, SDB. PhD, Universita Pontificia Salesiana, Rome.
- Maria Arul Anthuvan, SDB. PhD (ongoing), Universita Pontificia Salesiana, Rome.
- A number of students who have done Master's Theses, esp. at Divyadaan, Nashik.
Lonergan events in India:
- The Fred Lawrence Confernce on Hermeneutics, Divyadaan, Nashik.
- The Conference on Economics, with Philip McShane, Divyadaan, Nashik.
Articles and books:
- See Divyadaan: Journal of Philosophy and Education
- Ivo Coelho, Hermeneutics and Method
- Robert Pen, Communication as Mutual Self-Mediation
Selbstverstaendlichkeiten
From the 'dialogue' (not only interreligious) panel at the recent Gregorian International Lonergan Workshop in Rome: one of the questions, if I remember right, was: here we are, elites, speaking about high minded matters; but does all this affect the simple people in the bush? - And my response was: no, but yes. In a sense, no, because most people live in the world of undifferentiated consciousness (which is not to assume that we, just because we are 'scholarly', live in the world of theory). But in other ways, yes, because, first of all, even simple people do not live in a world of pure immediacy, but rather always in a world mediated by and constituted by meanings and values; and, secondly, because we just cannot assume that this world in which they live is 'innocent.' There is no first innocence anymore. Everyone, even the people in the bush, are somehow 'contaminated' - think of dominant cultures, the Selbstverstaendlichkeiten that seep down to every level, the influence of the media, and so on. There came to mind the Nicholas who I knew in Bosco Boys Home of long ago: so simply he told me, as he was going to see Ganpati: But brother, all religions are equal.
Monday, 2 December 2013
Being ethical
A byte-sized reflection on Milbank's "The Midwinter Sacrifice": I am recalled to Azzopardi's observation, the only reason for doing good is that it is good to do good; or to reading Sartre somewhere to the effect that the true heroes are the atheists, who do good without hope of any reward. Milbank counters this kind of thinking - or at least certainly Sartre - vigorously. To quote Milbank:
Milbank, in fact, extends the ideas he is opposing to arrive explicitly at the position of Sartre. The consensus (mentioned above), he says, involved a complex of ideas:
"This complex of ideas, or characterization of the ethical as gift-exchange, feast, marriage, and resurrection, I am seeking to set in deliberate opposition to a recent consensus which would try to understand the ethical as primarily self-sacrifice for the other, without any necessary 'return' issuing from the other back to oneself." (122)Not even a reflection, really, but merely an observation, that Milbank vigorously contradicts what I have taken so far as - a piece of wisdom. Undigested, fully, certainly. But then - I do recall having found texts in the gospels that echo this piece. Which I do not now recall.
Milbank, in fact, extends the ideas he is opposing to arrive explicitly at the position of Sartre. The consensus (mentioned above), he says, involved a complex of ideas:
- The notion that only an entirely sacrificial giving without any expectation of counter-gift distinguishes the gift from a form of self-interested contract.
- Death, far from being complicit with evil (as Milbank would understand it to be), is the necessary condition for the event of the ethical as such.
- God must be reduced to a shadowy hypostatized other lurking behind the human other, because any God who interfered to 'reward' the disinterested giver would undo the purity of this disinterest and the purity of the ethical realm.
- Hence the paradoxical conclusion: the true nobility and purity of religious self-sacrifice is only realized in a secular sphere.
These positions, observes Milbank, are common to Patocka, Derrida, and probably Levinas, while the first point is espoused by Marion without seeing that they logically lead to the other three.
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