CHAPTER II
The fully moral act has often been located in the purely rational element--in clear knowledge and unimpeded willing. Passion, moods and feelings are taken to be somehow external to the inner workings of the true man. Passion is at best a matter over which the rational principle rules, and its proper role is to be submissive to the leadership of the rational principle. At worst, the impulses of our so-called sensible nature are taken as a positive threat to reason, threatening to usurp its free, rational direction of human life and to turn life over to whim, caprice, and self-seeking--in a word to "feeling."
The position which I will defend in this paper, however, is predicated upon a unitary conception of man, a conception which was best defended in the classical world by Aristotle, and which receives its sharpest contemporary formulation in the writings of the phenomenologists. Phenomenologists, and foremost among them Heidegger himself, have always recognized in Aristotle a precedent and antecedent, for it was he who wanted to return to the "things themselves," to hew the work of reflection as closely as possible to concrete experience. Whence the direction of the present inquiry is at once Aristotelian, phenomenological, and experiential. In such a view man is understood to be an essentially embodied agent so that feeling and affectivity enter into the very structure of the moral act. Hence, moral life is not conceived as a battle waged between warring metaphysical principles.
The pages which follow strive to set forth the positive role of feelings in a sound moral theory.1 I shall do this in the name of what is termed here "moral sensibility," by which is meant the harmony between our sensible nature and moral values. The chapter will unfold in the following sequence: (1) I will show that, far from being external to the moral act, passion enters into its very fabric, so that failing passion no act is of any moral worth at all. This point will be established by following the Kierkegaardian analysis of passion. (2) Next I will show that, far from "blinding reason," passion or mood plays an essential role in the disclosure of our world, and that means the world of moral values. That point will be established in connection with a study of Heidegger's notion of mood and disposition. (3) Having secured our ontological bearings in the opening sections of the paper, I shall then shift to the specifics of a properly moral sensibility. The point of departure for this argument will be found in Kant's analysis of the "feeling of respect," a theory whose phenomenological implications have to be disengaged from its dualist moorings in Kant's metaphysics. (4) The feeling of respect will lead into a concrete phenomenology of the human person as the place of value or, one can say, as incarnate value. (5) And this will make it possible to formulate what is in fact the principal thesis of this paper, which is that our bodily and affective relationship to the other constitutes a "proto-ethics" upon which all moral reflection is based. Whence, instead of excluding the affective from moral life, it shall be argued that it is the spring by which all ethics is nourished.
KIERKEGAARD'S CONCEPT OF PATHOS
It was Kierkegaard more than anyone else who broke through the heavily encrusted structures of dualist ontology--who "deconstructed" them, to use a word whose day has come--and who cleared the way for a new ontology of the emotions. Kierkegaard saw that the fundamental distinction in human affairs is not between reason and the passions, but between the committed and the uncommitted, the engaged and the detached.
He considered the distinction between the rational and the emotive, soul and body, to be pagan and Platonic. Christianity was to draw a line between those whose faith is living, a vital and operative commitment permeating their whole lives, and those whom the Scriptures call "lukewarm" (CUP, 206).2 In the New Testament, Kierkegaard thinks, the crucial distinction which emerges is that between those who are fully involved or "engaged" and the apathetic, between the pathos of a living faith and the apathy or non-pathos, of those who drift along in a comfortable, bourgeois Christianity. "I do not deny," he writes in bitter satire, "that it is comfortable to be a Christian, and at the same time be exempted from the martyrdom which is always present . . . ."3 The essential distinction is thus between passion or pathos and a-pathos. This discrimination flies in the face of the Greek distinction between the rational principle and the irrational principle which has dominated the history of metaphysics from Plato to Husserl.
On Kierkegaard's terms a genuine Christian is one who is passionately committed to his faith, whose passion so informs his actions that, lacking passion, they are lifeless and rote.4 Everything thereby is reversed: the informing principle is the pathos, which Kierkegaard also calls the "how," whereas the "what," the belief or creed or article (proposition) of faith, is but the content or matter. The creed is just a list of propositions, an external and lifeless content which comes to life only in the passion of an existing and believing Christian faith. To know that I am going to die and that I am promised in faith a life after death, is not a thought, Kierkegaard says, but a deed. It is not accomplished by pronouncing the words, but by an act of faith that sends a shock throughout our entire being.
If Kierkegaard does not distinguish passion and reason, he does distinguish a merely aesthetic pathos or passion from true, ethico-religious pathos.5 In aesthetic pathos or aesthetic sensibility we are only partially transformed, and the transformation issues only in words, perhaps in verse. Our "taste" is struck by a thing of beauty, but our lives are not changed. Aesthetic pathos remains disinterested, looking on from afar.6 But ethico-religious pathos means a total transformation of our whole life so that we are made over into a new man, reborn in the image of God. It issues not in words but in deeds, and it signifies that one has entered into an absolute relationship to the absolute goal or telos. One is wholly committed to the absolute, committed even unto the end, unto death.
This is not to say that Kierkegaard's religious man is continually heaving and sighing with religious fervor, or that he is uninterrupted in the performance of great and heroic deeds: continually exposed to the lion, always on the verge of martyrdom. On the contrary, he tends to keep his absolute commitment under wraps and to bear it unseen (incognito). He hides it under the mask of humor and irony 7 so that outwardly, as he says in Fear and Trembling, the knight of faith may lead so uneventful a life that if we met him we would find that he looks like a tax collector. The real meaning of this absolute religious pathos is that it is an abiding, constant passion:
To relate oneself with existential pathos to an eternal happiness is never expressed by once in a while making a great effort, but by persistence in the relationship. . . . What holy vows a man knows how to make at the instant of mortal danger! But when that is passed, the vow is so promptly and so completely forgotten.8
Hence, the distinction between the resolute and the irresolute, which is often mistaken as a distinction between a pure, steadfast "will" and transitory passions, is rearticulated by Kierkegaard in a revolutionary way. Instead of opposing the pure will to the passion of the moment, Kierkegaard distinguishes a deep and abiding existential pathos--a totally self-transforming pathos--from a fleeting, transient pathos.
There is thus a difference in temporality between these two forms of pathos. The one is abiding, constant, sustained from day to day even under the most undramatic circumstances. The other is momentary and awakened only on great occasions:
When the earth quakes . . . how swiftly then and how thoroughly does even the dullest scholar . . . comprehend the uncertainty of everything.9
When the great occasion passes this pathos slips back into its customary complacency. Some men are moved by the thought of God only on solemn occasions, at weddings and funerals, say, or at official oath-takings; but others know how to bring the thought of God together with the task of taking a trip to the park. It is all a matter of the abiding depth of one's passion. Kierkegaard does not oppose pure will to bodily impulse, but deep passion to shallow passion, abiding, transforming passion to transient, momentary passions which merely result in occasional disturbances on a mostly placid surface. There is no question of getting outside or above passion, no question of standing on a higher, supersensible ground from which to control passion. That is the framework of Platonism and Greek metaphysics, of "recollection," not of "repetition."10 In the categories of Christianity, it is a question of separating the wheat from the chaff, the fervent from the lukewarm, those who are with Christ from those who are against, the total pathos from the occasional and transient one, the deep from the shallow passion.
There is, I might add, a good deal of confirmation for what Kierkegaard says in the sorts of distinctions we habitually make in ordinary language without falling into Platonism. We speak of a "cold anger," which is not the passing anger of the moment, an angry outburst, but a deep, even, life-long anger such as the patriot's profound, implacable anger against the colonial power. The same can be said of a "mortal" hatred, revenge, envy, or any other destructive passion which is deep-seated and abiding; it is too cunning and deadly serious to give itself over to mercurial and passing expressions. By the same token the love of a man and a woman, of a country doctor for his patients, of the farmer for the soil, has the same quality of quiet depth and surface calm. Still water runs deep, we say, meaning that the essential thing is the depth of a passion and not its surface stirrings.
By taking his point of departure in the categories of religious and Christian life, Kierkegaard redrew the map that Platonic metaphysics had given us: contrary to the Platonic view, there is no moral action at all outside of passion. The lack of passion in moral life means the perfunctory performance of acts which lack conviction and dedication. Indeed it is passion which brings the agent into the moral sphere, which makes his actions committed and decisive. The lack of pathos does not mean that the way has been cleared for the pure rational will. It means that we are not acting at all, but merely thinking about acting, or else that our actions are performed by rote, that they lack the moral quality of decisiveness, that they are neither heartfelt nor committed.
HEIDEGGER'S ONTOLOGY OF MOODS
But if Kierkegaard placed Platonic ontology into question, the task fell to Heidegger to formalize Kierkegaard's revolution. Heidegger proposed an ontological account of man in which affectivity was considered to be a primordial and irreducible structure of human existence.11 Existence, he held, is constituted of three co-equal and equally radical structures which he called projection, disposition and fallenness. Inasmuch as he is "projected" man is always ahead of himself, cast forth into one course of action or another; by "disposition," the being which is cast forth is at the same time already situated within pre-given circumstances; and inasmuch as he is "fallen," the being which projects himself ahead, from out of a given situation, is ever liable to give up his project and to sink back into complacency with present actuality. The three structures are transparently temporal in character, describing the way in which man runs forth into future possibilities in the midst of an oppressing actuality into which he has already been delivered (having been) which tempts him to remain content with the present. The ontology or understanding of reality which Heidegger developed in Being and Time completed the revolution which Kierkegaard had set in motion. For here was an ontology which drew the decisive distinction in human nature, not between "reason" and "feelings," but between the various temporal structures of man so that the problem of an act which is "free" of feeling, or "above" feeling does not arise.
To describe affectivity Heidegger used the word "Befindlichkeit", whose sense for him is drawn from the colloquial expression "how are you?" ("Wie befinden-Sie sich?"), "how are you found?", "how do things sit with you?" "how are you situated?"12 It is probably best translated as "disposition." If disposition represents an ontological structure, then moods are the particular entities (or "ontic" structures) through which the basic ontological structure is disclosed. In contrast, the intellectualist tradition speaks of the "light of reason," but regards moods as blind and subjective. Brooks do not brood; we do. Grey afternoons are not sombre, we are. But Heidegger rejects the idea that there is a subject here and an object there and focuses instead upon the interaction "between" subject and object. In that case, moods play an essential role in disclosing the structure of our world and of our experience.
Heidegger thus puts forward two basic theses about affectivity: the first concerns its necessity, and the second concerns its disclosive power. Let us examine each in turn.
The tradition treats moods as transient, mutable states which come and go and which do not enter into the stable, permanent essence of man. In contrast, Heidegger, following Kierkegaard, gives moods an ontological role and makes them essential structures of our Being. That means that everything in man is, as it were, "mooded." Moods are the way man is "tuned" to the world, and he is always in one state of attunement or another;13 it is a mistake to think that we are or can ever get free of moods. It is indeed necessary at times not to be disturbed, but that means simply that at times we require undisturbing moods such as peace and tranquility. When Descartes speaks of getting free of his passions in order to undertake his meditations, he is mistaking the mood of tranquility with being in a mood-free state. And when Kant speaks of countering inclinations with pure will, that can only mean countering bad inclinations with good ones.
Secondly, Heidegger assigns to moods a disclosive role; this is a phenomenological point not brought out explicitly by Kierkegaard. On the phenomenological account, a feeling is not some kind of "subjective response" to an "objective stimulus," but is possessed instead of an intentional structure,14 that is, it is a way of intending or turning to the world, of disclosing its make-up and the structure of our experience. It is nothing "inner" and subjective, but rather an intentional transcendence, a stepping outside (or ek-stasis), which reaches out to the world. According to Heidegger moods have a three-fold power of disclosure.
To begin with, and this is their most important function, moods disclose what Heidegger calls the "facticity," the givenness, of our Being. For Heidegger man finds himself situated within the world--within a society, a tradition, a family, etc.--prior to any possible consent on his part: that is, he is always "delivered over" (ueberantwortet) to his Being. Moods disclose how that being-delivered-over is experienced, whether as a burden or a weight pushing us down (de-pression), or as the lifting of a burden (e-lation). Whence they disclose the naked "fact" of being-in-the-world, which is what Heidegger means by "facticity," the naked "that-he-is-there" of man. Facticity is thus not a mere "matter of fact" in the manner of seventeenth- and eighteenth- century philosophy; it is rather a lived or existential fact, a disclosed or phenomenological fact: it is the lived through experience of being factically situated in the world.
Thus, it is not to be confused with the standard idea of "contingency," which is an objectivistic notion, referring to something which a disinterested speculative gaze observes to be there rather than not. Because facticity is something lived-through, it can be apprehended or disclosed only by mood. One can consider matters of fact with what the tradition calls intellect (nous) for as long as one wishes and never experience facticity. Facticity is disclosed only in that "tuning" which belongs to a being who is "thrown." Contingency is at best a distillate of lived facticity, its objectivistic correlate. One may thus give theoretical assent to the contingency of one's being without ever opening one's eyes moodfully to facticity. It would take an earthquake, Kierkegaard said, to bring some sleepy scholars to admit the uncertainty of things!15
Moods also disclose the world as a "totality." This is explained in What is Metaphysics? which treats of the disclosure of the world in anxiety.16 Through anxiety the world as a totality fades into meaninglessness, even as in joy it glows with charm. One is exposed to this anxiety even if one has an optimistic, theoretical account of things; contrariwise, one can experience Being in positive tones even if one has a pessimistic metaphysics (as seems to have been the case with Eduard von Hartmann, a Schopenhauerian pessimist who was happily married and professionally successful).
Finally, moods not only disclose the facticity of our Being and the Being of the world as a whole, they also disclose particular entities within the world in such a way as to let these entities "matter" to us, to let them be of concern to us (angegangen werden sein). Whence it is only in the mood of fear that something can matter to man as threatening:
Pure beholding, even if it were to penetrate to the innermost
core of the Being of something present-at-hand could never
discover anything like that which is threatening. . . . By looking at the world theoretically, we have already dimmed it
down to the uniformity of what is purely present-at- hand.17
The fearsomeness of a fearsome object cannot be disclosed by pure beholding; fear indeed is this disclosure of the fearsome object as such. The mood of fear, like every other mood, discloses the world in a way which cannot be substituted for or improved upon. Thus, moods are not "blind," but insightful and disclosive. They tell us about ourselves and others in a way to which we otherwise have no access. They tell us long before reason has noticed that we are on the wrong track, that we have no business here, that so and so is not to be trusted, that we are being untrue to what we have all along believed. Socrates' celebrated "voice" was precisely such a preconceptual, moodful power of insight, a way of disclosing things long before his dialectic could summon up arguments one way or the other. If this be so then in Socrates, at the very birth of philosophy, we find moral affectivity or the mooded disclosure of value. This is the point we want to make in the following pages.
But before taking up this issue let us summarize briefly the results achieved thus far. From Kierkegaard we learned that, far from being something external or outside the properly human, passion is precisely what renders an act decisive, committed and authentic: outside of passion there is only the lukewarm, the apathetic. In terms of morality this means that it is passion which makes a moral agent an agent, someone who truly does something, who acts and who stands by his action. From Heidegger, we learned that the ontological structure of passion and mood is to disclose; and that moods, far from being blind or subjective, reveal the world to us in a way to which reason has no access. This means that they play a disclosive role in moral matters as well. In the same way that fear discloses the fearsome object, moral affectivity discloses moral value, or what the tradition would call the "good." We are thus at an extreme removed from the dualism of is and ought, a point which is made also by David Schindler in Chapter X below. On this account value belongs integrally to the structure of what "is," so long as "is" is understood in all its amplitude as a self-manifesting or self-revealing phenomenon, (phainomenon), rather than being reduced to a mere matter of fact in the manner of seventeenth-century philosophy. The task now is to show how that is possible.
THE FEELING OF RESPECT
IN KANT'S ETHICS
To carry on Heidegger's metaphor, moral sensibility is the attunement of the moral agent to moral value, his sensitivity and responsiveness to value: moral sensibility is affective moral life. In search of help for a theory of moral sensibility, I shall turn to Kant, although he represents an extreme case of moral and metaphysical dualism. Kant wrestled with the question of moral feeling throughout his writings, and it is worth noting that in his earlier, pre-critical writings, he actually defended a theory of "moral sense."18 His mature ethical position was, in fact, a reaction against a view that he himself once defended. Indeed, even after he had formulated his rigorous separation of pure will and empirical inclination, Kant himself concluded that the view as it stood was dualistic and needed to be reconciled with the sensibility.19
The metaphysical setting of this moral feeling in Kant is, in my view, beyond redemption. In Kant's theory this feeling is the sole feeling which arises, not from antecedent phenomenal causes, but from the will itself, pure noumenal will.20 It is in a sense the inscription left by pure reason upon our sensible nature. But Kant can hardly defend such a view if the moral feeling is indeed a feeling and not a metaphor. For if it truly belongs to our sensible nature then it is as rigidly predictable as the movements of the heavenly bodies and has nothing to do with the freedom of the will; Kant could deny this only by denying the uniformity of nature. Moreover, on Kant's own terms, it must be fully explicable in terms of our neuro-physiological make-up and the physical stimuli which cause one neuro-physiological reaction rather than another; it can have no more to do with moral value than does feeling pain in the presence of excessive heat. It is a piece of nature which has nothing to do with the intelligible world; it has to do with facts and not values. The whole notion of moral feeling is a futile attempt to back out of the worst implications of his own theory. What he needed was a wholly new theory of experience and affectivity, one which would break with the fundamental presuppositions of eighteenth century philosophy.
Although this was not possible for Kant himself, the importance of Kant's analysis did not go unnoticed by Heidegger a century and a half later when he wrote: "Kant's interpretation of the phenomenon of respect is probably the most brilliant phenomenological analysis of the phenomenon of morality that we have from him."21 This suggests that, with the help of phenomenology, we can rescue Kant's theory from its dualist moorings and achieve thereby precisely what our argument requires, viz., a phenomenological analysis of the moral phenomenon which centers on an affective moral intentionality.
Kant was grappling with the notion which Kierkegaard would later make abundantly clear, that the will is not moved except through passion. The purely "impassive" will is motionless and never achieves the status of being an agent at all. But Kant's metaphysics makes it strictly impossible that anything other than the moral law itself should be the "incentive" or driving force (Triebfeder) of the will, lest the will be moved to act by non-moral motives. As the law alone must be the sole incentive, the cause of our action could not be the moral feeling of respect, but rather the effect upon our sensible nature which the law brings about. We do not obey the law because of the feeling of respect, but we feel respect because we are subject to the law. We are moved to act by the law, and insofar as the law is moving as an incentive it effects in us this moral feeling.
Now there are two moments to the feeling of respect. In the first place, the effect of the law upon our pathological nature is to thwart our inclinations which tend away from the law. The law checks the feeling of pleasure in something forbidden:
Thus far, the effect of the moral law as an incentive is only negative, and as such this incentive can be known a priori. For all inclination and every sensuous impulse is based on feeling, and the negative effect on feeling (through the check on the inclinations) is itself a feeling. Consequently we can see a priori that the moral law as a ground of determination of the will, by thwarting all our inclinations, must produce a feeling which can be called pain.22
The law holds in check self-love, our selfish urge for self-gratification, and self-conceit, our misled tendency to think ourselves of worth independently of our conformity to the law.
But the law is not merely negative, it does not merely forbid, it is also a positive, an ideal of freedom and moral excellence. Accordingly the feeling it induces cannot be merely negative; its positive grandeur is thus a function of its negative power to humble our sensible nature.23 The law subdues our pathological nature; it brings us into submission to reason; it asserts its priority over us and implants in us a sense of being a "subject" of the law. The law itself then emerges in its positive power, in its majesty, kingship and regal authority and overpowers us. The law has a power and might like the starry heavens above, a majestic sweep, a show not of physical but of moral force.
Heidegger recasts the analysis in phenomenological terms.24 Respect is always "respect for," that is, it has an intentional structure in virtue of which it intends the moral law. For Kant the law is the ground of the feeling, not the feeling of the law; the feeling is simply the way in which the law is disclosed or made manifest to me as intentional object. For Heidegger the feeling of respect is not only a feeling for the law, but also a certain self-feeling in which I am disclosed to myself. For I experience myself as subject to the law and so as free and responsible before the law. Hence I experience myself as a being of worth or dignity (Wuerde). If I feel subordination or subjection to the law, the law also raises me up by disclosing my true dignity as a moral personality (personalitas moralis), a member of the intelligible world.
The feeling of respect is at the same time both an inclination or tendency towards it as the source of our true dignity. The feeling of respect thus resembles anxiety, which Heidegger explains elsewhere. Anxiety, too, is a shrinking back before the nullity which it discloses and at the same time a being drawn towards, inasmuch as anxiety breaks the spell in which we are held by beings and enables us to experience the upsurge of Being itself as against this nothingness.25
The moral feeling of respect is then precisely this affective attunement of feeling and the law whose possibility we projected in the first two sections of this paper. We are attuned to the majesty of the law the way our aesthetic sensibility is attuned to the majesty of the starry heavens; we respond as deeply to the worth of a moral deed as to the beauty of a work of art. Kant's metaphysics made it impossible for him to defend his theory of the moral feeling, but the soundness of his phenomenological account of this feeling belied the metaphysics it was meant to defend.
I have not yet discussed, however, the most important feature of Kant's analysis. "Respect," Kant says, "always applies to persons only, never to things.26 That is a decisive qualification, for Kant's rationalist metaphysics often leads him to speak in terms of a hypostasized law or reason. But now Kant adds that respect is directed not at material objects, and by extension not at an abstract law, but always at a concrete person who embodies the law. I respect a person, not a thing, and I respect a person not insofar as he holds high office or exerts great power, but precisely inasmuch as he embodies the law. Whence Kant writes:
Fontanelle says, `I bow to a great man, but my mind does not bow.' I can add: to a humble plain man in whom I perceive righteousness in a higher degree than I am conscious of in myself, my mind bows whether I choose or not, however high I carry my head that he may not forget my superior position. Why? His example holds before me a law which strikes down my self-conceit when I compare my own conduct with it. . . 27
When we witness an example of virtue which surpasses our own, our own shortcomings are exposed and our self-love and self-conceit are struck down.
Now the person bears a two-fold relation to the law. The person is both the alpha and the omega of the law, the origin and the sphere in which it is applied. The dignity of a man of concrete virtue is not only that he holds his sensuous impulses in check and responds to a supersensible principle. It is found also--and even more primordially--in that he is the author of this law, that the law arises autonomously from his own rationality and is not imposed upon him from without. Hence the law as a purely formal principle is convertible with the person as the bearer of the law (as subject and legislator). This, of course, is the basis of the alternate formulations which Kant gives of categorical imperative in his Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals: the first expressing the law as a purely formal principle, the second addressing its content or matter, and the last announcing the kingdom of ends as the synthesis of the first two. Without the person, the law would be a nonexistent abstraction. It would not "hold" because it would have no one to hold for and no one to be held by. But without the law the person would lack all dignity and would remain a piece of nature, a merely phenomenal being no better than a Cartesian automaton. Whence the law insures the dignity of the person inasmuch as it is in virtue of the law that the person rises above the sphere of nature; while the person gives substance to the law, rendering it real and effective.
Now I maintain that Kant gives expression here, in the categories of a dualistic metaphysics, to a profound and genuine experience. In my view it is possible to rid this theory of its sensible-supersensible dualism and to give it the stamp of genuine phenomenological coin. This I would do in two steps. In the first place the categorical imperative is no dictum of "pure reason" over and above our "sensible" nature. As an "imperative" it is a mode of discourse, a linguistic formation in the form of a command. It takes shape in, and is possible only within the framework of, language and grammar. Hence it belongs to the sphere of "discourse" or the Being of man insofar as man speaks, what Heidegger calls Rede, in Greek logos. As a mode of discourse it is a call, indeed a call which issues from man himself, from the depths of his Being, and bids him to be the being which it is up to him to be. The categorical imperative is no supersensible law, but a call which only a being who speaks can utter--and hear. It belongs to the Being of man as incarnate, as speaking, as calling and hearing.28
The same result is even more forcibly visited upon us when we turn from the "form" to the "content" of the laws, from the mere form of an imperative to the moral person (an issue which is also discussed in Chapter IX below). What is the moral person? As Heidegger asks: "What is the ontological concept of the moral person, which is thus revealed in respect, of the personalitas moralis?"29 The answer is found in what Kant's Foundations calls the person as an end-in-himself and not merely as a means.30 Man is not good because he is good for something--he is not merely a commodity in the labor force, a purveyor of services--but a good in himself, for himself. He is not good because of what he can do--for himself or for others--but because of what he is, in his Being. The Being of this being is to be of worth, and the worth of this being is ontologically secured against anything which may be ontically disagreeable about him.
Now Kant expressed the dignity of man in the dualistic terms of the ability of our supersensible will to subdue our sensible appetites. I see this as an alienated formulation of a more profound phenomenological experience of the dignity of the person. Let us listen again to Kant's adaptation of Fontanelle's words:
"I can bow to a great man, but my mind does not bow." I can add: to a humble plain man in whom I perceive righteousness in a higher degree than I am conscious of in myself, my mind bows whether I choose or not, however high I carry my head that he may not forget my superior position.
That, I suggest, is the phenomenological origin of Kant's moral philosophy. What animated Kant's thought from the start was his experience of the dignity of the person, his concrete encounter with men and women of simple nature who understood better than generations of philosophers Socrates' statement that it is better to suffer injustice than to commit it. Kant was moved to deny reason in order to make room for faith because of a profound and animating experience of the dignity of the human person, an experience so deep and heartfelt that it has all the characteristics of the "passionate inwardness" of which Kierkegaard spoke. It was no shallow passion brought on by a great occasion, but a deep and lasting reverence which animated the whole critical philosophy.
We are thus led by Kant to a formulation of the fundamental principle of moral sensibility: that the person is given to us in the feeling of respect as a being of intrinsic worth and dignity. The moral feeling of respect discloses the concretely given person as an object of moral worth. The person is disclosed in moral affectivity as a being of dignity and worthy of respect. Lack of this moral sensibility, failure in this moral affectivity, would render us morally monstrous, coldly indifferent to the worth of others, perhaps even pathologically ill. One imagines the cold executioners of whom history provides an unfortunate list of examples precisely in these terms--as moral monsters, repugnant, repulsive, sickening. Here all the chords of our moral attunement are in discord. Our moral sensibility is in sensible, not mere metaphoric pain.
THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE PERSON
AS A PRIMORDIAL DISCLOSURE OF VALUE
I have claimed that the Kantian thesis of the person as an end-in-himself is a metaphysical theory which can be converted directly into phenomenological coin. I want now to make good on that claim and to offer a phenomenological account of our experience of the person, the point of which will be to show that value is disclosed to us prereflectively, in the sphere of affectivity, long "before" reflective reason has a chance to put in a word of its own. There is a prepredicative moral experience which lies at the base of moral reflection, even as there is a prepredicative perceptual experience which lies at the base of theoretical assertions. We are claiming thus that the life of the moral agent is prepredicatively shaped and formed, and that the reflection of the moral philosopher must be directed at unpacking or explicating this prepredicative experience. In the present section I wish to unfold this prepredicative experience of the person as an affective disclosure of value, and then in the concluding section to discuss how this constitutes a "proto-ethics."
Phenomenologists like Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty have argued long and persuasively that the "world" is not my world but a shared world, a world with others ("with-world"); and hence that the other is not only an object on my screen, a being-for-me which can be situated on my horizons, but a being-for-himself, irreducible to me. Such a phenomenologically construed world is at the far remove from the Cartesian illusion of an ego cogito on the one side and a totality of objects outside me. For I am from the start "outside," drawn into the world and subject to its innumerable influences. I am from the start in a world which is not of my own making, but shaped and formed by historical and linguistic structures which are thousands of years old, which were created with imperceptible slowness by long forgotten generations. These structures are not, as in Sartre's neo-Cartesianism, threats to my freedom; rather they nourish and give shape to my world (see Chapter XI below). My world is filled with others, shaped by their contributions. I am indebted to their generosity and filled with their presence. My family, friends and colleagues, my tradition at large, is a constellation of benefactors who hand over to me the possibilities of my Being.
Now I want to show how my debt to the others reaches down to the depths of my Being, of my prereflective relationship to them. Long before I reach the stage of reflective thought I am already in a relationship to others; my Being is from the start Being-with. I owe my origin to others, my nurturing and growth. From its first moments my life develops in rhythm with others, at first in tune with the rhythm of the maternal heart-beat, and then in tune with the rhythm of the home with its cluster of smiling faces and noises and lights and aromas. The world to which I belong from the start is not a world of material objects with various sizes, shapes, and velocities. It is a profoundly personal world focussed on other persons as on radiant points of energy or light, the way the evening sky is filled with stars. From these centers of energy are radiated influences which surround and envelope me so that, when they are present I am filled with them, and when they withdraw I feel their absence. Their very absence testifies to their presence. This enveloping personal world is constantly given to us, always and already pre-given. So true is this that Heidegger says that the so called "problem of other persons" is not the Cartesian pseudo-problem of proving that others are there--that we are not alone in the universe, as Descartes puts it so astonishingly--but rather of finding ourselves in the midst of their encompassing presence. Others, Heidegger argues, are not those whom I am not, as if the ego came first and others afterwards as the negation of the ego, but rather those among whom I too am.31 And this relationship to others, which could not be more profound, is borne witness to throughout the length and breadth of our intentional life. The whole range of our intentional acts stands under the influence of the presence of others.
Here I am concerned chiefly with the bodily and affective resonance of this relationship to others, with that affective intentionality which discloses the other to us as a being worthy of respect, and which is already at work before the ego cogito arrives on the scene. I wish to argue that bodily intentionality is already ec-static, that is, already extended beyond itself, stretched out to others, responsive to others. Long before the child enters the universe of words he already intends the parents' look and touch. He has already grown accustomed to the cadence of their voices, the style of their gestures, the feel of their grip, the aroma of their bodies; to the colors and patterns of the nursery, the home; to the bustle and noise of his siblings.
Long before reflective life intervenes we are tied by our bodies and bodily life and the network of its passions, feelings and moods, to the personal world around us. As intentional life matures, as the intentional moves I make become more refined and differentiated, I learn to sort out the persons themselves from the array of objects over which their influence spreads. I learn to lead a distinctively different intentional life towards other persons than I lead toward things, that is, the objects which we together share and use, accumulate and discard. Such things lead out from, and then back to others. They are made by others, sold by others, given to us by others, belong to others or to us: they are there for others or for us. I can grasp, push, pull and otherwise manipulate material objects, but my actions towards others are inscribed with caution, care and courtesy. When they are not, this is understood immediately and by everyone as offensive in the highest degree.
I can stare steadfastly at a material object in order to determine what it is, but it would be unspeakably rude to treat a person likewise. I lean against walls and furniture, but I keep a careful distance between myself and others, and an inner alarm sounds as soon as someone without an invitation approaches too close to us or touches us. I can feel a material object with curiosity about its texture, listen to a noise to discern exactly what it is, sniff about to isolate an aroma, but my bodily intentionality towards others is held strictly in check. I do not stare, poke, or sniff. I am aware, in a prereflective, bodily way, of the life which streams out from the other, of the subjectivity which makes its seat there, of the horizons which the other is constantly throwing out around himself. I do not lightly intrude into that circle. My bodily life takes heed of the autonomy which is exercised there, that the other is no being-for-me, no object reducible to my proportions and locatable on my horizon. I have from the start a bodily recognition that the other is something in itself and not merely for me.
Here then is the phenomenological equivalent of the beings which populate Kant's metaphysical world. Long before philosophical reflection arrives, there is a bodily disclosure of the other as worthy of respect, an end in himself, as a being not to be reduced to the sphere of objects available for my use. Long before philosophical reflection erects a distinction between subject and object, I am already tied to others, and they to me: together we carry out our mutual duties towards one another. Our bodily and affective life already apprehends the eye and hand of the other as the mediation of a personal life which commands our respect.
We have now been brought, I believe, to the point for which we have been striving. The world in which we live does not decompose into real facts on the one side and ideal objects on the other. What is primarily given is instead the inter-personal world, the world of other persons, their words and deeds and the things which they have made. In this world everything centers on the bodily presence of the incarnate other. The incarnate other is value incarnate, the concretely given embodiment of worth and value. The centers of energy, as we described other persons, are centers of value, commanding our respect.
Long before the debates of moral philosophers arise it is already clear that we are all, always and already, tied into a life of moral interaction and that we intend others--pre-reflectively--in a profoundly different way than we intend objects. The value of the other is not discovered by reflective thought, but only articulated in the language of concepts and judgments, for it is already prereflectively manifest in a more primordial way to our bodily affectivity. We are always and all along mooded and tuned to the other, whether in harmony (syn-pathos), or in discord (anti-pathos), or even when we treat him with callous disregard (a-pathos) which is not mood-lessness but the mood of indifference. We live all along in a charged environment of affective being-with, a field of affective impulses, a field of pathos. Were the life of pathos to give out on us, were the energy of our passionate involvement with one another to go dead on us, were we indeed ever to attain a pure reason free of the affective substructure which sustains our life, then moral reflection would become as meaningless as a treatise on the psychological effects of colors to a person born blind.
The task of reflection is to articulate a moral life in which we are already enmeshed, to which we are all pre-committed, not to hold court over it. Moral life and moral values are primordially disclosed to us prereflectively, affectively. Our prereflective attunement with one another is the spring by which moral reflection is nourished. Moral reflection simply gives conceptual shape to the prereflective moral life in which we are all along caught up.32
CONCLUSION: AFFECTIVITY AS PROTO-ETHICS
I have argued throughout this chapter that the moral struggle is misconceived as a struggle of reason with inclinations, of the rational principle with the irrational principle. I have said in effect that moral strife must be reconceived as a discord within a single nature. It is a dissonance within our affectivity which is reflected in a tossing to and fro between competing reasons on the reflective level: we are affectively drawn in opposite directions, and we can give reasons on either side. By the same token, moral reform does not take the form of bringing the passions back into subjection to reason, but rather of reestablishing harmony and consonance. As moral strife is not a tug of war between opposing metaphysical principles but a discord within a single nature, we should reorganize the totality of our existential forces, both reflective and prereflective, and redirect them to new and fruitful ends. It is a matter of "retuning," of a tune-up of our affective life.
In my view acquiring moral character is not unlike acquiring aesthetic taste, and I do not reject the proximity of morals and aesthetics which the expression "moral sensibility" suggests. Moral life seems to me a matter of being properly sensitized morally, and moral education a matter of seeing to it that our children grow up properly sensitized in moral matters. That means that we want them to feel for the poor and the oppressed--and that is no metaphor: they must in fact feel for the poor. If they do not, they lack moral sensibility as surely as their taste for the standard fare offered on television represents a failure in aesthetic sensibility. We want them to feel more strongly for justice than for acquisitiveness or the amassing of more and more material possessions of their own; we want them to be truly repulsed by brutality, to be horrified by war and inhumanity; we want them to feel a sense of reverence for the physical world and to abhor the technological desecration of the environment and of biological life; we want them to feel pain at violence and injustice. In short we want them to feel the right things: to take pleasure in the right things, and to feel pain at the sight of evil, as Plato and Aristotle both insist.33 If they are taught to feel well, if they are morally sensitized, then the reasons will come of their own, just as when they are taught to feel the wrong things they do not lack for reasons to rationalize their ill-feeling and ill-will. If they do not feel these things in their marrow, then they are merely paying lip service to what we teach and will throw it over at the first opportunity, for the rationales we make them learn will be a veneer over a hollow, a shell without a kernel. If they do not respond to virtue and vice from the marrow of their bones, if they do not resonate from the depths of their sensibility to these values, if they have not been affectively turned to moral matters, then our words of moral wisdom will be to them only so many tinkling cymbals.
But by reinstating affectivity to a central role in moral life, by insisting upon the centrality of moral affectivity, do we not turn everything over to whim and fancy and make everything a matter of taste? Do we not reduce the choice between justice and injustice to the level of the choice of our favorite color? That at least is the rejoinder of those who make everything turn on the old dichotomy between fact and value, is and ought, real and ideal, sensible and supersensible. The senses tell us what is, but reason must decide what ought to be. Our tastes tell us what we like, but reason tells us what we ought to choose. The old dualism does not give up easily; its death is painfully slow. Such an objection proceeds from a grossly inadequate analysis of the nature of human experience, one whose roots are in Platonism but which extend well into modern philosophy. The one lasting achievement of phenomenology, in my view, is to have corrected this abstract and contrived idea of experience, and to have replaced it with a sound and holistic account of experience as it is really lived. That is what I have attempted by means of my presentation of a phenomenology of the person.34
I have argued that experience is value-laden from the start, that we meet up with value from the first moments of waking life, and even before that. Human experience, properly conceived in all its amplitude, is from the start an experience of value, in particular of the value of the human person. Values are not something which reason discerns while the senses stand about, stupefied, awaiting its deliberations, though metaphysics has always favored such juridical metaphors. On the contrary, human affectivity is already sensitive to the value of the other, already discloses it, long before reason can set up court. We are always and from the start attuned to the other. We do not need to reach the age of reason, to achieve the cogito, or to undertake transcendental reflection, to know that: it is already inscribed in our prereflective being. We have already learned it, have all along been learning it, from the first moments of our life. Our being is a being-with, and our being-with is an attunement to the other. The other's presence is an omnipresence to which our whole affective life is attuned.
Hence, by turning things over to affective and prereflective life, we have not turned everything over to whim and caprice; we have not surrendered "reason" to "feeling." On the contrary we have found there the prereflective moorings of the principle to which Kant gave a famous conceptual formulation when he told us always to treat humanity, whether in our person or that of another, as an end and never merely as a means.35 Here is a principle which is already inscribed in our prereflective and affective intentionality, a principle which makes its presence felt from the start.
Now everything depends upon seeing that the relationship between affectivity and thought is not, as in dualist philosophers, a matter of having a blind feeling on the one side and pure reason on the other, the former lacking insight as the latter lacks incentive. On the contrary, in our scheme, affectivity and thought are related as the implicit to the explicit, so that the work of thought always consists in unpacking our prereflective life, explicating it, and giving it explicit formulation.36 Hence when Kant announced this principle, it is not as if this were something he had devised, a theory of his, some construction which he wanted to test out. As he himself argues, this law is exceedingly well known to the simplest man and the task of the moral philosopher is to say and to defend what everybody already knows. Kant misconceived this task when he took it to mean that the philosopher must "purify" this principle of any empirical origin. I have argued in the opposite direction, viz., to show as clearly as possible the experiential-affective base of any such principle, to show its birth certificate in experience adequately conceived.
This means that we must set aside the wooden and atomistic counterfeit for experience which empiricism offers us. For the texture of experience is complex, rich with meaning, a ripe fruit about to burst. The philosopher is one who stations himself at that critical juncture where this explosion of experience into meaning, of the prereflective into thought, will take place, so that he will be sure to be there. He must be ready, on the spot, and hence able to report everything just as it happens. This work of reporting the most intimate movements of our prereflective life is precisely what philosophy is.
Hence, when we turn to the prereflective, the affective, we do not turn to chaos and the irrational, but rather to that origin by which any principle is nourished. Our moral affectivity is already a proto-ethics. It is already possessed of proto-principles which are there, waiting to become explicit sense and meaning under the hand of reflective thought.
The moral agent is not a being of reason whose inclinations have been subdued, but a being of delicate moral sensibility who is attuned to the right things. Moral philosophy is not a metaphysics of morals which wants to preserve the rational purity of moral principles, but rather a phenomenology of moral sensibility which gives conceptual expression to that proto-ethics which is always and all along at work in affective life.
Villanova University
Villanova, Pennsylvania
NOTES
1. I have found Robert Solomon, The Passions (Garden City: Doubleday Anchor, 1977) to be especially helpful in formulating the present argument.
2. Kierkegaard's "Concluding Unscientific Postscript" (hereafter referred to as CUP), trans. D. Swenson and W. Lowrie (Princeton: University Press, 1941), p. 206.
3. Ibid., p. 208.
4. Because of his Ockhamistic metaphysics, according to which each moment is absolutely contingent, Kierkegaard rejected the Aristotelian notion of a habit (hexis). See George Stack, Kierkegaard's Existential Ethics (University, Alabama: University of Alabama Press, 1977), pp. 133-34.
5. CUP, pp. 347-50.
6. Soren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Dread, trans. W. Lowrie (Princeton: University Press, 1957), pp. 16-17, note. Kierkegaard is referring to the disinterestedness of the aesthetic judgment in Kant's Critique.
7. Ibid., 446.
8. Ibid., 476.
9. Ibid.
10. Soren Kierkegaard, Repetition, trans. W. Lowrie (Princeton: University Press, 1946), pp. 3-7.
11. In Ch. 3 above Sebastian Samay uses the term "affectivity" in the same ontological sense in which Heidegger uses the term "Befindlichkeit."
12. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (hereafter referred to as BT), trans. J. MacQuarrie and E. Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), p. 29.
13. The word that Heidegger uses for mood is "Stimmung," which means the way we are "tuned," gestimmt, to things.
14. Husserl already established this point in Logical Investigations, vol. 2, trans. John Findlay (New York: Humanities Press, 1970), Inv .V, 15, where he develops the position first put forward by Brentano.
15. CUP, 476.
16. See "What is Metaphysics?" in Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings, ed. David Krell (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), pp. 91-112.
17. BT, 177.
18. Lewis White Beck, A Commentary on Kant's Critique of Practical Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), pp. 213-14.
19. Hence the second Critique contained an "incentive" of practical reason whose function was architectonically parallel to the "Transcendental Aesthetic" in the first Critique, namely to provide the element of sensibility in transcendental synthesis. And it was for this reason that Kant proposed what he called the moral feeling of "respect" (Achtung).
20. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason (hereafter referred to as CPrR), trans. Lewis White Beck, (Library of Liberal Arts; Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1956, 77.
21. Martin Heidegger, Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. A. Hofstadter (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), p. 133.
22. CPrR, 75.
23. The moral law . . . completely excludes the influence of self-love from the highest practical principle and forever checks self-conceit, which decrees the subjective conditions of self-love as laws. If anything checks our self-conceit in our own judgment, it humiliates. Therefore the moral law inevitably humbles every man when he compares the sensuous propensity of his nature with the law. Now if the idea of something as the determining ground of the will humiliates us in our self-consciousness, it awakens respect for itself so far as it is positive and the ground of determination. (CPrR, 77)
24. Ibid., pp. 133-7.
25. Heidegger, "What is Metaphysics?" p. 106.
26. CPrP, 79.
27. Ibid., 79-80.
28. Cf. BT para. 34, 55-56.
29. Heidegger, Basic Problems of Phenomenology, p. 137.
30. Immanuel Kant, Foundation of the Metaphysics of Morals; Text and Critical Essays, ed. Robert P. Wolff (Indianapolis: Bobbs Merrill, 1969), pp. 52-60.
31. BT paras. 25-26.
32. Accordingly, one can ask how critical reflection is possible in such a standpoint. For if reason is bound to explicating a prereflective given, how is it ever possible for it to disengage itself sufficiently to put into question a particular pre-reflective structure in which it may have grown up? The answer to this is provided, I think, by Gadamer's notion of the fusion of horizons, which belongs to the heart of what he calls hermeneutics. In that view, critical reflection is awakened by the collision of my horizon, within which I have been nurtured and whose validity I have always assumed, with the horizon of the other. The collision awakens me to my horizon, which prior to this collision may well have been at work on me without my knowing it, and furthermore puts it into question by exposing its contingency. The ensuing dialogue between diverse horizonal understandings is thus at the same time a process of critical reflection upon the relative merits of each. It is our view that it would always be possible for such a dialogue to reach agreement about the principle of the worth of the person which we have expounded here, given the appropriate conditions of a dialogue. See Hans Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Garrett Barden and John Cumming (New York: Seabury Press, 1975), pp. 258-74.
33. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, II, 3 (ll04bl0-15); and Plato, Republic, 401 E-402A.
34. For more on this question, see my "The Presence of Others: A Phenomenology of the Human Person," Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association, 53 (1979), pp. 45-58; and Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. A. Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969).
35. Kant, Foundations, p. 54.
36. The prereflective is not reducible to the affective, for there is also a cognitive pre-reflective--as when I am buried in the complexities of a mathematical problem without adverting to the fact that now I am doing mathematical work. Whence there is both a cognitive and an affective pre-reflective which it is the task of reflective thought to explicate.