Understanding of alterity — the understanding of that which is “not I”, whether it takes the form of intersubjectivity or of objectivity (which is, in my opinion, simply a form of mediated intersubjectivity) — is a crucial matter. However, it is just as crucial not to allow concern for “the Other” to drag a thinker back into the old antithesis of self-vs-other. That line of thought inevitably leads to the modern disease of spasmodically oscillating between the antithetical extremes of autism and borderline.
What each of us must do is relate our own experience as we really experience it (trickier than it sounds!) to that which points beyond it, without slipping from methodological “bracketing” into practical denial, and without sliding outward into self-alienation in the name of service.
This relating/integrating activity, the attempt to conceive what it is that makes knowing and living worthwhile, and considering how to actualize it practically and concretely, not shortsightedly, but in the longest terms possible, which means involving others in that actualization — (this is where alterity enters the scene) — is the practice of ethics.
Below is a series of passages offered as support for ethical remojofication…
*
Yeats – “The Second Coming”
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight; somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
*
From the Gay Science:
…Maybe we philosophers are all in a bad position regarding knowledge these days: science is growing, and the most scholarly of us are close to discovering that they know too little. But it would be even worse if things were different — if we knew too much; our task is and remains above all not to mistake ourselves for someone else. We are different from scholars, although we are inevitably also, among other things, scholarly. We have different needs, grow differently; have a different digestion: we need more; we also need less. There is no formula for how much a spirit needs for its nourishment; but if it has a taste for independence, for quick coming and going, for wandering, perhaps for adventures of which only the swiftest are capable, it would rather live free with little food than unfree and stuffed. It is not fat but the greatest possible suppleness and strength that a good dancer wants from his nourishment — and I wouldn’t know what the spirit of a philosopher might more want than to be than a good dancer. For the dance is his ideal, also his art, and finally also his only piety, his ‘service of God’.
*
From Beyond Good and Evil:
Gradually it has become clear to me what every great philosophy so far has been: namely, the personal confession of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoires; also that the moral (or immoral) intentions in every philosophy constituted the real germ of life from which the whole plant had grown. Indeed, if one would explain how the abstrusest metaphysical claims of a philosopher really came about, it is always well (and wise) to ask first: at what morality does all this (does he–) aim? Accordingly, I do not believe that a “drive for knowledge” is the father of philosophy; but rather that another drive has, here as elsewhere employed knowledge (and mis-knowledge!) as a mere instrument. But anyone who considers the basic drives of man to see to what extent they may have been at play just here as in inspiring spirits (or demons and kobolds–), will find that all of them have done philosophy at some time–and that every single one of them would like only too well to represent just itself as the ultimate purpose of existence and the legitimate master of all the other drives. For every drive is domineering: and as such it attempts to philosophize.– To be sure: among scholars who are really scientific men things may be different–“better,” if you like–, there you may really find something like a drive for knowledge, some small independent clockwork that, once well wound, works on vigorously without any essential participation from all the other drives of the scholar. The real “interests” of the scholar therefore lie usually somewhere else, in his family, say, or in making money, or in politics; indeed, it is almost a matter of total indifference whether his little machine is placed at this or that spot in science, and whether the “promising” young worker turns himself into a good philologist or an expert on fungi or a chemist:–it does not characterize him that he becomes this or that. In the philosopher conversely, there is nothing whatever that is impersonal; and above all his morality bears decided and decisive witness to who he is–that is, in what order of rank the innermost drives of his nature stand in relation to each other.
*
From the Gay Science:
Get on the ships! — Consider how every individual is affected by an overall philosophical justification of his way of living and thinking–he experiences it as a sun that shines especially for him and bestows warmth, blessings, and fertility on him, it makes him independent of praise and blame, self-sufficient, rich, liberal with happiness and good will; incessantly it fashions evil into good, leads all energies to bloom and ripen, and does not permit the petty weeds of grief and chagrin to come up at all. In the end then one exclaims: Oh how I wish that many such new suns were yet to be created! Those who are evil or unhappy and the exceptional human being–all these should also have their philosophy, their good right, their sunshine! What is needful is not pity for them!–we must learn to abandon this arrogant fancy, however long humanity has hitherto spent learning and practicing it–what these people need is not confession, conjuring of souls, and forgiveness of sins! What is needful is a new justice! And a new watchword! And new philosophers! The moral earth, too, is round! The moral earth, too, has its antipodes! The antipodes, too, have the right to exist! There is yet another world to be discovered–and more than one! Embark, philosophers!