Subordinated Ethics. Caitlin Smith Gilson
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Aristostle, in his discussion of aesthetics, defends techne as necessarily preceding so as to ground aesthetic reflection so much so that while in NE 1139b we find a careful separation of episteme and techne this is deepened by their union in the following: Pr. An. 46a 22; Met. 981a1-b9, NE 1097a 4–8, Rhet. 1355b 32, 1362b 26, 1392a 25. The doing/making/originating is more primal than the artistic gaze, giving rise to the gaze. If we are all “gaze” and have no primal wellspring of non-reflexive union, then our ethical as well as our aesthetic ventures are forms of gnostic egoism. When the gaze repeatedly dissociates from its primal contact with presence, it first forgets its source, then demands the source be its own self-enclosed architectonic. Whether one “has” a faith-based ethical structure within this form of disintegrating image is of little improvement. For in doing so, the natural law being defended is prescriptively reduced to a perspective which as perspective is unable truly to compete for primacy except through force.
44. Jack Clemo, “On the Death of Karl Barth,” in Davie, New Oxford Book of Christian Verse, 291.
45. Cf. Desmond, Ethics and the Between, 170–76.
46. For a solid rationale for the interior intelligibility of this weakened theology, see Franco Crespi, “Absence of Foundation and Social Project,” in Vattimo and Rovatti, Weak Thought, 253–68.
47. Plato’s famous maieutic method is such a subordination. It refuses to place into the lead one who is not ready and only leads—as in the case of the Stranger—when subordinated to the Good which invests the soul with the embodiment of “teacher”. The genuine teacher is lover, synonymous with the natural forgetfulness of the ego which occurs when awed by the ordered newness of Being. Only in this form of forgetfulness does one gain what is lost—the self in its truer manifestation as beautifully in and reverently not of the world.
48. Cf. Voegelin, “Republic,” in Order and History, 3:126. Voegelin likens Plato’s understanding of democracy to a slow, comfortable, and often pleasurable rot, but one which must exhaust its own so-called aesthetic, revealing its abyss of depravation, red in tooth and claw.
49. Cf. C. Gilson, “Christian Polis: Noli Me Tangere,” 241–70.
50. Cf. DA 430a 20–25: “Actual knowledge is identical with its object: in the individual, potential knowledge is in time prior to actual knowledge, but in the universe as a whole it is not prior even in time. Mind is not at one time knowing and at another not. When mind is set free from its present conditions it appears as just what it is and nothing more: this alone is immortal and eternal (we do not, however, remember its former activity because, while mind in this sense is impassible, mind as passive is destructible), and without it nothing thinks.”
51. See Shestov, Kierkegaard and the Existential Philosophy, 1–28.
52. One here is reminded of the Hindu teaching on the Four Yugas or Four Age Cycle, i.e., Satya, Treta, Dvapara, Kali. See Gonzalez-Reimann, Mahabharata and the Yugas. In Satya one has that prelapsarian harmony, where breath, movement, and action are in perfect connatural karmic unity. What has/will become the cosmogonic in Kali Yuga was perfectly moving in seamless unreflexive innocence. Only the soul in reflection, estranged and tethered to the self which can only fear its own death, sees the fear, lives out the disharmony. In Treta, we begin to see the estrangement. No longer is the man aligned to the divine by a non-reflexive fully incarnational immediacy but by the spectatorial step-back so essential in knowledge. This is also paradoxically the age of heroes. The presence of the divine is most certainly still desired but can only be seen through the heroic, the larger than life. The desire thus for the hero reveals that the world is falling away from a perfected form. This is the same knowledge that often seeks wisdom but just as often tramples on it underfoot. This is where knowledge aligns itself with death; where it constructs the phantom self. The transition from our unknowing co-naturalness to our knowing courtship is a form of mediation which has already stripped the immediate of its immediacy, where ethical engagement has squandered its secondary status in favour of unsubordinated prescriptions. We then speak of that immediacy, but the speaking itself conveys reflection and our estrangement. Here the gods as less potent must entice our nearness, their presence has dwindled that now we must see, so to speak, to believe. In that third Yuga (Dvapara), this may be the golden age for man—a humanism of ideals, resources, intellectual insights—because, paradoxically, the divine has lessened considerably. In many ways, it’s a golden age built on shifting sands. It’s the ascent which prepares the most visceral of falls. We’ve constructed a pseudo-permanence which blinds us into seeing its impermanence. Only the “mad,” the one who has not made this ascent, understands how foolish it is for our natures to seek independence from the dust and clay; the earth itself is our brutal and gentle grace. We are in the final Yuga, where suffering is most intense, where the bull legs will be cut down to one as the moral karmic order is dramatically lessened. Kali Yuga is that prime antagonizing force undoing Vishnu at every turn. This is an apocalyptic age in the Christian sense. And yet, there is Salvation to be gained within all of these ages. Kali Yuga reveals itself in and through a heart-aching pandemic spiritual malaise—that out of all the ages, this one is the most entrenched in the necessity to suffer, to be pressed into relentless work, into the yoke of necessity. Transcending suffering in this period can only come about by entering the suffering so fully that the suffering can no longer claim you as its own. This suffering is of a visceral intensity and it seems as if this period, Kali Yuga, is where one is most apt to find the means to overcome suffering. But can one become so lost that they freely become unfree? Have we lost something along the way, in Sutya Yuga, that immemorial immediacy, which alone can lift us above the suffering? Does the Kali Yuga period, most apt to suffer, have the tools to overcome it? Or are they most apt to suffer because they have squandered or hidden or forgotten where to find those tools? This is why the battle between Kalki (Vishnu’s final avatar) is described in apocalyptic language.
53. See Chesterton, St. Thomas Aquinas, 19: “St. Thomas takes the view that the souls of all the ordinary hard-working and simple-minded people are quite as important as the souls of thinkers and truth-seekers; and he asks how all these people are possibly to find time for the amount of reasoning that is needed to find truth . . . [this] shows both a respect for scientific enquiry and a strong sympathy with the average man. His argument for Revelation is not an argument against Reason; but it is an argument for Revelation. The conclusion he draws from it is that men must receive the highest moral truths in a miraculous manner; or most men would not receive them at all. His arguments are rational and natural; but his own deduction is all for the supernatural; and, as is common in the case of his argument, it is not easy to find any deduction except his own deduction. And when we come to that, we find it is something as simple as St. Francis himself could desire; the message from heaven; the story that is told out of the sky; the fairytale that is really true.”
54. Rousselot, Intellectualism of St. Thomas, 8–13. See also Eckhart, “Sermon 34: When Our Work Becomes a Spiritual Work Working in the World,” in Breakthrough, 483: “Listen then to this wonder! How wonderful it is to be both outside and inside, to seize and to be seized, to see and at the same time to be what is seen, to hold and to be held—that is the goal where the spirit remains at rest, united with our dear eternity.”
55. Cf. DA 430b–431a: “The cognizing agent must be potentially one contrary, and contain the other. But if there is anything which has no contrary, it is self-cognizant, actual and separately existent . .