Subordinated Ethics. Caitlin Smith Gilson
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between those inhabited by the divine, and who thus live by a subordinated ethic, and those in whom the divine has faded, thereby causing ethics to lead and form abstractively the political and social orders, will then be brought to light. And here we will see how the traditional problem of ethics is the ethical problem of tradition, the lived-world in courteous transit through death to the non-reflective foundation of life.
Throughout, we will be tasked with setting out the image and action of the un-reflective or pre-reflective lover who lives by a subordinated ethic. This is the ethical soul who can bear the burden of reflection because such a soul is in contact with the foundation which precedes thought and is in harmony with Being as doing.43 We must be careful here, because the eidetic distance needed to illuminate such a figure awash in true self-presence, in the underlying co-naturalness of Being, has the danger of missing the point of such a figure. One can describe and easily admire, or admire and then dismiss, the effects of such a figure—as one sees, smiles and then bypasses the holy idiot. This bypassing becomes a ready-made option because the originary root of such a figure lays fallow, missing the stunning presence which reveals the un-reflective lover as the only truly reasonable being. To do so, we endeavor to recover a series of quiet, behind-our-backs transformations which set the stage for our political, social, ethical and thus interior lives. We will revisit non-reflexive love through how play becomes mythos, and imagination becomes consecration. Thus, affective intelligence transformed through mythos and consecration subordinates both the intellect and the will, and in doing so lives at the highest order of our animal nature in an enshrined unknowing immortality capable of grounding ethics not in reflection but in the ground of reflection, in Being as divine-bearing, a pre-thematic theotokos. The effort is to show how building up the animal—the affective intelligence—in us cultivates the true ratio because it is capable of situating within us a will that binds itself to the spiritual and to the living. By having a will that lives by a subordinated ethic, surrendered to the holy embodiment of love in ritual and familial accord, the intellect can then guide the will without beginning in the false sight of the ego, and only then will the fatal and free be in unison, where
Truth predicts the eclipse of truth, and in that eclipse it condemns man.44
This odd foundation which lives by being bypassed, which emphasizes the idiocy of Being,45 could be mistaken as the safe ground for an anti-ethics, or more precisely an ethics where all is “forgiven” only because there is nothing any longer to forgive. The saintly are meek but not vulgarly tolerant, and the fine line which allows one to go the distance in love of the other is only present because loss is present, because forgiveness is needed, because transcendence has been displaced by ignorance. We seek to articulate not a weak ethic, as companion to a so-called weak theology,46 but an ethical engagement which endures because it receives its strength from its incarnated subordination as viatoric and unfailingly guided by that originary affectivity. This is an ethics which can truly judge because it never relinquishes its status as secondary, as participant in Being-as-such; an ethics that can truly forgive because it lives within the beat of Being which alone can truly judge in its unity of fate and freedom. The beauty and terror of existence are not entitatively outside the participant, but sweep him up into the moving image of eternity, enabling him to judge authentically, living out the position which may rise above change but never above time. As such, this is an ethics of the Furies as much as it is of the Eumenides: the beauty beyond but not contrary to the world as the bearer of the world, even and especially in its failing, is experienced not by the judge but as the judge. The subordinated ethics must judge because, not only does it seek love, it is the enactment of love. It is an ethics experienced acutely in the repulsion from the lie, the unrelenting repulsion from the world which seeks to render the falsehood true, and it will not dismiss that experiential repulsion as if it is contrary to the go-the-distance love needed to judge and to save.47 If it were to dismiss what repels, having confused love and mercy with pandemic acceptance, it would disengage itself from the very subordination which gives all things life and reminds us that when we act in time we act from eternity. The experience of repulsion, not unlike the experience of joy, reveals our secondary status. Being repelled shows that we are not leading nor merely following but are reacting to a ground which precedes thought so as to inform it. We are neither leading in an ideologically enclosed manner nor following in a non-noetic indifference. Instead, we are in-formed so as to be formed through our always preceding contact with Being. In repulsion, we are being informed of a displacement of Being in our search for Being. Neither leading nor following represents the originary ethics, for both equate ethical meaning with prescriptive rule which overlooks the phenomenological harmony in which things are attuned to existence. Far too quickly our uneasy repulsion is put aside or quantified as a sociological apparatus reacting to social norms rather than as mystique incarnated in a politique. But this reduction occurs because, again, ethics loses union with that ab origine affectivity. If the natural law is to reveal its ever-deepening intelligibility as the shepherd of man, it is in how it reveals joy and repulsion, the former in its startlingly universal-into-particular communion of all things, placing the super-sensuous into the sensuous, and the latter, in the aching alienation of a world amiss, not at a distance but at such proximal nearness, so that the failings of one are the failings of all. If the natural law cannot somatically invoke the innocence and the fallenness of our natures, it becomes simply prescription and nothing more. And if it does invoke such experiential movements, it does so as movements, where each is informed of the ethical dimension of being-in-the-world because ethics is in failing, in trust to its secondary status.
If the secondary status is to be taken seriously, then the true political animal is far closer to the peasant than to the politician. The politician is not to be discarded nor his role lessened. But, for him to function properly, he must be aware of the dangerous territory, the polemos, of stepping out of the fertile ground of connatural communion where it would be better, thus truer-to-ethics, to remain. In one real sense, the politician must exile himself from the garden of daily affairs in order to defend the order of daily affairs. But, because the intelligibility of daily affairs is only genuinely revealed to us non-reflexively, if the politician stays too long in thought, he defends a perverted image. This is the paradox of political life. To think of the political life is, in a damning sense, to fall away from it. And yet, of course, we need to fall away as much as we need to return. Societies are built—but slowly rotting away48—on their successive powers to stray, to fall away. But how do we return?49 How do we defend what can only be enacted by familial into-the-earth entanglement? The much quoted and as often misunderstood “all men by nature desire to know” must be extrapolated in its relation to wonder. Aristotle is clearly seeking a somatic knowledge, one where phenomenologically the form is invested in matter, and thus where knowledge is never disengaged from Being as prime revealer.50 This knowledge is triggered by the naturalness of harmonious desire, not by the type of unsubordinated desire which exaggerates a defective human condition. It is knowledge as wonder. All men by nature overflow in participatory wonder, a wonder which naturally inoculates the participant against selfishness. Such political animals rarely, if ever, begin in the “I,” in the ego. They know themselves the proper way, non-reflexively, too busy to invoke the “I,” too full of love of the little things of the dappled earth. Wonder is the unifying principle aligning our being with the natural law as natural signage. The political animal is a being of wonder, his desire to know is never malformed by an ego which exists as a disservice to wonder, historically causing us to fall into knowledge.51 The difficulty: the politician more often than not exiles himself from wonder in order to defend the so-called ethical and social norms which are connaturally produced in wonder. How then can the natural law survive authentically if it pressed into a region alien to its very efficacy? If the natural law arises only in wonder, what happens to the natural law and its participants when wonder ceases and eidetic egoity takes hold?52 The true political animal is too busy being engaged by wonder.53 How then does the prescriptive recover what it has lost, how does the statesman defend without losing his ability to return?
Double Intentionality
To know is primarily and principally to seize within the self a non-self which in its turn is capable of seizing and embracing the self: it is to live with the life of another. To know means principally and first of all to accept and embrace within oneself the other who is just as capable of accepting and embracing; it means to live the life