is the word 'diary' better than the word 'blog'? probably not.
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Elected by Goodness.
I was thinking today about Levinas� claim that no one chooses the good. What that means is that no one is good voluntarily. What is good in us elects us, as it were, without our consent, before we have time to choose otherwise. This, of course, doesn�t mean that we can�t do good deeds intentionally, or that we are all good �by nature��it isn�t very useful to talk about what human beings are �by nature� because we are capable of reasoning and acting in ways that exceed anything instinctual or animal. Any example of human nature can be disproven with counter-examples, and counter-examples are a favorite sport of both optimists and pessimists when it comes time to discuss whether human beings are �naturally� good or bad.
No one is good voluntarily, but that doesn�t mean that we are all good people all the time (I mean, who would believe a philosophy that said that, given the world we live in?). So what does it mean?
It means a number of things. One, what is good in us is not necessarily solely the product of reason. The good, for Levinas, comes from what philosophers call �the other.� Other people. We may have the capacity to reason and thus are not subject purely to instinct like animals. But we are still animals, covered with sense organs and making our way through the world as vulnerable creatures who are affected by our surroundings and the people in them for better and for worse. The good is created by our response to others. And that response is unchosen on some level, because we can't help but be affected by our surroundings: there are others; we depend on them; they harm us and they benefit us, love us and hate us, and we respond. We can�t not be affected by others. That response is the seed of ethics.
Of course, in the everyday world, where what we do is always affected by a combination of past experiences, habits, cultural practices, our own reasoning, and our affective responses to others, the unchosen goodness of response to others gets complicated. We do bad things all the time. Some human beings do really really bad things, all or part of the time. It is even the case that the very fact of vulnerability to others could make you equally want to love or hate someone, nurture them or harm them. Those are two of the many possible responses to being affected by others. But the primordial sense of the other comes to each of us in an unchosen vulnerability to the very fact of being a human being, prey to wounding and outrage. To that you respond, despite yourself. And that response is the formation of responsibility for others. To save them from wounding and outrage.
You might want to deny it, to save the myth of your own autonomy, but on some level you can�t deny it because your response to others forms who you are. It is who you are even more than is your autonomy. Just think about how you got to be who you are right now. If you deny your response to others, you deny the formation of your self.
So, every time you reason your way out of being responsible for something (and keep in mind that I am not talking about legal responsibility, or a responsibility you earn by being at fault for something. That kind of thinking about ethics will never get us a world we�d want to live in�), every time you tell yourself it�s not your job to help, there will be a residue, somewhere, of a sense that your conclusion is not just. Your refusal might be rational or reasonable (and those two aren�t the same), it might be convenient, and it may even be justifiable, but it stops short of being just. A scruple you make or remorse you feel for your refusal�that is a sign that the good is not something we choose.
But we are free creatures, so what we choose to do with that basic insight is another story, and completely up to us. I was thinking about this as I walked home from the gym and John Vanderslice�s �Heated Pool and Bar� came on my iPod on shuffle function. It�s a song about someone who works at Guantanamo, and at one point he sings, �but you can�t be nice/ I�ve got a flak jacket on my soul with me tonight/ and you can�t be good.� No duh. So argues every �dirty hands� ethic ever written, not to mention the plotline of copious television shows, most notably 24. So I asked myself whether his song is compatible with the Levinasian point. Can I sing �and you can�t be good,� take the point, and then make Levinas� argument? I thought no, and then yes.
Yes. Because �you can�t be good� is a reasoned response to a cruel demand made by an unethical situation. If you accept the situation as something inescapable, something that cannot or should not be changed or challenged, then it follows that �you can�t be good.� No duh. But the goodness Levinas points to is tricky, and critical. By critical I mean this goodness should lead you to make judgments rather than accept how things are. Levinas� goodness asks you to challenge any situation that would lead you to the conclusion that you can�t be good. If you wonder how you might access that goodness that elects you without your consent but then doesn�t force you to act and doesn�t even tell you what to do, then you miss the point about human agency. The scruple and the remorse are signs. What you do with them is up to you. Goodness has elected you. But, to make election into a metaphor, you might be a really bad leader.
And now I�m going to make some marshmallows.
5:05 p.m. - June 19, 2008
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