Ethics, Place and the Fabric of Existence.pdf

1 Ethics, Place and the Fabric of Existence Andrew Benjamin No definition of the external world can disregard the limits set by the concept of the active human being. Between the active person and the external world, all is interaction; their spheres of action interpenetrate. Walter Benjamin. Fate and Character. 0. Relationality is an already present possibility.1 Note the following two moments both of which need to be understood as an affirmation of the being of being human as being-in-relation.2 The first is Hegel’s dramatic opening to the section on the ‘Independence and the Dependence of Self-Consciousness’ (§178) in the Phenomenology of Spirit. The second occurs in Chapter XII – the Chapter concerned with education - in Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women. As is well known Hegel writes that: ‘Self consciousness exists in and for itself when, and by the fact that, it exists for another: that is, it exists only in being acknowledged.’3 While Wollstonecraft argues that it is, ‘..only by the jostlings of equality can we form a just opinion of ourselves.’ 4 Both passages have elicited sustained critical commentary. Here all that will be noted are three elements. They form a set of motifs whose recurrence remains a constant in the argumentation to come. The first is that what the ‘dialectic of recognition’ identifies is, inter alia, that were self-consciousness to be posited as a singularity then such a position would be an after effect of an original relation. The set up implicit in the formulation of this position is that relationality precedes singularity. The second is that ‘being acknowledged’ and the ‘jostlings of equality’ are activities. Relationality therefore is – i.e. is what it is what it is - in its being acted out. In being acted out – an acting out that is marked by an inevitable contingency as to content – the relationship between potentiality and actuality is brought into play. Thirdly, what are described as ‘just’ opinions, understood as both accurate opinions and an opinion of human being as bound up with justice, occur as a result of activity and are given within reflection. Life and the just life have a possible and thus potential coincidence. A coincidence the setting of which has to be this life. Given these motifs it is possible to state the project of this paper in advance: the aim is to identify and then restrict the hold of a concern with morals as limited to actions by a subject (or moral agent) and in so doing to open up a definition of the ethical as ground in the always already present nature of relationality; i.e. being as being-in-relation. The contention is therefore that on the basis of this distinction there is a clear demarcation 2 between morals and ethics. The argument, which is linked to this demarcation, is that within a setting that defines the moral in terms of the centrality of a subject – a subject posited as prior to relationality - morality will always founder through its inability to provide a reason for actions. Two symptoms of that foundering can be readily identified: In the first instance it is the impossibility of reason to be self-justifying. To the extent that it can be conceded that reason and rational decisions are themselves sites of contestability – i.e. a particular state of affairs might give rise to two different responses where both responses despite being different were nonetheless rational, or where it can be argued following Kant that ‘evil’ is itself rational - and were this to occur without it having to involve forms of argumentation and the holding of positions that fall beyond the domain of reason, it would then follow that the mere invocation of reason cannot function as an end in itself. The case for this limitation is clear. Were reason to be inherently noncontestable then it would be functionally instrumental and formally tautologous. The second symptom is the recourse within moral theory to imperatives (thus a conception of law that is defined by a necessary relation to the imperative) and therefore to a concomitant inscription of the ineliminability of modes of policing. Policing seeks to secure the moral through its controlling and enforcing a subsequent enactment of morality. Morality, within this setting, has to be thought in terms of following the law. And yet there is a problem at the heart of such an undertaking since policing is itself extramoral. In contradistinction to moral theory, thus construed, there is ethics. Ethics, as its project emerges here, is not defined in relation to a single subject who comes to act morally. Hence, there is a fundamentally different contention, namely that the subject within ethics is always relational. The locus of ethics is not to be found in a link between a subject and future actions. Rather, the locus of the ethical is already at hand within the place of human activity and thus within what will be called the fabric of existence. Ethics thus construed does not demand a form of externality having an indifferent relation to human activity, and this will be the case even though there is the demand that this externality exert a regulative force over that activity. As a consequence, the concerns of ethics are neither law nor the police if the latter are both are linked to a determination of the future such that the content and form of the future is already determined in advance. The concern of ethics is judgment, where, it will be suggested, the nature of judgment is such that it has an indeterminate rather than a determined relation to universality. Judgment therefore is not determined in advance by a form of universality whose content is either already known or already there to be discovered (an instance of the latter would be a search for the ‘good’). Judgement is linked to a form of activity whose mediated nature is comprised of the continuity of connection between contingency and reflection. (Reflection can be understood as the recognition of ‘recognition’ or the process identified by Wollstonecraft in terms of ‘forming’ an opinion.) That link brings certain pivotal aspects of Aristotle’s conception of phronesis into play. Moreover, it recalls Aristotle’s distinction between epistemé and phronesis insofar as phronesis pertains to what Aristotle describes as ‘those things which admit of variation’.5 There is a necessary connection between what Aristotle refers to as ‘deliberation’ and the ‘variable’. To extrapolate from this setting, it can be argued that judgment becomes an activity that connects the content of the future to a 3 necessary contingency – i.e. the inevitability of the variable and thus the contestable as opposed to the ‘invariable’ that defines the practices linked to both epistemé and sophia. The latter give the future an already determined quality. Any argument that the ethical involves mere calculation or is purely deductive is predicated on the overcoming of the inherently variable in the namely of the putatively invariable. A consequence of this shift from the invariable to the variable and thus to the necessity of contingency whose setting is the fabric of existence rather than a correlation between self and world is that the question of the ground of judgment and what is meant by universality will themselves have to be reposed radically. 1. In order to get to the ethical a start needs to be made with the moral. Moral arguments are positioned by a particular conceit. The conceit is the following: human actions are best understood and evaluated in terms of self-referring intentions and decisions. The self to whom reference is made is the self who acts. Within such a delimited domain the site of moral action is, as a consequence, the human subject (perhaps transposed as a ‘moral agent’). To be precise, that site locates a subject prior to any form of relationality. As such what is staged is a particular modality of human being. Relations, understood as secondary, become the setting in which that agent comes to act morally (albeit positively or negatively). Again, there is the necessity to link morality to the future (and by definition occluded in advance is the link between morality and reflection.) Indeed, to take this position a step further it could be argued that within such a setting moral agency is constructed by actions as well as intentions to act. There is a related assumption, one with its own form of necessity, namely, that prior to the decision or even the holding of an intention to act, the subject or agent is in what might be called a premoral situation. There is therefore a constitutive gap. A gap held in place by temporal concerns as well as those pertaining to human being. Thus construed, morality only comes into play at the point of action (or the intention to act). Given the identification of morals with the actions of subjects, the problem (or question) that such a setting delimits concerns how to cause subjects to act morally. There are two aspects of this setting that have to be identified in advance. The first arises from having defined morals as the concern of an individualized subject; the moral subject as an individual and thus as posited prior to relationality. The locus of moral theory is the individual. With that identification what then emerges is the possibility of recasting the presence of differences within moral theory. Hence, even though there may appear to be differing arguments about, for example, weakness of the will or moral responsibility, insofar as such arguments are taken to pertain to the realm of the moral, they are in fact no more than divergent positions within the same setting. The reason is clear. Despite their differences these positions all take the simple or isolated agent, or the individual subject, as the locus of moral concerns. As such these divergences are mere appearance. Divergences within the Same are just that. One positioning in its diverging from another cannot function as its counter-measure. (The latter is that which delimits a position by creating a set up whose specificity is announced by it establishing a relation of non-relation to that which it is taken to counter.) 4 The second aspect of this setting that needs to be noted involves a projected self/world distinction in relation to which a correlation would have to be established subsequently. Within this setting, and this despite a proliferation of examples and the creation of fictions inhabited by these subjects or agents that are supposed to be worldly in that the examples and fictions are taken to bear upon the world, what is in fact created is a setting where there is no direct relation to the world. Hence, the enduring problem of causing subjects to act morally. The disjunction is there precisely because what the invention of fictions, examples and experiments is intended to establish is, in fact, that relation. In order to capture the complex quality of this second aspect; i.e. as having a necessarily disjunctive relation to the world and yet intended to be instances or subsets of the world in order to construct an eventual correlation as a project, such strategies will be grouped together under the heading of moral world making. In having made worlds, the overall approach that has been designated as moral world making is then constrained to hold itself apart from a conception of the world as the already present locus of human activity where that locus would be eo ipso the source of moral reckoning. There would be no need for world making and thus for invention and the creation of fictions if the already present furnished - both in terms of actual as well as potential presence - such a source. The latter, the already present – the world as already there, there in its differentiation from moral world making - is a conception of world defined by activity and in which agency cannot be abstracted straightforwardly from that activity (and therefore the possibility of a correlation – positive or negative – would not a apply). Moreover, it is an understanding of the world that is not defined by a conception of making, where making is such that even though it may be related of necessity to the world and the world’s potentialities, it is not defined in terms of them. At work within a setting that takes the world as already given, a conception of world that is radically distinct from the world of moral world making, is an understanding of the world that is no longer to be thought in terms of a founding disjunction between it and the subject or moral agent (the nature of the subject is repositioned as a consequence). Within this latter understanding – an understanding that is beginning to counter the determinations at work in moral world making - the world is there, already there, as the present place of human activity. In order to capture this distinction, one in which what is fundamental to the latter element is place as a locus of activity, which, again, is the fabric of existence in order to emphasize the presence of place, thus being-in-place, as the setting that both locates and defines the ontology of human being and in which human being is acted out. Being, thus understood, is an activity. Hence ontology is defined in terms of process. As a consequence of the presence of process being is positioned in terms of activity and it is this positioning which announces the already present status of relationality. This in part is Hegel’s insight, namely that the being of being human as lived takes on the quality of what can be called being-in-relation. Relationality, in the case of Hegel, is therefore that which constitutes self-consciousness as self-consciousness.) The formulation - the ontology of human being as being-in-relation - is simply that which is proper to the being of being human. In regard to the position that takes the fabric of existence as the place of human being, this results, as noted above, in the repositioning of human being as being-inrelation. As a result, the ontological configuration proper to human being needs to be thought within a relational ontology. Within this overall setting what is fundamental to 5 the distinction between moral world making and the fabric of existence concerns a number of interrelated elements. In the first instance, it concerns the disjunction between subject and world. There is on the one hand the presence and the necessity of that disjunction within moral world making, and, on the other, the subsequent absence of such a disjunction within a conception of subject and subjectivity that is itself delimited by a definition of human being in terms of its already present location within, and thus as part of, the fabric of existence. Hence there is the already present worldliness of human being. The next element in accounting for the difference between moral world making and the fabric of existence pertains to the differing conceptions of subject (or moral agent) that are at work within these two formulations of the subject/world relation. As will become clear this distinction needs to be understood both in terms of relationality, where the latter is thought in terms of the connection between the ontology of human being and the sense of relation necessitated by it. (At work here is a sense of relationality that has both an internal as well as an external dimension; i.e. in regard to internality alterity is already part of the self. In addition, there is a doubling of the self as the precondition for reflection.) Finally, the distinction pertains to what is to be described as the temporality of positioning. In regard to the subject as positioned within moral world making, though this is a positioning worked out in greater detail below, that subject is isolated and thus exists prior to relationality (or at least is posited as such). The prior to defines its worldly position. The subject within this frame of reference comes into relation without being, ab initio already relational. Or at least this would be the claim. It is, of course, a claim that the discovery of already present relationality would render simply putative and thus merely posited. On the other hand, in regard to the subject/world relation, encapsulated within a conception of relationality which is thought under the heading of the fabric of existence priority then needs to be given to a repositioning of the world as the already present locus of experience. What this means is that the subject is to be conceived, in this instance, as already placed within that world and thus already part of the fabric of existence. The contrast therefore is between the states of being prior to as opposed to being an already present part of that which pre-exists any one act of a subject. As a result, a different understanding of existence is demanded. The pre-existent needs to be understood as that which is imbued with potentialities rather than as that which is already determined. Indeed, the redefinition of the already present in terms of potentiality is a fundamental component in understanding the distinction between the conception of human being within a setting defined by the fabric of existence as opposed to one that emerges from within moral world making. In the latter were there to be a viable sense of potentiality it would be delimited by the capacity to create fictions. Potentiality in regard to what has been designated the fabric of existence is both a quality of the world and a quality of the subject (where the latter is defined in terms of being-in-place and being-in-relation and thus as already worldly). Relationality, identified as the activity of being, allows for the transformation of both components of the relation. In order to take this analysis a step further it is essential to begin to detail those elements that characterizes moral world making in order to develop what is distinctive about the subject world relation within setting identified as the fabric of existence. Moral 6 world making involves both the projected possibility of original singularity and holding the subject apart from the world such that the question to be pursued is delimited by the subject’s becoming worldly and thus how that process can be regulated and policed. The elements constituting moral world making need to be taken up again even though this position is restrictive, reductive and in the end marked by its own impossibility. While the list is not intended to be exhaustive a start can be still be made. In sum, there are six initial elements that can be noted. In part this necessitates reiterating aspects of what has already been noted above. 2. The first element defining moral world making is that the locus of the moral is the subject given as though it were always already prior to any form of relationality. Indeed, it can be suggested further that such a set up delimits moral theory by inscribing within it the sovereignty of a subject, where sovereignty is to be understood in terms of separateness and thus isolation. Morality, within such a setting, pertains therefore to the subject who can then come to act morally. As a result, the concerns of morality are delimited by this non-relation on the one hand and individualized subject on the other. As a consequence, and exclusively within this setting, acting is understood as moving from isolation into relations. (Hence the already noted state of being prior to.) This location creates the second aspect. Namely, to the extent that the subject exists prior to the moral, such a positioning reinforces both a disjunctive relation between subject and world and equally a disjunction between what is taken to be of value, i.e. that which has moral worth and then its subsequent enactment in the world. Sequence is essential to moral world making. Within this setting the world is non-moral or functions as the locus of morality only to the extent that some actions by certain individuals are taken to be exemplary. Exemplarity, of course, only reinforces the disjunction insofar as the problem is always how to move from the exemplary to its having generality and application. This establishes the third element. The problem of exemplarity underscores the position in which the central problem of morality then concerns the ways in a given subject is to be brought to act morally. (Note here that the subject position always moves from an empty abstraction to an abstract individual.) There is an inevitability here once morality is identified by, and is thus coterminous with, the actions of an individual subject. While these actions may come to have a relational quality insofar as actions necessarily involve others (directly or consequentially) what is taken as primary is the individual prior to relationality. Thereby reinforcing the definition of the locus of moral agency as the subject who acts. Given that locus what is then of greatest significance are the prompts or the directives that give rise to action. As a consequence, the problem that emerges is how actions come to be enacted. Enacting is not a description of action per se; rather, it is a description of a form of enactment that is itself moral. The action (or actions) in question come to be understood, of course, as actions that in being enacted are, or come to be, moral. What is opened up by this formulation, one that identifies both the founding gap between self and world and the identification of the moral with the isolated subject as in some sense creating the moral, is the question of how that gap can be bridged. The gap is constitutive of the problem at the heart of moral theory. Addressing what is inherently problematic and thus responding to the questions constituting moral theory can only occur to the extent that 7 the successful introduction of the imperative is possible. The imperative marks the gap. It defines it insofar as it locates what is not done but which has to be done. While the imperative’s second aspect, which might be described as enjoined actions, precisely because the presence of the imperative creates a subject who in being joined to action is then enjoined to act and as such intends to close the gap. Taken together they comprise the fourth element of moral world making, namely the presence of the imperative as that which links the isolated abstract subject and the world. A link that is thought to bring with it the exigency that resolves the problem constituting moral theory, namely the gap between self and world. From within this framework imperatives are to be understood as providing such a link which joins the subject to the world since imperatives seek to set in place an obligation to act. Acting as joining after having been enjoined. A state of affairs that is established by forms of presentation that take on the quality of imperatives; presentations as imperatives are then taken to be that obligation. Imperatives in order that they function as imperatives have to be defined by a form of immediacy. Given an imperative, it is then to be enacted. The imperative has the structure of an obligation that gives rise to an obligation; thus, immediacy has both a necessity as well as being effective. They are the latter, i.e. effective, in the precise sense that the imperative effects, effecting immediately. The problem here is straightforward. The imperative does not have any other form of necessity than the one acquired through self-definition. The imperative attempts to link subject and world; recognizing that within this set up the subject is in a pre-moral situation prior to acting such that acting morally necessitates the move from what has been called the ‘pre-moral’ to the moral. However, this move, characterized by self-definition and immediacy and thus the move whose presence is enjoined, is more productively formulated in terms of the presence, or absence, of relationality, since what is involved is the following: there is a subject that is initially isolated and thus defined by a constitutive without relation where isolation and singularity are taken here as the position of a founding without relation, such that moral action involves the coming into relation. That entry is then taken to be the subject’s entry into the world. The link between subject and world, within this context, is provided by the presence of what can initially be understood as an imperative without obligation, but which can be recast more productively in terms of the presence of law without force. The absence of obligation or force is the result of the imperative not having a necessary connection to a subject. Hence, it is not there as a matter of necessity. On the contrary, the imperative is only ever adduced or joined to a subject. It comes therefore to be added to a structure. While the imperative brings with it a form of necessity, the necessity in question is tautological. The imperative is an imperative. The imperative, despite its structural necessity as the link joining self and world, remains without any internal justification. Any attempt to seek a justification would involve an endless regress, as the ground of the imperative is always external. Hence the imperative becomes a law without force, if force were thought to be an intrinsic quality of law. What is meant by this formulation – law without force – involves a number of considerations. To begin it needs to be noted that ‘law’ by its very nature has a regulative quality. What law stages is a relationship to the world that allows for both regulation and evaluation. And this will be the case even though the law has to apply to the world. Law, 8 here, can have a certain fluidity insofar as it can move between statute, convention, norm and rule. Nonetheless, the question of law is, of course, the question of its being followed. Actions take place and are judged in relation to the way they accord with the law. To which it should be added, albeit parenthetically, that such a designation is reinforced by the recognition that ignorance of the law does not function as a defense). The presence of a law without force, once it is recognized that the absence of force is intrinsic to law, has a direct consequence; namely, that what is necessary to law, indeed fundamental to its operability as law, is the provision of force. Law needs force in order to maintain itself as law. If that force is not intrinsic then, given the necessity for force, it must be extrinsic to law. The force which is extrinsic to law but on which law depends is most effectively thought in terms of different modalities of policing.6 The inscribed necessity of policing is the fifth aspect that characterizes what has already been identified as moral world making. Once brought to act in a certain way, while always allowing for the negative position in which subjects are deemed not to have acted morally, then morals, precisely because of their dependence upon imperatives, which are to be understood as laws without force, become, as a consequence, a question of the police. The sixth and final aspect follows directly from the presence of the police (both as an actual force and as that which law without force demands in order to be enforced). The police are not in a position of judging. Policing becomes that which enforces and sustains morality. Enforcement is, as a result, the sine qua non for morality precisely because of the isolation of the moral subject within a founding disjunctive relation to the world. In sum, the interplay of the singular subject on the one hand, and the disjunctive self/world relation on the other, repositions morality as necessitating both the law and the police. Moreover, moral world making can only continue. More and more elaborate fictions, forms of experimentation, examples will always need to be invented. And yet, they cannot close the gap. Indeed, they only serve to compound the founding aporia within the project of moral theory, i.e. the founding gap between the subject and the world that constitutes the structure of moral theory in the first place. As such, it is an aporetic set up that condemns moral theory to a form of endless repetition in which the reiterated presence of policing continues to take on different forms and the necessity to move from the pre-moral to the moral functions as a site of an impossible enforcement. 3. Any response to this position which will be the development of what has already been alluded to as counter-measure, has to begin with what has been identified as the disjunctive relation between self and world and therefore acting and the world. The world, even that conception that is positioned within the disjunction can be defined, as mentioned above, in terms of its being an already present locus of experience. The problem posed by the disjunction devolves into the following question: how is it possible to obtain an accord between a subject’s actions and the world? The accord is the enactment of whatever it is that is taken to have moral worth and in which subject and world come to be joined. The world understood as the domain of activity is the one in which the subject is already located and thus the domain where such actions will have to occur. This brings the already present worldliness of the subject into play. The fact that such actions ‘will have to occur’ within the world and indeed as part of the world allows 9 for their reformulation. They can be recast as world referring. (It is not world creating for the precise reason that world will have already been created and is thus only ever recreated through acts of reference.) What that means is twofold. In the first instance there is the supposition that actions in the world are not neutral events and moreover that the world is not a neutral setting. (Neutrality will always be betrayed by the presence of disequilibria of power as constitutive of the world and thus integral to the construction of the subject as already worldly.) Secondly, those actions are inherently consequential and more significantly occur within already present modes of intelligibility. Given this setting a return can be made to the subject or moral agent. If actions can be understood as inherently consequential and if actions occur within pre-existing structures of intelligibility, then the capacity for actions to be understood as consequential and thus to be intelligible (positively or negatively) must, in some sense, pre-exist any one action. Without at this stage pursuing questions that would pertain either to the quality of these structures or their relation to specific or individual actions what needs to be noted is that what has been created is a setting in which in virtue of a subject’s or agent’s actions already being intelligible or understandable the subject has to be conceptualized differently. Here the subject is always already acting within the world. Moreover, the world is created and recreated through those actions. This is the sense in which actions can be described as world referring. The question then of prescribing a link between subject and world becomes unnecessary, if not redundant, precisely because the link is already there with (and within) any one action. As such what needs to be amplified is how the pre-existent is to be understood (an understanding that must include its relation to the specific instance) and what is entailed by the related redundancy of prescription. Norms, statutes, conventions and laws, what in sum can be called rules of sociality, cannot be natural (nor can they be naturalized). Not only do they have a history, more significantly they are sites of contestability. Indeed, their history is the history of their contestability. What is important here is that what is contestable and thus that which has a clear and direct history is their content. In other words, what has always been contested are specific laws, already determined conventions and given norms and thus what endures as axiomatically uncontestable is the presence of laws, conventions and norms. This is the key distinction, one that will allow for the development of the complex interconnection between ethics and judgment. As a result, what is opened up is the possibility of a critique of law in the name of law. This delimits an understanding of law as that which exists without force and thus forms the basis of what stands as that which is able to function as the counter-measure, At work within this setting is a distinction between rules of sociality that can be identified with content, where content is inherently mutable diachronically, and forms of presence that are immutable. Immutability, in this context, has to be understood as involving another sense of abstraction. This does not amount to the claim that there are actual rules of sociality that pertain independently of content. Rather, it underscores the presence of a set up in which the actuality of the rules of sociality (rules with a history and which endure as sites of contestation) is such that even though those rules have both a ubiquity and a necessity that while delimiting the possibility of sociality, possibility is not identical with the content of those rules at a given period. (Indeed, this has to be this case.) In addition, precisely because those rules, in their already determined presence, 10 contain a potentiality for revision and adaptation, it should be clear that the continual adaptation of the rules of sociality, even their radical transformation, retains the necessity for the presence of rule. As such, this marks the need to distinguish between sociality understood as held in place by already determined laws, norms, etc., i.e. rules of sociality – those with an already determined content and what can be described as the transcendental condition of sociality. Moreover, these conditions construct a space in which a distinction between potential modes of sociality can be held apart from rules of sociality that are actually present. In other words, the force of the distinction between the transcendental and the actual is that the former identifies both the actual’s conditions of possibility while at the same time locating potentiality’s possibility as given in relation to the actual presence of the disequilibria of power. Once it can be argued, as noted above, that the rules of sociality are sites of contestation, where this is a much a historical as it is a philosophical claim, then the fundamentally important conclusion to be drawn from such a position is that contestation and transformation on the level of the content of any one rule does not entail that rule itself is subject to critique. Here it is vital to be clear. Transcendental conditions are not transcendent. They exist within a setting that takes the already present structure of human activity as a given, Moreover, as has been suggested, transcendental conditions are staged in relation to potentially as opposed to actuality. That potentiality is both a quality of the world and thus of the already present subject/world relation. Both are present in terms of potential rather than actual existence. The giveness of the world is its presence as an already present locus of experience. This means that conditions of intelligibility and understanding are already at hand. Thus what has to be accepted is that the presence of such a designation captures human being, thus defining the being of being human as inextricably bound by and enmeshed within the giveness of the world, a position which recalls a point already noted (though which stands in need of greater development) namely, that one of the fundamental elements of human being is place, thus being-inplace. The already existent nature of the world and then what flows from it namely the world as a locus of activity in which the subject is both present, constituted by it, and in relation to it and where both self and world have the capacity, thus potentiality, for transformation. Once this network of relations are taken together it has profound implications. The co-presence of conditions of understanding and intelligibility as already present, once coupled with the assumption that rules of sociality are a locus of continual contestation (assuming thereby that the content of the rules of sociality are inherently contestable), underscores the presence of what might be described as an ineliminable structure of commonality. To the extent that conditions of intelligibility and understanding are shared then what is a work is a form of commonality. And yet the context of commonality cannot be assumed. There is a founding complexity at work within it. This occurs in part because it is also the case that within that structure both access to the common as well as the nature of the common (hence the presence of what would count as commonality as a question) is itself a locus of contestation. Evidence for an understanding of that locus in terms contestation can be found in the continuity of claims for autonomy on the one hand and concerns for the relationship between rights and citizenship on the other. The latter is a situation that is made more complex precisely 11 because what counts as being a citizen and then as being a bearer of rights is itself a contestable domain. The consequence of contestability and thus complexity is that the modes of argumentation that were brought to bear on the relationship between rules of sociality which were identified in that context as transcendental conditions of sociality also need to be deployed in relation to commonality. The force of that distinction in this context is that it allows for the deepening of what is intended by transcendental conditions. In regard to commonality the distinction means that while the detail is always determined where determination is subject to revision, it remains the case that what cannot be revised is the necessary presence of commonality. That presence is attested to, inter alia, by the already present status of intelligibility and understanding. They hold in their commonality. (To which it should be added that commonality cannot have an assumed content and moreover the setting created by the already present status of power relations structures how the common is to be understood. Moreover, those relations will also have had a determining effect on what counts as admission to the common; an admission that becomes the affirmation of being-in-relation. While it still stands in need of greater argumentation what is beginning to emerge is the reiterated presence of a distinction between content and conditions of possibility. In addition, central to content is its capacity for revision; a capacity to be understood firstly in terms of the ineliminability of potentiality and the indeterminant nature of commonality and rule (where the latter are present as transcendental conditions). Consequently, to the extent that this distinction holds what it indicates is that commonality and rules of sociality, both present as abstractions and thus as the always-to-be-determined, determination as the identification of rule with a specific content, a determination that is inherently finite and thus contestable, are, as a result, an integral part of human being insofar as they define what is proper to the place of being human. Indeed, any development of this position has to take human being as present in terms of place and commonality as integral elements. 4. The question of what it means to be human is to be in the world. Not in a disjunctive relation to the world, but always already worldly. Hence human being is the acting out of being human. There is therefore a sense of propriety within the question of human being. Once there is the concession that there are qualities that are intrinsic to human being, what then acquires acuity is the following question: what does it mean to think those qualities philosophically? Answering such a question can take the always already present structure of understanding and intelligibility as providing the way in. Understanding and intelligibility presuppose that the structure of acting and responding is not just present, but that it precedes every instance of understanding. Within that setting the subject occurs, takes place and is placed, within acting and responding. Being-inrelation cannot be separated therefore from being-in-place. Place is another site of relationality. Overall what this means is that the self is both situated within a relational structure and is equally an effect of it, moreover, it is that relational structure that has both internal as well as external dimensions. In other words, there are both self/other relations in which the other is other to the self and where that is thought in terms of presence of another entity, as well as there being a capacity for both reflection and equally 12 estrangement, in which otherness is part of the self itself. The self is able to be other to itself. Consequently, were there to be the possible autonomy of the moral agent – where autonomy is thought as a pre-relational singularity – then such a possibility would be premised on the disavowal of the original condition of relationality unless autonomy is redefined in relational terms such that any assertion of a singularity is as an after-effect of relationality. (Hence there would then be autonomy within relationality.) The setting of relationality, as has been suggested, is provided by rules of sociality. And yet, precisely because rules of sociality are inherently contestable that brings the structure of content/abstraction into play. Equally, it incorporates what might be described as temporality of mediacy at the heart of the relational subject. Again, this works in terms of both internality which as already indicated concerns any one subject’s relation to itself, a relation that has to incorporate the unconscious’ presence within a logic of desire and the conscious deliberations of reflection, as it does forms of externality. The distinction between mediacy and immediacy is fundamental to the overall project of a repositioning a thinking of the ethical within a relational ontology and thus of establishing that which will form the basis of a counter-measure to a concern with morals to the extent that the latter is defined in terms of a singular subject posited as existing prior to relationality. Immediacy marks the response to the law that is the setting in which the singular subject is taken to operate. Within this setting responding to the imperative must always be immediate in that the imperative precludes inherent contestability. Imperatives demand a response that is itself structured by and as an imperative: i.e. an immediate response. However, once contestability is taken as definitional and moreover once relationality is not determined in advance then this opens a space. Indeed, it sets up a reciprocity between spaces of decision making and deliberation and relationality staging once again the interconnection between being-in-relation and being-in-place. Such a space allows for judgment. As a result, there will be a different temporal structure. The mediacy of judgment has an importantly different temporality from the immediacy demanded by the imperative. While judgment is not determined in advance and indeed what occasions judgment is a relation that is intrinsic to human being, relationality is not arbitrary. What has to be argued in regards to judgment is that it occurs not just within a pre-existent structure of intelligibility and understanding but that integral to that structure are the three elements that have already be noted and which are integral to that structure’s construction In sum those elements are firstly the interplay between commonality and modes of relationality, secondly, there is place and therefore being-in-place and finally rules of sociality. Taken together they can be understood as integral to the composition of the fabric of existence. To which it should be added that it is a fabric whose presence involves the continual complication provided both by the presence of the distinction between potentiality and actuality and the disequilibria of power relations. Moreover, the ground of judgment and thus the presence of justice as a possibility defined in relation to this fabric is comprised of their already present status as it is positioned by the distinction between potentiality and actuality. Commonality, place and rules of sociality describe human being as being-in-relation. More precisely they describe life. Questions of evaluation/judgment will always pertain to life. Not the good life as though the ‘good’ was an external component. Rather, life as the site in which living (living as human being) is the living out of the complexities within commonality, place and the rules of sociality. Life, being within the fabric of existence, is the locus of judgment. 13 Even though there will always be a continual struggle to provide determinations for the actual presence of rules, the detail of commonality etc., this will only ever pertain to content. Content is the site of that struggle. Moreover, it can be argued that there is an important reciprocity insofar as the refusal of commonality, rules of sociality and place, either singly or together, have to be understood as the denial of life (and with it the denial of life defined in part by the concrete/abstract relation and the primordiality of relation and thus the being of being human as being-in-relation.) Within such a setting judgment is linked to the recognition that relationality predominates and that within which it predominates is life. Hence, the question of judgment can never be effectively separated from a concern with life and its capacity to be lived out. Forming, therefore, to use Wollstonecraft’s felicitous formulation ‘a just opinion of ourselves’ necessitates understanding that the absence of neutrality is the already present concession, firstly, that relationality is an activity that involves both what Hegel understands by ‘recognition’ and thus the inevitability of being-in-relation and what Wollstonecraft identifies as the ‘jostlings of equality’. The latter is also the inscription of difference as constitutive both of equality and relationality. Secondly, precisely because commonality and the rules of sociality are always contestable and thus contain, by definition, a capacity for transformation, hence the indispensable nature of potentiality, it then follows that life itself becomes the locus in relation to which the ‘jostlings’ unfold. To which it should be added that life provides the ground in relation to which what calls on judgment can, in fact, be judged. While any conclusion is inherently provisional it can be argued, nonetheless, that there cannot be a compelling reason to act other than those that link action to judgment. The complex relation between judgment and action defines and delimits the location of education as opposed, firstly, to laws without force and then, secondly, to the imperative’s necessity for the police. In more general terms actions have a relation to a judgment. However, it is a relation, which while necessary does not involve modes of causality. Judgment occurs not in place of life such that it would then need to be applied to it. On the contrary judgment is there in the place of life. Occurring as a possibility and then as a necessity within (and with) the recognition of life as always already placed. 14 1 This paper was given as a lecture on two occasions: firstly, at Manchester Metropolitan University (October 19, 2012) and then at De Paul University in Chicago (January 18, 2013). I would like to thank in general the participants at both institutions for their spirited response and in particular Joanna Hodge at Manchester and Michael Naas and Peg Birmingham at De Paul for their kind invitations to present the lecture. 2 The engagement with relationality throughout this paper is part of a larger project that pivots around the presence of a relational ontology. Part of the more general argument is that relationality is an already present force within the history of philosophy. However, it is effaced in the name of a singularity that is taken to pre-exist relationality. It is this position that has to be countered. I have developed a more sustained account of this project in my Towards a Relational Ontology: Philosophy's Other Possibility. SUNY Press. 2015 For the statement that forms a precursor to the argument presented here, see my, The Place of the Ethical. Irish Philosophical Journal. No.5. pages 31-45. 1986. 3 G.W.F. Hegel. Phenomenology of Spirit. (translated by A.V. Miller). Oxford University Press. Oxford. 1998. Page 111. 4 Mary Wollstonecraft. Vindication of the Rights of Women. T.S. Unwin. London. 1891. Page 258. 5 See the discussion of the relationship between these terms as it takes place throughout Book. VI of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. The key point – though it is one that warrants considerable discussion in its own right – concerns the way Aristotle links phronesis to the variable and thus to that which cannot have – by definition – the same structure of certainty that obtains in the domains of mathematics and then by extension the sciences. Calculation within the realm of the ethical is qualitatively different. One of the most important engagements with this position is T.H. Irwin. Ethics as an Inexact Science: Aristotle’s Ambitions for Moral Theory. In Moral Particularism. Edited by Brad Hooker, and Margaret Olivia Little. Clarendon Press. Oxford. 2000. 6 This is the position argued by Walter Benjamin in his ‘Towards a Critique of Violence’. It is integral to Benjamin’s philosophical project. I have pursued this argument in much greater detail in my Working with Walter Benjamin. Recovering a Political Philosophy. Edinburgh University Press. Edinburgh. 2013