“..for the relationship between people and government is the most pervasive ideal relationship upon which commerce between teacher and pupil, lord and servants, father and family, general and soldier, master and apprentice have unconsciously been modeled.”—Friedrich Nietzsche. 

For centuries, the history of philosophy has explored the general opposition set up between Occidental and Oriental philosophy, especially concerning their respective “origins.” Generally speaking, it has been assumed that Western and Eastern philosophies differ over the metaphysical question of the constitution of the (conditions of possibility of the) universe, ending with the antinomy of a decision concerning Being/Nothingness (Plato vs. Lao-Tzu, both of whom subordinate becoming either to the movement of the idea or the non-activity of the Dao). In the same sense, Aristotle’s political ontology has been argued to end up in another binary opposition with that of Confucius: it is asserted that the former makes the state primary to the family, whereas for the latter this formula must be inverted. Instead, these reflections will attempt to illustrate that the opposition of these philosophical decisions should be shown to be inadequately founded and that a more clarified reading can show that this opposition is both untenable and capable of exemplifying that the problem has not yet been sufficiently determined.

In order to construct a contextual problematic, i.e. one determined by other conditions already present in both philosophies, we should resituate the problem elsewhere before addressing the opposition between family and state. For example, one of the primary conditions for Aristotle in the Politics is that of equality. In book V especially, the problem of equality most especially addresses the ways in which the rich and the poor can be considered to be unequal or disproportionate. These distinctions gain their importance because they define the different ways in which democracies and oligarchies quantify the quality in equality. It could be easy to oppose Confucius to this characterization:

 Zigong said: “What do you think of the saying:’ Poor but not inferior; rich but not superior’?” The  Master replied: “Not bad, but not as good as: ‘Poor but enjoying the way; rich but loving ritual  propriety.’”E2

What Zigong says to the master appears to be the solution to the Aristotelian riddle or problematic concerning the status of the rich and the poor: it is not that they should be considered equal, but that they should not be considered unequal. By inverting the perspective on the relation, Zigong seems to have resolved the oppositions in an almost Hegelian way. But the master answers something that actually resonates with a more fundamental requirement of Aristotle, one that is even more primary than the family (for both philosophers): namely, the question of the perpetuation of noble actions or ritual propriety (li).    

Although it could be argued that the perspective of the state dominates the Politics, it is extremely symptomatic that Aristotle obsesses over characterizing the virtues and vices pertaining to individuals, even if it is only through generalized forms, especially in relation to virtuous persons (whom Confucius would call junzi, or “exemplary persons”). It is in this sense that Aristotle also founds his political ontology on the various types of individuals, differentiating them according to vice and virtue, and, more commonly according to the problematic of equality, according to wealth. When Confucius quotes: “Exemplary persons help out the needy; they do not make the rich richerE3,” Aristotle tries to take this one step further (even if it demonstrates his own prejudices of supporting the middle way). In order to regulate inequality of wealth, Aristotle advocates self-moderation for the rich: “The beginning of reform is not so much to equalize property as to train the nobler sort of natures not to desire more, and to prevent the lower from getting more; that is to say, they must be kept down, but not ill-treated.”E4 Although the last part of this statement seems contrary to the Confucian path, it should be noted that both philosophers would subordinate this question of class and wealth to something more primary than the state, which is the perpetuation of noble actions or ritual propriety (ends) which are actualized through the ideal of the family (means).

While it could be argued that Aristotle makes the state primordial in the sense that he argues it precedes the individual like the whole precedes its parts, it can be demonstrated that Aristotle makes the family primary in order to perpetuate a higher goal, namely that of noble actions or precisely li. He writes:

 It is clear then that a state is not a mere society, having a common place, established for the  prevention of mutual crime and for the sake of exchange. These are conditions without which a  state cannot exist; but all of them together do not constitute a state, which is a community of  families and aggregations of families in well-being, for the sake of a perfect and self-sufficing  life.

When Aristotle reminds us that the end of the state is the good life, he is not making a claim disconnected from the factical conditions of our existence (that we have to be raised, i.e. cultivated), but he is also not simply saying that the family is an end in itself, somehow cut off from ritual propriety. Instead, he emphasizes: “Our conclusion, then, is that political society exists for the sake of noble actions, and not of living together” (1281a3-4). It is here in this paradoxical twist where the family is negated and yet raised to a higher level that the political ontology of Confucius and Aristotle merge into a vision where the family only takes precedence due to its capacity for fostering virtue.
 

Although I have shown that Aristotle and Confucius agree more on the question of family than may be generally thought, I have hoped to be able to extend this to a more interesting conclusion, which is the fact that the more apparent opposition between Aristotle and Confucius actually lies elsewhere. It could be reduce it to the content of their arguments concerning morality, or some other criterion, or instead we could assert that the opposition actually lies in the differences in the form of the presentation and the audience held in mind. For the true opposition actually concerns the fact that Aristotle was thinking of a general (young aristocratic) audience and had no specific concept of a unitary culture motivating his conceptual investigations, whereas Confucius’ entire project is to specify the particular criteria for virtue in a particular, unitary culture (or at least one capable of being unified). It is in this sense that Aristotle’s emphasis on the generality of the state prevails in his discourse whereas the specifics to the dynamism of the family becomes Confucius’ central concern.

 In chapter 9 of book III of the Politics, Aristotle discusses the general relation between justice and the state. In the course of examining the relation of equality and inequality, Aristotle proposes that the state “exists for the sake of a good life, and not the sake of life only” (1279b31-32). Notice that the good is already predicated of the state in this statement, and it is because of this bias that Aristotle will conclude: “if life only were the object, slaves and brute animals might form a state, but they cannot, for they have no share in happiness in a life based on choice” (1279b33-34). Although happiness as an end for the virtuous life is one of Aristotle’s primary concerns, the emphasis on the choices that the political situation makes possible seems to conceal the fundamental lack of choices for the individual as well as the a priori nature of any state whatsoever. This assertion stems from Aristotle’s misunderstanding that the political arrangement of a state (whether constitutional or otherwise) has very little to do with the will or mood of the multitude, even if, in the last analysis, they are given priority in power because of their total quantity of property (cf. 1282a37-40).

 In other words, since Aristotle theorized earlier that the state precedes any individual which would constitute it (just as the whole precedes the parts), it seems to be false that the state would only consist of individuals for whom life was founded on a choice. Moreover, when Aristotle claims that the state is a community of families whose goal is self-perfection and self-sufficiency, he seems to undercut the primordial character of the state that would subordinate families for its own ends (i.e. his previous position). More fundamentally, he also seems to negate his earlier statement that political life had anything to do with a choice. He writes: “Such a community can only be established among those who live in the same place and intermarry. Hence there arise in cities family connections, brotherhoods, common sacrifices, amusements which draw men together. But these are created by friendship, for to choose to live together is friendship” (1280b36-38 my emphasis). It then follows that our political environment is contingent and that friendship is only a choice in terms of choosing to live virtuously; only then could we call “living together” a choice, insofar as we choose not to live or strive against one another.

 The concept of friendship, which is analyzed in depth in the Nicomachean Ethics, in relation to political choice can be better illustrated in reference to the pre-eminent individual (1284a10-15). The pre-eminent individual is a person whose excellence, especially in political affairs, overshadows that of anyone else. In fact, Aristotle admits that they are “God among men” and that “legislation is necessarily concerned only with those who are equal in birth and in capacity; and that for men of pre-eminent excellence there is not law—they are themselves a law.” In this sense, they are above the law simply by being at the very center of it. Men of this caliber may find it difficult to find friends because of a lack of equals suitable for them, but the important point is that the example of the man above the law logically leads to the counterexample, i.e. that of the ostracized man, the outlaw, those beneath the law (1284a34-36). 

What is characteristic of these singular positions in society is the fact that they have nothing to do with a political choice, at least in the straightforward sense in which Aristotle presents his argument. If we were to agree that these positions could be characterized by choice, we would be forced to look at the more fundamental phenomena at work in the unconscious of the society as a whole. In other words, ostracizing someone from political life and incarnating them in the very fabric of the law constitute the extreme forms under which the balance of justice and friendship in the state come to take on their most dissymmetrical distributions of equality and inequality. But it is also here that justice as friendship, as the (anonymous) perpetuation of noble deeds in the absence of a telos, can illustrate the very inconsistency of the social bond (Badiou).

Everyone will agree that it is of the highest importance to know whether we are not duped by morality. Emmanuel Levinas—Totality and Infinity

It is a question of attaining this will that the event creates in us…It is a question of becoming a citizen of the world—Gilles Deleuze, Logic of Sense [1]

From a Melancholy Science towards a Negative Diale(c)t(h)ics

Adorno’s ethics is a “melancholy science” because it has grown weary of the subject. In other words, Adorno’s ethics is both pessimistic and antagonistic because it aims to critique the processes of subjectification which the dominant society (re)produces. On the one hand, Adorno analyzes the principium individuationis of modern society, but on the other he does not subsume it to a dialectic which would lay claim to totality through a unifying principle of identity. Yet Adorno’s critique of modes of subjectification and individuation are always brought back to the society through which they are socially and economically determined. This is what allows his ethics the means to sharpen its critical edge. The main thrust of this ethics is to assert a radical critique of the substantiality of the subject and to fully do away with the absolute, constitutive nature of the self [2] founded upon a transcendent God [3]. In following this critique through its development in a negative dialectic, we will say that Adorno’s analyses constitute a minor ethics because they submit the major mode to a critique that attempts to dislodge the dominant image of thought [4] from its normative pretensions.

From Aristotelian Neurosis to Adornian Manic-Depression

Adorno’s first suspicion against modern society that we should identify is his fear of the dominance of normality. He writes, “No science has yet explored the inferno in which were forged the deformations that later emerge to daylight as cheerfulness, openness, sociability, successful adaptation to the inevitable, an equable, practical frame of mind.” (Minima Moralia, 59). Adorno might call this science “the psychoanalysis of proto-typical culture” (58). But Adorno, like Deleuze, identifies this movement of normality in thought itself. In his section “For Post-Socratics,” Adorno argues that the wish to be write in argumentation derives from the “spirit of self-preservation which philosophy is precisely concerned to break down” (44). He argues that this naivety is founded on agreement between minds able to communicate, “and thus on complete conformism” (44). On the other hand, Adorno urges us to lose an argument in such a way as to convict the opponent of untruth. This is precisely the dialectical thrust of a minor ethics: its dialectical reason, when set against the dominant mode of reason, is unreasonable (45). For Adorno, “The dialectician’s duty is thus to help this fool’s truth to attain its own reasons, without which it will certainly succumb to the abyss of the sickness implacably dictated by the healthy common sense of the rest” (45). In terms of the situation then, a minor ethics would appear irrational until the point at which it encompasses and cancels the mediocre/major mode. It therefore proposes an anti-Statist thought because it is not rendered homogeneous within a larger totality—its negativity remains as a residue which constantly thwarts the identity of any given power center, in other words, its negentropy (which can be quantified positively).
Adorno’s Minima Moralia could very well be aimed antagonistically at Aristotle’s “speculations” on happiness (Adorno’s Minima against Aristotle’s [5] Magna, how is Aristotle submitted to Adorno’s dialectic?), inverting them theoretically: “Psycho-analysis prides itself on restoring the capacity for pleasure, which is impaired by neurotic illness. As if the mere concept of a capacity for pleasure did not suffice gravely to devalue such a thing, if it exists. As if a happiness gained through speculation on happiness were not the opposite, a further encroachment of institutionally planned behavior-patterns on the ever-diminishing sphere of experience” (62). It is almost as though Aristotle could be the spokesperson for an overarching social super-ego [6] constantly imploring us to augment our virtue through pleasures guaranteed by the dominant middle-way. Indeed, not because Aristotle has psychoanalytic tendencies, quite the contrary: but precisely because the “authority” of the Nicomachean Ethics is so widespread and imperialistic that it most undoubtedly helped conspire with the development of Christian morality through the painstaking attempts taken by medieval scholars to synthesize doctrine with Aristotelian logic (guaranteeing the consistency of the social domination of desire due to its rigorous reliance on common sense). But the question becomes—doesn’t psychoanalysis equally produce its “virtues” to be followed precisely in its promise of resituating the subject for this better capacity? In effect, doesn’t the psychoanalytic “cure” of the normal-neurotic precisely mirror the Aristotelian virtuous type whose excellence must guarantee his happiness through the mediocritization of his desire? Isn’t there some sort of bizarre mathematical formula at work here that would stipulate that there is an inverse proportion between the capacity of/for desire and the capacity for pleasure? In other words, doesn’t the psychoanalyst and the Aristotelian at bottom believe that by reducing the subject’s continuum of desire (castrating it to the middle-of-the-road, normal-neurotic type), one’s capacity for pleasure can then be increased because of a gradual diminishment in lowered expectations, an impoverishment of the imagination of different possible worlds through various potential means, the acceleration of alienating mechanisms that overcode desire according to binary relations (which on a more fundamental level accord with a “politics” of how the socius is to be arranged and organized)?
But this does not yet answer the question of Adorno’s relation to Aristotle. Let us suppose that Adorno’s Minima is the minor mode of morality against Aristotle’s Magna, the major mode. Also, Adorno’s dialectic is a minor mode because by refusing to completely sublimate the individual into the universal, by asserting the residual negativity of the individual in every use of the dialectic, he forces ethics to enter into a state of dynamic disequilibrium which escapes the logic of constants established from predetermined binary oppositions. A minor ethics is suspicious of the common solutions proposed by the major mode. In effect, it is a teleological suspension of the ethical as such, for the minor mode is completely foreign and incomprehensible to the logic of the situation.
To get closer to the heart of the dominant, major mode of ethics, let us take a look at a passage from Aristotle’s Magna Moralia: “Being happy, then, and happiness, consist in living well, and living well is living in accordance with the excellences. This, then, is the end and happiness and the best thing…Happiness therefore will consist in living in accordance with the excellences. Since then the best good is happiness, and this is the end, and the complete end is an activity, it follows that it is by living in accordance with the excellences that we shall be happy and shall have the best good” (Book I:4, 1184b). Adorno knows this mode all too well: the reduction of man to things, desires to ends which are deemed good—happiness—because they do not threaten the social order. The pure reason of virtues and excellences treats subjects as so many “loci of modes of behavior [7].” Aristotle’s Magna Moralia is an investigation into character and its corresponding essence in the virtues or excellences. Aristotle even etymologically provides clues for his reasoning: “‘Character[8]’ (aethos) derives from ‘custom’ (ethos); for it is called moral (ethike)” (I:6, 1185b). In the major mode of ethics, one’s character is guaranteed by the impositions of custom through moral education. The minor mode is not anti-ethical as such, though it may seem that way to the dominant mode. Instead, one aspect of the minor mode calls for a teleological suspension of the major in order to wager on what the ethical will have been. Another side of it is more oppositional: perform a genealogy of morality, suspend it to examine it transcendentally, ask for the conditions of possibility for this character and what assemblages are necessary for the technics of this custom, etc. The terms seem to change as the dialectic progresses, for now we move into questions of identity [9] (the mechanisms for deploying redundancy) and freedom (the coercive social mechanisms of civilization and/or lines of flight that thwart identity through the minor mode of a negative dialectic).

From Negative Dialectics to Minor Ethics

To help establish the conceptual framework of a minor ethics, it would be helpful to take a detour through Adorno’s critique of identity in Negative Dialectics. The negativity of Adorno’s dialectic asserts a liberation from the equation that produces a positivity from the negation of a negation [10]. The principle behind this insistence of negativity resides in Adorno’s maneuver to substitute “for the unity principle, and for the paramountcy of the supra-ordinated concept, the idea of what would be outside the sway of such unity” (xx). In this sense, negative dialectics bases its movement on a critique of identity [11].
The critique of identity, however, is inseparable from the development of a meta-modelization of the dominant image of thought [12]. This is because Adorno stresses that thinking is identifying, that identity is inherent in thought itself (5). On the other hand, dialectics is the consistent sense of nonidentity, so much so that “Contradiction is nonidentity under the aspect of identity; the dialectical primary of the principle of contradiction makes the thought of unity the measure of heterogeneity” (5). However, in his objections to traditional dialectics, Adorno argues that if dialectics reduces everything to contradiction, “the full diversity of the noncontradictory, of that which is simply differentiated, will be ignored” (5). It is only because of the dominance of identity and the drive towards unity and totality—the structure of a certain image of thought—that all that is differentiated [13] becomes demoted into what is divergent, dissonant, and negative.
Negative dialectics strives to reconcile the nonidentical without submitting it to the positivity of a sublimated totality. In another sense, Adorno conceives this as the movement whereby concepts can transcend the nonconceptual [14] : “But whatever truth the concepts cover beyond their abstract range can have no other stage than what the concepts suppress, disparage, and discard. The cognitive utopia would be to use concepts to unseal the nonconceptual with concepts, without making it their equal” (10). In its reflections on utopia, negative dialectics “is the ontology of the wrong state of things” (11). A minor ethics based on negative dialectics calls into question a totality which would claim accrue in a positive aggregate. Thus it denounces the positive, bad infinity of a static identity resulting from the imposition of systems of homogeneity. These “systems” extend to States and other power centers in general which can only be defined on their resistance against allowing flows to escape, that is, allowing the nonidentical to proliferate without a supplementary, unifying principle. In turning to psychoanalysis, we can see that Adorno’s negative dialectics extends to the critique of the positivity of rational modes of attaining happiness, that is, virtue.

The Psychoanalysis of Broken Desires

As the projected science of the subject, psychoanalysis positioned itself at the turn of the 20th century both as a liberating investigation of the sources of repression and as a reinforcement of those very sources of domination. Adorno devotes at least 5 of his aphorisms in the first part of Minima Moralia to questions specifically addressing the psychoanalytical promotion of a certain type of sickness all the more difficult to uproot and identify because it takes on the guise of the health of the normal. Unfortunately, the ethics of Freudian psychoanalysis has always been subservient to a particular view of the good citizen, the good society, and thus to a certain type of political aspiration. Due to Adorno’s “melancholy science” which investigates the plight of the individual, it might be useful to analyze what follows from the fact that Freud “takes over the antithesis of social and egoistic, statically, without testing it…Or rather, he vaciallates…between negating the renunciation of instinct as repression contrary to reality, and applauding its sublimation as beneficial to culture” (37).
Adorno specifies that it is not Freud’s lack of warmth that is symptomatic of his repressive traits, but the fact that after tracing conscious actions back to an unconscious basis, Freud still “concurred with the bourgeois contempt of instinct which is itself a product of precisely the rationalizations that he dismantled.” This is what leads Freud to oppose sexual goals as selfish against social ones (in particular, this would be to ignore the role of reproduction—which does not mean that sexuality is more social than individual but that it shares social goals (maintaining the species) and individual ones (pleasure, shared intimacy, expression of love, etc.). By relegating sexuality to individual drives which must be sublimated in order to become socially redeemable, Freud reproduces the double bind of the bourgeois order which simultaneously urges us to enjoy while rejecting all signs of enjoyment as tactless and not polite to bring out in the light. Denigrating the sexual and obscuring the social, Adorno argues that Freud “stands ambivalently between desire for the open emancipation of the oppressed, and apology for open oppression.”
How does this double bind come to be manifested? To simplify somewhat on Adorno’s argument, Freud reduces reason to rationalization insofar as he rejects the end of sexuality (pleasure) which alones proves the means (reason) reasonable. Thus, pleasure becomes a “trick for preserving the species” and ultimately resembles a cunning form of reason, a rationalization. Adorno sees this as a false dialectical conclusion because Freud does not take account of the moment in which pleasure “transcends its subservience to nature.” Yet the conclusion nonetheless takes hold and truth becomes effectively relativized at the same time as individuals are left defenseless to dominant power formations.
The aporia continues further in Adorno’s next section where he begins by stating “Psychoanalysis prides itself on restoring the capacity for pleasure, which is impaired by neurotic illness” (38). Adorno finds it astonishing that a discourse on happiness could not have been immediately seen for what it is, i.e. a symptom of the very devaluation of pleasure and happiness themselves. In this sense, psychoanalytic discourse finds an ancient forerunner in Aristotle’s discourses on virtue. Don’t the psychoanalytic cure and the Aristotelian middle way represent perfectly the dismemberment of desire in the attempt to create stable individuals who are “happy” with the dominant order? Adorno performs a reversal on the assumptions of these two discourses when he argues that, in order to be able to imagine new ways of promoting different paths to happiness, we must become disgusted with the happiness of normality, we must gorge ourselves on the inadequacies offered by the actual state of affairs, in a word, we must destroy the categories of happiness to which we are resigned to the point of becoming insensible to the established means of creating happiness.
Isn’t this why in his discourses on the sickness of morality Adorno can seem simultaneously so pessimistic and yet so uncompromisingly sober? When sick with the health of the normal, it is only the forms that seem to be labeled as sick, perverse, and mad that hold the keys to revitalizing a more genuine form of health. Adorno would be in agreement with Nietzsche who believes that it is precisely the sickness, stagnation, and weakness of the good which have to be fought against at all costs. This is because, in order to stabilize its power centers and thus render them normal, the good have to foster means of repression that simultaneously represses the symptoms of that repression. With the double bind on the individual’s responsibility to become a sublimated, good citizen comes the double stranglehold on the dynamic production of desire. Relegated to the general, the particular’s power is nullified and brought to a higher level that ignores differences on a molecular level. Raising the social to the absolute, the individual cannot escape the normality which common sense declares as a universal constant of and precondition to good culture. In modern society (which, through its development of power, worries less about the individual’s transgressions), the individual’s deviance from an established order does not so much warrant open, reactionary and repressive measures but instead results to more insidious means which mark the individual as uncultured, unsophisticated, tactless and uncivilized [15].

Positive and/or Negative Freedom

Freedom [16] for Adorno struggles against the imposition of redundancies of the normal in the incessant reinforcement of identity which is produced by modern social machinery. Identity has a double edge to it depending upon its intent: on the one hand, it can be treated as the absolute and can be reinforced, or “we feel that identity is the universal coercive mechanism which we, too, finally need to free ourselves from universal coercion, just as freedom can come to be real only through coercive civilization, not by way of any ‘Back to nature’” (ND 147). In fact, the negativity of Adorno’s dialectic expresses its logic in a very tortuous way [17]: the actualization of any state of affairs (its identity) arises at the cost of an initial multiplicity, a flow of intensities which are in themselves pure differences. The untruth of any actualization of identity never exhausts the virtuality of the ideas which inhabit the “cavities” between the state of things as they now exist and the possible rearrangement according to virtual maps—the negative breaks with the real, the diagrammatic ideas—which can produce new assemblages and new actualizations. Adorno’s utopia would never accept the absolute character of any identity formation because the claim for a “togetherness of diversity” which would define likeness “as that which is unlike itself” arises from a dialectic which asserts the nonidentity of the system, its inevitable and incessant failure at complete homeostasis. Against the immanent threat of Adorno’s technico-social mechanisms of conformity, we should try to outline a new ecological machinics which does not proceed according to a dialectic of vital and mechanical forces but subverts this dualism altogether by finding the creativity of the machine in its ability to effectuate heterogeneous realities instead of rendering realities homogeneous in a structural matrix.
In the end, there is nevertheless a Nietzschean tone to his critique of a positive ethics, what we have called major. Adorno argues: “Posited positively, as given or as unavoidable amidst given things, freedom turns directly into unfreedom” (232). For Adorno, positive freedom turns concrete in the changing forms of repression, as a resistance to repression (265). He sees in Kantian ethics and its dogmatic doctrine of the free will “an urge to punish harshly, irrespective of empirical conditions.” He more clearly shows his ties to Nietzsche’s understanding of the metaphysics of the hangman when he argues that the glorifying the intelligible freedom of the individual allowed “empirical individuals to be held more ruthlessly accountable, to be more effectively curbed with the prospect of punishment that could be metaphysically justified” (215). In light of this dialectical movement, the positivity of freedom can only coincide with a continued belief in the absolute, constitutive nature of the self. How are we to recreate the social order transversally without rendering the more susceptible to the decay against which such processes are directed? In other words, the task for thought today is to rethink the coordinates and conditions of possibility of revolution and freedom [18] without resubmitting the socius to investments of the previously established order.

Adorno, Theodor. Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life. Trans. E.F.N. Jephcott. London: Verso, 2005.
—. Negative Dialectics. Trans. E.B. Ashton. New York: Continuum, 2004.
Aristotle. Magna Moralia in The Complete Works of Aristotle. Ed. Jonathan Barnes. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1984.
Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. Trans. Paul Patton. New York: Columbia, 1994.
—. Logic of Sense. Trans. Mark Lester. New York: Columbia, 1990.
Guattari, Félix. Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm. Trans. Julian Peyfanis and Paul Bains. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1995.
Levinas, Emmanuel. Totality and Infinity. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne, 1969.
Veatch, Henry B. Rational Man: A Modern Interpretation of Aristotelian Ethics, Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1962.

1. “Either ethics makes no sense at all, or this is what it means and has nothing else to say: not to be unworthy of what happens to us. To grasp whatever happens as unjust and unwarranted (it is always someone else’s fault) is, on the contrary, what renders our sores repugnant—veritable ressentiment, resentment of the event. There is no other ill will. What is really immoral is the use of moral notions like just or unjust, merit or fault. What does it mean then to will the event?” (p. 149).

2. Adorno writes in Minima Moralia: “The self should not be spoken of as the ontological ground, but at the most theologically, in the name of its likeness to God. He who holds fast the self and does away with theological concepts helps to justify the diabolical positive, naked interest” (“Gold assay,” 99).

3. Cf. Minima Moralia: “Even the Christian doctrine of death and immortality, in which the notion of absolute individuality is rooted, would be wholly void if it did not embrace humanity” (97). Thus the self is not necessarily done away with through discarding God, but, on the other hand, we would say that we do not believe in God because we do not believe in the permanence and transcendence of our own individuality. Deleuze writes in Difference and Repetition: “God survives as long as the I enjoys a subsistence, a simplicity and an identity which express the entirety of its resemblance to the divine. Conversely, the death of God does not leave the identity of the I intact, but installs and interiorises it within it an essential dissimilarity, a ‘demarcation’ in place of the mark or the seal of God” (86-87).

4. Deleuze will write in Difference and Repetiton: “The conditions of a true critique and a true creation are the same: the destruction of an image of thought which presupposes itself and the genesis of the act of thinking in thought itself” (139).

5. Adorno almost dedicates a subchapter (“Contemplation”)in Negative Dialectics to Aristotle (I say almost, because it’s actually on Marx—who better than to invert the Greek bourgeois contemplative life?: “To this day, the trouble with contemplation—with the contemplation that contents itself this side of practice, as Aristotle was the first to develop it as summum bonum—has been that its very indifference to the task of changing the world made it a piece of obtuse practice, a method and instrumentality” (244). He is also critical of Aristotle, the great formalizer of logic, elsewhere: “Logic is a practice insulated against itself. Contemplative conduct, the subjective correlate of logic, is the conduct that wills nothing.” (230). Strong words against the admirer of the vita contemplativa.

6. In reference to the super-ego, Adorno writes: “The Freudian school in its heroic period…used to call for a ruthless criticism of the super-ego as something truly heteronomous and alien to the ego. The super-ego was recognized, then, as blindly, unconsciously internalized coercion…Psychoanalysis, clinging to its fatal faith in the division of labor, uncritically receives this view of normalcy from the existing society. As soon as it puts the brakes of social conformism on the critique of the super-ego launched by itself, psychoanalysis comes close to that repression which to this days has marred all teachings of freedom…A critique of the super-ego would have to turn into one of the society that produces the super-ego; if psychoanalysis stand mute here, they accommodate the ruling social norm” (Negative Dialectics, 272-274). In effect, what should be noted is that psychoanalysis is a constant target for Adorno because it simultaneously parades itself as a liberating science while explicitly forming its ends and its subjects on behalf of the state of affairs. We will see that Freudian psychoanalysis especially stands convicted in Minima Moralia.

7. Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment. Trans. John Cumming. London: Continuum, 86.

8. Listen to how a neo-Aristotelian describes the situation: “From the moral standpoint the important thing is not whether I am shrewd enough to avoid certain misfortunes…but whether I have sufficient character (moral virtue) to sustain them in such a way as a good man or a wise man would do. For imprisonment and financial ruin are misfortunes which may be borne either nobly or ignobly. Which way, then, shall I bear them?” Henry B. Veatch, Rational Man: A Modern Interpretation of Aristotelian Ethics, Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1962. 163-164. What is truly interesting about this claim is that it comes close to approaching Deleuze’s dictum on ethics: not to be unworthy of what happens to us. This may be where an ethics of the event falls prey to a political territoriality which wants to know if we handle the event well, i.e. if we pass or fail, belong or become ostracized. Through what event do we gain the marks of morality which guarantee the stamp of character that we need to be a part of the good guys? In other words, mnemotechnically, what is the (corporeal) price to be paid (quantitatively) in order to rationally (re)produce the good throughout society? In a word, what are the social, technological, institutional, authoritarian, etc. machines that carry out this process and what are the assemblages required to guarantee the consistency of these machines?

9. Cf. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E.B. Ashton. London: Continuum, p. 146-48, “On the Dialectics of Identity.” Adorno’s insistence on the negativity of the dialectic—the unease with which the Aufhebung cancels the negative and renders it fully sublimated into a (normative)positivity—is extremely clear in his denunciation of totality as perpetually non-identical. Adorno argues that “The will to identity works in each synthesis. As an a priori task of thought, a task immanent in thought, identity seems positive and desirable: the substrate of the synthesis is thus held to be reconciled with the I, and therefore to be good. Which promptly permits the moral desideratum that the subject, understanding how much the cause is its own, should bow to what is heterogeneous to it. Identity is the primal form of ideology.”

10. Adorno writes: “the structure of [Hegel’s] system would unquestionably fall without the principle that to negate negation is positive, but the empirical substance of dialectics is not the principle but the resistance which otherness offers to identity. Hence the power of dialectics” (160-161). More emphatically, Adorno argues: “If the whole is the spell, if it is negative, a negation of particularities—epitomized in the whole—remains negative. Its only positive side would be criticism, definite negation; it would not be a circumventing result with a happy grasp on affirmation…To negate a negation does not bring about its reversal; it proves, rather, that the negation was not negative enough. The other possibility for dialectics—on which in Hegel’s case served to integrate it, at the cost of its potency—is to remain eventually indifferent to that which has been posited initially” (160). Notice Adorno’s language here: to remain indifferent to it is not to be rendered identical to. Indifference indicates the residual character of the negativity which does not affirm a nondifference, or positivity.

11. Adorno writes: “The name of dialectics says no more, to begin with, than that objects do not go into their concepts without leaving a remainder, that they come to contradict the traditional norm of adequacy. Contradiction…indicates the untruth of identity, the fact that the concept does not exhaust the thing conceived” (5).

12. Adorno will write: “A model covers the specific, and more than the specific, without letting it evaporate in its more general super-concept. Philosophical thinking is the same as thinking in models; negative dialectics is an ensemble of analyses of models” (29).

13. In fact, Adorno will stress: “Because of the immanent nature of consciousness, contradictoriness itself has an inescapably and fatefully legal character. Identity and contradiction of thought are welded together. Total contradiction is nothing but the manifested untruth of total identification. Contradiction is nonidentity under the rule of a law that affects the nonidentical as well” (6).

14. Adorno writes later: “That the concept is a concept even when dealing with things in being does not change the fact that on its part it is entwined with a nonconceptual whole…To change the direction of conceptuality, to give it a turn toward nonidentity, is the hinge of negative dialectics. Insight into the constitutive character of the nonceptual in the concept would end the compulsive identification which the concept brings unless halted by such reflection. Reflection upon its own meaning is the way out of the concept’s seeming being-in-itself as a unit of meaning” (12).

15. Concerning the role of the unity of common sense in the dominant image of thought, Adorno writes in Negative Dialectics: “Once it is held to be self-understood, excused from rational reflection, the self-understood character offers a refuge to the unelucidated remnant and to repression. To be self-understood is the mark of civilization: good, we say, is what is one, what is immutable, what is identical. What does not comply, any heritage of the pre-logical natural moment, will immediately turn into evil, into something as abstract as the principle of its opposite. Bourgeois evil is the post-existence of older things, of things that have been subdued but not wholly subdued” (242).

16. Adorno makes a Nietzschean echo against Kantian moral principles in his section ‘The Fiction of Positive Freedom:’ “Freedom can be defined in negation only, corresponding to the concrete form of a specific unfreedom” (Negative Dialectics, 231). Perhaps this is where Nietzsche’s freedom for can be brought in against the Kantian dogma that any positive freedom is an “as if.” A freedom for would have both aspects of positivity and negativity, due to different movements of connections, disjunction, destruction, which do not obey the laws of the situation. On the other hand, due to Adorno’s ambivalent relation to Nietzsche in Minima Moralia, it would be difficult to fully account for the complex relationship between the former and the latter. Cf. especially section 99 “Gold assay” in which Adorno strongly critiques Nietzsche’s uncritical reception of the notion of “genuineness.”

17. “Living in the rebuke that the thing is not identical with the concept is the concept’s longing to become identical with the thing. This is how the sense of nonidentity contains identity. The supposition of identity is indeed the ideological element of pure thought, all the way down to formal logic; but hidden in it is also the truth moment of ideology, the pledge that there should be no contradiction, no antagonism…Such hope is contradictorily tied to the breaks in the form of predicative identity. Philosophical tradition had a word for these breaks: ‘ideas…’ They are negative signs. The untruth of any identity that has been attained is the obverse of truth. The ideas live in the cavities between what things claim to be and what they are. Utopia would be above identity and above contradiction; it would be a togetherness of diversity…Traditional philosophy believes that it knows the unlike by likening it to itself, while in so doing it really knows itself only. The idea of a changed philosophy would be to become aware of likeness by defining it as that which is unlike itself” (ND, 150).

18. “The autopoetic node in the machine is what separates and differentiates it from structure and gives it value. Structure implies feedback loops, it puts into play a concept of totalisation that It itself masters. It is occupied by inputs and outputs whose purpose is to make the structure function according to a principle of eternal return. It is haunted by a desire for eternity. The machine, on the contrary, is shaped by a desire for abolition. Its emergence is doubled with breakdown, catastrophe—the menace of death. It possesses a supplement: a dimension of alterity which it develops in different forms. This alterity differentiates it from structure, which is based on a principle of homeomorphism. The difference supplied by machinic autopoesis is based on disequilibrium, the prospection of virtual Universes far from equilibrium.” Felix Guattari, Chaosmosis: an Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm. Trans. Julian Peyfanis and Paul Bains. Indianapolis: University of Indiana Press, 1995, 37.

19. Echoing Negative Dialectics throughout many different passages, Deleuze seems close to Adorno when he writes: “Take the social multiplicity: it determines sociability as a faculty, but also the transcendent object of sociability which cannot be lived within actual societies in which the multiplicity is incarnated, but must be and can be lived only in the element of social upheaval (in other words, freedom, which is always hidden among the remains of an old order and the first fruits of a new)” (Difference and Repetition, 193).

Aristotle and Light
Contemplation, Activity and Happiness in the Nicomachean Ethics

For while the whole life of the gods is blessed, and that of men too in so far as some likeness of such activity belongs to them, none of the other animals is happy, since they in no way share in contemplation. Happiness extends, then, just so far as contemplation does, and those to whom contemplation more fully belongs are more truly happy, not as a mere concomitant but in virtue of the contemplation; for this is in itself precious. Happiness, therefore, must be some form of contemplation.

Aristotle

What is reason? Aristotle tries many times to answer this question; but perhaps most vivid and penetrating among his responses is the spiritual “answer” he offers in the conclusion of the Nicomachean Ethics. There we find Aristotle claiming that the exercise of human reason cultivates ‘something’ in the human animal which is the “best and most akin” to God (1179a11). God loves and honors those who love and honor reason: those who “care for the things that are dear to them” and act “both rightly and nobly” (1179a14). In this sense the philosopher is dearest to God (1179a17) and is the one who “will presumably also be the happiest,” moreso — potentially, anyway — than any other (1179a18).

Why may we presume the philosopher’s life to be happiest? Even assuming he were to possess the virtues attendant upon a cultivated exercise of reason, does this ensure him a happy life, even the happiest of lives? Aristotle repeatedly acknowledges the serious difficulties barring the way to human happiness, perhaps most importantly our need for external sustenance. (It seems clear to Aristotle that it would be difficult to contemplate anything but food if you are starving — thus leisure, freedom from activity, is an essential requirement for contemplation.) Yet in this respect, too, the life of the philosopher is superior, even to other men of virtue, since his virtues require neither money nor power in order to be recognized.

Indeed, the philosopher’s contemplation may even be hindered by the sorts of conditions and resources which allow other kinds of natures the opportunity to exercise their highest virtue — money for the liberal man, power for the brave man, a tempting hint for the temperate man, and so on (1178a28). Moreover, despite the human need to attend to the health of our bodies, “we must not think that the man who is to be happy will need many things or great things, merely because he cannot be supremely happy without external goods; for self-sufficiency and action do not involve excess, and we can do noble acts without ruling over earth and sea; for even with moderate advantages one can act virtuously (this is manifest enough; for private persons are thought to do worthy acts no less than despots–indeed, even more); and it is enough that we should have so much as that; for the life of the man who is active in accordance with virtue will be happy.” (1179a11)

We cannot escape the reality that reason cannot promise happiness; yet Aristotle’s position here is in fact much more paradoxical: perfect happiness is a form of contemplative activity (1178a28). Reason as such “is” happiness, an excellence separate from both the passions and the virtues: “The excellence of the reason is a thing apart: we must be content to say this much about it, for to describe it precisely is a task greater than our present purpose requires….” (1178a5) It is interesting to consider why this should be the “halting point” for a description of reason — reason as a “thing apart” from the practical body of desire. In what sense could a further elucidation push our thought out beyond the scope of Ethics?

One possible reading is that the reason Aristotle halts at this point is because there is a theological basis for his position that happiness is a form of contemplation. For he grounds his argument in favor of contemplation on the basis of a brilliant reductio ad absurdum demonstrating the impossibility of assigning human and even physical qualities to God:

“We assume the Gods to be above all other beings blessed and happy; but what sort of actions must we assign to them? Acts of justice? Will not the gods seem absurd if they make contracts and return deposits, and so on? Acts of a brave man, then, confronting dangers and running risks when it is noble to do so? Or liberal acts? To whom will they give? It will be strange if they are really to have money or anything of the kind. And what would their temperate acts be? Is not such praise tasteless, since they have no bad appetites? If we were to run through them all, the circumstances of action would be found trivial and unworthy of gods. Still, everyone supposes that they live and that therefore they are active; we cannot suppose them to sleep like Endymion. Now if you take away from a living being action, and still more production, what is left but contemplation? Therefore the activity of God, which surpasses all others in blessedness, must be contemplative; and of human activities, therefore, that which is most akin to this must be most of the nature of happiness.” (1178b20)

Although mysteriously “realized” in the human faculty of reason, God is nonetheless absolutely separate from the material forces of the world and its unending activity. Slightly earlier we find this same argument framed more concisely (also with a similar “otherworldly” detour): “If happiness is activity in highest accordance with virtue, it is reasonable that it should be in accordance with the highest virtue; and this will be that of the best thing in us. Whether it be reason or something else that is this element which is thought to be our natural rule and guide and to take thought of things noble and divine, whether it be in itself also divine or only the most divine element in us, the activity of this in accordance with its proper virtue will be perfect happiness. That this activity is contemplative we have already said.” (1177a14)

Happiness is not about amusement (pleasure) but virtue (work); as Aristotle puts it, “serious things are better than laughable things and those connected with amusement…” (1177a2) Related to this idea is an important argument supporting the position that happiness is contemplation, demonstrated by the continuity of thought. The capacity for reflecting upon the truth is unbroken: “…we can contemplate truth more continuously than we can do anything.” (1177a22) Contemplation isn’t even a “doing,” but rather man’s connection to Being, to our Purpose. Like infinity, contemplation is an overflowing: reason is unlimited, unbounded, but nonetheless continuous. Furthermore, the reflection on truth brings pleasure of itself (1177a24), a unique kind of pleasure “for its own sake,” since nothing arises out of it other than further contemplation (1177a26). In this it is even superior to both military and political greatness since these “aim at an end,” are “unleisurely” and perhaps most importantly “are not desirable for their own sake.” (1177b14)

- Joseph Weissman

No one would choose a friendless existence on condition of having all the other things in the world.

Aristotle

In poverty and other misfortunes of life, true friends are a sure refuge. The young they keep out of mischief; to the old they are a comfort and aid in their weakness, and those in the prime of life they incite to noble deeds.

A true friend is one soul in two bodies…

ibid

There is an important sense in which Aristotle’s political and ethical project is well-studied in the Platonic method of questioning and re-evaluating conventional priorities and relationships between spiritual elements. Both projects re-discover in traditional virtues a philosophical power which they express in dialogues, encapsulating critical or diagnostic re-evaluations of specific mental and social priorities. The unspoken consonance (implication) here is interesting, and merits reflection: that the old social values and relations are themselves capable of producing new procedures, contain within themselves the power or potential to radically reformulate the ‘axiomatic’ rules and relations between material and psychic agencies.

Now, Aristotle can be seen as drawing a utilitarian or conservative ethics of happiness out of this non-identity of the form of the Good-in-itself (i.e., we need to find the optimal balance between the various aspects or agencies,) but there is another sense in which he can be seen as producing a radical empirical science of the ethical which seeks to expose within real human relations an already-potentially-existing optimal arrangement which, although it can be achieved by reconfiguring elements of the existing system, has the consequence of producing real, qualitative and revolutionary changes in terms of the particular embedded relations as well as the entire assemblage of social relationships.

Hence the science of ethics already is at the same time as it produces a procedural mechanics of happiness, a harmonics or dynamics of the social relation itself in actio — an unfolding partnership between friendship and justice which can and ought to be actively sought empirically, as well as (re)produced within the text itself, another kind of partnership. A double-unfolding of the movement of the ethical: while already divine love, the movement of interbeing itself, it is also a human partnership, solidarity and alliance, as well as an exclusive relation of responsibility which individuates us as interdependent ethical agents. Each aspect of the triple individuation of the ethical (friendship, justice, happiness) relates inextricably to the indeterminacy of the ethical. That is, for Aristotle, no action in isolation can be judged (that is, we can only judge assemblages, interdependent networks of forces, social machines.) This ‘quantum’ indeterminacy of the ethical speaks to the molecularity of human social relations, again underscoring the need for empirical study of the actual patterns of human relationships as they are lived and produced in a wide variety of social fields and under a diverse selection of structures.

This field work cannot be purely abstract or dialectical, nor can it remain purely substantive: it must be procedural, it must expose the movement from the actual — pure events, unspecified substances, chance encounters, fragmentary series — to the “full” virtual field of social relationships. Thus a given ethical logic founds the generic gestures of politics, the ‘prototypical’ science itself, the primary relation to that which prioritizes the social relation above “material” relations (justice.) An idea of ethics lays the first tentative steps towards a full science of the political, a real sensory anthropology of power and conscience (external/internal agency comparing and aligning function to behavior.) The experience of the ethical is an ungrounding, an un-”world”-ing, a depersonalization which places us beyond sovereignty, a descent into the noise beyond the law (which founds the law.)

Paradoxically, while the ethical is exceptional, learned, distilled, and must be actively “cultivated,” it also has an innate and universal aspect which reveals itself instantaneously and sublimely on an individual basis — and thus really only operates in terrifying moments of absolute despair. The self-different experience of the ethical — for example, in the simultaneous reality and impossibility of murder — discloses a horrifyingly personal kind of infinite or ultimate responsibility, revealed in the social relation (justice) itself. In other words, in society, there is always already an alliance with the other preceding violence. Ethics is two-fold: both the social relation itself as prototype (the Other, society, history, “God”) and an empirical study of social micro-politics (critique, “revolution.”)

At the heart of ethics there is a difference, a mark or brilliant trace of light, which is capable of untying the tightest bonds, but which is also already an absolute descent in pure horror, into the chaotic nothingness of impersonal being. This dark night of radical separation is in turn the impossible site of the dawn of humanity as society, the prioritization of the others and the social relation above and beyond the abysses of civic savagery…

Ethics is a cautious science of intermediation, always attempting to perform the impossible — an eth(n)ology of and within the text itself. Ethics in its full sense always produces an empirical science investigating wide varieties of functions and practices, a kind of non-ontological dialectical materialism, which knows well the price of dispensing with empirical investigations. Ethics is conscientious empiricism, a virtuous friendship between justice and happiness. The structure of ethics is recursive, but this is unavoidable — the writing of ethics always already produces an ethics of ethics. The non-linearity, alterity or divergence within ethics itself is a radical break with tradition on the basis of tradition. It is in this sense that ethics is the friendship (partnership) between the various ethical virtues or agencies themselves.

How do we recognize when a partnership is functioning well? If it is functioning well, how do we know if it is a better or worse kind of relationship? Can friendship be meaningfully analyzed in these terms? Perhaps a first clue in this direction is the partnership between the ethical life and friendship. The sense of ethical friendship is embodied in the concept philia, a wider idea than the English word “friend,” indicating the full transformation of heart through which a mutual attraction between two human beings is produced. For Aristotle, there are three kinds of partnerships:

(1) Partnerships between good people
(2) Partnerships based on utility
(3) Partnerships based on pleasure

Aristotle suggests that only in friendships based on character are we going to find a desire to benefit the other person (“simply”) for the sake of the other. It’s not really friendship, in an important sense, if there is an inequality of moral investment — if one party is engaged only because of an advantage to him or herself — or if there is an inequality of moral development. We find in friendship the same recursive paradox we did with ethics itself. Friendship is an immanent exposure of a hidden symmetrical fold or break in Being itself, encoded within the very relationships between human beings. Thus there are two potential routes for the diagnosis and restoration of true friendship.

In the first, we critique social relations based primarily on utility. In the second, we critique social relations based on pleasure. Both of these are ethical-critical procedures — which we recognize as an expression of the constitutive duality or recursivity within ethics, corresponding roughly to the methodology and structure of the ethical (i.e.: on the one hand, ethics as analysis of the good, and on the other, ethics as the general theory of virtue.)

But the method employed in an analysis of the ethics of friendship is itself an empirical study into the various species of friendships, as well as a general investigation into the proper essence of friendship. Only by putting into play both ethical moments — by uniting both virtue and the good into an equitable and just partnership — is the thought of ethics complete as a theory of right social action.

The ethical life is co-extensive with a proper mode of interdependence, of alliance with the other, which is justice; but pure friendships are always subject to degradation, owing to the twin temptations of utility and pleasure. Justice must be chosen for its own sake, not for its use or its pleasure (i.e., a law which we enjoy following would seem to be unnecessary.)

In one of the more singular passages of the Nicomachean Ethics (Book VIII, Chapter 7), Aristotle makes several claims about the nature of friendship.  One of these claims is that friendship arises out of (or, we shall say, strives for) equality. Similarly, friendship has a reciprocal nature insofar as the more useful or better of the friends (a father in relation to his son) deserves more love and thus owes less, so to speak. It is in this sense that friends would strive to be equal to one another, all things considered. Yet this is to take friendship only in its ideal cases: all of our friends are particular, and thus they play a variety of different roles (which are not reducible to being useful, helpful, beneficial, etc.). On the other hand, Aristotle seems to be saying something more profound than this: he stresses that friends are good things, and this does not have to consist in them simply being good to us. They are good for us and also help to intensify and actualize the good in us. Though this is not simply a question of prepositions: Aristotle poses to us that if friends are good, and we want good for our friends, can we want our friends to be gods, insofar as this would diminish (the proportionality of) the friendship, and thus not be a good for us? Can friends be gods and goods (1159a 1-7)?

                But Aristotle rephrases himself: we want the greatest goods for our friends, but not all the greatest goods (perhaps). This is because Aristotle is not so sure that we always wish the best things for our friends—what would prevent us from wishing the best for our friends? Obviously, wishing the best for ourselves! But back to the more important question, one that does not go away so easily for all that: if our friends could be gods, or aspire to such a status, they would “surpass us most decisively in all good things” (1158b 34-35). Aristotle’s more fundamental question is: to what point can friends remain friends?

                Instead of going to the side of the negative (bad vices, bad habits, hygiene, culture, style, attitudes, etc.) as a reason for breaking off a friendship, Aristotle goes to the other extreme of virtue and excellence. At what point are friends too unequal in terms of “goodness”, insofar as they base their relationship in that quality? But if we take this as an absolute abstract social value, virtue-in-itself, then we can say that friendship will be broken when one of the friends cannot stand the embarrassment of being inferior (ressentiment), or when one of the friends is too embarrassed by the other (contempt). Neither of these two states of mind or attitudes has to be real per se—they can still have negative effects if they are believed to be real by one or the other. Or it could be more subtle: becoming a god changes the value of things, including friends. There could be a relative displacement of systems of valuation: in other words, becoming a god affects the friendship negatively when the proportionality of the love between friends (in Aristotle’s terms) is broken because the love is considered too minimal to produce a noticeable effect—or the effort required to obtain recognition from the beloved is considered “not to be worth it.” Aristotle calls this distance. Another tie to Nietzsche: there is Zarathustra’s love of the farthest as a virtue—this would befit a noble or great soul—and Aristotle’s megalopsychia. As for our friends: if they become gods or overmen, we only hope that somehow some of that increases our belief in ourselves to recreate ourselves in such a manner as to continue to compete and struggle with them, in order to further develop the dimensions of a common godhood.

“We make war that we may live in peace.”
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics — 1177b (Book X, Chapter 7)

Let’s try to understand this work first through the method by which its project is assembled, the way the text functions.

In general Ta Ethika has three phases or stages of development: (a) a general, in-depth study of the “good” and the “good life”; (b) an analysis of moral virtue or excellence; and (c) an investigation into social ethics, or ethics within society.

These three moments are simultaneous — it is a deeply recursive text. Each ethical “moment” or “insight” relates inextricably to the other two. The third (justice) is, in an important sense, a medium (or “average”) between the other two (the study of the good and happiness; the analysis of virtue and excellence), which in a sense represent aspects or species of ethics. The themes of virtue, the good, and justice, are completely interwoven into one another, but also occur sequentially over the development of the work. Naturally, we find in the first book of the ethics an outline of the study of the good:

(1, 2) Goal-based ethics contrasted and complemented with character-centered ethics — presages discussion of the form of the good life, and virtue as a mean between two excessive or deficient goals or characters

(3) The essence and function of being human — a sort of “human-functional” argument for ethics (this is actually the most interesting one, and we will come back to it)

(4) Eudaimonia — “happiness” does not express the force Aristotle intends, it is both living and faring well — “bliss” may be closer, but it is also a lifestyle, the “best” kind of life there is, the “form” of the good life

(5) Critique of Plato’s theory of Forms: while the critique of the theory of the Forms seems to be presented last, it is in fact present from the very beginning of the discussion, even in the very logic Aristotle uses to introduce his analysis of morality along the two axes (goals — which move from potential to the real; character or virtue — whose structure is different — moves from the virtual to the actual.)

In other words, the two ‘species’ of ethics (the study of the good, the analysis of excellence) result from a primordial break with and within the idea of a universal good — whose force becomes transposed into the guiding concept of eudamonia, or “good life,” a negation of the universal good and the rediscovery of the good in life itself, in living well, in life “being good” to you.

The “good life” is all Aristotle thinks can be just — not a life of pleasure but not exactly the opposite either — a life of virtue, which only means: doing just and virtuous things, being a just and virtuous person. A single virtuous action in isolation can hardly be examined — this is declared very early on — so there is necessarily a certain degree of uncertainty, of imprecision, inherent in ethical analysis — the more you investigate particularities, the more difficult, even impossible it becomes to state generalities.

We now see why the third phase is necessary to resolve the divergence within ethics (as A understands it, between “character” and “goal.”) Only a science of justice or social virtue can repair the break or ‘first misunderstanding’ in ethics — the controversy over the abstract Form of the good — hence moral philosophy is a study which is already contained within an all-encompassing political science. Acts must be judged simultaneously from three perspectives: from the perspective of virtue or the mean (the “middle” position of the mind which can ethically determine the choice of actions and emotions,) but also from the perspective of the state (whose questions are different, and are questions of justice,) and finally also from the perspective of the individual (or life itself, the function of being-human.)

For Aristotle, reason humanizes us; in some sense, thought is our “function.” If we can conceive of a primary category of human function, it must be an activity of the soul which expresses reason. On this last point, Aristotle writes that if man is alive, and if the form of life which he is exercises the faculty and activity of a soul in association with a rational principle; and furthermore, if the function of a good man is to perform these activities well and rightly (i.e., in accordance with its own proper excellence) — from these points, he argues that it follows that the Good for man is exercising the faculties of his soul in conformity with excellence (or virtue.) Aristotle adds that we must act in conformity with the best and most perfect among these virtues, if there may be several.

This, then, is the path to achieving eudamonia — not merely living according to virtue, but being actively driven by them, and if there are many, only the best. The process is a mean or equilibrium between a condition of lack and of surplus. Ethics exists in a smooth space, on a continuum between blank nothingness and a black hole. Between a defective or ‘lacking’ quality and an excessive or ‘overflowing’ quality, there is a golden medium, a zone of equilibrium, not the center but the ‘in-between’ where the ‘just right’ quality glimmers. Not only do nothing to excess, but go further: find the mean. When Aristotle considers traditional Greek virtues, he finds them all to contain one sort of mean or another: courage (between cowardice and foolhardiness,) temperance (the virtue that controls emotion,) magnamity (which is an ‘in between’ of virtue itself, and places the virtues into their proper place.)

We come finally to the idea which would seem to complete and crown the work — the only virtue to have its own book — but which can be considered in some sense to be the primary virtue, without which all others are worthless. In this sense the notion of justice must also be present from the very beginning of ethics, as a “first” politics. This is because justice is absolute virtue, the comprehension of all the others. Particular justice cannot be rigorously distinguished from justice as a whole, but neither is it simply part of it; it is the same as justice (law) but has a different center or focus (fairness.) Aristotle offers a summary and clarification of this somewhat complex relationship: an unfair situation is always lawless; but not everything lawless is unfair.

Politics is large-scale ethics: a philosophy of human life will be incomplete without considering in its entirety the whole question of the management of a state. Ethics is, in a broad sense, an introduction to politics. Happiness is worthless without justice.

A verb is that which, in addition to its proper meaning, carries with it the notion of time.

No part of it has any independent meaning, and it is a sign of something said of something else… Verbs in and by themselves are substantival and have significance, for he who uses such expressions arrests the hearer’s mind, and fixes his attention; but they do not, as they stand, express any judgment, either positive or negative.

For neither are ‘to be’ and ‘not to be’ or the participle ‘being’ significant of any fact, unless something further is added; for in themselves they do not indicate anything, but imply a copulation, of which we cannot form a conception apart from the things coupled.

(Aristotle, On Interpretation)

The unspoken is not merely what is deprived of sound; rather, it is the unsaid, what is not yet shown, what has not yet appeared on the scene… [what is not spoken] will linger in what is concealed as something unshowable. It is mystery. The addressed speaks as a pronouncement, in the sense of something allotted; its speech need not make a sound.

(Martin Heidegger, “The Way to Language”)

Being, Language, Difference

(anticipating the essence of language: of a break and a blueprint)

Let us follow, if we can, a line of thinking which must arrive at the essence of writing. In order to more linearly explicate (and also to more narrowly circumscribe and constrain the necessary exorbitance of such a procedure) we shall also follow a related line of thinking which discovers the characteristic nature of writing in a certain relation between the hands and the eyes, that is, of thought to time: this clearly, if in an obviously limited way, inscribes the way our investigation must proceed, onto a far horizon here only implicated.

What is a universal language, the essence of a universal script or pure language of forms? Anticipation of the beginning: is this not the essence we are bringing thought to unearth, uncannily to grasp, an extruded logic of being, or form of language itself: all in order to cause someone to catch a glimpse of the last writing, the “writing” of the end of writing? This mystical closure-by-anticipation is already non-language in its purified immediacy, its incapability of substitution (which characterizes linguistic signals.) Alterity is not the ultimate horizon of expressivity, but rather something not entirely of the order of language, though it is secret the essence of expressivity itself; that is to say: a pure difference in itself, a parasitic infestation, light and noise, radical exteriority.

The essence of language is immanent, and not clearly or rigorously grasped in anticipation, but rather in creativity, in improvisation and the positivity of pragmatic variation. Speech is more narrowly circumscribed than inscription or graphism in this regard, but also more temporal, immediately more dramatic, already a showing and a saying — a double- and triple-articulation — whereas writing or ‘virtual’ speaking holds these two (and more) senses of performative language at the (a) critical distance, and in this opening (which is also a closure) allows a new kind of drama to unfold — one which will close at its effacement or beginning, the erasure of the mark (by time, by noise, by disaster.) The conflict between the sound and the mark unleashes radical alterity itself, opening the curtains again the oldest drama, ungrounding the duplicitous serialism of comedy, releasing the infinite parallelism of tragedy.

We anticipate this beginning in all beginnings, this conflict between the law and the noise, the exception that founds the law, the noise from which channels and signals are created. The parasites invent language in order to exchange it for reality; the essence of language is that which is aware before it is aware, which is inherently capable of desire, of experimentation and hypothesis, of transgression and infestation and hallucination — activities prior to sense and to empirical conceptions of form, in short of graphical writing — this essence of anticipation is always what is implicated in language, whether consequently as in its passive and written sense of ‘marking,’ counting, scratching (re-production of signs)…

Yet these origins also bring us close to the real and primary essence of language (i.e., its infinite virtuality or unbounded expressivity) insofar as language is that presupposes, and is in anticipation of, the invention or distinction of spaces for thought to cross and traverse: language is constituted for these breaks, these rifts riven onto a smooth space which compose a kind of blueprint, a virtual model or design, and only symbolically or analogically implicated by a linearized stream of signals.

In German, der Riss means a crack, laceration, cleft, tear or rift; but it is also a plan, a design in drawing, a graphical or theoretical account, a blueprint. Heidegger plays on this double-sense of Riss and Aufriss when he tells us in The Way to Language that

…the unity in the essence of language that we are seeking is called the Rift-design [der Aufriss]. The name calls upon us to descry more clearly what is proper to the essence of language. Riss [rift] is the same word as ritzen [to notch or to carve]. We often come across the word Riss in the purely pejorative form, for example, a crack on the wall. Today when farmers speak in dialect about plowing a field, drawing furrows through it, they still say aufreissen or umreissen [lit. to tear up, to rend or rive, to turn over]. They open the field, that it may harbor seed and growth. The Rift-design is the totality of traits in the kind of drawing that permeates what is opened up and set free in language.

Martin Heidegger, “The Way to Language” (from Basic Writings p. 407)

A blueprint is as close to a perfect symbol for virtuality as there can be, except for its apparent ‘rigidity’; the virtual includes all blueprints which are possible and which ever could become possible; this is why the virtual contains but is greater than the potential. From virtualization to actualization, the break indicates the work of pure alterity itself, the mediation or rupture in itself which is what interprets us, that which digs into the mind to open us up that we may be set “free” — is this rupture only the drawing of what is at work in language?

Or is it also a fractal blueprint of the essence of humanity? Heidegger is arguing that an inevitable fracture-design emerges between the speaker and his or her speech; language is thus a faculty of opening and being-lacerated-open by expressivity; and in order to be opened up by langauge onto a shared world, in order to express ourselves through language, a blueprint must be made, the space or rift between the spoken and the unspoken must be crossed, opened up, turned over and made fruitful. Hence we find Heidegger claiming again later that “[t]he Rift-design [der Aurfriss] is the drawing of the essence of language, the well-joined structure of a showing in which what is addressed enjoins the speakers and their speech, enjoins the spoken and its unspoken.” [Heidegger, the Way to Language 407-8] This enjoinment is a putting into motion of the categories of being, of presence and absence, in order to bring language to a self-disclosure.

Heidegger achieves a description of a pure category of self-composition, a truth beyond onto-theology; yet this thought of language is still fixated upon the actuality or “verbality” of being, and hinges upon a secondary dialectics of presence and absence, of the spoken and unspoken. He seeks to transcend metaphysics itself by this kind of primary and even scientific procedure; yet his work still remains proscribed within the horizons of a fractured or aporetic writing, even of a kind of fractal science of writing which upsets the classical orientation of scientific thought.

If writing is structured around rifts, around ruptures and equivocations, around arbitrary interconnections of significance and deep confluences of meaning, then metaphysics has to be revolutionized, not only in terms of new concepts and images of thought but to revival and invention of different kinds of expressivity. Heidegger overturns metaphysics without bringing philosophy with him, playing upon an equivocation to destabilize the formal boundaries of thought, the unconscious ontological structures of thought operating beneath classical metaphysics (identity, analogy, univocity.) For example, Aristotle:

…it is possible both to affirm and to deny the presence of something which is present or of something which is not, and since these same affirmations and denials are possible with reference to those times which lie outside the present, it would be possible to contradict any affirmation or denial. Thus it is plain that every affirmation has an opposite denial, and similarly every denial an opposite affirmation…

[However,] the identity of subject and of predicate must not be ‘equivocal’.

(Aristotle, On Intepretation)

Do we now see any more clearly the essence of the individuation of language, or hyper-alterity within writing we are seeking to expose? Aristotle is here experiencing the line of univocity we are chasing, whose beginning is indeed ‘formless’. A fractal history of abstraction: association, diagnosis, linearization; imagism, graphism and phonetic writing; and finally analysis, critique, social transformation.

Yet this origin of society and science at once in the essence of anticipation of particularity (i.e., hypothesis, experimentation) is figured in a much larger horizon than writing itself, that of social articulation, the psychobiological production of expressivity, the noisy essence of sonority, the profound essences actualized in our feelings and intuitions. Is this a vaguely-exposited idealism “guaranteed” by the inevitable process of temporality — or a study into the heart of the singularity of expression, the production of universality through language, which always and is almost even definable by the fact that it joyously anticipates its positive results?

There is an unease in the imagination which is healed by the production of codes, blueprints, systems: it is the unlimitedness of thought in imagination that paradoxically limits it, and of itself develops its own positive limits: these are thresholds of generativity, partial disclosure, a closure or marking off of certain spaces which opens up new modalities of expression, revolutionizes production and amplifies natural creative potentialities. Affirmation is a revolutionary closure because writing closes the infinity of time, paradoxical because affirmation opens horizons: that is, underneath the static form there is always an affirmation of difference.

A positive boundary: the essence of abstraction and conservatism at once. Association or repetition must again be asserted against encoding, as substance to form, and by analogy as matter itself to its human account. A pure difference and rupture precedes the unification of the imagination which occurs in the primary inscription or encoding, a break which is also a design which comes before the mark or the distinction. An absence which precedes the presence, through whose holding back presence itself is produced.
But this is still too abstract, let us find another way to express the same essence at the heart of producing expression: the hands that write are also instruments of hearing and reading, the ears that listen are also instruments of the production of sound. The eye that reads projects light and meaning, constructing linear spaces of thought. The mind which is opened up by thinking also produces dream images, revolutioanry spaces of thought; even the “primary” forms of self-affection, the essence of consciousness, is quite naturally capable of the construction of enormously detailed dream-realities.

Symbols are and are not the basis for this process: both the production and the overturning of the symbol, both the positive construction of a limit and its overturning by traversing the space. In short, there is a principle at work: every signal-transducer functions both ways, sentience has non-equivocal being and cannot be produced in terms of an object or subject, but always and only of multiplicities, networks, symbolic exchanges, parasitic infestations…
As always, it is the insects which discover writing first: in the construction of linearized spaces of production. Not to mention their faculties of chemical expression: they write on the landscape itself, demarcating territories for reproduction, for food, for work, for birth, for death, etc. A whole religion, local and global at once. A “spirit” moving them all, or just a communication network? Or yet something more primordial indeed, a function simply of complexity itself, of chaos and emergence from noise?

Where is the unity of expressivity we so humbly demanded from language — it has fractured completely, there is nothing left but multiplicity, always languages. There is no “essence” of language to be discovered, no singularity at the heart of expression, but always the mobile force of alterity, of expressive networks, of productive intensities and divergent, that is to say alternate and minoritarian spaces of thought. Radical exclusivity is the foundation of gesture, pointing, showing and saying are in effect the same political movement: this “is” the “way” “this” “thing” “is” — a five-fold injunction, five layers of assumption: individual, social, political, spiritual, material.

Language is a mobile cage of representation and identity, a way to synchronize thought which is naturally and of its own accord a-temporal, and about divergences in speed between flows of energy, about conjunctions and networks and signals and alternate modes of temporality. By thinking, we can pierce the horizons of being.

Thought naturally escapes representation and the institution of sense, unless it is trained to also to need and desire it. This is the ‘natural’ or ‘civic’ state of humanity, in a sense a pre-social humanity, a humanity without society — which now brings us to a suitable point of incompletion, and also a question for further discussion; and we shall have to postpone this thought until then.

To conclude, a late video of Heidegger on the future of philosophy (with English subtitles).