An Aesthetic Ethics
As long as God is in charge, morality is a subsection of theology. Ever since Sinai, the True, the Good, the Positive, and the Just all come from the Decalogue. No need to philosophize, to look for foundations, a genealogy, or origins. God serves as an explanation for all of them. The tablets of the Law, Torah, Gospels, and Pauline Epistles have had their time. When God bothers to show himself, or when he delegates this mission to his most dedicated envoys (who dictate all behavior between the self and itself, the self and others, and the self and the world), who could be so insolent or perfidious as to challenge or contest it? How arrogant and conceited is it to audit God’s accounts? If not the philosopher, who will do it? Let him live up to his title…
Theology tries to be enough for everyone. Ethics can’t pretend to have autonomy. It falls from the sky, descending from the intelligible universe. In this paradigm, morality does not come from a contract with the immanent; it comes from some epiphany, from an apparition. God talks; men listen; then they obey. Just in case his connection to men is hard to understand, since God is not always available, the clergy is there twenty-four hours a day. Ask the priest, the bishop, the cardinal, he’ll tell you. Theology, the pseudoscience of the divine, is more accurately the science of rendering people subservient to the fiction of God.
The first stirrings of rebellion were in the seventeenth century: First, Descartes revolutionized math and geometry; Leibniz required that the universe be described in scientific language; Galileo, a master of that entire beautiful philosophical world, was similar; Spinoza used geometry to account for the real; Newton showed how Providence works, submitting falling apples to algebraic language rather than theological formulas. God withdrew. We gently let go of him, and morality gained a little bit of autonomy…
Baroque libertine orthodoxy prepared the course for atheism. God exists, surely. How can we deny it when Galileo avoided death only by abjuring his findings? Giordano Bruno burned at the stake in Campo dei Fiori; the same for Giulio Cesare Vanini in Toulouse. Théophile de Viau was put in the Bastille and waited for the worst to happen while his books burned. Similarly, Charron, Descartes, Pascal, Malebranche, and so many others saw their works consigned to the Catholic banned books list…
The French Revolution speeds things up. There is a transition from orthodoxy to deism, which is a long way from theism. Atheism moves forward while Christianity starts to run out of gas. They decapitate the king who represents God on earth. God is silent. They burn churches, pillage the temples, violate the devout, and smash crosses and statues of the saints. He remains mute. What happens when they abandon their connection to religion and raise temples to the goddess of Reason? Silence again. Faced with this evidence of God’s inertia, they deduced his fiction.
After the paroxysm of the French Revolution, the nineteenth century starts to propose new models—the positivism of Auguste Comte, the dialectical system of Proudhon, Fourier’s mathematics of passion, the social physics of the Ideologues, Marx’s dialectical materialism, and other signs that morality and politics owe nothing to heaven or theology, but that they emerge from the sun, the earth, and the sciences. These men had diverse ideas and many successes, but they all pointed toward the same apex: a world divested of all transcendence, a world where men are accountable, but to their peers and no one else.
The mathematical model supplants the theocratic one, which was at work from the earliest times, right up until Louis XVI’s decapitation—thousands of years. The substitute model rushes into a much narrower space—a few decades between the fall of Louis Capet and the fall of the Berlin Wall—just over two centuries. These two periods are not commensurate; theology had a long time. Moreover, science has often been content to mathematize millenarian tropes and make cosmetic changes to its unitary form. Millenarianism, apocalypticism, and messianic and prophetic discourses at some point or another appropriated all the social, socialist, utopian, and communistic adventures.
Artists in Zurich’s cafes call themselves the Incoherents; Tristan Tzara introduces baptismal fountains into Dadaism (Dada, 1917); Marinetti sprinkles his futurism with holy water (The Futurist Manifesto, 1909); and André Breton traces the magic sign of the chrism on the forehead of Surrealism (Surrealist Manifesto, 1924). But the new world and the hopes of science begin to fade in Europe with the First World War: the West was bled for a long time by the absurd, unworldly, delirious, hysterical, foolish, furious, and bloody.
During the Verdun Offensive of 1917, Marcel Duchamp, an anartiste, exhibits his Fountain. It was something between a hoax and a radical shakeup: the first ready-made, which began a very real aesthetic Copernican Revolution. That metaphysical urinal demolished Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason and thus Platonism in art and elsewhere. More than twenty centuries of classical theory about Beauty went up in smoke in the blink of an eye. All of a sudden, Beauty in itself goes away and we believe that the audience constructs art.
Duchamp contributed yet another revolution, one of media. This was the end of noble materials, those enshrined through the history of art (colored pigments, marble, bronze, gold, silver, platinum), and a proliferation of media, from the noblest to the basest (fecal matter, dust, garbage), the most trivial (string, cartons, plastic), and the most immaterial (sound, light, ideas, language). For better or for worse, everything—absolutely everything—became the material of art. Why not existence too? It’s up to philosophers to look into themselves for the possibility of a revolution. Metaphysically, the time is ripe for an aesthetic ethics.
Sculpting the Self
Let’s keep the old metaphor of sculpting: Plotinus used it in the Enneads to call each person to be the sculptor of his own statue. A priori, Being is empty and hollow; a posteriori, it is what has been done and what one does. A modern formulation states that “existence precedes essence.”1 Thus, each person is at least partially responsible for her being and her becoming. A block of marble, as raw and identity-less as the sculptor’s chisel, does not decide to give itself a form. That form is not hidden and inherent in the material, but is a product of an ongoing work. The work continues day after day, hour after hour, second after second. Each instant contributes to becoming.
What should we endeavor to produce? An I, a Me, a radical Subjectivity, a singular identity, an individual reality, a proper person, a noteworthy style, a unique force, an impressive strength, a comet tracing an untraveled path, an energy making its way down a luminous passage though the chaos of the cosmos, a beautiful individuality, a temperament, a character. We don’t have to aspire to a masterpiece or aim for perfection—of the genius, the hero, or the saint; we should just reach out for an insight that will give us a sovereignty we did not previously know.
The philosophical tradition claims to dislike the I. It announces all over the place that it hates the Me. Many contemporary philosophers unabashedly defend this theoretical position. Then, in their books and articles, they spill forth details of their childhoods, confide their biographies, and give testimonies of their education and formative years. Some provide minutiae of their family’s agricultural property; others talk about their adolescent scholarship; and still others write entire books recounting the details of a long nervous depression.
This kind of schizophrenia leads to a contradiction: either they are right to condemn the Me, in which case they should be silent about it, or they can speak in the first person, in which case they should reconcile their system with their personal outpourings. I believe it is necessary to revise the theories as well as to continue the kind of existential autoanalysis that allows us to understand where our thought comes from, what it is, and where it is going.
This does not entail an egoistic religion—a cult of the Me that is autistic and narcissistic—nor does it entail a loathing of everything that manifests in the first person. It is about properly understanding the Me and giving it its due. We don’t want to become dandyish caricatures or lust after metaphysical chalices; rather, we compose ourselves in the world without hysteria or grandiloquence. We should be neither critical nor thanatophilic, but logical, like Descartes, who, for the sake of his metaphysics, looked for and found an I. It’s essential to do something similar to enable a new ethics. Without a point of departure, there can be no ethical goal.
We can only make sense of the world based on this I: we decline You, He, She, We, and You (pl.) as modalities of alterity: linguistically, we formulate the intimate, informal, close, and distant registers; collections of I’s connected by a common interest; the intimate third person; and distant assemblies. The self must have a healthy relationship to itself if it is going to relate well with others. An identity that is either missing or weak prohibits any kind of ethics. Only the force of an I authorizes the mobilization of morality.
Any part of an I that is unwilled, not forcibly fabricated, not manically hammered out, is, by default, constituted by all kinds of determinisms: genetic, social, familial, historical, psychic, geographic, and sociological. They all work on a Me from the outside, brutally impressing it with all the forces of the harsh world. Heredity, parents, the unconscious, the historical era, the cultural milieu, education, opportunities, lack of social opportunities—all of those knead a ductile material, something extremely plastic, and determine what it will be…There is disorder. Our deficient Me’s, broken I’s, and unfinished identities produce fodder for prisons, psychiatric wards, psychological clinics, psychotherapist waiting rooms, the backrooms of sophrology, marriage counselors, reflexologists, dowsers, magneticists and other fortune tellers, sex therapists, lines of people waiting for psychotropic drugs, and all kinds of postmodern shamans who do their dance.
Neuronal Training
Ethics is a matter of the body, not the soul. It proceeds from the brain, not the mists of conscience. After the brilliant recent demonstrations in the Neuronal Person,2 the time has come for an end to mind-body dualism in which physical and mental substances are connected by an imaginary pineal gland. Ever since Leucippus, materialist philosophers have verified the evidence of that genealogical truth.
Thus, I am my body, nothing else. Morality proceeds from there. Far from being the ontological and ethereal body of the phenomenologists, or the Deleuzian fiction of a body without organs (a creation of souls on the brink of fragmentation), the flesh works perfectly together with the organs, which are themselves interdependent elements that allow this sublime machine to function.
The old opposition between gross materialism and subtle vitalism pitted nonbelievers against Christians, producing a peculiar dialectical solution: vitalist materialism. Matter, and nothing else, is shot through with streams of perpetual flux, which are themselves reducible to matter, even if they elude pure and simple anatomical explanations.
Between these two kinds of matter, there is more matter, which is guided by forces that are also immanent and awaiting scientific decoding. Thus, the body is, to use Nietzsche’s term, very much the Great Reason. But the brain is the Great Reason of that other Great Reason, hence its major role in morality. Ethics is not given but produced and constructed. Like contemporary art, it exists as an artifact. The brain acts as a digital hub, so we need to train the neurons and imbue the nervous system with ethics. Education must play a major role. Formatting lays the foundation; without it, no morality is possible.
Good and bad, true and false, just and unjust, beautiful and ugly are all human judgments that are contractual, relative, and historical. Those forms do not exist a priori, only a posteriori. In order to exist, they have to be written into the neuronal network. There is no morality without the neuronal connections that permit it. So ethics entails a Faustian body that is controlled by the power and demiurge of an intentional intelligence. Morality is practiced. It inscribes itself into the brain’s matter, creating synapses and allowing for the anatomical function of moral actions.
Therefore, ethics is not a theological affair between man and God, but an immanent story concerning people, among themselves, with no other witnesses. Intersubjectivity evokes mental, and thus neuronal, representations: the Other is not a face (if the Levinassians will forgive us) but a collection of active nervous signals within a neuronal framework. If the interconnected network has not been put together with love—by parents, educators, mentors, family, environment, or epoch—then morality will not be possible.
Therefore, materialism is not fatalistic, not just a bunch of processes against which nothing can be done. Interaction transfigures both the individual that composes society and the society that forms the individual. They nourish each other and modify each other substantially. Universal, eternal, and transcendental morality gives way to ethics that are particular, temporal, and immanent.
Neuronal training is hard to accept in these politically correct times that we cannot escape: the absence of education, the refusal to transmit values, and the abdication of any pedagogy, all of which, through their absence, constitute another kind of neuronal training. This is dangerous because it builds into the nervous system a sense not of ethical law, but of the law of the jungle.
Therefore, ethology should consider this ethical flaw: each person evolves, within a limited territory, into his determined role as a dominant male, dominated female, part of the herd, or member of a flock that’s bigger than another flock. This produces the reign of the tribe instead of humanity. The construction of an ethical brain is the first step toward a political revolution worthy of the name. This used to be the primary idea of the radical philosophers of the Enlightenment.