The human experience of ethics is suddenly rendered unrecognizable as something unnatural, something anomalous, an excess in the context of the natural universe. Twentieth-century and contemporary moral philosophy gives me language to better express the meaning of these literary indications of the excess of ethical subjectivity. Each of these thinkers contributes in their own way to the ongoing critique of Enlightenment models of the closed, sovereign subject.
Poststructural methods pay attention to the textual eruption of the irreducible; they offer a way of pointing to the minimally universal ethical subjectivity that implicitly motivates ethics. The paradoxical singularity that results from this ethical subjectivity constitutes, in Arendt's words, the "infinite plurality which is the law of the earth" (Life of the Mind 1: 187). And this is my second observation about my methodology: I look beyond historicism and ideology critique to examine the value and relevance of the idea of ethical subjectivity for its own sake.
I focus on how this ethical subjectivity emerges as wonder in the literature of the era that produced so many stories. To better clarify how the wonder at the excess of ethical subjectivity defies the repressive colonial closure, I invoke Jean-Luc Nancy's The Experience of Freedom (1988).
Who am I?” The Wonder of Thought in Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus
In The Life of the Mind, Arendt articulates the ethical theory that motivates her critique of totalitarianism and of the banality of evil, which she defines as the suspension of thought (Life 4-5; Origins 474, 477). I now present some of the philosophical context and vocabulary necessary to show how Sartor Resartus explores thought as the object of this ethical wonder. Kant lays the groundwork for anticipating how this experience of the self-reflexive self emerges as the object of ethical wonder in Sartor Resartus.
In short, it is the dual, self-reflective structure of the thinking I posited between multiple possibilities that enables moral freedom. At the end of the day, in the stillness of the night, we must live with ourselves, answer to the judge—consciousness or conscience—within ourselves. The experience of moral freedom springs from the duality of the thinking mind—the strange, exceptional structure of "two-in-one" (1:180).
He is only in the early stages of the self-stabilizing effect of ethical wonder. In The Life of the Mind, Arendt agrees with Socrates in suggesting the continued relevance of this original miracle (1: 141). As she writes in The Life of the Mind: "The metaphor, which bridged the gap between inner and invisible mental activities and the world of appearances, was certainly the greatest gift that language could give to thought and thus to philosophy." (1:105).
Inherent in the mind's exceptional structure, "two-in-one heals the loneliness of thought; its inherent duality points to the infinite plurality that is the law of the earth.
Facing an Ethics of Obligation with Ruskin and Levinas
First, his emphasis on obligation distinguishes him from the other twentieth-century moral philosophers with whom he joins in criticizing totalitarianism and attempting to rethink ethical subjectivity in the wake of the Holocaust—the direct result of European imperialist, authoritarian logic (otherwise 10) -12). Second, Levinas is even more distinctive in locating the site of infinite obligation, or Other, in the face of the other person. And third, Levinas's ethics of face offers a particularly effective framework for illuminating our own ethical subjectivity, our implicit commitment to a sense of obligation when we judge.
In the famous chapter "The Nature of Gothic" he argues that Gothic architecture shows the value that Christianity places on the creative imperfection of the individual. However, such a reading would oversimplify Ruskin's argument, for this second type of obligation is not merely an extension of the first, but is in marked creative opposition to it. He sees this anarchic obligation or the absolute Other as manifested in the face of another person.
For Levinas, the encounter with the other exposes the self to the "idea of infinity", to the feeling of the immediate infinite demand of the absolute Other - pure responsibility (Totality 41; . "Being-for-the-other" 114). When he locates the absolute Other as resonant in the other person's face, he sees himself not as making some counterintuitive argument, but as describing the reality of universal human experience (Totality 187). The ethical obligation takes a discursive form in two forms, the first negative - not to kill - the second positive, to respond with "generosity" that preserves the life of another (Totality 50).
I will return to this resonance between Ruskin and Levinas's prioritization of generous action for the life of the other, which shows how Fors's fragmented style. This repurposing of the religious provides language to maintain a moral realist perspective of obligation as beyond the self's own interests, an ethical subjectivity distinguished as heterogeneous to egoism. In Totality and Infinity he writes that his work seeks what is akin to “the Platonic idea of the Good beyond Being.
Even the benign desire to enforce obedience for the sake of justice betrays the direct truth of the face-to-face encounter. These words evoke the liberated creativity, the paradoxical "perfect freedom" opened up in Ruskin's view of obligation as a personal relationship with the divine, exemplified in the surprising spontaneity and variety of Gothic architecture, which contrasts with the predictability of the Renaissance (11: 116). ). Simplicity of style is thus one of the main aesthetic strategies that Ruskin claims to have adopted in Fors.
They expose the supposed right of the wealthy ruling classes to profit from the physical and spiritual impoverishment of the lower classes, an impoverishment that the wealthy have perpetuated in the first place. Ruskin signals the paradox of the simultaneous obligatory clarity and anarchic incomprehensibility of truth as central to his work in the title of the series, Fors Clavigera.
Standing Apart from Oneself: Mind and Conscience in George Eliot and Marilynne Robinson
The very title of this lecture series suggests the legacy of the perceived tension between these Victorian-era discourses. He points out various humanist discourses, including the one about the aesthetics of language and art, but most often advocates religious language, which is particularly capable of contributing to this revaluation of spirit and conscience. Based on this context, in order to balance the scholarship focused on scientific discourses in The Mill on the Floss, I focus on religiously modified accounts of the experiences of mind and conscience.
This is the discourse I want to illuminate as an overlooked dimension of The Floss Mill. However, much of the religious rhetoric has often been aligned with reactionary, conservative views that support caution. Eliot's revaluation of the human in religion implicitly frames her other critiques of scientific reductiveness in accounts of human subjectivity.
My analysis of The Mill on the Floss is consistent with the end goal of this. This power of the subconscious as physiologically and hereditarily determined comes to the fore especially in the scenes of. I would first like to acknowledge the very helpfully suspect interpretations of this scene and its connection to the rest of the novel.
Another, citing Eliot's approval of Maggie's earnestness in attempting to renounce self-interest, sees it as a legitimate defense of morality. What is so strange about this scene is that, although Kempis advocates the renunciation of the will, such For example, Leslie Stephen writes: “The whole theme of the book is certainly the contrast between the 'beautiful soul' and the ordinary environment.
It is the awakening of the spiritual and imaginative nature and the need to find room for the play of the higher faculties, whether in the direction of religious mysticism or of human affection” (George Eliot 102). Mazaheri in emphasizing the religious allegorical meaning of the novel's ending (104); while Saswati Halder's equally Feuerbachian reading joins Bernard J. Verily, his piety has its foundations in the depth of the divine-human soul" (Cross 1: 144-45).
Instead, she finds the text's unconditional "piety" to be its affirmation of "the depth of the divine-human soul." Ethics emerges not only through intuitions in general, but through intuitions that illuminate the wonder of the "divine-human soul." After this scene with dr.
Excessive Ethical Subjectivity in Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm
Schreiner's reference to the excess of subjectivity occurs when he condemns abusive colonial and patriarchal authorities for trying to force and deny this excess. The novel dramatizes its commitment to ethical subjectivity as irreducible to structures that produce and enforce norms, such as religious institutions or political and economic ideologies. These norms do not justify ethical subjectivity, but instead presuppose it and are judged according to it.
This ethical subjectivity may seem strange in light of the modern view of nature as fixed and indifferent to human claims to justice or injustice. That the experience of ethical subjectivity persists despite this dominant view of the indifferent universe, which implicitly justifies any critique of injustice, suggests that ethics cannot be grounded in nature or culture or anything deeper than this given experience itself. Waldo discovers moral freedom in the experience of anger at the evil represented by the dominant imperialist.
Lyndall strives for a commitment that transcends both self and religion and gender norms. Gregory, a latecomer to the farm, responds to ethical imperatives by orienting himself to the other through a gender-bending ethic of care. These and other encounters with ethical subjectivity in the novel portray the experience of ethics as aberrant, and cannot be explained as caused by Victorian cultural mores on the one hand or by the natural universe on the other.
Ethics emerges in Schreiner's novel as a wonderful personal and interrelational experience that seems to transcend natural causes, just as it transcends the nineteenth-century social structuring of morality, especially organized religion, patriarchy, and capitalism as deployed by colonial power structures.
