Professional Documents
Culture Documents
To:
Professor Alexander Gungov
Sofia University St. Kliment Ohridsky
Kant
specified that
high culture is a kind of cultivation
of human capacity to realize purposes in general and is also the factor
that prepares man for a sovereignty in which reason alone is to
dominate2.
1 P.17
to his mothers womb. The inability to grief(mourn) is linked with the death
of the mother, or the Thing which Julia Kristeva talks about its a kind
of
more
fundamental
and
more
indefinable(elusive)
symbolic
representation of the object of melancholy. Still, Kristeva also mentions the
mother and the separation with her, but as an act of achieving psychic
maturity. Then Jay describes Kristevas explanations about the roles of the
mother and the father and the way they are linked to melancholy and
apocalyptic thinking through semiotic and symbolic language. It has to be
acknowledged though, that the mother has a more primordial and
influential role in the history of apocalyptic imaginary.
What Jay accomplishes(concludes) is that we cannot mourn about the
loss of an object belonging to the real world. Neither passing of time, nor
realization can achieve consolation, as we have invested (feelings) and
thus the object hasnt fully disappeared. Another explanation the author
suggests is that after all, mourning itself is a utopian myth , or
melancholia is not so much an illness to be overcome, but a permanent
dimension of human condition6. However, the healing of mourning will
lead to the extermination of melancholy and apocalyptic fantasies.
Agnes Heller has chosen the simple title The elementary ethics of
everyday life
But she begins in a quite complicated way by mentioning Levinas,
Weber, Habermas and by outlining the three approaches in Levinass work
that made philosophers suspicious. First modern culture is decentered
which means that morality concerns all spheres of ethics, second
knowledge may change but this doesnt mean that there is an
approximation or a centerepoint of knowledge. And third, because of the
second, true knowledge and right norms should be established and since
all kinds of discourse ethics are occupied with it, moral intuitions are
treated as if they are pre-scientific knowledge.
Then Heller examines the position of the Other since Plato, Aristotle, the
Christian tradition and Kant, for whom knowledge became decentered
while morality empathically well-centered. Kant also insisted on the
moral center.
represented by the categorical imperative and according to his theory the
difference between ethics and knowledge is not the difference between
two kinds of discourses, because when they are differed, morality
becomes reduced to a kind of knowledge.
Heller believes that practical discourse must remain silent about virtues
(especially about the other) and about the very source of morals, because
they cant become subject-matter of discourse, they are prior to
discourse.7 Heller shows some common question, which people believe to
be moral, but they arent. The real moral questions aim at the center of
the person who asks them, and this center is his responsibility.
6 P.42
7 P.50
The author believes that there are either well-centered morals, or none,
and if such a center is lost, then laws would entirely replace morals.
Philosophers began to decentre morals with the passing of modern history.
They wondered if these morals should be treated as remnants, already
marked for self-destruction, if those traditional and irrational ways of
centring morals should be swept away and if it is worth to speak about
them philosophically. Hellers conclusion is that no matter theories, morals
begin in everyday life that we all share.
At the center of the moral practical discourse stands the gesture, the
first gesture of ones acceptance to be moral and it has a transcendent,
absolute character by means of which it protects morals from being
colonized be sheer cognitive claims. The absoluteness of the initial moral
gesture lies in the resolve of each individual to be a good person and the
existential choice of goodness is the gesture of taking responsibility, which
is one of the fundamental moral concepts. Then Heller explains what
means to be responsible and how we face the others. The conclusion here
is that by taking responsibility for ones actions one takes responsibility for
the others too.
The kind of responsibility Heller talks about does not concern the
retrospect (what we have done) but the prospective being in charge,
which is always responsibility for others. The gesture of taking
responsibility can be seen as a respond to a question. Heller describes
what a decent person is and cites Dostoevsky and his Paradise on Earth.
He, similarly to other philosophers, cancels ethics, because he also
imposes a cognitive discourse upon morals and is ignorant to the fact that
despite moral responsibility is engendered by a gesture, however, it
doesnt remain such.
Heller talks about the inconsistency(discrepancy) in the situations of
everyday life and in borderline situations whichever we fail to be moral
in, means immorality.
It is interesting to note that moral phronesis requires constant practice,
rather than moral attitude. The universal orientative principle of morals is
care for other human beings, which can be interpreted as love, practicing
charity or taking responsibility.
Heller also counts(enumerates) a few orientative principles concerning
the others vulnerability, autonomy, morality and suffering. These
principles are nothing but interpretations or explications of the universal
orientative principle. Then the author talks about reciprocity what it
means (to give and to receive), its two kinds (symmetric and
asymmetric), its practices and the way it is related to culture and to
freedom. The author talks about the master principle (arche) of morals
which become evident by what is forbidden in reciprocity and this
precisely is:
instrumentalization of reciprocity; to do someone good in order to receive
a favour back; to ask a favour from someone you hate; or to ask relevant
feelings for doing good (gratitude for example).
Heller continues with Max Weber and his diagnosis of modernity, then
she discusses values which are regarded as old-fashioned and concludes
that the difficulties come up when virtues are to be practiced. Heller once
again proves (as she does during the whole essay) that the
right moral question is not Why should I be moral? but What is the right
thing for me to do?.
Despite that contemporary morals have become relativized, morality is
absolute and this fact cannot be changed and philosophys job is to
supervise whether human practice is to follow the example of decent
persons.
defined as the free play of the imagination and the sublimity of creation
is presented or received through an aesthetic idea.
Kant relates aesthetic ideas to reflective judgment which happens via
the harmony between the understanding and the imagination. There are
two directions in Kants work reflective teleology, revealed in the use of
human reason and a construction of human self-image, with which Kant
tries to fill the gap between reason and imagination. Then Rundell explains
freedom and friendship. Opinion, belief and of course knowledge also lie
in the basis of truth to which Kant claims one can get both subjectively
and objectively. Kant describes friendship as mutual love and respect,
but what is actually important for the self-image is that it is projected
phantasy or utopia in which reason or imagination are viewed
metaphorically as predominant in any cultural tradition. The human selfimages become home of reason and imagination, a place where they
happen.
the analogy of the ego, because it permits the subject to transfer his
self on the others and that is how intersubjectivity is achieved.
In the subchapter Social imaginary Ricoeur examines imaginative
practices like ideology and utopia. Both of them are antagonistic, there is
a twofold ambiguity resulting from this polarity and only a critique of such
antagonistic figures can help the productive imagination restore itself.
Ricoeur examines historically the polarity between ideology and utopia
and discusses the levels of meaning which form of ideology. He defines
social action as a radical level which constitutes ideology and its primitive
level is the social imaginary. Ricouer cites Levi-Strauss, who says that
society is an effect of symbolism and this symbolic constitution is closely
related to authority whose function is to monitor the ideological
representations. After all, the author concludes that utopia and ideology
are not only intertwined, but also mutually dependent, and all this makes
it sometimes difficult to discern the one from the other.
Ricoeur finishes by saying some words about ideologys reflective
function and utopias dysfunction. Still, he doesnt confirm ideologys
superiority to utopia, neither that it is a cure, because as he says, the
disease is often at the same time a remedy (or the other way round).
never won the place it deserved as soul and second, social imaginary
was also ignored by the history of philosophical, sociological and political
thought. He says that he will not come into details about souls history, but
for him it is important to note two remarks about Aristotles De Anima,
as well as to discuss Kant.
Phantasia for Aristotle covers two completely different ideas
secondary imagination (imitative, reproductive or combinatory) and
primary imagination the one that possibly precedes any thought.
Castoriadis states that the primary imagination roughly corresponds to his
radical imagination. Castoriadis clarifies that for Aristotle there is no
relation between phantasia and poiesis, because the second is for
Aristotle a technique imitating nature, Whats more, while for Aristotle
man is an animal with reason (logos), for Castoriadis animals are more
rational than humans and it is language which entails radical imagination
and human reason.
Then Castoriadis follows the history of language the way it was formed
by Plato and Aristotle and the way it remained with no consequence for
philosophy. He explains the term imagination as connected to images
and invention (or creation), the term radical as opposed to secondary
imagination and as an emphasis that the radical imagination is before the
distinction between real and fictitious and the term social imaginary as
creating images not in the usual, but in general sense (emblems, flags,
etc.). Radical imagination is the singular human being, more specifically
its psyche.
For Castoriadis the radical imagination can be elucidated in two ways
philosophical and psychoanalytical. For the first he uses Kant and his
imagination is the power to represent in the intuition an object even
20 P.165