Abstract
This chapter aims to awaken awareness of and appreciation for the root of intelligibility in moral responsibility. It understands moral responsibility as beginning in the singularizing response of me, I, myself, to the vulnerability and suffering of you, the other person, the singular other, as a being for-the-other before being for-oneself, as a disinterestedness before self-interest—this “before” serving also as the root significance of all priority, all value, the very importance of importance. It thereby defends a “cosmopolitanism,” the solidarity of all humanity, oriented by such a priority, by moral responsibility, in contrast to the rapacious nihilist greed and self-interest promulgated by globalized capitalism and its governmental allies. To effect such awakening, the chapter illustrates the character and priority of moral responsibility by invoking and commenting upon selected passages from Vasily Grossman, Aristotle, Antonio Gramsci, Heinrich Heine, Herman Melville, Emmanuel Levinas and Socrates.
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Notes
- 1.
Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, transl. A. Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 297, 298.
- 2.
Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate, transl. Robert Chandler (New York: Harper & Row, 1987), 407–408, 409, 410. Allow me to invoke another beautiful citation which in its own way highlights the same inexplicable but unwavering ethical fundament, from Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. The narrator is reflecting on the death that day of his dear and admired friend the author Bergotte. Wondering about the soul’s survival in afterlife, he muses: “All that we can say is that everything is arranged in this life as though we entered it carrying a burden of obligations contracted in in a former life there is no reason inherent in the conditions for life on this earth that can make us consider ourselves obliged to do good, to be kind and thoughtful, even to be polite, nor for an atheist artist to consider himself obliged to begin over again a score of times a piece of work the admiration aroused by which will matter little to his worm-eaten body, like the patch of yellow wall painted with so much skill and refinement by an artist destined to be forever unknown and barely identified under the name Vermeer. All these obligations, which have no sanction in our present life, seem to belong to a different world, a world based on kindness, scrupulousness, self-sacrifice, a world entirely different from this one and which we leave in order to be born on this earth before perhaps returning there to live once again beneath the sway of those unknown laws which we obeyed because we bore their precepts in our hearts, not knowing whose hand had traced them there—those laws to which every profound work of the intellect brings us nearer and which are invisible only—if then!—to fools.” Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, Vol. III, “The Captive,” transl. C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin (New York: Random House, 1981), 186; my attention was drawn to this citation by an article by Edmund Wilson, entitled “Marxism and Literature,” in his collection, The Triple Thinkers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963), 206.
- 3.
Emmanuel Levinas, Humanism of the Other, transl. Nidra Pller (Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 6. I don’t have to remind the reader that Proust’s reflections recall certain of Plato’s myths in Republic, Phaedo, Symposium and Phaedrus. Below we will comment on another of its literary treatments in Herman Melville’s Billy Budd.
- 4.
Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, transl. A. Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 30.
- 5.
Emmanuel Levinas, Humanism of the Other, transl. Nidra Poller (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 31.
- 6.
Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, transl. A. Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998), 126.
- 7.
Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind, transl. Mabelle L. Andison (New York: The Philosophical Library, 1946), 129. (In French the book is La Pensée et le mouvant (Paris, 1934)).
- 8.
Aristotle, The Politics, transl. T. A. Sinclair, revised by Trevor J. Saunders (Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1982), 60 (1253a15–17).
- 9.
See, Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003); and Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, ed. Marie-Louise Mallet, transl. David Wills (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008).
- 10.
Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, Book II, section 40, transl. Rex Warner (Baltimore, MD: Penguin Books, 1964).
- 11.
Aristotle, Politics, 185 (1278a25).
- 12.
Thucydides, Peloponnesian War, Book II, section 37.
- 13.
Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, Vol. III, ed. and transl. Joseph A. Buttigieg (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 17. To this citation perhaps we may append the epigram Czeslaw Milosz selected to place at the head of his anti-Soviet book The Captive Mind, the words of “An Old Jew of Galicia”: “When someone is honestly 55% right, that’s very good and there’s no use wrangling. And if someone is 60% right, it’s wonderful, its great luck, and let him thank God. But what’s to be said about 75% right? Wise people say this is suspicious. Well, and what about 100% right? Whoever says he 100% right is a fanatic, a thug, and the worse kind of rascal.” Czeslaw Milosz, The Captive Mind, transl. Jane Zielongo (New York: Random House, 1990), v.
- 14.
Immanuel Kant, “A Philosophical Sketch,” in Kant: Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss, transl. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 126.
- 15.
Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Books VI-X, transl. R. D. Hicks (Cambridge: Harvard University Press (Loeb Classical Library), 2005), Book VI, line 63; 65.
- 16.
Confucius, Analects, transl. Arthur Waley (New York: Random House, 1938), Book 1, chapter 1; 85.
- 17.
Saying of the Fathers, transl. Joseph H. Hertz (New York: Behrman House, 1954), Book IV, chapter 1; 65.
- 18.
These two articles are found in Kant: Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss.
- 19.
Ibid., 112.
- 20.
Confucius, Analects, Book IV, no. 16; 105.
- 21.
Regarding his politics, the following statement by Heine scholar Leslie Bodi provides a good summary: “He believed in the historical necessity of revolutionary change; emotionally, however, he was torn between Promethean enthusiasm and an insight into the horrors, the irrationality and the inhumanity inherent in political action.” Leslie Bodi, “Heinrich Heine: the poet as frondeur,” in Intellectuals and Revolution, ed. Eugene Kamenka and F. B. Smith (London: Edward Arnold, 1979), 44.
- 22.
See, Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, transl. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1969), 245 (Ecce Homo, “Why I am so Clever,” section 4).
- 23.
The Poetry and Prose of Heinrich Heine, ed. Frederic Ewen (New York: Citadel Press, 1959), 500–501 (transl. Frederic Ewen).
- 24.
See, Hannah Arendt, The Jew as Pariah, ed. Ron H. Feldman (New York: Grove Press, 1978. “Heine is the only German Jew who could truthfully describe himself as both a German and a Jew. “(74). The more usual position, from both sides, is of course the oppositional and hierarchical one, as for instance one finds, from the Jewish side, in Israel Zangwill, Chosen Peoples: The Hebraic Ideal ‘Versus’ The Teutonic (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1918).
- 25.
Arendt, Pariah, 75.
- 26.
This expression was made popular by the eponymous book, A Nation of Immigrants (New York: Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, 1959) by then Senator John F. Kennedy, re-published posthumously (New York: Harper & Row, 1964).
- 27.
See, e.g., D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (New York: Viking Press, 1968), p. 159: “It is an epic of the sea such as no man has equaled …. It is a great book, a very great book, the greatest book of the sea ever written. It moves awe in the soul.”
- 28.
Herman Melville, Billy Budd, Sailor, ed. Harrison Hayford and Merton M. Sealts, Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970). Published posthumously and without final authorial editing, this edition, among several others, seems to be the best—most accurate, most faithful to Melville’s text—from a scholarly point of view.
- 29.
Budd, 44.
- 30.
Ibid., 49.
- 31.
Ibid., 52.
- 32.
Ibid., 47.
- 33.
On such an asymmetry, see Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, in which a “noble” morality, by which the good define themselves by their deeds, is distinguished from a “slave” morality, which consists in rejecting the good of noble morality. To be sure, Melville’s opposition of good and evil, Billy Budd and John Claggart, conforms to neither of Nietzsche’s models.
- 34.
Ibid., 98.
- 35.
Ibid., 99.
- 36.
Ibid.
- 37.
Ibid., 103.
- 38.
See, Loren Goldner, Herman Melville: Between Charlemagne and the Antemosaic Cosmic Man (New York: Queequeg Publications, 2006), chapter 19, 264–286.
- 39.
Levinas, Humanism of the Other, 31.
- 40.
Emmanuel Levinas, Entre Nous, transl. Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 107.
- 41.
Emmanuel Levinas, Beyond the Verse, transl. Gary D. Mole (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 185.
- 42.
Levinas, Humanism of the Other, 7.
- 43.
Emmanuel Levinas, Alterity and Transcendence, transl. Michael B. Smith (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 123.
- 44.
Emmanuel Levinas, Is it Righteous to Be? Interviews with Emmanuel Levinas, ed. Jill Robbins (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 145.
- 45.
Levinas, Alterity and Transcendence, 171.
- 46.
Levinas, Humanism of the Other, 55.
- 47.
Levinas, Otherwise than Being, 178.
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Cohen, R.A. (2021). Naked Humanity Beyond the Inevitable Ceremonial. In: Cohen, R.A., Marci, T., Scuccimarra, L. (eds) The Politics of Humanity. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75957-5_3
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