/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.19129791]

For Levinas, responsibility produces value. For Whitehead, it is the process of valuation that first generates any sense of responsibility. For Levinas, ethics suspends spontaneous action: when I am confronted with the face of the Other, all I can do is respond to its call. For Whitehead, to the contrary, ethics can only be the result of a spontaneous aesthetic decision. Ethics is not the ground or basis of value. Rather, it is only out of the actual process of valuation or of determining importance that “the conception of morals arises” in the first place (MT 111). This process is performed without guarantees, and without subordination by every actual occasion. Whitehead beautifully says that “the basis of democracy is the common fact of value experience” (111). Such a “common fact” itself comes first. It cannot be derived from, or subordinated to, an encounter with the Other. From a Whiteheadian point of view, Levinas’ subordination of immanence to transcendence and of self-enjoyment to concern is one-sided and reductive—just as a philosophy of pure immanence and positivity would also be one-sided and reductive. Levinas’ claim for the priority of ethics is one more example of the “overstatement” that Whitehead sees as the “chief error” of so much Western philosophy: “the aim at generalization is sound, but the estimate of success is exaggerated” (PR 7). Concern is important, but it cannot be separated from self-enjoyment, much less elevated above it. Whitehead insists that “at the base of our existence is the sense of ‘worth’…the sense of existence for its own sake, of existence which is its own justification, of existence with its own character” (MT 109). This means that valuation is singular, self-affirming, and aesthetic, first of all. Aesthetics cannot be superseded by ethics. “The essence of power is the drive towards aesthetic worth for its own sake. All power is a derivative from this fact of composition attaining worth for itself. There is no other fact” (119).

[Anonymous No.19129822]

>someone was actually paid to write this analysis of two different approaches to verbal masturbation
>Whitehead and Levinas received academic salaries to produce this vapid redditesque gibberish in the first place
Thank god we now have vlogs and podcasts as dedicated containment media for sophistic pseudery.

[Anonymous No.19130405]

>>19129791
Moral arrangements, rules and laws are discovered through gaming it out over time.
Rules that are dictated are rule breaking, a state of exception is declared.