Next to knowledge of the world, concerning ethics Žižek
also starts with Kant, with his second Critique, of Practical Reason. Let me
say from the start that here I deviate almost totally from Kant and Žižek. In epistemology
I am a Kantian but in ethics I am not. There, I am an Aristotelian, going for a
virtue ethics rather than a duty ethics.
According to Kant, the human being has a natural urge
towards survival, in drives for food, sex, and protection, as well as a natural
urge towards social recognition and respect. Beyond that, it also has a
potential for a rational, unconditional commitment to a universal moral law, in
particular the Kantian categorical imperative. That commitment must be unconditional,
going against natural urges, desire and self-interest. One obeys the law not
because one supports it or believes in it, or out of a mutual interest in a
‘social contract’, but because it is the law.
I am not throwing this out. Democracy requires
acceptance of the law as an outcome of political contestation and compromise, even
if it does not suit one.
Kant recognized that the law in place is often the
outcome of a usurpation of power, and may not conform to considerations of
justice. One may then criticise the law, but only while obeying it. He
therefore condemned the French revolution, in particular the execution of Louis
XVI. But once the revolution has established a new order one must obey that
unconditionally.
Kant calls this freedom: freedom not to follow the
impulse of natural urges, emotions, or self-interest. At the same time, it is
odd to call the unconditional conformance to the law a form of freedom, since
it constrains action, which is a form of unfreedom.
God gave Adam and Eve the freedom to sin, Kant gave
humanity the freedom not to sin.
In my treatment of freedom, in this blog, I
distinguished between negative freedom, in constraints upon actions, and
positive freedom, which gives access to the good life, and I distinguished
several levels of the latter freedom. The first level is oriented not to what one
wants, but towards what one would want to want. That would include a Kant-like
orientation, in a turn from impulse towards duty. However, there I would
connect it to virtues, such as the virtue of justice, and I would not rule out
satisfaction of natural urges as part of the good life. I find it highly
perverse to define morality in terms of a denial of human nature. Kantian duty
ethics has caused manifold harms of hypocrisy and suppressed feelings.
Kant recognized forms of evil, in the difficulty to
adhere to the law unconditionally, in suppression of impulse and self-interest.
One evil is hypocrisy, in pretending to follow the law while going against it,
hiding the self-interest involved. An extreme form is to reject the legitimacy
of the law, as in a revolutionary movement. The most extreme is to not accept
any law, in the moral duty to reject any and all moral duty, as in the work of
de Sade. As Žižek formulated it: there are ways of ‘doing the right thing for
the wrong reasons’, and ‘doing the wrong thing for the right reasons’.
According to Žižek, obedience to the law cannot be
based only on rational acceptance and discipline or punishment of transgression,
and must entail belief in some non-existent, fantasized, well-funded, just law,
Lacan’s ‘objet-a’, with a perverse ‘lust going beyond lust’, ‘jouissance’, in
following the law while knowing that its demands can never be fully satisfied,
and feeling lust even in that failure. Ideology hides the arbitrary nature and
violent origins of the law. Rationally, consciously, people know it is not real
but emotionally, tacitly, they grasp the phantom.
Žižek goes further. The ‘jouissance’ includes some
surreptitious deviation from the social order that is publicly acknowledged,
such as acceptance of homosexuality or denunciation of misogyny, but with shared
guilty pleasures, pursued in complicit secrecy, like intimations and occasional
practice of homosexuality in the army, and misogynist jokes in a locker
room.
Žižek also refers to Blaise Pascal, who proposed that
conformance to the law, and religious ritual, arises not from rational
understanding and consent or belief but from habit, social inculcation, and from
that habit produces belief. Ritual is the vehicle for this. It is not that one
kneels because of faith but one acquires faith from kneeling. Rituals in
organizations, and rituals of elections and voting are not conducted from
belief in justice and democracy, but serve to turn make-believe into belief.
Here, Pascal was surprisingly close to modern insights
from brain science that deny the presence of free will. We act from social
habits that breed unconscious drives determining choice and producing acts,
which we rationalize afterwards with pious intent.
I am closer here to Pascal than to Žižek. I think that
the more or less automatic conformance to established order is not produced by
some hidden lust, but from assimilation of social practices one needs to
conform to for reasons and instincts of social survival and acceptance. Is that
in any way similar to Žižek’s ‘jouissance’? I do agree with Žižek that there is
a hidden bad consciousness involved, of the arbitrariness and injustices of the
established order, which needs to buried in the rationalizations of
ideology.
Bankers rationalize their perverse behaviour with
market ideology.
[i] Here also, an important source for
me is: Frank vande Veire, Tussen blinde
fascinatie en vrijheid; Het mensbeeld van Slavoj Žižek, 2015, Nijmegen:
Vantilt.
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