Of nature, ethics, autonomy, and meaning
My natural inclination is (or at least was) to disregard talk of ethics as roundabout ways of talking about other things. Today I was listening with Julia to a podcast about the philosophy of lying, whilst painting her hair, and (a) recovered one of these typical reductions ('truth' not being a moral value but a sociolinguistic mechanism, and hence lying not as a moral code so much as a protocol), as well as (b) came to think of the notion of lying as a very interesting key connection between the immanence / initiality of politics in reality, and the discourse of propositional truth.
I have been very prone to reduce (and think this reduction is a natural, widespread, modern, scientific one) ethics to the propositional realm. However, such a reduction, in our conception of man as an organism, creature, and mankind as a species, in the world, causes values to be reduced to the propellent / inherent structures in this technical conception of life; i.e. reduces degree of morality / truth / beauty to stability, force, procreation, boundaries, etc. of what is life.
And this is exactly my disconcertion of late, with the reliance upon the notion of 'natural' as a guide, whereas we should surely be wanting to divide this 'naturality' up somewhere.
An example. An interesting video I just watched1, a TED video in which a father, man of science, speaks of his gay child, and of the science indicating that homosexuality is an intended natural diversity effect etc -- does exactly this: argue for ethical values / an ethical stance in terms of found propositional truth.
Or: postmodern focus upon notions of natural geographic growth. Etc.
I find herein the key dilemma which we, as a society, are facing. It is that we are answering (Yalom's interpretation of?) Nietzsche's dilemma of finding meaning in an inherently meaningless world with (also possibly very much Nietzsche's opinion) our, indeed quite self-reflectively found and definitely not ill-suited, 'life'-ness (with 'life' interpreted in this technical sense).
However, hereby we are:
- tying ourselves to a radically unchangeable and only self-interested mechanism (i.e. like Habermas' purposive-functional systems, but then with my flavor of 'natural realism'), and thereby relinquishing autonomy in a very real sense (which is the contrary to, but simulteneously true, with the fact that mastery of nature is of course the becoming autonomous in the first place as well), and hence indeed not even being faithful to Nietzsche's aim of being 'value-creating' creatures, for we are relinquishing these abilities to nature;
- abandoning any 'just' ethics that one would currently adhere to, as far as I know it. The immutable and equal dignity of each human being, etc.
Hence we have here our paradox. We know of no other substitute for meaning, than our propellant natural (and technically/propositionally understood) force/desire of life. However, we cannot let it be the substitute, for it would have us relinquish our desire to be autonomous, value-creating beings.
And I would want add, redundantly and just for emphasis, that we must not answer this dilemma with a 'oneness with nature or environment' kind of argument; for it would be exactly that automatic alternative which abandoning any 'just' ethics as we now conceive of it.