this way.
Explicitly instrumental decisions, which are classically regarded as separate and distinct from moral ones, are also essentially matters of ethics—and not just because they can have ethical consequences. The differentiating of a decision as merely instrumental is already an act of ethics, an understanding implicit in the (Nietzschean) postmodernist critique of rationality. Constructing, on the basis of instrumental rationality, a category of decisions that stand outside the realm of ethics is just a deceptive way of doing ethics by taking for granted the good of instrumentality or, more incisively, instrumentality as the good. Put another way, the inauguration of a clean, dualistic distinction between means and ends marks an ethical decision of immense moment implicitly made on the basis of instrumentality. Indeed, in the economizing of ethics, this distinction goes a step beyond moralism: instead of curtailing the ethical process by determining the bad and the good beforehand, this distinction precludes altogether an immense category of decisions from the very idea of ethicality. Instrumentality is of course unavoidable, and I certainly do not mean to suggest that it may be taken simply to define the bad. I leave that to the moralists. Rather, I am arguing that the sheer distinction between means and ends is, although epistemologically powerful, existentially deceptive and ethically insidious.
A principal thrust of my usage is that ethics enjoys a fundamental primacy over determinacy. Because all of our decisions ultimately rest on our decided agential capacity, in the end all must be a question of ethics. It is important to be clear, though, that this critical (Levinasian) thesis of ethical priority does not mean that the realization of the good is inexorable. Although I describe ethics as the human condition, when ‘ontology’ is taken in the strict sense—the deterministic sense in which it tells not only what but also that something is—the force of ethics is not exactly ontological. Obviously, an ethical injunction against theft, for example, does not hold that in reality nobody robs and steals. Rather, the priority of ethics means that human existence is always informed by discretion. Of course, the measure of choice being fundamentally limited, since the idea of wholly unconstrained choice is specious (absent worldly constraint or delimitation, what would there be to choose between?), discretion itself betrays existential necessity. But this very necessity is one key meaning of my thesis of the primacy of ethics, for, paradoxically, it virtually condemns us to conduct ourselves in terms of meanings and values. In turn, it entails yet a second key aspect of ethics: human existence is necessarily mediatory. By virtue of our finite capacity to determine our own good or ends, we are, to an exemplary degree, our own medium.
In effect, then, the force of ethics is not a question of the power of being but of our ability to determine our own worth, which is to say, to mediate our lives in terms of value qua value. On the basis of this ability (and taking direction from Levinas), we might reformulate the second meaning of the primacy of ethics as follows: because it enables us to take advantage of the mediatory possibility of the good, ethics is better, not more powerful, than ontic necessity (R. Cohen 1986). To speak in terms of ‘better’ evokes the ordinary meaning of ethics as a matter of relative good and evil. I mention this here because it explains the paradox of why—regardless of the truth of the other meaning of the primacy of ethics (that one's conduct cannot help but describe ethical process)—it remains possible to conduct oneself unethically, that is, to choose against ethicality. Choices of this kind enfeeble the human capacity for self-mediation.
Power
The exhortation ‘to speak truth to power’ distinguishes the sense of power I stress here. It opposes what is ‘right’ (in the sense of fair, or just, or good, all of which are, like ‘right, enabling and relatively open terms) to what can simply be imposed without regard to what is right. In Nietzschean usage, ‘power’ signifies both sides of this opposition: the side of right as well as the side of might. Here I identify the right in terms of the concern to preserve and enhance humankind's capacity to make and remake itself continuously, which, apart perhaps from my insistence on this capacity's dependence on the other, I believe is similar to what Nietzsche had in mind by the positive, life-affirming side of power. More often than not, it is easier to spot what threatens rather than what fosters this side. From my perspective, which means to advance onto-epistemological nondualism, Nietzsche's purposely ambiguous usage—which has come to inform the theories of some of the most influential and celebrated thinkers of our age, such as Foucault and Bourdieu—is importantly salutary, since it brings into relief the fundamentally relative nature of power, the way in which the two sides of power help to define each other. Nevertheless, since I find that when it is used in this double-sided way, ‘power’ tends (perhaps because in the context of political economy, the relatively negative side has been so presumptive an acceptation) to reduce, and in this sense corrupt, the positive side, I prefer to use different terms for the two sides. I thus refer to the two sides as ‘power’ and ‘ethics’, respectively, the latter term serving as not only the opposed but also the inclusive rubric. By seeing power as both a counterpart to and a form of ethics, I make room for the relativistic nature of power while calling attention to the primacy of the positive side, which primacy is a question of power as a function of discretion, and of discretion or the principle of negative freedom as the pre-eminently distinguishing mark of being human.
Value-as-Such
I use ‘value’ loosely to mean end or good. By ‘value-as-such’ I am propounding a narrower meaning, in order to point to what it is about value that distinguishes the desirable from the merely desired. This usage follows from nondualism and the conception of ethics by reference to human existence as fundamentally a creative or mediatory dynamic. I do not intend by it value in itself, as if value could obtain without an element of practicality; rather, I am presenting the idea of a value that does not inherently lend itself to instrumental reduction. Put another way, value-as-such remains a relative usage, but one whose own relativity is itself relativized. Judging any given value is situationally dependent, but every such judgment is itself necessarily predicated on the idea of value, in the sense in which value is opposed to fact. Some values display this sense so representatively as to reaffirm critically the very idea of value. For example, because the value of ‘turn the other cheek’ transcends, eo ipso, the demonstrative economic function of reciprocity (in this instance, revenge), it veritably creates value-as-such. By contrast, the values of, say, racism and slavery, lending themselves as they do to economization and dehumanization, tend, paradoxically, to undermine or even deny the idea of value. I do not mean to suggest that any given value is in practice immune to all attempts to instrumentalize it, for depending on how it is deployed, it can always have its measure as value qua value vitiated. The rhetoric of values can serve well to conceal and justify instrumental conduct. Thus, a value such as ‘freedom’—which surely is construable as a value-as-such—can be used to justify all sorts of perfectly instrumental and ethically vile practices (such as, for example, torturing human beings in order to extract information). Even so, I propose that inasmuch as a value-as-such logically is based on its own opposition to the instrumental, it differs significantly from values whose internal logic directly cultivates reduction to instrumentality. And for this reason, in my view, values-as-such, although hardly foolproof, may be regarded as crucial components and conditions of social arrangements and practices that furnish the interpretative and rhetorical resources to resist virulent instrumentalization.
INTRODUCTION
Nondualism, Ontology, and Anthropology
The crisis of modern man…can be put in these terms. Reason triumphant through science has destroyed the faith in revelation, without, however, replacing revelation in the office of guiding our ultimate choices. Reason disqualified itself from that office…precisely when it installed itself…as sole authority in matters of truth. Its abdication in that native province is the corollary of its triumph in other spheres: its success there is predicated upon that redefinition of the possible objects and methods of knowledge that leaves whole ranges of other objects
