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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2024
There is a certain urgency about the ethical today. Amid reports of the misery and injustice that seem to accompany all our human undertakings, and with increasing demand that it prove itself useful to an expanding range of unprecedented crises, the ethical is found to occupy a crucial place in contemporary thought. It stands at the point of a change, as our desire for a better world seeks the transformation of the one in which we find ourselves, and so it is to become the means by which we may be carried over from one situation to another, by which we are to make a difference. The ethical is to save us, and so the urgency of our salvation comes to rest in a particular and intense way on the salvation of ethics itself, saved and preserved for our sake, so that we might also be rescued and kept in safety and brought into the fulness of life that is to be ours. The enormity of this expectation of the ethical has become a kind of running theme through all sorts of contemporary discourses, assuming in many cases a force that would compel agreement without question, and at times erupting in expressions of disgust or even censure at those who would defy this logic. What else are we to do or think?
There is a sense in which this ethical has become the last sounding of the thinking of being in the western tradition, taking on the now empty form of its hegemony, while that thinking of being itself is already known to be fraught with difficulty, and so pronouncing itself as the final grand narrative by which nonetheless our redemption is to be secured.
1 See e.g. his description of the relation of faith and reason as ‘not essentially distinct, since both are but differing degrees of participation in the mind of God’, and since both ‘are framed by the participation of our being and knowing in the divine being and intellection.’ John, Milbank, The Programme of Radical Orthodoxy in Radical Orthodoxy — A Catholic Enquiry?, Laurence, Paul Hemming (ed.), (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), p. 35Google Scholar. Whether or not this is the view of Aquinas, upon which Milbank seems here to base his own understanding, is matter for another debate.
2 See the discussion of ‘Being and the Ought’ in Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, Ralph Manheim (trans.), (New York: Doubleday & Co, 1961), pp. 164-167. [‘In dem Maße als das Sein selbst sich hinsichtlich seines Ideencharakters verfestigt, in dem gleichen Maße drängt es dazu, die damit geschehende Herabsetzung des Seins wieder wettzumachen.’ Einführung in die Metaphysik (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1987 [original publication 1953]), p. 150
3 ‘Im Bereich des Kennbaren ist die Idee des Guten die alles Scheinen vollendende und daher auch erst zuletzt eigentlich gesichtete Sichtsamheit, so zwar, daß sie kaum (nur mit großer Mühe) eigens gesehen wird.’ This is Heidegger’s translation of Plato’s Republic, 517b, 8: en toi gnostoi teleutaia he tou agathou idea kai mogis orasthai. Martin, Heidegger, Platons hhre von der Wahrheit in Wegmarken (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann Verlag, 1967), p. 132Google Scholar. [ET Plato’s Doctrine of Truth, Thos. Sheehan (transl.), in Pathmarks, Win. McNeill (ed.), (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 174.1 See also Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), pp. 283-6.
4 Susan, Frank Parsons, The Ethics of Gender (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001)Google Scholar; ‘To Be or not to Be: Gender and Ontology’, paper given at the Katholieke Universiteit, Leuven, 28 June 2002.
5 Heidegger, Basic Problems, p. 284.
6 Heidegger, Basic Problems, p. 287.
7 Heidegger, Basic Problems, p. 287.
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