Ethics: Advanced Course (B-KUL-W0EQ7A)

Aims:

The purpose of this course is to help the students understand the major ethical issues
surrounding the modern reconfiguration of the ethos of being, in light of human
autonomy, and the equivocal ethical result of this for our relation to what is other to
ourselves.
Having successfully pursued the course the student should have attained the  following
aims:
- Be able to formulate what is at issue in the claim that a particular ethics emerges in
terms of how we reconfigure the given ethos of being;
- Be familiar with how a project of objectification and subjectification are bound up with
the modern notion of autonomy;
- Be capable of articulating connections between autonomy and our ethical relations to
others;
- Be able to account for different reconfigurations of the ethos of being in terms of what
are called the potencies of the ethical;
- Be able to account for different reconfigurations of the ethos of being in terms of the
fundamental senses of being;
- Be able to apply the above insights to make sense of the diverse ethical contributions of
Kant, Hegel and Nietzsche.

Prof. dr. W. Desmond – Week 1 – 23 September 2014 – 14-16 pm – Room 00.14 (B)

Introduction by Dennis vanden Auweele

 Syllabus;
 Written exam (Three hours, with Three question);
 Read Introduction + Chapter 1 by October 7th;
 Next week: introduction to Metaxology (‘Logos or study of the Between’);
 This week: introduction to the Questions of Ethics and the Between.
o What are the questions which are being answered in this book? (Questions are
important)

The Questions of Ethics and the Between

 Postmodernity and the divorce of Metaphysics and Ethics
o Ens est Bonum et Verum (‘Being is Good and True’)
o Modern philosophy and Critique

Central questions: there is something happened, a kind of shift, through which ethics became
problematic?
In pre-modern philosophy Being (metaphysics) is intractably or non-separable from The Good
(Ethics). Cf. Plato. Also in Christian ethics (something is good because it has an important or crucial
place in metaphysics).

What happens in modern philosophy (i.e. after the middle-aged), is that Being and the Good are
divorced from each other. Metaphysics becomes devoid of value: valueleness thereness.

Descartes:
- Res absolutas (absolute Being);
- Res extensa;
- Res cogitans (thinking subject which is disconnected with res extensa and res absolutas).
Descartes recognizes that there is a need to connect all these three dimensions with each other.

Modern philosophy: has reconfigured the ethos of Being (shift from pre- to post-modern philosophy)

Ethical critique and metaphysical critique are (from Desmond’s point of view) inseparable.

Kant:
 The subject as legislator (subject is outside reality and bestows value to reality). A good will is
according to Kant an autonomous will. (This is from a pre-modern perspective very strange,
because you do not give, but obey the law).
 God as rational postulate for the consummation of virtue and happiness.

In pre-modern top-down: God > we, modern philosophy down-up: we > God

The problem of the Good and God

 Schopenhauer and Nietzsche: the Good of Being is a kind of self-legislation is not necessarily
rationally. (Rational postulates are for the weak, wishful-thinking). Human beings themselves
are not interested in the good or reality.
 The failure of Theodicy (‘God-justice’).
o Pre-modern: you give reasons that show that God is just;
o Modern: you put God for the trial of justice;
o Problem of Evil; ‘Radical Evil’ you cannot in any way see something as good; This is
the failure of Theodicy.
 Dostoevsky’s Grand-Inquisitor.
 Alyosha: some do radical evil, so that we commit ourselves more to
God/Faith.
 Alyosha: Moral Responsibility and Atonement in Christ.

Prof. dr. W. Desmond – Week 2 – 30 September 2014 – 14-16 pm – Room 00.14 (B)

Introduction to Metaxology

Today: general framework of Ethics and Between

 Desmond does not a lot of metaphilosophy, so his assistant does today.

Question of Ethics and the Between

 Modern: moral philosophy after the separation of metaphysics and Ethics.
 Modernity and the emphasis on autonomy.
 o Human reason is incapable of describing what is transcendental. This became the
idea in modern philosophy (after the nominalistic concerns of late-medieval
philosophy)
o Thinking from the perspective of autonomy.
 Dostoevsky
o The Grand-Inquisitor (Evil is not really evil, we just don’t understand God). Moderns:
no theological conception of evil.
o Alyosha and Ivan on the Moral Life
 Ivan (rationalist) tries to comprehend and do away with evil through rational
thought. Rational answer: focusing on own autonomy and trying to do away
with evil.
 Alyosha (faithful one). Recognizes that having faith is not enough. Contends
that we are autonomous and that there is evil, but that his faith in God has
given him the capacity to stand up against evil.
o Autonomy and/or faith?
 Dismantle the dichotomy between autonomy and faith. If you focus on sheer
autonomy, you have relinquished a more comprehensive metaxological view
of the world.
 Dream Monologues of Autonomy (Desmond: Reworking of ‘The Parable of The Prodigal Son’)
o Brother complaints, why feast for return of young brother? Answer: he was left, and
now he is found. (Message about converging): there is a gracious kind of love from
God
 Desmond puts philosophers in the story. All these philosophers turn away from God, but
they forget that their autonomy is a gift from God.
 Kant is disgruntled older brother?
 Where is justice? Is God to be trusted?
 Revolts against father.
 Move away from father, from God
 Hegel is the prodigal brother
 Self-realizing the world, returning on own accord.
 Revolts against father.
 Move away from father, from God
 Marx is worker on father’s land
 Revolution against ‘bosses’
 Revolts against father.
 Move away from father, from God
 Nietzsche is not sure he is
 Forgetting the ‘old man’
 Move away from father, from God
 Father: I let them go > let them return
 Gift of autonomy.
 What makes the temporary idea of self-determination so prevalent. What makes autonomy
valuable? Late-modern philosophers (Hegel, Nietzsche, Marx) doubt not the value of
autonomy, but are sceptical about the possibility of this ideal.

Metaxology:
 Logos of the Metaxu
 Metaxu = ‘Between’
 Between = different approach beyond systematic closed totalization;
o Modern philosophy: has the tendency to exclude ‘otherness’ from the system.
o Cf. Levinas (radical ‘otherness’ is not taken into account’)
 o Desmond uses the notion ‘Between’ (you are not here, nor there but in between) to
evade ‘closing system’. Keeping potentiality of a relativity of the Between open.
 Nietzsche: ‘The will to system is a lack of integrity’;
 ‘The Between’ opens space of relationships
 Metaxology: a way to re-think the potential ways of calling something good without:
o Falling into perspectivism. Metaxology will avoid perspectives.
o Claiming exclusivity. Metaxology will avoid pinpointing ‘the Good’
o Closing the ethical system upon itself
o Dislodging transcendence from ethics. This is the only way to keep the system open.

The Fourfold of Being Good

 Univocal Ethics;
o Pinpointing the good in a determinate good. (Non-perspectivism). Cf. Utilitarianism
vs. Deontological. (Cannot account for other things that might be good).
 Equivocal Ethics;
o Perspectivist pluralism. Many things are good. (Cannot account for hunch that some
things are better than other. Cf. IS).
 Dialectical Ethics (how to relate different perspectives?)
o The good is self-mediated, autonomous creation;
o Trying to deal with opposition in a constructive way (how?).
 Taking a more dynamical and comprehensive perspectives. (Cf. Hegel).
 Cannot accommodate radical ‘otherness’.
 Affinity with univocal ethics. (Cannot account for ‘radical otherness’;
otherness that cannot be put in the system).
 Metaxological Ethics
o Open community of ethical self- and other mediation.
o Retain all the previous forms of Being Good.

The Potencies of the Ethical

 Being Good is said in many different ways.
o Modern philosophy (‘Good’ only in a strongly moralized sense. Cf. Kant. Cf.
Univocalist tendency).
 The Idiocy of Goodness (focus on that Being is good).
o ‘Idios’, Greek for ‘intimate’, ‘close’, ‘not distant’.
o Idiocy is the intimate nature of Goodness (because it is so close, it is hard to
articulate).
 You do not need yourself to be de-individualized (like the Dioyonisian)
 Desmond often relates this to Being (Cf. Heidgger).
 Wisedom of Silenus. Weird. Why? Sense that there is something
inexplicably Good to Being/existence (although, calculative, it would
probably be better to never been born).
 The Aesthetics of Goodness (Beauty). (Focus on what Being is good. One thing).
 The Dianoetics of Goodness (Regularity). (Focus on the Goodness of the regularity in Being).
 Transcendental Goodness (‘Selving’. To become a self). (There is something Good about
being an authentic self).
 Eudaimonistic Goodness (happiness).
 Transcending Goodness (Self-surpassing. It is good to overcome something. Nietzsche’s
Übermensch).
 Transcendent Good (Agapeic Origin). From where does all thing Good spring? The Goodness
of all previous Good is
 Prof. dr. W. Desmond – Week 3 – 7 October 2014 – 14-16 pm – Room 00.14 (B)

Ethos and Valuelessness

What is ethics? Each of us is constitutively ethical. Spaces of ethos of worth and worthlessness.

Autonomy is central to modernity. Modernity is an epoch in which freedom is conceived as the

ultimate value. Yet, what does freedom consist of?
Freedom is in modernity always linked to autonomy. Is the notion of freedom identical with
freedom? Freedom of autonomous choice.

Autonomy: auto (self, same), nomos, (law). Autonomy is self-law. If freedom is autonomy, what than
about the other-than-self?
Heteronomy: heteros (other), nomos (law). Heteronomy is other-law.

If authonomy comes first, what than about the other? Does the relation between self and other not
has to be thought in other-terms than that of autonomy?

Heteronomy is currently regarded as a treat to our own autonomy > negative sense of the other?

In continental philosophy there has been attention to the other (in particular Levinas has emphasised
the importance of the other). Gestalt switch in ‘70’s from Nietzsche to Levinas. Return of the other as
central concern.
Early Sartre is proponent of certain kind of autonomy. Yet, Levinas and Sartre are not unrelated. For
Levinas the face of the other interrupts in the autonomy of the self. Autonomy is ruptured by the
other. Absolutization of self and autonomy, absolutization of the other. Is there more in the ethical
between than these two tendencies which feed of each other.

Posthumous mind reflecting on life: discover what is really worth in life.

Distinction between:
 Given Ethos (of Being): we don’t constitute the Ethos (it is given), but we participate in it. The
given Ethos possesses a kind of indeterminacy and overdeterminacy (it is so rich in
determinacy that you cannot pinpoint down to one meaning). We try to make indeterminate
and overdeterminacy more determinate we to feel us at home. (Science for example tries to
determinate nature by process of objectivation. This objectivation strips Being of all
‘secondary qualities’, so that nothing remains. Yet it is the subject who does the
objectivation).
v
 Reconfigured Ethos: by participation we reconfigure ethos.

Plato’s metaphysics: sense of openness to transcendent.

Being as Good

Convertibility of Being and the Good

‘Good’ is not merely the moral good!!! Not some human invention.

Modernity: divorce of Being and the Good. Being is reduced to valuelessness thereness.
Objectification Being: where does objectification come from? From an impatience with equivocity
(constitutive ambiguities). Reduce multiplicity of voices (meanings) to one univocal meaning.
Objectiviation is a process done by us subjects.
Subjectiviaton of Being:

Primary (objective mathematical truths) and secondary quality (subjective taste)

Pascal: infinite spaces make me afraid.

 Espirit de finesse: finesse cannot be matemathizized. Finesse comes first.
 Espirit de geometrie: want so univocalize Being

Can we objectify, mathematizise ourselves?

Desire to univocalize nature, but you have a feeling that the subject is something totally other, which
cannot be univocalized.

Being and Being Good is convertable for Desmond.

Aristotle: The Good -> Telos (end > for human being a purpose). Things have ends, human being has a
purpose. You cannot mathematize, objectify or univocalize this purpose? Purposeless process (no
end, but also no point to the whole).

Ad nausium: ad infinitum: it just goes on and on, humans cannot live without sense of purpose.

Nietzsche: we have invented values. What is other has for itself no value.

We are the victims of century old reconfigurations of Ethos.

Autonomy occurs after a variety of metaphysical shifts.

In modernity autonomy secretly seems to harbour the will to power.

Nietzsche and Schopenhauer: will prior to reason. In all cases the will is a will that wills itself. Self-
affirmation of the will. Is there a willing that not wills itself? Logic of self-determination dominates
modern philosophy.

Investigation in Ethics and the Between is a step back out of the determinate systems of
contemporary ethics. What is at work in all determinate ethical configuration? Not pitting one system
against another.

Ethical systems are themselves configurations of the potencies of the ethical. Potency refers also to a
power. It is not mere possibility. Power is seen as something bad, power enables beings to Be. Power
enables us to be. Potencies of the ethical are endowed potencies. Endowed character of ethical
potencies. We are always shadowed by the overdetermined, by the too much (nausea Sartre).

Thinking comes to one. Endowed character of thinking.

Prof. dr. W. Desmond – Week 4 – 14 October 2014 – 14-16 pm – Room 00.14 (B)
Ethos of modernity: first sense of the ethos as given, second sense of ethos as reconfigured. We
always live in the given ethos.

Second ethos (reconfigured) is grounded in something prior to itself. Makes it difficult to see
different potentialities.

Many intellectuals today: ethos of default atheism. Default > something on which one falls back
(something you don’t really think about)

Credit: that in which we put our trust in. Reconfigured ethos.

Default theism has lost its credibility.

Turn towards immanence in modernity is linked to religious wars in the beginning of modernity.
Interplay between (immanent) autonomy and neutralization of the world/ethos.

Is there a real difference between autonomous ethical being and a measure of right and wrong that
is more.

When we are the value givers of a valueless whole, are we as part of that totality characterized by
that same valuelessness? (Pacal)

Ethical potencies: potencies who are present in variant ethical systems.

Four fold sense of Being. ‘Being’ is said in many senses. (Does Being itself talk in many voices?)

Univocity of being > one voice (especially with regard to the Good, one Good). Tendency which is
very strong in history in ethical thought.
Equivocity of being > double voices.

Parmenides: to be is to be one.

History of philosophy: place univocity over equivocity. Philosophy must however be treated with
finesse.

H1: try to make the sense of the good more and more determinate, but equivocity keeps popping up.
We conquer univocity in one sense, but equivocity keeps popping up.

Determining the indeterminate. Ethos is rich with overdetermine possibilities, but the conquering of
the equivocal leads to new equivocal.

Potencies:
 Aestheic potencies: has to do with the senses. Sensuous show. Materiality, the mother,
matrix (vruchtbare source of). Womb. Has everything to do with the flesh. Too muchness of
ethic shows is at the same time perplexing and horrifying (e.g. crabs in sand). The one good is
‘pleasure’: product of univocalizing the good. Being pleased is an accord between us and
being. Utilism: hedonistic calculus> calculizing pleasure. Epicures: not only quantitative.
Epicurisan: pleasure is being at home with yourself and the whole (universe). Yet, equivocity
pops us again: if you eat to much, pleasure turns into pain. Equivocity keeps coming in.
Aesthetic is immediate.
 Dianoetic potency: lawlike quality. (Diaonoia: rationalizing, moving by ordered sequences). In
this potency pleasure, for example, is mediated. (Cf. Breaking the will of the child, part of
 becoming mature was that the will of the child must be broken). Our given aesthetic being
must be reordered. Dianoeticy potency stresses regularity and law. Problem: example two
atheletes need different food. Applying the law means deciding among equivocity. Law is
dictatorial. Danger of violence between different parts of human being. (Defined in
opposition against the aesthetic of the flesh, which must be contained)
 Eudaimonistic potency: happiness. The ideal has something to do with the whole of the life.
Brings aesthetic fleshy dimension and dianoetic together. A process of becoming! Process is
the whole unfolding like a process of music. Can’t pinpoint it in one note (like aesthetic).
Unity that gathers together. Problem: still too much equivocity. Eudaimonia is a unity that is
a multiplicity.
 Transcendental potency is a higher form as dianoetic. It is dianoetic is raise to higher level.
Kant: what makes morality possibility? (Duty as unconditional) Higher kind of regularity than
dianoetic. Not ‘for the most part’ (Aristotle), but ‘unconditional’. Aristotle lets equivocity
back in, but Kant wants pure unconditionality. Dualism between higher (purity) and lower.
Living human wholeness is lost. Unity of being as flashed figure, does not fit into the essence
of Kant’s case. Transcendental unity of sensibility and understanding is in the first edition >
immanent freedom. Ambiguity of what ‘higher’ (idealist dimension) is, formal logical
possibility or something self-generating? (like first edition of CPR).
 Transcending potency. Self-surpassing. Unfolding in which an energy is at work. How to
univicolize this unvolding in that it is held together? (Hegel: overcoming limitations, self-
strancending). Eros. Plato and Nietzsche > transcending tendency. Self-transcending oriented
to beauty.
 Transcendent of transcendence:. Otherness to us, in relation to which we are receptive
instead of active. Plato > Aristophenis. Kind of elan or eros in self-surpassing one to reach out
to the ultimate other.

Prof. dr. W. Desmond – Week 5 – 21 October 2014 – 14-16 pm – Room 00.14 (B)

Piety is perused under the light of a univocaty

Equivocity keeps returning.

Search for univocity, but equivocity keeps popping up. Limits of our definitions. Indetermant.

Philosophers have been lovers of univocity. In (history of ethics) a variety of candidates for the one
good, expresses the impulse of univocity.

Urge to univocity brings forth equivocity > potencies of being.

For example: transcendent potency is impossible to pin down univocally.

If everything is univocal, there would be no laughter.

Humans exceed univocal definition. There is always something which exceeds definition.

Dianoetic (?) and transcendental (laws without exception > rational univocity without exception.
Shows impulse to univocity)

Equivocity: many meanings. On one level they seem to be the same, on another, however, not.

Dog: barking animal, star, heavenly body (Spinoza)

Ambiguity of dog: philosophers analyze several meaning, make distinction to dismantle ambiguity.

Wittgenstein I was univicolist: atomic language (attempt at crystalline clarity) (end of Tractatus is
about mysticism, however).
Wittgenstein II departed from scientistic univocity. Univocalist Wittgenstein, become plurivocalist.
Wittgenstein II: ‘Back to the rough ground’, back to equivocity. Honour the fact that in language-
games something is at work that resist univocal definition.
Essentialist fallacy.

Absolute: is the identity as identity in difference

Interplay between univocal and equivocal

Tradition and sophistry: sophistry (not negative per se) is disturbance of tradition: bring difference in
stabilized world of tradition. (Nietzsche is traditionalist). Sophists undermine univocity and bring in
rationality against tradition.

Equivocity of equivocity.

Analytic debate: foundationalism and relativism.

Difference between ambiguity and equivocity. (Equivocity: being is not merely an ambiguous word,
but in itself an ontological equivocity).

Pascal: esprit geometry, esprite finesse (without finesse geometry is not possible)

Heidegger’s Being: when it shows itself, it also conceals itself. (Showing is a concealing) > art is a
determinate thing which shows being, but conceals it as well. The determinate artwork is beyond
univocity.

Conditions which make determinacy possible are not themselves determinate.

Endowed potencies > given

Aesthetic arising out of intimacy of being, question of transcendent (good as other), attaining of good
as other

Ascending through equivocities to ultimate good > back to dark

Descend back into darkness of caves.

The between (is not only horizontal between, but also vertical between).

Night-vision: being able to see in the dark. Philosopher has someone who has night-vision > you do
no longer see things in an univocal way.

Schopenhauer: opens up space prior to reasons with ‘Will’, honest philosophy must go into that
darkness. (Journey into underworld, Vergil, Dante, Homer, is not a modern thing).

Hospitability or hostility towards Being.

 1. Aesthetic equivocity > sorrows of satisfaction
 At some point, pleasure and pain are inseparable of each other (eating and drinking)
 AE is a particular human phenomenon.
 Boredom (sameness of satisfaction).
 Satisfaction carries traces of equivocity.
 Love > sorrows of satisfaction. Loneliness
 Boedism > desire is source of sorrow.
 Equivocity between sorrow and satification.
2. Dianoetic equivocity > the virtues of the promiscuous
 Stress on lawfulness
 Disappointment opens a gap between desire and satisfaction. Shows that desire
contain equivocity.
 Search for constancies.
 Example of athletic: measure is equivocal (measure for the one, is not measure for
the other).
 Application of law is not univocal superimposing.
 Task of law is to be applied on the promiscuous givenness of human life. Idea of an
pure uncontaminated law does not make sense.
 Casuistry (law about different cases?).
 Application of laws is rife with equivocity.
3. Transcendental equivocity > the strurring of the subterranean
 Kant against any mixing with promiscuous. Purifying morality.
 Effort to free yourself from equivocity of always runs the risk of emptiness, want and
lack
 Underground: Dostojevski (striking out tong to 2+2+4). Act of revolt against the law,
shows that there is something that is not contained in pure law.
 To do justice to equivocity of human condition the subterranean should not be
repressed.
 Nietzsche as twin brother of Kant.
4. Eudaimonic equivocity > Wholeness and death
 Eudaimonia: eu: good, daimon: mind, but (indication to something higher beyond
itself)
 Wholeness as a threshold to which we are brought by eudaimonia.
 Eudaimonic refers for Desmond to to the ‘beyond of the human’. (Fallen out in
modern notion)
5. Transcending equivocity > Blessedness and suffering
 Notion of ‘beatitude’ (Acquino, Spinoza), has a sense of blessedness of the gift from
beyond.
 Tragic wisdom. Being gifted by tragic suffering.
 Oedipus > makes himself blind, certain form of enlightenment
6. Transcendental equivocity > God and Dark face of Evil

Prof. dr. W. Desmond – Week 6 – 28 October 2014 – 14-16 pm – Room 00.14 (B)

Today: dialectic

Start general: nature and importance of dialectic

Dialectic is coincident with history of philosophy as a whole (in some sense).

Postmodern philosophy: dialectic came to be criticized > reveal hidden equivocity.

Deleuze: Hegel (dialectic) vs. Nietzsche

Hegel: epitome of dialectic.

No forget Marxist sense of dialectic. (Hot in French philosophy)

Legacy of dialectic is still with us, but not in the exclusively negative sense of post-structuralism etc.

Dialectic is sometimes regarded as highest form of philosophical thinking (Plato, Hegel).

Popper: dialectic reason turns things upside down

Presence of opposites made us consider equivocity in ethical issues. Doubleness of this equivocity
already contains something like dialectic.

Is dialectics only a way of thinking of us? Or has it something to do with the things themselves. (Last
one Desmond). Is there such a thing as a dialectics of nature? Desmonds: two sides (both subject and
object side).

Challenge with dialectic: you cannot absolutely separate one side of the other.

Redoubling of equivocity. Dialectic is a response to a more dualistic orientation of things. Dualism of

subject and object is questioned by a dialectical orientation. If we think about objective things, we
are returned to the subject.

Dialectic: objectivity makes no sense without the subject.

Kant: duality of nature and morality. He wants to separate them completely.

Kant: dualistic frame, but question keeps coming back: how do we get from one side to the other
(subject to object and vice versa).

Schelling: how do you got from the subject to the object and the other way around. Togetherness of
two sides. Both subject and object unfold themselves without the other.

Original togetherness is always presupposed in duality.

How does the determinate become to be the determinate? Something which is at the other side of
determination.

Aristotle: dialectic which emerges as dialectic on normally held opinions

If there are determinate rules? Do they become determinate? How do they come to be as
determinate. What is the nature of the process of becoming determinate?

Stress dynamic, stress the process of becoming.

If this process is a development, a process of unfolding, then we can see the process of becoming,
how it become, the difference between one point and another later point in the process of
becoming, development. Is there a logical pattern at play at the unfolding?
Dialectic seems to be invented by Plato. Dialogue: a logos in between. (Dia: 2 and logos)

Dialogue is close to the lived between.

Dialectic as more formal reflection of what is at play at dialogue.

Dialectic raises to consciousness of process between one and other. More than opposition at work.
Equivocity: opposition, dialectic: togetherness at work in the opposites that is not already at work of
one of the opposites. Some togetherness has to be presupposed, which is not reducible to one of the
two poles. Agon presupposes the possibility of concord.

Dialectic contains a kind of confidence in its unifying function.

Contrast with thinking as negation. Yet, must you not presuppose anything about the negation to
make it intelligible?

Would we seek the good if we were not already somehow open to the good in a way which we
cannot fully make determinate?

Already in the most extreme opposition is a kind of togetherness presupposed.

Primordial metaxu

Desmond: in modern philosophy this primordial between stands in the light of autonomy and self-
determination.

Platonic philosophy: plurivocal complex of voices.

Keeping middle states open (contrast to closing dialectic with autonomy).

Hegel pretends to have closed of all the possibilities of dialectic.

Dialectic can be univocalized (Hegel) opposed to ancient philosophy (philosophy as a way of life).

Plurality of promise in dialectic.

Desmond places Kant, Hegel and Nietzsche in the same dialectical frame.

Kant has a negative view of dialectic (philosophy has to do with coming to limits).
Virtual dialectic: moving beyond limits and how to justify moving to more beyond.
Hegel tends to univicolize dialectic.
Nietzsche: deconstructor of dialectical system. Using power of opposition (higher is lower, lower is
higher etc).

Interplay between self and other (dialectic). Other point: dialectic brings us back to ourselves.

You come to know things about yourselves in dialogue with another!! Characteristic of dialectical
unfolding.

If the good is what we seek, there is also something good in us > cf. internalization (child: no).
Not only imposed by others, external factors, but your sense of the good comes from the inside, is an
immanence, there is something unconditional at work in us.

Truthfulness to self is in the debt of being shown the truthfulness by the other.

In relation to others we come to ourselves. Equivocity of dialectic of freedom.

Modernity: inhospitability of current ethos to good.

Pauze

Kant (1724-1804)
 Mechanistic Nature (Newtonianism) + ethos
 Freedom + Responsibility/Obligation
 Ordinary moral consciousness
 Natural dialectic

Context: aristocratic classes rule, yet freedom (French revolution). Egalitarianism. (Kant regarded
Rousseau highly). Rousseau emphasised compassion.

Newtonian physics: problem of human? Where do we stand in the totality? (Problem for Cartesian
dualism: how are we related to the whole, are we not also partly mechanic either?)

Reconfiguration of ethos: Kant exerts our own power.

Sense of value of Kant is unconditional. Focus on unconditional moral values.

Transcendental ethicist (potencies)

Newtonianism: one reconfiguration of ethos, Kant tries to reconfigure this reconfiguration in such a
way that there is room for unconditional moral values.

Anti-Naive objectivism: laws of nature are not just there, but are put there to us (subject + object). In
a sense we are constituters of those laws.

Relation between subject and object. Primacy falls on the subject: constitutive, synthesising subject.

Transcendental subject can never be reduced to an object! Subject is always other than what can be
objectified. Opening as space for possibility of freedom. Turn towards the subject. (Cf. dialectic:
returning to ourselves through dialectic).
Romanticism > Pantheism.

Kant puts the stress on our moral being. Where do we stand in mechanistic totality? Kant: humans
cannot be completely defined in terms of this mechanistic totality. We are subjected to another
necessity: moral necessity, i.e. the moral law. Obligation. You must do such and such if you want to
be true to your being as moral being.

Groundwork: establish ground for morality.

Kant wants one principle that would constituted the moral as such (univocal tendency).

Kant want to separate out things in the ‘you must’:

  Natural heteronomy
 Supernatural heteronomy

Kant: uncouple morality of theological grounding. Purify autonomy from a variety of heteronomies.

If autonomy is to be rule, we cannot appeal to God/divine rule, because if God dictates law, we are
not free.

Kant’s return to the self, is a return to the moral self.

Ordinary moral consciousness

Natural dialectic in Kant: either go with our nature/inclinations or with duty.

Kant we experience this doubleness within our self. Existential stress: we find ourselves torn
between duty and inclinations. Human being as split creature.

Inclinations are tied up with aesthetic, dianoetic and eudaimonistic potencies.

Kant as immanent thinker: immanently at work in human being is the call in the human being that
there is an unconditional call. The ‘higher’ is what is contained in us. Sense of an absolute which
cannot be derived from (mechanic, conditional) nature.

Levinas shares with Kant is the unconditional demand to be ethical.

Kant-handout, 1: turn towards the moral self. Maxim is a subjective principle of action according to
Kant. Categorical imperative turns the mines of action, into a kind of universal ‘ours’, a principle of
action for all moral, rational beings. Kind of quarantining self from inclinations etc.

Story: Kant only smoke one pipe (got bigger).

Kant: drawing boundaries around the indeterminate.

Nietzsche wanted to demoralize the world. (Strange continuity between Nietzsche and Kant).

Prof. dr. W. Desmond – Week 7 – 4 November 2014 – 14-16 pm – Room 00.14 (B)

Next Tuesday no class

18th November > Dennis on Kant and Schopenhauer

Turn after Hegel (ascended rationality reaches a peak in Hegel’s philosophy). Teleology from
darkness to light.

Schopenhauer and Nietzsche: darker will arises (descending movement). Persistent darkness in the
ground > change in ‘metaphysical mood’

Today: Kant

Theme: relationship between autonomy and heteronomy. Kant is always haunted by heteronomy.
Keeps coming back. Notion of groundwork of metaphysics of morals. Metaphysics! Whereas we think
Kant as destroyer of metaphysics. What is metaphysics for Kant? A rational discipline, by means of
pure reason think about ultimate realities. Dominant forms of metaphysics which Kant attacks are
‘rationalist’ metaphysics from seventeenth century. Dogmatic rationalism: pure reason can discover
ultimate reality. This is primarily criticized in first critique. Claims of these rationalists to know cannot
be justified epistemologically. ‘Metaphysics’ comes back in Kant’s practical reason.

Theoretical vs. Practical reason. Interesting thing: different kind of metaphysics can come to be,
metaphysics of morals. We carry the moral principle with us. Philosophy can elucidate this principle.
Before Kant: being is said in many senses. What is it to be? What is it to be good? To be and the good
of the to be, were intimately connected in longer tradition before Kant.

Turning to our moral being carries an opening to unconditional realities > Groundwork.

Newton: not only mechanistic. Manuscripts: another Newton. Newton was deeply involved in the
practice of alchemy (mingling of theological and scientific). Also theological manuscripts. He did not
believe in the trinity. Newton thought Trinitarian Christianity was a false religion. Conflicting and
tortured thinker). Newton disliked Decartes because the latter was too mechanistic. Newton once
had an animated view of religion. World as vegetable which exhaled and inhaled.

Kant excepts Newtonian mechanistic view, but the problem of purposefulness, the other world,
(haunting of heteronomy) kept turning back.

Consequentiality vs. Deontological (good in itself, not because of consequences).

Kant’s sense of doing to good for the sake of the good. Pure inner intention defining the moral act as
such. Recall Kant’s background. Pietism: Lutheranism emphasised inner purity of soul. (Catholocism
was seen as heteronymous religion). Purity of one’s religious heart. Kant was brought up in pietistic
college. Pietism: examination of conscience. Not stress on external activities on most important
things. Retraction into innerness. Kant turned against his pietism. Kant’s rationalism floats on a sea, a
sea beneath which the surface is mystery. Disjunction of innerness and outerness (supervisor ‘looking
in your conscious’ > socially accepted answers). Hence, religious practices easily turned into
hypocritical confessions. Heteronomy is present even in religious practices. Kant never went to
church: a tortured Christian. Sense of innerness as deeply mysterious in itself.

H=external (nature)
A=inner (rationality > inward otherness communicates itself! Instability in moral being itself. Not just
between inclination and duty, but also in relation to our claims to living up to duty. We cannot be
certain that we live really up to the moral law). War between inclinations and duty: something higher
and lower. Though we rise up to ideal of CA, we are always haunted by the fact that we are creatures
of the flesh. Kant’s attitude towards sexuality. Masturbation as crime against humanity. Flesh as if it
were animalistic. If we exceed to desires we are drawn to animalistic level. Sex as central in
Schopenhauers metaphysics. Urges of sex as humiliation. Not master of yourself in complete way.
Will beyond reason (Schopenhauer). Kant: dualism which wants separate, but the higher still gets
haunted by the lower. Keeps coming back. Kant: sex as mutual contract to make use of each other’s
genital organs. ‘Lower things’ degrades you to a thing, an animal being, no longer moral being. Hegel:
spirit raises natural aspects. Work through the opposition, an synthesising mediation. Kant:
uncoupling morality from God. Postulate existence of God. Kant separated duty and virtue from
happiness (sum total of all our satisfactions). Kant acknowledges that we ought to seek our own
happiness. Happiness can never be guaranteed. Virtue/duty of happiness are separated, but have to
be put together again. Disjunction of immanent life itself that comes to the fore. We have to do the
good because it is good. Martyrs to the good. Kant as tormented thinker.
Kant as dandy in younger life (before 40).

Absolute demand being made of us by moral law. Very strong. How do we get virtue/duty and
happiness together? A matter of worthiness to be happy. They run parallel. Within finite immanence
they cannot be brought together. Only on the other side of this immanence they come together in
immortality. Since Kant: immanent frame as ultimate frame (no transcendence). Yet, Desmond things
a transcendence is apparent in Kant. Transcendent as God or absolute good. Kant moves beyond our
own self determination. Why is not God called the supreme good according to Kant? Virtue is the
Bonum supremum for Kant. Bonum consummatum is the unity of virtue and happiness. God
functions to guarantee the unity of virtue and happiness. Grace. Kant: philosophy of work. You have
to work for your happiness. You have to work to become worthy of your happiness. Antinomy in this
side (immanent side). God is brought back in the end: heteronomy comes back in. Should we
therefore not rethink the ultimacy of autonomy.

Hegel as post-Kantian Spinozist. Hegel > speculative univocity, a sense of unity, as the only way to
solve the problem. Kant pushes the problem into the beyond. Hegel brings the beyond back into the
immanent.

Problem of Evil: Kant published text on radical evil. Kant has given us philosophy of autonomy. When
he published this book on evil, evil is located in the will itself. It is within the moral space. Immanent
in moral situation something emerges which cannot directly be solved by self-determination.
Desmond: we cannot determine ourselves completely, because evil is in us. Internal debility within
our will. Evil will as inward otherness. Autonomy of will is severely compromised. Kant seems to solve
it by an appeal to the possibility of grace from God: work as hard as we can, although we can’t be
sure that God will give us grace.

Happiness as sum total of all satisfaction.

Kant: beauty is the expression of morality. Aesthetics is reduced to morality.

Serenity: pass over a threshold, when we enter into a phase of acceptance in suffering and beyond
suffering.

Nietzsche: in his best moments is returning to a pagan affirmation of things, which is not devoided of
a kind of sacred resonance.

Hegel. Not an inversion of Kant. Hegel sees himself as completing Kant’s system. Hegel’s primary
want was to be a teacher of the people (before his famous systems). Hegels was slowest. His interest
were ethical and political. Political-theological writing. Religion as glue for a culture (cf. Habermas).
Teacher to the people. Came to conclusion that modernity was an epoch of tornness; has become a
common theme. Fragmentation of life. Unity of live seemed to be tarnished. Philosophy begins with
distinctions. Religion had become one among many spheres in modernity. Philosophers were
dreaming a new wholeness. Modernity as the epoch as freedom (Hegel completely degrees)
Freedom as defining mark of modernity and history. Must be a freedom that does justice to all
fragments of human life. Not a freedom in dialectic opposition against fullness of live.

Kant projects point of unity in a beyond, for Hegel that is reintroduction of reality. Unity must already
be at work in opposites. Dialectic breaks down the fixity of opposites. Hegel saw Kant as thinker of
the Verstand (which breaks things into their parts). Reason as faculty of conditions. God is a
regulative idea that draws us on to bring about virtue and evil. For Hegel Vernunft is the faculty of
the unconditioned. Absolute is presupposed in Hegel.
Section 27 in philosophy of right. Free will that wills the free will > this will is initially indetermined. If
it is merely indertermined, it runs the risk of being empty. The free will that wills the free will
determines itself. Indetermined will that determines itself, is self-determining.

Indeterminacy to determinacy to selfdetermination. Spirit wake up to itself as self-determining.

Thematics of heteronomy and autonomy. For Hegels autonomous self-determination requires the
will to go outself of itself (heteronomy), discovering itself in heteronomous otherness.

Self-determination in philosophy of right is form of social determination (contra Kant).

Hegel: determine self-determination between autonomous agents.

Prof. dr. W. Desmond – Week 8 – 18 November 2014 – 14-16 pm – Room 00.14 (B)

Previous week: Kant’s morality (niche of value in modernity).

Autonomous evaluation is now source of value.

Next week: ascent to reason from Kant to Hegel

Today: descent of reason from Kant to Schopenhauer

Philosophy after Kant (line one): Kant > Fichte/early Schelling > Hegel
Fichte/early Schelling: rational intuition that allows us to positively know things beyond of
experience.

Philosophy after Kant (line two): Kant > Schopenhauer > Nietzsche
Schopenhauer: pessimistic + ? + art higher than science

Erasmus and Luther on the Freedom of the Will (preamble) > theological debate between Erasmus
and Luther.

Luther argued that Christianity (scholasticism> spirit/intellect/flesh, flesh leads to evil)

misunderstood the flesh. He argued that humans are nothing but flesh and that scholasticism
downplayed the fall (Luther: works do not justify; you can do nothing to come in heaven).

Erasmus: proper use of the free will can co-operate in human salvation. More optimistic
anthropology. On which side does Kant stand?

Are nature and evil radically different or a continuum?

Kant: radical evil. There is a propensity rooted (‘radical’ comes from ‘radix’> root) in the power of
choice that positively inclines the human being to overturn the moral hierarchy between self-love
and the moral law.

Radical (according to Kant):

 ‘corrupts the ground of all maxims’ (radix) > basic principle or root of man is evil.
 ‘cannot be extirpated through human forces’ > follows from above. If you are corrupted to
the root, how can you recover yourself?
Positive commitment to evil:
  Not a privation, but a positive commitment (CHOOSE to elect our own private maxim over
the other).
Propensity to evil is rooted in our free will. Free will is SOURCE of evil:
 Not legislative reason or nature, but the power of choice.

Nietzsche: Kant’s CI reeks of cruelty (Kant has a pessimistic anthropology and demands to go against
ourselves).

Kant on moral restoration. How can a rotten tree bear fruit? Radical evil and yet we have to heal
ourselves.

Deep optimism about rationality, deep pessimism about man’s nature.

Kant: the end of religious instruction must be to make us other human beings and not merely better
human beings. How?

Christology: moral example is inspiration that shows that it is possible to follow CI. (If Jesus can do it,
so can we). Heroic demand: do something (you duty), while knowing we are deeply corrupted.

HEGEL FOCUSSES ON THE RESTORATIVE POWER OF REASON.

Schopenhauer went a different road. Kant’s problem is the diremption between reason and nature
(Entzweiung).
 To collapse nature into reason: Hegel (one way to get away from Kant’s dualism. Idealism)
 To collapse reason in nature: Schopenhauer (another way to get away from Kant’s dualism.
Naturalism)
Instead of thinking about reason as the guiding light (Idealism), it becomes an Ignis Fatuus or Will-of-
the-Wisp (promised security, but brings you deeper into misery).

Schopenhauer’s thesis: what if all of reality is the kind of morally recalcitrant nature that Kant
opposed to rationality.
Schopenhauer: neutral, self-expressive will.

Schopenhauer on Morality (popular around 1850, but matured in early 18 th century).

Mother of Schopenhauer was famous writer (friends with Goethe). Yet she did not care much about
his son.

Time and space + categories > principle of sufficient reason (Schopenhauer).

Yet that rationality only applies is to the world of representations. Schopenhauer agrees with Kant
that you cannot know that thing-in-itself by reason. Schopenhauer argues however that there is a
different way to know it: sensuous awareness which is given through our bodies.

Schopenhauer on body:
 Know your body immediately as will (desires) (Hence you can know ‘my personal’ thing-in-
itself)
 Know your body as representation

Schopenhauer against solipsism: naturalism. Other bodies are like my body so we can the thing-in-
itself: Will. Yet, whenever the will manifests itself it has a goal, this is the will of representation (wills
only something as far as it is representation). There is also a will as thing-in-itself which only wills (not
something, no representation). Blind self-expression of the will.

Schopenhauer: you cannot speak sensibly anymore of good and evil.

Schopenhauer on morality:
 Morality is descriptive, not normative. (You can describe things as good actions, without
claiming that peoples should do it).

Schopenhauer: no freedom of the will. Hard determinism.

Inorganic > physical causes

Organic matter > physical stimuli
Motives > human causes

Everything in reality: will to life (propagation, survive) > egoism

Desiring is suffering.

Boredom: the wills will to will (restlessness if all your desires would be satisfied).

Four ways to avoid suffering:

1. Morality of compassion (moral incentive is the lack of egoist motivation). Enabled by the
recognition that the distinction between him and me is no longer an absolute one. If you
realize that there is no distinction between him and you that consoles you. Compassion
awakens metaphysical knowledge that you and I are the same.
a. To neglect one’s own suffering
b. To actively engage another’s suffering
2. Religion (though Schopenhauer was atheist he believe in value of religion). Metaphysics
assuages the fear of death in human beings. (Pessimistic vs. Optimistic religions)
a. Two types of metaphysics:
i. Philosophy: conviction, truth sensu proprio
ii. Religion: faith, truth sensu allegorico.
Religion is a symbolical/allegorical portrayal of philosophical truth for those of “whom
thinking cannot be asked”.
3. Art. The inspired ‘genius’ artist intuits the Platonic idea (beyond principle of sufficient reason)
in a representation and then uses imagination to re-create that idea in a piece of art.
4. Philosophical mysticism.

Heidegger and Sartre have a positive concept of ‘nothing’. Schopenhauer does not.

Prof. dr. W. Desmond – Week 9 – 25 November 2014 – 14-16 pm – Room 00.14 (B)

Rational descent > Hegel (nature has collapsed into reason)

Paradoxical: Kant comes out of Lutheranism, in Lutheranism focus is on saving power of grace (not
work). Paradox is that the philosophers who come out of this line focus on labour, work.

Hegel: self-determination
Nietzsche: creative activity with redemptive power (‘willing liberates’, not a gift)
Nietzsche: ‘pagan grace’ (creative power by which creator is inspired. Cf. Zarathustra)

Paradox: philosophy of work, out of Lutherianism (grace).

Hegel: freedom is negating the given. The ‘free will that wills the free will’. Can this idea join
ascending and descending line?

Hegel’s philosophy of right:

 Text has a place in philosophy as a whole.
 In whole the concept of spirit or ‘Geist’ is crucial.
 Contrast between Nature and Spirit; nature as ‘Spirited’: spirit is outside of itself. Contrast
with (partes extra partes) parts external parts. Being outside of oneself.
 Hegel: spirit emerges through nature and out of nature.
 Aristotle’s De Anima: hierarchical stages of soul. (Hegel regarded this as one of the major
books of antiquidity).
 Subject emerges out of nature: assimilating sustenance (food vs. trees)
 Spirit
o Subjective spirit (individual: subject)
o Objective (objective > objectivation of spirit, i.e. the processes how the spirit
objectivises itself) spirit > level of philosophy of right
 Distinction between morality (zoned in on individual moral being) and ethical
life. Geist is driven by an impulse to externalize our self in the world.
 Boy skimming stone over water (patters come back to you; you see
yourself in the disturbance).
o Absolute spirit > reconciliation between subjectivity and objectivity. (Art, religion,
philosophy are forms of absolute knowledge > self-knowledge. SELF-knowing).
 Nature is not a mere mechanism (Descartes), but something closer to organic totality.
Immanent purpose > nature. Human being is central in Hegels philosophy because it is in the
human that the nature comes to itself.
 End of Phenomenology of Spirit: the goal of knowing has no longer the need to know itself
 All of this is the work of the spirit (not grace). For Hegel the given must be appropriated.
 When we look at the development of the spirit we see process of overcoming nature.
 Philosophy of right > dialectic is everywhere but little metareflections about it (see section
31).
 Hegel’s notion of ‘concept’ (for Hegel ‘idea’ is the most concrete, not a subjective category in
the mind, but modes of intelligibility. Platonic).
o Universal > indeterminate (abstract right)
o Particular > determinate (morality)
o Individual (unity between particular and universal) > self-determining (ethical life)
 Hegel: true idea makes itself particular (inverse Platonism. Everything is self-expression of
idea > active character of idea). Determination is self-determination. Freedom: everything is
idea. Hegel is opposite of nominalist: in the end there is only one universal, one idea.
 Hegel > concrete universal? How does that fit with the individual? Unity of substance placed
in subject (as in Kant). There is only one concrete universal.
 Kierkegaard: truth is subjectivity (Hegel: absolute subjectivity).
 Philosophy of right:
o Abstract right > indeterminate. Theme’s property; taking possession, intention,
wrong. Freedom as not being determined by the external. Ability to thinks shows
indetermine freedom.
  Property (Hegel defends private property). Paragraph 44. Read it. This is the
point of transition from nature to culture. (a person has as its substantial
right...) Human are only ends in themselves.
 Schelling: wants to see more in Nature than Hegel. Us and otherness of
Nature. Only power and possession? Dialectic between different property
owners > notion of contract. Institutions free the powers of freedom > the
other always has to be taken into account.
o Morality > rights of conscience: absolute conviction you’re right. Hegel: danger of
individual claiming the universal or absolute for itself. Difference makes evil possible.
Hegel is against the empty assertion of the rights of conscience. Society mediates
conscious, so that it does not absolutize itself. Dialectic. (When Hegel does criticizes
things they are not merely negated but preserved an taken-in in a higher level:
aufhebung (sublimation). This holds also for Hegels critique on Kant’s morality.
o Ethical > Sittlichkeit. Family, Civil Society, State.
 Lutheranism: human is corrupted. If nature is also corrupted, we have to overcome nature. Is
nature something hospitable or hostile?

Morality Ethical Life World History

- Family (immediacy of ethical life)
|-> Child, responsibility
|-> Woman as centre of family
|-> IMMEDIATE UNITY
- Civil Society (world beyond intimacy of more
elemental familial relations). Social mediation
between family and state. Mediating institutions.
Social trust. > DIFFERENCES
-State > SELF MEDIATING WHOLE. Counterfit doubles
|-> State as most important form of immanent freedom
|-> Hobbes sovereignty is unity, non-seperate
|-> Possibility of war emerges

Hegel: marriage transforms social relation. Introduction two entities in institutional framework.

Prof. dr. W. Desmond – Week 10 – 2 December 2014 – 14-16 pm – Room 00.14 (B)

1. Orient
2. Greek world
3. Roman world
4. Germanic world

For Nietzsche, the Greek world was very important. Greek was popular in Germany at the time.
Greek were at home with Being, nature and their bodies. Not dualism between nature and mind. It
was a unified cultural world.
German’s picture of Christianity was formed out of dualities. Divide between itself and infinity. Hegel:
unhappy consciousness.
GM: Greek world standing over against the Christian world. Three essays:
1. Rome (Athens) versus Judea (Christianity). (Deals with Good/bad/evil)
2. Origin of bad consciences.
3. Plato versus Homer. (Deals with contrast between philosopher and artist). Ascetic ideal.
Greece and Rome were pagan and imperialistic cultures. Warrior is held in great respect in those
cultures, not in Judeaism/Christianity. Warrior is replaced by the priest.
Sometimes Nietzsche is contrasted with Hegel (Nietzsche as post modernist, Hegel as great stories).
Yet Nietzsche makes statements about whole cultures.
Orient is associated by Hegel with despot, patriarch, unity. Romes as mixture of orient (one unity)
and Greece. (Epictetus influence Marcus Aurelius).
Nietzsche is suspicious of notion of equality (democracy, socialism). Man has become domesticated
animal.
Germanic world for Hegel is about northern folks. Western history is world Hegel, because the spirit
always moves Westward. Nietzsche in later work against Germans. For Hegel Germans are
embodiment of freedom on earth. Nietzsche: will to power took hold on German culture, crude
imperialistic will to power. Disappointed with early hope about renewal of German people. For Hegel
Germanic world is Christian world: always oriented to reconciliation.
Jews experienced God’s forsakenness. Jews open for Hegel the inwardness of human self. Carried
forward by Christianity.
Instead, for Nietzsche Christianity seen as a kind of dualism. Projection of God to the beyond >
devaluation of earth. Will to power turned back against ourselves, man as sick animal. Hegel: spirit
inflicts the wound upon. Yet the hand the heals is the same as the hand the wounds. What kind of
spirit inflicts wounds upon itself. Hegel as seeing God as someone who tormented himself, to redeem
himself.
Geburt der Tragödie > Das ureine. Primordial one.

First essay: good and bad/evil. Nietzsche wants to accept distinction between good/bad; different
formations of will to power. Difference between master/slave morality is contrast between active
and reactive > autonomy (active) vs. heteronomy (passive).
Relation between autonomy and heteronomy for Hegel. For Hegel spirit incorporates the other > by
making mark on the other outside of me, you enrich and appropriate your self-determination.
Nietzsche: master > self-affirmative will to power. Slaves > affirms what master affirms, is entirely
reactive. Slave has no will of its own. Will to power is always self-affirming (cf. Hegel, the free will
that wills itself). Slave reconfigure relation: see in the soul of the master the question whether he is
morally good. Slave performs the original transvaluation of values.
Pride: hybristic over self-assertion, but also pride as justified self-worth. Nietzsche oscillates between
the two. Nietzsche: true nature of things is self-affirmative will to power.
Nietzsche: he recognized the original slaves in the Jews (only new testament good). Later Judeaeism:
wrath of impotence. Everything we now call good was bad.
Nietzsche: self-transcending-potency.
Zarathustra on the last man: the man that has no sense of something more than the human. Man as
medium of self-surpassing. Nietzsche against nihilistic Western society. Secret theology at work. Last
man has no sense of anything ‘Ubermensch’.

Second essay: supramoral sovereignty. Morality beyond good and evil. Not beyond good and bad
(this we will never escape). Erotic sovereignty. Bad conscience brings us back to unhappy
consciousness. Regression of self against itself: will to power? Extraverted, but with a bad conscience
it turns back upon itself. This happens in break of nature. Kind of fall.

Bad is good (term of masters), evil arises with slaves to react against master.

Nietzsche against hypocrisy of bourgeois society. D: das ureine as dark energy, whose characteristic is
not good, below reason. Like Medusa: if you directly into it we are lost. Bird of Tragedy: honest about
dark energy, while not going down under it. Nietzsche wants to say yes to evil darkness, because
otherwise every creativity dries up. D: dark origin remains in Nietzsche but goes underground, under
superficial.
Nietzsche took a lot from Emerson.

Nietzsche saw himself as transcending Wagner. Future philosophers as artists which can take in the
different voices of the human condition.

Priest redirects energy of sickness in a way that serves life. Why is N negative towards priest?
Exploitation of will to power, limits the creativity. Plato versus Homer (philosophers versus artist)
Artist transfigures Being. Homer as great affirmer of life. Plato as ascetic philosopher.

Nietzsche: agonistic, contest (Heracleitus: agon, war). Agon as pool of energy out of which creativity
arises. Nietzsche as declaration of war towards the levelling modern Western epoch.

Question of rank-order. Paradoxical analysis in which the slave has won. Nietzsche wants to re-
establish order of ranks.

How do you distinguish between higher and lower forms of power. If everything can be reduced to
power you have a univocal explanation for everything.

In Roman Caesar with the soul of Christ, D claims that there are three senses of the will to power.
1. Vulgar will to power
2. Will to power (political) master – Ceasar > capacity who orders people
3. Will to power (spiritual) leader – who determines the values of the common millennium.
What is the basis for higher values? Does Nietzsche here not return to the equivocity of
heteronomy and autonomy?

D place Nietzsche in space of equivocal. No dialect totality as in Hegel. Agon between Jesus and
Nietzsche.

Prof. dr. W. Desmond – Week 11 – 9 December 2014 – 14-16 pm – Room 00.14 (B)

Skipped

Prof. dr. W. Desmond – Week 12 – 16 December 2014 – 14-16 pm – Room 00.14 (B)

Last time: aesthetic potency. Self-multiplication of the human being is related to this potency.
Remake ourselves in a plurivocal. There is an inevitable equivocity involved in aesthetic potency.
Philosopher returning to the chase. Finding a labyrint.

Dianoethic potency concerns rules/constancies. Mindfulness of constancies in the human condition.

The notion of a ‘constant’. Con-stant: literally ‘stand with’. Not a simple sameness, but a
togetherness that holds. ‘Stand’ is a dynamic activity: equilibrium of balance. Emergence of
dianoethic constancies do not exclude dynamic.

Mexaological: unclosed interplay between self and other (not only what is other to the self. There is
an intimate otherness with respect to ourselves). Intimacy of being. Idiocy. Transcendence of other.
Other than Hegel, because the self ultimately prevails. Hegel: logic of self-determination. The sense
of otherness that is in us in terms of idiocy is important here. Metaxological: finesse for dynamic
intermediations, ‘structurings’ rather than ‘structures’.

‘Nature’ has different meanings. ‘Nature’ as dynamism of ‘naturing’. Difference between (modern)
natural rights, in the premodern sense ‘nature’ is not a reduced mechanism. Spinoza: conatus (as
essence), associated with self-assertive power. Nietzsche is continues with this.

There is an otherness of nature.

Aquinas: first precept of natural law: do good, avoid evil.

We always already find ourself in the metaxological betweenness. There is an ultimate between or
‘opening up’.

Step back out of determinate ethical systems.

Modern sense of natural right is defined by conatus. There is an ethos in which nature is understood
as conatus. ‘Con-atus’: ‘with’ ‘being-born’, litarally ‘being-born-with’: it refers to an original otherness
beyond self-activity. Intimate connection with source.

Transcendental constancies: ‘transcendental’ (Kant) linked with turn to subjectivity. First critique
especially epistemologically. Older notion: transcendental in metaxological sense: ontological sense
which contains the acknowledgement of the given otherness of Being itself. (Not reducible to
autonomous self-determination).

Metaxological: sense of origin. Archeology. The self in itself as transcendental in ontological good.
The absolute good makes possible all particular goods, but is not itself a particular good. This good is
the origin of the giving of being,

Openness to the givenness of Being.

Eudaimonic metaxological: ‘eu’ ‘daimonic’ (daimon was intermediate being between human and
divine), blessedness, beautitudo. Not incorporated in modern understanding. Beyond modern self-
determination. Eudaimonic refers to the beyond of wholeness (of life)

Suffering: you are brought to thresholds. Something can only be known by entering into suffering
(Nietzsche).

Modern silence about ‘wholly’ is attached to modern logic of self-determination, but without no
receiving of beyond there is no whollyness.

Transcending/self-suprassing is bound up with erotics of human being (Plato). Eros as energy of self-
surpassing. Schopenhauerian Eros refers to darker origin of striving. Ascending vs. descending eros.
We live in a more Schopenhauerian time. Self-surpassing: porosity at work in Eros (not present in
modern sense of eros). Two parents of eros: poverty, lack, Poros is drunk and penea
iscoupeling/having sense with him. Eros is born from Poros (cf. ‘porosity’ an opening) and Penia.
(Against Hegel who thinks in negative terms about desire as lack).

Three forms of transcending

 Equivocal transcending: otherness as renewed self-excitation (Don Juan) and satisfaction of
desire. Self-circeling of desire.
  Erotic transcending: ‘sovereignty’, eros and agapea not dualistic opposition. Self-surpassing
in relation to what is other of the self. DO we love the other because of the other, but
because of the other gives us back ourselves? Sovereingty carries something of this
doubleness.
 Agapeic transcending: erotic stresses overcoming of a lack, agapeic transcending is a going
beyond oneself. Agapeic is goes from fulfilment to a giving that can itself be even more full.
Not an economic relation. Beyond envy.

Self-interest: ‘inter-esse’ between being. Self-interest suggests something beyond the self.

Transcendent metaxology. Hegel weakens sense of transcendence, by turning it into human self-
transcendence. (Nietzsche: Dionyses as suffering God). Levinas: ethos as first philosophy. (Nietzsche
and Heidegger as metaphysical will to power). Plato: the good beyond being.

BREAK

Exam: four questions. Answer three. Broad questions, not very specific.

Keep structure/organization in mind while answering the questions.

We can write in Dutch, but write clearly/neatly.

First area: ethos, reconfiguration of the ethos, objectification/subjectification.

Recall that the first two parts of EB are not metaphilosophical, but attempt to ‘step back’.

Second area: not unconditional value besides the free will. Turn to selve is equivocal. Bring subject
under universal law, no unbridled freedom. Dialectical part: impressions of Kant, Hegel and
Nietzsche. Logic of autonomy. Tension between Kant autonomization was hunted by heteronomy.
Split subject also in Kantian subject. (Cf. Lacan). God brought back in the end (guarantee of
coincidence between autonomy and happiness). Summum bonum haunted. Kant: no sweat
(porosity).

Third area: Hegel. Dialectic dualism. The relation with the other cannot simply sidestep, but must be
incorporated in a dialectic. Emerges out of ethos, not stand purely above it. Original togetherness of
opposites. Self-determination through the other (dialectic, but not metaxological).

Fourth: different senses of will to power. All comes back on self-affirming. The other as other is not
recognized.

Fifth: