Reviews for Against ethics

The average rating for Against ethics based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2010-07-29 00:00:00 Lawrence Armijo I first read this book back in college and I had been meaning to read it again for the last couple of years, but never got around to it until now. It's still a good read and deftly moves through a wide range of thinkers' works. The writing can be a bit rich at times (it seems every continental philosopher wants to outdo everyone else in terms of playing with words), but I'd rather have someone try too hard playing around with words than be overly serious and stultified in their approach to language (such as Adorno). That said, this book is a good rejoinder to the Adorno book I just read: instead of relentlessly attacking Heidegger over and over to the point of mimicking Heidegger, Caputo's book tries to keep the best of Heidegger and discard the worst; perhaps the subtlest gesture of this is to be found in Caputo's insistence of using latin terms instead of Greek, as if to spite Heidegger, who looked down upon anything less than Greek or German. As a result, Caputo's book can be seen as a minimalist version of Heidegger, which is to say a book that acknowledges the contingency of our world and lives, but which makes no attempt to gloss over such contingency or find some redemption or justification. Caputo attempts what he calls a 'minimalist metaphysics,' which is a metaphysics that does not seek overarching, eagle-eyed, totalizing views, but rather recognizes the fact of partial, limited, and grounded perspectives. And this means arguing against Ethics and its focus on Greco-German virtuosity and athleticism in favor of those bodies of flesh that are always overlooked by the Greeks/Germans: the bodies of the poor, maimed, discarded, etc. Which is really everyone, since no one has yet managed to stave off what the dying process does to all of us: erode away our bodies and any notion of dignity/autonomy/respectability we have constructed to go with those bodies (or mask those bodies, depending on one's approach). Caputo's 'minimalist metaphysics' calls for respecting proper names or takes proper names to be the only truly binding obligation or ethical pull we can feel or respond to. Any attempt to ground our ethics beyond the weight and pull of the proper names or the faces that actually confront us will be meaningless and fruitless, particularly in light of what our physics tells us: namely, that our star will vanish over time, taking with it us and everything on the earth, thereby problematizing any sense of ethical foundation. Yet, if the sun is going to vanish over time (as Caputo repeats often), then all of the graves and stones marking the passage of our lives (by way of the proper names and dates engraved on them) will also vanish and with them their importance, thereby leaving part of Caputo's approach somewhat wanting. Nonetheless, the book is very rich in thought, particularly the first four chapters and the last two. The "lyrical-philosophical discourses" chapter (chapters seven and eight), though intriguing in places, was mostly tedious; it also felt forced, particularly in Caputo's claim that "somebody" mailed them to him, when it felt to me like he had written all of them himself. But it's easy to overlook that chapter when you come across a paragraph such as this: "Proper names happen in the abyss. They happen for a while. They happen for the while that they happen. Then thy die out like a lost language belonging to a lost time. In the long run, that is what they are and that is what our language is or will amount to. Eventually, as the little star grows cold, the noises of our language will disappear into the stellar night. Eventually, we will all have spoken forgotten, dead languages." Tell that to the bill collector next times he rings you up.

Review # 2 was written on 2019-08-24 00:00:00 Joan N. Boothe this book blew open my entire perspective on ethics and empathy.