#neg ev

So, here’s one of my favorite answers to soft Policy Framework. Enjoy.

Calls to focus ethics on action ties us to the back of the ‘praxis tiger’, where every time ethics and action might conflict action will always win out over ethics. Only by engaging in thought and reflection are we able to understand both our world and then the possibility of ethical action.

 Sloterdijk 88 (Peter Sloterdijk, Professor of philosophy and media theory at the University of Art and Design Karlsruhe Critiqiue of Cynical Reason. ISBN: 978-0816615865. P. 539-541)//UDC

  In view of these developments, the claim of classical philosophy to be more "serious" than mere life does not look good. Since modern thinking no longer entrusts itself with the translation of self-knowledge into worldly knowledge, and of world experience into self-experience, philosophy has had to withdraw from theories of "objective reason" into those of "subjective reason." The ground is thus taken from under the feet of the ancient holistic pathos, and philosophy sinks into the apparent truncatedness and groundlessness of the subjective. The truth is, however, that this subjective element establishes and unfolds itself in the process of modern civilization to such an extent that it was able to gain as much of a foothold as seemed necessary for its self-preservation. "Subjectivity" cast its nets over the "object" worlds and transformed excessively powerful first nature into a tamed second nature. Herein lies the source of modernity: The latter fosters the unfolding of the "subjective" to the relatively objective, of that which has no foothold to something that provides for itself its own foothold—the transformation of the world's wildness into what we make and think through. Modern philosophies that set themselves the task of grasping these transformations are those we rightly think of as the "rational" philosophies: social philosophies, philosophies of science, philosophies of labor, of technology, of language. They link up directly with the producing, acting, thinking, and speaking of a subjectivity that has become sure of itself. Therefore, philosophy that does not speculate past the structures of the modern world is basically practical philosophy. As such, it must equate what is intelligible in the world with what is rationally feasible, thinkable, examinable, and articulable. In the theory of subjective reason, the world is paraphrased as the content of our doings. Subjectivity has been turned fully into praxis.

The glaring poverty of modern practical philosophy, which would really like to produce something sound, above all, a universally binding, rigorously grounded ethics, and cannot for the life of it manage to do so, is, however, nothing other than the poverty of subjective reason as such. The latter finds a foothold in itself only to the extent that it uninterruptedly pursues its activistic fury of "praxis." Modern reason knows itself to be tied to the back of the praxis tiger. As long as the latter runs its course in a predictable way, subjective reason remains in relative balance. But woe betide when it gets caught in one of its notorious crises and becomes frenzied due to resistances or profitable prey. Then it lets its praxis rider know that with ethical tranquilizers alone, a predatory animal of its dimensions cannot be brought under control. Practical philosophy that tries to be respectable thus develops against its will into a seminar for modern tiger management. There it is discussed whether it is possible to talk reasonably with the beast or whether it would be better if a few of the tendentially dispensable riders were sacrificed to the stubborn systemic brute. In these taming conversations of subjective reason with the praxis tiger, cynicism is inevitably in play, which, with the appeal to reason, lets it be known with a wink that it did not mean it so seriously. The superficial view of things, in addition, confirms this stance. Where thinking has to agonize, especially over the projects of praxis that were unleashed with its own aid and have become autonomous, there subjective reason, even as reason, is treated with irony and suspected of being merely subjectivity that keeps on tearing along. With incessant irony, modern philosophizing, which had once been so sure of itself, shrinks to a circuslike rationalism that, in its efforts to train the praxis tiger, proves itself to be embarrassingly helpless. If the philosophers themselves, in time, also become somewhat addled in this occupation, then, given how things are, it is no wonder. In order to visualize the curiosity, philosophy, in the modern world, one has to recall an ancient episode, when a Greek Diadochian prince, to reciprocate for the gift of two elephants from an Indian maharaja, sent back two very sensible philosophers.

In the twilight of late enlightenment, the insight gains shape that our "praxis," which we always held to be the most legitimate child of reason, in fact, represents the central myth of modernity. The demythologization of praxis that thereby falls due forces radical corrections in the self-understanding of practical philosophy. The latter must now become clear about the grave extent to which it had been taken in by the myth of activity and how blindly it had given itself over to its alliance with rational activism and constructivism. In this blinding, practical reason could not see that the highest concept of behavior is not "doing" but "letting things be," and that it achieves its utmost not by reconstructing the structures of our doing but by penetrating the relations between doing and desisting. Every active deed is etched in the matrix of passivity; every act of disposing over something remains dependent on the stable massiveness of what is not at our disposal; every change is borne also by the reliable perseverance of what is unchanged; and everything that is calculated rests on the indispensable base of what is unpredictably spontaneous.

At this point, the most modern reflection of the classical "know thyself” is recovered. It leads us in a quasi-neoclassical movement of thought to the point where we can see how the producing, reflecting, active self is inlaid in a passive self that cannot be manipulated by any deed. All subjectivities, competences, activisms, and illusions of doers are still borne by this deeper layer. And no matter how much activity belongs to our essence, it nevertheless has basically the structure of "letting-oneself-do." The insight that "feasibility" has structural limits, has, since its processing by enlightenment, lost its antienlightenment tone and by no means necessarily ends up in the maliciously joyful impotence philosophies with which the conservatism of the church has long since pursued its business. Now it can be revealed that reason and praxis do not belong exclusively together, but that in a nonpraxis, a refraining from acting, a letting happen and a nonintervention, higher qualities of insight can come to expression than in any deed, no matter how well thought through.

Our ancient main witness, Diogenes of Sinope, the illuminated beggar, the self-sufficient, ironic representative of the pathos of nature, is to be cited one last time, he who, with his "restraint," had founded a model for those ancient European virtues of forbearance, from which modernity, with its activist ethos of self-assertion has turned away as radically as possible. Among the innumerable anecdotes documenting the impulse of his teaching, one in particular shines forth with profundity:

He praised those who want to marry and do not, those who want to sail off and do not, those who want to be active in affairs of state and refrain from doing so, who want to educate children and do not, who prepare themselves to enter into the services of a prince and hold off. (Diogenes Laertius, vol. VI, p. 29)