Abstract
Marx, militancy, critique – dead, all dead. They were killed, in one version of the story, by the provision of material needs by a separate and self-regulating economy, allowing our ethics and politics to turn instead towards the negotiation of preferences and identities. Such a story is, perhaps, as true for a relatively comfortable West as it is false for the other 85 per cent (in Enrique Dussel’s reckoning) of the world. There, the material basis of life is never to be taken for granted; and there, for precisely that reason, militancy, critique, and indeed Marx, are, according to Dussel, as necessary as ever. That the ethics presented in this, his major study on the topic, is ‘an ethics of life’ (a phrase that we are reminded of at the beginning of each chapter) should be understood, then, in the same breath as the other frequent reminder: that it is an ethics formulated from the perspective of the victims, especially those found at the global periphery, for whom remaining alive is a constant struggle.
Dussel is a major figure in the Philosophy of Liberation, author of a large number of books on ethics and political philosophy since the late 1960s. He is, as will come as no surprise, a persistent critic of Eurocentrism – a critique that encompasses Hellenocentrism in philosophy as well as the economic and military dominance of the United States. The critique of the West here is, however, not a simple rejection of it. The critique from the periphery is a critique from within the world-system that produces the poverty and victimhood to be found there. It is also underwritten by Dussel’s long and profound engagement with the philosophers of Europe and North America: Liberation Philosophy has learnt much, not only from Marx, but from Levinas, Pragmatism and both Frankfurt Schools, and Dussel has engaged in extended correspondence with many of these figures.
The first half of Dussel’s ethical project is foundational in nature, beginning with its material moment, a claim that all ethics necessarily concerns itself with the preservation and promotion of the life of human beings. Much follows from this apparently simple claim. Firstly, universality – all ethics, of whatever cultural or discursive origin – shares this basic concern, and so is capable of entering into dialogue with any other. Dussel is not one of those anti-imperialists who simply defend cultural particularity in the face of ‘western’ universals (or misrecognized particulars) – the concreteness of the human body, its will to live, contains its own ethical universality, to which the abstractness of reason is subordinate.
Secondly, there is already here a critique of ethical proceduralism – especially of Habermas, who is one of the book’s major interlocutors. In the second, formal moment of the foundation, Dussel accepts Habermas’s appeal to communicative rationality in the negotiation of the moral norms of a discursive community; but he does not accept the apparent corollary that nothing can be said about the content of the discourse. Rather, all such discourse must ultimately be about the maintaining and reproducing of human life. The resulting ethical settlement – indeed, any system or culture, whether traditionally or discursively grounded – is always ultimately a solution to the concrete problem of how the lives of its members are to carry on. This, among other things, is the meaning of economics, and the reason it is never fully a separate sphere.
The third moment of the foundation, that of feasibility, amounts to a critique of the impossible project – of abstract utopianism – as well as the conservative cynic’s claim that ethical society itself is impossible. Together, the three moments ground the ethical project of a realistic, rational and open negotiation about how best to maintain life.
Dussel, however, is not interested in foundations, at least not for their own sake. The foundation is both required for, and ultimately motivated by, its inversion into a critical ethics. It is a familiar Dusselian move, in which the ethical heaven founded above is all at once revealed, from another perspective, as hell; in which systems are confronted with their own failure; in which the West is confronted with the Global South. That is to say, critique emerges for those subjects for whom the ethical settlement fails – as it always must for some, in an imperfect world – and who therefore struggle to live within it. Each foundational moment now informs a critical one: the universal material requirement of the preservation of life becomes the critical denunciation of the difficulty or impossibility of life at the periphery; the formal, discursive requirement becomes the victims’ need for solidarity, education, and front-building; and the requirement of feasibility becomes a tactical and strategic sensitivity to questions about what can be achieved, about revolution versus reform, about the use of coercive force, and so forth.
All of this seems essentially right, intuitively speaking – in its discovery of material, ethical and political motivation at the margins and in the preservation and development of life; in the strident emphasis on realistic critique of the current reality. There is little by way of empirical critique in this book, however. It is a long and meticulous work of philosophy, not a rhetorical intervention – and in those terms I think Dussel convinces less than he hopes to.
Life, for example, is taken here to encompass more than bare survival and reproduction. Dussel would like his critique to take in the early Frankfurt School concern with less than literal ‘deadening’, as systems or rationalities become autonomous mechanisms that oppress their subjects. Life, then, also means developing and flourishing – the good life. And at this point, life no longer provides any kind of universal material principle. What constitutes flourishing, what constitutes the good life, is as contested as we could imagine, so that beyond the simple material point of keeping everyone eating, breathing and reproducing, Habermas once again has his day, as different versions of the good life come into conflict and negotiation.
Feasibility is likewise highly contested. Dussel occasionally appeals to the need, whether in the foundation of an ethical order or in the militant opposition to it, for expert scientific judgment about what can be done. However, there is no judging counterfactuals, even by the appeal to historical experience (which always requires interpretation). The anarchist, chided by Dussel for believing in the impossible, has instead simply a different assessment of what is possible – and, no doubt, a different set of experts to back her up. Much the same can be said of the conservative cynic. Indeed, what is foreclosed from the start, here, is the idea, found in Badiou or Žižek, of challenging the very field of what is considered possible, an idea for which realism is always rhetorical, and is already our worst enemy.
There is a curious quality to Dussel’s project: at once militant and risk-averse; at once angry and reasoning; at once scathing and forgiving of the system (and its philosophers) that, after all, was always itself established with the best of intentions. So much about it is right, as I have suggested; but the awkward synthesis of rationality and outburst is perhaps an indication of the ambition and difficulty of his task. He rightly wants to argue for a reasonable, articulate ethical revolt, not an irrational one; but the questions remain whether even a reasonable revolt requires the kind of universalist justification Dussel tries to provide for it, and whether such a justification is possible.