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Saturday, 9 September 2017



An ethical directive is addressed to you as a member of a class of subject comprised in a certain class of situation. It can be analysed as depending on a maxim, a universal form of the imperative: anyone in situation A should do B. Now, your situation A' is rightly understood as an instance of A, therefore you should do B'. Where B' is the appropriately relativised version of B. Even in cases where the ethic is implicit and not formulated as a maxim, it seems to proceed via such an abstraction, which might, for example, be understood from the outside as following a game-theoretic logic. The recommended behaviour would therefore be the one which maximises an intuitively evident utility. So, to grasp yourself as subject to an ethical injunction is to grasp yourself as kind of being, and not as pure individuality. But the contrary to this is that discovering yourself to be subject to an ethical imperative is precisely what individuates you. If your situation is understood as consisting only of indifferent possibilities of alternative actions, then it is not yet ethical, but you are also merely a possible being for whom it does not matter which course is chosen. Thus, to fully grasp your situation is to completely individuate it, and hence is to go to the limit of your own individuation, and in doing so to assume full responsibility. The only way to reconcile this antithesis is to see that realisation of your individuality, the suchness of your self, is the transcending of its particularity into universality of being. So, to fully assume your situation is to be that situation, and to be one with every other being embraced by that situation, to assume the faith in a commonality of ends in process of realisation.

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