Perhaps most importantly, ethical norms not only reflect who we are, but simultaneously condition how we think and act, and thereby who we may become.
I could ask what Saint takes to be the being of God, to which he will reply that the being of God is reason… The universe is built on reason. God is a God of reason. The fact that through the application of reason we can come to understand the rules by which the universe proves that reason and the universe are of the same being. And the fact that animals, lacking reason, cannot understand the universe but have simply to follow its rules blindly proves that, unlike man, they are part of it but not part of its being: that man is godlike, animals thinglike.
…
Both reason and seen decades of life experience tell me that reason is neither the being of the universe nor the being of God. On the contrary, reason looks to be suspiciously like the being of human thought; worse than that, like the being of one tendency in human thought. Reason is the being of a certain spectrum of human thinking.
…
Might it not be that the phenonmenon we are examining here is, rather than the flowering of a faculty that allows access to the secrets of the universe, the specialism of a rather narrow self-regenerating intellectual tradition whose forte is reasoning, in the same way that the forte of chess-players is playing chess, which for its own motives it tries to install at the center of the universe?
…
Of course reason will validate reason as the first principle of the universe - what else should it do? Dethrone itself? Reasoning systems, as systems of totality, do not have that power. If there were a position from which reason could attack and dethrone itself, reason would already have occupied that position; otherwise it could not be total.
I know what it is like to be a corpse. The knowledge repels me. It fills me with terror; I shy away from it, refuse to entertain it… [This] knowledge that we have is not abstract… but embodied. For a moment we are that knowledge. We live the impossible: we live beyond our death, look back on it, yet look back as only a dead self can…
What is this in Nagel’s terms, that I now? Do I now what it is like for me to be a corpse, or do I know what it is like for a corpse to be a corpse? The distinction seems to me trivial. What I know is what a corpse cannot know: that it is extinct, that it knows nothing and will never now anything anymore. For an instant, before my whole structure of knowledge collapses in panic, I am alive inside that contradiction, dead and alive at the same time.
Insofar as I can imagine this (which is not very far), it tells me only what it would be like for me to behave as a bat behaves. But that is not the question. I want to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat. Yet if I try to imagine this, I am restricted by the resources of my own mind, and those resources are inadequate to the task.
[Norma:] “Broadly speaking, yes. You cannot, in the abstract, distinguish between an animal mind and a machine stimulating an animal mind. […] Human beings invent mathematics, they build telescopes, they do calculations, they construct machines, they press a button, and bang, Sojourner lands on Mars, exactly as predicted. That is why rationality is not just, as your mother claims, a game. Reason provides us with real knowledge of the real world. It has been tested, and it works. You are a physicist. You ought to know.”
[John:] “I agree. It works. Still, isn’t there a position outside from which our doing our thinking and then sending out a Mars probe looks a lot like a squirrel doing its thinking and then dashing out and snatching a nut? Isn’t that perhaps what she meant?”
N: “But there isn’t any such position!”
J: “Except the position of someone who has withdrawn from reason/”
N: “That’s just French irrationalism.”
J: “Then except for God.”
N: “Not if God is a God of reason. A God of reason cannot stand outside reason.”
J: “I’m surprised, Norma. You are talking like an old-fashioned rationalist.”
Who can be an urban ecological citizen? Who has “rights to the city,” as well as obligations, duties, and the necessary virtues, to play a legitimate role in keeping it healthy? Traditionalists argue that citizenship involves enforceable contracts. But moral as well as contractual, legal aspects matter, resulting in an ecological citizenship that includes nonhumans. Such citizenship revolves around the pursuit of ecological justice and is underpinned by an ethics of care… This ethic is not rooted in some generalized compassion or sense of responsibility, but rather in co-evolutionary processes… Citizenly relations thus stretch across the nature-society divide.
Who comes to watch who here? Is there, somewhere in the sunless abyss of the canyon, a place that offers human-shaped toys and memorabilia? Does a clicking voice gush ‘Human Encounters this way! See Homo sapiens in the wild!’
Our constructions of individual animals depend on a complex overlaying of meanings and interactions, which in turn are dominated largely by constructions of groups, types populations, and so on. The life spaces that these animals occupy hence map on to distinct geographies of ethics.
When the Other dissolves in the Many, the first thing to dissolve is the Face. The Other(s) is (are) now faceless.
