The Birth of Ἦθος out of Πάθος Paths of Responsive Phenomenology, by Bernhard Waldenfels
This essay argues for an ethics based on the classical understanding of the relationship of ethos to pathos and discusses the erosion of the passive and emotional components of pathos in modern approaches to ethical or moral claims. Waldenfels outlines a series of missteps of ethical and moral approaches to the creation of the good life in the history of philosophy and argues for a phenomenological approach to ethics that roots ethos in a call to respond to what befalls one in pathos. Instead of calculating appropriate ethical or moral action, Waldenfels’ responsive ethics seeks to use the emotional content of experience to correct modern thought’s devaluation of passive experience in relation to subjective action. The author outlines the structure and character of responsive ethics: an unexpected demand for something made on someone, and the refusal or taking up of the call. Drawing primarily on Levinas, Waldenfels argues that the pre-normative call of pathos becomes the stable ground for an ethics that calls the subject out of indifference and moves it emotionally prior to provoking thought and action. In finding the origin of ethics and ethos in pathos, Waldenfels seeks to correct the “blind spot” of ungrounded morality claims by providing an experiential grounding for ethical claims in a pre-calculative compulsion to ethical action.
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Bernhard Waldenfels is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Bochum and the co-founder of the German Society for Phenomenological Research. He has authored numerous publications, including a four-volume series Studien zur Phänomenologie des Fremden (Suhrkamp, 1997–1999); Phänomenologie der Aufmerksamkeit (Suhrkamp, 2004); and Ordnung im Zwielicht (Suhrkamp, 1996), which has been translated into English as Order in the Twilight (Ohio University Press, 1996); and The Question of the Other (SUNY Press, 2007). He has also published a number of essays that have been translated into English, including “The Ruled and the Unruly: Functions and Limits of Institutional Regulations,” Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal (1982); and “Between Necessity and Superabundance: Metaeconomic Reflections on Marxism,” Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal (1991).
Bernhard Waldenfels, “The Birth of Ἦθος out of Πάθος Paths of Responsive Phenomenology,” Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 37:1 (2016), pp. 133–49.