Dis(appearance): Earth, Ethics and Apparently (In)Significant Others

Abstract

abstract models pay insufficient attention to the ecological (and the hermeneutic) contexts composing the world, contexts which can and do affect our ethical responses. [...]this attitude is the opposite of the love of the world, of trust, and loving devotion to the world. [...]while he certainly shared Kant's view that ethics requires that we treat 'persons' as ends in themselves, and that every attempt to 'measure the goodness of the person in terms of the degree to which his accomplishments support an existing world of goods' (370) is unethical in the sense that it reduces them just to their instrumental role in maintaining a wider social (and, one might add, ecological) world, Scheler states we should also ask whether a formalistic and rational ethics of laws does not also degrade the person (although in a different manner from that of goods or purposes) by virtue of its subordination of the person to an impersonal nomos under whose domination he can become a person only through obedience. Opacity in Earth is powerful, but it must manifest itself. [...]the weight of the stone or the particular radiance of colours are revealed as modes of what is obviously present but unexplorable. .