>Hi folks,

For those of you that are interesting in what might be called the 
philosophy of caring, check out the work of Harry Frankfurt. One of 
the most interesting aspects of this concept is how one identifies, 
and is justified in that identification, of an object that is to be 
cared for/about, a complex process of cultural interpretation 
(forgive the redundancy).

Best,
Tom

>I guess Jim that I could sum up the thesis of moral monism in one slippery
>term: caring. Care is the desire to fulfill the longing of others
>(Kiergekaard). This term which in latin is carita is similar to many other
>terms such as agape, ev, and so on. But the term care is not the love of
>cupid, the love of pleasure. The erotic and the noetic 'meaning sense' are
>united in human existence through care.
>
>Care can be explained through the categories of the 'pure understanding' or
>the 'ontological' categories.
>
>For instance the synthesis of the antithesis contained in  the categorical
>"unity of identity and difference" according to Aristotle and Kant (various
>the Categories and the Antinomies of Pure Reason) has a tremendous meaning
>to it as a set of pure antinomies. This antinomy has universal application.
>So when the idea of a 'founding' to establish an edifice where an
>'indication of an ethics', that is an edifice of caring, or ethos, as an
>habituation is concerned, then it is possible to begin the exercise of
>dialectical reasoning amongst cooperating participants to bear. Otherwise
>there is strife, and no love. The pre-archic originary meaning of care is  a
>sensibility regarding habituation, or inhabitation since ethos means
>pre-archically habit. So the pre-archic sense of caring is to be habituated
>in an environment both cultural and ecological.
>
>When applied to the 'situation type of ethics' that  families have to
>encounter in their daily existence, it is apparent that no set of strict
>rules always works in resolving conflicts and the arrangment of equal
>opportunities. The operative definition of the family from an anthropologic
>basis is that the family is a 'feeling' and the family cannot be
>conceptualized. The family is purely 'intuited' as an object of sympathetic
>and imaginary proportions, as magical as realism, and the feeling of family
>can extend to animals and even plants, and even rocks. So there is no pure
>intellectual, nor calculative, differentiable reason for the family to
>exist, except via the 'selfish gene' which is equally absurd as is most
>other 'theories' of care.
>
>The exercise of dialectical reasoning is said to be the method by which
>rational and caring people arrive a statements of truth, i.e. logos (an
>account in the sense of a 'gathering lay' or 'agora' - those who bring in
>the sheafs of wheat for the threshing, or the artesanal fishing village
>where the fish are brought to a place to process) [Socrates, The Republic].
>
>I would contend that a logos is a multiple accounts analysis and therefore
>as Rappaport indicates we need to invent a new paradigm or consensus which
>he calls the 'ecological logos'. He says that most neolithic societies were
>already at this point of conceptualization via sympathy, or caring, and the
>exercise of dialectical reasoning. Since the term ecosystem is a concept,
>rather than simply a directly intuited object, it would necessarily follow
>that the most knowledgeable ecologists are the persons that are most
>intimately familiar with their own environs (the neolithic hunter-gatherers,
>pastoralists, swidden agriculturalists and so on).
>
>So in the application of my creative approach to resolving the issue you
>bring to the attention of the list, I thought that I would raise the item
>which has been neglected. The 'Other who will not come along' is feeling,
>value, what Jung calls in his essays on Western Religious Tradition, the
>Trinity, is not a proper nor traditional foundation for an ethical edificio,
>nor source of inspiration in the subject of environmental ethics. Heidegger
>has mentioned this in his works that 'care' is  'equiprimordial' and
>[Dasein] fundamental mode of being. Feeling, emotion and intuition are said
>to be 'undifferentiable thought' but, as well, emotion (in the strict
>psychological sense) has an object corresponding to its existence which is
>erotic (has the quality of the beloved). That is why I brought into the
>discussion something forgotten: kinship through affinities by marriage and
>geneology. This is a good starting point for the discussion about what
>environmental values are in reality. These are the 'elective affinities',
>the strong forces in the universe.
>
>Spinoza wrote "reason does not overcome an emotion. Only a more powerful
>emotion overcomes an emotion." Fear is lost through love. But hate engenders
>more fear. Hate cannot be overcome by hate, but hate can be overcome by a
>more powerful act which is love. Love is - in the most ultimate sense - an
>act. Love is only known through enactment. True love of the other can only
>be expressed through an act of caring. Cupitatus is simply the love of
>pleasure that beloved begets in the lover and the beloved is never enriched.
>There is a strict enactment sense to love. To do nothing for the beloved is
>to not love the beloved, so by the strength of this analogy referred to as
>the 'enactment sense' in which care operates on behalf of the beloved then,
>to  hurl abuse (which ultimately is emotional abuse) is a form of  fencing
>in of the Other or wrangling, but it certainly is not a means for the
>acceptance of differences.
>
>Without the appreciation of the family as the enemy of bureaucracy, as Fox
>points out, the discussion of an environmental ethics ends in a morass of
>tragi-comic proportions. This is why the author of "Watersheds" - an
>environmental text - discusses  the most absurd (but believeable) forms of
>environmental conflict resolution. For instance the environmentalist Chico
>Mendes in Brazil was actually a communist that organized the rubber tappers
>to protect their opportunities in engaging in a sustainable practice of
>tapping the native rubber trees growing in the forest. The plight of these
>poor people was very much worse off prior to their organization, but the
>improvement came at a cost. That cost was the conflict that the rubber
>tappers encountered with land speculators who simply 'felt' and 'valued'
>solely the ownership of the land. So as a result of the rubber tappers being
>organized and engaged in non-violent means to improve their wages which were
>being sapped by labour barons, the new land owners, who only desired to
>clear the land and own and sell the timber, and then raise cattle for a few
>years, began murdering the rubber tappers. 
>
>Private property is not simply theft in Brazil, it often results in murder.
>
>The funny thing is that one of the most important persons to help the rubber
>tappers was a Republican congressman from the United States. His concern was
>twofold: the plight of the workers, and the meaningless destruction of
>rainforests. So that is interesting how a communist could make friends with
>a capitalist, and how a Marxist could become a environmentalist.
>Environmental ethics sounds like an absurd pastime if you were to read the
>more abstract tracts by Minteer, and Regan and Callicott, but that is my
>point. One has to get involved in a real issue that affects onself and ones
>family before one can really appreciate the power of 'principled
>negotiations' otherwise all we hear is abuse thrown over the fences that we
>are trying to take down to allow communication.
>
>Chico Mendes was finally killed by hired gunmen. The family that killed him
>(the patriarch) was already charged for a similar type of murder, and when
>the authorities rendered the conviction and sentence against the murderer,
>nothing actually happened because the prison had no security, and the area
>where Chico Mendes has no police forces to maintain law an order.
>
>The mind grapples with it's limited powers of comprehension (as opposed to
>emotion which apprehends and intuits)  to actually 'grasp' being, and the
>truth about being. But due to its' inability to understand 'undifferentiable
>thought' the intellect is often sundered on the 'slippery slopes' of
>'calculative rationality' or cast in terms that Kant uses, dogma &
>mathematics. This is why the use of en-principation (heirarchies) to
>engender first principles (the sole task of philosophy)  is so valid in the
>elaboration of ethical standards; since without principles there can be no
>sense of causality, and therefore no inferences. I know that much of what
>Minteer is saying is nothing but rhetoric, and actually mumble jumble
>because his use of specialized philosophical terms occassionally occurs in a
>colloquial manner. The Greeks were very great dramatists. And what they
>dramatized is the utter futility of pure reason (Blakes mind forged mancles)
>alone to solve immense problems (opportunities?) regarding existence.
>
>" Those whom the gods love first make crazy."
>
>When thinking begins to grasp rather than be granted the object of
>consciousness, some thing happens.
>
>Monism, Foundationalism....sounds like a great debate going on and then the
>bastards start shouting fascism to each other, well at least Callicott does
>not. He admits he is by consequence a fascist for being an enemy to
>bureaucracies.
>
>But Callicott uses the most spurious of reasoning himself. He actually
>thinks that vegetarianism would result in an increase in the human
>population, rather than less people simply because there would be more to
>eat thus more people reaching reproductive age that would otherwise die of
>starvation. Well as if starvation is a really good way to control
>populations. This does not imply that he is fascist but it does imply that
>people cannot control their own reproduction. We have birth control methods,
>many of them...so why should we necessarily think that eating meat will save
>the ecosystems of the world. That may be a plausible hypothesis, but there
>are exceptions to the rule. Bhuddists do not kill animals, and the countries
>where Bhuddists still live such as in Bhutan and Nepal are not full of
>starving people, nor on the brink of ecological collapse, and neither are
>the religious groups of practical vegetarians.
>
>Callicott mentions 'God served meat' as the proper form of food for man. He
>of course is borrowing the idea from Leopold.
>
>Like I said in plain english, if the world is going to improve for one's
>children in the future, then the most logical and caring thing to do is to
>limit the procreation of even more children than one already has. This is
>not something for the state or corporations to engage in as a form of social
>engineering, but it is something for the individual person to acknowledge
>and consider. Is it any less valuable to have 2 children than it is to have 7?
>
>Who knows? Are vasectomies in men good? Is the spaying of pets good? Of
>course as long as the person getting it done realizes the consequences in
>advance....so you don't have to stop or start eating meat to save the
>biosphere, you only need to limit the number of children that you bring into
>the world...that is purely democratic because you cannot deprive the unborn
>that were not conceived, you can only deprive the living. Vegetarianism is
>an immediate solution to reducing human consumption of resources, so that is
>good too.
>
>john foster



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