Rather liked Kent's hallucinogenic blooms here, and although my mind
feels like a squelch of porridge due to unpleasant micro organisms
exercising their own kind of visicidity and transparencies upon me,
wanted to respond: with apologies for slow wittedness. Dom seems to be
talking about one particular kind of Christian morality which arrogates
all truth and rightness to itself, but there are many other, perhaps more
moral moralities: the abnegation of the different in order to heighten
the correct Self described by Dom seems to be, rather, _immoral_. Kent
is quite right in saying that moralities demand imagination ("The only
crime," said Wilde, "is lack of imagination"). Whether a morality grows
first from an awareness of mortality seems to me moot: ye-es, of course,
but is it fundamentally that, or that, as Zygmunt Bauman suggests, we are
"moral beings" who are faced with the problem and responsibility of the
other. (Or are these two things inextricably linked? The awareness of
the other being a kind of death, the death of narcissicism and
egocentricity? And it's true, some human beings don't survive that
realisation.)
Bauman also calls morality a flower, but says it is rooted in
uncertainty, the permanent condition of life - "(Uncertainty is) the very
soil in which the moral being tkes root and grows. Moral life is a life
of continuous uncertainty. To be a moral person takes a lot of strength
and resilience to withstand the pressures and temptations to withdraw
from joint responsibilities. Moral responsibility is _unconditional_ and
in principle _infinite_ - and thus one can recognise moral persons by
their never quenched dissatisfaction with their moral performance, the
gnawing suspicion that they were not moral _enough_."
Best
Alison
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