CHAPTER 1

The Material Moment of EthicsPractical Truth

[57] This is an ethics of life; that is to say, human life is the content ofethics. For this reason, I want to forewarn the reader, here and at the outset,about the meaning of a material ethics or ethics of content. The projectof an ethics of liberation unfolds in in its own way from the exercise of anethical critique (which I present in chapter 4), where the negated dignity ofthe life of the victim, oppressed or excluded, is affirmed. Chapter 1, on thematerial content of ethics, is certainly the most difficult part of my discussionand the one that will raise the most suspicions. I present it not becauseI want to ground a Darwinist or naturalist (neo-Aristotelian, communitarian,axiological, or any other) material ethics but because it is necessaryto clarify on behalf of the victims, of the dominated or excluded, the materialaspect of ethics, in order to ground it well and to be able to take thecritical step from it (chapters 4–6). I am aware that I could be criticized as"rationalist" or "foundationalist," "vitalist," "irrationalist," or "materialist."However, my position is different from all of those positions.

In this chapter, I attempt to indicate some elements—only some—of auniversal principle of all ethics, especially of critical ethics: the principle ofthe obligation to produce, reproduce, and develop the concrete human lifeof each ethical subject in community. This principle claims universality. Itis actualized through cultures and motivates them from within, as well asthe values or the different ways of accomplishing the "good life," happiness,and so on. But none of these instances is ever the universal principleof human life. The principle penetrates them all and moves them to theirself-fulfillment. Cultures, for instance, are particular modes of life, modesthat are moved by the universal principle of human life of each subject incommunity from within. Every norm, action, microstructure, institution,or cultural ethical life always and necessarily has as its ultimate content somemoment of the production, reproduction, and development of the humanlife in the concrete. The limit act that would seem not to have life itself ascontent—suicide—is in no way an exception. The suicide, in the first place,cannot justify ethically his absolute self-negation; nor can he ground on suicidea posterior ethical act or a social order, given that he negates himselfas a subject of every posterior action. Furthermore, if, exhausted, hopeless,or suffering, one were to "take one's life," one would be presupposing one'slife always, since it is precisely because concrete life has lost meaning thatthis person seeks to extinguish it—unlivable life grounds the possibilityof negating life: suicide. I will return in a future work to this grounding,against the cynic who claims to justify death, thus committing a performativecontradiction. For now, I want to "situate" the structural place of thequestion. But grounding "against cynics," when these claim to ethicallyjustify death, it is necessary to show, from the absolute dignity of humanlife, the injustice or perversity that determines the negated existence ofvictims. My ultimate intention is to justify the struggle of victims, of theoppressed, for their liberation: reason is only "the cunning of life" of thehuman subject—and not the inverse—and, as such, we use it and defend itbefore the necrophiliacs (the lovers of the death of victims, the oppressed,the impoverished, of women, nonwhite races, peoples of the South, Jews,the old, street children, the future generations, and so on). For this reason,I recommend, in order to understand the importance and sense of this material,or its ethical content, that one first read chapter 4, which is the initialcritical theme of this ethics of liberation. In fact, in chapter 1 the possibilityof negating what is negated is grounded affirmatively as the originof the material critical process of ethics, which will be described in part II,on ethical critique. After reading chapter 4, the importance of the positivematerial ethics that we now describe will be understood better.

[58] It is a matter of following a long path, but from its correct "beginning"(the Anfang of Hegel or Marx), in this case, through its content. Iwill present the material moment of ethics, which, contrary to Kant, hasa universality that I will show in its moment. Kant writes: "All practicalprinciples that presuppose an object (matter) of the faculty of desire as thedetermining ground of the will are, without exception, empirical and canfurnish no practical laws." Practical laws are universal, and it would seemthat the "appetitive faculty" is necessarily particular, egoistical. In another,earlier text Kant expresses it even more clearly: "To preserve one's life is aduty, and besides everyone has an immediate inclination to do so. But onthis account the often anxious care that most people take of it still has noinner worth and their maxim has no moral content." It is a matter, precisely,of the question of the criterion and the material principle of ethics,as much because of its content (the conservation of human life) as becauseof the inclination, the drive, or affectivity that tends toward their conservation.I will show that the so-called inclination (Neigung), "appetitive faculty,"or "desire" can also have universality. But, in addition, as we will see,the human affective-evaluative system acts while fulfilling the indicatedmaterial principle of ethics, which is both necessary and universal. We willsee in due course that the mere "material" dimension (spelled with "a" inGerman) is not sufficient for the fulfillment of the "goodness claim" of themaxim, act, institution, or system of ethical life. Other criteria or ethical-moralprinciples will be necessary for their fulfillment, such as the areas ofconsensuality of moral validity or the feasibility of mediations, in order toeffectively reach "goodness." It is a matter of the articulation of numerouscriteria and principles of ethics, and of the construction of many categoriesthat are frequently defined unilaterally.

Moreover, we will have to pass beyond the reductionistic dualism (ofDescartes, Kant, or the "Enlightenment") that situated in a hypothetical"soul" what ethics is needed in order to present its theme and that, becauseof its dualistic "metaphysical anthropology," deformed from the outset allpossible posterior analysis. But, in addition, having fixed our attention on"consciencism," we have lost the entire level of the self-organizing processof life, including even the processes of self-regulated social life, which arenot discovered by conscience since it is a matter of structures that are partlynonintentional.

§1.1. The Human Cerebral Cognitive andAffective-Appetitive System

[59] Ethics should give importance to those self-organized or self-regulatedprocesses of life, since the modern, exaggerated, and unilateralimportance of "consciencism" results in the loss of the organic corporealityof ethical existence. Consciousness does not need to always intervene, butit is determinative in "critical" intervention, and corrects nonintentionalnegative or perverse effects. For this reason, I will make a quick propadeuticdetour into a topic of extreme currency, which, paradoxically, has only recentlybegun to awaken the attention that it deserves among philosophers.It concerns the empirical studies of the biology of the brain that will allowus, without falling into reductionism or into ethical naturalism or Darwinism,to recuperate the dimension of the corporeality with organic processesthat are highly self-referential—hence left to the side by the formal moralities—in order to frame more strictly the not always valid claims of materialethics. We should take into account the difference, always present evenin the long run, between the neurological "fact" and the reflexive "fact"of subjectivity, although the second is materially "carried" by the first (seefigure 4).

Humberto Maturana proposes three degrees of "organic units" of life.

a. The unity of the first degree is given in the living cell. All physical matterthat constitutes our corporeality is as old as the universe (more thanthirteen billion years). All the living cells of our corporeality, which areproducts of reproductive divisions of living cells, are part of a continuumthat has been living since the origin of life on the earth (about four billionyears ago). We are a moment of autopoietic life: "By realizing whatcharacterizes living beings in their autopoietic organization, we can unify awhole lot of empirical data about their biochemistry and cellular functioning.The concept of autopoiesis, therefore, does not contradict these data.Rather[, it] ... stresses that living beings are autonomous entities." Themetabolism of internal dynamics of the cell (autopoietic and autonomous)reacts to the environment through its mitochondria and membranes, itsboundaries, inaugurating a process of autogenesis.

b. The unity of the second degree is produced in metacellular organisms(multicellular, from mushrooms to the higher mammals). Metacellularontogenesis is a process of cellular phylogenesis. Evolution consists in perturbationsthat are conserved autopoietically through adaptation. The appearanceof the nervous system allows the organism then to "expand thedominion of possible behavior when it grants the organism a tremendouslyversatile and plastic structure," which grants it, in turn (through the systemof sensorimotor coordination), a greater mobility.

c. The unity of the third degree is fulfilled in social phenomena (from beehivesto the higher primates). Ants "communicate" by continually passingone another nourishing chemical substances (trophallaxis). Higher animalsuse interactive behaviors of the gestural, postural, or tactile type. The unityof the third degree, which includes ontogenetic and phylogenetic behaviorsof greater complexity, is the "linguistic dominion among participant organisms."Let us look at this with greater attention.

[60] Gerald Edelman describes in neurological-scientific terms thefunctioning of the brain. The brain, the internal moment of human corporeality,is a "selective recognition system" that proceeds on the basisof interconnected neural groups. In the first place, in the same way as theimmune system or the evolutionary process of the species, the cerebral nervoussystem acts through selection, starting from the universal criterionof becoming permanent and enabling reproduction and development, tonurture the life of the human subject, and this from the plant level to themost heroic and sublime cultural or ethical levels. Antonio Damasio tells usin his Descartes' Error that "several hours after a meal your blood sugar leveldrops, and neurons in the hypothalamus detect the change; activation ofthe pertinent innate pattern makes the brain alter the body state so that theprobability for correction can be increased; you feel hungry, and initiate actionsto end your hunger; you eat, and the ingestion of food brings about acorrection in blood sugar, this time an increase, and the appropriate neuronsplace the body in the state whose experience constitutes the feeling ofsatiety." As the reader might imagine, this is a radical simplification of animmensely bigger process (a trillion times more complex). In any event, allof this is part of the functions that are fulfilled by the brain—as functionsof ethical corporeality, which we are dealing with here. That is to say, thebrain is the organ directly responsible for the human subject's "continuingto live," via reproduction and the development of the human life of theorganism, of the communitarian and historical corporeality of the ethicalsubject.

[61] Let us now look at the functions of the brain as nonintentional,self-organized, and self-regulated processes of life, which always act as awhole, although a few of these functions refer more directly to some internalorgans that frequently constitute "circuits," where the currents of neuralinformation "enter," "exit," or "return" in diverse mutually implicatedmovements.

The stimulus (or simply the perception of reality) of the external world(moment 1 in figure 5) makes itself present through a signal that is receivedby the brain, through specialized neural receptive and transmitting mediationsthat bring about as a result, after other moments, a "perceptualcategorization" (moment 3) through selective recognition, adaptive tothe reproduction of the life of the organism, as noted earlier. In this way,"maps" or structures of groups of neurons begin to form that react insimilar ways in the future, although never in the same way, before a "memory"or a "new recall." Once there are enough maps, the brain can begina more complex function, called "global mapping": "A global mapping isa dynamic structure containing multiple local maps with entries and exits(both motor and sensory) that are able to interact with non-mapped partsof the brain."

[62] What is most important for the goals of an ethics is that the processfollows a "path" that includes not only the thalamocortical region (a recentformation in human evolution and unique because of uncommon cerebraldevelopment of the genus Homo), but also, before that, the limbic systemand the base of the brain (the oldest, already present in insects and reptiles,for example): "Categorization always occurs in reference to internal criteriaof value and this reference defines its appropriateness. Such value criteriado not determine specific categorizations but they constrain the domainsin which they occur.... [T]he bases for value systems in the animals of agiven species are already set by evolutionary selection."

To put it in another way: in order to construct its object, the process ofcategorization requires "passage" through the "evaluative-affective" system(essentially constituted by the limbic system and the base of the brain, asalready noted), where some of its organs are the hypothalamus, the ganglia,the hippocampus, and the thalamus, which give the "green light" (or "redlight") to the categorizing process that follows. What cause requires sucha "circuit" through the affective-evaluative system (moment 5 of figure 5)?It is a matter of having to "determine," "confirm," and "judge," no less,the manner in which, or how, the categorized "allows" or "opposes" thecontinuation or growth of the life of the organism, of the corporeality astotality, of which the brain itself is only a functional part. The human brainholds this criterion as a fundamental "criterion of truth." When an insector a mammal perceives through its senses another animal, for example, it"perceives-evaluating" that animal as "dangerous" or as "mediation" for thesurvival of the organism in question (it must make the distinction between"enemy" or "nourishment," for example). If it did not have this evaluativecapacity, the individual would die, and if all specimens lost this capacity,they would disappear as a species. It is a question of life or death. Whatis positively "worthy" (the norm or the maxim that is judged—by a judgmentof fact) is what allows the reproduction of life. "Value" (here theevaluation by judgment that coordinates what is to operate from the criterionof truth) is no more than the fact that such mediation (the objector judgment in question) allows survival, that is, what is "kept" by memoryin the repertoire of past experiences in certain neural groups, whichcan be "recalled" again, "remembered," in order to accept or not acceptthese stimuli (in an intuitive fashion, without explicit judgment, and innonhuman species not at all syntactically or linguistically). If this neural"memory" is wrong in its recall of the affective evaluation, the organism(the insect or the mammal) could be destroyed, as already noted, by things,organisms, or other real moments, the "danger" of which it was not awareat the time.

(Continues...)