Jeff Noonan

In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in 1987, the Russian-born American poet Joseph Brodsky argued that aesthetics is the mother of ethics. However, there is an ambiguity in his use of the term aesthetics. In the first part of this article, I distinguish between Brodsky’s narrow use of aesthetics, which refers to problems of beauty, and the broader sense, which refers to the cognitive function of sensibility and feeling. I then suggest that good sense can be made of the claim about the origins of ethics only if we employ the broader sense of aesthetics. The second part draws on examples from Brodsky and the American poet Jorie Graham to illustrate the ways in which the feelings generated by human sensuous receptivity transform the world from a meaningless physical system into meaningful sets of life-valuable relationships. The third part sharpens this conclusion by considering the conditions under which the world can appear to be meaningless. In the final section I link Brodsky’s poetic responsiveness to the world to John McMurtry’s philosophical analysis of “the felt side of being.” Poetic evocation and philosophical argument are two approaches to the same problem which, when brought together, provide a comprehensive explanation of why aesthetics is the mother of ethics.

This essay makes the case that Livy's version of the tale of Mettius Fufetius transmits certain facts that relate to inherited ritual practices along with formulas used in early law and diplomacy. Although the author may not be fully aware of the original meaning of all he is handing down because he has simply taken materials from his sources without much critical investigation, the traditional elements are important to him because they seem to authenticate this legend about the reign of Tullus Hostilius. For the moralizing historian that Livy certainly is, the treason of Mettius Fufetius and his execution at the command of the Roman king comprise the starting point of a remarkable sequence of episodes in his narrative that demonstrate the dishonorable behavior of Rome's chief rivals in Italy. The legend of Mettius Fufetius thus embodies a kind of “original sin” in the political realm, and becomes the paradigm for Rome's harsh dealing with faithless allies over the next five centuries. The essay concludes that this story typifies many Roman fabulae, insofar as they were often composed on the basis of outdated or unfamiliar idionyms, toponyms, ceremonial words and phrases, and ancient legal terms. In such fabulae characters like Tullus Hostilius and Mettius Fufetius, perhaps mere names in annals and king-lists, become the performers whose ceremonial acts turn into the foundational moments of Rome's public life

The article argues that historical materialism is not only a theory of historical change but more generally a mediation between the natural foundations of human life and its meaningful symbolic expressions. The article begins with an interpretation of the general philosophical significance of the basic premises of historical materialism as they are sketched in the German Ideology. I argue that these premises point us in two different directions: down, towards a scientific understanding of the natural world, and up, towards interpretations of meaningful human expressions. Reductionist scientific models are appropriate for the understanding of natural forces, but these reveal their own limitations when applied to social life. Social life cannot be understood outside its symbolic expressions, but these are not free floating ideal abstractions, but remain connected to fundamental human purposes and must be understood as such.

At different times Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse argued that immortality is a condition of overcoming misery and achieving complete human freedom. Their arguments were made before “practical immortality” had become a concrete scientific project. The difference between what was then and what is now scientifically possible alters the ethical and political value of the idea of immortality. Had the first generation of critical theorists occupied the present historical moment, they would have realized that science harnessed to the demand for limitless life would not solve the kind of ethical and existential problems they hoped it would. I argue that the scientific struggle against human finitude is driven by the same egocentric concern for money and self-maximization that early critical theory diagnosed as the main psychological pathology caused by capitalism. Finitude, I conclude, is the price human beings must pay if they are to live free and meaningful lives

The paper argues that the future of socialism depends upon the category of use value being grounded in a wider and deeper conception of life value. Only as such can it serve as the regulating principle of a future democratic socialist society. Life value is anchored in an understanding of the human life's space-time continuum understood as a continuum of life requirements. The multiple life crises regularly generated by capitalism are crises of its incapacity to adequately satisfy these life requirements. The practical conclusion is that a democratic socialist economy must prioritize the production not of use values as such, but only of those use values that also have life value.

Dussel’s complex work calls into question the standard history of philosophy, reveals a counter-history at work beneath the official history that gives voice to the victims of capitalism and colonialism, and systematically develops a novel ‘material ethics’ grounded in an unqualified, universal affirmation of life as the foundation of liberatory values. The Ethics of Liberation brings together the major problems explored in Dussel’s prolific body of earlier work: the relationship between Western philosophy and the expansion of European society; the relationship between centre and periphery in global political economy, considered as both a philosophical and an ethical problem; the ethical interpretation of Marxism; the politics of liberation in the colonial context; the defence of universal foundations of ethical norms; and the distinction between formal and critical ethics.

A new collection of essays edited by Michael J. Thompson aims to explicate and defend the humanist values which, according to the authors, were the core of Marx's critique of capitalist society. The text does not aim to provide a political roadmap to building an alternative society in which those values could be realized but rather philosophical analysis of the meaning and implications of those values. While there are sometimes tensions between the philosophical arguments developed in the various essays that make up the text and the traditions of Marxist political practice, the book as a whole certainly proves that the human values of Marx's philosophy are central to his politics and that his emancipatory vision remains relevant, even necessary.