Genuine Virtue Research Articles

Patriotism and Love of the Neighbor: A Kierkegaardian View of a Contested Virtue

Though patriotism has traditionally been considered a virtue, in many countries of the world today, the status of patriotism as a virtue has been challenged. Philosopher John Hare has recently defended patriotism as a virtue. Kierkegaard, with his suspicion of “the crowd” and attack on “Christendom” has sometimes been thought to be one of the critics of patriotism. This paper argues that Kierkegaard’s view is actually close to Hare’s. Kierkegaard does believe that patriotism can be a virtue, though it is perhaps especially susceptible to distortion and corruption. Patriotism, like other natural forms of “preferential love”, must be infused with the love of the neighbor to be a genuine virtue.

Plato’s Statesman: A Philosophical Discussion

<i>Plato’s Statesman: A Philosophical Discussion</i>

A Critique of Principlism

A Critique of Principlism

Анти-этика Сократа: Платон versus Аристотель

The purpose of this article is to compare the ethics that can be found in Plato’s Socrates with the ethics of Aristotle in the context of Plato’s and Aristotle’s understanding of the good. The first part analyzes Aristotle’s understanding of ethics. He proceeds from the fact that there is no good in itself, there are many of them. The highest good, according to Aristotle, is the good of polis; his ethics is determined by politics. The highest happiness is to live according to virtue; moral (ethical) virtue (ἀρετὴ ἠθικὴ) can be taught by suggestion and repetition of certain actions; the nature of virtue is connected with the middle, it is necessary to avoid both excess and lack of passions and actions in order to acquire the habit of sticking to the middle. The second part demonstrates the difference between Aristotelian and Platonic concepts of virtue. For Plato, the main thing is the good in itself, which is beyond being (ἐπέκεινα τῆς οὐσίας), but at the same time it is the cause of all things, the cognizable and cognition as such (R. 509b6–10). Accordingly, the good of polis for him is by no means the topmost good; in general, polis and politics are only one of the levels of the so-called visible realm of existence, where opinion rules. Since the good itself goes beyond the limits of existence, a person striving for it must go beyond the limits of existence, and his own self: such transcendence is described in the dialogues “Symposium”, “Phaedrus”, “Phaedo”; in the “Symposium”, it is emphasized that only this transcendence allows to give birth to a genuine virtue, and not merely a ghost of it. Thus, virtue according to Plato can in no way be the middle, and it is also impossible to teach it; it is in this sense that the views of Plato’s Socrates may be called anti-ethics (the word “ethics” in Plato does not exist at all).

Radical Evil, Social Contracts and the Idea of the Church in Kant

AbstractIn this article I argue that Kant’s understanding of the universality of radical evil is best understood in the context of human sociality. Because we are inherently social beings, the nature of the human community we find ourselves in has a determinative influence on the sorts of persons we are, and the kinds of choices we can make. We always begin in evil. This does not vitiate responsibility, since through reflection we can become aware of our situation and envision ourselves as members of a different community, one with different expectations, making genuine virtue possible. This understanding of radical evil helps to make sense of Kant’s high regard for the church in Religion.

Owning Virtue

Abstract At the end of the Meno, Socrates suggests that genuine virtue is knowledge. This is surprising because he has recently concluded that virtue is (mere) true opinion. I show that Socrates’ new position is motivated by two commitments. First, that being virtuous requires being responsible for the correctness of one’s actions. Second, that only a knower has this kind of ownership of action. An implication of my argument is that, despite his emphasis on virtuous action in the Meno, Socrates endorses an agent-centred ethics. He thinks the epistemic status of the agent is essential to the assessment of her goodness.

“Искусство и жизнь”: эстетический платонизм Оскара Уайльда

The article examines the Platonism of Oscar Wilde, starting from his studies at Trinity College and Oxford, and how it was related to his aestheticism. Plato was one of the key figures for the so-called Oxford Hellenistic movement (1850–70s of the 19th century). In its context, the “Symposium” was read almost as a manifesto of a new aestheticism, an important part of which was homoeroticism. Wilde believed that Plato should be interpreted as a “critique of Beauty” and compared a philosopher of the Platonic school with a poet. At the same time, considering himself a Platonist, Wilde turned Plato upside down. The metaphor of the “Cave” remained relevant to him as well, and the Cave itself was understood in about the same way, viz. as a vulgar sensual life with its senseless utilitarianism, taking shadows for genuine reality. But while for Plato the exit from the Cave was associated with pure comprehension in the rarefied and, most importantly, extra-figurative space of merging oneself with the transcendent, and attaining genuine virtue by this outlook for genuine reality, for Wilde, the beautiful in itself was imagery par excellence (according to Plato, the world of eidolons, the lowest sphere of being), and imagery was art, and the possibility of virtue according to Wilde is precisely fidelity to art.

DEFICIENT VIRTUE IN THE PHAEDO

Plato seems to have been pessimistic about how most people stand with regard to virtue. However, unlike the Stoics, he did not conclude that most people are vicious. Rather, as we know from discussions across several dialogues, he countenanced decent ethical conditions that fall short of genuine virtue, which he limited to the philosopher. Despite Plato's obvious interest in this issue, commentators rarely follow his lead by investigating in detail such conditions in the dialogues. When scholars do investigate what kind of virtue, if any, Plato thinks is open to non-philosophers, they typically look to the Republic. But in the Republic Plato sets out an ideal city; therefore, the virtue available to non-philosophers there is likely different from what he thinks is available to them in the real world. If we want to determine Plato's thoughts about the virtue of actual non-philosophers, we must look elsewhere. In this paper, I set my sights on the Phaedo.

The Impossibility of a Virtue Ethic

Virtue ethics is increasingly regarded as a viable alternative to consequentialist or deontological systems of normative ethics. This paper argues that there can be no such triumvirate of contending comprehensive ethical systems. That is not because virtue is unimportant but rather because genuine virtue is excellent and therefore rare. For most people in most morally salient situations there is no possibility of virtuous response because possession of the relevant virtues simply does not obtain nor can be usefully simulated. Instead, the much more universal and important moral requirement is suitable moderation of one’s vices. Nor should it be supposed that the absence of virtue(s) necessarily diminishes the quality of an individual’s life and that person’s value to others. Rather, moral deficiencies are compatible with other excellences and may indeed contribute to them. I conclude that virtue ethics is less worthy of pursuit than vice ethics.

Aristocratic Souls in Democratic Times ed. by Richard Avramenko and Ethan Alexander

Reviewed by: Aristocratic Souls in Democratic Times ed. by Richard Avramenko and Ethan Alexander * James V. Schall S.J. AVRAMENKO, Richard and Ethan Alexander, editors. Aristocratic Souls in Democratic Times. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2018. vii + 324 pp. Cloth, $72.00 Aristotle's Politics described three good regimes and three bad regimes. It indicated the virtues and institutions that went with each. In addition Aristotle identified a mixed regime that endeavored to include all the regimes in an ordered whole. This mixed regime was a checks-and-balance arrangement whereby the strength of one regime would counterbalance the weakness of the other. Modern thinking has modeled itself either on Aristotle's mixed regime or on a version of his democratic regime. The aristocratic regime, whose institutional form was a senate of the wise and experienced, was designed to keep in existence and to foster traditions and values that were not of primary interest to everyone but which were essential elements of mankind's worth. This book is not concerned with oligarchy, the deviant form of the governance of the few, usually the few rich. Rather, Avramenko and Davey's new book concentrates on genuine virtue, the kind that manifests itself in statesmanship, art, philosophy, and revelation. It is concerned with the classical forms of truth, goodness, with all those things that beautify and ennoble human life but require talent and time to achieve their objects in any reasonable measure. Edmund Burke's tradition of the value of the small platoon arose out of this spirit. Aristocracy has often been seen as elitism while its opponents have been seen to manifest an envy that was dangerous to any society. This book seeks to repropose the thinking on political life by following classical and modern advocates of aristocracy. Thus, we have chapters on Tacitus, the eighteenth-century French nobility, Louis de Bonald, Konstantin Leontiev, Ortega y Gasset, Hobbes, Burke, Nietzsche, the Eighth Duke of Northumberland, and Richard Weaver. Ethan Alexander-Davies in his introductory chapter of this book presents a brief summary of each of the authors treated. He writes that "Aristotle has the most to say about the cultural leadership of the gentleman." It is about the abiding need of such leadership that this book seeks to examine. The aristocrat was concerned primarily with honor, not wealth or pleasure. His relation to the philosopher and the prophet presents another [End Page 371] aspect of the aristocratic life, a topic familiar to readers of Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin. Aristotle's theory of revolution, moreover, had to do with the failure to recognize the worth of honor in civil society. Jay Langdale, speaking of Richard Weaver's notion of aristocracy in the American South, wrote: "This elite class was limited both in numbers and in area, but this, Weaver notes, is the very nature of genuine aristocracy. An aristocracy is an aristocracy when it earns respect, no matter how small the number. … The Southern ideal of education was therefore not adapted to the masses, but rather aimed to orient the gentleman planter towards virtue and honor." Honor meant to acknowledge what was genuinely due to deeds and words that were noble. A central issue that this book presents, one going back to the relation of modernity to the classics, is whether we can have an aristocracy without having something to be aristocratic about. Aristocracy, even more than polity and monarchy, depends on the existence and acknowledgement of an objective order to which human beings are subject. Thus in Jeffrey Church's chapter on Nietzsche, we read: "What is interesting about Nietzsche's view is that it forms community around a motivation that drives most human beings, namely, the longing to lead an excellent human life. It forms community not on the basis of abstract forms and commandments, but on the basis of concrete personalities and works of literature and art." These personalities may belong to a specific nation, but they stand for something more universal. If we deprive ourselves of abstract forms and commandments, it is difficult to see what limits the strong personalities might have. The classical aristocrat began by recognizing that the true and good were not of his own...

Doctor Faustusand the Art of Dying Badly

<i>Doctor Faustus</i>and the Art of Dying Badly

Relativism, Ambiguity and the Environmental Virtues

In response to the looming environmental crisis, many have recommended lists of environmental virtues. As a result, environmental ethics has been enriched by new virtue terms, such as ecological sensitivity or kinship with nature, and with new applications of older terms, such as benevolence or care. But how do we know which of these are genuine virtues? Although this question is important, it is difficult to answer for two reasons. First, we might think of ‘nature’ in a variety of ways, each of which presupposes ethical beliefs about the relationship between humans and the nonhuman world. Second, environmental virtue terms seem far less clear than our more familiar virtues, which calls into question both their intelligibility and usefulness as normative concepts. I respond to both problems by considering the environmental virtue of care for nature, and one plausible examplar of this quality, US nature writer and conservationist Rachel Carson. I claim that Carson's example illuminates this virtue, and that care for nature is one environmental virtue we have reason to recognise. While this account might seem vulnerable to a kind of relativism stemming from particular conceptions of nature, I claim that the threat of cultural variation need not shake our reflective confidence in recognising some ways of thinking about nature as excellent.

Aquinas and the Democratic Virtues: An Introduction

AbstractCan the theology of Thomas Aquinas serve as a resource for reflection on democratic civic virtue? That is the central question taken up by Mark Jordan, Adam Eitel, John Bowlin, and Michael Lamb in this focus issue. The four authors agree on one thing: Aquinas himself was no fan of democracy. They disagree, though, over whether Aquinas can offer resources for theorizing democratic virtues. Bowlin, Eitel, and Lamb believe he can, and propose Thomistic accounts of tolerance, civic friendship, and democratic hope, respectively. Jordan, in contrast, issues a cautionary note against such enterprises. This divergence is due in part to different judgments about what it would mean to claim certain resources as “Thomistic.” In part, too, it flows from a disagreement about whether Aquinas himself countenances genuine virtues among non‐Christian citizens, and about whether Christians and non‐Christians can be said to share even proximate ends. This conversation is an important one, since accounts of the democratic virtues constructed using Thomistic resources have the potential to move discussions of democratic and theological virtues beyond common impasses.

Diagnosing true virtue? Remote scenarios, warranted virtue attributions, and virtuous medical practice.

Immanuel Kant argues in the Foundations that remote scenarios are diagnostic of genuine virtue. When agents commonly thought to have a particular virtue fail to exhibit that virtue in an extreme situation, he argues, they do not truly have the virtue at all, and our propensities to fail in such ways indicate that true virtue might never have existed. Kant's suggestion that failure to show, say, courage in extraordinary circumstances necessarily silences one's claim to have genuine courage seems to rely on an implausibly demanding standard for warranted virtue attributions. In contrast to this approach, some philosophers-such as Robert Adams and John Doris-have argued for probabilistic accounts of warranted virtue attributions. But despite the initial plausibility of such accounts, I argue that a sole reliance on probabilistic approaches is inadequate, as they are insufficiently sensitive to considerations of credit and fault, which emerge when agents have developed various insurance strategies and protective capacities against their responding poorly to particular eventualities. I also argue that medical graduates should develop the sorts of virtuous dispositions necessary to protect patient welfare against various countervailing influences (even where such influences might be encountered only rarely), and that repeated failures to uphold the proper goals of medicine in emergency scenarios might indeed be diagnostic of whether an individual practitioner does have the relevant medical virtue. In closing, I consider the dispositions involved in friendship. I seek to develop a principled way of determining when remote scenarios can be illuminating of genuine friendship and genuine virtue.

The notion of the moral: the relation between virtue ethics and virtue epistemology

In this paper I argue that virtue ethics should be understood as a form of ethics which integrates various domains of the practical in relation to which virtues are excellences. To argue this it is necessary to distinguish two senses of the “moral”: the broad sense which integrates the domains of the practical and a narrow classificatory sense. Virtue ethics, understood as above, believes that all genuine virtue should be understood as what I call virtues proper. To possess a virtue proper (such as an excellent disposition of open-mindedness, an epistemic virtue) is to possess a disposition of overall excellence in relation to the sphere or field of the virtue (being open to the opinions of others). Overall excellence in turn involves excellence in integrating to a sufficient degree, standards of excellence in all relevant practical domains. Epistemic virtues, sporting virtues, moral virtues, and so on are all virtues proper. In particular it is impossible for an epistemic virtue to be a moral (narrow sense) vice.

Hebrew Bible / Old Testament: The History of Its Interpretation, II: From the Renaissance to the Enlightenment ed. by Magne Sæbø

BOOK REVIEWS 323 and depend upon divine assistance for these as for other, higher goods. A reader may be satisfied that he does not exhibit the crass desire for excess illustrated by characters from the film Wall Street. Upon reading DeYoung on avarice, however, that same reader might discover in himself a disposition to harbor the worldly hope of finding security in a career or the status afforded even by relatively modest means, and thus identify the very vice illustrated in this chapter. It is worth noting that although DeYoung is a philosopher by profession, she does not limit her consideration of the vices to an account of the human good attainable through natural capacities alone. Her work is more properly theological than philosophical, and aptly incorporates the Christian account of the work and effect of divine grace in remedying the vices opposed to the virtues by which man is capable of enjoying supernatural beatitude. She does not take a stand in this work on the existing debates concerning the relationship between man’s natural and supernatural ends, nor on the prospect of the intelligibility of an account of virtue, and here an account of vice, separated from Christian faith holding to the truth of revelation. Such a consideration of the vices from a purely philosophical perspective—how particular habitual dispositions may be understood as contrary to the genuine human good considered apart from any revealed truths—might be a worthwhile exercise. Or it might be an exercise in futility. Raising and resolving this question, however, is markedly neither the point nor the achievement of this book. Rather,the achievement of this book is the solid and straightforward recovery of the tradition of teaching about the vices as an essential but regrettably overlooked element of virtue theory today. The fact that DeYoung’s illustrations are so illuminating, and that the language of the vices remains so foreign and unfamiliar to popular and specialist audiences alike, is proof that this recovery is not complete. DeYoung’s work is a welcome reminder of the importance of the vices for any genuine virtue theory, and an effective starting-point for a more rigorous and systematic integration of the vices into virtue theory today. ROBERT BARRY Providence College Providence, Rhode Island Hebrew Bible / Old Testament: The History of Its Interpretation, II: From the Renaissance to the Enlightenment. Edited by MAGNE SÆBØ. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2008. Pp. 1248. $245.00 (cloth).ISBN:978-3525 -53982-8. BOOK REVIEWS 324 This large tome is the third in a projected series of five books on the history of the interpretation of the Old Testament. Known as the Hebrew Bible / Old Testament project (HBOT), the series is edited by Magne Sæbø, a senior Norwegian Old Testament scholar. After briefly describing the history of the HBOT and raising some questions about its methodology, this review will give an overview of the series and concentrate on those chapters published so far that will be of particular interest to readers of The Thomist. In 1869 Ludwig Diestel of the University of Jena published a history of the interpretation of the Old Testament under the title Geschichte des Alten Testamentes in der christlichen Kirche. Diestel’s monumental work, over eight hundred pages long, focused solely on the Old Testament rather than on the Bible as a whole. Diestel expressed regret that he was not able to include Jewish interpretation in his purview. A similar but significantly larger project was published in the 1980s, this time in French and under Catholic auspices. Eight volumes of Bible de tous les temps (BTLT), edited by Charles Kannengiesser, appeared between 1984 and 1989. Unlike Diestel’s volume, this series treated both the Old and New Testaments, and included Jewish and Christian interpretation. Magne Sæbø’s HBOT project was initiated in the late 1970s, and at first was intended as a updating of Diestel, extending his work to the contemporary period. In the early 1980s Sæbø enlarged the scope of the project and enlisted the help of Jewish (Menahem Haran) and Catholic (Henri Cazelles, Chris Brekelmans) co-editors. For the volume under review a new set of coeditors, Michael Fishbane (Chicago) and...

Virtue in Virtue Ethics

This paper represents two polemics. One is against suggestions (made by Harman and others) that recent psychological research counts against any claim that there is such a thing as genuine virtue (Cf. Harman, in: Byrne, Stalnaker, Wedgwood (eds.) Fact and value, pp 117–127, 2001). The other is against the view that virtue ethics should be seen as competing against such theories as Kantian ethics or consequentialism, particularly in the specification of decision procedures.

Forgotten Classic Holds Treasure for Today's Lab

Forgotten Classic Holds Treasure for Today's Lab

Virtue and Ethics in the Twelfth Century (review)

Reviewed by: Virtue and Ethics in the Twelfth Century Jeffrey Hause István P. Bejczy and Richard G. Newhauser, editors. Virtue and Ethics in the Twelfth Century. Brill's Studies in Intellectual History, 130. Leiden-Boston: Brill, 2005. Pp. vi + 393. Cloth, $189.00. The essays collected in this fascinating volume on virtue reveal both the increasing debt twelfth-century thinkers owe to Augustinian moral psychology, as well as the extent to which those thinkers integrate classical moral philosophy and its canons of rationality into their medieval Christian worldview. However, the authors also explore the historical, social, economic, and theological genesis of twelfth-century treatments of virtue, and studying these explorations closely will help historians of philosophy to avoid that all-too-common vice of anachronism. By the time readers finish this volume, they will have read encyclopedic treatments of virtue and moral psychology in such greats as Anselm and Maimonides, but also in such lesser-known, but illuminating thinkers as John of Salisbury and the Porretans. Although the collection is marketed as intellectual history, and some of the medieval authors discussed are better described as moralists (or perhaps even moralizers) than moral philosophers, historians of philosophy will find that their interests largely coincide with the contributors'. The medieval authors studied view ethics as having a wide scope, ranging beyond treatments of justice and honesty to include such topics as the moral value of weeping and easy manners. For instance, Willemien Otten's contribution, "In Conscience's Court," contends that Abelard's ethical thought is not restricted to his analyses and arguments. His works' very expression of his distinctive Christian identity—accomplished largely through the character and texture of his writing—turns his own life into a poetic example in his ethical thought. Like the medievals treated in this collection, Arjo Vanderjagt, in "The Devil and Virtue," himself adopts a broad view of ethics by trying to uncover what other scholars have neglected in Anselm's ethical thought by exploring his sense of life. Despite that welcome move, Vanderjagt assumes without warrant that we can discover Anselm's sense of life best from his "non-scholarly" work, in particular, from his letters. As I read him, Anselm conveys other aspects of his sense of life in his dialogues, which portray the interaction between the very Anselmian Teacher and his Student, and likewise in his highly impersonal Monologion, for the impersonal figures strongly in Anselm's sense of life. Moreover, what Anselm writes in his letters sometimes appears to contradict what he writes in his more theoretical works. The apparent contradictions may sometimes be resolved by arguing that that the letters' primary purpose is pastoral, and what nourishes the flock is not always the same as what nourishes the student of philosophy. For that very reason, relying on the letters as the primary source of Anselm's ethical thought is dangerous. [End Page 328] One theme linking many essays in the volume is the revival of Augustinian internalist ethics: virtuous activity requires not just political or social power, or the mere performance of prescribed acts, but the right internal disposition. Hence, as Björn Weiler points out in "Royal Justice and Royal Virtue," according to William of Malmesbury, Stephen of Blois lacked the qualities to be king because he lacked genuine virtue, despite his good intentions and political power. So did Earl Godwin, according to Walter Map, but that was due to his rustic birth. Many essays focus, in particular, on the moral thesis of intentionalism—the view that only one's intentions or consents are proper candidates for praise or blame. Abelard, Hugh, and perhaps Anselm as well hold that the promptings of vices such as anger or vainglory are not, in themselves, sinful. One sins only when one adds one's volition or consent to vice's promptings. Intentionalism's most prominent exponent, Abelard figures prominently in several essays, frequently as the object of unsubstantiated criticism. In "The Problem of Natural Virtue," István Bejczy contends that Abelard does not deserve his reputation for promoting natural, as opposed to theological, ethics. His case, however, relies crucially on the claim that virtue, strictly speaking, is what obtains merit with God...

Reading the Techno-Ethnic Other in Don DeLillo's White Noise

BIMAN BASU Reading the Techno-Ethnic Other in Don DeLillo's White Noise IN his classic statement, Notes on the State of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson makes an argument against both industrialization and immigration. He would "let our work-shops remain in Europe" (165), and he warns against the "importations of foreigners" (83). In the opposition between "agriculture" and "manufacture," the "manufacturers " or "artificers" become the "mobs of great cities" who are, of course, the potential immigrants, the "foreigners." The argument against industrialization, a social, political, and economic argument, is unleashed in an amazing rhetoric which is both physiological and epidemiological. A "pure government" is here projected as a "human body" in a state of "vigour" which will be reduced by "sores" to a state of "degeneracy." The "healthy parts" of the "husbandman" will be exposed to "corruption" by a "canker" which "eats" into the hearts of the "chosen people of God" whose "breasts" are the "peculiar deposit" of "genuine virtue" (164-65). In such an early document ofAmerican letters, then, the anxieties articulated are simultaneously directed toward technology and otherness , or rather, these technologies are embodied in the corrupt body of the other which then infects a healthy self. Against the contamination of the other, Jefferson prescribes the prophylactics available in the "industry of the husbandman," "labour in the earth," and the working of "their own soil" (164-65). The vivid contrast between this projection of a halcyon agrarian vision and the virulence of the epidemioArizona Quarterly Volume 61, Number 2, Summer 2005 Copyright © 2005 by Arizona Board of Regents issN 0004-1 610 88 Biman Basu logical rhetoric signals the intensity of the anxieties provoked by a perceived threat. What is threatened here, fundamentally, is the integrity of a self-adequate and pure subject grounded in nature and endowed with consciousness. This is the subject that serves as a model for individual and nation, for body and body politic, for libidinal and political economy. The threat posed here is the encroachment of an industrial ethnic otherness which is, of course, at this point, that of an urban, industrial, European otherness, that is, still, a techno-ethnic otherness.1 To cite such an early text is simply to mark a moment in which this sort of encroachment had already begun and was to progress steadily through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The first term of the technoethnic threat is perceived as a technological intrusion. We might best describe the technological component of the techno-ethnic as a disaggregating procedure, a numerical seizure, which will increasingly be turned from the space of production to the body of the worker and his/her home life and to the population at large. At about the turn of the next century, this numerical grid placed on the space of production is intensified, and made decidedly American , in Taylorist-Fordist practices by the implantation of technology on the body. Disaggregation begins with the Taylorist segmentation of the body, its movements, and its functions. The implantation of an algorithm of spatio-temporal coordinates on the body yields a sort of anatomical precision. The body becomes "arms," "muscles," "blood," "tissues"; movement becomes "walk," "sit," "push," "pull." This practice ofdisaggregation has, ofcourse, evoked different types ofresponses, and a writer like Gramsci recognizes that Taylorist-Fordist practices represent an effort "unmatched in history" to create "a new type of worker and of man" (302). This "new man," he observes, "cannot be developed until the sexual instinct has been suitably regulated" (297). Most responses to disaggregation have subordinated the body and mobilized the subject predicated as consciousness, and to this extent, they have been moral objections. Nietzsche, however, identifies the "deep-seated malady" of human beings when all instincts "turn inward" in a process he calls "man's interiorization," when they are "reduced to their weakest, most fallible organ, their consciousness!" (GM 217). Nietzsche's observation leads him to a critique of ethics and his "scandalous and virulent" assertion that "it is ethics itself which is the ideo- The Techno-Ethnie Other 89 logical vehicle and the legitimation of concrete structures of power and domination" (Jameson 114). Nietzsche offers a model of the body that does not respond to disaggregation...