Heidegger

>allen scult wrote:
>
>> Not only do morality and power correlate in the thinking on the
>> matter, but morality comes down to power in the raw acting out of
>> it. Two people in a long term relationship disagree about a matter
>> very important to both of them. As they work the dialectic through,
>> they reach the inevitable bottom line: Whose most basic grounding
>> moral principle will determine how we leave the matter, now and
>> forevermore, through all of history? And of course there’s no one
>> outside the two of them who can mediate some sort of compromise:
>> They already thought through all of the possibilities. It’s him or
>> her.
>
>On the contrary, the counterexample to your analysis is the morality
>regarding a parent and child in which the *parent* submits to a lesser
>power (as every parent knows when one has a newborn). It would be
>immoral to do otherwise, and yet the power relation is decidedly
>asymmetrical in favor of the adult. Hence Levinas’ analysis of morality,
>not Nietzsche’s.

Your counterexample leaves out the determinative element in the
scenario: language. The morality Nietzsche speaks of is a linguistic
one. Levinas escapes from the dilemma all too easily and obviously.
No one can deny the moral thing to do in the face of the other,
especially when the other is a child.

Posted on Sunday, March 2nd, 2008 at 8:00 am
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