Paper short abstract:

This presentation examines the dialectic between egocentrism and responsibility. First, it describes how a semiology of capitalism constructs human development and the ability to actualize free choice. Second, it engages in a discussion of a type and level of reflection that challenges these distortions in thinking. Third, it develops an ethical account of responsibility that promotes freedom.

Paper long abstract:

The Dialectic Between Egocentrism and Responsibility

Abstract

Research Context

My thesis is two-fold: First, that in order to achieve the aims of the capabilities approach, we must develop a theory of personal responsibility to others; and second, that inculcating one’s faculty for this commitment to responsibility allows us to achieve lives we value. It is this conception of responsibility that can mediate our capabilities approach in three parts.

Methodology

This is purely a theoretical-conceptual paper.

Analysis and Conclusion

ONE: SEMIO-CAPITALISM

First, I lay out current conditions of capitalism in which autonomy and free choice are debilitated. In our current historical period, we are structuralized by semio-capitalism, which is the overarching semiology that prioritizes capitalism, accumulation, and commodification as the main hermeneutic allocation of value in our politics and culture.

We see in this semio-space the potential further erosion of the fictions of autonomy and individualism given that choices and perceived freedom are already pre-structured. These exogenous forces create neurological limits to the brain and, derivatively, limits to existential imagination and freedom.

Unfortunately, these capitalist formations disengage our existential experience from deeper cultural meaning by separating the humanities from science, the technical from the social, and the cultural from the natural. At an individual level, this results in existential fragmentation. It distorts and narrows our source of meaning to one that that is circumscribed by accumulation and growth, possession, and control. The acquisition of knowledge thus becomes a teleological enterprise of assimilating and learning capitalist ideologies and dogmas. If we do not understand these foundations, then what we perceive as critical thinking and reflection is instead a mass manipulation through power and the way it utilizes language.

Because capitalism becomes the chief semiological fulcrum, we lose an authentic relation to the environment and all the life and being in it. This raises the issue of our human anthropology and our relation to the cosmos. Currently, we operate primarily from a foundation of humanism, in which humans believe that they are more ontologically valuable than other life forms and compete with each other for important goods and, in so doing, elevate capitalism and competition above all other values. This creates a valorization of autonomy, individualism, competition, evolution, acquisition, narcissism, and egocentrism, which becomes an unbridled violence contextualized in automation. This leads to an evental interrogation of the human anthropology and our most basic interpretational structures. This opens transcendent space in which we can choose to re-define ourselves and shift the source of meaning elsewhere.

TWO: REFLECTION

Second, I explain a level of reflection that challenges our enslavement to a subjectivity of desire. It challenges a kind of reflection that is conditioned by that very desire, or self-interest. I argue that self-interest often brings closure to availability and closure to deeper and broader reflection. Thus, when personal interest conflicts with reflection in some way, reflection is at risk for being suppressed or distorted. This is true, of course, unless there is a different kind of reflection, one that is more radical in that it interrogates the attachment we have to our self-interest. Therefore, is it not the case that the reflective self takes its own interest to task? That it thinks against itself? Doesn’t the virtue of responsibility require us to place full attention on the task of reflection itself? Doesn’t this full attention require us to bracket our very own interests and desires as we probe into the transcendent field from which they arise? Without this deeper level of reflection, we cannot be sure that any sort of reflection outstrips self- interest. The countermove trends toward a different kind of reflection – and truth. This countermove tends toward truth because it opens to the world of others and to things, instead of closing itself to them.

THREE: RESPONSIBILITY

Third, I develop an account of responsibility that challenges personal egocentric interest at the expense of the whole community, and therefore, which can result in the loss of freedom for all. This means that we must seek a form of resoluteness and responsibility to our own self-understanding and moral development, coincidental with our inter-relationship to all Others. The search for an authentic self lies in that dialectical process of inter-relationship but not just with other humans. It must be with all Others, human and non-human, in order to move beyond our egocentrism and our anthro-centrism. Further, this means that the quest must not just be an outward study of the objective. Instead, it must focus inward, on our very noetic structure and our own consciousness of how and to what extent we are

presencing in this world, in this situation.

It is this primary signifier that must be overcome and transcended and replaced by a signifier of life and its presencing. Methodologies toward this goal include phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and critical theory purified from a semiology of capitalism and a noetic architecture of the possessory, acquisitive self. This is the self that pursues a fiction of autonomy and individualism at the ontic level, while not understanding that their choices have been pre-determined by that very semiological structure. Thus, it is an opportunity for radical reflection, free from both personal desire and interest, and from a semiology that pre-structures what counts as valuable and good.

We see that a rights-based approach to ethics and the law that manifests itself in terms of one’s ability to self-actualize their autonomous desires results in a polis based on power. Our responsibility, in this system, is unfortunately measured solely by applying the law in a competitive, win-lose method, in which everyone seeks to manifest their desires with the resources and abilities they have. However, in contrast, there is a type of thinking about responsibility that mediates desirous, egocentric impulses toward self-actualization that do not include an extensive thinking about the Other. This presentation is an examination of such thinking about responsibility.