Chapter 38 intoxicated with moral relativity

The ambiguity of morality means that the world of life cannot be blamed. Once God, the moral judge, is expelled from the world of life by blasphemous humor, the world of life will show the face of moral relativity.However, moral relativity does not mean moral nihilism, and excluding moral guilt does not mean that novels are immoral: "It is not the novel's immorality to postpone moral judgment, but its morality." The novel has its own "morality", This kind of morality focuses on the dizziness (intoxication) of individual survival, and has nothing to do with politics, religion, and morality.The moral judgment of traditional patriarchal ethics is based on universal moral ideals and models, which will inevitably obliterate the specificity and difference of individual life.For the liberal ethic, the individual in life is not the paradigm of good and evil, the order of heaven.

They are not subjects in the secular order dominated by order, but specific individuals who are independent and live according to their own value preferences.By suspending the traditional universal moral judgment, the flesh and veins of individual existence emerge, and the morality of the novel is the flesh and blood and veins of this other person. The individuals in the narrative of the novel are not people in real life, but what Kundera called "imaginary characters".Kundera despises realistic novels, imitating or realistic novels are actually "false novels", "true" novels are all imaginary and fictional, and the people in the novel narrative are also fictional and imaginary.Liberal ethics, like liberal constitutionalism, is a self-constructed human being rather than a self-generated virtue of a social organism.The narrative of liberal novels depicts individuals who exist for themselves and live morally freely: they do not act as "examples of good and evil" or "representatives of objective laws" of history.This is how the narrative of liberal novels became a new ethics. Kundera even said that the establishment of human rights (the freedom of individual value preference) in Western society is basically the achievement of modern Western novels.

What is the meaning of intoxication in Kundera's affirmation of moral relativity?Indulging in moral relativity does not mean that anything is fine, but that each person has his own morality.To blaspheme the moral god and expel the moral god from the world of life does not mean atheism, but only means the individual subjectivization or privatization of the moral god. The individual, the cogito, replaces God as the basis of all; man can continue to maintain his faith, kneel in church, pray in bed, and his piety belongs only to his subjective world. "(, 8 pages) This passage, which articulates the ethics of humanistic liberalism, feels like it was copied from Weber's book: Individual God with the basis of his own life.Everyone has their own body, each person's body imagination is different, and everyone's God imagination is naturally different.If the morality of life is not a relative world, a certain moral understanding becomes the absolute moral god, and for others, moral tyranny appears.Blasphemy does not mean that there is no belief in anything, and revoking moral guilt does not mean that individuals no longer have faith.I no longer believe in a moral god, but belief has shifted the object of belief: belief in my desire—the natural right of my desire.Kundera does not intend to let individual life become a rootless canopy. The root of individual ethics is tied to the individual's own natural preferences.

The God of the Old Testament is the God of morality, and the God of the New Testament is the God who transcends good and evil and also shines on good and evil.Does Kundera want to turn from the God of the Old Testament to the God of the New Testament?No!The fictional narrative of humanistic liberalism does not proclaim any new religion, but "want to live its own faith".Kundera elevated intoxication in the carnival of relativity to a belief in survival, and intends to recommend it to people in the next millennium. His liberal ethics of humanism is like the addition of Rousseau and Nietzsche's humanism.

The world of moral relativity confronts the moral national court—the world of the ethical state, the moral law enforcement groups with social legal power—such as party organizations and league organizations—and their moral concept systems.A world of moral relativity would amount to a state of moral anarchy—no moral courts, no moral police on the streets.The relativization of morality is the absolutization of individual self-sensitivity, and the absolutization after relativization—the absolutization of pluralism and diversity—can offset the absolutization of moral tyranny.The narration of humanist liberal novels always has a personal sharpness, because the individual self-perceptual morality is always my body morality, and everyone "want to live their own beliefs".Morality is just the individual's autonomous feeling value preference, and the individual's cogito, cogito, and cogito have replaced God's position as a moral judge.Relative morality means that each individual has his own moral god, which belongs only to himself, and is a moral court established by cogito, desire and will.In the living world of moral relativization, there are moral courts, but they are moral courts within the self; moral police still exist, but they only patrol within the self.The moral imperative is only a limited and relative (relative to others) imperative of "should", there is no universal moral imperative of "you should" or "we should".

Because each person has his own moral God, the moral order of the living world is formed by the absolute moral principles of countless individuals, and these moral principles add up to form a moral world with only relativity.However, it is only in monasteries and monasteries that the individual needs to guard only his own self-life.When an individual with his own moral God lives in society and interacts with others, there will be individualized moral conflicts and moral events.Therefore, the relationships that constitute morality are all relative, and individuals face the problem of how to maintain themselves in a world of only relative morality.

In the case of sexual morality, sexiness and its morality are relative.For the traditional Plato-Gnostic-Christian morality, sex cannot avoid the birthmark of sin, and always carries the guilt of existence; today, sexuality is glorified, lyrical and even deified, both of which are moral tyranny on.Kundera said, "lyrical sex is more amusing than the lyrical emotion of the last century".Sex is "ambiguous": it's both exciting and repulsive.Whether it's arousing or disgusting depends on one's own sexual ethics and who they intersect with.There is no objective measure of moral feelings about sexual matters, and the predicates of sexual morality are no longer good or evil, conforming to or not conforming to traditional moral tables, but the arousal or nausea of ​​personal bodily sensations.This is called being intoxicated in relativity.

The same is true of the moral quality of the world of life: life is ambiguous, exhilarating and disgusting at the same time.The predicates of the morality of life are not true or untrue, good or evil.Whether it is sexy or a sense of life, it is just a feeling of one's own self, a density that makes one's own dizzy (intoxicated).Liberal fictional narratives have to capture both the exhilarating and the sickening moments, both of which are an individual's sense of the real world of life. Indulging in relativity requires an emotional distance. In real life, it is often difficult for individuals to maintain this distance, so that emotional involvement is too deep, and as a result, it becomes impossible to be intoxicated in moral relativity.The narrative of humanistic liberalism can provide a kind of ethical training that is free and intoxicating, which is what Kundera called freezing emotions.Kundera saw from many morally emotional political movements in the twentieth century that the rampant moral emotion will inevitably lead to the harm between people, and everything should ask about emotion, which is a kind of "terror of the soul" , fanatics with blood on their hands have never boasted of great emotion.Moral tyranny and emotional tyranny are two sides of the same coin, so we should end the stupid emotional investigation and learn to make emotion amoral.The greatness of Stravinsky's narrative voice lies in the fact that it dismantles not only the court of morality, but also the court of emotion; A dry eye is more valuable, a hand on the heart is no nobler than a hand in a trouser pocket.

Indulging in moral relativity cannot be understood as emotional indulging, rather, free indulging is a kind of emotional wisdom, which can be regarded as one of the basic virtues of humanistic freedom ethics.The novel narrative of humanistic liberalism should take the responsibility of training this kind of virtue, not only to describe the life world with only relative morality, but more importantly, to cultivate a mind that is comfortable in this morally relative world. Should the legitimate struggle against the moral politicization of emotion, however, entail the denial of any moral emotion?Is it possible to propose an emotionally neutral moral principle?