ABSTRACT
The philosophical thought that Artaud, Michaux and the Zhuangzi have clarified and enriched so far now raises an urgent philosophical question: the question of ethics. If ethics is broadly understood as the actions of life and their principles, does it have a place in the thought of these texts? And can these texts say something important on the topic? At first these texts’ relationship to ethics seems very precarious. If nature as fate and metamorphosis shows the predetermined, impersonal and nonteleological dimensions of life, then there is already a negation of personal agency, freedom and purpose. But can there be an ethics that is fatalist, unintentional and non-consequentialist? As usually understood, consequentialist ethics seeks to maximize the highest good: typically, happiness, or the f lourishing of life, as in Aristotelian teleology, and the effects of human actions towards achieving it. But the views on nature in Artaud, Michaux and the Zhuangzi render the notions of choice and telos impossible, which means that ethics lies elsewhere. Also, these texts’ cosmological views f lag up a tension with ethics, for if cosmic time is preferred to the human, and indeterminate infinity to demarcative space, then does this imply an ethics that goes beyond the human (though not excluding it)? But whether ethics is exclusively human and social is itself a fundamental question that needs investigation. Furthermore, if these texts embrace a non-rationalist worldview in which reason and non-reason coexist, and epistemological claims cannot be made in terms of propositional truth but only according to particular perspectives, then how can an ethics that stems therefrom, if any, be guided by rational principles? Certainly, it cannot be deontological as represented by the Kantian view that the moral imperative is decided by reason and justice rather than the consequences of action. In contrast, Artaud, Michaux and the Zhuangzi’s non-rationality seems to propose an an-archic, antinomian and circumstantial ethics. All these questions about ethics show the urgent need for the topic. In brief, what would be an alternative ethics that is non-agential, non-teleological, unprincipled and even transhuman? Is it still an ethics at all or a non-ethics that is nevertheless ethical from a certain viewpoint? These enquiries not only open the question of ethics from a meta-ethical angle but also will show the primary texts’ distinctive position within meta-ethics.
