BTL[/url] Parodites"]From my understanding, what we call value-ontology here is a reversal of the classical philosophical paradigm. Philosophy has first studied the nature of being, ontology, then built a morality on top of that. What we think is that ontology, that being, can only be discovered after valuations have been made, after a value system has been established. The primary ontological factor then, for a morality of this kind, must be that entity which empowers and makes the valuation possible in the first place: the valuing and creating self. The study of ontology then becomes the study of what is theoretically possible, conceivable, for the valuing subject in terms of experience, it becomes the attempt Adorno pointed towards in this quote, “Perspectives must be produced which set the world beside itself, alienated from itself, revealing its cracks and fissures, as needy and distorted as it will one day lay there in the messianic light.”
Morality (value) as primary, ontology as secondary, that is the basic premise. Following it through would eradicate the distinction between essence and appearance, noumenon and phenomenon, that Nietzsche often criticized and which had stifled philosophy by the 19th century.
This value before ontology notion I would sum up with this quote by Athanasius: Ει ουν φιλοσοφητέον είτε μη φιλοσοφητέον, φιλοσοφητέον. [Man, by virtue of his daemonic nature, must be a philosopher, rather he wants to or not, rather he philosophizes or not.]
The corruption of philosophy, morality’s loss of its primary quality, goes as far back as Plato.
Traditional ethical philosophy and morality have phrased the Good in a language quite distinct from the language that traditional philosophy uses to phrase the True. The true has always been purely representative. The truth, in the old Platonic sense, as the Ideas, are not positive specifications of knowledge. They are conditions of possibility of knowledge. Like the law of identity, a thing is what it is and no other thing. That is not itself a positive piece of knowledge, but is rather a representative kind of knowledge: it merely represents the transcendental object by which the empirical consciousness holds itself in existence and sustains the process of thought. I want to begin a new ethical philosophy that treats the Good in just this way, as purely representative, as a condition of possibility for the empirical, lived, finite, meaning-seeking consciousness. Our morals do not accomplish such a representative act, they do not represent to us a transcendental object. Our moral and ethical philosophies have tried to be merely positive designations of knowledge. Do this or do not do this. This is a virtue, that is a vice, etc. This owes itself to the primal error by Plato, who spoke of the good in a different language than he used to speak of the true. The true was spoken of as a representative idea, whereas the good was discovered within Eros’ loving gaze, was born of this gaze, and because it was related only to Eros, only to the lover and not the beloved object itself, not the transcendental order to which truth belonged, which truth represented, this “good” served for Eros as a merely positive objectification of knowledge rather than as a representative of the transcendental. The foremost goal of a new ethical philosophy must be to re-imagine “ethical ideas,” that is, purely representative goods. In the way in which the idea sustains the process of thought and holds the empirical consciousness in existence, “ethical ideas” must sustain a process that I call the “erotic-daemonic,” and that new ethical philosophy which engenders them must hold the transcendental objects and those truths which represent these objects in existence, must hold the “ontological” philosophy in existence, by continually recovering those conditions of limitation within the empirical consciousness from which such truths were born.