Could you elaborate on these 2 concepts Imperius brought up?
If you look at the way you frame things in (1), I think you can see the answer to your question. Liberalism thinks we need to describe the *morality* of ruling in declarative terms--but there's no mention of morality in your representation of "reactionaryism." Of course we have to think in declarative terms, and that includes planning, among other things, but the morality of ruling lies in how the ruler occupies the center, not in whether he measures up to some external (declarative) concept of "justice," or the "common good," or whatever.
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Regarding the second, my answer would be similar. Of course we speak about imperatives in declarative terms--in a sense, imperatives and ostensives is *all* we speak about in our declaratives. The point is that the vast majority of our imperatives could not be justified declaratively, and, so, to try and impose declarative accountability is really a power grab by those in the disciplines, who control the declarative order. By examining imperatives in declarative terms, though, we can clarify their consequences which provide feedback for those issuing imperatives.
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There's no contrast between aesthetic and declarative tools--the declarative is also aesthetic. Declaratives inform and evaluate--we think about what we're doing, and you can only think in declaratives. The question is whether the declaratives you are thinking in are attempts to figure out the implications of an imperative, or to provide criteria according to which all future imperatives will be judged.
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A moral ruler keeps the center singular--that is, everyone knows where the commands are coming from. And this is only the case if all the subordinate centers are also kept singular. A coherent chain of command is moral because lines of responsibility are clear and violent centralization (attributing excess guilt to others because events occur without a clear author) is minimized.
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The declaratives you give as examples might make motivations clear but they certainly don't justify anything--kissing a girl because she's hot is no more justified than kissing random girls. The question is whether there are imperatives in place forbidding people kissing whichever girls they want. What does the obfuscation or clarity of motive matter here? The act itself (which might include speech) declares as much of the intention as necessary--after the fact explanations might contribute to our understanding, and they may not. But either way we're focusing on defiance (or not) of some social sanctioned imperative.
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Sovereigns and rulers not only deliberate before making decisions but enlist others to help them do so. But they do so in order to make their decision, not a decision they are merely "delegated" to carry out. A ruler will have to decide, say, whether to go to war, and will give this decision a lot of thought--the question is whether he is thinking in terms preserving and enhancing his occupation of the center or, for example, fulfilling his obligations as commander-in-chief under the terms of the constitution. In either case, in truth, he's deciding, but in the latter case he's telling himself, and leaving it open for others to tell him, that it's really the Supreme Court, and therefore legal scholars, and therefore Harvard Law School, that's really deciding. The difference lies in whether the declarative is used to confirm or displace the central authority as the source of the decision.
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Yes, but relying on traditions to give meaning is different from relying, for justification, on concepts implicitly claiming to be outside of tradition. Let's say the ruler has to decide a case involving a dispute between different subjects. He can try to settle the dispute in a way that stays close to and confirms earlier decisions made within the legal tradition; or, he can try and decide it in terms that satisfy an abstract definition of "justice." If we all need to agree on the meaning of a term like "justice," "common good," or whatever, that is a sign we are in a declarative order--a ruler deciding within a tradition doesn't need a single, unequivocal understanding of these obviously complex, contentious and multivalent terms in order to make a good decision.
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The questions you're raising arise because I've neglected a couple of elements of the "thinking of the center" I'm proposing. In some recent posts I've been remedying this deficit. The moral content of Absolutist GA lies in the deferral of "centralizing violence." This goes back to the basics of GA and mimetic theory more generally: imitation generates rivalry, rivalry generates violence--and, not just violence, but a kind of "totalizing" or "existential" violence that threatens the community itself. For Girard, the way communities have traditionally dealt with this threat is through the institution of scapegoating: choosing a single individual or group, "finding" that "object" to be the source of the community's mimetically generated dilemmas, and killing or expelling it. For Girard, Christianity exposes the "bad faith" of this sacrificial logic, which we still revert to, but no longer with a good conscience, so it no longer solves the problem. Gans differs from Girard on some historical points here, but he accepts this scenario. I've broadened the "post-sacrificial" to include related developments in Eastern cultures. But the point here is that there is a very definite morality to Absolutist GA: refrain from and "disable" the tendencies toward mimetic crisis that lead towards violence against some chosen center. This is moral because it recalls and repeats the originary scene, and because it is the most advanced form of deferral yet, since it recognizes that when the community chooses a victim, there is almost inevitably an element of arbitrariness to it that we can try to reduce further. Of course, people need to be punished, we need to defend ourselves with force if necessary, wars need to be fought, etc., but it is moral to do so in a way reduces as much as possible the elements of scapegoating or centralizing violence that such situations always elicit. Of course, I am assuming that a central authority that establishes and maintain institutions that defer centralizing violence will also be one that establishes and maintains a clear chain of command. Ultimately, all centralizing violence, even against some marginal figure, contains an element of violence toward the central authority, which therefore has good reasons for ensuring restraint.
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One more thing. The way we know what counts as the kind of centralizing violence from which we must refrain is that the origin of all our institutions is in such self-restraint or deferral. More precisely, this is the case in "post-sacrificial" orders, which are post-sacrificial precisely because their institutions are marked by the resistance to scapegoating. To determine how to make law enforcement, education, corporate, etc., institutions more moral is to retrieve their origins in some act of deferral: in each case, some center that defers rather than incites, and therefore makes possible peaceful labor instead of the vendetta, has been created. Recovering that center also recreates it, in a way that defers current violent potentials.
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Why would I want to leave the circle of descriptors? If someone doesn't want to preserve the center, that person wants to destroy it--the "is" and the "ought" are bound up together. If someone wants to destroy the center, he imagines another center that would replace it. He is immoral for acting to destroy the only center available, but we could still engage him morally because he is nevertheless looking for a center. (How we engage others morally is more important than categorizing actions and individuals as more or less moral.) GA could certainly engage in dialogue with philosophical and other conceptions of morality and "the good," and it would do so by treating them, ultimately, as anthropology.
For philosophy to take off, I suppose we would have to leave the circle of descriptors. But can philosophy prove that we have to leave the circle of descriptors, and that there is somewhere else to be? Can it prove that it is not just another circle of descriptors?
On the other hand, if I understand your last few sentences, GA would already be doing moral and political philosophy (or at least might, with a couple of little tweaks). Maybe I should go with that! But the view of the human seems too static--rather than a "nature," the human is always constituting itself. And why is "telos" better than center? It seems the paradox of the human--it makes itself and is made by the center--would still place it outside of philosophy.
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I want GA to be closer to all kinds of discourses, including everyday ones, rather than more distant--that itself would be a good reason for rejecting metalanguages. "Philosophy" can say that morality involves statements like "one ought not to do X," but this is only the most ruled based, codifiable, way of thinking about morality. I think morality involves getting inside of the language someone uses in deciding what he is going to do, has done, or is in the process of doing, and helping that person see where he might be acting out or resentment rather than a desire to preserve the center or, more colloquially, "keep everyone on the same page." So, I'll be interested in philosophical discourses that seem most interested in the ways we use language regularly, not just working with very artificial examples that are constructed to frame a particular debate. We talk about morality all the time, and derive oughts from ises all the time, and doing so is only incoherent in terms of the very separations produced by modern society and modern philosophy. Simply in describing something I'm presenting it as worthy of another's attention, and that in itself is a moral gesture: it is "good" for you to pay attention to this rather than something else. Testing the coherence of statements is something done collaboratively, and as it is necessary--because it is "good" that we generate shared meaning and create more ways of examining our desires and subjecting them to scrutiny--because knowing the roles we are playing is good because clarifying our relations to each gives us more ways of imaginatively deferring violence, which is good... I think we started this conversation because you challenged my claim that GA can ultimately do away with philosophy--it seems to me you want to argue for philosophy's position as the "queen of the sciences," or at least the human ones. But philosophy will always be able to give good reasons for why every discourse needs its stamp of approval.
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Is philosophy good? Is living a good life good? Is good good? The "good life" seems to be the coin of the realm here, but your attempts to define it will be circular: something is good because it meets some criterion of "good," and that criterion of "good" is a good one because it meets some criterion of a good criterion, etc. You're not really explaining why I should answer all these questions, other than that I need to do philosophy, and the proof that I need to do philosophy is that I'm not conceptualizing things in a sufficiently philosophical way. You think I have to explain why enhancing sociality is good, but I don't think I do. I'd rather make fun of someone trying to argue that enhancing sociality is bad, which I think would be pretty easy to do. You think I need to explain why acting out of resentment is bad, but what, exactly, do you think "resentment" means? Value judgments are built into the words we use--so, instead of simply using those words, you think we should use other, presumably value free, words, so as to reconstruct the understanding of "good" already implicit in the original word.