When choosing the type of information that I will need to analyse, I am more and more inclined towards qualitative data. Answering the question why, I think this is due to the fact that the events of the last few years have made me understand that even the most obvious things, for example, the value of human life, are not obvious to everyone, and even to people whom I considered close in understanding this world and its values. This is some kind of feeling of insignificance of everything. There are so many opinions on all issues that it makes no sense for me to collect them. The utopian nature of opinions and people on a given situation will not provide a diversified analysis. For example, I could launch a poll on social networks about catharsis.
For example, the question, “What influences you more, a dramatic figurative composition, or a positive abstract one?” (This is just an example, and I understand that the wording of the questions is also extremely important and affects the quality and richness of the answers). Thus, my audience will be people at least somehow interested in art. But will this be a good example? No. There are no, and there will not be, people killing other people from the Russian army or from the Israeli army. And they will one day return to our societies and exert an influence with their war-damaged psyche. These are the tendencies of postmodern theory in which there is no objective reality, logic has failed us (isn’t it logical that in each war innocent people will die?), technology does not bring development to moral and ethical qualities…
At the moment, of this research, I feel that I want to analyse from the private to the general. The world is given to everyone through the unique prism of individual consciousness. It seems to me that the only thing we can have in common is the biological and neurological body. So, if a child in infancy receives a serious injury to the anterior frontal cortex, then with a 25% probability he will be a criminal. (18. Aggression II Stanford University, (May 12, 2010) Robert Sapolsky, Lecture Collection | Human Behavioral Biology [online] At: https://youtu.be/wLE71i4JJiM?si=4HV-Su4eK3Smk_Pn (Accessed 11.12.2023) This suggests that ordinary biological processes and events can have predictable effects. This is the little that the human species may have in common. But the reaction to the war and the subsequent behaviour resulting from this turns out to be something unpredictable. My family members and acquaintances in Moscow did not have damage to the front part of the brain, and yet their aggressiveness is off the charts. It is important to see the connection and/or separate the neurobiological characteristics of a person and the associated psychological aspects with ethical ones. If the average person is healthy, there is no deviation in the functioning of his frontal cortex and hormones, which then is WHAT makes him/her support war, wish for death, and be aggressive even against own child. How does humanistic theory lose to propaganda?
The conflict at one moment reveals the hidden sides of ethics. On the one hand, a person is inspired by the work of Picasso and cries while watching the film “Schindler’s List”, and on the other hand, he supports an armed invasion of the territory of another country with numerous casualties. Perhaps this is a question not of new ethics but of some contemporary ethics. Where the central aspect of the study will be the process of finding balance. American philosopher J. Howard Moore proposed a rule in The Universal Kinship 1906 - treat others the way you would want them to treat you. But this technique does not work due to obvious new trends; in modern Russia, for example, a person is ready to die in war in order for his family to repay the mortgage loan (because of the money death compensation). Therefore, this soldier will behave as he did to himself. He deliberately went to die, and in my opinion, Moore’s proposed principle does not imply an ethical justification for such a death. Depth Psychology and the New Ethics by Erich Neumann, 1949 also talks about accepting the “evil” within us. Such acceptance will allow us to understand that, firstly, since we have realized this bad side of us, then we are no longer so bad, and secondly, that this evil makes us vulnerable and non-ideal, and therefore it can be justified in the new realities of society. In Russia, the term “new ethics” received its own interpretation - this is the desire to be self-identical. Only this desire to be independent of American democracy and everything “European” (same-sex marriage and LGBT+ movements) took the distorted form of justifying uniqueness - justifying war.
Therefore, I will test existing statements and concepts through the prism of personal trauma and experience. This is Deductive research, which involves asking questions about established statements.
“…there is the idea that not all philosophy should be programmatic and that, on the contrary, instead of looking for a set of moral principles, philosophy needs to expose how ethics unravels itself, and here specifically, how it unravels itself within the context of an inter-subjective relation.” (Martinon, 2013 p. 42)
Thus, I mean to suggest what modern ethics is, to touch new sensations through the creation of a situation through the conflict.
Beyond this, I mean creating illogical and emotional experiments (Inductive research) and interpretations that should provide data for statements and for research.
The two methods chosen involve the collection of qualitative data where visits and observations can also be integrated.
Bibliography and references
1. After Rwanda_ In Search of a New Ethics, Jean-Paul Martinon (2013) Studies in Intercultural Philosophy, BRILL
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