TOWARDS A TRUE MATERIALIST ETHICS

How to help others while avoiding their disgusting proximity

Ivan’s Childhood, Andrei Tarkovsky, 1962

What does a materialist ethics look like? Let me begin with Baden Learning Play on Consent /Badener Lehrstueck vom Einverstaendnis/[1], in which Brecht provides his most poignant formulation of how an emancipated human being should relate to death. First, in a refined dialectical way, he formulates the loss in dying as giving up not only what you know or have, but also what you do not know or have; not only your wealth but also your poverty:

“The one of us who dies also knows this: I give up what is present there, I give away more than I have. The one of us who dies gives up the street he knows, but also the street he doesn’t know. The riches he has and also those he does not have. His very poverty. His own hand.”(601)

What this means is that what one has to give up if one is to consent to dying cannot be brought under the designation of “sacrifice.” In sacrifice, one gives up what one has, while here, one has to give up what one IS, an “is” of extreme poverty, deprived of all one “has” – in short, in the authentic gesture of “giving up,” one sacrifices nothing, because one already renounced all content one could have sacrificed: