An Ethic of

Emotions

The Paths of

Empathy

Jordi Vallverd, Ph.D.

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For Sujan, my beloved and hoped-for son.

I hope you dont need to understand this

Plenary Communion

My nerves adhere

to mud, to walls,

embrace the branches,

pierce the earth,

and spread through the earth

until they reach the sky

Marble, horses

share my veins

Any pain hurts

my flesh, my bones

Oh, the times Ive died

as I saw a bull get slaughtered!...

If I see a cloud

I must take flight,

If a woman lays

I lay with her.

Oh how many times Ive asked myself

is that me, that stone?

I never follow a corpse

without staying by its side

When an egg is laid,

I too cluck and crow

As soon as someone thinks of me

I become a memory

Oliverio Girando, 1942 Persuasin de los das

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An introductory remark Originally, I did not intend to write this text. My intention was to analyze the relations between biotechnological innovation and the limits of ethical thought, as the product of a scholarship in bioethics research from the Fundaci Victor Grifols I Lucas. Because of the always surprising chance that accompanies the steadfast researcher, I soon discovered that bioethical conflict lead to a debate on ethics itself and the meaning (certainly biologic and neuronal as well as cultural) of human actions, sheltered under the umbrella of language. Consequently, I delved into reflections on the conflictive in ethics and on the bases of ethical actions, which led to the writing of this essay on the ethic of emotions. Current biotechnology and its conceptual debates are the plan and basis of this debate on the ethical. They are in some way the conceptual starting point, the cause and excuse for this essay, as well as the material touchstone for ethical reflection. It would of course be presumptuous to attempt to correct the errors of so many others (who are truly great) to find a definitive solution to ethical conflict! Nothing is farther from my intentions. I have simply written on some things that I believe can be written about, but cannot be fully developed and explained in detail. I do not attempt to sound deep, but rather to express frustration. I have certainly tried, but without seeking the agreeable echo of my own voice. This has not been an easy text, neither wanted, nor desired. It gradually revealed itself on paper after a hard and unexpected process of reflection, and a series of diverse personal experiences. I dont know why it ended up being so scarcely an academic work of philosophy. Perhaps this is because it was written without considering its audience

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Preamble Although this is another book made up of words and concepts about the world, its motive lies beyond its own symbolic limits. This text is an excuse to experience the physical meaning of the ethical, all the while avoiding any kind of comprehension anchored on words. Alas, the road towards the ethical is a road of return from language, in order to return to language from a different vital framework. What allows us to explain the world separates us from it at the same time. The immediacy of the symbolic is a veil that distorts the world. This perspective is necessary for conceptual work, although in the realm of the ethical we must abandon all perspectives in order to access the realm of the emotional. This is not a book that should be simply read, because ethics is not something you read. Although this book is made up of language, it is grounded, and attempts to look at language from outside language (if this is even possible). Neither was I content to describe the ethical, because such action would be insufficient. In any case, the reflection upon the ethical leads to ethical language, which never wholly encompasses the ethical. (These words are tools that we should be able to forget once the problem is pointed towards. Words only point towards feeling, and feeling transcends the semantic limits of the subject and lead to action and full experience. Words are the shadows of actions). Besides, where may one think the ethical besides language? My intuitions, a private matter, are my own, but this is not useful for the ethical as a social project, not even on a small scale. Private intuitions can only be shared through language. And language is not limited to the spoken or written word; it includes bodily signals (the hands, the face, movement), which, in some way, constitute a non-symbolic language, because their biological evolutionary roots transcend and are a basis for language itself. Are my emotions, sensations and intuitions, however, something to be dismissed because they are private and somehow opaque to language? The ethical permits attributing a personal meaning to a feeling, and is but a consequence of feeling, a primal state of human existence. The cry of a baby contains a proto-semantic that transcends the supple meanings of human cultures. It stems from an emotion in search of another emotion. It is the miracle of genetic language which, wordless, emits meaningful signals. However, one must know how to listen.

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And listening to the profound in the ethical requires the most complex of activities for a human being: forgetting that one knows, forgetting that one is, forgetting that one stands upon the supposed order of the linguistic. Words accumulate throughout lives, generations, civilizations without running out but mutating in subtleties of meaning, in forms, signs, uses and misuses that hide their pliable and fleeting meaning. Maybe humans have words to thank for their rationality, but we have to thank emotions even more for making us human. Rationality is an order that is added on to our being. The problem lies in the success of the rational in the realm of evolution, which has led to an apparent rationalization of everyday activity. Apparent, I insist, because when we have to make a decision we dont appeal to rational arguments. Our rationality consists, rather, in the constant taking of decisions in situations of real or absolute ignorance of the context in question. Contemporary statistical and risk thinking is proof of that. And while it is true that we have shifted from a causal to a statistical paradigm, this does not imply that decisions taken within the first of these were taken with full knowledge. It was ignorance of the real structure of the world, based on the will to believe in a supposed order, which permitted the taking of decisions, most of which were based on wrong beliefs about the world. Therefore, we never decide based on facts themselves, but rather on incomplete approximations. The worlds meaning arises when we omit the inclusion, in our conceptual systems, of that which eludes all coherent explanation. Anomaly is a luxury which few societies or individuals can afford. Closing the loop of the infinite (through dogma or pseudo-rational explanation) is a necessary emotive response in order to handle the complexity of choice in daily life. Therefore, we must recognize the emotive element present in any rational explanation of the world, as well as in any human choice. The very desire to exclude emotions is motivated by an emotion, by fear of emotions. Since both pertain to the same sphere of decision, rationality and emotion have been at odds with each other throughout history. Their very nature confronts them (until now). Our existential immediacy manifests itself as an emotional flux with the world, which is then regulated by several tools, among which are language, as well as magical or rational thought. Let us look at the paradox of the train wagon: suppose we are in such a situation that we control the rails of a railway with two bifurcations. At the end of the first bifurcation there are five people working, whereas at the end of the first there is only one. A

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wagon approaches that will either kill the five people or the single one, depending on how we control the rails. What should be done? Surely, we will choose for the wagon to kill one, not five, people. But let us then suppose a sibylline modification: there is only one track and we are on a bridge with a person we do not know. The wagon approaches and we know that the only way to save the five people at the end of the track is to toss our companion in front of the wagon so that his body will stop the wagon and save the group. Once again, it is one against five. But in this case, doubts as to the course of action are greater. This theoretical experiment, performed on several people, has offered similar results; in the first case, no one has any doubts, in the second this is not so, but it would seem that from a rational viewpoint the whole thing boils down to saving either one or five people. Is this just another thought experiment, something to occupy the minds of boring philosophers? No. Lets think about the incredible amount of decisions that we must take in moments of conflict, and of the ways we have of making decisions. Not only do we have a limited rationality (due to the available data, and our cognitive limitations, which are evident in the many argumentative fallacies in existence), but we also dont develop this rationality fully. Rationality is pregnant with emotions. Emotions are key to decision-making under incomplete and restrictive conditions. However, the role of emotions is not instrumental, that is, they are not a means to an end (as if rationality were something external to emotions, and uses them to reach goals), but rather structural, in that they constitute thinking nature itself. Rather than seeing ourselves as thinking beings, we ought to underline the possibilities of our existence, under the cover of symbolic thought. The most important thing is that we are, and that this existence is conditioned by a material structure that predetermines our ways of interacting with the world. Emotions are this structure. And our being is pure change. A passage between the biological and the cultural that actively transforms both. The increased complexity of life is not a process required by life itself, as neither is the development of a semantic palette that describes a dozen shades of white, green or blue. There are social strategies in the animal world that have not varied in millions of years, and that are quite efficient and low cost for the individual. Language was our gambit for survival, although it has become as charged with the absence of meaning as with meaning itself. However, it has become an end in itself

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when it had been but one of our tools for survival. Language does not reveal existence, it rather hides it behind a solid and impenetrable semantic wall (even, syntactic: it is not only meaning but also the way in which we order and bring coordinated sense to events which leads humans to believe they deal with the world when they are only dealing with symbols using artificial grammars, although they may be universal). When we ponder on the value of our lives and the actions which give them meaning, that is; ethics, is when the tension between the social, cultural and genetic becomes palpable. These levels justified the difficulty in the possibility of finding a universal ethics. Ethic stems from us, and inexorably leads to others. The ethical is inevitably plural. This situation is not a virtue or a flaw, but rather it sets us before a consequence of a biological structure that is, through evolution, oriented towards the social. The social constitutes a double process: it stems from the nature of each individual to become a complex entity that is based on the existence of each of its parts. It is an organized whole that is dependent on its basic elements. For this reason we look inward to project outward. Ethics is the observation of the sum of ethical actions. The ethical is something else. That a world exists outside of language is obvious: it is what allows us to make decisions on actions that are not described by words. Our world is a semi-formal system that briefly and precisely refers to emotional elements that guide our action. Such a world is not better than language, only prior. Better and worse are not evolutionary categories but conceptual categories. When faced with a situation for which we have no ideas, or metaphors, or a history to analyze, there are no heuristics for action. In any case, humanity has never been stumped at such a time. Rather, we have made use of our basic emotional constitution to solve possible future events. I dont mean to say that it is necessary to trade our rational heuristics for an emotional heuristics. There are no pre-set rules to determine which actions are good. It would be better to consider the existence of a limited rationality, one that is also situated in a material structure that is oriented towards a basic emotional interaction with the world. And this is so because our nature is geared towards sharing actions with other beings. The tools we developed later, such as language, reinforce this previous physical orientation. They exist to put us in contact with others, what or whoever they may

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be. I dont speak of this process of openness towards things and beings as a desirable value in the study of the ethical, but rather as a structural constraint. We need to communicate with other beings, and this process gives us personal benefits. We feel better when we share our pleasure, our pain, our longings and questions. This process of communicating basic emotions benefits both the sender and the receiver. It allows us to understand and to be understood, which leads to the social sharing of emotions. Ordinarily, human beings are used to performing this process through language. However, language is not the place where the emotional in the ethics resides, it is rather the place in which it is made explicit and ordered. In reality, the ethical stems from a fundamental personal realm: the emotions. In fact, emotions are the basic expression of our being, not in the linguistic realm which is more of a second skin in the individuals relation to the world. Because, for individual action, no one needs guides. Even if we had been born in an environment without humans, we would act in some determined and foreseeable way due to our physical structure. Maybe this behavior (evidently non-linguistic) would be something special, but it would be [think of the cases of wild children that have been reported throughout history]. And even without having lived and grown among humans, such a being would have shared its time with some living being (in all likelihood, a social being), and would surely have developed an individual activity influenced by such beings. Mimicking is part of our neuronal structure for social learning. It is true that, even if any of us were to end his or her days in complete solitude, any action undertaken in this context would still be structured or guided by the values received during our social years. Therefore, ethics is a social project, and implies the need to gather proposals for action in order to select those that are optimal. Nevertheless, the ethical lies in the immediacy of the subject. The subject is a being conscious of its own feeling in relation to the world. And to define the optimal is a task that leads to the definition of the strategies of our actions. There are no absolute values or situations that predetermine the course of actions, nor can we measure the measuring rod with itself, unless we define it in order to copy it. This has been the greatest error of the ethics of empathy: to define emotion;

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to ground ethical systems in emotional states (such as pleasure or pain, whatever these mean both quantitatively and qualitatively) or in a predisposition to the same. Why are there no ethical absolutes? Because the world has long ago done away with absolutes, with the exception of the laws of nature which also seem to vary under the pressure of the centuries and of the active minds of scientists (tell Aristotle, or Ptolemy, or Copernicus, or Newton, or that natural laws are unchanging) The world, without ceasing to be the same, is always another world. But to reduce the ethical to a naturalist normativity; that is, to a position on action or reflection on the same that is based on scientifically demonstrable realities, would imply a deterministic ethics, devoid of freedom. It should be said that freedom is absent from the natural world, unless we equate it with mere existence or being. In this case, freedom would be the mere unfolding of things and beings, the happening (which makes possible the horizon of possibility, of change). Am I forced by my genes and by the whole universe to act as I do? Or rather, am I an ethical being situated in a body and a space that undoubtedly condition my actions? This would mean an ethic that is situated and reified and eludes universal and immaterial stances. The evanescent, as well as social, nature of the human, in being transitory, demands a provisional ethics, although this provisionality should aspire to a synchronic universality. An ethic for the good of as many as we are able to feel the same with, and as many as we are able to make feel empathetically towards others. At this point, there is no need to appeal to altruism. It is enough to accept that human nature is social. Neither is it necessary to obsess over a supposed underlying cause to this social nature. The electric charge of an atom has no deep meaning, it is a fact that determines the behavior of the real world. Things are more or less permanent (in relation to the time of observation) manifestations that hold a structure in the world. The ultimate meaning of all the beings in the universe is not their concrete order but rather the structural constraints that make them possible. However, to say that the meaning of an atom is the strong nuclear force seems absurd: although this is the sole reason for the existence of an atom as such, force in itself is not a meaning, only a direction (among few possibilities) in the possible order. Strong nuclear force provides, rather, an explanation of the atoms behavior as a function of its physical structure. With the social nature of human beings the situation

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is the same, although at a higher level of systemic complexity: material nature behaving in a social manner. Because emotions are regulated and oriented towards the social (their meaning is orientation towards the other), my pain and happiness depend on the pain and happiness of other components of my social sphere, as long as I am open to the signals that others emit. These signals may be hidden behind a linguistic wall, or a wall of social patterns of behavior, although in any case they point to basic human emotion. The complexity in our lives consists in the difficulty of freeing oneself from such obstacles in order to see the fundamental at the same time that we hold on at the edge of the dangerous wall of words and social habits. Never do I consider human nature to be good, nor the ethical to lead towards the good. Neither is human nature bad. Its been a long time since such absolutes have abandoned the human horizon. Some moth-eaten thinkers still believe in a universal semantics and in supernatural entities, but their own beliefs cancel each other out, because absolutes elude meaning and corrupt action. Absolutes are, by definition, not only beyond experience but also beyond language. On the contrary, emotions stem from experience, which they illuminate in a feedback process. On this point, someone might argue: But is not true that there are emotional experiences with the supernatural? Well, in this case all we can accept is that a subject is having experiences with an object or being (physical or symbolic, a somewhat obscure distinction, and not lacking in meaning) that only he or she can feel. But our ethics is not an ethic of absolutes, but of emotions, however they are guided although, the less cultural and symbolic filters we use, the better. An esthetic feeling towards nature is only this, a feeling. An overpowering fear of a furious tempest in the midst of a mountain or in the open seas allows us to feel (personal) ridicule and (natural) grandiosity at the same time but, absent a conceptual vehicle, there are no linkages between such events and supranatural beings. But, what if a thousand million human beings claim to feel such a supranatural object or being? The situation is the same: our focus is on the emotions that regulate action, not in the supposed meaning or origin of the same. The amount of people that attribute supranatural meaning to their emotions is not a sign of the veracity of such meanings, but rather a manifestation of the strength of their emotions and the kind of openness to the world that such people have developed. Good and evil originated from an ethics of emotions are transitory points in the actions undertaken by societies of individuals, not by social groups. From my perspective, the ethical is excluded from valuations on good and evil, because it cannot be put under the babble of such a tirade of conditioning values. The ethical is

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neither good nor bad, it just is, and it determines the basis of our actions. Only when we have spoken of ethics can we proceed to evaluations of actions, because we will then have a language to do so. And this language is laden with cultural and historical values. From meaning, we will orient or limit ethical actions. This direction of action will be more harmful in as much as it sides with words rather than with emotions. In some situations, pain may need to be overcome with pain, not with the flight from the same. But this does not turn pain into an absolute. Every emotion seeks, in reality, for an equilibrium, because a continued experimentation of one of them is not possible. The difference among emotions offers us a measure of the existing. Absolute equilibrium ceases to exist when this system of regulation is not only dependent on humans but also on the interaction of the same with other beings and natural things, and are put under the active power of chance. Thus, there are diverse moments and levels of pleasure and pain. Classical ethical systems dug their own grave by chasing after absolutes. Absolutes cave when faced with extreme situations. I shall not kill, but if a person threatens 15 of my relatives, I would consider it a necessity to defend my 15 love ones against the extraneous person. The threat of Nazism gave way to the building of atomic weapons, solicited and developed by pacifist physicists who later repented. And almost all countries that are opposed to the death penalty and to murder are flexible with the need to lift such prohibitions in a case of defense of national security. This leads to a new language: civilian victims, collateral damage, fight for peace. But when peace is reestablished, the old absolutes area again demanded as necessary. This is a violation of language and its meanings. It tears apart ethics and turns it into its own caricature. Absolutes, if they exist, cannot be manipulated nor changed over time. They are, by definition, absolutes. However, the history of humanity teaches us that no absolute has stayed over time in a manner both efficient and constant. We need no longer fool ourselves about our actions, nor construct ethical models that are free choice buffet menus. We aspire to something more, which is in fact something less: a coherent ethic of emotions. Or rather, to satisfactorily live and experience the ethical. Our actions our the sum total of a number of genetically pre-established directives and of our autonomous capacity to guide our actions. The ethical is conditioned by our capacity for conscious reflection.

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This is the reason for this essay: to orient towards the ethical and allow the reader to discover the limitations of his or her own language, hir or her own world, in order to allow a more direct experiencing of his or her own being. This idea of being is in no way an absolute. We speak simply of existence. For example: when we eat, most of the time we are conditioned by the routine of a certain number of foods, structured in a certain way (an entre of , followed by) centered on aspects that have interested us (that beautiful and tempting product we saw at that store),,, although little of this has to do with hunger or a desire to each those products. Starting from a natural impulse (the organic need to ingest food) we have been carried away by social conditioning. But how many times are we capable of deciding whether we really want to eat or not? Or that there is too much food on the plate? Or that a certain product is not good for us because we know it doesnt sit well with us or that it affects our health by, for example, making us overweight? Words are the food of the soul. And, unknowingly, we have become dyspeptic. Words saturate the reality they construct. They lead us to semantic excess, to a lack of referents, because they dont respond to our hunger but to our boredom. That said, it is hard to go on a diet of that which helps us the most to live, mortgaging our feelings. Words inundate daily life, anesthetizing the primary meanings of the world. I abandon signs in order to have more room to feel myself [that self is not superior to my conscious and social self, it is only its basis. In fact, my self lies more in the reified sign than in mere feeling]. I try to realize when I am hungry and what is good for me. I listen to my emotions in order to react appropriately to them. On the other hand, the attempt to verbalize my intuitions or emotions constructs the meaning of my actions. Even for me: why did I do that?... I often wonder, as if I did not understand the motive for my own action. As if I was not me and had no control over my actions. This is false, one is always the cause of ones actions (even if one is being pressured, forced, drugged I have yet to find a technique to activate, from another body, the complex muscular mechanisms that any habitual action by a human being requires). The logic of action goes through an analysis of language, which I use to remember. Consider a strong experience had by a group of people. For example: two couples take out their three children to walk and two of them (one of each couple) come close to dying from falling of a cliff. Luckily, no one is harmed. Surely, once the anguish is overcome and the situation is resolved, the four adults will talk among themselves and explain themselves, as if they had not experienced the event, together and at the same

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time. Over and over, the four adults1 will verbalize the situation: I saw as they slipped, but I was too far away, I saw you suddenly jump at them, I threw myself at the smaller ones It is as if they wanted to untangle the secret of lived experience, as if it was a simulacrum that they have overcome but must dissect by reliving over and over again using the theatre of language. Language permits comprehension, but it creates a space between experience and thought, in order to bring perspective. Therefore, the understanding power of language is at the same time its limitation on the immediacy of experience and on the response action that ensues. The ethical is lived and realized, although it requires words in order to provide a solid foundation. It is an act of choosing strategies in order not to have to ask ourselves over and over again for a solution. In this way we mark, so to speak, an easy-to-remember path. Like a neural network, continual passage habit constitutes the source of learning in ethical action. It is a feeling that requires a direction and a perseverance to remain in it. However, the use of the word path, frequent in this essay, should not lead us to error. The ethical is not a path. This is a worn-out metaphor. A path to where? To within oneself? Is there a within and without oneself? A self that extends or retreats? It is true that, under a certain cognitive and physical perspective, humans project in our instruments: machines to move faster or lift enormous weights, machines to calculate or process huge quantities of information. We widen our range of action through such instruments. But the ethical is myself, a complete existence manifest in each action and feeling: it is not exactly a mental state (let us flee any manipulative mysticism), but rather a coupling of body and mind. A dialogue between the biological and the cultural, where the first has a great weight. It is experience without consciousness. Without consciousness of our self, although our minds have been molded from language, which conditions our experience. Although we do not find the meaning of our actions by talking about them, we should talk about them, evoke memories, make their nature explicit as much as possible, value

1 El texto original dice humanos, pero considero que adultos es ms claro.

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their development. These actions help to close the circle of meaning and point to the essential, which is beyond it. The meaning of the ethical is not to be understood, It is experimented in the absence of intellectual or corporal limits. Allowing oneself to be carried away by existence. Therefore, we are not before a knowledge that can be communicated, taught, or expressed, but rather before an experience that can be imitated. But the imitation of an action does not make us understand its meaning. The cause of ethical action is what we want to attain. And I have not said that which we want to understand, because there is nothing to understand about the ethical. This has been the greatest mistake of all rationalistic ethical systems, pretending to know the motives that guide actions. And ethics that stem from the divine suppose that we cannot understand the divine, although there is a meaning to action that something or someone superior can understand. Grave mistake, the ethical does not stem from meaning because it is prior to it. The meaning of action and of the ethical resides in the subjects physical constitution. Linguistic and cultural variations come afterwards, like an extra room added to the main house. Sometimes, understanding a past action requires the remembering of the moments feelings, something really complicated and somewhat useless. Memory is not only selective but also incomplete. Why did I yell before that threat? Surely to defend myself and warn the others. This justification can explain the motives of my scream, but does not place me again at the scene where I, without thinking, started to yell. Here reason details the process of my action, painting on a patina of coherence, but the truth is I yelled without thinking. The key to all this would lie in recognizing the underlying mechanisms that produced my scream, be they inherent to my human constitution or a product of my education. This is a crucial point in our discourse on ethics, because the explanation of the justification for our actions underlies the whole debate. But, what will we do if we discover the origin of our actions? Will we buckle under the naturalistic fallacy, if it turns out that many of them stem from our genetic constitution? And if we dont, with what motive will we justify our breaking the laws of genetic ACGT? Using supranatural criteria? The truth is that the ethical does not need justification. It is not a reasoning but a living. Lets return, then, to the starting point, but in an even worse version: the answer is beyond, not only language but beyond us, to dilute in each self.

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In this case, we would return to the world of private intuition, locked within each subject and therefore inscrutable. Because organized spirituality, that is, religion, does not come from individuality but is delivered from the sociality of the phenomenon, basing itself upon the supposed and privileged intuitions of a few (the prophets, the enlightened, the priests in contact with the divine, the shamans, the individual before his divinity). This doesnt work. Our ethic cannot belong to him or to a few; it must be an ethic of all. Paradoxically, when we refer to the totality, we dont do it as if we wished to impose private intuitions to the social whole, but rather to the process of discovering in each of the members of society the same personal motives that guide their activity. Our attempt requires the blooming of the universality of individuality. Each individual possesses an emotional structure that permits him or her to feel empathy toward the rest of human beings. The filters that condition this capacity also proceed from cultural, spiritual, legal traditions, etc. I see you cry and I get sad. Also, I wonder why you are sad, looking for that state that affects both you as an originator and me as an emotionally implied receptor. And if I dont do this, it is because of all kinds of cultural filters in my cultural context. Also we must remember that the ethical feeling is an emotion, which gives it a fundamental role in our thoughts and actions. The following objection could be raised: Arent emotions private? Well, its clear that only I can feel my emotions. But I know that others have emotions (because of the faces they make, their voice, their looks, the movement of their body and also because of the verbal information they transmit). I also know that, because of diverse neural mechanisms, I react empathically to joy and pain. The perception of emotions in others activates my own emotions. And, more importantly, emotions have an action-orienting function, which consists in the search for emotional equilibrium in a feedback system: an event triggers an emotion which requires an action in order to be completed and give way to a final state of equilibrium. Emotion is the natural thermostat that regulates human actions, It constitutes the first stage of contact with the world, and it is the more lasting, deep and genuine of all.

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When words, through the years, bury the immediacy of our emotive relation with the world, we forget the fundamental principles that regulate our lives, those through which we become open to the world for the first time. Objections could continue thus: But arent emotions a structural part of the brain of mammals, constituting therefore a genetic determination to action? Well, if such a line of logic were followed, then the genetic determinism with regards to the number of legs on human beings, two, would determine ethical action and would fall into determinism. The absurdity of both lines of reasoning is clear. Whats clear is that emotional functioning, just like motor functioning, condition the kinds of actions we will perform; they are necessary but not sufficient conditions for action. Emotions posit actions and require responses, but they are not definitive arguments. They are guides for action, which does not make them univocal directives. Hunger is not an absolute, it is a provisional state that demands resolution and orients action that is necessary for such a resolution. The same can be said of fear or surprise. Except in cases of beings with severe corporal anomalies, no one suffers pain or pleasure constantly. The difference puts us in difference states. Neither should we underestimate the social role of emotions or, rather, the need of individuals to socially share emotions: everyone knows its not the same to go alone or accompanied to the movie, the theatre, a concert, a nature walk or many other activities. We need to share our emotions, and the stronger and more intense they are, the greater the desire for communication. This happens all over the world, in any gender, economic standing or cultural group. We need to share our emotions socially. The motive for this search is to project/visualize/order/analyze what has happened. For example, on hearing the news of an accident or grave illness of a person, people near that person comment on the situation in different ways. They are expressing their concern for their friend, doubts about the solution, fear in response to insecurity about their own lives, the painful pleasure of knowing oneself to be far from the direct problem (under a certain sense of culpability) Discussing and commenting the case over and over, its so shocking, him being so young, I still cant believe it, individuals calm each other, sharing emotions and revisiting them continually until a certain equilibrium is reached: understanding, acceptance, resignation or even despair (because there is no perfect emotion). The important thing in this process is to reach an equilibrium of internal emotions, reinforcing social bonds at the same time. Sports, both practiced and observed, serve as social cohesive agents through collective emotions. In this lies their success. But this very collective nature of emotions is the result of an emotional endeavor. Individual emotions rise to the collective, and this collective, in turn, modifies their development.

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These processes of collective emotion can be directed by a few individuals with a clear intentionality, although they can also occur in an improvised manner. When two human groups meet in one place facing opposite directions (say, at a pedestrian crossing across a wide avenue), they are able to organize themselves and reach their destinations without having to follow pre-set and controlled rules. In our social lives, we very often find a problem that we all wish to plow through in order to put behind us. But the existence of varied non-coordinated limiting norms on how to solve the problem prevents success. Recognizing that human beings orient ourselves under emotive premises would make the solution easier. But the problem persist when these premises remain hidden as motives for action. We seek to love and to be loved, not to suffer and for those we love not to suffer. If we all oriented our actions from this perspective, a universal ethic of emotions would be possible. Every human being in the world is connected in some way to every other human being. Separations are due to cultural motives, as well as geographic. But to hold that there are natural barriers that prevent the existence of a global world is absurd. A critical reader may be thinking by now: well, all this seems interesting, but we still dont have a definition of emotion, which is true and disheartening because although it is necessary to have a definition for this substratum of the ethical, at the same time a definition is not of any great use. For example, if someone were to shout at us: Define respiration!, our answer would be what purpose would that serve?. Would that help to clarify the breathing nature of a human being, the meaning of respiration? (because, does breathing have a profound meaning? Is it not, rather, a physiological act?). A definition would help us to circumscribe the situations in which we breathe, all while we are alive (in spite of a few momentary pauses), but this would not provide a deep meaning to respiration, nor a kind of definitive meaning. We can explain the mechanism, but the motive for which a mechanism works is not found in the mechanism itself. Breathing, like emoting, is an ongoing process that adapts to the demands of an environment. It is an inextricable part of our being. It is an inherent action in existence, without a meaning that is to be uncovered. Someone could criticize me in this way: this sounds interesting, but we can describe, in neurophysiologic terms, certain inner states that we habitually call emotions. And Id say, youre right, but Id also say it to whoever claimed that the music in a Mozart symphony lied in the sound waves. Like music, emotion is composed of physical

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elements held together by conceptual schemes and habits of interaction with information signals. Besides, the description of function does not answer the question on meaning (from language). If this were so, the meaning of music would lie in the satisfaction of a cultural demand adapted to human cognitive and auditory constraints. This is true, but it does not capture the emotion that listening to such a pattern of sounds produces. Nor does it explain artistic paradigm shifts. The meaning of the ethical goes beyond the bodily, and is, at the same time, impossible without the body. At the same time, ethics has a certain autonomy over the ethical. The individual and the collective are conditioned by their bodily structures, although they are not forced by them, which permits a reflection upon our actions. The material is the basis upon which the autonomy of action is developed. This autonomy is under certain constraining conditions. These conditions relate to language, culture or environmental constraints. Action, therefore, is neither a necessary nor random consequence of our emotional and rational (or rather arguable) mental processes. It is an equilibrium between the rational and the emotional which I am attempting to shift towards the latter. In some way, language accompanies the body satisfying the needs of the same, be they real or not. By real I mean sincere, and by sincere I mean acting in accordance to our emotions. There is no semantic loop here, no question-begging, because there is a point in the process in which we exit language and go to matter itself; lived, felt matter. The spiders web of language does not make it impossible to reach the ethical. The philosophy of linguistic signs has been abandoned after the multiple failures it has produced in the field of the ethical. The loop of meaning is dissolved in the corporal. The word is not the place of the ethical, nor of ethical action. We can explain an emotion, but that is not the same as feeling it. But if the ethical points towards the emotional, and the emotional goes beyond basic functionality (dying for a friend/relative/son is too costly a strategy for the individual although this can be explained by statistics and genetics it is an often intuitive act that knows no reasons), where, then, does the meaning of the emotional reside?

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My only answer is the world is this way. There is no meaning beyond acknowledging the nature of this world, and of us in this world. There is no ultimate meaning because there is no question prior to existence. Paradoxically, meaning requires a previous meaning in order to be understood. Meaning only fits in with a prior matrix of meanings, because a mold determines, rather than receives, the final shape of an object. Therefore, language is understood and explained from language. It is its own horizon and limit. In this context, meaning means abandoning the layers that clutter our spontaneity until we arrive at the basic cause of our actions, the emotional. But to attribute a meaning to the emotional (saying, the meaning of emotions is such and such) would imply putting the heavy load of language on our backs again. We are upon a deep indeterminacy in the search for deep meaning: language leads us to an inner ground within ourselves: once we are there, we must abandon meaning in order to hold it. When we reach the bottom of the matter, meaning is diluted in experience. There is no understanding of the ethical, but rather lived experience of it. It is in this way that I do not posit a definition but rather attempt to make the emotion rise within you. But we have yet to define emotion. This could serve: an organic, electrochemical signal that translates into a series of complex physiological reactions that go from the inner to the outer (and also from the outer to the inner). The signal can come from either the individuals perceptive or cognitive environment. This definition is clearly unsatisfactory from a formal perspective, although, again, it is unnecessary from a practical standpoint: we already know what an emotion is. I would even state the following, which is important: emotion exists in us before conscious knowledge of the same. It is a prior stage of connection with the world that escapes the cognitive, that is, the epistemic. When we are born, we act in an automatic manner (crying) in order to attract, through emotion, the attention of our parents. No one taught us to cry when we were cold or hot, hungry or unwell, but this was the first language with which we entered the meaning of the human. Our first language was and is emotional, after which language settled in with time. Emotions are the universal human grammar.

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The foundations of activity cannot, therefore, be a corollary to reason when reason believes itself in need of motives for action. Returning to the problem of definition, let us recall the case of Darwin. He offered a theory of evolution without having absolute evidence, nor even a coherent explanation of genetic evolutionary mechanisms, which would only come with Mendel. The evidence shown by historic human action point to the emotional nature of their activities. The question of to what cultural or genetic parts we owe the range of our emotions is at another level of analysis. Evidence places emotion at a fundamental level of human behavior and reasoning, although we are not technically capable of explaining emotions functioning. I am still annoyed that I dont have a definition, because almost all of me lives in language. The problem with any empirical definition is that it turns out to be very transitory and obsolete, because it depends on the exactitude and precision in the gauging of phenomena. I do not abandon the attempt, although I postpone the answer. But the path of the ethical does not stop waiting for an answer. Even when erring, action is produced incessantly. In fact, the most important function of emotions is to allow us to make decisions without having sufficient information. Most of the time we make decide on a course of action with limited, imprecise or even false information. We only need to look back at our personal lives to realize this. The dilemmas of ten years ago are nothing in the present. Although we dont have an exact definition, the truth is that each of us can recognize his or her emotions and the decisive role they have in our daily activity. In spite of language, and from language, the ethical goes on. Words, even the most precise words, do not explain the meaning of actions. The ostensive exemplification of their supposed meaning, although useful, does not account for all the subtle shades of meaning. Emotions have no meaning. They simply exist, and interact between themselves (even a single emotion in an individual capable of working out his affective relationship to other objects).

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The process of incitation and crystallization of emotive actions does not constitute its meaning. To imitate an action does not imply performing an ethical act. To imitate efficiently, we must do without knowing about this act in order to join in because of an emotive affinity. To answer feeling from feeling. To flow in order not to crack and be different from ourselves. There is nothing to understand in emotions, only something to be lived. The more we argue and reason, the more we stray from the emotional base. Is there an ethical perspective of action?, you may ask. This would be a sign of confusion: basic emotions do not proceed from intellectual processes. Rather, they are produced from an internal predisposition to react to emotively interpretable signals. This separates us from meaning without bringing us closer to ethical actions. With this I do not mean to say that the meaning of the ethical, whatever it is, is unimportant. On the contrary. Rather, it is part of a linguistic plane that does not univocally constitute the reason for action. The truth is we live socially in language with its fleeting meanings. The mere possibility of creating ethical meanings is given by the diversity of linguistic orientation adopted by individual emotions. The most effective publicity appeals to our emotions (its pretty, exciting, riveting) rather than our rationality. Or, more exactly, it appeals to the emotional factors in our rationality. Advertisers, as well as politicians (hardly a separable combination) have long ago understood this process. At the social level, emotions are useful when they can be correctly expressed and interpreted, so that they provoke an empathic reaction between the individuals sharing the emotions. At the same time, emotions are a thermostat for individual action. For example: our senses receive signals that the brain automatically interprets as danger, which activates the emotion of fear and alertness, which will lead us to an activity which should lead in turn to the avoidance of danger and the return to the emotional starting point.

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From this point of view, emotions are something private oriented towards external environments, including, for humans, the social environment. We can summarize emotions as internal sates that react to external stimuli (movement, words) and that, in turn, provoke actions that lead to new internal emotional states. The limit of action is given by the threshold of activation/neutralization of different types of emotions. Therefore, emotions are private, although oriented towards the plural. And they constitute a communicative and informational step prior to language. Now we face another problem, that of useful emotions in useful environments for a social ethics. Let us proceed. Is a mystical state an emotional state? Yes. But can it be shared? No. Thus, the emotional in the ethic is restricted to the socially emotive, or put another way, to the emotions that most human beings living in society can share. The truly universal in ethics are the emotions that provoke it and are caused by it. There is a human emotional substrate that is etched in our genes by evolution. This is what motivates us and gives action meaning, a meaning prior to language. Emotions are the cradle of humanity, the place in which we are, the goal towards which we strive. Emotions are the teleological principle of living beings, interwoven in the design of their bodies (and, later, their minds, which are in turn extended under techno-science). We are rewarded by our bodies when we react coherently to emotions: if my bladder hurts I go to the bathroom; if something hurts unexpectedly I become alarmed and try to stop the pain. Ethics is a map for desirable actions (for what? To be happy or to avoid pain? This is another problem, although to basic emotions can be seen in it: pleasure and pain!). The finality of emotions is in the realm of the existential and immediate. Only through language do emotions point to long term preferences and strategies (as a result of the use of language in development). Ethic is a map we know but cannot reproduce. It is like when we are told to go someplace we know and we go there without thinking too much about the way we reach our destination. If we had been told imagine the road to the destination and tell me how to get there, this would imply that whoever was asking imagines we have a clear map of the way to the destination, something like an inner movie that we mentally visualize in order to reach the destination. But the truth is we dont remember every corner, every turn, every small sample of the environment that we use for guidance. We can get there, and we remember a few indications. With practice, we can clearly indicate the way, as if we had a detailed map before our eyes.

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Ethics turns out to be a map of action, that we intuit because of its practical and personal necessity (modeled by genes and education), a map of which an exact delimitation eludes us. At least we know that it is a path, an acting, a practice. And that it refers to something that underlies all action: emotion. Our lives and actions are oriented by emotions, more than reasons. And this does not, in principle, imply that we are less rational. It just posits a wider idea of rationality. We only need to read a classic literary text, eastern or western, from the last three thousand years to realize this. Or we only need to open any world newspaper and analyze its contents. When I am in a foreign country, and sometimes distance becomes important, I open the local newspaper and try to understand what is going on. Regardless of language or alphabet, the typography, design, pictures, photographs and drawings appeal to a basic emotional foundation: this is important!, this is cause for indignation, trouble, thats the way things are This is what newspapers tell us. The appeal, through shared symbolic codes, to our emotions. True, they use codes, but beyond conventions there s a language behind language, a tacit system of communication that appeals directly to emotions. It is also clear that we have learnt, through culture, to attribute meaning to those signs. It is not necessary to know the language to fall in love with a foreign person. The language we seek in another human being is that of the emotions he or she produces, not so much that of the connection between strictly delineated mental states, which is what oral or written language permits. Of course, explicit linguistic mental states (as well as beliefs, and character) are part of the factors for selecting a mate. But it is also true that I can paternally love a child of another culture, for example an orphan, in such a way that he or she can understand my basic emotions, through different actions that show them: care, attention, tone of voice, kind physical contact This creature will understand my emotions, and the underlying intentions of projecting love. However, it could be argued: but if this child is hungry and does not know how to tell you, although he may give clues to what is happening, isnt it true that you will not understand? Well, this is what has happened to humans, since time immemorial, with their own children. Through crying and other expressions of unease, even with their morphologically special traits, babies provoke in us a number of emotions that imply a compulsive tracking of their vital needs: sleep, food, movement, hygiene and health.

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At least one of two people implied in the emotional dialogue understands the basic meaning of what is expressed and reacts accordingly (if the end is the reestablishment of an emotional equilibrium). Let us state again that emotions are something genuine for each individual, and that they evolve socially, within contexts of freedom or repression of their use and expression. But we all carry within ourselves a fundamental emotive realm. The fundamental elements of every human being are inscribed before verbal language. First we feel, later we understand. Even when we are jittery or nervous with regards to an event that cannot be predicted or understood, this is an emotion that prepares us for a future reaction. Or that pushes to seek it. Emotions are the stuff that human actions are made on. And if this is the foundation, this is where we should go for a basic ethics. This book does not seek to produce the ethical discourse, because human beings do not reason in such a way as the norms of optimal logic would dictate for optimal reasoning. Of all human activities, ethics is surely the least logical of all, or, if it is logical, it has its own logic, or several logics of its own, that achieve a more complete reasoning than what is accomplished in other realms. And this is so because ethics does not refer to presumably determinable and formalizable cultural entities but to actions grounded on emotive states. Therefore, it refers to physiological states, considered in their actual realization. The ethical only exists in the present. It can be conditioned and condition the future of ethical action, but it pertains to the eternally present. A continuous and felt present, proper to each individual that experiments it. A similar phenomenon that each individual interprets in a personal way. This is why an absolute and eternal ethics is intrinsically impossible. Ethics lives and dies in each of us, and, at the same time, constitutes the flux that transcends the individual, because it is realized as a symbiosis between individuals. Its like the weather: each finite element determines the weather and it is, in turn, conditioned by it, yielding a constant flux of interaction.

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The ethical exists only in the individual, but yet transcends the individual. When we reach the bottom of the matter, we see that the ethical really refers to something previous to language and its logic. It precedes text. We must recognize that human beings tend to escape from univocal meaning and from coherence. And, we fail to agree on what it is to reason and on the meaning of the words implied in that process. For this reason, semantic interpretative multiplicity leads to an open and mutating meaning, so to speak, of the ethical. The intrinsically social character of language allows, at the same time, that whoever is reading these words understands my thoughts, or maybe nothing. Understanding demands a predisposition towards the text. Each word is interlinked in a sea of concrete meanings that can be understood in a given moment. I can say nothing other than I see it in this way. And this does not imply an ethical solipsism. The contrary would be self-deceit. The historical load of each word limits that which it says to us and hides what it once was. To claim a single meaning for the ethical is as absurd as criticizing a friend for doing something as an adult that, as a child, he said he would never do. This person is not that person, although (to himself) he is still the same person. Only the present of the subject exists, the present of meaning and of ethics. Personal ethnicity, beyond the emotions that constitute it, is a flowing within the change of living societies. To go beyond is to get nostalgic over meanings that we never knew. The semantic echoes of the past are a ruse of philosophers obsessed with the immutability of words. As if words lived apart from us, in their eternal meanings. For this same reason, the ethical is temporal. That which is reiterative, which makes awkward the feeling of permanence, that is what we seek. The meaning of the ethical. The base upon which to build the ethical. Does this imply an abdication of the universal and the rational in the ethical? Well, we should start by defining rational, universal and ethical as well as the ways in which these elements are interrelated.

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This process implies a position within the linguistic. But the ethical is outside the linguistic. There is a world outside of language. Otherwise, we could not understand it. We build order from the infinite horizon of what surrounds us. We take on meaning with things as a starting point, not meaning. Its like trying to catch a gas with a fishing net. Language can only catch the fish that its net permits. Even if we made it very small, using nanotechnology, there is always room for escape, because empty spaces are essential to what a net is. The sayable clashes with the unsayable, the unsayable with the demonstrable. However, these limits offer a true measure of the human being. The ethical and current emotional states orient action. To proceed otherwise is to fall in the spiders web of language, drawing infinite concentric circles on the possible meanings of our ethical terms. When we search for absolute meaning for a word, the semantic web to which this word refers dissolves the possibility of reaching an end point. Each word refers to another, which every community uses in its own way, with new subjects coming in continually, continuing this dynamic process. Language itself points to its own meaning and to that of the world that surrounds it, but it also raises a wall between language and world. We find the meaning of language outside of it. This is not a linguistic meaning but rather an existential one. Things are. My emotions are the light which allows the meaning of actions to emerge, This meaning is intuited, developed only in the meaning of action. The universality of the ethical cannot lie in language and its uses, because then its meaning is trapped within impermeable walls. Where, then, does the ethical reside? I am in language, so I am not sure where to look for the ethical. Well, to move ahead: I feel the ethical in me. The origins of this feeling differ in their nature: they can be education, tradition, culture, genes

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And the act of feeling the ethical cannot be considered a conscious perception. It can be, but it is not necessary. Am I therefore referring to a supernatural or ideal realm? No; considering the existence of a supernatural space is only achievable from the natural world which we share under certain conditions. I do not know what another individual of my species can feel, imagine or even see. I suppose, from multiple clues (some linguistic, but also from body language or from external signs such as clothing), that that person feels and experiences things in a similar manner to myself. But I cannot share exactly, say, his feeling of tenderness towards a particular baby. Our ethical concepts refer to intangibles that we believe to be easily demonstrable. The notion of the good is a big one. To agree on the meaning of this term is to agree on usage, and because the uses of this term gain their definitive meaning in accordance with many other terms in the usage of a particular group of people, it is a useless task to attempt to distill, like frustrated alchemists, the essence of the good from its brute linguistic forms. We can only do this if we are platonic. In this case, we have to demonstrate this pure, absolute and universal meaning relative to ethics. And to fall into the naturalistic fallacy. . Even in this case we will not convince anyone that does not want to be convinced. We come back to the starting point: the meaning of the ethical stems from the use of the same. The fundamental problem is that transitory uses are considered universal imperatives. The ethical, expressed under signs of language, refers to emotional states.

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0. A taxonomy of emotions The role of emotions in nature has been oriented by evolution towards a better chance of survival for individuals. We could speak at a basic hedonistic level: I like this, or I dont like this which refers to the notions of pleasure (and the desire to perpetuate it) and pain (and the fear of feeling it again). Beyond these hedonistic proto-states, we have five basic emotions: fear, anger, happiness, shame and surprise. These emotions are associated with actions related to biological or social actions. We can wonder whether emotions are really five, or seven, nine, or fourteen. This depends on our language and on the available level of precision. At bottom, the quantification of the ethical is something trivial and even laughable. These basic emotions help us to detect relevant information in our environment and predispose us to a response action, a predisposition which will be satisfied once an equilibrium is reached, which returns us to a (supposedly neutral) state. Later, emotions would also help us to be better adapted to our environment, to social regulation, to motivation and learning, to complex strategic processes that is to say, to be competent beings, and flexible enough to react to complex situations in our environment. This implies that emotions are the basis for human action, not language, which prompts us to abandon a nominalistic ethics and embrace an emotional ethics. It is much more basic, but at the same time, truly universal. Of course, in a large group of individuals, such as the human race, composed of thousands of millions of subjects, there are cases of atypical processing of emotions, for example in autism. Although we cannot speak of a similar emotive realm in the manifestations of autistic people, the basic pulse of their actions would remit to emotions. This forces us to consider a social ethic of emotions that considers the broad lines of ethical manifestations in our species, although at bottom this ethic is an ethic of individuals in society. And whoever doesnt want to share these critical thoughts will not be able to find any logic to this text. This would not be due to a weakness in reasoning, but rather to the fact that such a person would be in a different dialectical space. Only people in linguistic realms that are based on similar emotional states can share information efficiently.

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Besides, my arguments do not appeal solely to linguistically expressible reasons, but also seek to produce emotions in the reader. This is not a manipulation of the ethical, but rather an affirmation of its emotional nature.

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1. Feelings, emotions, ideas, words, thoughts, actions Text constitutes the support for our expressable ideas, and at the same time points towards our inexpressible ideas. Whatever the medium (paper, papyrus, vellum, electronic, wood) or the format (be it sequential like in most of humanitys history, or hypertextual and non-sequential), words are our meeting place. But is this completely true? Do we not get more comfort from the embrace of our loved ones than from their words? What do we think of when we remember our childhood? Surely, human contact, and the feeling of experiencing different things for the first time We remember emotional states towards past events. Even the words that echo in our childhood memories are full of emotions, in that they are more a proxy for lived experiences, rather than reasoned thoughts. Emotion is the true vehicle that supports the words that heal us. Its not the words in themselves, but who, how, when and where they are spoken; and sometimes, the mere fact that they are spoken. Meaning is a sum of values, both syntactic-semantic and emotional. We crystallize our thoughts in words that we think could and should outlast us, as if they were bearers of absolute truths, valid in any age and situation. In some way, we are slaves of our tools, words. Its also true that without them we are not really social beings, nor culturally evolved beings. For these reasons the need for language for our realization and the attestation of its limits in the contention of the meanings implied in the same the ethical question requires a reflection on ethical language itself. However, ethics is manifest in two ways: the social, and therefore communicable, and the personal, a personal attitude or experience, that, in some way, may be verbalized. The ethics goes from the individual and incommunicable to the communal. Because of this dichotomy (which in its subtleties reaches a myriad of confrontations and oppositions that go beyond the initial dual presentation of the problem) a transcendent ethic that springs from the unity of ethical feeling is impossible. Under a religious perspective, individual ethical feeling is induced by external conditioning. Gods, saints, prophets or spirits appear in different ways in every culture, because different patterns of behavior are expected of them. Personal ethical religious experience reiterates fixed patterns that have been introduced in a subject through education. Besides, religious systems are closed universes that take information from their worlds (religious texts, images, metaphors) to interpret everyday situations exegetically.

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And whats worse, these systems only receive the information that their closed models are capable of processing. Their world is the world of their restricted language. When they are incapable of explaining a phenomenon that is not contemplated in their language, the web of meanings in these closed worlds becomes fragmented. But its hard for this to happen if one has available explanations for any fact. If all can be explained at all times, then nothing can be really explained. The limit of knowledge is the measure of its worth. At the same time, personal ethical experience is the sum of many influences in the social environment. But such individualities are not grounded in a supposed absolute experience of the ethical that precludes debate. One cannot start from the absolute and build a wide ethics (it will never be universal, because individuals will continue to defend absolute positions, both religious and civil). Therefore, the individual experience of the ethical is hardly transferable and communicable, although an attempt is necessary. An individual experience based on the supernatural is beyond the diffuse boundaries of the communicable. Its as if we tried to define the world through the real experience of a schizophrenic person. This world would be real, but not transposable to the rest of experiences of most individuals in a society. Call it defect, anomaly or particular world, but the world of such a person will hardly be analogously experienceable by the rest of human beings. The supernatural in ethics should be contemplated as a personal characteristic of each individual that, because it is strictly personal, does not reach universality. But hunger, pain, pleasure,, fear, cold, for example, are universal emotions, upon which ethics can develop a universality that links all human beings. But even now, the differences in the feeling and boundaries of pleasure, pain, cold, elude an absolute definition. We dont aspire to absolutes, but to a minimal recognition of the other. If we think this through slowly, the gradual recognition of animal rights has to do with realizing they supposedly have emotional states, similar in many ways to our own. And also, it has to do with our capacity to establish empathic relations with them, or to project our emotions on them. Thus, we base our ethic in the emotional substrate that joins several living beings as a species. It is the only horizon for the ethically visible (for an external behaviorist, it

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would be so only on the basis of behavioral evidence that would seem to imply a certain confused inner functioning). At this point, we consider the supernatural as something completely personal that can be externally codified by social agents in a culture. The realm of the aesthetic also refers to a personal experience that seems to be irrational, although culturally conditioned. For example: the perception of music as something pleasant refers to deep cognitive criteria (intensity, timbre, rhythm) but also to criteria of cultural habit: an Elvis Presley ballad would be inscrutable to a medieval monk who sang monodically at certain harmonic intervals But, at the end of the day, musical experience seems to transcend the merely visible. And no one would think of saying: Well, let us create an ethic from the aesthetical. Mahlers fourth symphony or the latest Marilyn Manson CD can give us intense emotions but no one honest would try to create an ethic from such intangibles, although the emotions thus produced could surely guide a person that has them towards a concrete direction of activity. We need a reified ethic. It would be best to say: until now it has been this way, although we dont want to admit it. And the lack of perspective has allowed a few to decide on the emotions of many. The value of art lies in the creation of these spaces of emotional reflection that transcend the rational, although they appeal to emotive elements that are present in rational processes. Therefore, both art and the religious-spiritual can be taken into account in the development of a universal ethic, as stimulators of universal emotions. But only that. Neither has a superior standing to the emotions they produce. No activity that activates emotions is not superior to the emotions themselves, because although it activates them, it is also conditioned by them. Emotion is the egg of other eggs. Omni vivum ex ovo. Actions are a response to impulses generated by emotions. Only a state of lack of emotion is beyond all action and resides in pure experience. But this is a (mystical) state that only few human beings have reached. Or so we may infer from their words about the realm in which words have no meaning. This is a non-ethical state, an experience without experience. The boundary between this state and the ethical state in which the subject is momentarily isolated from linguistic and cultural barriers is as fine as it is inscrutable. But in the latter state, emotion flows freely. There is not a desire to be liberated from this basic link to the world. We do not aspire to cease feeling, but to fully feel the world.

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An ethic of emotions is an ethic where the human subject is a universe in itself, open to other, similar, universes. A maximally applicable ethics must reduce its transcendent aspects to its minimal expression, that is, to the individual. It must take as a starting point the caducity of its concepts , within a social management of the meanings of language. Under this perspective there are no privileged subjects in the construction of the meaning of the ethical. If we were to deeply analyze the evolution of ethical codes, we would find that they were all redacted by small groups of individuals that, in theory, represented the community. Each subject may attribute meanings to the words in our language, which may end up being partially or totally shared by others, if said words are a part of the language. The history of ethics is linked to laws, codes and patterns proper to each civilization. We have transitioned from a state in which privileged individuals (shamans, priests, divine kings, prophets) controlled values, to a state in which undifferentiated society validates values. This has been possible thanks to the communicative spaces afforded by information technologies, as well as by the general will produced by the social management of knowledge. Aesthetic and strictly individual functions of language should be put outside the ethical. They are not a part of the social management of the ethical. They are unshared metaphors that, therefore, cannot be socially felt or expressed. The aesthetical in itself cannot be the ethical. However, the ethical has an unavoidable aesthetical dimension. That which is not captured by words cannot be openly shared. However, the aesthetical permits the introduction of new meanings, and produce new thoughts that open up possibilities of new meanings for old terms, and help define new terms.

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The emotional substrate

Under the premise of an individual ethic of emotions (avoid pain, seek pleasure as historically recognized maxims in both the east and the west), the exposition of the ethical is radically transformed. Being a parent has the meaning that the historically consensual use of that expression reveals. There is no absolute transhistoric meaning. And an ethic of emotions must not make us fall into a fallaciously naturalistic ethic. The relations between facts/things and our language are not univocal, definite or universal. They are, rather, agreements between the members of a human community. Words are pebbles of thought. They seem the same but their meanings are always different, worn away by water and wind. Like a human being: throughout our lives we have the feeling of being something, stable and continuous, but we are nothing but the sum of thousands of experiences that transform us at every moment. We always feel whole, and we interact with others in accordance to the state we live in. But we dont recognize ourselves in the child, adolescent our youngster we once were. It is like an echo, the image of someone else. Now, today, we are, and what we were seems incomplete. Words feed upon these emotions that evolve over time. But let us return to our unfinished example: being a parent. The evolution of the concept of paternity can be analyzed by looking at the history of adoption. In classical roman society, the status of pater familias was gained not only by blood ties but also by choice. For example, someone could choose any man as a son, and with this gesture, the man would become part of the biological family and would gain a new last name. If the man had a wife and children, they automatically became part of the new family. The role of the father consisted of ensuring the survival and well being of the family members. A pater in the roman sense is not what we had in the western world until recently. Because what does someone have to do to be considered a father? What requisites must someone fulfill to be called that? A basic and traditional aspect is to be the progenitor of the child. But having offspring is more complex nowadays. Can being the father be reduced to transmitting 50% of the genetic code? Looking at the implicit values related to paternity in many cultures, this is not so. And today this is not even a necessary condition. Let us return to the roman pater. The term has not been made obsolete, because when it was operative it already referred to moral and legal codes decided by various members of a society. And, at bottom, it refers to emotional states, reified in personal actions such as protection, care, education or love (concepts that are all subject to transformation).

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Let us return to the ethic of emotion. The most important words refer to basic emotional states. In this case, is it enough to qualify as a parent that someone else considers you to be his or her parent? If we discard the direct relations of language with legal codes, this is so. In this case, I could say, under certain circumstances, that the giver of half of my genes is my parent, but also Aristotle, the various legal couples of my mother or a cat that lives with me. We are thus upon a conceptual undecidable: if anything can mean anything then nothing makes sense. From another point of view: the reason of meaning is founded on its impermanence, as well as the emotional bonds we establish between the world and its provisional meaning. But the provisionality of meaning does not preclude its having a specific value. Although I know that the meanings of the words I use are fleeting, they still have meaning to me. They have the meaning that makes them useful in my life. To live in language is to accept this role, as If we were actors playing a part; their words are real within the context in which they are used, although the words and plays are transitory and produce a unique space of fictive reflection. At bottom, all words appeal to the feelings that guide actions. The intentionality of language is bathed in the emotional substratum, because without it action has no direction, be it theoretical or executional. To think something implies a process of selection, limiting, interest for a subject, will to resolve a doubt Without emotions, thought would be nothing more than the dead center of the sayable. Well, someone could argue, a computer can perform complex calculations through Artificial Intelligence (artificial neural networks, genetic algorithms). True, but these machines have not written the language with which they calculate, nor have they selected the problems they analyze (yet). To truly exist in the world and to interact, they need to interact affectively with the world, orient their physical structure towards it and react to the same. Machines are externally organized matter, without an autonomous capacity for reproduction (not even taking advantage of external tools, such as viruses), nor a capacity for experience of the world. Their bodies do not guide their actions, their programs do. Once again, the mind-body dichotomy is not solved without the link of the emotional. But even recognizing emotions, we human beings have a problem, order, the need to confine reality into simple categories that help us to simplify the world. We ground collective meanings in desires, fears and hopes under the omnipresent roof of uncertainty.

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In some way, meaning is an order. Whats interesting is finding the emotive grounding of meaning and the fleetingness of order. But this scares us. Where will this end? someone may scream, then a hetero-homo-bisexual polygamy is also possible! A child could have 28 fathers and perhaps no mother!. True, there is such a possibility. As far as the possibilities of future societies, that is one of them. The order of things can be articulated from meanings different than those in existence. Whats important is to understand the emotional nature of such meanings, and to simplify the amount of concepts necessary for life. People who would scream before the possibility of different orders feel the same way as a IX century Benedictine monk would react towards lay marriages, domestic partnerships, divorces, surrogate mothers, international adoption, ecumenism or radical atheism. The monk would understand nothing, because the web of meanings in his language has faded under a new social and emotive environment. Not only does our monk live in a different paradigm, he lives in a different language. For the same reason, love between the members of a classical heterosexual couple did not exist in the IX century in the way it does today. It was a completely different kind of relationship. There was not an equality of conditions, respect or freedom such as we understand today. This leads us to ask, once again, about the grounding of ethical meaning. There is nothing more universal in human beings than their emotions. They are the cornerstone upon which we ground our social and individual behavior, and even our rational essence. Emotion is prior to the golden rule, do unto others as you would have them do unto you (also its negative version do not do unto others). The rule follows the feeling of fraternity that emerges among individuals in a society, or in the basic relations of a few individuals. Human society took thousands of years to perform legal pacts, which didnt prevent its organization for the millions of years before it had an oral and written culture. The basis of such an organization was emotion: attachment to the mother, fidelity towards the group, care and defense of offspring We felt we should act, and the proto-social and genetic management of such feelings created the social forms that would later evolve legally under a more developed culture that officialized its ideas with stable words. Back to the golden rule: the codified feeling becomes a theoretical proposition that, at such abstract level, is easily criticized. If I am bipolar, I may desire for others the confused mental states I am suffering. If I am into bondage I can claim that pain should be universally used to arrive at pleasure. And the list of possibilities could grow at an absurd and alarming rate. Lets not believe ourselves to be semantic nouveau riches with a right to opine on anything at any time. There is no conceptual leap between certain emotional states and

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universal statements; there is nothing. At most, each emotion plays the role of guide in a set of mazes that end in different ways. Good will does not count. This is presupposing an emotional state that is more vague than the rest. Why waste time that way? The words we build gain their full meaning when they are used. Supposing or defining the meaning to a word does imply that it will be used that way. A set of language users can share the meaning of a word without putting that meaning into practice (which is fundamental in the ethical). The problem is that we speak too much about the ethical. The great spiritual guides of humanity made an impact because of their behavior and the coherence of their actions. Their ethics was an everyday living rather than a set of abstract rules on which to argue. To understand implied action. Socrates said that whoever knows the good cannot help but follow it. But this knowing is not an intellectual process, nor is the good an absolute beyond time and space: pleasure underlies all action, even the impulse that pushes us to avoid a greater pain, as well as the expression of pain, which affords us empathy. When I say charity I may mean a lot of things. But when I say I am doing a work of charity, as I do it, this act informs us of the meaning of the words, at least as far as whoever is saying the words is concerned. The word will be effective when multiple users of it react in similar ways before charity work. But that does not give us the right to say that we have defined charity in an absolute manner. What we have done is identify its use among a group of individuals. If meaning is identified with usage, then the horizon of the explicable has been conquered already in a definite manner, which is not the case. Because there is still the incapacity of defining what I feel, in that what I feel is an orienting impulse of my ethical activity. What is the cause of this? The syntax and semantics of (ethical) action is prior to linguistics. Because of obvious evolutionary reasons. Action existed before we had a meaning for it. This is the reason for the limits of language in capturing our material essence: language was a latter guest, when the being of things was already there. Ethics is a praxis, not a will to praxis. Ethical rules are maps of behaviors and emotional attitudes, but they do not constitute ethics. Maps are outside of doing. They are nothing but thinking. And each ethical act is individual, not universal. We therefore need to thinking what ethics is.

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2. The historical flux of the meanings of language Language is stuck to our thoughts. We lack a distance from which to observe it. If we want to see a house, it makes no sense to think that if we study each brick we will better understand its form. But we cannot step outside to take a look, because language is the space from which we inhabit the world of meaning. We dont have a garden from which to look at the house, either. The garden is part of the perimeter of the house. We dont have a space of meaning outside of language. The perception and understanding of a picture or a melody is conditioned by cognitive and cultural factors. There are no pure perceptions prior to language. All we have is the emotional substrate which guides our lives: maximization of pleasure, at the risk of falling spiraling downwards in our actions, for example, eating until we get sick from morbid obesity. The only available option at this dead end of the ethical refers to the history of words. It is, though, a false history, because words refer to each other depending on the different groups of people that use them, and past groups are no longer here to explain to us their usage. And even if they were here, we would not understand them. Each subtlety of meaning, each reference to their lives, their societies and dreams has disappeared with them. Through luck, we have thousands of written signs, some objects and plenty of ruins. Their words are semantic graves. Our own words condition the way in which we see theirs. The indeterminacy of the historical observer. Their world is not ours. We live in different social, linguistic, techno-scientific and ethical paradigms. And a strict hermeneutics of their texts is absurd, unless we value old words as a means to trigger new ideas by revisiting old ones. The words of dead people are dead, whereas ethics is a living thing that must always face new problems. Lets not fool ourselves: no ancient thinker, western or eastern, has faced the problems we face today. Neither have we faced their problems. The social structures that determine problems have varied in time and space. The languages with which events are given meaning are not the same, either. It is at this moment (when we face a new problem) that, for the first time, we live in a conflictive situation. At the same time, the situations that repeat themselves generation after generation must be solved again in new webs of meaning. Todays problem, even if it is the same as yesterdays, cannot be solved using another times procedure. Relax does not have the same meaning or solution in a high-tech industrial society than it does in a backwards agrarian society. Neither do other words such as work, goo, friendship, company

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But we can and must, at the risk of erring in our understanding, revisit the words of those that preceded us. The more habitual a word is, the harder it is to understand it in a historical perspective. It is, so to speak, so stuck to our thoughts that we cannot contemplate the possibility of a different meaning. And because words refer to forms of organization and social life, to think of a word in a different way demands a huge effort. We must also admit that changing our words hurts. We get them from our parents, and the social community in which we grew