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An Ethic of Emotions

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An Ethic of
Emotions
The Paths of
Empathy

Jordi Vallverdú, Ph.D.

 For Sujan, my beloved and hoped-for son.
I hope you don’t 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 I’ve 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 I’ve 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

Persuasión de los días

1
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 Fundació 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 don’t know why it ended up being so scarcely an academic
work of philosophy. Perhaps this is because it was written without considering its
audience

2
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.

3
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 don’t 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 world’s 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

4
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. Let’s 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 don’t
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

5
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 don’t 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

6
be. I don’t 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
individual’s 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 it’s 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 it’s 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;

7
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 atom’s behavior as a

function of its physical structure. With the social nature of human beings the situation

8
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”. It’s 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

9
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.

10
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 entrée 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 doesn’t 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 don’t 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 one’s 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

11
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 más claro.

12
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 moment’s

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 don’t, 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.

13
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 doesn’t 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 don’t 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
don’t 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: Aren’t 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.

14
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 aren’t 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. What’s 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, “it’s so shocking, him being so young”, “I still can’t 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.

15
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
don’t 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
I’d say, you’re right, but I’d 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

16
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 spider’s 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?

17
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 it’s 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 individual’s 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.

18
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 emotion’s functioning.

I am still annoyed that I don’t 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 don’t 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”).

19
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 (“it’s 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.

20
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 don’t 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.

21
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”, “that’s 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, isn’t 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.

22
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.

It’s like the weather: each finite element determines the weather and it is, in turn,
conditioned by it, yielding a constant flux of interaction.

23
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.

24
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 spider’s 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…

25
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.

26
 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 don’t 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 doesn’t 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.
27
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.

28
 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 humanity’s 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. It’s 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. It’s 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.
29
And what’s 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 it’s
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. It’s 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 don’t 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”. Mahler’s 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 don’t 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 don’t
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. What’s 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. What’s 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 didn’t 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.

Let’s 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

35
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 don’t have a
garden from which to look at the house, either. The garden is part of the perimeter of
the house. We don’t 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. Let’s 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. Today’s
problem, even if it is the same as yesterday’s, cannot be solved using another time’s
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 up on reinforced their meanings in a secondary
way. Our small and fragile vital order depends completely on these words. To say
something differently means thinking about it again, and this process necessarily
translates into changes in all spheres of social activity.

We cling to words. We would kill for them. “Liberty”, “race”, “honor”, “god”,
“motherland”, “rights” are samples of words used throughout history to give meaning
to certain actions. And those actions are at the same time a result of their meanings,
inscribed in the way a society feels and perceives the world.

To change the meaning of a word is to change the shape of a piece in a jigsaw puzzle.
We can throw the piece away and find another one that fits, or throw the whole puzzle
away and make a new one around the new piece. The choice of which action we are to
undertake with this piece is always new.

At this point we must recognize that the only valid link between the syntax and the
semantics of the ethical is emotion. Before the fleetingness of the meanings of
language, ethical feelings persist as if floating above them. Emotions overcome
cultural, legal, historical and even narrowly genetic limitations: the relation of paternity
between an adult and a human baby is grounded on emotion. The grounding of the
ethical lies in the recognition of such emotions.

Because, when we think about it, humans have basically aspired to three vital actions:
a) maximizing pleasure, b) minimizing pain, c) eliminating all emotions (which is called
“boddhi”, “ataraxia”, “mystical state of mind”…). These three basic actions that
regulate activities in our lives lie in an attitude towards the emotions that we have:
pleasure, pain, “anesthesia”.

The emotional is, thus, the grounding of the ethical.

But, at the same time, and because the ethical has to do with actions (it is a “doing”,
not a thinking), the emotional that underlies the ethical is what allows us to pass from
the intellectual or rational to activity.

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Buridan’s ass has been refuted by neurobiology and contemporary cognitive science. If
emotional systems function correctly, human beings perform complete actions, that is,
actions. They don’t doubt rationally until they starve to death if they have food in front
of them.

Context is not a problem but a guide.

A starting point for the development of a universal ethics is the identification of basic
biological emotions, together with those that are produced from a cultural
perspective.

But taking into account that we number in the billions, as well as certain deviations in
the psychic and physical functioning of a small part of the human population, we see
that agreement can never be complete or determining.

Also, an emotional argument is not, properly speaking, an argument in the classical

sense of the world, but rather an action.

Although it may seem nonsensical, perhaps the best idea to construct a minimum
ethics would be to identify the basic emotions of n number of people and then produce
a statistical average of general preferences. A calculation of Nash’s equilibrium, for an
ethical context.

A problem would lie in determining the honesty and effort of the questioned subjects
in looking within themselves and seeking the basic. Another would be the capacity of
transforming the emotions into socially expressible concepts.

And this is where whoever is reading me must think that the magic of the human,
emotion, disappears when it is put under something artificial, numbers and statistics.

But the quantitative is as human as the qualitative. Besides, ethics from one person to
another does without such categorizations, it just happens. In the individual realm of
ethical action, limited to the subjects that carry it out, this happening can occur in an
immediate environment or through long distances (with the use of communication
technologies).

In any case, this goes beyond the ethical and the limits of this essay. It is not my task to
define a statistical ethics.

I am creating shortcuts to the ethical. From language and the adjacent silence that
gives it meaning.

Let other people find words. I prefer to tell you how to escape them. Once this is done,
it may be possible to catalogue the ethical.

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We must increase the spaces between words, so that we may feel directly the
immediate content of our emotions.

The more cultural information we have to face the ethical, the more the obstacles for
reaching and agreement seem large and impassable.

Because in this case ethics is impregnated by the historical values of concrete groups of
people. This makes an ethics impossible, even a “minimum” ethics, because each value
in this axiological system is linked to a language, a tradition, a religion, a way of seeing
the world.

The meaning of “other” in a culturally codified ethical system is a highly varying

concept.

But from the ethical, nothing of the sort happens. Action takes place innately, and the
regulation of actions between different beings occurs naturally.

This is what happens in extreme situations: collective catastrophes (famine, natural

disasters…), grave accidents, or armed conflicts push people both to intense
competition and to strongly tighten their emotional bonds. It is in such extreme
situations that we humans understand the need for the existence of basic points in our
relations with others.

Emotion, group and individual are the interrelated elements. If we had to talk of an
ethics for a tribe of 40, none of this would be necessary. But we have before us the
task of proposing an ethical model that can be applicable for billions of human beings.
The task is complex, but at the same time must reach very simple solutions. The world’s
great religions have been successful because of their initial simplicity, or because they
presented simplified and accessible versions of their main ideas.

We must also take into account that the obstacles for an ethic of emotions are huge,
because current ethical systems are stuck to buildings, secular traditions, complex
theoretical constructs, economical systems (and what other meaning could we give to
such expressions as “the virtues of the free market”?)…

We must return to the basic origins of our actions: emotions.

I think we can consider the two basic emotions we have indicated (search of pleasure,
avoidance of pain) as a perfect synthesis of action.

I know that “pleasure” is not the same as the intent to “seek pleasure”, and that
feeling “pain” is not the same as “avoiding pain”. But these distinctions emanate from

40
language. It is the only way in which we can express such differences. Or, rather, it is
language which forces us to separate these concepts.

However, pleasure, from a biological basis, is a feeling geared toward the search for
pleasure; and pain is a feeling geared towards the avoidance of pain. Pleasure and pain,
therefore, are not pure emotions distinguishable from their action-oriented correlates
(seeking and avoidance). The feeling implies a determinate action.

The key lies in the implicit logic of ethics as a homeostatic system: my capacity to
obtain pleasure depends on the interaction with subjects that won’t give me pain; at
the same time, our empathetic capacity regulates our actions that produce pain in
others, because we feel their pain (even if we have not provoked it ourselves). A
system that maximizes pleasure and minimizes pain does not require universals.

It just needs a fact: that those involved live and experience their emotions fully. In this
case they don’t hide the meaning of their actions from themselves.

But because of its voluntary character, those who do not wish to accept their intrinsic
emotional nature will be capable of interfering with the ethical development of others.

These people will not be swayed by reasons, but rather by example, and by the
empathetic capacity inherent in every human being.

Picture a group of people sitting by the street. Another group of people that speaks a
different language, of various ages and sexes, walks nearby. A child of the first group
toddles towards the second. His non-aggressive intentions are understood by the
adults and children of the second group. All the adults in both groups seek the eyes of
the others, offering an understanding of the situation: “he’s small, I hope he doesn’t
bother you”, “we understand, its nothing, he’s a child”. The children in both groups
smile towards the little one, and towards the adults, showing their trust. This has
occurred without a word being spoken, a few bodily signals and an intense emotional
flux.

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 3. World-emotions-actions
At bottom, we don’t need ethics to act. Exposed to the world, we feel emotions that
call for (certain) actions. And in this process we can do away with ethics, the subject
and the mind. Most of the time we react unconsciously.

The problem with prior (and even present) normative theories is they suppose the
need for such norms. As if action came about through normative reflection.

Most of the time, it is an emotional drive that leads to actions under ethical guides, not
an argument. And ethical arguments are the result of the development of the axioms
of action.

But “axiom” and “action”, in a human plain, are contradictory ideas. How can the
absolute and timeless be the source and origin of the relative and finite?

The ethical is lived, not thought.

From the above we can deduce a simple scheme that explains the origins of action. The
world emits signals that activate our emotions, which in turn leads to actions that
require or demand a satisfactory resolution. We don’t need a map of emotions to
develop actions, much less an ethical scheme that activates such emotions. The inputs
from the world trigger an emotional response that leads to certain actions. No one has
been trained to feel pleasure or pain; two basic emotions that condition our first
actions as developing human beings, when we are babies. These are constitutive
emotions of our nature.

At the same time, they make up the first language we have to communicate with
others of our species. Emotions are the basic language of humanity.

Upon them we build more refined actions and states of reaction to the world.

For example, through a basic emotion such as empathy. But also through love, hate,
anger or satisfaction.

These more complex emotions allow for refined actions, such as understanding the
changing emotional states of someone we are speaking to, and even the production of
such states.

We have spoken of the world as the place from which the stimuli of our emotions
comes from, but have not yet specified it’s strata:

3.1 Natural World. In our process of development we have a primal and direct
interaction with the natural world (which soon becomes mediated by our parents). We
42
experiment with the materials, objects and animals that surround us. Here there is no
distinction between the natural and the artificial. Everything in the universe is natural.
We are not anachronistic Platonists that believe in the purity of certain ideas of the
world.

3.2 Social World. The second source of stimuli is the human social world, which is
mediated by the existence of recognizable emotional states with which we must
interact. It’s a more complex world, because emotions can be expressed with body
language, written language, subjacent or symbolic language. By “subjacent language” I
mean the attempts by contemporary artists to express themselves or create
expressions in their audience without recourse to established codes. However, such
artist select a determinate range of auditory or visual wavelengths, ordered in such a
way that they don’t escape the boundaries of our cognitive structure. For this reason
they can create new art that is art for us.

3.3 Particular (individual) World. Finally; we ourselves produce emotional states that
lead to actions. Through memories and images, for example. In a way, we are partially
self-nurtured emotional systems. Also at this level, the inputs from the natural and the
social world coexist and are processed in an individualized manner. The complexity in
the interaction of elements that lead to emotional states is quite high.

What’s really important is that we recognize that we undertake most actions in our
lives through (conscious or unconscious) emotional impulses.

It’s also clear that the emotional basis of ethics demands an ethic of proximity, as well
as a flexible ethic that adapts to the emotional transference performed by human
beings.

The homeostatic equilibrium of the ethical stems from the individual and his or her
immediate surroundings, and then widens to what is socially farther away through a
process of increased empathic capability.

This has nothing to do with a behaviorist ethic based on actions without reference to
mental states. There is a reference to mental states impinged upon by emotional
states, which activate actions.

This would permit an ethic without language, the ethic of animals (which is what we
are… time goes on and we have yet to take in Darwin).

At the same time, the empathic capability of human beings allows the projection of
emotions to all sorts of beings, such as other humans, animals and even objects. Would
an ethic of minerals be possible? Yes, in the sense that human beings project our
emotions towards minerals, and they could be recognized as desirable (important
monuments are recognized as desirable).

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There is a problem at this point: we have said that ethics is a homeostatic system, but
there is no active interaction with minerals. The important thing is to consider the
mechanism of communication: the subject projects or receives information from/to the
environment. But both in the process of emission and reception, the subject is active.
For this reason, a human can project emotions on a stone, and have the feeling of a
satisfactory response from the same (“sitting on this stone, I had my first kiss”).

In this case we are looking at a self-informing system, in which the subject can conceive
of outputs as genuine inputs after a process of interaction that occurs exclusively
within him or herself. Without wanting to sound defeatists, this is what happens when
humans rely solely on language to establish the basis of our social relationship:
concepts hide emotion, more so when most of us are not capable of original
expression (a notable exception would be poets, who can graze emotions with words
and their dance).

What’s clear is that the level of interaction is reduced as wee move away from
biologically similar beings and towards inanimate beings. This does not exclude the
latter from our ethic, because they too are an object of human emotion.

But it would be stupid to forgo of the linguistic in the human, because it is a key to
evolutionary cultural development. However, this shows us that the ethical can exist
outside of language. The beings that preceded us millions of years ago had emotions,
and performed actions without a language (or at least, a precise language). This
physical configuration underlies our current being. Therefore, ethics will take the
linguistic into account but will consider the existence of a previous level: the emotional.

With this clarification, we can go on to language.

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 4. The social construction of meaning
Written, thought or uttered words are the supposedly aseptic locus of human thought.

Language, meaning and ideas have been the battlefield of all prior generations of
thinkers, and will surely be the battlefield of all thinkers that are to come.

Language is, therefore, a trap, because it refers to itself and, at the same time, to all
prior languages. This leads to a historically uncontainable loop of meanings,
uncontainable because of its size and dynamical nature.

This is the reason why we don’t seek more precise words, nor seek supposed primordial
linguistic ancestors, a sort of semantic holy grail.

We do not allow ourselves to be impressed by the antiquity of words or the people that
formulated them. It is not a matter of precision, because the ineffable cannot be
circumscribed. Nor is it a matter of authority, because each person is his or her own
whole, from an ethical (not cultural) perspective.

A pathetic exercise is repeated generation after generation of western philosophers:

the remembrance and reflection upon the “true” meanings of modern words, inherited
from the Greeks, our intellectual parents.

What use is it to play with words immortalized two thousand years ago? Are such
authors not giving new meaning to said words, as the succession of interpretative and
exegetic schools show? Perhaps those words had real meaning to the humans that
used them.

Perhaps the elder creators of words appealed, as much as possible, to lived emotions,
like we wish to do today, and therein lied the success and proper usage of the same.

Its true that many of the words we use capture the reality of what they point to in a
limited way. But the words are useful. They abandon a large amount of subtleties to
focus on the aspects of things that the users of words share in order to perform
successful actions.

When we say “water”, “friendship” or “precision”, there is a multiplicity of possible

semantic universes in which these words acquire different meanings, which can be
complementary or even exclusive, and that can occur at the same time, given the open
nature of language.

When we think of a word, we are semantic computers that refer to limited spaces of
usage. To have more “perspective” on a concept is to have the ability to go through
the different positions of these vehicles and, at the same time, to establish new
45
connections between spaces. But even in this case, the possibilities of the diverse
semantic universes are not exhausted.

Language brings us close together, but never allows us to understand each other. The
misunderstanding of this phenomenon has lead to a deceitful view of the supposed
limits of the ethical.

Whatever the word we choose, the exclusion of meanings allows users to speak
efficiently, although sometimes there can be errors or lapses of communication, when
a common meaning is not interpreted.

When we refer to the ethical, we do not pretend to project homogeneous meanings on

the ethical from this personal space. That would be a vain attempt.

What’s the point of rejoicing in the supposed meaning of a Greek or Sanskrit word?
What added value can we find in words created thousands of years ago? That they are
closer, even naively, to the world?

What’s more: the short historical distance of linguistic users to their own words lead to
the greatest of errors: they believed that words had a univocal and direct relation to
the world.

After thousands of years of culture, we now know that this is not so, and that the
ethical is prior to words.

No one has been able to define the ethical, because we can only appeal to ethics in a
conscious manner.

For this reason, we must accept the absence of preeminent speakers of the ethical.
Each of us is his own guide and is responsible for understanding the actual meaning of
his existence.

Existence is here understood as full action, not as a definable idea.

When a meaning is embodied in a word, it acquires, through contiguity in the linguistic

game, the shades of meaning and values of other words. A word has no single meaning
isolated from other words (nor other language games). Each word used refers, in its
definition, to other words, and these to others, and those to yet other more distant
words… and so one ad infinitum.

Each word removes us from its meaning. The more a word is used, the less its meaning
is determinate. The precision of use is a temporal illusion. Any definition is intrinsically
transitory. Precision is not an absolute that can be acquired through accumulation.

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A paradigm change can produce more precision, but requires a radical change in the
definition of words.

Let’s look at the history of knowledge and action; and let’s be coherent with ourselves.

In any case, words point to things that are prior to language itself (when things were
not circumscribable in an intersubjective way). This previous state is penetrated by the
basic emotions of humans in the world.

The “naked” world is the realm of the ethical.

We must be radical here: the ethical resides not only outside of language but also
outside of the subject itself. I don’t mean that it is somewhere else, in some
transcendent space. It’s more complex still: the ethical is in each of us, in the state prior
to our self-perception as individuals, in pure existence, uncodified by language or the
net of the “self”.

It is outside of language, of “I, me, mine”, its in a body that feels the world.

There is no meaning that guides action, just a feeling. We don’t need to be able to
express something in order to feel it.

The immediacy of the body and its structural intentionality point toward the ethical.

Words do nothing but wrap the feelings expressed by a conscious subject.

The ethical precedes the subject. I don’t mean that the concept (“the ethical”)
precedes the subject but that the emotional experience that guides action (something
ineffable) precedes the subject.

Emotions without consciousness are our starting point.

Have you looked in the mirror for a long time until you have wondered what it is you
are looking at and why your mind seems to have lost all references? Have you repeated
a word hundreds of times until discovering that the sound does not refer to anything?
When you lose a word in this way, the rest vanish little by little before a placid gaze…
then you are close to that far-away place that is the pure body.

This must be the meaning of the mystical, the disappearance of the self. But there is
nowhere to go besides the body and its innate emotions. The subject, latent and
feeling, upholds the structure as an entity that resists disorder. Therefore, death is at
an infinite distance from the ethical, as is any appeal to something beyond the body. I
don’t mean a subject annulling ataraxia, but a state of reducing mere experience. There

47
is no place to hide, the body is the limit. But we can momentarily free ourselves from
thought.

Body is the limit, my own but also that of others I meet.

The collective character of language can gather the mutability of human practices and
actions, and can also evade the fixation of meaning.

The structure that underlies and orients the action-provoking characteristic of language
is emotions.

In this case, we have individual emotions that permeate language, that go from the
individual to the collective.

Emotion penetrates the perimeter of the ethical.

Collective meaning, therefore, refers to individual emotional states that we all share.
The maximum unfulfilled aspiration is to get certain specific forms of language to
activate specific emotions and produce specific actions.

This is the dream of universal meaning, of pure objective ideas, self-evident and
conducing to good action… a semantic chimera.

The “truth” of the ethical is not grounded in the models we have of the world, nor in
our cognitive capacities. In fact, our interaction with the world is teleologically
conditioned by our material structure.

However, this does not restrict the kind of social strategies that can be developed from
an ethic of emotions.

The cultural is ruled by other laws, although it should be impregnated with the attitude
that the ethical provokes in us and in our immediate environment.

The ethical does not require a subject to occur: we capture and process the elements of
the world that are better adapted to our philogenetic and ontogenetic structure.

The ethical does not refer to a knowledge of things but rather to their being (a being
that is not known but rather experimented in tis structural limitations). The
development and implementation of ethical actions occurs, however, in the
environment of our cultural models of the world.

The ethical goes beyond ethics, because the latter lives off language.

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The subtleties of ethics do not imply a greater precision in capturing the ineffable of
the ethical.

Ethics is a ponderation of action, not of the ethical that leads to the action.

The social and mutable character of language allows us to evolve, to undertake actions
without having to consider all the possible and supposed alternatives, conditioned by
stable and clear meanings.

This pliability of meaning allows us to survive throughout our lives, which are never
coherent with linguistic meaning but always coherent with the emotional substrate
that pushes us to change.

Ethical meaning, therefore, although a part of the individual, does not find equilibrium
outside the social collective. Through words, emotions embody language and seek
regulated states.

There is no ethical meaning, but rather a myriad ethical feelings below a patina of
language.

The ethical, from the social perspective of emotionally open beings, is constructed in a
collective manner. It is a process in which multiple subjects appeal to the determination
of meanings.

When there is a conceptual void, in which we have no precedents to orient us, the need
for such a collective process becomes urgent. In reality, it is all that we can do: sit
around the agora of the world and debate meanings.

The role of art, camouflaged and underestimated because it is in the realm of

supposedly inferior emotions, has always been to propose meanings, not always
formulated in a linguistic manner.

Societies of our time have increased the amount of individuals that are permitted to
debate meanings. Never before had language been as collective as it is now, as well as
open, mutable and critical.

Due to the closed structures of communication, until just a short time ago, historically,
the general meanings of words belonged to a minority.

There was no linguistic game that included human society, but rather a small group of
priests, potentates or intellectuals that controlled meanings and words.

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Our “bookish” tradition (of both sacred and profane texts) held a controllable and
fixed vision of meaning. At the same time, few people were authorized to read and use
consecrated texts.

Meanings are regaining their collective character as society’s means of communication

become more open.

And new media are the key to semantic change.

Current global society allows the presence of more subjects debating and reduces the
level of power on the control of meanings.

Language is for the first time open to each individual. We live in a brilliant moment of
the history of humanity: the return of language to its individual nature in a context of
flux.

Words are no longer determined by the dictates of a few who sanction the linguistic
uses of a controlled majority.

And he who controls language controls social structure, because words regulate life,
limiting possible actions and determining ways of thinking about the world.

If instead of a “father” and “mother” we had “Begetter A” and “Begetter B”, the
meaning of family, paternity and social organization would be radically transformed. By
changing a meaning, we change the world.

Words are the image of our world. Each meaning determines the realm of the existent,
the natural, the real. We are not idealists, nor naïve realists: we recognize the creative
aspect of social creation of meaning, which allows us to see the world differently every
time we change our capacity to interact with it.

And attempting to think outside of words is something for which, because of its
difficulty, few people are willing or able.

This is understood when we think about all the things in the world we are unable to
explain: We are experts at survival, not at language or the world that language
attempts to picture. We orient our efforts towards simple and direct objectives,
reasonably putting aside all that which interferes with our activity.

We don’t need an exact model of the world to interact with it. Our basic emotions and
a limited environment are enough. And the linguistic environment, the basis of
complex social communication, does not demand of us that we be specialists of
semantics or syntax, only that we have a basic knowledge of the beings that surround
us.

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Life is full of unforeseen circumstances that make the reflection upon all words
impossible. We live within dynamics of action that are established by those that are
near us, our families, societies or cultures. We get on board language and accept the
direction to which it takes us.

This is why, when there is a semantic crisis, a renegotiation of the meaning of language,
it is so necessary to reestablish an order that puts our lives back in balance.

The current process of a new constitution of language and meaning is a collective

activity.

And it is not so because of the will of a few, but because of the will of many who finally
have a means of expression. This is why we can talk about a “social construction of
meaning”.

Human communities have grown and enriched their levels of interaction thanks to new
information technologies. But we must look at the second half of the XX century to
understand this phenomenon. The beginning of writing implied a loss of control over
the world, because it was registered. Meanings, and concrete uses, could not be
carried away by the wind.

Also, if we have concluded that language is a second level of human communication,

that rides upon emotion, it is even more necessary to understand an open semantic
conception, because there are no direct links between our emotions and our words
about them.

Each individual is capable of reconfiguring the meanings of words through the

emotions he or she feels. But in the process of social interaction, individuals seek
emotional equilibrium through words, establishing a situation of informational
interaction that reaches the desired equilibrium when meanings are satisfactorily
stabilized.

Therefore, semantic equilibrium is impossible, because the multiplicity of individuals

are constantly producing emotions.

We traditionally allowed poets, writers and artists the role of judges our guides of
semantic debate, always under the eye of the guardians of ideas, and with a limited
access to media. Today, artists, scientists, citizens and politicians openly contribute to
the debate on meaning.

Artists should not have a preeminent or special role in the redefinition of the meanings
of language (a necessary action, since we live in language). It is true that, historically,
their proximity to emotions gave them a decisive role in the determination of the real.

51
But there is no way, no standard, to decide who has a better experience of emotions
and can thus “experience” the ethical. There are no privileged subjects in the
determination of meaning, because meaning is constructed collectively through
language.

Therefore, any subject is capable of assigning meanings to words. Signs change when
we want them to change and we are capable of sharing new meanings with others. The
value of new meanings resides in their use.

Everything is possible, though not everything is sincere. Our physical structure allows
multiple cultural configurations. What’s interesting is to make structure and meaning
as similar as possible.

In that way we escape a functionalism of emotions. We escape saying: emotions are for
being ready, being prepared, reacting, deciding… but life is not “for” anything, it is a
“being”. Life is an unstable instant of equilibrium, not the solid and timeless
perpetuation of beings. This is how the universe behaves: it increases general disorder
and allows local order.

Existing, as a function, would be an inviable anomaly.

Today, we can modify our structure through biotechnology, which widens the range of
possible social configurations. Genetic engineering, synthetic biology and cybernetics
are tools for this material change.

That which we have been able to do with words throughout history, we can now do
with our genes.

In this way, the decision about the meaning of the real is an urgent and necessary topic.
Semantic capability over reality is now complete, therefore there is a reason for this
debate.

We have also reached a historic moment (after different philosophies of language,

heuristics and hermeneutics) in which we are conscious of the foundational nature of
words. We know that each word constitutes the starting point to a personal reality and
that we should take each word to its final consequences in order to understand the
reach of its power.

We all want to participate in this process when we define fundamental words such as
“freedom”, “life”, family”, “patrimony”, “rights”, marriage”, “paternity”…

And we are capable of speaking of this process because we do not believe in the past
as an horizon of universal achievements, but rather as a possible point of departure.
After all, the meanings from which we act are based on current emotions.

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Someone could say: “but someone can decide to do something after receiving
information (a book, for example) from an earlier time”. It is obvious that this is
possible, but what will guide the person’s action is the current emotion, which is in the
person’s complex system of delicate equilibriums that determine the final outcome of
action.

It must be said that texts of the past are still relevant because we don’t need anything
but emotional data to understand the text and connect with the author in a univocal
emotional relationship. Great texts speak of ordinary things, although from a special
point of view.

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 5. A second level ethics: a classical meta-ethics
If emotions are the first level of the ethical, we must consider the existence of a second
level, a meta-level. This is what we habitually call ethics. In this essay I have
distinguished between “the ethical” and “ethics”. Any reader will have understood the
difference in usage. Ethics pertains to a second level.

If a first level of the ethical is posited, the second level should be dependent on the
first.

Meta-ethics should be a consequence, not a condition, of the ethic of emotions.

Cultural filters should not drown the ethical under a mesh of different meanings and
subtleties that devalue it. Difference per se is not desirable. Divergence should occur
under similarity.

The map of the ethical that emotions offer should be widened or made more detailed
by the wide focus of meta-ethics.

This meta-ethics, however, has been historically considered as the first level from which
to ponder the ethical. Therefore it has not been grounded in reality but in loose
concepts.

“Do good, as you would like people to do with you” is not a fundamental ethical
maxim, but rather a possible interpretation of the social orientation of our emotional
states.

This could be taken into account with another formulation that contemplates the
emotional: “”you know that certain situations have given you pleasure and you wish
that this pleasure be experienced by those you love”.

The “other” cannot be an ethical object unless it is an emotional object. Otherwise we

would be calling for ethical fetishism. It would be calling for an affective feeling for
something that is not another being to us.

A meta-ethic of emotions demands affective relations with the beings with which we
interact. Otherwise, we could not react or feel empathy.

This explains why most of us don’t feel affected when we see sick human beings on TV,
because we don’t understand them as “us”, but as another piece of information from
the non-affective world. They live in a non-world to us.

At the same time, this empathy or human affectivity is transferred not only to human
beings but to animals/pets, artifacts or objects.
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In this sense, a second level ethics should contemplate the inclusion of objects,
artifacts and animals in our ethical codes.

It’s absurd to defend a human ethics without contemplating an animal or object ethics.
It’s simple: the basis of a possible ethics between human beings lies in emotions, not in
humanity as such, although it’s true that it’s easier to find similar emotional systems
among our race than among animals or artifacts (if we don’t consider synthetic
emotions).

In some way, the history of ethics has widened the spectrum of the ethical (today we
speak unselfconsciously of “animal rights”), although the basis for this phenomenon,
emotions, was not understood.

Ethics is a defense of what we feel and want others to feel. The finer our sensibility, the
more likely we are to include different kinds of beings in our emotional spectrum.

Does this imply that all beings that share or constitute a part of our emotions are at
the same level?

I believe so. The only factor that allows making categorical distinctions between beings
that make us feel is the degree of emotional interaction. That is, a greater activity of
emotional interaction.

This has an interesting implication: whereas the degree of emotional interaction with
an animal is limited by its natural characteristics (although there are variations of
character or intelligence within a species), the degree of emotional interaction with
artifacts depends on the complexity of design. As machines widen their interaction
with humans, emotional involvement can become quite close.

At that point, we will wish that machines be protected by ethical codes. It will not be a
whim, rather an emotional state projected upon a being with which we have emotional
interaction.

If we see an “other” in an artifact, it will become part of “us”, part of our society of
emotions. The history of the ethical displays the progressive inclusion of beings in the
realm of “us” and “ours”: women, slaves, different social strata… the starting point
has been a feeling of belonging to a same group of emotional beings. But because
these beings were already emotional before they were recognized as such, their
acceptance did not come about because they were emotional beings but because of
our expanded capability of projecting emotions and of emotional interaction.

We defend what we love, we defend that for which we feel.

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Reason has nothing to do with ethics, at least at a basic level.

Besides, an ethic oriented towards the practical, towards the mere fulfillment off
certain values, does not reach the core of human action but remains at the surface of
human activity: this is a behaviorist perspective.

In ethics, it is not enough for people to fulfill normative expectations. People should
respond in a certain way because the necessary emotional mechanisms have
developed.

Therefore, a general theory does not emphasize words, with their changing meanings,
but emotions.

Words are useful in that they activate or reinforce certain emotions. Remembering that
someone is a “friend” implies a certain attitude toward the person. The word trigger a
series of memories of emotional states related to that person, our friend. But words
are not automatically stored in words like “friend”, “mother” or “sage”. The words
gain their meaning in relation to multiple emotional experiences.

Language is the social bond between individuals and groups. Except for collective
emotions, like those provided by sports in mass media events, language is the tool for
transmitting feelings.

But even when language is used, it is reinforced by appeals to emotions, gestures and
contexts of communication, as can be observed in politicians and other professionals
of social management.

Written language isn’t free of emotions either (this is obvious of spoken language,
which has prosody…). In today’s informal media, texts are complemented by
emoticons. Emotional states confer a different meaning to words, more so when we
have little space for them.

The ethical is grounded in pain and pleasure; in hate or empathy, fear or trust. In fact,
reason hides and blurs the immediacy of emotions. We are used to feeling that which
reason tells us to: the beautiful is not beautiful in itself and because of our direct
reaction but because of standards dictated by others; love is filtered by rational
expectations… We have not allowed ourselves to be led by emotions.

It’s not strange at all that so many people enjoy the company of pets more than that of
human beings: it is a simple straightforward relationship, where rules are clear because
they are grounded in emotions. Our dog does not judge us by our age, weight,
economic status or brand of car or clothes… It simply reacts to our presence. This is
extremely comforting for human beings, and strengthens the need of protecting these
animals.

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A coherent meta-ethics should start from the generalities of emotions to reach an
ethics of complexity.

Because going from the individual and his or her limited emotional environment
requires thinking about complexity, in which the emotions of hundreds, thousands or
millions of beings should be coordinated as efficiently as possible.

Meta-ethics is but an ethic of the balancing of individual emotions, seen from a

collective perspective.

Each individual, equipped with emotions and with close by beings with which he shares
them, should co-exist with other individuals in the same situation. It is a situation of
“emotions in a collective” that should tend towards collective emotions.

And this puts us before a new problem: we can have collective codes of behavior, but
not collective codes of emotions. Emotions are individual, although they are modified
in interaction with other beings. Therefore, a meta-ethics should pursue the goal of
converging emotions among individuals. That is, overcoming the fact that in a
collection of individuals, individuals have individual emotions through the fact that
individuals tend to share emotions at a social level.

Rather than fixing codes of action, a meta-ethic should start by stabilizing and fixing
certain emotional states, as well as the proposal of possible environments for their
development.

For this purpose, meta-ethic starts from the subject, or more accurately from the
emotions of the subject, and from the social mechanisms that give emotions
equilibrium.

Now, how to construct a meta-ethics is something that I don’t yet understand. Perhaps
the ethical refers to the individual and to small-scale interaction with other beings, and
there is no coherent bridge with legal macro-ethics. Therefore, the perimeter of the
ethical would be circumscribed to the individual and his or her emotions, considered as
open homeostatic systems.

If I hear you say: “tell me all the exact norms that your ethic proposes”, I will answer in
this way: “tell me all the exact propositions that can be formulated in your language”.
This is clearly impossible, and absurd. More so, if I said “tell me all the exact
propositions that can and could be formulated in your language”, because we don’t
know the future of our language… just like we don’t know the future of our biological
structure. We can now semantically manipulate genetic meanings.

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Presently, the biological is a syntax, open to our interpretation and semantic
determination

The “phenotype” of ethics is anchored to the “genotype” of the ethical.

Emotions are the syntax (the possible way of acting) and the semantics (the possible
interactive meaning of an action) of the language of action, they are not a logical
axiomatic system. The propositions of ethical activity are constructed one at a time.

I repeat: ethics is a practice, not a theoretical discipline.

This is why I cannot recite a code of universal norms to be followed by all human
beings. Although I could posit some norms, the ethical lies in constant experience, in
acting.

Each individual should discover the ethical in him or herself, and act accordingly.

This does not imply that there is only one path to the ethical that we all share: In fact,
the ethical is not a going, a moving towards a given goal. The ethical is right here.

This leads to a demand for personal responsibility with regards to actions, because we
cannot pass the buck of responsibility to the collective. “It’s the way my parents
behaved”, “life has treated me this way”, “my genes force me to act this way” are
statements that seek to pass responsibility onto others.

Self-help books are deceitful in this way: “Give me the answer, I will apply it to my life”.
But the ethical is not a repeating, but an autonomous development of the elements of
a full life.

It would seem, thus, that this essay is contradictory. It would be if it attempted to offer
a single answer, a clear guide to action, a self-evident universal principle.

I speak of my emotions and intuitions, expressing them under the linguistic meanings
that we seem to share. I speak of what I can, in as much as I can. I believe in the
sincerity of every letter, perhaps not in its precision.

Do I take pleasure on obscurity, indeterminacy, conceptual confusion? Throughout

history, this has been a tactic of hundreds of intellectuals, prophets and charlatans to
forge a semblance of intellectual authority.

My text is, in itself, a failure.

It shouldn’t be necessary to write about any of this.

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I feel as if I was continually throwing myself against a thick wall to prove that I am alive
and that my pain is an expression of my existence. I don’t need words to feel.

I use them to try to take you from the unreal world of language to the real world of
what you are. It is a disorientation in the linguistic meant to produce a consolidation in
the emotional.

Possible expressed norms are a secondary element of ethical action.

I can understand the ethic of collective emotions, although I would hardly consider it
stable and immutable, because individuals enter into changing relationship with a great
number of beings.

Ethic springs forth from the individual to the social. From the social to the individual
only laws are issued. Or education. But it should be an action-oriented education,
rather than one oriented to reflection, because the argumentative weakness of our
minds and the voids in language are openings for justified, senseless, action.

Surely, it is through education that the collective is impressed upon the individual,
where the individual is induced to have specific emotional reactions. The problem is to
tackle this project from a rational perspective. At the same time, this process has an
inherent weakness: the inducement of specific emotional states can be used for new
and more complex forms of fascisms and theisms. Although the key lies in
understanding ethical emotion from and for the individual, including the beings that
interact with the individual from within him or herself.

However, it’s important to distinguish between educating emotions and making them a
form of merchandise in our social transactions. Yes, it’s true that emotions play a
communicative and organizational role in beings that are close to us (submission, care,
attention…), although these emotions do not pass through a linguistic process in order
to occur. They flow from the inherent tendency to feel and act, and are filtered by
social interaction.

In our case, language gets between us and the world. Maybe not the mentally-
understood world, but the world as lived in a full and direct manner.

The ethical belongs to this second realm, ethics to the first.

The levels of conciliation between both worlds will depend on our ability and on the
complex strategies we develop. The simpler they are, the more effective they will be.

Emotions should never be considered as trading chips in a calculus of future actions, for
example saying “If I am good to you today, you should be good to me tomorrow”. It is
not this, but a lasting emotional bond, which forces us to act.

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 6. An ethic without consciousness
The supposed circle of our reflection comes to a close (rather, a circle that gives way to
another circle, and this to another, ad infinitum, in a sort of endless recurring fractal
cycle where at the end we only have an image of the myriad images this produces), and
we return to our starting point: the ethical.

But behind the words and feelings issued in this text, the only thing that seems clear is
that ethic does not necessarily require consciousness, because in its essence the ethical
act is not a physical act mediated by reflection.

The less linguistic and cultural filters, the more easily emotions flow and orient actions
in a clear manner.

One must abandon oneself to emotions. Saying them, thinking them, are latter
processes in the ethical.

There is nothing to understand, there is just a letting go.

There is nothing to agree upon, the thing speaks for itself.

There is no reason in emotion, although there is emotion in reason.

“This is anarchy”, someone might say. Someone who has yet to understand what I
would like to be intuited. We return to our body.

But the reader has a right to ask, once again, “but what are the emotions that produce
good actions?” since hatred is a genuine human emotion, and it doesn’t seem like a
basis upon which to build an ethics.

At this point, what we need to do is to remember the fulcrum of emotional

relationships: empathy. Since we avoid pain and seek pleasure, an empathetic activity
that flows without cultural barriers will tend to seek and provoke pleasure, in its most
basic state. At the same time, our capacity for empathy will lead us to imitate
pleasurable actions and fear painful ones, because they hurt in a curious way: they are
something like an uncontrolled emotional analogy.

If we really allow our empathetic capacity to develop, the pain of others will be
unbearable to us. More so if we are the direct cause of it.

We don’t need to imagine what it would be like to be before pain, because we feel it in
an efficient manner.

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The philosopher hugged a horse, not because he was insane but because he allowed
himself to feel empathetically and boundlessly as the horse was being whipped.

An alternative analysis of this occurrence would only take language into account, and
its self referential loops upon itself.

How we fear loving, and being loved!

Our rational capacity also serves us to avoid situations which would lead to the pain of
others. A pure intuition could lead us by mistake to the (momentary) creation of pain.
That is why a meta-ethics that orients the ethical is necessary, one that is circumscribed
by the ethical.

I reap and sow as I avoid provoking pain, because I feel the pain of others.

This is what the great ethical theoreticians have felt throughout history, but have not
correctly expressed, chained as they were to a second level ethics and to various moral
meanings: mutual respect (under categorical imperatives) and universal love.

What is the meaning of calling for love? What point is there in resolving to “be better”,
“be more ethical” at certain special dates? … What nonsense! This is all done at a highly
conceptual level, where only the word awakes the feeling. Language only works when
it appears as a cut-off path, a blind alley from which we must escape, shake loose, in
order to reach what’s important. Language’s real value is in its limits. The brave analyze
the realm of the sayable, revise its frontiers and even live outside of them. It is within
language that exist men who fathom themselves gods, but are nothing but animals.
The flexibility of language, and our rational weakness, are the keys to ethical failure.
But, beyond that, the failure of the ethical lies in thinking about the ethical, in having to
express it.

Ethics is a sum of errors, but the ethical is beyond error. My feeling is not false,
although the motives and the function of the same could lead to counterproductive
actions.

I am the ethical. By “I” I do not mean the distilled philosophical concepts of the west or
east. It’s more of a state of being than an idea. I look closely at my hand for five
minutes, I look at an eyebrow in the mirror, I smell the skin of my forearm, I push my
tongue against my palate… I feel, if I focus on my body and , by focusing on it, it seems
to disappear, to melt with all other things.

This has been the ambivalent path of the explorers of being: to forget about being, to
be trapped within it, or to concentrate on its fiction.

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I’m sorry, but this is not a text on mysticism. It is an analysis of our emotions. Of the
possibility of feeling and acting according to our true needs.

Thus, we must act from our emotions. Well, actually each of us can decide what he or
she wants. Nothing and nobody forces us to live in the ethical. Nature simply pushes us
toward it, but one can decide to bury one’s emotions under language. One can choose
to subrogate decision, meaning, conceptual constructions … one can even choose
voluntary indifference.

It is easy to be contradictory; the necessary attribution of meaning to things allows

this, creating unsatisfactory expectations.

The ethical does not consist in a specific pleasure or a specific absence of pain; it is
rather a general state that is efficiently regulated over time

We should get to live as I few were outside of language, since actually doing so is
impossible. Use language just enough that we don’t fall into inaction. To taste each
moment that we live.

Near-death experiences are similar to what I am trying to say: people who have had
them cannot fully express it, but they have felt the ephemeral value of things, as well
as an absolute present, which is why many decide to change their lives. That instant
experienced outside of a reality with meaning now guides their activity.

Ethical honesty refers to myself and my relations to objects and beings. Each individual
has a particular area of influence, so a social vision of the ethical consists of the sum
total of areas produced by individuals. The ethical context of the social therefore
consists in the spontaneous sum of individual experiences.

There is no single expressible meaning of the ethical for each individual, but there isn’t
one for the social collective, either.

Seek pleasure and avoid pain.

If all human beings acted in this way, life would be as simple as it would be full. Simplify
objectives. Make possible the fullness of the basic, now understood as the source of
happiness.

I insist on the matter of simplicity: what we have said up to now is so simple that its
historical overlooking could lead us to a great tearing pain. All that we have ever
needed for an ethical life has always been inside of us.

Throughout history we have blamed nations, leaders, prophets or gods for our ethical
failure, at the same time we were trying to design an absolute grounding for ethics. It

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was here, the solution was inside each of us. The absolute is actually a present
absolute, an experience of the moment in connection with our emotions.

In fact, what I offer is not a solution, it is a way towards what is deepest in each of us. It
is discovering ourselves outside the “us” that leads to nothing special, that simply leads
to a will to live life fully.

It could be argued that: “there are hundreds of new and conflictive situations for which
you have not offered any answers!” True, but any ethical system that attempts
universality is condemned to failure. A pre-established system cannot contemplate
doubts that always arise in daily life at the necessary level of precision.

An exhaustive system that contemplated every possible action would be as big as the
world. It would be useless; the world is the best map of itself.

And my thoughts do not point towards a model, they point to an awareness of the
ground for the ethical. Blueprints that indicate the direction of actions, ethics, are of
another realm.

What’s more, what I have said can be voided if human nature is genetically modified.
But, in this case, the right thing to say would be “let this new nature show itself”.

Because my ethic is an ethic that has the body as its starting point, not an abstract
principle. And it is an ethic of the specific time that the body exists.

“What purpose does this ethic serve, then, if it does not offer precise facts about
human acts that are universal and timeless?” a critical reader could say, almost scared
and clearly indignant. My answer: the same purpose as other ethics, which are not
respected, applied or accepted universally and for all times. But with a small difference:
this ethic is not written in wise books anchored to the past as they are written, but in
living bodies that listen to themselves and change, thanks to their genetic mechanisms.

Also, this ethical proposal does not allow the abandonment of responsibility nor the
attribution of its development to a specialized group. Each of us is the maker of his or
her actions and of the micro-events that make up an individual life.

We do not allow ourselves to be diluted in the immensity of the social, abdicating

responsibility. The social is nothing but the sum of individual actions. Even within the
masses, an individual is an individual.

There is a teleological emotional principle that gives direction to the mere matter of
which we are made.

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An ethic of emotions demands the redefinition of individual actions and of social
organization, because emotions organize action (understood as social communication
or coordination). In fact, such an ethic demands a simplification of social life, even of
the spirit, an adaptation to basic emotions. Details, development and precision of the
spirit only lead to unhappiness.

The ethical process that leads from self to others also demands a reform of the
contexts in which we live. Although nothing changes in us, the new context demands a
change in the environment.

In this way, the ethical finds common spaces outside the individual, spaces kept
through the effort of diverse individuals to live authentically.

Human rational capacity is beyond ethical feeling, although it constitutes an impulse to

survive through meaning. Matter demands that we live, and that we know in order to
live: the ethical comes first, science comes second. This dichotomy drives human
beings. We can choose; although the truth of the matter is that the more information is
necessary for life, the less full and complete it will be.

This tension is one I struggle with every day. I need knowledge, even as the frontier of
the unknown shows its arrogant face beyond the limits of natural and specialized
languages. At the same time, I need to feel good about myself, to reach an emotional
equilibrium, a purification of emotions so that I might reach those that are essential.

And between the extremes of material demands we live enchanted by language and
sterile objectives.

My ethical reflection is grounded in the present of life. There are no questions, and no
answers, only full experiences.

Consciousness is the source of maximum pain and confusion. And I don’t mean
consciousness of feeling, from a cognitive standpoint, but rather the need for models
of the world, mediated by words and concepts.

Besides, if ethics is action, and action flowing without conceptual obstacles, we don’t
need a theory of ethics. A theory of action is a contradiction in terms, because we
conceive action as an act.

If the ethical is realized in what can be experienced, ethics is realized in lived

interaction.

This essay rejoices in its own incoherence, because its objective is valid in that it
transcends the very ideas of “objective”, “validity”, “coherence” and “idea”.

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We finally abandon words, in order to return to them, having changed.

Thinking is unethical.

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 Epilogue
I have only tried to express that which I can remember having felt, and at the same
time, what I feel. I express myself both in spite of, and from words, those mirages of
temporality and durable meaning.

This is why ethics cannot depend exclusively on words.

Whoever has not felt and experienced this book does not need to re-read it, seeking
some hidden meaning. When the time is not right, things don’t seem like themselves…
To see is not always to see something. Just throw or give the book away. Or keep it in a
drawer until serendipity puts it in your hands again.

And to those who would think I have feigned wisdom or excellence with this text, I say
you have not understood. Like I have not understood. There is nothing to understand,
no meanings to unlock. It’s simpler than that, to live and to feel.

Page after page, I have stumbled around, jumping from word to word, limiting my own
experience. I have shown myself naked, but you have seen nothing.

I have grown before each letter that has shown me the sun of its shadow.

I could be wise without knowing anything. Finally, dear teachers, I have felt it.

May everything not end up in words.

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