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Ethics of Hospitality
The source of hospitality lies in the fundamental ethical experiences that

make up the fabric of people’s social lives. Therein lies our primary form
of humanity. Whether we are guests or hosts, this reveals our situation in
a world made up of receiving and meeting, leaving room for the liberty to
give and receive beyond the imperatives of reciprocity.
This book proposes an ethic that promotes the possibility of stir-
ring emotions before protecting ourselves from unexpected encounters.
Fundamental ethical competence consists of opening up to the wholly other
and to others, to be accessible to the world’s solicitations. There is a moral
superiority in vulnerable love over control and moderation, in g enerous
passion over rational prudence and in excess over exchange.
Constructing an ethic of hospitality is essential at a time when we are torn
between the imperatives of modernization and growth and the demands of
concern and protection. The experience we all have today, that of the fra-
gility of the world, is giving rise to a powerful tendency toward solicitude.
From such a perspective, the duty of individuals no longer consists of pro-
tecting themselves from society, but of defending it, and taking care of a
social fabric outside of which no identity can be formed.
Daniel Innerarity is a professor of Philosophy at the University of the Basque

Country (Spain) and a researcher at the Basque Foundation for Science
(Ikerbasque). As a Doctor of Philosophy, he has carried out research in
Germany, as a fellow at the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, in
Switzerland, Italy and France.
Law and politics: continental perspectives
Series Editors: Mariano Croce, Università di Roma, Italy
and Marco Goldoni, University of Glasgow, UK
A core legacy of the Continental juridico-political tradition is the methodological

commitment to the idea that law and politics are inextricably tied to one another.
On the one hand, law has to be studied in the light of the concrete political dynam-
ics, social forces, and societal movements that make law what it is. On the other
hand, the analysis of political processes should be coupled with the study of the legal
techniques through which politics exerts its effects on social reality.
The series aspires to promote works that use the nexus ‘law & politics’ as a prism
that allows understanding societal dynamics beyond the deep-seated borders sepa-
rating purely legal from purely political methodologies. It welcomes theoretically
informed and empirically grounded analyses that foster the development of theory
in the study of juridico-political processes.
The qualifier ‘Continental’ signifies not so much a geographical or socio-historical
feature as a methodological one. The approach that the series aims to promote,
regardless of the nationality of prospective authors, materializes at the intersection
between the vocabularies and methodologies of legal and political theories. In other
words, the starting point of this approach is that the interplay between legal and polit-
ical processes provides a precious lens to observe and comprehend contemporary
societal phenomena.
Titles in this series:
Daniel Innerarity (Translated from the Spanish
by Stephen Williams and Serge Champeau)
Forthcoming titles in this series:
Temporal Boundaries of Law and Politics
Out of joint
Luigi Corrias and Lyana Francot (eds)
Critical Transitions of Law and Politics
The actor’s revenge
Mariano Croce and Michele Spanò
The Anthropological Paradox
Niches, micro-worlds and psychic dissociation
Massimo De Carolis Di Prossedi
The Legal Order
Mariano Croce
Daniel Innerarity
Translated from the Spanish by
Stephen Williams and
Serge Champeau
English translation published 2017
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
a GlassHouse book
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2017 Daniel Innerarity
The right of Daniel Innerarity to be identified as author of this work
has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced
or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means,
now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording,
or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
Originally published in Spanish by Península 2001
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Names: Innerarity, Daniel, 1959- author.
Title: Ethics of hospitality / Daniel Innerarity.
Other titles: Etica de la hospitalidad. English
Description: New York : Routledge, 2017. | Series: Law and politics:
continental perspectives
Identifiers: LCCN 2016036627| ISBN 9781138669185 (hardback) |
ISBN 9781315618241 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: Hospitality. | Social ethics.
Classification: LCC BJ2021 .I5613 2017 | DDC 177/.1—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016036627
ISBN: 978-1-138-66918-5 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-315-61824-1 (ebk)
Typeset in New Baskerville

by Swales & Willis Ltd, Exeter, Devon, UK
For Teresa
The world was not created once and for all time for each
of us individually. There are added to it in the course of
our life things of which we have never had any suspicion.
(Marcel Proust, The Prisoner
and the Fugitive)
Contents
Taking care of others1
PART I
The domain of receiving 9
1 The pathetic, or the duty of events 11

A critique of pure action 11
Unpredictable existence 14
Lucky freedom 17
The ethics of vulnerable life 23
2 Accepting people: identity and the commitment to hospitality 28

The society of individuals 29
The disadvantages of being ourselves 32
The identity of those who can promise 35
Distance from ourselves and learning disappointment 38
3 The moral spectacle: the importance of absentees 42

The murmur of ghosts 43
The principle of the included middle 48
Consciousness as a space of interlocution 53
4 The fortune of the good life and the scandalous resemblance

between happiness and fortune 57
The tension between the good life and living well 58
The fragility of human good 63
The dialectics of the lucky instant 67
Happiness as lucky morality 70
viii Contents
5 Homo brevis: the ethics of duration, fatigue and of the end 74

The temporal condition of man 75
Beginnings and ends that are not really so 77
The anthropological aspect of fatigue 82
6 The meaning of everyday life: particularities of guests,

or uselessly waiting for the universal 89
Against the sensationalism of meaning 90
The value of prosaic life 94
PART II
Dimensions of piety 99
7 Xenology: prolegomena in understanding the other 101

The nature of otherness 102
The difficulty of taking charge of others 105
The experience of the other 108
8 Liberality: the virtue of pluralism 115

The new heterogeneity 116
Inevitable particularity and possible universality 118
Beyond tolerance 122
The political benefits of liberality 126
9 The time of others: human plurality as temporal diversity 129

The other as a temporal category 129
The experience of temporal alterity 131
Acceleration and privatization of time 134
The coordination of times 136
Time as freedom 137
10 The ethics and aesthetics of the natural 141

Natural beauty and the good life 142
The sublime and its surroundings 148
11 Poetics of compassion: the comprehension of

the incomprehensible 154
Forbidden compassion 155
The dignity of palliatives 159
Index 163
Taking care of others
Philosophers who wonder about what is good and desirable are not members
of a mystical religion or conscientious administrators of the sublime, but
rather they are those who show us a little more clearly the purpose we were
looking for. Theory must not abandon its commitment to the way people
live and act, i.e. with “customs” in their broadest sense. Kant wrote some of
his moral reflections as a theory of customs, expressing what turned out to
be a very good moral theory: reflection on our usual practices and our com-
mon value judgments, one that is rather associated with them so as not to
end up with unusual conclusions and from a sufficient distance from life to
be able to clarify and correct it.
Philosophical reflection on morals assumes moral experience. Like any
knowledge, ethical knowledge takes hold in horizons opened by percep-
tion. This is why it is impossible to make spectacular moral discoveries
through sudden flights of fancy. What ethics does is show how any new
conception must be brought to our attention: by showing its relationship
with our experience of the world and by acknowledging its ability to organ-
ize and structure our experience. Nothing can teach a lesson unless it has
been previously prepared in its association with good things. Virtues such
as respect, responsibility, gratitude, magnanimity, constancy and compas-
sion cannot be anchored in argument; rather, argumentation can only
strengthen them. It can be put forth that we should always be able to jus-
tify our value judgments by reason, and that this very defense already com-
prises a value in itself. However, this does not necessarily mean that we have
already created our values using justifications and arguments, or that they
would crumble if their justifications should weaken.
The teaching of ethics must be able to recall the essential moral experi-
ences of each of us, and to direct our reflective attention to our primary
experience of what has value. The best starting point for ethics is that of
the obvious beauty of fundamentally ethical situations. Relativism is a mere
theoretical game. I do not entirely agree with those who emphasize that
our time period is characterized by complete uncertainty in terms of val-
ues. It is true that many of the certainties that have allowed us to prepare
2 Taking care of others
ourselves morally have disappeared. The fact that many values have shown
themselves to be weak or that they are secret accomplices to unacceptable
situations speaks little against their plausibility. This is part of the nature
of values: that they are able to resist abusive attacks and undeserved scru-
tiny. Furthermore, we no longer have the full certainty of living in a time
of complete uncertainty either. This point of view is extremely theoretical
and contradicts the credibility we grant to many of our usual practices,
whose power we confirm implicitly. The thesis defending the end of cer-
tainty or the loss of a common vocabulary underestimates our societies’
implicit consensus. We only need to think of the quantity of things we may
not be ready to accept and of everything that we spontaneously revile or
admire. All over the world, people admire gratitude, despise pride and
cruelty, respect guests and we thank our hosts, even though the codes to
accurately measure these values vary from culture to culture, and even over
the course of our lives.
This is why it is possible to have a very high sense of morality without
being able to justify it. Obviously, this ignorance is no excuse for anyone to
write a book about ethics for they would need to justify what they support
yet keep in mind that rational justifications are not the only source of moral
wisdom. There exists a sort of wisdom without arguments in the practices
of human life, in its customs and institutions. We are living on a tacit basis
where certain common values whose justification very often cannot be found
in the vocabulary we have available. Through custom, we know what is right
before knowing the rule from which this all may derive. Ethics is nothing
other than reflection on an already effective ethos. What Merleau-Ponty said
about the body (that it knows more about the world that we do) can apply
also to our customs: they know more about morality than we do (1945, 276).
I wanted to begin this reflection by highlighting the parasitic status of
any moral theory, which always “sucks” from the sublime. As in so many
other dimensions of human existence, the worth of value is one thing, and
its explanation or theory is something else completely. This distinction is
present in all domains of life and it brings reflection back to the vital sphere
that feeds it: philosophy lives through common sense, morality through
virtue, political theory through prudence, theology through sanctity and lit-
erary critique through poetry. Similarly, immigration laws merely translate
hospitality, manuals of protocol channel amiability and tax laws give eco-
nomic worth to compassion. There is even a parallel division of labor that
can sometimes become slightly tragic or comical. Some may fall in love and
others may manage wedding agencies, there are poets who suffer and pro-
fessors who teach suffering to others, some may live without thinking and
others think without living in the same way as those who say what should be
done and those who do it are not necessarily the same, either. Commentary
and theory will follow, in the order of time and in ontological rank, in the
same way as that in which theory comes after life.
Taking care of others 3
Hospitality responds to the characteristics of these fundamentally ethical

experiences that make up the life of men. From the Bible to contemporary
literature and through a wide variety of cultural events, hospitality is pre-
sent as an exhortative pattern or as a theme for literary recreation. In hospi-
table exchange, which exceeds the very reciprocity of people, there appears
the primary form of general humanity. A series of duties lies around this
relationship, where transgression is particularly reprimanded. Hesiod and
Plato, for example, considered the fact of betraying visitors to whom you
offer lodging particularly unkind. Dante reserves the deepest, most glacial
circle of hell for spiteful hosts. Guests too may infringe on their obliga-
tions, such as the well-known Trojans whom Menelaus scorned for having
kidnapped his wife when he welcomed them hospitably into his home, as
told by Homer.
The category of hospitality may help to create a moral theory by virtue of
its cultural universality and the fullness of its meaning. As a category, it helps
to interpret the general situation of mankind in the world. The category of
hospitality reattempts to interpretively appropriate the rich otherness of
life, of others and of the culture we live in, which is sometimes opaque to
the point of verging on incomprehensibility and hostility, yet which is the
source of learning something new, the contact with that which is different
and the harmonization of the disparity our lives are made of. The fact that
we are hosts to each other (as Steiner so justly put it) means that our situ-
ation in the world is structured around reception and encountering, that
mere existence is a constant debt, that there is freedom in the fact of giving
and receiving that goes beyond the imperatives of reciprocity. In the ethics
of hospitality, the guest–host relationship may take up the space that Hegel
assigned to the master–slave dialectic.
Hospitality shows itself to be mostly a primary anthropological cate-
gory once we understand that the things incumbent upon us the most are
those we have not chosen and that passivity precedes activity. In a story by
Kafka, a man inherits a strange creature with instructions to take care of
it, which is what he does. He does not know why, but he has the impres-
sion that his life would be nothing if he gave up this caretaking duty,
which is as incomprehensible as it is necessary. In particular, the figure
of the uninvited or lingering visitor is a metaphor for human situations
where initiative lies in the hands of others. The idea of hospitality recalls
the meaninglessness of claiming to establish definitive symmetry between
what belongs to us and what belongs to others and between doing and
enduring. We could understand the ethics of hospitality as an ethics of
events; this is more of a theory of passion than action because it relies on
the experience that human life is less a set of sovereign initiatives than
a set of of replies to the invitations the world gives us, often without our
consent. In some way, these are the ethics of responses confronted with
the ethics of initiative I am putting forth, while focusing on an idea of the
good life more concerned with leaving open the possibility of commotion
rather than with protecting itself against unexpected barging-in. With the
category of hospitality, I claim to offer a conceptual refuge to the unpre-
dictable events against which our true moral stature is measured. This
receptiveness is not an abdication of reason; it is its antechamber, if we
deem it reasonable to give into whatever may come along.
The ethics of hospitality is learning the productive commerce with
alterity, the ability of being within the scope of reality, so that, like a self-
sufficient guest, it may contradict our own knowledge and exceed our own
desires. Fundamental ethical competence consists of opening up to the
wholly other and to others, being accessible to the demands of the world
and attentive to what is different from ourselves. Moral experience is not
properly described by the categories of subjectivity and objectivity; it can
be better expressed by the constellation formed by encounters and in the
categories that govern the domain of reception. In moral experience, some
situations may often be discovered and described as situations where “noth-
ing else could have been done; this was the only thing to do,” with the
particularity that we do not experience this constraint as something oppos-
ing our liberty, but rather as something that is intensely voluntary. We feel
obliged to hold values that do not seem to offer any choice, yet which do
not contradict our freedom either, even when they demand effort from us
or when we suffer their negative consequences.
In things they consider as extremely precious, subjects do not experience
them as proper positions or sovereign provisions such as propositions, ideas
or inaugural declarations, but rather as being independent from them,
commanding their respect and able to be defended with good reasons. It
is not true that we only find what we have previously hidden in things as
Nietzsche proclaimed – at least, not all the time. Sometimes, perhaps in the
happiest and most precious occasions, we find more than what we put into
them. Human beings are not sovereign to the point of being able to control
even what is supposed to surprise them. Usually, the reality is a failure of
certainty, disillusion or betrayal. However, without the possibility of disap-
pointment, things would no longer offer these surprises and the newness
that make up normal human life.
There is a certain moral superiority of mania over self-sufficiency, of
vulnerable love over control and moderation, of the generosity of passion
faced with rational prudence and of excess confronted with mere reciproc-
ity. Haemon suggested to his father Creon, the protagonist of Sophocles’
Antigone, that one should cultivate receptiveness (to other people or to the
world of nature), which is not necessary debilitating, and which may even
lead to subtler, more flexible movements. His advice shows that in order to
be civilized, we must conserve the mysterious and particular nature of the
outside world and cultivate the passions in ourselves that lead us to these
mysteries. Only those who manage to find a balance between the protection
of self on one hand, and vulnerability and openness on the other hand, can
be lovers or friends because the sovereign agent is blind when faced with
alterity. The trait of miserliness is generally more stable than generosity,
that which is closed is surer than that which is open and that which is simple
is more harmonious than that which is complex. Insofar as it involves gen-
erosity, openness and a situation that promotes a move to more complex-
ity, the ethics of hospitality are necessarily the ethics of instability, like the
vulnerable situation of a host whose anticipations are always threatened by
an untimely visitor.
Levinas criticized the position of self-sufficient subjectivity, which is always
“at home,” and of which hospitality can only be a reception appropriating
otherness and does nothing to change subjects focused on themselves. In
this case, visitors are rather hostages, and hosts are kidnappers. Yet human-
ity is only presented to us in a relationship that is not force, one might say.
Relationships that achieve freedom are not causal relationships, but rather
those where there is asymmetric intersubjectivity. These relationships, such
as with fatherhood, leave room for transcendence; they are relations where
subjects, while retaining their structure as subjects, may finally come out of
themselves and be fertile.
This means cultivating this receptiveness in a struggle against the natu-
ral tendency towards our own redundancy and to look a bit too much like
ourselves. When understood like this, ethics is a fight against aging, which
makes us predictable and inertial. It also makes us grow in openness, in
indetermination and in critical sense. There is no learning without hab-
its, nor is there any learning without fighting against inertia and routine.
The invulnerability that results from the atrophy of our habits and that
causes them to degenerate into automatic gestures reinforces the natural
tendency not to see everything that does not fit into our prior schemas.
Despite its apparent self-sufficiency, this invulnerability plunges us into
the particular situation of a lack of freedom, from which all those who
retain nothing of their soul by protecting it from the inertia of its own
degradation will suffer.
In a complex world (since everything people do becomes irremediably
more complicated), being yourself is a task that requires much imagina-
tion and a balance between tautology and alienation. Identity is a task
that cannot be solved by letting things happen by themselves, and that
cannot be gained by an emphatic act of self-affirmation either. Identity
is built between the extremes of ratification and disapproval; the way we
make ourselves depends on the balance we achieve between the experi-
ences that give us reason and those that contradict us. It is highly pos-
sible that it is impossible to live without a space where we are recognized
without any questioning, just as the opposite may be just as true: it is not
desirable to live in constant confirmation without criticism or exclusively
surrounded by cheerleaders. Our mental balance needs confirmation
from “the other”: as a retort, discordance, correction or questioning. Fear

may precisely be an absence of points of reference that ratify what we
know or who we are; by contrast, stupidity may be defined as an enormous
tautology. The human condition is found between these two extremes,
on a line running between the victorious and the spineless. The natural
tendency of a being, which just like mankind, fears the feeling of foreign-
ness more than ridicule, consists of creating its own choreography of self-
confirmation. In general, we tend to align our heartstrings with reality, so
that it confirms what we already know, want or expect. This is why we see
so many people spending their time congratulating themselves, focusing
on themselves, making themselves noticed, people who very well match
the poetic image of Paul Celan:
Fragments of dreams, wedges

driven inside nowhere:
we remain equal to ourselves,
the round star
shines everywhere
giving us its approval
(2011, 86)
The ethics of hospitality is particularly appropriate in a cultural period torn

by conflict between the imperatives of modernization and growth on one
hand and, on the other hand, the demands of the ethics of conservation,
care and protection. Faced with the general fragility of the world, we are
witnessing the birth of a powerful tendency promoting solicitude and con-
cern for the other, striving to stop the forces of destruction, negligence and
excessive modernization. Fragility begins with us: subjects who feel less pro-
tected, more exposed to perplexity and confusion in their various forms.
The fear of becoming disenfranchised seems to have replaced the enthu-
siasm of breaking away from the past prevalent in other times; once the
roar of transgression at any cost has subsided, loyalty to heritage appears as
a condition for personal development, just as environmental conservation
makes economic progress possible and as memory serves to support the
identity of individual and social groups.
The total sum of efforts invested in transforming the world and to build
again and start over is lower than the effort people spend on repairs. After
the movers and shakers and revolutionaries, it seems that those who take
care are those who are called to govern a new historical epoch. Nowadays,
Marx’s famous thesis can thereby be formulated: revolutionaries have dedi-
cated themselves to transforming the world; now we need to preserve it.
The duty of individuals is therefore not to protect themselves against
society, but to defend it, to take care of the social fabric outside of which
their identity could not be fulfilled. We might define the spirit of recent
years as the gradual awareness of the fragility of the civilized world. The
famous quote by Paul Valéry after the First World War, “We civilizations
now know ourselves mortal,” has become a commonplace, a general, everyday
experience, although it has a less dramatic tone than before (1957, 988). Yet
the danger is not with barbarians or with the threat of any war whatsoever;
rather it lies with the weakness comprising what the sociologist Ulrich Beck
calls “the society of risk” (1992). The fragility of society is represented by
the fact that uncertainty is an obligatory part of individual destinies. Life’s
trajectories are increasingly chaotic and fragmented, cut short by unsettling
events: immigration, family breakups, professional degradation, job loss,
vulnerability, solitude, and so on. Moreover, the economy is governed by
the unwavering law of competition, industrial sectors disappear completely,
solidarity seems to be buried underneath particularisms, social ties are
weakened and poverty and exclusion become the fate of a growing number
of people. This is how a general feeling of uncertainty and vulnerability has
spread.
This general vulnerability modifies the panorama where subjects must act
freely and assert their identity. The fragility of institutions, democratic hab-
its, sociability and the mechanisms of integration is becoming increasingly
evident, so that individuals feel far from oppressed by civilization yet feel
more their debt for all of this. Victims now become protectors; the impera-
tive of emancipation is a protective reflex. The duty of disalienation used
to make sense only within powerful institutions. However, with weakened
institutional constructions, the problem of taking care has replaced that of
“alienation.” This no longer means avoiding the influence of institutional
constructions, but protecting them when they are faced with decadence.
The contemporary vision of the world tends to do away with concep-
tions that saw it essentially as a powerful reality. Science has given up its
rigid determinism to manipulate some notions which now have more to
do with contingency, such as chaos, indetermination and disorder. The
Being, which traditional metaphysics imagined with the traits of stability
and strength, has been succeeded by a Being that shows up by disappear-
ing, and no longer speaks in such a peremptory tone. For Descartes, the job
of a thinker was comparable to that of an architect, whose duties consisted
of laying the foundations, building and justifying. In a weakened ontologi-
cal perspective on the other hand, the essential philosophical actions are
receptiveness, availability and attention. The Being is no longer the founda-
tion on which we build; it can no longer be considered as a raw material on
which we need to work, but rather as a reality that is revealing itself. These
two philosophical orientations correspond with an engineer’s vision of the
world and with the ethics of preserving. One is essentially promethean and
is focused on the construction of safe systems and foundations; the other
is interested in cultivating a theoretical openness to that which is revealed,
and in the moral tendency toward everything calling out to us.
The moral imperative when faced with fragility is no longer so much that
of building, but rather that of rescuing. Being confronted with the fragility
of things and beings raises the responsibility for maintaining them at the
level of values. In this context, once we are aware of the devastating effects
of great ambitions that forget their finiteness and their constitutive limita-
tions, the fundamental needs cannot be expressed with the word “libera-
tion,” but rather with the word “responsibility,” even though this is only in
the domain of small things. From now on, it is no longer relevant to know
which ideology individuals adhere to, nor under which political flag they
are fighting, or even which big project they are fighting for. Here on out,
each of us needs to question ourselves about our individual responsibility in
the fight against the destruction of the world.
In the ninth of his Duino Elegies, Rilke speaks of the ephemeral: “every-
thing that is here, that is fleeting and strangely involves us, seems to need
us. Us, the most fleeting of all”(1963, 73). This ambiguous experience of
being called out to and knowing at the same time that we are mortal is the
threshold through which we access a type of duty that no longer uses the
imperative language of power, but rather that of solicitude. This all forms
an invitation to take on a hospitable way of dealing with and encountering
the world – a certain kind of pity.
References
Beck, Ulrich (1992), Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. London: Sage.
Celan, Paul (2011), Briefwechsel mit den rheinischen Freunden, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1945), La phénoménologie de la perception, Paris: Gallimard.
Rilke, Rainer Maria (1963), Duino Elegies, trans. C. F. MacIntyre, Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press.
Valéry, Paul (1919), The Crisis of Mind, in Oeuvres I, 1957, Paris: Gallimard, 988–1000.
Part I
The domain of receiving

Chapter 1
The pathetic, or the

duty of events
Before the bipolarity of Good and Evil, the subject has thrown its lot in with the
Good in the passivity of bearing.
(Levinas 1974, 194)
The fact that people (as living beings) are beings of action who make deci-
sions and choices should not make us forget that they are also pathetic
animals, those to whom things happen, rather than being able to control
things. This is why a moral would be incomplete if it gave any indication
about the direction things were taking and remained silent with regard to
the provisions we would have to cultivate when faced with things that hap-
pen without our consent. One might even claim that events can be more
important for ethics than deliberate actions, yet not only for quantitative
reasons (the things that happen to us are more numerous than the things
we do) but because in human passivity, in circumstances of conflict, toler-
ance, respect, attention or risk, we can measure nobility of character better
than when the scenario has been conceived in advance, and better than
when circumstances submissively obey the intentions of subjectivity. Of
course, this point of view seems slightly paradoxical because ethics only
qualifies free acts and seems to have nothing to say about the mere fact of
being passive. However, in my opinion, this is the decisive point: the fact
that, in mankind, the domain where we cannot clearly distinguish between
what is active and what is passive is vast, because everything that is unequivo-
cally free or necessary only rarely appears in its pure state.
A critique of pure action

An agent is a network of relationships where everything produced by its
own volition is supported and bolstered, or even partially formed by the
things it is not (Williams 1981). This does not only mean that life is full of
unforeseen events; pure action is an abstraction that is of very little use.
Our action on the world is not usually a sovereign decision; it much more
12 The domain of receiving
resembles a compromise between what is given to us and what we are able

to do, something that could be represented by the imperative of “making
ourselves with what makes us” (Rubert de Ventós 1996, 165). The typical
representation of the ethics of hospitality is expressed in the ability to take
on situations in the same way as we do in life with everything that h appens
unexpectedly, whether they are people or even events.
This pathetic character of our condition is not a rhetorical exaggeration.
Although passiveness often precedes our actions (when we act as a response
to something), and our actions result in some passiveness (there are things
beyond our control or we face new obligations as a consequence of what
has made us), passiveness also intermingles with our actions because no
such thing as a pure action exists. This character trait of our situation in
the world becomes clear if we analyze what exactly makes up our finite-
ness. How can the world affect us in our attempts to live a good life? To
what extent do we depend on what is outside of us? Aristotle said (1220a,
11–123) that without being affected, we can be intelligent and even wisely
contemplative, yet, for instance, not have benevolence, courage or philia.
Ethics would be off course if it was ignorant of the lack of self-sufficiency in
any animal life, including our own. Of course, we are not inert objects or
drifting beings, nor are we sources of purely spontaneous movement.
There exists a long tradition that conceives of human excellence as if
we were actually invulnerable beings, or as if the ethical ideal was to con-
quer this invulnerability. Strictly speaking, nothing would happen to the
hero, as in the case of the sage according to Plato, “to whom absolutely
nothing happens” (Symposium 211b); good people are “those who have the
least need of others” (388a) says Plato. The profound influence of this way
of thinking has made us used to conceiving of value as an unconditional
dimension that cannot be affected by the outside world, reduced to pure
intention; from that point arises our surprise with the idea that ethics may
have something to say to those dimensions of our being most vulnerable to
changes and shifts: love and political activity, the feelings and passions that
push us toward the world of perishable objects and that bind us to it, placing
us at risk of losing and of conflict. In this fragile situation, we are not only
agents. We receive praise and censure for much of what we have not done;
facts that simply happen without our consent may transform our lives; it is
as problematic to confide our life to our friends, lovers or countries as trying
to live in ignorance of them. We ourselves are responsible for many of the
risks we have caused, but most of the time they are, rather, events produced
without our consent. These are inevitable aspects of life in an uncertain and
sometimes hostile world. Tragedies have described the complexity of these
situations with such beauty that sometimes we forget that they are part of
our everyday situation.
Since fortune has a definite role in the structure of human life and
courage, in the face of attempting to immunize existence against things
The pathetic, or the duty of events 13
that happen, ethics must seek a form of practical rationality that aims at a
type of properly human self-sufficiency, i.e. finite and limited. In this light,
Aeschylus may appear more reasonable than Kant and closer to the human
condition than any of the ideals of autarchy. Why must the good life exclude
or minimize our most fragile and unstable attachments and encourage the
most self-sufficient activities?
Tragedy is the best critique of pure reason. In it, we see the relation-
ship between human goodness and the world of the outside happen-
stance much better than in many deontological treatises. In Aeschylus’
Agamemnon, for instance, we see that experiencing a conflict is an opportu-
nity for personal learning rather than an elevation to the immutable good
where all rivalry disappears. Authors of tragedies suggest that in order to
discover all of the complexity and richness of life, commotion and tragic
suffering are required. Courage can be found in pathetic happenstance.
In Sophocles’ Philoctetes, Neoptoleme does not know how to respect the
suffering of others until he is made to scream in pain. Euripides’ Admeto
does not know what is involved in having a wife, in loving someone, until he
loses Alcestis. There is another type of knowledge that is learned through
suffering because it is precisely the appropriate perception of how human
life is in such situations. Some people may attain this knowledge without
experiencing extremely tragic situation; other may become even worse
and grow more hardened after experiencing a painful event. For many,
constant good fortune may be a curse and tragedy may be a happy reality
because the sudden experience of a tragic situation would seem to them
to be necessary in order to properly recognize this and other situations
afterwards.
One thing that tragedy teaches us is that human identity is the result
of conflict. Our identity requires a historical explanation because history
explains how the world enters into conflict with our subjective intentions.
Identity is a historical affair and not a willful act. It is not the product of a
conscious action or a plan to reach this precise result. Paul Valéry had a sim-
ilar perception when he complained of the fact that it was not possible to do
anything without everything getting intertwined. Identity is not the result of
an action, but rather that of a history, i.e. a process developed under condi-
tions that behave randomly when faced with our own aspirations. No one
owes their existence to an act of approval of it.
Histories are series of events that disobey its subjects’ intentions. They
are not the fruit of a completed plan or of what we do when we can do
whatever we want. Of course, history is full of voluntary acts and sovereign
initiatives, but this is not what makes up history; we can make plans, but the
future of these complex processes (that we or others tell as our own history
once the future becomes the present) is actually outside of our intentions
and prognostications. Subjects, institutions and social systems have no his-
tory by virtue of their intentions, but because of the involvement of the
intentions of others, the unexpected effects of the decisions they make and
contingent events they are not programmed to deal with. Identity is what
results from all of the conflicting intentions that clash before finally being
thwarted by unexpected events. What we are historically always results from
a mixture of intention and vexation.
What ought to be told is why someone did not do what they wanted to
do. We do not talk about the actions, but rather about what is added to
them, interferes with them or contradicts them, i.e. about everything that
owes nothing to will. Here, I do not mean that what we do always differs
from what we claim to do. At every level of social action, there is some
normality, such as regularity, repetition, security and the constancy of con-
ditions. There only need to be a few ruptures to this normality in order
to reach “historiable” material, i.e. in that it is necessary to say how some-
thing has become something completely different from what was expected.
What transforms events into histories is something that happens or occurs,
not something that is done. History is what we tell to explain how the cir-
cumstances of something have been changed without this change being
deduced from a change that complies with any known rules.
The result of a history, the final situation it ends up in, does not bear the
marks of a product. What results from history is not what we wanted, even
though history-makers often do what they wanted to do. This is particularly
obvious in the case of personal identity. With our actions and omissions,
we decisively take part in becoming who we are, but no one owes their
identity to the desire to produce what they are. Strictly speaking, identity is
not something available to us. What we are does not allow us to understand
ourselves as being the result of our will.
Unpredictable existence
Although human beings cannot effectively protect themselves from misfor-
tune, they may at least organize their lives and commitments in order to
prevent the appearance of serious conflicts in their daily lives. One way of
doing this would be to simplify the structure of our own moral commit-
ments, removing ourselves from those commitments that would normally
be generated by the requirements we encounter. Very often, in order to
organize our lives, we stick to the rational principle of avoiding conflict and
disappointment.
Yet it does not seem possible to live without shaping intentions or with-
out cultivating the images that inspire us while we are doing so. To live is
to anticipate. And the imaginary anticipation of an ideal of human excel-
lence is an intrepid exercise that introduces risk to the very core of our
lives. Forming an accurate idea of ourselves is something that is less certain
than calculating and predicting because predictions foretold by human
genius are always made at the expense of irreducible unpredictability.
Thomas Mann defined people as “dabblers in life,” i.e. that they venture to
live although they do not yet have the life experience they need to ensure
a successful life. The experience we gain to live is ours only when life is
waning. We are born and we die too soon. We are born although we do
not know how to live and we die when we can no longer live even though
we know how to. The most important things cannot be taught or learned
before doing them. We all have to have direct experience in life through
unique, individual paths that are rough and have no conclusion. An opaque
background seems to surround any attempt at becoming “professionals” of
life precisely because life, since it cannot be repeated, does not let itself be
subject to any experimentation.
One of the reasons why Aristotle refuses to protect our life against cer-
tain attacks of fate is precisely his resistance to make ethics a technique. The
Platonic aspiration to universality, precision and stable control is dismissed
by Aristotle in favor of a receptive, flexible perception. Prudence must
be prepared for surprise and improvisation, i.e. not to be a pure action.
Therefore, risk is an interesting, interested condition of life. Specifically,
human action occurs on an uncertain stage, unlike behavior from instinct.
Insecurity promotes flexibility; it is a time of openness to possibilities with-
out which both innovations and cultural evolution would be unthinkable.
Risks are also possibilities; “opportunity” is the generic name for an open
situation whose negative result is defeat. Our actions are strategies against
danger, but they are also the origin of new risks, to the same extent that
they establish opportunities to deploy freedom. Emancipation has much
to do with the rupture of “certain” horizons of waiting, with trying out new
operative possibilities and with keeping the future open. What is normal is
some chaos; disorder should not be eradicated at any cost. This involves not
so much perfecting the mechanisms of safety as normalizing this insecurity
that we have accepted as one element of our various ways of living.
There is something aporetic in the claim to be able to absolutely guar-
antee security and to eliminate any aspect in which any reason for fear may
appear on the horizon. Some fear makes up the human condition such
that recklessness and the elimination of contingency are not valid as exis-
tential norms. Free people are not those who need no foothold, as Adorno
claimed (1966, 100). The acknowledgement of human finiteness can also
be represented in the recommendation of accepting and overcoming fear,
by giving into the need for protection and similarly the need to distance
ourselves from our obsession of being reassured.
Faced with the ideals of a life spared from any risk and faced with the
illusion that is possible to live reasonably while being sheltered from misfor-
tune, the idea of hospitality reminds us of something special in our human
condition: our fragile, vulnerable existence, dependent on things that are
not at our full disposal and exposed to fate. This is why we suffer misfor-
tune, why we need others and why we seek out their gratitude, approval or
friendship. The particular beauty of human excellence resides precisely in

its vulnerability. When commenting on the image of the tree used by Pindar
in one of his odes, Martha Nussbaum insisted on the plant as a model for
moral imagination as opposed to the dominant model of a heroic animal
or mineral stability:
The tenderness of a plant is not the dazzling hardness of a gem. There

seem to be two, and perhaps two incompatible, kinds of value here.
Nor, perhaps, is the beauty of true human love the same as that of the
love of two immortal gods, only shorter. The liquid sky that covers these
people and circumscribes their possibilities also lends to their environ-
ment a quick, gleaming splendor that would not, we suspect, be the
climate of heaven.
(1995, 2)
In the Greek poetic tradition, human excellence cannot be invulnerable

while simultaneously keeping its distinctive nature. Ulysses preferred the
mortal love of a woman who was destined to grow old to the immutable
splendor of Calypso. The contingent character of something comprises the
strongest reason we can muster to praise that which is precious. There is
a particular beauty in the mutable character of what we enjoy in stories of
luck, indeterminable adventure and tragedy, a beauty barely included in
the human ideals of self-sufficiency and rationality. Any attempt to govern
life by eliminating happenstance, emphasizing aspects of action over passiv-
ity, would lead to our dismissing certain activities and human dimensions
that are particularly vulnerable to changes and shifts.
A life planned out to exclude risk can deteriorate seriously. Human
excellence is inseparable from vulnerability, the gratitude we cannot
demand from others and society that is beyond our control; it assumes a
type of rationality that is not identified with domination, but with open-
ness, receptiveness and astonishment. This is why we have always managed
to compensate for an excess of security as well. Games, art and sport are
precisely a show of imponderability. They are the enjoyment of insecurity,
which explains such passion for combat, games of chance, betting, and lei-
sure and similar activities of homo ludens. The organization of the domains
of uncertainty is an instrument by which we manage to make a distressingly
predictable world habitable.
Human life needs to balance out spaces of security with areas of risk. If
there were only one of these, existence would be unbearably boring; if eve-
rything were one gigantic risk, we would be living, so to speak, in exhausting
pleasantness. Many of the domains of our culture are configured around
techniques to produce indifference. Human beings need spaces made of
silliness (in customs and conventions of upbringing, the predictability of
promises) to be able to withstand unpredictability in what truly interests
us: love, business, games, politics, etc. But one of the features of the game
is the fact that we may lose; without this possibility, a game would not fulfill
the role we expect it to and would be a simulacrum of emotion with a guar-
anteed happy ending. I do not think that we would be prepared to give up
all the emotional aspects of life in exchange for a predictable existence, in
the same way that, generally speaking, we would not want to play if there
was absolutely no uncertainty in the result either. Games interest us because
they are open to victory as well as defeat.
Lucky freedom
One of the particularities of human beings is how easily we do things com-
pared with the unpleasantness produced by things that happen to us. We
control doing things better than suffering them, and nothing seems so wor-
risome to us as events that erupt into our lives such as people who show
up at our homes without an invitation or people who, although they were
invited, were not authorized to behave as masters and make us lose control
of our independence.
Even in Plato’s time, the Athenians were convinced that progress could
erase any uncontrolled contingency of social life. They found an opposi-
tion between tyche (fate) and techne (technique), between a life at the mercy
of fate and an existence that has become more certain or controllable by
using a few technai. Technique is associated with prediction, planning and
foresight, while, as Democritus asserted, the power of fate is only an excuse
imagined to mask the very lack of practical skill. This way of looking at
things is therefore nothing new. People have always been fascinated by arti-
ficiality and felt threatened by fate because things happen to us and we have
to make do with them, and they are not completely at our disposal. Activism
assumes that there is no such thing as being irremediable, irrevocable, des-
tined or unavailable. Freud expressed this in a very evocative way: the giver
of everything that is given to us lives in ourselves. And Nietzsche immortal-
ized this idea in the aphorism “I am a destiny”: the victory of freedom over
fate. We are the only masters of our vital space.
The “administered world” that displeased Adorno so much is governed
by the principle of “mastering luck” (Elster, 2002). The Enlightenment
appeared as a reasonable response to fatalistic nonchalance, but without
being exempt from visionary characteristics. The utopian city dreamt up
by Louis-Sébastien Mercier in 1770 was governed by the principle that
“we have left nothing to chance; this is an old, meaningless word, completely
expunged from our language.” This victory over fate has its own paradoxi-
cal irony, a sort of vengeance by fate that consists of leaving people at the
mercy of themselves. People absolutize themselves, of course, yet they also
make themselves highly guilty. If everything real must rely on our appro-
priation, existing evil would then become an unbearable recrimination.
The more people confirm they are competent to improve reality, the more
they make themselves responsible for reality that has not been improved.
Fatalism used to offer us at least a few excuses to exonerate ourselves by the
presence of evil in the world; it was possible to blame evil for how difficult
things were to improve or even to blame others in charge. The elevation of
people is equivalent to their potential feeling of guilt. When Fichte defined
the contemporary era as one of total guilt, he did nothing other than show
the least likeable face of its emancipating plan. De-fatalizing reality is done
at the price of making those who take action responsible.
This alternative between freedom and fate seems less and less adequate
to allow us to understand the human condition, fundamentally because
its precise distinction is becoming increasingly harder. Luck has much to
do with our freedom, and happiness has much to do with luck. This is why
it would be sensible to speak of “lucky freedom.” We are not facing two
opposed domains, but rather two domains that overlap in us in various ways
and prohibit us from dealing with anthropological problems, with our only
tool being the ability to discriminate between freedom and necessity or, to
put it as a Kantian expression, between what we do with nature and what
nature does with us. There are two fundamental reasons to be wary of this
simplification: the fact that freedom frequently transforms into fate, and
the fact that fate often takes on the form of freedom.
We can observe the blurred dualism between freedom and necessity
whenever there appears the finiteness that limits human claims of being
able to configure: people act in the context of the laws of nature and in
a temporal horizon that is not inexhaustible, and any act attempting to
bring order comes at the cost of the disproportionate increase of disorder
(to the point that we might even say that order is the continuation of chaos
by other means). Many experiments have torn down this kinetic utopia that
claims that the general movement of the world should be an implemen-
tation of our plans for it (the presence of uncontrollable elements, our
uneasiness with general mobilization, unbearable acceleration, blockages
and turbulence and the fact that things are beyond our control). In every-
thing we do, we do more than what we claim to do. Involuntarily, and some-
times unwittingly, we set in motion a chain of actions whose consequences
are heavier than what we intended to produced. A “second nature” formed
from unwanted and uncontrollable consequences belies the planning com-
petence of freedom. That which was thought to be active self-movement
turned out to be a relentless movement going beyond any controllable
plan. All actions enter into an exchange of interactions that are beyond the
intention and desires of its authors. What is produced in history is wiped
from our record; the stubbornness of involuntary results triumphs over our
freedom and moral initiatives.
Precisely, one of the most fertile postmodern experiences was the dis-
covery of the irrevocable nature of our past, our facticity and the fact that
there are not so many traditions to the point that we are always in the
comfortable situation of breaking with them. Considering all of this, I pro-
pose an acceptance of our natural condition, consisting of an accumula-
tion of experiences, accredited prejudice, habitual slowness, institutional
inertia or idleness. This would mean promoting the awareness of human
finiteness, of this passiveness that used to be the dark side of the modern
project. In other words: recognizing the random character of the world and
the contingency of identities that comprise it, learning to live under the
conditions of a recognized contingency and trying to transform fate into
opportunity.
In a world where we inevitably live with some degree of uncertainty,
where the consequences of what we do (or do not do) are essentially beyond
any prediction, we have no choice but to give ourselves up partially to our
destiny. With our actions, we can only make proposals, and their outcomes
in terms of success or failure are largely beyond our control.
Underestimating this situation is very often the source of stubbornness,
obstinacy and fanaticism. Voluntarism is not always ingenuous and praise-
worthy; it may also become blindly dangerous. Here, we may give reason
to what is often said: that the opposite of good is not evil, but rather good
intentions. There is nothing more incorrigible than a well-intentioned
blind action. Thus, many plans compensate for their lack of judgment of
the state of the world by well-intentioned wishes to change the world. The
absolute improvement of the world therefore becomes total confusion.
The other reason to abandon the rigid opposition between freedom
and necessity is that fate is often transformed into freedom. Our freedom
owes a lot to the randomness of life. Rather than trying to dominate it, we
must learn to make do with our fate, to make it favorable. Freedom is not a
territory conquered from randomness, but an alliance between the two of
them. Indeed, we cannot remove randomness from life, but would we do
so if we could? I am convinced that we would not. The dimension of open-
ness and uncertainty is what gives a certain flavor to the present and lets us
confront the future with interest. Incalculability provides a special tension
to the events of life, just as total predictability is the safest antechamber of
ennui. Randomness, newness and surprise are factors that make our human
existence a livable project. Our psychological and emotional constitution
is made so that we do not want to live in a world determined in advance,
where our future is set (even if we are the ones to set it). We would prefer
our fragile and uncertain condition, even at the price of being threatened
by misfortune. Randomness can only be fully eliminated at the price of
leading a life completely determined by routine. Unlike Kant, we might say
that it is not morality but life itself that supposes freedom that is incompat-
ible with predictability. Without this random freedom, life would be empty
of tension and surprises and would be deprived of any unexpected event.
This would be a life completely different from the one we want to live, and
the one we usually live. That said, and as with everything, there needs to be
a balance: a world that is sufficiently predictable to make a rationally led
life possible and sufficiently unpredictable to create areas to cultivate an
element of tension and interest.
The many intersections between fate and freedom prevent us from exag-
gerating the role of chance in human life. Luck is not completely unpre-
dictable, nor does it go against any likelihood. The fact that we are not the
masters of our own destiny does not mean, strictly speaking, that we have
absolutely no control over it. With destiny, we can collaborate. It is not pos-
sible to win big if we have not bought a lottery ticket or to win at the races
if we have not placed a bet. We at least need to be in the right place at the
right time. Nietzsche gave this idea the form of a nice imperative: we always
need to measure up to fate.
The clearest example of this synthesis of freedom and fate is to be found
in sport. In sport, we find a plastic version of this curious alliance. What we
love in sport is essentially a drama that obeys a law of imminent and always
deferred culmination. Our fascination with games can only be explained
by our interest in the uncertain; the possibility that something might hap-
pen. Sports are organizations regulated to become a “staging of irregu-
larity.” This logic in games has great anthropological meaning and can
explain why Camus said that everything he knew about morality he owed
to soccer.
Athletes are trained to give something they are not sure they are able
to give. They are trained in order to get something for which there is no
training possible: to reach the limits of their output. Any successful athletic
output results from a coordination of outputs that cannot be guaranteed.
Athletic success is not something that someone can produce. An athlete’s abil-
ity consists, strictly speaking, of setting conditions for the possibility (rather
than the necessity) of succeeding, in behaving so that, sometimes, there will
be an unintentional success, in being there. Physical fitness, training and tac-
tics are assumed so that at the moment of truth the body can do something
that exceeds what it can do. This is why there are several possibilities. This
is why the final result is up to chance. This is why manifest superiority is irri-
tating. This is why it is legitimate to rely on luck. This is why responsibility
is so difficult to assign (or so easily assigned, for example, to the referee or
coach). This is why the language preceding a competition features so much
unbridled desire. This is part of the normal state of professional sports:
resulting in actions that are not normal, actions that are not controlled, but
that happen. In this respect, it is very significant to observe how bland the
explanations given afterwards by athletes are. Athletes train for an action
that at the last moment they cannot fully control and that no one can teach
them perfectly. They train for the chance of their victory. Their triumph is
due to their good training, but is not the mere result of their effort. It does
not have the character of an output, but of something that is added to what
they are capable of doing by virtue of their proper preparation. Victory is

luck, the same as what we can say for things that turn out for us. This is some-
thing that, beyond anything we might claim, has the undeniable character
of an event. Athletes are those who, publicly and virtuously, try to do some-
thing they cannot do.
Nietzsche said that the procedure of legend was to make an event pass
for an action, to explain what happens as the result of what someone does,
placing a subject behind events. Fascination with games behaves inversely
to that with legends. Games do not suggest an intentionally explainable
world, but rather stage an unexplainable world that ultimately cannot be
understood as the result of intentions. All actions aim at an event that
cannot be described and understood as an action, i.e. making the action
pass for a pure event. Sports and other game events showcase the drama
of an increasingly risky transformation of a claimed action into an invol-
untary event.
If this interpretation is correct, this would allow us to draw several conclu-
sions. The most important one would be that the modern world celebrates
the mysteries of lucky freedom in games and sports. Wherever we appar-
ently boast of total control over space and time, we transform it into a game
with imponderable results. Sports are a celebration of the human inability
to make ourselves the master of ourselves physically. In sports, people also
celebrate their physical abilities as well as the limits to these abilities, and
through this, the limitations of power over ourselves and the world.
In my opinion, this is what sports should be and what they usually, but
not always, are. Many things that happen today in the world of sport cor-
respond rather to the opposite of what I have presented above. Current
sports have degenerated into sports mythology, precisely according to
Nietzsche’s underlying definition of mythology: what any event declares
to be an action or intentional product. In one way, sports assert them-
selves as the supreme expression of a society of production that is in
love with itself. But even though this exaltation of sports and its staging
strives to portray sports positively, its own purpose is betrayed by this
ideology. We can see this perfectly in cheating, and especially with the
phenomenon of doping. In general, this practice is criticized for giving
athletes prohibited advantages and because in the longer term it can
threaten their health. Both of these deserve to be considered, but they
still ignore the core of the anti-sportsmanship side of doping. We might
settle the issue if everyone was given the same advantages and if we could
eliminate any side effects. The act of doping is scornful of sport itself.
Those who dope deny the limits of their own abilities, not wanting to
be convinced or feel, at the summit of their power, that all meaning
of sports relies on the possible positive experience of these very limits.
In this way, doping is an expression that fully coheres with the ideology of
sports that only celebrates the desire for power, rather than the experience
of surpassing it. We might also put it thus: with it, the body appears to be
only an instrument of victory, not an incalculable way to resolve athletic
competitions.
This digression on sports can help us understand other forms of logic
that institutionalize luck. We have given this form to several of our con-
structions, like games, politics and law, which all find an ally of liberty in
the impartiality of chance. It is not true that luck always favors the powerful.
Randomness is generally more impartial than planning, and many institu-
tions who draw lots or use processes governed by impartiality have under-
stood this. The removal of this unpredictability in the name of human
freedom to control things would be as absurd as if sporting competitions
were regulated in favor of the team that makes the most effort, or if lotteries
were tweaked to favor the most underprivileged. Without a doubt, there are
teams that deserve to win, and people who are needy, but referees and the
governing bodies of lotteries and gambling have no obligation to be chari-
table: rather their duty is to protect luck. If they did not do this, they would
perhaps be worthy of all sorts of praise, but they would have destroyed insti-
tutions that many of us could not live without.
Of course, we can make it so that chances are on our side, but there is
something detestable in claiming to lead a life set out in advance, at least in
certain aspects. There are items we cannot claim directly, such as happiness;
there is no activity that can be described as a search for happiness. We work,
we rest and we play, but we do not seek out happiness. Nor can we offer hap-
piness as a gift. Happiness is not something that we can give ourselves inten-
tionally, but rather something that happens. Happiness “to order” does not
exist, nor does any specialized authority where this order could be placed.
Happiness is the sort of thing a tireless quest of which is the sign that things
are going badly, which Adorno called an “unintentional truth,” the tireless
quest for which is the sign that things are going badly (1970, 337–338).
These are unpredictable states that, like good ideas, and like emotions and
entertainment, can be favored without ever being produced for they are
not acts of will. This is something more than accomplishing an expectation.
Yet all the charm is found in this difficulty. Their resistance to occurring at
the dictate of our freedom makes them both fragile and, at the same time,
worthy of our highest esteem.
The beginning and end of human life, for example, also appear to be
events that resist being completely planned. Nearly every culture considers
it to be unacceptable to place the beginning and end of life in a register
other than that of fate. In its most acceptable extremes, genetically engi-
neered children or relentless therapy to artificially prolong life are exam-
ples of the unacceptable hold of technology on human life. The protection
that those who claim to limit human power seek in nature to decide on life
and death can be understood this way as a defense of its natural character.
That something is natural does not so much mean that a biological basis
should be respected, but rather than it is preferable to let things take their
own course. These events are better governed by chance than by relentless
or foolhardy techniques. Neither falling in love nor death are things that
are done, but rather they happen to us. Human sexuality in some way fol-
lows the lucky logic of sports events, of the very emotion of unpredictability.
Sex is always uncertain, if only because there are no prophylactics against
emotion.
The erotic follows a logic similar to that of sports; it shares the same
unpredictable seriousness. Difficulties in programming offspring result
from the relatively involuntary manner in which they are produced; there is
something like a generic invitation, but the host is not the one to propose
the date of the visit. There must be good reasons for procreation to have
an aspect of chance and for children to not be completely plannable. The
fact of being born in a context of actions with more or less uncertain results
may have something to do with human dignity; it is as if the fact of not being
born intentionally gives us the right to not be henceforth at the absolute
disposal of anyone. Defending the naturalness of our origins is equivalent
to limiting the power of those who will be involved in our life.
The ethics of vulnerable life

To understand the Socratic affirmation that it is preferable to suffer injus-
tice than to commit it (Gorgias 469c), it should be remembered that this
was said to counter the Sophists. One of those Socrates was speaking to pro-
posed an ideal life as that of a tyrant, i.e. someone who could do or say what-
ever he wanted without any other consideration, without anyone being able
to contradict him. For this Sophist, it was inconceivable for someone not
to want to have ultimate power over others. If someone is able to impose
their interests on others, he who does not would be stupid. For him, human
excellence was a life without hindrance.
Socrates considered that the Sophist was mistaken about the true nature
of happiness, because the life of a tyrant is a miserable life that no sound-
minded person would want to lead. A tyrant can trust no one. Given that his
life relies on his power over others, he cannot ever receive true gratitude
because he cannot hope for any real friendship. Furthermore, he would
have to take many precautions before entering into such a relationship.
The inherent reciprocity of friendship would shake the invulnerable core
of his own position. The tyrant cannot and must not configure something
like confidence in the world. For Socrates, however, justice is the kind of
relationship with the world that makes reciprocal confidence and aban-
donment possible. This is why we can say that injustice causes discord and
hate, while justice causes harmony and friendship (Republic 351d). Yet the
tyrant cannot even trust himself. The desire to live according to his desires
would make him a slave to these very desires, keeping him from forming
a stable relationship with himself. This would prevent him from living as a
“friend to himself,” i.e. as someone who respects and protects his own well-
understood interest.
For Plato, only communal life is a place of true happiness. The only ones
who can be friends with themselves are those who are able to be friends with
others; yet the friendship of others is within reach of those who behave gen-
erally (even toward those who are not friends) so as to cultivate the form of
a potentially friendly exchange with others. Justice is the virtue that directs
action in this form of communal life. This is why Socrates can say that it
is better to suffer injustice than commit it. Those who commit injustice
destroy the basis of this happiness, in addition to their own happiness, while
those who suffer it in the face of adversity do not lose anything decisive in
reaching happiness.
Human vulnerability is fundamentally based on the fact that the good
life needs relational goods, outside items toward which excellent action is
directed, other subjects that are present to receive our offer of hospital-
ity. This is particularly valid for activities having to do with citizenship and
political community, and those involving friendship and personal love. Of
course, these goods are extremely vulnerable to chance setbacks. Life is par-
ticularly vulnerable whenever we defend an idea of politics whose civil plu-
rality and vitality are open to the possibility of conflict and an idea of love
that wants its receiver to have independent movement, love that does not
linger on domination, that does not want to escape from the world of what
happens to us. This type of political and loving community highlights that
the best relationships between people are very vulnerable to what occurs in
the world over time.
In Antigone, there was mention of an existence lived “on the cutting edge
of fortune” and there was a warning against excessive zeal to eliminate the
uncertainty of human life. Value decreases when we eliminate the risks that
are part of specifically human virtue. There exists a precious quality in the
social excellence that disappears whenever we leave the realm of an uncon-
trollable future. There exists a sort of beauty in the desire to love someone
(despite the fact that this love is unstable and imperfect) that is outside
this sort of love that shuts out the possibility of betrayal. All human activity
devoted to certainty is a spoiled existence.
Is there any sense in the claim that we can rationally govern our lives? Is it
at least possible to in some way behave reasonably between resignation and
imposing our will? Of course, a total rationalization of every domain of life
is not part of rationally governing life. Rather, ethical rationality is trying
to behave correctly in a given circumstance, whether or not it is rational.
In several respects, and within a certain limit, it is better for us to maintain
nature as a space of contingent events and to respect the unpredictability
of free and spontaneous exchange with others, rather than to try to submit
everything to our planning. Even our nature is a domain of reality that
cannot be completely rationalized. Desires and feelings, for example, are

the elementary forms of human perception based on which all rational
behavior must be built. Therefore, the acknowledgement and manipula-
tion of the portion of reality that is not rational or that cannot be rational-
ized is a rational affair. It is not so much rationalizing that which is not an
affair of reason as succeeding in reasonably navigating with it.
Self-determination depends on external circumstances because there
is no self-sufficient life without a world or without a social context. Thus,
acting reasonably is independent to some extent of the result obtained.
Human life does not aim at self-sufficient happiness separate from the con-
tingencies and pathologies of human and social existence. The ability to
govern our own life also depends both on conditions beyond our control
and our very fragility. Disastrous impotence and tragic ignorance are not
affairs exclusively reserved for literature. However, those who renounce
governing their own life are more at the mercy of impotence and igno-
rance that those who undertake this job. There exists no alternative: no
other invulnerable life that is guaranteed to be spared from failure. We
might discuss the magnitude of this danger, but it is not reasonable not to
confront it.
The self-determination of life (even if it is fully self-determined) may
limit us. The good life is not sufficiently defined if we understand it as a
self-determined life. Self-determination can only be successful as an open
orientation toward the world. It is true that self-determination does not
only imply that we should be able to determine everything that affects the
conditions of our own life, most of which is not within our reach. The deter-
mination we are capable of occurs necessarily in contexts shared with oth-
ers, where we have the perspective from which they can be accepted or
modified. All self-determination has a meaning of contrast: it is done with
respect and as a response to determinations that occur in the social and
cultural spheres.
For any life oriented toward truth and goodness, the possibility of cor-
recting this way of life has central significance. Ethical rationality is an
attempt to lead our own life so that it can be corrected along the way and
modified for good reasons. The idea of being able to be corrected belongs
to the very idea of self-determination, either through the opinion of oth-
ers or through items about which we have an opinion. Self-determination
is the skill for giving a response to these two possible types of resistance. It
is the ability (in response to historic, social and biographical conditions)
to determine the course of our own actions using our own experience and
reflection. This orientation toward truth is a widening of the maneuvering
space of personal freedom. Those who lead their life while exposing it to
the possibility of being corrected are less at the mercy of circumstances than
those who give into these circumstances with no way of establishing any
distance from them and without being able to analyze and plan. Of course,
we cannot control everything that happens to us (even wanting to would be

irrational) and it is sometimes appropriate to let ourselves be guided. Yet
we still have to determine when and under what circumstances we give in to
the game of circumstances. Leading a life rationally is nothing other than
the continual exercise of this attempt. Such an attempt allows us to enjoy
the fragility of our existence with the ability to correct it.
It is possible to give a positive interpretation to the limits of all self-
determination. Life must be within the reach of the irruption of the moment.
By disrupting the continuity of life, desires and predictions, an unexpected
moment makes us feel that we are living within a finite time, with limited
possibilities, which we can choose or tolerate, know or ignore, accept or
despise. Successful self-determination may therefore be that belonging to
those who try to carry out a promising life while not letting themselves be
ensnared by this plan. This would involve being open to experiencing the
moment, that one’s own determination makes it possible to have freedom
consisting of taking on a form that is more than a mere instrument to fully
attain our goals. Human goodness does not consist of full coincidence with
reality; rather, it assumes a space where it is possible to discover the vital
possibilities and situations presented to us. This does not mean complying
with the world or with ourselves; it is a subjective openness to the relevant
possibilities of the world.
The good life can only occur within the scope of an intersubjective world.
In this sense, there is no such thing as leading a life privately. Leading your
own life is always a modification of experiences and orientations in a world
we share with others. Knowing the world always implies knowing the real-
ity of this world that is accessible to others. If happiness in life is not an
illusion, this happiness must include openness to a reality that can be per-
ceived by others, independently from whether it is perceived effectively or
not. Happiness describes the playing field of a good life, in which what is
good is good for others, not only for me. I experience a way of life that is
good for me as the realization of a possibility of life that I can say is, or could
be as well, a good way of life for others.
References
Adorno, Theodor W. (1931/1970), “Die Aktualitat der Philosophie,” Gesammelte
Schriften I, 1970, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
Adorno, Theodor W. (1966), Negative Dialektik, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
Aeschylus (2004), Agamemnon, trans. P. de May, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Aristotle (1999), Nichomachean Ethics, trans. W. D. Ross, Kitchener: Batoche Books.
Elster, Jon (2002), Ulysses Unbound: Studies in Rationality, Precommitment, and
Constraints, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Euripides (2013), The Complete Greek Tragedies, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Levinas, Emmanuel (1974), Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence, The Hague:

Martinus Nijhoff.
Mercier, L. S. (1770), L’An 2440, Rêve s’il en fut jamais, London.
Nussbaum, Martha (1995), The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy
and Philosophy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Plato (1997), Complete Works, Cambridge, MA: Hackett Publishing Co.
Rubert de Ventós, Xavier (1996), Ética sin atributos, Barcelona: Anagrama.
Sophocles (2013), The Complete Greek Tragedies, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Williams, Bernard (1981), Moral Luck: Philosophical Papers 1973–1980, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Chapter 2
Accepting people
Identity and the commitment
to hospitality
The relationship between host and guest is a good illustration of the

Hegelian idea that identities are formed in a relationship of reciprocity;
one cannot exist without the other. As Plato said, we are not entirely self-
sufficient and we have forged ourselves in an “exchange consisting of giving
and receiving” (Republic, 369c). Our identity is not a given. Being a person
means occupying a place that would not exist without a space where oth-
ers can occupy their own space. The same can be said with understanding
a language: we cannot know if we understand it if we do not know if oth-
ers can. We are not emitters of encrypted signals or receivers of anony-
mous messages, but rather speaking beings who know what we want to say
at the same time and to the extent that our words are understood by oth-
ers. The discovery of self is an intersubjective act. This does not mean that
personal identity is something we owe to the recognition of others, because
we have it by right. Recognition that is revocable would not be real recogni-
tion because it would not be the perception of an identity associated with
irrevocable ownership.
In any case, the perception of our rights and duties takes place in a space
defined by recognition, which I call “hospitality” here. Discovering ourselves
as a guest or a host, as the one giving or receiving (or perhaps better, as
someone who does both to different extents and at different times), means
discovering an identity paired with uncertainties and that is the source of
obligations and responsibilities. This is why the perception of self and the
perception of duty have the same source. The moral experience is not a
late discovery that realizes a being that has already been formed. Taylor
expressed this with the idea that the self is a moral position. Our idea of
who we are necessarily includes an idea of what we have to be.
The figures of the host and the guest represent a certain model for think-
ing about the decentered condition of the human subject, the particular
situation of someone who is not fully in himself, someone who lives in a
sort of dependency without total alienation: the relationship of hospital-
ity is not mechanical because the guest may leave and the host may also
send him away. Yet this is not a relationship supported exclusively by the
Accepting people 29
freedom of choice either; often, we receive untimely visitors and hospitality

is the response to an initiative we did not take ourselves. Furthermore, in
contemporary society, these figures of identity are formed in a context we
must pay attention to if we want to understand what possibilities we have for
creating hospitality.
The society of individuals

We live in a world where everything seems to conspire against the long
term, against projects spread out over time, long-lasting bonds or identi-
ties that cannot be modified. We cannot count on the assurance of a stable
job, of undebatable knowledge or on relationships protected against any
adversity. At any time, our job may be transferred and no one can guarantee
that what we know today will be of any use tomorrow and any relationship is
more threatened than ever by attrition and betrayal. Our morale also seems
to be that of vagabonds who do not know how long they will stay where
they are, especially because the duration of their stay is not completely up
to them. All they know is that they likely will not stay for long. What drives
nomads is the disappointment of their last place of rest and the unshakable
hope that the next place, which is still unknown to them, will be free from
the disadvantages of the previous one.
Independently of whether this sensation responds to a situation that is
real or not, despite the degree of pathetic exaggeration it may entail, it is
undeniable that we often perceive things this way. This is an experience
that can be explained by the logic of certain social processes as the result
of a weakening of traditional identities. This may be summarized in the
idea of switching from a received identity to an elective identity. In traditional
societies, people used to be born with the context fully included (one might
say), inserted into a determined social structure or cultural tradition. With
modernization, social status ceases to be something given as a destiny, loses
its inexorable character and is up to personal freedom. In principle, I may
give up the specific context I find myself in and construct my own social
scene whose configuration will essentially depend on decision and will.
In the modern world, genealogical orientations are relativized or sur-
passed by synchronic perspectives. The fact that something has always been
determined is less significant than our current decision about knowing
how we want it to be now. The very identity of individuals gravitates more
around responsibility than heritage, and invention becomes more impor-
tant than imitation. It is not surprising then that identities resulting from
belonging to assignment are growing weaker and that the idea of identity as
a free acquisition is becoming stronger. Rightly so, we tend to understand
the process of society’s changing as the dissolution of rigid social ties. The
subject becomes a constructor of society. Instead of adapting to assigned
social relationships, subjects attempt to develop the ability to create these
contexts themselves. The old obligations that granted security and stability
to individuals must be replaced by elective relationships. A majority of rela-
tions that used to be based on overseeing bureaucracy are now being cho-
sen and experienced at our own risk. Individualization essentially means
the dissolution of traditional forms of life into other forms where individu-
als are the ones who produce and stage their biographies without relying on
an unquestioned, safe and stable moral medium.
Individuals are no longer required to be prepared to accept “moral sur-
vival kits” or ready-made packages of “correct living” that may dictate every-
thing that needs to be done in any important situation in life. This is why we
must constantly stipulate rules, standards, purposes and procedures.
Individuality is therefore not thought of as a singularity out of a gen-
eral case or as an assigned characteristic, but rather as a personal conquest.
Gehlen ironically synthesized this particularity in his definition of the indi-
vidual as an institution of a single case (1980, 166). Individuals must cre-
ate themselves and must integrate their actions into their own biographies,
which then become “elective biographies” (Ley 1984), “reflexive biogra-
phies” (Giddens 1991), “handmade biographies” (Hitzler 1988) or “tink-
ered identities” (Keupp 1994). The tinkerer is a better metaphor than that of
a “builder” to characterize the contemporary fashion of organizing our own
lives. “Building” alludes to a complex, slow configuration that follows rela-
tively fixed rules. Tinkering, however, refers to an occasional action that var-
ies between amateur dabbling and works of genius. Tinkerers are those who
“assemble” their lives while working on other things part-time. They are not
“at home.” They do not live in a world of sense devoid of dissonance; they
are very much like vagabonds or nomads whose wandering is an inconstant
and uncertain movement amongst a variety of realms of meaning.
The possibilities open to individual subjects have the simultaneous form
of a freedom and an obligation. Individuals must in some way affirm them-
selves as autonomous subjects. What is new historically is that something
that used to only be required of certain people (to lead their own lives) has
become a general obligation. Durkheim formulated this in a very accurate
observation that there is no longer any discussion about the obligatory char-
acter of the rule that requires us to be individuals.
The society of individuals can easily be misunderstood if it is conceived as
a reality that is constantly supported by individual freedom. The new indi-
vidual configuration of institutions is not a mere product of individuals and
their desires, but it is strongly related to the institutional conditions, the legal,
political and economic system. Individuals are not the ones who are indi-
vidualistic, but rather institutions that have been thought up for individual
subjects. We can then understand what Talcott Parsons called “institutional-
ized individualization” (1978, 321). The job market, the requirements of
education and mobility, marital rights, labor laws and mandatory insurance
Accepting people 31
are examples of this institutionalized individualization. They are not always

just expansions of possibilities for individual choice, they also impose new
forms of constraints on them and deliver them to the fragility of insecurity,
which is the hidden side of the freedom gained. For example, to earn free-
dom, individuals must have a pension scheme and protect themselves from
potential risks; they sign a temporary work contract even though they might
want a more stable work situation; they are subject to inheritance laws and
taxes that are designed to make it impossible to live off of an annuity, i.e. not
to be an individual.
We might understand individualization as a swap of bonds with possibili-
ties of choice. In these expanded spaces of decision, there is an increase
of the individual’s elective burden. Subjects see themselves obligated to
set up an office to plan out their lives, abilities and relationships. “Society”
becomes an individually available variable. The themes that individuals have
to decide upon are found in all domains of existence, from the smallest ones
(such as how to distribute household chores or what subjects to choose in
a university program, which has become flexible) to the most transcenden-
tal, life-or-death situations (from prenatal diagnostics to end-of-life care).
De-routinization opens life up to a series of very diverse moral and social
issues that used to be “resolved” by the inertia of tradition. In an active envi-
ronment, the very possibility of non-decision vanishes. Sometimes, there
appears a hybrid figure consisting of not deciding and giving into chance,
or deciding not to make a decision. Yet whatever it may be, the option of
not deciding is the result of a decision.
Having a competitive biography assumes that there has been training
and that there is the ability to have professional mobility, which forces indi-
viduals to forge themselves as such to the extent that they plan, predict,
act and face the randomness of events. However, what might seem to be
freedom may also be interpreted in a completely different register: as an
obligation to decide. To put it as Jean-Paul Sartre does, people are con-
demned to individualization. That being so, we can see the paradox that
individualization does not rely on the free decision of individuals, for whom
the diktat of custom would very often be simpler. Individualization is a con-
striction in order to produce, configure and self-stage your own biography.
One decisive characteristic of the processes of individualization is that it not
only allows for personal action, but demands it. The opportunities, dangers
and insecurities of a biography which used to be defined by the family clan,
the local community or the rules of the social class or position, must now be
discovered, interpreted, decided or redeveloped by the individual subject.
The resulting consequences (in terms of triumph or failure) depend on the
individual. It therefore seems logical that these processes of emancipation
be experienced by the individual with a blend of interest in opportunity
and fear of resulting disadvantages.
The disadvantages of being ourselves

Identity suffers from insecurity and becomes riskier when we essentially
experience freedom as individualization. In fact, we work more and more
with riskier freedoms. What an individual has within reach is not merely an
increase in freedom, but rather something much more complex: a blend of
freedom and necessity full of conflicts and tension. Our biography is risk-
ier than the assurance available may suggest. Its duration, continuity and
meaning are all threatened, either explicitly or in hidden ways. First of all,
individualization means the dissolution of established social forms of life.
Individuals are expelled from the guarantees of an industrial society toward
the turbulence of what, since Beck (1986), has been called the “society of
risk.” In it, we can observe that being ourselves is a serious disadvantage,
despite the rhetoric that only celebrates the emancipation of the individual.
A certain description of the relationships between individuals and insti-
tutions seems to suggest David against Goliath, labor against capital, the
world of life opposed to the system, Asterix versus the Romans or a slave
subject to a master. On one hand, there is the good, weak individual, and
on the other, a powerful yet ineffective institution. Clearly, this is an unfair
fight that has historically been decided in favor of the evil executioner
and morally decided in favor of the good victim. This type of melodrama
abounds with many advantages when compared to the complexity of the
most cautious theories: they are encompassing, seem pleasant and give
a clear conscience to those who describe it. However, they do not reflect
how rich things are or how they grow increasingly complex. They do not
understand everything that institutions do in order to make individual free-
dom possible. Institutions lighten individuals’ burden to decide, make and
respond to everything by themselves; they offer the orientation of what is at
stake at all times and give the feeling of existential security. From Hegel to
Marx, there is a way of thinking that highlights this aspect, which often goes
unnoticed, of the processes of socialization and cultural transmission: the
cognitive and moral potential of individuals only comes true and is realized
whenever there are institutions that “face” them.
Individualization is not necessarily the equivalent of successful emanci-
pation. Freed individuals are dependent on the market and on social rules
and conventions, often more immediately than when these influences used
to pass through the filter of institutional mediation. Immediate freedom
becomes an additional burden for individuals. The ambivalence of this situ-
ation appears clearly if we consider the disagreement it causes with regard
to its value. There are optimists, and there are pessimists. The former
celebrate the subversive mobility of individuals, of their creativity and of
new possibilities they have, whereas the latter are aware of the domination
that institutions force upon disoriented individuals and of new forms of
discipline and control.
Accepting people 33
Of course, the freedom that governs the processes of breaking with

tradition can be understood as an ambiguous emancipation. Marx
understood this with irony when he spoke of “free” paid work, wherein
we can see the ambivalent experience of emancipation. Premodern soci-
eties, with social structures organized by hierarchy, barely had a playing
field for self-determination in their subjects’ life decisions. The order
of things consisted of a prescription of standards, functions and paths.
The process of modernization led to a dramatic liberation when faced
with territorial and social bonds, and can be seen, for example, in what
was called the “social question.” A paid employee’s “freedom” is particu-
larly threatened by mobility, insecurity or uncertain survival. This threat
would lead to new forms of association and forms of collective struggle
where the welfare state appeared as a balance of interests between labor
and capital. In this process of reorganization of the collective interests,
new associative structures and collective forms took shape in order to
deal with the risks of life.
Biographical insecurity is the logical consequence of individualization.
Independence becomes vulnerability and equal relationships give rise to a
fear of an uncertain future. Individualization leads to fragility. This is the
other face of the effort of emancipation: everything becomes more indeter-
minate and everyone has to organize their lives in a lonelier, more precari-
ous fashion. The price of emancipation is increased uncertainty.
The discourse of liberation needs to be understood ironically. The free-
dom that subjects have in contemporary society may then be seen from
two very different points of view. On one hand, the weakening of tradi-
tion inaugurates historically unprecedented possibilities of self-sufficiency,
and at the same time, faced with constrictions, emancipation leads to the
establishment of new dependencies.
Therefore, we must say that our society is not necessarily dissolving forms
of control, but that it is modifying their appearance. Individualization is
usually accompanied by a trend that goes contrary to the standardization
of lifestyles. To the extent that subjects remove themselves from traditional
common contexts and they are singularized as individuals who decide, their
dependency increases with regard to types of external decisions that are
barely perceived; states of affairs in administration, economics or culture
stealthily penetrate into the biographical plans of individuals, to the point
that pathways that were originally going to be freed end up being assimi-
lated again.
In the field of culture, Gerhard Schulze (1992) gave a very convincing
explanation of the phenomenon by which emancipated individuals end up
being mere imitators. If individual actions were adjusted only to the param-
eter of individual experience, subjects would enter into a spiral of self-
observation with no contrast, leading them irremediably to insecurity since
they are incapable of judging their own desires and appreciations. People
would thus be deprived of the opportunity to judge their own assessments.

Unsettled, there is no surprise that subjects develop an internal disposition
both to configure individual custom and to join social groups. Through the
first mechanism, they select desires and intentions in the growing set of pos-
sibilities, and through the second one, they stabilize their own desires with
the support of others who are like them.
From this perspective, the problems of contemporary society could there-
fore be formulated otherwise. With the erosion of rigid forms of identity,
possibilities emerge that allow us to exercise sovereignty over our own lives,
but at the same time, there appear new rigidities and constraints to identity.
Very often, daily praxis is gradually freed from traditions and normative
bonds without being replaced by orientations where individual subjects can
find intersubjective recognition. This void of recognition gives rise in part
to a growing disposition to take on prefabricated lifestyles as propositions
to fill in empty biographies. In the age of karaoke, the subject is not neces-
sarily a source of creative originality.
It seems to be appropriate to ask ourselves whether the loss of traditional
contexts of life has led to isolation of the individual. Of course, current
society is not a society of hermits if we look at the enormous magnitude
of relationships that connect subjects. These relationships are more open,
more elective and relaxed than those in the past, which were more rigid
and limited. New relationships have the particularity that they require sub-
jects to do something to keep them; otherwise they would quickly crumble.
These are in no way guaranteed properties, the consistency of which would
allow us to give ourselves over to them. They can never completely satisfy
our demand for security and confidence. There is therefore no surprise
that contemporary subjects, who have built themselves a very large network
of social relationships, can complain as if they were solitary, stateless per-
sons or as if they were suffering from a vague feeling of a lack of identity
(Innerarity 1993).
For many, this situation involves too heavy a load. This is why they
cling desperately to standardized “correct” models given freely by means
of communications and the leisure industry. Sometimes, we react atavis-
tically: reviving old enemies or inventing new ones allows us to distin-
guish once more between what belongs to us and what is foreign, and
to reinforce a wavering identity. All forms of return toward supposedly
limited and harmonious communities, which we often call upon when
faced with a society perceived as an unbearable aggravation, have some-
thing in common: they lighten the burden of subjective autonomy and
of contradictory experiences. They serve to immunize subjects against
betrayals and disappointments. They claim to protect them forever from
the risk of self-destruction caused by crises of orientation, identity and
meaning. Ultimately, they are different forms of actions to deal with the
disadvantages of being ourselves.
Accepting people 35
The identity of those who can promise

Descriptions of contemporary society have made us familiar with a pano-
rama of individualization and disintegration, which we sometimes observe
by declaring the “death of society.” Yet as we have already seen, people
are always involved in joint projects and they do not scorn values as being
incompatible with their personal realization. Several diagnostics signaling
an incompatibility between freedom and the moral point of view have a
unilateral idea of what appears to them as contradictory.
To dissolve this equivocal position, it seems to me to be useful first of
all to understand freedom as the capacity to get involved in projects. From
this point of view, freedom as disengagement appears primitive and rudi-
mentary, something that only has power over the present moment and
that is unable to make itself stronger by joining other freedoms. Whenever
freedom takes on the task in a project, it dissipates the fog of indecision
and invests in a reality based on certain values and associated with other
freedoms.
I propose to examine what the identity is of a being that, like humans (accord-
ing to Nietzsche’s famous formula), is capable of promising (1995, 39).
A promise is a suitable domain to grasp the joining of the freedom and
values that configure our own identity. It appears that the logic of an institu-
tion is precisely that of a bond resulting from freedom. Obligations estab-
lished this way are not necessarily hostile to freedom itself. They may even
be experienced as its condition of possibility or its expansion and growth.
The identity of those who can promise may be called a post-conventional
identity, which includes institutional advantages (orientation, prediction
and security), without needing to give up on personal aspirations of realiza-
tion and freedom.
In promise, freedom itself becomes an institution: within the act of
promising, we can see how freedom and ethical value are not two neces-
sarily opposed realities. There is more freedom with those who can oblige
themselves than with those who cannot say now that they will be able to
answer in the future for what they want now freely.
Promise reinforces freedom because it expands our identity by making
us who we are; it brings us something like a virtual identity consisting of
having now what we will be in the future. A promise is one way of taking
charge of what is not yet. Promising means anticipating and subverting the
order of time while appropriating the future. It alters the relationship of
the whole to its parts because it deals with our entire life even though we have
lived only part of it.
It should be remembered that a promise is not an isolated act that we
perform with the ceremony surrounding anything that is exceptional. Life
itself is woven with implicit promises that do not have to do with an original
act. Most promises we live in are not the result of an explicit agreement, but
are rather the implicit condition for us to be able to agree with each other.
Any linguistic action, for instance, is a promise. To speak is to establish a
personal relationship that precedes any promise and makes it possible. The
speaker is signing a contract to tell the truth, without which any attention
given by others would make no sense. The explicit promise not to lie is
required in moments of crisis and wariness, but usually, it acts as one of the
implicit presuppositions explaining the usual functioning of the institution
known as human communication. We cannot constantly demand it to be
ratified without freezing the communication system. A promise is always
present silently in the background, justifying the usual confidence we give
in the veracity of the words of those we speak with. Being unable to locate
an original promise in time shows that recognition between human beings
is spread out in a series of actions that bind us in a nearly imperceptible
exchange of reciprocal credit.
One might say that the very fact of speaking is a moral action, or even,
the mere fact of existing is based on certain values. Identity and value are
not two things that follow each other, as if we first existed and then we
add the moral ingredients to life. In this case, something like a neutral,
insipid, life without value would be possible. Yet this neutrality is fictional.
Living means making value judgments. Identity itself is built on the basis
of moral values. A moral subject is already immersed in a community of
subjects wherein the possibility of choosing the obligations and require-
ments relevant to this position does not take place. We might subsequently
modify this position, for better or worse, but the moral point of view is not
a perspective we can choose out of several others, but rather the one where
we are already positioned before any other option we may choose. By virtue
of this position, we impose upon ourselves certain obligations and we antici-
pate certain positive suppositions, such as credibility and recognition. This
is why our legal system considers a contract to be invalid if someone gives up
their fundamental rights, i.e. that they take a position that would contradict
an irreducible part of their identity. The same would be true if someone
claimed to exonerate themselves from all their obligations. Entering into
a community of free beings is not a free action; it presumes that all others
have approved, that they implicitly recognize any new arrival as a peer. We
cannot access the category of moral subjects by opposition. This means that
we constitute a promise (by speaking, for instance) and thereafter comes
the appropriate or fraudulent use we make of this credit.
However, the identity of those who can promise is not an identity free
from the influence of time, which entails evolution and change. What loy-
alty to a promise requires is for the subject to behave according to this
evolution while subjecting the spontaneity and immediacy of the circum-
stances to the project of identity heralded by the promise. A matrimonial
promise, for instance, is not a promise to abandon the development of
your own personality; what we are promising is not to consider personal
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Ethics of Hospitality 1St Edition Daniel Innerarity Online Ebook Texxtbook Full Chapter PDF

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Ethics of Hospitality 1st Edition Daniel

The Range of Reasons: in Ethics and Epistemology 1st

DEVELOPING HOSPITALITY PROPERTIES AND FACILITIES 3rd

The Theory of Hospitality and Catering 14th Edition

Introduction to Hospitality 8th Edition John Walker

The Principles of New Ethics I Meta ethics 1st Edition

The Principles of New Ethics I Meta ethics 1st Edition

Cruel Hearts Knights of Templar Academy 2 1st Edition

Marketing Tourism and Hospitality: Concepts and Cases

The source of hospitality lies in the fundamental ethical experiences that

Daniel Innerarity is a professor of Philosophy at the University of the Basque

A core legacy of the Continental juridico-political tradition is the methodological

ISBN: 978-1-138-66918-5 (hbk)

Typeset in New Baskerville

Taking care of others1

1 The pathetic, or the duty of events 11

2 Accepting people: identity and the commitment to hospitality 28

3 The moral spectacle: the importance of absentees 42

4 The fortune of the good life and the scandalous resemblance

5 Homo brevis: the ethics of duration, fatigue and of the end 74

6 The meaning of everyday life: particularities of guests,

7 Xenology: prolegomena in understanding the other 101

8 Liberality: the virtue of pluralism 115

9 The time of others: human plurality as temporal diversity 129

10 The ethics and aesthetics of the natural 141

11 Poetics of compassion: the comprehension of

Hospitality responds to the characteristics of these fundamentally ethical

from “the other”: as a retort, discordance, correction or questioning. Fear

Fragments of dreams, wedges

The ethics of hospitality is particularly appropriate in a cultural period torn

The domain of receiving

The pathetic, or the

A critique of pure action

resembles a compromise between what is given to us and what we are able

friendship. The particular beauty of human excellence resides precisely in

The tenderness of a plant is not the dazzling hardness of a gem. There

In the Greek poetic tradition, human excellence cannot be invulnerable

they are capable of doing by virtue of their proper preparation. Victory is

The ethics of vulnerable life

cannot be completely rationalized. Desires and feelings, for example, are

we cannot control everything that happens to us (even wanting to would be

Levinas, Emmanuel (1974), Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence, The Hague:

The relationship between host and guest is a good illustration of the

freedom of choice either; often, we receive untimely visitors and hospitality

The society of individuals

are examples of this institutionalized individualization. They are not always

The disadvantages of being ourselves

Of course, the freedom that governs the processes of breaking with

would thus be deprived of the opportunity to judge their own assessments.

The identity of those who can promise

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Taking care of others1

2 Accepting people: identity and the commitment to hospitality 28

5 Homo brevis: the ethics of duration, fatigue and of the end 74

7 Xenology: prolegomena in understanding the other 101

8 Liberality: the virtue of pluralism 115

9 The time of others: human plurality as temporal diversity 129

10 The ethics and aesthetics of the natural 141