Hermeneutic as original ethics

Ethical questioning has always been defined by its essential difficulty: it is that realm of questioning that begins where the uncomplicated and the facile have ceased. One speaks of ethics only when there is difficulty; Immanuel Kant's notion of"judgment," especially as Hannah Arendt develops it, nicely captures the problem of ethical life as emerging out of an undecidability and the failure of theoretical knowledge. Nonetheless, even if ethics has always been a matter of the difficult, there seems to be a special and new form of difficulty defining the problematic of ethical thought today: the very idea of the ethical has become questionable. Some of the most cherished assumptions underpinning the dominant traditions of ethical thought-assumptions about subjectivity, agency, and autonomy, among others-have been called into question, and those traditions have largely collapsed, or at least lost all vitality, under this questioning. The most telling form of this decline of ethical thought is found in what now goes by the name of "applied ethics"-as if ethics were simply applied theory. Nothing signals the loss of an ethical sensibility more than the emergence of such "applied ethics." But this decline of ethical thought is not new; Friedrich Nietzsclle diagnosed it and spoke of the clear need to think "beyond good and evil" if we were ever to be in a position to take up the task of ethical reflection.