ON THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL STRUCTURE OF ETHICAL TESTIMONY

The essay aims to elucidate the phenomenological structure of ethical testimony. I start by referring to the perplexing current situation that, despite our having a plurality of testimonies that elaborate, often in a philosophically insightful manner, the experience of those whose lives were transfigured by the emergence of human evil, philosophy has not yet undertaken a systematic investigation of the philosophical and, especially, ethical significance of testimonies. Further, I present a concept of testimony as a proto-philosophical, narrative elaboration of the meaning of «ethical experience». I define the latter as an experience in which the irreducibility of good to evil («ethical difference») is revealed to us as «evidence» that cannot be denied, except perhaps at the price of betraying ourselves in our innermost self or identity (§ 1). Second, I show why phenomenology has a crucial role to play in the elucidation of the philosophical meaning of testimony and describe in some detail the relationship between ethical experience and testimony. In particular, I examine the crucial issue of the impossibility of exhausting the meaning of ethical difference in a purely theoretical or conceptual discourse: ethical difference, I claim, is not a pure eidos, but is always given in experience as an un-totalizable plurality of meanings, as a radically open series of expressions of the cleavage between good and evil as an irreducible polarity (§ 2). Finally, I suggest that Heidegger's analysis of «testimony» (Bezeugung) in § 54–60 of Sein und Zeit may be read as describing some essential traits of our encounter with truth(s) as given in experience. On this basis I briefly show that, when interpreted in specifically ethical terms, such an analysis may contribute to the understanding of how ethical difference is actually given in experience, and, consequently, of testimony in its ethical dimension (§ 3).