February 16, 2007
Ethos and systematicity
I’ve been thinking recently about ethos (taken for now as a mode of practical rationality) and systematicity – using as springboard a comparison of the Calvinist ethic and Confucian (and relatedly, Greek?) ethics, or more precisely, Weber’s Protestant Ethic and his Religions of China.
Thinking in terms of Luhmann’s systems, the Protestant ethic is a system constituted by the system/environment distinction of this-world/God. Knowledge – true/false values – is a strictly system internal coding. The reduction of infinite to finite information that this distinction effects, creates the possibility of a science (epistemology, capitalism, modernity).