Embodied ethical sensibility, not reasoned responsibility, can drive moral action

Evidence

The nature of Oedipus’ moral action may thus not depend on a sequence of natural causality to which “responsibility” can be attached. One might say that Oedipus’ actions on discovering what he has done (beginning with “self-punishment”) arise from virtues that depend on what Marcel Mauss called habitus—an embodied capacity that is more than physical ability in that it also includes cultivated sensibilities and passions, an orchestration of the senses. Thus Oedipus’ self-inflicted pain should not, I think, be regarded as the outcome of a judgment about his responsibility. It is perhaps best not thought of as “punishment” (a notion that has pretensions to being a reasoned and reasonable action), but as itself the passionate performance of an embodied ethical sensibility. Oedipus suffers not because he is guilty but because he is virtuous. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 463

Categorization

• DEFINE: Asad redefines Oedipus’s self-blinding as habitus-driven passion rather than reasoned punishment, giving habitus a precise ethical meaning.
• XREF: This contrast between embodied habitus-ethics and responsibility-as-accountability connects to the Cooper/Asad thread about how a secular-protestant paradigm of individual moral agency marginalizes other ethical forms.