Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 2002. Vol. 8. Eger Journal of American Studies.(Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 28)

Studies - László Dányi: On the Bad Side of the Fence: Fiascos of Southern Ethos

offers a starting point for a field of study which presupposes the "

reine Sprache is the Sache of reading" (Critchley 46). So pure speech is the matter of reading, in other words, the reader has to differenciate between what is said in the text and what the text says, and he has to be faithful to "the law to which the text is subject. This law is the matter or Sache of reading" (46). Secondly, nobody has ever lived under the regulations of a purely ethical world, yet the existence of the awareness of the norms, rules and values of a world like that is unquestionable. Not only are we conscious of the commands and imperatives of that world but they also influence our decisions, and we often act in accordance with ethical norms. Notwithstanding the presence of moral norms in our awareness, not any society can fully erase, or create the social apotheosis of moral norms. What endows ethos with such a strength that we cannot sweep it away, and such a weakness that it can never gain overwhelming dominance? We do not want to do away with it because we need it and cling to it with such tenacity that we try to rationalize our successes and mainly our failures with its help. Ethos plays the role of a faux ami in the friendship with rationale, and we do not usually recognize it, or do not want to notice it. We are fallible individuals who nourish our firm belief that nothing is impossible, or inaccessible to our modern and enlightened mind, and the conquest of the universe of knowledge is just a stonethrow. We wish to make sense of the world around us, and cannot bear the existence of white spots and gaps that could be filled with "just because", so we try to explain even the unexplainable which, in this case, is our ethos. But this norm and value producing and legitimizing tendency keeps our ethos and the discourse about it alive. The innocents, the ones with good intentions and criminal intentions, the victims and the victimizers, the iinpeccant and the miscreant, the pure and the sinner all resort to ethical judgments concerning their own and others' lives and acts. Ethos cannot gain absolute power in any society because of the latent incongruency in the ethos-intentions-acts-consequences-ethos circle. Earlier I mentioned the significance of failure that arises from this incongruency. 178