Ethics and Contingency. On Ethical Experience and its Expression as Testimony

This essay is an attempt to clarify the two fundamental dimensions of the ethos – ethical experience and its eminent expression in testimonies – following the thread of contingency as a crucial dimension of ethical experience. First, I address the notion of experience: I claim that in all fundamental human experiences there is an element of contingency, constitutive of their meaning, that cannot be “neutralized” in the element of the concept; second, I develop the notion of ethical experience and show that it is an essentially contingent experience. Finally, I argue that the contingency of ethical experience is most adequately expressed by testimonies and sketch a notion of a “comprehensive phenomenological ethics” that makes of testimony a genuine ethical category.