The Obligation Before Us

May 22, 2025

Last Saturday night, while engaged in some Very Serious Reading about Very Important Topics, it became apparent that our cat, Theseus, was not well.

I'd noticed that he was breathing a bit heavily in the late afternoon and so had been keeping an eye on him. My wife was out of town and I thought we might assess how he was doing together later, when she got home. Besides, it was Saturday, and by the time I began to suspect he might need to get checked out, any local vets were closed.

So I finished my day's tasks and moved on to the reading I started in the morning: Against Ethics by John Caputo. When my wife got home, I pointed out Theseus' breathing. We sat with him and watched him as we caught up with each other, shared the stories and jokes and frustrations of our last few days. I then returned to reading, and she started working on other things.

In Against Ethics, Caputo admits to being, well, against ethics -- "clearly and without apology" (1). ⊕ Of course, "clearly" here may be debatable, although as far as Derrida-influenced, deconstruction-oriented postmodern philosophers go, Caputo is much more approachable, much more clear than some. I'm early in the book but we might say that he's against Ethics, with a capital 'E'.

"Ethics makes safe," he writes. "It throws a net of safety under the judgments we are forced to make, the daily, hourly decisions that make up the texture of our lives." The deconstruction of ethics, which he explicitly states as his method, "cuts this net." It shows

how a film of undecidability creeps quietly over the clarity of decisions, on cat-soft paws, clouding judgment just ever so much, so that we cannot quite make out the figures all around us (4).

Where ethics suggests systems and order and stability, the deconstruction of ethics suggests unwieldiness, instability, and uncertainty; Caputo compares ethics to a map to a finished network of roads and highways, while deconstruction is warning signs and yellow lights marking everything as under construction.

At the core of ethics is "obligation," and it is obligation that Caputo takes up as his central theme. Caputo describes obligation as

a certain line of force that runs along the surface upon which you and I stand: the obligation I have to you (and you to me, but this is different) and the both of 'us' to 'others'" (5).

Caputo's key point of entry to his deconstruction of ethics is that obligation is not safe: it comes from outside of ourselves and our consent is not required or even acknowledged. It is not a contract agreed upon by two parties, yet it binds us still, perhaps at a level deeper than such negotiations. We are recipients of obligation, not issuers, and we find ourselves obliged, always, "in the midst" of obligations.

"Obligation happens," he writes repeatedly. It "happens before I get there, has always already happened, without my even being there at all" (7).

Theseus is on one end of the couch, and I am doing my Very Important Reading at the other end, only I cannot seem to make it very far into the current chapter. My wife is distracted, too.

⊕ A vet once said that food was obviously a great passion of Theseus's, which she was clued into mainly by his size. Distracted by Theseus, of course, whose breathing is quite rapid but who otherwise seems mostly fine. I think back over the last day or two. He has eaten less, I think, did not come running for breakfast as he usually does. And he has not been as interested in heading outside, to make his rounds across the backyard.

While I mentally collect this data, my wife is counting his breaths over the span of a minute. She performs this exercise a few times.

⊕ 'I am not sure that this is true. We think through, reason through obligations all the time. If we didn't, wouldn't the particulars of obligation - of any particular obligation - be universal? We debate the moral patienthood of animals, for instance, and whatever our findings, consider the effect of those deliberations upon our actions. But this is early in the text, too early perhaps to be arguing with the author quite yet, especially as I am not sure yet how, or even if, he is parsing obligation as an abstract principle/force vs obligation in practice.

We are shifting between our concern for Theseus and our other tasks, back and forth and back again. I am scribbling in the margins on p. 22, to the side of a passage where Caputo is wrestling with a snippet from Lyotard's The Differend. Lyotard suggests a certain logic to obligation ("A phrase is obligatory if its addressee is obliged.") Caputo first begins to contend with the logic itself but then shifts gears: he questions the need for that logic altogether, its actual practicality/praxis, citing the lived experience of obligation.

"Does anyone really wait for cognitive reports to come in before concluding that one is obliged," he asks. We don't stamp certain obligations as authorized or unauthorized, he says, we don't reason through obligations. Rather, we are "from the start, always and already, on the receiving end of commands," of obligation.

I am puzzling my way through this, but I am also puzzling over Theseus. My eyes are drawn to him and his breathing, this cat who is approaching 9 or 10 years old, who has lived with us since he was a bit over one year old. We adopted him knowing little about his background, other than that he'd been a stray when he was picked up; we adopted another cat, Bacchus, on the same day. ⊕ We chose the name Bacchus to match his adoptive brother's name in spirit, although we might have opted for The Minotaur, as he was a bit of a hulk. Bacchus passed unexpectedly a few years ago while I was home; it happened right in front of me, in the span of a few minutes. That day hung over us for a while, and I wondered for a very long time if I had missed some clue that day, an alarm that would have signaled that something was wrong.

So I am watching Theseus breathe as though his breath might tell me something. I am hunting for clues in the way he is sitting, the way he is laying, the way he is or is not purring.

We are trying to figure out what to do but already know what to do. Or rather, we already know we will do something, even if we don't know exactly what, even if it is inconvenient, even if its necessity is uncertain. We share words of deliberation between us, my wife and I, but this almost seems a gesture, a hollow prerequisite. We both knew, almost from the moment we began watching him together, that we would gather him up and hop in the car, find our way to an emergency animal hospital an hour away.

"We know our obligations because we meet up with them, face to face" (39).

When does one day end and the next begin?

We got to the hospital around 9 pm. When we arrived home, the sun was rising. That blurry stretch of time warped the next 48 hours or so, as we worked to recover from exhaustion and reset our clocks.

Theseus did not come home with us then. He stayed at the clinic for two nights being tested and medicated and observed, during which he charmed the doctors and student interns who worked with him. When I checked in to pick him up, even the desk clerk said his name with affection. Theseus is home now, freshly diagnosed with a heart condition, armed with two medications, and likely to live at least another year.

Our house has new inconveniences, new challenges, new sacrifices, new concerns.

We are learning to pill him, never a fun task for either cat or caretaker.

That also means that time away from home right now is a bit more limited, at least until we know he's stable and until we can find someone to help us when we need to be out of town. So tonight we'll turn what would have been an overnight trip, to see our nephew graduate from eighth grade, into a up-and-back trip of seven hours or so. He'll understand and, although we'll grumble a bit, so do we.

While I've been touching up this post, he's been sitting next to me, on the couch. He is fine - almost as though the weekend never happened - but his presence interrupts me.

I stop and watch the rise and fall of his body. I count his breaths.