Abstract
Mass society and neoliberalism induce a sense of political inefficacy and apathy in much of the population. Some propose that empathy could counter these forces, by motivating action to alleviate injustice and suffering. Critics of empathy, however, cast doubt on this proposal, for a number of reasons, including that empathy focuses on particular individuals, whereas justice has to do with the universal. This chapter argues for the importance of cultivating our moral capacity to attend to the particularity of the other. It examines the ethics of particularity of Emmanuel Levinas and Iris Murdoch to show how our attention to individuals’ specificity can support care and concern for humanity more generally, especially the most vulnerable.
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Notes
- 1.
Unlike Bloom, I am willing to grant forthrightly that we have special obligations toward our loved ones and toward ourselves, though these do not disregard or eliminate our obligations to strangers and foreigners. On the moral significance of special relationships, see Williams (1981). On self-love, see Frankfurt (2004, ch. 3). Bloom (2016) writes against special relationships in pp. 76–77, 108–109. He seemingly contradicts this on pp. 160–163, though, “conced[ing] the importance of some amount of partiality here, the value of giving family and friends some special weight.”
- 2.
This is not to say that Levinas or Murdoch, the main foci of my analysis of particularity, would agree with this account of love.
- 3.
“Inasmuch as the access to beings concerns vision, it dominates those beings, exercises a power over them. A thing is given, offers itself to me. In gaining access to it I maintain myself within the same” (Levinas 1969, p. 194).
- 4.
Levinas (1969) construes totality in terms of encompassment on 12 and 194, in terms of envelopment on 194, in terms of objectification on 23, in terms of containment on 27 and 194, in terms of comprehension on 194, and in terms of content on 27 and 194.
- 5.
In opposition to totality, Levinas (1969) speaks of exteriority on 22 and 24, transcendence on 24, and infinity on 23 and 25.
- 6.
- 7.
Nechama Juni has proposed in an unpublished essay that it is by reading Levinas that we come to understand our responsibility for the other. This seems a promising approach, but has the implication that only those in a position to read Levinas (or, by extension, receive instruction about his ideas), a relatively small and privileged group, can achieve an understanding of their responsibility to others.
- 8.
Note that the Jew’s obligation to God in the Jewish tradition is not merely a result of God’s transcendence, but rooted in a specific narrative of election and covenant. If the obligation were supposed to be strictly based on God’s transcendence, the account would have the same problem I identified above about basing an obligation to the human other on the other’s transcendence alone.
- 9.
“[Jewish thinking’s] basic message consists in bringing the meaning of each and every experience back to the ethical relation between men, in appealing to man’s personal responsibility—in which he feels chosen and irreplaceable—in order to bring about a human society in which men are treated as men” (Levinas 1990, p. 159). The two problems with Christianity, in this chapter of Difficult Freedom, are its doctrine of incarnation (which identifies God with one person instead of with all) and its need for supernatural salvation (which presumably leads us to neglect our this-worldly obligations to one another).
- 10.
For example, Rupert in Murdoch (2001a).
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Acknowledgments
I’m grateful to have benefited from conversations about the ideas and arguments in this essay with Fannie Bialek, David Decosimo, Chris DiBona, David Eckel, Nechama Juni, Sarah Stewart-Kroeker, and the audience at the Boston University Institute for Philosophy and Religion lecture series.
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Bush, S.S. (2022). Making Lovers: Emmanuel Levinas and Iris Murdoch on Moral Formation. In: DuJardin, T., Eckel, M.D. (eds) Faith, Hope, and Love. Boston Studies in Philosophy, Religion and Public Life, vol 10. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95062-0_11
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