A Phenomenological Grounding of Feminist Ethics

Abstract

The central hypothesis of this paper is that the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty offers significant philosophical groundwork for an ethics that honours key feminist commitments -embodiment, situatedness, diversity and the intrinsic sociality of subjectivity. Part 1 evaluates feminist criticisms of Merleau-Ponty. Part 2 defends the claim that Merleau-Ponty's non-dualist ontology underwrites leading approaches in feminist ethics, notably Care Ethics and the Ethics of Vulnerability. Part 3 examines Merleau-Ponty's analyses of embodied percipience, arguing that these offer a powerful critique of the view from nowhere, a totalizing God's-eye-view with pretensions to objectivity. By revealing the normative structure of perceptual gestalts in the intersubjective domain, he establishes the view from everywhere. Normativity is no longer deferred to higher authorities such as duty, utility or the valorised virtue, but through the perceptual gestalt it is returned to the perceiving embodied subject. This subject, defined by inherent intersubjectivity, is thereby vulnerable to others and has the capacity for care.1 Thanks go to the anonymous reviewers who gave extremely cogent feedback on this paper. Thanks also go to various other persons for commentary on earlier versions of this paper; notably, Katherine O'Donnell (University College Dublin), Adam Loughnane and other philosophers who attended the invited lecture on this paper at University College Cork (November 2017), and also participants of the SWIPI

The Declaration of Interdependence! Feminism, Grounding and Enactivism

“…In writing an earlier paper (Daly 2019 ), I realized that the ‘metaphysical turn’ in feminism, which I had noted briefly in that paper, warranted further investigation and so this paper takes up this challenge. The bridging of feminist socio-political concerns and ontological grounding is the key issue, but there is also a complicating challenge in trying to also speak to feminists who work within an analytic framework.…”

“… 2 The ground-breaking insights of Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Iris Marion Young and Judith Butler, working within the existential-phenomenological tradition, are the insights that established the feminist philosophical bases for these interrogations (de Beauvoir 2010 ; Merleau-Ponty 2012 ; Young 1980 ; Butler 1990 ; Daly 2019 ; McWeeny 2017 ). Analytic feminist philosophers have subsequently drawn on these ideas—sometimes with acknowledgement, sometimes not.…”

“…“For feminist philosophers this dualism has divided the world and experience into dichotomous categories wherein one term becomes the positive and the other the negative thereby underwriting the denigration of the feminine. And so Merleau-Ponty’s work to reinstate the philosophical significance of all that Plato and the heirs to his thought have sought to eliminate or marginalize,—notably perception, the body, intersubjectivity and also his non-dualist ontology, has immense political implications” (Daly 2019 ).…”

Ontology and Attention: Addressing the Challenge of the Amoralist through Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology and Care Ethics

“…While contemporary care ethics derive from feminist theorizing, and phenomenological ethics from the aim to give philosophical significance to the interrelated concerns of the first-person perspective, the body, perception, and intersubjectivity, both can retrospectively find points of concordance with the sentimentalist philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment-not only Hume, but also his teacher Francis Hutchinson, Anthony Ashley-Cooper, Adam Smith, and some of the common-sense philosophers, notably, Thomas Reid and later Dougald Stewart. 6 (see also [11][12][13][14][15][16][17]).…”

Understanding experience better in educational contexts: the phenomenology of embodied subjectivity

“…However, the everyday nature of these types of experience often requires that the hidden intentionality of experiences becomes more visible. In this sense, Merleau-Ponty recognised the importance of context and background relative to Husserl whose emphasis was much more on description (Daly, 2018). That said Merleau-Ponty was initially more guarded than Husserl on whether personal evaluations could be translated into language.…”