Self-Sacrifice in Care: A 'Responsive' Perspective (Ethics of Care) 9789042942783, 9789042942790, 9042942789

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Self-Sacrifice in Care: a “Responsive” Perspective Susanne Pohlmann

Christina Schües (ed.)

VOLUME 12

Self-Sacrifice in Care: a “Responsive” Perspective

Ethics of Care Editorial Board Prof. dr. Helen Kohlen, Vallendar Prof. dr. Sandra Laugier, Paris I – Sorbonne Prof. dr. Frans Vosman, Utrecht, chief editor Advisory board Prof. dr. Andries Baart, Utrecht Prof. dr. Guillaume le Blanc, Paris Prof. dr. Sophie Bourgault, Ottawa Prof. dr. Fabienne Brugère, Paris Prof. dr. Elisabeth Conradi, Stuttgart Prof. dr. Chris Gastmans, Leuven Prof. dr. Per Nortvedt, Oslo Prof. dr. Annelies van Heijst, Tilburg Prof. dr. Linus Vanlaere, Leuven Prof. dr. Marian Verkerk, Groningen

Cover from a painting by the German Jewish painter Felix Nussbaum (1904-1944). Site of the Museum of his work: http://www.osnabrueck.de/werkverzeichnis/. Nussbaum has—while firmly rooted in the European tradition of modern art— given the atrocities of Nazism a face. We honor his life and work by pointing at his artwork on the covers of this series Ethics of Care. Felix Nussbaum Werkverzeichnis nr. 64, Sonnenblumen, 1928 Oil on canvas, 60 × 51 cm Private collection Foto © Felix-Nussbaum-Haus Osnabrück Permanent loan from the Niedersächsischen Sparkassenstiftung

Ethics of Care Volume 12

Self-Sacrifice in Care: a “Responsive” Perspective Susanne Pohlmann edited by Christina Schües

PEETERS Leuven – Paris – Bristol, CT 2020

A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. ISBN 978-90-429-4278-3 eISBN 978-90-429-4279-0 D/2020/0602/99 © 2020 – Peeters, Bondgenotenlaan 153, B-3000 Leuven

Dedication to Susanne Pohlmann (°23.07.1970-†07.10.2006)

Published posthumously, this book is dedicated to the author’s eternal husband and their grateful daughters, loving mother, father, and caring family, as well as to her devoted and supportive friends.

Table of Contents

PREFACE

1

INTRODUCTION

5

The self-sacrifice debate in care Blurring the lines: Self-sacrifice for the Other and the Self? Reappraisals of self-sacrifice Rethinking the reappraisal Structure of the investigation 1. SELF-SACRIFICE AND THE ETHICS OF CARE

6 7 13 19 20 23

1.1. Critique of self-sacrifice 1.1.1. Self-sacrifice and social marginalization 1.1.2. Towards fair care relations 1.1.2.1. Political measures 1.1.2.2. Individual measures 1.2. Self-sacrifice as a feature of care 1.2.1. Self-sacrifice as a vital feature 1.2.2. Self-sacrifice as a distinctive feature 1.2.2.1. Care ethics and liberal ethics 1.2.2.2. Care ethics and reason-based ethics 1.2.2.3. Conclusion 1.3. The dilemma of the ethics of care

23 24 30 30 34 42 42 47 49 56 65 66

2. AT THE CROSSROADS OF PHENOMENOLOGY AND CARE

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2.1. General remarks 2.2. Thematic intersections

69 72

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self-sacrifice in care: a “responsive” perspective

2.3. Methodological reflections 2.3.1. Literature review 2.3.2. Experience as a nexus and demarcation 2.3.2.1. Phenomenology as the study of experience 2.3.2.2. Care ethics and the ambivalence of experience 2.3.2.3. The differences 2.4. Introduction to Bernhard Waldenfels 3. RESPONSIVE PHENOMENOLOGY

78 78 84 84 85 90 94 99

3.1. Responsivity 3.1.1. Responsive rationality 3.1.2. Responsive freedom 3.2. Phenomenology of the foreign 3.3. Traces of foreignness 3.3.1. Trust 3.3.2. Responsibility 3.3.3. Traces of foreignness as moral surplus 3.4. The ethos of response 3.4.1. Heterotopoi of morality 3.4.1.1. Responsive ethics and Kant 3.4.1.2. Responsive ethics and Nietzsche 3.4.1.3. Conclusion 3.4.2. The suspended self of response 3.4.2.1. Responsivity and self-withdrawal 3.4.2.2. Self-withdrawal and morality 3.5. Results

99 103 108 110 115 116 119 122 125 125 126 132 134 136 139 144 149

4. A “RESPONSIVE” ACCOUNT OF SELF-SACRIFICE

153

4.1. Self-withdrawal and self-sacrifice 4.1.1. Intersections 4.1.2. Practice versus event 4.2. Self-sacrifice as hetero-practice

154 154 155 157

table of contents

5. CONSEQUENCES FOR THE ETHICS OF CARE

IX 161

5.1. Responsive phenomenology and social change 161 5.2. The reappraisal of self-sacrifice revisited 170 5.2.1. The non-normativity of responsive ethics 170 5.2.2. The ethos in statu nascendi 173 5.2.3. A responsive reappraisal of self-sacrifice and closing remarks 175 LITERATURE

179

CONTRIBUTORS

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Preface

Over the years, the ethics of care has developed into an exciting field for diverse and controversial discussion. Care ethicists argue for a normative approach, which always includes epistemology. The close intertwinement of ethics and epistemology has developed in different directions. One persistent question concerns the relationship between the self and the Other or, more specifically, the issues of altruism and self-sacrifice, selflessness of care and lack of recognition. The inquiry by Susanne Pohlmann re-evaluates discussions about the existing stances on this question and opens a new perspective on the relationality of care ethics in general and on the specific issue of self-sacrifice. Even though care ethicists have been inspired by authors such as Buber, Merleau-Ponty and Levinas, a rigorous discussion of the role occupied by the German philosopher Bernhard Waldenfels has not yet taken place. This is surprising because his approach of a responsive phenomenology is particularly valuable in understanding the relationship between self and Other, and the experience of otherness that is central to any care relationship. Responsive phenomenology reconsiders anew the “responsive difference” between claiming and responding, attracting attention and noticing, inviting and listening. It sets out, not from the subject’s intentionality, but from the way one is affected by the Other. This exposes the asymmetry between foreign demands and responding, between the self and the Other.

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self-sacrifice in care: a “responsive” perspective

Waldenfels does not develop a concept of self-sacrifice on his own but offers an account of the relationship between self and Other from which a new perspective on self-sacrifice can be developed. His description of the experience of otherness changes our view of the ways we are connected with each other and of the reasons why we respect and care for each other to a point at which the self is at risk. Susanne Pohlmann shows us that an alternative perspective of selfsacrifice can be unfolded with the inspiration and influence of Bernhard Waldenfels’s responsive phenomenology. By bringing together intense debates in the ethics of care and responsive phenomenology, her new approach of a “responsive” perspective will not only inspire but will reorient the field of discussion. I know that Susanne Pohlmann would have loved to take part in these discussions. She was always eager to investigate issues in depth, following up questions and arguments, and discussing them with patience and curiosity, in eager anticipation of the next turn of the argument. But there will be no next round of discussion – at least, not with her present. Susanne Pohlmann died in October 2016. She was my doctoral student for nearly four years. Her philosophical devotion concerned the field of ethics of care and the phenomenology of Levinas and Waldenfels. She worked hard, eager to finish what she had begun. And she did succeed in completing the manuscript before she died of breast cancer. When we spoke for the last time, it was her wish that this work should be discussed in the academic community, thus ensuring and stimulating a next round of discussion. Susanne’s family, her husband and daughters, her sister, mother and father, and her friends supported her book project with great enthusiasm and admiration. I extend acknowledgement to the Institute for Philosophy at the Leuphana University, Lüneburg, for  providing Susanne Pohlmann with an inspiring institutional context. For very careful and respectful language revisions, I thank Hansjörg Bittner and Kareni Bannister. My particular gratitude goes to Frans Vosman for supporting this publication in the Ethics of Care series, to

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the Foundation Critical Ethics of Care in Utrecht for financial support, and to the Felix-Nussbaum Haus in Osnabrück for permission to use the image of “Sunflower” by Felix Nussbaum, 1928, on the cover. Christina Schües, March 2020

Introduction

“In care ethics … we are not much interested in moral credit. We are, rather, interested in maintaining and enhancing caring relations – attending to those we encounter, listening to their expressed needs and responding positively, if possible” (Noddings, 2013, p. xvi).

Nel Noddings is correct in her description of care. In the moment of care, the Other’s well-being is at the center of our thoughts and actions. We do not care in order to be rewarded for it and we do not care whether what we do for the Other is recognized or not. The recognition of care becomes important, however, if we look at care relations from a more detached and theoretical position. From this position, selflessness of care and lack of recognition trouble our ideal of equality and fairness and evoke concerns that the carer might be exploited. Annette Baier, for example, expresses her concerns with the following words: Volunteer forces of those who accept an ethics of care ... will not be the solution. ... [I]t will not just do to say let this [care] version of morality be an optional extra. … let whoever wants to go further and cultivate this more demanding ideal of responsibility and care (Baier 1994, p. 25, her emphasis).

This investigation aims at contributing to the debate that evolves around the phenomenon of goodness without acknowledgment. It draws on the responsive phenomenology of Bernhard Waldenfels in order to suggest a new perspective on self-sacrifice – one that is  apt to strengthen both the ideal and the recognition of selfless care.

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self-sacrifice in care: a “responsive” perspective

The self-sacrifice debate in care Altruism and self-sacrifice are an intricate issue for the ethics of care. Many care scholars are critical of self-sacrifice. They are concerned that the self-sacrificial carer may over-identify with the Other’s demands and thereby forget the pursuit of their own needs (Hoagland 1999; Held 2005; Petterson 2012 et al.). Moreover, self-sacrifice in care is seen as a reason for the marginalized status of care. Because the self-sacrificial nature of care keeps carers from defining their interests, the importance of care for the flourishing of individuals and societies is not adequately acknowledged, care professions are systematically underpaid and care work in households and families is often not recognized at all.1 Accordingly, some care scholars see the dissolution of self-sacrifice from care as a way to end the carer’s exploitation and to improve the social status of care (Card 1990; Houston 1990; Jaggar 1990; Rommelbacher 1992; Flaake 1994; Hoagland 1992; Borgerson 2001; Groenhout 2003; Petterson 2012). These suggestions, however, raise questions of whether a disconnection of self-sacrifice from care is possible or whether self-sacrifice is not, rather, an essential element of care. The ethics of care is not only a political theory that aims at revaluing care work and improving the social status of care. It is, first and foremost, an ethical theory that seeks to redefine morality and the requirements of ethical behavior. As a relatively new approach to morality, the ethics of care understands itself as an alternative to classical reason-based and liberal ethics. One of its most important tenets is the notion that a dependency on care is a universal feature for at least some periods of our lives. It can further be characterized as a relational ethics that sees relationship as the place where morality arises and as an ethics that revalues emotions such as love and compassion as inevitable requirements for lasting and effective care. The ethics of care stands for a concern for needs and demands of the 1 For a detailed account of the critique of self-sacrifice and of the ways the relationship between self-sacrifice and the marginalization of care is theorized see chapter 1.1.1.

introduction

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weak, the sick and the disadvantaged. It calls for a commitment for the sake of the needy Other. The question is how a commitment to relieve the Other’s pain and distress can be conceived without some form of sacrifice on the part of the care giver.2 The debate about self-sacrifice and care, accordingly, points into two directions. On the one hand, care ethicists are concerned about the underprivileged status of agents of care, the majority of whom are women. This calls for a power-sensitive and feminist-informed analysis of the relationship between care and marginalization. On the other hand, there are increasing concerns that a political theory of care will erode the meaning of care and deprive the ethics of care of its unique perspective on benevolence and morality. From the perspective of an ethical agenda that seeks to strengthen the practice of care, the phenomenon of self-sacrifice cannot simply be dismissed on the grounds of a socio-political agenda. The response to the problems with self-sacrifice cannot be to eliminate self-sacrifice from care because this would deprive the ethics of care of its central feature, commitment for the sake of the Other. The phenomenon of self-sacrifice, hence, constitutes a dilemma for the ethics of care. It raises the question of whether an ethics of care can hold on to an ideal of care that necessarily includes sacrifice for the sake of the Other, or whether this ideal must be limited or compromised because of the pressure that self-sacrifice puts on the agent of care.

Blurring the lines: Self-sacrifice for the Other and the Self? Conventionally, self-sacrifice is understood as an act of giving that involves a donor and a receiver of sacrifice. The act of giving does not necessarily imply that an object is moved from one place to the other. Self-sacrifice also includes the possibility of giving up where the sacrifice does not consist of transferring a good but of letting someone take this good. In order for a good to count as a sacrifice, the object of 2 Moreover, it is debatable whether self-sacrifice is an essential feature of all forms of moral behavior. Chapter 1.2. will address this question. It will also provide arguments why self-sacrifice must be seen as a distinctive feature of an ethics of care.

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giving or giving-up must be important and valuable to the donor. If we give something we do not need or like, we do not sacrifice. Further, we can only speak of sacrifice if the donor, for one, is aware of losing something that is important and valuable and, second, if there is an alternative to sacrificing. If someone loses a good as the consequence of their doing but this loss had not been anticipated or if the loss is inevitable due to uncontrollable circumstances such as, for example, a natural catastrophe, we do not regard this as a sacrifice.3 Even though the literal meaning of the word “self-sacrifice” would suggest a sacrifice of the self, the good that is given is, in most cases, actually not the self. A person may sacrifice their life in order to protect their loved ones or their country. More often, however, the sacrifice comes in a less demanding form, for example as a material good, or in a non-material form, such as the time we spend with the sick or the lonely and the energy that we invest in order to help someone to achieve their goals – time and energy that could be used to pursue our own interests and projects. Finally, the receiver of a sacrifice can appear in different ways. Self-sacrifice can be given in favor of another person or a group of people. It can also be given for the sake of the community or the state and even on behalf of an abstract idea. Regardless of whether the sacrifice is given to a person, to the community or humanity as a whole, self-sacrifice is always oriented towards the other human by serving one’s friend, one’s fellow citizen, the future generation, etc. In the context of care, self-sacrifice is mostly a good that is given for the sake of a person in need rather than for the sake of an abstract idea. The sacrifice often comes in the form of time, effort or energy that is spent to relieve the other’s distress, although some forms of care, for example parental care, also imply material sacrifices. Care theorists who have contributed to the self-sacrifice debate have used expressions like “altruistic care”, “agape” or “other-centeredness” to describe what they see as self-sacrificial forms of care (for example Houston 1990; Hoagland 1999; Groenhout 2003; Noddings 2013). What these terms 3

For the latter point see Overvold (1980), pp. 113f.

introduction

9

have in common is that they stand for a transcendent move towards the Other, for a priority that is given to the Other’s needs, for the suspension or abandonment of one’s own interests and goals. Self-sacrifice in care stands for a commitment to the Other’s well-being and flourishing, a commitment that not only fails to contribute to the pursuit of own interests and needs but that is even detrimental to it. Care scholar Inge van Nistelrooij has questioned the conventional notion of self-sacrifice as described above. She criticizes the idea that self-sacrifice is an act of giving whereby the donor transfers a good to the receiver of sacrifice. Instead, she advocates an understanding of self-sacrifice that she develops from the phenomenology of givenness by the French philosopher Jean-Luc Marion. From the perspective of a phenomenology of givenness, self-sacrifice is not an object and it does not take place in a dyadic structure of donor and receiver. Rather, selfsacrifice appears as an event that creates a relationship between two or more people. Donor and receiver both take part in this relationship, but they are not the agents of sacrifice. As van Nistelrooij holds, selfsacrifice “should not be seen as the object that two subjects, the giver and the receiver, have decided to transfer and accept as gift. Rather the gift itself prompts both donor and recipient to enter into the ‘sphere of giving’” (van Nistelrooij 2014b, p. 117, my emphasis). Because identities are interdependent and the interests of those that take part in the relationship are indissolubly intertwined, self-sacrifice may be understood as a form of “sharing a good” (ibid., p. 30) or as “a practice that is directed at an other, others, the self, the world” (ibid., p. 252). Van Nistelrooij’s claim resonates with a more general tendency within the ethics of care to overcome binary concepts that see the carer on the one side and the beneficiary of care on the other side of a care relationship. In contrast to this dichotomic view, care theorists such as Virginia Held or Elisabeth Conradi underline the relational and cooperative nature of care. They hold that caring is a relation “in which carer and cared-for share an interest in their mutual wellbeing” (Held 2005, p.  35f). For them, the separation between care receiver and care giver conceals the fact that care can emerge only when both sides contribute equally to its success. Care only becomes

10

self-sacrifice in care: a “responsive” perspective

care if the Other accepts it as such (Conradi 2001, p.  51). Rather than perceiving care in the form of an opposition of interests, we should, as they argue, de-emphasize the subject of care and emphasize the significance of the relationship itself. Care is not about meeting the interests of just one part of the relationship. Rather, those who take part in a care relationship share common goals and benefit equally from the achievement of these goals. For other care scholars, these considerations can be seen in an even larger framework of ontological assumptions about the nature of social life. According to them, the dominant understanding of social life is underpinned by an ontology of antagonism and rivalry in which interests are seen as mutually exclusive or even hostile to each other. Individuals are regarded as isolated and opposed to each other; social relations appear to be basically antagonistic and tension-ridden. They hold that the ontology of separateness and the dichotomy of one’s own and the other’s interests disregards the relatedness of our existence and that it cannot plausibly explain moral and caring behavior. In contrast to an ontology of rivalry and conflict, human existence should be understood as relational and social. Connectivity and interdependence should be seen as the real foundation and driving force of social life because the split between self and other is not inevitable or natural but is, rather, an artificial construct. Mutual dependency and social entanglement are always prior to individualization and individualism. The ontology of separateness, therefore, should be replaced by an ontology of inter-subjectivity and connectivity that is more apt to integrate the individual and social aspects of our existence. (Noddings 1990, p. 124; Clement 1996, p. 43; Held 2005, p. 13, et al.).4 4 In a similar vein, theorists of relational autonomy stress the inadequateness of an ontology of separateness. For them, this ontology distorts our notion of autonomy because it conceives autonomy in the sense of individualism and detachment alone. They stress that autonomy must rather be understood as socially constructed and that relatedness, social enmeshment and care are inevitable for the development of autonomy competence. Inter-subjectivity precedes autonomy and is the prerequisite for our ability to make autonomous decisions (see Mackenzie/Stoljar, 2000 and Sherwin 2002).

introduction

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What the notions of self-sacrifice as a “sphere of giving”, of care as a relationship of shared goals, and the ontology of intersubjectivity have in common is their emphasis on the commonalities between self and other, and the intersections of one’s own and other’s interests. These notions constitute a counterbalance to the view of social relations as inherently competitive and aggressive. They address an imbalance in the ontology of separateness because this ontology ignores dependency, relatedness and feelings of sympathy as fundamental features of human life. If we read these accounts in light of the self-sacrifice debate, however, the following problems occur: first, it is difficult to distinguish the notion of shared goals, relatedness and intersubjectivity from normative claims about the way we want social life to be. It is not clear how these claims can be founded in something that is given or natural and, at the same time, be completely independent of the way we wish relations to look like. The ontology of shared interests and inter-subjectivity would seem to suggest that dependency and common goals are facts. But just as the ontology of separateness can hardly be justified with empirical evidence, its contradiction is hardly adequate to describe what social life is about. One could respond that the intertwinement of interests is not an ontological proposition but, rather, a correction that aims at fostering an aspect of our existence that, eventually, can orient social behavior. Wishful thinking can change the way things are. We always strive towards the better and our perceptions of the world are never free from our desires of how we want the world to be. In light of this view, the distinction between ontological and normative claims appears to be artificial and obsolete. Even if we free these claims of categories like normativity or ontology, the question remains to what extent they can usefully contribute to the self-sacrifice debate. Since this debate deals with the marginalization and undervaluation of care, we have to ask to what extent these claims provide analytical tools to overcome these problems. The question is whether the emphasis on the intersection of interests and goals is helpful in advancing the socio-political agenda of the ethics of care or whether it does not, instead, weaken or even paralyze the impetus of the ethics of care as a social movement and political theory.

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self-sacrifice in care: a “responsive” perspective

Janet Borgerson, for example, is critical of the ontologies of intersubjectivity. She holds that ontologies in general must be treated with suspicion because of their inherent essentializing tendencies. From a power-sensitive perspective, the primary task of an ontology, she argues, is not to study the nature of things but to uncover power relations and hierarchies that are perpetuated by dominant ontologies. Accordingly, Borgerson, although she welcomes the notion of a fundamental connectivity and relatedness (“to be human is to be connected” (Borgerson 2001, p. 173)) worries that an ontology of connectivity will not solve the problem of inequality but, on the contrary, moves this problem out of sight, thereby reinforcing inequality and oppressive conditions. For her, an ontology of inter-subjectivity bears the risk of an “ontological blindness” of scholars who privilege other-centeredness without accounting for the discrimination of those who live this ideal (ibid., p. 181). Second, it means (and this is the second problem of the ontology of intersubjectivity and its related concepts) that relegating the problem of injustice in care to the realm of ontological beliefs does not contribute to overcoming the injustice. In the context of the enduring injustice in care, it is not appropriate to emphasize commonalities and intertwinement. What is needed, instead, is an acknowledgment of vulnerability and exploitation, taking into account the antagonisms and the conflicts that self-sacrifice and care involve. It also means that the relationship between the donor and the receiver of self-sacrifice should not be re-conceptualized in a way that silences calls for change. As long as care theorists and practitioners are concerned with the power implications of care and as long as care givers deplore the marginalization of their work, the categories of donor and receiver of care and sacrifice and the acknowledgment that my own and other people’s interests differ remain relevant. A contradiction between the interests of the care giver and the care receiver is real if the care giver perceives it as such – a notion that is also supported by feminist claims that experiences of marginalized groups should be taken seriously (Alcoff 2000, p. 235). An approach that alleviates these antagonisms must be understood as an affront because it ascribes the tensions that are felt by those who shoulder the

introduction

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burden of care to a misled interpretation of the nature of social relations. In this way, the experience of an unequal distribution of care responsibilities and rights is just “theorized away”. For these reasons, scholars such as Sarah Hoagland, Tove Petterson or Janet Borgerson hold that rather than re-interpreting the nature of social relations, the injustice in care can only be overcome through analyzing the causes of marginalization and developing strategies of liberation. From this perspective, the primary task of an ethics of care as political theory is to contribute to social transformation and change. Moreover, they hold that an ethics of care should not ignore, deny or discard the very circumstance of an unfair distribution of care work but rather “consider analyses of oppression” and develop “a vision of, if not a program for, change” (Hoagland 1990, p. 113). For Petterson, an ethics of care must “continue the job of uncovering and scrutinizing different aspects of care” because “our understanding of care is linked to structures of power and inequalities” (Petterson 2012, p.  366). Any ontology of human relatedness and inter-subjectivity, finally, should be concerned with and aware of the “subjugated status of certain forms of being” and offer tools to articulate the transition from oppression towards humanization (Borgerson 2001, p. 175). Endorsing this criticism does not mean rebutting the notion of relatedness and connectivity, but to doubt the usefulness of directing a debate about the injustice of care into the realm of ontological statements which not only ignore the problem at stake but are also difficult to verify or to invalidate. The distinctions between giver and receiver of care, between donor and beneficiary of self-sacrifice are relevant and justified as long as we think that we need the ethics of care to be an ethics of change.

Reappraisals of self-sacrifice Not all care ethicists see vulnerability and harm as the most important characteristics of self-sacrifice. They suggest highlighting not only risks and vulnerabilities but also the meaningfulness of self-sacrifice for the self, for social relations and for our ability to respect and care for each other.

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Self-sacrifice and joy One of the care theorists who gives an account of the positive meaning of self-sacrificial care is Nel Noddings. Noddings’s concept of care entails the element of giving as a preeminent characteristic of care. She defines caring as “a shift of my energies toward the Other and his projects” (Noddings 2013, pp.  50 and 33) and as a way of putting ourselves “at the service of the Other” (ibid., p.  33). This implies that, in care, we prioritize the Other’s needs and wishes over our own interests and pursuits, that we step into the Other’s shoes and look at the world through the Other’s eyes. It implies moving towards the Other, listening to the Other’s plight, not hesitating to go the extra mile to relieve the Other’s pain and distress. Caring, for Noddings, is a devotion to the Other’s affairs and “the readiness to bestow and spend oneself” (ibid., p. 19). Noddings’s phenomenological description of care is an account of care that emphasizes the asymmetry of care. In care, we give without expecting anything in return, we treat the Other’s affairs, well-being, and flourishing as something that matters to us. We are ready to invest our time and energy for the sake of the Other’s well-being. Hence, Noddings’s concept of care is an example of the indissoluble connection between care and self-sacrifice, of the necessity to sacrifice on behalf of the Other.5 Noddings’s work has been seminal for the development of the ethics of care. Many see her account of care as one that enforces self-sacrifice (Petterson 2012, p. 368 footnote 5; Hoagland 1990, p. 109; Houston 1990 pp. 115f; Card 1990, p. 104; Chinnery 2003, p. 5 and passim). Therefore, it is remarkable that van Nistelrooij, on the other hand, holds that Noddings’s concept of care is not compatible with self-sacrifice and that Noddings rejects self-sacrificial practices in care (van Nistelrooij 2014b, p. 48). Van Nistelrooij refers to passages in Noddings’s work which state that a carer should not overstretch their capabilities to an extent where their own well-being is at risk or where they sacrifice “bitterly, grudgingly” (Noddings 2013, p. 105, cited in van Nistelrooij 2014b, p. 49). These passages indicate that Noddings is aware of the dangers of self-sacrificial care. Van Nistelrooij, however, holds that they are not compatible with Noddings’s overall concept of care as “spending oneself” (van Nistelrooij 2014b, p. 49). Unlike van Nistelrooij, I do not think that they contradict Noddings’s overall account of caring. I see Noddings’s concept of care rather as an example of the tension between acknowledging that care entails conflict and attempting to promote care as a moral ideal despite these challenges. 5

introduction

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Although Noddings is aware of the potentially harmful effects of self-sacrifice (Noddings 2013, p.  105), she also seeks to stress the reward and fulfillment that come along with care. In her book Caring, a paradigmatic care relationship is one between teacher and student or between parent and child (ibid., p. 52). Noddings’s carer is a person who lives in and for the relationship with others, someone who gains “strength and hope” through their care for others (ibid., p. 33). Noddings also holds that the demands of care are often not felt as demands because the caring parent or educator is rewarded with delight, appreciation, information and insight (ibid., p. 52). She says that any such demands are “occasions that offer most of what makes life worth living” (ibid.). Noddings even speaks of joy (ibid., p. xvii), euphoria and ecstasy “that accompan[y] my activity with the caredfor” (ibid., p. 37). As her account of care suggests, a life for the Other that necessarily implies the sacrifice of my energy and time can be reconciled with personal fulfillment and joy. The sacrificing self is not impoverished by focusing on other needs and wants, but enriched. While reading Noddings’s work on care we do not associate the caring person with marginalization and exploitation. We see them in light of competence, impact, agency and excitement. Their sacrifices for the sake of the Other do not appear as a loss but offer the possibility for a brighter and more joyful life. Self-sacrifice and moral development Noddings also elaborates on care as an opportunity to reflect on oneself and to form a picture of oneself. As a carer, she says, I find myself because “that which connects me naturally to the Other reconnects me through the Other to myself” (ibid., p. 49). Noddings sees in care a possibility of leaving intact the boundaries of the self, of looking at ourselves from the place of the Other, and thereby gaining a better understanding of who we are. Caring for others helps us to live “fully as a person” (ibid., p. 35). By reconnecting to myself through the Other in need, I see myself as caring, I see my moral competence to relieve the Other’s pain. I also see the limitations that restrict my moral competences. Care as

self-sacrifice in care: a “responsive” perspective

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a way of looking at the world through the Other’s eyes means that we develop a sense of self, but this sense of self is inflicted with doubts regarding the sufficiency of our care. It is a look at ourselves that instills in us the wish to become better than we are. It opens up a horizon of goodness (ibid., p. 49), a “vision of my ideal self” (ibid.) that I cannot but strive to achieve. Care bestows on us a sense of self but also the idea of a self that has not yet met its full moral potential.6 Self-sacrifice and identity Care and sacrifice for the Other is not only a way to foster and increase a sense of our moral competence and responsibility. It can also be a source of identity and belonging. Van Nistelrooij pursues this line of thought with the help of the French philosopher Paul Ricœur. According to van Nistelrooij, Ricœur shows that by giving ourselves or even giving our own life we come to a better understanding of who we are; we find our personal and professional identity. It is our relationships to others, our care for others and our dependency on others that reveal the true core of our existence as being enmeshed

The same line of thought can be found in some readings of Emmanuel Levinas, in particular in interpretations of his concept of “face”. In Levinas, the “face” stands for the notion that the Other’s existence resembles a call that appeals to us or a demand that is imposed on us. Furrow and Wheeler (2012) write that the confrontation with the “face” is a constant reminder that the fulfillment of the Other’s demands exceeds our possibilities. In the encounter with the Other, the self experiences itself as inadequate and accused (p.  155), as constantly called into question (p. 161). There is an ambiguity and uncertainty with regard to the Other’s infinite demands. Because my response to the Other is never sufficient and satisfying, it is always oriented to the better. The Other’s demands transform me into an ethical person who strives “to become better than myself” (p. 160). The subjection to the Other’s demands “is an escape from being” and a call on us to become more ethical beings (p.  161). In the confrontation with the Other, the self emerges as a better version of itself. Ann Chinnery (2003) offers a similar interpretation. Chinnery argues that the moral agency that emerges in Levinas’s account of self-hood through subjection is one of a “subtle shift from ‘me voici’ to responsibility ‘accepted’” (p. 9). We become a self by developing our moral competency, by accepting responsibility for the Other. Self-hood and agency emerge not from the pursuit of self-interests but from the care for the Other. 6

introduction

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in relations. Through self-sacrifice we come to an “ultimate expression of belonging, friendship, devotion and loyalty” (van Nistelrooij 2014a, p. 519). From this perspective, self-sacrifice is a means of selfattestation, rather than a risk or an infringement upon one’s autonomy (ibid., p. 521). For Ricœur, life is possible only through a sense of belonging – since the self cannot be thought of without the Other and since one finds oneself being related and in a position with regard to others. However, the development of a sense of belonging may require sacrifice. It may require stepping out of the realm of the self and moving towards the Other, sacrificing what is important to us to the Other’s well-being and happiness. Van Nistelrooij concludes that, because self-sacrifice is a means to build a sense of identity and belonging, it contributes to the carer’s personal growth and development despite the risks of vulnerability, exploitation and marginalization that are inherent in self-sacrifice as well. A sacrifice ... is not an act of destruction or devaluation of life; nor is it an exclusive valuation of one individual life over another, e.g. subordinating the caregiver’s needs to those of the care-receiver. Sacrifice instead should be considered as a middle position: the transcendent idea of living well together, rejecting, on the one hand, any neglect of each person’s worth and, on the other hand, the idea that no sacrifice may be made for another or for a good (ibid., p. 528).

Evaluation The re-evaluations of self-sacrifice as a source of joy, moral development and a sense of identity and belonging lend an important voice to the experiences that we make as carers in different contexts. They show that care ethicists conceptualize self-sacrifice not only as a form of vulnerability and exploitation, but also from the perspective of self-actualization, personal growth and joy. The varying interpretations suggest that the experience of care is ambiguous in that it implies not only loss and risks but also opportunities and prospects. The care position is not only one of weakness and fragility but also one of wisdom, competency and agency. The re-evaluation of selfsacrifice thus counterbalances the sharp critique of self-sacrifice in

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other versions of the ethics of care. Critique and reappraisals together provide us with a comprehensive picture of the demanding and rewarding nature of self-sacrifice. Similarly to the re-evaluation of the relationship between the donor and receiver of self-sacrifice, we must ask whether these reappraisals alleviate worries that arise as a result of the non-reciprocity, uncertainty and infinity of self-sacrifice. The question is whether consideration for these aspects addresses, in any way, the concerns about the alleged relationship between self-sacrifice and the marginalized status of carers. In the face of the self-sacrifice debate we must ask whether they actually conceptualize self-sacrifice in a way that does justice simultaneously to the unique care approach to morality and to the transformative agenda of the ethics of care. The above-mentioned reappraisals of self-sacrifice, though differing in many respects, share a focus on the self of sacrifice. At their center are the benefits for the self and the transformations that the self undergoes when it sacrifices itself for the sake of the Other. Whereas the critique of self-sacrifice describes the risks for the self, the reappraisals reveal the benefits for the self. Both, critique and reappraisal, put the self at the core of the analysis. However, this form of self-centered reappraisal does not effectively address the marginalization of care. Marginalization and exploitation take place regardless of whether the carer feels enriched or whether their moral competence and identity are enhanced. A carer can be exploited despite their feeling rewarded. Accounts of the positive aspects of self-sacrifice for the carer do not diminish their vulnerability nor the misconception of self-sacrifice as a weakness that justifies exploitation. Acknowledging the personal gains of self-sacrifice illuminates this phenomenon from an alternative perspective, but it fails to respond to the claims and concerns of those who suffer from the burden of care. These reappraisals of self-sacrifice change the way we understand our sacrifice for the Other, but they do little in order to change the status of care. They may even turn out to be detrimental to an agenda of change because they may obscure or euphemize our view on the carer’s status, rights and duties. A sensitivity towards the

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power implications of care relations may suffer from an emphasis on joy and personal fulfillment that care, without a doubt, also entails. This means that the attempts to revalue self-sacrifice exist rather independently of the debate about the relationship between selfsacrifice and marginalization. They do not relate the positive meaning of self-sacrifice as a source of joy and personal growth to the power dimension of care. Although Noddings and van Nistelrooij acknowledge this power dimension (Noddings 2013, pp. xvii and 33; van Nistelrooij 2014a, pp. 519f), their accounts of self-sacrifice do not meet the requirements of a transformative agenda. An acknowledgment of power implications is not enough as long as it remains separated from the opportunities and perspectives that self-sacrifice provides beyond the rewards for the self.

Rethinking the reappraisal In the beginning, I have argued that the self-sacrifice debate in care has to be seen within the context of a twofold ethical and socio-political agenda. A re-evaluation of self-sacrifice should support both the importance of self-sacrifice for the practice of care and the relevance of self-sacrificial care for society. The second requirement is not being met as long as self-sacrifice is reappraised from a perspective of the sacrificing self alone. It is necessary to emphasize the value of selfsacrifice independently of the sacrificer’s circumstances and to account for the social context within which self-sacrifice takes place. What we need is a perspective that not only sheds light on the personal rewards but that also gives self-sacrifice a new place in relations and communities. This perspective depicts self-sacrifice as a social and human rather than an individual phenomenon. It is a perspective that is apt to invalidate the connection between self-sacrifice and marginalization. As the inquiry aims to show, this alternative perspective on selfsacrifice can be unfolded with the help of Bernhard Waldenfels’s responsive phenomenology. Waldenfels does not develop a concept of self-sacrifice on his own but offers an account of the relationship between self and Other from which a new perspective on self-sacrifice can be derived. His description of the experience of otherness changes

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our view of the ways we are connected with each other and on the reasons why we respect and care for each other to a point at which the self is at risk. Waldenfels’s responsive phenomenology focuses on the experience of foreignness that pervades our encounter with the world, including our encounter with the other human. He describes the relationship between the self and the Other as ambivalent because he sees it as characterized by a fundamental interdependence and an insurmountable separateness. The constitution of self and Other depends on an invasion of the self by the Other. Through this invasion the Other is perceived as “Other” and the self is constituted by seeing itself in difference fom the Other. This means that the self carries the Other within itself but that self and Other never collapse into a joint horizon. They remain separated from each other through a gap that cannot be closed. The own and the foreign, i.e. other people’s perspectives, never merge. The permeability of the self and the incorporation of foreign elements in the self have their roots in – as Waldenfels calls it – a responsivity or response-ability to the world. The concept of responsivity stands for the idea that experience takes the form of a response. This notion differs from the classical subject/object split in experience. It also differs from the phenomenological view of experience as intentionality or directedness. According to Waldenfels, responsivity is a specific human form of experience. It stands for an ability to experience the world as inappropriable. This ability arises with a withdrawal of the self because only through a withdrawal can the outside world appear as inappropriable and different from the self. It also has, as Waldenfels shows, far-reaching consequences for our social and moral competencies. A concept of self-sacrifice that is derived from responsivity associates self-sacrifice with the ability to experience the world in the form of a response, an ability that allows human relations and communities to thrive.

Structure of the investigation The investigation is divided into five chapters. The first chapter develops the self-sacrifice debate within the ethics of care. It exposes

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the critique of self-sacrifice and the accounts that draw a connection between self-sacrifice and the marginalization of care. In a second step, the chapter argues that self-sacrifice must be seen as a distinctive feature of an ethics of care. The chapter ends with the conclusion that the critique of self-sacrifice poses a problem for the ethics of care because it creates a tension between the political and the ethical agenda of the ethics of care and thereby diminishes its normative authority. The second chapter casts light on the relevance that phenomenological inquiry has had for the advancement of the ethics of care. It provides an overview of care literature that draws on the phenomenology of alterity as a source of inspiration. It presents the main fields of intersection by summarizing important themes and topics and by highlighting the insights that these cross-ethical investigations have yielded so far. It also offers reflections on methodological challenges resulting from the engagement of care ethics with phenomenology. The third chapter is dedicated to the responsive phenomenology of Bernhard Waldenfels. In a first step, it introduces responsivity and the foreign as the core concepts of Waldenfels’s phenomenology and shows how these features build the foundation of a radical notion of subject de-centrism and heterology. In a second step, the chapter develops the ethical dimension of responsivity. This dimension takes different forms. First, it can be found in the traces of foreignness in phenomena, such as trust and responsibility. Second, it appears in Waldenfels’s critical engagement with principle-based ethics (Kant) and ethical skepticism (Nietzsche). In debating these ethics, Waldenfels aims to show that conventional attempts to define the provenance of morality are flawed and that responsivity must be seen as the real source of moral commitment. The fourth chapter develops a new perspective on self-sacrifice. It draws mainly on Waldenfels’s concept of a “dovetailing self/other constitution” and the “doubled pathos”. Central elements of these concepts are passivity, self-suspension and a suffering from the Other’s distress as if it were our own – elements that are especially meaningful in the context of care and self-sacrifice.

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The fifth chapter, finally, discusses the consequences of a “responsive” perspective on self-sacrifice for the ethics of care. It addresses the question of whether the responsive perspective is conducive to the transformative agenda of the ethics of care, i.e. to its aim of gaining more acknowledgment and recognition for care. Unlike the ethics of care, responsive phenomenology is not a political theory, nor is it sensitive to the power implications of heteronomy. Chapter five argues that a responsive phenomenology – despite its lack of a power perspective – can advance the political goals of the ethics of care. Self-sacrifice from the perspective of a responsive phenomenology is not an individual character trait that yields joy, identity, and also exploitation. It is rather the exemplification of a fundamental feature of experience, which Waldenfels describes as an intertwined response and self-withdrawal – and as the reason why there is morality.

1 Self-sacrifice and the ethics of care

1.1. Critique of self-sacrifice Care theorists have criticized self-sacrifice from different angles. For some, self-sacrifice is problematic from an ethical point of view. They question the underlying assumptions and the moral value of self-sacrifice. According to Hoagland, for example, granting more weight to the care receiver’s interest than to the interests of the carer is unethical because it establishes an inequality between cared-for and carer that contradicts the idea of justice. Altruistic care replaces the injustice of self-centeredness with the injustice of other-centeredess. No moral principle can justify the needs and interests of one person’s having priority over another’s (Hoagland 1999, p.  111; in a similar vein Petterson 2012, p. 369). Moreover, as others argue, putting systematically the interests of the care receiver over the interests of the care giver can be harmful – in emergencies as well as in the long run. It not only denies the legitimate interests of the caring agent but also the likelihood that the care that one gives is effective and sustaining. Too much sacrifice on the Other’s behalf can lead to physical and psychological problems such as burn-out and depression. The carer loses the ability to care at times when it is needed most. Also, self-sacrificial care pampers the Other to an extent that impedes their competence to take care of themselves and to become independent and self-confident agents (Petterson 2012, p.  370; Held 2006, pp.  135 and 138). According to  this reasoning, the costs of self-sacrifice exceed the short-term

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benefits for the cared-for. Self-sacrifice creates asymmetries and dependencies that are unfair for the carer and detrimental to the cared-for’s personal development. The lack of an ethical legitimation of self-sacrifice is not the only problem that care ethicists address. An even larger group of scholars is concerned about the social and political implications of self-sacrificial care. For these theorists, self-sacrifice in care is a problem because it is at the root of discrimination against carers and a marginalization of care activities. Their arguments will be set out in the following chapters. 1.1.1. Self-sacrifice and social marginalization Care ethicists have long deplored the marginalized status of care within societies and intimate relations. Their claims can be divided into two groups. For one, critics point at the lack of recognition for care work and care givers. They see a discrepancy between the relevance of care for the survival, flourishing, and well-being of individuals and communities on the one hand and the low status and remuneration of care work on the other. Christa Schnabl, for example, holds that modern societies are characterized by a systematic devaluation of care. The roots of this underrating, she says, can be traced back to the early forms of public welfare in the 16th and 17th  centuries, when care givers, almost exclusively women, were expected to perform care duties for altruistic reasons, i.e. in the form of an unpaid charitable service. This situation changed in the 19th and 20th centuries, when care work became more diversified and developed into a number of professions. However, to date, these professions have been suffering from a misconception that links them to an altruistic attitude. The association of care with altruism justifies low wages, little or no career opportunities, difficult work conditions, frequent hours of overtime and a lack of prestige and reputation (Schnabl 2005, p. 39). Schnabl also points to the consequences of a systemic devaluation and underpaying of care work for societies. Because of the marginalized status of care, fewer people are willing to work in the care professions and bear the social and economic

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disadvantages. Accordingly, modern societies suffer from an increasing care gap, a “crisis of care”, as Schnabl puts it, that affects those who depend on care most, like the young, the elderly, the sick, or the disabled (ibid., p.  11). According to Schnabl, we must direct our attention to the discrepancy that exists between the relevance and the recognition of care. Because all societies depend on care, it is high time to raise awareness for this and to achieve the recognition that it deserves (ibid., p. 14). A second group of claims refers to the maldistribution of care privileges and responsibilities. These scholars deplore the fact that those who give a lot of care are often those who are the least cared for. If the lack of recognition and adequate remuneration constitutes an economic injustice because it does not adequately reflect the relevance of care, the maldistribution of care rights and duties stands for injustice of an uneven access to the benefits of care. Care is a good that everyone needs at least during some time in their life. But many of those who have received care are never involved in actively caring for another person. One of the most important voices in addressing the unequal distribution of care is Joan Tronto’s. In her book Moral Boundaries, Tronto coins the term “privileged irresponsibility” to capture the injustice in care responsibilities and rights (Tronto 1993, p. 146). For her, the uneven distribution of the benefits of care follow the pattern of power distribution in societies. Those who are well-off define their own needs and concerns as the most important. Whereas the needs of those who are less well-off are ignored or devalued (ibid., pp. 146f). Power inequalities also condition the care relations themselves. The beneficiaries of care fail to acknowledge not only their own privileges but also the work and efforts of those who do the care work. “These ‘self-made’ figures would not only find it difficult to admit the degree to which care has made their lives possible, but such an admission would undermine the legitimacy of the inequitable distribution of power, resources and privilege of which they are the beneficiaries” (ibid, p.  111). The work of care for the elderly, the sick, the young and the disabled is shouldered by some who often work in harsh conditions and get little pay and recognition. In the private

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realm, moreover, care work often goes completely unnoticed. Care for intimate others, for family members, friends or neighbors is seldom recognized as work at all, and is often taken for granted. For Eva Feder Kittay (1999), the undervaluation of care necessitates the mobilization of social and political support in order to enable carers to continue their work for Others. The power-sensitivity of the ethics of care with regard to the injustice in care is linked to the gender aspect of care. To date, many more women than men are involved in care labor, whether professionally or in the private realm. Alhough the share of women in the so-called “productive” sector of the workforce has increased in western societies over the last decades, the imbalance in the distribution of caring labor has not changed much up until now. Women work in production but only a few men work in care (Schnabl 2005, p. 14). Accordingly, many more women than men are affected by the discrepancy between the relevance and recognition of care and the unequal distribution of care rights and responsibilities. Concerns with the unequal division of care work and the lack of recognition for care givers are then “naturally” connected with the feminist project of liberating women from oppressive structures, including those structures that undervalue their work and keep them at the margins of societies. Feminist care theorists interpret self-sacrificial care as the symbol of a patriarchal ideology that confines women to the realm of unpaid altruistic labor. For them, care is stereotyped as a female morality or characteristic. Women are expected to fulfill this stereotype by developing and showing a caring attitude. Diemut Bubeck speaks in this context of the “circle of care” as “an interlocking set of constraints and practices that channels women into doing the bulk of care. This forms a nexus of material practice, psychology and ideology that has been proven hard for men to enter and for women to escape. The circle of care works on many level, social, individual, situational, psychological, conscious and unconscious” (Bubeck 2003, p.  174). Feminist care ethicists argue that the association of women with care

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perpetuates women’s submissiveness and masculine oppressiveness and counters efforts to implement political justice and professional fulfillment for women. According to them, the economic advantages of keeping the costs of care low and of freedom from the responsibility to care must be understood as either the motivational forces behind the injustice in care or, at least, its convenient side effects.1 Analyzing care as a gendered concept raises intricate questions about the intersectionality of care, gender and marginalization. Does care work lack recognition because it is performed by women more often than by men? Or is the lack of recognition linked to other aspects of care? Are women more occupied with care work because care represents a female voice in morality? Or do women care because this reflects and reinforces their marginalized status within societies?2 One way to deal with the complexity of the inequity-triangular of care is to bracket the gender aspect of care and focus only on the problem of the marginalization of care. This move, which I will adopt in the following, is not meant to trivialize the importance of a gender-related analysis of care or to deny the reality of an unequal division of care work based on sex. It, rather, follows pragmatic considerations. Bracketing the gender aspect of care reduces the complexity of questions that are related to the injustice in care without compromising the overarching goal of gaining more recognition for care. Exempting the gender aspect of care from justice considerations can be seen as being justified if the marginalized status of care is seen as the most pressing issue at hand. Within the framework of justice considerations, the gender aspect of care may be regarded as secondary because an improvement of the status of care will serve care givers regardless of their sex (or other markers of oppression such as ethnicity). Any progress in reducing the marginalization of care serves the justice perspective and the feminist perspective alike 1 See Groenhout 2003, pp.  157f for a good summary of the debate and, in a similar vein, Friedman 1987, p. 101; Tong 1993, pp. 100f and passim. 2 As Tronto puts it: “It is difficult to know whether the least well off are less well off because they care and caring is devalued or because in order to devalue people they are forced to do the caring work” (Tronto 1993, p. 113).

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because the feminist perspective is concerned with the marginalization of feminized care rather than with the feminization of care as such. By bracketing the gender aspect of care, the marginalized status of care comes to the fore, not as a problem related to women but as one that is related to care and has far-reaching consequences for societies at large. It helps redirect efforts to (re-)conceptualize care in ways that highlight the importance of care for all of us. Bracketing the gender aspect of care, finally, has the advantage of pre-empting criticism about essentialist views in theories of care – a criticism that is inevitably invoked if the marginalization of care is treated as a problem of women alone. Earlier versions of the ethics of care especially, such as those by Carol Gilligan (Gilligan 1982), Noddings (Noddings 2013, first edition 1984) or Sara Ruddick (Ruddick 1980), have been criticized for perpetuating the stereotype of care as a female morality and for brushing over differences that exist in the moral experiences of women (Houston 1990, p. 118; Hoagland 1990, p. 113; Tong 1993, pp. 100f; McLaren 2001, p. 101). Bracketing the gender aspect of care does not mean that the ethics of care can no longer be seen as a feminist ethics. The question of whether the ethics of care is a feminist ethics depends on how we define the latter. As long as we define it as an ethics that sees any inquiry into it as linked to the project of justice and equality, an ethics of care that is concerned about the marginalized status of care is a feminist ethics. This implies that it can be seen as supportive of other feminist claims such as, for example, the relational view on autonomy and the critique of subject-centrism. Even after bracketing the gender aspect of care, we are still left with the question if, and if so why and to what extent, self-sacrificial tendencies in care should be regarded as the cause of the marginalization and uneven distribution of care. Those who are critical of self-sacrifice from a power-sensitive perspective argue that care givers are marginalized because their sacrifices entail a vulnerability that may lead to exploitation. They claim that other-centered care impairs the carer’s ability to pursue their own interests and needs, including their legitimate demands for more recognition, better payment and the equal distribution of care

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work. Hoagland, for example, is concerned about the sense of self that emerges from other-centered care. She argues that someone who cares more about others than about themselves understands their moral value primarily through the care she gives. Hence, their ethical identity has an other-directed justification. It is defined and valued in their usefulness for others (Hoagland 1999, p. 109). The carer’s projects and interests are meaningless as long as they cannot be set into a relationship with the needy Other (Hoagland 1990, p. 110; in a similar vein Houston 1990, p. 117). Moreover, self-sacrificial care can create vulnerabilities to an extent at which the caring agent will be deprived of their resources to resist exploitation. Janet Borgerson offers an insightful analysis of how the prioritizing of other interests and perspectives can impoverish the carer’s agency. Borgerson understands other-centered and asymmetrical care as a form of othering. Othering or othering mechanisms, in a classical sense, are processes of demarcation whereby the Other is defined in their difference to the self. The self sets the standard against which the Other is measured. The Other is unable to achieve the standards and norms of the self, they are, from the self’s perspective, a failure and deviation. Standard setting is a process of sense making and interpretation. It is a right and privilege which is reserved to those who have power and embody the standard. Only those who embody the standard have an “authentic identity” (Borgerson 2001, p. 178), whereas the Other defines her identity in relation to her “success” in copying the norms and forms of behavior that have been invented by someone else. For Borgerson, the attitude of caring undermines the ability of standard setting. In other-centered care, the epistemic competence and authority of the carer is suspended. The caring agent abstains from enforcing their own perspectives and ideas. They seek rather to bring the Other’s voice to the fore and to look at the world with the Other’s eyes. The other-centered carer is no standard setter. By prioritizing the Other’s way of defining needs and formulating perspectives, processes of sense-making and standard-setting are shifted from the carer to the cared-for. The care giver loses their self-starting identity, they become the

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“Other”. As Other, the carer finds her energy and attention directed towards the fulfillment of wishes and the achievement of projects that are not their own. And since they have given up or not developed a sense of self that is independent from the care they give, they also do not develop ideas or perspectives that benefit their own interests. The carer’s perspective is not one of “rule-making”. Carers must be seen “not as authors of principles who fully participate in the life of these principles, but as those who negotiate details and relationships within the context of principles and rules that have been given to or forced upon them“ (ibid.). As someone who receives rules and norms rather than inventing them, the carer does not have the epistemic tools to escape injustice and to transform societies. The fight for more justice requires standard setting abilities. But as Other, or “othered”, the carer belongs to a subordinated group that can “rarely contradict, and typically reproduce, versions of subordination” (ibid.). The problem, then, is that in caring we do not just neglect our interests and wishes but we are also caught in the trap of being othered and measured against standards that are set by another. The carer follows foreign standards that they are neither able to achieve nor to overcome. Accordingly, other-centered care is “dangerous” for the caring self because if offers those whose interests and perspectives are prioritized the possibility of reinforcing norms, hierarchies and inequality (Petterson 2012, p. 374). Other-centered care impedes the care giver from developing perspectives of her own that could function as a means towards more justice in care relations (Tong 1993, p.  101; Crigger 1997, p.  218). Care givers are not at all well-positioned to enforce their rights and to initiate necessary changes. There is a relationship between self-sacrificial care and the undervaluation of care. Care givers are marginalized because they care. 1.1.2. Towards fair care relations 1.1.2.1. Political measures Scholars of care have offered a variety of solutions to improve the status of care. For some, the revaluation of care and the redistribution of care rights and privileges are primarily a political task. They argue

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that the marginalization of care within modern societies points at a failure of political elites to implement the principle of justice. The distribution of care responsibilities will be unfair as long as social norms channel the care work to some while exempting others. The need for justice in the realm of private and intimate relations is one of the claims that Susan Moller Okin raises in her book Justice, Gender and the Family (Moller Okin 1989). Moller Okin addresses the inconsistency of any concept of justice that does not encompass the realm of households and private relations in which most of the work is unpaid and unrecognized. These relations need to become part of justice considerations, otherwise societies cannot be called just. The undervaluation of work in the private realm endangers the foundations of modern societies. As Moller Okin writes: [T]he unequal distribution of rights, benefits, responsibilities, and powers within the family is closely related to inequalities in the many other spheres of social and political life. There is a cyclical process at work, reinforcing the dominance of men over women from home to work to... the political arena, and thence back home again (Moller Okin 1989, p. 113, her emphasis).

Other scholars establish a more direct line between justice and caring activities. Justice and care have long been treated as two different, or even mutually exclusive, approaches to morality. By advocating a justice perspective in care, these theorists seek to overcome what they see as an artificial division. Marilyn Friedman, for example, identifies three ways in which justice is relevant to caring. First, we need justice to address the injustice in the gender division and distribution of caring labor. Second, we need justice to correct harms that are being done because of the vulnerabilities that are created by personal relationships. And third, we need justice because caring relations are always fraught with myriads of instances of potential injustice and questions about the equal distribution of care (Friedman 1987, pp. 100-102). Held similarly emphasizes the need for justice in caring relations. She holds that a justice perspective has to complement care relations to make them more fair. However, as Held stresses, care will always be more important than justice because “[t]here can be care

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without justice: There has historically been little justice in the family, but care and life have gone on without it. There can be no justice without care, however, for without care no child would survive and there would be no persons to respect” (Held 2006, p. 17). One of the most outspoken advocates of a political solution to injustice in care is Joan Tronto. For Tronto, improving the status of care is a political task beause “[o]nly if we understand care as a political idea will we be able to change its status” (Tronto 1993, p. 157). According to Tronto, care activities are devalued, underpaid and disproportionately occupied by the relatively powerless in society (ibid., p.  113). The distribution of caring work serves to maintain and to reinforce patterns of subordination (ibid., p.  116). Our perception that care is somehow tied to a subordinate status in society is not inherent in the nature of care, but is, rather, a function of the structure of social values and moral boundaries that inform our current ways of life (ibid., p. 93). For Tronto, the most promising strategy to overcome the undervaluation of care is to create an appropriate political framework. This framework, basically, consists of a democratic system. Its pillars are justice, a democratic and open opportunity for discussion and more equal access to power (ibid., p.  155). Political decision makers and people with the appropriate means and power must implement change so that caring becomes a more valued practice. “For a society to be judged as a morally admirable society, it must, among other things, adequately provide for care of its members and its territories” (Tronto 1993, p. 128). A fair distribution of care rights and responsibilities requires concrete political measures. “Simply positing a moral ideal of caring will not suffice to make the world more caring; we need as well be able to translate that moral ideal into practice. In this way, morality and politics must be interwoven to effect change” (ibid., p. 154). Kittay, too, argues that ending the injustice in care is a political task. Her concern is with those who shoulder the burden of care for the sick and disabled. Their support is, she says, a public and social responsibility. “Just as we have required care to survive and thrive, so we need to provide conditions that allow others – including those

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who do the work of caring – to receive the care they need to survive and thrive” (Kittay 1999, p. 68). In Love’s Labor (1999), Kittay develops the concept of the doula as a public system of paid professional care workers who care for care givers in a form of public welfare akin to worker’s compensation or unemployment benefits. The above mentioned authors point to the need for political, institutional and legal support to address the injustice in care. Political measures are viewed as essential to gain care recognition and to fight the unequal distribution of care. Political actors are urged to acknowledge the relevance of care for the survival and flourishing of societies. They are seen as those who have the power and means to provide adequate frameworks for making care work a more valued and sustaining activity. Three critical points remain. One is the limited scope of state action. Even if the legal situation improves, if care givers get better pay and working conditions, if the burden of care is more equally shared by all constituents of a society, individuals will still have to find the right balance between the care they provide and the pursuit of their own interests, including the care they need. This holds true particularly in those cases in which the demand for care is unexpected and unprecedented. Trajectories of life are manifold, unique, and dynamic. Laws and directives can organize, facilitate or improve relationships but they normally lag behind the reality of social life and they are never sufficient or comprehensive enough to cover all facets of intimate relations. The second problem relates to the lack of voluntariness of state action. Political strategies to improve the status of care are imposed from above and thus lend, rather than transfer, power and status to individuals. Care givers are enmeshed in social relations of love and friendship, competition and rivalry. The limited reach of state measures leaves a leeway at the micro level of relations which can be abused to circumvent any emancipatory and liberating agenda if it is enforced from above. In order for strategies to improve the status of care, they must both involve care givers and care receivers at the level

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of individual choice. Individually tailored approaches to care are required not only to improve the status of care but also to orient carers and help them master the complexity of their relations. As Ruth Groenhout puts it: “Care can have social implications – Tronto seems exactly correct in drawing this conclusion. But even after having drawn those conclusions ... the individual still has to decide when she will care and when she will not” (Groenhout 2003, p. 161.) Proper political concepts and frameworks or even coercive measures may improve working conditions or salaries. But they do not necessarily change our perception of care and our attitudes towards it. Recognition and a re-evaluation of care can not be imposed from above. It must grow from below and from within care relations themselves. Third, politically oriented strategies to improve the status of care address legislators and politicians as the main agents of change. And this is probably their biggest flaw. In order to move towards fairer care relations, it is necessary to combine political measures with strategies and orientations that directly address the providers of care because they are, in the first place, those who shape our perception of care and who can be the agents of change in care relations. In the following chapters I will show two different approaches from the body of literature that seeks to advise care givers how to end the injustice in care. They are built on the rationale that, if care is marginalized because carers sacrifice themselves, then self-sacrifice should be reduced or eliminated from the practice of care. This will strengthen both the carer’s ability to care for themselves and the way people perceive the work of care. Although they share a general objection to self-sacrificial tendencies in care, they differ in their conclusions of how self-sacrifice should be detached from care. 1.1.2.2. Individual measures During the 1980s and 1990s – when the ethics of care emerged as an independent ethical theory – the majority of care scholars were critics of altruism and self-sacrificial care. These authors share a general rejection of self-sacrifice and of the notion that altruism and selfsacrifice have no moral worth per se: rather, they are the product of

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oppression or of a lack of self-esteem, or are even motivated by selfish interests. According to these scholars, care givers have not only the right, but also the duty, to put an end to asymmetrical and othercentered forms of care. Alison Jagger, for example, understands extensive and asymmetrical care as motivated by a reluctance to stand on one’s own feet. She suggests that self-sacrificial-care relations are often maintained for fear of separation and abandonment. The willingness to care for the Other by sacrificing one’s own interests and prospects not only symbolizes but also reinforces powerlessness and an escape from responsibility for one’s own life. Ending an asymmetrical care relation may imply hardship for the care giver but also offer opportunities for personal growth and increased independence (Jagger 1990, p. 148). Birgit Rommelbacher argues in a similar vein. She sees two reasons equally motivating care for the Other: charity and humanity on the one hand and a flight from the burden of self-responsibility on the other (Rommelbacher 1992, p. 11). Hoagland, too, is critical of self-sacrificial care. For Hoagland, self-sacrifice is less the expression of morality and benevolence; but rather it must be seen in the context of self-interests, even though these interests are defined from the position of subordination and powerlessness. For Hoagland, self-sacrifice and other-centeredness are primarily survival skills that women have developed in order to gain at least some control in situations in which their energy and attention are focused on others (Hoagland 1992, p. 158f). She concludes that the virtue of selfless care is not an ethical ideal, but rather the product of a masculinist ideology that functions to oppress female agency (ibid., pp. 159 and 163). An even more deprecatory judgment of self-sacrificial care is made by Karin Flaake. Flaake suggests that women sacrifice their own interests for the sake of family obligations because they want to avoid the conflicts, confrontations and challenges of a professional life. As caring housewives, women take advantage of the economic and social benefits of their husbands’ careers by, wrongly, declaring them as their own achievements (Flaake 1994, p. 50).

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What these accounts have in common is denial of the idea that self-sacrifice can have worth in itself. Asymmetrical care is not seen as a benevolent act for the sake of the Other but as a symbol of weakness combined with self-interest. Against this background, self-sacrifice must be condemned because it is not only ethically worthless but, moreover, perpetuates the powerlessness of women by serving as an excuse for them not to resist their social marginalization and to start a life of their own. Published in the 1980s and early 1990s, these accounts nowadays seem harsh and categorical in their objection to asymmetrical care, too negative in their denial of the moral worth of self-sacrifice, and reductionist and simplicistic with regard to the motives of selfsacrificial carers. They refer to a model of submissive housewives that has never been a universal standard nor representative of all forms of care. Moreover, the overtly critical stance towards self-sacrificial care shows a disturbing similarity to other forms of a devaluation of care in more traditional ethics. It resembles, for example, Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of slave morality, which holds that oppressed peoples tend to develop moral theories that reaffirm subservient traits as virtues (Nietzsche 1998, section 1, §7-8). This view undermines or even contradicts attempts to overcome negative connotations of care and to gain more recognition for care as an ethical ideal. Finally, a reduction of care to stages of fear, lack of maturity or weakness or to the quest for more security, protection and love creates a sense of personal failure and of responsibility for the misery that the care giver experiences in imbalanced care relations. From this perspective, the scandalous discrepancy between the relevance and the recognition of care is reinterpreted as the deserved punishment for inappropriate behavior. This, however, thwarts the liberating and transformative agenda of the ethics of care and once more turns the ideal of care into a tool of oppression and perpetuation of the status quo. Although a strong objection to self-sacrificial care characterizes earlier versions of care scholarship rather than more recently published work, the self-defeating effects of excessive and asymmetrical care still cause concern for many care theorists. The termination of the care relation is still seen as a drastic but legitimate option and, in some

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cases, as a necessary step. Care theorists thereby are eager to stress that the withdrawal from a cared-for does not necessarily diminish the ethical ideal of care. Sometimes a withdrawal may even be important to preserve this ideal (Hoagland 1999, p. 111). The care giver has the right to critically assess relationships of abuse/oppression and to end them without feelings of guilt or shame. Moreover, withdrawal from a person who has never learned to stand on their own feet as a result of unrestrained care and support may be the only way to help this person grow and become more independent (ibid.; also Friedman 1987, p. 56). From this perspective, loosening the bond between self and other can be an adequate means of ending oppression and breaking up the primacy of the Other. By reinforcing and maintaining stronger personal boundaries, the care giver is able to regain agency and resources to resist oppression, things that are lost in the status of selfless care (Borgerson 2001, p. 180; similarly Rössler 2002, p. 150). Other care ethicists who are critical of self-sacrifice do not advocate a withdrawal from care but seek a middle ground between care for the Other and care for the self. These positions are based on the assumption that care givers who are able to strengthen the aspect of self-care in their relationships are less prone to exploitation and abuse. One such position has been developed by Groenhout. Groenhout suggests that, in order to overcome extreme tendencies of selfsacrifice in care, the ethics of care should draw on a Christian agapic theory of self-sacrifice, in particular on the concepts of creation, sin and vocation that can be found in this theory. Groenhout argues that the ethics of care can learn from Christian agapic theory by developing concepts in analogy to creation, sin and vocation because these concepts are useful to limit self-sacrifice and thus alleviate powerrelated issues in care (Groenhout 2003, p. 154). As for the creation, this concept, according to Groenhout, helps us understand that we have a responsibility of self-preservation. In Christian agapic ethics the conceptual trope of creation implies that all humans are created equal by God. The notion of equal value and sanctity, however, puts a restraint on self-sacrifice because it cannot be reconciled with the idea that one should value others more highly

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than oneself (ibid., p. 166). The ethics of care is a non-theistic theory but the concept of creation, as Groenhout argues, can still be put to good use. From a non-theological perspective the responsibility of self-preservation may be deduced from the essence of what it means to be human – not in the sense of our relation to God, but in the sense of our relation to other humans and to the communities we live in. As Groenhout puts it, “[h]umans are fundamentally communal selves” (ibid., p.  167). This implies that, because of my position within a community, both care for the Other and care for the self are required. For if I harm myself through extensive and self-sacrifical care, the community also gets affected and harmed. This means that care should not destroy my ability to care for myself because of my position in and responsibility towards the community (ibid., p. 168). Groenhout’s second argument builds on the Christian concept of sin. Groenhout argues that the idea of sin reminds us that humans are not only naturally caring but also naturally able to be evil and destructive. By keeping in mind these contradictory tendencies of our abilities and behavior and by being aware of the possibility of harm and evil, the call to care can be constructed in a way that is less prone to advocating self-sacrifice because “I have a duty to preserve myself to continue the fight against evil” (ibid., p. 169). Being aware of the possibility of evil is also important to prevent forms of care that are themselves abusive and destructive. The notion of the will to destruction and evil provides a needed correction to the idea that all forms of care are ethical (ibid., p. 170). The last agapic concept that Groenhout evokes for a re-evaluation of self-sacrifice is vocation. Vocation in Christian agapic ethics implies the notion that I am responsible to God for how I live my life. It also implies “that I am responsible to God for how I live my life in ways I cannot be responsible to God for my neighbor’s life” (ibid., p. 166). If each individual has a unique vocation to which they are called, their responsibility to give up on themselves must be questioned (ibid.). For a non-theistic theory such as the ethics of care it is difficult to develop a conceptual grounding for being responsible for developing capabilities and abilities. Still, as Groenhout argues,

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the concept of vocation can be meaningful and important for care relations even if the ethics of care fails to give an analogical account of it (ibid., p. 170). Groenhout sees Christian agapic ethics as a valuable source for the ethics of care. A Christian ethics allows for a reduction of care for the Other and a balance between self-care and other-centeredness because it holds that carers have a moral obligation towards the community not to destroy themselves, that there is a possibility of harm and destruction, and that carers have a responsibility to develop their own abilities and capabilities (ibid, pp. 170f). Our obligation to care for the Other requires balancing it with the obligation to care for ourselves. The need for self-preservation limits my obligation to self-sacrificial care. Tove Petterson argues for a limitation of self-sacrifice and an emphasis on more self-care, albeit from a different angle. In order to advocate self-care within care, Petterson develops the concept of mature care.3 With this concept, she wants to provide care givers with an orientation of how to protect themselves against the harmful consequences of selfsacrificial care. The concept suggests that, in a care relation, all parties should count equally, that no one should care more for another than for herself, and that one’s own and other people’s interests should have equal value. “Mature care is characterized by its intermediate position between selfishness and self-sacrifice, as the mean between too little For her concept of mature care, Petterson draws on Gilligan’s account of moral maturity, which, according to Petterson, is characterized by the carer’s ability to balance concern for self and concern for others (Petterson 2012, p. 376). This interpretation of Gilligan’s account, however, can be contested. I understand Gilligan’s concept of moral maturity less as the carer’s ability to balance self-care and care for the Other than, by analogy with Lawrence Kohlberg’s stages of moral development, as the capability to make moral decisions (in contexts of care) independent from the expectations and judgments of external authorities (see for example Gilligan (1982): “[T]he exercise of choice brings her … into conflict with the conventions of feminity” (p. 70, my emphasis), or: “This is the essence of the transitional shift toward a new concept of goodness, which turns inward in acknowledging the self and in accepting responsibility for choice” (p. 85, my emphasis). The maturity to overcome indecisiveness and to assume responsibility for one’s moral choices is different from the way in which Petterson defines moral maturity, namely as the ability to reduce care obligations for the sake of one’s own health and well-being. 3

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and too much concern for others” (Petterson 2012, p. 377). For Petterson, an agent’s inability (or unwillingness) to develop this form of balanced or mature care is considered immature; the agent’s moral capacity is underdeveloped, or even “unethical” (ibid.). According to Petterson, mature care involves “the awareness of the importance of identifying, developing, correcting, or confirming what is in the best interest of the cared-for” (ibid.). This means that the care giver plays an active role in defining needs and solutions because “one cannot take it for granted that the cared-for always knows, or can determine or decide this” (ibid., p.  378). This, one could add, holds true in particular in those cases in which the caredfor’s ability to make decisions is obviously impaired or restrained (cf. Hem 2014, p. 798). Assuming an active role in identifying needs, however, bears the risk of paternalism. To avoid tutelage and dominance in care relations, Petterson emphasizes the need for communication and dialogue as well as for an ongoing reflection about not only the Other’s needs but also the carer’s position in the relationship (Petterson 2012, p. 378). Mature care, finally, implies that both the carer and the cared-for bear a responsibility for the success of their care relationship. The cared-for is more than a passive receiver and in some situations can even be held accountable for their situation. Carer and cared-for contribute equally to the relationship; both must make an effort in building trustworthy connections that are conducive to care. “Care work is a shared responsibility” (ibid., p.  382). In Petterson’s concept of mature care the relationship between the carer and the cared-for is different from what we understand by self-sacrificial relations. Carer and cared-for, despite their differences in strength and capabilities, meet each other on an equal footing. Interests and perspectives, as well as responsibilities for the relations, are shared equally. The carer does not meet the Other with the intention of putting themselves in their shoes, to see the world through their eyes. Despite their commitment to the Other in need, the carer keeps a distance. Carer and cared-for are partners in achieving a common good, namely to foster their relationship and make care a success.

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A withdrawal from care can be an important means of regaining one’s own voice and of re-establishing control over an abusive partnership or situation; to protect oneself against the excessive demands of the cared-for. Care theorists who argue for a withdrawal from care as a last resort offer justification and an important moral support for those who are confronted with the difficult question of whether they should terminate their care for one another. They affirm the care giver’s fundamental right to place self-interest over the interests of the other in need if the situation becomes unbearable. Both Groenhout’s and Petterson’s arguments for more self-care in care relations strengthen the carer’s position and help restore her agency. Still, a few questions remain. In order to advocate the termination of exploitative care relations we need criteria that help us determine at what point the damage caused by continuing the relationship outweighs the harm that would be caused by ending it. The option to withdraw from care may appear unrealistic or even impossible in cases in which our care makes a difference to the cared-for, to the extent that their mental and physical health is at stake. The dependency on our care may be so strong that any compromise on its quantity or quality is impossible – regardless of how abusive or exploitative this relation is. Moreover, it is questionable whether we are ready to reduce or terminate our care relations – even if we know that our efforts go unnoticed, are devalued or distract us from the pursuit of our own projects and interests. The recommendation to withdraw from care provides important alternatives in those cases in which the care relation obviously has gone wrong, but it leaves out those cases in which to care still feels to be the right thing to do despite gross injustice and inequality. The most pressing question is whether care performed in line with the concepts of maturity and equality still captures the meaning of care. Does the emphasis on self-interest and self-care not erode the very notion of care as a concern for the well-being and flourishing of others? Is it enough to develop theories of how to care in a reasonable and self-preserving way and to be assured in our rights to withdraw from care, or is it not even more important to understand how we

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can maintain and improve those relations despite their implicit asymmetry and inequality? The question remains whether the elimination of self-sacrificial tendencies does justice to the specific care approach to morality; whether we can balance self-care with care for the Other and treat ourselves in the same way we treat the Other in need – and still speak of care?4

1.2. Self-sacrifice as a feature of care The question is whether we can address the problems of other-centered care, especially the vulnerabilities and risks that it entails, by recommending a reduction or termination of self-sacrifice, or whether care and self-sacrifice are connected in such deep ways that the implementation of these recommendations becomes difficult or even impossible. The question is whether self-sacrifice and care are indissolubly connected or whether we can understand care as being disconnected from self-sacrifice. 1.2.1. Self-sacrifice as a vital feature For van Nistelrooij, self-sacrifice is, indeed, a vital feature of care. In her dissertation Sacrifice: A care-ethical reappraisal of sacrifice and selfsacrifice (2014), van Nistelrooij states that caring “involves sacrifices, even to the point where the self is sacrificed” (p. 31). Van Nistelrooij provides four arguments to substantiate her view. First, she asks “what would be left of care if the aspect of sacrifice would be excluded from it” (ibid.). This statement alone, however, does not yet explain plausibly why self-sacrifice should be vital to care. Second, van Nistelrooij says that care necessarily involves self-sacrifice because it is directed “towards the Other’s needs and concerns, to a positive, to a good” (ibid., p. 32). This argument seems to be based on the notion that care implies a directedness and an active involvement 4 See also van Nistelrooij’s critique of the concept of “mature care”. Van Nistelrooij, in particular, questions the normative implications of a concept of good (as in mature care) that calls for an equal treatment of one’s own and other people’s interests and that asks moral agents to care for themselves as much as they care for others (van Nistelrooij 2014b, p. 46).

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for the sake of the Other. But why should this justify the claim that self-sacrifice is vital to care? In order to make van Nistelrooij’s argument conclusive we have to add the premise that an active involvement on the Other’s behalf always implies self-sacrifice. This premise can be questioned, as I will show in chapter 1.2.2. In her third argument, van Nistelrooij states that care is often “beyond the moment of decision and free choice; it is not something that caregivers can always decide on beforehand, but they find themselves in the midst of the situation” (ibid.). Again, the problem is that she does not link this – appealing – observation to the idea that self-sacrifice is vital to care. Even if care is often not a matter of choice, why should this imply that we sacrifice our interests and needs for the sake of the Other? Do we sacrifice what is important to us because care is often beyond free choice? Is self-sacrifice the result of an inner compulsion to care? An argument that this is the case would be circular because it would simply equate care with self-sacrifice instead of showing why this is the case. Finally, van Nistelrooij states that self-sacrifice is vital to care because “when people do sacrifice themselves and give disinterested care to the Other, caring is at the same time partaking in a rich interpersonal contact” (ibid.). We can understand from this statement that self-sacrifice enhances our relationship with the receiver of care and that it plays a positive role in intensifying relationships and evoking feelings of trust and sympathy. This can also have a positive effect on the care giver’s life, making it more meaningful and fulfilled. Selfsacrifice, we may conclude, has positive effects on the self because it fosters relationships. The notion that self-sacrifice has not only harmful but also positive effects on the self and self-other relationships has been discussed in the introduction. As for the relationship between care and self-sacrifice, this, again, does not provide additional insight. All in all, van Nistelrooij offers an interesting counterpoint to the sharp critique of self-sacrifice but her arguments do not convincingly show why self-sacrifice is, indeed, a vital aspect of care. The main goal of van Nistelrooij’s dissertation is to show that selfsacrifice contributes to a broader and more meaningful understanding of care. Van Nistelrooij wants to convince her readers that “self-sacrifice

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not only is part of the reality of caring practices ... but in fact ... crucial for facing the meaning of caring” (ibid., p. 43). As she says, “[t] he term self-sacrifice ... uncovers a fuller understanding of the reality of caregiving … It discloses caring as being constituted by the willingness to give, to give up, and to give in, in the conviction of its meaningfulness, and not owing to any hoped-for return” (ibid., p. 254). Van Nistelrooij argues that, by seeing the practice of care as one of self-sacrifice, we understand that caregiving is not about reciprocity and the exchange of goods. We do not care because we expect something in return. Care cannot be understood without sacrifice. Rather, caregiving is always an “inevitable loss” (ibid., p. 252). Further, the metaphor of self-sacrifice discloses care as “inescapably uncertain and non-causal” (ibid., p.  253). If care is understood in terms of self-sacrifice and non-reciprocity, then the practice of care is an open process that does not allow for certainty with regard to the effects and outcomes of care. All we have is the hope that our care will lead to the desired effect. Third, if care involves self-sacrifice we understand that care also contributes to strengthening relationships and a sense of belonging that can overcome individualism and isolation. Care as self-sacrifice tightens the bonds of social life. It is “an expression of community” (ibid.). Finally, if care is understood in terms of self-sacrifice, i.e. in the sense of non-reciprocity, loss, uncertainty, non-causality and communal bonds, it reveals itself as meaningful simply by being good. The practice of self-sacrifice lets care appear as a multifaceted benevolence. And only through the element of self-sacrifice is care able to unfold its full potential, its “horizon of meaning” (ibid., p. 254). Van Nistelrooij calls her book a care-ethical reappraisal of sacrifice and self-sacrifice. Her approach is remarkable in so far as it is not a normative discussion about the risks and advantages of self-sacrifice. In contrast to those reappraisals of self-sacrifice that have been mentioned in the introduction and that seek to uncover the full meaning of self-sacrifice for the agent of sacrifice, van Nistelrooij addresses the practitioners and theorists of care who, as she says, have “prematurely excluded” (ibid., p. 15) self-sacrifice from care, who have “smuggled

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away” (ibid., p. 43) and “backed away from the complexities of care” (ibid., p. 31), who have failed to think self-sacrifice through conceptually (ibid.). Her reappraisal of self-sacrifice is based on the assumption that self-sacrifice is meaningful for a better understanding of the concept of care. However, if self-sacrifice is meaningful for a better understanding of care then self-sacrifice is also vital for care. The indissoluble intertwinement of self-sacrifice and care is one of the premises that we need in order to proceed with the argument that self sacrifice discloses the true meaning of care. The idea that care cannot be understood without self-sacrifice is already built on a certain concept of care – one that sees self-sacrifice as an essential feature of care. It does not answer the question of whether self-sacrifice is vital to care or not. Van Nistelrooij’s form of reasoning points to a general dilemma with regard to the question of whether self-sacrifice is vital to care or not. In order to determine the relationship between self-sacrifice and care, we have to work with a certain concept of care that will shape the outcome of our reflections in one way or other. For example, if we understand care primarily as a profession and as a practice of healing and nurturing, the principle of self-care can, probably, be implemented more easily than if we think about care primarily as a form of solidarity or compassion that bears meaning in the private realm. Moreover, a stance towards self-sacrifice cannot be thought completely independently of the theorist’s sensitivity towards the inherent power-implications. Those who are concerned about the marginalized status of care are likely to focus on the requirements of fair and mature care, whereas those who are primarily interested in the stability and harmony of social relations are, probably, more inclined to value self-sacrifice. The question of whether self-sacrifice is an essential element of care therefore depends on our concept of care, as well as on the goals that are attached to a (re)conceptualization of care. This means that, before arguing for or against an indissoluble link between self-sacrifice and care, we would need a generally accepted and “objective” definition of care. This definition, however, does not

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exist – despite far-reaching and lively discussed attempts to determine and clarify the main features of care. Held offers a useful summary of the discussion of what care stands for (Held 2005, pp.  30-37). Her overview reveals that central questions such as “who is the agent and who is the receiver of care”? and “what are the central elements of a practice of care”? are far from being resolved. For example, Tronto describes care as an extensive practice that includes “everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible”. Her concept of care not only includes human others but also the environment and even non-living things (Tronto 1993, p.  103 cited in Held 2005, p.  32). Held, conversely, thinks that Tronto’s definition is too broad. She criticizes that it could include economic activities “such as retail sales, house construction, and commercial cleaning” which means that “the distinctive features of caring labor would be lost” (Held 2005, p. 33). According to Held, Tronto’s definition does not require “the sensitivity to the needs of the cared-for that others often recognize in care” and, on the other hand, “excludes production, play, and creative activity, whereas a great deal of care, for instance child care, can and should be playful and is certainly creative” (ibid.). There is also no consensus about the agents of care. Whereas for Noddings care can be best understood in the intimate relationships between persons who know each other and are connected to each other through various bonds, for Held the group of care givers should include all kind of care practitioners, including domestic workers, workers in hospitals, teachers and those who work in public institutions in order to promote the welfare of others (Held 2005, p. 32) Another major debate arose around the question of whether care should be understood as depending on intimate and face-to-face relationships or whether it should include our concerns for distant others. According to Diemut Bubeck “[c]aring for is the meeting of the needs of one person by another person, where face-to-face interaction between carer and cared-for is a crucial element of the overall activity” (Bubeck 1995, p. 129 cited in Held 2005, p. 33) However, as Held remarks, this notion has made it difficult “to think of our concern for

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more distant others in terms of caring” (Held 2005, p. 34). For Held, a definition of care must include a concept of global care that acknowledges our concerns with the welfare of distant others with whom we will never have a real relationship (Held 2005, p. 18). As these examples show there is, to date, no consensus among care theorists about the definition of care, nor with regard to the scope of care or the nature of care relations and the definition of who cares and who is the cared-for.5 As long as this is the case, views about the relationship between self-sacrifice and care will vary as well. 1.2.2. Self-sacrifice as a distinctive feature A debate about whether self-sacrifice is a vital element of care appears to be futile as long as there is no consensus about the definition of care. This is of course an unsatisfactory result, in particular if we consider the volume of debate that the issue of self-sacrifice has elicited among care ethicists. Is the intensity and endurance of the selfsacrifice debate in care not already a clue that there is a deeper link between self-sacrifice and care than some of the critics of self-sacrifice suggest? And is this question not even more pressing if we consider that this debate lacks an equivalent in other ethics? Groenhout raises the question of why the issue of self-sacrifice is apparently more problematic for care scholars than for other ethicists. For Groenhout, self-sacrifice plays a prominent role in all ethics. All ethics, she states, “require a denial of self-interest at some level” (Groenhout 2003, p. 154). The specific interest in the issue of selfsacrifice by care ethicists is, according to Groenhout, not the result of a closer relationship between care and self-sacrifice. Rather, it can be explained by two external factors. First, care theorists are more concerned because the conception of self-sacrifice in other ethics “accommodates a broad range of behavior” (ibid.), that is (in my 5 See Petterson (2012), who not only asserts the lack of a clear definition of care but also refers to care scholars who question the possibility and usefulness of establishing one (p. 366). For Petterson, however, it is still crucial to continue the job of uncovering and scrutinizing different aspects of care even if complete agreement on what it means to care may remain out of reach forever (ibid.).

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understanding), a broader range than in the ethics of care. Second, care ethicists are more concerned because self-sacrifice is associated with femininity and socially constructed gender roles – something unacceptable to a feminist-informed ethics of care (ibid., pp. 154f). To support her argument of “a broad range of behavior”, Groenhout brings one example from utilitarian ethics. She says that self-sacrifice understood in utilitarian ethics is at work, for example, if one “throws oneself into one’s work for the sake of the greater good” (Groenhout 2003, p. 154). It may be asked whether one example is enough to show that there is a broader range of self-sacrifice available in other ethics. Furthermore, it does not become clear why a “broad range of behavior” should alleviate our concerns about self-sacrifice. Her second argument about the feminization of self-sacrifice is more convincing, although I would like to extend, as I have explained in chapter 1.1., the notion of injustice and power implication to all care givers regardless of their sex. Groenhout’s second argument not only explains well why care scholars are more concerned with self-sacrifice than other ethicists but, moreover, supports her overall thesis that self-sacrifice is important for all ethics alike. But is this argument enough to give up on the notion that there is a stronger link between self-sacrifice and care than between, let’s say, self-sacrifice and a principle-based ethics? Is it true that self-sacrifice is important to all ethics alike and that the greater concern among care ethicists can be explained with greater power-sensitivity alone? In the following, I will approach this question again by analyzing the key aspects of an ethics of care as they appear separate from other ethics. This approach differs from the previous reflections as it treats self-sacrifice no longer as an aspect of care in absolute terms but rather, in relative terms, as a form of morality that emerges if we look at the ways the ethics of care distinguishes itself. Self-sacrifice, thereby, does not appear as a vital element but probably as a distinctive element of care. This would contradict Groenhout’s thesis that selfsacrifice is an element of all ethics alike. While it may be difficult to identify the place of self-sacrifice in care by referring to the nature of care – because this work is never free from underlying assumptions that will shape its result – such identification may be possible if we

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set the ethics of care in relation to other ethics. In this way, a place of self-sacrifice can be found, not in relation to a general idea of care, but in relation to its place in other ethics. From its early beginning, the ethics of care has seen itself as an alternative to classical ethical paradigms, as a “different voice” in morality (Gilligan 1982). As such, the ethics of care is not only a political theory that fights for social change but also, and foremost, an ethical theory that seeks to promote a novel perspective on moral behavior; a distinctive vision of goodness and benevolence. Care ethicists have developed and sharpened their understanding of care by demarcating an ethics of care from classical ethics, mainly liberal ethics and reason-based ethics.6 1.2.2.1. Care ethics and liberal ethics Care ethicists refer to liberal ethics as an approach that derives morality from the acknowledgment of shared humanness based on reason, which evokes mutual respect and recognition. The notion of shared humaneness makes us respect the Other’s rights as “inalienable rights”. Liberal ethics values the co-existence of projects and agendas, needs and wishes and respect for impeding social boundaries. This respect stems from our rational capability to consider the consequences and implications of our doing for ourselves and others. I identify two areas in which the ethics of care differs from liberal ethics: intervention for the sake of the Other and the non-reciprocity of care. Care and intervention For Held, the ethics of care is different from liberal ethics because of the implicit non-interventionism of the latter. Instead of calling on us to take responsibility for each other, liberal ethics teaches us “how Virtue ethics is another important point of reference for the ethics of care. Whereas some emphasize the differences, others argue that care ethics and virtue ethics have a lot in common. For differences see e.g. Sanders-Staudt 2006; for commonalities see Benner 1997, Halwani 2003, and Slote 2007. Virtue ethics, less than liberal and reason-based ethics, therefore serves as a foil to shed light on the distinctiveness of care. 6

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to leave each other alone” (Held 2005, p.  15). According to Held, this form of laissez-faire is neither adequate nor sufficient for human survival, flourishing and well-being. It is “at best suitable for a restricted and limited part of human life” (Held 2005, p. 43) but not for the whole. As a non-interventionist ethics, liberal ethics downplays active involvement on behalf of the Other’s welfare. The practice of care, on the other hand, strives to improve the Other’s conditions through active interference. It is a response to material, emotional, psychological and cultural needs (Held 2005, p. 54), aimed at the relief of physical and psychological pain and at the provision of comfort and affection. As Baier reminds us, a liberal non-interventionist ethics may be useful to constitute equal rights for formal goods such as contract compliance, equal opportunities to participate in political activities, and freedom of speech, of association, of assembly and of religious worship. However, as she continues, none of these goods does much to ensure that the person who has and respects rights will have any relationship other than the minimum needed to keep civil society going. Having these rights does not save one from misery and loneliness. Equality does not give us attachment (Baier 1994, p. 23). Liberal ethics is entrenched in the western tradition of individualism and the belief in the possibility and desirability of each person having her own good in her own way. This ideal of non-interference, however, can easily amount to neglect (ibid., p. 24). Conradi further explicates the problems of any form of non-interventionism, which she calls a minimal approach to ethics. She refers to Axel Honneth’s ethics of recognition as an example of a minimalist ethics, i.e. an ethics that sees morality fulfilled in the mutual respect of inalienable rights. Everything that exceeds this ethical program is understood as a moral surplus or over-fulfillment that can neither be expected nor demanded from all and to the same extent (Conradi 2001, p.  117). A minimalist ethics seeks to regulate and solve those issues that are relevant to all humans alike. Whatever exceeds the regulation of basic rights (for example, care for the needy) is admirable but not compulsory. They are special duties in concrete situations in contrast to the universal duty of mutual respect

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(ibid., p. 76). The minimal approach implies that moral duties reach to a point at which the autonomy and freedom of the agent is not yet endangered. As Conradi argues, this sustains the illusion that people will grow into independent and strong persons even when no care is provided at a young age or during times of illness. A minimalist ethics disregards aging and dependency as invariable conditions of our existence. The liberal or minimal perspective on the function and value of care as being no more than a moral surplus justifies, as Conradi rightly remarks, the continuation of a system whereby many benefit from care without being obliged to give something in return (ibid., p. 117). Framing care as a non-compulsory and special duty in contrast to the universal duty to respect others’ rights contributes to a disregard of caring activities. Caring activities are shifted to the margins of morality (ibid., p. 75). Baier is also concerned with the consequences of a liberal approach that regards mutual respect and non-interference as the standard forms of moral behavior. This view, she argues, degrades carers within a society “where power is assigned to and exercised by those who represent a less communal ethics of minimally constrained selfadvancement. The liberal individualist”, she argues, “may tolerate the more communally minded if they keep the liberal rules but the more communally minded cannot be content with the liberal rules” (Baier 1994, p. 25), because these rules do little to protect the young or to help the dying or starving; and they do little to protect the interests of the next generation (ibid., p. 29). The ethics of care positions itself in contradiction to the noninterventionism of liberal ethics. In order for care to be effective in helping the Other recover, a significant investment of time, energy and effort is needed. “Care connotes some kind of engagement” (Tronto 1993, p. 102). Care requires a contribution and even partial transfer of one’s own strength, means and resources to the Other. When we care, the Other in need is the focus of our thinking and acting. Care implies that I am there for the Other, that I act on the Other’s behalf. When people care, we presume that they are willing to work, to sacrifice, to spend money, to show concern, to expend

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energy on the object of care. As Tronto remarks: to the challenge that you do not care, one responds by showing some evidence of work, sacrifice, commitment (Tronto 1989, p. 173). Evaluation The ethics of care is different from liberal ethics in that it prescribes an engagement on behalf of the Other. Does this mean that the carer is more likely to sacrifice themselves than the adept of a liberal ethics? Self-sacrifice implies that we give something that is important to us. The call to respect the Other and leave them alone does not necessitate giving. We cannot say that we give or invest in the Other if we abstain from murdering and stealing because this is already served by doing nothing. These cases do not fully describe liberal ethics. There are cases in which the respect of the Other requires self-sacrifice. It is, for example, a self-sacrifice not to reveal the names of your companions to an oppressive regime, even under torture. However, these cases represent exceptional situations that not many of us are confronted with throughout our lives, and they do not reflect what is at the core of a liberal ethics. The possibility of “giving” or sacrificing from the standpoint of a liberal ethics should not hide the fact that mutual respect and recognition are, crucially, applicable to situations in which greed and voracity are greater threats to communal life than tyranny or the scarcity of goods. The practice of care, on the other hand, always requires an investment of time, energy and resources. Care is a form of giving on a regular rather than on an exceptional basis. This does not mean that a carer always sacrifices something, i.e. gives something that is important to them. For example, if we visit our neighbor because we feel lonely or bored, we cannot say that we sacrifice our time – we have too much of it, anyway. Moreover, giving time and resources in care can take the form of paternalism, which serves the care giver’s interests’ more than the cared-for’s. However, in most cases, care is a giving of time, energy and resources that could have been used for the pursuit of one’s own interests and projects, and thus is a sacrifice for the sake of the Other. For example, we sacrifice our time if we visit our neighbor

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even though friends have asked us to join them on an exciting trip. If the difference between care ethics and liberal ethics is the greater investment of time, energy and effort of the former, then self-sacrifice is more likely for an adherent of an ethics of care than for an adherent of liberal ethics. More active intervention on behalf of the Other implies more sacrifice because intervention often imposes constraints on our freedom and possibilities, limits our choices and actions and subjects them to other people’s wishes and wants. Care and non-reciprocity The ethics of care is also critical of the liberal notion that our acknowledgment of fundamental equality is the source of morality. Care scholars argue that this notion leads to reciprocal thinking. If we respect the Other’s rights and interests because of a shared humanness, this guarantees that my interests and rights are similarly respected. However, as Tronto remarks, reciprocity in moral relations is a “fiction” (Tronto 1993, p. 147). Reciprocal thinking is incompatible not only with care relations but also with social life more widely, and which is characterized by essential inequalities and dependencies. As Tronto stresses, care for the Other is not the affirmation of equality but, on the contrary, “arises out of the fact that not all humans or other objects in the world are equally able to take care of themselves” (ibid.). This does not mean that we do not appreciate the commonalities that exist between us but it disputes the idea “that the Other is exactly like the self” (ibid., p. 138; in a similar vein Held 2005, p. 107). The assumption of equality and of reciprocity of mutual respect leaves no room for the acknowledgment that we are sometimes weak, sick and dependent. To care for the Other is, basically, an asymmetrical practice that cannot be subsumed under the notion of reciprocity (Conradi 2005, pp. 105 and 118). As Baier puts it, a liberal ethics guarantees the wellbeing of the equally strong but it denies the reality of inequality among humans and the necessity to care for the needs of those who do not fulfill the criteria of standardized humanness (Baier 1994, pp.  52f). Care relations are intrinsically asymmetrical. An ethics of care is not compatible with an equality-based morality.

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Petterson’s concept of mature care seeks to reconcile the asymmetry in care relations with the notion of a basic equality among humans. She argues that we have to distinguish between the conceptual and the empirical level of reciprocity. At the conceptual level, the notion of equality and reciprocity is, according to Petterson, important for an ethics of care because it promotes the idea that no one should be treated as inferior or less worthy. It also implies that both care giver and care receiver make a commitment to a good care relationship. However, at the empirical level, Petterson argues, care givers acknowledge and accept the differences between the carer and the cared-for. It is not possible to care equally for everyone nor to put the cared-for’s and the carer’s interests on an equal footing. By means of this differentation, the notion of a fundamental equality between the rights of the carer and the cared-for can be reconciled with an acknowledgment of differences and asymmetries at the empirical level and that are caused by different stages of physical, emotional and mental sanity (Petterson 2012, p. 381). Petterson is right in pointing at the importance of respect and recognition for feminist/care ethics claims. But her distinction does not undermine the critique of liberal ethics by scholars of care. This critique addresses the conceptual rather than the empirical level of equality and reveals an important difference in evaluating the function of conceptual equality. For liberal ethics, the notion of equality is fundamental to bringing about moral behavior. For the ethics of care, however, equality is a value and a goal, but moral commitment does not depend on an acknowledgment of fundamental sameness. If we understand equality and mutual recognition as the foundation of morality, it is difficult to explain the motivation or necessity to care. Care ethicists are worried about the reciprocal thinking of liberal ethics – not because they reject mutual respect and recognition nor because they think that the notion of equality is wrongly applied at the empirical level. The ethics of care is, rather, concerned with the inability of liberal ethics to account for a commitment to asymmetrical practices of care and to integrate this commitment into a catalog of moral virtues. While liberal ethics builds morality into equality

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and reciprocity, the ethics of care sees the acceptance of non-reciprocity as the core of moral competence. Evaluation But what does this mean for the self-sacrifice debate? What is the relationship between self-sacrifice and non-reciprocity? The acceptance that there will be nothing in return is a necessary condition of self-sacrifice. We cannot speak of self-sacrifice if we expect that the same will be done for us in return. The latter resembles a bargain but not a sacrifice. This means an ethics that accepts non-reciprocity and asymmetry allows for self-sacrifice, whereas an ethics of reciprocity denies the possibility of self-sacrifice. However, is it correct to say that a liberal ethics is an ethics of reciprocity? A liberal ethics that is based on equality does not require that I invest more attention and energy to fulfill the Other’s needs than I would with regard to my own. Moreover, taking the Other’s rights into account in the expectation that my rights will be equally respected, can be hardly seen as an act of self-sacrifice. On the other hand, the fact that liberal ethics builds moral commitment on the notion of a fundamental equality does not mean that it forecloses or rejects non-reciprocal behavior. The idea of a fundamental equality based on shared rationality is a very abstract principle. It does not necessarily apply to a concrete situation in which I am called to respect the Other’s right. The liberal principle is fulfilled if I show respect, but this fulfillment does not depend on the reciprocity of the concrete relationship. Liberal ethics does not accommodate asymmetrical morality as the fundamental form of morality but it also does not render non-reciprocal behavior impossible. For liberal ethics, non-reciprocal forms of behavior are not completely ruled out, but they play a rather marginal role in comparison with the sense of shared humanness. This is different in the ethics of care. For the ethics of care, the asymmetry in competences and capabilities is not a marginal phenomenon in morality. Because dependencies and weaknesses are indissoluble elements of our existence, the acceptance of inequality and of the likelihood that what I do on

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the Other’s behalf will not be returned is essential for care. The asymmetry of our relations is marginalized in liberal ethics, whereas it is central to our understanding of care. This implies that the adepts of care find themselves more frequently in an asymmetrical relation in which sacrifice is required than an adept of liberal ethics, who is keen to respect and recognize Others. The adept of care is more likely exposed to self-sacrifice than the adept of liberal ethics because care relations are intrinsically, and not only occasionally, asymmetrical. 1.2.2.2. Care ethics and reason-based ethics The ethics of care is as critical of reason-based ethics as it is of liberal ethics, albeit for different reasons. Since the early years of its emergence, the ethics of care has seen itself as an alternative to reasonbased ethics, mainly in the form of Kantian ethics and utilitarianism (Gilligan 1982; Tronto 1993; Baier 1994; Jaggar 1995; Little 1995; Clement 1996; Conradi 2001; Held 2005; Noddings 2013 et al.). Two lines of care critique exist. One questions the dominant role of reason for the production of moral knowledge; the other is concerned about over-generalization caused by a premature adherence to principles. Care and the source of moral knowledge Care ethicists argue that reason is not the only source of moral knowledge and that reliance on rational thought and abstract principles is inadequate to generate adequate moral responses. For Grace Clement, the insufficiency of reason as a source of moral knowledge is caused by a negligence of historical and social contexts that undermine the idea of moral knowledge as the product of isolated rational thought. The ethics of care, she argues, corrects this view because it emphasizes social interdependence and reminds us that “knowledge depends not only on rationality but on socially determined factors” (Clement 1996, p. 110). Other care scholars deplore the fact that an emphasis on reason underrates the role emotions can play in moral epistemic processes. Held, for example, sees the ethics of care in contrast “with the dominant rationalist approaches” because it regards “emotions as sympathy,

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empathy, sensitivity, and responsiveness ... as the kind of moral emotions that need to be cultivated not only to help in the implementation of the dictates of reason but to better ascertain what morality recommends” (Held 2006, p. 11). For Baier, the ethics of care challenges the Kantian rationalism of a controlling reason that dictates possibly unruly passions, as not only control of emotions but also love and sympathy are needed to perform benevolent behavior towards the Other (Baier 1994, pp. 30f; in a similar vein Jaggar 1995, p. 181). A detailed account of the role of emotions in caring and moral relations is given by Olivia Little. Little sees the relations between reason and emotion in morality traditionally conceived as a form of dualism, whereby “reason reveals the way the world is; emotion and desire move us to respond to that world with action and feeling” (Little 1995, p. 120). However, according to Little, “how good one is to discern the moral landscape and to find the morally appropriate answer does not just depend on how good one is at weighing risks and foreseeing consequences“ (ibid., p. 122). Little asserts that our ability to interpret a situation and to invoke abstract principles as guidelines for our response does not necessarily demonstrate moral competence in the sense of knowing what suits the Other best (ibid., p. 118). She elaborates on the moral risks of adopting a stance of observation, investigation and inquisitiveness which, she believes, often comes at the expense of what really matters. For Little, “[s]ometimes truth is better revealed, the landscape most clearly seen, from a position that has been called ‘loving perception’ or ‘sympathetic thinking’” (ibid.). In order to revalue the role that emotions can play, not only in motivating a moral response but also in discerning the most appropriate measures, Little develops a detailed account of two different cognitive features of emotions. First, certain desires and emotions are crucial for seeing what is required of us in a situation that calls for a moral response. It is only through emotions that we see the moral salience of a situation and notice the “subtle patterns” (ibid., p. 121) that make it necessary to act. Seeing for Little means “being attentive to one’s surrounding” (ibid.) rather than adopting a conscious attitude, or the disposition of vigilance to check for as many things as

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you can think of, or the capability to weigh risks and foresee the consequences (ibid., p.  122). The capability of seeing the morally relevant features rather circumscribes that “one must be aware of a complex set of details“ (ibid., p. 123), that one “must be receptive to the particulars of cases, to what is different and novel in a case … hear how it is for her, in a way that welcomes novelty or uniqueness” (ibid., p.  124). According to Little, we have these capabilities for listening and seeing if we care about things, if we are attentive and if we listen “from a stance of caring” (ibid). As she says, “[t]he extent to which one actually cares about and is responsive to moral ends [...] has enormous impact on how accurately and reliably one sees the moral landscape, because what one is attentive to is deeply influenced by what one cares about” (ibid., p. 123). The second epistemic role of emotions is to effect the shift from making a moral judgment (for example: torture is wrong) to carrying out the ethical action (becoming active in preventing someone from torturing another). According to Little, “there is a difference between acknowledging that an action causes pain, say, and coming to see it as cruel, a difference between noting that a homeless person is going hungry and seeing that charity is called for“ (ibid., p. 125). The difference lies in seeing the moral feature on the one hand and feeling inclined to act on what one sees on the other hand. For Little, the capability to act on what one sees in a morally relevant situation stems from emotions. It is the emotions and desires to act which make one act. In order to “see the moral landscape clearly, and to discern it fully and properly, one must have certain desires and emotions. Caring, being outraged, being moved to act – all these are part of discerning moral features clearly” (Little 1995, p. 126). In more recent years, care ethicists have increasingly drawn on neurological research into the rational and cognitive role of emotions to emphasize the part they play in supporting or correcting moral behavior. Catriona Mackenzie, for example, investigates the lack of morality that appears if emotional capabilities are demaged. According to Mackenzie, the capacity of moral reasoning is too often understood “in highly intellectualist terms”, which overlook the importance of emotional and

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imaginative skills (Mackenzie 2012, p. 252). Emotion, for Mackenzie, must be seen as a partner of reason, which contributes equally to moral knowledge; as a faculty that can provoke, support, or correct moral judgments (reference). For example, emotions can make me realize that  the ethical principle not to lie may not be the adequate moral response facing the damage my truth-telling would cause for someone in danger. Here, emotions oppose the pursuit of a certain moral principle. They prevent this principle from being implemented. Emotions play an important and independent role in morality. They are moral factors, drawing on resources different from that of logic and abstraction (Langdon/Mackenzie 2012, p. 21). Care and principles The second line of criticism refers to the importance of principles such as the ‘Categorical Imperative’ in Kantian ethics or the ‘Maximumhappiness Principle’ in utilitarian ethics. Moral principles may be defined as propositions or statements, as a form of knowledge claim. Both the invention of principles as well their use are based on reflection. Principles are reason’s contribution to morality. However, as Little says, “[c]aring for moral ends [i.e. for the sake of certain principles] ... plays a pivotal though contingent role in ensuring reliable awareness of morally salient details“ (Little 1995, p. 117). For her, the complexity of a moral situation can never be fully grasped with the help of principles alone because pre-given propositions and judgments will never do justice to the particularities of this situation. An orientation towards abstract principles is helpful in understanding a few aspects. But it is the attention to detail and differences which provides us with relevant information. Rather than asking which moral principle should be applied, carers seek to avoid premature judgment because they are aware that acting on abstract principles is not necessarily in the interest and for the sake of the Other (Gilligan 1982, pp. 30f; Hoagland 1990, p. 113; Houston 1990, p. 115; Conradi 2001, p. 33; Held 2005, chapter 6 and passim). One of the most outspoken critics of premature judgments in moral situations is Noddings. For Noddings, approaching the Other in need as a rational knower is counterproductive to care because it fails to

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bring the Other’s voice to the fore. According to Noddings, an untimely switch to a rationalizing mode is one of the greatest dangers to caring (Noddings 2013, p.  26). Moral judgments are an impediment to our attentiveness to Others because they distract us from the Others’ specific needs and redirect our attention to the values and beliefs that we already hold. Noddings conceptualizes care as a mode of “receiving” in contrast to a principle-based morality. The mode of receiving implies that we abstain as long as possible from rationalization and judgment because this allows us “to receive the Other and to put ourselves into their presence” (ibid., p. 34). Caring as receiving is different from rational objectivity, “which swarms over an object and assimilates it” (ibid., p. 33). Receiving is characterized by absorption and concentration, by listening, looking, feeling (ibid., p. 34). Noddings’s account of caring as receiving has been challenged by other care ethicists. Hoagland, for example (who shares, in general, Noddings’s critique of an overly dominant role of reason and principles in classical ethics (Hoagland 1990, p.  111)) argues that Noddings’s non-judgmentalism is an illusion because even not judging already entails a judgment (ibid.). This point is further elaborated by Ornaith O’Dowd. O’Dowd (2012) makes the point that even in cases in which it seems that we act out of a spontaneous feeling or impulse, we draw on internalized principles that guide us. We cannot talk about specific circumstances without engaging in abstraction and without invoking principles upon which the ability to identify and classify circumstances is based (p. 409). Principles are inevitable in making sense of the complexity of situations and understanding which facts from among an infinite number are morally relevant and require intervention (ibid., p. 412). For O’Dowd, contrasting abstraction with attention to context is wrong, first, because abstraction is always involved as soon as we try to make sense of a situation and, second, because it does not imply that we lack focus on important details. As she says, “[w]e engage in abstraction any time we talk about anything in a way that goes beyond the specifics of this circumstance. Abstraction in ethics does not mean ignoring concrete particulars, but determining what is morally relevant in them” (ibid., p. 409).

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Indeed, care ethicists have questioned the usefulness of a dichotomy between adherence to principles on the one hand and attention to particularities on the other (Card 1990, p. 105; Tong 1993, p. 92; Clement 1996, p. 111; Held 2005, p. 16). They suggest that there is no black and white solution to the principle question. No matter how abstract an ethics is, the moral agent still has to attend to matters of context to determine whether the principle, in fact, is applicable in this situation; and no matter how concrete an ethicist is she cannot focus on each element equally without being overwhelmed by details, which means that she must make judgments and selections. Principles as well as attention to detail are important in finding the adequate moral response. And as Claudia Card remarks, “[p]rinciples do not necessarily abstract from special connections with particular others. The principle that it is good to honor our parents or to value familial ties and relationships with intimates presupposes and applies to such attachments“ (Card 1990, p.  105). By means of and adherence to abstract principles we can be inclined or committed to value the special and the particular – and be sensitive to context. The inevitability of abstraction is a powerful argument for overcoming the care-justice-dichotomy but it does not refute or alleviate the above-mentioned critique of a principle-based morality. Drawing on principles is self-assertive and distracts us from seeing things through the Other’s eyes, even if these principles compel us to care for the Other in need. Adherence to the principle to value the particular other, for example, may lead to an attentiveness to detail in a situation in which the Other prefers to be left alone or to keep things to themselves. Moreover, to adhere to the principle of being attentive to detail is not sufficient to be properly attentive because being attentive requires, as Little has shown, more than mere will and intention. A sensitivity to the self-centeredness of principles fuels the notion that, although moral intervention is always based on some form of abstraction and generalization, principles should be used in careful and moderate ways, and that the role of principles is overvalued in deontological and utilitarian ethics. The difference between a principle-based ethics and the ethics of care is that caring is predominantly not about principles

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and judgments but more about a genuine interest in Others’ needs and perspectives. This implies that carers hold back on their own interpretations and judgments, and, rather, try to understand a situation from the cared-for’s point of view. Tronto affirms that a caring attitude is an attitude by which one “suspend[s] one’s own goals, ambitions, plans of life, and concerns, in order to recognize and to be attentive to others” (Tronto 1993, p. 130); that care requires “that one start from the standpoint of the one needing care or attention. It requires that we meet the Other morally, adopt that person’s, or group’s, perspective and look at the world in those terms” (ibid., p. 19). The ethics of care, thus, demarcates itself from reason-based and principle-based ethics by the relevance and weight it places on the attentiveness to particular needs and on the abstention from premature judgment. Attentiveness to other needs is far more than a positive feeling, like love or tenderness. It is also different from empathy, which is the projection of one’s feelings onto the Other. Caring as attentiveness is a motivational shift or move towards the Other while suspending one’s own preferences, perspectives and priorities. By this attitude of caring, we intend to bring the Other’s ideas and voice to the fore, not in the sense of a political participation of vote and representation but as a form of listening. In the form of attentive listening and of holding back of one’s own judgments, the caring attitude enables us to understand the Other, to restore her confidence, trust and optimism. Accordingly, a lack of attentiveness, inattentiveness or indifference is, from a care perspective, the antipode of morality (ibid., p. 130). The emphasis on listening, attentiveness and voice is reinforced by the relational character of the ethics of care. As relational ethics, the ethics of care builds on the recognition and acceptance of inter-subjectivity. It stresses that morality is not the property or intrinsic feature of a moral agent but rather arises within the relationship. It is only in relationships that we get to know the Other, understand their needs and differences and develop moral competence (Tronto 1989, p. 102; Tronto 1993, p. 136; Conradi 2001, p. 47; Hem 2014, p. 799). Moral decisions and actions are understood not as the outcome of isolated individual processes but as a responsive interplay between the persons

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involved (Conradi 2001, p.  30). Getting into touch, building a relationship is itself already a promising approach to solving the problems that we have with each other. It differs from autonomy-based approaches that give normative primacy to independence, self-sufficiency and separation from others (Mackenzie/Stoljar 2000, p. 8). Evaluation The ethics of care, it may be concluded, demarcates itself from reason-based ethics by revaluing the role of emotions, by reducing the role of principles in moral epistemic processes and by emphasizing, instead, interdependence, connectedness and the relationality of morality. The critical stance towards rationality and principles, however, comes at a cost. For a reason-based morality, the appropriateness and validity of moral claims and actions are measured by their compliance with principles. The rational agent relies on their judgment, their capability to see moral truth and their competence to make autonomous choices. They are self-sufficient and independent with regard to moral knowledge. Moreover, referring to moral principles in order to explain a situation and to draw conclusions for further proceedings is self-affirming. It serves as a reassurance of the self by reinforcing that which is already known and approved by the self. As Little says, “most of us have deep tendencies to project our own template of experiences onto others. We catalog and classify others’ experiences as soon as they are mentioned, eager for them to be confirming instances of our current favorite generality” (Little 1995, p. 124). Accordingly, the emphasis on reason and principles is a means of asserting the self and protecting it against foreign forces and influences. It works like a bulwark against subjection under foreign rule, deviations and distractions. A reliance on reason and principles is like an in-built protection against the intrusion of the self by ideas and wants that are different from itself. An ethics that is based on reason and principles is a flight from heteronomy. The adepts of an ethics of care, on the other hand, rely on emotions for the production of moral knowledge. They hold back on their own analyses and judgments in order to see the situation through the Other’s

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eyes. As much as they give up on reason and principles as sources of moral knowledge, they lose control over processes and the form and content of the moral response. Reducing the role of reason and judgment means weakening the stronghold against foreign influences. Moral action is no longer the outcome of our rational choice alone. It becomes a response to what we experience in our relationship with others, a form of processing of what they are teaching us. If the centrality of reason is undermined by a revaluation of emotions and the abstention from principles and judgments, the self-protective measures collapse. Foreign influences and forces take hold of the self. Allowing for emotions and the mode of receiving implies an impairment to the possibility of shaping the relationship according to our own perspectives and ideas. Developments and situations become unforeseeable and uncontrollable. By destroying the protective wall of the rationalizing and evaluating self, processes and relations become open-ended. The moral agent is no longer the omniscient knower and observer but part of a network of relations and interdependence. Giving up on the primacy of reason and principles makes people vulnerable to the twists and turns the relationship may take. Personal independence is not safeguarded in an ethics that requires stepping back in order to let the Others’ perspectives and concerns come to the fore. Responses do no longer represent moral truth but imperfect means in specific situations. Our faculty of pure reason is not the center and breeding ground of moral behavior but of our subjection to foreign needs. Moral reasoning that refrains from aligning actions with principles and instead puts forward as an argument the needs of particular persons implies greater interdependence. The benchmark for the choice of action as well as for its evaluation is the consensus and satisfaction of the person concerned. This means that principles may play a role in an ethics of care, albeit to a lesser extent than in principle-based ethics, and not at an early stage. The ethics of care calls for the use of principles with caution and … care. The reliance on autonomy and principles in reason-based ethics functions like a self-protective mechanism, whereas the ethics of care is ready partly to give up on this measure. For reason-based ethics, the search for moral truth is an inner process, whereas, for the ethics

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of care, moral truth emerges through relationships and an opening up to the Other. An emphasis on reason and autonomous decision-making is a bulwark against heteronomy. Accordingly, a critical stance against judgment and rationalizing implies a loss of control. These differences are decisive in determining the role of self-sacrifice. The bulwark of self-affirming principles renders self-sacrifice difficult because the Other is flooded by a sense of self. Reason’s recommendations are unlikely to be trumped by an abandonment of the self. In contrast, abstention from excessive use of rationalizing and judgment leads to interdependence. Self and other are on the same footing and their destinies are interwoven. Against this background, self-sacrifice is not inevitable, but it is a possible way of re-establishing well-being and prosperity for all parties involved. Delaying the use of rational calculation and judgment reflects the acceptance of openness and a willingness to be exposed to others’ demands. With a genuine effort to put on the Other’s shoes we signal readiness to grant priority to the Other’s needs and wants. Those who are willing to abstain from the imposition of their own perspective are also willing to sacrifice what is important. 1.2.2.3. Conclusion Juxtaposing the ethics of care with liberal and reason-based ethics shows that self-sacrifice is not a phenomenon that is limited to care alone. However, if we look at the ways in which the ethics of care distinguishes itself from liberal and reason-based ethics, it becomes clear that a carer is more likely and more often to be in a situation of sacrificing themselves than an adept of the other ethics. From a perspective of care, rather than from a liberal perspective, we are more inclined to intervene on behalf of the Other and spend our time, energy and effort for the Other’s sake. As carers for the needy and dependent, we accept the non-reciprocity of our action as an essential, not only occasional, feature of morality. In comparison with an ethics of laissez-faire, the suspension of one’s own preferences and priorities emerges as a distinctive feature of care, which symbolizes the willingness and need to sacrifice oneself.

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Moreover, the carer distinguishes herself by her willingness to look at the situation with the Other’s eyes and to trust her feelings, rather than relying on reason and free will as sources of moral inspiration. Whereas an emphasis on reason and autonomy protects the moral agent against an infringement on their autonomy, the carer exposes herself to foreign demands and thereby makes self-sacrifice a possible and more likely option. This does not show that self-sacrifice is a vital element of care, but it does suggest that self-sacrifice has more significance for the ethics of care than for other ethics. In comparison with other ethics, the greater susceptibility to self-sacrifice is a distinctive feature of the ethics of care. This means that care scholars are concerned about self-sacrifice not only because they are sensitive to its power-implications but also because they see the carer in a particular way exposed to the possibility of self-sacrifice. This allows the conclusion that, by conceptualizing care without self-sacrifice, the ethics of care would lose its distinctive position among ethical theories.

1.3. The dilemma of the ethics of care The debate about self-sacrifice and care has many facets. From a power-sensitive perspective, self-sacrifice is a risk for the caring self. It is seen as a reason for undervaluing care and the unfair distribution of care privileges and duties. On the other hand, care ethicists stress the positive effects of sacrifice on the self. Care scholar van Nistelrooij, moreover, argues that care cannot be conceived without self-sacrifice. These different approaches show not only the complexity of the selfsacrifice debate but also a tension that is caused by the twofold agenda of the ethics of care. As an ethical theory, the ethics of care aims at promoting an ideal of care that has been disregarded and ignored by traditional ethics. As a political theory, the ethics of care seeks to gain recognition for care in the private, national and international realm and to achieve more equality with regard to care responsibilities. As a feminist-informed ethics, finally, it also seeks to uncover mechanisms that reinforce the socially constructed division of care work. Both the ethical and the socio-political agenda are difficult to

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reconcile. The same features that position care as an alternative to a principled and reciprocal morality appear to be linked to its undervaluation and marginalization. The ethics of care is, moreover, a normative ethics that not only describes the practice of care but also seeks to provide moral guidance for carers. As a theory of moral orientation it values certain aspects of morality that are different from the beliefs of other ethics. The combination of an emphasis on care and on social change creates a difficult situation. It multiplies the tensions that moral agents in general are confronted with. A carer who seeks advice and orientation is left with the choice of caring for the needy or to fight for the improvement of the status of care. As a theory that is committed to care and empowerment at the same time, the ethics of care generates claims that are difficult to reconcile.7 A contribution to the self-sacrifice debate may be found in those ethics that share an acknowledgment of relatedness with the ethics of care, but are not committed to social change – ethics that do not

The tension between a commitment to relatedness on the one hand and selfdirectness and emancipation on the other is not only a problem of the ethics of care. It is also reflected in feminist debates about autonomy and self-hood. On the one hand, feminist theorists criticize the concept of autonomy, self-sufficiency and the privilege of reason over other capacities as hostile to their social experiences and as an androcentric legacy of modernity. On the other hand, many feminist philosophers acknowledge that the concept of autonomy plays a crucial role in enforcing interests of oppressed or marginalized groups and in asserting women’s need for self-determination. They hold that in the context of feminist inquiry the inability to exert autonomous choices must be seen as a culturally constructed mechanism of oppression or even as a moral failure. (For a good summary of the discussion see Stoljar 2013 and Mackenzie/Stoljar 2000, pp. 3-31.) The different views of the debate may be translated into the context of care and the twofold agenda of the ethics of care. But while the autonomy debate theorizes about the features of our social existence (only), the tensions are intensified in the debate about care where relatedness and other-centeredness attain a moral quality and are, therefore, even harder to refute. On an even more general level, the debate reflects the tension between equality in the sense of same rights and privileges and difference in the sense of alternative voices that has shaped feminist discourse for many years. 7

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struggle with divergent aims. In the remaining part of the inquiry, I will argue that the responsive phenomenology of Bernhard Waldenfels constitutes one possible source of inspiration. Engaging with phenomenology from a care perspective is not a new approach. It ties in with a growing body of literature that seeks to harness the insights that phenomenology can provide to advance the ethics of care. Before I discuss the usefulness of a responsive perspective for the ethics of care I will, in the following, give an overview of the results that these care/phenomenological investigations have yielded so far. The next chapter, then, serves as a transition to a discussion of Waldenfels’s philosophy as a way of elucidating the self-sacrifice debate in care.

2 At the crossroads of phenomenology and care

This chapter is about phenomenology as a possible source of inspiration for the ethics of care. It opens with general remarks about the intersections between phenomenology and ethics and provides an overview of the literature that engages with phenomenology from a care perspective. Next, the chapter debates the methodological challenges this form of cross-ethical investigation implies. The last part is a transition to chapter three. It introduces the philosophy of Bernhard Waldenfels and exposes the links that exist between his responsive approach and other phenomenologies of alterity, mainly those of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Emmanuel Levinas.

2.1. General remarks Ethicists from different strands have engaged with phenomenology to gain a better understanding of the nature of morality and our relation to the Other human (see for example Drummond/Embree 2002; Weiss 2008; Sanders/Wisnewski 2012). This is remarkable, given the fact that phenomenologists seldom claim that their work has an impact on ethical inquiry and moral conduct. Heidegger, for example, on the one hand, explicitly refused to comment on issues that deal with morality or to provide an evaluative analysis of modes of existence. On the other hand, his phenomenology of being has been seen as an example of how phenomenological inquiry is intertwined with ethical questions (Sanders/Wisnewski 2012, p.  1). According to Sanders/Wisnewski (p. 1), phenomenology can be best described as a

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kind of world view about how we take part in and interact with the world. Phenomenology seeks to understand our experience of the world, which amounts to an understanding of our relationship to it. From a phenomenological point of view, our relationship to the world is not one of a spectator to a spectacle. The subject of inquiry approaches its object not from a detached or superior stance. Rather, the relationship is characterized as one of parity that acknowledges mutual interdependence and our enmeshment with the environment. Objects of experience are described rather than analyzed and explained. Experience is understood as a mode of existence and interaction rather than as a tool of knowledge and judgment. For the phenomenologist, even the distinction between subject and object of experience cannot be upheld. Experience is not a stance from above or from nowhere; nor isit the approximation of two separate entities. It is, rather, a process of interaction that brings about both the perceiving self and the perceived object. Phenomenological analysis is a way of looking at our existence as being related and dependent. This also means that we are affected by what happens around us, and that we are concerned with our environment. Phenomenology raises questions about our place or role in the world and our behavior towards the world. It implies a certain attitude towards the world, an attitude that is shaped by the acknowledgment of a fundamental involvement. We experience ourselves as part of the world, as responsible to the world and as dependent on the well-being of those who surround us. Even though the phenomenological perspective does not provide a set of rules or the justification for moral behavior, it instills a readiness to be concerned and to ask ourselves what we should do. In Sanders’s words, “[p]henomenology ... entails an ethics, even if such an ethics is not always apparent in the work of phenomenological thinkers” (ibid.). Two strands within phenomenology have a special relevance for ethical inquiry because of their focus on ethically relevant experiences, the phenomenology of values and the phenomenology of alterity. The phenomenology of values and value sensation has been developed to better understand the experience of the good and

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desirable, the phenomenon of values, and the way in which we experience and assign value to things. The starting point of phenomenologists such as Nicolai Hartmann and Max Scheler is the assumption that, in order to understand value and value experience, we must free ourselves from any interpretation and judgment, and from any form of sympathizing or affirmation of the value itself. In their view, the phenomenological approach of experience as a mode of affection and involvement promises to be more useful in understanding the origin of value sensation than the moralist stance of a normative ethics (Drummond/Embree 2002, p. 8). The second phenomenological strand with a special relevance to ethics is the phenomenology of alterity and inter-subjectivity. This phenomenology focuses on the analysis of otherness-experience and the obligation that is posed by the presence of the Other (ibid.). In so doing, it can offer valuable insights to philosophers of ethics who seek to better understand how we relate to the Other and where our moral commitment towards the Other comes from. Phenomenology of alterity also responds to a problem that has been created by the subjectcentrism of modern philosophy. From the perspective of phenomenology, modern philosophy often treats otherness and non-selfhood as a threat to the self and therefore as something that should be either avoided or eliminated through appropriation. A phenomenology of alterity can countervail these tendencies by revaluing difference and otherness, and by reaffirming that pluralism and respect for otherness are some of the driving forces that structure our social life (Weiss 2008, p.  3). It can help us to re-evaluate the interdependence and relatedness of our existence and to rethink the relationship between self and other, and the origin of morality. The phenomenology of alterity stands for the acknowledgment that morality is located in relationships rather than in detached moral agents and that both agent and beneficiary of a moral action are transformed by the encounter. The insights provided by a phenomenology of alterity are especially relevant to the ethics of care. A phenomenology of obligation and intersubjectivity resonates with experiences of care and the interdependencies in care relations. Accordingly, a significant body

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of literature has evolved to scrutinize the intersections of these two ethical approaches. The following chapter will give an overview of the themes and topics of these cross-ethical encounters.

2.2. Thematic intersections Given the relevance of phenomenology to ethics in general, and of a phenomenology of alterity to relational ethics in particular, an increasing interest in the latter does not come as a surprise. In recent years, ethicists of care were engaged with different phenomenologists of alterity to explore commonalities and intersections, for example uniqueness and interdependence, the corporeality of morality, the situatedness of the moral agent or the relation between care and justice (Benner 1994; Bookman/Aboulafia 2000; Diedrich/Burggraeve/ Gastmans 2003; Taylor 2005; Brubaker 2006; Lavoie/ Koninck/ Blondeau 2006; Upton/Reed 2006; Hamington 2008; Donohoe 2010; Hamington 2012; van Nistelrooij 2014a). Among the phenomenologists who gained the greatest attention are Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and to a lesser extent Edmund Husserl and Paul Ricœur. One example of the importance of phenomenology for care ethics is Janet Donohoe’s analysis of Husserl’s concept of vocation. Donohoe argues that this concept contributes to a deepened understanding of motherhood and parental care, which is crucial to feminist ethics of care. Vocation stands for a commitment to care that is rather felt than rationally understood. Yet it cannot be used to separate feeling from rational thought. It is rooted in pre-reflexive layers of our consciousness, but it needs the activity of rational thought to transform into something that guides us through our life, that makes us understand our life and the relationships that shape it. According to Donohoe, vocation in Husserl’s phenomenology must be seen as the foundation of all our activities, including our rational thought. Vocation stands at the beginning of human agency and creativity and encompasses emotional responses as well as the invention of rules and principles. Since vocation is both a pre-reflexive source of commitment to the Other and a foundation for rational activity, it overcomes the

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split into reason and emotion as two different moral faculties, as well as the split into attentiveness to the particular and adherence to principles and the split into universality versus the subjectivity of moral norms (ibid., p. 139). Moreover, it supports recognition of the role of the social for establishing ethical norms without conceding the ethical responsibility of the individual (ibid., 133). Whereas Donohoe seeks to apply insights from Husserl’s phenomenology to theoretical questions such as the foundation of morality and the possibility of moral truth, a care ethics discussion of MerleauPonty is more practice-oriented. The main focus is directed towards Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the body and its possible relevance to a better understanding of hands-on care. Merleau-Ponty developed a rich phenomenology of the role of the body in human experience, thereby resisting the traditional Cartesian separation of mind and body. Of special importance to the ethics of care are his concepts of embodiment, inter-corporeal empathy, the ethos of the body, reversibility and flesh. These concepts highlight the important contributions that bodily experiences make to the development of morality. The tactility of the body has an ethos in itself. It contributes to the moral knowledge that we possesses and share. This is especially important in caring relations, in which we have to understand and respond to the bodily needs of the Other. With the help of MerleauPonty, care ethicists find ways to describe and emphasize tactile knowledge that arises from inter-corporeal relations. Maurice Hamington, for example, shows how Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the flesh helps us understand why we care for injured people and why we can develop an imagination of the Other’s pain – even from a physical or social distance (Hamington 2008, p.  215). According to Hamington, Merleau-Ponty’s concept of flesh describes a layer that exists between me and the Other. This layer establishes community, bonds and, eventually, the competence to feel with the Other and to know which kind of care is appropriate for them. The flesh stands for embodied resources that make possible meaningful and reciprocal connections with the Other (ibid., p.  204). Our bodies have a silent conversation with each other and with the world. They provide

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articulated silent knowledge that creates attachments or webs of unattended understanding. When confronted with another, my body will garner much more information than my consciousness (ibid., p. 208). The concept of flesh, accordingly, is most powerful when it comes to explicating inter-subjective corporeal connectedness. Because our bodies are all of the same type, the organs of my body find transitivity from one body to another. Experience is understood across bodies. My experience is blended with the experience of the Other in the ongoing emergence of inter-subjective meaning (ibid., p. 211). The reversibility of the flesh means that I can be touched and be the one that touches. Thus the reversibility of the flesh spans a divide between me and the Other (ibid., p.  212). In addition, my positive affective relationship with my own body helps me recognize that others will have an analogous regard for the well-being of their bodies (ibid., p. 213). David Brubaker similarly sees the concept of flesh as a weighty motive to appreciate a bodily sensed community with the Other and to understand why we can develop an understanding of the Other’s bodily needs. Like Hamington, Brubaker argues that habits associated with care arise in consequence of the carer’s own intimate acquaintance with her own body (her “innate portions of flesh”) (Brubaker 2006, p. 231). However, unlike Hamington, Brubaker adds a layer of meaning to the concept of flesh that is important in particular to the ethics of care. For Brubaker, the concept of the flesh is important for caring because it supports and sustains a sense of particularity and uniqueness with which we approach the Other in need. If the flesh is the medium that links us in a corporeal way, the Other can only be someone who is unique and lives in concrete contexts. This is different from an ethics that draws on a general or abstract idea of shared humanity to develop a sense of solidarity and commitment. It is also different from an adherence to abstract principles based on generalizations and assimilation as it is typical of modern rationalist philosophy. Approaching the Other through the flesh is characterized by respect for difference and sensitivity to context. It is “a composite of thoughts and context that provides a non-egoistic yet unique opening upon the natural world” (ibid., p. 244).

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On the other hand, innate contexts of flesh may be sublimated into an idea that is sufficient for the notion of generalized embodiment. In this way, they can serve the needs of an ethics of care for a universal principle. “If the fragment of one’s own flesh generates an idea of embodiment that can be generalized to others, then an imperative to care for all such instances of concrete uniqueness may be generalized as well” (ibid., p. 244). Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology thus provides us with the generalized idea of particularity and uniqueness. According to Brubaker, this resonates well with care-ethical core tenets of living one’s body with an awareness of the moral value of all those who possess similar pre-objective contexts of flesh. By choosing to notice this inner context of visibility, the carer finds a sample that gives meaning to the idea that each person has a concrete and unique interior life (ibid., p. 231). Like the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, the phenomenology of Levinas has had a significant impact on the ethics of care. Levinas’s thoughtful analysis of otherness experience has inspired a number of care ethicists. In his philosophy, Levinas develops a rich account of the ethical dimension of pre-conscious and pre-reflective processes in our encounter with the Other. For Levinas, this encounter is to be characterized as a subjection to the Other’s infinity. The Other’s presence poses an unaccomplishable demand that I cannot escape. Levinas’s philosophy is a strong repudiation of ethical skepticism but also of those ethics which see moral obligation arising from processes of ethical reflection or mutual respect. For Levinas, the moral commitment to the Other precedes processes of sense-making and understanding. Ethics is the first philosophy. Diedrich/Burggraeve/Gastmans (2003) examine the contribution Levinas’s philosophy can make to the ethics of care, especially to the work of care ethicist Joan Tronto. They hold that Levinas is important to the ethics of care because of the notion of an original asymmetry and non-reciprocity in our relation with the Other in need (ibid., p.  53). This notion, they argue, resonates well with the concept of care as being attentive to and working towards the relief of the Other’s

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distress because this implies non-reciprocity and asymmetry. For them, the difference is that, in Levinas, this asymmetry is not created by the competence and capability of the care giver but by the insatiable demand of the Other in need who stands in a position over me (ibid., p. 56). They hold that this insight is important in redefining caring relations as a relationship of equal competences and contributions and to assign the one who receives and needs care a position of autonomy, and even authority, over the one who cares. Bookman/Aboulafia (2000) argue in a similar way. Their crossethical analysis focuses on intersections between Levinas and Carol Gilligan. They see the major convergence between Levinas and the ethics of care in an emphasis and account of the “transcendental moment” in a relationship. At this moment, the self flows over to the Other and assumes moral responsibility for the Other. The injunction to assume responsibility is not rooted in reason or autonomy and it “cannot be explained in terms of commitment to reciprocity” (ibid, p. 170). Levinas’s phenomenological description of human encounter and moral behavior cannot be reduced to reciprocal thinking. It, rather, describes the experiences in caring relations well, because caring is “a moral injunction to act not because of principles but simply because of an awareness of needs” (ibid., p. 171). In contrast, Chloé Taylor’s focus is less on Levinas’s account of relatedness and more on his notion of self-hood and moral agency. She explores the relevance of these concepts for the ethics of care. According to Taylor, Levinas reminds us that subjects are dependent and vulnerable. A sense of dependency and vulnerability creates a commitment to the Other. It evokes the “conception of the self as responsible for others” (Taylor 2005, p. 234) as having a moral obligation. According to Taylor, this explanation of moral commitment marks a major shift away from traditional modern philosophy (ibid., p. 220). She sees another intersection in the emphasis of an intertwinement of care and justice. Both ethics, Taylor argues, find common ground in the idea that care and justice need to cooperate and to be equally valued and respected in an ethical relation. For some time, care theorists have argued for an end to the dichotomy of

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care-based and justice-based ethics and for an integration of the concept of justice into relations of care.1 Taylor sees these claims supported by Levinas – something she considers remarkable, given the fact that Levinas fails to acknowledge that care work is unevenly distributed and that there is a concrete need for justice in care relations (ibid., p. 224). For Levinas, the need for justice in relations of care is born out of the need to consider the third person as the person who is far away but is nevertheless calling on us and claiming an ethical response from us. Our care cannot be limited to those with whom we live in intimate relations. Considering the rights and interests of the distanced Other necessitates choices and the effort to distribute care fairly. Moreover, our responsibility towards each other may call us to judge those who are harming someone who is calling for justice (ibid., p. 225). Levinas’s reflection on justice, Taylor argues, may even be useful for the politically construed justicedebate of the ethics of care because Levinas affirms that there is also justice for me and that I can be the third, a face to myself. It is compatible with Levinas’s understanding of justice to let another take the place of someone who is overwhelmed with the burden of care – for the sake of justice. Justice in Levinas’s thinking will “superimpose” itself when it is ethically necessary (ibid., p. 227). As these examples show, the phenomenology of alterity provides numerous insights into the ethics of care. It explains processes between self and other on multiple layers that cannot be fully grasped by rational analysis alone. As for Merleau-Ponty, intersections are predominantly seen in the field of bodily relatedness. His insights are meaningful for the work of healing and comforting. Mutual understanding at the corporeal level is crucial for the effectiveness and success of handson care. It further enables us to acknowledge the Other’s particularity and uniqueness because the bodily experience of the Other cannot be generalized. Levinas’s major contributions are seen in the notion of otherness experience as subjection to the Other’s call and demands. 1

For more details on the debate see chapter 1.2.2.2.

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This notion redefines the position of the needy Other as one of agency and power to act on the world. These insights, in particular, are crucial in our attempts to safeguard the Other’s autonomy against tendencies of tutelage and paternalism. A commonality of interests and the affirmation or expansion of core beliefs are not, however, sufficient to explain the relevance of phenomenology to the ethics of care. The reasons for these cross-ethical investigations exceed the search for intersections. In the following I  will introduce further motives for this form of scholarship as may be found in the literature. One approach sees phenomenology as a means to provide the ethics of care with a philosophical legitimation. A second uses phenomenology primarily as a moral orientation that can guide our attitudes and practices of care. The third approach emphasizes the methodological differences between phenomenology and the ethics of care as a source of insight.

2.3. Methodological reflections 2.3.1. Literature review Diedrich, Burggraeve, and Gastmans write that their investigation into intersections between care ethicist Joan Tronto and phenomenologist Emmanuel Levinas is motivated by two factors. For the first, they hope to find a common ground between Levinas and the ethics of care to fruitfully address shared issues of importance (Diedrich/ Burggraeve/Gastmans 2003, p. 33). The authors confirm that this is the case (see chapter 2.2.). Second, they want to find out whether Levinasian philosophy is different enough to challenge and transform care ethics, something which, they believe, is necessary for the ethics of care to become “a perspective with the philosophical legitimacy that it has been hitherto lacking” (ibid., p.  33). According to the authors, a discussion of Levinas is important in order to see “whether a philosophical foundation in the vein of the ideas of Levinas can be forged and grafted onto the care ethics perspective […] suitable for providing a philosophical grounding [to the ethics of care]” (ibid., p. 34). Again, their answer is affirmative. According to these authors,

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Levinas’s ethics lends the ethics of care more philosophical legitimacy because it raises a greater awareness of the asymmetry in ethical relations (ibid., p.  53). This, they state, is a “concrete revision to care theories” (ibid., p. 56). Unfortunately, the authors fail to provide arguments to support their conclusion. It does not become clear why a greater awareness of asymmetry would lend care ethics more philosophical legitimacy.2 The authors presuppose a relationship between a certain belief – in this case the belief that moral relations are asymmetrical relations – and the “legitimacy” (ibid., p. 33) of the theory. However, to argue that the ethics of care gains more legitimacy because it incorporates the belief about the asymmetry of care relations, is as confusing as the idea that beliefs about the role of emotions or the source of moral commitment lend philosophical legitimacy – apart from the fact that the asymmetry in moral relations is not a core tenet of some of the well-established ethics, such as liberal or communitarian ethics. Raising issues or taking a stance in favor of or against something cannot be cast in terms of a gain (or loss) of legitimacy and philosophical grounding. It is, rather, the approach itself that raises questions about the legitimacy of authors’ methodical and philosophical perspectives. According to Diedrich et al., the ethics of care lacks philosophical legitimacy (ibid., p.  33). They support this claim by referring to Tronto, who, they say, is concerned “with the question of how to bestow upon the care perspective greater currency and respect in the social and political spheres” (ibid., p.  35). This remark, which the authors derive from a lecture Tronto gave at the Catholic University of Leuven, may be interpreted in two ways. For the authors, it is a statement about the poor legitimization and philosophical grounding of the ethics of care. Another interpretation would be that Tronto deplores the politics of legitimization that dominate the philosophical field and that are not always in favor of the ethics of care. The difference between these interpretations is important because it evokes The authors also fail to show that this awareness does not yet exist within the ethics of care. 2

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different counter-strategies. In the first case (the authors’ interpretation), the strategy is to find a source of legitimation, something that the authors claim to have found in the philosophy of Levinas. In the second case, the appropriate strategy is to ask for the reasons for lending legitimacy and to unmask mechanisms of recognition, or their absence. From the second perspective, the lack of legitimacy is not a problem of the ethics of care but of the community of ethical scholars and the moral boundaries that have been established between theories that are acknowledged, and those that are marginalized. Claiming a lack of recognition does not culminate in the belief that the ethics of care is not a fully-fledged ethical theory. The article by Diedrich et al. conveys the notion of hierarchical relations that exist between different ethical approaches whereby Levinas’s philosophy is more philosophically ‘grounded’ than the the ethics of care. But the implementation of a hierarchy does not adequately reflect the meaning and function of cross-ethical investigations or of philosophical discourse at large. Instead, it rather forecloses a fruitful back and forth of thoughts and the readiness to engage with divergent positions. In this specific case, moreover, the authors fail to explain why Levinas’s ethics has more credibility than the ethics of care and why it is qualified to lend it more legitimacy. A different approach is pursued by Lavoie, Koninck, and Blondeau. The authors engage with Levinas to find an orientation for better nursing. According to them, Levinas’s philosophy forms a point of departure from which we can develop more adequate practices of care. As they say, Levinas “throws considerable light on the ontology of care, thanks especially to his focus on the deeper implications of human encounter” (Lavoie et al. 2006, p. 226). They see, in particular, benefits from an engagement with Levinas’s accounts of relations. Their contribution to the dialogue between care ethics and phenomenology is that they read Levinas’s account of the “face” in a normative way. For the authors, Levinas understands the obligation towards the Other as more than just an innate feature or character trait. Moral commitment is something that “needs to be encouraged”

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(ibid., p. 229). As they say, “[a]ccording to Levinas, care is more than one characteristic of humans; it is an unavoidable moral obligation that precedes any ontology. In other words, the innate characteristic of human beings to look after their neighbor arises more from a feeling of moral responsibility towards the Other than from a natural determination” (ibid., p. 233). Their motivation to engage with phenomenology is, then, the search for moral orientation that can be used in the context of nursing and for the ethical dilemmata and demands that nurses are confronted with on a daily basis. Also for Brubaker, the engagement with Merleau-Ponty is, in the end, a normative rather than a meta-ethical or philosophical undertaking. For Brubaker, Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy gives meaning to the experience of concrete uniqueness and follows the moral command to care for the concrete other. Phenomenology helps in transforming experience into certain behavior towards the Other. It brings to the fore the moral principle of uniqueness that has already been in use but “not been mentioned in European tradition” (Brubaker 2006, p. 254). The ethical implications of phenomenological analysis and their importance for normative questions will also play an important role in my inquiry. However, it is questionable whether the search for moral orientation can be the motive for an engagement with phenomenology. To regard phenomenological ethics as a genuinely normative ethics may lead to an over-interpretation of the ethical implications of its analyses. It implies the risk of losing sight of the intermediary place that phenomenology occupies between ontology and normativity, and of misinterpreting phenomenological insights as commands rather than as a way to look at our place in the world.3

Chapter 5.1 will elaborate on the intricate relationship between phenomenology and normativity in more detail. See also Michael Morgan, who provides thoughtful arguments for a non-normative transcendental reading of Levinas (Morgan 2011, pp. 36-58). For yet another normative interpretation of Levinas, see Carmen Salazar who argues that Levinas, indeed, calls for a commitment to being more related to the Other rather than describing this merely as a given of human life (Salazar 2008). 3

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Neither a hierarchically conceptualized relationship between the ethics of care and phenomenology nor a normatively motivated search for intersections can be fully convincing. More promising appears to be a third approach, which sees the fruitfulness of a cross-ethical investigation primarily in methodological differences. This approach is pursued by Bookman/Aboulafia, Taylor, and Hamington. Similarly to Diedrich et al., Bookman/Aboulafia address charges of theoretical deficiencies that have been leveled against the ethics of care, in particular against Gilligan’s work. But unlike Diedrich et al., Bookman/Aboulafia do not take these deficiencies for real. They explain them as the result of a misinterpretation, which they want to overcome in order to gain more recognition for Gilligan’s ethics. The authors look for convergences between Gilligan and Levinas. They show that, where Levinas was cheered for the innovative approach towards ethics, the same theses in Gilligan’s work were discarded or ignored. Accordingly, they state that “[r]eading Gilligan in the light of Levinas clearly brings to the fore some aspects of her work that have been misunderstood or neglected” (Bookman/Aboulafia 2000, p. 173). Hence, the insight that an engagement with Levinas can offer is that philosophical recognition is unfairly distributed and that Gilligan’s work has been underrated for no reason. Against the background of thematic convergences, Bookman/Aboulafia highlight methodological differences between Gilligan and Levinas. The psychologist Gilligan works empirically, drawing her conclusions mainly from interviews. For the authors, her work serves “as an interesting counterpart” to Levinas’s phenomenological descriptions (ibid., p. 170). As a phenomenologist, Levinas adopts a specific method to bring to the fore those phenomena that easily escape our attention or that have been explicitly excluded by a rationalist philosophy. Given that both Gilligan and Levinas work on the same issues, such as the asymmetry of care relation and the intertwinement of care and justice, but with different methods, mutual enrichment and a synergy of thoughts become possible. Empirical analysis and rich phenomenological description can complement each other. Taylor, too, holds that an engagement with Levinas’s phenomenology is particularly useful because of the phenomenological method.

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For her, the particular phenomenological approach is apt to “further” care ethics’ insights and tenets (Taylor 2005, p. 235). Moreover, she holds that Levinas’s philosophy is “more radical in its break with Western tradition than is found explicitly formulated in most feminist care theory“ (ibid.), whereas it unfortunately remains open whether Levinas’s phenomenology is more radical because of its methodological approach or because of its radical stance towards certain positions. Similarly, Hamington believes that the phenomenological method is especially fruitful, because it sheds light on aspects of our experience that have not been covered so far. Hamington holds that Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of corporeal interconnections has important implications for the ethics of care, especially because the ethics of care has not attended to the aspects of embodiment of care and “the body’s epistemological participation in caring” (Hamington 2008, p.  204). Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological analyses bring aspects of the embodied nature of mutual understanding and care to the fore that have not been addressed by the ethics of care. What Bookman/Aboulafia, Taylor, and Hamington have in common is their emphasis on the phenomenological methods as a means to understand the radicalizing insights that phenomenology can provide. They hold that. because of its specific method, phenomenology is apt to provide insight and knowledge which is not available to other disciplines, including the ethics of care. But what is the phenomenological method? Apart from Bookman/Aboulafia, who briefly touch on methodological issues by juxtaposing phenomenology and empirical research, the authors say nothing about the characteristics of the phenomenological method and why it is useful to advance the inquiry into care ethics. In the following, I will discuss these questions by focusing on the concept of experience. I will argue that this concept is central to the specific phenomenological method and to care ethics alike, and that it shapes the cross-ethical investigation in two ways. First, it constitutes an important link between phenomenology and the ethics of

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care as a feminist ethics. Second, it stands for significant differences, which eventually lead to a radically different perspective on phenomena related to care. 2.3.2. Experience as a nexus and demarcation 2.3.2.1. Phenomenology as the study of experience Phenomenology is the study of “phenomena”, which means the study of things in the way they appear. But phenomenology is also a study of the way we access phenomena, of the way things appear. According to this approach, experience occupies a special place. It is through experience that we perceive the things in the world and interact with them. Any attempt to understand the process of perception must assign a central role to experience. The object of investigation can never be dissolved from the way we experience the object, because the way we experience defines our experience of the object and defines the object as we perceive it. Phenomenological inquiry, accordingly, depends on an understanding of the structure of experience and of the various types of experience, such as thought, memory, imagination, emotion, desire, volition, as well as bodily awareness and social activities. A main characteristic of the structure of experience is what Husserl calls “intentionality”. This term characterizes experience as being directed toward something. Intentionality is the reason why our experience can be the experience of something, the reason why we lend or “intend” sense and meaning to the objects of perception. The directedness of experience toward the things in the world is a characteristic of subjective acts of experience. In order to understand the way we interact with the world it is important to take the first-personperspective of experience seriously. The experiential or first-person perspective underscores that we can talk about experience only because it is experienced by someone. It is I who have a certain experience, and I can experience the object in one way rather than in another. This, however, does not render experience a merely subjective event. Experience is embedded in a context of objective and shareable meaning, which is the reason why we can come to an

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interpersonal understanding of phenomena. Things have meaning because I give meaning to them, which does not mean that I bring these meaningful things into the world. Phenomenology studies experience by way of the phenomenological method of “bracketing”. Bracketing stands for a foreclosure of preconceived ideas, biases, emotions or normative stances which phenomenologists call the “natural attitude” and which, according to them, could cloud or obscure the process of understanding. Bracketing of bias and “natural attitude” is complemented by the concept of the phenomenological epoché. Both bracketing and epoché are the preconditions for the phenomenological reduction, defined as a reduction of a thing that appears as it appears. In this process, an object and its mode of perception condition each other. The former cannot be without the latter. There is only an object because it is an object of my perception. But there is only perception because it is apperceived by an object. By bracketing, epoché and reduction, phenomenology promises an unbiased view on our experience, a view that is not just shaped or affected by conventions and pre-conceived ideas. Phenomenology assumes a middle position between objectivism and subjectivism. It does not hold that things can be approached by a position from above, or by a stance from nowhere. Nor is experience shaped by subjective impressions only. Phenomenology, as the study of things that appear in experience, is largely the study of experience as the medium of perception This investigation is enabled and facilitated through thematizing the own experiences and through bracketing, epoché, and phenomenological reduction. 2.3.2.2. Care ethics and the ambivalence of experience Experience is also a central concept for the ethics of care. The centrality of experience derives from the proximity of care ethics to feminist inquiry. As a feminist-informed ethics of change, the ethics of care seeks to overcome dominant patterns of interpretation represented by traditional philosophy, and to bring experiences of care to the fore that have been excluded or marginalized by mainstream ethics. In particular, it seeks to uncover hidden, ignored or devalued aspects of the experiences

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of those who work in care, and to strengthen and re-value these experiences. For these reasons, autobiographies and self-testimonies are seen as meaningful tools of expression. The underlying assumption is that the process of making these experiences visible is a first step towards addressing injustice and initiating change. It can help to re-frame relations and to alter concepts and language. Linda Alcoff demonstrates the transformative power of an experience that has, finally, become visible in two examples of sexualized violence: date rape and rape within marriage. Neither of these forms sexual violence could be grasped in terms of conventional understanding of rape as a crime that occurs between strangers in the public space. It was only because the victims were encouraged to speak about their experiences, that rape within intimate relations could be recognized as a criminal act. The newly coined words date rape and rape within marriage reflect the recognition of these experiences (Alcoff 2000, pp. 235f). The importance of experience for the project of transformation and justice depends on trusting that these experiences are truthful. Experience can only be valued as a source of knowledge if it is seen as authentic. The authenticity of experience is the Achilles heel of a feminist form of knowledge production that relies on the narratives of marginalized people. Feminist theorists are aware that experience is never the simple expression of how we perceive the world that is always already modeled and transformed through language and preestablished horizons of interpretation. Experience is never neutral or immediately given. Whatever we experience takes place through the lens of existing patterns of understanding. This makes experience a contested concept and the reliance on the narratives of subordinated people a questionable tool.4 The critical stance towards the authenticity of experience has also strained the relationship between feminist theory and phenomenology. Noddings, for example, holds that phenomenology is not a valid philosophical approach or source of inspiration because it conflates The feminist critique of experience overlaps largely with its post-structuralist counterpart. I will treat them as one in the following. 4

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truth and perspectives and erroneously holds that the phenomenological method in the form of introspection and intuition is a path to truth (Noddings 2013, p. 32). Silvia Stoller, on the other hand, develops some powerful arguments to show that feminist and phenomenological concepts of experience have more in common than critics such as Noddings suggest. She identifies a number of feminist/poststructuralist critiques of the concept of experience and shows how, in each case, phenomenology offers a way to accommodate this criticism. Stoller begins with the assumption that phenomenology understands experience in an empiricist sense as the foundation of knowledge. The empiricist use of experience disregards post-structuralist and feminist insight with regard to the situatedness of experience. However, as Stoller argues, this critique erroneously conflates phenomenology and empiricism. In contrast to empiricism, phenomenology does not take experience as the starting point of knowledge but, rather, treats experience itself as an object of investigation and analysis. Experience is not the foundation of knowledge. It is the tool that shapes the way we perceive the world (Stoller 2005, p. 141). Stoller’s second argument refers to the historicity of experience. Post-structuralists see experience placed in a historical framework of interpretation, which it is based upon past forms of interpretation and sense. According to this critique, any approach that does not take the historicity of experience into account is flawed. However, as Stoller argues, phenomenologists, such as, for example, Martin Heidegger in Sein und Zeit, have thematized the “Horizontstruktur” of experience (ibid., p.  143). This shows that phenomenology, in fact, acknowledges that experience is embedded in a world horizon that constitutes the framework within which experience can take place and that gives meaning to experience. Past experience shapes and determines my present experiences. Future experiences are already in the making through my present experience (ibid., p. 144). Also, as Stoller argues, phenomenology does not assume that experience is immediately given. Rather, it is a specific method to address the mediateness of experience. The specific concept to explicate the

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mediateness of experience is the concept of intentionality. According to this concept, things appear in our experience because of the directedness of perception. This implies that the object of perception is not given as such, but transformed in perception by grafting sense and meaning onto the object (ibid., p. 146). Stoller, further, evokes the concept of intentionality to show that phenomenology accommodates the post-structuralist claim of experience as being always already interpreted experience that cannot be accessed prior to interpretation. Intentionality as the basic structure of experience renders experience always the experience of something, whereas the something is an intrinsic element of experience, not of the object of experience. The experiencing subject is always at the same time the agent of interpreting her experience. To enforce her argument, Stoller cites Merleau-Ponty’s dictum of the violence of experience, which limits the potentiality of the object through exclusion but also makes experience possible in the first place (ibid., p. 152). Another, primarily feminist, critique is that the phenomenological concept of experience does not account for the gendered aspect of experience; in particular, it does not acknowledge that gender is a central category of analysis and that experiences are shaped by gender stereotypes and differences. Stoller rebuts this criticism. She argues that because phenomenology views experience also as a bodily event that is mediated through a bodily sense of perception, it gives room to the notion that experience can also be gendered (ibid., p. 158). Post-structuralists, finally, criticize experience for reproducing ideological systems because of its embeddedness in historically construed horizons of sense and its mediatedness – a problem that feminist theory is especially wary about. Stoller, however, replies that phenomenology takes a different stance towards experience. Experience in phenomenology is never simply reproducing the ideological system. Rather, experience is seen as principally open, despite its historicity, embeddedness and mediatedness (ibid., p. 154). A notion of the openness of experience is, for example, supported by Merleau-Ponty’s work on language. Merleau-Ponty shows that there is not only a constituted language but also a constituting language. The constituting

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language makes use of the constituted language but it does not completely overlap with it (ibid., p.  161). The constituting language is the living language, the parole. It is the one that gives language its sense and that bears the potential of transformation. This rebuts poststructuralist claims that experience is always the product of a pregiven system of sense and therefore static. Similar to post-structuralists, Merleau-Ponty believes, other than post-structuralists, that there is no experience prior to language. He also believes that through constituting language, experience is also open to change and transition. Mediatedness through discursiveness is not the only aspect of experience (ibid.). Phenomenology, following Stoller’s line of thought, is a powerful rebuttal of a post-structuralist criticism because it accommodates the flaws of empiricism, the historicity, mediatedness and embeddedness of experience and the gender aspect of experience. It invalidates claims that experience reproduces ideological systems by showing the dynamic side of experience. And it shows that the mediatedness of experience by language always bears an element of innovativeness. Stoller further holds that the notion of openness and possibility of change is more convincing than the post-structuralist closure of systems of thought. Only a principal openness of experience explains the dynamic of human thought. The inability to account for changes makes post-structuralist theory wrong. It is more plausible to assume, as phenomenology does, that experience is both situated in pre-established structures of sense and open to new influences, because sense is too broad and possible perspectives and their combination are too manifold not to allow for change and innovation (ibid., p.  156). Moreover, it would be absurd, Stoller argues, to think that science and knowledge production would be possible without experience. To forgo experience would, for example, make it impossible to use qualitative approaches such as Oral History in the social sciences (ibid., p. 169 footnote 126).5 Stoller also refers to Judith Butler, who uses the term constitutive instability to account for the creative and unconventional element of experience (ibid., p. 156). 5

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The latter point makes the phenomenological concept of experience not only a suitable but also an attractive concept for feminist inquiry. Similar to phenomenology, feminist theory holds that experience functions in both ways, as a reproduction of sense and meaning, and as a site of resistance, creativity and change. We are never fully subject to what is given to us. Experience always oscillates between repetition and innovation. Whereas post-structuralism stresses the embeddedness of experience and its dependency on language, phenomenology allows for the possibility of change that is decisive for feminist theory. Furthermore, not trusting the experience of marginalized groups because of their alleged subjection to structures of sense and interpretation constitutes a form of paternalism, as Stoller rightfully remarks. It suggests that agents understand their own experiences in a way that is self-deceiving. This is a form of ignorance or devaluation of the agent’s epistemological autonomy. Rather, narratives of oppressed groups should be trusted as authentic reports and should be valued as a meaningful source of empowerment (ibid., p. 158).6 2.3.2.3. The differences Phenomenology rebuts post-structuralist criticism of experience. It also fulfills feminist needs of a critical concept of experiences that addresses power mechanisms as well as the possibility of change. This does not mean, however, that feminist and phenomenological 6 Apart from invalidating post-structuralist and feminist claims, phenomenology also – according to Linda Fisher – rebuts the more conventional criticism of experience. Conventional philosophical criticism often depicts experience as subjective, anecdotic or unphilosophical. However, according to phenomenology, personal experience provides access to inquiry which is neither objective nor subjective. The phenomenological approach pursues a form of subjective objectivity. Experience is analyzed from a first-person perspective, as “my” experience. But it is also understood as part of socially established structures of sense that have been passed on to me since my birth. Fischer says that, by overcoming the traditional split into subjectivity and objectivity, phenomenology renders experience not only an acceptable but also a legitimate access to philosophical insights and, therefore, supports the reliance on experience by feminist theory (Fisher 2000, pp. 32f).

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concepts of experience overlap fully. There remain decisive differences with regard to the function as well as the forms of experience. For ethics of care, experience is a way to make sense of the world. Carol Gilligan’s In a Different Voice, for example, shows how experiences of care givers can be re-interpreted as valuable and morally significant experiences. The “different voice” questions dominant concepts of morality. It invents a new terminology to express these experiences. Amy’s response to Heinz’s dilemma is no longer the symbol of moral immaturity or of a failure to develop an ethics that transgresses social conventions.7 Amy’s response, rather, emerges as a moral approach in its own right that speaks the language of empathy, communication and relatedness rather than that of logic and justice (Gilligan 1982, pp. 25-32). Gilligan’s effort to bring Amy’s voice to the fore is a good example of how experience “functions” in the context of an ethics of care. Experience is treated as a message or stance that conveys certain positions and messages. It is a tool that can be used to achieve a certain goal and defeat the status quo. Phenomenology, on the other hand, is not interested in experience as a tool of resistance or change. For phenomenology, experience is in the first place an access to the world, a means to interact with the environment. Phenomenology seeks to track experience at the margins of what we can know. For phenomenology, there is no either–or with regard to the interpretation of experience. Rather, there is a more–or–less of experience. What matters is the attempt to stretch the boundaries of what is experienceable at all. Our experience of the world is enabled but also limited in specific ways; these possibilities and limitations are not, as in critical theory, linked to the embeddedness of experience in social and historical structures. They exist prior to the interpretation of experience. The way we experience the world is decisive for what we experience, but it is prior to political or ideological controversies. In phenomenology, the focus of analysis is not 7 Lawrence Kohlberg discusses a moral thought experiment, the Heinz dilemma, which is supposed to tell us about a person’s moral development. The question is whether in times of illness and crisis a life-saving medicament shall be stolen.

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on the object of experience as such but on the way we approach, perceive and interpret the objects of experience. It is the phenomenality of the phenomena which is at the core of phenomenological inquiry. Phenomenology, therefore, is less a method in the sense of a tool than an investigation of our existence, more specifically an investigation into the way we experience the world. The difference between the feminist and the phenomenological concept of experience is, therefore, a difference with regard to its function. For the feminist ethics of care, experience is a medium to take a position. What is at stake is the content of experience, how we experience certain things and how we interpret this experience. For phenomenology, on the other hand, experience is a means to access the world. What is at stake is the way we interact with the world, how we experience something as something, and what kind of experience is out there that can be described. Phenomenology never takes experience as the starting point of knowledge. It is not an epistemological project that uses experience for knowledge production (Stoller 2005, p. 141). Feminist theory, on the other hand, despite a general alertness towards the situatedness of experience, draws on experience to produce alternative narratives and to bring marginalized voices to the fore. The difference in the function of experience reveals a difference with regard to interests and goals of an experience-based analysis. The feminist interest in experience is linked to the quest for a re-interpretation of social life and the re-distribution of social goods. The underlying assumption is that theorizing has revolutionary potential and that the way we talk about the world changes the world. Phenomenology, on the other hand, does not pursue any transformative or senseproducing agenda. Stoller exemplifies the different uses of experience through the phenomenon of fear. We can argue that fear of something, e.g. darkness, is fortified or evoked by talking about dangers of darkness, by a discourse about fear in darkness. We can also expect that a discourse about forms of fear and an analysis of its sources may alter our concept of fear and our fears themselves. But this still does not help us understand the experience of fear as such. At this point, phenomenology comes into play. It provides the method to analyse and understand

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the phenomenon and the experience of fear. In this context, it is not important whether this fear is justified or not, whether it rests on illusions or is produced by discourse. From a phenomenological standpoint, all that matters is to understand how we experience fear, how fear shows itself (ibid., p. 158). Another example could be Levinas’s concept of solidarity and help. For Levinas, the commitment to help is not a specific feature of the moral agent and it is also not a specific content of experience. It is, rather, an experience in the form of a subjection to the Other. Experience and subjection become one; there is no gap between experience as a means of accessing the world and experience as a commitment to help the Other in need. There is a commitment to help precisely because of the subjection as a form of experience. The subjection to the Other is like a medium through which I experience the Other in need. According to Levinas, moral obligation is a specific mode of experience rather than a moral virtue or ability. Similar things may be said about Merleau-Ponty’s concept of flesh. For Merleau-Ponty, the bodily knowledge of how to relieve the Other’s pain is not an element that is contained in experience. It is the very form of experience. The flesh is an invisible layer that exists between me and the Other, and it is through this layer that I can experience the Other at a bodily level. The flesh is a gateway as well as a transmitter. I cannot experience the Other’s presence if not through the flesh. The flesh is the medium through which I experience the Other’s pain as it if were mine although I know every second that it is not mine. The flesh fills the vacuum of spatial separation and thereby causes a unification of the other person’s and one’s own pain. The pain of the other person crosses the line and comes over to me, as much as I cross a line by moving to the Other in pain although it is not I who got hurt. Merleau-Ponty’s concept of flesh, hence, stands for both the experience of the Other’s bodily existence and the medium or mode of experience. Content and mode and experience become one. Thus the phenomenon itself (inter-corporeal understanding) and the way we investigate this phenomenon (by describing the flesh) merge.

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A final difference between the feminist and the phenomenological use of experience as a tool of inquiry relates to the forms of experience. Feminist inquiry mostly draws on conscious types of experience in the form of statements and propositions. Experience must be or must become conscious in order to transform conventional patterns of interpretation. Phenomenology, on the other hand, deals with both conscious and pre-conscious layers of experience. It accounts for the fact that experience can shade off into less conscious phenomena and that we are often only vaguely aware of the things that happen to us. Phenomena are often experienced at the margin or periphery of our attention. For example, we are not explicitly conscious of our habitual patterns of action. We perform things without volitionally endorsing them because we became used to doing them or because they are spontaneous reactions rather than volitional choices. Phenomenology, as the study of experience, is concerned with both the conscious and the pre-conscious forms of experience. Care theorists engage with Merleau-Ponty, Levinas and other phenomenologists of alterity to harness the insight that the phenomenological method provides. The philosophy of Bernhard Waldenfels adds an important voice to this phenomenological tradition but has not yet been in the focus of scholars of care. Before the following chapters turn to the core aspects of a responsive ethics and to a “responsive” perspective on self-sacrifice, I will briefly illuminate the place Waldenfels’s philosophy occupies within the phenomenology of alterity.

2.4. Introduction to Bernhard Waldenfels Waldenfels is a phenomenologist of alterity just as Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, Ricœur and other mainly French philosophers are. Born in 1934, Waldenfels studied philosophy, psychology, classical philology and history in Bonn, Innsbruck and Munich, and modern French philosophy in Paris with Merleau-Ponty and Ricœur. He has published extensively on French phenomenology including Levinas, Merleau-Ponty, Ricœur, Sartre, Lyotard, Jacques, Castoriadis and Derrida (Waldenfels 1983; Waldenfels 1995; Waldenfels 2005).

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French phenomenologies of alterity were seminal for the development of his own unique approach. Waldenfels can be seen as the phenomenologist who re-imported the phenomenology of alterity – which had originated with Husserl in the early 20th century – back to Germany after multiple alterations and diffusion through French philosophers. In particular, Levinas and Merleau-Ponty were decisive for the development of his philosophy. The Levinasian themes of nonreprocity and subjection on the one hand and Merleau-Ponty’s themes of bodily understanding, mind/body unity and language as a medium of otherness recur in Waldenfels’s oeuvre in manifold ways. In the words of Karl Dallmayer, Waldenfels’s Deutsch-Französische Gedankengänge (1995) may be understood as a conversation with Levinas and Merleau-Ponty and as an attempt to find a middle way between them regarding the place of the Other in relation to the self (Dallmayr 2001, p. 142). As will be shown in the following chapter, separateness and intertwinement of self and Other is constitutive of Waldenfels’s account of rationality and self-hood as something that is pervaded by foreignness. Both Levinas and Merleau-Ponty locate the place of the Other in a proximity as well as distance to the self: Levinas’s position can be characterized as being more concerned with distance, that of Merleau-Ponty as emphasizing proximity. Waldenfels, according to Dallmayer, seeks to reconcile both by overcoming Levinas’s radicalness, which shows in the separateness and infinity of the Other (which seems to replicate the traditional split into self and Other), and at the same time by being wary of a totalizing synthesis between self and Other that Merleau-Ponty has been accused of. Dallmayer sees in Waldenfels’s phenomenology of the foreign the attempt to combine both Merleau-Ponty’s interconnectivity and Levinas’s radical separateness. For Waldenfels, the Other is irreducibly different but the separation between me and the Other is only a rip in the fabric of a general intertwinement (ibid., p. 146; see also Huth 2008, p. 28.)8 A more detailed account of Waldenfels’s conception of the relationship between self and Other will follow in chapter 3.4.2. 8

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Even after 1995, French phenomenology remained very influential in the development of Waldenfels’s thought. In 2005, Waldenfels published Idiome des Denkens. Deutsch-Französische Gedankengänge II. But Waldenfels’s contribution to philosophy is more than just a tribute to contemporary strands in phenomenology. His responsive phenomenology or “phenomenology of the foreign” sets a new accent. In contrast to Levinas’s phenomenology of the Other, which centers on the question of how the Other appears to the self, Waldenfels’s phenomenology of the self is, in its encounter with the Other, a phenomenology of how the self experiences the Other as irreducible to the self. Levinas is often called the thinker of alterity, whereas Waldenfels may be seen as the phenomenologist of the experience of foreignness and of the alienation of experience through the experience of the Other. With a focus on foreignness as a central element of experience, Waldenfels’s work ties in with the infinity of Levinas’s “face”. But whereas, for Levinas, the face symbolizes the impossibility of transgressing the threshold between me and the Other, Waldenfels investigates the effect that the experience of foreignness has on the self, effects that ultimately shape and change the relationship of the self with another and with itself. It is Waldenfels’s focus on foreignness as a feature of experience that adds a new layer to the phenomenology of alterity and that bears fresh insights for the self-sacrifice debate. The alienation of experience through the irreducibility of the Other is useful to interpret phenomena such as self-sacrifice because it dethrones the self as the center and motor of our thoughts and actions. Responsive phenomenology holds that experience is pervaded by elements of foreignness. This lets morality and othercenteredness appear in a new light. Waldenfels’s account of foreignness – a foreignness which separates us from the Other and, at the same time, invades us – renders his phenomenology a thought-provoking approach for our struggle with self-sacrifice. In addition, responsive phenomenology offers insights into a phenomenon – the foreign – which normally defies reflection. In Waldenfels’s phenomenology, as in phenomenology at large, method and

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object of inquiry cannot be separated from each other. For a phenomenology of the foreign, the foreign as the object of investigation requires a specific method. The foreign cannot be grasped and understood by means of conventional approaches. Per definitionem, the foreign is a mystery that cannot be accessed by a rationalizing and synthesizing mind. Strictly speaking, even an experience of foreignness is not possible because experience is already a way to reduce the world onto the self, to make the world known and familiar to the self. Experience and understanding do not leave room for the foreign. They are, rather, processes that assimilate the foreign to the self. This means that the foreign appears within our experience but that we do not experience the foreign in the same way as we experience other phenomena. The foreign is a phenomenon that evades our experience. It is not even a phenomenon but rather, as Waldenfels calls it, a hyper-phenomenon or an epiphenomenon (Waldenfels 2011b, p.  35). The foreign precedes and conditions any given order but it cannot be explained by the concepts that are provided by the order and by existing patterns of discourse and dichotomies. The foreign is an essential element of our experience but it appears only at the unconscious layers of experience. It is this realm of unconscious experience that makes the phenomenology of the foreign an important point of reference to better understand phenomena such as selfsacrifice. An engagement with Waldenfels from a care ethics perspective thus promises new insights: first, because he approaches the Other not only as an object or facet of moral behavior but also as part of experience itself; and, second, because he develops a unique approach to the phenomenon of the foreign within ourselves which, under normal circumstances, remains inaccessible to us. Waldenfels’s phenomenology of the foreign has found recognition and appraisal from other phenomenologists (Fischer/Gondek/ Liebsch 2001; Busch/Därmann/Kapust 2007; Huth 2008). Moreover, Waldenfels’s work attracts increasing interest from disciplines such as hermeneutics, pedagogy, theology and the nursing sciences (Feiter 2002; Huth 2006; Woo 2007 and 2008; Hackermeier 2008; Leskovec 2009; Wabel 2010). However, so far no study has sought

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to harness Waldenfels’s phenomenology from a care ethics perspective. One reason for this lack of involvement is probably the limited number of English translations. The ethics of care is largely represented by anglophone scholars. Although some of Waldenfels’s articles are published in international journals and although a couple of books have been translated into English, the translation of some of his major publications is still outstanding. This analysis, therefore, also hopes to introduce Bernhard Waldenfels to a larger audience of care theorists.

3 Responsive phenomenology

3.1. Responsivity The central concept of a responsive phenomenology is “responsivity”. Waldenfels developed this concept by drawing on German medical literature from the 19th century. The neurologist Kurt Goldstein used responsivity to describe the exchange between an organism and its environment. Responsivity, according to Goldstein, stands for the ability of an organism to meet the requirements of its surroundings in an adequate way that activates its full potential (Waldenfels 2007d, p. 28). As a phenomenologist, Waldenfels does not investigate the conditions of physical well-being. He is, instead, interested in the structure of experience. Responsivity, in a Waldenfelsian sense, characterizes the way we experience the world. Experience is, first and foremost, a response and “[t]he human being is an animal which responds” (ibid., p. 27; Waldenfels 2011b, p. 38). For Waldenfels, responsivity is “a basic trait, present in all our behavior towards things, towards ourselves, and towards others” (Waldenfels 2013, p. 423). Responsivity stands for the notion that our thoughts and actions do not start on their own. They have a foreign beginning, triggered by things that affect us. Our thoughts and actions are responses to events that happen to us and that set our interaction with the world in motion (Waldenfels 2007d, p. 45). The notion that we are responsive to what happens around us may, at first glance, be self-evident. Its thought-provoking potential is unveiled if we compare the concept of responsivity with the ways in which experience is normally

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understood. According to the phenomenologist Dan Zahavi, experience is conventionally seen as a process by which the objects of the world become understandable and thereby enter a relationship with the self. Experience is, then, self-affirmative because it stands for the ability to find the place of the self within a complex and mostly confusing environment. Experience, according to this view, stands for a reduction of the world to the self, for a way to make the world more familiar to the self (Zahavi 1999, p. 195). The notion of experience as self-affirmative and reductive corresponds to a concept of intentionality which was first introduced by Husserl and which has been highly influential for the subsequent development of phenomenology. Intentionality stands for the notion that the basic structure of experience is a directedness towards the objects of perception. In perception, we encounter the world with the intention to understand, to lend meaning and to integrate objects into horizons of sense. It is because of this directedness that objects acquire a meaning for us. The sense of objects is “intended” through experience. By lending meaning and sense, objects appear as objects of our experience. According to Waldenfels, the concept of intentionality is not wrong, but it is also “not enough” ( Waldenfels 2003, p.  28) to describe the structure of experience. As long as we understand experience as intentional, our relationship with the object of the world is non-reciprocal. Experience starts by approaching an object with the intention of sense because “[i]t is we who make sense of things” (Waldenfels 2007d, p. 22). The outside world is “reduced to some part of a sense-whole” (ibid., his emphasis). Intentionality describes experience as a process whereby the world loses its foreignness, becomes our  world (ibid.), becomes something to us because we link it with something. This notion of experience, according to Waldenfels, is incomplete because it does not describe experience in its full complexity. Intentionality overlooks the important aspect of foreignness and irreducibility that is also part of experience and that equally shapes our encounter with the world. Describing experience merely as a process

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of lending sense falls short of capturing the “inexperienceability” and the fugitiveness of the world. It does not account for the indissoluble separateness between me and the world. What Waldenfels tries to capture with responsivity is this element of foreignness and irreducibility in experience. Within the framework of a responsive phenomenology, experience is not only a directedness. It is not only driven by the intention to lend sense to the objects of perception. Experience, rather, starts with a response to something that is outside the self and that can never become fully appropriated by the self. For Waldenfels, experience “begins at the point where something challenges us and puts our own possibilities into question” (ibid., p. 25). A world that appears partly irreducible is not one that we meet with the intention of understanding and assimilating. It is rather a world in which we find ourselves and to which we respond. The world does not appear as the result of our sense-making activities. We interact with the world by responding to it. The basic structure of experience is therefore not the directedness towards potential objects of sense and meaning, but responsivity to events that occur to us and provoke our interaction. Under the concept of intentionality, experience is understood in light of a need to reduce the complexity of the world. For Waldenfels, it does not account for the fact that we are first and foremost placed in the world before we interact with it, and that responding is the very first stage of experience. With the notion of responsivity we can reach this initial stage of experience, which transgresses the sphere of intentional sense (ibid., p.  24; Waldenfels 2011b, p.  36). Responsivity expresses the idea that experience not only lends sense and meaning but also accounts for a world that is larger than the self. We respond to the world because we acknowledge its irreducibility and independence from us. The world is not something of our own making. It rather disturbs and surprises us and thereby triggers our response. Waldenfels is often called the phenomenologist of the foreign. The four volumes of Studien zur Phänomenologie des Fremden (Waldenfels 1997, 1998b, 1999a, 1999b) are among his most important publications. Responsivity and the notion of foreignness are indissolubly linked. We

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respond to the world because the world appears to us as irreducibly foreign. The acknowledgment of foreignness lets us experience the world as something that does not begin with us. The world appears as independent from us. The world is there and we respond to it. Responsivity is an ability to respond to the world by acknowledging its irreducibility. It is a response-ability. If we see experience in light of reduction and assimilation, responsivity may represent an imperfect or incomplete form of experience or even a failure of experience. This is, however, not Waldenfels’s intention. The experience of the “inexperienceability” of the world is not a deficiency. It is an ability that allows for complexity and potentiality of its objects, for “a profusion of possibilities” that open up through the ability to respond (Delhom 2002, p. 548). Responsivity is a faculty of expanding experience in the way that it accounts not only for a world that makes sense but also for a world that remains beyond the scope of sense. It stands for an acknowledgment of that which cannot be known or named. When we experience the world as something to which we respond, the thing that triggers our response also becomes part of our experience, not as something that can be completely known and understood, but as something that is the reason for experience in the first place. Experience, thus, is pervaded by the nonselfhood of the event to which we respond because this event always appears at the horizon of our response. Hence, responsivity stands for a complex and rich form of interaction with the world that includes and allows for more perspectives than one’s own. The ability to experience the foreign as foreign in the sense of a porousness or permeability towards the alien resonates with what Nietzsche says about the human as “the animal not yet properly adapted to his environment”.1 In contrast to its medical counterpart, responsivity does not refer to a physical interaction with the world. It, rather, describes a certain mental feature of human existence, the ability to acknowledge that the world is more complex than our own “...das noch nicht festgestellte Thier...” (Nietzsche 1966, section 3 § 62). See Waldenfels’s own reference to this passage in his (1993), p. 515. 1

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abilities of interpretation and understanding. Responding to events that happen to us in experience is not to be conflated with an answer that we give to a question. It is neither a sense-seeking intention and directedness that stands at the beginning of experience nor a question about the world. Experience begins at a point at which something challenges us before we become involved in an act of questioning that strives for knowledge. Responsivity “undermines the traditional priority of questioning” (Waldenfels 2007d, p. 25). Responsivity does not refer to a specific answer or a specific act, nor does it refer to speech or action only. Responsivity, rather, stands for a “wider sense of responding on all registers of our bodily experience” (Waldenfels 2013, p.  423). We respond through our senses, desires, memories, expectations, through our spatial orientation, our speaking and acting, with words and with silences, with gazes and gestures (ibid.).2 3.1.1. Responsive rationality For Waldenfels, responsivity is a form of experience and of rationality. It points at the responsive nature of rationality. Human rationality is a responsive rationality, which is characterized by four features: the inevitability of responding, the singularity of the event to which we respond, the deferment of the response, and the asymmetry between event and response. The inevitability of the response Responsivity as a key characteristic of experience is not something we can endorse or avoid. Responding to the world comes with an inevitability and pathos, that we “endure” (Waldenfels 2007d, p. 34). The inevitability of our response to the world is comparable to the inevitability of listening to a call (Waldenfels 2011b, p.  40). As much as it is impossible to miss a call, so is it impossible to hear the imperative “listen” without listening to it (Waldenfels 2007d, p. 26). Waldenfels has written at length about the different forms and “registers” of the response in his (2007a). 2

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For Waldenfels, the inevitability to respond is similarly entrenched in our existence as striving for happiness or the drive to self preservation (ibid., p. 30; Waldenfels 2011b, pp. 39f). The inevitability to respond points at the pre-conscious nature of the response. We respond to the world prior to being a conscious self. The pre-consciousness of the response is not a feature of the response. It is rather its requirement. The pre-conscious mode is one in which the self takes a pause from explanation, assimilation and appropriation. This pause is the necessary condition for the experience of the foreign. It is the condition for our ability to respond to what is outside the self because that to which we respond must be unaffected by interpretation and understanding. Otherwise it would simply be, or turn into, the known and familiar. Foreignness is not a feature of the world. Additionally, there is nothing intrinsic to the event that would exert pressure or coerce us to respond. Rather, the foreignness of the world is conditioned by the event of self-suspension at the moment of the encounter. Responsivity is a responseability in the sense of permeability to the foreign that we neither choose nor control. The singularity of the event Waldenfels calls the event that triggers our response a singular event. This does not mean that the event happens only once or that nothing compares to it (Waldenfels 2007d, p. 29). The event is singular because it occurs on a pre-conscious level where it defies meaning and classification. The event cannot be integrated into a sense-whole; it is “more than a part of a whole and more than a case of law” (ibid., pp. 28f). The event is like a proper name that has no other meaning (Waldenfels 1995, p. 306). Singularity as the impossibility of generalization represents a realm outside the self that “deviate[s] from the familiar and inaugurate[s] another way of seeing, thinking and acting” (Waldenfels 2007d, p. 29; Waldenfels 2011b, p. 39). As such, it is the source of dynamics and innovation because it represents the insufficiency of existing orders to account for the infiniteness and singularity of the events that trigger our response to the world.

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The deferment of the response Pre-consciousness is the requirement for the foreign to appear in experience. It marks an initial stage of experience where thoughts and actions are set in motion. We cannot go back to this initial stage of experience. Our response in the form of a thought or action comes too late to capture the event, it is always deferred. The deferment of the response stands for an “unreachable previousness” (Waldenfels 2007d, p.  30) of the event which undermines “the primacy of an originary presence” (ibid., p. 31) of the self. If the event was anticipated or expected, it would be transformed into a certain event, an event with a meaning. As singularity, the event always precedes our interpretation. We never come in time to catch the event of foreignness experience in flagrante. We also cannot wait for it because the event of the alien occurrence happens without our knowing and expectation. It comes as a surprise. If we could have been waiting for it, it would not have been unusual. The event obliviously occurs too early, the response too late (Waldenfels 2011b, p. 30).

With its apriority, the event resembles a traumatic experience that can only be grasped in its after-effects (Waldenfels 2007d, p. 31).3 The asymmetry between event and response Because the event to which we respond is singular and can never be caught “in flagrante”, the relationship between the event and our response is characterized by an asymmetry. Our response not only comes too late. It is also unable to capture the event in its whole complexity, to cover all aspects of the event. The event is infinite, “senseless”, and our response always insufficient. The singular event appears as the extraordinary which cannot be subsumed under the familiar; it 3 The deferred response is comparable to the event of our own birth. Our birth is never fully our own. It concerns us but we cannot attribute it to ourselves. Each birth is a premature one, each infant is a latecomer. This delay repeats itself wherever anything new comes into being (Waldenfels 2011b, p.  18). For the unreachable previousness of birth see also Christina Schües (2005), pp. 56ff.

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breaks through all familiar structures and does not provide a sufficient foundation from which the response can be derived. Accordingly, event and response never converge fully. They never find a common ground, they “collide like two glances that meet” (ibid., p. 31). Waldenfels calls the gap between event and response hiatus. This hiatus renders the fulfillment of a demand in the guise of an event impossible (Waldenfels 2006, p.  54). Asymmetry and hiatus, however, not only stand for a gap but also for an interdependence. Event and response are intertwined because the event evokes the response and because it is only through the response that the event emerges as an event. The “responsive difference” (Waldenfels 1993, p.  517) stands for the infiniteness of the event and the insufficiency of the response, but also for the reason why there are orders, laws and norms (“blinder Fleck”, 517f). On the other hand, the answer is also always mediated by aesthetic, technological, economic and political intermediaries and never completely independent of its context (Waldenfels 2006, p. 56).4 Responsivity takes place at a pre-conscious level. Our interaction with the world does not take its departure from the subject. It starts at a place that is outside the self. The notion of the self-starting rational subject is an illusion which, according to Waldenfels, should be replaced by a responsive rationality or heterology (Waldenfels 2013, p.  424). Responsive rationality stands for the impossibility not to respond (inevitability of the response), for our inability to integrate the event that triggers our response into a sense-whole (singularity of the event) or to go back to the place from which our response starts (deferment of the response). It finally stands for the impossibility to fully capture the event in our response or to master all facets of the response The ethics of care also stresses the inherent asymmetry of relations (see chapter 1.2). However, this asymmetry is based on differences between needs and capabilities, whereas Waldenfels adopts a more Levinasian approach. According to responsive phenomenology, the asymmetry arises from the impossibility of responding adequately to the call of the Other. The Other’s call cannot be fully grasped through processes of interpretation and lending sense. Our responses are always incomplete. 4

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(asymmetry between event and response). We are not able to confine that to which we respond.5 In responding, I am involved, “but not as an author or actor who fulfills an act but as a patient to whom what happens happens” (Waldenfels 2007d, p. 34). Responsivity stands for the infusion of experience by foreignness and for an initial stage of thought and action that is prior to the conscious and autonomous self. Responsive phenomenology radically undermines any form of subjectcentrism. Our acts and thoughts place us in a certain way in the world, but they are not our thoughts and acts in the sense of creation and authorship. Their point of origin lies outside the self (Waldenfels 2006, p.  106). Responding is characterized by a “starting from elsewhere” (Waldenfels 2013, p.  424, his emphasis), where elsewhere is not just another place. It is the “place where I am not, where I have not been and where I will never be” (ibid., p. 430). By undermining the notion of the self-starting subject, Waldenfels’s phenomenology is a rejoinder to the subject-centrism of modern western philosophy. For Waldenfels, the project of modernity can be best described as a movement that questions the ancient vision of a borderless cosmos. The ancient cosmos represents an order without exteriority whereby each thing is assigned its place. The order itself is the result of an establishment of order (Ordnungsstiftung). As soon as modernity unmasks the borders and the exteriority of the ancient cosmos, the relational structure of the whole implodes. The sense-whole of the ancient order is replaced by a radical contingency. Order degenerates into disorder or can even become a different order (Waldenfels 2011b, p. 11). Modern thought is characterized by a thinking of the exteriority. The discovery of a radical contingency of orders is the birth both of rationality, which tears down the structure of the whole and its orders, and of subjectivity, which positions the I into the center of ordering (ibid., p. 11). From that time onward, the subject seizes a place from above to look at orders from an outside position. The modern subject embodies the abstract and impersonalized master of “Das Antworten [ist] nicht Herr … dessen, worauf es antwortet” (Waldenfels 2007a, pp. 334f). 5

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ordering processes, the creator of orders. It emerges as something that “says I before it is named subject” (ibid., p. 11). The project of modernity, however, comes under pressure from a responsive phenomenology that triggers a shift and heralds “a new orientation” (Waldenfels 2007d, p.  25). From a responsive perspective, the subject loses its status as the initiator of sense, meaning, reflection and action. Responsivity re-assigns the self a place in the world that is characterized by dependency and enmeshment. We are interwoven in a web of events and influences that stream into our lives. We are driven by waves of events. The subject no longer creates the world by lending sense to it. Rather, “I find myself in a world that I did not create” (ibid., p. 9). Responsive phenomenology is a response to the subject-centrism of modern philosophy by tracing the roots of our thoughts and actions back to their foreign origin, back to a place that lies outside the self. 3.1.2. Responsive freedom The concept of responsivity undermines the notion of the self-starting subject. It stands for the pathos of a pre-conscious self in its initial encounter with the world. A responsive phenomenology shares its suspicion towards the omniscient and initiating agent with poststructuralism, but it also differs from post-structuralism in decisive ways. As Waldenfels stresses, a responsive phenomenology does not see the subject dissolved in or absorbed by supra-human structures. It does not announce the death of the subject. The experience of a withdrawal undermines any direct determination and description of given objects and subjects. However, this does not lead to the ‘death of the referent’ or the ‘death of the subject’. These are rhetorical figures that lack phenomenological substance. That which is by withdrawing is not nothing and not no one. (Waldenfels 2012, p. 180)6 6 The German original reads: “Die Entzugserfahrung unterminiert jede direkte Bestimmung und Beschreibung, die von gegebenen Objekten und Subjekten ausgeht. Doch dies führt keineswegs zum ‚Tod des Referenten‘ oder ‚Tod des Subjekts‘. Dies sind rhetorische Figuren, denen es an phänomenologischer Substanz mangelt. Was da ist, indem es sich entzieht, ist nicht nichts und nicht niemand.”

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The pathos of the response does not shift the epistemic agency from the first person to an impersonal third-person perspective. It is not the negation of subjectivity, nor does it hold that agency and free will are mere illusions. The response does not need to presuppose “a steering center” (Waldenfels 2007d, p. 46). But that does not mean that there is no subject of thoughts and acts, that responses are impersonalized happenstances. “What happens to me is anything but my action, but on the other hand it is more than a mere passion” (ibid., p. 47). For Waldenfels, the line between passion and action runs between the that and the what of the response. The that of the response stands for to the “response event” (ibid., p. 27). This means it stands for the event of the saying and doing but it does not refer to a specific content of the response. The that of the response is characterized by a pathos. We endure a certain pathos by responding to the world. We cannot not respond. The brute fact of response is characterized by inevitability. The second element of the response is the what of response. It refers to the specific answers that we give, to our concrete thoughts and acts. It corresponds to the content of our response, to the fact that we respond in one way rather than in another. The what of response is not subject to pathos and inevitability. It is the result of choices and decisions and of our capability to reflect and anticipate the consequences of our doing. There is not only one possible answer. Our answer can turn out this way or that way (ibid., p.  49) and not all answers are equally good. Answers have to be invented. (Waldenfels 2006, p. 56). Accordingly, what we experience on a pre-conscious level does not interfere with our ability to make choices. The experience of inevitability and pathos does not dictate the response. Inevitability and pathos “provide a hold for normative judgments” (Waldenfels 2011b, p. 29) without prescribing the judgments themselves. The experience of alterity establishes the ground for our response in light of this experience. The response that we give is pervaded by the experience of alterity, but this is not to be conflated with a loss of agency and choice. Responses are not forced upon the subject. Agency and choice are not affected by our ability to acknowledge the irreducibility of the world.

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The distinction between the what and the that of the response points at a gap that exists between our subjection to events that occur to us and the freedom that we have in choosing our response. It sheds light on the fact that “we invent what we respond, but we do not invent what we respond to and what gives weight to our speaking and acting” (Waldenfels 2011b, p. 42). The self first appears as a patient who is subject to what happens to it from the outside. It then becomes an agent by responding to what has happened to it in a creative and innovative way. The “from what” of being affected turns into a “to what” of responding (ibid., p.  28). The freedom of an autonomous being to make choices does not vanish under the experience of irreducible foreignness; it is not dissolved by depersonalized structures or historical processes. But it is a freedom that Waldenfels calls a “responsive freedom” because it starts with a response to something that cannot be reduced to the self. Responsive freedom is different from the classical notion of freedom of a steering center. “It is not the freedom that Kant defined as the capacity to begin a state by oneself (KdRV B561)” (Waldenfels 2007d, p.  34). Responsivity poses an antithesis to the subject as a self-starting entity but it does not undermine the notion of autonomy. Responsive philosophy does not take side with post-structuralism or post-modernism. The distinction between the what and that of the response is important to uphold the notion of an autonomous subject that can weigh options and anticipate consequences. It is meaningful in repelling charges of naturalism or concerns about an arbitrariness or contingency of our responses that could be leveled against a responsive phenomenology. Our responses are not mere elements in a chain of instinctual or biological happenstances. The distinction between the that and the what of the response renders the response still the choice of an autonomous agent.

3.2. Phenomenology of the foreign Waldenfels sees experience as pervaded by foreignness. This earned him the title “phenomenologist of the foreign”, although his phenomenology should not be understood as a phenomenology of the

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foreign as such. Waldenfels’s investigations do not focus on the foreign. They focus around a specific ability that exceeds the narrow form of experience as assimilation and allows for the notion of foreignness. This ability is not brought about by an intrinsic irreducibility of things. It is, rather, the sign of a specific structure or feature of experience. Responsive phenomenology is a phenomenology of experience rather than a phenomenology of the foreign because the foreign as such can never be the object of phenomenological investigation. The foreign is characterized precisely by evading any form of description or identification (Waldenfels 2012, p. 180) because as soon as we study the foreign, it would be transformed into something familiar, thereby losing its foreignness. It would “disappear behind a mantle of sense” (Waldenfels 2011d, p. 31). The foreign is that which is absent in our experience, like a cavity, or a wrinkle that carves itself into experience (Waldenfels 2012, p.  180). Accordingly, the study of the foreign, xenology, would be “paradoxical” (Waldenfels 2007d, p.  16), because posing the alien as a special theme would mean to have missed it already (Waldenfels 2011b, p. 3). To claim that every appropriation is limited because of the open horizon of experience and understanding will not suffice to break or stop the process of appropriation. Even in this case the alien would only be relatively alien, as something which has not yet been given or understood awaiting givenness or understanding. Phenomenological experience and hermeneutic understanding, although each are directed towards the Other, remain ambiguous as long as they cling to a logos encompassing both, the own and the alien. The more a science of the alien succeeded the more it would cancel itself, losing itself by losing its object. Because a determined, explained or understood alien would cease to be alien. (Waldenfels 2007d, p. 16).

A phenomenology of the foreign is not a phenomenology of the foreign. It is the attempt to understand experience as pervaded by foreignness. The experience of foreignness must be distinguished from the experience of mere otherness. The foreign is more radical in its evasiveness than the Other because the Other can still be understood in its relation to the self, as something that is different from the self. The difference between the Other and the foreign becomes clear if we

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consider the opposite of each type. The opposite of the Other is the same. The same is different from the Other through demarcation. Same and Other can be distinguished from each other but this distinction is backed by a “dialectically created whole” (Waldenfels 2011b, p. 11), which can integrate both. The foreign, however, is not simply different from the self. Nor is it the opposite of the same. The foreign is the opposite of the own and is characterized precisely by its escape from the “sphere of ownness” (Waldenfels 2007d, p. 7). The foreign cannot be integrated into the realm of the self, neither as representative of the self nor as a deviation from it (ibid., p. 6; Waldenfels 2011b, p.  11). It is separated from the self by a threshold and nobody ever stands on either side of the threshold at the same time (Waldenfels 2007d, p.  7; Waldenfels 2003, p.  25). The foreign arises from elsewhere, whereby even the “elsewhere” is not an attribute that could be assigned to the foreign. The foreign has no place that could be identified as the place of the foreign. “The alien does not simply dwell elsewhere. It reveals itself as an original of the elsewhere” (Waldenfels 2007d, p. 9). Any form of allocation contradicts the meaning of foreignness as that which is unapproachable and unknowable. Waldenfels further speaks of the difference between a radical and a relative foreignness. Relative foreignness depends on the status of our knowledge and abilities. Something is relatively foreign as long as we have not learned it, as long as we have not yet become familiar with it. Still, a familiarity with the relative foreign is within reach (Waldenfels 2007b, p. 2). Radical foreignness, on the other hand, cannot be overcome by approximation or apprehension. The radical foreign is not something that is not yet or no longer known. It does not represent a lack or deficiency. Radical foreignness is characterized by an insurmountable absence, a distance and inaccessibility (Waldenfels 2003, p.  26). As radical and insurmountable absence, the foreign evades processes of sense-making and subsumption under a general law. It is “located on the hither side of sense and rule” (Waldenfels 2001b, p. 36). The foreign, finally, can be set in analogy to the phenomenon of contrast. The contrast itself is nothing that we can feel or experience, but it lets the things that are different from each other appear. In a

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similar way, the foreign cannot be experienced in a direct way, but it reveals itself in being irreducible to the self. As much as we need the phenomenon of contrast in order to distinguish between good and right, or same and other, we also need the phenomenon of the foreign in order to see the own. Both, the contrast and the foreign, are primordial phenomena in the sense that they let something else appear (ibid., p. 36). Still, the question remains: How one can lay bare the elements of foreignness in our experience if the foreign evades our attempts of investigation and understanding? A phenomenology of the foreign encounters a methodological problem of how to approach something that permanently escapes our epistemic hold, that “resists any attempt to insert it into a local grid” (Waldenfels 2007d, p. 8). If the foreign is what eludes us, how can we see it as a part of experience? Waldenfels’s method of approaching the foreign is characterized by a mediatedness. As responsive beings, our thoughts and actions are set in motion by experiences of alterity, which are, in a most basic understanding, experiences of surprise, unrest, or disturbance (Waldenfels 2011b, p.  26). In being surprised, hit, or disturbed, we respond to something that we have not experienced as selves. Foreign is what goes beyond our expectations (Waldenfels 2007d, p.  2). We cannot even talk of the experience of the foreign, because experience already presupposes an agent of experience whereas the encounter with the foreign is prior to self and sense. Talking about a “me” is already too strong because, at the moment of being hit, there is no “me” which could understand and ultimately control the event (Waldenfels 2006, p.  29). A phenomenology of the foreign, accordingly, looks for instances and events of unrest, disquietness, disturbance. It begins “with that which challenges us … before we enter into our own wanting-to-know and wanting-to-understand situation” (Waldenfels 2011b, p.  36), not because these challenges represent, or are examples of foreignness as such, but because they give a testimony of something that has happened to us prior to becoming a self. The experience of foreignness shows itself in the traces that have been left behind by that

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which has occurred to us as a surprise. It resembles the past which cannot be grasped in any other way than in its aftereffects (Waldenfels 2003, p. 26, Waldenfels 2011b, p. 36) or by recollection (Waldenfels 2007d, p. 9). A responsive phenomenology is, then, a search for traces that bear testimony of foreignness and that give evidence of the lasting effects of this pre-conscious form of experience. Traces of alterity can appear in manifold forms because foreignness “permeates all our experience in a tacit and inconspicuous way” (Waldenfels 2013, p.  424). One sphere of foreignness is the body (Waldenfels 2011b, p.  6). By causing feelings of surprise, fear, or anger, the foreign leaves its traces on our own bodies. Bodily reactions give important testimonies of foreignness in the form of behavior that is inaccessible to and separated from the conscious and rationalizing self. As a living body (Leib) the body is same to the self, but as a mere body (Körper) it is alienated from the self; it surprises us with what is not under our control. Our relationship with our body is pervaded by foreignness. Other examples of traces of alterity are ordering processes. Orders leave out what cannot be subsumed under a general law but they are not able to eliminate the foreign completely. Traces of foreignness can be found in the insufficiency of orders to fully lend sense to experience. All orders run up against some kind of boundaries which cannot be infinitely extended. On the edges and borders of orders, the alien emerges in the form of the extra-ordinary (Waldenfels 2003, p. 24). The alien is neither what represents the standards and norms of the order, nor does it represent the Other of the order, the deviation from order. As deviation, the foreign would still belong to the order by providing a faulty or deficient blueprint against which the standard appears. The foreign is not the un-ordered or disordered, nor is it the negation of an order (Waldenfels 2007d, p. 13). The foreign, rather, emerges at the boundaries of every order in the form of something extraordinary that does not find its place in the existing order (Waldenfels 2011b, p.  4). Although it is not a part of an order, the foreign is still decisive for the emergence of order because order can only emerge through what is left out. The foreign is the birthplace of

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order, because order appears in contrast to its exteriority (Waldenfels 2007d, p. 13).7 Traces of alterity, finally, reveal themselves in our interaction with the fellow human. An experience of foreignness occurs in our encounter with the Other that remains irreducibly separate from us despite empathy or a sense of mutual understanding. The insurmountable inappropriability of the fellow Other poses a constant challenge to the self, a permanent intrusion of the realm of the self. Phenomenological insights into the ways we experience each other are of particular importance to an investigation into the intersections of phenomenology and care. To better understand the provenance and nature of self-sacrifice in morality, our responsivity to the Other as foreign is at the center of the analysis rather than the origin of orders or the relationship between body and self. As a first step to illuminate interhuman relations from the perspective of a responsive philosophy, the following chapter will show how traces of alterity reveal themselves in certain forms of social behavior.

3.3. Traces of foreignness Waldenfels speaks about the elements of foreignness in our experience although the foreign is not something that we can grasp, understand or describe. The foreign escapes our rational hold. We can only approach the foreign indirectly through the traces it leaves behind. One way for Waldenfels to uncover the traces of foreignness in experience is through the study of phenomena like trust, responsibility, hospitality, the gift, substitution, or promise. Traces of foreignness reveal themselves in our effort to understand why we trust, why we are responsible to the Other, why we host strangers, etc. What these phenomena have in common is their dependency on a permeability of the self in the face of the foreign. In the following, I will exemplify the search for traces of alterity through Waldenfels’s studies of trust and responsibility. As these studies will show, trust and responsibility For a detailed phenomenology of the interiority and exteriority of order see Waldenfels 1996. 7

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are not only meaningful in providing evidence of elements of alterity in experience. They are, moreover, relevant to the emergence of a responsive ethics by revealing the ethical significance of our ability to respond. 3.3.1. Trust Waldenfels begins his analysis of trust with a historical overview of the various concepts of trust. His focus is on Aristotle, Thomas Hobbes and Niklas Luhmann. For Waldenfels, Aristotelian ethics links trust to friendship. Trust is a bond that exists between friends because friendship provides the ground where trust can blossom. Friendship constitutes a sphere of confidence and familiarity where the interests of ourselves and of the Other can merge. Trust between friends ennobles a relation that has already been built and strengthened through shared goals, mutual understanding and love (Waldenfels 2013, p. 431). The Aristotelian emphasis on friendship as a typical and paradigmatic form of social bonds stands, according to Waldenfels, in sharp contrast to Hobbes’s notion of the normal or “natural” state of social relations. For Hobbes, social relations are characterized by conflict and mistrust rather than by love, friendship and trust. Self-preservation is the dominant impulse. Conflicts and rivalry are endemic, but they also create a sense of threat and insecurity. The only way to maintain the status quo and to balance diverging interests is by agreeing on a social contract. The social contract does not terminate hostility and competition, but it ensures an end of wars for the sake of safety and better chances of survival. Fundamental mistrust is not transformed into trust, but it is mitigated by a mutual agreement. The social contract turns hostility into a ceasefire. It is the substitute for the bond of trust (ibid.). A third point of reference for Waldenfels is Luhmann’s systemtheory. Waldenfels sees the role that Luhmann assigns to trust predominantly as “reducing social complexity, based on a risky form of advance payment” (ibid., p. 433). For Waldenfels, Luhmann explains the phenomenon of trust as a “‘reliance upon one’s own expectations’”

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(ibid.) that bears uncertainties as well as benefits and gains. We trust each other because trust opens up opportunities. We can do more and different things if we trust.8 The benefits of trust outweigh its risks. Mutual trust makes us better-off; it is a win-win situation. This implies that trust, although directed to the other, eventually serves our own interests and needs.9 For Waldenfels, any of these historical accounts are flawed and insufficient to explain the phenomenon of trust. In Aristotle, trust is confined to the limited realm of friendship and love. This implies that trust in a stranger or unfamiliar person can not exist at all, or is, if it occurs, an illusion or self-deceit. This concept, however, ignores the pervasiveness of social relations by the phenomenon of trust as a daily rather than an exceptional form of behavior.10 The problem with Hobbes’s social contract is, according to Waldenfels, that each contract, including the social contract, is based on unfulfilled promises, which require an advanced payment of trust that the contract will be respected and adhered to. The social contract to guarantee safety and protection cannot mislead us about the necessity of a fundamental trust between the contracting partners prior to the contract’s being concluded and put into effect. Even the natural state, which Hobbes describes as one of fear and mistrust, has some elements of trust which bind the conflicting parties to each other, because “if the Other would really have qualities of a wolf – that is, of a being threatening me to death – I would never be able to conclude a contract with such a dangerous being” (Waldenfels 2013, p. 436). 8 “Wer Vertrauen schenkt erweitert sein Handlungspotential” (Waldenfels 2012, p. 274). 9 “Fremdreferenz bedeutet nicht mehr als zeitlich verschobene Selbstreferenz” (ibid.). 10 It ignores that economic activities such as trade, contracts or financial transactions would not be possible without trust. It ignores that most of us trust political leaders, insurance brokers, trade partners, etc. See also Schües (2015), who even speaks of a will to trust in this context although, according to her, this is not based on a free decision or on rational reflection (p. 156).

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The flaw in Luhmann’s system theory, finally, is the self-referentiality of trust. For Waldenfels, trust cannot be explained fully by the pursuit of one’s own interests. If we were only and exclusively interested in the advancement of our own agendas and opportunities, manipulation and force or the application of law and order would do a better job than trust. The problem with trust is that it is always inflicted with risk and insecurity. It cannot, therefore, be fully understood and explained in terms of a “calculation of effects” (ibid., p.  435). The uncertainties of trust and the risk of an abuse of trust make trust an unlikely means for the pursuit of self-interests and the stabilization of a status quo. In conclusion, we need a different concept of trust, one that does not link trust exclusively to relations of friendship, one that prevails over fear and threat, and one that trumps rational calculation and self-interest. For Waldenfels, trust is a phenomenon that gives evidence of processes which take place between me and the Other prior to friendship, but also prior to mistrust and self-centeredness. It gives evidence of the existence of a pre-legal, pre-rational and pre-institutional response to the Other, of a pre-final and pre-normal syn or with (ibid., p. 433). We do not trust because we feel something for someone, or because we expect something from someone. To give and – in a similar way – to induce trust does not follow any moral or legal prescription or norm (Waldenfels 2012, p. 287). Trust is prior to contracts and conventions. It also predates economic relations, which are based on calculation and reciprocity. Trust can only be understood as something that is given in advance (ibid., p. 284). According to Waldenfels, trust is responsive. To give and to induce trust is the response to an experience of alterity that cannot be integrated into existing orders or subsumed under general laws. The phenomenon of trust points at something unorderly, non-reciprocal, “senseless”. There is no good reason to trust and there is no rational explanation for trust (ibid., p. 287). Trust starts at a place where there is no conscious and rationalizing self. It starts with a pre-conscious face-to-face with the Other as foreign. The encounter with the foreign puts the self on hold. Trust is the trace of an encounter without

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self. It is a primordial phenomenon, a hyperphenomenon, that can only be explained from a responsive perspective as a pre-reflective response to the human other. Trust is also creative, but not in the sense that it opens up new opportunities for the self. Trust is, rather, the creative answer to something that does not provide a solid foundation in itself because it eludes processes of sense and meaning, and because it precedes our possibilities of interpretation and explanation. Trust opens possibilities, not for the self, but for a life with the Other. Trust “involves a response which makes something new flourish between us” (Waldenfels 2013, p.  435). It is “a dynamic process of binding in actu” that needs to be renewed again and again (ibid., p. 436).11 3.3.2. Responsibility Waldenfels begins his reflections on responsibility by introducing three ways in which responsibility is conventionally understood. Responsibility may be understood, first, as being responsible for something one has said or done; second, as being responsible to someone, be it an individual, a court, the public, society, history; and, third, as being responsible in the sense of a rational and self-conscious subject (ibid., p.  426). According to Waldenfels, this classical paradigm of Waldenfels’s concept of trust not only differs from classical theories but also from that of care ethicist Annette Baier’s. For Baier, trust takes a middle position between reason and emotion. Trust is characterized by a combination of rational calculation and unconditioned connectedness, cautious planning and a transcendent move to the Other. Trust is not only an obligation in the sense of coercion and rationality because trust lets go, whereas obligation restricts and controls. And trust is also not only love because it is vigilant and choosy whereas love is generous, uncritical, and widespread. According to Baier, trust perfectly suits the needs of an ethics of care that seeks to accommodate moral insights provided both by men (representing a morality of obligation) and women (representing a morality of love) (Baier 1994, p. 4). In contrast to Waldenfels, Baier sees the insecurity of trust symbolizing the difficulty of combining reason and emotions (obligation and love) (ibid., p.  15), whereas for Waldenfels this insecurity stems from a loss of control at the moment of trust-building. There is another difference, whereby Baier sees a balance between trust and mistrust; for Waldenfels a fundamental and initial trust precedes mistrust, reciprocity, and caution. 11

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responsibility has severe limitations, which prevent us from fully understanding its meaning. To begin with, being or feeling responsible for something one has said or done must be understood as a deferred action. Responsibility in this (first) sense occurs post festum. It takes place once the speech or action for which one is responsible has been completed. This notion does not account for the fact that responsibility is, in the first place, a behavior in actu and not a deferred action. As behavior in actu, responsibility stands for the observance of rights and interests, the considerations of circumstances and consequences, and the coordination of actions prior to being held responsible by established norms and rules. It stands for a responsive form of behavior that answers to demands of the irreducible other prior to being made familiar with the code of conduct (ibid., pp. 426f). Responding in actu is different from the a posteriori assessment of what one has done. It precedes our own initiative and agency, but it comes too late if measured against what has happened to us (Waldenfels 2012, p.  77). If the meaning of responsibility is reduced to the attitude and behavior that follow speech and actions, we miss the responsiveness that underlines our behavior prior to its evaluation. A responsibility for something refers to an accountability in the aftermath but not to the responsivity during the event or process. The second limitation, according to Waldenfels, is set by responsibility understood in the sense of being responsible to someone or something. The problem with this interpretation is that it relies on preestablished standards according to which we are held responsible to a court, to the public, etc. These standards regulate who is responsible to whom, when and why, but they are contingent upon and subject to changes throughout time and place. This means that they confine responsibility to varying patterns of do’s and don’ts of different standards of who is answerable to whom and for what reasons (Waldenfels 2013, p. 427). This notion reduces the phenomenon of responsibility to the implementation of contingent norms. Responsibility, however, cannot be explained as the mere result or implementation of standards that have been set for a limited period of time. Being responsible to

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someone goes deeper than laws and norms; it exists independently of orders and it endures throughout time and place. A third limitation is created by the idea that responsibility is that which characterizes the free and autonomous agent, by the notion that person-hood is based on the possibility to be held responsible for one’s decisions and actions. Waldenfels questions the possibility of the autonomous rational subject and the link between responsibility and rationality. For him, the notion of a subject as the complete master of its doing and saying is flawed. “Our actions are our own only to some extent” (ibid.). Actions are subject to unconscious and involuntary forces, to “something incalculable” (ibid.). Questioning the notion of the autonomous subject that can be held fully accountable for its actions and thoughts does not impair our responsibility, but it challenges the idea that responsibility is founded in rationality. In summary, the classical accounts of responsibility as being held responsible for something, as being responsible to someone or something, and as being the essence of rationality and personhood are flawed for three reasons. First, they do not account for the fact that being responsible implies a responding in actu prior to any evaluation. Second, they are based on contingent standards and norms that hold us accountable for something today and something other tomorrow. Third, they presuppose the possibility of autonomy without taking into consideration the constraints that, although they impair our autonomous choices, do not impair our ability to respond. Responsibility, in Waldenfels’s understanding, goes beyond our judgment of past events, it goes beyond existing norms of responsibility that are set by a contingent order, and it goes beyond our (limited) capability to plan and to anticipate effects. For Waldenfels, being responsible for something and to someone arises out of a response to an event that exceeds the realm of the self as well as the horizon of sense and norms. Responsibility arises out of pre-normative and prelegal demands that address us and are imposed on us at the moment of the encounter with the Other as alien. Being responsible for

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something and to someone is a trace of the experience of alterity that can neither be explained by the prospect of an evaluation post festum, nor by the existence of contingent norms or by the competence for autonomy. 3.3.3. Traces of foreignness as moral surplus The phenomena of trust and responsibility provide evidence of the experience of foreignness that takes place at a pre-conscious level and induces a relationship with the Other that exists independently of rational calculation, norms and conventions, and from self-interest. They point at stages of the inter-human encounter where there is not yet a self that could make judgments, invent or draw on principles or define its needs. Phenomena such as responsibility and trust stand for an experience without self, for a form of behavior that cannot be integrated into an existing order or be explained by laws or rational reasons. Trust and responsibility in a fundamental and primary sense are possible only because of the self’s ability to include a notion of foreignness in its horizon of sense. I am able to trust because I have experienced the Other prior to becoming a self that consciously reflects on the risks and uncertainties of trust. I feel responsible for the Other because I respond to the Other’s existence, the Other’s interests and rights prior to being told to do so. Traces of alterity are the trust that we have in the stranger and rival, independently of guarantees and securities. They are the responsibility that we show for what we do vis-à-vis the Other, prior to any legal prescriptions or moral commands. The traces of the foreign are the Others within us that make us trust them and that make us feel responsible for them. Waldenfels’s phenomenological studies of trust and responsibility provide evidence of the foreign as something that can only be grasped in an indirect way. But they do more. They uncover an ethical dimension of the experience of alterity. Trust and responsibility stand not only for the foreignness that pervades experience. They also stand for the ethos of an alienated experience. They give testimony of pre-legal and pre-reflective obligations towards the Other in the form of trust

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and responsibility, obligations that open up a “time of the Other” (Waldenfels 2006, p. 13). Trust is the web and the fabric that enables human cooperativeness and peace. It is the sign of a “moral surplus” that resides at the bottom of social behavior and exceeds reciprocity and the expectations of a return of investment. It is because of trust that we can draw a line between morality and mere lawfulness, between an unconditioned obligation towards the Other and a mere application of norms and conventions, between, as Waldenfels puts it, morality and a “herd morality” (Waldenfels 2011b, p. 35). We trust even though we are not told to do so and no legal norm could ever sufficiently establish the obligation to trust. Trust gives evidence of the ethical dimension of responsivity as the ability to acknowledge the foreignness of the world because it responds to the Other on a pre-predicative and pre-legal stage.12 Trust is a “surplus phenomenon”13 because it exceeds expectations and claims that are directed towards us and because it cannot be integrated into a system of rational reasoning of reciprocity and

The ethical dimension of trust is also reflected in care ethics accounts of trust. For Baier, trust is the perfect foundation for care relations (Baier 1994, p. 4). Schües elaborates on the relationship between trust and peace. According to her, trust is always directed towards a shared future because relationships of trust are meant to last. They are characterized by a hope for stability and continuity. Stable and lasting relationships are the foundation of peace. Trust as well as peace point at the future (“...die Zukunft [ist] dem Vertrauen wie auch dem Frieden eingeschrieben”) (Schües 2015, p. 161). Trust is directed towards peace (“Vertrauen ist auf Frieden hin ausgerichtet”) (ibid.). 13 Waldenfels’s usage of the “moral surplus” differs from how Conradi describes it in her critique of Axel Honneth (see chapter 1.2.). According to Conradi, Honneth’s moral surplus refers to those forms of ethical behavior that cannot be expected by everybody and at every time (similar to Kant’s imperfect duties towards the Other). In this sense, care is a form of moral surplus because we cannot expect everyone to be able to care for another at any time (Conradi 2001, p.  117). For Waldenfels, however, moral surplus is a form of ethical behavior that exceeds what is expected of us by norms and conventions. In opposition to Honneth who, in a normative way, distinguishes between the things that we have to do (like respecting the Other’s interests and rights) and the things that we can do (like caring for another), Waldenfels’s moral surplus is what shows itself as moral behavior and as something that exists independently of moral norms and commands. 12

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calculation.14 Similarly to trust, responsibility points at an ethical dimension of responsivity. Responsibility, according to Waldenfels, is an acknowledgment of the Other’s rights and interests. Because of this acknowledgment we are responsible to the Other. It is through responsibility that we respect the Other, that we can admit failures and are ready to change our behavior. Responsibility is a foundation of lasting and cooperative relationships and is directed towards harmony and peace. Like trust, responsibility stands for a moral surplus because it exceeds and precedes norms and standards of being responsible. We are not, or not only, responsible for what we have done to someone because we are told to be so. We are responsible prior to being told to be responsible. No command or law commits us to being responsible for what we do to the Other while we speak or act. Responsibility as a process in actu can only be understood if we account for the influence of the Other as alien that shapes our interaction with the world prior to selfhood and conscious choice. Both trust and responsibility point at a pre-normative, pre-legal state of morality that can neither be coerced nor expected. They point at a moral surplus that exceeds what is expected of us in terms of adherence to or compliance with laws and norms or what is deemed to be right as a result of rational reflection. Both stand for an original morality that comes prior to moral commands and claims. Because trust and responsibility are the product of a response-ability to the foreignness of the world, they also shed light on the ethical significance of this ability. Responsivity not only stands for the ability to account for the non-selfhood of the world, it also stands for a form of experiencing the world by responding to it. This differs from processes of assimilation and appropriation because it enables us to build trustful and responsible relations with one another. Responsivity not only allows for a permeability of the self but also for the commitment 14 “...Vertrauen [erweist sich] nicht als Resultat sondern als Überschuss, als kritisches Movens, und als ein überinstitutionelles Mehr in allen institutionellen Gewohnheiten und Normen” (Waldenfels 2012, p. 291).

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of the self to the Other’s interests and needs. Responsivity enables connectedness, cooperation and peace. Phenomena like trust and responsibility give evidence of the foreignness of the Other in our experiences by revealing the traces that the encounter with leaves within us. At the same time, they point at the ethical dimension of responsivity. Our ability to respond to the world is interconnected with the competence to build ethically significant relationships with one another.

3.4. The ethos of response 3.4.1. Heterotopoi of morality Phenomenological studies of trust and responsibility provide worlddisclosing arguments for the notion that our experience is pervaded by foreignness. They lay bare the traces of the foreign within us. At the same time, these studies point at the ethical dimension of the responsivity. They show that relatedness and interconnectivity are based on the ability to let foreignness appear in experience. Before we become individual selves who see themselves in separation from one another, we become who we are through the experience of the Other as irreducibly foreign. The ethical dimension of responsivity, however, consists not only of being the cause of relatedness and sociality. Although relatedness has a moral value in itself because of its life-sustaining effect, it is not of the same moral quality as, for example, benevolence or charity. As the following will show, responsivity has an ethical dimension because it is the reason why we are concerned with the Other and act for the Other’s sake. The moral quality of responsivity cannot be shown through the phenomena of trust and responsibility alone. It requires an engagement with the question of why we are moral. It requires a debate about the source of morality. For Waldenfels, the responsive structure of experience has far-reaching ethical implications. “The motif of responsivity”, he says, “is not conceivable without an ethical dimension” (Waldenfels 2011b, p. 35). According to Waldenfels, responsivity is the reason why we act on the Other’s behalf. Waldenfels develops his arguments for this view by

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critically examining the more classical attempts to determine the source of morality, notably, the Kantian reason-based approach and Nietzsche’s skeptical view. Waldenfels is convinced that the source of morality can be found neither in the ability of rational reflection nor in the quest for self-preservation. In his most important book about ethics, Schattenrisse der Moral (2006), Waldenfels argues for a third place as the origin of morality, one that lies outside the self and that can only be reached because we are able to respond to the foreign. 3.4.1.1. Responsive ethics and Kant At the beginning of Schattenrisse der Moral, Waldenfels declares Kant’s approach to finding in the groundworks of morality the starting point for his ethical reflection – and also for a revision (p. 11). Waldenfels interprets Kantian ethics as the attempt to found morality in an abstract principle, the Categorical Imperative (CI), which he calls an absolute and unconditional practical law.15 According to Waldenfels, Kant’s approach is flawed for two reasons. First, principles such as the CI can never be the foundation of moral behavior because they always depend on the support of other principles. In fact, no principle or belief will ever provide a foundation for action because any belief must be justified by another belief. The chain of argumentation based on abstract principles is endless. This kind of reasoning falls into the trap of an infinite regress (Waldenfels 2006, pp. 22 and 35). The command to act according to the CI is not sufficiently justified in itself because each principle that grounds a command to behave morally must include another command to follow the former and so on.16 The CI is not the highest moral command because it can only command the adherence to its law but not the adherence itself. Kantian ethics has no foundation because it relies on rules that cannot be justified by another rule. 15 Kantian ethics is “der Versuch einer Grundlegung der Moral … mit der Berufung auf ein uneingeschränktes und unbedingtes praktisches Gesetz” (Waldenfels 2006, p. 11). 16 “... jeder Satz, der ein Gebot begründet, müsste selbst wieder eine Aufforderung enthalten” (ibid., p. 22).

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A second problem with Kant’s principle-based ethics is, according to Waldenfels, that it does not find a hold in itself. Principles are not selfstarting, they do not emerge from nowhere. Rather, they are embedded in existing patterns of rules and conventions. They therefore depend on already existing moral and legal orders.17 A moral principle, even if it is attributed to the highest moral authority, always entails elements of pre-established norms. It is never completely detached from dominant conceptions of right and wrong. Principles are representations and reflections of moral orders. Therefore, they cannot be seen as independent of the order from which they derive and they can not, in particular, be understood as the foundation or groundworks of morality. A principle-based approach to morality, accordingly, is a circular approach because the principle reflects and prescribes what already exits. It is the outcome of the same moral order that it is meant to establish. Waldenfels, in his argumentation against Kantian ethics, employs the trope of the infinite regress to show that the CI is not justified in itself. The argument of the infinite regress is generally used in epistemological debates about the nature of justified beliefs and the possibility of knowledge. In ethical contexts, the argument can show that moral beliefs (in the form of principles) do not have a foundation and thus do not represent objective truth. In this form, the argument can be reconstructed in the following way: • Premise 1: In order for moral beliefs to be justified they must be adequately supported. • Premise 2: This support must be provided by other moral beliefs. • Premise 3: This support cannot be provided by other beliefs because any belief would need to be supported by another belief in an endless chain of support. • Conclusion: Therefore there are no justified moral beliefs (cf. Shafer-Landau/Cuneo 2007, p. 384). 17 “Das Unvermögen der Moral, in sich selbst Halt zu finden, äussert sich in Anlehnungsversuchen und fremden Anleihen. An erster Stelle ist das Recht zu nennen...” (ibid., p. 11, his emphasis).

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The particularity of Waldenfels’s approach is that he employs the argument of the infinite regress not to show that moral principles cannot provide certainty in the form of moral truth but, rather, to underline that the CI (or any other moral principle) cannot be the foundation of morality in the sense of moral commitment. An ethical approach that relies on a moral principle to provide the foundation of moral commitment is doomed to failure, not because it lacks the foundation for the truth claim of the principle, but because it lacks the foundation of the obligation to follow the principle.18 It can, however, be questioned whether this reading of Kant’s Groundworks of Morality does justice to Kantian ethics, and especially to the meaning of the word “groundworks”. Waldenfels reads “groundworks” in the sense of origin or source of moral obligation. This becomes obvious in the passages in which he writes that ethical impulses cannot be derived from principles19 or when he affirms that practical truth can explicate, illuminate and differentiate but not found moral behavior.20 Waldenfels’s interpretation points to a specific ethical

Similarly to the ethics of care, Waldenfels takes Kantian ethics as a starting point for his ethical reflections. Moreover, Waldenfels is critical about an overemphasis on principles in morality (see chapter 1.2). However, Waldenfels’s criticism differs decisively from that of care ethics. The ethics of care is concerned with the self-assertiveness of rational judgment. It rejects a reason-based (Kantian) ethics for not sufficiently valuing the moral significance of emotions and for the tendency of generalizing moral situations at the expense of particularity and difference. According to the ethics of care, the problems with reason are related to epistemological questions (what does it take to bring morally adequate responses about?) and questions of moral conduct (how can I approach the Other in need without assimilating them to my own wants and perspectives?). Waldenfels, on the other hand, is less worried about the ethicity of principles than about their inadequateness to motivate moral commitment. Discrepancies between Waldenfels and Kant, therefore, concern less the level of epistemological and normative claims but, rather, an ontological level with regard to the source of moral obligation. 19 “Es gibt ethische Impulse, die aus keinem Prinzip zu gewinnen sind” (Waldenfels 2006, p. 10). 20 “Das praktische Wissen hat demnach eine erläuternde, aufhellende, differenzierende, aber keine fundierende Funktion” (ibid., p. 85). 18

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pursuit of responsive ethics, an interest to reveal the source of moral obligation, to find an answer to the question of why we are moral. His interpretation also implies that the CI, for Kant, serves as a principle from which the respect of this principle can be derived and that it is more than just the highest point of reference for moral orientation and commands. There are two reasons to believe that Waldenfels’s interpretation of the term “groundworks” is based on wrong premises. One can be found in the relevant passages of Kant’s work. The other stems from inconsistencies in Waldenfels’s interpretation of Kant. As for the first reason: In Groundworks of the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant refers to the CI as the highest moral command (GMS 414), but he also concedes that the source of our respect for the moral law can only be found in good will. Good will and respect for the CI are attitudes that, according to Kant, cannot be further explained by reason, because “reason would overstep all its bounds if it took it upon itself to explain how pure reason can be practical, which would be exactly the same task as to explain how freedom is possible” (GMS 459, his emphasis). The will to follow the CI remains a mystery that does not belong to the world of experienceable and describable objects. It is the presupposition on which, alone, it is possible to use reason and to be convinced of the validity of the CI, “but how this presupposition itself is possible can never be seen by any human reason” (GMS 461). Second (and this refers to Waldenfels’s own interpretation of Kant), there is a passage in Schattenrisse der Moral in which Waldenfels acknowledges the centrality of good will for Kant’s account of moral obligation and Kant’s reluctance to provide an explanation of the provenance of good will. In this passage, Waldenfels, referring to Kant (KpV A 56), speaks of a fact of reason (“Faktum der Vernunft”) and an awareness of the moral law (“Bewusstsein des Moralgesetzes”) to abide by the CI (Waldenfels 2006, p.  21). But an awareness of the validitiy of the moral  law does not explain our subjection to it. As Waldenfels concedes, “[t]he law of reason that I, as a reasonable and sensual being,

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know myself to be subjected to is, strictly speaking, baseless, unfounded, unfathomable. All we can understand is the ‘incomprehensibility’ of the moral imperative” (Waldenfels 2006, p. 21, his emphasis).21 The blind spot According to Waldenfels, the inability to account for the origin of moral obligation points at a “blind spot” in Kantian ethics where an explanation of moral behavior refers back to those laws and norms whose existence is at the center of investigation. Laws and conventions represent and perpetuate a moral order. They are the products of this order but not its foundation. They derive from an obligation towards the Other, but the provenance of this obligation must be located outside this system of laws and commands, at a place where the notion of morals does not yet exist, a place that is not moral in itself. The origin of morality can only be found on the hither side of good and evil. For Waldenfels, the “blind spot” stands for the historical coming-into-being of morality.22 The blind spot, according to Waldenfels, is not only a problem of Kantian ethics but of all ethics that are based on abstract principles or ideas.23 A similar argumentation can, for example, be applied to utilitarianism. Utilitarianism is built upon the principle of maximum happiness. Morality is constituted in achieving the highest possible good for the highest possible number of people. However, the principle of maximum happiness itself cannot be used to explain why the adherence to this principle is a desirable goal. It cannot explain a commitment to follow the principle of maximum happiness (Waldenfels 1993, p. 512). The German original reads: “Das Vernunftgesetz, dem ich mich als vernünftigsinnliches Wesen unterworfen weiß, ist im strengen Sinne grundlos, unbegründbar, unergründbar. Zu begreifen ist lediglich die ‚Unbegreiflichkeit‘ des moralischen Imperatives.” 22 “Der blinde Fleck ist die Stelle, an welcher die Moral historisch geworden ist” (Waldenfels 2006, p. 9). 23 “Gemeinsam ist den verschiedenartigen Ansätzen zu einer Begründung von Ethik und Moral, dass sie einen blinden Fleck umkreisen, der sich den jeweiligen Ordnungen des Zuerstrebenden, des Gebotenen oder Zubewirkenden nicht integrieren lässt” (Waldenfels 1993, p. 513). 21

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Equally problematic is an explanation of the source of moral commitment within teleological ethics. Ancient teleological ethics assigns the cosmos the role of a paradigmatic form of order from which all other orders, including the moral order, derive. The cosmos “embodies order as such” (Waldenfels 2011b, p. 9). Within the order, each object has its horizontal and vertical place. A web of relations represents the cosmological order and prescribes a set of laws that everything on earth must follow. The degree of representation of the cosmological order is in accordance with the degree of the rationality of the object. Full conformity with the cosmological order is the final and highest – though un-achievable – good that every living thing seeks to approximate to.24 The ancient cosmos does not have an exteriority. It is the utmost limit of order, “an order without an outside” (Waldenfels 2011b, p. 9). If the cosmos had an exteriority, it would lose its exceptional status. It would turn into one order among others. It could no longer represent the highest principle of order. This implies that the highest good embodied by the principle of the cosmological order cannot be good for something else. It cannot be defined in terms of its value for something, it cannot, itself, be part of a teleology.25 Because the cosmos represents the highest form of order and the highest good that all living things seek to achieve, the highest good remains undefined, unmarked. It cannot be used to determine what we seek to achieve. This also implies that it cannot be explained why conformity with the cosmological order should be the highest good. The provenance of a morality in terms of striving towards the highest good remains undetermined. The logical impossibility to define this highest good constitutes the blind spot of teleological ethics. It is “das dem Erreichen nach letzte, seiner Anlage nach erste Ziel” (ibid., p. 510). 25 “Das Gute entzieht sich einer teleologischen Bestimmung ... Wäre das Gute selbst wieder zu etwas gut, so ware es kein letztes, allumfassendes Ziel. Also kann das ,Gute an sich‘ nur ein Gut sein, dem das Prädikat ‚gut‘ nicht selbst wieder zugesprochen werden kann” (Waldenfels 1993, p. 510). 24

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For Waldenfels, ethics have their blind spot as long as they deny an exteriority of the moral order that is itself not subject to moral judgment and evaluation. The blind spot is the Achilles heel of ancient and modern ethics alike. It reveals a weak point at which explanations of moral commitment fall apart.26 Any principle-based attempt to explain respect for the moral law is flawed because this attempt is bound to the very laws, norms and conventions that it seeks to found. It is no more than the affirmation of a morality that already exists.27 Similarly, any teleological ethics that defines morality as a quest for some kind of highest good fails to determine the highest good and the provenance of our desire to reach it. The highest good remains an unmarked construct; its value and desirability are plausible only as long as the exteriority of its order remains unthinkable. 3.4.1.2. Responsive ethics and Nietzsche Waldenfels claims that, in order to eliminate the problem of the blind spot in traditional ethics and to reach the exterior realm of morality, we need an ethical epoché. Epoché, in its traditional Husserlian sense, is the first step towards a phenomenological reduction which leaves the “natural attitude” behind by bracketing preconceived opinions and beliefs about the world. The epoché is necessary in order to attain the phenomenological attitude, i.e. the attitude that is appropriate for phenomenological investigations. Waldenfels, however, uses the term epoché in a slightly different way. For him, the ethical epoché is less the aspiration of a proper attitude to approach the objects of our experience than a step out of the moral order, an attempt to leave our ideas about right and wrong behind us. The ethical epoché, in a Waldenfelsian sense, is meant to enable us to look at morality from an exterior point, a place that, in itself, is “Was wir den blinden Fleck der Moral nennen, verweist auf das Scheitern aller Versuche, Moral rein aus sich selbst zu bestimmen und zu begründen” (Waldenfels 1993, p. 509). “[Der blinde Fleck] bringt jede philosophische Beschäftigung mit der Moral in Verlegenheit” (Waldenfels 2006, p. 84). 27 “Eine Begründung der Moral, die diesen blinden Fleck tilgen wollte, wäre lediglich Ausdruck einer bestehenden Moral” (Waldenfels 1993, p. 513). 26

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neither good nor bad. The ethical epoché is an attitude only insofar as it refrains from moral judgment (Waldenfels 2006, p. 48), suspends norms and moral ideas (ibid., p.  14) and grants an observer status with regard to the provenance of moral commitment (ibid., p.  84). The ethical epoché is a method that may bring about the origin of morality (Waldenfels 2011b, p.  31), a technique to overcome the blind spot of conventional ethics. According to Waldenfels, the exteriority of morality, the nonmoral place where morality arises, first came into the focus of moral theorizing in the twentieth century. Waldenfels refers to Nietzsche’s (and to a lesser extent to Luhmann’s) attempt to find the ground of morality at a place that is not moral in itself. He credits Luhmann’s system-theory with the insight that, in order to understand the origin of morality, we must leave the moral order behind, because the moral binary between good and bad cannot be good in itself (Waldenfels 2013, p. 425). He further refers to Nietzsche as the philosopher who first tried to reach the hidden land of morality (“das ,versteckte Land der Moral‘”, Waldenfels 2006, p. 10). From the perspective of an ethical epoché and the exteriority of the moral order, morality appears as the product of processes and events that are not moral in themselves. This means that we must trace the emergence of the difference between good and bad back to the moment at which morality comes into being. It can only be a point that lies outside the moral order. The exteriority of morality is the locus of moral differentiation, the birthplace of morality (Waldenfels 1993, p. 509). According to Waldenfels, Nietzsche accounts for the exteriority of the origin of morality and therefore escapes charges against rationalist ethics. Waldenfels, on the other hand, criticizes Nietzsche’s skeptical and nihilist account of the origin of morality as being completely freed from moral meaning and selfless regard for the Other. For him, the Nietzschean account of the source of benevolence and charity erodes any idea about what morality stands for. If we explain the provenance of morality with negative experiences and the feeling of resentment, it does not become clear where the obligation and

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commitment towards the Other’s welfare comes from.28 Forces of moral obligation cannot be explained by a posteriori claims and justifications, but neither can they be reduced to selfish desires and interests. The problem with Nietzsche’s approach, according to Waldenfels, is a reduction of the ‘hidden land of morality’ to self-conceit and resentment, to an inward turn of unpleasant experiences of defeat and shame. Morality, in this view, fulfills a psychological function in concealing the oppression of wants and desires, but it can no longer be understood as what it really is, namely a concern directed at the Other and a commitment for the sake of the Other.29 3.4.1.3. Conclusion For Waldenfels, both accounts, Kantian principle-based ethics and Nietzsche’s ethical skepticism, fail to provide a reason why morality exists. Morality is an ought that can neither be imposed by another person, by law or by God; nor can it be simply equated with a capability or will (Waldenfels 1993, p. 516). Kant escapes from the dilemma of ethical nihilism that reduces morality to selfish interests and needs by establishing a split between ought and being. This approach, however, fails to explain the origin of morality by referring back to those principles whose provenance a Groundworks of Morals purports to explain. On the other hand, Nietzsche, who acknowledges the exterior source of morality, fails to give an account of the obligation for 28 “Für die Erfüllung einer Bitte und ähnlicher Aufforderungen gibt es ... Beweggründe. Solche Beweggründe lassen sich nicht auf eigene Wünsche und Interessen zurückführen” (Waldenfels 2006, p. 42, Waldenfels’ emphasis). 29 Waldenfels’ remarks with regard to Nietzsche are insightful and thoughtprovoking. However, when it comes to the ethics of care, they are less relevant than his debate of Kantian ethics. Whereas the enduring impact of reason-based ethics on our moral understanding (at the expense of, for example, the role of emotions) is a continuing concern for many scholars of care, ethical nihilism is hardly a position that attracts interest or debates. For the ethics of care, moral commitment is usually taken for granted. Skepticism with regard to the “pure” ethical provenance of our concern for the Other can, if at all, be found in accounts of misled, excessive or paternalistic care (see for example Verkerk 2001 and 2011), but even here care scholars refrain from adopting a Nietzschean position.

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the Other in moral behavior. If morality is founded in selfishness, it does not become clear where our obligation towards the Other stems from. Whereas Kant reduces the being to the ought by drawing on moral principles to explain the origin of morality, Nietzsche reduces the ought to the being by diminishing and eroding moral commitment to a feeling of defeat and resentment. And whereas Kantian ethics has a blind spot because it fails to explain why we are moral, Nietzsche fails to explain why we, actually, are moral. The challenge for Waldenfels, therefore, is to overcome the flaws of Kantian and Nietzschean ethics alike. His task is to combine ought and being without dissolving the ought into the being, to explore a zone of indifference where ought and being are not yet separated from each other and where the ought is not yet absorbed by an exisiting order.30 Waldenfels seeks to find the place of an a-morality on the hither side of good and evil that, nevertheless, does not turn morality into an antimorality.31 Moral commitment cannot derive from commands and principles. They are the outcome, not the foundation, of morality. Moreover, moral commitment is not a mere illusion that conceals self-interests and self-preservation. Morality is not something that arises within us for the pursuit of certain projects or interests; neither is the self moral on its own or to its own ends. Reason-based ethics fails to acknowledge that the origin of morality cannot be derived from a moral principle because this would lead to circular argumentation. Ethical skepticism, on the other hand, fails to explain why, as moral agents, we care for the Other more than for ourselves. For Waldenfels, these shortcomings in traditional ethics are the starting point for unfolding an alternative approach. With a responsive ethics he seeks to account for moral commitment as a commitment that comes prior to moral commands and that is not subject to selfish interests and the quest for survival. The failure of 30 “Diesem Dilemma könnten wir entkommen, wenn sich eine Zone der Indifferenz auftäte, wo das Sollen noch nicht vom Sein geschieden wäre, ohne daß das Sollen in den Zielen einer Seinsordnung aufginge” (Waldenfels 1993, p. 517). 31 “Wir hätten es mit einer Amoral zu tun, die nicht in eine Antimoral verbissen wäre und in diesem Sinne diesseits von Gut und Böse stünde” (ibid.).

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classical ethics in providing a ground for morality necessitates a fresh start that must point at a pre-legal and pre-predicative place which is outside moral orders and not seized by the self alone. It must include a self that is responsive to what is irreducible to itself. Morality has its origin in the faculty to respond to the foreign that comes prior to assimilation and appropriation. The place where morality arises is a pre-predicative encounter with the world whereby the self is responsive to the Other human as foreign. With a responsive ethics that traces the origin of morality back to an ability to allow for the foreignness of the world, Waldenfels does not aim at replacing existing normative claims. But he wants to add to ethics “a new tone” (Waldenfels 2013, p. 423 and 2011a, p. 151) that sheds new light on the origin of morality. 3.4.2. The suspended self of response By revealing the failures of ethical rationalism and nihilism to plausibly explain the provenance of morality, Waldenfels directs our attention towards responsivity as the real source of moral obligation. For Waldenfels, the source of morality is our ability to experience the world in the form of a response that takes the alienness of the Other into account. Experience in the form of a response allows for the irreducibility of the things of the world, for their resistance to full assimilation and appropriation. It stands for a recognition of difference and otherness. However, why should the ability to recognize difference and otherness be equated with moral commitment? Are difference and otherness not something that evokes rather ambiguous feelings? Why should the ability to experience the world (including the Other human) as irreducibly foreign be conducive to the development of morality? Why should the permeability to this foreignness lead to benevolence and charity? The idea that response-ability is the origin of morality is puzzling at first glance. The experience of something that is foreign to the self is associated with separation and demarcation rather than with connectivity, sympathy and mutual support. Otherness is often perceived as a

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threat that should be eliminated through appropriation or as a mystery that we should escape from. But neither elimination nor avoidance can count as moral behavior. Elimination transforms the foreign into the own and negates difference and particularity. Avoidance leads to indifference, something which, according to Waldenfels, is the antipode rather than the source of morality (Waldenfels 2011b, p. 30). The foreign is something that frightens us. Dan Zahavi speaks of a “horror” of alterity that has led to mechanisms of exclusion in philosophy (Zahavi 1999, p. 196). Waldenfels, too, accounts for the fear of the unknown and inapproachable. In his words, the foreign challenges our “safety devices” (Waldenfels 2011b, p. 3). We usually seek to hold on to what is common and seek to resist or to assimilate the strange and unknown. The self feels at home with what can be integrated into its own realm, but it seeks to escape what is different from itself, especially if the difference renders appropriation and assimilation impossible. Any resistance to assimilation leads to an alienation that disturbs and terrifies us. The foreign “trips the chaos alarm” (ibid.). According to Waldenfels, a historical example of the exclusions of the foreign from western thought is the concept of the ancient cosmos. With its overwhelming vision of a borderless extension, the ancient cosmic order included the whole world, encompassing “everything and everybody” (Waldenfels 2007d, pp. 2f). Thereby it did not provide room for what could not be subsumed under its laws, neither as perfection nor as an imperfect reproduction of it. The ancient order “domesticated” (ibid., p.  3) the foreign. Objects of the world could be described and classified according to their compliance with, or reflection of the cosmic order but never in their complete noncompliance. Complete non-compliance would have pointed to an unthinkable exteriority of the ancient cosmos. Because the foreign was outside the cosmos, it did not exist. In modern times, the idea of a border-less cosmos came under pressure. Modern philosophy unmasked the model of the all-encompassing ancient cosmos as a deficient construct. Exteriority and borders were assigned the role of constituting elements of order. The cosmic law was replaced by the rational subject as the creator of orders.

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Rationality and subject-centrism, again, were dismantled by postmodern thought in the late twentieth century. Postmodernism questioned not only the possibility of a border-less cosmos but also that of the autonomous and omnipotent knower. It is this “double mutation” (ibid., p.  4) of the dissolution of the ancient cosmos and the de-centering of the subject that finally paved the way for a thinking of the radical alien as it is central to the philosophy of Bernhard Waldenfels. Responsivity as a notion of otherness, as an awareness of foreign entities that cannot be reduced to one’s own realm, can be seen as an ethical stance towards the Other because, at least, it is a stance of recognition and respect rather than of avoidance and hostility. A recognition of foreignness that eludes assimilation and appropriation entails tolerance. For Waldenfels, this ethical dimension “goes deeper than a philosophy of morals” which, from the beginning, relies on commands, rights or values (Waldenfels 2011b, p. 35). A responsive phenomenology opens up a new perspective on the foreign. The foreign is no longer simply an impossibility or a threat. It rather appears as an indissoluble element of experience. The foreign is the pervasive characteristic of the objects of experience, it shapes our way of perceiving the world and interacting with it. We live with the foreign and this ability makes us who we are. Responsivity is a specific human mode of experience. It stands for a way to deal with the alien as alien, to cope with alienness in our experience despite the threats and fear that it evokes. It stands for a self that is not fixed and self-contained but permeable to the foreignness of the objects of our experience. It finally stands for openness instead of foreclosure, for the possibility of transcendence and understanding instead of ignorance or conflict. However, tolerance and respect alone do not explain the feeling of moral obligation and the commitment towards the Other’s wellbeing and flourishing. A rift between me and the Other, even if this implies the recognition of otherness and difference, does not naturally lead to benevolence, care or support. Recognition of otherness can explain a liberal ethics of “leaving each other alone”, but not the

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genuine interest and the active involvement in the well-being of the Other in need. By itself, it is not enough to fully understand the ethical dimension of responsivity. This dimension shows itself in the impact that our response-ability has on the constitution of the self and on the relationship between self and other. In order to understand why a response-ability not only accounts for difference but also motivates us to treat one another with respect and care, we have to look at the effect of responsivity on the self and on the self’s relationship with the Other. 3.4.2.1. Responsivity and self-withdrawal The experience of alterity is both constitutive of the foreign and constitutive of the self. It is constitutive of the foreign because the foreign emerges in its difference from the self, but it is also constitutive of the self because the self arises in opposition to and in demarcation from the foreign (Waldenfels 2011b, p.  11). The experience of alterity is an experience of border-crossing and border-drawing. The foreign remains outside the self, on the Other side of the self. Waldenfels calls the process of demarcation from the Other an “offbounding” of the self (ibid., p.  14). Through processes of bounding off from the alien, the self gets a sense of itself. Waldenfels compares the self that emerges by bounding off with a cavity (ibid., p. 15). The off-bounding self is an empty space, which can, similarly to a cavity, only be defined by its boundaries. It is “an inside which separates itself from an outside” (ibid.). The boundaries of the self are a special place. They demarcate the self and are thus a part of the self. But they are constituted by the foreign which had caused the self to bound-off and, therefore, carry elements of alienness as well. The boundaries are like a third place, a “place in-between” the self and the foreign. This “place in-between” can neither fully be inhabited by the self nor by the alien and it can also not be transgressed by either of them. In constituting the boundaries of the self, the alien resides at the margins of the self without being appropriated by the self. The foreign neither disappears, nor is it resolved into the self.

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The concept of boundaries as a third place that connects and separates self and other, however, is of limited use because foreignness does not only reside at the margins of the self. Rather, the alien must be thought of as a part of the self that does not merge with the self, like oil spills that do not merge with the surrounding water. The foreign is an “intrasubjective” otherness (Waldenfels 2007d, p.  10) that originates in ourselves. The alien is the reason why experiences are never fully owned by the self. What happens to us is, from the beginning, “interspersed” with what is alien to us (ibid., p.  46). The alien is within the self, which results in an alienating of the self from itself, in a split into I and me (Waldenfels 2003, p. 26). The experience of the alien affects experience in a way that turns this experience into a “becoming-alien [Fremdwerdung] of experience” (Waldenfels 2011b, p.  3). Self-alienation, however, should “neither be confused with reflexive self-consciousness nor with the inter-subjective dialectics of recognition” (ibid., p.  17). The self-alienated self, rather, results from the ability to respond to foreignness which is equal to being pervaded by foreignness. Because we are pervaded by foreignness, we are never only ourselves, we are never completely “at home” in the world (Waldenfels 2003, p.  24; Waldenfels 2007d, p. 4). Hence, foreignness experience is a bifurcated process that leads, first, to self-constitution through demarcation, and second, to self-alienation. As the cavity metaphor shows, the alien is constitutive of the boundaries of the self. However, like oil that does not resolve into water, it is also the reason for alienness within the self. Waldenfels describes the encounter with the Other as foreign as a process of off-bounding. This process is doubly paradoxical in its parallel self-referentiality and alien-referentiality. The first paradox lies in the self-referentiality of off-bounding from the alien and self-bounding through demarcation. The activity of self-bounding can only be grasped in the aftermath because it takes place at a point zero where there is no self that could choose, resist, understand or describe the process of self-constitution. The activity lies neither on the hither side nor beyond the boundary of the self, because prior to the process of

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self-bounding there is neither this nor that, and there is no I or you either. The self is neither the subject of one’s own act of bounding nor the result of an alien act of bounding. Rather, in the act of bounding, “the self springs out” (Waldenfels 2011b, p. 15). The metaphor of the cavity suggests that self-bounding and off-bounding from the alien is like a withdrawal from a place that, without the experience of foreignness, would be seized by an undefined, unmarked state of being. Selfconstitution through demarcation is a process of ‘giving way’, of making room for the foreign. The self-referentiality of drawing boundaries consists in its “self-withdrawal” (ibid.). The paradox in the self-referentiality, thus, lies in the fact that the process of bounding-off is self-constitutive because of a self-withdrawal. Self-constitution, strictly speaking, is the result of a giving-in to something that is different from the self, of a surrender to the foreign. Self-constitution through the experience of alterity is the constitution of something that is not yet there. It stands for “something [that] is there by being absent” (ibid., p. 18). The second paradox of self-bounding lies in its alien-referentiality. In the act of off-bounding, the self appears as a cavity, as an inside which separates itself from an outside. That which separates itself (the self) is marked while that from which it separates itself (the foreign) remains unmarked (ibid., p. 15). The foreign emerges through the process of demarcation, but it emerges only as that which constitutes the boundaries of the self. Apart from its role in bringing the self about, the foreign remains per definitionem undefined (see chapter 3.2.) The self as a cavity is nothing without that which surrounds it, but instead of marking the inside of the cavity, which remains empty, the cavity marks a nothing that is surrounded by something (the first paradox of self-referentiality). And instead of marking that which surrounds nothing, the cavity marks nothingness that surrounds it (the second paradox of alien-referentiality). Self-bounding is, thus, alien-referential by pointing at that which brings the self about. But it is also paradoxical in its alien-referentiality because it refers to something that remains unreferentiable. The alien is constituted as alien through our experience of it as alien although, strictly speaking, this experience is not even possible. The experience of the alien lies

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in its withdrawing from the self (ibid., p.  16) because that which withdraws is that which we experience as alien. The double paradox of self-bounding, therefore, lies in a double withdrawal as the event that brings about both self and alien. In the case of self-referentiality it is a withdrawal of the self from the alien which is the birth of the self. And in the case of alien-referentiality, it is the withdrawal of the alien from the self which lies at the heart of the experience of alterity. The paradox of self-bounding is reinforced by the fact that the first aspect of self-referential off-bounding, as withdrawal of the self, and the second aspect of alien-referential in-bounding (of the self) and out-bounding (of the alien), as withdrawal of the alien from the self, “dovetail into each other” in the form of a reference to the alien within self-reference (ibid.). The manifestation of otherness can only take place because of the ability to respond to the foreign. Furthermore, the manifestation of foreignness is the condition and primordial event for the manifestation of the self. As much as the self is subject to foreignness and withdrawal – because it is only through withdrawal that foreignness can come into existence – so does the acknowledgment of foreignness lead to a re-constitution of the self in its response to the experiences of alterity. Self-withdrawal and self-constitution belong indissolubly together. There is no off-bounding without inbounding. Against this background it is pointless to ask whether the alienness of the self or the alienness of the Other comes first. The answer is: neither. The self becomes a self only by being touched by the Other and responding to their appeal. And the self is outside of itself precisely in being duplicated by the Other and it is duplicated precisely in getting outside of itself (Waldenfels 2007d, p. 12). The fact that selfreferentiality and alien-referentiality dovetail into each other explains why no one is merely who they are (Waldenfels 2011b, p. 16). According to Waldenfels, experience appears as a process of selfconstitution through bounding off from the alien – which nevertheless remains at our boundaries and provokes a constant shift of these boundaries, a continuing transformation of the cavity-self. This implies a notion of self-other relations that is characterized by both

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indissoluble interdependence and insurmountable separateness. Self and alien, me and other, are two separate entities which nevertheless come into being only because of each other’s existence. The notion of a dovetailing self-other-constitution both “strengthens and undermines a clear distinction between self and other” (Waldenfels 2007d, p.  48, his emphasis), but it also “lays bare the impossibility of creating a unified whole” (ibid.). Self and other, from the first moment of their existence, are neither completely separated from each other nor do they ever enter a realm of perfect understanding and convergence. Their interactions are intermediary events which form a realm in-between (ibid., p. 47). They create something that we have in common but they cannot be understood as the summary of individual achievements nor as the representation of a unifying center. The realm in-between, which connects and simultaneously separates self and Other, can be radically conceived only in terms of a self-doubling in the Other, as a “lived impossibility” (ibid., p. 49), as a distancein-proximity and proximity-in-distance (ibid., p. 50). Self and Other unite but do not merge, they are a unity within a duality. Dallmayr describes Waldenfels’s position as a middle way between Merleau-Ponty and Levinas (see chapter 2.4.). While Merleau-Ponty emphasizes the convergence and commonness in, for example, his account of intercorporeal understanding, and while Levinas stresses the infinity and irreducibility of the Other’s face, Waldenfels manages to integrate separateness and unity into an account of intertwined self-and-other-constitution that illustrates the interdependence and discreteness of our existence alike. With the notion of asymmetry and hiatus, Waldenfels opposes the idea of an overarching joint horizon that merges own and foreign interests and perspectives. You and I remain separate entities. The alien is not just another ego (ibid., p. 24). There is no Weltgeist, transcendent apperception or other form of jointless community where everyone becomes part of the greater whole.32 The line between self and other cannot be blurred. “Fragwürdig ist [...] die Annahme einer fugenlosen Gemeinschaft die jeden zum Glied des Ganzen macht” (Waldenfels 2006, p. 74). 32

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Against the background of intertwined self-constitution and otherconstitution, the concept of the hiatus as described in chapter 3.1. acquires a new meaning. In the context of self/other relations the hiatus between call and response translates into a gap between self-withdrawal and self-constitution, between the provocation of the Other in the call that destabilizes the self on the one hand, and the response to the call that leads to the re-constitution of a transformed and selfalienated self on the other (ibid., p. 34). The change from bounding off into a state of self-dissolution to bounding in the sense of a reconstitution through demarcation and self-alienation is not a smooth transition. The moment of bounding off is a moment of radical self-suspension, of complete surrender to the foreign, of absolute passivity, which is not compatible with agency and selfhood. The re-constitution of the self in the response is an abrupt event. A hiatus between the affection by the alien and the affection by myself cannot be bridged by mutual understanding nor by shared meaning (Waldenfels 2003, p. 29). The experience of alterity is, therefore, indissolubly tied to the double paradoxical movement of the self away from itself and away from the foreign. It is tied to the withdrawal of the self from itself because the withdrawal of the self is the prerequisite for the constitution of the self in its difference from the foreign and the constitution of the foreign in its difference from the self. Further, the withdrawal of the self and the withdrawal of the foreign are both constitutive features of the self. Experience of foreignness is, thus, characterized by a double withdrawal. The ability to account for the foreignness of the world is a movement towards the foreign by withdrawing from it. Withdrawing from the foreign is the other half of responsivity. Without the withdrawal of the self there would be no experience of alterity. Responsivity and self-withdrawal are indissolubly linked together. Responsivity and self-withdrawal are two sides of the same coin. 3.4.2.2. Self-withdrawal and morality Self-withdrawal is the other side of responsivity, the condition of the appearance of foreignness in experience. Only because the self

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withdraws in the event of the encounter can the Other become a part of the self and reside within the self without being assimilated to the self. We are never completely alone with ourselves; we are never fully cut off from the existence of the Other. The withdrawal is constitutive of a foreignness within the self as the transgression of oneself and one’s own potential and possibilities (Waldenfels 1995, p. 312). Selfwithdrawal and receptivity of foreignness are intertwined. Whatever happens to ourselves happens to us and the Other within us. Our thoughts and acts are induced with the Other’s existence, which can be neither denied nor ignored. Acknowledging the foreignness not only implies a pre-reflective knowledge of the Other’s existence but also an awareness of interests and claims that are different from one’s own. The irreducible foreign is experienced as a foreign demand to which I have to respond (ibid.). Acknowledgment of foreignness lies at the heart of a recognition of difference. Response-ability explains behavior in the form of respect for the Other’s rights and of non-interference with the Other’s interests and pursuits. It is because of the alienness within ourselves – Waldenfels calls it “the wild region” (Waldenfels 2007d, p. 18) – that we are able to understand each other. It is because of the foreignness within ourselves that we are able to look at the world from a place that is beyond the standpoint of our own interests. Responsivity enables us to “adopt the viewpoint of another” (Waldenfels 2011b, p. 15). However, responsivity as self-withdrawal not only explains why we show respect towards the Other’s interests and rights. The concept of responsivity also sheds light on our commitment to act on the Other’s behalf in the sense of an ethics of charity and care. As mentioned in chapter 3.2., responding is a passive event. Being responsive is not something that we choose. As responsive beings we endure a certain pathos. An absolute passivity does not only refer to our subjection to the foreignness of the world. The pathos has a second meaning. It is “doubled” as soon as we encounter the Other in need, distress or pain. Waldenfels elaborates on this second meaning of pathos in “In the place of the Other” (2011). The pathos of the Other’s suffering and pain becomes our pathos. This does not mean that the Other’s suffering

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becomes my suffering, that I feel the Other’s pain as if it were my pain. My pain and the Other’s pain do not merge. Still, the Other’s pain and distress unfold a force to which I must surrender. I am enduring the pathos of not being able to remain untouched by what the Other is going through. Whenever I am affected by the presence/absence of the Other, I am simultaneously affected by what affects the Other. The pathos of Otherness rises, so to speak, to a higher power, I am passing through the Other’s pathos, for example, when I am seized by the Other’s joy, fright, or concern... [T]he encounter with the suffering other, hence, is a form of “doubled pathos” that I endure: It is the pathos that I endure because of the Other which is irreducibly foreign. And it is the suffering of the Other that creates a suffering within me. (Waldenfels 2011a, p. 6)

Acting on the Other’s distress is carried out under a compulsion that is similar to the desire to end one’s own distress because “I cannot not respond to the Other’s demand once I am touched by it” (Waldenfels 2007d, p. 29). It is the Otherness within the self that not only leads to the acknowledgment of the Other’s rights and interests but also to a suffering from the Other’s pain. The concept of the “doubled pathos” spans a bridge from an invasion of foreignness to the commitment on behalf of the Other’s well-being and care. Because the Other’s pain is part of me I suffer from it and feel compelled to act on it. Waldenfels, in order to underline the ethical significance of responsivity, often employs morally significant words. The event of the encounter with the irreducible world is for Waldenfels like a call or demand that is posed on us. A call implies much more than a surprise or a disturbance. It addresses us as responsible beings. It defines our existence as being oriented towards the world. By being called upon, we acknowledge that our place in the world is one within a web of relations and obligations. The call can either take the form of an appeal to someone or of a claim to something (Waldenfels 2011b, p. 37). Appeal and claim are intertwined. In the call I receive (as an appeal) something is demanded (claimed) from me (ibid.). The binary structure of the event as an appeal and claim is reflected in the two

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possible forms of response. The event as a claim corresponds with the response in the form of the content of the answer. It stands for what we actually do or say. The answer can take one form or another and it can be refused or given, the refusal itself being already a form of response (Waldenfels 2007d, p.  49). The event of responding to a call, however, is not exhausted by the answer we give. Responding not only occurs at the level of the enunciated, it also occurs at the level of enunciation in the event of saying or responding itself. This level refers to the very fact that we respond (Waldenfels 2003, p. 30); to the fact that we are addressed. The event of saying corresponds with the call as an appeal that is directed towards us. Responding to the appeal is not something that we choose, nor is it an answer that we give to a question. It takes place at the level of the enunciation in the event of responding. It is a response to a call in the sense of an appeal, a call which is neither a question nor a claim and which “breaks the purpose circle of intentionality as much as the regulative circle of communication” (Waldenfels 2011b, p. 37). Response to the foreignness of the world precedes the questions that we have. Referring to the event as a call or demand establishes a link to the ethical concepts of recognition of rights as well as of charity and care. From an ethical angle, the pathos and inevitability of the response are directed not only to the Other who has interests and rights but also to the Other who suffers from pain and distress. The foreign Other turns into the fellow Other whose very existence is marked by the pursuit of wants and the subjection to distress. Interaction with the world in the form of a response does not simply start at the place of the foreign; it starts at the place of the fellow human. Switching from ‘the experience of alterity’ to the ‘call of the fellow human’ and from a mere ‘response to alterity’ to a ‘response to the Other in need’ is a shift of viewpoint from ontology to ethics that illuminates the ethical dimension of responsivity. According to responsive ethics, self-withdrawal is the reason why there is morality. Self-withdrawal is the source of moral obligation and commitment because it is the reason why the foreign can enter

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the self without being assimilated to the self. Once the self is invaded by foreignness, foreign interests and needs become part of the self. This explains Waldenfels’s dictum of responsivity as the source of moral obligation. Responsivity as such does not have a moral meaning. It is a hyperphenomenon that belongs to an unmoral and unordered realm of unconscious processes (Waldenfels 2012, pp.  234f). However, in its combination with self-withdrawal as the necessary condition for the Other to appear, the moral dimension of responsivity comes to the fore. The ethos of responsivity lies in the withdrawal of the self. Self-withdrawal as the provenance of moral obligation fulfills the criteria that Waldenfels establishes in his critical engagement with reason-based ethics and ethical skepticism. For Waldenfels, the source of morality is a place where there is not yet a sense-making and rationalizing self, a place which is not yet the scene of rules and justifications. Moral obligation precedes, and is independent of, principles, norms and conventions. The call, as the event that triggers my response, precedes the laws of the moral and legal order and it also precedes any judgment of whether the claim is justified or not. The call lies at the hither side of good and evil (Waldenfels 2007d, p. 25; Waldenfels 2011b, p. 37), but morality is also more than, and different from, the pursuit of self-interests. It is the ability of the self to allow for more than itself, to see the world as being larger than itself. The source of moral obligation, the condition of the possibility of morality is the withdrawal of the self that suspends rationalizing activities of a conscious self and that gives way to the Other to appear at the horizon of the self. Accordingly, the antipode of morality is a lack of responsivity, because this amounts to an impairment of our ability to withdraw in the encounter with the Other. Those who fail to hear or see what announces itself also fail to respond to its demands. Moral failure is a failure of letting the Other enter the self. Only a self that is alienated from itself is able to understand its choices and options in light of the Other’s needs. An unaffected and self-affirming adherence to existing orders, on the other hand, is the opposite of moral behavior.

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Indifference and self-assertion, at best, lead to lawfulness. Yet they are not capable of generating moral knowledge and behavior. An impaired response-ability stands for ignorance and neglect of foreign interests and rights. Waldenfels even calls the inability to account for the Other’s interests and rights a form of violence (Waldenfels 2006, pp. 155f). It is a violation of the Other’s demands (ibid., p. 187).

3.5. Results Responsivity as the core concept of a responsive phenomenology stands for a specific characteristic of human experience. The objects of experience appear not only as bearers of sense. They are also irreducibly foreign to the self and resist a complete subjection to sense. Experience in the form of a response is different from experience understood as assimilation. Our interaction with the world is not only characterized by a directedness towards the objects of experience – as in intentionality – but also by a responsiveness to a world that exists prior to us and independent from us. Response as experience precedes processes of interpretation and understanding – as is usually the case when we give a well-thought-out answer to a question or when we follow up on an event. The event to which we respond in Waldenfels’s original sense is a singular event that has no name or characteristic and that can never fully be captured with the response. The event always remains partially infinite and unreachable. Moreover, our responses to a singular event come with an inevitability. Responsivity is not something that we choose, it is a mode or structure of experience but not a property or character trait of individual agents. We do not choose to respond and we cannot avoid responding either. This does not question our possibility of choice with regard to the way we respond, but it denies the possibility of choosing whether we respond or not. Xenology, the phenomenology of the foreign, is paradoxical, since it tries to understand a phenomenon that eludes interpretation and understanding. The foreign can never be grasped in a direct way, because this would transform the foreign into something familiar and deprive it of its foreignness. A phenomenology of the foreign, accordingly, requires an indirect method of detecting the traces that the foreign leaves behind

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in phenomena like trust, responsibility, the gift, hospitality or promise. These phenomena cannot satisfactorily be explained as outcomes of rational deliberation, nor as the adherence to moral commands or the manifestations of self-centeredness. They rather give evidence of an influence or a force that comes from the outside, that is uncontrollable, but also decisive for the way we interact with the world. At the same time, these phenomena lay bare the ethical structure of a responseability to the world. It is thanks to the foreignness in our experience that the fellow human appears on our horizon of sense, that we can build trustful relations and that we feel responsible to the Other. The ethical dimension of responsivity further manifests itself when it is measured by a reason-based or skeptical account of the source of morality. According to Waldenfels, neither reason-based ethics nor ethical skepticism can plausibly explain why we are concerned with the Other’s well-being. Moral commands that derive from rational reflection always rely on an already existing moral command or principle and therefore can never found morality itself. Ethical skepticism, on the other hand, sees the foundation of morality in self-referentiality, which does not explain why the Other’s voice should direct our thoughts and actions. The real source of morality is, rather, the ability to respond to foreignness as an indissoluble element of experience. The experience of foreignness shapes the way we act on the world. Responsivity is itself a morally neutral form of behavior, but it depends on processes of self-withdrawal. Responding to the foreign is a process of withdrawing from the foreign, which, in turn, allows for the foreign to enter the self. The invasion of the self by the Other is possible only because the self withdraws at the moment of the encounter. Self-withdrawal is the other side of responsivity. Only because there is a pause from the self at the moment of the encounter is it possible for the foreign to find its own place within the self. Self-withdrawal, then, is the condition for the possibility of any experiences of foreignness, because without self-withdrawal, the foreign would be reduced to the self. On the other hand, self-withdrawal is also the reason why responsivity must be seen as the source of moral obligation. Because of a suspension of the self, the Other can

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enter the self and make their interests and needs be heard. Because Otherness resides within the self, foreign interests and needs undermine the thought and action of the self and are acted upon as if they were the interests and needs of the self. The withdrawal of the self is necessary for the Other to be able to invade the self. This is the precondition for our ability to take the Other’s interests and wants into account and to act on the Other’s needs as if they were our own. The withdrawal of the self at the moment of the encounter with the Other explains our respect of the Other’s rights as well as our commitment to care for the Other. Foreign interests and needs become part of the self without becoming the interests and needs of the self. They are both part of the self and separated from the self. Waldenfels links responsivity to morality and, at the same time, ties responsivity to a withdrawal of the self as the condition for the foreign to appear in experience. This establishes an indissoluble link between self-withdrawal and morality. The source of moral competence in the form of a recognition of the Other’s inalienable rights and of moral obligation in the form of care for the Other in need is inseparably tied to a suspension of the self as the condition of the possibility of experiencing the Other as foreign. Morality, thus, is intrinsically linked to an infringement of the self, to an impairment of the pursuit of one’s own interests and needs. A self that withdraws in order to let the Other enter the self is affected and impaired in its quest for self-assertion and survival. Morality in the sense of respect and care is the result of an invasion of the self at the moment of its withdrawal. Self-withdrawal is the reason why we take the Other’s interests into account and why we act on behalf of the Other. With the account of self-withdrawal in the process of the response and of the relationship between self-withdrawal and morality we can reconstruct the argument of responsive ethics as follows: • Premise 1: Responsivity implies the ability to experience the foreign. • Premise 2: The experience of the foreign is possible only if the self withdraws.

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• Inference rule: If A implies B and B is possible only if C, then A necessarily implies C. • Preliminary Conclusion 1: Hence, responsivity necessarily implies self-withdrawal. • Premise 3: Self-withdrawal means that the self gives way to the Other and that the Other’s interests and needs become part of the self. • Premise 4: If the Other’s interests and needs become part of the self, then the self respects the Other’s interests and acts on the Other’s needs. • Premise 5: Respecting the Other’s interests and acting on the Other’s needs is what defines morality. • Inference rule: If C is D and D leads to E and E is F then C leads to F. • Preliminary Conclusion 2: Hence, self-withdrawal leads to morality. • Inference rule: If A necessarily implies C (PC 1) and if C leads to F (PC 2) then A leads to F. • Conclusion: Hence, responsivity leads to morality. Responsivity as the acknowledgment of the Other as foreign resonates with important aspects of an ethics of care. It relates to moral arguments against the use of reason and principles, and supports the notion of particularity and difference. Moreover, it shares with the ethics of care a relational view of morality as an intrinsic property of the relationship rather than of the moral agents themselves. Apart from these obvious commonalities, the question still remains how responsive ethics can contribute to the self-sacrifice debate in care. The concept of self-withdrawal as the other side of responsivity seems to be a good starting point for an investigation of further intersections. The following chapter will therefore focus on the commonalities and differences between self-withdrawal in responsive ethics and the phenomenon of self-sacrifice.

4 A “responsive” account of self-sacrifice

The aim of this inquiry is to investigate whether a responsive perspective on self-sacrifice is useful for the ethics of care. In the beginning I have argued that the issue of self-sacrifice poses a major challenge for care theorists and practitioners alike. The issue of self-sacrifice in care is controversal. For many care ethicists, self-sacrifice is associated with exploitation and the marginalized status of care. They empower carers by limiting self-sacrifice, by advocating more self-care and by justifying a withdrawal from exploitative care relations. On the other hand, self-sacrifice seems to be a distinctive element of an ethics of care in comparison to classical ethics. An ethics of care promotes the intervention on behalf of the Other in need – something that requires the sacrifice of energy and time – and the revaluation of emotions and abstention from premature judgment – something that increases the vulnerability of the moral agent. Further, care ethicists like van Nistelrooij and Noddings interpret selfsacrifice in more positive ways as a source of identification, belonging and self-affirmation. The controversies about self-sacrifice are reflected in a twofold ethico-philosophical and socio-political agenda that seeks to strengthen the voice of care and, at the same time, aims to improve the status of carers within societies and intimate relations. In order to find a new perspective on the intricate issue of selfsacrifice in care I have turned to the responsive ethics of Bernhard Waldenfels. At the center of Waldenfels’s phenomenological inquiry is the search for the source of moral commitment which lies in our

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response-ability to the world and which is based on a withdrawal of the self. How does this core tenet of responsive ethics contribute to the self-sacrifice debate? To answer this question the following chapter will show the intersections and differences between self-sacrifice in care and the phenomenological concept of self-withdrawal.

4.1. Self-withdrawal and self-sacrifice 4.1.1. Intersections Both self-withdrawal and self-sacrifice describe a transcendent move to the Other. They both stand for an acknowledgment of the existence of foreign interests and needs. They also stand for the intricate and confusing notion that our own well-being is not always at the center of our pursuits, that we can give way to the Other, that foreign interests and needs may prevail over our own. Accordingly, self-sacrifice and self-withdrawal both stand for an impairment of the assertiveness of the self, for a temporary loss of self, for a pause from the self. The impairment of the self, however, is conceived in different ways. For the ethics of care, self-sacrifice implies the giving-up of something that is important to us. Own interests and needs are neglected to an extent where the own well-being may be at risk. In responsive ethics, self-withdrawal is described as a form of surrender to the Other, as a suspension of the self. In self-withdrawal, the place of the self is flooded by foreignness. Foreignness supersedes the self. Further, self-withdrawal and self-sacrifice both stand for an asymmetry in the relation between self and other or, more precisely, between the giver and the receiver of “space” and sacrifice. Moving towards the Other by giving way to the Other or by sacrificing what is important to oneself does not necessitate that the Other moves towards me/sacrifices something for me to the same extent. The asymmetrical relation between self/Other can be neutralized through similar processes on the other side. But there is no guarantee that this will be the case and it is not necessary for self-withdrawal/self-sacrifice to happen. In the introduction and in chapter 1, I have shown that care theorists evaluate the consequences of self-sacrifice for the self in different ways. For many, self-sacrifice is primarily a cause of vulnerability and

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a possible source of exploitation and marginalization. Others value self-sacrifice as being rewarding and as an important feature of care. Depending on how the role of self-sacrifice is conceived, intersections between the self-withdrawal and self-sacrifice become more prevalent. The notion that self-sacrifice not only stands for an impairment of the self but also for its transformation into a higher form of self is supported by Waldenfels’s description of the reconstitution of a self. The transformation of the self through the experience of the Other appears as a compensation for the previous loss. But again, responsive ethics and care ethics accounts do not fully overlap. In responsive ethics self-withdrawal is the pre-requisite of self-constitution. Self-withdrawal does not only bring the Other to the fore but is also the condition for the self to emerge in demarcation from the Other. In contrast, care ethicists such as van Nistelrooij and Noddings point at the gains of self-sacrifice for the self in the form of enhanced social and moral competence, personal development and growth, and even self-affirmation through a feeling of belonging and identity. For them, self-sacrifice opens up new capabilities and possibilities for the self. Finally, a “positive” concept of self-sacrifice intersects with the phenomenological account of self-withdrawal in inducing a shift of moral competence from the self-sufficient agent to the wishes and commands of the Other. This shift stands for a relational approach to morality that sees morality no longer as a property of the moral agent but rather as an effect of relatedness and proximity. However, strictly speaking, the concepts of self-withdrawal and self-sacrifice do not locate the place of morality in the relationship itself. The provenance of morality, rather, is the move towards the Other, a move that transcends one’s own interests and needs. Self-withdrawal/selfsacrifice both stand for morality in the form of a surrender to the needs and demands of the Other. 4.1.2. Practice versus event Besides these commonalities, the concepts of self-sacrifice and selfwithdrawal differ in decisive ways that make it impossible to exchange one for the other. Self-sacrifice is a practice. The notion of practice is

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essential for self-sacrifice. In order to speak of self-sacrifice the agent must sacrifice something. It does not make sense to talk about selfsacrifice as an attitude or perspective only. And it is not sufficient for the agent of self-sacrifice merely to plan to sacrifice or to act in a way they merely expect to, but do not actually suffer a loss themselves. The sacrifice must be committed and the loss must be suffered as a result of the agent’s act for us to be able to speak of self-sacrifice.1 Self-sacrifice is implemented and demonstrated through the things we do. The practice of self-sacrifice can take different forms. Self-sacrifice is directed towards another, but there is no limitation with regard to the number or nature of beneficiaries. It can be directed towards the intimate other as well as towards the fellow human as a stranger, towards the community or even towards humankind as a whole. The sacrifice can be offered to one or several or everyone. It can be implemented through direct intervention but its meaning is equally fulfilled if I let something happen that is harmful to me but beneficial to the Other. For example, we speak of self-sacrifice when a man sacrifices his holidays in order to care for his sister’s children while she is in hospital. In this case, the man’s action interferes with his sister’s family affairs and necessitates changes and preparations by all conerned. But we can equally speak of self-sacrifice if a university teacher forgoes her right to sabbatical leave in order to let her colleague participate in an important research project. In the latter case, the teacher’s sacrifice is not an explicit interference in her colleagues life. It can even go unnoticed – the colleague does not have to know about the sacrifice that has been made on her behalf. Neither intervention nor visibility are essential features of self-sacrifice. But in all cases, self-sacrifice comes in the form of an action, the action to care for the sister’s children and the action to forgo one’s right to a sabbatical. Self-sacrifice must be more than a plan, a will, or an expectation. It must happen. On the other hand, self-withdrawal in responsive ethics is not a practice. Waldenfels describes self-withdrawal as an event that happens to us in our encounter with the fellow human. The event is 1

For the latter point see Overvold (1980), p. 110.

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triggered by our ability to perceive the world as something larger than ourselves. Self-withdrawal takes place on a pre-conscious level. Strictly speaking, there is not even a self that experiences the event as self-withdrawal. Self-withdrawal precedes the emergence of the self. Because of the dovetailing constitution of the self and the Other, self-withdrawal is the condition for the self. But it is not a competence or ability of the self, and not even a property or feature. There is no “agent of self-withdrawal”. Self-withdrawal starts at the “place of the Other” (Waldenfels 2001a).2

4.2. Self-sacrifice as hetero-practice Self-withdrawal in responsive phenomenology is not something we do or initiate. It is not a practice. Nevertheless, the event of self-withdrawal underlines and shapes the practice of self-sacrifice as it shapes practice in general. Self-withdrawal is the other side of an experience that, according to Waldenfels, permeates our interaction with the world “in a tacit and inconspicuous way” (Waldenfels 2013, p. 424). Whatever we think or do has its beginning in a response to the foreign. The experience of the foreign “provide[s] a hold” for our judgments (Waldenfels 2011b, p. 29). Our thoughts and actions take their departure from pre-conscious experiences of alterity and self-withdrawal. These experiences are converted into different types of response, including interpretation and judgment as well as actions. As Waldenfels puts it: because of the otherness in experience “figures like aisthesis, logos, nomos, praxis take on certain features of heteroaisthesis, heterology, heteronomy, hetero-practice” (Waldenfels 2013, p. 424). The concepts of heterologos and heteropractice open up a new perspective on the relationship between theory and practice (praxis). Throughout the history of occidental philosophy this relationship has focused around the questions of how both contribute to understanding and knowledge, and whether one should be seen as superior to 2 For a more detailed account of the relationship between conscious self-sacrifice and pre-conscious self-withdrawal and the consequences of this difference for the ethics of care see chapter 5.1.

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the other. Traditionally, the relationship between theoretical reasoning and practical interaction has been understood as antagonistic or complementary and mutually interdependent. In any case, they were conceived in binary terms, representing a dualism of two different modes of interaction with the world.3 Waldenfels, however, pursues a different path. With his responsive phenomenology, the dualism of theory and practice is dissolved into a stream of events that starts on a pre-conscious level and leads to consciously chosen interpretations, principles and actions. Theoretical reflection and practical work are different types of response, but they take their departure from the same point, the place of the Other. Neither thought nor action are self-starting processes. They are both subject to forces that lie outside the self. With his concept of heterologos and heteropractice, Waldenfels reveals the shared ground of thought and action. Thought and action are connected through the same experience of foreignness; they are both a means of manifesting this experience and of bringing it to life.4 For Plato, for example, abstract reflection assumes primacy over practice. He understands practice as the act (or attempt) of implementing the outcome of reflective processes, of converting theoretical results into action. Kant, on the other hand, assigns practice a theoretical meaning in the form of practical reasoning. In Kantian philosophy, the line between theory as intellectual and practice as manual or emotional work is blurred. Practical reasoning is an ethically significant thought but it does not depend on a concrete actualization. In Marx’s philosophy, finally, the hierarchical relationship between theory and practice is ultimately reversed. The primacy of reflection is given up in favor of an emphasis on practice. According to Marx, it is through practice in the form of a revolutionary activity that we are able to understand the world – and not the other way round (cf. “Practice” 1994). 4 By dissolving the dualism of theory and practice into a multifaceted response to the foreign, responsive phenomenology is an even more radical “theory of practice” than the ethics of care. Care theorists, in general, advocate the integration of theory and practice in a concept of care that relies both on a caring attitude and the practice of care. The concrete practice is essential to our understanding of care. Care reveals itself through practice and we cannot speak of a caring person if the person’s concerns and feelings for others are not followed by action. A caring attitude without the practice of care is useless (Tronto 1993, p. 102). On the other hand, a practice of care without a caring attitude is no more than mechanical work which could be 3

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If practice is a hetero-practice that takes its departure from preconscious experiences of self-withdrawal and alterity, then this holds true for the practice of self-sacrifice as well. From a responsive perspective, self-sacrifice is interwoven with self-withdrawal. It is a practice “in the light of the Other”. This becomes even more plausible if we consider Waldenfels’s distinction into the what and the that of the response (see chapter 3.1.2). The what of the response represents the specific response in form of something we think and do. In the case of care and self-sacrifice, we can choose between different options, for example to donate money, to spend time with each other, to listen to the Other’s plight and so on. Also, our response does not have to take the form of a self-sacrifice. It is still our choice whether we care and heal or whether we respond in other ways, including the decision not to care. The that of the response, on the other hand, represents the preconscious event of self-withdrawal. It stands for the fact that we are responsive to the world and the Other, independently of our will. Being invaded by foreign wants and needs is not the result of a decision we make. It is an inevitable and uncontrollable event that lies at the roots of experience and informs our thoughts and actions. It is not our choice to take the Other’s interests into account and to feel obliged to act on the Other’s pain. Responsive phenomenology does not disregard autonomy and choice as illusions, nor does it advocate performed even by someone who is emotionless or insensitive towards the other (Crigger 1997, p. 217; Held 2005, p. 30f; Noddings 2013, p. 10). Accordingly, both practice and attitude are needed to develop a good understanding of care although practice is granted a more important epistemological role because the viewpoint of care evolves only in a continuing process, which includes setbacks and conflicts over best practices (Conradi 2001, p. 233). Care must be thought of as a constant process of remaking and development (cf. ibid., p. 179). The practice of care is a source of knowledge and inspiration for the ethical reflection about care and the invention of moral norms. It supports the development of a theory of care because it is through the practice of care work rather than through reflection and introspection that we understand what care stands for (Tronto 1993, p.  154). In analogy with Marxist theory, practice is a tool of change for the ethics of care (Conradi 2001, p. 235; Held 2005, p. 43).

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the notion of supra-human structures which renders human morality a herd morality (Waldenfels 2011b, p. 35). It reminds us, however, of the beginning of our thoughts and actions as processes that are not under our control. The very initiative of responding to the Other’s wants is not at our discretion. It is the result of an openness to the world that is the consequence of our ability to withdraw in the face of the Other. With the notion of heteropractice and heterology, responsive phenomenology does not develop an account of self-sacrifice. However, it lays bare the foundation and groundwork of self-sacrificial behavior by uncovering the pre-conscious processes of self withdrawal and foreignness experience that initiate and inform our responses to the world. Against this background, self-sacrifice appears as a heteropractice. It is a process whose beginning is not under our control.

5 Consequences for the ethics of care

In the beginning I have argued that the concept of self-sacrifice poses a major challenge for care theorists and practitioners alike because it is associated with exploitation and the marginalized status of care. The link between self-sacrifice and exploitation is often seen in the failure to draw boundaries and to protect oneself against excessive demands. I have further argued that a re-evaluation of self-sacrifice should not focus on rewards for the self alone, since this does not address the problem of marginalization. Rather, a re-evaluation should highlight the significance of self-sacrifice for the flourishing of relationships and communities. This chapter will discuss the question whether a responsive account of self-sacrifice as hetero-practice fulfills this goal, i.e. whether it changes our perception of self-sacrifice in a way that is conducive to the transformative agenda of the ethics of care.

5.1. Responsive phenomenology and social change The ethics of care is an ethics of change. Care ethics’ critique of selfsacrifice aims at the transformation of intimate relations and the social status of care. The central agents of change are the providers (and receivers) of care. Political measures to improve working conditions and salaries, or to institutionalize a doula system, can support transformative processes but the real change must start from within, with individual attitudes and behavior. The transformative agenda of the ethics of care relies on the possibility to change relations of care. It relies on self-determined agents of care.

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This raises the question of whether a responsive perspective is compatible with the need for change. One of the main important contributions of responsive phenomenology to philosophy is that it undermines the notion of a self-starting subject. Responsive phenomenology is primarily a critical response to the subject-centrism of modern philosophy. This means that adopting a responsive perspective on self-sacrifice implies changes in our perception of the agent of sacrifice. Responsive phenomenology describes the experience of self-withdrawal and surrender to the Other as a pre-conscious event that turns logos and practice into a hetero-logos and hetero-practice. The subject of morality and self-sacrifice which had “considered itself as the basis and center of everything” (Waldenfels 2003, p. 24) begins to falter. Moral behavior, solidarity and care are no longer intrinsic features of the self-starting agent. The commitment to act on the Other’s pain is no longer one of our intrinsic properties or characteristics. The view that self-sacrifice is a completely voluntary act is, for example, advanced by Mark Overvold. For Overvold, the voluntariness is a necessary feature of self-sacrifice; self-sacrifice “must be selfinflicted. There must be an element of choice such that the individual chooses to perform an act which he expects to bring a loss” (Overvold 1980, p. 109). This means, in reverse, that acts which are driven or conditioned by external forces cannot be seen as self-sacrifice. To illustrate his concept of self-sacrifice, Overvold draws on Richard Brandt’s definition of volitional choice. For Brandt, an act is volitional if, first, the agent has full access to the available information about the consequences of his doing; and, second, if the agent is rational in the sense that he has “firmly and vividly in mind, and equally at the center of attention, all those knowable facts which, if he thought about them, would make a difference to his tendency to act” (ibid., p. 106f). According to these requirements and Overvold’s definition, self-sacrifice is an autonomous act as long as the decision to sacrifice something is based on complete information and on the rational capability to understand the implications and consequences of one’s decision.

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Overvold’s account implies the assumption that self-sacrifice begins with a clear idea about our wants and desires and about the reasons why we should sacrifice something. The rationality and volitionality of self-sacrifice, ultimately, guarantee that our own needs and interests are met, which supports Overvold’s overall argument that self-sacrifice is a form of self-interest (ibid., p. 107). This view is irreconcilable with a responsive phenomenology, which sees our interaction with the world (including self-sacrifice) as starting at a point that is prior to rational and informed decisions. According to responsive phenomenology, selfsacrifice cannot be explained by rationality and self-interest. Neither conscious reflection nor pre-established principles or complete information about the consequences of our doing are sufficient to illuminate the motives of thoughts and actions. Feminist theory of volitional choice1 differs from Overvold/Brandt but also from responsive phenomenology. It can be positioned somewhere in the middle, between subject-centrism and a radical de-centering of the subject. For feminist theory, Harry Frankfurt’s account of autonomy has been instructive (Frankfurt 1988).2 According to Frankfurt, an autonomous decision is one that the agent wholeheartedly endorses and identifies with (cited in Mackenzie/Stoljar 2000, p. 14 and Stoljar 2013, chapter 2.1). From this perspective, the conditions of rationality and complete information are not sufficient to render a decision an autonomous choice. A decision by a rational and knowledgeable agent is heteronomous as long as the agent does not wholeheartedly endorse or identify with it and as long as the decision does not represent the agent’s choices and preferences, for example because they are afraid to decide against the will of someone else or they are forced by pressure or violence. Stoljar calls these decisions cases of “diminished autonomy” or a “failure of autonomy” (Stoljar 2013, chapter 2). 1 In the following my arguments will be based on the assumption that the feminist concept of autonomy is applicable to the ethics of care as a feminist ethics. 2 See for example Mackenzie/Stoljar 2000 (p. 12ff) and Stoljar 2013 (chapter 4), who deal critically with Frankfurt in order to construct a feminist-informed concept of autonomy.

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Frankfurt’s account allows for the possibility that a decision by a rational and knowledgeable agent is subject to external forces of oppression and manipulation that undermine choices and preferences and that render a personal decision the decision of someone else. Unlike Overvold’s rational and knowledge-based account, it concedes that agents may sacrifice something that is important although they do not wholeheartedly endorse and identify with this act. From this perspective, self-sacrifice can be subject to social expectations, gender roles and stereotypes, or can be the result of an internationalization of oppressive norms and a diminished sense of self-worth. The combination of this critical concept of autonomy with the self-sacrifice debate is important to a theory of care that aims at analyzing the causes and motives of self-sacrificial care. It is, for example, a good starting point for an investigation into why self-sacrificial care is more often associated with certain groups or genders, and for analyses of stereotypes that assign to certain groups roles and places within societies that are hard to escape. As feminist analyses show, full endorsement and identification can be undermined or impaired by external forces such as stereotypes and social norms. Natalie Stoljar uses the term “deformed desire” to refer to this phenomenon by which “the oppressed come to desire that which is oppressive to them as the result of the internalization of an oppressive ideology” (Stoljar 2013, chapter 2).3

3 Because it is difficult to demarcate endorsement/identification from manipulation and indoctrination, some argue that we need a more substantive account of autonomy that requires not only a certain procedure – wholehearted endorsement and identification – but also a specific content of choices. According to the substantive account of autonomy, decisions can be called autonomous only if they are compatible with a life of dignity and freedom. From this perspective, the decision to assume a subservient role is not an autonomous decision. Although self-abnegation, deference or servility can be chosen in a way that the agent feels positive about, they do not in the light of a substantive theory, count as autonomous acts. See Mackenzie/Stoljar 2000 on the difference between Frankfurt’s hierarchical procedural account and the substantive accounts of autonomy, and on the difference between strong and weak substantive accounts of autonomy (pp. 19-21).

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Grace Clement distinguishes between two forms of impediment to autonomy. One such impediment is external forces that compel us to carry out actions that are essentially not our actions but the actions of the person who forces us to act according to her will. The second impediment is a form of inner compulsion or alienation, such that our actions do not truly represent our choice. Our actions, rather, are directed towards the implementation of the Other’s wishes and needs (Clement 1996, p.  23). As Clement rightfully remarks, the second concept of autonomy bears the intricacy that the ability to reflect upon one’s choices depends on additional factors, most importantly on the question of whether the communities and societies we live in allow for and are conducive to critical reflections about our preferences and choices. For this reason, as Clement argues, it is important to combine the psychological account of autonomy with a social account of autonomy that considers the social conditions that allow individuals to be in control of their lives and to critically reflect on and also transform the environment within which their decisions are taken (ibid., p. 24). An analysis of the social factors that condition our choices and decisions is of great importance to the ethics of care and to feminist theory at large. Factors that diminish autonomy competence include personal experiences by which the agent came to acquire not only certain beliefs, values and emotions, oppressive socialization in the form of manipulation and indoctrination, but also an agent’s learned ability to self-reflection, self-direction and self-knowledge and feelings like self-respect, self-worth and self-trust.4 One important publication in this regard is Relational Autonomy, edited by Mackenzie/Stoljar (2000). The concept of relational autonomy accounts for the effects of socialization and oppressive contexts on autonomy competence. Of particular importance in the context of diminished autonomy are the contributions of Paul Benson (2000), on the relationship between self-worth and the ability to assume responsibility for one’s actions, Mackenzie (2000), who explores the connection between autonomy, self-hood and imagination, arguing that oppressive contexts may play a role in constricting or impairing an agent’s capability of self-imagination, Anne Donchin (2000), who investigates the impact of interpersonal dependencies and relations of power on autonomy, Carlyn McLeod and Susan Sherwin (2000), 4

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Unlike Overvold’s subject-centric and rationality-based account, relational and critical concepts of autonomy share some commonalities with responsive phenomenology. Both responsive phenomenology and feminist theory see agency determined and restricted by the sociality of our existence. Experiences of alterity constrain preferences and choices. The Other’s voice is a constant companion that undermines our autonomy. However, feminist and responsive accounts of autonomy also differ in fundamental ways. Whereas feminist theory locates the elements of heteronomy in social norms and structures, Waldenfels’s analysis runs deeper by referring to processes that precede not only volitional choice but also the pre-conscious influence of conventions and norms. Whereas, for feminist theory, selfsacrifice can be a voluntary practice because involuntariness is not intrinsic to self-sacrifice, Waldenfels is more radical in relegating all our thoughts and actions to a starting point that is outside ourselves. For him, our practices must be understood as a response to what happens to us prior to becoming an agent (Waldenfels 2007a, p. 462). Moreover, for feminist theory the impairment of autonomy through social norms and oppressive structures can be overcome by analyses, reflection and the power of the “performative”. There is more than just a theoretical possibility that an agent can be freed from external forces and influences. Recommendations to withdraw from exploitative care relations, to terminate self-sacrificial care or to replace self-sacrifice with self-care are based on the belief that self-sacrifice can – against all odds – be a free decision taken by a rational, self-responsible and mature agent. Liberation from these forces is not only possible but also desirable. The ultimate goal of a critique of self-sacrifice is to help heteronomous selves transform into self-determined agents who are liberated from fear, excessive self-doubt and the compulsion to perpetuate gender stereotypes. Feminist analysis aims at a reconstitution who analyze the effects of oppression on self-trust, which they see as necessary for the exercise of autonomy, and finally Susan Brison (2000), who is concerned about the negative effects of hate speech on agents’ autonomy by reducing significant options available to the agents, by affecting the agents’ beliefs about themselves and by affecting others’ beliefs about and attitudes towards agents.

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of self-directedness in contexts of care and dependencies. This may be harder to achieve than Overvold’s/Brandt’s account of autonomy suggests, but it is not impossible. For the ethics of care, self-sacrificial behavior is, in principle, under our control and can be reduced or even abandoned. The question is to which extent change is possible if, as responsive phenomenology describes it, there is no subject at the initial stage of self-sacrifice. The heteronomy of the responsive self raises doubts about the power to free ourselves from self-sacrificial behavior and the (at least theoretical) possibility of choosing self-sacrifice just as we choose pasta or rice, black or brown shoes. It undermines the idea that moral commitment and care for the Other is, after all and in the ideal state of social justice and equality, the result of conscious reflection and choice. From the perspective of a responsive phenomenology, the recommendation to end self-sacrificial practices of care ignores that the experience of foreign pain and distress just happens to us, and that the commitment to and for the sake of the Other has grown within ourselves independently of our initiative or permission. From a responsive perspective, the ideal of the mature and autonomous carer is an unreachable illusion. Subjection to foreign wishes and needs is an essential aspect of our life. Waldenfels’s radicalness in describing the heteronomous foundation of our existence exceeds the relational approach of the ethics of care and dismantles the feminist agent of change. Self-directedness and autonomy is not the normal state. Neither is the impairment of autonomy the result of a foreign will to dominate and exploit. Rather, heteronomy and subjection to the Other’s voice are part of our existence from its very beginning. The freedom that we have is reduced to the possibility of converting moral commitment and obligation into different forms of response. But there is no free decision to let the Other invade the self, take the place of the self. The desire to act on the Other’s pain is not at our disposal. At the moment of encounter, the Other has already seized the self. The Other’s demands are imposed on us in the form of a compulsion or coercion. The commitment to act for the sake of the Other is not something we choose or initiate, even if it comes at the expense of our

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own interests. The Other’s demand approaches us before we start moving into its direction (Waldenfels 2006, p. 29). We care because we feel the pain of the Other in a form of urgency and need to act. The notion of a compulsion to sacrifice something and care for someone is often not mentioned in politically informed debates about self-sacrifice. For the ethics of care, it is ambivalent. On the one hand, this notion describes an important aspect of our experience with care. It is explained as the intrusion of the self by the Other and as the dwelling of foreign pain and needs within ourselves in a way that we can neither ignore nor tolerate. On the other hand, the inevitability of the response is the impossibility of not listening to the Other’s call for attention, help, support; not to be committed to the Other’s welfare and thriving. The Other never lets us free. It affirms the notion of the passivity of our response as such, the notion that we are not only inclined but, indeed, compelled to act on the Other’s pain. The phenomenological description of the compulsion to care differs from the idea that care obligations are imposed on us because we are members of certain groups or bearers of certain features. With the notion of inevitability and coercion, responsive ethics addresses an aspect of self-sacrifice that is well known by carers but not sufficiently described by a theory of care that scrutinizes coercion in the light of social oppression and power inequalities. Responsive phenomenology describes ought and involuntariness as an aspect that is inherent in self-sacrifice and not the result of social oppression, as a form of compulsion that cannot be grasped with social and political analyses alone. It thereby questions the possibility of overriding self-sacrificial forms of care by simply liberating ourselves from oppressive structures or relations. As Waldenfels shows, our commitment and moral obligation towards the Other is rooted in our ability to respond, which is more deeply entrenched in our psychic life than stereotypes and social norms. From the perspective of a responsive phenomenology we are able to re-conceptualize a suspension of the self in favor of the Other as the condition for the possibility of morality rather than as a failure of autonomy or personal weakness. Responsive phenomenology emphasizes the involuntariness of acting on foreign interests. The acknowledgment of a

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coercion as an indissoluble element of self-sacrifice can increase a feeling of acceptance. The commitment to care and sacrifice does not start within us and is not part of our individual and distinctive features. To be human means to be responsive, to allow for otherness within the self. From a responsive perspective it may even help us accept and embrace our sacrifices on behalf of the Other. Self-sacrifice appears as an expression of our responsive existence, in conformity with the way we are. On the other hand, the moral ought of self-sacrifice limits our capabilities to significantly alter our commitment to the needy and dependent Other. Does this mean that the analyses of the power implications of self-sacrifice are futile and that the hope for more justice in care relations is in vain? Responsive phenomenology describes heteronomy and self-suspension as important aspects of human existence, but it does not explain why there are differences in the extent and quantity of moral commitment, why there is uneven distribution of care rights and responsibilities, and why the concepts of self-sacrifice is gendered. The acknowledgment of an a priori permeability towards foreign needs and wants does not render an analysis of the different forms of response useless. In chapter 2.3.2.2. I have shown that the phenomenological concept of experience is compatible with dynamic and change. Waldenfels’s distinction between the that and what of the response is his contribution to the general openness of phenomenology. From a responsive perspective, self-sacrifice is a bifurcated phenomenon. It is the inevitable event of responding to the Other as the foreign. And it is the actualization of the experience of foreignness in contingent and divergent practices. The act of the response can take the form of a recognition and commitment as well as the form of ignorance or negligence. The multitude of possibilities does not interfere with a primary and inevitable response-event. The that of the response cannot be cut off from our experience, even if we decide not to act on it. It is indissolubly inscribed in our lives. It is the runway for our interaction with the world. The what of the response, however, is flexible. It is subject to changing norms and conventions. The flexibility and openness of the what of the response allows for specific

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patterns of who responds to whom, why and how, to differences in the way someone sacrifices something on someone’s behalf. Analyses of social factors that distort equality and promote exploitation are still possible from a responsive perspective. A responsive ethics leaves room for a broad range of possibilities of how the experience of alterity and of a withdrawal of the self can be processed and transformed into sense and action. This multiplicity of response-acts supports the feminist thesis that the range and availability of options are conditioned by historical and social processes. Although responsive ethics is radical in destabilizing the subject-centrism of modern philosophy and in emphasizing the inevitability of our commitment to the Other, it still leaves room for the possibility of changing those factors that shape our responses in one way or the other. Change is compatible with responsive ethics because the problem of the feminization of self-sacrifice (to give an example) can be located at the level of social contexts that have been added to the initial response. Even from a responsive perspective we can account for social processes that underlie, devalue, distort or exploit our response-ability. Adopting a responsive perspective does not render the analysis of these processes impossible. The notion of self-sacrifice as hetero-practice and the search for the social constructions that shape and inform practices of self-sacrifice are not mutually exclusive.

5.2. The reappraisal of self-sacrifice revisited The mere compatibility of responsive phenomenology with a transformative agenda is not yet enough to be able to speak of a usefulness of the phenomenological perspective for the ethics of care. Why should care theorists adopt a responsive perspective on self-sacrifice and care? The following chapter argues that the usefulness of this perspective stems from a reappraisal of self-sacrifice that can be both affirmative and liberating. 5.2.1. The non-normativity of responsive ethics A phenomenological reappraisal of self-sacrifice seems, at first glance, counter-intuitive because phenomenology normally abstains

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from evaluative statements. In this it differs from the ethics of care, which is a normative ethics that seeks to answer questions about right or wrong and to provide moral guidance and orientation, for example regarding the right balance between care and overcare, the role of emotions or the value of relatedness and interdependence. Normativity also shapes the debate about self-sacrifice. As mentioned in chapter 1.1. care ethicists raise questions about the ethicity of self-sacrifice and the moral value of altruism and other-centeredness. Responsive ethics, on the other hand, is not a normative ethics. Waldenfels explicitly sees his role as a phenomenologist in describing moral phenomena, but not in evaluating them (Waldenfels 2000, p.  305). He argues that a phenomenologist who raises normative claims would have to justify them by applying their own moral values and beliefs. The justification of beliefs on the grounds of rational reasoning, however, is confronted with the problem of infinite regress. It is not possible to provide an ultimate and justified foundation for these claims. Moral reasoning does not lead to moral truth. For this reason, philosophers should refrain from making normative claims (ibid., p.  306; also Waldenfels 2006, p.  89). Phenomenology can describe or explain moral behavior but it can never serve as its foundation. Moreover, a normative ethics would not suit as an orientation because moral competence does not derive from normative claims. It derives from practice and testing.5 The non-normativity of responsive ethics sometimes gets blurred in passages in which Waldenfels writes about multiculturalism and tolerance. Here, responsivity and permeability of the self transform into attitudes that we should adopt in order to show respect towards otherness and a critical stance towards euro-centrism. In Phenomenology of the Alien, for example, Waldenfels asks “[h]ow can we engage the alien without neutralizing or denying its effects, its 5 “Man lernt gerecht zu handeln, indem man gerecht handelt. Die Beurteilungskriterien entwickeln sich im besonnenen Handeln und nirgends sonst” (Waldenfels 2006, p. 85).

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challenges and demands in and through the way we are dealing with the alien?” (p.  5). However, since these passages focus on multiculturalism and not on issues of social inequality and justice, they do not alter the overall notion that responsive ethics does not explicitly acknowledge the possible power implications of selfsacrifice. In his article “In the Place of the Other” (2011), Waldenfels mentions the risk of an “over-identification” with the Other. According to Waldenfels, over-identification can restrain or even impede responsivity. This can result in “a blockade of response”, in “a pathos without response” (p.  6). His concern refers to an impairment of our responsive abilities but not to the impact of these abilities on the social status of the respondent. At the end, it is the Other and the relationship which may suffer from an over-identification, rather than the caring self. Further, Waldenfels concedes that the way we respond is always embedded in a horizon of cultural practices and norms that determine who asks what and whom and who responds to whom and in what forms (Waldenfels 2006, p. 41). But this does not lead him to further reflections about the relationship between social practices and power relations. The usefulness of Waldenfels’s philosophy for a political theory such as the ethics of care is, moreover, constrained by his Foucauldian concept of power, which describes power relations as horizontal instead of being implemented from above, and thereby hierarchical, pluralistic, diffused and pervasive.6 This approach, however, is not helpful in advancing feminist inquiry into the reasons for structural oppression and inequality, nor does it contribute to developing strategies of how to overcome power inequalities. As a preliminary conclusion, we can say that responsive ethics, apparently, does not serve the theoretical needs of the ethics of care as a political theory. Even though responsive phenomenology is, in principle, “… Macht, die nicht von oben kommt, sondern sich horizontal ausbreitet … Macht ist plural durch und durch” (Waldenfels 2006, p. 160). 6

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open to change, it lacks a normative stance and, moreover, a sensitivity towards the power implications of moral behavior. 5.2.2. The ethos in statu nascendi Waldenfels states explicitly that responsive ethics is not a normative ethics, but this does not mean that it is a descriptive ethics in the classical sense. Descriptive ethics, normally, are either meta-ethics that seek to understand the functionality of moral systems within the larger framework of a social order or human communities, or they are comparative ethics which analyze moral beliefs and practices throughout time and place by comparing one ethics with another. A descriptive ethics seeks to understand how people acquire moral knowledge and why their moral beliefs differ. It is often linked to psychological, empirical, sociological or anthropological research about the attitudes of individuals or groups of people. One overarching characteristic of a descriptive ethics is, further, that it approaches morality from a detached third-person perspective. A descriptive ethics seeks to understand moral behavior from the position of a non-involved observer. The criteria of a descriptive ethics do not apply, however, to Waldenfels’s responsive ethics. Waldenfels does not approach morality from the detached position of a non-involved observer. His ethical inquiry is not part of a larger project to identify the elements that build and strengthen human communities in different cultural, social and historical contexts. Waldenfels’s interest in morality is different from that of a sociologist, anthropologist or evolutionist. He is also not interested in comparative studies. Responsive ethics, finally, is not a form of ethical naturalism. Although the key concept of responsive ethics – responsivity – is not a matter of volitional choice, it is also not a form of biological or instinctual behavior. Responsivity, rather, is a re-interpretion of rationality. Humans as responsive beings are rational beings, not despite their being subject to the irreducible foreignness in the world but because of their ability to acknowledge this foreignness. Responsibility is the breeding ground of a rational life in the sense of a life that is capable of transcending nature. The moral response to the Other in

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need is not derived from universal laws. But it is also not an intrinsic property of our unconsciousness. It is, rather, “a practical necessity [that] belongs to the essential presuppositions of our social existence in the world” (Waldenfels 2011b, p. 39). According to Waldenfels, responsive ethics stands for an escape from the dilemma between normativism and descriptiveness (Waldenfels 2000, p.  308). Responsive ethics neither seeks to contribute to normative debates about the moral good, nor does it describe morality from a third-person perspective. Rather, the focus of Waldenfels’s ethical inquiry is on the origin of morality and the source of moral obligation (see chapter 3.3.2 ). In his own words, Waldenfels explores the “ethos in statu nascendi” (ibid.; Waldenfels 1993, p.  514). This means that he seeks to lay bare the conditions for morality to arise, to shed light on morality at the moment of its formation. If descriptiveness stands for a method only, responsive ethics should be called a descriptive ethics because it portrays morality at the moment of its emergence and describes the conditions of this rise. But if we associate descriptive ethics with a certain inquisitive interest, such as the role of morality in social systems or the differences between moral beliefs throughout time and place, then responsive ethics is not a descriptive ethics. Waldenfels’s inquiry, rather, is guided by a genuine interest in the provenance of our commitment to the Other; in the obligation we feel in the face of someone’s distress. It is guided by the belief that moral obligation is neither the result of rational reflection nor of self-interest. Foreign interests and our own never unite, yet the move to the Other is not an illusion or self-deceit. Morality arises with the uptake of foreignness within the self as the consequence of a responsive way of experiencing the world as something that is larger than the self. This ability, however, is only possible because we are ready to withdraw at the moment of the encounter. There is no responsivity without self-withdrawal. And there is no morality without self-withdrawal. Self-withdrawal is the condition of the possibility of morality. Laying bare the sources and conditions of morality is, therefore, descriptive and normative at the same time. Responsive ethics describes

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the ethos “in statu nascendi”, but this description has a normative dimension because it is motivated by a genuine interest to understand why we are moral and what it takes to be moral or more than this. Uncovering the source of morality cannot be completely detached from our perception of this source and our behavior towards it. Responsive ethics oscillates between normativity and descriptiveness. The inquiry into the ethos in statu nascendi is not a mere description of the nature of morality. But it is also not framed in the form of a moral command or prescription. For Waldenfels, the normative dimension of a responsive ethics consists in providing us with an orientation for practical life.7 A responsive ethics does not call for the adherence to certain principles, but it sharpens our awareness that morality starts with the surrender to foreign wants and needs. Waldenfels connects morality with the ability to respond. He draws our attention to the fact that responsivity has an ethical significance, that morality is built on the responsive aspect of our existence. Our ethical choices appear in light of a responsive perspective. 5.2.3. A responsive reappraisal of self-sacrifice and closing remarks From a responsive perspective, self-sacrifice is a hetero-practice that takes its departure from an invasion of the self by the Other. The condition for this invasion is an absolute passivity and complete withdrawal. Self-sacrifice (and moral behavior in general) is possible only because of this transcendent moment when the place of the self turns into a place for the Other. Without this pause from the self there would be no responsiveness but only self-sufficient selves that are ignorant of a world outside themselves. The interchange with the world would be reduced to a permanent appropriation. Self-withdrawal is an ability without which moral reasoning and action would not be possible. I have argued in chapter 4.1.1 that self-withdrawal and self-sacrifice share important features. Both embody the ability to give way to the Other and let foreign needs and perspectives prevail over one’s “Unter reponsiver Ethik verstehen wir eine lebenspraktische Orientierung, deren Leitidee die Responsivität ist” (Waldenfels 2006, p. 39). 7

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own. Both stand for an impairment of self assertiveness and for a shift of agency from the self to the Other. However, self-withdrawal and self-sacrifice cannot be equated. Whereas self-withdrawal is a preconscious event that happens to us, self-sacrifice is a practice that processes and visualizes this event. Self-sacrifice as hetero-practice is the outcome and manifestation of a withdrawal of the self in the face of the Other. If self-withdrawal is the condition of the possibility of morality, then self-sacrifice puts this possibility into practice. It converts experience into action. It transforms the possibility of moral behavior into moral behavior. Critics of self-sacrifice view it as the result of oppression and indoctrination, or as a weakness and failure. In each case, an exploitation of the self-sacrificing carers is the predictable result. From a responsive perspective, the fact that we subject to the Other’s demanding voice within ourselves is an essential feature of human existence. The inability to hear this voice is a deficiency and an impairment of experience. Not the autonomous agent, but the relational and heteronomous respondent, is the standard form of human existence. In the introduction, I have mentioned different ways in which self-sacrifice has been reappraised by scholars of care. They describe self-sacrifice as an experience of joy or as a source of personal development, identity and belonging. I have argued that these reappraisals conceptualize self-sacrifice as a private endeavor, as an individual preference or property, as a path towards more possibilities and perspectives for the self and for the self’s relationships with another. They seek to find an answer to the question: What does sacrifice mean for me and why should one sacrifice? In these approaches selfsacrifice appears as a gift or new horizon for the self. I have further argued that these forms of a reappraisal of self-sacrifice are not connected to the socio-political agenda of the ethics of care because they do not address the connection between self-sacrifice and the marginalization of care. The responsive perspective provides self-sacrifice with a significance that exceeds individual character traits or preferences. From the responsive perspective, self-sacrifice appears as the manifestation

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of a key element of human existence. It illuminates the role that selfsacrifice as hetero-practice plays within a range of responses. It highlights self-sacrifice as a trace of the responsive mode of experience. From a responsive perspective we see self-sacrifice in light of its significance for a full and rich form of experience. Self-sacrifice appears as the embodiment of a feature that enables human relations and the flourishing of communities. Joan Tronto emphasizes the need for political measures to achieve for care the recognition and remuneration it deserves. She suggests that the distribution of rights and privileges of care is a responsibility of those in power. I have argued in chapter 1.1. that political measures are important, but that the most effective way towards greater recognition of care is a change from within the relations of care. The way we look at self-sacrificial care determines the way we behave towards it. A perception of self-sacrifice in the sense of a responseability can thus be a step towards more recognition of care – a recognition that protects the carer against exploitation, which is more easily justified if self-sacrifice is seen as a weakness. A re-evaluation of self-sacrifice in a way that improves the status of carers and care could serve the twofold agenda of an ethics of care both as an ethical and socio-political theory. It could change the status of self-sacrificial care within societies and empower the care givers not to compromise on care by adapting to the standards of “uncaring” societies but to take pride in the care givers’ ability to respond to the Other in need. The ethical dimension of a responsive phenomenology reminds us that giving the Other a place within the self is not a weakness or moral surplus but, rather, a specific human form of experiencing the world and interacting with it – and the condition of the possibility of morality.

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Contributors

Susanne Pohlmann (1970–2016) taught in the field of International Studies at the American University of Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates. She prepared her doctorate (supervised by Christina Schües) in the Institute of Philosophy at the Leuphana University of Lüneburg on the subject of care ethics and responsive phenomenology. She had almost completed her book when she died. Further research interests include feminist ethics and epistemology, global business ethics and Islamic philosophy. She investigated the attribution of, or responsibility for, biased beliefs, and reflected on the institutionalization of Women’s Studies in Germany and the Arab world. Publications: Feminist Epistemology and Philosophy of Science: Power in Knowledge. Journal of International Women‘s Studies, 13, (2012), 1, pp. 170-173. Altruismus und Fürsorge – Von der Schwierigkeit zu sorgen, ohne sich zu verlieren, in: Praxis der Achtsamkeit. Schlüsselbegriffe der Care-Ethik, Elisabeth Conradi, Frans Vosman (eds.), Frankfurt a.M./ New York: Campus 2016, pp. 319-334. Christina Schües is Professor of Philosophy in the Institute for the History of Medicine and Science Studies at the University of Lübeck and Titular Professor for Philosophy at the Institute for Philosophy and Art Sciences, Leuphana University of Lüneburg. She studied philosophy, political sciences, and literature in Hamburg and Philadelphia, taught philosophy at several universities in Germany and the United States, and held an assistant professorship at the University

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self-sacrifice in care: a “responsive” perspective

of Vechta. Her research interests focus on classical and French phenomenology, epistemic injustice, the power of time, and concepts of inter-corporeality, natality and generativity. Related publications: Philosophie des Geborenseins, Freiburg: Alber 2008 (2016 new edition); Ethik und Fürsorge als Beziehungspraxis, in: Praxis der Achtsamkeit. Schlüsselbegriffe der Care-Ethik, Elisabeth Conradi, Frans Vosman (Hg.), Frankfurt/M./New York: Campus 2016, pp.  251-272; The Transhuman Paradigm and the Meaning of Life, in: Future Directions in Feminist Phenomenology, H. Fielding, D. Olkowski (Eds.), Bloomington: Indiana 2017, pp. 218-241; Phenomenology and the political – injustice and prejudges, in: Rethinking Feminist Phenomenology: From the Theoretical to the Practical, Sara Cohen Shabot, Christinia Landry (eds.), London/New York: Rowman & Littlefield 2018, 103-120; Hannah Arendt – Philosophie der Praxis als Welteröffnung, in: Philosophien der Praxis – Ein Handbuch, Thomas Bedorf, Selin Gerlek (eds.), Stuttgart: utb 2019, S. 179-209; Vulnerability and Trust. A  Phenomenological Perspective on the Practice of Care, in: The Ethics of Care: The State of the Art, Frans Vosman, Andries Baart (eds.), Louvain: Peeters (Leuven, 2020).

Ethics of Care

1. C. Leget, C. Gastmans, M. Verkerk (Eds.), Care, Compassion and Recognition. An Ethical Discussion, 2011, IV-250 p. 2. A. van Heijst, Professional Loving Care. An Ethical View of the Healthcare Sector, 2011, VI-212 p. 3. G. Olthuis, H. Kohlen, J. Heier (Eds.), Moral Boundaries Redrawn. The Significance of Joan Tronto’s Argument for Political Theory, Professional Ethics, and Care as Practice, 2014, IV-232 p. 4. I. van Nistelrooij, Sacrifice. A Care-Ethical Reappraisal of Sacrifice and Self-Sacrifice, 2015, X-302 p. 5. R. J. Lynch, Care: An Analysis, 2016, X-305 p. 6. S. Bourgault, E. Pulcini (Eds.), Emotions and Care: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, 2018, VI-262 p. 7. F. Brugère, Care Ethics, 2019, VI-101 p. 8. F. Vosman, A. Baart, J. Hoffman (Eds.), The Ethics of Care: The State of the Art, 2020, VIII-317 p. 9. F. Vosman, P. Nortvedt (Eds.), Care Ethics and Phenomenology: a Contested Kinship, 2020, VIII-226 p. 10. S. Bourgault, F. Vosman (Eds.), Care Ethics in yet a Different Voice: Francophone Contributions, 2020, VI-335 p. 11. S. Laugier, Politics of the Ordinary. Care, Ethics, and Forms of Life, 2020.

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