Worldly ethics: Democratic politics and care for the world

Abstract

Wordly Ethics is a beautifully written and erudite intervention in debates about the relationship between ethical disposition and political action. Ella Myers approaches the turn to ethos from the perspective of a sympathetic critic. Instead of reiterating familiar critiques of the universalism, abstraction and ahistoricism of normative political theory, she focuses her attention on 'the new ethics'. This ethical turn draws on continental thought, particularly the late work of Michel Foucault and Emmanuel Levinas. Myers focuses on two main approaches: the Foucaultian 'care of oneself' and the Levinasian 'responsibility for the other'. She is a careful reader of these theorists, and also shows how their ideas have been taken up by contemporary political theorists such as William Connolly, Simon Critchley and Judith Butler. Her evaluation comes across clearly when she describes these two approaches as the therapeutic and charitable models of ethics. According to Myers, both of these approaches are ultimately depoliticizing and therefore not particularly democratic. The alternative she proposes is more Arendtian in tenor. She describes it as a 'contentious and collaborative care for the world'. In the first chapter, Myers explains why the ethics of self-care is not democratic. She concedes that a therapeutic approach may sometimes be a first step towards democratic participation, but she argues that it may just as easily lead to narcissism or even domination. A closer look at Foucault's late work shows why this is true. Foucault developed his new aesthetic approach to the self through readings of ancient texts. Myers points out that these Greek authors understood self-fashioning to be preparation for rule over others. This should remind us that the link between self-care and political equality is not something we can take for granted. Some of Myers' other criticisms of Foucault are familiar but still worth reiterating in this context. For example, she notes the difficulty of distinguishing between types of 'care of the self' that reproduce power and those that resist it. In his later works, Foucault called for 'action by the self on the self' but never fully explained how we can be sure the self-fashioning agent is not also the subject of power. Do contemporary Foucaultians provide a richer account of the link between self-care, democratic ethos and democratic politics? According to Myers, they do not. Myers focuses on Connolly's depiction of the relationship between self-care and democratic ethos. Connolly emphasizes that the arts of the self are important because they cultivate democratic sensibilities such as critical responsiveness and agonistic respect. He also suggests that the self is multivalent and this makes it possible to mobilize certain dispositions against other dispositions, habits and assumptions. Myers argues that the connection between self-formation and political action remains underspecified: What motivates people to engage in critical self-fashioning in the first place, and why should we be confident that such reflexivity will generate a democratic ethos rather than narcissism? For Myers, the answer to the first question is 'democratic association'. Working together with others to improve the world is a praxis that motivates us to reconsider our own habits and provides a social context that enables us to change them. This emphasis on intersubjectivity might seem to suggest an affinity with the ethics of responsibility, an approach influenced by the work of Emmanuel Levinas. The second chapter of the book, however, highlights the difference between worldly ethics and the ethics of responsibility. The key idea of the ethics of responsibility is that the self is produced through an originary, asymmetrical encounter with the other, which inaugurates a limitless responsibility. According to Myers, this theory fails to explain the relationship between ethical responsibility for the concrete other and political responsibility in a world of multiple others with conflicting needs. Furthermore, while the content of this responsibility remains vague, it seems to point towards an obligation to provide for the basic material needs of specific individuals rather than to attend to broader structural change or ideological analysis. This unintentionally ends up reinforcing the liberal tendency to embrace charitable ethics and devalue democratic action. According to Myers, even Judith Butler's more explicitly political notion of 'precarity' is problematic because it still rests on the false promise of Levinasianism: the hope that mere exposure to the other will generate a sense of responsibility that motivates action to combat vulnerability and domination. Many of these criticisms of Levinas are convincing and generally accepted in the secondary literature, but I would not go so far as to conflate the ethics of responsibility with 'charitable volunteerism'. Myers argues that charitable ethics is a kind of noblesse oblige: hierarchical, asymmetrical and non-reciprocal; it would be misleading, however, to characterize Levinas's self–other relationship in this way. He does describe the relationship as hierarchical, but the hierarchy stems from the way the self is subordinate to the other. The asymmetry is meant to emphasize that the other is not a projection of the self and the relationship is not one of contract and exchange. This account helps us think beyond the dominant categories of individu-alism, identity and a form of equality, which is actually the projection of the self onto the other. The face of the other is not the poor person whom I pity but rather the transcendent force that ruptures my sense of mastery and constitutes the self.