Living for the Future by Muers Rachel;

Author:Muers, Rachel;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Published: 2019-11-22T00:00:00+00:00

2. Gender and intergenerational responsibility

One of the best-known examples of the use of the ‘maternal’ to talk about responsibility and substitution comes from the work of one of the key proponents of this theme in recent ethics. Emmanuel Levinas’ emphasis on maternity in Otherwise than Being, as the central interpretive framework for thinking about substitutionary existence, has attracted considerable attention – especially, as might be expected, from feminist commentators. For Levinas, the maternal body/self reveals something basic about all human existence and the extent to which it is antecedently given over to the other. Levinas’ work set alongside Bonhoeffer’s reveals more clearly both the crucial importance of the idea of ‘substitution’ for intergenerational responsibility, and its ethical dangers.

Levinas’ philosophy, as is well known, is an extended attempt to think the primacy of the other over the self, and hence of ethics over ontology. The other for Levinas is the one in relation to whom I am always already responsible, with a responsibility that affects the core of my selfhood – to whom I must give, as he puts it, the bread out of my mouth, by whom I am ‘ripped open’. In Otherwise than Being, this way of thinking of the other is closely connected to a phenomenology of the maternal self. The ‘enfleshed’, biological connection to future generations1 is made central to an account of all human ethical existence. Like Bonhoeffer, Levinas makes being-for-others a given of human life – one that is often denied or obscured; and, unlike Bonhoeffer, he places great emphasis on the fact that substitution begins at the material and biological level. ‘Incarnation’, embodied existence, in Otherwise than Being is thought in terms of vulnerability, proximity and exposure – to be fleshly is to exist in unavoidable proximity to the other who can make demands on my embodiment. Incarnation thus understood is also primary in human existence; we are not separate or of invulnerable consciousness that then has to come to terms with ‘being in the flesh’, and ‘incarnation does not result from a materialisation’.2 In a context in which responsibility to future generations is being thought about to a large extent in terms of material resources and genetic inheritance, it is particularly important to see the connections between social and cultural ‘substitution’ and the facts of human embodiment.3

All of this is really to repeat, in differently gendered terms and hence with a different emphasis, what was said in the previous chapter (using Bonhoeffer’s thought) about the way in which substitution is built into human existence, and the possibility of reading this Christologically. The change of gender does, however, point rather starkly to a problem with the whole idea. Recall that Bonhoeffer started with the father’s relationship to his child, and that he used this to demonstrate that relationships of responsibility are not a matter of choice, but a given. The father can walk away, but he will still be a father. The text is, then, apparently addressed to people who think they can, as it were, walk away – who have the isolated self as their starting point.

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