Mérédith Laferté-Coutu | From Creation to Genesis: Husserl and Levinas on the Formation of the Ethical Subject | Philosophy Speaker Series

Abstract: This paper brings Husserl and Levinas together to think about the relationship between value-independent and value-dependent forms of ethical responsibility. The major advantage of such a phenomenological approach is that it conceives ethical responsibility as tied to the various temporalities of subject formation. This explains how a person and a community can be bound by, at times, incommensurate ethical demands (for all others and for this other). Moreover, it provides a way to critically reflect on both sources of normativity without needing to choose which one is foundational. To build this argument, I first introduce Husserl’s account of ethical responsibilities as generated, often passively, alongside the very persons who bear them. Second, I connect this account with Levinas’s notion of ethical responsibility as creating the subject prior to the possibility of any valuation. By turning to Husserl’s unpublished manuscripts on ethics, to which Levinas had no access, I argue that both thinkers can ultimately be read as much more complementary than Levinas himself realized.