Toward a Feminist Ethics of Nonviolence

Adriana Cavarero, Judith Butler, Bonnie Honig, Timothy J. Huzar, Clare Woodford, Timothy J. Huzar, Clare Woodford

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780823290109
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Toward a Feminist Ethics of Nonviolence brings together major feminist thinkers to debate Cavarero's call for a postural ethics of nonviolence and a sociality rooted in bodily interdependence. Toward a Feminist Ethics of Nonviolence brings together three major feminist thinkers—Adriana Cavarero, Judith Butler, and Bonnie Honig—to debate Cavarero's call for a postural ethics of nonviolence. The book consists of three longer essays by Cavarero, Butler, and Honig, followed by shorter responses by a range of scholars that widen the dialogue, drawing on post-Marxism, Italian feminism, queer theory, and lesbian and gay politics. Together, the authors contest the boundaries of their common project for a pluralistic, heterogeneous, but urgent feminist ethics of nonviolence.

ÉTUDES

Cavarero, Kant, and the Arcs of Friendship

CHRISTINE BATTERSBY

My underlying concern in this étude is the extent to which Adriana Cavarero’s relational ontology can provide us with a suitable opening for the important task of reimagining the grounding principles of political and ethical theory in ways that help us reconcile the ideals of free choice and individualism with the recognition that all humans are vulnerable, and that the individual’s choices are subject to manipulation. This is an urgent question, since we find ourselves living at a time when power inequalities and states of dependency are increasing rather than diminishing. The so-called tech giants (including Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple) play on our weaknesses as they manipulate our needs, our friendships, and our desires, and there is increasing evidence that these technologies are themselves being exploited in order to distort the operation of democratic systems of government. There is a pressing need for a political and ethical framework that can adequately address issues relating to power imbalances, along with bodily and psychological frailties. I will, however, approach this topic in a sideways fashion: through a consideration of Cavarero’s criticisms of Immanuel Kant in her recent book Inclinations: A Critique of Rectitude.¹

There we discover that Cavarero is highly critical of Kant for privileging a self that positions itself as solitary, as upright and always under the control of the head and of reason, and for developing an “autarchic and egoistic model” that makes “verticality” key to the “postural geometry of Kantian ethics.”² As such, Cavarero places Kant in opposition to her own relational ontology and her own alternative ethics and politics, which emphasize interpersonal relationships, vulnerability, and modes of inclination and subjectivity linked to maternity. Cavarero’s argument against Kant is important to that of the book overall, as well as to her philosophical position more generally, as Judith Butler also shows in her chapter, “Leaning Out.”³ We see this in Chapter 2 of Inclinations, entitled “Kant and the Newborn,” and in comments on Kant scattered throughout that book, as well as in a related essay, “Rectitude: Reflections on Postural Ontology” (2013), which focuses almost entirely on Kant.⁴

Inclinations opens with the observation that it was when writing about what is missing from Kant’s philosophy that Walter Benjamin came up with the idea that moral philosophy would be radically transformed if we gave inclination (Neigung) a positive moral value.⁵ For Kant, famously, moral worth is tied to obedience to the moral law and, more especially, to duty (Pflicht); by contrast, inclination is either morally neutral or morally harmful. Cavarero regards Kant’s low esteem for inclination as symptomatic of a more general failing in our culture and develops Benjamin’s hint about inclination—and about Kant—as she seeks to expose the bias toward the upright and the perpendicular that dominates Western thought. In Inclinations, it is the maternal that takes center stage, and Cavarero shows how Kant, along with many other writers, fails to register the ontological and ethical imbalances that result from the fact that a human fetus is dependent for its growth on a mother, and that infancy is also a state of dependence on an adult—and usually female—carer. Neglecting ontological dependencies and power inequalities, philosophers and political theorists overprivilege fully autonomous, and ideally equal and adult selves. Cavarero provides a pithy critique of such a cultural bias, and seeks to counterbalance it by stressing the visual, metaphoric, and philosophical importance of being off-balance, with one self inclining toward another. As such, Cavarero is seeking to provide an alternative imaginary not only to an ontological schematism that has a dominant and solitary “I,” but also to any ethics or politics that is erected on such a basis.

Much of her critique of Kant is well-founded, but Cavarero neglects Kant’s privilege of friendship and his account of “unsocial sociability” (ungesellige Geselligkeit) as integral to human civilization. In what follows I will look at this gap. I will be critical, but the criticisms are offered in a spirit that does, I hope, reflect my longstanding friendship with Adriana Cavarero. Indeed, the criticisms are not meant to detract from the power of this, her most challenging, original, and important book—at least as far as I am concerned. My criticisms will be detailed insofar as they relate to Kant; but at stake is a broader issue, in that it seems to me that Cavarero’s ontology, with its emphasis on asymmetrical relationality, needs a further swerve so as to include arcs of dependence that are appropriate to friendship between individuals, states, and other social groupings.

And here I need to start by saying that Cavarero is not entirely fair to Kant. Relationality does, for example, play a larger role in his philosophy than she allows. She suggests, for example, that Kant is a solipsist, relying on Hannah Arendt’s Book of Thoughts to establish this claim.⁶ But this is rather misleading, insofar as solipsism is usually defined as the view or theory that the self is all that can be known to exist. Kant’s position, by contrast, as it emerges in the Critique of Pure Reason—and, more especially, in the “Refutation of Idealism” of the second (1787) edition—is that we cannot have direct inner knowledge of the self, and that we are only able to say “I” insofar as we are able to locate an object in space and time to which we stand in a relationship of negation. Cavarero’s reading of Kant elides the positions of Descartes and Kant; but, for Kant, Descartes is an idealist, and precisely the type of idealist that he sets out to “refute.”⁷

Cavarero and Arendt are on stronger ground when together they suggest that Kant’s moral philosophy goes astray insofar as it neglects other human beings with whom we share the space-time world. But even here there is a degree of exaggeration. Cavarero quotes Arendt as claiming that “ ‘it is most surprising that in The Critique of Practical Reason, and in his other moral writings, Kant hardly can speak of other people [Mitmenschen]. It is really just about the Self and Reason functioning in isolation.’ ”⁸ But the I and reason are never isolated in Kant, at least on the level of the space-time world, which is, Kant insists, the only world that it is possible to know. Cavarero reads Kant as adopting a “two-world” ontology that reaches back to Plato.⁹ Kant is, however, even more critical of Plato and Platonism than he is of Descartes.¹⁰ He does not claim that we can have knowledge of the world of the noumenal in which freedom, God, and the soul exist as ontological entities; but only that in our moral dealings with others—and also in terms of the relation that the self has with itself—we have to act as if that were the case. Ascribing moral responsibility in the empirical (phenomenal) world does, Kant argues, require treating the “I” as if it were autonomous and also a unity, and as if it were responsible for its own freely chosen actions. As such, Kant does not fit straightforwardly into the “two-world” view of human reality that Cavarero describes in terms of an “immobile and ecstatic verticalization” that is entirely hostile to inclination and the “curled-up posture” of those who are trapped within Plato’s cave of sensory illusion.¹¹

There is a caricature of Kant as an isolated individual who did not much like other people—especially children. And, to some extent, Cavarero recycles this view. But we now know this to be a historical mistake. Kant’s closest friend was Joseph Green, an English merchant, originally from Hull, also unmarried, but three years younger than Kant. Green lived his life in accordance with strict rules and maxims, timetabling his day-to-day activities with scrupulous attention to detail—so much so that it has been argued that he provided the model for the main character, Orbil, in Theodor Gottlieb von Hippel’s satirical play The Man of the Clock or the Orderly Man (1765).¹² Kant is also often mocked for leading a similarly routinized life; but this was not a feature of his daily life as a young man, and it was Green who persuaded Kant to change his ways.

The two men spent so much time together, and were so close, as to lead one German scholar to suggest that it was potentially schwul—a slang term for homosexual or “queer.”¹³ Earlier in this volume, we saw Judith Butler playing with a similar idea, although her mischievous comments are made on the basis of narrative and philosophical and physical instabilities, rather than through awareness of Kant’s male friendships and their associated routines.¹⁴ The two friends ate together, went on trips together, discussed books and politics together, and were also said to take an afternoon doze together—also with other male friends—side by side, in easy chairs.¹⁵ Kant was said to have read every sentence of the Critique of Pure Reason to Green and discussed each sentence with him.¹⁶ After Green died in 1786, Kant went into a kind of mourning and stopped going out to eat in the evenings. He did, however, keep up his relationship with Robert Motherby, another of the Hull merchants and the business partner of Green. Kant was a frequent guest for Sunday lunch, and was treated as a family member as he played with the nine surviving children and helped with the education of the older boys.¹⁷ Thus, if we follow Kant into the labyrinths of his moral philosophy and look more closely at his private life, we end up not with an isolated self and reason, but with an intimate circle of friends who care for each other, mostly in male friendship circles, but also within the domestic and family sphere.

In testimony to Kant’s close friendships, I was excited to stumble across the image of an engraved glass goblet, inscribed with the date August 30, 1763, together with a motto (in English) and the names of K...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Prelude
• Introduction: Adriana Cavarero, Feminisms, and an Ethics of Nonviolence
• Scenes of Inclination
• Leaning Out, Caught in the Fall: Interdependency and Ethics in Cavarero
• How to Do Things with Inclination: Antigones, with Cavarero
• Scherzo
• Études
• Coda
• Bibliography
• List of Contributors
• Index