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ritual language games that protect the integrity of speaking persons, which “cannot be done unless reverence for persons and their rights to speak and be listened to is a prevailing norm” (p. 109). In short, Holiday’s argument goes against the view that all moral norms are socially constructed and culturally relative. Some of them might be, but if Holiday is right, we have to admit the intriguing point that there are objec- tive (in the sense of nonconventional) moral values that make language and dis- course possible. Some of these values may even concern norms for changing other norms, e.g., as seen in democratic societies where the social negotiation of govern- ing norms is institutionalized in democratic practices. Core language games refer to those discursive practices that serve to preserve and sustain such essential moral values and also the complex social and psychological life made possible by them.
Holiday makes this point with reference to the practice-oriented philosophy of Wittgenstein (1953), but it could also have been arrived at by asking (like Habermas, 1993) for transcendental conditions of communication in the Kantian tradition. The argument in favor of the existence of certain universal moral values does not pre- clude values from developing (e.g., justice comes in many forms), and it also does not prevent other values from being culturally contingent (as many values probably are). One may understand the moral values articulated through core language games as hinges upon which other values may turn.
In addition to this Aristotelian, practice-oriented track, there is also the phenom- enological approach to universal normativity found in the works of Løgstrup (1956) and Levinas (1969). I have previously discussed the perspective of the former (Brinkmann, 2016a), so here I shall concentrate on the latter. The key to unlock the often dense and difficult work of Levinas is to understand how he builds upon, but also criticizes phenomenology, in the Husserlian tradition. The problem that Levinas saw in phenomenology and traditional philosophy more generally was that it reduced the other to the same (Levinas, 1969). The post-Husserlian phenomenology of Levinas was meant to respect the otherness of the other as an essential aspect of our experience and not make the other into something that has meaning only in rela- tion to the experiencing individual. In Davis’ helpful book on Levinas, he spells out the problem that he (Levinas) saw in Husserl’s phenomenology where “conscious- ness can never meet anything truly alien to itself because the external world is a product of its own activity” (Davis, 1996, p. 19). And, positively about Levinas’
contribution, Davis writes that what is at stake in his discussions of intentionality “is the ability of consciousness to encounter something other than itself. If meaning is entirely given by the subject rather than found in the world, then consciousness can- not experience, perceive or learn anything that it did not already contain” (p. 19).
Against the philosophical tradition from Descartes to Husserl, Levinas worked toward a conception of subjectivity as “radically turned outwards, maintaining an openness to the non-self which is not subsumed under the categories of representa- tion or knowledge” (p. 20). This was particularly important in relation to ethics, which, for Levinas, rests on the acknowledgement that the other is more than my image or representation of him or her. Ethically speaking, we must therefore not reduce the other to my representation of her. The reality of the other simply sur- passes any image I may form of her. This, in a nutshell, is Levinas’ great contribution
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to phenomenology, and it is noteworthy that the subtitle to his grand work on Totality and Infinity is “an essay on exteriority.” Husserlian phenomenology, Levinas thought, did not take the exteriority of the other sufficiently into account or the oth- erness of the other.
Levinas is most famous for his concept of the face: This is the ground of ethics in his work, because it is in the encounter with the face of the other that one may understand that the other is not like me, on the one hand, but also not against me, on the other hand (Davis, 1996, p. 45). Phenomenologically, the face demands infinite responsibility and expresses a prohibition against harming and killing the other. And furthermore, for Levinas, my own subjectivity does not exist prior to my responsi- bility for the other, but emerges in my encounter with the other. Although it may be hard to grasp if one comes from standard, nonnormative philosophical perspectives, it means that our subjectivity is primordially ethical rather than epistemic or theo- retical. Ethics should therefore, as Levinas famously claimed, be understood as
“first philosophy.” We cannot begin with a neutral metaphysics of the world or of human subjects, for our first understanding is always already constituted ethically.
To put it in quite un-Levinasian terms, we can say that the world as we know it is normative and ethical “all the way down.” There is nothing below ethics, nothing more primitive from which it emerges, in a subject’s understanding of others and the world.
Thus, if Levinas is right, it is from the concrete other – and from one’s own responsibility when faced with the other – that the most fundamental normativity in human life appears. Levinas’ work has not just been taken up by other philosophers, but interestingly also by empirical researchers like the anthropologist Scheper- Hughes. In her thorough and deeply moving ethnography of life in the northeastern part of Brazil, where people struggle with poverty, hunger, and extreme child mor- tality, she documents how bereaved mothers, who lose their children, develop prac- tices of mourning that are very different from those found in more affluent parts of the world where the death of children is a rare event. Actually, the mothers display a high degree of indifference when small children die. Scheper-Hughes has returned many times to the same shantytown in Brazil since the 1960s, and in the following passage, she describes an initial experience with infant death in the region:
Within the first month of my arrival in Bom Jesus, a young mother came to me with a very sick and wasted baby. Seeing the child’s condition was precarious, I rushed with him to the local hospital, where he died soon after, the desperate efforts of myself and two clinic atten- dants notwithstanding. I was devastated and frightened. […] How could I break the news to the child’s mother? Would she hold me responsible for the death? Would I be forced to leave my post of duty so soon after my arrival? Selfish concerns, mind you. […] To my great wonder and perplexity, however, the young woman took the news and the bundle from my arms placidly, almost casually and indifferently. Noting my red eyes and tear-stained face, the woman turned to comment to a neighbor woman standing by, […] “Tsk! Tsk! Poor thing! Funny, isn’t she?” What was funny or amusing seemed to be my inappropriate dis- play of grief and my concern over a matter of so little consequence. (Scheper-Hughes, 1993, pp. 270–271)
She goes on to describe the funeral ceremony, which is very quotidian without any- one taking much notice, and, throughout the book, Scheper-Hughes comes to an
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understanding of the moral order of this poor part of Brazil. She learns to see the
“apparent indifference of Alto mothers toward the deaths of some of their infants [as] but a pale reflection of the ‘official’ indifference of church and state to the plight of poor mothers and children” (Scheper-Hughes, 1993, p. 272). But still, in spite of these large cultural differences, and the difficult understanding of a seeming indifference in the face of dead children, Scheper-Hughes invokes the universal eth- ics of Levinas. Although the shantytown mothers seem to have “suspended the ethi- cal” and their expected motherly love (p. 22), there is a logic to their ways of responding, and we probably need ethical reflection that transcends cultural con- texts in order to approach the matter properly. At least, this is Scheper-Hughes’
conclusion, and in Levinas she finds an ethics that “is always prior to culture because the ethical presupposes all sense and meaning and therefore makes culture possible”
(pp. 22–23). Again, ethics is presented as “first philosophy” – as a pre-cultural con- dition for the existence of cultural life – rooted in the encounter with concrete oth- ers: “the ethical as I am defining it here,” writes Scheper-Hughes, “is ‘precultural’
in that human existence always presupposes the presence of another. That I have been ‘thrown’ into human existence at all presupposes a given, moral relationship to an original (m)other and she to me” (p. 23). This is also why it makes sense to criti- cize the debilitating life conditions of people in this part of the world, because there is a pre-cultural source of moral normativity that one may invoke to fight for the alleviation of suffering in a world of “death without weeping” (to quote the title of her book). Scheper-Hughes’ work nicely represents a cultural sensitivity that enables readers to understand the (non)responses of the bereaved mothers without judging them but which at the same time articulates a deep moral normativity that should make us wish for a change in the life conditions of the mothers.