Situating the Self:
Gender, Community and Postmodernism
in Contemporary Ethics
by Seyla Benhabib
New York: Routledge, 1992, vii + 266 pages
ISBN 0415905478 $16.95 softcover
The essays collected in this volume are mostly expanded, revised or rewritten
version of previously published work by Benhabib, covering a range of subjects
which engage with the ethical theories of Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, Kohlberg,
Arndt, and most notably, the communicative rationality theories or discourse
ethics of Jürgen Habermas. Benhabib's critical reading of Western ethical
traditions from antiquity to modernity results in a reformulation of Habermas's
communicative ethics that puts a greater emphasis on the satisfaction of
individual material and emotional needs that does not displace Habermas's
concern with justice, but rather augments it. Benhabib argues for the possibility
of an "historically self-conscious universalism" (30) that while
preserving a reconstructed Kantian principle of universality also at the
same time remains sensitive to the social and personal contexts within which
people engage in moral decisions. Her reformulation of Habermas's discourse
ethics envisions moral decision-making in terms of an ongoing conversation
that is less concerned with rational agreement or consensus than with "sustaining
those normative practices and moral relationships within which reasoned
agreement as a way of life can flourish and continue" (38). She criticizes
Habermas for his too-strong focus on principles of justice which might exclude
moral conversations about what communities and individuals conceive as a
good life for them. Benhabib argues for a softening of distinctions between
judgments of justice and those of the good life. In this way, discourse
ethics becomes a radically democratic procedure for sustaining ordinary
moral conversations structured around the Hegelian notion of "reciprocal
recognition," where the participants have some insight into "what
it means to be an 'I' and a 'me' to know that I am an 'other' to you and
that likewise, you are an 'I' to yourself but an 'other' to me" (52).
Although Benhabib's modified discourse ethics resonates with current feminist
preoccupations such as the concern for difference, particularity, situatedness,
and the importance of the emotional life in ethics, she clearly does not
subscribe to feminist postmodernist theories. In what is perhaps the most
vigourous and controversial essay in the book, "Feminism and the Question
of Postmodernism," Benhabib criticizes Jane Flax's call for the multiple
deaths of Man, History, and Metaphysics, primarily on the grounds that the
absence of subjectivity implies the incapacity for rebellion and resistance.
She also criticizes Judith Butler's theoretical displacement of the subject
who no longer uses language but is used by it, with the result that the
thinking, acting, and feeling self dissolves into "systems of signification"
and "chains of signs" (216). From the point of view of ethics,
it is impossible to hold an "authorial position" accountable for
anything; only authors bear responsibility, but in the feminist postmodernist
world, there are no authors.
Benhabib's concern with preserving a dialectic between universality and
particularity with respect to ethics in deeply connected with her insistence
on the preservation of subjectivity, and rightly so. While Benhabib accepts
as necessary the demise of an abstract, imperial subject with all its claims
to epistemic and political privilege, she proposes a subjectivity that is
radically situated and contextualized. In this respect, Benhabib echoes
the concerns of the older Frankfurt theorists, Adorno in particular, who
sought the dissolution of abstract humanism in favour of a concrete humanism
that embraced living beings in all their concrete suffering and need. Benhabib
understands as well that without specifically modern concepts of agency,
autonomy, and selfhood, the emancipation of women would be unthinkable.
Although a variety of ethical theories are treated in this collection, the
essays have a common focus. Benhabib articulates an emphatic concern with
uncovering and promoting possibilities of a way of life based on universal
values of respect for others and mutual intersubjective recognition that
yet allows people to engage in moral decisions that are best for them and
their particular communities within specific historical epochs. In several
respects, Benhabib's efforts to envision possibilities for an ethical theory
that leads to humane procedures for moral decisions is courageous insofar
as it brushes against the grain of much contemporary theorizing.
Reviewed by Marsha Hewitt
Trinity College, Toronto