The Metaphysics of Affectivity and Ethical Responsibility

In this dissertation, I seek to establish, in the style of Levinas, an affective foundation for ethics that is rooted in real persons who exist beyond my interpretation of them. In this way, I hope to show that emotions cannot be tossed aside in ethical matters as merely subjective. The term ethics ordinarily refers to our dealing with other people who are taken to be real, autonomous beings that exist independently of our interpretation of them. If so, and if ideas are interpretations, then access to other people must be available outside of ideas. In this work, I argue that such access can be found on the level of feelings and affectivity. Chapter One offers a short critique of Descartes\u27 Meditations, Kant\u27s Critique of Pure Reason, and Husserl\u27s phenomenology to show that their theories reduce the whole world to ideas and, thus, are unable to account for access to others as independently real. Chapter Two discusses Descartes\u27 later works and Hume\u27s affective empiricism to establish affectivity as a component of knowing what is beyond ideas. Affectivity serves ideas in the process of knowing by confirming the extra-mental existence of what is represented in ideas. In other words, affectivity has a metaphysical import that ideas, by themselves, do not have. Chapter Three examines Levinas, who goes beyond Descartes and Hune by claiming that affective contact with an other person is already ethical, For him, this contact commands the self to respond to the other, thus giving rise to ethical responsibility. Chapter Four discusses Levinas\u27 notion of responsibility by examining the particular characteristics of the command to responsibility which is issued from the face-to-face encounter with an other person. While Levinas shows how I am responsible to and for the others, he does not show that the other is essentially responsible to and for me. This lack of ethical reciprocity presents problems for developing a normative ethics. Hence, in Chapter Five I make some suggestions for revising Levinas\u27 position in order to establish such responsibility