Critical Distance: Ethical and Literary Engagements with Detachment, Isolation, and Otherness (SpringerBriefs in Philosophy)

This book argues that no ethically appropriate relation to other human beings is possible unless we treat them as genuinely other. The authors provide reasons to be critical of various attempts, many of them popular in our contemporary (Western) culture, to encourage deeper attachment to and immersion into others’ lives and experiences. They defend the significance of the distance between human beings, criticizing exaggerated uses of, e.g., the concept of empathy and related concepts in academic as well as more popular ethical contexts, across a range of issues from the nature of ethical duty to the philosophy of love. The chapters offer non-technical philosophical and cultural criticism through selected perspectives on the continuum between closeness and distance, exploring various aspects of ethically significant relations between human beings. This book thus appeals to a wide audience, especially researchers and students in different fields of the humanities, including philosophy, literary studies, and cultural studies, by combining philosophical and literary methodologies in a humanistic examination of the value of distance. The book also argues that we have to be able to abstract from the concrete other in ethical relations, living in the normative and rational sphere of duty instead of emotional immersion. Acknowledgments 6 Contents 8 1 Introduction 10 2 Against the Empathetic Fallacy: On the Seriousness of the Moral Point of View 24 Earlier Criticisms of Empathy 27 Moral “Experts” and Moral “Selfies” 29 Moral Puzzlement 34 The Problems of Sympathetic Identification 37 Empathy or Duty? 42 Suffering and Antitheodicy 44 Human and Inhuman Detachment 48 The Judging Self 50 3 Distancing, the Pandemic, and Our Tragic Condition 55 The Emotional Versus the Normative: Facing the Abstract Other 56 Literary Investigations of Our Tragic Condition 58 Theodicies and Antitheodicies (Again) 60 The Instrumentalization of Suffering 63 Appropriate Distance in Sickness and Quarantine 66 When Safe Distance Is Forgotten 69 Banal Evil 76 4 The Limits of Sense and Transcendental Melancholy in the Philosophy of Love 78 Bestowal, Appraisal, and Recognition 78 Tragic Female Characters and Being at Home in Carthage 81 The Limits of Meaning and the Contingency of Necessity 83 Transcendental Shareability and Melancholy 89 The Love of the Good 93 Love as a Limit Phenomenon 95 Recognition, Acknowledgment, and Naivety 96 5 Conclusion 99 References 104