Intergenerational Generativity: Toward a Feminist Ethics of Life

IAS Talking Points: Intergenerational Generativity - Toward a Feminist Ethics of Life
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Location: IAS Common Ground, Ground Floor, South Wing
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The IAS is delighted to welcome Senior Visiting Research Fellow, Professor Mary C. Rawlinson (Professor and Chair, Department of Philosophy and Affiliated Faculty, Comparative Literature and Women’s and Gender Studies at Stony Brook University, New York) for this Talking Points Seminar. The respondents will be Professor Tina Chanter (Head of the School of Humanities, Kingston University) and Dr Alex Hyde (Lecturer in Gender Studies, CMII, UCL).

From Hobbes to Hegel, philosophers in the West locate the origin of social life in a mythic time outside history where violence is pervasive and the fear of death motivates men to institute the law of property, substituting right for might to secure life and ownership. This narrative renders nature a state of war and installs the man of reason as the figure of the human. Under man’s regime, the exchange of women’s bodies, the paradigm of property, cements the bonds of fraternity. Property, the originary right, is inextricably linked to laws of sexual propriety and to a universal always already marked masculine. The politics of rights aims at “mastering nature and the nature in man” (Kant), a mastery requiring the subjection of man’s others: women, children, and “savages.”

Against this ethics of death, property, and subjection, my recent work develops an ethics of life. Eschewing the speculative universal of the man of reason, I invoke two concrete universals-- everyone has been born of a woman and everyone needs to eat-- to advance an ethics of intergenerational generativity, figured in the two mothers, Demeter and Persephone. But what exactly do I mean by ‘life’?

Beginning from Hegel’s identification of Geist and life, I analyze the logical, temporal, and ethical distinctions that determine the concept of life. Against Hegel, I argue that an ethics of life not only requires the cultivation of intergenerational generativity, but also incorporates the ethical and political effects of the irreparable loss of the singular living being.

In this narrative, ethics and politics require, not merely tolerance, respecting the other’s rights, but collaborations that generate conditions of agency across generations. This narrative of justice and solidarity aims at the creation of a community capable of collective agency, while also preserving the singularity of each and all.

All welcome.