CREATING ETHICAL SOCIETIES IN A CONCENTRATIONARY UNIVERSE: Simone Weil’s Phenomenological Ethics of Attention

This essay argues that Simone Weil’s writings suggest a phenomenological method of particular relevance to investigating ethical questions. It begins by presenting evidence that although Weil does not mention phenomenology explicitly, she thinks about ethics in a phenomenological manner. Subsequent...

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1. VerfasserIn: Reed, Robert (VerfasserIn)
Medienart: Elektronisch Aufsatz
Sprache:Englisch
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Veröffentlicht: Dharmaram College 2020
In: Journal of Dharma
Jahr: 2020, Band: 45, Heft: 4, Seiten: 529-544
weitere Schlagwörter:B Phenomenology
B Ethics
B Shoah
B concentrationary universe
B Levinas
B Arendt
B Simone Weil
B ethics of self-abdication
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Zusammenfassung:This essay argues that Simone Weil’s writings suggest a phenomenological method of particular relevance to investigating ethical questions. It begins by presenting evidence that although Weil does not mention phenomenology explicitly, she thinks about ethics in a phenomenological manner. Subsequent sections outline a "phenomenological ethics" derived from Weil’s notion of attention and her hermeneutics of ‘reading’ the world. Since attention sets aside the self and its personal world, this allows for an ethics of self-abdication (decreation) relatively free of influence by the forces of domination. David Rousset’s term "concentrationary universe" is introduced to describe the claim, argued by Hannah Arendt, Giorgio Agamben, and others, that present-day societies show evidence of an increasing reliance on ways of thinking derived from the Nazi concentration camps. Examples are given of applications of Weil’s phenomenological method to the problem of how to recognize signs of potential domination in a concentrationary universe.
ISSN:0253-7222
Enthält:Enthalten in: Journal of Dharma