Wonder and Generosity: Their Role in Ethics and Politics

Notes

197 Notes Chapter 1.Wonder and Generosity 1. irigaray is also interested in the way descartes’s view in The Passions moves beyond the rigid dualism of his earlier work. as naomi schor says,“in irigaray, descartes functions both as the philosopher who irrevocably sunders body from soul and the one who most brilliantly reunites them” (1995, 58). schor is referring to irigaray’s earlier reading of descartes in Speculum of the Other Woman (1985a, 180–90) and the essay on wonder. 2. elizabeth of Bohemia asked descartes to clarify the role of the passions in our everyday life and to answer the question of how can they help us to lead a good life. see shapiro (2007, 110–11) and nye (1999, 59). The Passions of the Soul (1989) provides descartes’s answers to these questions. 3. it should be noted that desire has no opposite either,in descartes’s view (1989, 66). 4. this strength depends on two things—the novelty of the object and the fact that the movement that it causes has its whole strength from the start of the experience.descartes thinks that wonder affects unusual parts of the brain, which are tender (because they are not used often), and this increases the effects of the movements of the animal spirits in the body (1989, 58). 5. Both Plato and aristotle said that philosophy begins in wonder. Plato, in “theatetus,” says,“Wonder is the feeling of a philosopher, and philosophy begins in wonder” (1999, 155d). aristotle, in the Metaphysics, 198 notes to Chapter 1 states that “it is owing to wonder that men both now begin and at first began to philosophize” (1984, 982b12–27), and in the Rhetoric he says, “Wondering implies the desire of learning,so that the object of wonder is an object of desire” (1371a31–b10). 6. descartes discusses sexual difference in The Passions in relation to the desire that arises from delight when we feel “as though one were only half of a whole whose other half has to be a person of the other sex” (1989, 69). elsewhere, he says that a father’s love of his children is the most pure and perfect love because it does not expect any return or involve any desire for possession (1989, 63–64). 7. irigaray discusses aristotle’s conception of the female in Speculum (1985a, 160–67), and his notion of place in relation to women in An Ethics of Sexual Difference (1993a, 34–55). 8. For an exploration of irigaray’s critique of Levinas,see dana Mcdonald (1998). For an elucidation of Levinas on these points, see Claire Katz (2001). 9. anne Caldwell notes that irigaray posits a reciprocity that does not “collapse the difference” between self and other (1997, 49). 10. one can take as an example how wonder relates to the problem of other minds, which descartes discusses in the Meditations (1984, 21). this problem makes little sense if we consider that in wonder the other strikes us first. 11. in his work on ethics, Cordner also sees wonder as “a mode of registering otherness,” as accepting that the other is beyond our grasp (2002, 143). 12. this is an important claim in irigaray’s work, and i will discuss it in detail in chapter 3, where i focus on sexual difference in relation to other differences between human beings. 13. although irigaray is critical of Levinas’s view of the feminine, her understanding of ethics has been influenced by his conception of ethics as an attempt to respond to the alterity of the other, who is prior to the subject. see her essays “the Fecundity of the Caress” (1993a) and “Questions to emmanuel Levinas” (1991a). 14. Wittgenstein says that the experience of wonder—”seeing the world as a miracle”—suggests the supernatural character of ethics (1993, 43). 15. in a later article, Cheah and Grosz defend irigaray from the charge that her work is “heterosexist” by arguing that the interval of sexual difference concerns only the basis for social change, that respect for sexual difference will also positively affect homosexual relations, and notes to Chapter 1 199 that implications for reconceptionalizing lesbianism outside current social structures can be drawn out from her work (1998, 28–29). 16. young gives three telling examples of nonsymmetrical differences: between disabled and nondisabled people, between native and nonnative americans, and between african americans and non-african americans (1997, 41...