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  • Nourishing the Hunger of the Other: A Rapprochement between Levinas and Darwin
  • Peter Atterton (bio)

To give, to-be-for-the-other, despite oneself, but in interrupting the for-oneself, is to take the bread out of one’s own mouth, to nourish the hunger of the other with one’s own fasting.

—Emmanuel Levinas (1981, 56)

That human beings engage in acts of radical altruism is no more of a “miracle” or rupture in the order of being than when animals do the same thing (and it is all too clear that they do it frequently).

—Matthew Calarco (59)

The young of altricial birds, not only when they are in the nest, but as long as a month after leaving it, are fed by the parents…. The food, at first, is usually more or less digested in the crop or stomach of the parent whence it is regurgitated into the mouth of the young.

—Frank Michler Chapman (80)

In many cases, the bat that has just eaten will regurgitate some of the blood it has consumed into the mouth of the hungry bat.

—Jay Phelan (343)

We can observe mouth-to-mouth feeding among the anthropoid apes (gorilla, chimpanzee, orangutan), and among animals generally, as a parental care behavior.

—Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt (135)

We have come a long way since the sociobiology controversy a quarter of a century ago when scientists curiously found themselves embroiled in the same heated debates as those of their counterparts in the humanities during [End Page 17] the same period—debates over matters such as diversity, sex roles, biological determinism, and human agency. Neil Jumonville, in his discussion of the cultural politics of the controversy, remarks that “Many critics of sociobiology, frequently scientists who were attached to the lineage of the New Left, argued for the same multicultural values promoted by humanities professors in the academic Cultural Left. Similarly, liberal sociobiologists defended the universalist values of liberal humanities professors” (570). There is little doubt that sociobiologists were often guilty of the sins that the New Left attributed to them. They were too prone to make assumptions, too prone to play down the absence of a direct genetic foundation for behavioral traits, too disposed to generalize and ignore the differences in cultures and human behaviors, and, perhaps worst of all, too ready to legitimize the political status quo. Still, with the mapping of the human genome, the gathering of more facts about animal behavior, the elaboration of more theories, and the weeding out of extraneous moral-cum-political agendas from scientific debate, the intellectual and cultural climate has changed, so much so that it is now possible to speak of a biological basis of social behavior without having a pitcher of ice-water poured on one’s head!1 While it remains—and perhaps will always remain—an open question how much of human social behavior can be adequately explained in biological terms, there is now a mounting body of literature devoted to showing that human morality, in particular, is connected to our genes, and that much of what we think of as a product of free will and individual responsibility is shaped by selection-driven evolution no less than our physical nature is.

The first person to claim that morality has a biological basis and is the outcome of an evolutionary process that selects certain behaviors in preference to others was, not surprisingly, Darwin himself. We shall see later that Darwin’s claim is buttressed by three theories of altruism: kinship selection, reciprocal altruism, and the theory of empathy. But despite the persuasiveness of the arguments in favor of a biological explanation for ethics, its intuitive plausibility, and its usefulness in dealing with the problem of the relation between morality and self-interest, incredibly it has not received the attention it deserves from contemporary philosophers writing on ethics. Levinas is one such philosopher whose work includes hardly any references to Darwinism. On the very rare occasions that Darwin or evolutionary theory is mentioned, it is claimed that the struggle for existence is incapable of accounting for the altruistic character of certain kinds of obligations, including, for instance, the obligation to feed the hungry...

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