Ethics Embodied: Rethinking Selfhood through Continental, Japanese, and Feminist Philosophies by Erin McCarthy (review)

Erin McCarthy introduces her book by saying, “What follows here opens a dialogue and prepares the way for further exploration” (1). Accordingly, I take my review of Ethics Embodied as an opportunity not only to introduce and discuss the book’s main themes, but also to join in the conversation McCarthy has initiated by recommending several fields of research in which I can see her work being implemented. I hope that readers will find, with me, that Ethics Embodied lends itself to a variety of new directions in interdisciplinary and comparative scholarship.

McCarthy aims to make her book accessible to anyone who has a background in at least one of the major fields she discusses, including twentieth-century phenomenology, poststructural feminism, care ethics, and Watsuji Tetsurō’s ethics of “betweenness.” Her second chapter establishes a theme that recurs throughout the book: Japanese traditions may be of interest to various continental and feminist scholars because they are alternatives to, not reactions against, dominant Western categories. In this chapter, she focuses on the work of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, to the extent that each challenges the conventional picture of subjectivity as reducible to the solitary ego or atomistic individual. Heidegger’s concept of Dasein as “being-in-the-world” and “being-with” and Husserl’s emphasis on intersubjectivity both indicate the necessarily relational character of personhood. Within this framework, McCarthy is able to effectively show that Watsuji’s perspective on relationality goes a step further, rooted as it is in a tradition that never presupposes a solitary self in the first place. McCarthy moves the reader away from conceiving of the self as “in” relations, or even dependent upon them, but instead as fully constituted by relationality or what Watsuji calls betweenness.

In the third chapter, McCarthy follows a similar line of reasoning to distinguish between the Husserlian self, which is embodied in the sense that it necessarily “has” a body, from the self as discussed by Japanese philosophers such as Watsuji and Yuasa Yasuo, which is embodied in the nondualistic, Buddhist-influenced sense of being a “bodymind.” Again, she helps readers appreciate the difference between Western philosophers who begin from Cartesian dualism and strive to criticize or overcome it, and Japanese philosophers who work outside of a dualistic framework altogether.

Having established this foundational picture of the relational and embodied self, McCarthy turns to consider the usefulness of this model for feminist thought in her fourth and fifth chapters, focusing first on the American care ethicist Virginia Held and moving on to the French psychoanalyst and linguist Luce Irigaray. Part of the success of these chapters lies in McCarthy’s careful conceptual mapping of the connections between not only feminist and Japanese traditions, but of connections among an array of feminist fields congenial toward but not straightforwardly in sync with each other. For example, although psychoanalysts such as Irigaray and care ethicists such as Held both challenge the atomistic portrayal of the subject, it is by no means clear that they reach similar, or even related, conclusions. McCarthy is mindful of differences in their research, and does not make vacuous generalizations, while at the same time she constructs an ethics of embodiment and relationality that draws on compelling resonances between her various sources.

With this comparative approach in mind, I will continue a more detailed discussion of the fourth and fifth chapters by considering several other fields that might contribute to, or benefit from, McCarthy’s interdisciplinary conversation on ethics. In discussing these fields, I of course do not have the space in a short review to attempt the same careful conceptual mapping as McCarthy, but I hope that through the material I mention—Lévinasian ethics, queer theory, and ritual studies—readers will find below some suggestions for further research that spark interest.

Lévinasian Ethics

Broadly speaking, the work of Emmanuel Lévinas maintains fruitful but uneasy ties with various feminist philosophies. For example, Irigaray has criticized Lévinas’s portrayal...