Embodied Care: Jane Addams, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Feminist Ethics (review)

For roughly twenty years now, the language of care has enjoyed an increasingly prominent place in ethical discourse, emphasizing concrete relationships and the affective dimensions that shape them. Early in Embodied Care, Maurice Hamington offers an excellent overview of major developments in the ethics of care, showing how it avoids simple dichotomies (between thought and feeling or justice and care) to appreciate the complexities of caring. His book offers an important contribution by highlighting the embodied dynamics of care and their relevance to a caring social ethics.

From the start, Hamington stresses that his aim is not to formulate another ethical theory but rather to characterize a caring approach to moral issues. The contextuality endemic to caring means that it provides illumination of moral dimensions and their impact on our connectedness rather than universal principles, formulas, or stock answers to sticky dilemmas. Hamington defines care as "an approach to individual and social morality that shifts ethical consideration to context, relationships, and affective knowledge in a manner that can be fully understood only if its embodied dimension is recognized" (32). To illustrate this approach, he effectively begins each chapter with an example that highlights the relevant dimension of caring. Moreover, Hamington ends the book bybexploring the difference his approach makes to the current controversy surrounding same-sex marriage. These appeals to the concrete are appropriate to his approach and offer effective illustrations.

Hamington characterizes care as the interweaving of caring knowledge, caring habits, and caring imagination. The former two features, in particular, highlight care's embodied nature. Hamington argues convincingly that embodied caring presupposes caring knowledge. Caring knowledge is importantly concrete knowledge of individuals; we do not care for principles or abstractions, even though we may use them to facilitate effective caring. The embodied knowledge needed to care derives from feelings and attitudes expressed (and read) through body language. Such knowledge, though, is best understood via an embodied epistemology, and so Hamington draws on Merleau-Ponty to focus on the centrality of the body-subject in perception. Also important is Merleau-Ponty's notion of the reversibility of the flesh (illustrated by the fact that a hand can be both subject and object). Hamington argues that the body, which he describes as "the ultimate common denominator of human experience" (92), is a site of reciprocity that funds our sympathetic perception of others; it is thus fundamental to caring.

Caring knowledge is manifested in caring habits and expanded or transformed by the caring imagination. Caring habits, or bodily practices that "contain the body's understanding of how to care and adapt to new situations" (46), include behaviors like gently touching as well as attending and listening to others. While non-caring habits harm and limit embodied others, caring habits promote the growth and well-being of those for whom we care. Though borne out of the structures and metaphors of our embodied knowledge, the caring imagination is a muscle that enables us to apply caring knowledge to new others. It enables us to overcome disconnection by promoting empathy (helping us transcend physical and social distances), critical reflection (transcending time), and an understanding of another's psychosocial context (enabling us to transcend our subjective position). As we exercise our caring imagination, especially through lessons learned in stories, we expand our experience and increase the scope of our moral purview. Here Hamington's position coincides with that of authors like Martha Nussbaum who advocate educating the imagination through literature.

While some critics object that care proves insufficient in generating a social philosophy, Hamington argues that habits of embodied care can be applied at social and political levels. He turns to Jane Addams, who calls for "a wider experience of one another in the creation of a social ethics" (108). Addams argues that fostering a healthy democratic impulse means seeking out diverse but face-to-face experiences that give us firsthand knowledge of others and build genuine connections. [End Page...