With all the others

In a world threatened with collapse, deaf to ecological issues and turned towards an economism sacrificing the humanist aspirations of individuals and darkening democratic processes, the challenge of Corine Pelluchon’s work is to make possible “new Enlightenment” (p. 262) by proposing an ethics capable of reducing the gap between what we know and what we do. Throughout this dense, arduous and stimulating book, the philosopher describes a process of subjectivation drawing on ancient moralities but free from any relationship to God, with the aim of opening up to a consideration recognizing the own value of each human being and each living being.

The universalism in singularity that is affirmed here takes into account corporeality, poses humility as a first condition and makes vulnerability a major notion in order to impose a change in the way we think about the subject. The newborn as an “unpredictable and totally new being” whose birth teaches us plurality, carries within him the hope of a renewal of the world and appears as a political figure engaging towards the ethics of consideration (p. 142).

This ethic is rooted in the deepening of the relationship to oneself and coexistence, political organization of subjects affirming their interrelations in a common space, nourished by each other and nourished by the world, restored in their capacity to act and to emancipate themselves from the stereotypical representations carried by thehomo economicus.

Relationship to oneself and broadening of the subject

Norms, or ethical principles external to oneself, do not constitute the starting point of the ethics of consideration; it is in subjectivity that it is rooted. Thus, it is in the relationship to oneself that the relationship to the world is forged for this original ethics oriented towards action and aiming for the transformation of the contemporary world. Knowledge is not enough to change behavior, which is why the author develops “an ethic that deeply touches what unites us with other living beings”, human beings and animals (p. 128).

Where consideration took the meaning of an upward movement towards God in Bernard of Clairvaux (p. 27), the essentialism of all deist transcendence is evacuated in favor of the concept of “transdescent”. This means that the subject experiences the incommensurable which, instead of referring him to the upward movement of transcendence or transascendence (p. 254), refers him to the common world: “composed of all generations and living beings, it is like a transcendence in immanence and implies the understanding of the link uniting us to other beings” (p. 98). The author defines privileged paths to experience the incommensurable which leads to transdescent, the first being that of suffering which no longer allows one to escape sensation (aisthesis) and no longer offers a distance between oneself and oneself, and between oneself and the world. It underlines the human capacity to construct a process of subjectivation that is specific to the subject in “the test of his vulnerability in illness, pain, depression, pity, the relationship with animals and the aesthetic appreciation of nature or works of art” (p. 255). Because experiencing oneself as finite, mortal, and having “the experience of what connects us to the common world is the key to the transformation of individuals” (p. 254), which allows the deepening of the subject and its broadening instead of a confinement in what Corine Pelluchon denounces as sad passions. The “recognition of our vulnerability is the key to having consideration for other sensitive beings” (p. 112), so that human beings feel that “there is in each one the pulsation of other lives than one’s own” (p. 120).

Benchmarks for a common world: coexistence

This program of self-transformation is therefore indeed a program of transformation of the world while our system is based on a “false anthropology” (p. 142) that must be refuted by highlighting two main categories that found the politics of consideration: birth rate and coexistence. The pages on birth rate as a political category with the figure of the newborn, like many of the very beautiful pages of this book, offer memorable sentences, such as this extract:

When we celebrate the birth of a child, by carrying him in our arms, by looking at this being of whom no one can guess what he will do or who he will be, we admire this capacity he possesses to renew the world. We are moved by this newborn who does not know the world in which he is inserted and which the world does not yet know, and we measure the indeterminacy and unpredictability which are at the bottom of each human being and also condition his freedom understood as the power to perform an act which breaks with the past. Natality means that each human being, by the fact of being born, is not only capable of performing a new action, but also that he must do so. The newborn refers each one to the fact that he must assume his freedom, act and engage in the world, instead of locking himself in stereotypical behaviors (p. 143).

Thus the politics of consideration requires an ethics of virtues anchored in subjectivity. The effects of the process of individuation described aim to lead subjects to pass with pleasure, as in the ancient eudaemonistic moralities, from “living from” to “living with” and ideally to “living for” (p. 148-149). This objective is that of convivance, that is to say a desire and a pleasure to live together “with each other, and not only next to each other” (p. 149). For this, specific, dialogical and civil virtues are at work in convivance: affability, courtesy, politeness, lightness as sprezzatura, delicacy. Convivance is in fact teaching individuals what they owe to others, the finite nature of the resources they use and consume, and the ethical and political dimension of their daily actions, which is very well embodied by the affirmation of ecofeminism as an inspiration. In addition, Corine Pelluchon tirelessly punctuates her ethics with convincing arguments on the centrality of the relationship with animals in this consideration that does not separate beings: consideration cannot stop at a speciesist hierarchy of the living, it “begins with the examination of what we have on our plate and with the awareness of the fact that food establishes a close link between the three dimensions of living” which are “living from”, “living with” and “living for” (p. 159). If “we cannot demand that all citizens expressly make love of the world the horizon of their actions” (p. 160), it is a question of promoting practices and paths for consideration, with an approach to medicine as support and care or to work as “living work” and not reduced to “a production activity” (p. 161). The proposal of consideration and anchoring in feeling in its pathic and archaic dimension is that of overcoming all dualisms that promote mechanisms or behaviors of domination: animal-human, nature-culture, body-mind, feminine-masculine, emotion-reason.

Obstacles and Pathways to Consideration

While appreciating the non-denunciatory nature of the work but the construction of a solid conceptualization, the reader may regret that the author did not develop the obstacles to consideration more. They are well mentioned with the reflection on drives and destructiveness, the philosopher then underlines that “by getting used to the fact that there is always a gap between thought and action, human beings become cynical” (p. 193). However, the text does not explicitly refer to what constitutes an obstacle in social interrelations or government techniques, it remains focused on the development of the transformation of the relationship to oneself: what social violence arising from stereotypical world views versus humility as a method, what of frustrating education versus the Rousseauist ideal of education (p. 195-203), what of the futile dispersion of the self versus the ability to cultivate attention. All these second terms are developed as necessities for consideration. The obstacles, whose scope would be more properly political, remain in the background in favor of a highlighting of ethics.

It is therefore a question of being enriched as subjects in the sense of an enrichment that defines the meaning of life and of proposing concrete ways to do this. The relationship to the symbolic that the subject can develop through literature as a resource for thinking about the world and growing in consideration for the point of view of others in the first person, also appears very relevant for feeding on a symbolism, creating one’s own representations, in the idea of ​​”freeing oneself from the representations of oneself and of the world that are those of thehomo economicus » (p. 262). Because concern for the world is the condition of consideration and of all the virtues in the ethics developed by Corine Pelluchon, it is imposed by the process of transformation of the subject that she describes in a programmatic manner. With the warning that virtues can become vices when these moral dispositions are not born of consideration and are not preceded by humility, a humility which consists in never taking one’s moral conduct for granted and in relying on one’s affects and negative emotions to become aware of one’s responsibilities.

An Ethics of Human Development for Our Time

Consideration is not contemplation but a “way of being-with-the-world” (p. 238). The ethics of consideration is an ethics for our time, denouncing the subordination of politics to the economy and affirming the emergence of “the age of the living” (p. 262) assuming for the subject, “unlike the morals of duty, ancient philosophies and even the Levinassian ethics of responsibility (…) an opening of oneself from the other” and of accepting to be “so to speak transported from within” (p. 251). It challenges the reader, seduces and even recognizes itself in this proposal of a demanding trajectory. It is first of all a question of relating the subject and his environment in a sensory, affective and spiritual experience which opens to an individuation capable of transforming the subject, of emancipating him, so that he is equipped morally and psychically in order to transform our world threatened with collapse.

The theoretical-practical power of the ethics of consideration so brilliantly developed makes the conviction developed over the course of reading the work very frustrating: it will be difficult for non-philosophers to appropriate this work despite the political necessity that it be so.