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Document Details : Title: Does Humanism Necessarily Imply Speciesism? Subtitle: The Case of Levinas' Humanism in the Light of Herder's Author(s): COOLS, Arthur , DIERCKXSENS, Geoffrey Journal: Ethical Perspectives Volume: 32 Issue: 1 Date: 2025 Pages: 1-23 DOI: 10.2143/EP.32.1.3294141 Abstract : This article intends to show that Levinas’ humanism does not imply speciesism. Our argument is that Levinas does not derive the sense of an ethical obligation from a pregiven concept of the human being. His defence of humanism is therefore not the expression of the idea that human beings have an exclusive moral dignity on the basis of their being human. This argument will be developed in two parts. In the first part, we situate Levinas’ humanism within the tradition of modern humanism and differentiate it from Herder’s approach in the eighteenth century, which can be considered paradigmatic for a modern concept of humanism that inevitably implies speciesism. In the second part, we argue that a metaphorical transference is at the core of Levinas’ concept of subjectivity, the appearance of which is required for the ethical sense of oneself-for-the-other. We will refer, therefore, to Levinas’ use of the metaphor of the ‘skin’ in his analyses of subjectivity and otherness in Otherwise than Being. As a result, it will be shown that the ethical sense of subjectivity does not deny but entails ‘the ambiguity of the animal’. |
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