Abstract
The ethics of development is commonly understood as justice for the global south. Phenomenologically, ethics can be seen as springing from our hospitable being in common without exclusivist communion that denies the Other’s otherness. Hence, justice need not mean replicating in the global south the “flatness of organized uniformity” wrought by the technological society. Contemporary development ethics and practice are insufficiently critical of the transformation of selfhood imposed by developmentalism in the global south, which plunges vulnerable subjects of development into further marginalization. While desire for good life invites our ethical attention, global justice can mean several things other than the project of unequal duplication of northern opulence in the global south. Global justice calls for understanding the limits of opulence, letting the various conceptions of the good life to flourish and bloom, and contributing positively towards this goal.
I want to save time and labour, not for a fraction of mankind, but for all. I want the concentration of wealth, not in the hands of the few, but in the hands of all. Today machinery merely helps a few to ride on the backs of millions. The impetus behind it all is not the philanthropy to save labour, but greed. It is against this constitution of things that I am fighting with all my might.
—M.K. Gandhi, “Discussion with G. Ramachandran, a Shantiniketan Student, in 1924”, Vol. 25, 251
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Notes
- 1.
Two cautionary remarks. Firstly, the subject-centred approach to justice is unmindful of “that which is not the subject”. In this approach to justice, that which is not the subject is considered as “that which is for the subject”. We will address this dimension of the question of justice later in this chapter and in the next chapter. Secondly, the term “subject” calls for caution in the present study, undertaken from the perspective of Heidegger’s critical philosophy. I use “subject” in this chapter to mean something like the “protagonist” (see George 2008: 20–21), for whom is all development, and I take for granted the already emphasized point that the protagonist of development is to be imagined after Dasein.
- 2.
This is not to say that the ethics of care for things and the world as such is meaningless or has a lower priority than the ethics of our relation to the Other. It, rather, means that the way we experience the Other and the things of the world are different and that these experiences demand different ethical responses from us. However, we can say this only when we consider Heidegger’s writings as a whole. Hodge shows that the originary ethics of Being and Time is the ethics of human relations because fundamental ontology is “a description of what it is to be human for which there are three central ethical concerns: taking responsibility for oneself, refusing the temptation to take responsibility for others … and recognizing differences between self and others” (1995: 202). The ethics of care for things is absent in the descriptions of fundamental ontology. The later Heidegger sets matters right with his writings on the ethics of dwelling. I shall deal with the ethics of dwelling in Chap. 6.
- 3.
Heidegger writes: “This kind of solicitude pertains essentially to authentic care—that is, to the existence of the Other, not to a ‘what’ with which he is concerned; it helps the Other to become transparent to himself in his care and to become free for it” (BT: 159).
- 4.
Pollock (1998, 2000) emphasizes the local/global slippage. In my essay, “The Cosmopolitan Self and the Fetishism of Identity”, I looked at the question whether a self is authentically capable of inhabiting the Other’s space of meaning through a postcolonial lens, considering such a habitation as authentic cosmopolitanism. There I emphasized with Levinas the need to leave home and world, pointing out that Pollock’s literary history of vernacular cosmopolitanisms attests this possibility (see George 2010). However, it now seems to me that any attempt to think an absolutely worldless self-other encounter like that of Levinas is untrue to existence as such. Pollock’s vernacular cosmopolitanism in fact shows that it is from out of our embedded situation or world (which itself, however, has not emerged in absolute exclusivity but through an ungrounded historical process of encounters with the alien) that we weave the story of authentic encounter with the Other. Hence, Nancy’s extension of Heidegger’s notion of Being-with to an ontology of non-exclusionary community seems to me to be the most robust ground (in fact, the abyssal abground) for ethical relation.
- 5.
I do not deny that this reading of Heidegger’s remarks on solicitude can be seen as militating against his own unpardonable politics and also against certain emphasis in Heidegger’s writings and lectures about autochthony. In the famous interview ten years prior to his death, Heidegger stated: “According to our human experience and history, at least as far as I see it, I know that everything essential and everything great originated from the fact that man had a home and was rooted in a tradition” (GS: 106). My point, however, is that Heidegger’s idea that our embedment in tradition is itself ruptured and open, and his remarks on positive solicitude as non-dominative can be appropriated for an ethics of human relation that is neither averse to embedment nor to openness towards the Other as Nancy demonstrates. The logos that lead Heidegger’s philosophical meditations, I conclude with Nancy as I showed in the last chapter, Sect. 4, can be better understood in this fashion.
- 6.
Goulet calls development experts “one-eyed giants” because they forget about the dilemma of development and are unwise to consider “non-scientific rationality retrograde” (1980: 481).
- 7.
These arguments of Pogge are presented in their fuller form in his 2002 book, World Poverty and Human Rights (2008).
- 8.
However, Gandhi was ambivalent about equitable distribution of inherited wealth accumulated in social pockets. His non-violent and non-revolutionary social imagination asks the inheritors of wealth to act as its trustees in order to bring about the best possible distribution of wealth. This suggestion is generally considered an unworkable and largely conservative scheme of protecting the status quo rather than changing it radically for the sake of social equality. In 1932, in an interview given to French journalist, Charles Petrasch, Gandhi spoke of converting “the better-off classes into trustees of what they already possessed… they would keep the money, but they would have to work for the benefit of the people who procured them their wealth” (2011: 38). Nevertheless, Gandhi was in support of peaceful voluntary or legislative redistribution as in the case of land reforms. As for capitalism, he believed that capital and labour could work in perfect coordination.
- 9.
The article Hemming refers to is from GA13, which is still untranslated.
- 10.
For a critique of Sen’s idea of person, see also Giri (2002, Chap. 12: Rethinking human wellbeing: A Dialogue with Amartya Sen). While Giri here offers a critique of Sen’s notion of “personhood”, his overall goal in the book is self-cultivation and self-transformation through spiritual practices and social change through the spiritual pragmatics of the self. “The task of practical spirituality”, writes Giri, “begins with… self-realization but does not end there: its objective is to transform the world” (2002: 5). Giri denounces Western modernity’s disparaging of the spiritual angle to personhood. This goal in itself has a wide array of resonance within South Asia, where the Western “flight of the gods” or “death of God” cannot be said to be a culturally entrenched form of human experience. Answers to social and political questions in such contexts have to be sought also from within the organized social spaces of religion. The Hindu religious movements against caste hierarchy, Latin American liberation theology, Sri Lankan Sarvodaya Shramadana Movement and Bhutanese happiness index are examples of such transformative spiritual engagements. However, Giri does not offer a sustained critique of traditional spiritual pragmatics that brought modernity justifiably into conflict with religious traditionalism. Without this critique, it is impossible to see what the spiritual pragmatics of self-cultivation could mean in pluralistic and contested spaces of democracy like India in terms of the current value conflicts in development practice.
- 11.
This existentialist credo may be referred back to Heidegger’s claim that “[t]he essence of Dasein lies in its existence” (BT: 67).
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George, S.K. (2015). Justice, Ethics, Development. In: Heidegger and Development in the Global South. Contributions To Phenomenology, vol 82. Springer, New Delhi. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-81-322-2304-7_5
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