Situating the Self and the Problem of Moral Motivation

• In Event: In Search of the Concrete Universal: Evaluating Benhabib’s Theoretical Vision

Abstract

In her influential and widely discussed book Situating the Self: Gender, Community, and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics (1992), Seyla Benhabib quoted Walt Whitman’s famous lines – “Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes” – to caution against a common intuition shared by Hannah Arendt, namely that moral experiences express the desire for unity and consistency. While Benhabib did not deny the importance of harmony, she also warned of its dangers. Wasn’t one of the most perplexing characteristics of Eichmann in Arendt’s eyes precisely that he was “at home” with himself? Situating the Self has been predominantly read as an account that stakes out a middle ground between liberal, communitarian and poststructural theories of social criti-cism. Benhabib’s self is not as disembodied as the selves in the original position, resists the essentializ-ing effects of group identities, and retains a fundamental sense of judgment and agency against the pervasive dynamics of power. What is less discussed, however, is the insightful anthropology of mor-al experience that undergirds Benhabib’s idea of selfhood. Taking the standpoint of the other and engaging in enlarged thinking is not simply a cognitive capacity but one that involves complex psy-chological and motivational dimensions as well. This paper traces Benhabib’s critique of the most predominant accounts of selfhood and the extent to which they rely on the desire for certainty. It then illustrates her own account of moral motivation driven by amor mundi and brings it to bear on the dis-cussion of modernity’s so-called normative deficit. If the love of the world is the ground for moral experience rather than the need for harmony, the paper argues, modernity as a process of disen-chantment does not turn into a disenchantment with modernity itself. While Jürgen Habermas’s latest opus has put the question of moral motivation front and center again, Benhabib’s work offers much neglected resources in response.

Author

• Carmen Lea Dege, Polonsky Academy