Levinas vs. Maldiney. On the Face of Sensible Nature

Abstract

If environmental ethics would be a part of politics, as Levinas suggests, it would run the danger of privileging human interests and downplaying the power of nature’s own ethical call. This is why the present article against Levinas argues that nature needs and has a face in the strong ethical sense. It begins by extracting the definitional criteria of the face from Levinas, and then—through an excursion into the work of Maldiney, whose relevance for eco-phenomenology it wants to highlight—follows some of the attempts to extend the concept of face beyond human ethics. Thus, the article concludes that sensible nature, giving itself as Maldiney’s event, does not have a human face, but the encounter with its transcendence in its various facialities has a similar ethical force, from which an eco-phenomenological ethics of nature could grow.

Keywords

• eco-phenomenology
• environmental ethics
• nature
• face
• levinas
• maldiney