Ethics of Hospitality

177 Pages·2017·0.696 MB·English

by  Daniel Innerarity, Stephen Williams, Serge Champeau

Ethics of Hospitality
The source of hospitality lies in the fundamental ethical experiences that
make up the fabric of people’s social lives. Therein lies our primary form
of humanity. Whether we are guests or hosts, this reveals our situation in
a world made up of receiving and meeting, leaving room for the liberty to
give and receive beyond the imperatives of reciprocity.
This book proposes an ethic that promotes the possibility of stir-
ring emotions before protecting ourselves from unexpected encounters.
Fundamental ethical competence consists of opening up to the wholly other
and to others, to be accessible to the world’s solicitations. There is a moral
superiority in vulnerable love over control and moderation, in g enerous
passion over rational prudence and in excess over exchange.
Constructing an ethic of hospitality is essential at a time when we are torn
between the imperatives of modernization and growth and the demands of
concern and protection. The experience we all have today, that of the fra-
gility of the world, is giving rise to a powerful tendency toward solicitude.
From such a perspective, the duty of individuals no longer consists of pro-
tecting themselves from society, but of defending it, and taking care of a
social fabric outside of which no identity can be formed.
Daniel Innerarity is a professor of Philosophy at the University of the Basque
Country (Spain) and a researcher at the Basque Foundation for Science
(Ikerbasque). As a Doctor of Philosophy, he has carried out research in
Germany, as a fellow at the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, in
Switzerland, Italy and France.
Law and politics: continental perspectives
Series Editors: Mariano Croce, Università di Roma, Italy
and Marco Goldoni, University of Glasgow, UK
A core legacy of the Continental juridico-political tradition is the methodological
commitment to the idea that law and politics are inextricably tied to one another.
On the one hand, law has to be studied in the light of the concrete political dynam-
ics, social forces, and societal movements that make law what it is. On the other
hand, the analysis of political processes should be coupled with the study of the legal
techniques through which politics exerts its effects on social reality.
The series aspires to promote works that use the nexus ‘law & politics’ as a prism
that allows understanding societal dynamics beyond the deep-seated borders sepa-
rating purely legal from purely political methodologies. It welcomes theoretically
informed and empirically grounded analyses that foster the development of theory
in the study of juridico-political processes.
The qualifier ‘Continental’ signifies not so much a geographical or socio- historical
feature as a methodological one. The approach that the series aims to promote,
regardless of the nationality of prospective authors, materializes at the intersection
between the vocabularies and methodologies of legal and political theories. In other
words, the starting point of this approach is that the interplay between legal and polit-
ical processes provides a precious lens to observe and comprehend contemporary
societal phenomena.
Titles in this series:
Ethics of Hospitality
Daniel Innerarity (Translated from the Spanish
by Stephen Williams and Serge Champeau)
Forthcoming titles in this series:
Temporal Boundaries of Law and Politics
Out of joint
Luigi Corrias and Lyana Francot (eds)
Critical Transitions of Law and Politics
The actor’s revenge
Mariano Croce and Michele Spanò
The Anthropological Paradox
Niches, micro-worlds and psychic dissociation
Massimo De Carolis Di Prossedi
The Legal Order
Mariano Croce
Ethics of Hospitality
Daniel Innerarity
Translated from the Spanish by
Stephen Williams and
Serge Champeau
English translation published 2017
by Routledge
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and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
a GlassHouse book
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2017 Daniel Innerarity
The right of Daniel Innerarity to be identified as author of this work
has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced
or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means,
now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording,
or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
Originally published in Spanish by Península 2001
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Names: Innerarity, Daniel, 1959- author.
Title: Ethics of hospitality / Daniel Innerarity.
Other titles: Etica de la hospitalidad. English
Description: New York : Routledge, 2017. | Series: Law and politics:
continental perspectives
Identifiers: LCCN 2016036627| ISBN 9781138669185 (hardback) |
ISBN 9781315618241 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: Hospitality. | Social ethics.
Classification: LCC BJ2021 .I5613 2017 | DDC 177/.1—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016036627
ISBN: 978-1-138-66918-5 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-61824-1 (ebk)
Typeset in New Baskerville
by Swales & Willis Ltd, Exeter, Devon, UK
For Teresa
The world was not created once and for all time for each
of us individually. There are added to it in the course of
our life things of which we have never had any suspicion.
(Marcel Proust, The Prisoner
and the Fugitive)

Contents
Taking care of others 1
PART I
The domain of receiving 9
1 The pathetic, or the duty of events 11
A critique of pure action 11
Unpredictable existence 14
Lucky freedom 17
The ethics of vulnerable life 23
2 Accepting people: identity and the commitment to hospitality 28
The society of individuals 29
The disadvantages of being ourselves 32
The identity of those who can promise 35
Distance from ourselves and learning disappointment 38
3 The moral spectacle: the importance of absentees 42
The murmur of ghosts 43
The principle of the included middle 48
Consciousness as a space of interlocution 53
4 The fortune of the good life and the scandalous resemblance
between happiness and fortune 57
The tension between the good life and living well 58
The fragility of human good 63
The dialectics of the lucky instant 67
Happiness as lucky morality 70
viii Contents
5 Homo brevis: the ethics of duration, fatigue and of the end 74
The temporal condition of man 75
Beginnings and ends that are not really so 77
The anthropological aspect of fatigue 82
6 The meaning of everyday life: particularities of guests,
or uselessly waiting for the universal 89
Against the sensationalism of meaning 90
The value of prosaic life 94
PART II
Dimensions of piety 99
7 Xenology: prolegomena in understanding the other 101
The nature of otherness 102
The difficulty of taking charge of others 105
The experience of the other 108
8 Liberality: the virtue of pluralism 115
The new heterogeneity 116
Inevitable particularity and possible universality 118
Beyond tolerance 122
The political benefits of liberality 126
9 The time of others: human plurality as temporal diversity 129
The other as a temporal category 129
The experience of temporal alterity 131
Acceleration and privatization of time 134
The coordination of times 136
Time as freedom 137
10 The ethics and aesthetics of the natural 141
Natural beauty and the good life 142
The sublime and its surroundings 148
11 Poetics of compassion: the comprehension of
the incomprehensible 154
Forbidden compassion 155
The dignity of palliatives 159
Index 163
Taking care of others
Philosophers who wonder about what is good and desirable are not members
of a mystical religion or conscientious administrators of the sublime, but
rather they are those who show us a little more clearly the purpose we were
looking for. Theory must not abandon its commitment to the way people
live and act, i.e. with “customs” in their broadest sense. Kant wrote some of
his moral reflections as a theory of customs, expressing what turned out to
be a very good moral theory: reflection on our usual practices and our com-
mon value judgments, one that is rather associated with them so as not to
end up with unusual conclusions and from a sufficient distance from life to
be able to clarify and correct it.
Philosophical reflection on morals assumes moral experience. Like any
knowledge, ethical knowledge takes hold in horizons opened by percep-
tion. This is why it is impossible to make spectacular moral discoveries
through sudden flights of fancy. What ethics does is show how any new
conception must be brought to our attention: by showing its relationship
with our experience of the world and by acknowledging its ability to organ-
ize and structure our experience. Nothing can teach a lesson unless it has
been previously prepared in its association with good things. Virtues such
as respect, responsibility, gratitude, magnanimity, constancy and compas-
sion cannot be anchored in argument; rather, argumentation can only
strengthen them. It can be put forth that we should always be able to jus-
tify our value judgments by reason, and that this very defense already com-
prises a value in itself. However, this does not necessarily mean that we have
already created our values using justifications and arguments, or that they
would crumble if their justifications should weaken.
The teaching of ethics must be able to recall the essential moral experi-
ences of each of us, and to direct our reflective attention to our primary
experience of what has value. The best starting point for ethics is that of
the obvious beauty of fundamentally ethical situations. Relativism is a mere
theoretical game. I do not entirely agree with those who emphasize that
our time period is characterized by complete uncertainty in terms of val-
ues. It is true that many of the certainties that have allowed us to prepare