Bucka, Marvin
Dissertation topic:
"Peace for the Other: Violence and non-violence in Emmanuel Levinas and Simone Weil."
Doctoral scholarship
of the Evangelisches Studienwerk Villigst
(01/07/2022 - 30/06/2025).
Contact address at the University of Würzburg:
Institute of Philosophy
Ehrenhof, south wing
Residenzplatz
97070 Würzburg
First supervisor: PD Dr Robert Ziegler
Second supervisors:
Dr habil. Pascal Delhom (Univ. Flensburg)
Class in the Graduate School: "Philosophy, Languages, Arts"
Doctorate in the Graduate School since WS 2021/2022.
Abstract
In the face of global environmental, health and human rights crises, human vulnerabilities and their constitutive role for an ethical justification of responsibility are increasingly discussed. These crises are equally responded to through a variety of non-violent forms of resistance, such as in the Black Lives Matter movements. In my work, I will attempt to define an ethics of non-violence that derives a fundamental responsibility for others from human vulnerabilities.
Based on the works of Emmanuel Levinas and Simone Weil, who have both dealt intensively with the possibility of non-violence and with responsibility in ethical relationships, in the first part of my work I will first clarify what it means that we are "vulnerable from top to toe, down to the marrow of [our] bones" (Levinas). I will then look at how this encounter with our own and other people's vulnerability can be used to understand the responsibility that Levinas calls "the humanity of man" and which, for Weil, culminates in an "obligation towards every human being simply because he is a human being". This finally leads me to the topic of non-violence, the possibility of which is discussed by both philosophers, not without recognising its limits, which is why Weil calls for "an effective non-violence". Inasmuch as both also formulated their theories against the violence and injustice of National Socialism, they develop a non-violence despite violence, a non-violent resistance that is intended to save "the little bit of humanity that adorns the earth" (Levinas).
In the second part of the work, I will explore non-violence phenomenologically, following the previous analyses. Here, the work joins current philosophical debates, for example around Judith Butler, who also attempts to rethink humanity on the basis of shared vulnerability. My focus will be on grief as a form of non-violence, as for Weil, it is precisely the sensitivity in grief that signifies one of those moments of grace that can open up spaces of non-violence even in an environment of omnipresent violence
. And Butler also emphasised "grievability" early on as a momentum in dealing with violence. At the end of my work, I hope to have a phenomenologically well-founded understanding of forms of non-violence and an ethical justification of this as a responsibility for our shared vulnerabilities.
