Ethics Embodied: Rethinking Selfhood through Continental, Japanese, and Feminist Philosophies by Erin McCarthy (review)

Erin McCarthy introduces her book by saying, “What follows here opens a dialogue and prepares the way for further exploration” (1). Accordingly, I take my review of Ethics Embodied as an opportunity not only to introduce and discuss the book’s main themes, but also to join in the conversation McCarthy has initiated by recommending several fields of research in which I can see her work being implemented. I hope that readers will find, with me, that Ethics Embodied lends itself to a variety of new directions in interdisciplinary and comparative scholarship. McCarthy aims to make her book accessible to anyone who has a background in at least one of the major fields she discusses, including twentieth-century phenomenology, poststructural feminism, care ethics, and Watsuji Tetsurō’s ethics of “betweenness.” Her second chapter establishes a theme that recurs throughout the book: Japanese traditions may be of interest to various continental and feminist scholars because they are alternatives to, not reactions against, dominant Western categories. In this chapter, she focuses on the work of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, to the extent that each challenges the conventional picture of subjectivity as reducible to the solitary ego or atomistic individual. Heidegger’s concept of Dasein as “being-in-the-world” and “being-with” and Husserl’s emphasis on intersubjectivity both indicate the necessarily relational character of personhood. Within this framework, McCarthy is able to effectively show that Watsuji’s perspective on relationality goes a step further, rooted as it is in a tradition that never presupposes a solitary self in the first place. McCarthy moves the reader away from conceiving of the self as “in” relations, or even dependent upon them, but instead as fully constituted by relationality or what Watsuji calls betweenness.