Edith Wyschogrod is J. Newton Rayzor Professor of Philosophy and Religious Thought at Rice University. Her field of specialization is continental philosophy of religion and ethics. She was a Guggenheim Fellow (1995-96), a past President of the American Academy of Religion (1992-93) and a Fellow of the National Humanities Center (1981-82). Her books include: An Ethics of Remembering: History, Heterology and the Nameless Others (University of Chicago Press, 1998); Saints and Postmodernism: Revisioning Moral Philosophy (University of Chicago Press, 1990); Spirit in Ashes: Hegel, Heidegger and Man-Made Mass Death (1985); and Emmanuel Levinas: The Problem of Ethical Metaphysics, to be reissued in 2000 by Fordham University Press. She is currently co-editing a volume on contemporary ethical problems such as responsibility in a technological age, globalization, economy and moral identity from the perspective of continental thought.

Contemporary accounts of the body often depict the body as an intricate system of coded genetic information that governs its form, capacities and behaviors. The distinction between mechanism and organism no longer suffices to describe corporeality. In effect, the body as a haptic field (what can be touched) has been dematerialized. The presocratic philosopher Pythagoras who thought that “numbers must be the elements of everything” prefigured this position. The body thus understood is divorced from pain and suffering.

But the body is not only the ensemble of its mathematizable processes. It is also the subject of experience, a sensorium that can feel with the other. The pain of the other can be empathically engaged, experienced as an imperative that may lead to choosing to give oneself over to relieving the other’s suffering. Such acts may be radically self-sacrificial lasting over a considerable time period or may involve less difficult tasks. Radical altruism is more likely to spur others to undertake comparable actions and can be seen as a visceral engagement in the interest of ameliorating the suffering of others.