Before the Voice of Reason: Echoes of Responsibility in Merleau-Ponty's Ecology and Levinas's Ethics

Provides a critique of reason, demanding that we take greater responsibility for nature and other people.

Before the Voice of Reason is a phenomenological critique of reason grounded in our experience of the voices that already address us and summon us prior to the emergence of the voice of reason. In part one, David Michael Kleinberg-Levin explores the voices of nature and draws on Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology to offer a new way of thinking about environmental responsibility. In part two, he looks at the voice of the moral law and the voices of other human beings, advances a more nuanced account of Levinas's distinction between "Saying" and "Said," and proposes a new argument for our responsibility to the other.