The Ethics of Immediacy

Drawing connections between Freudian psychoanalysis Virginia Woolf's criticism and fiction and Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology The Ethics of Immediacy recounts the far-reaching consequences of the modern turn towards a new ethics of immediacy. During the first half of the 20th century a profound transformation – an existential revolution – took place in European culture in how human beings conceived of themselves. Inspired by Freud's psychoanalysis a newfound appreciation for the realm of immediate experience in human life emerged. With Freud himself making a signal contribution to this existential revolution and with Woolf and Merleau-Ponty taking up Freud's ideas in their own unique ways all three figures began to regard first-order spontaneous direct unselfconscious concrete experience of self and world as standing at the heart of what it means to be human.. Jeffrey McCurry describes how this new state of affairs stood in contrast to how immediate experience had been historically dismissed devalued repressed and even negated in the fields of psychology literature and philosophy. This experience posed dangers to psychological stability social order and philosophical certainty. McCurry examines how Freud's psychoanalytic theory Woolf's modernist criticism and fiction and Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology psychology literature and philosophy in turns embraced the risks and dangers of putting immediate experience as the center of humanity of respecting understanding appreciating and following the lead of immediate spontaneous pre-reflective pre-evaluative concrete experience in human life.