Attention and recognition as preconditions of the ethical bond

Abstract

This article critically examines the dominant paradigm in communication ethics, which grounds intersubjective recognition in language and discursive normativity. Against this position —whose most influential contemporary formulation is the discourse ethics of Habermas and Apel— it argues that the other's appearance as interlocutor presupposes a more originary openness: attention, understood as a perceptual and corporeal mediation through which the other appears as a meaningful presence prior to any argumentative articulation. The analysis proceeds in three steps: first, it shows, through a triangulation between Simone Weil, Iris Murdoch, and John Dewey, that incompatible philosophical traditions converge in identifying the dispossession of the self as a condition of encounter; second, it grounds this openness in Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology, including his late ontology of flesh, which conceives observer and observed as reversible within a single fabric of being; and third, it articulates the normative dimension of the argument by recovering the etymological coincidence between Achtung, respect, and attention (Esquirol), the Levinasian distinction between the saying and the said and the Aristotelian concept of phronesis as practical wisdom. From this trajectory follows a precise thesis: language does not create obligation but articulates and universalizes a demand already instituted in encounter. The article concludes by exploring the implications of this perspective for communication theory, applied ethics, and political dimension of recognition, and the diagnosis of the present, in which acceleration and saturation erode precisely the sensible conditions of recognition.