Book Supplement Series to the Journal of Chinese Philosophy Editor: Chung-ying Cheng
LÉVINAS: CHINESE AND WESTERN PERSPECTIVES Edited by Nicholas Bunnin, Dachun Yang, and Linyu Gu
Lévinas: Chinese and Western Perspectives Editor by Nicholas Bunnin, Dachun Yang, and Linyu Gu © 2008 Journal of Chinese Philosophy. ISBN: 978-1-405-19545-4
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01—2008
Book Supplement Series to the
Journal of Chinese Philosophy Editor: Chung-ying Cheng
LÉVINAS: CHINESE AND WESTERN PERSPECTIVES Edited by Nicholas Bunnin, Dachun Yang, and Linyu Gu
CHUNG-YING CHENG / Preface
1
NICHOLAS BUNNIN / Introduction
5
DACHUN YANG / Lévinas and the Three Dimensions of Surpassing Phenomenology
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JACQUES TAMINIAUX / Lévinas and Heidegger: A Post-Heideggerian Approach to Phenomenological Issues
31
DU XIAOZHEN / The Philosophy of Saintliness: Some Notes on the Thought of Lévinas
47
MO WEIMIN / Phenomenology or Anti-Phenomenology? —The Ethical Subject in Lévinas
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SIMON CRITCHLEY / The Split Subject
79
WANG LIPING / Transcendence or Immanence? Lévinas, Bergson, and Chinese Thought
89
WANG HENG / Lévinas’s Phenomenology of Sensibility and Time in His Early Period
105
MARIE-ANNE LESCOURRET / Desire by Lévinas
123
SHANG JIE / The Phenomenology of Death
133
WANG TANGJIA / The Concepts of Death in Heidegger and Lévinas
143
SUN XIANGCHEN / Emmanuel Lévinas and the Critique of Modern Political Philosophy
155
iv
contents
ROBERT BERNASCONI / Extraterritoriality: Outside the Subject, Outside the State
167
DORIAN WISZNIEWSKI / “The Space of Communicativity”: Lévinas and Architecture
183
chung-ying cheng
PREFACE In Totality and Infinity (1969) Lévinas understood totality to be a state of subjectivity in which the Other was merged with the self as Being and regarded infinity as a way of representing the Other that could lead to the self assuming responsibility for the Other and even responsibility for the responsibility of the Other. On this basis, Lévinas took ethics of responsibility to be the first philosophy. The face of the Other is revealed through language, but we do not have grounds to speak of the Being of the infinite Other. On the basis of our infinite trust in the Other, we can start our knowledge and our reflections on beings of the world. Our trust in the Other and our commitment to the Other allows us to give meaning to our epistemological and ontological statements. We can ask how this philosophical stance is to be compared to Chinese philosophy, which also takes ethics as its first concern before the initiation of ontology and epistemology, but which grounds ethics and morality in the unity of heaven and man. Chinese philosophy in its classical, medieval and contemporary periods, has always maintained a core practical concern with ethics as the realization of human good in both individuals and collective society. According to the Daxue, “From the Son of Heaven to common people one must take self-cultivation of one’s self as the basic task of life” (Analects 14–42). In the Confucian Analects, “One cultivates oneself so that one will bring peace to other people (anren ).” Nevertheless, Confucius also speaks of knowing the mandate ), and Mencius speaks of knowing of heaven (zhi tianming ), where this knowledge is based on knowing heaven (zhitian (one’s) nature as revealed in one’s reflection and the exercise in practice of one’s heart-mind. A concern for moral action involving others leads to reflection on the source of one’s nature and leads to an understanding of ultimate reality. Hence, we see how ontology of the world can arise from moral concern and practice. We may call this moral metaphysics and see that it characterizes the position of some contemporary Neo-Confucian thinkers. In my own work, I have characterized this position as possessing an onto-ethical aspect and speak of onto-ethics in relation to moral metaphysics. Because the purpose of moral metaphysics is ethical rather than © 2008 Journal of Chinese Philosophy
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metaphysical, moral metaphysics serves as a basis for ethical practice and hence becomes onto-ethics. We see that moral metaphysics and onto-ethics form an onto-hermeneutical circle: moral concern and moral commitment give rise to a metaphysics that is needed for moral action and moral practice. If we focus on Lévinas’s account of the infinite otherness of God, we may perhaps say the same for Lévinas, insofar as the infinite otherness of God is ultimately the basis for our moral action and our moral understanding toward others. For Lévinas, unlike Confucians, however, an absolute separation from the Other, rather than identification with the Other, is the source of the metaphysics or theology that in turn gives validity to our moral actions. I see no problem in this contrast because Heaven or the Other can be separated from man under one condition and unified with man under another condition. Under either condition, morality could reign. In this special collection of essays on Lévinas: Chinese and Western Perspectives, as edited by Nicholas Bunnin, Dachun Yang, and Linyu Gu, we can see the essential relevance of Lévinas for Chinese Philosophy and the respects in which Lévinas becomes essentially relevant. It is not accidental that many contemporary Chinese philosophy students take an interest in Lévinas and related figures in French philosophy. Many of these students have found that phenomenology provides a new approach our experience of encountering philosophical problems and issues of life and reality. Like Lévinas, they are more often attracted to Heidegger than to Husserl because Heidegger focused on human existence and its inner life while Husserl concentrated on cognition. In not following Heidegger, although being inspired by him, Lévinas counterbalanced Heidegger by focusing on the Other. We can see this focus on the Other in terms of the other pole of the profound relationship of humanity with heaven in Chinese philosophy, including things in nature for Daoism and people in the world for Confucianism. For this reason, Lévinas can be highly challenging and meaningful for Chinese philosophical self-understanding and can stimulate Chinese philosophers to work out a dialectics of sameness and otherness to accommodate possible alienation of man from God and to allow both transcendence and immanence. In his thoughtful introduction Nicholas Bunnin raises the question of how we may fruitfully conduct comparative philosophy across cultural and philosophical traditions that are far apart in their orientation and their vision of the ends of life and society. He mentioned “saving the phenomena” as a method of Aristotelian synthesis regarding truth, where what is to be saved are both common experience and the different views of philosophers governed by a constructive notion
preface
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of truth based on philosophical argument. What then is this philosophical argument? One might point out that philosophical argument must be based on observations of a common world and reflections on what one has observed and that comparative philosophy must involve opening oneself to wider observations and deeper reflections in order to reach what I have called a transcendental integration of the different or conflicting. In doing this, one must interpret the other in terms of ) and interpret the self in terms of the other the self (zibenti ) in order to achieve an overarching balance between (duibenti the two interpretations. This approach, which I have termed the approach by an “onto-hermeneutical circle,” can save phenomena by transforming them into relatively better understood forms under interpretation. Further, to approach radical difference and conflict, one must observe others in the world and reflect on what one has observed through an awakening of one’s inner creativity. This is the third volume in our Series of Supplements since 2006. I wish to thank our three guest editors for this outstanding Supplement, particularly Nicholas Bunnin, who recommended this group of excellent papers to me for publication in the spirit of both Socrates and Confucius. Chung-ying Cheng Editor of Supplement Series Editor-in-Chief Journal of Chinese Philosophy Honolulu October, 2008
nicholas bunnin
INTRODUCTION The articles in this volume are drawn from an event in China marking the centenary of the birth of Emmanuel Lévinas. They show the capacity of Chinese philosophers, in this case specialists in phenomenology and French philosophy, to contribute along with leading Western scholars to the perplexing task of assessing a deeply original contemporary philosopher. Among the many reasons for the contributors to appreciate Lévinas are his transmission of the thought of Husserl and Heidegger to France; his spiritual transformation of their phenomenology; his reflective response to the iconic horrors of modern life, exemplified by the Holocaust; his rejection of totalizing political and cultural conceptions of ourselves that he considered to be a source of these catastrophes; his profoundly original Talmudic studies; and his reinterpretation of the thought of Maimonides about our response to the otherness and face of Jehovah in his radical analysis of the otherness and face of human beings. In addition, reading Lévinas can lead us to see each of his major predecessors in a new light. All of these features have stimulated a rich diversity of response to his methodology and doctrines, including fascinating and serious objections as well as critical explications and applications. For Chinese philosophers there are special reasons to pursue an interest in Lévinas, centering on his regard for ethics, rather than Husserlian epistemology or Heideggerian ontology, as first philosophy. Although terminology and methods differ, this move can be compared to the search for a moral metaphysics in the works of Xiong Shili and Mou Zongsan, two twentieth-century philosophers who provide modern distillations of this theme from Chinese philosophy in their contemporary Neo-Confucianism. Along with Lévinas, they hold that questions of human value lie at the heart of our conception of reality rather than in a separate domain supplementing a value-free account of what there is. Whatever the methodological problems of coping with it, the world from this perspective is a single world that is ethical and natural rather than two worlds that defy unification. In this way, inherited dichotomies of fact and value or metaphysics and NICHOLAS BUNNIN, Dr., Director, Philosophy Project, Institute for Chinese Studies, University of Oxford. Specialties: metaphysics, philosophy of mind, Chinese and comparative philosophy. E-mail:
[email protected] Lévinas: Chinese and Western Perspectives Editor by Nicholas Bunnin, Dachun Yang, and Linyu Gu © 2008 Journal of Chinese Philosophy. ISBN: 978-1-405-19545-4
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morals are viewed as providing an inherently flawed grounding for social and individual self-understanding. With their attempts to combine ethics with metaphysics as first philosophy, Lévinas, Xiong, and Mou raise questions about conceiving ourselves, our history, our institutions, and our world, questions that open vistas and domains that are often hidden or distorted from other standpoints. For Chinese philosophers critically exploring territory opened by Emmanual Lévinas, the terrain, for all of Lévinas’s originality, might have a certain welcoming familiarity. It is important, nevertheless, to recognize that the aim of fusing morality and metaphysics has been contested since the formative beginnings of Chinese philosophy. While the Dao for Confucians is both metaphysical and moral, the Dao for Daoists is fundamental reality that is indifferent to human conceptions of value. The Daoist injunction is to live naturally and spontaneously rather than living according to codes, principles, or laws that are mistakenly supposed to be inherent in the Dao.They hold that ethical rules cannot capture the creativity required for persons to lead their lives. Creativity in practice is recognized by both Confucians and Daoists in their interpretations of the Book of Changes, but the Daoist understanding of this creativity does not lead to a Confucian moral metaphysics. To understand either Lévinas or Confucian accounts of morality and metaphysics, we must grasp the questions they were addressing in the intellectual context of their thought. To compare their views, we must understand the differences as well as the similarities of their intellectual cultures. Although Lévinas worked in the phenomenological tradition, analytic philosophers who recognize the importance of other approaches to philosophy can also be stimulated by his views to use their own methods to explore the consequences of placing ethics and metaphysics as fundamental to all philosophy. Simon Blackburn has argued that metaphysics historically has been shaped by a succession of fundamental concerns, including logic, religion, science, and language.1 From this perspective, a metaphysics with ethics as its most basic concern can be seen as an intelligible goal rather than a beckoning mirage that leads us only to confusion. In considering the possibility of analytic as well as phenomenological and contemporary Neo-Confucian approaches to establishing a moral metaphysics and by examining critical responses to such projects within Chinese, phenomenological, and analytic philosophy, we find that questions about comparative philosophy recur at every stage, however historically or culturally close or distant the philosophers or doctrines that we discuss. We have problems of comparison whether we are considering Lévinas and Heidegger, Confucians and Daoists, or Lévinas and Mou Zongsan. In all of these cases, we must
introduction
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determine how to find our way among strikingly different philosophical aims, methods, doctrines, conceptions of rigor, and standards of argument. Jiyuan Yu and I have proposed “saving the phenomena” as an Aristotelian method in comparative philosophy, with philosophical goals that go beyond the achievements of comparative intellectual history.2 The phenomena to be saved are both the common views and the views of the wise on philosophical topics. Aristotle argued that dialogue is the best way to conserve the important contribution that conflicting views can make to complex and many-sided philosophical truth. Aristotle aimed at the truth and sought to use philosophical argument to reconcile different views in order to achieve an objective account of reality rather than as a compromise removing tensions among disputants without regard to truth. Because he was pursuing truth, his own creative philosophical engagement could lead him beyond the positions that he surveyed. I recommend this method again, but because the way forward in comparative philosophy remains fairly murky, I hope that readers will also explore other methods of achieving philosophical ends through comparison. Chinese philosophers will also be interested in the key role of Kant’s account of “nothing” as a stimulus to Lévinas’s rejection of Husserl’s phenomenology. For Husserl, intentional experience involves the act of thinking (noesis) and the object of thought (noema), but Lévinas argued that because of their absolute alterity the Other and God are not objects for us and hence cannot be brought within the scope of Husserl’s analysis. In this, he was inspired by Kant’s discussion of Nothing in the Critique of Pure Reason.3 Kant distinguished four senses of Nothing: First, an empty concept without object (ens rationis), such as a noumenon; second, an empty object of a concept (nihil privativum), such as a shadow or cold; third, an empty intuition without an object (ens imaginarium), such as space or time; and fourth, an empty object without a concept (nihil negativum), such as an impossible object like a two-sided rectilinear figure. We speak of “nothing” where for the reasons specified we lack a concept with an object. We should also note that according to Kant the transcendental unity of apperception,4 the “I think” that accompanied all my representations, is not an object and is certainly not a Cartesian substance, but a mode of presenting objects. Lévinas took Kant’s account of a noumenon as an ens rationis as a starting point to express his disquiet with Husserl’s phenomenology, which could be employed where we have noesis and noema as the phenomenological counterparts of Kantian concept and object. In assessing the consequences of Lévinas’s way of dealing with acts of thinking that lack a noema, we can explore other ways that
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terms without an object can be meaningful as part of a more general strategy of dealing with meaning in philosophy of language and philosophy of mind. Lévinas can be approached radically in this regard through the account of language games in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations,5 but philosophers can also explore nonWittgensteinian approaches to dealing with meaning and transcendence. Further, nothingness can be examined through Chinese traditions of immanence, as examined by Wang Liping in this volume, especially the claims that being originates from nonbeing and gives rise to the myriad things and that nonbeing is unformed matter, where matter rather than form is the fundamental source of change and transformation. Lévinas’s fundamental theme of the priority of the other over the self in ethics, metaphysics, and the rest of philosophy can be discussed in relation to distinctive Chinese explorations of the philosophical problems of the self and other as well as against the background of Lévinas’s Western predecessors and contemporaries. At a time when Chinese philosophers continue to explore Confucian and other traditional responses to Western liberal thought, Lévinas offers an appreciation of liberal values that is grounded in religion rather than in the enlightenment. Chinese philosophers should also attend to the ways in which Lévinas differs from Carl Schmitt6 and Leo Strauss,7 two virulently antiliberal theorists with a current following in China. The volume contains explicitly comparative discussions of Lévinas within the context of modern European philosophy. Jacques Taminiaux explores a post-Heideggerian approach to issues of phenomenology through a comparison of Lévinas and Heidegger. Wang Tangjia focuses on concepts of death in Lévinas and Heidegger, but also compares their accounts with Confucian and Daoist treatments of death. Wang Liping compares Lévinas and Bergson on transcendence and immanence and relates his discussion to Chinese explorations of the theme of immanence and transcendence.A comparative approach within phenomenology or between phenomenology and Lévinas’s metaphysics is a recurrent feature of virtually of the articles. Readers can ponder similarities and differences in method and results that arise in considering Lévinas from comparative perspectives involving philosophers close to him and philosophers distant from him in time and philosophical culture. Questions about the relations of Lévinas’s metaphysics to phenomenology and his replacement of epistemology or ontology by ethics as first philosophy are a primary focus of articles by Dachun Yang, Mo Weimin, and Wang Heng, but these themes are also addressed by many others in this volume. Dachun Yang’s discussion of intentional-
introduction
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ity, temporality, and subjectivity in Lévinas includes a comparison of theories of man in Lévinas and Confucianism. For Lévinas, the consequences of seeing ethics and metaphysics as first philosophy are remarkably deep, rich, and manifold, but several articles test these claims as well as expounding them. Du Xiaozhen explores Lévinas’s relation to Greek philosophy and Hebrew religion and the religious origin of Lévinas’s account of the other and his commitment to alterity rather than being, the other rather than the self, as fundamental. Simon Critchley suggests an alternative secular psychoanalytic interpretation of these issues, and his views of Lévinas’s understanding of the subject are accompanied by Mo Weimin’s study of the subject in Lévinas and Marie-Anne Lescourret’s discussion of subjectivity and desire. The central themes of time and death, as newly understood by Lévinas, are discussed by Wang Heng and Shang Jie. Ambiguities in Lévinas’s relations to modernity and his critique of liberalism are examined by Sun Xiangchen and Robert Bernasconi. Dorian Wiszniewski discusses the importance of Lévinas’s notion of the space of communicativity for architecture. For technical rather than intellectual reasons, five articles on Lévinas that are part of the same project have been published separately in “Lévinas for Chinese Philosophy,” a special issue of the Journal of Chinese Philosophy.8 Feng Jun provides an assessment of Lévinas’s ethics. Jiang Yi considers Lévinas’s concept of infinity from a Chinese perspective. Wu Xiaoming reexamines central features of Mengzi’s ethics from a Lévinasian standpoint. Giovanni Levi explores ethical conceptions of calm in Lévinas and Zhuangzi. Lin Ma traces implications for the possibility of understanding non-Western cultures of Lévinas’s account of sense in terms of Judaic prophetic religion instead of Greek philosophy. The Hangzhou International Conference on Emmanel Lévinas, the source of the articles collected in this volume, took place on September 11–13, 2006 as a joint project of Zhejiang University, the Philosophy Summer School in China and the Lévinas Ethical Legacy Foundation (USA), with further support from the French Embassy in Beijing. We welcomed the cooperation provided by the Forum for European Philosophy (UK), the Association pour la Célébration du Centenaire d’Emmanuel Lévinas (France), and the Raïssa and Emmanuel Lévinas Center-MOFET (Israel). The conference was organized by Professor Dachun Yang (Zhejiang University), Dr. Nicholas Bunnin (University of Oxford), and Professor Simon Critchley (New School for Social Research). We invited a selection of leading Chinese and international philosophers who have already contributed to the study of Lévinas, but also drew together a number of excellent younger scholars who have only recently embarked on
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their study of his thought. The success of the conference planted seeds of further philosophical exchanges among participants, but we also hope that the articles in this volume will carry resonances of the fresh discoveries and convivial relations that characterized the conference sessions themselves to encourage further serious investigations of Lévinas’s thought among a wider circle of scholars both in China and elsewhere in the world. To further this aim, Renmin University of China Press has published A Century with Lévinas or the Destiny of the Other, a volume of the conference articles in Chinese.9 I conclude by expressing my deep appreciation to my coeditors Dachun Yang and Linyu Gu, to Chung-ying Cheng, and to our contributors. Dachun Yang initiated this Lévinas project with Simon Critchley and me. He hosted the Hangzhou conference and was the main editor of the Renmin University of China Press volume. Linyu Gu has worked tirelessly in editing the English versions of the articles with me. As editor of the Journal of Chinese Philosophy, Chung-ying Cheng has offered valuable guidance toward the publication of this supplement to his journal. It has been a delight to work with them and with our contributors. UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD Oxford, UK
Endnotes 1. Simon Blackburn, “Metaphysics,” in The Blackwell Companion to Philosophy, 2nd ed., ed. Nicholas Bunnin and E. P. Tsui-James (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 61–89. 2. Jiyuan Yu and Nicholas Bunnin, “Saving the Phenomena: An Aristotelian Method in Comparative Philosophy,” in Two Roads of Wisdom, ed. Bo Mou (Chicago: Open Court, 2001), 293–312. 3. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan, 1968), 295 (A292, B348). 4. Ibid., 152–55 (B131–35). 5. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1953). 6. Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. George D. Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 7. Leo Strauss, Political Philosophy: Ten Essays by Leo Strauss (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989). 8. Journal of Chinese Philosophy, vol. 35, issue 4, December 2008. 9. Dachun Yang, Nicholas Bunnin, and Simon Critchley, eds., A Century with Lévinas or the Destiny of the Other [Lieweinasi de shiji huo tazhe de mingyun] (Beijing: Renmin University of China Press, 2008).
dachun yang
LÉVINAS AND THE THREE DIMENSIONS OF SURPASSING PHENOMENOLOGY Emmanuel Lévinas begins with phenomenology, but in the end surpasses it. By bringing into coincidence and mediating the two great civilizations of Hellenism and Judaism and by criticizing and reflecting the theories of the other in phenomenology, Lévinas constructs his own theory of the other within a kind of metaphysical ethics: Beyond all kinds of theories of relative otherness, he insists on the absolute otherness of the other. This idea differs not only from the epistemological attitude of Husserl, but also from the ontological positions of Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty. Starting with his particular ideas of intentionality, temporality, and subjectivity, we shall discuss in this article how Lévinas attempts to surpass phenomenological positions regarding the problem of the other.
I. Another Intentionality In the phenomenological movement, intentionality is a central concept that no one researching the problem of the other can neglect. In Husserl, the problem of the other involves the cognitive relation between pure consciousnesses, so the relation between otherness and intentionality appears to be of essential importance. This relation has nearly the same significance in Sartre, because Sartre thinks the problem of the other involves conflicts between different pure consciousnesses. Because Heidegger discusses the other as the problem of Being-with and does not discuss it in terms of consciousness, his idea of the other does not directly refer to intentionality, but this concept is implicit in his philosophy and is indirectly related to the body. As for Merleau-Ponty, who regards the problem of the other as that of Being-with between the bodies, the key point is to discuss the relation between the otherness of the other and the intentionality of my body. Generally speaking, intentionality is a basic concept of phenomenology, although there is a difference between existential DACHUN YANG, Professor and Vice-Chairman, Department of Philosophy, Zhejiang University. Specialties: French philosophy, Merleau-Ponty, Lévinas. E-mail:
[email protected] Lévinas: Chinese and Western Perspectives Editor by Nicholas Bunnin, Dachun Yang, and Linyu Gu © 2008 Journal of Chinese Philosophy. ISBN: 978-1-405-19545-4
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intentionality and cognitive intentionality. What Lévinas wants to do is to shake this basis of phenomenology. Simon Critchley says: . . . if one comprehends the word “phenomenology” as a theory of cognition or an ontology based on intentionality—either the relation between the noesis and noema in Husserl or the co-appendance between the Dasein and the world in Heidegger—the work of Lévinas is a phenomenology of the inphenomenologizable, or what he names as the order of enigma in opposition to the order of phenomena.1
Since Lévinas believes that ontology does not remove epistemology—in his opinion, “the general title of ontology is appropriate to the theory as comprehension of beings”2—we shall here select Husserl’s opinions as the examples to investigate in showing how Lévinas surpasses phenomenological theories of intentionality in his own discussion of the problem of the other. Consciousness is always consciousness of something, that is to say, it is always directed at something. This is what the intentionality means. The basic sense of intentionality in Husserl is of a kind of destination-direction given by consciousness which points to the “selfgivenness” or “self-possession” (clarity) of the object. Intentionality signifies not only the ego-pole in the action of the cogito, but also the pole of object that is constituted by the same cogito. That “something” or object of the action of consciousness is constituted by the action itself. With phenomenological reduction, the relation between the subject of the cognitive action, namely the transcendental ego, and its object, that is, the world, becomes the problem of immanence in the domain of consciousness. But this leads Husserl to a dilemma: If the world were constituted in our consciousness, phenomenology would be a kind of solipsism. He says, The meaning of transcendental reduction therefore implies that it can only at first pose the ego and that it includes its noématiconoétique content as existent. It therefore begins surely as a pure egology and as a science which is condemned, it seems, as a solipsism, although it is transcendental.3
That is to say, if the ego, the cogito, with the transcendental reduction reduces itself to an absolute ego and has relations only with immanence, I will become a lonely ego. This philosophy concerning pure ego is still a pure solipsism; in order to be a transcendental and phenomenological philosophy, it is necessary to pose the other. It is evident that Husserl poses the other as a means to help avoid falling into complete solipsism. The relation between my ego and the other’s ego therefore appears as follows: The world is constituted not only by my consciousness, but
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also by the consciousness of the other. The other, as the transcendental condition for the existence of world, will ensure the objectivity of the world, but even if the empirical ego of the other can be constituted by the intentionality of my consciousness, its transcendental ego cannot be so constituted and the presence of the other as pure consciousness overcomes the loneliness of my consciousness and its solipsism. It is very easy to understand the intentional relation between my consciousness or the other’s consciousness and their objects, but the intentional relation between my consciousness and the other’s consciousness cannot be understood in the same way. The problem is how the other’s (pure) consciousness can appear to my (pure) consciousness. To deal with this problem Husserl advances his idea of “copresentation.” Taking perception as an example, in my perceptions of a table, one side or two sides of the table appear to me directly, while the other sides are co-presented virtually with what appears to me directly.Thus, all sides of the table are presented to me, either virtually or directly. There are differences, however, with my perception of the other. The behavior of the other’s body, of course, could be presented directly or co-presented virtually to my consciousness, but his consciousness could only be co-presented virtually and could never be presented directly to me. In consequence, the other’s consciousness is only the indirect object, and not the direct object, of my intentionality. In his cognitive attitude, Husserl faces a dilemma: Either the other is constituted by the action of my consciousness and I fall into solipsism or the other exists independent of my consciousness and I must return to the natural attitude that Husserl criticizes. Both Sartre and Merleau-Ponty believe that Husserl cannot resolve this problem, because he begins from epistemology and cannot be conscious of the ontological position of the other, that is to say, he has no interest in the other’s actual existence. Sartre criticizes him like this: “The only relation that Husserl could constitute between my Being and that of the other is that of cognition, therefore, like in Kant, he could not avoid solipsism.”4 Lévinas to some extent agrees with this criticism by Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, because, like them, he demands going beyond epistemology. But in Lévinas’s view, their existential attitude has not completely avoided the standpoint of cognition. I do not know if one can talk about “phenomenology” of the face, because phenomenology describes the thing which appears. Just the same, I ask myself if one can talk about regarding the face, because the regard is cognition, perception . . . the relation with face may be controlled by perception, but the one that is specially face is the one that can’t be reduced to perception.5
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It is evident that, according to him, the opinions of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty can still be reduced to phenomenological epistemology. In his own theory, there is no need either to explain how the other is presented to me or to prove that the other exists. He must only firmly defend the otherness of the other in an attitude that is beyond both epistemology and ontology. Lévinas understands the concept of intentionality in Husserl like this: “All consciousness is therefore conscious of that consciousness itself, but also and especially of something other than itself, of its intentional correlate, of its thought-of.” It implies “the openness of the thought to something present to the thought, to everything other than the lived experience of this thought.”6 This understanding of intentionality as openness leads Lévinas to his own idea of intentionality. He replaces immanence by transcendence, somewhat like in Sartre. He begins with Husserl, but surpasses him in the end. He himself says: . . . the character of value has nothing with the beings according to the modification of knowledge, but comes from a special attitude of consciousness, from a non-theoretical intentionality which cannot from the very beginning be reduced into knowledge. There is a Husserlian possibility which can be developed beyond what Husserl himself says about the problems of ethics and about the relation with the other (which remain a kind of representative relation in Husserl, while Merleau-Ponty has attempted to interpret it differently). Even though we should end it here by finding the rupture of intentionality, the relation with the other can still be researched as irreducible intentionality.7
This implies that Lévinas wants to surpass the attitude of epistemological intentionality and does not regard the relation with the other as that of representation. He wants to retain the concept of intentionality, but endows it with a different sense. To metaphysical thinking, where a finite has the idea of infinite— where a radical separation is produced, at the same time the relation with the other (is produced)—we have reserved the term intentionality, of consciousness of . . . it is attention to speech or welcome of the face, hospitality and not thematisation. . . . The subject is a host.8
All of this leads to the relation of ethical intentionality. There may be a friendly relationship between the other and me, but it is after all not an immanent one. The other is always an “other person” and keeps permanently his otherness and difference. He would not identify himself with me and could never be contained in my immanence. There is a rupture between this position of Lévinas and the position of cognitive intentionality. For Lévinas, cognitive intentionality regarding the other implies solipsism, because “cognition is a sort of suppression of the other by the grasp, by the hold or
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by the vision that grasps before this grasp.”9 Cognition emphasizes identity and not difference. The relation of cognitive intentionality is essentially a relation with the object, which we want to assimilate or to unite. We suspend its difference, which we want to change into something immanent. It takes the cogito as the scale and means that everything is immanent in me or contained by me. The cognition is always explained as assimilation; therefore, even the furthest cognition could not enable me to communicate with the real other. I could only remain always in the subjective solitude of my cogito. I have not yet considered and could not consider the other’s otherness and externality. Cognition seems as a bunch of lights: Everything has to have its value and meaning under these lights, and, therefore, everything loses its own value and meaning. Everything has been possessed or virtually could be possessed in my cognitive activity. Eliminating the relation of cognitive intentionality between the other and me, Lévinas insists, is just to shake off the relation of possessing and to let the other become the absolute other who has essentially his proper otherness. Because he regards the other as a kind of infinity that cannot be assimilated to the cogito, we should not treat the other within a cognitive position. To know the other means to reach totality, to contain the whole world and the other in my brain, and to pose the sameness that clears up the other’s otherness, difference, and externality. The cognitive position is evidently unessential and limited,“hence intentionality, where thinking remains accordance with the object, does not define consciousness at its fundamental level. All cognition as intentionality already presupposes in itself the idea of infinity, especially the idea of disaccord.”10 The conception of infinity means the impossibility of assimilating the other to myself. My cognitive activity cannot behold the other, as the symbol of God, that is to say, the infinity that cannot be known is the basis of cognition. So we must think in the idea of infinity that is always exterior to the thinking. We could confirm the importance of infinity and admit the importance of the other only by abandoning cognitive intentionality. According to Lévinas, “To think infinity, the transcendent, the Stranger is not to think an object”;11 “The idea of infinity is neither the immanence of the I Think or the transcendence of the object.”12 This means that infinity has no relation with either the cognitive subject or cognitive object. It concerns only the other in the society, while the other “eludes thematization,”13 in other words, “the presence of exteriority, the face, will never become an image or an intuition.”14 Lévinas criticizes the cognitive position of phenomenology, but does not abandon completely intentional analysis. The reason for this is that the phenomenological method to some degree has deviated from the trend of totality. As Lévinas says, “intentional analysis is the
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search for the concrete.”15 This has two sides: On one hand, intentional analysis is a kind of theoretical position that thinks mainly about the subject–object relation in the intentional structure and does not pay attention to the inspiration coming from externality and transcendence; but on the other hand, “theoretical thinking, guided by the ideal of objectivity, does not exhaust this kind of inspiration.”16 That is to say, the conception of intentionality still leaves some space for relations outside of cognition (especially ethical relations). He writes: If, as this book will show, ethical relations ought to appeal to transcendence as its term, it is because the essence of ethics is in its transcendent intention and because not every transcendent intention has a noesis-noema structure. Ethics has already become an “optics” by itself. It is not content merely to prepare for a theoretical exercise of thought that monopolizes transcendence. From the point of view of metaphysical transcendence—here the relation with the absolute other or the truth is established, and therefore ethics becomes a royal road, the traditional opposition between theory and practice is abolished.17
We should cancel the opposition between theory and practice and regard them as the different styles of metaphysical transcendence. Naturally, with both of them having changed their traditional meanings, the conception of intentionality recovers its vitality. The conception of intentionality in Husserl expresses the activity and spontaneity of my consciousness; it wants to include everything in the same and eliminate all differences. While in Lévinas, the essential thing is to pay attention to absolute otherness and absolute difference. This is a metaphysical desire, a never-satisfied desire for transcendence, and is not a need for something. The need for something makes the other as something assimilated, makes it be part of me, and therefore makes it lose its otherness. This need represents a nostalgia, a longing for a return to the origin, to the motherland. On the contrary, metaphysical desire does not retreat from the outside to the inside, does not make the outside into the inside, and does not have a nostalgia for a lost origin or motherland: . . . metaphysical desire tends towards something else completely, towards the absolutely other, it is desire for a land not of our birth, a land foreign to whole nature, which has not been our motherland and to which we will never be transported. Metaphysical desire does not depend on any precedent kinship.18
It therefore implicates a different kind of intentionality, “Metaphysical desire has another intention; it desires beyond everything that can simply complete it. It is like goodness: the desired does not fulfill it, but empties it.”19
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II. Another Temporality The problem of temporality also occupies a central place in phenomenology. Concerning the conceptions of time, there are naturally many differences in Husserl, in Heidegger, in Sartre, and in MerleauPonty. But we can also find that they are in accord with one other in principle. First, time is closely related with the inner experiences of the individual or with the individual’s existential actions. In Husserl, phenomenological time “is a united form of all lived experience in the single fluid of lived experience (a unique pure ego),” and it is different from “objective time.”20 This kind of lived experience naturally belongs to the field of pure consciousness. In Sartre, time is at first related to pure consciousness, somewhat as it is in Husserl, but in the end Sartre makes time appear as the mode of existence. He writes that, Temporality is not a universal time that contains all beings, and especially human reality. It is not a law of development that is imposed on being from the exterior. It is also not being, but it is the intrastructure of being that is its own “nihilization,” that is to say, the mode of being of the being-for-itself.21
Second, phenomenological time signifies that the inner experience of the ego, or each moment of individual existence, contains the unity of the three dimensions of time. Heidegger says that, “the primordial unity of the structure of care lies in temporality”;22 “temporality makes possible the unity of existence, facticity, and falling, and in this way constitutes primordially the totality of the structure of care.”23 Sartre has the same opinions. He tells us that “temporality is evidently an organized structure, and past, present and future, the so-called three dimensions of time should not be conceived as a collection . . . but as the structured moments of an original synthesis.”24 Third, each philosopher admits the united structure of the three dimensions, while emphasizing a different dimension, which is the future in Heidegger, the present in Sartre. The later writes that, Dispersing its being into the three dimensions, present, past and future at the time, the for-itself, for the only fact that it nihilitizes itself, is temporal. No one of these dimensions has an ontological priority over the two others and could exist without them. Even if this is the case, we should emphasize the ecstasy of the present—and not the ecstasy of the future as in Hedeigger.25
We find that phenomenological time is related to being, especially the being of the ego, and that “traditionally, the relation between being and non-being is expressed as temporality.”26 Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty have not directly discussed the relation
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between temporality and the other, because, according to Lévinas, temporality for them always relates to the being and solitude of the ego. In Husserl, this means the solipsist dilemma of the cognitive subject, and in Heidegger and Sartre, this means the existential solipsism of the solitary ego. In Merleau-Ponty, there is some difference, but the ego still has priority over the other. Lévinas, however, wants to give time some new senses in order to go beyond being, to be “otherwise than being.” He introduces time into ethics and not into ontology and relates time to the other and not the ego. He emphasizes the absolute otherness of the other and establishes a social relationship between the other and me. All of this gives meaning to temporality. In De l’existence à l’existant, Lévinas criticizes the Heideggerian conception of time. According to him, “temporality in Heidegger is an extase,” and “by extase, man assumes his existence.”27 Dasein in this extase projects itself toward its authentic potentiality-for-Being, that is to say, it returns to its self-solitude or goes toward a world not shared by the other in its Being toward death. Lévinas writes: From then on, existence is “contemporary” of the world and of light. . . . The world and light are solitary. These given objects, these worked-out beings are other things than myself, but they are mine. Enlightened by light, they have a sense and therefore are as if they are from me. In the comprehended universe, I’m single, that is to say, enclosed in an existence which is definitely one.28
In Le temps et l’autre, Lévinas continues his criticism. In Heidegger, time is related with the future, that is to say, with the Being toward death that means Dasein’s solitude. In contrast, Lévinas says that:“the relation with the future, the presence of future in the present seems still to be accomplished in the face-to-face with the other. The faceto-face is the accomplishment itself of time; the invasion of the present towards the future is not the fact of a single subject, but the intersubjective relation.”29 Being and Time is the most important target of Lévinas’s criticism. He admits that he appreciates Being and Time and is affected profoundly by it, writing that “my admiration for Heidegger is especially admiration for Being and Time,”30 “though I have gotten rid of the systematic regularity of this thought, I am still marked by the same style of analysis in Being and Time, by the ‘central points’ to which existential analyses make reference.”31 But he does not agree with Hedeigger’s position regarding existential temporality. As we know, the central points in Being and Time are two concepts: time and being. Heidegger takes the existential time of Dasein as the starting point to probe the problem of Being. According to Lévinas’s understanding of Heidegger,“to be” is “there be” (il y a), while “il y a” relates to existential experiences such as “anxiety,” etc. Existential experiences are deployed in the dimensions of time, and anxiety is the
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most essential one, because it leads to the dimension of the future. Lévinas criticizes the conception of existential time from the perspective of the experience of insomnia. In insomnia, one cannot say “I” am not yet asleep,“I” can’t stop “waking up with a startle”; all this is made by a kind of non-personal “il y a” that is independent of my activity. So it is not “I” wake up, but “this” or “it” wakes up. The existence is “swaying” and “murmuring,” it is made of tension, fear, and flurries. In order to exist, “I” am always awake and keeping alert, but “it” is always in this situation. Fatigue, indolence, and diligence are merely styles of existence. Lévinas has found from these phenomena my fear in front of existence and my helpless retreat and escape. On the surface, these are descriptions of the nonpersonal “il y a,” but they in fact imply my worry and bother about existence. Lévinas says, “For me, the existential entanglement is the form adopted by the famous Heideggerian care.”32 According to Heidegger, care is the action of Dasein itself at the limit of “nothingness.” For Lévinas, this means that Dasein’s care regarding itself is caused by existential solitude and Dasein’s extreme need to possess itself completely.33 In Heidegger, care signifies the unity of the three dimensions of time, with the future having priority. The future is the principal item of care, and its direction implies the return of Dasein to itself, “care is that which forms the totality of Dasein’s structural whole. Yet the primary item in care is the ‘ahead-of-itself,’ and this means that in every case Dasein exists for the sake of itself.”34 This view is evidently different from that of Sartre, who emphasizes the present, but it nevertheless clearly manifests the existential situation of the solitary ego. Although Being-in-the-world of Dasein is always Mitdasein (Dasein-With), Mitsein (Being-With), and Mitsein mit Anderen (Being-With Others), and although the care with which we do something always accompanies the care with which we communicate with others, the authentic existential relation is not with others, but with death. The most important content of Dasein is Being-toward-death. We can share what we possess, but cannot share what we are, cannot share one’s death. Therefore, with Being-toward-death, all nonauthentic relations, including Being-with the others, are abandoned, because one will meet with one’s death alone. Heidegger writes: We may now summarize our characterization of authentic Beingtowards-death as we have projected it existentially: anticipation reveals to Dasein its lostness in the they-self, and brings it face to face with the possibility of being itself, primarily unsupported by concerned solicitude, but of being itself, rather, in an impassioned freedom towards death—a freedom which has been released from the illusions of the “they,” and which is factical, certain of itself, and anxious.35
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In Heideggerain theory of existence, according to Lévinas, One can exchange everything between beings except existing. In this sense, to be is to be isolated by existing. Inasmuch as I am, I am a monad. It is by existing that I am without doors and windows, and not by some content in me that is incommunicable. If it is incommunicable, it is because it takes its root in my being, which is the most private in me. So, every enlargement of my knowledge, of my means of self-expression, remains without effect on my relationship with existing, especially the interior relationship.36
It is evident that Lévinas mainly criticizes Heideggerian existential solitude produced in the return to the authentic state in anticipation of death. Heidegger positively emphasizes the sense of “il y a,” but Lévinas thinks that “il y a” signifies completely useless attempts and endeavors in one’s existence. According to him, one should go beyond the “il y a,” beyond existence, attempts, and endeavors, but to do so does not lead to nothingness. Lévinas wants to go beyond the opposite between being and nonbeing, between being and nothingness. We have not yet fully noticed that the “otherwise than being” transcends the alternative between being and nonbeing, if, as Lévinas thinks, nothingness is still nothing other than the counterpart of being, a counterpart that has no sense outside a relation with being: Being or nonbeing is there not the question.37 His position is to return to the existent. That is to say, it needs return to the existent from existence, to beings from Being, by transforming the state of a verb to the state of a thing. This way is completely opposite to that of Heidegger. In Lévinas’s view, it is the existent that supports existence, not existence that supports the existent: “[T]he existent dominates existence, as substance dominates the attribute.”38 In Heidegger, existence is mainly related to the future, but for Lévinas, to return to the existent emphasizes the present, especially the so-called “instant.” He says, “in the instant, the existent dominates existence.”39 The “person” of the subject is fixed and is not free because it encounters the other in the instant. In consequence, going out of the “il y a” is self-dethroning; it uncrowns self-domination or the centrality of the self. Going out of the “il y a” without returning to the ego and without going on to nothingness means going out of solitude, especially that of “Beingtoward-death” and absolute freedom, and thereby leads to a relation with the other. Time in Heidegger, as in Husserl and Sartre, is nearly the same as the Bergesonian durée, in which different moments lead to a continued unity without rupture. From this point of view, difference or otherness is to be overcome. In disagreeing with the Heideggerian conception of temporality that is related to the united structure of care and especially to one’s future, Lévinas links temporality with
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transcendence that goes beyond the self and leads to the other. He tells us that Le temps et l’autre “deals with the relation to the other insofar as it takes time as the element, as if time is transcendence, is especially the openness to the other and the Other.”40 Concerning the two most important relationships with the other, eros and filiality, Lévinas emphasizes that the other or otherness is absolute. This means that openness is the openness of self to society. He wants to tell us, “time is not the fact of the isolated and lone subject, but the very relationship of the subject with the other.”41 I have a social relationship with the other; there is no more the solitary and insomniac ego. I will escape from anxiety and fear, from being on guard and hostility. According to his analysis, Being-in-the-world involves an emphasis on esse, and to demand the realization of the essence of the self (the inner essence) is also to pursue private interest (interessé): Esse est interesse, l’essence est intéressement.42 To go out of the “il y a,” to be otherwise than being or to be beyond essence, signifies responsibility for the other and represents justice (dés-inter-essée). The social relationship with the other is the just relation (la relation dés-inter-essée): “justice” is the same as the “dés-inter-essée.” To be just is to go beyond inter essence, to give up pursuing private interest. His conclusion is: “Responsibility for the other, being-for-the-other, it seems to me, has since this time interrupted the anonymous and nonsensical noise of being.”43 III. Another Subjectivity Both intentionality and temporality have an undivided relation with subjectivity. In order to discuss the problem of the other or otherness profoundly, we must pay much attention to the problem of subjectivity, strictly speaking, the problem of intersubjectivity. Kant’s philosophy dissolves the Cartesian substance of cogito and replaces it with the transcendental ego in the character of function. The transcendental reduction in Husserl develops Kant’s idea to the extreme and establishes the principle of the transcendental subject, but this theory of the transcendental subject has evidently led into the impasse of solipsism. As we pointed out previously, the world (include the other’s empirical ego) could be something constituted by my transcendental ego, but the other’s transcendental ego could not be so constituted. Although in his later years Husserl begins to consider intersubjectivity from the perspective of epistemology, he still faces many difficulties. What he emphasizes is still transcendental subjectivity. His many disciples give up the doctrine of transcendental subjectivity, but continue to emphasize the central place of the subject and thus cannot overcome the difficulty of solipsism.
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Heidegger does not use the concept of the ego. He establishes the priority of Dasein and takes it as the starting point of his phenomenological ontology. Although he determinedly holds that his theory is not any kind of humanism in “Letter on Humanism,” and many scholars consider it to be a kind of antihumanism, he still essentially confirms the central place of human being. He wants to resolve the difficulties of solipsism by the Being-with of others, but demands in the end to return to the solitary existence of Dasein in the primary Being-toward-death. Therefore, subjectivity still has an important place and has priority over intersubjectivity. Sartre thinks that Husserl’s transcendental ego is still related to Descartes’s Cogito, therefore destroying pure consciousness. He himself makes “consciousness without the ego” the starting point: Human reality at first is so-called pure consciousness or being-for-itself, while pure consciousness and being-for-itself mean freedom and subjectivity. The relation between my consciousness and the consciousness of the other is regarded as a conflict for freedom and subjectivity, as an attempt to make each other’s being-for-itself into being-in-itself. He criticizes Heidegger’s conception of Being-with-others, because it transforms the relationship between the other and me into the relation “between us,” and this is somewhat like Kant’s conception of subjectivity, although in a nonauthentic form. In Sartre’s view, Being-for-other has a place in the making of subjectivity, but is not its essential side. The inspirational source of Merleau-Ponty is Husserl’s later doctrine that “transcendental subjectivity is inter-subjectivity.” He abolishes the priority of pure consciousness in Husserl and Sartre, and makes subjectivity of body the center of his doctrine; he accepts Heidegger’s concept of Being-with and tries to transforms the intersubject relationship in Husserl into an interbody relationship.The heart of all these doctrines is the conception of subjectivity, with intersubjectivity occupying only an accessorial place, because, although these philosophers discuss the problem of the other, what they care about is sameness rather than otherness: They want to reduce otherness into sameness. According to Lévinas’s interpretation, the “absolute and pure” ego in Husserl demands identity. This implies “the waking up with a start of ego” and means maintaining the central place of ego. Therefore, any attempt to leave identity will be criticized, “the transcendental I, who does not display any thematizing attitude and does not claim for itself the identity of the same, is criticized as being diverse, in the sense of ‘common’ difference.”44 Nevertheless, Lévinas finds that the conceptions of the subject in phenomenology contain an antinomy: The subject is not in the first place identical, but existing in differences, it could only be the result of synthesis; and before accomplishing this identification, “the pure I, the subject of transcendental consciousness
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in which the world is constituted, is itself outside the subject.”45 With the abolition of substance, it is impossible to pursue the identity of the subject in change. Lévinas insists in some sense on restoring the substance of the subject, but he does not emphasize its identity; on the contrary, he insists on transcendence and demands going beyond sameness and identity. Heidegger and Sartre also emphasize transcendence and openness, but their account of transcendence and openness leads to self-choice in the domain of subject. What Lévinas demands is that the subject should overcome its isolated existence by transcendence and openness. According to Lévinas, phenomenology concerning the relation between “For-itself” and “For-itself” in Sartre is a phenomenology of regard. With regard, both the other and I want to let each other be in the position of an object. But the endeavor simply shows that both the other and I are free, are subject. The subject displays a kind of active power to materialize the other. Lévinas obviously denies Sartre’s conflictual relation between subjects. In his view, it is progress for Merleau-Ponty to emphasize Being-with and reciprocity between the other and me and to deny that each subject materializes the other. But Lévinas also criticizes Merleau-Ponty. Because his Being-with, by not maintaining the otherness of the other and its personality, tries to unite the otherness into my self-identification and still emphasizes the spontaneity of my subject. Lévinas develops from the face, which is a part of the body, a metaphysical sense. The face is the body, but is not simply the body. We should insist on neither returning to inner consciousness from the exterior body as in Husserl and Sartre, nor uniting internality and exteriority as in Merleau-Ponty. We should instead go to the outside, to exteriority, and to transcendence. Lévinas critically reconstitutes phenomenology of subject by throwing away epistemological and existentialist subjectivity and establishing an ethical subjectivity. The face in Lévinas goes beyond the regard and perception. It attends to the absolute otherness of the other and represents an ethical relationship. “My idea is that the entrance to face is ethical at the very start.”46 The face has two senses. First, it is naked, poor and fragile, easily attacked and injured, but it is neither our competitor nor an object that could be assimilated by us. Second, it is a power that can conquer the strongest power by its gentleness, a power that forbids us to kill, a kind of demand, an order; it signifies a height that is higher than the self, and there is an order in the other’s presence as if a master talks to me. Do not complain that I have nothing. I am the rich man and the other the poor, to whom I should give all of my riches and for whom I should bear all their responsibilities.As a subject, I am the very person who should respond to the other’s calling and find
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their solutions. The other might appear with the form of violence, hatred, and contempt, etc., but Lévinas insists that even though there may have been such situations, all of his analysis about the face—the other’s order and poverty, my obedience and riches—occupies first place. From this point of view, the subject obtains passivity in the sense of ethics and gives up his positivity. We must change our position toward the other: We must not watch the face, we must just listen. The reason is that “the face resists possession, resists my powers,”47 “The face to face is not a modality of coexistence nor of the cognition.”48 The face represents the otherness of the other. The meaning of subjectivity has been changed in Lévinas. In the preface of Totalité et infini, he writes: “This book presents itself as a defense of subjectivity, but it will apprehend the subjectivity not at the level of its purely egoist protestation against totality, nor in its anxiety before death, but as founded in the idea of infinity.”49 And he also indicates: “This book will present subjectivity as welcoming the other, as hospitality, in which the idea of infinity is consummated.”50 Husserl’s theory of the transcendental transforms all things into objects of the Cogito, while Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty attribute some senses to these things either by self-existence or by Being-with. In Lévinas’s view, there is not much difference among them, because they all want to assimilate the other into my cognition or my existence. This means generalizing the other. Lévinas holds that the relation between the other and the self should not be considered in general, because the other signifies infinity. Intersubjectivity is actually sociality other than totality and is established on the ground of an ethical relationship that is responsive to the other and responsible for the other. This subjectivity means responsibility. Husserl talks about responsibility for the truth; Heidegger discusses responsibility for one’s authentic life or existence; Sartre demands responsibility for one’s free choice; Merleau-Ponty insists that together with the other we must be responsible for the fate of community. Lévinas takes responsibility to be for the other:We must even be responsible for the other’s responsibility, and must undertake the effects of the other’s actions. This is a responsibility beyond my responsibility. The subject in this case is not a “for it-self,” but a “for the other.” The other as infinity is out of us. We could witness the other and make them close to me in reality only when we are responsible for the responsibility of the other. Taking the idea of infinity as a starting point, this ethical relation of responsibility for the other represents an inequality and an asymmetry and thus leads to the subject in Lévinas’s sense. “Between the other and the self, the relation is not reciprocal, I am subjected to the other. And I am essentially ‘subject’ in this sense.”51 Further, I am
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responsible for the other, but do not demand accordingly the other’s responsibility for me. In this sense, to be a subject is equivalent to being a hostage. I am pledged for the other and held as a hostage for him, but I do not thereby ask for the other to do something for me. To witness infinity signifies that the subject will always bear responsibility and can never escape from an obligation for the other. This is a demand coming from divinity. The subject listens to the divine voice, not the voice of one’s consciousness. No one can at any time say: I have finished my obligation.The responsibility for the other cannot be released and no one can replace me. Infinity does not make itself appear before us, only the subject responding to the other and responsible for the other can witness it. This is not to say that Lévinas has not noticed the noises around him caused by the doctrines of the end of the subject or the death of the subject. According to him, the death of man means that the inner world maintained by subjective metaphysics has lost its place. Both in social sciences and in postmodern philosophies, doubts about the subject have much influence and lead to the crisis of humanism. Lévinas says, The end of subjectivity began with the twentieth century. The social sciences and Heidegger lead to the triumph of mathematical intelligibility, sending the subject, the individual, his unicity and his election back into ideology, or else rooting man in being, making him its messenger and poet.52
In the eyes of Lévinas, although antihumanism has its own reasons to eliminate egocentrism, and he agrees with this orientation, he does not take the side of antihumanism. Rather, he demands starting from responsibility for the other and redefining subjectivity by comparing it with those former ideas of Being. According to him, subjectivity demands the responsibility for the other, and this is a “defense for human beings,” especially a “defense for the other different from myself.” This idea should “preside over the criticism of humanism.”53 It is evident that the philosophy of Lévinas still has a kind of humanistic care, although it is not a self-centered humanism, but a “humanism of the other” (humanisme de l’autre homme).
IV. From the View of Confucianism Lévinas’s philosophy surpasses phenomenology and therefore surpasses the ontology and epistemology of Western philosophy. It represents a demand for an open-hearted attitude of Western culture and people toward other cultures and people. It will play a very important
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role in the era of globalization. We must have a comprehensive understanding of the significance of Lévinas’s project of surpassing phenomenology if we are to understand his philosophy in relation to Confucianism. Lévinas’s philosophy is an ethics that concentrates on the sociality of man, while Confucianism is often held to be a system of social and ethical philosophy. It is evident that they share many similarities as theories of man that pay great attention to the other. Lévinas’s philosophy concerns the destiny of the other and maintains a humanism for the other, while Confucianism is a theory of benevolence or kindheartedness (ren ), exemplified by the claim that “the ).” In Chinese, this benevolent love people (renzhe airen is nearly the same as the character ren , signifying character ren human, people, man as man, humanity, love for the other and having a heart of compassion toward the other. From this point of view, Lévinas’s philosophy may play an important role in the comparison between Chinese and Western philosophy. But we must carefully consider the status of Lévinas’s philosophy and realize that the theory of man in Lévinas is different from the traditional views both of Western philosophy and of Confucianism. Nearly all the modern Western philosophies since Descartes can be included in the category of theories of man, but they devote their main attention to the subject as knower and its relation to the object as the known. Only since the later half of the twentieth century has there appeared a so-called ethical or practical turn, to which Lévinas’s philosophy has contributed very much.This ethical turn, of course, has some similarity with Confucianism. But does this mean that Western philosophy has moved toward Eastern philosophy, as some Chinese scholars have suggested? In my opinion, this new tendency insists on the main intrinsic principles of Western philosophy while making use of some resources from other civilizations or cultures. In the same way, other civilizations or cultures are but mirrors of this development, and in this way can usefully assist its self-reflection. Of course, we find that Lévinas has a more open mind than his predecessors through opening a breach in their Euro-centrism. This is because he is inspired by two great civilizations: Hellenism and Judaism. The whole effort of Lévinas is to break through the intention of sameness maintained by Western philosophy, including Husserl and Heidegger, whom he regarded, in this sense, as Greeks! For many Chinese scholars, Lévinas’s placement of Husserl and Heidegger together is impossible, but for Lévinas this pairing is evident and very natural. Lévinas pays great attention to the otherness or alterity between Hellenism and Judaism, while many Western philosophers accentuate their sameness. The attitude of maintaining the otherness or difference between different cultures or persons perhaps shares some views with
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Confucianism, which also realizes differences or otherness between different cultures or persons and maintains a harmony between dif) (Harmonize and yet remain ferences (he er butong different). Yet, if we pay closer attention, we will see that the attitudes toward difference or otherness in Lévinas and Confucianism are not the same. Lévinas maintains a view of absolute otherness, while Confucianism demands only a kind of relative otherness. In both Confucianism and Lévinas, ethics is deployed around the in center of subject, but there exist many differences. Ren Confucianism places emphasis on “the I” as subject. As active agents, ideal Confucian persons have a generous and internal harmony and through the high quality of their moral training will act benevolently toward others. This is a process from the inside to the outside. In this process, it is evident that I am called by my conscience, not by the other as other people or as some divine power. In contrast, for Lévinas the other is most important. I have only a passive status, I am a passive subject; I am subjected to the other. For him, the center of ethics is occupied by the other, and I am ordered by the other. Instead of the Confucian “I will do something for the other,” Lévinas has “I have to do something for the other.” I am not called by my conscience but by other. Therefore, the subject for Lévinas is different from both that of the Western tradition and that of Confucianism. We must also remember that for Lévinas there even exists a fundamental otherness between father and son and between husband and wife, while in Confucianism, it is unethical for a son to disobey his father or for a wife to disobey her husband, and in this way the otherness between them is overcome. For Lévinas, love is toward anyone, without considering whether that person is my relative or not, even neglecting whether that person is my enemy. He demands the subject to be responsible for the other, and it is not necessary to keep a definite boundary between love and hate. For Confucianism, my love is in the first instance toward my family, my relatives, and my friends, from which my love toward foreigners is derived. My relationship with the other can be reduced in the end to a relationship maintaining sameness between you and me, between “us.” For Confucianism, the relationship between father and son is primary, with other relationships to those near or faraway as extended ones based on this primary relationship. This makes it easy to overcome the distance between persons, with fathers always wanting to impose their points of view on their sons, and teachers always imposing their ideas on their students. As a result, sons and students often lack creativity and self-development. As I have said already, the concept of intentionality in the cognitive sense is very important for Husserl, while for Lévinas intentionality
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has been transformed into an ethical sense. My relation with the other cannot be objectified or it will not become a theme. This relation, which for Lévinas is realized in concrete behavior and not in cognitive activity, shares some similarity with Confucian empiricism. But we also know that Lévinas does not always remain at the level of experience, because what is more important for him is the transcendent. The ethical desire aims at the infinite and transcendent and will not try to reduce the whole universe in my immanence. Therefore, the center place is not occupied by my activity. Lévinas’s philosophy puts ontology and epistemology aside and concentrates on metaphysics, aiming at the transcendent and letting the other take the place of God. Confucianism also denies ontology and epistemology, because it pays attention, not to things belonging to ontology, but to those belonging to the ontic level. Western philosophers often talk about the empiricist anthropology of Chinese philosophy. One reason is here: The idea of harmony between nature and man denies subject– object dualism, but does not search for a truly transcendent dimension. The idea of “inner sageliness and outer kingliness (neisheng )” in Confucianism remains inward in its concrete waiwang utility without a transcendent aim. Because it is not concerned with absolute otherness, neither God nor the other has a true place in Confucian ethics. In Confucianism, nothing exists as absolute; everything is relative. ZHEJIANG UNIVERSITY Hangzhou, China
Endnotes This article is supported by the Chinese Ministry of Education’s Program for New Century Excellent Talents in the University. I am extremely grateful to Dr. Nicholas Bunnin and Professor Chung-ying Cheng for their suggestions and help in editing. 1. Simon Critchley, “Le traumatisme originel—Lévinas avec la psychanalyse,” in Emmanuel Lévinas, Rue René Descartes 19, ed. Danielle Cohen-Lévinas (Paris: PUF, 1998), 166. 2. Emmanuel Lévinas, Totalité et infini (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1968), 13. 3. Edmund Husserl, Méditations Cartésiennes et Les Conférences de Paris (Paris: PUF, 1991), 74. 4. Jean-Paul Sartre, L’Être et Le Néant (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1943), 274. 5. Emmanuel Lévinas, Éthique et infini (Paris: Fayard et Radio-France, 1982), 89–90. 6. Emmanuel Lévinas, Hors sujet (Cognac: Fata Morgana, 1987), 208. 7. Lévinas, Éthique et infini, 27–28. 8. Lévinas, Totalité et infini, 275–76. 9. Ibid., 279. 10. Ibid., xv. 11. Ibid., 20. 12. Ibid., 58.
lévinas and surpassing phenomenology 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53.
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Ibid. Ibid., 273. Ibid., xvi. Ibid., xviii. Ibid., xvii. Ibid., 3. Ibid., 4. Edmund Husserl, Idées directrices pour une phénoménologie (Paris: Gallimard, 1950), 272. Sartre, L’Être et Le Néant, 178. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1962), 375. Ibid., 376. Sartre, L’Être et Le Néant, 142. Ibid., 177. Rodolphe Calin and François-David Sebbah, Le Vocabulaire de Lévinas (Paris: Ellipses, 2002), 11. Emmanuel Lévinas, De l‘existence à l’existant (Paris: Vrin, 1986), 139. Ibid., 139, 144. Emmanuel Lévinas, Le temp et l’autre (Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1979), 68–69. Lévinas, Éthique et infini, 34. Ibid., 38. Ibid., 50. Lévinas, De l‘existence à l’existant (Paris: Vrin, 1986), 36. Heidegger, Being and Time, 279. Ibid., 311. Lévinas, Le temp et l’autre, 21. Calin and Sebbah, Le Vocabulaire de Lévinas, 11. Lévinas, De l‘existence à l’existant, 16. Ibid., 170. Lévinas, Éthique et infini, 56. Lévinas, le temp et l’autre, 17. Emmanuel Lévinas, Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1978), 4. Lévinas, Éthique et infini, 51. Lévinas, Hors sujet, 212. Ibid., 213. Lévinas, Éthique et infini, 89. Lévinas, Totalité et infini, 172. Ibid., 281–82. Ibid., xiv. Ibid., xv. Emmanuel Lévinas, Ethique et infini, 105. Emmanuel Lévinas, Humanisme de l’autre homme (Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1972), 90. Ibid., 100.
jacques taminiaux
LÉVINAS AND HEIDEGGER: A POST-HEIDEGGERIAN APPROACH TO PHENOMENOLOGICAL ISSUES I Let me start with Husserl. To be sure he repeated again and again that the phenomenological investigation demands at the very beginning a universal epoché which suspends all accepted conceptions whatever their basis: common experience, scientific experiments, or philosophical tradition whether ancient or modern. Inasmuch as phenomenology claims to be without presupposition, it does not advocate any testament. Such abstention is claimed to be necessary in order to gain access to the field phenomenological investigation has to explore. That field, the famous Sache selbst, is the life of intentionality taken in the two-pole correlation of its intendings and of its intended, as well as in the entire diversity of their ways of appearing. That is the phenomenon in the phenomenological sense of the word, and the point is to describe it faithfully as it appears and not at all to submit it to pre-established definitions or problems. Although the purism of Wesenschau is in principle free from all inheritance, the phenomenologist is aware that his research instead of being the dawn of thought is connected with what he learned from masters who had a name, like Brentano. Moreover, he cannot avoid remembering that in order to open the specific field of phenomenology, he had to repudiate several theses which in his early work were only the echo of predominant psychologistic ways of thinking. He is aware as well that the angle from which he is approaching the new field was already designated by inherited terms like logic, theory of knowledge, Wissenschaftslehre, and was a subject matter around which trends with historical roots like empiricism and NeoKantianism were opposed to one another. Moreover, the exploration of the new field had to be made accessible to students and scholars. It was impossible to convey the exploration results without using words understandable because they are transmitted by a long tradition, such JACQUES TAMINIAUX, Professor, Centre d’études phénoménologiques, University of Louvain. Specialties: phenomenological philosophy, Heidegger, Lévinas. E-mail:
[email protected] Lévinas: Chinese and Western Perspectives Editor by Nicholas Bunnin, Dachun Yang, and Linyu Gu © 2008 Journal of Chinese Philosophy. ISBN: 978-1-405-19545-4
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as noesis and noema, intuition, category, fact and essence, immanence and transcendence, etc. Finally, inasmuch as the new field is revealing its structures and articulation levels, it reveals as well an ultimate foundation the exploration of which cannot avoid falling under very old labels such as first philosophy and metaphysics. Hence, the very gesture through which phenomenology emerges as a claim to pure intuition sub specie aeternitatis is paradoxically pervaded by history. However, the link between Husserl’s phenomenology and the history of philosophy is not at all limited to the more or less implicit paradox I just evoked. Indeed, the more the exploration expands, the more explicitly and thematically the phenomenologist acknowledges the relevance of many inherited theses, provided that they lend themselves to a strictly phenomenological retrieval. Such are Kant’s distinctions between judgment of perception and judgment of experience, or his thesis about Being as a nonreal predicate, or the Cartesian clear and distinct apprehension of the cogito resisting the famous doubt. More generally, Husserl’s phenomenology in its aiming to the level of first philosophy had no hesitation in mentioning expressis verbis the stages in the history of Western philosophy to be held as the most significant for its own projects. Here is their sequence: Plato’s notion of philosophy as a universal science obeying the Socratic demand of a radical justification and proposing to mankind a teleology of reason; the sketching out by Aristotle of a pure logic and of a universal theory of subjectivity; the discovery by Descartes of the cogito as the cornerstone of science; the attempt by Locke to elaborate a pure egology conceived as a genetic and intuitive discipline; the progression in Berkeley and Hume of an intuitive investigation of pure immanence; the discovery by Leibniz of several basic features of intentionality thanks to an intuitive elucidation of the apperceptive capacities of the monad; and finally, the irruption in force of the idea of transcendental philosophy in Kant’s Copernican revolution. But at each step of that genealogy, Husserl’s stance is twofold. On the one hand, he celebrates what was promising in the past because retrievable by a transcendental phenomenology scrupulously attentive to the imperative of reduction; on the other hand, he firmly denounces a manifold sequence of confusions, misunderstandings, lacks of attention, easy temptations of dogmatism, naturalism, constructivism, and so on. Hence a properly Husserlian relation to the history of philosophy combines the acknowledgment of what in the past anticipates in some way the eidetic exploration of intentionality, which is the task of transcendental phenomenology, and also the rejection in each anticipation of several flaws due to the lack of an authentic reduction.
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One more aspect of precision: At close inspection it turns out that Husserl’s debate with that long history of philosophy is not peripheral and more or less introductory. Indeed, at least in the last phase of his philosophical career, Husserl became convinced that such debate with the history of philosophy entails at the center of the transcendental investigation not only a teleological philosophy of the history of philosophy taken as a process culminating in phenomenology, but more importantly a general philosophy of the history of mankind, by which is meant that that idea of phenomenology is both the arché and the telos of an authentic humanity, thereby turning the phenomenologist into some sort of missionary in charge of curing human culture as a whole. This presentation gives me the opportunity to ask how Lévinas, before the war, when he introduced in France Husserl’s phenomenology, was reacting to the project of a universal transcendental foundation. In connection with this, let me pay attention briefly to his early book Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s Phenomenology, which came out in 1930 in French. On the one hand, this early publication displays a strong admiration for what Lévinas calls “the primordial and simple inspiration” of Husserl’s philosophy,1 an inspiration, he says, which is less epistemological in spite of appearances than committed to a “new conception of Being.”2 Indeed, for the young Lévinas Husserl deserves above all the credit for having dismissed the notion of being as a physical object taken for granted by the prevailing naturalism of the second half of the nineteenth century, and of having imposed a notion of being closely tied to “the lived experience of consciousness” by demonstrating that the latter is both presupposed and obliterated by naturalism.3 Lévinas accordingly credited Husserl with opening to philosophy a new ontological perspective: The worth of phenomenological intuition is precisely to show that “the concrete life of consciousness is an absolute existence,”4 to which the appearance of all beings is referred and which instead of having a determined character like the object of physics is an intrinsic relationship to something else, an “act of transcendence,”5 an intentionality. But as a backdrop of that admiration, this early publication also expresses a certain reservation toward Husserl’s phenomenology. Lévinas indeed believes that there is sort of an “intellectualist” bias in Husserl’s intuitivism. To be sure, Husserl definitely manages to broaden the scope of ontology, but by repeatedly proclaiming the “primacy of theoretical consciousness,” he seems to restrict existing to the condition of a knowledge object.6 In connection with this reservation, the conclusion of Lévinas’s first book expresses a timid but strong refusal of the perspective guiding
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Husserl’s relation to the history of philosophy. For Husserl, he writes, “philosophy in the metaphysical destiny of man has the same position as the theoretical practice of sciences. In such conception philosophy seems as much independent from the historical situation of man as a theory aiming to understand everything sub specie aeternitatis.”7 In other words, Husserl’s philosophy advocates a “super-historical stance,” thereby overlooking what the young Lévinas calls the “sui generis phenomenon of historicity,” a phenomenon which is not “a secondary property of man” for “historicity and temporality are the very substantiality of his substance.”8 This is of course an allusion to Heidegger to whom the conclusion of Lévinas’s first book explicitly pays tribute, revealing, by the same token, that his ontological accentuation in the presentation of Husserl’s thought owes much to Being and Time. Hence the problem: Is there a specific relation to the history of philosophy in the phenomenological research of Heidegger whose influence on the young Lévinas is obvious? There is one indeed. Let me try to describe it in its main features. At the very beginning of Being and Time, Heidegger announces that his phenomenological investigation focused on the question of Being involves a relation to the history of philosophy. The question at stake, he says, is not just any question: It is restating a question “which provides a stimulus for the researches of Plato and Aristotle, only to subside from then on as a theme for actual investigation”9 under the triple pretext that Being is “the most universal concept,” that it is “indefinable,” and that it is “self-evident.” It would be too easy to conclude therefrom that Heidegger’s relation to the history of philosophy consists in opposing the Greek beginning to the tradition which came after. Indeed, in the same paragraph Heidegger warns his readers that “the prejudices . . . fostering the belief that an inquiry into Being is unnecessary . . . are rooted in ancient ontology itself.” Consequently, Heidegger’s relation to the history of philosophy is no less ambiguous than Husserl’s. In both cases, the point is to separate along that history what is retrievable because of showing a phenomenological basis from what is not retrievable because of being phenomenologically irrelevant. And in both cases reduction is the key to retrieval. But reduction in Heidegger’s sense of the word is no longer, as he says in a lecture course he offered shortly after the publication of Being and Time, what it was for Husserl, that is, “the method of leading phenomenological vision from the natural attitude . . . back to the transcendental life of consciousness and its noetic-noematic experiences.” It consists rather in “leading phenomenological vision back from the apprehension of a being . . . to the understanding of the
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Being of this being.”10 Therefore, the understanding of Being replaces the life of consciousness as the specific topic thanks to which phenomenology may deserve the title of rigorous science. And of course the elaboration of such a phenomenology conceived as an ontology demands a construction by which is meant the conceptual articulation in all its structures of the understanding of Being, the site of which is the being-in-the-world of the human being, called Dasein because for him to be is a question. But neither reduction nor construction could work without an intrinsic reference to the historical legacy of philosophy. Heidegger calls deconstruction (in German Destruktion) that reference carried out by both reduction and construction. In Being and Time and in the lecture course I am alluding to, the deconstructive component of the phenomenological method of the ontological investigation is justified by the historical character of Dasein, which means that it is based upon what Lévinas in his first book called “the historical situation of man,” a situation advocated by him to express his resistance to the super-historical stance of Husserl. When Heidegger insists on the historicity of Dasein, he means that each human being considered as a being for whom to be is a question is in fact thrown in his problematic condition in such a way that in fact he inherits a preliminary articulation of philosophical problems which implicitly determines the questions he may raise concerning the human condition. But such historicity is still more determinant when questioning about Being becomes an explicit and methodical task, as it is in the case of the philosopher. Indeed, that task has a date and a place of birth: ancient Greece. Therefore, the present elaboration of the ontological investigation in order to appropriate its ownmost potentialities is compelled to take into account the history of philosophy since its beginning. Such accounting is a deconstructive procedure inasmuch as it is both a reappropriation and a dismantling. The reappropriation aims at detecting in past philosophies what comes near the primordial phenomenon on which is focused the phenomenological ontology, that is, the ownmost understanding of Being whose proper site is the Dasein. The dismantling discards what in past philosophies diverts from the primordial phenomenon or obstructs the way to it. And the practice of deconstruction shows that each step of the history of philosophy starting with Plato and Aristotle is characterized by some entanglement of the primordial phenomenon with a certain concealment of it. And the reason for the historical persistence of such entanglement in one way or another is to be found ultimately in what Heidegger takes to be the ontological structure of Dasein itself who is again and again torn between facing authentically its ownmost
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finite and mortal potentiality of Being, and falling away from it by focusing on everyday preoccupations shared with other people. It is important to notice accordingly that the relation of Heidegger’s phenomenology to the history of philosophy is deliberately circular. The point in studying past thoughts is not to be taken aback by surprising discourses but to find oneself back in them. In other words, deconstruction is ultimately ruled by a hermeneutic circle which turns the understanding of past discourses into a self-understanding. That circle is totalizing not only because it encompasses all the great texts of the history of philosophy from Plato and Aristotle up to Nietzsche, but more deeply because Dasein, which is the principle of the deconstructive procedure, is itself ontologically defined as a circle that is as a power to be itself a closed totality. Dasein has that power to the extent that its own end, its death, is not an external limit but its ownmost potentiality, a potentiality which transforms thrownness into resolute self-projection. That potentiality is for Heidegger the key to the intelligibility of the meaning of Being, that is the ek-static and finite temporality of Dasein. This is enough to suggest that there is a kinship between Husserl and Heidegger, as far as the style of their relation to the history of philosophy is concerned. Without using the word, Husserl practices deconstruction when he distinguishes in the philosophies of the past what anticipates the reduction or return to the primordial phenomenon of intentionality from what remains trapped within the natural attitude. Moreover, in Heidegger no less than in Husserl we do find a philosophy of the history of philosophy since Heidegger deciphers that history as a teleology of his own fundamental ontology. And in both cases we do find an overall philosophy of history with the significant difference that Husserl more or less naively believed that transcendental phenomenology could be the cure to the devilish temptations of Germany, whereas Heidegger at the same time was celebrating in the national-socialist revolution the hope of enlarging his fundamental ontology to the historical destiny of the German people in charge of a modern rebirth of ancient Greece.
II At this juncture, I am finally in a position to investigate correctly the specific relation to the history of philosophy in Lévinas’s own phenomenology by which I mean the works he published after the war, primarily From Existence to the Existant and Totality and Infinity. Since Lévinas repeatedly claimed that his personal thought would not have been possible without his early study of both Husserl and
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Heidegger, I believe that in order to determine the specific features of his own relation to the history of philosophy, the more convenient approach is to look in these works for the influence of Husserl, on the one hand, and of Heidegger, on the other hand. By so doing I am just trying to take seriously the text of the preface that the French philosopher wrote in 1987 for the German translation of Totality and Infinity. In that preface Lévinas stated that: “this book whose inspiration is deliberately phenomenological proceeds from a long study of Husserl’s texts and from a ceaseless attention to Being and Time.”11 But in an obvious allusion to Heidegger, he also states that the book puts in question the conatus essendi of the “being always concerned with its Being and with its persistence in Being”; on the other hand, with respect to Husserl he stresses that the book undertakes “a phenomenology of the face” involving the amazing discovery of a “noesis which is overstepped by its noema.” Thus, the face is the primordial phenomenon of Lévinas’s phenomenology. As such it determines his reading of the history of philosophy. It is a must to consider the specific character of that primordial phenomenon in order to define the specific features of that reading. We could say that it is a situation in which potentiality overcomes actuality and which cannot be dissociatiated from a relation to the Other. That relational potentiality is situated inasmuch as it elects and interpellates somebody qua irreplaceable individual even as it expects from him an answer to the height of an imperative coming from another unique individual. It is important to notice that such a relation of unicity to unicity is without mediation, which means that instead of providing a synthesis of the related individuals in a middle term operating a symbiosis or communion, the face-to-face relation separates them. Hence the subtitle of the book: An Essay on Exteriority. In Lévinas’s terminology, the terms of that relation without synthesis are “the Same and the Other.” The same—in French le Même—is at once idem and ipse, for it is the Ego which is “the primal identity, the primordial work of identification”12 not in the abstract sense of the formal tautology “I am I,” but in the concrete sense of dwelling in the world. For Lévinas being-in-the-world operates a “reversion of the alterity of the world to self-identification,” an identification articulated by “the body, the home, labor, possession, economy.”13 In other words, the same is a Self understood as “the concreteness of egoism.”14 But then what about the Other? The alterity of the other cannot be in any way the correlate of a representation by the Self because as something represented it would be absorbed within the Self. According to Lévinas, the other he is referring to is “other with an alterity
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that is not formed, is not the simple reverse of identity, and is not formed out of resistance to the Same, but is prior to every initiative, to all imperialism of the Same.”15 As such, it is “metaphysical” in the sense that it thoroughly “remains transcendent to the Same.”16 In a concrete language, the other is a unique individual disturbing my being-at-home with myself, who remains alien and upon whom I have no power, this face confronting me. Lévinas stresses that “a relation whose terms do not form a totality can hence be produced within the general economy of Being only as proceeding from the I to the other, as a face to face, as delineating a distance in depth—that of discourse, of goodness, of Desire. . . .”17 The movement at stake in the relation is a transcendence in the verbal sense of an elevation; if it is a desire it is not at all in the sense of a prelude to a satisfaction but on the contrary in the sense of an increase of separation between desiring and desired, hence as an endless avowal of the authority of the other upon the same. Such avowal is what characterizes discourse (or logos) in its genuine character. Originally discourse, because it is a fundamental issue in the face-to-face relation of separation, is not apophantic, that is, disclosing to the same, nor hermeneutic, that is, taking possession of a meaning; it is an apology (an excuse) of the I in front of the face of the other who is the primordial expression interpellating me but not falling in my power for it remains transcendent. In other words, in the analysis of the word “phenomeno-logy,” the link between phenomenon and logos is no longer what it was for Husserl and Heidegger who were both focusing on the Self. And it is obvious that the phenomenologist who focuses on the face-to-face qua primordial phenomenon can no longer read the history of philosophy as they did. Because it is phenomenological, Lévinas’s reading of that history has to combine reduction, construction, and deconstruction. But reduction from now on is a return to the primordial phenomenon of the face-to-face. Hence, construction has to become first of all the conceptual articulation of that reduction. And consequently, deconstruction has on its own affirmative side to bring to light what in the works of the past was grounded in the primordial phenomenon, even as, on its negative side, it has to dismantle what in those past works covers up the primordial phenomenon either by amalgamating the terms of the relation—the self and the other—or by conceiving as primordial the self without realizing that it comes second. Let me try to suggest with the help of significant examples how that deconstructive reading of past philosophy by Lévinas is pervaded by a constant debate with Husserl and Heidegger. In the history of philosophy, Plato and Descartes are among the philosophers who draw from him a privileged attention. Somehow both are quoted and
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retrieved to some extent by Husserl and Heidegger. But it is clear that in Heidegger Plato plays a more decisive role than Descartes as evinced by the fact that the author of Being and Time presented several times his own thought through a literal commentary of the parable of the cave in the Republic; and it is obvious as well that Descartes was a decisive reference for Husserl, author of the famous Cartesian Meditations. Let us consider first Lévinas’s reading of Plato compared to Heidegger’s. As he claims already on the first page of De l’existence à l’existant, the Platonist formula which places the Good beyond Being is what orients his research. The same formula, the famous to agathon epekeina tès ousias of Plato’s Republic, had provided before a decisive inspiration to Heidegger’s fundamental ontology.18 But for Heidegger the formula had to be taken as a strictly ontological motto and not as an ethical one. Accordingly, the formula meant that Being is beyond beings. The difference in the translation betrays what each phenomenologist respectively considers to be the primordial phenomenon. For Heidegger, the primordial phenomenon is the understanding of Being by the Dasein which in its mineness and facticity projects itself toward its own mortality. Therefore, Plato’s formula, as Heidegger insists in Vom Wesen des Grundes, ultimately means that Dasein exists for its own sake (Das Dasein existiert umwillen seiner). For Lévinas, on the contrary, the phenomenon held as primordial by Heidegger actually comes second after the primordial relation of transcendence between the totalizing Self and the radical and imperious otherness of the Other. The “beyond” mentioned by Plato thus expresses the irreducible height of the Other and its ethical demand and not my ownmost potentiality. From that basic difference results a different approach to key topics in Plato’s thought, such as theoria, truth, and discourse. They are all approached by Heidegger in the ontological perspective of the finite self-projection of Dasein, whereas they are approached by Lévinas in an ethical perspective which interrupts ontology. Theoria, contemplation, is of course the fabric of the parable of the cave, and it is a topic whose retrieval is at the core of Heidegger’s fundamental ontology. The retrieval stresses in Plato’s narrative a sequence of levels of vision culminating in Dasein’s solitary insight of its ownmost Being, an insight out of which it becomes visible that everyday concerns together with other people for what is ready to hand or for the present-at-hand are falling away from what is ontologically primordial. Theoria is thus absorbed in an ontology focused on the understanding of Being by the Self. By contrast, Lévinas without denying that there are in the Greek theoria signs of a predominance of the Self or Same, also insists that
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such predominance is shaken by Plato’s stressing of the Good as the highest aim, a stressing which amounts, he says, to the acknowledgment within theoria of a desire for the otherness of the other. This desire, in Lévinas’s retrieval, is what explains that Plato’s research expresses itself in dialogues in the course of which the spontaneous dogmatism of the self is again and again shaken by a critique coming from the other, whereas the predominance of the Same explains the emphasis often put by Socrates on the anamnesis. Indeed, this form of remembrance, by interposing between the Other and the Same a middle term that I find in myself, amounts to receiving “nothing of the Other but what is in me, as though from all eternity I was in possession of what comes to me from the outside.”19 As far as truth, alètheia, is concerned it is well-known that Heidegger, defining it as unconcealment, considered the topic as a central issue of the works of Plato in his Marburg lecture courses on The Sophist, The Theaetetus, The Republic, which were paving the way to his fundamental ontology. A conflicting topic, he said, for the negative structure of the word a-lètheia indicates that truth is a combat between concealment and unconcealment. In Heidegger’s retrieval, the conflict at stake is to be understood in ontological terms, which means that it opposes the light of Being to its obscuring by entities. In other words, truth, ontologically retrieved, is the conflict between Eigenlichkeit and Uneigenlichkeit within Dasein whose way of Being is again and again torn between its ownmost potentiality of being and possibilities coming from without. In that context, Heidegger did not hesitate to claim that such a conflict is the real content of Plato’s notion of dikè, justice, since in the Republic dikè reaches its paradigm in the soul of the sage who in his dedication to the bios theorètikos is fighting to distinguish in himself the authentic from the inauthentic. To such reappropriation by the self, Lévinas objects that justice is primordially consideration for the other, that is, for an existent facing me from outside. That consideration is an ethical relation to the absolute otherness of the other. A relation, he says, which far from turning away from truth “accomplishes the very intention that animates the movement unto truth.”20 Truth, in other words, requires the separation of the face-to-face or “the presence in thought of an idea whose ideatum overflows the capacity of thought,” that is, a desire for otherness. Lévinas claims that such a desire which is overlooked by Heidegger is very often insisted upon by Plato, for example, in the Phaedrus where “against a thought that proceeds from him ‘who has his own head to himself’ he affirms the value of the delirium that comes from God, ‘winged thought.’ ”21 Concerning discourse, logos in Greek, Rede in German, everybody knows that its function for Heidegger is primarily apophantic. This is
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why he writes in the introduction to Being and Time: “Legein is the clue for arriving at those structures of Being which belong to the entities we encounter in addressing ourselves to anything or speaking about it.”22 In this interpretation, speaking is not primarily addressed to an interlocutor; it is first of all the disclosure of a What, the quiddity of an entity. Therefore, since the function of discourse is an uncovering, it cannot be more than the means of a vision. And as I have already suggested, in the framework of fundamental ontology the highest vision is ultimately the privilege of a solitary spectator. This is why in the same context Heidegger interprets Plato’s dialectic as a movement toward a vision and not as a dialogue. For the same reason he contends that Aristotle goes beyond Plato because he no longer writes dialogues but treatises in which he clearly overcomes dialectics by channeling speech up to a silent noetic apprehension. Heidegger does not hesitate to retrieve within his own fundamental ontology that process of overcoming discourse in a silent ontology which instead of being focused on the archè and telos of Nature is focused on the ontological principle and end of Dasein’s Being. This occurs when conscience (Gewissen) becomes that ultimate accomplishment of both discourse and vision. Indeed, conscience in Heidegger’s strictly ontological, not ethical, sense of the word is the call that Dasein addresses to itself to take up its ownmost potentiality of Being, and such call is accomplished by a moment of vision (Augenblick). Thus, discourse in the Heideggerian interpretation of it reaches its peak in a monologue and a self-centered insight. Against this egology, Lévinas insists that discourse is primarily “a non-allergic relation with alterity.”23 And, in an explicit objection to Heidegger he writes: “This ‘saying to the other’ . . . this relationship with the other as interlocutor, this relation with an existent . . . precedes all ontology.” Likewise, discourse as invocation of the other precedes all unconcealment for the way the other presents himself to me, his face, overcomes its idea in me. Accordingly, in another obvious objection to Heidegger, Lévinas writes:“This mode does not consist in figuring as a theme under my gaze, in spreading itself forth as a set of qualities forming an image. The face of the other at each moment destroys and overflows the plastic image it leaves me, the idea existing to my own measure and to the measure of its ideatum—the adequate idea. It does not manifest itself by these qualities, but kath’auto. The face brings a notion of truth which, in contradistinction to contemporary ontology, is not the disclosure of an impersonal Neuter, but expression: the existent breaks through all the envelopings and generalities of Being.”24 That being the case, it is not amazing to observe that Lévinas, when he refers to the works of Plato, deliberately stresses their dialogical
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character downgraded by Heidegger. He writes accordingly: “For Plato true discourse can come to its own assistance: the content that is presented to me is inseparable from him who has thought it—which means that the author of the discourse responds to questions. Thought, for Plato, is not reducible to an impersonal concatenation of true relations, but implies persons and interpersonal relations.”25 This is why beyond the solitary debate of the soul with itself, beyond the classical concept of the Idea as a sublime object pervious to thought, beyond the thesis that society derives from the contemplation of truth, all topics relished by Heidegger, Lévinas contends that the ideality of the Platonist idea, instead of transmuting the other into the Same, “is in the last analysis tantamount to the transmutation of the other into this Other (autrui),” which means that it points “to a region where beings have a face, that is, are present in their own message.”26 For the same reasons, Lévinas situates Plato’s debate with rhetoric in a quite different perspective than Heidegger does. For Heidegger that debate has to be considered in the perspective of an elevation to an ontological vision. He contends accordingly that Plato, on the one hand, criticizes rhetoric for being attached to mere semblances and, on the other hand, makes use of it as a pedagogical and psychological trick in order to introduce to the dialectical progression toward true vision individuals trapped in the blindness of everydayness. On the contrary, Lévinas sets Plato’s debate with rhetoric in the perspective of the relation with the other. Rhetoric, he says, “approaches the other not to face him, but obliquely”: It tends to corrupt the freedom of the interlocutor by flattering him and therefore “it is preeminently violence, that is, injustice.”27 As far as Descartes is concerned, Lévinas’s reading of his work is once again ruled by the primordial phenomenon of the face-to-face, with respect to which he deconstructs Husserl’s reappropriation of the Meditationes de prima philosophia. It is puzzling to notice that Husserl in his own Cartesian Meditations pays attention only to meditations one and two in Descartes’s masterpiece inasmuch as he discovers in them the project of a universal science grounded upon an absolute basis. These two meditations are enough in order for him to salute in Descartes’s doubt the anticipation of his own epochè of the natural attitude with its uncritical realism as well as the anticipation of the reduction to the pure Ego thanks to the discovery that the Cogito resists the doubt and therefore imposes itself as the absolute basis of knowledge. But Husserl also deplores, with respect to the primordial phenomenon of intentionality several flaws in Descartes’s proceeding, namely the preservation after the doubt of several notions, principles, and arguments belonging to
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the natural attitude, such as the notion of substance, the principle of causality, the deductive argument, etc. and consequently the absence in Descartes’s meditations of a really intuitive and eidetic description of transcendental immanence, which remains unexplored as soon as it is asserted. By contrast, Lévinas discovers in Descartes at least two objections to the Husserlian retrieval. The first objection is aimed at the supposed apodicticity of the pure Ego at the core of the doubt; the second is aimed at the supposed universality of the noetic-noematic parallelism in the intentionality of the Ego. About the first point, the lesson drawn by Lévinas from Descartes’s narrative is the impossibility for a solitary Self to get out of the doubt. Husserl overlooks the details of the steps in Descartes’s narrative and what he overlooks—the persisting dream, the descent to the abyss, the evil genius—is precisely what testifies according to Lévinas that “a world absolutely silent that would not come to us from speech, be it mendacious” (like the world of the evil genius) “would be an-archic, without principle, without a beginning.”28 Husserl’s simplified reading of Descartes is aimed at when Lévinas writes: “The silent world is a world that comes from the other, be it an evil genius. . . . Thus silence is not a simple absence of speech; speech lies in the depths of silence like laughter perfidiously held back. It is the other side of language. . . .”29 In other words, Lévinas carefully detects in Descartes’s description of the doubt several signs of the primordial phenomenon of the relation to the other. By contrast, Husserl overlooks those signs because for him, as he already claimed in his first Logical Investigation, what is essential to language is not expression or communication but solitary vision of categories. And it is precisely because he holds communication as peripheral that Husserl does not really pay attention to Descartes’s developments about the Infinite that he considers to be mere residues of the natural attitude wherein communication prevails. By contrast, Lévinas claims that the primordial phenomenon of the relation to the other is what is strikingly confirmed by the fact that in Descartes’s text only the Infinite can dispel the evil genius, thereby stopping the doubt. This is why he writes: “In the Cartesian cogito, taken as the first certitude (but which, for Descartes, already rests on the existence of God), there is an arbitrary halt which is not justified of itself” because “it is a movement of descent toward an even more profound abyss” so vertiginous that “the I does not find in the cogito itself a stopping place. It is not I—it is the Other that can say yes. From him comes affirmation: he is at the commencement of experience. Descartes seeks certitude, and stops at the first change of level in this vertiginous descent, because in fact he possesses the idea of infinity, and can gauge in advance the return of affirmation behind
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negation. But to possess the idea of infinity is to have already welcomed the other.”30 At this juncture I reach Lévinas’s second objection to Husserl’s reading of Descartes. As I just suggested, Husserl only finds in the third meditation of Descartes evidence of an incomplete epochè permitting us to treat the cogito like a thing having properties determined by external causes, instead of recognizing that the cogitationes form the specific field of intentionality that requires phenomenological description but not deductive explanation. By contrast, Lévinas contends that Descartes’s idea of Infinity is phenomenologically relevant and deserves a retrieval. What he salutes in that idea is the recognition of the primordial phenomenon of a separation between the Same and the Other and of a transcending movement of the former toward the latter. He writes accordingly: This relation of the same with the other, where the transcendence of the relation does not cut the bonds a relation implies, yet where these bonds do not unite the same and the other into a totality, is in fact fixed in the situation described by Descartes in which the “I think” maintains with the Infinite it can nowise contain and from which it is separated a relation called “idea of infinity.”31
To be sure no less than Husserl, Lévinas dismisses as nonphenomenological “the Cartesian argumentation that proves the separated existence of the Infinite by the finitude of the being having an idea of infinity (for there perhaps, he says, is not much sense in proving an existence by describing a situation which is prior to proof and to the problems of existence).”32 As such that idea is phenomenologically relevant: It is indeed an intentionality, yet an intentionality “unique in its kind.”33 Its uniqueness is due to the overcoming of the idea by its ideatum, of the intending by the intended, of the noesis by its noema. Because Husserl holds that the primordial phenomenon is the Self whose cogitationes are all characterized by an adjustment between noesis and noema, he simply overlooks that uniqueness. This is why Lévinas objects to the privilege Husserl bestows upon the theoretical intentionality when in his own fifth Cartesian Meditation he deals with the relation to the other that he calls Fremderfahrung. What Lévinas claims about Husserl’s analysis is this: Because Husserl takes as a clue for his analysis the objectivity of the theoretical object intended by the totalizing Self, Husserl’s attempt to describe what is primordial in the relation with the other paradoxically “harbours in each of its stages which are taken as a description of constitution, mutations of object constitution into a relation with the other—which is as primordial as the constitution from which it is to be derived.”34 In other words, what Husserl calls the “primordial sphere” on the basis of which he describes levels of disclosure—living
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body, body similar to mine, body of an alter ego—only corresponds to one of the terms of the relation of separation and transcendence, which is for Lévinas the primordial phenomenon. It is only correspondence to the Same and obstinately tends to ignore that, instead of being able to disclose the other at the limit of its own field of objectification, the Same “turns to the absolutely other only on call from the Other.”35 It obstinately tends to ignore as well that the other is the alterity of Infinity expressing itself without disclosing itself for its height overflows the Self instead of fulfilling a disclosing intention emanating from the Self. All this is perhaps enough to suggest that Lévinas’s reading of the history of philosophy with reference to the primordial relation of exteriority can be more attentive to the texts of the past than the reading carried out by the first masters of the phenomenological movement on the unilateral axis of the Same understood either as an ego giving meaning or as a Dasein existing for its own sake. One last remark to conclude: Precisely because he returns again and again to the primordial relation of exteriority, Lévinas, unlike Husserl and Heidegger, does not show in his reading of the history of philosophy any temptation for a teleology of the history of philosophy, and a fortiori for a philosophy of world history. If the primordial phenomenon is a face-to-face having the character of an unpredictable event happening between persons, the ethical eschatology occurring in it is fundamentally pluralist and impervious to teleology, that is, to all systems claiming to reveal the orientation of the totality of history. As he says in the preface to Totality and Infinity: “It is not the last judgment that is decisive but the judgment of all the instants in time, when the living are judged.” Because those living beings exist “on the basis of themselves and not on the basis of totality” they “can speak rather than lending their lips to an anonymous utterance of History.”36 UNIVERSITY OF LOUVAIN Louvain, Belgium
Endnotes 1. Emmanuel Lévinas, Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s Phenomenology (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1995), 14–15. 2. Ibid., 19. 3. Ibid., 62. 4. Ibid., 51. 5. Ibid., 69. 6. Ibid., 98–99. 7. Ibid., 220.
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8. Ibid., 221. 9. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), §1. 10. Martin Heidegger, Basic Problems of Phenomenology, revised ed., trans. Albert Hofstadter (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), §5. 11. Martin Heidegger, Vom Wesen des Grundes, 6th ed. (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1973). 12. Emmanuel Lévinas, Totalité et infini (Paris: Le Livre de Poche [Biblio Essais]), 1998), I–IV. 13. Ibid., 37–38. 14. Ibid., 38. 15. Ibid., 38–39. 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid., 39. 18. Heidegger, Grundes, 40–41. 19. Totalité et infini, 43. 20. Ibid., 47. 21. Ibid., 49. 22. Heidegger, Being and Time, 47. 23. Lévinas, Totalité et infini/Totalität und Unendlichkeit, 47. 24. Ibid., 51. 25. Ibid., 71. 26. Ibid. 27. Ibid., 70. 28. Ibid., 90. 29. Ibid., 91. 30. Ibid., 93 31. Ibid., 48. 32. Ibid., 49. 33. Ibid. 34. Ibid., 67. 35. Ibid. 36. Ibid., 23.
du xiaozhen
THE PHILOSOPHY OF SAINTLINESS: SOME NOTES ON THE THOUGHT OF LÉVINAS I. Heir of “the Heresy” Lévinas writes: “The need for evasion—whether full of chimerical hopes or not is of little importance—leads us to the heart of the philosophy.”1 It is no doubt that Lévinas is one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century in France even in the West. At the occasion of his centenary and the tenth year after his death, we feel more deeply the effects of the importance and great value of his works, his personal experiences, and his reflections, especially on humanity and the contemporary world. The heritage that he bequeaths to us belongs to France and the West, as well as to China and the East. As China is the “Other” of the West, the thought of Lévinas probably inspires us even more. The two great events or contemporary philosophical jolts, which Derrida thinks that Lévinas greatly contributes to France,2 have also exercised great influence in us. In particular, the mystique and profound arguments on the thought of the Other, which is full of charm, make us feel that their significance is always open to reflection. The philosophy of Lévinas occupies a particular place in twentiethcentury Western academic research. Fundamentally, the peculiarity originates from the tradition from which Lévinas comes, or rather, originates from his reflections on the heritage of philosophical tradition and his double attitudes toward this tradition: heir and heretic. He is one of the Western thinkers, the number of which is so limited, who know the tradition quite well, are faithful to it and closely related with it and, at the same time, who make sharp critiques that are just to its value and full of wisdom with regard to this tradition. Lévinas comes to the profound in these two senses, which make his relations with the tradition important. Debating this problem will help us in studying and knowing more extensively the origin and development of Lévinas’s philosophy, discovering the interest and significance of
DU XIAOZHEN, Professor, Department of Philosophy, Peking University. Specialties: Western philosophy, twentieth-century French philosophy, comparative philosophy. E-mail:
[email protected] Lévinas: Chinese and Western Perspectives Editor by Nicholas Bunnin, Dachun Yang, and Linyu Gu © 2008 Journal of Chinese Philosophy. ISBN: 978-1-405-19545-4
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his thought that conceals itself, and making us feel the power and solid foundation of his theory of “the Other.” Lévinas speaks many times of the European spirit, saying that it has two sources: The tradition of the Bible and the tradition of Greek philosophy,3 that is, the encounter between the wake of the Narration of experience (Récit de l’expérience)—the text of the Bible—and humanity—the primary intention taken by thought from Heraclites to Aristotle. These two sources, or rather two traditions, weave European culture by contradictions and conflicts, and, in the same way, they intertwine in the process of the development of Lévinas’s philosophy. What deserves our attention is that Lévinas’s heritage and critique that in these two domains have surpassed the limits of philosophy and theology constitute a reflection different from philosophy and theology.4 This constitutes a beginning point of the reflection on Lévinas and these traditions. The position and attitude of Lévinas with regard to Hebrew and Greek tradition make us reflect and think of Paul Ricœur.As one of the most important French philosophers of the twentieth century and as a colleague and close friend of Lévinas, Paul Ricœur is a great master in connecting different currents of ideas in contemporary France. Ricœur is called a “heretical heir.”5 This is evident in Ricœur’s reception of phenomenology: “[P]henomenology in the large sense is the summation of the œuvre of Husserl and of heresies issuing from Husserl.”6 Ricœur also said that “phenomenology is in large part the history of husserlian heresies.”7 The relation of Lévinas to the tradition could be considered to be that of a “heretical heir.”8 In fact, to inherit traditional thought always consists of two sides: On one hand, to inherit means to accept a tradition or a theory; on the other hand, in accepting, the heir has already traced a line of demarcation between this tradition and his own theory, has begun to oscillate the principal notions and to read the world in their own way. He then begins to change the sense of the world in a penetrating and progressive way in order to let it speak out what it would not like to say—at least in appearance. Being faithful to a tradition (or a theory) or not is always dialectical. In some sense, being excessively faithful to a tradition might appear to be unfaithful. To analyze the relation of Lévinas with the traditional thought of Being (or with other theories) from the perspective of an heretical heir permits us to reflect the thought and spirit of Lévinas more profoundly and in a more significant way. II. Reflection on Tradition—Interrogation of “Being” Lévinas writes: “. . . and not in the ‘truth of Being’, resides authenticity.”9 Lévinas’s primary reflection aims at the theory of Being, which
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is incontestable in Western philosophy. In the interior of the tradition of Western philosophy that originates from Greece, one will feel a strong desire that tends to the One and the Whole. Fundamentally, it is affirmation of the supreme position of “absolute Being,” “absolute knowledge,” or “totality”: “the discourse of Western philosophy demands the amplitude of all-encompassingness or ultimate comprehension. It forces all other discourses to be justified before philosophy.”10 He estimates that for centuries, Greek philosophy aspires ardently to the “One,” to the search for the Absolute and never gives up dreaming of turning back to the “One” as to Paradise. It seems that philosophy undertakes such a mission: in transcending multiplicity to reach identity, that is to say, to realize the desire to rejoin the static absolute.11 In fact, such transcendence is no longer the transcendence in its proper sense, but a “destruction of transcendence.”12 Lévinas estimates that such philosophy, parallel to its nature and its problems, consists in schematization or in conceptualization, demanding the suppression of the difference between the subject and the object, the thinking and the thought.13 According to Lévinas, the thought that has “One” as dominator or destination is always related with the thought of Being. Aristotle, through Stoicism, Epicurus, and scepticism, guides philosophy with the aid of metaphors of convalescence, follows the doctrine of Being, and always rejects Others or establishes relations with the Other under the doctrine of Being, because philosophy aspires to become the thought of totality, that is, from difference of negation back to identity: Western philosophy coincides with the revelation of the Other where the Other, in manifesting itself as Being, loses its alterity. . . . It is for this that it is essentially a philosophy of Being, and the comprehension of Being is its finality and fundamental structure of the human. It is for this that it becomes the philosophy of immanence and autonomy, or atheism. The God of philosophers, from Aristotle to Leibniz, through the God of scholastics, is a god equivalent to reason.14
People reflect in speaking of Being, of interiority, of autonomy, and of atheism, and these notions become the categories and language of philosophy, also of the logic of identity in which philosophy imprisons itself. Lévinas advocates that philosophy should step out to see elsewhere, not what happens in its interior. Opposed to traditional Western philosophy, Lévinas’s philosophy poses the following question: “Couldn’t one understand from outside of the Essence of the subjectivity of the subject, as from the exit of the concept—from the oblivion of Being and of non-Being?”15 Lévinas, who knows well Plato, Descartes, Kant, Husserl, and Heidegger, very early felt that our
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philosophical tradition “raises all significance—all rationality—to Being, to the gesture of being led by Beings in so far as they affirm themselves as Beings, to Being in so far as they affirm themselves as Being, to Being in so far as Being, to the essence of Being.”16 This means that the tradition of Greek philosophy raises spirituality17 to the height of conscience of Being and knowledge, which makes Being that contains “the absolute” express nothing other than itself. The realm of the supreme Being is much more powerful than that of gods. This traditional intention, which intends completely to comprehend the subject from Being, is called into question by the philosophy of Lévinas, who searches to break away from the notion.18
III. The Rupture with Tradition—Evasion from Being Lévinas writes: “The experience of pure Being is at the same time the experience of its internal antagonism and the evasion that imposes itself.”19 Lévinas summarizes the critique that he imposes on the traditional theory of Being in a path from existence to existent,20 which is the trace from “anonymous existence to the discovery of alterity.”21 In the beginning, the peculiar retrospection of Lévinas with regard to Western traditional Being has been much influenced by German phenomenology, especially by the thought of Heidegger; at the same time, it shows its own spiritual option, that is to say, the fusion of Greek tradition and French tradition, tending to an evasion that searches for a pure spiritual pursuit and points out the error of Being. This is Lévinas’s rupture with traditional Greek philosophy and also the spiritual point of juncture with the Hebrew tradition.22 The notion of evasion appears very early in Lévinas. This notion, which Lévinas later hardly uses, expresses clearly his ardent desire and his need to break away from Being; this manifests clearly how Lévinas’s thought from the beginning intends to realize the movement from transcendence to the Good, which is beyond Being. According to Lévinas, Being, which is so suffocating that one feels oneself to be enclosed in it, is Being without a way out, without nothingness. It could only be comprehensible to itself: In the identity of me, the identity of Being reveals its nature of enchainment because it appears under the form of sufferance and it invites evasion. Thus evasion is the need to depart from itself, that is to say, to break the most radical and the most irremediable enchainment, the fact that the I is myself.23
What deserves attention is that to depart from Being does not mean the negation of Being in the traditional sense, but means “otherwise
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than Being.” Here is the profound meaning of the Other in Lévinas: A profound meaning rooted deeply in the Hebrew tradition. To the Other, that is to the search for “Otherwise than Being,” the finite aspires to the infinite and is thus closely related to Lévinas’s idea of God. The thought of evasion from Being in Lévinas also penetrates reflection and critique with regard to the antique theory of Greek philosophy. He wishes to build on this tradition of thought while departing from the constraint of the coherence and unity of this tradition. In Totalité et infini, he makes it plain: For the philosophical tradition of the West, every relation between the Same and the Other, when it is no longer an affirmation of the supremacy of the Same, reduces itself to an impersonal relation within a universal order. Philosophy itself is identified with the substitution of ideas for persons, the theme for the interlocutor, the interiority of the logical relation for the exteriority of interpellation. The beings are reduced to the Neuter of the idea, Being, the concept.24
This results in the invalidation of the most important function of philosophy, that is, to analyze and reflect upon the Beyond. The philosophical gesture is being confused with the practice of effacement of what rebels against the order of universal resemblance which waits the foreign thought to fail. To philosophise is to oppose the mutiny of irreducible plurality to unity, of inassimilable exteriority, of the absolute exterior. And, thus, make a triumph the order of Neuter whose Being and the concept are guarantors.25
It should be noticed that when tracing back to the origin of Greek philosophy, Lévinas indicates in De l’un à l’autre26 that at the birth of Greek philosophy, there had already existed a separation between the world of diversity, multiplicity, and the perfect, absolute “One”—pure intelligence. Therefore, the exterior or the problem of evasion already existed at the birth of philosophy: “The first multiplicity is the light of the theoretical, of vision, the duality of seeing and seen, of thinking and thought. The first exteriority—the exteriority with regard to the One—is the intelligence of the One.”27 That is to say, the absolute separation present from the origin is an evident fact in ancient Greece and in the tradition of Greek philosophy that searches for the domination of the Absolute: Its Idea and its reminiscence manifest the nostalgia for the One and the desire of return in the human mind. Philosophy has forgotten its own origin, as Derrida says:“Metaphysics has erased within itself the fabulous scene that has produced it, the scene that nevertheless remains active and stirring inscribed in white ink, an invisible design covered over in the palimpsest28.”29 More radical than Derrida, Lévinas breaks with the return to Greek phi-
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losophy, and his “return” traces back to the origin of alterity, to the departure where the commencement takes place. Fundamentally, it is a tendency to exteriority. This evasion philosophy cannot support or make function: “Philosophise, is it to decrypt in a palimpsest a hidden writing?”30 Chalier has well said: “[H]owever isn’t the priority of this rationality that characterises the philosophical tradition in the West constructed in a big oblivion? This question penetrates the whole philosophy of Lévinas.”31 Lévinas reminds us that one should not forget the other source of European culture (the heritage neglected and even rejected for a long time): the Hebrew tradition, the heritage of the Jewish culture. IV. Relinking with Tradition— Alterity, Transcendence, and the Beyond Lévinas writes, “This transcendence is living in relation with the other man.”32 In La trace de l’autre, Lévinas exposes in an extensive way the problem of the alterity of the Other. The evasion from Being is to evade from the Whole, out of the Whole, is a rupture with “there is,” with itself, and is, in a word, movement to transcendence. Lévinas’s perspective of a particular tradition, that is, Hebrew thought, plays a decisive role in the formation of his theory of the Other and its development, going to the extremity of the absolute Other. Lévinas estimates that Greek philosophy is after all responsible for the oblivion of the alterity in which ethics functions. And alterity constitutes the core of the history and thought of the Bible and has ethics as its center. That is to say, his research has never been separated from the writings of the exegetists of the great Torah or from the great pharisaic masters of Talmud. He estimates that these serious writings are full of vitality and are more dynamical than life. They are fundamental for his thought because they are not what the great masters such as Kant and Heidegger have claimed for ages: Judaism is the thought of rabbis. These writings are far from being canonical readings of the Bible; they are an important and integral part of the oral Torah.33 Lévinas criticizes those who consider Judaism as “Hasidic stories”; the connotations and profundity of Judaism are far beyond their imagination. In attending to the thought originating from the Bible and in penetrating into it, Lévinas reminds us that at a very early time this religious thought, as Christianity, searches to respond the modality of significance of Greek rationality, and that at the same time it enters in the linguistic and philosophical domains. Those who have vision remember themselves and those surpass the intellectual and conceptual activities that have already been formed.34 On the
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devotion of Judaism, Lévinas speaks of: “. . . a religious metaphor of a formal type whose logical genre remains the relation.”35 He goes on to say: One has every right to wonder whether the devotion that animates this religion, which was originally inseparable from the love of one’s fellowman and concern for justice, would not find in this ethics itself the place of its semantic birth and thence the significance of its non-indifference for the infinite difference of the One, instead of owing it to the non-satisfaction of knowing. A radical distinction which would impose itself between religion and relation!36
One should see that this devotion expresses fundamentally the supreme respect—in the sense of transcendence—for the Bible and the texts of interpretation, that it constitutes life and faith37 in the real sense of transcendence and that it is the succus that nourishes life and the living breath, the sign of respiration. In this sense, God in the thought of Lévinas is not exposed in a theory of Being, but is defined as duty: “The intelligence of the transcendence is not ontological. The transcendence of God cannot be said or thought in terms of Being, element of philosophy, and behind God, philosophy only finds night.”38 Lévinas’s study of religion in the philosophical sense is a study of transcendence in the strict sense. In this study, as in his study of other problems, Lévinas pays attention to the dimension of “nonBeing,” “invisible,” “night,” “there is,” etc., that perception is not able to transcend and that only soul and spirit are able to arrive at, the dimension of “the Beyond” that some scholars have formulated, to which Greek Neo-Platonism pays attention.39 In this sense, the philosophy of Lévinas is a philosophy of saintliness, a philosophy of spirituality of religion. Transcendence is always closely related with alterity. Evasion is the evasion from the “Whole,” the separation from “there is,” from himself. As mentioned above, instead of taking evasion as an aim, Lévinas intends to search for the Height of transcendence. The Bible and rabbis’ interpretations also regard alterity and transcendence as the key. Abraham and Ulysses have become the two symbolical personages of the two traditions of cultures that transcend alterity. Between the two symbols, Lévinas has an inclination to Abraham. For Lévinas, Ulysses symbolizes a philosophy that returns to the Same: “The itinerary of philosophy remains to be that of Ulysses whose adventure in the world has been only return to his natal island— complaisance in the Same, lack of knowledge of the Other.”40 Thus, in order to reach ethics, Lévinas substitutes the Promised Land for the territory occupied. Leading the Hebrews and the errant for forty years in Sinai, Moses did not enter Canaan and died in Nebo, while Ulysses returned to Ithaca where he died. Abraham is faithful to his
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God, Ulysses to his motherland. For philosophy, even for Greek philosophy, Lévinas engraves its traces in exile and in the ontological image of return. Instead of having regrets in the image of ethics, of errancy, and of migration, Lévinas has chosen Abraham, not Ulysses; he has chosen departure without regret for quitting his origin and his autochthony, not return to a natal country. This is for two reasons: The first is to underline that the oblivion of alterity in Greek philosophy is the point to which the biblical tradition pays the most attention; the second is to express the ardent desire to quit autochthony to go elsewhere, to the foreign and unfamiliar land. This thought concerns not only his personal past but also the five years that he endured in a concentration camp and his reflections after his return in France: How philosophy could find in tradition the method to evade the thought of identity.41
V. Conclusion: the Utopia of the Human Being Catherine Chalier states: “The choice of a human life undergoes the assumption of an existence for the Other.”42 In reading the works of Lévinas, we reflect on the problems that he raises and we have little serenity in our heart, seeing that we live in a world that still witnesses turmoil. Lévinas always has a deep concern to respond to the question of the “Human.” Some researchers attribute such concern to his Jewish origin, to his extensive knowledge of the classical works of Judaism. In Le tournant théologique de la phénoménologie française, Dominique Janicaud claims that Lévinas has responded to the movement of the thought of methodological liberation: The phenomenology in him is used as the access to the quest for divine transcendence.43 This book of Janicaud has provoked debates in France, and it is difficult for us to discuss it here. We would, however, like to say that as a Witness of Shoah, as a Jewish professor, most of whose relatives were assassinated by the Nazis in Lithuania, as a philosopher who always reflects on the human and the world in terms of radical alterity, and as a thinker full of love for humanity, who has a noble heart, Lévinas wants to inquire about the conditions in which humans could still hear the voice of God. The profundity or the cruelty of Lévinas consists in this: His research does not bear the aim of consolation for the victims, because the victims of inhuman violence cannot be consoled, or of dispensation for the survivors from interrogation about the significance of their “privilege” to survive in this world, because the survivors still live in an inhuman world. The inhuman violence that he himself has experienced always concerns Lévinas.
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It is exercised in the name of “human reason” and “supreme saintliness”: Auschwitz, Shoah . . . Lévinas wants to say to us that these adversities are in the end concerned with the relation between humans and God. The concern or the reflection on God is reflection on the human: I would like nothing to be defined by God, because it is the human that I know. It is God that I can define by the relation to the human and not inversely. The notion of God,—God knows it, I’m not opposed to it! But, when I say something about God, it is always from the relation of the human. The inadmissible abstraction, it is God; it is in terms of the Other (Autrui) that I speak of God.44
This God comes to Idea, he is not contaminated by Being, he is the Beyond, he is the Other in majuscules. God signifies this true human world, because it is there that one has a true love anterior to Being, to unity, to reason, a real height and a real transcendence. This proves that his concern, or rather his reflection, on God is essentially that on the human: “The concern with the Other is another thing in nature, including the concern with the self, from the law which comes from elsewhere.”45 Philosophy was used to defining the human as the rational animal that, however, is not the real human endowed with human nature. The tyrants, the executioners, and the militant in the twentieth century are in effect the rational animals. Isn’t this distinction made by Lévinas a caution which reminds us that in front of these ineffaceable primitive incidents—isn’t it supposed to give a more rigorous definition of the human?46 The tension between Judaism and philosophy manifested in the thought of Lévinas first tells us that reason which demands autonomy has quit the orbit of signification and regards itself as the only source of intelligence by pushing what it cannot control into the domain of opinion or faith. For reason, “nothing transcendent could affect or truly enlarge a mind.”47 An autonomous culture of humanity concerning only itself and rejecting alterity should first be an atheism of profound thought to which Lévinas is opposed, not to defend religious works, but to recover his thought of Revelation that aims to search for Infinity. In accepting the traditional thought of Judaism, Lévinas does not intend to make apology or complaisance for this religious thought, but to express an even more “rigorous” fidelity that weighs on the heart of survivors. Chalier estimates that, on one hand, Lévinas wants to aid the survivors, who often ignore their tradition and mode of thinking and those who have already been Christianized, in rediscovering the Bible: “In a world where nothing is Jewish, only the Hebrew text reverberates and changes the echo of teachings that no cathedral, plastic form or specific social structure can break away with their abstraction.”48 On the other hand, “in order to maintain in the
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persecution his human essence,”49 this text is supposed to prevent the survivors from diving into despair and nothingness, despite inconsolable afflictions, it is supposed to say to them that “I have put before you life and death, a blessing and a curse: so take life for yourselves and for your seed.”50 The philosophy of Lévinas demands an everlasting memory: Such a choice does not mean yielding to ferocity but means assuming infinite responsibilities. This absolute duty51 to the Other, with the demand of the justice of Being to oppose evil, is what philosophy and Christianity could not prevent over the centuries.52 A true human life is beyond: As thought is always elsewhere, it cannot be realized if it is not beyond Being, that is, in transcendence. The beyond to which the human should tend toward and be to the point of messianism, is the Utopia of the human, and the philosophy that interprets this movement to the height we name “the philosophy of saintliness.” PEKING UNIVERSITY Beijing, China
Endnotes 1. Emmanuel Lévinas, De l’évasion (1935) (Paris: Fata Morgana, 1982), 99. 2. The two philosophical jolts that Derrida speaks of: The first is that it is Lévinas that introduced at the same time the phenomenology of Husserl and the thought of Heidegger to France around 1930; the second is that it is “the happy traumatism” raised by Lévinas that is “the traumatism of the Other.” The first one “will in this way disrupt once more the scene without scene of the thought; it did this justly, without dispute, at the same time from the interiority, faithfully, and from very far away, from the attestation of a completely different place.” Jacques Derrida, “A dieu,” in Chaque fois unique, la fin du monde (Paris: Galilée, 2003), 249–51 and in Adieu, à Emmanuel Lévinas (Paris: Galilée, 1997). 3. See Emmanuel Lévinas, C’est la Bible et les Grecs, in Cosmopolitiques (Paris: Éditions Apogée, 1986) and in A l’heure des nations (Paris: Minuit, 1988), 157–58. 4. Here one finds that Lévinas was inspired by Maurice Blanchot. In Blanchot’s reflection on art and literature, Lévinas finds the things are more rigorous and more profound than rigorous critique: In fact, the œuvre of an author is situated out of all critics and all exegeses. Blanchot does not have philosophical intention, which does not mean that his intention is inferior to such a measure, but he finds neither the ultimate possibility in philosophy, nor the limit of human in the possibility. For those who want to build a better world, it means not only to comprehend but also to change. See Emmanuel Lévinas, Sur Maurice Blanchot (Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1975), 9–10. On the other hand, in his research and analysis of the Bible and classic works of Judaism, in favor of a philosophical position, Lévinas states many times that his work is to draw attention to the reflection on the Hebrew culture and history, which have suffered grave discrimination, with regard to the thought of the traditional autonomy of the knowledge of interiority of Being and equality, thought that summons alterity that could not be reduced to be an alterity of Being. This is why Lévinas refutes any points of view that take Jewish theology as the perspective of his philosophy of transcendence: “My beginning point is absolutely not theological.” Emmanuel Lévinas, “Transcendance et hauteur” (1962), in Liberté et commandement (SaintClément-la-Rivière: Fata Morgana, 1994), 96.
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5. See Bruce Begout, L’héritier hérétique, in Esprit (Paris: Mars-Avril, 2006). 6. Paul Ricœur, A l’école phenomenology (Paris: Vrin, 1986), 9. 7. Ibid., 156. Also see Agata Zielinski, Lecture de Merleau-Ponty et Lévinas (Paris: PUF, 2002), 14. In this book, the author points out that Lévinas and Merleau-Ponty have brought particular contributions to the movement of heresies of Husserl’s phenomenology in France. They both testify the fidelity and the rupture with Husserl. In fact, these heresies do not renounce the origin of phenomenology, but transcend from the interior of phenomenology and introduce questions and new important points. 8. The fact that Lévinas inherits and criticizes phenomenology best shows this heresy: “I begin with Husserl as before, but what I say is no longer in Husserl.” See Emmanuel Lévinas, Transcendance et intelligibilité (Geneva: Labor et Fides, 1964). The primary conception of the present article is inspired by my friends Catherine Chalier, specialist of Lévinas and of Jewish thought, Professor of Paris X, and Miguel Abenseur, Professor of Paris VII. I benefit a lot from reading their works and discussing with them. Jean-Marc Narbonne, Lévinas and the Greek Heritage (Paris:Vrin, 2004) also gives me inspiration in my primary reflections. Narbonne is Professor of l’Université de Laval. 9. Lévinas, Sur Maurice Blanchot (Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1975), 20. 10. Emmanuel Lévinas, De Dieu qui vient à l’idée (Paris: Vrin, 1982), 94. 11. Here Lévinas cites “the four metaphors” of Plotinus (Enneads, V, I, 6), which have clearly pointed out the “movement of the Immobile”—or the emanation of Being from the One. See Emmanuel Lévinas, “De l’un à l’autre, transcendance et temps,” in Entre nous, essais sur la pensée-à-l’autre (Paris: Grasset, 1991), 153–55. 12. Lévinas, De Dieu qui vient à l’idée, 95. The tendency of this transcendence reaches its summit in the Spirit of Hegel. 13. Emmanuel Lévinas, Totalité et infini (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1961), 37. 14. Emmanuel Lévinas, “La trace de l’autre,” in En découvrant l’existence avec Husserl et Heidegger (Paris: Vrin, 1963), 267. 15. Emmanuel Lévinas, Autrement qu’être ou au delà de l’essence (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1974), 223. 16. Lévinas, De Dieu qui vient à l’idée, 174. Here, “a” signifies the character of verb. Lévinas, Autrement qu’être ou au delà de l’essence, 9: The term essence here signifies that Being is different from being, as Sein in German is different from Seiende, esse in Latin is different from scholastic ens. We dare not write essance as the history of language demands, the suffix ance, originating from antia or from entia, gives birth to the abstract noun of action. 13 (note): the term essence—which we dare not write essance, see Lévinas, De Dieu qui vient à l’idée, 94 and 78 note, 160 note. 17. Here, we should mention an article that Lévinas published: “Vairas,” Konas 7, no. 5 (1933): 271–80: “The Comprehension of Spirituality in French and German Cultures.” In this article, which was translated from Lithuanian into French for the first time in 2006, in Cités (Paris: PUF, 2006), 126–37, Lévinas has already expressed in a clear way his ardent desire of evading Being to search for transcendence and pure spirituality. On one hand, Lévinas admires the originality of Descartes’s theory of separation of body and mind, which differs from Aristotle who considers evident the relation between the material and spiritual substances in humans. For Descartes the two substances do not have the common point in them and could only be unified by the grace of God. On the other hand, Lévinas shows that the true spiritual life is elsewhere. The spirit—it is peculiar to French culture even today—is pure thought surpassing imagination, sensation, and passion. As Pascal says: “The dignity of human is in his thought.” This is declaration peculiar to the French. 18. Simonne Plourde, Emmanuel Lévinas, Altérité et responsabilité (Paris: Cerf, 1996), 9–11. 19. Lévinas, De l’évasion (Paris: Fata Morgana, 1982), 116. 20. See Emmanuel Lévinas, “Signature,” in Difficile liberté: Essais sur le judaisme (Paris: Albin Michel, 1976), 405–12. 21. This is the subtitle of Lévinas’s article on Paul Celan, in Noms propres (Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1976). 22. What is interesting is that the Hebrew language itself well expresses the historical characters of the Jews: “errancy,” “foreign,” etc. As Chalier well shows that the
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23. 24. 25. 26.
27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37.
38. 39.
du xiaozhen Hebrew language is a language of passers. The word “Hebrew” means “passer.” It is same for the word “trace” which means those who pass. It disturbs the world order and tends to the “beyond” Being. Catherine Chalier, Figure du féminin, lecture d’Emmanuel Lévinas (Paris: Cerf, 1982), 143. In Hebrew, the verb “be” does not have the present tense; it has only the past and the future. The past and the future are not the variations of presence. In Hebrew, the present is nothing but a point: The end of the past and the beginning of the future. (Spinoza, Abrégé de grammaire héraïque, trans. Qskénazi et Askenazi-Gerson [Paris: Vrin, 1968], 131.) This proves the rejection of confusion of Being with presence, the present with Being. The play of Hebrew in space, in tending to nonpresence, surpasses Being. Lévinas, De l’évasion, 98. Lévinas, Totalité et infini, 60 Also see Catherine Chalier, Figure du féminin, Lecture d’Emmanuel Lévinas (Paris: Cerf, 1982), 16. Emmanuel Lévinas, “De l’un à l’autre, transcendance et temps,” in L’univers philosophique, Dictionnnaire Encyclopédie philosophique universelle, vol. 1 (Paris: PUF, 1978) and collected in Lévinas, Entre nous, essais sur la pensée-à-l’autre. This article extensively expresses Lévinas’s comprehension and critique of Greek philosophy. Lévinas, “De l’un à l’autre,” 153. The original meaning of the word: Parchment manuscript, on which the primitive text can be scratched and a new text can be written. Jacques Derrida, “La Mythologie blanche,” cited by Marie-Anne Lescourret, “Homo philosophicus,” in Lévinas, de l’Etre à l’autre, ed. Joelle Hansel (Paris: PUF, 2006), 25. Ibid. See Catherine Chalier, La trace de l’infini, Lévinas et la source hébraïque (Paris: Cerf, 2002). Emmanuel Lévinas, Altérité et transcendance (Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1972), 131. Emmanuel Lévinas, Difficile liberté, essais sur le judaïsme (Paris: Albin Michel, 1963), Preface, 28. Chalier, La trace de l’infini, Introduction, 9–11. Lévinas, “De l’un à l’autre,” 156–57. Ibid. The faith, according to Lévinas, thereby does not mean the adhesion to indemonstrable propositions which collides with reason, but the discovery, made possible by the works and their commentaries, but that the most secretive folds of psyche vibrates only to the rhythm of another and that the human in Being begins there, only there. See Catherine Chalier, L’Utopie de l’humain (Paris: Albin Michel, 1993), 17–18. Lévinas, De Dieu qui vient à l’idée, 232. Lévinas shows that “the Good” of Plato is situated out of Being, but it lacks real height: “The relation with the Other (Autrui); as a movement to the Good. Plato’s thought guides them. It signifies that the movement which leads the existent to the Good is not a transcendence by which the existent is elevated to superior existence, but a way-out from Being and from the categories that describe it: an ex-cendance.” (Preface to De l’existence à l’existant) Lévinas formulated the thought in De l’évasion, in 1935, and in his later works, he realizes the movement from “Beyond Being” to “Otherwise than Being.” But we should note that “Otherwise than Being” does not mean “another Being” or simple supplementation, but opposition and subversion of the domination that Being imposes upon the thought, that is to say, to open up a new way. Here, it should be mentioned that the problem of the theory of Being in contemporary philosophy in the West is posed by some scholars, especially by French thinkers, among whom Lévinas is a representative, who are influenced by Heidegger but who separate themselves from Heidegger regarding the problem of Being. They estimate that Heidegger’s reflection on the problem of Being constitutes one of the most important events in twentieth century in the circle of thinkers. Heidegger, however, notes only one retrospection on the existent in Greek philosophy, and he does not pay sufficient attention to the “Beyond Being” of antique Greece, that is, to “the Beyond.” This kind of reflection, which finds its origin in Plato and perfection in
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40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46.
47. 48. 49. 50. 51.
52.
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the neo-Platonist Plotinus, makes the scholars who succeed Heidegger pay special attention to the importance of the thought of “the Beyond” Being. This thought is affirmed in ancient negative theology and in the tradition of Plato, of which Lévinas is an important representative. He finds a similarity between “Beyond Being” in neo-Platonism and “Otherwise than Being” in contemporary phenomenology. Emmanuel Lévinas, Humanisme de l’autre homme (Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1972), 43. Yve CharlesZarka, “S’évader de la scolastique,” in Cités, No25 (Paris: PUF, 2006), 1–5. Cited by Alain Finkielkraut, “Une pensée d’après la catastrophe,” Le Monde 26, no. 12 (1995): 22. Dominique Janicaud, Le tournant théologique de la phénoménologie française (Combes: L’Eclat, 1991), 57. Emmanuel Lévinas, “Transcendance et hauteur,” in Cahier Herne, Emmanuel Lévinas (Paris: l’Herne, 1991), 70–71. Guy Petitdemange, Cités, No25 (Paris: PUF, 2006), 11. At the end of Difficile liberté, Lévinas says that “his biography is dominated by the presentiment and the memory of Nazi horror.” In La Souffrance inutile, Lévinas shows that the reflection on the twentieth century obliges us to break away with the religion as consolation and all philosophies of history. Also see Catherine Chalier, La trace de l’Infini (Paris: Cerf, 2002), Preface. Lévinas, Entre nous, essais sur la pensée-à-l’autre, 200. Lévinas, Difficile liberté, essais sur le judaïsme, 341. Ibid., 362. The Basic Bible, Containing the Old and New Testament, trans. Samuel Henry Hooke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1949) Deuteronomy 30:19. In fact, this brings primitive difference to the human: From the beginning, human is different from one another, and even equality has never existed. Therefore, for Lévinas, in order to make human conflicts disappear and to realize true peace, it is supposed to count not only on reason, but on ethics—the first philosophy—that is, the absolute for the Other and inequality between I and the Other. See Catherine Chalier, Lévinas: l’utopie de l’humain, I (Paris: Albin Michel, 1993), 31–35.
mo weimin
PHENOMENOLOGY OR ANTI-PHENOMENOLOGY?— THE ETHICAL SUBJECT IN LÉVINAS In the history of Western philosophy, dealing with the subject is always a fundamental task, not only for the construction of metaphysics, but also for the unfolding of ethics; and understanding the subject has an immediate reference to the attitude toward the other. Roughly, some philosophers, such as Descartes, Hegel, and Husserl, regard the subject as a constructing agent to whom the other is subject; whereas most of the twentieth-century Western philosophers, like Heidegger and Foucault, treat the subject as a constructed and passive object being-with-others in the world. Lévinas further “degrades” the subject, suffering and self-tormenting, yielding and devoting itself to the other, whose subjectivity has, as a matter of fact, become a passivity more passive than all passivity. The Lévinasian ethical subject itself can adequately affirm that he has demolished the groundwork of Husserlian phenomenology and, hoisting his own unique banner, has inaugurated a distinct path from the one taken by Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty, a path allowing him a prominent position in the history of the twentieth-century Western philosophy.
I. The Crisis of the Phenomenological Subject Lévinas once frankly said that his study of Logical Investigations before his graduation from the University of Strasbourg set him on an inevitable road to phenomenology. In 1928–29, Lévinas spent an academic year in Freiburg, Germany, where he attended Husserl’s seminar and began his adventure in phenomenology that brought fresh air into the European philosophy of the day, with new possibilities and potentials of thinking and the transition from one concept to another. Lévinas went to Freiburg in the first place on the strength of Husserl’s reputation, yet in the end he discovered Heidegger. Lévinas variously criticized Husserl, mainly for the lack of novelties in his MO WEIMIN, Professor, Department of Philosophy, Fudan University. Specialties: French philosophy, Foucault, Lyotard, Lévinas. E-mail:
[email protected] Lévinas: Chinese and Western Perspectives Editor by Nicholas Bunnin, Dachun Yang, and Linyu Gu © 2008 Journal of Chinese Philosophy. ISBN: 978-1-405-19545-4
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phenomenology. He found that a great deal of Husserl’s manuscripts were merely a sort of proof of ideas that had been in his head quite early. For Lévinas, those ideas were never unexpected, despite Husserl’s enviable capacity to employ his acute vision. Whether from his works or his teachings, it was not at all difficult for people to infer what Husserl really wanted to say. Furthermore, Lévinas even reckoned Husserlian phenomenology to be unconvincing because of its lack of change and innovation. In my opinion, Lévinas’s critique of Husserl for his lack of innovation actually implies that he ascribes Husserl’s conservatism and intellectualism to his theory of intentionality, the presupposed pure Ego and the transcendental subject. In Logical Investigations, Husserl stubbornly sticks to the intentionality of consciousness. “Any consciousness is certainly the consciousness of this consciousness itself, but also, and especially, of something other than itself, of its intentional correlatives, of its thought (pensée).”1 Consciousness is the thought being directed toward something revealed in that thought, which is the route from the subject to the object, while there is another one from the object to the subject in his theory of intentionality. Husserlian phenomenology tells us that the scientific or philosophical cognitive method consists in the study of the constitution of the objective articulations of the beings (things, values, the correlatives of affectivity and will) that is made in the concreteness of thought, or of the noetic-noematic life of consciousness that is purified of any prior contamination by the objective affirmed prematurely, in the thought searched for or achieved, under the name of pure or transcendental consciousness, in a so-called operation of phenomenological reduction.2 In Ideas I, the intentionality with the noetic-noematic structure, to which transcendental phenomenology pays attention, is regarded as the concrete of “phenomenon” that originates in the “pure Ego,” which is primary for transcendental phenomenology. The intentionality of thought with the noetic-noematic structure is the intentionality of the ego. Neither the ego nor the object is extracted from the “body” of mental phenomena in consciousness. The ego maintains its unicity; thus, it is absolute, and independent of any otherness, despite its factual and active living in the acts of consciousness “derived from it,” nor can any reduction grasp it for it is indescribable in and for itself, simply as the pure Ego.3 Lévinas is quite surprised by the unicity and monadism of the Husserlian pure Ego. For Husserl, the unicity of the pure Ego does not originate in difference; on the contrary, the former becomes the cause of the latter. So where does the unicity of the Husserlian pure Ego
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come from, given that its meaning must be constructed in anything but the subject, who is more absolute than the constructed absoluteness? “The pure Ego, the subject of transcendental consciousness itself, in which the world is constituted, is outside the subject: the self without reflection—unicity is identical to incessant awakening.”4 Husserl criticizes Descartes’s “ego cogito” for the discovery and affirmation of the ego achieved in the world horizon, which seemed to be inadequately pure. Thus, the Cartesian ego is, in Husserlian phenomenology, reduced to the pure Ego who herefrom holds an extraordinary position, transcending the ego in the intentional interiority. In other words, the extraordinary position of the pure Ego indicates that it cannot be described by the subject. It is outside the subject. The transcendental ego is presupposed in its absolute unicity, which ensures the truth in the revelation of Being. But where on earth does the unicity come from? Lévinas considers it to be derived from an ethical relation prior to the cognitive relation of the phenomenological structures. Facing the other person that one can certainly approach as presence, and that he approaches as well in humanities, hasn’t the thought (le pensant) already exposed itself—beyond the presence of the other, illuminated without anbages like the visible—to the nudity without defence of face, the exclusivity or the misery of human beings? Hasn’t the thought exposed itself to the misery of nudity, but also to the solitude of face and, from then on, to the categorical imperative of assuming the responsibility for that misery?5
Human beings possess the irreplaceable unicity, selected by God and responsible to the other, that is, Lévinas substitutes the unicity of the ego as an ethical subject for the unicity of the Husserlian pure Ego as a knowing subject. Lévinas alerts us to the indescribable “pure Ego” of transcendental construction resumed by phenomenological reduction. He wants to get rid of the ultimate standpoint of Husserlian transcendental philosophy. If we should be vigilant against the Husserlian pure Ego, then what is Lévinas’s attitude toward Merleau-Ponty’s theory of intersubjectivity? Husserl’s phenomenological reduction isolates every irreducible region which belongs to the noeses, the materials (étoffe), even the flesh (chair), and the absoluteness, of the “I think.” Body is the flesh in which thought is embodied or incarnated, while flesh is the body constructed by thought. For Merleau-Ponty, there must be an intermediary between the transcendental nature and the spiritual interiority, its acts and noemata, both of which are less original than the intermediary, namely the incarnation. Through the original incarnation of spirit, nature discloses its meanings in the cultures signified by
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corporal movements, such as conducts and manners, languages, arts, poetry, and sciences. Due to the ambiguity of body or mind in sensing, the sense contents need to be recognized by intersubjectivity for the transition from the sensibility connected with corporal subjectivity to a real objectivity. Ideas II, published after Husserl’s death, has abandoned the transcendental philosophy of Ideas I and begun to focus on the corporal structure in sensing on which the relation between I and the other will also depend. The other and I, myself, will be copresent as the only elements of intercorporeity (intercorporéité). I acquire myself from the other, who is created in my own thought, and by myself. We can say it is the community of “sensibility” that lays the foundation of intersubjectivity. However, Lévinas cannot accept Merleau-Ponty’s theory of intersubjectivity based on intercorporeity. Lévinas regards Merleau-Ponty’s theory of intersubjectivity as an attempt, relying on knowing another ego, to explode egological isolation (isolement égologique). Even those values that another ego dreams of, or has obtained, are similarly based on a priori knowledge. Thereupon, Lévinas’s question will be: . . . in the handshake that phenomenology tries to comprehend with effect from the mutual cognition—even if it is a double touch— doesn’t the essential that overflows cognition lie in the confidence, the devotion and the peace—with the gift that I give to the other, and a certain indifference to the compensations in reciprocity, and with ethical gratuitousness—established and signified by that handshake, not as the simple code that transmits the information of it?6
Can’t the absolute separateness between both hands, neither belonging to the same body nor to the presumed intercorporeity, establish such an ethical relation? The absolute separateness between both hands is signified, not only in the nudity of the visage that is illuminating the face of the other, but also in the expression of its entire perceptual existence, even in the shaking hands. In face, the other is involved in a relation to the self according to its ineffaceable difference in ethical responsibility; and sociality, as the human possibility approximating the absolutely other, is signified and commanded, starting off with the other’s face. Lévinas’s theory is that it is not the epistemological clasping hands based on the community of “sensibility,” but the non-in-difference (non-in-différence) to the other that gives prominence to the difference the other has as a stranger in ethical responsibility, and the love of the other derived from the command of God via the other’s face, that can establish a social relation. For Lévinas, the significance is rather the mode of the philosophical method initially advanced by Husserl, and then reconstructed by Heidegger who does not accept Husserl’s “transcendental reduction.”
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If Husserl is considered by Lévinas unconvincing for his lack of innovation, then Heidegger, despite his involvement with Hitler, must be the greatest philosopher in history respected by Lévinas. Heidegger’s application of phenomenological analysis, discovered by Husserl, is a work of genius. Everything of Heidegger seems unexpected; every page of Being and Time is innovative. Heidegger’s analysis of affectivity, his new discussions of day-to-day preoccupations, his distinction between Being and beings, his proclamation of the end of metaphysics, and his theory of the “es gibt” (there be) in the mysterious goodness, etc., inspires and enlightens Lévinas greatly. Nevertheless, despite Heidegger’s valuable and significant legacies, Lévinas actually advances a distinct theory of anonymous being, of affectivity, and of death, which I will proceed to discuss. II. The Birth of the Ethical Subject In Existence and Existents, Lévinas probes into the birth of the ethical subject. Anonymous being, or the “there is” (il y a), gives birth to the ethical subject. The “there is” is an anonymity. In point of the impersonal neutrality, the “there is” is like “it is raining” or “it is dark.” We do not know either anyone or anything that takes this existence upon itself. You may say it is the “sky” that is raining or becomes dark, but there is no “sky” present in any of these sentences. Lévinas calls anonymous being the “there is.” No matter what he does, no matter whether he is in motion or motionless, all the while, there is the being (il y a l’être). Even though there is no possessor, no subject, there is the being all the same. Lévinas’s thought on the “there is” is derived from his childhood memories. When Lévinas was a child, he always slept alone in a room with curtains closed, where he could not fall asleep, inclining his ear to the “murmuring” silence which sounded like joggling but actually rustling curtains. Lévinas applies the “there is” in referring to the impersonal phenomena of existence. “Neither nothingness, nor Being.”7 The child is frightened and flustered, but not anxious. In Lévinas’s opinion, his term “there is” has very different tastes and interests from Heidegger’s es gibt as discussed in his later period. The latter, namely the es gibt, is forgiveness, the anonymous unconcealment of Being, spreading as sufficiency and the benevolent Good, stuffed with beings which, on the contrary, Lévinas’s “there is” lacks. Its indifference is intolerable, not owing to anxiety, but to the constant fear of meaningless monotony. Of course, Heidegger’s es gibt from the year 1933 to 1945 did not show any forgiveness! The “there is” is “the chaotic rustling of an anonymous existing, an existence without existent, that no negation can happen to sur-
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mount.”8 In On Evasion, Lévinas describes the fear of the entangled anonymous being, which is not fear of death, but the weariness of the “excess” of the self, which is different from what Kierkegaard or Heidegger called the anxiety of nothingness. The “there is” is the site for silence, darkness, and obscurity of night. Once existents come forth and get positioned in the fearful neutrality, namely the “there is,” light and meaning will come into the world, setting out the extradition of existence to existents, and of existents to existence, which is a way of time that never ends.This is precisely the mode ( façon) of the subject’s conducts and manners. Lévinas tells us the subject’s functions in respect of both breaking and making. The mode of the subject . . . has the power to rupture, to refuse the neutral and impersonal principles, to refuse the Hegelian totality and politics, and the spellbinding rhythms of art. It has the power to speak, freely speak, without establishing a sociology or a psychoanalysis behind the speech that is pronounced, which searches for a seat for the speech in a system of references, and which reduces it to what it has not wanted. Thus, it attains the power to pass judgement on history, instead of awaiting its impersonal verdict.9
By refusing the “there is,” the subject comes into the world and grows up in it, which is the extradition of existence to existents. That an existent gets rid of and excludes totality, admitting another existent as the absolutely other, is the extradition of an existent to another, of me to the other. To be out of the “there is” means less an enactment than a dethronement. By dethroning the sovereignty of the self, a dis-inter-ested (dés-inter-essée) relation of the self to the other can be established. The murmuring of the anonymity of Being can be stopped with an asymmetrical relation established in which the other is higher than me, whereas I am subject to the other, via walking out of the anonymous being, becoming dis-inter-estedness (dés-interessement), being-for-the-other (être-pour-autrui), and taking the responsibility for the other.When walking out of the fearful “there is,” at the very start, “I” enact myself for the other, in a relation of infinite responsibility for the other, as the only one taking that responsibility, as the first one hearing the call and responding to it. This is original subjectivation (subjectivation originelle). The growing up of the ethical subject is the reviving of the Biblical figures. The Lévinasian ethics roots in the Judaic classic the Talmud. Lévinas gives expression to the primacy of ethics, namely the relationship among existents, instead of the cognitive subject–object correlation. This ethical relationship is a relation to the Other (Autrui), approximating the Other. There is an asymmetry in terms of ability and freedom between me and the Other. The Other has precedence over me. This is what Lévinas calls moral consciousness that is less an
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experience of values than an access to exteriority, or the other as exterior being. The other is higher than the self, whereas the self is subject to the other. The self is a dethroned subject exposed to the other, just like a dethroned tyrant, since when I gaze indeed into the other’s absolutely naked eyes and suffering face straightforwardly and naively, it seems that I receive the command of God and have to respond to it, taking the responsibility for the other. Hence, the relationship with the other person is important; the other person is incomparable, stripped of any social “roles.” Moreover, the other person, in his nudity (nudité), his destitution (dénuement) and his mortality (mortalité), imposes responsibilities on me at the very start: goodness, benevolence or mercy.10
This nudity that calls and commands me to be responsible to the other is what Lévinas means by face (visage). In what way can I, as an ethical subject, approximate the other, be exposed to the other, and transcend to the other? Lévinas believes that it is through Desire (Désir) and language (langage) that I can achieve this. Desire is different from unsatisfied needs. Desire does not satisfy needs, but multiplies them. Need is the principal sign of the subject getting rid of the “there is,” and the primary movement of the Same. Moreover, enjoyment ( jouissance, jouir-de) is the successor to need, the slogan of egoism. “The release from the horror of the there is is announced in the contentment of enjoyment.”11 In enjoyment, although the ego does not oppose the other, it is absolutely egoistic, and completely indifferent to the other. “Subjectivity originates in the independence, and in the sovereignty of enjoyment.”12 Apparently, the Desire for the Other is not realized in enjoyment. The Lévinasian desire is a metaphysical “Desire” with a capital “D,” which means the Desire for the “absolutely other,”“the invisible,” or whatever does not belong to me, and is out of me. The Other is placed in the illuminated and unchangeable alterity, while the ego is dethroned. The force that essentially used to murder the Other can never do so when facing it, but starts thinking it justly. The Other is an incomprehensible stranger, unknown and irreducible to me. Thus, the metaphysical Desire cannot be satisfied or quenched. In Violence and Metaphysics, Jacques Derrida reckons the Lévinasian Desire as a metaphysical transcendence; in addition, he articulates the paradox of such antiHegelian desire: “only as paradox, as the renunciation of the Desirable, can the movement of Desire be itself.”13 Lévinas regards language rather as the condition of attempting to communicate with the other than as the expression of thought, since language belongs to morality before it enters the regime of theory. Language is used not only for communication, but also, maybe espe-
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cially, as a movement that takes the other as the other to touch, that is to say, a movement that has been responsible to the other for a long time. The relation of me to the other is maintained through language, which is, in the first instance, the saying of the self to the other, summoning and praying the other, exposing the self to the other. Language is less a means for knowing and comprehending the other than the place of encountering the strange and unacquainted other. The other reveals itself as the other in language, responding to my prayer. Above all, speech is the summons, the invocation where the invoked is less the awaited, even though it is abused, respected, obliged to keep quiet, called for the presence of the speech, without being reduced to whatever I say about him, than the theme of discourses or the subject of conversation who is always beyond or outside me, surpassing me and overhanging me, since I pray him, whom I don’t know, to turn towards me and, who is foreign to me, to hear me.14
Insofar as language has features of both revelation and concealment, the other speaks with me in the distant, as well as proximate, place that cannot be reduced to me. It is because the other is absolutely otherwise than me that there can be a dialogue between me and the other. Here comes the paradox of dialogue: The other is strange to me. We converse with each other in that interval where I can approximate the other, yet I can never reach it. Thus, the paradox of dialogue becomes a form of the paradox of Desire. Lévinas calls the mode of the other’s straightforward, exterior, and imminent manifestation face (visage). The epiphany (épiphanie) of face is no other than language. The infinity of the other’s face assails my spontaneous freedom; the other’s face assails my spontaneous happiness. Speech speaks to face. The presence of face implies the possibility of being attentively listened to. In front of face, I at all times make excessive demands on myself. The more I respond to it, the more demands I will make on myself, which is also among the tokens of the unsatisfied Desire that demands to be satisfied. This movement is even more fundamental than self-representing freedom. I am in obedience to the other, without asking for the other’s obedience to me. This is the moral consciousness as ethical inequality. Lévinasian moral consciousness restricts and contracts consciousness, limiting the freedom, activity, and subjectivity of the moral subject. The subject growing up in the “there is,” having got rid of the anonymity of Being, is not only a knowing ego, but also a person living in society, encountering the other. Thus, such a subject, giving up any mastery and sovereignty, and exposed to the other’s face, is a kind of moral subject that is for-the-other, responsible to the other, placing
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the other in front of itself, meanwhile, disregarding any expiation or repayment. Such subject is a tormented subject in suffering. The fundamental viewpoint of Existence and Existents summarized by Lévinas is as follows: Getting rid of the “there is” authentically, the real possessor of Being will perch in obligation and “for-the-other” that introduces a meaning into the meaninglessness of the “there is.” I am subject to the other! In Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, he asserts such subjectivity to be vulnerability, the passivity more passive than all passivity. III. The Subject Responsible for the Other According to Lévinas, saying that “responsibility” is a metaphysical theme is identical to saying that it is an ethical theme. Metaphysics is a science investigating origin or Being, which is in close proximity to ethics. Dostoyevsky’s philosophy is the starting point of Lévinas’s ethics of responsibility. Dostoyevsky’s well-known remark, “every one of us is guilty before all, for everyone and everything, and I more than others,” has been variously cited by Lévinas. It is because I am more guilty than others that I have to deign to the other, taking infinite responsibility for the other, regardless of any expiation or repayment. Only if my responsibility exceeds my rights can the society become a just one. The ultimate mission of philosophy is to safeguard justice, to fight for the return of lost justness. Lévinas emphatically points out that the groundwork of human nature lies in the Good, that is, encountering the other and taking responsibility for the other. The moral subject walks out of the existent and itself to the other, which implies the concern for the other, for its pains and death prior to the care for the death of itself. I wish the other safety, peace, and happiness, which is the expression of concern for the other and its hope, presence, and life. “Salut!” is not only a greeting or a well-wishing, but also a message giving expression to the other’s mastery of me, its precedence over me. The other is strange to me, indifferent to me, yet it is gazing at me with its alterity in relation to me. The relation of me to the other goes beyond cognition or comprehension, that is to say, I cannot simply reduce the other to an object of cognition. The relation between the Same (le Même) and the Other (Autre) cannot always be reduced to the knowledge of the Other acquired by the Same, nor even the revelation (révélation) of the Other to the Same, which has already been different from disclosure.15
The absolutely other is the Other (Autrui). Lévinas lays stress on autonomy as the supreme principle of the Other, while he opposes
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reducing multiplicity to totality. He criticizes Western philosophy, typically embodied by Heideggerian ontology, for the priority or the privilege of Being, on account of which beings are reduced to Being, and the Other to the Same, that is, the preference of ontology to metaphysics. Lévinas perseveres in overturning this relationship with his well-known assertion that “ontology presupposes metaphysics.”16 Lévinas even thinks that the “Da” of Heidegger’s Da-sein, whose understanding (verstehen) of Being may overlook the Other, invades and occupies the Other’s place. For Lévinas, metaphysics means transcendence and ethics, insisting that the Other is irreducible to the Same, questioning the spontaneity of the Same’s egoism, inducing the Same to accept the Other. In his conversation with François Poirié, Lévinas points out that, “placed in an ethical relation, the other person remains as other. Here, it is precisely the strangeness (étrangeté) of the other, that is, his ‘foreignness (étrangère), which connects the other to you ethically.’ ”17 At the very start, the relation to the Other’s face is ethical. I encounter the Other’s face, whose revelation preserves an exteriority calling or commanding me to take my responsibility, that is to say, I have to listen attentively to the Other’s demand and God’s command at the very start. In the Other’s face, regardless of its particular forms of expression, I hear the Other’s summons and God’s command of not deserting the Other. Under all the particular forms of expression, I see the Other’s nudity, indefensibility, and suffering. Face is the command of taking responsibility for the Other, not letting it be solitary. Face calls or even commands my benevolence and obligation to be responsible for the Other’s suffering and pains. The obligation to the Other is higher than any other obligations: Place the self after the Other, respecting the Other, thinking about the interests of the Other. The Other is otherwise than me. The Other’s alterity (altérité) is a consistent theme in Lévinas’s works. Alterity does not mean another attribute, nor a difference in spatial position. Accordingly, neither attribute nor space is the alterity that can distinguish me from the Other. The Other is the one otherwise than me, different from me, as the absolutely other retreating into its secrecy. This is what Lévinas calls the alterity of the Other. However, it is not through the comparison between me and the Other that an alterity can be discovered. Alterity is assumed by the plurality that is against totality. Furthermore, it is what I am facing, starting off with my egoism.“The alterity of the Other reveals itself in the Other, which is not connected with me, while I reach the Other starting off with me instead of the comparison between me and the Other.”18 Whereas I am present as the Same (le Même), the Other is nonpresent due to its alterity. It is no more than the Other’s trace that coexists with me simultaneously. Lévinas denies any
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pure interiority, since the pulse of human mental phenomenon for the first time is to pursue alterity.The closed pains and suffering of my own will be groaning for alterity. Once I am tied to the Other’s face and its alterity, God will come to my mind. However, the Other’s alterity is not equal to the infinite and holy transcendence. It is God’s illeity (illéité) that summons me to wait on neighbor, to take the responsibility for the Other. The awe of God is concretely that of the Other. The individual is commanded by God not to desert the other and chosen by God to be responsible to the other. Lévinas has always criticized Martin Buber’s theory of responsibility for theoreticism, formalism, and inertia. For Lévinas, my responsibility for the Other is to see to the entire material suffering of the Other: food, clothing, shelter, and means of travel. My responsibility for the Other starts off with these basic necessities of life. This concrete responsibility answers to the Bible: Give food to the hungry, give clothes to those that are short of clothing, give water to the weary, give dwelling to the homeless. That I am concerned about nothing but myself would be very nauseating, while the Other’s basic necessities of life are divine, since the Other I am pursuing is equated with God people are in pursuit of. It is likely because they feel guilty that people pursue God, whereas I am in pursuit of the Other for my responsibility for unblamable guiltiness. Before I know the Other, I have been tied up with him in an immemorial and irrecuperable past that has never happened. The Other’s strangeness is gazing at me. I have to be responsible not only for the Other’s food, clothing, shelter, and means of travel, but also for the Other’s death. I must be concerned about the Other’s death! Even though I am incapable of preventing the Other from death, I cannot let him die in solitude; in other words, I must be responsible for the Other’s death. Am I too severe on myself? At this point, we can see that Lévinas and Heidegger remain widely divided on the question of death. Heidegger’s “being-toward-death” (Sein zum Tode) actually implies an active attitude toward existing that a human being will have once he feels deeply anxious and helpless, facing the finitude of his subjectivity. I die my own death, and I am destined to die; death cannot be shared, so I must choose the possibility which is my ownmost, out of varied options, and die. However, for Lévinas, the reason that I have to be responsible for the Other’s death which suffocates me is, the important events, even the origin of affectivity consists in the Other! Not only my affections, but their spirituality as well is derived from the Other, from being affected by the Other’s suffering. Any affections include the relation of me to the Other. I have to be responsible not only for the Other’s death, but also, to some extent, for the evil that the Other does. I cannot desert the
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Other and leave him alone. Thus, besides punishing evil, I should prevent it from running riot. It’s Lévinas’s conviction that the Good is older than evil. People usually treat the Other as an enemy. If so, shall I take responsibility for the Other? The Good is the possibility of listening attentively to the original language of the Other’s face in the Other’s suffering and ethical command. As regards evil, it is the refusal of such responsibility; in other words, I am not concerned about the Other’s face in the first place. We cannot help to ask this question: Where is the end of my responsibility? Concerning responsibility,the relation of me to the Other is radically asymmetrical. It seems that the emphasis on the asymmetry of the responsibilities taken by me and the Other is the key to Lévinas’s ethics of the subject. It is because the relationship between me and the Other is nonreciprocal that I always take more responsibility than others do, and I am subject to the Other. The Other is prior to me; I am for the Other. As for the Other’s obligation to me, it is none of my business. I should not demand that the Other treats me as I do, inasmuch as my courtesy and humility cannot be exchanged for the Other’s. It is the Other’s own business whether or not he expresses his humility to me. There is no reciprocity between an ethical relation and a responsibility. However, I still express my courtesy and humility to the Other; I take infinite responsibility for the Other; I make excessive demands on me; I even persecute myself. Can such responsibility disregard justice? The answer is negative. We live in a pluralistic society. In such society, I am always in an ethical relation to a great multitude of people instead of only one other. That is why I have to think carefully about the various relations and the entire situation among people, so as to modify the modality of my obligation with my acts, and to take on new responsibility. While I take the responsibility for the Other, I am also thinking of the other Others, the Others as the citizens of this state. Justice must be judged, understood, and exerted. The state law may need to be improved in order to become more just, in which case we should restate the goodness and benevolence that the state has ignored, amending and mitigating austere justice, calling the goodness and the benevolence behind that austere justice. I cannot merely look at one Other’s face, so the essential relation of me to the Other is tied up with the indispensable knowledge of justice, that is, I am for the Other by virtue of pure goodness; I clearly know that I owe the Other everything. As regards what the Other owes me, it is none of my business! This is what Lévinas means by “justice,” the groundwork of which lies in goodness and benevolence! Lévinas’s ethics manages to break away from ontology,19 to substitute his ethics as first philosophy for Heidegger’s ontology as the understanding (verstehen) of the Being of beings. Formerly, it was in
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its being in general that Being could toughly survive, containing violence and evil, the self and egoism. However, here and now, such endeavor of Being is interrupted by my responsibility for the separate and strange other. God’s speech turns my survival in my own being into the concern for the other. Being needs to walk out of interiority and solitude, transcending its modality of endeavor in its own being in general. Such dis-inter-estedness (dés-inter-essement) is the Good. Solitude sometimes implies man’s mastery of and his reign over himself and the universe. At this point, walking out of solitude is precisely walking into society, approximating and encountering the other. This is the Good; such proximity to the other is love. Sociality is the essential moment for love. Lévinas regards sociality, peace, and love of the other as the Good. The groundwork of love is that the other and I will never coincide, that is, the other is always the absolutely other, even though I approximate the other, take the responsibility for the other. The more the other is loved, the more it will become the other. The other’s nonpresence in love is precisely the other’s presence as the other. This is what Lévinas means by nonin-difference (non-in-différence), which, through double negative, becomes difference (différence) and alterity. This non-in-difference, benevolence, and the Good is love par excellence. In his conversation with François Poirié, Lévinas emphasizes the unicity of both sides in an ethical responsibility. The other is unique, absolutely important and unique in the responsibility I take for the other. It is through such unicity that neighbor becomes the other than me. As the other, the other is unique in its modality; as the loved one, the other is also unique in this world. To encounter the other as the human unicity, you should be responsible and non-in-different to the other, instead of deserting the other! The unicity of the other does not exclude or overlook the relationship between me and others. I must judge those others, according to the principle of justice based on goodness and benevolence, to choose one par excellence out of them. I need to make a comparison among the “unique ones.” The chosen other from the “unique ones” is still unique. Not only the other, but also this responsibility has unrepealable unicity. The other is unique; I am also unique. My unicity consists in my irreplaceable responsibility for the other; in other words, I am precisely the chosen one responsible to the other. “The responsible self is irreplaceable, noninterchangeable, scrupulously abiding by unicity.”20 I am chosen (not anyone else) by God as the one to take the responsibility for the other. Once I am chosen, no one can be a substitution for me: It is impossible for me to escape from the other. “Here I am” (me voici), that is, I am the accusative me, by virtue of unicity, which seems I am the chosen. Such unicity is the supreme secret of my subjectivity. Here
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I am, not as the master containing and ruling the world, but as someone summoned exclusively and chosen inevitably by God. It is true that I will be involved in endless trouble and infinite responsibility once I am chosen as the one taking the responsibility for the other. However, I should be grateful to God for his choice, inasmuch it is a goodness to be responsible to the other. God chooses Judaism, which shows that the Jew has more responsibility than others; God chooses me as the one taking the responsibility for the other, which similarly shows that I have more responsibility than others. The other is known, understood, and especially, welcomed, saluted. I should always think of for-the-other first, instead of others-for-me, since the “responsible-to-the-other,” as the absolute passivity prior to any freedom, is imposed on me. The ultimate significance of such responsibility is to think the ego in the absolute passivity of the self, becoming the other’s hostage, whose condition is the incapability of making choice. The independence of the hostage consists in sustaining the other, suffering for the other. Lévinas’s “I–him/her” (Je–Autrui) relation reminds us of Buber’s “I–Thou” relation. Martin Buber makes a distinction between the “I-Thou” (Je–Tu) as an interhuman relationship and the “I–It” (Je– Cela) as a relationship between man and thing. Meanwhile, he emphatically points out that the former is irreducible to the latter. At this rate, the interhuman relationship can be distinguished, in a convincing, conspicuous, and extraordinarily exquisite manner, from the subject–object correlation. Lévinas pays high tribute to Buber’s emphasis on such irreducibility, which is regarded as his primary contribution to Western thought. Despite this, there is an important difference between Lévinas and Buber. For the latter, the “I–Thou” relation is reciprocal at the very start; and intersubjectivity appears as a reciprocal responsibility, that is, the two sides can interchange their places. Nevertheless, Lévinas denies any symmetry, equality, or reciprocal responsibility in the “I–him/her” relation.
IV. Lévinas Is Not a Phenomenologist Lévinas conceives phenomenology, which greatly inspires him, merely as a novel philosophical method for the transition from a concept or an idea to another, which, as we know, is quite away from the essentials and the hinge of phenomenology. In his conversation with François Poirié, Lévinas describes the phenomenological method as . . . the passage from the object to intention, and from intention to whatever the intention comprises, as the horizon of targets, as the
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true thought, and the thought about the truth or, if you like, the world of what is donated to you in the purely objective knowledge. . . .21
That is, the movement from an object to all the phenomena in its revelation, and a proper understanding or description of the secret intention of intentionality. Nevertheless, as we have known, Lévinas does not follow such method, but, rather, he abandons it and establishes and develops a philosophy of the other and an ethics of responsibility. Although Lévinas alleges his fealty to the phenomenological method, he actually inaugurates a completely different path from the one taken by Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, etc., through his study of their works. Lévinas asserts that the ethical relationship between the self and the other is more original than the cognitive subject–object correlation; the ethical subject is more original than the theoretical subject, that is, only based on ethical relation can theoretical relation be affirmed and understood; affectivity (affectivité) is more original than sensibility (sensibilité); responsibility (responsabilité) is more original than thematization (thématisation); the ethical sovereignty of the other is higher than the ontological sovereignty of the self. Considering Lévinas’s critique of Husserlian phenomenology for the objectification of the intentionality of consciousness, the interiority of consciousness, the eternity of time, the excessive expectations that the conscious subject can become the absolute origin, the refusal of God as the infinite other; furthermore, in view of his claim to the substitution of the intentionality of enjoyment for the Husserlian intentionality of consciousness, of the exteriority of the other and the other’s face for the Husserlian interiority of consciousness, of the “I–him/her” relation of his ethics of responsibility for the cognitive subject–object correlation of Husserl’s intentionality theory, I have to say, phenomenology actually produces a negative effect on Lévinas, that is to say, he can hardly be taken for the heir or successor to Husserl. Where Husserl comes a cropper, Lévinas sets about his work. For Lévinas, the entrance to phenomenology is precisely the exit from it, and the entrance to anti-phenomenology. When an existent grows up, with a relation to the other, in the anonymous and fearful “there is,” transcends to the other, takes responsibility for the other, the authentic ethical subject is born. Such an ethical subject is alien from the Husserlian transcendental subject and the pure Ego. If ethical relations, as this book will make clear, should carry out transcendence to its end, it is because the essential of ethics lies in its transcendent intention, and any transcendent intention does not have the noetic-noematic structure.22
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Basically, Husserlian phenomenology is an epistemology, while Lévinas’s philosophy is an ethics; Husserl investigates the intentionality of consciousness, while Lévinas discusses the intentionality of enjoyment; Husserl sets up a constitutive and active transcendental subject, whereas Lévinas develops a passive ethical subject of suffering; for Husserl, objects should be thematized by the subject, whereas for Lévinas, I have to be hospitable and subject to the other. In a word, Lévinas abandons Husserl’s intentionality principle, transcendental reduction, and the fulcrum of his phenomenology, namely the transcendental ego. The basis for Lévinas being called a phenomenologist seems to have gone altogether! How could Lévinas be called a phenomenologist? Perhaps, in the first place, there is no phenomenology at all in France. For Lévinas, Husserlian phenomenology is a negative example, a target of criticism, producing negative influence. Then where does the positive influence come from? Besides Russian literature, typically embodied by Dostoyevsky’s works, Lévinas is greatly influenced and inspired by the Bible. He interprets the Bible in the light of the Talmud, and the wisdom, questions, religious practices of rabbins, through which he finds that the other appears almost everywhere in the Bible, demanding that we get rid of the attachment of Being to itself. This is of decisive and ultimate importance for Lévinas to advance his philosophy of the other. According to himself, the ultimate mission of Jewish thought consists in the reduction of the meanings of all experience into an interhuman ethical relationship, making everybody find out that he has been chosen by God as the one to take the irreplaceable personal responsibility for the other, so as to realize the human society where everybody has good and sympathetic intentions toward each other. It is the interpretation and analysis of the Bible, in the light of his study of the Talmud, that distinguishes Lévinas’s ethics from its predecessor based on the universality of moral laws. For Lévinas, ethics emerges from the relation of me to the other, instead of resorting to the universality of moral laws at the very start. In this way, Lévinas’s moral philosophy is distinct from the one founded by Kant in Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. Husserlian phenomenology discusses, in the interiority of consciousness, how objects are thematized by knowing subjects, whereas Lévinas asserts clearly that the significance of the relation between me and the other cannot be reduced altogether to thematization that is less applicable to the interhuman ethical relationship than to the one between human beings and things or objects. Ethics, transcending the cognitive pursuit of positivity, contours the other’s exterior structure that is outside me. “Morality is not a branch of
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philosophy, but first philosophy.”23 In this way, neither Descartes, nor Husserl, nor Heidegger has ever set foot in the palace of first philosophy. “The subject is a host,”24 that is, it places itself after others, endures humiliation in order to carry out an important mission, expecting nothing in return, and it is concerned with bad times and human sufferings. Would anyone like to become such a selftormenting moral subject? Who can accomplish this? Perhaps only those biblical figures can. It is true that morality concerns ought and ideal. Moreover, it is quite reasonable and inevitable, on account of the horrible and bloody memory of the slaughter of six million Jews as the Other of suffering by Nazis as the malignantly expanding self, which dominated him as a devout believer in Judaism for all his life, that Lévinas calls for an ethics of responsibility, “respecting the other, degrading the self,” and appeals to the self to devote benevolence, forgiveness, goodness, and concern to the other without pay. However, we still expect that such an ethics of religion can have greater practical humanizing influence and operable value to guide and prescribe people’s conduct. This is because in such pluralistic and nontotalized society, in point of ethical relationship, it would be difficult for the other to receive equal treatment, not to mention a relationship of reciprocal responsibility between the self and the other. Undoubtedly, Lévinas clearly knows the moral reality of this pluralistic society; in addition, he variously criticizes the state law for the lack of justness, and the self for irresponsibility. In this regard, we may say that Lévinas’s ethics is a moral ideal established for everyone. The moral reality is less than satisfactory; as to the mission of philosophy, it shoulders heavy responsibilities over a long period of time. In my opinion, this is probably the significance of Lévinas’s first philosophy to us. If each of us puts the other first, treats the other respectfully, and cares for the other to the utmost, this human world will definitely be in great harmony. In conclusion, we can easily find that the discussion on interpersonal relationship in Western philosophy has gone through a process of deepening and upgrading, from Sartre, who yells “hell is other people” (L’enfer c’est l’autre), Heidegger who makes an analysis of “Dasein’s being-with-others in the world,” and Foucault who comes to realize that “the concern for the self is the concern for other people,” to Lévinas who appeals to “the other first.” And Lévinasian ethics is fundamentally anti-phenomenological. FUDAN UNIVERSITY Shanghai, China
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This article is supported by the State Innovative Institute at Fudan University (SMITA O5FCZD0010) and the National Social Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 07BZX045).The article was translated by Wang Wei, Ph.D. candidate of Fudan University. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.
Emmanuel Lévinas, Hors sujet (Paris: Fata Morgana, 1987), 208. Ibid., 210. Ibid. Ibid., 213. Ibid., 215. Ibid., 139. Emmanuel Lévinas, Éthique et infini (Paris: Fayard, 1982), 38. Emmanuel Lévinas, Difficile liberté (Paris: Albin Michel, 1963), 407. Ibid., 408. Emmanuel Lévinas, “Entretien,” in Répondre d’autrui (Neuchâtel: Les Editions de la Baconnière, 1989), 9. Emmanuel Lévinas, Totalité et infini (Paris: La Haye, Nijhoff, 1971), 208. Ibid., 117. Jacques Derrida, L’écriture et la différence (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1967), 138. François Poirié, Emmanuel Lévinas: qui êtes-vous? (Lyon: La Manufacture, 1987), 21–22. Lévinas, Totalité et infini, 13. Ibid., 39. Poirié, Emmanuel Lévinas: qui êtes-vous?, 94. Lévinas, Totalité et infini, 26. In Totality and Infinity, Lévinas’s ethics is still expressed in the language of ontology, while his succeeding works cut themselves off from ontology, getting rid of “ontological egoism.” Poirié, Emmanuel Lévinas: qui êtes-vous?, 116. Ibid., 74. Lévinas, Totalité et infini, 14–15. Ibid., 340. Ibid., 334.
simon critchley
THE SPLIT SUBJECT We never know self-realization. We are two abysses—a well staring at the sky.1
Before turning more closely to my interpretation of Lévinas, let me quickly sketch the theoretical and sociopolitical framework that guides that interpretation and which is drawn from a recently completed book.2 On my view, philosophy begins in disappointment. That is, philosophy, modern post-Kantian philosophy, begins not in an experience of wonder (thaumazein) at what is, but from an experience of failure and lack. One senses that things are not simply wonderful. The two main forms of disappointment I analyze in my work are religious and political: Religious disappointment provokes the question of meaning (what is the meaning of life in the absence of a transcendent deity who would act as a guarantor of meaning?) and opens the problem of nihilism; political disappointment provokes the question of justice (how is justice possible in a violently unjust world?) and provokes the need for an ethics. It is in this connection and with the issues of religious and political disappointment in mind that I engage in a little Zeitdiagnose and try to paint a picture of the present age. I consider a couple of coherent, tempting, but in my view deeply misguided, diagnoses of our times, social pathologies if you prefer. I call them “active nihilism,” where I talk about those, like al-Qaida, who seek a violent destruction of the purportedly meaningless world of capitalism and liberal democracy; and “passive nihilism,” where I discuss forms of what Nietzsche calls “European Buddhism” or indeed “American Buddhism,” that is, forms of contemplative withdrawal where one faces the meaningless and violent chaos of the world with eyes wide shut. I reject both forms of nihilism, but think that each of them expresses a deep truth: namely, their identification of what I see as a motivational deficit at the heart of liberal democracy, a sort of drift, disbelief, and slackening that is both institutional and moral. In the drift of this deficit, we experience the moral claims of liberal democratic societies as externally SIMON CRITCHLEY, Professor and Chair, Department of Philosophy, New School for Social Research. Specialties: Continental philosophy, political theory and ethics. E-mail:
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compulsory, but not internally compelling. We approach ethical issues in a spirit of Diogenean cynicism rather than free commitment, where, as Yeats writes, the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity. The question, then, is how might we fill the best with passionate intensity? My larger claim that I deal with at length in the abovementioned book is that what is required to deal with this motivational deficit is a motivating, empowering ethics of commitment and political resistance. What we need to start thinking about in order to begin to make up that deficit is a motivating theory of the ethical subject. On my view, an ethical subject is the name for the way in which a self binds itself to some conception of the good, whatever that good might be, whether it is Kantian, Sadeian, or something in-between. At the core of ethical subjectivity is a theory of what I call ethical experience, which is based in two concepts: approval and demand. My basic claim is that ethical experience begins with the approval of a demand, a demand that demands approval. Ethical experience is virtuously circular. The nature of this demand varies in different thinkers: In Plato, it is the demand of the good beyond being; for Paul and Augustine it is the demand of the resurrected Christ; for Kant it is the demand of the moral law which is felt as the fact of reason; for Fichte the fact of reason becomes an act of the subject; for Rousseau it is the demand of the suffering human other; for Schopenhauer it is compassion for all creatures, and so on and so forth. In the longer version of this argument, I illustrate the motivational deficit in morality with an extended discussion of the relation of moral justification to motivation in Kant as his work constitutes a locus classicus for the problem I am trying to address: namely, how a self binds itself to whatever it determines as its good. Through an analysis of the concept of the fact of reason, I try to show the fragile necessity at the heart of Kant’s claim for the primacy of practical reason and how this claim is taken up by contemporary Kantian philosophers, like Habermas and Rawls. I conclude with some remarks about what I call the “autonomy orthodoxy” in postKantian philosophy and try to begin to question the sufficiency of autonomy in our ethical thinking. The wider theoretical task, then, is the following: The construction of a model of the ethical subject. In order to do this, I take three concepts from three thinkers and then raise a question that I will address briefly at the end of this talk: The problem of sublimation. From Alain Badiou, I take the idea of the subject committing itself in fidelity to the universality of a demand that opens in a singular situation but which exceeds that situation, what I call a “situated universality.” From Knud Ejler Løgstrup, I take the idea of what he calls “the ethical demand” and his emphasis on the radical, unfulfillable, and
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one-sided character of that demand and the asymmetry of the ethical relation that it establishes. From Emmanuel Lévinas, I will try and show how this moment of asymmetry in my relation to the infinite demand of the other’s face defines the ethical subject in terms of a split between itself and a exorbitant demand that it can never meet, the demand to be infinitely responsible. So, my normative claim, if you will, is that at the basis of any ethics should be a conception of ethical experience based on the exorbitant demand of infinite responsibility. Not only that, I will also recommend that this exorbitant demand of which I approve is that in relation to which the ethical subject should form itself. The subject shapes itself in relation to a demand that it can never meet, which divides and sunders the subject, the experience of what I call “hetero-affectivity,” as opposed to the “auto-affection” of the autonomy orthodoxy. Having sketched this larger framework, albeit too quickly and briefly, let me turn directly to Lévinas. For Lévinas, the core of ethical experience is, indeed, the demand of a Faktum, but it is not a Kantian fact of reason as much as what we might call “a fact of the other.” In Totality and Infinity, the name for this fact is the face of the other (le visage d’autrui). The ethical relation begins when I experience being placed in question by the face of the other, an experience that happens not only when I respond generously to what Lévinas, recalling the Hebrew Bible, calls “the widow, the orphan, the stranger,”3 but also when I pass them by on the street, silently wishing they were somehow invisible and wincing internally at my callousness. Lévinas’s difference with Kant is that ethical experience turns around the facticity of a demand that does not correspond to the subject’s autonomy, but which rather places that autonomy in question. Ethical experience is heteronomous, my autonomy is called into question by the fact of the other’s demand, by the appeal that comes from their face and lays me under an obligation that is not of my choosing. For Lévinas, there are two main tendencies in Western philosophy: autonomy and heteronomy. The former has usually been dominant, particularly in the modern period, and Lévinas sees his task as the attempt to breathe some life back into the latter. For a philosophy that pursues the project of autonomy, the highest value is that of the subject’s freedom and what must be eliminated, philosophically and socially, is that which stands in the way of freedom. The most extreme expression of this view would be a sort of comic-book or Fukuyama-esque version of Hegel which would see history as the progressive realization of freedom. Lévinas’s claim is that responsibility precedes freedom; that is, prior to the free activity of the subject bringing all of reality within its comprehensive epistemic grasp, there is the experience of a heteronomous demand that calls me into ques-
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tion and calls me to respond. Autonomy comes back into the picture for Lévinas at the level of another demand: namely, the demand for justice, the just society, and everything that he gathers under the heading of “the third party.” What must be acknowledged is the heteronomous constitution of autonomy, that the ethical demand is refractory to our cognitive powers and the other person can always resist whatever concept under which we may try and subsume them. In my view, the basic operation of Lévinas’s entire work is the experience of an exorbitant demand which heteronomously determines the ethical subject. This demand is the imperative “tu ne tueras point,” “you shall not kill,” which is expressed in the resistance of the other’s face.The demand provokes an act of approval on the part of the subject, the words “me voici,” “here I am,” the Hebrew hinneni of Abraham’s response to the demand of God in Genesis 22. Lévinas insists that the subject discovers itself as an object, in the accusative case as he puts it, as interlocuted by the demand of the other. But the Lévinasian subject is constituted through an act of approval to a demand to which it is fundamentally inadequate. I am not the equal of the demand that is made upon me. It is this fundamental inadequacy of approval to demand that explains why, for Lévinas, the relation to the other is assymetrical. That is, the subject relates itself to something that exceeds its relational capacity. This is what Lévinas paradoxically calls “le rapport sans rapport,”4 the relation without relation, which is arguably the central concept of Lévinas’s Totality and Infinity.Yet, how can there be a relation between beings that remain absolute within that relation? Logically speaking, this is a contradiction in terms, yet it is precisely such a relation that Lévinas wants to describe as ethical. This difficulty can be illuminated by considering the function of the concept of infinity in Lévinas’s work. From the late 1950s onward, he describes the ethical relation to the other in terms of infinity. What does this mean? Lévinas’s claim is very simple, but even quite sophisticated readers still get it muddled. The idea is that the ethical relation to the other has a formal resemblance to the relation, in Descartes’s Third Meditation, between the res cogitans and the infinity of God. What interests Lévinas in this moment of Descartes’s argument is that the human subject has an idea of infinity, and that this idea, by definition, is a thought that contains more than can be thought.As Lévinas puts it, in what is almost a mantra in his published work,“In thinking infinity the I from the first thinks more than it thinks.”5 It is this formal structure of a thought that thinks more than it can think, that has a surplus within itself, that intrigues Lévinas because it sketches the contours of a relation to something that is always in excess of whatever idea I may have of it, that always escapes me. The Cartesian picture of the relation of the res cogitans to God through
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the idea of the infinite provides Lévinas with a picture or formal model of a relation between two terms that is based on height, inequality, nonreciprocity, and asymmetry. As he writes, in a characteristic series of antitheses: The idea of the infinite consists precisely and paradoxically in thinking more than what is thought while nevertheless conserving it in its excessive relation to thought. The idea of the infinite consists in grasping the ungraspable while nevertheless guaranteeing its status as ungraspable.6
However, Lévinas is making no substantive claim at this point; he is not saying that I actually do possess the idea of the infinite in the way Descartes describes, nor is he claiming that the other is God, as some readers mistakenly continue to believe. As Hilary Putnam rightly points out, “It isn’t that Lévinas accepts Descartes’ argument, so interpreted. The significance is rather that Lévinas transforms the argument by substituting the Other for God.”7 As Lévinas is a phenomenologist, it becomes a question for him of trying to locate some concrete content for this formal structure. Lévinas’s major substantive claim, which resounds in different ways throughout his mature work, is that the ethical relation of the self to the other corresponds to this picture, concretely fulfilling this model. One might say that the ethical relation to the face of the other person is the social expression of this formal structure. Lévinas writes, “the idea of infinity is the social relationship,” and again, “the way in which the other presents himself, exceeding the idea of the other in me, we here name face.”8 Thus, the ethical relation to the other produces what Lévinas calls in a favorite formulation—rightly emphasized by Maurice Blanchot in his writings on Lévinas—“a curvature of intersubjective space.”9 When I am actually within the ethical relation, I experience the other as the high point of this curvature. As such, the relation can only be totalized by imagining myself occupying some God-like, third-person perspective outside the relation. From a Lévinasian point of view, this is the common shortcoming of various theories of intersubjectivity. For example, Hegel’s thesis is that subjectivity is constituted through an intersubjective dialectic, namely the life and death struggle of master and slave. For Husserl, my full constitution as an ego is dependant on a relation to the alter-ego, whereas for Heidegger Dasein is Mitsein, what it means to be a person is indistinguishable from my being with others. For each of “les trois H,” as they were called in France, the relation between self and other is a relation of equality, symmetry, and reciprocity. Lévinas’s polemical point is that the relation between myself and the other only appears as a relation of equality, symmetry, and reciprocity from a
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neutral, third-person perspective that stands outside that relation. When I am within the relation, then the other is not my equal and my responsibility toward them is infinite. It is such a nondialectical model of intersubjectivity that Lévinas has in mind, I think, with the notion of the “relation without relation.” The picture of ethical experience that I am trying to elicit can be explored by picking out one item in the philosophical vocabulary of Lévinas’s later work: trauma.10 What is trauma? Trauma has both a physiological and a psychological meaning, denoting a violence effected by an external agency, which can be a blow to the head as much as the shock of emotional bereavement. As such, a trauma is a heteronomous fact that comes from outside the self without warning, for example, a terrorist explosion. Whence arises the riddle of traumatic neurosis. Traumatic neurosis is the disorder that arises after the experience of a trauma, where its effect lives on at the heart of the subject. Like other neuroses, it is compulsive and repetitive: The original scene of the trauma is obsessively and unconsciously repeated, perhaps in nightmares or insomnia. It is the phenomenon of traumatic neurosis, in the form of shellshock or war-neurosis, that causes Freud such theoretical difficulties in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. This is for the simple reason that if there is a compulsion to repeat at work in traumatic neurosis that repeats the origin of trauma, then how can this be consistent with the thesis of Freud’s early work that dreams and other psychic phenomena are wish-fulfillments governed by the pleasure principle. It cannot, and it is on the basis of the clinical evidence of traumatic neurosis that Freud is led to introduce the repetition compulsion and to engage in the speculation that he calls “the death drive.”11 What does that have to do with Lévinas? In his later work, Lévinas constructs what he calls an “ethical language,” composed of several strange, wonderful, and hyberbolical terms: persecution, obsession, substitution, hostage, and trauma. Lévinas makes the extreme claim that my relation to the other is not some benign benevolence à la Hutcheson, compassionate care à la Rousseau, or respect for the other’s autonomy à la Kant, but is the obsessive experience of a responsibility that persecutes me with its sheer weight. I am the other’s hostage, taken by them and prepared to substitute myself for any suffering and humiliation that they may undergo. I am responsible for the persecution I undergo and even for my persecutor; a claim that, given the experience of Lévinas’s family and people during the Second World War, is nothing less than extraordinary. Trauma was not a theoretical issue for Lévinas, but a way of dealing with the memory of horror. In a number of texts from the late 1960s and 1970s, Lévinas describes the relation of
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infinite responsibility to the other as a trauma. In “God and Philosophy,” he writes, This trauma, which cannot be assumed, inflicted by the Infinite on presence, or this affecting of presence by the Infinite—this affectivity—takes shape as a subjection to the neighbour. It is thought thinking more than it thinks, desire, the reference to the neighbour, the responsibility for another.12
In short, the Lévinasian ethical subject is a traumatic neurotic. The ethical demand is a traumatic demand; it is something that comes from outside the subject, from a heteronomous source, but which leaves its imprint within the subject. At its heart, the ethical subject is marked by an experience of hetero-affectivity. In other words, the inside of my inside is somehow outside, the core of my subjectivity is exposed to otherness. I focus on the notion of trauma in order to bring out the links between Lévinas and the psychoanalytic dimensions of ethical experience, particularly when we think of Lacan. Although Lévinas was extremely hostile toward psychoanalysis and largely ignorant of it, I would like to redescribe Lévinas in psychoanalytic terms for at least two critical reasons: It is hoped that using Freudian categories to offer a reconstruction of Lévinas’s work as a theory of the subject minimizes some of the metaphysical residua and religious pietism present in Lévinas’s texts, but even more present in certain interpretations of those texts. For reasons that I would be happy to go into during discussion, I find the increasing hegemony of the religious reading of Lévinas, whether Judaic, Christian or otherwise, the most disturbing feature of the events of his centenary year. In my view, psychoanalysis provides a nontheological vocabulary for conceiving the affections of ethical subjectivity. Turning briefly to Lacan’s The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, it is important to recall that there are two main topics in Seminar VII: ethics and sublimation.13 Might one not wonder whether Lévinas’s ethics condemn us to a lifetime of trauma and lacerating guilt that cannot— and, moreover, should not—be worked through? Doesn’t Lévinas leave us in a situation of sheer ethical overload where I must be responsible even for my persecutor, and where the more that I am just the more I am guilty. If so, then such a position risks amounting to nothing less than a rather long philosophical suicide note or at the very least an invitation to some fairly brutal moral masochism.14 In my view, thinking of the work of Melanie Klein, the trauma of separation requires reparation, the ethical tear requires repair in a work of sublimation that would be a work of love.15 In other words, Lévinas risks producing an ethics without sublimation, which risks being disastrously self-destructive to the subject. The question is, and here we
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pass from ethics to aesthetics and overflow the limits of this article, what form of sublimation might be imagined here? In my view, and here I differ from Lacan for whom the model of sublimation is always conceived in relation to tragedy, it is a question of thinking Lévinas’s work in relation to a rather unusual conception of humour and the humorous self-division of the subject. To conclude, ethical experience in Lévinas is rooted in the claim that responsibility begins with a subject approving of a demand that it can never meet, a one-sided, radical, and unfulfillable demand in Løgstrup’s sense. Lévinas writes, “To be I signifies not being able to escape responsibility”; or again, “to be a ‘self’ is to be responsible before having done anything.”16 I, as it were, decide to be a subject that I know I cannot be. I give myself up to a demand that makes an imprint upon me without my ever being able to understand it. I am an existential exaggeration. In language closer to Lévinas, this is another way of thinking about what he means by the claim that ethics is not ontology. Arguably, the main thesis of Lévinas’s work is that the ethical relation to the other is not one of comprehension and cannot therefore be subsumed within Heideggerian Seinsverständnis, understanding of being. We can now see how this thesis looks from the perspective of ethical subjectivity: The relation to the other lives on as an imprint in the subject to which it responds but which it cannot comprehend. That is, there is something at the heart of me, that arguably makes me the “me” that I am, but which is quite opaque to me. This is moment of irreducible facticity at the heart of the subject, a facticity that cannot be mastered in the kairos of the moment of vision or the free movement of existential projection. In my view, and this is a somewhat heterodox claim, the key concept in Lévinas’s work is ethical subjectivity. The precondition for the ethical relation to the other is found in Lévinas’s picture of the ethical subject. It is because of a disposition toward alterity at the heart of the subject that relatedness to the other is possible. This is why I tend to privilege Lévinas’s later work, Otherwise than Being, over his earlier work, Totality and Infinity, for it is here that ethics is worked out as a theory of the subject, what he calls “the other within the same.” In terms of my overall normative argument, commitment or fidelity (Badiou) to the unfulfillable, one-sided, and radical demand that pledges me to the other (Løgstrup) can now be seen to be the structure of ethical subjectivity itself (Lévinas). The ethical subject is defined by the approval of a traumatic heteronomous demand at its heart. But, importantly, the subject is also divided by this demand; it is constitutively split between itself and a demand that it cannot meet, but which is that by virtue of which it
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becomes a subject. The ethical subject is a split subject and this is not tragic, it is comic. NEW SCHOOL FOR SOCIAL RESEARCH New York, New York
Endnotes 1. Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, ed. and trans. Richard Zenith (London: Penguin Books, 2001), 20. 2. Simon Critchley, Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance (London and New York: Verso, 2007). 3. Emmanuel Lévinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 212. 4. Ibid., 71. 5. Emmanuel Lévinas, “Philosophy and the Idea of Infinity,” in Collected Philosophical Papers (Dordrecht: Nijhoff, 1987), 54. 6. Emmanuel Lévinas, “Transcendence and Height,” in Emmanuel Lévinas: Basic Philosophical Writings, ed. Adriaan Peperzak, Simon Critchley, and Robert Bernasconi (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 19. 7. See Hilary Putnam,“Lévinas and Judaism,” in The Cambridge Companion to Lévinas, ed. Simon Critchley and Robert Bernasconi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 42. 8. Lévinas, Collected Philosophical Papers, 54; and Emmanuel Lévinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 50. 9. Lévinas, Totality and Infinity, 291. 10. Emmanuel Lévinas, Otherwise than Being, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Dordrecht: Kulwer, 1974), 92. 11. Freud, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” in Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis (London: Penguin, 1984), 275–338. 12. Lévinas, Basic Philosophical Writings, 142. 13. Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, trans. D. Porter (London: Routledge, 1992). 14. Judith Butler has recently suggested this criticism in a fascinating reading of Lévinas in Judith Butler, Precarious Life (London and New York: Verso, 2004), 140. 15. This criticism was suggested to me in discussion with Axel Honneth. 16. Lévinas, Basic Philosophical Writings, 17, 94.
wang liping
TRANSCENDENCE OR IMMANENCE? LÉVINAS, BERGSON, AND CHINESE THOUGHT Giorgio Agamben has recently identified two different orientations in contemporary French philosophy, both of which pass through Heidegger: One toward Transcendence, which includes Lévinas and Derrida and goes back through Husserl to Kant; the other toward Immanence, which includes Foucault and Deleuze and goes back through Nietzsche to Spinoza.1 We agree that, in the twentieth century, French philosophers are greatly affected by Germanic philosophers, such as Heidegger, Husserl, and so on. But we must indicate that there are also some essentially French sources for contemporary French philosophy. We can say that Lévinas is profoundly influenced by Husserl and Heidegger, but we should admit that he has also inherited many things from French thought, especially from Bergson. We know that Bergson insists on Immanence and Lévinas on Transcendence. They look so different. But in this article, in addition to trying to analyze the reasons for their difference in theory, I will try to explore how they have reached the same point in the dimension of ethics through their two different routes.
I. Being and Otherwise than Being: Around NÉANT or Death Although deeply influenced by Heidegger, Lévinas is also profoundly enlightened by Bergson’s conception of Duration (or Time) for his central conception of “otherwise than being” that indicates his break with all kinds of ontology in history. Lévinas says: “It is Bergson who has taught us the spirit of newness (le neuf), the Being has broken through the phenomena and then reached to the ‘otherwise than being.’”2 He thinks that the conception of being (être, durée, temps) in Bergson is totally new and completely different from the conception of being of the traditional ontology. Duration is not anything that is limited only in the dimension of the present, or just according to phenomena and representation to define time or the being of all WANG LIPING, Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy, Zhejiang University. Specialties: French philosophy, Deleuze, Bergson. E-mail:
[email protected] Lévinas: Chinese and Western Perspectives Editor by Nicholas Bunnin, Dachun Yang, and Linyu Gu © 2008 Journal of Chinese Philosophy. ISBN: 978-1-405-19545-4
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things in the world. Duration does not belong to a traditional conception of “the metaphysics of presence.” It is always changing, becoming, and creating. There is always something absolutely new and unpredictable, which could not be included in the dimension of the present. According to Lévinas, the present is the core of traditional ontology. It devours everything: The past is the present passed, and the future is the present in coming; consequently, everything in the universe belongs to only one Being (in presence), which is in fact just an eternal dead presence or a dead concept. In Bergson’s words, it is “l’éternité de mort” (the dead eternity).3 This Being swallows everything, and nothing can go beyond it. At this point, for Lévinas, Bergson’s duration has already touched something “otherwise than being.” We know that both Bergson and Lévinas are against traditional ontology, but for Bergson, philosophy is still a kind of ontology and also a kind of thought of Immanence; in contrast, Lévinas has completely abandoned ontology, because he thinks that ontology could not exhaust the meaning of “thinking” (la pensée).4 For him, there is always something otherwise than Being, such as the il y a, the other, the face, death, infinity, and so on, which could never be immanent and is transcendent. By exploring their personal explanations concerning the conception of Nothing (Néant, Bergson) or Death (Lévinas), we will try to show why Bergson insists on Immanence while Lévinas goes to Transcendence. Bergson’s philosophy, we claim, is based on his critiques of the conception of nothing, and this is, in theory and in logic, the foundation of his whole thinking. This point has been long neglected by most of Bergson’s readers. Bergson says that Being and Nothing have always been regarded as a couple of concepts that have not been discussed profoundly and correctly by philosophers. We think that Nothing is always prior to Being, especially in the example of God, who creates the world from the absolute nothing (ex nihilo). “Nothing was the first thing, and Being has come as something added after. If something has always existed, it requires that Nothing had already served it as it’s substratum or receptacle. Therefore, Nothing is always prior to Being.”5 With that, Bergson has asked a very important question:Why is there the Principe of the world rather than nothing?6, which is similar to Heidegger’s famous question at the beginning of An Introduction to Metaphysics, “Why are there the essents (existents), ‘why is there anything at all, rather than nothing?’ That is the question. . . . Obviously this is the first of all questions.”7 But is this question, indeed, the first of all questions? Further, is this also the first question for Bergson and Lévinas? In fact, Lévinas, like Bergson, faces the question: What is this Nothing? Is Nothing possible or not? The answers are negative. Both of them ignored them, but in different
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ways. We will see that their different answers will guide them to their own philosophy, with one going to Immanence and the other to Transcendence. For Bergson, the question of “Why is there anything rather than nothing?” needs to be examined carefully, because “all the mystery” of the whole tradition of metaphysics or ontology “comes from there,” and “it is necessary that this mystery should be cleared up.”8 We need to break up one illusion, which regards “Nothing and Being” as “a couple of concepts” essentially connected by the nature of their logic, so that we can return to real Being, meaning the immediate data (les données immédiates) or true reality. For the disdain of metaphysics for all reality that endures comes precisely from this, that it reaches being only by passing through “not-being” (le néant), and that an existence which endures seems to it not strong enough to conquer nonexistence and itself posit itself. It is for this reason especially that it is inclined to endow true being with a logical, and not a psychological nor a physical existence.9 Logical existence, in Bergson’s eyes, which is just out of time and not the immediate data, belongs to something unreal. That is why the old metaphysics or ontology could not reach to the true reality of Being. For Bergson, “Why is there anything rather than nothing?” is a mistaken question, because there is no Nothing— Nothing is just a false conception. Why? At first, Bergson insists that, from the beginning to the end of his works, we must return to the immediate data, that is to say, we need to “return to fact” (retour aux faits), which is a claim that is more original than Husserl’s “return to things themselves” (retour aux choses mêmes). We need to touch reality im-mediately by our intuition. Nothing is an impossibility that could not be affirmed by experience in any condition, including our death that means totally nothing to our life. This point apparently inspired Lévinas when he was giving his seminar “Death and Time” at the Sorbonne. For Bergson, almost all Nothing comes from our negation of something that is absent in our eyes or in our desire. In truth is that in a place where something is absented, there must be something other to replace it. “For a mind which should follow purely and simply the thread of experience, there would be no void, no nothing. . . . Such a mind would see facts succeed to facts, states succeed to states and things succeed to things.”10 So the world is absolutely full (not as a huge space full of things, but as a whole full of creating movement). Being exists in itself and does not come after Nothing. Being is “being in itself” and does not need Nothing as its base. This means that Being founds and confirms itself by itself. In Bergson’s cosmology, because there is no nothing, his universe has no cranny filled by void; everything belongs to a huge continuity,
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and each one is different from the others in quality. We can get the point that for Bergson the first important thing in philosophy is no longer “Being and Nothing,” but is rather “Whole and Difference.” Certainly, we need to notice that this Whole is not the same as Totality. Totality includes everything and nothing beyond, meaning that the universe has already stopped creating and has already finished itself, so that, like the world of the dead moon, nothing will be new and everything is already there. In contrast, the Whole is something inseparable and continuous that could never be finished. Bergson’s universe is a great duration (as a whole), which is always creating and has no ending. This gives Being a character of time, that is to say, temporality. For Bergson, the huge Being as duration is not only something appearing in presence, but also something virtual. The past has already passed, but has not disappeared forever. It survives as a kind of virtual memory and exists somewhere unknown, but it is still something real. The future has not yet come but, like the past, it is not a nought. Past, present, and future are not three terms of time, but continuous elements of one becoming and creating whole that are prolonged infinitely until they are all over the universe. We can give this whole universe the name of “Being,” which is a continuity of multiplicity in quality and which signifies a kind of real difference. For Bergson, being = duration = time = difference, but here the equal sign does not mean completely equality, but rather a kind of coincidence. This is the world of “immediate data” or the world of fact (le monde du fait) that Bergson tries to regain. The theme of Bergson’s ontology is not “Being and Nothing,” but “whole and difference.” For him, being never means things in the dimension of presence. Such things would be at present and in fact have no change and no future and would always be eternal or dead. There is always something beyond presence. On this point, Lévinas has never stopped praising Bergson. He thinks that, for the first time in the history of occidental ideas, Bergson contemplates time beyond eternity.11 His being is creative and would never be finished. We can say that Bergson has rebuilt the ontology that concerns real time, the ontology that could never be the metaphysics of presence, which is founded according to the presence of eternity. For him, the first important thing is “whole and difference.” There is no void or nought, and each thing must be immanent in the others (as each note is immanent in the others in a piece of continuous music). Things not only differ from each other in quality, but also are always part of the same continuity, and nothing will transcend the world. The world is an immanent world. This is why Bergson insists on Immanence. Lévinas, unlike Bergson, who has modified ontology, is more radical: He has abandoned ontology. The criticism of nothing and the
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viewpoint of duration (or Being) in Bergson impressed and affected the young Lévinas very much. Like his two masters, Bergson in 1907 and Heidegger in 1935, Lévinas was interested in what they took to be the first of all questions: “Why is there anything at all, rather than nothing?” In 1951, Lévinas published an article “Is Ontology Fundamental?” which asked whether the fundamental or first question in philosophy is “Why is there anything rather than nothing?” He answered that “The question . . . is not ultimate and also is not the most important.”12 More clearly, in his famous conference text in 1982, “Éthique Comme Philosophie Première,” he said: “The question of philosophy is not ‘why is there Being rather than Nothing,’ but how Being could justify itself.”13 Further, ontology as first philosophy could not exhaust the possibilities of the significance of thinking.14 For Lévinas, aside from these so-called “beings,” there are other things that he called “otherwise than being.” He held that these are much more important and offers death as a typical example. “Nothing has defied occidental thought.”15 In fact, Lévinas prefers to talk about death rather than Nothing and in his discussion substituted death for Nothing. “Death is something the most unknowable in all unknowable things.”16 Death is not Nothing or nought.“Death means disappearance for the others. But in itself, it is a dilemma between being and non-being.”17 It is “something other than Being and Nothing, but still provokes fear (l’effroi).”18 On the one hand, Lévinas has accepted Bergson’s idea of death, which holds that death is absolutely not Nothing; on the other hand, he has absorbed Heidegger’s viewpoint of death. Lévinas believes not only that death is unknowable, but also that it makes people fear. This fear concerns something essential: Death could never be known and experienced; it is just one possibility, always as “il y a,” but one that could never be actualized. It is a mystery, an infinity, and is something transcendent. Heidegger thinks that death is “an ultimate possibility,” “a possibility of impossibility,” which means that death (Nothing) is possible and there must exist “Nothing” in logic and in fact. Unlike Heidegger, Lévinas holds that death is more like “an impossibility of possibility”19 and emphasizes the “impossibility” of death. Lévinas cares not about Nothing, but about death. Death could never be realized and experienced when we are alive. In addition to Heidegger and Bergson, we should notice that Blanchot affected Lévinas very deeply about death.As with Blanchot, in the anxiety of death, Nothing is impossible.20 Death excludes Nothing; the pair “life and death” could not be reduced to “to be or not to be.” Death is some sort of il y a, which is no longer either being (être) or a kind of something (un quelque chose). Rather, “it is an event that is neither Being nor Nothing (c’est un événement qui n’est ni être ni néant).”21
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We can see that death for Lévinas differs not only from Bergson but also from Heidegger. For Bergson, death is just some sort of “degradation of energy.”22 Death is impossible and is a synonym of corruption, growing old, and the degradation of life. The death of someone or something is not the end of its existence, but is merely a metamorphosing, transmitting, or changing into some other things. The human mind or the élan vital of the world is immortal, that is, Bergson’s famous l’éternité vivante. In contrast, Heidegger admits death, and Dasein’s Being is “Being-toward-death.” Lévinas locates himself between the two masters by neither denying death nor admitting its existence in our experience. It is a mystery, absolutely “otherwise than being,” which not only differs from things in reality or in presence, but also is totally unreachable. Because there is “no Nothing,” the really important matter is not “Being and Nothing,” but is rather, as for Bergson, the legitimacy of Being, a question that concerns the problem of ethics. For Bergson, Nothing is banished, making all beings exist independently in themselves. Everything owns its legitimacy, which does not need to be supported by anything else— especially by Nothing. Further, everything belongs to a huge continuity, which is an immanent multiplicity. All of this leads Bergson to a philosophy of immanence. For Lévinas, ontology or the metaphysics of presence is abandoned, and he obtains the conception of altérité by affirming death, God, and the Other. These unknowable things, which are full of the meaning of ethics, lead Lévinas, contrary to Bergson, to a philosophy of Transcendence. II. Immanence and Transcendence: With the Ruin of the Representation In spite of their radical differences, Lévinas and Bergson still share the same ambition against traditional metaphysics, especially the concept of representation, and this leads them both to go beyond the old ontology. In 1901, as the first twentieth-century French philosopher to criticize the concept of representation, Bergson said that the etymology of representation showed that representation could never be the first thing in our mind. Because re-presenting is a double action, we should not use re-presentation to express something like pure affection in our mind, but should substitute presentation for re-presentation.23 Bergson wants to affirm something that has never figured properly in traditional epistemology: immediate data (les données immédiates). Immediate data, like pure affection, are not the reflected image of anything outside our mind that is filtered by a subject called I (le Je).
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For Bergson, there is no place for the old relation of subject–object. The whole world itself is a kind of neutral presentation, which could be regarded as a transcendental field without subject (champ transcendental sans sujet).24 Even perception, in Matière et Mémoire, is independent of the subject, because pure perception is, in some degree, not in our eyes, but “part of things.”25 Bergson tries to return to fact, which is really direct and changing, that is to say, duration. Duration, as the immediately given, is always something more than “being” in present, that is, in eternity. As a continuity of multiplicity and becoming (devenir), it is real being/time in Bergson. According to Lévinas, Bergson, for the first time in the history of philosophy, tries to think le temps (time) not by “the moving image of the immovable eternity” (l’image mobile de l’éternité immobile) or the consummate One (l’Un consommé).26 The One is Present, and Past and Future are representations of the One (present): Past is the second-time (re-) of present; Future will be the second-time (re-) of present. Lévinas says that representation is totally a kind of repetition of presence, which could never seize the re-turned (le ré-venu) or the be-coming (l’à-venir).27 For Bergson, the whole world is an original, infinite, neutral, and transcendental field (without subject or master), which is creating and becoming forever. And its moments are completely different in quality and are interior to each other. In a word, it is a world of absolute difference. Because there is no Nothing, and everything belongs to the One-whole-world, nothing is possible to transcend this world. This is a world of absolute immanence, which is described perfectly by Deleuze: “Absolute immanence is in itself: it is not in something, not to something; it does not depend on an object and does not belong to a subject.”28 In one word: “A LIFE, and nothing else.”29 Lévinas was inspired very strongly by Bergson’s Duration. Like Bergson, he drastically criticized the concept of representation. It is representation that helps the Idea, the I or the One to devour everything. It is a typical old mistaken formula of the theory of knowledge to assimilate all Other to the Same (Assimiler tout Autre à Même). Lévinas says: Occidental philosophy has been most often an ontology: a reduction of the Other to the Same, by the mediation of a middle and neutral term which assures the intelligence of being. This primacy of the Same was the lesson of Socrates.30
This famous lesson means that ignorance is the eternal shame of the human, so to gain knowledge must become the essential obligation of the (the occidental) human to recover their glory (a kind of “will to knowledge”). This is no doubt a metaphysics of violence for Lévinas. Because
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wang liping . . . knowledge is a relation between the Same and the Other where the Other is reduced to the Same and loses its strangeness, where the thought relates to the other but where the other is not any longer other because there it is already own and mine . . . knowledge is immanent.31
Knowledge generally comes from “seeing,” which is the necessary method to re-present the object, and presence occupies the central place in the knowledge-movement. “It is also a temporal mode.”32 Knowledge is the dimension of the present of time, in other words, the eternal presence or present. The demarches of knowledge reestablish presence in the eternity of an ideal presence. Reminiscence [past] and imagination [future] assure the synchrony of the ideal presence to comprehension, and maintain . . . those already lost or those be-coming together. It is maybe this adequation between knowledge and Being which makes us say that we can only learn what we have already known, and there is absolutely no newness, no other things, and no stranger . . . the circle of the Same encircle that of the Other.33
This is why Lévinas admires Bergson’s duration so much, but criticizes Husserl. Husserl’s analysis of temporality still talked in term of presence and simultaneity: of presents retained or anticipated.34 This is the secret of traditional theories of knowledge (or ontology): The formula of presence–representation or subject–object, which means that the Same devours the Other, or Thinking subordinates to the subject–object relation. In his famous article “The Ruin of the Representation” (1959), Lévinas writes: To end the coexistence of the thought and the relation of “subject– object,” it is to let us glimpse a relation with the other (l’autre) which will neither be an intolerable limitation of thinking, nor a simple absorption of this other into an I (un moi), in the form of contained (sous forme de contenu).35
He also insists that real phenomenology connects to an original experience, not to the fruit of experience.36 This original experience is for Lévinas the experience of the Other, the real immediate presentation (which means “to be given originally”), which is anonymous, independent, and transcendent. “The immediacy, it is the face to face.”37 Faceto-face is a kind of original experience. We always face something strange or independent that cannot be assimilated to a subject or a master. This is the first important thing. Il y a, death, God, and the other are all mysteries and otherwise than being. No more in representation, and so no more in subject. “It seems to me that transcendence is the point of departure of our concrete relations with Others (Autrui), all the rest is grafted. That is why the transcendent is the first
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notion to me.”38 “If transcendence has a sense, it can only signify the fact . . . to pass to the other of Being (passer à l’autre de l’être).”39 “Pass to the other of Being, to otherwise than being. Not to be in other way, but otherwise than being (non pas être autrement, mais autrement qu’être).”40 There is always something beyond Being that could never be represented by the subject or I.
III. Immanent Transcendence: The Case of Chinese Thought “Why is there anything rather than nothing?” is certainly an occidental question, but it is perhaps the best question that we can use to assess Chinese philosophy and to understand immediately why, contrary to the view of David L. Hall and Roger T. Ames,41 one of its radical characteristics is Immanent Transcendence. Before explaining my argument, I shall briefly present their main point. In their extremely influential books Thinking through Confucius,42 and especially Thinking from the Han, they present the challenging claim that Western notions of truth and transcendence cannot be used to reconstruct ancient Chinese philosophy because in this philosophy strict transcendence is absent. They hold that the misapplication of these concepts will distort the real character of Chinese philosophy and lead to an underestimation of its contribution to the culture of the world. But strangely, most distinguished contemporary Chinese scholars insist that Immanent Transcendence is a typical characteristic of Chinese thought. No doubt, these arguments of Hall and Ames are to some degree important and inspiring. Their deep analysis reveals many new dimensions and their endeavor to protect the purity of Chinese thought and culture is absolutely necessary today. But we must still ask whether it is true that we cannot use the Western notions ) and Immanence (nei zai of Transcendence (chao yue xing ) to describe or reconstruct ancient Chinese thought. If we xing can use these notions, we must know their different proper meanings in two very different traditions and contexts. We especially must understand the logical basis of Transcendence and Immanence in traditional Chinese thought and their contemporary meaning in Chinese philosophy. As Li Minghui said, the essential division in the controversy between Hall and Ames and Chinese scholars is a difference of categories.43 Transcendence in Hall and Ames is too narrow: Strict transcendence may be understood as follows: A principle, A, is transcendent with respect to B, which it serves as principle if the meaning or import of B cannot be fully analyzed and explained without recourse to A, but the reverse is not true.44 Transcendence
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(pair-bound with Immanence) is typically used in the theological tradition of Judaism and Christianity to describe God, who created the world from absolutely nothing (creatio ex nihilo) and who absolutely transcends the world.45 Here we do not want to entangle the notion of Transcendence (and its companion notion of Immanence) with other cases such as those of Platonic Forms or the Aristotelian unmoved mover. In contrast to these, creation ex nihilo by God is closely connected with the question “Why is there anything rather than nothing?” and gives us the most powerful method to judge what is transcendent or immanent. God created the world from nothing implies that God is Transcendent and absolutely separate from the world. God’s creation of the world from nothing is necessary for the success of this account, because without absolute Nothingness, Void, or empty Distance, God could not be separated from the world and would have to be immanent within it. This would amount to Spinoza’s Pantheism, with Immanence as its essential character. We can now use the same question “Why is there anything rather than nothing?” to test Chinese thought. In doing so, we can perhaps get some very important and interesting results that seem to be very similar to those of Hall and Ames, but in fact are very different. First, from the discussion of Wu (nothingness) in Chinese philosophy,46 we see that, in general, Chinese philosophy involves Immanence, an important conclusion that seems to support Hall and Ames. According to the research of distinguished Peking University scholar Pang Pu, Wu has three main senses in ancient China:47 A. Wang (nonbeing, the indeterminate, the (loss, absence, death); B. Wu invisible or figureless substance, virtual Principle or Being); C. Wu (nothingness). The first Wu, as loss, absence, or death, is similar to Bergson’s nothing: something existing that has become lost, absent, or dead, with the idea of nothing coming from our psychological or intellectual judgment. The second, more important, Wu is that of (the determiDaoism. Laozi said: “All the things arise from You nate, being), and You arises from Wu (the indeterminate, nonbeing.”48 Here Wu is not nothingness, but on the contrary is transcendental being, in fact, Dao (way or way-making) itself.“Dao engenders one. One engenders two. Two engenders three. And three engenders the myriad things.”49 Because Dao engenders the myriad things, and “all the things arise from You,” so we can say that Dao = You. Because “You arises from Wu,” we get the strange result that Dao = You = Wu, that is, Way = being = nonbeing. This puzzling result is reasonable because as figureless, invisible, and nonspatial or nondimensional being, Dao cannot be directly present and is therefore a kind of Wu (nonbeing). Ontologically, Dao is not something that is present.
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All being originated from non-being. The time before physical forms and names appeared was the beginning of the myriad things. After forms and names appear, Dao (the Way) develops them, nourishes them, and place them in peace and order; that is, becomes their Mother. This means that Dao produces and completes things with formless and nameless (Wang Bi, Laozi zhu).50
Dao as nonbeing contains infinite vital force, and when it descends, it engenders the myriad things. This image is very similar to that of Bergson’s élan vital. The third Wu is nearest to the Western conception of nothingness, but when we compare it with the nothingness in God’s creation, we find that Wu as nothingness was denied and refused immediately in Chinese thought. Wu as nothingness is meaningless, and there is no place for it in a Chinese ontology of events or becoming. Since Wu is nothing, it cannot produce You (being). Before You (being) itself is produced, it cannot produce other beings. Then by whom are things produced? They spontaneously produce other beings. That is all (Guo Xiang, Zhuangzi zhu).51
You (being) is “self-existent,” “because it is so by itself, we call it natural. Everything is what it is by nature, not through taking any action.”52 Even though there is an idea of “nothing” that is similar to Western nothingness in Chinese philosophy, this nothing cannot be the absolute nothingness of the Creation of the world ex nihilo by God; on the contrary, it is regarded as a kind of nonsense. The world in Chinese thought is You (being) transcendentally and naturally. It is continuity and creates itself by itself permanently. Any void or vacuity is impossible, and as a result there is not anything that could be separated from the whole being. On this conception, the world is immanent and an infinite becoming, but we must examine whether this conclusion proves that Chinese thought, with this account of Immanence, cannot be reconstructed by Transcendence. Robert C. Neville noticed that “. . . transcendent elements are pervasive in the Confucian tradition.”53 In fact, these transcendent elements are not confined to Confucianism, but can be found in the whole tradition of Chinese thought. Contemporary Chinese scholars, including the most famous philosophers, such as Mou Zongsan, Tang Junyi, Tu Weiming, Cheng Chung-ying, and Yu Yingshi, agree that there is Transcendence (chao yue xing) in Chinese thought. Transcendence, which literally means “goes beyond,” is possible for any limited domain. Neville provides a more reasonable definition: Transcendence is that to which reference can be made, in any sense of reference, only by denying that the referent lies within the
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In Chinese thought, regarding both the world and the person, there are elements of Transcendence. For the world, above the myriad or tian dao things, there is something higher named tian (heaven or the way of heaven). Laozi said: [T]here was something undifferentiated and yet complete, which existed before heaven and earth, soundless and formless, it depends on nothing and does not change. . . . I do not know its name, I call it Dao.55
The Book of Change says: “What exists before physical form [and is therefore without it] is called Dao (the Way). What exists after physical form [and is therefore with it] is called a concrete thing.”56 Different philosophers have their own explanations for Dao, but all agree that Dao is a kind of universal Principle or law that is transcendent to concrete things and that dominates the becoming and changing of the myriad things. For the individual or person, Transcendence is change or growth that goes beyond the individual’s limits as a moral person to the realm of extreme Good or ren (benevolence, goodness, humanity, or love). This is not only the center and highest spiritual sphere of Confucianism, but also the center of Chinese philosophy. The Dao of heaven transcends the myriad things, but is still immanent in the world; human nature is transcendent, but is also immanent in our heart-minds. In fact, these two transcendences could coincide through the basic principle in Chinese thought of tian ren he yi (the continuity or interrelation between Tian and human beings). The Book of Change said: The character of the great man is identical with that of Heaven and Earth; his brilliance is identical with that of the sun and moon; his order is identical with that of the four seasons, and his good and evil fortunes are identical with those of spiritual beings.57
Mencius said: “He who exerts his mind to the utmost knows his nature. He also knows his nature knows Heaven. To preserve one’s mind and to nourish one’s nature is the way to serve Heaven (Meng ).”58 The Book of the Mean said: Zi, Jin Xin Shang “What Heaven (Tian) (Nature) imparts to man is called human nature. To follow our nature is called the Way (Dao).”59 If human nature is identical with Heaven and also embodies Heaven, we could obtain a kind of Transcendence that starts from one’s social life and proceeds to the depths of one’s self and then goes beyond the boundary of an individual to be connected with tian dao as the transcendent source of Heaven. In the opposite direction, we
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could say that tian dao descends to the inner-mind of human beings to become human nature that is immanent in human beings. In short, because Chinese thought completely rejects Wu as nothingness, the world could only be a continuity of Immanence and nothing could go beyond it. Nevertheless, Immanence in Chinese thought never excludes Transcendence, and this thought is indeed characterized by what we call Immanent Transcendence.
IV. Conclusion: The Meaning of All Existents What is the essential meaning of Immanence for Bergson? What is the essential meaning of Transcendence in Lévinas? And what is the essential meaning of Immanent Transcendence in Chinese thought? For Bergson, the essential meaning of Immanence is Difference. The world is a huge Being. It includes all kinds of beings or individuals that are different from each other in quality and inseparable. Everything has its own qualities and its own right to exist in itself. Every moment is unique and could never be assimilated into others. Difference obtains its own original meaning in the sense of ontology. Every existent is absolutely founded by itself and does not need to depend on others. They are not decided or controlled by anyone else higher than themselves. Immanence implies an original ethical meaning: All existents have their own original or legal droits (rights), in the sense of ontology, to flourish or develop themselves; all beings are selffounded and legal because of themselves. At the same time, God is just super-love or Duration itself, which penetrates the whole universe. God is immanent in the world, and everyone can love his neighbor by loving God. For Lévinas, Transcendence means another kind of original ethics: first philosophy. We must notice that Lévinas has criticized the traditional conception of Transcendence. For Lévinas, Transcendence and the Transcendent do not mean anything beyond the world as a final reason or superior power. Nor is Transcendence the transcendence of intentionality in Husserl, which is still immanence.60 Like Death, which could not be known, Transcendence means “nonsynthesizable” (le non-synthétisable) and is an original “relation” of face to face with the others. It is impossible for one to assimilate the other, not only between an individual and God, but also between faces (les visages) because the others are nonsynthesizable. And face to (a strange) face, I have an absolute obligation: “Don’t kill!” This original relation is a kind of absolute command, that is, an absolute refusal or distance that could never be closed or eliminated. It gives me an order that I must unconditionally obey. This absolute refusal creates a tension that
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promises a kind of “existential distance.” It is because of this distance that every person obtains his own original meaning, value, and legitimacy. In society, everybody, every face, is transcendent to the others, just as God is to us. This guarantees that all existents justify themselves and live better in the world. We have found that the two French philosophers, Bergson and Lévinas, even if they have chosen very different ways, have finally encountered each other in the realm of ethics for the good fortune of human being. Transcendence or Immanence? Their difference is not so important as the real importance of what they mean for human life. Finally, what conclusions can we anticipate for a completely different tradition that comes from ancient China and is characterized by Immanent Transcendence? As everybody knows, the main character of Confucianism is its ethical orientation, and now we can conclude that it is on the basis of immanent transcendence that Chinese ethics becomes possible. On the one hand, Transcendence provides a universal basis that guarantees the principles of Chinese ethics, especially the highest principle ren. Like the other principles, ren obtains its universality through being immanent to individuals; on the other hand, Immanence guarantees that tian dao can descend and enter into every heart-and-mind and become their great-inner-sublime principle. Transcendence or Immanence? The two are no longer a couple of enemies, but are rather married to each other as a single synthetic conception of harmony. The great idea of ren, their biggest and most valuable fruit, has the following ethical meanings: 1. Ren as the way of heaven could be internalized in everyone as their inner moral principle, so that they could become a great man by cultivating their personality. Everyone is equal and independent by himself, thus making ethical responsibility possible. 2. Ren as benevolence, goodness, humanity, or love is love between “you-and-me.” In Chinese ren literally means “two persons,” and Confucius said that ren means “to love men.”61 There are similar relations of loving one another between every two persons “youand-me.” 3. Ren as the relation between human being and nature is also a kind of love between “you-and-me,” because tian ren he yi demands that we protect nature. In fact, protecting nature is at the same time protecting ourselves. In short, even though the radical differences, Immanence (Bergson), Transcendence (Lévinas), and Immanent Transcendence (Chinese thought), are all encountered in the realm of ethics, they can
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be considered to be different approaches to pursuing the meaning of all existents and the good fortune of human being. ZHEJIANG UNIVERSITY Hangzhou, China
Endnotes This project was supported by the China National Social Science Research Foundation (Code: 07CZX013). 1. Cf. Daniel W. Smith, “Deleuze and Derrida, Immanence and Transcendence: Two Directions in Recent French Thought,” in Between Deleuze and Derrida, ed. Paul Patton and John Protevi (London: Continuum, 2003), 46. 2. Emmanuel Lévinas, Éthique et infini (Paris: Librairie Arthème Fayard et RadioFrance, 1982), 18. 3. Henri Bergson, La pensée et le mouvant, in Œuvres (Paris: PUF, 1959), 1419. 4. Emmanuel Lévinas, Éthique comme philosophie première, préfacé par Jacques Rolland (Paris: Rivage Poche, Éditions Payot et Rivage, 1998), 77. 5. Henri Bergson, L’évolution créatrice, in Œuvres (Paris: PUF, 1959), 728. 6. Ibid. 7. Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Ralph Manheim (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), 1. 8. Bergson, L’évolution créatrice, 728. 9. Ibid., 729. 10. Ibid., 743. 11. Cf. Emmanuel Lévinas, Altérité et transcendance (Saint-Clément-la-Rivière: Fata Morgana, 1995), 36. 12. Emmanuel Lévinas, “Le philosophe et la mort,” in Altérité et transcendance (SaintClément-la-Rivière: Fata Morgana, 1995), 164. 13. Lévinas, Éthique comme philosophie première, 109. 14. Ibid., 77. 15. Emmanuel Lévinas, Dieu, la mort et letemps (Paris: Grasset, 1993), 82. 16. Lévinas, “Le philosophe et la mort,” 159. 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid., 160. 19. Ibid., 161. 20. Ibid., 162. 21. Lévinas, Éthique et infini, 40. 22. Lévinas, Dieu, la mort et letemps, 80. 23. Henri Bergson, Mélanges (Paris: PUF, 1972), 506. 24. Cf. Victor Goldschmidt, “Cour sur le premier chapitre de Matière et mémoire (1960),” in Annales bergsoniennes I (Paris: PUF, 2002), 69–128. 25. Henri Bergson, Matière et mémoire, in Œuvres (Paris: PUF, 1959), 212. 26. Emmanuel Lévinas, “De l’un à l’autre: transcendance et temps,” in Cahier de l’Herne “Emmanuel Lévinas” (Paris: Éditions de l’Herne, 1991), 34. 27. Ibid. 28. Gilles Deleuze, “L’immanence: Une vie . . . ,” in Deux régimes de fous, textes et entretiens 1975–1995 (Paris: Minuit, 2003), 360. 29. Ibid. 30. Emmanuel Lévinas, Totalité et infini, essai sur l’extériorité (La Haye: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971), 33–34. 31. Emmanuel Lévinas, Transcendance et intelligibilité, suivi d’un entretien (Genève: Labor et Fides, 1984), 12–13. 32. Ibid.13.
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33. Ibid. 34. Lévinas, “De l’un à l’autre,” 33. 35. Emmanuel Lévinas, En découvrant L’existence avec Husserl et Heidegger (Paris: Vrin, 2001), 188. 36. Ibid., 185. 37. Lévinas, Totalité et infini, essai sur l’extériorité, 44. 38. Emmanuel Lévinas, “Transcendance et hauteur,” in Cahier de l’Herne “Emmanuel Lévinas” (Paris: Éditions de l’Herne, 1991), 68–69. 39. Emmanuel Lévinas, Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974), 13. 40. Ibid. 41. Cf. David L. Hall and Roger T. Ames, Thinking from Han (Albany: State University of New York, 1998), chap. 9. 42. David L. Hall and Roger T. Ames, Thinking through Confucius (Albany: State University of New York, 1987). 43. Cf. Li Minghui, The Self-Transformation of Contemporary Neo-Confucianism (Beijing: The Social Science Press of China, 2001), 129. 44. Hall and Ames, Thinking through Confucius, 13. 45. As Robert C. Neville notes: “For many Monotheists, God is not to be constructed as separate and real apart from the world; consider Aquinas’s conception of God as Act of Esse, or Tillich’s as Ground of Being.” See Robert C. Neville, Boston Confucianism (Albany: State University of New York, 2000), 69. 46. In Chinese philosophy, Confucianism talks about Wu very rarely because it always emphasizes reality and social life, and that means Wu is nearly no meaning and no place in Confucianism; most of opinions about Wu come from Daoism and Buddhism. 47. Pang Pu, Eleven Lectures on Chinese Culture (Beijing: Zhonghua Book Company, 2008), 81–88. 48. Laozi, Daodejing, chap. 40, my own translation. 49. Ibid., chap. 42. 50. Wing-Tsit Chan, A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), 321. 51. Ibid., 328. Translation modified by the author. 52. Ibid. 53. Neville, Boston Confucianism, 69. 54. Ibid., 151. 55. Laozi, Daodejing, chap. 25, in Chan, A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy, 153. 56. Ibid., 267. 57. Ibid., 264. 58. Ibid., 78. 59. Ibid., 98. 60. Cf. Lévinas, Altérité et transcendance, 27. 61. Chan, A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy, 40.
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LÉVINAS’S PHENOMENOLOGY OF SENSIBILITY AND TIME IN HIS EARLY PERIOD I. Lévinas’s Phenomenology The French phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty claims: Phenomenology is the study of essence . . . but phenomenology is also a philosophy which puts essence back into existence . . . for which the world is always “already there” before reflection begins—as an inalienable presence; and all its efforts are concentrated upon re-achieving a direct and primitive contact with the world, and endowing that contact with a philosophical status.1
It is from such a point of view that he argues that “the eidetic reduction” is neither a reduction to sensationism, which means that we never experience anything but states of ourselves, nor a kind of transcendental idealism that reduces the world to the mere correlative of our consciousness with the results that the world becomes immanent in consciousness in order to be guaranteed. On the contrary, the eidetic reduction is “to make reflection emulate the unreflective life of consciousness.”2 Herbert Spiegelberg announced, “This case is most revealing of the changed perspective of French philosophy.”3 “This reversal of the phenomenology of essence in a way which makes phenomenology actually subservient to the study of existent fact is clearly in line with the shift of the existentialists from essence to existence.”4 In fact, French phenomenologists changed their perspective rather radically. For them, the revolutionary function of intentionality lies in the apposition of consciousness and world, which is different from the sole being of consciousness, and therefore lies in the emergence of the “living” consciousness world. They believe that all the phenomenologists hold the same view; the only difference is that Husserl concentrates on “rigorous science,” that is, the essential structure of cognition and meaning or its fundamental function, while French phenomenologists care more about the concrete existence of human beings. In other words, they want to be involved in the world and life that are WANG HENG, Professor, Department of Philosophy, Nanjing University. Specialties: phenomenology, thought of Heidegger and Lévinas, postmodernism. E-mail: hengwang@ nju.edu.cn
Lévinas: Chinese and Western Perspectives Editor by Nicholas Bunnin, Dachun Yang, and Linyu Gu © 2008 Journal of Chinese Philosophy. ISBN: 978-1-405-19545-4
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alienated from the Ego. This is the essential spirit of French phenomenology. According to Paul Ricoeur, French phenomenology is based on Lévinas’s The Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s Phenomenology. For this reason, “in part through Lévinas’s continuing influence, French Husserl studies have never been free from a certain Heideggerianism.”5 Lévinas claims that French existentialism mostly comes from phenomenology (with the exception of Gabriel Marcel), and it comes from Martin Heidegger’s phenomenology at the side of anthropology, to which Heidegger objects.6 However, the relationship between Lévinas’s phenomenology and Husserl’s and Heidegger’s phenomenology is so complicated that it can hardly be simply put as “changed.” The complexity is the same as the relationship between Merleau-Ponty and Husserl as appraised by Spiegelberg.7 Lévinas wants to surpass, or more precisely, to overcome Heidegger. He wants to break away from Heidegger; however, such a break has to be made in the shadow of Heidegger even in Lévinas’s original magnum opus Totality and Infinity. From the 1930s, Lévinas began to introduce Husserl’s phenomenology to France “as it is,” but this turned out always to be a Heideggerian Husserl. Furthermore, when he struggled away from Heidegger’s influence with Husserl’s phenomenology, his phenomenology is still full of Heidegger’s spirit. What we have is the rebellion against Heidegger in Heidegger’s own way. Lévinas’s relation with Husserl’s phenomenology is simpler. However, it leads to revolutionary and creative reform. Like Heidegger, Lévinas studied Husserl’s phenomenology using ‘Ideas I’ as the background. His own philosophical reform was triggered when he focused on Husserl’s genetic phenomenology (genetische Phänomenologie), which regards time consciousness as its clue. Paradoxically, the exact time Lévinas began to digress from Husserl coincided with the point he strayed from Heidegger’s influence and turned back to Husserl’s phenomenology. Lévinas’s own philosophical world was not illuminated until he was enlightened by Husserl’s phenomenology.All these happened in the mid-1960s; Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, published in 1974, is the achievement of this period. Therefore, Lévinas’s phenomenology digresses from Heidegger’s Dasein, and digresses from Hursserl’s intentionality. Antinomical, but it is true. It is his unique “phenomenology of trace.” As for Lévinas’s phenomenology, my basic claim is as follows: The genetic explication of the embodied subject “here” and “now” in Existence and Existents, the description about fecundity and eros in Time and the Other and Totality and Infinity, and the totally heterogeneous presentation of “constructing the presence with the unrememberable past” from 1961 are three key points to reveal his phenomenology; the crucial connections should be sensibility, sense
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(sens), pre- or non-intentional consciousness, and the heterogeneous experience itself. Throughout such arguments, Lévinas’s unique definition of time is the cornerstone.8 Precisely in this crucial problematic of time we find something significant: Lévinas turned away from Heidegger with the idea of the “future,” and went beyond Husserl with the “past”; and, in his early period, after Husserl and Heidegger brought forward their antitraditional understanding of time, Lévinas wanted to emphasize the “instant” again so as to “Zur Sache” as a phenomenologist. Therefore, time is understood in its own dimension rather than in the dimension of subject/consciousness (Husserl) or Dasein (Heidegger). We can find that, until Totality and Infinity, the escape from Heideggerian ontology kept focusing on the self-position of existents, the main theme of which was the instant.This escape even includes Husserlian transcendental phenomenology, because in his early period Lévinas’s comprehension of Husserl is based on Heidegger’s thought. In the following, we will step into his exuberant text to pursue the phenomenological trace of such an escape.
II. Horizon of Ontology Lévinas’s rebellion against Heidegger, initiated in On Escape published in 1935, was not at the beginning for theoretical reasons. Only when he wanted to give a theoretical foundation for this escape did Lévinas gradually take up his theoretical critique toward the essential issues of phenomenology, especially temporality and intentionality, within phenomenology. Even in the period of “rhetorical”9 critique, Lévinas still counted on phenomenology, and he especially depended on the phenomenological context of the shift—from the objectivism of rigorous science to the existentialism of human Dasein—initiated by Heidegger’s critiques toward Husserl. It can be said that the formal Lévinasian expression of criticism on Heidegger did not arise until the article “Is Ontology Fundamental?” in 1951. Although he unfolded his argument against Heidegger, Lévinas still stayed within the problematic of “the relationship with Being” till his magnum opus Totality and Infinity. Distinguishing himself from the Heideggerian tradition of Parmenides, that is from the claim that Being is One, Lévinas thinks that Being is multiple and can not be totalized into One. Rather, it is such a “scission ontologique” that has been developed as his early period’s ontological argument of the Other: The Other is the other side of Being, or, rather, real Being is the Other or the being of the Other. It should be said that in his early period Lévinas’s expositions about the “escape from Being” and the “encounter with the Other”— both will soon be identified although they came up successively—
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were carried out as criticism within the thought of Husserl and Heidegger. Lévinas agrees with Heidegger that all philosophical issues are ontological issues. Being is the essential philosophical topic. Hence, ontological difference is not only Heidegger’s concern but also his own original point. According to Lévinas, however, Heidegger’s argument about ontological difference is defective. On the one hand, Being cannot depart from entities, because Being is accessible only through the understanding of entities. “Parmenides was the first to discover the Being of entities, and he ‘identified’ Being with the perceptive understanding of Being.”10 It is crucial here that “there is truth only in so far as Dasein is and so long as Dasein is,”11 and further that “Being (not entities) is something which ‘there is’ only so long as truth is.”12 But, on the other hand, asymmetrically, entities exist in any case without Dasein: “entities are, quite independently of the experience by which they are discovered, the acquaintance in which they are discovered, and the grasping in which their nature is ascertained.”13 It is just on the precondition that “Dasein is” that they can be understood and are accessible. Therefore, it seems that there is a presupposed “existence.” Existent was discussed exactly under this presumption. Hence, Lévinas named this presupposed “existence” as il y a. It cannot be understood; however, it has to be presupposed. It is obvious that Lévinas’s appraisal of Heidegger has involved the start and mode of his own thought. For Heidegger, state-of-mind (Befindlichkeit) has already been a part of the understanding of Being. It reveals the facticity (Faktizitaet) or thrownness (Geworfenheit) of Dasein. However, Lévinas argues that there is an ontological prehistory for hypostasis corresponding to Heidegger’s Dasein; that is, there is a process of hypostatization or substantiation in which hypostasis has to overcome fatigue and indolence—in other words, fatigue and indolence have their groundwork within ontology—and ceaselessly to create. This process has nothing to do with the understanding of Being, including the state-of-mind. It means that Heidegger’s Dasein is revealed at the same time as the world. This is also the original meaning of Husserl’s intentionality, that is, the apposition of consciousness and world. Meanwhile, what Lévinas explored is what happened before this appearance together of Being and the world. Hence, the genesis of hypostasis, that is, the escape from il y a, becomes the starting point of all his creative thoughts. With this background we can understand why, in On Escape and Existence and Existents, Being has been treated as a burden, a problem. Lévinas mentioned experience of the dark night to describe il y a, existence without existents. In the darkness of the night, the forms
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of things are dissolved, without an object or even the quality of an object. The dark night, which is like a kind of “pure presence,” emerges alone as if this universal absence is in its turn a presence, “an absolutely unavoidable presence.”14 It is “like a field of forces,”15 “a mute, absolutely indeterminate menace,”16 in which one is exposed because it is impossible to take shelter in oneself. There is only “horror.” Horror, which is in no sense Heideggerian anxiety (Angst) about death, leads in the opposite direction to the loss of subjectivity. From the viewpoint of Lévinas, Heideggerian anxiety points to Being itself rather than nothingness. Nothingness does not come out of the anxiety of Being because from Hegel to Heidegger nothingness as “the negation of Being” is attached to Being or has always already been Being par excellence. Therefore, either nothingness has not been thought at all or the core of the nothingness is just il y a. Lévinas’s conclusion is as follows: There never is nothingness, there is il y a at the center within nothingness; in other words, it is existence or being rather than nothingness that should be the threshold of philosophy. In fact, il y a has already been the game of Being, that is, the verb form of Being. Nevertheless, according to Lévinas, this is only the first step for ontology. We have only Being or the relation between Being and Being itself; there are no human beings, no subjects, let alone reflection. What we have is the panic brought by “insomnia,” which, for Lévinas, is the very anxiety of Being. Insomnia is not unconsciousness. The latter, though not being able to be experienced any more, has already turned into a kind of sleep. More than that, sleep breaks through or escapes from insomnia, for sleep has already taken place “in consciousness as position.”17 However, this place for sleep, as well as the here as the place of consciousness escaping into itself from il y a, “is radically different from the Da involved in Heidegger’s Dasein. The latter implies the world. The here we are starting with, the here of position, precedes every act of understanding, every horizon and all time.”18 Hence, according to Lévinas, the action of the existent itself happens prior to the action of being-in-the-world. In other words, Heidegger’s Dasein as being-in-the-world is on the posterior layer, which is the layer of “world and light”; and then, the ecstasy of temporality is neither the original mode of Being (or, precisely, existence) nor the ex-istence of Dasein. “To the notion of existence, where the emphasis is put on the first syllable, we are opposing the notion of a being which, contrary to the ecstaticism of contemporary thought, is in a certain sense a substance.”19 Even though Lévinas talked about existence, the “ex-” in this word should first means standing out of Being and becoming itself in its position. Freedom, solitude, cognition, light, etc. are all posterior to the position of the existent. What is at stake is that there should be an existent at first. The “fact” that “there
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is an existent” is “the present.” And “the absolute character of the present is in the very presence of the present.”20 The “instant” is the very “presence” of “the present.”
III. Implications of the Instant In Existence and Existents, Heideggerian ontological difference was expressed by Lévinas as “the distinction between that which exists and its existence,” that is, the difference between a noun and its verb form, that is, the event of being (l’événement d’être). Generally, the verb form is hollow; only its participle (existing) could be intelligible. Hence, Being qua Being slips to be a Being in general which becomes either the object of knowledge or a being, as a God, whose essence certainly involves its being. In both cases Being has been confused with a being; there is no more being-event. Lévinas claims that such confusion is caused by the exclusion of the instant from the beingevent. The instant should be understood from the standpoint of temporality, not the reverse. This has already been common sense for many philosophers. But then, there is no dialectic and ontological function of the instant itself any longer. The fact is, however, if we want to talk about time ontologically, the instant is the only starting point for us. Lévinas argues that, before it combines with other instants to form “the flux of time,”21 the instant has already connected with Being itself. “In addition to the mystery of creation a parte creatoris, there is, in the instant of creation, the whole mystery of the time of a creation.”22 The instant’s “Creation” is that the instant as presence is the conquest over being in general or existence; it consists not only in the relationship between Being in general and a being (or existence and existent), but also in the achievement of Being or existing—the beingevent is just at the core of the instant. “Beginning,” “arche,” and “originality” all indicate such a being-event. In other words, a beginning “is” such an event. If we take the being-event as an instant and regard the present as the primary theme of Existence and Existents, we acquire its structure: We begin with the anonymous il y a, then analyze the concepts of presence and position, and at the end articulate the genetic process, by the way of hypostasis, of the existent and subject. In this period, Lévinas’s argument, by emphasizing the instant, has broken through the understanding that time is eternal continuity. Beginning, arche, and origin mean rupture and “recommencing.”23 The subject comes up, but meanwhile it is riveted to here. It has no competence to escape from itself and has to return to itself forever—
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existence turns into a kind of burden that cannot be evaded: “What is absolute in the relationship between existence and an existent, in an instant, consists in the mastery the existent exercises on existence, but also in the weight of existence on the existent.”24 Surely, what Lévinas wants to do in this period is to reveal the internal structure of the instant in the horizon of ontology. He claims that the essential in human spirit is our linkage with Being as pure event. Nevertheless, his leitmotiv is to deconstruct the foundation of the Western idea of the subject or freedom. It should be said that Hiedeggerian Dasein, especially his Denken des Seins in his later period, has destroyed the traditional idea of the subject as making legislation for himself. But, if the subject is the procedure of self-identification or autonomy, the event or transitivity, in the sense of constructing synchronously both self and object, if “the very spontaneity of freedom is not put into question—such seems to be the dominant tradition of Western philosophy,”25 what Lévinas had done is to deconstruct these two origins: Self-identification and the autonomy or spontaneity of freedom.26 His first step is to expose the complicated internal structure of an indecomposable instant that is the ultimate component of the Same, involving the genetic mechanism of ontology, the corporeality and materiality of the subject, the unavoidable characteristic of delay, the relationship with the Other, and so on. These thoughts are the main clues for understanding Lévinas in this period from Existence and Existents till Totality and Infinity, as well as a primary theme of his early phenomenology. Now we will make some explication of the instant. First of all, “the evanescence of an instant constitutes its very presence”27—it needs no future or past. In other words, an instant can be revealed just because the past has been cast off.28 The instant does not obtain “happiness”29 until it takes off from its past. The subject is born in the instant, because there is no past. History, as objective consciousness, is posterior to the subject’s primordial happy instant. Second, the instantiality of instant is the pure sensation in this original point, the mute sensation. The instant means: . . . the fundamental and irreducible self-sufficiency . . . to sense is precisely to be sincerely content with what is sensed, to enjoy, to refuse the unconscious prolongation, to be thoughtless, that is, without ulterior motives, unequivocal, to break with all the implications—to maintain oneself at home with oneself.30
This is the enjoyment of self-satisfaction, the sensatory satisfaction, the naive in the sense of Schiller, an “animal complacency.”31 Naivity and happiness are the essence of the instant: “the unreflected and naïve consciousness constitutes the originality of enjoyment.”32 The origin of all despairs is the nostalgia for this happiness. As a state
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of sensibility, enjoyment is the primordial mode of the embodied subject, “the very pulsation of the I.”33 The subject emerges originally from such sensatory satisfaction; this is “the subject as enjoyment.” Enjoyment is the embodied being, the self-sensing of sensation. It is in such sensatory enjoyment that the subject gets its individualization. Life is never the naked Will to be, an ontological Sorge, without nourishment, just like a wafting shadow. Life is a transitive verb, whose first object is its own content. Enjoyment is ultimate consciousness, which means not first pure consciousness and then being filled with content. “Living from . . .” (vivre de . . . ), which is consciousness with its content, is the final Sache (thing or matter) for the phenomenologist Lévinas of this period: “[B]ehind theory and practice there is enjoyment of theory and of practice . . . the final relation is enjoyment, happiness.”34 This is “the egoism of life,” which is the condition of all acts (in the sense of the Aristotelian act, equivalent to being). Here comes the subject. Third, because the safety of the instant is threatened by the elemental (l’élément)35—enjoyment means being immersed in the elemental—and because the fragmented mode of the instant is of indeterminate risk, maintaining this self-satisfaction means having motive (in the sense of Husserlian phenomenology) for selfconservation. Thus, self-satisfaction and self-conservation compose this enjoyment. From this viewpoint, Lévinas said: “Dwelling is the very mode of maintaining oneself [se tenir].”36 “Maintaining oneself,” “here,” “position” are the most original self-relation of the I: “I am in my position” is not an idea of position but means what the I is. Only originating from here can the representation (or re-presentation), labor, concept, instrumental system (“in order to” or “I can”) come forth; and hence, the duration of self-satisfaction of the instant, the self-conservation’s conquest over the fragmental heterogeneity, can appear. Such is the process of substantializing, from which the object and ego are presented, and the synthesis of time, which is the subjectivity itself, is originated.
IV. Phenomenology of the Sensible and Time Lévinas has developed a phenomenology of the sensible and the concrete:The intentional structure of enjoyment is sensible desire and its satisfaction (not the understanding of Being). Within such a structure, on the one hand, object or thing never exists as naked haecceity opposite to the same naked subject, or just as an instrument corresponding to the aim of the subject. On the contrary, “in enjoyment the things revert to their elemental quality.”37 In enjoyment all objects
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dissolve in the elemental and turn into sensible quality without any substance. On the other hand, to become an existing subject has not presupposed Being. It is accomplished in the happiness of enjoyment, without any instrument or aim, without any reason or knowledge. In enjoyment, the subject is body, in possession only of sensibility and affection. Sensibility is always naive, only for its own satisfaction, never for the Being of beings, let alone for communication with the others. In Lévinas’s words, it is “the separated being”38 that is “entirely deaf to the Other, outside of all communication and all refusal to communicate—without ears, like a hungry stomach.”39 In a word, it belongs to the order of sentiment, not to the order of thought. Enjoyment exhibits the essence of sensibility. It does not constitute the world or representation. It only constitutes the satisfaction of the existent. Such a sensibility does not direct itself toward an object; it even does not belong to “the order of experience.”40 Lévinas argues that Kant was aware of the apparition of sensibility itself when he distinguished sensibility from understanding and separated out the independence of materiality as opposite to the faculty of representational synthesis. However, when he evaded this “absurdity,” he deviated from the phenomenology of the sensible. According to Lévinas’s phenomenological orientation, opposite to representation, “the sensibility is therefore to be described not as a moment of representation, but as the instance of enjoyment.”41 The intentional structure of enjoyment, that is, living from . . . , as the original sensible movement of subject, is prior to the intention of representation. Lévinas claims that, “in ‘living from . . . ’ the process of constitution which comes into play wherever there is representation is reversed,”42 that is to say, enjoyment in no way needs to be thematized by representation. On the contrary, “living from . . .” reveals the origin of representation itself. As for the point of departure of philosophy, corresponding to the Cartesian cogito, Lévinas said, “there is not only a consciousness of localization, but a localization of consciousness, which is not in turn reabsorbed into consciousness.”43 In other words, the precondition of an act as cognitive act is the sensibility of enjoyment. What is represented by the intention of representation, which is posterior to the act of the instant, is always already a congealed fact and is always already subjected to the past. Representation assembles the past and the future in the present. Although it is objective recognition that can be thematized, in the end, representation, like labor, is also necessarily made to resist the threat from the future and to keep enjoyment proceeding. In a word, it is only as originated from the sensible that all phenomenological intentions and relations could present themselves.44 So the fundamental point is to analyze the intentional structure of the
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instant itself. Put simply, this is a kind of self-reference of the sensible, in which the sensible subject and the elemental (anonymous existence) juxtapose each other, the former “thematizing” the latter as nourishment. Here, what is most difficult and related directly to the foundation of all thought of the Other, henceforth, is Lévinas’s description of the delay or lag within an instant. Delay, from the viewpoint of the structural analysis of intention, is the special relation between sensing and the sensed. In Existence and Existents, it presents itself in the “united” relation between effort and fatigue: On the one hand, existents endeavor to being themselves (freedom of beginning, the master of its own existence); on the other hand, the chains of materiality, the burden of being, come forth. This foreshadows Totality and Infinity’s account of the embodied subject: “Corporeity is the mode of existence of a being whose presence is postponed at the very moment of his presence.”45 Within the instant of enjoyment, which, in both Time and the Other and Totality and Infinity, has nevertheless not yet broken through the self-satisfaction of enjoyment—because of the accompanying feelings of unreliability and unsteadiness—there is also a delay or distance. The characteristics of such a delay make a being never totally or even actually present. In Lévinas’s opinion, the delay or distance within the instant means the delay of the presence of beings; that is to say, the present is indefinable, the I has, in no way, an identification of itself. Nevertheless, there is evidence of “a simultaneity of absence and presence,”46 which is exposed in Lévinas’s description of dwelling and labor. Just as the consciousness of death is consciousness of the infinite delay of death, which is in fact the negation of the definition of death, so are dwelling and labor consciousness of delay. This is the suspension of the unsatisfactory. Possession and labor are needed to conquer the heterogeneity on which the subject depends; therefore, the distance between subject and world appears. The presupposition of such suspension and distance is anticipation, from which the time or the time-consciousness comes forth. In a word, in virtue of labor “to be a body is to have time”; conversely, “time (is) presupposed by need.”47 Lévinas said, . . . to be conscious is to be in relation with what is, but as though the present of what is were not yet entirely accomplished and only constituted the future of a recollected being. To be conscious is precisely to have to possess time—not to exceed the present in the project that anticipates the future, but to have a distance with regard to the present itself.48
In conclusion, both consciousness and time originate in labor that delays the threat of the elemental. Time is the power of freedom to
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postpone death. It means that the future is no longer the prolongation of the present, but a capability to keep the distance with the present. In such a sense, “the primary phenomenon of time” is “not yet.”49 It is what “have consciousness” and “have time” imply. However, such a kind of time of delay also implies that “to be temporal is both to be for death and to still have time, to be against death.”50 Following this dimension, which also leads to a new domain of encountering the Other, Lévinas said, “the supreme ordeal of freedom is not death, but suffering.”51 Suffering reduces the distance and difference supposed by the time of delay, resulting in the subject’s being captured directly by a terrible future. This is the reality of suffering, or the suffering of actuality, during which the subject is turned into complete passivity. In such suffering, to expect consolation or compensation is just an escape. It cannot make any change. “The future can bring consolation or compensation to a subject who suffers in the present, but the very suffering of the present remains like a cry whose echo will resound forever in the eternity of spaces.”52 No promise, no compensation, means “waiting patiently”: “Patiently” means passively, in the way of respecting infinity; “waiting” means waiting without the waited object, that is, nonintentional waiting. Real hope or salvation means to rescue the subject from its own time, that is, the time of economy. This is the time of the Messiah, in which patience is the experience of the limitation of our will, by which the time of patience changes into the time of passivity. The crucial point of this change is the change of the instant itself, returning and facing up to the instant of suffering. It is “not concerned with what is to come with afterwards in economic time; it concerns the very instant of physical pain . . . one should have to return to that instant, or be able to resurrect it.”53 Based upon this fundamental point, pardon turns into the key to Lévinas’s unique thought of time: “pardon, a very work of time.”54 Surpassing the mechanism of oblivion, which is in fact the historicity of subjective identity itself, pardon brings about the whole change of time: The subject is set free from the ceaseless burden of its own present; the genuinely heterogeneous instant comes forth; and hence, real time, other than the recommencement of the present, appears. “To understand the mystery of the work of time, we should start with the hope for the present, taken as a primary fact.”55 Therefore, what the future really concerns is the event of the instant at present rather than the subject. Future is the resurrection of the present instant. This is a new idea of the future. On the other side, Lévinas said, “pardon conserves the past pardoned in the purified present.”56 Significantly, this saying corresponds to Heidegger’s classical definition of temporality.
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We can find that the premise or result of such thinking is the fragmentation of the identity of the present or presence. The present does no more consist of the combination of instants; even the instant itself has been suspended as endless possibilities. As a result, nothing can be present sufficiently or really; meanwhile, the lock-like linkage between future and the present, which is based on or appears as the identity of the subject, has been broken up. Of course, from the standpoint of Lévinas, such a break is, in the end, brought by the Other, which is also the reason that the separated beings in despair have hope. The instant is evanescent and worldless, so it withdraws in the horizon of the past and the future and of the world; at the same time, the absolute otherness of the instant could not be found here. As Lévinas stated, the dialectics of time is the dialectics of the relationship with the Other; sociality is time itself.57 The otherness of the Other is related radically with time—this would be Lévinas’s persistent leitmotiv. Without the Other there is no authentic temporality, because the latter, that is, extasis, should have exteriority as its presupposition. So, Existence and Existents, which focuses on the present and the instant, is, in the final analysis, only “on the way to time.” Such a time has not been dealt with until Time and the Other; and it is only after the middle 1960s that Lévinas gradually fulfilled a phenomenological description of such a time of the Other.
V. Lévinas’s Early Thought and Chan Buddhism It is useful to compare Lévinas’s phenomenology of the sensible and time with the principles of ancient Chinese Chan Buddhism, espeand his cially in the works of the Sixth Patriarch Hui Neng successors. Here I shall briefly discuss three points. First, the “instant” for early Lévinas is very similar to “Dang Xia ” (at present) in the thought of Hui Neng and his school. Lévinas draws the instant out of time constituted by subjectivity or as subjectivity, and develops the temporality of the Other from the heterogeneous instant. For ancient Chinese Chan Buddhism, Dang Xia is the instant of sudden enlightenment of the practitioner: “[I]f one gets insight distinctly, one will at present surpass the secular to the sacred (Ruo de zijian fenming, dangxia chaofan rushing , ).”58 This is the sudden experience of “instant being eternity,” with the prerequisite of breaking off the circulation, or Samsara, of past–present–future. The Diamond Sutra, the primary canonical source of Chan Buddhism, claims that “people cannot recover past thoughts, cannot hold on to present thoughts, and cannot obtain future thoughts (Guoqu xin bukede,
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xianzai xin bukede, weilai xin bukede , , ).”59 It claims that for the practitioner a mind distinguishing between past, present, and future cannot attain Buddhahood at all. Dang Xia has positive contents that do not deny the continuum of thoughts in daily life; “our thoughts of the past, present, and future link up in a series without any abrupt break , (Qiannian, jinnian, hounian, niannianxiangxu, wuyouduanjue , , , ).”60 From a Chan Buddhist point of view, the reason for this continuum is that human beings live their lives in this world in a conditioned genesis, or Karma, from which daily thoughts naturally arise. The temporality of the continuum of thoughts is based upon this Karma. Hence, Dang Xia denies only the regenesis of one thought from another and does not deny ). Just like thoughts whose essence is nonattachment (Wu Zhu the instant for the early Lévinas, which has the heterogeneous intention of deconstructing the self-identity and autonomy of occidental culture, Hui Neng’s Chan Buddhist notion of Dang Xia has the function of requiring the subject to let down its own desire or intention. Hui Neng asserts in the Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch: It has been the tradition of our school to take “idea-lessness” as our object, “non-objectivity” as our basis, and “non-attachment” as our fundamental principle (Wo ci famen, cong shang yilai, duanjian jieli: wunian wei zong, wuxiang wei ti, wuzhu wei ben , , : , , ).61
Second, there is similarity between Lévinas’s positive attitude to the sensible subject and dimension of sensation and Chan Buddhism’s positive aesthetic attitude to daily life. Lévinas affirms the selfsufficiency of the sensible subject by virtue of the instant. Furthermore, by relating the sensible subject to the Other, he introduces the subject to Infinity and has a positive attitude to everyday life. As is well-known, before Chan, Buddhism separated the real heart or Thusness (Tathata) from daily thought and life, and took a negative attitude to the latter. Influenced by Chinese traditional culture, Hui Neng’s Chan Buddhism inherited and developed the thought of Mahayana, holding: “There exists non-difference between the worldly )”; and the transcendental (Shijian chushijian buer “Birth-death and Nirvana are the same (Shensi niepan buer )”; “Klesa is Bodhi (Fannao ji puti ).” In doing so, it unified the real heart and daily heart, realized the pursuit of deliverance in everyday life, and thus held a positive attitude to daily and even corporeal life. Chan Master Shi Tian Fa Xun , for example, said, “Carrying water and conveying firewood is the magical function of wisdom (Yunshui banchai jishi shentong )”;62 another Chan Master, Zi Bo miaoyong
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Zhen Ke , said, “Dharma is in everyday life, in dressing, eating and shitting (Fofa zai riyong chu, chuanyi chifan chu, eshi , , ).”63 Neverthefangniao chu less, this positive attitude to daily life is based on the enlightenment of dependent origin. Third, Lévinas’s thought about the relationship between the sensible subject and the Other is comparable to the Chan Buddhist view of the correlation between all living beings and Buddha. Lévinas emphasizes the essential meaning of the correlation of the subject with the Other, which leads to Infinity. He stresses that it is only by virtue of the Other that the genuine subject could be established. Hui Neng’s Chan Buddhism inherited Mahayanistic concern about the salvation of all living beings. It therefore denies the individual ego’s desire and intention and, at the same time, insists on the non-ego’s concern about everyday life and all living beings. From the perspective of Chan, one’s own liberation is correlative with the salvation of all other living beings: There is Buddha only if there are all living said,“Buddha is nothing other beings.As Chan Master Sheng An than all living beings, there is no Buddha without all living beings, no all living beings without Buddha (Foxin feita, ji zhongsheng shi, , , li zhongsheng wu fo, li fo wu zhongsheng , ).”64 Chan Buddhists argue against the claim that Buddha could exist alone without all living beings and against the claim that it is I who liberates all other living beings. For them, there is no I at all; instead, there are, within the subject, only all living beings tending to Buddha. Of course, differences between Lévinas’s early phenomenology of the sensible and time and the thought of Chan Buddhism are obvious. For example, Lévinas emphasizes the constructive meaning of the subject face-to-face with the Other, and holds a much more positive attitude to daily life. As a phenomenologist and a “philosopher of philosophers,” Lévinas can be clearly understood and expressed only after understanding Husserlian and Heideggerian theories. In contrast, Chan Buddhism’s positive attitude to daily life rests upon the fundamental pursuit of deliverance. For most Buddhists, Chan’s attitude is a kind of passive acclimation. Chan rejects scriptural tradition, preaches the sudden experience of enlightenment as the culmination of meditation, and lacks interest in constructing theory. Crucially, Chan holds that there is neither transcendence nor immanence, that essence (ti ) is identical with function (yong ), and that Buddha and the heart are the same. Furthermore, under the influence of Chinese traditional culture, especially Confucianism, Chan Buddhism, unlike Indian Buddhism, aims to awaken the immanent Buddha nature, self-deliverance and self-salvation,“to carry on imme-
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diately that which originated neither from the outer nor from the inner; to get such evidence at present and leave alone asking whose Buddhist heart it is (Zhixia chengdang, bu cong wai lai bu cong nei chu, dangxia kuoran mingzheng cixing, geng shuo shenren foxin? , , , ?).”65 Lévinas’s Other, especially the absolute Other or the Other of the other, which is not accessible, calls the subject to its singularity by virtue of the epiphany of exteriority. This is perhaps one of the essential differences between Chinese culture and Western culture. NANJING UNIVERSITY Nanjing, China
Endnotes 1. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge, 1962), vii. 2. Ibid., xvi. 3. Herbert Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement: A Historical Introduction (The Hague, Boston, and London: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1982), 581. 4. Ibid., 552. 5. Tom Rockmore, Heidegger and French Philosophy: Humanism, Antihumanism, and Being (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), 128. 6. Ibid., 55. 7. Spiegelberg writes, “What Merleau-Ponty attempted was to go beyond Husserl by consciously extrapolating certain lines, mostly from unpublished texts, as far as he knew them, and by playing down others in the published writings. Nevertheless, in doing so he seemed to consider himself as the executor of the ultimate and best inspirations of the master.” See Herbert Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement: A Historical Introduction (The Hague, Boston, and London: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1982), 538. 8. Two of the most famous scholars of Lévinas, Bernasconi and Cohen, focused on the question of time in Lévinas’s thought as early as in 1970s and 1980s: Richard Cohen’s doctoral thesis “Time in the Philosophy of Emmanuel Lévinas” (presented to SUNY at Stony Brook in December 1979); Robert Bernasconi, “Lévinas on Time and Instant,” in Time and Metaphysics: A Collection of Original Papers, ed. David Wood and Robert Bernasconi (Warwick: Parousia Press, 1982), 199–217. Also, Chanter stressed the crucial function of time in Lévinas’s philosophical thinking (Tina Chanter, Time, Death and the Feminine: Lévinas and Heidegger [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001]). 9. “Lévinas’s criticism is presented in the form of a few rather rhetorical questions.” Adriaan T. Peperzak, Beyond: The Philosophy of Emmanuel Lévinas (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1997), 50. 10. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1962), 256. 11. Ibid., 269. 12. Ibid., 272. 13. Ibid., 228. 14. Emmanuel Lévinas, De I’existence à l’existant (Paris: Vrin, 1981), 94; and Emmanuel Lévinas, Existence and Existent, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Dordrecht, Boston, and London: Kluwer Academic, 1978), 58. 15. Ibid., 95; 58.
120 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.
22. 23.
24. 25. 26. 27. 28.
29.
30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.
36. 37. 38. 39. 40.
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Ibid., 96; 59. Ibid., 124; 72. Ibid., 121–22; 71. Ibid., 138; 81. Ibid., 133; 78. A time composed of a series of homogeneous instants is called by Lévinas “the time of economy” or “the time of world,” opposite to “time of redemption” or “time of justice.” It is based on the action of economy and has nothing to do with ontology. Cf. Lévinas, De I’existence à l’existant, 153–57; and Lévinas, Existence and Existent, 89–91. Ibid., 131; 76. Strasser writes: “To temporalize itself means for Lévinas: to begin ever anew; and what has to start ever anew, is one’s own being. Dasein, one could say in the language of younger Heidegger, must take the load of Being upon itself ever again” (Herbert Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement: A Historical Introduction [The Hague, Boston, and London: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1982], 626). However, this kind of time as “to begin ever anew” is Lévinas’s characteristic argument of this period, which is still remaining within the ontological phenomenology though expositing in another way. In fact, “to begin ever anew” just means that time has not been taken into action because there is not yet the real past and future not ascribing to presence of the present. Lévinas, De I’existence à l’existant, 132; and Lévinas, Existence and Existent, 77. Emmanuel Lévinas, Collected Philosophical Papers, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Dordrecht, Boston, and Lancaster: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1987), 57. Tracing back from this viewpoint, we can say that what Heidegger has done is to lay a foundation for the self. Lévinas, De I’existence à l’existant, 132; and Lévinas, Existence and Existent, 77. General speaking, the substantiality of subject concentrates in its past. Lévinas’s aim of argument is the Other rather than the subject as the self, so in the earlier period he opened the argument field from the view of future. Here we can find the dominant influence of Heidegger. Of course, this is the point of Totality and Infinity. In Existence and Existents, this self-sensing is fatigue and indolence. In Totality and Infinity, such burden of existence has been replaced by the well-being of dwelling and anonymous horror of the elemental has been overcome. In such dwelling, the self-satisfaction of enjoyment and the labor as self-conservation compose the dualistic mode of embodied subject. Emmanuel Lévinas, Totalité et infini: Essai sur l’extériorité (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971), 147; Emmanuel Lévinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 138–39. Ibid., 159; 149. Ibid., 147; 139. Ibid., 116; 113. Ibid. The elemental is also il y a. Il y a, as one of the keywords in Lévinasian thought, is used mainly in the period of Existence and Existents, which, along with instant, burden, anxiety, concerns the outstanding of subject. Owing to contending with il y a, selfpresence is needed, which is self-conservation. Here, we can also find the haunting of Heideggerian Angst. However, the elemental, originated from ancient Greek philosophy, more like apeiron of Anaximander, is used mainly from Time and the Other on, which, along with nourishment, safe, etc., involves the economy. It can be said that Existence and Existents endeavors to go beyond Being, while Time and the Other attempts to lay a foundation for being-in-the-world. Lévinas, Totalité et infini: Essai sur l’extériorité, 26; and Lévinas, Totality and Infinity, 37. Ibid., 141; 134. The separation means both from the element and from the Other. Lévinas, Totalité et infini: Essai sur l’extériorité, 142; and Lévinas, Totality and Infinity, 134. Ibid., 145; 137.
lévinas’s early phenomenology 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65.
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Ibid., 144; 136. Ibid., 134; 128. Lévinas, De I’existence à l’existant, 117; and Lévinas, Existence and Existent, 68. Lévinas is aware that Husserl has acknowledged the synthesis of sensibility and act as well as theoretical thematization. He has also realized that not all intentional acts could be reduced to that special thematization of cognitive consciousness. Lévinas, Totalité et infini: Essai sur l’extériorité, 248; and Lévinas, Totality and Infinity, 225. Ibid. Ibid., 121; 117. Ibid., 179; 166. Ibid., 277; 247. Ibid., 262; 235. Ibid., 266; 239. Lévinas, De I’existence à l’existant, 53–54; and Lévinas, Existence and Existent, 89–90. Ibid., 156; 91. Lévinas, Totalité et infini: Essai sur l’extériorité, 315; and Lévinas, Totality and Infinity, 282. Lévinas, De I’existence à l’existant, 158; and Lévinas, Existence and Existent, 92. Lévinas, Totalité et infini: Essai sur l’extériorité, 316; and Lévinas, Totality and Infinity, 283. Lévinas, De I’existence à l’existant, 160; and Lévinas, Existence and Existent, 93. ). Taisho Shinshu Daizokyo, vol. 47, 598a ( ). Taisho Shinshu Daizokyo, vol. 8, 751b ( Zhou Shaoliang, ed., Dun Huang Xie Ben Tan Jing Yuan Ben (Beijing: Wen Wu Chu Ban She, 1997), 122 ( ). Ibid., 121. ). Shinsan Zokuzokyo, vol. 70, 345b ( ). Shinsan Zokuzokyo, vol. 73, 24b ( Shinsan Zokuzokyo (Xuzangjing), vol. 62, 244c ( ). ). Taisho Shinshu Daizokyo, vol. 47, 785b (
marie-anne lescourret
DESIRE BY LÉVINAS Jacques Derrida once wrote that Lévinas’s philosophy was unmistakably a male’s philosophy. This statement can be avowed or confirmed by certain points of his work, mainly the passages that motivated Catherine Chalier’s book about the “images of the feminine,”1 and also those which refer to caress and love and—roughly—their result: fecundity, fecundation, and ultimately, the child. In that respect, we could have the feeling at first that my or Lévinas’s interest in desire would be relevant to a kind of erotic reflection. But I shall try to show that if this pertinacious notion in Lévinas’s work has definitely something to do with his anthropology and most of all with his conception of the subject, it has very little to do with gender studies. And I take this statement as the first difficulty in understanding and exposing the Lévinasian notion of desire, which is so far from the notion of Eros in whatever traditional understanding of that word we have from Plato and before until Freud and later. I shall maintain that this unexplored, or scarcely explored, Lévinasian notion runs through the whole of his work, with a special emphasis in Totality and Infinity; that it bears some—actually a radical— influence upon the content and understanding of his conception of exteriority; that it is the core, I dare say, of his philosophy, the bearer of what he calls and aims at, namely “the conatus in the reverse way” (un conatus à l’envers).2 There again, I have named a second possible translation of desire: conatus, endeavor, the Spinozian translation that Lévinas, as we all know, fought in his subtle, personal way.
I. Terms and Traditions But first of all, since we already have two meanings for desire, let us have a look at this very word. Desire, désir as it comes from the Lévinasian texts (I shall refer preferably to the three big works: Existence and Existents, Totality and Infinity, and Otherwise than
MARIE-ANNE LESCOURRET, Professor, Institute of the History of Art, Université Marc Bloch. Specialties: Lévinas, visual arts and music, literature. E-mail: marie-anne.
[email protected] Lévinas: Chinese and Western Perspectives Editor by Nicholas Bunnin, Dachun Yang, and Linyu Gu © 2008 Journal of Chinese Philosophy. ISBN: 978-1-405-19545-4
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Being), desiderio in Italian, Begehrungsvermögen in Kantian German, exists also in other languages and therefore other traditions. In ancient Greek, we find epithumia: desire, natural impulsion; horme: appetite; boulesis: wish; philia which we encounter in philosophy philia of sophia (wisdom); and eros as it appears in Plato’s Symposium, as the son of penia and poros (lack and the expedient). Within the Latin tradition, Aquinas distinguished between concupiscentia which is nowadays linked with flesh, but at that time could have a spiritual object; and appetitum which is oriented especially to what pleases or delivers satisfaction and is linked with pleasure. Aquinas also distinguished between a lower, sensual appetite and desiderium, an upper spiritual appetite that preserves the unity of the soul. Later, in his Pensées3 Pascal reactivated the Christian Johannine distinction between three kinds of libido, namely libido sentiendi, libido sciendi, and libido dominandi. Libido appeared then without its contemporary Freudian sexual connotation and referring to the desire for feeling, for knowing, and for dominating. I shall take this last kind of libido, by virtue of its political resonance, as a link to another definition of desire as effort, endeavor, conatus, conatus essendi, as it appeared with Spinoza, and as it developed with the Nietzschean notion of the Great Desire, of Will to Power. For this Nietzsche thanked his predecessors who considered Eros, love, as the principle of Being, namely Hesiod, Parmenides, Empédocles, Plato, Aristotle, etc., and there we have another word for Eros, not desire but love. In our civilization, or at least for a certain generation, the distinction still holds: love as spiritual is good, compared to desire, which is condemned as fleshly. Would then Lévinas’s celebrated interest in the other come down to a bodily addiction illustrated by the irresistible male desire for woman? And why not? Under the condition that this link, this desire, be understood not according to our vulgar moral prejudices, but according to the Lévinasian understanding of the relation to the “absolute” other, it is the radical otherness in the beloved female that the male seeks. Let us then be clear about the ordinary understanding of the notion of desire, which, because it is so simple and obvious, made us neglect it, while we forgot that philosophy is the science of triviality, before being love of wisdom and, finally, wisdom of love. Desire concerns something that we do not have, and wish for. We wish for that missing thing since we think, know, remember, or imagine that it is pleasant.We thus can desire something that we know or do not know of. From this comes a distinction between desire and knowledge, and further, between passion and reason, since the desire
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for something which, being ignorant, we have not experienced, is alien to rationalization. Would we not be happier without those incoercible desires, and should not an aim of our lives consist in getting rid of these nuisances for the sake of a quiet, serene, stoic, wise life? Or shall we implore with Faust, Rousseau, or Kierkegaard: Give me back those desires that exhausted my life! Is desire good or bad? Should we master our desires or listen to them? Those conceptions of desire, necessary and positive, or negative, as a lack, as a deficiency of will or reason, pervade the history of philosophy, from Plato to Lévinas via Hegel and Sartre, up to John Searle, in his consideration of intentionality where desire appears (with believing) as a basic mental state. Desire concerns our relation to the common world as well as our relation with our neighbors. It has a social, biological, and temporal dimension. There arises the Platonic question in the Theaetetus: Is it good because I want it or do I want it because it is good? (Spinoza’s answer will be: It is good because I want it, and Kant will refuse to grant any moral value to anything elected by desire, in spite of conforming to the moral rule). The problem is that just as it is not quite possible to distinguish between desire, love, wish, appetite, and perhaps intention, desire for what is lacking, or desire out of excess, it is just as impossible to identify the desires, as defined by their objects, the desired. Andronicos of Rhodes used to distinguish twenty-seven kinds of desires. Aside from the Freudian definition of libido as sexual energy, up to now we have the components of desire throughout the history of philosophy. Desire is a matter of body and soul, passion and reason, spirit and will, interiority and exteriority, self and alterity. We just have to add another question: Does desire have to be desire for something or can it be just desire? These components will appear in Lévinas’s conception. In his own definition of desire, Lévinas mostly and explicitly refers to Plato’s Symposium. Nevertheless, we might be entitled to think that his definition has much to do with the ontologically powerful Hegelian notion of desire (Begierde), such as it appears in the fourth chapter of the Phenomenology of Spirit concerning the consciousness of the self as related to the other, namely in the dialectic of master and slave. Here, as hinted at in Plato’s dialogue, appears the link between desire and dialectic, desire and dialogue, desire and the other. But besides those historical ancestors, Lévinas’s understanding of desire has its own determinations, all related to his philosophy of exteriority, his critique of Western ontology and of the supremacy ontology lends to the questioning of beings rather than to the questioning of the praxis of being as such. And actually, how could Lévinas miss the simplest way out of interiority, of passage from the inner self to the outer other that desire as
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appetite, ad petere, aiming at, represents? And the Lévinasian treatment of desire runs throughout his work, according to the peculiar movement of his thought that, as it were, seems to proceed backward,—à rebours—in accordance with the Lévinasian definition of philosophy as the quest for the presupposed. In this precise case, the questioning of desire proceeds from desire to the undesirable. This last definition of the “object” so to say of desire occurs in Otherwise than Being: when Lévinas, after having conceived of or assumed being as a burden in Existence and Existents, has provided the setting of exteriority in Totality and Infinity. We shall then see, I hope, that the undesirable as the fulfillment of desire maintains desire as such, instead of blowing it out, instead of extinguishing it by satisfaction, instead of losing the meaning of the world in a pretended comprehension that actually comes down to a repetition of the self. Desire will appear as the core or the kernel of the Lévinasian conception of the self and subjectivity, of his ethics, his understanding of freedom and of our relation to the world in action and time, and, finally, his definition of philosophy.
II. The Burden of Being Let us recall Lévinas’s inaugural book About Evading. This evading does not lead us out to an enchanted somewhere, nor back to a golden age: It leaves us with a nauseous self, seeking relief, alleviation of an excessive, stodgy, opaque burden. From the beginning, hence, it appears that Lévinas’s conception of aspiring, of desiring, will differ from the main philosophical conceptions of desire: I mean first, from the platonic Eros of the Symposium as the son of lack and the expedient, poenia and poros (which Lévinas translates as abundance and poverty), and second from the Husserlian intention. Desire, according to Lévinas, does not mean the seeking for more, for an imagined better: Desire does not proceed from lack but from excess that has to be unloaded. The need is not the lack but the excess. Existence and Existents will identify this excess as the burden of being or more precisely the uneasiness caused by the inescapable and heavy surrounding of the il y a: There is. The human tragedy according to Lévinas is not death but being. Second, if we consider this there is, this il y a, of course, as Husserl points out, the given world always turns a face toward a human intention, but as Lévinas remarks, in defining intention, Husserl misses in this appetite, the animation of desire, this “cheerful or joyous appetite” for the things that constitute the being of the world. “Desire, as link to the world entails both a distance between me and the world, therefore time ahead of me, and a pos-
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session of the desirable before desire. This position of the desirable before and after desire is the fact that is given. And the fact of being given is the world.”4 Since that book, we have the implications of desire for Lévinas, namely its link with the conception of the self as second and open, of the world as given, of time as measured by desire and action. I shall just underline the main quality of desire, namely that it is primary hence devoid of ulterior motive (we say arrière-pensée in French), hence sincere. This primacy of desire means that desire is devoid of any guiding knowledge that might determine a target for desire or an excuse, or reason for disgust. The sincerity of desire does not imply any judgment that would help praise or condemn it. The sincerity of desire refers only to the conception of the self as second according to Lévinas, which also means its passivity and susceptibility to the world, and agrees with the ordinary conception of desire as a mental state rather than a mental act, as John Searle would put it. There comes the first attack of Lévinas against the Spinozian definition of the human being as conatus essendi: effort, endeavor for being. The self is second, separate, and summoned. I am given the world, something I did not ask for and that I have—tragically—to take on. Desire is a passive reception of the world in the light of the distance of this givenness that is also the distance and the meaning of its meaning to me. This passivity determines a specific approach to the world, quite contrary to the normal active desire, that seeks for understanding and comprehending the world from my point of view. The ignorant sincerity of my link—my response—to the world frees me from any hermeneutical approach of a world collected, gathered, totalized in the solitude of a self. I cannot but desire, I cannot but be distanciated and open to the given world.
III. The Setting of Exteriority Desire then receives, in Totality and Infinity, a further description as Eros, as “love,” as this soul and body movement that breaks the totality, the self-satisfaction or reclusion of the self, of subjectivity. In this incarnated, fleshly, and sentimental description of desire, Lévinas seeks to construct a link not only to the world as in Existence and Existent, but to mankind.The erotic relation between man and woman as model for the passage to alterity is another significant provocation of Lévinas. By giving a visible, sensible, sensitive, sensuous, bodily account of the relation between one and the other, Lévinas stresses the undeniable difference of genders, the undeniable difference between ego and the alter. The link of desire between human beings
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expresses itself in dialogue, a dialogue that measures the distance between me and him, the first dialogue before language being that of gesture, the bodily exchange of caressing. What is at stake in this provocation is the critique of both the idealistic and the phenomenological constructions of alterity. Thanks to the difference of sexes, Lévinas shows the insufficiency of dialectic or intentional deduction of the other: since the other as the logical reverse of the same, or as the necessary condition of consciousness, ultimately refers or returns to the self. For Lévinas, the alter is quite other, and cannot be reduced to an alter ego. This is possible since the desire that links me to the other is not a matter of deliberate choice, but as Lévinas puts it, surely an ignorant desire but further a metaphysical desire that records a distance, a difference. If there is any election in my love for you, it is not my will, my choice, my nature, my lack. It is not a matter of my being me and he being him as Montaigne would say. Love just concerns another as such: Someone that is not me and that I am linked to, as it were,“in spite” of myself.The election is not my doing: Quite the opposite, I am elected to this election. Desire is an election, is a grace since it makes me susceptible to the other. Thereupon, it is quite clear that the other is not the fulfillment of desire as lack, since I cannot identify or select the object of my desire according to resemblance or sympathy. And so is the persistence of desire ensured or ascertained. Any other is my other, desire means the possibility of the encounter, and this encounter as such is a blessing or an election. Moreover, the erotic, the sexual description of the encounter with the other, permits the description of the inaccessibility of the other.As Jean-Paul Sartre rightly observes in Being and Nothingness, in the sexual encounter, caressing is for the man a way of making the woman his, first of all by virtue of the anesthetic power of the caresses. Caresses aim at diverting the senses from their normal duty of perceiving the outer world: Repeated and relevant caresses aim at focusing a woman’s sensibility to the love business. Caressing is the first step of seduction, possession, submission, reduction of the other to me, in the hope to be one. In the Sartrian understanding, it is a matter of libido dominandi. Lévinas also understands caresses as the first gesture of love,a behavior that seeks to bridge the gap between man’s and woman’s bodies. But in his view,the caressing man is a bad anesthetist since he fails to clutch his beloved. Hence, he is a good lover, since caressing appeals caressing, as far as the caressed body retreats, vanishes, and escapes. Caressing testifies to this escape and entertains the desire in the experience of the unreachable. Love as inadequate lives from this inadequacy that counts also as the experience of the infinite. The unsatisfied erotic relation also serves as a metaphor for thought. A thought that thinks beyond its capacity is desire. Lévinas
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then refers to the Cartesian conception of a positive infinity, infinity inadequate to its human vessel, an unreachable yet conceivable infinity. It is also a metaphor for the quality of love that is unfulfilled, unsatisfied, and twice disinterested: Disinterested as far as it has no egoistic choice in the election of the other (choice is egoistic as Lévinas says only as far as each self is separated, different from the others, the link going then necessarily from an ego to an alter); disinterested in the second way as unfulfilled. But as Lévinas writes: “Desire does not coincide with an unsatisfied need; it is beyond satisfaction and dissatisfaction. The relationship with the other or the idea of infinity is its fulfillment.”5 This disinterestedness of desire contributes to a description of Lévinasian subjectivity as a wounded, a “pervaded” self: Pervaded by an unmasterable desire, that manifests the subject’s passivity and freedom. We are used to think of freedom as absence of boundaries and limits. This is the case for the Lévinasian subject, not, of course, because he would trespass law, social or collective order, but by virtue of its primacy, its ignorance, its innocence. The desiring pervaded subject is free for three reasons at least. First, because, as we saw, desire is not a matter of lack. My desiring passivity responds to no identified necessity that would circumscribe its fulfillment. It is not the compensation of a deficiency. Second, because desire concerns something that exceeds it, something beyond its means, something inaccessible that does not complete it in a closed up perfection, but on the contrary something that entertains its activity, its dynamic, its life, its openness. Third, desire is free because it is not a matter of will, and cannot be limited, restricted by my egotist gravitation. In desire, I am free of myself and also free, not determined by the specific others, since my ignorant and innocent desire concerns alterity altogether beyond my will and wish. Last but not least, exempted of egoistic wish, of the necessity of anticipation, the desiring self appears timeless, apophantic says Lévinas (I would rather quote the poet Stéphane Mallarmé who speaks of “le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd’hui” (“virgin, lively and beautiful today”), when time is only a matter of duration, in the intensity of the openness that adjourns all future, adjourns death. “The metaphysical event of transcendence, the welcome of the other, the hospitality, desire and language, does not fulfill itself as love. But the transcendence of discourse (language) is linked to love.”6 IV. The Undesirable In Otherwise than Being,7 Lévinas found the way out he was looking for since his first text. Evading—evading the burden of being—
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happens not in death, not in love or by Eros, but by what Lévinas calls “goodness,” for which he provides a specific analysis. Nothing escapes goodness, writes Lévinas. In this statement, he repeats the passivity of the self and the election of desire. My goodness is not my doing. According to Lévinas, nobody is voluntarily good: As a reversal of the famous Platonic formula, “nobody is voluntarily bad.” Moreover, this emphasis upon the passivity of desire and of the self dissolves the remnants of Husserlian intentionality. According to Husserl, knowledge and understanding are prior to intention, then completed by intuition. Whereas for Lévinas, desire, response to the intentional face of the world, happens to me. It is not as we saw, a matter of will even less of knowledge, it is the first step of consciousness. Consciousness as desire proves the intrinsic vulnerability of the self, of mankind. Lévinas thereby reaches a kind of understanding of being, of the verb “being,” the act of being that amounts to a conception of humanity. Humanity, in the primacy of its innocent consciousness of the world, appears as vulnerability, that is, as accessibility, openness, hospitality to goodness, to alterity, prior to knowledge and understanding. There comes the reversal, of the Spinozian definition of being as conatus essendi, and it is more the conatus than the essendi that is transformed. Vulnerability replaces endeavor. It also shows my sensibility, my sensitivity as we saw in the erotic relation of Totality and Infinity; that is, my belonging to the physical world in which desire then receives as its object the other’s hunger: Another kind of desire, of openness, of vulnerability. What is at stake in the few occurrences of desire in Otherwise than Being is the modality of the link between the “absolute”—detached (created, ignorant)—self, and transcendence. Totality and Infinity brought us back to the sensible world where transcendence disposes of a mundane face, namely the face, the speaking, appealing face of the other. In the absence of temporality and history, this face is not the physiognomy of a person, but the incarnation of vulnerability, visible expression of the command: Feed those who are hungry, dress those who are naked. This encounters with alterity in the unidentified face Lévinas calls “proximity.” Proximity is a kind of euphemistic designation of encounter, which preserves the detachment of the self and the alterity of the other. It is, as it were, the philosophical translation of caressing, midway between possession and strangeness, embracing and distance, entertained precisely by this “entre-deux,” this uncertainty, this ambiguity. Assignment to a non erotic proximity, to a desire for the un-desirable, to a desire for the stranger in my neighbor, beyond concupiscence which keeps on seducing by showing the appearance of good-
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ness. . . . This desire for the undesirable, this responsibility for the neighbor—this substitution of hostage is subjectivity, is the uniqueness (unicité) of the subject.8
The object of desire—if ever desire needs an object—is clearly the undesirable, what cannot be desired because it can be neither named, nor called nor designated, but is what calls and names and designates the self in its passivity and responsibility.
V. Conclusion We started with the burden of being and the question of the meaning of being. We end up with an understanding of the intelligibility of being according to a reorientation of sense, of the link between man and the world. It does not go from me to the world but in the reverse order from the world to me. Intelligibility of being, hence the meaning of the world or of life, the way of easing my discomfort, my malaise, lies in my response, my hospitality to the world rather than in the deployment of my libido sciendi, my desire for knowing. If language is a way of grasping things in words, according to the intrinsic passivity of the speaker, it will consist in its openness to the infinite. This means that philosophy as a quest for truth, thus in charge of the relevance of language to the world, will begin with the exposition of the saying rather than with the thematization of the said.The philosophical quest for wisdom, for knowing, begins first with the wisdom of quest, of philia, of desire. Of course, having chosen to recall the numerous aspects and bearings of desire in Lévinas’s philosophy, I expose myself to a further discussion of the different links of desire with the heavy concepts of this thought, namely time, language, alterity, freedom, the historical philosophical trends such as idealism, phenomenology, and hermeneutics that this philosophy of desire criticizes, and so on, a discussion that I am unable to satisfy now with the specialists of those topics. I shall just conclude with the interesting ambiguity of Lévinas’s conception of humanity, which shows his deep appreciation of his fellow people whose weakness he particularly understands, appreciates, estimates, and exploits. So far, Lévinas has defined humanity in two ways: An optimistic way as vulnerability to the other, a vulnerability which places each of us in a position of responsibility. Luckily, I would add, this responsibility is inescapable, since goodness is no human deed, according to Lévinas, who simultaneously shows his skepticism toward humanity, together with a total faith in
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the transcendence that pervades humanity and helps us find the meaning of being. UNIVERSITY MARC BLOCH Strasbourg, France
Endnotes 1. Catherine Chalier, Figures du feminine. Lecture de E. Lévinas (Paris: editions de La nuit surveillée, 1982). 2. Emmanuel Lévinas, Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1988), 70. 3. Blaise Pascal, Pascal’s Pensées, trans. William F. Trotter (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1958), 128–47. 4. Emmanuel Lévinas, De l’existence à l’existant (Paris: Vrin, 1986), 50, 59 (my translation). 5. Emmanuel Lévinas, Totalité et infini (Paris: Livre de Poche Biblio/Kluwer, 1971–90), 196 (my translation). 6. Lévinas, Totalité et infini, 285. 7. Lévinas, Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence. 8. Ibid., 158.
shang jie
THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF DEATH The most important task of Lévinas’s difficult representative work “Death and Time”1 is to clarify the similarities and differences between his views and phenomenology. The central problem is to understand Lévinas’s concept of death. There is no metaphorical signification here, and the term simply denotes its original meaning of what we can think of—that is, have the ability to think of—from the gates of death. If someone is dead, his lively face becomes vague, his appearance vanishes. We cannot have “experience” of our death, but can we have “experience” of the death of others? We have to make use of quotation marks on the term experience, with a function like that of the bracket in Husserl’s phenomenology. I do not know the content, per se, in the bracket. I cannot directly experience what death is, because it happens to me only once. But this does not mean that I cannot form opinions about death. When I do this, however, I do something that goes beyond my ability. This problem concerns the original meaning of phenomenology, that is, the conception of intention: The key of intention is not its objectivity, but its orientability. This orientability does not affect the meaning that the intention indicates, even if the object of the intention does not exist. Husserl takes as an example the square round that cannot exist. The problem of intention involves Husserl’s important conception of transcendence, although this conception is obscure, and Lévinas’s transcendence is not the same as Husserl’s. Lévinas rejects Husserl’s transcendence as real transcendence on the grounds that Husserl’s transcendence is still an internality that does not go beyond the bounds of pure consciousness. Let us examine Lévinas’s temporal perspective next, and ask how can we cognize the relationship between myself and death. We think about nothingness during a time that is a time for measurement, but this time is different from Husserl’s and Heidegger’s temporal perspective. In brief, the meaning of time is identified with the meaning of SHANG JIE, Professor, Department of Philosophy, Institute of Philosophy, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Specialties: French philosophy, Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Lévinas. E-mail:
[email protected] Lévinas: Chinese and Western Perspectives Editor by Nicholas Bunnin, Dachun Yang, and Linyu Gu © 2008 Journal of Chinese Philosophy. ISBN: 978-1-405-19545-4
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death. We can regard phenomenology as a kind of metaphysics of presence, and the time of phenomenology as being an existent. Heidegger’s Dasein, however, is related to the ontology of existence exoterically or esoterically as a structure linking the past, present, and future together and is more or less like a river. In contrast, Lévinas rejects ontology in any sense. If this view is correct, time as understood by Lévinas is not like this ontological sense of time. The concept of time in his thought is connected with death and is, thus, a time of death or, rather, a phenomenology of death. Although Lévinas starts from phenomenology, he then gets away from phenomenology. We return to the conception of intention: What is meant by death? Death, as the most astonishing event, escapes from the intention of phenomenology. Intention has a structure of backing out. The thing, whether as object or as meaning that is intended, should be intuited, grasped, completed, filled, and cleared. The intention of nothing, which is a kind of thought without intuition in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, is dismissed as mere symbolization in Husserl’s phenomenology. In brief, the conception of intention in Husserl’s philosophy has a deep basis in epistemology, while in Lévinas’s philosophy it is grounded in ethics—not ethics as a branch of traditional philosophy, but as first philosophy. Death has an appalling meaning, because it transcends intention and goes outside the bounds of the epistemological concepts of traditional philosophy, such as knowing, understanding, and intuiting. It seeks to say what cannot be said and, in doing so, brings paradox and absurdity by going beyond formal logic and identity or the law of identity. This concept does not evolve from simplicity to complexity, according to Hegel’s mode, but develops entirely differently. It moves from birth to death and transgresses the law of excluded middle and law of contradiction. It exceeds the traditional habit of thought which unifies opposites. So all things are turned upside down in this inflexion of death, which raises a real impossibility, or the possibility of impossibility. Following this assumption, there are many styles of imaginative or poetic language, such as those of Heidegger and Lévinas. A style of this sort is rooted in romantic tradition, but constitutes a different romanticism in which philosophy is connected with imagination rather than being restricted by logical reason. In other words, philosophy is not restricted to thinking clearly, but can operate in domains, such as chaos, that are marginal to traditional philosophy and exceed the understanding of truth and falsity.When philosophy is deconstruction, it remains thought, and the ways of thought extend all directions. The term “deconstruction,” by the way, is not a loanword. It appears in the Huainanzi, chapter 2: “Who is willing to deconstruct human events and to annoy his life by those deconstructions?”
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Plato discussed death in Phaedo: What is the nature of death? It is a bad, ugly, and strange event, a crisis of life that leads to nihility, and every person alive cannot bear it. Plato initiated a dialectic tradition in Western philosophy and used this method in discussing death. In the river of time, death is the end of life, but we need to compare death with life to understand death, thus requiring a unification of two opposites: death and life. Death has signification only for man. Animals do not know what death is, while humans can recognize what death is. But the understanding of death does not develop in all ages. Death is either the death of others or one’s own death. It is an interruption of intention in both conditions, since the object of cognition is nothing. The feeling along with death is an absolute passive one. Death is far and near at the same time: Death seems far from people, because we do not know when it comes; death seems close to people, because it could come at any moment. We also can change our perspective to demonstrate by this doctrine of farness and nearness that nothingness becomes existence when people have a strong feeling about groundless things. The oldest phenomenon of death comes quite close with a real nearness metaphysically—a metaphysics of nearness. Compared with the metaphysics of being, the metaphysics of death or nothingness is more metaphysical. It is the extreme of metaphysics and beyond the thought of philosophy, but it is nevertheless not theology. Human experience of the phenomenon of death, with its invisibility and aimlessness, is an experience of nonexperience. For the phenomenology of death, every phenomenological term can be explained either in a psychological or natural dimension or in a pure phenomenological dimension, just like Husserl’s phenomenology. Why not invent new terms to explain the phenomenology of death? There are no new terms; rather, people have to use their ability to explain farness by nearness. There is a subtle but important difference between Lévinas’s phenomenology of death and Husserl’s phenomenology of intentional structure. Intention is the fundamental character of pure consciousness to affirm mental activity; all consciousness is a kind of consciousnesses to something. There must be not only a direction of intention, but also an object that is intended. For example, according to intentional analysis, there must be beloved objects and hated objects in all emotional acts of love and hate. But there is no such thing which can be directly perceived in phenomenology of death, such as standing in absolute darkness or a vast abyss. What feelings can we have in such a condition? For Lévinas, it is a pure feeling without object or a feeling without responding to an object. Like love without being loved, it is an
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absolute love, and no one can stop it. Of course, it is same in the case of passive emotion, such as the anxiety of death, because death is a phenomenon which cannot be revived, and it is a phenomenon of nonphenomenon. It is a disappointed anxiety belonging to pure feelings such as those caused by love without response or by the absolute strangeness of its object. It is like the feelings of those entering Hades, who according to Dante, have to abandon all hope. There could be love without a kiss, or love without communication. In this sense, the phenomenology of death involves not only falling in love at first sight, but falling in love without sight. Lévinas, unlike Husserl, holds that meaning is not based on cognition and that unknown things are sometimes the most meaningful. Husserl’s cognition is based on intention; that is, a thing which is known always has signification. Moreover, a thing has meaning when we can form an intention of it. For example, the expression of round square does not denote any actual object, but we can understand its meaning without effort owing to the intention that we can form from this expression. According to the same theory, letters at large have no meanings, because they cannot form intention. But now, Lévinas said that the pure feelings could have no intentions. They were mental phenomena without a standpoint, such as ineffable feelings, or a judgment without a positive or negative. Pure feelings seem to be redundant feelings, abundant feelings or spare feelings, a melancholy without reasons, or unequal feelings, indescribable feelings (as fear or inebriation to the degree of the sublime). Lévinas’s time of death is a continuous feeling. He said that transcendence is a relationship to others or a relationship to nothingness or death. Time in itself is transcendent, but not like a river which can run back or anticipate. Lévinas also took this transcendence as infinity, which is like a vast abyss. In brief, all phenomenological terms that are normal or have a sign of intention become abnormal terms in the phenomenology of death. We thus have absolute difference instead of difference, a relation of nonrelation instead of relation. Intention is under suspicion in the phenomenology of death. When Heidegger in Being and Time claimed that the anxiety of facing the being of death is the real problem of philosophy, he suggested a solution for Lévinas. Why are we anxious? Because we miss having an intention and our mental activity has no place to depend on, we must stop to have a rest. Once we form an intention, the anxiety disappears. From this anxiety, all the terms of the phenomenology of death from have a modality which cannot form an intention. This anxiety is the source of the feelings of the phenomenology of death that are beyond the natural feelings of humankind; it also transcends old conceptions of human nature and the humanitarian.
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How can we transcend these conceptions? We can do so by taking the terms of nontraditional philosophy as a new kind of metaphysics. For example, insomnia is understood as closing one’s eyes to stay up all night; watchfulness is understood as never getting what you want; extreme excitement and self-complacence are the excitement of excitements and awareness of awareness. Lévinas said that we have a responsibility to others and to odd things; meanwhile, we become the hostages of others. What does it mean to be this hostage? It is a responsibility for you to what is out of your affairs, to a result that you do not cause, and to form a relation that has a nonrelation with you. It destroys causality. It has an implication irrationally in that you are not in debt, but have an obligation to compensate. Could this responsibility be explained as purity? Is this what remains of the Categorical Conscience or Categorical Imperative of Kantian philosophy? The distance between insomnia and anxiety is not very far.They are both abnormal mental conditions and passive feelings that should be endured. Is the time of insomnia the time of the phenomenology of death, where we cannot understand many phenomena? We become insomniac and anxious because we cannot grasp being and our mentality cannot have a natural rest. This description also transcends the thought of Heidegger, since it even does not begin from Dasein. It also transcends any ontology that seeks to understand transcendence, and because it does not contemplate connecting life with death, it exceeds dialectic as well. Lévinas understands the “Da” of Dasein as leaving and walking out, since it is irrelevant to philosophy or wisdom. He puts the conception of being in the bracket of the phenomenology of death. Hence, the world is amazing and astonishing. Both Husserl and Heidegger held that phenomenology should avoid asking questions of what it is. For example, it is wrong to ask what time is. Lévinas went on to say that time was an anticipation of nothingness to anticipate, and it was an excess of intention that cannot be achieved or formed. There is an infinity of time, continuousness forever. There are two different kinds of pain. There is pain where one cannot achieve one’s wishes; and there is pain without wishes or exceeding intention, which, Lévinas claims, is also called happiness that takes despair as inebriation. Pure pain and pure inebriation are the same, as the abysmal desire from the nondesirable desire and the creative hope from the hopeless hope. In Heidegger’s book Wegmarken (Pathmarks), the marking of the way is just the road of roadlessness. Without old pathmarks, there are many new possibilities of advancing that change former mental customs, just as the thought of death without comparing death with life changes our mental customs. The thought structure inclines, and thus the object of thought is given the wrong place. There is no anxiety from the anxious thing. This is
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fuss about the past, while the most important problem of philosophy is the present. It is not closed mental conditions, but deconstructive mental conditions, that destroy the structure of the unification of opposites. We can ask why Heidegger devotes so much discussion to openness and closeness. This resembles the patterns of thought of traditional epistemology where subject and object adapt well to one another. In contrast to Derrida, whose closed power of deconstruction disintegrates traditional mentality, Lévinas offers transcendence which means getting away, walking out, or going forth. Openness is the horizontal transfixion, which is the so-called relationship of others. There are many new possibilities, which is impossible in traditional philosophy, that are produced from the relationship of nonrelationship. These new problems of philosophy, such as death and time that is before one’s birth or after one’s life, are knocked into rather than reasoned out. Death is a phenomenon that never recurs. What are the differences between considering time from death and considering death from time? When we connect time with death, time becomes a river that is absolutely stopped that man cannot go into even once.This ancient Greek sophism becomes the basis of Lévinas’s proof about time. The time of phenomenology of death is completely strange or entirely new, because death is new—it can occur only once and cannot be replaced by another death. You have to die by yourself. Death happens in an absolute hetero-region. But hetero-regions are different from one another. My death and the death of others that I observe all belong to my hetero-regions, but the meanings of the two are utterly different. They are roads of roadlessness, but each one of these roads of roadlessness is never similar to the others. Here we enter a new subtle mentality and a new enlightenment. Lévinas often quoted Heidegger’s sentence “once man is born, he is decrepit to death.” This sentence and the sentence “man cannot go into the same river even once” are mysterious.There is no distance between being and dying, even saying nothing of the Great Wall between the two. This is not to say that time is the ontological condition of being or that death is something that happens during time. For Lévinas, original time is nonbeing; that is, the condition of being is death. You have to die by yourself. Death is not measurable, since it has a starting point, but does not allow returning back. Man is destined barely to understand two things: The time before his life and the time after his life. Are these two times the same, with both being boundless night and entirely hopeless? They are both deadly times. The time before one’s life that one has never lived and the time after one’s life that one has ever lived—how could they be same? Can we
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get out of this problem by translating Dasein as hetero-being on the grounds that Dasein indicates the boundless night? The time that is before and after life is much longer than the length of length and is not like the daily time that can be measured. So-called linear time, which can be spoken of or be divided to the past, the present, and the future, is a kind of measurable time. Beyond this linear and measurable time, there is a kind of time that is before and after life. Can we say that this time before and after life is much more profound and more primary than linear time? What is coming is the disengaged thing or absent thing that is not in linear time. Lévinas praised Bergson who divided time into different levels. The traditional occidental idea of time before Bergson placed emphasis on its measurement, just as according to Aristotle time was the quantity of movement. From Bergson’s view, this was a linear time that had been spatialized, or it was an arrangement of historical events, or it was the conception of the philosophy of history that was understood as reason. For Bergson, there could be a different kind of primary and continuous time. Every moment of this time is different and not serial or not transfixed, as shown in the line of verse: “to turn round suddenly, finding the person who is in the waning glimmer.” No moment of this time can be deduced from its surrounding moments. To start anew is to start from a new point. Confronting the time of death, which is disappointing, inebriation/anxiety/panic comes out suddenly without succession. If we use this time to describe our daily life, the boring reality becomes redolence as in the world of Proust’s work. The oldest question of philosophy “Who am I?” led to the Socratic injunction “gnothi seauton (know yourself)”! The modern enlightenment is a great humanitarianism movement based on this question. Kant reformulated this question, but Heidegger and Lévinas subverted it. Kant’s manner of questioning was: What can I know? What should I do? What am I entitled to hope? What is man? He restricted understanding to an epistemological meaning, but also examined obligation that is irrelevant to understanding. This is why Lévinas was interested in Kant’s philosophy: In confronting an unknown object, a transcendent object, what could we cognize? Every actual phenomenon is constructed by a category in the domain that is under my ability to cognize. These phenomena are allowed as experiences. But this is the world of phenomena, and the world of ousia (essence) or being is beyond man’s ability to cognize. Although being is outside man’s epistemological ability, its meaning cannot be rejected, just as death, which cannot be formed in thought, can have meaning. Does this meaning come into Lévinas’s domain of others? It does so at least in a form that Kant called doing without knowing, or practical reason.
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Of course, Kant did not mention Lévinas’s problem of time and did not consider the question of continuous time that is different from measurable time. If the time of death is a new anticipation, Kant did not consider this hope or the pivotal question What is coming? which goes beyond reason. Kant held that this problem of what was to exceed possibility was impossibility. Kant, unlike Descartes, did not provide a new proof of the existence of God in order to suppress human anxiety in facing death, but stated a new hope beyond life’s finitude. It is a hope unproven by experience, and an unsatisfied hope that is like Heidegger’s Dasein facing death. Lévinas claimed that thinking beyond time or finitude was the source of the power of Kant’s practical philosophy. To think this is to exceed being, and the possibility of this thought provides a new hope that was never before available. This original quality of openness turns despair to hope. It is hope in desperation, since death does not mean nihility. Hope about what is coming is forever the hope about that of which we are unaware. It is hope, even though there is no intention of it. The structure of hope is not connected with what we expect, and is not connected with cognition. Hope and desire are always poles apart. Hope remains at the edge of being that is redundant; it is a thought that is much more than thought. Mysterious thought is also thought, anxious anxiety is also anxiety. The famous definition of intention, that all psychological activities intend something, could be rewritten as “intention is something’s consciousness which does not belong to its own, that is, consciousness to nihility.” The thing that does not belong to its own is not in any sense an object, but a nihility. Sartre apprehended Husserl’s conception of intention in this way—so-called nothingness or nihility is absent or irreproducible. The special meaning of intentional act tampered with Husserl’s original meaning, because it is anxiety in Heidegger’s sense. Just as anxiety has no object, its object is a nonobject. The resulting description of phenomenology belongs to the description of phenomenology of death. It is a way of seclusion, a road of roadlessness, a possibility of impossibility. This thought beyond the limits of thought is a severe challenge to Western traditional philosophy. When the subject of I think does not work in Descartes’s sense, the world becomes much more fantastic. Lévinas quoted a paragraph from Tolstoy’s War and Peace. The wounded general in the battlefield enters speculation through contemplating the vault of heaven. What interests him is not the color of the sky, but the height of heaven. He thinks of the negligible nature of man’s life. One can explain neither the meaning of life nor the meaning of death.What do these sentences mean? The subject of I think stops thinking and is left surprised without thinking. His mentality is at the level of the grass; his heart is
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in a pure condition: absent-minded. It is all without reason, and it is all strange. Lévinas said his task was to consider death from time rather than Heidegger’s considering time from death. What is the difference between them? The crucial difference is that it is a phenomenology of death considering death from time, while it is an ontological phenomenology of being considering time from death. It is a horizontal time to consider death from time that can connect others. In joining two different temporal standpoints that are not related, it changes Heidegger’s perspective of time completely. What does Heidegger’s considering time from death mean? It means Dasein is a kind of being confronting death. Heidegger defined a limitation of time. He did not discuss others out of time, but took death as the end of time. In other words, Lévinas went on from where Heidegger ended. CHINESE ACADEMY OF SOCIAL SCIENCES Beijing, China
Endnote *Editor’s note: Due to unforeseen circumstances, the author was unable to address a few of the citational questions raised by our copy-editors before the issue went to press. The author regrets his responsibility for the remissness. 1. Emmanuel Lévinas, “Death and Time,” in God, Death and Time, trans. Bettina Bergo (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 7–120.
wang tangjia
THE CONCEPTS OF DEATH IN HEIDEGGER AND LÉVINAS Death is not only a natural event, but also a social and cultural event as well as a psychic event. Although the term “thanatology” appeared very early in Ancient Greece, the science of death in a very strict sense has not come into being because there is no requirement on the horizon for the presence of this discipline, that is, a synthetic consideration of the concept of death. It seems to me that the experience and apprehension of death which menaces life and the life-world are the important, and even the dominant, constituents of our understanding and explanation of life and the lifeworld. Death is at once resistance and urgency of life, or as Lévinas put it, “healing and impotence.” This is why a number of philosophers since Socrates focus their attention on the enigma of death so that we might as well say that together with the thought of death goes the death of thought. The comprehension of death implies the lightening of existence, which manifests its meaningfulness through our thoughts, while our thoughts are brimming over with vitality by means of the stimulation of death. As a matter of fact, Vladimir Jankélèvitch is right partly in saying that: “Man can doubt that the problem of death, properly speaking, was a problem of philosophy. If he considers this problem objectively and from a general point of view, he can hardly find what could be a metaphysics of death.”1 Nevertheless, among many philosophers in the twentieth century, two persons have drawn and deserve to draw much attention because of their insightful philosophical speculation concerning death. One is Martin Heidegger, and the other is Emmanuel Lévinas. Lévinas substantially overturned Heidegger’s account, in spite of his drawing inspiration from his master. In the following sections, I try to explore the relatedness and differences intrinsic to their conceptions of death as they were unfolded through Heidegger’s interpretation and Lévinas’s reinterpretation.
WANG TANGJIA, Professor, Department of Philosophy, Fudan University. Specialties: ethics, French philosophy, German philosophy. E-mail:
[email protected] Lévinas: Chinese and Western Perspectives Editor by Nicholas Bunnin, Dachun Yang, and Linyu Gu © 2008 Journal of Chinese Philosophy. ISBN: 978-1-405-19545-4
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In Sein und Zeit and other articles, the analysis of death is often referred to as the existential ontological analysis. Heidegger singles out death above all as the ontological phenomenon and expounds how existential analysis of death differs from other possible explanations of this phenomenon, such as biological, medical, and psychological explanations, because he views the existential analysis of death as the condition of the possibility of all other explanations. Even if we talk about such topics as the “hereafter,”“next world,”“paradise,” and “inferno,” which are very familiar to us in our ordinary life, we still have to answer the question whether the essence of death may be accommodated by the opposition of being and nothingness. Heidegger lays emphasis more than one time upon the priority of the existential analysis of death over other explanations of death by revealing why these explanations can be meaningful and rational only after death is understood in its full ontological essence. It is because death is considered as a way of being of Dasein that the existential analysis of death is eventually brought back to a structural analysis of Dasein. Naturally, Heidegger does not deny the fact that death is a phenomenon of life in the broad sense of the term to the extent that the experience of life is also the experience of death. For him, the experience of dying which is studied by modern medicine and psychology gives information about the life of the “dying person” rather than about dying itself.2 No doubt, the existential analysis of death implies at first that the overall new concept of death is derived from the structural analysis of Dasein. In Sein und Zeit3 we find the following comprehensive and clear formulation of the concept of death: As the end of Dasein, death is the most nonrelational, certain and as such, indefinite and unsurpassable possibility of Dasein. As the end of Dasein, death is in being of this being toward its end.4
According to this definition, death is explained as the end of Dasein, through which Dasein comes to its completeness. The end of Dasein implies that Dasein is not in the world any longer, not in “da” any longer. In this sense, death is a primordial demise, a “dimettere” in Latin, a demarcation of the completeness from the incompleteness of Dasein. From this point, it can be concluded that death may not be acclaimed as an apophantical usage since it ends the continuous incompleteness of Dasein. According to the above definition, death is not a fixed point in the horizon of time, but is a living process that awakes and reawakes constantly the original consciousness of time in man. Dasein is onto-
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logically defined as the being-toward-death at the same time as death is described as a “Noch-Nicht” (“not yet”) and a determinate possibility. In reality, the “Noch-Nicht” turns out to be the ontic root of the openness and transcendence of Dasein in Heidegger’s theoretical framework. Death is not a thing ready at hand, but it is death that keeps Dasein alive in its process. The figure “journey of life” manifests itself precisely as an appropriate description of the process of Dasein. Heidegger sometimes compares death as end to the ripeness of the fruit, but asserts that life’s being is also death. Heidegger writes in Introduction to Metaphysics: “Everything that enters into life also begins to die, to go toward its death, and death is at the same time life.”5 In Sein und Zeit we also read, “Death is a way of being which Dasein takes over as soon as it is. ‘As soon as a human being is born, he is old enough to die right away.’ ”6 According to the above definition, Heidegger emphasizes that death is the ownmost possibility of Dasein, which is usually called the possibility of the impossibility, because death is not substitutable. Even though we give up our life for others, we have not yet taken their death from others at all. In most cases, what we can do is no more than to delay their death. Death is the indefinite and certain possibility because death is an empirical fact that human beings have to meet, but death is always impending before us, as Dasein does not know when and in which way death happens to him. For this reason, Heidegger occasionally explains death in terms of Bevorstand, or something standing before us. It is clearer if we consider the publicity of everyday being-with one-another talking about death ambiguously and evasively. Accordingly, Heidegger says “Common people do not permit the courage to have Anxiety about death.”7 Here, the question we should ask is “Why Heidegger makes a judgment that death is the possibility of the impossibility instead of saying that death is an absolute necessity?” The question is accessible if we grasp the meaning inherent in the point that Dasein never experiences his own death by himself because death is always a resistance of life. If he died, a man could never tell us what death might mean and how death happened to him. If he has not died, the information he gives us is not about death, but about life; so, death is a possibility all the time. However, when he argues about the possibility of experiencing the death of others,Heidegger claims that the ownmost death of others could not be experienced authentically. We are merely beside it. In this way, Heidegger concludes that death causes isolation. Here, we find further justification for the perspective of the uniqueness, Jemeinigkeit (mineness) and nonsubstitutability of death. But Heidegger has not forgotten to proceed from the existential analysis of death to the exposition of the everydayness of death. The
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former is regarded as an authentic Being-toward-Death, whereas the latter is seen as an unauthentic Being-toward-Death.The real meaning of death is concealed by the unauthentic Being-toward-Death. In fact, death takes root in care. For Heidegger, care becomes the way of humans to escape from the fear of approaching death. Although the person who has died is not in the world any longer, he is still alive in the image and memory of others, and he is still the object which others care about and are busy dealing with because there exists the dead body of a human being as a physical thing, which is referred to as “the beginning of the things at hand.” Although others seem to dislike or fear the corpse, they would express more or less respect for it because it is not treated merely as an inert object, but as a being to be mourned and prettified with flowers and ritual, as a being together with us as Daseins. Certainly, Heidegger’s existential analysis of death is complicated, but crystalizes many deep insights into the together-belonging of death and being which provides Lévinas with the resources of inspiration as well as the possibilities of critique and transformation that enable him to reorient the concept of death by his reinterpreting Heidegger’s interpretation of death.
II. Reorientation of the Concept of Death In The Rationality of Transcendence, Theodore de Boer says, “The difference between Heidegger and Lévinas is nowhere more evident than in the discussion of death. Lévinas doesn’t approach this phenomenon in terms of being-toward-the-end, but begins from the experience of murder.”8 Why does Lévinas begin from the experience of murder? If we really understand the meaning immanent in William James’s proposition that “philosophy is a response to life,” we will understand why Lévinas begins his discussion of death with the experience of murder. We have good reason to believe that the miserable experience of life during the World War II results in his tendency to regard the experience of murder as an extreme case of death in which a person is deprived of life intentionally and violently. This is also a reason why Lévinas attaches much more importance than Heidegger to the discussion of death, as is apparent in the fact that most of his works, such as De l’existence à l’existant, Le temps et l’autre, Totalité et infini. Autrement qu’être ou au-dela de l’essence, Dieu, and La mort et le temps, are more or less concerned with death. Lévinas himself is a living witness to Auschwitz and the Holocaust. His parents and brothers were barbarously killed by Nazi collaborators in Eastern Europe.
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His wife and daughter had to hide themselves in Paris, while he was captured by the Nazis and forced to do hard labor as a prisoner. Death follows him like a shadow and even becomes a shock to the depth of his heart. However, in Lévinas’s eyes, the question concerns not merely the number of people murdered, but also the manner of murder and the Nazis’ way of dealing with the dead. The bodies of the people murdered were transported on lorries like wood. They were referred to as die Scheisse (waste, excrement), as if they were not human bodies. The murders were carried out less in hatred than in contempt.9 It is remarkable that this miserable experience resulted in the idea that death is not equivalent to the mere end of life. What distinguishes murder from natural death is the way of death and the way of dealing with the corpse. Death is not nothingness, because it involves its relation to others. Only a murderer tries to treat the death of a human being as the death of an animal and to identify death as nothingness. On this point, Lévinas is in agreement with Heidegger, but lays much more stress on the meaning of death for the survivors in the family in which the dead person lived. Jacques Derrida clearly expresses Lévinas’s explanation of death. For Lévinas “Death: not, first of all, annihilation, not being, or nothingness, but a certain experience for the survivors of the without-response.”10 In his book Totalité et infini, Lévinas criticized the traditional philosophical and religious explanation of death as either a passage to nothingness or a passage to some other existence. In reality, murderers always identify death with nothingness when they want to kill others. The spontaneous intentionality of their passion points to annihilation.The point is true of both Cain and the Nazi with the crazy will to murder. For this reason, Lévinas asserts: The identifying of death with nothingness befits the death of the other in murder. But at the same time this nothingness presents itself there as a sort of impossibility. For the other can’t present himself as other outside of my conscience, and his face expresses my moral impossibility of annihilating. This interdiction is to be sure not equivalent to pure and simple impossibility, and even presupposes the possibility which precisely it forbids—but in fact the interdiction already dwells in this very possibility rather than presupposing it.11
Lévinas’s illustration of death appears as a dialectics of being and nothingness. He calls into question the equivalence and juxtaposition of being and nothingness in Heidegger’s philosophy. Lévinas argues that the fear of death is as primordial as the fear of being. Our consciousness is usually occupied with being and the “il-y-a” (Es-gibt) to the point that we find ourselves unable to accept or take over impending death and nothingness. As a result, we must remain trem-
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bling in fear for our own annihilation, but this is just a ruler with which we measure the degree to which we involve ourselves in being in the world. Existence in its depth contains and presents the moments of tragedy. Obviously, it is true that Lévinas pays more attention than Heidegger to some anthropological observations of the existential situation and of the ideas of life, including attitudes toward death, among primitive tribes. On a few occasions, Heidegger mentions the experience of life in primitive people. In contrast, Lévinas views this kind of experience as the origin of the fundamental human experiences of existence. For example, he again and again cites two famous French anthropologists, Durkheim and Lévy-Bruhl, to expound his point of view. In opposition to Heidegger, who seems to deny externality, Lévinas insists that externality can be seen as the way in which totality and infinity reveal themselves to us. Correspondently, loving, desiring, and dying manifest themselves through the similar existential mechanism and structure that are sometimes understood as the transcendence of the finitude by the finitude. For Lévinas, they are all transcendence of the possession and affirmation of individuality. Death implies going to the place where freedom and negation function as double possibilities. Our fear of death implies the fear of the shadow of being. We fear the ghost accompanying the corpse more than the corpse itself. It is also because we fear the ghost that we fear the dark in which the ghost is supposed to appear. Death in the everydayness of being is connected to the night because the night is supposed to be the time when the ghost appears. Lévinas tells us that even though death might be connected to nothingness, nothingness in this case has a positive meaning because the contour of being presents itself by nothingness, as death drives us to fulfill our own purpose and ideal. Hence, he interprets the relation between existence and death in terms of Hegel’s characterization of the dialectics of being and nothingness. In a sense, Lévinas is really explaining Heidegger from the perspective of Hegel, as clearly seen in chapter 6 of De l’existence à l’existant12 and the first part of Dieu, la mort et le temps.13 Heidegger defines death as a possibility of the impossibility. In contrast, Lévinas understands death as “the impossibility of the possibility.” The reversal of the literal expression implies a far-reaching theoretical difference. Heidegger gives privilege to “the impossibility,” which he presupposes. For him, death as an unsurpassable possibility stands before us as Dasein. Here, “the possibility” opens itself only by the impossibility. We might say that Heidegger observes life from the viewpoint of death, whereas Lévinas meditates death with
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the idea of life on the grounds that only life can open possibilities for us. As seen from life, death appears as the end of all possibilities, namely, impossibility. Heidegger says that death causes isolation. In contrast, Lévinas asserts that “death breaks down loneliness.”14 He holds that death implies its relation to others. Biologically, death is decomposition: It is “the without-response.”15 Lévinas in fact has conceived the being of others when he defines death as “the without-response” and claims that “the death of other is the first death.”16 However, the death of the other means the disappearance of the expressive movements that enable him to appear as a living being. Movements are always response. Death will touch above all this autonomy or expressivity of movements that goes so far as to cover someone’s face.17 Lévinas concludes that in this sense we meet death in the face of the other. Nevertheless, the relation to the death of the other is neither knowledge of the death of the other nor experience of death as a way of annihilating being. The relation between death and the other has its ground in actual life.Along the lines of Hegel’s thought in the Phenomenology of Spirit, Lévinas makes explicit that death takes someone back to the family because death causes the survivors and the dead at once to establish and end the relation of the family. For the survivors, the death of a member of the family is never nothingness, but only a way from the world there. In this way, the Bible says that the dead sleeps together with his ancestor. Similarly, we Chinese sometimes say “that a person has gone to see his ancient ancestor.” In our society, the mourning ritual belongs above all to the family. The members of the family establish their self-respect and the dignity of the dead through the mourning ritual. The survivors transform the dead into a living memory. Lévinas refers to the explicit relation between the dead and survivors in terms of an “ex-ception” that is established through the mourning ritual. From this point arises the issue of responsibility for the death of the other, and thus death becomes a theme of ethics. Lévinas claims: Mortality is in no way my death, but the death of the other. But there is not only weakness, at the same time as this weakness appears in the face—this mortality—there appears also the command: do not leave me in solitude. Consequently, there is an imperative, which is in no way the imperative of the universal which arouses my will: on the contrary there is an authority in the face which commands me not to leave this mortal to dwell alone. Taking up that: here is my responsibility for the other.18
I am responsible for the other to the point that I myself am involved in this death. This is perhaps shown in the following more acceptable proposition: “I am responsible for the other insofar as he is mortal.”19
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“Responsibility” is the central concept of Lévinas’s Ethics. For Lévinas, ethics is viewed as first philosophy; in other words, ethics is the starting point and the destination for Lévinas’s philosophy. It is a characteristic of Lévinas’s philosophy, different from that of Heidegger, to bring the problem of death into the discussion of ethics as first philosophy. In Lévinas’s eyes, responsibility for the other consists finally in the way of dealing with death. “The essence of responsibility lies in the uniqueness of the other for whom you are responsible.”20 Substantially, the responsibility for the dead embodies this uniqueness of the other. Perhaps there exist a variety of responsibilities for the dead, such as the responsibilities to fulfill the wishes of the deceased and to protect the honor and dignity of the dead from any possible stain. But to bury him is the most basic responsibility for the dead. Because this responsibility is without repayment, it shows a noble and holy character. Although responsibility for the death of the other can be derived from my death, I anticipate my future and have reason to consider the death of the other as a rehearsal of my death. Nevertheless, the death of the other is not a projection of the anticipation of my death. I preconceive my responsibility for the death of the other in the totality of our society. Finally, Lévinas and Heidegger take different philosophical positions with regard to the relation between death and time. Heidegger focuses on the explanation of the primordial meaning of death in relation to time, whereas Lévinas, in reinterpreting Heidegger’s point of view, emphasizes the significance of time in relation to death. For Lévinas, we might as well conceive death from the perspective of time when, as Heidegger does, we conceive time from the perspective of death. To conceive time from the perspective of death is the way of thinking that Heidegger takes in Sein und Zeit. Heidegger distinguished between primordial time and ordinary time. Ordinary time is characterized as linear time, in which the present is always the starting point from where the past and the future extend back and forth. On the contrary, primordial time which has its end is not the series of the present. The present and past are derivative from the future, which depends on the fact that, as the possibility of the end, death is waiting for Dasein and the fear of the future leads Dasein. According to Lévinas, ordinary time is derivative from primordial time that is related to death. Death is the phenomenon of the end and the end of the phenomenon. Moreover, death is relevant to possibility as possibility (se rapporter au possible en tant que possible). Death implies ideas of the future insofar as it is seen as “Noch-Nicht.”
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Lévinas, however, does not regard death as the ultimate possibility of existence, but as an alien power that destroys all possibilities. For him, the effective explanation of death has to be concerned with time, that is, with the possibility of the duration of life. Quite differently from Heidegger, Lévinas defines death as “the patience of time.” What does “the patience of time” mean? It means the disappearance of the possibilities of wanting, willing, and desiring everything. The usurpation of time and the shattering of hope constitute the process of death itself. III. Drawing Inspiration from the Doctrine of Death of Chinese Philosophy Chinese culture, especially Chinese classical philosophy, provides many significant insights into death, which can be regarded as a mirror or complement of the conceptions of death in Heidegger and Lévinas. They enrich our understanding and comprehension of death and thus offer a certain sort of wisdom and inspiration for our meditation on life. In Chinese culture, death gains various metaphorical names that seem to conceal or beautify death in order to reduce the fear and sadness of people facing impending death. In ordinary life, death is very often called, for example, passing away, leaving, returning to the west, going back to the hometown, or having one’s eyes closed forever. The death of an emperor in Ancient China was called the collapse of mountains, whereas the death of a maiden was called the destruction of jade and disappearance of perfume. Daoism describes death of a Daoist priest as the journey to the west by a crane, while Buddhism refers to the death of a Buddhist monk as entering into or returning to calmness. As is well known, the mainstream of ancient Chinese philosophy, Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism, is concerned with different aspects of the relationship between human beings and nature. Confucianism focuses on issues of the life-world, while Buddhism tries to work out a solution to problems of the after-death. Daoism attempts to transcend the difference between life and death in order to experience and highlight the horizon of Dao. My discussion here is confined to Confucianism and Daoism. In spite of different perspectives on death, there are some similarities between Lévinas’s idea of death and that of Confucianism. For example, they both explore the rich meanings of death by relating death to the Other, time, and responsibilities. When Confucius asks “How can you know death without knowing life?”, he obviously intends that the issue of life should take priority over the issue of
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death in the theoretical framework of Confucianism. Substantially, within a complex system of discourse, Confucian ideas of death become entangled with the doctrine of Rites (Li), broadly understood. In the past, many Chinese followed the principle: “Respect the dead as if they still lived.” They did so because they believed that there is a certain sort of continuity between life and death. From the series of mourning rites held after a person died, we can easily see that Confucianism treats death not only as a natural event, but also as a cultural event. In spite of the great importance attached to life, death is regarded by Confucianism as both the end of being in the world and a coming into being in another world. When Lévinas defines death as “without response,” he presupposes metaphysically the existence of the Other because response always already implies the alterity of the Other quite different from the being of oneself. Similarly, Confucianism deals with the issue of death by placing death in relationship to the Other. Because death for Confucianism implies that the dead could get together with their ancestors, death is very often called returning to the hometown or going to see the ancestors. Indeed, as Hegel says, death makes people go back to the family in which the responsibilities of living people for the dead is single-sided, without return, and is hence more holy. In Chinese Confucianism, burying, mourning, and defending the honor of the dead are responsibilities that are ascribed to the family or relatives. The Confucian philosopher Xunzi thought that mourning embodies the self-consciousness of the living and their respect for life that distinguishes human beings from other animals.21 For Confucianism, death appears to belong not only to the individual, but also to others, in the first instance to the family. Death implies the end of the connection of the dead with their family in the actual world while reestablishing in the world of imagination a spiritual tie among the dead, ancestors, and the living. As the life of the dead is supposed to be prolonged into the next generations, offering sacrifices to ancestors symbolizes the intergenerational connection and continuity of spirit between the dead and the living. Just as Lévinas emphasizes the relevance of death to the consciousness of time when he defines death as “patience of time,” Confucianism implicitly asserts that death can arouse the consciousness of time in the living. This view is strengthened by the idea of filial piety that plays a significant role in Chinese Confucian values. Filial piety is meant to enable the life of ancestors to last in the next generations, to support care and respect for the elder generations such as grandparents and parents, and to keep ancestors in mind by offering sacrifices to them after they have died. For Confucianism, death is just a transition from one form of life to another rather than the absolute end of
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life. Put simply, death opens a new horizon, a new possibility for life in another world. For this reason, some Chinese are measured in their sadness about the death of an old person. Another reason for this attitude is that the Confucian ideas of decorating death with life and filial piety weaken the fear of death. As far as the idea of death is concerned, it is very difficult radically to separate Confucian from Daoist elements because of the mergence of Confucianism and Daoism in their philosophical systems and actual life.Although Daoists search for long life, they also focus on the possibility of transcending the difference between life and death. The life of human beings is considered to embody the Dao, and Dao is understood to be the highest metaphysical substance and to have a permanent vitality. The life of human beings is supposed to originate from Dao and in consequence death is no more than returning to Dao as the ground of all life. In this sense, Laozi regards the process of life from the birth to the death of human beings as going back to the root. For Laozi, the infinity, permanence, and perfection of life are realized by the great, holy and ceaselessly changing Dao that embraces all things and their movements. For this reason, death for Daoists is not so terrible. Zhuangzi even took an aesthetic attitude toward death from the perspective of the unity of heaven, earth, human beings, and god. Beyond the difference between life and death, merging the life of the individual into the universal life of the cosmos could bring us true freedom of mind. In a vivid example of the Daoist idea of transcending death, Zhuangzi celebrated the death of his wife by singing while beating a vessel. If Heidegger were still alive, he would perhaps appreciate this Daoist attitude toward death. FUDAN UNIVERSITY Shanghai, China
Endnotes Acknowledgments: I would like to thank the Journal of Jiangsu Administration College in China for permitting me to use all materials of my Chinese paper ” Journal of Jiangsu Administration (“ College 3 [2007]: 22–26) and translate them into English. Also thanks to Dr. Nicholas Bunnin and Dr. Linyu Gu for their editing work. Thanks as well to Ms. Joyce Li for proofreading. 1. 2. 3. 4.
Vladimir Jankélèvitch, La mort (Paris: Flamarion, 1997), 5. Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tuebingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1986), 247. Ibid., 52. Ibid., 247; translation from Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), 259, but with my own retranslations of some expressions.
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5. Martin Heidegger, Einfuerhrung in die Metaphysik (Tuebingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1976), 100. 6. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 245. 7. Ibid., 254. 8. Theodore de Boer, The Rationality of Transcendence (Amsterdam: J. C. Gieben, 1997), 143. 9. Raoul Mortley, French Philosophers in Conversation (London: Routledge, 1991), 15. 10. Jacques Derrida, Adieu to Emmanuel Lévinas, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 6. 11. Emmanuel Lévinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 232–33. 12. Emmanuel Lévinas, De L’existence à l’existant (Paris: Vrin, 1978). 13. Emmanuel Lévinas, Dieu, la mort et le temps (Paris: Grassert, 1993). 14. Emmanuel Lévinas, Le temps et l’autre (Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1979), 63. 15. Lévinas, Dieu, la mort et le temps, 20. 16. Ibid., 54. 17. Ibid., 17. 18. Mortley, French Philosophers in Conversation, 15. 19. Lévinas, Dieu, la mort et le temps, 54. 20. Mortley, French Philosophers in Conversation, 16. 21. Xunzi, “Book 19: Discourse on Ritual Principles,” in Xunxi, vol. 2, trans. John Knoblock (English) and Zhang Jue (Modern Chinese) (Changsha: Hunan People’s Publishing House & Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1999), 601–48.
sun xiangchen
EMMANUEL LÉVINAS AND THE CRITIQUE OF MODERN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY Because of the strong Jewish background of Lévinas’s thought, scholars often pay great attention to the tension between Greek and Hebrew tradition in his philosophy, and Lévinas himself confesses freely his criticism of ontological tradition beginning with the Greek philosophy. Actually, this tension conceals another conflict between the ancient and the modern, the opposition between the ancient Greek and the modern and between ancient Jewish wisdom and the modern with its Greek roots. So, my main interest in Lévinas’s works is not only in the tension between Greek and Hebrew, but also in his implied criticism of modernity, especially of modern political ideas, which, he thinks, are rooted in the Greek philosophical tradition or the ontological tradition. Of course, some scholars think that modernity has a Christian root, but for Lévinas the root of modernity stems from the Greek tradition. This article tries to show the opposition between Lévinas’s ideas and modern political philosophy. Lévinas has his own project concerning political society, and wants to replace, or more precisely, to limit the project of modernity. We will extend his criticism from the perspective of his ethics, which is regarded as first philosophy.
I. Political or Ethical? Whether from Lévinas’s own experience in the Second World War or from his philosophical inference, we can clearly discern his great concern about political problems. Actually, the preface and the conclusion of Totality and Infinity show that his real topic is peace and war. It reminds me of another great book, Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, which can be considered to be the first book of modern political philosophy or the modern Bible. The topic of Leviathan is also peace and war. SUN XIANGCHEN, Professor, Department of Philosophy, Fudan University. Specialties: French philosophy, Lévinas, political philosophy, history of early modern philosophy. E-mail:
[email protected] Lévinas: Chinese and Western Perspectives Editor by Nicholas Bunnin, Dachun Yang, and Linyu Gu © 2008 Journal of Chinese Philosophy. ISBN: 978-1-405-19545-4
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According to Hobbes’s logic, there is initially a natural state of war. In order to escape violent death, people want to enter into political society, and finally morality is established to guarantee peace and stability within this political framework. This logic is opposed by Lévinas, who holds to a logic according to which we have no possibility of escaping war. For Lévinas, war is a normal state of the Western world, and the Second World War is the necessary result of the Western political tradition. We can even say that it resulted from traditional Western philosophy, which has a possessive orientation, as the extreme expression of the Western ontological tradition. Even in ancient Greece, Heraclitus had already held that being reveals itself as war. The modern world shows this tendency to war more strongly than ever, but the root of this tendency is still in the ancient ontological tradition, which pursues sameness and totality, implying some kind of violence. I think that this is the ultimate reason why Lévinas is prepared to struggle with the whole Western philosophical tradition. The defect of this tradition is not, as claimed by Heidegger, in the oblivion of Being, but is in the oblivion of the other, or rather, in the suppression of the other. Hegel seemed to pay more attention to the other than other philosophers in the Western tradition, but in fact what Hegel does is to transform the other into his own wholeness. Lévinas’s position is totally different, opposing this tradition from Greece to Heidegger, including the Hegelian attitude to the other, by placing not ontology but ethics as first philosophy. From this point of view, he also opposes the structure of modern society by claiming that society should be based on the ethical and not the political. If politics is the basis of the whole society, Lévinas’s question in the preface to Totality and Infinity, “whether we are not duped by morality”1 would be crucial. Because war, which is behind modern politics, suspends the strength of morality, Hobbes held that morality could be a cheat. For political reasons, the sovereign could even burn all the books of geometry, which Hobbes regards as the sole gift from God.2 Because this is precisely what Lévinas cannot accept, he must seek another foundation for society in order to limit the logic of politics and violence within politics. Lévinas wants to establish a prepolitical ethics, which can overturn the logic of war underlying the political. Lévinas thinks that modern political theory is based on individualism and calculation, by which modern society is built up. If so, there is no chance to avoid violence and war. From the viewpoint of Hobbes, there are only two kinds of peace: Cold peace, in which people are scared of each other and keep a terrible balance, and the peace of sovereignty, in which there is one sovereignty with the rest of the population as subjects. We can imagine that the background of this
lévinas’s critique of modern political philosophy 157 theory of peace is war. From Hobbes to utilitarianism, the inner logic of calculation is same. By this calculation, peace is temporary, utilitarian, and only the interval between wars. Regarding the question of whether the basis of society is political or ethical, Lévinas’s answer is clear: It is definitely ethical. When Lévinas tries to resolve the tension between the political and the ethical, he does not rest on the political, like modern philosophers. He seeks to justify a prepolitical ethical life-world to serve as the foundation of the political. This is what Lévinas has done in Totality and Infinity. He appeals to other resource of thought in the world, such as Jewish tradition, although he does not refer to it directly. He considers that the only real peace is a kind of messianic peace: Morality will oppose politics in history and will have gone beyond the functions of prudence or the canons of the beautiful to proclaim itself unconditional and universal when the eschatology of messianic peace will have come to superpose itself upon the ontology of war.3
This is Lévinas’s view of peace, which has a strong Jewish accent. Husserl regards European civilization as having a universal and absolute significance for all human beings and considers Indian or Chinese culture as having only an empirical anthropological meaning. Lévinas seeks to show how Jewish thought has transcended a narrow anthropological meaning to exert a universal influence on the whole of humanity. In this way, ethics has a special status in philosophy. It is the vision of first philosophy, which is beyond nature, history, and the world, and is prior to the distinction between theory and practice. We can say the life-world is originally ethical, which is the safeguard of truth, freedom, and equality.
II. Opposition to Hobbes: You Shall Not Commit Murder Thomas Hobbes is regarded as the first modern political philosopher to form a new basis, other than ancient Greek thought, for modern political philosophy. He has had great impact on modern society. According to Hobbes’s interpretation of human nature, first, men pursue their interests and avoid harm naturally; and, second, men are all equal, because even “the weakest has strength to kill the strongest.” They have an equal natural right to pursue their own interests and to realize their own ends, and this right is limitless. In nature, there is no rule of life at all, with the clear result that “every man has a right to everything, even to one another’s body.”4 This means you endeavor to destroy, or subdue the Other; dispossess, and deprive him, not only of the fruit of his labor, but also of his life, or liberty.5 It is so-called
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jungle principle. For Hobbes, the starting point of his political idea is that you can kill the Other, in the name of your self-conservation or for your own benefit. The most outstanding feature of modern political thought is its emphasis on “power.” Power is the original strength on which will be built all political construction and distribution. Modern political philosophy is also called the philosophy of right. Obviously, if everyone uses his power without limitation, the result is necessarily cruel competition. This is the real source of all conflicts. Hobbes thinks there are three elements leading to conflict: competition, diffidence, and Glory. If there is no common power to be abided, war is the state of nature: A war of every man against every man.6 The problem of war is the biggest problem of human existence. People will live in a state of terror, violence, and poverty. That is the reason why men and women need political society. Without political society, human existence will be destroyed and human society will no longer survive. People must extricate themselves from this predicament. Contrary to Hobbes’s fundamental position, Lévinas has a totally different standpoint. For Hobbes, every man has a right to everything, even to the bodies of others, but for Lévinas, the starting point of his theory is the command “you shall not commit murder” that is revealed by the epiphany of the Other’s face. Through his phenomenological description and analysis of face, Lévinas shows that the face of the Other, as something different from other beings, presents a transcendent dimension beyond being and forbids us to kill. The epiphany of the Other’s face “exceeds my powers infinitely, and therefore does not oppose them but paralyzes the very power of power.”7 Hobbes’s infinite natural right of the I has an obstacle in the Other’s face, which hinders my possession of the whole world. Based on my natural right, I will destroy, and even deprive the Other of life. In this situation, Lévinas held, “the Other is the sole being I can wish to kill.”8 But, when I meet with the Other’s face, I not only stop killing, but also need to respond to him. This is the origin of the ethical. For Lévinas, if human society wants to survive, Hobbes’s kind of human nature must be reversed. He thinks that access to the face is straightaway ethical; it overturns the natural intention of human beings. And for Hobbes, he distinguishes natural right from natural law, and then according to the natural rule “Do not do to another, that which you would not have done to yourself” stops killing and keeps the peace. Lévinas thinks that natural law is essentially a calculation and that in the history of political thought the theory of natural law was replaced with utilitarianism. Lévinas believes that there is another logic which does not come from human nature, but from a transcendent dimension through the Other’s face. “This infinity,
lévinas’s critique of modern political philosophy 159 stronger than murder, already resists us in his face, is his face, is the primordial expression, is the first word: ‘you shall not commit murder.’ ”9 In an original sense, it is not human nature, but something otherwise than human nature, that will be the basis of political philosophy. It is a dividing line: On one side, it is the principle of modern political philosophy; on the other side, it is Lévinas’s work, a new basis for political philosophy, and a criticism of modernity. Lévinas provides another choice to the Hobbesian position. If we accept Lévinas’s starting point, we would overturn the whole basis of modern political ideas.
III. Opposition to John Locke: Restoration of Paternality The overall characteristic of modern philosophy is individualism and atomism, and the same is true of modern political philosophy. In order to establish modern individualist political philosophy, modern philosophers must try to destroy the Patriarch, just like John Locke’s criticism of Sir Robert Filmer. Filmer thinks that the first kings were fathers of families and that this constitutes the origin of the whole political system and is also the basis of monarchical power. Locke agrees that parents have a temporary power over their children, but this power is not an arbitrary dominion. Children do not have mature understanding to take the government of their will, and the ignorance and infirmities of childhood stand in need of restraint and correction from their parents. But once they have mature understanding, they are fully free, “without any dominion left in the father over the life, liberty or estate of his son.”10 As a result, political power is totally different from paternal power. When a person comes of age, why does paternality still has some authority? Locke’s explanation is that fathers have the right to give property to their favorite children, so that they can oblige their children to show obedience to themselves. This is also based on a kind of consent, a kind of contract, but not on consanguineous relationship. Locke shows us how he replaces the principle of family with the principle of politics, replaces family relationship with individualism, and replaces consanguineous relationship with property. In this respect, Lévinas holds an opposite position to John Locke. In a sense, he reinstates paternality in political philosophy in a very special way. In the fourth part of Totality and Infinity, Lévinas gives us a phenomenology of Eros, which attracts feminism very much. But this part of phenomenology is not limited to Eros, and the whole process of this dialectic is more complicated. By means of a description of fecundity, Lévinas puts forward many concepts, such as pater-
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nality, filiality, fraternity, and election, which are about family, and these provide material for Lévinas to reconstruct the basis of society. As described by Lévinas, the relationship between the son and the father is a special kind of relation between myself and the Other. Although the possibility of the son is not the possibility of the father, it is still the possibility of the father in a sense that is difficult to understand from the individualistic perspective. In Lévinas’s context, the relationship with the feminine will merge into the darkness of night, into “il y a,” while the relationship with the son is open to the future. Lévinas always says that I am my son, meaning that I will survive in my son’s substance. This is what Lévinas understands by his new concept of trans-substance. Lévinas deconstructs the closure of individualism and opens it for the future. If Heidegger uses “death” to understand the limit of human existence, Lévinas uses “fecundity” to understand the infinite possibility of existence. We must be concerned with this very important dimension of Lévinas’s philosophy in understanding his approach to the field of political philosophy. For Lévinas, there is not only the relationship between father and sons, but also the relationship among brothers, through the medium of father. Thus, Lévinas goes from paternality to fraternity. In Lévinas’s philosophy, this is the starting point for moving from the family to the political level. Lévinas provides a new way to explore the equality and love between brothers, which will be the new foundation of social relations. Fraternity is the guarantee of the ethical relationship, which is opened by the Other’s face. “Fraternity is the very relation with the face in which at the same time my election and equality, that is, the mastery exercised over me by the other, are accomplished.”11 Here, fraternity is closely connected to Lévinas’s description of the face and is also the secret basis for my relation with the face of the Other. It is fraternity that creates the possibility of my responsibility. The relation with the face in fraternity, where in his turn the Other appears in solidarity with all the others, constitutes the social order, the reference of every dialogue to the third party by which the We—or the parti—encompasses the face to face opposition, opens the erotic upon a social life, all signifyingness and decency, which encompasses the structure of the family itself.12
The relationship with the face makes the interpersonal an asymmetric relation, which can not be the direct basis of politics.13 Fraternity has two functions, one directed to the relation with the face and the other directed to solidarity with all others. Fraternity itself means an equality that is not according to the principle of individualism, but is equality under a common father. In fraternity, Lévinas completes the process from Eros to social life. We can see that Lévinas leads paternality to play a new role in political life by helping people to establish
lévinas’s critique of modern political philosophy 161 the relationship of equality with Others. This relationship is the new basis for political philosophy. The very status of the human implies fraternity and the idea of the human race. Fraternity is radically opposed to the conception of a humanity united by resemblance, a multiplicity of diverse families arisen from the stones cast behind by Deucalion, and which, across the struggle of egoism, results in a human city.14
Fraternity, which is based on paternality, has a great impact on human society. It is not limited to the problem of family, but is a new basis for community. In this way, it shows some shadow of Jewish tradition.
IV. Opposition to Hume: Morality Presides over the Work of Truth We know modern politics, even from Machiavelli,15 is based on the theory of a gap between fact and value, according to which politics should free itself from theological and moral judgment. Hume’s philosophy gives us a classic statement of this distinction. Hume said, “the rules of morality are not conclusions of our reason.”16 Our reason can only compare different ideas or reasoning from one idea to another, but morality calls up the passions to do, or not to do, something. Hume gives a very clear and logical distinction between “ought” and “is,” between factual statements which describe what the world is and value judgments which prescribe what acts we ought to do.17 Although this kind of distinction is common in modern philosophy, it is clear that beginning with Hume it became common sense in modern moral philosophy. On this view, the moral is not based on reason, but involves awaking the passions. This distinction provides very important theoretical foundations for modern political thought to transcend classic political thought and becomes a science. As a science, it does not determine norms for people’s behavior, but analyzes people’s political action and models their behavior. Reason in this science can do nothing with value judgment. Many scholars believe that politics cannot provide any guidance to value or to political meaning and standards. Political science has grown within such a framework. In contrast, Lévinas’s position is that the ethical is prior to truth. Ethics as first philosophy questions the value neutrality of the factual proposition and the ontological basis of a distinction between fact and value. For Lévinas, the factual proposition without dialogue is totally different from discourse conducted face to face. The saying is prior to the said, to the proposition, and saying implies the Other’s existence
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and my response. The so-called purely objective world, which like Descartes’s world could be created by a devil who deceives men, is an impersonal world without a starting point and without principle—it is a nonhuman world. For Lévinas, the life-world has a starting point in consciousness of the Other and responsibility for the Other. It refuses to be an impersonal world that, in fact, puts the I at its center. On the contrary, Lévinas opens a space for the Other and for the dimension of infinity. Lévinas regards this dimension as the premise of all knowledge, which belongs to the domain of the Same and Being and to the world of intention of violence. For Lévinas, justice means responsibility for the Other, and in this way, “truth presupposes justice.”18 Without justice, we have no right to talk about truth. Modern political philosophy, especially utilitarianism, wants to establish the basic and purely factual that is impossible for Lévinas’s thought. For Lévinas, the responsibility for the Other is primary, and pure fact does not exist. Indeed, stating the “fact” implies that all judgment and responsibility are mine. In this sense, we can say “morality thus presides over the work of truth.”19 This is the Lévinasian answer to the question how knowledge and science are possible. In a sense, Lévinas overturns another fundamental modern political idea. V. Freedom and the Priority of Responsibility In modern political philosophy, regardless of whether we turn to Locke or Rousseau, freedom is of the first importance: “Man is born free.”20 It seems that freedom does not need to be justified. As we know, modern liberalism is based on individualism, focuses on everyone’s power and interests, and stresses one’s own right. So when we see how Lévinas criticizes individualism, we can draw conclusions about his attitude to freedom. Freedom, according to Isaiah Berlin, is the freedom to do something without the Other’s obstruction. For this reason, the Other has a very negative meaning for my freedom. In modern political philosophy, the Other is regarded as an obstacle, and there is a feeling of hostility toward the Other. Philosophers from Hobbes to Sartre have different philosophical views, but maintain the same attitude to the Other. Someone is free only when he has autonomy without any obstruction and does what he wants to do; otherwise, we cannot say that someone is free. Freedom for modern philosophy is right and proper without any further justification. If the Other is a negative moment in such a concept of freedom, for Lévinas the Other has a positive meaning for my existence as my ethical resource. Furthermore, Lévinas sharply questions this concept of freedom. “The face is to put my ontological right to exist-
lévinas’s critique of modern political philosophy 163 ence into question,”21 and the ontological right to existence is synonymous with liberty or freedom. For Lévinas, freedom is not a self-sufficient conception, is not enough for one’s life, and cannot be justified by itself. If freedom has priority, the precondition of Hobbesian political philosophy is necessary: You have a right to everything, even to the Other’s body. For Lévinas, although the epiphany of the face is a limit to my power and freedom and “to approach the Other is to put into question my freedom,”22 the Other’s presence is still very important in my life, as argued in most of Totality and Infinity. Against the traditional concept of freedom, Lévinas claimed: “Existence is not in reality condemned to freedom, but is invested as freedom.”23 For Sartre, men are condemned to freedom. According to Lévinas’s emphasis on “investing,” freedom is not self-sufficient and “freedom is not justified by freedom.”24 Rather, freedom must be invested from the outside, from the height. Lévinas believes, as shown in the title of his work Difficult Freedom, “Ethical freedom is a difficulty liberty, a heteronomous freedom obliged to the other.”25 We cannot discuss freedom without the consciousness of responsibility; freedom of the subject is neither the highest nor the most fundamental value, and responsibility is prior to freedom.
VI. Justice and the Third Party A core value of modern political thought is equality. For instance, Hobbes pays great attention to arguing for the idea of equality. Hobbes’s argument relies on various grounds, such as human nature, human psychology, natural right, natural law, and civil law. In contrast, Lévinas insists on the ethical asymmetry between the Other and the I. The Other is higher than me and makes moral demands on me. On the social level, there is a problem regarding how this asymmetrical relationship between the Other and the I becomes equality among people. Lévinas agrees that equality is necessary for justice, but he argues for this in a way that is totally different from Hobbes. He avoids any argument that is from a total perspective, that is from the human genus, or that is universalized; otherwise, Lévinas’s position as a whole will be challenged. For Lévinas, “equality is produced where the other commands the same and reveals himself to the same in responsibility; otherwise it is but an abstract idea and a word.”26 Although I have an asymmetric relation with the Other, Lévinas acknowledges that equality is very important on the level of politics. As we have mentioned, the concept of fraternity helps us to proceed from asymmetry to equality. Lévinas’s more crucial theory, which
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balances this difficult position, is his thought on “the third.” Lévinas puts forward various versions of this very complicated theory, which seeks to allow the possibility of political equality and justice.27 One version holds that the face of the Other reveals not only this unique Other but a third and a fourth and an nth Other, all equal to the first Other insofar as they are all equally unique, naked, and devoid of particular properties.28 The “third party” reveals countless subjects. Although it interrupts the close connection between the Other and me, it allows the possibility of social justice. We need to establish some organization, institution, system, and principle to treat any other man equally, not according to modern social contract theory or in terms of universal consent, but based on Lévinas’s theory that equality in the public sphere is very important, but that the asymmetry between the I and the Other is primary and equality is secondary.
VII. Pluralism and Peace In the history of Western thought, plurality, compared with the One, is always a defect. Although Hegel gives room for the other and plurality, in the end for him the other still belongs to the One, wholeness, and totality. In the modern world, liberalism also gives great room for plurality, but along with plurality comes relativism and nihilism. How can we retain plurality, while simultaneously giving enough respect to something absolute, such as the Other? Lévinas’s philosophy provides a possibility for this kind of plurality, a plurality with absolute difference and not a multitude of the same. It is the conclusion of Totality and Infinity that in the transcendent and ethical relationship with the Other, we can discover the implications of such a plurality and, at the same time, grasp something absolute. He says: the face to face is a final and irreducible relation which no concept could cover without the thinker who thinks that concept finding himself forthwith before a new interlocutor; it makes possible the pluralism of society.29
In this way, there is goodness and transcendence in this plurality and no violence. Because the I gives respect to the Other, it maintain plurality and respect at the same time. Once the plurality is a real possibility, peace is possible. Lévinas returns to and appeals to Hebrew tradition, not only because of the abstract harm of Greek tradition, but more importantly because of the crisis of modernity. Although Lévinas’s thought seems utopian and unrealistic, it is still a voice other than the Greek
lévinas’s critique of modern political philosophy 165 voice and other than modernity with a Greek root. It reveals another direction that might help us to face the modern world and make an alternative to violence possible. FUDAN UNIVERSITY Shanghai, China
Endnotes 1. Emmanuel Lévinas, Totality and Infinity (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 21. 2. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 74. 3. Ibid., 22. 4. Ibid., 91. 5. Ibid., 87. 6. Ibid., 88. 7. Lévinas, Totality and Infinity, 198. 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid., 199. 10. John Locke, Two Treatises of Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 307. 11. Lévinas, Totality and Infinity, 279. 12. Ibid., 280. 13. Cf. ibid., 215. 14. Ibid., 214. 15. Cf. Niccoló Machiavelli, The Prince (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 61. 16. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1958), 457. 17. Cf. ibid., 469. 18. Lévinas, Totality and Infinity, 90. 19. Ibid., 304. 20. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 351. 21. Richard A. Cohen, ed., Face to Face with Lévinas (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986), 24. 22. Lévinas, Totality and Infinity, 303. 23. Ibid., 84. 24. Ibid., 303. 25. Cohen, Face to Face with Lévinas, 27. 26. Lévinas, Totality and Infinity, 214. 27. Cf. Emmanuel Lévinas, “The Ego and the Totality,” in Collected Philosophical Papers of Lévinas, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987), 25–45; Lévinas, Totality and Infinity; and Emmanuel Lévinas, Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981). 28. Cf. Adriaan Peperzak, To the Other (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 1993), 168. 29. Lévinas, Totality and Infinity, 291.
robert bernasconi
EXTRATERRITORIALITY: OUTSIDE THE SUBJECT, OUTSIDE THE STATE 1 In his Preface to Beyond the Verse, written in 1981, Emmanuel Lévinas poses the following provocative question: “Can democracy and the ‘rights of man’ divorce themselves without danger from their prophetic and ethical depth?”2 The question is clearly intended to threaten the comfortable consensus that has gathered around these icons of our time and, more specifically, to displace the rights of man from the context of the European Enlightenment with which they are so often identified. Lévinas performs this act of displacement in the first instance by relocating them within the tradition of the Jewish prophets. However, this effort ultimately leads him to a more radical displacement, one that amounts to a certain re-placing of them, a relocating of them elsewhere altogether. What does that mean? What are its implications for the doctrine of rights of man? In “The Rights of Man and the Rights of the Other,” an article written about the same time as the Preface to Beyond the Verse, Lévinas explains that the rights of man find their justification not within the political sphere alone, but outside the state from what he calls somewhat enigmatically “extraterritoriality.” More specifically, he refers to “a kind of extra-territoriality, like that of prophecy in the face of the political powers of the Old Testament.”3 This is his answer to his question in the Preface to Beyond the Verse, albeit it is formulated in a language that will take some unpacking. My aim in this article is to throw some light on both these notions of an “extraterritoriality” and an “outside the state,” and in particular to pose the question of what they reveal about Lévinas’s relation to liberalism. Within Western political thought, since the seventeenth century, to be “outside the state” is to be in the state of nature. Does Lévinas’s use of the phrases “outside the state” and “extraterritoriality” amount to an underwriting of the state of nature? Does he join with liberalism in locating the basis of the rights of man in the state of nature? Indeed, does Lévinas’s appeal to the rights of man align him with liberalism?
ROBERT BERNASCONI, Lillian and Morrie Moss Professor, Department of Philosophy, University of Memphis. Specialties: Heidegger, Derrida, Gadamer. E-mail: rbernscn@ memphis.edu
Lévinas: Chinese and Western Perspectives Editor by Nicholas Bunnin, Dachun Yang, and Linyu Gu © 2008 Journal of Chinese Philosophy. ISBN: 978-1-405-19545-4
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In the sentence that follows the reference to the defense of the rights of man to extraterritoriality, Lévinas explicitly evokes liberalism and its contribution to the attempt to bring ethics and politics into relation: “The capacity to guarantee that extra-territoriality and that independence defines the liberal state and describes the modality according to which the conjunction of politics and ethics is intrinsically possible.”4 This is not Lévinas’s only endorsement of liberalism. In an interview from 1988, he suggests that democracy and liberalism provide the possibility for an ethical corrective of politics. The work of justice involves comparing what is incomparable, but this cannot be done with a good conscience. That is why one must always be trying to correct the severity of justice, not least by enacting new legislation. Lévinas privileges liberalism in this regard. He writes: “That is perhaps the very excellence of democracy, whose fundamental liberalism corresponds to the ceaseless deep remorse of justice: legislation, always unfinished, always resumed, a legislation open to the better.”5 Lévinas in this place seems to be inviting his readers to think of him as an adherent of liberalism and some scholars read him this way uncritically.6 However, what makes this apparent celebration of liberalism somewhat surprising is the fact that Lévinas was, from the time of his earliest articles, and most notably in “Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism” from 1934, outspoken in his critique of liberalism. He there acknowledges a certain debt of liberalism to the Judeo-Christian conception of freedom, but his focus is on the way that liberation by grace came in the course of the Western tradition to be replaced in liberalism by autonomy.7 This leads him to offer the following critique: Man in the liberal world does not choose his destiny under the weight of history. He does not know his possibilities as troubled forces churning within, that already orient him on a determined track. He sees them simply as logical possibilities offered to serene reason that chooses while eternally keeping its distance.8
Lévinas here is not simply drawing a distinction between positive and negative freedom: It is not a matter of a “freedom for” giving way to “freedom from.” He believes that, prior to modernity and at least in the West, freedom meant being captivated, and it was only subsequently confined to the now more familiar idea of a capacity to make arbitrary choices. Freedom, hitherto located in the whole human being, was in liberalism concentrated in the realm of thought. Furthermore, Lévinas judges that a high price was paid for that shift in focus. It was on his analysis this degenerate conception of freedom, which included liberation from one’s body, that deprived Europe of the adequate intellectual resources to combat Hitlerism.9 By denying the evident significance of the body, liberalism left biological deter-
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minism without a credible alternative. Lévinas already in 1934 sets out to find a way beyond both liberalism and Hitlerism. Immediately after the end of the Second World War, in a brief article welcoming Sartre’s Anti-Semite and Jew, Lévinas renews his attack on liberalism. In the present context, this text is significant because in it we see Lévinas putting in question the ideas of the rights of man. Lévinas complains that the Enlightenment was one-sided in its tendency to subordinate the world of concrete economic and social conditions to the inner realm in which thought is free. He employs an anecdote to illustrate the problem: In a memorandum that UNESCO recently circulated among philosophers, while preparing a report for the UN on the rights of man, the emphasis is on the antinomy facing reason when it tries to specify human rights: personal freedom is inconceivable without economic liberation, while the organization of economic freedom isn’t possible without an enslavement of the moral person—temporary but for an indeterminate duration.10
This antinomy has not only been the classic dilemma that all developing countries have faced in modernity when they are determining their order of priorities, but also been the choice that since the late 1940s the two dominant ideologies imposed on those countries. But that is perhaps only another version of the problem that Lévinas already identifies in “Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism”: Either one allows human thought to be overwhelmed by historical, social, and economic phenomena or the concrete situation in which we find ourselves is reduced to mere thought and structures of knowledge.11 Lévinas continues the same train of thought in “The I and the Totality.” He explains that “The impasse of liberalism resides in the exteriority of my consciousness to myself,” an exteriority that exhibits one’s lack of identity with oneself.12 One finds the law of one’s actions, the meaning of one’s existence, even one’s own self-consciousness, not in the depths of one’s heart or in introspection, but outside oneself.13 It is outside oneself that one is asked to give an account of oneself.14 This is the crucial first step in Lévinas’s attempt to overcome the opposition between individualism and communitarianism, the alternatives that, in one form or another, have shaped political philosophy since the advent of modernity. It starts from the insight in 1934 that there is no isolated individual identical with himself or herself and culminates in 1968 in the insight that the self as self is for the other to the point of substitution, but nevertheless still separate from the other.15 Lévinas was not the only philosopher who was convinced of the ultimate inability of liberalism to combat the threat posed by totali-
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tarianism. Hannah Arendt’s questioning of the capacity of the rights of man to serve as a resource with which to combat the persecution of stateless refugees paralleled Lévinas’s own sense that liberalism and the much-vaunted values of the European Enlightenment were illequipped to combat Hitlerism at its core. Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism in 1951 complained that the existence of stateless refugees had shown that the idea of the rights of man was worthless: The refugee was by definition stateless and as such without protection. Civil rights, the rights that belonged to citizens as such, proved to be the only rights worth having. As a mere human being who lacked citizenship, there was nobody to turn to on whom one could rely.16 In 1973, Lévinas echoed Arendt’s observation and associated it with his earlier suspicion of liberalism when, in “Antihumanism and Education,” after recalling the inhumanity of men toward their fellow men in the twentieth century, he asked himself: “Is this the fragility of humanism in Western liberalism? Is it a basic inability to guarantee the privileges of humanity of which humanism had considered itself the repository?” Lévinas answered: “We, as Jews, were the first to feel it.”17 So what led Lévinas to be apparently more open to liberalism by the time of “The Rights of Man and the Rights of the Other”? One cannot be sure, but the historical record points to Lévinas’s study of the eighteenth-century Jewish thinker, Moses Mendelssohn. This took place when Lévinas responded to an invitation to write a preface to a French translation of Mendelssohn’s masterpiece, Jerusalem. There are very few other references to Mendelssohn elsewhere in Lévinas’s writings, but this preface offers one of his few major discussions of an Enlightenment thinker. It is also his only prolonged discussion of any political thinker as such.18 In his article on Mendelssohn, Lévinas does not step back from his critique of “the fragility of Europe’s democratic institutions, which were unable to prevent two world wars, fascism and Auschwitz,”19 but he also acknowledges the historical impact of the idea of natural rights, particularly for Jews, whose emancipation preceded and survived the Holocaust. This text is of more than marginal interest here because Lévinas identifies Mendelssohn as a representative of liberalism.20 Nevertheless, it is important to understand that Lévinas recognizes this as a different kind of liberalism because of its radically different conceptions of freedom and of the relation between religion and the state. Lévinas makes clear that the Holocaust and the advent of the new philosophical framework introduced by phenomenology have made much of Mendelssohn’s philosophy unsustainable today. He celebrates the continuing relevance of Mendelssohn’s “liberalist scruples,”21 but at the same time insists that the conception of freedom
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Mendelssohn introduced requires “a philosophical elaboration more complex” than that which Mendelssohn could provide in the context of the Enlightenment. I shall show here that “The Rights of Man and the Rights of the Other” is an attempt to supply this “more complex” elaboration in the form of an implicit critique of the original framework on which Mendelssohn relied. What is at stake is indicated by Lévinas when he explains that Mendelssohn’s idea of freedom needs “a less abstract theology and an eschatology less unproblematically optimistic.”22 Lévinas thereby announces that he plans to develop an idea of concrete freedom within the context of an eschatology divorced from teleology.23 Such an eschatology would owe little or nothing to the philosophy of history introduced by Kant and Hegel and instead draw on Judaism. According to Lévinas, the Jews of the nineteenth century already recognized in Mendelssohn’s ideas of freedom and of the rights of man “something close to their own prophetic traditions.”24 However, it should be emphasized that although Lévinas, so far as I am aware, nowhere identifies a prophetic dimension in liberalism, except in relation to Mendelssohn, he goes out of his way to emphasize a prophetic dimension to Marxism, which he characterizes as having the interrupting force of ethics.25 This is, at least in part, because he appreciated its strong commitment to the poor and oppressed. In order to emphasize the Judaic heritage he shares with Mendelssohn, Lévinas, when introducing Mendelssohn’s radical idea of freedom, recalls the title of his first collection of confessional writings, Difficult Freedom.26 To be sure, in this book, Lévinas is clearer about the philosophical problem posed by freedom than he is about the solution. When, in “A Religion for Adults,” he asks how Judaism integrated the need for a virtually vertiginous freedom into a desire for transcendence, he is in fact identifying a dilemma that haunts his own thinking from beginning to end.27 Nevertheless, elsewhere in the book, he brilliantly encapsulates his conception of freedom: “[M]an’s freedom is that of an emancipated man remembering his servitude and feeling solidarity for all enslaved peoples.”28 This sentence goes to the heart of Lévinas’s philosophy, a philosophy born not from the individual’s experience of an arbitrary free choice,29 but from the solidarity that emerges among the oppressed from suffering at the hands of others. In that context freedom emerges as moral freedom.30 Surprisingly, given the idiosyncrasies of most of Lévinas’s readings in the history of philosophy, his exposition of Mendelssohn relies on the best scholarship available to him. More specifically, he draws heavily on Alexander Altmann’s article, “The Quest for Liberty in Moses Mendelssohn’s Political Philosophy.”31 What Altmann supplies, and what Lévinas certainly would not have been able to provide on
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his own, was an account of what is original in Mendelssohn’s contribution to social contract theory. Mendelssohn radicalizes the sense in which the freedom of natural law cannot be limited by the social contract, by insisting that the social contract is for the pursuit of securing that freedom. Mendelssohn does not understand the social contract as a way to guarantee security. There is not, as in Hobbes, an exchange where one sacrifices a measure of one’s freedom the better to enjoy what freedom is left to one. Freedom is moral freedom, in the sense of the exercising of beneficence, which one can only do effectively as a citizen.32 According to Mendelssohn, in the state of nature one is already looking for fulfillment in beneficence. That is why he can say that it is for the sake of promoting beneficence that one takes on citizenship through the social contract.33 One enters society not to avoid a state of war but to fulfill a preexisting obligation, an obligation from which no agreement, tacit, or explicit could release one. It is in that sense that Altmann attributes to Mendelssohn “a moral, even a metaphysical” quality to freedom in its inalienability, a point Lévinas makes his own by referring to a “quasi-ontological impossibility of relinquishing one’s freedom.”34 Lévinas repeatedly complains that the fact that the traditional conception of the rights of man are based on the right to a free will lead social contract theory to be faced with the problem of competing freedoms.35 In other words, because social contract theory takes its starting point in the individual within the state of nature, the advent of society is understood as a necessary attempt to address the problem of constraining and limiting those competing freedoms in such a way that we are persuaded to believe that we have imposed these limitations on ourselves. This complaint mirrors Mendelssohn’s critique of his predecessors in social contract theory, and, following Altmann, Lévinas judges that when Mendelssohn presents freedom as a right and a duty at the same time it is in order to negotiate this problem.36 Indeed, according to Altmann, Mendelssohn believes that rights flow from obligations.37 This idea reemerges transformed in Lévinas’s “The Rights of Man and the Rights of the Other” as the claim that the original manifestation of the rights of man is in the form of rights for the other and duty for an I.38 Lévinas expresses a similar idea in another article from 1981, “The Prohibition against Representation and ‘the Rights of Man.’”39 He again summarizes his thoughts on rights in a way that suggests his proximity to Mendelssohn: “You shall not kill” is not simply a prohibition but means “You shall cause your neighbour to live.” He adds: “Event of sociality prior to all association in the name of an abstract and common ‘humanity.’ The right of man, absolutely and originally, takes on meaning only in the other, as the right of the other man. A
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right with respect to which I am never released!”40 This last phrase echoes Mendelssohn’s recognition that leaving the state of nature by way of the social contract cannot release one from the obligations existing there. Unlike the traditional perspective on the rights of man, which highlights the struggle between my rights and those of others, such that it seems that my rights can always be compromised by the rights of the other, Lévinas highlights the fact that the other’s rights represent obligations for me. This is not just a typical Lévinasian assertion of the asymmetry of ethics. It is a phenomenological point about how rights appear, as Lévinas is careful to specify.41 Rights do not become manifest when I make demands for myself. This is indistinguishable from egoism. As he said many years earlier, “My consciousness of my I reveals no right to me. My freedom shows itself to be arbitrary.”42 Rights appear as such only when one comes to the defense of others.43 In other words, Lévinas takes from the traditional idea of the rights of man its formal structure as a priori, but locates the concretization of the rights elsewhere than where the tradition finds them. They are no longer to be understood as concretized originally in the right of a free will, but in the rights of the other.44 Hence, Lévinas describes the transcendent dimension of the exercise of freedom in these terms: “. . . the I frees itself from its ‘return to self,’ from its auto-affirmation, from its egotism of a being persevering in its being, to answer for the other, precisely to defend the rights of the other man.”45 However, Lévinas’s theory passes beyond phenomenology. In locating originary right in the rights of others, he thereby locates it not only apart from the state but also beyond the subject. Rights are located “outside the subject,” to employ the phrase he used as the title of the book in which he published “The Rights of Man and the Rights of the Other.” It needs to be understood that when Lévinas refers to an “extraterritoriality” beyond political society, he is not invoking anything like a state of nature, but distancing himself from any such framework. To be sure, he initially used the term “extraterritoriality” in Totality and Infinity in his discussion of the home or domicile: “Man has overcome the elements only by surmounting this interiority without issue by the domicile, which confers upon him an extraterritoriality.”46 This extraterritoriality is “produced in the gentleness or the warmth of intimacy” in a welcome that is itself “produced primordially in the gentleness of the feminine face.”47 In this way, Lévinas seeks to combat totalitarianism, which is defined in part by its denial of any “outside the state.” But as a number of critics have noticed, this account of extraterritoriality seems to be in danger of confining the feminine to the home, which would reproduce for women the same exclusion from which Mendelssohn suffered as a Jew. That is why it is
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so important when we read the paragraph on extraterritoriality from “The Rights of Man and the Rights of the Other” to understand that the term “extraterritoriality” is being used in a very different way. It can no longer be construed as simply referring to a private realm outside the state such as we find it in classical liberalism. Lévinas’s discussion of Mendelssohn is indispensable: It offers some guidance as to how to relate his somewhat enigmatic language to the social contract tradition in all its variations. Although many adherents of the social contract tradition see themselves as promoting freedom, it seems likely that when Lévinas presents Mendelssohn as a philosopher who, writing from the experience of oppression, promotes natural law as “mankind’s protection against oppression,”48 he means to distinguish him from the others. Altmann provides the basis for this interpretation by relating Mendelssohn’s account of freedom to his experience of being excluded from citizenship as a Jew. The question facing Mendelssohn as a Jew was whether a Christian society could legitimately constrain dissidents.49 Mendelssohn was dissatisfied with the standard liberal solution whereby one submits to the state in the public realm but exercises freedom of conscience privately.50 He rejected the radical separation of private and public that was reflected in conventional liberalism’s sharp division between religion and the state. By emphasizing the function of religion, its right to admonish, instruct, fortify, and comfort, Mendelssohn brought church and state into contact.51 However, neither church, nor state had a right to subject man’s principles and convictions to coercion.52 Altmann claims that Mendelssohn was particularly concerned with the danger that some people might focus exclusively on cultivating religion in private at the expense of the affairs of this world, a concern which was also Lévinas’s, as is apparent from his refusal to find in mysticism the concretization of transcendence, insisting instead that transcendence is produced as ethics and fecundity. But Lévinas also knew the danger in granting autonomy to the political. He thus attempted to locate the rights of man not as what politics must secure, or even as the very foundation of the political, but at the point of intersection of ethics and politics.53 What is of lasting significance in Lévinas’s question about whether “the rights of man” can be divorced from their prophetic and ethical depths is the way that it highlights the dangers that ensue once politics—however well-intentioned in terms of its goal—is separated from ethics, as, for example, when the expectation of some desired result distracts attention from the atrocities that occur along the way, allowing them to be dismissed as so much “collateral damage.” Even though the relation of ethics to politics dominates the Preface to Totality and Infinity from the opening sentences about war and moral-
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ity, there is no final resolution of this problem within the confines of the book because Lévinas never fully follows through on the reconception of ethics as an eschatology, understood as “a relation with being beyond the totality or beyond history.”54 This is perhaps because Totality and Infinity is directed primarily against totalitarianism, and so Lévinas is content to look to the family as the concretization of that “outside the state” which nevertheless reserves a place for the state, even as it resists totalitarianism’s claims to dominate everything. Hegelianism, which regards the family as merely “a step toward the anonymous universality of the State”55 is thereby resisted. But when, at the beginning of the 1980s, Lévinas interrogates democracy and the rights of man a more nuanced approach is called for, one that calls for a transformation of the meaning of “extraterritoriality.” To be sure, as I shall show, Lévinas had already prepared for this transformation, but until then he had not seen the need to address directly how his own still embryonic account of the relation of ethics and politics necessitates a refiguring of the relation of the private and the public. Lévinas introduces the central paragraph of “The Rights of Man and the Rights of the Other” by recalling that the quest for justice submits the incomparable singular individual to comparison and calculation, so that limitation of one person’s rights to satisfy another’s rights seems inevitable.56 In this context, Lévinas immediately reiterates what had been for him, as it was for Arendt, one of the lessons of Auschwitz: one cannot rely on the state to secure one’s rights. But that is not the last word. Just as justice needs to be always put in question from elsewhere so that conformity to its abstract rule does not become a new tyranny, so one cannot rely on the politicians for protection and implementation of the rights of man. Hence, the need for voices from outside, like those of the Old Testament prophets. This also means (and it is important that this be emphasized) that the defense of the rights of man corresponds to a vocation outside the state, disposing, in a political society, of a kind of extraterritoriality, like that of prophecy in the face of the political powers of the Old Testament, a vigilance totally different from political intelligence, a lucidity not limited to yielding before the formalism of universality, but upholding justice itself in its limitations.57
Elsewhere Lévinas offered an illustration of such a vigilance when he celebrated the visit of President Sadat of Egypt to Jerusalem.58 This was a break from political prudence. Lévinas continues: The capacity to guarantee that extra-territoriality and their independence defines the liberal state and describes the modality according to which the conjunction of politics and ethics is intrinsically possible.59
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The reference to the prophets in the previous sentence is decisive because it interrupts any expectation that reliance on the timehonored distinction between public and private, so beloved of classical liberalism, will be sufficient. Hence, the focus is not on the separation of politics and ethics, but on their conjunction. Classical liberalism, through its insistence on separating the public and the private, reduces ethics to a private morality. It is ethics in an entirely different sense that conjoins with politics in the form of an eschatological interruption of it, as when supplying justice with the bad conscience that arises from an awareness of the tears that the bureaucrat cannot see.60 And yet Lévinas seems to allow, and we saw it reiterated in the 1988 interview, that this conjunction of an eschatological ethics and a politics respectful of rights is most likely in liberalism, because liberalism does not allow politics to be everything. The explanation is that Lévinas has in mind here a Mendelssohnian, prophetic, liberalism, not the classical version. The shift in the meaning of “extraterritoriality” is an indication of this. In 1964 “extraterritoriality” still suggests to Lévinas a kind of irresponsibility, as “The Temptation of Temptation,” a Talmudic lecture, makes clear.61 It is only in the 1980s that Lévinas reserves the word to point to an intersection of ethics and politics that traditional liberalism cannot readily accommodate, but that Mendelssohnian liberalism makes possible. This more profound meaning of “extraterritoriality” can perhaps best be approached through the idea of the trace and in a way that confirms how, notwithstanding the changes I have just documented in the use of that word, Lévinas remains faithful to the fundamental trajectory of his thought. Already in 1953, in “Freedom and Command,” and apparently quite independently of any impact of Mendelssohn, Lévinas presents the command issued to me by the defenseless face as presenting a model of freedom that not only challenges the tyranny of the state, but predates it. Drawing on the phenomenological idea that reflection draws on an unreflective fund of experience which this forms a kind of “past that has never been present,” Lévinas locates the command of the face in such a past, thereby anticipating his notion of the trace.62 The notion of extraterritoriality is, as it were, the equivalent of the trace, albeit in another idiom. Freedom in Lévinas is not the experience of free choice but the “experience” of an exit from oneself.63 However, this exit is not from the private realm into the public arena of the world, as in existentialism, but an exit that passes beyond being, albeit not in such a way that the material dimension of life can be ignored. Substitution, the one-for-the-other, is to pass outside the subject, while retaining a responsibility that is mine alone. This is the concrete meaning of
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transcendence for Lévinas and he evokes it in the article, “The Rights of Man and the Rights of the Other,” when he writes of how there is an exercise of freedom in which “the I frees itself from its ‘return to self,’ from its auto-affirmation, from its egotism of a being persevering in its being, to answer for the other, precisely to defend the rights of the other man.”64 What this all amounts to still remains highly abstract, so I will close by offering an account of an ancient right, the so-called right of necessity, which determined that if the poor in case of necessity took what they needed to survive from someone else’s surplus, they were not committing theft but reasserting a common ownership that was ultimately inalienable. Although this idea was long-standing, it seems that it was first widely articulated in twelfth-century Europe and survived intact in modern rights theory with Hugo Grotius.65 I have argued elsewhere that it was in the chapter on property in John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government that this right of necessity for the poor was supplanted by the right to amass private property without limit.66 Whereas for Grotius the rights of the poor were inalienable, Locke tells us, albeit only in passing, that those rights were abandoned when we allegedly gave tacit agreement to the invention of money: That is to say, the poor were sacrificed to the interests of the unlimited accumulation of private property. In other words, classical liberal social contract theory highlights the rights of property, thereby securing the home or domicile which guarantees the independence of the private realm, but at the same time ignores those who do not have a home: the homeless and, of course, the refugees. Even if mainstream political philosophy, with the striking exception of Hegel, largely forgot the rights of the poor and only a relatively few scholars have kept the memory of it alive, it resurfaces in Lévinas. In “A Religion for Adults” from 1977,67 he reports the conviction of the eleventh-century commentator Rachi that one must know that God created the earth in order to possess the Promised Land, because without that knowledge possession would be mere usurpation. Lévinas adds: “No rights can therefore ensue from the simple fact that a person needs espace vital.”68 The consciousness of my ego (moi) reveals no right to me. This might sound like a reassertion of the Lockean theory in all its harshness: the spoils go to the industrious and rational, and not to all by virtue of their existence. However, it is, on the contrary, in conformity with the phenomenological approach elaborated in “The Rights of Man and the Rights of the Other” where the focus falls on my experience of an obligation imposed on me by virtue of the rights of the other. I am confronted not by a specific set of obligations or duties that I might fulfill to establish my good conscience, but by an infinite responsibility. One hears a similar suspicion
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of the rights of property in Entre nous: “My ‘being in the world’ or my ‘place in the sun,’ my home—are they not a usurpation of places that belong to the other man who has already been oppressed or starved by me?”69 In one of his Talmudic lectures Lévinas poses the problem even more dramatically. He writes: “The problem of a hungry world can be resolved only if the food of the owners and those who are provided for ceases to appear to them as their inalienable property, but is recognized as a gift they have received for which thanks must be given and to which others have a right.”70 Lévinas does not associate the privileging of property rights over the rights of the poor with the individualism of a certain strand of the social contract tradition. Nor does he draw attention to Mendelssohn’s recognition that the notion of beneficence (Wohltum) calls for the benevolence (Wohlwollen) that was expressed in the right of necessity: If, therefore, a man possesses goods or owns certain means of attaining felicity, which he can spare, that is, which are not necessarily requiring for maintaining his existence but serve the improvement of his existence, he is obligated to employ a part of them for the benefit of his fellow man, that is, for benevolence. For the improvement of one’s existence is inseparable from benevolence.71
This was in marked contrast with the theorists that used the right to private property as a way of denying the rights of the poor. Nevertheless, the rights of the poor resurface in Lévinas. Lévinas was not a great political thinker in the way that Jean-Paul Sartre was, for example, but he pinpointed the deep-seated deficiencies in classical liberalism and saw the direction from which a new thinking of the conjunction between ethics and politics might arise: from outside the state and outside the subject. Central to that new direction was the notion of extraterritoriality which points beyond the division of private and public, and thus threatens the classical version of the state of nature, which takes as its starting point the isolated individual for whom others are a threat. “Extra-territoriality” is not the “outside all places” of more pious thoughts,72 any more than it is the state of nature of liberal thought. It names the site of the conjunction of ethics and politics, where politics is called to go beyond its own procedure of comparing the incomparable in order to meet ethical obligations that come from elsewhere and face the complexity of difficult choices. In the works published after Totality and Infinity Lévinas accomplished a departure from possessive individualism without embracing the totalizing tendencies of communitarianism. This was achieved, not only by introducing an eschatological conception of peace in place of the Hobbesian state of war, but more particularly by construing the
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event of identity in such a way that the conception of personal identity on which liberalism relies is undermined. In consequence, the rights of man can no longer be understood as a function of liberalism, even if it was in the context of liberalism that they were first articulated. It is my conviction that, although Lévinas’s ideas of the rights of man are only presented by him in broad outline so that, particularly in the English-language discussion, they have not been given much prominence, they are a valuable resource for anyone committed to struggle for social justice and particularly the struggle to improve a world that turns its back on the victims of famine. UNIVERSITY OF MEMPHIS Memphis, Tennessee
Endnotes 1. A version of this article will also be published in Lévinas Studies: An Annual Review, vol. 3 (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2008), 61–77. 2. Emmanuel Lévinas, L’au-delà du verset (Paris: Minuit, 1982), 12–13; Gary D. Mole, trans., Beyond the Verse (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 15. Henceforth: AV and BV. 3. Emmanuel Lévinas, Hors sujet (Cognac: Fata Morgana, 1987), 185; Michael B. Smith, trans., Outside the Subject (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 123. Henceforth: HS and OS. 4. HS, 185; OS, 123. 5. Emmanuel Lévinas, Entre nous (Paris: Grasset, 1991), 260; Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshas, trans., Entre nous (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 229–30. Henceforth: EN and ENT. See also François Poirié, Emmanuel Lévinas. Qui êtes-vous? (Lyon: La Manufacture, 1987), 98; Jill Robbins, trans., Is It Righteous to Be? (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 52. 6. See, for example, Thaddée Ncayizigiye, Réexamen éthique des droits de l’homme sous l’éclairage de la pensée d’Emmanuel Lévinas (Boston: Peter Lang, 1997), 485. 7. Emmanuel Lévinas, Les imprévus de l’histoire (Cognac: Fata Morgana, 1994), 32; Nidra Poller, trans., Unforeseen History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 15. Henceforth: IH and UH. 8. IH, 32; UH, 16. 9. IH, 38–39; UH, 19. 10. Emmanuel Lévinas,“Existentialism and Anti-Semitism,” October 87 (Winter 1999): 28. 11. IH, 27–41. 12. EN, 36; ENT, 23. 13. EN, 36; ENT, 23. 14. EN, 44; ENT, 30. 15. I have chartered this itinerary in Robert Bernasconi, “No Exit: Lévinas’s Aporetic Account of Transcendence,” Research in Phenomenology 35, no. 1 (2005): 101–17. 16. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1973), 293. Arendt’s ideas on this issue were given a renewed currency when they were recalled in ´ à nous-mêmes (Paris: the late 1980s and 1990s both by Julia Kristeva, Êtrangers Fayard, 1988), 220–29; Leon S. Roudiez, trans., Strangers to Ourselves (New York: Columbia University Press,1991),148–54 and by GiorgioAgamben,Homo Sacer,trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 126–35. 17. Emmanuel Lévinas, Difficile liberté. Essais sur le judaïsm (Paris: Albin Michel, 1976), 360–61. Henceforth: DL; Seán Hand, trans., Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 28. Henceforth: DF.
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18. It is surprising that more attention has not been paid to this article. For an exception, see Ephrain Meir, In Proximity: Emmanuel Lévinas and the Eighteenth Century, ed. Melvyn New, Robert Bernasconi, and Richard Cohen (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2001), 243–59. There are, of course, a few references to Thomas Hobbes, but no real engagement at any level of detail. See Cheryl L. Hughes, “The Primary of Ethics: Hobbes and Lévinas,” Continental Philosophy Review 31, no. 1 (1998): 79–94. 19. Emmanuel Lévinas, A l’heure des nations (Paris: Minuit, 1968), 161; Michael B. Smith, trans., In the Time of the Nations (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 138. Henceforth: HN and TN. 20. HN, 162; TN, 139. 21. HN, 161; TN, 138. 22. HN, 167–68; TN, 144. 23. See further Robert Bernasconi, “Different Styles of Eschatology,” Research in Phenomenology 28 (1998): 3–19. 24. HN, 161; TN, 138. 25. Emmanuel Lévinas, De Dieu qui vient à l’idée (Paris: Vrin, 1986), 19; Bettina Bergo, trans., Of God Who Comes to Mind (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 4. See also 126; trans., 77. 26. HN, 167; TN, 144. 27. DL, 32; DF, 16. 28. DL, 201; DF, 152. 29. DL, 24; DF, 10. 30. DL, 98; DF, 71. I have recently elaborated on this idea, with its clear biblical resonances, in “Strangers and Slaves in the Land of Egypt: Lévinas and the Politics of Otherness,” in Difficult Justice, ed. Asher Horowitz and Gadd Horowitz (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 246–61.To be sure, the question immediately arises as to whether all share equally in this “memory of the totalitarianisms that still haunt today’s humanity” (HN, 161; TN, 138). The privilege Lévinas accords to Judaism in his philosophical works arises because it maintains the memory of suffering. It thus gives rise to a philosophy that relies on an evidence that seems to be available only to those who share in the cultivation of this memory. Nevertheless, it raises serious questions about his attempt to pass from a Jewish philosophy to one that is truly universal, questions that I have explored elsewhere. 31. Lévinas cites the article in the Hebrew version which appeared in Daat, 5, 1980, with an English summary (23–24). The full English text appeared in a supplement to the Lessing Yearbook; Ehrhard Bahr, Edward P. Harris, and Laurence G. Lyon, eds., Humanität und Dialog (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1982), 37–65. Henceforth: HD. On this topic, see also “Moses Mendelssohn über Naturrecht und Naturzustand,” in Ich handle mit Vernunft . . . , ed. Norbert Hinske (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1981), 45–82. Alexander Altmann is the author of a 900-page biography of Mendelssohn: Moses Mendelssohn (University: University of Alabama Press, 1973). 32. One should not be misled by the fact that Mendelssohn insists that the social contract is not for the sake of peace, to establish a difference on that issue between him and Lévinas who is constantly invoking peace. Both are arguing against a broadly Hobbesian approach. Lévinas’s way of saying this is to set out not from a state of war, but “on the basis of a prior peace” (HS, 185; OS, 123). Lévinas was always clear that what he meant by peace was not security and the cessation of war. Peace for Lévinas is eschatological in his sense of an interruption of history. 33. HN, 160–61; TN, 138; HD, 48. 34. HN, 160; TN, 137; HD, 44. 35. Emmanuel Lévinas, Alterité et transcendence (Cognac: Fata Morgana, 1995), 151–55; Michael B. Smith, trans., Alterity and Transcendence (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 145–49. Henceforth: AeT and AT. See also HS, 183; OS, 121–22; and Lionel Ponton, Philosophie et droits de l’homme de Kant à Lévinas (Paris: Vrin, 1990), 194–95. 36. HN, 160; TN, 137; HD, 44. 37. HD, 41. 38. HS, 187; OS, 125.
extraterritoriality 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60.
61. 62.
63. 64. 65.
66.
67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72.
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AeT, 129–37; AT, 121–30. AeT, 131; AT, 127. HS, 177; OS, 117. DL, 33; DF, 17. HS, 177, 187; OS, 117, 125. HS, 187; OS, 125. HS, 186; OS, 124–25. Emmanuel Lévinas, Totalité et infini (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1961), 104; Alphonso Lingis, trans., Totality and Infinity (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 131. Henceforth: TeI and TI. TeI, 124; TI, 150. HN, 161; TN, 138. HD, 47. Altmann in another article, entitled “The Philosophical Roots of Moses Mendelssohn’s Plea for Emancipation,” explores this further. See Essays in Intellectual Jewish History (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1981), 154–69. Moses Mendelssohn, Jerusalem oder über religiöse Macht und Judentum (Berlin: Friedrich Maurer, 1783), 62;Allan Arkush, trans., Jerusalem or on Religious Power and Judaism (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1983), 59. Henceforth: J and JJ. J, 85; JJ, 70. For the essential background, see Robert Bernasconi, “The Third Party,” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 30 (1999): 76–87. TeI, xii; TI, 22. TeI, 283; TI, 306. HS, 184; OS, 122–23. HS, 185; OS, 123. AV, 221–28; BV, 188–95. HS, 185; OS, 123. Emmanuel Lévinas, “Transcendence et hauteur,” in Liberté et commandement (Cognac: Fata Morgana, 1994), 80–81; Tina Chanter and Simon Critchley, trans., “Transcendence and Height,” in Basic Philosophical Writings, ed. A. Peperzak, S. Critchley, and R. Bernasconi (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 23. Emmanuel Lévinas, Quatre lectures talmudiques (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1968), 7, 78. Henceforth: QL.; Emmanuel Lévinas, Nine Talmudic Readings, trans. Annette Aronowicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 36. Henceforth: NTR. Emmanuel Lévinas, Liberté et commandement (Cognac: Fata Morgana, 1994), 46; Alphonso Lingis, trans., Collected Philosophical Papers (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987), 22. On the trace, see Robert Bernasconi, “The Trace of Lévinas in Derrida,” in Derrida and Différance (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 13–29. DL, 24; DF, 10. HS, 186; OS, 124–25. On the background, see Scott G. Swanson, “The Medieval Foundations of John Locke’s Theory of Natural Rights,” in History of Political Thought 18 (1997): 399–459. However, it should be clear that I am on the opposite side of the debate when it comes to the interpretation of Locke. See Robert Bernasconi, “Locke and the Politics of Desire,” Acta Institutionis Philosophiae et Aestheticae 7 (1989): 97–110; and Robert Bernasconi, “On Giving What Is Not Mine to Give: A Critique of John Locke’s Displacement of the Rights of the Poor to Charity,” in Le Don et la Dette, ed. Marco Olivetti (Milan: Cedam, 2004), 419–29. DL, 33; DF, 17. DL, 33; DF, 17. EN, 149; ENT, 130. Emmanuel Lévinas, Du sacré au saint. Cinq nouvelle lectures talmudiques (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1977), 77; NTR, 133. J, 33–34; JJ, 47. AV, 70; BV, 82.
dorian wiszniewski
“THE SPACE OF COMMUNICATIVITY”: LÉVINAS AND ARCHITECTURE In Language and Proximity,1 echoing the sentiment that prioritizes the act of giving over the materialism of the gift, Lévinas makes the point that it is not what is being said that is important—it is the saying. What he is asking us to do is think less about the information given by the saying and think more about the “proximity” of the speaker that carries what is being said. Lévinas urges us to understand both the first word and last word of our communication as signs of our desire to say what we cannot keep saying, which is, that it is a pleasure to be with you. Speaking, as action, is already an embracing of coexistence and allows us to feel the warmth of our fellow human beings and the good will of one to another. This is beautiful. However, this beautifully simple sentiment has its complexities. There are two obvious ones that spring immediately to mind and provide insight into what Lévinas is really advising. First, if the speaker is with you then the engagement with the speaker is not difficult.What if the speaker was not there? For example, the speaking might be done through text. And we know that there are various degrees of abstraction between texts and speakers, between texts and authors. We can think of personal letters at one end of a textual spectrum and perhaps legislation at the other.The greater the abstraction from word to speaker the more difficult it might be to embrace the good will of the speaker through the word. The second complexity in this beautifully simple sentiment revolves around the suggestion that we must somehow listen to a speaker yet be disinterested in what is being said. To be delighted while being disinterested is of course beautiful—in the Kantian sense.2 But the nub of this complexity is that it would be rude to show such disinterestedness in what is being said! Clearly, this is not what Lévinas had in mind. What is at stake here is no mere aesthetic judgment. Lévinas’s notion of the Other provides an ethical schema for overcoming either of these difficulties of communication. Lévinas provides detailed analysis of the “relational” workings of communication DORIAN WISZNIEWSKI, Senior Lecturer, Department of Architecture, University of Edinburgh. Specialties: phenomenology and architecture; architectural practice. E-mail:
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and therefore provides means by which to navigate the complexities of communicative abstraction, that is, the distance between speaker and what is being said. He focuses on our incapacity to express all that we know, or can know; we can say that this other knowledge is also knowledge of the Other, in its multiple extrapolations, and is the observation that allows us to consider the intrinsic communicative complexity of speaker-to-saying abstraction. It occurs on all occasions of communication. Or, to say the same thing in other words, we all know that it is possible to say something other than what is said; therefore, it is also possible to imagine what might “otherwise” be said and, furthermore, possible to imagine that someone other than the one who happens to be speaking more logically says the alternative to what is said. In short, anything that is said could be said as something else entirely by someone who does not happen to be there for the moment. This simultaneity of possible speech and actual speech is a formulation embedded in all speech. We might say that all speech carries with it “the trace of the Other.”3 This detection of the trace of the other, or in other words, sympathy for the other point of view that has not yet announced itself, is what “allows one to think the modality of transcendence otherwise than by an abstract negation that presupposes an identity that precedes the very act of this negation.”4 The Other is possibility rather than actuality or identity. In this sense, speech automatically signals the very impossibility of Being as an existence which is anything other than coexistence, and furthermore, where the modality of Being must be understood as much to do with transcendence as immanence. I will say more on the correspondence between immanence and transcendence in due course. For the moment, the complexity of speech that I am trying to simplify here is that speech, even if conveyed by a speaker who is here, automatically invokes an abstract relation of speaker to speech in the sense of what might have been said differently by someone different. It is this very sense of the speaker “being not there,” but having “proximity” to the saying, that Lévinas urges us to grasp so that we may let it in to our dealings with others and, thereby, inform the very character of communication and political relations. However, in case we get overly cosy in specific circumstances and presuppose an identity of the Other, Lévinas also reminds us,“Proximity is not a simple coexistence, but a restlessness.”5 As an architect, this is, in a nutshell, what interests me in Lévinas. His ethical-political turn of phenomenology allows the framing of two very important questions. First, how do we give a sense of speech in architecture that speaks as much of the notion of interlocution as much as what is being said? And second, how do we say anything in
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architecture so as to provide for the interests that seem to necessitate the architecture while simultaneously providing whatever is necessary for there to be a disinterest in the perceived necessity so as to think more of the saying than what is said? Or in other words, as a single question, how is it possible for architecture to materialize Lévinasian ethics? What interests me is the possibility to open through architecture what might be called “the space of communicativity,” which would be a space for the Other, that promotes transcendence of specific material interests for the sake of general well-being and good will between people. It seems to me that architecture can speak to welcome the Other and as interlocutor for the Other. My apologies if these two questions and architectural ambitions seem yet too abstract. If I can try a different, more direct question: What is the Philosophy/Architecture interface, or more specifically here, what is the Lévinas/Architecture interface? As a way of answering this question and the question of how we say anything in architecture, rather than going down any semiotic route, let me offer this. A very erudite architectural scholar has said, “All of Western thinking was first grounded in architecture.”6 She takes architecture on a Heideggerian turn, reinvesting Greek language with Pre-Socratic thinking, to invert the seemingly more usual position that Architecture represents philosophy; she suggests, rather than philosophy coming first followed by architecture, as it were rationalizing then doing, in the West we have done (architecture) and then rationalized through it (at least “until the eighteenth century”7). She thinks that from the earliest times architecture has taken part in the wrestling with reason and that reason has been informed by architectural action. Anybody who has ever produced anything, architecture or text, from house to city, from letter to legislation, would surely understand that any production is an enactment of this wrestling with reason, because there is to-and-fro of reasoning between what is first perceived as wisdom and any wisdom conveyed through the course of production. Or to say it as Lévinas said it, “Logos as speech is entirely one with logos as rationality.”8 Therefore, we can say that any embodiment of rationality is a form of speech, and any record of one’s reflection on rationality is a form of speech. And, as we know, the point of reflection is this: A reflection mirrors both foreground and background of a temporal circumstance, but one usually only takes the opportunity to reflect as a checking procedure for what is yet to happen.9 Therefore, to me, at first glance, it seems a very unremarkable conclusion to say that philosophy is first grounded in architecture. I might go so far as to say, in the same sense but clearly with different expression and probably with different wisdom as its
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outcome, it is probable also that in China philosophy was first grounded in architecture. However, I imagine it is safe to say that philosophy can also be first grounded, for example, in music, poetry, writing, or art. However, clearly the grounding metaphor has a special resonance for architecture. The issue I am framing here through this reference that suggests thinking is grounded in architecture concerns what the term grounding implies. The “grounding” notion is a Heideggerian technique. As an example, Heidegger suggests that the “grounding question of philosophy . . . the primal question of philosophy”10 is the question “What is truth?” However, what is clear from his often used metaphor is that, as in this example, truth is a slippery question that only gets close to being answered by first being grounded. Grounding grasps hold of something by first bringing it down to earth. Grounding suggests a gravity (in the double sense of weight and seriousness) that philosophy might have metaphorically, but which architecture has literally. It is as though even Heidegger is invoking the old divide between material action and thinking.11 That is, unless we have a material application philosophy is nothing, and in this example, there is no truth without first a question. Well, I would go along with this insofar as to say that so long as philosophy has been communicated, it can be called philosophy and so long as it has been communicated by at least one person to another we can say that it has been grounded. Clearly philosophy, the love of wisdom, cannot be restricted to the interior world of thought. Both love and wisdom only come about by transference, through experience, by being, being-in-the-world, being with others. The first dynamic of philosophy is exchange, which requires reasoning, for which we might say exchange of speech. Obviously then, philosophy can be grounded in philosophy, at least, as the exchange of experience between people. For Heidegger, grounding is the only way of discussing philosophy. It is the necessary modality for philosophy, that is, for philosophy defined by Heidegger as “universal phenomenological ontology.”12 Therefore, grounding is merely the willingness to take something seriously enough to attempt an articulation of it for the sake of communication to others. Thus, it is difficult to see how philosophy has a restriction to its grounding in either architecture or any other modality for it not to be possible to stake the claim that it can be grounded first by any modality of transference between people, any modality of rationality. So, with more than a first glance, it seems that the reference of architectural grounding in this reference has two possible aspects. It might be one of magnitude, that is, the communicative realm of architecture as a form of expression, of communication, of transference, of rationality, is one that is deemed,
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especially in its civic circumstances, to be more prolific than the purely philosophical modalities. That is, it communicates to a larger audience. No doubt many think this is why architecture is traditionally harnessed as a directly representative medium for particular ends. Or perhaps the reference to grounding is a symptom of a propensity toward existentialism over metaphysics. This seems to be what the grounding of philosophy really infers and, furthermore, why philosophy has to be “first” grounded. Grounding brings ideas down to earth and, by implication, goes against metaphysics. And this is where Lévinas provides so much. Through his first-hand involvement with Husserl and Heidegger, Lévinas had a wonderful vantage point of the phenomenological ground and its counterpart of horizon.13 Lévinas was able to extend the horizon of the immanence–transcendence relationship first developed by Husserl and was also able to overcome the solipsism and nostalgia of Heidegger’s grounding that tended, and still tends, to polarize the “care of Dasein”14 as propensity for either “The Grand Style”15 or vernacularism.16 I will return to Lévinas’s particular working of Husserl’s conception of the immanence–transcendence relationship in a moment. First, as a means of alluding to all the possible architectural expression that might sit between the extremes of The Grand Style and Vernacularism and that I will not be able to discuss in detail here, I would like to clarify the compromise to Dasein’s openness to others and openness to the world (which “is constituted existentially by the attunement of a state-of-mind”17) that Heidegger’s propensities suggest. “The Grand Style” and “vernacularism” are both guilty of exclusiveness; the former condemns the “masses” for their lack of sense for “elegance, logic and beauty,”18 and the latter encourages the individual to seek refuge in the “factical Being-in-the-world . . . which has been discovered [and] allotted itself a ‘here’ which is of the character of Dasein.”19 Heidegger’s later discussions on dwelling seem to evidence contradiction and forgetfulness of his own earlier formulations, for example, that “Being is the transcendens pure and simple,”20 and that for Phenomenology “higher than actuality stands possibility.”21 On one hand, despite Heidegger’s exhortation to transcend the view of “artistically shaped sciences . . . [which are also] readily useful for life,”22 the problem of The Grand Style is that it has the actuality of a grand manner that grounds high mindedness and carries in its semantic an image of an orthodoxy, which is merely an aestheticized view, and, rather than sending someone on the road to “revelation” and “Becoming,” tends to discourage the possibility of a new horizon—and one might say, especially for others unprepared for such elevated horizons. On the other hand, the problem with the “vernacular” is that it grounds the “ecstati-
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cal temporalisation”23 of one’s Being in the specific place and temporality of one’s forefathers. Speaking of his Black Forest farmhouse, Heidegger suggests that the farmhouse responds to the passing generations, of birth and death, the rhythm of the seasons, and where room is made “for the hallowed places of childbed and the ‘tree of the dead’ . . . and in this way it designed for the different generations under one roof the character of their journey through time.”24 This is all very well, but it suggests that the other in the formulation “Being with Others,”25 is in fact the others of a shared history, one’s own ancestors, and suggests that the others in the formulation “Dasein ‘is’ essentially for the sake of Others”26 are one’s own descendants. These are hardly other in the Lévinasian sense. It is difficult to avoid the privilege of nativity suggested by Heidegger’s notion of dwelling and the sense of belonging it promotes. As we know, the history of the world is as much about those that move across the world as those that remain in one place. So, although the gravitas of architecture is clear, the message that Lévinas might bring to the notion of grounding is that grounding acts in concert with what needs grounding—that is, metaphysics. What metaphysics stands in place of is all that is not yet grounded, for example, ideas, knowledge yet to come, infinity, that not yet said, unknown identity, and the other not yet here. Returning to the issues of immanence and transcendence, the issues that respectively seem to denote and differentiate the existentialists from the metaphysicians, rather than being ideologically opposed, they are put into relation by Husserl and further energized by Lévinas. However, Husserl’s relation between them is concerned more with his first phenomenological break from the empiricism and positivism of cognitive science, whereas Lévinas’s concern is to make a break from some of the grounding characteristics of phenomenology. Husserl’s first break can be understood by considering his notion of the “phenomenological epoch” or “phenomenological attitude.” The phenomenological attitude is placed in distinction to the “natural attitude” or “existential thesis.” Rather than categorizing moral, aesthetic, scientific, and other such judgments independently, the phenomenological epoch “presents positional consciousness itself as object of research.”27 The move here is what leads to the phenomenologists’ war cry “Down with construction!” and “Let us get to things themselves!”28 In other words, any specific positional consciousness is only one part of a larger circumstance which comprises the sum total of all possible positional consciousnesses; a “thing” in this larger circumstance, a “material thing,” stands to remind us of these possibilities rather than only the object status in a specific consciousness or particular rationality. The constructions that want to
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be pulled down by phenomenology, and also by Derrida’s Deconstruction, are the artifices of rationality that present themselves as some form of natural condition, that stand in the way to the development of reason and the repositioning of consciousness. Material things can be understood by extension through the phenomenological epoch as “regional ontologies,” and for Husserl, and I would argue also for Lévinas, these regional ontologies become means by which to break down constructions and extend the limits to our understanding of given circumstances. As recognized by both Husserl and Lévinas, “establishing these [regional] ontologies is a vast field of labor.”29 Rather than succumbing to the standoff between immanence and transcendence, the philosophical excitation of material things in the notion of regional ontologies begins to illustrate the immanence– transcendence relationship that Husserl and Lévinas promote. Using Lévinas’s synopsis of Husserl to explain further, “The existence and transcendence of the object are not metaphysically presupposed, as in the traditional statement of the problem; rather, prior to any metaphysics, the very sense of this existence and transcendence becomes the object of study.”30 Where this takes us in the question of the Philosophy/Architecture interface is quite simple. The relation between immanence and transcendence is an everyday question for architecture. However, it is not necessarily always confronted knowingly. It is more often than not confronted as a technical problem. The example I offer is an architectural drawing. An architectural drawing is simultaneously a material thing and a representation of a material thing. The usual problem is that we wish to get as close as possible to the thing represented and bypass the thing as drawing of thing. A sense of frustration arises when the thing as drawing of thing appears defective. There is a fine line that an architect treads between the drawing of the thing and the thing represented. It is not always clear whether the defect is in the drawing of the thing or the thing represented. This seems to me to be a practical example of the immanence–transcendence relationship. If, on one hand, we only look to what is represented we transcend the material facts of the drawing and focus entirely on what may have been intended and presume that we might make up for the drawing’s defects in our mind’s eye, or by some other form of “extra” reasoning be it further drawings, text, the spoken word or a subsequent rearticulation. If, on the other hand, we only look to the drawing of thing as drawing and not of anything in particular, we are confronted by a concrete reality that immanently provides the means for thinking the thing differently. In the first instance intentionality is defined by presupposition; in the second instance intention is discovered. To approach architecture from its entirely empirical or metaphysical
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traditions might foreclose the possibility of the immanent– transcendent reciprocity. To open architecture to its own representational phenomenological epoch would permit the architectural drawing, the architectural project, to be a reflective iteration, a philosophical practice, where, following Husserl’s and Lévinas’s lead, not only would the architectural project participate in the extensive task of recording regional ontologies, it would make the very sense of existence and transcendence the object of study. Thus, not only might we recognize the limits of recognizable rationality or find unsuspected things or associations at the Architecture/Philosophy interface, we might activate limits as openings for rationality not yet formed. The opening for the rationality not yet formed is of course the space for the Other and is a space of communicative possibility. However, Lévinas goes further than Husserl in the immanence– transcendence relation to question ontology itself. This further excitation of material things needs also to be taken on board for “the space of communicativity” to function as such. Lévinas’s move beyond the fascination for “things in themselves” is a move beyond the phenomenological notion of essence. Phenomenology reckons that essence cannot be grasped but can be sensed; and the way one gets a keener sense of this essence is to reflect on the knowledge that regional ontologies bring forth. In other words, rather than the essence of a thing being entirely inherent, the essence of a thing is caught up in the consciousness of the world, as it were, in “the tangle of ‘intentionalities’ that compose it.”31 However, Lévinas’s impetus is prevention of a slip into falsity, as perhaps Heidegger’s propensities for The Grand Style and German Vernacular illustrate. It is perhaps easy to romanticize and rationalize a particular equation of regional ontologies toward a particular end. This end may be ethically very questionable. The problem that Lévinas highlights is that phenomenology as Heidegger ultimately directed it failed to tackle the ethical dimension of Being beyond the very particular regional ontologies and intentionalities of German philosophy and culture. For Lévinas the dynamic or “restlessness” of transcendence in the grounding-to-metaphysics relationship supplies the move beyond essence—as he puts it, “If transcendence has meaning, it can only signify the fact that the event of being, the esse, the essence (in the sense of process or event of being), passes over to what is other than being.”32 What he eventually concludes is that a transcendental movement par excellence is one that questions the very notion of grounding. What this requires is a move away from the conventional notions of subjectivity. It seems that even for Heidegger “the most radical individuation”33 of Dasein’s Being gets grounded on self-
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centeredness. For Lévinas, we need to transcend the very limits of ourselves as self-centered construction. The notion of grounding tends to ground in a region either determined by an egoistical center or extended from egoistical interests. Grounding could mistakenly be taken as synonymous with self-centeredness. Whether or not Lévinas is overstating this case he maintains, “against Heidegger, that philosophy can be ethical as well as ontological.”34 He is “trying to show that man’s ethical relation to the other is ultimately prior to his ontological relation to himself (egology) or to the totality of things that we call the world (cosmology).”35 For Lévinas, the ground of essence has to shift. In reply to his own exhortation to conceive of the possibility of a wrenching from essence, he asks, “To go where? Toward what region? To stay on what ontological plane?”36 At this point, I might say that these are very perplexing questions for an architect. The site for an architect is a fundamental issue. If there is no site or if the site is a “non-place,”37 as Lévinas might describe it, it is difficult to imagine what an architect might do. However, this is not quite as difficult as might be first imagined. Lévinas proposes only that “the wrenching from essence contests the unconditional privilege of the question ‘where?’”38 We may understand this as an unconditional privilege usually given over to the ground of particular regional ontologies and, therefore, very particular rationality. Such unconditional privilege may lead to the privilege of some people’s interests over others. The “where” is still important but should not be given “unconditional privilege.” Quite clearly, Lévinas is “deranging” the ground of phenomenology with his play between “esse” and “essence,” Being and essence. And also quite clearly, his notion of “désinteressement”39 deliberately invokes Kant. Where we might be led, then, in the question of “where” is “a movement away from (dés) the interestedness of being (esse),” which may be understood as a very specific trajectory, toward a different kind of movement entirely (rather than a place at all), a sort of between condition, perhaps designated by the prefix inter in the term désinteressement, which for Lévinas is “a movement of nonparticipation, ex-ception or transcendence.” This movement places our reflective consciousness in a position between all, and in this sense between all Others, so that, on one hand, it might provide unspecified riches, but on the other hand, it also acts as an ethical check against any tendency to over or under privilege some rather than others. So, I am now at a point where I can outline the Lévinas/ Architecture interface and elucidate what I am calling “the space of communicativity.” It is impossible to deny that architecture is both construction and grounding. However, we need not foreclose its role
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to the servitude of ends be they mere ends of utility or the ends to which we might put representation. To reiterate, we understand that “Logos as speech is entirely one with logos as rationality”; therefore, we can see the architectural project as speech and rationality; an architectural project might both ground and transcend its ontological context; grounding need not be against metaphysics; grounding acts in concert with what needs grounding, which is metaphysics. As speech, architecture stands for a speaker not there; therefore, it is interlocutor and can have the necessary restlessness of its own proximity to invoke both Other of original speaker and Other of imagined speaker. The architectural project can participate in the extensive task of recording regional ontologies, so even in its most empirical and epistemological sense it can be an extensive project rather than an object of predetermined limits. The architectural project could be open to the possibilities it encounters in the course of its own research so that it can reorient, reshape, or reconsider its trajectory, sweep, and articulations of rationale. Its own phenomenological epoch can be transcended in the course of its own grounding. Finally, in answer to the question of how architecture might provide for the interests that seem to necessitate the architectural project while simultaneously providing whatever is necessary for there to be a disinterest in the perceived necessity so as to think more of the saying than what is said, we look to Lévinas’s notion of désinteressement. To make disinterest the region of our interest potentially limits the very thing that must remain limitless—we cannot prescribe a limit to that which must remain infinite. How we deal with this apparent paradox is by giving infinity its place (nonplace) in the formulation of architecture. The privilege previously given over to “where” may be given, temporarily, to the question of “how.” Lévinas urges that we make any privilege conditional rather than unconditional. Being is always temporally conditioned. Essence is the sense of process or event of being. If we can extend the process of the architectural project, of philosophy, the interfacing of architecture and philosophy, then we give being and otherness greater opportunity to be welcomed by one another. Surely nobody wants faceless architecture, architecture that says very little or architecture that says the same trite thing over and over again. Relinquishing the usual priority given to the material thing to extend the process of making is not to abandon the material thing. It merely suggests that the material thing is carried along and developed over time—perhaps in perpetuity, inconclusively. We can only tackle this infinite task in stages. We need to take time. Take time, time to record and discover means by which to convey the openings to specific otherness and infinite otherness and to keep all projects speaking
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yet open for future reasoning; to do this is to create space of communicativity—and this is beautiful. UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH Edinburgh, United Kingdom
Endnotes 1. Emmanuel Lévinas, “Language and Proximity,” in Collected Philosophical Papers, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998), 109–26. 2. By looking at Kant’s definitions of the Beautiful drawn from his first, second, third, and fourth Moments of the Judgment of Taste, we can ascertain that the common aspect of all moments of beauty is the disinterestedness in apprehension of circumstance: “Taste is the faculty of estimating an object or a mode of representation by means of a delight or aversion apart from any interest. The object of such delight is called beautiful”; “The beautiful is that which, apart from a concept, pleases universally”; “Beauty is the form of finality in an object, so far as perceived in it apart from the representation of an end”; and “The beautiful is that which, apart from a concept, is cognised as object of a necessary delight.” Immanuel Kant, “Analytic of the Beautiful,” in Critique of Judgement, trans J. C. Meredith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952), 41–89. 3. Hent De Vries, “Lévinas,” in A Companion to Continental Philosophy (London: Blackwell, 1998), 252. 4. Ibid., 142. 5. Lévinas, “Language and Proximity,” 121. 6. Indra Kagis-McEwan, Socrates’ Ancestor: An Essay on Architectural Beginnings (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993), 130. 7. Ibid., 130. The full quotation is: “My claim is that not only metaphysics but all of Western thinking was first grounded in architecture, and that, until the eighteenth century, the legitimacy of architecture rested on the preservation of that memory.” The late eighteenth century saw the first major shift toward technological reasoning in the mechanization of trade and industry spurred by the Industrial Revolution. 8. Lévinas, “Language and Proximity,” 109. 9. Or, as Lévinas records Husserl’s thoughts on reflection, “Reflection is the only way of knowing consciousness, and it would be absurd to consider the modifications it imposes, by definition, on its object as defects of a given psychological constitution.” Emmanuel Lévinas, “On Ideen,” in Unforeseen History (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 44. 10. Martin Heidegger, “Grounding the Five Statements on Art,” in Nietzsche, vols. 1 and 2, trans. David Farell Krell (London: Harper Collins, 1991), 141. 11. See, for example, Aristotle’s bios theõrëtikos that outlines thought as a form of action and as such a superior type of action (Politics, 1325 b 18). “That is to say, thought has an end or aim (telos), which is to ‘do well’ (upraxia), which is thus action (praxis); when therefore thought ‘for its own sake’, its end or aim (action) is thought; thought is therefore, qua aim, action; thought is therefore ‘active’ in a double sense, as both agent and aim.” Aristotle, Politics, trans. T. A. Sinclair (London: Penguin Books, 1992), 401, fn. 3. 12. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. J. Maquarrie and E. Robinson (Blackwell: London, 1962 [2005]), 62. 13. “Lévinas not only worked with Husserl in Freiburg, he also discovered Heidegger.” Pierre Hayat, Introduction to the French edition, Lévinas, Unforeseen History, 3. 14. Heidegger, Being and Time, 273. 15. Heidegger suggests that The Grand Style “places the whole of Dasein in decision and keeps it there.” Martin Heidegger, “The Grand Style,” in Nietzsche, vols. 1 and 2, trans.
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16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.
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David Farell Krell (London: Harper Collins, 1991), 125. “Dasein in decision” might be understood through Heidegger’s notion of “Enframing.” However, The Grand Style which Nietzsche and Heidegger favor, carries with it the humanist anthropomorphic aesthetic that sees man’s orderly uprightness in the classical columnation of space and opposed to the chaos of nature. It seems that to hold such a preference flies in the face of Heidegger’s own warning that “Enframing not only endangers man in his relationship only to himself and to everything that is. As a destining, it banishes man into that kind of revealing which is an ordering. Where this ordering holds sway, it drives out every other possibility of revealing.” Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 27. See, for example, Kenneth Frampton’s Critical Regionalism and Christian Norburg Schultz’s Architecture and Phenomenology. Heidegger, Being and Time, 176. Heidegger, “The Grand Style,” 124. Heidegger, Being and Time, 470. Ibid., 62. Ibid., 63. Martin Heidegger, “The New Interpretation of Sensuousness,” in Nietzsche, vols. 1 and 2, trans. David Farell Krell (London: Harper Collins, 1991), 219. Heidegger, Being and Time, 488. Martin Heidegger, “Building, Dwelling, Thinking,” in Poetry, Language, Thought (New York: Perrenial, 2001 [1971]), 160. Martin Heidegger, “Being with Others Belongs to the Being of Dasein,” in Being and Time, trans. J. Maquarrie and E. Robinson (Blackwell: London, 1962 [2005]), 160. Ibid. Lévinas’s synopsis of Husserl’s first volume of Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology in Lévinas, “On Ideen,” 35. Emmanuel Lévinas, “Freiburg, Husserl and Phenomenology,” in Unforeseen History (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 63. Lévinas, “On Ideen,” 35. Ibid., 46. Lévinas, “Freiburg, Husserl and Phenomenology,” 63. Emmanuel Lévinas, “Essence and Disinterestedness,” in Emmanual Lévinas, Basic Philosophical Writings, ed. Adriaan Peperzak, Simon Critchley, and Robert Bernasconi (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 109. Heidegger, Being and Time, 62. Lévinas in dialogue with Richard Kearney, in Richard Cohen, ed., Face to Face with Lévinas (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986), 21. Ibid. Lévinas, “Essence and Disinterestedness,” 114. Ibid. Ibid. (my italics). Ibid., 185, n. 8.
