KUMPULAN ARTIKEL LEVINAS & THE OTHER Seminar Filsafat Rm. Prof. Dr. F.X. Eko Armada Riyanto CM Fransiskus Kebry CM (09.09042.000004) Sham Jisan Jiwi CSE (09.09042.000010) Jonas Pablea Pr (09.09042.000021) Manaek M. Sinaga O.Carm (09.09042.000057) Marcellius Ari Christy CP (09.09042.000071) SEKOLAH TINGGI FILSAFAT TEOLOGI WIDYA SASANA MALANG 2010 Daftar Isi Emmanuel Levinas: Biography 1 01. Emmanuel Levinas Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy 4 02. Levinas and the Revelation of the Other David Grandy 25 03. Summary of Ethics as First Philosophy by Levinas Michael Sean 29 04. Emmanuel Levinas's Ethics of Responsibility Dr. Michael Smith 32 05. Ethics and Trauma: Levinas, Feminism, and Deep Ecology Roger S. Gottlieb 37 06. The Voice of God and the Face of the Other: Levinas, Kierkegaard, and Abraham Claire Elise Katz 52 07. Kesadaran terhadap Liyan bagi Levinas Savindievoice 56 08. Levinas, Ostler and the Face of the Other Aaron R 58 09. Emmanuel Levinas’s Totality and Infinity Alex Scott 60 10. Excursus: Lévinas’ Ethics of the Other Michael Eldred 63 11. From Transcendental Freedom to the Other: Levinas and Kant Texas Tech University Press 75 12. “I” and the “Other”: Levinas and Ontological Violence Daniel S. Trout 93 13. Psikologi Ego (Aku) vs Psikologi Liyan (Yang Lain) Audifax 95 14. Heterofobia dan Penindasan atas Liyan Lucian E. Marin 98 15. The End of Psychology Audifax 102 Quotations of Emmanuel Levinas and “The Face of The Other” Bruce Young 105  Emmanuel Levinas Biography "My effort consists in showing that knowledge is in reality an immanence, and that there is no rupture of the isolation of being in knowledge; and on the other hand, that in communication of knowledge one is found beside the Other, not confronted with him, not in the rectitude of the in-front-of-him. But being in direct relation with the Other is not to thematize the Other and consider him in the same manner as one considers a known object, nor to communicate a knowledge to him. In reality, the fact of being is what is most private; existence is the sole thing I cannot communicate; I can tell about it, but I cannot share my existence. Solitude thus appears as the isolation which marks the very event of being. The social is beyond ontology." "...I am responsible for the Other without waiting for reciprocity, were I to die for it. Reciprocity is his affair. It is precisely insofar as the relation between the Other and me is not reciporcal that I am subjection to the Other; and I am "subject" essentially in this sense. It is I who support all...The I always has one responsibility more than all the others."   Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995) Levinas, the French philosopher, was born in Kaunas, Lithuania to Jewish parents. He moved to France in 1923, and, between the years of 1928 and 1929, resided in Germany where he studied under Husserl and Heidegger. Levinas published his first book, Theorie de l'intuition dans la phenomenologie de Husserl, in 1930, and became influential in France for his translations of Husserl and Heidegger into French. In the late 1950's and early 1960's, Levinas began to formulate his own philosophy which became increasingly critical of Heidegger's philosophy, and, with his critique of prior phenomenological thinkers and Western philosophy in general, Levinas began to assert the primacy of the ethical relationship with the Other. Levinas' scholarship directly influenced the movement of existential-phenomenology in France. His translations and secondary texts influenced thinkers such as Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. In the last several decades, Levinas has become increasingly influential in continental philosophy, and his influence is evident in Jacques Derrida's more recent writings, where he has increasingly emphasized a Levinasian ethics as being at the heart of deconstruction. Derrida, a close colleague of Levinas, influenced Levinas' attempt in his book, Otherwise than Being (1998), to go beyond the still too ontological language of his Totality and Infinity (1969). Levinas' philosophy is directly related to his experiences during World War II. His family died in the Holocaust, and, as a French citizen and soldier, Levinas himself became a prisoner of war in Germany. While Levinas was forced to perform labor as a prisoner of war, his wife and daughter were kept hidden in a French monastary until his return. This experience, coupled with Heidegger's affiliation to National Socialism during the war, clearly and understandably led to a profound crisis in Levinas' enthusiasm for Heidegger. "One can forgive many Germans," Levinas once wrote, "but there are some Germans it is difficult to forgive. It is difficult to forgive Heidegger."  At the same time, Levinas felt that Heidegger could not simply be forgotten, but most be gotten beyond. If Heidegger is concerned with Being, Levinas is concerned with ethics, and ethics, for Levinas, is beyond being--Otherwise than Being. Levinas' work, particularly beginning with his  Totality and Infinity (1969), is a critique of Heidegger and Husserl, not to mention all of Western philsophy, in the service of ethics.  Levinas is concerned that Western philosophy has been preoccupied with Being, the totality, at the expense of what is otherwise than Being, what lies outside the totality of Being as transcendent, exterior, infinite, alterior, the Other.  Levinas wants to distinguish ethics from ontology.  Levinas' ethics is situated in an "encounter" with the Other which cannot be reduced to a symmetrical "relationship." That is, it cannot be localized historically or temporally.  "Ethics," in Levinas' sense, does not mean what is typically referred to as "morality," or a code of conduct about how one should act.  For Levinas (1969), "ethics" is a calling into question of the "Same": "A calling into question of the Same--which cannot occur within the egoistic spontaneity of the Same--is brought about by the Other.  We name this calling into question of my spontaneity by the presence of the Other ethics.  The strangeness of the Other, his irreducibility to the I, to my thoughts and my possessions, is precisely accomplishmed as a calling into question of my spontaneity as ethics.  Metaphysics, transcendence, the welcoming of the Other by the Same, of the Other by Me, is concretely produced as the calling into question of the Same by the Other, that is, as the ethics that accomplishes the critical essence of knowledge."  (Totality and Infinity, p.  33) Levinas adopts a style of writing that is fluid and includes self-effacing double-movements.  Ethics cannot be reduced to a set of propositions--cannot be reduced to the Same (or, thinking in terms of Lacan, to the One of the Symbolic)--and so Levinas must repeatedly unfold and then withdraw his propositions.  Even as he uses the language of ontology, his style of writing endeavor's to resist ontology's totalizing grasp. "Western philosophy," writes Levinas (1969), "has most often been an ontology: a reduction of the Other to the Same by interposition of a middle and neutral terms that ensures the comprehension of being" (pp.  33-34).  As ontology, philosophy is narcissistic, seeking pleasure by incorporating the other into the Same.  Philosophy, in this sense, is an "egology" whenever it asserts the primacy of the self, the Same, the subject or Being.  Ontology as totality admits to no outside.  Thus, if Levinas is to preserve the Other, the Other cannot become an object of knowledge or experience within the totality of an egology.  In the enjoyment (jouissance) of egology, the I is the "living from" which uses up the other in order to fulfill its own needs and desires.  The "transmutation of the other into the same," writes Levinas (1969), is "the essence of enjoyment" (p.  113).  The other, in this sense, however, is not the Other.  Only the other, not the Other, can become a source of enjoyment.  The transcendence of the other is not a threat to the self, but rather a source of satisfaction and happiness: "The I is, to be sure, happiness, presence at home with itself.  But, as sufficiency in its non-sufficiency, it remains in the non-I; it is enjoyment of ‘something else,' never of itself.  Autochthonous, that is, rooted in what it is not, it is nevertheless, wtihin this enrootedness independent and separated."  (Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 1969, p. 152) The relation with the Other, however, is a "relation without relation" (p.  79).  The Other is never reduced to the Same, thus remaining unknowable, outside of the totality of the Same.  The encounter with the Other calls egology into question.  The "I" can no longer live in the fantasy of a unique possession of the world.  The power and freedom of the Same are called into question. The Other cannot be possessed, resists enjoyment, and, as the I encounters this Otherr, it is called back to the meaning of its freedom--a freedom which is founded by the Other and which, in this encounter, is called to responsibility and obligation towards the Other as genuine freedom. As responsible for the infinite Other, I am called to guard her against the systematic determination of any moral law.  "For Levinas, the God that provides sanctity for the Other can never be reduced to a set of commandments because the Other calls me only as herself" (Cornell, 1998, p. 140).  To reduce the Other who calls me as a unique self in the face-to-face to a set of a priori moral principles is a violence to her alterity.  And since my responsibility to the Other is to the Other in her uniqueness and alterity, my responsibility is infinite.  "It is precisely because the Good is the good of the Other that it cannot be fully actualized" (Cornell, 1998, p. 141). http://mythosandlogos.com/Levinas.html, diakses 30 Agustus 2010.  Emmanuel Levinas First published Sun Jul 23, 2006; substantive revision Sun Mar 18, 2007 Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Levinas's philosophy has been called ethics. If ethics means rationalist self-legislation and freedom (deontology), the calculation of happiness (utilitarianism), or the cultivation of virtues (virtue ethics), then Levinas's philosophy is not an ethics. Levinas claimed, in 1961, that he was developing a “first philosophy.” This first philosophy is neither traditional logic nor metaphysics, however.[1] It is an interpretive, phenomenological description of the rise and repetition of the face-to-face encounter, or the intersubjective relation at its precognitive core; viz., being called by another and responding to that other. If precognitive experience, that is, human sensibility, can be characterized conceptually, then it must be described in what is most characteristic to it: a continuum of sensibility and affectivity, in other words, sentience and emotion in their interconnection.[2] This entry will focus on Levinas's philosophy, rather than his Talmudic lessons (see the bibliography) and his essays on Judaism (notably, Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, 1963). Levinas's philosophical project can be called constructivist. He proposes phenomenological description and a hermeneutics of lived experience in the world. He lays bare levels of experience described neither by Husserl nor by Heidegger. These layers of experience concern the encounter with the world, with the human other, and a reconstruction of a layered interiority characterized by sensibility and affectivity. 1. Introduction 1.1 Overview of Levinas's Philosophy Jacques Derrida pointed out in 1967 that “Levinas does not want to propose laws or moral rules…it is a matter of [writing] an ethics of ethics.”[3] An ethics of ethics means, here, the exploration of conditions of possibility of any interest in good actions or lives. In light of that, it can be said that Levinas is not writing an ethics at all. Instead, he is exploring the meaning of intersubjectivity and lived immediacy in light of three themes: transcendence, existence, and the human other. These three themes structure the present entry. At the core of Levinas's mature thought (i.e., works of 1961 and 1974) are descriptions of the encounter with another person. That encounter evinces a particular feature: the other impacts me unlike any worldly object or force. I can constitute the other person cognitively, on the basis of vision, as an alter ego. I can see that another human being is “like me,” acts like me, appears to be the master of her conscious life. That was Edmund Husserl's basic phenomenological approach to constituting other people within a shared social universe. But Husserl's constitution lacks, Levinas argues, the core element of intersubjective life: the other person addresses me, calls to me. He does not even have to utter words in order for me to feel the summons implicit in his approach. It is this encounter that Levinas describes and approaches from multiple perspectives (e.g., internal and external). He will present it as fully as it is possible to introduce an affective event into everyday language without turning it into an intellectual theme. Beyond any other philosophical concerns, the fundamental intuition of Levinas's philosophy is the non-reciprocal relation of responsibility. In the mature thought this responsibility is transcendence par excellence and has a temporal dimension specific to it as human experience. The phenomenological descriptions of intersubjective responsibility are built upon an analysis of living in the world. These are unique to Levinas. They differ from Heidegger's analytic of existence. For Levinas, an ‘I’ lives out its embodied existence according to modalities. It consumes the fruits of the world. It enjoys and suffers from the natural elements. It constructs shelters and dwellings. It carries on the social and economic transactions of its daily life. Yet, no event is as affectively disruptive for a consciousness holding sway in its world than the encounter with another person. In this encounter (even if it later becomes competitive or instrumental), the ‘I’ first experiences itself as called and liable to account for itself. It responds. The ‘I’'s response is as if to a nebulous command. Nothing says that the other gave a de facto command. The command or summons is part of the intrinsic relationality. With the response comes the beginning of language as dialogue. The origin of language, for Levinas, is always response—a responding-to-another, that is, to her summons. Dialogue arises ultimately through that response. Herein lie the roots of intersubjectivity as lived immediacy. Levinas has better terms for it: responsibility is the affective, immediate experience of “transcendence” and “fraternity.” We will return to these themes. The intersubjective origin of discourse and fraternity can only be reached by phenomenological description. Otherwise, it is deduced from principles that have long since been abstracted from the immediacy of the face-to-face encounter with the other. Levinas's descriptions show that ‘in the beginning was the human relation’. The primacy of relation explains why it is that human beings are interested in the questions of ethics at all. But for that reason, Levinas has made interpretative choices. To situate first philosophy in the face-to-face encounter is to choose to begin philosophy not with the world, not with God, but with what will be argued to be the prime condition for human communication. For this reason, Levinas's first philosophy starts from an interpretive phenomenology. Like Husserl's, his first philosophy sets aside empirical prejudices about subjects and objects. Like Husserl's phenomenology, it strips away accumulated layers of conceptualization, in order to reveal experience as it comes to light. For Levinas, intersubjective experience, as it comes to light, proves ‘ethical’ in the simple sense that an ‘I’ discovers its own particularity when it is singled out by the gaze of the other. This gaze is interrogative and imperative. It says “do not kill me.” It also implores the ‘I’, who eludes it only with difficulty, although this request may have actually no discursive content. This command and supplication occurs because human faces impact us as affective moments or, what Levinas calls ‘interruptions’. The face of the other is firstly expressiveness. It could be compared to a force. We must, of course, use everyday language to translate these affective interruptions. Therein lie difficulties that this entry will clarify. Suffice it to say that first philosophy is responsibility that unfolds into dialogical sociality. It is also Levinas's unique way of defining transcendence in relation to the world and to what Heidegger called Being. Throughout this entry, we will refer to the themes of transcendence and Being in light of the work of Husserl and Heidegger. It is Levinas's project to uncover the layers of pre-intellectual (what Husserl called pre-intentional or objectless intentionality), affective experience in which transcendence comes to pass. Thus, the phenomenological descriptions that Levinas adapts from Husserl and Heidegger extend both of their approaches. However, Levinas's particular extension of Husserl and Heidegger unfolds over the course of an entire philosophical career. For that reason, this entry will follow that career chronologically, as it evolves. We will emphasize, in what follows, how it is that Levinas's thought is: (1) a unique first philosophy; (2) not a traditional ethics (neither virtue, nor utilitarian, nor deontological ethics); (3) the investigation of the lived conditions of possibility of any de facto human interest in ethics; (4) a highly original adaptation of phenomenology and the interpretation of pre-intentional embodied existence (viz., descriptions of sensibility and affectivity). 1.2 Life and Career 1906 Born January 12 in Kaunas (or Kovno, in Russian), Lithuania. Lithuania is a part of pre-Revolutionary Russia in which the then surrounding culture ‘tolerates’ Jews. He is the eldest child in a middle class family and has two brothers, Boris and Aminadab. 1914 In the wake of the War, Levinas's family emigrates to Karkhov, in the Ukraine. The family returns to Lithuania in 1920, two years after the country obtains independence from the Revolutionary government. 1923 Goes to study philosophy in Strasbourg (France). Levinas studies philosophy with Maurice Pradines, psychology with Charles Blondel, and sociology with Maurice Halbwachs. He meets Maurice Blanchot who will become a close friend. 1928-29 Levinas travels to Freiburg to study with Edmund Husserl; he attends Heidegger's seminar. 1930 Publishes his thesis in French, The Theory of Intuition in Husserl's Phenomenology. 1931 French translation, by Levinas, of Husserl's Sorbonne lectures, Cartesian Meditations, in collaboration with Gabrielle Peiffer. 1932 He marries Raïssa Levi, whom he had known since childhood. 1934 Levinas publishes a philosophical analysis of “Hitlerism,” Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism. 1935 Levinas publishes an original essay in hermeneutic ontology, On Escape, in the Émile Bréhier's journal Recherches philosophiques (reprinted in 1982). 1939 Naturalized French; enlists in the French officer corps. 1940 Captured by the Nazis; imprisoned in Fallingsbotel, a labor camp for officers. His Lithuanian family is murdered. His wife Raïssa, and daughter, Simone, are hidden by religious in Orléans. 1947 Following the publication of Existence and Existents (which Levinas began writing in captivity), and Time and the Other that regrouped four lectures given at the Collège Philosophique (founded by Jean Wahl), Levinas becomes Director of the École Normale Israélite Orientale, Paris. 1949 After the death of their second daughter, Andrée Éliane, Levinas and his wife have a son, Michael, who becomes a pianist and a composer. Levinas publishes En découvrant l'existence avec Husserl et Heidegger (selections of which appear in 1998 as Discovering Existence with Husserl). 1957 He delivers his first Talmudic readings at the Colloque des Intellectuels juifs de Langue française. A colloquium attended by Vladimir Jankélévitch, André Neher, and Jean Halpérin, among others. 1961 Publishes his doctorate (ès Lettres), Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Position at the Université de Poitiers. 1963 Publishes Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism. 1967 Professor at the Université de Paris, Nanterre, with Paul Ricœur. 1968 Publishes Quatres lectures talmudiques (English translation in Nine Talmudic Readings). 1972 Humanism of the Other. 1973 Lecture at the Université de Paris IV-Sorbonne. 1974 Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence, the second magnum opus. 1975 Sur Maurice Blanchot (no English translation). 1976 Proper Names. 1977 Du sacré au saint (English translation in Nine Talmudic Readings). 1982 Of God Who Comes to Mind, Beyond the Verse and the radio conversations with Philippe Nemo, Ethics and Infinity. 1984 Transcendance et Intelligibilité (English translation in Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writings) 1987 Outside the Subject, a collection of texts, old and new on philosophers, language, and politics. 1988 In the Time of the Nations. 1990 De l'oblitération: Entretien avec Françoise Armengaud (no English translation); a discussion about the sculpture of fellow Lithuanian, Sasha Sosno. 1991 Entre Nous: On Thinking-of-the-Other. An issue of the prestigious Les Cahiers de L'Herne is dedicated to Levinas's work. 1993 Sorbonne lectures of 1973-74, published as God, Death, and Time. The annual colloquium at Cerisy-la-Salle publishes a volume devoted to him. 1994 Raïssa Levinas dies in September. Levinas publishes a collection of essays, Liberté et commandement (no English translation) and Unforeseen History, edited by Pierre Hayat. 1995 Alterity and Transcendence. Emmanuel Levinas dies in Paris, December 25. 1996 New Talmudic Readings (published posthumously). 1998 Éthique comme philosophie première (no English translation, published posthumously). 2. Philosophical Beginnings: Transcendence as the Need to Escape Levinas published his thesis, The Theory of Intuition in Husserl's Phenomenology in 1930. It was the first book-length introduction to Husserl's thought in French. By privileging the theme of intuition, Levinas established what German speaking readers would have found in Husserl's Ideas (published 1913): every human experience is open to phenomenological description; every human experience is from the outset meaningful and can be approached as a mode of intentionality.[4] The following year, he published a translation of Husserl's Cartesian Meditations, in which the latter laid out a systematic presentation of transcendental phenomenology.[5] In the 1930s, Levinas continue to publish studies of the thought of his two principal teachers, Husserl and Heidegger. These included “Martin Heidegger and Ontology”[6] and the comprehensive “The Work of Edmund Husserl.”[7] In the 1930s and 40s, his philosophical project is influenced by Husserl's phenomenological method, which turned around the centrality of the “transcendental ego.” However, suspicious of an excessive intellectualism in Husserl's approach to essences, Levinas embraced the concrete, worldly approach to existence in Heidegger's Being and Time.[8] Between 1930 and 1935, he will nevertheless turn away from Heidegger's approach to Being and transcendence and develop the outlines of a counter-ontology. He will reconceive transcendence as a need for escape, and work out a new logic of lived time in that project. Levinas's first experimental essay, On Escape (De l'évasion, 1935), examined the relationship between the embodied (sentient) self and the intentional ego,[9] from the perspectives of physical and affective states, including need, pleasure, shame, and nausea. In this original philosophical exercise, Levinas revisited Heidegger's approach to time and transcendence.[10] He was less concerned than was Heidegger with the question of existence that opens up before us when, beset by profound anxiety, we experience the ‘dissolving’ of things in the world. Levinas's question was not: “Why is there Being instead of simply nothing?” His concern was to approach Being differently, through the (human) being for which the primary experiences of Being are of its embodied, but not physiological, existence. Unlike Heidegger, Levinas's approach gave priority to embodiment and its lived “moods,” as well as to humans' failed attempts to get away from the being that we ourselves are. “Escape,” he wrote, “is the need to get out of oneself, that is, to break that most radical and unalterably binding of chains, the fact that the I [moi] is oneself [soi-même].”[11] In the two, crossing dimensions of human life, sentient-affective and intentional, our experience of Being comes to pass. Levinas's early project approached transcendence in light of humans' irreducible urge to get past the limits of their physical and social situations. His transcendence is less transcendence-in-the-world than transcendence through and because of sensibility. This approach to transcendence as evasion poses the question of mortality, finite being, and so, infinity. Levinas accepted Heidegger's arguments that a human being experiences itself as if cast into its world,[12] without control over its beginning and ending. Heidegger's human being, or Dasein, lives out its time projecting itself toward diverse possibilities, and may confront its own mortality in this way. The projective element of transcendence, which Heidegger described in The Basic Problems of Phenomenology[13] as simply a “stepping over to…as such,” was of interest to Levinas. But he would enquire: to what are we ‘stepping over’? And from what are we ‘stepping over’? Levinas writes: And yet modern sensibility wrestles with problems that indicate…the abandonment of this concern with transcendence. As if it had the certainty that the idea of the limit could not apply to the existence of what is…and as if modern sensibility perceived in being a defect still more profound (OE, 51). The objection Levinas raised against Heidegger's transcendence was not that it rejected theology. Rather, it was that ‘stepping over’, or being out ahead of oneself, suggested that Being, as Heidegger understood it, was finite or somehow flawed. That places Being in a cultural and historical context,[14] or, to put it more philosophically, it poses the question of the meaning of the finite and the infinite; that is, the question of the “idea of the limit.” Levinas asks: “[Is] the need for escape not the exclusive matter of a finite being?…Would an infinite being have the need to take leave of itself?” We are admittedly finite. But how do we know this, and from what perspective do we contemplate Being as finite? “Is this infinite being not precisely the ideal of self-sufficiency and the promise of eternal contentment?” (OE, 56). The decision about the ultimate meaning of the infinite is not made in the 1935 essay. It returns as a theme in the 1940s essays, however. Important here are: (1) Levinas's argument that Heidegger's conception of existence is historically specific. (2) To be embodied is to struggle with the limits of one's facticity and one's situation, and it is here that the question of Being first arises. If Heidegger's Dasein confronted the question of Being by finding itself brought before itself in anxiety, Levinas proposes other ways by which the gap narrows between Being itself and the beings that we are. Following the leitmotif of our irrepressible need to escape, Levinas examines a host of attempted and disappointed transcendences: need, pleasure, shame, and nausea. In these possibilities, the corporeal self is posited, set down as a substance, in its existence. Unlike Heidegger's Being, these states are not abstract. Here begins Levinas's protracted insistence that Being is continuous presence, not, as Heidegger insisted, an event of disclosure and withdrawal. From the outset, the “fact of existing” refers to concrete human existence. In identifying existence as firstly human, Levinas establishes that Heidegger's Being, or the “being of that which is,” answers a formal ontological question, to which determinations like finiteness and infinity, not to mention escape and transcendence, apply only vaguely. He will therefore concentrate on what it means for a human being to posit itself, in an act that is not already abstracted from its everyday life. Affective self-positing, not Heidegger's Dasein with its projective temporality, would offer the purest and most concrete access possible to our finite existence. I am my joy or my pain, if provisionally. Our diverse attempts to get out of our everyday situations are not the same as projections toward new possibilities, where our death lies behind all the others (death is the ultimate limit, or “possibility of impossibility,” for Heidegger). Escape represents, for Levinas, a positive, dynamic need. But needs are not equivalent to mere suffering. Within many needs is the anticipation of their fulfillment. If need, whether for sustenance or diversion, cannot assure an enduring transcendence of everyday existence, it nevertheless beckons and enriches us, even if it can sometimes be experienced as oppressive. In this youthful work, Levinas thus rethinks need in light of fullness rather than privation, as was commonly done. In so doing, he opens a different understanding of existence itself. Whether it is experienced by pleasure or suffering, need is the ground of our existence. That means that transcendence, in Levinas's understanding of it, is continually directed toward “something other than ourselves” (OE, 58). And it suggests that the deep motivation of need is to get out of the being that we ourselves are—our situation and our embodiment. In 1935, Levinas's counter-ontology moves Heidegger's Being toward the unified duality of sentient self and intentional ‘I’, here and now, not projected toward its ultimate disappearance in death Reconceived as need, pleasure, or even nausea, transcendence gives us access to a temporality that is neither Aristotle's “measure of motion,” nor the fullness of awaiting (the kairos or moment in the early Heidegger). Pleasure and pain are intensities: “something like abysses, ever deeper, into which our existence…hurls itself” (OE, 61). The priority of the present, concentrated into an extended moment is opened up through sensibility and affectivity. In pleasure as in pain, we need—not out of lack—but in desire or in hope. “Pleasure is…nothing less than a concentration in the instant…” (OE, 61). The present thus receives existential priority over Heidegger's projections of lived temporality. Levinas's emphasis on the embodied present is a theme he never abandons.[15] In as much as he received it from Husserl, he will vastly enrich it.[16] In sum, Levinas's early project is structured around the reconceptualization of fundamental existential categories. If Husserl's transcendental ego[17] returns, here, as the ‘I’ of conscious intentions, which Levinas differentiated from the self of embodiment, it remains the case that the embodied self holds priority, precisely as the site from which transcendence first arises. If the ‘self’ and ‘I’ duality is where the positivity of Being is clearest, then the precedence of the world and of Being is necessarily displaced. On the other hand, Heidegger's finite Being, which he understood as disclosure and withdrawal, is interpreted in a pre-Heideggerian fashion, as constant presence. That presence is modalized through our manifold sensations, emotions and states of mind. In 1935, Levinas was convinced that through sensation and states of mind, we discover both the need to escape ourselves and the futility of getting out of existence. In the physical torment of nausea, we experience Being in its simplest, most oppressive neutrality. To this, Levinas adds three provocative themes. First, a being that seeks to escape itself, because it finds itself trapped in its own facticity, is not a master, but a “creature” (OE, 72). Second, nausea is not simply a physiological event. If nausea shows us, dramatically, how existence encircles us on all sides, to the point of submerging us, then social and political actuality can also nauseate. Third, if Being is experienced in its pure form as neutrality and impotence, then we can neither bypass Being (following the “aspirations of Idealism” [OE, 73]), nor accept it passively. Being is existence, but it is our existence. The mark of our existence is need, or the non-acceptance of neutral Being. In 1935, Levinas concludes, “Every civilization that accepts being—with the tragic despair it contains and the crimes it justifies—merits the name ‘barbarian’,” (OE, 73). The question remains: How shall we conceptualize a sensuous need to transcend Being? Embodied need is not an illusion; but is transcendence one? 3. Inflections of Transcendence and Variations on Being The writings of the 1940s prolong Levinas's counter-ontology (against Heidegger's question of Being, but always with recourse to interpretations of embodiment). They inflect the notion of transcendence, away from the partial transcendence of need and pleasure, toward the promise of fecundity. In late 1939, Levinas was mobilized as a reserve officer in the French army and sent to the front, where he was captured less than a year later. While interned in the Fallingsbotel camp near Hanover, Levinas studied Hegel and began work on Existence and Existents. There is no doubt that the uncertainty about his wife and daughter, not to mention rumors about the liquidation of the Jews of Lithuania, influenced his work at this time. We need only recall Levinas's anecdote about “the last Kantian” in Nazi Germany.[18] The only being, who was not a prisoner, to acknowledge the sequestered officers, was a dog. A more critical evaluation of the period can be seen in his conception of Being in Totality and Infinity (1961). In Existence and Existents (1947) and Time and the Other (1947), existence has the surprising, dual aspect of “light,” and of a dark indeterminacy. It is as though it were divided between the Being of the created world and the darkness out of which light was created. This shifts the phenomenological focus onto Being as light and visibility, in which we can constitute objects at a distance and Being as the dark turmoil into which we sink, in insomnia. The attempt to close the hiatus between Heidegger's Being and the being that we are has also changed. Following Husserl's transcendental phenomenology, in which an ‘I’ grounds the movements of intentionality like a magnetic pole, Levinas's embodied ego is neither preceded nor outstripped by its world. The corporeal self, now called the “hypostasis,” is its own explicit basis; we awaken out of ourselves, into light. We fall asleep, curled about ourselves. To put it succinctly, consciousness, with its moods and activity, begins and ends with itself. It awakens, acts, and falls asleep. The question of transcendence continues in these middle-period essays. The meaning of transcendence is refined to the temporal transcendence promised by “fecundity,” or the birth of the son. The partial transcendences of pleasure and voluptuosity, sketched in 1935, receive a fuller development and variations. As to the son, he is myself and not-myself, Levinas will say. The open future of the family responds to two significant limits imposed on human knowledge and representation: death and the other person. While not denying Heidegger's intuition that death (if viewed from a stance of the living) is the “possibility of impossibility,” Levinas argues that we witness death only as the death of the other, but even as such it escapes understanding as an absolute limit. Hence he will qualify it as a radical alterity; the same sort of alterity as that which the other human being presents me. Against these enigmas, every mode of comprehension runs aground. For this reason, Levinas insists that death is really the impossibility of (all our) possibilities. The other person is an event I can neither predict nor control. Two reversals should be noted relative to 1935. First, against Hegel's conception of work as the dialectic of spirit transforming nature (and nature naturalizing labor), Levinas describes labor phenomenologically as effort and fatigue,[19] highlighting the divergence between embodied self and the intending ego. The second reversal concerns moods themselves. While anxiety was the state of mind, for the early Heidegger, by which humans came before themselves and the question of their existence, in subsequent years, Heidegger would expand his “attunements,” to include joy, boredom, and awe. All of these open Dasein to being and the world. In his middle period, Levinas also addresses our openness to the world, privileging it over questions of Being. However, instead of adumbrating revelatory moods, Levinas has recourse to bodily states like fatigue, indolence, and insomnia, in which the gap between self and I is clearest. Themes of joy and love of life appear in regard to the world, because the world is now understood as light. But this, too, is part of Levinas's counter-project to Heidegger, for whom our concern for the world coexists with instrumentalist relationships with it: entities in the world are as if on display, at the reach of the hand; tools are used like material. Ever in search of a primordial, sense-rooted, relation to the world, Levinas situates his discovery, offering a profoundly Husserlian insight: “The antithesis of the a priori and the a posteriori is overcome by light” (DEAE, 76). It is worth recalling that light figured as the very heart of Husserl's phenomenological intuition. Light is awakened consciousness, whose intentionality[20] Levinas rethinks as “lived affectivity” (DEAE, 56), rather than as a ray of intentional focus, aiming at objects. In Existence and Existents, the emotions characteristic of being in a world of light are desire and sincerity, not Heidegger's care and circumspection. We see at work, here, a significant rethinking of the transcendental-anthropological distinction (expressed as a priori and a posteriori). These levels represent the legacy of Kantianism and inform the early Heidegger's “ontological difference.” Levinas sublates the distinction phenomenologically; light functions, here, as a quasi-transcendental, a condition of possibility that is nevertheless in and of the world and its experience. Being, as we noted, also is dark indeterminacy. Having suspended the binaries of de facto inside and outside as part of his own phenomenological bracketing,[21] Levinas will approach this indeterminacy not as objectivity, but as something revealed through mood. Whether it is the dark indeterminacy that besets the insomniac self, or whether it is the rustling of nocturnal space, Being's dark aspect horrifies us. “The things of the day world then do not in the night become the source of the ‘horror of darkness’ because our look cannot catch them in their ‘unforeseeable plots’; on the contrary, they get their fantastic character from this horror. Darkness…reduces them to undetermined, anonymous being, which they exude” (EE, 54). This anonymous being, also called the il y a [there is], does not ‘give’ the way Heidegger's Being does. And it is not revealed through mere anxiety. Nevertheless, it is a beginning. Insomniac and in the throes of horror, the hypostasis falls asleep. Or again, it lights a light and reassembles its consciousness. It “sobers up.” Therein lays our first, constitutive escape from neutral Being. But the il y a gives the lie to the question: Why is there Being instead of simply nothing? Nothing, as pure absence, may be thinkable, but it is unimaginable. Indeterminate Being fills in all the gaps, all the temporal intervals, while consciousness arises from it in an act of self-originating concentration. This is the first sketch of Being as totality. The self-‘I’ dyad becomes a limited transcendence arising in the midst of the self's encompassing horror. It hearkens to a call that comes not from neutral Being but from the Other. The stage is thus set for Totality and Infinity's elaborate analyses of world, facticity, time as now-moment, transcendence in immanence, and transcendence toward future fecundity. These themes constitute the core of Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. 4. Transcendence as Responsibility, and Beyond Levinas's first book-length essay, Totality and Infinity (1961), was written as his Habilitation or Doctorat d'État.[22] Transcendence is a significant focus of Totality and Infinity, coming to pass in the face-to-face relationship. For Levinas, to escape deontology and utility, ethics must find its ground in an experience that cannot be integrated into logics of control, prediction, or manipulation. Whether it takes the form of the conscious ‘fit’ between subject and object in Husserl's phenomenology, or whether a unity of mind and being evolves dialectically, rational activity can never become ‘angelic’. That is, it cannot step outside the totalizing logics of metaphysical systems, without supposing them or restoring them. There is no formal bridge, for Levinas, between practical and pure reason. Philosophy in the twentieth century (Heidegger, the Frankfurt School, deconstruction) has shown, at least, that the universality of concepts and the necessity carried by transcendental arguments are simply not sufficient to prevent the triumph of ends-rationality and instrumentalization. Ethics is therefore either an affair of inserting particulars into abstract scenarios, or ethics itself speaks out of particularity about the first human particularity: the face-to-face relationship. For much Jewish thought after Kant, the ethical message of the biblical prophets held a dignity equal to the justice aimed at in Jewish law. Levinas carries this insight into phenomenology, starting with a relationship that is secular, yet non-finite (not conceptually limitable), because it continuously opens past the immediacy of its occurring, toward a responsibility that repeats and increases as it repeats. The new framework of transcendence as human responsibility involves an extensive exploration of the face-to-face relationship, and it opens onto questions of social existence and justice. Finally, Levinas approaches to Being more polemically as exteriority. We will examine these themes in what follows. 4.1 Logic of Totality and Infinity Totality and Infinity unfolds around phenomenological descriptions of Being, understood mechanistically as nature. Being as love of life holds an important place here, much the way need as positivity, and existence as light, did in the 1930s and ‘40s. Levinas again reframes labor, less as mastery and humanization of nature, and more as the creation of a store of goods with which an other can be welcomed. Thanks to his joy in living and his creation of a home, the human being is able to give and to receive the other into his space. On the basis of these descriptions, transcendence comes to pass in several stages. First, the onset of the other, as the expression of the face, causes freedom of will to falter and opens a ‘me’ to goodness. Second, in accounting for itself, the subject approached by the other engages the first act of dialogue. Out of this, discourse eventually arises. The unfolding of discourse carries a trace of ethical investiture and self-accounting, and may become conversation and teaching. As the breadth of dialogical engagement expands, the trace of the encounter with the other becomes attenuated; and this, to the point where the meaning of justice poses a question. Is the essence of justice the reparation of wrongs; is it disinterested equity, or is it the interest of the stronger? Because justice is clearly all these things, it constitutes a kind of pivot between the mechanism evident in Being and the supererogatory gesture of responsibility. Levinas's logic unfolds up to the question of justice and then takes an unanticipated tack. Rather than pursuing justice as it is refined through civil society into the State, Levinas focuses on an ‘institution’, the family, which is common to all of humanity. In the family, election by the father and service to the brothers, set forth a justice more decisively conditioned by face-to-face responsibility than the justice of the State could ever be. The phenomenology of the family, entitled “beyond the face,” crowns Levinas's first major work. 4.2 Time and Transcendence in Totality and Infinity Totality and Infinity does not devote much attention to clock time or to the time of history. Because Being is accepted in its Hobbesian character as mechanistic causality and competition, human time will not be situated firstly in social time with the invention of clocks and calendars. History, too, seems to be a history of metaphysicians: Levinas describes history as violence, punctuated by extremes of war and annihilation. However, an alternative history, in which the wrongs done to particulars can be attested, is envisionable. It will not be recorded in a history of the State. Levinas will not focus on time as the measure of movement, or even on time as Henri Bergson's “duration.” Duration denoted a temporality lacking all subjectivity. It was like the time of ritual participation in dream worlds, as observed by French ethnographers. For Levinas, time will consist in two axes: (1) the flowing synthesis of now moments, Husserl's structure of transcendental consciousness; (2) and a peculiar kind of interruption that Levinas will call the event of transcendence. Transcendence is, above all, relational: it is a human affair. It is difficult to determine whether transcendence is an “event” per se or not. An event should be characterized as a force that introduces a decisive break into the historical status quo and redirects it in function of its own magnitude. The encounter with the other person, so far as it is an event, merely inflects history or leaves a trace in it. But this is not the history found in the textbooks. It is more like a history of isolated acts or human ideals (justice, equity, critique, self-sacrifice). Transcendence in Levinas is lived and factical. How could transcendence be factical? While it has the temporality of an interruption that ‘I’ cannot represent to myself, transcendence nevertheless has a circular relationship with everyday life. That is, transcendence, understood as the face-to-face relation, lives from our everyday enjoyment and desire even as it precedes these. Human existence, as sensibility, is full and creative, before it is instrumentalist or utilitarian. From enjoying the elements to constructing a home, human existence is never solipsistic. Our life with others is never a flight from a more resolute stance toward our reason for being (our mortality). We are always already in social relations; more importantly, we have always already been impacted by the expression of a living other. Because this impact is affective, because transcendence is not conceptualizable, we forget the force the other's expression has on us. We therefore carry on, in our respective worlds, motivated by our desire for mastery and control. Nevertheless, desire in Totality and Infinity always proves to be double. There is a naturalistic desire, subject to imperatives of consumption and enjoyment. This desire is coextensive with the exercise of our concrete freedom. And there is a desire that comes to light in the failure of our will to mastery. This failure of the will is experienced in the face-to-face encounter. The other's face is not an object, Levinas argues. It is pure expression; expression affects me before I can begin to reflect on it. And the expression of the face is dual: it is command and summons. The face, in its nudity and defenselessness, signifies: “Do not kill me.” This defenseless nudity is therefore a passive resistance to the desire that is my freedom. Any exemplification of the face's expression, moreover, carries with it this combination of resistance and defenselessness: Levinas speaks of the face of the other who is “widow, orphan, or stranger.” These figures are more than allegorical. Each one lacks something essential to its existence: spouse, parents, home. It is as summons that we see expression precipitating transcendence. In other words, if I am self-sufficient in my everyday cognition and my instrumental activities, then that is because I am a being that inhabits overlapping worlds in which my sway is decisive for me. The approach of the other person halts the dynamism of my cognitive and practical sway. Passive resistance inflects my freedom toward an affective mood already explored in 1935: shame. Freedom experiences itself as imperial, unjustifiable; in thus coming out of itself, the ‘I’ accounts for itself. It gives an account to another, who is experienced as “higher” than the ‘I’ in two respects: (1) the passive resistance and ‘facing’ quality of the face holds the other outside of structures of force and conflict; (2) the “demand” the face makes on me (described phenomenologically as the ‘I’) is unavoidable, at least in its coming to pass. Thus the ‘I’ is singled out by the other, extracted from its context of interests. It “trans-ascends,” rising to the other in an affective intentionality, which other philosophies may well have understood as moral sentiments. Of course, Levinas's descriptions are presented under phenomenological bracketing, so this is not a philosophy of moral feeling or a psychology of empathy. Now, Levinas argues that the instant of trans-ascendence belongs to an order different from that of existence or Being: this is the order of the “Good beyond Being,” already glimpsed by Platonism. It is impossible to set up a linear logic of priority between Being and the Good beyond Being. For humans, the Good comes to pass, as if trivially, in that responsibility and generosity are perceivable in human affairs. Cruelty and competition are also readily discerned. The two moments in the philosophical tradition in which the irreducible value of the Good has been pinpointed are, for Levinas, Plato's Idea of the Good, and Descartes's Idea of Infinity, which points beyond itself to an unknowable cause. It may be that insisting that the Good is prior to, rather than just beyond, Being, is necessary to deconstructing Hegel's phenomenology of consciousnesses in struggle for recognition, that there are moments of inexplicable generosity, even occasional sacrifices for another (person or group), is otherwise inexplicable within a logic of competing freedoms and reductive desires. In that respect, the trace of the Good is always present within Being, as a possibility that something other than consumption or instrumentalization may take place. Trans-ascendence, or Levinas's transcendence, evinces the surprising characteristic of being both a common everyday event, a relation, and what he will call “Infinity.” Now, insofar as Infinity means the not-finite, it refers to the unmasterable quality of human expression. So far as Infinity has a positive sense, then it has the affective qualities of desire for sociality, and of joy. Thus, Infinity, before we interpret it as “God” or reify it as a highest being, is a quotidian event that takes place at the sensuous-affective level, and repeats. If it repeats without leaving a clear memory of itself, then this is because it repeats pre-cognitively and pre-intentionally—like a memory ‘of the flesh’, as adumbrated by Merleau-Ponty and his fundamental historicity.[23] Having bracketed any psychological unconscious, always too much the mirror of consciousness itself, Levinas will insist on the ontological significance of the body and the flesh: these are always already in relation with something, be it only air and light. And sensibility consists of an indeterminate number of affectations, of which we become conscious only by turning our attention to them. Levinas's ‘pre-conscious’ sensibility is thus the ongoing shadow or double of the intentional ‘I’. Like the embodied self, who suffocated within itself in 1935 (in nausea), the self of sensibility is the locus of relationality and transcendence in 1961. The implication of this is radical. Whereas light and consciousness afforded Levinas the means by which to sublate the a priori-a posteriori distinction in 1947, and therewith Heidegger's ontological difference between Being and beings, here, the everyday facticity of the face-to-face encounter destabilizes transcendental versus pragmatic distinctions. Transcendence is “anthropological,” a human affair, or it is nothing. Any philosophical translation of embodied concrete life must consider the human subject as it is constituted through relations with others in a simultaneous occurrence of particularization and loss of self. 4.3 Willing, Being, and Two Histories (the State and the Family) In Time and the Other, Levinas first voiced “the profound need to quit the climate of [Heidegger's] philosophy.” In 1961, he will do so, albeit not without a certain violence in his interpretation of Heidegger's ontology. As we have seen, it is possible to envisage Being as existence by way of the concepts of willing and strife in Levinas. Certainly, the experience of the Shoah is reflected in this work, notably in the very anti-Heideggerian characterization of Being as constant presence. For Levinas, this Being has two modes of carrying on. In nature, it is mechanism, drives, and linear causality. In social life, it is the ‘totalization’ or absorption of individuals and institutions by the State. In 1961, the State, no matter what period of its history we examine, decides questions of security and property, life and death. In the “Preface” to Totality and Infinity, the State is the ‘organism’ of politics: it declares and manages war—whether military or commercial (trade wars). This leaves the question of justice suspended between the moral responsiveness coming out of the face-to-face encounter, and the conflict of ontological forces. It is unclear which of these two human possibilities for justice represents what Carl Schmitt, then later Walter Benjamin called, the “state of exception.” Being, in Levinas, is never Heidegger's disclosure and withdrawal. Thus, Being is not an event per se. Levinas never addressed the question of whether an ethics could be derived from Heidegger's ontology. But it is clear that no thinking whose primary focus was on an openness toward the world, and a confrontation with one's mortality, afforded the means necessary for grasping the hidden meaning of consciousness, which begins in the double constitution of the subject by life and by the encounter with the Other. For Levinas, Heidegger's philosophy was a thinking of the neuter, a recrudescent paganism that sacralized natural events and anonymous forces. Worse, it was a thinking that drew its inspiration from an ancient structure of temporality, Paul's kairos, which was the time of awaiting the messiah's return for the early Christian community. If the evacuation of lived, religious content gave Heidegger access to a temporality more substantial than what was available to the neo-Kantian, formalist tradition, one question remained: How can one preserve the living source of human facticity while removing all connection to its contents? It is for this reason that Levinas returns to a conception of Being more familiar to the metaphysical tradition than to Heidegger's Being, glimpsed in the ‘moment’. Being carries on as continuous presence for Levinas. The face-to-face encounter inflects it toward the possibility of responsibility and hospitality. But an inflection does not mean a transformation. Inflection opens to what Kant called “interests of practical reason,” through the repetition of responsibility. This inflection of Being also opens a course toward universality as ethical humanity rather than universality as politics. An inflection toward humanity is fragile, because it is continually absorbed by the rhetoric of political institutions. However, in 1961, Levinas's inflection is best seen in the family. How the responsibility and election experienced by fathers, sons, and brothers, passes into a larger history and public space remained a difficult question—probably best addressed through critique, witnessing, perhaps even limited demands for justice. Nevertheless, the constituent ‘moments’ of the family are universal. Beginning with fecundity, in which the time of an individual (life span) is opened beyond its limits by one (the son) who is both (the image of) the father and other than he, the life of the family continues through election and responsibility enacted between parents and offspring—and between brothers. This is illustrated by the fact that there are events and crimes that the son or grandson may pardon, whereas the father could not. However, the logic of fecundity-election-responsibility leaves the State and the family as two distinct human collectivities with nothing to mediate between their ontological and moral characteristics. Being, understood as existence in all its dimensions, may be modified, but not durably. Thus Being could be called absolute, were it not for the fragile interruption of transcendence and the persistence of its trace. If family and State represent two irreconcilable instances in Levinas's 1961 thought, willing and ethical responsibility prove likewise irreconcilable. Moreover, given Levinas's characterization of the will—naturalistic and drive-based—it is hard to see how this natural inheritance could be halted in its élan or caused to question itself. If Derrida is right, and Totality and Infinity is a “treatise on hospitality,” then the transcendence that comes to pass in the face-to-face must have nothing to do with the will. It must never be a matter of nature, even human nature. That excludes from transcendence not only an intentional component (already bracketed by Levinas's phenomenology), but also anything like moral sentiments or innate capacities to be affected by the other. The non-violent force of the face as expression can be reduced neither to physical force nor to inertia. In such a case, there would be no question of escaping the mechanistic order of Being. This requires the conception of a different kind of force, which Levinas will call “Illeity.” An attempt to express, differently, the unbridgeable distance between myself and the other, “he-ness” or Illeity, signifies the impossibility of initially pronouncing a “thou” in some kind of reciprocity with the other person. Thus the moment of address in the second person comes after the impact of the face as widow and as He. Moral height is thus not expressed in thou-saying; it is a third person relationship. Here lies the point at which a reading begins that bridges the philosophical and the religious, particularly the Jewish dimension of Levinas's thought. It is and must remain a question too large for philosophy to know what explains the force of the other's expression. Nothing explains it. There are, Levinas insists, objects behind their objects only in ages of penury. The face-to-face encounter likely gives rise to the impetus to pronounce an impossible signifier like “God.” Be that as it may, whatever we attribute to God must be subject to the conditions Levinas already placed on transcendence: non-thematizable, it is an experience of assignation and command. To say more than this is to return to the confidence that representation and conceptuality capture every aspect of meaning lived out in a human life. Thus Levinas stands, minimally, within the negative ‘theological’ tradition inaugurated by Maimonides; more acutely, perhaps, because Levinas's task is not so much to reconcile Judaism and Aristotelianism, as it is to describe phenomenologically the indescribable: breaking out of totality and Being. We will have more to say on this when we discuss time and transcendence in Otherwise than Being 5. Transcendence as the Other-in-the-same Otherwise than Being grew up around its core fourth chapter, entitled “Substitution” and published first in 1968.[24] It is a justifiable simplification to say that substitution is responsibility, explored this time as a multi-faceted interiority, an inner life with a host of affective tones. These tones require extensive recourse to discursive figures borrowed from psychology, poetics, and even ‘dogmatics’ (“obsession,” “persecution,” “recurrence,” “too tight in its skin,” “exile,” “maternity,” “love,” “expiation,” and “kenosis”). The central wager of Otherwise than Being is to express affectivity in its immediacy, with minimal conceptualization. Consequently, transcendence becomes transcendence-in-immanence before it is transcendence toward the other as untotalizable exteriority. 5.1 The Logic of Otherwise than Being Otherwise than Being opens with a general overview of the argument, in which Being and transcendence will now be called essence and disinterest. Emphasizing the processual quality of Being, Levinas will now refer to it equivalently as Being or essence. Responsibility will be focused more sharply as the condition of possibility of all signification. The themes of conversation and teaching recede into the background. A more strategic use of the body as flesh, that is, simultaneously an inside and outside locus, is evident. Subjectivity is now the coming to pass of responsibility itself. That means that subjectivity is properly itself because it is regularly dispossessed of itself from within. The other has become other-in-the-same. But the other-in-the-same is not different from the factical other. It is that Levinas has returned to Husserl's investigation of transcendence-in-immanence and his phenomenology of the living present. The second chapter approaches Heidegger's theme of language as the way in which Being becomes, the way it temporalizes. Levinas adopts Heidegger's argument that the logos gathers up Being and makes it accessible to us. But Levinas will argue that the lapse of time between lived immediacy and its representation cannot really be gathered by a logos. Therefore, the lapse poses a challenge to language itself and falls, much the way that transcendence did, outside the realm of Being as process. This is Levinas's ultimate critique of Heidegger, which passes through language rather than through Being itself. The three most remarkable innovations of Otherwise than Being include: (1) The proposed phenomenological reduction to the birth of meaning in a self, carrying what is not itself (the other, affectively). This is a radicalization of Husserl's idealism, in which meaning arises thanks to the inner dialogue whose language is more rarefied than that composed of everyday signs. (2) The exploration of sensibility as the locus at which ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ merge. If sensibility already played an important role in Totality and Infinity, sensibility will now be traced back to the density of the flesh itself. And the flesh serves Levinas as his pre-consciousness, whose ontological meaning counts above all else. (3) The exploration of the self, minus the intentional ego, through an affective ‘complex’, unfolds in a language that is best communicated through enactment. It can be likened to prophetic witness. It is as though Levinas were describing the affective investiture of a subject called to witness. This is also the sense of the subject carrying more than it can express, and writhing under the constraints of that investiture. Chapters four and five of the work have a tone more somber than that of any work Levinas had written up to that point. If responsibility expresses the intersubjective genealogy of the affective subject—arising between Being and the Good—then this affective constitution will be called traumatic in 1974 (OBBE, 56). Affectivity is now expressed, above all, in light of suffering. Nevertheless, the split subject continues ‘to be’ as sincerity. But the concepts of desire, especially ‘metaphysical Desire’, have a diminished significance here. The lapse of time, irrecuperable to conceptual identification, will be expressed figuratively as the adverbial. Adverbs inflect Being (which the verb makes ‘resonate’ for us); they do not change it. The adverb expresses the autrement; literally, “other-ly” than Being, not another order of Being. The final half of chapter five recurs to the performative register of language to express the tension of consciousness striving to gather itself in the midst of the subject's affective divisions and its investiture by the other. (Levinas calls this, at times, its ‘psychosis’, OBBE, 142.) Thus Levinas writes: “that is true of the discussion I am elaborating at this very moment” (OBBE, 170; emphasis added). To be sure, there is an inevitable artificiality to presenting as immediacy what is already past. But this is a wager we also find in religious language's continuous revivification of the present. It is likewise a wager in Levinas's philosophical discourse; one ventured in the hope that hyperbole and strategic negations will convey a meaning that would otherwise disappear in predicative statements. (Nietzsche already taught us that “the lightning does not flash,” which conveys the immediacy at which Levinas too is aiming.) The final chapter of Otherwise than Being thus makes a transition out of philosophy into a certain lyricism, repetition, and bearing witness. It is Levinas's step toward the affective conditions of possibility of prophetic speech. 5.2 Time and Transcendence in Otherwise than Being In the 1974 work, Levinas's earlier concern with charges of psychologism (i.e., descriptions limited to subjective particularity, admitting no generalization as conditions of possibility) diminishes. The 1961 ontological language also changes. The ways in which existence echoes in language is taken up resolutely. The structure of human sensibility[25] is explored as passive ‘epidermal’ vulnerability. As in his 1935 discussion of need and nausea, the complex of sensibility and affectivity overflows representation, while providing an index to the Being that is our own being. Interwoven layers of affectivity are unfolded in Otherwise than Being. Levinas explores the sensible-affective ‘proto-experience’ of the approach of the Other in light of moods, using deliberate tropes: “there is substitution for another, expiation for another. Remorse is the trope of the literal sense of sensibility. In its passivity is erased the distinction between being accused and accusing oneself” (OBBE, 125). As in Existence and Existents, where “light” dissolved, for phenomenological description, the a priori-a posteriori distinction, Otherwise than Being is a study of transcendence as the Other-in-the-same. The experience of the affective trace of ‘my’ relations with particular others is preserved, again not as psychological memory, but as a reminiscence of the flesh. We should recall that the spatial distinction between inside and outside falls as one effect of phenomenological bracketing. That spatial distinction—like the separation of an intending ‘I’ and its intended object—was the outcome of a cognitive, abstractive decision whose finality set a subject in a ‘here’ and a ‘within’, just as it set an object in a ‘there’ or an ‘outside’. Faithful to the spirit of Husserl's phenomenology, Levinas suspends that distinction.[26] The new concept of the Other-in-the-same does not abrogate the de facto approach of another human being, as described in Totality and Infinity. Rather, it problematizes that more ontological approach. There is good reason for this. As we know, responsibility is an event that repeats. It even increases as it repeats, according to a logic of expanding significance. That is why the question of immanence arises in regard to responsibility's enduring, and its rememoration. The status of a memory of sensuous events, which affect us before we can represent them, must frame sensibility as intrinsically meaningful, intrinsically beyond-itself. But that implies that the sensuous meaning-event is vulnerable to a skeptical challenge. Levinas does not solve the question of memory and repetition in cognitive terms. As an interpretive phenomenologist, his concern is to pursue transcendence back behind Husserl's transcendental ego, that formal, passive accompaniment of all conscious contents.[27] Levinas's investigations into transcendence turn, here, on the challenge of expressing the depths of passive syntheses and the excessive quality of sensibility and affectivity.[28] While his question still concerns transcendence as spatio-temporal interruption, less attention is devoted to ontological matters like love of life, building a home, or witnessing the promise of a son. The opposition to Heidegger now takes place through an analysis of temporality and language, with the focus on the dynamism of verbs and their inflections by adverbs. Addressing Heidegger, Levinas argues, “Being is the verb itself. Temporalization is the verb form to be. Language issued from the verbalness of a verb would then not only consist in making Being understood, but also in making its essence vibrate…” Here, we see him thinking, with Heidegger, of language as gathering Being, but above all, as rendering Being as pure activity, which Levinas calls ‘vibration’. He continues, this time undermining Heidegger for whom there is no concept of the ad-verbial: “The lived sensation, being and time, is already understood in a verb. In sensibility the qualities of perceived things turn into time and into consciousness… [But,] do not the sensations in which the sensible qualities are lived resound adverbially…as adverbs of the verb to be? If they could be surprised on the hither side of the said, would they not reveal another meaning” (OBBE, 35)? Given the hermeneutic insight that language does not pair up with a pre-existing, objective reality, but instead brings existence to light, language and temporalization have complementary functions vis-à-vis each other: they create meaning, and reality. If Being resonates in the verb to be, then transcendence must belong either to Being and verbality, or transcendence must differ from them. This is why Levinas proposes to capture the lapse of time between a lived moment and the return we make to it, with his concepts of adverbial modification and with “the Saying” (OBBE, 37-55). The Saying hearkens to his theme of sincerity, introduced in Existence and Existents. In Otherwise than Being, he will radicalize sincerity by insisting that the structure of sensibility-affectivity is to be always already fissured. It is this that opens us to venture communication. Sensuous vulnerability is the locus of the birth of signification, understood as approaching or speaking-to another (whether words are actually spoken or not). There is more, in living affectivity, than Heidegger's conception of Being coming to pass, can designate. To adumbrate transcendence as alterity within a subject and, in so doing, to express metaphorically the lost lapse of time—which is the immediate present—Levinas recurs to Husserl's “so little explored manuscripts concerning the living present” (OBBE, 33).[29] He goes beyond Husserl by insisting that this lapse be called being-for-the-other. If transcendence is transcendence-in-immanence in 1974, it is not simply the continuous birth of intentional acts of consciousness that bestow meaning, as it was in Husserl. Has this ultimate approach to transcendence charted a new apophatics, a new discourse of the unspeakable? Levinas does not refrain from thinking the lapse of time, which is also the gnawing of remorse, and the symptom of the Other-in-the-same. He calls this “Ipseity,” that most concrete and particular core of the subject. “The [I]pseity has become at odds with itself with its return to itself. The self-accusation of remorse gnaws away at the closed and firm core of consciousness, opening it, fissioning it” (OBBE, 125). But he now argues that what is said about transcendence and responsibility must also be unsaid, to prevent it from entering into a theme, since it transcends every thematic. While this is a deconstruction whose first ‘text’ is consciousness already inscribed, sensuously, by an ‘other’, this is also a hermeneutical crossroads. The history of Jewish philosophy, from Philo and Sa'adya Gaon to Maimonides, and then from Cohen to Rosenzweig, alone clarifies Levinas's strategies and figures. Levinas has recourse, for example, to Maimonides' approach to the Infinite, using a negative interpretation of affirmative propositions. Rather than saying “God is powerful,” Maimonides proposes that “God is not weak.” Rather than insisting that “God is one,” Maimonides says, “God is not multiple.”[30] In bracketing from our discourse all that which human language may not appropriately attribute to God, we create an infinite proposition (“A is not B”). A similar proposition is found in Levinas's characterization of transcendence. We can be otherwise, if we choose to do so, he argues. However, we cannot “otherwise than be”—since otherwise suggests the infinity, the open non-structure of human sensibility and affectivity, so long as these are understood as for-the-Other. 5.3 Sensibility, Facticity, and the Hermeneutic Circle In the wake of Schleiermacher and Dilthey, Heidegger realized in the early 1920's that life as concrete, lived immediacy can be interpreted, but that we cannot be certain that what we are interpreting does not move perpetually within the circle of discursive conceptuality. Interpretation spawns interpretation (of itself), and a hermeneutic circle arises from this. Does that mean that factical experience is structurally inaccessible? Levinas's text here echoes his 1961 claims about the face as expression that pierces through phenomenality. The hyperbolic language of Otherwise than Being would have us ‘sense’ the excess of what he means to express—and its limit. This is not allegory; that is, it is not the signification, born of a Christian reading of the Bible, of higher realities hidden under everyday objects and events. It is almost the contrary: signification has its incipience in transcendence; transcendence is the intersubjective quality of sensibility. Levinas seeks the factical and moral depths from which signs arise. To combine Maimonides' negation strategies with an affirmative discourse that is not positivistic, does not result in ‘positing’ entities, Levinas seeks “to measure the pre-ontological weight of language instead of taking it only as a code.” He reminds us that “interpreting the fact that essence exposes and is exposed, that temporalization is stated, resounds and is said, [does] not give priority to the [words] said over the saying. It is first to awaken, in the said, the saying which is absorbed in it” (OBBE, 43). This is why to ‘say’ transcendence-in-immanence means to say and to unsay it. “For the saying is both an affirmation and a retraction of the said. The reduction could not be effected simply by parentheses…It is the ethical interruption of essence that energizes the reduction” (OBBE, 44). Levinas is thus performing a non-technical, interpretive reduction in his text. His radical reduction aims to get at the affective meaning of his ethical interruption of Being and consciousness. “Without a shell to protect oneself, stripped to the core as in an inspiration of air….It is a denuding beyond the skin, to the wounds one dies from…being as vulnerability” (OBBE, 49). Surprisingly, Levinas also calls this “Glory.” In the tradition of Jewish philosophy, glory (kavod) is the finite instance in which what is not-finite comes to pass. It is like a light out of which arises speaking (the dibbour, or Saying, of the Infinite). These thematic parallels are not accidental.[31] The temporality specific to the sensuous passivity that precedes the passive synthesis of time as a unified flow, is stranger than Husserl's complex stream of consciousness with its retentions and protentions. Levinas compares his ‘temporality’ to aging. Like living, the time of sensibility occurs despite oneself. “The despite oneself marks this life in its very living. Life is life despite life—in its patience and its aging” (OBBE, 51, 54). This passivity, as pure “for-another,” adumbrates Levinas's temporal perspective on the genesis of signification. No longer do we heed spontaneously our own immanent voice, as in Husserl; no longer do we hearken to a silent call of Being, as in Heidegger (OBBE, 56, 62, 64). We are constituted, affectively, by the other within and without. 5.4 Being, the Third Party, and Politics Being or existence remains on the parallel tracks of a naturalistic will to persist in being and its implications for culture and politics. Levinas's adaptation of the Spinozist conatus essendi predictably has nothing of the latter's monism or pantheism. Nevertheless, existence is not so markedly identified with war as it was in 1961. But Levinas will now argue that however we constitute “Nature”—phenomenologically, scientifically, culturally—sensuous vulnerability and the broken subject precede our constitutions, which all presuppose rationality and tradition. It is therefore possible to speak of a “pre-natural signification.” Levinas writes, “In renouncing [Husserl's] intentionality as a guiding thread toward the eidos [formal structure] of the psyche…our analysis will follow sensibility in its prenatural signification to the maternal, where, in proximity [to what is not itself], signification signifies [as sincerity] before it gets bent into perseverance in being in the midst of a Nature” (OBBE, 68). The question remains, as it did in Totality and Infinity: How do responsibility and transcendence enter into the continuum of time and Being? And, how does an investiture of this intensity pass into reason? As in the 1961 work, we find, here, that the Third Party, another way of speaking of other people identified as other selves, also ‘looks at me through the eyes of the Other’. Here too the passage to reason, sociality, and measurable time occurs because the spatio-temporal lapse is as if spontaneously integrated by consciousness. Levinas accords Husserl his argument that sensibility and affect are always on the verge of becoming intentional consciousness. The responsibility and fraternity expressed now as the abyssal subject or other-in-the-same leaves a trace in social relations. Moreover, faithful to his project of 1961, the form of the trace is not traditionally metaphysical. It is found in our concern for reparatory justice, even for modest equity. This concern for justice does not change the Hobbesian or Machiavellian nature of human drives or political virtù. But neither could the adverbial change the verbal quality of being in its continuous becoming. In 1974 however, the difficulty of holding together the time and passivity likened to aging (OBBE, 54), with the flowing time of consciousness and its projections toward future possibilities, is more obvious in the text. Thus, Levinas inquires, “does a face abide in representation and in proximity; is it community and difference?” (OBBE, 154). Insoluble, this proves a question for us as well. “The third party introduces a contradiction in the saying whose signification before the other until then went in one direction. It is of itself the limit of responsibility and the birth of the question: What do I have to do with justice? A question of consciousness” (OBBE, 157). With the consolidation of consciousness and the return to a philosophy of representation, the indispensable ‘fiction’ Levinas has created here dissolves: speaking here and now in writing; figural language pointing not toward another ‘world’ or another being, but to the intensities and openness of pre-conscious affectivity itself—all this returns to a poetics of the inexpressible. Now, attempts to express lived facticity occurred not infrequently in philosophy over the course of the last century. The text as first person witness may well date from Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. But the inevitable thematization of intersubjectivity, from a standpoint outside the face-to-face encounter, simply underscores the necessary double reading Levinas demands of us: conceptualization and performance.[32] Yet the question of justice requires an additional transcendental move that Levinas will not make. That is, what the Other means to the Third Party; or why Third Parties insist that ‘I’ too receive just treatment. These are questions that require a systematic perspective outside the passive now in which ‘I’ emerge, over-full with what is not-me. For that reason, Levinas is not interested in pursuing a deduction of questions of equity. The site at which comparison, justice, and normativity can be deduced is beyond Levinas's immediate concern. Illeity and fraternity lose the quality that defines them, that excessive and intensive sensibility-affectivity, when they are incorporated into conceptualizing discourse. The hiatus, here, is well known: it is that already found between intuition and conceptual adequation; truth, in Plato's sense of an unmediated intuition of an Idea versus knowledge, as positing and possession of entities. The notion of a just politics has meant different things according to the form of the State (absolute, noninterventionist, liberal). Given his occasional evocations of a pluralist Being in Totality and Infinity, Levinas's argument that justice is marked by the trace of responsibility accords relatively well with liberal theories of political justice and sovereignty. Anglo-Saxon theorists of sovereignty always emphasized that individuals live in multiple social associations, which impose a host of responsibilities on them. This pluralist cultural existence diminishes conservative emphases on sovereignty as concentrated in the State itself. But Levinas never decided whether politics meant war or a real possibility of peace. In his 1984 essay “Peace and Proximity,” Levinas is more favorable to the State which, as liberal, evinces palpable aspects of the trace in its policies. “It is not without importance to know—and this is perhaps the European experience of the twentieth century—whether the egalitarian and just State in which the European is fulfilled—and which it is a matter…above all of preserving—proceeds from a war of all against all—or from the irreducible responsibility of the one for the other.”[33] For the Jewish philosophical tradition, justice forms the core of the prophetic message. In that respect it has a distinctive political dimension. If the prophets demanded justice (as well as repentance) of their wayward communities, their hyperbolic invocation of justice concerned humanity as a whole. But the prophetic message did not aim at the enactment of justice in the public sphere, whether agora or parliament. As Hermann Cohen recognized, the foundational pillars of “Athens” and “Jerusalem” carried with them two distinct finalities for political justice: the polis or humanity.[34] This best explains why Levinas's remarks on politics are rare and, at times, idiosyncratic. Politics and the Third Party are, by 1974, largely synonymous with “humanity.” This is a significant displacement from his condemnation of politics as the polemos of Being itself, in 1961. 6. Concluding Remarks Levinas's works subsequent to Otherwise than Being refine its complex thematics. There are few significant radicalizations, outside a firmer resolve to speak of the ambiguity intrinsic to the signifier “God,” and the verbal totalization of Being as “essence.” Commentators have differed on the importance of the two major works (Totality and Infinity and Otherwise than Being). It is plausible to see in them two sides of a single coin: that of responsibility and intersubjective fraternity, understood as meaningful outside of a biological framework or the discovery of biological paternity. Others argue that Otherwise than Being is Levinas's mature work, a study on the creativity of language endebted to, yet different from, Heidegger's investigations of the poetic lògos, which gathered Being and brought it to light. As we pointed out, Derrida called Totality and Infinity a “treatise on hospitality,” and devoted, in sum, more attention to it than to Otherwise than Being. But Levinas had essentially one philosophical project: to interpret existence and transcendence in light of the birth of ethical meaning. To that end he consistently revisited Husserl's phenomenological method. He reconceived Heidegger's ontological difference as the difference between existence and the Good. He had extensive, often undeclared recourse to the profound, anti-totalizing intuitions into religious life found in Hermann Cohen and Franz Rosenzweig's philosophies. Yet Levinas never remained wholly within any one philosophical system. That does not mean that Otherwise than Being was not motivated by the difficulties highlighted in Totality and Infinity by Jacques Derrida and others. There is little question that the sophistication of Otherwise than Being lies in its three innovations: 1) the analyses and figural expression of transcendence-in-immanence; 2) the critique of language as the site in which existence arises, and 3) the ‘wager’ of stepping out of philosophical reasoning into a performative register that ‘says’ and ‘unsays’ itself. A common thread thus runs through his philosophy and his Talmudic readings. Transcendence is the spontaneity of responsibility for another person. It is experienced in concrete life and expressed in a host of discourses, even before a de facto command is actually received from that other. This curious proposition hearkens to the much debated meaning of “receiving the Torah before knowing what was written in it.”[35] Levinas calls this sort of responsiveness the “Good beyond Being.” Responsibility enacts that Good, that trace of the infinite, because such instances of answering to or for another are everyday events, even though they are not typical of natural, self-interested behaviors. We do not choose to be responsible. Responsibility arises as if elicited, before we begin to think about it, by the approach of the other person. Because this theme is found in both his philosophy and his interpretations of Talmudic passages, Levinas's thought has, at times, left both Talmud scholars and philosophers dissatisfied. For the first, his thought is thoroughly humanistic, with Infinity proving a more rarefied concept of divinity than Maimonides' apophatics. No stranger to Mishnah and Gemara, his interpretations are, nevertheless, less focused on inter- and intra-textuality than on the ethical tenor of the teachings. To the philosopher, Levinas's thought may not escape the hermeneutic circle of facticity, which Heidegger first adumbrated. His philosophy's antifoundational approach to responsibility as the prethematic structure of the self, and as transcendence, appears to lie between phenomenology and a religious élan with no religious finality. Thus Illeity, or the ethical height of the other person, expresses in a concept my affective experience of a power, and an excess, greater than I can ‘contain’. It is precisely in these tensions, between the Jewish religious and philosophical traditions, and his phenomenological-existential thought, that Levinas's originality lies. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/levinas/, diakses 30 Agustus 2010.  Levinas and the Revelation of the Other by: David Grandy       Relation is central to the question of otherness. How successfully, if at all, can otherness be related to sameness or ego (the "I")? Levinas proposes that the other--at least the personal other--always and forever exceeds one's conception of it; thus, the relation is never secured but ongoing and infinite--a "relation without relation" (Totality 80). With this formula, he offers an alternative to Husserl and Heidegger, both of whom (he feels) "totalize" otherness by drawing it into the economy of the self or sameness. One's apprehension of the other, Levinas believes, forever trembles on the possibility of novelty, owing to its irreconcilable strangeness and brimming autonomy. Moreover, light enables such apprehension by its singular ability to yield ontological ground to other things: Light makes possible... this enveloping of the exterior by the inward, which is the very structure of the cogito and of sense. Thought is always clarity or the dawning of a light. The miracle of light is the essence of thought: due to the light an object, while coming from without, is already ours in the horizon which precedes it; it comes from an exterior already apprehended and comes into being as though it came from us, as though commanded by our freedom. (Existence 48) Levinas seems to acknowledge light's bi-directionality, its ability to make other things present while absenting itself in the clarity of the moment. Further, light "comes from an exterior already apprehended," so that it seems to arise from within. Already "there" before we make the here/there distinction, light seems "here" as well.       While light's ambiguity erodes the authority of familiar space and time intervals, it also undermines our ability to speak clearly about its nature. David Michael Levin states that Levinas's view of light and vision is "quite complicated" owing to an ambivalent characterization (250). Often Levinas describes light as imperialistic and totalizing: its expansiveness overtakes the world and thereby subjects it to objective knowing. What's more, that kind of knowing engenders a self-satisfaction that keeps one from trying to see beyond the expanse marked out by light: To see is always to see on the horizon. The vision that apprehends on the horizon does not encounter a being out of what is beyond all being. Vision is a forgetting of the there is [il y a] because of the essential satisfaction, the agreeableness [agrément] of sensibility, enjoyment, contentment with the finite without concern for the infinite. (qtd. in Levin 249) Interpreted thusly, light acts to delimit and finitize human experience. Yet Levinas also recognized that seeing by light involves an immediacy, a closeness without interval, that runs counter to the finite, interval-laden vision that we see: Sight is, to be sure, an openness and a consciousness, and all sensibility, opening as a consciousness, is called vision; but even in its subordination to cognition sight [still] maintains contact and proximity. The visible caresses the eye. One sees and hears like one touches. (Collected 118) This characterization calls forth light's generosity, its graciousness in revoking the interval so that visible images may caress the eye. Here light's infinite aspect emerges as the finite intervals that inform the seeing experience are invisibly overcome. At issue is the uncanniness of light as it put us in touch with distant, seeming untouchable entities. That touching bespeaks integrative embrace, welcoming, rather than objective knowing, borne of separating intervals.       For Levinas, the other is not seen at a distance; rather, its eruptive immediacy or hereness radically dislocates the viewer by revoking ego-protective intervals. At this point, "vision turn[s] back into non-vision, into... the refutation of vision within sight's center, into that of which vision... is but a forgetfulness and re-presentation" (Levinas, Outside 115). Something occurs to reverse the apparent geometry of the world that affords us survey of distant objects: intervals fall away and otherness punctures the pretense of the self as an aloof, objective agent.       Once more, light's bi-directionality emerges: light gives us the visible expanse through an invisible merging of perceiver and perceived. Sappho wrote: Thou, Hesper, bringest homeward all That radiant dawn sped far and wide, The sheep to fold, the goat to stall, The children to their mother's side. (57) Sunset gathers together what sunrise scatters abroad, and the evening star, hinting at the imminent collapse of light's expanse, prepares us to see the world "feelingly," as Shakespeare's Gloucester put it after losing his eyesight (King Lear, IV.vi). More prosaically, light simultaneously gives us expansive spatio-temporal visibility and takes it back by its own invisible action. When experienced, that taking-back is Levinas's revelation of the other: empathy borne of light's invisible coupling eclipses the wide visual experience with its pretense of dispassion borne of separating intervals.       In his preface to Totality and Infinity, Levinas wrote that "this book will present subjectivity as welcoming the Other, as hospitality; in it the idea of infinity is consummated" (27). Infinity for Levinas is that which cannot be overtaken by thought or even (Heideggerian) Being. It is, on the one hand, outside Being, but on the other, intrusive of Being: it possesses an experiential abruptness that contradicts the thought that it is infinitely distant. Thus, infinity entails the collapse of separating intervals and the consequent integration of self and other. As noted earlier, light effects such integration by its indifference to space-time intervals, which indifference brings us forward as participants unable to command light as we command lighted things. Furthermore, infinity is found in that indifference--in light's non-local action whereby visibly separated objects are brought into timeless, spaceless conjunction. So, for both Levinas and Einstein infinity is never consummated in intervals--perhaps least so in those that seem to stretch off endlessly. It is instead consummated in proximity, contact, and integration.       One may specify a point at which physical light merges into otherness by attending to a fundamental difficulty that would seem to foreclose any apprehension of the latter: how does the other bridge into our experience when its very saliency is strangeness and apartness? Would not an absolute other lie beyond both comprehension and experience? Any answer to this question inevitably seeks for a way to make "the infinite distance of the Stranger" traversable, the end-result being a collapse of the normally distinct categories of finiteness and infinity--though, for Levinas, not a collapse of the other into the familiarity of sameness. For those dubious of this "self-challenging double movement" (Davis 38), light, particularly as it is rendered by modern physics, offers a striking retort. Nowhere are infinity and finiteness more mutually implicated. When the finite velocity of light is found to be incommensurable with the finite space-time metric of the material world, infinity suggests itself, and this suggestion becomes more pronounced as the inquiry ensues. The picture that emerges points back to the question of otherness with its concern for an underlying metric to mediate the relation between the ego and the other.       In the case of light, there is no underlying metric. When Einstein dismissed the luminiferous (light-bearing) ether, he freed light from the universal substratum that putatively supported its motion through space and thereby made its behavior intelligible in terms of relation. Absent that substratum, the mind naturally reaches for something--some other constancy--to set light's motion in relation to. But by making the motion itself constant (immune to variant readings), Einstein turned light into a completely auto-referential phenomenon: it is its own metric and one that cannot be coordinated with or related to the space-time metric of the material world. Despite that, light opens the world to view, thereby affording us vision of something other than itself.       A similar dynamic seems to inform Levinas's outlook. Not scaled into an underlying metric that interconnects all entities, the other has an integrity, a metric, of its own. It is kath'auto, self-existing and self-expressing, a fact that allows it to exceed, as if by a never-overtaken constancy, the ideas one musters up to understand it. Like the speed of light, its own value cannot be assimilated into a relation between object and observer. The other transcends objectifying relation and is therefore unrealizable as a determinate phenomenon.       For Levinas, this irreducibility carries over into the ethical sphere. More accurately, there it begins as the shock of otherness "opens humanity" (Levinas, Totality 50) by signaling a shared world of implied moral responsibility. Thus, ethics is "first philosophy": when the other ruptures (Heideggerian) Being, that intrusive event calls us out of ontological self-enclosure (the self-absorbing need to fashion the world in our own image) into unending moral concern. Indeed, since we cannot subsume otherness into our own being, our moral obligation to it is never fully discharged. We lag behind it, unable to close the distance either ethically or conceptually on the other.       In this respect, the other bears a light-like relation to the self: it erupts into our experience, but we cannot recover that eruption as understanding. In the case of light, we cannot reduce it to the familiar and seemingly universal terms of space and time. Similarly, the other comes to us but registers an alien economy that cannot be scaled into our own. Incommensurability thus fosters the polar extremes of immediate contact and infinite separation with no intermediate commonality to bring the two into reconciliation. Moreover, this breach between the two, this openness that freely receives the other and that cannot be overtaken by sight or reason, is the origin of seeing. "Ethics is an optics," wrote Levinas, albeit "bereft of the synoptic and totalizing" images that accompany visual experience (Totality 23). Those images come after the ethical awakening and, being derivative, have no authority over it.       Inasmuch as light enables apprehension of the other, we should not assume separate, though analogous, processes. Light reveals otherness, throws it so cleanly and seamlessly into our experience as to cover or re-veil its own action. That revelation, I submit, is the basis for the infinite though traversable distance between the same and the other: light, in one stroke, gives and takes away the distance; it functions simultaneously as a principle of separation and of unification. It gives us expanse, and thereby a sense of apartness, but only by coupling us to things across space-time intervals. That coupling is immediate (unmediated), not actually a passage across space-time but a nullification of the same owing to light's autonomy from the space-time regime. Thereby the hegemonic frame of everyday reality is broken so that infinity replaces totality. The world, normally hedged-in and fully complete by its very being, undergoes renewal as openness and un-self-containment.       In sum, the otherness or strangeness of light is bound up in its sublime capacity to announce other things visibly while itself remaining hidden from view. That hiddenness, moreover, is an openness or clarity that fosters the seeing, knowing experience. After describing how photons circumvent space and time in physical experiments, John Wheeler proposes that each photon constitutes "an elementary act of creation" when it finally strikes the human eye or some other instrument of detection. He then asks: "For a process of creation that can and does operate anywhere, that reveals itself and yet hides itself, what could one have dreamed up out of pure imagination more magic--and fitting--than this?" ("Law" 189). We could not have dreamed up the non-local photons that constitute light, for they are the means by which we see, know, and imagine other things. http://www.kalpakjian.com/Grandy.html, diakses 30 Agustus 2010.  Summary of Ethics as First Philosophy by Levinas by: Michael Sean Feb. 18th, 2010 at 1:54 AM Ethics as First Philosophy by Levinas “This is the question of the meaning of being: not the ontology of the understanding of that extraordinary verb, but the ethics of its justice. The question 'par excellence' or the question of philosophy. Not 'Why being rather than nothing?', but how being justifies itself." (86) This quote summarizes Levinas' break from first philosophy as an ontological question of being to an ethical inquiry occupying justification of being. In 'Ethics as first philosophy', Emanuel Levinas establishes an entirely new framework, going beyond Heidegger’s notion of Being and borrowing from Sartre’s' conception of Others. Levinas parts with the phenomenological legacy of Heidegger in Section I by ruling out intentionality as the requisite for knowledge and examining the non-intentionality that passively subsists beneath our cogito. Being is intelligibility. Being and knowledge correlate in that knowing is freed from otherness qua being. Man grasps around his world and makes Otherness his own. This Otherness, objects throughout the world, provides a satisfaction. Knowledge is only unique in that it has a dependent relation to I and is separated from Others through the creation of this relation. It gains independence as a result of a uniqueness derived from this creation. In Section I Levinas refers to the idea of grasping for things as a metaphor for acquiring knowledge. This activity of grasping for things involves a desire for the satisfaction that they provide. The whole of human lived experience has been expressed in terms of experience-- relationally. Intentionality is linked to the lived experience which contributes to the identification of being and knowledge. In Section II Levinas explores the possibility of going beyond the notion of thought understood as knowledge in an effort to attain something greater: wisdom. Drawing from Husserl, Levinas examines his theory of representation, or the objectivizing act. This act contains a relation. Levinas says “within consciousness… knowledge is, by the same token, a relation to an other of consciousness and almost the aim or the will of that other which is an object (78).” Here, intentionality is introduced and establishes the I that is in relation to all other differences. This self consciousness establishes an itself as an absolute being through its identification of nature and the powers of knowledge acquisition. However, this intentionality of consciousness that acts to sharpen and hone its powers of illumination and science are diminished by its reflection upon itself. As a result, the powers of intentionality and the ego are retained but now are aimless and indirect as it operates a “non-objectivizing knowledge” (79). This non-intentional consciousness passively subsists beneath all reflection. “The question is what exactly happens, then, in this non-reflective consciousness considered merely to be pre-reflective and the implicit partner of an intentional consciousness which, in reflection, intentionally aims for the thinking self, as if the thinking ego appeared in the world and belonged to it?” (81) In Section III Levinas addresses the question of whether the knowledge of the non-intentional, non-reflective, consciousness can possibly know. Because non-intentionality contains no willful aim, it is not an act, according to Levinas, but pure passivity and therefore exists and endures implicitly outside of time. Where intentionality is accompanied by the ego, non-intentionality is accompanied by the pre-reflective consciousness and produces the passive bad conscience (mauvaise conscience), restless and devoid of any willfulness. Anterior to the ego resides this timid bad conscience, unable to sufficiently assert itself, which the self affirming ego hates. “However, it is in the passivity of the non-intentional, the way it is spontaneous and precedes the formulation of any metaphysical ideas on the subject, that the very justice of the position within being is questioned, a position which asserts itself with intentional thought, knowledge, and a grasp of the here and now.” (82) Levinas says that the non-intentionality produces the restless and passive bad conscience that creates the need to assert itself with intentional thought. This assertion of intentional thought questions and therefore begs a response, forcing the responsibility of language in a response to one’s right to be. In Sec IV Levinas introduces Sartre’s’ notion of the Other. The Other produces a response for the right to be, due to fear of the Other—not an arbitrary law or principle. This fear is a result of occupying another’s space with ones presence, or being. (82) Our space is a utopia where I exists and is devoid of conflict. When the Other comes into view and disrupts ones space, the initial reaction is to kill the Other. Here Levinas talks of the awareness of the mortality of the other that is recognized before any knowledge of death (83). The invasion of space creates a face to face relation that is incongruent with the sameness that one sees in oneself and the world. This face to face relation with the Other calls upon my responsibility and my being into question. This relation, or relationship, with the Other is archaic and existed a prior responsibility ‘to which nothing in the rigorously ontological order binds me’. In Sec V, Levinas expounds upon the reversal that takes place in the face of the Other man. In the face of the Other I am charged with responsibility to my humanity in me and therefore unique and chosen. Creating freedom signifies anteriority and uniqueness of the non substitutive truth value. By encountering the subjectivity, the relation to the Other replaces the ego and creates suffering due to a disruption in sameness. Strong feelings of suffering and desire resonate throughout the essay. The fear of the Other and death of the Other create an ethical awareness within one which supersedes the ego. When the ego ‘lays down’ an ethical appeal for justification takes place. (85) “The first philosophy shows through the ambiguity of the identical, an identical which declares itself to be I at the height of its unconditional and even logically indiscernible identity, an autonomy above all criteria, but which precisely at the height of this unconditional identity confesses that it is hateful.” (85) Levinas states that the “ego is the very crisis of being of the being in the human domain”. “Humans prefer that which justifies being to that which assures it.” Levinas believes that to ask the question ‘To be or not to be?’ asks the wrong question by forcing oneself into being and understanding the meaning of being. Rather, the first philosophy takes place with the bad conscience, and the “instability which is different from that threatened by my death and my suffering…” referring to Heidegger’s being-towards-death (86). Levinas insists that our right to justify being—as a result of encountering the Other—and the legitimacy of this right is our first and last question. “Whether he regards me or not, he ‘regards’ me. In this question being and life are awakened to the human dimension.” (86) Ethics as first philosophy is a prime example of a 'reversal'. Levinas successfully posits an explanation of first philosophy that goes beyond the ontological question of Being. Relying on Heidegger and Sartre, Levinas creates a new paradigm for understanding Being, not as a question of intentionality as it reveals knowledge through contact with concrete reality, but as the non-intentionality's affirmation of being by a response to one's right to be. Ethics as a starting point for first philosophy seems to echo similar aims as Nietzsche, but continues with the phenomenological tradition of Heidegger and Husserl. http://mikeeffint.livejournal.com/170378.html, diakses 30 Agustus 2010.  Emmanuel Levinas's Ethics of Responsibility Dr. Michael Smith Berry College Having taught for many years in a Department of Religion and Philosophy, I have often wondered about the appropriateness of cobbling together two domains, one of which specializes in faith, the other in doubt. Aside from extraneous reasons, such as school budgets, one defense for the practice might be that although the methods and answers arrived at in the two disciplines differ, the questions often coincide. In the case of ethics, specifically, we find that Philosophy includes ethics as a branch of inquiry known as axiology, to which group belong ethics and aesthetics. This is the area in which “values” are discussed. Thus one might meaningfully say that one painting, concert, or action is better than another. And although it is proverbially idle to argue over tastes (De gustibus non disputandum), there is a sense of an urgent need for consensus about ethical or moral questions. This is even more true in the religious treatment of ethics, and there have been times in history, and there are still places today (I am thinking of the application of the sharia or Islamic law in parts of Africa, the Middle East and Indonesia) in which morality extends beyond mores, taking on the force of law. The topic I have chosen to speak to you about is the thought of Emmanual Levinas on ethics. But from a religious, philosophical or mixed point of view? Emmanual Levinas himself, a Lithuanian Jew (1906-1995) who was granted French citizenship at the age of 24, said he used different publishers for his philosophical and his Judaic writings (or his “confessional” writings as he was amused to call them). And in most cases it is not difficult to maintain the distinction. A very good study by the French philosopher Etienne Feron, in an as yet untranslated work, “From the Idea of Transcendence to the Question of Language: The Philosophical Itinerary of Emmanuel Levinas,” frames the terms of his study in the following way: One will perhaps be surprised not to find in my approach any explicit reference to Judaism, although Levinas has certainly contributed to the renewal of Jewish thought. I have adopted the policy of reading Levinas in a strictly philosophical way and of putting in parentheses the Judaism that he openly professes and in which I confess I have no competency, because his major works are truly philosophical and emphatically not a simple transposition, in pseudo-philosophical discourse, of any sort of Jewish theology. Etienne Feron, De l’idée de transcendance à la question du langage: L’itinéraire philosophique de Lévinas (Grenoble: Jérôme Millon, 1992), 10. I would be tempted to ascribe a very French academic—a very Cartesian—clarity to this policy, were it not for the fact that Descartes himself did not departmentalize his own texts in this way, since God and infinity circulate freely in them. Feron’s approach may be more understandable if we consider that Judaism does not enjoy the same seamless integration with French intellectual life that Catholicism does. It would probably not have been possible, had Feron’s principle interest been not Levinas’s use of language but his ethical thought, to maintain so neat a “cordon sanitaire” between the philosophical and the Judaic in Levinas. Before I leave Feron, let me emphasize my agreement that we do not find in Levinas a pseudo-philosophical discourse that would dissimulate an occult importation of Jewish theology. But if the thought of Levinas (to pick a neutral term) is to have any integrity, there must surely be, underlying the treatment of Judaic versus philosophical themes, an intellectual organism that has the gift of nourishing itself from two sources: Judaism and Greek philosophy. To do one’s best to understand Levinas’s work; it is improvident, in my view, to deprive oneself of any resource. Beggars can’t be choosers. Any attempt to understand Levinas’s ethics that makes abstraction of his Judaism will be at best a truncated version of this aspect of his work. I will now attempt to show, briefly how the two are related in what I call Levinas’s ethics of responsibility. First let me set the philosophical context as Levinas understood it. A prevalent philosophical tradition identifies reality and goodness with being; illusion, mere appearance, and evil with a lack of being. This is the situation as reflected by Augustine in his Enchiridion, or handbook, written during the last decade of his life, between 420 and 430. Having earlier espoused Manichaeism, an understanding of the world as torn between the battle of good and evil, Augustine replaces that heretical view with neo-Platonism, in which evil is not only the equal opponent of good--it literally does not exist. Evil is a lack of being. This philosophical view can be squared with scripture. The Platonic equation of good with being, and a coordinated diminishment of both good and being as we move down the “divided line” from truth or episteme to doxa or mere appearance--this system can be made to fit in with the Judeo-Christian notion of the creation’s being characterized as “good” as it is progressively brought into existence by the word of God in the Book of Genesis. Evil is safely viewed as parasitic on the Good since it has no being of its own. And although Catholicism since Thomism, since the 13th century, has turned more frequently in the direction of Aristotle than Plato for the logos of its theology, tradition associates good with being, falsehood with that which is not (the case), and God with Supreme Being. Let me comment in a preliminary way that this equation of good with being is a particularly ill-chosen basis upon which to develop an ethics. Not only does it seem to give an unfair advantage to the status quo. One could make the same objection to it that Kierkegaard, the putative father of existentialism, made to Hegelianism. It is such a perfect, and perfectly abstract, system, that we never need to make an “either/or” decision. Manichaeism may have been more in keeping with the good and bad penchant (or “yitzer”) of the Jewish Bible. Hence it is with some surprise that and not unmitigated pleasure that European philosophy received the work of Emmanuel Levinas, whose most important thesis, I will argue, is that being is not only not synonymous with goodness: it may antithetic to ethics altogether. Levinas, following Heidegger’s example, takes being as a verb, and is thus able to characterize it. Like Heidegger, he goes beyond a long philosophical tradition according to which being is an empty abstraction, pure “subject” without predicates, or pure “substance” without “accidents.” His description of being, not possible since the pre Socratics, is a metaphysics that distinguishes three modes of being: the “life of the living, the existence of human beings, the reality of things. He finds at all three levels a kind of violence. I quote: Origin of all violence, varying with the various modes of being: the life of the living, the existence of human beings, the reality of things. The life of the living in the struggle for life; the natural history of human beings in the blood and tears of wars between individuals, nations, and classes; the matter of things, hard matter; solidity; the closed-inupon- self, all the way down to the level of the subatomic particles of which physicists speak. Entre Nous: Thinking of the Other (New York: Columbia University Press), xii. Levinas’s being is thus characterized by its “inflection back upon itself” (“tension sur soi”), which on the human level is easy enough to recognize as selfishness. But selfishness is not, in this dispensation, a character defect: it is the separateness of the ego, the cell that sets up its private economy, the secret of a self, a home. Where the human—the possibility of the human—begins, is in responsibility for the other. Ethics, then, is not layered onto the human being as we know him. Non-indifference to the other, responsibility for the other, the possibility of dying for him or her, is the point at which being is transcended. It is no longer being, but beyond or otherwise than being. This Levinas terms “the perspective of holiness.” In his essay, “Is Ontology Fundamental,” for example (1951), Levinas states that “the relation to the other is not . . . ontology.” Ibid., p. 7. There is a fundamental difference in the way we apprehend a particular object, within the horizon of being, and the way we approach the other (i.e. the other person). This is because we address the other, speak and listen to her or him. Now there is, to be sure, a background of the thinking of both Franz Rosenzweig here, and of Martin Buber--I have in mind particularly the I-Thou relation in the meeting, or the encounter, that is elaborated by the latter. The essay “Is Ontology Fundamental” develops its problematic against Heidegger’s Being and Time, with its distinction between Sein and Seiendes (being and beings.. It is true that Heidegger approaches an understanding of Being through a particular being, namely Dasein, or a “being-there” sort of being, which is his existential term for what corresponds more or less to what was formerly called a human being. But while both philosophers begin with human being, rather than with the classical sort of being that, as in Aristotle, makes no ontological distinction between the being of a rock or tree and a man, Heidegger’s point of departure differs from that of Levinas in two important ways: it is distinctive in that it is a being for whom its very being is an issue, i.e. it knows itself to be and its life is a conscious orientation toward death (toward its own death--since we cannot know the death of the other authentically); and secondly it is essentially a revised version of the self. Aside from some considerations of a “Mitsein” or being with, Heidegger’s main consideration of the other is in the negative, inauthentic and impersonal guise of “Das Man,” which represents a betrayal of our ownness. Levinas did find in the history of philosophy a few indications pointing in the direction of a beyond being (in Plato’s Republic, 509b, and in Plotinus’s Enneads, but by and large his attempt to develop a philosophical path towards ethics by characterizing being as the domain of egotism and strife noted by Hobbes, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, and then moving on to what he refers to in an early work as an escape from being is new. The French Catholic philosopher Jean-Luc Marion’s God without Being is a development of one of the possible consequences of such a direction of thought. One of the most surprising aspects of Levinas’s ethics—perhaps “meta-ethics,” or better yet “proto-ethics,” would be a preferable term, since Levinas’s philosophical work is really a revamping of philosophy that replaces ontology by ethics: his “ethics” is not simply layered onto thinking-as-usual—one of the most surprising aspects of this protoethics, then, is that there is no parity between my situation and yours from an ethical standpoint. You are always better than me. I am responsible, not only for my transgressions, but for yours as well! There are two aspects or stages of Levinas’s ethical thought: my relation to you (as if you were the only other person in the world) and my relation to you seen in relation to the other of you, my other. Your other may have conflicting claims, so that I am put in the position of comparing incomparables, to the extent that each person is a world. From the relation of me to my other, you, love is enough. To realize the intention of love in a broader sociality, justice is necessary. Justice, the harsh name of love, must realize love’s intentions, and in doing so may lose sight of its original intent, become alienated into a self-serving institution. This risk, in Levinas’s view, is one that must be taken. Here Levinas seldom develops his thought along the lines of strict reasoning. One senses that the stays of being are relaxed and we would have no possible means of directing our thought beyond this point without a certain “inspiration.” Knowledge is no longer sought after: it is inescapable. We are the “hostage” of the other. No discussion, even as brief a one as this, can be complete without some mention of the face. This is a term that Levinas elevates to status of a philosopheme, a term endowed with a specific philosophical role. The face does not refer to the plasticity of a visual form in Levinas, nor is it just the look of the other, since the face speaks in Levinas. It is perhaps the phenomenal basis, or as Levinas sometimes says, the “mise-enscène” or theatrical “production” of the appearance of the person, and it is the way in which we may become aware of God. I quote: “The face puts into question the sufficiency of my identity as an I, it compels me to an infinite responsibility.” Of God Who Comes to Mind, trans. Bettina Bergo (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 133. It is by substitution for the other, or by taking on the fate of the other, that I embrace a responsibility for which I never signed up. Here Levinas diverges from the usual notion of responsibility, since the ethical meaning of responsibility is bound up with the notion of freedom. We are not to imagine that Levinas is involved in some sort of Skinnerian “beyond freedom,” but Levinas does enter a realm that is distinct from the dialectic of promise and promise-keeping and freedom such as we find in the thinking of Jean-Paul Sartre, for example. This taking up of responsibility is not a virtue (virtue in the sense of strength), nor is it a weakness (as suggested by the late Michel de Certeau), but precisely the carrying out of the mitzvah, or commandment of God. We should not expect gratitude, for this would entangle us in an endless dialectic of quid pro quos. (It is interesting to note in passing that Levinas praises the institution of money, despite its possible abuses, because if frees us from having to have a personal relation with each person with whom we deal in life. We can carry on without this burden.) If we should expect anything, it is rather ingratitude. There is an impersonal—transpersonal?—sense in which action, good conduct, is nothing more nor less than a going beyond the bog of being. What is ethical behavior? It is (I quote) “the original goodness of man toward the other in which, in an ethical dis-inter-estedness—word of God—the inter-ested effort of brute being persevering in its being is interrupted.” Is it righteous to be? Interviews with Emmanuel Levinas, edited by Jill Robbins (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 19. This “ethics of ethics,” as it has been termed (by Jacques Derrida in his critical essay on Levinas, “Violence and Metaphysics” in 1964), is not only so called because it does not prescribe any specific acts, but also because Levinas’s ethics of responsibility cannot, as the philosopher himself states, be preached. Is it because humility (which is not listed among the virtues by Aristotle) permeates Levinas’s manner? No doubt, but it is also the case for what could be called a technical reason. We noted that the I-Thou relation in Levinas is not symmetrical. The other is always greater than I, and my responsibility cannot be transferred to anyone else. This responsibility extends to and includes responsibility for the evil perpetrated against me! In commenting on Philippe Nemo’s book Job and the Excess of Evil, Levinas ventures a surprising interpretation of a well-known biblical verse of the book of Job (Job 38: 4). “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?” The usual interpretation is that God is reprimanding the creature for questioning His ways, and perhaps also implying that if man knew the whole story a theodicy would be possible—and this would be seen as being the best of all possible worlds after all. Levinas: Can one not hear in this “Where were you?” a statement of deficiency (constat de carence) that cannot have meaning unless the humanity of man is fraternally bound up with creation, that is, responsible for that which has been neither his I (son moi) nor his work? Might this solidarity and this responsibility for any and all—which cannot be without pain—be spirit itself? Of God Who Comes to Mind, p. 133. A remarkable interpretation indeed, worthy of the Talmudic spirit of interpretation Levinas studied and admired so ardently. I liken the observation to the following extraordinary remark made by a child to his mother, spontaneously metaphysical: “Mother, when did we have me?” This retrogressive movement of being is very close to the sense of retrogressive and all-encompassing responsibility Levinas finds in this passage from Job. Neither his “I” nor his work. “I” in the sense of his ego, that limited “moi” that must, in Levinas’s view, be transcended by the ethical self toward responsibility for the other. http://www.kennesaw.edu/clubs/psa/pdfs/Smith_2003_PSA.pdf, diakses 30 Agustus 2010.  ETHICS AND TRAUMA: LEVINAS, FEMINISM, AND DEEP ECOLOGY by Roger S. Gottlieb Levinas's concept of the other, born out of the trauma of the Holocaust, is challenged by both feminism and deep ecology. ROGER S. GOTTLIEB is professor of humanities at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Worcester, Mass. The author acknowledges helpful comments from Richard A. Cohen and Mario Moussa. How do the sorrows and terrors of personhood, rather than the demands of impersonal reason, shape our ideas of morality? What dark mysteries of history are ethics designed -- consciously or unconsciously -- to solve? I hope to shed some light on these questions by juxtaposing three broadly construed ethical perspectives: Emmanuel Levinas's attempt to surmount the rationalist and ontological biases of Western philosophical ethics; the cultural feminist revaluation of ethical theory in light of women's culturally shaped personality structure and socially allotted tasks; and deep ecology's emerging holistic and spiritual orientation toward moral value and human identity. Though I will focus a good deal of critical attention on Levinas, and less on cultural feminism(1) and deep ecology, I believe all three frameworks have something important to tell us. The pressingly important feature they share is a common motivation of trauma; i.e., a sense that life is threatened by times of terror and helplessness in which conventional restraints, resources and forms of understanding are inadequate.(2) I believe that ethical frameworks open to tasks set by the distinctive experiences of our century must comprehend the traumas of mass industrialized genocide, ecocide, and collective personal violence toward women and minorities. Ethics not aimed at somehow "solving" -- or permitting us to live with -- these dark mysteries are simply not relevant to our horror, our pain, or our scant hope. Levinas: Ethics of Irreducible Concern Levinas seeks to overcome the fundamental rationalist, egocentric presuppositions of Western philosophical ethics. His project centers on a basic assertion about human relationships, which can be summarized thus: Other philosophies of human existence have tended to describe our ethical obligations as consequences of historically, conceptually, or developmentally prior structures of social life, rational thought, or experience. These philosophies generate the need for ethics out of the contradictions of a life without ethics (as in contract theory or, to some extent, Hegel); or out of the dialectical development of self-consciousness; or out of ontological assumptions about the nature of humanity, nature, reason, or God. Traditionally, in short, ethics is secondary to knowledge of "things" (with that term construed as broadly as possible), including knowledge of or concerns about oneself. It is this sense of knowledge of things that Levinas tries to capture under various rubrics -- most importantly, in his two major philosophical works, as "totality," "essence," and "being." (Levinas believes that the attempt to generate ethics out of self-knowledge or interest is simply a form of war.) For him, knowledge is necessarily aimed at or inevitably leads to objectification, alienation, and domination. Therefore knowledge cannot be the basis of ethical life -- that is, of a kind of transcending concern for other people, a concern untouched by our own needs, desires, or attempts to control. As Hume could not get an "ought" from an "is," Levinas finds an unbridgeable gap between knowledge and ethics. If we begin with knowledge -- in the guise of science or philosophy, technique or ontology, rational reflection or psychoanalysis -- we will never respect the other person as irreducibly other. Knowledge is something acquired, dispensed, and instrumentally used by us. Consequently, knowledge of others necessarily reduces the other to something we possess, something we have acquired, and something -- ultimately -- we will use.(3) If the foundation of our relation to others is knowledge, the other will be reduced to the same. Otherness will not be allowed to coexist with the agent of sameness. What Levinas poses as an alternative is the irreducibility or underivability of our concern for the other. This concern does not stem from an empirically or conceptually based sense of the "facts" or the ultimate ontological structures of the universe. It does not come from an expansion of self-interest through identification with the other, either practically (as in contract theory from Locke to Rawls) or transcendentally (as in Kant). Nor does it come from the discovery of common interests in the realm of historical struggle (as in Marxism, feminism, or antiracist movements). Levinas leaves little doubt that the terrain of history, in the sense of political conflict, is too implicated in the wars of self-interest to be a site for ethics. Like a negative theologian, Levinas is most effective in characterizing what the grounds of our concern for the other are not. They are neither a consequence of our knowledge of things (totality) or of the ultimately knowable character of things themselves (essence); nor are they how the things appear to us or exist in their truth (being). Working through, behind, and beyond essence and totality, being and knowledge, and leaving a subtle trace of itself in our capacity to speak with care, the call of the other simply breaks through and across the barriers of science and philosophy and the greedy attempt to satisfy my desires by "knowing" about the world and others. We do witness the other in the face-to-face relation. The naked vulnerability of the other person, the sense that this person speaks to us (whatever is actually said), the imperative to leave this person alive and not to murder constitute for Levinas the basis of an ethics outside the limitations of totalizing thought. The face of the other is not an empirical face, reducible to generalizations provided by sociology or psychology. Rather, our sense of the other's vulnerability and need, together with the other's call to justice -- neither of which is reducible to any particular empirical, historically defined situation -- represents the "trace" of the infinite. The infinite can only be a trace, irreducible to the empirical person in front of me, because, as Robert Bernasconi observes, Levinas is urging us to remember our experience not (as in Heidegger) of "being" but of "the good beyond being," which he also calls "metaphysical exteriority," "transcendence," and "infinity." The good surpasses "being," "objectifying thought," "objective experience," "totality," and history.(4) This primordial experience constitutes our capacity to function as human beings: the face of the other is the primordial signification, from which all other signs take their meaning; the perception of the other is the true one, from which all other bodily perception ultimately derives.(5) Responding to the other's call leaves us infinitely concerned with the other, with the way our very existence on earth takes up her space, with our unlimited responsibility which constitutes or makes possible -- rather than follows from -- ego-bound interests, communication, or subjective freedom. Only by responding can we give up our attitude of domination; but knowledge of the world always involves a comportment of domination, and Levinas therefore rejects the aggressive imperial gaze of detached reason which has been the hallmark of Western thought from Parmenides to positivism.(6) Thus, if we are to have ethics at all, it must be, in Levinas's phrase, our "first philosophy." The capacity to speak and to know, to haggle over questions of truth and evidence are signified by rather than signify this ultimate responsibility for that which cannot be knowingly reduced to myself: the other for whom I must act and be concerned; the other in answering whose call I receive the distinctive imprint of my humanity. The basis of ethics is thus the sheer fact of "otherness" -- that which somehow penetrates my psychic and ethical space from outside. The freedom of another could never begin in my freedom, that is, abide in the same present, be contemporary, be representable to me. The responsibility for the other can not have begun in my commitment, in my decision. The unlimited responsibility in which I find myself comes from the hither side of my freedom, from a "prior to every memory.". . . . The knot tied in subjectivity, which when subjectivity becomes a consciousness of being is still attested to in questioning, signifies an allegiance of the same to the other, imposed before any exhibition of the other, preliminary to all consciousness -- or a being affected by the other whom I do not know and who could not justify himself with any identity, who as other will not identify himself with anything.(7) What motivates Levinas's philosophy? What do we receive and what do we escape from, if in fact my obligation to the other, especially to those most in need, does not follow from who I am or who they are, but precedes those contingent identities? What trauma has led Levinas to this conclusion? Feminism We will approach this last question indirectly, beginning by noting that there are many problems posed by Levinas's categorical assertions of human responsibility without knowledge, emotional connection, or self-interest. Why, for instance, must all knowledge be objectifying, tied to domination and the eradication of difference? Why does Levinas feel compelled to accept the instrumental view of knowledge and leave our ethical connections, to a realm beyond essence and outside of knowledge? What would he make, for instance, of Habermas's attempt to situate forms of knowledge in relation to distinguishable human interests in the control of nature, communicating with others, and social emancipation? Of these three, certainly the first and possibly the second -- but not, it would seem, the third -- serve the tasks of domination or control. For Habermas the very idea of a free consensus presupposes a kind of knowledge that enables us to distinguish between exploitative and nonexploitative human relations, between domination and justice. That such knowledge takes a different form in natural science is not surprising, because it is motivated by a different -- but equally inescapable -- human project. Nevertheless, unless we remain under the sway of positivism, we can see that it remains a form of knowledge. That is, it is part of a context of discourse and practice in which concepts such as truth, correctness, evidence, argument, reality, and illusion have a place. Similarly, there is the Western Marxist concept of praxis, in which self-knowledge, knowledge of the world, and emancipating political action reinforce each other. In Lukacs, for example, the proletariat's knowledge about its own social status as a commodity helps undermine that status, enabling it to make the transition to different beliefs about and practices in society.(8) This process of achieving self-knowledge about one's social position and then being motivated by that knowledge to change one's position has been relevant in many social contexts, most notably in the political movements of women and of ethnic/racial minorities. The feminist process of consciousness-raising, for example, involves women's transcending their objectification by patriarchy in the process of coming to see that objectification. A kind of knowledge of the self -- that the pain one thought was personal, for instance, stems rather from one's social/political condition -- makes it possible to initiate relationships and practices which will change the self. From a rather different source, we might ask Levinas why self-interest cannot lead, by a Kierkegaardian existential dialectic, toward the choice of ethical life, principles, and commitments to the good. Kierkegaard's subject begins in the aesthetic realm (self-interested, without principles, totally egotistical); however, boredom, repetition, and a sense of personal emptiness inevitably lead the aesthetic subject to confront the possibility of ethical life. The outcome of this confrontation is not guaranteed; for Kierkegaard personal choice is always a necessary ingredient of significant personal change. But the self has undergone a kind of premoral education, has acquired a kind of knowledge -- of what the inevitable consequences and limitations of a purely selfish life will be. This knowledge does not reduce the other to the same, but allows us to recognize our obligations to principles which involve commitments to care for and respect the other.(9) Of all such questions about Levinas, I have been most struck by his obliviousness to the feminist counterview that his radical disjuncture of self and other simply consummates a culturally male perspective on human relationships. The idea that our ethical connection to others is possible because the other to whom I am "ethical hostage" leaves a "trace" in the objective realm is at odds with what a host of cultural feminist writers have, in a variety of ways, described. This feminist view is not monolithic (all the more reason Levinas and his commentators should have seen it); its range can be roughly summarized, however.(10) The culturally male ego is predominantly formed through a process of separation, toward an ideal of autonomy, and results in a bounded, competitive, and dominating self. By contrast, the female ego is shaped through affiliation, toward an ideal of "self-in-relation," and results in an empathic, nurturing, and connected self. Women's selfhood stems from women's role as primary caretakers of infants and their responsibility for emotionality and nurturing in adult relationships. Consigned by patriarchy to the "labor of relatedness," to the production of sexuality, emotional intimacy, and affection, women approach the moral realm from a radically different sense of themselves and others than men. Partly as a consequence of their distinctive ego structures, men and women reason differently about moral problems: men favor abstract principles of justice, while women think in terms of concrete relatedness, and reason via empathy rather than abstraction. Feminist ethicists have developed the concept of an ethics of care, of "maternal thinking," to refer to moral perspectives based in a sense of emotional kinship between self and other, as distinguished from those stemming from abstract principles, self- -- as opposed to other- -- interest, or Levinas's own infinite obligation across an irreducible gap. Cultural feminists have further argued that, because social domination and hierarchy express highly individuated and competitive egos, political injustice and economic exploitation are male forms of relationships. These evils cannot be overcome by the application of abstract principles of liberal democratic-rights theory, or by Marxist-oriented strategies of class struggle, since both these perspectives reproduce the individualism, abstraction, and aggression endemic to the male styles embedded in the evils themselves. Neither, clearly, are they addressed by Levinas's view that we must serve an other who is categorically so separate. Rather, a social order based in the cooperative, nurturing, noncompetitive style of female identity might overcome the antagonisms and oppressions of male-dominated society. The "feminine virtues" of relationality, empathy, and cooperation could make possible a social order which escapes the domination, exploitation, and violence endemic to both capitalist and bureaucratic state societies. It is further suggested that the image of rigid ego boundaries between people is largely the product of a masculine prejudice inflicted on psychological theory. Certainly women, and no doubt men as well, develop not as self and other but as "selves-in-relation" -- so that even theoretically we must speak of persons in the contexts of their relations, unknowable outside those relations.(11) It is not hard to see that feminism presents a vision of ethical life rooted in a recognition of the fundamental trauma of male domination. The insights of cultural feminism are products of and reflections on the exploitation and devaluation of women. An ethic of care, compassion, and emotional inter-identification is not simply a conceptual alternative to one based on (supposedly) disinterested reason or metaphysical foundations. Rather, this ethic is a desperate cry for the recognition of women; and against a masculine world which wields impersonal categories in one hand while it ravages women with the other. Feminist ethics celebrates what masculinity has consigned to women and (therefore) devalued. It posits as a strength what men have tried to kill in themselves while they exploit it in women: a sense of emotional connectedness. Feminist ethics is thus a post-traumatic ethics, an imperative exclamation against the hypocrisy and violence of masculinity. If you do not see who you are, and you do not learn to understand your own emotions and your emotional relations to others, this ethic warns a patriarchal culture, you will continue to violate women and the men you dominate as well. In other words, Levinas is lost in a world in which we know the other and answer the other only through this imponderable call to a responsibility divorced from every other facet of my being -- just because he accepts the basic premises of masculine theoretical culture. On these premises human identities are formed in rigid isolation and opposition to one another; and bridging the gap between self and other always requires some extended process of reflection, self-development, or transformation. In this culture we start as isolated owner/producers (Locke) or isolated minds (Descartes) or aesthetic enjoyers of amoral experience (Kierkegaard) or isolated ego-id-superego complexes whose struggle for mastery and sex can lead, at best, to the autonomous ego of bourgeois adult masculinity (Freud). In patriarchal thought we never start in connection to others. We are not seen as beginning, as we in fact do, as babies at our mother's breast, after having come out of her body. Or if the beginning is there, that image of connection is not carried into the heart of the theoretical representation of adult ethical life. Men have tried to obliterate the memory of their own relation to their mothers.(12) Ironically, Levinas does have a sense of our beginning with our mothers, but in his view precisely that beginning needs to be overcome if we are to achieve the full ethical identity of someone answering the "call" of the other. Like other patriarchal writers, Levinas sees motherhood as an embracing warmth of care, that which makes a house a home. But the relationship of mothering, just as the figures of mothers themselves, is conceived of as separate from the world of men, of maturity, of the ethical. Women do not provoke our utter responsibility, they do not call for justice or demand honesty; they provide relief.(13) Further, Levinas makes it clear over and over again that the ethical relation is with a being who is in some sense "foreign" to us. I may owe care to my neighbor, but that neighbor is (strangely) unknown. In discussing a passage of the Talmud he states: Nothing is more foreign to me than the other; nothing is more intimate to me than myself. Israel would teach that the greatest intimacy of me to myself consists in being at every moment responsible for the others, the hostage of others. I can be responsible for that which I did not do and take upon myself a distress which is not mine.(14) Between real mothers and children, however, the other's "distress" belongs to the self just because the fluid boundaries between them, as well as the emotionally based knowledge each has of the other, makes the rigid distinction between self and other much more problematic than it is in patriarchal thought.(15) Unfortunately, Levinas's image of the face-to-face relation, a relation meant to overcome the egotism and totalizing reason of traditional Western philosophy, is ultimately a relation with a being whom we do not really know. For him, personal identity can be either wrapped in an inescapable egotism or exist in thrall to a superior moral force which derives from the vulnerability and neediness of the other. Since knowledge is always domination, we cannot "know" that other; rather, his appearance is what makes knowledge, communication, and, ultimately, my identity possible. That the Other is placed higher than I would be a pure simple error if the welcome I make him consisted in "perceiving" a nature. Sociology, psychology, physiology are thus deaf to exteriority. Man as Other comes to us from the outside, a separated -- or holy -- face. His exteriority, that is, his appeal to me, is his truth. In the face to face the self has neither the privileged position of the subject nor the position of the thing defined by its place in the system; it is apology, discourse pro domo, but discourse of justification before the other.(16) Levinas's self -- cruelly abandoned in a world of objectifying knowledge and self-interested war -- answers the trace of the Divine in the other's face, and sees the obligation to answer -- to put the self in the other's place and seek the other's good. The basis of this movement, for Levinas, cannot be the kind of inter-identification described as the basic feminine ego structure by cultural feminism. The use of emotion -- as empathy, compassion, or intuition of the other -- reeks to Levinas of simply another form of egoism. In his view, empathy begins with the self. Further, the self on an emotional -- i.e., for him, empirical and social -- level cannot help but be self-centered. Therefore, the move of empathy must be a move out of the self-centered self, a move which, for Levinas, is impossible. We do not respond to the other because of who we are; rather, we are possible as truly human beings only because we first heed the other. Because I respond, I am able to speak, to reason, and to know. The call of the other unifies a self out of the chaos of self-interested action, action which itself reflects varying emotional conditions and desires. There is an anarchy essential to multiplicity [of selves]. In the absence of a plane common to the totality. . . . one will never know which will, in the free play of the wills, pulls the strings of the game; one will not know who is playing with whom. But a principle breaks through all this trembling and vertigo when the face presents itself, and demands justice.(17) In a theoretical world of purely masculine possibilities, Levinas's solution may be the best alternative possible. But would the whole edifice come crashing down if he realized that it is possible to see human identity as based in a relation to the other from the start? that the other is not a trace, not an uninteriorizable "outside," not something which can only get flattened into sameness if it is brought "in," but rather that the other has been known, connected to, and made part of ourselves from the beginning? if he could have conceived of a self so implicated in the other that the Face we see is in some sense our own, because the boundaries of self and other -- far from being obliterated by a reductionist or instrumental knowledge -- are fluidly constructed by the reality of a shared relationship in which both find their selves? Even when Levinas seems to be hinting that we have some kind of direct relation with others, that relation seems to me abstract, constructed, distant, formal; in a word, metaphysical rather than emotional or psychological. We may, as he insists in the crucial chapter in Otherwise Than Being, necessarily "substitute" ourselves for the other, in fact, for the whole world. But in that substitution there is no real connection to the other, just (once again) that limitless responsibility for the whole universe of suffering and vulnerable others. Responsibility for my neighbor dates from before my freedom in an immemorial past, an unrepresentable past that was never present and is more ancient than consciousness of. . .(18) Just because our responsibility is so absolute -- preexisting to everything in our personal life or social world -- it never seems to shine with any direct connection to another real human being with whom I, as (in Kierkegaard's words) an actually existing human being, am in an actually existing relationship. But what is then left for us to relate to? or with? For Levinas the empirical self is always so implicated in struggles for domination that he must appeal to some "other" realm of identity: a primordial, hypothetical, speculative, and ultimately metaphysical notion of a self formed in response to the other's call. Such a self has no basis on which to mobilize a response. In this reliance on a self out of time, mind, and body, Levinas simply repeats the culturally masculine rejection of the particularities of identity. From a feminist viewpoint, such a rejection accumulates authority for the speaker at the expense of the reality of the situation, which is that we can never reach beyond our actual position to a viewpoint which is other than that of an embodied, concretely located person.(19) The greatest fear of masculine thought is that the speaker is simply a single person, bereft of sources of authority such as Objective Reason, Human Nature, or, in the case of Levinas, a "time-out-of-mind" phenomenological essence of selfhood found in response to a reified other. What is missing from Levinas, then, is a kind of conceptual humility, a humility found not just in the rejection of dominating reason but in the recognition that we are situated, partial, finite, empirical. Further, from the feminist standpoint, our empirical identity is implicated in the other in the very psychological foundation of its being. Holocaust It might seem, then, that Levinas's work simply lacks a feminist viewpoint. And while this is true, the matter as a whole is not that simple. Like the best of the feminist writers, Levinas is not simply a theorist, but a person responding to the traumas of our time. His ethic is at once an intellectual edifice and an extended prayer. He can -- does he realize this? -- prove nothing. He can only beg that it be so. And this returns us to the question of motivation. Why does he so want us to feel -- or if not to feel, to have it true about ourselves -- that beyond knowledge and history, we are ethical hostages for the other whom we do not know? The answer, I believe, is the trauma of the Holocaust. In Levinas's world, the destruction of the Jewish people is the basic fact: more basic than theory, more basic than self-interest, more basic than the conventional forms of ego development or psychic, emotional, familial, or even communal inter-identification. Ethically, what were the Jews of Europe during the Holocaust but the irreducibly other? What were the Jews but the other with whom the gentile world could so little to identify, share so few interests, know so little about? The Fascist world did not know the Jews, or did not know them as Jews, but only as the enemy, as vermin, traitors, insects, germs. The only "knowledge" which was possible was the knowledge of genocide, to reduce the other to the same. . . . by murder. Even more particularly: why does Levinas violate the conventions of symmetry that are virtually ubiquitous in philosophical ethics -- i.e., why does he insist that our obligation to the other is in some sense greater than the other's obligation to us? Consider, quite simply, what it meant in Nazi-dominated Europe to side with the Jews. To shelter or protect -- to stand against the regime of evil -- meant, with few exceptions, torture and death, possibly for one's family, friends, and village, as well as for oneself. To be responsible, as many were, was to reach out to those who could not reach back to you. In such a world one might well pray with Levinas that we feel a kinship, a bond, to the other we do not know. Or that we feel an infinite obligation of care, holding us hostage before any choice on our part, to that other of whom we know nothing. We are bound solely to the fact of otherness. For Levinas, only this prayer will do; only this prayer really speaks to that terrible loneliness of the Jew who is not known by the gentile world, or known only in a way that sets in motion the technology of the death camps. Levinas is not just arguing for a new philosophical system; he is praying or dreaming or simply hoping against hope that what he says might be true: that out of the sheer fact of otherness, there is hope of ethical life. Nothing else, as he has seen, can protect the "widow, the stranger, the orphan" -- the Jew. In a different setting, yet another group will be the otherness that is grist for the mill of power and murder. In another of his talmudic readings, this one centered on the question of what Judaism has to give to the world, Levinas suggests that . . . morality belongs in us and not in institutions which are not always able to protect it. It demands that human honor know how to exist without a flag. The Jew is perhaps the one who -- because of the inhuman history he has undergone -- understands the suprahuman demand of morality, the necessity of finding within oneself the source of one's moral certainties.(20) Even more telling, when he points out the way in which the face is beyond any sign or representation, he describes it as "a trace of itself, given over to my responsibility, but to which I am wanting and faulty. It is as though I were responsible for his mortality and guilty for surviving."(21) Here we see Levinas not only as prophet of the murdered people, but as guilty survivor who feels his own survival as a burden. In a world in which no one seems responsible for me, my choice is simple: I can either reciprocate their immorality or create a moral framework in which concern for the other is built into every basic framework of human life as its metaphysical precondition. If I cannot find such a framework in history, in self-awareness, in knowledge of self or other, it had better be there in a way so basic that it is inescapable. Without it, the result will be. . . . the history of the Jews as well as the countless other murders which history has provided. (As Elie Wiesel has remarked: "Has mankind learned the lessons of Auschwitz? No. For details, consult your daily newspaper.")(22) In short, because Levinas finds himself in a world of cultural masculinity -- of violence and domination toward the other, of the use of instrumental knowledge to reduce the other to the same -- he must create a vision of moral responsibility across an unbridgeable gap. Because he is stuck not simply in the theory of cultural masculinity but in its reality, he is compelled to theorize an unrationalizable moral connection based simply in the fact of otherness. In a culturally masculine world every other is, a priori, a kind of enemy. Having seen how such a world operates, Levinas is praying that the opposite might somehow come to be -- that is, against all appearances to the contrary, the other, far from being the object of hostility, is the unknown and infinitely deserving subject of our ethical devotion. This world of the Holocaust pervades the nightmares not just of the Jews, but of anyone not stuck in denial. After Stalinism, Cambodia, the economically induced mass starvations in Africa, Latin America's bloody civil struggles, and too many more tragedies than can be mentioned, mass industrialized murder cannot be dismissed as an aberration of the 1940s; it is the defining characteristic of the twentieth century. The enormous power of Levinas's thought, its attraction despite his hopelessly dense language, resides in the fact that it speaks to this condition, offering a prayer of hope during a century of death camps. That prayer does not describe what we know or could ever know. From the standpoint of the best in cultural masculinity, it describes what we must be if we are to survive. Reaching out beyond the self-imposed isolation and loneliness of the masculine ego, of a patriarchal society which relegates empathy and emotional inter-identification to a devalued female caste, Levinas's philosophy seeks a source of ethical life in what must be a metaphysical mystery to the lost self of male culture: the voice, the face, the very presence, of the other. Ecocide Is there then no way out? Are Levinas's failings simply those of patriarchy? Is his reaction to the Holocaust all that we can expect in a traumatized world? Likewise, is the feminist critique hopeless in the face of historical reality? Is it perhaps not Levinas who is the dreamer but the feminist? After all, in a world made by men empathy, connection, and inter-identification have little chance or place. Does feminism's answer to male domination remain within the privatized and domesticated realm of the family or the intimate relationship, at least until patriarchy is ended? Is the feminist response to the trauma of male violence necessarily marginalized until social institutions come to reflect the logic of feminine personality styles and forms of relationship? Is the feminist dream of an ethical cosmos of care and compassion as alien to the real world of exploited wives and sexually abused children as Levinas's dream of infinite obligation is to the real world of the Holocaust? Are both these frameworks, different as they are, trapped by history, leaving us no way out? Are they simply lanterns waving dimly in a shrouded night of endless trauma? Perhaps. But perhaps not. Perhaps there is in progress another, even more encompassing Death Event, which can be the historical condition for an ethic of compassion and care. I speak of the specter of ecocide, the continuing destruction of species and ecosystems, and the growing threat to the basic conditions essential to human life. What kind of ethic is adequate to this brutally new and potentially most unforgiving of crises? How can we respond to this trauma with an ethic which demands a response, and does not remain marginalized? Here I will at least begin in agreement with Levinas. As he rejects an ethics proceeding on the basis of self-interest, so I believe the anthropocentric perspectives of conservation or liberal environmentalism cannot take us far enough. Our relations with nonhuman nature are poisoned and not just because we have set up feedback loops that already lead to mass starvations, skyrocketing environmental disease rates, and devastation of natural resources. The problem with ecocide is not just that it hurts human beings. Our uncaring violence also violates the very ground of our being, our natural body, our home. Such violence is done not simply to the other -- as if the rainforest, the river, the atmosphere, the species made extinct are totally different from ourselves. Rather, we have crucified ourselves-in-relation-to-the-other, fracturing a mode of being in which self and other can no more be conceived as fully in isolation from each other than can a mother and a nursing child. We are that child, and nonhuman nature is that mother. If this image seems too maudlin, let us remember that other lactating women can feed an infant, but we have only one earth mother. What moral stance will be shaped by our personal sense that we are poisoning ourselves, our environment, and so many kindred spirits of the air, water, and forests? To begin, we may see this tragic situation as setting the limits to Levinas's perspective. The other which is nonhuman nature is not simply known by a "trace," nor is it something of which all knowledge is necessarily instrumental. This other is inside us as well as outside us. We prove it with every breath we take, every bit of food we eat, every glass of water we drink. We do not have to find shadowy traces on or in the faces of trees or lakes, topsoil or air: we are made from them. Levinas denies this sense of connection with nature. Our "natural" side represents for him a threat of simple consumption or use of the other, a spontaneous response which must be obliterated by the power of ethics in general (and, for him in particular, Jewish religious law(23) ). A "natural" response lacks discipline; without the capacity to heed the call of the other, unable to sublate the self's egoism. Worship of nature would ultimately result in an "everything-is-permitted" mentality, a close relative of Nazism itself. For Levinas, to think of people as "natural" beings is to assimilate them to a totality, a category or species which makes no room for the kind of individuality required by ethics.(24) He refers to the "elemental" or the "there is" as unmanaged, unaltered, "natural" conditions or forces that are essentially alien to the categories and conditions of moral life.(25) One can only lament that Levinas has read nature -- as to some extent (despite his intentions) he has read selfhood -- through the lens of masculine culture. It is precisely our sense of belonging to nature as system, as interaction, as interdependence, which can provide the basis for an ethics appropriate to the trauma of ecocide. As cultural feminism sought to expand our sense of personal identity to a sense of inter-identification with the human other, so this ecological ethics would expand our personal and species sense of identity into an inter-identification with the natural world. Such a realization can lead us to an ethics appropriate to our time, a dimension of which has come to be known as "deep ecology."(26) For this ethics, we do not begin from the uniqueness of our human selfhood, existing against a taken-for-granted background of earth and sky. Nor is our body somehow irrelevant to ethical relations, with knowledge of it reduced always to tactics of domination. Our knowledge does not assimilate the other to the same, but reveals and furthers the continuing dance of interdependence. And our ethical motivation is neither rationalist system nor individualistic self-interest, but a sense of connection to all of life. The deep ecology sense of self-realization goes beyond the modern Western sense of "self" as an isolated ego striving for hedonistic gratification. . . . . Self, in this sense, is experienced as integrated with the whole of nature.(27) Having gained distance and sophistication of perception [from the development of science and political freedoms] we can turn and recognize who we have been all along. . . . we are our world knowing itself. We can relinquish our separateness. We can come home again -- and participate in our world in a richer, more responsible and poignantly beautiful way.(28) Ecological ways of knowing nature are necessarily participatory. [This] knowledge is ecological and plural, reflecting both the diversity of natural ecosystems and the diversity in cultures that nature-based living gives rise to. The recovery of the feminine principle is based on inclusiveness. It is a recovery in nature, woman and man of creative forms of being and perceiving. In nature it implies seeing nature as a live organism. In woman it implies seeing women as productive and active. Finally, in men the recovery of the feminine principle implies a relocation of action and activity to create life-enhancing, not life-reducing and life-threatening societies.(29) In this context, the knowing ego is not set against a world it seeks to control, but one of which it is a part. To continue the feminist perspective, the mother knows or seeks to know the child's needs. Does it make sense to think of her answering the call of the child in abstraction from such knowledge? Is such knowledge necessarily domination? Or is it essential to a project of care, respect and love, precisely because the knower has an intimate, emotional connection with the known?(30) Our ecological vision locates us in such close relation with our natural home that knowledge of it is knowledge of ourselves. And this is not, contrary to Levinas's fear, reducing the other to the same, but a celebration of a larger, more inclusive, and still complex and articulated self.(31) The noble and terrible burden of Levinas's individuated responsibility for sheer existence gives way to a different dream, a different prayer: Being rock, being gas, being mist, being Mind, Being the mesons traveling among the galaxies with the speed of light, You have come here, my beloved one. . . . You have manifested yourself as trees, as grass, as butterflies, as single-celled beings, and as chrysanthemums; but the eyes with which you looked at me this morning tell me you have never died.(32) In this prayer, we are, quite simply, all in it together. And, although this new ecological Holocaust -- this creation of planet Auschwitz -- is under way, it is not yet final. We have time to step back from the brink, to repair our world. But only if we see that world not as an other across an irreducible gap of loneliness and unchosen obligation, but as a part of ourselves as we are part of it, to be redeemed not out of duty, but out of love; neither for our selves nor for the other, but for us all. And Yet. . . . That last sentence would make an elegant finale to this essay. Unfortunately, our trauma is so great, and exists on so many levels, that no such simplicity is possible. The movement from Levinas through feminism to deep ecology is not a dialectic of success. Rather, each moment must be preserved, at least until the traumas which gave rise to them have been forgotten -- or we have created a world in which their recurrence is impossible. Thus it would be fitting for someone to point out that I have taken for granted that nature -- as a totality structured by principles of interaction -- is nurturing and benign. Yet nature -- whether as the drama of an earthquake or the quiet tragedy of crib death -- can be as brutal as any hired killer. How are we to structure an "ethic of nature" in the face of such brutality, unless we ignore the pain nature causes and think only of blue skies and daffodils? The answer is that brutality exists only from the standpoint of the isolated ego. It is true that nature cares nothing for individuals; yet nature as a totality provides the inspiration for deep ecology. In that inspiration, we must look not at how this or that person, animal, or plant has fared. We must look at the whole and pronounce it fitting or horrific or indifferent: the brutalities of nature are inevitable consequences of cycles of birth and death, renewal and destruction. Unlike the nightmare genocides or everyday viciousness of human cruelty, they are essential to a totality of life which we judge proper, beautiful, and ultimately moral. In that totality each process has a productive role: when one animal eats another, one animal feeds another. The "injustice" of defective life is simply part of the price of living in an imperfect world. An appreciation of these principles of life is possible, however, only if we give up the standpoint of the isolated, self-interested ego. To practice deep ecology is to practice the art of such vision. Without it, the ecological revelation makes no sense. But such revelation cannot replace Levinas's concerns: care for the human neighbor is a call still to be heard in the councils of deep ecology. However much we identify with the earth and nature, the effects of ecocide are not felt equally by all. The poisons disproportionately affect the poor, people of color, and the Third World. Without a commitment to social equality, efforts to create a sustainable society will place vastly unequal burdens on the socially powerless. Deep ecologists must beware of identifying with all of life while ignoring the compelling differences that are structured by social relations and theorized by conventional anthropocentric perspectives. The widening circle of ethical concern must not skip over human beings, but move through them. We are responsible, as Levinas tells us, "for all who are not Hitler."(33) Yet it is our final continuing trauma that the demarcation of this responsibility is terribly, at times tragically, unclear.(34) What is to be our ethical stance in a world which may contain yet another -- and another -- Hitler? Knowing that the Holocaust is not a grotesque fantasy but an established fact, and that the world repeats this fact and threatens more, how are we to know where the boundaries of ethical responsibility -- of a Levinasian, feminist, or deep ecology sort -- lie? When is my enemy a neighbor for whom I am responsible? and when is he a Nazi, savagely and madly bent on my death? When are people to be offered empathy, compassion and compromise? and when have they so violated the bounds of humanity that they -- as in those who threatened nuclear war for thirty years or who continue to produce ozone-destroying CFCs -- are no longer my neighbor, or someone with whom I can identify, or anything but a rabid cancer on the body of the ecosystem? The ethical perspectives examined here leave off where these questions begin. The loneliness, terror, and hope we feel in responding to them marks us all as human beings trying to live ethically in an age of trauma. Notes 1. [Back to text]  For a critical discussion of cultural feminism see my "Broken Relations: Some Barriers to the Triumph of Feminine Virtue," in Roger S. Gottlieb, ed., Radical Philosophy: Tradition, Counter-Tradition, Politics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993). 2. [Back to text]  For a clinical and social account of trauma, see Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery (New York: HarperCollins, 1993). 3. [Back to text]  Levinas is relatively untouched by environmentalist critiques of instrumental knowledge applied to nature. He rejects the Heideggerean concern with Being, except insofar as our concern with that abstraction signals our own moral dimension. Concerning Levinas and animals see John Llewelyn, "Am I Obsessed by Bobby? (Humanism of the Other Animal)" in Robert Bernasconi and Simon Critchley, eds., Re-Reading Levinas (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989). 4. [Back to text]  "Levinas and Derrida," in Richard A. Cohen, ed., Face-to-Face with Levinas (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986), 185. 5. [Back to text]  Robert Gibbs, Correlations in Rosenzweig and Levinas (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 186. 6. [Back to text]  The phrase and the point come from Susan A. Handelman's insightful Fragments of Redemption: Jewish Thought and Literary Theory in Benjamin, Scholem, and Levinas (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1991), 211. 7. [Back to text]  Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence (Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1974), 10, 25, my emphasis in both quotes. 8. [Back to text]  Georg Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1971). 9. [Back to text]  Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964). 10. [Back to text]  The proliferation of feminist viewpoints makes it hard to speak of any "general" feminist position. My focus is on the trend often called "cultural" feminism. 11. [Back to text]  Some central texts on the relation between female psychology, women's social role and feminist ethics and social theory are Jean Baker Miller, Toward a New Psychology of Women (Boston: Beacon, 1976); Miriam Greenspan, A New Approach to Women and Therapy (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1983); Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978); Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983); Susan Griffin, Women and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her (New York: Harper & Row, 1979); Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature (New York: Harper & Row, 1980); Eva Feder Kittay and Diana T. Meyers, eds., Women and Moral Theory (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1987); B. Andelson, C. Gudorf, and M. Pellauer eds., Women's Consciousness, Women's Conscience (New York: Harper & Row, 1987); Nancy Hartsock, Money Sex and Power: Toward a Feminist Historical Materialism (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1983). 12. [Back to text]  This last phrase comes from Miriam Greenspan. 13. [Back to text]  The sexism of Levinas's early and middle work is somewhat muted by his use of mothering as a model of supportive relationship in Otherwise Than Being. However, his awareness of feminist issues remains minimal at best. 14. [Back to text]  Nine Talmudic Readings (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1990), 85. 15. [Back to text]  Space precludes a discussion of Levinas's concept of fecundity. In brief, that account, while tremendously interesting on its own terms, replicates many of the problems of the material discussed here. 16. [Back to text]  Totality and Infinity (Pittsburgh: Dusquesne University Press, 1969) 291, 293. 17. [Back to text]  Totality and Infinity, 294, my emphasis. 18. [Back to text]  "Ethics as First Philosophy," in Sean Hand, ed., The Levinas Reader (London: Blackwell, 1989), 84. 19. [Back to text]  I have made a similar critique of various Marxists in History and Subjectivity: The Transformation of Marxist Theory (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987). 20. [Back to text]  Nine Talmudic Readings, 81-82, my emphasis. 21. [Back to text]  Otherwise Than Being, 91. See also Handelman's Fragments, 212-14, 270, 276. 22. [Back to text]  I cannot recall the precise location of this statement. 23. [Back to text]  See Nine Talmudic Readings, 83. 24. [Back to text]  Totality and Infinity, 120-21. 25. [Back to text]  See Totality and Infinity, 130-34; and "There is: Existence without Existents," in The Levinas Reader. 26. [Back to text]  The literature is very large here. For a beginning on eco-feminism, see: Irene Diamond and Gloria Orenstein, eds., Reweaving the World: The Emergence of Ecofeminism (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1990). For deep ecology, see Christopher Manes, Green Rage: Radical Environmentalism and the Unmaking of Civilization (Boston: Little, Brown) 1990, as well as the works by Vandana Shiva and Joanna Macy referred to in later footnotes. 27. [Back to text]  Bill Devall and George Sessions, "The Development of Natural Resources and the Integrity of Nature," Environmental Ethics 6 (Winter 1984): 302-3. 28. [Back to text]  Joanna Macy, World as Lover, World as Self (Berkeley: Parallax Press, 1991), 14. 29. [Back to text]  Vandana Shiva, Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development (London: Zed Books: 1989), 41, 53. 30. [Back to text]  See Sara Ruddick, Maternal Thinking (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989). 31. [Back to text]  See the account of the "loving eye" as opposed to the "arrogant eye" in Marilyn Frye's The Politics of Reality (Freedom, Calif.: Crossing Press, 1983), 75-76. 32. [Back to text]  "The Old Mendicant," by Thich Nhat Hanh, quoted in Joanna Macy, World as Lover, World as Self, 14. 33. [Back to text]  Nine Talmudic Readings, 87. 34. [Back to text]  I develop this point in my Introduction to Roger S. Gottlieb, ed., Thinking the Unthinkable: Meanings of the Holocaust (Mahwah, N.J.: Paulist Press, 1990). Copyright of Cross Currents is the property of Association for Religion & Intellectual Life and its content may not be copied without the copyright holder's express written permission except for the print or download capabilities of the retrieval software used for access. This content is intended solely for the use of the individual user. Cross Currents Summer94, Vol. 44 Issue 2, p222, 19p http://www.crosscurrents.org/feministecology.htm, diakses 28 Agustus 2010.  The Voice of God and the Face of the Other: Levinas, Kierkegaard, and Abraham by: Claire Elise Katz Penn State University   I love him [God], but I love even more his Torah... Yossel Ben Yossel, cited by Levinas in Difficult Freedom Can we still be Jewish without Kierkegaard? Emmanuel Levinas, in Difficult Freedom The Akedah begins with a command from God to Abraham. God demands that Abraham willingly sacrifice his [Abraham’s] child to God in order to prove his faith.[1] The test, as Abraham understands it, is to take Isaac, his beloved son, the son through whom God has promised the fulfillment of the covenant, up to Mt. Moriah where he is to be offered as a sacrifice. It is in the absurdity of the situation that Abraham’s faith is tested, for God has promised that Canaan will be delivered through Isaac, but now God is asking that Isaac be sacrificed. Abraham, because of God’s initial promise, must believe Isaac will be returned to him, though this seems impossible. It is in light of this absurdity that Abraham proceeds with Isaac up the mountain.[2] If we take seriously Kierkegaard’s reading of the story in Fear and Trembling[3], then we must imagine that it took all of Abraham’s strength to get him to the point of raising his lethal knife. Kierkegaard gives us an excellent psychological portrayal of Abraham. In particular, Kierkegaard reminds us of the time it took to for Abraham to make the decision: that he had to lie to Sarah, travel up the mountain, cut the wood, and then bind Isaac. To read Fear and Trembling is, to be sure, not to take lightly what Abraham is asked and commits himself to do. In light of the captivating power of this psychological profile, we are led to ask: what must have happened that Abraham so easily puts down the knife without so much as a question to the angel? If nothing else, inertia alone might have prompted him to execute God’s original command.[4] Thus, we might ask if Kierkegaard has glossed over the real concern: the father of Israel has just been asked by God to kill his own son, for no reason other than to pass a mysterious test.[5] In light of this portrayal, I want to examine what it means that Abraham "heard" the second voice, and that Abraham put down the knife. Something is missing from Kierkegaard’s reading of the story, a story he began but did not finish. Just as Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling teaches us not to read The Akedah too quickly, I think we should apply that same vigilance to Kierkegaard himself. We should read the story of the Akedah slowly and carefully, but we should also read it to its end! I think that we can read Kierkegaard back upon himself and discover another message in the text, a message Levinas himself notes, and one that I want to underscore. [6] This paper will re-visit the Akedah using, as its point of departure, Marc Bregman’s commentary on the visual in the text: what does Abraham see and how does vision mediate what he hears? My aim here is to examine the relationship between the voice of God and the face of Isaac in order to see the role each plays in the test to which Abraham has been put. My claim is that the test Abraham had to pass was an ethical test, not a test of obedience to God. The test Abraham passed was to see the face of Isaac and abort the sacrifice. Moreover, I also claim that Abraham had to have seen the face of Isaac before the angel commanded him to stop. * * * In his essay "A propos Kierkegaard Vivant," Levinas writes, "that Abraham obeyed the first voice is astonishing: that he had sufficient distance with respect to that obedience to hear the second voice—that is essential."[7] Levinas’s focus on Abraham’s attunement to the second voice should not be minimized. Like Silentio, Levinas does not want us to gloss over the fact that the sacrifice did not happen. This distance from obedience, this receptivity to the other that Abraham displayed, is at least as extraordinary as his initial faith.[8] On Levinas’s view the dramatic moment of the story occurs when Abraham heeds the Angel of the Lord, who tells him "do not lay a hand on the lad." This moment in the story marks the turning point from a focus on Abraham to a focus on Isaac. The story is no longer about Abraham as a man of faith or about Abraham’s perceived duty to God. Rather, this moment in the story could be read as the need for our attention to be focused on the victims, those who suffer the violence, not the administrators of that violence, even if, or maybe especially if, that violence is administered in the name of God.[9] And yet by focusing on this last point, it is still possible to see Abraham as a man of faith, but not in the sense that Kierkegaard, Silentio, or Christianity wants to ascribe to him. The faith Abraham has must be a condition for him to see the ethical, not necessarily a faith merely to obey the command of God. Thus, as Bregman suggests, Abraham must be a man of faith in order to see what needs to be seen. He needs to be able to see Mt. Moriah as a holy site, as a place where this kind of sacrifice is out of order. He needs to be able to see Isaac’s face, and he needs to be able to see his responsibility to God precisely as a responsibility to Isaac. As Bregman points out, these "seeings" are not thing the others see. The servants, for example, do not "see" what Abraham sees. Thus, Abraham is a man of faith, but not the man of faith Kierkegaard and the rest of Christianity desires. For Levinas, among others, a suspension of the ethical, which allows for the sacrifice/murder of another, cannot be tolerated. Levinas’s criticism of Kierkegaard thus focuses on Kierkegaard’s understanding of the ethical, which is defined in terms of the "universal." The religious is the sphere in which one reclaims the particular. At the level of the religious, the particular is reclaimed but in a higher form than the particular at the level of the aesthetic. In Kierkegaard’s understanding of the ethical, the singularity of the self, and the other, is lost in a rule that is valid for everyone. Levinas’s criticism rests on his claim that "the ethical is not where [Kierkegaard] sees it [emphasis added]."[10] As in much of the history of philosophy, the ethical is characterized in terms of the universal, as that which applies to everyone. For Levinas, Kierkegaard’s violence emerges precisely when he ‘transcends ethics,’[11] and ascends to the religious. Though the religious, in Kierkegaard’s account, reclaims the particular, it cannot be seen as Levinas’s account of the ethical. Although the religious reclaims the particular, and although the ethical that is suspended for Kierkegaard is the ethical understood as the universal, in Levinas’s view, the religious still appears to suspend the ethical, the ethical even as Levinas understands it. A conception of the ethical that accounts for the singularity of the I, and that poses the I as a unique individual, that implies an infinite requirement of a responsibility toward others, is still missing from Kierkegaard’s religious stage.[12] But, and this is crucial, the religious stage for Kierkegaard is outside language. This means that one is "out of communication," one cannot explain what one is doing. No one would understand what it means for Abraham to hear to this voice. And this is precisely the kind of relationship Levinas fears when he quotes Yossel ben Yossel with regard to loving the Torah more than God. For Levinas, to love the Torah more than God is precisely to love ethics more than God; it is to be willing to respond ethically to the other rather than to be willing to kill because one "heard" this commanded by the voice of God. Levinas insists that responsibility pre-supposes response. Responsibility must not lose sight of ‘response.’ It is precisely this response that we see in Abraham at the point when Abraham aborts the planned sacrifice. An angel of the Lord says, "Abraham, Abraham."[13] Abraham replies to the angel, "here I am [hineni]." The Angel then says, "do not lay a hand on the lad." It is significant that while it was God who initiated this sequence of events, it is an Angel who brought them to an end. It is often remarked that Abraham should have wondered if it really was God who issued the initial command. We might also ask if Abraham should have wondered if this presence really was an Angel of the Lord, an Agent of the Lord, if you will? Should Abraham not have wondered if aborting the sacrifice really was what God intended? I do not mean to suggest that "seeing is believing"; nor do I mean to suggest that we should always doubt what we hear. But we should be able to ask what it means to hear a particular voice, and what it means to hear the voice of God? Even if this is a voice Abraham has heard before, what does it mean that he hears the voice of an angel, and agent of God? The "here I am" [me voici], hineni, in Hebrew, implies a sensitivity, a total awareness, or an openness to respond. In a sense, Abraham’s words imply that the response actually precedes the utterance of the phrase.[14] To utter "here I am" is already to be ready to respond.[15] We should remember what Abraham endured to get to the point of raising the knife in order to respond to a command given to him by God. Then, is it not extraordinary that Abraham is ready to "hear" the second command, the command not to continue, a command given to him, not by God, but by an alleged messenger of God. This point in itself is significant for Silentio, since this means that Abraham no longer stands Absolute in a relation to the Absolute. The relationship between Abraham and God is now mediated by Isaac, and the immediate relationship has shifted to that between Abraham and Isaac, a relationship Levinas terms the "face to face."[16] Could we not say that Abraham’s receptivity to the second voice implies that Abraham had already turned toward the ethical, has already seen the ethical? Could we not read this moment, as Levinas also suggests, as the essential moment in the story? Here I turn again to the midrash, which asks after the phrase, "do not lay a hand on the lad" and suggests that Abraham had already put down the knife. The Angel’s voice, then, is a less a command from above, than it is a response to a response that is already in motion.[17] And though this is the essential moment for Levinas, I wish to claim that something had to take place in order for Abraham to be receptive to this voice: he had already seen the face of Isaac; he had already seen the holiness of the land. Thus, as Bregman suggests, Abraham does see what needs to be seen. He sees Mt. Moriah as holy, and as the picture of the ram tugging at Abraham’s hem suggests, he has turned his attention from God to Isaac, from the command of God to the command of the other. As Bregman also points out in one midrash, "Abraham is bent over looking down at Isaac, who is lying on his back looking up into heaven. In the next ‘shot’, we see the face of Isaac through the eyes of Abraham. What he sees in his son’s face is so horrific that it cause [sic] him to weep to a surrealtistic extent and to let out an inhuman cry." Though the end of this midrash has the angel staying Abraham’s hand, I claim that Abraham was changed when he looked into Isaac’s face. The staying of the hand was the continuation, or affirmation, of an action that was already set into motion; Abraham had already begun to abort the sacrifice. That is, I claim, he has turned from sheer obedience to the ethical. For Levinas, the point at which Abraham hears the second voice marks the moment at which Abraham has heard the voice that has led him to the ethical. This moment is not only the essential moment; it is "the highest moment in the drama."[18] Is it not the case that, as Levinas says, we rise to the level of the religious precisely when we are ethical?[19] The ethical for Levinas takes precedence, even over the apparent commands of God. Thus, if religion is to provide genuine freedom, God must be understood to be free and able to deceive, or to command a murder that we are free to choose not to commit.[20] We must be free to show that we are strong by being able to disobey God’s commands. It cannot be the case that Abraham waited for or merely responded to another command from God, even if the command was from an Angel. If it is, then we are left with the Divine Command Theory and all its problems, and Judaism is merely a religion that has its members wait for the word of God for orders to tell us what to do and how to act. As Levinas reminds us, Judaism is a difficile liberté precisely because it both commands us to be and allows us to be adults. There is no doubt that Kierkegaard gives us a different reading from the collection of midrashim in the Judaic tradition; Kierkegaard, if you will, gives us his own version of a midrash on Abraham’s struggle. But Kierkegaard stops precisely where the drama begins, namely, when Abraham hears the angel, puts down the knife, and sees in the face of his son the true meaning of the religious. This, I claim, was the test Abraham had to pass and did pass. http://etext.virginia.edu/journals/tr/archive/volume10/Katz.html, diakses 28 Agustus 2010.      Kesadaran terhadap Liyan bagi Levinas December 4, 2009 by savindievoice Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995) menjadi salah satu ikon fenomenologi sekaligus menjadi penggerak gerbong post-strukturalisme Prancis. Sangat dipengaruhi oleh kajian-kajian fenomenologi Husserl, dan tentunya fenomenologi bercorak ontologis a la Heidegger, Levinas ternyata mampu menciptakan fenomenologi yang berbeda dengan kedua tokoh di atas. Sebagai seorang Yahudi yang hidup di episentrum politik Eropa, dan pernah menjadi saksi hidup holocaust, peristiwa ini ternyata menjadi salah satu titik tolak pemikiran Levinas. Karena itu orang sulit untuk membedakan karya-karyanya sebagai sebuah karya filosofis atau religios. Ada beberapa individu yang mempengaruhi filosofi Levinas, selain Husserl, sang dewa fenomenologi, di Prancis Levinas banyak mendapat bimbingan dari Charles Blondel dan Maurice Pradines. K. Bertens (2006) menyebut bahwa pengaruh agama Yahudi, pemikiran filosofis barat dan fenomenologis inilah yang kemudian menjadi corak pemikiran filosofis Levinas. Reputasi sebagai pembawa fenomenologi ke ranah Prancis, terutama melalui disertasi “La theorie de l’instuition dans la phenomenology de Husser”l (Teori tentang Intuisi dalam Fenomenologi Husserl/1930) dan bukunya “En decouvrant l’existence avec Husserl et et Heidegger” (Menemukan Eksistensi bersama Husserl dan Heidegger/1967), membawa Levinas untuk masuk ke dalam kajian-kajian kesadaran, eksistensi, dan tentu saja mengenai apa yang lain (the other). Ketiganya nanti mendapat legitimasi kuat dari Levinas sehingga berkorelasi satu sama lain secara holistik. Di sini kita akan mulai menemukan pemikiran-pemikiran murni dari Levinas. Seperti tadi disebutkan, pengaruh filosofi barat, bertemu fenomenologi, dan khususnya, sebagai seorang Yahudi yang taat, Levinas sangat menghayati kepercayaannya. Mendalami teologi Yahudi bukan sesuatu yang asing bagi Levinas mengingat sejak kecil orangtuanya mengajarkan bahasa Ibrani dan Rusia kepadanya yang saat itu masih tinggal di Lithuania dengan harapan memperoleh masa depan yang lebih baik. Selain giat mempelajari Talmud dan bacaan-bacaan Yahudi lain, secara khusus Levinas juga sangat terkesan terhadap dua pemikir agama Yahudi: Martin Buber dan Franz Rosenzweig, dua tokoh pembaharu dalam Yudaisme. Dan kita ingat Levinas ikut menjadi saksi hidup holocaust, atau pembantaian umat Yahudi, serta dinamika peran Yudaisme yang jatuh bangun terguncang peristiwa tersebut. Ini pula yang mengundang minat Levinas mendalami masa-masa krusial dinamika sebuah agama yang berusaha menuntun identitas umatnya kembali. Levinas sendiri merujuk kepada ayat Alkitab Yesaya 53 tentang  “Hamba Tuhan yang Menderita”. Masa-masa inilah krisis terbesar bagi Yudaisme, seperti yang diungkapkan Karen Armstrong dalam “History of God” bahwa “Tuhan orang Yahudi telah mati” di kamp Autscwithz, Dan zionisme sebagai sebuah gerakan politik kemudian merebut peran dan orientasi bangsa Yahudi setelah itu. Menyoroti eksistensi, Levinas memulainya dengan memakai konsep-konsep fenomenologi: intensionalitas. Fenomenologi meminjam definisi Donny Gahral Adian (2005), adalah ilmu tentang esensi-esensi kesadaran dan esensi ideal dari obyek-obyek sebagai korelat kesadaran. Inti fenomenologi bagi Levinas adalah intensionalitas kesadaran. Kesadaran kita selalu mengarah dan menuju kepada sesuatu, yaitu intensionalitas. Kesadaran yang transendental a la Husserl ternyata tidak disepakati oleh Levinas yang justru lebih setuju bentuk yang lebih ontologis sesuai dengan pemikiran Martin Heidegger. Menariknya lagi, Levinas yang meninggal pada Natal tahun 1995 ini  tidak berhenti pada sisi konseptual kesadaran itu saja, tapi juga melangkah ke ranah yang menjadi spesialisasi para filsuf psikoanalisis: liyan atau “the other”. Karya Levinas pada tahun 1961 berjudul Totalite et infini, Essai sur l’exteriorite (Totalitas dan Tak Berhingga, Esei tentang Eksteriorits) menjadi rujukan utama bagi kita untuk mendalami sang liyan bagi Levinas. Dalam buku ini Levinas mengkritik keras konsep totalitas yang cenderung egoistik. Levinas menyebutnya sebagai la philophie du Meme (the philosophy of the same). Bagi Levinas, totalitas itu akan runtuh jika bertemu dengan sesuatu yang benar-benar lain, bukan termasuk totalitas egoistik itu, dan benar-benar sesuatu yang bukan aku. Yang dimaksud tentu saja adalah yang liyan atau the other atau Autrui. Inilah yang kemudian lebih dikonkritkan Levinas dalam konsepnya: wajah (visage). Dasar yang membedakan sang liyan Levinas dengan yang lain adalah bahwa sang liyan itu benar-benar bukan alter ego kita, bukan aku yang lain, tapi totally different. Dan relasi yang terjadi antara aku dan liyan bukan sesuatu yang timbal balik (resiprositas), tapi sesuatu yang asimetris. Mungkin ini mengingatkan kita tentang bagaimana Jacques Lacan memaknai cinta yang berarti memberi kepada orang lain apa yang tidak dipunyainya (Love is giving something one doesn’t have…). Universalitas other inilah yang nantinya dikritik oleh Sloterdijk, seperti yang diungkapkan oleh Slavoj Zizek dalam bukunya “Violence” (2008), bahwa ada liyan yang tidak diperhitungkan (imponderable other) yang tidak menerima prasyarat universalitas tersebut, liyan yang benar-benar musuh bagi kita. Bila kita menelusuri lebih dalam sang wajah liyan tadi, maka kita akan bertemu pondasi-pondasi religius bernuansa humanis a la Levinas. Perjumpaan antara sang aku dan liyan dengan memakai instrumen bahasa yang etis akan membawa manusia kepada yang lain tapi berdimensi ilahi, yaitu Tuhan. Dalam bahasa yang lebih sederhana, perlakuan kita kepada yang liyan atau sesama (neighbour), juga menyiratkan relasi yang sama kepada Tuhan kita. Konsepsi-konsepsi di atas menuntun kita pada kesimpulan Levinas bahwa kesadaran tidak timbul karena begitu mendalam intensitas egoistik kita, bukan karena intuisi yang muncul dari dalam diri kita yang mengakibatkan seorang anak manusia mengalami state of mind bernama kesadaran (consciousness). Tapi perjumpaannya dengan ‘wajah’ yang lain, dengan orang lain yang benar-benar berbeda dengan kita itu yang menimbulkan kesadaran, tapi bukan cogito(la conscience theorique) seperti yang diklaim Rene Descartes yang bernuansa egoistik, melainkan kesadaran yang bermoral (la conscience morale). Iya, moralitas dan hati nurani, itulah yang menjadi dasar utama filsafat bagi Emmanuel Levinas. http://savindievoice.wordpress.com/2009/12/04/kesadaran-terhadap-liyan-bagi-levinas/, diakses 30 Agustus 2010.  Levinas, Ostler and the Face of the Other by: Aaron R. – March 12, 2010 Aaron R. returns to ponder the meaning of suffering. Trying to think through the problem of suffering has been something which has occupied me for around a year now and I don’t have a lot to show for it. However, the work of Emmanuel Levinas will continue to be a source of renewal for me in the future when I inevitably confront this issue. In this post I want to draw out Levinas’ major insight into suffering which is that it is meaningless when we suffer but that suffering of another should bring a change in how we respond them and their needs. I am drawing my comments almost solely from Levinas’ essay ‘Useless Suffering’ contained in the book Entre Nous. Levinas defines suffering, as ‘the denial, the refusal of meaning’ and is therefore by definition meaningless and/or useless. For Levinas, suffering is in part a passivity, because it involves (to use LDS language) being acted upon. Levinas writes that pure suffering provides ‘no way out’ and yet ‘a beyond appears in the form of the inter-human’. Thus it is in the suffering of the other that we begin to sense our ‘inescapable obligation’ to lift them. King Benjamin teaches that Christ bled from every pore because of his ‘great anguish for the wickedness and the abominations of his people’ (see Msh 3:7). One reading of this passage might suggests that Christ’s suffering was because of his ‘mourning with those that mourn’ as much as an actual suffering for our sins. In addition, Elder Maxwell has taught that Christ’s love/empathy was perfected through this experience. This indicates to me that Levinas has managed to capture one way that suffering becomes meaningful, and this is through the expansion of our capacity to love and empathise with each other. For Levinas then, suffering is meaningful if it becomes ‘a suffering for the suffering… of someone else’. Further it is this consciousness that ‘brings us closer to God’. This method of atonement is more difficult but it is also, according to Levinas, more spiritual because it requires of us a faith (without theodicy) that drives us toward the realisation of our responsibility toward the Other. This responsibility has been aptly captured by Elie Wiesel in his speech, ‘The Perils of Indifference’, in which he said ‘to be indifferent to that suffering is what makes the human-being inhuman’ and thus other people become an object or an IT, rather than a Thou. We see then this suffering Other face-to-face or I toThou. This I-Thou relationship becomes possible because we are able to strip away all other subjectivities and through suffering reveal to ourselves a foundational identity (an essence, an intelligence). Moreover, it helps us to see this same essence in the Other. Perhaps it is for this reason that suffering has the power to propel us to the intimate embrace of God and others because we become stripped of pride, envy and conceit in the depth of our suffering. We become ‘us’ in the presence of that other eternal being, whom I call God. Without explicitly expressing this connection, Ostler provides a uniquely Mormon view of what I take be Levinas’ argument regarding suffering. Ostler believes that the interpersonal dimension of suffering is central to our ethical responsibility. He extends this into the pre-mortal life and agues that these relationships open ‘the possibility that some persons face challenges to give us an opportunity to learn to express our love for them through service and healing prayer’. Such suffering in others was voluntarily chosen, and therefore is not unjust. Whether we accept Ostler’s theological foundations or not; the concept of a pre-mortal life does provide a unique lens through which to think about Levinas’ ideas. Despite Ostler’s insistence that if we choose to suffer (even the most ugly and vile experiences) then this is not unjust I feel decidedly uncomfortable with another person suffering for me so that I can learn to love more deeply. This is surprising because it is this same dynamic that I accept whole-heartedly as the foundation of my faith. Perhaps then, being a ‘saviour on Mount Zion’ is not solely linked to our temple or missionary efforts but also refers to a pre-mortal willingness to suffer that another might be saved. Perhaps we have all come here to learn the work of redemption by redeeming and being redeemed through suffering. Yet, in the midst of all this fuzzy speculation I feel confident that Levinas is right. There is an ethical responsibility to turn toward those others in our life and to willingly see them face-to-face, I to Thou. Then I believe we will be able to fulfill our baptismal covenant to ‘mourn with those that mourn and to comfort those that stand in need of comfort’. http://bycommonconsent.com/2010/03/12/levinas-ostler-and-the-face-of-the-other/, diakses 28 Agustus 2010.  Emmanuel Levinas's Totality and Infinity Emmanuel Levinas. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969. Review by Alex Scott Emmanuel Levinas’s Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (1969) describes how subjectivity arises from the idea of infinity, and how infinity is produced in the relationship of the self with the other. Levinas says that ontology enacts a relation with being which reduces the other to the same. Instead, Levinas takes an approach which does not reduce the other to the same, but which views the separation between the same and the other as inherent to the relation with Being. Levinas explains that exteriority is how the finite individual transcends being merged into infinity. Exteriority is how the individual transcends being merged into a totality. Exteriority is a relation whereby the self is separated from the Other. Exteriority is a relation whereby the being of self and Other cannot be totalized or merged into infinity because it is absolutely separated. Exteriority is produced by interiority. Interiority is a subjective relation in which a being refers to itself. Subjectivity allows the self to view itself as separate from the Other. Exteriority is a state of being in which the self cannot be merged into a totality. The separation of the self from the Other is a form of non-participation by the self in the being of the Other. When the self is separated from the Other, the self no longer derives its being from the way in which it refers to the Other. The self that no longer participates in the being of the Other derives its being from itself. The self must be separated from the Other in order to have the idea of infinity. The idea of infinity is itself a form of transcendence of the relation to the Other. Exteriority is achieved by having the idea of infinity. Levinas says that the idea of infinity is not a representation of infinity.1 Infinity overflows the idea of infinity. The idea of infinity is an overflowing of finite thought by infinite content. Infinity is produced by the overflowing of the intellect. The production of infinity cannot be separated from the idea of infinity. The idea of infinity is the mode of being of infinity.2 Infinity is produced as a revelation to the self of the idea of infinity. The idea of infinity does not proceed from the self, but is revealed to the self. Infinity is revealed as the infinite being of the absolutely other. To have the idea of infinity is to be aware of the infinity of the Other. Thus, the idea of infinity maintains the exteriority of the Other. The Other is absolutely other than the same. The Other is everything other than the self. The Other is infinite being which overflows the idea of infinity. The Other is an infinitely transcendent reality. Levinas says that the idea of infinity requires the separation of the same from the Other. This separation is a fall of the same and Other from totality. The level of separation is a level of fallenness. But this fall from totality produces infinity. The idea of infinity is moral in that it is an idea of what the finite being lacks in relation to infinity. Thus, the self can transcend this relation by a welcoming of the Other. Indeed, to have the idea of infinity is to have already welcomed the Other.3 The welcoming of the Other is the beginning of moral consciousness.4 Exteriority is a form of subjectivity, but is not a selfish protest against totality. Subjectivity is a welcoming of the Other. Levinas distinguishes between the idea of totality and the idea of infinity. The idea of totality seeks to integrate the other and the same into a totality, but the idea of infinity maintains the separation between the other and the same. According to Levinas, the idea of totality is theoretical, but the idea of infinity is moral.5 Multiple beings can exist in a totality, but Being itself is exterior to totality. The truth of Being is a being situated in a subjective field of exteriority.6 The face of the Other overflows the idea which the self has of the Other. The face of the Other transcends the distinction between form and content, because it reveals the idea of infinity to the separated being. The revelation of the face of the Other to the self is necessary for separation. The face of the Other is the way in which the Other is revealed to the self. The face of the Other is the exteriority of its Being. The face to face relation of the self to the Other is an ultimate situation. The face to face is an ethical relation, and calls the freedom of the self to responsibility. The face to face relation of the self to the Other does not integrate the self and Other into a totality. Nor does the face to face relation integrate the self and Other into each other. The self and Other are transcendent to their face to face relation. Levinas explains that the face of the Other speaks to the self. Language begins with the presence of the face, with expression. Language is a system of interaction whereby meaning is derived from the face of the Other. Signification requires the presence of exteriority. Signification arises from the way in which the face of the Other is revealed to the separated being. Signification does not arise merely from the need or desire of the self for exteriority, or because the self is lacking something. Signification is derived from the signs which the Other reveals in speaking about the world. The Other is the signifier, manifested in language by the production of signs which propose objective reality or which thematize the world.7 The Other itself cannot be thematized. Thematization cannot make an object of the Other. Truth is a modality of the relation between the same and the other. Truth is the modality in which the same speaks to the other, though they are separated. Truth emerges from a dimension of exteriority. The face which the absolutely other presents to the self is not a negation of the self. The presence of the Other does not contradict the freedom of the self. The presence of the Other endows the self with a responsible freedom. The mode of being for the Other is not a negation of the self. Being for the Other does not mean that the self disappears in a totality. Being for the Other is a state of exteriority. Being as goodness is being for the Other. Goodness brings transcendence of the face to face relation, in that the being of the self affirms the being of the Other. Levinas admits that the assertion that a separated being derives its being from itself is a form of atheism. The independence of the separated being also introduces the problem of causality. The problem to be solved is how cause-and-effect relations can exist between separated beings, and how absolute separation can explain objective reality. Totality and Infinity is a profound and challenging work of philosophy. Levinas provides an interesting viewpoint on the problem of modern alienation in that he explains how separation can be understood as a basic condition of Being. 1 Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, translated by Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), p. 27. 2 Ibid., p. 26. 3 Ibid., p. 93. 4 Ibid., p. 84. 5 Ibid., p. 83. 6 Ibid., p. 291. 7 Ibid., p. 96. http://www.angelfire.com/md2/timewarp/levinas.html, diakses 28 Agustus 2010.  Excursus: Lévinas' ethics of the Other Michael Eldred i) Lévinas' move against fundamental ontology  To set the contours of worldsharing and the encounter more starkly into relief, it is useful to study a widely diverging account of the same phenomena. Lévinas' philosophy is eminently suited to such a contrast for it engages, albeit from a critical distance, the tradition of dialogical philosophy that surged in the early twentieth century associated with names such as Buber, Rosenzweig and Rosenstock-Huessy, on the one hand, as well as with Heidegger's Sein und Zeit, on the other. This latter work — together with certain elements in Heidegger's later thinking — is latently or explicitly present in all of Lévinas' writings and forms one of the major touchstones for his alternative to what he regards as "the honourable tradition that Heidegger continues",(1) viz. the tradition of ontology. Thus, in one of his main works, Totality and Infinity, his efforts are turned to claiming the priority of what he understands by metaphysics over ontology, of metaphysical desire over ontological totalization. In an article first published in 1951(2) entitled 'Is Ontology Fundamental?', Lévinas briefly presents a case for a negative answer to this question. This negative answer bears and marks his entire thinking, and that to such an extent that it is by and large a negative movement, akin even to negative theology. There is no doubt that Lévinas has a genuine phenomenon in view, a phenomenon that opened up and provided the essential impetus for dialogical philosophy and is roughly indicated by the grammatical difference between the third person and the second person. Lévinas is also correct in pointing out that Heidegger's fundamental ontology, as presented in Sein und Zeit and lecture courses throughout the twenties, does not enter into an interpretation of this phenomenon but rather keeps it at arm's length. But whereas Lévinas argues for a strong distinction between what he calls metaphysics, which is concerned with infinitude, and ontology, which he claims to be totalizing, the thesis presented in the present excursus is that Heidegger, even in shying away from the dialogical phenomenon, provides an indispensable placeholder and starting-point for adequately interpreting it. To put it colloquially, Lévinas throws the baby out with the bath water. Moreover, he insists on mixing theology with philosophy, with the result that his texts take on the hue of a dogmatic, morally exalted, incantatory insistence. This will be shown in the following by selecting passages from the above-mentioned  article mentioned above which is representative of and quintessential to Lévinas' enduring stance toward Heidegger's thinking. Some comments will also be made on Totalité et Infini and Autrement qu'être ou au-delà de l'essence.  ii) Opening up to the world: understanding and moodedness Lévinas claims that, in spite of fundamental ontology locating itself in the midst of lived existence, it nevertheless interprets existence narrowly as understanding:  But philosophy of existence immediately pales in the face of ontology. This circumstance of being involved, this event in which I find myself entangled, this fact of being bound, as I am to that which is supposed to be my object, through ties that cannot be traced back to thoughts, this existence is interpreted as understanding. (S. 107/p. 91)  This claim is astonishing since it is plain to any reader of Sein und Zeit that understanding is only one mode in which the world opens up to Dasein; the other, equiprimordial mode is moodedness or disposition (Befindlichkeit), the mode in which Dasein is how it is and how it has been cast. Lévinas even makes mention of attunement (Gestimmtheit) in passing but returns nonetheless to the claim that understanding is all-dominating in fundamental ontology:  To understand our situation in reality does not mean to define it but to find oneself in an affective attunement; to understand being means to exist. (106/90)  This is the only point in the article where moodedness enters the discussion, in a statement that could almost have flowed from Heidegger's pen. Lévinas' opposition to fundamental ontology rests on a movement counter to the primacy of understanding in which he attempts to show that the relation to the other "cannot be traced back to understanding" (108/92). Lévinas' counter-movement can only be undertaken at the price of wilfully overlooking that for Heidegger's fundamental ontology, moodedness is a fundamental way in which Dasein opens up to the world and takes it in and in fact so fundamentally that it can reach further than knowing (which, it should be noted against Lévinas' lax use of terms, Heidegger distinguishes from understanding). Consider, for example, the following quotation from Sein und Zeit:  Das Sein des Da ist in solcher Verstimmung als Last offenbar geworden. Warum, weiß man nicht. Und das Dasein kann dergleichen nicht wissen, weil die Erschließungsmöglichkeiten des Erkennens viel zu kurz tragen gegenüber dem ursprünglichen Erschließen der Stimmungen, in denen das Dasein vor sein Sein als Da gebracht ist. (SuZ 134, italics in the original)  The being of the here has become obvious in such a bad mood as a burden. One does not know (weiß) why. And Dasein (being-here) cannot know (wissen) suchlike because knowing's possibilities of opening up fall far too short compared with the originary opening up performed by moods (Stimmungen) in which Dasein is brought before its being as Da.  Cf. also the following passage from Holzwege:  Vielleicht ist jedoch das, was wir [...] Stimmung nennen, vernünftiger, nämlich vernehmender, weil dem Sein offener als alles Vernunft... (3) Perhaps however, what we call [...] attunement is more reasonable, i.e. more perceptive, because more open to being than reason could ever be...  Moodedness opens Dasein up to the world more deeply than knowing it, and moodedness is on a par with understanding in opening up the world. Lévinas does not acknowledge this and even uses the terms 'understanding' and 'knowing' interchangeably, which only causes more confusion. Is this only a cavil? I think not because, by omitting moodedness and confusing understanding with knowing, Lévinas is able to put Heidegger too comfortably back into the philosophical tradition which the former claims does violence to the other through the totalizing hegemony of reason. It is Heidegger, however, who put reason into question before Lévinas came along. The conflation of these differences allows Lévinas to make the following exemplary movement:  Truth does not exist because there are humans. Humanity exists because being in general is inseparable from its opening-up, because there is truth, or because, if you like, there is insight into being. [...] All non-understanding is only a deficient mode of understanding. The analysis of existence and what is called its Here is thus nothing other than the description of the essence of truth, the condition of the understandability itself of being. (105/89; 108/91)  The quintessence of ontology in Lévinas' eyes is the understanding of being, which is interpreted as the opening up of being in its truth through which beings, including the other, are disclosed or unconcealed from the horizon of universal being, as opposed to a being as such in its particularity. On the basis of this conception of ontology there is no room for truth consisting in the openness of self-concealment, and it is precisely moodedness that can be interpreted as a mode of opening-up in which concealment itself comes into its truth. Moodedness must be regarded, contra Heidegger, privatively as the mode of "non-understanding" par excellence but, as we have seen, it is by no means merely "a deficient mode of understanding" but a mode of the opening up of world in its own right. Allowing concealment to be in its openness is a possibility that Lévinas apparently does not consider. Lévinas curiously distinguishes between metaphysics and ontology by contrasting "relations with beings as such, as pure beings [...] rather than with an horizon" (117/97), which is strange because already the traditional Aristotelean formulation of metaphysics is as an investigation into "beings qua beings" (to\ o)\)n $(= o/)/n). Even when the other is addressed as an other, this other is ineluctably always already understood as an other, that is, from within one of the most venerable categories of being that address beings as such, viz. to\ e(/teron (cf. Plato's Sophist), a crucial point that is lost on Lévinas. Lévinas apparently believes naively that ontological categories can be avoided, while contradicting himself with every word he speaks.  iii) Addressing others Lévinas wants to say that the relation to the other is "prior to understanding" (108/92). The priority of the other, he claims, is grounded in the priority of particularity over universality, which universality is seen as a characteristic of Western philosophy that Heidegger simply accepts and continues in his fundamental ontology.  The particular being is understood by assuming a position that is already beyond the particular; understanding means relating to the particular by means of knowledge which is always knowledge of the universal. (109/92)  Lévinas wants to save the particular "mere individual" as a "being as such" (112/94) from the totalizing horizon of universal being in general. But this opposition is spurious because the individual as a "being as such" is still a being, and so the attempt to save individuality from the universality of being (assuming for the moment that being is universal) always comes too late. Moreover, Lévinas does not distinguish between the particular and the singular, individual; the particular, as the word itself says, is a particularization. Of what? Of the universal. In fact, understanding a being as such is precisely the task of ontology: a being as such means that the individual is always already encompassed by the universality (e(/n) of being. For Aristotle, to think the being as such, i.e. to\ o)\)n $(= o)/n, is the task for metaphysics. And in referring to the other (e(/teroj) as an other, Lévinas is also situated ineluctably within the universality of being. Even the terms 'individuality', 'particularity', etc. are designations of being and thus universal. The distinction between particularity and universality is entirely inadequate for showing up the phenomenon that Lévinas has in view. The relation to the other as a "being as such" still has to be thought as a phenomenon of being. But being is manifold; it has many folds, and it is in one of these folds that the other as such is situated. The fold in being I am referring to is its folding into second and third person, and the further folding of the second person into meeting and encounter, as elaborated in the main body of this study.  In approaching the other in what he regards to be a non-totalizing way, Lévinas introduces the existential of addressability, which is indeed one of the essential characteristics of the relation to the other in the second person. Addressability is introduced in contradistinction to understanding, or knowing, the other:  Certainly our relation to the other consists in wanting to understand him, but this relation goes beyond understanding. Not only because knowledge of the other, independently of curiosity, also demands sympathy or love, modes of being which are different from disinterested observation. But because the other in our relation to him does not affect us on the basis of a concept. The other is a being and is regarded as such. (110/92f)  Understanding and knowledge are conflated here once again. The former is an ontological existential of world-opening involved in any relations to beings as such, whereas knowledge proceeds on the basis of the a priori understanding of being and is thus not originary. Lévinas is correct in pointing out that the other "affects" us and that this affectedness "goes beyond understanding", but this in no way gainsays fundamental ontology, as already noted above. The existential of addressability is, however, not a way of going beyond understanding to consider moodedness (in which Dasein is affected), but is precisely the way in which the other is understood, recognized and acknowledged as other Dasein, i.e. as Mitdasein. Addressability (which plays a major role in dialogical philosophy) is indeed an existential not considered by Heidegger, but it is fully compatible with fundamental ontology once it turns its attention to the phenomenon of relations to other Dasein in Mitsein. Addressability is an existential (even a universal existential) adequate to the phenomenon of Mitsein in the second person. Thus, Lévinas' claim, "Is the one to whom one speaks already understood in advance in their being? Not at all." (110/93), has to be denied.  Without being already "understood in advance in their being", the other as other would not be addressable at all, i.e. addressability belongs essentially to the being of Mitdasein; it is one of the existentials which open up other Dasein and make it accessible, namely, in the second person. Lévinas is setting up specious oppositions here but is at the same time pointing to concepts adequate to thinking the other as other. Addressability is the condition of possibility of entering into a relation with the other as other Dasein. Such addressability is, in turn, the condition of possibility of understanding the other in the sense of an ontic understanding or knowledge of this particular being, as Lévinas rightly points out: "To understand a person means to already speak with them." (111/93) This is no contradiction to Heidegger's conception of Dasein and Dasein sharing the Da, as already laid out in Section 1. Sharing the truth.  Mitdasein is unique in that, because it is itself Dasein, it has a world, its very own world, to which it is opened up and which it takes in both comprehendingly and moodfully; and because it is also addressable (by virtue of the dimension of the second person), it can also be spoken with. Understanding and knowing other Dasein is not restricted to understanding and knowing them from the 'outside', i.e. in a third person understanding, but deepens into knowing them directly from the 'inside', i.e. in the second person. This inside is not a psyche or an inner life or the depths of a soul but the inside of Mitdasein's very own world which is nevertheless open in the universality of a shared truth. Because the other is Mit-dasein, Dasein as being in its world within the openness of truth can be shared, and because the other is Mit-dasein, it is itself within the openness of truth. Addressability and speaking with the other are essential aspects (existentials) of the ontology of being in the second person, of you-and-me-ness. Addressability is the condition of possibility of talking to you and speaking with you. You and I are only possible in a you-and-me relation by virtue of addressability, which is the potentiality of calling you into being, of invoking you as you for (a) me. It cannot be assumed that you pre-exist our you-and-I relation, just as little as I exist in a second person way outside the relation. You and I come about through the realization of the potentiality of addressability. You and I exist only in between, in the present. Addressability holds open the door to a potential sharing of world by talking to each other. Only by virtue of addressability do we not just share the world, but can share the world with each other.  Lévinas has no concept of sharing the world, but only of a shared relationship between the one and the other because he rejects the fundamental-ontological concept of Dasein and operates instead within the metaphysics of subjectivity, for which there is no openness of truth, no clearing. Hence his express sympathy for Kant's subjectivist philosophy with its emphasis on morality (cf. 114/95, 118/98). Contrary to his intention of treating the other in their particularity (more properly: singularity), he does not take care to distinguish between the third person and the second person with the result that the other is dealt with in just as impersonal a manner as in other philosophical discourses. Addressability and speaking with the other does not mean that the plane of "universal being" has been left in order to engage with the "particular being" (112/94); it does not mean that the understanding of being has been dispensed with, but that another dimension in the folds of being has been entered, and this entry into another dimension demands another kind of language than the one we find in Lévinas' thinking.  iv) A hole in the horizon of being?  Lévinas has singled out two of the main phenomena featured in dialogical philosophy, namely, addressability and speaking with the other (language), in order to make a case against fundamental ontology. The peculiar essential characteristic of the relation to the other is, according to Lévinas:  that my understanding of the being as such a being [i.e. the other as an other ME] is already the expression that I offer him of this understanding. (112/94)  The relation with the other, in which "expression consists in constituting a communality" is supposed to be a "relation that cannot be traced back to understanding". (113/94) From this Lévinas concludes:  The essence of speech is prayer. What distinguishes thinking that is directed toward an object from the connection with a person is the fact that the latter is expressed as a vocative: The object of the naming is at the same time the one who is called upon [the addressee]. (113/95)  The vocative is indeed the opening of the dimension of the second person which allows world to be shared in speaking with each other. Whether this vocativity should be called prayer is a moot point, but Lévinas does seem to have the distinction between the third and second person in view in the following passage, even though the concepts of particularity and universality are entirely inadequate to capturing this difference:  He [the other] does not emerge completely in the opening-up of being where I am already situated as if on the field of my freedom. He does not encounter me against the foil of being in general. Of course, everything about him that becomes accessible to me from being in general is proffered to my understanding and my possession. I understand him against the background of his history, his milieu, his habits. What it is about him that escapes understanding is he himself, the being. (116/96)  This is the transition from the third to the second person within the folds of being, which should not be confused with a shift from the universality of being to the particularity of the "being as such". The phenomena themselves should guide thinking. Talking with the other is to be distinguished from talking about the other. Only the former can have the immediacy of meeting and encounter, although it must be noted that talking with the other is not a guarantee that an encounter takes place. Indeed, for the most part, talking with the other does not amount to an encounter, which is an exceptional occurrence, but is instead the commerce or intercourse between individuals in a meeting-together.(4) For Lévinas, the encounter takes place when the face of the other appears, from which he is quick to derive ethical consequences: "To stand face to face with the other, this means not being able to kill." (117/97), but such over-hasty, far-reaching ethical conclusions should be refrained from, since they smother and obscure the phenomenon of the second person of being that is coming into view. Instead, every effort should be made to clarify the distinction between the third and the second person within the folds of being, which is eminently, albeit implicitly, expressed in the following passage:  The relation to a being is invocation of a face and already a word; it is rather the relation to a depth than to an horizon, a hole in the horizon; my neighbour is the being par excellence... (117/97; italics Lévinas)  Whence does this hole in the horizon come? Is such a term justified? Isn't the horizon of being all-encompassing, admitting no exceptions? The horizon of being is the world that envelops the three ecstasies of time into which Dasein stands out temporally in the movement of its existence. Within this three-dimensional ecstatic unity, beings as such appear to Dasein, who is opened up to this horizon. The hole in the horizon of world comes about with other Dasein, since each other Dasein has its own horizon and is itself a temporalizing of three-dimensional time out of which it casts its own self freely. The hole is emptiness; it is the nothingness of other Dasein's freedom which lights up flickeringly in the encounter in which you and I inkle each other's nothingness from which each casts its self. Freedom itself, which is the ontological origin of selfhood, is the hole, the casting of oneself out of nothingness in which the bearings of existence are laid in a definite direction that becomes the sense of an individual Dasein's existence. The empty hole of the other's freedom from which its selfhood springs is the source which I come up against in the encounter and experience directly, albeit barely. This hole in the horizon is not consistently experienced in dealings with other Dasein, for it has no perduring presence, but it makes itself felt in the resistance that other Dasein offers as a free being, i.e. through its withdrawal into its self, its ineludible self-encryption, which is not a particular ontic mode of behaviour, but a fundamental ontological characteristic of the other as Dasein: Dasein as self remains encrypted, sheltered in the crypt of its self.  Because Dasein is freely self-casting, it has always already swung over beyond beings, incorporating them into its existential casting. This freedom of Dasein calls forth the resistance of beings, it is in fact the very origin of their resistance. In the case of other Dasein, however, which is itself free, this resistance is compounded and takes on a different form, since now, in the meeting or encounter of first and second person, freedom comes up against freedom. This is what is most impossible for Dasein to overcome, because Dasein is metaphysically impotent to overcome the freedom of the other. When Lévinas refers to the impossibility of murder, he is translating this ontological impotence into an ethical (not a factical)(5) impossibility. In so doing, he employs a line of argument strikingly reminiscent of the Hegelian dialectic of master and slave (116/97). The phrase "most impossible" seems to be a pleonasm. What is meant is that the resistance of beings (in the third person) already refers to Dasein's metaphysical impotency which cannot be overcome by any technological mastery (cf. Section 6. Addressability and proper-namedness: Dasein's inviolable freedom). This metaphysical impotency is exponentially compounded in relations with other Dasein which is itself essentially free with its own infinite degrees of freedom of movement.(6) Lévinas translates this ontological impotence into an (ontic) ethical imperative which he himself remarks is akin to the categorical imperative in Kant's practical philosophy (118/98), but such a translation is misleading and only obfuscates when one considers that Dasein's freedom has an ontological status, i.e. it is situated already within the truth of being and needs to be thought as a question and a problem of (human) being.  What Lévinas calls the "relation to the face [of the other] as the event of communality, the word" (117/97) is treated in the present study as the possibility of encounter that in turn opens up the possibility of you and me sharing our freedom with each other and indeed the necessity of having to do so, one way or the other, since our respective freedom is ontologically inviolable. Although Lévinas claims that this hole in the horizon where the other as such appears is occluded by fundamental ontology by way of the universality of being suffocating the particularity of the other as a being, the discussion in the main body of the present study should have made clear that the phenomenon of Mitsein as sketched in Sein und Zeit and elaborated on in Heidegger's lecture courses in the late twenties (cf. esp. Gesamtausgabe Bd. 26 and Bd. 27) leaves a space for this 'hole' to be thought through adequately in turning explicitly to the problem of you-and-me, i.e. of first-and-second person in their existential-ontological intertwining. Heidegger claims in these lectures that the phenomenon of Duheit (you-ness) has to be investigated on the basis of the "fundamental neutrality" of Dasein in its selfhood. The phenomena of the encounter and the sharing of freedom between you and me can indeed be interpreted on the basis of an adequate understanding of Dasein, its world and its freedom, although not in the way Heidegger prescribes.(7) v) Ontology flattened  In stark contrast, Lévinas, in Totality and Infinity, takes the appearance of the face of the other to be the point at which the Infinite or the Absolute intervenes with the word that teaches or instructs, like a master instructs his disciple. The point at which the master appears is, he claims, the origin of language. The intervention of the Absolute is strongly reminiscent of the Old Testament motif of God calling on Moses to lay down the Ten Commandments, and this impression is reinforced by Lévinas' insistence on the ethical impossibility of killing the other: "Thou shalt not kill". The appearance of the Infinite on the scene is in a quite literal sense a deus ex machina in Lévinas' hands; in fact he introduces the idea of a "creatio ex nihilo" (e.g. TI:149/78) in order to "break" with the system of a (causal) totality and introduces an understanding of human being as a "separate existent" self-centred on its own enjoyment (cf. e.g. 166/91). But this totality is conceived as an ontic-causal system (and precisely not as an ontologically conceived world) into which he introduces the dimension of freedom, much as the metaphysical tradition usually does. Strangely enough, the deus ex machina who performs the creatio ex nihilo is a causal principle:  The creature is an existent which of course depends on an other, but not like a part which separates itself from the other. Creation out of nothing breaks the system; it posits a being outside the system, i.e. there where its freedom is possible. (149/78)  The dimension of freedom, however, is not something created out of nothing by a God, for that would be to deal with it like some ontic thing caused by an agent. The dimension of freedom is indeed the dimension of Dasein, but Dasein's existence cannot be accounted for ontically-causally by way of creation, but rather only ontologically-transcendentally by uncovering and stepping back into its conditions of possibility, for freedom is the transcendental (not: transcendent) dimension par excellence. Lévinas presents the shift to the dimension of freedom as if he were shifting from the ontological dimension (in which the egoistic subject supposedly reigns) into the ethical dimension (in which the subject becomes ashamed of his egoism), but in truth he is shifting from the ontic dimension of causal relations to the ontological dimension of Dasein as freedom. He treats the realm of freedom, however, as the ethical dimension in which the egoistic subject is confronted with moral injunctions and imperatives mediated by the face of the other. This stance is maintained and even radicalized in his last major work, Autrement qu'être ou au-delà de l'essence, in which the "unbending, indeclinable ego, protected from every scratch" (171/95) is overwhelmed in its "sensibility" by the "non-phenomenon, a putting-into-question by the otherness of the other" (170/95) that results an-archically in a "giving", in which "the giving does not offer the super-fluity of what is superfluous but the bread snatched from one's own mouth" (174/97).  In explicitly renouncing ontology as fundamental and presenting the alternative of the primacy of ethics (cf. the dictum in the table of contents of Totality and Infinity: "I.4 Metaphysics precedes ontology"), Lévinas at the same time renounces any possibility of thinking the essence of human being, which can only be achieved through ontological questioning, not through vain moral exhortations. His writing flattens to ontic narration in which repetition substitutes for clarification of essential structures, i.e. the various moments of an ontological dimension that is held together by unifiying concepts. Lévinas even explicitly defends this way of proceeding:  All the discussions in the present work [Totality and Infinity] aim at getting away from a conception which strives to unify the happenings of existence which have opposite signs in an ambivalent basic relation where only the basic relation has ontological dignity, whereas the happenings themselves which manifest themselves characteristically in one direction or the other maintain an empirical status without articulating anything new ontologically. The method practised here does consist in looking for the conditions for empirical situations, but it ascribes an ontological role to the concretization, i.e. to the so-called empirical manifestations in which the condition of possibility is fulfilled. (252f/148)  Although in other passages Lévinas seeks to get away from ontology altogether to champion the ethical manifestation of the other, here he wants to wilfully and arbitrarily elevate empirical happenings, i.e. ontic event, to an ontological status, but without working out the ontological structures within which this could take place. His "looking for the conditions for empirical situations" is not a search for ontological conditions of possibility but a hypostasization of the ontic to lend it ontological dignity. Thus, for example, the reader searches in vain for an explication of the ontological structure of the world in Lévinas' writings (which amounts to the totality of what the "separate existent" enjoys). It is not enough to baldly claim that an empirical phenomenon, such as "hospitality" or the " face of the other", has an ontological status. It only makes sense to talk of an ontological status if the ontological difference is taken seriously, but this is what Lévinas explicitly refuses to do. His rejection of ontology means that his texts shift back and forth between ontic phenomenal analyses and assertions of the primacy of the ethical (e.g. "Transcendence is ... the first ethical gesture." 253/149) which however remain mere assertions redolent of moral diatribe. The above-quoted passage, for instance, occurs in a discussion of hospitality and egoism in which the ontic possibility of opening the doors of one's house to the other is supposed to establish transcendence as an "original giving" (252/149) and language as the "first gift" (ibid.). Nonetheless, Lévinas' way of proceeding cannot entirely make us forget that ontological grounding is something entirely different.  Because they are conditions of possibility, ontological structures have the characteristic of unifying a range of empirical phenomena into their essence. This by no means excludes particular concretizations from gaining special attention and even a special status. Lévinas' method has to be contrasted with Heidegger's method in Sein und Zeit, where Heidegger employs concretizations to bring existiential-ontological structures phenomenologically to light, to highlight them. Thus, for example, in order to show the structure of care in its wholeness, he chooses a concrete phenomenon in which Dasein is its whole existence, namely, in the resolute disclosedness of self arising out of going forward to death. Heidegger's procedure does ascribe an important phenomenological role to empirical, i.e. ontic, phenomena, but it does so whilst maintaining, i.e. not confusing, watering down and flattening, the ontological difference.  Lévinas, by contrast, disseminates the seeds of irremediable confusion by not reading the structure of care in Sein und Zeit ontologically but as the ontic phenomenon of care in the sense of having cares and worries (cf. e.g. "The world... as a totality of equipment... that depends on the cares of an existence full of Angst about its being..." 190/107). This (in the case of Lévinas, one would have to say: wilful) misunderstanding of the existential-ontological concept of care is as old as Sein und Zeit itself and arises from precisely not respecting the fundamental existential-ontological character of care as a structure that unifies ontic phenomena with opposite signs and serves to characterize the ontological structure of being-in-the-world which ultimately will be taken back into Dasein's temporality, the (provisionally) 'final station' in Sein und Zeit. Lévinas' ontic misunderstanding of the ontological structure of care serves him only as a polemical foil to bolster his opposed claim that the "subject" or "human being" is not fundamentally full of cares but fixated on its own egoistic enjoyment (cf. Totality and Infinity II A 2 "Living off... (Enjoyment)" and II A 3 "Enjoyment and Independence").  vi) Beyond being  If there is one single, decisive point at which the issue between Heidegger and Lévinas becomes abundantly clear, it is the issue of e)pe/keina th=j ou)si/aj. This famous phrase from Plato's Politeia which announces the beyond of being as the i)de/a a)gaqou=, i.e. the Idea of the Good, is cited by both thinkers, but whereas Lévinas, to my knowledge, is content to quote the phrase and interpret it immediately as the intrusion of ethics into (the 'ontological totality' of) being without taking the effort to provide even the skerrick of an in-depth interpretation of the relevant passages in Plato, Heidegger is at some pains to provide an ontological interpretation of the i)de/a a)gaqou=,(8) which he interprets — via a translation into Aristotelean ou(= e(/neka — as the "Umwillen des Daseins" (e.g. GA26:237, cf. the entire section GA26:237-252 "Die Transzendenz des Daseins"). Even in Lévinas' last major work Autrement qu'être ou au-delà de l'essence,(9) whose title plays on the Platonic phrase, there is no serious attempt made to interpret in extenso the phrase e)pe/keina th=j ou)si/aj in a critical engagement with Plato's texts.  The e)pe/keina in e)pe/keina th=j ou)si/aj is interpreted by both Lévinas and Heidegger as the dimension of transcendence, but each thinker thinks the latter very differently. For Lévinas transcendence is the entry into the ethical-religious realm in which responsibility for the other shows its face. For Heidegger, by contrast, transcendence is the transcendence beyond beings to being. If matters come to a head between Heidegger and Lévinas on the issue of transcendence, then the latter has to be focused on. Since, as we have seen, Lévinas is intent on moving 'beyond Heidegger' to the dimension of the other, i.e. specifically, to the ethical dimension of responsibility for the other, Heidegger's reply to Lévinas now has to be turned to. Heidegger's reply to Lévinas? Since Heidegger never concerned himself with Lévinas' writings, this turn of phrase is somewhat paradoxical, but it does make sense once it is realized that Lévinas represents a very traditional position with which Heidegger engaged critically in some depth. The i))de/a a)gaqou=, namely, has usually been interpreted in an ethical way. Heidegger breaks with this tradition and rejects the ethical interpretation as Weltanschauung (cf. GA26:241) and compels thinking to focus on the question of being, i.e on freedom and transcendence in the context of the question concerning the very meaning of being.  Now, this is supposed to be an excursus on Lévinas, but is quickly becoming an interpretation of Heidegger. The reason is obvious: Lévinas claims to break with a tradition within which he locates Heidegger as the last "honourable" representative, whereas the present study aims to show that it is Heidegger who has radically unearthed the philosophical tradition, whereas Lévinas has fallen far behind the insights signalled in shifting human being to the site of "Dasein" and instead formulates a headstrong, theologically founded ethics of the other. The heading "Freedomsharing, strife and the possibility of intimacy and commitment" in Section 12. of the present study indicates that freedom and its sharing is the crucial, and painful, issue, and indeed, the sharing of freedom between the one and the other in togetherness. It is well known that Heidegger does not provide a philosophy of the other, which has left the field open for Lévinas to occupy it with figures such as "the face of the other". Heidegger's treatment of transcendence has to be amplified and augmented and also criticized in such a way that the vacuum that has apparently been left by his neglect of 'the other' is filled with thoughts that are adequate to the thinking of transcendence within the problematic of the question of being. This requires that we turn to the fold in being which I call first-and-second person, you-and-I or simply whoness.(10) If Lévinas' philosophy in very large part can be characterized as a movement of negation against the claim, 'Ontology is fundamental', in order to assert the unconditional, i.e. absolute, primacy of ethics (of the other) over ontology, an adequate reply to Lévinas must consist in showing that ontology is indeed fundamental, i.e. that the transcendence of being that is freedom is also the indispensable key to understanding the sharing of freedom with the other, thus shifting the 'ethics' of the other (which is a moral philosophy in the sense of modernity) back onto a fundamental ontological level.  Heidegger refers to two crucial litmus tests for the understanding of the issues of ontology (cf. GA26:241f). The first is to break with the deeply ingrained modes of thinking that proceed from conceiving a subject encapsulated in its consciousness and separated from the world. The second is to defuse the idea that Dasein, because it exists "for the sake of itself" (Umwillen seiner selbst) is egoistic. Lévinas is a victim especially of this second misunderstanding because, apart from refusing to shift from the metaphysics of subjectivity to a consideration of human being as Dasein, he adamantly insists on a fundamental casting of human being as egoistic, i.e. as an egoistic subject, into which he then introduces the imperative, absolute, moralistic ethics of the other. On the other hand, it still has to be shown that fundamental ontology à la Heidegger leaves room for. or can be twisted into, the problematic of the other's freedom. The freedom of the other, i.e. the (im)possibility of freedomsharing in the world, is the issue and not, as Lévinas claims, ethical responsibility for the other.  Heidegger and Lévinas agree that the issue is what lies beyond being, but whereas the latter interprets the beyond of being ethically and theologically with an intervention of the Infinite, the Absolute, the former endeavours to show that the transcendental dimension beyond beings in their being is freedom, if not freedomsharing. The freedom of the other is the missing link that separates Heidegger's thinking from Lévinas' thinking. The issue is the following: if there lies beyond being the Idea of the Good, and this is translated as the Umwillen des Daseins, i.e. the for-the-sake-of Dasein's self, how is this for-the-sake-of-self to be reconciled with the freedom of the other, who likewise exists for the sake of self? This is a far more subtle and perplexing question for thinking than Lévinas' demand — via the invocation and injunction of the Infinite that breaks with the (ontic-causal) Totality — that moral-ethical responsibility be assumed for the other and that a certain conception of justice prevail, for it requires that the question of being itself be folded and unfolded richly enough for the other as other to appear — albeit scarcely and non-substantially — in the folds in adequate concepts that do not misrecognize it as a being in the third person, which has been its fate hitherto within the long tradition of the metaphysics of whatness.    Notes  In E. Lévinas Spur des Anderen: Untersuchungen zur Phänomenologie und Sozialphilosophie Alber, Freiburg 31992, S.109/p.92. All pages references are to the German translations of Lévinas' works followed by the original French editions. The English renderings of the German translation are all my own. The motto to this Excursus is at ibid. S.115/p.96. Back    The original French publication of 'L'Ontologie est-elle fondamentale?' ' is in Revue de métaphysique et de morale LVI (1951) pp. 88-98. Reprinted in Phénoménologie - Existence Vrin, Paris 1953 pp.193-203. An English translation is in E. Lévinas Basic Philosophical Writings Indiana U.P., Bloomington 1996 pp.1-10. Back    M. Heidegger 'Der Ursprung des Kunstwerks' (1935/36) in: Holzwege Klostermann Frankfurt/M. 6th revised edition 1980 p. 9. Back   Cf. the main body of this essay for details, starting with Section 4. Reciprocity of meeting. Back    That it is a matter of an ethical impossibility is clearly stated in Infinity and Totality, e.g. in the following passage: "The exceptional presence of the other expresses itself in the fact that it is ethically impossible for me to kill him; he thus signifies the end of my abilities." (S.120/ p.59) Back    Cf. on Dasein's inviolable freedom Section 6. Addressability and proper-namedness: Dasein's inviolable freedom. Back    Pace Heidegger, selfhood is not ontologically prior to I-ness and you-ness, but rather, the constitution of self is itself always also a mirroring through the others. Cf. my 'Heidegger's Restricted Interpretation of the Greek Conception of the Political' from 2003-2004, the section on interchange and also my 'Dialectic of Self and Other: Wrestling with Plato, Hegel, Heidegger' and Social Ontology op. cit., especially Chapter 3 on whoness. Back    In later lectures, Heidegger interprets the idea of the good as "das Ermöglichende" ("the enabling power"; GA36/37:194). "Das Gute ist die Ermächtigung des Seins und der Unverborgenheit zu ihrem in sich zusammengehörigen Wesen." ("The good is the empowerment of being and unconcealment to their essencing in which they inherently belong together." Sein und Wahrheit WS 1933/34 GA36/37:200) Back    Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1978. Back    Cf. my Social Ontology op. cit., whose basis is a phenomenology of whoness. Back   Copyright (c) 1997-2010 by Michael Eldred, all rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of U.S. and international copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the author is notified and no fee is charged for access. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author. http://192.220.96.165/wrldshrg/lvnsoth2.html#6., diakses 28 Agustus 2010.  From Transcendental Freedom to the Other: Levinas and Kant © Texas Tech University Press, 2001 In Proximity: Emmanuel Levinas and the l8th Century, Eds. Melvyn New, Robert Bernasconi, and Richard A. Cohen, pp. 327-54. The principle of mutual love admonishes men constantly to come closer to one another; that of the respect they owe one another, to keep themselves at a distance. [1] Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals That to which we are alluding here seems to us suggested by the practical philosophy of Kant, to which we feel particularly close. Emmanuel Levinas, “Is Ontology Fundamental?” [2] In his only essay dedicated entirely to Kant, published in 1971 under the title “The Primacy of Pure Practical Reason,” Levinas applauded the “great novelty” [3] of Kant’s practical philosophy and its unique contribution to the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. Seven years later, Levinas compiled a list of exceptional moments in the history of philosophy when “under different terms [the] relation of transcendence shows itself.” [4] Alongside references to Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Hegel, Bergson, and Heidegger, the list included “the elevation of theoretical reason into practical reason in Kant.” [5] Six years after that, Levinas referred to the doctrine of primacy not merely as an exception to the tradition of philosophy as ontology, but as an exceptional exception, the critical inception of a “new intrigue” which “no longer amounts to bringing to light presence.” [6] Evidently, Levinas found in Kant’s practical philosophy something exceptionally close to his own ethical thinking, so much so that one is naturally led to wonder why so few of Levinas’s commentators have been disposed to remark on the fact. [7] How does Kant’s doctrine of primacy, according to Levinas, evince a break with Western philosophy characterized by ontology, freedom and the “primacy of the same” (TI 16/45)? How does it go beyond ontology when it sanctions, as we will see, the prerogative of morality to assume as “real” (i.e., existing) what critical speculation alone designates as merely possible? In what way does it overturn the traditional priority of freedom and the Same given Kant’s insistence that reason is autonomy and that “in the end there can only be one and the same reason, which must be differentiated solely in its application” [8] ? These and related issues will be addressed in the following three-part discussion. By showing how Kant’s doctrine challenges rather than reconfirms traditional ontology, I hope to provide a clearer understanding of Levinas’s claim that the practical philosophy of Kant stands closest to his own thinking in ethics. 1. The Primacy of Practical Reason In the Critique of Pure Reason, II. ii. 3, entitled “On the Primacy of Pure Practical Reason in its association with Speculative Reason,” Kant writes: in the combination of pure speculative with pure practical reason in one cognition, the latter has primacy, provided that this combination is not contingent and arbitrary, but a priori, based on reason itself and thus necessary. Without this subordination [Unterordnung], a conflict in reason with itself would arise, since if the speculative and the practical reason were merely arranged side by side (co-ordinated [koordiniert]), the first would [critically] close its borders and admit nothing from the latter, while the latter would extend its boundaries to everything and, when its needs required, would seek to comprehend the former within them. [9] The interest of pure practical reason, according to Kant, “lies in the determination of the will with respect to the final and perfect end” (CPrR 120/124). This interest is advanced by assuming that the Ideas of freedom, God, and the immortality of the soul have “objective reality” (3/3). Without freedom--the ratio essendi of the Moral Law--pure practical reason would be impossible; without the other so-called postulates, the concept of the highest good (summum bonum) would find itself in an antinomy, since virtue and happiness are only contingently related from the standpoint of nature, and virtue is seldom attainable in a single lifetime. The doctrine of primacy circumvents any possible “conflict” (Wiederstreit) of interests between theoretical and practical reason. It rules a priori that theoretical reason go beyond the critical agnosticism of the Critique of Pure Reason and make room for the “assertoric” judgment that the transcendental Ideas have objects. Such a description of the priority of practical reason over theoretical reason is meaningful only on the assumption that the interest in the summum bonum is independent of any speculative interest in architectonic completeness. Few commentators have ever granted this assumption. [10] Even Kant himself appears to have had his doubts. Near the end of the first Critique he wrote: “I maintain that just as the moral principles are necessary according to reason in its practical employment, it is in the view of reason, in the field of its theoretical employment, no less necessary to assume that everyone has ground to hope for happiness in the measure in which he has rendered himself by his conduct worthy of it.” [11] Clearly, the interest in the highest good is here assigned to theoretical reason. We are to assume the existence of God and of the soul’s immortality because of the natural or subjective interest that human reason has in representing to itself a complete system of ends united by the concept of the highest good. Like the transcendental Ideas in the first Critique (“soul,” “God,” and “world”), the Idea of the summum bonum is regulative. It directs the understanding toward answering the question “What is to result from this right conduct of ours?” [12] and, in so doing, brings theoretical closure to the practically conditioned. It may perhaps be thought that since the practical interest in the Ideas of God and immortality of the soul does not “conflict” with the interests of theoretical reason, and even harmonizes with those interests, the primacy that Kant attaches to practical reason over theoretical reason is altogether misplaced. “If practical reason may not assume and think as given anything further [weiter] than what speculative reason affords from its own insight, the latter has primacy” (CPrR 120/124-5) (emphasis added). [13] If this is true, and there really is no non-speculative relationship between reason and the transcendental Ideas, then Levinas’s enthusiasm for the Kantian doctrine would appear embarrassingly misinformed, and his sweeping assertion that “All Kant’s work presents itself as the primacy of pure practical reason” [14] grossly exaggerated. In “Transcendence and Evil” (1978), Levinas makes it clear that whatever the importance the resolution of the antinomy of practical reason in terms of Kant’s overall system, it constitutes a concession to speculative reason and undermines the radical implications of Kant’s moral theory: “after a moment of separation, the relationship with ontology is reestablished in the ‘postulates of pure [practical] reason.’” [15] According to Levinas, it is not belief in the existence of God and of the soul that effects the break with ontology, but the practical interest in the Idea of transcendental freedom: across these returns of ontology, Kant was bold enough to formulate a more radical distinction between thought and knowing. He discovers a plot in the practical usage of pure reason not reducible to being. A good will, as it were utopian, deaf to the information, indifferent to confirmations, that could come to it from being (which are important for technique and for the hypothetical imperative, but do not concern practice nor the categorical imperative), proceeds from a freedom which is situated above being and on this side of knowing and ignorance. [16] (my emphasis) Let us attempt to clarify the importance of the Idea of transcendental freedom for practical reason. The Idea was introduced in the first Critique as a way of avoiding any incompleteness in theoretical reason: “Reason showed freedom to be conceivable only in order that its supposed impossibility might not endanger reason’s very being and plunge it into an abyss of skepticism (CPrR 3/3). [17] Theoretical reason pushes inquiry to its furthest limits by seeking the unconditioned. Without the concept of a cause that is independent of the phenomenal mechanism of nature, that is, “freedom in its strictest, i.e. transcendental, sense” (29/28), this inquiry would never end. Reason would be caught in an infinite regress as it moved from the conditioned back to its condition and back to its condition in turn. Practical reason, however, goes an important step further. It demands that freedom not only be regarded as thinkable qua “the purely transcendental and to us unknown ground of the possibility of the sensible series [appearances] in general” (CPR 564/592), but also upheld without proof as true. That demand is quite different from the alleged “practical”—actually theoretical--need to assume that the Ideas of God and the soul have objective reality. Transcendental freedom is indeed a “postulate,” but not one that reason is compelled to assert in order to resolve the antinomy of practical reason. It is not an endpoint that reason must attain but rather an assumption that reason must make to be practical: “I maintain that to every rational being possessed of a will we must also lend the Idea of freedom as the only one under which he can act” (G 448/108-9). There is no mention here of the highest good and the other postulates. The presupposition that freedom exists is indispensable for practical purposes, and thus required by morality itself. Again, it might be objected that this presupposition is not practically necessary at all, but instead answers a merely theoretical need to the extent that looking upon ourselves as self-legislating members of an intelligible realm is “only a point of view which reason finds itself constrained to adopt outside appearances in order to conceive of itself as practical” (G 458/118). The objection has been made by Nathan Rotenstreich, who argues that we are bound to adopt such a viewpoint in every case where we use reason, not just practical reason: “Kant does not need to assume the primacy of action, or of practical knowledge over theoretical knowledge, in order to prove the possibility and the reality of freedom. Freedom is warranted by the very presupposition of the discussion, by the very activity of philosophizing” (my emphasis). [18] However, Rotenstreich appears to have misconstrued Kant’s transcendental deduction of freedom. He is, of course, right to argue that freedom is not the exclusive property of practical reason, and is presupposed by reason in general. Freedom and reason are reverse sides of the same coin. But this is not grounds for concluding that “reason is its own guarantee and need not take refuge in the dubious assumption of the Primacy of Practical Reason.” [19] As Kant repeatedly asserts in the second Critique, it is only the Moral Law qua “fact of reason” (Faktum der Vernunft) that is capable of establishing the legitimacy of the Idea of freedom. [20] Theoretical reason is altogether insufficient here. Freedom may be a condition that reasoners in the “discussion” presuppose as having been realized, but, as Habermas would argue, it is also a practical goal to attain. For the same reason that Rotenstreich is correct to assert that it “cannot be taken for granted that [immortality, happiness, reward, and God] are not related to a given historical situation and to a particular set of convictions, beliefs, expectations, dogmas, traditions, etc,” [21] it is implausible to assume that any theoretical reasoning is free of non-discursive and “irrational” interests. The opposite is true in the case of the use of pure practical reason, which by definition excludes what Kant calls the “private use of reason,” that is, reason in the service of self-interest or some other self-styled “authority” such as the church or state. Indeed, it is because “the moral law expresses nothing else than the autonomy of pure practical reason” (CPrR 33/33-4]), being none other than the “supreme principle” (G 409/73) of following principles that can be shared by all, that Levinas is justified in making the seemingly hyberbolic claim that (Kantian) “practice . . . is the basis of the logos.” [22] Pure practical reason is basic because, as Kant says in the Groundwork, “reason must look upon itself as the author of its own principles independently of alien influences” (G 448/109). The Moral Law thus supplies not only the rule for autonomy but also grounds for believing that it exists (though of course it might not). By making the Moral Law “the principle for the deduction of an inscrutable faculty: freedom” (CPrR 49/48-9), Kant has done two things necessary to assure the primacy of morals. First, he has established an independent interest on the part of morality in the Idea of freedom. Theoretical reason indeed demands that freedom be thinkable in its attempt to think the unconditioned in a causal series and attain completeness, but it is morality that provides the only rational interest in asserting that it has objective reality. Second, he has shown that the moral law is not only the supreme principle of the practical use of reason, but also of reason in its theoretical capacity, since “we cannot possibly conceive of a reason as being consciously directed from the outside in regard to its judgments” (G 448/109). To be sure, an appeal to morality is not a theoretical proof of freedom, which would constitute an extension of knowledge and breach the critical limits defined by the Copernican Revolution. It is, however, a vindication to the extent that freedom is an assumption we are required to make if we are to consider ourselves under moral obligation, and not merely compelled by whim. No other type of interest is capable of legitimizing such an assumption (“no one would dare introduce freedom into science [Wissenschaft] had not the moral law and with it practical reason come to the concept and forced it upon us” [CPrR 30/30]). These considerations help us understand why Levinas claims that Kantian good willing “proceeds from a freedom which is situated above being and on this side of knowing and ignorance.” As something that is a merely deduced rather than a datum, a postulate rather than a proof, it exceeds ontology and the comprehension of reality, as Kant understood when in the first Critique he wrote that “transcendental philosophy . . . takes no account of objects that may be given (Ontologia)” (CPR 845/874). [23] 2. Respect and Desire What is it that makes the will (Wille) good? Kant’s answer to this question is its rationality, its unconditional determination to act in accordance with the Moral Law, a principle of pure practical reason. For Levinas, on the other hand, it is not rationality that makes the will good but responsibility for the Other (“to be for the Other is to be good” [TI 239/261]). This entails the adoption of maxims of nonreciprocal and non-universalizable action (“Goodness consists in taking up a position in being such that the Other counts more than myself” [225/247]), presupposing the spontaneous capacity to act independently of pure practically legislative reason. The importance that Levinas attaches to what Kant in the Groundwork called “lawless” (G 446/107) freedom is not always appreciated by readers whose understanding of Levinas has been largely informed by the chapter in Totality and Infinity entitled “Freedom called into Question.” In “The Rights of Man and the Rights of the Other” (1985), Levinas clearly suggests that spontaneity of the will has a moral connection that goes far beyond the merely “negative” (G 446/107) use that Kant made of it: Is it so certain that the entire will is practical reason in the Kantian sense? Does the will not contain an incoercible part that the formalism of universality could not oblige? And we might even wonder whether, Kant notwithstanding, that incoercible spontaneity, which bears witness both to the multiplicity of humans and the uniqueness of persons, is already pathology and sensibility and a “bad will.” . . . The universality of the maxim of action according to which the will is assimilated to practical reason may not correspond to the totality of good will. [24] (my emphasis) Levinas is not saying that a Kantian good will is not good. What he is calling into question is the Kantian claim that a complete account of moral willing can be given in terms of universal law. Implicit in the reference to “incoercible spontaneity,” attesting to the difference between persons, according to Levinas, is the suggestion that moral goodness resides in the capacity of the will to disregard reason no less than in its capacity to follow reason. That the will could be motivated to act independently of reason altogether would be unintelligible to Kant. In the Groundwork we are told that the will must be determined by some principle, either an a posteriori rule (a hypothetical imperative) serving to promote an end set by natural inclination, or by an a priori law of reason (the Categorical Imperative) which determines the will immediately (G 400/65). A will (Willkür, choice) that could be determined prior to the representation of any rational principle whatsoever would be for Kant a will in name only, a mere arbitrium brutum, not just pathologically affected but “pathologically necessitated” (CPR 534/562). It would not be “bad” but inhuman. [25] It might seem that Levinas has no alternative but to fall back on some form of Kantian rationality if the good will is not to dissolve into the rest of nature. But this is precisely what Levinas refuses to do. In the chapter in Totality and Infinity entitled “Will and Reason,” he writes: “To distinguish formally will and understanding, will and reason, nowise serves to maintain plurality in being or the unicity of the person if one forthwith decides to consider only the will that adheres to clear ideas or decides only through respect for the universal to be a good will . . “ (TI 192/217). A page later, however, Levinas makes it clear that the analytic distinction does not imply a loss of practical freedom: if the face . . . [is] the very upsurge of the rational, then the will is distinguished fundamentally from the intelligible, which it must not comprehend and into which it must not disappear, for the intelligibility of this intelligible resides precisely in ethical behavior, that is, in the responsibility to which it invites the will. The will is free to assume this responsibility in whatever sense it likes; it is not free to refuse this responsibility itself (TI 194/218-9). Levinas describes the face as “intelligible,” but intelligible in such a way that the will “must not comprehend [it] and into which it must not disappear.” The prohibition against understanding is aimed in particular at Kantian idealism and the famous transcendental unity of apperception. Recall the “Transcendental Deduction” in the second edition of the first Critique: “Only insofar . . . as I can unite a manifold of given representations in one consciousness, is it possible for me to represent to myself the identity of the consciousness in these representations” (CPR 133). Irreducible to the synthetic application of concepts, the face has meaning solely in the context of “an ethical behavior, that is, in the responsibility to which it invites the will.” Notice that Levinas speaks of responsibility here as a type of act. It is something that the will can be “invited” to perform. There is no contradiction between this and the claim that the will is “not free to refuse this responsibility.” Levinas is simply making a distinction between being under obligation and fulfilling it. The will is under obligation to the Other without having made any binding contract or promise. Nevertheless, it is “free to assume this responsibility in whatever sense it likes.” Earlier in Totality and Infinity Levinas wrote: “I can recognize the gaze of the stranger, the widow, and the orphan only in giving or refusing; I am free to give or to refuse” (49/77). Again, this should not be taken to suggest that obligation is optional, which would be a contradiction, but only that the will has the negative freedom not to fulfil the obligation that it owes the Other. Indeed, putting it that way is perhaps not so very different from Kant’s claim that transgression of the Moral Law is “freely assumed” (CPrR 100/103), even though the Law itself obligates “unconditionally.” The preceding observations indicate that Levinas reserves an important place for Kantian spontaneity in his moral theory without making responsibility optional. If, however, responsibility for the Other is not determined by pure practical reason in its autonomous or self-legislating capacity as Wille, how is it different from what Kant calls mere heteronomy, which occurs when the will (Willkür) is motivated to act by natural inclination or some underlying sensuous impulse that is “pathological”? To the extent that the encounter with the Other is immediate (“the immediate is the face to face” [TI 23/52]), by which Levinas means that it is independent of reason (principles) and the understanding (concepts), what stops it from being pathologically determined? The question was raised by Jacques Derrida in his influential essay “Violence and Metaphysics,” published in 1964. Finding resources in Levinas’s work that would justify calling the ethical relation “an immediate respect for the Other himself,” though apparently not “following any literal indication by Levinas,” [26] Derrida made the following note: “An affirmation at once profoundly faithful to Kant (“Respect is applied only to persons”--Practical Reason) and implicitly anti-Kantian, for without the formal element of universality, without the pure order of law, respect for the other, respect and the other no longer escape pathological immediacy. Nevertheless, how do they escape according to Levinas?” [27]   Again, Derrida would have given us an instance of Levinas’s dependence on the logos in his very attempt to go beyond it. The assumption, of course, is that all non-rational motives would be pathological in Kant’s sense, in which case Levinas’s ethics must have recourse to the very reason that it is meant to supersede if the distinction between it and need is to be maintained. [28] Is this assumption valid? To be sure, Levinas would deny that the ethical relation is pathologically immediate if by that is meant that the will does not just undergo pathological processes but is caused to act by them. But he does not deny that it is sensibly affected: “The role Kant attributed to sensible experience in the domain of the understanding belongs in metaphysics to interhuman relations” (TI 51/79). However, Levinas makes it clear that the affective character of the ethical relation does not preclude what he calls “disinterestedness” (5/35). Levinas’s use of this term is quite different from the use Kant made of it in the third Critique, where it referred to the entirely disinterested satisfaction involved in contemplating objects of beauty. [29] In Totality and Infinity Levinas informs us that “in Desire the being of the I . . . can sacrifice to its Desire its very happiness” (31/63). Kant, of course, would simply argue that “in such a case an action of this kind, however right and amiable it may be, has still no genuinely moral worth. It stands on the same footing [gleichen Paaren gehe] as other inclinations” (G 398/64). But Levinas calls into question this reduction of moral sentiment to mere inclination. In doing so, he doesn’t simply illustrate the limitations of Kant’s famous distinction between “pathological” and “practical love” by providing an exceptional case of a “metaphysical” desire that can be commanded and thus is irreducible to self-love; he gives us reason to believe that Kant himself ultimately fails to maintain the distinction when developing his own views on the moral feeling of “respect” (Achtung). In an essay ambiguously situated between his confessional and philosophical works, entitled “Have You Reread Baruch?” (1966), Levinas offered an unusually sympathetic reading of Baruch Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. “Spinoza’s genius,” Levinas wrote, was to have perceived the irreducibly “ethical significance of the Scriptures.” [30] Levinas acknowledged the pre-critical implications of “Spinozist” moral faith, though he went on draw an analogy between it and Kant’s practical philosophy: “As in Kant, this God of faith reflects the demands of practical reason”; “faith is the support of the Scriptures . . . independent of all philosophy while agreeing with the practical consequences of philosophical reason” (“Baruch,” 164-65/115). The analogy, however, is less than perfect, not because Kant himself regarded Spinoza as an atheist and thereby “restricted in his [moral] endeavor,” [31] but because, as we have seen, for Kant “moral belief” is altogether dependent on philosophical reason in both its theoretical and its practical employment. Furthermore, Kant maintains that without the support of pure practical reason faith would remain dogmatic (“historical”) and the Scriptures would lack imperative force: The possibility of such a command as, “Love God above all and thy neighbor as thyself” agrees very well with this. For as a command it requires respect for a law which orders love and does not leave it to the arbitrary choice to make love a principle. But to love God as inclination (pathological love) is impossible, for He is not an object of the senses. The latter is indeed possible toward men, but it cannot be commanded, for it is not possible for man to love someone merely on command. It is therefore, only practical love which can be understood in that kernel of all laws (CPR 83/86; my emphasis). It certainly seems, at least initially, that Levinas and Kant are very close here. Both argue that there may be no relation to God separated from the relationship with human beings (cf. TI 51/78), and both make a distinction between ethos and eros in terms of the traditional distinction between logos and pathos. In Totality and Infinity Levinas explicitly says “discourse is not a pathetic confrontation of two beings absenting themselves from things and others. Discourse is not love” (49/76). However, in “Have You Reread Baruch?” he appears to undermine the distinction altogether: “the incentives [mobiles] of obedience are not of a rational order. They are incentives of an affective order, such as fear, hope, fidelity, respect, veneration and love. Obedience and heteronomy, but not servitude . . . Obedience comes not from constraint but from an internal and disinterested élan. Commandment and love do not contradict one another, contrary to Kant” [32] (“Baruch,” 163-64/114-15). Levinas does not explain how it is possible to command love and so it is unclear to what extent he considered the assertion to carry weight in a non-confessional or philosophical context. It might be thought that Levinas is not obliged to provide an argument since that would weaken the distinction he is trying to make between moral faith and reason. However, this does not sit comfortably with the idea that moral faith “can be presented as agreeing with philosophy” (“Baruch,” 167/117). Indeed, the irony in this case is that what may look like a fundamental disagreement between Levinas and Kant as to whether love can be commanded--and Levinas certainly presents it as such--turns out to be illusory when we consider what Kant himself has to say about moral incentive of “respect.” “Respect always applies to persons only, never to things” (CPrR 76/79). Kant’s assertion from the second Critique is frequently quoted, though it is not always understood by humanists who read it in straightforwardly anthropological terms. Strictly speaking, “respect for a person [is] really for the law, which his example holds before us” (CPrR 78/81). It applies only to Persönlichkeit understood as the predisposition to exemplify pure practical reason (87/90), something that all humans share, but which is not unique to them. [33] Nevertheless, not every “personality” has a predisposition to feel respect, which can be said truly to apply to persons only. [34] In the absence of this moral feeling persons would be incapable of exemplifying the law, which requires an “incentive” (Triebfeder, literally, “spring” or “impulse”) (76/79) on the part of a subject whose will is not naturally in accord with the requirements of duty. Even so, we might be inclined to ask, what it is that allows Kant to be so certain that “Respect is the sole and undoubted moral incentive” (78/81)? Why is respect indubitable and why are not “other” incentives possible? Three pages later in the second Critique Kant asserts “reason through the practical law commands respect pure and simple” (81/84; my translation and emphasis). How is it possible to reconcile this with the claim quoted earlier that “it is not possible for man to love someone merely on command”? Respect in Kant may not be the same as pathological love, but it is a feeling that “is of such a peculiar kind that it seems to be at the command only of reason” (76/79). Can Kant continue to deny that pathological love--or any other non-rational feeling--can be “commanded” when he does not deny that practical love can? Not that Kant claimed to have anything like insight into respect after the Copernican revolution. In the Groundwork he made it quite clear that it is “wholly impossible to comprehend . . . how a mere thought containing nothing sensible in itself [Moral Law] can bring about a sensation of pleasure and displeasure” (G 460/120). It is impossible to comprehend because to do so would be equivalent to explaining what Kant calls “moral interest,” by which is meant “that in virtue of which reason becomes practical--that is becomes a cause determining the will” (G 460n/120n), tantamount to explaining per impossibile freedom. Here we run up against “the extreme limit of all moral enquiry” (G 122/462). For Levinas, by contrast, the limit of moral inquiry is signaled not by the impossibility of explaining how pure reason can be practical in its autonomous capacity as Wille, but by the impossibility of explaining how “obedience and heteronomy, but not servitude” is possible. By “heteronomy” Levinas does not mean determination of the Willkür by practical principles in the service of inclination. Nor by “obedience” does he mean slavish subjection to the will of another implying the loss of practical (i.e., transcendental) freedom. In Totality and Infinity he writes that “obedience precisely is to be distinguished from an involuntary participation in mysterious designs in which one figures or prefigures” (52/79). But it still does not amount to Kantian autonomy since its motive is not a rational law given by the will to itself but rather un élan désintéressé inspired by the Other. As indicated, Kant would strenuously deny that the will is capable of being obligated by anything other than reason. Any other conative (and not merely cognitive) element in willing would, according to Kant, be governed by “pathological” motives reducible to self-interest and thus not necessarily valid for all rational beings as such. Levinas too would deny that the motive behind moral action is “pathological,” if by that is meant that it is directed by an object of natural inclination and need. But the Other who is the conative element in willing is said to go “beyond” inclination: “Desire is desire for the absolutely other. Besides the hunger one satisfies, the thirst one quenches, and the senses one allays, metaphysics desires the other beyond satisfactions” (TI 4/34). [35] We should not suppose from such statements that Levinas is indifferent to the compromises and contradictions that Kant saw arise once irrational feeling and desires were permitted to filter into ethics. Indeed, in the early fifties, so preoccupied was Levinas with avoiding any such compromise that he even questioned whether the Moral Law itself was sufficiently equipped to rule out such intrusion. This was the case in an essay appearing in 1953, entitled “Freedom and Command,” in which he attempted to show how the human will can achieve autonomy without being reducible to reason pure and simple. To this end, Levinas reversed the Kantian primacy of autonomy over heteronomy by showing how reason itself presupposes the relation with the Other. 3. Transcendental Argumentation and the Other “Freedom and Command” opens with a dilemma. How can a will be commanded to act and remain free? Alternatively, how can a command apply to anything other than a free will? From Plato to Kant the dilemma has been resolved by arguing that the command must in advance be in accord with the will of the person commanded. A will can accept the order of another only because it recognizes the rationality of the order. [36] If the will does not see this rationality then it can refuse to obey--to the point of death. The execution of Socrates is a case in point: “Up to the last moment his thinking remains a refusal” (“Freedom,” 265/16). First his feet become insensate by the hemlock, then his legs, and thereafter “as far as his waist,” [37] but no farther; at no point during his execution does he lose his head. But Socrates is a remarkable “character” in the dual sense of the term. “We know,” writes Levinas, that “the possibilities of tyranny are much more extensive. It has unlimited resources at its disposal, those of love and wealth, torture and hunger, silence and rhetoric. It can exterminate in the tyrannized soul even the very capacity to be struck, that is, even the ability to obey on command” (265/16). Levinas is not diminishing the importance of what Plato and the Greeks called “self-control” (auton heauton archein, sophrosyne, enkrateia). [38] His claim is rather that such “inner freedom”--as Kant would call it (MM 408/207-8)--requires further guarantees if it is to escape subjective degradation and be spared the ordeals of tyranny: “We must impose commands on ourselves in order to be free. But it must be an exterior command, not simply a rational law, a categorical imperative defenseless against tyranny; it must be an exterior law, a written law, armed with a force against tyranny. Such commands are the political condition for freedom” (266/17). Nevertheless, there is no guarantee that human freedom will not experience these statutory laws as another tyranny in turn. “The last will and testament drawn up by a lucid mind can no longer be binding on the testator who has survived” (266/17). Whatever is the cause of the will’s repudiation of impersonal reason and the law, the implication is that, pace Kant, impersonal reason is incapable of generating its own incentive. Levinas explicitly says “the individual act of freedom which decided for impersonal reason does not itself result from impersonal reason” (267/18). [39] However, we need to ask how it is possible from freedom to result from anything other than impersonal reason. Is not autonomy precisely rational self-constraint? Levinas concedes that “no one wants to force another to accept the impersonal reason of the written text, unless out of tyranny. Were it done by persuasion that would already presuppose the prior acceptance of impersonal reason” (267/18). It is at this point in “Freedom and Command” that Levinas recalls Polemarchus’s famous question at the beginning of The Republic: “Could you persuade men who do not listen?” [40] Glaucon abruptly answered that it was not possible, though the reentry of Thrasymachus into the discussion with Socrates, despite his having made up his mind “merely to nod yes and no, as one does to old wives’ tales” [41] is interpreted by Levinas as Plato’s way of saying that it is possible: Yet there is a sort of necessity for persuasion in favor of a coherent discourse. It is perhaps this persuasion, this reason prior to reason, that makes coherent discourse and impersonal reason human. Before placing themselves in an impersonal reason, is it not necessary that different freedoms be able freely to understand one another, without this understanding being already present in the midst of that reason? Is there not a speech by which a will for what we call coherent speech is transmitted from freedom to freedom, from individual to individual? Does not impersonal discourse presuppose discourse in the sense of this face-to-face situation? In other words, is there not already between one will and another a relationship of command without tyranny, which is not yet obedience to an impersonal law, but is the indispensable condition for the institution of such a law? Or again, does not the institution of a rational law as a condition for freedom already presuppose a possibility of direct understanding between individuals for the institution of that law? (267/18; my emphasis) On what does Levinas base his conclusion that rational constraint presupposes moral constraint? Certainly the language of “necessity,” “condition,” and “possibility” harbors the appearance of what since Kant has come to be known as a transcendental argument. As I read it, Levinas is pushing back one stage further the deduction of the conditions of the possibility of rational self-obligation (autonomy) by revealing the condition of what according to Kant is an incomprehensible and unconditioned interest imbedded in reason itself. Nevertheless, Levinas’s deduction can never be strictly “transcendental,” which requires a direct assault on the subjective conditions of possible experience. [42] As already noted, Levinas maintains that the Other is capable of obligating “ethical behavior” prior to the representation of the law, which means there may be no straightforward regression upon the unity of the will as the practical counterpart to the “I think” in theoretical reason. Here it is not a question of bringing the manifold of desires to the synthetic unity via the category of causality, namely freedom, in order to issue in a possible moral judgment. On the contrary, as Levinas will make clear in Totality and Infinity, the movement that leads to the Other, “a deduction--necessary and yet non-analytical,” entails “the break-up of the formal structure of thought . . . into events which this structure dissimulates, but which sustain it” (TI xvii/28). This confounding of thought and ontological conditions is already operative in “Freedom and Command,” though it is not explicitly marked by Levinas. Levinas’s “transcendental argument” may be formally presented as follows (“Freedom,” 267/18): A1) Political freedom is possible. A2) Political freedom presupposes the acceptance of impersonal reason. A3) If the acceptance of impersonal reason were coerced, then it would undermine the will and political freedom would be illusory. A4) If the acceptance of impersonal reason were rationally motivated, then this would presuppose the prior acceptance of impersonal reason. It follows from A2, A3 and A4 that A5) Political freedom presupposes the acceptance of impersonal reason in a way that is non-coerced and non-rationally motivated. A6) Only the Other is capable of providing a non-coercive and non-rational incentive for accepting impersonal reason through his or her capacity “to persuade people who do not listen.” It follows from A1, A5 and A6 that A7) The condition for the possibility of political freedom is the Other. The argument has a simplicity about it that is liable to lead the unsuspecting reader into a false sense of ontological security. The problem with arguing in this kind of sequacious fashion is that it dissimulates an irreducible circularity in the account. Where is the circle? Levinas claims that Other provides the only non-rational and non-coercive incentive for adopting impersonal reason. The Other does so precisely insofar as he or she is able to obligate the will directly through speech. Hence Levinas writes “commanding is speech, or . . . true speech, speech in its essence, is commanding” (23/272). However, the relation with the Other would then appear to presuppose what it is said first to make possible. If we assume that language is never merely private, that the commanding essential to speech is constrained to traffic in universal signs (signifieds/signifiers), discursive rules, regimens of statements, etc., then any priority Levinas can be seen to assign to the face to face as the “indispensable condition” for impersonal reason is vitiated by the intelligibility of the logos itself. Certainly, the priority cannot be straightforwardly chronological or logical. As a relationship that is not merely one of “irrational contact” (271/22), the face to face cannot dispense with reason. This is not equivalent to saying that discourse is reducible to the intelligibility of the logos, even if the irreducibly ethical dimension that Levinas finds within language face to face cannot be separated from ontological categories in the concrete. Indeed, it is in order to distinguish for analytical purposes the ethical and the ontological aspects of language that Levinas will later, most notably in Otherwise Than Being, deploy the terms saying and said respectively (OB 74/58). However, it is due to a critical awareness of their irrevocable conjunction that Levinas will also assert elsewhere that “There is, it is true, no Saying that is not the Saying of a Said.” [43] Without the sophisticated vocabulary characterizing the later work, combined with the absence of a thematic presenting the limitations of transcendental philosophy in regard to the Other, “Freedom and Command” lacks the necessary apparatus for explicitly marking the self-undermining of the argument as a function of the “otherwise than being” as distinct from what might be called a “mere” contradiction. Hence, when Levinas claims that “there is a sort of necessity for persuasion in favor of a coherent discourse” (“il y a comme une nécessité de persuasion en faveur d’un discours coherent”)--which he goes on simply to call “persuasion” (“Freedom,” 267/18)--he appears to undermine his statement a couple of lines earlier where he denied that the acceptance of impersonal reason were one of “persuasion” on the grounds that it would be question begging: “Were it done by persuasion, that would already presuppose the prior acceptance of impersonal reason.” It is in apparently self-undermining fashion that he refers to the Other’s command as “reason prior to reason” and “a discourse before discourse” (267/18). What is a speech prior to logos? The point, however, is not that Levinas offers a circular argument. The antilogy of the account signals the transcendence of the Other, not the failure of reason. In “Freedom and Command” it derives from the fact that “any one who reaches [the face] has already denied that every past must have been present” (271/22). What Levinas means by this seemingly contradictory expression is that the Other commands without having ever been present to consciousness at the time of the commanding, notwithstanding that it is always possible for consciousness “after the event” to regress upon a condition for that commanding-conditioning itself, in this instance the intelligibility of discourse. Here we have, I suggest, a precursor of the peculiar structure of the “anterior posteriori” discussed in Totality and Infinity in connection with the analysis of separated dwelling (where representational consciousness is said to rest on what it constitutes), and Descartes’s third “Meditation” (in which the apparent isolated certainty of the cogito is found to rest on the “earlier” idea of Infinity). It is the same structure that is explored at length in Otherwise Than Being under the name of “trace.” In “Freedom and Command” the face has what we might call--to choose Habermas’s felicitous expression [44] --a “quasi-transcendental” function. A retreat upon the conditions that make autonomy possible regresses upon a condition that is also conditioned by what it conditions. Alternatively, we could say that the face is quasi-empirical to the extent that it is not entirely separate from the field of experience it makes possible. To be sure, from the point of view of the fundamental tenets of transcendental philosophy such formulations are absurd. It is just as absurd for Levinas in “Freedom and Command” to speak of “the experience of a face” (271/22) at the same time as referring to it as a “thing in itself” (270/20), “noumenon” (270/21), “intelligible” (271/22). The least that can be said is that these descriptions are not ultimate for Levinas. They belong to an “ontological” register that has not yet been modified to the point where a different “ethical” key can be heard, no less strange from the point of view of the Apollonian logos, though more faithful to what Levinas is trying to say. Strictly speaking, there may be no “experience” of the Other, for the Other is not given as an object of cognition and is not treated as such. It is only the idea of the Other’s infinity that is given, the sense I have of the Other as infinitely transcending my cognitive powers, and that, according to Levinas in Totality and Infinity, “cannot, to be sure, be stated in terms of objective experience, for infinity overflows the thought that thinks it” (TI xii/25). Alternatively, it is not a matter of starting with the truth of experience, the conditioned, which is then traced back in linear sequence to reveal an a priori condition necessary for that truth to be possible: “the revelation of infinity does not lead to the acceptance of any dogmatic content and one would be wrong to argue for its philosophical rationality in the name of the transcendental truth of the idea of infinity” (xiii/25). The important, though--as I have shown--implicit lesson of “Freedom and Command” is that transcendental argumentation ultimately breaks down in connection with the Other in that it is incapable of regressing upon a condition that can be thought in terms of the intentional structure of consciousness governed by the unity of the “I think,” the basis of all experience, according to Kant. Conclusion In the final paragraph of “Substitution,” the “centerpiece” (OB ix/xli) of Otherwise Than Being, Levinas makes a statement that better than any other summarizes the proximity between him and Kant. The statement concerns ethical proximity itself: If one had the right to retain one trait from a philosophical system and neglect all the details of its architecture (even though there are no details in architecture, according to Valéry’s profound dictum, which is eminently valid for philosophical construction, where the details alone prevent collapse) we would think here of Kantism, which finds a meaning to the human without measuring it by ontology and outside the question “What is there here . . .?” that one would like to take to be preliminary, outside of the immortality and death which ontologies run up against. The fact that immortality and theology could not determine the categorical imperative signifies the novelty of the Copernican revolution: a sense that is not measured by being or not being; but on the contrary being is determined on the basis of sense (166/129; my emphasis). [45] Ignoring the Byzantine detail of the summum bonum and the practical postulates necessary for architectonic completeness, Levinas finds in Kant’s practical philosophy “un sens” (meaning, sense, direction) that is irreducible to ontology. By subordinating the interests of theoretical reason to those of practical reason, which amounts to asserting that the Categorical Imperative has practical efficacy without any theoretical explanation as to how it is possible, Kant’s doctrine of primacy signifies for Levinas a reversal of philosophy’s traditional vocation to ground thought and action in knowledge and truth. The ontological problematic “that one would like to take to be preliminary” is in this instance subordinated to ethics as an independent and preliminary praxis. We have seen how obligation in Kant is not determined by the comprehension of being, for the transcendental ground of the Moral Law--freedom--is not given to cognition. Nor is it determined by one’s “concern for being” (Heidegger) to the extent that “not even the threat of death” (MM 483/271) qualifies exemption from duty, which is unconditional. Rather, “being is determined on the basis of sense,” which is Levinas’s shorthand way of saying what Kant said in the second Critique about dutiful precepts “not needing to wait upon intuitions in order to acquire a meaning . . . for the noteworthy reason that they themselves produce the reality of that to which they refer” (CPrR 66/68). [46] Morality, according to Kant, prescribes what ought to be the case, not what is the case. It thus is capable of providing an orientation in thinking and acting independently of ontology, and this despite the fact that after the Copernican Revolution there is no longer any “up or down,” indeed no absolute knowledge at all. If Valéry’s “profound dictum” from Eupalinos ou l’architecte (1921) [47] is “eminently valid for philosophical construction,” then so is Kant’s statement in the “Doctrine of Method” of the first Critique: “it turned out that although we had in mind a tower that would reach the heavens, yet the stock of materials was only enough for a dwelling house--just roomy enough for our tasks and just high enough to look across the plain” (CPR 707/735). Doubtless Kant can still be accused of exaggerating the commodiousness of his critical architecture. Yet his claim for its height still stands. As a philosopher “looking across the plain” he stands shoulder to shoulder with Levinas--proximity itself. [48] Peter Atterton San Diego State University NOTES [1] Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Mary Gregor (Cambridge, 1993). Henceforth MM, pagination of Prussian Academy/translation; MM 449/244. [2] “L’ontologie est-elle fondamentale?” Revue de métaphysique et de morale 56 (1951): 98; trans. Peter Atterton as “Is Ontology Fundamental?” Philosophy Today 33 (1989): 127. [3] Levinas, “The Primacy of Pure Practical Reason,” trans. Blake Billings, Man and World 27 (1994): 451. This article originally appeared in Dutch as “Het primaat van de zuivere praktische rede,” trans. C. P. Heering-Moorman, Wijsgerig Perspectief op Maatschappij en Wetenschap 11 (1970-1971). It has yet to be published in the original French. [4] Levinas, “La Pensée de l’être et la question de l’autre,” De Dieu qui vient à l’idée (Paris, 1986): 185. [5] “La Pensée,” 185. [6] Levinas, Transcendance et intelligibilité (Geneva, 1984): 19-20; trans. Tamra Wright and Simon Critchley as “Transcendence and Intelligibility,” Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writings, ed. Adriann T. Peperzak, Simon Critchley, and Robert Bernasconi (Bloomington, 1996): 154. [7] An important exception is Etienne Feron, “Intérêt er désintéressement de la raison Levinas and Kant,” Levinas en contrastes, ed. Michel Dupuis (Brussels, 1994). [8] Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals (The Moral Law), trans. H. J. Paton (London, 1983). Henceforth G, pagination of Prussian Academy/translation; G 391/57. [9] Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Lewis White Beck (Indianapolis, 1956). Henceforth CPrR, pagination of Prussian Academy/translation; CPrR 119/124. [10] See Lewis White Beck, A Commentary on Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason (Chicago, 1960), who writes: The truth of the matter is that the concept of the highest good is not a practical concept at all, but a dialectical ideal of reason. . . . It is important for the architectonic purpose of reason in uniting under one idea the two legislations of reason, the theoretical and the practical, in a practical dogmatic metaphysics wholly distinct from the metaphysics of morals. Reason cannot tolerate a chaos of ends . . . But we must not allow ourselves to be deceived, as I believe Kant was, into thinking [that the] possibility [of the highest good] is necessary to morality or that we have a duty to promote it (245). Beck is surely correct. Not only would a prima facie duty to promote the highest good jeopardize Kant’s fundamental claim about the lawful form of a maxim being the sole determinant of moral action, it introduces into the field of morals impossible demands insofar as I, as a Kantian willer, can do nothing toward apportioning happiness in accordance with virtue aside from seeking to be worthy of happiness by becoming virtuous (the first component of the summum bonum). [11] Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London, 1929). Henceforth CPR, Prussian Academy pagination to first and second editions separated by a slash; CPR 809/837. [12] Kant, Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, trans. Theodore M. Greene and Hoyt H. Hudson (New York, 1960): 4. [13] See also Kant’s remark in The Critique of Judgement, trans. James Creed Meredith (Oxford: Clarendon Press: 1957): if we do not bring the causality of any other means beside nature into alliance with our freedom, the conception of the practical necessity of such an end [the highest good] through the application of our powers does not accord with the theoretical conception of its effectuation (sec. 87). [14] “The Primacy of Pure Practical Reason,” 446. Levinas is not alone in considering the doctrine of primacy fundamental to Kant’s philosophy. A. D. Lindsay in his Kant (London: Ernest Benn, 1934) likewise contended: “The primacy of practical reason is Kant’s most essential doctrine. He will have nothing to do with reality except in terms of our action upon it” (303). For a quite different reading of Kant, see Habermas’ Knowledge and Human Interests, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro (Oxford, 1987): “Kant secretly conceived of practical reason on the model of theoretical reason” (208). [15] Levinas, “Transcendance et mal,” De Dieu qui vient à l’idée: 190; trans. Alphonso Lingis as “Transcendence and Evil,” Collected Philosophical Papers (Dordrecht, 1987): 176. Levinas continues: In their own way the ideas rejoin being in the existence of God, who guarantees . . . in the letter of criticism, the concord of virtue with happiness . . . and the efficacy of a practice decided upon without knowledge. The absolute existence of the Ideal of pure reason, the existence of the Supreme Being, finally prevails in an architecture where the keystone was to be the concept of freedom alone (176). Levinas’ criticism of the “postulates” here should be read in conjunction with the two lectures he gave on Kant at the Sorbonne two years earlier (see Dieu, la mort et le temps [Paris, 1993]). In the first lecture (74-78), Levinas offers a far more positive reading of the summum bonum: “To admit the existence of God and the immortality of the soul is required by Reason, but the highest Good can only be hoped” (77). For Levinas such hope delineates a temporal structure that is very different from the anticipation of being (or non-being) à la Heideggerian being-for-death. In Kant, hope is not governed by “anticipation” (Vorlaufen) or any prescience. Nor, as is sometimes thought, does it spring from the desire for immortality qua perpetual bliss (independent of one’s worthiness to be happy). Hence Levinas’ final remark: “it is not by chance that this way of thinking a meaning beyond being is the corollary of an ethics” (78). In the second lecture (175-178), Levinas deals with the first Critique and is a little less conciliatory toward Kant. Having gestured toward a break with ontology accomplished by Kant’s “Transcendental Dialectic” and the separation of ideas and concepts, reason and understanding, Levinas ends with a discussion of the “return to onto-theo-logy in Kantian thought” (177) by its determination of God as a transcendental Ideal (qua omnitudo realitatis). What is interesting about both lectures is the way in which they manage to offer a double-reading of Kant by separating practical reason from theoretical reason. The question as to which has primacy in Kant’s system overall is not addressed. [16] De Dieu qui vient à l’idée, 190; Collected Philosophical Papers, 176. What are we to make of Levinas’ description of the good will as “utopian, deaf to the information . . . that could come to it from being”? What does he mean when he says that it “proceeds from a freedom which is situated above being” etc? As is well known, Kant considered the good will to be determined by a purely rational law called the Categorical Imperative. The Categorical Imperative does not prescribe what actually exists in the world, but what ought ideally to exist through the adoption of principles that can be shared by all rational agents. It thus produces in us the “splendid ideal [herrliche Ideal] of a universal kingdom of ends” (G 462/122) whose members subject themselves to laws of their own making. Such agents are in a sense “deaf” because the laws (of duty) they follow do not need ”to wait upon intuitions in order to acquire a meaning . . . they themselves produce the reality of that to which they refer” (CPrR 66/68). Kant calls this “property which the will has of being a law to itself” (G 447/107) autonomy. But autonomy is only the legislative side of the will (Wille). It presupposes (“proceeds from”) “negative” (G 447/107) freedom in the sense of the capacity of the will (Willkür) to act independently of the mechanism of nature. This lawless “spontaneity” (G 447/107), which is the condition of the possibility of the good will, is “freedom in the strictest, i.e., transcendental sense” (CPrR 29/28). It is interesting to juxtapose Levinas’ reading of Kant here with that of Nietzsche. In The Gay Science, Nietzsche writes in typically irreverent fashion: “old Kant . . . was led astray--back to ‘God,’ ‘soul,’ ‘freedom,’ and ‘immortality,’ like a fox who loses his way and goes astray back into the cage. Yet it had been his strength and cleverness that had broken open the cage!” (trans. W. Kaufmann, New York, 1974, sec. 335): 264. While both Levinas and Nietzsche view the postulates as a step back into traditional ontology, their understanding of the way in which Kant can be said to have “broken open the cage” differs enormously. For Levinas this takes place in the “practical usage of pure reason,” and thus directly in association with the Categorical Imperative and the concept of a good will grounded in transcendental freedom. For Nietzsche, the Categorical Imperative is precisely what led Kant astray, and the postulate of freedom is not considered essentially different in kind from the metaphysical postulates of God and immortality of the soul. Had Kant held firmly to the critical agnosticism of the first Critique he might have remained outside the cage. [17] Kant writes in the second Critique: the concept or freedom was problematic but not impossible; that is to say, speculative reason could think of freedom without contradiction, but it could not assure any objective reality to it. [Theoretical] Reason showed freedom to be conceivable only in order that its supposed impossibility might not endanger reason’s very being and plunge it into an abyss of skepticism (CPrR 3/3). Note that the resolution of the third antinomy and the theoretical interest of reason offered only a “natural recommendation for the assertions of the thesis” (CPR 475/503). Kant goes on to say that “if men could free themselves” of their “natural” bias toward the belief in freedom for the purposes of architectonic completeness, theoretical reason itself would be unable to decide on the intrinsic force of each of their grounds between the thesis and the antithesis, and we would remain in a state of “continuous vacillation” (CPR 475/503). [18] Experience and Systematization (The Hague, 1965), 121. [19] Rotenstreich, 121. [20] I realize, of course, that the meaning of the “fact of reason” passages in the second Critique is open to debate. My interpretation is guided by a constructivist reading of the type undertaken by Onora O’Neill in her Constructions of Reason: Explorations of Kant’s Practical Philosophy (Cambridge, 1989). While acknowledging that “a great deal of textual spadework” (65) has to be done in support of her claim, O’Neill argues that if the Moral Law is not to be construed as something purely given, a datum, which we lack the intuitive faculty to receive, then we would do well to understand it as a factum, as something constructed or made by reason, thereby attesting to the spontaneity of reason and its capacity to generate its own principles when everything empirical or alien is abstracted. On this reading, the “fact of pure reason” is not simply a fact given by reason, but the fact that there is pure reason, i.e., autonomy in thinking and acting. O. Neill’s book is a convincing defense of the primacy of practical reason in Kant in that she shows that any vindication of reason must vindicate the Categorical Imperative. However, her remarkable and highly original reading of Kant’s second analogy (62-63), whereby she shows that Kant’s crucial distinction between the appearance of succession and the succession of appearances presupposes practical freedom, to an extent weakens the doctrine as Kant presents it in second Critique (which she quotes in a footnote at the beginning of her book). For we have here a theoretical interest in the assertion of freedom which is independent of moral interest. Hence her conditional claim: “if we are to have empirical and scientific knowledge, we not merely may but must be free agents” (63). O’Neill thus gives a stronger argument than Rotenstreich does to show that freedom may be deduced from theoretical standpoint, though she does so only at the expense of undermining Kant’s claim that practical reason alone provides the only assertoric interest in the Idea of freedom. It is, of course, that interest over and against any theoretical interest in the existence of the Ideas that interests Levinas. [21] Rotenstreich, 119. [22] “The Primacy of Pure Practical Reason,”  451. [23] Kant was also dismissive of ontology earlier in the first Critique: “the proud title of Ontology that presumptuously claims to supply, in systematic and doctrinal form, synthetic a priori knowledge of things in general (for instance, the principle of causality) must therefore give place to the modest title of a mere Analytic of pure understanding” (CPR 246-7/303). [24] Levinas, “Les droits de l’homme et les droits d’autrui,” Hors subjet (Paris: 1987): 184; trans. Michael B. Smith as “The Rights of Man and the Rights of the Other,” Outside The Subject (Stanford, 1993): 122; modified translation. [25] When reason is deployed in a merely cognitive and not a conative capacity, as when it is ancillary in the achievement of some pathologically determined end, then the will can really be said from a Kantian point of view to be a “bad will” (böse Wille). [26] Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge, 1978), 96. However, see TI 41;240;274;279(twice)/ 69;262;298;302;303, where Levinas calls the ethical relation “respect.” [27] Derrida, 314, n. 26. [28] In Totality and Infinity, “need” (besoin) is said to be in principle satiable, in contradistinction to ethics, which is “beyond satisfactions” (TI 4/34). The sum satisfaction of need is “happiness” (87/115). Note that in Otherwise Than Being Levinas recasts the distinction between ethics and need in terms of the inveterate “man versus nature” opposition: “responsibility for others could never mean altruistic will, an instinctual ‘natural benevolence’” (OB 142/111-20). “It is against nature” (OB 157n27/197n27). Kant too, of course, sought to remove ethics from the realm of nature. [29] The Critique of Judgement, sec. 5. Disinterestedness here is also to be sharply distinguished from type of disinterested pleasure that the British empiricists called “moral sense,” which we allegedly experience when performing or contemplating a righteous action, and which, according to Kant, “reduces everything to the desire for one’s happiness” (CPrR 38/40). [30] Levinas, “Avez-vous relu Baruch?” Difficile liberté: Essais sur le judaïsme (Paris, 1976): 169; trans. Seán Hand as “Have You Reread Baruch?” Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism (Baltimore, 1990): 118. [31] The Critique of Judgement, sec. 87. [32] The idea that “love” can be commanded, “contrary to Kant,” is one Levinas finds in the work of Franz Rozensweig. See “‘Entre deux mondes’” (Difficile liberté); trans. Seán Hand as “‘Between Two Worlds’” (Difficult freedom). [33] In the third Critique Kant states that the “feeling of the sublime in nature is respect for our vocation, which we attribute to an Object of nature by a certain subreption (substitution of a respect for the Object in place of one for the idea of humanity in our own self--the Subject)” (sec. 27). As a homo noumenon, a person is a subject of morally practical reason (autonomy); however, as a homo phaenomenon, he or she is also subject to morally practical reason (obligation). It follows that only the “personality” of a person is an appropriate target of respect, and it would be subreptic here to confuse anything sensible with what properly belongs to reason and the understanding as such. [34] While Kant considered every rational being as such is capable of awakening the feeling of reverentia, and also due respect in the sense of observantia (not to be treated as a means only), he certainly did not think that every rational being was capable of feeling reverentia, “which presupposes the sensuousness and hence the finitude of such beings on whom respect for the moral law is imposed” (CPrR 76/79). Human beings alone, beings which can be viewed both from the standpoint of the phenomenal order of sensible appearances and the intelligible order of rational causes, are capable of this feeling. God and “holy wills,” to choose the standard examples, as pure or disembodied wills, are exempt according to Kant (CPrR 76/79). Indeed, despite the common belief that Kant sought to eradicate all sensibility from moral affairs, it is clear from all three of Kant’s major works on morals that without this peculiar feeling, morality could not function at all for us. We would be incapable of being under moral obligation and thus “morally dead” (MM 400/20). [35] Passages such as this might suggest that Levinasian Desire is a type of libidinal movement or assemblage of singularities that Deleuze calls “desiring production,” a machine-like desire that is “productive” in the sense that it is motivated without the consciousness of any prior lack. However, it has to emphasized time and again that Levinas is entirely opposed to the theory of the unconscious (even if it is irreducible to the Freudian-Lacanian model), which he calls a “merely provisional retreat of alterity” (“Transcendance et mal,” 199; “Transcendence and Evil,” 180). Levinas maintains that the psychoanalytic “unconscious” is simply the opposite of consciousness, and thereby intelligible only on that basis. To repeat what was said earlier, the will remains free to disobey the command of the Other even though it is not free to choose responsibility itself. Indeed, it is because of the possibility of disobedience that the will can be subject to obligation at all, to an imperative in the Kantian sense, applicable to a being whose “natural” impulse is to satisfy its own material needs. [36] Levinas, “Liberté et commandement” (Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 58:3 (1953): 264; trans. A. Lingis as “Freedom and Command (Collected Philosophical Papers); henceforth cited as “Freedom.” [37] Plato, Phaedo, translated by Hugh Tredennick and Harold Tarrant, in The Last Days of Soctrates, ed. Harold Tarrant (London, 1993), 118a (185). [38] Plato, The Republic, trans. G. M. A. Grube (London, 1981), bk. IV, 430e (110). [39] This is the first time we encounter what will become a central claim in both the third section of Totality and Infinity, and the fifth chapter of Otherwise Than Being. However, the justification Levinas presents for making such a claim is slightly different in each case. In Totality and Infinity it is argued that for the will to have recourse to impersonal reason there must be an understanding of language first taught by the Other: “The Other is not for reason a scandal . . . but the first rational teaching, the condition for all teaching” (TI 178/203). In Otherwise Than Being, a major preoccupation of which is to justify the move from ethics to third party justice and politics, reason and ontology are said to derived from the ethical necessity to surmount the threat of complaisance compromising the ethical relationship, in danger of becoming an egoïsm à deux. In “Freedom and Command”--a work that shows the influence of Plato on Levinas’ thinking at this time--it is primarily a question of sparing the will “the ordeals of tyranny” (“Freedom” 266/17). [40] The Republic, bk. 1, 327c (2). [41] Republic, bk 1, 350e (28). [42] See Förster Eckart, “How Are Transcendental Arguments Possible?” Reading Kant: New Perspectives on Transcendental Arguments and Critical Philosophy, ed. Eva Schaper and Wilhelm Vossenkuhl (Oxford, 1989). In this helpful article Förster writes: “In transcendental science . . . only a single proof is possible, namely, from the concept of the subject” (7). [43] Levinas, “Langage quotidian et rhétorique sand éloquence” (Hors sujet, 210); trans. Michael B. Smith as “Everyday Language and Rhetoric without Eloquence” (Outside the Subject, 141). See also OB 182-3n7/198n8. [44] Habermas, 194. [45] This statement is an extended version of one Levinas made six years earlier at the end of “Humanisme et An-archie,” Humanisme de l’autre homme (Paris, 1972): 82; trans. Alphonso Lingis as “Humanism and An-archy,” Collected Philosophical Papers, 138. [46] See note 16 above. [47] Literally Valéry’s dictum runs: “Il n’y a point de détails dans l’exécution” (Oeuvres II, ed. Jean Hytier [Paris, 1960], 84). These words are spoken in the dialogue by Phaedrus, who represents the views of the architect or engineer, Eupalinos. While it is possible that Phaedrus is referring here to the execution of art in general (including music) rather than to architecture as such, the fact that the prose work was commissioned by the review Architectures, who according to Walter Putnam, in Paul Valéry Revisited (New York: Twayn Publishers, 1994), “knew of Valéry’s passionate admiration for their art” (91), suggests that Levinas is probably correct in taking Eupalinos’ guiding principle to refer to architecture, the “first of the arts” etymologically speaking. [48] I wish to thank Graham Noctor and David Webb, for their generous help with an earlier version of this paper. http://theology.co.kr/wwwb/data/levinas/The%20From%20Transcendental%20Freedom%20to%20the%20Other%20Levinas%20and%20Kant.htm, diakses 30 Agustus 2010.  “I” and the “Other”: Levinas and Ontological Violence by Daniel S. Trout January 26, 2007 by cityofgod Is it possible to treat with respect the transcendence of that which is “Other” to myself? The Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas argued that this is precisely the problem overlooked in the history of the ontology-soaked West. Levinas criticized that Western philosophy has been so concerned with both the epistemological and ontological privilege of the rational self that, not only had it exaggerated the adequate potential of man’s knowing and defining, but it also ethically violated everything apart from the self by forcing it into a mold suitable within its own ontology. Levinas contended that due to this ontological narcissism, the autonomous self sought to recast all exteriors into a likeness of itself, for–taking Descartes as perhaps the greatest offender–all that one could be certain of is self; thus, according to Levinas, the self became God by making it’s metaphysical powers the determinate of everything apart. To continue the Descartes harangue, one might suggest that the world–so ontologically defined–in fact becomes an extension of the self, even its own property, a fate even more fully realized with Kant. To protect the Other from this ontological violence, Levinas makes (what I deem) nothing better than an ontological exchange by prioritizing the alterity of the Other over the repressive self and its metaphysical machinations. Instead of becoming the self’s prisoner through an exploitation of radical immanence, Levinas posits the infinite transcendence of the Other: unnameable, undefinable, uncontrollable. The Other is everything and nothing, elusive to my attempts to categorize and beyond my ability to identify. In fact, as opposed to the traditional way of approaching the Other and having my with it, the only way I can contact the Other is for it to intrude into my world and rock my perceptions with a trace of itself–what Levinas calls the “face.” For the sake of brevity, let me simply say that, in Levinas’ description, the self’s interaction with the Other (no matter how prolonged the connection) can never be anything more than a brush with the ineffable. I can never conceptualize, never really know the Other–only accept the violence of its imposition with hospitality, but otherwise leave it alone. The Other must be what it is, and I can only desire for a deepened communion with it: an erotic sort of longing for disclosure that can never be satisfied. In fairness to Levinas, there is some merit in his criticism. Everything that is “not-self”, whether it be another person, an animal or some other form of organic or inorganic matter, certainly possesses an ontic depth and worth beyond our capacity to master. Unquestionably, modernity, especially the natural science’s greatest hubris was to think that the whole realm about us could be subjected to our ability to observe, test and slap with a label. To say that modern man suffered from a slight God-complex would be an understatement; in this, Levinas and those who echo his condemnation deserve a nod. However, where he errs and deserves stern rebuke is an over-protection of Otherness that renders meaningful communion impossible. In Levinas’ world, the self becomes a lost, frustrated and incoherent muddle within a world of indistinguishable shadows. Is there a God? Who is my friend? my enemy? my lover? What violence and control Levinas takes away from philosophy he replaces with the pestilences of guilt and fear. What shall we say, given his description, if the face of the Other is but a mask? How could we ever know deceit? It would seem that the Other can simply have its way with us. Levinas’ bizarre ideal seems like a realm full of paranoid strangers. There is no easy solution to this problem. Levinas is right, but he is also dreadfully wrong. Ontology can be a tyrant’s tool, but it can also unite those of a like mind and spirit. What Levinas forgot as he tried to weigh “I” and “Other” is that both participate in “Together.” Men and women are not monads (even with windows!) flitting about, but are situated in the world collectively: we need one another, not just for order and prosperity, but for our very lives and identities. The imposition of image that Levinas so feared is a reciprocal activity; though I can never expect to totalize someone else, I know well that in either love or hate I can own him/her (to various degrees). But I accept this power, because I know that I, too, am owned. Be it parents, friends, mentors, casual acquaintances or enemies, my self is determined by what they give and take. Is this violence? Perhaps, but maybe only if I am my own private property. Certainly, I do not suggest one just recklessly give himself away, but likewise I must propose that only the fool guards his being as a secret for personal cultivation. If this is where Levinas’ suspicion takes us, then surely the next level of violence is ontological suicide. Shall I boldly suggest that Christianity is beyond disputes of “self” and the “other?” If I dare to impose myself on my neighbor, have I committed an offense? If he should intrude on me, am I simply at his mercy? Or is this the harmony of fellowship, be it ever so complicated at times? Scripture teaches that we are community of love: love for one another and love for the God that first loved us. For those reconciled to God, we are his image, the very icon of the Holy Trinity, if we live as one. Yes, because we are imperfect, we will strain this love and perhaps do serious violence, but love bears all these things. God has put us together, because “iron sharpens iron” and not one of us will ever become the person, the Christian God desires without togetherness. Ontology within a Trinitarian structure need not be sinister, but it will always be painful as we learn to sacrifice, esteeming others better than ourselves. http://cityofgod.wordpress.com/2007/01/26/i-and-the-other-levinas-and-the-violence-of-ontology/ “I” and the “Other” Levinas and Ontological Violence « Homilia Anglicana.htm diakses: 28 Augustus 2010.  PSIKOLOGI EGO (AKU) vs PSIKOLOGI LIYAN (YANG-LAIN) oleh: Audifax Dalam esei saya sebelumnya yang berjudul “AKU dan YANG-LAIN”, saya menyoroti masalah penerimaan manusia terhadap ketakpastian dan kemajemukan dalam kehidupan. Pada esei saya kali ini, saya masih berbicara hal yang kurang lebih sama namun dalam konteks psikologi. Pola-pola relasi yang tak mampu menerima ketakpastian hidup serta keluasan keunikan manusia, ironisnya juga terjadi dalam dunia psikologi di Indonesia. Banyak orang-orang psikologi ketika berhadapan dengan klien, berusaha mendefinisikan sang klien dalam berbagai definisi dari buku atau PPDGJ dan menganggap bahwa semua penjelasan yang terdapat di sana dapat memberi kepastian akan kehidupan macam apa yang dimiliki klien serta jenis orang macam apa dia. Termasuk bagaimana mesti memperlakukan dia. Menafikkan segala ketakpastian dan keluasan keunikan. Psikotes yang disusun belasan bahkan puluhan tahun lalu, masih dianggap mampu menjelaskan kehidupan manusia di masa sekarang lengkap dengan kontekstualisasi perkembangan budaya terkini, bahkan dijadikan acuan memutuskan nasib orang lain. Sebentuk upaya penghilangan keunikan manusia dan ketakberanian menghadapi ketakpastian. Beberapa waktu yang lalupun, ada sebuah peristiwa menarik ketika saya membaca “penolakan” di milis psikologi@yahoogroups pada Leonardo Rimba yang notabene membawa sesuatu YANG-LAIN bagi orang-orang di milis tersebut yang umumnya menganut psikologi mainstream. Fenomena itu mengingatkan saya pada fenomena yang lebih luas, termasuk pengalaman saya dan rekan-rekan komunitas saya ketika dulu masih berada di lingkup Fakultas Psikologi di salah satu universitas swasta terkenal di Surabaya. Kamipun (yang mengusung sesuatu yang berbeda) mengalami penolakan. Beberapa waktu lalu kita juga sering menerima posting yang menggambarkan bagaimana seorang Vincent Liong yang berbeda dari umumnya mahasiswa Psikologi di alma maternya, juga mengalami penolakan. Semakin prihatin ketika di Bandung beberapa waktu lalu, seorang rekan mengeluhkan pula resistensi psikologi terhadap kalibrasi dan validasi psikotes yang jelas-jelas sudah tidak relevan dan kontekstual dengan perubahan jaman. Bahkan teman tersebut sempat mengutip ucapan: “Wong [psikotes] begini saja sudah menghasilkan uang kok”. Ya, inilah potret dari sebuah lingkungan yang menamakan dirinya PSIKOLOGI, berikut salah satu jargon terkenalnya: “Understanding Human Being” atau “Individu itu unik” Psikologi, tak lebih dari sekumpulan manusia yang melestarikan totem-totem untuk disembah. Ego-ego yang dikekalkan dari perubahan. Konformitas semu yang disterilkan dari sosok-sosok unik yang berpotensi menghasilkan perubahan. Bukan hal aneh jika kemudian gelar, IPK, dan berbagai modal simbolik kosong justru dikejar ketimbang kualitas pengetahuan itu sendiri. Tak heran jika mahasiswa-mahasiswa itu menurut saja peraturan aneh yang melarang lulusan S-1 yang sudah kuliah empat tahun untuk mempraktekkan kemampuannya, sebelum mengeluarkan uang lagi untuk mengambil magister. Tak salah jika Michael Foucault pernah mengatakan bahwa pengetahuan berpeluk erat dengan kekuasaan. Ya, hanya dengan kekuasaanlah mereka bsia mempertahankan konfomitas semu. Leonardo Rimba di-banning oleh orang berinisial JeHa yang menempatkan diri sebagai “penguasa” milis psikologi@yahoogroups. Vincent Liong harus berhadapan dengan sistem absensi yang belum tentu benar-benar mampu menyaring mahasiswa yang berkualitas atau menguasai materi. Rekan yang ingin mengupayakan kalibrasi dan validasi psikotes, harus berhadapan dengan kesimpangsiuran dan jawaban konyol dari mereka yang resisten. LOGOSENTRISME Sejak jaman Yunani kuno, sebenarnya manusia memang terbiasakan untuk berpikir secara linier dengan menempatkan logos di ujung-ujung pemikiran. Logos itu berfungsi sebagai causa prima yang sifatnya absolut, tak tergugat. Kita mengenal itu dalam term-term seperti: Akal Budi, Hati Nurani, Iman, dan banyak lagi. Seringkali juga Tuhan ditempatkan di ujung sana. Dalam banyak hal, situasi ini justru membuat manusia lepas dari tanggungjawabnya. Banyak hal ditimpakan pada Tuhan. Mungkin salah satu konteks yang bisa sama-sama disaksikan oleh anggota milis psikologi transformatif dan R-Mania adalah somasi Mujahidin kepada Bali yang diakhiri kalimat: Ya Allah, saksikanlah, kami telah menyampaikan, Allahu Akbar!. Dalam pemikiran logosentris semacam ini, Tuhan pun menjadi banal, ketika namanya disebut di mana-mana dalam banalitas kehidupan manusia. Kasus-kasus lain sering kita temui juga di keseharian. Di ruang-ruang perkuliahan misalnya, berapa banyak dosen yang mau disanggah teorinya di depan kelas? Apalagi mereka yang sudah memegang modal simbolik seperti Profesor, Guru Besar, Master, dsb. Dalam banyak kasus yang dialami saya dan teman-teman saya dulu (mungkin juga Vincent Liong saat ini) mereka cenderung mengamankan diri dalam psikologi ego yang mengeliminir hadirnya YANG-LAIN. Dalam banyak kasus-kasus seperti ini, bisa dikatakan humanitas telah mati. Keprihatinan seperti inilah yang kemudian memunculakn orang-orang seperti Friedrich Nietzche, Sigmund Freud, Carl Gustav Jung berikut sejumlah pengikut mereka yang mulai membongkar ego manusia. Sejumlah tokoh mewarnai sejarah, seperti Martin Heidegger, Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, Helen Cixous, Michel Foucault, Emmanuel Levinas dan lain-lain, yang berbicara hal yang sangat erat hubungannya dengan psikologi. Namun, jangan harap itu semua diajarkan di fakultas psikologi. Mereka beralasan bahwa tokh-tokoh itu terlalu filosofis atau jatah fakultas filsafat. Sebuah upaya konyol untuk menutupi ketakmampuan mengikuti sekaligus melestarikan psikologi ego dari hadirnya psikologi Liyan. MENGGESER LOGOS KE LOXOS Emmanuel Levinas, filsuf Perancis, adalah seseorang yang pernah menawarkan pemikiran untuk menggeser dari metafisika yang mengedepankan logos menuju metafisika yang mengedepankan loxos, dari sejarah yang terpusat pada ego ke sejarah yang mengawali lahirnya the Other atau Yang-Lain. Inilah titik menyatunya keterpisahan antara ontologi dan epistemologi dalam filsafat. Tak ada lagi perbedaan ontologi dan epistemologi, karena apa yang ontologis sekaligus epistemologis, begitu pula sebaliknya. Manusia memang terbiasa mengembangkan ego, sehingga banyak tertanam pemikiran bahwa manusia tak bisa hidup tanpa ego. Sejak Rene Descartes, memaklumatkan cogito ergo sum (aku berpikir maka aku ada), pada saat itulah berawal perkembangan pemikiran Barat--yang kemudian memengaruhi dunia-- yang cenderung membangun suatu keseluruhan dengan menjadikan ego sebagai pusatnya. Ego cogito Descartes menunjukkan bagaimana “AKU” didaulat menjadi pusat bagi realitas ontologis. Ego mendapat prioritas utama yang mutlak tak tergugat. Jean Paul Sartre pernah mengatakan bahwa aktivitas manusia untuk mengembangkan egologi sebagai totalisasi. Ketika manusia mengedepankan ego, maka ia sebenarnya tengah melakukan totalisasi, apapun yang dihadapannya akan di-utuh-kan dalam sebuah konsep yang telah ada di pikiran AKU, sehingga apapun itu masuk dalam pemahaman dari sudut pandang aku. Totalitas semacam inilah yang kemudian bisa kita saksikan pada bagaimana Mujahidin mensomasi Bali misalnya, pada kasus itu Bali dengan segala keunikannya yang membedakan dengan kaum Mujahidin direduksi dalam penilaian yang ada pada diri kaum Mujahidin. Tak hanya dalam kasus besar seperti Mujahidin dan Bali, tapi dalam kasus-kasus yang lebih keseharianpun terjadi, manusia dengan mudah mengkonstruksi orang lain berdasarkan pemahamannya dan menentukan baik buruknya orang itu. Dalam pemikiran Levinas, totalitas itu didobrak oleh yang tak berhingga (l’Infini). Dengan istilah ini, Levinas memaksudkan sebuah realitas yang tak dapat direduksi ke dalam diri AKU (sebagai ego) dan pengetahuan AKU. Yang-Tak-Berhingga adalah Orang-Lain, Liyan, the Other, YANG-LAIN daripada AKU, Yang Beda dari AKU dan Yang bukan AKU. Semua totalitas yang AKU bangun, seketika runtuh ketika AKU berjumpa dengan Orang-Lain. Inilah yang dimaksud dengan eksterioritas, yakni bahwa ada YANG-BEDA di luar AKU, yang bukan bagian dari interioritas diri AKU. YANG-TAK-BERHINGGA mengajak AKU keluar dari DIRI-AKU dan menyapanya[i]. Inilah bertemu dan menyatunya mikrokosmos dan makrokosmos. Dunia dalam diri dan dunia di luar diri. Yang-terbatas dan Yang-tak-terbatas. Imanensi dan Transendensi. Jika ada nasehat dalam agama bahwa Tuhan ditemukan dalam diri orang-orang di sekeliling anda, maka inilah kontekstualisasinya. Bagaimana anda memperlakukan dan bersikap terhadap orang-orang di sekeliling anda, menunjukkan seberapa anda ber-Tuhan dalam kehidupan anda. Inilah suatu pemahaman kehidupan yang mampu menyembuhkan manusia dari segala kecemasan akan ketakpastian dan ketakmampuan menerima keunikan YANG-LAIN. Kita dapat melihat dalam sejarah bahwa manusia-manusia seperti inilah yang dalam berbagai mite dan Kitab Suci diceritakan bertemu Tuhan. Mereka ini tidak hidup diliputi dendam karena ketakmampuan menerima keunikan dan ketakpuasannya atas imbas dari ketakpastian hidup. POSKRIP Kembali dalam konteks psikologi, seberapa anda mampu menerima kemajemukan, menunjukkan pula sebagaimana anda menguasai sebuah ilmu yang bernama psikologi. Sayang, hal seperti itu tak banyak terjadi. Psikotes masih saja seperti itu dan upaya untuk melakukan kontekstualisasi dengan jaman tak kunjung (bisa) dilakukan. Padahal, banyak nasib dan kehidupan manusia di negeri ini tergantung dari psikotes. Sungguh sebuah ironi dalam kehidupan akibat permainan orang-orang yang mengklaim diri menguasai sebuah ilmu yang bernama “psikologi” Psikologi ego dengan arogansi-arogansi semacam itu, sebenarnya merupakan bentuk ketakberanian menghadapi ketakpastian. Hadirnya psikologi alternatif adalah ancaman karena mereka tidak memahaminya. Psikologi yang berbasis pada the Other adalah sesuatu yang menakutkan, sehingga orang-orang yang mengusungnya dianggap aneh dan perlu dibasmi agar tak menggangu ketenangan mereka dalam Ego-ego yang telah mereka bangun. Orang-orang seperti ini adalah mereka yang tak berani menghadapi hidupnya sendiri sebagai manusia yang dalam kesejatiannya selalu dalam ketakpastian. Mereka adalah pecundang-pecundang yang begitu takutnya berhadapan dengan orang-orang yang menghadapi ketakpastian hidupnya sebagai petualangan. Bagaimana cermatan anda? © Audifax – 22 Maret 2006 http://kumaraqulmi.multiply.com/reviews/item/124, diakses 28 Agustus 2010.  Heterofobia dan Penindasan Atas Liyan oleh: Lucian E. Marin Lelaki buruk rupa itu merangsek ke kerumunan orang di jalanan. Wajahnya ditutupi kain. Penuh benjolan. Bibirnya sumbing. Bentuknya tak keruan. Matanya cekung ke dalam. Terhalang oleh gumpalan daging yang tidak rata. Dahinya menonjol ke depan. Rambut depannya rontok meninggalkan botak tak merata. Rambut belakang awut-awutan dan jarang-jarang. Giginya tidak utuh. Kerepes di sana-sini. Berselimutkan liur yang tak henti menetes. Kulitnya bersisik. Ia pendek. Cara berjalannya tidak seperti orang normal. Ia mirip monster ketimbang manusia. Orang-orang pada takut dan jijik saat memandangnya. Mereka terdiam sesaat. Terpukau, berlanjut takut dan menghindar. Sosok lelaki itu tak lain adalah John Merrick. Ia tinggal di London. Ia seorang yang tercerabut dari khalayak. Ia harus lebih sering mengurung diri di kamar sumpek ketimbang keluyuran di ruang publik. Sampai suatu ketika Merrick ditemukan oleh Dr. Frederick Treves dalam sebuah pertunjukan sirkus. Kondisi Merrick mengantarnya pada kehidupan seperti binatang. Ia disuruh tampil dalam hiburan sirkus. Ia menghibur, tapi ia sendiri mengalami penderitaan yang dalam. Akhirnya, di sepotong hari, Merrick memberontak dalam hati. Ia menjerit atas kemanusiaannya. "Aku bukan binatang. Aku seorang manusia! Seorang Manusia!" jeritnya. Itulah sepenggal narasi dalam film besutan David Lynch berjudul "The Elephant Man" (1980). Alur film ini mengalir dan menguarkan suasana horor yang meneror kemapanan berpikir kita. Selain itu, atmosfer absurditas campur satu dengan suasana ngeri, takut, jijik, pilu, kasihan, dan cinta. Campur baur jadi satu. Sebenarnya, film ini memunyai tujuan kritik pada masyarakat industrialis yang mekanistis, otomatis, praktis, dan tunggal. Dalam masyarakat demikian, ada beberapa yang terpinggirkan, terasingkan, tak diperhitungkan, dan dibuang. Film yang dibintangi John Hurt ini multinilai. Salah satunya adalah bagaimana kita menerima kehadiran "yang lain" atau “liyan” (the other). Tak disangkal, hidup senantiasa menyuguhkan kejutan-kejutan. Kejutan itu timbul dengan kehadiran sesuatu yang lain (yang lain). Liyan ini adalah yang tidak lumrah, yang asing, yang tidak lengkap, yang tidak serupa dengan kita, ganjil, beda, tidak biasa, tidak umum, tidak semestinya, di luar hukum dan aturan, yang melenceng, menyimpang, dan sebagainya. Realitas "Liyan" ini tak jarang kita temui di tengah-tengah kita. Liyan muncul sebagai yang dianggap menyimpang dari sebuah standar normalitas (yang normal) yang dianut secara dominan oleh mayoritas masyarakat. Kita akui dengan jujur, tidak jarang, kehadiran Liyan ini sangat menggelisahkan, bahkan menakutkan. Sastrawan Italia Elias Canetti menulis, "Tidak ada yang lebih menakutkan manusia daripada persentuhan dengan yang tidak dikenal." Yang tidak dikenal ini datang membangkitkan bulu kuduk. Ketakutan pada sosok Liyan inilah yang disebut dengan heterofobia. Ikon Alien Salah satu paling gampang menggambarkan yang lain adalah ikon alien—mahkluk luar angkasa. Alien jamak dilukiskan dengan paras menjijikkan sekaligus mengerikan. Mari kita lihat film besutan Neill Blomkamp berjudul “District 9” (2009). Suatu ketika—selama 20 tahun, sebuah pesawat alien bertengger di atas kota Johannesburg, Afrika Selatan. Pesawat superbesar ini membawa jutaan alien. Sampai suatu saat, ras manusia yang diwakili oleh kelompok peneliti MNU (multi-national united), menemukan mereka dan mengkarantina mereka dalam wilayah yang disebut District 9. Ruang gerak mereka dibatasi oleh pagar berduri. Nasibnya persis seperti yang dialami John Merrick dalam The Elephant Man—hanya saja Merrick ditampilkan sebagai manusia. Paras alien itu mengerikan. Mirip zombie. MNU lebih suka menyebutnya prawn, udang. Seperti yang ditampilkan dalam sosok Christopher Jonson—sosok alien yang diberi nama oleh MNU. Dalam film ini, ras alien ditampilkan lemah. Mereka diberi makanan kaleng khusus kucing. Mereka juga menjadi objek observasi. Objek penelitian di laboratorium ilmiah. Untuk kepentingan supervisi, setiap alien harus disensus. ‘Penindasan’ pada koloni itu pun dimulai. Tapi, mereka mempunyai senjata yang supercanggih dan membuat MNU mengincarnya. Meski senjata itu hanya bisa dioperasikan oleh alien sendiri. Di karantina itu, para alien berhabitat dengan komunitas orang kulit hitam yang berdagang senjata. Puluhan tahun District 9 menjadi tempat kumuh. Mirip perumahan di kompleks tempat pembuangan sampah. Populasi di sana terus meningkat. Membuat MNU berniat merelokasi mereka. Tapi, para ‘udang’ ini tidak mau. Muncullah konflik antara MNU dan mereka. Mereka juga diawasi agar mereka tidak bisa naik ke pesawat mereka dan pergi. Operasi yang dipimpin Wikus van der Merwe (Sharlto Copley) gagal. Wikus sendiri malah terkontaminasi cairan alien dan perlahan mengalami mutasi menjadi alien itu sendiri. Wikus pun bernasib seperti para ‘udang’ itu. Tapi, tragedi membuat Wikus mampu membangun komunikasi dan relasi intim dengan Christopher Jonson. Sampai akhirnya, Wikus mampu mengantar Jonson dan anakknya melarikan diri ke pesawat mereka dan pergi dari karantina itu. Ada di antara Kita Sebenarnya, liyan atau alien itu nyata hadir di tengah-tengah kita. Mereka terserak di ruang publik tempat kita berada. Mereka ada di hampir setiap dimensi sosial dan personal hidup kita. Seperti dimensi sosio kultural, politik, psikologi, ideologi, agama, gender, seksualitas, dan sebagainya. Dua film di atas menjadi kritik atas kehidupan sosial kita. District 9 adalah sebuah metafor. Beberapa sumber menyebut film Neil Blomkamp tersebut mau mengungkap kembali coretan hitam politik apartheid di Afrika Selatan. Ia terinspirasi dari film dokumenternya berjudul Joburg. Film ini merekam relokasi massal komunitas non kulit putih dari District 6 Cape Town ke Cape Flats pada 1966. Ada sekitar 60 ribu orang kulit hitam yang selama 20 tahun tinggal di sana dan dipaksa pindah sejauh 16 mil. Kita tahu politik apartheid sebagai politik yang meminggirkan kaum kulit hitam. Memang, alien atau liyan ini biasanya terwakili dengan berbagai pihak minoritas. Minoritas yang tidak menganut aturan (pakem) umum atau arus besar (mainstream). Mereka bisa berupa minoritas etnis, suku-suku terasing, kaum gipsi, anggota sekte terlarang, musuh politis rezim penguasa, kaum pendatang, dan sebagainya. Mereka muncul pada orang-orang yang menganut perilaku, ada kebiasaan yang berbeda dengan komunitas besar. Termasuk juga mereka yang berpenampilan norak. Liyan juga muncul pada orang-orang dalam situasi yang sangat ekstrem, seperti orang yang sangat miskin dan menderita maupun orang yang sangat kaya raya. Liyan juga tampil dalam diri kaum homoseksual. Kaum gay maupun lesbian dianggap sebagai alien, sosok asing di kalangan masyarakat penganut standar normal seksualitas. Liyan hadir pula dalam orang-orang yang mengalami kemunduran mental, seperti orang idiot maupun gila. Bahkan, orang-orang yang mengalami deformasi fisik (cacat) seperti Si Manusa Gajah atau Chrisopher Jenson mewakili sosok Liyan yang tidak jarang membuat orang lain jengah. Di ranah ideologis, Liyan muncul dalam orang-orang yang dianggap PKI alias komunis. Selama Orde Baru, kita dicekoki gambaran kaum komunis sebagai kaum sadis, menakutkan, dan jadi ancaman. Di wilayah agama, sekte atau aliran sempalan menjadi suatu yang dianggap menganggu. Tak jarang, para penganut aliran ini mengalami penindasan, baik dalam rupa pengejaran, perusakan tempat ibadat, maupun pembunuhan. Problem dari heterofobia terletak pada turunannya, yakni menjadikan Liyan sebagai ancaman. Bahkan menjadi objek diskriminasi sekaligus objek kekerasan. Stigmatisasi terjadi dan menghambat proses komunikasi kita dengan mereka. Bahkan, dengan mudah terjadi dehumanisasi dan depersonalisasi. Kita sebagai mayoritas merasa punya kekuasaan otomatis untuk menghakimi mereka sebagai yang pantas direndahkan, dibenci, bahkan dilukai (bdk. F. Budi Hardiman, 2005). Ketakutan mempunyai potensi melahirkan kekerasan. Bertrand Rusell menyatakan ketakutan sebagai muara takhayul sekaligus kekejaman. Sejarah Indonesia menorehkan berbagai mozaik sejarah ketakutan pada Liyan ini. Komunisme yang bangkrut sejak lama masih menghantui sampai sekarang. Lepas dari permainan politik, stigmatisasi komunis sebagai yang jahat dan membahayakan masih terasa hingga sekarang. Diskusi-diskusi buku-buku kiri dibubarkan secara paksa. Para keturunan orang-orang yang dicap PKI masih kehilangan hak-hak publiknya. Belum lagi, kekerasan-kekerasan berlatar ras, agama, dan etnis. Warga Indonesia beretnis Tionghoa harus menunggu bertahun-tahun untuk bisa merayakan Imlek di samping mendapatkan perlakukan sejajar dengan warga Indonesia lainnya di berbagai dimensi sosialnya. Kaum homoseksual masih hidup sembunyi-sembunyi dalam kantong-kantong. Sebagian masyarakat masih belum bisa menerima mereka. Mereka masih dianggap sakit dan ‘virus’ yang bisa menular. Lebih-lebih kaum homoseksual diidentikan dengan perilaku seksual tidak sehat dan rentan penyakit mematikan. Cinta Pada Yang Lain Salah satu jalan mencintai Liyan ini adalah keberanian memahami Liyan itu sendiri. Mematahkan rasa takut dilakukan dengan menghilangkan stigma-stigma dalam batok kepala kita pada mereka. Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995) dalam Totality and Infinity mengatakan Liyan bisa dipahami karena yang lain itu menampakkan wajahnya (l’epiphanie du visage). Tidak sebatas penampakan fisik. Tetapi, orang lain menurut keberlainannya. Lebih tepatnya wajah yang telanjang (le visage nu). Wajah yang mempunyai makna secara langsung, tanpa penengah, dan tanpa konteks (K.Bertens, 1996). Bagi Levinas, Liyan itu muncul secara otonom, punya dimensi tak terselami, dan bukan bagian dari perentangan (ekterioritas) diri kita (ego). Penampakan wajah ini menjadi sebuah kejadian etis. Wajah itu menyapa kita dan kita tidak boleh acuh tak acuh pada wajah itu. Kita harus mendengarkannya. Lantaran penampilan wajah, kita diinterpelasi dan dipanggil untuk bertanggung jawab. Perjumpaan dan persentuhan dengan wajah Liyan inilah yang memungkinkan proses komunikasi dan pembelajaran. Kita hanya bisa memahami Liyan kalau kita mempunyai compassion dengan mereka. Kata lain, ada di di pihak mereka. Persis seperti yang terjadi pada Wikus dalam District 9. Komunikasi terjalin karena ia mampu merasakan pahitnya menjadi seorang alien itu sendiri. Komunikasi langsung dengan tatap muka Liyan melahirkan kewajiban etis yang bersifat asimetris. Artinya, kita mempunyai tanggung jawab pada Liyan tanpa harus mengetahui Liyan akan melakukan tanggung jawab serupa pada kita. Dalam relasi ini, tidak ada sistem do ut des, balas jasa. Bahasa komunikasinya adalah bahasa sapaan, percakapan, maupun dialog. Titik tolaknya bukan pada kesadaran ala Descartes (la conscience theorique) melainkan hati nurani (la conscience morale). Dialog yang mendengarkan Liyan itu akan membawa kesadaran kita pada pemahaman bahwa Liyan itu ternyata sama dengan diri kita pada taraf terdalam. Liyan adalah panggilan kita untuk bertanggung jawab secara etis. Karena ini relasi etis, setiap tindakan pengucilan, pencideraan, diskriminasi, perusakkan pada diri Liyan atas nama yang sakral, kebenaran, ketertiban umum, maupun normalitas sekalipun adalah tindakan tidak bermoral! Mari kita melihat sekeliling kita. Siapa tahu John Merrick, Christopher Jenson, dan para alien itu hadir di depan, belakang, samping kanan, samping kiri, kita saat ini. Siapa tahu selama ini mereka ternyata tertindas oleh kita sendiri? http://www.katakataku.com/2009/10/06/heterofobia-dan-penindasan-atas-liyan/, diakses 30 Agustus 2010.  The End of Psychology oleh: Audifax [1] “Setiap individu adalah unik” Premis itu menjadi pegangan yang seringkali didengung-dengungkan di kalangan orang-orang yang menekuni psikologi. Di bangku kuliah di Fakultas-fakultas Psikologi, para mahasiswa/i diajarkan bahwa “setiap individu adalah unik”. Tapi pernahkah dicermati bahwa inkonsistensi logik juga terjadi dalam penerapan di ruang-ruang kuliah maupun masyarakat luas? Pernahkah terpikir bahwa premis itu bisa memporak-porandakan semua pendidikan psikologi yang diselenggarakan di Indonesia? Mari kita telaah lebih jauh. Orang Lain (Liyan) dan Keluasannya Jika saya menganggap “tiap individu adalah unik”, maka ada “sesuatu yang tak terhingga” di luar saya. Ini karena ada begitu banyak individu di luar saya dan masing-masing darinya unik. Bahkan terus lahir individu-individu baru yang juga unik. Dalam akumulasi begitu banyaknya individu unik, maka Orang di luar saya (selanjutnya akan saya sebut “Liyan”) adalah hamparan laut tiada bertepi. Sementara dalam psikologi, kita belajar “understanding human being” melalui berbagai tokoh, definisi, teori, mazhab dan sejenisnya; yang kelak akan digunakan untuk menjelaskan Liyan. Para mahasiswa/i psikologi dituntut untuk menguasai setiap mata kuliah yang isinya teori, mazhab dan diharapkan menguasai apa yang diajarkan secara total. Seberapa total penguasaan, akan tampak pada nilai kelulusan dari mata kuliah tersebut. Jika anda lulus dengan nilai “A”, itu mencerminkan suatu tingkat totalitas penguasaan tertentu yang lebih baik dari nilai ‘B”. Kelulusan demi kelulusan setelah menziarahi sejumlah ruang perkuliahan, pada puncaknya akan bermuara pada diperolehnya gelar kesarjanaan psikologi atau S. Psi. Jadi gelar itu adalah “kelulusan puncak” atau akumulasi dari semua kelulusan yang pernah dicapai. Sementara kelulusan itu sendiri merupakan simbol totalitas penguasaan. Lalu, mari kita kembali pada premis bahwa “tiap individu adalah unik” sehingga Liyan adalah sesuatu yang tak terhingga. Totalitas penguasaan atas konsep manusia yang dibangun dengan susah payah, seketika runtuh ketika “Saya” berjumpa dengan ‘Liyan”. Ini karena Liyan bukan “Manusia Pavlov”, ‘Manusia Behavioristik”, “Manusia Psikoanalisa”, dan semua konsep-konsep “manusia” yang telah dibangun dalam benak lulusan psikologi. Bangunan itu runtuh ketika “Yang tak terhingga”, yang bukan bagian dari konsep yang ada dalam diri “saya”, menyapa “saya” dan mengajak “saya” keluar dari diri “saya”. “Liyan” menampakkan diri dalam keunikan yang tak dapat direduksi oleh “Saya”. “Saya” tak dapat menghampiri “Liyan” dengan bertolak dari kerangka “aku”. Liyan sama sekali lain dengan teori-teori. “Liyan” adalah pendatang, orang asing (stranger), yang mendatangi, mengajak agar “saya” memperlakukannya sebagaimana adanya dia. Inilah momentum yang kerap justru terabaikan dalam relasi. Hubungan dengan orang lain sering dipahami dan ditempatkan sebagai hubungan egalitarian antar subyek. “Saya” adalah yang lain bagi “Dia”, maka kita setara. Dalam relasi psikolog klien pun demikian. Dia (klien) harus hormat karena saya (psikolog) yang menguasai ilmu jiwa dan saya (psikolog) hormati anda (klien) karena konsumen adalah raja. (beberapa hubungan bahkan bisa jadi tak setara). Padahal, kembali pada pemahaman bahwa “Liyan” adalah sesuatu yang tak terbatas, maka “saya” tak bisa menempatkan diri sebagai subjek dalam posisi relasi tersebut. “Liyan” hadir mengundang “saya” untuk menyelami dimensinya yang tak terhingga. Menyelami dan menyelami, hanya itu yang bisa “Saya” lakukan. Hubungan dengan “Liyan” adalah hubungan dengan misteri. Kehadiran “Liyan” justru menunda kehadiran “Saya” dan melenyapkan “Saya” dalam pencarian dan pencarian tak terhingga akan “Liyan”. Inilah yang oleh Emmanuel Levinas disebut sebagai alteritas. Suatu sapaan yang bukan bertujuan untuk menjadi negasi dari konsep yang ada dalam diri, tapi mengundang “saya” untuk keluar dari imanensi dan mengalami “transendensi” bersama “Liyan”[2]. Manusia pada dasarnya terbentuk dari elemen yang sebenarnya adalah konsep-konsep yang pernah dipelajarinya. Konsep-konsep inilah yang digunakan untuk membangun diri dan kerapkali juga digunakan untuk memahami orang lain. Manusia terbenam dalam elemen-elemen ini seperti dijelaskan Jacques Lacan sebagai keterbenaman manusia dalam imaji-imaji yang membuatnya semakin terasing dari diri. Namun bagi Levinas, elemen adalah suatu pra-kondisi bagi pemisahan subjek dari elemen. Subjek pada dasarnya tenggelam dalam ke-liyan-an (otherness) elemen-elemen yang dimasukkan dalam dirinya, membawa elemen-elemen itu ke dalam suatu rentang identitas dan kesamaan, sehingga bisa disimpulkan bahwa subjek hidup dari elemen-elemen itu[3]. Namun, ketika berjumpa dengan Liyan, maka manusia disapa dan diajak untuk keluar dari imanensi elemen-elemen dan masuk dalam transendensi, dalam sesuatu yang tak terbatas. “Matinya Manusia” dalam Psikologi Dalam Psikologi, manusia kerap sudah terlebih dulu mati sebelum ajal menjemputnya. Ini terjadi ketika ia menjadi korban definisi-definisi atau hasil-hasil pengukuran yang tak bisa dipertanggungjawabkan. Apalagi ketika dihadapkan pada premis “setiap individu adalah unik”. Manusia-manusia ini menjadi mati karena ia tak lebih dari kerumunan. dalam kerumunan, manusia itu dianggap sama saja semuanya, sehingga keunikannya yang hidup dan menghidupinya serta merta dicerabut dengan mengatasnamakan ilmu pengetahuan yang bernama psikologi. Inilah sebuah kesalahan yang menurut Hans-Georg Gadamer sering terjadi pada ilmu-ilmu humaniora dan penerapannya pada fenomena moral dan sosial. Para “penguasa ilmu” itu mencoba memberi penekanan pada kesamaan-kesamaan, keteraturan-keteraturan, dan kompromi-kompromi terhadap sebuah hukum yang dianggap memungkinkan untuk memprediksikan fenomena dan proses individual. Padahal dalam fenomena yang sebenarnya, tujuan ini tidak selalu bisa dicapai dengan hasil yang sama, namun orang lantas mengajukan alasan bahwa kesamaan itu ada tetapi tidak bisa selalu diperoleh dalam kuantifikasi memadai. Di sini sebenarnya orangtidak menemukan sebab untuk pengaruh-pengaruh khusus, yang unik pada individu, tapi hanya menegaskan kesamaan-kesamaan[4]. Jika “Liyan” adalah sesuatu yang tak terbatas, maka “saya” itu tak bisa menggeneralisasikan treatment atau program karena dalam ketakterbatasannya akan berimplikasi pada ketakmampuan “saya” untuk meng-handle efek yang ditimbulkan karena akan juga terjadi keluasan efek yang tak terbatas akibat akumulasi keunikan individu satu dengan yang lain. Tak ada urusannya pula mengubah pola pikir orang Aceh seperti pernah diungkapkan seorang member milis. Karena ada banyak orang Aceh dan masing-masing adalah individu yang unik, sehingga efeknya akan berbeda-beda. Mereka bukan “kerumunan” orang Aceh, tapi individu demi individu yang berbeda satu sama lain. Begitu pula akan sungguh naif ketika “saya” men-download” berbagai teori atau alat tes dari internet lantas menerapkan begitu saja pada sekerumunan orang, karena mereka bukan kerumunan, mereka adalah “Liyan” yang memiliki ketakterbatasan. Poskrip Nah, sekarang bisa dilihat bahwa premis “setiap individu adalah unik” telah memporak-porandakan hampir semua yang diajarkan di ruang perkuliahan oleh dosen-dosen di Fakultas Psikologi. Jika “setiap manusia adalah unik”, tak perlu mahasiswa disuruh menghafal catatan-catatan dari dosen. Apa yang perlu dibiasakan adalah “ketulusan” atau “genuinity” ketika berhadapan dengan orang lain. Segenap ketulusan dan genuinitas untuk menyelami apa adanya, tanpa pretensi apa-apa, dan membiarkan serta memperlakukan sebagaimana adanya tampaknya akan lebih pas untuk jargon “memanusiakan manusia” yang seringkali pula saya dengar di psikologi. Esei “The End of Psychology” bukanlah judgement, penyembuhan, propaganda, apalagi manifesto. Ini hanyalah sebuah paparan pemikiran mengenai inkonsistensi logik yang sangat manusiawi untuk dipertanyakan (justru manusia sudah kehilangan kemanusiaannya jika tak mempertanyakan lagi inkonsistensi-inkonsistensi semacam ini). “The End of Psychology” bisa jadi merupakan gambaran sebuah “gaya” pendekatan manusia dalam psikologi yang membuat manusia mati dalam definisi yang semestinya gaya itu diakhiri; sekaligus awalan bagi munculnya “gaya” yang lebih menempatkan manusia dalam kemanusiaannya, yaitu ketakterbatasan, kesementaraan, dan pertumbuhan. Bagaimana cermatan anda? © Audifax – 12 Oktober 2005 CATATAN-CATATAN: [1] Peneliti; Institut Ilmu Sosial Alternatif (IISA)-Surabaya [2] Muhammad Al-Fayyadl; (2005); Derrrida; Yogyakarta: LKIS; hal.150 [3] Immo Pekkarinen; The Many Faces of Woman-The Place of Woman in Emmanuel Levinas´s Totality and Infinity; retrieved 6 Oktober 2005 pukul 18.05 WIB; online documents: http://www.saunalahti.fi/immopek/elevinasa.htm [4] Hans-Georg Gadamer; (2004); Kebenaran dan Metode; saduran Ahmad Saidah; Yogyakata: Pustaka Pelajar; hal 4 http://groups.yahoo.com/group/debat-alkitab/message/15533, diakses 30 Agustus 2010.  Quotations of Emmanuel Levinas and “the face of the Other” by: Bruce Young The following consists of quotations that help illuminate what Levinas means by “the face of the Other.” Two comments first, though: (1) “Other” (sometimes capitalized, sometimes not) usually translates the French word autrui, which means “the other person,” “someone else” (i.e., other than oneself). It is thus the personal other, the other person, whoever it is, that each of us encounters directly or experiences the traces of every day. Of course, we encounter a multiplicity of others, but Levinas more often uses the singular “other” to emphasize that we encounter others one at a time, face to face. (2) By “face” Levinas means the human face (or in French, visage), but not thought of or experienced as a physical or aesthetic object. Rather, the first, usual, unreflective encounter with the face is as the living presence of another person and, therefore, as something experienced socially and ethically. “Living presence,” for Levinas, would imply that the other person (as someone genuinely other than myself) is exposed to me and expresses him or herself simply by being there as an undeniable reality that I cannot reduce to images or ideas in my head. This impossibility of capturing the other conceptually or otherwise indicates the other’s “infinity” (i.e., irreducibility to a finite [bounded] entity over which I can have power). The other person is, of course, exposed and expressive in other ways than through the literal face (e.g., through speech, gesture, action, and bodily presence generally), but the face is the most exposed, most vulnerable, and most expressive aspect of the other’s presence. QUOTATIONS FROM LEVINAS (short version): The face is a living presence; it is expression. . . . The face speaks. (Totality and Infinity 66) Expression, or the face, overflows images. (Totality and Infinity 297) The face of the Other at each moment destroys and overflows the plastic image it leaves me, the idea existing to my own measure. . . . It expresses itself. (Totality and Infinity 50-51) . . . the face is present in its refusal to be contained. (Totality and Infinity 194) The face resists possession, resists my powers. (Totality and Infinity 197) . . . the face speaks to me and thereby invites me to a relation . . . (Totality and Infinity 198) [T]he face [is] a source from which all meaning appears. (Totality and Infinity 297) The face opens the primordial discourse whose first word is obligation. (Totality and Infinity 201) [T]he Other faces me and puts me in question and obliges me. (Totality and Infinity 207) [T]he face is what forbids us to kill. (Ethics and Infinity 86) In front of the face, I always demand more of myself. (“Signature” 294 in Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism) The skin of the face is that which stays most naked, most destitute. . . . [T]here is an essential poverty in the face; the proof of this is that one tries to mask this poverty by putting on poses, by taking on a countenance. The face is exposed, menaced. . . . (Ethics and Infinity 86) The being that expresses itself imposes itself, but does so precisely by appealing to me with its destitution and nudity--its hunger--without my being able to be deaf to that appeal. (Totality and Infinity 200) [T]he Other manifests itself by the absolute resistance of its defenceless eyes. . . . The infinite in the face . . . brings into question my freedom, which is discovered to be murderous and usurpatory. (“Signature” 294 in Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism) . . . the face presents itself, and demands justice. (Totality and Infinity 294) In the face the Other expresses his eminence, the dimension of height and divinity from which he descends. (Totality and Infinity 262) ************** QUOTATIONS FROM LEVINAS (long version): What we call the face is precisely this exceptional presentation of self by self. (Totality and Infinity 202) Expression, or the face, overflows images. (Totality and Infinity 297) The way in which the other presents himself, exceeding the idea of the other in me, we here name face. . . . The face of the Other at each moment destroys and overflows the plastic image it leaves me, the idea existing to my own measure. . . . It expresses itself. (Totality and Infinity 50-51) The face is a living presence; it is expression. The life of expression consists in undoing the form in which the existent, exposed as a theme, is thereby dissimulated. The face speaks. The manifestation of the face is already discourse. He who manifests himself comes, according to Plato’s expression, to his own assistance. He at each instant undoes the form he presents. (Totality and Infinity 66) The face is present in its refusal to be contained. (Totality and Infinity 194) The face resists possession, resists my powers. (Totality and Infinity 197) . . . the face speaks to me and thereby invites me to a relation . . . (Totality and Infinity 198) . . . the face brings the first signification (Totality and Infinity 207) [T]he face [is] a source from which all meaning appears. (Totality and Infinity 297) Meaning is the face of the Other, and all recourse to words takes place already within the primordial face to face of language. (Totality and Infinity 206) The face, preeminently expression, formulates the first word: the signifier arising at the thrust of his sign, as eyes that look at you. (Totality and Infinity 178) The face opens the primordial discourse whose first word is obligation. (Totality and Infinity 201) [T]he Other faces me and puts me in question and obliges me. (Totality and Infinity 207) [A]ccess to the face is straightaway ethical. . . . There is first the very uprightness of the face, its upright exposure, without defense. The skin of the face is that which stays most naked, most destitute. It is the most naked, though with a decent nudity. It is the most destitute also: there is an essential poverty in the face; the proof of this is that one tries to mask this poverty by putting on poses, by taking on a countenance. The face is exposed, menaced, as if inviting us to an act of violence. At the same time, the face is what forbids us to kill. (Ethics and Infinity 85-86) The first word of the face is the “Thou shalt not kill.” It is an order. There is a commandment in the appearance of the face, as if a master spoke to me. However, at the same time, the face of the Other is destitute; it is the poor for whom I can do all and to whom I owe all. (Ethics and Infinity 89) In front of the face, I always demand more of myself. (“Signature” 294 in Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism) [T]he Other manifests itself by the absolute resistance of its defenceless eyes. . . . [i.e., “The other person manifests himself by the absolute resistance of his defenceless eyes.”] . . . The infinite in the face . . . brings into question my freedom, which is discovered to be murderous and usurpatory. (“Signature” 294 in Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism) This gaze that supplicates and demands, that can supplicate only because it demands, deprived of everything because entitled to everything, and which one recognizes in giving (as one “puts the things in question in giving”)--this gaze is precisely the epiphany of the face as a face. The nakedness of the face is destituteness. To recognize the Other is to recognize a hunger. To recognize the Other is to give. But it is to give to the master, to the lord, to him whom one approaches as “You” in a dimension of height. It is in generosity that the world possessed by me--the world open to enjoyment--is apperceived from a point of view independent of the egoist position. The “objective” is not simply the object of an impassive contemplation. Or rather impassive contemplation is defined by gift, by the abolition of inalienable property. The presence of the Other is equivalent to this calling into question of my joyous possession of the world. (Totality and Infinity 75-76) [An] infinite resistance to murder, . . . firm and insurmountable, gleams in the face of the Other, in the total nudity of his defenceless eyes, in the nudity of the absolute openness of the Transcendent. (Totality and Infinity 199) . . . the face presents itself, and demands justice. (Totality and Infinity 294) The being that expresses itself imposes itself, but does so precisely by appealing to me with its destitution and nudity--its hunger--without my being able to be deaf to that appeal. Thus in expression the being that imposes itself does not limit but promotes my freedom, by arousing my goodness. . . . The face opens the primordial discourse whose first word is obligation, which no “interiority” permits avoiding. . . . The will is free to assume this responsibility in whatever sense it likes; it is not free to refuse this responsibility itself; it is not free to ignore the meaningful world into which the face of the Other has introduced it. (Totality and Infinity 200, 201, 218-19) The being that presents himself in the face comes from a dimension of height, a dimension of transcendence whereby he can present himself as a stranger without opposing me as obstacle or enemy. (Totality and Infinity 215) In the face the Other expresses his eminence, the dimension of height and divinity from which he descends. (Totality and Infinity 262) http://english2.byu.edu/faculty/youngb/levinas/face.pdf, diakses 28 Agustus 2010. 105 5