Emmanuel Levinas - A Response to Heidegger

Much of post-modern philosophy is a footnote to Martin Heidegger and his classic Being and Time. Despite his support of the Nazis, Heidegger remains one of the most important philosophers of the 20th century.

One of his students, Emmanuel Levinas, was eventually captured in the Second World War and sent to a concentration camp to do hard labor. But he also had time to read, study, and begin formulating a response to Heidegger.

From The New Humanist:

Emmanuel Levinas spoke scathingly of the “stupidity” and “pathos” of any endeavour to relate his life meaningfully in a linear narrative. In his book Difficult Liberty, he briskly recounts a rough sequence of events that coloured his personal and intellectual development: reading Pushkin, Tolstoy, and the Hebrew Bible during his childhood in Lithuania; the Bolshevik Revolution; philosophical studies in Freiburg; captivity during the Second World War; distinguished professorships at Poitiers, the Sorbonne, and so on. Nevertheless, these loose threads were bound together by a single cataclysmic theme: “This disparate inventory,” he concluded, “…is dominated by the presentiment and the memory of the Nazi horror.”

Nor was his most abstract philosophical thought unaffected. As circumstance would have it, the most profound intellectual influence of his life, the German thinker Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), would also happen to be a Nazi who saw himself as no less than the official philosopher of the Third Reich, at whose hands Levinas would remain imprisoned for five years while the systematic murder of his people was carried out across Europe.

Despite his fate as a Jewish prisoner of war, Levinas saw Heidegger as a genius who must be answered rather than ignored or dismissed. While Heidegger sought to do away with the metaphysical tradition in Western philosophy that had evolved since Plato and replace with an ontology of being, Levinas wanted to restore some sense of human ethics.

In his 1961 masterpiece Totality and Infinity, Levinas argued that beyond ontology – the basics of existence – is an irreducible ethical sense that arises in us when we come “face to face” with “the Other”. It is experiential, and therefore transcends theorising – it just happens. This Other is always another person, and is always, Levinas says, “absolutely other”, always absolutely inscrutable. We can never objectify, theorise, or reduce the Other to a likeness of one’s self, or to an ontological category. We may meditate insularly on Being, but the Other always comes to us unexpectedly, and calls us out of ourselves and into an ethical confrontation. The unbridgeable gap between us gives rise to a “metaphysical desire” for discourse and reciprocity, which can never be completely fulfilled, but remains all the more powerful for that reason. We may choose to shun the call of the Other or to subject him to our will, but not even by murdering him can we dissolve the infinite gulf between us, and objectify him, as the Nazis attempted to do to European Jewry. And no matter how we may treat the Other, he is always justified in his existence, and speaks to an innate need in us to justify our own existence in his presence, for he is always higher than one’s self, is never subsumed by Being, and always remains outside any totalising mode of thought (such as Nazism). In this sense, the Other is “infinite”.

This inscrutability, and the sense of “infinity” that arises from it, is the fundamental experience from which all thought derives, and is the generator of our ethical feelings. Indeed, Levinas, in arguing that thought arises from ethics, and not vice versa, turned philosophy on its head, and as such is the humanist philosopher par excellence. He brought philosophy back from the realm of the lone thinker meditating dangerously on Being, to the experience of our fellow human being. Totality and Infinity, then, can be seen as a veritable humanist manifesto. Though not without its problems (many criticise, for example, the opacity of Levinas’s language when it comes to explaining just how it is that we know that this primordial experience is genuine or reliable), Levinas’s thought comprises the most comprehensive attempt yet to bring philosophy to bear upon the world of human relations. As such, it is ever more relevant to the current geopolitical morass, which, without a drastic reevaluation of our relation to our fellow human beings, is doomed to enact a repetition of the same old round of nationalism, theocratic fascism and ideological dogma.

This brief article doesn't get too much into detail, but I was drawn to it because it represents a direction in philosophy that I think remains largely marginal. A lot of current philosophers are caught up in deciphering the nature of consciousness, as though the mind exists in a vacuum.

But we are social beings, and a great deal of our humanity derives from our interactions with other human beings. From the moment we emerge from the womb, our lives are defined by the "Other." The first Other we encounter in any real sense is our mother (at least for most of us). From her we learn what relationships are and how they function (both good/healthy and bad/dysfunctional).

From then onward, our sense of self, our values, our likes and dislikes -- nearly everything about us -- is shaped by our relationships with others. This relationship to the Other begins with individuals (our family), then moves to our peers, then to the culture at large, and for most of us -- at some point and in some way -- to the nature of God, the ultimate Other.

And as Levinas suggests, it is from these relationships that our ethical sense develops, and from that sense, our thinking evolves. From Wikipedia:

Lévinas maintained that subjectivity was formed in and through our subjected-ness to the other. In this way, his effort was not to move away from traditional attempts to locate the other within subjectivity (this he agrees with), so much as his view was that subjectivity was primordially ethical and not theoretical. That is to say, our responsibility for-the-other was not a derivative feature of our subjectivity; instead, obligation founds our subjective being-in-the-world by giving it a meaningful direction and orientation. Lévinas's thesis "ethics is first philosophy", then, means that the traditional philosophical pursuit of knowledge is but a secondary feature of a more basic ethical duty to-the-other.

At some point I will have to read Totality and Infinity. If you want to know more about Levinas, I suggest the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy page devoted to him and his work.

Tags: Emmanuel Levinas, Response, Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, Nazism, New Humanist, Totality and Infinity, ethics, other, philosophy