[Doi 10.1007%2F978!94!007-0473-2_40] Bello, A. Ales; Antonelli, M.; Backhaus, G.; Balaban, O.; Baptis -- Phenomenology World-Wide Emmanuel Levinas- The Ethics of ВЂњFace to FaceвЂќThe

7/26/2019 [Doi 10.1007%2F978!94!007-0473-2_40] Bello, A. Ales; Antonelli, M.; Backhaus, G.; Balaban, O.; Baptis -- Phenom

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EMMANUEL LEVINAS:

THE

ETHICS

OF

"FACE

TO

FACE"(fHE RELIGIOUS TURN

409

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Sources

Ortega y Gasset, J. "Apuntes sobre el pensamiento, su teurgia y

su demiurgia", in his Obras Completas, Vol. V.

Ortega y Gas set, J. "Historia como sistema", Obras Completas,

Vol. VI.

Ortega y Gasset, J. "La idea de principia en Leibniz ... ", Obras

Completas, Vol. VIII.

Ortega y Gasset, J. Obras Completas. Madrid: Revista de

Occidente.

Ortega y Gasset, J. "Pro ogo para alemanes", Obras Completas,

Vol. VIII.

Ortega y Gas set,

J.

~ Q u e es el conocimiento?, Madrid: Revista

de Occidente/Alianza, 1984.

Ortega y Gasset, J.

~ Q u e

es filosoffa?", Obras Completas,

Vol. VII.

Ortega y Gasset,

J.

"Sobre el concepto de sensaci6n", Obras

Completas, Vol.

I.

Zubiri,

X.

El Sol, March

8,

1936.

Zubiri,

X.

Ensayo de una teona fenomenoldgica del juicio.

Madrid: 1923, p.

8.

Zubiri,

X.

Inteligencia sentiente, Madrid: Alianza, 1980.

Zubiri,

X.

Sobre Ia esencia. Madrid: Sociedad de Estudios y

Publicaciones, 1972

(4a

ed.).

Zubiri, X. Inteligencia y razon. Madrid: Alianza, 1983.

Secondary Literature

Benavides, M. De la ameba al monstruo propicio. Madrid:

UNAM, 1988.

EMMANUEL LEVINAS: THE ETHICS OF

FACE TO FACE /THE RELIGIOUS TURN

INTRODUCTION

In

the preface

to

The Phenomenological Movement: A

Historical Introduction,

Herbert Spiegelberg acknowl

edges

that the main

innovation

of the

third edition to

his

work is the inclusion

of

a new chapter on

Emmanuel

Levinas. Spiegelberg

states:

Previously Levinas had been mentioned only in his

historical role as one of the early links between French

and German

phenomenology and as a co-translator of

Husserl's Cartesian Meditations into French. Only a brief

note in the Supplement had hinted at his independent

philosophical development. Now his academic rise and an

additional major work have made it clear that his thought

and especially his original type of phenomenology call for

fuller treatment. (xliii)

Cerezo, P. La voluntad de aventura. Barcelona: Ariel, 1984.

Conill,

J.

El crepusculo de la metafzsica. Barcelona: Anthropos,

1988.

Conill,

J

El enigma del animal fantdstico. Madrid: Tecnos,

1991.

Conill,

J.

El poder de la mentira. Nietzsche y Ia pol{tica de

la

transvaloracion. Madrid: Tecnos, 1997.

Fowler, Th. B. "Introduction to the Philosophy of X. Zubiri",

The X. Zubiri Review

1(1998), pp. 5-16.

Garragorri, Paulino. "Nota preliminar" in

J.

Ortega y Gasset,

Investigaciones psicoldgicas, Madrid: 1979.

Gracia, D. Voluntad de verdad. Barcelona: Labor, 1986.

Marias, J. Ortega. Circunstancia y vocaci6n. Madrid: Revista de

Occidente, 1973.

Orringer, N. Ortega y sus fuentes germdnicas. Madrid: Gredos,

1979.

Pintor,

A.

"El magisterio intelectual de Ortega y

Ia

filosoffa de

Zubiri", Cuadernos salmantinos de filosofza 0 (1983), 55-78;

Pintor, A. "Zubiri y Ia fenomenologfa", Realitas III-IV (1979),

389-565.

Pintor,

A.

"La 'maduraci6n' de Zubiri y

Ia

fenomenologfa",

Naturaleza y Gracia XXVI/2-3 (1979), 299-353.

Pintor,

A.

Realidad y verdad. Salamanca: Universidad Pontifica,

1994.

Regalado,

A.

El laberinto de Ia razon: Ortega y Heidegger.

Madrid: Alianza, 1990.

San Martin,

J.

(ed.). Ortega y

la

Fenomenologza. Madrid:

UNED, 1992.

Spiegelberg, H. The Phenomenological Movement. A Historical

Introduction. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1969 (2. ed.).

Levinas' rise

to a position of eminence within the

international philosophical world has been further con

firmed

since Spiegelberg

wrote

these

words in 1982.

The

place Levinas now occupies within the history

of

the phe

nomenological

movement

is

unquestionably

one of the

highest importance. In his Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas,

Jacques Derrida accurately gives us a sense

of

the enor

mity

ofLevinas's

a?uvre: It is so large that one no longer

glimpse

its

edges One can predict with confidence that

centuries

of

readers

will

set

this as their task"

(3-4). One

of

the

most

lucid and coherent expositions

of

Levinas'

thought can be found in Stephan

Strasser's

essay

"Emmanuel

Levinas:

Phenomenological Philosophy,"

excerpted and translated by Spiegelberg,

and included in

the

third edition. However, Levinas continued to write

and

publish important

work in

the

decade

postdating the

Spiegelberg

volume.

Although

at

times the reader will

notice some factual corrections, the present essay is

not

an

A. A. Bello et al., Phenomenology World-Wide

Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2002


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410 EMMANUEL LEVINAS: THE ETHICS OF "FACE TO FACE" THE RELIGIOUS TURN

attempt to improve upon Strasser's piece, but rather to

include material that postdates his publication and to offer

an alternative reading

of

Levinas based in part upon his

later writings. The more recent material published by and

about Levinas indicates more clearly the way in which

Levinas understood his own philosophical itinerary.

Additionally, since the time

of

Strasser's publication,

Levinas, through a series

of

interviews, revealed some

of the elements of his biography that bear upon his phi

losophy, and therefore are also included here. While his

specifically Jewish writings are not considered as a

separate subject, the path that he so often describes as

"otherwise than Greek," including the relevance

of

his

reflections on the Talmud for his ethics are here introduced.

The originality

of

Levinas' s thinking, his use

of

language, and the richness

of

his phenomenological

descriptions do not easily yield a summary of his research.

Given the enormity

of

his philosophical task, his work has

already been subjected to a variety

of

interpretations,

responses, and applications. As Levinas' s thought con

tinues to be recognized as one that challenges every stu

dent

of

phenomenology, the secondary literature has

grown exponentially in the past two decades. A selective

bibliography of primary and secondary sources can be

found appended to this article. A glossary

of

some

of

the

key terms introduced by Levinas is also included.

BIOGRAPHY

The life of Emmanuel Levinas was affected and shaped

by some of the epochal events of the twentieth century.

His own thinking may be viewed in part as a response to

the crises and catastrophes that produced so much suf

fering in the world around him. Regarding his own phi

losophic biography Levinas writes a single statement that

is to remain permanently associated with his life and

work:

It

is dominated by the presentiment and the

memory of the Nazi horror" ("Signature" 291).

Levinas was born in Kovno, Lithuania, on January 12th

1906. Kovno had for centuries been recognized as one

of

the main centers

of

Talmudic scholarship, and Levinas's

childhood was dominated by a traditional Jewish atmos

phere that was itself a way of life. His father, Yechiel,

owned a bookshop, and Levinas's relation to books was

first nourished here. He learned to read the Jewish Bible

in the Hebrew language in which he was tutored.

Reflecting back on the Judaism of his childhood, Levinas

describes it in the following way: "the spiritual

essence

and this remains a quite 'Lithuanian

Judaism'-rested

for

me not in mystical modes but in a tremendous curiosity

for books"

(Elevations

116).

Levinas's family was forced to leave Lithuania in

1915, along with the other Jews

of

the Kovno district, as a

result

of

an edict from the Czarist government. The fol

lowing year, the family settled in Karkhov, Ukraine,

where Levinas attended public high school.

It

was from

this distance that Levinas witnessed the disintegration

of

the Czarist regime and the beginning of the Soviet

Revolution. In the aftermath

of

the Revolution, civil war

ensued, accompanied by outbreaks of anti-Semitism that

engulfed the Ukraine. These orchestrated pogroms, led by

the Ukrainian nationalist Semeon Petlura, resulted in the

murder

of

over 100,000 Jews. While the Levinas family

survived this upheaval, they chose to return in 1920 to the

familiarity and comparative safety of Lithuania.

Levinas remained in Kovno for the next three years

where he enrolled as a student in a Jewish Russian

Language Gymnasium.

It

was during this time that he

developed an abiding love for the Russian classics, from

Pushkin to Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, and also "the great

writers

of

Western Europe, notably Shakespeare" whose

descriptions of human existence prepared him for his

encounter with philosophy

(Ethics and Infinity

22). These

initial pre-philosophical experiences he would subse

quently regard as a first contact with "the meaning of the

human" (ibid). In 1923, Levinas left Kovno and enrolled

at the University

of

Strasbourg. It was at this time that he

absorbed the French language as his own, while also

devoting himself to the study of German and Latin.

During the same period, he met and was befriended by

Maurice Blanc hot, who later emerged as one

of

France's

eminent literary critics. Blanchot would remain a life

long source

of

intellectual inspiration for Levinas, and

Levinas in turn would leave his mark upon the writings

of

Blanchot.

Levinas first became interested in Husserl's phenom

enology in 1927. He traveled to the University of Freiburg

for the academic year 1928-29, where he studied with

Husserl, who was teaching his last public course, and with

Heidegger, who was teaching his first courses at Freiburg,

and "who was then the leading light in German phe

nomenology and philosophy"

(Face to Face with Levinas

14). In 1929, Heidegger singled out Levinas to serve as

his second in his famous debate at Davos with Ernst

Cassirer, the eminent Kant scholar. At that time,

as

Levinas later remarked, "My admiration for Heidegger is

above all an admiration for

Sein und Zeit.

I always try to

relive the ambience

of

those readings when 1933 was still

unthinkable"

(Ethics and Infinity

33). While Levinas

would always retain his admiration for Heidegger as the

author

of Being and Time,

he would later regret the

assistance which he had given him in light

of

Heidegger's


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EMMANUEL LEVINAS: THE ETHICS OF "FACE TO FACE"{I'HE RELIGIOUS TURN 411

subsequent political

act1v1ty.

Heidegger' s involvement

with the Nazi regime would force Levinas to reformulate

the foundational importance

of

ethics to philosophy.

In 1930, Levinas published his prizewinning doctoral

dissertation:

The Theory

of

Intuition in Husser ' s Phe

nomenology.

During this time, he married Raissa Levy, a

childhood friend. He became a naturalized citizen of

France and received a position in the French army.

Throughout most

of

the 1930s, Levinas worked as a

teacher and administrator at the Alliance Israelite

Universelle, a French-Jewish organization dedicated to

the education

of

Jews in countries under the influence

of

France, especially in North Africa.

Levinas served in the French army as a translator

of

German and Russian. With the help

of

Maurice Blanchot,

Levinas s wife and daughter escaped from Paris to

Orleans, where they were given refuge in a monastery.

Levinas's entire family

of

origin, including his mother, his

father, and his brothers, were murdered by the Nazis and

their collaborators in Lithuania. Levinas himself was

captured and transported to a prisoner-of-war camp for

French Jewish soldiers near Hanover, Germany, where he

performed forced labor. In

Difficult Freedom,

Levinas

comments on his incarceration, and acknowledges that the

French uniform protected him and the seventy in his unit

of

Jewish prisoners-of-war from Hitlerian extermination.

He recalls that "the other men, called free, who had

dealings with us or gave us work or orders or even a

smile-and the children and women who passed by and

sometimes raised their eyes stripped us of our human

skin." The only creature who recognized the prisoners as

human beings was a dog. Levinas explains: "He would

appear at morning assembly and was waiting for us upon

return jumping

up

and down and barking with

delight . . . For him, there was no doubt that we were

men . . . This dog was the last Kantian in Nazi Germany,

without the brain needed to universalize maxims and

drives" (152-53). Levinas' subsequent philosophical

reflections on the Holocaust are born

of

these searing

personal experiences and observations.

After his liberation, Levinas produced three important

works in quick succession:

Existence and Existents,

begun

in the stalag; Time and the Other; and Discovering Exis

tence with Husser and Heidegger.

These works represent

the emergence

of

Levinas' s own philosophic path. In the

late 1940s Levinas began to immerse himself in the study

of

the Talmudic texts in the presence

of

a master teacher,

Mordechai Shoushani. This period marks the beginning of

Levinas' philosophic recovery

of

the Hebraic tradition,

and the alternative approach to philosophy that he would

later inscribe in the phrase "Otherwise than Greek."

Levinas is not indifferent to the rich phenomenological

content

of

the Talmudic tradition which permitted him

over the course

of

the next many years to reflect on a

variety of subjects such as hunger and nourishment,

injustice and forgiveness, suffering and

redemption

subjects too often submerged in the history

of

philosophy.

However, Levinas tended to keep his philosophical and

Talmudic reflections quite separate, at least in an overt

sense, until after he had established himself as a philos

opher of the first order through the publication

of

Totality

and Infinity

and

Otherwise Than Being: Beyond Essence.

In 1951, Levinas authored the important article "Is

Ontology Fundamental?" representing his clearest break

with Heidegger as a philosopher. In 1961 he received his

first academic appointment at the University

of

Poitiers,

followed in 1967 by a position at Nan erre, a branch

of

the

University of Paris. In 1974, Levinas published Otherwise

than Being

which represents a radicalizing

of

his phe

nomenological work and ensured the international repu

tation that

Totality and Infinity

had already established.

His teaching career culminated in a position as Professor

of

Philosophy at the Sorbonne in 1973, where he con

tinued to teach and remained a Professor Emeritus until

1979. In 1986, Levinas published Of God Who Comes to

Mind,

a work that would serve to provide a new model for

the relation

of

philosophy to theology. In each of these

works, Levinas continued to propel the human subject

toward that which is beyond or outside

of

himself. By this

time, Levinas had demonstrated that there is a third

alternative between absolutism and the humanism

of

the

enlightenment, a theism that is also a radical humanism:

the humanism

of

the Other. During the last years

of

his

life Levinas taught at the lnstitut Catholique in Paris.

Levinas' s philosophic writings span over sixty years.

The originality and rigor

of

his thinking secured for

Levinas a position

of

eminence in Europe and continue

gain him ever greater recognition throughout the philo

sophic world. Levinas continued to write both new and

important philosophic texts in the last years

of

his life. In

addition, he produced a series

of

commentaries on the

Talmud and the status of morality, especially in light of

the Holocaust, and opened up new horizons for phe

nomenological inquiry. Emmanuel Levinas died in Paris

on the 25th

of

December 1995.

EXPLORATIONS IN PHENOMENOLOGY

When considering his philosophical influences, Levinas

singles out the great masters Plato, Descartes, and Kant,

and the twentieth-century luminaries Bergson, Husserl,

and Heidegger. The philosophy of Henri Bergson made a


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412

EMMANUEL LEVINAS: THE ETHICS OF "FACE TO FACE"{fHE RELIGIOUS TURN

strong impression on Levinas. In Face

to

Face with

Levinas, he observes: "In 1925, in Strasbourg University,

Bergson was being hailed as France's leading thinker."

Levinas credits Bergson's theory of concrete duration (la

duree concrete,

as a contribution to philosophy of lasting

importance. Levinas adds: "Indeed, it was this Bergsonian

emphasis on temporality that prepared the soil for the

subsequent implantation of Heideggerian phenomenology

into France" (13).

In Discovering Existence with Husser , Levinas gives a

clear indication

of

the importance that he attributes to the

work of Edmund Husserl. He refers to Husserl as the

creator of phenomenology and then describes its project:

Phenomenology means the science of phenomena.

All

things given, shown or revealed

to

our gaze are

phenomena. But then

is

everything a phenomenon

and every science a phenomenology? Not at

all.

What

is given

to

consciousness only deserves the name

phenomenon if one grasps it through the role it plays

and the function it exercises in the individual and

affective life of which it is the object.

(33)

Levinas makes it a point to place the philosophical

revolution affected by Husserlian phenomenology in a

historical perspective:

[phenomenology] reverses the scientific attitude.

Newton's physics precisely turns away from the subject

for the greater glory of the object.

t

decrees the

expulsion of every so-called subjective element from

the object. For example, it

wipes

out from space every

subjective heresy: "top" and "bottom: "righC and

"left: far and "near Thus purified, objective space

and the objective world

see

no limits to their ever-purer

objectivity. (33)

Here Levinas recognizes the existential importance of

the attempt by phenomenology to recover the meaning of

spatiality from its purified and overly reduced objectivism

where there would be neither a sense of direction or dis

tance or placement recognizable by and for the human

subject.

The immediate effect

of

the first phase

of

Levinas'

encounter with phenomenology in the early 1930s

resulted in the publication of translations and texts that

made Levinas the recognized authority in France on the

subject of phenomenology. These efforts include a col

laborative translation

of

Husserl's

Cartesian Meditations

and The Theory of Intuition in Husser ' s Phenomenology,

the first systematic examination

of

Husserl's thought in

French. This latter work also served as Levinas' s doctoral

dissertation. Levinas had already published a serious

study

of

Heidegger in

La Revue Philosophique

in 1932,

and it is clear that he was preparing to write a book-length

study following Heidegger's adaptation

of Husserl's phi

losophy. However, this project was put to the side with

Hitler' advent to power in 1933.

While Levinas continued to publ ish articles on Husserl

and Heidegger in the 1930s, he also authored "Some

Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism" in 1934.

Levinas had already begun to rethink his relation to

Heidegger, the philosopher whom one could not bypass in

the twentieth century if one were to aspire to do serious

work after the publication of

Being and Time.

In

Ethics

and Infinity, Levinas describes Heidegger's analysis in

Being in Time of "anxiety, care and being-toward

death... as a sovereign exercise of phenomenology"

(39). For Levinas, Heidegger's methodological contribu

tion consisted in

verbalizing

existence: "It aims at

describing man's being or existing, not his nature." In this

respect Levinas indicates that Heidegger expresses ele

ments

of

a philosophical anthropology that awakens

and delineates the awareness of the patterns of human

existence.

However convincing and brilliant Heidegger's analy

sis, Levinas, by steps almost imperceptible in the early

stages

of

his work in the thirties and forties, emerges as

Heidegger's most serious philosophic critic. Levinas' own

original thinking offers a radical alternative to Hei

degger's ontology of power. The project of fundamental

ontology becomes in Heidegger the consummate expres

sion of

a will-to-power unbounded by the other person's

claims. Subsequently, with the 1951 publication of "Is

Ontology Fundamental?" Levinas provides the first ser

ious critique of Heidegger's insistence that ultimate or

"first philosophy" is necessarily and inescapably ontol

ogy. Here Levinas introduces a metaphysical critique

of

ontology which yields the ethical relation to the Other as

irreducible and hence

of

unsurpassable importance. He

elevates discourse to a place of special significance. And

he criticizes the Hegelian notion

of

negation whose

existential expression reveals itself

as

murder.

Against Heidegger, Levinas argues that one's fear for

the other, for his death and therefore his life, takes pre

cedence even over concerns for one's own ultimate pos

sibilities. Surely there is an undeniable interweaving

of

Levinas' thinking with his life and the climate under

which his philosophy was nourished. Life is no longer to

be modeled after an existential autobiography in which

others merely make their appearances and recede. As

Levinas writes in "Signature:"

The fundamental experience which objective experi

ence

itself presupposes

is

the experience of the Other.

It

is experience par excellence. . . the disproportion


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EMMANUEL LEVINAS: THE ETHICS OF "FACE TO FACE"(fHE RELIGIOUS TURN

413

between the Other

and the

self

is

precisely moral

con-

sciousness. Moral consciousness

is

not an experience of

values but an access

to

external being: external being

is

par

excellence,

the Other. Moral consciousness is thus not

a modality of psychological consciousness, but its

condition.

(293)

For Levinas, the humanism

of

the other person is a

precondition for the possibility of philosophy, which in

tum forms a precondition for theory, and the responsi

bility that grounds consciousness.

LEVINAS' S PHILOSOPHICAL ITINERARY

In the preface to Existence and Existents, Levinas notes:

These studies begun before the war were continued and

written down for the most part

in

captivity. The stalag

is evoked here not

as

a guarantee of profundity nor

as

a claim to indulgence, but as an explanation for the

absence of any consideration of those philosophical

works published, with

so

much impact, between

1940

and

1945. (15)

In these revealing remarks, Levinas, in a sharp and

pointed manner, indicates that he will be charting his own

philosophic course. Muting his own personal reservations,

here, about the role

of

Heidegger' s collaboration with the

Nazis, Levinas is clearly announcing his own future

philosophical itinerary, while at the same time expressing

his recognition of the changing conditions under which

philosophy must begin to think anew. As if

to drive home

this point, Levinas states:

f

in the beginning our considerations

as

far

as

the

concept of ontology and the relation of man to Being

are concerned are inspired in a high measure by Martin

Heidegger's philosophy, they are [nevertheless] domi

nated

by

the deeply felt need to relinquish the climate

of this philosophy.

(91)

For Levinas, Heidegger's nihilism is situated ontically,

between the insensibility toward the death of the Other

and the totalitarian egocentrism inscribed in the arbi

trariness

of

the resoluteness

of

the will. The future

of

phenomenology in part depends on the critique

of

Hei

degger's presentation. The philosophic path which Levi

nas takes from the time of

the destruction

of

European

Jewry focuses on a critique, and at times an enlightenment

of the entire Western spiritual tradition.

Preparing the reader for his work in Time and the

Other, Levinas indicates the larger context within which

his original reflection moves by first situating his phe

nomenological exploration within the history of philoso

phy: "Traditional philosophy, and Bergson and Heidegger

too, remained with the conception of a time either taken to

be purely exterior to the subject, a time-object, or taken to

be entirely contained in the subject" (90). The path that

Levinas is about to chart will diverge not only from

Heidegger, but also from Greek philosophy:

Classical philosophy left aside the freedom which

consists not in negating oneself, but in having one's

being pardoned by the very alterity of the other. It

underestimated the alterity

of

the other in dialogue

where the other frees us, because it

is

believed there

existed a silent dialogue of the soul with itself. In the

end the problem of time

is

subordinate to the task of

bringing out the specific terms with which the dialogue

has to

be

conceived.

(90)

In order to bring out these specific terms, Levinas

introduces the phenomenon

of

the il

y a.

The il

y

a, or

"there is," is an endless sequence

of

instants without

direction, purpose or claiming power. The il

y

a is

described as the consciousness of horror, the depersonal

ization

of

the subject, and the experience

of

an inability to

escape from existence. f there were no relation between

the self and the other, the "the re is" would be completely

senseless. However, from the relation between the self

and the other arises the possibility of meaning, justice and

goodness. In Existence and Existents, Levinas begins to

explore a way

of

escaping the il

y

a through a description

of time and alterity. He asks:

How indeed could time arise in a solitary subject

. . .

if

time is constituted by my relation to the other, it

is

exterior to my instinct, but is also something else than

an object given to contemplation. The dialectic of time

is the very dialectic of the relationship of the other,

that

is,

a dialogue which in turn has to be studied in

terms other than those of the dialectic of the solitary

subject.

(93)

For Levinas, the diachronic nature of time makes time

and alterity virtually synonymous. Here, the notion

of

a

time that is not one, or "diachrony" emerges. In Time and

the Other, Levinas states that "time is not the achievement

of an isolated and lone subject, but that it is the very

relation

of

the subject with the other"

(39).

In this text,

Levinas lays claim to the originality

of

his presentation in

a critique which reaches all the way back to Parmenides

and Plato, and whose themes will dominate, in various

ways, much of the rest

of

his philosophical writings:

"There is a multiplicity and a transcendence in this verb

'to exist,' a transcendence that is lacking in even the

boldest, existential analysis" (91). Anticipating the more

metaphysical grounding

of

these concrete descriptions in

Totality and Infinity, Levinas emphasizes that "existing

itself becomes double. The Eleatic notion

of

being


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414

EMMANUEL LEVINAS: THE ETHICS OF "FACE TO FACE"{THE RELIGIOUS TURN

dominates Plato's philosophy, "where multiplicity was

subordinated to the one, and where the role of the femi

nine was thought within the categories

of

passivity and

activity and was reduced to matter" (92-93). As part of

his inquiry into the transcendence

of

being, Levinas refers

the reader to the concrete situations

of

death, sexuality,

paternity, femininity, and fecundity. He reminds the

reader that the phenomenon

of

fecundity has not pre

viously been treated in a philosophical manner, and that

this omission leaves out one

of

the irreducible phenomena

of

human existence: "The fecundity

of

the ego must be

appreciated at its correct ontological value, which until

now has never been done." Levinas presents paternity,

fecundity, femininity, and love as generative patterns of

human existence that are open to phenomenological

investigation. For example, the child is a paradox that

formal logic cannot explain. The child both is and is not

a continuation of the parent. In this respect the child repre

sents an irreducible existent not completely reducible to

genetics or biology with an identity to claim as its own.

Just as Levinas raises birth to a philosophic category,

so

too does he register the death

of

the other as being

phenomenologically irreducible. In this respect he challen

ges Heidegger's understanding

of

human finitude and his

notion that authenticity does not permit us to register the

deaths of others as something outside of our own projects.

In fact, for Levinas, the death

of

the other, and therefore

the life

of

the other can take precedence over the possi

bility of one's own death and at times one's own life?

Totality and Infinity

The publication

of

Totality and Infinity: An Essay on

Exteriority in 1961 provided a vital new direction for

phenomenology. Totality and Infinity represents the cul

mination of Levinas' s independent philosophical positions

and delineates his rethinking

of

the relation of time and

alterity, ethics and ontology, self and other, justice and

freedom. Levinas became the first phenomenological

philosopher to offer a distinctly alternative approach to

a field whose underpinnings remained dependent on

Heidegger's fundamental ontology. Some

of

these origi

nal departures are noted in John Wild 's Introduction to the

English edition of Totality and Infinity. In Totality and

Infinity, Levinas embarks upon what Wild characterizes

as a "phenomenology of the other" (13). In so doing,

Levinas, while building on the work

of

Husserl, recog

nizes and responds to the egocentrism with which phe

nomenology had been charged. He reaffirms the priority

of

the existent over existence. For Levinas, it is the Other

as

existent who now occupies a position of primacy.

In this sense, Levinas could be interpreted as elevating the

"ontic" over the ontological.

I t

is in the elaboration

of

the ethical character

of

Levinas' metaphysics that Totality and Infinity marks a

new chapter in the history

of

the phenomenological

movement. While Sartre and Merleau-Ponty had each

contributed valuable and creative descriptions

of

human

existence, metaphysics, as envisioned by Levinas, takes a

position beyond and outside

of

Being.

It

begins with a

relation to the Infinite that cannot be reabsorbed into

Being. For Levinas, metaphysics arises and is maintained

in desire, a desire that cannot be reduced to need. Need

belongs within a system of ontological reference, where

each being is the bearer

of

meaning. The preface to Tot

ality and Infinity shows Levinas linking his metaphysical

undertaking to the phenomenon of morality, describing

its conditions for appearing, and attaching existential

importance to the subject: "Everyone will readily agree

that it is

of

the highest importance to know whether or not

we are duped by morality" (21). Levinas appears to be

asking whether or not morality is irreducible, despite war,

which vitiates its application; despite commerce, in which

subjects become commodities; or despite administration

that would subsume all subjects, in advance, as objects or

data exhausted in their quantification. An irreducible

phenomenon

of

morality would mean that morality cannot

be reduced to politics, or human beings reduced to bearers

of historical meaning or sociological function. The other

cannot be reducible to the self, nor can infinity be

encapsulated within totality. Establishing this position is

the work that Levinas undertakes in Totality and Infinity.

Levinas begins his phenomenological investigation

with an exposition and critique

of

totality, while posi

tioning the sameness that dominates totality in relation to

the otherness that derives from infinity. These formal

categories

of

metaphysics, with their roots in the thought

of Plato and Aristotle, are immediately endowed by

Levinas with a concrete sense

of

urgency and existential

importance. Levinas argues that an ontology of power is

subsumed under totality:

t

establishes an order from which no one can keep his

distance; nothing henceforth

is

exterior. War does not

manifest exteriority and the other as other; it destroys

the identity of the same. The visage of being that shows

itself in war is fixed in the concept

of

totality, which

dominates Western philosophy. (21)

Levinas argues and affirms an alternative version of

philosophy in which reason cannot be employed on behalf

of injustice. He presents significant variations on the


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EMMANUEL LEVINAS: THE ETHICS OF "FACE TO FACE"{rHE RELIGIOUS TURN

415

ontology presented by Heidegger in

Being and Time

and

positions his thinking outside Heidegger's ontological

paradigm altogether.

The break with ontology makes it possible for Levinas

to investigate a variety of phenomena in a new way.

Levinas takes pains to describe phenomena such as the

home, the face, and the welcome that have for the most

part been previously overlooked. He also argues against

Heidegger that such phenomena are not reducible to tools

or implements, nor are they describable only within the

realm

of

projects for the self. These new phenomen

ological categories are essential to Levinas s critique

of

Heidegger and to his endeavor to situate ethics as first

philosophy.

The home, as described by Levinas, makes it possible

for interior life to go on. "The privileged role

of

the home

does not consist in being the end of human activity but in

being its condition, and in this sense its commencement.

The recollection necessary for nature to be able to be

represented and worked over, for it to first take form as a

world, is accomplished

as

the home" (152). The home

appears to enjoy an irreducible ontological status for

Levinas. The home does more than shelter the self from

the elements.

It

secures for the separated self a sense

of

stability, and interiority, where one can recover one's

sense

of

personal identity interrupted by sojourns through

the world.

The human face plays a central part in Levinas'

depiction

of

ethics. He shows how the face is connected to

ethics, reason, discourse, signification, and objectivity.

Levinas's contribution to raising the phenomenon

of

the

face to a philosophical category has both epistemic and

ethical dimensions. Epistemically, it is impossible for

one person to speak to another without making implied

or tacit reference to the human face.

It

is impossible for

anyone to understand anyone else, or for the speaker to

know if the meaning

of

what he has said was understood

without turning toward the face

of

the other. Here, the

other may be absent or present, the face turned toward

or away. Anonymous reason unattended by the human

face is incapable

of

rendering itself into the personal, the

singular, and the temporal dimensions

of

human exis

tence. Prior to speech with the other is the face-to-face

encounter.

I t

is here that original expression arises prior

to any language. It is from the face

of

the other that an

appeal prior to thematization appears. This appeal arises

in "the uprightness

of

the face, its upright exposure

without defense" (86). The face is the source

of

original

expression mandating a relation that opens the realm

of

the ethical. The face is

as

necessary for meaning as

the category

of

quantity is for counting. In Ethics and

Infinity

Levinas refers to the expression

of

the face as

"signification without context" (86). In this respect

Levinas begins to explore a distinctively non-intentional

consciousness. This is to say that for Levinas there is a

consciousness which exceeds the object

of

which it is

aware, or to put it in more Husserlian language, a

noesis

which goes beyond the object to be known, the

noema.

Like the home and the face, Levinas elevates the

phenomenon

of

hospitality to a metaphysical category

with vital ethical implications for the relation

of

the self

to the other. Hospitality arises as the welcoming

of

the

other to the home without divesting the other

of

his or her

alterity. The welcome is the first act of discourse where

the "I" turns toward the other, thus making the self

receptive to his speaking. The "welcome," then, is the

invitation to language. For Levinas, the welcoming

of

the other, generosity and shame before the other, are no

longer treated

as

pre-philosophic layers

of

human exis

tence but as transcendental conditions necessary for the

establishing

of

just discourse with the other. The welcome

also suggests a dimension

of

moral height, the asymmetry

that favors the other over the self, thereby wakening

the self to a sense

of

responsibility for the other. For

Levinas, the other has priority over the self, and through

discourse the self is summoned to justify itself before

the other.

Here Levinas reveals the necessity of rethinking the

unannounced premise that spontaneity is at the core of

human freedom. He searches for an alternative description

of

human freedom that necessitates a critique

of

sponta

neity, that is,

of

arbitrary self-assertion in relation to the

other. Spontaneity is the absolutely free exercise of one's

will, power, and self-assertion. Its unchecked expression

may serve to menace, dominate, or subordinate the other.

Levinas associates the phenomenon of spontaneity

understood as absolute freedom with the ontology

of

power. "Political theory derives justice from the undis

closed value

of

spontaneity; its problem is to ensure, by

way of knowledge of the world, the most complete

exercise of spontaneity by reconciling my freedom with

the freedom of others"(83). The calling into question of

spontaneity by the other is for Levinas the way that one

first stumbles upon ethics. In a stunning reversal of

modem philosophical thinking, Levinas argues that jus

tice precedes freedom. This

tum

arises, in part, because

only a just relation with the other makes discourse pos

sible. Freedom, then, for Levinas, is understood as

invested in justice, which delimits it and makes it possible

and meaningful.

Phenomenologically, justice has an epistemic as well

as an ethical dimension. According to Levinas, the

"I"


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420


the "for-the-other" emerges completely. This is a primary

thesis

of

Otherwise than Being.

For Levinas, subjectivity and alterity are spoken

together. In his exploration

of

the diachronic relation with

the other, Levinas moves beyond the reach

of

Rosenz

weig's speaking-thinking and concerns himself with the

origins

of

the phenomenon

of

speech before it is deposited

in the lapidary language

of

the said.

Levinas argues that it is proximity that binds sensibility

to sense. As Levinas puts it, proximity "is to be described

as extending the subject in its very subjectivity, which is

both a relationship and a term

of

that relationship" (86).

Here, Levinas introduces the phenomenon

of

obsession.

It

is only as proximity besieges the subject that the abso

lutely exterior other is near to the point

of

obsession.

Obsession for Levinas is a complete passivity, a rendering

into the grammatical and existential mode

of

the accusa

tive. Obsession renders the subject infinitely responsible,

beyond its own intentions, even for what it does not

will. In the concrete sense, this means, for Levinas, that I

bear a responsibility for what others do, even against me,

in the persecution I am forced to undergo. In

Levinas, an

Introduction,

Colin Davis explains this succinctly in the

following way: "I am persecuted because I cannot escape

the dominance

of

the other person over me" (80).

It

is the

recurring character of obsession that breaks open the limits

of

identity. Levinas writes, "This wound in the subject,

that begins in sensibility, opens me to responsibility for

the other" (120). Sensibility, rather than merely referring

to the first registering

of

neutral sensory experience, is

now reconceived in a more radical way as a susceptibility,

a vulnerability, and an exposure to the Other.

It

is through

this exposure that one begins to configure, perceive, and

give sense to one's cognitive life.

The phenomenon

of

responsibility does not displace

the central role that justice plays in Totality and Infinity.

Rather, responsibility occupies an ongoing, almost

incessant place in language. Levinas argues that to speak,

at its pre-original level, is to be responsible for others. The

reestablishing

of

the saying in the said makes it possible

to found economic, legal, and social justice. This, in turn,

makes room for a kind

of

justice for the self as well as the

other, the neighbor and the third party. The rationality of

transcendence has been broached by Levinas through

phenomenology.

I t

presents "the defection of identity . . .

as a for-the-other in the midst

of

identity: it is the inver

sion

of

being into time, the subversion

of

essence begins

to signify before being, the disinterestedness

of

essence"

(153). Before moving back to the conjuncture

of

respon

sibility with justice from the saying to the said, the

anarchic character of responsibility prior to commitment

without a present, without an ongm, must be further

exposed. This occurs through the "iteration of exposure

. . .

as expression, sincerity

as

saying

. . .

"

(Otherwise than

Being 153). In this saying the said begins to emerge

through re-iteration always moving first to what is

furthest, to the third party who is other to the neighbor

and therefore makes justice for me also possible.

Toward the close

of Otherwise than Being,

Levinas

makes it clear what it means to speak as an ethical subject

in the first person singular. He does so by interrupting his

own philosophic discourse in the following statement:

"And I still interrupt the ultimate discourse in which all

the discourses are stated, in saying it to one that listens to

it, and who is situated outside the said that the discourse

says, outside all it includes. That

is

true

of

the discussion I

am elaborating at this very moment" (170). Levinas, here,

indicates that in Otherwise than Being he has been

speaking philosophy to the reader and to the other.

Levinas characterizes his phenomenology

of

transcend

ence, that is, philosophy, as a "fine risk" (170).

This does not mean that Levinas has absolved himself

of

the necessity for explaining keeping the relation

between the self, the other, the neighbor, and the third

person. The infinite responsibility of the saying must be

reinstalled within the language

of

totality,

of

the said, if

just institutions are to be possible in this world. However,

the relation between the other and the third person is one

of

synchrony where coming together, reasoning together,

and creating a peaceful and stable society is realized. The

presence

of

the third person forces a common discourse.

The third person preconditions the neighbor and the other,

thus making room for me also, for my claims, for a

symmetry in which democratic forms express themselves.

However, it is in this sense that we may say that language

arises posterior to expression with the appearance

of

the

third person. Such synchrony is required to give just

institutions continuity, stability, and coherence. This does

not mean that Levinas reverts to the realm of totality in

which the subject might free itself

of

the position

of

infinite responsibility. On the contrary, it is from the

saying that the said can emerge and maintain itself. It is

from the time

of

diachrony that the time

of

synchrony

makes simultaneity and the time

of

sociality possible.

Justice, in its turn, must be rendered finite in order to

realize itself. However, in order for justice to appear, it

must reflect the conjuncture

of

peace and reason that

issues from the expression

of

the face

of

the other.

Levinas describes the relation between responsibility and

justice by reintroducing the phenomenon of the third

person. Levinas calls the "illeity

of

the third person," the

condition for the irreversibility

of

time.


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EMMANUEL LEVINAS: THE ETHICS OF "FACE TO FACE" {THE RELIGIOUS TURN

421

PHENOMENOLOGY OF TRANSCENDENCE

In the preface to the second edition

of

Of God Who Comes

to Mind

(1986) Levinas acknowledges that he has been

reproached for not taking up questions

of

theology. He

responds:

We

think, however, that theological recuperation

comes after the glimpse of holiness, which

is

primary.

This is all the more true that

we

belong to a

generation-and to a century-for which

was

reserved

the pitiless trials of ethics without consolation or

promises; and because it

is

impossible-for us, the

survivors-to witness against holiness,

in

seeking after

its conditions. (ix-x)

Here, Emmanuel Levinas appears to be searching for

the conditions of holiness just as he previously sought to

describe the conditions

of

knowledge and ethics. Is it

possible, then, to speak in the language of transcendence

without recourse to onto-theo-logy? Levinas does not, he

insists, take leave completely from phenomenology. In

fact, in Of God Who Comes to Mind, Levinas asserts that

his inquiry into the holy may be understood as philosophy

in the strict sense. How is this possible?

It

is through the approach

of

phenomenology that

Levinas moves to metaphysics: the beyond

of

being. At

the core

of

the argument in "God and Philosophy," the

centerpiece

of

Of

God Who Comes to Mind,

Levinas takes

issue with the position that the approach to the God of

philosophy and to "the God

of

Abraham, Isaac, and

Jacob" cannot be reconciled. He argues that such oppo

sition is itself philosophically based upon ontological

categories wherein the phenomenon of Transcendence

cannot be approached. Levinas searches for a way that

does not commit what we might call the ontological

fallacy, a problem to overcome for theology as well

as

philosophy. As Levinas notes, this obstacle is

inscribed within the history

of

philosophy: "the history

of

Western philosophy has been a destruction

of

trans

cendence" (56).

In philosophical discourse prior to Levinas, God can be

thought

of

only as the exception to the categories gov

erning an ontology of immanence and this Exception must

itself be situated within the move or "gesture

of

Being."

God, then, is reduced to a being within the unfolding

gesture of Being. Rational theology depends upon the

same kind of error that it originally sets out to rectify.

If

the intellection

of

the biblical God, theology, does not

reach the level

of

philosophic thought, it is . . . because in

thematizing God, theology has brought him into the

course

of

being, while the God

of

the Bible signifies in an

unlikely manner the beyond

of

being, or transcendence"

(56). Here, Levinas concludes that the "faith" of rational

theology-however unknowingly-has tied itself to the

imperfect opinions

of

an uncritical, philosophical ontol

ogy. In other words, Levinas rejects the opposition

between the God

of

philosophy and the God

of

the Bible,

thus putting the reader on notice that he is searching for an

alternative approach to transcendence.

For Levinas, rational theology reduces transcendence

to complete intelligibility or dogma. While Levinas

rejects such a reduction, he nonetheless proposes an

ethical-religious stance that obligates the self in relation

to the other. An extreme vigilance that expresses itself

in what Levinas calls "insomnia" would be the "I" in a

state of wakefulness resisting the fall into the impersonal

matrix

of

being. This condition, not to be confused with

the inability to sleep, is a readiness to be called by and

made answerable to the other.

"Insomnia," understood as vigilance for-the-other,

permits otherness-in-sameness as a non-alienating con

sciousness. Levinas insists that insomnia, understood as a

primarily ethical meta-category, is irreducible. Trans

muted into wakefulness it appears without intentionality.

Levinas refers to this wakefulness as "a non-content"

Infinity (59). Wakefulness without intentionality emerges

as dis-interestedness. This breaks the simultaneity

of

consciousness resting within itself. In this way it differs

dramatically from reminiscence. Here, Levinas intimates

a critique

of

the Platonic doctrine

of

anamnesis. "Remi

niscence is the extreme consciousness that is also uni

versal presence and ontology " (60). This description

of

the hold that "universal presence and ontology" enjoys

in the West extends, with variations, for Levinas from

Plato to Husser . In order to explore Levinas's view fur

ther, it necessary to consider being as pure act, i.e., "pure

presence" for Aristotle, the sense

of

self-presence that

accompanies the "I think" in Kant's transcendental unity

of

apperception, and the doctrine of intentionality in

Husser where intelligibility or meaning is rediscovered

completely in consciousness present to itself. Common to

all these positions is the refusal to break with immanence,

and therefore an absence of Transcendence.

Levinas' s philosophic move toward transcendence calls

not for the abandonment

of

phenomenology, but rather for

pushing the phenomenological approach to its limits.

Levinas achieves this end by beginning with what is

already beyond the finite, thus making it possible to speak

philosophy in terms

of

the criteria

of

measure, order and

sense. This requires an ongoing "deformalization of time"

as Levinas calls it. Only by beginning with the Infinite do

the contours

of

the finite begin to emerge. How then does

the Infinite appear? For Levinas, the infinite appears as a


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422


"trace" that has already pierced the simultaneity

of

self

presence.

It

is the past, or more precisely the trace

of

the

present in the past, that positions the "I" in the realm

of

the accusative. This means, therefore, that my responsi

bility extends beyond my own intentions, beyond my

own consciousness

of

the past. The "Infinite-in-me"

as

Levinas calls it, renders the "I" to a state

of

"pure pas

sivity." Aware that the

"I"

is so severely conditioned as

to be what Levinas calls "created," the awakening to this

condition already positions the "I" as a "me." In awak

ening the "I" to the accusative mode of subjectivity, what

is exterior to consciousness, what consciousness can never

quite contain, also makes responding to this exteriority

possible. Here, the diachronic sense of time appears in the

awareness that the other was there before me. I recognize

myself as called upon to respond to the others who obsess

me with their exigent appeals and demands. Understood

as

a respondent, the "I" can recognize itself as chosen,

as

singled out by a non-transferable responsibility. Sig

nification appears now in order

of

exigency. In this way,

Levinas begins to chart a way to understand meaning in

terms

of

importance to some one.

Levinas's philosophic moves, so original in their for

mulation, have vital implications for reconfiguring the

task

of

philosophy. Levinas charts a course which charges

philosophy with responsibility for describing the condi

tions that make ethical life possible. This has far-reaching

practical, moral and political implications. Levinas argues

philosophically for benevolent non-indifference toward

the other and urges a philosophically inescapable position

that must answer affirmatively to the question: "Am I my

brother's keeper?"

In Of God Who Comes to Mind Levinas discusses the

philosophical error in the thinking

of

Cain that makes

murder possible. The simple evocation

of

brotherhood is

not sufficient to prevent murder:

Biological human fraternity, considered with the

sober coldness

of

Cain,

is

not sufficient reason that

I be responsible for a separated being. Sober, Cain

like coldness consists in reflecting on responsibility

from the standpoint of freedom or according to a

contract. (79).

Levinas reaffirms his argument that one's responsi

bility for the other comes prior to one's freedom. Levin as's

description

of

ethical life forms the core

of

his phenom

enology of transcendence. Levinas begins his quest for

transcendence in a precisely philosophical manner. For

Levinas, metaphysics arises as a desire for the Infinite.

It

is a desire that cannot be reduced to mere need.

It

is in

this sense that the Infinite bestirs us, rips us out

of

our

inertia, and moves us beyond the simultaneity of self

presence. Levinas says that "love is only possible through

the idea

of

the Infinite" (67). Such love, born

of

tran

scendence, is beyond eroticism and interestedness for the

beloved. Love (a term that Levinas uses with great dis

cretion), even when it tries to grasp the other, always finds

the other slipping away. For Levinas, what is unique in the

beloved is that which is beyond the finite and therefore

ungraspable. Levinas, then, begins his philosophy

of

the

infinite with a registering of that which is unknowable.

However, this does not nullify, but rather enables the

inter-human drama that makes us responsible one for the

other.

Here Levinas approaches transcendence as love for the

neighbor, the widow, the orphan, the stranger--even the

beloved. The ultimate expression

of

love

is

in the "near,

yet different" that Levinas calls Holy (68). With extra

ordinary directness Levinas reformulates the "otherwise

than being." In the language

of

a via eminentiae elevation

to the good, even the holy is expressible in what Levinas

calls "the humanism

of

the other man."

The last two lecture courses

of

Emmanuel Levinas

were edited and annotated by Jacques Rolland, and pub

lished under the title God, Death, and Time. These lec

tures are based upon student notes and therefore quite

condensed. The first course on 'Death and Time' provides

Levinas' distinctive view of these vital subjects within the

context

of

some

of

modem philosophy's seminal thinkers,

including Kant, Hegel, Bergson, Fink, Bloch and above

all, Heidegger. Levinas crystallizes the main question

of

the course in the opening of the first lecture: "In question

in this course is, above all, time. This is a course on the

duration

of

time." As such, the text can be utilized to help

the reader understand Otherwise than Being.

Levinas argues in God, Death and Time that where the

philosophic scandal

of

death has not been ignored alto

gether, time has been thought on the basis

of

death. This is

indeed the signature

of

the philosophy

of

finitude. Levinas

sees in Bergson's duree, time as lived and irreducible.

Bergson's presentation prepares the way for a phenom

enological analysis of temporality. Here Levinas re

encounters Heidegger's thinking. Whereas the ecstatic

phases of human temporality would be authentically

unified for Heidegger on the basis

of

resoluteness in the

face

of

one's own death, Levinas refuses to regard the

death

of

the other as inauthentic.

Elevating the death

of

the other beyond the realm

of

the inauthentic, as Heidegger would have it, forces a

re-thinking

of

the Heideggerian notion

of

authenticity.

The other, for Heidegger, is merely a diversion from my

facing the inevitability

of

my own being-towards-death.


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EMMANUEL LEVINAS: THE ETHICS OF "FACE TO

FACE" IHE

RELIGIOUS TURN 423

Is not indifference toward the other, thereby, prescribed

by Heidegger? What stops this indifference from a tum

toward an interestedness accompanied by absorption into

my own project, which can result ultimately in the

negation or annihilation of the other?

It

is by emphasizing the diachronic nature

of

time that

Levinas recognizes the death

of

the other as an event

of

irreducible importance. Describing time

as

diachrony

makes it possible to think

of

death on the basis

of

time

rather than time on the basis

of

death. When death is

understood as the unknown, for both the Other and the

self, it is possible to reinvestigate the ethical relation

with the other on the basis of the infinite demands placed

upon the self within the context

of

one's own finite

temporal existence.

Here meaning is understood in the context

of

the time

left. Such time, deformalized, means that the death

of

the

other can be elevated even beyond my own. This is one

of

the most essential differences between Levinas and

Heidegger. For only by taking the death

of

other with utter

philosophic seriousness is an ethical relation, one prior to

the neutrality of Being, possible.

The second set

of

lectures entitled "God and Onto

Theo-Logy" clearly prefigures Levinas's last milestone

text, Of God Who Comes to Mind. Here Levinas first

reconstructs Heidegger's critique

of

theology by investi

gating Heidegger's claim that philosophy prematurely

becomes theology as soon

as

God is identified with

ultimate being or reality. In this sense, Levinas sees in

Heidegger's reading

of

Aristotle the beginning

of

"the

European philosophy

of

being as being becomes theol

ogy" (God, Death, and Time 123). According to

Heidegger, Being, in its truth,

is

immediately vaporized as

a question and instead becomes "the universal founda

tions

of

being, by a supreme Being, a founder, by God"

(123). Levinas clearly breaks with Heidegger on the most

ultimate level by arguing on the contrary that God signifies

the other of being.

Heidegger' s thoughts still belong essentially to the

ontology

of

power that has dominated the West. In

opposition to Heidegger, Levinas posits that "to contrast

God with onto-theo-logy

is

to conceive a new mode, a

new notion

of

meaning. And it is from a certain ethical

relationship that one may start out this new search" (125).

To inquire after God on the basis

of

ethics does not reduce

God to ethics, but rather, on the contrary, accounts for the

possibility

of

religious life itself. In other words, to ask

what makes totality possible

is

at the same time to ask

what makes the possibility

of

intelligibility appear as

well. According to Levinas, it is Infinity expressing

itself through its trace in the finite-the metaphysical

relationship par

excellence-that

makes it possible for us

to speak in the common language

of

philosophy. Fur

thermore, Levinas is explaining how God is other than

and different from the neighbor. God is the alterity that is

prior to the alterity

of

the other person-"prior to the

ethical compulsion to the neighbor" (224). Levinas

describes God as transcendence "to the point

of

absence,

to the point

of

the possible confusion with the agitation of

the

there is"

(224). The

there is

is pure immanence.

Transcendence makes this immanence possible. This

appears to be the philosophic basis

of

Levinas' s argument

for identifying the infinite with pure transcendence and

therefore as God. However, according to Levinas it is still

possible to speak

of

bearing witness to and for the Glory

of the Infinite. What does he mean by bearing witness?

"Bearing witness does not thematize that

of

which it is

the Infinite, and as such it can be a witness only

of

the

Infinite" (196-97). Bearing witness has powerful ethical

implications. We try to take refuge from responsibility by

hiding in the concept. This represents Levinas' s very

perplexing, but original refusal

of

the ethical as the

universal: "Contrary to what Kierkegaard thought, the

'ethical stage' is not universal; rather, it is the stage in

which the

'me'

forgets its concept and no longer knows

the limits

of

its obligation" (196). This more expands the

realm

of

the ethical by contracting it. In other words, all

obligations bear on me, personally.

REITERATIONS: DISTILLATIONS, NEW DIRECTIONS:

INTERVIEWS

AND

COLLECTED ESSAYS

A number

of

interviews are found in collections of essays

assembled by Levinas presenting diverse profiles on a

variety

of

subjects toward the close of his philosophic

career, in the late 1980s and early 1990s. These texts

include Entre Nous: Thinking

of

the Other, Proper

Names, Alterity and Transcendence, Outside the Subject,

and

In the Time of the Nations,

a text devoted largely to

issues in Jewish philosophy. Here we will introduce only

some of the most salient subjects and themes explored by

Levinas in some of his later works.

For Levinas, speaking philosophy expresses an infinite

conversation whose future does not announce itself in

advance. It is extremely important to note that to

re-iterate,

to say again, is to keep these words saying what

they still intend by taking continuing responsibility for the

texts already authored. The interviews given by Levinas

to serious interlocutors permit a greater mobility for the

intention

of

saying to be addressed also to the third

person, the reader. Levinas speaks with an unusual


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424

EMMANUEL LEVINAS: THE ETHICS OF "FACE TO

FACE"ffHE

RELIGIOUS TURN

mixture

of

patience for his questioner, and a sense

of

urgency regarding the existential necessity to respond to

the suffering

of

the twentieth century, to which he was so

often the witness. Despite his mastery

of

the Western

philosophic tradition, or perhaps because of this mastery,

he seldom strays from the junctures that shape the lives

of

human beings. The same tradition of philosophy in

which he is so much at home, permits him to think beyond

its self-defining limitations, and in so doing to open a

vein

of

inquiry where the advance

of

philosophy

implies the elevation

of

what he calls the humanism of

the other.

As is the case with the best

of

teachers, Levinas awak

ens the other to a living encounter, pointing the student

beyond himself toward the Infinite. However open the

space

of

speech, Levinas goes beyond the level

of

encouraging questioning. Ethically, language is the other

prior to a context, and is therefore devoid

of

presupposi

tions. The continuing response I am called upon to give to

the other constitutes "me"

as

an ethical subject answer

able to and responsible for the other to an unimaginable

degree. Levinas ' s reiterations are not mere repetitions,

but the forward movement

of

an itinerary.

What Levinas appears to be searching for is a language

adequate to express the urgencies

of

human existence.

The reiterations in dialogue, then, represent his continuing

attempt to express again what has been said before; to

make room for the reader to enter a temporal context

along with the author where both can proceed together in

the pursuit

of

wisdom. This is a way

of

reconceiving

philosophy in terms of temporality, and phenomenology

as a discourse open to transcendence. In Totality and

Infinity

Levinas puts it in the following way: "philosophy

itself constitutes a moment

of

this temporal accomplish

ment, a discourse always addressed to another. What

we are now exposing is addressed to those who shall

wish to read it. Transcendence is time and goes onto the

Other" (269).

Entre Nous

In Entre Nous, Levinas speaks

of

exploring the inter

subjective relation in the transcendence

of

the 'for-the

other,' thus encapsulating what he calls the ethical

subject.

It

is the ethical subject that initiates the entre

nous.

For Levinas, all thinking is

of

the other and for

the other. This has technical and epistemological rele

vance and serves as a kind

of

exhortation for the reader.

Among the more original contributions in Entre Nous

are "Useless Suffering," Levin as' meditation on human

suffering; "Philosophy, Justice and Love," an interview

that helps to clarify some of the salient social, ethical

and political implications of Levinas' later thinking; and a

succinct reflection on "Non-intentional Consciousness,"

which deals with questions of phenomenological method.

"From One to the Other: Transcendence and Time" pre

sents the philosophic determination

of

the idea of culture

and a critique of Eurocentrism. This critique originates

from an invocation

of

metaphysical pluralism, founded

upon the irreducibility of ethical life, where difference

is argued to be a function of otherness, and uniqueness is

discussed as non-transferable responsibility at the core of

the singularity of the human subject. "Dying for" is a

meditation on a non-egoistic form

of

self-sacrifice and

the primacy of the death of the other. In two important

dialogues, "Thinking of the Other," and "The Other,

Utopia and Justice," Levinas invites a sustained inter

rogation

of

some of the most fundamental complexities

of

his later thinking.

In these essays, as elsewhere, Levinas, without

preaching, speaks about the importance

of

philosophy

guided by benevolence in the face

of

the legacy of the

sufferings of the twentieth century and the burden that

they impose upon the future

of

philosophy. Above all,

Levinas is concerned with disconnecting philosophy from

violence. In "Useless Suffering" Levinas argues against

rationalizing the sufferings of others. He juxtaposes this to

my own efforts to make sense out

of

my own suffering.

The moral height

of

the other, however, prohibits me from

superimposing a premature justification for the sufferings

of

others on whose behalf I may intercede, but in whose

name I cannot speak. Therefore I can forgive, pardon, and

absolve only the one who persecutes me. I am not per

mitted to do so for the other without his or her consent. In

this way, Levinas rejects as premature any recourse to

systems based upon theodicy. Commenting on human

suffering, Levinas asks the reader: "consider the outrage it

would be for me to justify my neighbor's suffering" (98).

For myself I can choose such a course. For the other, this

is beyond the path

of

mere rationalization and shows an

ultimate insensibility toward the other. Reckoning with

human suffering requires no less than a reconfiguration

of

the essential nature

of

human intrigue

as

a social and

political drama. For Levinas, the war

of

each against each

and all against all must be viewed as subordinate to the

relation he calls the "for-the-other".

It

is in this sense that

it would be possible to justify the ways of God to the

other as well as to myself. Refusal to justify the other's

suffering marks Levinas's response to Nietzsche's "death

of

God" theology. There is no theodicy that I may impose

upon the others who exceed my attempts to justify the

ways

of

God. Levinas absorbs Nietzsche's warning

of


17/22


425

making a virtue into a necessity. However, he does so

without abolishing the idea

of

the good as transcendent.

Here again, the opening up

of

time proves to be decisive.

As he states in "Philosophy, Justice and Love," "in

my responsibility for the other, the past

of

the other,

which has never been present 'concerns me:' it is not

re-presentation for me" (115). Levinas goes on to explain

the reason for this by again resorting to an unrelenting

phenomenology

of

human time: "the past of the other

and, in a sense, the history

of

humanity in which I have

never participated, in which I have never been present,

is my past" (115). The future, on the other hand, is dif

ferent. "It is not my anticipation which is already and like

the imperturbable order

of

being, as

if

it had already

arrived, as if temporality were a synchrony" (115). Levinas

links the future to the phenomenon

of

prophecy as a

philosophical idea that can be articulated through phe

nomenological inquiry: "the future is the time

of

pro

phecy which is also an imperative, a moral "order, herald

of

an inspiration" (115). Levinas makes the ethical rela

tionship with the other depend upon the diachronic rela

tion between the past and the future in which each have

their own sense of time, responsibility and signification.

Proper Names

Proper Names

contains a collection

of

essays by Levinas

on such thinkers as Buber, Derrida, Kierkegaard, Proust

and Maurice Blanchot. There

is

also a touching essay

devoted to Father Herman Leo Van Breda and the debt

which future phenomenologists owe to his pains in

creating, maintaining and disseminating the work of the

Husserl Archives.

Proper Names

was first published in France in 1975

and dates from the same time as

God, Death and Time.

Levinas begins

Proper Names

with a description

of

the

breakdown of the human order in the catastrophes and

crises haunting the twentieth century. He speaks more

openly

of

the importance

of

formulating a response to the

breakdown

of

language: "at no other time has historical

experience weighed so heavily upon ideas, or at least

never before have the members

of

one generation been

more aware

of

that weight" (34). Showing a pronounced

and keen awareness

of

the conditions leading to this cri

tical time, Levinas offers his own characterization

of

the

post-modem age:

Now theories on the death of God, the contingency

of

humanness in philosophical reflection and the bank

ruptcy of humanism-doctrines already voiced

by

the

end of the last century-have taken on apocalyptic

proportions. The new anxiety, that of language cast

adrift, seems to announce without periphrases-which

are henceforth impossible, which are henceforth

impossible or deprived of all persuasive

force-the

end of the world.

(4)

As an alternative to the nihilism that follows from this

condition, Levinas proposes the humanism

of

the other

man. In

Proper Names,

Levinas diagnoses the disin

tegration

of

contemporary life from some

of

its linguistic

indications. As he states, "Time no longer conveys its

meaning in the simultaneity

of

sentences. Statements no

longer succeed in putting things together" (4). He refuses

to believe that this signifies the death of philosophy, that

is, its much-discussed inability to deal with the larger

questions concerning the meaning

of

human life. He

explains why each

of

the articles included in the volume is

attached to a proper name. He urges the reader to keep in

mind the irreducibility

of

a proper name that attaches to a

human face. This is the someone with whom I can speak

philosophy. As he says almost longingly, "Perhaps the

names

of

persons whose

saying

signifies a face-proper

names in the middle

of

all the common names and com

monplaces--can resist the dissolution

of

meaning and

help us to speak" (4). Levinas ties the importance

of

proper names to the recovery

of

the saying prior to the

said where we are always speaking philosophy to some

one. The said by itself can convey fields

of

knowledge,

systems of thought, or being. However, it is necessary

to join the said with the saying if we are to understand

why it is that we are responsible for what we say. Only

in this way is it possible to understand the meaning

of

what is most urgent, most important and therefore most

meaningful.

There

is

one essay that stands out

as

the exception

that demonstrates what happens when proper names are

effaced.

It

is an article entitled "Nameless."

It

refers to

a time between 1940 and 1945 where all the institutions

of justice had been suspended, and where proper names

were reduced to an inhuman series

of

numbers branded

on the arms

of

the concentration camp victims. In

"Nameless," Levinas asks us to rethink the role

of

phi

losophy in general, and phenomenology in particular in

the aftermath

of

the Holocaust. He argues that when I

express non-indifference toward the other, my uniqueness

returns to me. I become aware of my irreplaceability

rather than being alienated. It is in this sense that it is

possible to again begin speaking philosophy. By elevating

ethics to the rank

of

first philosophy, Levinas has

embarked upon the task

of

restoring to philosophy its own

good name.


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426

EMMANUEL LEVINAS: THE ETHICS OF "FACE TO FACE" {THE RELIGIOUS TURN

ALTERITY AND

TRANSCENDENCE

Alterity and Transcendence

includes twelve texts

authored by Levinas from 1967 to 1989.

It

was first

published in 1995, the last year of his life. The thrust

of

the work as a whole is in the direction of a philosophy of

transcendence which absorbs but does not synthesize

his previous work, and in which the social, political

and religious implications of his philosophy are further

delineated.

In Alterity and Transcendence Levinas emphasizes

that transcendence indicates both a crossing over (trans)

and also an ascent (scando). As Pierre Hyatt notes in his

preface, "Transcendence would appear to be the marker

of

the paradox

of

the relation of what is separate" (ix).

This, for Levinas, represents ascent. What does "ascent"

signify beyond the moral height

of

the other person? We

may describe the ascent as a "surplus of morality." The

phenomenology of transcendence, then, begins with the

neighbor and my responsibility for this the "third" person

who appears "before" and "after" the second or the you-

to whom I am obliged completely. Here, Levinas ven

tures toward the perfectly other. Earlier, in Totality and

Infinity, Levinas had characterized religion as the refusal

to engage in the reduction of the Other to the Same. The

motive force behind these philosophical moves is to enact

justice responsibly. Bleak times cannot compel us to give

up on the phenomenon

of

transcendence.

There

is

in Alterity and Transcendence a further dis

tillation and reiteration of some of the signature themes

of Levinas's later writings. For example, in "Philosopher

and Death" he allows himself to be interrogated about

questions on the importance of the way "we are answer

able not only for the death of the other, but for his life

as well" (167). Levinas remains very much concerned

with taking responsibility not only for one's own life, but

for the life and death of the other. This is not expiation by

proxy for the other. This means that I am willing to

substitute myself for the other even to the point of self

sacrifice to preserve the humanity

of

the other.

OUTSIDE THE SUBJECT

In Outside the Subject, Levinas assembles a number

of

essays on important contemporary thinkers including

Buber, Rosenzweig, Jean Wahl and Merleau-Ponty.

Returning to the subject of the task of phenomenology,

Levinas shows through his essays in this text that he has

not left behind his original concerns to understand human

subjectivity, and to rediscover

Documents

[Doi 10.1007%2F978!94!007-0473-2_40] Bello, A. Ales; Antonelli, M.; Backhaus, G.; Balaban, O.; Baptis -- Phenomenology World-Wide Emmanuel Levinas- The Ethics of ВЂњFace to FaceвЂќThe