Reason and the Face of the Other

American Academy of Religion

Reason and the Face of the OtherAuthor(s): Stephen WatsonSource: Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Vol. 54, No. 1 (Spring, 1986), pp. 33-57Published by: Oxford University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1464099 .

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Journal of the American Academy of Religion, LIV/ 1

REASON AND THE FACE OF THE OTHER STEPHEN WATSON

I

The problem of the Other is as ancient as "the Greeks" and "Metaphysics" itself. The same perhaps cannot be said of the encounter with the other person, whose complexity as a problem is in a sense peculiarly modern. The parameters of this encounter and its accom- panying epistemic and ontological implications are commonly desig- nated under the rubric "the problem of other minds." Yet, as will become evident, much more than a simply isolated or regional problem may be at stake. And it is perhaps already at stake in the locus classicus of the problem, Descartes' second of his Meditations:

Thus I might be tempted to conclude that one knows the wax by means of eyesight, and not uniquely by the perception of the mind. So I may by chance look out of a window and notice some men passing in the street, at the sight of whom I do not fail to say that I see men, just as I say that I see wax; and nevertheless what do I see from this window except hats and cloaks which cover ghosts, or automata (which move only by springs)? (1960:31)

The problem for Descartes concerns the veracity of an image, specif- ically, of a representation that in its veracity would present the thing itself before the mind's inspection with clarity and distinctness.

Descartes' pause at this point before the Other's representation is an overdetermined event. In fact, one might conclude differently, that precisely because I see wax "Cartesianly," I cannot see men, or that, more directly, I see automatons.' Since the essence of the visible appears under the guise of the quantitative in the Fifth Meditation,

Stephen Watson is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, Indiana 46556.

1 See, for example, Merleau-Ponty (170): "A Cartesian does not see himself in the mirror; he sees a dummy (un mannequin), an 'outside,' which, he has every reason to believe, other people see in the very same way but which, no more for himself than for others, is not a body in the flesh. His 'image' in the mirror is an effect of the mechanics of things."



34 Journal of the American Academy of Religion

and since, according to the Treatise of Man (1972:4), the metaphors for Descartes' theoretical models are analogized by automata, we might wonder how Descartes ever came to see otherwise. We might even wonder if Descartes has destroyed the evidence by which the Other could appear. The Cartesian image of the Other is mechanized: the essence of bodily appearance is subsumed under the guise of mathesis, extension. And, under this guise, in a problem that seems wholly a matter of image and appearances, the appearance of the Other may be foreclosed. It may not then be simply a matter of what Descartes calls "eyesight" that is in question. And yet a problem of vision remains-perhaps more than one of "seeing" and retinal irradiations.

II

Despite all the normal allusions that might connect Descartes' text with its Scholastic and Augustinian archive, the last book of De Civitate Deo offers a radically different constellation. If the problem of other minds is not explicitly there, the question in another sense may be already posited within the Augustinian oeuvre: "[E]veryone is aware of his own life, the life with which he is now alive in the body, the life which makes those earthly members grow, and makes them living; everyone is aware of this life not by means of the eyes of the body but through the inward sense" (1086). There is a kind of inspection of the mind. And, consequently, we moderns would expect the inference of other minds to be fast on its heels, to be "systemic." Indeed, Augustine himself almost immediately seems to pose the question: "However, the lives of others, though invisible, he sees by means of the body. For how do we distinguish living bodies from non-living except by observing bodies and minds simultaneously? We cannot see the lives except by means of the body.. ." (ibid). Does this indicate the Cartesian inference and consequently the problem of its validity? What does it mean to say, as does the last sentence (unintel- ligible to the Cartesian) that we "see" the lives of the Others? Or does Augustine merely speak metaphorically? The following text straight- forwardly speaks against the latter: "Now in this present life we are in contact with fellow beings who are alive and display (exserentes) the motions of life; and as soon as we see them we do not believe them to be alive, we observe (videmus) the fact. We could not observe their life without their bodies; but we see it in them (in eis), without any possibility of doubt, through (per) their bodies" (ibid).

What Augustine "sees" is radically different from what remains "visible" to Descartes. Against Descartes' reduction of the living to the paradigm of mechanics, Augustine's discussion of the human body



Watson: Reason and the Other 35

refuses to make the substance of this materia quantitative, dissectible partes extra partes. In fact, appealing to notions he already ascribes to "the Greeks," and in particular, to a homeostatic conception of the organism in which the soul, as the principle of life, organizes a harmony and proportion in vivifying the parts of the body, Augustine rebels against a reduction that would make the body thus dissectible. Indeed, it is just here that he finds the act of dissection itself revulsive:

Even though some surgeons, anatomists, they are called, have ruthlessly applied themselves to the carving up of dead bodies, even though they have cut into the bodies of dying men to make their examinations, and have probed into all the secrets of the human body, with little regard for humanity, in order to assist their diagnosis, to locate the trouble and find a method of cure-even after all that, no man could ever find, no man has ever dared to try to find, those proportions of which I am speaking, by which the whole body, within and without is arranged as a system of mutual adaption. (ibid)

Although Augustine's position and the revulsion it entails symbolize a controversy often repeated in the history of medicine (Descartes is said to have practiced dissection as a backdrop to writing the Treatise

of Man),2 the controversy is not one between those for and those against scientific progress, nor even, between those committed to the "right" paradigm of living organisms versus those who maintained outmoded conceptions. Augustine is committed to the claim that what is in question lies both "within and without" the body (i.e. both on its surface and in its depth). But he acknowledges that what is in question could never be put to the test; it is neither isolatable nor verifiable in this sense. Augustine's revulsion concerns the appearance (and in this case, the violation) of human dignity.

At first glance perhaps, this passage has an unlikely context, a discussion of the greatness of God's creation.3 Dignity and the aesthetical here are intertwined by nature, consistent with Augustine's own Greek archive, which made the Beautiful the sensible manifestation of the Good. What the soul's organization of the body discloses, what displays human dignity, belongs no more to mere beauty than to mere order or to mere virtue. It is the event of their coincidence, or as Augustine puts it, the event of a "rational beauty" (pulchritudo rationis). "Now if it is true (and it is scarcely a matter of debate) that there is no visible part of the body which is merely adapted to its function without being also of aesthetic value

2 See A. Baillet (196-7). 3 Its context in fact is a passage that almost prefigures Pico's declaration concerning

the dignity of man as the aesthete of God's creation. See Mirandola (4).




(decorum), there are also parts which have only aesthetic value without any practical purpose. Hence it can, I think, readily be inferred that in the design of the human body dignity (dignitatem) was a more important consideration than utility" (1074).

The appearance of this dignity is lost in the modern (and Cartes- ian) translation's rendering of decorum as "aesthetic value," in its subjectivization of an idea-and an experience. The same holds for the polarity that lurks not far off-and depends upon it-the fact/value distinction. As with many Augustinian texts, there is a Ciceroean archive here distinguishing honestum and decorum,4 the latter relat- ing to the former as the appearance of health does to the internal state of the organism, that is, the radiance of the latter's proper form. Still, we may fail to be convinced by Augustine's attempt to demonstrate, to ground, this pulchritudo, which naturally transcends the usu of the corporeal: a man's beard exists for purely "aesthetic" purposes since it is not found on women, the weaker sex, and clearly could not exist on men for protection, since they are already the stronger sex (1074). The form of the argument notwithstanding, Augustine sees in the body what Descartes must refuse: its self-transcendence, to appeal to a platonic idiom, a meaning that beckons beyond itself and that figures its appearance, an invisible that is not beyond the visible but that "displays" itself without ever being simply visible. The event of this figuring, which the human body displays, constitutes its dignity. It is an event that escapes all possible utility, and, moreover, must escape the particularity, the discreteness, of the simply temporal.

Still, Augustine's treatment of the appearance of the Other remains incomplete so long as it does not account for the "face to face" that escapes all particularity and all temporality. His account here is based upon his exegesis of I Corinthians 13:12, which concerns the difference between our knowledge in this life and our knowledge in the next: "Now we see a puzzling reflection in a mirror, but then we shall see face to face. The knowledge I now have is partial; but then I shall know as clearly as I am known."'5 The exegetical problem is whether, following the resurrection, our knowledge will occur on the basis of the limitations of our earthly finite bodies, or whether, on the contrary, we will see (and finally see God, the ultimate "face to face") with new spiritual powers. The latter, Augustine argues, must be the case:

[I]t is possible, it is indeed most probable that we shall then see the physical bodies of the new heaven and the new earth in

See Cicero's Offices (56). Likewise, see the analysis of these concepts in de Bruyne, (18ff).

' Quoted in Augustine (1083).




such a fashion as to observe God in the clearest perspicuity (clarissima perspicuitate) seeing him present everywhere and governing the whole material scheme of things by means of the bodies we shall then inhabit and the bodies we shall see whenever we turn our eyes. It will not be as it is now, when the invisible realities of God are apprehended and observed through the material things of his creation, and are partially apprehended by means of a puzzling reflection in a mirror. (1086: translation altered)

In this life our knowledge remains partial; we lack the truth that is "present everywhere and governing the whole material scheme of things." We lack ultimate access to the Ratio that orders all things. Against this ultimate form of "seeing," Augustine declares, in this life man "walks by faith and not by sight" (873); here we remain "pilgrims in a foreign land." Due to the limitations of the human intellect, things do not occur in full presence.

In the next life this distortion will be overcome. We will have new bodies, new spiritual powers, that surpass the limitations of the materiality of this world. Hence, following the resurrection "there will be no ugliness" (1061); the decorum of the human will be complete. In this way, the images, those "puzzling reflections in a mirror" are to be done away with, in the same way that later, confronted with the inverse retinal image and the problem of representation, Descartes will attempt to purge thought of the distortion of the image. Consequently, beyond this mediation things will be seen in their clearest distinctness, to cite Augustine's "Cartesian" predicates. But, not in this life.

Augustine admits that such a heightened transformation of our spiritual powers is difficult, if not impossible, to support with passages of Holy Scripture. Consequently, he offers a different account, which he claims is easier to understand. On this alternative, God would not be seen immediately as he is himself, but he would be "spiritually perceived by each one of us in each one of us, perceived in one another, perceived by each in himself' (1087). Such an occurrence, beyond the limitations of the finite, beyond the limitations of an epistemic belief without "sight" as in our present state, would then overcome the problem of the other mind as well-in a way whose characterization again sounds entirely "Cartesian:" "The thoughts of our minds will be open to mutual observation; and the words of the Apostle will be fulfilled; for he said 'Pass no premature judgements,' adding immediately, 'until the Lord comes' " (ibid).

In a sense, the foundations of rational practices that Descartes would seek in the seventeenth century, bolstered by a new belief in the success of scientific practice, for Augustine can only be a possi-




bility of the next world. Only then will we be ultimately beyond the realm of our prejudices, beyond the screen of images, and, as well, finally beyond the gap between my mind and the Other's-in the same transformation that dissolves the gap between my mind and the full presence of things. For Augustine, nonetheless, all this is a projection, an image-belief and not sight. The best he can do is offer alternative accounts, yet another example of the undecidability in hermeneutics, which marks the finite. Before this uncertainty, as he puts it, "each one of us must choose as he thinks fit between those interpretations" (984).

Nonetheless, what is disclosed for Augustine is the moment of the transcendence in belief itself, that point at which finite vision discov- ers a beyond in its object, a transcendence in the incompleteness of its presence. Augustine finds the keys to decipher that incompleteness, its context as well as its lexicon, in Holy Scripture. In medieval thought, the focus upon the mystery in the gulf between the finite and the infinite results in an allegorization of the visible. Moreover, Descartes himself was not wholly exempt from a similar allegorization in the construction of the visible, in its mathematization. As a result, the visible itself became a text that finds its completion in the lexicon of mathesis. It becomes in fact a text, a "fable," as he called it (1980:2), shorn of its prejudices, a world destitute of belief, precisely in the move that had shorn it of its mystery.

Still, it might be argued that just because of this allegorization or metathexis it is impossible in each position to detach the account of the Other and the presence of human dignity from the underlying metaphysics and theology. Both authors, it might be said, equally, present instances of what Kant would later call metaphysica rationalis (1965b:662)-the attempt to provide a final account of being qua being, an ultimate foundation for what constitutes its experience- through an appeal to a hylo-morphic conception of the soul, or a claim that views the world of the material as having its metathexis in mathesis, etc. And so, one might be tempted to write off the difference here to what Hume calls the "dreams" of Western thought. One might be tempted to ask, for example, if Augustine's claim that we do not believe in the existence of other minds but we observe them "through their bodies" must not have appealed to an evidence that already surpasses the finite, or if it does not approach what he called the "mutual observation" in the spiritualized life of the next world. How is this "videmus" to remain simply declarative once the "per corpora" has been assigned to the site of this discourse, the site of a transcendence without resolution? In what way is Augustine to be taken? On the other hand, one may be prompted to say of the Cartesians just what Aristotle had said of the Pythagoreans, that they had substituted




the principles of mathematics for the principles of things (665:985b). What one must give, perhaps, to the standpoint of Cartesian doubt concerning the ultimate resolution of the Other's transcendence returns from the Augustinian side on the emphasis on finitude and the experience that this emphasis reveals against the objectivity of science. We may need to question, as did Descartes himself, the guarantee of the veracity of the clear and distinct before the "partial- ity" of human reason in its recherche de la verite, and perhaps, even at the same time, what stops up the regress of the sceptical before the face of the ethical.

III

Kant, who questioned the possibility of completing the project of metaphysica rationalis, nevertheless encountered the same stum- bling block. Unable to attribute a certainty to it in the classical sense, Kant's claim still presents a repetition of Augustine's affirmation and its "videmus." Despite all his arguments against original intuition and the via intuiti, Kant too felt compelled to cite the claim of the Other as the unique faktum der Vernufnt: "Now I say (Nun sage ich) that man, and in general every rational being, exists as an end in himself, not merely as a means for arbitrary use by this or that will .. " (1964:95).6

As the grammar here makes clear, this assertion involves a claim and not a proof, a commitment and not a ground. The claim involves a "phenomenon" that must occur beyond grounds, an end without external conditions. This is consistent, of course, with the rational mechanics of the nomothetic of freedom constituting pure practical reason. That man is this end, that the Other retains this claim, must be asserted groundlessly-the Other, qua rational agent, never appears for Kant. This agent and its appearance cannot be an object of knowledge in the Kantian sense. The appearance of freedom, of a free agent which claims my respect, cannot take place. Kant's assertion cannot, in his understanding of it, be said to have Sinn und Bedeutung. We have no experience from which to make the proof, neither of ourselves nor of the Other. We therefore have no grounds, and no knowledge in the strict sense, on or from which to prove that the Other has this dignity, that he or she withdraws from our use and consequently demands our respect. Yet Kant refuses to dissolve the claim. Rather he reimposes it, without grounds, if not without hope.

This is precisely the dilemma of Kant's Anthropology. The critical system is nothing if not a regressive delineation of the transcendental

6 For further discussion of this issue see my paper, "Kant on Autonomy, The Ends of Humanity, and the Possibility of Morality," forthcoming in Kant-Studien.




conditions, i.e. faculties, of knowledge. And yet, no description of the being that has those faculties is possible. Anthropology is a "pragmatic" and not a scientific discipline. The preface of his Anthropology is clear about the nature of the conceptual dispersion that constitutes a study of man. He explicitly rejects Descartes' Treatise of Man and its methodological pondering of the "natural causes" that lie behind human actions not because such a standpoint is not scientific, but because no science is possible here (1974:3). A science of man would have to be deterministic. But that method is not applicable since the discourse of science and its experience, and that regarding the Other and its "experience," are incommensurable. If it is true that a theory can be refuted only on the basis of the experience it opens up, the wonder is that Kant stood fast here, having so strictly confined the notion of experience and justified knowledge to the former. Still, Kant rebels against the Cartesian anthropology as much as Augustine did against dissection. The difference is categorical. Kant has given knowledge and science, justification and truth, to Descartes-or almost.

Still, Kant lacks an enclave, a mode of access to the phenomenon that has been excluded by his paradigm of knowledge. His commitments, nonetheless, presuppose it. All that Kant removes from the example of science presupposes a description of the agent and human dignity. Kant lacks an account of the agent as a phenomenon,7 a phenomenology of what withdraws from the narrow constraints of what he calls the phenomenal field.8 Nonetheless, perhaps he once had a trace of it. This "phenomenology," though not in the requisite sense, remains active perhaps throughout the pre-critical Observa- tions on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime. In delineating the

7 Martin Heidegger has quite rightly said that "Kant's interpretation of respect is probably the most brilliant phenomenological analysis of the phenomenon of morality that we have from him" (1982:133). Still, Kant's analysis remains always, or "always already" a reaction, without an analysis of that summons before which it is claimed. The appearance of this "stimulus" is cursorily described either as a placeholder within the logical syntax of freedom's nomothetic or as the ungrounded abyss of the "Nun sage ich." Heidegger's own analyses in a sense continues this tack: respect remains "respect for the law" in which my own dignity is revealed to me, and consequently respect "is the mode of the ego's being with itself' (1982:135). Still, a fully adequate account of Heidegger's position here would require a discussion of his various (but disparate) writings on ethics and theology. For example, in a footnote in his 1928 lectures on logic he states, (still within the perspective of fundamental ontology): "The idea of being as a superior power can only be understood out of the essence of "being" and transcendence, only in and from the full dispersal belonging to the essence of transcendence ... and not by an interpretation referring to an absolute Other (Du)" (1984:165). The reader is also referred to Jacques Derrida's discussion of the objections of Emmanuel Levinas, mentioned below.

8 In this respect this argument rejoins those posited against Kant by Scheler (69f).




distinction between the pretty (Hiibsch) and the beautiful (Sch6n) in relation to women, for example, Kant felt free to be simply declarative. Regarding the pretty, Kant displays his taste, perhaps his preference, for the quantitative, the proportionate, and the regular while noting its limitations: "A well-proportioned figure, regular features, colors of eyes and face which contrast prettily, beauties pure and simple which are also pleasing in a bouquet and gain a cool approbation. The face itself says nothing (sagt nichts), although it is pretty, and speaks not to the heart. What is moral in the expression of the features, the eyes and the mien pertains to the feeling either of the sublime or of the beautiful" (1960:87). The text is pre-critical, and in its almost fetish- istic portrayal, in more ways than one.9 But its being pre-critical, its being simply declarative, is overdetermined by what withdraws from the simply pleasing to pertain to what transcends to the beautiful and the sublime, a logos that "says nothing" in its simple presence, but rather "breaks forth" in its expression, in its withdrawal.

Kant returns more and more to signal this withdrawal. From the precritical standpoint, Kant could simply have asserted perhaps that what is "moral" is in a sense a matter of physiognomy, the simple appearance of a form, a matter of observation in the Cartesian sense. The "critical turn" in Kant's work, with its rejection of the presence of metaphysics, marks precisely the disruption of this immediacy. The project of simple description must fail, as the Anthropology relates: "For taste, which is a merely subjective ground for one man's being pleased or displeased with other men... cannot serve as a guiding principle to Wisdom, which, has the existence of a man with certain natural qualities objectively as its end (which is, for us, quite incom- prehensible)" (1974:161). A physiognomy of the beautiful that would be accessible to simple observation, Kant realized, must fail. As the precritical text demonstrates, perhaps despite itself, the recognition of that failure rejoins a tradition as old as Plotinus, which refused to confine the overflowing, the expression of the face's beauty and dignity to its symmetry, to the proportionality of the appearance of the

thing.1o The appearance of the Other, the Other's face, is never proportionate, not a totalization whose parts could simply harmonize in presence, or which could present in this sense a simple truth, a simple homoiosis. In fact he is still willing to allow that "good nature

9 Kofman presents an insightful analysis of the Kantian fetishization of the feminine, both in the aesthetical and the moral domains, and its depiction of the feminine face as the "veiled goddess before whom one way or another we kneel," as Kant put it.

10 See for example Plotinus' criticism of immediacy and the Doric principle of proportion in The Enneads I: [S]ince the one face, constant in symmetry, appears sometimes fair and sometimes not, can we doubt that beauty is something more than symmetry, that symmetry itself owes its beauty to a remoter principle" (78-79)?




still shines forth from the eye" and that a disfigured man is not ugly "as long as his features do not betray the expression of a spirit marred by vice or by a natural but unfortunate tendency" (1974:163-4). But this occurrence is one without a simple immediacy, the site of a certain withdrawal, a dignity whose principle, to use Plotinus' word, remains "remote." The beautiful here is necessarily a matter of expression (Ausdruck) and precisely not a fact.

Still, having been unable to confine beauty to an appearance, a phenomenon, and having destroyed the metaphysical text, he was unable to find it in another, in a direct analogization or direct expression: the beautiful cannot be a sign. It cannot be a mere index for a transcendent reality. Following the end of metaphysics, such claims would have nothing but subjective grounds. Kant is left with the same problem with the beautiful that he had with the Good. Incommensurable and ungroundable, both are "abysses" for the imagination, as he calls it, "ungroundable and unavoidable" (1968a:97). As the grammar indicates, his solution for both is the same:

Now I say (Nun sage ich) the beautiful is the symbol (Symbol) of the morally good and that it is only in this respect ... that it gives pleasure with a claim for the agreement of everyone else. By this the mind is made conscious of a certain ennoblement and elevation above the mere sensibility to pleasure received through sense, and the worth of others is estimated in accordance with a like maxim of their judgement. That is the intelligible to which.... taste looks. .... (1968a:198-9)

Kant's text is decisive without being complete. In it is marked the transcendence of the intelligible with respect to the sensible, the transcendence of the beautiful by the good that has marked aesthetics since Plato--and yet there is a distinct difference.

Following the critical turn, Kant has lost the metaphysician's right of simple assertion. The beautiful, i.e., the sensibly beautiful, cannot be a simple index of its superior. There is no literal sign of the moral law, but only a symbol. Kant's usage here is precise, as his discussion of semiotics in the Anthropology indicates. The opposite of symbolic knowledge, Kant claims is, not intuitive knowledge but discursive knowledge "in which the sign (character) accompanies the concept only as its guardian (custos), so that it can reproduce the concept when the occasion arises," ensuring, thereby, that the other expresses the same thing as do I (1974;64). Symbols, on the other hand, remain lodged within the sensible. They are primitive in this respect, and Kant claims that "people who express themselves only in symbols have as yet few intellectual concepts." Their "vivid description" is then only a "poverty in concepts" (ibid). But the poverty here is the underdetermination of the concept, a poverty of concepts. We have no




way to justify the link between the sign and the signified. It is this "transcendental signified," that point at which the intelligible simply surpasses the sensible, that has become lost for Kant. There is instead, at best, a symbolization of the transcendental field, precisely in the moment in which Kant declares, the sensible withdraws from its simple presence-not to reveal itself elsewhere, in a signified, or a text, or a theory. Syntactically and semantically the "Nun sage ich" and its symbolization indicate this dispersion of the metaphysical sign.

And yet if Kant's discussion is direct it remains incomplete, divided against itself. The grammar of the first person in this text (ethical and aesthetic at the same time), which commits itself to the Other's transcendence, bespeaks a certain hesitancy, which it indicates in being bound by a subjectivity and finite rationality. As the above text itself indicates, the Other is valued and finds a worth in his or her (at least potential) agreement with my own judgment-"and the worth (Wert) of others is estimated in accordance with a like maxim of their judgment". In all this, the worth of the Other, so disconnected from my own interest, remains predicated upon my judgment, and finally on the demands of reason upon me.

It is perhaps not coincidental that Fichte, in his Sittenlehre, thinking himself faithful to the Kantian text, excludes the consideration of the Other entirely (1971). Kantian morality, its end in itself notwithstanding, had in one sense, indeed its most explicit sense, been arrived at by the via negatativa. Respect in this sense only concerns what withdraws from my particularity. But thereby, Kantian mortality dictates no positive respect for what in the Other summons my obligation. Indeed, respect (Achtung) just is the humiliation of my particularity (the maxim of my judgment) before the law's pure form. Consistent with this, ethics becomes on this side of Kant's legacy simply the self-actualization of finite rationality. It is perhaps not hard to understand how Hobbes' war of each against all becomes reas- sumed at the epistemic level in Hegel's Phenomenology in the dialectic of master and slave and the fight to the death. Once the identity of the Other is put in question (incipient with Cartesianism), since reason and self-consciousness dictate their own ideal, another self-consciousness is free to appear only as a negation: "Self- consciousness is faced by another self-consciousness; it has come out

of itself. This has a twofold significance: first, it has lost itself, for it finds itself as an other being; secondly, in doing so it has superceded the other, for it does not see the other as an essential being, but in the other sees its own self" (1977:111).

Kant's text then remains incomplete. An adequate grasp of the




Other will require something like a phenomenology of the Other's

appearance, a description of an entity whose being in its dignity demands my respect. In this regard Kant's attempt to radically distinguish the "pure" and the "mixed" in ethics and to separate morality from anthropology was inflated. He acknowledges as much in the Lectures on Ethics: "Practical philosophy (that is, the science of how man ought to behave) and anthropology (that is, the science of man's actual behavior) are closely connected, and the former cannot subsist without the latter: for we cannot tell whether the subject to which our consideration applies is capable of what is demanded of him unless we have knowledge of that subject" (1979:2). Even a phenomenology here is not without its risks, however. In fact, phenomenology will reach a limit here. A phenomenology is a description of what lies present to consciousness, an analysis of the objects of experience. But the Other is precisely a phenomenon that is not present, by not being an object. Its dignity acquires our respect precisely in its withdrawal from our presence. And, a turn to the philosophers normally grouped under the rubric "Phenomenology" will show that even at a cursory level the problem of the Other as an object before consciousness is unavoidable, and as an object before a consciousness in quest of certainty, insurmountable.

IV

The founder of Phenomenology, Edmund Husserl, initially "reconfronted" this problem under the guise of its Cartesian ancestry, the appearance of the Other presenting itself once more under the scepter of solipsism. At the same time, Husserl's treatment meets up again with Augustine's "puzzling reflection in a mirror." In discussing the constitution of the Other in the fifth of his Cartesian Mediations, Husserl states:

In this pre-eminent intentionality there becomes constituted for me the new existence-sense that goes beyond my monadic very-owness; there becomes constituted an ego, not as "I myself," but as mirrored in my own Ego, in my monad. The second ego, however, is not simply there and strictly pre- sented; rather is he constituted as "alter ego"-the ego indi- cated as one moment by this expression being I myself in my ownness. The "Other," according to his own constituted sense, points to me myself; the other is a "mirroring" of my own self and yet not a mirroring proper, an analogue of my own self and yet again not an analogue in the usual sense .... [T]he question must then be asked: How can my ego, within this peculiar ownness, constitute under the name, "experience of something other," precisely something other...? (94)




Husserl is aware that (in accordance with Augustine's discussion of the finitude of experience) we cannot be immediately in contact with, we cannot have the "mutual observation" of, the Other. There is, accordingly, a gap between ego and alter ego: "[N]either the other Ego himself, nor his subjective processes or his appearances themselves, nor anything else belonging to his own essence, becomes given in our experience originally. If it were, if what belongs to the other's essence were directly accessible, it would be merely a moment of my own essence, and ultimately he himself and I myself would be the same. . .. A certain mediacy of intentionality must be present here

... ." (109).

The mediacy Husserl seeks is disclosed in the harmony between the other's bodily appearance and mine. I recognize the Other through his or her body in the phenomenon of "pairing" by which the Other's behavior manifests analogical actions with my own. On the one hand, Husserl here allows that the meanings of the mental are, again, "displayed" bodily. On the other hand, he reassumes the Cartesian stance that I know myself better than any other thing, even in recognizing myself in another. The relation, then, is one founded on "similarity" (111). Consequently, whatever I find "dignified" within myself can then be transferred to the Other. Consistent with the epistemics of Cartesianism, Husserl's charge is the defense of objectivity. Under this guise, dignity becomes the ability to repeat, to re-iterate what I (at least implicitly) already know. The central concern is what Husserl calls "apperceptive transfer" (110), described also as the "supremely significant" problem of how it is that objective idealities, i.e., the certitudo of the ideal, can be intersubjectively constituted. But one can wonder, as Jean-Paul Sartre did, whether such an emphasis respects the Other qua other rather than finding a mirror image of the ideality of my experience: "The perception of the Other-as-object refers to a coherent system of representations, and this system is not mine. This means that in my experience the Other is not a phenomenon which refers to my experience but that on principle he refers himself to phenomena located outside of all experience which is possible for me" (1956:227-8).

Sartre's own text surpasses here only hesitantly, however. In the first place, he acknowledges that the appearance of the Other is a phenomenon too complex to be reduced to the problem of the mirror's image. Rather, "the Other is not only the one whom I see but the one who sees me." The look (le regard) of the Other, then, nihilates all presence, precisely in being a flesh that transcends and withdraws itself from my grasp: "If I apprehend the look, I cease to perceive the eyes; they are there, they remain in the field of my perception as pure




presentations, but I do not make use of them; they are neutralized, put out of play; they are no longer the object of a thesis but remain in that state of "disconnection" (mise hors circuit) in which the world is put by a consciousness practicing the phenomenological reduction pre- scribed by Husserl" (1956:258).

In this sense, the Other never returns from this state of disconnection, from the positing of a consciousness that forms the preamble for transcendental knowledge in Husserl. It is not a presence, an evidence of appropriation, but an absence-not on the other side of the body's mirror image, but in the "internal hemorrhage" at the absence of my world. Its de-totalization indicates a world other than my own, for which, I, too, am an object only within this peculiar form of absence. Consequently, what was for Husserl the iterability of objective meaning across the field of intersubjective verification is here the possibility of its inherent failure. It is the presence of the failure of totalization, which for Kant marked the end of metaphysics in general-though his notion of the sign also presupposed a similar iterability. Sartre claims, on the contrary, "(t)he Other's look as the necessary condition of my objectivity is the destruction of all objectivity for me" (1956:269). Moreover, if the Other is this absence, if his or her being is "non-objective," then it is only through a similar "conversion and degradation" that he or she can become an object present to hand for my use in the realm of the practical.

And yet, Sartre wavers. The synthetic unity of consciousness, too, he claims, is insurpassable. And in this sense he remains staunch: "But the Other is still an object for me." And insofar as the Other is an event before the detached being of consciousness, "this very detach- ment which is the being of the For-itself, causes there to be an Other" (1956:283). Just as Descartes had reduced Being to representations that were clear and distinct, Sartre's Cartesianism must return him to an account of the ultimate separation between consciousness. The Other, this "intra-mundane presence absence" (1956:294), radically incommensurable with my consciousness remains, as an appearance before my consciousness, a "transcendence-transcended" (ibid). Con- sistently, there is a reappearance of a certain Hegelianism:

Thus the Other-as-object is an explosive instrument which I handle with care because I foresee around him the permanent possibility that they are going to make it explode and that with this explosion I shall suddenly experience the flight of the world away from me and the alienation of my being. Therefore my constant concern is to contain the Other within his objectivity, and my relations with the Other-as-object are essentially made up of ruses designed to make him remain an object (1956:297).




This ruse, the cunning of subjectivity, is Sartre's own bow to Hegel. Its assertion occurs immediately on the heels of Sartre's own criticism that in Hegel the "ontological problem (of the other) remains everywhere formulated in terms of knowledge" (1956:238). This passion for the image, for the security of self-certainty, nonetheless fails before the re-appearance of a trace that is archaic both to a certain experience and to the archive of its articulation: "But one look on the part of the Other is sufficient to make all these schemes collapse and to make me experience once more the transfiguration of the Other" (1956:297).

Once Sartre has it that the dispersal of the Other's regard is transcendable, if the Other is ultimately a "transcendence- transcended," then the difference between myself and the Other, one as clear as that between percept and image for Sartre, becomes, too, a difference transcended. It becomes mine in the transcending of this transcendence. And, in the moment the Other is "objectivized", so too truth is lost in the Sartrean text. The same move that restores dignity in the withdrawal of the Other likewise makes the face of the Other the preserver of truth. For precisely in the destruction of objectivity and the totalization of my regard, and, consequently, in the destruction of the strict subjectivizing of truth, such a move enforces a truth that transcends the individual regard of the for-itself." But with the re-valorization of Sartre's Cartesianism, both become jeopardized in what is now the phenomenalization of the transcendental field. Presence and absence, image and thing (the regard of the Other and its image), are cut loose from their moorings: "Thus I am referred from transfiguration to degradation and from degradation to transformation without ever being able to get a total view of the ensemble of these two modes on the part of the Other-for each of them is self-sufficient and refers only to itself-or to hold firmly to either one of them-for

11 The problematic that identifies the Other as the guarantee of a truth beyond the "I" already in fact had arisen in post-kantian readings of the transcendental ego. Prior to Hegel's dialectic of self-consciousness, Schelling too claimed that "[o]nly by the fact that there are intelligences outside me, does the world as such become objective to me (173).

.... For the individual, these other intelligences are, as it were, the eternal

bearers of the universe, and together they constitute so many indestructible mirrors of the objective world. The world, though it is posited solely through the self, is independent of me, since it resides for me in the intuition of other intelligences" (174). Still, Schelling remains in a sense "pre-critical", in fact Leibnitzean, in his reading of this mirror-play between "monads." Not that he was unaware of the conflict and the perspectivalism which looms on the horizon. Nonetheless, he glosses over it: "In a transcendental enquiry we make no appeal to the fact that a discrepancy in our presentations with respect to those of others immediately makes us doubtful as to their objectivity.. ." (174).




each has its own stability and collapses in order for the other to rise from its ruins" (1956:297).

The Cartesian move in this respect always delivers its own inverse image, a radical scepticism, one that in a sense destroys the radicality of Sartre's insights. This play of image and thing must deny precisely what is neither: the event of the look itself, where immanence and transcendence, presence and absence provide a self- sufficiency that occurs precisely in the Other's withdrawal. But Sartre must have it one way or the other: subject or object, immanence or transcendence, in-itself or for-itself. The appearance of the Other is a problem because it will not fit this ontologization. Hence its ruins and the ruse. Against the transcendence which "displays itself," against Augustine's "rational beauty," Sartre must say straight away: "It is never when eyes are looking at you that you can find them beautiful or ugly, that you can remark on their color. The Other's look hides his eyes .. ." (1956:258). For Sartre, the Look does not in the strict sense appear, any more than for Descartes one could see men behind the hats and cloaks: such an appearance must degrade it into an object, the in-itself. It therefore cannot even appear on the eyes of the other person. "On the contrary, far from perceiving the look on the objects which manifest it, my apprehension of a look turn toward me appears on the ground of the destruction of the eyes which 'look at me' "

(ibid).12 The Other remains too much an absence to appear (but not to be manifested), while my image is too much a presence, too much the object before a subject, to trace his or her withdrawal into otherness. The Other "appears" just as a mask that hollows out an infinite distance between itself and the visage. As Roland Barthes, Sartrean in more ways than one, has said of the cinematic face, that is imago: it presents a "kind of absolute state of the flesh, which could be neither reached nor renounced" (56).

V

The work of Emmanuel Levinas operates on the ruins of the Husserlian and Sartrean failure. It offers an attempt to confront the Other as an originary phenomenon that is non-reducible before the ontologizing grasp of the Cartesian project and ultimately provides the necessity of its dissolution.

In (the face's) epiphany, in expression, the sensible, still graspable, turns into total resistance to the grasp. This mutation can occur only by the opening of a new dimension. For the

12 And yet, paradoxically, Sartre so limited what he called the "visible transcendence" of the face to the specificity of its flesh that he claims that "A face without eyes is a singular animal" (1974:70).




resistance the grasp is not produced as an insurmountable resistance, like the hardness of the rock against which the effort of the hand comes to naught, like the remoteness of a star in the immensity of space. The expression the face introduces into the world does not defy the feebleness of my powers, but my ability for power. The face, still a thing among things, breaks through the form that nevertheless delimits it. This means concretely: the face speaks to me and thereby invites me to a relation incommensurate with a power exercised, be it enjoy- ment or knowledge (1969:197-8).

Rather than an unresolved play between presence and absence, infinitely distending the Sartrean face between the mask and the masked in the thematics of objectification, here the face itself "breaks through the form that nevertheless delimits it." But it does so not by simply escaping it, or negating it, as the animate is to escape the "naughtness" of a rock, but by a "mutation," which is in itself, i.e., en presence, the opening of a new dimension that is the dissolution of all objectivity: "The eyes break through the mask-the language of the eyes, impossible to dissemble. The eye does not shine; it speaks" (1969:66). This "speaking" of the eyes, (a phenomenon, which, Kant, too, already marked) has a logos of its own, the site of a fundamental incommensurability. Its otherness remains irreducible to my judgment, my own regard, my own interest, or finally even any epistemic grasp which might reduce this other to an identity before me, the Same. Respect for the Other then occurs without regard for what might count or seem respectable to me, for what I am familiar with, with my "Sameness."

The same and the other can not enter into a cognition that would encompass them; the relations that the separated being maintains with what transcends it are not produced on the ground of totality, do not crystallize into a system.

.... The

conjunction of the same and the other, in which even their verbal proximity is maintained, is the direct and full face welcome of the other by me. This conjuncture is irreducible to totality; the "face to face" position is not a modification of the "along side. . . ." The face to face remains an ultimate situation. (1969:80-1)

In accord with Kant, the factum of the good will remains unapproach- able from the standpoint of the theoretical. This "Other" remains irreducible, not a regional problem for the application of an organon of cognition. For Levinas, as for Kant, it divides metaphysica rationalis from within. Against the latter's need to provide a foundation, a ground, an arch6, the appearance of the Other introduces not a higher dimension, but another dimension, not a ground, but an abyss (Abgrund), one that cuts across all others as their dis-ordering, the




refusal of their homogeneity, and in this regard, a certain "an-archy" (Levinas, 1981:100).

Against the mediation of the judgment, against all attempts to cognize the Other as an inner content inferred from the mediation of the body, Levinas declares simply, "The immediate is the face to face" (1969:52), an immediacy in which presence and transcendence coincide as an originary phenomenon, which refuses ob-jectification and the grasp (Be-griff) of cognition. But it does so here just as the specificity which is the presentation of this "mutation," as Levinas calls it. This move implicitly repeats, but now explicates, Augustine's "videmus" and his refusal of inference-"since there is no possibility of doubt," as he put it. The appearance of the other claims us not because it is immediately certain, but because it occurs prior to the question of doubt, or certainty, or grounds, as Kant blinkingly saw. Rather than knowledge specifying "the ruins from which the Other must arise," this Other, irreducible to all "sameness," indicates the ruin of the concept, the failure of conceptual subsumption, and the latter's accounting for the mode of rationality characteristic of the finite-as Augustine cognized it, or even as Kant himself schematized it as early as the Inaugural Dissertation: "There is not given (to man) an intuition of things intellectual but only a symbolic cognition, and intellection is only allowable for us through universal concepts in the abstract and not through a singular concept in the concrete" (1968b:60). But the face will not fit here. It is neither fully "intuit- able," nor schematizable. Rather it presents an event that "breaks through the form that delimits it," in the same way that Kant's moral law could not be grasped within the account of the "forms" of theoretical reason. "Synthetic" and a priori, it must nonetheless be disclosed as afactum; not deducible from pure concepts. It remains, nonetheless, "firmly established of itself' (fuir sich selbst fest), beyond the domain of finite epistemics (1965a:48).13

By making the being of rational agents undecidable before our mode of cognition, Kant is the precursor of the failure of theory vis di vis the other person. Like Sartre, Levinas initially states this failure phenomenologically as our inability to anticipate the Other-a failure regarding "the unforseeableness of his reaction" (1969:199). Still, this otherness does not involve a simple logical difference. It is not the problem of induction or analogy applied to persons. Rather, here all

13 Equally, the phenomenon of the face for Levinas is not simply a phenomenon but a demand, a demand that obligates, or more properly "supplicates," as Levinas puts it: "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 things in question in giving")-this gaze is precisely the epiphany of the face as a face" (1969:75).




the hypotheses fail because they are ours. Since the Other's past was never fully present, we are never able to generalize his actions in

formulating our predictions, just as all deductions will proceed from conditional premises, which indicate that others are always possible in the withdrawal of the Other's appearance. In a strong sense, the

problem of the Other remains a disruption of the Same, the failure of

ontology, the failure to find the thread that winds its way through all

things, and perhaps even the failure of philosophy itself in its attempt to come to grips with the "being" of other persons. In this light, Levinas claims "Philosophy itself is identified with the substitution of ideas for persons, the theme for the interlocutor, the interiority of the

logical relation for the exteriority of interpretation" (1969:88).14 For Levinas, philosophy has too often been in this sense a kind of

"ontological imperialism" (1969:44) that needs to reduce the Other to a homogeneous theory about the nature of things and to avoid the

problem of interpretation. The "infinity" introduced has always been, then, what Hegel called the "bad infinite" (Schlect-Unendliche)-one based upon our concepts, on Verstand, rather than the being-beyond of the surpassing that the Other inaugurates (1969:139). Rather than this simple homogeneity, satisfying our desire for simplicify and

univocity in theory-construction, but not perhaps the encounter with

14 This substitution of ideas for persons is perhaps already archetypically manifested in Plato's Symposium's account of eros and Diotima's denial that the vision of beauty will "take the form of a face, or of hands, or anything that is of the flesh," but instead will focus upon what surpasses that, Beauty itself, the idea or the form in which all particular features participate (1963:522:211). While this vision enforces the surpassing of the "material," it may nonetheless rob individuality of its uniqueness. It is precisely the universal, the non-particular, the non-unique within the singular that is the content of the metaphysical absolute. The "absolute" invoked, then, remains opposed to all that Levinas retrieves from a tradition in which the "absolute" is understood precisely as personal, "the epiphany that occurs as a face (1969:196)." Moreover, this surpassing within metaphysics, far from enabling the foundation of an ethics which would, in Kantian terms (though he too remains its representative) respect the dignity and autonomy of the individual, enforces, instead, what Max Scheler appropriately de- scribes as logonomy. In this regard, as he puts it, the discourse of humanitas as animal rationales is the discourse of the "logonomy and at the same time extreme heteronomy of the person" (372-3). And, while it has always figured in arguments against the corruptibility of the corporeal, safeguarding that part which surpasses, it has often enough not been noticed that what has been surpassed is precisely that which individualizes and constitutes the specificity (the "composite") of the personal. In this respect, as Scheler notes, his argument perhaps repeats Thomas Aquinas' protestations in the controversy with Averroes. A metaphysics based simply on the surpassing of the idea results in a position in which "[t]his particular soul differs only numerically from that one as the result of having a relationship to a numerically different body." (Aquinas: 234) It is in this regard that Plato's metaphysics (and, if one follows Levinas, philosophy in general) operating within the strict opposition between the sensible and the intelligible, is perhaps already on the way to the dissolution of the Other.




the Other, Levinas wants to focus upon the problem of heterogeneity, of pluralism, separation, and exteriority. Those themes now are to "unite" thought with the problem of the infinite and call forth the need for interpretation before "an event more fundamental than theory" (1969:61).

Is Levinas correct here? Must the meditation on the face, ultimately through "respect", mark the end of the theoretical unity of conceptualization? Or, does such meditation risk again the ploy of its correction, of adequatio and certitudo? Does the move that refuses to contain, which for Levinas is a metaphysics preceding all ontology, destroy all attempts to think anew? On the contrary, Levinas calls the site of this separation, of the refusal to reduce the Other to the Same, the site of the encounter with the Holy. But his ultimate relation does not simply repeat Augustine's "face to face," the Divine vision of the next life: "The Other is not the incarnation of God, but precisely by his face, in which he is disincarnate, is that manifestation of the height in which God is revealed. It is our relations with men, which describe a field of research hardly glimpsed at... that give to theological concepts the sole signification they admit to" (1969:79).

In a formidable article, Jacques Derrida has wondered whether the relation for Levinas might not go the other way around, whether "independent of its theological content (an expression Levinas would most likely reject) does not this entire discourse collapse" (103)? Rather than the peace and justice that Levinas finds originating in the summons of the Other's transcendence, Derrida has wondered whether what remains left over, apart from a theological content, is an "unfathomable transcendental violence." He has questioned whether what follows from Levinas' position, apart from its theological presup- positions, is the possibility that "anything goes," and thus the possibility of an irredeemable "play of the same," in which nothing forbids the violence of the irrational. It is one thing to make room for faith and another to deliver reason over to it. On Levinas' account, however, since reason lives in the dialogue of language, which refuses the foundation of the identically iterable, "the first rationality gleams forth in the opposition of the face to face" (1969:208).

Nonetheless, it may be a mistake to force a simple opposition upon this site. What the discourse of separation forces is perhaps the foreclosure of a reason which could simply decide apart from its commitments. Levinas' discussion of the Other and Ethics (and ultimately, Religion) does not involve an attempt to turn the latter into another kind of foundation, a simple reversal of modernism for the sake of its ancient heritage. It is just this move, in fact, which would make Derrida's question regarding transcendental justification perhaps uncircumscribable. And this bar may separate the face to face of




Levinas and Augustine. Moreover, it cannot be merely a Kantian move to limit reason simply in order to make room for faith. Rather than introducing a final discourse, it introduces another discourse (Lyotard). Before the face of the Other we encounter not a foundation for rationality, but the necessity of a resolve--one which forces us, as Levinas states (and perhaps Kant missed it), in moving beyond the metaphysical hierarchy that classically connects them, to confront "the risk of appearing to confuse theory and practice" (1969:29).

VI

Apart from this move, and perhaps still within it, the problem does not go away. Levinas' claim is that the Other has not been seen. Descartes thought more than once on the problem: "[I]f I see two eyes with a nose, I at once imagine a forehead and a mouth and all the other parts of a face, because I am unaccustomed to seeing the former without the latter" (1972:90). It is, Descartes says, a matter of "recollection" (souvenance), namely "how the recollection of one thing can be excited by that of another which was imprinted in the memory at the same time. " But does this "another" already reduced to a "part" (Descartes is already on the way to "spirit particles," as he calls them), in the end present "another?" Or, rather, does it introduce a mask within the endless cycle of constitution/destruction? Does this appeal to memory, and ultimately to mimesis, make possible the appearance of the Other? Does the appearance of the Other ever even qua appearance present an "image like myself?" Is the Other ever simply constituted in my image, a difference to which I can become accus- tomed by similarity? In the strict sense, what inner memory could connect me with the Other's appearance? Perhaps at stake is the inverse image, even Descartes' own mirror image, Augustine's "puzzling reflection in a mirror." Do I know the Other through a series of deflections, analogizing in the end the connection of my own representation, my own mirror image with myself, or ultimately, my own presence to self? Not even this: empirically, the child recognizes "Others" before his or her own image, a fact that should be taken seriously, perhaps. Moreover, it is not, supposedly (a Freudian, too, would be equally puzzled here), my face that I identify in the visage of the Other. Is it the pairing of our bodies, that is at stake, then, as Augustine (in one sense) and Husserl (in another) have said? But there is a moment of subreption here, an illusion, as Kant would say, that is transcendental. Subject and object undergo an essential confla- tion. I then have a face like the Other, since he or she has a body like mine. The inference, again as the psychologist would say, self- inference, proceeds,from the Other, a relation that is non-reflexive. In




this regard, perhaps it is after all the Other, irreducible to objectivity, who gives me back to my self, as Levinas has claimed.

"The trouble is," Sartre stated, in all the mirror's puzzling reflections "I don't see my face.. ." (1974:68). In a sense it is just this puzzle which constitutes the Cartesian site and its need to justify the ideas "naturally occuring before the mind." "I shall pause here to consider the ideas which previously arose naturally and of themselves in my mind whenever I considered what I was. I thought of myself as having a face ..." (Descartes, 1960:25). But this thought occurs only within a fundamental absence, like the withdrawal of the Other from "before my mind." The Other remains in all this that which escapes mimesis, an irreducible appearance that never becomes an object. And, for the same reason, no simple intuition will suffice, either. Here, as Sartre rightly said of the beautiful, the Other remains an "intuition refused," a phenomenon that refuses to be subsumed before a concept, a symbol, a sense that refuses to become a sign (1964:371). Rather, it is the site of the tracing of an image that refuses to undergo disenchantment, a flesh and a figure that is the site of its own trans-figuration.

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Reason and the Face of the Other