Heidegger vs. Levinas

Levinas just doesn’t get Heidegger. At all. He reacts so violently against his own (mis)reading of Heidegger that he becomes a parody. As the man said, be careful when battling monsters…

In Existence and Existents, Levinas gives his seminal critique of Heidegger’s notion of being. He believes, in his analysis of the “anonymity of being,” that he is performing a proper ontological analysis which leads to the understanding of being. He focuses (in a fundamentally flawed way) on the ontological difference: that Being is not a being. He imagines the disappearance of all beings, and asks what remains. He says that it is “the fact that one is, that there is…” I’m going to be frank, this is just stupid. The disappearance of beings as a whole would imply the disappearance of Dasein (or Levinas’ “on”) and therefore also of all facticity (the fact that there is…). Because he misunderstands the ontological difference (and this misunderstanding, since Levinas, has become endemic in French philosophy) he fails to grasp Heidegger’s argument. Being is the Being of beings. Being is not to be understood as the absence of beings, an anonymous plain of factitious knowledge. Being is to be *questioned*, and a great deal of thinking must occur before this even becomes possible.

He takes a further wrong turn when he argues that ethics is first philosophy. In a certain sense, I can agree with this claim: it is more important to do good than to know truth. But what is the nature of this priority? For Levinas (and Derrida has already pointed this out) the priority of ethics over truth is a *classically ontological priority*. What does Levinas understand as the priority of ethics over truth? He understands affirmation of truth (the ethical commitment to the other not to speak deceptively) as the *condition for the possibility* of truth. Now it is silly to argue that ethics is ontologically prior to ontology (because then ethics simply becomes ontology by another name). Levinas should have argued for the ethical priority of ethics.

If one wants to find Heidegger at his most Levinasian, the only text to which one can turn is the infamous rectorship address. Heidegger’s hope that a Fuhrer could initiate a decision that would rescue western spirit from technological nihilism. What is the structure of a decision? De-caedere means to cut off. A decision introduces a caesura within a common field of the one. In Heidegger’s Nazi-era writings, he looks to decision as an authentic act which can be taken up by western humans in order to leave behind the epoch of technology. After he realized the horror and failure of the Nazi project, Heidegger reversed his position. Human decisions do not create historical epochs, rather the epoch itself is the decision within the history of Being. Dasein is left to ponder what has already decided upon him/her. This is to say *Levinas’ Other operates in precisely the same fashion as Heidegger’s Fuhrer*, except that the Other is eternal: always to be respected, obeyed, welcomed, etc. The Other is an eternal Fuhrer.

Scratch a Levinasian, find a fascist. In short, f**k the Other.

John, I agree with much of what you say, although I do think that Heidegger’s authentic encounter with others simply isn’t all about themselves. There’s a dual movement there of which Levinas only notices a single part.

I don’t think Heidegger is perfect nor do I think someone doing things differently should be criticized solely for that. As I said I think Levinas both directly and indirectly has significantly affected how I view philosophy as well as how I read Heidegger.

Having said that though I think that Heidegger’s notion of authenticity and Levinas’ notion of ethics simply are much more similar than Levinas appears willing to accept. That’s not to say there aren’t other differences.

As to the rectory address, I agree that it’s scary, although I think many of the scary elements are there in his Nietzsche lectures as well. Having said that though there’s also elements from the address which are quite profound.

My personal feeling is that neither Levinas nor Heidegger really provide a way to avoid fascism, totalitarianism (of the fascist or socialist varieties) or so forth. It’s just too incomplete to do that. But criticizing them for that is ultimately futile. It’s akin to complaining that physicists haven’t provided us the tools to do that. I think we sometimes demand too much of a philosophical theory.

The issue of Levinas and the reception of Heidegger in France is interesting. Clearly Levinas was party to spreading the Heideggarian word, as it were. But Heidegger’s Nazism clearly affected him. (And completely understandably)

I think though that simply removing beings in an analysis of Dasein really doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me. Although I admit that this does get into the issue of Dasein’s relationship to ontic entities and to what degree Heidegger is a “pure” idealist and to what degree he is an ontic realist. I wouldn’t characterize the fact Dasein is both ontic and ontological quite as you do. But I completely agree that Heidegger and Levinas are pointing in different directions. (I think this gets done even more in Derrida)

That Levinas doesn’t like Heidegger’s focus on Being is undeniable. That’s not really the issue (as I see it). Rather the issue is to what degree this is a focus with other elements also present in Heidegger’s thought. (i.e. is the critique just that Heidegger doesn’t write about what you want him to write about) Or, if it is more than that, whether one is being fair to Heidegger and whether the focus has the consequences Levinas asserts.

I rather like Levinas’ phenomenology of the Other. I think his criticisms of Heidegger are far less plausible. Having said that though such an appropriation can be useful. And a Heideggerian criticizing Levinas too much on these points has to ask how fair Heidegger was to Plato, Nietzsche, Kant and others. Appropriation in this way – even to the degree of a polemic encounter like Levinas often gives us – can be philosophically useful. One might ask though whether by engaging in polemics against Heidegger Levinas ends up abbrogating his own logic of the Other. That is does he respond to the call of the Other in Heidegger.

The issue of the evil in Levinas wasn’t whether he recognized the other could be evil. As you say, he obviously knew that well. The question is whether philosophically he was able to deal with this. While you say Levinas is a political liberal his view and justification of actions by Israel obviously raise questions. (And I say that as someone who politically typically supports Israel) That is there is a very real philosophical question of fascism in Levinas.

I’d meant vaguely to get back to this thread. The relationship between Levinas and Heidegger is a vexed one, not least because Levinas’ own thinking is thoroughly immersed in, dependent on, and responsive to Heidegger’s, even as he launches a harsh excoriating, repudiating critique of seemingly the whole cast of Heidegger’s thinking. (That might make it seem as if the appreciation of Heidegger’s thinking isn’t there and as if Levinas has only a one-sided understanding of Heidegger, but I think something of the harshness or vehemence of his criticism is due precisely to his feeling the full force of Heidegger’s thinking, and due to his need to underline his exact points of difference with Heidegger, and differentiate his own views from the immense influence of Heidegger, within the terms of which they are situated. And it is especially Heidegger’s implied “political ontology” or his complicity with power, without, of course, worldly power being something that can be eliminated, disarmed, or simply disavowed, that Levinas takes aim at). Scholars have often expressed perplexity at Aristotle’s critical comments about Plato, but, I think, something of the sense that Aristotle simply misread Plato can be dispelled if one realizes that he is actually claiming to do Plato “one better”, so that, e.g., that aporetic, riddling distinction between existence and essence, or, better, that it is and what it is, can be taken as unraveling the relation between the forms and their degenerate empirical instantiations. (My sense is that it’s less that Aristotle is more like Plato than commonly received, but more that Plato is more like Aristotle than commonly received). I think something like that “doing one better” is virtually always the case when one philosopher criticizes another, by whom he/she is strongly influenced. So I think you are right that the issue of responsibility is already strongly “there” in Heidegger, though Levinas does serve to bring it out sharply, and calls into question the adequacy of the basis that Heidegger gives to the “call”. (Heidegger’s critique of modern technology would be very much a case in point, since there is a peculiar doubleness to it, since he obviously wants to criticize it, which would mean some sort of normative counter-appeal, but he also sees it as a dispensation of Being itself, which must be submitted to and accepted. It’s as if the formula were: Being is, therefore it is a commandment. And Heidegger is not entirely wrong, when he sees the Nazis’ mass exterminations as belonging to the self-proliferating complex of modern technology, since part of its “unique” horror is that it called upon the “advanced” organizational and technological means of modern “civilization” to implement itself, which makes it different from other such mass murders, all of which are nonetheless “unique” in their absolute evil and horror. But there is something culpably obtuse is Heidegger’s assimilation of such a mass occurrence to an ontological dispensation or destining, as if it would serve to “prove” a point. I think one can see there part of Levinas’ motivation for shifting from an ontological to an ethical “ground”, as a refusal of any such “gnostic” rationalization of such occurrences. But his ethics is “an-archic”, since any authority, political, ethical, religious, is groundless, without foundation: most simply put, any imperative exceeds the conditions from which it arises, in fact, would aim, in some measure, at altering those conditions, or, in the case of a negative imperative, a prohibition, at altering what would otherwise result or ensue, such that it can’t simply come from Being. And, indeed, our language doesn’t just “house” Being, but is always riddled with imperatives and involves, microscopically, a shifting tissue of norms. Gregory Bateson put the point too simplistically in referring to the “report/command” duality involved in every statement. No condition or state of the world is ever simply a destining of Being. However limited or minute our power of disposal over it, there always remains the bare possibility of such a condition or state being transformed or “redeemed”, in being transmitted otherwise to futural states or conditions of the world. That would be what Levinas espies in “responsibility”, and the issue he contests with Heidegger concerns the source and, perhaps, the “structure” of such responsibility).

Heidegger’s Rectoral Address does, indeed, exude a kind of dark brilliance. His appeal to the “leading principle”, the arche, in addressing the disintegration and loss of motivating force in the truth behind the organization of modern knowledge, in its very groundlessness, as connected to a renewal of an idealized polis, in which the German people wills to know itself in its “essence”, IIRC something of its rhetoric, amounts to a foreshortened synopsis of a “whole” range of issues. It’s fair to say, at least, that Heidegger was deluded, in that he didn’t understand who was leading whom, until it was too late. (And, perhaps if one wants to try an understand what Heidegger “saw” in Nazism, a glance back at “The Earliest System Program of German Idealism”, with its philosophically-backed popular religion as a key to the socially emancipated German nation, in a right-wing interpretation of an originally “left” document, might hold some clues). But then one can see precisely why Levinas, from the start, took aim at the ontology of knowledge, as an exclusive and supreme criterion. (And, of course, it’s not just Heidegger, but also Hegel, who he takes aim at, as exemplars, though the case is different with each, of the whole tradition of Western metaphysics, wherein humans are conceived as “the rational animal”, with “rationality” being conceived as closely tied to knowledge and the “logic” of truth, and knowledge thereby being the supreme “justification” of existence, such that human beings are to be ranked and recognized in a hierarchy of knowledge, which is the sole common “substance” in which they participate. And, of course, one shouldn’t forget Sartre, as the reigning “presence”, with whom he maintained personable collegial relations throughout, inspite of, perhaps, finding Sartre’s politics absurd, if not reprehensible, since he maintained his sense of connection with what had happened in his native U.S.S.R.). The shift to another normative dimension, while still maintaining its ties both to philosophical generality and phenomenological “demonstration”, would motivate the discrete moves he would gradually, painstakingly make to accrue an alternative “position” as a philosophical riposte. The dimension of the ethical that is invoked wouldn’t necessarily claim to dispose over knowledge, nor over the worldly conditions to which it is directed, but it also wouldn’t be reducible to its terms, though it might draw into question its “value”. (At any rate, a sheer “ethics” of truth, at its limit, would be “cynicism”, whereas a sheer ethics of “justice”, at its limit, would be “fanaticism”).

So I think one should read Levinas as operating within a basic acceptance of Heidegger’s Dasein analysis, and not rejecting it, to understand the specific import of the revisionary moves he makes. He certainly doesn’t simply reject Dasein’s relation to ontic entities. Rather he “dissolves” it, early on, beginning with his formulation of the “il y a”, perhaps his first move of response. He “begins” with the enjoyment of the “elements”, even prior to any practical involvements with organized “things”, and, of course, that is precisely aimed at the account of Zuhandendsein, as involved with the discipline of work and its “worries”. Work, then comes to be described in terms of fatigue, just as temporality is not a progression to any finite realization, but rather “aging”, though it is the chasm in time, the diachronic “time of the other”, which is beyond “my” time, which comes about from such erosions of self. And that self, which is “hypostatized” into its irreducible particularity as interior from the exteriority of its relation to the other, is itself ontic, but only “fully” becomes so through being uprooted and eroded from itself through its responsibility for the other, which individuates it even as it prevents it from being a “completed” or fully coherent self, through its project. Rather its project, rather than being grasped through “authenticity” and being a donation of Being, is donated to the other, giving “sense”, (which, of course, also means “direction” in French), through its “sincerity”. The “il y a”, which begins in “enjoyment”, is an alternate account of anxiety, but is also the counterpart of “illeity”, which is the structural condition from which the other approaches and invokes. (And, yes, there is a difficulty in distinguishing “il y a” and “illeity”, which is to say, a profound ambiguity between good and evil, which can only be resolved through enduring/repairing evil through the call of the good “beyond Being”). The upshot is that there is a whole series of moves in Levinas, which are revisions and parallels to Heidegger, which I don’ think can be grasped, except in terms of Levinas having accepted and worked within Heidegger’s basic account and analysis of both Dasein and the truth of Being, before, and even after, any attempted “break-out”, and seeking of another “direction”.

I was a bit too abrupt in saying that Heidegger simply stuffed Husserl’s transcendental ego back into the empirical ego in ocnceiving Dasein, though the referential problem of assigning the transcendental ego bothered him. But the ontic/ontological distinction is a transformation of the empirical/transcendental one, (with Dasein being both providing an “identity condition” as a point of phenomenological access). And Heidegger does follow out the ontological line, once having gained access, tending to dismiss ontic engagements as mere “Weltanschauung”. And there is a tension between the finitude of Dasein and the giving of Being as a “whole” which inhabits his thinking and lends it still a certain theoretical-transcendental distance, though I think his conception of “the world” is one of his enduring strengths. And philosophers are, of course, not stupid in thinking up and recurrently being lured into distinctions such as transcendental/empirical. There is a real phenomenal duality to human beings that it draws on, as at once particular objects among objects and subjects capable in principle of a universal knowledge of objects, in the Kantian-Fichtean version, or as particular beings in the world involved with other such beings, and that peculiar being in the world for whom there is a world, as an environing set of meaning-horizons, by which it must interpretively understand both itself and other beings that appear within the world, in the Heideggerian version. But I understand Levinas as engaged with a withdrawal from transcendental problematics, and any effort at a referential mastery of the world. (That would be a point of contact with Wittgenstein, who I also see as de-transcendentalizing issues, though, in his case, with specific reference to Kant. An actual quote: “Enough of all this transcendental twaddle, when everything is actually as plain as a sock to the jaw!”) When Levinas says, e.g., “Insomnia is a formalism more formal than any possible formalism”, interpret that as one may, (though it imitates some of Heidegger’s hyperbolic tropes), I take it to be saying that the “formal” occurs within the empirical and is not somehow theoretically distinct from it. Figures concerning the “pre-original” and the “immemorial past”, which can never be gathered up recollectively into a present, are also part of that withdrawal. There is nothing in Levinas that is not lived out, except perhaps for reference to a future which never “necessarily” arrives. Indeed, he’s probably the most “materialist” of phenomenologists, and certainly his “subject” is as thoroughly embodied as anything in Merleau-Ponty, inspite of notions that he is supposed to be concerned with “spiritual” matters, or narrowly moralistic concerns. It’s only through seeking out a different “angle” on “things” that he attempts to twist free from Heidegger.

I don’t think that philosophy can somehow forestall or “cure” fascism or, more generally, political violence. At best, it provides resources to understand and critically engage with such conditions and identify them as they occur, without in any way disposing over the course of the world. Philosophy is for thinking reeds. Levinas account of “ethics” is only political by virtue of being “anti-political”, delimiting the political, which is not to say it’s quietist and abjures any active engagement with the world. To me, it precisely points to the domain of practical reason, in terms of “responsibility”, which constrains one’s variously situated engagements with the violences that afflict the world and are perhaps endemic to social relations. But I don’t see how he could be accused of being infected with “fascism”, except in that he is far more forthright about the intrications of good with evil than Heidegger ever managed to be. And I said he was a republican, if one of liberalistic bent, not a liberal. (That the pursuit of self-interest results in the realization of general interest he once termed “hatefulness itself”). A comparison with Hannah Arendt, though indirect, would not be out of order. His work might suggest a concern for “human rights”, but, contrary to much current self-righteous tergiversations, I don’t think he would have missed that “rights” are legal constructions that require a coercive enforcement power, even if only over against that enforcement power itself, hence such questions are thoroughly intricated with issues of worldly power and “authority”. His Zionism, which I don’t share, was clearly an idealized and hopeful affair, but obviously meant to tax such a project in terms of his own hyperbolic conception of “responsibility”. (The interview about the Sabra and Shatilla massacre, for which he is often taxed, occurred just after the news had broken and well before the extent of Israeli complicity with and responsibility for the Lebanese militia had been established). At any rate, he wasn’t a ready political activist or commentator. That was not the sort of observant life he choose to lead.

It seems to me your asking the question of the relation, if any, between “fundamental” thinking, which reflects on the pre-reflective and pre-conceptual sources of our thinking/understanding of how we are in the world, and the world of “common sense” experience, in which thinking must be bound to acting, or vice versa. And any “answer” could be only a highly indirect relation, which might elucidate or resonate with the situations, which we fall into, but doesn’t provide any specific account of those situations themselves. (But I might find your claim about the “impossibility” of any move between levels perhaps a bit Derridean). But I think it’s also worth pointing out that even on the “ordinary” level of ethical thinking or theorizing, a binding determinacy is not readily on offer. The charges of empty formalism and too rigorous purism directed against Kant are not quite true, since in lesser works he does offer extensive prescriptive lists of duties, (including that quaint nicety about cheerfulness as a duty), but the formalism and noumenality of his main systematic account takes precedence over any effort at specification. And Wittgenstein, who maintained his ethics of silence early and late, abruptly dismissing ethical talk as worthless, idle chatter, since ethics is a matter of commitment to action or conduct, also I think meant to imply that ethical theorizing, in attempting to derive prescriptive actions from first principles, actually leads away from and reifies and distorts the matter “at hand” in terms of ethical disclosure, insight, or responsiveness, or, otherwise put, tends to suppress an “aesthetic” aspect essential to ethical matters. At any rate, I don’t think ethics can be meaningfully reduced to a calculus or decision procedure, since it amounts to a refusal of sheerly instrumental conduct, and morality always first and foremost redounds upon one’s own head, since no one can truly decide for another. And, indeed, it is precisely out of a sense of one’s own wrong, at least potentially, that one comes to conscience, with proclamations of a “good” or “clean” conscience not necessarily redounding to one’s credit, since it might just be an indication of obtuseness or obliviousness. (Orthodox Christianity begins with a consciousness of sin, without which I don’t think it can be understood, though try arguing that with an atheist, who insists on “evidence” for the “existence” of God). But, at any rate, that issue that you mention of the source of a “good” act, is partly as old as Aristotle, as I mentioned below, who problematized the moral evaluation of a “good” act, in terms of whether it was intentionally or dispositionally “free”, though, of course, his ethics is quasi-aristocratic, concerned with “honor” and a certain ontological perfectionism, (and pagan, as well, with “natural slavery”, etc.) But some version of the problem crops up recurrently, with “authenticity/responsibility” just raising it more “radically” and at greater “depth”, in terms of questioning just how and to what extent we dispose over our possibilities.

Levinas is clearly operating at the “fundamental” level of thinking, seeking to draw out the source of any possible ethical conception or norm, while also “opposing” such a source to what is uncovered by fundamental ontological “rationality”. But I don’t think what he is “saying” is completely unrecognizable at the level of more “ordinary” ethical thinking. And, in fact, I think he’s trying to get at some of the blockage that occurs at the fundamental ontological level, if taken as an exclusive focus. And he is certainly not claiming to avoid or extricate the ethical from our fatal entanglements. (In a different context for somewhat different reasons, Arendt made “forgiveness” a crucial condition for political action). The troubled restlessness of Levinasian ethical “insomnia” is not, certainly, Sartrean “bad faith”,- (though the slogan “to decide for one is to decide for all” is worth considering as something he’s picking apart, as good for neither the all, nor the one),- but I think something of the “same” unavoidability is involved. On the other hand, Levinas conception of an heteronymous freedom bears the very height of risk and is “dangerous”, in a way that should give the armoring of liberal or other conceptions of “autonomous” freedom pause for thought.

I typed out a screed yesterday, but found it so garbled that I didn’t press post. Re-reading it today, I felt too lazy or exhausted to try and disentangle it into a more readable form, but I thought it did part way pin some things down. (Aside from trying to pin down my own thoughts, in a somewhat obsessed, disorganized way, I can never quite be sure that I’ve been explicit enough, in terms of what exactly, in what someone else has said, in this case you, I am attempting to respond). So I decided, with apologies for my prolixities and confusions, to post it any way. Two points to try an clear up the mess. I think that the modal relation to the other, as a kind or dimension of signification, is something not to be found in Heidegger, which is original with Levinas, (though something similar is implicit in Wittgenstein), and which then “frames” the saying, unsaying, resaying trope by which he at once tries to disentangle himself from Heidegger and indicate an excess or surplus in meaning that is “otherwise” than the ontological. The other point is that my “account” of the Jewish sources that Levinas is drawing on, (which has nothing to do with the specific Nazi/Jew diatribe, but only concerns what might “shape” his thinking), was foreshortened jibberish, though since I’m not Jewish, it would not be my forte. Suffice it to say, that Jewish thinking has no “kairos”, no “fullness of time”, in which all things might be teleologically or predeterminedly gathered together and announced. And Judaism defines itself through observance of the law, an ethical compact, rather than through theological doctrine. And their notion of redemption is far more collectively or communally oriented than Christian conceptions concerning individual salvation. It “operates” counter-historically and reparatively, and the Messianic is a rupture with, rather than a fulfillment of, worldly history. All this tends to give Jewish styles of thinking an “intersubjective” or “interpersonal” cast and orientation, though those words sit oddly with Levinas, with his modal “saying” which can not be said, and his descriptive focus on the “hypostasis” of the lone “subject”, who is touched by, but can never reach the other, (which might make his taxing of Heidegger with a kind of sollipsism seem hypocritical, though he doesn’t lose the focus on ontic involvements, but rather, assuming all that from Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, he focuses on the ontic status of the “subject”). (And he has an excellent essay on Buber, in which it becomes clear, at least to me, how much “deeper”, more rigorous and refined a thinker he is). At any rate, all this just goes to try and “clarify” what I was trying to indicate about a different way of “gathering” meaning/signification involved in Levinas’ uncovering of/appeal to the modal “nature” of the relation to the other.

Finally, a crucial difference with Heidegger is that the Levinasian “subject” doesn’t come to some sort of “completion” or “fulfillment” in the authentic resolution of a finite project. Rather such a “subject” remains self-divided, non-identical, “split”, and Levinas’ “ethics” is that of such a fatally “incomplete” subject in a fractured, multivalent world. (Yes, something of such incompleteness as finite openness can be found in Heidegger, and it leads on to Derrida’s critique of self-presence, though I don’t think Levinas should be simply subsumed under either account). If Levinas “inevitably” fails to offer any decision criteria, it is because his ethics is a non-knowledge, since for him the urgency of the ethical always occurs in the mean-time, before it is too late, before any “final” knowledge could arrive and decide.

O.K. A last remark on the delimitation of the ethical from the political. It might seem obvious to you or I that political ends are neither total, nor ultimate or final, but, then, we didn’t live through the first half of the 20th century, and we’re Americans, (though I’m first generation). But, regarding the past, I tend to try to avoid the “enormous condescension of posterity” and regard past culpabilities with some sense of what it must have been “like” for participants, else the false sense of security and certainty in the present just breeds moral sentimentality and a blindness to the confusions and risks of the present. So, again with apology, I append the following comment.

Of course, I don’t think that such projects of “fundamental” thinking, which aim “deeply” at disclosing how it is laid out with the world and us in it, and the sources of thinking itself and what is “given” to think, can be readily tied to acting and be expected to issue “immediate” directives for action. (It is partly at disspelling such illusions of theoretical control that their criticisms are aimed). Though why Heidegger thought his “authority” as a philosopher would “translate” so readily into the political realm is part of what is drawn into question, (though he actually was among the least Nazified of the Nazi-supporting “respectable” philosophy professors of that time,- it’s just that the others, such as Nicolai Hartmann and Oskar Becker, are little remembered now). But the issues in question don’t just concern the “case” of Heidegger and personal criticisms are largely beside the point, though I don’t think excavating some of the sources of his complicity in his own thinking is irrelevant to examining just how it is with the world, and that would be how I would understand Levinas’ criticisms and revisions. And I do think, even at the “fundamental” level, and even granted his difficult entanglements, (which the very slowness and carefulness of his work painfully reflects), that Levinas’ criticism and revisions do mark significant differences and even a kind of “progress”. Simplistically put, the question of Being becomes at once more porous and less all-determinative. And though his work is to be taken in its philosophical generality, without any confessional mortgages, (no more than with Heidegger or anyone else), Levinas does specifically cite Rosenzweig, (whom I’ve never looked in to), as a main antecedent, and it’s worth considering something of that Jewish background, in that it does involve some specific differences in terms of issues of communication and signification and how the meaning-horizons of the world might gather-together and accrue, (which I think is part of the “beyond Being”).

What Levinas does aim to bring out, as “missing” in Heidegger, is just the difference, “forgotten” by the forgetfulness of Being, between an “ontological” and an “ethical” mode of intelligibility and signification, which is not just a matter of the subsumption of the individual under the impersonal “totality”, (since I think both would acknowledge that the individual belongs to community, sine qua non), but involves a specific reflection on just how and from “what” we at once receive and deliver our significations. Heidegger is pretty notoriously “incommunicative”, with his focus on the “soundless saying of the “voice” of Being”, and his “strategy” involves, AFAICT, a “purification” of the (conditions of the) understanding of Being, as prior to any “authentic” communication. Translating roughly, it would be a matter of how the semantics of such understanding would be delivered unto us and of the conditions for its “proper” reception. Levinas is offering up a “dirtier” proposition, though, for different reasons, perhaps equally “incommunicative”, focusing on how the usage of any such semantics and what it would disclose is inflected by the relation to the other, who is never just another semantic item, and affects any possible orientation toward (the reception of) meaning in the world. Being and the other run in parallel, as both concealing themselves through revealing themselves, but they nominate different dimensions of the question: how is it that meaning/understanding discloses the world and beings within it and what is its source. That the relation to the other is “modal”, i.e. neither what, nor that, means that the saying of the other, like that of Being, can not be reduced to a said, but the reason is different. That modal dimension of meaning “constitution”, in more superficial jargon, the “illocutionary”, is neither a symbol, nor a sign, neither semantic, nor semiotic, though it inflects and troubles both, which is part of why Levinas avoids any discussion of language, (though avoiding all the technical linguistic discussions of the surrounding structuralism, as missing or concealing his point, was no doubt also involved). However, there lies the parting of ways with Heidegger, whose odd manner of discourse involves the effort to talk about “something” that is not any thing, if not nothing, which is that which “gives” the what/that. In contrast, Levinas is not talking about. If his revisionary descriptions and criticisms have a deflationary tone toward Heidegger’s “bombast”, it is not because he has missed the point, but because it serves to make a counter-point. And, from that prosaic deflationary description, that good beyond Being, (which is explicitly meant to withstand the Nietzschean critique of morality, which makes his appeal to Plato rather odd), arises, such that the more it arouses the desire for the good and instills responsibility, the more one’s responsibility grows, together with the desire for the good, such that the Levinasian “subject” ends up hyperbolically buried beneath the full weight of the world. That such a hyperbolically crushing burden might be a parody of the Heideggerian destiny of Being is not quite the point. Rather note that Heidegger carefully specified that authenticity is a modification within the inauthenticity of “das Man”, and in no wise eliminates it, so that, by the “logic” of thrownness and projection, authenticity and inauthenticity “inevitably” come to change places, a “tragic’ note to the destiny of Being, which was echoed in the ersatz evocations of “tragic grandeur” in Nazi ideology, as if Heidegger had foreseen his own downfall. Nonetheless, the saying of Being remains a destiny or destining. By contrast, Levinas’ responsibility involves not just a saying of and to the other, but an unsaying and a resaying, (which I think is a distinctly anti-dialectical trope). (And I believe that “dedire” in French, “retract”, also suggests connotations of “de-duct” and “deny”, since it’s commonly a promise or contract that’s at issue in its use, hence a loss of “credit” and an erasure of conditions.) So it’s not the case that Levinas failed to respond to “the other” in Heidegger, but rather that, in order to do so, he had to shift ground and pull the “ground” out from under Heidegger, in the process originating an “other” conception of that “ground” in resaying Heidegger. And Levinas conception of responsibility is structured much differently than in Heidegger with respect to answering the call and to “what” is answered to.

So if you’re asking, in Piercean-pragmatic terms, for a criterion of discernible difference, I think the beginnings of an answer can be made out in that shift in ground and the way the underlying “lay of the land” is altered, so that the way the “issues” would arise and come into “focus” in a discernible perspective is affected by how one regards the “unanimity” of Being. But if you’re asking, in terms of such a criterion, how such “fundamental” thinking might be “translated” into decision criteria for acting, I’d be hard pressed, not just because the question might be slightly beside the point, since we’re dealing with a highly generalized mode of reflection on background conditions “before” any such question would arise, but because any possible answer would be so highly mediated through all sorts of other conditions that the thread of the sorts of questions and their criteria that would need to be addressed would get lost. The relation between thinking and acting neither begins, nor ends with “fundamental” thinking, but the point of such thinking is to draw out, in all sorts of embedded situations, including epistemic activities, what sorts of questions might be asked about the “stakes” at issue, rather than to bind actions to answers. The hope would be that if the “right” questions are asked, then one needn’t worry so much about resolving upon answers.

The classical philosophical-metaphysical desire was to know completely and fully the possible, (hence the prestige of logic, as, at least, ruling out the impossible). But such a desire is precisely impossible, even as we exist in the world in terms of our(?) counterfactual possibilities, which we must “of necessity” choose from and decide upon. Without any classical metaphysical guarantees. As if in compensation, we now have extensive and robust explanatory/predictive theories. But it is our ironical fate, that they at once multiply possibilities and obscure what is specifically “given” to us to decide upon. And, of course, our fates are not entirely determined by any possibilities that we would choose, even as what is set in chain by those possibilities entangle us in our fates. It seems to me that raising the question of responsibility in terms of the relation to the other is a way of drawing out what remains, not indestructable in Being, but unmanipulable in (collective) fate.

Well, this particular screed went off-track, as I try to gather my teeming thoughts into focus to make specific points, (though, in my defense, these are complicated matters). I might have more to add later about authenticity/sincerity/commitment being not quite criterial, and how part of that is as old as Aristotle. And about delimiting the ethical from the political, and about how confusing the two is damaging to both. And how the complexity of modern conditions tend to render the ethical “fugitive”. But I’ve inflicted enough of my own confusions for now.

To add, the one way out that I think even Heidegger points to is to say that philosophy is useless in providing answers but in thinking philosophy something happens to us. In Levinasian terms we might not be able to do much at providing reasons or even ideas but perhaps as a kind of unconscious side effect we become better people. I think this is something both talk about to varying degrees. I’m just not sure it’s anything but wishful thinking.

Now Mark Wrathall took me to task in an email list I’m in with him for suggesting there was good empirical justification for saying ethics professors aren’t made more ethical. Something we’d expect if ethical thinking had an effect. The evidence (mainly from the blog Splintered Mind) is somewhat weak. But it’s sufficient to have a fair bit of skepticism (even if the ethics professors Eric is discussing are more analytic)

I know the above comments are old but a few comments anyway from what I have read so far…

“The Other is not constituted by the self, as Levinas haves it, but the inverse.”

There is no ‘constitution’ of the self from the Other in Levinas. The self is a historical and/or personal retreat from the absolute alterity of the other. The self is a kind of violence that totalizes the other into a representation (ex., from the self), a plastic cast of the face of the other, and thus, brings the Other into the light of rational (ratio), conceptual relatedness that ‘is’, ontologizes, the Other (the tyranny of the same). Levinas wants to think otherwise than being. Being is the archaic violence that effaces the other. Levinas thinks that ontology imagines that the time of the other and my time are commensurate and therefore, levels the Other off into the same – not as identity but as kind, i.e., differences are certainly allowed but the essence of the difference assumes a prior basis for comparison, the ratio of nous, an archical (originary) temporalizing that I and Other exist and move and have our being in. Levinas thought the Other was anachronous to my time, a time not my time, not commensurate in any way to me. He thought that retreat from the face of the other was history and why metaphysics failed. It failed because it lost the Other, transcendence, it made the other into the said, the idolatry of the image and the word.

“Now it is silly to argue that ethics is ontologically prior to ontology (because then ethics simply becomes ontology by another name). Levinas should have argued for the ethical priority of ethics.”

For Levinas ethics is the interruption of ontology. Ethics cannot be a prior ontology to ontology. Ontology is a sort of prison that can only ‘see’ within itself – the originary narcissus. If the Other is a moment of Being or circumscribed in the light of Being then ethics will always, already be pre-understood as a positive relation among beings, an authentic mode of being-with. This ‘already understood’ levels off beings as equal in an essential way, as ontologically identical, known and understood in essence (arche). What gets lost in this is radical difference, perhaps in the direction of Derrida’s ‘differance’ but with an important exception – leveling off favors the neutral. ‘It’ ‘is’ already understood. Essence as ontologically identical reduces the radical alterity of the ‘he’ or ‘she’ into an ‘it’.

Signs, semiology, as endlessly referential, must essentially, undo the knot they tie as they tie it – thus the trace of ‘differance’. The time of signs as Blanchot (Levinas’ mentor) thought is il ya, the there is, it is dead time – it neutralizes the other as another sign, an it, and therefore, loses radical alterity of him or her – it makes the saying the said. All the while the Dread, from an ontological point of view, that must be retreated from is the non-being of the Other, the other than being.

I do not think that you can ‘arrive at Levinas’ as ‘saying the same
thing as Heidegger’ (as ‘without being aware of it’). I think that would be an equivalence that would totally miss the direction of Levinas’ thought. Perhaps you may think he is wrong but his work will not allow a similarity to Heideggerian mitsein or an elevation of Heideggerian ethics (whatever that would be).

“The Other is an eternal Fuhrer.”

The Fuhrer controls within the same, it is the System, light, ontology – it is the reduction of the other to the same. To think the same as identical to the Other is to do exactly what Levinas tells us that ontology does. The violence of the pure race is based on absolute, unquestioned knowing of the kind of being of the ‘pure’ and the ‘impure’. This kind of knowing can never be possible in Levinas’ notion of the Other without totalizing the Other under the tyranny of the same.

Clark,

Thanks for your comments. I understand your comment about older writings and certainly experience the draught of Lethe, the ever forgetful retreat from Mnemosyne, at the ancient age of 55!

I agree with much of your thought on Levinas. I also have written and thought about the middle voice in Greek and Heidegger, Levinas, and Derrida (kairos – http://www.mixermuse.com/blog/2010/09/08/the-problem-of-logic/).

With regard to this,

“I think part of this is how one reads Levinas but I think Levinas also reads Heidegger a bit unfairly. (Understandably so, all things considered) To me it is much more a difference of focus and emphasis rather than denying a phenomena. To the degree ones explication of the phenomena is always conditioned by ones stance then of course you are right. To the degree there is a phenomena then I think they are getting at the same thing.”

-yes, the Nazi thing was a major ‘understandable’ difference but I think for Levinas the difference is much more fundamental and somewhat ambiguous. Levinas was fully aware that Heidegger’s early work was focused on ontology and the Greek hermeneutic. He also knew that aletheia was the alpha-privative of lethe (forgetfulness, concealment). However, as ‘phenomenology’ a certain kind of behind the scenes understanding of ‘kind’ accompanies closedness viz. the neutrality of phenomenon. The ‘it’ of phenomenon, even as concealed, already ushers in a disposition that Levinas would not want to mediate away. ‘It’ takes on a certain gnosis that already determines what is to be thought. As you know Levinas would not have any issue with the reconstitution of metaphysics – not as the privileging of the present but as the radical interruption of the Other. Heidegger’s ontology and less Ereignis still fashions a site for the ‘there’ of being that unifies (hen) as thrown and appropriates from many (polumeres – what cannot come to presence). However, this is not the Other of Levinas. With Heidegger we favor the ‘it’ over the ‘he’ or ‘she’ and according to Levinas lose the an-archic sense of Ethics. Phenomena (phainomenon – “that which appears or is seen”) is already self-referential (moreover, Kant understood noumenon, neut. passive of prp. of noein “to apprehend”) and made evident in polemus. Hegel as well thinks from neutrality as Truth viz. the Logic…perhaps, nous-centric. Levinas does not have to be believed or thought as sensible. However, I see a kind of maturity of Kierkegaard’s break with objective certainty and absolute passivity in the face of ‘my eternal happiness’ (for K.) in Levinas. Postmodernity has made the break with the metaphysics of presence but seems to me to languish in its un-deconstructed canon of neutrality. I think Derrida was fully aware of this and was fascinated with the Other. He knew the anthropomorphic was again entangled in the nous of the violence of the light but I think he could only articulate the rupture of Levinas in his later writings. The Hegelian ‘not’ neutralizes its antecedent. The Other has a face and interrupts my narcissism (and world historical Spirit).

I am not that familiar with Peirce but just curious, what do you make of Levinas’ third other and Peirce?

From the little I know I would think that Derrida does adopt semiotics. I am writing a post on Heidegger and Lacan with regard to some of these issues. I started including some of Peirce’s thought in it but realized I did not know enough about him and took it out. I would love to hear some of your observations about the post when it is done with regard to Peirce.

“I think when one is going through the texts doing phenomenology that the phenomena ends up being the same.”

I suppose this makes me think that Derrida might think about the ‘same’ here as the im-possiblity of the ‘same’ as he does of the im-possiblity of justice. We must decide in this impossibility as if justice were possible. I suppose we must think of irreconcilables in terms of phenomena; the impossibility of a meta-language to ‘justify’ the ‘same’ and yet we must. In “The Gift of Death” Derrida writes about the “messianic without the messiah”. He calls this the secret. Apotheosis arrives as the impossible event without theosis. He thinks of death in this fashion – the gift of death is its event in the face of its impossibility. I think the almost instinctive need to think the ‘same’ as the event of meta-language is a similar ‘gift’.

I must confess I am a bit curious about you and this site…in light of what you know about the impossibility of metaphysics ( a meta-language), how do you come by Mormonism and metaphysics? I have had interesting theological discussions with Mormons but none have ever tried to think Mormonism from post-modernism…seems to me like it is a bit like a curious twilight zone episode. Is this a case of you must? If so, I wonder how your brethren respond to this approach. Is there an official church position regarding alternate philosophical approaches to Mormonism? In orthodoxy, it seems to me this would simply be deemed heresy.

Interesting…I had no idea there was a LDS faithful, continental strain at BYU. Of course, I would have believed there were continental philosophers there but without any necessary allegiance to Mormonism as Catholic Universities like DePaul have fantastic programs in continental philosophy but from my personal experience there I knew none that thought of themselves as Catholics much less do apologetics for it.

I did read some of the links you pointed me towards. It does appear that these thinkers are comfortable with Heidegger, Derrida Levinas, etc. – I did not see anything on Nietzsche though – hmm. What would LDS philosophers think of Nietzsche – he did seem to have a lot of criticisms of Christianity and postmodernists seemed to have found him essential, Heidegger in particular…and Derrida.

This brings up another point. I also read that these LDS philosophers think of the apostate church (everyone not LDS) as rooted in the paganism of Greek thought. I certainly understand the ‘Platonism’ (Neo-Platonic) of the Latin world. However, Heidegger thought of this as a corruption of the Greeks and I agree. I am sure I need not remind you of his warnings of onto-theologizing. Any kind of other start from the Greeks would certainly not be a mere replay of the history of metaphysics. Heidegger even gave up the word ‘Being’ to make sure others knew he was not making Being, God. This lapse back into the reifying of presence (meta-language of conscious, Heidegger’s early thinking of Plato’s Ideas, substance, etc.) made the nous (ratio, reason) absolute, infinite, omniscient, omnipresent, etc. -the logos, and produced the unifying canon of violence that Derrida wrote so much about. I suppose I do not think Christians were corrupt because of Greek thinking but Greek thinking was corrupted by Christianity. I think this is the direction of Heidegger and Derrida for sure. Nietzsche went much further than this in thinking of decadency, the ignoble, the ingenious manipulation of Christian sheep by their Sheppard priests, etc. (The Antichrist, Beyond Good and Evil, Zarathustra, etc.). It seems to me the whole idea of continental postmodern thinkers is the God is dead – we have totally played out that metaphysical hand historically speaking.

Certainly, we know from Of Grammatology (and Gadamer) that writing ‘supplements’ speech by overturning and playing with it from the margins. I suppose this could give one liberty to find other readings of the text that are equally absurd (from the point of view of truth) as the canonical reading. However, if the reading once again ends up affirming logocentrism wouldn’t this iteration of the text simply ignore deconstruction altogether and simply once again affirm meta-theology? I suppose it could be done in irony with postmodernism in mind. However, I fail to see how anyone could take LDS seriously if this is the case. In any case, I found it very interesting that the discussions I read were not fatally shot done by the ‘chosen’ as would have been in fundamentalism…maybe, it is so far out they do not bother with it. Anyway, let me know if there are any postmodern, Mormon congregations in Boulder Colorado – would love to check it out.