ISSN 1393-614X Minerva
- An Internet Journal of Philosophy Vol. 10 2006
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A
Pathological Goodness: Emmanuel Levinas’ Post-Holocaust Ethics
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Abstract
This essay
offers a detailed and comprehensive study of the ethical thought of
post-Holocaust phenomenologist, Emmanuel Levinas, through the lens of human
passions. Its purpose is to reveal the strengths, ambiguities and
risks inherent in the practice of an ethos of infinite generosity, in
the modern era.
In the words of Emil Fackenheim, the Holocaust is “the rupture that
ruptures philosophy” (Fackenheim, E. 1982,
266). The philosopher, labouring in the shadow of that rupture, recognizes that
in many respects philosophy stands at an impasse. The cumulative wisdom of the
greatest minds of the past twenty-five hundred years, with all its attention to
the Good and the Beautiful and the True, cannot account for the reality of the
radical evil concealed deep within the human heart and exposed at
Levinas approaches the rethinking of philosophy through a redefinition
of the human subject. In this rethinking, the passions will play a central role
at every stage in the healthy development of the responsible human being. The
natural drives and emotions, for Levinas, provide the person with valuable
guides to the Good, pointing the way to spiritual and moral fulfilment. A
positive view of the passions, a rarity in ethical philosophy, composes not
simply a bold innovation but a highly puzzling one, given the dark backdrop of
the atrocities of the twentieth century against which Levinas is staging his
work. Perhaps the greatest paradox concerning Emmanuel Levinas resides in his
ability to maintain, in the wake of the Holocaust, such a sympathetic view of
human existence that he can claim his utterly idealistic account to be a
phenomenology rather than a religious sermon, a description rather than a
prescription of human encounter (See Derrida, J. 1978, 79-153).
In his recasting of the drama of human subjectivity, Levinas affords the
passions a fundamental role. From the “instant” the existent erupts from the
field of Being-in-general, it
is overwhelmed by feelings of aporia, helplessness, and dread. In an
early work entitled Existence and existents, Levinas explains
that the immediacy of need and fear in the existent stems from its inability to
understand its own being, the nature of its felt freedom, in relation to Being-in-general (Levinas, E. 1988, 1-7).
Levinas' “instant”, like Kierkegaard's “moment,” is bereft of a history. A
“polarization of Being in general,” the instant thus provides the
occasion for the genuinely new. The existent, thus seen, is to itself a result
of the free act of its own creation, a self-fashioned project that is
self-propelled into the world (Levinas, E. 1988, 18). But the essence of our
humanity does not lie in our relationship with that world into which we have
thrust ourselves; it is to be found in the relationship effected in the very
act of our existence, a relationship, as Levinas puts it: “with the pure fact
that there is Being, the nakedness of this bare fact” (Levinas, E. 1988, 19).
This relationship is one of disquietude, restlessness, anxiety.
There is yet another aspect of this initial upsurge that requires our
attention for the passions that it provokes, for the human existent is not
merely the event of the genuinely new; he is at the same time the event of
finitude. And that finitude is felt as need and fear, and results in a
problematic state of clinging to that very being that is the source of
simultaneous anxiety.
The belongingness to being is in fact not a rest in a
harbour of peace; the dialectic of being and nothingness within essence is an
anxiety over nothingness and a struggle for existence. (Levinas, E. 1991, 176).
From the instant of birth, the existent feels stalked by Death, that
“absolute violence, murder in the night” (Levinas, E. 1969, 233). As a
corporeal being, continuance is only ever secured an instant at a time, and
thus remains a source of anxiety and a matter of constant vigilance. However,
as we have seen, a clinging to being proves anything but a safe or comfortable
refuge. On the contrary, it is experienced as “ontological claustrophobia”
(Llewelyn, J. 1995, 11) for, Levinas tells us, “essence has no exits” (Levinas,
E. 1991, 176); its formless content cannot be understood any more
satisfactorily than death can be fathomed. The alternative to the struggle for
survival reveals itself to be an eternal imprisonment in indeterminate
content-free being where it is felt as the “il y a.” Here,
timeless being takes on a gravity and a seriousness that make it unbearable,
and that make its interruption seem imperative. The encounter with the il y
a is always an affective encounter: an encounter felt viscerally as horror.
The il y a is the horror of an
inescapable fatality, an unavoidable eternity which one cannot flee. It is
interesting to note that, for Levinas, the fear of eternal life is as original
as the fear of Death, and both, at bottom, amount to a terror of the unknown,
the unknowable. It is the horror in the face of the mysterious night of Being
that Levinas substitutes for the wonder of intelligible, luminous Being that
Plato places at the origin of philosophy.
Gathering the unknown into the “known” is the method by which the
existent builds interiority and thus security against the mysterious exterior
realm of the “not-I.” Through cognitive processes, an existent hollows out an
autonomous realm where alterity loses its sting. The gap between the unknown
and the known is filled with the designation of meaning, the existent’s
meaning. “Like a famished stomach that has no ears”, the knowing ego emerges
and seizes control of the world. The ego’s knowledge of the other becomes a
cancelling out of otherness, a reduction of the other to the self, and thus,
for Levinas, a predatory act.
Driven by fear of the morrow, the ego gathers about itself all the
necessities for survival: “ 'good soup', air, light, spectacles, work, sleep,
etc.” (Levinas, E. 1969, 110); these things, extracted from the “elemental” in
which man is steeped, gain new meaning as the “domicile.”
Man has overcome the elements only by surmounting...
[immersion in the elemental] which confers upon him an extraterritoriality. He
gets a foothold in the elemental by a side already appropriated: a field
cultivated by me, the sea in which I fish and moor my boats, the forest in
which I cut wood; and all these acts, all this labour, refer to the domicile.
Man plunges into the elemental from the domicile. (Levinas, E. 1969, 131)
Human fears and needs are never eliminated, since death is only ever
postponed but never overcome. The essential ambiguity of this very corporeality
comprises the dilemma. But the naked and hungry body that permits the
enslavement also allows labour, so one can establish a safe refuge from the
world at large and thus ensure endurance. The time of labour remains a time of
need and fear, but it is also the occasion for meditation, the emergence of the
psychic aspect of human existence. This emergence admits a certain limited
freedom, as the existent recognizes needs to be purely material and thus admitting
of satisfaction through one’s own power (Levinas, E. 1969, 116). In the
domicile, the ego becomes a “separated being”; he stands outside of the
totality by establishing an inner life and an individual destiny that refuse
integration into the historical order. This is the “heroic existence” of the
isolated being that requires no other for contentment (Levinas, E. 1969, 307).
The separated being is comfortable in solitary refuge, “naturally atheistic”
and has no need for God. This stage is prior to the affirmation or denial of
the existence of God; it is the separated self's mode of positing the self as
unique and singular, by refusing to be just another nameless and insignificant
face in the human crowd. The creature's unshakeable belief in self-sufficiency
is, for Levinas, the mark of the greatness of the creator:
It is certainly a great glory for the creator to have
set up a being capable of atheism, a being which, without having been causa
sui, has an independent view and word and is at home with himself.
(Levinas, E. 1969, 58-59)
In the activity of filling needs, the separated being lives in a realm
of self-satisfaction and isolated contentment, but also of enjoyment. The
things that are extracted from the elemental for use do not merely represent
utility, but these are always a source of joy. Levinas posits the act of eating
as the example par excellence of enjoyment, for here there is an exact
conformity of object to intention. Though essentially an act of need, eating is
not merely undertaken in order to ward off death, but eating constitutes the
very act of living. In food, form and content are exactly adequate to each
other; the path of pleasure goes out to the other, and returns to the self
without remainder. The contents are lived; they feed life. The
definitive subjective experience, eating describes a perfect “curvature of
space” that is essential to the ego stage of the human subject.
To be sure, in the satisfaction of need the alienness
of the world that founds me loses its alterity; in satiety the real I sank my
teeth into is assimilated, the forces that were in the other become my
forces, become me. (Levinas, E. 1969, 129)
Enjoyment is understood by Levinas as an ultimate relation with the
substantial plenitude of being; eating is how one embraces within one's own
being the substantiality of external things. In other words, it is the ultimate
form of cognition.
Although Levinas is clear about the violent and predatory nature of the
ontological adventure, not to mention the utter absurdity of the entire project
of concern for myself, given that I am a being destined for destruction, he is
also explicit about its absolute necessity in the evolution of the healthy
human subject. Only through the upsurge of the ego who needs, thinks, manipulates
and utilizes he everyday world, enjoys and feels free, can the separation from
the anonymous realm of the il y a be effected, and can the ego mature to
the degree where it overcomes the fear that turns it inward, where it is able
to welcome the call of the needy other.
In Totality and Infinity, this call from outside comes to the ego
in the form of Desire:
Having recognized its needs as material needs, as
capable of being satisfied, the I can
henceforth turn to what it does not lack. It distinguishes the material from
the spiritual, opens to Desire. (Levinas, E. 1969, 117)
For Levinas, need is a movement of interiority, a descent into oneself
to build security and to establish an individual identity through the attaching
of one's own truths to the world. But Desire is a relationship with “height”:
with utter exteriority and irreducible mystery. Desire is the movement outside
oneself, an insatiable longing to escape one's singularity, to seek passionately
a higher realm where truth becomes the property of the other. Despite the firm
denial that Eros is lack, Platonic influence can be seen in Levinas'
view of Desire. A sympathetic reading of the Symposium reveals strong
parallels between that dialogue and Totality and Infinity. In
both works, Desire mediates between the individual and the divine. In both, it
is the ardent sensuous desire for the other that serves as the invitation to
transcend one's constricted loyalties, an erotic summons to break through the
narrow bounds of one's personal physical existence, and to produce results that
are, as far as is possible, boundless and infinite.
But since a relationship based on Levinasian Desire is not a matter of
lack; it has, over Platonic Eros, the clear advantage of remaining
perfectly disinterested. Levinas calls it a metaphysical movement of Goodness
itself. Thus it pulls the subject up short in the midst of cognizing, and
reveals the violence of ontology:
To approach the Other is to put into question my
freedom, my spontaneity as a living being, my emprise over things... the face
in which the Other is produced submits my freedom to judgement. (Levinas, E.
1969, 303)
Putting my freedom into question has always been the task of a worthy
ethics. The Greeks challenged freedom with truth, the Hebrews with justice. But
Levinas insists that it be grounded at some deeper level that cannot be reduced
to objective cognition. He tells us: “To identify the problem of foundation
with the knowledge of knowledge is to forget the arbitrariness of freedom,
which is precisely what has to be grounded” (Levinas, E. 1969, 85).
In Totality and Infinity, Desire arrests my totalizing efforts in
the instant of the appearance of the face and is felt as the
overwhelming longing to bestow the world I possess upon the needy stranger. The
face of the other constitutes the call to another dimension of being, the moral
dimension. The face is the very “opening” through which the “invisible” cries
out, and with Desire, a listening ear now tempers, nay eclipses, the devouring
mouth. This call is heard, sensed, at a level much more subtle, more passive,
than that of sensation, and it constitutes a shattering of the realm of
identity, a rupture of its time and space. In Totality and Infinity,
this rupture is represented as “a delightful lapse of the ontological” by which
we are called to host the neighbour. But, in the darker mood of Otherwise
Than Being, the potentially violent nature of the event is disclosed. In
the latter work, Desire is conspicuous in its absence and, instead, I am
depicted as summoned to the event of my execution; the "delightful lapse”
becomes a “shock” whereby my persecutor takes me hostage against my will,
burdens me beyond my capability, possesses me, obsesses me. It seems that,
between the two works, it occurs to Levinas that the host, in actively
welcoming the widow, the orphan and the alien, was not passive enough, still
retained some of the free movement that would allow escape from the threatening
stranger. In order truly to achieve infinity, Levinas will say, one must be
prepared to give the infinite response, to sacrifice all that one is and has,
to offer oneself as holy sacrifice to the most radical of evil. Indeed,
Socrates would agree: But only when the situation is one in which one cannot
avoid suffering wrong except by doing it (Gorgias 469
b-c).
In either case (host or hostage), however, the ego is not shed or
abandoned as the desiring and compassionate moral being comes on the scene, nor
does he unfold organically into something other than what he previously was.
The ego continues across that rupture, with all its selfish needs and fears,
all its predatory arts engaged. But the face is invulnerable to attack by the
cognitive process; it is infinity itself, excess of being, full transcendence.
Here the essential difference between need and desire is marked out. Need,
grounded as it is in an economic self concerned exclusively with its own
survival and happiness, implies violence; its principle rests on the distinct
possibility that I may need to kill anyone who puts at risk my joyful
existence. Desire, as Levinas describes it, alone forbids that murder:
Desire is unquenchable, not because it answers to an
infinite hunger, but because it does not call for food. This desire without
satisfaction hence takes cognizance of the alterity of the other. It situates
it in the dimension of height and of the ideal, which it opens up in being.
(Levinas, E. 1993, 56)
I can want to murder only the one who cowers below me, not the one who
hovers above me. Or, we might say, I can exercise my power only over a being in
the phenomenal world, not over the divine itself. As John Llewelyn puts it,
that enigmatic other “escapes my power through resisting it not with force but
by the first and original expression of the face commanding ‘Thou shalt not
kill’” (Llewelyn, J. 1995, 102).
For Levinas, mere proximity is experienced as guilt and shame, as
obsession and helplessness. Inescapable, shame proves to be the very instrument
of glory. In Totality and Infinity, it transforms the sorrow of the
other into my sorrow; In Otherwise Than Being, it transforms my
suffering for the other into my suffering from the other. This
shame is not a theoretical consideration in its turn, but a fundamental shame
that freedom has of itself, as it discovers itself to be murderous and
usurpatory. It is the way I discover what true freedom is all about. It teaches
me that I possess only that which has been freely given to me, not that which I
have taken as an outlaw. My shame lets me see the need in the other, by
eclipsing my own needs and fears, casting me headlong into absurdity itself, an
abyss of infinite responsibility, where the weight of the demand always exceeds
my capability, where I am always committed before commitment, where guilt
increases the more I respond, where, by Otherwise Than Being, I desire
the undesirable (to be persecuted) in proportion to its undesirability.
Levinas paints a sombre picture of the moral assignment, as the joyful
ego is crushed by the passions of shame, restlessness, obsession, and
inadequacy. And Levinas is careful not to “sell us” on the benefits of the
moral response, so as not to taint the pure gift by robbing it of its
disinterestedness. However, certain benefits do reveal themselves in the course
of the unfolding of this stage of the drama.
First of all, in my self-sacrifice for my neighbour, my death, that most
terrifying of mysteries, receives a meaning. Death, for Levinas, is the
ultimate mystery that opposes and threatens the ego. Because it is “foreign to
all light”, death can never be grasped or understood. This poses a very real
problem for the ego since death represents nothing short of a foreign and
menacing power that invades the home realm but cannot be expelled. All attempts
to overpower it through the knowing process are futile. Responding to
Heidegger's definition of death as that which reveals to me my own individual
authentic possibilities, Levinas shows death to be the ego's greatest threat,
violently insinuating itself into the very solitude of the self-satisfied being
and shattering the “safe house.” Levinas demonstrates the utter futility of the
ego's concern for its life so long as Death has no meaning.
Nothing is more comical than the concern that a being
destined to destruction takes for itself, as absurd as him who questions the
stars, whose verdict is without appeal, in view of action. Nothing more
comical, or nothing more tragic. [Only] the pre-original responsibility for the
other is not measured by being, is not preceded by a decision, and death cannot
reduce it to an absurdity (Levinas, E. 1993, 138).
Only in the ethical response, can the humble moral subject defuse
death's sting. I force death to take on meaning. I give my death the meaning I
choose in placing my own life at risk for the sake of extending the life of my
neighbour, in choosing to remain governed by Goodness even unto death at the
hands of my persecutor.
A further benefit of the moral response suggested by Levinas is my
singularization. By virtue of my mere proximity, I become the chosen one, the
saviour. I become unique and irreplaceable, the only one who, as host, can
postpone my neighbour's death, the only one who, as hostage, can sacrifice my
life for the Good.
Furthermore, for Levinas, I gain a truer freedom in the moral response.
As I limit my finite freedom for the sake of prolonging the life of the other,
another dimension of my freedom emerges. Levinas tells how the other actually
sets free this fuller freedom. In imposing upon me the weighty burden of
responsibility, the other whose life I save releases me from my ennui,
that anonymous fatality of the il y a from which enjoyment and work
could bring but temporary relief. It takes the other to release me from my
ontological prison; it takes the other to found and justify my true freedom, to
bring me out of the darkness of my solitary and secret existence, and lead me
to sincerity.
Moreover, Levinas explains, the ethical response involves a “teaching.”
The falsity of the glory of the quest of my ontological adventure is suddenly
exposed in all its predatory ugliness, and it is simultaneously revealed to me
that true glory is felt as the weight of my shame. While still
maintaining my complete immanence as ego, I am cast into a connection with full
transcendence, as pure glory opens up before me and ultimately reveals itself
as the divine. For Levinas, as I humble myself before the other, I stand in
“Society with God” that turns out to be not merely the absurdity of
non-meaning, though it is this too, but an abundance of meaning about the
nature of God's perfection. Levinas explains:
Society with God is not an addition to God nor a
disappearance of the interval that separates God from the creature... [Instead,
it is a revelation:] Multiplicity and the limitation of the creative Infinite
are compatible with the perfection of the Infinite; they articulate the meaning
of this perfection (Levinas, E. 1969, 104).
So Glory, for Levinas, is a feeling, a passion that connects me
for a split instant with the divine, revealing a meaningfulness that is other
than representation. I become the vehicle of the manifestation of god. “Glory
could not become a phenomenon without entering into conjunction with the very
subject to which it would appear, without closing itself up in finitude and
immanence” (Levinas, E. 1991, 144).
For Levinas, it is precisely because the burden of responsibility is
experienced as infinite, and because I feel my utter inadequacy to the task,
that the divine can become manifest. The Infinite has glory only through
subjectivity as it becomes a crucial term in the human adventure through my
substitution. Glorification is “a peace sign to the other” (Levains, E. 1991,
148). My “witness” proves to be the unique structure that opens up an exception
to the rule of being, revealing God.
Conclusion:
Thus the drama of the unfolding of human subjectivity appears to pull to
a close with the emergence of the dimension of responsibility. However, this is
not the case since responsibility shows itself to be infinite and thus, the
more I respond to the call of the other, the more I am called, the more I am
indebted, the more I feel the weight of that debt. Levinas insists that the drama
of my humanity never closes as I am ever more guilty. What are we to make,
then, of Levinas' picture of human existence, draped as it is in hues of deep
emotion? The passions that underlie each stage of subjectivity clearly
designate one's outlook on the world. It is only natural that we feel fear and
need as finite beings trapped between Death and the il y a. It is only
natural that we seek to secure a safe stronghold against the unknown that
threatens our very survival and happiness. Though they may lead to predatory
acts and evil consequences, human passions, natural drives and instincts are
not evil in themselves.
For Levinas, human beings are essentially good. Just as the innocent
child groping toward maturity leaves a little spilt milk in the path, so the
ego is a “natural man” just surviving as best he can. In good Socratic fashion,
he does not even knowingly do harm to others; he merely overlooks them. He is,
in Levinas' words: “innocently egoist and alone. Not against the Others, not
‘as for me...’ — but entirely deaf to the Other, outside of all communication
and all refusal to communicate — without ears” (Levinas, E., 1969, 124).
Furthermore, the ego's evolution into a moral being is entirely outside
of freedom or autonomous control. The call to
fuller being must come from the other. If I fail to hear that call, it is thus
the other's fault, and not my own. The ego can never be counted guilty. In the
Levinasian world, the devouring ego remains blameless while, paradoxically, the
responding moral subject is the condemned, sentenced to greater and greater
depths of self-sacrifice, and ever increasing feelings of shame and inadequacy.
What is ostensibly problematic in this theory of subjectivity is the
denial of conscious choice as an essential aspect of human action. Of course,
in a way, the humble response of the me voici finds precedent in
Socratic humility that claims to know nothing and to know that it knows
nothing, in order to preserve the soul's openness for learning. In the case of
the moral subject, we can readily see the need to insist that response remain
prior to choice; this clearly maintains the subject's disinterestedness, by
refusing all opportunity for calculation of advantage or disadvantage prior to
response that would by necessity taint the pure gift.
Furthermore, Levinas sees the concern for grounding action in a knowledge
of the Good as a profound flaw in Western tradition born of a predominant
tendency to “subordinate unworthiness to failure, [and] moral generosity itself
to the necessities of objective thought” (Levinas, E. 1969, 83). Levinas is
telling us that our very humanity means having many centres from which we
approach truth. As we witnessed in Alkibiades' speech at the end of Plato's Symposium,
a unique learning can take place in the community of love that cannot be known
through rational inquiry. A crucial aspect of Alkibiades' learning, that gave
access to very private secrets about Socrates, was a naked vulnerability and a
deep-rooted sense of shame. When our mode of communication is other-oriented,
there is a greater openness to our own fragility and inadequacy, a humble
readiness to listen and learn. Then our response has a greater chance of being
a good one, even without the “guarantees” of knowledge. Perhaps, like
Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Derrida, and Freud, Levinas is suggesting that the
choice made in oblivion gives a fuller account of our decisions. Levinas raises
many provocative questions regarding the adequacy and violence of a
knowledge-based ethics, not to be easily glossed over. But, in the end, are we
not obliged to agree with Martha Nussbaum that what does not reach out to order
the world does not truly love (Nussbaum, M. 2001, 199)? Do we really want to
repeat in our own lives the tragic-comic love of an Alkibiades ... comic for
its Dionysian display of wanton frolic and happy abandonment, tragic not merely
because of its unrequitedness, the anger, pain and frustration consistent with
the disordered life, but because we, as audience enjoying the God's eye view,
can see ahead to the tragic results of Alkibiades' recklessness (disgrace,
exile, murder)? Alkibiades' tragic end reveals to us the self-cancelling
character of an unordered love. Levinas' call to service beyond the structure
of reason inherent in any concept of duty is nothing short of a call to
martyrdom. Reason may not have exclusive access to the
Good-Beyond-Being, but reason is needed to access the truths of this
world. In the real world, reason will inform the heart of the hungry man, who
has but a crust of bread, to give only half to the hungry stranger.
And what about Levinas' self-serving ego? How is he to be held
accountable for the selfishness and violence? Where decisions are depicted as
wholly natural acts of instinct, justified in themselves as conatus esse,
the violence of the ego's reckless exercise of its “freedom” and autonomy,
while acknowledged by Levinas, is yet trivialized as a mere failure to notice
the other's pain. Again, we saw such optimism in the Socratic claim that no one
knowingly harms others. We might object that our everyday experiences
reveal many a self-serving individual clearly making a conscious choice
to sacrifice others for the sake of expedience or personal profit. Yet, with
Levinas, the persecutor is exonerated of every rapacious and predatory choice
by the fact that those choices are not morally educated choices. Decisions that
victimize others are a function of reason alone, prior to any input from the
heart. With Levinas, this is enough for acquittal; the perpetrator remains
innocent of the crimes.
In fact, the worse the victimizer’s choices, the more innocent. Levinas
holds it as unfair to consider persons as the sum of their actions. He
explains: “To measure a man by his works is to enter his interiority as though
by burglary... Works signify their author but indirectly, in the third person”
(Levinas, E. 1969, 66-67).
In Levinas' opinion, to view another's acts dispassionately from the
outside is to remove them from their authentic contextuality, their “primordial
sphere.” But if the “truly moral” lies beyond reason, discursive language, and
community view, what is to found a system of justice? How are we to decide on
appropriate conduct for all men? This view of unlimited sympathy for the
uniqueness of the individual undercuts the very basis upon which moral disputes
can hope to reach settlement. We can only argue whether our actions conform to
a law, all the while knowing all laws to be removed from the moral order.
This is an amazing stance for the philosopher labouring in the shadow of
the Holocaust. Does it not give license to the diabolical and dismiss it as
innocent self-preservation? The Auschwitz guard is even a necessary instrument
of God's glory, indeed a blessing in disguise, because he becomes the occasion
for us to become full moral subjects. That is to say, if it takes the other to
free me from my ontological prison, it takes the Nazi guard to call forth my infinite
response and bring me all the way to glory and to God. Thus radical evil is calmly
excused as mere unreadiness to relate to exteriority.
Moreover, while absolving the evil person, is Levinas not also
trivializing the sacrifice of the good person, insisting that the moral
response, always prior to thought, is never knowingly undertaken? These are
serious questions with profound implications in a world where radical evil
continually masquerades as the civilized and the cultured. Is Levinas upholding
the duty of the post-Holocaust philosopher if he dismisses the diabolical thus?
Is Levinas “dozing off” in the midst of his “night watch?”
There may be another way to understand the apparent paradox of Levinas'
sympathetic view of the amoral choice. As an explanation for radical evil, the
theory of the innocent ego certainly appears lacking. If intended as
inspiration to turn the evil person in the direction of moral growth and
worship of the Good, the restless obsession and unbearable weight of shame and
inadequacy are hardly effective selling points of the moral realm. But perhaps
Levinas is not addressing himself to the amoral person at all. After all, he
asks, paraphrasing Plato's question of the Republic: “Would you be able
to convince people who do not want to hear? (Levinas, E. 1993, 18)”
Perhaps Levinas is not so much concerned with reaching the unreachable
or explaining why the evil person does what he does, as with giving the good
person a reason to go on serving the good. In a world so full of evil that
self-sacrifice can be seen as utter foolishness and senseless martyrdom, where
the degree of one's unscrupulousness all too often parallels the degree of
one’s “success”, good action, in fact any action, runs the risk of a loss of
all meaning and justification.
Levinas reveals how human meanings are emptied out by events of radical human brutality. He says:
The unburied dead in wars and extermination camps make
one believe the idea of a death without a morning after and render tragic-comic
the concern for oneself and illusory the pretension of the rational animal to
have a privileged place in the cosmos (Levinas, E. 1993, 127)
Levinas understands that even the person of strong conscience who
desires to do the good can easily become trapped in fear and hopelessness, or
worse, become driven to desperate and violent measures to protect oneself and
one's loved ones. Levinas sees the dangers of an uncontrolled individual
freedom, but he also sees the difficulty (impossibility?) of limiting that
freedom... that anarchy... without ourselves becoming totalitarian. With this
radically new way of defining human subjectivity, Levinas may be offering us
the occasion to move beyond the paralysis of ressentiment of the
atrocious, and a divine “reason” to go on serving the Good, simply because we
are blessed with a conscience, simply because we recognize the good when we feel
it, simply because we recognize ourselves as the chosen ones, called
to do good, whether it makes sense to do so or not. In fact, it is the utter
absurdity of my quest for the Good Beyond Being that determines its utter
necessity to my moral, and human, fulfilment.
Perhaps there is another subtle message in the infinite guilt Levinas
assigns to the moral subject. Levinas may be issuing a warning to morally
self-satisfied Westerners in the light of the vast masses of third world
victims whose wretchedness supports Western over-abundance. He may be alerting
us to the possibility that, though we enjoy a prosperity much greater than the
rest of the world, we ought not take our full bellies and fine possessions as
signals of moral virtue. We may live better than the wretched of the earth
because we are “guilty” of failing to acknowledge the rights of other human
populations to share in the commonwealth of the earth’s riches. Levinas may be
positing that to be fully human means to be “guiltily” responsible for others
less fortunate than we, our human fellows. He repeatedly quotes with approval,
throughout his interviews with Philippe Nemo (1981), as elsewhere in his
corpus, the words of Dostoevsky from The Brothers Karamazov:
We are all guilty of all, and for all men, before all,
and I more
than all the others (Dostoevsky, F. 1957, 264).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Jacques Derrida. Writing and Difference. Alan Bass, trans. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1978).
Fyodor Dostoevsky. The Brothers
Karamazov. (Garnet, tr. North American
Library. 1957).
Emil Fackenheim. To Mend the World. (
Emmanuel Levinas. Totality and Infinity. A. Lingis, trans.
(Pittsburg: Duquesne University Press. 1969).
____ Ethics and Infinity, Conversations with Philippe Nemo,
Richard Cohen, tr. (Pittsburg, Penn.: Duquesne University Press, 1981).
____ Existence and Existents. A. Lingis, tr. (Dordrecht: Kluwer
Academic Publishers. 1988).
____ Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence. A. Lingis, tr.
(Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. 1991).
____ Collected
Philosophical Papers. A. Lingis, tr. (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer
Academic Publishers, 1993).
John Llewelyn. Emmanuel Levinas: The Genealogy of Ethics. (London: Routledge. 1995).
Martha Nussbaum. The Fragility of Goodness. (
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