Wittgenstein and Levinas: Ethical and Religious Thought (Routledge Studies in Twentieth-Century Phil

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We see at work, here, a significant rethinking of the transcendental-anthropological distinction expressed as a priori and a posteriori. Being, as we noted, also is dark indeterminacy. Having suspended the binaries of de facto inside and outside as part of his own phenomenological bracketing, [ 21 ] Levinas will approach this indeterminacy not as objectivity, but as something revealed through mood.

Whether it is the dark indeterminacy that besets the insomniac self, or whether it is the rustling of nocturnal space, Being's dark aspect horrifies us. And it is not revealed through mere anxiety. Nevertheless, it is a beginning. Insomniac and in the throes of horror, the hypostasis falls asleep. Or again, it lights a light and reassembles its consciousness. But the il y a gives the lie to the question: Why is there Being instead of simply nothing?

Nothing, as pure absence, may be thinkable, but it is unimaginable. Indeterminate Being fills in all the gaps, all the temporal intervals, while consciousness arises from it in an act of self-originating concentration. This is the first sketch of Being as totality. It hearkens to a call that comes not from neutral Being but from the Other. The stage is thus set for Totality and Infinity 's elaborate analyses of world, facticity, time as now-moment, transcendence in immanence, and transcendence toward future fecundity.

These themes constitute the core of Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. For Levinas, to escape deontology and utility, ethics must find its ground in an experience that cannot be integrated into logics of control, prediction, or manipulation. That is, it cannot step outside the totalizing logics of metaphysical systems, without supposing them or restoring them. There is no formal bridge, for Levinas, between practical and pure reason. Philosophy in the twentieth century Heidegger, the Frankfurt School, deconstruction has shown, at least, that the universality of concepts and the necessity carried by transcendental arguments are simply not sufficient to prevent the triumph of ends-rationality and instrumentalization.

Ethics is therefore either an affair of inserting particulars into abstract scenarios, or ethics itself speaks out of particularity about the first human particularity: For much Jewish thought after Kant, the ethical message of the biblical prophets held a dignity equal to the justice aimed at in Jewish law. Levinas carries this insight into phenomenology, starting with a relationship that is secular, yet non-finite not conceptually limitable , because it continuously opens past the immediacy of its occurring, toward a responsibility that repeats and increases as it repeats.

The new framework of transcendence as human responsibility involves an extensive exploration of the face-to-face relationship, and it opens onto questions of social existence and justice. Finally, Levinas approaches to Being more polemically as exteriority. We will examine these themes in what follows. Totality and Infinity unfolds around phenomenological descriptions of Being, understood mechanistically as nature. Levinas again reframes labor, less as mastery and humanization of nature, and more as the creation of a store of goods with which an other can be welcomed.

Thanks to his joy in living and his creation of a home, the human being is able to give and to receive the other into his space. On the basis of these descriptions, transcendence comes to pass in several stages. Second, in accounting for itself, the subject approached by the other engages the first act of dialogue.

Out of this, discourse eventually arises. The unfolding of discourse carries a trace of ethical investiture and self-accounting, and may become conversation and teaching. As the breadth of dialogical engagement expands, the trace of the encounter with the other becomes attenuated; and this, to the point where the meaning of justice poses a question. Is the essence of justice the reparation of wrongs; is it disinterested equity, or is it the interest of the stronger? Because justice is clearly all these things, it constitutes a kind of pivot between the mechanism evident in Being and the supererogatory gesture of responsibility.

Levinas's logic unfolds up to the question of justice and then takes an unanticipated tack. In the family, election by the father and service to the brothers, set forth a justice more decisively conditioned by face-to-face responsibility than the justice of the State could ever be. Totality and Infinity does not devote much attention to clock time or to the time of history.

Because Being is accepted in its Hobbesian character as mechanistic causality and competition, human time will not be situated firstly in social time with the invention of clocks and calendars.

History, too, seems to be a history of metaphysicians: Levinas describes history as violence, punctuated by extremes of war and annihilation. However, an alternative history, in which the wrongs done to particulars can be attested, is envisionable. It will not be recorded in a history of the State. It was like the time of ritual participation in dream worlds, as observed by French ethnographers.

For Levinas, time will consist in two axes: Transcendence is, above all, relational: An event should be characterized as a force that introduces a decisive break into the historical status quo and redirects it in function of its own magnitude. The encounter with the other person, so far as it is an event, merely inflects history or leaves a trace in it.

But this is not the history found in the textbooks. It is more like a history of isolated acts or human ideals justice, equity, critique, self-sacrifice.

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Transcendence in Levinas is lived and factical. How could transcendence be factical? That is, transcendence, understood as the face-to-face relation, lives from our everyday enjoyment and desire even as it precedes these. Human existence, as sensibility, is full and creative, before it is instrumentalist or utilitarian. From enjoying the elements to constructing a home, human existence is never solipsistic.

Our life with others is never a flight from a more resolute stance toward our reason for being our mortality. We are always already in social relations; more importantly, we have always already been impacted by the expression of a living other. Because this impact is affective, because transcendence is not conceptualizable, we forget the force the other's expression has on us. We therefore carry on, in our respective worlds, motivated by our desire for mastery and control. Nevertheless, desire in Totality and Infinity always proves to be double. There is a naturalistic desire, subject to imperatives of consumption and enjoyment.

This desire is coextensive with the exercise of our concrete freedom. And there is a desire that comes to light in the failure of our will to mastery. This failure of the will is experienced in the face-to-face encounter. The other's face is not an object, Levinas argues.

It is pure expression; expression affects me before I can begin to reflect on it. And the expression of the face is dual: The face, in its nudity and defenselessness, signifies: Any exemplification of the face's expression, moreover, carries with it this combination of resistance and defenselessness: Each one lacks something essential to its existence: It is as summons that we see expression precipitating transcendence. In other words, if I am self-sufficient in my everyday cognition and my instrumental activities, then that is because I am a being that inhabits overlapping worlds in which my sway is decisive for me.

The approach of the other person halts the dynamism of my cognitive and practical sway. Passive resistance inflects my freedom toward an affective mood already explored in Of course, Levinas's descriptions are presented under phenomenological bracketing, so this is not a philosophy of moral feeling or a psychology of empathy. Now, Levinas argues that the instant of trans-ascendence belongs to an order different from that of existence or Being: It is impossible to set up a linear logic of priority between Being and the Good beyond Being.

For humans, the Good comes to pass, as if trivially, in that responsibility and generosity are perceivable in human affairs.

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Cruelty and competition are also readily discerned. The two moments in the philosophical tradition in which the irreducible value of the Good has been pinpointed are, for Levinas, Plato's Idea of the Good, and Descartes's Idea of Infinity, which points beyond itself to an unknowable cause. It may be that insisting that the Good is prior to, rather than just beyond, Being, is necessary to deconstructing Hegel's phenomenology of consciousnesses in struggle for recognition, that there are moments of inexplicable generosity, even occasional sacrifices for another person or group , is otherwise inexplicable within a logic of competing freedoms and reductive desires.

In that respect, the trace of the Good is always present within Being, as a possibility that something other than consumption or instrumentalization may take place. So far as Infinity has a positive sense, then it has the affective qualities of desire for sociality, and of joy. And sensibility consists of an indeterminate number of affectations, of which we become conscious only by turning our attention to them. Like the embodied self, who suffocated within itself in in nausea , the self of sensibility is the locus of relationality and transcendence in The implication of this is radical.

Whereas light and consciousness afforded Levinas the means by which to sublate the a priori - a posteriori distinction in , and therewith Heidegger's ontological difference between Being and beings, here, the everyday facticity of the face-to-face encounter destabilizes transcendental versus pragmatic distinctions. Any philosophical translation of embodied concrete life must consider the human subject as it is constituted through relations with others in a simultaneous occurrence of particularization and loss of self. As we have seen, it is possible to envisage Being as existence by way of the concepts of willing and strife in Levinas.

Certainly, the experience of the Shoah is reflected in this work, notably in the very anti-Heideggerian characterization of Being as constant presence. For Levinas, this Being has two modes of carrying on. In nature, it is mechanism, drives, and linear causality. In , the State, no matter what period of its history we examine, decides questions of security and property, life and death.

This leaves the question of justice suspended between the moral responsiveness coming out of the face-to-face encounter, and the conflict of ontological forces. Being, in Levinas, is never Heidegger's disclosure and withdrawal. Thus, Being is not an event per se. Levinas never addressed the question of whether an ethics could be derived from Heidegger's ontology.

But it is clear that no thinking whose primary focus was on an openness toward the world, and a confrontation with one's mortality, afforded the means necessary for grasping the hidden meaning of consciousness, which begins in the double constitution of the subject by life and by the encounter with the Other. For Levinas, Heidegger's philosophy was a thinking of the neuter, a recrudescent paganism that sacralized natural events and anonymous forces.

Worse, it was a thinking that drew its inspiration from an ancient structure of temporality, Paul's kairos , which was the time of awaiting the messiah's return for the early Christian community. If the evacuation of lived, religious content gave Heidegger access to a temporality more substantial than what was available to the neo-Kantian, formalist tradition, one question remained: How can one preserve the living source of human facticity while removing all connection to its contents?

Being carries on as continuous presence for Levinas. The face-to-face encounter inflects it toward the possibility of responsibility and hospitality. But an inflection does not mean a transformation. This inflection of Being also opens a course toward universality as ethical humanity rather than universality as politics. An inflection toward humanity is fragile, because it is continually absorbed by the rhetoric of political institutions. However, in , Levinas's inflection is best seen in the family.

How the responsibility and election experienced by fathers, sons, and brothers, passes into a larger history and public space remained a difficult question—probably best addressed through critique, witnessing, perhaps even limited demands for justice. Beginning with fecundity, in which the time of an individual life span is opened beyond its limits by one the son who is both the image of the father and other than he, the life of the family continues through election and responsibility enacted between parents and offspring—and between brothers.

This is illustrated by the fact that there are events and crimes that the son or grandson may pardon, whereas the father could not. However, the logic of fecundity-election-responsibility leaves the State and the family as two distinct human collectivities with nothing to mediate between their ontological and moral characteristics.

Being, understood as existence in all its dimensions, may be modified, but not durably. Thus Being could be called absolute, were it not for the fragile interruption of transcendence and the persistence of its trace. If family and State represent two irreconcilable instances in Levinas's thought, willing and ethical responsibility prove likewise irreconcilable. It must never be a matter of nature, even human nature.

That excludes from transcendence not only an intentional component already bracketed by Levinas's phenomenology , but also anything like moral sentiments or innate capacities to be affected by the other. The non-violent force of the face as expression can be reduced neither to physical force nor to inertia.

In such a case, there would be no question of escaping the mechanistic order of Being. Thus the moment of address in the second person comes after the impact of the face as widow and as He. Moral height is thus not expressed in thou-saying; it is a third person relationship. Here lies the point at which a reading begins that bridges the philosophical and the religious, particularly the Jewish dimension of Levinas's thought.

It is and must remain a question too large for philosophy to know what explains the force of the other's expression. There are, Levinas insists, objects behind their objects only in ages of penury. To say more than this is to return to the confidence that representation and conceptuality capture every aspect of meaning lived out in a human life. We will have more to say on this when we discuss time and transcendence in Otherwise than Being.

The central wager of Otherwise than Being is to express affectivity in its immediacy, with minimal conceptualization. Consequently, transcendence becomes transcendence-in-immanence before it is transcendence toward the other as untotalizable exteriority. Otherwise than Being opens with a general overview of the argument, in which Being and transcendence will now be called essence and disinterest. Emphasizing the processual quality of Being, Levinas will now refer to it equivalently as Being or essence.

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Responsibility will be focused more sharply as the condition of possibility of all signification. The themes of conversation and teaching recede into the background. A more strategic use of the body as flesh, that is, simultaneously an inside and outside locus, is evident. Subjectivity is now the coming to pass of responsibility itself. That means that subjectivity is properly itself because it is regularly dispossessed of itself from within.

The other has become other-in-the-same. But the other-in-the-same is not different from the factical other. It is that Levinas has returned to Husserl's investigation of transcendence-in-immanence and his phenomenology of the living present. The second chapter approaches Heidegger's theme of language as the way in which Being becomes, the way it temporalizes. Levinas adopts Heidegger's argument that the logos gathers up Being and makes it accessible to us.

But Levinas will argue that the lapse of time between lived immediacy and its representation cannot really be gathered by a logos. Therefore, the lapse poses a challenge to language itself and falls, much the way that transcendence did, outside the realm of Being as process. This is Levinas's ultimate critique of Heidegger, which passes through language rather than through Being itself. The three most remarkable innovations of Otherwise than Being include: This is a radicalization of Husserl's idealism, in which meaning arises thanks to the inner dialogue whose language is more rarefied than that composed of everyday signs.

If sensibility already played an important role in Totality and Infinity , sensibility will now be traced back to the density of the flesh itself. And the flesh serves Levinas as his pre-consciousness, whose ontological meaning counts above all else. It can be likened to prophetic witness. It is as though Levinas were describing the affective investiture of a subject called to witness. This is also the sense of the subject carrying more than it can express, and writhing under the constraints of that investiture.

Chapters four and five of the work have a tone more somber than that of any work Levinas had written up to that point. If responsibility expresses the intersubjective genealogy of the affective subject—arising between Being and the Good—then this affective constitution will be called traumatic in OBBE, Affectivity is now expressed, above all, in light of suffering.

The lapse of time, irrecuperable to conceptual identification, will be expressed figuratively as the adverbial. The final half of chapter five recurs to the performative register of language to express the tension of consciousness striving to gather itself in the midst of the subject's affective divisions and its investiture by the other. To be sure, there is an inevitable artificiality to presenting as immediacy what is already past. But this is a wager we also find in religious language's continuous revivification of the present.

It is likewise a wager in Levinas's philosophical discourse; one ventured in the hope that hyperbole and strategic negations will convey a meaning that would otherwise disappear in predicative statements. The final chapter of Otherwise than Being thus makes a transition out of philosophy into a certain lyricism, repetition, and bearing witness.

It is Levinas's step toward the affective conditions of possibility of prophetic speech. I n the work, Levinas's earlier concern with charges of psychologism i. The ontological language also changes. The ways in which existence echoes in language is taken up resolutely. As in his discussion of need and nausea, the complex of sensibility and affectivity overflows representation, while providing an index to the Being that is our own being. Interwoven layers of affectivity are unfolded in Otherwise than Being.

Remorse is the trope of the literal sense of sensibility. We should recall that the spatial distinction between inside and outside falls as one effect of phenomenological bracketing. Faithful to the spirit of Husserl's phenomenology, Levinas suspends that distinction. Rather, it problematizes that more ontological approach. There is good reason for this. As we know, responsibility is an event that repeats.

It even increases as it repeats, according to a logic of expanding significance. That is why the question of immanence arises in regard to responsibility's enduring, and its rememoration. The status of a memory of sensuous events, which affect us before we can represent them, must frame sensibility as intrinsically meaningful, intrinsically beyond-itself.

But that implies that the sensuous meaning-event is vulnerable to a skeptical challenge. Levinas does not solve the question of memory and repetition in cognitive terms. As an interpretive phenomenologist, his concern is to pursue transcendence back behind Husserl's transcendental ego, that formal, passive accompaniment of all conscious contents. The opposition to Heidegger now takes place through an analysis of temporality and language, with the focus on the dynamism of verbs and their inflections by adverbs.

Temporalization is the verb form to be. He continues, this time undermining Heidegger for whom there is no concept of the ad-verbial: In sensibility the qualities of perceived things turn into time and into consciousness… [But,] do not the sensations in which the sensible qualities are lived resound adverbially …as adverbs of the verb to be? If Being resonates in the verb to be, then transcendence must belong either to Being and verbality, or transcendence must differ from them.

The Saying hearkens to his theme of sincerity, introduced in Existence and Existents. In Otherwise than Being , he will radicalize sincerity by insisting that the structure of sensibility-affectivity is to be always already fissured. It is this that opens us to venture communication. Sensuous vulnerability is the locus of the birth of signification, understood as approaching or speaking-to another whether words are actually spoken or not.

There is more, in living affectivity, than Heidegger's conception of Being coming to pass, can designate. If transcendence is transcendence-in-immanence in , it is not simply the continuous birth of intentional acts of consciousness that bestow meaning, as it was in Husserl. Has this ultimate approach to transcendence charted a new apophatics, a new discourse of the unspeakable?

Levinas does not refrain from thinking the lapse of time, which is also the gnawing of remorse, and the symptom of the Other-in-the-same. But he now argues that what is said about transcendence and responsibility must also be unsaid , to prevent it from entering into a theme, since it transcends every thematic. The history of Jewish philosophy, from Philo and Sa'adya Gaon to Maimonides, and then from Cohen to Rosenzweig, alone clarifies Levinas's strategies and figures.

Levinas has recourse, for example, to Maimonides' approach to the Infinite, using a negative interpretation of affirmative propositions. A similar proposition is found in Levinas's characterization of transcendence. We can be otherwise, if we choose to do so, he argues. In the wake of Schleiermacher and Dilthey, Heidegger realized in the early 's that life as concrete, lived immediacy can be interpreted, but that we cannot be certain that what we are interpreting does not move perpetually within the circle of discursive conceptuality.

Interpretation spawns interpretation of itself , and a hermeneutic circle arises from this. Does that mean that factical experience is structurally inaccessible? Levinas's text here echoes his claims about the face as expression that pierces through phenomenality. This is not allegory; that is, it is not the signification, born of a Christian reading of the Bible, of higher realities hidden under everyday objects and events. It is almost the contrary: Levinas seeks the factical and moral depths from which signs arise.

Levinas is thus performing a non-technical, interpretive reduction in his text. His radical reduction aims to get at the affective meaning of his ethical interruption of Being and consciousness. It is like a light out of which arises speaking the dibbour , or Saying, of the Infinite. These thematic parallels are not accidental. The temporality specific to the sensuous passivity that precedes the passive synthesis of time as a unified flow, is stranger than Husserl's complex stream of consciousness with its retentions and protentions.

Like living, the time of sensibility occurs despite oneself. No longer do we heed spontaneously our own immanent voice, as in Husserl; no longer do we hearken to a silent call of Being, as in Heidegger OBBE, 56, 62, We are constituted, affectively, by the other within and without. Being or existence remains on the parallel tracks of a naturalistic will to persist in being and its implications for culture and politics. Levinas's adaptation of the Spinozist conatus essendi predictably has nothing of the latter's monism or pantheism.

Nevertheless, existence is not so markedly identified with war as it was in The question remains, as it did in Totality and Infinity: How do responsibility and transcendence enter into the continuum of time and Being? And, how does an investiture of this intensity pass into reason?

Here too the passage to reason, sociality, and measurable time occurs because the spatio-temporal lapse is as if spontaneously integrated by consciousness. Levinas accords Husserl his argument that sensibility and affect are always on the verge of becoming intentional consciousness. The responsibility and fraternity expressed now as the abyssal subject or other-in-the-same leaves a trace in social relations. Moreover, faithful to his project of , the form of the trace is not traditionally metaphysical. It is found in our concern for reparatory justice, even for modest equity.

But neither could the adverbial change the verbal quality of being in its continuous becoming. In however, the difficulty of holding together the time and passivity likened to aging OBBE, 54 , with the flowing time of consciousness and its projections toward future possibilities, is more obvious in the text. Insoluble, this proves a question for us as well.

It is of itself the limit of responsibility and the birth of the question: What do I have to do with justice? Now, attempts to express lived facticity occurred not infrequently in philosophy over the course of the last century. The text as first person witness may well date from Kierkegaard and Nietzsche.

But the inevitable thematization of intersubjectivity, from a standpoint outside the face-to-face encounter, simply underscores the necessary double reading Levinas demands of us: For that reason, Levinas is not interested in pursuing a deduction of questions of equity. The site at which comparison, justice, and normativity can be deduced is beyond Levinas's immediate concern.

Illeity and fraternity lose the quality that defines them, that excessive and intensive sensibility-affectivity, when they are incorporated into conceptualizing discourse. The hiatus, here, is well known: The notion of a just politics has meant different things according to the form of the State absolute, noninterventionist, liberal.

Given his occasional evocations of a pluralist Being in Totality and Infinity , Levinas's argument that justice is marked by the trace of responsibility accords relatively well with liberal theories of political justice and sovereignty. Anglo-Saxon theorists of sovereignty always emphasized that individuals live in multiple social associations, which impose a host of responsibilities on them.

This pluralist cultural existence diminishes conservative emphases on sovereignty as concentrated in the State itself. But Levinas never decided whether politics meant war or a real possibility of peace. For the Jewish philosophical tradition, justice forms the core of the prophetic message. In that respect it has a distinctive political dimension. If the prophets demanded justice as well as repentance of their wayward communities, their hyperbolic invocation of justice concerned humanity as a whole.

But the prophetic message did not aim at the enactment of justice in the public sphere , whether agora or parliament. Levinas's works subsequent to Otherwise than Being refine its complex thematics. Levinas on Ethics and Holiness. John Caruana - - Journal of Religious Ethics 34 4: Jewish Philosophy as a Guide to Life: Rosenzweig, Buber, Levinas, Wittgenstein.

Hilary Putnam - - Indiana University Press. Adriano Fabris - - Teoria 26 2: Morgan - - Indiana University Press. Levinas and the Philosophy of Religion.

Kosky - - Indiana University Press. After the Death of God: Emmanuel Levinas and the Ethical Possibility of God. Kosky - - Journal of Religious Ethics 24 2: God, Otherness, and Community: Some Reflections on Hegel and Levinas. Philosophy and the Idea of the Transcendental by Jeff Malpas. Pragmatism and Realism by James Conant. Laws in Nature by Stephen Mumford. The metaphysics of perception: Wilfrid Sellars, critical realism, and the nature of experience by Paul Coates. Philosophy and Ordinary Language: Philosophy and the Vision of Language by Paul Livingston.

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