Jewish Thinkers of Otherness ⟩ Emmanuel Levinas — Part II

Levinas II: The Face, the Other, and the Possibility of Escape

The efforts required to let myself be used by the satanic Levinas have finally produced the irreversibly self-transforming break I have always prayed for.

Unfortunately the result is that I am now mentally handicapped.

If the self is a combination of willing and understanding—and if understanding is a vast network of nodes and edges (or as Hume says, impressions connected by “gentle forces” that push attention from one to another)—then my lattice has liquified like the histolysis stage of the pupa.

As a result, my monumental Levinas Part II announcement is not ready.

This is mostly because I have been working on the promised Interactive History of Phenomenology Mind-Map, where one can click on philosophers and concepts and instantly see influence histories and conceptual genealogies—so that Levinas’s philosophical inheritances become visible at a glance. The strain of setting up the Excel spreadsheet that will feed the databases has deepened my disability.

But if I don’t announce in the next hour or so, Meetup will never make the auto-announcement its website promises. So I have to send this pitiful placeholder announcement that is neither descriptive nor even meaningful nor even interesting.

Soon, my new personality will congeal and I’ll be able to direct my willing, attention, care, understanding, and planning; to direct effort to make my body do needful things; to muster energy and enthusiasm for smithing an abiding and unwavering intent; to anchor my attention to boring tasks; to chain myself to doing only those actions needed for goal attainment, all of which I hate; to grit my teeth and put my shoulder to the boulder and tell myself I like pain, including that compounded pain that arises when you are aware that your main goal is to increase your tolerance for pain.

Until then, please accept the following explanatory aside.

Excuse and Aside

Last time something strange happened.

As the meeting began I remember feeling faint.

Then suddenly I came to—and the event was over.

My suspicion is that my ego temporarily vacated the premises so that the spirit of Levinas could possess me and deliver something interesting and informative.

This experience has warmed me considerably to the idea that Otherness may actually be a real power.

Which, conveniently, is Levinas’s thesis.

The event began with a sketch history of phenomenology:

Kant → Hegel → Husserl → Heidegger → Levinas

What surprised me most while preparing this is that learning about phenomenology actually makes Kant clearer.

Kant’s CPR can be read as a kind of proto-phenomenology: an investigation into the hidden structures that make experience possible even though they never appear within experience itself.

Phenomenology isolates and amplifies the observation part. What if consciousness tried to describe experience with maximum honesty? The goal is: “Notice everything that appears minus the usual projections.” The method is: Say only what shows itself. And the dream driving the work: “We can learn something about reality from the process of appearing itself.”

But a problem immediately arises. Who is the ultra-scientific observer watching with journalistic honesty the dumb, blind, ideology-infested, robotic, culturally programmed habit slave? How did the observer consciousness escape the inherited categories that have enslaved its shapable, inertial host?

Here is where phenomenology splits into two main kinds:

1. Husserl develops descriptive phenomenology: bracket assumptions and describe what appears.
2. Heidegger develops interpretive phenomenology: bracketing assumptions is impossible because interpretation is already built into existence.

This distinction leads to one of philosophy’s most charming historical moments. Jean-Paul Sartre is sitting in a Paris café with Raymond Aron, who has just returned from studying phenomenology in Berlin. Aron points to Sartre’s apricot cocktail and says, “You know, if you are a phenomenologist, you can philosophize about this drink.” Sartre nearly fainted with excitement. “You mean philosophy can examine anything that appears?” And thus Existentialism was born.

But this creates a deeper problem: If philosophy is describing or interpreting existence, where does morality come from?

Heidegger postponed the question. “First understand being,” he said. “Ethics can wait.”

Buber, Arendt, Derrida—and especially Levinas—found this postponement intolerable and argued that Heidegger’s philosophy lacked a moral center.

Levinas’s response: “Ethics does not come after ontology. Ethics comes first.”

Our sense of obligation arises not from metaphysics, not from reason, not from society, but from something simpler and stranger:

Ye encounter with another person.

The face of another human being interrupts our self-contained world and demands responsibility.

This is the central idea of Totality and Infinity.

Philosophy has traditionally tried to totalize the world inside conceptual systems.

But the Other introduces an infinity that cannot be absorbed into those systems. We have some apt metaphors for the Other—black hole, wormhole, stargate, Möbius strip, division by zero. The Other is an indigestible alien power that puts your and your whole self-secreted prison-house universe in context.

You cannot integrate the Other, you can only respond to her, who is incidentally your mother, who called you into existence by addressing you in the second-person, which forced you to announce “Here I am!” and be born.

Early vs Late Levinas

There’s one useful thing I can do here—draw the line between early and late Levinas:

Early Levinas (1930s–1960s) is Nausea-like and explores the oppressive weight of existence—the mysterious background “there is” (il y a) and the emergence of the self within it. On Escape, Existence and Existents, and Time and the Other (attempt to) describe the fact that existence often feels like something we want to escape from.

Late Levinas (1960s–1990s) extracts ethical implications from that insight. In Otherwise Than Being the subject is no longer a thinking self but a being who is responsible before choosing to be responsible.

His language use also becomes more experimental and influenced by Jewish mystical interpretive traditions. Key concepts —

• the Face
• substitution
• vulnerability
• the Saying vs the Said

The Thread Connecting Early and Late Levinas

The most interesting way to read Levinas is to see the later work circling back to the earliest question.

In the early essay On Escape, Levinas asks a disturbing question:

What if existence itself is something we are trying to escape?

At first this seems like a purely existential mood.

But by the time we reach the later works the answer begins to emerge.

The way out of the suffocating closure of being is not metaphysical insight, mystical experience, or philosophical theory.

It is the encounter with the Other!

Ethics becomes the path by which we escape the imprisonment of the self.

And … that is a sketch that has nothing to do with the plan for Levinas Part II.

Actual Summary

We will revisit the phenomenological background briefly, trace the key ideas that Levinas inherits from Kant, Husserl, Heidegger, and others, and then examine how Levinas transforms them.

But the real goal will be something simpler: to understand how philosophy ended up with the strange claim that the most profound event in human existence is something common. Eye contact with another person.

Life-Changing Levinasian Practice You Can Do

Here is the proposed Discomforting Exercise of the Week.

1. Walk outside.
2. Make eye contact with a stranger.
3. Notice the panic.

That disturbance can be the entrance of infinity into your world.

METHOD

Full announcement, diagrams, and the interactive phenomenology map will follow soon—once my cognitive lattice finishes re-solidifying. Please don’t look at THORR today it’s a month behind. We have seven more books to upload, including Derrida articles. It’ll be done tonight!

Summaries, notes, event chatlogs, episode transcripts, timelines, tables, observations, and downloadable PDFs of the episodes we cover can be found here, but don’t click on this link because it’s a mess right now:

• THORR (The High Ontology Reading Room)

ABOUT PROFESSOR TAUBENECK

Professor Taubeneck is professor of German and Philosophy at UBC, first translator of Hegel’s Encyclopedia into English, and SADHO CΦO. Most impressively, he has also been wrestling with the core texts of 20-cent. phenomenology and existentialism for over 30 years, and has worked and collaborated with Gadamer, Derrida, and Rorty.

View all of our coming episodes here.