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The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 17.3 (2003) 192-203



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A Time for Being Ethical:
Levinas and Pragmatism

Sandra B. Rosenthal
Loyola University


Though Levinas and the classical American pragmatists 1 operate within diverse historical contexts, there are remarkable convergences as well as crucial differences in their respective reconstructions of the traditional concepts of freedom, selfhood, and the moral, and their grounding of these in what each calls a sociality of time. This essay will engage in a comparative exploration of these reconstructions to clarify the depth of the issues involved and provide a focal point for weighing the merits of their respective positions, not only in these areas but for a host of other areas of shared concern that extend beyond the scope of this paper.

Levinas' understanding of time plays a vital role throughout his philosophy, and this role is rooted in his understanding of the discontinuity of time as the basis for the radical alterity of self and other and the radical novelty that he seeks. While his understanding of time and the alterity with which it is inextricably tied evolves in a more extreme way as his thought progresses, this progression always exhibits his belief in the discontinuity of time and its essential role in alterity.

Levinas credits Bergson for liberating philosophy from the model of scientific time or clock time. 2 The importance of Bergson's work for Levinas' understanding of time is encapsulated in the latter's assertion that "[t]he first contemporary influence on my own thinking was Bergson. . . . Moreover, Bergson's theory of time as concrete duration (la durée concrète) is, I believe, one of the most significant, if largely ignored, contributions to contemporary philosophy." 3 Both the concreteness of duration and the duration of concreteness provided a lasting influence on Levinas' thought.

This influence is evident in Levinas' rejection of the abstract formal time line, which, he holds, has instants inserted with it, each of which [End Page 192] excludes the others but is the same as the others. He agrees that each instant excludes the others, but rejects the abstract understanding of it. 4 An instant for Levinas is the concrete embodiment of existence. And as Levinas stresses in this connection, "[d]uration is not to be taken as the measure of existence, the present denied its plenary contact with being, simply because an instant has no duration." 5 Here the instant is self-contained in the weight of its concreteness; 6 in the instant, the subject is burdened with its own materiality. 7 As one commentator well characterizes Levinas' position here, he "gives the ancient sense of time as an infinite succession of instants a wholly new existential interpretation." 8

Levinas explains the importance of duration in his analysis of the melody, which he uses in recognition of its function as the ideal model in terms of which Bergson conceived pure duration. 9 While the purpose of Levinas' analysis is to contrast effort with play, his general view can be abstracted from this particular context to reveal certain aspects of time in a significant way. In his analysis of musical duration Levinas points out that "[e]ach instant does not count as such; the instants of a melody exist only in dying." 10 Duration is the time in which the instant "is not present." 11 Duration, then, is composed of the absolutely present and the absolutely not present. Because each instant is self-contained, duration "can be broken up into its elements which can then be counted." 12 Duration is composed of, is decomposable into, a discrete series of self contained instants. In the words of Drucilla Cornell, time expresses "a rupture of continuity." 13 The discrete moments from which Levinas builds his understanding of time are ultimately woven together by the trace of what is not present. In this way the trace plays a key role throughout his philosophy and, like time, evolves in a more extreme way as his thought progresses.

This view of time is the vehicle by which Levinas preserves both...

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