Levinas and the Ancients

6. ETHICS AS FIRST PHILOSOPHY: ARISTOTELIAN REFLECTIONS ON INTELLIGENCE, SENSIBILITY, AND TRANSCENDENCE

103 6 ethics as first philosophy: aristotelian reflections on intelligence, sensibility, and transcendence Claudia Baracchi One of Levinas’ crucial contributions to contemporary thought is the understanding of ethics as first philosophy. This view calls for a radical critique of the priority traditionally accorded to rational-scientific knowledge, with respect to which the various disciplines would be construed in their derivativeness, merely as fields in which purely rational structures would find their application. In this perspective , theoretical knowledge, far from autonomous and self-grounding, is exposed as emerging out of practical involvements and, more broadly, out of the involvement in sensibility and phenomenality. Such an involvement is irreducible to experience understood as the content of formal and formalized knowledge as always already brought back to, contained in, and owned by self-consciousness. Rather, it points to experience as that which cannot be thematically circumscribed. It points to the “vivacity of life” as a matter of “excession (excession), the rupture of the container by the noncontainable” (EN 88). Such would be the “very event of transcendence as life” (EN 87) in its anarchic precedence with respect to all arkhe. The present essay undertakes to show that a consonant understanding of the relation between the practical and the theoretical may be found in Aristotle.1 Such a way of receiving Aristotle’s thinking is called for by Levinas himself. To be sure, he pervasively refers to Aristotle as one of the paradigmatic figures in a philosophical tradition obsessed with logic/ontology and culminating with Heidegger.2 And yet, Levinas also lets transpire, with occasional and sudden gestures, the irreducibility of Aristotelian thinking to the hegemonic aspirations of the metaphysics it inaugurates . For instance, he notes the resourcefulness of Aristotle’s thinking of the plurivocity of being vis-à-vis the concern with justice (EN 27). In the essay “Totality and Totalization,” he highlights the inexhaustibly disruptive power of sensibility at work both in Aristotle and in Kant: “Discovering a rationality at the level of the sensible and of the finite, in contrast with the inordinate rationality of the Platonic Idea, rediscovering the Aristotelian intelligibility inherent in things (which expresses itself in the Kantian doctrine of schematism, in which the concepts of the understanding are exposed in time), Kant’s [critical] philosophy seriously shakes the foundations of the idea of totality” (AT 46). Again, Levinas repeatedly underlines the way in which Aristotle’s understanding of the agent intellect splits open any pretense at rational as well as subjective self-containment and self-sufficiency. Various philosophies at their “heights,” he says, make it apparent that the “questioning of the Same by the Other, and what we have called ‘wakefulness’ or ‘life,’ is, outside of knowledge, a part of philosophy.” Among the symptoms of such a questioning , he mentions “the beyond being in Plato . . . the entrance through the door of the agent intellect in Aristotle; the idea of God in us, going beyond our capacity as finite beings” (EN 89). Levinas is especially captivated by the phrase “through the door,” thurathen, which he borrows from Aristotle. It occurs twice in the treatise On the Generation ofthe Animals (736b28 and 744b22) and refers to the intellect, nous, which enters from the outside and is “divine.” Levinas takes this phrase to indicate the radical exteriority haunting interiority, and he returns to it more than once. Already in 1954, he affirms that justice “comes from the outside, ‘through the door,’ above the fray; it appears like a principle external to history” (“The Ego and the Totality,” CPP 40; in the footnote on the same page, the Aristotelian expression is said to be specifically related to “the agent intellect [nous poietikos],” while this is at most implicit in Generation). Levinas speaks of the “Other calling the Same” as “a heteronomy of freedom that the Greeks have not taught us” (GCM 24). And yet, in a note, he immediately adds, with caution: “Unless they suggest it, both in the Daimon of Socrates and in the entry, by the door, of the agent intellect in Aristotle” (GCM 189 n. 24). Again, Levinas mentions “the entry, ‘through the door,’ of the agent intellect in Aristotle” as showing the “relation of transcendence” (GCM 119). What follows is an approach to Aristotle informed by these intuitions recurring in Levinas’ work. It is an attempt to take them seriously as interpretive indications and rigorously unfold their implications. Thus, the discussion here presented is not “comparative,” comparing two bodies of work presumed in...