The Rigor of a Certain Inhumanity: Toward a Wider Suffrage

Nine: Who or What or Whot

Who or What or Whot A stumbling block Kierkegaard’s statement “The metaphysical, the ontological, is [er], but it does not exist [er ikke til]” draws the line that separates him from Hegel and both of them from Levinas.1 His Danish does this distinctly. On the one hand, the preposition “til,” “to,” indicates a relation between subjectivity and otherness that, Kierkegaard maintains, cannot be subsumed within the sphere of being or essence. On the other hand, while agreeing with Kierkegaard’s denial, Levinas argues against Kierkegaard (and Heidegger) that the ec-static, ex-sistent to-ness and toward-ness of the relation indicated by Kierkegaard’s preposition presupposes an inward-ness without which there can be no relations . This in-wardness is not the inwardness of subjectivity as Kierkegaard describes it. It stems not from the singular individual’s decision and free will, but from finding itself subjected to and responding to another’s command . Before investigating this difference more closely, let us review briefly the Hegelian conception they agree in rejecting. Hegel teaches that the other is the negative of the same, “the necessary other,” as Kierkegaard calls it. In The Concept of Anxiety Kierkegaard applies to Hegel a criticism he has heard made of Schelling. Having affirmed that the negative is the evil, it is a short step to a position in which transitions in NINE WHO OR WHAT OR WHOT | 185 logic are declared illogical because they are evil and transitions are declared unethical in ethics because the evil is the negative. “In logic they are too much and in ethics too little. . . . If ethics has no other transcendence, it is essentially logic. If logic is to have as much transcendence as common propriety requires of ethics, it is no longer logic.”2 It is to this panontologicism that Levinas too is objecting when he writes that “the fundamental fact of the ontological scission into same and other is a non-allergic relation of the same with the other.”3 To say that this relation is non-allergic is to say that it is not a relation in which there is a conflict between forces, not an inter-action (ergon). Hence the quotation marks when he writes that “The ‘resistance’ of the other does not do violence to me, does not act negatively; it has a positive structure: ethical.”4 The other resists me in being undesirable, because he or she is my accuser. This resistance is also a resistance to system “without its resistance to system manifesting itself as the egoist cry of the subjectivity, still concerned for happiness or salvation, as in Kierkegaard.”5 For both Kierkegaard and Levinas the other is the one I am commanded to love. For both Kierkegaard and Levinas the other is my neighbor. According to both Kierkegaard and Levinas I am commanded to love my neighbor by God. According at least to Levinas I am commanded to love my neighbor also by my neighbor. Furthermore, God commands me to love my neighbor as I love myself. “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Leviticus 19:18, Matthew 22:39). You shall love your neighbor. I do love myself. According to Kierkegaard self-love is part of all preferential love, whether the latter be friendship or erotic love. These are forms of temporal love. They fall short of commanded love as the temporal falls short of the eternal. But if they fall short through being forms of self-love, how can I be commanded to love my neighbor as myself? Only if self-love can be unselfish. “The concept ‘neighbor,’” Kierkegaard writes, “is actually the redoubling of your own self; the ‘neighbor’ is what philosophers call ‘the other,’ that by which the selfishness in self-love is to be tested.”6 The friend and the beloved are nearest to me by preference. Their being near to me is exclusive of others. My love ceases to be exclusive only when the other is as near to me as I am near to myself. As such the other is my neighbor. The selfishness and narcissism of preferential love is superseded by a love of oneself as neighbor to a neighbor. The former love differs from the latter in that while in the former love I make demands on the beloved, in the latter love demands are made on me. The latter love is a test of the former in that the beloved as neighbor makes demands on me as myself a...