The Wild Region in Life-History

4: Elements for an Ethic of Alterity

4 Elements for an Ethic of Alterity T he aim of the investigations reserved for the last chapter of this book is to adumbrate a phenomenological approach to ethics, for which I take the Levinasian idea of an “alternating movement” between unlimited responsibility and moral ordering as a point of departure. This option may be surprising, since Levinas himself decidedly opposes ethics to phenomenology. But even if this is true, it is no less true that his ethical inquiries constantly revolve around a question which resides at the very core of phenomenology. Indeed, they are designed to disclose a region of elementary claims and ties which underlies—to use the Husserlian term—the Urstiftung, i.e., the “generation by primal instituting ,” of justice, law, and moral order. It is at the very basis of such a generation that, in Levinas’s approach, the third party enters into the sphere of the elementary relationship between oneself and another. It seems to me that the specific kind of responsibility encountered in this sphere might be best qualified, as Waldenfels rightly suggests, with the word wild.1 This adjective, borrowed from Merleau-Ponty, of course, is to make it clear that responsibility is not yet confined by any particular or well-articulated duties, and it is not yet conditioned or delimited by the universal law. I will argue that the unlimited responsibility Levinas talks about belongs to a wild region which lies at the root of all moral order introduced into personal life-history, or created by society. From what I say below it will be clear that for the study of how moral order arises from the wild region, the Levinasian idea of alternating movement appears to me to be a more appropriate model than the Husserlian notion of a generation by primal instituting. As a matter of fact, the very talk of primal instituting may be judged as inconvenient because it risks the relegation of this question to the obscure areas of a psychological or historical origin. In addition, Urstiftung, in Husserl, is closely connected with Endstiftung; consequently, it conjures up a teleological perspective, 123 124 T H E W I L D R E G I O N I N L I F E - H I S T O R Y which, in turn, remains committed to a by no means incontestable philosophy of history. Obviously, none of these ingredients of Husserl’s original thinking can find a place in a phenomenology inspired by the diacritical method. The model of alternance, suggested by Levinas, rather invites us— as the diacritical method requires—to concentrate on critical situations which reveal the indelible contrast between wild responsibility and moral ordering principles. This model will guide me in locating the first elements of an ethic based on the idea of alterity. This aim involves an inquiry into the role moral ordering principles may play in life-history, so I shall consider how wild responsibility is related to such intricate matters as law, desire, and guilt. In the first section of the present chapter, I shall expose a generalized model of alternation, applying it to the relationship of wild responsibility and the universal law. The argument to be developed here may be regarded as a more systematic elaboration of the hints formulated at the end of the previous chapter. In the second section, I will face some of the possible objections which might be raised against the very idea of wild responsibility on the basis of the theory of narrative identity combined with an ethics of a teleological bent. I shall turn with a special interest to Ricoeur’s repeated efforts to integrate duty, law, and even moral autonomy into the history of a desire capable of a—teleologically interpreted—process of sublimation. The conclusion which I draw from the reflections upon Ricoeur’s undertaking is, however, that all such efforts are doomed to failure. The third section will still be dedicated to the problem of desire. Here, I shall be concerned first with Lacan’s remarkable venture to bestow a properly ethical weight on desire, and then I will make an attempt at the characterization of the relationship between wild responsibility and desire. The fourth and last section will engage itself with the highly enigmatic problems posed by guilt and evil. I shall try to show how the idea of wild responsibility may provide a clue to a dismantling of what may be described as “the metaphysics of evil...