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Being and the Other
- Northwestern University Press
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Introduction There is a tendency nowadays, in the wake of a certain reading of Levinas, to oppose ethics to ontology, the thought of the other to the thought of Being. I would like in this paper to question the pertinence of this opposition , the accuracy or the justice of Levinas’s critique of Heidegger. Should we accept without question the equivalence that Levinas posits between Being and the Same? Can the question of the other and therefore —for Levinas—of ethics only be posed “beyond being,” beyond ontology ? And in that respect, what can the “primacy of ethics over ontology” mean if the thought of Being, as Heidegger explains in the “Letter on Humanism,” is an “originary ethics” (ursprüngliche Ethik)?1 What is the relation between Being and the Other? Does fundamental ontology represent the obliteration of ethical concern? Is there a possibility, despite Levinas’s claims, of developing an ontological sense of ethics and praxis? These are some of the questions that I will pursue here, by focusing on Levinas ’s interpretation of Heidegger. The Ethical Trial of Ontology Ontology as a Thinking of the Same Levinas’s critique of Heidegger begins, as we know, by putting the “primacy of ontology” into question; that is to say, to be precise, the primacy of ontology over ethics. At the outset, with Levinas, everything revolves around the meaning to be given to ontology. It is thus important to dwell Being and the Other: Ethics and Ontology in Levinas and Heidegger François Raffoul 138 on this question for a moment. Levinas’s thesis, which appears throughout his work and is introduced very early on, can be summarily presented as follows. Ontology, the thinking of Being, as it has defined the entirety of Western philosophy from Parmenides to Heidegger, is a thinking of the Same, a thinking which reduces otherness to the Same by the very power of its theoretical comprehensiveness. Levinas states: “Theory also means intelligence—logos of being—that is to say, a manner of approaching the known being in such a way that its otherness in relation to the knowing being vanishes.”2 In the traditional philosophical correlation between Knowledge and Being, knowledge represents, as Levinas explained in the 1982 lecture “Ethics as First Philosophy,” “an activity which appropriates and comprehends the alterity of the known.”3 Consequently, Western philosophy has most often been an ontology, “that is to say, a reduction of the Other to the Same” (TeI 33–34). Ontology is understood, then, as a reduction of alterity. In opposition to the tradition of Western thought, defined as we just saw, Levinas, as early as 1947 in Time and the Other, attempts to go “beyond the eleatic notion of Being,” to overcome ontology, and to move beyond Being, toward what he calls “the absolute other.”4 The “absolute other” is for him the other human (l’autre homme). One should note here the crucial importance of this movement, the constitutive motif of “evasion beyond Being,” in Levinas’s thought. From the essay On Evasion (1935) until Otherwise Than Being (1974), one finds this motif of a need to escape, to exit what Levinas calls the suffocating nauseating presence of being, the il y a, the suffocating presence of a Same. One could in fact approach Levinas’s thought as a whole from this effort to exit, or go beyond, and toward an other that does not return to a same, that does not come back, and in that sense is Absolute. There would indeed be much to say, or question, concerning this broad definition of the entire Western tradition as a “thought of the Same.” But what of Heidegger’s place in this history? Wasn’t he the one who subjected Western metaphysics to an unprecedented phenomenological destruction? Most important, wasn’t he the one who destroyed Western ontology by bringing out the difference between Being and beings, a difference ignored by metaphysics in its enterprise of substantialization of Being? In short, wasn’t it precisely Heidegger who undertook the overcoming or abandonment of “Western onto-theo-logy”? For Levinas, the answer to these questions is no. Precisely to the contrary —at least for Levinas—the phenomenological thought of Heidegger would in fact be the “imperialist” culmination of the dictatorship of the Same (TeI 35). By positing the anteriority of Being over beings, Heidegger would have only accentuated the all-encompassing character of Being, and thereby the reduction of the entity, which is other, to the...