Levinasian Meditations: Ethics, Philosophy, and Religion

SIX: Some Notes on the Title of Levina's Totality and Infinity and Its First Sentence

107 SIX Some Notes on the Title of Levinas’s Totality andInfinity and Its First Sentence Being and Time, Being and Nothingness, Totality and Infinity —these short titles, made up of two ponderous words connected by an “and,” modest in its indeterminacy, spanning the twentieth century, announce big books, important books about the most important things. There are, of course, other big books in twentieth century philosophy. One knows the authors, the contentions, the struggles, as well as the abyss that divides continental and the Anglo-American debates. Twentieth century continental philosophy commenced at the dawn of the century with Husserl’s call for a renewal and extension of science through a rigorously descriptive and transcendental phenomenology . As he veered into idealism—the natural tendency of all philosophical science—his two greatest students, Martin Heidegger and Emmanuel Levinas, staked out alternative paths. In this regard, perhaps no two books are more important or stand in more fateful or closer quarters—with one another and with their teacher—than Heidegger’s Being and Time, which challenged Husserlian science through the disclosure (Entdecken, Erschliessen, Geben, etc.) of an ontological-aesthetic path for phenomenology, and Levinas’s Totality and Infinity, which challenged the nature and status of both Husserlian science and Heideggerian ontology by calling attention to the primacy of the ethical-social condition (or, properly speaking, 108 Ethics as First Philosophy “noncondition,” transcendence) of both scientific knowledge and ontological disclosure.1 The aim of the present all too brief notes is to approach these issues and others as well by examining the title and the first sentence of Totality and Infinity. Regarding the term Totality, for instance, we might consider that it would have been more natural for Levinas to juxtapose it to the term Part or Individual rather than Infinity, for parts or individuals stand in opposition to totality, the whole, as the many, the multiple, the plural stand in opposition to the one. In this way Totality and Individuality would have made a striking title that would recall an ancient opposition with a fine pedigree, found at the very origins of philosophy and continuing throughout its history. How does the one become many? How are the many one? Are not these two questions —so prominent in the pre-Socratics, in Plato, in Plotinus and, much later in German Idealism, not to mention in monotheism—the alpha and omega of metaphysics, ontology, cosmology as well as theology? Or, moving east of Greece proper and past Persia, where these questions first arose in the West, surely the opposition between individuals —“dualities”—and the totality is the issue at stake in India’s two great monisms, Hinduism and Buddhism. They strive to show how beings, more particularly how human individuals who are selfconscious and free, can and should unite themselves to the whole, to realize their identity, to annihilate their differences, in order to achieve liberation or deliverance (Moksha) from all the dualities of individualism and thus to return to the oneness of the all, the absolute One (whether World Soul, Reality, Brahman, or World NotSoul , Emptiness, Shunyata, it does not matter). In this way, they can attain complete being (or nonbeing), complete enlightenment and complete freedom. While Levinas’s title does not go back to the Greeks alone, or out toward Persia or India, it does draw—especially in its invocation of the term Infinity —from the deep wells of Beersheba, that is to say, from the heritage of Abraham, of “Jerusalem,” which in its own way goes even farther than Greece or India, indeed to the farthest reaches and beyond, forging a path at once without exit and without return. That is to say, for Jerusalem—for Levinas—humanity is created and responsible at once, irreducibly multiple and yet each existence bound Some Notes on the Title of Totality and Infinity 109 to the infinite through and not despite that very multiplicity. It is also a path that opens out across a history moving from bondage to freedom , from injustice to justice, in a great exodus and redemption. To give such an absolute priority to the good without diminishing the integrity of the multiple—this will demand an extenuated existence and an exceptional thinking, developments perhaps too troublesome, too disquieting, too risky, apparently, for the longed for composure and tranquility of a Greek or Persian or Indian cosmos. As for the crucial term Infinity, one could also make similar...