The Intersubjectivity of Time: Levinas and Infinite Responsibility

3. Intersubjective Time: Fecundity

79 THREE Intersubjective Time Fecundity Levinas presents an interpretation of time that is not merely a different way for considering the topic but an entirely new approach. For Levinas time is neither egological nor cosmological, neither interior nor exterior (see TI 290), neither Heideggerian-Bergsonian nor Aristotelian. His criticism of both the Aristotelian, traditional analysis of time and the Heideggerian-Bergsonian reading is tied to his attempt to show that “man’s ethical relation to the other is ultimately prior to his ontological relation to himself (egology) or to the totality of things that we call the world (cosmology)” (DEL 21). Levinas’s understanding of time reexamines egological and cosmological views of time, and it may overcome the gap that Bergson and Heidegger formed by leaving the discussion of temporality in the realm of the individual, and for the most part, reduced the time relevant to our existence with other human beings to the spatial, the inauthentic, clock time. On the one hand Levinasian time does not ignore the relevance of time to the human structure of existence, and on the other hand it reinterprets the everyday view of public time and locates the significance of time in our ethical existence among other people. Thus, although Levinas does not reject the egological or cosmological views of time, he insists that the original, primordial way for experiencing time is constituted by one’s ethical relationship with the other person . As he details, “Is not sociality something more than the source of our representation of time: is it not time itself? If time is constituted by my relationship with the other, it is exterior to my instant, 80 The Intersubjectivity of Time but it is also something else than an object given to contemplation. The dialectic of time is the very dialectic of the relationship with the other, that is a dialogue which in turn has to be studied in terms other than those of the dialectic of the solitary subject” (EE 96). In presenting a view that regards time as rooted in our relations1 with the other person, Levinas is considering time as intersubjective . The term “intersubjective” does not refer to the view of time as a public, common dimension, but rather it is the literal sense of the time existing in between the subjects constituted through their interaction. Consequently veritable time, although embedded in the human structure of existence, is not an inner time that is limited to the perspective of the individual, but rather, is revealed precisely in our ethical face-to-face encounter with the other person. While one must not overlook the significance of the interpretations offered by Bergson and Heidegger, in limiting their views of temporality to the perspective of the individual, they do not present an intertemporal understanding of time and seem to neglect a crucial aspect of human life, namely, that time is meaningful for our ethical existence among other individuals. Therefore, it appears that Levinas is correct in his effort to understand time from the ethical perspective and in his endeavor to provide a view that not merely acknowledges the social aspect of time, but rather, considers it to be the primordial approach. By focusing on fecund time, I begin examining Levinas’s claim that the locus of time is found in the relationships formed between individuals , that time is neither interior nor exterior. The three themes of fecund, intersubjective time—fecundity, discontinuity, and recommencement —provide the framework for characterizing the ethical relations between the subject and the other, for demonstrating the ways in which such ethical encounters are the foundation of time, and for elucidating why, from Levinas’s viewpoint, they are required for the constitution of time. Intersubjective Time: Fecundity 81 FECUNDITY Since fecundity provides for Levinas a concrete illustration of interhuman relations, an elucidation of the role he assigns to fecundity and its outcomes (such as discontinuity and recommencement) in the formation of time reveals a way of thinking of time as grounded in our ethical relations with other people. But Levinas was not the first to connect fecundity and time, and such a link can be found already in Plato’s Symposium.2 In the first part of Diotima’s discussion of love she claims, “Pregnancy and procreation instill immortality in a living, mortal being.”3 Diotima explains this procreative activity, which may be regarded as an aspect or outcome of fecundity,4 as the mortal creature...