Levinas and Asian Thought

8. The Hidden Hour

131 EIGHT The Hidden Hour Thinking Levinas through Bushidō AndyAmato What is the relation of killing to dying, of taking life to offering it up? These two events, as I wish to think through them here, meet one another in the mortal equation of violence. On this point we might recall Heraclitus: “One must realize that war (polemos) is shared and conflict (eris) is justice (dikē), and that all things come to pass in accordance with conflict.”1 This ancient observation informs us that between killing and dying there stirs something more fundamental than the end, however tragic, of any particular human life: the very meaning of life is found in relation to conflict. Our great borders of experience and our story’s most significant chapters, according to this precept, all turn upon turbulent happenings, on sorrows and the fear of sorrows. Still, do not most people desire peace? Who really seeks a conflict of flesh and blood? Excepting those of diminished humanity —those who actually enjoy hurting others2 —could we not say that often times we employ violence only as a cure, to end oppression, or confront imminent aggression? Is it not employed for any of those few and noble reasons justifying a bellum justum? Individually or collectively , we are prompted by our interests and ideologies—arising as expressions of our most primordial cares—to take life or lay down our own in the hope that such an act in due measure answers the call for peace. Yet the genealogy of violence rushes over us into perpetuity. There seems no way for an act to be so final and true as to end all conflict and commence a pax universalis. And for this reason, given that we 132 Andy Amato continue to struggle in violent fashions for those people, ideas, and beliefs about which we care, I wonder whether or not some utopian dream or prelapsarian nostalgia does not continue to undergird the actions of those who ply their trade as warriors or peacemakers. I wonder if we are not all pulled in two directions on the question of violence. Most people, it seems to me, have no desire to actually be on either side of physical violence; but, at the same time, we see our baser fantasies often revolving around sensational violence—not as subjects of it, but rather as witnesses to it, as occasional heroic perpetrators of it. Could we not reduce the majority of our literary epics and theatrical great works to narrations instancing larger-thanlife conflicts—Passions pit against principles, principles against loyalties , loyalties against loves? Human life appears utterly conditioned by such ill-fit pairings. And we would do well here to keep in mind that these meditations do not necessarily indicate that we are essentially violent beings, but rather, if we want to think through the relation of taking life to giving up life, we ought to ever keep in mind that the compass of our existence is horizoned by violence. We would be hard-pressed to find two more alluring and alien understandings of the relation of killing to dying than the ethical thinking of Emanuel Levinas and the Japanese warrior code of bushidō (武士道). Both require little interpretive genius to see their sheer radicality and difficulties in relation to our contemporary context. The ethical demands put forward by Levinas, and the obligations of loyalty embraced by the samurai, appear to those of us more pragmatically minded as hyperbolic, if not impossible, modes of conduct. To begin with a note of difference: while some might consider Levinas’s ethics ambiguous and aporetic, bushidō seems to have provided samurai with fairly clear guidance (doing so despite the fact that it was principally an oral tradition).3 Samurai could appeal to one another’s sense of decorum, to a shared sense of honor and appropriate behavior. However, similar appeals premised upon a reading of Levinas would be quite problematic: he rejects outright the basic notion of reciprocity , and by so doing places all the responsibility for proper action in the hands of the subject4 —in our own hands. No appeal is made to the other’s obligation to us, nor to the relation between us (be it some bond, code, law, or whatever) (EI 98).5 Bushidō relies upon a The Hidden Hour 133 deep respect for, and adherence to, traditions and shared values, while Levinas, in his questioning and reformulation of the...