Aspects of Alterity: Levinas, Marcel, and the Contemporary Debate

2. Emmanuel Levinas

2 Emmanuel Levinas ‘‘This dog is mine,’’ said those poor children; ‘‘that is my place in the sun.’’ Here is the beginning and the image of the usurpation of all of the earth. Pascal, Pensées Each of us is guilty in everything before everyone, and I most of all . . . ‘‘But how is it possible that I am guilty for everyone,’’ they would all laugh in my face, ‘‘well, for instance, can I be guilty for you?’’ ‘‘But how can you even understand it,’’ I would answer, ‘‘if the whole world has long since gone off on a different path, and if we consider what is a veritable lie to be the truth . . .’’ Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov These passages, both alluded to by Levinas in various places, underscore the impetus of his thought, which argues that ethical responsibility is more fundamental than ontology, inverting twenty-five hundred years of philosophy by showing that ‘‘man’s relation to the other is prior to his ontological relation to himself (egology) or to the totality of things that we call the world (cosmology).’’1 Although his work is exceptionally focused in its concern for the other, Levinas’s philosophy is extensive enough that a complete treatment of it is beyond the scope of this project, which demands that we summarize Levinas’s philosophy and focus on certain aspects of it rather than undertaking a comprehensive account of his thought.2 As is the case 11 with any summary, subtleties and shades of meaning may be lost, and some significant themes will be overlooked or de-emphasized, although I will have occasion to address many of the themes and topics central to his thought—ipseity, alterity, illeity, responsibility, substitution , and sociality among them. Furthermore, while I will not neglect the breadth of Levinas’s work, this analysis will focus on Totality and Infinity and therefore will not focus on the subtle evolution in certain ideas from the early to the later work.3 This is perhaps acceptable , as Levinas himself denies the notion that there is a Kehre in his work, noting that ‘‘Je ne suis pas Heidegger.’’4 The primary considerations will be as follows: First, to give a general summary of Levinas ’s philosophical project, noting especially his relation to ontology. Second, to set the stage for an encounter with Marcel by articulating Levinas’s version of the intersubjective relationship or, as he usually terms it, the relation of the same to the other.5 Finally, to describe alterity as seen by Levinas and to address the role of justice and love within his work. Needless to say, the question of otherness will be ever present in these considerations. Transcendental Phenomenology: Metaphysics Precedes Ontology Levinas’s philosophical project is an attempt to point out and address a significant, indeed the significant, lacuna in the Western philosophical tradition: the ability to account for the other qua other. Summed up in a single sentence, the objection to ontology is that it cannot be primordial because it cannot account for otherness. Thus, properly understood, Levinas’s arguments are more an attempt to reposition ontology, to point out that it cannot account for a certain basic phenomenon , than an attempt to do away with ontology. This philosophic project straddles two worlds, the transcendental and the empirical, walking a fine line between what would traditionally be construed as metaphysics on the one hand and ethics on the other. The nature of this balancing act has been the topic of several fine essays (for example, Robert Bernasconi’s ‘‘Rereading Totality and Infinity’’ and Theodore de Boer’s ‘‘An Ethical Transcendental Philosophy’’) and, more recently, Jeffrey Dudiak’s compelling book, The Intrigue of Ethics.6 The contradictory positions taken by Bernasconi and de Boer, and Dudiak’s reading of Levinas in light of these positions, illustrate the difficulty of teasing out and differentiating the transcendental and the empirical in Levinas’s thought. In fact, there 12 Aspects of Alterity are both transcendental and empirical elements in Levinas’s philosophy , which makes it difficult to keep in mind the largely transcendental character of certain arguments and leads to confusion regarding his role within the philosophical tradition.7 Levinas himself points out that responsibility (the ethical relationship) is both ‘‘extraordinary and everyday.’’ Responsibility is, he claims, a ‘‘commonplace moral experience,’’ and despite the infinite obligation demanded by this relationship, it does...