Face to Face with Levinas

5. Levinas' Question

CHARLES WILLIAM REED 5. Levinas' Question "How does he do it?" The question of method continually nags at anyone reading Totality and Infinity for the first time. How can Levinas be so aggravatingly profound and yet still retain any semblance of philosophical rigor? Is he merely naive and moralistic? Is there a deep structure concealed within his thought? Or does he prod us into responding to his writings by asking an unheard-of question? Levinas claims to be simply expanding upon the phenomenological method of Husserl. But his view of philosophical method is quite different from Hussed's: That would be my answer concerning method. I would also tell you that I know no more about it. I do not believe that a transparency in method is possible, nor that philosophy is possible as transparency. Those who have spent their lives on methodology have written many books in place of the more interesting books they could have written. What a pity for the walk beneath the noon-day sun that philosophy is said to be. l Intrigued by the possibility of tracking down a method that apparently has to deny its own existence in order to create a positive thought and by the all-too-obvious contradiction between what Levinas claims about his method and the various procedures and stylistic devices he actually adopts, I completed an extensive methodological analysis of Levinas' philosophical writings. And in spite of laboring under that peculiar eclipse of clarity called a Ph. D. dissertation, I did uncover something like a method within Levinas' thought, a way of proceeding that often seemed closer to a style than a method and that was built upon an observation about the 73 74 CHARLES WILLIAM REED structure of all questioning. I named that method "diachronic transcendentalism."2 Although I do not doubt the scholarly merit of my endeavor, and while I hope someday to make it available in a more readable and condensed format, I am now firmly convinced that the question of method is simply the wrong entrance into Levinas' thought. Methodology is essentially and unavoidably a quest for transparency about the foundations of thinking; it not only assumes a structure, but it assumes the strict and formal repeatability of certain procedures . As Levinas readily acknowledges, the phenomenological method has deeply influenced his thought. But Levinas' appropriation of Husserl's method is as exorbitant and as indirect as his appropriation of all the rest of the thinkers who have influenced him: Do you retain from a philosophy which influences you deeply the truths of an "absolute knowledge;' or certain gestures and "vocal inflections" which form for you the face of an interlocutor necessary to all discourse, even internal discourse?3 A methodological analysis nece:,sarily misses the gestures and inflections that comprise the original philosophical style Levinas has developed. By considering structure to be primary and procedures to be repeatable, methodology misses the question to which structure is only a response. Methodology can never discover why Levinas induces trembling in those who read him.4. The real provocation of Levinas lies in the questions he addresses to us not only as philosophers but also as fellow human beings. These questions are often raised explicitly in his writings, but as with every major thinker it is most difficult to hear them asked for the first time. Levinas aggravates the level of difficulty because of his claims about the nature of his questions: they arise from our relation to what lies outside of ontology, beyond being. Thus his questions also demand an unusual response. Whatever wisdom comes from his philosophizin~;, whatever he has to teach us, will emerge only after we have heard his questions. "Everyone will readily agree that it is of the highest importance to know whether we are not duped by morality."5 Levinas never returns to this sentence, which opens the preface to Totality and Injini ~y. It contains none of the technical expressions he constantly adopts and imbues with new meaning. Yet it provides a convex reflecting Levinas' Question 75 surface by which we can magnify Levinas' indirect, but also indiscreet , manner of confronting the reader with disturbing questions. By analyzing this sentence and the interactions between its five elements, 1 hope to show how Levinas pierces our embedded philosophical expectations and gently forces us not only to hear his questions but to acknowledge the responsibility they provoke. "Everyone will readily agree...