Face to Face with Levinas

11. The Sensuality and the Sensitivity

ALPHONSO LINGIS 11. The Sensuality and the Sensitivity '10 sense something is to catch on to the sense of something, its direction , orientation, or meaning. Sensibility is sense perception, apprehension of sense. In addition, to sense something is to be sensitive to something, to be concerned by it, affected by it. It is to be pleased - gratified, contented, exhilarated - or to be pained, afflicted, wounded, by something. A sentient subject does not innocently array object forms about itself; it is not only oriented in free space by their sense, it is subject to them, to their brutality and their sustentation. Was it ever evident that the sensibility in our nervous circuitry has to be conceived as a passivity of the mind, upon which the physical action of the material world taps out impressions - impressions that a free and spontaneous understanding can then take as signs and for which it can relate and posit referents? Is receptivity passivity? Is there in it a synoptic assembling of the multiplicity of sense data? Is there in it an intentional orientation? But is the sensuous element really a multiplicity of discrete impressions? Is the affective sensitivity but a side effect of sensibility, a factor of confusion and indistinctness in sense perception? Is there opposition between sensibility and responsibility - between the sentiment of respect, which Kant called the receptivity of the spontaneity of the mind, the sensibility of the faculty of understanding, and the sensibility for sensible things? Were the metaphysical correlates of matter and form, activity and passivity really imposed on the classical philosophy of mind by analysis of the phenomenon of sensibility? There is a movement in sensibility, the moment of ex-isting. Our existence is sensitive. In the receptivity for sense, the capacity to catch on to the orientation and potentialities of things, Heidegger 219 220 ALPHONSO LING!S has seen the propulsion that makes our being ex-ist - that is, cast itself out toward entities exterior to itself - and cast itself beyond them to take in the context in which they could move. The given beings make an impression on us, because the active, self-propelling thrust of our being makes contact with them and advances beyond where and how they actually are to their possible positions and employment, to their futures. What we sense when we sense the solidity of the seat is neither a coagulation of chromatic and tactile impressions, nor an idea, an ideal o~iect, associated with them; it is a possibility. Sense perception is, in fact, apprehension of the forces of things, the possibilities things are, anticipation of the future of the world, clairvoyance. But the propulsive force by which our existence casts itself perceptively into the world is oriented by the layout of things. There is subjection to the world in the sensibility. Our emotions disclose to us, in us, how the things we envisage matter to us; our affective disposition, our moods, reveal how the layout as a whole besets us. The world is not only a layout of contours, whose orientation, whose sense, whose future, we envisage; in our affectivity the facticity of its being is imposed on us. Affectivity, far from being just a subjective factor of confusion and immanence in the mind, is exposure and revelation of the world. Revelation of its being. It is in itself that our being knows the being of the most remote things, of the whole world. The existential elucidation of affectivity is astonishing: Heidegger showed that, while our existence entfernt, distances itself from, posits apart, the forms and appearances of things through sensibility, our being is afflicted from the start with the pressure, the gravity, of the being of those exterior things. 'We find ourselves exposed not merely to the appearances, the phosphorescence, of things that are closed in themselves but to the incontrovertible plenum of their being, all the infinity of the condensation with which their being has replaced and excluded nothingness. Our own being is exposed from the start to the being of the most alien and remote things, exposed to the dimensions of remoteness in which beings can be exterior; the weight of the being of the world presses down on us. In fact, the ecstatic thrust of our existence, by which we cast ourselves beyond their actual forms and positions to their possibilities, is not really a free-floating domination over them; it is rather a continual effort to escape the burden of their being, which oppresses our being from the...