The Philosophical Sense of Transcendence: Levinas and Plato on Loving Beyond Being

THREE The Lighter Side of Being and the Sensibility of Enjoyment

77 THREE The Lighter Side of Being and the Sensibility of Enjoyment B eing is not only darkness and suffering for Levinas, but also light and enjoyment. While the subject’s relation with the il y a and with its own being in hypostasis is heavy and suffocating, the subject is given a measure of respite from this darkness and weight in certain kinds of worldly relations, where being is illumination and lightness. What we find on the lighter side of being in Levinas is subjective being described as independence—from the il y a and from itself as weighty selfpossession —in its relation to (or dependence upon) all kinds of alterity, a paradoxical and entirely human independence born out of dependence. Levinas describes this independent subject in terms of human need interpreted as enjoyment and of knowledge interpreted as representation. It is to these relations that we turn in the present chapter. This focusing on ontological light is important because it shows a more positive approach to being in Levinas and a way of understanding philosophical 78 The Philosophical Sense of Transcendence sense as elaborated in an interplay between enjoyment and representation . The predominant way Levinas defines philosophy in his thought is as ontology or the “thought of being,” and the positive approach to being as light is one of the senses he gives to philosophy as ontological. Moreover, the movement from darkness into light brings goodness into the picture for the first time: enjoyment and representation are the first way the subject experiences its own being as a kind of goodness, as a first morality and happiness for itself. This is not yet the full- fledged transcendent Good, but it is an inkling of this goodness in being and as such a movement in the right direction on the way toward transcendence. In the framework of our guiding question—what philosophical sense is to be given to transcendence—an important related question arises, namely: what role does being as light have to play in the happening of transcendence and in our way of access to transcendence for Levinas? In his early works, transcendence is defined as excendence, as a movement out of anonymous being and away from the isolation of subjective being. It may seem that enjoyment and knowledge as relations to otherness constitute a movement of transcendence for the subject—it moves outside itself—but in fact, we will see, worldly relations do little more than expand the circle of self-referential subjectivity in the early Levinas. The excursion of the subject into light is but a temporary reprieve from the darker side of being, and true transcendence must find a way to pass into the subject out of this darkness. Suffering remains the essential aspect of subjectivity and the key to transcendence. In the first part of this chapter, I consider Levinas’s description of worldly being in the early works, the point of which seems to be: (1) to give an account of being in the world as relations with things and beings that are not reducible to Heideggerian ontology, but that have much to do with Husserlian intentionality, especially in relations of knowledge; and (2) to show that worldly being (once again The Lighter Side and Enjoyment 79 contra Heidegger) and phenomenological intentionality are not transcendence, but a further expansion of subjective self-reference and a temporary living space for the subject—who, left to its own devices, is always on the brink of being plunged back into the darker side of being. In Totality and Infinity, however, transcendence is redefined, or perhaps better put, it is defined explicitly for the first time. As well as considering being and human being in terms of their verbal (active, existential) aspect, Levinas focuses in particular upon human beings as personal, private beings and on the relations that obtain between them. Transcendence is defined as a relationship between me and an exterior being—the other human being, but also, we shall see, God—in which the distance between myself and this being cannot be removed, and in which neither I nor the other draw their being from each other. Levinas claims that the transcendent being’s distance from me is definitive of the relation itself, but so, it turns out, is my distance, or separation, from this being: I am absolutely separated from the transcendent (TI 35, 53...