Totality and Infinity at 50

5. The Fundamental Idea of Emmanuel Levinas’s Philosophy

105 FIVE The Fundamental Idea of Emmanuel Levinas’s Philosophy GeorgW.Bertram TranslatedbyDianePerpichandNathanRoss According to a standard way of thinking, philosophy is occupied with a diverse set of questions. It deals with questions of knowledge, action, art, and still others. For the most part, philosophers understand their task in such a way that their purpose is to answer these questions—one after the other, more or less. And it is rare for philosophy not to start from one or another of these questions. That this is so can be found in philosophy’s being concerned with the unfolding of an idea. Philosophers who are concerned with an idea in this sense frequently write works that are hard to distinguish from one another. Their project is ongoing; it is the unfolding of their idea. They modify, correct, and often bring a single thought, in ever new forms, to expression. Their works read like layered and interlinear versions of a single text. The philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas is of just this type. His essays as well as his main works, Totality and Infinity (1961) and Otherwise than Being (1974), 106 Georg W. Bertram stand before the reader as a series of variations on a single problem: how is alterity, the otherness of the other, to be thought?1 The peculiar construction of Levinas’s thought is one of the reasons for the fascination it exercises on the reader, but also one of the reasons for its inaccessibility. It is crucial that interpretations be made that put Levinas’s fundamental idea in connection with other philosophical questions. Most interpretations of Levinas’s philosophy commit themselves to the slogan “ethics as first philosophy” (see TI 304). They take up the idea that access to the other is of a fundamentally ethical nature. An autonomous individual submits to a demand from the other. This demand is understood to be something that cannot be anticipated or comprehended. The other is thus presented as an entity that continually withdraws itself. Levinas makes clear how much effort and attention of thought is needed to think this. Such a reception of Levinas’s philosophy assigns it to a specific area of philosophy: to practical philosophy, that is, to philosophical reflections on ethics and morality. In general, one can distinguish two different ways in which Levinas’s idea has been taken up as a perspective within practical philosophy: on the one hand, it has been understood as the completion of ethical thought and, on the other hand, as the founding of ethical thought. Someone who completes practical philosophy by way of Levinas considers the experience of an absolutely irreducible other as a relevant part of a picture that otherwise consists of different experiences and concepts.2 Someone who founds all ethical thinking on this experience considers it the original scene of the ethical.3 In the one case, the other is viewed as an extraordinary object, in the other case, as a challenge to construct a practical philosophy. No matter which side one takes, the reception is guided by the phrase “ethics as first philosophy.” In my view, these ways of reading Levinas miss a certain radicality in his thinking. The radicality lies in calling for a fundamental expansion of philosophy’s perspective. Levinas formulated this Fundamental Idea of Levinas’s Philosophy 107 expansion in terms of the conceptual alternative between totality and infinity. He begins from the fact that in most philosophies concepts of totality predominate. Concepts of infinity, however, are not available. In what follows, my concern is not to figure out whether Levinas’s diagnosis is on the mark or not. I am much more concerned with the expansion of philosophy Levinas claims by means of the concept of infinity. My thesis is that Levinas is concerned with the intersubjective bonds that irreducibly determine our entire way of being in the world. He correspondingly claims that these bonds cannot be reconstructed with the concepts through which we grasp the rest of our dealings with the world. For this, we require concepts of infinity rather than concepts of totality. In my view, there is far too much consensus around the idea that Levinas’s philosophy is rightly classified in the realm of ethics.4 If there is a rubric that makes sense for this philosophy at all, it is that of the theory of normativity.5 Levinas explicates what it means to be bound—a being...