Totality and Infinity at 50

4. Emmanuel Levinas as a Philosopher of the Ordinary

79 FOUR Emmanuel Levinas as a Philosopher of the Ordinary MichaelL.Morgan CAVELL, LEVINAS, AND ORDINARY LIFE From early in his career Stanley Cavell has sought to show how ordinary language and our ordinary, everyday lives ought to be the primary locus of philosophical interest and concern. In this regard he has drawn first and foremost on philosophical forerunners , preeminently Wittgenstein, Austin, and Heidegger.1 Like those three, and others as well, Cavell has argued that the presuppositions of traditional philosophy—epistemology, metaphysics , ethics, and philosophy of language—direct attention away from the nuanced, complex, conflicted, and rich character of everyday experience in which the most significant human projects are carried out and in which we human beings come to understand ourselves and our relationships with others.2 His writings and his philosophical examinations have focused, then, on how to diagnose traditional philosophical biases and distortions in order to treat them, to set us on the way of 80 Michael L. Morgan clarifying and enriching for ourselves our ordinary social and personal lives. Cavell’s project is about our ordinary lives, and it is also about philosophy. In his voluminous writings one finds a great deal of disclosure, clarification, and illumination; reading Cavell one can learn a good deal about our relationships with others and the implications of such relationships for self-understanding. At the same time, one can come to a very nontraditional or at least nonorthodox view about what philosophical thinking is, both by following his critique of it and by observing Cavell’s own philosophy of the ordinary at work. It is in this sense that Cavell’s philosophical inquiries are modernist; they are inquiries into the very nature of philosophy and what it means to philosophize, at the same time that they are examples of philosophy.3 In this essay, I will preliminarily show why I think Emmanuel Levinas should be understood as a philosopher of the ordinary in roughly this sense, that is, in the sense that Cavell, following Wittgenstein and Heidegger, is a philosopher of the ordinary. To be sure, Levinas and Cavell do not see eye to eye on everything , but on their attitudes toward the tradition of Western philosophy and their attentiveness to our ordinary lives as the primary locale for our ethical lives to be worked out, they do agree. I say this even though many readers of Levinas may find this proposal surprising and perhaps simply wrong. Especially in his early writings, Totality and Infinity preeminent among them, Levinas presents himself often as a critic of totality, of ideologies and institutions. He also presents himself as an opponent of traditional humanism or of the traditional primacy of the subject or self. On occasion he calls his philosophy a form of Platonism, and Platonism certainly seems to be antiempirical and hence a corrective and even a radical corrective to the distortions and deficiencies of the ordinary and the everyday. On the face of it, then, Levinas might seem to be a poor candidate for a philosopher of the ordinary and the everyday. However, a careful and deep reading of Levinas and especially Levinas as a Philosopher of the Ordinary 81 Totality and Infinity will show such a judgment to be false and itself a distortion. In order to explore the way in which Levinas is a philosopher of the ordinary, I want to juxtapose Levinas specifically with Cavell’s use of some claims that Peter Brooks, in his important book The Melodramatic Imagination, makes about melodrama. By considering Cavell on melodrama and the way in which it figures in his film criticism and his philosophical disclosure of the everyday, we can come to understand how Levinas might be said to have developed a melodramatic philosophy, a philosophical disclosure of the meaningfulness of our ordinary social lives that employs the tactics of the melodramatic imagination and exposes in that way the ethical character of our ordinary lives. BROOKS ON MELODRAMA Cavell cites Brooks primarily in the introductory chapter of his book on the “melodramas of the unknown woman,” Contesting Tears.4 The chapter introduces the themes, which his subsequent reading of four Hollywood films is intended to explore. These themes include the relationship between the comedies of remarriage and the melodramas of the unknown woman; the sense in which both concern that aspect of moral choice that involves the self being true to itself or what Cavell calls “moral perfectionism...