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9. Earthly Morality and the Other: From Levinas to Environmental Sustainability
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191 NINE Earthly Morality and the Other From Levinas to Environmental Sustainability SilviaBenso LEVINAS — A THINKER OF TRANSCENDENCE? “I beseech you, my brothers, remain faithful to the earth, and do not believe those who speak to you of otherworldly hopes!”1 Almost at the beginning of the twentieth century, such is Zarathustra’s message to the people. It is a message uttered in the shadow of the death of God (and of all transcendent values) proclaimed by Nietzsche at various passages in his thought. It is a message that invites its receivers to the immanence of the earthly existence, to a life that finds its ultimate meaning in the hic et nunc and not in the solaces provided by some otherworldly kingdom or promise. When confronted with the tragedies of the twentieth century, which has seen the collapse of many if not most of the transcendent values and ideologies inspiring the previous epochs, Zarathustra’s message seems to retain a certain degree of attractiveness and plausibility , even some desirable necessity. As Levinas writes, “we belong to a generation—and to a century—for which [were] reserved the pitiless trials of an ethics without consolation or promises” (GCM ix). It is in many senses arguable, even improbable, however, that precisely a thinker such as Levinas would subscribe to the Nietzschean invitation of faithfulness to the earth. First of all, Levinas is not willing to abandon the notion of transcendence, which rather constitutes a central structure in his philosophy. Alterity is transcendence 192 Silvia Benso for Levinas,2 in the sense that the Other, Autrui (as the other human being who comes again and again to question and interrupt the egoistic attitudes constituting the self) always remains beyond the powers of the I. Additionally, the I too is transcendence for Levinas in the sense that, through the encounter with the Other who inevitably faces the I since the beginning, the I is moved by a metaphysical Desire to go beyond the limits and limitations of its own constitution. And the attempt to overcome one’s own enchainment to being (the il y a) and the ensuing solitude is one of the motifs driving the I ever since the initial descriptions of it that Levinas provides in Existence and Existents. In other words, for Levinas transcendence is a primordial dimension constitutive of both the I and the Other, and hence of their relationship (which Levinas calls “ethics”). Beside the constitutive transcendent structure sustaining Levinas’s philosophy, there is also an additional reason why Levinas would arguably not subscribe to Zarathustra’s call. This has to do with the risk of paganism and the dangers therein entailed that the invitation to faithfulness to the earth contains. The theme of the earth is often linked to problematic notions of space, place, land, home, nation, and blood ties. These notions nourish much racist rhetoric in addition to sustaining the I’s claims to domination and usurpation of the places of others. As Levinas recalls, “‘my place in the sun,’ said Pascal, [is] ‘the beginning and prototype of usurpation of the whole earth’” (EN 144, emphasis added). For personal, historical, as well as theoretical reasons, Levinas is rightly suspicious of all discourses of a rooting in the earth. In the short essay “Heidegger, Gagarin and Us,” he praises the Soviet astronaut’s enterprise not for its technological merits but rather because through it, albeit only for an hour, human beings have been perceived outside of all spatial situations and a new possibility has opened up—that of “let[ting] the human face shine in all its nudity” (DF 233). It is precisely toward the face of the human being in its nakedness that Levinas’s ethics is oriented. It is the face of the Other as personally but also humanly other that summons the I to call into question the I’s own claims, spontaneity, and freedom and to open up to the ethical dimension of the infinite responsibility for and to the Other. As [3.236.98.81] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 09:54 GMT) Earthly Morality and the Other 193 one of the titles of his works poignantly states, Levinas’s philosophical project is a Humanism of the Other [Human Being]. Although, as some scholars have argued, one can perhaps find in Levinas’s thought suggestions and indications for categories and concepts that enable the construal of an ecological ethics that places at its center nature, the environment, or animals, it seems quite clear...