The Demanded Self: Levinasian Ethics and Identity in Psychology

Conclusion

173 CONCLUSION The Demanded Self Horizons More Vast Than History Biblical religion is in a sense rebellion against the tyranny of things, a revolt against confinement in the world. Man is given the choice of being lost in the world or of being a partner in mastering and redeeming the world. (Heschel 1963, 83) One must keep one foot in the Eternal. A tough discipline of knowledge, exercises carried out every day in order to cling to the steep rock that juts out....Only in this way is there fulfilled on earth and for men a privileged possibility: a free being who judges history instead of letting himself be judged by it. (Levinas 1976/1990b, 227) LEVINAS AS A PROPHETIC VOICE It is not unusual to read the word “prophet” in many secondary texts describing Levinas’s approach (Alford 2002; Ford 1999; Harold 2009). In his groundbreaking work The Prophets, Heschel (1962) provided an illuminating description of the characteristics of prophets . It provides a resonant picture of the prophetic dimension of Levinas ’s thought —particularly as it relates to his approach to rationality, the immanent and normative order, and the individual subject within psychological discourses. First, Heschel writes, “The prophet is human, yet he employs notes one octave too high for our ears. He experiences moments that defy our understanding....Often his words begin to burn where conscience ends” (10). Levinas describes the gaze of European 174 The Demanded Self: Clinical Applications philosophy and science as having an impaired conscience and urges philosophers to recognize that, to use Cohen’s (1994) words, “there are more stringent demands than those of rigorous science” (xvii). He argues that where scientific discourse ends, there is more to be said and that we must “exceed the categories and structures which have thus far determined thought itself” (159); if we end with scientific discourse, we lose significant facets of human experience and identity. Of greatest concern for Levinas is the significant loss of the ethical relation to and responsibility for the other within the immanentizing and ontological constructs of modern social sciences. Without the ought, scientific definitions of the self remain merely procedural and instrumental, excluding any recognition of the other: “Without rejecting modernity, that is to say, without rejecting science, Levinas stands radically against these developments and the imperial inflation of psychology that is part and symptom of them. His countercriticism is precise: the problem is not with science, knowledge or truth, but rather with their hegemonic inflation, with the philosophy of science as totality. Levinas stands against the idea of the psyche reduced to immanent logic, to what science can know of it....Levinas embraces science, but he embraces ethics more closely” (Cohen 2002, 37). Levinas also challenges us to see that science’s totalizing and constricting discourses are reflected, reinforced, and paralleled in the tendencies of egoist subjectivity. Levinas argues that the ontological and rationalist presuppositions that underlie the Western consciousness and the normative narcissism that characterizes the self out of which we live create cataracts that impair meaningful attention to the ethical imperative resident within the face of the other. Levinas thus defies conventional modes of understanding identity and ethics, his work challenging the monadic limits and self-entitled rights within which European-American persons function. Furthermore, the pitch with which Levinas speaks (“one octave too high”) makes him hard to listen to. That is, Levinas’s sensibility makes his critique and constructions profoundly difficult to understand .1 Speaking about Levinas’s writings, Davis (1996) observes that “the text hovers on the edge of nonsense....Similes are adopted but simultaneously undercut....Levinas’s text strains to describe something that it characterizes as lying beyond any experiential or cognitive measure” (121). The seduction and intoxication of certainty Conclusion 175 and universal truths are paralyzed in Levinas’s literary and conceptual style. He intentionally undermines the reification and calcification process of conventional knowledge, almost taunting the constituting logic of modern (and ‘Greek’) thought. In terms of modern psychologies, Levinas’s critique of egology and depiction of the person as ethically constituted are discourses that are foreign and enigmatic (House 2005). In decentering the ego from its primacy, psychological theories and practices are without the resources to comprehend or assimilate a Levinasian framework. Modern psychologies’ measurements offer only a depraved ability to listen to, recognize, and attend to Levinas’s thought, which requires relinquishing normative measures for the self and their adjunctive...