Aspects of Alterity: Levinas, Marcel, and the Contemporary Debate

5. Concrete Philosophy

5 Concrete Philosophy Personally, I am inclined to deny that any work is philosophical if we cannot discern in it what may be called the sting of reality. Gabriel Marcel, Creative Fidelity It would generally be a decisive refutation of a moral philosophy to show that moral agency on its own account of the matter could never be socially embodied; and it also follows that we have not yet fully understood the claims of any moral philosophy until we have spelled out what its social embodiment would be. Alisdair MacIntyre, After Virtue The previous chapter examined Levinas’s transcendental critique, assessed its applicability to Marcel’s work, and offered some hypothetical Marcelian responses. This critique argued for the transcendental priority of the infinite over being—that is, the priority of the Infinite as the condition for the possibility of truth, subjectivity, transcendence , etc.—and took the form of an accusation regarding the inability to account for the other as other. Levinas’s transcendental critique of the tradition (and of Marcel) looks for the other qua other in the tradition and finds the tradition wanting. Marcel’s work, however , takes a different tack. Some of his harshest criticism is reserved for those philosophies that cannot account for the fullness of experience or those that do not address the wholeness of human nature 122 and the human situation.1 While Levinas’s critique is transcendental, Marcel’s is ‘‘concrete’’ or ‘‘existential.’’ Marcel’s existential critique takes two general forms, although, for all intents and purposes, they amount to the same thing. He either attacks the ‘‘spirit of abstraction’’ that thinks it can understand the whole by abstracting and analyzing a part, or, without explicitly accusing a philosophy with abstraction, points out that it does not account for the fullness of lived experience. If the previous chapter, which examined the transcendental argument for the priority of the infinite over being, put Marcel on the defensive against Levinas’s critique , this chapter will turn the tables. Although Marcel never explicitly applies his concrete critique to Levinas, it is appropriate to do so by extension. Levinas must answer this challenge because one of the more frequent criticisms of his position is that it is inapplicable, unlivable , and utopian; that is, that there is a disconnect between his philosophy and our life.2 Both Levinas and Marcel have, in differing degrees, already provided us with accounts of their concrete moral or ethical positions. Nevertheless, these overt statements must be examined alongside the unspoken implications of their transcendental positions in order to ascertain more fully how each of these philosophical positions would manifest itself in concrete human action. How would each theory manifest itself in praxis? Although Marcel and Levinas are unusual ethical thinkers, qua ethicists, they must be held responsible for the way in which their respective philosophies apply to actual life. Marcel’s philosophy, because it makes such liberal use of examples , is full of concrete ethical exploration. Although his thought is not expressed in deontological terms, an ethical imperative is contained in the very descriptions Marcel uses when providing concrete examples.3 Even when the issue in question is not expressed, for example , as a commandment of the sort ‘‘Thou shall remain open and permeable to your fellow man,’’ the elucidation of the concrete consequences of failing to do so makes clear what the ethical command of the other person is. Pessimism is rooted in the same soil as the inability to be at the disposal of others. . . . The capacity to hope diminishes in proportion as the soul becomes increasingly chained to its experience and to the categories which arise from it, and as it is given over more completely and more desperately to the world of the problematic.4 Concrete Philosophy 123 In contrast to the captive soul we have [just] described, the soul which is at the disposal of others is consecrated and inwardly dedicated; it is protected against suicide and despair, which are interrelated and alike, because it knows that it is not its own, and that the most legitimate use it can make of its freedom is precisely to recognize that it does not belong to itself; this recognition is the starting point of its activity and creativeness.5 It does not take an especially keen or insightful reader to understand what is being urged of us in these passages—especially when they are read...