Crossover Queries: Dwelling with Negatives, Embodying Philosophy's Others

Chapter 25: The Art in Ethics

25 The Art in Ethics Aesthetics, Objectivity, and Alterity in the Philosophy of Levinas Two objections arise repeatedly in connection with Emmanuel Levinas ’s philosophy of language. First, it is argued, in the spirit of Jürgen Habermas and K. O. Apel, for whom ethics is grounded in discursive reason, that for Levinas ethics is an unmediated relation to the other and, as such, transcends linguistic and conceptual structure . Ethics is not a matter of moral argument but of solicitation by the other, who by virtue of sheer otherness resists violence. Levinas’s access routes to the other are nonlinguistic: they include the human face, an idea of the infinite that exceeds any description of it, and sensation as a noncognitive relation between sensing and sensed. His position is not merely a restatement of the poverty of language with regard to transcendence, one made familiar through negative theology , because for negative theology, even if one cannot say what God is, propositional language is not excluded but is restricted to statements of negation. In sum, the first argument against Levinas is that, if ethics is beyond language, then ethics remains silent, and rationally derived moral norms are meaningless. Language has become a liability , a fall, and ethics an inchoate relation to the other. A second standard reproach directed at Levinas is that he disparages the aesthetic by relegating art and poetry to a status inferior to that of philosophy and, a fortiori, to ethics. In his early Existence and Existents (conceived between 1940 and 1945), for example, art is interpreted as divesting things of their forms so that things cannot be 388 made present, as they are in cognition. Although it may seem paradoxical to sever art from form, Levinas explains that form always arises in a context. In cognition and relations of utility, we experience objects in a network of relations, whereas art lifts entities out of the world to create a field not of forms but of pure sensations (EE, 52–57). In the 1948 ‘‘Reality and Its Shadow,’’ Levinas argues that art substitutes images for being. The image is not a transparent sign pointing toward objects, through which objects become intelligible; instead, images are the doubles of objects, resemble them, in the sense that shadows resemble things. This duality of thing and image is born in resemblance. A kind of duplicity or evasion is created in that the image neither yields the object nor replicates it in an ontological sense. As a nonobject, the image lies outside the world, is not in time. Because images cannot move along naturally in the stream of becoming, they immobilize time, freezing it. This atemporality, unlike the eternity of concepts, distorts the flow of becoming. The image is trapped and cannot free itself for the world of action (CPP, 5–12). Artists are under the sway of images, possessed by them. Insofar as the literary artist is also a purveyor of images, the same criticism applies, mutatis mutandis, to fiction and poetry. This interpretation presupposes Heidegger’s view that the true poet is not a creator but a passageway for being, as well as André Breton’s and the surrealists’ belief that literature is an automatic or spontaneous production, dream rather than work. In sum, Levinas is charged with a Platonic aesthetic: art is infraethical and infracognitive. If art is ‘‘legitimate,’’ it is so only as the handmaiden of ethics and requires augmentation by criticism. In this view, Levinas could be seen as endorsing straightforwardly didactic tales or Socialist Realism as the highest types of art; such is far from being the case, however, as Levinas shows in his sympathetic and nuanced analyses of complex contemporary writers and painters. I shall argue that the objections I have rehearsed can be countered by a new reading of Levinas’s view of the ‘‘art’’ of literature. The two frequently voiced objections I have sketched—first, that ethics is an unmediated relation to the other and, as such, beyond discursive language , and second, that the language of art is infracognitive and dangerously nonethical—are actually linked. When these objections are taken together, the problems that arise in connection with Levinas’s view of religious language can be resolved, at least partially, because The Art in Ethics 389 important clues for the interpretation of ethico-religious expression can be found in the uses of literary language. This claim can be established by turning...