When you think about the major concerns of philosophy, what comes to mind?
Perhaps it's the meaning of life, existence, substance,
the afterlife, being.
For Emmanuel Levinas, the persistence of categories such as these is a mark of
where Philosophy has actually gone awry.
Philosophy has historically been cut up in a process of totalizing, trying
to figure out the meaning of life and totalizing it into a system that will
be universally applicable and eternal.
The problem with this kind of approach for Levinas is that it focuses on what
he calls the same, whether that means the subject, the self, life, intentionality
in phenomenology, et cetera.
Trying to find ways of understanding the world that start from a first person
perspective and end in a totality.
For Levinas,
this process gets things entirely backwards, and it leads us to be caught
in an obsession with sameness, which he associates with totality and with
ontology, which is the study of being.
So I'm talking here a little bit about some ideas from Levinas's
seminal text, Totality and Infinity.
If philosophy has largely been focused on totality throughout its history and
has been caught in a kind of metaphysics of the same, he thinks that what we
need to do is reorient philosophy.
We need to reorient philosophy in the idea of infinity, which he associates,
not with the sameness, but with the other.
And this also for Levinas, means that instead of ontology or the
study of being, philosophy is first and foremost an ethics.
It's a way of orienting us towards what is radically other, radically
transcendent, beyond our grasp.
And so when we think about others in general, we often think about
beings who are like ourselves, right?
You might think about, uh, philosophy of empathy, for instance, an
ethic that's grounded in the idea that another person is like me.
They have a similar makeup to me, similar feelings, perhaps et c.
And for Levinas, this notion of ethics is misguided because the other is not
somebody who is like me and who, uh, by whom I also expect to be treated well.
The other is instead what is radically beyond what is out of reach.
And so this is why he associates the other with infinity.
Thus for Levinas, ethics is not about rational decision making or
weighing options in the abstract.
It's not even about relating to other beings because we see similarities,
as I mentioned a moment ago.
Instead, ethics is about responding to an other.
So who or what is this other?
If they are, as we've said, radically beyond my, my reach?
The other appears as fundamentally separate from me.
As foreign to me.
And as arising from a place beyond my own perspective on the world.
I can never understand the viewpoint of the other, and so trying to
put myself in the other shoes is misguided from Levinas's perspective.
Instead of doing this, ethics is about responding to the other as they
present themselves and a key feature of how they present themselves.
Is as a perspective on the world that I can never access directly.
On Levinas's account, we must treat others as other and not presume
any shared experience with them.
So the ethics that Levinas then proposes is what he calls the end of mastery,
and it indicates that we are in relation to something that is absolutely other.
And other whom we cannot assimilate through our own understanding or control.
So in his methods, Levinas is deeply influenced by the tradition of
phenomenology that one finds starting with Husserl and then developing
in Merleau-Ponty and others.
And one of the central insights of phenomenology is into the
first person perspective.
This idea that instead of Presuming some abstract view from nowhere,
philosophy has to start from the perspective of the perceiver itself.
Now, Levinas us wants to hold on to the heart of that insight, but he disagrees
with phenomenology's assumption that the first person perspective can give
us, uh, what he calls an add equation between being and representation.
This sense that we can experience others through our first person perspective.
Instead, he wants to emphasize the transcendence or what he
will sometimes call height, this radical difference of the other.
He says that phenomenology is a useful method for philosophy, but
it's not the ultimate event of being.
The relation between same and other is not reducible to a revelation or disclosure.
Whereas you find the theme of disclosure a lot in, uh, mainstream
phenomenology or classical phenomenology.
So he's still in line with phenomenological tradition,
but taking issue with it.
For Levinas, this first person perspective or subjectivity is essentially founded
in what he calls the idea of infinity.
It is a welcoming of the radically transcendent other infinity is primary it.
It is more important, more originary than totality , than this emphasis
on trying to explain things away and understand things completely.
Starting from an equation between being in representation, so for
living us, same and other are not opposing or symmetrical terms.
They're not a formal opposition since presuming that they are would already
imply a kind of third person perspective on, uh, the relation between same other,
which, ultimately what he calls justice, but that's kinda a different story.
So following this idea, Levinas says that the other is not other one.
One conceptualizes or represents it or imagines it spatially.
The other is also not other when one considers it in terms of the others'
qualitative differences from myself from, or counts their differences in terms of a
quantitative difference from one's self.
So alternative for him is neither qualitative nor quantitative.
He thinks that philosophy has in general through a variety of moves,
reduced the other to the same.
And the failures who account for this irreducibility of alterity has
foreclosed the possibility of an ethics that would figure responsibility as
a relation to the other, as other or absolutely other (tout autre in French).
Instead, Levinas offers an ethics of alterity, sometimes known as response
ethics in contemporary philosophy, um, especially in the anglophone world.
But this still emphasizes, as we've noted before, subjectivity because
subjectivity is the necessary condition for the possibility of having the
other even make a claim on oneself.
And Levinas's contention that ethics is first philosophy is quite a radical
departure from the history of philosophy, where traditionally metaphysics or
ontology is considered first philosophy, and then you can later get ethics, right?
So ethics is often considered a secondary form philosophy
rather than first philosophy.
And Lebanon says this is indicative of the way that philosophy has tended
to totally get things backwards.
Now, I've noted that Levinas closely associates the other
and ethics with Infinity now.
So you might wonder, what does he mean by that?
Well, Levinas takes his notion of infinity from René Descartes, who in
the meditations in the third meditation, famously argues that Infinity is the
only idea that must have been implanted in us by being other than ourselves.
And that being is God.
So Infinity Descartes says, could not have been produced by human
knowledge because we are unable to actually wrap our heads around it.
So the very idea of the infinite is necessarily surpassed
by what is ideated in it.
That is, infinity overflows.
The idea of infinity.
The idea of infinity is just one tiny speck of what infinity actually is.
And so this leads Descartes to conclude that there must be a God.
That is not relevant for our purposes.
But for Levinas, one of the things that this means is that the very
idea of the infinite in us is proof of the infinite exceeding
us and to use loving us in terms.
This is proof of its absolute exteriority transcendence and ul alterity.
And so it's precisely the fact that what the idea of infinity is about, namely
infinity, exceeds the idea of infinity
that so intrigues Levinas.
Because this conception of infinity allows him to figure the absolute exteriority
of the other, the absolute al alterity of the other, because it demonstrates how the
same can come into contact with the other without collapsing it back into the same.
Because keep in mind that for Levinas, the whole point of philosophy is
to be able to apprehend the other as other without trying to reduce
it to our categories of sameness.
So again, it's alterity is not qualitative.
It's not quantitative, it's not something we can grasp.
And Levinas writes here.
I'm just gonna go ahead and read a quote from Totality and Infinity.
The Cartesian notion of the idea of the infinite designates a relation with the
being that maintains its total exteriority with respect to him who thinks it.
It designates the contact
with the intangible.
A contact that does not compromise the integrity of what is touched to affirm
the presence in us, of the in, of the idea of infinity, is to deem purely
abstract and formal the contradiction the idea of metaphysics is said to harbor,
which Plato brings up in the Parmenides, that the relation with the absolute
would render the absolute relative.
The absolute exteriority of the exterior being is not purely and simply lost
as a result of its manifestation.
It quote, absolves itself from the relation in which it presents itself.
Still reading this quote from Levinas.
But the infinite distance of the stranger, despite the proximity
achieved by the idea of infinity.
The complex structure of the unparalleled relation.
Designated by this idea has to be described.
It is not enough to distinguish it formally from objectification,
and so describing it is one of the main points of this.
Which by the way, I don't think is very well translated.
Um, I have a lot of problems with this translation.
I've, uh, written about Levinas in my dissertation and elsewhere
and often end up kind of retranslating some of these passages.
But for our purposes that reading was totally fine.
In any case, you get the sense that, uh, Levinas is using the idea of infinity to
conceive of the other as absolutely other.
Now the word that loving house most often uses to describe
the other is that of the face.
And by face, Levinas doesn't mean a set of eyes, a nose, a mouth, Cetera, Cetera.
Um, he means that with which we are faced and to which we have to respond.
He uses metaphors sometimes like the widow or the orphan to describe the face here.
Um, but for him, the face speaks to me and.
Thereby, this is also from the text invites me to a relation
incommensurate with a power exercise, be it enjoyment or knowledge.
So the face is sort of the figure of the infinity of the other and this
other as uh, absolutely other, right?
But one other theme that is really important in Levinas's notion of alterity,
and there's whole section this in totality and Infinity as well, is that of eros.
He thinks that the erotic relation to the other is where
otherness, most saliently emerges.
And I've written about this from a feminist perspective in, uh, some of
my publications in at least one of my publications because the way that
he writes about eros very clearly foregrounds a male point of view,
and the other figured as absolutely other is the quote, feminine.
But suffice said to say that for him, The desire that we feel in an erotic relation,
discloses, or I should say, maybe reveals, I don't even, maybe he would disagree
with those terms because for Levinas, the desire of eros orients us fundamentally
to the alterity of the other.
Desire is no longer desire if the other is grasped or captured, right?
So there's something essentially inviolate, essentially beyond my grasp,
about an erotic desire for the other.
There's a lot more to say here, but this is just a very quick
intro to some of the key ideas from Levinas's Totality and Infinity.
Check out the book if you have not already.