Levinas Logic of totality and Infinity.

Introduction

Emmanuel Levinas is one of the greatest thinkers of the twentieth century. Levinas studied under both Husserl and Heidegger in Freiburg during the late 1920s, and his philosophy accordingly occupies a position midway between those of his teachers. The philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas (1905–95) filled an important void in post-structuralist ethics. Followers of Derrida and Heidegger increasingly relied on Levinas’s idea that the traditional, rationalist methods of moral adjudication—Kant’s categorical imperative, for example—fail to do justice to the nature of the individual case in its irreducible particularity. In this paper, we shall be discussing in detail, Levinas Logic of totality and Infinity.

Background

Hubert Dreyfus in his commentary on Being and Time, stresses that, among other things, “What Martin Heidegger is after in Being and Time is nothing less than deepening our understanding of what it means for something (things, people, abstractions, language, etc.) to be.”[1] As Dreyfus emphasizes, Heidegger’s allegedly unique contribution is the overturning of prior conceptions of intentionality- how a mind directs itself towards objects - from an epistemological or representationalist model to a practical one.[2]

According to Heidegger, we are always already ‘being-in-the-world,’ that is we are oriented around and immersed in a familiarity and practical engagement with a world, and that any other stances we might take (say that of locating elements of the world as ‘subject’ and ‘object’) are in fact derivative on that prior “absorbed coping” (in Dreyfus’s words). For Heidegger, this means that human existence is best understood as oriented around ‘care,’ which is a term of art that for Heidegger unifies the various formal and structural elements that make up ‘being-in-the-world’ (say, the fact that we have a world, a past, a present, and future, and so forth),[3] and that above all, ‘being-in-the-world’ is not some sort of positional or spatial category but rather a phenomenological one that makes spatial and positional categories themselves possible.[4]

Levinas was impressed by Heidegger’s effort to transcend Husserl’s arid rationalism by according primacy to Dasein’s being-in-the-world rather than to the standpoint of a disembodied transcendental subjectivity. Thus he regarded Being and Time as an existentially rich extension of philosophy’s thematic boundaries beyond the conventions of post-Cartesian epistemology, in which the abstract, subject-object opposition predominates. By the same token, however, Levinas was profoundly troubled by Heidegger’s affinities with Nazism, from which he concluded that the Freiburg philosopher’s break with Western metaphysics had been insufficiently radical.[5]

Logic of Totality and Infinity

Totality and Infinity unfolds around phenomenological descriptions of Being, understood mechanistically as nature. The human being is able to give and to receive the other into his space. On the basis of these descriptions, transcendence comes to pass in several stages. First, the onset of the other, as the expression of the face, causes freedom of will to falter and opens a ‘me’ to goodness. Second, in accounting for itself, the subject approached by the other engages the first act of dialogue. Out of this, discourse eventually arises. The unfolding of discourse carries a trace of ethical investiture and self-accounting, and may become conversation and teaching.[6] Levinas’s logic unfolds up to the question of justice and then takes an unanticipated tack. Rather than pursuing justice as it is refined through civil society into the State, Levinas focuses on an ‘institution’, the family, which is common to all of humanity. In the family, election by the father and service to the brothers, set forth a justice more decisively conditioned by face-to-face responsibility than the justice of the State could ever be. The phenomenology of the family, entitled “beyond the face,” crowns Levinas’s first major work.[7]

Time and Transcendence in Totality and Infinity

For Levinas, time will consist in two axes: (1) the flowing synthesis of now moments, Husserl’s structure of transcendental consciousness; (2) and a peculiar kind of interruption that Levinas will call the event of transcendence.[8]

Transcendence is, above all, relational: it is a human affair. The encounter with the other person, so far as it is an event, merely inflects history or leaves a trace in it. It is more like a history of isolated acts or human ideals (justice, equity, critique, self-sacrifice). Transcendence in Levinas is lived and factical.[9] While it has the temporality of an interruption that ‘I’ cannot represent to myself, transcendence nevertheless has a circular relationship with everyday life. That is, transcendence, understood as the face-to-face relation, lives from our everyday enjoyment and desire even as it precedes these. Human existence, as sensibility, is full and creative, before it is instrumentalist or utilitarian. From enjoying the elements to constructing a home, human existence is never solipsistic. Our life with others is never a flight from a more resolute stance toward our reason for being (our mortality). We are always already in social relations; more importantly, we have always already been impacted by the expression of a living other. Because this impact is affective, because transcendence is not conceptualizable, we forget the force the other’s expression has on us. We therefore carry on, in our respective worlds, motivated by our desire for mastery and control.[10]

Levinas argues that the instant of trans-ascendence belongs to an order different from that of existence or Being: this is the order of the “Good beyond Being,” already glimpsed by Platonism.[11]

It is impossible to set up a linear logic of priority between Being and the Good beyond Being. For humans, the Good comes to pass, as if trivially, in that responsibility and generosity are perceivable in human affairs. Cruelty and competition are also readily discerned. The two moments in the philosophical tradition in which the irreducible value of the Good has been pinpointed are, for Levinas, Plato’s Idea of the Good, and Descartes’s Idea of Infinity, which points beyond itself to an unknowable cause. It may be that insisting that the Good is prior to, rather than just beyond, Being, is necessary to deconstructing Hegel’s phenomenology of consciousnesses in struggle for recognition, that there are moments of inexplicable generosity, even occasional sacrifices for another (person or group), is otherwise inexplicable within a logic of competing freedoms and reductive desires. In that respect, the trace of the Good is always present within Being, as a possibility that something other than consumption or instrumentalization may take place.[12]

Trans-ascendence, or Levinas’s transcendence, evinces the surprising characteristic of being both a common everyday event, a relation, and what he will call “Infinity.” Now, insofar as Infinity means the not-finite, it refers to the unmasterable quality of human expression. So far as Infinity has a positive sense, then it has the affective qualities of desire for sociality, and of joy. Thus, Infinity, before we interpret it as “God” or reify it as a highest being, is a quotidian event that takes place at the sensuous-affective level, and repeats. If it repeats without leaving a clear memory of itself, then this is because it repeats pre-cognitively and pre-intentionally.[13] Having bracketed any psychological unconscious, always too much the mirror of consciousness itself, Levinas will insist on the ontological significance of the body and the flesh: these are always already in relation with something, be it only air and light. And sensibility consists of an indeterminate number of affectations, of which we become conscious only by turning our attention to them.[14]

Willing, Being, and Two Histories (the State and the Family)

In Time and the Other, Levinas first voiced “the profound need to quit the climate of [Heidegger’s] philosophy.” In 1961, he will do so, albeit not without a certain violence in his interpretation of Heidegger’s ontology. As we have seen, it is possible to envisage Being as existence by way of the concepts of willing and strife in Levinas. Certainly, the experience of the Shoah is reflected in this work, notably in the very anti-Heideggerian characterization of Being as constant presence. For Levinas, this Being has two modes of carrying on. In nature, it is mechanism, drives, and linear causality. In social life, it is the ‘totalization’ or absorption of individuals and institutions by the State. the State, no matter what period of its history we examine, decides questions of security and property, life and death. In the “Preface” to Totality and Infinity, the State is the ‘organism’ of politics: it declares and manages war—whether military or commercial (trade wars). This leaves the question of justice suspended between the moral responsiveness coming out of the face-to-face encounter, and the conflict of ontological forces. It is unclear which of these two human possibilities for justice represents what Carl Schmitt, then later Walter Benjamin called, the “state of exception.”[15]

Being, in Levinas, is never Heidegger’s disclosure and withdrawal. Thus, Being is not an event per se. Levinas never addressed the question of whether an ethics could be derived from Heidegger’s ontology. But it is clear that no thinking whose primary focus was on an openness toward the world, and a confrontation with one’s mortality, afforded the means necessary for grasping the hidden meaning of consciousness, which begins in the double constitution of the subject by life and by the encounter with the Other. For Levinas, Heidegger’s philosophy was a thinking of the neuter, a recrudescent paganism that sacralized natural events and anonymous forces. Worse, it was a thinking that drew its inspiration from an ancient structure of temporality, Paul’s kairos, which was the time of awaiting the messiah’s return for the early Christian community. If the evacuation of lived, religious content gave Heidegger access to a temporality more substantial than what was available to the neo-Kantian, formalist tradition, one question remained: How can one preserve the living source of human facticity while removing all connection to its contents? It is for this reason that Levinas returns to a conception of Being more familiar to the metaphysical tradition than to Heidegger’s Being, glimpsed in the ‘moment’.[16]

Being carries on as continuous presence for Levinas. The face-to-face encounter inflects it toward the possibility of responsibility and hospitality. But an inflection does not mean a transformation. Inflection opens to what Kant called “interests of practical reason,” through the repetition of responsibility. This inflection of Being also opens a course toward universality as ethical humanity rather than universality as politics. An inflection toward humanity is fragile, because it is continually absorbed by the rhetoric of political institutions. However, in 1961, Levinas’s inflection is best seen in the family. How the responsibility and election experienced by fathers, sons, and brothers, passes into a larger history and public space remained a difficult question—probably best addressed through critique, witnessing, perhaps even limited demands for justice. Nevertheless, the constituent ‘moments’ of the family are universal. Beginning with fecundity, in which the time of an individual (life span) is opened beyond its limits by one (the son) who is both (the image of) the father and other than he, the life of the family continues through election and responsibility enacted between parents and offspring—and between brothers. This is illustrated by the fact that there are events and crimes that the son or grandson may pardon, whereas the father could not. However, the logic of fecundity-election-responsibility leaves the State and the family as two distinct human collectivities with nothing to mediate between their ontological and moral characteristics. Being, understood as existence in all its dimensions, may be modified, but not durably. Thus Being could be called absolute, were it not for the fragile interruption of transcendence and the persistence of its trace.[17]

If family and State represent two irreconcilable instances in Levinas’s 1961 thought, willing and ethical responsibility prove likewise irreconcilable. Moreover, given Levinas’s characterization of the will—naturalistic and drive-based—it is hard to see how this natural inheritance could be halted in its élan or caused to question itself. If Derrida is right, and Totality and Infinity is a “treatise on hospitality,” then the transcendence that comes to pass in the face-to-face must have nothing to do with the will. It must never be a matter of nature, even human nature. That excludes from transcendence not only an intentional component (already bracketed by Levinas’s phenomenology), but also anything like moral sentiments or innate capacities to be affected by the other. The non-violent force of the face as expression can be reduced neither to physical force nor to inertia. In such a case, there would be no question of escaping the mechanistic order of Being. This requires the conception of a different kind of force, which Levinas will call “Illeity.” An attempt to express, differently, the unbridgeable distance between myself and the other, “he-ness” or Illeity, signifies the impossibility of initially pronouncing a “thou” in some kind of reciprocity with the other person.[18] It is and must remain a question too large for philosophy to know what explains the force of the other’s expression. Nothing explains it. There are, Levinas insists, objects behind their objects only in ages of penury. The face-to-face encounter likely gives rise to the impetus to pronounce an impossible signifier like “God.” Be that as it may, whatever we attribute to God must be subject to the conditions Levinas already placed on transcendence: non-thematizable, it is an experience of assignation and command. To say more than this is to return to the confidence that representation and conceptuality capture every aspect of meaning lived out in a human life. Thus Levinas stands, minimally, within the negative ‘theological’ tradition inaugurated by Maimonides; more acutely, perhaps, because Levinas’s task is not so much to reconcile Judaism and Aristotelianism, as it is to describe phenomenologically the indescribable: breaking out of totality and Being.[19]

Conclusion

Heidegger has failed to acknowledge certain phenomenological elements and categories as essential, notably the structure of the ‘home’ or ‘dwelling’ (which is a prerequisite for any ‘being-in-the-world’), and the priority of ‘enjoyment’ or ‘living from’ to the very structure of ‘care’.[20] The discussion of ‘home’ and ‘dwelling’ in fact requires a deeper engagement between Levinas and Heidegger since both saw the value of this category but disagreed about the most fundamental ethical and political commitments.[21] This point about ethics returns us to the second point: that Levinas has ethical objections to Heidegger’s project. For Levinas there is allegedly something prior “to that asserted by Heidegger’s existential analytic of Dasein as care”.[22] Levinas presents the phenomenological importance of the fact that the most fundamental basis for all intentionality and human consciousness is a sensuous engagement with another. Levinas’s term of art for this is the ‘face-to-face,’ as when he points out that the “face-to-face is not a modality of coexistence . . . but is the primordial production of being on which all the possible collocations of the terms are founded”.[23]

Levinas, according to a phenomenological method, describes how subjectivity arises from the idea of ​​infinity, and how infinite is a product of the relationship of self to another. His project, ultimately, is to ask the primacy of the other so to ask entity unconditional and based on the epiphany of the face. …Others and me is me responsible for him. The infinite is another who meets me. In other words, the infinite is the starting point of morality, its foundation. This infinity is irreducible to knowledge. Levinas rejects any moral intellectualism. However, Levinas admits that man is not naturally moral, it must be awaken to ethics: it is the desire of others.

Totality and Infinity is a profound and challenging work. Levinas expresses an interesting perspective on the problem of modern alienation in that it explains how the separation can be understood as a fundamental condition of being.
REFERENCE

Bergo, Bettina, “Emmanuel Levinas”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2017 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.)

David Gauthier, Martin Heidegger, Emmanuel Levinas, and the Politics of Dwelling (Baltimore: Lexington Books, 2011).

Dermot Moran, "Heidegger's Critique of Husserl's and Brentano's Accounts of Intentionality," Inquiry 43, no. 1 (2000).

https://www.britannica.com/topic/continental-philosophy/French-Nietzscheanism#ref978089

Hubert Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger's Being and Time, Division I (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1991).

James R. Mensch, Levinas’s Existential Analytic: A Commentary On Totality and Infinity, (Northwestern University Press. 2015) Reviewed by Martin Shuster.

Levinas, Emmanuel. “Language and Proximity.” Translated Papers, 109-27. Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1987.by Alphonso Lingis. In Collected Philosophical

Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: State University of New York, 1996), §79.

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[1] Hubert Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger's Being and Time, Division I (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1991), 1. As quoted in James R. Mensch, Levinas’s Existential Analytic: A Commentary On Totality and Infinity, (Northwestern University Press. 2015) Reviewed by Martin Shuster.

[2] Dermot Moran, "Heidegger's Critique of Husserl's and Brentano's Accounts of Intentionality," Inquiry 43, no. 1 (2000), as quoted in James R. Mensch, Levinas’s Existential Analytic: A Commentary On Totality and Infinity, (Northwestern University Press. 2015) Reviewed by Martin Shuster.

[3] Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: State University of New York, 1996), §79.

[4] James R. Mensch, Levinas’s Existential Analytic: A Commentary On Totality and Infinity, (Northwestern University Press. 2015) Reviewed by Martin Shuster.

[5] https://www.britannica.com/topic/continental-philosophy/French-Nietzscheanism#ref978089

[6] Bergo, Bettina, “Emmanuel Levinas”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2017 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.)

[7] Bergo, Bettina, “Emmanuel Levinas”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2017 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.)

[8] Bergo, Bettina, “Emmanuel Levinas”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2017 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.)

[9] Bergo, Bettina, “Emmanuel Levinas”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2017 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.)

[10] Bergo, Bettina, “Emmanuel Levinas”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2017 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.)

[11] Bergo, Bettina, “Emmanuel Levinas”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2017 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.)

[12] Bergo, Bettina, “Emmanuel Levinas”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2017 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.)

[13] Bergo, Bettina, “Emmanuel Levinas”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2017 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.)

[14] Bergo, Bettina, “Emmanuel Levinas”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2017 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.)

[15] Bergo, Bettina, “Emmanuel Levinas”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2017 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.)

[16] Bergo, Bettina, “Emmanuel Levinas”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2017 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.)

[17] Bergo, Bettina, “Emmanuel Levinas”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2017 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.)

[18] Bergo, Bettina, “Emmanuel Levinas”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2017 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.)

[19] Bergo, Bettina, “Emmanuel Levinas”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2017 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.)

[20] James R. Mensch, Levinas’s Existential Analytic: A Commentary On Totality and Infinity, (Northwestern University Press. 2015) Reviewed by Martin Shuster.

[21] David Gauthier, Martin Heidegger, Emmanuel Levinas, and the Politics of Dwelling (Baltimore: Lexington Books, 2011), as quoted in James R. Mensch, Levinas’s Existential Analytic: A Commentary On Totality and Infinity, (Northwestern University Press. 2015) Reviewed by Martin Shuster.

[22] James R. Mensch, Levinas’s Existential Analytic: A Commentary On Totality and Infinity, (Northwestern University Press. 2015) Reviewed by Martin Shuster.

[23] James R. Mensch, Levinas’s Existential Analytic: A Commentary On Totality and Infinity, (Northwestern University Press. 2015) Reviewed by Martin Shuster.