In his obituary for Emmanuel Levinas in Radical Philosophy Simon Critchley says:
"Levinas is usually associated with one thesis: ethics is first philosophy. But such an eviscerated statement risks creating more problems than it solves, and goes no way towards capturing the phenomenological richness and breadth of Levinas's work. For me, what remains essential to Levinas's writing (and his extraordinary style of writing should be noted here: strange, elliptical, rhapsodic, sensual) is not its contribution to arcane debates in moral philosophy, but rather its powerful descriptions of the night, insomnia, fatigue, effort, jouissance, sensibility, the feminine, Eros, death, fecundity, paternity, dwelling, and of course the relation to the other. To my mind, like Heidegger before him, but also like Merleau-Ponty, Levinas is concerned with trying to excavate the pre-theoretical layers of our intentional comportment towards the world, an archeology of the pre-reflective constitution of existence, a discussion that, in Autrement qu'Etre, [Otherwise than Being, 1998], leads to a quite radical account of the subject as substitution, hostage, persecution, obsession and trauma."
So far so good. I can hang in there.
But then we strike this:
"Levinas attempted to address the problematics of ontology by investigating and analyzing the 'face-to-face' relation with the Other. The Other is not known or comprehended as such, but calls into question and challenges the complacency of the self through desire, language, and the concern for justice."
I've heard many people say that one ought not consider Levinasian ethics to really be ethics as we use the term. I tend to agree. I also agree that despite his attacks on Heidegger, he ends up doing much the same thing only in a different vocabulary and emphasis. Thus I tend to see the relationship between Heidegger and Levinas much like the relationship of Heidegger before and after the turn.
Posted by: Clark Goble on June 4, 2005 12:19 PMClarke
that makes a lot of sense. The late Heidegger makes the turn to ethics in response to the technological mode of being in modernity.
So I struggle with commentary that says Levinas goes beyond ontology to ethics.
I would even argue that there is a tacit ethics in Being and Time--a comportment of care.
Posted by: Gary Sauer-Thompson on June 5, 2005 12:30 AM