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June 7, 2005
The more I dig around the work about Immanual Levinas on the internet the more he appeals to me. He appears to be uncomfortably situated in the difference between Husserl and Heidegger's phenomenology, which heralded "the return to the things themselves". He appears to reason from the perspective of phenomenological ethics, breaks away from subjectivism of Kantian ethics, and questions the power of the subject's gaze that dominates the other.
My suspicion is that to counter and confront Heidegger Levinas returns to Descartes via Husserl. It strikes me that such a stepback is a return to subjectivism that Heidegger placed in question.
This article by Jacques Taminiaux indicates why. Taminiaux says that Totality and Infinity (scroll down for selections) is marked by a close attention to Heidegger's Being and Time, and the Heideggerian analysis of the structures of the comportment of human beings in everydayness: being there in the world, thrown in our own existence and temporally projected toward our end.
That close attention is combined with a critical resistance to Heidegger that highlights two flaws in Heidegger's new ontology of everydayness:
---the shutting of all windows upon the eternal;
---the fact that the predominance of the ontological is such that the relation to the other is no longer fundamental.
The last point is the one that interests me---the ethics. I'm not much concerned with the religious bit, even though I recognize that the ethical and the religious can, and do, intertwine.
What interests me about Levinas' resistance to Heidegger is that this resistance takes the form of a debate with Heidegger; not a polemical dismissal like that of Adorno; or a rejection of Heidegger by modernist liberals because of his Fascist politics but who give no indication of ever having read Heidegger's philosophical texts or acknowledge the hermeneutical circle they work within.
The characteristics of this eternal recurrence of the same are: the participants being oblivious to the history of interpretations they are thrown into; they are willing to dump the ethos of scholarship when it comes to rejecting Heidegger; the tendency to celebrate any text that affirms their prejudices; and a refusal to critically engage with Heidegger. The rejection of Heidegger's philosophy because of his politics mostly relies on second rate Anglo-American texts rather than texts like Derrida's Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question that engages with Heidegger's categories.
Is this more prejudices that the enlightened liberals refuse to confront? More prejudices functioning as gatekeeping to protect a defensive liberal culture from the intellectual viruses contained in foreign bodies of continental philosophy? Surely not.
So how does Levinas critically engage with Heidegger?
Jacques Taminiaux says that:
Levinas agrees with Heidegger as far as the concept of ontology is concerned. The task of ontology is not the task of a superscience defining the ultimate properties of all beings and characterizing their relations. The task is to ask what it means to be, a question that only makes sense for the human being, a question which points to a relation between a being, or an existent, and its Being or its existence.
But it is one thing to agree with Heidegger on this formal concept. It is quite another thing to agree with Heidegger's definition of the relation existent-existence in ekstatic terms. What does that mean?
Taminiaux says that it refers to the relation between a being (an existent) and Being (existence) which Heidegger characterizes in ekstatic terms. What is being questioned in Heidegger's ontology is the move from existent to existence. This means from an existing human being who finds himself thrown among other beings and whose mode of being is at first determined from without and not properly his own (uneigentlich) towards a mode of being which is his ownmost possibility, and becomes authentic by facing his finite and mortal temporality.
Levinas draws attention to a relation to existence that is overlooked by Heidegger's emphasis on ekstasis; a relation of staying under the burden of 'the there, which escapes all intentionality, and can only be approached in situations which cannot be described according to the bi-polar structure intention-intended. Among those situations we find for example fatigue, laziness, insomnia. These situations have no place in Heidegger's analytic of Dasein for the simple reason that they escape all intentional project.
Okay. What then hangs on this? How do we interpret the significance of this? Taminiaux makes the following suggestion:
It is important to notice that in all those states the present is experienced as disconnected, resisting to a projection towards the future. In other words those situations are in no way ekstatic in Heidegger's sense. And indeed by referring to those situations, Levinas wants to detect the specific features of an hypostasis opposed to all ek-stasis.
What then are the specific features of hypostasis opposed to all ek-stasis?
The word hypostasis which is Greek literally means staying under. By naming hypostasis as the primary relation between an existent and existence, Levinas means that the human being emerges first of all from an anonymous flow of existence under which he stays, to which he is intimately submitted and which again and again is experienced by him as a load, a burden he has to sustain. Presumably fatigue is a burden that we have to sustain.
Fine. No problems. Yet Heiddegger's praxis was concerned with tacit embodied knowledge of our habitual practices in everyday life.
Does that Levinas' criticism open a window to introduce the unconscious into the debate. What it indicates is the closeness of Levinas' engagement with Heidegger---something that is rather unusual. Hence the attraction of levinas
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Gary, I'll admit that most of what I know of Heidegger is second-hand via Sartre. Having waded through Being and Nothingness and found little of value (in fact, a fair bit of negative value), I'm disinclined to repeat the exercise with a writer who seems to be even more turgid and obscure.
But if anyone can give me a clear indication of the philosophical errors that led Heidegger to Nazism, and point to something of value is left in his philosophy after these errors are corrected, I'll be happy to pay attention.
The fact that no-one seems willing or able to do this, and that the same kind of reasoning can be turned with equal facility to support for Stalinism and various kinds of New Leftism suggests to me that the whole enterprise is devoid of any real implications.