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June 11, 2005
In an earlier post I mentioned that one of Levinas' criticism of Heidegger's Being and Time was that the predominance of the ontological in this text is such that the relation to the other is no longer fundamental. According to this article this critique is explored in Levinas's Infinity and Totality.
Jacques Taminiaux says that:
The confrontation is, so to speak, condensed in Levinas' strong formula: "Metaphysics precedes ontology". Metaphysics has precedence over ontology. By contrast, Heidegger claims that metaphysics accomplishes itself in ontology, that is in the vision attainable by the human Dasein of what it means to be.
This is an ethics without ontology. As I understand it the theme at the center of Levinas’s philosophy is that all attempts to reduce ethics to a theory of being, or to base ethics upon a theory of being,(upon ontology) are disastrous failures.
However, I'm puzzled by the 'metaphysics precedes ontology'claim in the above paragraph, as I've always understood metaphysics to be ontology--it is the basic categories that we use to understand, and make sense of, being. Digging further it appears that Levinas uses metaphysics to stand for ethics. Hence we have ethics without ontology. Does not ethics imply an ontology--a conception of being?
So how does Levinas understand ethics as metaphysics?
Jacques Taminiaux says:
Metaphysics is a movement from a condition of being at home with oneself in the world towards an outside of oneself. To that extent metaphysics, before being a doctrine, is a desire for the other, as Plato has already acknowledged. But traditionally the desire for the other pervading metaphysics was taken to be a desire for another home. In other words being at home was at the beginning of the metaphysical movement and at the end as well. Accordingly the metaphysical movement was like an Odyssey, a circular movement longing for a return on a higher level supposedly offered to a view, thanks to which the desiring metaphysician, i.e. the human being as such, truly becomes itself. So understood the metaphysical desire is aiming to a full visibility through which thought reaches an achievement.
If ontology concerns itself with grasping the truth being apart from the plurality and density of actual existents, then it prevents us from maintaining the other's alterity. Consequently, ontology creates a self-contained system (the "same") that resists any intrusion that would call forth from us an existential response. Allowing the Other to disrupt the "at homeness" (chez-soi) of our own horizon is ethics.
The concern with being at home is a very Heideggerian theme and it is bought into play with Heidegger's criticisms of Nietzsche's subjectivism and isolation.
Nietzsche made a virtue out of the (Cartesian) subjectivist isolation in which he found himself. He held that each must take responsibility for the creation of the self and its world of meaning. This heroic individualism, with its pathos of distance separating the noble individual from the herd, is necessary for the nurturing of the sovereign individual and new values to live by. So Nietzsche celebrates homelessness, leaves home to wander the open seas, and becomes a nomadic self that is cut off from meaningful rapport with others, and becomes the strangest of all guests in a world that turned into a wasteland.
If complacency in homelesssness is the postmodern condition, then Heidegger alternative to such homelessness is the place of human dwelling.
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