Doesn't "thrownness" mean that one is existentially exposed to the sheer existence of the world, which precedes one, and that one has to be what one already is and hence is always burdened with the pressure of decision with respect to one's own existence in the world and the work of appropriation that it involves? It seems to me that the burdensomeness of existence is already there in "Being and Time". But "On Evasion" was Levinas' first "Levinasian" work, written after he had abandoned his book on Heidegger after reading the "Rectoral Address" and began to try to work away from Heidegger, while working him through. I don't exactly know that a "contract" between existence and existents is Levinas' notion rather than something interpellated by the reviewer. The "es gibt", the sense of Being as a "gift" in the mutual appropriation of Being and Dasein, which pertains more to the later work of Heidegger, would seem to be more like a "contract", at least, the assuring of an identity between the two. And "Being and Time" begins with the being of the "Zuhanden" as manifested in tools and signs, that is, with an active practical intentionality, in which there is no doubt an implied reference to the physicality of existence, but no thematization of its sheer bodiliness. To the contrary, the subsequent course of analysis tends toward an historical/cultural appropriation, "repetition", bounded only by death. Levinas counterposes to this the "il y a", the anonymous menacing rustling of the "elements", (which, of course, suggests the biblical "tohu bohu"), out of which the existent must draw itself, in establishing the hypostasis of a "subject". There is no possibility here of the existent not being bodily. (The analysis is suggestive of Kojevean/Hegelian slave before the Heideggerian master, n'est-ce pas?) The long-run trajectory of Levinas' thinking leads to subtending and displacing the phenomenological device of intentionality with the modal relation to the other qua other. (It is there one could perhaps, warily, speak of a "contract"). Only in the exteriority of the relation to the other, in the "face" of the manifestation of the other which withdraws from any manifestation, can the hypostasis of an existent interiority establish itself. That would be how "we are humanized by consciousness". (Though I've never read him mention this, one of the upshots of Levinas' work seems to me to be a metacritique of existentialism, showing how the very existence of an isolated consciousness in the face of an indiffernet world is subtended by its sociality, in a manner different from, but not all that alien to, the concerns of the "private language argument".) The burden of existence then is for Levinas one's infinite responsibility before and for the other, by virtue of which one bears the whole weight of the world on one's shoulders. Though like all phenomenology, which questions the meaning of existence, rather than assuming it in the natural attitude, Levinas' work is anti-naturalistic, it doesn't follow that it's un- or anti-materialistic, let alone a reversion to "subjectivism". One of its main burdens, it seems to me, is to preserve human agency and its responsibility in the face of and thus within its multiple naturalistic dissolutions.

John
yes I accept that the burdensomeness of existence is already there in "Being and Time". I also accept that what we have is a reworking of Heidegger's Being and Time by Levinas and the displacing of Heidegger's emphasis on intentionality.

I'm just easing way into Levinas and I'm sympathetic to the way that he prioritises ethics over ontology.

A question: doesn't ethics presuppose an ontology--just like economics does?

Gary:

I'm not sure that economics presupposes an ontology. Which economics? Sraffan, Marxian, Keynesian, neo-classical? (All of which reject utilitarianism, as not operationalizable, even the neo-classical conception of "subjective" utility.) And I'm not sure what the notion of ontology amounts to, after Kant's telling criticisms. As I understand him, Hegel was not proposing a renewed ontology, but rather a metacritique of epistemology, (the determinations of "The Logic" being the extended set of transcendental conditions of possibility that the being of the world appears to us, more or less, as what it is, without staking any claim to the intrinsic being of the world, as per a piece of fancy footwork vis-a-vis Kantian strictures; that is, there is no question of the pre-existent being of the world, but only of our knowledge of our knowledge of the world, which is only questionable with respect to the hyperbolic certainty and scope accorded to such knowledge).

And it's never been exactly clear to me what Heidegger means by "ontology",- (though it's certainly not the "regional ontologies" of which Husserl secondarily spoke),- except, perhaps, as a thinking of "Being", which leaves traditional ontology behind, while attributing the transformations of such thinking, to something other than thought, which "sends" them. Those would be the two paradigm cases of what Levinas criticizes as the exclusive pre-occupation with the ontology of "truth" in Western metaphysics,- (which he, at one point, suggests might be identical with reification itself).

The contrast with Heidegger would be whether the clarification of the "authentic" thinking of Being would be the condition for the establishment of any ethical relation with others, or whether the "sincerity" of the relation to the other qua other would be the condition of any contingent clarification of being. Levinas does not so much reject the "ontology" of "truth" as relativize it in terms of the ethical relation that subtends it. (He suggests in interviews that the next step beyond his work would be "political ontology", no doubt, in full awareness of what such, undelimited, has led to.)

And obviously, inspite of the ascetic rigour of his work, it would be a gross misunderstanding to see it as a narrow moralizing. The point would rather be that the transformation of human relations at once subtends any tranformation in "Being" and is thrown upon it.

John,
neo-classical and Marxist economics have different ontologies do they not?

The former is composed of atomistic events and natural individuals in external relations etc; the latter is about process and historical individuals in internal relations.

Ontology here refers to an Aristotlean or Hegelian understanding of ontology as metaphysics, the very basic categories which we use to make sense of, and gain a knowledge of the world.

I too have great difficulty in grasping what Heidegger means by Being as distinct from beings. One way that I try to get it is to say that neo-classical and Marxist economics have different ways (being) of conceptualizing the domain or field of Being.

It's not much help, I know.

Gary:

Yes, that's just the point: that there is a potential plurality of different sets or systems of categories by which we can understand the "things" of the world. (Whether there can be translations between such systems of categories is the really difficult point.)

But traditional ontology involved an attempt to delimit and "ground" the totality of beings in the world, in terms of a predetermining foundational order to the world, which would uniquely constitute their rational "justification" as "necessary", forming a fixed hierarchy of beings and the categories that emmanate from them rooted in the primacy of some such kind of being, ("arche" not just meaning "ground" or "reason" but also carrying the sense of "firstness" or principle).

Hegel already shifted away from the notion of a pre-determining ground with his elaboration of the notion of a presuppositionless "science" of logic, but Adorno was to twist and turn that against Hegel with his insistence that nothing, not even intelligibility or understanding itself, nor any agency that would carry it, could be truly regarded as "primary", as bearing an ontological status. There is no point to regarding beings, the "things" of this world, as fixedly delimited and immune to contingency, perhaps least of all the special topics or domains of the sciences.

The trick would be how to realistically acknowledge and grasp the materiality and circumstantiality of the "things" of the world, without succumbing to the philosophical or scientistic temptation to idealize them in terms of complete determinacy, thereby foreclosing their possible, if not strictly determinable, future transformations.

But Levinas' point about the other qua other is that it is precisely acategorical, not graspable or subsumable by one's categorical understanding, which could only obliterate it or cover it over. That renders the other neither "necessary", not least of all not something that imposes itself on one's thinking like a destiny, as with a Heideggerian dispensation of Being, even as the other ungraspably "obsesses" one, nor contingent, since it is the other that individuates one's freedom as already irremissibly responsible. The other belongs to another dimension than that of "Being", the neutrality of which Levinas, clearly referring most of all to Heidegger, criticizes as "a voice which no face commands", to something that can not be reduced to a givenness, but always remains "otherwise".

The Levinasian paradox, it seems to me, concerns the limited and finite "nature" of human freedom, which, despite its separateness, can not achieve any self-constituted "autonomy", since its possibility precedes its very intelligibility, and the undelimitability of human responsibility, which exceeds oneself, together with any givenness.

The upshot here is to step outside of the metaphysical definition of the human being as the "rational animal", with "rationality" being identified with (a capacity for) knowledge, whereby the being of the human being is recognized solely in terms of (degrees of) knowledge, which superintends the being of the world. Rather human beings should be regarded as vulnerable and suffering beings, who, by the very same token, open to the world and to one another, are capable of initiative and renovation.

That, then, situates and relativizes knowledge, without impugning it, rather than drawing it into question in terms of the "other" dimension of the ethical rationality of needfulness, justice and goodness. It's a matter of acknowledging at once the reality of the world and its human exceedence without any ontological or naturalistic reduction and without becoming entrapped in idealism.