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April 23, 2006
Levinas's basic point about shame in his early On Escape essay is this: in shame we are not shamed of the properties we have, or the qualities we possess, but of our very being itself. Of the pure and utterly inescapable fact that "the I is oneself". Levinas’ concern in 'On Escape' is 'getting out of being by a new path, at the risk of overturning certain notions that to common sense.... seemed the most evident.'
The question that drives Levinas’s phenomenological investigations in On Escape is a digging into why humans reach out and bond with others and objects, whether to grow or to stagnate. But Levinas asks, “what motivates these desires?” What is at the root of need?
If you recall, needs, for Levinas, points to something other than lack. Needs indicate the insufficiency of self-possession. The genuine significance of a human life is not found in the satisfaction of needs. Needs point to an original and incarnate concatenation, an embodied binding of the links of the self with itself, at the deepest level with its being. In its very incarnate existence, the self wants to escape. Levinas discovers not peace, but dissatisfaction, malaise, disquiet, at the heart of subjectivity. He writes, “Thus, escape is the need to get out of oneself, that is, to break that most radical and unalterably binding of chains, the fact that the I is oneself”. It is a desire to escape self-enclosure.
In making this case Levinas digs deeper into the self beneath its self-conscious theoretical constructions or its instrumental practical complexes. He argues though pleasure is meant to be, an abandonment, a loss of oneself, a getting out of oneself, the escape from self found in pleasure is not sustained: the self falls back into itself, returns to itself, remains attached to itself. Pleasure ends not in escape but in shame. Shame here is not meant in its directly moral sense of a guilt regarding one’s actions, but shame in the sense of the regret one feels regarding oneself. What is uncoverdby the latter sense of shame is the being who uncovers himself ” The embodied self is “riveted” to itself, as it were, bearing its own self like a double, incapable of getting away from itself.
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Gary, These 2 essays by my favourite "philosopher" address the topic of transcendence and escape. The fundamental point that ALL beings (not just humans) are heart impulsed to transcend themselves and be boundlessly happy. And paradoxically/tragically incapable of doing so via self effort of any kind.
Divine Grace being the necessary Agency for that to occur.
The Dual Sensitivity at:
1.www.dabase.net/dualsens.htm
The Unique Potential of Man at:
2. www.dabase.net/unique.htm