conversations

Levinas: Why the other?

Could we not forget the other and take refuge in my own egoism? Why should we be concerned with the other?Are these reasonable responses to Levinas phenomeology of the other, given the current emphasis on the strong ego of the entrepreneurial individual making and shaping the world these days?

In her Corporeal Generosity: on giving with nietzsche, merleau-ponmty, and levinas Rosalyn Diprose provides an answer along Heidggerian lines. She says:

...there is a moral responsibility to my responsibility. According to Levinas that disturbing experience of the other's alterity urges me not to turn back...What drives this urge is sometimes described by Levinas in terms of the naked vulnerability expressed in the other's face, the primordial expression "you shall not commit murder". (Totality & Infinity, p. 199)

What if the other's strangeness was due to them being a murderous thug full of hate? Or a terrorist? A wild rapist or criminal as opposed to a vulnerable refugee seeking asylum. We would be disturbed, would we not? What sort of ethical obligation to the other do we have in this situation?

Don't we need to move from the abstract other to a concrete one, given that our responses are going to depend on who the other is? I'd turn back when faced with a criminal who wants to shoot me. I have no moral responsibility not to turn back surely.

Tis at this point that Levinas goes transcendental. Diprose says that:

Levinas point is that even the most secure individual cannot efface the other's alterity that is its condition, and even the most fragile ego faced with the other's strangeness is nevertheless "autonomous" as a result....In accounting for the urge to respond to the other's strangeness as a command that I cannot escape, Levinas is gesturing towards the idea that even my turning away from the other, that is even the egoism of enjoyment and the self-knowledge and self-possession of autonomy, presupposes another who cannot be possessed and for whom my possessions are destined.(p.138)

How then is this different from Hegel's conception of recognition? More primordial?

Levinas: Preface to Totality & Infinity

In the preface to Totality and Infinity, Levinas describes being and ontology as a condition of violence and war. One's own being is tied to self-interest to the exclusion of concern for the other. The question of being is not the question of the other.

Yet is there anything in being and in one's own being that allows one to be addressed by the other and that allows the ethical to interrupt and challenge self-interest? What is it about the face that singles me out and motivates me to act for the sake of that other? What of the possibility of a spontaneity which is intrinsically moral and inherently responsive to the concrete suffering and need of the other, no matter who they are?

Levinas argues that prior to all reflection and calculation one is compelled to answer to the other in acting for her, as when one leaps without thinking to save a child who falls into a well or river without considering the risks or rewards of such an action.

Doesn't such an example prejudge the situation. What if the other was a criminal with a gun? Surely my response depends on the other is, as well as their concrete suffering?

Levinas, phenomenology of the other, language

The phenomenology of the other reverses the alleged priority of the self in the phenomenological conception of alterity, in that there is an opening to the other beyond the boundaries of the self.However, it is an opening if every other were wholly other, then they wouldn’t be conceivable at all. There is a divergence or disassociation between self and other,but they are also chiasmically intertwined with one another in such a way that to speak of the radical singularity of the self, or the radical otherness of the other, is to ignore the fact that both paradigms are conceivable only on account of being of the one same flesh.

Levinas breaks with Heidegger's phenomenology by understanding the ethical relation to the Other, the face-to-face, as exceeding the language of ontology. John Wild in his 'Introduction' to Levinas' Totality and Infinity says that Levinas introduces language into the initial or primordial face-to-face encounter with the stranger as follows:

The questioning glance of the other is seeking for a meaningful response. Of course, I may only give a casual word, and go my own way with indifference passing the other by. But if communication and community is to achieved, a real response, a responsible answer must be given. This means that I must be ready to put my world into words, and to offer it to the other. There can be no free exchange without something to give. Responsible communication depends on an initial act of generosity, a giving of my world to him with all its dubious assumptions and arbitrary features. They are then exposed to the questions of the other, and an escape from egotism becomes possible.

Isn't language a system of public meanings that stands between me and the other?

Wild says that:

Levinas is not denying that a greater a part of our speaking and thginking is systematic and bound by logic of some kind. What he is interested in showing is that prior to these systems, which are required to meet many needs, and presupposed by them is the existing individual and his ethical choices to welcome the stranger and share his world by speaking to him. In other words we do not become social by first being systematic. We become systematic and orderly in our thinking by first freely making a choice for generosity and communication; ie., for the social.

Levinas: phenomenology of the other

As I understand it Levinas argues that the phenomenological conception of the other--ie., that of Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and Husserl---actually deprives the other of exactly that which would constitute their alterity. According to this interpretation, phenomenology almost invariably describes the other along the lines of what subjectivity knows of it (or at least thinks it knows).

If you recall, the phenomenological reduction is an attempt to bracket out the outside world, and to restrict itself to a description of the contents of consciousness. As a consequence of this theoretical starting point, it would seem that alterity can only be analysed according to how it appears to consciousness, and is hence defined in terms of what it is for the self. For Levinas, on the contrary, the other is precisely the opposite to this, being primarily that which resists knowledge as well as every attempt to thematise or capture that alterity.

John Wild in his 'Introduction' to Levinas' Totality and Infinity spells out the phenomenology of the other in terms of the meeting the other for the first time in his strangeness face to face. Wild says:

I see his countenance before me nude and bare. He is present in the flesh. But as Levinas points out in his revealing descriptions, there is also a sense of distance and even of absence in his questioning glance. He is far from me and other than myself, a stranger, and I cannot be sure of what this strangeness may conceal. Hence the need to show friendly intent which bought forth the earliest forms of introduction and greeting. (p.13)

This seems to presuppose a relational aspect (being other than myself), makes alterity dependent on a face-to-face encounter with another human, and presupposes that the other is always being conditioned by the horizons and contexts that the subject brings to bear upon that alterity.

Wild adds that this is but the beginning of the phenomenology of the other. He adds:

Even if he comes with no ill will, he remains a stranger inhabiting an alien world of his own. Of course, I may simply treat him as a different version of myself, or, if I have the power, place him under my categories and use him for my purposes. But this means reducing him to what he is not. How can I coexist with him and still leave his otherness intact?

According to Levinas there is only one way and that is language.

Bergson, Darwinism, Deleuze

In Germinal Life Ansell Pearson writes of the relationship of Bergson and Darwinism in terms of Bergson's argument with Darwinism.The argument is that Darwinism:

...lacks the notion of 'activity' that has to be seen as essential to any understanding of the evolution of life (the closeness to Nietzsche is, let us note again, striking). He accepts the fundamental principle of neo-Darwinism that what is passed on in hereditary are accidental modifications of the germ and that natural selection may eliminate forms of instinct that are not 'fit to survive.' He also concurs with Darwinism in the view that evolution involves and takes time. His critical point, however, is to stress that the instincts of life could not have evolved in complexification by a process of simple accretion since each new element or piece requires a 'recasting of the whole', a recasting which, he contends, mere chance could not effect. In other words, complexity in evolution cannot by itself be simply the result of an exogenous mechanism (such as natural selection [or adaptation]).

The emphasis is on creative as opposed to mechanistic evolution in order to capture the movement or activity of life. This creative evolution is represented by 'elan vital' and no appeal is made to an outside cause in order to endow life with a creative impulse or principle. The emphasis is on life is a movement or a flux or becoming, or an energy that flows or discharges into different forms of life, as distinct from an autopoietic conception of the organism.

Deleuze then reworks 'elan vital' into 'internal difference' in which the tendency to change is not accidental. What we get is the beginnings of a theory of individuation.

generosity as an ethical virtue

Another book that I picked up the other day is Rosalyn Diprose's, Corporeal Generosity: on giving with nietzsche, merleau-ponty, and levinas. She says the underlying claim of this book is that:

...generosity is not only an individual virtue that contributes to human well-being, but that it is an openess to others that is fundamental to human existence, sociality and social formation. Usually the the former understanding of generosity, as a socially benefical virtue, is said to exhaust its definition.

On this Aristotlean account generosity is taken to be a habituated and cultivated character trait---(a virtue)---that guides a person towards giving to others beyond the call of duty. Diprose says this is spelt in Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, which she interprets as follows:

Provided that the person gives by "deliberate choice" according to "right reason", that is appropriately according to his or her means and the circumstances and without self-serving motives so that the act is neither wasteful or mean, not only do the recipients benefit through the enhancement of their well being, but so does the one who gives through the pleasure that this brings .

There does seem to be openness to others tha tis implict in Aristotle's account. Diprose says that the problem with this account is that it assumes the individual is already constituted, prior to the act of giving, as a self-reflexive, self-present self, separate from others.

However, what Diprose does is interpret Aristotle through modern accounts of generosity articulated in a capitaliist economy. Tibor Machan's Politics and Generosity is the text referred to here, and this argues that Aristotle's model of virtue can only flourish, or indeed can only be possible, in a polity of sovereign propoerty owners; and more specifically within a libertarian political system as opposed to a welfare state. Diprose's critique is that in a modern capitalist economy the emphasis on utility in social relations tends to reduce the gift to a calculable commodity and generosity to the logical of an exchange economy with its 'I will give you this in exchange for that.'

It is not clear that Aristotle's account of generosity-- -as distinct from Machan's---remains trapped within the logic of exhange and contract whereby the gift functions as a commodity. Hence Diprose's critique is targeted at Machan's reworking of Aristotle's account of generosity, not Aristotle's account per se.

I would argue that it is the economy of contract and exchange between self-present sovereign individuals deploying instrumental reason that makes generosity impossible. The gift needs to be uncommodified, and this implies a different set of social relationships to those of contact and exchange. If generosity is expressed as altruism in society that is smanifest in voluntary blood supply systems, then what is highlighted by the characteristics of voluntary blood donation is that this form of conduct is distinct from other forms of exchange in a market-oriented society.

The generosity displayed by blood donors, to unnamed strangers is, like other virtues, in that it is learned over time. That is, one becomes generous or otherwise virtuous by repeatedly performing generous or virtuous acts. Virtues, as attitudes, dispositions, or character traits, enable us to be and to act in ways that develop the potential to become different to what we are. The self is transformed by performing generous actions of giving to others without reciprocation.

Diprose says that her account of generosity:

... is an openness to others that not only precedes and establishes communal relationss but constitutes the self as open to others. Primordially, generosity is not the expenditure of one's possessions but the dispossession of one-self, the being-given to others that undercuts any self-contained ego, that undercuts self-possession. Moreover, generosity so understood, happens at a prereflective level, at the level of corporeality and sensibility, and so eschews the calculation characterstic of an economy of exchange.

She adds:

Generosity is being given to others without deliberation in a field of intercorporeality, a being given that constitutes the self as affective and being affected, that constitutes social relations and that which is given in relation. On the model of generosity in this book, generosity is not one virtue among others but the primordial condition of personal, interpersonal, and communal existence.

Well that requires a working through Merleau-Ponty and Levinas in the context of Heidegger's texts doesn't it.

Levinas: the phenomenology of the other

I've just bought Emmnual Levinas' Totality and Infinity. It is far more phenomenological than I'd thought. In the 'Introduction' John Wild says:

According to Levinas, I find myself existing in a world of alien things and elements which are other than, but not negations of myself. The latter is a logical relationwhich brings its terms together into a neutral system in the light of which each can be understand impartiality, as we say. But the world as I originally experience it is not a logical system of this kind in which no terms takes precedence over the rest. I take precedence over the various objects I find around me, and in so far as my experience is normal, learn to manipulate and control them to my advantage, either as as the member of a group which I identify with myself or simply as myself alone. In general, these objects are at my disposal, and I am free play with them, live on them, and to enjoy them at my pleasure.

This is the French Hegel --the logical one--- and it ignores that dialectics is one of existence, not just logical relations between terms.

Wild goes on to say that the primordial experience of enjoyment has been neglected by Heidegger and other phenomenologists and that Levinas devotes many pages to describing it. He argues that the neiothe rof the egocentric attitude--thinking of other students either as extensions of the self, or as alien objects to be manipulated for the advantage of the subejct--does justice to our original experience of the other person as I encounter them in a face-to-face suituation. The analysis and description of this experience is the phenomenology of the other.

Deleuze & Bergson

In Chapter I of Germinal Life Ansell Pearson says that it is Henri Bergson who defines the task of of philosophy as one of learning to think beyond the human condition. Pearson says that going 'beyond' the human condition does not entail leaving the 'human' behind, but rather aims to broaden and deepen the horizon of its experience. This is the task of an autonomous philosophy, and it requires a major orientation of philosophy, a new concept of critique, and a new logic that proceeds through nuances and not contradiction. (pp. 20-21).

My concern is with vitalism rather than intuition and duration. Pearson says that Bergson's vitalism is often portrayed as being outside the Darwinian tradition. This overlooks:

...the extent to which there is a serious and informed engagement with Darwinian theory in Creative Evolution (1907). Moreover, a great deal of Bergson's position can be seen to resonate with with contemporary developments in biophilosophy, such as complexity theory, where the focus is on an understanding of living systems as dynamical systems, in which organisms do not simply passively adapt to changes in the environment but rather are seen to develop internal structures which serve to mediate the environment, including the 'meaning' an environmment has for an organism as a complex living system. (p.40)

Germinal Life: re-reading Deleuze

I have just bought Keith Ansell Pearson's Germinal Life: The difference and repetition of Deleuze--which I mentioned here. As I bought the book yesterday I've just begun to read it. Someone else has already done so.

The concern is with a "bio-philosophy" or philosophy of life which is not dealt with in any systematic fashion in Deleuze's texts. Ansell Pearson says:

The aim of this book is to illuminate the character of Deleuze's philosophy by situating it in the context of a neglected modern tradition, that of modern biophilosophy...Deleuze is difficult to place in the philosophical discourse of modernity largely, I suspect, because fo the peculiar character of his philosophical thought with its investments in biology and ethology....I believe that the character fo Deleuzes "Bergsonism' has been little understood, and yet I want to show that it plays the crucial role in the unfolding of his philosophy of 'germinal life'.

Bergson, on this interpretation, is extremely important for the way Deleuze rethinks the problems of philosophical modernity, his conception of philosophy as an autonomous practice, and for thinking beyond the human condition.

Ansell Pearson then says:

The critical question to ask, and which I simply pose here, is this: does thinking beyond the human condition serve to expand the horizons by which we think that condition and deepen its possible experience, or is the 'change of concept', in regard to the overhuman, so dramatic that it requires the dissolution of the human form and the end of the 'human condition? Such a question takes us, I believe, to the heart of Deleuze's project and brings us into a confrontation with its peculiar challenge, as well as its most innovative and demanding aspects.

I must confess to having very little idea of what is going here in relation to 'thinking beyond the human condition.' I have no idea what that phrase means. My best guess is that it links back to Nietzsche, the 'overman', and the revaluation of values.

I don't even know what 'germinal life 'means. Something to do with modern neo-Darriwnism, molecular biology and a mechanistic account of evolution that places all the emphasis on natural selection as the mechanism that guarantees the reproducion of life from one generation to the next? Does this connect with the 'selfish gene' of Richard Dawkins and a metaphysics that holds there no design, no purpose, no evil, no good-- only blind pitiless indifference. DNA just is. And we dance to its music

I'm on a step learning curve.

Andreas Molt in Adorno and the Myth of Subjectivity' in Contretemps 3 2002 says that

two features of modern subjectivity can be found in Kant. Firstly, the individual has the power for reason within her and can use it to make her own decisions: she is not bound by the rational cosmological order. As a result, secondly, the individual is free to make her own choices. It is these two features that make the individual a subject.

Strange I though it would have been freedom to make the moral law Myself, but never mind. My interest lies with Adorno. Molt says that:

For Adorno the subject-centered reason of the Enlightenment has deteriorated into an instrumental reason [in the service of money and power]. On this understanding reason cannot set goals, cannot evaluate standards; it is purely instrumental in fulfilling given functions. Reason has become a tool for something else. However, Adorno goes further and questions the autonomy of the subject altogether. People in modern society are passive and unfree.....In this way the Enlightenment created both the possibility of subjectivity, and destroyed its realization in modern society.

Heidegger reception

This quotes is from the Ereignis interview with Richard Polt. Ereignis says:

I appears to me that Heidegger's analysis of everydayness in Being and Time was the initial impetus for his popularity. For example, Hubert Dreyfus' book on Division I is the most popular English book in the vast secondary literature on Heidegger. This analysis of everydayness is the basis for a new way to do philosophy. Instead of doing philosophy by reflecting on an ideal world as Plato suggested, or imagining oneself as a detached subject in the mind dealing with or experiencing objects out there, Heidegger philsophizes about man already thrown into a world of meaningful things. In your collection on Being and Time Charles Guignon says that man in Heidegger's examination of the everyday deals with things without having to first reflect on their "substance", and that Heidegger aims to "deflate" the Cartesian or substance dualism that had dominated western philosophy up until that time.

Well, that's how I came to Heidegger--through the return to everydayness. This philosophical focus on the everyday was hugely influencial in French philosophy: Sartre's examinations of interpersonal relation, Merleau-Ponty's critique of perception, Lefebvre and the Situationists' critique of Marxism for ignoring everyday life etc.

What was less influential was the way Heidegger criticizes man in his habitual everyday mode. In Division II of Being and Time Heidegger says that at times man is aware of his finitude, and this forces man to chose between living life in light of that finitude or to remain in an "inauthentic" everydayness. As Polt observes:

This section of Being and Time too has been influential, oftentimes with the same philosophers, and in some cases with others, and can also be interpreted as one in a philosophical and literary tradition of existential choices found in the 19th century works of Kierkegaard and Dostoyevsky, both of whom Heidegger read.

Dreyfus, for instance, initially viewed Division II as a separate, "existentialist" side of Heidegger. He latter revised this position.

Though I thought that Adorno's Minima Moralia had more philosophical bite by way of a critique of everydayness, I thought that Heidegger conception of "the 'not-at-home'" that we feel in anxiety is "more primordial" than comfortable familiarity in that in such experiences as anxiety, we confront the sheer givenness of things and of ourselves. Those experiences can then transform the ordinary world.

What is not mentioned in this interview is the ecological turn of the latter Heidegger in his exploration of the technological mode of being.

Deleuze: affirmation

Lets go back to this post and pick up on Deleuze's Nietzsche and Philosophy.There I argued that what is missing from Deleuxes account of the connection between active force and will power is Nietzsche's link to the enhancement of life. I said that Deleuze says that ''Becoming-active is affirming and affirmative, just as becoming reactive is negative and nihilistic." (p.68). However, affirming and affirmation is related to affirming one's own differences whilst becoming reactive is negative in the sense of denial of differences.

Deleuze understands that the transvaluation of values means affirmation instead of negation, which he codes as negation transformed into a power of affirmation.

vitalism again

If we regard vitalism in philosophy in its broad sense as 'living things are specific forms of being', then it appears when this is placed in opposition to biomedicine we get two further positions: a rejection of the dualist conception of the mind-body relationship and an acceptance of the body's ability to self-heal. These are not very controversial positions; other than when the terminology used to state themconvey spiritual connotations. An example would be "Universal Intelligence" controls the body's "Innate Intelligence" by directing "Life Force" through the nervous system. These concepts implied an intelligent governing entity and is interpreted as a spiritual construct.

There is a long tradition of mental self-help that concentrates on overt and positive rather than covert and negative feelings, began in the late nineteenth century and was still strong in the 1950s and 1960s. This tradition had consistently focused attention on proactive ways people could become more positive and optimistic about life, master their moods, and fix their physical ills without taking medications. People could align their thoughts and constructively adjust their attitudes. This takes it for granted that harmonizing one's emotions in a positive way would, unquestionably, improve one's physical well-being and it presupposes that mind and body are closely interconnected.

Self-healing presupposes that living things are inherently equipped to have a complete, self-sufficient and healthy life. Consequently ill health is an unnatural state. The healing process of an organism is within each living system itself, just like the process of respiration, digestion, secretion and reproduction. Health is assumed to be a state of harmony and balance. It is homeostasis.

Nietzche, vitalism, will to power, Deleuze

Vitalism flows through a number of Nietzsche's texts. My understanding is in terms of a reworking of the legacy of Aristotle's understanding of ordered growth and development of organic form. Vitalism in its widest sense holds that living things are specific forms of being. My understanding of Nietzsche's vitalism is roughly along the following lines.

One way to approach vitalism is through Nietzsche's ethics. This is premised on life as good in itself and the enhancement of life is the standard by which the value of everything else is to be measured. It is the enhancement of life that characterises a healthy morality with enhancement of life interpreted as promoting or fostering human flourishing or well-being (as distrinct from mere survival.) An unhealthy morality, in contrast, is one that hinders, prevents, or inhibits human flourishing. It is life-denying. Promoting human flourishing, therefore, is that for the sake of which all other goods are good.

What then is life? In the Will to Power it is a multiplicity of forces organized by a mode of functioning to bring about the enhancement of life. The mode of organic functioning is will to power. Virtue is the integration of the parts of the self, the way one part of the self imposes order on other parts by successfully orientating the subordinate parts to its own ends. These ends are enhancement, flourishing, wellbeing.

Deleuze in his Nietzsche and Philosophy conceptualizes this in terms of a dynamic of forces, namely life enhancing forces and life denying forces as active forces and reactive forces, and as active becoming and reactive becoming. Deleuze says that:

It must not be said that active force becomes reactive because reactive forces triumph; on the contrary, they triumph because, by separating active force from what it can do, they betray it to the will of nothingness, to a becoming reactive deeper than themselves. This is why the figures of the triumph of reactive forces (ressentiment, bad conscience, and the ascetic idea) are primarily forms of nihilism....Is there another becoming? (p. 64)

What is severed from this account is the way that will to power as a mode of functioning is divorced from the enhancement of life. Deleuze says:

The will to power must therefore manifest itself in force as such....But what does "the will to power manifests itself" mean?...It follows that wil to power is manifested as a capacity for being affected. This capacity....is necesarily fulfilled and actualised at each moment by the other forces to which a given force relates.....the capacity for being affected is not necessarily a passivity but an affectivity, a sensibility, a sensation. ...Before treating power as a matter of will he treated it as a matter of feeling and sensibility.... All sensibility is only a becoming of force. There is a cycle of force in the course of which force "becomes" (for example, active force becomes reactive). Ther are even several becomings of force that can struggle against one another.... The will to power manifests itself, in the first place, as the sensibility of forces and, in the second place, as the becoming sensible of forces: pathos is the most elementary fact from which a becoming arises. (pp.62-63)

What is missing from this account is the connection between active force and will power is Nietzsche's link to the enhancement of life. Deleuze in a latter section, entitled Ambivalence of Sense and of Values, says that ''Becoming-active is affirming and affirmative, just as becoming reactive is negative and nihilistic." (p.68). But affirming and affirmation is related to affirming one's own differences whilst beccoming reactive is negative in the sense of denial of differences.

Levinas, the face, ethics

Levinas' various phenomenological arguments give confidence that we are not doomed to a Hobbesian state of nature. However, the question of the nature of ethics, the "source" of the break with being, is a difficult one. For Levinas, it is the face of the other that establishes this order, a dis-ordering of myself and a re-orientation towards the other.This requires that we understand Levinas' use of the term "face."

John Spooner

In Totality and Infinity Levinas says :

The way in which the other presents himself, exceeding the idea of the other in me, we here name face. This mode does not consist in figuring as a theme under my gaze, in spreading itself forth as a set of qualities forming an image. The face of the Other at each moment destroys and overflows the plastic image it leaves me..(pp.50-51).

Normallly we encounter a face in a context--that of a friend, a student, a teacher or a lover. We remember a face more easily than a name. Why so? Perhaps the visual is stronger than the verbal. Or maybe it is because faces are the location for the expressions and emotions which indicate character and subjectivity?

Levinas' understanding of the face of ethics is more radical than this, as it involves a signifyingness of its own independent of this meaning received from the world. In Ethics and Infinity, conversations with Philippe Nemo, Levians says:

There is first the very uprightness of the face, its upright exposure, without defense. The skin of the face is that which stays most naked, most destitute. It is the most naked, though with a decent nudity.... The face is meaning all by itself...it leads you beyond. (trs. by Richard A. Cohen, Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1985, pp. 86-87).

The face of the other, whether masked by make-up, earrings, artificial coloring, scarves, and so forth encounters me directly and profoundly. Face to face encounter with the other discloses the other’s weakness and mortality. Naked and destitute, the face commands: “Do not leave me in solitude.” We ought welcome, be hospitable to, the Other who encounters us, asthe stranger who comes to me in my mundane, self-centered existence demanding from me a “Here I am.” Levinas is clear that what is given in the face-to-face encounter is the fact of another's independent expression.

Levinas: two orders of being

Levinas' attempts to distance the human being from a sphere in which all is reducible to causes and effects, profits and losses. To do this he distinguishes between two orders of things.

In section II of Totality and Infinity Levinas describes how the subject establishes itself in the world, its attempts at delaying the uncertainties of the futurethrough the activities of acquiring possessions and sheltering itself from the forces of nature. These reflections show us a level of human existence in which the leading motive for action is self-concern, the care that one takes of oneself. For Levinas this is the animal order, the realm in which there appear beings who are concerned with their being, beings for whom the fundamental question surrounds their persistence in being. Levinas equates this order with the thought of both Heidegger and Darwin, saying that 'a being is something that is attached to being, to its own being. That is Darwin's idea. The being of animals is a struggle for life, a struggle without ethics. It is a question of might.' For this reason, animal existence is essentially appropriative, a re-appropriation and recuperation of oneself

And the second order of being?

Levinas contrasts the animal order with that of the human, in that in relation to the animal, the human is a new phenomenon.

This newness is dueto the fact that in the human order there is a break with being, a detachment or distancing from being not found in the animal. It is that with the appearance of the human, according to Levinas, that 'there is something more important than my life, and that is the life of the other.' The human order is the ethical order, the order in which being is no longer a being-concerned-foritself but is instead a being-for-others, a being-concerned-for-the-other. For Levinas ethics is not a life of autonomous reason presenting itself as a law to itself. Ethics is the advent of the Other,the appearance on the scene of something which assumes priority over myself, something heteros (other) proclaiming the nomos (law).

Levinas: different readings

As we know Levinas's alternative to traditional approaches was a philosophy that made personal ethical responsibility to others the starting point and primary focus for philosophy, rather than a secondary reflection that followed explorations of the nature of existence and the validity of knowledge. My understanding is that, 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.

The quote below is from a review of a collection of essays on Levinas by Martin Kavka.The concern is whether Levinasian ethics can be critiqued for being as empty as Hegel thought Kantian morality to be. Kavka says:

On one hand, Levinas is clear that the other person is not given in the face-to-face encounter, since if the other person is given to my knowledge, s/he is no longer other. And so once I become obsessed by another's radical exteriority, there seems to be no way to think about the other person as more than a bare site -- or, to invoke the pun in Lingis's title, bare flesh -- upon which I can project my own desires and fantasies. On the other hand, Levinas is equally clear that what is given in the face-to-face encounter is the fact of another's independent expression, or self-attestation, as the precondition of propositional discourse. In that case, the coherence of my response to another with his or her speech might serve as a standard by which one could judge between good and bad ethical acts. But Levinas does not help us decide between these two options.

This is the major issue that arises when reading Levinas. Is Levinas telling us what actually happens in an interpersonal encounter, or telling us what needs to be the case for conversation to take place?

So we have the distinction between the empirical and transcendental readings of Levinas.

Levinas, ethics, other

For Levinas ethics is a calling into question of the "Same":

A calling into question of the Same--which cannot occur within the egoistic spontaneity of the Same--is brought about by the Other. We name this calling into question of my spontaneity by the presence of the Other ethics. The strangeness of the Other, his irreducibility to the I, to my thoughts and my possessions, is precisely accomplished as a calling into question of my spontaneity as ethics. Metaphysics, transcendence, the welcoming of the Other by the Same, of the Other by Me, is concretely produced as the calling into question of the Same by the Other, that is, as the ethics that accomplishes the critical essence of knowledge." (Totality and Infinity, p. 33)

The question of the other is acute when it is not just any other; or pious and sentimental talk about the general other, but the concrete other who is encountered as radically different than myself. This is the other who I ignore, push-aside, marginalize, exclude, fear or despise---and it is this other for whom I am in some sense responsible. responsibility has been identified with autonomy or rational freedom. Levinas powerfully criticizes the failure of autonomy and spontaneity in Western ontology from the Greeks through Heidegger. These concepts are ethically inadequate insofar as they are intrinsically self-centered given the self's ethical dependence on the other.

More Slavoj Zizek

We get some psychoanalysis from Zizek on Bill Gates here The context is the theory fo the risk society:

According to the risk society theory of Anthony Giddens, Ulrich Beck and others, we no longer live our lives in compliance with Nature or Tradition; there is no symbolic order or code of accepted fictions (what Lacan calls the 'Big Other') to guide us in our social behaviour. All our impulses, from sexual orientation to ethnic belonging, are more and more often experienced as matters of choice. Things which once seemed self-evident - how to feed and educate a child, how to proceed in sexual seduction, how and what to eat, how to relax and amuse oneself - have now been 'colonised' by reflexivity, and are experienced as something to be learned and decided on.

I don't buy it myself--we continue to live in traditions --eg nationality, consumerism, religion.--and there is plenty of non self-reflexive fundamentalism going around. What Zizek says:

Reflexivisation has transformed the structure of social dominance. Take the public image of Bill Gates. Gates is not a patriarchal father-master, nor even a corporate Big Brother running a rigid bureaucratic empire, surrounded on an inaccessible top floor by a host of secretaries and assistants. He is instead a kind of Small Brother, his very ordinariness an indication of a monstrousness so uncanny that it can no longer assume its usual public form. In photos and drawings he looks like anyone else, but his devious smile points to an underlying evil that is beyond representation. It is also a crucial aspect of Gates as icon that he is seen as the hacker who made it (the term 'hacker' has, of course, subversive/marginal/anti-establishment connotations; it suggests someone who sets out to disturb the smooth functioning of large bureaucratic corporations). At the level of fantasy, Gates is a small-time, subversive hooligan who has taken over and dressed himself up as the respectable chairman. In Bill Gates, Small Brother, the average ugly guy coincides with and contains the figure of evil genius who aims for total control of our lives. In early James Bond movies, the evil genius was an eccentric figure, dressed extravagantly, or alternatively, in the grey uniform of the Maoist commissar. In the case of Gates, this ridiculous charade is no longer needed - the evil genius turns out to be the boy next door.

a Zizek joke?

A quote from someone I've basically stopped reading---Slavoj Zizek. The quote is taken from this article in the London Review of Books about the new hip capitalists who say that we 'can have the global capitalist cake (thrive as entrepreneurs) and eat it (endorse the anti-capitalist causes of social responsibility, ecological concern etc).' He adds:

There is a chocolate-flavoured laxative available on the shelves of US stores which is publicised with the paradoxical injunction: Do you have constipation? Eat more of this chocolate! – i.e. eat more of something that itself causes constipation.

Huh? Chocolate a laxative like prunes? A joke about Madison Ave, food regulation and American consumerism?

Zizek continues and makes a serious point:

The structure of the chocolate laxative can be discerned throughout today’s ideological landscape; it is what makes a figure like Soros so objectionable. He stands for ruthless financial exploitation combined with its counter-agent, humanitarian worry about the catastrophic social consequences of the unbridled market economy. Soros’s daily routine is a lie embodied: half of his working time is devoted to financial speculation, the other half to ‘humanitarian’ activities (financing cultural and democratic activities in post-Communist countries, writing essays and books) which work against the effects of his own speculations. The two faces of Bill Gates are exactly like the two faces of Soros: on the one hand, a cruel businessman, destroying or buying out competitors, aiming at a virtual monopoly; on the other, the great philanthropist who makes a point of saying: ‘What does it serve to have computers if people do not have enough to eat?’

Okay, Bill Gates is similar, is he not? It's a familar contradiction, isn't it: capitalism plus philanthropy.

But where is the psychoanalysis of this antinomy of reason and care? Without that analysis we are left with journalism that simply describes.

Being passive to oneself

In his Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive Giorgio Agamben asks:

What does it mean to be passive with respect to oneself?

He says that passivity does not mean receptivity, the mere fact of being affected by an external force, since the the passive subject must be active with respect to its own passivity. He then links it to Auschwitz:

Passivity, as a form of subjectivity, is thus constitutively fractured into a purely receptive pole (the Muselmann) and an actively passive pole (the witness), but in such a way that this facture never leaves itself, fully separating the two poles. On the contrary, it always has the form of an intimacy, of being consigned to a passivity, to a making oneself passive in which the two terms are both distinct and inseparable. (p.111)