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May 11, 2006
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).
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O.K., one reference back is to the Spinozan "conatus essendi", which Levinas constantly cites rather than any Heideggerian notion,- ("self-preservation gone wild"),- which peculiarly mixes the mechanistic notion of inertia with the biological/spiritual notion of striving. The other reference back is to the introduction to the second "Self-consciousness" chapter of the "Phenomenology", wherein Hegel distinguishes between animal appetite and human desire. Levinas is drawing both into question. There is no notion here of two different levels or kinds of being, but rather it is a matter of two levels in the same being, which disrupts and tears it appart.