June 4, 2006
Levinas ethics are part of an approach that is suspicious of totalizing accounts of a world that are too complex to be reduced to a single point of view--- an example would be an ontology that reduces the other to the same. One does not establish an ethical relation with the Other human individual if the Other is not radically alter (i.e. other-than) to my ego.
The first use of the word ethics in the main text of Totality and Infinity is connected to critique:
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 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. And as critique precedes dogmatism metaphysics precedes ontology (TI, p.43)
Subsuming the Other into the same is the violent process of Hegelian dialectics, according to Levinas. He signifies a strong opposition to the Hegelian totalizing system, so much so that the singular individual stands against the system.
Being for the other exceeds being for oneself in responding to the other.
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Isn't there a distant, muffled echo of Kant here? The "critical essense of knowledge" suggests not only Kant's critique of ontology, but the "priority" of critique to the validation of knowledge. However, it is no longer the "pure rational will" that precedes/"grounds" the critique of knowledge and it is no longer the unity of (knowledge of) the world that is sought. Rather it is the disruption of "spontaneity" by the other from across the world that forms or accomplishes the ethical basis of "critique". There is a dissociation of the ethical from the cognitive here, with the ethical declared "pre-original", traverse to the world. This is a critical dissolution of the modern project of epistemology from Kant to Husserl.