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October 20, 2006
As we know Levinas distinquishes himself from Heidegger in terms of the Other and he states that this difference is a new idea that Heidegger has missed. Is it the case that Heidegger 'missed' something? or is it the case that his project of thematization and the reduction of being to ontology does not reflect what is to dwell in a world. Does Heidegger imply that the Other cannot be thematized because it is that which is beyond the realm of understanding? Or does Levinas open up a different account of what it is to dwell in a world?
Michael Eldred in this article on Levinas entitled 'Excursus: Levinas' ethics of the Other' says that:
In a short article first published in 1951 entitled 'Is Ontology Fundamental?', Levinas briefly presents a case for a negative answer to this question. This negative answer bears and marks his entire thinking, and that to such an extent that it is by and large a negative movement, akin even to negative theology. There is no doubt that Levinas has a genuine phenomenon in view, a phenomenon that opened up and provided the essential impetus for dialogical philosophy. Levinas is also correct in pointing out that Heidegger's fundamental ontology, as presented in Sein und Zeit and lecture courses throughout the twenties, does not enter into an interpretation of this phenomenon but rather keeps it at arm's length. But whereas Levinas argues for a strong distinction between what he calls metaphysics, which is concerned with infinitude, and ontology, which he claims to be totalizing, the thesis presented in the present excursus is that Heidegger, even in shying away from the dialogical phenomenon, provides an indispensable placeholder and starting-point for adequately interpreting it.
Eldred argues that not only Levinas throws the baby out with the bath water but that, in mixing theology with philosophy, Levina's texts take on the hue of a dogmatic, incantatory insistence.
We will explore this argument over the next few posts.
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The article stuck me as question begging. It's little plausible to assume that Levinas simply failed to understand "Being and Time" and regressed behind its innovations. Rather it's clear that he was working from early on both with and away from the framework of "Being and Time".
The "theme" of the other doesn't so much function as a replacement for Being-in-the-World, as a corrective within it. Levinas too is adhering to a radically non-dualistic account of embeddedness in the world, "thrownness", and to the encounter with beings that such an account renders possible. The difference is not that L. ignores "ontological difference", but that he raises a different difference that the latter cannot accommodate, and the different dimension of meaning constitution that it implicates.
As well, he refuses the distinction between the empirical and the transcendental, the ontic and the ontological, not out of a failure to understand it, but out of an effort to push beyond the limits that it sets, since ontological thinking implies a kind of limit or barrier, which thinking can not get quit of, but is constrained by as the thinking of a given world. The other, which formatively preoccupies the hypostasis of the one to the point of obsession and persecution, transcends the horizon of the given world even as it gives one over to it, even if no other horizon of a world is discernible: another world is always possible through the transformation of relationships in this one, irremissibly.
I think this show up in the very theme of "mood" or affectivity. Heidegger, following out phenomenological intentionality, must conceive of affects as referent to an intentional object, even if the "object" is the sheer situatedness of Dasein itself, such that affectivity must be referred to the "for sake of which" of Daisein itself.
But for L., affectivity is a modal relation with the other qua other, which stirs up in the one through the withdrawal of the other, which subtends any intentional relation with his being. There is no failure on his part to understand the interrelations between existence, mood and understanding, but rather the point is that the modal relation with the other is an enigma, drawing one "beyond" the understanding of the truth of Being, but crucially orienting that understanding.