Levinas’ The Philosophy Brief Introduction

Emmanuel Levinas was a truly original thinker in the existentialist tradition (although he
wouldn’t have classified himself so, given the pains he took to illustrate how his thought
differed from other existentialists), who took his cue, like his contemporary Sartre, from
Husserl and critically responded to Heidegger’s Being and Time.
If Heidegger built his philosophy around Being, Levinas built his around the relation
with other human beings (the Other). The relation with the Other is, for Levinas, a relation
with a completely transcendent alterity forever beyond our grasp, but one through which,
precisely because it is wholly transcendent, meaning and significance can be discovered.
The original lines of enquiry and remarkable insights in Levinas’ work don’t come easy
but they are no less profound for this. If one were going to criticise him however, one might
take issue with the way he corrals his (genuinely interesting) philosophical insights to
legitimise and support Judaeo-Christian dogma. Although, it isn’t fully fleshed out in Totality
and Infinity, he is clearly laying the groundwork for a relation (of some sort) with a
transcendent God in the relation with the Other. In particular, he pushes credulity to the limit
when he talks about Eros and Paternity with all of the references to things like “virginity”, the
“Eternal Feminine”, “trans-substantiation”, and the Father-Son relationship. If you happen to
be Christian, this might not be a bad thing (albeit Levinas’ version of religion definitely goes
well beyond what you’ll hear about in Church); if you are atheist, however, you will just have
to grin and bear the references and resist Levinas’ religious motivations and tendencies.
 
The following summary is limited to themes raised in three of Levinas’ works; two early
essays (Existence and Existents (1947), Time and the Other (1948)) and his first major
work, Totality and Infinity (1961). It therefore lacks later developments in Levinas’ thought,
particularly from his second major work, Otherwise Than Being, or Beyond Essence (1974)
and the collection, God Who Comes to the Idea (1982).          
 
Metaphysics and Ontology
Metaphysics, for Levinas, is rooted in transcendence, which importantly, can only take
place before an Other that is “absolutely other”, or, as he calls it, alterity. Metaphysical Desire
is a desire for this absolutely other, i.e. transcendence, but since the Other is, by definition,
beyond our grasp, it is a desire which can never be satisfied.
Ontology, on the other hand, is grounded in knowledge which confronts the other and
absorbs its otherness, reducing it to the same; i.e. a totality comprised of the subject and the
object. This, Levinas calls ‘need’ and nostalgia, or a longing for return. This kind of desire has
its origin in a void, or lack, in the subject, rather than coming from the other, as in
metaphysical Desire. Ontology works through a third term to achieve the totality. Examples of
this third term include the concept (being in general), sensation (the objective and the
subjective), and Husserlian phenomenology (an existent in a horizon).
 
Being / Existence / Nothingness
 What would be left if all things, beings, and persons were to disappear? A pure
nothingness which Levinas calls the there is. The there is, being neither subject nor object is
both impersonal and anonymous. It is eternal since, without a subject, it lacks a starting point.
Importantly, nothingness is not non-being but nor is it a particular being; on the contrary, it
is pure Being. Levinas describes it with words like, “ambiguous” and “darkness”, calling it a
“menace of pure and simple presence” in Existence and Existents.
Heidegger suggested that anxiety revealed Being (we are anxious not about this or that
being, but about Being (existence) in general) and through this we could be brought to an
authentic “being toward death”. Levinas rejects this, affirming that the apprehension of
the there is arouses “horror”, not in the face of death or even pain, rather it is a horror of being
itself, that anonymous, impersonal “condemnation to perpetual reality, to existence with no
exits”, the horror of the night that is infinite. Our greatest fear turns out not to be death, the
possibility of non-being, but life, the impossibility of non-being.
We get a glimpse of the there is in insomnia which, while not being a direct experience
of nothingness, nevertheless shares some of the same features. In being unable to fall asleep, I
experience the feeling of eternal being without reprieve, but with a wakefulness which, rather
than being a personal consciousness, is more like the suspended non-state of anonymous
being. I’m not me, conscious and clear; rather, I’m set adrift in a hazy, semi-conscious, almost
anonymous vigilance I cannot break free of.    
 
Separation
Existents (Levinas’ term for conscious beings) come to be through an event he calls
the psychism, which he describes in Time and the Other (there called the hypostasis) as a
“rupture of the anonymous vigilance of the there is” and a “mastery over existing”. While he
acknowledges that he can’t explain why the hypostasis happens (“There is no physics in
metaphysics”), he can describe its significance and the subsequent relation existents have with
the existence from which they were birthed (separated).
We start with two key terms; fatigue and indolence, which Levinas thinks are examples
of attitudes prior to reflection and which therefore concern existence. Fatigue is a weariness,
not of specific things, but of existence itself. It is a desire to refuse existence. Indolence also
gets the existential treatment and reveals a “hesitation before existence, an indolence about
existing... an impotent and joyless aversion to the burden of existence itself.” Fatigue occurs
in effort because all effort contains within it the sense of being “yoked to our task” (which is,
at this ontological level, existing), and effort is characterised by interruptions in the
anonymous, continuous flow of the there is, as in when work is completed step by step. This
“stoppage and a positing” of effort creates the instant, which is an ontological structure that
has nothing to do with time, and is essentially a condemnation of existence. We now have a
being which is suddenly “out of joint with itself… a being that is not joining up with itself in
the instant” (because it is a refusal of it), and this creates a lag. It is this lag which comprises
the interval which is the present. This ontological ‘distance’ (the present) is precisely the
“upsurge [birth] of an existent” and is how the existent gains mastery over existence.
The act of separating itself from existence is what Levinas calls atheism. Levinas’ use of
this term is obviously unconventional; rather than being a stance one might take towards the
existence or non-existence of god, it is simply the accomplishment of separation from
the there is and is therefore a natural, unavoidable feature of the cogito.
 
The Relation Between the I and the Self
In the psychism, the existent first becomes an existent. This relation is characterised
by identity, or, as Levinas also calls it, the interiority of the same. The subject is identical to
itself, and while this may sound tautological, compared to the anonymous sameness of
the there is it arose from, this relation is a significant development. Moreover, this relation is
unique in that while the I is identical with itself, it is also separate from itself because it is the
nature of the cogito (consciousness) to posit a distance between itself and everything else,
including itself.
One feature of this newly birthed existent Levinas describes in his earlier writings is the
way it finds itself in solitude, which has nothing to do with other people. Solitude is the
despair and abandonment the existent feels because it is now, for the first time, identical to
itself. He goes on to describe this identity as an “enchainment to itself” and one which
paradoxically limits the freedom of the free being, which is already no longer free because it
is, and cannot not be, responsible for itself. Levinas calls this relation between Ego and
Self, materiality. Ontologically speaking, materiality is not physical matter; rather, it is the
weighing down of the Ego with itself, the heaviness that the existent takes on in coming into
existence.
 
The Relation Between the I and the World / Economic Existence
Levinas rejects the idea that the world exists ‘out there’, completely divorced from the
observer. The world is not merely “the sum of existing objects. The very idea of totality or of
a whole is only intelligible where there is a being that can embrace it.” Nevertheless, things in
the world do afford us an encounter with beings that aren’t us. How exactly does the existent
relate to this world it is a part of and yet separate from? Heidegger considered the world a
utilitarian ensemble of tools that referred back to the being of Dasein as care. Levinas
disagrees, seeing in the world an “ensemble of nourishments… To stroll is to enjoy the fresh
air, not for health but for the air.” Our relationship with things in the world is characterised
by enjoyment, not usefulness. The thing in the world, as the end of an intention, is a goal, a
limit, a value in and of itself. He compares beings in the world to Aristotle’s unmoved mover,
which, without moving itself, nevertheless arouses beings around it to movement. This idea
of nourishment Levinas calls a living from…. For Levinas, “life is an existence that does not
precede its essence”; rather, its essence (the contents it lives from) make up its worth and this
in turn constitutes existence (being). Life, as happiness, is already beyond ontology.
Enjoyment isn’t quite the ‘need’ we talked about earlier, where the object becomes
drawn into a totality with the subject. The intentionality of enjoyment “determines the other
while being determined by it” in what we have called “living from…”. In this, the alterity of
the world is overcome but in such a way that it remains separated. It is this feature that allows
us to be nourished by, and enjoy, objects in the world. Moreover, because we love our needs
and thrive on them, the ‘need’ we experience here for objects in our world doesn’t derive
from any lack in the subject.   
Although we naturally relate to the world through enjoyment, our relation with the world
is also a sojourn, or a dwelling at home with oneself. What this means is that everything in the
world can be grasped and tamed, or possessed by me. This grasping of the object is what
Levinas calls labour. Labour submerses the objects in the world in a plan, a project, relating
them to an end, a goal, centred on the individual, and in this, represents a movement, not
towards transcendence, but towards oneself. Possession and labour take things
and comprehend them, positing them as durable, as substance, as a support of qualities. The
hand (which we use to grasp) comprehends because it does not approach the thing as a sense-
organ through enjoyment, but rather through mastery and domination. It doesn’t consume the
thing it grasps, but gathers it, “keeps it, puts it in reserve, possesses it in a home.” In
labouring, possession reduces to the same what at first presented itself as other. Labouring
and possession in the separated interiority is what Levinas calls economic existence.
 
Living in the world like this creates an “interval… between the ego and the self”, which
we saw had become united in a materiality characterised by heaviness. The existence of the
world frees the subject from its initial materiality because it “permits it [the subject] to exist at
a distance from itself.” Instead of returning to ourselves (as we do in identity), our intention
carries us outwards away from ourselves to be absorbed by the things we enjoy.
Nevertheless, this salvation, the reprieve from the burden of ourselves, is ultimately
illusory, or at best, temporary. This is because in encountering things in the world, they never
appear as strange and completely separated from us; rather, we
encounter/understand/interpret/use them as things for us. In other words, they ultimately refer
back to us, returning us to our solitude, back where we started. Reason and knowledge can
never free the ego from its materiality. True salvation (or redemption) would require that we
encounter “an event that stops [our] everyday transcendence from falling back upon a point
that is always the same.”
 
One final aspect of our relation with the world worth mentioning is the milieu. This is
the background which objects in the world emerge from. Levinas calls this background,
the elemental, and examples include earth, sea, light, sky, etc. This is not a system of
references; rather, it is a non-possessable “common fund or terrain” out of which we enjoy the
object. Because the elemental lacks support (e.g. the earth upholds me without me worrying
about what upholds the earth), it appears mythical and mysterious. Nevertheless, the element
is not absurd (as in Camus) or alien (as in Heidegger’s thrownness). Any insecurity we feel
here is disturbing because it shares a similarity with the anonymous, menacing background of
the there is. Levinas is clear that any disquietude here doesn’t mar our happiness though. The
reason for this is that the I doesn’t exist and then have enjoyment added to it; “only in
enjoyment does the I crystallize.” Enjoyment therefore, isn’t something that can be taken
from us; it is what it means to exist in the world, to live from….
 
The Relation Between the I and the Other / Ethics
The Other (which for Levinas means the other I, or other consciousness) is the first
example of a complete alterity, or absolute other, we meet. The relation the I makes with this
absolute alterity is one that cannot be reduced to a totality. As Levinas says, the Other is a
Stranger, a being we cannot appropriate or completely know. The I is separated from itself but
within a totality that is Ego/Self; the world retained a sense of alterity but even in this it
referred back to the self; the Other however, is complete alterity. The relation with the Other
is the first true instance of metaphysical Desire we have encountered.     
This relation with the Other is an “idea of infinity”. Infinity is a thing which always
surpasses our idea of it; i.e. something we can never completely grasp because it always
exceeds any mental concept or form we might try to make it understandable with. The Other
is infinite in this way because it, being a cogito, like the I, is separate from itself. Since the
appearance of the Other has nothing to do with the subject; but rather, appears on its own
terms, Levinas calls this revelation, as opposed to disclosure (the way other beings appear
before us). Interestingly, this relation is what Levinas takes to be religion.
 
Works (things the Other does) don’t disclose the Other. They are merely signs which
need to be interpreted and ultimately give us a what in response to our questioning for a who.
We ask who such and such is and are told she is the president of XYZ company. This doesn’t
bring us any closer to who the Other is. The who we grasp in works is not actually expressed
in the work, is not actually present. Rather, he or she is “simply signified in it by a sign in a
system of signs…”
So, how can we establish a connection to the who of the Other? Through discourse.
By discourse, Levinas doesn’t mean spoken words; rather, he means the “production of
meaning”, which happens essentially through the face and expression. Because discourse
which facilitates the “face to face” relation with the Other is authentic and honest, Levinas
calls this justice. Discourse which approaches the Other obliquely is rhetoric, e.g. propaganda
and flattery, and is injustice. In authentic speech, the signifier attends the signified; the Other
is present in what they are saying.
 
In the face to face relation, the Other, as the idea of infinity, an alterity I can never grasp,
calls into question the I. From on high, an infinite height I can never transcend, the Other calls
me to account for myself. This is the moral summons and brings us to what Levinas
calls ethics. Ethics is deeper than simply following moral prescriptions or maximising
happiness; it is the face to face encounter with the Other in which my freedom is limited and I
am revealed as “arbitrary, guilty, and timid”. The Other calls my freedom into question in two
ways. First, as consciousness of failure (since I was unable to choose my own existence, I am
unjustified), and second, as consciousness of guilt (the Other is a resistance to my powers, not
by being stronger than me, but by revealing my spontaneity as impotent). I
am ashamed before the Other because my freedom turns out, “instead of being justified by
itself… to be arbitrary and violent.” It is a power which destroys its object by absorbing it
into a totality. To justify our freedom (find a foundation for it), we must begin with shame
before the Other; i.e. conscience, which is a submission in morality. The presence of the Other
then, doesn’t clash with freedom, it invests it, by calling into question the self and inviting us
to justice. We aren’t condemned to be free, we are “invested as freedom” by the Other.
The way the Other “puts into question the brutal spontaneity” of the same and imposes
an order of responsibility upon me, all takes place prior to the disclosure of being in general
(conceptual knowledge which aims at a totality) proving that the ethical plane precedes the
ontological one. 
 
Contingency (that is, the irrational) consists in egoism, unjustified in itself. Our relation
with the Other ends this contingency by introducing into me what was not in me. It therefore
founds Reason. Since reason is grounded in the Other and the relation with the Other is
produced through language (discourse), language precedes and conditions rational thought.
The signs of language don’t produce meaning; rather, meaning (grounded in the face to face)
makes the sign function possible.
In addition, our relation with the Other is the only way we can come to know the world.
To a being completely alone, universal doubt would loom everywhere. The world would be
“silent”. Descartes’ cogito is not a starting point for certitude because “the thinking subject
which denies its evidences ends up at the evidence of this work of negation… at a different
level from that at which it had denied.” [italics added] The I, alone and unjustified, cannot say
yes.
The world can only be posited in a conversation “between two points which do not
constitute a system… a totality.” The Other posits the world and stands ready, with discourse,
to interpret it. This is teaching (placing in me the idea of infinity). The entry of beings into a
proposition constitutes the original event of their taking on signification. Speech is
a giving for Levinas, a giving from the Other who “gives by thematizing” and presenting the
“phenomenon as given”. In doing so, what was merely apparition loses its phenomenality and
becomes fixed as a theme, an object. “The proposition relates the phenomenon to the existent,
to exteriority, to the Infinity of the other… The infinite, against which every definition stands
out, is not defined, does not offer itself to the gaze, but signals itself, not as a theme but as
thematizing”. “A meaningful world is a world in which there is the Other through whom the
world of my enjoyment becomes a theme having a signification.”
 
Despite all of the above, Levinas describes our relation with the Other as “war”. This is
because, in war, “beings refuse to belong to a totality, refuse community… affirm themselves
as transcending the totality, each identifying itself not by its place in the whole, but by
its self.” In short, war is a relation between beings exterior to totality, which is why it
adequately captures the relation between the I and the Other.   
 
Eros, Paternity, and Filiality
Given the importance Levinas places on the human relationship, one might have thought
that love would be a pinnacle of sorts, or ideal instance. This is not the case however. Love,
Levinas states, requires that the Other appear as the object of a need while, at the same time,
remaining an absolute alterity. The result is that in love, the Other appears, not in the open
frankness of the face, but while remaining hidden. The primary movement in Eros is sensible
in nature; namely, the caress. However, the caress is a sensibility which transcends the
sensible in that it “seeks what is not yet”. The Beloved it seeks to possess is neither the
“body-thing” of biology, nor the “lived body of the “I can””, nor the expression of the face.
The Beloved, at once graspable but intact and beyond grasp in her nudity (being alterity),
beyond object and face and thus beyond the existent, abides in what Levinas
calls virginity (Levinas seems to only approach Eros from the male perspective – perhaps this
is less surprising when one considers his Jewish faith). This is the “Eternal Feminine”, the
“future in the present”, the ungraspable. The passion in the caress which cannot grasp the
eternally possible feminine he calls voluptuousity. Profanation is the way the caress discovers
the hidden as hidden. 
The metaphysical relation with the Other is accomplished in society and signification.
The relationship with the feminine is realised in voluptuosity and is precisely the “very
contrary of the social relation. It excludes the third party, it remains intimacy, dual solitude,
closed society, the supremely non-public.” Voluptuosity thus “isolates the lovers, as though
they were alone in the world.” Levinas’ final word on love is that ultimately love loves
oneself in love and thus returns to oneself. Love is not a transcendence.
 
Paternity, becoming a father (again, what about maternity?), is a relation of
transcendence, although this is one of trans-substantiation. Apparently looking to validate
Judaeo-Christian dogma (specifically the relation of identity that supposedly characterised the
relation between Jesus (the Son) and God (the Father)), Levinas sees the child as both the I
(of the father) but also as an Other; “Paternity remains a self-identification, but also a
distinction within identification.” Through the child, a relation with the future is established.
Levinas calls this relation fecundity. It “denotes my future” but at the same time a future
“which is not a future of the same.” The future Levinas is talking about here is actually an
“absolute future, or infinite time”, in which the father lives forever. Fecundity, as Levinas
says, “continues history without producing old age.” When Eros leads to fecundity, it
ultimately delivers one from the encumberment of the self we talked about earlier, because in
it, the I can find itself in the self of an Other.
This relation also neatly clarifies why metaphysical Desire can’t be sated; because Desire
for the Other is a Desire for a Desire, a transcendence which transcends towards him who
transcends.
 
In filiality (the father-son relation), the son is but without being on his own account. The
father does not cause his son – rather he is his son. So, rather than being a break and a new
beginning, taking on the past as if for the first time, the son recaptures the past as a
“recourse”, or connection, through the father.
With all of the preceding, Levinas is clearly angling towards securing some kind of
legitimacy for Biblical promises of salvation and eternal life.
 
Truth
Truth does not undo distance; rather, it depends on separation. Truth is a quest outwards
to a being other than the same. We have already encountered this theme in metaphysical
Desire. This is the opposite of existentialism which locates truth in Being, thereby
overcoming the distance between the being and the other. “The truth of the will lies in its
coming under judgment; but its coming under judgment lies in a new orientation of the inner
life, called to infinite responsibilities.” Hence, truth lies only in the authentic, face-to-face
encounter with the Other.
 
Reason
Levinas rejects the identification of the will with reason (as in Spinoza, Kant, and Hegel)
because if individuals willed the universal or the rational, they would negate their own
particularity. This would result in the loss of all discourse and loss of the Other. “The ideal of
a being accomplished from all eternity, thinking only itself, can not serve as the ontological
touchstone for a life”.
 
Death
For the existent itself death is not its end, simply because it cannot experience its own
death. Death acquires its sense of menace or dread not through our knowledge of it but
because it is imminent but unforeseeable. “The unforeseeable character of death is due to the
fact that it does not lie within any horizon. It is not open to grasp.” Our relation to death is a
war with a transcendence, an absolute alterity. It is therefore a relation with an Other. My
relation with death is not the “fear of nothingness, but the fear of violence – and thus it
extends into fear of the Other, of the absolutely unforeseeable.”
Given this, Levinas rejects the idea that death can “drain all meaning from my life.”
Because death “threatens my from beyond”, because I am “exposed to a foreign will… who
does not form a part of my world”, this will, already betrayed (by death) but postponing this
betrayal, “exposed to death but not immediately, has time to be for the Other [the human
being], and thus to recover meaning despite death… The Desire into which the threatened will
dissolves no longer defends the powers of a will, but, as the goodness whose meaning death
cannot efface, has its center outside of itself.” Our relation with the Other, grounding our
existence in ethics, in something transcendent, gives us a source of meaning death cannot
threaten.
 
Art
Levinas has an interesting view of art. We have seen how, ordinarily, objects refer to an
inwardness (the I) which makes them parts of a world; our world. Art plucks them from this
world by “interposing an image of the thing between us and the thing” thereby causing us to
relate to the object indirectly through the intermediary of the picture. These objects no longer
refer to the inwardness of the I; they have been freed from the subject. This gives them a
“nakedness”, as abstractions. This nakedness Levinas calls their exoticism. The result is that
the exteriority doesn’t take us to the worldly object, but rather leaves us “wandering about in
sensation, in aesthesis”. Art restores to objects the character of “alterity” (otherness) and
“returns to the impersonality of elements”.