Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 21-30: Preface Levinas begins the preface by opposing to morality its opposite, that

of war. He writes, Everyone will readily agree that it is the highest importance to know whether we are not duped by morality. Does not lucidity, the minds openness upon the true, consist in catching sight of the permanent possibility of war (Totality and Infinity, hereafter cited as TI, p. 21). With war, we see the opposite of morality: War renders morality derisory (ibid.). This means, for Levinas, that if we want to understand morality, then we must first grasp war, which is its opposite. Now what characterizes war is totalization. One should not forget the reference of this word, like that of totality to the expressions popular during the Second World War: Totalitarianism, Total War, etc. In each case, there is the emphasis that nothing be left out: Total War, a phrase that Goebels employed, means the use of any and all means to prosecute the war. It means not distinguishing enemy civilians from enemy soldiers, etc. Totalitarianism means the inclusion of all life under state control. War, according to Levinas, is the example of totalization. In his words, war establishes an order from which no one can keep his distance; nothing henceforth is exterior. War does not manifest exteriority and the other as other (ibid.). Morality, as the opposite of this, is the order in which one maintains exteriority, one preserves the other as other. To enter into the moral realm is, in his words, to proceed from the experience of totality back to a situation where totality breaks up, a situation that conditions the totality itself. Such a situation is the gleam of exteriority or of transcendence in the face of the Other (autrui) (24). Levinass claim is that totalization, the denial of alterity, and, hence, war is a feature of Western philosophy. In his words, The visage [face] of being that shows itself in war is fixed in the concept of totality that dominates Western philosophy. (21). The ideal of such philosophy is that of gaining a total knowledge, one that leaves nothing out. Ontology manifests this in its attempt to grasp being qua being, that is, being in its totality. This can only be done by searching for the sense of beings, that is, by knowing them through concepts in their generality. In Levinas words, For the things the work of ontology consists in apprehending the individual (which alone exists) not in its individuality but in its generality (of which alone

there is science). The relation with the other is here accomplished through a third term [the concept], which I find in myself (TI, p. 44). Ontology, thus, does not grasp the other person as an individual. It apprehends the person through the generality of a concept. In doing so, it conceals the ethical relation, whose focus is the individual. It also reduces this relation to the realm of the same. It attempts to express it in the same terms as those of the generality that I find in myself. From Socrates to Heidegger, this attempt has characterized the West. In Levinas reading of the tradition, Western philosophy has most often been an ontology: a reduction of the other to the same by the interposition of a middle and neutral term that ensures the comprehension of being. This primacy of the same was Socrates teaching: to receive nothing of the Other but what is in me ... (ibid., p. 43). The reference here is to Platos doctrine of recollection, where to know is to recall what is already within one. The ideal of Socratic truth implied by this is clear according to Levinas. It rests on the essential self-sufficiency of the same, its identification in ipseity, its egoism. Philosophy is an egology (44). What links egotism, egology, and the reduction of the other to the same is, as Levinas elsewhere writes, the correlation between knowledge and being. The correlation indicates both a difference [between the two] and a difference that is overcome in the true. Here the known is understood and so appropriated by knowledge. In this, it is freed from its otherness. ... [B]eing as the other of thought ... becomes ... knowledge. (Ethics as First Philosophy, in The Levinas Reader, ed. Sen Hand. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1989, p. 76). It becomes the known as it is grasped in the circle of the same which is composed of our concepts.1 According to Levinas, modernity completes this appropriation insofar as it attempts to move from the identification and appropriation of being by knowledge toward the identification of being and knowledge (ibid., pp. 77-78). Here, its foremost exemplar is Heidegger himself. In Being and Time, according to Levinas, Heidegger makes Being inseparable from the comprehension of Being. In doing so, he embraces the same ideal as Socrates. For Heidegger, Being is already an appeal to subjectivity (TI, p. 45). As with Socrates, philosophy is egology, a study of the senses the ego imposes in its attempts to gain a total comprehension. This attempt to be all embracing is, as I said, the link between ontology, war, and totalization. To repeat Levinass words, war establishes an order from which no one can keep his distance; nothing henceforth is exterior. War does not manifest exteriority and the other as other (TI, p.21). Rather, its relation to alterity--e.g., the other nation, the other race-is that of conquest and absorption. This, according to Levinas, also holds for ontology.

In his words, The visage of being that shows itself in war is fixed in the concept of totality, which dominates Western philosophy in the form of its ontology. Such ontology involves the reduction of the other in the Same (ibid., p.43). This reduction occurs because the meaning of individuals (invisible outside this totality) is derived from the totality (ibid., p. 22). The totality, however, is only known through the imposition of concepts, that is, through generalities that miss the individuality of the individual. In their impersonality, i.e., in their relation to being in general, such concepts involve us in a situation where there are no individuals apart from the totality. Such concepts as impersonal are anonymous according to Levinas. They do not name individual names. With such concepts, we conceal the ethical relation. The unique relation to an existing individual has no field for its disclosure. The loss of this, however, is the state of tyranny and war. It is precisely in implying such a state that Heideggers ontology is seen by Levinas as a culmination of Western philosophy. Rather than involving any paradigm shift, ... Heideggerian ontology, which subordinates the relationship with the Other to the relation with Being in general, remains under obedience to the anonymous, and leads inevitably to another power, to imperialist domination, to tyranny (ibid., pp. 46-7). How are we to get beyond such tyranny? How do we go from war to peace? From the view of totality, the peace of empires rests on war. It is the result of victory. Or else it is a function of eschatology (the knowledge of the final things, the end of history), which is Hegels view. Here the unicity [uniqueness] of each present is incessantly sacrificed to a future appealed to [in order to] to bring forth its objective meaning (22). Thus, at the end of history, when we have the total picture, the real meaning of events will be shown. It will then become clear that all the oppositions that made history violent were necessary so that the final total synthesis could be achieved. Against such a view, Levinas proposes a view of prophetic eschatology that institutes a relation with being beyond the totality or beyond history (22). This is the view of the ultimate that the prophets of the Old Testament speak of. Eschatology here is a relationship with a surplus always exterior to the totality (22). The concept of such a surplus is that of infinity. What does Levinas mean by infinity? According to Levinas, infinity is produced in the relationship of the same with the other (26). Its mode of being, which is that of

infinition , is produced in the improbable feat whereby a separated being fixed in its identity, the same, the I, nonetheless contains in itself what it can neither contain nor receive solely by virtue of its identity (26-7). Here, subjectivity realizes the astonishing feat of containing more than it is possible for it to contain (27). Thus, infinity signifies the exceeding of limits (26). It implies both limits and their surpassing. The limits are those of the subject or I (the same). The surpassing of them is accomplished by the presence of the other as other. It occurs through the other that is in me and yet transcends me. Why should we assume such surpassing takes place? Levinas asserts: All knowing qua intentionality already presupposes the idea of infinity, which is pre-eminently nonadequation (27). How does it presuppose it? Intentionality comes from the Latin intentio. Stretching out, straining, and tension are the three basic meanings of intentio. From thence its meaning comes to be a directing of the mind towards anything (A Latin Dictionary, eds. C. Lewis and C. Short [London: Oxford University Press, 1966], p. 976). Levinas is claim is that this stretching out or straining is initially towards the other. It is a surpassing of the knower towards the known that exceeds the intention. It involves intending the other as exceeding ones intention, the other offering you more than what was contained in your intention. The three possibilities: the other offering me less (the mannequin), the other offering exactly what I intend (the thing), the other offering me more (the person). Claim: intentionality as the condition of consciousness being consciousness of what is not itself, of consciousness transcending itself to reach the object, involves this excess. As such, it implies a relation to the other. Why is this the case? Because objective knowledge involves others confirming ones assertions and, hence, involves a relation, not just to the object, but to such others. Such others, however, exceed the knowing relation. We can grasp them in their being only by intending that our intentions be surpassed. A further problem with trying to identify being and knowledge (and hence with totalization) is human action. Such action crosses the barriers of immanence (27). This means, as Levinas writes, The notion of act involves a violence essentially . What, in action, breaks forth as essential violence is the surplus of being over the thought that claims to contain [being], the marvel of the idea of infinity (27).

His point is that when we act, we do more than contemplate. There is more than the adequation of thought with its object in action. The action results in something effected a new situation that results from the act. There is a surplus of being as a result of the act. Something is present, is, has being, that was not there before. Thus, action surpasses the thought that claims to contain being by producing the new. It involves the idea of infinity in the sense of both presupposing limits (those of thoughts) and exceeding them. What action produces exceeds thought in the sense that existence or being is not just the thought of the existence or being. What we confront in action is the incarnation of consciousness as human consciousness, that is, its incarnation in an embodied human subject that acts. Such incarnation is comprehensible only if, over and beyond adequation, the overflowing of the idea by its ideatum, that is, the idea of infinity [as such overflowing] moves consciousness (ibid.). The the overflowing of the idea by its ideatum is the overflowing of the content we think of by the existence that bears this content. When we act to produce this existence, we presuppose this surplus that is actual existence. Insofar as we take it acting, consciousness, Levinas writes, does not consist in equaling being with representation but rather in overflowing [these representations] and in accomplishing events whose ultimate signification (contrary to the Heideggerian conception) does not lie in disclosing (27-28). The reference here is on the one hand to Heidegger's pragmatic theory of disclosure: I disclose things as material for my projects by acting to achieve my ends. On the other hand, it is to the fact that action does not just disclose (as if it only revealed what already was there waiting to be disclosed). It actually creates the new. It surpasses disclosure by creating what was not yet there to be disclosed before the action. The point here is that intentionality, where thought remains an adequation with the object, does not define consciousness at its fundamental level. At its fundamental level, intentionality is a stretching of consciousness beyond itself. Thus, as Levinas continues, all knowing qua intentionality already presupposes the idea of infinity, which is preeminently non-adequation (27). If this is true, then ethics with its focus on the other as other, is not something posterior to epistemology taken as the science of knowing. It is prior to it. Thus, Levinas writes, What counts is the idea of the overflowing of objectifying thought by a forgotten experience from which it lives (28). This forgotten experience is the ethical, where the essential of the ethical is its transcendent intention (29). Here, already of itself, ethics is an optics; it is a mode of vision like the sensible and the intellectual modes of vision (ibid.). When we recognize this, then we cannot say that activity rests on cognitions that illuminate it, that is, first we have to know, then we can act. In a certain sense, ethical action is its own seeing, its own relation to the truth.

The claim here is that the welcoming of the face and the work of justice are not interpretable in terms of [Heideggerian disclosure or theoretical truth]. Yet they do condition the birth of truth itself (28). They condition the showing of things as they are by conditioning the action of disclosure. If this action is unethical, if it is the action of war, of totalization, we get the evidence of war, the evidence that refutes morality. But this evidence of war has been maintained in an essentially hypocritical civilization, one claiming to be attached both to the True and the Good, but in fact antagonistic to them (24). If fact, such civilization cannot really account for the knowledge it claims, since such knowledge involves infinity, that is, surpassing. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 33-48: I, A, 1-4 This reading begins with Levinas describing the metaphysical desire. This desire is turned towards the elsewhere and the otherwise and the other. (33). Note: on this sense of metaphysicsthe true world is elsewhere: Nietzsche It is not a desire for something I can possess. The other metaphysically desired is not other like the bread I eat, the land in which I dwell, the landscape I contemplate (ibid.). The reason for this is that the things I can possess can becomes mine, can lose their alterity. In Levinass words, Their alterity is reabsorbed into my own identity as a thinker or a possessor. By contrast: The metaphysical desire tends towards something else entirely, towards the absolutely other. (ibid.). What we have here is desire in a very special sense. It is not desire based on need, a desire based on being indigent. It is not a longing for returni.e., a return to a previous state of satisfaction (ibid.). Not being based on need, it is, Levinas writes, a desire that cannot be satisfied by the fulfillment of need (34). Water completes thirst, food hunger, and so on. But this desire desires beyond what could complete it. It is a desire that nourishes itself with its hunger. In this case, the relation of the desire to the desired is a relationship that is not the disappearance of distance (not a closing the gap between the desire and the desired). Rather it is a desire without satisfaction which understands the remoteness, the alterity, the exteriority of the other (ibid.). This understanding of the exteriority of the other is an understanding that the relation between the desire and the desired cannot be comprehended, that is, brought under some embracing concept.

The relation of the desire to the desired that is based on need can be comprehended. The desired and the desired can be put together in a totalitythus, hunger and food and be comprehended together in the concept of a sentient, organic being. But here the formal characteristic of the desired is to be other. This alterity makes up its content. Thus, the desire and the desired cannot be totalized, since the very content of the desired is that of escaping such totalization (35). For the same reason, the relation between the desiring person (the individual that has this metaphysical desire) and the desired (the transcendent other) is not a reversible relation. As Levinas puts this, the reversibility of the relation would couple them the one to the other; they would complete one another in a system visible from the outside. The intended transcendence would be thus reabsorbed into the unity of the system, destroying the radical alterity of the other (35-6). As he also expresses this: the same goes unto the other differently than the other unto the same. In fact, the radical separation between the same and the other means precisely that it is impossible to place oneself outside of the correlation between the same and the other so as to record the correspondence or non-correspondence of this going with this return. His point is that there is no outside here. If there were, both the same and the other would be reunited under one gaze, and the absolute distance that separates them would be filled in (that is, overcome by the grasp of them together) (p. 36). Another way of putting it would be to say that if the relation were reversible, then one could look at it from both sides. One could start with the other just as well as starting with the same (the I), but this would mean to have the other within ones grasp, to comprehend it as a starting point (that is, as an I just like oneself.) The very content of the other however denies this possibility. Now to say that the relation is non-reversible means that it has only one starting point this, Levinas says, is the I (ibid.). The I as the starting point is the same. It is the primal identity, the primordial work of identification. Not that it remains unchanged, rather it is identical in its very alterations. It represents them to itself and thinks them. (36) Even when it faces itself, and harkens to itself thinking, it overcomes the implicit subject object split and merges with itself (ibid.). The doctrine here harks back to Descartess assertion that it is one and the same I or ego that engages in all the different acts of thinking, perceiving, willing, remembering, hoping, etc. A further reference is to Kants assertion that the I think must accompany all our representations. All consciousness points back to an I as its center. Levinas extends this by noting that this work of the Is self-identification involves the world. The world is not really other than the I. In fact, the I identifies itself by existing

in the world at home with itself. It finds in the world a place and a home (37). Here dwelling is the very mode of maintaining oneself (ibid.). Thus, I am the person who built and dwells in this house, who has carved out this career for himself, etc. This does not mean that the world doesnt resist my efforts, that I dont have to struggle. But it is in overcoming this resistance that I make the world my home, that I fashion my concrete presence in the world. The world is like the air that resists the birds wings in flight and thus allows it to fly by pushing against it. In Levinass words, I am at home with myself in the world because it offer itself to me or resist possession (38). In neither case, do I get out of the same. In both cases, the identification of the same is the concreteness of egotism. In a veiled critique of Heidegger, he adds, The reversion of the alterity of the world to self-identification must be taken seriously; the moments of this identificationthe body, the home, labor, possession, economy are the articulations of this structure [of the same] (ibid.). Heideggers existential analytic takes account of none of these in articulating the structure of Dasein as Being-in-the-world. Dasein doesnt work, own things, have a home. He is simply an abstract chooser. What then is the object of this metaphysical desire, what is this absolutely other? Levinas writes: the absolutely other is the Other (autruithe other person). How can the other person be other? Two ways of putting this: The first is in terms of Kants distinction between inner sense (which grasps temporal relations) and outer sense (which grasp spatial relations). Inner sense grasps temporal relations by grasping memories and anticipations. I cannot grasp these through outer sensei.e., through the perception of the external world. I have to turn inward. But to grasp the other in himself is to grasp his present perceptions, his memories and anticipations. It is to directly apprehend the content of his consciousness. But if I were to do this, his consciousness would merge with my own. My inner sense would include both my own contents and his. As a result, he would not be other but part of myself. The point: the very intention to the other person as he is in himself cannot by definition be fulfilled. The very content of his alterity prevents this. The intention to the other thus intends its own surpassing. I intend you as you (as a person) insofar as I intend what cannot fulfill my intentions. The second way of putting this:

The other persons actions are based on his interpretations of a given situation. On the most basic level, interpretation is anticipatory. Thus, if I interpret the shadows that I see under a bush to be a cat hiding there, I anticipate that as I move forward to get a closer look, I will more and more clearly see the cat. Now, we anticipate on the basis of past experience. We project forward such experience, as it were, in interpreting what we encounter. Now, neither the others memories nor anticipations are available to me. Thus, neither his interpretations nor the actions based on these can be grasped in terms of their origin. The other, then, on a deep level remains unpredictable. In fact, were I able to completely predict him, he would not be other. Such prediction could only be based on an access to his inner sense, but I dont and cannot have this. Thus, on a profound level, the other escapes my control. In Levinass words, But stranger also means the free one. Over him I have no power. He escapes my grasp by an essential dimension, even if I have him at my disposal. He is not wholly in my site (39). Thus, even if I have you at my disposalin the extreme case, I imprison you, tie you up you still escape my grasp in an essential dimension. You still remain a person, not a thing. Thus, the relation between the I and the other is not reversible because the I has to transcend itself (transcend its knowledge as based on its memories and anticipations) in desiring the other. Only in exceeding itself, can the I intend the other. In Levinass words, The irreversibility of the relation can be produced only if the relation is effected by one of the terms as the very movement of transcendence (ibid.). The I engages in this movement when it intends the other. Concretely, this surpassing relation to the other, Levinas writes, is primordially enacted as conversation. In this conversation, the samethat is, the Ileaves itself. As he also puts this, A relation whose terms do not form a totality can hence be produced within the general economy of being only as proceeding from the I to the other, as a face to face, [produced] as delineating a distance in depth[the distance] of conversation, of goodness, of desire (ibid.). Thus, when we talk with (as opposed to talking at or talking about) someone, we do not desire that they simply mirror our sentiments. We desire that they tell us something new, something we havent thought about. All of this points to the fact that, for Levinas, the face of the other is a speaking face capable of exceeding the said in speaking.

(This answers the common criticism that the face of the other could be that of a bat, as Todd May wrote). Thus, in speaking with you, I intend you as exceeding my intentions which are based on what has already be said. I expect you will add something new to the conversation. Once again, my intention intends its own surpassing. In doing so, I suspend my own interpretation to hear yours. I wait for you to speak your mind. I then respond. But this response calls forth a further response from you, one that transcends what has already been said. This transcendence is the break up of the totality of the said. As Levinas writes, Conversation maintains the distance between me and the other, [it maintains] the radical separation asserted in transcendence which prevents the reconstitution of the totality (40). This does not mean that in speaking I renounce my egotism. It does, however, mean that conversation consists in recognizing in the other a right over this egotism. It involves the need of justifying oneself. (40). Thus, in conversation, I admit the right of the other to call me into question. I see myself as called to respond to this question. With this we have Levinass definition of ethics. A calling into question 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 (43). Note the agreement with Kant. Ethics is self limitation. I do not do all that I have power to do with regard to the other. For Kant, however, reason is the ground of this self-limitation. Reason gives me the categorical imperative. The universalization of my maxim makes it applicable to all. If I can lie, everyone can. But then lies are impossible, no one would believe them. If I am a willing subject, so is every one else. As a willing subject, I am not a means to an end but that for the sake of which things are done. I am an end in itself. So is everyone else. Therefore I cannot treat the other as a means. As a willing subject, he would not will that I he be lied to. The point: for Kant, the ethical relation is completely reversible. For Levinas it is not. It begins with my acknowledgment of the otherness of the other, in particular, with his calling into question of my spontaneity. The result of such calling into question is my need to justify myself, my need to respond to the interpretation of the other. Now, the claim of Levinas is that this ethics (taken as metaphysics) precedes ontology. Ontology is comprehension of being, it is the reduction of being to the same. According to Levinas, Ontology, which reduces the other to the same, promotes freedomthe

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freedom that is the identification of the same, not allowing itself to be alienated by the other (42). What we have here is the equation of freedom and sovereignty (of freedom with the power of rule, of command). According to Levinas, the ethical relation [is] opposed to first philosophy which identifies freedom and power, (47) The equation of freedom and power occurs because we need each other to survive. We are dependent. Either we say that freedom is not opposed to such dependence, that is, we achieve freedom through co-operation or else, equating freedom and autonomy (independence), we control others, we rule over them, to insure our freedom. Here freedom is identified with the power to rule over others. According to Arendt, this is an ancient error that has constantly led political philosophy astray. Levinas sees this error as present in Western rationality. Its principle is that of a reason that sees nothing in the world alien to itself (Hegel). It is one where we equate the real and the rational. As Levinas puts this, Cognition is the deployment of this identity; it is freedom. That reason in the last analysis would be the manifestation of a freedom, neutralizing the other and encompassing him, can come as no surprise once it was laid down that sovereign reason knows only itself, that.nothing other limits it (43). The equation of this notion of rationality with power (as in the assertion made by Francis Bacon, that knowledge is power) follows as a matter of course. The ultimate result of this view of rationality is to assert, with Heidegger, the primacy of freedom over ethics (45). Levinas concern is to present an alternative view, one where we do not equate reason, freedom, sovereignty and power. He claims that ethics is not contrary to truth; it goes to being in its absolute exteriority, and accomplishes the very intention that animates the movement unto truth.(47). There are two reasons for this: the first is that the intention that animates the movement to truth is the intention of consciousness to transcend itself so as to grasp what is not itself. The second is that the notion of the self as independent of others is unrealistic. According to Levinas, I cannot disentangle myself from society with the Other (ibid.). Note: Arendt asserts the same entanglement in the Human Condition. The equation of freedom and sovereignty is an error insofar as it ignores this entanglement. Her assertion is that no man can be free, only men (in the plural) can.

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Thus, behind the said of ontology is the saying that generates it. In Levinass words, This saying to the other, this relationship with the other as interlocutor, this relation with an existentprecedes all ontology; it is the ultimate relation in Being. Ontology presupposes metaphysics (48). The claim here is that being qua being includes alterity. Its very sense includes a certain excess. The others whom I interact with and construct a common world, a world that is there for all of us, the objective really existing world, constantly introduce newness into this world. They animate it. They make it alive, rather than a fixed, dead, an already accomplished totality. But I can grasp this world only if understand that the meaning of being includes others. Heideggers failure is in not grasping this. Totality and Infinity, 48-64: I, A, 5, B, 1-2 The first part of the reading finishes up Levinass attempt to delineate the idea of infinity. It begins with a kind of meditation on Descartess description of the idea of God. Descartes, to prove that he is not alone in the world, has to show that not all of his ideas could be generated by himself. He affirms that the idea of God, as an infinite substance, is one such idea. He then goes on to assert that since God as infinite cannot be a deceiver (all deception being a ruse of the weak), God could not have been deceptive in giving him the inclination to believe that external objects exist. Therefore they do exist. Levinas draws from this proof the distinction of the I and God. Descartes first evidence revealing the I and God in turn without merging them characterizes the very meaning of separation. Descartes cannot generate the idea of God. The reality corresponding to this idea surpasses his finitude. This means that inherently, essentially, the I and God are distinct. In Levinass words, The separation of the I is thus affirmed to be non-contingent, non-provisional. The distance between me and God, radical and necessary, is produced in being itself. (48). Why is this important? For one thing, it breaks with the transcendence of religions which emphasizes participation, submergence of the individual and God (ibid.). Thus, Descartes has the idea of the infinite God, but he cannot contain it, cannot be merged with it. In Levinass words, The relation of the same with the other . is in fact fixed in the situation described by Descartes in which the I think maintains (with the infinite it can nowise contain and from which it is separated) a relation called [the] idea of infinity. (ibid.). The content of the object of this ideathat is, Godis given by the infinite distance between the idea and the reality the idea represents [the ideatum, which is the reality of God]. I cannot generate the idea of God, it must come from God and nowhere else since

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the idea is of what infinitely surpasses me. Thus, the transcendent [God] is the sole ideatum of which there can only be an idea in us [as opposed to the reality as when we generate the idea]; [the transcendent] is infinitely removed from its idea, that is, exterior, because it is infinite. (49). What is this idea of the infinite? Leaving Descartes behind, Levinas asserts that it is produced as desire, not the desire generated by need that the possession of the desirable slakes. What we have here is a disinterested desiregoodness. (50). Here I desire the good of the other. I desire to become good by exercising goodness. The presence of God to me is that of the face of the other. In its presence, my desire turns into generosity, incapable of approaching the other with empty hands. This generosity can express itself in witnessing as described by Ethics and Infinity. Here I manifest Gods goodness in my generosity to another. This manifestation bears witness to Gods goodness in that I can never do enough. The generosity also appears in conversation, in responding to the other by answering him. With this we have Levinass definition of a face: The way in which the other presents himself, exceeding the idea of the other in me, we here name [the] face (ibid.). This face each moment destroys and overflows the plastic image it leaves on me. It does not manifest itself by such an image, it expresses itself. (51). The face is the saying that expresses itself in the said. The expressing that results in the expression is the first content of expressing (51). Thus, as Levinas adds, To approach the other in conversation is to welcome his expression, in which at each instant he overflows the idea [that] a thought would carry away from it (ibid.). The overflowing is his adding to the said. It is his excessive presence, his exceeding the presence that he has just verbally presented by adding to it. In fact, teaching is possible only on the assumption of this overflowing. In Levinass words, insofar as it is welcomed, this conversation is a teaching. Teaching is not reducible to [recollection]; it comes from the exterior and brings me more than I contain. (ibid.). As part of this, it calls us into question. It makes us wait upon the other, on what he has to say (on his interpretation of the situation, which is not our own). It thus puts the spontaneous freedom within us into question. It commands and judges it and brings it to its truth. What we have in the face is the philosophical priority of the existent over Being. (51) The reference here is to Heidegger. The existent is the other. It is before Being (or the sense of Being), which is understood by Heidegger as a standard for disclosure. According to Levinas, To say that the existent is disclosed only on the openness of Being is to say that we are never directly with the existent as such (52).

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The existent in this, Heideggerian view, is mediated by the standard for disclosure. It is secondary to the overall project that the standard animates. Think of trying to disclose someone by the standards of physics, biology of sociology, of psychology. In each case only those aspects of the individual appear that correspond to the standards. In no case does the existent put the standards into question. At the end of this description of the infinite, Levinas remarks that he is trying to find a relation with the other that is neither one of immanence where at the end of history all alterity is overcome in a grand synthesis nor one of an elsewhere that one can reach only in the privileged moments of liturgical, mystical elevation or in dying. (52) What he wants is a relation with the other that does not result in a divine or human totality, a relation that in fact breaks up all totalizations (ibid.). Against historicism, he remarks when a man truly approaches the other he is uprooted from history (ibid.). In Heideggarian terms, one escapes ones historical situation, but not by escaping into the they world (the world where everydayness and hackneyed opinions reign). The next chapter begins a complex description of the I or self. Infinity signifies transcendence. It thus implies the I as that which is transcended. To understand infinity we have to understand its exceeding which means we have grasp what it exceeds, the I or self. In part, Levinass account mirrors Heidegger's. Both take time as crucial. Both see human being as ahead of itself. Thus Levinas writes, by virtue of time, this being is not yetwhich does not make it the same as nothingness, but maintains it at a distance from itself. In other words, ahead of myself, I am a distance from myself. As for my past, I transcend it in that I use it as material for my projects. The project is the not-yet, the after-effect in Levinass terms. He writes, For in [thought] the After or the Effect conditions the Before or the Cause It conditions it, because we view the before (or the past) in terms of the not-yet, that is, in terms of what we want to accomplish. Thus, on the one hand, we are rooted in the past, in a situation [which Levinas calls the site]. On the other, we transcend it, we remain free from it by virtue of the interpretation based on our not yet that we give to it. In Levinass words, Likewise, by virtue of the psychism [or thought] the being that is in a site remains free with regard to that site; posited in a site in which it maintains itself, it is that which comes thereto from elsewherethis elsewhere being its future as determined by its projects. One may think of this being (of Dasein) as integrated into its situation, of resolutely accepting it. But against this Heideggarian view, Levinas remarks, In reality it is so integrated only once it is dead. Life permits it an as-for-me, a leave of absence [from the situation], a postponement [of its determination], which is precisely its interiority.

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This interiority involves the existent being set up and having its own destiny to itself. It has a destiny because it has its future. Thus, interiority institutes an order where everything is pending, where what is no longer possible historically remains always possible (55). This remaining possible comes precisely from our being able to have our own destiny, of being able to transcend our situation. For Heidegger, we cannot really transcend our situation. All the possibilities from which we choose in order to project ourselves into the future are given by our historical situation. Being resolute is simply accepting this situation. For Levinas, the I has an interiority in its ability to separate itself from its historical situation. This ability shows itself in memory. Memory makes the past available to me as material for my future. Its presence is to determined by my not yet. My memory does not record the dead weight of the past determining me historically, it rather is a basis for my freeing myself from the past. In Levinass words, By memory, I ground myself after the event, retroactively By memory I assume [the past] and put [it] back into question. Memory, after the event, assumes the passivity of the past and masters it. Memory as an inversion of historical time is the essence of interiority. It inverts it, since here not the past but the future is determinative (56). Why isnt the future just the projection forward of the possibilities given by the past? Levinass ultimate answer is that this occurs because of the other. The other, not our projected past, is the future. S/he introduces the transcendent element into this accounting. In other words, what frees us from determinism is that our historical situation is intersubjectiveit involves others with their different pasts and hence different interpretations of our common situation. In coming to terms with these different interpretations, we create the new future. It becomes a matter of our choices. At the basis of newness is the fact that we all have our private histories, histories given by our unique perspectives. Memory here as presenting what is uniquely my own gives me my interiority. It is this that give me a unique future, one that cannot be simply absorbed or determined by a given historical situation. [note: if he didnt assert this then no one could serve as an Other, with a different past and a different interpretation, to someone else] For Levinas, death is agony because it collapses the temporal extension required for this projecting forward from our unique past. We have no more future to breath in. In Levinass words, Dying is agony because in dying a being does not come to an end [in his projecting forward] while coming to an end; he has no more time, that is, he suffocates (56). Now this very interiority is what separates selves from one another and from history. Levinas writes: This separation is radical only if each being has its own time, that is, its

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interiority, if each time is not absorbed into the universal time (57). This means, on the one hand, psychic life does not exhibit itself in history; the discontinuity of the inner life interrupts historical time. In fact, the reality of history has to be interpreted not just in terms of the givenness of determining situations. One also has to view it from interior intentions, from the secrecy that interrupts the continuity of historical time. This is because, Only on the basis of this secrecy is the pluralism of society possible (58). As he also puts this, the inner life is the unique way for the real to exist as a plurality. It is because of this life that we can say that the fundamental condition of humans is plural. It is also because of this that this condition involves the newness that comes from the confrontation of (and choice between) different interpretations of our given situation. Levinas here has a dual purpose. On the one hand, he wants to contest Heidegger's historical determinism. On the other, he wants to establish the interiority of Dasein. For Heidegger, Dasein does not have interiority. It exists realizing its projects and is disclosed as such. This means, that its ontological status is that of being-in-the-world. I am the person who has accomplished (or is accomplishing) these projects in the world. As being-in-the-world, Dasein is essentially outside of itself. It is, ontologically, transcendence. It has no need of another to transcend itself. For Levinas, then, such interiority must be shown in order to have the right to assert the metaphysical relation of transcendence (the transcendence of self brought on by the other). Interestingly, Levinas defines atheism in terms of this separation of selves. He writes: One can call atheism this separation so complete that the separated being maintains itself in existence all by itself without participating in the Being from which it is separated one lives outside of god, at home with oneself; one is an I, an egotism. The soul being an accomplishment of separation, is naturally atheist (58). Why call this atheism? Perhaps because of the association of God with the Other. Levinas now turns to the question of truth. Truth relates to the theme of exteriority, because as Levinas says, Without separation, there would not have been truth; there would have been only being. According to Levinas, truth in the risk of ignorance, illusion and error, does not undo distance, does not result in the union of the knower and the known, does not issue in totality (60). The truth that Levinas is referring to is the relation in which the subject has to go outside of itself. It cannot make the truth. The truth of what it asserts is in the hands of what it speaks of, not itself. Thus, only if the book is on the table is my assertion, the book is on the table, true. I do not make it true. Something outside of me does.

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Here, once again, Levinas is attempting to present an alternative to Heideggers position. According to Heidegger, truth is manifestation, unhiddenness, disclosure. It occurs through Dasein's disclosive behavior, that is, through its practical activities as it uses things to gain its ends. The origin of truth is Dasein's need. Dasein is a being for whom its being is an issue. It cannot take such being for granted. It needs the things of the world to accomplish and maintain this being. Thus, its circumspective concern is constantly regarding them in terms of its projects. It reveals them by disclosing their what is it for (Wozu), their purpose for its projects. Against this view, Levinas asserts [The knowing subjects] aspiration to truth is not the hollowed-out outline of the being it lacks. It is not an aspiration based on need. Rather to seek and to obtain truth is to be in a relation because in a certain sense one lacks nothing (61). For Heidegger, truth as manifestation, is simply a consequence of our being in the world. It is a function of our enrootedness in being as we accomplish our projects. Levinas, by contrast, asserts: Despite the theses of the philosophy of existence, this contact [of the knower and the known] is not nourished from a prior enrootedness in being (ibid.). It is not a function of our Being-In, to use Heideggers term. Continuing to contrast his notion of truth, Levinas asserts that truth is not a function of participation. Thus, with Plato, Levinas asserts, the quest for truth unfolds in the apparition of the forms. But he adds, the distinctive characteristic of the forms is precisely their epiphany at a distance (60). I dont participate in the forms when I know what they instantiate. The relation of the knower to the known is not a participation in the form (=being) of the known. It is not a relation where somehow, as Plato thought, I become the knownwhere, for example, I become eternal in knowing eternal things. Lets return to Levinass statement, to seek and to obtain truth is to be in a relation because in a certain sense one lacks nothing (61). He clarifies this by saying that such seeking is a going towards the other in Desire (ibid.). This means, he adds, the idea of exteriority which guides the quest for truth is possible only as the idea of infinity. This idea of exteriority (of infinity) guiding the quest for truth, Levinas writes, does not proceed from the I, nor from a need of the I gauging exactly its own voids; here the movement proceeds from what is thought and not from the thinker (ibid.). The point Levinas is getting at is that if my relation to truth is based on my needs, on exactly [my] own voids, then it is relative to me. My needs determine my projects, which determines what I disclose and how I disclose it, which thus determines truth as disclosure in the Heideggarian sense.

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In Levinass words, To recognize truth to be disclosure is to refer it to the horizon of him who discloses. The disclosed being is relative to us and not (according to itself). Here, we disclose only according to a project (64). But since such truth is not determined by the object according to itself, the disclosed cannot stand against me. It cannot convict me of error. It is a truth without risk. The crucial distinction here is, Levinas writes, between desire and need: desire is an aspiration that the desirable animates; it originates from its object; it is revelation whereas need is a void of the soul; it proceeds from the subject (62). Thus, as motivated by desire, truth is sought in the other, but by him who lacks nothing (ibid.). What Levinas is implying is that Heideggers pragmatic account of truth is seriously lacking. What it lacks is the disinterestedness of theoria. As Aristotle puts this in the beginning of the Metaphysics, the theoretical sciences are different from the practical ones because they are not directed either to our pleasure or to our necessities. They appeared first in those places where men had leisure. Hence it was in Egypt that the mathematical arts were first developed. (Metaphysics, 918b 2225). Such sciences begin not in need but in wonder. They are cherished on their own and in the interests of knowledge (982a 16). One engages in them in the pursuit of knowledge and not for some useful end (982b 20). He also writes: other sciences are more necessary, but not more excellent than these (983a 11). There is a profound difference between being necessary and being excellent. The former refers to us, the latter refers to the object. (There is, however, a secondary reference to the subject insofar as the more excellent sciences, as not driven by need, are appropriate to free enquirers). Thus, for Aristotle, these more excellent sciences begin when one is free from need, when one has leisure. The motivation here is not some advantage but simply the truth. Such truth is correlated to our freedom to enquire. Levinass claim is that this relation to the truth, which is not based on need, is metaphysical in his sense. It is motivated by the metaphysical desire. Rather than use the other, I respond to it. I let it put me into question. Instead of thrusting my interpretation on it, I let it guide me. (Cf. Simon Weils point in The Right Use of School Studies. In doing a translation from Greek, one learns to wait [attender] till one has looked up the words, till one understands the grammar, the intention of the author, in short, one learns attention. One learns the moral basis for discovering the truth.)

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According to Levinas, this moral basis becomes apparent when engages in conversation. In his words, truth arises where a being separated from the other is not engulfed in him, but speaks to him. Separation and interiority, truth and language constitute the categories of the idea of infinity or metaphysics (62). Thus, the broad claim here is that truth is a conversation, one where one lets oneself be led by the object. One poses a question to nature, and waits for a response which may in fact put ones categories into question. One has to go out of oneself in a different way than need to engage in theoria. One needs to surpass oneself and ones needssuch surpassing is, of course, implicit in the idea of infinity. The search for truth is, at bottom, then, a moral relation according to Levinas. There is an analogue here with Kants equation of reason with freedom. The reason he has in mind is not practical, where the need for the object determines the action. It is theoretical. Universalizing my maxim, I look at the action in itself. I ask if it could be consistently willed by everyone independent of their circumstances (that is, if they were free from the determination by such circumstances). If it can pass this, then it is moral. It is also appropriate to my status as a free human being, as not being controlled by such circumstances. Similarly, I look at others not as a means to my ends but as ends in themselves. I thereby regard them in themselves (theoretically in Aristotles sense). Our reading finishes up with Levinas remarking that Desire marks a sort of inversion In it being becomes goodness. It becomes preoccupied with another being. There occurs an inversion of its very exercise of being. This inversion is in Dasein. It is no longer directed towards the affirmation of its own being, but rather the affirmation of the other. This, according to Levinas, affects the mode of disclosure that it engages in. It makes it capable of truth. Totality and Infinity, 64-81: I, B, 3-7 Let me begin by reviewing my remarks regarding Levinass account of truth. According to Levinas, truth in the risk of ignorance, illusion and error, does not undo distance, does not result in the union of the knower and the known, does not issue in totality. (60). The truth that Levinas is referring to is the relation in which the subject has to go outside of itself. It cannot make the truth. The truth of what it asserts is in the hands of what it speaks of, not itself. This is the risk of truth. A further element emphasized by Levinas is that the relation to truth is not based on need. Truth is not manifestation brought on by some project that manifest things in their instrumental value.

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Truth is based on responding to the other, which implies letting it put one into question. Instead of thrusting my interpretation on it, I let it guide me. Attention to the other is here the moral basis for truth. Attention is not absorption. This becomes apparent when one engages in conversation. In Levinas words, truth arises where a being separated from the other is not engulfed in him, but speaks to him. (62). His general claim is that truth is like a conversation, one where one lets oneself be led by what one is inquiring about. One poses a question to nature, and waits for a response which may in fact put ones categories into question. One has to go out of oneself in a different way than need to do this. One has to surpass oneself and ones needs. Here, as Levinas says, we have to let the object manifest itself according to itself independently of every position we have taken in its regard. It consists in the being telling itself to us expressing itself. It is present as directing this very manifestation present before the manifestation, which only manifests it (65). Thus, here, in the moral relation to object, we let the object take the lead. We assume it is present before the manifestation, directing the manifestation. We disclose it not according our needs, but rather according the way it shows itself to our attentive regard. This is the attention that waits for it to take the lead. (Simon Weil). It is not imposing on it our preconceived ideas. The primary example of such a relation is, of course, the relation to another person. In speaking to the other, the saying always surpasses the said. This surpassing points to the other person as beyond my present categories, as, in fact, modifying them. It points to me as having to wait for the other to give his interpretation of what is happening, an interpretation that does not necessarily coincide with my own. As Levinas says, Discourse is not simply a modification of intuition (or of thought), but an original relation with exterior being (66). We have this relation with the face of the other. As a face, it exceeds what we can intuit. In Levinass words, The manifestation of the face is already discourse. This holds especially for the eyes: The eyes break through the mask the eye does not shine, it speaks (ibid.). This is because the eyes point to the other as a seer and not just as seen. As a seer, the other already exceeds the seen. With this we have Levinass critique of Husserls theory of recognition, according to which I recognize the other as a subject like me by transferring to him my apprehensions of the world. For Husserl we have the analogy: My subjectivity (that is my interpretations of my situation) is to my behavior as the others subjectivity is to his behavior. Thus, if his behavior is like mine, I assume his subjectivity is like mine. I then

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recognize him as a subject like me, an alter ego. Implicit here is the fact that my interpretation of the situation sets the standard for what counts as the behavior manifesting subjectivity. For Levinas, it is not I who set the standard, but the other. I have to wait on his interpretation. Thus, the primordial sphere, which is that of my subjectivity, turns to the absolutely other only on call from the other person. Revelation [of the other] constitutes a veritable inversion of objectifying cognition. (67). It is an inversion since I dont sent the interpretation, the other does. It is precisely a recognition of this fact that allows me to recognize the other person as other. Returning to the theme of discourse, Levinas writes, The other is maintained and confirmed in his heterogeneity as soon as one calls on him. He speaks, and then he adds to what he says. As Levinas puts it, his speech consists in coming to the assistance of his wordin being present. He is present in an incessant recapture of instants that flow by through a presence that comes to their assistance, that answers for them (69). He recalls and modifies the said (69). The opposite of such discourse is what Levinas call rhetoric. To say that the other has his interpretation of the situation is to say that the other is free. He is not under my sway. According to Levinas, the specific nature of rhetoric (of propaganda, flattery, diplomacy, etc.) consists in corrupting this freedom What I do when I engage in rhetoric is manipulate the other. I dont just solicit his ascent to what I say, I try to control it. Doing this, I corrupt the truth, that is, its possibility of revelation of something new. I also corrupt justice, at least when I define it as Levinas does as this face to face approach, in conversation (71). Levinas thus writes, Justice is access to the Other outside of rhetoric, which is ruse, emprise, and exploitation. And in this sense justice coincides with the overcoming of rhetoric (72). Why would we call this justice? Justice is, according to Aristotle, fair exchange, one agreed on by both parties. It is a voluntary exchange. Injustice is getting more than your fair share. One way to do so is through rhetoric since rhetoric uses emotional manipulation to establish agreement. There is, of course, another way of establishing agreement. This is reason, taken as a universal thought. According to Levinas, a universal thought dispenses with communication. In fact, from the perspective of such thought, there are no individual thinkers: Separated thinkers, this view holds, become rational only in the measure that their personal and particular acts of thinking figure as moments of this unique and universal discourse (72).

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Examples of what he is thinking of is Platos belief that to the point that my assertion is true, it coincides with all other assertions having the same content. As a speaker of the truth, therefore, I am not distinct from them. The same holds with regard to my use of the correct forms of inference. Using them to link my truths, to generate new truths, I am no different from anyone else who does this. Thus, all rational discourse can be considered to be part of what Aristotle calls selfthinking thought. Such thought consists of all the true statements and all the correct inferences connecting them. Leibniz had the idea of actually generating this totality through a rational calculus (something in part realized through the modern predicative calculus of logic). Levinas thinks that such a view forgets that language presupposes interlocutors, a plurality. The relation of such interlocutors is ethical. It presupposes the exteriority of the speaker. Thus, language is spoken where the common plane is yet to be constituted. It is, in fact, spoken to constitute this plane. (73). What is missing here in this attempt to establish justice through universal thought is, then, the freedom of the interlocutors, the freedom that each has to assent to the other. Such freedom, which is the freedom of each to have his interpretation, is inherent in their exteriority. In Levinass words, Free beings alone can be strangers to one another. Their freedom, which is common to them, is precisely what separates them. The relation of free beings, in acknowledging their freedom, is ethical. This ethical relation involves recognizing the individuality of the other. This is recognizing their material circumstances. In Levinass words, The perception of individual things is the fact that they are not entirely absorbed in their form; [that] they then stand out in themselves. There is also, pragmatically, the recognition of the surplus of [a things] absurdity, its uselessness. The thing that is an individual, an itself, is not reducible to its meaning for us, which for Heidegger is its usefulness, its Wozu. There is a surplus beyond this (74). Finally, the ethical relation also consists in generosity. As Levinas puts, it to recognize the other is to give. I obligate myself to give a response to the other. I obligate myself to come to terms with the other. Thus, the view Levinas is criticizing gets things backward. It begins with conceptualization, with general terms. It sees the relation of the speakers in these terms. But, in fact, as Levinas writes, The generality of the Object is correlative with the generosity of the subject going to the Other, beyond the egotist and solitary enjoyment (76). In other words, I move from the world there for me to the world there for both of us, the world that has common (general) objects. I do so in discourse, that is, in going outside of myself to the other.

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Thus, language, so understood, is universal because it is the medium by which I speak to the other generously offering my view and accepting his. In Levinass words, Language is universal because it is the very passage from the individual to the general [rather than from the general to the individual]. [It is this passage] because it offers things which are mine to the other. To speak is to make the world common. Language lays the foundation for a world in common (ibid.). It can only do so, however, if I take up an ethical relation to the other, that is, attempt to see what his perspective is so as to learn from it. Pragmatically, this means sharing projects and thus sharing the senses they disclose. Theoretically, it means investigating together. Here, the relationship between the same and the other, my welcoming the other, is the ultimate fact (77). It is the foundation of all other facts. Note the radical claim. Ethics precedes epistemology. I do not proceed to the other through a timeless realm of ideas (stable meanings). Such meanings are rather generated through common actions. Note the political implications of this: the difference between technocratic and democratic governments. Todays reading concludes with Levinas making some remarks on God which should be familiar to you from Ethics and Infinity. For Levinas, the face to face the ultimate relation. It, rather than the Greek notion of participation, designates our relation with the divine. This means that the comprehension of God taken as a participation in his sacred life, an allegedly direct comprehension, is impossible because participation is a denial of the divine and because nothing is more direct than the face to face (78). Participation denies the divine because the divine is the other. The access to the other is the face to face. God appears in the face. He appears as the call to generosity. We manifest his presence when we respond to this call. The relation to God is, in other words, ethical. In Levinas words, to posit the transcendent as stranger and poor one is to prohibit the metaphysical relation with God from being accomplished in the ignorance of men and things. . God rises to his supreme and ultimate presence as the correlative to the justice rendered unto men (78). As he also puts this: Metaphysics is enacted in ethical relations. Without the signification they draw from ethics theological concepts remain empty and formal

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frameworks. The role Kant attributed to sensible experience in the domain of the understanding belongs in metaphysics to interhuman relations. (79) The point: God manifests himself in our witnessing to him. To talk about God in the absence of this (in ignorance of it) is have concepts without any experience to given them a definite content. Kant asserted, concepts without experience are empty, sensible experience without concepts is blind. His point is that we need the concepts to order our experience, but such concepts as ways of ordering our experience have no content without such experience. For Levinas, this means that moral relations (interhuman relations) are the sensible experience we need in order that our theological concepts not be empty. Thus, the concept of God in the absence of the human relation of witnessing to him though generosity, is empty. It is simply a formal notion: the first cause, pure being, etc. Point put in terms of the fact that metaphysics is onto-theology. It is both the study of being qua being and the highest being (God) as Aristotle defined it. The highest being is the being that most exemplifies being qua being. If we say that metaphysics is enacted in ethical relations, then we have to say that the study of both being qua being and the highest being must draw their content from ethical relations. Metaphysics says that objectively true is true for everyone. Ethics says that there is an ethical relation that must be enacted before we can come to this concept. Therefore the concept cannot deny this relation, cannot ignore it. Doing so would involve us in a performative contradictioni.e., denying what we implicitly presuppose. This holds, according to Levinas, for all levels, epistemology, metaphysics, science, etc. In his words: The establishing of this primacy of the ethical is one of the objectives of the present work. (79). Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 82-101: I, C, 1-3 Levinas in this section continues his attempt to found epistemology on ethics. Since Descartes Meditations, epistemology, the science of knowing, has replaced metaphysics, understood as the science of being qua being, as first philosophy. Being has been understood as a correlate of knowing. What is (a being) is taken to be what can be known. Heidegger, in Being and Time, follows this tradition since he reduces Being to the meaning of being and attempts to explicate this meaning in terms of the structures of Dasein, that is, the ways in which Dasein understands its world, knows how to make its way in it. The fact that for Heidegger, knowing is pragmatic does not change the fact that for him in Being and Time, it is determinative of what we take a being to be.

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As for ethics, this really has no theoretical place in modern philosophy. In ancient philosophy, it was a part of metaphysics. The good, for Plato, was an attribute of being. For Aristotle, the good was happiness. Happiness was activity; the higher the human activity, the higher the happiness. Activity, however, was the principle of being. To be was to-be-in-act (en ergon). In the modern period, ethics is reduced to a function of epistemology. Thus, happiness becomes understood as some knowable condition and the moral is what leads to the greatest amount of it (in utilitarianism). The ethical problem with this is that if knowing (epistemology) precedes ethics, then it is independent of ethics. It can proceed without it. This means that one can engage in research without any ethical standards. One can become Dr. Mengele. If we object to this, then, as philosophers, we need some philosophical basis for such an objection. Levinas thinks that this basis has to come from making ethics first philosophy. After Aristotle, first philosophy, which he defines as the science of being qua being, has been called metaphysics. This is why Levinas calls ethics, which he takes to be first philosophy, metaphysics. Levinass strategy here is to assert that epistemology arises when we let facts, objects call into question our dealing with them as we will, i.e., our freedom. But this calling into question of our freedom is morality. Levinas begins by noting that the concern for intelligibility signifies a certain respect for objects. This respect includes their ability to obstruct our freedom. The opposite of such respect is the assertion that free exercise is not subject to norms, but is the norm. Yet as Levinas writes, For the object to become a fact that requires a theoretical justification or a reason [that is, for epistemology as a science to get started], the spontaneity of the action that surmounts it had to be inhibited, that is, itself put into question. It is then that we move from an activity without regard for anything to a consideration of the fact (82). In other words, it is then that we can engage in questions of how and why we know this fact. As Levinas affirms, Knowing becomes knowing of a fact only if it is at the same time critical, if it puts itself into question, goes back beyond its origin (ibid.). What we have here is a restraining of freedom. The freedom needed for inquiry is one that does not abandon itself to its drives, to its impulsive movements, and keeps its distances (ibid.).

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The problem is that in the modern period, the spontaneity of freedom is not called into question (83). In fact, in the modern period, the one thing worthy of being called tragic is the limitation of freedom (ibid.). Thus, for modern political theory, the problem is to ensure by way of knowledge of the world, the most complete exercise of spontaneity by reconciling my freedom with the freedom of others (ibid). What we need to do is to know how to accomplish this by establishing a state and writing its laws. Note: this is Kants idea. He writes: A constitution of the greatest possible human freedom according to laws, by which the liberty of every individual can consist with the liberty of every other is a necessary idea, which must be placed at the foundation not only of the first plan of the constitution of a state, but of all its laws. (Critique of Pure Reason, B373/NKS 312). The only thing that can call freedom into question for the moderns is its failure to reach its goals. But this is understood by them as a failure in the knowledge of how to reach such goals. It can only be recognized and corrected by knowledge. In Levinass words, this failure implies then a power [by knowledge] to reflect on its failure It founds neither theory nor truth; it presupposes them; it proceeds from knowledge of the world (ibid.). If it thinks about the relation of knowledge to freedom, it equates the two. Thus, Kant sees synthesis as an act of our pure spontaneity. It is our freely combining experiences so as to get an object, understood as what we are having experiences of. For Heidegger, the freedom in question that of our choosing our projects and hence the disclosure that they entail. Failure here occurs within disclosure and ends in disclosure. Thus, for Heidegger, it is when I fail to achieve my goal that I examine the instruments for achieving ite.g., the hammer that does not work. I then look at it in itself and see why it is not functioning, why it is not functioning. I then repair it. Once repaired, the hammer again reveals itself in its hammering. The problem here is that we never proceed beyond disclosure, beyond knowledge to get at what it presupposes. What it presupposes is not freedom (which is itself understood in terms of knowledge by the moderns). It is rather our ability to call freedom into question. Levinas claim is that the freedom that can be ashamed of itself founds truth (83) This ability comes from the Other. He imposes his perspective on me. He calls my standards, my freedom to set them as unquestionable standards, into question. The experience of the other, Levinas claims, is the revelation of a resistance to my powers that does not counter them as a greater force, but calls in question the nave right of my powers, my glorious spontaneity as a living being. What we have here then is a moral basis for epistemology. This morality begins when freedom, instead of being justified by itself, feels itself to be arbitrary (84).

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With this we have Levinass reworking of Kants critical philosophy. He agrees with Kant that Critique or philosophy is the essence of knowing. He adds, however, what is proper to knowing is not its possibility of going to an object, a movement by which it is akin to other acts; its prerogative consists in being able to put itself into question in penetrating beneath its own condition (85). There is here a twofold point. The first is that the ability of critique to penetrate beneath its own condition is to see that knowing is conditioned. Its condition is, in fact, the Other. The Other makes knowing possible since he/she liberates freedom from the arbitrary. In Levinass words, To welcome the Other is to put in question my freedom. Thus, according to Levinas: If philosophy consists in knowing critically, that is, in seeking a foundation for its freedom, in justifying it, it begins with conscience, to which the other is present as the other person, and where the movement of thematization is inverted. This inversion of thematization is where I let the other thematize (set the interpretation) rather than attempting to thematize the situation that faces us (86). In making this point, Levinass rhetoric is rather sloppy. Having said that knowing involves the restraining of ones freedom (82). He then forgets this and begins to equate knowing with freedom. He asserts that in knowing one extends the same to what of itself comes to refute this identity. This imperialism of the same is the whole essence of freedom. Here freedom consists in negating or possessing the non-me. It is as such that it retreats before the Other since the other person overflows absolutely every idea I can have of him (87). Aside from this lapse, what Levinas is taking as the moral basis of knowing seems clear. Knowing involves a self-restraint, one that we first get from the Other person. It thus has a moral basis. This moral basis stands in sharp contrast to the pragmatic basis for knowing that Heidegger puts forth. Heidegger discusses knowing in the context of disclosure. Disclosure occurs in terms of our projects, where things show their meaning as their Wozu, their whats is it for. Thus, for Heidegger I really know the hammer in its being when I use it. Its very being as a hammer is disclosed as I hammer. If the hammer breaks, then I regard it apart from the context of relationships in which it functions, and I see it as a thing with its own internal structure. As such, however, it is meaning-less in the human sense, since all human meaning involves projects. Now we have projects because we have needs that have to be satisfied. Such satisfaction is enjoyment. Levinass claim is that this whole process is a concealment. The project is set by the goal. When the goal is reached there is enjoyment. Thus, the what is for ends at the goal. With this, according Levinas, the meaning ends. In Levinass words, The reference that signification implies [as a what is it for] would terminate where the reference is made from the self to the selfin enjoyment.(94)

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The two selves here are the self engaging in the project and the self at the goal enjoying the accomplishment of the project. Now according to Levinas, the outcome is the point at which every signification is precisely lost (ibid.). As long as things do have a use value, as long as they serve as the means for accomplishing my project, they have a what it is for, that is, they have a meaning. In Levinass words, beings take on or lose their signification as means according as they are situated on the way that leads to [the outcome] or away from it But the means lose their signification in the outcome (95). At the stage of enjoyment they have lost their what is it for, their meaning or signification. What Levinas is questioning here is the priority of care over contemplation, such care being understood in the Heideggarian sense of the comprehension that opens up the worldhood of the world. Levinas is asking: is practical significance the primordial domain of meaning? (94). His answer is that it is not, since its focus is consumption, not contemplation. As Levinas puts this, Objectivity, where being is proposed to consciousness, is not a residue of finality. The objects are not objects when they offer themselves to the hand that uses them, to the mouth and the nose, the eyes and the ears that enjoy them (95). For objectivity to arise, one needs to interrupt the process of their consumption. This interruption is more than the breaking down of a tool. What one needs is the breach of the ultimate unity of the satisfied being (ibid.). This breach, Levinas claims, is provided by discourse. Thus, in opposition to Heideggers claim that the object in itself appears when it is separated from its context of relations, as for example, by a breakdown, Levinas writes: Objectivity is not what remains of an implement or a food when separated from the world in which its being comes into play. It is posited in a discourse, in a conversation which proposes [posits] a world (96). To understand this, we have to note the fact that objectivity and intersubjectivity are correlative notions. The objective world differs from the private, subjective world by being there for more than me. Thus, if I doubt that something is objectively real, I ask someone else if he sees what I see. If he doesnt then I assume it is a subjective illusion. Now, the presence of the intersubjective world is linguistic. I cannot see out of another persons I eyes. I can only ask him what he is seeing. He replies through language. What he says, e.g., a book, is my only access to the object as there for us both.

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Without discourse then, there is no intersubjective, no objective world. Discourse, language, is the medium of its presence. If we accept this, then we have to say with Levinas, the objectivity of the object and its signification [as objective] come from language. Here, my interlocutor is the other person. He signifies by speaking, he issues a sign. In Levinas words, The Other, the signifier manifest himself in speech by speaking of the world he manifests himself by proposing a world, by thematizing it (96). I do the same thing. Together we talk about the world, which in our discourse, becomes the world for both of us, the objective world with its significances. The important point is that this discourse is ongoing. Thus, the Other manifests himself in speech because the proposition that posits and offers the world does not float in the air, but promises a response to him who receives this proposition. One doesnt just receive the proposition from the other, one also receives the possibility of questioning him. (ibid.). Here, speech is an ever renewed promise to clarify what is obscure in the utterance (97). This continuing discourse maintains the world. It generates meaning because it continually impinges on my subjective freedom to simply take the world as an object for my enjoyment. It forces a restraint on my freedom, which lets the object show itself as it is. This object is not cut off from all human (practical) significance, as Heidegger would have it, when we look at the object as it is in itself. It rather is there through our signifying. Thus, Levinass claim is that the signification of beings is manifested not in the [Heideggarian] perspective of finality [of the what is it forthe Wozu], but in that of language. (ibid.). The problem with Heidegger's view is that disclosure implies the solitude of vision (99). The ground of disclosure is care, the object of care is my being. I disclose in relation to it. But then what I disclose is only there for me. It is not objective. For Levinas, by contrast, To put speech at the origin of truth is to abandon the thesis that disclosure, which implies the solitude of vision, is the first work of truth (ibid.). The first work of truth is being attentive to the other. According to Levinas, Attention and the explicit thought it makes possible are not a refinement of consciousness, but consciousness itself. Attention is attention to something because it is attention to someone. (99). The other in proposing a world makes me attend to it because he presents it for the first time as there for more than me. This more than me is the other, who exceeds me.

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Without his alterity, there would not be an objective world, a world there for myself and others. There is a certain irreversibility here. If the other were reversible with myself, he would not be other. I could start out equally from either side. But this would mean that my interpretation would not be questioned. I would already have both sides (both interpretations) at my disposal. Thus, for objective meaning to arise, our relations are never reversible. (101). He remains beyond the system he is not on the same plane as myself. Only as such can he come to me from outside and call my thematization into question, thus forcing me to respond by attending to the world that we are talking about. To sum up the presence of the other breaks what Levinas calls the silent worldthe world in which there are no others to call into question my way of viewing the world. At this point, I am subject to Cartesian doubt. The silent world is the world that Descartes supposes might be the result of a malin genie. This is a world where I cannot distinguish the true for me and the true in itself, where there is no distance, no separation between the sign and the signified. It is one where the signified does not have the objectivitythe in itselfnessto call the sign into question, to assert that it signifies incorrectly. What breaks this spell is the other. His/her alterity is what puts an unbridgeable distance between the sign and the signified preventing their collapse into one another. The signified as there for the other as well can never be reduced to its being there for me. Totality and Infinity, pp. 102-121 Todays reading begins with the final part of the first section. In it Levinas contrasts the view he is advancing with that of the Greeks. The latter maintain the ancient privilege of unity [according to which] separation and interiority were held to be incomprehensible and irrational (102). What Parmenides asserted is that you can only speak of being, what is not is unspeakable. Thus, Parmenides asserts that there are two ways of inquiry: the one way, that it is and cannot not-be, is the path of Persuasion, for it attends upon Truth; the other, that it is-not and needs must not-be, that I tell thee is a path altogether unthinkable. For thou couldst not know that which is-not (that is impossible) nor utter it; for the same thing can be thought as can be (The PreSocratic Philosophers: A Critical History with a Selection of Texts [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966], p. 269). The injunction here is to think about the it is, not about the is-not. The latter cannot be grasped. The correlation between thinkability and being means that the is-not can 30

neither be philosophically known nor uttered. From the beginning, then, the limits of philosophical inquiry are those of being. Since everything that exists is, being is one according to Parmenides. It is an undivided knowable, speakable whole. This Greek view that reaches its culmination in the one substance theory. To be a substance is to be on ones own. It is to have ones own source of being. Now everything exists, either by itself or by something else. If it exists by itself, then it has its own source of being and cannot not be. Its essence, its nature, includes its existence. The being is a necessary being. If it exists by another, then it is contingent. It is dependent on the others giving it being. It is not, properly speaking, a substance. Now, everything except God is dependent. Its essence does not demand its existence. We can know this essence, that is, what the thing is, without knowing whether it is. Thus, everything is contingent. It must, as dependent, point back to a necessary being. This is God. Thus, everything is dependent on God. It is not a substance but, as having its being from God, part of Gods being. There is only one substance in the world. This is God. Whatever one thinks of this argument (which is, essentially, that of Spinoza), it points out that the Parmenidean notion of being ultimately collapses beings into being. Against this Greek view, we have the view of Bible. It begins with Gods creation. God creates by separating. He starts with the formless empty waste and divides the light from the dark, the waters above from the waters below, the land from the water, the day from the night with the creation of the sun, the living from the nonliving with the creation of plants and animals, the human from the animals with the creation of the first human. Its final act is to divide man himself into male and female. God pronounces the results of these separations good. (The exception, being the creation of man. It is said to be in Gods own image). For Levinas, this is the paradigm one should take to understand being. The paradigm is the paradox of creation. This is the paradox of an Infinity admitting a being outside of itself which it does not encompass. It is the paradox of an Infinity accomplishing its very infinitude by virtue of this proximity of a separated being (103). What we have here is an infinity that does not close in upon itself but withdraws so as to leave a place for a separated being (104). In other words, the infinite God creates by limiting itself. This means that society with God is not an addition to God nor a disappearance of the interval that separates God from the creature (104). My relation to God does not result in my being added to him or being absorbed by him. Thus, the Biblical vision is one where the infinite shows its perfection by creating beings that are distinct from itself. In Levinass words, multiplicity and the limitation of the

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creative Infinite are compatible with the perfection of the Infinite. They articulate the meaning of this perfection (104) How do they articulate this meaning? The key here is the distinction between desire and need. In Levinas view, the ancient ontology conceived of separation as a privation because it knew of no other separation than that evinced by need (102). Desire, however, is the need of him who lacks nothing, the aspiration of him who possesses his being, who possesses his being entirely (103). Here, the relation [of desire] connects not terms that complete one another and consequently are reciprocally lacking to one another, but terms that suffice to themselves (ibid.). Turning towards the separated being in desire, infinity surpasses itself (ibid.). Doing so, it opens up the order of the Good (104). One has an ethical relation to the other. Ethically, then, God has a relation to us in generosity, in acting for our sake. We have the same relation to God. This is possible because of Gods presence in the widow and orphan. Here God does not give us good things, he calls us to be good. Ontologically, one can say that the biblical creation from nothing expresses a multiplicity not united into a totality; the creature is an existence that does depend on the other [the creator], but not as a part that is separated from it. In fact, creation ex nihilo breaks with [every totalizing] system. It posits a being outside of every system. (104). As Levinas also puts this, the dependent being draws from this exceptional dependence its very independence, its exteriority to the system. One has a separation from the infinite that is not simply negation (105). One way of illustrating this relation is the story of Abraham and Isaac. As the story begins, Abraham has a relation to God through Gods promise to make him the father of a people. But Abraham has only one child, Isaac; thus, it is through him that Abrahams descendants will come. But, Gods demand that Isaac be sacrificed voids this promise and, hence, the basis of Abrahams initial relation to God. Moreover, if Abraham goes through with the act, then God does not create a new people through Abraham. With the sacrifice of Isaac, he loses the means. It seems, then, that to the point that he is sincere in his request that Abraham sacrifice Isaac and Abraham takes him seriously, everything is undone. Not only is their relation unraveled, but Gods whole effort to make a new people is brought to nothing. Before the request, their relation appeared as one of exchange, as part of an economy in which each would get from the other what he needed. God would realize his purpose to create a chosen people through Abraham, and Abraham would become the father of this people. After the request, this economy is suspended. Just as God can get nothing

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from Abraham, so Abraham can get nothing from God once Abraham becomes willing to sacrifice Isaac. Abrahams consent to this request puts an end to whatever utility or pleasure that marked his relationship with God. That Abraham continues towards Moriah, that he proceeds to the point of raising his knife, signifies that his relation is with God himself, not with any benefit. He no longer acts out of need. He acts for Gods sake. This, of course, is Gods relation to Abraham. He really does not need him. He actually does act for Abrahams sake. Now it is after this interrupted sacrifice that Abraham becomes the father of faith. The point of this story is that the relation between God and Man (as represented by Abraham) is not that of need, where each gives what the other needs. What is the relation? When Abraham, facing Isaac, picks up the knife, he hears the command, Do not raise your hand against the boy or do anything to him (Gn 22:12). It is possible to combine this command with the face of Isaac, the face that Abraham regards as he holds the knife. The face is that of the helpless victim, of a person bound and about to die. For Levinas, Gods command comes from this face. Thou shalt not kill, he writes, is the first word of the face. He writes: It is an order. There is a commandment in the appearance of the face, as if a master spoke to me. However, at the same time, the face of the Other is destitute (Ethics and Infinity, p. 89). Now, for Levinas, in the access to the face there is certainly also an access to God (ibid., p. 92) . This implies that the relation between Abraham and Isaac is that of the access to God in the face of the victim. Abraham hears the command of God seeing Isaacs face. Once again we return to Gods presence in the widow and orphan. God in such presence does not give us good things, does not fill our needs; he calls us to be good. Abraham, in having the same relation to God, also calls on God to be good as he pleads with him not to destroy the city of Sodom and Gomorrah, lest he destroy the good with the bad. As the other of God, he calls God to account. Moses also does this when at Mount Sinai, he persuades God not to destroy the Israelites who have been worshiping the Golden Calf. The point is that the relation is one of discourse. God creates creatures who as other than him can call each and him into account, just as he can call them through the widow and the orphan, through the victim, into account. This ability to do so is part of their being created in the image of God. ---The next section begins Levinas account of the relations that are produced within the same (110). These are the relations of egotism that the ethical relation interrupts.

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Levinas asserts that he will not found this relation (which he terms the metaphysical relation) on Being-in-the-world, [on] the care and the doing characteristic of Heideggerian Dasein (109). In fact, he will continuously attack Heidegger's account of being-in-the-world. The reason for this is that this account ignores the enjoyment and egotism that the ethical relation interrupts. As such, it has no place for the ethical relation to appear. For this relation, beings must be separate, independent. They must have desire beyond need, a desire that overcomes their self-sufficiency. In Kantian terms, they act ethically when they act not out of need, but simply to do the right thing. In Levinasian terms, they do so when they act, not to fulfill a need, but to be generous. They act out of desire for the other, they transcend their egotism by acting for the others sake. For Heidegger, however, everything is based on need. In this sense, he continues the ancient ontology that sees the relations of being in terms of need and knows no other separation than that evinced by need (102). It is in terms of this need, that things appear. They appear as means for our purposes, as tools. There is in Heidegger, according to Levinas, an all pervasive utilitarianism, one that ignores enjoyment. Levinas writes, The things we live from are not tools in the Heideggerian sense of the term. Their existence is not exhausted by the utilitarian schematism that delineates them as having the existence of hammers, needles, or machines. They are always in a certain measure objects of enjoyment (110). Similarly bread is not just a means for living. While hunger is a need, eating is enjoyment (111). In fact, one is nourished by all the contents that fill ones life. In Levinass words, nourishment, as a means of invigoration, is the transformation of the other into the same, which is the essence of enjoyment: an energy that is other becomes in enjoyment my own energy, my strength, me (ibid.). One faces here is the phenomenon of living from. As Levinas defines it, living from is not a simple becoming conscious of what fills life. These contents are lived: they feed life. Thus, we have the general definition of enjoyment: enjoyment is the ultimate consciousness of all the contents that fill my lifeit embraces them (ibid.). Enjoyment here is Levinass substitute for Heidegger's care. He writes: Life is not the naked will to be, an ontological Sorge (care) for this life. Life is love of life, a relation with contents that are not my being but more dear than my being: thinking, eating, sleeping, reading, working, warming oneself in the sun (112.).

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Ex-istence comes from two Greek words, meaning standing and out. For Heidegger, existence (Dasein's being outside of itself in being ahead of itself) precedes essence (what Dasein will be). This is because Dasein's essence, that is, what it is, is the work of its existence, its projects. For Levinas, by contrast, Life is an existence that does not precede its essence (ibid.). Its essence, as enjoyment, as happiness, is first. It is because I want to be happy that I engage in my projects, that I go out of myself, that I ex-sist in Heidegger's sense. As Levinas puts this: happiness is not an accident of being, since being is risked for happiness (112). What Levinas is doing here is reintroducing Aristotle's notion of happiness and its relation to life. For Aristotle , life is perceiving and thinking. But such a life is self-present, we perceive that we are perceiving, thinking etc. In such pre-reflective consciousness, we receive pleasure. Thus, Aristotle writes: To perceive that we are living is something pleasant in itself. (Nichomachean Ethics, 1170b 1, trans. Martin Ostwald [New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1962], p. 266). The general doctrine here is that pleasure the self-presence of functioning. It ranges from our sense of bodily well being when our organism is functioning well (we are organically healthy) to a pleasure in seeing, hearing, etc. to a pleasure in reasoning, talking, figuring things out Aristotle adds that life is desirable especially for good men because their existence is good and pleasant to them. (ibid., p. 266) Why? Because the good man is such because he functions well and functions at a high level. The pleasure which is the result of the self-presence of functioning increases with the functioning. Levinas is putting forth a similar doctrine when he writes action itself enters into our happiness. We live from acts What I do and what I am is at the same time that from which I live. We relate ourselves to it with a relation that is neither theoretical nor practical . The final relation is enjoyment, happiness. (113). This happiness is not a mood in the Heideggerian sense (113). It is not how I find myself my Befindlichkeit. It is not my bearing in being, but already the exceeding of being; being itself befalls him who can seek happiness (ibid.). It is what moves me to acquire being in the Heideggerian sense. In Levinass words, Happiness is a condition for activity.

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As Aristotle puts this, happiness is that for the sake of which we do all other things. This fact of happiness positions need differently. We are not driven by our needs as Heidegger asserts. According to Levinas, What we live from does not enslave us; we enjoy it . The human being thrives on his needs; he is happy for his needs (114). In fact, I have my independence through such dependence. In Levinass words, The paradox of living from something is not a mastery on the one hand and a dependence on the other, but a mastery in this dependence (114). Here, the same acquires its own identity by this dwelling in the other (and not logically, by [a formal] opposition to the other (115). What is Levinas doing here? In the ancient ontology (which he sees Heidegger carrying forward) need is seen as demanding a unity of being. The doctrine of being from another collapses into the doctrine of their being only one substance. To avoid this, he has to rework the doctrine of need. Need, for living beings, is not simply dependence. It is the means by which they establish their independence. As Levinas puts this, ones abilities to meet ones needs, constitute a being independent of the world, a veritable subject capable of ensuring the satisfaction of its needs, which are recognized as material, that is, as admitting of satisfaction. Needs are in my power; they constitute me as the same and not as dependent on the other (117). The reason why they can do this is because their foundation is my body. My body is my uniqueness. Through it, I have the unicity or uniqueness of the I. Thus, for Levinas, The body is the very self-possession by which the I, liberated from the world by need, succeeds in overcoming the very destitution of this liberation (117). It does this by its bodily I can, by which it fulfills its needs and overcomes the other, changing it into the same. Because it is founded on the body, the I has a uniqueness that occurs on the preconceptual level. It is a uniqueness that arises by the refusal of the concept (118). This refusal of the concept is the Is interiority. What we have here is the egotism of happiness or enjoyment. The I is an existence for itself as the famished stomach that has no ears is for itself . The self-sufficiency of enjoying measures the egotism or the ipseity of the ego. Levinas emphasis is on the privacy of the bodythe fact that no one can eat for you, sleep for you, etc. which he translates into the privacy of the enjoying self. Without this, Levinas claims, we do not have human plurality. Thus, when the I is identified with reason it loses its very ipseity reasons makes human society possible; but a society whose members would be only reasons would vanish as a society.

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 Reason has no plural; how could numerous reasons be distinguished? (119). For the I to be means to enjoy something (120). Note how Levinas is approaching the same point from two different sides. He approaches human plurality from the side of God by defining creation as the ability of God to create beings separate from himself. He approaches the same plurality from the side of the creature, through the ability of the creature to be by himselfthis, even though as finite, he has needs. In both cases, what Levinas wants to do is to leave room for the ethical relationship. This is a relationship requiring plurality, requiring the distinction of the same and the other. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 122-135: II, B, 1-3 In todays reading, Levinas continues to propose his alternative to Heideggers existential analytic. He also wants to distinguish his position from Husserls constitutive analysis. His object is to counter Heideggers analysis of Dasein as Being-in-the-world, as inherently outside of itself. His aim is to assert that real transcendence comes only from Daseins relation to the other. Levinas begins by asking is not enjoyment, as a way of life relates to its contents, a form of intentionality? He follows this with a second question: What is the relation between the theoretical intentionality of the objectifying act, as Husserl calls it, and enjoyment? (122) Intentionality is, for Husserl, the property that consciousness has of being of some object. The intentional relation is that between consciousness and its object. The relation is not a causal one, that is, one between two realities (See LU, Tb. ed., II/1, 391 F., p. 572). It is the relation between the consciousness and the objects perceptual sense. If we ask how consciousness gets this sense, we have Husserls theory of constitution, which involves the notion of the objectifying act. The function of this act is interpretive, it interprets the sensations that consciousness receives as sensations of some one thing - i.e., of an object which is there for consciousness. The doctrine here is that it is in "the animating interpretation of sensation that what we call the appearing of the object consists" (LU, Tb. ed., II/1, 351; F., p. 539). Thus, according to Husserl, we do not per se "see" our sensations but rather objects of which we have sensations. Thus, we see, e.g., one and the same box however it may be turned. The perceived object remains the same, although the actually experienced contents shift with each turn of the box. In Husserl's words, "Very different contents are thus experienced, but in spite of

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this the same object is perceived. Thus, to give a general principle, the experienced content is not itself the perceived object" (LU, Tb. ed., II/1, 382; F., p. 565).4 What makes the difference between the object and the sensations is the objectifying act. It interprets the sensations we receive. The result is the perception of the object. In Husserls words, It belongs to perception that something appears within it, but interpretation makes up what we term appearance - be it correct or not, anticipatory or overdrawn. The house appears to me through no other way but that I interpret in a certain fashion actually experienced contents of sensation. I hear a barrel organ - the sensed tones I interpret as barrel organ tones. Even so, I perceive via interpretation what mentally appears in me, the penetrating joy, the heartfelt sorrow, etc. They are termed "appearances" or, better, appearing contents precisely for the reason that they are contents of perceptive interpretation (LU, Halle ed., II, 704-705). Husserls claim is that what consciousness in its interpretative activity does to its sensations is "make sense" of them - i.e., place them in an interpretative framework of identity in multiplicity. Sense is a one in many. Thus, the result of the interpretation is a sense. It is, in Husserls terms the presence of the perceptually embodied "fulfilling sense." Thus, according to Husserl, consciousness transcends the real influence of the real object on itself - i.e., the real presence of contents of sensation - by virtue of the interpretation it places on this real influence. In Husserls words, What appears is not a "real part of my concrete seeing" (LU, Halle ed., II, 326). It is an "ideal intentional content" i.e., the content of the object grasped as a sense. How do I know that I get this content? How do I know when I am mistaken? The reason is that whenever I intend an object, I have to adjust my intention so that it can be fulfilled. Thus, not every intention of consciousness is fulfilled. There is a dialectic between intention and fulfillment. To put this in set of terms that Levinas uses, the noesis consists of my interpretative acts. The noemata are the intentional objects that result from these acts. They are the representations that Levinas speaks of. Levinas claim is that the Husserlian thesis of the primacy of the objectifying act leads to the affirmation that the object of consciousness, while differing from consciousness is as it were a product of consciousness, being a meaning endowed by consciousness, the result of a Sinngebung. Sinngebung (sense-giving) is Husserls term for the bestowal of meaning that the interpretative, objectifying act engages in when it interprets what it perceives as perceptions of one and the same object.

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For Husserl, the epistemological presence of a real object is the presence of a sense. As the Ideen I expresses this, "All real unities are 'unities of sense'" (Ideen I, 55; Biemel ed., p. 134). As senses, they are the products of our acts of sense making. This is why Levinas, echoing Husserl, writes, The intentional relation of representation [that is, the relation that presents us with the intentional object] is to be distinguished from every other relation, especially that of mechanical causality. The object here is a result of our interpretative acts. Thus, it is always the same that determines the other. (124). What Levinas is thinking of here is Husserl's radical assertion that ". . . pure consciousness in its own absolute being ... conceals and constitutes in itself all worldly transcendencies . . ." (Ideen I, 50, Biemel ed., pp. 118-19). For Husserl, this means that the presence of a transcendent object is only a correlate of specific type of connection among our experiences, namely the type that allows us to posit unities in multiplicity. Levinas sees a number of problems with this view. The most important is that as long as we remain with it, the body, taken as something that we represent to ourselves, i.e., as an intentional object, is only a unity of sense. It is a meaning. But it is because we have bodies that we have a position in the world, the body being at the center of our world. In Levinass words, The body naked and indigent identifies the center of the world it perceives. When, however, we represent it, it is thereby, as it were, torn up from the center from which it proceeded (127). It becomes a meaning. As naked, the body is exposed to the world. As indigent, it lives from the world. Our body points to the dependence of our consciousness on the world. It points to life as prior to representation. As Levinas puts this, The body naked and indigent is the very reverting, irreducible to a thought, of representation into life (ibid.). Furthermore, to have a body is to assume exterioritythe exteriority of the world one depends on. But this is to assume a mutual determination. It is to enter a relation with [the other] such that the same determines the other while being determined by it (128). I am determined by the other insofar I live from the other. Here, the constituted object, reduced to its meaning overflows its meaning, becomes within constitution the condition of the constituting, or, more exactly, the nourishment of the constituting (128). In other words, the meaning-bestowing subject has to eat. I can think that food and eating condition my consciousness. But, food and drink are not reduced to such a thought. In Levinas words, The surplus over meaning is not a meaning in its turn, simply thought as a condition . The aliment [food] conditions the very thought that would think it as a condition (ibid.). Such a surplus is the way the I, the absolute commencement, is suspended on the non-I, that is, on the world which it need to live from (129).

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It is also the surplus that the body is as non-representable. This non-representable body is neither an individual example of a species, nor a species. It is oneself in ones nonsubstitutabilityi.e., in the fact that no one else can perform your organic functions (sleeping, eating, etc.) for you The body, so thought, is a permanent contestation of the prerogative attributed to consciousness of giving meaning to each thing (ibid.). It is both outside of meaning and, in its indigence, the reverse of the intentionality that goes from consciousness to the object. The intentionality between the body and the object is that of livingfrom. Here, the very movement of constitution is reversed since it proceeds from the thing to the body (ibid.). The embodied subject lives from what it thinks. In fact, what we have here is a kind of inside-outside relation in Merleau-Pontys sense. I am inside the world that, as represented, that is, as a sense, is inside me. As Levinas expresses this relation, What the subject contains represented is also what [externally] supports and nourishes its activity as a subject (130) As representing the world, I determine it. I give it sense. As living-from the world, it determines me. This is because the relation of living-from involves my embodiment. But to posit oneself corporeally is to touch the earth, to do so in such a way that the touching finds itself already conditioned by the position, a foot settles in the real as though a painter would notice that he is descending from the picture he is painting (128). The relation is as if the painter were both outside the painting and in it, living-from it. This is our relation of being-in-world. To be in the world is to live from it. It is to enjoy it. Levinas now turns to argue against Heideggers account of our being in the world. For Heidegger, being-in-the-world is disclosing its objects according to ones projects, the ultimate project being the care one has for ones own being. The things in the world are implements, tools or materials needed for ones projects. This includes even the food we eat. In Levinass words, The world, as a set of implements forming a system and suspended on the care of an existence [of a Dasein] anxious for its being, [the world] interpreted as an ontology, attests labor, habitation, the home and economy. But it does so in a peculiar way. Everything appears as means towards a goal, even food. Thus, Heideggers view bears witness to a particular organization of labor in which foods take on the significance of fuel in the economic machinery. Heidegger, in fact, does not take the relation of enjoyment into consideration. Dasein in Heidegger is never hungry. (134). To take account of enjoyment, one needs a different sense of being-in-the-world. Levinas calls this bathing in the world.

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He writes, in introducing this concept, in enjoyment the things are not absorbed into the technical finality that organizes them into a system. They take form within a medium in which we take hold of them. The medium remains essential to things it has its own density. The medium, he adds, is a common fund earth, sea, sky, city Every relation or possession is situated within the non-possessible which envelops or contains without being able to be contained. We shall call this the elemental (130-31). For, Heidegger wind is there for me as wind for my sails if I need to cross the lake in a sailboat. The sea is there to support my boat, a highway appears as that on which I make my way. For Levinas, such disclosure masks the special character of the elemental. He writes: the element has no forms containing it; it is content without form. Thus, I only grasp a side of it, the surface of the sea and of the field, the edge of the wind. I cannot represent the whole of it. In fact, the only thing one can say is one is steeped in it, I am always within the element (131) The adequate relation with the element is precisely bathing (132) This bathing is also a living-from, one that is particularized in enjoyments. The point of all our projects is, in fact, enjoyment. In Levinass words, The handling and utilization of tools concludes in enjoyment. Even tools are there to be enjoyed. As material or gear, the objects of everyday use are subordinated to enjoyment. I enjoy using my lighter to light my cigarettes, etc. (133). The same holds for furnishings, the home, food, clothing. They are not Zeuge or tools. They have their purposes, but we enjoy them or suffer from them; they are ends. In fact, he concludes, to enjoy without utility, this is the human (133). Only Heideggers all pervasive utilitarianism makes him forget this. In fact, as Levinas remarks, Food can be interpreted as an implement only in a world of exploitation (134). What Heidegger has forgotten is the elemental. In enjoyment things revert to their elemental qualities (ibid.). We live from the world, are immersed in it, in such enjoyment. The reason for this stress on enjoyment is that ethics for Levinas is defined as the interruption of enjoyment. The ethical demand interrupts my pleasure. I feel the hunger of the other as the bread snatched from my mouth. The absence of enjoyment in Heideggers account is, then, an absence of ethics understood in Levinass sense. What we have here is a correlation of a number of factors that link the body to the possibility of ethics. We have

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1) the sense of the body as being neither individual example of a species nor the species itself. This is the body as unrepresentable, the body in its unique singularity, a singularity expressed in the fact that no one else can perform your bodily functions for you. This non-representability is the surplus of the lived body over the representation of it. 2) We also have the tie of this unique singularity to our interiority, an interiority expressed in the famished stomach that has no ears. The body is here thought of the basis of our egotism. 3) Then there is the fact that the enjoyment that the body makes possible ties us to the present. We are not ahead of ourselves at the moment of enjoyment. We are enjoying the present moment in its sensuous affective presence. 4) Such enjoyment manifests the world in its elemental character. The world does not appear perspectivally. It comes to presence in enjoyment as something we bath in, something in which we are immersed. The water we drink does not have a side, neither does the smell of a rose, or the chocolate in our mouth. In this they are like the air, water, earth, and air: they doe not appear perspectivally. All this makes possible ethics in Levinass sense. The ethical relation is to a unique other, but such uniqueness is the function of the body. The relation is to the other in his or her need: to the widow, orphan, and stranger. But the body is the condition of our neediness. The ethical relation also presupposes our interiority as something that is exceeded or transcended. But this given to us by our embodiment. The ethical relation is to the other as exceeding our representation of her/him. It is to the other as immeasurable. It is a relation to the in-finite. But this exceeding is there through the surplus of the body, the body in its non-representable singularity. Thus, the other as embodied confronts us with an immeasurable interiority, one that is irreplaceable and hence of non-finite value. The same holds for the world that the embodied other brings to presence. It is also unique and irreplaceable. Thus, he who saves another person saves a world. The appeal coming from this other is to preserve this unique, embodied world. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, pp. 135-151: II, B, 4-5, C, 1-3 Todays reading continues Levinass depiction of enjoyment and sensibility. The point of this is to 1) go over an area that Heidegger ignored in his existential analytic 2) reconceive Dasein such that there is an opening for the ethical in Daseins being-in-the-world. Thus, against Heideggers view that being is disclosed in terms of our projects as material and tools for accomplishing our goal, Levinas introduces the idea of the element. We do not use the element, we bathe in it. Against Heideggers conception that care is the most basic state of Dasein, Levinas introduces the notion of enjoyment. Enjoyment does not spring from our care for our being, i.e., for what we will be through our choices. It is

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a present condition. It does not fit into the for the sake of, the in order to of projects. We do not enjoy things for the sake of something else. We enjoy them for their own sake in the present. All of this is very Aristotelianthough how much Aristotle Levinas actually read is problematical. Aristotle makes the argument that if we did everything for the sake of something else, life would be futile. In fact, we do a number of things just for themselves. The activity contains the goal in itself. We see beautiful objects just to see them, we hear music just to hear it, etc. Doing so we have pleasure. We enjoy our life. For Aristotle such enjoyment is the self-presence of our functioning, of our being alive. For Levinas, it is simply our response to the elements we bathe in: those that we do not possess, but rather possess us: the air, water, light, the city, etc. Corresponding to this basic view, Levinas defines sensibility, not as representation, not as belonging to the order of thought, but rather as the affectivity wherein the egotism of the I pulsates. (135). He adds: One does not know, one lives sensible qualities: the green of these leaves, the red of this sunset. The relation to sensibility as such is not intentionality. One does not intend to see ones sensations as objects. You live through them. In Levinass words, The finite as contentment is sensibility. Sensibility does not constitute the world, because the world called sensible does not have its function to constitute a representation (135). We represent something by interpreting our sensations as sensations of some object. What Levinas is asking us to do is to think of sensibility not as material for the interpretative, objectifying act, but rather as it is in itself. When we do so, we think of it in terms of affectivity.2 The sensible affects us. Primarily, this affection is pleasurable. I bite into the peach. I feel it dissolve in my mouth. Here, it affects me without being an object, without having sides, without showing itself perspectivally like some spatialtemporal reality. It is there as an element. In Levinass words, sensibility establishes a relation with a pure quality without support, [it establishes a relation] with the element. Sensibility is enjoyment (136). In affirming that sensibility is enjoyment, he disassociates himself from Platos theory that pleasure and pain inevitably go togethere.g., the pleasure of drinking with the pain of being thirsty when one quenches ones thirst. Plato in his theory fails to recognize to recognize the originality of the structure living from.

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This is the structure where we are in need, but we proceed towards the satisfaction of this need without having to know the means necessary for its obtainment. Here, our action [is] released by the end, accomplished without knowledge of means, that is, without tools (ibid.). Hans Jonass description of metabolism provides an interesting point of comparison with Levinas account According to Jonas, to exist, the organic body must reassert its being from moment to moment. It must reach outside of itself if it is to be. This is because it is both totally composed of matter and yet different from it. It must engage in metabolismin the exchange of material (Stoffwechsel) with the worldin order to be. Thus, the matter composing the organism, Hans Jonas writes, is forever vanishing downstream. [I]ndependent of the sameness of this matter, [the organism] is dependent on the exchange of it . . . .3 Thus, in contrast to the inorganic, the organisms material state cannot be the same for any two instants. Were it the same, were its metabolism to cease altogether, it would die. It would become inorganic. Since it is organic, it needs the influx of new material. In Jonass words, This necessity (for exchange) we call need, which has a place only where existence is unassured and its own continual task.4 Such need expresses its relation to the future. Thus, a living body has a future insofar as its being is its doing, i.e., stretches beyond the now of its organic state to what comes next.5 Here, its will be the intake of new materialdetermines the is, that is, determines the nature of its present activity. Insofar as the organism exists by directing itself beyond its present condition, it is ahead of itself, it has a future. In other words, the organism, as need, as the necessity for exchange, is already stretched out in time. It is stretched out as striving. It is possible to see such striving in Levinass terms as both separated from its end (that is, need), but already proceeding toward that end without having to know the means necessary for its obtainment (136). What we have here is a sort of blind instinctual striving. It does not know, does not yet represent the future in terms of representing it to itself. Thus, it is not a conscious temporal stretching out. Levinas speaks here of the overflowing of sensation by the element that takes on a temporal meaning. Such overflowing escapes the gentle mastery of enjoyment (141). It escapes it because the element is not yet a thing. We cannot master it as we can a thing. We sit in the sun 44

and warm ourselves. We do not control the warmth. We feel the cool of the wind, we do not control the wind. In Levinas words, the blue of the sky above my head, the breath of the wind, the undulation of the sea, the sparkle of the light do not cling to a substance. They come from nowhere. This coming from nowhere appearing without there being anything that appearsand consequently coming always, without my being able to possess the source delineates the future of sensibility and enjoyment. This is not yet a representation of the future (ibid.). This non-representational sense of the future is felt as disquietude, the disquietude that we cannot hold on to the elemental. It is the sense both of it slipping away and its coming from nowhere. This may be the other side of the striving that Jonas attributes to the organic body. A second point of comparison can be found in Husserls doctrine of instinctive striving. Levinas writes The sense datum with which sensibility is nourished always comes to gratify a need, responds to a tendency, a striving (136) For Husserl, on the most basic level, this striving is instinctively directed toward some goal. This occurs even though the animal does not know beforehand the means to achieve the goal. Thus, the infant placed at the breast is motivated by smell, then by touching the nipple, then by the kinesthesia of sucking and swallowing before the goal of the drive towards nourishment appears. In Husserls words, When the smell of the mothers breast and the sensations of moving ones lips occur, an instinctive directedness towards drinking awakes, and an originally paired kinesthesia comes into play. ... If drinking does not immediately occur, how does it happen? Perhaps the smell alone awakens something else, an empty apperception, so to speak, which has no conscious goal. If touching occurs, then the way to fulfillment is first properly an ongoing instinctive drive, which is an unfulfilled intention. Then, in fulfillment, [there are] the movements of swallowing, etc., which bring fulfillment, disclosing the instinctive drive (Ms. C 16 IV, p. 36b). The general principle here is that Striving is instinctive and instinctively (thus, at first, secretly) directed towards what in the future will first be disclosed as worldly unities constituting themselves.6 To quote Levinas again, what we have here an action released by the end, accomplished without knowledge of means, that is, without tools (136) Here all three philosophers, Husserl, Levinas and Jonas (the last two being Husserls students) are asserting that at its lowest level life is a striving that is prior to any

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existential analytic of Dasein as care. What is fundamental here is simply having a living, organic body. The fact that enjoyment is bodily implies for Levinas that the patterns of my primary relation with myself, of my coincidence with myself are themselves bodily. (138) Thus, my separation, my having a distinct position in the world separated from others, comes most immediately from my bodily standing in one place rather than another. In fact, sensibility enacts the very separation of beingseparated and independent. (ibid.). Such separation is accomplished as enjoyment, that is, as interiority (139) In fact, for Levinas, only in enjoyment does the I crystallize (144) The I becomes one thing (my I), rather than something else (your I). It does this through bodily enjoyment because such enjoyment is an interiorization. I take food and eat it. It becomes mine. Once it enters my mouth it is no longer public. The fact that nobody can eat for me conditions my having a sphere interior to myself. So does the fact that nobody can bathe for me, sleep for me, etc. In fact, the whole field of the bodily sensible qua bodily sensible designates the private. The object that I see out there is common to myself and others. My bodily experiences, the feeling of the suns warmth, the sense of food as a chew it, etc., are not common objects. They are accessible to me but not to you. The book that is over there on the table is a public object. It has features that can be publicly discerned. We can, for example, all agree on its color. But taste is not disputable. It is already an interiorization. It is my enjoyment. Thus, Levinas writes: The interiorization of enjoyment is separation in itself, is the mode according to which such an event as separation can be produced in the economy of being (147). Another way to put this is to note that sensibility is precisely our not being outside of ourselvesi.e., our not being there with the things. The latter requires that we interpret our sensations as sensations of something. But in itself sensibility is prior to this. In itself, then, it is pure interiority. The one flaw in enjoyment is that it is dependent in the continual arrival of enjoyable contents. The sun from which I am warming myself may go behind a cloud. Thus, the I is enjoyment of something else, never of itself (143). Because of this, enjoyment is without security (142). Here, as I cited Levinas, the contents that I enjoy, this overflowing of sensation by the element takes on a temporal meaning. The contents come from nowhere. I cannot, as long as I remain on the level of sensibility, possess the source. I am

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stretched out beyond myself to the future without owning it. Such stretching out delineates the future of sensibility and enjoyment. (ibid.). To insure this future, I have to engage in labor. Such labor by mastering the uncertainty of the future and its insecurity and by establishing possession, delineates separation in the form of economic independence (150). I establish through labor a home. Within it there are the things I need to enjoy. There is also the others whom I am at home with. Here the interiority of the ego because the interiority of the home. In the home, there are the other members of my family. The infant in its enjoyment experiences this in the context of the mother (or caregiver). The ego of the infant, established in the interiority of bodily pleasure, yet troubled by the fact that the continuance of pleasure is not under its control, opens itself to the first other: the caregiver. For Levinas, this is the mother, the feminine. It shows itself in the gentleness of the feminine face (150). The mother (or caregiver) supplies the infants needs. In this relation, the other precisely reveals himself in his alterity not in a shock negating the I, but as the primordial phenomenon of gentleness (ibid.). With this welcoming of the face, we have the unquenchable Desire for Infinity. The child enjoys the mother but cannot possess her. She is not elusive like the element (which we cannot posses since it has no sides and hence cannot be encompassed). She is elusive because of her excessive presence, her offering more than the child can anticipate or intend. What we have is a new form of dependence, a new form of non-representability, a new form of separation. This, is one that does not deny, but rather builds on the dependence, non-representability, and separation that sensation establishes. Here, Levinas fulfills the demand he sets for himself: This is that the [sensuous] interiority that ensures separation must produce a being absolutely closed over upon itself. And yet, this closedness must not prevent egress from interiority, so that that exteriority [namely, the exteriority of the Other] could speak to it. The demand then is that in the separated being, the door to the outside must be at the same time open and closed (148). Levinas thinks he has done this in his account of sensuous existence. It is both closed into itself as interiority and yet open to the other in its first dependence on the caregiver. To sum up, we can say that, for Levinas, not every sense of being is the result of our positing or representing it to ourselves. Prior to such is our organic being. This organic being is what grounds the ego in its interiority. The fact that no one can eat for you, etc. gives us an irreplaceable singularity, one that we experience in the phenomenon of enjoyment. This enjoyment is a pre-objective experience. The relation it expresses is not

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that of the subject to an object, but rather that of the ego that is immersed in the element, that baths in it. The critique of Heidegger here is that before there is Being-in-the-world, there is being in oneself. This is distinct from being-for-oneself, which involves a self-separation, an inner distance. The existentialist start off with the category of selfhood as being-foroneself. Individuality for them is a matter of the choices we make, the projects we engage in. Levinass claim is that there is an individuality prior to this, one that comes simply from our embodiment, i.e., from its irreplaceability. This difference can be put in terms of human freedom. We can assert that freedom is rational autonomy, which according Kant expresses our being a self-caused cause, or we can assert with Levinas that there is a freedom, referring to happiness compatible with a being that is not causa sui, that is created (148). This is the freedom of the autonomy of the self in its sensuous interiority. It is the freedom of the self that lives from the world. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 152-168: II, D, 1-5 Todays reading continues Levinass reworking of Heidegger's existential analytic. Levinas considers three elements that he feels Heidegger has left out: Dwelling (or habitation), Labor, and the Body. With regard to the first, his claim is that the dwelling is not situated in the objective world, but the objective world is situated by relation to my dwelling (153). The claim is that my Being-in-the-world, my active disclosure of the world, is situated in relation to my dwelling. To forget the fact of dwelling is to misunderstand the nature of actions by which we disclose the world. Why? Because the home is an extension of my ego. [Note: For Heidegger, the ego is being-in-the-world; as such, he prefers the term being-in-the-world to that of ego. Levinas, however, reintroduces the term ego.] Normally we say that the objective world is situated in relation to the ego, the zero-point in space and time from which you view the world. To make this claim with regard to the home is to say that the home, itself, is an extension of the ego. It extends its interiority to a part of the objective world. The home then becomes the 0-point Levinas puts this point as follows: the consciousness of the world is already consciousness through the world [i.e., through the home that is part of the world]. Something of that world seen is an organ or an essential means of vision. This organ is the home. The home is the incarnation of consciousness and inhabitation. The

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reference here is to existence proceeding from the intimacy of a home, the first concretization [of the ego in the world] (ibid.). This means that Interiority [is] concretely accomplished by the home (154). This can be put in terms of the fact that there is a level of the for-itself of the ego, of the egos reflection on itself, that is accomplished in the home (153). One recollects oneself. There is a suspension of the immediate reactions the world solicits in view of a greater attention to oneself, one's possibilities, and the situation (154). The home is what makes this reflection possible. In describing the home, Levinas presents the most controversial (that is, most politically incorrect) part of his work: his description of the feminine. The home is the feminine or at least embodies the feminine principle. Levinas puts this in terms of recollection. According to Levinas, the woman is the condition for recollection, the interiority of the home, and inhabitation. This is because her face is not just present, but is revealed, simultaneously with this presence, in its withdrawal and in its absence. What we have in woman is the very essence of discretion. And the other whose presence is discreetly an absence is the woman She accomplishes the hospitable welcome that describes the field of intimacy (155). Whatever one thinks of this, Levinass idea is clear: The home is a place of intimacy, a place whose presence involves withdrawal from the world. He associates it with women. Needless to say, not everyone makes this association. Even from a male perspective, it depends on the women one knows. Levinas himself, backs off, and says, there is no question here of defying ridicule by maintaining the empirical truth or counter-truth that every home in fact presupposes a woman The feminine has been encountered in this analysis as one of the cardinal points of the horizon in which the inner life takes placeand the empirical absence of the human being of "feminine sex" in a dwelling nowise affects the dimension of femininity which remains open there, as the very welcome of the dwelling (157-8). In other words, he is trying to describe something other than women in talking about the feminine? What is this? He gives us a clue by saying: The Other who welcomes in intimacy is not the you [vous] of the face that reveals itself in a dimension of height, but precisely the thou [tu] of familiarity: a language without teaching, a silent language, an understanding without words, an expression in secret7 The welcoming other is not that of the face who calls one into question. It is of the face whose presence is discreetly an absence. One way to think of this is in term of God. Just as God limits himself to as to leave a space for creation, so the welcoming other limits himself. He or she withdraws so as to leave a space for the other to express 49

himself, to grow and develop. This is creating an environment, nourishing space for the other. A gardener does this for her plants. A woman and a father do this for their children. One can think of this in terms of incarnation, of providing the flesh (in the extended sense of a nourishing environment) for the other to come to be, grow, and develop. One can also put this in terms of empathy and the incarnation involved in empathetically taking up the other persons standpoint. There is actually a double incarnation here: Loving his parent, the child takes up the parents standpoint. He shares in a kind of primitive empathy in, say, his parents seeing him. Incarnating himself through empathy in them, he see himself through them. In other words, in allowing himself to come to presence through this loving gaze, he sees himself through their seeing him. The child thus incarnates himself in the world of things, not as a thing, but as his parents child with all the human content this involves. The same model applies not just to sight, but also to touch. Touching, for example, his mother, a child touches himself. Her return of his touching allows him to incarnate himself as a located touching. The same may hold for our other senses, such as hearing and smell. If it does, then the result of this incarnation is the located selfhood of the sensing individual. Deprived of such contact and, hence, of this incarnation through the other, the child becomes placeless. He feels lost. Turning to describe the home, Levinas describes its primary function as breaking the plenum of the element. Such separation makes labor and property possible (156). Thus, the home separates one from the outside world. The window of the home makes possible a look of him who escapes looks, the look that contemplates (ibid.). In other words, just as our interiority prevents others from seeing our seeing from the inside (they cannot share our consciousness), so the home manifests this on an extended level. The other can see my body, not the seeing that takes place within it. So also he sees the outside of the home, not those looking out through the windows. Having a home both takes labor and makes labor possible. Having built a home, we can through labor withdraw things from the elementalfrom the common sky, wind, rain, earth, etc. Thus, in the home, we are not exposed to the elements. We do not just live from them. We do not just enjoy them. We postpone enjoyment. For example, we do not just eat food, we put it in storage. We take concern for the morrow. In Levinass words, the labor that draws the things from the elements put[s] [them] in reserve, deposited in the

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home. The home, in other words, founds possession. It, itself, is not a possession in the same sense as the goods it can collect and keep (157). In other words, with a home, possession of durable goods first becomes possible. By contrast, possession by enjoyment is one with enjoyment; no activity precedes sensibility (158). The most primitive activity that results in possession in the proper sense (the possession of property) is that of grasping and gathering something (For John Locke this is the origin of property). According to Levinas, labor as the energy of acquisition would be impossible in a being that had no dwelling (159). Gathering, in other words, would not make any sense, if I had no place to store what I gathered. The action of labor is, then, for Levinas, egotistical. It involves seizure and acquisition. This is concealed by the wastes and works, this movement of acquisition leaves in its wake city, field, garden, landscape (ibid.). The public realm, for Levinas, is simply a by product of the essentially private and egotistical action of labor. Such labor, he adds, is not violence since it is applied to the elemental, that is, to fathomless obscurity of matter that is faceless (160). Now, for Levinas, it is with labor that the beings of the world emerge. He writes: The hand delineates a world by drawing what it grasps from the element, delineating definite beings having forms. Labor is the informing of the formless. Its result is the emergence of the existent, support of qualities. Labor, in other words, creates the substantiality of the thing (161). Note: there is a double contrast here. The first is with Aristotle, who declares that some things are by art (that is, labor), but others have their forms naturally. These are the other living beings and natural bodies. The second is with Heidegger. Heidegger does not mention labor in its relation to the home in describing how Dasein discloses its world through its projects. For Levinas, by contrast, The dwelling conditions labor. The hand that acquires is burdened by what it takes. It needs home to store it (161). The distinction between Levinas and Heidegger can be put in terms of the Greek word for being or substance, which is ousia. Its original sense was property. We still have that sense in expressions like a man of substance, a substantial sum, etc. Levinass claim is that substance refers to the dwelling. This means that possession alone touches substance; the other relations with the thing only affect attributes (162). Thus, the claim is that Heideggers account does not really touch the disclosure of beings, but only of their attributes. As Levinas adds, the function of being [an] implement imposes itself as [only] one of the attributes of these beings (ibid.).

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This, incidentally, is why substances, things, can be bought and sold. They are substances as property. But as such, they can be converted into money (ibid.). Here, the implicit claim is that Heidegger has no conception of an economy. At the basis of an economy is the fact of the elemental being having been transformed by labor into property (substance). If this correct, then the being of beings involves dwelling and interiority in the extended sense. But if this is so, their ontology is structured by ethics, namely, the ethical relations that permit the home to be. The final part of todays reading concerns the body. In order to labor, one has to have a body. As Levinas defines it, the body [appears] as the very regime in which separation holds sway, as the how of this separation (163). It is the place where a movement of interiorization meets a movement of labor and acquisition (ibid.). To explain this, Levinas begins with enjoyment. Enjoyment manifests a sovereignty distinct from that of being a causa sui, which nothing outside could affect It is equally foreign to Heideggers Geworfenheit (thrownness) which caught up in the other that limits it and negates it, suffers from this alterity (164). In enjoyment, sovereignty and submission are simultaneous. The existence of this equivocation [between the two] is the body (ibid.). This is because I gain my independence through a dependence on the other. The other nourishes me and makes possible whatever independence I have. Thus, Levinas defines corporeal existence as the ability to be at home with oneself in something other than oneself, to be oneself while living from something other than oneself, to live from (ibid.). This recalls Jonass definition of being alive as defined by metabolism, which I mentioned in the last lecture. For Levinas as well, the simultaneity of independence and need constitute the body. (165). He goes on to claim that this ambiguity of the body is consciousness (ibid.). This because consciousness is defined as the outside-of-itself of temporality. It is an openness upon duration. Now, as we saw in our discussion of bodily metabolism, need gives me a future. But when I labor, I postpone this future. I get the stretched out quality of time we call duration.

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Here, in Levinass words, enjoyment, as the body that labors, maintains itself in this primary postponement, [it maintains itself] in that which opens the very dimension of time (165). Given this, we have to emend Heideggers definition of freedom as finite freedom. Levinas asserts, Freedom as a relation of life with an other that lodges it is not a finite freedom. It is not a freedom of limited choices coming out of my thrown situation in the face of a limited time available to me. It is, rather, virtually a null freedom. Freedom is as it were a by-product of life (ibid.). It is the result of the body in its dependence and independence. It comes with the laboring body. In Levinass words, To be free is to build a world in which one could be free (ibid.). Here, we should note the transformation this works on the traditional Kantian ethics. For Kant, the ethical relation involves treating the other as an end in himself. He is such insofar he engages in rational choices. This means that reason and not bodily needs determine his choices. The person does the right thing simply because his reason convinces him that it is the right thing in and of itself independent of any external circumstances. The individual thereby is autonomous. This argument implies that respect for the other (treating him not simply as a means) is conditioned on the other existing as a rational agent in abstraction from his body and its needs. Against this, Levinas develops an alternate view of freedom, understood as autonomy. Such autonomy is a function of embodiment. It involves living from and labor. It is an independence rooted in our dependence of the world. Such autonomy, as based on the body, implies the vulnerability of the other. This means that the ethical relation to the other as free takes into account the vulnerability of the other. The focus is not just acting such that the other could authorize ones actions. The other, for example, would not normally will that you would lie to him. It is also on the vulnerability of the other. The other as the widow, the orphan, the stranger In respecting his freedom one also respects the bodily basis of this. Kant, of course, has a general command of benevolence. I must be benevolent to the other insofar as I cannot universalize non-benevolence since I might need the help of others. But Levinas goes beyond this utilitarian view. His view of helping the other ultimately transcends any utilitarian economy. Let me return to Levinass statement: To be free is to build a world in which one could be free. It is the key to Levinas account of our consciousness. According to Levinas, in building this world, one also makes concrete ones consciousness as a temporal outside of itself.

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Thus, for Levinas, consciousness is produced as all the concreteness of dwelling and labor. To be consciousness is to be in relation with what is, but [to be this] as through the present of what-is were not yet entirely accomplished and only constituted the future (166). This future is the postponed need, a postponement accomplished by labor in gathering what one needs and placing it in ones dwelling. Thus, against Heidegger, Levinas writes: To be conscious is precisely to have timenot to exceed the present time in the project that anticipates the future where one is ahead of oneself awaiting oneself at the goal. It is, rather, to have a distance with regard to the present itself, to be related to the element in which one is settled as to what is not yet there (ibid.). Philosophically, the claim here is that Heideggers claim that consciousness is a temporal structure, specifically, that of the apartness of time in which the future is not yet the present, is founded on our bodily being. Consciousness as such apartness is implied in the body as postponing its demise. It does so, organically, by living from. But, also, because of the uncertainty of this, by laboring and storing up what it needs. Here, I relate to the element as that-from-which-I-live-from as if I did not live from it this by storing up from the element what I need. My relation to time becomes my making use of it. In Levinass words, The indetermination of the element, its future, becomes consciousness, [it becomes] the possibility of making use of the time (ibid.). For Levinas, to conceive the future is to forestall its exigencies. To labor is to delay its expiration. The future, the time when I will be in need, does not come. The time between my present enjoyment and my future neediness does not expire (ibid.). The duration, the temporal apartness of my life, is maintained. This happens only when I labor, but labor is possible only in a being that has the structure of a body. In other words, without the body, there is neither labor nor time in the apartness of concrete duration. Now, this futurity that labor grasps, Levinas notes, is not something planned out in advance. The end is a term that the hand searches for in the risk of missing it (167). What we have here is the accomplishment and representation of the end going on together. In Levinass words, In reality the representation of the end and the movement of the hand that plunges towards it through an unexplored distance, preceded by no searchlight, constitute but one and the same event and define a being that inhabits the world, that is, that is at home with itself in it (168). The point is that the process is like the metabolism in which the result of the metabolic process is the being that is engaging in the process. I take in things and make them part of my substance. The end (which is taking in nourishment) and the being of the organism as engaging in metabolism are the same.

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The same holds for the temporality that characterizes this being. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 168-183: II, D, 6, E, 1-3 Levinas in todays reading continues his existential analytic of the person (Dasein). This is an analytic that in its treatment of enjoyment, labor, the body, the feminine (the welcoming Other), recollection (as self-collection Selbstbesinnung in Heideggers terminology), and the Other who places one in question, is put forward as an alternative to Heideggers account in Being and Time. It is an analytic that is designed to position ethics as prior to ontology, In certain sense it represents a natural counter thrust to Heideggers position. Having chosen Dasein as the privileged point of access to the question of being (being is disclosed in and through Daseins understanding of being (Seinsverstndnis) as exemplified by his choice of projects), one has to ask: why does Heidegger leave out the ethical? Karl Jaspers, Heideggers friend, read the work and found it extraordinarily egotistical with its focus on the individuals care for his own being. If the ethical is essential to understanding human existence, and if human existence is determinative of the meaning of Being, then ethics is prior to ontology (at least in Heideggers sense of ontology). Levinas begins todays reading by taking up the conception of representational thought. Such thought assumes that first we represent to ourselves an object and then we add to this representation other value predicates associated with our emotional and volitional life. This position is not Heideggers. It stems from Descartes, who claims that when I wish, or fear, or affirm, or deny, I conceive something as the object of the action of my mind, but I also add something to the idea which I have of the entity. The result is the object as wished for, feared, etc. (p. 36, Le Fleur trans.). Levinas gives this position when he writes that this position (which he calls the intellectualist thesis) maintains that in order to will it is first necessary to represent to oneself what one wills; in order to desire, to represent ones goal to oneself; in order to feel, to represent to one self the object of the sentiment, in order to act, to represent to one self what one will do (168). This position is also Husserls in the Logical Investigations. Against this, Levinas remarks that this intellectualist thesis subordinates life to representation (ibid.). Yet to represent, we first must live. Living involves desiring,

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feeling, and acting. Moreover, we have to live from the things we represent (food, water, air, etc.). Levinas remarks that representational thought, which nourishes itself and lives from the very being it represents to itself, refers to an exceptional possibility of this separated existence. How can this existence claim its priority over what it lives from? How can it, as conditioned by life, claim to substitute itself after the event for this life in reality so as to constitute this very reality (169). The question concerns the idealistic thesis that the sense that being has for me is constituted by me. The thesis takes the subject as constituting the sense of the world from a standpoint external to the world. This is the thesis of the transcendental idealism of Kant, Husserl, etc. Levinas remarks that such idealism is an eternal temptation, one that results from the very event of separation (169). This event of separation is my establishing a home. It is a result of my having limited a part of this world and having closed it off, having access to the elements I enjoy by way of the door and the window. Through the window I can see without being seen. I have a sovereignty with regard to the world that is prior to the world (qua represented) even though it is posterior to the world (in fact). Thus, my sovereignty is anterior posteriorly in Levinas phrase (170). It is only in this way that I can see without being seen and hence assume that I am not conditioned by the world, that I have mastery in determining it, that I do not in fact live from it (ibid.). The exceptional possibility of this separated existencewhich is that of engaging in idealistic philosophyis thus conditioned by having a home. Heidegger misses this point in his notion of pragmatic disclosure. In Levinass words, In Being and Time, the home does not appear apart from the system of implements. But can the in view of oneself characteristic of care be brought about without a disengagement from the situation without being at home with oneself? (ibid.). Heideggers care is care for ones own being. This involves recollection. It requires disengagement from the situation and a reflection on oneself (Selbstbesinnuung). Levinas is asserting that this cannot arise without the home. Heidegger, in other words, fails to give an essential condition for the possibility of care. When you are homeless, you are immediately exposed to the elements. You have no time or place to plan ahead, have projects. You cannot labor, since you have no place to store the results of this labor. For the same reason, you cannot have property. Given this,

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the care that concerns itself with what sort of being you will be has not the possibilities open to it that would give you any sort of choice. Care, here, becomes impossible. Returning to the theme of representation, Levinas defines it as a determination of the other by the same, without the same being determined by the other (170). If I am just living from the other, this is impossible. This would be my remaining exterior to the elements I live from. (ibid.). If I establish a home, I do recollect myself. But I do not yet separate myself from my possessions. In Levinass words, the withdrawal is not a simple echo of possession. The possession of things, understood as a presence to them, does not imply a withdrawal from them (ibid.). If I have the welcoming face of the Other that establishes a home, this is still not enough. I need to free myself from the very possession that the welcome of the home establishes. This means, I need to know how to give what I possess (171). I do this when I welcome the Other who presents himself in my home by opening my home to him (171).8 What does this Other bring that allows me to engage in representation? What does my welcome of him involve? Levinass answer to both questions is language. The other calls me into question in his very presence. This calling into question of the I, coextensive with the manifestation of the Other in the face, we call language (ibid.). What does language do? It makes present the intersubjective, the objective world that is there for everyone. Since I cannot see out any other eyes than my own, the presence of the object as there for others as well as myself can only be assumed by asking others if they see what I see. If they agree, then I assume that the object is real, is present not just for me but for them. But this means its real presence is that of language. The intersubjective, objective world is present to me only through language. The result of this linguistic transformation is representation understood as a determination of the other by the same, without the same being determined by the other. As Levinas put this: the universality a thing receives from the word extracts it from the hic et nunc (here and now). We have a primordial dispossession, one where the generality of the word institutes a common world (173).

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This dispossession is the things being dispossessed of my here and now, my sensuous interiority. The intervention of the other moves the thing into the realm of language and the common communicative world This world is one that I and my others can represent. We do not have a material relation to it. Composed as it is of linguistic symbols, it does not materially (i.e., physically) determine us. Thus, we transcend the physical worlds real influence on us by transforming it into linguistically present senses or meanings. The result is the freedom of representation. In Levinass words, representation derives its freedom with regard to the world that nourishes it from the essentially moral relation with the Other (172). This moral relation is provided by language, that is, by the sincerity and generosity that speaking and responding imply. Now, the separation of the world from its sensuous representation in us is accompanied by a self-separation. When the Other calls me into question, I have to go outside of myself. I have to regard the world from a different perspective than my own. Thus, through the other, I put myself and my perspective into question. Here, as Levinas says, morality calls in question and puts at a distance from itself, the I itself (172). Note the constitutive build up here of a number of layers, the later presupposing the earlier: living from, having a home, the welcoming other, the other that puts one into question, language, representation. Given this build up, we have to say with Levinas, the transcendence of the face is not enacted outside of the world. People dont encounter each other as abstract, disembodied spirits. We are in an economy. In its broadest sense, this economy can be defined as the system of exchange between ourselves and the world. Our bodily metabolism with its organic needs is an example of this economy; so are our normal, everyday commercial transactions. They point to our dependence on the world, i.e., to the fact that we live only through a constant process of exchange with it, of living from it. The relation to the Other, as presupposing the earlier constitutive levels, must be in terms of this economy. In Levinas words, No human or interhuman relationship can be enacted outside of economy; no face can be approached with empty hands and closed home (172). This does not mean I give to the other only if I can expect a return. Rather my action is one of generosity. I speak and I explain myself. I dont just return one coin for its equivalent. I add to the conversation. Conversation is a mode of generosity, of giving to (sharing with) the other.

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In Levinass words, The relationship with the Other is not produced outside of the world, but puts in question the world [that is] possessed. Here, the first donation, the first gift to the other consists in speaking the world to the Other. With language, one makes ones world common, open to oneself and to the other. This is a a primordial dispossession, a first donation (173). Such speaking to the other is a generalization, a making common. This, Levinas writes, is the offering of the world to the Other. It is the act which answers the face of the other (174). Here, another factor enters in. This is choice. I can choose to open my home to the Other or I can chose not to. Generosity to the Other is not based on need. There is no compulsion in it. It is a voluntary, and hence an ethical act. Thus, as Levinas says, the separated being can close itself up in its egoism. This possibility of banishing with impunity all hospitality (that is all language) from ones home evinces the radicalism of separation (173). Separation means that my needs are fulfilled. I can live in my home (I can speak my language with those of my home, my friends, my group, etc.) and never open myself up to the language of the otherto his teaching me. All this can be done with impunity insofar as I do not need anything. Thus, the other in his demands on me manifests authority without power. The author is their for me as the author of his words, but I need not listen. I need not respond by offering him my world, my view. Since this is not a power relationship, am not forced to respond. Were it a relation of power, it would not be a communicative relation, it would not involve mutuality. The underlying point here is that only voluntary actions can be considered to be moral. But these are not actions driven by need. For Heidegger, Dasein is driven by need. Dasein has no home. For Levinas, he does and having a home means that he can choose or not choose to be generous. The remainder of todays reading consists in Levinas rejecting some alternate senses of the other. The first is Hegels notion that the other manifests himself in his works. Hegels dialectic genesis of self consciousness: Animal selfhood as generated by desirethe first separation of the self from the world The satisfaction of desire, the collapse of such selfhood. The human solution, to maintain ones selfhood through the recognition of the other. One does not desire the other in order to consume him. This would not give one any recognition The other as an animal self is desire What one desires is the others selfhood as desire. Animal desire is, at bottom desire for life, for its preservation. To attain this is to be recognized by the other as the object of its desire That is as life, as controlling its preservation.

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This is ones recognition as master, as having the other completely in ones power, as being for the other (who assumes the position of the slave) life itself The two preselves fight to the death. One shrinks back and will not risk his life, which remains for him the highest object of his (animal desire The other risks everything. He holds his life at naught. He shows himself free from being determined by nature and natural desires. The victory of one confirms his position of being recognized by the other and not recognizing the other in return. It leaves us with a one-sided recognition. The victor is master, the loser is slave The slave works for the master, he labors on nature and prepares it for the masters enjoyment. The master is at a dialectical dead end. For the recognition of the slave to mean anything, he must recognize the slave as a self like himself. But he cant do this and still be master. The slave in laboring on nature recognizes himself in its projects. He sees his selfhood in the human world he creates. He can make dialectical progress as he fashions this human world. All this is from Kojeves course on Hegel, a course Levinas took. Against this view of one recognizing a person in and through his works, Levinas says the worker does not hold in his hands all the threads of his own action. Works have a destiny independent of the I, are integrated in an ensemble of works: they can be exchanged, that is, be maintained in the anonymity of money. This inner life does not recognize itself in the existence attributed to it by the economy (176). Levinas puts this point by distinguishing the who from the what question. When we answer the question, who is someone, by saying what he does, our answer refers to system of relations. But the who designates a non-qualifiable presence of an existent who presents himself without reference to anything, and yet distinguishes himself from every other existent (177). What we confront here is a face who speaks, who signifies himself through this speaking. As such, he is present as a being who is manifested precisely as absent from his manifestation: a manifestation in the absence of beinga phenomenon (178). He is present as the saying that is not the manifest said. Here, the signifier, he who gives a sign, is not signified. Hence the signifier must present himself before every sign, by himselfpresent a face. What we are encountering in this face is the surplus that language involves with respect to all the works and labors that manifest a man. This is a surplus that measures the distance between the living man and the dead (182).

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What we are encountering here Bibles sense that one cannot represent God through any graven image, but only through the word. The distinction between the Greek religious sensibility and the Hebrew is encapsulated in this. The Greek gods were natural entities in the world. As such they could be represented in terms of the world (its animals, humans, etc.). The Hebrew God cannot. He is infinite in the sense of not being representable by any finite thing. The claim here is that the same can be said of the presence of the other. Now, recollection involves recognizing this aspect of oneself. In Levinas words, It is only in approaching the Other that I attend to myself. The face I welcome makes me pass from phenomenon to being. In discourse I expose myself to the questioning of the Other, and this urgency of the response engenders me for responsibility; as responsible I am brought to my final reality (178) I am moved from a what to a who. I can become capable of care but in a very different sense that that Heidegger envisaged. A final point: Levinas claims that the phenomenal noumenal split of Kant is manifested in my relation to the Other. The others interiority remains noumenal. This means that man has a phenomenal presence. The noumenal is only present to me through language. More precisely, it is present in the other coming to the aid of his words, adding to them, qualifying them, etc. Totality and Infinity, 187-204: III, A, B, , 1-3 With todays reading, we begin the section Exteriority and the Face. The first part of this, Sensibility and the Face, attempts to position the approach to the face by arguing against the traditional views of sensibility and vision. As before, Levinass position has to be understood as a contestation of Heidegger's. For Heidegger, Dasein is its disclosedness. It does not rely on something else to be such. In his words, It is itself the clearing (Being and Time, p. 171). It is such in its being outside of itself in its temporal exstases. These are what open up the world so as to let things appear. For Levinas, the openness of the clearing (the Lichtung or lighting in German) is a function of the face. It provides the light that allows us to see. This involves a different sense of light than that present in the phenomenological thought of Husserl and Heidegger. They think of the clearing in terms of vision, that is, in terms of sensible experience. But for Levinas, the epiphany as a face determine[s] a relationship different from that which characterizes all our sensible experience (187).

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The emphasis on the face shifts the relation from the visual to the ethical. Conversation rather than sight becomes the means of disclosure. Levinas begins by noting that Husserls doctrine of intentionality has compromised the idea of sensation by removing [from it] the character of being a concrete datum (ibid.). Husserl does this by his doctrine that the intentional relation to the object involves the interpretation of our sensations. This means that we dont see our sensations, we see objects that result from this interpretation. As I earlier cited Husserl, It belongs to perception that something appears within it, but interpretation makes up what we term appearance. I hear a barrel organthe sensed tones I interpret as barrel organ tones (Logische Untersuchungen, Halle ed., II, 704-705). Thus, as Levinas writes, if we follow this doctrine, then color is always the color of a dress, a lawn, a wall; sound is a noise of a passing car, or a voice of someone speaking and so forth (187). The problem with this view is first that it fails to recognize the plane on which the sensible life is lived as enjoyment. In enjoyment, we have sensations whose representational content dissolves into their affective content (ibid.). For example, when you eat an apple, your experience is not objectifying but affective. It is one of tastes, textures, chewing, swallowing, the sense of something being within you, of hunger being satisfied. I am describing this objectively (that is, in terms of what is publically there-foreverybody). But this is deceptive. The experience that each of has is private, not open to the public. As entering into the private, non-publicly representable sphere, enjoyment, Levinas writes, is endowed with a dynamism other than that of perception (ibid.). The sensation I have in eating the apple is, in Levinas words, not the subjective counterpart of objective qualities, but an enjoyment anterior to the crystallization of consciousness, [into] I and non-I, into subject and object (188). Sensation exhibits here a transcendental function sui generis. According to Levinas, the structures of the non-I are not necessarily structures of objectivity. Sensation per se yields a quality without [the] support or extension [of some] object endowed with qualities (188). Sensation, in other words, is not the I, but it is also, per se, not reducible to being the sensation of some objective quality. Think of the bodily experience of eating the apple. What Levinas is here opposing is the denial of the body in its non-substitutability, its uniqueness, which translates into the uniqueness, the non-objective quality of sensation. More generally he is opposing the elimination of the body from ethics and ethical theories.

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Such elimination truncates such theories since disembodied beings are not vulnerable, do not suffer physical wants. Thus, our responsibility to such beings is not thought of in terms of such needs. Virtue ethics. Character is what is important. It helps one function well. There is not a word in Aristotle about the widow and the orphan. The body only comes in in the fact that if one is ugly one cannot be happy since one cannot function well socially. Duty ethics. Abstract from all particularities, follow the universal categorical imperative. Utilitarianism. Pursue the greatest happiness, even if this means sacrificing the happiness of the few for the sake of the many. The fundamental principle of morality is, in Mills words, that one person's happiness, supposed equal in degree is counted for exactly as much as another's. The principle, in other words, is summed up in Bentham's dictum, 'everybody to count for one, nobody for more than one. Such a doctrine makes each person as one equivalent to every other one. There is no uniqueness. The point: all such theories are based on an epistemological error of failing to recognize our bodily being in its uniqueness. At their basis is their taking the object as a visible and touched object. Its objectivity is interpreted without the other sensations taking part in this. Here, the object is outside the body. Vision is the chief sense. It has a relation to the light. As Levinas remarks, for Plato, besides the eye and the thing, vision presupposes the light. The eye does not see the light, but the object in the light (189) The light makes the air transparent. It becomes a void. In Levinass words, The light make the thing appear by driving out the shadows; it empties space. It makes space arise specifically as a void. Through it we have the openness of experience. We can move our hand through the void. We can see through it. This coming through the void is the coming of objects to us from their origin. Levinas writes, that this conception explains the privilege of objectivity and its claim to coincide with the very being of existents (ibid.). How does it do this? The object is public. It is out there in the open available to everyone. It can be in relation to everyone becomes it is in the open, in the void. Here, as Levinas writes, the relation of the subject with the object is subordinated to the relation of the object with the void of openness, which is not an object. To comprehend the object is to apprehend it out of an illuminated site that it does not fill (190).

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Now, for Heidegger, a relation to Being, understood as a standard of disclosure takes the place of Platos light. In Levinas words, For Heidegger, an openness upon Being, which is not a being, is necessary in order that, in general, a something manifest itself. Here being itself (in the form of a standard for disclosure) provides the clearing (189). For Kant, and modern philosophy, the clearing, the void, means that the object, defined in its relation to it, becomes understood in terms of the mathematical relations that give us the properties of space itself. As a result, geometrical notions impose themselves on our conception of the object. We can also speak of mathematical relations of objects to each other, that is their spatial (and temporal relations) to each other across space (or the void) (190). For Levinas, however, the void ultimately reduces itself to nothing. In his words, considered in itself, illuminate space, emptied by light of the obscurity that filled it, is nothing. What we face, if not such nothingness in the strict sense, is the impersonal there is this aperion (the limitless) that he described in De leixstence a lexistant (190-191). Vision forgets the horror of this interminable aperion in its focus on objects. It thus forgets the enjoyment (the focus on the sensuous as sensuous) that first allows us to escape the aperion (191). Doing so, it gives objects their significance by reference to other objects. As such, however, it is not a transcendence. It ascribes a signification by the relation it makes possible. The empty space through which it moves simply ensures the condition for the lateral signification of things within the same. They become things within the system of spatial (and temporal) relations (191). They do not relate to anything beyond themselves. In fact, they have no interiority. In Levinass words, in the current view of bodies, the depth of the thing can have no other meaning than that of its matter, and the revelation of matter is essentially superficial (192). It is against this view of the body and of bodies in general that Levinas is focusing on the lived body with its sensuous enjoyment. It has an interiority. As such, it can sustain a relation of transcendence. This is the relation to face of the other. It provides the light. In Levinass words, The relation with the Other alone introduces a dimension of transcendence and leads us to a relation totally different from experience in the sensible sense of the term (193). Heideggers Lichtung (or clearing) is, in other words, provided by this relation to the Other.

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How does the other occasion transcendence? How does the relation to her make possible the clearing? The key here is discourse. The face of the other is a speaking face. He does not just speak, but comments on what he says. He adds to it. Thus, my relation to him is not just the Heideggarian letting a being be that and how it is. In Levinass words, Speaking rather that letting be, solicits the Other. Speech cuts across vision. It does so because the other (unlike the object) can contest my interpretation. Thus, speaking to the other, what I say when I make him my theme seems to contain the other. But, Levinas adds, already it is said to another who, as interlocutor, has quit the theme that encompasses him. This other rises up behind the said. Emancipated from the theme that seemed a moment to hold him, he forthwith contests the meaning I ascribe to him. Here, the putting into question emanates from the other as he speaks to me (195). Transcendence or openness is inscribed in this relation because of the infinity of the other. Such infinity means simply the non-limited character of the other. It signifies his crossing the limits that have been laid down. Thus, Levinas writes: The presence of a being not entering into, but overflowing the sphere of the same determines its status as infinite (ibid.). The idea of infinity is that of the more contained in the less. It is that of excess. A phenomenological way to describe this is in terms of intention and fulfillment. For most things, we recognize something as itself when it shows itself as we intend it, that is, as we expect it to appear given our past experience. The intention, we can say, forms our anticipatory interpretation of a given experience. Now, there are four possible relations of intention to fulfillment. The givenness of what we intend can exactly match our intentions. It can be other than what we intendas is the case when we are simply mistaken. The givenness also can be less. It can, for example, not offer the detail that was part of our intentions. Finally, givenness can exceed our intentions. In showing itself, the object offers us more than what was intended. The last alternative is that of an intention that intends its own surpassing. In intending the other I expect that the other will surpass the content of my intention. Thus I recognize the other as a person by virtue of her behaving as I do, but not in any strictly predictable ways. There is always a certain excess in what she shows me. She is not limited to the content of my intention, that is, to the anticipations that arise from my interpretation of her situation. She acts out of her own interpretation. To intend her as such is, in fact, to intend the inadequacy of ones intention. The intention directs itself towards a fulfillment that will exceed it. Its object is an exceeding givenness. This excess manifests the otherness of the other. 65

Levinas is expressing this phenomenological description in terms of his notion of infinity. He puts it in terms of a contrast with Kant. For Kant, the infinite is a regulative ideal. For him, the infinite presupposes the finite, which it amplifies infinitely (196). The Kantian regulative ideal of a free act, for example, is that of an act where the limiting conditions that determine it are removed. Similarly the ideal of God would be that of an absolutely unconditioned condition (here we remove, one by one all the conditions that condition something). In each case, we start off with the finite and gradually approach the infinite by removing limits. Yet, as Levinas notes, this passage to the limit implicates the idea of infinity with all the consequences that Descartes drew from it (196). Descartes asserts that we cannot grasp the finitude of the finite unless we first have the idea of the infinite. The finite presupposes the infinite, not vice-versa. (This is the same argument as Platos that the idea of perfect equality is what first allows us to recognize the approach of things to the condition of being equal). Levinass conception of the infinite is simply that of the more in the less, of overflow, of inability to contain. It is this that we presuppose (and, in fact, experience) in grasping another person and hence in grasping the objective world that is there for both of us. This idea of infinity has an ethical component. According to Levinas, this in the desire that overflows ones egotism and directs itself to the others good rather than ones own good. The idea is also, in Levinass words, the overflowing of finite thought by its content [the finite thought being that of the interpretation I have of the Other, the content being what the other presents me with]. As such, the idea brings about the relation of thought with what exceeds its capacity, with what at each moment it learns without suffering shock. It occurs in the opposition of conversation, [that is, in gaining the opposing views of the other, it occurs] in sociality (197). Another expression of this opening up or transcendence occurs in the ethical aspect of the face. Here, as Levinas writes, the face speaks to me and thereby invites me to a relation incommensurate with a power exercised (198). It does not defy my power as an opposing power, but rather it opposes my ability for power (mon pouvoir de pouvoir) (198). Facing him, I face the very unforseeableness of his reaction. He can sovereignly say no to me.

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What resists me is not the superlative of power, but precisely the infinity of his transcendence (ibid.). What I confront here is the resistance of that which has no resistancethe ethical resistance (199). I cannot get a hold of the other as other. I can murder him/her, but then I face a thing. The only possible relation I can have to him as Other is to respond to him. As Levinas writes, if the resistance to murder were not ethical but real, we would have a perception of it. But we cannot see this resistence. It is not something in the world. It is a presence that exceeds things. Since I am always already with others, I have to say that this relation is first. In Levinass words, the epiphany of the face is ethical. War presupposes peace [war] does not represent the first event of the encounter (ibid.). By contrast, in Hegels description of the genesis of self-consciousness, peace presupposes war. Its beginning is the struggle of two pre-selves for recognition. Peace only arises when one side wins. But such peace is temporary. One side is master, the other slave. One side is free, the other not. The result is an inherently unstable situation. For Levinas, the initial encounter is actually such that freedom results from the other. In his words, the being that expresses itself imposes itself, but does so precisely by appealing to me with its destitution and nudity. . Thus, in expression, the being that imposes itself does not limit but promotes my freedom, by arousing my goodness (200). This pacifistic, non-violent relation is essential for learning. If I limit the others ability to put me into question, if I silence him so that I dont have to respond, then I can learn nothing from him. The question of reason, the question of why something is the way it is can only arise if I confront alternatives. But this happens only when I face the other as other. Without this, reason, which looks for reasons or grounds, cannot get started. Ethics, the pacifistic, free relation to the other, is the ground of reason. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 204-219: III, B, 4-8 Levinas now turns to give his theory of language. According to Levinas, discourse founds signification. Levinas position is designed to avoid two alternatives. In the first, which he only briefly mentions, we reduce reason to a function of the body. This is the view of naturalism. Here, having similar bodies, similar brains, etc., would mean that we have a similar

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reason. In Levinas words, The concordance between consciousnesses would then be explained by the resemblance of beings constituted in the same fashion. Language would be reduced to a system of signs passing between them (207-8) This leads us to naturalist psychologism. The problem with this is that one has no way of distinguishing signification as such. All one has are material categories. Signs do not function as causal agencies, linguistic sequences are not causal sequences, etc. The other alternative is Husserls response to this in the Logical Investigations. Here, reason becomes the internal coherence of an ideal order. It is the internal order between signs, which is determined by their content alone. It consists either of formal relations, e.g., p v ~p, which make up formal logic, or of the relations of various types of content (e.g., color, extension, loudness, pitch, etc.), which make up material logic. In both types of logic, the individuality of the speakers is completely abstracted from so that one loses the ipseity of individual consciousness (208). What language needs, however, is a plurality of individual consciousnesses. These have to be in communication and yet distinct from each other. Levinas, thus asserts, it is not the mediation of the sign that forms signification, but signification (whose primordial event is the face to face) that makes the sign function possible (206). In this sign function, I signify something to someone. To signify is to indicate in the absence of something. Thus, you cannot see out of my eyes. The only way in which I can indicate to you what I am seeing is to speak. My words function as signs insofar as they stand for (or stand in the place of) what they point to. The same holds for you. I cannot see what you see since I cannot occupy your position in space at the same time as you do. Our embodiment prevents this. In both cases, as Levinas says, signification is to perception what the symbol is to the object symbolized (207). The symbol stands for the object, just as signification of my words stand for both what I see through my eyes and what you see through yours when we use the same words. Thus, the objective, (the there-for-everyone) presence of the world is through discourse. The words stand for the objects that we see in common (objects that we never, however, see through one anothers eyes). Otherwise put: the objective presence of the world is linguistic. It is present in speech. One can also put this by saying that if the other were present to me so that I could directly experience his perceptions, that is, see through his eyes, his consciousness and mine would merge and we would not need language to communicate what we are experiencing. Language, therefore, presupposes the otherness of the other, it assumes his

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nonpresence as a consciousness. It is based on the fact that our consciousnesses do not merge but preserve their individuality. This signifies, as Levinas writes, the essence of language is the relation with the Other (207). I cannot constitute the sense of this Other. I cannot, starting from myself and my experiences, make complete sense of him. He always exceeds the intentions I draw from my experiences. What I face in confronting him is, thus, an overflowing of the intention that envisages [intends] by the envisaged [the person I intend] (ibid.). Here, in fact, as Levinas writes, the being of signification consists in putting into question constitutive freedom itself (206). My freedom to constitute the other [to make sense of him] is limited since as other, he escapes me, that is, he is not present. I can access neither his memories nor his expectations. This non-presence is, however, precisely what makes language necessary. In the face to face, I speak to the Other. We form, in discourse, a society that does not dispense with alterity. In this society, we are obligated to respond to each other. What obligates us is the fact that the Other sees the world from a different perspective. To the point that I take it on, I am uprooted from my perspective, that is, from my consciousness as centered on my point of view. In Levinas words, The consciousness of obligation is no longer a consciousness, since it tears consciousness up from its center, submitting it to the Other (207). What I experience is a self-separation. I see the world from my point of view; yet, called into question by the other, I also am called to apprehend the world from a different perspective. One perspective (one interpretation of the situation we are experiencing) is overlaid on the other. When I try to combine them, when I try to get the objective world, the world there for everyone, then I detach myself from myself. Since the work of combination is through talking with the other, objectification is produced in the very work of language. The result is that the subject is detached from the things possessed as though the subject hovered over its own existence, as though it were detached from it. Such distance is more radical than every distance in the world. This is because, for language, to work, the subject must find itself at a distance from its own being (209). Thus, when I express myself, I convert into linguistic signs what I experience. The signs signify or point to such experience. My linguistic presence in such signs is distinct from my self-presence as an actual experiencing subject. I am in this linguistic presence at a distance from my being as an experiencing subject. As Levinas puts this, In designating what it possesses to the other, in speaking, the subject hovers over its own existence. This designated possession is linguistically present. Only as such linguistic presence is what I possess there for me and my other. Only as such is it objective. Before its expression, it is only subjective (only there for me).

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This means, as Levinas says, language makes possible the objectivity of objects. Such objectivity presupposes an Other person to whom I speak. I constitute the linguistic presence of objects in relation to this other. As Levinas draws the conclusion, What I communicate therefore is already constituted in function of others. In speaking, I do not transmit to the Other what is objective for me: the objective becomes objective only through communication (210). Objectivity, as I said, is this linguistic presence. It presupposes the others to whom it is spoken. It presupposes the non-identity or individuality of their consciousnesses. With this, we can understand Levinas assertion: if the face to face founds language language does not only serve reason, but is reason (207). The claim is that reason lives in language, that reason is defined by signification rather than signification being defined by the impersonal structures of reason. The ultimate claim is that the pluralism of society is the condition of reason. As such, it does not disappear in the elevation to reason (208). This is because both language and reason (which are the same word in Greeklogos) involve shared meanings or significations. To signify, however, involves plurality. Signification is the way we bridge, without denying, alterity. It involves the selfseparation of the linguistic presence that gives birth both to objectivity (the world as there for everyone) and reason as something objective and impersonal. Thus, the impersonal objective relations of formal and material logics apply to the linguistic signs we use, but such signs presuppose our acts of signification. As such, such relations are founded on and cannot dispense with, plurality. Thus, they cannot dispense with the ethical basis of signification. The same point holds with regard to the very question of reason, the question why. In asking for a reason why something is one way rather than another, it presupposes different possible ways it could be. But our experience gives us only one of these ways. It is our others with their different ways of being and behaving, their different ways of disclosing the world that present us with alternatives. My encounter with them thus raises the question of why I should discloses things one way rather than others. In other words, in presenting me with different ways of disclosure they confront me with my freedom to disclose and, hence, with the question of reason. For Heidegger, my freedom is the ultimate ground of the question of reason. For Levinas, others in providing the self with the alternatives that form the content of its freedom, as well as in providing the self-separation that language makes possible, ground freedom. Levinas now turns to the relation of language and justice. The question is: Who is this Other that I address and who speaks to me? Levinas claims that the epiphany of the face qua face opens humanity (213). The epiphany of the face attests the presence of the whole of humanity, in the eyes that look at me.

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How does he do this? By speaking, by using a language open to all, a language in relation to which all are equal. Here, language is justice. It is equality, fairness. (ibid.). Such justice recognizes the otherness of the contending parties. While there is a common genus or concept that unites human beings as a biological species, this is not the case with language. In Levinas words, the human community instituted by language, where the interlocutors remain absolutely separated, does not constituted the unity of [a] genus. That all men are brothers is not explained by their resemblance, nor by a common cause of which they would be the effect, like metals which refer to the same die that struck them (214). The reference here is to a section of the Talmud, were the famous saying is made: whoever saves a life saves a whole world. In this section, the claim is made that every life is unique. The Talmud puts it this way, ... if a man strikes many coins from one mold, they all resemble one another. But [God] fashioned every man in the stamp of the first man, and yet not one of them resembles his fellows. Therefore every single person is obliged to say: the world was created for my sake (Talmud 1935; p. 234). The point is that every person is unique like Adam. Just as the world was created for Adams sake, so it is created for every persons sake. The phenomenological significance of this is that the world of each person, the world that comes to presence in and through this person, is unique.9 Now, if we take this biblical view seriously, then we have to say with Levinas, Fraternity is radically opposed to the conception of a humanity united by resemblance. The biblical account gives us a view of humanity and therefore of language and reason that is radically distinct from the Greek view. Being for the Greeks is one. Being, for Levinas, is plural. It is not first a unity that afterwards, by breaking up, gives place to a diversity (215), one whose terms would still remain in reciprocal relation. As human being, as Dasein, being is plural. What we have here is multiplicity in being, which refuses totalization but [which] takes place as fraternity and discourse (216). Now, for Kant, as Levinas notes, such multiplicity rests in fact only on the hope of happiness (217). This means people are distinct only through their inclinations. Kant defines happiness as the satisfaction of these inclinations. According to him, one can act so as to be worthy of happiness, but between the choice of satisfying an inclination and fulfilling ones duty, one can, as free, only choose the latter. As free, a person is a member of Kants kingdom of ends. The price its pays for such membership is, however, the loss of all particularity with regard to its will. This is because we can only conceive this kingdom if we abstract from the personal differences

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between rational beings, and also from all the content of their private ends (Groundwork, p. 101; IV, 433). As free, then, the autonomous self is like everyone else. Only the pure form of its willingthat of the universality of its maximsremains once it enters this kingdom. There is a certain paradox here. It comes to the fore when we ask: Who is actually willing according to these universal maxims? Whose autonomy is Kant actually referring to? Kant doesnt have an answer. All he can say is that acting morally, we show ourselves as worthy of happiness. What we face in Kant, as Levinas says, is the identification of will and reason. I am free only insofar as I follow universal laws (those given by reason). The alternative, that I follow my inclinations, makes me unfree. As Kant writes of a person who follows his inclinations, his will does not give itself the law [of its actions], but the object does so in virtue of its relation to the will (Kant 1964, p.108; IV, 441). The world in which this self is situated is, here, the ultimate agent. It acts through the willing self. The self is only free insofar as it abstracts from all such inclinations, that is, insofar as it follows only reason, that is, wills the universal. If it follows its inclinations, it reduces itself to appetite and is not really free. Hegel follows this, but adds that substantial freedom is the objectification of this universal will in the laws of the state. Politics is the way we work out what the universal will actually is. Referring to Kants and Hegels idealism, Levinas thus writes, Idealism completely carried out reduces all ethics to politics (216). As Levinas notes, this identification of will and reason is opposed by the entire pathetic experience of humanity (217). For Levinas, this experience shows that will and reason are not the same. Their identification cannot serve as the ontological touchstone of society (218). This is because the individual and the personal count and act independently of the universal that would mold them [in Kants in and Hegels accounts] (ibid.). What we have here is a very different account of freedom. For Levinas as for Hegel and Kant, self-separation is required for freedom. Hegel and Kant see reason as providing this. They take the universal standpoint as that which allows me to step back from myself and regard myself. (The difficulty is: Who is stepping back? It cannot be the embodied individual). For Levinas this self-separation (and hence freedom) occurs through the other. It arises when I respond to the others particular perspective, which is not my own. The

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distinction of my will from mere whim or appetite occurs when I have to explain myself to the other, i.e., give reasons. As for reason, its origin is precisely this necessity of explaining yourself. As I noted above, the origin of the question why is provided by the alternatives presented by my others. If we accept this account, then we break up the equation of freedom, reason, and universality. We assert with Levinas that particularity (or egotism) must first be there to be called into question. The response to this call is given in language and through the reason that language supports. But this presupposes separation, i.e., presupposes the other as the person to whom one speaks. In fact, without others, reason cannot begin. It cannot even formulate its question: why? Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 220-236 In todays reading, Levinas attempts to think through plurality in terms of the previous themes of the book: war, violence, freedom, labor, and the alienation of the will. The sense of plurality he is advancing is the radical one he is drawing from the Bible via the Talmud. What he is advocating is a radical multiplicity, distinct from numerical multiplicity. This is a multiplicity that would not be defenseless against totalization (220). In numerical multiplicity, each individual is one, and as such is just like every other one. Individuals can be counted since we find a common measure by virtue of which each can be seen as one. This presupposes an external viewpoint by which we grasp their commonality. This total reflection, according to Levinas is impossible because of the surplus of the social relation. The face of the other, as I said last time, has an excessive presence. As such, it exceeds the intentions I frame with regard to it. There is here an impossibility of congruence between the intention and this presence (221). Because of this, we have a multiplicity that is not numerical. Such a multiplicity, Levinas writes, implies an objectivity posited in the impossibility of the total reflection, in the impossibility of conjoining the I and the non-I [the Other] in a whole. This impossibility results from the surplus of the epiphany of the other (ibid.). The point is that the other, in his ability to add the saying that exceeds the said, exceeds or brings a surplus to any concept I might form of him. The reflection on which this concept would be based is always outdated by what the other has to add. If this is correct, what are we to think of the ways in which people interact, for example, in war and commerce?

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Given that we are essentially plural and that such plurality is a function of the face and its surplus, Levinas claims war and commerce presuppose the face and the transcendence of being appearing in the face (222). As he also expresses this, War like peace presupposes beings structured otherwise than as parts of a totality. This is because war presupposes the transcendence of the antagonist; it is waged against man. As Levinas writes in the preface, war establishes an order from which no one can keep his distance. Its aim is to eliminate exteriority and the other as other (21). As such, it presupposes this exteriority as that which it seeks to undo. Thus, Levinas writes in the present reading, war aims at a presence that always comes from elsewhere, [it aims at] a being that appears in a face (ibid.). In war, the combatants are not pure activities, not pure causa sui [self caused beings]. If they were, they could not do violence to each other. In Levinass words, as pure activities, capable of receiving no action, the terms could undergo no violence (223). Equally, they cannot be pure passivities, since they then could not act on each other. They thus have to involve both. But how is this possible? Levinas writes: Violence bears upon only a being both graspable and escaping every hold. Without this living contradiction in the being that undergoes violence, the deployment of violent force would reduce itself to labor (ibid.). Thus, I must be able to grasp the other whom I mean to do violence to. Yet if he is a mere thing, if does not escape the hold I have on him, then my action on him would be like that on something inanimate, something that I labor onfor example, a tree that I cut down and make into boards. I want to do violence precisely to a person. I demand that he suffer it as a person. This means that the freedom that marks him as a person must somehow become unfreedom in my hands. It must as freedom, as something escaping every hold, be graspable by me. In the next section, Levinas gives his explanation of how this living contradiction is possible. In the present, he attacks Heidegger's notion of finite freedom as a solution to this contradiction. For Heidegger, this is the freedom we have in our thrownness, that is, as placed in a given situation with finitely given possibilities, amongst which we have to choose to actualize some rather than others Levinas does not attack this conception directly. Rather, he raises the problem of the relation existing in it between the free part, [the] causa sui, and the non-free part. He asks, how can the free part, causa sui, undergo anything whatsoever from the non-free

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part. How are we to conceive this freedom, given that it is belied by birth, non-chosen and impossible to choose which situates the will (224). What in fact is freedom when situatedness (Heideggers thrownness) limits it? Insofar as it does limit it, can I really say that I transcend my situation, that I stand out from it? More concretely, what allows me to transcend the world of my others (Heideggers they-world)? How do I grasp the fact that the world offers possibilities distinct from those approved by my others? To see Levinass answer, we have to turn to the fact that for Heidegger, the notion of finite freedom makes the notion of time intelligible. This is because the finite freedom that flows from my situation involves a finite past (a distinct having been) that pertains to me. It also involves the fact that, as mortal (as being towards death), I will die and, hence, have only a limited time to act. My situation thus makes time intelligible by defining it as a given stretch. For Levinas, however, it is not finite freedom that makes the notion of time intelligible; it is time that gives meaning to the notion of finite freedom. In his view, the whole existence of the mortal being is not being towards death, but [towards] the not yet, which is a way of being against death (224). Time is what separates a being from its death (ibid.). Corresponding to this, freedom itself is but [deaths] adjournment by time. It is a postponement by virtue of which nothing is definitive yet, nothing consummated (224). The implication is that time gives meaning to the notion of freedom since we are free only as long as we have time to act. We use our freedom to postpone our inevitable death, this by providing for ourselves and warding off dangers. Such postponement can be interrupted by violence. Beings that live by postponement are vulnerable and hence subject to the violence of war. In his words, War can be produced only when a being postponing its death is exposed to violence (225). We are exposed to violence because we are embodied, but such exposure is limited by the fact that we use our bodies to postpone our inevitable deaths. As Levinas expresses this, my skill postpones the inevitable. This skill is inscribed in the very existence of the body. Corporeity is the mode of existence of a being whose presence is postponed at the very moment of his presence (225). This postponement of presence at the very moment of presence points to the fact in engaging in projects I am always ahead of myself. I can be ahead of myself because my body is the instrument of my will. In and through it, I am able to accomplish my goals. My bodily I can is the condition for the possibility of my having projects and, hence, is of my being ahead of myself and having the time that postpones my death.

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As embodied then, we are both subject to violence and capable of postponing the death it brings. According to Levinas, both aspects are present in an exemplary fashion in the face. To postpone something is to absent yourself from it; postponement is being elsewhere and hence avoiding it. Now, as embodied, the face can be struck. But as manifesting alterity, the face is elsewhere. Thus, according to Levinas, violence can aim only at a face. The face, in its alterity, manifests the exteriority (the otherness) that violence seeks to destroy. Such exteriority exists as postponement. The ethical presence of a face, Levinas writes, consists in soliciting a response. It awaits my reply to its putting me in question. As a speaking face, it is always adding to the said, always awaiting a response, always opening up time as a postponement of the end of our relation. Now the violence of war, Levinas writes, seeks to reduce this to silence, to end the time available. But as long as such violence does not succeed, I have, Levinas writes, a relation with the other who, as infinity, opens time (ibid.). By virtue of this relation, I also have the self-separation that makes freedom possible. My relation to the other, insofar as it involves infinity (that is, involves excess) is not part of the totality. Levinas puts this by saying, Freedom can be manifested only outside totality, but this outside totality opens with the transcendence of the face. It is this transcendence that separates me from my situation. The surplus of this transcendence is that of the saying that adds to the said, that is, to the situation into which I have been thrown. For Levinas then, It is therefore not freedom that accounts for the transcendence of the Other, but the transcendence of the Other that accounts for freedom (ibid.). Thus, time, as opened up by the other, gives meaning to my finite freedom. This can be put in terms of the choices that give content to this freedom. In the other, I have the could be otherwise of the possibilities that our situation affords. He interprets this situation differently. He thus adds to those possibilities that I have seen and actualized from my perspective. By virtue of the possibilities he makes me aware of, I have a choice. My freedom actually has a content that is sufficiently diverse that I can choose to alter my interpretation, my situation. Let me return to the main issue in this section. It is how do we understand human relations given the plurality of human being? In particular, how can we think of human beings as free, as agents, and yet as subject to violence? How can their freedom admit unfreedom? The answer comes from the fact that freedom is not my innate (inborn) possession. It is the transcendence of the Other that accounts for freedom. Coming to me from the Other, I can be deprived of it by others.

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Let me put this in terms of political freedom. Politically, it is through our spoken and written public debates that we present to one another the alternative ways of being and behaving that result in alternative ways of disclosing the world. Such words are the carriers of the content of our freedom. They determine the direction of the discourse through which free societies shape their course. Thus, the impoverishment of language through the narrowing of the horizons of discourse either through censorship or social constraints is an impoverishment of freedom. The empirical evidence for this view consists in the susceptibility of humanity to tyranny, that is, the ability of states, systems, and ideologies to limit human freedom for long periods of time. It also involves the importance tyrannies place on the control of ideas, that is, on the control of the language that serves as their medium. Were liberty innate, the break-up of a tyrannyno matter how long its durationwould necessarily involve the restoration of our natural freedom and with this, our ability to immediately recommence the give and take of political and civil society. But this is not the case. The point is that the very freedom that is afforded to you by the Other is inherently vulnerable. Coming from the other, it can be undermined by undermining ones relations to ones others. This can be put in terms of Levinass assertion, Violence bears upon only a being both graspable and escaping every hold. Without this living contradiction in the being that undergoes violence the deployment of violent force would reduce itself to labor (ibid.). The living contraction is, on one level, the fact that my ability to escape every hold comes to me from the other and hence can be undermined by undermining this relation. My freedom is not my being a causa sui, but my being dependent in such freedom on the transcendence of the Other. This dependence on others as transcendent allows us to understand the possibility of economic violence, that is to say, exploitation. For Hegel, the laboring slave recognizes himself in his work; more generally, he recognizes himself in the human world he creates. Because of this he overcomes the alienation of selfhood that his slavery imposed on him. Hegel wrote this before the industrial revolution, before mass production and what Marx called the alienation of labor. This is where the laborers product alienates his selfhood since it becomes an anonymous commodity. Levinas repeats this criticism. The works of labor, he writes, take on the anonymity of merchandise, an anonymity into which, as a wage-earner, the worker himself may disappear (226).

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More generally, when I make, write, or do something, I issue it into the unknown. I have no control of the uses other make of it or the interpretation they impose on it (227). In fact, history is just such an interpretation. What history interprets are the works we leave behind us, our products, our sayings, our deeds. As Levinas writes, Wills without works constitute no history; there is no purely interior history (ibid.). History is focused on these works or deeds. The authors of such works are generally not present when the history is written. Each age interprets these for its own proposes. Quite apart from this, the entanglement of humans and their actions is such that I can never claim complete responsibility of what I do. In no case am I entirely what I want to do (228). With this we have the possibility of economic violence, of exploitation. Such exploitation presupposes others having their own interpretations. Their very alterity implies, in Levinas words, that the work is destined to this alien Sinngebung [interpretation] from the moment of its origin in me (227). This, of course, is a consequence of our plural condition, of the fact that each of us exceeds our others in our interpretation of the world. In other words, the same transcendence of the Other by which I have my freedom is what allows my works to alienated from me. In both cases the transcendence is based on the Others having alternative interpretations of the world. These interpretations present me with the alternatives that give me the choices that make my freedom real. But, as other, they can also misinterpret and hence alienate my works. The root cause of the plurality of the possible interpretations is our embodiment, which causes us never to see the world from the same point of view, never to have exactly the same experiences of the world. This same embodiment, however, makes our embodied wills subject to Others and their violence. This holds especially with regard to the works that result from the embodied will. The Other can undo my willing by destroying or making impossible the works in which it manifests itself. In Levinas words, The part of eternal truth that materialism involves lies in the fact that the human will can be laid hold of in its works. On an even more basic level, my having a body as an instrument of my will is what allows this will to be negated through this body. It allows me to be treated as a passive thing. As Levinas writes, the body in its very activity, in its for-itself, inverts into a thing to be treated as a thing. I am any thing you like, says Sgnarelle, under the blows.

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Thus, the embodied will is affected as a thing by things yet, as ahead of itself, gives itself a reprieve and postpones the contact (229). The living contradiction then is that of the corporality of the will. It is that of a will that qua embodied can accomplish its purposes and, yet qua embodied, can also be coerced and enslaved as a will, becoming a servile soul (229). What happens concretely is that the will moves between its betrayal and its fidelity which, simultaneously, describe the very originality of its power as embodied (231). This embodiment involves its mortality. I cannot know anything about my death. Ultima latet, as Levinas says. The ultimate things are hidden. Here my being temporal is my ability to both to be for death and still have time, to be against death. Death is my ultimate exposure, my alienation. Yet to be alive is to postpone it. In speaking about death, Levinas is at pains to distinguish his position from Heideggers. For Heidegger, death is my own. As such it is isolating. It confronts me with the fact that ultimately, I alone am responsible for my choices, that is, for the shaping of my life through my finite freedom. Levinas wants to break up this isolating interpretation of death. He begins by noting that Death is normally interpreted either as a passage to nothingness or as a passage to another existence (232). I interpret it either as my annihilation or my entrance into the afterlife. The alternatives situate death either in nothingness or in being (233). There is, however, a third alternative. According to Levinas, my relation with my own death places me before a category that does not enter into either term of this alternative (ibid.). This is the fear I have for my own being. This fear confronts the unknown quality of death the fact that death does not lie within any horizon. It is not something I can comprehend, grasp. Thus, in an absolute sense, Death threatens me from beyond. This unknown that frightens comes from the other (234). But this associates it with the Other in his transcendence. As Levinas puts this, The solitude of death does not make the Other vanish, consequently still renders possible an appeal to the Other, to his friendship and his medication. The doctor is an a priori principle of human mortality. Death approaches in the fear of someone, and hopes in someone. ... A social conjuncture is maintained in this menace. It does not sink into the anxiety that would transform it into a "nihilation of nothingness" (234). In the being for death of fear I am not faced with nothingness, but faced with what is against me (ibid.). For Heidegger, facing death is facing the "nihilation of nothingness." It is ultimately isolating. For Levinas, the very unknowability of death confronts us with neither being nor nothingness, but with alterity. This alterity can have a threatening form. In his

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words, the fear for my being which is my relation with death is not the fear of nothingness, but the fear of violenceand thus it extends into fear of the Other, of the absolutely unforeseeable (235). But precisely because it involves the Other, it also involves the possibility of transcendence, of postponement. Such postponement can involve the founding of institutions in which the will ensures a meaningful, but impersonal world beyond death (236). In other words, rather than thrusting me into absurdity, my relation to death leads me to make provisions for it. In thinking about death as confronting us with either being or nothingness comes, Levinas asserts, from an abstraction, where we consider ourselves either as a for itself and a causa sui (a self-caused cause) or as physical. The former cannot die, death here is simply a translation into a new life. The later can diethat is, dissolve into its elements. The question, here, of course, is whether the physical as such was ever alive. What both abstractions ignore is the concrete fact of mortality. Mortality is the concrete and primary phenomenon (235). It designates us as both physical and psychical and, hence, as the living contradiction that is the embodied will that is both subject to death and yet acts to postpone it.

Totality and Infinity, 236-247: III, C, 4-5 In todays reading, Levinas continues his discussion of the embodied will. As he said in our last reading, the embodied will is affected as a thing by things. As ahead of itself, however, it gives itself a reprieve and postpones the contact (229). This means that the will is capable of being coerced and enslaved as a will. Yet, as conscious, it is never really reducible to a mere thing. Thus, the Other can undo my willing by destroying or making impossible the works in which it manifests itself. Furthermore, since my body is an instrument of my will, my will can be coerced through my body. Levinass claim, however, is that the will still has resources even under coercion. This means that the will combines a contradiction: an immunity from every exterior attack to the point of positing itself as uncreated and immortal and the permanent fallibility of this inviolable sovereignty to the point that the willing being lends itself to techniques of seduction, propaganda, and torture (237). The immunity comes from the temporal extension of our consciousness. Levinas puts this as follows: To be conscious is to have timenot to overflow the present by anticipating and hastening the future, but to have a distance with regard to the present: to relate

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oneself to being as to a being to come, to maintain a distance with regard to being even while already coming under its grip (ibid.). Here, freedom is selfseparation. I am distinct from the being that grips me. This is present, but I am ahead of this. I am to come. Thus, from the vantage of elsewhere, elsewhere being the point at which I get through this, I see that I am being seduced, mislead, tortured. To will is to have a relation to the future. It is to choose a future, one where the object of ones will is accomplished. The freedom of the will is thus based on the holding open of this future. One of the ways to close this down is to speak of the future as already determined by the past. As free, however, I am not just determined by my past situation, by my birth, by my nature as defined by this. As free, Levinas writes, the being [who is] defined by its birth can take up a position with regard to its nature. It is not totally defined by it. It can judge it, partially reject it. As Levinas continues, it disposes of a background [or situation] and, in this sense, is not completely born. It still has a future of coming to be. (238). Now it is this very being ahead of one self that suffering attacks. In physical suffering at the limit of consciousness, we find ourselves backed up to being. We are reduced further and further into the present. Our ability to separate ourselves from ourselves by having a distance with regard to the present progressively diminishes. In Levinass words, the acuity of suffering lies in the impossibility of fleeing it, [in the impossibility] of being protected in oneself from oneself (ibid.). This being protected in oneself is your ability to be ahead of yourself, that is, stand in the future as opposed to the present. The self one is protected from is the self that is in the present, this is the self that is vulnerable. This can be put in terms of the two elements that according to Freud characterize the traumatic experience. They are extreme bodily affect and lack of sense. Sense involves futurity. It involves having projects in the Heideggerian sense. In the Husserlian sense, it involves running through a series of experiences and making sense of them by seeing their pattern, seeing how they point to objects as experiences of them. For Husserl, I make sense of my world by projecting myself forward and anticipating such patterns which, I expect, will be fulfilled by the experience to come. But this is what suffering prevents. It nails one to the present. One is reduced to the bodily affect, the pain imposed by the other (be it a person or an illness). You experience the affect without any futurity, without any ability to make sense of it. Now this being nailed to the present is never complete. If it were, one would not be conscious. In Levinass words, as consciousness the pain is always yet to come. Consciousness involves intentionality, but intentionality involves futurity. It involves ones synthesizing the to come, the anticipated experiences. Thus, I am consciousness

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insofar as I grasp objects, things, events in the world. But this means intending what is coming, seeing it as the oncoming of things, events, etc. The result, Levinas writes, is that suffering remains ambiguous. We suffer and we witness this turning of ourselves into a thing defined as that which has no inner distance, no being-ahead-of-itself. Because of this, Levinas continues, we are at the same time a thing and at a distance from our abdication (ibid.). Those who make us suffer know this. As Levinas writes: To inflict suffering is not to reduce the other to the rank of an object, but on the contrary to maintain him in his subjectivity. In suffering the subject must know his reification, but in order to do so he must precisely remain a subject. Hatred wills both things (238). Is this a contradiction? Not really. It simply takes cognizance of the fact that the will combines a contradiction, since it is both free and liable to coercion. One way of putting this is in terms of the two types of causality involved in willing. We have the natural causality of bodies that can be represented by a line.

past

present

future

line of temporal determination

We also have the causality of our embodied willing that can be represented by having the line of causality start with the future, that is, with our goal. The goal determines the past insofar as it determines how we interpret it as material for accomplishing our goal. This interpreted past determines the present, since it determines our present use of this material in our ongoing accomplishment of our goal future past present

To combine both arrows, we can just bend them into a circle

present

past

future

This circle points to the two ways of viewing the functioning of our will. 82

In the first, which emphasizes its freedom, we start out with the future and go to the past and then to the present. We assert that the future determines the way the past determines the present. Here, the goal makes the past into a resource, into a material as it were, for the process of its own realization. The goal thus determines the past in the latters determination of the present by structuring it as a potential for some particular realization. In the second, which emphasizes our lack of freedom, we start out with the past, which determines the present, which determines the future. This is the causality of our bodily agency with regard to the things it deals with. It employs natural causality to accomplish our will. In fact, the body in the employment of the limbs through the muscles is itself an example of natural causality. Our will as embodied, involves both. The circle is its ontological form. As Merleau-Ponty noted there is a certain intertwining here. By virtue of my body, I am in the world. As such, I employ the causality of the world. But by virtue of my being ahead of myself, the world is in me. It is in me as a future that I envisage and attempt to bring about. Such a future is not yet existent in the world . It is in me, that is, in my conscious conception of the not yet. To understand the embodied will, both views have to be maintained. I have to say that I am bodily in the world that is consciously in me. The ultimate resistance of the subject, given this duality, is what Levinas calls patience. In it, the subject maintains a minimal distance from the present. This involves a disengagement within engagement (238). We find ourselves in extreme suffering backed up to being, nailed to the present. But in the very limitation of the future that suffering imposes, the other intervenes as that for whom I die. He becomes my future. He gives me the temporal distance from myself that makes patience and the enduring of suffering possible. When I suffer for others, there is a kind of inversion. It is one where the will breaks through the crust of its egotism and as it were displaces its center of gravity outside of itself. In its passivity, the will remains patient since it realizes not just that it can die as a result of someone. It also sees that it can die for someone. As such, the will breaks through the egotism of willing for itself to will as Desire and Goodness limited by nothing (239). Thus, in patience, the will is translated to a life against someone and for someone (240) Here, in the midst of torture, understanding the reasons for the torture reestablishes the famous inward freedom (241). What is Levinas thinking of? Most probably of the lives of those resistance fighters who died at the hands of the Nazis rather than revealing the plans of their friends.

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The question that arises here is why would one do this? What is the truth of the will that exercises such patience? As Levinas notes, the reasons for doing this appear only to the beneficiaries. But there may be none. History, after all, is written by the victors. It is in this context that Levinas in the section, The Truth of the Will, raises the question of the apology of the inner life. The inner life, he writes, is not an epiphenomenon and an appearance (240). It is not something, like the rainbow, which appears but has no causal efficacy. The word, apology, is taken from Platos Apology. It means, the defense statement of the accused. On what grounds does the will exercise patience? What is the judgment it appeals to? As I just quoted Levinas, And, to be sure, in the midst of torture understanding the reasons for the torture reestablishes the famous inward freedom But these reasons themselves appear only to the beneficiaries of historical evolution and institutions (241). Does this mean that the ultimate judgment appealed to by the man undergoing torture is that of the beneficiaries of historical evolution and institutions ? In a certain sense this is correct. But in another sense there is a problem with it. As Levinas notes, freedom takes refuge from its own perfidy in institutions (ibid.). It fashions institutions that can protect the will from the assaults it is subject to as an embodied will. These institutionsthe laws as passed by the legislative assembly, the judiciary that interprets them, the police that enforce themare fashioned to drive violence and murder from the world (242). They enact a postponement. They do so in the same way that the animal fabricating tools frees itself from its animal condition. The human animal does this when instead of going of itself to its goal as an inviolable will, it fabricates tools and fixes the powers of its future action in transmissible and receivable things (241). The tools in this case are the universal laws of the state and the institutions that sustain them. Are these the ultimate references of the apology of the soul undergoing torture? Is the objective judgment it appeals to that which is pronounced by the existence of rational institutions? Does the apology amount to the submission of the subjective will to the universal laws which reduce the will to an objective signification? (242). Is this the truth of the will?

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Not for Levinas. He writes: the possibility of seeing itself from outside [that is, seeing its objective signification] does not harbor truth if I pay for it the price of my depersonalization (243). An apology is personal. In Levinass words, judgment must be borne upon a will that could defend itself during the adjudication. This is a will that could be present at the trial and does not disappear into the totality of a coherent discourse (243). If I say that my appeal is to history, there is the same impasse. Historical events, Levinas writes, are the visible par excellence the visible forms a totality. It excludes the apology, which undoes the totality in inserting into it, at each instant, the unsurpassable, unencompassable present of its very subjectivity (ibid.). Now, as Levinas admits, the invisible must manifest itself if history is to lose its right to the last word. Such manifestation, however, is produced in the goodness reserved to subjectivity. Here, the truth of the invisible is ontologically produced by the subjectivity which states it (ibid.). It is produced by the being for the other, by its not receiving good, but doing good. Such manifestation, Levinas writes, is subject not simply to the truth of judgment, but the source of this truth. This source is the others, without whom, no judgments would be uttered. Thus, the appeal, the apology is made to those to whom one manifests ones goodness. The conception here involves the idea of a judgment of God, which represents the limit idea of a judgment that takes into account the essential offence to a singularity that a universal judgment involves. This judgment of God does not silence by its majesty the voice and the revolt of the apology (244). Here God is taken as seeing the invisible without being seen. This is because, God comes to me via the face of the others, the very others I will not betray. As Levinas puts this, The will is under the judgment of God when its fear of death is inverted into fear of committing murder (ibid.). Thus, the head of the French resistance who was tortured to death had his fear of death inverted to the fear of betraying his comrades and, hence, of indirectly committing murder. Note that this ultimate escape from the torturer is through the transcendence offered to you by the other. The other is the future, as Levinas, asserts. It is for his future that you have the time to resist. The patience of this person responded to the appeal of his friends not to betray them. Now, according to Levinas, judgment involves a response. In his words, Judgment is pronounced upon me in the measure that it summons me to respond (244).

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This is because I achieve my individuality as the person who responds. The judgment of the law touches me only insofar as I come under its purview. I am judged as a thief, as a careless driver, etc. The point of contact is the category of the offence. When however I respond to the summons of the other, I am called to respond as this person now, that is, as myself . What we have here is a confirmation of my uniqueness or individuality. Such uniqueness begins with my separation and enjoyment. It is confirmed in my abandoning this (that is in my decentering) in responding to the other. As Levinas puts this, The I, which we have seen arise in enjoyment as a separated being, a being whose existence gravitates about itself, is confirmed in its singularity by purging itself of this gravitation. This is termed goodness (244-5). The doctrine here is that the I is a privilege and an election. It is one where we have to say the accomplishing of the I qua I and morality constitute one sole and same process in being. I am elected or chosen in the demands I encounter of serving the poor, the stranger, the widow, and the orphan. Such demands converge at one point of the universethis being myself. This holds, not just for me but for everyone. Thus, only through morality are I and the others produced in the universe (245). This is Levinass response to Heideggers account of individuality. For Heidegger, being an individual means resolutely accomplishing your being, this by seeing and acting on the possibilities present in the situation one has been thrown into. These possibilities are present in your having been, that is, in what the past has given you. For Levinas, individuality is a result of your acting according to the irreplaceable responsibility that others summon you to. This responding is morality. For Nietzsche, being individual not being moral, but rather going beyond good and evil. Such categories are simply types imposed on us by the many, the they-world, in Heideggers terms. For Nietzsche, I am an individual when I can will beyond them. Levinass response to this is that individuality is not a function of transcending the social categories of good or evil by virtue of the affirmation of the will qua will, the will that does not need such categories to justify itself. It arises in the individual response to the individual summons. The transcendence of these categories is in the individuality of the response. As he puts it, to place oneself under the judgment of God is to exalt the subjectivity, called to moral overstepping beyond laws (246). This moral overstepping consists in Goodness. Goodness, Levinas writes, consists in taking up a position in being such that the Other counts more than myself. Doing so, I make my apology. I answer the other. (247).

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This answering the other can even extend to taking responsibility for the others responsibility, that is, undoing the harm that the other was responsible for creating. As Levinas puts this, the more I am just, the more guilty I am (244). This is a responsibility that transcends universality. So to sum up, the apology is ultimately not through history, not through the judgments of others. It is not through some Kantian submission of the subjective will to the universal laws which reduce the will to an objective signification. It is through the responsibility that uniquely identifies you. Totality and Infinity, 251-266: IV, Beyond the Face, A, B With the section Beyond the Face, we return to Levinass treatment of the feminine. This is, needless to say, the most controversial part of the book. It is open a number of objections, which cannot be ignored. We will consider these later. First, however, let me turn to the summary of his doctrine that Levinas presents in the introduction to this section. This summary comprises three important points. The first is that alterity is prior to identity. It is not that the alterity comes from things having distinct identities. Rather, as Levinas writes: Here the alterity of the other does not result from its identity, but constitutes it: the other is the Other (251). In fact, it is in relation to the other that you have your distinct identity. This identity is a result of your acting according to the irreplaceable responsibility that others summon you to. This responding is morality. This is why Levinas writes: the accomplishing of the I qua I and morality constitute one sole and same process in being. There is a deeper ontological sense involved in saying that the other is not other by virtue of its identity (an identity that distinguishes it from other things), but rather the otherness of the other constitutes its identity. This is that difference is prior to identity. This is the position that Derrida puts forward in his Speech and Phenomena, where he writes that diffrance understood as the operation of differing precedes and, indeed, makes possible every identity (SP, p. 88). This difference, Derrida writes, is always older than presence and procures for it its openness (SP, p. 68). If this is true, then every so called identity, can be deconstructed into an alterity that makes it possible. Levinas and Derrida were both friends, both were Jewish by birth. There may be something motivating both of them within the Jewish tradition where God creates by dividing (light from dark, day from night, waters above from waters below, land from

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earth, living from nonliving, male and female from the human, etc.). The result of each division is an identity, which is called good. But division, separation, is prior to identity. This, however, is only speculation. What one can say is that when Levinas writes, The other is the Other, he means that this Other is prior to and constitutive of human identity. The result is that the primordial multiplicity is produced in multiple singularities (251). It is not produced as a replication of the same, but rather as an addition of singularities. There is multiplicity insofar as there are multiple of individuals whose uniqueness is given by the Others they respond to. The second point concerns freedom. According to Levinas, I achieve not just my identity but also my personal freedom through responding. He writes, the freedom of the I is neither the arbitrariness of an isolated being nor the conformity of an isolated being with a rational and universal law incumbent upon all (252). The freedom of the arbitrariness of an isolated being is that of simple animal desire. Here, I have my individuality, but my freedom has no content other than the immediate objects of its appetite. At this point, the world wills through me. I am not the actor. As Kant writes, my will does not give itself the law [of its actions], but the object does so in virtue of its relation to the will (Groundwork 1964, p.108; IV, 441). Freedom taken as the conformity of an isolated being with a rational and universal law is Kantian freedom. For Kant, I am free only to the point that I abstract myself from my circumstances, that is, follow the categorical imperative and act such that the maxim of my will could be taken as a universal law. Otherwise, my will is bound by the desires that tie it to its particular situation. Here, my freedom is bought at the price of my individuality. Freedom as conformity to universal law demands, in Kants words, that we abstract from the personal differences between rational beings, and also from all the content of their private ends (Groundwork 1964, p. 101; IV, 433). At this point, the free beings have no distinct identities. How then do I combine individuality with freedom without reducing freedom to mere animal desire? For Levinas, the individuality consonant with non-arbitrary freedom is given to me by the Other. He writes, my arbitrary freedom reads its shame in the eyes that look at me (252) What prevents my freedom from being arbitrary is not the universality of reason that Kant and Hegel invoke. It is the other calling me into question and my having to respond to him.

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This not a limitation of my freedom, a making it finite. It is rather a giving my freedom the individuality of agency. The other who makes me an individual in calling me to respond to him invests my freedom. He calls it from egotism to goodness. This brings us to the third point Levinas makes, which concerns the relation between reason and intersubjectivity. Which is prior? Is it the case that reason creates the relations between me and the other. Or do we have to reverse this and say the Others teaching me creates reason (252). The first is the position of Kant and Hegel. Hegel asserts that the universal reason that the Kantian subject employs to test the maxims for his actions forms the content of the substantial freedom that is embodied in the laws of the state, laws that hold for all the citizens. Thus, reason convinces me that I cannot universalize theft and therefore theft is immoral. The state embodies this rational principle in its laws against theft. The relation between the citizens is rational in this sense. The difficulty here is that there is no face to face, no individuality in this view. What we confront here is the inhumanity of a humanity where the self has its consciousness outside of itself in a universal reason. Such an impersonal reason does not convince me of my inhumanity when I violate its strictures. It is the other, to whom I have to respond, who does this. According to Levinas, reason grows out of this response. It grows out of the Others teaching me by pointing out objections, by calling me into question. Here, Apology is the primordial phenomenon of reason (252). It is my having to answer to and explain myself to the other. Reason does not deny individuality. It flows from personal discourse. For Kant and Hegel, by contrast, my individuality is a function of my animal partiality, my subjective desires. Levinas doubts that such partiality would provide any basis for universalization. Wouldnt the everybody in what would happen if everybody did x simply be an addition of incoherencies? (253) For Levinas, the singularity of a person is at the very level of its reason, it is apology, that is, personal discourse (253). Let me now to turn to Levinas phenomenology of Eros or of love. Such a phenomenology is part of Levinass attempt to complete his own existential analytic. It is, in fact, curious that Heidegger in his description of being with others, never mentions being in love with them. According to Levinas, the erotic is the equivocal par excellence (255). It involves both the otherness of the other and the other as an object of need, of appetite. In his words, Love remains a relation with the Other that turns into need, and this need still presupposes the total, transcendent exteriority of the other, of the beloved (254).

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What we experience in love is the possibility of the Other appearing as an object of a need while retaining his alterity. We experience this simultaneity of need and desire, of concupiscence and transcendence (255). Given this dual nature, love cannot be interpreted as mere sensation. Equally and it cannot be just a desire for the transcendent. It has to involve both. This is the pathos of love. We seek the other through his or her body, we expose the body in erotic nudity as if we were uncovering the Other, but the other still escapes us. In such nudity, as Levinas writes, the essentially hidden throws itself towards the light, with out becoming signification. Not nothingnessbut what is not yet. The not yet refers to the fact that the Other is still beyond us (257). Thus, Levinas writes, Being not yet refers to a modesty that [erotic love] has profaned without overcoming. The secret appears without appearing (257). Thus, in erotic love, you want the other in and through the others flesh. The secret that is the other appears in the others flesh without appearing. It constantly eludes you. This modesty, this refusal to exhibit itself, is profaned again and again in ones attempts to get at the other through bodily passion. Yet the modesty remains. This is the pathos. In Levinass words, modesty, insurmountable in love, constitutes its pathos. One of the expressions of this pathos is the caress. The caress does not grasp. It does not seize on anything. It solicits what slips away as though it were not yet (257-8). Rather than grasping it searches, it forages. It is not an intentionality of disclosure but of search; a movement unto the invisible (258). It is a physical expression of metaphysical desire. The body of the other is present to me, lies exposed to my caress. The embodied Other is always just ahead of this. With the caress, I try to expose the Other, to profane or exhibit the essentially hidden. But always without success. This is why the caress is more of a searching than a grasping. In Levinass words, The profanation which insinuates itself in caressing responds adequately to the originality of this dimension of absence (ibid.). All of this is excellent phenomenological description. But then Levinas instead of describing, starts projecting on to the phenomena his own stereotypes. He takes the essentially hidden that appears as flesh as the feminine. He thus writes, the desire that animates [the caress] is reborn in its satisfaction, fed somehow by what is not yet, bringing us back to the virginity, forever inviolate, of the feminine. He goes on, The beloved, at once graspable but intact in her nudity abides in virginity. The feminine essentially violable and inviolable, the eternal feminine, is the virgin of an incessant recommencement of virginity, the untouchable in the very contact of voluptuosity, future in the present (258).

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The point he is making is that the body of the other can be penetrated, can lose its virginity. But the embodied other is, as other, always future; it always is ahead of me. Its virginity is always recommenced as it escapes my grasp to be a not yet. Thus, in shifting from the body of the other to the embodied other and back again, I experience an incessant recommencement of virginity. The problem with this is not the point itself, which holds both for men and women insofar as they are the other. It is with Levinas descriptions. They assume a male perspective, thereby assuming that the female body is the subject of the caress and not the male body as well. They associate inviolability with feminine virginity and the escape of the other that constitutes the pathos of love with the recommencement of [this] virginity. Thus, the erotic nudity which manifest the other as other in the flesh, the nudity that is the object of the caress, is taken as feminine nudity. With this, all the shortcoming of erotic love with regard to ethics become shortcomings of the feminine. Thus, the fact that lovers seal themselves off from society, forming between themselves a closed society, becomes a fact of the feminine. This allows Levinas to write, The relationship established between lovers is the very contrary of the social relation. The feminine is the other refractory to society, member of a dual society, an intimate society, a society without language (264-5). It also allows him to contrast the ethical and the corresponding signifying character of the masculine face with the nonsignifying character of the erotic taken as feminine. With this, he falls into the stereotype: the ethical relation is masculine, the loving, emotional relation is feminine. An example of this is the following: In the face, the Other expresses his eminence, the dimension of height and divinity from which he descends. . The frailty of femininity involves pity for what, in a sense, is not yet, [it invites] disrespect for what exhibits itself in immodesty and is not discovered despite the exhibition (262). One may ask, dont women have a face? Of course they do, but, for Levinas, this is a beautiful face. It is face that makes you see the other in it, even though you know that the other is beyond it. One thus has the equivocation of love. Levinas writes: Equivocation constitutes the epiphany of the feminine. The face in its feminine epiphany dissimulates allusions, innuendos. It laughs under the cloak of its own expression, without leading to any specific meaning (264). As beautiful, the face does not signify. It simply is. One looks at it, not through it. One grasps the other as flesh and grasps flesh as the other in the beautiful feminine face. One gazes at it searching for other, seeing the other in the expressions, gestures, etc. According to Levinas, in this inversion of the face in femininity, in this disfigurement that refers to the face, non-signifyingness abides in the signifyingness of the face. This presence of non-signifyingness in the signifyingness of the face where the chastity and decency of the face abides at the limit of the obscene still repelled but already close at hand and promisingis the primordial event of feminine beauty (263).

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All of this is highly questionable Does the fact that a woman has a beautiful face mean that the decency of her face abides next to the obscene? What about the male face seen from the feminine perspective? Why couldnt we make the same assertions? Do men have no erotic attraction for women? All this seems to be simply Levinass projection of his own attitudes with regard to sexuality on to women. If we strip these out, we can say that the erotic differs from the ethical insofar as alterity and flesh, desire and need, equivocate in the erotic, but not in the ethical. In the ethical the other is other. In the erotic, the other is me and separated from me (265) What we have in the erotic is an identity of feeling. As Levinas puts this, The nonsociality of voluptuosity is, positively, the community of the sentient and sensed: the other is not only a sensed, in it the sensed is affirmed as sentient, as though one and the same sentiment were substantially common to me and to the other. This is not a community like that of two people observing the same external objecte.g., a landscape. It is not sharing a common language or having a common idea. Nor is the community due to an analogy of feeling; it is due to an identity of feeling. What we have in the erotic is an approach to the identity of two bodies. I recognize my body as my own since, touching myself, I feel both the flesh that I touch and the flesh that is touching. Object that I touch do not give me the feeling of their being touched. I only feel my touching them. I do not affirm them as sentient. With the other as an erotic partner, however, the sensed is affirmed as sentient. This is affirming the partner as part of my own bodily identity. I do not, however, desire my own body. I desire others body. This is why Levinas asserts: In voluptuosity, the other is me and separated from me. The separation of the Other in the midst of this community of feeling constitutes the acuity of voluptuosity (265). Desire is desire for what I do not possess. In the erotic, this is a desire for what is me and yet is not me, is my flesh, and yet escapes this. The tenderness I feel towards my flesh is also the tenderness directed to the other. This is very different from the frailty of the face, its nudity, which commands inviolability. (262) Totality and Infinity, 267-285: IV, C-G Todays reading focuses on fecundity and filliation. The best way to grasp its point is to understand the position it s arguing against. This is the tradition that begins with Parmenides.

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Parmenides (born 515 BC) asserts that being is one. Everything that is is. As such, it is not diverse. In the way of appearance, being appears multiple, but not in the way of reality. In his poem (see the footnotes), he claims that being is, and it is impossible not to be. He writes: Come now I will tell thee-and do thou hear my word and heed it-what are the only ways of enquiry that lead to knowledge. The one way, assuming that being is and that it is impossible for it not to be, is the trustworthy path, for truth attends it. The other, that not-being is and that it necessarily is, I call a wholly incredible course, since thou canst not recognize not-being (for this is impossible), nor couldst thou speak of it, for thought and being are the same thing He also asserts that being is eternal in the sense that it never came to be. Being is without beginning and indestructible; it is universal, existing alone, immovable and without end; nor ever was it nor will it be, since it now is, all together, one, and continuous. For what generating of it wilt thou seek out? From what did it grow, and how? I will not permit thee to say or to think that it came from not-being; for it is impossible to think or to say that not-being is. What time would then have stirred it into activity that it should arise from not-being later rather than earlier? Equally, being never will be destroyed: How then should being suffer destruction? How come into existence? If it came into existence, it is not being, nor will it be if it ever is to come into existence. . . . So its generation is extinguished, and its destruction is proved incredible. Nor is it subject to division, for it is all alike; nor is anything more in it, so as to prevent its cohesion, nor anything less, but all is full of being; therefore the all is continuous, for being is contiguous to being. Thus, not subject to destruction, being is unchanging: Moreover, it is unmoved, in the hold of great chains, without beginning or end, since generation and destruction have completely disappeared and true belief has rejected them. It lies the same, abiding in the same state and by itself Therefore divine right does not permit being to have any end; but it is lacking in nothing, for if it lacked anything it would lack everything. Nevertheless, behold steadfastly all absent things as present to thy mind; for thou canst not separate being in one place from contact with being in another place; it is not scattered here and there through the universe, nor is it compounded of parts. Since it is unchanging, change is only an illusion.

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Therefore thinking and that by reason of which thought exists are one and the same thing, for thou wilt not find thinking without the being from which it receives its name. Nor is there nor will there be anything apart from being; for fate has linked it together, so that it is a whole and immovable. Wherefore all these things will be but a name, all these things which mortals determined in the belief that they were true, viz. that things arise and perish, that they are and are not, that they change their position and vary in colour. Levinass account of being is the opposite of this. Basing himself on Heideggers notion that the sense of being can come through an analysis of our own being, i.e., an examination of how we disclose the world and make sense of it, Levinas asserts that the sense of being, springing from such disclosure, is not one but plural. The reason for this is that humanity is plural. It involves the relation of one human (the male) to another (the feminine) and results in the engenderment of another human being (the child). The future beyond possibility (that is beyond the Heideggerian notion of the future as arising from my possibilities) which is sought in the feminine is not just the other person who is the opposite sex. It is the child. According to Levinas, with the child we have a relation which cuts across that of identity. It is not one we can think of in the Parmenidean terms, which picked up by Plato, who identified being with the ideas, have dominated western philosophy. The child is not just another instance of the idea of humanity, one having being to the point that he participates in this single idea. The child has his own being. According to Levinas, the I is, in the child, an other. Paternity remains a selfidentification, but also a distinction within identification (267). The child is me and not me. I cannot explain this relation via formal logic, where things cannot both be the same and other. Yet the child is both. Here, Levinas says, we leave the philosophy of Parmenidean being. This is because, being is produced as multiple and as split into the same and other. This is its ultimate structure. It is society and hence it is time (269). To see how time is involved, let us note that the child is not the result of a Heideggerian project. He is not a result of my being ahead of myself that is a function of my being as carei.e., care for my being. He is not disclosed in this way. Rather, as Levinas writes, the encounter with the Other as feminine is required in order that the future of the child come to pass from beyond the possible, beyond projects

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(ibid.). Fecundity is the relation with such a future, irreducible to the power [of a Heideggerian Dasein] over possibles (268.). This power of Dasein over possibiles is the power Dasein has to choose among the possibilities that are authentically his own as given by the situation he has been thrust into via the accidents of birth, education, etc. But a child involves the other, a person whose possibilities exceed my own. As other, she exceeds my power over possibiles. The future that results from this relation is that of the child. With the child, a new center of temporization arises, a new Dasein. This temporalization is both the same as my own and yet is other. It transcends me. The child will, in all likelihood, live beyond me. Thus, when I am growing old, the child will be growing up. He will continue time without adding my years to his. In Levinass words, the I is other and young Fecundity continues history without producing old age. Infinite time does not bring an eternal life to an aging subject. It is punctuated by the inexhaustible youths of the child (268). Thus, the eternity, the unchangingness of being that Parmenides posited, does not flow from the abstract unity of beingfrom the fact that every thing that exists participates in being, which is one. It involves, concretely, the alterity of the child. As such, it is broken up into a plurality of perspectives, of singular points of vision. These points are not, as Parmenides supposed, illusory. The claim here is that transcendence is not towards an immovable being that is outside of time. Rather, transcendence is time and goes unto the other. This other, however, does not stop the process. He continues it. In his own erotic desire for the other, he also produces a child. Thus, transcendence transcends toward him who transcends. What we have is fecundity engendering fecundity. What generates the different, transcendent temporalizations is the erotic desire for the other (269). This erotic desire produces both the independence of separate being and its transcendence (ibid.). It produces being as plural. Now if we take fecundity as essential to Dasein and take Dasein as a privileged access into the meaning of being, then we have Levinass conclusion that being is essentially plural, and that its meaning involves something more than Heideggers three temporal ecstasiesthe future, the past, and the present. It involves the temporality of new generations, new temporal centers. In Levinass words, Being is here produced not as the definitiveness of a totality, but as an incessant recommencement, and consequently as infinite (270). The continuity of being implies that somehow I am my child. As Levinas writes, Eros goes towards a future which is not yet and which I will not merely grasp, but I will be (271). This, holds, even though my child is an other, that is, transcends me. As Levinas 95

puts this, I do not have my child; I am my child. Paternity is a relation with a stranger who while being Other is me, a relation of the I with a self which yet is not me (277). The fact that I have to affirm both means that the Parmenidean (or Eleatic) categories of being are not adequate. As Levinas continues, In this I am being is no longer Eleatic unity. In existing itself there is a multiplicity and a transcendence. In this transcendence the I is not swept away, since the son is not me; and yet I am my son (277). How are we to understand this claim? In Parmenides, the unity of being is thought of as generic. Being is the highest genus. Thus, my son and I are the same insofar as we share the same genus, humanity. I and some other thing are the same insofar as we share the even higher genus, thinghood. The highest genus is that of unity. I can say that all things are the same insofar as they are one. In each case, I am taking the meaning of being as that which is common. If to be is the same as to be one, then since all things are one, all exist. But qua existence, they are the same. There is just one being. This is Parmenides point. His logic always leads us to the one substance theory. Against this Levinas writes, What remains unrecognized is that the erotic, analyzed as fecundity, breaks up reality into relations irreducible to the relations of genus and species, part and whole, action and passion, truth and error; that in sexuality the subject enters into relation with what is absolutely other, with an alterity of a type unforeseeable in formal logic, with what is never converted into mine (276). Sexuality insofar as it is procreative involves a duality. It requires that the partner be other. Yet it produces an identitynamely, the child This means that the root of the identity is not itself an identity, but rather a difference. One can also put this by saying that if we take sexuality seriously, then plurality is prior to identity. From a Parmenidean perspective, as Levinas writes, quantity is scorned as a superficial category (274). It is just the reiteration of the unit. It does not touch being, which is simply one. It is a category that remains on the surface. But this means that there is no transcendence. We never get out of being, except superficially, as we move from one unity to the next. As Levinas puts the conclusion, Whence transcendence itself will never be profound; as a simple relation, it is situated outside of the event of being (274). This, Levinas claims, is why the whole history of philosophy from Parmenides to Heidegger cannot grasp transcendence in its thinking about being. If it thinks the subject, it takes it only as a subject of knowings and powers (276). We recognize such a subject in Descartes I think therefore I am as well as in his assertion that it is in the faculty of the will that I have my identity to God (Mediatation IV). In fact, however, as Levinas writes, sexuality is in us neither knowledge nor power, but the very plurality of our existing. The sense of being that takes this seriously is that of taking both being and time as inherently plural.

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In sexuality, there is, Levinas claims, an unparalleled relation between two substances, where a beyond substances is exhibited, is resolved into paternity (271). As Levinas describes this: the erotic subjectivity is constituted in the common act of the sensing and the sensed as the self of an other, and accordingly is constituted within a relation with the other, within a relation with a face. Both I and my partner sense and are sensed. We engage in this together. Doing so, we mimic the identity of the body which both senses and is sensed (has the double sensation of touching and being touched). Yet, in the sexual relation, the other still remains other. He is both different from me and presents himself as lived by myself, as object of my enjoyment. As such an object, he seems to be someone capable of being absorbed, consumed by me. Yet, since this occurs , within a relation with a face, he is both an object of my bodily need and an object of my metaphysical desire. This is why erotic love oscillates between being beyond desire and being beneath need (ibid.). It already embodies a unity that both is and is not me. This unity is what becomes concrete in the child. I will die for the child. I will protect it as my life. And yet the child is beyond me. The sense of time that grows out of this non-Parmenidean sense of being is that of time having its infinitude in the lives that exceed us. There is a discontinuity at the basis of the continuity of time, one based on its continuance in separate lives. Levinas puts this in terms of the pardon inherent in this new sense of time. As he notes, the paradox of pardon lies in its retroaction. When I forgive someone, I treat the fault as not having happened. In Levinass words, pardon permits the subject who had committed himself in a past instant to be as though that instant had not passed on, [it permits the subject] to be as though he had not committed himself. In other words, pardoning him, I undo time. I dont simply forget the act. Forgetting, according to Levinas, does not concern the reality of the event forgotten. Rather pardon acts upon the past, somehow repeats the event, purifying it. Thus, forgetting nullifies the relations with the past, whereas pardon conserves the past [which is] pardoned in the purified present (283). Now, this is just what the child does. The discontinuous time of fecundity makes possible an absolute youth and recommencement. The child need not take up the burdens of the past. Here, we have in the child an existence as entirely pardoned. According to Levinas, this recommencement this triumph of the time of fecundity is a pardon, [is] the very work of time (282). Here, reality is what it is, but will be once again, another time freely resumed and pardoned. Infinite time is produced as times. It is not the finitude of being that constitutes the essence of time as Heidegger thinks, but [times] infinity (284). The essence of time, in other words, involves the possibility of renewal, of escape from the situation through the changeover of generations. What we confront here is the 97

fundamental fact of what Arendt terms natality. This the renewal of the world in each newborn child. The point is that discontinuity is the possibility of renewal. The relation to the other breaks up being. It allows a rebirth, a resurrection. As Levinas concludes, resurrection constitutes the principal event of time. There is therefore no continuity in being (ibid.). The move from fecundity, with its focus on the father child relationship, to filliality, the relation of the child to his brothers and sisters, is treated very briefly by Levinas. Levinas notes that each son (or child) is unique for himself because he is unique for his father. He is unique because he is the chosen one. This means that the sons I qua filial commences not in enjoyment but in election by his father (279) There relation of election here is not that of causality. It is not as if the father causes through election uniqueness of the son. The relation is rather that of creation. Levinas asserts: creation [understood] as a relation of transcendence, of union and fecundity, conditions the positing of a unique being, and his ipseity qua elected. Creation does not contradict the freedom of the creature. It is mode is the self-limitation of the creator, it is his creating the nurturing space for the other to be uniquely, individually himself. As a result, the son resumes the unicity of the father and yet remains exterior to the father. There are, however, other children. Each is unique, each is chosen. By analogy with the Talmuds passage that I quoted above, each is in the position of Adam to say that the world is created for my sake. Thus, the future that paternity opens up to us involves others. In Levinas words, it is produced as an innumerable future; the I engendered exists at the same time as unique in the world and as brother among brothers (ibid.). Thus, the child has dual relation. Chosen by the father, it exists among other chosen ones, among equals. Along with its relation to the father, its I is turned ethically to the face of the otherthat is, to the other chosen ones, the other children. Fraternity, Levinas claims, is the very relation with the face in which at the same time my election and equality, that is, the mastery exercised over me by the other, are accomplished (ibid.). As children, we are all equal. This equality is in each of us having our unicity in being chosen. Our Is equally refer beyond themselves to the father, who effectuates them. This is both a privilege and a subordination since others are also elected. Thus, election does not place the I of the child among the other chosen ones, but rather in face of them, to serve them. Equal to the others in terms of the father, it is subordinate to them in terms of the face to face relation. The result is that the human I is posited in fraternity. This holds for all the elected ones. They also are both equal to one another and yet subordinate to each other. The result is solidarity with all the others (280). It is the society in which we help each other out and yet assert our equality. This, according to Levinas is what constitutes the social order. It is what opens the erotic upon a social life in encompassing the face to face opposition (280). It also encompasses the structure of the family itself opening it to the social life beyond it. In all this neither the erotic nor the family disappear. Rather another dimension of 98

them becomes manifest. They are, in the face to face relation called to goodness (ibid.). Totality and Infinity, 289-307: Conclusions, 1-2 In this final section of Totality and Infinity, Levinas presents the conclusions of his existential analytic. These are conclusions about the nature and meaning of being. Let me for a moment recall the original, Heideggarian context for the analytic. Heidegger writes: the question of Being requires that that right way of access to entities shall have been obtained and secured in advance. The access is through Dasein: this entity which each of us is himself and which includes inquiring [into being] as one of its possibilities of being (Being and Time, p. 27) Dasein is not an origin of being. He is the entity that discloses (through his projects) the sense of being. Heidegger believes that if we can understand this disclosure, i.e., its structures, we can understand the meaning of being. As he puts this in a letter to Husserl, Which kind of being (Seinsart) is the being in which the world constitutes itself? This is the central problem of Being and Time, i.e., a fundamental ontology of Dasein. At issue is showing that human Daseins kind of being is totally distinct from all other beings and that it is precisely this [kind] that contains in itself the possibility of transcendental constitution. Levinas, the student of Husserl and Heidegger, is essentially engaged in the same project. He wants to know the nature of our Dasein to show how being shows itself, thereby, delineating the meaning of being. For Levinas the nature of Dasein is given by what he calls the social relation, the relation of the I to the other. His claim is that this relation forces us to abandon the traditional logical categories of being. The social relation, he writes, consists of the idea of infinity, [that is, the idea of] the presence in a container of a content exceeding its capacity. If we taken this as the logical plot of being, that is, if we take the social relation ontologically, we must redo the traditional plot or storyline of being (289). According to the traditional account, individuality arises through the specification of a concept. At the point where we add the ultimate specific difference, (that of the here and the now) we get the this. The this here, the , is correlate of the act of pointing to an individual.

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Hegel, as Levinas observes, undermines this view. The Hegelian dialectic converts even the this here back into concept since the act of pointing to a here and a now implies a reference to a situation and hence to a moment in the dialectic of the unfolding of the concept. In other words, what counts as an individual is specified by a historically determined conceptual framework. For Levinas, this failure to actually define or determine an individual indicates that the identity of the individual does not consist in letting itself be identified from the outside by the finger that points to it; it consists in identifying oneself from within (ibid.). For Dasein, this internal identification involves enjoyment and responding to the other. This reconfiguration of Dasein means that we have to break with the traditional logical categories of being. If we stay with them, then relations such as the idea of infinity appear absurd. At best, such categories prompt us to interpret these relations in theological or psychological terms as a miracle or as an illusion (ibid.). But this is only because the traditional categories are those of the third person. We specify relations from the outside. Dasein appears as a he or a she, never as an I and a you (as it does from within the social relation). But this insistence on the third person misunderstands Dasein and hence the access to being that occurs through Dasein. According to Levinas, Social relations are the original deployment of the Relation that is no longer open to the gaze that would encompass its terms, but is accomplished from me to the other in the face to face (290). What this means is that we have to redo the traditional view that being is exteriority that is, being is what shows itself to an exterior, encompassing view. If being were really exteriority in this sense, then interiority would be nonexistent. At this point, as Levinas writes, Exteriority would then no longer mean anything since it would encompass the very interiority that justified this appellation [of exteriority] (290). In Levinass view, exteriority has to be thought in its opposition to interiority (ibid.). Exteriority happens in a relation that exceeds the interiority of the I. Its truth, Levinas writes, exists in a face to face that goes further than vision (ibid.). According to Heidegger, truth is disclosedness, uncoveredness (Being and Time, 261). The basic sense of truth is uncovering, thus, what is true (in the sense of being in the truth) is, in the first instance, Dasein, since Dasein is what uncovers. In Heideggers words, Being-true as Being-uncovering is a way of Being for Dasein (263). Thus, without Dasein then there is no truth. Levinas agrees, but sees this in terms of the face to face. He writes: The truth of being is not the image of being [an appearing] it is being situated in a subjective field which

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deforms vision. What we have here is a curvature of vision given by the other, that is, given by his authority, his height. This is the other to whom I have to respond. (291). In Levinass words, Man as Other comes to us from the outside, [from] a separatedor holyface. His exteriority, that is, his appeal to me, is his truth (ibid.). This reference to the holy recalls the etymology of this word, which means inviolable, not to be touched. Thus, the Greek root of the Latin, sacred or sacer is o. The Greek word means safe, in the sense of kept apart or reserved for the divinity.10 As consecrated to the god, the sacred cannot be used by us. One cannot, for example, cut down and use the timber of a sacred grove. The trees forming the grove are inviolate. One should not, in fact, even enter the grove. Thus, as Sophocles has the stranger say to Oedipus who has strayed into a sacred place, It is forbidden to walk on that ground It is not to be touched.11 A similar sense of the sacred is present in Gods encounter with Moses.12 In both cases, we have to do with the exceeding quality of the appearing of the divine. The presence of the divinity sets limits to my behavior and, hence, to the interpretative intentions that animate what I do and say. Facing the divine, my intentions are controlled by a context that I do not set. I am not master of the sacred. The sacred is first. I, in my intentions, am second. It calls to me. I have to respond.13 The claim of Levinas is that this primitive sense of the sacred is present in the face. The exteriority of the other involves this type of being set apart. That man or Dasein as the other appeals to one, that he calls on one to respond is his truth, his unhiddenness in Heideggers terminology. For Heidegger, as I quoted him, Being-true as Being-uncovering is a way of Being for Dasein (263). Daseins truth is that he discloses or uncovers things through his projects. His unhiddenness or truth is his role in this. For Levinas such unhiddenness involves both inviolability and an appeal. Thus, the other arrests and paralyzes my violence by his call (ibid.). He discloses himself as inviolable. But he also speaks to me and calls on me to answer. He is exterior and yet is in relation to me. The resulting discourse with the restraints on my arbitrary freedom that this involves are, we have seen, essential for our disclosure of the world. I am prevented from treating the world as a use-value. I have to face it as it is in itself both for myself and my others. My being-uncovering thus assumes a different form than that assumed by Heidegger. Levinas now gives his conclusions with regard to society. The first is that if we accept with Levinas that the face to face is a final and irreducible relation, then we accept his conclusion that the face to face makes possible the pluralism of society (ibid.). Society presupposes alterity. It assumes we cannot reduce the many to one.

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To think society concretely, we have to think the finites relation to the infinite (and hence to God) such that the finite is not absorbed in the infinite. An example of such absorption is the City of Man, which, for Augustine, is supposed to mirror the City of God, The latter is a monarchy where all wills conform to God (the divine ruler) and thereby express a general will. According to Levinas, this view assumes a false conception of God and of his infinity. In fact, the production of infinity calls for separation. It only functions starting from the absolute arbitrariness of the I and its egotism (292). Not that it remains with this. In fact, my goodness involves my overcoming my egotism when I respond to the other. Doing so, I act beyond need and the egotism of my needs in doing good to the other. Now, according to Levinas, the austere happiness of goodness would invert its meaning and would be perverted if it confounded us with God (292). We do not act as God in doing good for the other. His action does not absorb ours. We do, however respond to God in the face of the other. But the God that is present in the face, in the appeal of the other, does not compel me, does not absorb me. In Levinas words, the relation between the finite being and the infinite does not consists in the finite being absorbed in what faces him, but in remaining in his own being (ibid.). The key element here is the idea of a separation resistant to synthesis (293). It is that of plurality as resistant to unity. In Levinas words: The Is form no totality; there exists no privileged play where these Is could be grasped in their principle. There is an anarchy essential to multiplicity (294). This idea of separation is implicit in the biblical notion of creation in. An infinite God in the traditional metaphysics cannot create since it cannot limit itself. As infinite, there can be nothing outside of itself. Thus, to affirm an infinite God is to affirm an a priori community of everything from eternity. Everything is always already there in the infinite God that absorbs all finitude. This is why Levinas writes, To affirm origin from nothing by creation is to contest the prior community of all things within eternity. The absolute gap of separation that transcendence implies could not be better expressed than by the term creation (293). Such creation is neither a negation nor a limitation nor an emanation of the One (292). All of these presuppose a prior unity between beings, one that must be negated or limited. Creation, thought in terms of exteriority, is rather an acting beyond neediness; it is acting for the sake of the other. In the extreme case of creation, the other is not. Its ultimate neediness is that of non-being, which God remedies by creation. This same sense of exteriority plays itself out in Levinass sense of language. For Heidegger, language is a function of disclosure. In his view, as I gain more and more skill in making my way in the world, the world itself becomes more practically meaningful. I understand it in the sense of knowing the purpose of its elements. For

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Heidegger, interpretation, defined as the considering ... of something as something articulates this understanding. Interpretation makes explicit the purposes of the objects I encounter. It expresses what one does with them. Such interpretations form the core of a language. They constitute the significance of its expressions. As he put this in the History of the Concept of Time, There is verbal expression languageonly insofar as there is considering, and such consideration of something as something is possible only insofar as there is interpreting; interpretation in turn is only insofar as there is understanding, and understanding is only insofar as Dasein has the structure-of being-of discoveredness, which means that Dasein itself is defined as beingin-the-world (History of the Concept of Time, trans. Theodore Kisiel. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985, p. 261). For Levinas, this account rests on the primacy of the panoramic, that is, on the gaze that surveys things from an exterior point of view. If we take the face to face as prior to exteriority, as generative of it, then exteriority opens in the other. The fundamental fact of language is that it is said by someone to someone. As Levinas contrasts this view with Heidegger's, In contradistinction to disclosure, which manifests something as something, in expression, the manifestation [the words] and the manifested [the person speaking, who is manifested by his words] coincide; the manifested [the speaker] attends its own manifestation [his words] and hence remains exterior to [or not captured by] every image one would retain of it. Here, the speaker does not deliver images of himself only, but is personally present in his speech. He comments on what he says, he interprets it, adds to it, changes it, etc. In other words, when we take language as an actual discourse between two people, language evinces infinity. It is constantly surpassing the said, the sense that has been given, by the saying. In Levinass words, Language is the incessant surpassing of the Sinngebung [the sense giving] by the signification. Exteriority in this context means not being enclosed. It is accomplished by an overflowing of the said by the saying. Such overflowing expresses the sacred in its inviolability, in its quality as not to be touched or reduced to a use value. As Levinas puts this, Divinity keeps its distances. There is a divinity in exteriority. The way divinity accomplishes this is in its overflowing, its excessive presence (297). Such presence, however, is that of Dasein. It is its truth in Heideggers sense. It is its unhiddeness in its action of making things unhidden. Thus, for Levinas, Dasein discloses himself as excessively present. And such excessive presence is inherent in the way it discloses the world. If we take the structure of being as implicit in the structure of this disclosure, then we have to say that exteriority is a fundamental ontological structure. Being is in the self separation of plurality.

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Levinas sums up his analytic by asserting that we have thus the conviction of having broken with the Heideggarian Being of the existent (298). This holds not just for Being and Time but also for Heidegger's late philosophy [which] posits the revelation of Being in human inhabitation between heavens and Earth, in the expectation of the gods and in the company of men. For Heidegger in his late works, the Being of the existent is a Logos that is the word of no one. By contrast, Levinas believes that [t]o begin with the face as a source from which all meaning appears is to affirm that being is enacted in the relation between men. That Desire rather than need commands acts. Desire [which] does not proceed from a lack is the desire of a person. It is not need that drives me and forces my disclosure of the world as the early Heidegger assert. It not the revelation of being, i.e., of a standard of being, that does this as the later Heidegger claimed. What is active here is the desire for the other (299). This involves both the generosity of my offering my view of the world to the other and the hospitality of accepting his and letting it call mine into question. Let me close by noting the very different conceptions of freedom that arise here. According to Heidegger, when I confront myself as care, i.e., as the being whose being is the result of my actualization of the possibilities lying ahead of me, i.e., my future possibilities, I confront my freedom. Such freedom, however, is anguished. I face the fact that it is all up to me. I cannot really base my choices on the disclosed world since what is disclosed is determined by how I act, which is determined by my choices, which spring from my freedom. As Heidegger puts this: What anxiety makes manifest in Dasein is its Being towards its ownmost potentiality for beingthat is, its being-free for the freedom of choosing itself and taking hold of itself. Anxiety brings Dasein face to face with its Being free for the authenticity of its being (Being and Time, p. 232). In other words, I am anxious because I realize that it is all up to me. My choice decides who and what I am. It decides what will be disclosed, that is, the truth or the unhiddenness of the world. As Levinas interprets this position, the founding of truth on freedom would imply a freedom justified by itself. As self-justified, nothing would limit freedom. It would be infinite. Thus, There would have been for freedom no greater scandal than to discover itself to be finite. Given this, to not have chosen ones freedom would be the supreme absurdity and the supreme tragic [act] of existence. In fact, not to have chosen ones freedom would be the irrational (303). Levinas view, by contrast is that the irrational in freedom is .. due to the infinity of its arbitrariness. But this means that freedom is not just justified by freedom. In fact,

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freedom feels this arbitrariness when facing the other. The other person makes freedom appear to itself as a shame for itself (303). In fact, to approach the Other is to put into question my freedom. It is a call for me to justify it, that is, to act not arbitrarily but rather responsibly. It is not my clear and distinct ideas which enforce such responsibility (as Descartes thought, when he advocated limiting our wills to what we can clearly and distinctly conceive). Only in morality is freedom put into question. Morality thus presides over the work of truth. Similarly, it is not, freedom, or the abyss of freedom, that raises the question of reason, of why this rather than that? It is the other with his alternate view of the world, his alternate way of disclosing it. If this is true, then as Levinas says, Morality is first philosophy (304). Morality, as the social relation, is at the basis of our disclosure of the world. As such, it cannot be abstracted from in our attempts to describe the meaning of being.

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Endnotes In doing so, it becomes present: Knowledge is re-presentation, a return to presence, and nothing may remain other to it (Levinas 1989, p. 77). Correspondingly, what is beyond knowledge is beyond such immanent presence. This is the Other in his or her alterity.
2

Husserl writes in this regard, The ego is awakened by affection from the non-egological because the non-egological is of interest, it instinctively indicates, etc.; and the ego reacts kinesthetically as an immediate reaction (Ms. B III 3, p. 5a). This means that we cannot abstract the awake ego from the impressions that awaken it: The ego is not something for itself and the non-ego something separate from the ego; between them there is no room for a turning towards. Rather, the ego and its non-ego are inseparable (Ms. C 16 V, p. 68a). There is , in fact, a certain identity between the two. It is one where we can say: What from the side of the hyletic data is called the affection of the ego is from the side of the ego called tending, striving towards (Ms. B III 9, pp. 70a-70b). This striving manifests itself in the striving to continue to have [or else to turn away from] the affecting contents. Out of such sensible contents, one can constitute an intentional objectthis by taking them as contents of some object. But this is not Levinass focus. Hans Jonas, 1996, Mortality and Morality: A Search for the Good after Auschwitz, ed. Lawrence Vogel (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1996), p. 86. Ibid. In Jonass words, . . . organisms are entities whose being is their own doing ... the being that they earn from this doing is not a possession they then own in separation from the activity by which it was generated, but is the continuation of that very activity itself (Ibid.). Das Streben ist aber instinktives und instinktiv, also zunchst unenthllt gerichtet auf die sich knftig erst enthllt konstituierenden weltlichen Einheiten (Ms. A VI 34, p. 34b). This thou, he adds, it the thou of the I thou relation of Buber (155).

In a certain sense, I myself become the welcoming Other. I play the role of the feminine.

The Mishnah notes that capital cases are not like monetary cases (Talmud 1935, Sedar Nezikin, p. 233). Giving false witness in the latter can result in financial loss for the defendant, which can be made up by monetary restitution. But, in capital cases [the person giving false witness] is held responsible for [the accuseds] blood and the blood of his descendants until the end of time (ibid.). The Mishnah explains this by referring to the creation of Adam: For this reason was man created alone, to teach thee that whosoever destroys a single soul of Israel, scripture imputes [guilt] to him as though he had destroyed a complete world; and whosoever preserves a single soul of Israel, scripture ascribes [merit] to him as though he had preserved a complete world (ibid., p. 234). The Mishnah claims that this is the reason why Adam was created: God fashioned him alone to teach us the extent of our guilt in destroying a single soul. In other words, God created humanity, not as a race of beings (as, say, in the ancient myth of Prometheus), but first of all as a single individual, to teach us that in each individual there is a whole world. Had one destroyed Adam, the destruction of all his potential descendants implied in this would stretch to the whole of humanity. The claim, then, is that in some sense everyone is an Adam, everyone potentially contains humanity, contains the totality of the human world in him. The Mishnah reinforces this position by arguing that since God originally created the world for the sake of Adam, if everyone is like Adam, then everyone can say that God created the world for him. Everyone, however, is like Adam in his uniqueness. As the Mishnah puts this: ... if a man strikes many coins from one mold, they all resemble one another. But the Supreme King of Kings, the Holy One, Blessed be He, fashioned every man in the stamp of the first man, and yet not one of them resembles his fellows. Therefore every single person is obliged to say: the world was created for my sake (Talmud 1935; p. 234). The assertion is that every person is unique like Adam. Thus, the world of each person, the world that comes to presence in and through this person, is also unique. As such, it is irreplaceable. It cannot be made up by the world of another person or persons for not one of them resembles his fellows. The legal point here is that we cannot atone for false witness in a capital crime, for no one resembles the unique person at risk in the false judgment. The biblical point is that we are fashioned ... in the stamp of the first man, not because, like coins, we resemble each other in our resemblance to an original mold, but because each of us resembles Adam in being absolutely first, absolutely unique. We are singular like Adam when he was first created. Creation understood as referring to the presence of the worldis, then, for the sake of each us. Like Adam, each person in his uniqueness can say that creation, in its coming to presence, is for my sake. Each, then, manifests the founding quality of human life in its self-reference, i.e., in lifes being, in each

individual, for its own sake .

10

Lewis and Short 1966, p. 1610. Sophocles 1954, lines 36ff, p. 81. As the Bible relates their initial encounter, God called to him out of the [burning] bush: Moses! Moses! He answered, Here I am. And He said, Do not come closer. Remove your sandals from your feet, for the place on which you stand is holy ground.And Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God. (Exodus, 3:4-6, in Torah 1962, p. 102).

11

12

13

Thus, when God appears to Job, he says: it is my turn to ask questions and yours to inform me (Job, 38:3, in Jerusalem Bible 1966, p. 772).