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Levinas’s account of ethics as the encounter with the Other that puts the Same into question, to a large extent, has become a critique of a dominant tradition in Western philosophy. He argues that Western philosophy since Plato has predominantly been an ontology, which is the attempt to comprehend the Being of what is, or beings (TeI, 13/TaI, 43). It takes up the project of acquiring and taking possession of entities through the activity of labor, which is “the very en-ergy of acquisition” (TeI, 132/TaI, 159). It is like the movement of the hand that grasps, takes hold of (prend) and comprehends (comprend) beings in order to possess them. By doing so, Western philosophy has reduced the alterity of beings to the comprehension of Being. It is fundamentally a “movement toward oneself; it is not a transcendence” (TeI, 132/TaI, 159). To put it in another way, Western philosophy, as ontology, in its due course has set the priority of Being over beings, depriving them of their otherness: “To affirm the priority of Being over existents is to already decide the essence of philosophy; it is to subordinate the relation with someone, who is an existent, (the ethical relation) to a relation with the Being of existents, which, impersonal, permits the apprehension, the domination of existents (a relationship of knowing), subordinates justice to freedom” (TeI, 36/TaI, 45). Heidegger’s fundamental ontology, for Levinas, serves as a good example of such ontology because it subordinates the relation with the Other to that with the anonymous

Being and espouses the Nietzschean will to power.86_{Such a will, however, is dressed up}

as the Logos, which attempts to make everything fit within its conceptual frames. Its goal is to create a world in which a Self has a total rule, neither disturbed nor impeded by any Other. For this purpose, the otherness of the Other needs to be suppressed. In Levinas’s view, the question of the meaning of Being, which Heidegger pursues and elaborates in Being and Time, already presupposes a comprehension of Being, which does not recognize the alterity of the Other (TeI, 36/TaI, 45). What at stake here is the ethical relation with beings whose otherness has been suppressed.

The ontological character of Western philosophy, according to Levinas, manifests itself eminently at the epistemological level, as it underlies the long-standing project to attain absolute knowledge. Here the object of knowledge becomes an object for consciousness through internalization, or grasped through an adequate representation. Nothing is left out by, and for, consciousness, which embraces everything that is to form a totality: “[The history of philosophy] can be interpreted as an attempt at universal synthesis, a reduction of all experience, of all that is reasonable, to a totality wherein consciousness embraces the world, leaves nothing other outside of itself, and thus becomes absolute thought. The consciousness of self is at the same time the consciousness of the whole” (EeI, 69/EaI, 75). It is the very adequation of the two consciousnesses that is being challenged in Levinas’s ethics.

86 _{Emmanuel Levinas, “Philosophy and the Idea of Infinity,” Collected Philosophical Papers, hereafter}

CPP (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998), 52; “La Philosophie et l’Idée de l’Infini,” En découvrant l’existence avec Husserl et Heidegger, hereafter EDE (Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin,

2001), 236. See Derrida’s critical analysis of this argument in “Violence and Metaphysics, ” particularly pp. 135 ff.

What has happened in Western philosophy, as Levinas reads it, is intimately linked to the notion of truth that gets developed in the history of such philosophy. We recall that in traditional metaphysics, or ontology, as Levinas calls it, the source of intelligibility and meaning lies in the correlation between knowledge and being. Truth, which is the goal of human knowing, is defined as the adequation of intellect and thing (adaequatio intellectus et rei), which is often called ‘the correspondence theory of truth.’ In the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition one is said to have acquired knowledge of an object when the form in the object is the same as the form in one’s intellect. For Husserl, the genuine adaequatio intellectus et rei occurs when “the object is actually ‘present’ or ‘given,’ and present as just what we have intended it; no partial intention remains explicit and still lacking fulfillment.”87 _{Whether understood as the adequation of forms or the}

fulfillment of signifying intention, such notion of truth lends itself to the activity of knowing that consists in reaching out and grasping the object of knowledge in order to appropriate it, to reach the adequation between ego and non-ego, Same and Other.88_Such

activity assumes that consciousness will always remain the source of meaning. The act of understanding turns into an attempt to possess what is to be known: “Absolute knowledge, such as it has been sought, promised or recommended by philosophy, is a thought of the Equal. Being is embraced in the truth… In the limit where this task is accomplished, it consists in making the other become the Same” (EeI, 85/EaI, 91). To put it in another way, “in the realm of truth, being, as the other of thought becomes the

87_{Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations, Volume II, Investigation VI, trans. J.N. Findlay (London and}

New York: Routledge, 2001), 261, italics original; see TIPH, 113/TIHP, 74.

88

See EDE, 196-97; Discovering Existence with Husserl, hereafter DEH, trans. Richard A. Cohen and Michael B. Smith (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1998), 127.

characteristic property of thought as knowledge” (EFP, 68/LR, 76). It is this comprehension of Being, more than anything else, in Levinas’s view, that becomes first philosophy and that determines the course of Western philosophy (EFP, 67/LR, 76).

For Levinas, Husserl belongs to this particular tradition in Western philosophy. In fact, his mentor was often portrayed as the culmination of the tradition that sees knowledge as the absolute rule of the conscious I in which all that is meaningful is to be found. The Husserlian phenomenology is, in Levinas’s view, “the conclusion to which one of the characteristic traditions of philosophy leads, according to which knowledge of entities and of their presence is the ‘natural place’ of the senseful and is equivalent to spirituality or to the psychic life of thought itself.”89

In a language that is reminiscent of the Nietzschean struggle for power, Levinas describes the transcendental reduction that Husserl proposes as, in effect, suspending all independence in the world save for that of consciousness itself and, in doing so, causing the world to be rediscovered as noema. This reduction necessarily leads to the full affirmation of the self as absolute being and as “master of its own nature as well as of the universe and able to illuminate the darkest recesses of resistance to its powers” (EFP, 79/LR, 79). Philosophy as ontology is for Levinas nothing but a philosophy of power “insofar as knowing is always mastery.”90_In

this manner knowing is nothing but “re-presentation, a return to presence, and nothing may remain other to it,” (EFP, 71/LR, 77). This return to presence, for Levinas, eliminates all transcendence, and is, therefore, unethical. One may argue that there is

89

Levinas, “Beyond Intentionality,” hereafter BI, Philosophy in France Today (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 100-101.

transcendence or exteriority in thought, as consciousness reaches out and intends an object. But for Levinas, thought in intentionality is still “transcendence in immanence” (BI, 112), because it does not really respond to the call of the other: “The transcendence of the object is exactly what it is in conformity with the inner meaning of the thought that intends that object… The exteriority of objects proceeds from the absolute respect given to the interiority of its constitution” (EDE, 72/DEH, 86).

Since intentionality merely signifies “an exteriority in immanence and the immanence of all exteriority” (BI, 106), Levinas asks whether all the ways in which thought is meaningful can only be found in intentionality. More poignant questions that move toward his ethics are posed this way: “Does thought have meaning only through consciousness of the world? Or is not the potential surplus of the world itself, over and beyond all presence, to be sought in an immemorial past – that is, irreducible to a bygone present – in the trace left by this past which, perhaps, marks it out as a part of creation” (BI, 106). The search for meaning beyond self-presence fundamentally guides Levinas’s thinking about ethics, metaphysics, and even religion.

Levinas describes the path he walks on as moving toward “a relation anterior to” or “irreducible to comprehension.”91_{It is not to deny the validity of knowledge, but rather}

to relativize knowledge in order to make room for ethics.92_{What he sees as the dominant}

tradition of Western philosophy is the fact that “the very spontaneity of freedom is not put into question,” evocative of his definition of ethics (CPP, 57/EDE, 243). Here we

91

Levinas, “Is Ontology Fundamental?,” ENP, 16/ENT, 4.

92

This is reminiscent of Kant’s rejection of the possibility of pure reason to attain the knowledge of God, freedom, and immortality in order to make room for faith.

find the link between ethics and metaphysics in Levinas’s philosophy. His critique of knowledge as pursued in the dominant tradition in Western philosophy is intimately linked to his claim about the primordiality of ethics, or ethics as first philosophy. He argues that in the climate in which knowledge always means a return to presence, it would be impossible to do proper ethics, namely, to exercise the responsibility for the Other. Ethics, as he understands it, would be fatally compromised and corrupted if it developed from the standpoint of what he calls ‘ontology,’ which sets the priority of Being over beings, and which denies the otherness of the Other. In fact, the attitude that is promoted in such ontology fundamentally runs counter to the spirit of the ethical relation: ethics is not, in Levinas’s terms, about dominating the other, but rather about being put in question by the Other: “Ethics is when I not only do not thematize another; it is when another obsesses me or puts me in question. This putting in question does not expect that I respond; it is not a question of giving a response, but of finding oneself responsible. I am the object of an intentionality and not its subject.”93_{Ethics for Levinas}

concerns the act of surrendering the I in order to find meaning beyond presence, self- mastery, or comprehension: “It is in the laying down by the ego of its sovereignty (in its “hateful” modality), that we find ethics and also probably the very spirituality of the soul, but most certainly the question of the meaning of being, that is, its appeal for justification” (EFP, 104/LR, 85). Thus, unless ethics becomes first philosophy, it will never develop properly into what it is supposed to be. One can only exercise one’s

93

Emmanuel Levinas, “God and Philosophy,” De Dieu qui vient à l’Idée, hereafter DVI (Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 1998), 156; Of God who Comes to Mind, hereafter GCM, trans. Bettina Bergo (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 99.

responsibility for the Other where there is room for the alterity of the Other, which is exactly lacking in the dominant tradition of Western philosophy that Levinas criticizes. That is why Levinas holds that his preoccupation with ethics is not primarily concerned with “the purpose of developing ab ovo a code in which the structures and rules of good private conduct, public policy, and peace between the nations would be set forth, however fundamental the ethical values implied in these chapters may appear to be. The main intent here is to try to see ethics in relation to the rationality of the knowledge that is immanent in being, and that is primordial in the philosophical tradition of the West” (ENP, 9/ENT, xi; emphasis added).

In the preceding exposition of Levinas’s account of ethics, one may sense a rather strong Heideggerian overtone. Indeed, it is hard to separate Levinas’s works from Heidegger’s philosophy, as they often emerge through various critical conversations with it. All this occurs through both Levinas’s constant fascination with Heidegger’s works, particularly, Being and Time (1927), and his later disappointment with the political turn of the German philosopher. The events of World War II, particularly the Shoah, forced Levinas to rethink not only his own philosophical stand, but also the whole Western philosophical tradition, including Heidegger’s philosophy.94 _{This historical background}

helps us understand Levinas’s insistence in his philosophy on the movement beyond being (au-delà de l’être) and ontology as well as on transcendence. It deeply shapes his preoccupation with the question of the Other, hence ethics, in relation to metaphysics.

94

See Ethan Kleinberg, Generation Existential: Heidegger’s Philosophy in France, 1927-1961 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2005), 249.

In reading Levinas’s works, one may thus sometimes feel that one must choose between Being and the Other. This is because for Levinas, the question of the Other is equally important as that of Being, as both can serve as the starting point of thought and the source of meaning. But in the thought of Being, one “affirms the fact of remaining in oneself, returning to oneself, positing oneself as a oneself, as the sense of the world, as the sense of life, as spirit. As if the meaningful or the reasonable always came back to the event of the perseverance in existence, which finds its full expression in the apparition of an ‘I’ understood at the same time as an ‘in itself’ and a ‘for itself’.”95_{Such character of}

Being leads Levinas first to ask this question: “Does Being provide its own reason for existing as the alpha and omega of intelligibility, first philosophy and eschatology? Does it not, on the contrary, carry on with its task of being, while still calling for a justification (as a question preceding every other question)?” (BI, 100). With Being comparable to “an atom which is closed unto itself,” Levinas further wonders whether this is not a threat against all forms of alterity. The question of the Other, by contrast, disrupts “the ‘easy conscience’ of the conatus, of the animal persistence of beings in Being, concerned solely for their own space and for the time of their own life” (BI, 100). Here in the for-the-other, for Levinas, lies the possibility of the ultimate intelligibility and meaning, as he poignantly puts in “Ethics as First Philosophy”: “Whether he (i.e., the Other) regards me or not, he ‘regards’ me. In this question being and life are awakened to the human dimension. This is the question of the meaning of being: not the ontology of the understanding of that extraordinary verb, but the ethics of its justice. The question par

excellence or the question of philosophy. Not ‘Why being rather than nothing?’ but how being justifies itself” (LR, 86).

Levinas further argues that thinking the Other as other before affirming oneself is bearing the sign of goodness. In his view, letting the Other be other in the act of contemplation seems to already presuppose what he calls ‘dis-interestedness’ or a “relaxation of the allegiance to being” (IRB, 106-7). This is because one really needs to go beyond the realm of being (inter-esse) in order to fully respect the otherness of the Other. Disinterestedness is thus another way of speaking about transcendence, which is the desire for the Good (cf. DVI, 111/GCM, 67). Only in the realm of disinterestedness or transcendence does ethics, as Levinas uses it, become possible: “Ethics is not a moment of being; it is otherwise and better than being; the very possibility of the beyond” (DVI, 114/GCM, 69). To put it in another way, transcendence finds its meaning or signification in ethics, which is structured as the movement toward the Other.

All this exposition does not suggest that Levinas had developed a thorough philosophy of his own, as he was criticizing Heidegger. In fact, it often appears that he had not really elaborated his own critical thought in his early writings, even though one could see its seeds here and there. On the issue of transcendence, Levinas owes a great deal of debt to Jean Wahl, his best friend and promoter for the doctorat d’état degree in 1961. It is to the topic of transcendence expressed in the face of the Other that we are going to turn in the next section.