ISSN 1393-614X Minerva - An Internet Journal of
Philosophy Vol. 8 2004.
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|
ON SOVEREIGNTY AND
TRESPASS: THE MORAL FAILURE OF LEVINAS’ PHENOMENOLOGICAL ETHICS Wendy C. Hamblet |
For
the little humanity that adorns the earth,
A
relaxation of essence to the second degree is needed
In
the just war waged against war
to
tremble or shudder at every instant because of this very justice.
This
weakness is needed.
This
virility without cowardice is needed for the little cruelty our hands
repudiate.
Emmanuel
Levinas.
With
my pitiful earthly Euclidean understanding, all I know is that there is
suffering
and
that there are none guilty. Fyodor
Dostoevsky.
Abstract
Mortal being is not being pure and simple, not posit-ive being alone, as the lived
experience suggests it to be. Living being is always a living of mortal flesh,
a living taunted by death as “the nothingness that wearies it.” This taunting doggedly pursues
the living being and turns it inward in what Levinas terms “inter-esse.” In
living its mortality, essence is always inter-esse — inside of itself — in the
for-itself of self-interest.
This paper attempts to track the opening of essence from its
“innocent” lived mortality, through the “thinking” awakening that brings it to
an awareness of the violences entailed in its living, to its opening as an
ethical being where self is abandoned, ruptured, sacrificed for the sake of the
suffering other. This paper also addresses the larger question of what, if
anything, is missing in Levinas’ account of living being. In his fidelity to a
monadic view of isolated existence with its meaning-appropriations, is Levinas
bound to maintain the “innocence” of all living beings, even in their most vile
acts against others? Can Levinas account for the ability of the existent to
leap outside his enclosed world to effect the destructive works that we witness
every day in the human world? Can Levinas, committed to the “innocence” of living being, do justice to
the injustices of the holocaust that motivate his work, or to the endless
parade of holocausts that mark the history of the human species even to the
present day? Finally, this paper entertains whether Levinas’ weddedness to this
view of living being as isolated self-enclosure compels him to overlook the
degree to which our meanings are preordained by the socio-politico-economic
realities of our cultural contexts, whether the phenomenologist, as much as the
existent, must remain blind to the powers of histories and institutions and
systems to dictate the meanings that we find as the borders that give us
the stable lifeworld.
In a rethinking
of Hegel’s insights into the experience of living being, Emmanuel Levinas
states:
The
concept emanates from essence. The nothingness that wearies it mortally
perpetuates the truth of idealisms, the privilege of thematization and the
interpretation of the being of entities by the objectivity of objects. (OB175)
Levinas’
rewording captures, in Hegel, the fact that living mortal being is an enterprise
of refusal. It is a project of repudiation of the losses that are definitive of
mortal existence. It is a project of forgetting its own deathliness. Living
being sets about denying its mortality by constructing a living site, bounded
by permanent changeless truths. The home site of living being is a work of
self-definition, accomplished through the same meaning-full process whereby it
defines surrounding others. This defining is accomplished through
conceptualizations, thematizations, objectifications, interpretations — the
construction of stable identities and ideal truths. Within this site paved with
established meanings, a living evolving subjective reality, surrounded by other
living evolving subjective realities, can experience the lifeworld as a
standing, a stopping, a stasis in the midst of mortal flux and flow. The chaos
of fluctuating being is banished from the site of existence by a simple sleight
of hand — naming stabilizes as “known” things infinitely unknowable — my
mother, my son, my lover, my dwelling place:
Man
has overcome the elements only by surrounding this interiority without issue
[his engulfment in the chaos] by the domicile, which confers upon him an
extraterritoriality. (TI 131)
And
also:
the
interiority of the home is made of extraterritoriality… (TI 150)
A stable site of
existence can only be accomplished by grasping onto a “side” of a being as it
flows endlessly alongside and past the existent, pursuing its own living
adventures (TI 131-132). These “graspings” — appropriations of alterities — make
mortal existence bearable, even pleasurable, since they permit a forgetting of
the persistence of death. Mortal being is not being pure and simple, not
posit-ive being alone, as the lived experience suggests it to be. Living being
is always a living of mortal flesh, a living taunted by death, “the nothingness
that wearies it.” This taunting doggedly pursues the living being and turns it
inward in what Levinas terms “inter-esse.” In living its mortality, essence is
always inter-esse—inside of itself—in the for-itself of self-interest.
This paper
attempts to track the opening of essence from its innocent lived mortality,
through the “thinking” awakening that brings it to an awareness of the
violences entailed in its living, to its opening as an ethical being where self
is abandoned, ruptured, sacrificed for the sake of the suffering other. This
paper also addresses the larger question of what, if anything, is missing in
Levinas’ account of living being. In his fidelity to a monadic view of isolated
existence with its meaning-appropriations, is Levinas bound to maintain the
“innocence” of all living beings, even in their most vile acts against others?
Can Levinas account for the ability of the existent to leap outside his
enclosed world to effect the destructive works that we witness every day in the
human world? Can Levinas, committed to the “innocence” of living being, do
justice to the injustices of the holocaust that motivate his work, or to the
endless parade of holocausts that mark the history of the human species even to
the present day? Finally, this paper entertains whether Levinas’ weddedness to
this view of living being as isolated self-enclosure compels him to overlook
the degree to which our meanings are preordained by the socio-politico-economic
realities of our cultural contexts, whether the phenomenologist, as much as the
existent, must remain blind to the powers of histories and institutions and
systems to dictate the meanings that we find as the borders that give us
the stable lifeworld.
“Essence,
cognition and action are bound to death,” states Levinas in the opening of the
final chapter of his final work, Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence.
The history of philosophy is founded upon this insight, Levinas suggests. “It
is as though the Platonic Ideas themselves owed their eternity and their purity
as universals only to the perishing of the perishable” (OB 175). The existent
employs the concept — the universal — to stabilize its living world. With the
concept, the coming-to-be-passing away of mortal existence can be fastened down
to something eternal and unchanging. With concepts, clear and distinct meanings
constitute boundaries to the chaos, and mortal being can forget the
passing-away inherent in its coming-to-be.
Thus, in living,
in action, in labour and in pleasure, the existent is at work constructing the
names and assigning the meanings that form the borders of its secure, stable
world, its home in the flux. This is an “ontological adventure” wherein freedom
carves out a world. But does this view of the project of situating oneself
within the chaotic “elemental” do justice to the real powers that configure
individual worlds? Though Levinas is sensitive to the hollowness of a “finite
freedom,” its inability to effective real ontological changes outside the
immediate home (after all, the home is an isolated space without reach into the
infinite depths of otherness), he rarely draws attention to the power of histories
and cultural contexts to configure the parameters of lifeworlds in advance
of the arrival of existents (TI 131-133). His analyses of living being help us
to see ourselves in our egoistic isolation, but do they reveal the true powers
behind the phenomenal scene, manipulating our meanings and dictating the logic
that configures our conceptual constructions? Is not the existent as blind as
the phenomenologist to the ways in which human life is most truly, most
insidiously, shaped?
Since both must rely
upon the consciousness of a subject to gain access to the world, can either
unmask the falsehood of a reason that understands itself to be uncovering the
secrets of the universe in every clear and distinct idea? Human life, human
ways of being-in-a-world, may appear, to the existent, as though shaped by the
workings of the subject, but, in actuality, to a very great extent, meanings
are carved out in a time long prior to the upsurge of a free being from
Being-in-general. Human life is production, but historically-configured. Human
practice transforms the elemental to answer to human needs by means of tools,
organizations, and visions of what constitutes “human needs” — and these are
historically drawn. Practical reason contemplates a world it finds already
meaningful, if wanting, but it seeks to alter that world, according to
historically-dictated idealities. Human labour uses reason to further the
process of world-building and to evaluate the results of its work, but its
processes and its measuring tools are products of a history, cultural
configurations forged over time, in response to situations — politico-socio-economic
circumstances — radically removed from the “now” of existence, radically
foreign to the historical circumstances surrounding the existent. But, as
Heidegger has shown, a tool is taken up without conscious attentiveness to the
tool itself. The attention of the worker is directed toward the work, until the
occasion when the tool breaks down and, only in its malfunction, only in its
failure, does the tool reveal itself to the subject as a tool.
All societies are
class societies, social hierarchies, and, as such, they depend for their
continuance upon their ability to foster illusions of freedom in their
individual members. Phenomenological accounts of living being report this
freedom as non-illusory, in the lived experience of the existent. But this
freedom is accomplished within the context of an encompassing cultural
incarceration. Societies produce ideologies to conceal the contradictions of their
“freedoms.” Reason, and the political action founded upon it, are configured by
social ideologies, reinforced by social rituals, and reified in the world of
commodities forged by existent’s hands. All participants in the transactions of
the society are deceived about the reality of their powers, and about the
reality of social relations within the structure.
Though the advent
of capitalism has been hailed by many as a breakthrough to a new era of
freedom, offering hope that, with markets liberated from governmental monopoly —
with industrialization’s promise to free the labourer from tributary dependence
and undue toil, and with the diffusion of “free thought” that promised to
deliver the ignorant many from the conceptual fetters of absolutism or religious
dogmatisms—social critics have increasingly noted the vast numbers of people
who fall victim to the system, stripped of rights to natural resources once
understood to be common, and thrown to the uncertainties and exploitations
characteristic of industrial employment. Instead of the spread of a liberal
humanizing dignity and equality of right and prosperity, critics have noted
that the new global system merely fosters the proclivity of the few to
luxuriate in their material prosperity while the vast majority of others are
left to languish hopeless in the bottom-most realms of capitalist heaven.
It becomes the
task of the philosopher to address the inequalities of goods and opportunities
that discomfit the founding promises upon which the current global free-market
paradise stands. She must address the falsity of a freedom that is always
already configured by histories and their hierarchical legacies, their
institutions and the social rituals that bind people into their social places.
A clear and distinct vision of the injustices of the system is denied to the
existent from within the secure home-site of identity. Therefore, it is of the
gravest importance that the philosopher not be limited to the existent’s lived
experience of freedom, blinded to and by the dark designs of egoistic being,
blinded to the limitations upon freedom imposed by the home system of values.
Levinas demonstrates a subtle awareness of this problem, on those occasions
when he gestures toward the problem of “finite freedom” and the power of
institutions to betray their makers’ intentions. On the question of the power
of histories to configure the conceptual universe of the existent, Levinas
states, in his treatment of “The Dwelling” in Totality and Infinity:
The consciousness
of a world is already consciousness through that world. Something of
that world seen is an organ or an essential means of vision: the head, the eye,
the eyeglasses, the light, the lamps, the books, the school. The whole of the
civilization of labour and possession arises as a concretization of the
separated being effectuating its separation. (TI 153)
Levinas
highlights the falsity of the existent’s freedom and the power of the
historically-figured modes of production to reconfigure meanings, when he
speaks of the products of the existent’s labour, the very means through which
the existent forges a home in the chaotic elements. Levinas states:
The product of
labour is not an inalienable possession, and it can be usurped by the Other.
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.
(TI 176)
Levinas grants
that “integration within a system” does not mean that the inner life of the
existent is absorbed or burglarized. However, that inner life is transfigured,
in its confrontation with the estranged world of its works, since it “does not
recognize itself in the existence attributed to it within economy” (TI 176). In
like fashion, the politico-socio-economic institutions, with which the existent
finds itself thrown, return to it “as alien,” “slip toward tyranny,” and
immediately “[violate] the freedom” for the sake of which they were originally
forged (TI 176).
Thus we can say
that Levinas, though restricted to the phenomenologist’s view of lived
experience, does, in the course of his works, find occasion to reveal the
powers of histories and systems to configure and co-opt the existent’s freedom.
He also reveals the limitations of a freedom that relies upon concepts and
thematizations to accomplish its task of carving out a secure site. Levinas
notes that the existent, concept-maker, is itself subject to the concept, since
the ontological enterprise of existence fastens the existent itself in the
center of his domicile as definitively as it fastens surrounding others into
the ”sides” of its world. In appropriations, walls are built, stable
constructions of meanings. These walls form, not only the conceptual barriers
that occlude the threat of death and the menace of the elemental unknown, but
they form the prison walls within which the existent is trapped, in endless
isolation from real, evolving living existences. The home represents a
suffocation—a stale air, a stifling enclosure, an “essence without exits.” In Otherwise
Than Being, Levinas states:
The detour of
ideality leads to coinciding with oneself, that is, to certainty, which remains
the guide and guarantee of the whole spiritual adventure of being. But this is why
this adventure is no adventure. It is never dangerous; it is self-possession,
sovereignty, αρχή. (OB 99)
And again in Totality and Infinity,
Levinas explains:
Freedom, as a
relation of life with an other that lodges it, and by which life is at
home with itself, is not a finite freedom; it is virtually a null freedom.
(TI 164)
Therefore we can
say that, in Levinas’ account of living being, the feat of a freedom
living-against-death is a freedom within incarceration. Mortal
being-against-death is an imprisonment within an enclosure from which there
exist no exits. The existent can look out from its windows and doors onto a
world that gives it a delightful, forgetful pleasure. But it cannot walk freely
out of its doors or communicate with its neighbours. It cannot escape its
histories.
The
feat of 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, realizes
extraterritoriality and the sovereignty of thought…Thus only do I see without
being seen, like Gyges, I am no longer invaded by nature, no longer immersed in
a tone or an atmosphere. Thus only does the equivocal essence of the home
hollow out interstices in the continuity of the earth. (TI 170)
Levinas
concludes: “Gyges is the very condition of man, the possibility of injustice
and radical egoism, the possibility of accepting the rules of the game, but
cheating” (TI 173). In this latter passage, Levinas seems to be admitting
living being is poised, in its most natural “condition” for injustice toward
others around it. Its living is a potentiality for cheating, for bending the
rules of the game. This hints toward a guiltiness in respect of other existents
the possibility of which Levinas, elsewhere, refuses. The incarceration within
being, lived through appropriations, is a pure “extraterritoriality,” a
“trespass” without apology. However, Levinas insists that such trespass is
entirely “innocent.” In Totality and Infinity, where Levinas treats of
the enjoyment of separated being, he asserts:
In
enjoyment I am absolutely for myself. Egoist without reference to the Other, I
am alone without solitude, innocently egoist and alone. Not against the Others,
not “as for me…” — but entirely deaf to the Other, outside of all communication
and all refusal to communicate — without ears, like a hungry stomach. (TI 134)
Again, in the
essay, “The Ego and the Totality” (CPP 25-46), Levinas describes the living
being as existing within the conviction that “it occupied the center of being
and were its source” (CPP 25). Thus the living being is “in ignorance of the
exterior world… with an absolute ignorance” that is identifiable with
“innocence” (CPP 25-27). How can one be guilty of trespass when one knows no
exterior terrain? Any encroachment upon the other, any violence done to
another’s sovereign site of existence, can only constitute the paradoxical
event of an “innocent violence.”
It is a
fundamental flaw in Levinas’ phenomenology that his commitment to the monadic structure
of lived existence, and to the “innocence” of that structure, compels him to an
understanding of violence — of trespass — that redeems it as necessary (due to
the structure of mortal existence), or as a function of innocent ignorance (a
blindness to the exterior nature of other beings), or, worst of all, as a
necessary “evil” that exists as “an excess” to meaningful existence that
affords the utilitarian service of delivering us over to the god (CPP 175-186).
Monads, as Leibniz insists, do not talk to each other. They compose windows to
the world that cannot give real access to others. So, though each opens onto a
world of its own, interaction between monads is merely illusory. That explains
why Leibniz, in his Monadology, was obliged to guarantee the harmonious flow of
the cosmic system by the “pre-established harmony” of a caring god.
Since Auschwitz,
humankind has had to rethink its gods, question their existence, and, if bound
to the god’s existence, question their omnipresence, their omnipotence, or, at
the least, their unqualified goodness and concern for the sufferings within
creation. This raises the question of whether Levinas, a philosopher largely
motivated by the horrors of a holocaust that took most of his family and so
many other millions of families, with his insistence upon this monadic view of innocent living being and with his
interpretation of “evil” as redemptive, is doing justice to the suffering of
the oppressed of the world. It raises the question whether Levinas appreciates
the degree of conscious purposeful violence that comprises the history of the
human world. How can such a phenomenology explain the radically intrusive
violations that we know to occur in the world? In short, can Levinas’
phenomenological account of existence explain the deeply agonizing penetrations
to the body, and the even more intrusive penetrations to the mind, that were
daily events in Auschwitz and Mauthausen and Buchenwald? Can he explain the
diabolical forces that continue to configure daily events in Afghanistan, Iraq,
the Congo, Sri Lanka, Croatia, or Zimbabwe? How do these mundane horrors occur
at all, if the only commerce between beings is conducted as unilateral
“seeings” through windows that cannot penetrate their vistas?
Paradoxically,
Levinas demonstrates, from his earliest writings, a deep sensitivity to the
radicality of violence that intrudes into, and configures, the worlds of
victims under the tyrannizing grasp of another’s power. In the essay “Freedom
and Command” (CPP 15-24), Levinas speaks of the sleight of hand whereby the
history of thought, since Plato’s Republic, has misunderstood tyranny as
the forced fulfillment of the will of the tyrant. Only another “noble lie” can
claim merely apparent the heteronomy between the will that submits and the will
the commands, states Levinas. “A will can accept the order of another will only
because it finds that order in itself” (CPP 15). Therefore, the seemingly
benign command of the good shepherd philosopher-king comprises the greatest
tyranny of all. The supreme violence transpires where obedient compliance
occurs, for there, explains Levinas, tyranny reaches into the soul of the
victim and transfigures it in its very substance. Trespass, encroachment of the
other, becomes occupation — colonization — of the other’s very being, his site
of identity and freedom. Levinas states:
True
heteronomy begins when obedience ceases to be obedient consciousness and
becomes an inclination. The supreme violence is in that supreme gentleness. To
have a servile soul is to be incapable of being jarred, incapable of being
ordered. The love for the master fills the soul to such an extent that the soul
no longer takes its distances. Fear fills the soul to such an extent that one
no longer sees it, but sees from its perspective. (CPP 16)
The tyrant has
many tools at his disposal: “love and wealth, torture and hunger, silence and
rhetoric” (CPP 16). But, it is precisely when an alien order is no longer seen as alien, but comes to be accepted as
though it originated from the self, that the greatest tyranny is in force.
Clearly, in this
early essay, Levinas displays deep sensitivity to the variety of forms of
weapons that tyrannize the peoples of the world. Yet, within the logic of his
own phenomenology, Levinas cannot account for these violences as violences, because
innocent isolated being cannot be resolved into tyranny. The existent, trapped
in isolation, can trespass only with the weapon of vision. It can
conceptualize, thematize, appropriate in meanings that misconstrue. But it
cannot step outside its domicile to forge real contacts with the other. It
cannot effect real penetrations of the lifeworld of other existents. People
represent isolated ontological realms, entire self-contained worlds. That one
world can occupy and rule another is a brute fact empirically witnessable in
the world—in nations, in religious orders, in marriages and in parent-child
relations—but it is not a fact that can be accommodated within the
phenomenology of this phenomenologist.
In the final analysis,
what does it mean that Levinas cites again and again the haunting phrase
expressed by Dostoevsky’s forlorn and maddened philosopher, Ivan Karamazov: We are all guilty of all things and to
everyone; and I more than all the rest. What does it mean, in the end, for
violence and subjectivity to be guilty of innocence?
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Levinas,
Emmanuel. Totality and Infinity: An Essay
on Exteriority. tr. Alfonso Lingis. Pittsburg: Duquesne University Press,
1969. (cited as TI).
———. Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence.
tr. Alfonso Lingis. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991.
(cited as OB).
———. Collected Philosophical Papers. tr.
Alfonso Lingis. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1993.
(cited as CPP).
Copyright © 2004 Minerva
All rights are reserved, but fair and good faith use with full attribution may
be made of this work for educational or scholarly purposes.
Wendy
C. Hamblet is a Canadian philosopher teaching Ethics and History of Philosophy
at Adelphi University, New York.
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