Levinas

An Introduction

Colin Davis

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 1997
• ISBN:
  9780268161071
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Filosofia delle religioni

In recent years, there has been a resurgence of interest in the work of Emmanuel Levinas, widely recognized as one of the most important yet difficult philosophers of the twentieth century.

In this much-needed introduction, Davis unpacks the concepts at the center of Levinas's thought-alterity, the Other, the face, infinity-concepts which have previously presented readers with major problems of interpretation.

Davis traces the development of Levinas's thought over six decades, describing the context in which he worked, and the impact of his writings. He argues that Levinas' work remains tied to the ontological tradition with which he wants to break, and demonstrates how his later writing tries to overcome this dependency by its increasingly disruptive, sometimes opaque, textual practice. He discusses Levinas's theological writings and his relationship to Judaism, as well as the reception of his work by contemporary thinkers, arguing that the influence of his work has led to a growing interest in ethical issues among poststructuralist and postmodernist thinkers in recent years.

Comprehensive and clearly written, this book is essential reading for students and teachers in Continental philosophy, French studies, literary theory, and theology.

1

Phenomenology

In 1932 Raymond Aron returned from Berlin to Paris and told fellow students Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir about his discovery of Husserlian phenomenology. Sartre, according to de Beauvoir, ‘turned pale with emotion’: here was precisely what he had been looking for, a means of extracting philosophy from the most concrete, apparently most banal, experiences.¹ By this time Levinas was already intensely involved with the adventure of phenomenology. In Freiburg between 1928 and 1929 he had studied under Edmund Husserl in his final year of teaching and under Martin Heidegger in his first. In 1930 he published the first book on Husserl in French and in 1932 the first substantial article in French on Heidegger’s philosophy;² and he collaborated on the French translation of Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations (1931). More than Sartre, who adapted Husserl and Heidegger for his own ends, Levinas devoted much of his early philosophical career to explicating the work and significance of his German teachers. In subsequent years he has continued to insist that, despite fundamental divergences from Husserl and Heidegger, he has remained faithful to the phenomenological method that he first encountered through them.

Today, it is difficult to appreciate Sartre’s emotion on first discovering Husserl. Phenomenology, out of fashion in Continental thought and never in fashion outside it, seems to belong to a quaint past where consciousness was held to be sovereign, where the reflexive, self-present subject could still assume its centrality in an intelligible world. Yet it is important to remember that phenomenology occupies a vital position in the genealogy of modern Continental thought: its influence on the existentialism of Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty was crucial; it provided methods and themes for some of the most innovative literary critics of their day, such as Georges Poulet and Jean-Pierre Richard. Some of the most important recent thinkers have been preoccupied with its founding texts: Paul Ricœur has devoted a considerable part of his work to a discussion of Husserl and Heidegger; Jean-François Lyotard’s first book was an introduction to phenomenology; Jacques Derrida’s early reputation was established at least in part on his introduction to and translation of Husserl’s The Origin of Geometry and his patient reading of Husserl in La Voix et le phénomène.³ Phenomenology occupies a central place in the philosophical trajectory of modernity, even if its methods and aims have been rejected; and the post-structuralists might just as accurately be called post-phenomenologists.

Levinas played an important part in the dissemination of phenomenology in France; Ricœur described him as the founder of Husserl studies in France, and Sartre acknowledged that he played an important role in his discovery of phenomenology.⁴ Yet Levinas’s role in the dismantling of the prestige of phenomenology is no less important. The aim of this chapter is to account for Levinas’s involvement with phenomenology and to explain his gradual development of a post-phenomenological ethics which characterizes itself in opposition to the philosophy of Husserl and Heidegger. The process is a slow one: in terms of published material it begins with Théorie de l’intuition dans la phénoménologie de Husserl in 1930 and culminates in Totality and Infinity in 1961.

Husserl and Heidegger

According to his own account, Levinas discovered through Husserl ‘the concrete meaning of the very possibility of “working in philosophy”’ (EI, 19/28). Husserl offered him a method of philosophical investigation which depended neither on inflexible dogma nor on chaotic intuition. Levinas places this discovery at the very origin of his own intellectual project (see EN, 141). And Husserl occupies a privileged position in his writing in two senses: firstly, through the phenomenological approach which Levinas never fully renounces even though he comes to reject many of Husserl’s central ideas; and, secondly, through the continuing reference to and discussion of Husserl’s key texts and notions. Levinas’s first book was on Husserl, and the final essay in one of his later collections, Outside the Subject (Hors sujet, 1987), is devoted to Husserl’s conception of the subject. Levinas considers the principal and abiding contribution of phenomenological method to be its heightened reflexivity towards its own status; it teaches the philosopher to confront the world whilst also radically questioning the manner in which the world is presented to him or her:

A radical, obstinate reflection about itself, a cogito which seeks and describes itself without being duped by a spontaneity or ready-made presence, in a major distrust toward what is thrust naturally onto knowledge, a cogito which constitutes the world and the object, but whose objectivity in reality occludes and encumbers the look that fixes it. […] It is the presence of the philosopher near to things, without illusion or rhetoric, in their true status, precisely clarifying this status, the meaning of their objectivity and their being, not answering only to the question of knowing ‘What is?’, but to the question ‘How is what is?’, ‘What does it mean that it is?’ (EI, 20–1/30–1)

The encounter with Heidegger was, for Levinas, no less decisive than his discovery of Husserl’s ideas. Already in Théorie de l’intuition dans la phénoménologie de Husserl Levinas presents a distinctly Heideggerian interpretation of Husserl, particularly in the emphasis on the ontological aspects of phenomenology and his criticisms of Husserl’s intellectualism and neglect of historicity.⁵ Yet the influence of Heidegger is more restricted: Levinas describes Being and Time as ‘one of the greatest books in the history of philosophy’ (EN, 255; see also EI, 27/37), but he rarely refers to any of Heidegger’s later writings. And Levinas is cautious in his acceptance of Heidegger’s influence. Although he continues to admire Being and Time, Levinas has difficulty separating Heidegger’s later philosophy from his involvement with the Nazis in the early thirties. Like Adorno,⁶ Levinas even suggests that the key notion of Eigentlichkeit (authenticity) already introduces into Being and Time the seeds of Heidegger’s subsequent political disgrace (see EN, 255–7; EDE, 170). The work of Heidegger appears to Levinas as a crucial but dangerous stage in modern philosophy; to escape the limitations of his thought entails thinking through and beyond him rather than returning to the comforts of pre-Heideggerian naivety. In the rest of this section I shall outline the significance of the work of Husserl and Heidegger as Levinas understood it in the thirties and forties; and in subsequent sections I shall describe the reasons for Levinas’s increasingly critical attitude towards key aspects of their thought.

At its very simplest, phenomenology has been characterized by the slogan ‘Zu den Sachen selbst’ (‘Back to the things themselves’). This is proclaimed by Husserl as his ambition and accepted as founding the philosophical originality of phenomenology by Heidegger at the beginning of Being and Time.⁷ But to return to the things themselves turns out to be less simple than the slogan might have led us to hope. One of the principal ambitions of Husserlian phenomenology was to give an absolutely secure philosophical foundation to the natural sciences. This could only be provided by a stringent reflection on what science does not normally question: the role of the perceiving consciousness in the constitution of the perceived world. Husserl cannot accept as unquestionable the ‘natural attitude’ of scientific realism, that is the presumption that the world as we experience it exists outside and independently from consciousness. Knowledge is only entirely secure if it is, in the term used by Husserl, apodictic, that is beyond any possibility of doubt; and, at least in the initial stages of reflection, I cannot be certain that the world as I experience it really exists. As Descartes suggested, the evidence of the senses can be misleading: I might be dreaming, or I might be mad, or I might simply be mistaken in my perceptions.⁸ The key notion of intentionality, which Husserl took from his teacher Franz Brentano and which plays a central role in Levinas’s analysis and later critique of phenomenology, asserts that all consciousness is consciousness of something, that all mental acts (for example perception or memory) have an object. But even intentionality does not necessarily guarantee the independent existence of intentional objects: intended by consciousness, they are also constituted by it. Intentionality implies a relationship with something outside the self, but does not yet give it apodictic certainty. As Husserl writes in his Cartesian Meditations, ‘Whatever exists for a man like me and is accepted by him, exists for him and is accepted in his own conscious life, which, in all consciousness of a world and in all scientific doing, keeps to itself.’⁹

So, the phenomenological ‘Return to the things themselves’ begins by putting into doubt the very existence of the things to which it aims to return. Husserl follows a procedure which he calls phenomenological reduction, or transcendental reduction, or the epoché, and which he explicitly compares to the method of Cartesian doubt. Apodictic certainty can only be acquired if everything which can be doubted is provisionally bracketed off. This includes the existence of the external world, and – crucially – the existence of other consciousnesses. What this leaves, according to Husserl, is consciousness itself: when I am conscious of a tree, I may doubt the objective existence of the tree, but I cannot doubt the reality of my consciousness. The ‘me’ I thus discover is not my empirical self, born in such and such a year, teaching at such and such a university: these things could themselves be errors or illusions. The epoché reveals a transcendental Ego which is not a part of an objective natural order, but which actually constitutes the knowable world through its intentional acts. For Husserl consciousness is primary and absolute; the transcendental Ego is the first apodictic certainty from which all others must be derived.

For the phenomenologist, getting back to the things themselves inevitably involves reflecting on the ways in which the Ego perceives and experiences those things; the intentional object cannot be separated from the consciousness that intends it. Husserl was well aware of the dangers of solipsism into which this line of thinking could easily fall. In the fifth of his Cartesian Meditations he attempted to offset such dangers by demonstrating that a second epoché could reveal the apodicticity of both other egos and the external world. I shall return to this and its importance for Levinas in the final section of this chapter. In his earliest discussions of Husserl’s work, Théorie de l’intuition dans la phénoménologie de Husserl (1930) and ‘L’Œuvre d’Edmond Husserl’ (originally published in 1940 and reprinted in En découvrant l’existence avec Husserl et Heidegger in 1949), Levinas alludes only in passing to this problem. He concentrates on what he regards as the positive contribution of Husserlian phenomenology, making no more than brief and schematic general criticisms. The issue of solipsism remains largely implicit, and Levinas concentrates on the philosophical vistas opened up by Husserl’s accounts of intentionality and intuition.

Despite Husserl’s ambition of giving a secure foundation to scientific knowledge, the major achievement of his work for Levinas lies in the liberation of philosophy from the stranglehold of naturalist epistemology. Husserl achieves this by rethinking the notion of the phenomenon. Proponents of scientific objectivity implicitly rely upon an unquestioned ontology according to which a stable essence lies hidden behind the flux of perceived phenomena. The phenomenon, then, is conceived as a potentially deceptive surface which we must go beyond if secure knowledge is to be acquired. Husserl boldly erases this implicit separation of essence and phenomenon. Phenomenology is not the study of phenomena as distinct from essences, but the study of phenomena as the available mode of presentation of essences. Phenomenology, then, surpasses naturalist epistemology by establishing two new areas of investigation: existence is to be studied in all its multiplicity, and not just as a fallible sign of unchanging essences; and the phenomenologist will also enquire after the meaning of the existence of objects, not in any grand theological sense, but as it is conferred on the world by acts of consciousness.

The link between these two areas of investigation is provided by intentionality. Levinas describes how, for Husserl, intentionality is the characteristic activity of consciousness as it constitutes itself in relation to the world (see PH, 69). Consciousness is directed outside itself; and since the world as experienced is intended, in the phenomenological sense, its meaning and intelligibility are also assured. Husserl’s consciousness, characterized by its intentional acts, is not self-enclosed; on the contrary, at the very centre of consciousness is a primary openness to what lies outside it: ‘The interest of the Husserlian conception [of intentionality] consists in having put, at the very heart of the being of consciousness, contact with the world’ (PH, 73).

Levinas describes how Husserl surpasses naturalist epistemology by rethinking its fundamental distinction between subject and object. For Husserl, the relationship with the object takes place within the subject; the very distinction, then, presupposes and relies upon a transcendental subjectivity in which the ‘objective’ world is constituted as a meaningful object of experience. Intuition, in the special sense given to the word in Husserlian phenomenology, is in consequence not an unreliable, ‘unobjective’ form of knowledge, but rather what Levinas calls ‘the primitive phenomenon which makes possible the truth itself’ (PH, 19). Intuition is pre-objective because it is a mode of knowledge which does not presume the existence of the objective world required by scientific realism; it makes possible the direct knowledge by consciousness of its own intentional objects.

Two important strands emerge from Levinas’s discussions. Firstly, Husserlian phenomenology provides a method for investigating the experience of the world freed from the search for objective essences hidden beneath phenomenal existence. Secondly, in its reliance upon the capacity of consciousness to reflect freely upon itself, it also represents what Levinas calls ‘the authentic spiritual life’ (EDE, 45). The transcendental Ego possesses itself fully as it constitutes the world through its intentional acts. Particularly in his 1940 article, ‘L’Œuvre d’Edmond Husserl’, written whilst Sartre was formulating his own ideas on consciousness and liberty which would culminate in L’Être et le néant (1943), Levinas repeatedly insists that phenomenology is a philosophy of freedom:

The philosophy of Husserl is ultimately a philosophy of freedom, of a freedom which is realized as consciousness and is defined by it; of a freedom which does not only characterize the activity of a being, but which is posited before being and by relation to which being is constituted. […] Man, able to coincide absolutely with himself through phenomenological reduction, thereby regains his freedom. Phenomenology does not respond only to his need for knowledge which is absolutely founded: this is subordinate to the freedom which expresses the demand to be an I and, in relation to being, an origin. (EDE, 49)

At this stage in his thinking Levinas does not directly confront the issue that would preoccupy Sartre during the forties: the limitations imposed on the freedom of consciousness through its relationship with the world. Levinas pays little attention to the tensions, stresses and conflicts that might arise when consciousness encounters a world potentially hostile to its intentions. In his endeavour to promote a better understanding of Husserl, Levinas seems concerned to make him as coherent and topical as possible; and in the Introduction to Théorie de l’intuition he openly states that he will refrain from any full-scale philosophical critique (PH, 15–16). Even so, this does not mean that Levinas completely suppresses any reservations he might have. He suggests two principal avenues of criticism; one has immediate importance in the context of his study, and the other will acquire greater significance with time.

Firstly, he reproaches Husserl with his intellectualism. Consciousness, as Husserl describes it, is primarily reflexive and contemplative. Revealed through phenomenological reduction, it stands outside time and the experiences it observes; historicity and temporality appear as secondary properties rather than the very conditions of the transcendental Ego: ‘Philosophy seems, in this conception, as independent of the historical situation of man as theory which seeks to consider everything sub specie aeternitat...