AFFECTIVITY, AGENCY AND INTERSUBJECTIVITY

Peter Sajda et al.

L’lfarmattan2012

This book has been published with financial support from the Institute o f Philosophy o f the Slovak Academy of Scienccs in Bratislava

The volume has been produced as part o f the grant project VEGA no. 2/0201/11 as well as of the international project On the Boundary o f Phenomenology, which was developed on the basis o f an Agreement o f Cooperation between the Institute of Philosophy o f the Slovak Academy of Sciences

(Bratislava) and the Institute o f Philosophy o f the Academy of Sciences o f the Czech Republic (Prague)

Copyright © Florin George Cälian, Jakub Čapek, Martin Muránsky, Szabolcs Nagypál, Martin Nitschc, Matthew Post, Martin Ritter, Peter Sajda, Pavol Sucharek, Jana TomaŠovičová, Anton Vydra, Jaroslava

Vydrová, Zoltán Wagner, David Weberman

Reviewers: Ivana Komanická, Petr Urban Translation: Radomír Masaryk

Copy editor: Matthew Post Cover illustration: Miklós Szalay, Tegyél k (2002)

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C o n t e n t s

Introduction

F l o r i n G e o r g e C ä l i a n

Plato’s Psychology of Action and the Origin of Agency

M a t t h e w P o s t

Unity, Identity and Otherness in Hegel’s Account ofLife-and-Death Struggle

P e t e r Sa j d a

From Pathos to Ethos\ On the Notions of Intersubjectivity and Community in Buber’s Pre-dialogical Authorship

J a r o s l a v a V y d r o v á

Phenomenology in Communication and Interdisciplinary Relations Mutual Interconnections and Tensions from the Point of View of the Phenomenological Methodology of the Sixth Cartesian Meditation

M a r t i n M u r á n s k y

On the Way to “the Things Themselves.”On Heidegger’s Interpretation of Husserl’s Phenomenology

J a n a T o m a š o v i č o v á '

Existential Analytics and the Social Sciences

M a r t i n N i t s c h e !

Thinking Non-violence within the Framework of Phenomenological Ontologies

J a k u b Č a p e k

Merleau-Ponty on Actions, Reasons and Words

D a v i d W e b e r m a n

Does the Endeavor to Understand the Other Suppress the O ther’s Otherness?

P a v o l Su c h a r e k

A Voice from Heaven Cried Out: W ho Has Revealed to My Children This Secret of Angels? 153

M a r t i n R i t t e r

Movement of/to Inwardness. Intersubjectivityin Jan Patočka’s Concept of the Movements of Existence

A n t o n V y d r a

Solitude as a Philosophical Stance in the Later Bachelard

Z o l t á n W a g n e r

Second-Order Desires, Self-Management and Intersubjectivity

SzABOLCS N a g YFÁL

Assisting Interreligious Dialogue by Intersubjective Mediation

L i s t o f C o n t r i b u t o r s

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A V o ice fro m H ea v en C r ie d O u t : W h o H a s R e v e a l e d t o M y C h il d r e n

T h is S e c r e t o f A n g e l s?

Pavol Su chare k

“Everyone will readily agree that it is of the biggest importance to know whether we are not duped by morality.”1 W ith these words, Levinas introduces his most well-known volume Totality and Infinity. An Essay on Exteriority. And truly, it is very important to know whether or not are we being misled by morality. At the same time, it is important to know if we are not being duped by Levinas himself. His philosophical concept of the primacy of ethics leads to several very interesting problems. We however first need to ask ourselves several questions: 1. W hy would he consider ethics to have primacy over every ontology? 2. W hat does it mean when Levinas equates ethics with metaphysics? 3. How could we accept Levinas’s elementary presumption that “the access to the face is ethical through and through?”, and lastly 4. W hy is it not possible to be more sceptical toward ethics? In the present paper, we search for answers to the questions listed above.

As a point of departure I shall choose the paper by Levinas titled Is Ontology Original?,2 because this text represents his first explicitly formulated problematisa- tion of the primacy of ontology. “A philosophical search should in no way be satisfied with the reflection of itself or of existence. Reflection provides us only with a narrative about a unique incident, about the private soul that keeps coming back to itself, even at the point w£en it is trying to escape itself.”3 In this we can not only see a critical evaluation of Heidegger’s philosophy but also the obvious distance from Levinas’s previous philosophical investigations in Existence and Existents and Time and the Other;4 The basic departure point for Levinas’s thinking had always been represented by the meeting with the Other; however, ever since

1 Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity. A n Essay on Exteriority (The Hague, Boston and London: Martinus NijhofF Publishers, 1979), p. 21.

2 Emmanuel Levinas, “L'ontologie est-elle fonda merit ale?” R evue de Metaphysique et de M o­rale 56 (1951), pp. 88-98.

3 Ibid., p. 98.4 Emmanuel Levinas, Existence and Exis tents (The Hague: Martinus NijhofF, 1978); Emmanuel

Levinas, Time and the Other (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1987).

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that moment, this relationship was not mediated by a preliminary precondition of sociality or the understanding of Being. Meeting the Other occurs without any intermediation which means that the O ther is the basis of sociability and human­ity. A t this point, Levinas’s stance does not significantly differ from the post­metaphysical interpretation of the autonomy of the person and their relationship toward their own existence as the source of morality. A person is autonomous, and only for this reason they may be free and responsible, i.e. moral. The problem however is the status of this autonomy (exteriority or alterity) which only “learns” about itself through inter-subjectively functioning and mutually balanced social relationships. I f the principle of autonomy should still present the basis of think­ing about ethics, then, according to Levinas, it cannot be based on sociality. Autonomy would thus lose its own content. Describing what the autonomous status of an ethically acting individual is based upon—this is Levinas’s own phil­osophical problem.

W hat was said above however suggests the overall shift and specification of basic categories— at least on the level of Levinas’s attempts to de-ontologise his own language and vocabulary—of Totality and Infinity. However, Levinas shall later criticize the language of the book as “still too oncological.” This evaluation of the language of Totality and Infinity can be found in the Leyden discussion on the occasion when Levinas was honoured with the honoris causa doctorate. Levi­nas claims, “The ontological language employed in Totality and Infinity is not at all a definitive language. The language in Totality and Infinity is ontological because it wants above all not to be psychological. But in reality, it is already a search for what I call ‘the beyond being,’ the tearing of this equality to self which is always being— the Seirt...”5 The importance of L'ontologie est-e!lefondamentale? is based on Levinas’s alchemic attempt to limit the possibilities of ontology as theoretical knowledge at the point of a basic event, the encounter -with the Face of another hu­man. In his opinion,.ontology loses its privileged position vis-a-vis this event because to grasp the O ther on the ontological level and to get to know them paradoxically means to lose them. The reason is that manifestation does not belong to the light of knowledge and the Face is manifested just as something that cannot be “looked at” in principle. Questions formulated by Levinas at this point sig­nificantly define the specific nature of this problem. Levinas asks: W hy seeing a face is not seeing any more but it is rather listening and words? In which way could an encounter with a face be described as a condition of consciousness? W hat are the conditions of the revelation of a face?fi It is no wonder that the later Levinas’s

5 Emmanuel Levinas, O f God Who Comes to M in d (Stanford, California; Stanford UniversityPress: 1998), p. 82.

6 Levinas, “L'ontologie est-elle fondamentale?" pp. 97-98.

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concept of ethics as metaphysics, shall be structured in connection with the terms of listening, word, and revelation.

In the same year Levinas published another article, Liberté et commandementJ where we find two terms describing the interhuman relationship. In addition to the term “religion,” there appears a new term, “metaphysical relationship.” “A metaphysical relationship with the one external to me (l'extérieur) is only possible as an ethical relationship.”** The context points out that the external is the Other. The next paper in chronological order, Le Moi et Totalité? follows up on this un­derstanding of metaphysics and emphasizes, to put it in Heideggerian terms, the existential loneliness of separation: “'Thinking starts right there where conscious­ness becomes the consciousness of one’s own uniqueness. (...) when it becomes the consciousness of I and at the same time the consciousness of exteriority where it transcends its nature, when it becomes metaphysics. Thinking is the relationship of I toward the exteriority that it does not accept.”10 In this sense, metaphysics is the expression of the relationship between “I” (the interiority) and the exteriority. This exteriority (the Other) is however not absorbed through I. In its relationship with subjectivity, it remains forever separated. Metaphysics thus expresses the relationship of interiority to exteriority when the interiority—I—is located in the totality (of the whole of the world), and at the same time it is absolutely separated from it (conscious of its separation and uniqueness).

The most detailed elaboration of this topic is to be found in the volume Total­ity and Infinity. According to this volume, the place for metaphysics is the human relationship, “The ethical relation is defined, in contrast with every relation with the sacred, by excluding every signification it would take on unbeknown to him who maintains that relation.”11 He thus puts ethics before ontology, which, accord­ing to him, presumes some preliminary understanding, a certain “grasping horizon.” However, a social relationship—an ethical relationship—is primarily a Revelation which does not presume “any non-existent: light of generality” (an ethical norm) yet which illustrates that the possibility to accept a human is infinite. It reaches further than the understanding that stops with its object, which means that it thematises and absorbs its; object. In Heidegger, for example, this means being open to Being (this is not the same as a being—this is not “an entity”) which is a

7 Emmanuel Levinas, “Liberté et commandement,” Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 58(1953), pp. 264-272.

8 Ibid., p. 271." Emmanuel Levinas, “Le M oi et Totalité,” Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 59 (1954),pp.

353-373.“ Ibid., p. 354.11 Levinas, Totality and Infinity. A n Essay on Exteriority, p. 79.

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necessary precondition for the revelation of a being as “something,” as an entity. On the other hand, Levinas does not hesitate to denote the revelation in relation to objectifying cognition as its inversion}2 According to Levinas, revelation is discourse, speech occurring between two separate beings. The O ther is mani­fested KO0’ (xuTO, based on itself, and—what shall be especially important for us later—without previous intermediation. The metaphysical relationship should be purified of any participation and objectification. According to Levinas, classic instruments of ontology (intentionality, representation, abstraction and synthesis) fail to adequately describe the relationship toward the Other. This may partly be because this ethical relationship presents a break-up of the formal structure of thought. Informal, maybe even non-objective thinking, is the true metaphysics according to Levinas.

Levinas's aspiration is to base ethics as metaphysics on the event that inevitably transcends the requirement for ultimate comprehensibility of philosophical dis­course, This experience is paradoxical and at the same time absolute. It is the experience of the face of another human who does not need to hide because he or she is invisible. The experience of the face, this is the contact with the invisible. One could object, Is not the face of another human* on the contrary one’s visible part? Is not the face of the Other my initial image? Is there any image at all that would not have a certain level of comprehensibility, that would not be articulated in some way, and that could not be transferred to a certain terminological unit? W hy does Levinas emphasize the invisibility of an obviously visible phenomenon? Is Levinas actually talking about a “human face?”

Maybe he is not. W hen the face of an Other appears in front of me, it is not manifested according to Levinas in the manner of a phenomenon. It is not a phe­nomenon that I could comprehend in the horizon of my representations. A face is not only its physiognomy describable in the terms of appearance. It appears immediately. However, the contact with the face cannot be the relationship of cognition. I f the experience of a face cannot be reduced to the relationship of cognition, it means that this is not a phenomenon that would always be immanent to consciousness. The Other appears to me as a face. However, the face is not a spectacle, it is a voice. A nd the face speaks. However, what the face speaks is not a message that needs to be deciphered. It is not information that needs to be read. It is not an image that needs to be understood. Levinas says this about the face,

The face is a living presence; it is expression. The life of expression consists in undoing the form in which the existent, exposed as a theme, is thereby dissim­ulated. The face speaks. The manifestation of a face is already discourse. He

13 Ibid., p. 67.

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who manifests himself comes, according to Plato’s expression, to his own as­sistance. He at each instant undoes the form he presents. The way of undoing the form adequate to the Same so as to present oneself as other is to signify or to have a meaning.13

To manifest does not mean to represent, and manifestation cannot thus be the condition of representation. To represent something means to accommodate it to oneself, to absorb it into oneself, and thus to deny the alterity of the presented. The Other however in their face signifies—makes themselves known—in the space of thinking that does not have the nature of cognition. This thinking is referred to by Levinas as metaphysics. It is the thinking of the expression based on the mean­ing that was never articulated, that is an articulation of itself. The meaning of the expression is articulated from within—it is a strange type of knowledge whose “messenger is simultaneously the very message”—as explained by Levinas.14 As we shall see, the paradoxical nature of this affection shall be resolved by Levinas with the paradox of revelation. I am intentionally using the term “affection” in connec­tion with the term “thinking.” In one interview, editor Philippe Nemo asked Levinas the following question, “How does it happen that a human starts to think? Is he or she primarily driven by events based on which we start to ask ourselves and about ourselves?”15 W ithout hesitation Levinas answered: at the origin of thinking there is a trauma or a shock—“some separation, a violent scene, a sudden realization of the monotony of time.”16 This subordination of intentionality in the classic Husserlian sense of the original impression (which is affection) has since then become a classic, mainly thanks to Levinas. Affection became the condition of the possibility of intentional relating to the world, and to thinking itself. Au­tonomy, alterity, exteriority or absolute difference— this is the face of another human, according to Levinas. This means the original affection that cannot be synchronized with one’s own consciousness because it is not an equal and sym­metrical relationship but rather an asymmetric one.

The original affection of the face of the other thus appears as the key to au- tonomising the ethically motivated behaviour of an individual, at least in two points. Firstly, affection is always the experience that cannot be reduced to anything because the face of the other is not quantifiable content or datum. Secondly, it goes hand in hand with a significant change in the current status-—that is why

13 Ibid., p. 66.14 Emmanuel Levinas, N ine Talmudic Readings (Bloom ington and Indianapolis: Indiana

University Press, 1990), p. 48.15 Emmanuel Levinas, Etbique et infini (Paris; Le Livre de Poche. Biblio essis, 1994), p. 11.16 Ibid., p. 11.

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Levinas always refers to it as a traumatic event or an injury.17 This peculiar connec­tion between affectivity and traumatism, pain or shock, explains Levinas’s spe­cific understanding of the optics of “ethical thinking.” Despite the fact that the original „face to face” experience is not representable in consciousness, it could be thought in the categories of proximity and immemorial difference'.

Face to face..At is not a qualitative datum added empirically to a foregoing plurality of l ’s or of psyches, or interiorities, like contents which can be, and are, added together into a totality. The face that here commands assembly founds a proximity different from that which regulates the synthesis uniting what is given “into” a world, or the parts “into” a whole. It commands a think­ing that is older and more awakened than knowledge or experience. To be sure, I can have an experience of the other man, but precisely without discerning in him his difference as an indiscernible. Whereas the thought awakened to the face, or by the face, is the thought commanded by an irreducible difference: a thought that is not a thought of..., but from the outset a thought/or..., which is not a thematization, which is rather a non-indifference for the other, disrupt­ing the equilibrium of the equal and impassive soul of knowing. This awaken­ing must not be interpreted immediately as intentionality, or as a noesis equal­ling—as a full or an empty intention—its noema and simultaneous with it. The irreducible alterity of the other man, in his face, is strong enough to “resist” the synchronization of the noetico-noematic correlation and to signify the immemorial and the infinite, which do not “hold” in a presence or in re-pre­sentation... The indiscernible alterity of the other is precisely missed. As an alterity irreducible to the one that we attain by grafting a characteristic or a specific difference onto the idea of a common genus, this alterity is irreducible to a diversity assured of synthesis in a time—which is supposed and synchro- nizable—wherein it is dispersed as irreducible to theiultimate homogeneity necessary to all representation.18

The relationship toward the O ther is thus on my side a relationship (reference), or in the etymological sense of the word, of subordinance (deference) or of that which cannot be represented (that of which we, for some reason, cannot say “that is”), but in its absolute difference it cannot be indifferent to me. This means face as a question, as an ethical problematisation of the hegemony of the subject—non-in­

17 Emmanuel Levinas, O f God Who Coma to M ind, pp. 70, 96; Emmanuel Levinas, God,Death, and Time (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2000), pp. 139, 145,152, 178, etc.

19 Levinas, O f God Who Comes to M ind, pp. 160-161.

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difference, non-lethargy in difference—passivity or patience without any synthe­sis—being subordinated in a relationship to that which infinitely transcends the possibilities of a subject. The face as a question, and, thanks to this, something that is infinitely more than a representation, possession, contact, or answer. Levinas’s ethics is actually the thinking of the original affection: a difference in non-in­difference. The inception of the autonomy of “I” cannot thus be found in any original self-affection, in the sovereign subject that could in a certain moment freely look the O ther in the face. On the contrary, the inception of one’s own autonomy should according to Levinas be seen in the traumatism that does not have a moment of inception (in myself), that precedes any possession of oneself. The Other is in its face absolutely different than “I,” resists all identification, because it cannot be illuminated on the level of the theoretical way of reflection “with the aid of a philosophical lamp,” as R. Kearney says. “The O ther precedes philosophy and necessarily invokes and provokes the subject before any genuine questioning can begin.”19

The Other thus appears as the precondition for any discursive opposition and at the same time as the condition of sociality even before the transcendental con­stitution of “I,” which allegedly constitutes this horizon on which this O ther appears as “non-I.” The Other “invokes” subjectivity in the ethical space of a re­lationship that is not based on identity but rather on radical difference. I am thus speaking about affection as a traumatizing and painful impact, as a special type of resonance of looking straight into somebody’s eyes which does not have its origin in my need for the Other. It is the O ther who needs me.

Ethics...is not a “region,” a layer or an ornament of being. It is, of itself, ac­tual dis-interestedness, which is possible only under a traumatic experience whereby “presence,” in its imperturbable equality of presence, is disturbed by “the other,” Disturbed, awoken, transcended.20

However, what structure could this thinking take up if it is not based on repre­sentation and synthesis, that is, if it will be a kind of thinking that would be radically different from the representation of being (of the Other) in consciousness? W hat form would Levina s’s thinking of the original difference have to take?

It seems that one of the possible answers to this question is suggested by the paradoxical “invisibility of the face,” “I” is affected by what does not constitute an

19 Richard Kearney, “Deconstruction and Other,” Dialogues 'with Contemporary Continental Thinkers, ed. Richard Kearney and Paul Ricoeur (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), p. 118.

20 Emmanuel Levinas, Beyond the Verse (London and New York: Continuum, 2007), p. 203.

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intentional object and does not have its intentional correlate. “I” is affected by the invisible—thus the face of the Other is in principle u n-t he mati sable, unnameable. It cannot be referred to. Levinas even denies it the status of corporeality.21 “I” thus finds itself face to face with the Other in the position of utmost passivity. It does not thematise anything, it does not touch anything, it does not name or see any­thing. That is catastrophic! However, such is the true nature of Levinas’s affectiv- ity, “A dazzling where the eye holds more that I can hold.”22 This holding how­ever means that the blinded eye keeps on looking—it looks on although there is nothing to see. The question remains, W hich structure can this thinking take up, and in which other ways could affectivity be thought of from the position of utmost blindness?

Let us try to break down this high-level notion of looking into the face of the Other into something that is more practical. According to Levinas, the face of the Other is invisible, which implies that we cannot look at it. W hy this is so is suggested in the paper L’intentionnalitéde l ’amour by the French phenomenologist J.-L. Marion,

To look someone in the face does not mean to look on their mouth or another part of their “façade;” it means to fix the gaze on their eyes, and this means eyes in their centre which is always a black point because a pupil is actually just simple emptiness. Even for the objectively on-looking gaze a pupil remains a living denial of objectivity, an unstoppable denial of the object. Here, for the first time, at the very centre of the visible, there is nothing to see, only empti­ness that cannot be observed or targeted...W hen I catch a look it does not avoid my look, and thus denies it the very horizon of the visible.23

Maybe it means that the living eye has its “dead,” black centre, which although seemingly visible hides something that is invisible and «ncapturable. However, one has to realize that the absence of the visible is not altogether negative. Human gazes meet by “exchanging,” “absorbing” each other, one “disappears” in the eyes of the Other. In this “unstoppable denial of the object” or “removing the horizon of the visible” the pure look aims toward that which cannot be defined by bound­aries. W hat follows is “the exchange of looks,” the loss of one’s sight and finally complete “blindness.” It is not the eye that looks on anymore; in a wink of an eye it was absorbed and got lost in the very centre of the world, in the absolute night

21 Cf. Levinas, O f God Who Comes to M ind, p. 118.22 Ibid., p. 67.23 Jean-Luc Marion, “L’intentionnalité de l’amour,” Prolégomènes à la charité (Paris: La Diffe­

rence, 1991), pp. 101-102.

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from which there spills out the peculiar black light that marks the eternal empti­ness. It is the non-existent point of departure or point of destination, the non­existent centre that at most illuminates the contours of nocturnal objects. The gaze fixed on the eyes of another human is at its most concentrated point “the noctur­nal gaze,” it tears down the last icon. The last nocturnal image is the devastation of any image.24

It will not be just a poetic metaphor when I write: a look is aflash of Being from the night of the world. The night however does not denote the simple succession to and the opposite of the day; it is something much more. It is the void, the night when there is nothing to see, or, even better, the night when we have the chance to see the invisible—on one hand, the night that is opening up for me, in which the “intercepted gaze does not avoid my gaze,” on the other hand, the absolute unavailability. This second, averted side of the night cannot be defined from the classic ontological perspective of the light and day— the day is a panorama and at the same time a synthesis, meaning the brightness of seeing and enunciation. However, visibility and brightness are negative features in this case. The light exposes mercilessly. Thus the eye is^the two-faced medium of the proximity of the Other. The eye, on the one side, is the medium of the absolute experience of the night, yet, on the other side, it remains the messenger of the day.

This has two consequences. Firstly, the ethical thinking that is not based on representation and synthesis cannot in its immediacy head toward the adequacy of truth. Thinking affected by the experience of the face cannotjustbe the think­ing for oneself but rather thinking against oneself or despite oneself as repeatedly suggested by Levinas in the book Otherwise than Being.25 The experience has tra­ditionally been explained through its fixation in consciousness. The openness toward Being becomes imagination or symbolism, that what is being exposed in openness is transcended and becomes the symbol, the image, the sign. The other of the “face to face" experience loses its own sovereignty at the expense of securing the power position of the subject of experience. The source of the ethical way of thinking however cannot be the rational consciousness of stable and continuous course of reality. Ethical thinking does not have its source in intentional conscious­ness. It has been deprived of all targetedness and it originally is not an act, but rather passivity and affectivity. “The passivity of the non-intent ion al”26 is thus based on the “face to face” experience, which is the relationship of absolute immediacy.

24 Elsewhere Levinas writes: “The eye does not glow, the eye speaks." Emmanuel Levinas,Oeuvres 2. Parole et silence (Paris: Gras set), p. 371.

15 Emmanuel Levinas, Other-wise than Being or Beyond Essence (Dordrecht: Kluwer AcademicPublisher, 1991), pp. 16, 51, 113, etc.

26 Levinas, O f God Who Comes to M ind , pp. 174-175.

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It is the primal structure of affectivity, which, according to Levinas, precedes all figures of sociality.

Secondly, thinking about affectivity from the point of utmost blindness is possible by shifting toward the regime of language and hearing. On the level of language and hearing, Levinas describes specific features of the “face to face” relationship which is a certain bond but at the same time a radical separation. The relationship between me and the Other is the relationship of speech. By speaking and by addressing someone, “the O ther” enters a relationship with me where one remains absolutely separated because until the end one cannot become the topic of discourse. One is irreducible to the content of this discourse. One is not what is being told about one. One is signifying. This relationship is described by Levinas as metaphysics because the Other always remains “beyond saying.” In the ethical relationship, I become “a metaphysician” because I am heading toward that which is absolutely different and invisible. By looking one directly into the face I cease to look at all. On the contrary, I am listening to one in a way that does not presume I have looked through the meaning of one’s speech beforehand. I am not total­izing, my experience has not gained the status of spmething evident, and each visible component is dissolved in the immediacy of the non-evident which has not become an image yet. In this meaning, the original affectivity remains unique, and for this reason we need to understand the sound as something that is more than light. The Other that is non-re presentable and invisible appears to me in the blinding flash that hurts the retina of the eye. Thus the experience of the look— this openness of truth and at the same time brightness—matures into the trans­parency of the void. W hat else should signify the look into the eyes of the Other— this dramatic and traumatic experience—than the injury, than acquiring brightness and sobriety at the same time? About this peculiar signification of the face of the other human which is without the context-grasping horizon, Levinas said his well-known words, * i

The experience of morality does not proceed from this vision—it consummatesthis vision; ethics is an optics. But it is a “vision” without image, bereft of thesynoptic and totalizing objectifying virtues of vision; a relation or an inten­tion ality of a wholly different type.27

This is an intention ality of a different type because it is the intentionality in which thinking does not remain adequate toward its object. It is in the “optics” of every honest metaphysics that is targeted, so to speak, against the monologue with oneself, against the totality of one’s own constructs and contents of thinking:

27 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 23.

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To contain more than one’s capacity does not mean to embrace or to encompass the totality of being in thought or, at least, to be able to account for it after the fact by the inward play of constitutive thought. To contain more than one’s capacity is to shatter at every moment the framework o f a content that is thought, to cross the barriers of immanence.23

This means that immanence— the monologue of the soul with itself—structural­ly presumes openness to the voice of the Other, listening provoked by its voice. Ethical optics can absorb into itself more than what is currently located in its field of vision—this “more” is not given in the element of light which grants things their contours and forms. The face that is the dissolution of the form appears im­mediately from within. In the experience of the face the intention that reaches its climax in breaking the immanent content of consciousness becomes “blind” and at the same time became an unbearable burden, because— and this is the origin of “that miracle of ethics before the light”29—this blind vision starts “to see more than it sees.” It allows the other to speak up and to listen to their demands. Seeing suddenly becomes the burden of responsibility,30 A metaphysician is thus positioned vis-a-vis the face as the one who hears this invisible demand. Blindness “which sees more than it sees” becomes the blindness “which hears more than it sees” and, thanks to this, there remains the paradox that this blindness “sees more than it sees.

However, is this specific optics the ultimate answer to the question of why it is not possible to be more sceptical toward the ethical commandment. Is not the structure of this affectivity even deeper and more paradoxical? In other words, what gives the grounds for the inevitable acceptance of the burden of responsi­bility for the other?

I f we(want to thoroughly investigate Levinas’s basic presumption, which is based on the claim that “the access to the face is ethical through and through,” we must explore his works Otherwise Than Being: Or Beyond Essence and Four Talmudic Readings. In the former, Levinas transcends the layer of descriptive phenomenol­ogy by analyzing the immemorial time of the event of meeting the O ther in the terms of “proximity,” “difference” and “election.” The latter work is especially in­teresting due to the way it, in the context of giving an exegesis of the Talmud, describes responsibility for another human as the immediate and thus inevitable precondition of sociality as such.

29 Ibid., p. 27.29 Levinas, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, p. 44.30 Cf. ibid., p. 18.

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W hen Levinas writes about the inevitability of taking over the responsibility for the O ther with a proximity that is not reducible to the consciousness of prox­imity, “anarchically a relationship with a singularity without the mediation of any principle, any ideality,”31 what he has in mind is that the relationship of proximity cannot be transferred to some form of the mode of distance, geometrical connec­tion, or pure “representation” of the relative. Proximity is already the call, the utmost urgency, or even the duty that anarchically precedes every engagement. In other words, “this anteriority is older than the a priori''12 Tflie word “anarchically” here means the “instruction” by which I was called upon (in the past that cannot be brought back by reminiscence any more) by the Other to be responsible, before consciousness was brought to life. Levinas in this case rules out any initiative or spontaneity on the part of the subject. According to him, the original affectivity is an-archic in the sense that it precedes any activity and any engagement, as if it did not have its point of inception in time. Levina s’s thesis about the an-archic proximity and the passivity of the subject thus goes against every idealism, but especially against Fichte’s idealism,

“older” than a priori. This formula expresses a way of being affected which can in no way be invested by spontaneity: the subject is affected without the source of the affection becoming a theme of representation. We have called this rela­tionship irreducible to consciousness obsession. The relationship with exterior­ity is “prior” to the act that would effect it. For this relationship is not an act, not a thematising, not a position in the Fichtean sense. Not everything that is in consciousness would be posited by consciousness— contrary to the proposi­tion that seemed to Fichte to be fundamental.33

In the responsibility for the Other that the subject takes up without any engage­ment, Levinas sees the ?m eta-ontological,” “meta-logical” structure of Anarchy that breaks through the Logos of the thematising consciousness which reduces everything to the present. This relationship of responsibility is seen as obsession, “a seed of folly” (un grain defolie)34 of the presence of the Other sown into my in­nermost I. It however seems that the term that expresses this anteriority in relation to the presence of consciousness most aptly is election. “I” was elected and every­thing takes place outside of its activity. A t the moment of election was “I” abso­

31 Ibid., p. 100.32 Ibid., 101.

Ibid.34 Ibid., pp. 84, 91 ,142, etc.

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lutely passive. The Levinasian election is in no way related to the problem of its eventual acceptance or failure to be accepted. If it was, we would have to speak about passivity as something that could be reduced to the passivity of an effect— within some form of cause and effect relationship. The Levinasian passivity has a very different meaning. In the depth of Self, subjectivity uncovers itself as chosen and as goodness,

Chosen without assuming the choice! I f the passivity is not reducible to the passivity of an effect in a causal relation, if it can be conceived to be on the hither side of freedom and non-freedom, it must have the meaning of a “good­ness despite itself’ a goodness always older than the choice. Its value, that it, its excellence or goodness, the goodness of goodness, is alone able to counterbal­ance the violence of the choice (and, beyond counterbalancing, be for the bet­ter!). Goodness is always older than choice, the Good has always already chosen and required the unique one. As chosen without choosing its election, absent from the investiture received, the one is a passivity more passive still than all the passivity of undergoing. The passivity of the one, its responsibility or its pain, do not begin in consciousness—that is, do not begin.35

According to Levinas, subjectivity manifests itself as goodness called in the an­archic time to goodness, through the Good. I f the subjectivity of the subject is expressed in principle as the responsibility for the Other (or others), then this ir­revocable election that was made through the Good is the precondition o f subjec­tivity as such. The Good is the an-archic source of sociability and humanity. The term “proximity” then contains in itself the whole transcendence, otherness of another human who has already become a neighbour. Proximity is paradoxical because this is the kind of proximity that can never turn into unity and fusion. Being.close, in contact, means to be committed to another even before “entering a contract” of any voluntary association. Proximity is not the result of freedom, it is antecedent to freedom.

Proximity represents a community with neighbours. Such a community is based on accepting a commitment. It is an irrefutable bond of responsibility. In this sense we are faced with an ethical impossibility of refusal par excellence. To get rid of one’s own chosen status is impossible without the “alienation or fault” experience.36 And this is actually Levinas’s answer to the question of why it is not possible to be sceptical toward the ethical commandment. In proximity I am the witness of

35 Ibid., pp. 56-57.36 Ibid., p. 87.

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the commandment that comes from the immemorial past. This commandment was never present and its origin cannot be sought in my free decision. Proximity, according to this meaning, is the impossibility of distance, so a neighbour cannot become a correlate of consciousness.

The election that occurred as “the antecedence prior to all representable ante­cedence; immemorial (antecedence),”37 cannot be expressed on the level of ontol­ogy. Since ethics precedes ontology, election has an ethical nature—in this sense we should understand it as the primacy of the Good in relation to Being. If we do not want to get caught up in the trap of ontology we need to resolve this reality by means of a paradox. In ontology, the Good and the subject are synchronized, and the election would only reveal itself within causality when the Good is the cause and the subject its effect. Levinas responds to this synchronization in ontol­ogy with the term “difference:” “The Good is before being. There is diachrony: an unbridgeable difference between the Good and me, without simultaneity, odd terms. But also a non-indifference in this difference.”38 This is the proper meaning of non-phenomenality or the Revelation of the face of the Other: the commitment invoked by the proximity of the neighbour, transceryiing the horizon of images that if offers.

Figurative thinking at this point inevitably goes outside of itself, outside of Kantian formal conditions for the possibility to think in space and time. The in­evitable consequence is the occurrence of contradictions and aporias. It seems that resolving this conflict is not within the power of phenomenology, and when it comes to grasping the paradox of the Revelation, even Levinas himself has to rely on the shift to the religious manner of explication. The most apt description of the problematic of Revelation could be found in Chapter 2 of Four Talmudic Read­ings, “The Temptation o f Temptation.” Here, Levinas comments on the Tal­mudic discussion about the way the Torah (God’s Commandments) was revealed to the Israelites. One of the most remarkable features of this acceptance is that the acceptance preceded the understanding ofthese commandments. According to Levinas, in this acceptance of the commandments before they were understood lies the “angelic secret” of subjectivity, which is shown to be chosen, good, and responsi­ble even before freedom is distinguished from unfreedom, or good from evil. Let me quote two passages.

Rabbi Eleazar has said: W hen the Israelites committed to doing before hear­ing, a voice from heaven cried out: W ho has revealed to my children this secret

57 Ibid., p. 122. 38 Ibid., p. 122.

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the angles make use of, for it is written (Psalm 103:20): “Bless the Lord, Oh, His angels, you mighty ones, who do His word, hearkening to the voice of His word.” They do before hearing.39

The antecedence that Levinas ascribes to doing before hearing, this reversal of the logical order, this angelic secret of autonomous subjectivity, could also be seen in the second image that describes the conflict between a Sadducee and the Jewish sage Raba. In the person of Raba we can see how Levinas is trying to overcome the allegedly “legitimate” requirement of philosophy that fights against every naivety. A philosopher (maybe a phenomenologist, but definitely “a European,” as suggested by Levinas) is represented by the figure of the Sadducee:

A Sadducee saw Raba buried in study...He said to him: People in a hurry, for whom the mouth passes before the ears, you always find yourselves in a state of headlong haste. You should have listened in order to know whether you were able to accept, and if you were not able to accept, you should not have ac­cepted. Raba answered hijn: It is written about us who walk in integrity: “The integrity of the upright guides them”; about those who walk upon tortuous paths, it is written: “The crookedness of the treacherous destroys them” (Prov­erbs 11:3).40

The first passage outlines the general structure of the ethically motivated subjec­tivity that when it is given a command from God answers positively even before assessing one’s possibilities, before doing any calculation or rational deliberation. The Israelites “first fulfilled" G od’s will and “only then adopted” His Law. The act of giving the Torah is an event that is not comparable with anything else. This event is the immediacy of the ethical commandment that flows out of the contact with the face of another human. The; face of the Other is revealed immediately. However, the contact with the face cannot be a relationship of knowing. The giv­ing of the Torah which one accepts before getting to know it is just like the rev­elation of the face—it means the irrefutable taking over of the responsibility for the neighbour. This is where lies the paradox of the un-human, or the angelic secret of ethical subjectivity that happens as a certain confirmation, the original

fiat, that is the practical answer that precedes all rational consent. It is not a prod­uct of a subjective will but precedes it. It is thus a condition for my relationship to the Other. It is not a coincidence that Derrida wrote, “whether we want it or not,

39 Levinas, N ine Taludic Readings, p. 45.J0 Ibid., p. 31.

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we are responsible.”41 And the sign of this binding responsibility is this “act of saying yes” that I would be unable to consent to as a naturally egoistic being. This is a consent before consent, or the order wherein “fulfilment” precedes “hearing out.

Levinas teaches us that this acting before hearing out (before every understand­ing, control, inclusion; before any Sirmgebimg) defines ethics specifically as spiritual optics, where seeing and understanding is not only transformed into hearing, but also into a specific and responsible act, as if it were first necessary to blind the eye­sight that thinks it sees something. To put it another way, according to Levinas, we need to learn “to see” in the space of blindness, in this invisible space of encounters between I and the Other. The point of this encounter, some kind of a “loophole” of the spirit, is represented by the central part of the eye’s retina which is the point of sharpest vision, the macula that we usually do not perceive because the eye is in constant motion. Ethics becomes immediate optics, a specific vision—i.e. action in favour of an other human, a moral act in this “loophole” of the invisible. Because the face is not a phenomenon, it cannot be thought of as something “given." In this sense, it is only a trace of the original commandment to which I respond before any consent. An ethicist can “see” in the space of blindness only by hearing. W hat one “sees” is far from a feeling of pleasure or satisfaction. The spirit in him or her traumatically captures the resonance of the expression of the Other’s face, a sharply resonating expression that may not even be meaningfully read, an un­bearable screaming of human misery, an unbearable and above all voiceless scream­ing detectably only by the ears of angels.

Only an angelic being can look at God face to face. It is impossible for a hu­man. But approaching the divine face through the human face nevertheless is possible for a human. This possibility of approach is provided by the immediately realized ethical act. Thus God can ask in wonder, “W ho has revealed to my chil­dren this secret of angels?” W hich could be stressed by asking the question, “W ho is tby the act o f looking trying to deceive Death, which is the fair punishment for abiding in God’s presence—-which is the prerogative of angels?” or “W ho is trying to walk in God’s footsteps, which is to desecrate God’s dwelling by self-sanctift- cation?” Such highly exposed questions could however be quite simply transferred to the level of the categorical imperative: always act in the way that you would also see God tn theface of the neighbour. The benefit of the categorical imperative formu­lated in this way is that it has not been construed rationalistically, i.e. it does not lack the moral motivation that Kierkegaard seeks in Kant so desperately.

It is definitely no coincidence that Levinas defines ethics as the optics of the blind (of immediate behaviour, the practical fiat) in a text describing the gift of

41 Jacques Derrida, Points de suspension. Entretiens (Paris: Editions Galilee, 1992), p. 398.

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the Torah, and uses it to delineate the paradoxical nature o f integrity and of the autonomy of subjectivity,

The direct relation with the true, excluding the prior examination o f its terms, its idea—that is, the reception of Revelation— can only be the relation with a person, with another. The Torah is given in the Light o f a face. The epiphany of the other person is ipsofacto my responsibility toward him: seeing the other is already an obligation toward him, A direct optics—without the mediation of any idea— can only be accomplished as ethics. Integral knowledge or Reve­lation (the receiving of the Torah) is ethical behaviour.42

The face of the other is thus a revelation— a trace— of G od’s original command­ment, and ethical optics is the very sighting of God! Levinas confirms this else­where, “Ethics is an optics of the Divine. Henceforth, no relation with God is direct or immediate. The Divine can be manifested only through my neighbour.’143 Integral knowledge, that specific manner of sighting, is the Revelation or the autonomy of the meaning that occurs between two mutually competing forces, that is, the movement of wiping away, the vanishing of G od’s presence in the world, and the movement of approaching it. However, this meaning is shown to be impossible. It cannot be thought on the basis of fullness, presence or the iden­tity of the presented. It is only possible as a trace, i.e. as an irreducible relationship between I and the Other, as the very precondition for the possibility of all mean­ing. I f the Revelation can be described as the situation in which nothing is given (because the meaning of the commandment cannot be objectified in any way), then the antecedence of fulfilling before hearing out—the ethical commandment— presents itself as the ^wari-transcendental precondition for the production of mean­ing. The peculiar nature of the non-given Revelation is aptly explained by J.-L. Marion in:his paper, “Metaphysics and Phenomenology: A Relief for Theology.”14 God, according to him, is revealed based on Himself, and this absolute self-ref­erence belongs to his definition, God gives us Himself, and does not give anything

I

42 Levinas, N ine Taludk Readings, p. 47.43 Emmanuel Levinas, Difficult Freedom. Essays on Judaism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U ni­

versity Press, 1990), p. 159. Levinas argues elsewhere in the similar manner: “The moral relation therefore reunites both self-consciousness and consciousness o f God. Ethics is not the corollary o f the vision o f God, it is that very vision” (Levinas, Difficult Freedom. Essays on Judaism , p. 17); “The vision of God is a moral act. The vision o f God is an ethics” (Levi­nas, Ibid., p. 275); “Already o f itself ethics is an ‘optics™ (Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 29), etc.

“ Jean-Luc Marion, “Metaphysics and Phenomenology: A Relief for Theology,” Critical Inquiry 20, no. 4, Symposium on “G od” (Summer, 1994), pp. 572-591.

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else besides Himself. This leads to at least three consequences. Firstly, God giving Himself from the within is thus given outside of any subjective horizon.45 The response to this giving is represented by the (Levina sian?) act of blinding in which the eye (consciousness) is unable to encompass His meaning. Secondly, the revela­tion is absolutely present. The adjective “absolutely” is supposed to suggest that it cannot be localized in time or space without the risk of reducing it to the object of consciousness. The absolute presence then refers to His absolute invisibility. “‘God’ becomes invisible not in spite of his donation but by virtue of this donation."46 Thirdly, the God who gives Himself in this absolute absence is at the same time the God who has long departed.

The second passage in which we witness the discourse between Raba and the Sadducee in a peculiar way once again refers to that “angelic secret of subjectivity.” The Sadducee—i.e. a European, a sceptic, a philosopher or, in short, a mistrustful person—is one for whom the “direct relationship with the truth of the Revelation” shall appear as the greatest lack of good judgement and prudence, which is to say as naivete and stupidity. The peculiar nature of “fulfilling before hearing out,” the original affirmation of the truth of Revelation, is described by Levinas in the fol­lowing manner,

The yes o f ‘we will do’. ..is a lucidity as forewarned as scepticism but engaged as doing is engaged. It is an angel’s knowledge, of which all subsequent knowl­edge will be the commentary; it is a lucidity without tentativeness, not pre­ceded by a hypothesis-knowledge, or by a tria 1-knowledge. But such a knowl­edge is one in which its messenger is simultaneously the very message.47

This is the angelic knowledge to which any subsequent knowledge shall only present itself as a commentary!—that is, ethical optics qr the immediacy of the relationship toward the O ther who is not me and thus can command. This is the law par excellence, or the precondition of lawfulness and justice as such. It does not explain, it does not provide reasons^ it does not argue, it just commands. Moreover, it does not represent a transcendental condition of the possibility of consent or dissent. “The yes” according to Levinas is unconditional because it is direct and honest——it is the basic ethical configuration.48

45 Ibid., p. 588.46 Ibid., p. 589.A1 Levinas, N ine Talmudic Readings, p. 48.

Ibid.

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In Hebrew there is a term for this direct and honest uprightness (in French, droiture): temimut.49 Ethics is direct or immediate optics. And similarly direct is Raba’s answer to the scepticism of the Sadducee toward morality: The human is placed into a relation to the Revelation even before he or she assumes his or her stance vis-à-vis the truth. It is obvious that two contexts intersect here, a religious context and a philosophical context. I will discuss the philosophical context first. Levinas uses the term ‘upright’ for two different terms, droiture and intégrité. Both these terms suggest the need to adopt an upright stance toward the ethical require­ment that arrives from the Other—the upright, the simple, but not the naive or the stupid. Subjectivity is constituted as this original split emerging from the direct acceptance of responsibility for the Other, And this split means, on the one hand, an upright and honest stance toward oneself (the problematisation of one’s own hegemony), and, on the other hand, an upright and honest stance toward the Other. The split is happening at the same time w ith the problematisation of oneself as the lifting up of and the giving preference to the other human before oneself. However, in the text there resonates yet another meaning of droiture and intégri­té which could refer to another, religious context, translated as the integrity of orthodoxy.

Temimut, the basic ethical configuration or the specific manner of direct sighting, thus represents the very structure of subjectivity or the elementary precondition for sanctifying humanity. Humanity is presented by Levinas as lifting the human up toward—if it could be phrased like this—-angelic perfection.

Translated by Radomir Masaryk

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45 Temimut'. uprightness or si ncerity. There are three general levels o f temimut-. tem im ut harat-zon (sincerity o f will), temimut ba/ev (sincerity o f heart) and temimut hama'aseb (sincerity ofaction). Temimut always implies “completeness." In one’s divine service, tem im ut at thelevel o f w ill, represents one’s “complete” will to fulfil G od’s w ill.

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11115 article was produced at the Institute of Philosophy and Ethics of Presov University as part of the grant project VEGA 2/0201/11.

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