Emmanuel Levinas

The Genealogy of Ethics

John Llewelyn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134842483
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

First Published in 2004. 'Emmanuel Levinas's thought can make us tremble' exclaims Jacques Derrida, one of the increasing number of writers in many different fields through whose works reverberate shock waves transmitted by the prophetic words of this eminent contemporary philosopher. John Llewelyn's exemplary study hears in Levinas's words an argument to the effect that is ethics is in crisis today it is because we fail to acknowledge that there is crisis in ethics from all time. After Auschwitz, he asks, dare we leave unheeded what Levinas has to say?

Part I

1
Ontological claustrophobia

A NEW WAY OF POSING AN OLD PROBLEM

With hindsight it can be seen that the essay On Evasion published in 1935 announces the issue with which all Levinas's philosophical writings will be preoccupied: the issue of the issue from ontology. Why does he state already in this essay that ‘the ancient problem of ontology’ has to be posed in a new way? Why does he consider the new way of posing it attempted by Heidegger in Being and Time (1927) still not new enough?¹

Why is Levinas so concerned with the new? A historical answer to this question is that he inherits the topic from Bergson who, when Levinas was a student in the 1920s at Strasburg, was being hailed there as the leading thinker in France. Indeed, in the year preceding that in which De l’évasion (Of Evasion) was published the Alcan edition of the works of Bergson had appeared. It was the wide interest in Bergson's philosophy of time, Levinas notes, that prepared the ground for the reception of Heidegger in France.² Bergson's interpretation of psychological time as duration and his notion of creative evolution as élan vital purport to show how there can be an intuition of radical newness despite the conception of physical time which, he argues, is reducible to space, and which permits to intelligence only the uncreative fake novelty of geometrical reconfiguration. It is to the bustle of such mere rearrangement, remue-ménage, that Maurice Blanchot refers to illustrate what he means by ‘the neuter’ and later, with Levinas, the there-is, the il y a.

In lectures published under the titles La mort et le temps and Dieu, la mort et le temps Levinas cites the following sentences of Bergson's Creative Evolution (1928):

All living beings are linked one with another, and all yield to the same tremendous drive. The animal takes its stand on the plant, man bestrides animality, and the whole of humanity, in space and time, is a gigantic army galloping alongside, in front of and behind each one of us in an all-embracing charge capable of overcoming every resistance and of clearing [franchir] many obstacles, perchance even death.³

Death according to Bergson is the translation of duration and its interpenetrating phases into space divided into spaces according to more or less arbitrary convention. It is the reduction of quality into quantity and of differential energy into entropic equilibrium. It is not nothing or non-being. The idea of nothing is an idea of being:

the idea of an absolute nothing, in the sense of the annihilation of everything, is a self-destructive idea, a pseudo-idea, a mere word. If suppressing a thing consists in replacing it by another, if thinking the absence of one thing is only possible by the more or less explicit representation of the presence of some other thing, if, in short, annihilation signifies before anything else substitution, the idea of an ‘annihilation of everything’ is as absurd as that of a square circle.⁴

It is this absurdity, the impossibility of nothingness, that is being acknowledged, Levinas suggests, when Macbeth laments that it cannot be truly said of death ‘And there an end’, and when Hamlet realizes that the ‘not to be’is, perchance, not to be. What these characters in the so-called tragedies of Shakespeare are expressing—and Levinas remarks that it sometimes seems to him that the whole of philosophy may be regarded as a meditation on Shakespeare (TA 60, TO 72)— is that they are beyond the tragedy of tragedy. If there is still tragedy in a conflict between fate and freedom where the hero or heroine is able, like Juliet, to say ‘I keep the power of death’, Hamlet is beyond tragedy. For he understands that if death is nothingness perhaps he does not have the power to die, even by his own hand. ‘Suicide is a contradictory concept.’ I can take life, but I cannot take death. Death comes without my being able to assume it. Beyond my capacity, out of reach of the ‘I can’, death, as Heidegger says, is impossibility. But it is not, as he also says, the possibility of impossibility. It is the impossibility of possibility.

Coming toward me rather than that which I am toward, death is not non-being before which I am anxious, but being before which I am afraid. It comes toward me across a gap over which, as over my shadow, I am forever unable to jump. This interval will suddenly be closed by the arrival of my death. It is this interval rather than the arrival that is what occasions my dread. For if ‘Prior to death there is always a last chance’, the chance that the hero, the heroine or the saint grasps in ultimately tragic hope, there is also always a last risk, the risk of my committing murder. This, rather than my death, is what rouses dread.

In this sense, I do not die alone. And it is this that gives sense to death, as for Bergson it is this, and no longer the élan vital which according to Creative Evolution may perchance even leap over death, that comes to give sense to time when in his The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1932) duration comes to be the fact that one human being calls out to another.⁵ We shall see that this is the fact that will allow Levinas to put a new interpretation upon a word that occurs in one of the passages from Bergson cited by him and reproduced above: the word ‘substitution’. To consider at this stage what Levinas will mean by this word would be to move too quickly ahead. Not to stay longer with Levinas's very early publication Of Evasion to ask what is anticipated there would be to miss an opportunity to understand the nature of the anticipation that his genealogy of ethics involves and so the genealogically of this genealogy itself, its logic, or its ‘logic’. To understand this must be an aim of any reading of his works. It is a principal aim of the reading we are engaged in here. It should be kept in mind as we proceed; as we proceed to ask, to begin with, of what kind of escape this early essay treats.

ESCAPE

Levinas tells his readers that although the word used in his title is borrowed from literary criticism the escape in question is not that of so-called escapist literature or of literature as such regarded as escape. In these latter contexts the need to escape is the need to escape ‘harsh reality’, ‘bourgeois conventions’, ‘boredom’ and suchlike. It is a need to escape a certain style of existence. What the title of Levinas's essay refers to is the need to escape existence as such, to escape the elementary and, as he also describes it, brutal truth that there is being, il y a de l’être. That the momentum of the élan vital will offer no chance of exit from sheer existence is already plain. That urge, however allegedly creative, however deconstructive of inherited frames, leaves one state of being only to enter another. It does not achieve the issue from being as such that would be the only remedy for what we might call ontological, as distinct from ontic, claustrophobia. Although it may, to employ Bergson's word, clear (franchir) death, depriving it of its sense, as in his paraphrase Levinas says (MT 62, DMT 67), this is transcendence to a new estate of existence. It is not the excendence that would be the exit from existence, turning the senselessness of death into sense.

We have still not read further than the first of the eight parts of Of Evasion. Yet it has already raised questions that will be of primary importance in the interpretation of Levinas's entire future work. For example, his recourse to this word excendence may be compared with his use of the word ‘need’, words that occur together in his phrase besoin d’excendance’. Levinas introduces this neologism apologetically, as though he might have preferred to stay with words in common currency. This will not be his last coinage, but we shall find that he generally prefers not to invent or to change words, but to bring out in old words an overlooked, overheard sense. The word besoin (‘need’), is a case in point. Of Evasion employs this word in a dual capacity. On the one hand it is used, as it is usually used, in the sense of that which implies an expectation that would be met by something that is missing. But such ontic need is not the need for excendence. No satisfaction of a lack can meet that. Although in later writings Levinas will tend to restrict his use of the word ‘need’ to the ontic dimension and the difference between the ontic and the excendent will be marked by the difference between lower-case and upper-case initials for the word ‘desire’, a certain dramatic force is carried by the dual role given to the word ‘need’ in this early work. Its duality answers to the duality Levinas attributes here already to the self-identity of the human being, a certain duality that will turn out to be other than that of self-reference traditionally attributed to the identity of the self since Descartes at least, though in Descartes himself that duality of self-reference is no more than the beginning of the story he tells about the duality of human identity. The full story, as Levinas continues to tell it, will reveal that this duality takes on a forme dramatique.

Existence is an absolute that affirms itself without referring itself to anything other. It is identity. But in this reference to himself man distinguishes a kind of duality. His identity with himself loses the character of a logical or tautological form; it takes on, as we shall go on to show, a dramatic form. In the identity of the ego [moi], the identity of being reveals its nature as enchainment because it appears in the form of suffering and it is an invitation to evasion. So evasion is the need of going out of itself [or the need to go out from itself (le besoin de sortir de soi-même)], that is to say, to break the most radical, most irremissible enchainment, the fact that the ego is itself. (DE 73)

Will Levinas go on to tell us that the tautologicality of self-identity gives way to heterologicality? All we have been told up to this point about heterologicality is that it is—otherwise than being. Why should this be a reason for saying that identity with oneself takes on a dramatic form? Are we to expect, in the words with which one dictionary defines ‘drama’, a ‘set of events having the unity and progress of a play and leading to catastrophe or consummation’? Does his ‘dramatic’ have the force it has when used of utterances that are, as the same dictionary says, ‘not to be taken as one's own’, when instead of being attributed to an authorial ‘I’ the words are put in the mouth of a dramatis persona, whether a she or a he, an il—or an Il? We can perhaps expect at the very least that the word ‘dramatic’ here is being used with its root meaning, from draô (‘to do, be doing, accomplish or fulfil’). If this is so, however, the doing in question cannot be the activity (activité) of creation that Bergson ascribes to the élan vital. It cannot be that of Bergsonian creative becoming because Levinas has just been arguing that however successfully that becoming escapes the prison of the present by immediately making it past, the creative activity itself is still in the service of being.

Yet, if this dramatic deed or accomplishment is not activity or creation in Bergson's sense, in what sense can it be suffering? How can the dramatic form be a form of suffering? How is this duality to be understood? One clue to be followed is the statement that the identity of the self's being reveals itself as imprisonment because it appears as suffering. Being is suffered as imprisonment, as being riveted, enchained. Experienced as suffering, being is already an invitation to escape. The ‘and’ of ‘and it is an invitation to escape’ seems to be an implication of rather than an addition to the suffering, just as the first word of the sentence immediately following this clause seems to introduce not simply independently but as a consequence the idea that the escape to which the suffering of being invites the self is the need of going out of itself. This is an idea that calls for a closer scrutiny of the ‘is’, of being itself. Could it be that being is not itself? Could we say that where there is being, where il y a de I'être, there is evasion, il y a de l'évasion, so that just as books entitled De la grammatologie and De l’esprit might help their readers understand what they are about by giving them a helping of grammatology and spirit or wit, the De of De l‘evasion might be not simply a preposition, but also a partitive pronoun, so that while the title announces an essay about or concerning evasion, it could at the same time announce an essay that is in some way a performance, a dramatic performance of evasion?

But of what sort is that other interesting ‘of’ in the assertion that evasion is the need of going out of oneself? The logic of this would be odd if evasion or escape here meant the same as going out of oneself (and how could the Latin root evadere not mean ‘to go out’?), for in that case the assertion would be that going out of oneself is the need of going out of oneself. In the light of our analysis of the sentence immediately preceding it it looks as though we are being given to understand that the very identity of the oneself incorporates the need of being quit of oneself, and that the second de of the phrase le besoin de sortir de soi-même admits translation both as ‘from’ and as ‘of’. One's self is from the start the need to leave oneself. The unity of the self labours in the pain of a need to be outside itself. Its unity is a disunity. Oneself is a twoself.

Is its labour labour lost? Is its pain pain in vain? If the tie I need to break is strictly irremissible, the need to break it can never be met. Levinas says however that the need in question is to break ‘the most irremissible’ enchainment. His admission of degrees means that whether the need can be met or not remains to be shown. The paragraph is avowedly proleptic.

NEED

When, however, in the second section of the essay Levinas reminds us that the need in question is not a privation, his explanation is that privative needs are needs of what is: they have to do with the ti esti. Whereas the need here in question has to do with the self's that it is: its hoti esti, the very fact that it is. Now that has no degrees. So does this mean that the need to go outside myself can never be satisfied? If so, this would not mean that I cannot not exist. This is no ontological argument by which my immortality is guaranteed. Levinas is not here treating of third-personal or impersonal logical truths of the kind that an imaginary independent onlooker might constate and process in a logic machine. The fact of existing that refers only to itself, as he first says, is the fact of existing as lived or existed by a self that poses itself or, sich setzt, as the German Idealists would say. Though it is less the idiom of German Idealism than that of Austrian, Husserlian phenomenology as modified by Heideggerian ontology that in this essay Levinas is beginning to adapt. It is from some of the implications of this phenomeno-ontological idiom that he feels the need to escape. But he does not feel the need to escape from the concreteness of the point at which thinking in this idiom begins. That is evident from the beginning of the thinking that goes on in Of Evasion, thinking that is a thinking of the beginning. However, this thinking of the beginning is not a thinking of the origin. That thinking and the thinking of death can be properly undertaken only when the analysis of evasion has reached a more advanced stage. And here we get no f...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• ABBREVIATIONS
• PREFACE
• INTRODUCTION
• PART I
• PART II
• PART III
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY