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- LEVINASS PHILOSOPHY: THE OTHER AS PRIOR TO THE SELF
Emmanuel Levinas"Everyone will readily agree that it is of the highest importance to know whether we are not duped by morality." --Emmanuel Levinas, TOTALITY AND INFINITY, p. 21 Debate about philosophy and values has for too long been confined to particular dichotomies, which force participants into an "either-or" mentality: individualism versus collectivism; freedom versus order; egoism versus altruism; the list goes on. The job of philosophy, however, is to question the very underpinnings of those choices forced upon us. Why is the individual constantly pitted against society? Why is freedom inherently opposed to attempts to order society? Why must selfishness be the natural and inevitable outcome of individualism? If the job of philosophy is to explode these binary oppositions, then Emmanuel Levinas ought to receive the employee of the century award. Levinas offers a radical departure from Western philosophy by shifting the starting point of all conceptual thought from the Self to the Other. He argues that our very being, and all the philosophical systems we produce, comes from our encounters with other people, rather than our own self-referential reflections. In so arguing, Levinas is not a collectivist, nor is he an individualist. He is not a communitarian (although he is concerned about communities); he is not an egoist (though he believes in individual freedom). His argument should turn value debate completely around, for he argues that there is an inviolable relationship between the Self and the Other that cannot be captured or controlled by any set of systematized ethics or politics. In short, he invites us back, from speculations about systems and metaphysics and rights and universals, to the most basic of human relationships. The results are revolutionary, staggering, inspiring. This essay traces the philosophical thought of Emmanuel Levinas and its impact on value debate, particularly in the realm of ethics. After a brief biography, this essay explores the fundamental contribution of Levinas: a shift from Self-based philosophy to Other-based philosophy. BIOGRAPHYEmmanuel Levinas was born in Lithuania in 1906. The timing and placement of his birth, along with the path of his life travels, would place him at the center of the most significant and cataclysmic events of the 20th century. To begin with, he witnessed the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the rapid Bolshevik takeovers of Lithuania and surrounding countries. After the Revolution, which did not eliminate anti-Semitism and hence could not protect the safety of Jews like Levinas, he went to France. For some years afterward, Levinas traveled between France and Germany to study both Talmudic religion (which he had really began studying as a boy in Lithuania) and the very important philosophical changes going on in Europe at the time. These changes are worth mentioning in some detail. In 1927, Martin Heidegger published Being and Time, perhaps the most important philosophical work of the 20th century. Heidegger argued that humans have an essentially subjective and relative relationship to the world around them, that they engage in projects, alone and with others, veering between authenticity and inauthenticity, fearing death, and falling into alienation. Heidegger's work profoundly touched Levinas, although Levinas felt the work did not tell the whole story. Levinas would argue that we are far more influenced by other people than Heidegger suspected. While in Germany, Levinas was captured by the Nazis and spent six years in a concentration camp. Here, he began to see the "others" that Heidegger wrote of, but in a profoundly different light. Instead of trying to avoid their travails, Levinas was drawn to their suffering, and deeply frustrated by his inability to stop it. Levinas would spend the rest of his life meditating on the question of "the Other." He wrote several books and essays detailing his belief that all philosophy, and many other human projects, represent an attempt to escape the inescapable: the obvious fact that people need one another, and are capable of profound cruelty to each other even as they try to fulfill that need. Along the way, Levinas befriended philosophers such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Jacques Derrida. However, he kept his distance from them philosophically, stubbornly reminding his audience that before there is text (Derrida) or absolute freedom (Sartre), there is the starting point of it all: the encounter with the Other. Emmanuel Levinas died on Christmas day, 1995. Derrida gave his funeral eulogy, humbly admitting that his friend Emmanuel had raised questions none of the other philosophers could answer. By the time of his death, Levinas was already becoming deeply influential in the United States as well as Europe. Today, there are law review articles analyzing the impact of Levinasian thought on legal codes; religious books speculating on whether God is the Ultimate Other, and volumes of ethics essays acknowledging that we may have come a long way on the wrong track, thinking that we can invent ethical systems to bring us closer to each other, when, in fact, they may force us even further apart than we were in the first place. LEVINAS'S PHILOSOPHY: THE OTHER AS PRIOR TO THE SELFIn the history of philosophy, we find a longing to establish universals. Philosophical thought longs to be able to say "everything is X," and then place that X at the center of a comprehensive system. Plato declared all things to be reflections of the perfect and ideal forms. Before that, Heraclitus announced that everything was constantly changing; and the very first philosopher, Thales, naively posited all to consist of water. The moderns, and even the so-called postmoderns, continued this trend. Marx declared everything to be material and all human activity reducible to labor. Freud reduced all human endeavor to ego and libido. Nietzsche announced that all was the will to power. Heidegger, supposedly breaking away from modernism, laid out a description of human endeavor, "Dasein," which was supposedly applicable to all people. Derrida, perhaps the most popular postmodern thinker, did little more than reduce everything to "text." In Levinasian language, all these philosophical projects were simply a reduction of the Other to the Same. When faced with a plethora of phenomena, philosophers long to make it all into one understandable system. Levinas sees the history of Western philosophy as a conspiracy to make everything the same, for the intellectual Self to assimilate all Others. As philosopher Nick Smith explains: Several philosophers became acutely self-aware that their discipline had sought, since its pre-Socratic beginnings in Parmenides and others, and through Hegel and Heidegger, to render existence as a singular unified phenomenon. Philosophers and scientists of the Western tradition craved a final theory that could neatly systematize the world into an organized framework that could logically explain away all the aberrations and anomalies of existence. For these thinkers, nothing could exist outside of their understanding of the world and all "otherness" could somehow be related to and harmonized with their conception of the world. (Nick Smith, "Incommensurability and Alterity in Contemporary Jurisprudence," BUFFALO LAW REVIEW, Spring/Summer 1997, p. 510) Levinas's answer to this conspiracy is to remind us that all these systems place the Self, and the concept of same-ness and universality, as the starting point for all philosophical projects. If we put the Self first, it is natural to assume that everything must be made to be like the Self. However, Levinas sees the Other as actually prior to the Self. Alterity, or otherness, rather than being a far-away alien, is actually our very foundation. I would not even begin to know myself, as self, without first having my dormant consciousness interrupted by that which I am not. The very preconditions of realizing my self-ness rely upon a distinction between the self and this interruption of the self. To think--at all--is to think about the Other first. Since the Other appears to the Self before any philosophy, metaphysics, or any rational system can define it at all, all thinking is subsequently a response to this alterity. For Levinas, to know the Other one must know it in the realm of basic human relationships, not philosophy. In fact "knowledge" of the Other is a contradiction in terms, since rationalism constructs the Other rather than allowing its Other-ness to go unopposed. This basic relationship, what we could call an ethical relationship, is pre-philosophical. Moreover, the relationship between Self and Other is mutually dependent, since I would not exist in consciousness without others. This is why Levinas believes people are more important than ideas, and that our responsibility to others is unavoidable, simply given their existence, and the demands placed upon our very being by that existence. 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