WE SHOULD REJECT SYSTEMIC VIEWS OF PHILOSOPHY AND ETHICS

WE SHOULD REJECT SYSTEMIC VIEWS OF PHILOSOPHY AND ETHICS

1. PHILOSOPHICAL SYSTEMS DECLARE WAR ON OTHER-NESS

Emmanuel Levinas, Philosopher, TOTALITY AND INFINITY, 1969, p. 21

The state of war suspends morality; it divests the eternal institutions and obligations of their eternity and rescinds ad interim the unconditional imperatives. In advance its shadow falls over the actions of men. War is not only one of the ordeals--the greatest--of which morality lives; it renders morality derisory. The art of foreseeing war and of winning it by every means--politics--is henceforth enjoined as the very exercise of reason. Politics is opposed to morality, as philosophy to naivete.

Emmanuel Levinas, Philosopher, TOTALITY AND INFINITY, 1969, p. 21

But violence does not consist so much in injuring and annihilating persons as in interrupting their continuity, making them play roles in which they no longer recognize themselves, making them betray not only commitments but their own substance, making them carry out actions that will destroy every possibility for action. Not only modern war but every war employs arms that turn against those who wield them. It establishes an order from which no one can keep his distance; nothing henceforth is exterior. War does not manifest exteriority and the other as other; it destroys the identity of the same.
3. PHILOSOPHICAL SYSTEMS REDUCE INDIVIDUALS TO COMPONENTS OF THOSE SYSTEMS

Emmanuel Levinas, Philosopher, TOTALITY AND INFINITY, 1969, pp. 21-22

The visage of being that shows itself in war is fixed in the concept of totality, which dominates Western philosophy. Individuals are reduced to being bearers of forces that command them unbeknown to themselves. The meaning of individuals (invisible outside of this totality) is derived from the totality. The unicity of each present is incessantly sacrificed to a future appealed to bring forth its objective meaning.
4. SYSTEMS REDUCE OTHERS TO SAME-NESS

Emmanuel Levinas, Philosopher, TOTALITY AND INFINITY, 1969, p. 43

Western philosophy has most often been an ontology: a reduction of the other to the same by interposition of a middle and neutral term that ensures the comprehension of being. The primacy of the same was Socrates's teaching: to receive nothing of the Other but what is in me, as though from all eternity I was in possession of what comes to me from the outside--to receive nothing, or to be free.
5. SYSTEMS DE-PERSONALIZE OUR RELATIONS WITH OTHER PEOPLE

Emmanuel Levinas, Philosopher, TOTALITY AND INFINITY, 1969, pp. 87-88

For the philosophical tradition of the West every relation between the same and the other, when it is no longer an affirmation of the supremacy of the same, reduces itself to an impersonal relation within a universal order. Philosophy itself is identified with the substitution of ideas for persons, the theme for the interlocutor, the interiority of the logical relation for the exteriority of interpellation. Existents are reduced to the neuter state of the idea, Being, the concept.

LEVINASIAN PHILOSOPHY IS GOOD FOR SOCIETY

1. JUST SOCIAL RELATIONS CANNOT BE FOUND IN PHILOSOPHICAL SYSTEMS

Emmanuel Levinas, Philosopher, TOTALITY AND INFINITY, 1969, p. 290

Social relations do not simply present us with a superior empirical matter, to be treated in terms of the logic of genus and species. They are the original deployment of the relationship that is no longer open to the gaze that would encompass its terms, but is accomplished from me to the other in the face to face.

Emmanuel Levinas, Philosopher, TOTALITY AND INFINITY, 1969, p. 291

The face to face is a final and irreducible relation which no concept could cover without the thinker who thinks that concept finding himself forthwith before a new interlocutor; it makes possible the pluralism of society.
VALUES ARE INCOMMENSURATE
1. INCOMMENSURABILITY OCCURS WHEN PARTIES CANNOT AGREE ON FUNDAMENTALS

Nick Smith, Vanderbilt University Department of Philosophy , BUFFALO LAW REVIEW, Spring/Summer 1997, p. 505

For a problem of incommensurable valuation to arise, the following three conditions must exist: (1) a belief is held regarding the value of something (the right of animals to be free from torture); (2) this belief comes into conflict or is incompatible with another belief regarding the value of that thing (the right to sacrifice animals in furtherance of promising medical research); and (3) a choice must be made between the competing beliefs. Also, incommensurability can occur in two forms: (1) intersubjectively, such as between one party who believes people should have freedom to contract for sexual services and another party who believes prostitution should be outlawed because it degrades the value of sexual relations; and (2) intrasubjectively, such as in a decision between leaving your toddlers with a day care provider so that you can pursue a fulfilling career, on the one hand, and placing your professional life on hold to spend all of your time with your children, on the other.
2. THERE IS NO OBJECTIVE SCALE TO WEIGH VALUES AGAINST ONE ANOTHER

Nick Smith, Vanderbilt University Department of Philosophy , BUFFALO LAW REVIEW, Spring/Summer 1997, p. 505-506

Generally speaking, incommensurability theorists believe that human valuation flows from particular institutional or personal beliefs about what each actor considers and interprets to be meaningful and important, and thus value cannot be reduced to a single quantifiable calculus that would be appropriate in all circumstances. Thus, incommensurability theorists assert that it is crucial for us to evaluate certain goods, such as love, profit, talent, or friendship according to separate scales and within distinct "spheres," in Michael Walzer's terms, so as to properly understand the nature of that good as qualitatively distinct from other goods. In Margaret Jane Radin's words, a belief in the incommensurability of values "means that there is no scale along which all values can be arrayed in order so that for any value or package of values we can say definitively that it has more or less value than some other."