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LEVINAS'S LACK OF CLARITY DOOMS HIS PHILOSOPHY
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- LEVINASS PHILOSOPHY CANNOT SOLVE FOR THE INJUSTICE HE DESCRIBES
- LEVINAS IS UNREASONABLE AND ABSOLUTIST
- UNIVERSAL VALUES EXIST: THE INCOMMENSURABILITY THESIS IS WRONG
LEVINAS'S LACK OF CLARITY DOOMS HIS PHILOSOPHY1. LEVINAS LACKS A CLEAR DEFINITION OF HIS MOST IMPORTANT CONCEPT: THE OTHER Michael Haar, Philosopher, University of Paris, PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIAL CRITICISM, Vol. 23 number 6, 1997, p. 95 What or who is Levinas's Other? Can this question even be asked? Is such a question not already ruled out because it belongs to the realm of conceptuality or to the coercive order of the Same which, for Levinas, equals Being? What is the philosophical status of the verb to be, for Levinas, when it is used in a seemingly naive way (for instance, in a definition)? If the Other (or rather others, as he would say) ‘is before or beyond being,' does this anteriority or transcendence change, suppress, or leave untouched the very precondition of every definition, i.e. the implicit pre-understanding of the verb to be? This preliminary questioning of method is never put. Nonetheless, Levinas's ‘concept' of Other, in its own way, tried to force into a strange kind of sameness several different and apparently contradictory senses of otherness. 2. LEVINASIAN ETHICS PLACES NO DISTINCTION BETWEEN TORTURER AND TORTURED Michael Haar, Philosopher, University of Paris, PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIAL CRITICISM, Vol. 23 number 6, 1997, p. 101 The strange logic of the Other, deeper within the self than the self, would be obliged to admit that the torturer and the tortured are one and the same, as in Schopenhauer, and, moreover, that the highest good, the ethical demand and the greatest evil (to be persecuted to death) are one and the same principle. For to be obsessed by the Other means, for Levinas, having to respond personally to and for him or her.
1. LEVINAS ASSUMES THAT PERSECUTION IS OUR NATURAL CONDITION: This prevents any meaningful discussion of injustice and how to solve it Michael Haar, Philosopher, University of Paris, PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIAL CRITICISM, Vol. 23 number 6, 1997, p. 100-101 For Levinas, both conscience and consciousness are purely egoistic: ‘Ethics is the egoistic spontaneity of the Same always already put into question by the Other.' Can ethics be conceived or simply understood by a purely passive pre-understanding implying no truly external relationship or reciprocity? Such a unilaterally passive, preontological ethics which is only suffered seems necessarily to lead to a kind of monadism. In effect, Levinas writes: ‘Obsession means to suffer, to be'; ‘Altruism is antinatural, nonvoluntary, inseparable from possible persecution'; and ‘Persecution brings the ego back to the self'. But which persecution? It is unbelievable that an immemorial or a priori form of persecution precedes all historical and, moreover, contemporary images and aspects of percecution.
Michael Haar, Philosopher, University of Paris, PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIAL CRITICISM, Vol. 23 number 6, 1997, pp. 103-104 The Levinasian atmosphere is even more gloomy than the Sartrean. The words which constantly recur in the latter half of Otherwise Than Being are characteristic: persecution, accusation, being hostage (to the Other), anxiety and loneliness. The terrifying ambience is that of a trial before a totalitarian court of justice, one imagining oneself obliged to appear before the court without any hope of self-justification.
1. THE LEVINASIAN CONCEPT OF RESPONSIBILITY IS TOO ABSOLUTE Michael Haar, Philosopher, University of Paris, PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIAL CRITICISM, Vol. 23 number 6, 1997, p. 104 If I am responsible for everything and everyone without or before any will or knowledge, it seems that responsibility places itself outside any relation, or, at least, that no ‘real' relation is required. It is not surprising to read that ‘the Other escapes every relation'; or that ‘The obsessed ego obsessed by all the others is not the inversion of the ecstatic intentionality'. No liberty can bear a responsibility which is so tremendously heavy that it declares and defines the true me (me as in the Same) as being only guilty of what the others are, do, or suffer. The abysmal wound of the Other empties the subject and deprives him or her of any self-sufficient ground. The restless subjectivity must roam the world endlessly, without home or land; it is primordially extradited, originally banished, its substance and attributes radically contaminated, demanded, skinned alive, deprived even of its own poverty. 2. LEVINASIAN ETHICS IS TOTALITARIAN: It turns the self into a slave to the other. Michael Haar, Philosopher, University of Paris, PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIAL CRITICISM, Vol. 23 number 6, 1997, p. 106 At this point, must we not rehabilitate the Same against the literally unbearable excess of the Other, against what Levinas himself calls the ‘enormity' and ‘incommensurability' of the ‘absolutely Other', and defend some kind of norm and measure or come back to the primacy and privacy of myself and yourself? Without the balance of the Same, the Other could become highly dangerous, even terroristic and totalitarian; that is to say, it could be more domineering than any totality ever instituted by the Same. UNIVERSAL VALUES EXIST: THE INCOMMENSURABILITY THESIS IS WRONG1. COMMON GOODS ARE POSSIBLE TO FIND Ronald R. Garet, Assistant Professor of Law and Religion, University of Southern California, SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA LAW REVIEW, July, 1983, p. 1001 For while it is indeed true that the intrinsic group good differs from the intrinsic individual good and the intrinsic social good, all three of these goods nonetheless have a common foundation. They must have a common foundation if they are to be recognized as intrinsic goods. That is, there must be some utterly primitive goodmaking element that is common to all three goods. Moreover, the three units -- individuals, groups, and society -- are related by the manner in which good gives rise to right in each case. 2. EXISTENCE ITSELF IS A COMMON GOOD Ronald R. Garet, Assistant Professor of Law and Religion, University of Southern California, " SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA LAW REVIEW, July, 1983, p. 1002 Existence, as the human mode of being, comprises the self-formative struggle that distinguishes the human world both ontologically and ethically. As I shall explain at greater length in section III, existence both carries its own moral value (i.e., the intrinsic good) and insists upon that value in the form of the right. Communality is the ground of a right -- the right of groups to maintain themselves and to pursue their distinctive courses -- because communality is one of the characteristic structures of existence and, in that sense, of the intrinsic human good. To rob existence of communality, of the communal celebratory process which forms the substance of much of our experience, would be to deny one ethical constituent of our humanity.
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