Levinas

Emmanuel Levinas

For two and a half thousand years, Western philosophy had been, at bottom, a quest to know: to grasp reality, to comprehend the world, to capture being in concepts and leave nothing outside the system. The first and deepest question was always "what is?" Emmanuel Levinas spent his life arguing that this was a mistake, and that something else comes first, before all knowing, before all being: my responsibility to another human being. Ethics, he insisted, is not one branch of philosophy among others, a set of rules we work out after we have settled the nature of reality. Ethics is first philosophy, prior to everything, because before I know anything, before I theorize or comprehend or even fully exist as a self, I am already claimed, summoned, made responsible, by the presence of the other person. And the place where this claim happens, the origin of ethics and perhaps of meaning itself, is something utterly ordinary that Levinas made strange and infinite: the face of another human being, turned toward me, in all its nakedness and need. Everything in his difficult, beautiful, demanding philosophy flows from that encounter, and from a conviction, hard-won in the darkest of centuries, that the deepest truth about a human being is not that we are, but that we are responsible for one another.

The violence of the concept. To grasp why Levinas thought ethics had to come first, you have to see what troubled him about the philosophy of knowledge. When I know something, Levinas observed, I take it into my mind, I fit it under my concepts, I make it part of my world, my system, my understanding. This is fine, even wonderful, when the thing is a stone or a star. But what happens when the thing I am trying to "know" is another person? Then the same move turns darker. To comprehend another person, to sum them up in my categories, to reduce them to a type I understand, a "case," a "kind," a known quantity, is, Levinas argued, to do them a subtle violence, to deny their irreducible otherness, to swallow them into my world as though they were just another object for my thought. He called this the imperialism of the Same: the way the knowing self tries to reduce everything other to a version of itself, to leave nothing genuinely outside, nothing it cannot master and contain. And he had come to believe, writing in the wake of a catastrophe that had tried to erase a whole people from the earth, that this drive to totalize, to allow no remainder, no excess, no untouchable otherness, was not innocent, that there is a hidden line running from the philosophy that must comprehend everything to the politics that will tolerate nothing it cannot absorb. Against the totality that closes over everything, Levinas set the infinite: that which always exceeds my grasp, overflows my concepts, refuses to be reduced to the same. And the infinite, he said, has a face.

The face that commands. What is it about a human face? Levinas asks us to attend to the moment when we are confronted, really confronted, by the face of another person, not the face as a set of features I could describe, the color of the eyes, the shape of the nose, but the face as a living, vulnerable, expressive presence turned toward me. In that encounter, he says, something happens that no concept can hold. The face exceeds every idea I have of it; it overflows my attempt to grasp it; it looks back. And in its very nakedness and defenselessness, the face makes a demand, issues a command, that I did not choose and cannot evade. Its first word, Levinas writes, is "thou shalt not kill." The face of the other, precisely in its fragility, in the fact that I could harm it and it lies exposed before me, lays an absolute claim on me, summons me to its defense, makes me responsible for it. This is not a feeling I happen to have, nor a rule I have reasoned my way to; it is, for Levinas, the primordial ethical event, more fundamental than any theory, the very thing from which morality springs. Before all philosophy, before I have decided anything, the face of the other person has already commanded me, already made me its keeper. To be human, Levinas thought, is to be the one who is summoned by the face, and the whole of ethics is contained in our response to that summons.

The idea of the infinite. Levinas found a name for the strange structure of this encounter in an unlikely place: in Descartes. Long ago, Descartes had noticed something odd about the human mind, that it contains an idea of the infinite, of a perfection greater than itself, and that this idea is peculiar, because a finite mind could not possibly have produced it out of its own resources; the infinite must have been placed there from beyond, breaking into the finite from outside it. Levinas seized on this as the very shape of the ethical encounter. The other person, met in the face, is exactly such an infinity: a presence that overflows my mind, that I did not and could not generate from myself, that breaks into my closed little world from beyond it and shatters my comfortable totality. In the ordinary run of experience, everything I meet I can more or less master, fit into my categories, make my own. The face is the one exception, the place where something genuinely other, something I cannot contain or reduce or see the limits of, irrupts into my world and calls me out of myself. This is what Levinas means by transcendence, not a God somewhere in the sky, but the way the other person transcends every idea I can form of them, comes at me from a height I cannot survey, and lays on me a claim from beyond. The trace of the infinite, even of God, he thought, is to be found not by gazing at the heavens but by turning toward the face of one's neighbor, in which something immeasurable looks back and will not be reduced to my measure.

Responsible before I choose. Here Levinas pushes to a conclusion so extreme it can take your breath away. My responsibility for the other person, he insists, is infinite, and it is asymmetrical. Infinite, because there is no point at which I have "done enough," no limit at which my obligation to the other is discharged and I am free of them; the more I respond, the more I find is asked. And asymmetrical, because my responsibility does not wait for the other to reciprocate, does not depend on what they have done for me or will do; I am responsible for the other, Levinas says, even if they are not responsible for me, even for their responsibility. This sounds impossibly demanding, and it is meant to. But Levinas's deepest and strangest claim is that this responsibility is not a burden added onto a self that exists first; it is what makes me a self at all. I do not begin as a free, self-contained ego that then chooses whether to care about others; I am called into being as a self by the claim of the other, summoned into responsibility before I have chosen anything. Responsibility, for Levinas, comes before freedom: I am responsible first, and only in answering "here I am" to the other do I become someone. The self, on this view, is not a fortress but a response, not a possession but a being-for-the-other, claimed by an appeal it never agreed to and cannot lay down. We are, at the very root, our responsibility for one another.

The other is already there. The room reads Levinas from the wider record, since his work survives only under copyright, and the chat says so; his prose is genuinely hard, deliberately so, because he is trying to say something, the pure address of one person to another, that resists being frozen into any flat statement, and his sentences break and double back and unsay themselves in the effort. He came to philosophy through Husserl and Heidegger, whose phenomenology he carried into France as a young man; but he turned against Heidegger with his whole soul. For Heidegger had made the question of being the first question, and had then, catastrophically, embraced the Nazis and kept his silence afterward, and Levinas, who lost almost everything to that catastrophe and bore its weight on every page he wrote, drew from it a terrible lesson: that a philosophy with no place for the face of the other, that puts being or knowledge or the system before the ethical claim of the neighbor, is a philosophy that has already, in principle, consented to violence. Against the whole tradition he set the priority of the other person, and he wove together two streams the West had kept apart, the Greek philosophy of the schools and the ethical passion of the Hebrew prophets. His influence has been quiet but deep; he gave the late twentieth century, weary of systems and sickened by what they had justified, a way to begin again from the most concrete thing there is, the encounter with a single human face. And his demand remains, unappeasable and clarifying: that before all our theories and all our knowledge, the other person is already there, already looking at us, already asking, by their very existence, that we not abandon them.