I understood the importance of the human face in the philosophy and ethic of Lévinas. He declare that the other’s face tie up human goodwill to it. But why built a philosophy and ethic on something which you can hide. For example in muslims countries people hide their faces behind clothes. How to follow moral rules when you hide your humanity, which Levinas means the face is a expression for.
Paideia,
I haven’t read Levinas, but James No. 2 recently has, so hopefully he’ll check in. This is his brief but recent thread, if you are interested: A brief reading of Levinas’ 'Is Ontology Fundamental?
ilovephilosophy.com/phpbb/vi … ht=levinas
Dunamis
Hi guys - little busy right now… give me another 7 or 8 hours and I will post something. 
Regards,
James
I have read a collection of essays by Levinas, although strictly speaking I have yet to ‘study’ him.
More accurately, we are responsible before we are constituted as an ego. The word ‘goodwill’ does not belong at this level of Levinas’ analysis. Responsibility is ‘ultimate’ and not ‘penultimate’, because we are ‘guilty’ before we are able to construct any halo of accountability around us, around our ‘identity’; and so our responsibility subverts delineations of this kind. The ‘Good’ is the ‘One’, which is part of the horizon for the projection of being, in the Heideggerian sense. Levinas is playing around this with his idea of the Infinite, and the Face is an important part of this subversion. This is prior to ‘Will’, or at least Levinas wants it to be (where ‘Will’ is read metaphysically as schematizing (of) Chaos). It is most certainly prior to any common notion of ‘will’, of which the conjunct ‘goodwill’ usually speaks.
This is a rather mundane reading though, I suspect. Why does it sound like I have heard all of this before? The Other-that-is-not-constituted-in -relation-to-the-Same; that is Levinas’ idea, and methinks his philosophy stands or falls on this one point. Derrida, for one, attempts to stab right here with the killer thrust.
“Levinas’ argument is of the form; ‘no you guys… don’t you see? There really is an Other-than-Being. Seriously!’”
I am uncertain about Levinas’ attempt to displace the ‘universality’ of ‘rationalist discourse’; i.e. the discourse of Being. Primarily because his Heidegger seems in places to be rather strawman-ish, and if Levinas is wrong about his position in metaphysics, then he is in trouble.
The Face is not a manifestation of Being, but a manifestation of the Other. A being is delimited on the horizon of Being; yet the Face is the voice of something more alien yet - the Other which is not a distancing from the Same. Indicative to read Levinas here as bearing Sartrean influences. Strangely ironic, perhaps? Indicative of tension…moreover?
Pish. What is Hidden; this is exactly what is outside of the Light of Being, and therefore rationalist discourse. So if this was not a silly question, it would be one which begs the question, against Levinas.
‘moral rules’? The Face is an expression of the Other. Humanity? I do not remember Levinas using this word. How could ‘humanity’ have anything to do with the Other, given that it is usually meant as a projection of Beings on the background of Being?
“No. I have not understood Levinas. You have yet to read him.”
Careful to remember that the only way we read is intertextually. Who is Emmanual Levinas for you? This is the question.
Regards,
James
Thank you for answering.
Myself I read “Time and the other” and “Ethic and Infinity” in swedish translation. I wish I also got the time to read “Totality and Infinity” and “Otherwise than being” by Lévinas.
I’ve got interest in Lévinas because he pointed out like no one else a communication philosophy which solves the mistakes you often do when you communicate with someone. And also he puts up alternatives for you to make it right when you communicate. He speaking of diacrony instead of dialogue and bring focus on time and not on language. He argument very well for what rights the self have and don’t have to another. He defines what people can exhange in the communication situation - everyting except existence. And because you are not the other person you can not know him, possess him you can only be in the relation or the contact with him and trust in his free mind and spirit that he response on your existence or anotherness. When you can not share your existence with another person, it remains for you to be social but not join in togetherness.
There’s many echoes from Buber but Lévinas philosophy are more ontological than Buber and therefore intellectual more developing.
James,
“The Other-that-is-not-constituted-in -relation-to-the-Same”
Can you clarify this summation? Is it your own, or a quotation of a technical term of his? Is the “Same” a category of perception? Is the Other a categorical kind, or the designation of a kind of radical alterity? Is this alterity an alterity that is understood not from the perpective of the “Same”, is that what you mean by “not in relation to the Same”?
When you say: " There really is an Other-than-Being."
How does this “Other than” differ from Derrida’s infrastructural generative precondition of Being, Differance/iteration? Is “Being” here qualified as the “Same”? How much of this is word-play where in, as in the Greek, the “same” the “autos” is both “same” and “self”, such that this radical Other is simply something radically different than the “Self”, and then conflated to a radical difference to the larger sense of “Same”?
Sorry for the involved questions, but I would like to understand this with a little more precision.
Dunamis
I would have said ‘less ontological’, and that this was the whole point.
The ‘Other’ (Autrui) is a technical term. It is my summation; the shortest I could give.
The Same is the formative category of Reason. Perception (defined in intentional terms) means standing in the Light of Being, and is therefore a configuration of Reason for the reduction of every Other to the Same. The concept of ‘immanence’ is likewise brought into the orbit of the Same by its relation with the Light of the unconcealed. Levinas, though, wants to rescue a notion of truth which is not obligated to conform to this definition; a revelatory truth, “more passive than passitivity itself”.
The latter, for obvious reasons.
Depends on how you would render ‘understood’ (because if we establish a second ‘truth’, then what it means to ‘understand’ can be realigned also); but in a sense, yes.
Yes very good. Levinas pre-anticipates this response, and so you must judge his response, which is itself his philosophy, and not the other way around. Like I said though, Derrida challenges the very ability of Levinas to define his radical alterity; even though Levinas acknowledges the necessity of the task, Derrida maintains that it cannot be done. This is what is meant when I say; “Derrida maintains that the power of the Logos can domesticate any Other”, because the Same is a radically re-configuring system of enclosure and encapture-ment, etc etc. Derrida’s argument, based on the organic flexibility of the Same, is met by Levinas with a simularly organic argument about the nature of the Saying and the Said. The Saying gives testimony in its passivity to the presence of the Infinite, which reveals itself in giving me the breath for this very Saying.
Derrida attacks Levinas’ pretensions to be doing ‘first philosophy’, because if he granted this he might as well grant the rest as well.
Mind you I have not ever read a single word of Derrida, as I have said on numerous occasions.
Anyway, I have to run.
Regards,
James
James,
Levinas, though, wants to rescue a notion of truth which is not obligated to conform to this definition; a revelatory truth, “more passive than passitivity itself”.
I have read though, in brief, that Levinas regarded the Other as something that should become our teacher. So this passivity produces an active change, does it not?
Derrida challenges the very ability of Levinas to define his radical alterity; even though Levinas acknowledges the necessity of the task, Derrida maintains that it cannot be done.
I suspect that impossibility of definition is because Levinas has conflated the two aspects of “autos/same-selfâ€.
This is what is meant when I say; “Derrida maintains that the power of the Logos can domesticate any Other”
What comes to my mind considering the teaching aspect of the Other, whether that be the alterity of the stranger’s face, or the infinitesimal alterity of Derridian Differance/iterability, and the Power of the Logos, is Campanella’s “cognoscere est esseâ€, “To know is to be.†It is true that the Logos can domesticate any Other, but if Campanella’s instincts are correct, to know something is also to become it, to be altered by it. This seems to work on both the subjective level of the encountered stranger and the ontological level of radical Differance. If the Logos domesticates, the Differance en-wilds. The appropriation carried forth then in any “knowing†is the becoming other, what John Headley calls the “transformation of the knower into the object knownâ€. This would involve the necessary harmonization of identity limits with external otherness, such that the Same is unalterably changed. Is this something of what Levinas proposes, or is it foreclosed by his definition of the Other as Other?
Dunamis
I do not remember this theme being developed to any great length in the papers I have read so far.
Does it? The question is; could there be such a passivity that does not reduce as such? A passivity that conditions before the ‘act’ or the ability to ‘act’ - ‘agency’ - is this a less radical, or more radical, presupposition, than the one you are currently working from?
Elaborate?
Foreclosed, I think. I have not read on the notion of Differance, but I imagine for Levinas that it can be read back into Logos the way that Derrida himself is read back into the ‘rationalist tradition’.
Regards,
James
James,
I do not remember this theme being developed to any great length in the papers I have read so far.
From my spare sources:
For Levinas, the face-to-face encounter with another human being is a privileged phenomenon in which the other person’s promixity and distance are both strongly felt. Upon the revelation of the face a person’s first natural desire is to murder the Other. At the same time, the revelation of the face forces the immediate recognition of one’s inability to do so. One must instantly recognize the inviolability and autonomy of the Other. One must then place him or herself in the position of a student, and the Other is recognized as a teacher. Ultimately, morality is recognized through one’s relation to the Other.
Wikipedia
With Levinas we encounter decisive limitations for that identification: Levinas is more a Teacher than a Thinker - and for Levinas, fundamental teaching verges on Revelation. For Levinas, Mind’s basic openness is a function of exposure to the Other. Expression evades form in sustaining such exposure: as teaching, First Philosophy’s saying must also be an unsaying lest we allow ourselves to be captured by what is said
differnet.com/experience/sec11.htm
The question is; could there be such a passivity that does not reduce as such? A passivity that conditions before the ‘act’ or the ability to ‘act’ - ‘agency’ - is this a less radical, or more radical, presupposition, than the one you are currently working from?
Your description would correspond to the scholastic absolute division between potency and activity, which finds its roots in both Aristotle and NeoPlatonism. It is interesting because for Plotinus matter as the indistinct is described exactly as this absolute passivity, which conditions the production of the phenomenological, which is only a reflection of the actuality of forms. When we get to Giordano Bruno we finally find the coincidence of the potential (radical passivity) and the actuality of forms, in a kind of synthesized dialectic that produces what we call “reality†through various “modesâ€, no longer with matter/potentia taking a backseat to the Logos.
The individual, whether corporeal or incorporeal, is never completed; and among eternally pursuing individual forms, seeking eternally nevertheless those to pursue, resteth never content… Thus is the infinity of All ever bringing forth anew, and even as infinite space is around us, so is infinite potentiality, capacity, reception, malleability, matter.
and
Without taking active potency [of matter] into consideration for the moment, I say that potency, in its passive sense [of matter] (although it is not always passive), may be considered either relatively or absolutely. Thus, there is nothing to which we can attribute being without also attributing to it the possibility of being. And this passive potency corresponds so perfectly to active potency that one cannot exist in any way without the other, so that, if the power to make, produce and create has always existed, so, likewise has the power to be made, produced and created, for one potency implies the other. I mean that in positing one we necessarily posit the other.…
Because the absolute possibility through which the things which are in act can be is not before that actuality, nor after that; moreover, the capacity to be is together with the being in act, and does not precede that; because if that which can be could make itself, it would be before it was made. Now contemplate the highest and best principle, which is all that it can be; it itself would not be all if it could not be all; in it, therefore, the act and the potency is the same thing…
That which is all that it can be is one, which comprehends and contains in its being all being. It is all that is and can be whatever other things that is and can be. Every other thing is not so; for here potency is not equal to the act because the act is not absolute but limited; moreover, the potency is always limited to one act because it never has more than one specific and particular being; and when it nevertheless refers itself to every form and act, it does so through certain dispositions and through a certain order of succession of one being after another…
That matter, through being actually all that it can be, has all the measurements, has all the species of figures and dimensions, and because it has all, has none of them; because for that which is so many different things it is necessary that it be no one of those particular things. It is proper for that which is all to exclude all particular being…
Cause, principle and unity
Bruno position seems rather close to what you advocate. By both equating absolute passivity of potency in matter with the act, the alterity is subsumed as both a pre-condition and actuality itself, so as to make the activity of form [perhaps an equation with the Logos] in synthesis with the Other which grounds it. The last paragraph is most telling those. The Logos [activity] excludes all particular being which is the consequence of absolute passivity, what we can call the Other as you describe it. Yet I’m not sure that it is more or less radical. Under the question of the “Same†as we experience ourselves to be the “Sameâ€, and the alterity of the Other, the “object known†when it becomes known and appropriated, still would work as an altercation of the Same by manifesting it, a reformulation of the body/identity limits.
Elaborate?
I thought we reached agreement on this. The Autos in Greek is both the Same and the Self. It seems that when discussing the Same Levinas is working within an phenomenology of the Self, and from that understanding extrapolating ontologically to the alternate meaning of Autos, the Same as a category, in a word conflating. I’m not saying that this is inappropriate, but it may lead the impossibility of a definition for there is a semiotic slippage. Considering that Derrida is arguing from an infrastructure of Being, a precondition of Differance in the heart of Being, I can see how he might object to the attempt at such a definition beyond, or beneath the ontological he insists upon.
but I imagine for Levinas that it can be read back into Logos the way that Derrida himself is read back into the ‘rationalist tradition’.
I suggest that the manner in which it is read back into Logos is through perceptual appropriation, the turning the exterior object into a reading aspect of the body of one’s identity, and in a conceptual projection of such experience onto an infinite limit.
Dunamis
I did of course already ask the question. I suspect you would like to put passivity back into a greater activity, or elsewise return to something more holistic, or if you will, monistic. Which is precisely what Levinas would have expected you to do. So where does that leave you in relation to him? This question I posed also. (and you answered)
I am not sure that my description corresponds to this division. Passivity-as-potency in this discussion? Hmm. If we start in this direction, we are caught by Derrida’s saber, I suspect.
“why the discomfort; is the Same like the theory which can never be disproven? Turn the diamond on any angle you wish, indefinitely; can you reflect the light in just the manner you seek?”
Within but ultimately against. Extrapolating as ‘going-over-to’ in the mode of a transcendence which is ultimately antagonistic; this is almost conflation as conclusion, rather than conflation as predicate. To the exact extent that we find difficulty holding apart ‘conclusion’ and ‘predicate’ in this context; to this extent, the sense of ‘slippage’ is made ambiguous.
When did we reach dis-agreement on this, let alone agreement?
Yes. Only, is the horizon of Being an ‘infinite’ limit? I would have said ‘radically delimited’. We need to remain mindful of the use of binaries.
Regards,
James
James,
I am not sure that my description corresponds to this division. Passivity-as-potency in this discussion? Hmm. If we start in this direction, we are caught by Derrida’s saber, I suspect.
I still am unclear what Derrida’s problem is with Levinas, unless it is a kind of pure allergy to anything called Logos. If following Bruno the Logos-Self is ever fused into the self-same utter passivity-alterity of potency Other, in otherness upon otherness producing itself in modes, contingent unfoldings, is this not his Differance in action? As Logos-Self seeks to subsume that alterity, itself is altered and becomes Same/not-Same, and that is Becoming.
Extrapolating as ‘going-over-to’ in the mode of a transcendence which is ultimately antagonistic; this is almost conflation as conclusion, rather than conflation as predicate.
It seems to me that the problem with “going-over-to†is simply the small brook over which logic cannot jump, but language can – in the potency of metaphor, (the same as other). The great sin seems to be that there is some final and conclusive appropriation. If following this breathing pattern, wherein the Logos-Same confronts the Other, appropriates it, is altered by it and Becomes, Levinas is simply saying that the final act is some kind of last appropriation that defines the process with a border, and Derrida is saying not the final act will just be one more alteration, an alteration that defines a border. Because neither can be known, logically, but that each is manifest in the working metaphor here, language, it is really meaningless to side with a final ontological “restâ€. Let the Logos ever become in a sea of alterity. Let Alterity rest within Logos dissolved into a One. They are the same thing.
Of interest, and forgive me for concentrating on Bruno here, but I feel that in Bruno we already have many of these limits marked out, as least primitively. Consider his “vision†of the magus, the perfect man which is a figure that lies hidden behind both Levinas and Derridean metaphysics.
When Bruno outlines in De immensso the contemplation worthy of the perfect human being, he takes his inspiration from the image which he has of the divinity. The divinity is a matter which creates all and becomes all; thus, the perfect human being is one who, by elevating himself to the infinite in contemplation of the divine, actualizing in the infinite his cognitive potency, is capable of assimilating everything because he knows how to transform himself into it. The excellence of this magnum miraculum which is man is not taken for granted at the outset but rather constitutes a point of arrival and a final achievement. It coincides with the process of human deification, make possible by man’s capacity to become, in some sense, omniformis, like divinity. It is therefore significant that, in A General Account of Bonding, the metaphysical conclusions of Cause, principle and unity are taken up – the identity of facere and fieri, the potency of creating and being created.
Introduction C, P & U, Alfonso Ingegno
In contemplation of the divine, that is through mental status of the Self-Same, the perfect man elevates himself by transforming himself into that which he contemplates. Though this language appears extravagant and fantastical, given that magic is its subject matter, one must ask what is it in man that can transform itself – potentially – into omniformis. This of course is nothing other than the Logos as language, the appropriating form, the extensive body of Man put forth, actualizing itself upon the absolute passivity/alterity of the Other. But this is not an act of pure appropriation. The perfect man becomes that which he contemplates – there is a strict identity of creating and being created – thus he becomes divine. It is nearly superfluous whether the horizon of this infinite becoming is an inexhaustible act of creating/being created, or if the process itself is grounded by an ineffable One, where such distinctions inexplicably find their root. The material reality of the marriage of potency and act in contemplation, itself becomes revelatory and productive – - divine. In magical theory here, the absolute passivity [matter] is prepared for the activity of forms. This is nothing other than the affective rituals of science, which in experiment “matter†is prepared so as to produce the revelation of “lawsâ€. The magus rather, makes of his own material Same-Self the productive fusion of creating/being created, appropriating/being appropriated. That is poieticizing. Logos as making.
Dunamis
Do you three actually believe that you understand each other?
Or better yet, do you believe that the writers you are discussing are concerned with “doing philosophy,” or just publishing a bunch of nonsense so they can make some money?
Language out of control. That’s what this is. You’ve got to be a fucking psychic to understand what the other means here. You guys are posing. You don’t fool me.
detrop,
“Do you three actually believe that you understand each other?”
I suppose this is another thread that should end because you don’t understand what is going on?
Dunamis
No, no, I didn’t mean it like that. What I meant to say is this: you’re all dead in less than sixty years. What you do meanwhile doesn’t matter.
I guess its this or TV. I say stick with this.
And quit with the smiley faces already.
I know your a gentle sage wise in the ways of Spinoza. A modern OB-1 Kinobe. There’s no need to keep the peace. In fact, I don’t think you’re capable of harming anything.
detrop,
“What I meant to say is this: you’re all dead in less than sixty years. What you do meanwhile doesn’t matter.”
This should have been posted on my “We are Answerable…” thread
Dunamis
Levinas is doing, or trying to do, something strange with the Logos; which is why I am tempted to assign “commitment” to the Logos to Derrida, and not Levinas, and then array the latter’s thought against the former on these roughly outlined terms. What I can say, though, is that between the two of them there lies something of a rhetorical wonderland. For now I think I will stick to what I am familiar with; my coursework is about to pick up again, and so the Levinas gets put to rest, the Gadamer taken up. Tasty Heidegger, thoughtful Merleau-Ponty, and humorous Wittgenstein…
[size=59]Hahaha this is killing me… Are you there?[/size]
We have a fine line to walk, Detrop. I hope you do not think you have caught me off guard, or ‘red handed’. I do not think you are where you think you are, rhetorically speaking. If you truly think you are, in your heart, and cannot make sense of what I have just said (i.e. the very last sentence - I am not talking about previous posts), then (frankly speaking) you are my bitch, and I own you.
Dunamis sits behind his computer screen; his smile is not smug. He might rampage forth, but he does not. You wonder why, but you ought not to be so tormented by the silence between words. Your sense of honesty is not a Revelation.
Regards,
James
James,
“Gadamer taken up. Tasty Heidegger, thoughtful Merleau-Ponty, and humorous Wittgenstein…”
I look forward to the infusion of thoughts.
Dunamis
You’re too late, buddy.
I’m with Colinsign now. He is my true love. I’ve come out of the closet and I gotta tell ya’, I feel fabulous!
On another note, one day I going to write a parody of you and Dunamis in discussion. Its gonna be great…you’ll love it. I’ll have you burning the books in no time. 