ok…so…meontology means beyond being…
levinas says that thing beyond being gives meaning to being (so i assume levinas is an abslutist cause he gives ‘‘the truth’’ to the ‘beyond being’…
so acording to mosy ppl, what is levinas? a relativist? or an absolutist?
acording to me he is an absolutist, but i may be understanding incorrectly.
i don’t understand ‘‘the other’’ thingy…ok he says basically that (this in my own terms) ‘‘the other demands so f$%%^% much with their lil’ faces that we HAVE to give in and think about them first and put our SELF second…because the ‘other with his puppy face’ represents THE OTHER with capitals, wich is ‘‘god’’ which is not being… the ein sof…the meontological being , the tao or whatever’'…
Your questions are good ones! Kudos for wrestling with this very difficult text. Hope this helps you get a better handle on what Levinas’ may be trying to do!
Right. Here he’s challenging Heidegger’s conception of ontology, using the idea of the infinite to announce a final split, or incompleteness in classical “closed” ontology. Heideggerean metaphysics, which would place the ontological question of being before metaphysics, essentially persists in this very lie: “The true life is absent.” But, as Levinas points out, we are in the world. What does this mean? It means metaphysics is turned towards an outside, it’s turned towards an Other. This other is otherwise than being, but it’s not non-existent–it’s just inconsistent from a limited, or totalized, ontological perspective. For ethical principles, we have to look beyond what merely exists–and Levinas is actually with Plato on this point, who states somewhere that “the Good is beyond being.” Thus we need to “widen” our cognitive horizons, or to relate the Other as though he came from a “height”–this dimension evoking the very sky above our heads as the model of a transcendence which Levinas says the relation to the Other represents:
“The metaphysical desire tends toward something else entirely, towards the absolutely other. The customary analysis of desire can not explain away its singular pretension. As commonly interpreted, need would be at the basis of desire; desire would characterize a being indigent and incomplete or fallen from its past grandeur… but thus it would not even suspect what the veritably other is.” (Totality and Infinity, 33)
If one thing can be said, he is against a philosophy of the neutral. We do not come into any situation completely devoid of our ethical (you can also understand this as: social) postures; any face-to-face situation cannot be rendered “objective” without a violent reduction which negates the basis for discourse and the process of peace. Levinas’ amazement that people could make this sort of ontological mistake for so long is something akin to Nietzsche’s shock at how long the mythologies of religion retained such a choke hold on people’s ability to think for themselves.
But from another direction, the absolute/relative issue is the real question with Levinas: does his ethico-meontological method amount to an authentic moving-beyond this classical question of ontology? I think that it does, but it’s by no means clear. Incidentally, it would seem that the completion of such a project would amount to a new physics as well as an ethics/metaphysics. So on this question (relative versus absolute,) it might not be a bad idea to consider the role light plays in Levinas’ text. Light is presented as generative, as producing a void-- rather an undecidable density. It’s as though it were our responsibility to take this “density” (or depending on our perspective, this “nothingness,”) and to fill it with the jouissance of sociality. Light sparks the discourse which creates a common world, a discourse which breaches the silence of empty space and fills it til overflowing with conversation and music (or something like that.) Here’s Levinas:
“In driving out the darkness the light does not arrest the incessant play of the ‘there is’. The void the light produces remains an indeterminate density which has no meaning of itself prior to discourse, and does not yet triumph over the return of mythical gods. But vision in the light is precisely the possibility of forgetting the horror of this interminable return, this aperion, maintaining onself before this semblance of nothingness which is the void, and approaching objects as though at their origin, out of nothingness.” (Totality and Infinity, 190-191)
But is this relativism or absolutism? The truth is, it’s hard to say! Maybe the question doesn’t mean so much anymore to Levinas. But I definitely think he’d be against most forms of absolutism, but also equally against many of the naive and watered-down versions of relativism.
OK, try thinking about it this way: when we are truly approaching the Other, we are uprooted from history. Why would this be true? It’s because even though I myself am not exterior to history, I do find in the other a point that is absolute (with regard to history.) OK, so how do I reach this point? It’s easy: by speaking to him.
Still don’t quite have it? That’s ok, try this: “The immediate is the face to face.” No representation can ever be quite as startingly present, as completely real, as the face to face interaction with another human being. Levinas is tracing a middle path here, with a philosophy of “transcendence” (where the true life is beyond) on the one side, and a philosophy of “immanence” (where we would come into being when every “other” has vanished, as though at the end of history). Where does Levinas try to squeeze through? He wants to describe a mode of human relationship to the Other that doesn’t result in a divine OR human totality: “A relationship…that is not a totalization of history but the idea of infinity. Such a relationship is metaphysics itself.” (T&I 52)
Dear Joe the Man: I am redoing an old paper on Meontology in Heidegger and found your post by Googleing “meontology”. Thanks for the reference to Levinas. I have never read him at all, but am very much into Heidegger. My upcoming paper will be expanded to show the development of Heidegger’s Meontology from “What is Metaphysics?”, Sartre, the Nihilism lectures to the “Letter on Humanism”. As soon as I am done with this, I will dive into Levinas; what’s the best thing to read, given my interests? Have you ever checked out the Kyoto school? Their reception of Heidegger started before the French and focuses on Meontology, Technology and Religion.
