Excess and Violence: Thinking with Levinas on Heidegger, time, need, and subjectivity
§1. Introduction
In this paper, I aim to pick up on building my notes towards a theory of time and excess that I first elucidated in a summer seminar at the New School for Social Research.
The concept of slow death was elucidated by Lauren Berlant as the affective structure of the current neoliberal climate in which capitalism has made the human a productive being, seeing the human’s ability to produce as the source of its freedom. This individual “doing” of the human has created an ethos of production and consumption based on a vitiated conception of liberty by which freedom is conceived as the capacity to attain ownership, and ownership by labor.
In what follows, I will explore recent discourses on our modern relationship to our time – namely those by Martin Heidegger and Emmanuel Levinas – that is punctuated by the passage of unpredictable and violent, horrific, and even traumatic events. This paper seeks to build a set of introductory notes towards a Levinasian concept of time and excess that takes into account an understanding of contemporary relationships to violence, precarity, and responsibility. By introducing Levinas as a respondent to Martin Heidegger’s concept of time, I show that Levinas further points out that the modern subject is not simply bored because of mindless engagement with the world but rather is alone in it, and it is this relationship with solitude that helps us diagnose a contemporary pathos of excess that both exposes the solitude of the subject in its original position and reveals that it is a mindless engagement with the world that prevents the subject – even the contemporary subject – from entering into meaningful society with those that share the world with them.
§2. Heidegger & Boredom
Heidegger, in a series of lectures given on the Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics (FC) attempts to pick up on the affective climate of his contemporaries in the years following the first world war. Attempting to understand the fundamental “attunement” of Dasein’s subjectivity, by somewhat odd methods, Heidegger attempts to draw an equivalence between philosophy as “homesickness” and its homophonous equivalent “boredom.” To wit, Heidegger diagnoses modern man as profoundly bored. Boredom, he details, is what drives time on (FC 93); makes us tediously aware of the passage of time so that it feels like it does not pass. When there is nothing to occupy us, we sense that the present moment is somehow longer, and when we are meticulously engaged with meaningless tasks, we find the same. (FC 101, 108-109). It turns out, then, that it is not mere engagement with the world alone that drives boredom away or kills time, but rather a particular quality that accompanies any engagement (or lack of engagement) with the world and its objects.
Heidegger elucidates further that boredom stems from a feeling of dissatisfaction or emptiness (FC 101) with the tasks at hand or lack thereof. This emptiness proves to be the point of boredom, insinuating further that boredom is perhaps more profound than we let on (FC 113).
Passing the time is not enough, Heidegger finds, to put boredom away. In fact, he shows that even in passing the time, as we find ourselves occupied in an activity that we find satisfying, we draw ourselves unwittingly into a situation that is doomed from its incipience. Satisfaction, he details, involves a “seeking nothing more” (FC 119), that:
“With this seeking more, something is obstructed in us. In this chatting along with whatever is happening we have, not wrongly or to our detriment, but legitimately, left our proper self behind in a certain way.” (ibid.)
This is where Heidegger posits that “an emptiness can form” that signals to us the profundity of boredom.
Summarily, Heidegger’s point about the profound boredom that marks the attunement of Dasein in the modern world is that, “In this casualness of leaving ourselves behind in abandoning ourselves to whatever there is going on, an emptiness can form.” (ibid.)
Dmitri Nikulin (2017) outlines quite clearly that Heidegger elucidates two sorts of structures of boredom: meaningless activity that leaves a feeling of emptiness from an absence of desire (2017: 129), and delay (2017: 130), the inability of Dasein to catch up with the events of its contemporaneity. Noting quite clearly that this stems from Dasein’s situation as only being here for a short while (2017: 131), boredom is an inability (or refusal) [1] of any single existent or individual person or subjectivity to be consumed by the expansive wholeness of Dasein, or being as such.
Boredom, then, for Heidegger appears as withdrawal from oneself, an absence or a disconnect from who one is, or from one’s very being. It is no wonder, then, that Heidegger is renowned for his position that Dasein is truly most authentic at home with those who are like him; his countrymen, etc. Heidegger thus shows that modern man is wracked with a boredom that can only be solved by a return to authentic being, by some engagement with oneself.
This refusal of self, or this inability to be with oneself or by oneself is a fundamental relation to or with existing that grounds one space in time. Importantly, what Heidegger proposes signals the possibility that a lack of engagement with that which makes us who we are, or – even further I might suggest – an inability to make an identification with our own being is directly related to our engagement with the outside world in its inescapable temporality.
§3. Levinas & Solitude
Coming out of the second world war, a prisoner of war himself in a Nazi camp in Fallingbostel, Germany, Emmanuel Levinas who himself was a student of Martin Heidegger, begins to spend an entire career puzzling through what was wrong with his beloved teacher’s philosophy so much so that it resonated with the German spirit yet so clearly moved this man (and doubtless others who shares similar sentiments) to commit the atrocities of this modern war. Germany at the time was arguably the height of modernity, leading in the arts and sciences, masters of infrastructure and engineering. Yet, in a moment of weakness, an entire nation could succumb to the vices of nationalism, leading to the genocide of anyone considered “undesirable.”
Addressing directly the problems of his teacher’s philosophy, Levinas meticulously begins to dissect the existential claims that Heidegger makes, including and quite poignantly the notion of “boredom,” to show that there is something prior to boredom; a relationship with time that does not indicate a withdrawal from the being itself, taken up with the world, but rather, that the “I,” the Heideggerian existent is a mode of being and not purely or initially a separation from being, but a relationship of the subject, or some Heideggerian Dasein, to the world. (TO 53)
Being’s relationship to the world then isn’t some per chance disengagement that can be “fixed” by some return to authenticity, but rather it is its situation in the world, recognizing its solitude. The Levinasian “I” is always already situated in the world. For Levinas, it appears that the primary attunement of being is solitude; solitude not as “deprivation,” but rather as self-interested existing in the materiality of the world, outside of time, solely engaged with itself and the things it can use. (TO 57) This engagement with the self would signal the end of boredom for Heidegger, but for Levinas, it signals a beginning or originary point, outside of time such that boredom – or the driving on of time – could not be.
For Levinas, the subject’s relationship to time is the present, its very existing in existence is the present, but the fleeting nature of the present makes the very nature of the “I” enigmatic in that it dwells in its solitude. It is not that the present endures for Levinas, in a situation likened to the drawn on sense of time in Heidegger’s Dasein, but it is rather the absence of time. Thus, the logical next step would be for the I to be in time. For time to be given, there must be some rupture in this solitude so as to draw the I out of itself. For Levinas, then, unlike Heidegger, time is given (that is, it is not delayed) when the I is drawn out of itself. Thus time begins from the evanescence of solitude by something that awakens it from outside.
This exteriority that opens up the possibility of time subsists in relationship with the Other. It is the call of the Other (unlike the announcement of Dasein in Heidegger) that releases the “I” from the solitude of being, and orients the self outward to another possibility: the possibility of another solitary subjectivity that presents itself to us and directs us towards a future by means of responsibility for this same other that has torn us from our solitude and vulnerability. Levinas writes:
“Does not responsibility for the Other’s death – the fear for the Other [...] – consist in understanding, in the finite being of the mortal ego starting from the Other’s face, the meaning of a future beyond what happens to me [...] ?” (TO 116)
Unlike Heidegger’s choice of language to describe the originary dis-engagement of being, namely “boredom,” which signals a lack of agency, emptiness, or meaningfulness in the existent’s situation in the world, and suggests that a rejoining of the existent with its authentic being qua Dasein, Levinas leverages language which suggests that the originary disengagement of being is not disengagement with itself – explicitly against Heidegger in that the existent cannot be wrent from existence – but rather disengagement with the world about it. Solitude, then, is the “attunement” of Being for Levinas, the solution of which is sociality with the Other.
§4. Between Heidegger and Levinas: The historicity of Being
4.1. The Limits of Subjectivity
It is of anecdotal consideration that the ponderance of one’s relationship to history, or to the structures of time at a larger, more general scale are prominent in the face of war. Heidegger emerges from the first world war at a time in European history where modernity was met with disillusionment about one’s own sense of agency in a world that seems productive only as a means to war. While Europe was settling into the industrial age while witnessing in tandem the egregious losses of modern war, the mood of early 20th century Europe was marked by a sense of boredom, or inability to produce meaning. The modern turn to a naturalism and empiricism that grounded knowledge in the world made knowledge a world-making effort, and this effort for labor that generated the new machinery of war still affected horrible losses in human lives. Modernity seems to have failed.
Modernity in Europe was to usher in an age of peace with the enlightenment of reason. Modernity instead brought industrialization and removed many from their ancestral lands, planting them squarely in urban centers where they now labor for the mass production of goods, the value of which never truly gets back to them. Alienation from the products of labor makes for meaningless work. The clock measures productivity, and meaningless time means meaningless delay.
Despite the philosophical inquiry for some final truth, one cannot help but realize that both Heidegger and Levinas attempted to tap into a sense of disengagement. Where Heidegger taps into the post war feeling of emptiness or boredom – the meaningless ticking of a clock that produces no progress – and Levinas heralds some deep seated awareness of a primitive solitude that is only made self-aware through concern for another who wakes us up to ourselves, and without whom we are left alone and devoid of meaning in a timeless state of solipsistic unity, both predict sentiments of separation, either from oneself or from ones reality or from one’s situation. Despite the particulars, however, there is good cause for each.
The experience of temporality is deeply enmeshed with one’s historical situation. Though perhaps the transcendental apperception of the I think cannot be thematized in such a way that any truth can be spoken of it, the judgments it makes tell quite a great deal about the situation in which the apperceptive subject is embedded.
Heidegger rightfully acknowledges that there is an undeniable feeling of “thrownness” that is attached to the situation of Dasein. Being is always being in the world, and man is of this world even if only for a short time. Though through Kant it has been proven that one cannot qualify the transcendental unity of apperception on account of an impossibility to intuit consciousness, both Heidegger and Levinas acknowledge that the embedded nature of the conscious subject makes it possible for some level of self realization to occur; and embeddedness coupled with the givenness of time means that it is possible to infer that one’s relationship with time also molds the limits of the subjective capacity as much as the material conditions of its space. This coupling of time and space in material form produces the phenomenal subject, and it is through this historicity that Being can qualify itself through the judgements it makes.
The particular historical situations of the individual subject, however, through the synthesis of representations, reveals the limits of what the subject can say about itself.
The Heideggerian subject thus can say “I am bored.” The Levinasian subject can say, “I am alone.”
Both of these utterances, however, follow their respective subjectivities emerging from war.
4.2 Excess and Society
War, as it is, separates the victors from the victims, but loss is common to both. Heidegger emerges as an apostle of the disaffective incongruity of modern warfare. Modern and war should be antithetical, as modernity promises peace. Yet war still emerges, and afterwards, the peace that follows… How can one trust in its eternity? This fundamental question of the longevity of peace is central to my thinking.
Levinas, who finds lineage in Heidegger’s thought, also emerges as a prophetic voice, but this time after the second world war, which saw some of the lowliest atrocities of modern times. Modernity now has presented its greatest disappointment. What was simple anxiety in the face of the uncertain ticking of the clock in peacetime now is disappointment in modernity’s promises.
Industrialization, alienation from labor and land, war and genocide all follow so called “enlightenment.” War not only shines light upon the disappointments and failures of modernity, but it invites an opportunity to be inspected. Something about war for both Heidegger and Levinas signals disengagement and lack.
Levinas offers a crucial insight into the phenomenon of war. War is the antithesis of society. Levinas, as we have seen, shows that a being must come into society by relation to another, and it is through this relation that this being becomes aware of his own solitude without her. Without the other, Being is alone and vulnerable. Not only does this entering into communion with the exteriority of another oblige us to protect her on account of our solitude there without, but it is through the face of this Other that we become immensely aware of our own vulnerability. Levinas writes as such:
“[I]nfinity does not present itself to a transcendental thought, nor even to meaningful activity, but presents itself in the Other; the Other faces me and puts me in question and obliges me…” (TI 207)
If war effaces the other, then war returns us to solitude. If war effaces the Other then it is meaningless activity. Here again we find, depending on the situated subjectivity of Being, that war reveals solitude or it reveals boredom.
In both cases, however, war strips us from sociality with the world, reduces us to a temporality stripped of excess, and we see that in the final analysis, war presents to us a relation to history that is void of meaningful engagement.
It is safe – and further, sound – to say that the profound effects of war on any individual or society has a direct correlation with their disenfranchisement from society, and the limits of subjectivity are thus stripped away. The subject of total war, then, absolutely disenfranchised by violence, sees past boredom, and in the final analysis after the obliteration of the Other, becomes aware of its own solitude. War reveals not only the primordial solitude of an originary past, but also the loneliness of a future beyond the life of the Other. [2]
As demonstrated thus far, our relationship with time (our temporality) through our embedness in our material conditions (our historicity) has an empirical effect on the capacity of our subjectivities to make judgements about our situations. Whereas one can judge at least that they are bored, another can judge that they are alone.
Thus again, war reveals that inconsistency of the logic of modernity’s promise of peace, and this holds weight well into our current situation.
§5. Beyond Solitude, and Otherwise than Boredom
From here on, it is of interest to explore the subtle space between boredom and solitude, between the slow passage of time and the vulnerable loneliness of solitude. There is value in both Heideggerian and Levinasian phenomenology here, but something seems deeply unsatisfying about both accounts, in as far as the solutions to either problem do not have a compromise that speaks to both affective experiences.
While Heidegger’s return to Being implores the rallying around a common cause of a people (Zuckert 1990: 53-54) as the return to authenticity, and Levinas’ responsibility to the Other demands an indissoluble and infinitely asymmetrical responsibility to those beyond ourselves [3], perhaps something is to be said about a halfway ground, a meeting at the two, where one is responsible for others but not always, and where difference does not have to be assimilated, but boundaries of concern can be in place.
Though Heidegger and Levinas ground their claims and sentiments in metaphysics which are not insignificantly different, both echo sentiments of disengagement and exile as roots of a moral problem and propose solutions that engender notions of care, home, and hospitality. While it might be argued that the Heideggerian return to Being involves a return to a home that would cure the homesickness he theorized as the root of boredom, such as the unity of a people in pursuit of their authentic spirit, and Levinas would insist that the home is a place of hospitality that is to be extended to those who share no similar spirit of our own, on account of their inviolable subjectivity.
The issue emerges here as we begin to realize that the practicability of this morality is difficult to engage in the real world, and the tendency we have for moralizing via politics inescapably raises the question of whether or not these moral principles in fact are moral insofar as they are just. In response to Derrida who interjects in the argument of Totality and Infinity that the problem of politics arises, Levinas appears to steadfastly hold that the asymmetrical relationship between the Self and the Other is indissoluble by any politics. [4]
Though this admirable moral stance of complete hospitality and infinite responsibility for the Other compels significant reconsideration of our metaphysical commitments, there appears to be a logical lapse against the argument which rejoins with this moral stance as its conclusion, namely: that if it is the case that without the Other I am returned to my own solitude, I must be responsible for this Other in this asymmetrical and obligatory way that precedes our encounter.
While this posits some truth it also signals a fear of the return to Solitude. Perhaps here Heidegger offers some inspiration on the account that solitude – or the original state of being “chained” to one’s own Being – is not necessarily a bad thing, and that it is in this return to Being from the flight from it that Levinas conceptualizes is ultimately the space by which a moral intuition – viz. the face of the Other – allows for thinking [5] and moral reasoning, or thinking. [6]
Perhaps it might signal some virtue to conceptualize the moral response to the face of the Other as one of hospitality to strangers, but to be concerned primarily for those with whom we share our home. Though hospitality is a virtue, it may be prudent as well to understand our homes as spaces of finite resources which, as objects rather than subjects, cannot extend infinitely.
§6. The failures of modernity, the grips of war, and the height of freedom
Today in the 21st century, war still persists, and as Levinas might note, it is the state of affairs in which we are thrown. The discontentment with modernity that Heidegger gave language to, and which Levinas resists but concedes, has led us to another lengthy war in Afghanistan and the Middle East in general, which has this time affected the entire world economy and infrastructure. We are again forced to recon with our own relationship to time.
Yet, to imagine a world totally disenfranchised from society and ravished by war is not hard to do. It takes not much to look into our own backyards and see what we have infrastructurally hidden from the sight of “society.” Similarly to ways in which other nations have created infrastructure to render invisible those whose subjectivities were problems or considered to be antithetical to the authentic spirit of the nation, we in our own nation have continued this same practice of subjecting others to the objectification that Levinas wishes so hard to resist. We ourselves have fashioned a national spirit and have decided that those who hold those values of productivity and consumption – a world of the spirit of Capitalism and technological war that is oversaturated by subjectivity and feeds off of the subject’s desire to extend above and beyond its limits – are not our kind and thus do not belong in our home.
As we have shown above, the historicity of the subject informs what the subject can claim of itself and its relationship to time. In our current world where many of our Black neighbors find themselves living in geographical situations which totally disenfranchise them from engagement with society – by means of redlining, lack of access to transportation to urban industrial areas, lack of nutritious food options, and precarious housing – and who are policed into these situations by armed local militia who spontaneously and without predictability incarcerate and kill them without the care of the law, time is marked not by the spontaneity of life with which one can become bored or find themselves lonely, but with the spontaneity of death which leaves one stultified.
What can one say about this temporality which is marked by the delay not of life but the delay and uncertainty of the arrival of death? This reality is lived by many of the people who live not far from us, and given the argument about war and excess above in §4.2, this is an example of the extremes of bare life; subjectivity stripped of all its excess and reduced to more than boredom or loneliness.
I have argued against this idea that morality in such bareness would operate the same way as Levinas would hope, where morality extends infinitely to the stranger. Yet I offer that if we were to imagine ourselves in such a situation, it would be the case that what is moral is not to care only for those who are like ourselves, but to prioritize those who are of immediate concern to us; our families, our friends.
Though it seems prima facie that such an exercise of self-concern would inhibit the notion of freedom as expansive, I would argue that the height of freedom is to be able to make any conscious decision at all given the looming spontaneity of death and difference, where alterity is overbearing. Freedom, then, would be to act despite what one knows, especially if what one knows is little to nothing [7], and to more bravely choose oneself despite concern for those who also need our help. I also believe firmly that for Levinas, what is moral is not a categorical injunction that is deduced from the anecdotal encounters between subjectivity and alterity, but rather the negative and always new injunction that emerges from the face of each Other the subject encounters: “Do not kill.” (TI 199)
For Levinas, morality emerges as a limit on freedom, to skirt its excess. For Levinas man’s mastery of the world is natural to his being, his already embeddedness in the world and his necessary relationship to the world; this “living from…” that he speaks of in Part II of Totality and Infinity.
§7. Reason, Necessity, and the Excesses of Freedom
For Levinas, need is man’s original situation, and so man’s “relation with the world is henceforth only need.” (TI 116) For Levinas who attempts to break from prevalent ideas about freedom being the pinnacle of ethics, man’s original state in the world is one of enjoyment, already freely at one in the world which is at his disposal. Poking at Husserlian phenomenology and breaching the confines of reason’s power, Levinas in his Totality and Infinity demonstrates that reason is not necessary for man’s being in the world, as Heidegger would have it, but rather a product of necessity for being in it. Before man is conscious, prior to any comprehension of the objects beyond himself, man is already embedded in the world, living from it as a matter of fact. It is the world which necessarily sustains him; and before he can sustain himself, the world already does. This “enjoyment,” as he calls it, is the nature of man, with the world at his disposal already and unthinkingly consuming, imbibing, and breathing it in. This dependence on the world, however, is realized as need when man finds that he must work for his survival and wellbeing. As a matter of necessity, man must satisfy his need to eat, to drink, to breathe. Man’s dependence on the world is concomitant with his enjoyment of it, and so the satisfaction of need is enjoyment.
Levinas in his writing is careful to point out every step of the way how each moment in man’s ethical awakening is different from the next. Enjoyment is different than need, need is different than desire, etc. Similarly he differentiates the order of these moments, enjoyment is before need, need before desire. Coextensively, and parallel to these moments, Levinas makes it clear that enjoyment is before consciousness, need demands it, and desire requires it. This is to say that before one desires things, he has already enjoyed them, and before he knows what he wants, he had already had it.
One can say that the excessiveness we call gluttony lives in the liminal space between enjoyment and desire. It inhabits the essence of need itself; or more aptly, “privation in the primal sense of the word.” (TI 111) Yet, to satisfy this hunger, man must work for his living, “to earn one’s bread.” (ibid.) and so must make use of the world as tools to satisfy this craving. Unlike Heidegger who insists that man’s being is naturally disposed to using the world as instruments for his very existence, Levinas to the contrary depicts man as being brought into this sort of relationship to the world – one of utility – and who must make the conscious effort to labor for his sustenance; that is to say, man by virtue of his need must reason – or reckon – with his hunger.
It follows then that in order to satisfy his needs, man enters into a relationship with the world wherein he comprehends it and chooses that course of action which is best suited to his well being. The satisfaction of desire is the pinnacle of egoism, as it is driven by the memory of a primordial desire between the self and the world, the other. As Levinas very aptly points out, “If enjoyment is the very eddy of the same, it is not ignorance but exploitation of the other.” (TI 115)
Today, we know that resource precarity is on the rise across the globe for many people disaffected or blatantly cast aside by our societal structures. Pointed arguments accuse to all sorts of “-isms” which are at fault for what can be described as disruptions of our food chains making the demand for nourishment grow while supply tether on the brink of austerity. Whether it is capitalism, socialism, globalism, industrialism, or what have you, and whether the inflated demand is orchestrated, or austerity the product of artificial scarcity, the need for food is real and the precarity many families are facing on account of the inflated cost of food and the very real and unavoidable demands of hunger highlight not only man’s dependence on the things of this world, but how certain responses to this need can become so ingrained in our culture, that the -isms which allocate our resources become habit to us, and these forms of consumption and labor which produce such scarcity are no more than the mechanisms of a maladapted need which center on the logic of egoism.
Of course in a world where it is us and the resources at our disposal alone, the paradigm of egocentric consumption makes perfect sense. Yet, there is more to the world than just us and the land and the things that come from it. There are, of course – more than us and it – them. There are other people in the world who also are at hand. Similarly to our encounter with the objects in the world which impress upon us and are disposed to us before we are aware of them or what they are to us or for us, the faces of others appear to us and impress upon us. Yet unlike corn, wheat, rice, water, sunshine, air, hammers, or cars, other persons resist our comprehension insofar as that they contain within them a world of needs, desires, and preoccupations of their own – representations and judgements which are hidden behind the opacity of their face.
Levinas like Descartes and Spinoza before him insists that we can know the world at our hands, and like Kant he knows that reason is deployed to comprehend the world at our disposal. Yet unlike Spinoza’s hard empiricism and Kant’s transcendental idealism, Levinas insists that our knowledge of the world is not one dependent on reason, and rather that our knowledge of the world is even already a rudimentary sensibility grounded in a primal enjoyment of it, and that it is separation between myself and the things of the world which sustain me that moves me to consider the world as things of comprehension so that I might utilize them at my disposal for my own considerations. It is this moment between desire and satisfaction that is propelled by need where consciousness comes to the scene. It is at this moment in which a responsibility is awakened in the egoist subject where he must choose what to make of the world, both as concept and as material.
Yet, with a firm commitment to the infinite regression of the human face – that which signals what is beyond comprehension and completely interior – otherwise a commitment to the distinct possibility of a subjectivity in the Other, Levinas believes that this moment of encounter between the self and the face of another is the crucial moment where ethics begins, where the self is opened to its own need and its desire for privation. It is the moment of encounter between myself and some other human where I not only become responsible for them, as I would with any other object in the world, but where I must choose whether to be responsive in such a way as I would treat every other object in the world as a tool at my disposal… as a means to my end… or as a person, as a human deserving of the same dignity to which I deed myself.
Levinas gives us a clear insight to the economy of needs, where economy is figured as the arrangement of our resources in a rational way so as to satisfy our enjoyments. Yet it is the fact of the Other which forces us to act responsibly. The danger of -isms – beit is Marxism, Socialism, Capitalism, etc. – is its sedimentation into our habits so that we find ourselves able to act according to their logic without thinking about it.
Levinas gives us an accurate diagnosis to the problems which plague humanity: that our heavy handed reliance on our external structures to provide some illusory promise of justice always bears with it the tendency for habitual patterns, modes of being, or states of affairs to become ingrained in our sensibilities so close to hand that there is no need to think before we act; our decisions have been made, and our complacency leads to our demise.
Levinas shows that the logic of egoism, where to choose not to curb our egoes – not enough or not at all – or to order our responsibility to the world-as-other as secondary to our nature and to act on this comprehension in such a way that affirms this judgment is to engage in what Levinas might happily call the excesses of freedom, the uninhibited satisfaction of enjoyment, and the unfettered banality of need. And so, Levinas does well to demonstrate that the temporality of need is an immediate enchainment to the present and to the satiation of the needs of the body and a lack of futurity. He writes:
“Let us again note the difference between need and Desire: in need I can sink my teeth into the real and satisfy myself in assimilating the other; in Desire there is no sinking one’s teeth into being, no satiety, but an uncharted future before me.” (TI 117)
§8. Conclusion and further thoughts
Something is to be said of morality and ethical thinking that signals more than what we should do or how we should act, but also about our own situations and relationships. Ethics here is perhaps what Levinas envisioned as first philosophy, that existence is about relation and not simply about being. Further than what Levinas pushes, that relationships with others are essential for the recognition of ourselves, it is being able to care for oneself in the face of the Other, or despite the Other, but not against the Other, that marks ethical freedom.
War we have seen not only forces us to rethink our relationships with others and ourselves and the world at large, but it illuminates a natural state of things, bare of the positive affects of care and concern that extend beyond ourselves. As Levinas hints, care of the other reveals to us the possibility of our own vulnerability, and this vulnerability I think allows us to rethink an engendered and primal fear of death that not only abides in our subjectivity but is present by virtue of the external, phenomenal, and evanescent world we live in.
Further, I wonder what care of the self means for care of the Other, and how this plays out in a space that is more akin to politics. Though Levinas until the very end has insisted that politics could never be moral, because of his insistence in the face-to-face relation as the only ground for morality, I wonder if the concept of need can traverse the logic of the subject and rather be thought of as the driving impetus for practicality. That is to say, would it perhaps be the case that in order to unchain ourselves from the excessive hunger of the individual subject stuck in its own present, the individual must be willing to relinquish its own enjoyment for the benefit of others?
NOTES
Heidegger’s method of philosophizing uses poetic language which I believe can obscure certain facts about the matter at hand. Though the language of refusal is important for Heideggerian phenomenology, it implies (and he does leverage it for the cause of) an agency in whether or not one can engage with Dasein in a meaningful way that makes it identifiable. Though it is not the topic of this paper, it is interesting to note that this same refusal of Dasein is what ultimately grounds Heidegger’s claim that Dasein is most authentically itself when at home with its Volk: “The will to the essence of the German university is the will to science as will to the historical spiritual mission of the German people as a people ["Volk"] that knows itself in its state ["Staat"]. Together, science and German destiny must come to power in the will to essence. And they will do so and only will do so, if we – teachers and students – on the one hand, expose science to its innermost necessity and, on the other hand, are able to stand our ground while German destiny is in its most extreme distress.” (Heidegger, M. “The Self-Assertion of the German University.” 1993)
I am thinking about similarity here with Arendt.
It is important to qualify that Heidegger is proposing a solution which is philosophical in nature because it is for a problem which is philosophical rather than political. This is to say – and it is significant for understanding how we approach societal ills – that the Heideggerian solution is a moral one, and not a political one, and a distinction is to be made between the moral and the political. Though often the moral sentiments which become popular for whatever reason come to influence the politics of a people, as arguably might be the case in the Heideggerian problem, or at least vice versa in some symbiotic sense, it must be noted that morality does not necessarily influence politics and in many instances throughout history it has been the case that the political sphere has operated in deeply antithetical manners to the moral sentiments of the people or even the political actors themselves. A deep distinction and even double mindedness arises in one’s moral judgments and their practical ones, as is the case often times with the debates around abortion rights. A good amount of people who oppose abortion on moral grounds often will support it in light of circumstances which directly affect themselves. This is also the case on issues of queerness, where politicians who claim to oppose gay or trans rights on the grounds of morality can often be found in compromising situations which oppose those moral claims. The difficulty arises in determining the veracity of these claims due to their weighty political motivations or disincentives and also on account of the contentious and philosophical problem of whether or not one can make a judgment of another’s moral reasoning. This problem is taken up by Kant, Heidegger, Levinas, Arendt, and others, and is of interest to the present author.
Levinas, in response to this criticism, builds the concept of illeity which is the absolute transcendence of the Other which cannot be grasped even by welcoming the Other. This absolute alterity of “the Third” stands for Levinas as something which cannot be compromised lest it be a betrayal. “[t]he relationship with the third party is an incessant correction of the asymmetry of proximity in which the face is looked at. There is weighing, thought, objectification … in which my anarchic relationship with illeity [transcendence] is betrayed … There is betrayal of my anarchic relation with illeity, but also a new relationship with it: it is only thanks to God that, as a subject incomparable with the other, I am approached as an other by the others, that is, “for myself”” (OBBE 158)
Arendt (1971) also takes up this concern about moral thinking, suggesting that a return to solitude which must be distinguished from loneliness is the space in which one is able to think with oneself. Her argument stems from her theorizing about morality and the Eichmann trial, and she goes on to say that the bureaucratic “following of orders” does not allow for thinking, and thus risks the danger of one truly understanding the moral implications of what one does. Similarly to Levinas in responding along the Heideggerrian idea of being-with, morality somehow involves a sense of responsibility with some other. Against the Heideggerian notion that this must be with one's own Volk (ref. footnote 1), some reflexivity exists where one retreats from the world one encounters and must respond to and must think whether one can live with oneself.
Here I am taking up the claim made by Abi Doukhan (2010) that the moral responsibility one has for the Other is a precognitive responsiveness that resists the tendency of reason to go beyond what it is capable of grasping and to meet the subjectivity of the Other in a sensible way that is similar to the intuitive way that Kant’s sensibility behaves. Yet the problem persists that if I am able to sensibly intuit the other, then the other is in fact an object in the world which can impress itself upon me and is then not resistant to cognition.
Something is to be said about the material production of knowledge. While it is true that knowledge depends on the phenomenal existence of a world beyond the self, this also insinuates that the material conditions of the world are what the production of knowledge depend on in such a way that to censor the world, to police the world, or to deprive the subject of worldly engagement means to limit what the subject can know.
ABBREVIATIONS
Emmanuel Levinas
OBBE – Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence
TI – Totality and Infinity
TO – Time and the Other
Martin Heidegger
FC – The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Arendt, Hannah. “Thinking and Moral Considerations: A Lecture.” In Social Research. 38 no. 3 (1971): 417-446
Doukhan, Abigail. “From Exile to Hospitality: A Key to the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas.” In Philosophy Today. 53 no. 3 (2010): 235-246
Heidegger, Martin. Fundamentals Concepts of Metaphysics. Bloomington: Indian University Press, 1995.
_____. The Self-Assertion of the German University. 1933.
Levinas, Emmanuel. Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998.
_____. Time and the Other. Translated by Richard A. Cohen. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1987.
_____. Totality and Infinity. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969.
Nikulin, Dmitri. “The Burdens and Blessing of Boredom: Heidegger and Kraucer.” In Kronos Philosophical Journal. 6 (2017): 120-132