Levinas’ Pessimism and the Need for Necessity
The Scapegoat, by William Holman Hunt, 1854
“The ego is in itself like one is in one’s skin, that is to say, cramped, ill at ease in one’s skin, as though the identity of matter weighing on itself concealed a dimension allowing a withdrawal this side of immediate coincidence, as though it concealed a materiality more material than all matter.”
In a prefatory note to his Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant pointed out in what is now in my opinion an all-too-overlooked observation that, “Human reason has the peculiar fate in one species of its cognitions that it is burdened with questions which it cannot dismiss… but which it also cannot answer, since they transcend every capacity of human reason.” [1] Kant gives this answer to what is arguably the pinnacle question of modern European philosophy, from Descartes forward: can we know what is necessary? Of course, Descartes Meditations and Principles lay out an argument for the necessity of the cogito, and Spinoza takes up the necessity of a sufficient reason, but Kant takes it to task reminding us that perhaps one way to read these works is to imagine that the question of necessity isn’t an analytic a priori concept, but rather a synthetic one born out of Reason’s need to understand its causes.
Those familiar with the Kantian argument will take my word that what Kant argues is that the theoretical deployment of “pure” reason is grounded in a practical need to understand the way the world operates. In a word, the nature of Reason’s theoretical pursuits are ‘tragic.’ I’d argue that it is this healthy dose of skepticism that marks the modern mind’s philosophical interests; to imagine what it is we need to know in order to make sense of a chaotic and often disappointing world, especially if we find ourselves unable to trust the institutions charged with our care. If man is to break from his “self imposed tutelage,” [2] then he must pave a way for himself, or at least rebuild the foundations he had lost in his distrust. In sum, Kant’s critical philosophy illuminates the task of modernity: to find something to trust in, or better, to find a way to trust in ourselves.
It is arguably the case that at least one of these disjuncts, both of which entail the question of trust, is the proper subject matter of Western European philosophy well into the latter part of the twentieth century. Emmanuel Levinas is no exception to this rule, emerging in the French philosophical world as a strong critic of the German phenomenological tradition. Having been touched by tragedy in the second world war, having much of his family slaughtered by Nazi terror and he himself having been a prisoner of war while serving in the French army, Levinas was no stranger to disappointment, and as a Jew – like many others – found himself deeply distrustful, if not suspicious, of the common held philosophical beliefs that grounded the cultures which played party in either side of the evils that befell Europe.
Much scholarship on post-holocaust intellectual history will demonstrate a Jewish struggle to come to terms with a theology and ethics that makes sense of the devastation of a global aspiration for an experiment in eugenics. Levinas – as scholarly critics are often quick to point out – develops a systematic philosophical position that feels foreign to European philosophical sensibilities, often sitting squarely in the borderlands between philosophy and theology, blurring the distinctions between the two. It is my opinion that this criticism is also an honest and accurate reflection of what might be called the Levinasian project: an experiment in breaking from Western philosophical influence, embracing a cosmological inquiry that centers cultural beliefs as a legitimate means to living a good life.
The rationalist traditions of the European enlightenment all follow a distinctly Christian pattern, from Descartes onward, imagining and making distinctions based on thought experiments and axioms that follow a logic presupposing at least a definitional distinction between God and man that has lead to distinctions between body and spirit, mind and body, material and thought. Whether it is Descartes’ soul, or Spinoza’s distinction in attributes of thinking and extension, or Kant’s proposal of a distinction between the noumenal and phenomenal, European philosophy has privileged to greater or lesser extents some sort of duality in regards to what the human can know to be real.
It was when Heidegger introduced something of the German sentiment of groundedness that Levinas, who was a student of his, found a philosophy that resonated deeply with him. As Simon Critchley points out, “Levinas was completely persuaded by Heidegger’s philosophy. Levinas was a Heideggerian.” [3] For Levinas, Heidegger’s analysis of being as Dasein – the “thereness” of human being – was deeply resonant with the European milieu coming out of the first world war. (It is probably worth noting – as I have postulated elsewhere and as Critchley would perhaps take kindly to – that great philosophical novelties emerge in the face of war if one can understand that war is the greatest disappointment of modernity; again, distrust in the establishments who are charged with our care.) As Heidegger keenly observed, following Husserl’s phenomenology, Dasein was embedded in the world and cannot be understood abstractly outside of this fact. For Levinas, this facticity of being made the most sense.
Yet, it was not enough. For Levinas, Heidegger still was wrong. As he understood it, Heidegger’s Dasein was most authentic in its achievement of authenticity, that in order to be its most authentic self, Dasein needed to be at home with itself. For Levinas, it is this uncomfortable starting point from which his philosophy arguably emerges.
The question of Being’s authenticity is a misplaced one, as being is not in its various situations more or less authentic, more or less at home with itself. For Levinas, Being – Dasein, the soul, spirit, or the Self or whatever you want to call it – is not something that is simply in the world despite its locus in the body, rather Being is the body. In several places Levinas speaks of Being as “chained” to the body. As Critchley points out, for Levinas, being’s attunement to death is not towards my death such that being is concerned with surviving past death so that to die is useless sacrifice; rather, Being for him is not concerned with survival past death, or even imminently challenged by death. It is precisely that Being is chained to the body that death is not a question for Being. Rather, the question of Being’s attunement with death is indicative of Being’s need for escape.
It is the epigraph to this essay which adequately sums up Levinas’ “ontological” position, if one could call it so. To quote it again in its full context:
“The ego is in itself like one is in one’s skin, that is to say, cramped, ill at ease in one’s skin, as though the identity of matter weighing on itself concealed a dimension allowing a withdrawal this side of immediate coincidence, as though it concealed a materiality more material than all matter. The ego is an irritability, a susceptibility, or an exposure to wounding and outrage, delineating a passivity more passive still than any passivity relating to an effect.” [4]
What Levinas is (perhaps enigmatically) alluding to here is a fundamental and important position in his ethical thinking; that it is the body’s fate that it can recognize its own situation as finitude, as material, as prone to abuse and wounding, exposed to the world outside of itself and vulnerable in its particularity. It is this Being that emerges as a subject – subjected to the pains of living – in the fact of its corporeity. It is no surprise, then, for Levinas that Hume, Locke, Rousseau, Spinoza, Kant, and Heidegger before him – among countless others – were so preoccupied with freedom and good. It is the very intuition of exposure and of disappointment in one’s own vulnerability where the human being emerges as a subject that desires its freedom. In his essay, “On Escape,” he writes that:
“The I that wants to get out of itself does not flee itself as a limited being. It is not the fact that life is the choice and, consequently, the sacrifice of numerous possibilities that will never be realized that incites us to escape. The need for a universal or infinite existence allowing for the realization of multiple possibilities supposes a peace become real at the depths of the I, that is, the acceptance of being. Escape, on the contrary, puts in question precisely this alleged peace-with-self, since it aspires to break the chains of the I to the self. It is being itself or the “one-self” from which escape flees, and in no wise being’s limitation.” [5]
Levinas makes the profound point that Being, chained to the body is likewise chained to itself. The idea that the attunement towards death either marks an escape from the finitude of being or that the very desire to ‘get out’ of one-self is somehow to escape the limitations of the self (both ideas directed towards a living beyond, as I understand it) fundamentally misses the point. Levinas points out that because Being is embodied being or ‘being-as-body,’ it is the case that the desire to escape or to get out is precisely a desire to not be one’s self; not some perfected version of self, not an authentic version of self, but rather, for Being, being is precisely a desire to be anything but oneself.
Notably, this philosophical ambivalence towards some idea that death signals some transition to a life beyond this one resonates with the commonly held Jewish position that religion is not purposed for a life beyond this one; that whether or not the soul survives this life is not relevant to any notion of ethics. Unlike Spinoza whose philosophy depends crucially on the belief that in some capacity the soul is eternal, Levinas insists that it is unimportant, and that ethics – if ethics is somehow or another construed as a way towards a good life – is about making do with what we have and what we are, not with what we might have or what we could be. And, to reiterate, what we have and what we are is this body and this Being that so desperately wants to flee itself. Being, for Levinas, as Simon Critchley illuminates, is tragedy. Just like Kant who recognized that Reason fatally pursues what it can’t have, but yet cannot help but do just that, Levinas maintains that Being – human beings, ourselves – desire an escape from being we fundamentally cannot have. It is no wonder that Levinas in his later writings finds himself using an ethical language that closely resembles the language of Leviticus and the priestly office of sacrifice in the old testament. For Levinas, Judaism understands something that Western philosophy in the trappings of European Christianity just cannot wrap its head around, namely the fatality of Being and the particular situation that humanity finds itself in: one of vulnerability.
This is why Levinas develops an ethics that uses the language of substitution, expiation, election, escape, and sacrifice. His ethics is deeply entrenched in a Jewish philosophy that understands that in order to escape the finitude of being, to pursue a happy life, one needs the necessity of escape, even if it is impossible. To become the scapegoat and carry the sacrificial burden appears to Levinas to be the only truly ethical thing to do. It is this pessimism that makes Levinas perhaps so relevant to the sentiments which emerge from the failures of modernity and Christian Europe’s enlightenment. We find, unfortunately, that we are not creatures that can achieve freedom, and we are not already free. Yet it is freedom that we need.
It is pessimism that drives Levinas’ almost martyrological account of the ethical life; that we are elected by the Other as the Jews were chosen by God, and it is this relationship with alterity and its vulnerability which signifies the primacy and inescapability of our obligation towards the Other. Yet, it is of duty in responsibility to the Other which subjects us, that makes us ethical subjects, and it is for the need of the Other that Levinas finds the source of an ethical necessity.
To use Kantian language, the language of which Levinas hints is the ground of his humanism [6], it is categorically imperative that we ground our ethics in the obligation towards the Other. For Levinas, it is this impossible escape that is the pinnacle of ethical life, and it is this tragedy of Being that we must live with. Ethical life is not grounded in reward. It is not grounded in a Spinozist concept of connatus or striving to continue on. Rather poignantly, ethical life is bound up with the formal idea of sacrifice. Perhaps what Levinas can teach us is that the ethical life is an impossible life; a standard from which we always fall short, just as Kant’s categorical imperative demonstrates the very limits of a rational morality.
It is my assertion that it is because of the impossibility of ethics and Being’s need for freedom that Levinas urges us to understand that what is most necessary for Being – that is, the very ground of our subjectivity and the sufficient reason for freedom – is duty towards our fellow human beings.
NOTES
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans.,ed. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998. p. 99
Immanuel Kant, “What is Enlightenment?”
Simon Critchley, The Problem with Levinas, ed. Alexis Dianda. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2015. p. 17
Emmanuel Levinas, “Substitution,” in Basic Philosophical Writings, ed. Adriaan T. Peperzack, Simon Critchley, and Robert Bernasconi. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. p. 86
Emmanuel Levinas, “On Escape,” trans. Bettina Bergo. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003. p. 55
Emmanuel Levinas, “The Name of a Dog, or Natural Rights,” in Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, trans. Seán Hand. 1990. p. 153. “This dog was the last Kantian in Nazi Germany…”