The course, as well as providing a background to Levinas’s philosophy in relation to Husserl and Heidegger, will carry out a reading of Levinas’s key texts, Totality and Infinity and Otherwise than Being. The focus, in the first instance, will be on the meaning of ‘ethics as first philosophy’ as revealed through an explication of key concepts. Secondly, the course will address the relation between the ethical and the political in Levinas’s philosophy. Some attention will thus be given to defining the ‘political’. The terms ‘immanence’ and ‘transcendence’ as Levinas understands them will be explained.
In the latter part of the course the implications will be set out of Levinas’s view of the image, ethics and art. In one sense, for Levinas, the image, ethically speaking, is a mistaken view of the face of the other. This is the image as pure immanence. The image is also important because, as regards totality, it is the part that reflects the whole.
Finally, we want to know whether Levinas’s approach to the image means that images as evidence are rendered problematic.
Lecture One
This lecture will, firstly, provide background on Levinas’s early philosophical career. His studies with Husserl in Germany in the 1930s will be outlined as well as his attendance at Heidegger’s seminar. Levinas’s involvement with Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations in Paris in 1929 will be described. His relationship with Sartre in 1948 on the question of art and the image will be referred to briefly. To be explained is the significance of each of these events for Levinas’s later work. The idea of ethics as first philosophy will be introduced with the question: Is Levinas simply giving a transcendental account of ethics?
Reading:
- Levinas, E. (1999) Alterity and Transcendence, trans. Michael B. Smith, London: Athlone Press, 97-109.
- Levinas, E. (2000) ‘Freiburg, Husserl and Phenomenology’ (1929) in Discovering Existence with Husserl, trans. Richard Cohen and Michael B. Smith, Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 32-38.
- Levinas, E. (1985) ‘Heidegger’ in Conversations with Philippe Nemo, trams. Richard A Cohen, Ann Arbor: Duquesne University Press, 37-44.
- Robbins, Jill, ed. (2001) Is it Righteous To Be? Interviews with Emmanuel Levinas, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 31-40.
- Burggraeve, Roger (1997) ‘Emmanuel Levinas: Thinker between Jerusalem and Athens
A Philosophical Biography’, Journal of Social Philosophy, 28 (1), 110-126.
Lecture Two
In this lecture, an explication will be given of key terms of Levinas’s philosophy. The opposition that is of crucial significance is that between ontology (where being is a totality) and ethics as first philosophy and the basis of the absolute Other. In other words, Levinas develops his philosophy via a critique of Heidegger’s Being and Time. The key terms to be explicated include: ethics (as first philosophy) with a brief comparison with other approaches to ethics (e.g. Spinoza and Kant and the notion of ‘ought’); ontology; ‘here I am’ (me voici); the same; ‘egology’; totality; face; Other; responsibility; infinity; immanence; transcendence; exteriority; substitution; expression; war.
We will see from an explication of these terms that ethics is not self-focused; it is not about what one should do, even less is it about what the other should do. Of equal significance is the notion that Western philosophy has, according to Levinas, hitherto been dominated by the order of the Same, making it an ‘egology’ that shuts out the Other, infinity, exteriority, the Good and transcendence, in favour of finitude, the ego-self, interiority, or immanence and freedom. To be noted is that the latter grouping of terms is specific to the nature of the political and it is the latter to which we will turn in the next lecture.
Reading:
- Levinas, E. (1969) Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: Duquesne University Press, 21-30; 33-52; 187-201
- Levinas, E. (1998a) Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: Duquesne University Press, 114-115.
- Levinas, Emmanuel (1999) Alterity and Transcendence, trans. Michael B. Smith, London: The Athlone Press, 3-37. Levinas, E. (1998b) Entre Nous: On Thinking-of-the-Other, trans. Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav, London: The Athlone Press, 8-10; 11-15; 161-6.
- Kant, Immanueal (1998) Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Mary Gregor, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 19-47.
- Spinoza, Benedict de (1955) ‘Of Human Bondage or the Strength of the Emotions’ in The Chief Works of Benedict de Spinoza, trans. R.H.M. Elwes, New York: Dover, 187-236.
Lecture Three
A full appreciation of the significance of ‘ethics as first philosophy’, requires that the nature of the political be understood. Violence is implicated here. The origins of thinking the political will be briefly recalled – from Heraclitus to Hobbes and Rousseau – summarised in large part by the myth of ‘the social contract’. Also, Hannah Arendt’s concept of the polis needs to be considered, along with her notion of the political as freedom. The point here is to show that the nature of the political – the political as enacted today – runs counter to ethics as understood by Levinas. It will be argued that, contrary to the view of certain commentators, there is no easy transition from ethics to politics even if the reality of the political must always be acknowledged.
The key points as regards the political are: 1) from the Greeks (Heraclitus): war (polemos) as the natural condition of the human thus needs to be controlled – recall, too: ‘war is politics by other means’ (Clausewitz). 2) The state of nature in social contract theory is a state of freedom (but also of violence) for the individual. 3) Freedom is essentially political freedom.
Reading:
- Levinas, E. (1969) Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: Duquesne University Press, 21-2, 64.
- Levinas, Emmanuel (1999) Alterity and Transcendence, trans. Michael B. Smith, London: The Athlone Press, 121-30; 145-9.
- Levinas, E. (1998a) Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: Duquesne University Press, 121-29.
- Arendt, H. (2005) The Promise of Politics, New York: Schocken Books, 108-123.
- Schmitt, Carl (2007) The Concept to the Political, trans. George Schwab, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 19-53.
- Martin Oppelt: ‘Thinking the World Politically (interview with Chantal Mouffe)’, ZPTh Jg. 5, Heft 2/2014, S. 263–277
Lecture Four
This lecture examines Levinas’s approach to the image prompting two lines of inquiry. The first is the image as referred to in the articulation of ethics as first philosophy. This will include an interpretation of Levinas’s notion of ‘trace’. The second is the image in art. In this respect attention will be given to the 1948 text, ‘Reality and its Shadow’ published in Les Temps Modernes. What we want to know is whether Levinas’s approach to the image is operational. What, for example, are its implications as regards the Shoah?
Reading:
- Levinas, E. (1969) Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: Duquesne University Press, 50-1, 297-98.
- Levinas, E. (1998a) Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: Duquesne University Press, 29, 61, 87, 89, 93-4,
- Levinas, E (1986) ’The Trace of the Other’, trans. by Alphonso Lingis from ‘La trace de 1’autre’ (1963) (in: Tijdschrift voor Filosofie, 25 (3), 605-23, and in Levinas, E. (1974) En découvrant 1’existence avec Husserl et Heidegger, 187-202, Paris: Vrin, in: M. Taylor (ed.), Deconstruction in Context, 345-59, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
- Saxton, Libby (2007) ‘Fragile Faces: Levinas and Lanzmann’, Film-Philosophy, 11 (2), 1–14.
Lecture Five
In this concluding lecture, an attempt will be made to determine what it might mean to adopt a Levinasian position in ethics. Does it make sense to speak in these terms? What has been outlined in Lectures One and Two is relevant here in as far as ethics should not be understood as a set of rules to be applied to the self and to others, or simply as an account of ethics. If we interpret the ‘here I am’ (me voici) in a quasi-religious sense, it could well refer to Levinas himself. Thus, one may well be witnessing Levinas’s own ethical struggle. The issue arising, however, is that the role of philosophy is not accounted for in the notion of ‘ethics as first philosophy’. To be determined is whether, for Levinas, philosophy is, ultimately, essentially Western philosophy. If so, there seems to be no way out. However, there are the following lines of inquiry that will be examined in the lecture: 1) philosophy as ‘awakening’; 2) philosophy as ‘saying’ rather than the ‘said’; 3) philosophy as a theoretical discourse; 4) philosophy as the idea that comes to mind; 5) philosophy as dialogue; and 6) ‘contesting of the philosophical privilege of being’ (OTB 18). These lines of inquiry are what truly call on us to think.
Reading:
- Levinas, E. (1969) Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: Duquesne University Press, 40, 48-9,
- Levinas, E. (1998a) Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: Duquesne University Press, 18, 114, 120, 146, 149, 152, 155, 161-2, 165, 169, 183, 185.
- Levinas, E. (1998) Discovering Existence with Husserl and Heidegger, trans. Richard A. Cohen and Michael B. Smith, Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 153-179.