EMMANUEL LEVINAS locates the ethical experience neither in the rationality of the social regulation of behavior, nor in the imperative for rationality internal to the mind, but in an event, a specific form of encounter among humans: when I find another facing me. He or she who faces me is not simply exposing himself or herself to me as an object of my perception but is calling for my attention and speaking to me. Before speech is informative, it is vocative and imperative. It is the voice of a vulnerable and mortal body. In the other facing me Levinas finds the ethical imperative. It is not found in an abstract and universal form and is not an imperative for acts that are universal or universalizable. The ethical imperative is encountered in the appeal and demand the other puts on me in facing me, in the concrete exhibition of his needs.
Levinas rejects “intersubjectivity,” rejects the Hegelian doctrine that it is in reciprocal recognition that each arises out of animality to free and responsible subjectivity. He posits an essential asymmetry in the face-to-face encounter. In the enjoyment of the sensuous elements, an egoism first arises as a positive event. In inhabitation and in labor, this “I” acquires a position and appropriates a range of resources. The encounter with another who perceptibly faces does not give rise to a collective being-with (Mitsein); instead, the other who faces intrudes upon my enjoyment and possession, contesting them, putting demands on my resources.
In Totality and Infinity, Levinas centered on speech, its vocative and imperative force, as the experience in which the other faces. He did emphasize that the other speaks with his needy, vulnerable, and mortal body and that I respond not with my voice only but with my body that has a position and a posture supported on a home base and that exists in appropriating the resources of my environment. But in Otherwise Than Being, Levinas showed that the sensitivity to the appeal and demand of another is first a being affected by, afflicted by, his needs, his suffering, and his mortality, before it is an understanding of his words. The encounter with another makes an impact on my sensibility, which, even before it is sensitive to the elements or open to things, is sensitive to the radical exteriority of the other. The sensitivity to another makes my enjoyment of the sensuous environment and my perception of things a sensitivity to the resources of the wide world.
The action that is really my action then is not the free action that I legislate for myself but responsible action—responsive to the needs of other humans, who are more exterior to me than the substances of the world or the fathomless elements in which things take form. In responsible action one assembles and integrates one’s forces and resources and comes to exist as an integral I.
To maintain the distinctive exteriority of the other, irreducible to an alter ego, Levinas widens the gap between the phenomenal reality of the other human who faces me and that of other beings in the phenomenal environment. The elements—light, warmth, chromatic tonality and resonance, ground—are revealed in and exist for us in sensuous enjoyment. Although he refuses Heidegger’s dissolution of things into relationships and asserts their existence as substances, existing in themselves, Levinas maintains that they only appear as things by being constituted in and through inhabitation, appropriation, and labor. But the other is not reducible to what I enjoy or what I inhabit and use.
To maintain the irreducible alterity of the other human, Levinas invokes infinity, or rather infinition. This dimension of unendingness seems evident in speech: every response elicits a response from the other—affirmation or contestation—and every contestation and also every affirmation require a response in turn from me. Although Levinas does affirm, in Time and the Other, that needs are finite and end in satisfaction, he then makes them give rise to an unending demand in the other, through his analysis of responsibility (TO 63). Against the juridical concept of responsibility that has dominated ethics since Aristotle, Levinas shows that responsibility cannot be measured by what I have foreseen and intended. To be responsible for my child is to take responsibility for what others have done to him, to take responsibility for what the debilitating or twisted conceptions that the culture that lies beyond me and existed before me have done to him. If he is born deformed or autistic, this is perhaps the result of a recessive gene from generations back, but it is I who must respond for it with all my resources.
Levinas conceptualizes this unending dimension of demand that opens in the one who faces me as infinity, and he names it “God.” He invokes not “the sacred” but the monotheist God, conceived not substantively but as the “wholly Other,” whose uniqueness speaks in the singularity of the one who singles me out to face me.
We can object that if the absolute alterity—absolutely other than any concrete need or want with which the other faces me—of Levinas’s monotheist God is constitutive of the otherness of every other who faces me, the demand put on me loses its location in the midst of the resources of the world and its determinateness. And the otherness of the one who faces me and another who also faces me is reduced to difference—difference in time and place, difference between the empirical figure of want and need each presents.
If this vocative and imperative force is not localized and singularized, if the imperative put on me is metaphysical—issuing from the Kantian God, or the utterly nonobjective Sartrean Other which Merleau-Ponty called a “faceless haunting,” or Levinas’s monotheist God—it cannot give rise to a veridical response in language or a practical response in deeds. A veridical response responds to the environment open to observation and verification by the singular other who faces me. A practical response to the requirement another presents supplements the other’s own resources and the resources at hand in his or her environment. The otherness of the other must be each time particular.1
Since responsiveness is constitutive of me as a subjectivity, Levinas depicts ethical acts, responsive initiatives, done by me as the acts that are genuinely my acts. They contrast with acts done to maintain or aggrandize myself or acts done in response to the abstract or anonymous decrees, rational or not, of institutions, or done in conformity with social mores. Levinas shows that the needs and wounds of another affect, afflict, my sensibility immediately and elicit my resources. The eyes do not view the suffering of the wounded one; they wince, feeling the pain in themselves. He affirms that before the other I am the rich one; I have always something to say, something to offer. This richness is in life that enjoys the fathomless nourishment of the elements, has a home base on the supporting ground, appropriates the resources of the environment, and labors.
Friedrich Nietzsche observes that we tend to understand the suffering and needs of another too crudely and we too quickly take ourselves to have the resources to remedy them. In our sense that we can help with our commonplace notions and resources there is a will to power, which the weak too readily seize upon. A keener eye may understand that the suffering another endures he has to endure for his own destiny. (The landlady thinks that what Beethoven needs is good soup and regular sleep.) Even the emaciated refugee needs not simply food but food that comes with acknowledgment of the justice of her wrath and with the pledge that she will see her village garden again. The suffering that we see in another’s spasms and tears is not simply in his own body; it is in the coupling that body has on what it cares for. This youth is in vigorous health and has a panoply of educational and professional opportunities open to him, but he suffers, afflicted with the suffering of the oppressed in his land or in distant lands he has never seen (GS §338).
Levinas affirms that the vulnerability and suffering—the mortality—of another concerns us; the doctor, he says, is an essential dimension of our being-with-others (TI 234). Nietzsche cautions:
A physician has not now attained the highest degree of training of which he is capable when he knows the best and most recent remedies and is practiced in applying them, and can draw those quick conclusions from effects to causes that make the celebrated diagnostician—he also has to possess an eloquence adapted to every individual and calculated to touch him to the very heart, a manliness at the sight of which all timorousness (the wormrot that undermines all invalids) takes flight, a diplomat’s flexibility in mediating between those who require joy if they are to become well and those who for reasons of health must (and can) make others joyful, the subtlety of an agent of police or an advocate in comprehending the secrets of a soul without betraying them.
(HA 1:§243, 2:§336)
What is more, the one we see suffering may be suffering because he inflicts great suffering on others and hears the cry of their suffering. The revolutionary finds himself unable to endure the oppression of the poor and will inflict upon them still greater oppression when he launches the struggle. Their agony intensifies his pain, which he has to suffer (GS §325).
Levinas elaborates the existence of the I as a being-for-others, responsible for others, responsible for the very irresponsibility of others. But, Nietzsche asks, if we really understand another’s irresponsibility and his distress and also the misfortune that has befallen him blindly, would not our understanding convert actively into “an overall justification of his way of living and thinking”?
Consider how every individual is affected by an overall philosophical justification of his way of living and thinking: he experiences it as a sun that shines especially for him and bestows warmth, blessings, and fertility on him; it makes him independent of praise and blame, self-sufficient, rich, liberal with happiness and good will; incessantly it refashions evil into good, leads all energies to bloom and ripen, and does not permit the petty weeds of grief and chagrin to come up at all. In the end one exclaims: How I wish that many such new suns were yet to be created! Those who are evil or unhappy and the exceptional human being—all these should also have their philosophy, their good right, their sunshine! What is needful is not pity for them.
(GS §289)
Nietzsche observes that we lack a name for indignation at another’s unhappiness—“the more manly form of pity” (DB 1 §78). But he understands that having to receive from another what one needs is a recognition of dependence and servility; it debases the receiver. That is why the receiver often refuses any sign of the gratitude that the giver awaits as an affirmation of his power. Nietzsche also understands why Jonathan Swift said that men are grateful in the same degree as they are vengeful. In expressing his gratitude, the receiver affirms the resources and power he now has, which intrude upon the sphere of influence of the giver. The politician who publicly declares how much he has received from the great statesman is encroaching upon his place in the nation and in history. (Academics who in their “Acknowledgments” list the renowned authorities who have assisted them in their researches are hoisting themselves up to their level.) “That is why every community of the good, that is to say originally the powerful, places gratitude among its first duties” (HA 1:§44).
Levinas locates the other above oneself; his superior position lies in the force his appeal and demand have to make claims on me—and this force, in turn, lies in the unendingness of those claims, the dimension of infinity, or God, in them. Nietzsche, however, observes that “under civilized conditions everyone feels himself to be superior to everyone else in at any rate one thing” (HA 1:§509). His “under civilized conditions” would indicate that in the ever-growing complexity of skills, concretely exercised in each time’s particular social and psychological conditions, each one finds that at this time and place he is best at something. We can extend that to say that in any conditions we may find ourselves best in sensitivity, sensuality, temperament, or physical strength to care for this child or this garden or to maintain ourselves composed in boredom or in suffering. “It is upon this,” Nietzsche argues, “that the general mutual goodwill that exists depends, inasmuch as everyone is someone who under certain circumstances is able to be helpful and who thus feels free to accept help without a sense of shame” (HA1:§509).
Levinas cites Pascal approvingly that “the ego is detestable”—the egoism that arises in enjoyment and materializes itself in inhabitation, appropriation, and labor. In responding to another, this egoist self gathers up all its resources and acquires the identity of an “I”; its responsible acts are its own. Nietzsche finds an egoism in apparent altruism but derives a distinctive insight from it.
A good author whose heart is really in his subject wishes that someone would come and annihilate him by presenting the same subject with greater clarity and resolving all the questions contained in it. A girl in love wishes the faithfulness and devotion of her love could be tested by the faithlessness of the man she loves. A soldier wishes he could fall on the battlefield for the victorious fatherland; for his supreme desire is victor in the victory of his fatherland. A mother gives to her child that of which she deprives herself, sleep, the best food, if need be her health, her strength.
(HA 1:§57)
In all such instances one loves something of oneself—an idea, a desire, an offspring—more than something else of oneself. “Man treats himself not as individuum but as dividuum” (HA 1:§57). And just as love of another is “understanding and rejoicing at the fact that another lives, feels and acts in a way different from and opposite to ours” (HA 2:§75), so also self-love is astonishment and rejoicing at a part of oneself that appears enigmatic and acting on its own.
This explains why it is not only unmagnanimous to be always the one who bestows; one feels shame in it.
There are occurrences of such a delicate nature that one does well to cover them up with some rudeness to conceal them; there are actions of love and extravagant generosity after which nothing is more advisable than to take a stick and give any eyewitness a sound thrashing: that would muddle his memory. Some know how to muddle and abuse their own memory in order to have their revenge at least against this only witness: shame is inventive.
(BG §40)
Nietzsche finds the impulse to give not in an agent “I” that assembles its resources, a life that in acting becomes an agent, but in the intrinsic happiness of life. He evokes the immemorial dialogue between the wise man and the one who comes to him, seeking happiness: “What must I do to be happy?” The wise answer is: “Be happy, and then do what you will” (KSA 10:195). For happiness is not something outside that is to be sought in things; it is in life, and is the exultant upsurge of excess energies. Happiness is not something acquired by seeking; it happens by happenstance, as our life, improbable result of one of billions of possible combinations of the roughly 30,000 human genes, happens by chance. Happiness is the feeling of the upsurge of superabundant energies, and this happiness radiates and discharges itself gratuitously. The good deeds that the powerful and joyous life realizes are done out of no inner need and ask for nothing in return.
It is so unmagnanimous always to play the bestower and giver and to show one’s face when doing so! But to give and bestow and to conceal one’s name and awareness one is bestowing a favour! Or to have no name, like nature, in which the most refreshing thing of all is that here we at last no longer encounter a giver and bestower, a ‘gracious countenance’!
(DB §464)
But this happiness is not innocent generosity; indeed Nietzsche affirms that “the evil of the strong harms others without giving thought to it—it has to discharge itself; the evil of the weak wants to harm others and to see the signs of the suffering it has caused” (DB §371)—but in fact the compulsion to destroy and to mock likewise issues from happiness. If magnanimous acts issue involuntarily from our nature, they do so only when this nature is a cultivated nature. Indeed, love, the pleasure over someone remote from ourselves, has to be learned. “We have to learn to love, learn to be charitable, and this from our youth up; if education and chance offer us no opportunity to practice these sensations our soul will grow dry and even incapable of understanding them in others” (HA 1:601, GS §334).
Emmanuel Levinas has fundamentally changed ethical philosophy in locating the ethical imperative in an experience, which he has lucidly analyzed phenomenologically. His ethical writings are largely confined to the ever more skillful analysis of this original ethical experience. There is little discussion of the social regulation of behavior and the institutions that societies elaborate. There is little attention to the conflict that arises when attending to the needs of the one I encounter results in depriving resources from those I do not encounter—the most urgent problem in today’s world of increasing, institutionalized global inequality. In expending my funds on medical treatment on my son, who requires repeated and immensely complicated surgery, and in giving him all the attention and support he needs, I neglect the wants and needs of my other son and my spouse. In famine times the bread I give from my stores to the stranger is taken from my own family. What we in the rich countries think our children need is the result of turning distant lands to export-driven economies that do not supply the basic needs of their people.
Nietzsche recognizes this conflict already on the level of affective relations with individuals; we do feel hedged in when someone favors us with his affection. There arises in us a grudge against a friend or lover for his injustice in prizing us at the expense of others who are equally worthy of, and may well need, his friendship or his love (DB §488). Thus while jealous love may want the exclusive attention of the lover, this closed utopia is uneasy; there stirs the subterranean sense that we are unworthy of such exclusive valuation and that it is unjust:
Do we not blush when we detect ourselves in the act of feeling a violent aversion? But we ought to do the same in the case of violent affections too, on account of the injustice which they too involve! More, indeed: there are people who feel as though hedged in, and whose heart grows tight, when anyone favours them with his affection only by withdrawing something of his affection from others. When we hear from his voice that we are chosen and preferred! Ah, I am not grateful for this favour, I notice in myself a grudge against him who wants to favour me in this way: he ought not to love me at the expense of others! I want to see how I can endure myself at my own expense! And often I find that my heart is full and I feel in high spirits—to a man who possesses such things one should give nothing that others stand in need, sorely in need of!
(DB §488)
It is the third party, Levinas says, who judges the truth of what I respond to my interlocutor and what my interlocutor responds to my response. He or she determines a just distribution of resources for the needs of each of us. But how would he or she not simply demand of us that the zone of the environment I have shared with my interlocutor be now put in terms he or she understands and the resources I have made available to the needs of the one who faces me be offered to the third party?
Levinas inherits the phenomenology that reduces the world—the landscapes and oceans, ecosystems, and other species—taken as independently real by the natural attitude into a phenomenal world, appearing to us, existing for us. He elaborates a phenomenology that explicates the other who, in facing us, appears as not appearing to us and not existing for us. But there are imperatives in things. To see something is to see what it requires to exist in its setting. There is no inhabitation, appropriation, or labor without recognizing that to perceive what is, is to perceive what it requires to be protected, nourished, and healed. These are not simply hypothetical imperatives, derived from the imperative to answer the needs of human beings. The landscapes, ecosystems, and other species that appear to us do not appear as existing for us, for our needs and wants.
Levinas and Nietzsche have so radicalized our understanding of the experience of our encounters with others and of the good we do to them and the malice in that good that they dominate the ethical philosophy read today. But who can think of our interpersonal behaviors without thinking of the scandalously growing gap between obscenely rich countries and destitute countries, and between rich and poor in all countries? Without thinking of the global corporate powers that have been institutionalized in our societies and of the massive weapons of state terror that guarantee them, today only disrupted by terrorist acts of individuals and small commandos? Vast populations are reduced to destitution, are ravaged by plagues, and die in genocidal wars programmed and armed by neocolonial and neoimperalist policies. We urgently need an analysis of the imperative imposed on social and economic institutions and explanations of effective and institutional ways to make them responsible.
Who can think of the imperatives imposed by and in our interpersonal behaviors without thinking of ecological and climatic destruction? But neither Nietzsche nor Levinas recognizes any imperative imposed on us by nature. The earth, light, warmth, liquidity, chromatic density, sonority, and the landscapes, ecosystems, oceans, and planetary system do not appear, do not exist, as a phenomenal field constituted by human subjectivity; human subjectivity is an evolutionary part of Earth’s ecosystem. The most urgent ethics of responsibility is yet to be elaborated.
NOTE
1. See Alphonso Lingis, “Theoretical Paradox and Practical Dilemma,” in International Journal of Philosophical Studies 12, no. 1 (2004): 21–28.