The Neurotic Turn

Emmanuel Levinas proposes that we owe infinite responsibility to an infinitely alterior other. However, the relationship to the other is asymmetrical, meaning that the same (I) owes the infinitely different other infinite responsibility, but reciprocity is the other’s business. Says Levinas, “[I] am responsible for the Other without waiting for reciprocity, were I to die for it” (Levinas and Nemo 1965: 98). This presupposes that we juxtapose one infinite with another infinite and then call the relationship asymmetrical. The paradox of infinity is that it has no limit and infinite set A responsibility and infinite set B alterity, both exist in the same. The infinitely alterior set exists in the other, but responsibility from the other to the same is the business of the other, ranging from infinity to zero. While on its face this paradox seems illogical, we are dealing with human logic. If the same were to demand reciprocity, then the same could withhold giving responsibility to the other until reciprocity is given. Therefore, infinite responsibility is asymmetrical.

Why should the same owe infinite responsibility to the other, any other? All others are equal in that they are infinitely alterior from the same and each other. Because they are infinitely alterior, abstracting from them the idea of race, colour, religion, or even good or bad would destroy equality based upon infinite alterity. Equality comes from infinite otherness. Therefore, one can never abstract the other from the other. Equality is granted to all others because of the sameness of the other as infinitely different; on the other hand, responsibility required depends upon the circumstances of the infinitely alterior other.

Given the fact that all others are equal in this infinity of alteriority, ethics requires the treating of all equally. Treating all the same way means giving infinite responsibility to the infinite other without expecting any reciprocity. Any deviation from treating all equally as has been described threatens ethics. Therefore, according to Levinas, ethics does not begin in the same but in the infinite other.

Hobbes’ state of law versus state of nature has a third component, state of otherwiseness. The state of otherwiseness Levinas calls the otherwise than being. The otherwise than being is not, as Levinas says, being otherwise, because that would still be being (Levinas and Nemo 1985: 100). Otherwise than being foregoes the ego, existing in the state of nature for the awe of the sovereign in the form of the other. This sovereign other is not the governing sovereign that Hobbes envisions but the equal but infinitely alterior other. The ego of the same is subsumed in service to the other. This, Levinas calls radical passivity. The same substitutes oneself for the other in responsible service to the other; hence the same is outside of being in the same and as a result becomes otherwise — otherwise than being.

Saying that the same substitutes the other for the same in service to the other is problematic because it brings the other into the context of the same and by doing so appears to deny the infinite otherness of the other. Levinas clarifies what he means by substitution, “I can substitute myself for everyone, but no one can substitute himself for me” (Levinas and Nemo 1985: 101). I can substitute myself because I am infinitely responsible to the infinite other. However, because I am infinitely responsible to the infinite other and the infinite other does not have to reciprocate, this asymmetry means that the other can never substitute for me and my infinite responsibility. I am both unique and equal to the other in alterity, but my responsibility to the infinite other is uniquely mine.¹

Substitution also suggests that the same can understand the infinite needs of the other. Leah Kalmanson and Sarah Mattice point out the difficulty of this argument when they explain:

Indeed, acting in any way at all toward the other seems to be a problem for Levinas, in that no matter what I do, I will likely overstep my bounds, i.e., make assumptions and thematize. Because of the epistemological constraints of the face-to-face relation, alterity per se can never become a principle that guides action. (Kalmanson and Mattice 2015: 238)

The infinite alterity of the other is simply a fact; need is the principle that guides action. However, that action is likely to be imperfect because one can never understand the needs of the infinite other.

Both asymmetry and infinity must be presumed for the logic of Levinas’ ethics of responsibility to hang together. However, the paradox of responsibility is that it produces a neurotic process based upon the need to act without ever really knowing how to act and never being sure that the act is responsible.

Since 1980, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) editors have maintained that there is no consensus on the definition of neurosis. Some consider neurosis to be an etiological process and others give neurosis a descriptive meaning through the use of behaviours. What the titles, beginning with the DSM-III, do is to authorize the use of “neurotic disorder” through the description of its behaviours.² The paradox of responsibility is not on the surface a description of behaviours, rather it is an etiological paradox for which a cause must be sought. Rather than choose the behavioural route of the DSM to provide answers for the neurotic process of responsibility, we must begin an etiological search for the cause of this neurotic process. In other words, what is the hidden cause of the neurotic process of responsibility?

To begin with, in the same vein as Descartes’ skepticism about reality, we must recognize that we will always be unsure of what is being responsible and what is not. Also with Descartes, with his only sure knowledge that he is a thinking thing, one can be held to be infinitely responsible to an other without ever knowing just what that means. The neurotic process of responsibility can be described as uncertainty, because infinity is. This uncertainty is anxiety-producing, as the DSMIII says about neurotic processes in general, “[t]hat is distressing to the individual and is recognized by him or her as unacceptable and alien”. The manifestations of the psychological disorder of the neurotic process of responsibility come from the behaviour of the same to the other. There is no possibility for normalcy in the ethics of responsibility because one’s behaviour towards the other is always already suspect.

Should we derive from infinite responsibility a sense of normalcy which we might call justice? If we do derive justice as a subset of infinite responsibility are we not reducing the other to the same? Reducing the other to (or towards) the same violates the principle of infinite alterity. If normalcy is the derivation of justice from infinite responsibility, then the definition of normal is itself a disorder because it ignores the infinity of otherness.³

A-normality is the mode of existence in Levinas’ responsibility ethic because one cannot ever behave in a way that will be infinitely responsible to the other even if that infinite responsibility is a requirement for being normal, or at least ethical. We are not God, who is both an infinite and perfect being, and also is the only entity that can be both infinitely alterior and provide infinite responsibility without error.

In fact, what this ethics of responsibility says is that while the DSM can classify different behaviours into different classes of otherwise than normal (i.e. a disorder), it cannot at the same time define normal because normal is impossible due to the paradox of responsibility to the other. To make things even more complicated, Levinas contends that the same is responsible for the other’s responsibility (Levinas and Nemo 1985: 99). This, of course, is logical if I am infinitely responsible to the infinite other. However, this extends the idea of responsibility even further into the realm of fuzzy logic. If understanding the other is problematic, then how does one understand what that other is responsible for so as to substitute oneself in the cause of responsibility for the other’s responsibility?⁴

We can agree that responsibility for the other is a good ethical ideal. That it comes from the mind of a noted and well-respected philosopher we may also agree to. However, for the neurosis of responsibility to be an etiological neurotic process there must be a fundamental psychological mechanism at work in the human. Levinas explains that infinite responsibility for the infinite other is pre-originary, meaning it is before consciousness, ego, even reason. Levinas also says that “The good is before being” (Levinas 1974: 122). Levinas elaborates:

This antecedence of responsibility to freedom would signify the Goodness of the Good: the necessity that the Good choose me first before I can be in a position to choose, that is, welcome its choice. That is my pre-originary susceptiveness. It is a passivity prior to all receptivity, it is transcendent. It is an antecedence prior to all representable antecedence: immemorial. The Good is before being. (Levinas and Nemo 1985: 122)

This pre-originary condition Edith Wyschogrod explains: “In Levinas’s account, the passive, preoriginary self of ipseity is a living system, one for which not love but a preoriginary openness to the other who cannot be conceptualized is the condition of ethics” (Wyschogrod 2006: 188). Once again, Wyschogrod exposes the paradox of responsibility with the idea that the other cannot be fully conceptualized.

Let’s say that we agree that the good is before being. Responsibility before ego sounds like a good beginning to any ethics of the other. However, how does responsibility become pre-originary? Levinas, like Descartes, points back to God. Who else could have given us the idea of the infinite, if not God? Why? Our horizon for the understanding of being is temporality, so says Martin Heidegger. We are finite beings; we cannot ever fully grasp that which is outside of our experience of temporality. Therefore, what meaning can infinity give us other than mystery or paradox?

What if we don’t want to accept the idea that there is a God? The circularity of the argument that is God also represents a paradox as does infinity. There must be something we can agree upon for the location of the neurotic process of responsibility. In other words, rather than remain “generally atheoretical with regard to etiology”, as the DSM does, we will be searching for the etiological origin of the neurotic process of responsibility (DSM-III: 7).

If the neurotic process of responsibility has so far remained hidden, how do we become aware of this neurotic process? Levinas does not point to consciousness, the ego, or any obvious or commonplace psychological process. Rather, he points to the face of the other. The face is the trigger for responsibility and the resulting neurotic process. Says Levinas, “The face is signification, and signification without context” (Levinas and Nemo 1985: 86). The face reveals, but conceals more than it reveals. He says, “There are these two strange things in the face: its extreme frailty — the fact of being without means and, on the other hand, there is authority. It is as if God spoke through the face” (Bernasconi and Wood 1988: 169). This is the opening to the infinite other as the recognition that there is more to the other than the phenomenon of the face.

Don’t we look at the face to try to understand the other? Is it not the first thing that the child sees? Not its own face but the face of the mother and father. The face forms the locus and the focus of attention in the world where others are more numerous than the same. Attention to the world leads to language, language leads towards responsibility. Says Levinas, “I think that the beginning of language is in the face. In a certain way, in its silence, it calls you. Your reaction to the face is a response. Not just a response, but a responsibility” (Bernasconi and Wood 1988: 169). Your reaction to the face is a query, the question of responsibility for the other, the infinite other. Language, however, is imperfect and in the cause of discovering the needs of the other runs into the infinite otherness that the face exposes in its stark nakedness. While the paradox of responsibility produces a neurotic process, there is also a pathological side where one denies the paradox.

Consider the disorder of the ethnic cleanser or Hitler and his henchmen. Their idea is to stamp out otherness for sameness, by killing others. The futility of this becomes self-evident when one considers the neurotic process of responsibility. The other is always infinite, so killing the other is not killing otherness because even in the other who the ethnic cleanser wants to abstract certain characteristics of otherness, there is still more other in that other and in all others. This ethnic murderer has an obsessive-compulsive disorder that produces a repetition that becomes ever more disabling to the sufferer of that disorder because there simply cannot be any logical conclusion to the process. What cruel dictator has not also gone after his own kind in order to rectify perceived wrongs that convert those who should be the same into others? Like a computer do-loop, the disorder overtakes the mind that is trying to erase the face of the other in order to produce the same face which can never be possible.

When Levinas says that we see the trace of God in the face of the other, we see that infinite otherness in the face of the other that can never be explained by our temporally constricted selves.

If responsibility is the neurotic process and the face is its manifestation or point of recognition, we are still not at the underlying cause of the hidden psychological process. Levinas gives us two additional clues, first is the condition he called the il y a, or the there is, and the second is fecundity.

While the good comes before being, there is being. Whether this is the being of Parmenides that is and cannot not be, or the Being of Heidegger that is before death, there is always being. Levinas derives the idea of the there is from the darkness:

Things covered by darkness elude our foresight and that it becomes impossible to measure their approach in advance. For the insecurity does not come from the things of the day world which the night conceals; it is due just to the fact that nothing approaches, nothing comes, nothing threatens; this silence, this tranquility, this void of sensations constitutes a mute, absolutely indeterminate menace. The indeterminateness constitutes its acuteness. There is no determined being, anything can count for anything else. In this ambiguity the menace of pure and simple presence, of the there is, takes form. (Levinas 1978: 34)

We are always in existence, the anonymous mode of being. The anxiety that emerges is that of presence and not absence. The darkness is a presence rather than an absence. Noted schizophrenia researcher, Eugene Minkowski, unlike Levinas, felt the darkness. He says that there is positiveness to the pervasive darkness; it contains materiality; it touches me directly; as if a blanket (a kind of intimate umwelt) that isn’t just there but here and throughout me, where “one can almost say that while the ego is permeable by darkness it is not permeable by light. The ego does not affirm itself in relationship to darkness but becomes confused with it, becomes one with it” (Minkowski 1970: 429). Is this not also Levinas’s there is, the pervasiveness of being even when there is no light, a connectedness to being itself as existence in space but also existence in time?

Being is always already there. Levinas calls this existence insomnia, “[a] watching on when there is nothing to watch” (Levinas 1978: 5). He explains, “Wakefulness is anonymous. It is not that there is my vigilance in the night; in insomnia it is the night itself that watches. It watches. In this anonymous nightwatch where I am completely exposed to being all the thoughts which occupy my insomnia are suspended on nothing” (Levinas 1978: 48). Being is ever vigilant because it cannot escape itself. If being is and we cannot escape experiencing being, is this the cause of the neurotic process of responsibility? Not exactly, says Levinas, “Indeterminate Being fills in all the gaps, all the temporal intervals, while consciousness arises from it in an act of self-originating concentration” (Bergo 2015).

We are always already in being and from that being consciousness arises. However, responsibility is pre-originary, before consciousness, and the good is before being. Once again, even the there is of being cannot connect us directly to the neurotic process of responsibility because we must discover that which is before being and consciousness.

We must examine goodness. Levinas says, “Goodness consists in taking up a position in being such that the Other counts more than myself. Goodness thus involves the possibility for the I that is exposed to the alienation of its powers by death to not be for death” (Levinas 1979: 247). Goodness has become a-temporal because the other can survive the same. The fecundity of otherness is always more than the same if responsibility to others is infinite. Levinas explains:

Both my own and non-mine, a possibility of myself but also a possibility of the other, of the Beloved, my future does not enter into the logical essence of the possible. The relation with such a future, irreducible to the power over possibles, we shall call fecundity. (Levinas 1979: 267)

Fecundity not only unsticks one from the same as sameness — repetition — it removes one from the power to realize the possibilities for the other and the child. Yet, the possibilities for the other and child become possible because of fecundity. Responsibility and the birth of the child create the possibility for possibilities; however, the realization thereof is not the province of the same.

The fecundity of the drive to be responsible to the other comes from the fecundity of the drive to reproduce, but not to reproduce the same, for that is not possible, but the drive to reproduce an other from the same. The inner tension of the Heideggerian being before death is interrupted by the drive towards fecundity and the creation of yet another other.⁵ Says Critchley, “Fecundity is the production of the child”. Says Levinas, “Fecundity escapes the punctual instant of death” (Levinas 1979: 56).⁶ Fecundity is the possibility for possibilities that can never be realized by the same. This is why the idea of responsibility and fecundity are linked. Responsibility is fecund because it enables the other to produce more possibilities. Fecundity of the child produces more others for which responsibility can be given — hence the cycle of responsibility can continue. This continuity is essential to the continuity of life itself.

The there is is preceded by the good and the drive towards fecundity and the reproduction of otherness. This is the pre-originary understanding that the same, the there is, cannot succeed itself in the same form. Says Critchley, “In fecundity repetition ceases. I cease to endlessly repeat my stale project.” The same can only succeed itself in otherwiseness or in fecundity, but never to become the same again. Therefore, being for the other is a fundamental condition of life that we cannot choose for or against. This fundamental condition of life, fecundity, is prior to the good, but its necessity for life as continuity requires the good in order to produce the continuity of existence, and of being. The neurotic process of responsibility begins in the primordial need for fecundity in the human species. This is not something that can be eliminated even for persons who cannot have or will not have children. This need for maintaining and continuity of otherness through otherwiseness (e.g. substitution or the child) is a fundamental aspect of existence that cannot be eliminated or repressed. If being is totality, otherness is infinity.

It is when the there is sees the face of the other, that the manifestation of the neurotic process of responsibility begins. The chain of the neurotic process begins in the primordial need to be fecund, to produce or enable otherness. This is before goodness, but generates goodness because it is the engine that produces or enables otherness in the first place. The there is is a continuity of existence that cannot escape itself and as a result cannot escape fecundity. Fecundity enables goodness (for the same: being) which one sees in the face which then is manifested as responsibility to the other through otherwise than being.

The face of the other is not the phenomenological manifestation of this fecund other but represents that which is the mystery of fecundity, otherwiseness of being. The appearance of the face translates into responsibility for the other. Levinas simply explores how the paradox of responsibility comes from the idea of otherness that is infinite in nature. The hidden psychological process, the neurotic process of responsibility, has its origins in fecundity. Fecundity is a primordial process which is rational in the notion of continuity. Given the notion of continuity as something without end, even those who do not believe in God can find answers for the origination of the idea of infinity even if it was not given to us by such an entity. If infinity is always already with us then the paradox of responsibility is only that, a paradox. However, it is a paradox for the living, because the living are not immortal.

The requirements of infinite responsibility fulfill the needs of fecundity towards continuity. Fecundity is not something created by consciousness. It is before consciousness, before being, and before the good, but it is the origin of the neurotic process of responsibility.

We say to ourselves that it is your consciousness that is in charge of us. As we have seen, consciousness is but a link in the chain that begins in the primordial need to be fecund. It is the letting go of consciousness to accept the infinite that is the nature of continuity that will help humanity understand that responsibility to the other is fulfilling a primordial condition and a requirement of life itself.⁷

Works Cited

American Psychiatric Association. (1980). Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (Third Edition)—DSMIII, Washington DC: American Psychiatric Association.

Bergo, Bettina. (2015). “Emmanuel Levinas”, in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta. Stanford: Stanford University Press. http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2014/entries/levinas.

Bernasconi, Robert and Wood, David. (1988). The Provocation of Levinas: Rethinking the Other. London and New York: Routledge.

Critchley, Simon. (2015). The Problem with Levinas. New York: Oxford University Press.

Kalmanson, Leah and Sarah Mattice. (2015). “The De of Levinas: Cultivating the Heart-Mind of Radical Passivity”. Frontiers of Philosophy in China 10, no. 1: 113-29.

Ketcham, Christopher. (2016). “Towards an Ethics of Life”. Space Policy.

Levinas, Emmanuel. Existence and Existents, trans. Alphonso Lingis. London, Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

—. (1974). Otherwise Than Being, trans. by Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburg: Duquesne University Press.

—. (1979). Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Springer.

Levinas, Emmanuel and Philippe Nemo. (1985). Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo, trans. Richard Cohen. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press.

Minkowski, Eugene. (1970). Lived Time: Phenomenological and Psychopathological Studies, trans. Nancy Metzel. Northwestern. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

Wyschogrod, Edith. (2006). Crossover Queries: Dwelling with Negatives, Embodying Philosophy’s Others. New York: Fordham University Press.

Notes

1 Simon Critchley (2015) explains his concern with the idea of substitution: “My concern is that I’m not sure substitution is a way out of the tragic fatality of being. It seems to me to be a claim of identity, however that’s understood.”

2 Beginning with the DSM-III, the term neurosis was minimized in favour of giving definition to classes of behaviours. It said, “At the present time, however, there is no consensus in our field as to how to define ‘neurosis’”. However a neurotic disorder is acceptable if:

The term neurotic disorder thus refers to a mental disorder in which the predominant disturbance is a symptom or group of symptoms that is distressing to the individual and is recognized by him or her as unacceptable and alien (ego-dystonic); reality testing is grossly intact; behavior does not actively violate gross social norms (although functioning may be markedly impaired); the disturbance is relatively enduring or recurrent without treatment and is not limited to a transitory reaction to stressors; and there is no demonstrable organic etiology or factor. (DSM-III 1980: 9-10)

3 Levinas explains the conundrum of justice:

In Totality and Infinity I used the word ‘justice’ for ethics, for the relationship between two people. I spoke of ‘justice’, although now ‘justice’ is for me something which is a calculation, which is knowledge, and which supposes politics; it is inseparable from the political. It is something which I distinguish from ethics, which is primary. However, in Totality and Infinity, the word ‘ethical’ and the word ‘just’ are the same word, the same question, the same language. When I use the word ‘justice’ there it is not in the technical sense as something opposed to or distinct from the moral. (Bernasconi and Wood 1988: 171)

Justice resides in the political, however, it is no different from its underlying ethic. Responsibility is unlimited even in a situation where justice says otherwise. Responsibility’s paradox makes justice paradoxical because justice cannot be if it abstracts from the infinite nature of responsibility. It becomes political expediency and a collective disorder all its own.

4 Not everyone is enamoured with the extent to which Levinas takes responsibility, when Levinas insists one is responsible for one’s persecutor. Simon Critchley says, “That is my feeling about masochism. We need just enough but not too much. Levinas simply goes too far” (Critchley 2015). Isn’t this the paradox of infinite responsibility for the infinite other? Is the persecutor always a persecutor; will always be a persecutor? By abstracting the other as persecutor, we fail the test of maintaining the condition of infinite alteriority. Can we deny responsibility to someone who is only a part-time persecutor? The paradox of responsibility leaves us in the neurotic condition of not knowing what to do even when for some it may otherwise be clear.

5 Said Levinas:

Heidegger says at the beginning of Being and Time that Dasein is a being who in his being is concerned for this being itself. That’s Darwin’s idea: the living being struggles for life. The aim of being is being itself. However, with the appearance of the human — and this is my entire philosophy — there is something more important than my life, and that is the life of the other. That is unreasonable. Man is an unreasonable animal. (Bernasconi and Wood 1988: 172)

Unreasonable because the neurosis of responsibility requires actions that go beyond being, otherwise than being. Fecundity is a given in the human and other life, but responsibility to the other as infinite is not altogether a reasonable idea for a Being that has a temporal horizon.

6 However, Levinas cautions that biological fecundity is not the only fecundity: “Biological fecundity is but one of the forms of paternity. Paternity, as a primordial effectuation of time, can, among men, be borne by the biological life, but be lived beyond that life” (1979: 56). There is strong objection by many of Levinas’s uses of the terms feminine and paternity, which I will not go into here. However, living beyond life is both the idea of the child and the other who continues existing having had a prior interface with me whether beneficial or not.

7 In “Towards an Ethics of Life” (2016), Ketcham suggested that continuity is fundamental to an ethics of life: “My thesis is as follows. First, that continuity of life is the foundation for an ethics of life. Second, that the fundamental question for an ethics of life is, ‘What is best for life?’”