Phenomenology, ethics, and the Other:
Rediscovering the possibility of ethical absolutes with Husserl, Heidegger, and Levinas
It may be surprising to some to see the phenomenological tradition proposed as a solution to the problems addressed by and inadvertently repeated in the work of Alain Badiou and Quentin Meillassoux. After all, both thinkers, particularly the latter, situate their work as a critique of the phenomenological tradition. According to Meillassoux, for one, the phenomenological tradition remains too trapped within the structures of the Kantian critique to address reality as it actually is or to pose any viable solution to the immanent ethical and political problems that plague us as a result of it. Thus, while the aim of the phenomenological tradition may have been to go “back to things themselves,” as Husserl declared, and to bring philosophy down from the theoretical heights of idealism and reintroduce it to the concrete lived experience of those of us here below, it nevertheless remains, Meillassoux claims, entirely circumscribed by what he infamously calls Kantian correlationism: “the idea according to which we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other.”1 Indeed, according to Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman, some of Meillassoux’s greatest supporters in the English-speaking world, the phenomenological method fundamentally requires “the renunciation of any knowledge beyond how things appear to us. Reality-in-itself is cordoned off at least in its cognitive aspects.”2 It is therefore incapable, they argue, of asserting anything more than the merely virtual reality of perception and appearance—not being, but seeming. As a result, they conclude, it is incapable of grounding any material judgment, ethical or otherwise.
It was in fact precisely with the aim of addressing and overcoming this apparent “correlationism” at the heart of the phenomenological tradition that Meillassoux, Badiou, and their followers called for philosophy to “speculat[e] once more about the nature of reality independently of thought and of humanity more generally.”3 According to them, it is only by “recuperat[ing] the pre-critical sense of ‘speculation’ as a concern with the Absolute, while also taking into account the undeniable progress that is due to the labour of [Kant’s] critique,” that philosophy will be able to both address the nature of reality revealed in the material sciences and establish thereby a new ground upon which to mount a critique of the excesses of ethical and political life.4 Hence Meillassoux’s emphasis on factial speculation on the basis of the ancestral object as a means of uncovering the radical contingency of existence and reinscribing absolute value into being, which we examined in the last chapter.5 According to Meillassoux and his colleagues, without some ground in an actual reality which exists outside of and beyond the limits of perception, phenomenology is destined to revert, despite its intentions, to some form of idealism at best or collapse into outright solipsism at worst. Thus, they conclude, in order to “construct a transcendental naturalism capable of providing an ontological foundation for science” and ethical judgment anew, the project of correlationism in general and phenomenology in particular must be jettisoned.6 It was in large part this conclusion which led Tom Sparrow to call for “the end of phenomenology” and the initiation of a “new realism” capable of taking up these challenges in earnest.7
This critique of phenomenology is however not as “new” as Sparrow would have it. To the contrary, it is a critique which has haunted phenomenology since its very beginning. Indeed, as early as 1894 Gottlob Frege argued that the phenomenological insistence on approaching phenomena in and through the structures of perception guaranteed its eventual reversion into a form of idealism.8 By beginning with the first-person perspective, he argued, Husserl’s phenomenology was fundamentally incapable of acknowledging the radical asubjective ground of thought; specifically, he argued, phenomenology was incapable of affirming what he took to be the absolute validity of arithmetic principles. In many ways, what is at stake in Badiou’s and Meillassoux’s speculative critiques of phenomenology is a resurrection of Frege’s critique: namely, phenomenology’s apparent difficulty discovering in thought that which transcends it—its absolute ground, reality in and of itself. For Frege, the transcendent, absolute ground for thought was, by contrast, discoverable, at least in part, through mathematics.
For Frege and his followers, the laws of mathematics which ground logic must be conceived of as existing entirely independently from human perception lest it lose its validity. Even if there were no thinker to do the calculation, Frege insists, two and two must still make four. Such transcendental harmonies exceed human meaning making, he insists. Instead, Frege thinks, such arithmetic principles must be thought of as the language of the stars and the music of the spheres, and therein lies their status as the absolute ground for thought. Since the principles of mathematics must be valid independently of human thought, he reasoned, their foundations must lie in that which is separate from and outside of human thought, in some absolute. Given this conviction, it was with good reason that Frege was suspicious of Husserl, who in 1887 defined mathematics and numbers as nothing more than a category of human understanding, one formulated by consciousness according to the structures of social life.9 What this amounted to, for Frege, was an attack on the absolute power of mathematics. In Husserl’s account, Frege feared, mathematics becomes nothing more than a singular and unusual form of human language, no different in status really than Mandarin or French, and not, as he insisted, the absolute language of material reality itself.
The essence of the problem with the phenomenological project according to Frege was this way in which it appeared to reduce reality to the structures of subjective life, thereby denying from the outset the possibility of any full access to absolute reality in itself. In effect, thinks Frege, what Husserl’s phenomenology accomplishes is the final disavowal of the possibility of any certifiable knowledge of reality in itself: reality as it exists independent from our perception of it. As a result, he reasons, the only thing a rigorous phenomenology could actually accomplish would be a detailed accounting of the psychological structures of subjective experience. Far from establishing a transcendental basis for a science then, which is precisely what Husserl proposed his phenomenological project would complete, Frege argued that Husserl’s assumptions effectively eradicated the possibility of a full and robust concept of science by limiting human access to any absolute, asubjective, and preexistent structures and patterns present in the universe itself.
From this it is clear that the speculative critique of phenomenology which decries it as a kind of correlationism is most definitely not new. It is instead simply the newest version of the Fregian critique of phenomenology as a form of psychologism. The link between these two critiques even extends into the commitment by the authors of both to the absolute nature of arithmetic principles. Alain Badiou, for example, has expressly called for an effort to reframe philosophical ontology in the language of mathematics.10 According to Badiou, “Pure presentation as such, abstracting all reference to [the] ‘that which’—which is to say, then, being-as-being, being as pure multiplicity—can be thought only through mathematics.”11 This is a suggestion which Meillassoux has seconded in his praise of “mathematics’ ability to discourse about the great outdoors, to discourse about a past where both humanity and life are absent.”12 Through mathematics, Badiou and Meillassoux think with Frege, philosophy has access to an absolute reality, one which exists outside of and beyond the structures and limitations of human consciousness. In this regard, all three conclude, mathematics is more equipped to ground ethical and political projects than anything discoverable within the phenomenological tradition.
For Husserl, famously, such pre-critical conceptions of an absolute reality accessible outside of and beyond human perception are naïve—necessarily resorting to a kind of naturalism that he thinks simply cannot bear any serious scrutiny. It was in fact precisely against such naturalisms that Husserl initiated his project, identifying within them the seeds of a “crisis” which threatened, according to him, the very foundations of science.13 Thus the whole phenomenological project was conceived by him as a critique of and argument against something not unlike the sort of “speculation” called for by his contemporary critics. And yet, Husserl was not unchallenged by the charge of psychologism brought against him by Frege and others. To the contrary, he was very nearly obsessed with this critique and returned to it consistently throughout his work. Indeed, even a quick survey of his oeuvre reveals him dedicating almost as much time defending his project against the charge of psychologism as articulating the aims and methods of that project. From Volume 1 of the Logical Investigations, his first major work published in 1900, where we find the most extended defense of the phenomenological method against the critique of psychologism,14 to section B of Part II of the Crisis, written near the end of Husserl’s life, where the transcendental status of phenomenological philosophy is asserted almost dogmatically,15 Husserl appears incapable of launching even a cursory account of the phenomenological method without taking at least some time to shore it up against the possible critique of psychologism. In all of these passages, what Husserl suggests is that what ultimately saves phenomenology from falling into psychologism is the method of inquiry he proposed it must take: the phenomenological method. In particular, he cited what he called the power of the phenomenological reduction to buoy phenomenology up from the depths of mere psychologism.
According to Husserl, since phenomenological inquiry occupies a liminal space between the empirical sciences and psychologistic idealisms, it necessarily runs the risk of collapsing into either errancy: psychologism on the one hand, and naïve naturalism on the other. What protects it from doing so, Husserl assured his readers, are the methodological constraints demanded by proper phenomenological research. The phenomenological reduction, first intimated in the Logical Investigations but most fully articulated in Ideas I, was for Husserl what guaranteed that the phenomenological project not fall into either errancy and instead fulfilled its aim to ground and secure the foundations of scientific inquiry.16 Through the reduction, he insists, “nothing at all stands in the way of accomplishing a transcendental . . . science of the lived in experiences.”17 By ensuring a properly phenomenological attitude, free from the vicissitudes of naturalistic assumptions and commonplace judgments, according to Husserl, the reduction grants philosophy immediate access to precisely the kind of “immanent,” “absolute,” and “empirical” “givenness” of phenomena sought by the empirical sciences and the contemporary speculative realists.18 Indeed, according to Husserl, it is in fact only by way of this reduction that some absolutely pure and immediately given “this” can be encountered at all without falling into the problems of naturalism. In recognition of this fact, contemporary phenomenologist Dan Zahavi has concluded that Husserl, in particular, and phenomenology, in general, are ultimately immune to Frege’s critique and its contemporary speculative revival.19 The problem with both, he thinks, is that they miss what is not only ultimately at stake in phenomenological research—namely, precisely the kind of absolute reality they seek; more importantly, they miss what is truly radical, in the most original sense of the word, in the phenomenological approach to the absolute. To understand the basis of his claim, let us examine what are perhaps the two most radical elements of Husserl’s thought. Thusly we will begin to understand how and why phenomenology can be of use to us in our present attempt to discover a simultaneously universal and actual absolute capable of grounding a new approach to ethical judgment. The first of these two claims lies hidden within the rallying cry of the Husserlian project itself: zu den sachen selbst, back to things themselves.
The radical foundations of the phenomenological revolution
When first reading Husserl, one is likely to note the superficial resemblance between his call to return to “things themselves” and Kant’s renunciation of “things-in-themselves” in the first critique. This is of course a homophonic connection which only exists in translation. In the original German, Husserl’s sachen selbst bears no immediate connection to Kant’s Ding-an-sich. This is nevertheless an instructive confusion. For however exterior to the language this connection is in the original, it is a connection which reveals all the same something interior and essential to Husserl’s project: namely, the way in which it revolutionizes the Kantian critique, turning it, as it were, on its head.
The hard core of the Kantian system is the claim that it is impossible to rationally conceive of things existing “in themselves.” Such noumenal objects, as Kant calls them, exceed the scope of human perception. As such, he argues, while such noumena may exist and may function as a ground for human experience, they cannot be known or addressed as such. Indeed, according to Kant, one cannot even talk about them in any meaningful way as actual. At best, one can think of them as possible objects—one can act “as if” they are out there. But such a move is ultimately a kind of leap of faith for him, albeit a rationally grounded one. According to Kant, therefore, these possible objects should not be treated as the actual ground of human experience. Instead, he argues, one must acknowledge that the real and actual ground of phenomenal experience lies in the transcendental structures of subjectivity itself: the a priori concepts of space and time, for example. It is these a priori concepts which, argues Kant, while functionally empty without the content of a posteriori experience, are the real ground of phenomenal experience.20 This is the hard core of Kant’s critique of dogmatic metaphysics: that no absolute reality independent of the structures of consciousness is accessible to consciousness. Hence his, and the subsequent history of philosophy’s, attempt to ground ethical judgment in something other than the absolute in-itself.
In calling for a return to the sache of “things themselves,” it was Husserl’s aim to question the grounding assumptions of the Kantian schema and to reconcile this split between phenomenal and noumenal realities. For Husserl, phenomenal life must be grounded anew in a more primal encounter with some external reality. In this regard, Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology can be read as a direct response to Kant’s transcendental idealism—not a rejection of it, but a revolution of its assumptions.
For Husserl, prior to the subjective experience of objective reality, there must be a more immediate engagement with things. Husserl famously names the raw material of this primal engagement the pure plena of noetic data. 21 For him, this pure plena, this unstructured noetic material, is the ultimate ground and condition for subjective experience, even the abstract concepts of time and space. Of course, he concedes with Kant, in order for this noetic data to take on any real meaning or value for the subject as this or that concrete object, it must be apprehended and organized according to certain noematic ideas, as he calls them, which motivate a subject’s judgments or actions.22 Nevertheless, Husserl insists throughout his work, such noematic ideas are not primary, but secondary to the nonsubjective consciousness of pure noetic data. That is, they do not precede the reception of noetic data, but come afterward, as an adopted structure which gives meaning to and makes sense of that data.
The call to return to “things themselves” is in part for Husserl a call to push beyond the noematic structures of subjectivity and to discover beneath them the pre-subjective ground of the thinghood absolutely present in the noetic data itself. It is, in other words, a call to discover beneath the Kantian structures of transcendental idealism a more primal ontological immanence. To put it another way, using the language of phenomenologist Ed Casey, what Husserl wants to do is to show that in order to derive the abstract ideas of space and time, for example, we must have the lived experience of place and history first.23 It is from more primal experiences of this sort, Husserl thinks, that the structures of egoic life arise and subsequently shape phenomenal life qua subjectivity and objectivity.
This argument is made especially clear in Husserl’s later works, particularly the Krisis (1934–37), but is equally present throughout his career.24 Take, for example, the first section of Ideas II (particularly alinea §8 through §11), which Husserl began writing in 1912 and later amended and added to in 1928 (after the rigorous reworking of Edith Stein in 1916 and Ludwig Landgrebe from 1923 to 1925).25 There Husserl expounds upon the primacy of what he refers to as the sensuous (e.g., sense-objects, sense-data) as the pre-given ground for egoic life, a pre-given which, he argues later, is present for the ego through the aesthesis of the body.26 Such allusions to a pre-subjective aesthesis localized in a lived body can be found even in Husserl’s earliest works. Take, as another example, alinea §3 of The Basic Problems of Phenomenology (1910–11), where Husserl localizes lived experience in a pre-subjective bodily engagement.27 This same basic intuition can even be discovered in Husserl’s first explorations of consciousness (Bewusstsein) in the Logical Investigations (1900–1), which, he argues there, underlies and supports all egoic experience,28 and which, as early as 1907, he situates in what he calls the “kinaesthetic sensations of the Body.”29
The assertion that beneath the phenomenal life of the subject there lies a more primal pre-subjective ground is absolutely essential to understanding the power of Husserl’s critique of Kant. And, it leads directly to the second of what I take to be Husserl’s most radical claims: the recognition that this pre-subjective ground is a shared lifeworld (lebenswelt), one which is constituted intersubjectively with and through our interaction with others.30 Others are not for Husserl, as they are for Kant, merely an object of consciousness: something we confront on the basis of our subjective structures or conceive of according to our noematic ideas. This is a point Husserl makes clear in alinea §62 of his 1929 Cartesian Meditations.31 There he argues that other consciousness resides in the pre-given sensuous lifeworld of pure noetic data. As such, the experience of any other, he insists, precedes subjective life and, as he makes especially clear in Ideas I and II, even conditions it.
Our pre-subjective contact with others is mediated, thinks Husserl, by the primal affect of empathy (einfühlung).32 It is through empathy, he argues, that one connects with others pre-subjectively; and, it is therefore in empathy, he claims, that the conditions for subjective life are established. For Husserl, empathy operates as the channel through which the ego receives the noematic structures around which subjectivity and objectivity are organized. As the source of these structures, the influence of others exists immanently within every phenomenal apperception for Husserl. It was for this reason that he writes in the Krisis: “We, each ‘I-the-man’ and all of us together, belong to the world as living with one another in the world; and the world is our world, valid for our consciousness as existing precisely through this ‘living together.’”33 The objective world and my subjective experience of it are inexorably shared intersubjective constructs for Husserl. They are products of this pre-subjective “living together.” All reality is, in other words, socially structured for Husserl. And, since phenomenal life is fundamentally and inexorably structured by social interactions, Husserl concludes, any rigorous inquiry into the nature of the world must involve an inquiry into the nature of the others with whom we share it. It is here, in this absolutely pre-subjective relation with others which is guaranteed by Husserl’s phenomenology, that we begin to catch a glimpse of the possibility of discovering a new absolute ground for ethical and political action missed by the speculative thinkers. Indeed, it was precisely this possibility opened up by phenomenology which attracted a young Emmanuel Levinas, unquestionably one of the most influential ethical thinkers of the twentieth century, to travel to Freiburg in 1928 to study for a year with Husserl.
Emmanuel Levinas and the possibility of phenomenological ethics
According to Levinas, the history of Western philosophy prior to Husserl had been little more than a history of various idealisms, a history he defined as the perpetuation of “the myth of a legislative consciousness of things, where difference and identity are reconciled.”34 These prevailing idealisms, argued Levinas, all rest on a fundamental error in Western philosophy which has privileged one’s self over others in the formation of conscious life—making one’s connection to their own being more primary than their connection to anything outside of or beyond their being. Levinas defined this privileging in the history of philosophy as the persistent “totalitarianism or imperialism of the Same.”35 For Levinas, the consequences of such imperialisms have been multitude: from rampant solipsism in the history of philosophy to outright violence and murder in the history of politics. It was therefore in the hopes of discovering a philosophical system which moved beyond such idealisms and violence that Levinas turned to phenomenology. In Husserl’s insistence on the intersubjective nature of the lifeworld, which he established as the foundation of conscious life, Levinas saw a possible path to discovering a nonsubjective ground for absolute ethical judgments which could overcome the violence of philosophical and political history. In his pursuit of a new absolute ground for ethical judgment which could escape the vicissitudes of the Kantian critique, we find in Levinas a project parallel to our own. But, in order to understand how Levinas forged this path, we must first understand his engagement with Martin Heidegger, Husserl’s most gifted student; for, while it is Husserl who set Levinas on his journey, it was Heidegger who pointed the direction his work would eventually take.
Martin Heidegger and primal ontology
In 1929 Levinas wrote that though he went to Freiburg “because of Husserl,” while there he “found Heidegger,” who had just taken over Husserl’s chair in philosophy.36 Heidegger was at that time just coming into his own as copies of his lecture notes and his recently published Being and Time circulated Germany, prompting what Hannah Arendt described as “rumor of the hidden [philosopher] king,” returned to save us all from our naïveté.37 In Heidegger, Levinas found an even clearer articulation of the primacy of a pre-subjective engagement with the world than was announced in Husserl’s method. According to him, “While Husserl still proposed—or seemed to propose to me—a transcendental program for philosophy, Heidegger clearly defined philosophy in relation to other forms of knowledge as ‘fundamental ontology.’”38 It was in Heidegger’s “fundamental ontology” that Levinas would finally discover the means of carrying his ethical concerns beyond the limitations of Kantian idealism. Indeed, it was this conviction that inspired him to write at that time that “[Heidegger’s] teaching and his works are the best proof of the fecundity of the phenomenological method”—the ultimate means of overcoming the errors of the past, both those which plague us intellectually and which haunt us practically.39
By developing a phenomenological analysis of the pre-subjective givenness of the world, Heidegger illuminated for Levinas what he, and even some today, saw as obscured in Husserl. For Levinas, the great achievement of Heidegger’s work lay in how it was able to abandon entirely the structures of subjectivity through an ontological analysis of a pre-subjective being-in-the-world. In Heidegger’s ontology, then, Levinas found what he had gone to Germany looking for: a way out of the “myth of the legislative consciousness.”40 The great revelation of what Heidegger called “Dasein analysis” was for Levinas this regrounding of existence in a pre-given sensuous lifeworld, a move which irrevocably cut the legs out from under philosophical idealism.41 In this way, Heidegger’s thought represented for Levinas, as he wrote in 1934, the final death knell of subjectivism in philosophy.42 What Levinas failed to realize then, and only really became aware of after the Second World War, was that what Heidegger’s work gave to him with one hand, it simultaneously took away from him with the other, what we discovered in the other side of Husserl’s radical project: the insistence on the primacy of the Other in the formation of consciousness.
For Heidegger, as for Husserl, the inexorability of being-in-the-world entails a being-with others (Mit-sein).43 Inasmuch as Dasein finds itself thrown into the world, handling and absorbed in the tool-being of the world, it finds itself thrown alongside others. Yet, despite the inexorable sociality of Dasein’s everyday being-in-the-world, Heidegger insists, in contrast to Husserl, that the fundamental ontological nature of Dasein’s being-in-the-world is not its being-with others, but what he calls its ownness, or Mineness (Jemeinigkeit).44 This is a reality which is testified to, thinks Heidegger, in the facticity of death.
One’s death, he writes, is exclusively one’s own.45 No one can rescue us from its inevitability, alleviate us from the weight it places upon our lives, nor venture into that darkness with us. As the ultimate possibility of one’s life, death is for Heidegger the expression of one’s ownmost reality, that which most de-fines or circumscribes the nature of one’s being.46 It is only through being authentically toward-death (Sein-zum-Tode), he therefore concludes, that one can discover that, despite the inexorability of being-with others, one is ultimately and always truly alone in-the-world—bound more primordially to oneself than to others. The inevitability of death, he concludes, reveals that the sociality of Dasein’s being-with others must inevitably give way to its being-its-Self (Selbstein) in recognition that others are not really a structural part of one’s own being, merely an addition to it—an addition, moreover, he argues, that presents a kind of threat to one’s being-in-the-world.47 As such, argues Heidegger, being-with others is not ultimately a modality of being-in-the-world to be embraced, but one which must be resisted. For, he thinks, when one too closely identifies with others, one risks losing sight of the singularity of his or her own being, forgetting the essenti al aloneness or mineness testified to by the inevitability of death. Heidegger names this risk inauthenticity (uneigentlichkeit), which is the possibility of not-being-one’s-own or, to romanticize it, becoming inappropriate.48 Fortunately, thinks Heidegger, no matter how suffused or entwined with others one becomes, no matter how inauthentically one lives one’s life, he or she will always hear what he calls the call of conscience (die Anrufung der gewissen): the call of one’s own being to return to what is authentic and appropriate to one’s self.49
For Heidegger, the true power of phenomenology lies in its ability to amplify this call. For him, Husserl’s summons to “return to things themselves” is nothing more than a way of hearing properly the call of conscience articulated by our being, summoning us back to what is truly ourselves. What Heidegger saw in the phenomenological method, then, was a means of resisting the temptation which he saw present in the being-of others—a way of harkening to the solicitation of being and becoming truly authentic (eigntlich). It is for this reason that so many scholars have sensed in Heidegger’s phenomenology a kind of prescriptive “ethics of authenticity.”50 Heidegger, of course, always denied this claim, insisting instead that his account of authenticity was purely descriptive. Still, there is sufficient reason to suspect that in Husserl’s epoche, Heidegger found a path through phenomenology to the kind of ethical ontology he credits with first appearing in the Hellenistic ethical systems skepticism and stoicism, two schools of thought which seem to have obsessed him as a young man.51
Levinas and the ethical primacy of the Other
This possibility of grounding an ethical project in Heidegger’s “fundamental ontology” was immediately apparent to Levinas. Indeed, part of what Levinas seems to have found so invigorating in Heidegger’s project was the way in which it refigured Husserl’s call to “return to things themselves” as an ethical mandate, one which revealed the primacy of ethical phenomena. Indeed, his earliest works praise Heidegger precisely for the way he united phenomenological analysis with an ethos of life. But, what began to trouble Levinas increasingly, particularly in his work from 1946 onward, was the way in which Heidegger’s particular account of the ethical power of the call to “return to things themselves” sacrificed the primal sociality of the shared lifeworld which he found so alluring in Husserl’s work. What Levinas sought to do in his mature work was to reinfuse Heidegger’s fundamental ontology with Husserl’s insistence on this primordial sociality within the shared lifeworld. To do this, however, required radically refiguring Husserl’s account of the relationship between the self and others. Specifically, Levinas aimed to recast the appearance of the other to the self as a power which appeared outside of and beyond the structures of subjective thought and perception: not as an intersubjective phenomenon, but as an extra- or supra-subjective phenomenon—indeed, as an absolute power capable of radically reconfiguring our understanding of ourselves and our understanding of ethical responsibility. To indicate the superiority and power of the position which he thought others occupied in the life of the subject, Levinas took to capitalizing the first letter of the word: the Other.
According to Levinas, in order to account for contact with this Other as a truly primal structure within one’s being-in-the-world which nevertheless comes somehow from outside of or “otherwise than” one’s own being, we must situate the appearance of the Other “on its own [ground]”—“outside of” and “beyond” the structures of subjectivity.52 Only in this way, he reasons, can contact with the Other remain truly prior to subjectivity and therefore not only free from it, but capable of effecting it radically and absolutely. Only thusly, he argues, can we frame our interaction with the Other outside the confines of idealism, subjectivism, and ultimately violence. What Levinas’s phenomenology attempts to accomplish, in other words, is to identify in the Other something which, while apparent to the subject, signals the subject’s access to some absolute reality which lies outside of and beyond itself and operates as its ground and condition. In this regard, we find in Levinas’s account of the Other precisely the kind of radical asubjective absolute which Frege and the speculative realists claim is renounced by phenomenology, one which could be used to ground not only science anew, but also, ultimately, absolute ethical judgment. It is for this reason that his work is of such vital importance to the investigation at hand.
According to Levinas, precisely such an absolute ground is made available through a phenomenological analysis of the way in which the Other appears in and through the human face (le visage) in social interactions. According to Levinas, the human face, though apparent in the world alongside other phenomenal objects of the world, nevertheless appears impossibly otherwise than such objects, as if it came from outside of the world. This is the case, he argues, due to the way that the human face is capable of standing out from the world and demanding our attention. Unlike other phenomena which remain perfectly in their place in the world, the face of the Other, claims Levinas, somehow exceeds its context, appearing, as it were, on its own horizon, or in its own light. Its meaning is not, like the pen upon the desk, or the cup upon the table, defined by its surrounding or use. Its meaning is defined by itself, on its own. In this regard, he argues, the face of the Other does not play by the rules of the world—it appears otherwise than other objects. For these reasons, he thinks, though the human face is in fact a discrete phenomenon in the world, it somehow appears to us as if it came from “outside of” and “beyond” our world. Or, put another way, though the face of the Other is perceived by the self, its meaning does not seem to come from the self—one cannot define the meaning of the face of the Other for him or herself. Rupturing as it does with the way in which other p henomena appear, Levinas nominates the face of the Other as a kind of anarchic phenomenon: one which “disturbs” or unsettles the grounding order or arche of phenomenality—one which ruptures with what we take to be the horizons, limits, and rules of perception.53 It is for this reason, he claims, that the face of the Other appears as an “enigma” to the perceiving subject, one which appears from the “hither side of consciousness” and which cannot be accounted for by the subject nor ever fully encompassed within his or her understanding.54 Indeed, according to Levinas, the nature of Other apparent in the human face exceeds any set of finite qualities which the subject may use to describe or circumscribe its nature. As such, he concludes, though the face of the Other appears in a finite and definite form, it nevertheless appears within the consciousness of the perceiving subject as a kind of infinitude.55
It is for these reasons, according to Levinas, that the face of the Other is so valuable for reframing an understanding of the nature of the self; for while it appears to the self in a concrete and actual form, it cannot be reduced to the morphe of that which is seen by the self. To the contrary, he claims, the face of the Other somehow exceeds its form, “overflowing the plastic image it leaves me,” testifying to the fact that the self is in contact through it to something which exceeds it.56 This is what defines the unique nature of the human face according to Levinas: the fact that it “is present in its refusal to be contained”—that “it cannot be comprehended, that is, encompassed” by any set of finite attributes or descriptions—and thus signals the death of any idealistic account of selfhood.57 The enigmatic and anarchic nature of the face signals for Levinas a breach within the totality of subjective life presumed by various idealisms and opens up, thereby, a lane to the land of that which lies beyond phenomenality and subjectivity—a lane to the land of the absolute.
Evidence of this anarchic power present in the face lies, according to Levinas, in any number of concrete lived social experiences, most notably shame (la honte), conscience (la conscience), and what he calls metaphysical desire (désir métaphysique), experiences he spends considerable time unpacking in his work.58 Such experiences are for him radicalized versions of Husserl’s empathy or Heidegger’s call of conscience: that within us which testifies to our primal responsibility to that which exceeds us. The difference of his analysis is that where Husserl’s empathy and Heidegger’s call function to reinforce a subject’s connection to itself, shame, conscience, and metaphysical desire operate inversely for Levinas: they function, he thinks, to destabilize the centrality of the subject’s relation to itself. What we experience in shame, conscience, and metaphysical desire is an absolute reconnoitering of a subject’s attention—a pulling away from the self which opens up the possibility of relating to something radically and absolutely other than the self. It is on the basis of this new relation, Levinas argues, that not only the self but ethics can be understood anew outside the limitation of the Kantian critique. Understanding how such a relation is possible, however, requires a detailed phenomenological accounting of the experience of one, or all, of these sorts of experiences. Let us turn for now to just one: shame.
According to Levinas, there is a qualitative difference between shame, guilt, and remorse.59 Whereas guilt and remorse arise from subject’s reflection upon itself, a reflection in which it finds itself lacking in relation to some abstract or virtual ideal, shame occurs, thinks Levinas, spontaneously, as if for no reason. It is, he argues, the instantaneous affect one feels before the presence of an Other who, simply by being there, “calls into question the naïve right of my power, my glorious spontaneity as a living being” and forces me to give an account of myself.60 Shame is thus for Levinas the uncomfortable and unaccountable experience of finding one’s self all of a sudden no longer comfortable nor at home in one’s own being. It is, in other words, the experience of having been abruptly displaced from the center of one’s own being by something or someone outside of, beyond, and other to oneself. According to Levinas, shame is this experience of being forced to examine oneself in a new light, one which does not originate from one’s self, but which originates with something outside of one’s self: the Other. What one discovers through an analysis of this experience, he contends, is not only the fact that “my freedom does not have the last word; [that] I am not alone in the world”; one also discovers that the Other is capable of requisitioning my experience of myself and reorienting that experience such that I see myself from an alien perspective.61 What one discovers, in other words, is that, as Levinas puts it, the Other is “situated on a height” above us and bears a more primordial connection to our being than we do ourselves!62
As Levinas puts it, in shame we discover that “the Other measures me with a gaze incomparable to the gaze by which I discover him. Th[is] dimension of height in which the Other is placed is, as it were, the primary curvature of being from which the privilege of the Other results, the gradient [denivellement] of transcendence” which allows the Other to call us into question.63 Thus, Levinas concludes, though the Other appears in the mode of a face which I may recognize, a face which appears to me as an equal to whom I can speak, what we experience in shame is the fact that this “interlocutor is not a Thou, he is a You; he reveals himself in his lordship. Thus exterio rity coincides with a mastery. My freedom is thus challenged by a Master.”64 “The Other—the absolutely other,” Levinas writes, “paralyzes possession, which he contests by his epiphany in the face. He can contest my possession only because he approaches me not [merely] from outside but from above.”65 So it is that by attending to the experience of shame, Levinas argues, one can discover through phenomenology a subjective experience which testifies to that which lies beyond the structures of the subject: namely, the absolute. “Shame,” he writes, “does not have the structure of consciousness and clarity. It is oriented in the inverse direction; its subject is exterior to me,” its subject is the Other, the absolute.66
What a proper understanding of shame reveals, according to Levinas, is the fact that subjectivity is not in fact closed off to some absolute reality, as the Kantian tradition would have it, but is in fact inexorably related to the absolute. What a phenomenological analysis of shame and other similar experiences reveals, he argues, is that in and through the face of the Other the subject is not only always already in contact with that which is absolutely beyond it, its very experience of itself is grounded and conditioned through this relation. According to Levinas, “The relation with the Other” opened in the presentation of the face “does not immediately have the structure of intentionality. It is not opening onto . . ., aiming at . . ., which is already an opening onto being and an aiming at being. The absolutely Other [of the face] is not reflected in a consciousness; it resists the indiscretion of intentionality.”67 As such, he thinks, a proper phenomenology of the power of the face not only calls for a reconception of the nature of the self, it calls for a reconception of the nature of ethical judgment. This power of the face of the Other to “put . . . into question” the nature of the self and bring it into relation to that which lies absolutely outside of it is what creates for Levinas the possibility of reframing ethical consideration anew, outside the limitations of the Kantian critique, in what he calls absolute responsibility.68
Responsibility and ethical subjectivity
To be a subject, according to Levinas, is to be fundamentally and inescapably responsible to the Other—always capable of being summoned to respond to the Other, “put into question,” and required to give an account of oneself. This responsibility is, he thinks, the primary condition of subjective existence.69 “To utter ‘I’,” Levinas writes, is “to affirm the irreducible singularity in which the apology is pursued,” it “means to possess a privileged place with regard to responsibilities for which no one can replace me and from which no one can release me. To be unable to shirk: this is the I.”70 The relation we have to the Other is not therefore, he concludes, a mode of intersubjectivity, as Husserl would have it—for it is not according to him established horizontally between equals. To the contrary, according to Levinas, we relate to the Other as a “superior,” a “master.”71 Our relation to the Other is thus what he calls a “transascendence,” a relation to that which exceeds our being.72
Given the supra-ontological nature of this relationship through which the subjectivity of the subject is founded, Levinas argues that the subject should not be thought of as “a modality of essence,” or Being as a whole, but as dependent upon an absolute which falls “outside” of and “otherwise than” being.73 According to Levinas, “Our inquiry concerned with the otherwise than being catches sight, in the very hypostasis of a subject, its subjectification, of an ex-ception; a null-site on the hither side of the negativity which is always speculatively recuperable, an outside of the absolute which can no longer be stated in terms of being.”74 From this he concludes that the subject must be considered not primarily as a kind of being-in-the-world, but as the site of a kind of rupture within being: that place wherein being loses its hold and something absolutely beyond Being manifests.75 As such, he claims, “properly speaking [the subject] does not exist.”76 The experience of being a self is not therefore of being-in-the-world, as Heidegger would have it, or of being conscious, as Husserl put it. Instead, it is for Levinas the experience of the “locus and null-site of [the] break-up,” of identity and being affected by the responsibility one feels for that which is absolutely beyond it, for the Other.77 This is a radical redefinition by Levinas of the traditional understanding of selfhood. For Levinas, the self is not primarily an experience of its own being. It is instead the experience of that which is Other than it—of that which lies on the hither side of its own being—of that which is absolutely outside of it. As such, Levinas defines the self as a form of “exteriority,”78 a “concave without a convex.”79 “Subjectivity,” he writes, “is vulnerability, is sensibility,” it is to always already be in contact with that which exceeds and precedes it.80 Subjectivity is for Levinas, in other words, to always already be in contact with the absolute.
Phenomenology and the absolute
This, thinks Levinas, is the crowning achievement of phenomenology: its ability to reveal the priority and superiority of that which is situated outside of and beyond the structures of subjectivity in the formation of subjective experience. Its lasting legacy, he thinks, is to overcome the limitations of the Kantian critique by detailing through a rigorous accounting of everyday experiences like shame and desire how the subject is always already related to that which lies absolutely beyond it. But, even more importantly for Levinas, it is capable, thereby, of redefining and reestablishing the nature of ethical deliberation upon this absolute. Indeed, according to Levinas, since the Other to whom the subject is related primordially is situated “beyond” or “otherwise than [the subject’s] being,”81 the relation the self has to it “is not therefore ontology,” he concludes, but “ethics.”82 Hence Levinas’s claim that ethics, and not metaphysics, must properly be thought of as “first philosophy.”83 According to Levinas, only ethics is capable of understanding properly the relation we bear to ourselves through the Other manifest as an absolute power. The Other, he writes, “enters into our world from an absolutely foreign sphere, that is, precisely from an absolute, which in fact is the very name for ultimate strangeness.”84 And, it is for this reason that it holds such a power over us. But, manifest as it is in the social relation we have with a specific human face, the power of the absolute appears to us as a form of ethical responsibility. So it is that we discover in Levinas’s work not only a way of responding to the concerns of Frege and the speculative realists; much more importantly, we discover a way of overcoming the limitations of the Kantian critique explored in the last chapter. What we discover is, in other words, a way of regrounding ethical judgment anew upon a potentially simultaneously universal and actual absolute. Through an ethics grounded in a proper phenomenological understanding of the Other, we may finally find the means of accomplishing Meillassoux’s call to reinscribe “value into being,” thereby overcoming the vicissitudes of the ethical disjunction initiated by the Kantian critique. Perhaps in Levinas’s Other we have discovered precisely the kind of “great outdoors” sought by Meillassoux in mathematics—one which while remaining faithful to “the undeniable progress that is due to the labour of [Kant’s] critique” nevertheless provides for us a ground for critiquing the kind of evil given way to by every ethical project emergent from that critique. In this regard, we may find through his work a way beyond the ethical deadlock which has haunted post-Kantian philosophy, and perhaps even a ground for a robust ethical critique of the kind of evil such philosophies have justified. As we will discover more in the next chapter, however, what Levinas’s analysis gives us with one hand, it takes away with the other, requiring us to turn our understanding of an absolutely grounded ethics on its head—away from the ethics of acquiesence and toward an ethics of resistance.