Embodying Original Ethics

Abstract

Following in the footsteps of Emmanuel Levinas, John Caputo has recently established himself as a forceful critic of the of Heidegger, which argues that ethics must be based on ontology. For both Levinas and Caputo, the ethical relation in which I am called to responsibility to the other more primordial than an understanding of Being, as this depicted in various forms from Parmenides to Heidegger. According to Levinas, the ethical relation consists specifically in the to encounter with the other, whereas for Caputo it consists more concretely in our encounter with the afflicted flesh of the other. After an initial sympathetic engagement with Heidegger's ontology in a series of earlier works, including The Mystical Element of Heidegger's Thought and Radical Hermeneutics, Caputo's critical Levinasian position against Heidegger has only recently been worked out in two powerful works, Demythologizing Heidegger and Against Ethics. 1 this essay I will provide a response, from a Heideggerian perspective, to Caputo's position and to that of Levinas on which it based. However, this Heideggerian perspective by no means an orthodox one. Rather, with the aid of the thought of Merleau-Ponty and David Michael Levin, it critically appropriates and transforms Heidegger's by embodying it in an ontology of the body. First, I shall show that, in spite of their aversion to ontology, both Levinas and Caputo rely upon ontologies, including an ontology of the body, to make their claims for the primordiality of ethics over ontology. Moreover, the various themes of these hidden ontologies are either incomplete or inadequate for both ontological understanding and ethics. Second, in order to indicate how these shortcomings can be overcome, I shall present the outlines of a fuller ontology, and especially an ontology of the body, based on the work of Merleau-Ponty and Levin. Finally, I shall argue that this ontology of the body can lead to a workable embodiment of Heidegger's in concrete ethical relations and that this embodied original ethics required in order to fulfill concretely the various possibilities of that kind of ethical relation on which Levinas and Caputo focus. The Hidden Ontology of the Body in Levinas and Caputo Violence and Metaphysics, Jacques Derrida develops a forceful critique of Levinas's ethcs. One aspect of this critique to show that Levinas's reduction of Heidegger's notion of Being to a concept oversimplified, since Levinas ignores Heidegger's insistence on the concealment and difference which are essential to Being as an event (Ereignis). Derrida also points out that, while historical Being as Heidegger understands it does to a great extent involve the kind of violence that Levinas ascribes to it, it still preferable to Levinas's a-historical account of the transcendent face of the other, which in fact absolute violence since it allows for no response. It precludes all response because it overwhelms any idea I can have of it and breaks through my historical consciousness, the only basis I have for generating a response. Related to this critique Derrida's insistence that the experience of the face would not be possible if Being were not already implied in it. How could I experience the face of the Other without the experience that it (Being) a face, without understanding it as a face (and not, say, as aliment)? In effect the face the inaugural unity of a naked glance and of a right to speech. But eyes and mouth make a face only if, beyond need, they can be `let be,' if they see and say what such as it is, if they reach the Being of what is (VM 143). Moreover,Derrida argues that, in the idea of the face as that which calls my freedom into question, Levinas actually presupposing a particular type of Being or substantiality, when he uses the metaphor of the face as the trace of God. …