Facing Nature

Abstract

For all his radicality and originality, Emmanuel Levinas nonetheless has general conception of the ethical that is arguably quite Kantian at least one of its aspects. Ethics is not, one could say both Kant and Levinas, concerned maximizing the return to oneself the economy of the same; it does not entail any sort of calculative reasoning about the relative goods or harms that one can receive from an action. What happens is something new, something unprecedented the life of being concerned for its own well-being. Ethics is something radically un-economical. In order to articulate this break economy, Levinas attempts to distance the human being from sphere which all is reducible to causes and effects, profits and losses. And to do this he distinguishes between two orders of things. Section 11 of Totality and Infinit, describes how the subject establishes itself the world, its attempts at delaying the uncertainties of the future through the activities of acquiring possessions and sheltering itself from the forces of nature. These reflections are aimed at showing us level of human existence which the leading motive for action is self-concern, the care that one takes of oneself, the conatus essendi. For Levinas this is the animal order, the realm which there appear beings who are concerned their being, beings for whom the fundamental question surrounds their persistence being, literally their livelihood. Levinas equates this order the thought of both Heidegger and Darwin, saying that a being is something that is attached to being, to its own being. That is Darwin's idea. The being of animals is struggle for life. A struggle for life ethics. It is question of might.1 The thought that this is realm without ethics indicates that we are dealing an autonomous and not heteronomous order because for Levinas relationality is here seen to be relation to oneself, return to oneself the care that one takes for oneself, which shows that here there is to be found nothing truly heteros, nothing other. Animal existence is essentially appropriative, re-appropriation and recuperation of oneself, and this is thought which colors Levinas' analyses of everything from eating to sexuality. Although Levinas is convinced that Western philosophy has been, the notable exceptions of Plato and Descartes, an elaborate account of this egoist ontology, he is equally sure that there is something more to be said. He contrasts the animal order that of the human, telling us that in relation to the animal, the human is new phenomenon (PM 172). This is due to the fact that the human order there is break being, detachment or distancing from being not found the animal. It is, Levinas insists, that 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 (PM 172). The human order is the ethical order, the order which being is no longer being-for-itself but is instead being-for-others, being-concerned-for-the-other. Diverging sharply from Kant, for Levinas is not life of autonomous reason presenting itself as law to itself, but the advent of the other, the appearance on the scene of something which assumes priority over myself, something heteros proclaiming the nomos. But the question as to the nature of this novel event of ethics, the source of the break being, as it were, is difficult one. Those familiar the work of Levinas are no doubt inclined to respond by saying that it is the face of the other that establishes this order, dis-ordering of myself and re-orientation towards the other. And this is undoubtedly true. But what are we who are concerned not only human others but also the alterity of other-than-human others to make of this? What is Levinas saying to us? …