The Status of Saying: Witness against Rhetoric in Levinas’s Philosophy

Tomohiro Inukai

doi:10.3390/rel9120410

Abstract

In regard to rhetoric, Emmanuel Levinas stands against its violence. In spite of the rhetoric, he justifies the notion of discourse in Totality and Infinity in order to prove the possibility of the ethical relationship between the Same and the Other. In later works, he also criticizes the ontological language, which is used in the tradition of occidental philosophy. He explores a third way and proposes the notion of Saying, opposed to Said, as ethical language, witness in Otherwise than Being. However, there is a paradoxical structure of language. Although the Saying precedes the Said, the system of language and even the ontological language, it has to be reduced to this latter when it is expressed as philosophical form. The present study situates what is at stake in the criticism of rhetoric and ontological language by Levinas and examines the notion of witness as opposed to these forms of language. Witness is a concrete form of ethical language that consists in “for the other” of the ultimate passivity of the subjectivity. Therefore, the Saying is possible only as witness where the subject is exposed to “a calling into question” by the Other.

Highlights

This article discusses the development of Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophy of language.His philosophy of language gives a brief insight into the diverse limits between the following fields: philosophical language and the language used in everyday life; philosophical language and literature; and philosophical language and theological language, etc.1 These limits, which are discussed in this study, have a paradoxical and unsteady structure and, it is not possible to reduce them to any one of the mentioned disciplines
We first analyzed the notions of rhetoric and discourse in Totality and Infinity, and the analysis demonstrated the nature of rhetoric; it corrupts the freedom of the other as violence in the Socratic order
Levinas changed the perspective of his philosophy rather than those notions adopted in Totality and Infinity

Summary

Introduction

This article discusses the development of Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophy of language. His philosophy of language gives a brief insight into the diverse limits between the following fields: philosophical language and the language used in everyday life; philosophical language and literature; and philosophical language and theological language, etc.. Religions 2018, 9, 410 the Saying to the Said has to be carried out in the frame of philosophy Based on this logic the following questions shall be discussed: Is it possible that the Saying holds importance in the philosophy? We need to think about the ‘religious’ aspects or the meaning of religion in Levinas’s philosophy because Levinas does not refuse to refer to the ethical relation between people as religion insofar as the ethical relation between the Same and the Other does not constitute the totality, and insofar as it defines God and not the reverse. The paper examines the status of the Saying in relation to witness

Restricted Rhetoric and Teaching

Cartesian Order and Idea of Infinity

Witness

Conclusions