The World Inhospitable to Levinas

Abstract

All great thinkers create powerful concepts and/or images of their own but as a rule design them together with a complete universe to accommodate them and infuse them with sense. For Emmanuel Levinas, world he constructed was the of which was self-consciously a utopia in both of its inseparable senses (i.e., of no place and good place). The of two was primal scene of morality, test-tube in which selves germinate and sprout. It was also only stage on which such selves could play themselves, i.e., as beings, instead of playing scripted roles and reciting someone else's lines. The primal scene of morality is realm of face-to-face, of tremendous encounter with Other as a Face. Morality, which in Levinas' terms referred to being for Other, has a notoriously awesome potential for love and hatred, for self-sacrifice and domination, care and cruelty. Ambivalence is its prime mover. And yet of two is capable of sustaining universe on its own. In this morality does not need codes or rules, reason or knowledge, argument or conviction. It would not understand them anyway; morality is all that (one cannot even say that impulse is ineffable or mute since ineffability and dumbness come after language). The impulse triggered by Face precedes speech. It sets its standards as it goes. It does not know guilt or innocence. It is pure in only true sense of purity, purity of naivety. As Vladimir Jankelevitch has pointed out, one cannot be pure except under condition of not having purity, that is to say of not possessing it knowingly.1 The moral of postulated by Levinas as birth-home and homeland of morality, is naive; it does not know (has not been told) that it is a let alone a one. Only when gazed upon from outside, does congeal into a couple, a pair, a they out there. It is outside gaze that objectifies and thus makes it into a unit, a thing that can be described as it is, handled, compared with others it, assessed, evaluated, and ruled on. But from point of view of me as a self there is no we, no couple, no supraindividual entity with its and rights. Inside there is just me, with my responsibility, with my care, with command that commands me and me alone, and there is Face, catalyst and midwife. My togetherness with Other won't disappearance or opting out of myself or Other. There would be nothing left to survive that disappearance. Togetherness in moral party is vulnerable, weak, fragile, and lives precariously with a shadow of death never far away and all this because neither I nor Other is replaceable. It is precisely this non-replaceability that makes our togetherness moral. Because each of us is irreplaceable, it makes no sense to think of actions in terms of interests. There is no way in which actions of either of us could be classified as egoistic or altruistic. Good can be seen only in its opposition to evil. How can one say inside a in which no one is replaceable, that what is good for one partner may be bad for another? It is inside such a moral moral of that my responsibility cannot be fathomed and fulfilled; it feels unlimited and becomes a whole life responsibility. It is under this condition that command needs no argument to gain authority, nor support of a threat of sanctions. It feels like a command, and an unconditional command at that. But all this changes with appearance of Third. Now, true society appears, and naive, unruled, and unruly impulse, simultaneously necessary and sufficient condition of moral party, does not suffice any more. The Moral Party Broken Into In society, unlike in universe of two, Levinas ' postulate of putting ethics before ontology sounds odd. …