The Ethics of Emmanuel Levinas

by Diane Perpich

Too often, Levinas's thought is distanced from traditional ethical enterprises, especially from normative ethics. It is put into the service of directly normative ends such as a call for respect for women or disadvantaged social groups, or for new normative understandings of the relation of doctors to patients or teachers to students and the like. There is nothing wrong with using Levinas for normative purposes, but this demands that we be clear on what account of normativity can be found in his work. Perpich re-reads central ethical concepts in Levinas's thought (alterity, the face, and responsibility) in order to offer the first full account of his contribution to our understanding of normativity or the ways in which others' claims are binding on us. She then extends this interpretation into two vexed areas of Levinas scholarship: the possibility of developing an environmental ethics based on his work and the possibility of applying his ethics to the emancipatory projects of new left social movements.

Genres: Philosophy

254 pages, Paperback

First published August 6, 2008

Reviews

[Zachary · Rating 5 out of 5]

Diane Perpich’s The Ethics of Emmanuel Levinas is one of the most lucid, most helpful commentaries on Levinas’s philosophy that I have read. Perpich, an associate professor of philosophy and associate director of women’s studies at Clemson University, is a remarkably careful and perceptive reader of Levinas and, with this text, has earned her place as one of his foremost recent expositors. Prima facie, her approach to Levinas may not seem especially distinct; after all, the title of this book simply reasserts what one often hears in synopses of Levinas’s work in surveys of French twentieth century philosophy: Levinas is an ethicist, he asserts that “ethics is first philosophy,” and he influenced the postmodern turn to ethics in the latter half of the twentieth century. Yet Perpich demonstrates from the outset that in contemporary Levinas studies, many scholars do not really view Levinas as a traditional ethicist, while others who do view his work as “ethics” frequently misread or misinterpret the normative elements in his philosophy: “Is it certain what we mean when we speak of ethics (or philosophy) in relation to his work? . . . There appear to be two main responses to this quandary: at the one end of the spectrum are those for whom it is obvious that Levinas’s [work] has ethical import or contains an ethical address. . . . At the opposite end are those for whom it is not apparent at all that Levinas’s [work] shares more than a name with ethics as it is usually understood” (1, 3). And, “contrary to expectations, Levinas’s supporters do not cluster at one end of this continuum, nor do his critics alone crowd the other pole” (3). Sympathizers and detractors alike distance Levinas from ethics or else assert the normative aspects of his philosophy, either to herald Levinas as a revolutionary ethical thinker or to criticize the excessive and perhaps unethical responsibility to other humans Levinas describes. Perpich herself remains sympathetic to Levinas, yet astutely and appropriately critiques problematic elements in his work. Ultimately, while she remains adamant that Levinas’s account of the ethical encounter with the Other “need not and does not issue in specific directives or rules,” and that his “ethics” is neither deconstructive nor post-humanist nor even postmodern, Perpich defends the view that his work is an attempt “to say how we come to find ourselves within a moral life at all” (12). In effect, she expands upon Levinas’s claim in Totality and Infinity that “the face [of the Other] is the evidence that makes evidence possible—like the divine veracity that sustains Cartesian rationalism” (TI 204).

While The Ethics of Emmanuel Levinas is certainly a cohesive work, each of its chapters can also stand alone as a perceptive meditation on a complex and often misunderstood theme. Thus, Perpich opens her account with an overview of alterity in an early twentieth century continental philosophical context and how, exactly, Levinas mobilizes alterity in his work. Perpich defends the view that alterity plays a foundational role in all of Levinas’s philosophy and thus traces his view on alterity back to his early years as the foremost expositor of Husserl in France. Her thesis in this first chapter is that “Levinas’s conception of alterity is better captured by the idea of singularity than by the notion of difference or even otherness. It is not the other’s difference from me, but his or her immediate and concrete presence, here and now, in an absolutely unique bit of skin that interests Levinas in this early period”—and, I would add, for the rest of his life. Over the course of this chapter, she explains why Levinas’s account of alterity builds on and modifies earlier notions of alterity which date back to Husserl, and how he ultimately arrives at, via Jean Wahl’s reflections on “how to characterize the immanence of the subject within a world and its simultaneous transcendence,” a view of transcendence wherein “the beyond” is not in any way otherworldly—neither an extraterrestrial phenomenon, nor the interruption of the “here below” by a divine “beyond”—yet rather “functions as a trope to express the inadequacy of every representation to the singularity of the other who faces me. . . . The other as a face,” Perpich writes, “cannot be the object of an adequate representation” (49).

Consequently, Chapter Two focuses on the dilemma of the face, “one of the most overused terms in discussions” of Levinas’s philosophy (13). In this chapter, Perpich offers an especially creative interpretation of the face derived from a peculiar hermeneutic: Perpich reads Levinas’s description of the face “for the tensions of Levinas’s account” in the hopes that this “may well succeed in a manner that those who want to reconcile or resolve the dilemmas of the face do not” (54). What exactly are these dilemmas? For starters, it is not clear why the face qua face manifests an ethical encounter. What about the face is ethical? “Why should uniqueness command in a face and not when it is encountered in an animal, a tree, a stone, or a work of art?” (51). On the other hand, if one starts with the notion that the face is already ethical, i.e. that the face already has ethical force built into it, then Levinas’s account of the ethical manifest in the face-to-face seems circular. On this view, Levinas’s philosophy appears rather unphilosophical and dubiously theological. Perpich’s response to this dilemma is to show how the tensions in Levinas’s account of the face “are constitutive of the manner in which ethics is reconceived in his work. In particular, these tensions perform a desire for justification and a simultaneous frustration of that desire that are at the heart of the ethical relationship as Levinas reconceives it” (54). In other words, philosophers are often at pains to show how there is a sure foundation for ethics—traditionally dependent on metaphysics. After all, should we not seek certainty for why we should act in a particular way? Levinas’s point, Perpich claims, is that the face cannot offer this foundation, and thus any attempt to reconcile the aforementioned tensions in Levinas’s description of the face will necessarily fail. “The face is not a rational principle, but that which ‘opens’ up or institutes rationality.” The face “conveys the desire for the possession of unshakable normative principles or an ethical fundamentum, but at the same time renders the basis for such principles null and void,” and is therefore “not a thesis about ethics but is the performance of the ethical life . . . the enactment of our ethical situation” (77). Perpich’s defense of this thesis is extremely persuasive and offers a viable way round some of the most difficult interpretive issues faced by Levinas scholars.

In Chapter Three, Perpich demonstrates most explicitly why she is such an excellent reader of Levinas. She tackles Levinas’s two major philosophical works, Totality and Infinity and Otherwise Than Being, or Beyond Essence with an eye toward how Levinas construes responsibility in both. She offers three main theses in this chapter: first, while Levinas uses the term responsibility in a way “that systematically inverts core features of standard accounts of responsibility,” he nevertheless retains the sense of responsibility of that which binds us without physical force, and in this way his account depends on the more common views (79); second, Perpich identifies a distinct failure in Totality and Infinity, which she says is ultimately unable to answer the skeptical voice that opens the book with any certainty—particularly, in the plot of responsibility in Totality and Infinity, Levinas cannot explain how the feminine other, who helps the self accomplish the move to ethics and encounter the Other qua absolute alterity in the ethical face-to-face, is herself converted to a life of ethics; and finally, Perpich maintains that Totality and Infinity’s failure to satisfactorily answer the skeptic stimulates and inspires Otherwise Than Being, wherein “the demand for ethics becomes the only positive content of ethics.” In this later work, Levinas demonstrates that while “to be ethical is not to achieve moral certainty,” it is to nevertheless continuously demand it (81).

Perpich covers a lot of territory in this chapter, so I excerpt here a few select points that illustrate her rich interpretation of these texts. On the infinite nature of responsibility, which Perpich says more appropriately resembles one’s moral conscience, she explains how the more I understand the connection of my own life to the lives of those whose circumstances are quite different from my own, the more I feel the imperative to live responsibly in relation to these others. Consequently, when Levinas says that the more I attempt to fulfill my responsibility, “the more I am responsible” and “the further away I am” from its full realization (OB 93), it is not that the actual number of demands increases; rather, my sensitivity to the destitution of the other person increases “so that demands and injustices of which I was formerly unaware now come to pass” (89). To think of Levinasian responsibility in terms of moral conscience is, I think, extremely helpful. Likewise, Perpich lucidly characterizes the inscrutability of the face’s “trace,” which she describes as “a ‘lapse’ in the temporal order, a moment that escapes the play of retention and prolepsis that sustains the present moment and makes it of a piece with [all] else that occurs” (112). Thus the trace, she explains, is not of the same temporal order of its effect, insofar as its effect is phenomenal (I can experience or encounter the trace in the face of the other person, i.e. it appears), whereas its “disturbance does not appear, is present even in its absence.” The trace is “that mark of the erasure of marks” (113). Finally, in her commentary on Otherwise Than Being, Perpich writes that “content and form, what is said and how it is said, are inseparably intertwined [in that text]. . . . That [Levinas’s statements] cannot say directly what they ‘want’ to say is . . . raised to the level of method” (109-110). To support this view, she cites Levinas’s own characterization of his textual approach to responsibility: “Exasperation as a method of philosophy!” (GCM 89). Via hyperbole, emphasis, and exasperation, Perpich claims, the text passes from one term to another in a rhetorically linked chain which “breathlessly forms and unfolds the itinerary outlined in the introduction to the text” (121). Few commentators have so successfully—and so vividly—captured these complex textual and rhetorical patterns in Levinas.

Chapter Four represents the culmination of Perpich’s approach to Levinas. Here, she demonstrates why, despite commentators’ tendency to “divorce [Levinas’s] work from normative ethics,” we should take seriously the normative dimension of Levinas’s construal of the ethical, and in particular we should understand responsibility as a call “to justify one’s life and one’s construal of the world to others. [Responsibility] is to respond to the other’s demand for justification,” and this is the normative force of Levinas’s ethics (126). Importantly, however, Levinas’s notion of responsibility, as noted earlier, cannot provide us with specific norms or moral principles; as such, the Levinasian ethic describes “normativity without norms,” i.e. how we are constituted as ethical subjects in relation to other persons. In effect, Perpich explains in this chapter that Levinas wants to show how “the other plays a foundational role in the possibility of my own subjectivity” (139). My encounter with the Other, he says, transforms my relation with the environment which marks a shift from enjoyment to relation, from the libido dominandi of thematization and totality to the ethics of transcendence and infinity. In Levinas’s early work, enjoyment is the primary way I inhabit and apprehend my environment. In enjoyment, the self is at home with itself and revels in its dependence on objects it can thematize and possess in the mode of totality. Yet the encounter with the Other breaches the totality of enjoyment and manifests responsibility in relation to infinity, or the Other. In responsibility to the Other, the subjectivity of the I is constituted in an ethical relation that introduces ethics as such. I consequently view the world as an ethical subject, and while this does not determine my moral behavior (I can still act unethically), other ethical considerations derive from my responsibility to the human Other. In fact, to have a world at all “presupposes an other who has opened that world to me and with me,” Perpich writes (132). The idea that I cannot have a world without sociality—in effect, a world wherein I can critically reflect on what I value—stands at the heart of Levinas’s philosophy.

Chapters Five and Six apply Perpich’s interpretation of Levinasian responsibility in two concrete contexts: environmental and animal ethics on the one hand, and the extension of Levinas’s analyses of the other to questions about identity politics and multiculturalism on the other. Since space prohibits a more detailed summary of these chapters here, it suffices to say that Perpich shows just how useful it can be to think with Levinas about practical normative concerns. While Levinas may not be able to offer clear moral rules, Perpich explains how his unclear—even idiosyncratic—comments on non-human others illuminate an otherwise obscured truth about humans’ relationship with the environment that complicates how one thinks of anthropocentrism. Likewise, in the final chapter on identity and multiculturalism, Perpich mobilizes the political dimensions of Levinas’s philosophy to contest an impoverished and reductionist version of modern identity politics. In both these chapters, she critiques and improves upon misinterpretations of Levinas to make her point. In this way, Perpich nods to how frequently commentators misread Levinas, either to make claims Levinas himself would most likely reject or to criticize, uncharitably, complex elements in his work. In my view, Perpich reads Levinas extremely well—that is, she reads Levinas charitably, albeit with a critical eye toward tensions, contradictions, anthropocentrism, and sexism in his work. Perpich therefore avoids the more common interpretive pitfalls of less perceptive commentators, and, with this text, rehabilitates Levinas as a serious ethical thinker from whom all ethicists—continental, analytic, and otherwise—can learn.

[Doni · Rating 4 out of 5]

I got a lot out of the introduction and first chapter.