Levinas and James: Toward a Pragmatic Phenomenology

by Megan Craig

Bringing to light new facets in the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas and William James, Megan Craig explores intersections between French phenomenology and American pragmatism. Craig demonstrates the radical empiricism of Levinas's philosophy and the ethical implications of James's pluralism while illuminating their relevance for two philosophical disciplines that have often held each other at arm's length. Revealing the pragmatic minimalism in Levinas's work and the centrality of imagery in James's prose, she suggests that aesthetic links are crucial to understanding what they share. Craig's suggestive readings change current perceptions and clear a path for a more open, pluralistic, and creative pragmatic phenomenology that takes cues from both philosophers.

276 pages, Paperback

First published October 10, 2010

About the author

Megan Craig is a painter and an associate professor of Philosophy and Art at Stony Brook University. She teaches courses in aesthetics, ethics, French phenomenology, and American philosophy. She also has strong interests in psychoanalysis. Her first book, Levinas and James: Toward a Pragmatic Phenomenology, was published with Indiana University Press in November of 2010. She edited the text Art? No Thing, Analogies between Science, Art, and Philosophy, by the Dutch artist and theorist Fré Ilgen. Recent articles include “Deleuze and the Force of Color,” “James and the Ethical Importance of Grace,” “The Infinite in Person: Levinas and Emily Dickinson,” “Locked-In,” “Cora’s World,” and “Slipping Glancer: Painting Place with Edward Casey.” Craig’s new research is focused around accounts of memory, sensibility, and the ethical importance of ambiguity – with a particular focus on sensation, synesthesia, color and color perception. Craig has exhibited her paintings nationally and internationally. You can find more information about exhibitions and images of her work at www.megancraig.com.

Reviews

[Jeffrey Howard · Rating 4 out of 5]

Levinas is an incredibly opaque and challenging philosopher.

I first encountered him as an undergraduate, reading his book Totality and Infinity. I gave up on that text half-way through and immediately went grasping for a secondary source to help walk me through his ambiguous philosophy. Although still haven't read many of his primary works, his philosophy has had an outsized impact on my worldview, coming to me, like osmosis, through a couple of choice professors and secondary sources.

Megan Craig's Levinas and James is now one of those secondary texts.

Early in life we learn rules for moral conduct. We are taught which actions are right and which ones are wrong. Eventually we’re able to grasp principles and closed systems that allege to hold in place the reasons for why any particular action has moral value.

In philosophical terms, this might look John Stuart Mill’s utilitarian happiness principle: an action is right insofar as it maximizes utility or pleasure for the greatest number of people. It might resemble Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative: to act only according to a maxim whereby you can will at the same time that it should become a universal law.

There’s an assurance and comfort in having this sort of written in stone approach to morality. A moral reality that is unchanged, universal, enclosed in the structure of the universe. We just have to discover it, reason our way to it, and once we pen it to paper, we have moral laws we can always fall back on.

This reliability and simplicity has its appeal, but what if closed moral systems are incomplete, wrongheaded? What if ethical living arises from a more ambiguous and ineffable place? What if we were instead to understand that the moral life is embedded in face-to-face interactions, that ethics is derived from a place of radical subjectivity and infinite responsibility to “the Other”?

Emmanuel Levinas is a twentieth-century French philosopher who rejected rules-based notions of morality. Informed by phenomenologists like Edmund Husserl and Martin Heiddeger, Levinas champions a subjective approach to the ethical life that demands a constant vigilance and moral responsiveness from us. The “face” is interruptive and constantly calling after us for attention. Levinas suggests an immense obligation to others that seems inexhaustible, a moral demand we’ll never be able to satisfy.

In Levinas and James, Megan Craig offers us an overview of Levinas’ ethics by positioning him alongside the pragmatist philosopher William James. She does this not only to introduce Americans to an otherwise opaque and challenging continental philosopher but as a way of revealing the more practical or pragmatic elements of his ethics.

She wants us to consider what might be a more creative and vitalizing approach to ethical living, a perspective that prioritizes lived experience over moral abstractions and detached laws.

I hope to dig deeper into Levinas at a future point and am deeply appreciative of Craig for her willingness to juxtapose him alongside the great American philosophy.