Levinas' First Philosophy - Essay Example

?Levinas' First Philosophy [ID Emmanuel Levinas has become associated primarily with his notion that “Ethics is the first philosophy” (1969). Yet in one of the supreme ironies of his career, Levinas scarcely advances an ethics at all! Instead, he advances what could be considered a meta-ethics, an ethics of ethics, a study of how people arrive at ethical conclusions (Bergo, 2007). “Levinas does not want to propose laws or moral rules…it is a matter of [writing] an ethics of ethics” (Derrida, 1967). What does this mean? “An ethics of ethics means, here, the exploration of conditions of possibility of any interest in good actions or lives. In light of that, it can be said that Levinas is not writing an ethics at all. Instead, he is exploring the meaning of intersubjectivity and lived immediacy in light of three themes: transcendence, existence, and the human other” (Bergo, 2007). Levinas' claim that the first philosophy is ethics, then, must be understood based off of his esoteric interpretation of the idea of ethics; nonetheless, the argument has some compelling qualities. Levinas' ethics begins with the simple, face-to-face interaction with another human being. Levinas tries to make the claim that the way that people behave when faced with each other implicitly places them in the same moral universe. At the core of Levinas's mature thought...are descriptions of the encounter with another person. That encounter evinces a particular feature: the other impacts me unlike any worldly object or force. I can constitute the other person cognitively, on the basis of vision, as an alter ego. I can see that another human being is “like me,” acts like me, appears to be the master of her conscious life. That was Edmund Husserl's basic phenomenological approach to constituting other people within a shared social universe. But Husserl's constitution lacks, Levinas argues, the core element of intersubjective life: the other person addresses me, calls to me. He does not even have to utter words in order for me to feel the summons implicit in his approach. It is this encounter that Levinas describes and approaches from multiple perspectives (e.g., internal and external). He will present it as fully as it is possible to introduce an affective event into everyday language without turning it into an intellectual theme. Beyond any other philosophical concerns, the fundamental intuition of Levinas's philosophy is the non-reciprocal relation of responsibility. In the mature thought this responsibility is transcendence par excellence and has a temporal dimension specific to it as human experience. (Bergo, 2007) For Levinas, then, the fundamental reality to an interpersonal encounter is the basis for ethics. This ties in with ideas of ethics that Victorian-era scholars, Hume and Enlightenment scholars in general had about the obvious connection between empathy for others and moral behavior (Wright, 1983, pg. 232; Parrinder, 1972; Halperin, 1974). Hume, for example, argued that empathy preceded more advanced moral judgments and was a necessary condition for those judgments: “[S]ympathy is the source of the esteem, which we pay to all the artificial virtues” (Wright, 1983, pg. 232). Hume's position is that empathy naturally guides us to behave to others morally: There is no need to tell most fathers that it is wrong to starve their children, and no need to tell people not to beat their friends randomly. It is when that empathy is stunted that pathological behavior is caused. Hume argued that the role of morality was merely to make explicit and clear the transition from obvious principles derived from empathy to abstract behavior norms. Indeed, the Enlightenment in total agreed with Levinas' sentiment that it was human sympathy and interpersonal interaction that gave birth to moral behavior. Even Adam Smith, seemingly amoral in his defense of markets, actually assumed a deep empathy in human behavior, which combined with a fundamental political and economic equality that he assumed for his model would in his view lead markets to be mindful (Korten, 2000; Chomsky, 1995). “[Smith's] driving motives were the assumption that people were guided by sympathy and feelings of solidarity and the need for control of their own work, much like other Enlightenment and early Romantic thinkers. He's part of that period, the Scottish Enlightenment” (Chomsky, 1995). Levinas, like Hume, argues that ethics is inherently an outgrowth of interpersonal relations, of humans being social creatures. Why bother restraining your behavior if you have no need to do so? A lone hunter like a cat does not need ethics: It merely needs the ability to defend its territory and survive. It's only when people interact with each other that they need ethical safeguards to guide their behavior and make sure that everyone gets what they want from the social contract. “The primacy of relation explains why it is that human beings are interested in the questions of ethics at all” (Bergo, 2007). Levinas puts the ethical concern at what Kant might call an a priori level, arguing that it precedes experience. Thus, Levinas puts ethics as the first philosophy because, in his view, people begin to develop ethical intuitions the first time they interact with others and possibly even as an a priori part of human knowledge and behavior, and the way people resolve issues of identity, relationship to God and to the world, and fear of their own mortality is through ethics and empathy (Bergo, 2007). The idea that ethics is the first philosophy is compelling to me on a number of levels: Logical, historical, psychological, etc. Implicitly, even an immature notion of ethics and values is what guides people to make decisions to embrace whatever philosophies or research that they do. Whether Marx or Bakunin, Dewey or Chomsky, Hume or Rousseau, Habermas or Adorno, philosophers overwhelmingly do the research that they do based on what they find valuable and interesting. That will be determined by their intersubjective, interpersonal experiences and their personal moral code. If someone studies the philosophy and epistemology of science, what makes a claim scientific, one is likely to find that research valuable, perhaps to guide future research or to shed some light on the process of finding truth. To be a philosopher, one first has to have embraced a philosophy, a value system that guides one's research. To be fair, not every philosopher is acting out of deep-seated altruistic or moral impulses. Some may just be interested in interesting philosophical puzzles. Strogatz in Sync recalls that he was doing his work on synchronicity, chaos and related factors because the math was interesting, even though the work clearly had broader reaching ramifications that were also important to him and his fellow researchers (2003). Others may like power, prestige, or being a member of an intellectual priesthood. Bakunin warned that philosophers and intellectuals were likely to become part of dreaded commissar classes in both the capitalist and what would later become known as the “Communist” states, a dreaded “red bureaucracy”, and that both would “beat the people with the people's stick” (1873; Chomsky, 2002). Chomsky and Herman later connected this notion to an analysis of media and intellectual institutions and pointed out that the rewards of power, prestige, fame, and other factors were powerful inductions to play along and parrot the needs of the powerful (Chomsky, 2002; 2004; Chomsky and Herman, 2002). But what drives people to be interested in and vulnerable to those inductions or motivations is itself part of Levinas' broader conception of ethics and human behaviour. Yes, it is true that this may become tautological: People obviously do things that they are motivated to do. But the tautological insight nonetheless establishes the point: Philosophers begin with a set of motivations, values and goals that their philosophy fulfills, their first philosophy. Further, consider the condition of a primitive society. This society is likely to not be concerned with epistemology: The amount of knowledge that they can have is so restrained, the type of knowledge so practical and verifiable by experience, and its form of transmission so limited (verbal record or perhaps a primitive written record) that debating how people can know what they know is likely not to be a frequent indulgence. Similarly, ontology and metaphysics seems futile in circumstances where information is so limited. In the state of nature, then, it is likely that the first philosophy that ever was developed to a large degree, debated and given scholars of a kind would be ethics. Shamans, priests, chiefs, medicine men, elders and wise men of all kinds would serve at least in part the social role of providing advice, resolving disputes, distributing resources, and so on, based on ideas of how to treat people that would have a combination of theological and practical justification. Consider Moses' first major task in creating policy for his tribe: He laid down rules of conduct and behavior. The Ten Commandments are not concerned with ontology and epistemology and barely concerned with metaphysics: They are normative declarations of what thou shalt and shalt not do. Jesus similarly created a whole new religion based not least on major, transformative ethical concepts: Forgiveness, pacifism, treating others as one would want to be treated, the costs of hypocrisy. Indeed, I would argue that for most, all philosophy is designed to serve some compelling social goal. Perhaps people enjoy being enriched, or perhaps knowing how knowledge can be justified, defended and expanded serves economic needs. Further, there is an obvious connection between ethics and social structures, which would precede philosophy conceptually. From Hobbes to Locke to Rousseau to Marx to Proudhon to Rawls to Murray Friedman, ideas about what people deserve, what rights people have, what behavior is appropriate, and what constitutes justice are obviously connected to the social structures they propose. The logic behind the justice or injustice of a given social system is often a major component in that social system retaining legitimacy or having that legitimacy be undermined leading to its replacement. Insofar as ethics undergirds our understanding of social philosophy, and insofar as social structures determine the opportunities available to philosophers, ethics takes a preceding role to other philosophies. It is also quite likely that some elements of morality, or some intuitions or reasoning about morality, are hard-coded or soft-coded into our genes the way that language and cognition are. Certainly, anyone who has worked with children can see the trajectory of their growth and development from egoistic creatures concerned primarily with themselves to greater and greater levels of empathy and recognition of others. Whether one is discussing Kohlberg, Piaget or any other moral theorist, moral psychology indicates nothing so much as the fact that moral reasoning ends up developing in regular ways and has some rhyme and reason to it, even if that rhyme and reason is currently up for debate (Schachter, Gilbert and Wegner, 2007). There are some obvious issues with Levinas' interpretation. For example: Levinas is hesitant to talk about justice because he views the term as too transcendant and arbitrary, too far from lived experiences (Bergo, 2007). In his view, the fundamental building block of moral behavior is the dyadic relationship of empathy between two people, and justice inherently involves discussing third parties beyond the mere singular Other. The issue, of course, is that it's highly unlikely that this is the way people actually think in practice or behave. Anyone who has been in a group of people is aware that there is a gestalt that emerges from that group interaction that is more than simply the sum of adding every empathic relationship between each member. The cliche “Three's a crowd”, for example, indicates that the triad of three people has different behaviors from any of the individual dyads. People can be empathic to animals who they can't have a mutual interaction with, and can feel sorry for groups of people either concretely or abstractly. A more serious analysis would acknowledge that bonds of empathy may be found in interactions as large as the human ability to process distinct people! Describing justice, then, is actually trying to describe the empirical behavior and consensus on the norms of triadic and above interactions between ever larger groups of people. Nonetheless, the claim that ethics, both in the Levinasian sense and the traditional sense, tends to be the first philosophy, is richly compelling. References Bakunin, M. 1873, Statism and Anarchy. Bergo, B. 2007, Emmanuel Levinas. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, March 18. Bloechl, Jeffrey (ed.), 2000. The Face of the Other and the Trace of God. Essays on the Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. New York, NY: Fordham University Press Chalier, Catherine and Abensour, Miguel (eds.), 1991. Cahier de L'Herne: Emmanuel Levinas. Paris, France: Editions de l'Herne. Chomsky, N. 2002. Understanding Power. The New Press: New York. ––– 1995, “Education is Ignorance”, Class Warfare. Available at: http://www.chomsky.info/books/warfare02.htm Chomsky, N. and Herman, E. Manufacturing Consent, 2008, Random House. Chomsky, N. and Otero, C.P. 2004, Language and politics, AK Press. Cohen, RA. 2001, Ethics, exegesis, and philosophy: interpretation after Levinas, Cambridge University Press. Derrida, Jacques, 1980. “Violence and Metaphysics,” in Writing and Difference, Trans., Allan Bass, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. –––, 1991. “At this Very Moment in this Work Here I Am” in Re-Reading Levinas, Eds. Robert Bernasconi and Simon Critchley. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. –––, 1999. Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas. Trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Diprose, Rosalyn, 2002. Corporeal Generosity: On Giving with Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty and Levinas. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Drabinski, John E, 2001. Sensibility and Singularity: The Problem of Phenomenology in Levinas. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Dudiak, Jeffrey, 2001. The Intrigue of Ethics: A Reading of the Idea of Discourse in the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas. New York, NY: Fordham University Press. Dupuis, Michel (ed.), 1994. Levinas en contrastes. Brussels, Belgium: De Boeck. Duncan, Diane Moira, 2001. The Pre-text of Ethics: On Derrida and Levinas. New York, NY: Peter Lang. Eaglestone, Robert, 1997. Ethical Criticism: Reading after Levinas. Edinburgh, Scotland: Edinburgh University Press. Emmanuel Levinas: basic philosophical writings Emmanuel Levinas and Maurice Blanchot: Ethics and the ambiguity of writing Eskin, M.A. Survivor's ethics: Levinas' challenge to philosophy. From communicative action to the face of the other: Levinas and Habermas on language, obligation and community. Halperin, J. 1974, Egoism and self-discovery in the Victorian novel: studies in the ordeal of knowledge in the nineteenth century, Ayer Publishing. Korten, D. 2000, The post-corporate world: life after capitalism, Berrett-Koehler Publishers. Levinas, E. 1969, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Trans. Alphonso Lingis, Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press Morgan, M.L. Discovering Levinas. Cambridge University Press Parrinder, P. 1972, “The Look of Sympathy: Communication and Moral Purpose in the Realistic Novel”, NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, Winter, vol. 5 no. 2. Peperzak, A.T. Ethics as a first philosophy: the significance of emanuel levinas for philosophy, literature and religion. Schachter, D.L., Gilbert, D.T., and Wegner, D. M. 2007, Psychology, Worth Publishers, December 28. Strogatz, S. 2003, Sync, Hyperion Press. The Cambridge Companion to Levinas. Wright, JP. 1983, The sceptical realism of David Hume, Manchester University Press. Read More