"A spiritual intrigue wholly other than gnosis": A brief introduction to Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas
On the rare days when I lament the fact I don’t teach in a PhD program, it’s mostly because I would love the excuse to teach an in-depth seminar on Emmanuel Levinas. It’s hard to communicate how formative the encounter with Levinas was for me (he died on Christmas day, 1995, at the end of my first semester at Villanova). To this day, I think Levinas–a staunch critic of Husserl and Heidegger–was nonetheless the most faithful practitioner of Husserl’s axiom, “To the things themselves!” His most famous work, Totality and Infinity, is an exercise in moral attentiveness. Rather than merely debating the theories of others, Levinas undertakes a patient and impassioned description of ethical encounter that is as literary as it is phenomenological. I remember first reading Totality and Infinity and being struck by the dearth of footnotes. Attending to themselves, Levinas’ method is not logical demonstration but phenomenological unveiling. He takes us to “the things themselves” in order to show us the Other that calls to us in our everyday experience.
Levinas is no doubt going to make multiple appearances in this newsletter. His work represents one of the 20th-century’s most sustained, creative, and fecund philosophical encounters with God. But I thought it might be helpful to first offer a more summary introduction. So this week I offer you an encapsulated portrait of Levinas’ singular contribution to contemporary philosophy.
Levinas and Phenomenology
Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995) is both a critic and disciple of Husserl–a critical disciple who played a significant role in Husserl’s introduction into French philosophy. Levinas’ dissertation, The Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s Phenomenology (1930), was the first monograph-length consideration of phenomenology by a French philosopher and served as an introduction to Husserl for many in the French scene. (It is still an excellent introduction to Husserl.) In addition, Levinas was co-translator of Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations (1929) delivered in Paris. However, even in his earliest work–which was also significantly influenced by Heidegger–one detects a trenchant critique of phenomenology, one which would become more fully articulated in his two master works, Totality and Infinity (1961) and Otherwise Than Being, or Beyond Essence (1974).
The Same and the Other
The critique revolves around the question at the heart of the Fifth of Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations: the problem of transcendence. How can we know that which is genuinely transcendent? Does not knowledge itself–as conceptual thinking–reduce what is transcendent to the immanence of the ego? In other words, if we are to know something, must it not be “reduced” to concepts by which the ego “makes sense” of it, or as Husserl would say, gives it sense (Sinn, meaning)? Is this not a reduction of what is other (transcendent) to the sphere of the same (immanent)? And would this not preclude knowledge of transcendence? Wouldn’t we always only know immanence, the same rather than the different? Would this not mean that infinity is always reduced to the finite?
This charge is leveled against phenomenology in an acute way; indeed, is it not precisely Husserl’s phenomenology which represents the pinnacle of such reduction? Does not phenomenology found itself on the very principle (the “principle of all principles,” as Husserl calls it in Ideas §24), that what is known must be constituted by the ego, must be given sense by the ego? In the Fifth Meditation, Husserl maintains that what can be known must present itself in the sphere of ownness–the sphere of the “same,” of the ego’s constitution. Anything that cannot “show up” within this sphere cannot be known.
For Levinas, this is not just an epistemological problem. It is a question of ethics, of “doing justice” to the other as Other, as different, rather than reducing to concepts, to the Same. In this respect we must appreciate the extent to which Levinas’ work is motivated by the horror of the Holocaust which he himself endured as a Lithuanian Jew. In the epigraph to Otherwise Than Being he expresses this connection:
To the memory of those who were closest among the six million assassinated by the National Socialists, and of the millions on millions of all confessions and all nations, victims of the same hatred of the other man, the same anti-semitism.
To effect a phenomenological reduction to immanence, Levinas shows, is its violence–one which has accompanied the history of Western philosophy up to Husserl, and includes also Heidegger. Philosophy, construed as conceptual knowing, seeks to “grasp” and “encompass” (con-capare), to acquire and possess its object. To know is to constitute, to give meaning on the basis of the ego, to possess the object. Thus phenomenology, for Levinas, is a philosophy of immanence par excellence.
But if knowledge is relegated to immanence–to conceptuality–can transcendence or alterity be “intelligible”? Would transcendence be something we could “know?”
“Another Phenomenology”: Spiritual Intrigue
What this calls for, Levinas suggests, is another phenomenology, an-other phenomenology which differs from Husserl’s phenomenology, and also differs from the philosophical tradition which as privileged “knowledge,” particularly theoretical knowing. What Levinas is looking for is an account (a description, hence the retained title of “phenomenology”) of a relation to transcendence which is not one of “knowing” in the sense of grasping–a relation which is otherwise than knowledge, “a spiritual intrigue wholly other than gnosis.” This will be a relation which is not a relation in the sense of adequation— “a relation without relation” as he often puts it in Totality and Infinity)–such that the other term is not reduced to the sphere of the same, but is related to as Other. This would not be thought or knowledge, but could only be indicated as “thought” or “knowledge” in a different sense, a non-conceptual “knowing” by which the transcendent “appears,” reveals itself, but is not reduced to concepts (Levinas’ project requires incessant square quotes because he’s trying to challenge the paradigm of western philosophy while still using the lexicon of western philosophy).
Levinas sees intimations of this transcendence in the history of philosophy, notably in Kant’s notion of the Categorical Imperative, and even more importantly in Descartes’ account of the idea of Infinity in the Third Meditation–an “idea” which exceeds thought, an idea which cannot be contained by the finitude of the cogito. It is a thought which cannot be reduced to immanence, cannot be grasped in a concept. Here we have an “appearance”–a “revelation”–in which the other who appears remains Wholly Other. And for Levinas, this revelation is linked to obligation, to responsibility, to ethics. It’s not that I “know” the Other; rather, it’s that the face of the Other claims me. My response in the face of such transcendence should not be, “I know,” but rather, like Abraham: “Here I am” (me voici).
Further Resources
- The article on Levinas in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is comprehensive and includes a rich bibliography.
- I still like to point readers to Adriaan Peperzak’s introduction to Levinas, [To the Other](http://www.thepress.purdue.edu/titles/format/9781557530240 not only because it’s very good but also out of a fondness of Peperzak, a saint of a man.