Essential Vulnerabilities

Front matter

ESSENTIAL VULNERABILITIES

SERIES EDITOR

John Russon

Contents

Acknowledgments Abbreviations Introduction

Totality and Infinity Chapter 1: Violence Chapter 2: Freedom Chapter 3: Creation Chapter 4: Knowledge

Otherwise Than Being

Introduction

Emmanuel Levinas sees Plato not as a philosopher of the other, but as a philosopher of freedom: “This primacy of the same was Socrates’ teaching,” Levinas says: “to receive nothing of the Other but what was in me, as though from all eternity I was in possession of what comes to me from the outside—to receive nothing, or to be free” (TI 43/13-14).' In what follows, I contest the idea that Plato is a philosopher of freedom for whom thought is a return to the self. Instead, Plato, like Levinas, is a philosopher of the other. More broadly, I maintain that Plato and Levinas are more similar than Levinas thinks because neither of them accepts the idea, often associated with early modernity, that human beings are fundamentally self-sufficient but instead thinks human beings are essentially vulnerable and essentially in relation to others.

The point of the book, however, is not simply to critique Levinas, but also to resituate his work and see what is most unique about it by carefully delineating how he and Plato are different. They are different because they conceive our essential vulnerabilities and forms of responsiveness differently. For Plato, when we are knocked out by beautiful others, we are knocked out by the beauty of what is, that is, by the vision of eternal form. We then respond to the beauty and form we have seen by acting in its light, and we relate to others by sharing that vision with them and by acting in the light of that vision in our relations to them. For Levinas, we are disrupted by the newness, foreignness, or singularity of the other. The other, for him, is new, not eternal. The other is foreign. The other is unknowable singularity. For Plato, what makes nonaggressive relations to the other possible is sharing in a common third through mutual beholding of what is. For Levinas, to the contrary, cognition is a source of violence because of its selectivity and inability to comprehend singularity. Whether contemplative or calculative, knowledge for Levinas cannot comprehend the new, the foreign, the singular.

Especially in his earlier writings, Levinas exposes his work by contrast to Plato. Some contrasts he draws are striking and helpful such as the one, just discussed, between beholding what is and respecting singularity, or the one between the eternal and the new. On the other hand, his view that Plato is a philosopher of freedom who thinks we receive nothing of the other but what is already in us involves, I maintain, an important misunderstanding of Plato’s view of cognition or knowledge. The misunderstanding leads to a misleading contrast between their views that keeps us from seeing what is most unique in Levinas’s own work. Plato does not think that “cognition is freedom.” Instead, like Levinas, Plato thinks responsiveness is prior to freedom—but Plato construes knowledge itself as responsive while it is crucial that for Levinas knowledge is not responsive but active.

The book is divided into two parts referring to Levinas’s two major works, Totality and Infinity (1961) and Otherwise Than Being (1974). Each chapter in the Totality and Infinity part includes an interpretation in some detail of one or more Platonic dialogues coupled with interpretation of relevant parts of Totality and Infinity. The first chapter, “Violence,” proceeds by way of interpreting the theme of violence in the drama and argument of the first part of Plato’s Phaedrus. In the chapter, I argue that both Plato and Levinas think we are essentially vulnerable and responsive, but they differ about what the vulnerability and responsiveness are like. For Plato, like the helmsman of the soul imagined as a chariot, when we human beings are knocked out by the beauty of an other, we are knocked out by the beauty of what is, that is, by the shining forth of eternal form. As a result of being knocked out, we cannot remain in ourselves. Instead, we act in the light of the beauty and form we have seen, and we relate to others not aggressively or selfishly but by sharing that vision with them and by acting in the light of that vision of beauty or goodness in our relations to them. For Levinas, in our everyday going on being, we are mastered, ruptured, and broken open by an other. The rupture results from the fact that the other is singular—not the individuation of a concept—and utterly new—absolute upsurge or absolute commencement— and therefore not assimilable to my self. In addition, though the rupture is disturbing or unsettling, it is peaceful: the mastery teaches us something, and the breaking open opens for us a new dimension. Moreover, because the other is singular and new, my relation to him or her is not need, since need according to Levinas fulfills a retrospective lack, but desire, since for him desire is accomplished in hospitality, directness, openness, and other forms of relation to what is singular. For Plato, then, we are knocked out by beauty and, as a result, endeavor to share it, while for Levinas, we are peacefully broken open by the singular other who is new and, as a result, experience desire for him or her and accomplish that desire in openness, directness, or hospitality. For Plato, nonviolent relations are accomplished through sharing a common third while for Levinas they are accomplished through types of relation to what can never be common. ‘The topic of violence opens up one way of delineating the different types of responsive relatedness found in Plato and Levinas: one type takes place through mutual beholding of what is while the other is accomplished by bracketing all cognition and relating to the other as singular.

In chapter 2, “Freedom,” I give a detailed interpretation of the drama and argument of Plato’s Meno, arguing from it that Plato is not a philosopher of freedom but in fact a critic of the emphasis on freedom in Greek cultural life. I then go on to show, through detailed interpretation of the Republic, that Plato nonetheless has a concept of freedom—an unusual concept of freedom through response. Then, through analysis of Tozality and Infinity, I show that Levinas also discusses two levels of freedom, including one he critiques, freedom as spontaneity or the ability to determine the other, and one he accepts, freedom as responsibility. Each, then, believes we are essentially in relation to an other, so in that sense not free, and that we are free only in an unusual sense of freedom as response to what is outside us. At the same time, I argue, the type of response they espouse is different, with Plato focusing on responsive knowledge of form including the form or idea of the good and Levinas focusing on noncognitive response to the singular other. The former frees us from being thwarted in all our activity while the latter frees us from the enchainment to self.

‘The third chapter, “Creation,” delineates a distinction between the eternal and the new. Starting out with the fact that Socrates in the Symposium thinks love (erés) is desire and desire a type of need, while Levinas, in Totality and Infinity, argues that desire is not a type of need, I argue that the two thinkers are closer together in their understanding of love and desire than it seems since Plato introduces need for the same reason that Levinas rejects it, namely, to highlight essential human vulnerability. I then go on to delineate how their views of love are nonetheless different since for Plato’s Socrates essential human vulnerability is to the eternal while for Levinas it is to the new. The chapter includes detailed interpretation of the drama and argument of the Symposium and related parts of Totality and Infinity. It also includes discussion of the good beyond being in Plato supported by interpretations of the Republic and a new and detailed interpretation of Plato’s dialogue on the beautiful, the Hippias Major, in which I argue that beauty, for Plato, is the appearance of form.

Chapter 4, “Knowledge,” interpreting accounts of recollection found in the Meno and the Phaedrus and related images in the Theaeretus, again argues against a strong distinction Levinas draws, this time between Platonic maieutics and knowledge, on the one hand, and Levinas’s teaching and revelation, on the other, and claims that they are more similar than Levinas thinks since each involves the learner’s responsiveness or receptivity to what is outside herself. Nonetheless, the chapter argues that the two are significantly different since in maieutics and recollection I direct myself to something both transcendent and immanent, namely, form, but when I am taught by an other, in a Levinasian sense, I direct myself to what can never be immanent or comprehended, namely, the other who, as other, is absolutely foreign. The distinction between recollection in Plato and teaching for Levinas is between disclosure of what is hidden but indicated and revelation of what is absolutely foreign.

‘The Otherwise Than Being section of the book describes how Levinas, in his second major work, treats distinctions similar to those treated in Totality and Infinity but without reference to differences between Plato and Levinas. Chapter 5, “Time and the Self,” begins by showing that something like the Plato/Levinas distinction recurs in Otherwise Than Being but as a metaphysical distinction between synchrony and diachrony rather than an intertextual distinction between Plato and Levinas and that the central metaphysical idea of Totality and Infinity also recurs in Otherwise Than Being, namely, that the self is essentially in relation while at the same time absolving itself of relation. In addition, I argue that for Levinas this metaphysical idea shows up in ethics, epistemology, religion, and, most centrally, the treatment of the self. ‘The argument is accomplished through a discussion of the idea of sensibility (in both of Levinas’s major works) including an interpretation and analysis of Levinas’s use of the Yom Kippur morning haftarah portion on giving the bread from your mouth to the hungry (Isa. 58) as well as discussion of Levinas’s portrayal of knowledge as active and selective and the resulting implication that, in all knowledge, part stands in for or is an image of whole and therefore conveys only part of the whole so that knowledge cannot be allowed to remain fixed lest truth be incomplete or one-sided.

Chapter 6, “Violence, Freedom, Creation, Knowledge,” argues that Levinas’s views on the topics named in the title remain the same in Otherwise Than Being and then goes on to argue that the central characteristic of knowledge distinguishing Plato and Levinas is knowledge as responsive for Plato and knowledge as fundamentally active and selective for Levinas. Because knowledge is fundamentally active according to Levinas, it is by itself fundamentally violent, even when it is a contemplative beholding of what is. Levinas deals with the issue of such violence by subscribing to what I want to call a principle of epistemological humility in the face of the problem of epistemological idolatry, that is, of a fixed saying of what is, which is a decision rather than simply a type of responsiveness.” Epistemological humility is realized through what Levinas in Otherwise Than Being calls the reduction (an idea closely related to Husserl’s epoché and Derrida’s deconstruction), the reduction of the said to the saying, that is, through a resaying—and resaying and resaying and resaying—a dizzying back and forth between positing and resaying of the said in order to avoid congealment.

‘The seventh and final chapter, “Glory and Shine,” returns to comparison of Plato and Levinas and discusses their treatments of the accessible good— beauty for Plato and glory for Levinas. I show that each de-emphasizes the most accessible good due to our tendency to overidentify with it and, as a result, to overlook our deficiencies and our need to remedy them. The discussion of Levinas includes exegesis of Otherwise Than Being illuminated by comparisons to key passages in Jewish liturgy, Talmud, and Midrash. In it, I argue that Levinas’s approach to glory and the holy has strong affinities to one traditional Jewish approach to them, and that this insight helps us think about how to interpret central themes in the discussion of the glory of the infinite and in his work as a whole. Some support for this claim is given through an interpretation of Levinas’s later essay, “Loving the Torah More Than God.” I argue, in addition, that the incomprehensibility of the singular other of whom we can only have a trace is echoed by Jewish notions of the holy, which is separate, and glory, which is immanent but because immanent must be articulated cautiously to avoid idolatry. I also argue against the idea that Otherwise Than Being’s austere emphasis on responsibility and gift implies that the more positive topics found in Totality and Infinity, such as love, desire, and marvel, have been superseded in the second work. Such topics are present but de-emphasized in each work, I maintain, though de-emphasized in different ways corresponding to the different rhetorical strategies each contains. My discussion of Plato shows that Socrates, when young, values beauty so highly that he overlooks his own deficiencies; learns later to care less about appearing beautiful if it stands in the way of self-improvement, but comes to value beauty once again, in the Hippias Major, when he learns that beauty is form or form’s appearance. He learns, as a result, that beauty, as the most accessible human good and the source of grace and happiness in our lives, also can be dangerous, since our identification with it can lead us to overestimate ourselves. I also argue that, nonetheless, eros for the beautiful is not in fundamental conflict with passionate bodily eros for Socrates but, instead, begins with it. Eros for the beautiful, which results in beautiful action, is the final stage or development of what is intrinsic to bodily passion itself.

My approach in this book is to utilize extended textual exegesis to show both Plato and Levinas as philosophers of the other and then go on to show how their philosophies of the other are the same and how they are different. To an extent, the texts, once interpreted and set side by side, speak for themselves. As a result, the focus of this book is not on analyzing Levinas’s specific comments about his relation to Plato. Some discussion of those comments here, however, will set the stage for the exegesis and comparison to follow.

Levinas develops his own work in relation to Plato’s in the 1930s and 1940s and extensively in his mid-century work—especially in Totality and Infinity (1961) and the one-page outline he wrote of Totality and Infinity when it was his thesis (1961), but also in other works such as “Philosophy and the Idea of the Infinite” (1957) and “Meaning and Sense” (1964). References to Plato decrease after mid-century.’ In the references to Plato, Levinas vacillates on whether to identify his work and ideas with Plato’s or to distinguish them. He distinguishes them most when he thinks that Plato in much of his work is a philosopher for whom thought and spirit more generally return to the self. He identifies them most when he identifies his own idea of the absolute or singular other with Socrates's idea of the good beyond being in the Republic or of the beautiful in the Phaedrus. We can put these two gestures together in the following way. For Levinas, Plato is a philosopher for whom thought and spirit more generally are a return to the self, though he is as well one among a few Western philosophers who sometimes catch sight of a beyond being that keeps philosophy from being such a return.

Levinas sees a return to the self in reason, knowledge, recollection, maieutics, philosophy, love, and desire as Plato understands them. For Socrates, according to Levinas, “sovereign reason knows only itself” and to know something is to remove its alterity from it: “To know amounts to grasping being out of nothing or reducing it to nothing, removing from it its alterity” (TI 43/14, 44/14). Knowing reduces being to nothing because knowing strips being of its alterity and reduces it to the self. Recollection, the Socratic way to knowledge, remains within the self and is contrasted with teaching as Levinas defines it: “The transitivity of teaching, and not the interiority of reminiscence, manifests being” (TI 101/74). Levinasian teaching conveys something that is outside the self and, for this reason, is truly transitive. Reminiscence, or recollection, to the contrary, is a simple return to the self. Teaching, thus, is preferable to maieutics, that is, to Socratic midwifery, because “teaching is a discourse in which the master can bring to the student what the student does not yet know. It does not operate as maieutics, but continues the placing in me of the idea of infinity” (TI 180/155). Maieutics brings out in me what I already contain. Levinasian teaching, to the contrary, brings me what I can never contain. Socratic philosophy relates to an other through the mediation of a third term found in the self: “The relation with the other is here accomplished only through a third term which I find in myself. The ideal of Socratic truth thus rests on the essential self-sufficiency of the same, its identification in ipseity, its egoism. Philosophy is an egology” (TI 44/14). To illuminate or know an other is to bring the other within the self. Socratic philosophy, as a result, is egology.

Similarly, Socratic love returns to the self according to Levinas. Socrates interprets love as a type of desire and desire as a type of need and, for Socrates, according to Levinas, “need is a void of the Soul; it proceeds from the subject” (TI 62/33). The alterity of what fills or feeds desire, according to Levinas, is “reabsorbed into my own identity” (TI 33/3). Here, too, Levinas distinguishes his views from Plato’s. For Levinas, love is a type of desire and desire is for the absolutely other: “metaphysical desire tends toward something else entirely, toward the absolutely other (TI 33/3). To the contrary, “love as analyzed by Plato does not coincide with what we have called Desire” since its first objective is not the other, the stranger, but immortality (7T 63/35). In addition, need for Plato is simple lack. “Need,” Levinas says, “cannot be interpreted as a simple lack, despite the psychology of need given by Plato” (TT 114/87). Moreover, for Plato, the lack can be filled since need is the source of resource as described in the story detailed in the Symposium according to which Eros is the son of Need (penia) and Resource (poros)—that is, eros is need that spurs me to the satisfaction of need (7T 115/87). Desire, for Levinas, by its very nature can never be satisfied.

On the other hand, Levinas identifies his work with Platos when he identifies his idea of the singular other—the other who, because singular, cannot be related to through qualities—with Plato’s notion of the good or the beautiful as beyond being. Plato’s philosophy is ontology and thus egology, but Plato sometimes catches sight of a beyond being. To the extent that Levinas sees Plato as a philosopher for whom the beyond being is important, he identifies his work with Plato’s and considers himself a Platonist. For example, in the outline of Totality and Infinity Levinas publishes in 1961 in the Annales de Université de Paris, he concludes by describing Totality and Infinity as a “return to Platonism” (“Summary,” 121/386).* What he finds important in Platonism, he says in the outline, is the idea of an absolute, that is, a principle that is absolved from history and culture. The first intelligible, he maintains, is the other revealed by the face rather than disclosed through qualities. The first signification, thus, since it is signification of the absolute other, emerges in morality and is independent of or absolved from history. To say that the other bared of all qualities is the first intelligible, he maintains, is “to affirm also the independence of ethics with regard to history” (SU 121/386).

Levinas makes a similar point in “Meaning and Sense” in 1964: “the contemporary philosophy of meaning is thus opposed to Plato at an essential point: the intelligible is not conceivable outside of the becoming which suggests it” (MS 83/30-31). Plato, to the contrary, believes that “the separateness of the intelligible world” means that “the world of meanings precedes language and culture, which express it” (MS 84/31).

Levinas associates this absolute first intelligible with the good beyond being of Plato’s Republic. For example, in the section of Totality and Infinity on “Separation and Absoluteness,” he says, “One of the ways of Greek metaphysics consisted in seeking a return to and the fusion with Unity. But Greek metaphysics conceived the Good as separate from the totality of essences, and in this way ...it caught sight of a structure such that the totality could admit of a beyond” (TI 102/76). Greek philosophy totalizes, in other words but, with Plato’s idea of the good beyond being, catches sight of something separate from or beyond the totality. In general, Levinas associates Plato's good beyond being with his own idea of the other as transcendent: “If the notions of totality and being are notions that cover one another, the notion of the transcendent places us beyond categories of being. We thus encounter, in our own way, the Platonic idea of the Good beyond Being. The transcendent is what can not be encompassed” (TI 293/269).

Levinas also associates his idea of the absolute other with the idea of the beautiful in Plato’s Phaedrus. In that dialogue, Socrates claims that the greatest goods come to human beings through divine madness. The delirium is not irrational, according to Levinas. Instead, it is reason itself in its thinking of the ideas. The delirium has to do with “the presence in thought of an idea whose ideatum overflows the capacity of thought” (TI 49/20). Such madness is contrasted with “a thought that proceeds from him who ‘has his own head to himself’” (TI 49/20, where the reference Levinas gives is to Plato's Phaedrus 244a). Possession by a god is not irrational but is experience of the noumenal and the new (7750/20). In other places, Levinas refers to such desire as non-nostalgic (PI 57/242). Regarding love, Levinas once again speaks of Plato as catching sight of the true view. For, when Plato’s Socrates rejects Aristophanes’s idea of love that brings us together with our ancient missing half, Levinas speculates that he has “caught sight” of love and philosophy as non-nostalgic: “Has not Plato, rejecting the myth of the androgynous being presented by Aristophanes, caught sight of the non-nostalgic character of Love and philosophy” (TI 63/34-35; compare PI 57/243).

As with Plato, so also with Western philosophy more generally for Levinas. Most often, he says, it is ontology: “Western philosophy has most often been an ontology: a reduction of the other to the same” (TI 43/13). However, there are exceptions—cases in which traces of the ethical break through (EI 190-91). In addition to Plato’s idea of the good, Levinas also refers to Descartes’s idea of the infinite as the relation between thought and an idea that thought cannot contain: “the ‘I think’ maintains with the Infinite it can nowise contain and from which it is separated a relation called ‘idea of infinity” (TI 48/19). Levinas also refers to Plotinus on the good (OB 95/121) and Aristotle on the agent intellect (TT 49/20) as exceptions.

In chapters that follow, I will indicate that desire that does not return to the self (homecoming) or to the past (nostalgia) need not be desire for the absolute or new but could be, and for Plato is, desire for the eternal. Similarly, I will question whether the image of divine madness in Plato’s Phaedrus is of thought aiming at something singular or absolute that it cannot contain. I will also question Levinas’s view that for Plato reason, knowledge, recollection, maieutics, philosophy, love, and desire all return to the self and will maintain instead that in each of these, for him, I am, in part, directed outside myself. Plato, in my view, is a philosopher of the other throughout his work. My point here is, simply, that Levinas is critical of Plato when he sees Plato as one for whom thought and spirit are a return to the self and that he identifies with Plato when he takes Plato to have the same notion of absolute otherness that Levinas has, namely, absolute otherness as an idea that thought cannot contain.

A word about my approach to interpreting Plato and Levinas. Plato’s dialogues are a combination of argument and action (/ogos and ergon). The teachings of the dialogues—what we might venture to call Plato’s teachings or Plato’s views—are found in both. Argument must be understood in relation to action and action in relation to argument.

For example, at one point in the Meno, a dialogue I will discuss in more detail in chapter 2, Socrates argues that true opinion is as good as knowledge in practice and that, therefore, the prior conclusion they reached that virtue is knowledge is incorrect (Meno 97b9-10). Reading the argument he gives on behalf of true opinion by itself might lead the reader to the conclusion that Socrates no longer believes that virtue is knowledge. However, after Socrates gives that argument, Meno is affected and begins to wonder. He wonders why knowledge is valued more highly than true opinion (Meno 97c11-d3). After he does so, Socrates brings into the discussion the statues of the great sculptor Daedalus, which are thought to be so lifelike that they run away if they are not chained down, and uses them as an analogy for true opinions since true opinions, according to Socrates, run away from a human being’s soul if they are not chained down by reasoning about cause (Meno 97d4— 98a4). The imaginative interlude indicates that their earlier conclusion that virtue is knowledge in fact has not changed since knowledge is more secure than true opinion. Meno has changed, though. He stops simply repeating what he has heard and instead expresses himself. Even more, he expresses wonder. Wonder involves awareness of one’s own lack (if you wonder, then you do not know). Socrates has created the conditions for Meno to wonder and, as a result, actually think instead of simply absorbing someone else’s views. Moreover, he has given Meno a reason for valuing knowledge over opinion, namely, that knowledge is more secure. Arguments in Plato, the example shows, need to be interpreted in their dramatic context.

Drama also is intrinsically important in the dialogues. The whole drama of Meno ordering Socrates around in argument and refusing to think is part of the dialogue’s teaching on its topic, virtue. The drama illuminates the opening question of the dialogue, namely, is virtue teachable and, more generally, how is virtue acquired. If virtue is knowledge, then the drama itself is an example bearing on the dialogue’s topic since it is the drama of a particular search for knowledge. Virtue is as difficult to teach as it is difficult for Socrates to get Meno really to inquire about what virtue is. The dialogue, in other words, performs an answer to the question whether virtue is teachable. Because it does so, it functions as well as an apology or defense of Socrates on the charge of corrupting the young. Though Meno is known for his viciousness after the dramatic date of the dialogue, the dialogue does not show Socrates as culpable but as trying to lead Meno in a better direction and failing due to Meno’s own strong tendencies.

I see Plato’s Socrates—the Socrates created by Plato in the dialogues—as having the skills of a good teacher, if eacher is the right term, given that Socrates, in the Apology, says he is not one. As a good teacher, or at least someone very much like a good teacher, Socrates speaks differently to different types of people. Doing so is a principle Socrates himself enunciates in the Phaedrus where he laments writing on the grounds that it speaks to every person in the same way instead of speaking differently to people who have different soul-types (Phdr. 271c10-d2). Socrates is well aware of different soul-types—of different personalities or characters, we might say—and addresses what he says differently to different people. The reader needs to keep this in mind in interpreting Socrates's claims and arguments.

For example, in the Crifo, at one point Socrates imagines that the laws come in and speak to Crito. They tell him that they are his mother and father who bore him and raised him. Therefore, they claim, he should treat them well in return (Cr. 50a6-51c4). Why does Socrates personify the laws in this way? The answer lies in recognizing Crito’s age and what it tells us about his soul-type or personality. Readers, in my experience, often think Crito is young. Instead, he is about Socrates’s age and from the same deme (4%. 33d9-e1). What his age indicates about Crito is that his difficulty in understanding Socrates does not result from youth and inexperience but likely from an ingrained tendency only to see things a certain way. Specifically, he cannot comprehend any obligation other than an obligation to philoi (family or friends) such as Socrates, his contemporary and fellow demesman. Once Socrates sees Crito’s ingrained tendency, he realizes that he can only make his point about obligation to the city and its laws through personification. Crito understands obligation to his phi/oi—it is because Socrates is a friend that Crito comes to steal him out of prison—so Socrates makes the laws into two of Crito’s most important pAi/oi, his mother and father. In a number of Plato's dialogues, a crucial moment in the dialogue is a dramatic moment such as this one in which Socrates can connect the topic of the dialogue’s argument to something about which the interlocutor cares deeply. In the Crito, it is family. In the Meno, it is whether there is anything such as virtue and, if so, how to get it.