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Sartre's and Levinas' Phenomenological Ethics A OPENING ONESELF TO AN OTHER: SARTRE'S AND LEVINAS' PHENOMENOLOGICAL ETHICS A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate School at the University of Notre Dame in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Jennifer E. Rosato ____________________________ Gary Gutting, Director Graduate Program in Philosophy Notre Dame, Indiana April 2010 OPENING ONESELF TO AN OTHER: SARTRE'S AND LEVINAS' PHENOMENOLOGICAL ETHICS Abstract by Jennifer E. Rosato. In this dissertation, I raise the question as to what sort of ethics might be gotten out of phenomenology, and begin to answer it by examining the ethical theories of Jean- Paul Sartre and Emmanuel Levinas. I begin the project by circumscribing the sense in which I take it that both Sartre and Levinas are working within the phenomenological tradition, and by outlining the fundamental assumptions -- phenomenological and ontological -- about the self and its position in the world upon which Sartre's and Levinas' ethics are based. I then proceed to discuss these philosophers' accounts of relations with others, and discuss in detail the ethical theory that Sartre and Levinas develop on the basis of their respective descriptions of self and others. Finally, in the last chapter of the dissertation, I conclude that, in the case of Sartre and Levinas, the sort of ethics that phenomenology offers is: (1) a metaethical account rather than a first-order normative ethics, which proposes (2) that in order to be genuinely free, my choices must be determined through my relations with other persons and (3) that ethics is a matter of self-construction, in the sense that ethical normativity is constituted Jennifer E. Rosato. in relationship with others along with the construction of the free and conscious self (Chapter 5). TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgments ..............................................................................................................iv Introduction .........................................................................................................................1 Chapter 1: Sartre's and Levinas' Phenomenological Ontology I: Fundamental Accounts of the Self...................................................................................................................15 1.1 Sartre on the self..............................................................................................16 1.1.1 Being-in-itself and Being-for-itself ........................................................16 1.1.2 Reflection, negation, anguish and bad faith ...........................................26 1.2 Levinas on the self...........................................................................................36 1.2.1 The il y a and the hypostasis of the self..................................................36 1.2.2 Sensation and representation: pre-objectifying and objectifying intentionality.............................................................................................45 1.3 On "ontology" and "metaphysics" ...................................................................54 1.4 A few remarks on phenomenological ontology...............................................63 Chapter 2: Sartre's and Levinas' Phenomenological Ontology II: The Encounter with the Other ......................................................................................................................75 2.1 Sartre on the Other...........................................................................................76 2.1.1 The look, being-for-others, and the internal negation ............................76 2.1.2 Concrete relations and the possibility of conversion..............................89 2.2 Levinas on the Other......................................................................................104 2.2.1 The face, language, passivity, and hypostasis as substitution ..............104 2.2.2 Concrete relations.................................................................................122 2.3 The priority of the Other in Sartre and Levinas.............................................127 Chapter 3: Sartre's ethics: Creation, Authenticity, and Situated Freedom ......................133 3.1 The "Ethical Implications" of Sartre's ontology: man as an ens causa sui....134 3.2 The ens causa sui revisited: freedom and conversion in the Notebooks for an Ethics............................................................................................................147 3.3 History, concrete ethics, and the Other..........................................................161 Chapter 4: Levinas' ethics: From the face to ethics.........................................................176 4.1 Responsibility, the face, and ur-ethics...........................................................179 4.2 A pre-linguistic command .............................................................................188 ii 4.2.1 The saying of responsibility .................................................................188 4.2.2 Murder and violence.............................................................................199 4.3 Freedom.........................................................................................................209 Chapter 5: Conclusion: Phenomenological Metaethics as a Humanism of the Other.....219 5.1 Phenomenological ethics as phenomenological metaethics ..........................220 5.1.1 Sartre.....................................................................................................221 5.1.2 Levinas..................................................................................................230 5.2 The Social character of ethical freedom........................................................236 5.3 Sociality, ethical self-construction, and phenomenology..............................254 Bibliography ....................................................................................................................264 iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank my advisor, Dr. Gary Gutting. His prompt comments on earlier drafts of this dissertation and his sincere encouragement have been invaluable. Many thanks also those who read and commented on my dissertation at the defense, Dr. Karl Ameriks, Dr. Fred Rush, and Dr. Steve Watson. I would also like to thank Dr. Kathryn Gardner, whose friendship, support, and hours spent watching my son made this work possible. Finally, thank you to my husband, Drew, who doesn't like Sartre or Levinas very much, but who has discussed them with me at length anyway. iv INTRODUCTION "Everyone will readily agree that it is of the highest importance to know whether we are not duped by morality", writes Emmanuel Levinas at the beginning of his Preface to Totality and Infinity. Our ordinary experience of human relations, he admits, might seem to provide evidence that we are indeed duped by morality: herein, what we experience is "the permanent possibility of war", while the "art of foreseeing war and of winning it by every means -- politics" is "opposed to morality, as philosophy to naïveté" (TI 21). Politics, it seems, dictates a successful man's actions, while morality is a fool's game. The state of "war", as Levinas describes it, includes not only physical violence inflicted by persons on one another, but also the subjugation of persons to a system, a "totality" or "order" that reduces individuals "to being bearers of forces that command them unbeknown to themselves" (Ibid.). In war, individuals and their personal dignity are subordinated to a power play through which tyrants in control treat lesser men as pawns, while these tyrants themselves are controlled by the demands of political calculation. To answer the question of whether morality is myth or reality, we will need to consider whether this state of war is or can ever be suspended: "The moral consciousness can sustain the mocking gaze of the political man only if the certitude of peace dominates the evidence of war" (22). Is there an experience of this peace, or a way for us to see the limits of the 'totality' enforced by war? 1 Levinas' answer, of course, is well-known. In a relationship with an Other who is "a surplus exterior to the totality" we discover evidence that the totality of war does find a limit: namely, the transcendence of the Other over and above that totality (Ibid. 22). Levinas argues that "ethics is an optics" that allows us to "see" this transcendence, which reveals itself with an entirely unique phenomenality, and which, he goes on to claim, is the foundation of subjectivity itself (22, 26, 29). This optics, this vision, which Levinas argues is already present within the self, proves that we are not duped by morality. It will be a goal of this dissertation to elucidate the meaning of these claims by explaining the ethical theory that Levinas proposes in Totality and Infinity and Otherwise than Being. It is, furthermore, the purpose of this dissertation to consider the fact that Levinas' ethical theory is a phenomenological one, and to question whether this methodological approach has any distinctive effect on the type of ethics he proposes. Hence it will not be incidental to my study that Levinas describes the transcendence of the Other using the framework and vocabulary of phenomenology. Thus he claims that "Husserlian phenomenology has made possible" a "passage from ethics to metaphysical exteriority": namely, the demonstration that the relation with the Other ("ethics") involves a unique intention that overflows objectifying
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