THE MIDDLE VOICE OF ECOLOGICAL CONSCIENCE Also by John Llewelyn

BEYOND METAPHYSICS? The Hermeneutic Circle in Contemporary Continental Philosophy DERRIDA ON THE THRESHOLD OF SENSE The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience

A Chiasmic Reading of Responsibility in the Neighborhood of Levinas, Heidegger and Others

John Llewelyn

Palgrave Macmillan ISBN 978-1-349-21626-0 ISBN 978-1-349-21624-6 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-21624-6 © John Llewelyn, 1991 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1991 978-0-333-54448-8 AU rights reserved. For information, write: Scholarly and Reference Division, St. Martin's Press, Inc., 175 Fifth Avenue, New York. N.Y. 10010

First published in the United States of America in 1991 ISBN 978-0-312-06173-9

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Llewelyn, John. The middle vo1ce of ecological conscience: a chiasmic reading of responsibility in the neighborhood of Levinas, Heidegger, and others/John Llewelyn p. em. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-312-06173-9 1. Conscience. 2. Philosophy of nature. 3. Levinas, Emmanuel. 4. Heidegger, Martin, 1889-1976. I. Title. BJI471.L54 1991 17o--dc20 90-28464 CIP In memory of Kenneth Allsop and Chico Mendes That the respiration by which entities seem to affirm themselves triumphantly in their vital space would be a consumption, a denucleation of my substantiality, that in respiration I already open myself to subjection to the whole of the invisible other, that the beyond or the liberation would be the support of a crushing charge, that is indeed astonishing. It is this astonishment that has been the object of the book proposed here. Que la respiration par laquelle les etants semblent s'affirmer triomphale• ment dans leur espace vital, soit une consumation, une denuc/eation de ma substantialiti; que dans la respiration je m'ouvre deja a ma sujition a tout l'autre invisible; que l'au-dela ou la liberation soit Ie support d'une charge ecrasante - est certes etonnant. C est cet etonnement qui a eti l'objet du livre ici propose. Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence all behaviour with regard to entities is under the sway of obligation. Obligation cannot be explained in terms of objectiv• ity, but the reverse. alles Verhalten zu Seiendem ist durchwaltet von Verbindlichkeit. Wir konnen uns Verbindlichkeit nicht aus Gegenstandlichkeit erklaren, sondern umgekehrt. Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics

And where there is the perilousness of being moved by terror, only there is the blessedness of astonishment - that wakeful rapture which is the breath of all philosophizing ... Und nur, wo die Gefahrlichkeit des Entsetzens, da die Seligkeit des Staunens - jene wache Hingerissenheit, die der adem alles Phi!osophierens ist ... Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics Contents

Preface viii

1 Introduction to Metaphysics 1

2 Anarchic Responsibility 27

3 Who is my Neighbour? 49

4 Critical Responsibility 68

5 Post-Critical Poiesis and Thinking 89

6 Ontological Responsibility and the Poetics of Nature 114

7 The Responsibility of Saving the World through Song 146

8 The Absolute Master 174

9 The Feeling Intellect 197

10 Something like the Middle Voice 225

Postface 245 Notes and References 278 Bibliography 294 Index 297

vii Preface

Warum schweigt die Erde bei dieser Zerstiirung? Martin Heidegger, Beitriige zur Philasaphie

The motivation, perhaps mauvance, behind this essay in philosophical ecology is a desire, perhaps Desire, to speak for those that cannot speak for themselves. To this end I adapt and attempt to adapt as far as possible to each other the philosophies of Emmanuel Levinas and Martin Heidegger, a rash project given that so much of the former's writings are directed at exposing what he considers to be short• comings of the latter's. Where this adaptation has not been possible I have tried to make it plain where I take leave of the one or the other or both. Those familiar with Levinas's. publications, in particular with the one entitled Du sacri au saint, will charge me with reversing the transition indicated in that title and urged in the lectures collected under it. What I plead guilty to is not Simply reversing the order of priority of the sacred and the holy but seeing the second of these in the first, independently of whether the hand at the top of the apsidal mosaic in the basilica of Sant' Apollinare in Classe is reaching down even toward the birds and flowers and rocks at the bottom or (Fehl Gaffes, as Heidegger says, or, as Levinas says, God's anachoresis) drawing itself away. Sacrosanctity is only one of many such chiasmic alterations proposed in the following chapters. The chiasm between Levinas and Heidegger which these chapters effect, affect or explore is not a totalizing synthesis or bland reconciliation. It is a setting out of each from the other, an Auseinandersetzung in which each is in some respect the supplement of the other and each is in tum one step ahead. A chiasmic exchange as spelled out by Jacques Derrida responds to and supplies a need which is met not just by external addition or by logical inference of what is internal to the essence of a term. It supplies an externality to which the term is essentially exposed, demonstrating that the terms of the exchange are not really terms of a simple opposition and that what is inside and what is

viii Preface ix outside must sometimes remain undecidable. When I call something a chiasmic exchange it may not always be one that can be spelled out in this way. I sometimes use the word chiasmus more loosely, as it is used when Levinas speaks of crossing Derrida's path at the heart of a chiasmus (NP 89). There is convergence and divergence. Nor, for reasons which will gradually emerge in the text, do I stipulate a strict definition of what I mean when I use the phrase 'middle voice'. Greek and Sanskrit grammars do not manage to come up with a definition that is both strict and helpful. The following definition by Jan Gonda is unstrict but helpful as a place from which to start:

the 'original' or 'essential' function of the medial voice was ... to denote that a process is taking place with regard to, or is affecting, happening to, a person or a thing; this definition includes also those cases in which we are under the impression that in the eyes of those who once used this category in its original function some power or something powerful was at work in or through the subject, or manifested itself in or by means of the subject on the one hand and those cases in which the process, whilst properly performed by, or originating with, the subject, obviously was limited to the 'sphere' of the subject. l

The crucial words here are 'power', 'process', 'through', 'by' and 'subject'. We need a notion of power which does not merely pass through the subject, and a notion of subject which is neither merely a conduit or passage (the 'through' of pure passivity) nor the conductor entirely in charge of a performance (the 'by' of pure agency) but is performed by as much as it performs the process - or the procedure, Verfahren, to employ the term Kant applies to the schematism of the imagination which Heidegger takes as a point for a new departure in a manner which we shall in some of the following chapters describe. Heidegger's problem, and ours, is to avoid the metapRysics of subjectivity, which may seem to be threatened by the last part of Gonda's characterization of the middle voice, without falling into the metaphysical denial of metaphysics by positing a power that has at most a contingent need of human or other beings. This latter may appear to be threatened by the first part of Gonda's characterization of the middle voice and by Heidegger's thinking after the 'tum' from the philosophical style of Being and Time. For example, in 'Building Dwelling Thinking' (1951) he writes: 'Man acts as though he were the x Preface shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man. Perhaps it is before all else man's inversion of this relation of dominance that drives his nature into alienation (in das Unheimische)' (VA2 20, PLT 146). However, man's contribution is acknowledged by the statement which ends the same paragraph: 'Among all the appeals (Zuspriichen) that we human beings, on our part, can help to be voiced, language is the highest and everywhere the first.' What Heidegger and we need to escape both extremes of domination, that of self-interest and that of the total absorption of self and its interest in a totalizing Self, is a characterization of the middle voice which adjusts each part of Gonda's description to the other. Gonda speculates on the reasons why many forms we would expect to be medial are in fact active and why there is a tendency for middle voiced forms to become assimilated in their function to passives. This bifurcation, which we could call deponence in a sense extended beyond that of the grammar books, illustrates what Heidegger calls falling or fallenness, Verfallen, an existential-ontolo• gical presupposition of falling from grace more original than original sin. There may be something to be said for endeavouring to retrieve the middle voice or translate it from the Greek. Heidegger's writings, the later ones especially, can be read as an attempt to do just this. More difficult to sustain is the suggestion that Levinas's writings too may be read in this way. Can the middle voice express the emphasis on absolute passivity in them? Here is a sentence to encourage us not to abandon too soon the thought that it can: 'What verbs like "to deliver oneself', "to consume oneself', "to exile oneself' (se livrer, se consumer, s' exiler) suggest by their pronominal form is not an act of reflection on oneself, of concern for oneself; it is not an act at all, but a modality of passivity which in substitution [in one's non-selfpositing and one's being for the other] is beyond even passivity' (AEAE 176, OBBE 138). I was introduced to the writings of Levinas through two important essays on them by Derrida.2 I am indebted to both authors, as I am also to Jean Greisch and the Centre Culturel International de Cerisy• la-Salle for the ten days of discussions of Levinas's philosophy at the chateau in Normandy where the participation of Levinas himself provided an opportunity to keep down the number of misunder• standings that may remain in my chapters on work whose sometimes (dare one say?) poetic density, richness and intricacy present no small risk of inducing in its readers the unsober fascination against which he would have them be on guard.3 Further assistance in time of need has Preface xi come from Tina Chanter, Alphonso Lingis, Adriaan Peperzak, David Wood and Robert Bernasconi - the relation of Robert Bernasconi's forthcoming book Between Levinas and Derrida to my own arbitration here between Levinas and Heidegger may well tum out to be as good an example as any of chiasmic supplementation: a chiasmus of a chiasmus. I might have described Derrida's work in the words Levinas uses in the preface to Totality and Infinity of Franz Rosenzweig's The Star of Redemption, as 'a work too often present in this book to be cited'. However, although there is discussion of an aspect of his work only in Chapter 10, I have been unable to avoid making passing references to his writings throughout. I make no apologies for now reciting at length the sentences, already cited in my Derrida on the Threshold of Sense, 4 that sowed the seed from which so much in what follows has sprung:

In a conceptuality adhering to classical strictures differance would be said to designate a constitutive, productive, and originary causality, the process of scission and division which would produce or constitute different things or differences. But, because it brings us close to the infinitive and active kernel of differer, differance (with an a) neutralizes what the infinitive denotes as simply active, just as mouvance in our language does not simply mean the fact of moving, of moving oneself or of being moved. No more is resonance the act of resonating. We must consider that in the usage of our language the ending -ance remains undecided between the active and the passive. And we will see why that which lets itself be designated differance is neither simply active nor simply passive, announcing or rather recalling something like the middle voice, saying an operation that is not an operation, an operation that cannot be conceived either as passion or as the action of a subject on an object, or on the basis of the categories of agent or patient, neither on the basis of nor moving toward any of these terms. For the middle voice, a certain intransitivity, may be what philosophy, at its outset, distributed into an active and passive voice, thereby constituting itself by means of this repressIOn.. 5

Conversations and correspondence with Charles Bigger have helped me distinguish the various tones of the middle voice, and the interest I share with him also in the doctrine of schematism in xii Preface

Kant, its antecedents going back beyond Plato and its still continuing fecundity make me impatient for the publication of his Kant's Methodology: A Concluding Hermeneutical Postscript, forthcoming from Ohio University Press. My hearing has been improved too by Charles Scott's papers on the middle voice referred to in my notes. I recall with pleasure the day he, Thomas Pepper and I met in Perugia on a sunny terrace overlooking Assisi during a session of the Collegium Phaenomenologicum and discovered that we had each been separately cultivating thoughts on different applications of what Derrida, who was also there, refers to as 'something like the middle voice'. The doctrine of schematism as it develops in Kant's three Critiques, his phenomenology of respect and the remarks about the great chain of being made in Religion within the Bounds of Reason Alone and elsewhere serve, through Heidegger's post-critical treatment of these, as a base from which to launch a comparison of this last with Levinas's reaction to the deontology of Kant. The investigation of rationalist deontology and of Levinas's super-rationalist dis-ontology is preceded by some reflections on sentimentalist, utilitarian and other teleological theories in Chapter I. A briefer version of Chapter 3 was read at the Levinas conference organized by Robert Bernasconi and David Krell at the University of Essex in 1987 and appears in Re-Reading Levinas, a collection based on the proceedings edited by Robert Bernasconi and Simon Critchley. I thank them and Indiana University Press, for allowing me to use that material here. Chapters 4 and 5 include sections of a paper which was read at the Conflict of Faculties conference at the University of Alabama in 1987 organized by Richard Rand and is to be published in the volume of the proceedings entitled Our Academic Contract. I thank him and the University of Nebraska Press for permission to use those sections here. For permission to use as my Chapter 6 an expanded version of an article included in the Heidegger centenary number of Research in Phenomenology, XIX (1989) I thank the editor, John Sallis. My thanks are due to him too, and to David Krell, for forcing me by their example to be more micrological in my reading of the great texts in the neighbourhood of which this book is written. I am grateful for the assistance given me by the staff of the University and New College libraries at Edinburgh and the Director and librarian of the Institut Fran~ais d'Ecosse. I count myself fortunate to have been a member of the Department of Philosophy at Edinburgh with chairmen and other colleagues more than ready to Preface xiii accommodate my philosophical predilections in the arrangements made for teaching, not least through a programme of cooperation promoted by Alan Steele and his successors in the Department of French. I thank all my colleagues for encouraging and facilitating my acquisition of the word processor on which this book was composed, and in particular Dory Scaltsas and Mark Bedau who with nothing short of the infinite patience of which Levinas writes taught me the skills required for the use of this wonder of wonders of the technological age. Also for their patience, and for their inspiration, I thank my students. For preparing the index I thank David Gandolfo. I thank Frances Arnold and Keith Povey for putting at my service so unstintingly their editorial expertise. I am indebted to Timothy Sprigge for reading and commenting on the Postface thereby enabling me to raise its argument toward the standard of rig our I admire in his own philosophizing. I thank Robert Gibbs for cooperating in the mouvance of this book and for helping me see that the ecological extension of responsibility it seeks by following clues in the works of Heidegger may already be at hand in the work of which Levinas says that it is too often present in his book to be cited - unless the lines cited as the first epigraph of my book, as well as being a more complete citation of Dostoevsky's monk Markel than Levinas sometimes gives, is also already a citation of the icriture du dis-astre in which Rosenzweig says:

Thus the neighbour is . . . only locum tenens. Love goes out to whatever is nighest to it as to a representative, in the fleeting moment of its presentness, and thereby in truth to the all-inclusive concept of all men and all things which could ever assume this place of being its nighest neighbour. In the final analysis it goes out to everything, to the world ...6

It goes out to my nighest, my wife Margaret, along with gratitude for her collaboration. She and I are of one mind that royalties from the sale of the product of this work should go to Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth.

JOHN LLEWELYN