LEVINAS AND THE TRIPLE CRITIQUE OF HEIDEGGER

As twentieth century fades into of purposes, but close off in themselves, with a the distance, seems to be sort of inviolable integrity apart from all net- standing the test of time. His stature in conti- worksorfunctions.Humansalwaysstand nental philosophy is beyond question, and somewhere in particular, bathing in the mate- those French thinkers who avoid his influence rial reality of wind, water, and stars, not to most noticeably (such as Alain Badiou and mention hammers and cigarettes, none of them Gilles Deleuze) are often difficult for precisely entirely used up by their assignment to wider this reason, since it is Heidegger who has purposes. It is often forgotten that this second shaped our vision of philosophy more than criticism of Heidegger is the basis for the first: anyone else. Even analytic philosophers have for in , it is “separation” begun to find useful insights in Heidegger’s that paves the way for exteriority and transcen- works, while no analytic thinker has a compa- dence.1 rable influence in the other direction—not In this article, I will claim that there is also a even Wittgenstein. As the dust settles on the third critique of Heidegger to be found in past hundred years of philosophy, it is Levinas, one more closely related to the sec- Heidegger who looms as the ancestor whose ond than to the first. As Alphonso Lingis has influence we most need to absorb and resist. lucidly observed,2 Levinas gives us a new defi- No one has seen this more clearly than Em- nition of individual substance without relaps- manuel Levinas. His claim that we must leave ing into the traditional substance discredited the climate of Heideggerian philosophy, and by Heidegger’s shifting system of tools. For that we cannot do so by returning to a philoso- Levinas, specific things are not just ontic de- phy that would be pre-Heideggerian, strikes bris to be dissolved in a mighty ethical Other, me as definitive. Nor does Levinas offer this but neither are they just formless elements statement as merely a vague program: in my such as water or clouds. Things are substances, view, he has done more than anyone else to closed off in themselves even while permeated move us into the post-Heideggerian climate by what lies beyond them. If metaphysics for that he recommends. In the works of Levinas, Levinas is inconceivable without the com- the lasting breakthroughs of Husserlian phe- mand of the Other, it is also unthinkable with- nomenology are present in easily recognizable out the integrity and resistance of specific, au- form, even if played in a strange new key. He tonomous entities. Heidegger misses the grapples with Heidegger’s question of being ethical moment, but perhaps more fatefully, he and his famous tool-analysis, reworking them also misses the unyielding autonomy of spe- in ways their author never attempted. Levinas cific objects. While Heidegger is quick to dis- does this along two separate paths. First and miss drums, houses, and tea plantations as most famously, he senses the lack of any ethi- “ontic,” Levinas glimpses the metaphysical di- cal philosophy in Heidegger, and also identi- mension of particular things. My one criticism fies a new space for such an : the famous of the Levinasian approach is that it remains alterity or exteriority of the other. In this way too human-centered, too much in the shadow Heidegger is challenged from above, with an of Kant’s Copernican Revolution. Things may appeal to the good beyond being. In a second hide behind their contours in substantial pleni- and less prominent sense, Levinas challenges tude, resisting human effort, but Levinas also Heidegger from beneath, with his concepts of seems to grant them independence only when enjoyment and the elemental. While humans are on the scene to feel resistance. A Heidegger submits all objects to a relational genuine, full-blown metaphysics would also system of tools serving a series of purposes, need to account for the causal interaction of Levinas objects to this form of holism. Entities substances even when no humans are any- are not simply dissolved in some global system where in the vicinity. The separation and exte- PHILOSOPHY TODAY WINTER 2009 407 © DePaul University 2009 riority found in Levinasian metaphysics does not manifest exteriority and the other as should not be seen just as new categories of hu- other; it destroys the identity of the same.”3 man experience, but should be injected into re- And finally, “individuals are reduced to being ality as a whole— even in pure inanimate colli- bearers of forces that command them unbe- sions between rocks and grains of salt. Only in known to themselves. The meaning of individ- this way do we make a clean break with the uals (invisible outside of this totality) is de- Heideggerian climate, where being and Dasein rived from the totality....Fortheultimate always come as a pair. Against Heidegger’s meaning alone counts; the last act alone claims, while it may be true that being needs changes beings into themselves.”4 If we take beings, it does not need human Dasein at all. In the word “war” in its literal sense, these state- this respect Levinas lays the groundwork for a ments are certainly true for the Blitzkrieg strange new form of realism, without taking through Poland and the Ardennes, the strug- the final step of severing concrete entities from gles at Dunkirk and Normandy, and all the var- their dependence on human being. ious massacres and deportations that touched Let’s now take a closer look at the three the Levinas family to no small degree. Yet the ways that Levinas overcomes his strategic en- primary target of these anti-war passages is not emy—totality. What Levinas most abhors is the Nazi war-machine, but the philosophy of the model of the world as a totalized system, Heidegger, whose tool-analysis presents the each thing defined by its relations to the others. world as a system of entities that gain meaning If Levinas has one original idea in metaphys- only in relation to a totality of purposes. All ics, it is this: the world is not a system, but is beings are assigned to the full system of be- split up into dignified local zones that demand ings, and nothing can be viewed as an inde- to be taken seriously. And we must remember pendent substance. For Heidegger, autono- that Levinas does not oppose totality only (1) mous or separate things exterior to the whole with the infinity that lies beyond it, but also (2) of meaning could only be present-at-hand with the elemental enjoyment that lies beneath entities, and his contempt for presence is it, and (3) the kingdom of substances that lie clearly central to his philosophy. directly within it and prevent totality from Surely Heidegger must have realized that gaining a foothold in the first place. Although we deal with individual cigarettes and loaves Totality and Infinity is the title of his most fa- of bread, and that such objects are not entirely mous book, it could just as well be phrased as used up in a totality of meaning. But this Totality and Separation, Totality and Enjoy- “surely” is irrelevant in judging any philoso- ment, or Totality and Substance. Or rather, the pher— Parmenides must surely have realized book could easily have been designed with that our perceptions are filled with entities in these as the titles of three separate chapters. motion, yet this did not prevent him from treat- ing them dismissively. The question is not 1. Separation what philosophers “must have known,” but only what they openly honored and welcomed The enemy is totality, and another name for into their thinking. And it is Levinas, not totality is war. For Levinas, the metaphor of Heidegger, who makes sufficient room in phi- war means not just that each thing struggles to losophy for individual beings such as wood, impose its will on the others, but also that each silk, or apples. In his own words, “the handling loses its identity in this struggle, fully de- and utilization of tools, the recourse to all the ployed without reserve in all the conflicts and instrumental gear of a life, whether to fabricate relations with its neighbors. As he puts it, the tools or to render things accessible, concludes “black light [of war is] ...acasting into move- in enjoyment . . . the lighter to the cigarette one ment of beings hitherto anchored in their iden- smokes, the fork to the food, the cup to the tity ...byanobjective order from which there lips.”5 Our world is not a unified totality of ob- is no escape. The trial by force is the test of the jects plugged into other objects, and so forth real.” More than this, war makes things “play without end. Instead, we live amidst a carnival roles in which they no longer identify them- of independent zones, districts, and termini, selves, making them betray not only commit- and explore a world without fissures or gaps,6 ments but also their own substance. ...War where the meaningless hum of insects and the PHILOSOPHY TODAY 408 © DePaul University 2009 feel of cotton garments on our skin is not dis- pitchforks, towers, and windmills that give us solved into some global empire of references. separation, but only the human being who hap- We live in a milieu or medium, not in a tool- pens to be experiencing these things. In a system.7 In this sense, the things are partly sep- word, hypostasis means people. Without peo- arated from totality, but also partly immersed ple, there would be nothing but totality, in it. Levinas has no wish to return to an old- nothing but apeiron, a pure insomnia without fashioned theory of natural lumps of substance insomniacs. whose relations would only be accidental. He does not deny the system of tools; he merely 2. Exteriority insists that the tool-system is riddled with gaps and tropical islands where individual things Without forgetting these criticisms, let’s take shape for our enjoyment. consider again the positive side of what While this friendly critique of Heidegger is Levinas has shown. Things are separated from compelling enough, two immediate objections the global tool-system, which is riddled with come to mind. The first is that Levinas is am- comforts and resting-stations. As a description biguous as to just what it is that resists the tool- of enjoyment, Levinas uses the provocative system. Sometimes he says it is individual en- term atheism, since enjoyment is sincerely oc- tities such as “fine cars” or “fine cigarette cupied with whatever it now enjoys, and pays lighters,” which we encounter as autonomous no attention to the beyond. But such a distinc- things to be touched and enjoyed quite apart tion cannot entirely be maintained. As he puts from their ultimate meaning. But just as often, it: “the exteriority of a being is inscribed in its he appeals to a formless elemental realm pre- essence.”10 Stated differently, “[the] ‘beyond’ ceding any condensation into definite shapes. of the totality and objective experience is . . . Separation is defined as sensibility, and not to be described in purely negative fashion. Levinas praises the senses as naïve or sincere It is reflected within the totality and history, only in those passages when they do not split within experience.”11 the world into distinct objects. For Levinas, In other words. the separation by which en- objects always lie partly beyond the sensible. joyment is cut off from the whole is never com- Second, and more importantly, Levinas plete; even the most terrestrial crust of bread is tends to reserve to human consciousness alone bathed in light from beyond. And it is impor- the right to break the totality of the world into tant never to forget that both separation and ex- separate zones of enjoyment. This is already teriority are ways in which the totality of the explicit in his brilliant 1948 treatise Existence world is interrupted with gaps. Levinas begins and Existents, where only the human being is by insisting that enjoyment and the elemental able to hypostatize the anonymous rumble of are ways of breaking up Heidegger’s unified the il y a, just as Anaxagoras only allowed nous tool-empire. But even if the global system of (mind) to break the formless apeiron into equipment is already shattered into fragments pieces.8 While Heidegger posits Dasein as by enjoyment, there is the danger that each what turns the world into a system of refer- fragment might represent a new sort of micro- ences, Levinas moves in the reverse direction. totality, visible at a glance and entirely sub- The world-in-itself, for him, is called system, sumed within human consciousness. In some totality, or war, and only human being gains a ways this is the predicament of Husserl’s phe- foothold or builds a home amidst the global nomenology, which according to Levinas blur of systematic relations. As Levinas still turns the given into “an exteriority surrender- claims in Totality and Infinity more than a de- ing in clarity and without immodesty its whole cade later, it is the psychism that resists total- being to thought. . . . [Such] clarity is the disap- ity: psyche or cogito are what generate separa- pearance of what could shock.”12 By contrast, tion (and he makes no mention here of animal Levinas holds that “consciousness . . . does not psyches). “The separation of the Same is pro- consist in equaling being with representation . duced in the form of an inner life, a psychism. . . but rather in overflowing this play of The psychism constitutes an event in being . . . lights—this phenomenology—and in accom- it is already a way of being, resistance to the to- plishing events whose ultimate signification . . tality.”9 Then it is neither wind and water, nor . does not lie in disclosing.”13 The events of the LEVINAS AND HEIDEGGER 409 © DePaul University 2009 world are never fully deployed before our eyes, of Chartres are equally valid, since only some which would simply make them a new kind of vantage points fully bring out the greatness of totality even if broken into pieces—a totality the Cathedral. Likewise, not all speeds of con- of all the things as grasped by me. Instead, all suming gourmet chocolates or prize-winning our thoughts and actions aim at an exterior wines are optimal for bringing out the true fla- realm of absolute otherness. vor of these items. It is impossible for The separation of enjoyment and the ele- separation to wall off perceptions in mental does not, for Levinas, entail their fini- themselves. We are always aiming beyond tude. Things are not projected against a back- those perceptions, toward the unified objects ground of nothingness, but open onto the lying beneath them. infinite—not as some ethereal realm located We now return to the theme of the across a Platonic khorismos, but as an infinity “psychism.” Here we find the most dubious that animates enjoyment from within. As he step taken by Levinas. On the one hand, it is puts it, “what is essential to created existence true that he makes the following remark about is its separation with regard to the Infinite. This intentionality, and in a critical spirit: “the ob- separation is not simply a negation. Accom- ject is converted into an event of the subject. plished as psychism, it precisely opens upon Light, the element of knowledge, makes all the idea of infinity.”14 Let’s ignore the phrase that we encounter be ours.”21 But although he “accomplished as psychism,” since I will re- counters the reign of light with an infinity that turn to this issue shortly. The key for now is can never be made present, he also strangely that separation is never entirely closed off, holds that the Infinite exists only as a correlate which would simply give us a new totality: a of thought. For Levinas, even if infinity is total set of finite bread, knives, orphans, and never absent, it is always produced. And what widows as opposed to a global tool-system, but produces it is a human subject, the only thing a totality nonetheless. When Socrates denies in the world capable of hypostatizing individ- that justice means helping one’s friends and ual zones from amidst the rumbling, insom- hurting one’s enemies, his first step is to distin- niac totality of the il y a. As he puts it in the guish between the true and the apparent preface to Totality and Infinity: “the idea of in- friend.15 This entails that the friend, or any- finity is the mode of being, the infinition, of in- thing else, is not exhausted by its current ap- finity. Infinity does not first exist, and then re- parent state of affairs, and that some deeper re- veal itself. Its infinition is produced as ality lies behind it. Hence the claim of Levinas revelation, as a positing of its idea in me.”22 He that his philosophy is diametrically opposed to repeats this point at the close of the book, tell- Spinozism,16 now at its height of prestige in ing us that transcendence “concerns a being thanks to Deleuze and which is revealed in a face. ...Transcendence others, but guilty now as ever of reducing is the transcendence of an I. Only an I can re- things to their current deployment in the spond to the injunction of a face.”23 This leaves world, free of any excess or potentiality. This is us with the following picture of the world. The what Levinas means when he says that “the world is not entirely exhausted in warfare, but Place of the Good above every essence is the split up into countless discrete zones of domes- most profound teaching, not of theology, but of tic peace, even if temporary ones. The things as philosophy.”17 Spinoza like Heidegger leaves we perceive them are separate, both from the no place for the good above every systematic system of tools and from the anonymous rum- totality. This association of transcendence ble of being as a whole. But these separate with the good leads Levinas to link it to eth- things would degenerate into a more frag- ics,18 and even to God.19 But this may be aim- mented form of totality if they existed only in ing needlessly high, and needlessly quickly. the unified light that bathes them. Hence, As Lingis has shown in The Imperative, there along with separation, things have exteriori- is something like an ethical dimension even in ty—an aspect that lies beyond their position in the merest imperative to focus our eyes a cer- the world as we know it. I am happy to endorse tain way to see a certain object correctly, or to this ubiquitous interplay of separation and ex- treat specific objects in specific ways.20 Not all teriority in all the things of the world. What I angles and distances for viewing the Cathedral am not happy to endorse is the further notion PHILOSOPHY TODAY 410 © DePaul University 2009 that only human beings are able to break the to- things: “the sensible quality already clings to a tality into fragments, or that only humans substance.”28 The things are manifested in en- bathe in the element and bow before the face of joyment, but never reducible to it. For “sub- the Other. In fact, I believe that Levinas is even stantiality . . . does not lie in the sensible nature more powerful as a philosopher of substance of things, since sensibility coincides with en- than as a philosopher of ethics. For even in his joyment . . . without substantive, a pure quality, own thinking, it is only individual substance a quality without support. . . . The substantial- that rebels against totality in both directions. ity of a thing lies in its solidity, offering itself to the hand which takes and takes away.”29 3. Substance Few philosophers have ever given such beautiful descriptions of particular substances It is surprising that so little attention has as Levinas. To give just one instance: “Trans- been paid to the concept of substance in formations occur to things which remain the Levinas, since it the one notion that contains same: the stone crumbles but remains the same both methods by which Levinas overcomes stone; I rediscover my pen and armchair the Heidegger’s position. If enjoyment is the space same; it is in the selfsame palace of Louis XIV of non-finality and immediacy, it is not just that the Treaty of Versailles was signed; the wind and water, but always has definite con- same train is the train that leaves at the same tours; after all, the enjoyment of bread, sun- hour.”30 Admittedly, he also seems to back light, cigarettes, and kisses are all different away from this strange realism in two addi- kinds of enjoyment. Enjoyment, then, is al- tional passages: “the world of perception is ways just the surface configuration of some in- thus a world where things have identity,” and dividual substance. The same is true for exteri- “an earth inhabited by men endowed with lan- ority, also known as alterity. If things cannot guage is peopled with stable things.”31 Yet it is exist without being permeated by Infinity, the difficult to see how the depth of substance same holds true in reverse—after all, Levinas could be produced by perception or language. claims that the Infinite is not a preexistent Even Levinas tells us that the alterity of a thing monolith or apeiron, but instead can only be is not exhausted in its visible form. When he produced in some specific manifestation. Nei- reminds us that “one can melt the metal of ther separated enjoyment nor exterior alterity things to make new objects of them, utilize the ever exist in isolation. These two moments are wood of a box to make a table out of it by chop- always moments of some specific thing. ping, sawing, planning,”32 this is clearly not a Levinas tells us that action entails “a certain linguistic exercise. “The depth of the thing can respect for objects.”24 Such respect is said to be have no other meaning than that of its matter. . . missing in Heidegger, who underestimates the . The darkness of matter would denote the state objectivity of objects,25 since his tool-system of a being that precisely has no façade.”33 But enslaves all objects to a process which “by es- most importantly of all, Levinas does not offer sence [consists] in proceeding to a term, in us a frozen dualism with mysterious matter pit- coming to an end. But the outcome is the point ted against shiny visible form. There turns out at which every signification is precisely lost. . . to be an infinite regress of substance and . The means themselves lose their signification façade, one tangled into another endlessly, in the outcome.”26 Turning against this with objects shifting constantly (and simulta- Heideggerian conception, the more object-ori- neously) between their form-roles and matter- ented Levinas reports that things “are not en- roles. As we read in a stunning passage: tirely absorbed in their form; they . . . stand out in themselves, breaking through, rending their Things present themselves as solids with con- forms, are not resolved into the relations that tours clearly delimited. Along with tables, link them up to the totality....Thething is al- chairs, envelopes, notebooks, pens—fabricated ways an opacity, a resistance, an ugliness.”27 things—stones, grains of salt, clumps of earth, They are not imaginary substrates that unify icicles, apples are things. . . . One thing is dis- supposed bundles of qualities that alone are ac- tinct from another because an interval separates cessible to the mind. On the contrary, sensible them. But a part of a thing is in turn a thing: the qualities have meaning only with respect to the back, the leg of the chair, for example. But also LEVINAS AND HEIDEGGER 411 © DePaul University 2009 any fragment of the leg is a thing, even if it does one another: confronting each other as forms not constitute one of its articulations—every- or façades, but mutually dependent on their thing one can detach and remove from it.34 dark inner realities where secret conspiracies are always being hatched. This appeal to an endless chain of things, one Despite pushing us to this point, Levinas contained inside another, is important for a shies away from drawing any conclusions very specific reason. Namely, it implies a cos- about inanimate matter. In this respect he mos with more than the usual two layers. For stands clearly within the phenomenological the leg of a chair, or fragments of the leg, do not become parts of the thing only when we tradition that he so greatly honors—a tradition happen to be looking at them. They must al- founded precisely to counter the reign of scien- ways be there, always supporting the thing as a tific naturalism. Rather than letting the science whole. But this implies that the difference be- of inanimate impact explain the sounds of vio- tween exterior depth and sensible particularity lins and the odor of baked potatoes, phenom- is not something rooted solely in human real- enology wants us to stay on the plane of human ity—as though human consciousness were a experience. While this serves wonderfully to unique tear in the fabric of an otherwise prevent false reductionism, it concedes too totalized cosmos. The leg of a chair is not much through its tacit agreement that natural- “totalized” by the chair any more than the chair ism gives an adequate explanation of what is totalized by its assignment to purposes in happens when a rock slams into the leg of a ta- Heidegger’s tool-system. ble. This is usually regarded as nothing more This raises the question of why Levinas is than the collision of one hard solid with an- so committed to giving all power of rupture other, a dull mechanical process best measured and hypostasis to the “I,” the human self, and in laboratories and left to physicists. But if language. For humans, individual substances Levinas is correct, the interaction between are always a strange interplay of warm sensible substances is never quite as boring as this. As façades and opaque cores that can be cut or he tells us in a brilliant phrase, “a thing exists melted. But the same must hold true even for in the midst of its wastes.”35 This is not merely things when we consider them as parts or a statement about human perception, but a wholes apart from all human involvement. The more general claim about how the substance of chair is able to stand only because its legs have a rock or table hide behind their sensible con- a leg-form, rigid and reliable, pointing at right tours, which cling to these individual sub- angles into the floor, regardless of the quality stances like frost to windows or rust to shovels. of their material. But imagine that one of the Thus, when one inanimate object encounters legs were made of rotting wood—its rotten another, we do not have a blind mechanical state currently irrelevant to the standing of the collision, but one substance in the midst of its chair, but eventually very relevant when the wastes encountering another in the midst of its chair topples to the floor centuries after being wastes. How each of these objects penetrates abandoned, seen and heard by no one. “Lan- the wastes of other objects to engage in direct guage” and “the self” have nothing to do with contact is a philosophical problem that this kind of situation. Instead, it is a more gen- Levinas never openly formulates, but which eral question of substances interacting with his own thinking invites us to consider. ENDNOTES

1. , Totality and Infinity: An Essay 5. Ibid., 133. on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Dordrecht: 6. Ibid., 135. Kluwer, 1991). 7. Ibid., 130. 2. Alphonso Lingis, “A Phenomenology of Sub- 8. Emmanuel Levinas, Existence and Existents, trans. stances,” American Catholic Philosophical Quar- Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, terly 71 (1997): 505–22. 1948). 3. Totality and Infinity, 21. 9. Totality and Infinity, 54. 4. Ibid., 21–22. 10. Ibid., 196. PHILOSOPHY TODAY 412 © DePaul University 2009 11. Ibid., 23. 23. Ibid., 305. Italics added. 12. Ibid., 124. 24. Ibid., 82. 13. Ibid., 27–28. 25. Ibid., 94. 14. Ibid., 150. Italics added. 26. Ibid. 94–95. 15. Plato, Republic, Book I. 27. Ibid., 74. 16. Totality and Infinity, 105. 28. Ibid., 137. 17. Ibid., 103. 29. Ibid., 161. 18. Ibid., 174. 30. Ibid., 139. 19. Ibid., 79. 31. Ibid., italics added in both sentences. 20. Alphonso Lingis, The Imperative (Bloomington: In- 32. Ibid., 192. diana Univ. Press, 1998.) 33. Ibid., 192–93. 21. Totality and Infinity, 274. 34. Ibid., 160. Italics added. 22. Ibid., 26. 35. Ibid., 139.

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LEVINAS AND HEIDEGGER 413 © DePaul University 2009