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Ontology in Emmanuel Levinas's Philosophy

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Loyola University Chicago Loyola eCommons Dissertations (6 month embargo) 1-23-2012 Ontology in Emmanuel Levinas's Philosophy Stacy Carol Bautista Loyola University Chicago Follow this and additional works at: https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss_6mos Part of the Ethics and Political Philosophy Commons Recommended Citation Bautista, Stacy Carol, "Ontology in Emmanuel Levinas's Philosophy" (2012). Dissertations (6 month embargo). 7. https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss_6mos/7 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by Loyola eCommons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations (6 month embargo) by an authorized administrator of Loyola eCommons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. Copyright © 2012 Stacy Carol Bautista LOYOLA UNIVERSITY CHICAGO ONTOLOGY IN EMMANUEL LEVINAS'S PHILOSOPHY A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY PROGRAM IN PHILOSOPHY BY STACY C. BAUTISTA CHICAGO, ILLLINOIS DECEMBER 2011 Copyright by Stacy C. Bautista, 2011. All rights reserved. PREFACE The work you are about to read was motivated primarily by the author's interest in that strange Levinasian notion, il y a: what is it? How does it function, and how did Levinas arrive at it? What becomes of it in Levinas's later work? Over the course of his career, Levinas maintained a tempestuous and vexed relationship with ontology and with being as it functions and is described in ontological investigations. Il y a — “there is...”—is not the first way in which Levinas attempts to formulate what troubles him about being—a generality that manifests as an anonymity and indifference that is far from being neutral with respect to human subjectivity. Nor is il y a the first sign that Levinas is troubled by the project of phenomenology as fundamental ontology, which Heidegger had at least partially sketched and justified in Being and Time (1927). The culmination of a line of thinking and struggle with philosophical assumptions about the priority of being, Levinas’s development of the notion of il y a is spurred by descriptions of death and evil as non-being in philosophical analysis, which both leads to ontological investigations of these phenomena, and to their misinterpretation. Death becomes a revelatory moment of the whole of a being; evil becomes reducible to an absence of being. Levinas’s philosophy begins when he asks whether such interpretations can stand, and whether a phenomenological ontology can serve as the method to access these phenomena. The philosophical privilege of being, based on the need to avoid giving either iii parity or privilege to non-being, as Levinas tells the story of philosophies emerging from Greek thought, prevented philosophers from recognizing the inadequacy of ontology to ethical life, i.e., life lived in the face of human existents. Even Heidegger, by privileging death as the moment of the impossibility of my possibility of being, a moment crucial for any attempt to articulate the meaning of being, falls prey to the tendency to give priority to the couple being/nothingness—he simply privileges this couple as a description of being different from individual beings, on Levinas's reading. In formulating il y a Levinas attempts to upset the productive dialectic of being and nothing: “there is…” is one term in the formulation of ontological difference between being and an individual being, and in Levinas's hands, Heidegger's mention of being in Being and Time as “there is” becomes a horrifyingly fruitless presencing of that which is neither a being nor time nor grounded upon nothingness as a dialectical counter-concept of being. In terms of his own positive project, il y a serves as Levinas's justification for seeking a beyond of being1: within his analysis, il y a is an evil of being, not because it constitutes a lack or a deficiency of the presence of being—il y a is not a phenomenon exclusively attached to becoming, if becoming is considered as the opposite of being or as a moment of being—but because it is the very a-subjective being-present of being, and so insurmountable within the movement of being. “There is...” sets out a problem that Levinas would pursue throughout his career: if ontological difference accomplishes only itself, and accomplishes itself indifferently to human aspiration or desire, then how to transcend the terms of being and of ontological research in order to speak of interhuman 1 And a beyond of nothingness as simply the privation of being. iv relationships? For these latter always and primarily unfold an order of value: they signify axiologically, on Levinas's reading, more2 than they do ontologically, and the axiological signification is irreducible to any ontological signification. When Levinas first articulated the notion of il y a, the beyond of ontological difference remained incompletely analyzed: the transcendence of being was proposed more than carefully articulated and described. Nevertheless, a reader following Levinas's work chronologically would expect him to continue to work out the transcendence of ontological difference in relation to il y a, its indifference, and the evil that he understands the indifference of being to signify. Yet il y atic being mostly disappears from his work. Levinas will hold steadfastly to the claim that il y a remains an important presupposition of his work,3 but if he requires “a consistent conception of Being”4 in order to work out what counts as transcendence, il y a is not that conception. For after 1948, despite its occasional appearances in other texts, it goes largely undiscussed. It is hardly even mentioned. Not until 1974 does Levinas give il y a any renewed analytical attention, and then only for a short section which does as much to confuse as to clarify, as we shall see in chapter five of the present work. For in that late text, it is unclear that we can consider il y a to signify the pure indifference of a direct and primary ontological relationship between being and 2 The reader hopefully will forgive the imprecision of this “more.” The point is that such relationships do not simply cancel or negate ontological relationships, but neither are they bound absolutely by them. The difficulty in articulating this point is a risk one runs with Levinas, and in the knowledge that he used forty years trying to say the “more” of “transcendence.” 3 See his 1981 interview with Philippe Némo: EI 51/EaI 52. 4 Bettina Bergo, “Levinas's 'ontology' 1935-1974” in Emmanuel Levinas: Critical Assessments of Leading Philosophers, eds. Claire E. Katz and Lara Trout, vol. 1 (New York: Routledge, 2005), 27. v the individual existent, i.e., the subject of being. Why, then, do I focus on what may, at the end of the day, be a marginal concept, and which is, itself, problematic? Precisely because il y a had articulated how being is, such that its very being demanded transcendence of some sort: regardless of one's eventual evaluation of the viability of il y a, it seems to me undeniable that it was intended to pose the most intractable problem to fundamental ontology and the priority of analysis based on the ontologically articulated difference between being and beings. As such, its eclipse by other concepts and descriptions of being is remarkable, the more so given Levinas's claim that il y a remains at the foundations of his thought. Commentators will often assume continuity throughout Levinas's thought— sometimes without qualification, sometimes despite noting that Levinas does give different ontologies at different times in his career.5 Yet it seems to me that neither of these positions in the end is warranted without reservation. This is not to say that there is no continuity in Levinas's work, but that this continuity need not lie in his articulation of being or its sense. Does il y a retain its original pride of place—that of the problem to be confronted and from which to make an escape—in Levinas's work? That is to say, in the work of Levinas as we all know him now, after Totality and Infinity and Otherwise than being? Or has there been a quiet shift in the nature of being, and thereby of the problem to which Levinas's work must respond? If the former, then why does il y a nearly disappear? If the latter, then what is the nature of the shift, and what becomes of being and ontology? 5 For example, Bettina Bergo, ibid. vi These questions came to guide the present work; they have necessitated a review of Levinas's analysis of being and subjectivity at each major stage of his thought in order to identify both continuity and difference (often unreconciled) within Levinas's conception of being and ontology. I make no claim to great originality: many others have argued that Levinas's ontology cannot support all of his conclusions. Nor can I claim to have reconciled all or even the most significant claims Levinas puts forward concerning ontology over the course of his philosophical career, only to have shown that certain tensions in Levinas's work, when exposed to others of his analyses, seem to warrant reading being and ontology in a more positive light than Levinas often interprets them. What is finally at stake in rereading and analyzing Levinas's ontology is, I think, the question of whether ontological evil can stand: is the structure of being in the end the mode under which we should interrogate and analyze the massive human misery that affects us all, in
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